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BDS banned! – Hear them whine

January 11, 2018

BDS banned! – Hear them whine | Anne’s Opinions, 10th January 2018

Back in August I wrote about anti-Israel boycotters being banned, and the irony of their complaints at having a taste of their own medicine.

Last week the Israeli government expanded on their original decision by publishing a list of about 20 anti-Israel organizations whose members will be denied entry to Israel:

“We have switched from defense to offense,” said Public Security and Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan.

“The boycott organizations need to know that the State of Israel will act to stop them and prevent their representatives from entering the country to harm its citizens.”

The list features BDS groups who, according to the ministry, carry out campaigns of “falsehood and incitement” in an effort to undermine Israel’s legitimacy worldwide.

The blacklisted groups “consistently and continuously act against the State of Israel by pressuring groups, institutions and states to boycott Israel,” the ministry said.

Among the groups on the list are six US based organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, and 10 European organizations, including leading BDS groups in Italy, France, Norway and Sweden.

The ban is set to be enforced beginning in March and will be limited to people who hold senior positions or who are very active within the organizations.

“The formulation of this list is another step forward in our battle against the incitement and lies of the BDS organizations. No country would grant entrance to visitors who seek to harm it, especially ones whose goal is to terminate Israel as a Jewish state,” said Erdan.

The ministry added that it will be passing the names of the organizations over to the Interior Ministry and border patrol.

Interior Minister Arye Deri said, “As the minister in charge of the Israel Entry Law, I made it perfectly clear that I would use my authority to prevent individuals and representatives of groups, whose sole purpose is to harm Israel and its security, from entering its borders.”

“These people are trying to take advantage of the law and our hospitality in order to act against and defame Israel,” he added.

Erdan claims a certain degree of success in this new method for deterring BDS:

The ministry pointed out that this approach is successful in curtailing BDS efforts, highlighting the recent announcements by Denmark and Norway, who said they would toughen their stances against the funding of pro-Palestinian organizations.

The ministry also touted their efforts which they claim led 24 US states, as well as the federal government, to pass anti-BDS legislation.

The BDS-ers themselves dispute this of course:

The organizations on the list, however, seem undeterred by the latest tactic. Several organizations on the list issued statements on Sunday, claiming that Israel’s move only serves as proof that the BDS movement is spreading and having an impact.

Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, issued a statement and said the ban was “disconcerting but not surprising, given the further erosion of democratic norms and rising anxiety about the power of BDS as a tool to demand freedom.”

…

The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign issued a statement via its Facebook page and said being on the list was a “badge of honor” and that it was “in good company.”

In fact Prof. Gerald Steinberg, director of NGO Monitor, warned that the ban, while a good idea in theory, might backfire by giving the haters free publicity:

Professor Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of the NGO Monitor watchdog group, told JNS that the government’s move signals that Israel “won’t turn a blind eye to those who work to delegitimize it — but the downside is that it also serves to raise the profiles of these groups.”

The list drew fire from “rights” groups – that is, rights for everyone except Jews. I can’t say I am surprised or even disappointed. They are acting precisely as I expected.

See these tweets for example:

The blogger Edgar Davidson has a nifty graphic illustrating the hypocrisy of the boycotted boycotters:

And here is the full list of the banned organizations – or at least the leaders of the following organizations:

United States:
• AFSC (American Friends Service Committee)
• AMP (American Muslims for Palestine)
• Code Pink
• JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace)
• NSJP (National Students for Justice in Palestine)
• USCPR (US Campaign for Palestinian Rights)

Europe:
• AFPS (The Association France Palestine Solidarité)
• BDS France
• BDS Italy
• ECCP (The European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine)
• FOA (Friends of al-Aqsa)
• IPSC (Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign)
• Norgeׂׂ Palestinakomitee (The Palestine Committee of Norway)
• PGS Palestinagrupperna i Sverige (Palestine Solidarity Association in Sweden)
• PSC (Palestine Solidarity Campaign)
• War on Want
• BDS Kampagne

Latin America
• BDS Chile

South Africa
• BDS South Africa

Other
• BNC (BDS National Committee)

In my humble opinion the ban does not go far enough. There are many more such hateful organizations, plus the ban should include everyone who has been active in these groups, not just the leaders. Why should anyone working to undermine the State of Israel, and especially those trying to harm it, whether physically or politically, be permitted to enter and carry out their despicable work on our own turf? Let them try to do it by remote.

If you would like a further reminder of what BDS is all about see this post of mine about the malicious aims of BDS.

Categories: BDS, Boycott of Israel, NGO's
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Judge Reinstates Hamas/AMP Lawsuit

January 8, 2018

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.

Categories: American Muslims for Palestine, Anti-Israel, Anti-Zionism in America, Antisemitism in America, Hamas, U.S. courts
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Kaf Tet beNovember: 70 years since UN Resolution 181

November 29, 2017

Kaf Tet beNovember: 70 years since UN Resolution 181 | Anne’s Opinions, 29th November 2017

Today 29th November, or as it is quirkily called in Hebrew “kaf tet beNovember”, is the 70th anniversary of the fateful UN Resolution 181 which aimed to partition Palestine and created a Jewish area and an Arab area. As we all know, the resolution was rejected by the Arabs who never fulfilled any of its provisions or conditions, while it was accepted in full by the Jews. No sooner had the vote passed in the UN than 5 Arab armies invaded the newborn Jewish state with the overt intent of destroying it before it was born. They lost the war and the rest is history.

It would serve us well to recall the events of that historic day. The Israel-advocacy organization Legal Grounds, which promotes Israel’s legal rights to all the Land of Israel, sent out this important backgrounder with vital facts that are either unknown, misunderstood or ignored:

INFORMATION ALERT: 70 YEARS SINCE RESOLUTION 181

In June, Attorney Karen Stahl-Don made a presentation in The Hague, on behalf of the Legal Grounds Campaign, on the subject of UNGA Resolution 181 of 1947:

The Resolution, which is often misunderstood, was merely a recommendation and carried no weight in international law.

Palestinian Arabs refer to it as “The Partition Plan,” claiming, after all this time, that it gives them rights to a state. This is blatantly false, as they rejected this plan 70 years ago. According to international law, a party that rejects an agreement does not retain any rights based on that agreement.

What is more, the recommendation was not simply that two states, one Jewish and one Arab, be established. It proposed that two states be joined by an economic union, with a myriad of requirements. The states were to share currency, transportation, postal systems, and a great deal more; both were to be democratic, provide civil rights and prohibit discrimination.

Israel accepted this partition. However, acceptance was premised on what was described in the Resolution: economic cooperation and peaceful coexistence. Israel never agreed to disregard the nature of the Arab state recommended for creation at its border.

In the end, Resolution 181 was abandoned and never came to fruition. The UN Palestine Commission charged with facilitating the Resolution never even met, and the Security Council would not lend support. The Commission was officially relieved of its duties.

Israel, the sole party to accept Resolution 181, is not responsible for its failure, and is certainly not in violation of international law by not complying with it now.

Keep this last paragraph in mind as we now read of the UN’s efforts to delegitimize Israel on a daily basis.

In order to “celebrate” this auspicious day, the UN – as it has done every year for 70 years – makes it its business hold an International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Not the International Day of Solidarity with Israelis and Palestinians mind you. Just those most pampered self-made “refugees” in the world, the Palestinians, who only arrived at this glorified status because of their constant rejection of any Jewish State, of any size, anywhere in the Middle East at all.

Isn’t it pathetic that the UN (Useless Nations) cannot find it within themselves to celebrate a National Day for the Inalienable Rights of the Jewish People to their own Homeland in the State of Israel.

Surely after 70 years it is about time that the UN gave up this charade? Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor demanded of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that the UN repudiate its ingrained anti-Israel hatred:

The seventieth anniversary of the passage of UN Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states on November 29 will be marked by UN offices around the world as the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” The global organization first designated the date as a day of Palestinian solidarity in 1977, with a General Assembly resolution authorizing the practice as an “annual observance.”

In a letter to Guterres, Prof. Gerald Steinberg – president of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor – argued that the Day of Solidarity, along with the numerous UN bodies that promote an anti-Israel agenda through various pro-Palestinian committees and agencies, undermine the UN’s stated desire for peace based on a “two-state” solution.

“Too often, UN officials are willing and active players in this dynamic, applying double standards and singling out Israel for attack,” Steinberg wrote. “Next week, as occurs every year, the UN will hold a special meeting in Geneva on the occasion of ‘International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,’ featuring anti-Israel demagogues and highlighting agendas that undermine the spirit of UNGA 181.” Among the events planned is a photographic exhibition at UN Headquarters in New York entitled “The Palestinian People: Everlasting Roots, Infinite Horizons.” The exhibition, according to the UN’s web page devoted to the “Question of Palestine,” “…celebrates the lives and careers of Palestinians who have contributed to humanity in different walks of life, in the face of extraordinary challenges. The UN General Assembly will also hold its annual debate on the question of Palestine on this day.”

Steinberg highlighted a number of UN bodies – such as its dedicated Division for Palestinian Rights and its annual condemnation of Israel through the UN Human Rights Council’s Agenda Item 7 – as contributing decisively to the anti-Israel environment at the UN. The Division for Palestinian Rights in turn services the “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” (CEIRPP), created on November 10, 1975 – in the same session of the General Assembly that passed the infamous Resolution 3379 denouncing Zionism as a “form of racism.”

…

In his letter to Guterres, Steinberg pointed out that the UN spends millions of dollars on pro-Palestinian activities every year. “In October 2017, 24 separate UN agencies contracted with the Palestinian Authority to spend more than $18 million on campaigns aimed at isolating Israel through coordinated political, economic, and legal attacks,” he noted, emphasizing the need for the UN as a whole to “accept the obligation to end the rampant and systematic discrimination against Israel that currently plagues the UN.

“A good place to start will be in your remarks to be read on November 29 in Geneva at the forthcoming ‘Special Meeting on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,’” Steinberg told Guterres. “Your repudiation of anti-Israel hate and rejectionism on this occasion would send a strong message that the vision and principles expressed in the 1947 Partition Plan remain guiding principles in the UN.”

The amount of money spent pampering the Palestinians is mind-boggling. Imagine how many genuine refugees and other minorities could be assisted with this money.

Gutteres is actually relatively sympathetic to Israel, but whether he will have the intestinal fortitude to stand up and condemn his own institution’s racism is another matter. And if he does, will his words be heeded? I doubt it somehow.

Meanwhile, over in Geneva at the UN Human Rights Wrongs Council, the 29th November – in fact any day at all – is a day to be marked by condemning Israel for .. well…. anything it can think of. The most popular crime du jour is the settlements of course, and the HRC last year put together a list of companies “profiting” from the settlements – and that includes neighbourhoods of Jerusalem and other major cities – so that their products should be boycotted. Doesn’t this have echoes of a much darker time in our history? 1933 anyone? And then in September the UN began sending out warning letters to these companies that they will be added to this blacklist:

The UN’s Human Rights Commissioner began sending letters two weeks ago to 150 companies in Israel and around the world, warning them that they are about to be added to a database of companies doing business in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, senior Israeli officials and Western diplomats involved in the matter told Haaretz.

The Israeli official, who requested to stay anonymous due to the sensitivity of the issue, noted that the letters, sent by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, said these firms were doing business in the “occupied Palestinian territories” and could thus find themselves on the UN blacklist for companies acting in violation of “internal law and UN decisions.” The letters, copies of which also reached the Israeli government, request that these firms send the commission clarifications about their business activities in settlements.

The Washington Post reported in August that among the American companies that received letters were Caterpillar, Priceline.com, TripAdvisor and Airbnb. According to the same report, the Trump administration is trying to work with the UN Commission on Human Rights to prevent the list’s publication. Israel’s Channel 2 reported two weeks ago that the list includes some of the biggest companies in Israel, such as Teva, Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, Bezeq, Elbit, Coca-Cola Israel, Africa-Israel, IDB, Egged, Mekorot and Netafim.

Senior Israeli officials said the Israeli fear of divestment or scaled-down business due to the blacklist is already becoming a reality. They said that the Economy Ministry’s Office of Strategic Affairs has already received information that a number of companies who received the letters have responded to the human rights commissioner by saying they do not intend to renew contracts or sign new ones in Israel.

“These companies just can’t make the distinction between Israel and the settlements and are ending their operations all together,” the senior Israeli official said. “Foreign companies will not invest in something that reeks of political problems – this could snowball.”

Countering this vicious boycott attempt, fighting fire with fire, a pro-Israel law group, The Lawfare Project, has announced that companies targeted by the UN HRC for working in the settlements will have legal recourse:

International firms targeted by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for doing business with Israeli settlements will have legal recourse, a US-based pro-Israel nonprofit law group noted this week.

It is expected that a “blacklist” of such companies will be published by the UNHRC by the end of this year — a move which both the US and Israel oppose and are lobbying against.

According to the Washington Post, the list could include Caterpillar, TripAdvisor, Priceline.com and Airbnb.

On Monday, the Lawfare Project issued a statement saying the purpose of the UNHRC’s potential action was “clear” — “to coerce the blacklisted companies into reducing or ceasing their Israeli operations, and/or to prompt other business entities (and consumers) to boycott or refuse to deal with the named companies.”

However, the Lawfare Project continued, “what the UNHRC seems to ignore, perhaps purposefully, is that compliance by business enterprises with the boycott of Israel can violate a slew of US federal and state laws.”

“It comes as no surprise that the proponents of the Israeli boycott — the Human Rights Council, NGOs, Arab League member states, and others — do not acknowledge the serious legal implications of actually carrying out the discriminatory conduct for which they advocate,” Benjamin Ryberg — the Lawfare Project’s chief operating officer and director of research — said.

… “When corporations are faced with such proposals or consider implementing boycotts based on the HRC’s database, it is imperative that they are well-versed in the relevant laws so that they can act in their own self-interest, which is to firmly reject the boycott,” he went on to say. “To this end, the Lawfare Project drafted a comprehensive analysis of US and foreign law relating to the boycott of Israel, which we have disseminated to a number of Fortune 500 companies that have been or may be targeted. Our aim is not to threaten legal action, but to prepare these entities to protect themselves from liability that could ensue should they succumb to pressure from the boycott campaign.”

Good for them! Kol hakavod to the activists in the Lawfare Project for throwing the boycott back in the UN’s face, and equally as important, for involving Congress in this anti-boycott legislation:

Lawfare Project Director Brooke Goldstein stated, “For years, the Human Rights Council has focused obsessively and disproportionately on Israel, while turning a blind eye to the most egregious and rampant human rights violators in the Middle East and around the world. With this blacklist, the HRC continues to unabashedly devote disproportionate resources to foment discrimination based on national origin. It continues to make a mockery of its mission to the detriment of human rights worldwide.”

Lawrence Hill — the chairman of the Lawfare Project’s board — said the UNHRC’s “farcical conduct” demonstrated the necessity of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act — which is currently making its way through Congress.

The six Nos of the Arabs besides the 3 Nos of Khartoum

As a reminder of the complete irrelevance of the settlements to the Palestinian’s self-made predicament, it is worthwhile looking back at the article written by John B McCormick, (chairman of Hawke’s Bay Friends of Israel Association and a member of Hawke’s Bay Branch of NZ Institute of International Affairs) which was published in Hawke’s Bay Today newspaper back in January 2017, which I quoted from in this blog at the time. Here is a relevant excerpt:

The focal point for peace efforts was (and many say should still be) UNSC Resolution 242 of November 1967 – the way the UN dealt with the outcome of the 1967 Six Day War. This requires an understanding of its wording. It calls for:
Clause 1 (I) Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;

It is very precise wording. The words “all” or “all the” are not used. The UK’s UN Ambassador Lord Caradon who helped write 242 said in 1978: “We didn’t say there should be a withdrawal to the 67 line, we did not put the ‘THE’ in, we did not say ‘all the’ territories deliberately… we all knew – that the boundaries of 67 were not drawn as permanent frontiers, they were a ceasefire line of a couple of decades earlier…. We did not say that the 67 boundaries must be forever.”

President Johnson said in 1968 relating to UNSC242 that “We are not the ones to say where other nations should draw lines between them that will assure each the greatest security. It is clear however that a return to the situation of June 4 1967 will not bring peace.”

…

In 2005 Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip without any kind of peace agreement. At the same time they also withdrew from the West bank city of Jenin and four nearby settlements, again without any agreement. The Palestinian response was indiscriminate firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel.

…

The British were granted the mandate for Palestine at the San Remo Conference in 1920.
In 1921 Britain separated what we now know as Jordan from the rest of the mandate, making Transjordan the Arab Palestinian State on 78 per cent of the mandate area, and banned Jewish settlement east of the River Jordan. In 1923 Britain ceded the Golan Heights to the French mandate of Syria. The remaining mandate area, 22 per cent of the original total, was to be the Jewish homeland. Read it for yourself! Do the UN and the Arabs want to go there?

So where to now? On January 3 on Palestinian TV Palestine Liberation Organisation executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi, said: “We have refused and still refuse to say that Israel is a Jewish state.” The PLO was formed in 1964 when there was no Israeli occupied territory.

So until there is a Palestinian leadership that accepts Israel as the Jewish State nothing much will happen.

And I will leave it to the redoubtable Melanie Phillips who succinctly sums up the entire argument about the irrelevance of settlements to the Arab-Israeli conflict in her article: The signature cause of Western progressives is purging every Jew from Israel:

MEMRI has translated a report in the the Urdu daily Roznama Urdu Times in wihich al Habbash said: “Every Palestinian will continue the struggle till the complete freedom of Palestine. Those who started the movement for the freedom of Palestine took a pledge, while leaving this world, from the next generation that it will continue this struggle until the land of the first qibla [direction of prayer, i.e. Palestine] is purified of the impious existence of Jews.”

As is clear from the rest of his remarks, he was not talking merely about the “West Bank” and Gaza. He meant the whole of Israel would be “purified” of Jews. This man does not speak for Hamas. He is part of the Palestinian Authority, regarded by the west as “moderate”, and religious adviser to Abbas, regarded by the west as a statesman-in-waiting.

Western “progressives” support the Palestinian Authority and support the Palestinan cause. What do they imagine Mahmoud al Habbash means by the world “purified”? How do they think he intends to put that word into practice in Israel? I’ll give them a clue. It will involve, at the very least, a war of annihilation, racist ethnic cleansing and mass murder.

Only when the West finally admit to themselves that what they are working for is ethnic cleansing of the worst sort against the Jews, and when they apply the force of law and morals to the Palestinians, to all the Arab states and their international supporters, only then will we have a chance for peace.

Categories: Anti-Israel, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Arabs, Palestinian "refugees", Palestinian state, UN and Israel, UN and Palestinians
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The UN – here we go again

November 14, 2017

The UN – here we go again | Anne’s Opinions, 13th November 2017

UN – Useless Nations

It was action replay time at the UN General Assembly last week, as the UN lived down to our expectations and voted to condemn Israel 9 times:

GENEVA, Nov. 10, 2017 – The U.N. General Assembly will condemn Israel nine times today, “part of its annual ritual of enacting 20 Arab-sponsored resolutions singling out the Jewish state, and making no mention of Hamas stabbings, shootings or vehicular attacks against Israelis,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based monitoring group UN Watch. Click here for list of 9 resolutions.

By contrast, in this year’s session there will be a total of 6 condemnatory resolutions for the rest of the world combined — with one each on Syria, North Korea, Iran, Crimea, Myanmar, as well as one on the U.S. for its Cuba embargo.

All 193 UN member states participate in the initial committee vote today, and then almost always vote the same way in a second and final vote at the GA plenary in December.

“The U.N.’s assault on Israel today with a torrent of one-sided resolutions is surreal,” said Neuer.

“Even after Syrian president Bashar Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people within the past year, the U.N. is about to adopt a resolution — drafted and co-sponsored by Syria — which falsely condemns Israel for ‘repressive measures’ against Syrian citizens on the Golan Heights. It’s obscene,” said Neuer.

“While there will be a total of 20 resolutions against Israel this session, not a single U.N. General Assembly resolution is planned today or this year for gross human rights abusers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Venezuela, China, Cuba, Pakistan or Zimbabwe.”

“At a time when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his state-controlled media incite to the continued stabbing and shooting of Israeli Jews, the U.N.’s response is to reflexively condemn Israel in nine separate resolutions, each of them one-sided, each of them utterly silent on Palestinian abuses.”

The resolution drafted annually by Syria condemns Israel for holding on to the Golan Heights, and demands Israel hand the land and its people to Syria.

Israeli military medics assisting wounded Syrians in April. Credit Dusan Vranic/Associated Press

“It’s astonishing,” said Neuer. “After the Syrian regime has killed its own people by the hundreds of thousands over six years, how can the U.N. call for more people to be subject to Assad’s rule? The timing of today’s text is morally galling, and logically absurd.”

“Today’s resolutions claim to care about Palestinians, yet the U.N. is oblivious to the dozens of Palestinians who have been slaughtered, maimed and expelled by Assad’s forces, and more than 3,000 victims killed since 2011.”

“Today’s farce at the General Assembly underscores a simple fact: the U.N.’s automatic majority has no interest in truly helping Palestinians, nor in protecting anyone’s human rights; the goal of these ritual, one-sided condemnations remains the scapegoating of Israel,” said Neuer.

“The U.N.’s disproportionate assault against the Jewish state undermines the institutional credibility of what is supposed to be an impartial international body. Politicization and selectivity harm its founding mission, eroding the U.N. Charter promise of equal treatment to all nations large and small,” Neuer added.

As a further example of the UN’s extreme insanity, there is a possibility that Iran will chair the next UNESCO Executive Board!

A diplomatic battle is under way to prevent Iran’s election to the post of UNESCO Executive Board chairman to replace Michael Worbs of Germany.

The words of Jeremiah in Eicha (Lamentations) illustrated perfectly at UNESCO

Israel has had a contentious relationship with the 58-member board, which in the past has approved resolutions that some say have ignored Jewish ties to Judaim’s holiest site, the Temple Mount.

US and Israeli efforts to block Iran received a boost on Wednesday when the Philippines was one of 27 countries the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s General Assembly elected to a four-year term on the board, effective immediately. Some of those countries are serving their second four-year terms.

In advance of the November 16 election, the board has been split between choosing Iran or South Korea to head the board, but it is possible that the Asia Pacific group will push the Philippines ambassador as a compromise candidate, a diplomatic source speculated in a conversation with The Jerusalem Post.

But the overall make-up of the board with the new members is seen as more hostile to Israel than the previous one.

Germany and the Netherlands lost seats and Turkey gained one. Jordan joined Egypt on the board, thereby providing additional support to any anti-Israel resolutions regarding Jerusalem in the future.

Whether Iran is elected or not, the result is almost irrelevant given the inherent hostility to Israel built in to the organization. The more important issue is the fact that a terror-supporting and revolution-exporting country, which is destabilising the Middle East and holding the world hostage to its desire to build nuclear weapons, could even be considered for such a symbolic post. In fact Iran should not be allowed to be a member of the UN at all.

Then again if the UN expelled every terror-supporting member state, there would be almost no UN left at all. Quite a comforting thought, all in all.

Israel’s Ambassador to UNESCO, Carmel Shama Hacohen, slammed the organization as “the Titanic of international organizations”:

UNESCO is “the Titanic of international organizations,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization said, accusing it of deliberately falsifying history to persecute the Jewish people.

Carmel Shama Hacohen argues with a Palestinian diplomat at UNESCO

In a scathing speech Friday to UNESCO’s 39th General Conference in Paris, Carmel Shama-Hacohen also slammed the United Arab Emirates for having given a gift to all member states but Israel, urging delegates to give it back in protest.

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“UNESCO is the Titanic of international organizations, which was hijacked and led by the Arab Group into crashing the iceberg of politicization, and which has been sinking ever since,” Shama-Hacohen said.

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He added: “Sadly, UNESCO has been hijacked and abused as a tool for the persecution of Israel and the Jewish people, while concocting fake facts and fake history, meant to erase our history in Jerusalem and rewrite global history.”

Shama-Hacohen dedicated a significant part of his speech to the UAE’s October 30 snub of Israel, though he did not name the Gulf state by name.

At the opening of the General Conference in Paris, the Emirati delegation had placed a box containing a silver medal on the desk of each foreign delegation in honor of the UAE having sponsored the renovation of the conference hall. No box, however, was placed on Shama-Hacohen’s desk.

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“Even the inauguration of this very hall was contaminated with the poison of politicization, as the donor state handed out to all member missions a greeting letter and a medal memorabilia: all member missions, aside from one — Israel,” the Israeli envoy said Friday. “How petty, how primitive, how pathetic.”

The incident made clear once again “that petro-dollars can buy much, but there’s no price tag on wisdom, manners and etiquette. Your wealth might be in money, but in dignity you are poorer than poor,” he added.

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“These wrongs are done in full daylight, and all keep quiet: silent accomplices to discrimination in sports: one of the foundations of education and culture, and silent accomplices to the attempts to isolate and ostracize Israel in the inauguration of this hall,” Shama-Hacohen said Friday.

“As for the silver medal, which was handed to you as a gift, I’d return it if I were you, so as not to partake in a despicable act which has no place in a free and enlightened world.”

Kol hakavod to those diplomats who took Hacohen at his word and handed him their medals:

Many foreign diplomats stationed at UNESCO gave him their medals — which bore a portrait of Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the deputy ruler of Dubai and the country’s finance minister of the UAE — in protest of the UAE’s move, the Israeli envoy said.

“My initial instinct was to put it to good use as a doorstop,” he said. “However, after giving it some more thought, I decided to donate them to the Syrian refugees who are wandering the cold streets of Paris. These refugees include infants and children, who escaped the atrocities of the Syrian regime and the chemical attacks of that member of the Arab Group against its own women, children and innocent civilians.”

He added: “If you only invested in them 1% of the efforts you put in here against Israel, their lives would have been better.”

Watch his speech below. If only his English was better pronunciated he would make a much bigger impact. Nevertheless, kol hakavod on an excellent speech:

As a palate cleanser listen to UN Ambassador the UN Nikki Haley’s fantastic speech to the Israel-American Council as she blasted the previous Obama administration for its betrayal of Israel at the UN, and pledged staunch American support for Israel:

Nikki Haley is a shining example of what a diplomat should look like. Sadly she is a rare diamond in a pig sty.

Categories: Anti-Israel, Anti-Zionism, Nikki Haley, UNESCO, United Nations and Israel
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An epic moment at the UN as former Hamas member speaks up for Israel

September 28, 2017

An epic moment at the UN as former Hamas member speaks up for Israel | Anne’s Opinions, 28th September 2017

This has to be one of the most epic and stunning moments in the history of the UN. Once more the UN Human Rights Wrongs Council was holding a debate on “the human rights situation in Palestine”. All the usual anti-Israel suspects had their say, spouting lies, slander, blood libels and epithets at the one and only free, civilized and democratic country in the Middle East. How the likes of Pakistan, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria and other like dictatorships, who between them have killed millions and imprisoned even more – how they can sit there with straight faces while they accuse Israel of the very crimes of which they are guilty, is a subject for a psychologist to deal with.

And then it was UN Watch‘s turn. We have already seen Hillel Neuer speak at the UN many times, and his is superb. But Mosab Hassan Yousef (aka The Green Prince) was in a class of his own, not only for what he said, but for who he is.

Just watch the faces of the Palestinian delegation and enjoy a bit of schadenfreude from the UN for a change.

The funniest reaction was the face of this Palestinian delegate:

Shock horror at the UN as Palestinian speaks up for Israel

 

This speech was a master-stroke by UN Watch.

Kol hakavod on their persistence and devotion to the cause of Israel’s defence.

Categories: UN and human rights, UN and Palestinians, UN Watch
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The Man Who Most Deserves to be DNC Chairman

January 5, 2017

The Man Who Most Deserves to be DNC Chairman, Front Page Magazine, John Perazzo, January 5, 2017

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In a recent interview with the Fox Business Network, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz announced that because of U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison’s past ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, he (Dershowitz) is prepared to “resign [his] membership to the Democratic Party after 50 years of being a loyal Democrat” if Ellison is named as the next DNC chairman.

It’s actually hard to figure out exactly what’s got Mr. Dershowitz in such a snit. It’s not as if Ellison represents some type of sudden, radical departure from what has become the mainstream Democratic position regarding race and religion. In fact, when it comes to racialism and anti-Semitism, Ellison is a mere piker compared to Barack Obama, for whom Dershowitz voted twice. That would be the same Barack Obama who spent 20 years worshiping in the church of a racist Jew-hater named Jeremiah Wright; the same Barack Obama whose longtime close friend and mentor, Professor Rashid Khalidi, was a devoted ally of the late Jew-killer extraordinaire, Yasser Arafat; the same Barack Obama whose policies toward Israel were described by a Likud Party chairman as “catastrophic”; the same Barack Obama who, according to Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, has plunged “Israel’s ties with the United States” into “a crisis of historic proportions”; and the same Barack Obama who, in an act of historic treachery just a few days ago, permitted the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank.

By any metric one chooses, Keith Ellison’s resumé makes him an absolutely perfect choice to continue this proud Democratic tradition of endlessly stoking the fires of racial and religious antagonism.

While attending law school in 1989-90, for instance, Ellison, who had converted to Islam in 1982, wrote several student-newspaper columns where he: (a) stated that the U.S. Constitution is “the best evidence of a white racist conspiracy to subjugate other peoples”; (b) advocated slavery reparations as well as the creation of a geographically self-contained “homeland” for black people in the Southeastern United States; (c) praised the Jew-hating Nation Of Islam (NOI) organization for “all of its laudable work”; and (d) defended the incendiary NOI spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad—a black supremacist who once praised a black gunman for killing six white commuters (and wounding fourteen others) in a racially motivated atrocity aboard a New York City train—as a hero who possessed the courage to “just kill every goddamn cracker that he saw.”

In February 1990, Ellison participated in sponsoring Kwame Ture (a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael) to speak at his law school on the topic of Zionism’s ties to “imperialism” and “white supremacy.” The speech was replete with anti-Jewish slander—hardly a surprise, given that Ture, who in the ’60s had called for “killing the honkies,” was now in the habit of proclaiming that “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.”

Ellison supported, and was affiliated with, the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan for at least a decade, from the late 1980s through the late ’90s. Notwithstanding Farrakhan’s long, well-documented history of venom-laced denunciations of “white devils” and Jewish “bloodsuckers,” Ellison described him as “a role model for black youth” who was “not an anti-Semite”; as “a sincere, tireless, and uncompromising advocate of the black community and other oppressed people around the world”; and as “a central voice for our [black people’s] collective aspirations.”

When Farrakhan supporter Joanne Jackson—the then-executive director of the Minneapolis Initiative Against Racism—asserted in 1997 that “Jews are among the most racist white people I know,” Ellison declared that he and his NOI comrades “stand by the truth contained in [Jackson’s] remarks.”

In February 2000 Ellison gave a speech at a fundraising event sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, on whose steering committee he previously had served. Also in attendance was the former Weather Underground terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, a longtime Obama friend and political ally who had once devoted her life to the goal of fomenting violent revolution across the United States. Incidentally, that 2000 fundraiser was held on behalf of onetime Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Kathleen Soliah, after her apprehension for the attempted murder of some Los Angeles police officers. Ellison called for Soliah’s release, and also spoke favorably of such high-profile killers and leftist icons as Mumia Abu Jamal, Assata Shakur, and Geronimo Pratt.

But alas, America would still have to wait another six-plus years before Ellison would finally grace the U.S. Congress with his presence. Following his electoral triumph in 2006, Ellison’s victory party featured a number of his supporters shouting “Allahu Akbar!”—the traditional battle cry of Islamic jihadists.

Between 2006 and 2016, Ellison spoke at a minimum of twelve fundraising events sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization whose co-founders had close ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine, which functioned as a public-relations and recruitment arm for Hamas—the infamous horde of missile-launchers and suicide bombers committed to the mass murder of Jews. At one of those dozen CAIR fundraisers, Ellison urged his listeners to support Sami al-Arian, the former University of South Florida professor who already had confessed to aiding and abetting the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which, like Hamas. has always had a fondness for the smell of dead Jews.

Ellison has also spoken at numerous conventions held by organizations like the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, and the Islamic Circle of North America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the the North American Imams Federation—all of which are closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, you may recall, advocates the use of violent jihad for the creation of a worldwide Islamic caliphate ruled by strict Sharia Law, and is the parent organization of both Hamas and Al-Qaeda.

But apart from that, the Brotherhood is quite moderate.

In 2007 Ellison denounced what he called the baseless “persecution” of several officials of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) who were being tried on charges that they had funneled millions of dollars to Hamas. The trial ended with a hung jury on most counts, but the following year the HLF defendants were retried and convicted on all charges.

In a July 2007 speech, Congressman Ellison likened the Bush Administration’s military response to the 9/11 attacks, to the manner in which the Nazis had exploited the 1933 burning of the Reichstag in Berlin: “It’s almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”

During “Operation Cast Lead” (OCL)—a December 2008/January 2009 military operation in which Israel sought to quell the aggression of Hamas and other terrorists in Gaza—Ellison made it quite clear that his hatred for America was equaled by his contempt for Israeli Jews. Stating that he was “torn” on the issue, he refused to support a nonbinding House resolution “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza” and “reaffirming the United States’ strong support for Israel.” In September 2009, Ellison called for an end to all U.S. aid to Israel.

In 2009 as well, Ellison met with Mohammed al-Hanooti—a leading U.S.-based fundraiser for Hamas—at a campaign event for Virginia House of Delegates candidate Esam Omeish, who had previously exhorted Palestinians to follow “the jihad way” in their struggle against Israel.

While Ellison is fond of pro-jihadists like al-Hanooti, he’s not too keen on Muslims who seek to persuade other members of their faith to reject jihad and Islamic supremacism. In the fall of 2009, for instance, Ellison disparaged Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim activist who has consistently warned about the threat that political Islam poses to the West, as an Islamic “Uncle Tom.”

During his 2010 congressional re-election bid, Ellison accepted campaign contributions from such notables as Jamal Barzinji and Hisham Al-Tali—both of whom had previously served as vice presidents of the Saudi-dominated, pro-jihad International Institute of Islamic Thought, and both of whom had been identified by the FBI as U.S. leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In September 2012 Ellison condemned a portion of the Republican Party Platform which stated that “there must be no use of foreign law by U.S. courts in interpreting our Constitution and laws.” Characterizing this as a manifestation of anti-Sharia intolerance, the congressman said: “It’s an expression of bigotry.… They’re demonstrating hatred toward Muslims.… [T]hey’re the party that is basically a bigoted party and they have now officially declared themselves against a whole segment of the American population …”
During Operation Protective Edge—a 2014 Israeli military incursion that was launched in response to a dramatic escalation in rocket fire against Israel by Hamas-affiliated terrorists in Gaza—Ellison penned a Washington Post op-ed arguing that any ceasefire should be predicated on Israel ending its blockade of Gaza. Curiously, he made no mention of the fact that the blockade, which explicitly permitted the import of humanitarian supplies and other basic necessities, had been implemented out of necessity in 2007, due to Hamas’s relentless importation and deployment of deadly weaponry from its allies abroad.

Also in 2014, Ellison was one of only eight Members of Congress to vote against a House Resolution to increase the amount of U.S. financial aid that was earmarked to help Israel maintain and develop its Iron Dome missile-defense system—a system that had successfully intercepted 735 Hamas rockets aimed at Israeli population centers during Operation Protective Edge.

To be fair, we should note that Ellison is no less concerned about Israel’s national security than he is about America’s. Indeed, when President Obama announced in September 2015 that he planned to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S. during the ensuing year, Ellison said: “Ten thousand is not enough. Aren’t we the people who say, ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses’? We must do more for families who are not safe in their own homeland.” He said this in spite of the fact that the Islamic State‘s bloodthirsty savages had openly vowed to secrete their own terrorist operatives into the refugee masses, as well as the fact that high-ranking government officials like FBI Director James Comey, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, CIA Director John Brennan, and FBI Deputy Assistant Director Michael Steinbach had all said that it would be impossible to reliably screen out terrorists posing as refugees.

In 2015 as well, Ellison voiced his unequivocal support for the passage of the Iran Nuclear Deal, which allowed the Islamist regime in Tehran to enrich uranium, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism, and have a near-zero breakout time to a nuclear bomb approximately a decade down the road. “This deal is a triumph of diplomacy over war and proves negotiation is an excellent method of peacemaking,” said Ellison.

Last year, Bernie Sanders used his influence to secure, for Ellison, a major role in formulating the Democratic Party’s platform for the presidential election campaign. As terrorism expert Steven Emerson reports: “Ellison and other delegates supporting Sanders wanted the Democratic Party platform to delete a description of Jerusalem as Israel’s ‘undivided capital’ and wanted to gut language opposing the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement targeting the Jewish state.”

At the Democratic National Convention last July, Ellison was a featured speaker in a session held by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation—part of an alliance of anti-Israel organizations that promote the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) campaign. Ellison himself supports BDS, a Hamas-inspired initiative that aims to use various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and court rulings to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.

But lest you think that Ellison’s only qualifications for the post of DNC chairman are his Jew-hatred, his admiration for Islamist radicals, and his utter contempt for his own country, don’t neglect to credit him also for the high regard in which he held the late totalitarian dictator and mass murderer Fidel Castro. After Castro died this past November, Ellison sang his praises as a “revolutionary leader” who had nobly “confronted a system of government that excluded everybody except the military and the money-rich”; who had “[stood] up for peace and freedom in Africa”; who had “[taken] on the South Africa apartheid military forces and defeated them”; who had “deployed doctors anywhere … people were sick”; and who had “made medical education very available [and] made medicine available.”

So, here’s to Keith Ellison—in hopes that he will get the DNC chairmanship that a man of his caliber so richly deserves.

Categories: Anti-Israel, Antisemitism, Democrat National Committee, Democrat Party, Israel, Keith Ellison, Obama and Israel, Obama and racism, Obama's affinity for Islam, Obama's anti-semitism, Obama's foreign failures
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Twitter Grants Verification to Muslim Brotherhood’s Violent, Anti-Semitic Online Mouthpiece

November 28, 2016

Twitter Grants Verification to Muslim Brotherhood’s Violent, Anti-Semitic Online Mouthpiece, Washington Free Beacon, , November 28, 2016

Bydgoszcz, Poland, 20 June 2016: Twitter has announced the possibility of live streaming via itís site. With the integration of Periscope, the popular live streaming app Twitter now has the majority of the live streaming market in itís hands making rivals like Meerkat all but disappear. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto) *** Please Use Credit from Credit Field ***

Twitter. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto) 

“At a time when Twitter is already facing criticism for banning individuals based solely on speech, Twitter has effectively lionized a group responsible for the burning of Coptic churches and the killing of Egyptian police and judiciary officials,” Shideler added. “How is Twitter supposed to help defeat online radicalization when it essentially endorses the biggest source for Islamist radicals in the world?”

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The social media website Twitter is facing criticism for its recent decision to grant verification to the Muslim Brotherhood’s official mouthpiece, which routinely writes in favor of violent terror acts and disseminates anti-Semitic propaganda.

The Muslim Brotherhood–which has been designated as a terror outfit and banned by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and elsewhere–operates in the online sphere via a website known as Ikhwan Web, which serves as the Brotherhood’s “official” English-speaking feed.

Twitter recently granted verification to Ikhwan Web’s online feed, giving the organization an air of legitimacy that leading lawmakers and experts described as reckless given the Brotherhood’s history of supporting violent jihad and terrorism.

‎”Verifying the Muslim Brotherhood’s Twitter feed helps further their narrative of civilization-Jihad,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), a Muslim Brotherhood critic who has authorized legislation to designate it in the United States as a terror organization, told the Washington Free Beacon.

“This maneuver makes the Brotherhood seem like a legitimate group while providing them cover to spread their radical version of Islam,” Cruz added. “I look forward to working with the new administration to expose the Brotherhood’s efforts to increase their influence in America.”

Ikhwan Web’s Twitter feed serves as a central hub for the Brotherhood’s radical propaganda and official statements. A Free Beacon request for comment to Twitter’s public relations department went unanswered.

Twitter has faced a wave of criticism for failing to shut down various accounts promoting radical jihad and terrorism against Western countries. Others have criticized the social media site for cracking down on accounts associated with conservative-leaning thinkers and writers.

Recent tweets indicate that the Brotherhood is, via its Twitter feed, advocating continued violence and resistance against Egypt’s ruling government. It also is working to mainstream the Brotherhood as a legitimate resistance organization and governing body.

Ikhwan Web has a history of promoting violence in the Middle East, primarily in Egypt, where the Brotherhood led a bloody coup and continues to support violence against the country’s ruling authority.

“It is incumbent upon everyone to be aware that we are in the process of a new phase, where we summon what is latent in our strength, where we recall the meanings of jihad and prepare ourselves, our wives, our sons, our daughters, and whoever marched on our path to a long, uncompromising jihad, and during this stage we ask for martyrdom,” the Brotherhood said in a 2015 statement that was posted on Ikhwan Web.

The website also has a history of defending individuals accused of organizing terror attacks on U.S. soil.

Other recent articles posted by the group promote violence against the Israeli government and Jewish people, including one 2009 post quoting a Muslim Brotherhood leader as calling for “jihad” to “liberate” Jerusalem from Israeli control.

The Brotherhood falsely claims that Israel is attempting to vandalize Muslim holy sites and prevent access for adherents to the faith.

Other postings rally against “the ugly face” of Zionism.

Kyle Shideler, director of the Center for Security Policy’s Threat Information Office, told the Free Beacon that Twitter’s decision to grant legitimacy to the organization is “deeply concerning.”

“This decision by Twitter to provide the Muslim Brotherhood with this literal blue check of approval is deeply disconcerting,” Shideler said.

“At a time when Twitter is already facing criticism for banning individuals based solely on speech, Twitter has effectively lionized a group responsible for the burning of Coptic churches and the killing of Egyptian police and judiciary officials,” Shideler added. “How is Twitter supposed to help defeat online radicalization when it essentially endorses the biggest source for Islamist radicals in the world?”

Categories: Anti-Israel, Antisemitism, Ikhwan Web, Islamic terrorism, Muslim Brotherhood, social media, Twitter
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Odeh Adds Israel-Hating Lawyer, Fights Psych Evaluation

July 29, 2016

Odeh Adds Israel-Hating Lawyer, Fights Psych Evaluation, Investigative Project on Terrorism, July 29, 2016

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Editor’s note: For details on the Rasmieh Odeh case and the intense support behind her, see our series, “Spinning a Terrorist Into a Victim,” here.

As she fights to block a psychological examination by a government expert, convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmieh Odeh added a new member to her defense team, one who shares her intense hatred for Israel.

Huwaida Arraf helped organize the 2010 flotilla aimed at breaking Israel’s blockade of Gaza by delivering humanitarian supplies. The blockade was implemented to prevent the Hamas government and other terrorists from smuggling materials that can be used to make bombs and rockets. The flotilla, and similar convoys which claimed to be delivering aid to Palestinians in Gaza, worked closely with Hamas officials in Gaza.

The flotilla ended in a violent confrontation on one ship after passengers attacked Israeli soldiers with knives, pipes and other weapons. Arraf was on a separate ship, but still is suing the Israeli government claiming mistreatment when the flotilla was intercepted. Among the allegations, her handcuffs were too tight.

Odeh, meanwhile, is trying to persuade a federal judge in Detroit to grant her a new trial for naturalization fraud. She was convicted in 2014, but an appeals court ruling could lead to a new trial in which jurors would hear Odeh’s claim that she suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), supported by her own psychologist’s testimony.

When applying for a visa to come to the United States, and later when she sought naturalization as an American citizen, Odeh failed to disclose her arrest, conviction and 10 year imprisonment in Israel for her role in a lethal 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing that killed two college students.

During her trial, immigration officials testified that Odeh never would have been allowed into the United States, let alone granted citizenship, had they been informed of her terrorist history.

Odeh claims the omission was unintentional, the result of PTSD she suffers from due to alleged torture while in Israeli custody. Her confession, she says, also was the result of the alleged torture.

There is no physical evidence for this claim, and it has been contradicted by records created at the time and by Odeh’s own testimony two years ago.

Such testimony was barred during the original trial, but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in February that U.S. District Judge Gershwin A. Drain’s ruling was flawed. The appellate court remanded the case, saying there might be other reasons that are legally valid to exclude the PTSD testimony.

That will be determined at a hearing scheduled for Nov. 27. If Drain rules that the PTSD testimony should be heard, Odeh would get a new trial in January. If not, the conviction stands, pending another likely appeal.

But the judge who must decide whether such testimony is both relevant and valid should rely solely on the defense’s expert, Odeh’s attorneys argued in court papers last week.

Any additional mental evaluation carries “the grave risk … [of] a serious aggravation of her symptoms and the suffering they cause her,” the defense argued.

The government review is described as inherently hostile and “bent on” discrediting Odeh. This, the defense reply says, “will plunge [Odeh] to the depths of ghastly ‘flashback’ memories which have afflicted her life for all these years…”

The one opinion from their own psychologist, they argue, is sufficient.

A second opinion, prosecutors argued in requesting a second opinion, is necessary.

“At present,” they wrote, “the only information the Court has before it is the testimony of the defense expert herself based only on her own examination of the defendant. This Court cannot make an informed decision about the reliability and competence of the defense expert’s conclusions based on that expert’s word alone.”

Arraf is among the attorneys listed on the brief. She formally joined the defense team last week.

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She served as interim board chair for the Free Gaza Movement, which advocates for a Palestinian right of return “without delay to their homes in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.” Creating such a right would threaten to flood Israel demographically, challenging its existence as a Jewish state.

Arraf advocates boycotts against Israel and calls the right of return “a matter of time.”

The flotilla’s objectives and actions were rejected by a United Nations investigative panel. This is striking because of the UN’s willingness to condemn Israel often, while overlooking tremendous human rights abuses elsewhere in the Middle East and throughout the world, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, China, Russia and more.

Last year, UN Watch director Hillel Neuer tallied UN condemnations, finding 61 targeting Israel, while the rest of the world garnered only 55 such statements.

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In its report on the 2010 flotilla, the UN found that the six ships involved carried very little actual humanitarian aid supplies. “The number of journalists embarked on the ships gives further power to the conclusion that the flotilla’s primary purpose was to generate publicity,” it said.

In addition, “the flotilla rejected offers to unload any essential humanitarian supplies at other ports and have them delivered to Gaza by land. These offers were made even during the voyage.” Investigators found evidence that Hamas planned a reception for the flotilla.

In her lawsuit against the Israeli government, Arraf alleges she was “arbitrarily detained and forced to adopt a kneeling position while being hooded for an extended period of time and placed in handcuffs that were too tight.”

The UN report, however, called it “a dangerous and reckless act” to “deliberately seek to breach a blockade in a convoy with a large number of passengers.”

Worse for flotilla advocates, the UN acknowledged that “Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza. The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.”

That threat endures, as Hamas openly digs as many attack tunnels along its border with Israel as it can, at the cost of diverting materials that could be used to build housing for Palestinians and restore its crumbling infrastructure.

Arraf’s lawsuit claims the blockade is illegal despite the UN finding to the contrary.

Now she’s helping Odeh, convicted of killing two Israelis and more recently convicted of lying about it to U.S. immigration officials, argue that a wholly unsubstantiated claim – Odeh’s supposed torture in Israeli custody and resulting PTSD – should be accepted by the court and presented to a jury unchecked.

Prosecutors describe Odeh “as the principal architect” of the 1969 bombing which killed students Leon Kanner and Edward Joffe. And Odeh’s statements over time contradict the current defense claim that she is emotionally incapable of discussing it.

In her first trial, and in a 2004 documentary, Odeh presented dramatically different stories about the 1969 terrorist bombing, her role in it and her ability to remember it.

Naturalization forms ask whether the applicant has ever been arrested, convicted or imprisoned. The word “ever” is set off in bold, upper-cased letters. Barred by court rulings against invoking the PTSD claim, Odeh testified that she thought the word “ever” applied only to her life in the United States, and not before.  Had she understood the questions better, she would not have hesitated to mention her Israeli record.

“It’s not [a] secret that I have been in the jail,” she testified. “Everybody knows.”

And while she says she has difficulty thinking about that trauma, she claims specific memory of her naturalization interview more than a decade ago.

The immigration official who interviewed Odeh testified that she clarifies for all applicants that the question applies to “anywhere in the world.” Odeh insisted she remembered the interview and this did not happen in her case.

She is equally adamant in claiming she is not guilty of the terrorist bombing. But in the documentary, which came out the same year Odeh applied for naturalization and claimed to have no arrest record, she visited with a co-conspirator in the 1969 Supersol bombing. Odeh sat and listened as her friend said it was Rasmieh who “dragged me into military work” and who was more involved than I was” in the grocery store bombing.

She described scouting the targeted supermarket in terms that matched the confession given to Israeli authorities. That confession, Cornell University Law Professor William Jacobson first noted, came a day after her arrest, long before the abuse she now alleges took place. Odeh says she broke after 25 days of torture.

But given the chance to make a torture allegation in 1969, Odeh’s father had little to say. An American consulate official who met with him while she was in custody reported “uncomfortable, overcrowded jail conditions, but he apparently [is] receiving no rpt [repeat] no worse than standard treatment afforded majority detainees at Jerusalem jail.”

In addition, Odeh discussed her role in the Supersol bombing, and in a second bombing at the British Consulate that caused only property damage, in a 1980 Journal of Palestine Studies article that remains online.

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“Actually we placed two bombs,” she said, “the first was found before it went off so we placed another.”

Arraf posted on Twitter that she is “honored” to defend someone who killed two Israelis. That’s not surprising.

Categories: Anti-Israel, Crime, Flotilla to Nowhere, Fraud, Hamas, Immigration, Israel, Israel and human rights, Palestinian heroes, Rasmieh Odeh, U.S. courts
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Jews Denied Security Clearance While Huma Infiltrates the Government

December 24, 2015

Jews Denied Security Clearance While Huma Infiltrates the Government, Front Page Magazine, Joseph Klein, December 24, 2015

(This has nothing to do with Islam or Obama? Please see also, The United States and Islam: What Is Going On? — — DM)

huma_abedins_muslim_brotherhood_ties

The Obama administration’s anti-Israel sentiment knows no bounds. The latest example involves the denial of a security clearance to a Jewish-American dentist, Dr. Gershon Pincus, on the grounds that he has “divided loyalties.” All that Dr. Pincus wanted to do was to use the experience and skills he had gained over a lifetime of private practice to give back to his country – the United States of America. He wanted to serve American troops as a dentist at an off-base U.S. Navy clinic. Nothing doing, decided the Obama administration after a second security investigation of the dentist. Using a McCarthyite guilt by association rationale, the dentist was disqualified because of his close family ties in Israel and the possible contact of his family members with their Israeli neighbors. 

Dr. Pincus’s original security investigation had reached a positive conclusion: “There is nothing in subject’s background or character that would make him vulnerable to blackmail, extortion, coercion or duress.” That should have ended the matter. After all, Dr. Pincus was not applying for a sensitive job in the Department of Defense or the CIA. He was simply seeking to provide dental services at an off-base U.S. Naval clinic.

However, the Obama administration was not through investigating Dr. Pincus. It ordered a second investigation, conducted this time by a contract investigator sent by the Office of Personnel Management. The bill of particulars resulting from this second investigation are set out in the “Statement of Reasons” for denying Dr. Pincus’s request for security clearance. They included such shocking details as the fact that the dentist’s ailing mother now lives in Israel along with his brother and sister. He sends money to his mother to help her pay her rent. He calls his family members and has even visited Israel three times in the last eight years for his father’s funeral, his niece’s wedding and to see his mother. Dr. Pincus’s deceased son was a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel and also served for six months in the Israeli Army.

“Foreign contacts and interests may be a security concern due to divided loyalties or financial foreign interests,” quoted the Statement of Reasons from the federal government’s Adjudicative Guideline B – Foreign Influence. They “may be manipulated or induced to help a foreign person, group, organization, or government in a way that is not in U.S. interests, or is vulnerable to pressure or coercion by any foreign interests.”

Just regurgitating this expression of security concerns from the Guideline is meaningless without considering the context in which it is supposed to be applied. Guideline B lists a number of mitigating circumstances that investigators are expected to take into account, among which are whether “the nature of the relationships with foreign persons, the country in which these persons are located, or the positions or activities of those persons in that country are such that it is unlikely the individual will be placed in a position of having to choose between the interests of a foreign individual, group, organization, or government and the interests of the U.S.”

In Dr. Pincus’s case, the Statement of Reasons explaining the decision to deny his security clearance does not point to any security risk posed by the dentist himself or his relatives living in Israel. There is not a single shred of evidence cited, including any questionable statements or associations, which calls into question the loyalty of Dr. Pincus’s family members to the United States.  Nor are any activities referenced that could pose a conflict of interest for Dr. Pincus in serving as a dentist at the Navy clinic. The dentist’s son who had served in the Israeli army is no longer alive. His mother is ailing. His brother does not want to become an Israeli citizen. His sister does hold dual citizenship, but there is nothing to indicate that she is in a position of influence in Israel that would force Dr. Pincus to have to choose between Israel’s interests and the interests of the United States, assuming there were even a circumstance in which his dental activities and access to the Navy clinic could cause a problem.

Moreover, the Statement of Reasons admits that Dr. Pincus himself has “no intentions of moving to Israel, or obtaining Israeli citizenship.” Nevertheless, the second investigation led to his disqualification.

This disgraceful decision was not an isolated occurrence. Although subject to an appeal, there is not much cause for optimism that it will be reversed. A Wall Street Journal Op Ed by Bret Stephens reported that “there have been a total of 58 cases in which Israeli ties were a significant factor in the decision. Of these, 36 applicants—an astonishing 62% of the total—lost their appeals and had their clearance applications denied.”

Contrast the arbitrary, discriminatory treatment of a Jewish American dentist who has family ties to Israel with a Muslim American who has family ties to Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood.  The latter, Huma Abedin, was allowed to serve in the Obama State Department and remains a close confidante of Hillary Clinton.

Obama’s Office of Personnel Management and State Department evidently did not consider Ms. Abedin a security risk for a much more sensitive job than serving as a dentist at an off-base Navy clinic, despite the following undisputed facts:

1. Although born in the United States, Huma Abedin grew up in Saudi Arabia, where her parents were recruited by Abdullah Omar Naseef (a jihadist affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Muslim World League) to establish an organization known as the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA). The principle underlying the notion of Muslim Minority Affairs is to discourage assimilation of Muslim minority populations into the culture and society of their host non-Muslim majority countries. Such separatism would enable the Muslim minority population to grow over time and expand the influence of sharia law in their host countries.

2. Huma Abedin returned to the United States from Saudi Arabia to attend George Washington University, where she was an executive board member of George Washington University’s Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Muslim Students Association.

3. Huma’s late father founded IMMA’s Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, now run by Abedin’s mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin.  Saleha Abedin is a sociologist with ties to numerous jihadist organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood. She has directed the Jordan-based International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC), which supports the implementation of strict sharia law. Saleha Abedin still lives in Saudi Arabia.

4. Huma Abedin served as an assistant editor for the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs for twelve years, leaving shortly before she joined the State Department in 2009. The first seven of the years in which Huma was an assistant editor overlapped with the al-Qaeda-affiliated Naseef’s active presence at IMMA, including one year in which Huma and Naseef served together on the editorial board of the journal.

5. Huma Abedin did not distance herself from her mother, despite her mother’s jihadist views that place sharia law over man-made law and self-governance. In fact, Huma Abedin introduced Hillary Clinton to her mother during a visit to Saudi Arabia, while Hillary was serving as Secretary of State.

In short, Huma Abedin has a family connection to Saudi Arabia, the source of the Wahhabi jihadist ideology and the country where fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers came from. She grew up there. Huma’s mother is a well-known jihadist in Saudi Arabia still active in pushing a sharia law agenda that is antithetical in material respects to the Constitution of the United States and American values. Dr. Gershon Pincus has a mother, brother and sister living in Israel, which, at least prior to the Obama administration, has been our closest ally in the Middle East. His mother has dementia and neither she, nor Dr. Pincus’s siblings, have expressed any ideology incompatible with the U.S. Constitution or American values.

Yet Huma Abedin, a self-proclaimed “proud Muslim,” slid through her security screening to a highly sensitive job at the State Department and is now a key adviser to the leading Democratic candidate for president. No such luck for Dr. Pincus, who just wanted to take care of the dental needs of some Navy personnel. If this isn’t an example of blatant discrimination against American Jews with family members living in Israel, then pray tell what is?

Categories: Anti-Israel, Foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Jews, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Islam, Obama and Israel, Obama's affinity for Islam, Saudi Arabia, Sharia law, State Department
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Anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias in the media and State Dept.

October 7, 2015

Anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias in the media and State Dept. | Anne’s Opinions, 7th October 2015

As I write this, events are overtaking me with a huge wave of terror attacks (145 at the last count) hitting throughout Israel, including my own hometown of Petach Tikva. I wonder how the media will cover this – if at all. — anneinpt)

I have been documenting anti-Israel bias in the media since I started this blog. In fact it was one of the reasons I st this blog up in the first place. Sadly it seems to be getting worse despite the fact that there are so many media-monitoring websites out there, at least in certain media outlets (Haaretz, the BBC, the NYT, I’m looking at you – and others besides). This is besides the built-in hostility towards Israel in international institutions like the UN. But it goes further. Much more egregiously, the double standard to wards Israel has become blatantly clear in the US State Department. Following are several examples from the past week which saw several terrorist atrocities in Israel.

CAMERA billboard posted opposite the NYT building

The Algemeiner has an “interesting” (i.e. enraging) roundup of the blatant bias of the New York Times with examples from just the past month (there are many more recent exampels at the following links) documented by two media watchdogs: CAMERA and Honest Reporting):

On September 10, the NYT singled out Jewish lawmakers on the Iran deal. [At the link you will read that this was a blatantly antisemitic act, targeting Jews for no other reason than that they are Jewish. The NYT has yet to be made to pay for this racial discrimination. -Ed.]

On September 15, the NYT suggested that the Israeli who was murdered by rock-throwing Palestinians had died of a “self-inflicted accident” after the attackers had merely “pelted the road” (rather than his car). The National Review provided a detailed critique of this farcical “reporting.”

Unbelievably, Diaa Hadid, a NYT “journalist” responsible for reporting on Israel, used to work for an anti-Israel hate group, so it’s no surprise that she authored an article suggesting that Palestinian attackers pelted a road with stones on which an Israeli’s self-inflicted car accident just happened to cause him to die.

On September 29, Hadid used an anonymous European advocate of Palestinian rights as a witness to contradict Israeli army claims that a Palestinian woman who was shot at an IDF checkpoint had been armed with a knife. Hadid then omitted confirmatory reports from another witness mentioned in the article, a Palestinian named Fawaz Abu Aisheh, who said the woman had dropped her knife after being shot. (Hadid ignored this evidence even though Amnesty International mentioned Aisheh’s corroborating testimony about the knife).

On September 30, the NYT struck again with false historical information and tendentious coverage of Abbas’ UN speech. The article, by Rick Gladstone and Jodi Rudoren, noted that “Mr. Abbas accused Israel of having systematically violated these pacts,” without mentioning the many violations of the Oslo Peace Accords by Palestinians. In an article exceeding 1,000 words, the reporters made not even one reference to Palestinian terrorism, a basic historical fact that is essential to any fair and balanced understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, since the Oslo Peace Accords, there have been 22 years of Palestinian terrorist attacks — including 140 suicide bombings — which have murdered more than 1,500 Israelis (in U.S. population terms, about 60,000 people killed) and made Israeli compliance with a complex and risky “peace” agreement even harder.

…

The reporters shamelessly failed to note that the “new strife over contested religious sites in Jerusalem” was produced by Palestinian incitement, anti-Jewish harassment and violence.

Equally egregious is their patently false claim that “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most protracted dispute vexing the United Nations since the organization’s founding 70 years ago.” Some basic Wikipedia research reveals that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began in 1948 and has produced about 24,000 fatalities since then, while the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan began in 1947 and has produced about 47,000 fatalities, and the conflict over Kurdish separatism in Iran began in 1946 and has caused at least 30,000 fatalities.

Moving on to the events of last week, the BBC outdid itself (if that is at all possible) in its outrageous headlines which even they themselves were persuaded – eventually – to change – four times! – until they matched the events on the ground. Honest Reporting gives us a screenshot of the initial BBC headline after a Palestinian terrorist stabbed and murdered two Israeli Rabbis and injured the wife and child of one of them in the Old City of Jerusalem:

BBC biased headline

Note how the headline focuses on the poor Palestinian murderer.

BBC Watch follows up on how the BBC flunked the headlines on the Jerusalem terror attack: – and includes a reference to the BBC’s misleading reporting on the murder of the Henkin’s two days previously, in which they did not mention the Palestinian Authority’s connection to the murder:

Predictably, that headline prompted considerable protest on social media and shortly after its publication the title was changed to one displaying yet another regular feature of BBC reporting; the use of superfluous punctuation.

Pigua Lions Gate art vers 2

Following further complaints, the headline was amended again.

Pigua Lions Gate art vers 3

And later on – yet again.

Pigua Lions Gate art vers 4

In other words, professional journalists supposedly fluent in the English language had to make three changes to the article’s headline in not much more than an hour.

And what of the report itself? In line with standard BBC practice, the word terror does not appear in any of the versions of an article describing a terror attack on Israeli civilians. Readers are told that:

“It comes two days after an Israeli couple, who were in a car with their four children, were shot dead in the West Bank.”

Of course BBC audiences had not been informed that was a terror attack either.

Readers of the third version of the report were told that:

“Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, issued a statement praising the attack which it described as “heroic”.”

They were not, however, informed that social media accounts belonging to Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party similarly praised the attack and described its perpetrator as a ‘hero’. The information concerning Hamas was later removed.

As BBC Watch remarked on its report on the BBC’s coverage of the Henkin murders:

The BBC cannot claim to be meeting its remit of building “a global understanding of international issues” as long as it continues to conceal the role played by the Palestinian Authority in inciting violence and executing terror attacks on Israeli civilians.

But the Beeb’s bias doesn’t seem to worry anyone in the British halls of power.

As for international coverage of the terror attacks that killed four Israeli civilians in 2 days, besides the countless attempted murder attacks via rock-throwing on the roads, firebombs, tossing firecrackers at the police, and arson, Israel experienced agricultural terrorism in the form of uprooted vineyards, as well as the destruction of priceless Bar Kochba-era antiquities.

Uprooted vines in the Shilo region

Kiryat Aravia caves before the destruction

The site after Palestinians bulldozed it

If you live outside Israel I’m pretty sure you haven’t heard of any of this. Edgar Davidson has produced another great (but sad) info-graphic showing the disparity in political reactions and the bias in reporting: (click to enlarge):

Compare and contrast responses to terror in Israel

Sadly, I find none of this surprising. We have become so inured to biased, misleading, distorted or simply missing reporting on Israel that, at least speaking for myself, I have no expectations at all from the foreign media and am pleasantly surprised when I find an accurate report.

However the bias at the US State Department which is also not new (it is dominated by Arabists, rather like the “Camel Corps” of the British Foreign Office), seems to have hit a new low.

The blogger “First One Through” at Jews Down Under created an instructive table comparing the State Department’s reactions to Israeli and Arab casualties of warfare and terrorism. Even with the knowledge that State is biased, I admit I was shocked by this (I edited the heading of the chart for errors):

Event July 1 Attack on Arabs October 1 Attack on Jews October 3 Attack on Jews
Words in Statement 122 68 77
Condemnation “condemns in strongest possible terms” “strongly condemns” “strongly condemns”
Terrorist attack “vicious terrorist attack” AND “terrorism” “terrorist attack” Not called terrorism
Condolences “profound condolences” “condolences” No condolences
Prayer for Injured “prayers for a full recovery” None None
Families mentioned “Dawabsheh family” None None
Location of Incident “Palestinian village of Douma” “West Bank.” Not Israeli; not Samaria “Old City of Jerusalem today”. Not Israeli
Call for Justice “murderers” “the perpetrators” “all perpetrators of violence” A general term

Furthermore, in an outrageously undiplomatic move, the White House instructed Secretary of State John Kerry and Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power to stay away from the UN while Binyamin Netanyahu delivered his speech to the UNGA last week.

I cannot recall ever such a disgraceful, overtly antagonistic act being taken – for no reason other than hurt personal feelings – by the White House or the State Department. Shame on them!

But history is a cycle. Do you remember the “outrage” and “appalled” feelings at State when Israel hit a school or hospital – or rather, NEAR the buildings – in Gaza? That was described as a war crime and Israel was villified in every media outlet that you can think of, besides the State Department (reminder: the US is supposed to be Israel’s ally!) and of course the UN.

This week the tables have turned. Russia has begun brazenly bombing civilian targets in Syria. Meanwhile the US Air Force bombed an Afghan hospital, and it is instructive to note the media coverage and its comparison with Israel’s attack in Gaza, as Honest Reporting reports:

It will certainly be interesting to compare the media coverage of Russian and U.S. air strikes to the reports that Israel had to contend with. All too often, the media attributes a level of malevolence when it comes to Israeli military actions.

So, while, for example, the New York Times’s headline from July 2014 actively attributes responsibility to Israel for the alleged shelling of a UN school, its headline covering the Afghan hospital incident passively attributes the air strike rather than those who carried it out.

nytimes300714

nytimes031015Ultimately, both Israel and the U.S. have shared values when it comes to the ethics of war. It is hard to believe that the U.S. has intentionally targeted civilians in a hospital. It does, however, comparatively demonstrate the lengths that Israel goes to in order to avoid just such a scenario as the Afghan hospital.

It is a tragic inevitability that civilians will die in war. Russia does not appear to be influenced by morals or ethics. Meanwhile the U.S. may be realizing that it has something to learn from Israel when it comes to ethics on the battlefield.

I would have been angrier at the duplicity of the State Department, but I must admit I’m finally enjoying a great surge of schadenfreude at their expense as their spokesman squirmed, evaded and tried to wriggle out of a straight answer to a direct question posed by Matt Lee of AP about the Afghan hospital bombing. Watch the video at Israellycool:

Matt Lee decided to ask the State Department’s Mark Toner exactly what kind of standards they hold themselves to because it would seem to be a different set that they applied to Israel last year.

I’ll spoil it. He’s got no answer. They can’t justify it. They hold Israel to an impossible standard, one to which they cannot themselves match because this is war and bad stuff happens. We join the briefing for Matt’s follow up question after his first is left completely unanswered in over 3 minutes of bluster.

You can read the transcript of the entire question and answer session at the Israellycool link.

Enjoy! Maybe the State Department will think twice before again condemning Israel’s perfectly legal actions taken in self-defense.

—

One update before I go: there has been another terrorist stabbing in the Old City, near the site of the double murder on Saturday night:

Watch out for biased reporting about this one too – if it even gets a mention.

Categories: Media, State Department
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