The West’s shameful response to the Iran protests

Posted January 9, 2018 by anneinpt
Categories: EU and Iranian protests, Former Obama officials and Iranian protests, Iran, Iran - Green Revolution, Iran - regime change, Jeremy Corbyn
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The West’s shameful response to the Iran protests | Anne’s Opinions, January 8th 2018

Iran protests continue

In my earlier post about the Iran protests I mentioned the limp response from both Western governments and Western media. Melanie Phillips picks up on the weak institutional response from the West, saying:

… utterly risible the gloss initially put on these protests by the western media – those outlets, that is, that even bothered to report the demonstrations when they first erupted – that the issue which has brought Iranians onto the streets is merely economic privation.

They said this because the media reflects the European/Obama view that the Iranian regime is not an enemy but an ally. How then can they acknowledge that the Iranian people are rising up against oppression?

The Obama/EU axis and its media supporters have consistently dismissed or denied Iran’s role as the world’s principal sponsor of terrorism. They have ignored or downplayed its march to regional hegemony. They procured or applauded the shocking nuclear deal which enables this fanatical Islamist regime –– which has been at war with the west since 1979 and which openly declares its genocidal intent to wipe out out Israel – to become a nuclear armed power in ten or fifteen years’ time: a deal which, though sanctions relief, has also funnelled money to the regime to enable it to step up its terrorism and embed itself further in the region.

The result has not been merely that the free world has been placed in hugely increased danger. The European/Obama axis also abandoned and betrayed the Iranian people who have been suffering under the cruel tyranny of a regime which oppresses women, jails dissidents and hangs gay men from cranes.

…

If people are to rouse their courage to pit themselves against the might of a regime that can kill and crush them, the support of the rest of the world is absolutely crucial. So far, though, Trump is alone in offering such support. Apart from Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson feebly and pointlessly tweeting his “concern”, Britain and the EU have been silent. They are not supporting the people of Iran against the regime. They are not trying to weaken it. How can they? They have helped empower it. As have their cheerleaders and Obama sycophants in the media.

Melanie Phillips continues on this theme in a further post on Europe’s shameful silence on the Iran protests, in which she also excoriates Barack Obama and his administration for empowering the Ayatollahs through the nuclear deal:

The people have been calling for “Death to Khamenei,” Iran’s supreme leader, “Death to Rouhani,” Iran’s supposedly moderate president, and to “End the clerical regime!” Revolutions against tyrannical oppressors require extraordinary levels of courage and determination. We know from Soviet Union dissidents how desperately such people need to know the world is with them and to hear their oppressors put on notice that their behavior is being watched.

Support for the protestors from London

 

The very worst thing for those pitting their lives against tyranny is silence from the rest of the world. That’s what tyrants depend upon to stamp out the sparks of freedom.

President Trump stepped up to the plate by repeatedly tweeting support and encouragement to the protesters and issuing warnings designed to undermine and weaken the regime.

But from all those progressive folk in the West who never stop parading their anti-fascist credentials and signaling their support for the persecuted and for human rights there has been… silence.

The media tried to dismiss the uprising as merely an economic protest. Instead of condemning the regime for killing and jailing protesters, the media condemned Trump for supporting them.

The British and EU governments, with their vast and sordid financial ties to the regime, have given zero support to the revolt, offering merely bromides about the need to avoid loss of life. In the US, former Obama administration staffers have been desperately playing down the uprising.

Obama’s Middle East coordinator Philip Gordon called on Trump “to keep quiet and do nothing” in response to the protests.

The Iranians, he claimed, wouldn’t want Trump’s support. His threat to end the nuclear deal, his unconditional support for “Iran’s biggest adversaries, Saudi Arabia and Israel” and his recent recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital would give the Iranians reasons to unite against him.

Gordon thus stupidly conflated the Iranian people with the Iranian regime.

It’s the regime that is against America on all these issues. The Iranian people, by contrast, have no intrinsic prejudice against Israel, have no reason to reject the recognition of Jerusalem and are unlikely to lose sleep over the ending of the nuclear deal, nor America’s alliance with the regime’s foes in Saudi Arabia.

For the protesters were also shouting: “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon! Our life only for Iran!” They don’t support the regime’s aim of regional and global domination. They want Iran to be run for the benefit of Iranians.

For this, they desperately need Trump’s support. They want to know that the US won’t support the regime. Obama did that, and it hurt the Iranian people.

…

Obama thus bent over backward to give Iran a free pass. According to Politico, his administration stymied an FBI-led operation to shut down Hezbollah’s drug-running, terrorism- financing racket.

In the 2016 prisoner swap deal with Iran, he released several men who his own law enforcement agencies believed posed a danger to national security.

And in the 2009 Green Revolution, Obama abandoned the Iranian people by refusing to give the protesters support.

All of this was to secure the nuclear deal – which has merely empowered Iran to use the money released by sanctions relief to strengthen its terrorist infrastructure and step up its malign and aggressive meddling in the rest of the region.

…

If the Iranian uprising is stamped out, it will be because of the absence of support from Britain and Europe. Their silence makes them complicit with a genocidal regime at war with the West and has caused them shamefully to betray a brave people fighting for its freedom.

Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky, himself a former Prisoner of Zion at the hands of the brutal Soviet regime, agrees with the Melanie Phillips’ position, writing in the Washington Post that the West should stop dithering and support the Iranian protestors:

As an opinion piece in the New York Times recently put it, the best way for the U.S. government to help the Iranian protesters is to “Keep quiet and do nothing.”

Fortunately, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have already shown themselves unwilling to follow this advice. Even so, it is vital to understand why failing to support the protesters at this critical juncture would constitute a moral and strategic mistake — one of potentially historic proportions.

Consider what happened in 2009, when Iranians came out in large numbers to denounce their country’s rigged presidential election. The response they received from the American government was decidedly tepid. The priority of then-President Barack Obama was to reach an agreement with Tehran over its nuclear program, and he and his advisers feared that they would alienate the regime by vocally supporting its detractors.

Yet subsequent events have proved these views completely wrong. This policy of non-interference discouraged protesters and reinforced the regime at the very moment when the opposite could have led to genuine change.

My experiences as a political prisoner and my decades of involvement with democratic dissidents around the world have shown me that all democratic revolutions have some elements in common. It is the drive of ordinary citizens to free themselves from government control over their thought, speech and livelihoods — to shed the burden of having to conform in public despite their private misgivings and grievances against the regime — that has propelled dissidents and revolutionary movements around the world, from Communist Russia to the Arab Spring to today’s Islamic Republic of Iran.

Any regime that refuses to respect its citizens’ most basic rights, and especially the right to think and speak freely, can maintain its power only by intimidation and force.

…

Dissidents know the penalties of speaking out but are compelled more by the desire for freedom than by fear. They are willing to brave the consequences, including the loss of their livelihoods, physical freedom and even their lives, to gain the liberty to speak their minds. Revolutions take place when enough people simultaneously cross that fateful line between silent questioning and open dissent, between cowering in fear and standing up for freedom. Once they do so, the regime can no longer contain the upsurge of opposition and must either begin to liberalize or collapse.

This is why a policy of silence on the part of world leaders is so misguided. What matters to Iranians debating whether to cross this decisive threshold is how much they dislike their own government, as well as their knowledge that the free world — those who share the basic principles for which they are fighting — stands behind them in their moment of truth.

…

… Our leaders must not be misled by the argument that publicly siding with Iran’s dissidents will give the regime an excuse to blame the protests on foreign meddling or crack down even harder on dissidents. The government in Tehran will do these things no matter what, since a regime as threatened as Iran’s is right now will take any steps in its power to deflect and suppress opposition.

Yet, world powers should go even further than this. They should warn Tehran — and thereby reassure protesters — that it must respect its citizens’ rights if it wishes to continue receiving benefits from their countries. Articulating a clear policy of linkage would put pressure on the regime to make genuine changes and give hope to protesters that their sacrifices will not be in vain.

These sterling words from Natan Sharansky stand in stark contrast to the utterly pathetic reaction from Britain’s establishment, particularly the Labour Party whose leader has never met a terrorist he couldn’t like.

Here’s a tweet from a spoof Jeremy Corbyn account, but the link is no spoof:

And more:

Even the leftist Independent calls on Britain to support the protestors and condemns the equivocation of the Labour Party:

Anyone with a conscience, meanwhile, knows that the Iranian government hangs gay people, tramples on women’s rights, has a poor human rights record and sponsors terrorism. It is not difficult, in a contest between such a regime and the right to free expression, to know which side is wearing the whiter hat.

Ms Thornberry’s warning that Westerners should not “simply impose our views” on other countries is the most appalling moral cowardice. There is nothing “Western” about universal human rights, and all representatives of the British people should stand up for them.

But let’s not just concentrate on the Labour Party who, after all, are not in power. What about the British government itself?

Allister Heath in the Telegraph laments Britain’s non-response:

What’s wrong with us? Why isn’t there loud, universal support from all shades of political opinion, in Britain and across the West, for the anti-regime protesters in Iran? Why such reluctance to encourage these brave young men and women who are risking their lives by taking on the theocrats?

Have we forgotten the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, or is it that our elites are now so embarrassed by Western values that they can no longer relate to those in other countries who also yearn for freedom and democracy?

…

Scandalously, but unsurprisingly, Mr Corbyn has yet to speak out about the protests: he was quick to condemn Donald Trump’s commonsensical recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but has nothing to say about the murder of dozens of Iranians.

…

So much for the hard-Left. Why are the Tories and the (clearly hopeless) Foreign Office almost as silent, in effect aligning themselves with the worst of European foreign policy, despite the liberating potential of Brexit?

Why has Boris Johnson been so uncharacteristically mealy-mouthed? Why is the British government still clinging to the absurd notion that the Iranian nuclear deal was a good idea, rather than a shameful exercise in appeasement which ended up propping up an illegitimate regime while lining the pockets of a few European companies?

…

I understand that Boris feels he must tread carefully after the disastrous Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe affair, but it is deeply disappointing that Mr Trump’s foreign policy towards Iran is far more ethical than Britain’s. We need a Kennedy-esque oration, a “we are all Tehranis” moment from our Foreign Secretary to give the rebels the kind of moral support they desperately need.

The Americans get this: Mr Trump – yes, Trump, the president despised by so-called liberals the world over – has adopted exactly the right tone in recent days, and Nikki Haley, his ambassador to the UN, has been superb and now looks like a future Republican presidential contender.

The reality is that there is no moral ambiguity when it comes to the Iranian protests, no shades of grey, no trade-off to be had for reasons of realpolitik. There are the good guys – the young, brave counter-revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the brutes who have ruled their country for so long – and then there is the regime, a barbaric and corrupt mob that has brought a once great society to its knees.

The protests were precipitated by economic chaos, as is often the case, but quickly mutated into open attacks on the regime. … In social terms, there has been an explosion in drug abuse, mental illness, depression and atomisation.

Most encouragingly, the protesters are furious that the regime is spending so much on financing terrorism and on its wars in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, rather than on its own people. They have been saying so, clearly, in demonstrations around the country.

This remarkable message – a powerful counter-blast to the pernicious idea that the Middle East is somehow different, that none of its people want democracy, individual liberty or toleration – is far more radical than the demands made during the 2009 uprising. If any country is ready for a real dose of modernisation, it’s Iran.

True, the protesters are disorganised and they disagree about much, but they deserve our support, and that of all of the global bodies supposedly concerned with human rights which have been pretending not to notice what has been going on (they are only interested in the “right” kinds of rights violation, that is those by Western countries).

We cannot be sure that a new, successful counter-revolution would not lead to chaos, but Iran doesn’t need an authoritarian regime to prevent tribal warfare and the Islamists are totally discredited, so the omens are better than they were in Afghanistan or Libya.

What is certain is that we’ve failed the Middle East appallingly in recent decades. We mustn’t also betray Iran again. Its dissidents need a clear signal that the world would be delighted to work, when the time is right, with a new government in Tehran. Foreign Secretary, are you listening?

The only foreign representative who does seem to be listening and is not afraid to express an opinion is the US Ambassador to the UN who overtly threatened the Iranian regime:

Let’s just hope that the world does not restrict itself to just “watching”.

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Judge Reinstates Hamas/AMP Lawsuit

Posted January 8, 2018 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: American Muslims for Palestine, Anti-Israel, Anti-Zionism in America, Antisemitism in America, Hamas, U.S. courts
Tags: , , , , ,

Judge Reinstates Hamas/AMP Lawsuit, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Abha Shankar, January 8, 2018

At a conference last week hosted by the Muslim American Society (MAS) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Abuirshaid tried to erase Jews’ historical claim to Israel. He claimed the “Zionist Project” is a “form of apartheid” that seeks to “Judaize” Palestine. “In creating false Zionist historical and religious narratives, it’s a deliberate attempt to deny the indigenous people of Palestine, us, from their rights and their own land. And Jerusalem is the bedrock to forge and falsify the history of Palestine and Judaizing it,” he said.

That’s the kind of message that would have fit right in with any of the Palestine Committee groups. When the suit was originally filed last May, the Boims’ attorneys issued a statement explaining that Abuirshaid and the other defendants “directed and controlled the organizations in 1996 … that are legally obliged to pay the judgment won by the Boims.

“These defendants cannot escape their legal liability and accountability for murder by merely changing the names of their organization.

*****************************************

A Chicago federal judge on Thursday reinstated a lawsuit alleging that a virulently anti-Israel group and several of its activists are “alter egos and/or successors” of a defunct U.S. based Hamas-support network previously found liable for the murder of an American teen in a 1996 terror attack.

American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) routinely sponsors conferences that serve as a platform for Israel bashers, and openly approves “resistance” against the “Zionist state.” One AMP official acknowledged the goal is to “to challenge the legitimacy of the State of Israel.”

AMP is also one of the principal advocates of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state. Its BDS campaigns include: Ramadan Date Boycott, SodaStream, Stop the JNF, Stolen Homes/Airbnb, and Stop G4S. Because they include groups dedicated to Israel’s elimination and single out Israel for criticism while they ignore other nations with severe human rights abuses, BDS campaigns are considered inherently anti-Semitic.

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman not only vacated her earlier dismissal of the case, she also authorized limited discovery in the case. “[T]his Court placed too much weight to defendants’ declarations without providing plaintiffs with the opportunity to conduct limited jurisdictional discovery on the existence of an alter ego relationship. Accordingly, this Court will vacate its previous order dismissing the case … and permit plaintiffs to conduct discovery solely to address jurisdiction.”

This is a major victory for the family of 17-year-old David Boim. He was shot dead in Israel in May 1996 by Hamas terrorists. In a historic judgment, Boim’s parents Stanley and Joyce Boim won $156 million in damages against the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and other members of the U.S. Hamas support network called the “Palestine Committee.” The Committee was created by the Muslim Brotherhood to advance Hamas’ agenda politically and financially in the United States.

The IAP was the first to publish the genocidal, anti-Semitic Hamas charter in English. Its fundraisers benefited the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), which – along with five former officials – was convicted in 2008 of illegally routing millions of dollars to Hamas. IAP fundraisers featured overt praise for Hamas, and skits in which Palestinians murdered Israelis.

A 1996 Dallas Morning News story captured the scene at one IAP rally:

Inside a Kansas City auditorium in 1989, a masked man stepped to a lectern and described in Arabic the “oceans of blood” spilled in Hamas’ armed attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.

He thanked two nonprofit organizations for being early allies: the Islamic Association for Palestine, sponsor of the conference, and the Occupied Land Fund [an early name for HLF].

An internal 1992 IAP document, “Islamic Action Plan for Palestine,” makes at least four specific references to Hamas, including its leadership role in the Palestinian intifada through “a lot of sacrifices from martyrs, detainees, wounded, injured, fugitives and deportees…”

IAP was among the first organizations the Muslim Brotherhood created in North America to specifically focus on the Palestinian cause, even preceding the Palestine Committee, the document said. Among the Palestine Committee’s tasks, “Asking the countries to increase the financial and the moral support for Hamas.”

At the time of the Boim judgment in 2004, IAP and other defendants claimed they were no longer in business and had no money to pay the damages. But that was a ruse, the Boims’ attorneys say, alleging that the defendants formed new organizations like the American Muslims for Palestine to escape their legal responsibility to pay damages. Successor groups, or alter egos, of organizations previously found liable for providing material support to Hamas need to pay the remaining judgment, the new litigation argues.

In 2015, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) first identified at least five AMP officials and speakers who worked in the Hamas-supporting “Palestine Committee.”

An April 2014 AMP-sponsored conference in Chicago, for example, featured former IAP Chairman Sabri Samirah.

“We are ready to sacrifice all we have for Palestine. Long Live Palestine,” Samirah said. “We have a mission here [in the U.S.] also to support the struggle of our people back there in order to achieve a free land in the Muslim world, without dictators and without corruption.”

The Boims’ attorneys say that AMP’s current leadership and donors are “significantly identical” to their Palestine Committee branches, including the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), and the American Muslim Society (AMS) which served as another name for the IAP.

Rafeeq Jaber, a defendant in the new lawsuit, is a former IAP president and is now AMP’s registered agent in Chicago. AMP President Abdelbasset Hamayel was IAP’s secretary general. AMP’s conferences and other events are identical in their pro-Hamas message to conferences held earlier by IAP, including overlapping speakers’ lists.

AMP board member Osama Abuirshaid, a target of the current lawsuit, has close affiliations to both the IAP and the Northern Virginia think tank called the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), a Palestine Committee branch that was headed by senior Hamas member Mousa Abu Marzook.

Abuirshaid served as editor of IAP’s Arabic periodical, Al-Zaytounah, a mouthpiece for pro-Hamas propaganda. The magazine also published advertisements by terrorist-tied charities, including HLF, the Global Relief Foundation (GRF), and the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF).

UASR published an academic journal that prosecutors in the HLF case say was “involved in passing Hamas communiques to the United States-based Muslim Brotherhood community and relaying messages from that community back to Hamas.”

Abuirshaid has openly expressed support for Hamas. He criticized Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in a 2015 tweet for designating Hamas as a terrorist organization. Calling Egypt’s capital “Cairo Aviv,” Abuirshaid dismissed the move: “Look who’s talking!? A terrorist murder regime.”

In a 2014 article written in Arabic, he praised the “Palestinian resistance” against the “Zionist aggression” in Hamas-controlled Gaza: “The facts of the current Zionist aggression have clearly shown that the Palestinian resistance is no longer in the position of receiving slaps without the response of some of them, and even many of them responding. It also showed the creativity of the resisting Palestinian mind, consistent with the severity of its being unyielding with long-range rockets, high-explosive missiles and bombs, and unmanned aerial vehicles, most of which are domestically manufactured, being designed to attack the enemy at the doorstep of its military bases by sea, landing behind its lines through tunnels, etc. It is a slap that Israel receives from the Resistance every day, and it finds no response except through the cowardly weapon of targeting civilians with artillery, air and sea missiles to raise the human and economic costs of the Palestinians.”

Abuirshaid has also praised Hamas war tactics: “There is a difference between Hamas, whose youth renewed their adherence to their starting point determined on liberalization, and Fatah, which has grown old after deviating from the creed of liberation and resistance upon which it was established.”

“There is a difference between those who resist and those who compromise; between those who constitute an army for liberation, and those who ready battalions of lackeys; a difference between those who rise up for the blood of martyrs, and those who spill it in the wine glasses of Israel,” he added.

At a conference last week hosted by the Muslim American Society (MAS) and theIslamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Abuirshaid tried to erase Jews’ historical claim to Israel. He claimed the “Zionist Project” is a “form of apartheid” that seeks to “Judaize” Palestine. “In creating false Zionist historical and religious narratives, it’s a deliberate attempt to deny the indigenous people of Palestine, us, from their rights and their own land. And Jerusalem is the bedrock to forge and falsify the history of Palestine and Judaizing it,” he said.

That’s the kind of message that would have fit right in with any of the Palestine Committee groups. When the suit was originally filed last May, the Boims’ attorneys issued a statement explaining that Abuirshaid and the other defendants “directed and controlled the organizations in 1996 … that are legally obliged to pay the judgment won by the Boims.

“These defendants cannot escape their legal liability and accountability for murder by merely changing the names of their organizations,” they said.

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Trump Ends Temporary Protected Status For 200,000 El Salvadorans

Posted January 8, 2018 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Department of Homeland Security, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Temporary Protected Status, Trump and immigration law enforcement
Tags: , , , , ,

Trump Ends Temporary Protected Status For 200,000 El Salvadorans, Breitbart, Neil Munro, January 8, 2017

Alex Wong/Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s deputies are ending the often-extended ‘TPS’ temporary refugee status for up to 200,000 El Salvadoran migrants, which was first granted when earthquakes hit their home country in 2001.

The TPS decision — reported by numerous media outlets — underlines Trump’s determination to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, and to push his “Buy American, Hire American”  inauguration-day promise, despite growing pressure from the GOP’s business-first wing, Democrats and their allies in the establishment media.

The decision also pressures Democrats to accept Trump’s immigration reforms —  or else run as the pro-amnesty political party in November 2018.

The secretary of the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for deciding whether or not to extend TPS status, based on whether the original disaster is still damaging the country. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is Trump’s DHS secretary.

Most of the 200,000 El Salvadoreans will return home by September 2019, likely boosting the small nation’s economy with savings and skills earned in the United States during the last 17 years.

The decision will free up jobs for American citizens and other legal immigrants.

Many of the El Salvador migrants were living illegally in the United States when the earthquake hit their home country in 2001. Since then, the “Temporary Protected Status” has been 11 times by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

TPS. An official at the Comite Hispano de Virgina in Falls Church takes a photo of Salvadoran national Douglas Garcia Martinez 11 November, 2002, to attach to his paperwork to extend his Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

The Washington Post offered several examples of illegals who have used the TPS program to establish themselves in the United States:

Losing TPS “would be catastrophic for my family,” said Edwin Murillo, a 41-year-old father of two reached by phone at his home in Texas …

Murillo had studied business administration in El Salvador but left in 1999 because, he said, jobs were scarce. He entered the United States on a visa, which he overstayed, and in 2001, following the earthquakes back home, he and his wife jumped at the chance to apply for TPS.

A second  Washington Post article quoted two more illegals who used the TPS program:

[Oscar] Cortez, a father of two, said he came to the United States in 2000, after he dropped out of college in El Salvador because he couldn’t afford the tuition and was downsized out of a job at a textile factory. Undocumented at first, he worked low-wage, sporadic jobs laying carpet or cutting lawns …

His co-worker Jaime Contreras, a welder on the project that will extend Metrorail to Dulles International Airport, said his job has transformed his family’s lives, both in Maryland and in El Salvador. As a child in El Salvador, Contreras went to school in the mornings and to work in the afternoons, painting houses at age 7 and welding at 11.

At 20, he moved to the United States seeking higher wages.

Trump’s deputies have also ended TPS status for migrants from several other countries, including Haiti and Nicaragua. DHS deputy secretary Elaine Duke, however, gave a short extension to 57,000 Hondurans in late 2017.

Democrats and pro-migration advocates strongly criticized the decision to end temporary protected status for the El Salvador migrants:

Senator Tom Carper

✔@SenatorCarper

The Trump administration’s decision to end TPS for El Salvador breaks with our country’s moral obligation to care for our neighbors who desperately need our help and safe refuge. https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/950379353967341569 …

United We Dream (#DreamActNow: 478-488-8059)

✔@UNITEDWEDREAM

DHS has ended TPS for El Salvadorians – another step of Trump’s racist agenda to force people of color into the shadows.

Congress must act now to save TPS or they’ll be complicit in mass expulsion of people who have lived in the US for nearly 20 years.http://wapo.st/2FhaIMn 

Demonstrators march Dec. 6 in Washington during a rally in support of the Deferred Action for the Childhood Arrivals and Temporary Protected Status programs. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

OK some thoughts on today’s cruel decision to terminate  for 200K Salvadorans. This was completely unnecessary and leaves hundreds of thousands of people in limbo (not to mention their families.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/01/08/200000-salvadorans-will-be-forced-to-leave-the-u-s-or-face-deportation-as-trump-administration-ends-immigration-protection/?tid=ss_tw-bottom&utm_term=.c468c8f7dc46 …

Kristian Steffany 🌹@kksteffany

TPS for El Salvador was ended this morning, with an 18 month extension. This devastating news affects 200,000 individuals. This TPS group makes up about 60% of all TPS holders & have 193,000 US citizen children. This decision is going to break families apart.

Frank Sharry

✔@FrankSharry

DHS ends TPS for Salvadorans, continuing their assault on immigrants in America with deep ties and strong equities. Expelling Salvadorans and others with TPS, many of whom own homes and have US citizen children, is cruel and heartless. It’s now up to Congress to step up.

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Iran’s cyber war over 48 million smartphone users was sparked by protest demos

Posted January 8, 2018 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: China and Iran, Iranian protests, Iranian protests and cyber warfare, Russia and Iran
Tags: , , ,

Iran’s cyber war over 48 million smartphone users was sparked by protest demos. DEBKAfile, January 8, 2018

Tehran’s Internet shutdown, its doomsday weapon for breaking up the new year’s anti-government protests, was routed with astonishing speed.

The successful cyber campaign, waged against Iran by certain Western and Arab intelligence agencies led by the US, during the week-long protest rallies across Iran, is gradually breaking surface. Two new comments shed light on this contest and the future direction of Iran’s protest movement after it petered out last Thursday.

Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo corrected Fox Sunday interviewer Chris Wallace on Jan. 7, who noted that the wave of demonstrations was over. Pompeo put in firmly: “They are not behind us” – meaning that, according to his information, more are on the way.

And in Tehran, new Iranian laws have cut English classes out of the primary school curriculum after supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled that learning English at an early age paves the way for the West’s “cultural invasion.” The Shiite theocracy is clearly engaged in another desperate bid to segregate the population from external influences. Khamenei hopes to achieve this by depriving the next generation of the essential key for accessing the world web – the English language.

But when every second Iranian holds a smartphone complete with apps in his pocket, totally shutting down social media communications proved beyond the powers of the regime’s cyber experts last week. They tried and failed to block Iran’s most popular Telegram app, which has 40 million users, in order to disrupt communications among the protest rallies.

Before the eruption of this upheaval, Western intelligence agencies had ranked Iran as the sixth cyber power in the world after the US, Britain, China, Russia and Israel. But when Western and Arab agencies operating behind the anti-government movement acted to reverse the government shutdown and restore the networks, they were amazed to find how easy it was. The US State Department played its part by encouraging virtual private networks to help users gain access to blocked websites. In no time, the cyber weapon had slipped out the grasp of the ayatollahs’ regime.

DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources were not surprised to learn that Tehran was sending out feelers to Moscow and Beijing appealing for expert assistance to combat Western raids on its communications networks. This has put Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in an awkward position. Neither is inclined at this moment to run slam up against President Donald Trump on Iran, certainly not in the field of cyber warfare. For Russia, which is already entangled in siding with Iran’s military positions in Syria, the cyber issue is an ultra-sensitive subject for his overt and covert relations with Washington. The Chinese president is in the same boat as Putin.

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The Hive Mind

Posted January 8, 2018 by Peter Hofman
Categories: Uncategorized

In between dodging the rockets being shot from Gaza to Sderot, our Israeli correspondent MC found the time to write this essay about the timeless lure of the totalitarian collective.

The Hive Mind

The Hive Mind
by MC

Rudyard Kipling wrote a story about the hive, and, of course there was the Borg (and it didn’t play tennis).

But just maybe we should think more about the concept of hive consciousness. Is Islam a hive mindset? Is socialism a Borg mentality controlled by the BBC/MSM and its ilk?

It is a fascinating concept: you assimilate into the hive, or you die. The Soviets did it with their gulags, the Nazis with their Concentration Camps, and Islam with its Ummah.

Yes, folks, we are fighting a Borg-like mentality, and we are the ones who don’t want to be assimilated and thus we are demonized.

One thing that has always mystified me is why Islam appears to be successful, but is not successful — it is just oil-rich. It is more comfortable for most who are born into it to be inside the Islamic hive mind than outside it. As for the new converts: a wealthy hive is not without its attractions

The socialist hive is more subtle than the Islamic hive, more nuanced and much more dangerous. The socialists have taken the Marxist ideas of class and transposed them into a layering system based on eugenics and a perverted meritocracy. In pre-WW2 socialist thought, the stock of humanity could be cleansed, subdued and perfected by brainwashing, by supervised breeding and by sterilization (or culling) of those considered unfit to join the breeding pool. The Nazis had one solution for this, and the Communists a slightly different one.

Once in the Gulag or Stalag, social Darwinism applied (read One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich). Life and survival was predicated on all sorts of small random events such as the size of one’s food bowl.

The despised class (or race) hierarchy becomes transformed into a hive hierarchy of the despised, the drones and the elites, where the despised are disposable slaves, the drones are part of the hive but have no individuality, and an elite whose word is law even if it is whimsical or downright wrong.

The resulting hive resonates to its own self-abnegation. It is more than a religion; it is an obsession where conformity is taken to murderous extremes. An obsession that counts mass murder as a totally acceptable tool in the hive’s arsenal of process and protection.

As the Age of Reason passes away, and the Enlightenment dims, so the emotional takes hold as the prime human need and desire. The safe space of cradle-to-grave welfare and protective encapsulation is enforced; play the game or die. The truth is too painful. It is stark and unbeautiful and uncomfortable. It means taking responsibility for one’s actions: better the make-believe of the hive mind. If everybody believes the same thing, then it must be true!

The hive used to have barbed wire fences and guard towers with searchlights and machine guns, but now it has a more effective cage, a mind-cage called visual media. We started with the movies telling us how to think, but television brought the mind-gulag into our homes, and sprayed our brains with pixilated scopolamine, imprisoning us in a controlled virtual environment. Walls? Who needs walls when electronic prisons are far more effective?

Then came mobile phones and the hive mind made a great leap forward.

The cultural Marxists specifically targeted the media, and they successfully infiltrated it. Now what was once seen as leftist propaganda has been totally absorbed into our psyche, particularly the idea that our Judeo-Christian heritage is not only of no value, but has positively damaged the ‘global’ society. The whole ‘global warming and climate change’ issue was configured to the illusion that ‘the West’ had robbed the rest of the world of its rightful share of resources and thus the white man should be made to pay it all back.

This and many other Marxist-derived memes were fed into the hive mind, along with the idea that those who resisted were somehow deranged.

The liberal-conservative right operates on a shoestring. It has few resources and those who contribute time and talents tend to do so voluntarily. But the hive, in contrast, is very well-funded indeed, so much so that it can deny a platform to any opposition. In my country of birth, England, I know that I no longer have any kind of freedom at all. My ‘rights’ are dictated by (manipulated) public opinion, and there is no longer any statute that cannot be massaged by those public servants charged with keeping people docile. The authorities in England provide a hive-friendly environment in the name of multiculturalism and diversity, where the Islamic hive is given a free rein to exploit and plot its expansion at the expense of the automatically guilty indigenous Judaeo-Christian who must pay the price for his past exploitation (‘colonialism’), supposedly on the understanding that he will not cause trouble because of the constant re-education he is subjected to.

My feeling is that the English people are seething, but the Marxist hive is moving heaven and earth to keep the lid on the pressure cooker. The whole of the British mainstream media is goose stepping to the strains of a elitist Horst-Wessel-Lied whilst selling out to the threat of terrorism. They actually believe that the Muslim hive is benign and not at all to blame, that the Muslims are the supposed victims of years of colonial oppression, and it is thus their absolute right to kill and maim whitey and take revenge on the Jew because everybody knows that it is all a Jewish plot.

This is a tangled message, with the nits combed out by the teeth of the accusation of ‘racism’ against anybody who points out that the emperor’s new clothes are somewhat skimpy.

The propaganda walls of the hive give rise to all sorts of cognitive dissonances. A relative of mine supported Brexit but did not vote because she thought that one of the leaders was a sleaze ball. It is much like a kangaroo courthouse where the (leftist) defense has only to demonstrate possible reasonable doubt but the (conservative) prosecution has to positively prove its every statement.

The hive is a literally an imprisoned audience which has its every move and thought governed by its media tormentors. As for the dissenters — we too are not immune to the hive influences. They appear regularly in the comments section here and I cannot guarantee that I am absolutely free of its honey; it is sweet and pervasive.

Like the Bereans of the Bible we should test everything. The hive mind is very powerful, and its influences are not always easy to recognise. For a modern child it starts at a tender age: father is a bumbling idiot, mother is stressed by her job, the teacher is upright and reliable and b-lie, b-lie, b-lie.

While the Internet is a wonderful tool, it is also a terribly dangerous one. Used judiciously it exposes the lies, but that is not an easy skill to acquire. To perceive the differences among fact, conspiracy theory (which often turns out to have an element of truth) and the pure out-and-out lie is hard, but to the hive mind, truth is predefined anyway, and there is simply no need to make any effort at validation. The hive is ‘truth’; it exists, therefore it is.

In the Kipling story was written at a time before education was freely available for all. In it the hive is penetrated and poisoned by mind-bending alien creatures (in our case it is a ‘conservative’ hive penetrated by Marxists). That availability of low-cost high quality education made a huge difference to Western society, and I was one of its last recipients. The government of the UK actually paid me to go to University, and the tuition was free.

However, this became very threatening. Too many free-thinkers.

Most Marxists I have met had privileged upper-middle-class backgrounds. They felt that they could justify the big house and the expensive private education only by organising the workers. When they finally discovered that the workers did not want to be organised, they switched to the immigrants etc. — anything rather than actually working for a living.

Kipling was right: the penetrated hive goes insane and dies, and the Marxists move on, happy with their destruction — Zimbabwe a mess, Venezuela a disaster, South Africa heading that way.

Next stop Europe, where the long march through the institutions has reached its apogee. Almost every government department in UK is staffed by followers of the socialist religion.

We should no longer regard political religions as separate entities from theocratic religions. Fanatics are fanatics, wherever and whatever they believe. If you are prepared to kill and maim for the cause then you are a terrorist, whether political or religious.

The Nazis settled on genocide as a political solution. Muslim fanatics want the same thing, so why do we treat them differently? The Nazis were socialists who were slightly to the right of the communists, Muslims, too, are basically socialists, but because they claim to be a theocratic ‘religion’ so everybody gets moonstruck and we have to use different words.

And we compound the problem every time we allow a jornolist to get away with the greatest hoax of the 20th century: that Nazis are from the conservative ‘right’.

The great ‘conservative’ hive so well described by Kipling has been fragmented into tiny little islands of reason, each of whom cannot agree upon reasonable behaviour because they still do not reject wholesale the smears of Nazism. And while the right accommodates the idea of Nazi ‘racism’ rather than Nazi socialism, the right will not recover.

Did the racial genocide arise out of the Nationalism or out of the Socialism?

It is very easy to put that to the test. Even if we charge the eleven million butcher’s bill of the Nazis as ‘nationalism’, it is miniscule when seen against the abattoir of the socialist slaughter…

There is nothing much wrong with Nationalism; MAGA has not yet produced any monsters. But there is a very bloody history to socialism; within the first three months of both communism and Nazism, the barbed wire, the watch towers; the camps and the political prisoners to fill them all begin to appear.

If we continue along the path defined by their hoax, and acquiesce to its taint of racism, and remain good men who do nothing, then all is lost.

At the top of the socialist pyramid is an eye, but whose eye would that be?

Just whose is the ‘all seeing eye’? Does it belong to Jesus, to Allah, to the chief Rabbi? Does it belong to the chief Atheist (whoever he is)? Or does it belong to the guy who has set out to destroy Western culture and society? We can bicker over this forever and a day; all the while the tide of tyranny sweeps in to swamp us with the raw and unpleasant truths of slavery, shackles and starvation.

Western culture’s unique gift to the world was the abolition of slavery, but it seems to me that the world wants to return to its shackles: Nazi shackles, communist manacles, or the ball and chain of Islam.

Or we conservatives can forget our differences, we can unite and fight, make war against those who wish to inundate us with their modern versions of the failed fanaticisms of yesteryear. We CAN drain the swamps — if we work together!

MC lives in the southern Israeli city of Sderot. For his previous essays, see the MC Archives.

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Iran warns world to prepare for US nuke deal withdrawal

Posted January 8, 2018 by Peter Hofman
Categories: Uncategorized

By AFP Today, 3:11 pm

https://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-warns-world-to-prepare-for-us-nuke-deal-withdrawal/

US Secretary of State John Kerry sits across from Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif on July 1, 2015, in Vienna, Austria (State Department photo)

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran warned the world on Monday to prepare for the possible withdrawal of the United States from the landmark nuclear deal agreed in 2015.

“The international community must be prepared for the US possibly pulling out of the JCPOA,” said deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, using the technical name for the nuclear deal.

Iran signed the accord in 2015 with six world powers, agreeing to curb its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of many international sanctions.

US President Donald Trump openly despises the deal — a central foreign policy achievement of his predecessor Barack Obama — but has so far continued to waive the nuclear-related sanctions at regular intervals as required to stay in compliance.

The next deadline for Trump to waive sanctions falls on Friday.

“It’s been more than a year that the US president has sought to destroy the JCPOA with all his efforts,” said Araghchi, speaking at the Tehran Security Conference.

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Ghassemi (YouTube screenshot)

“We in Iran are prepared for any scenario. The international community and our region will be the biggest loser, since a successful experience in the international arena will be lost,” he added.

“Our region will not become a safer region without the JCPOA.”

A withdrawal by the US will lead to an “appropriate and heavy response,” added foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi.

“The US administration will definitely regret it,” he said on state television.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is due to travel for talks with the European parties to the deal — Britain, France, Germany and the EU — at the end of the week.

Zarif denied reports that the talks would focus on the recent protests in Iran that claimed 21 lives, saying such claims were “baseless and unfounded”.

“Given the importance of JCPOA these days, and in particular considering the US destructive policies, based on talks we’ve had, we agreed to have a consultative meeting between Iran and the three European Union members,” said Zarif, according to state broadcaster IRIB.

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The Ayatollah Empire Is Rotting Away

Posted January 7, 2018 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Iran - sanctions, Iran - sanctions enforcement, Iran's military spending, Iranian corruption, Iranian protests, Obama and Iran, South Korea and Iran, Trump and Iran
Tags: , , , , , , ,

The Ayatollah Empire Is Rotting Away, Tablet, Edward N. Luttwak, January 7, 2018

 

There is no need to laboriously negotiate a new set of sanctions against Iran—strict, swift, and public enforcement of the restrictions that are already on the books is enough. Every time a South Korean regime-related deal is detected, the offenders need a quick reminder they will be excluded from the United States if they persist. In this, as in everything else, it is just a matter of getting serious in our focus on Iran.

Obama was serious in his courtship of the ayatollahs’ regime. Trump should do the same to bring the regime to an end, faster

*************************************

Ronald Reagan, who outraged the Washington elite and frightened European leaders by flatly refusing coexistence with the Soviet Union, lived to see its sudden decline and fall. There is a fair chance that Donald Trump, who contradicts Barack Obama and Europe’s leaders by refusing coexistence with Iran’s ayatollah empire, will also have the satisfaction of seeing the dissolution of a regime that Obama among many others preferred to accommodate.

Whether or not this past weekend’s mass demonstrations in Iran will spread, whether a second revolution is imminent or not, the numbers for the ayatollah empire just don’t add up. A breakdown is materially inevitable.

With some 80 million people, and with oil accounting for 80 percent of its exports, Iran would need to export some 25 million barrels a day to make a go of it, but it can barely export 2.5 million. That would be luxuriously ample for the likes of Abu Dhabi with fewer than 800,000 citizens, but it is a miserable pittance for Iran, with a population more than 100 times as large.

Iran cannot even match the $6,000 income per capita of Botswana. That most fashionable of safari destinations is a fine and well-governed country to be sure, and far from poor by African standards—but then its citizens are not required to pay for extensive nuclear installations, which are very costly to maintain even in their current semi-frozen state, or for the manufacture of a very broad range of weapons—from small arms to ballistic missiles—for which much expensive tooling is imported daily from the likes of our own dear ally South Korea. Neither is Botswana mounting large-scale military expeditions in support of a foreign dictator at war with 80 percent of his own population or providing generous funding for the world’s largest terrorist organization, Hezbollah, whose cocaine-smuggling networks and local extortion rackets cannot possibly cover tens of thousands of salaries. The ayatollah empire is doing all those things, which means that average Iranians are actually much poorer than their Botswanian counterparts.

You would never know it looking at photographs of Tehran, one more bombastic capital city fattened on intercepted oil revenues and graft, but Iran is dirt poor. I recently saw Iran’s general poverty at first-hand driving through one of Iran’s supposedly more prosperous rural districts. In an improvised small market next to a truck stop, several grown men were selling livestock side by side, namely ducks. Each had a stock of three or four ducks, which looked like their total inventory for the day.

That is what happens in an economy whose gross domestic product computes at under $6,000 per capita: very low productivity, very low incomes. The 500,000 or so Iranians employed in the country’s supposedly modern automobile industry are not productive enough to make exportable cars: Pistachio nuts are the country’s leading export, after oil and petroleum products.

The pistachios bring us directly to Iran’s second problem after not-enough-oil, namely too much thieving by the powerful, including pistachio-orchard-grabbing Akbar Hashemi “Rafsanjani,” former president and a top regime figure for decades.

Akbar Hashemi was not being immodest when he claimed the name of his native Rafsanjan province for himself. He became the owner of much of it as huge tracts of pistachio-growing orchards came into his possession.

His son Mehdi Hashemi is very prominent among the aghazadeh (“noble born”), the sons and daughters of the rulers. He preferred industrial wealth to pistachios, and his name kept coming up in other people’s corruption trials (one in France), until he finally had his own trial, for a mere $100 million or so. But the Rafsanjani clan as a whole took a couple of billion dollars at least.

The Supreme Leader Khamenei himself is not known to have personally stolen anything—he has his official palaces, after all. But his second son, Mojtaba, may have taken as much as $2 billion from the till, while his third son, Massoud, is making do with a mere 400- or 500-hundred million. His youngest son, Maitham, is not living in poverty either, with a couple of hundred million. The ayatollah’s two daughters, Bushra and Huda, each received de-facto dowries in the $100 million range.

This shows that the regime is headed by devoted family men who lovingly look after their many children, for whom only the best will do. It also cuts into the theoretical $6,000 income per Iranian head, because some “heads” are taking a thousand times as much and more.

That is one motive for today’s riots—bitter anger provoked by the regime’s impoverishing and very visible corruption, which extends far, far beyond the children of the top rulers: thousands of clerics are very affluent, starting with their flapping Loro Piana “Tasmania” robes—that’s 3,000 euros of fancy cloth right there.

Much of the economy is owned by bonyads, Islamic foundations that pay modest pensions to war widows and such, and very large amounts to those who run them, mostly clerics and their kin. The largest, the Mostazafan Bonyad, with more than 200,000 employees in some 350 separate companies in everything from farming to tourism, is a very generous employer for its crowds of clerical managers.

That is why the crowds have been shouting insults at the clerics—not all are corrupt, but high-living clerics are common enough to take a big bite out of that theoretical $6,000 per capita.

But the largest cause of popular anger is undoubtedly the pasdaran, a.k.a the Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), an altogether more costly lot than the several hundred aghazadeh or tens of thousands of high-living clerics. The IRGC’s tab starts with the trillion dollars or more that the pasdaran-provoked nuclear sanctions cost before the Obama team agreed to lift them and continues with the billions that Iran still loses annually because of the ballistic-missile sanctions that Trump will never lift. Then there are the variable costs of the pasdaran’s imperial adventures, as well as the fixed cost of pasdaran military industries that spend plenty on common weapons as well as on “stealth” fighters and supposedly advanced submarines that exist only in the fantasies of regime propagandists. Pasdaran militarism and imperial adventures are unaffordable luxuries that the demonstrators very clearly want to do without—hence their shouts of “no-Gaza, no-Syria.”

Whatever happens next—and at least this time the White House will not be complicit if it ends in brutal repression—the ayatollah empire cannot last. Even despite Obama’s generous courtship gifts, the Iranian regime cannot just keep going, any more than the USSR could keep going by living off its oil.

So what can be done to accelerate the collapse? Broad economic sanctions are out of the question because they would allow the rulers to blame the Americans for the hardships inflicted by their own imperial adventures. But there is plenty of room for targeted measures against regime figures and their associates—the State Department list of sanctioned individuals is far from long enough, with many more names deserving of the honor. (Iran is not North Korea; it is not hard to find names and assets and to make them public.)

Above all, very much more could be done to impede the pasdaran and their military industries. Many European and Japanese big-name companies are staying away from Iran because the missile and terrorism sanctions persist—and to avoid displeasing the United States. They should. But the South Koreans whom we defend with our own troops totally ignore U.S. interests in regard to Iran and have therefore emerged as the lead suppliers of machinery and tooling for the pasdaran weapon factories. Nor do they hesitate to sell equipment that can be adapted to military use in a minute or less, as in the case of the airfield instrument landing system and portable ILS/VOR signal analyzer that the Korea Airports Corp. has just agreed to supply to Iran’s Tolid Malzomat Bargh.

There is no need to laboriously negotiate a new set of sanctions against Iran—strict, swift, and public enforcement of the restrictions that are already on the books is enough. Every time a South Korean regime-related deal is detected, the offenders need a quick reminder they will be excluded from the United States if they persist. In this, as in everything else, it is just a matter of getting serious in our focus on Iran.

Obama was serious in his courtship of the ayatollahs’ regime. Trump should do the same to bring the regime to an end, faster.

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Watch: Egyptian Scholar Tells Rowdy Arab TAU Students They Should Thank God for Living in Israel

Posted January 7, 2018 by Peter Hofman
Categories: Uncategorized
By David Israel

Watch: Egyptian Scholar Tells Rowdy Arab TAU Students They Should Thank God for Living in Israel

Rami Aziz, an Egyptian researcher and political analyst, whose research focuses on the growth and development of political Islam in Europe, recently responded to a group of Israeli Arab students who last week left a Tel Aviv University lecture hall after having interrupted and taunted the lecturer inside. Their victim was Egyptian American Sociologist and one of Egypt’s leading human rights and democracy activists, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who delivered a talk on Israeli-Egyptian relations and ways to preserve them (Israeli Arab Students Crash Egyptian Civil Rights Hero’s Lecture, Calling him a Sellout).

Millions of students in the Arab world envy you, you should thank God that you live in Israel, you bunch of hypocrites and liars,” Aziz said in his angry video, representing a familiar trend in Arab society these days, which is too busy with its own serious issues, such as the Iranian threat, to bother with crybaby Israeli Arabs.

“Only in Israel can Arab students shout at an Egyptian lecturer that he is a traitor for coming to a Zionist university. And what exactly are they doing at a Zionist university? There is no limit to the hypocrisy, disgust and aggravation of Israeli Arabs. How much can you bite the hand that feeds you?” Aziz said.

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Egypt quietly urges Palestinians to accept Ramallah as capital

Posted January 7, 2018 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Egypt and Palestinians, Jerusalem - status, Jerusalem status - Egypt's reaction, Ramallah - status
Tags: , , ,

Egypt quietly urges Palestinians to accept Ramallah as capital, DEBKAfile, January 7, 2018

Cairo has tacitly accepted Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. An Egyptian intelligence officer Capt. Ashraf al-Kholi is recorded in four audios of telephone calls to Arab media as asking: “How is Jerusalem different from Ramallah, really?”  Palestinians should content themselves with Ramallah, he said. “Like all our Arab brothers, Egypt would denounce in public” President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but strife with Israel is not in Egypt’s interest and the Arabs must accept it.

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Israeli Government Publishes Full Anti-BDS Blacklist

Posted January 7, 2018 by Peter Hofman
Categories: Uncategorized
By Hana Levi Julian

Israeli Government Publishes Full Anti-BDS Blacklist

Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan, Photo Credit: Tomer Neuberg / Flash 90

The Israeli government has published the anti-BDS (anti-Israel Boycott, Divest & Sanctions) blacklist developed by the Strategic Affairs Ministry.

Those who are members of the 20 organizations on the blacklist will be unable to gain entry to the Jewish State, beginning in March.

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“The boycott organizations need to know that the State of Israel will act against them and not allow them entry to harm our citizens,” said Minister Gilad Erdan. “No nation would have permitted entry to critics coming to harm the country.”

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri, whose ministry will implement the ban, said, “These people are trying to exploit … our hospitality to act against Israel and to defame the country. I will act against this using every means.”

In addition to senior officials of the blacklisted organizations, and key activists, mayors and establishment figures who lead or promote boycotts against Israel will also be banned from entering the Jewish State. Activists who arrive on behalf of one of the blacklisted groups, or as part of a delegations sponsored by, or initiated or promoted by one of the blacklisted organization, will also be denied entry as well.

The Anti-BDS Blacklist

Europe

The France Association Palestine Solidarity
BDS France
BDS Italy
The European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine
Friends of Al-Aqsa
Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign
The Palestine Committee of Norway
Palestine Solidarity Association of Sweden
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
War on Want
BDS Kampagne

North America

American Friends Service Committee
American Muslims for Palestine
Code Pink
Jewish Voice for Peace
National Students for Justice in Palestine (umbrella for SJP)
US Campaign for Palestinian Rights

Other groups

BDS Chile
BDS South Africa
BDS National Committee

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