Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, May 27, 2017

05/27 Links: What is the West Bank's real legal status?; Why Aren’t Muslim Countries Helping the Palestinians?

From Ian:

50 years since 1967: What is the West Bank's real legal status?

ACCORDING TO former Hebrew University Law School dean and Israel Democracy Institute Fellow Yuval Shany, the starting point for the discussion was Shamgar and Israel’s acceptance of the 1907 Hague Regulations applying to the West Bank.
This means Israeli control over the West Bank falls into the category of “belligerent occupation.”
In less fancy language, it means that Israel has not annexed the land and is holding it temporarily. Further, it means that Israel has certain obligations not to change the face of the land or harm the rights of the local people already there – the Palestinians.
Shany said that agreeing to apply the Hague principles “was the only possible decision since there was no political decision to annex the West Bank.”
He noted that Israel could have decided to extend Israeli law to the West Bank, as was done in east Jerusalem, “but the government did not want to make that political decision. All governments since also did not make this decision,” so accepting the international law obligations and limits of the Hague Regulations was “the only option.”
In contrast to the Hague Regulations, Shany said there has always been a debate about the application of the Geneva Conventions to the West Bank.

50 Years after the Six-Day War, We Shouldn't Lament Israel's Power to Protect Itself

In May 1967, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, who had joined in a military alliance with Syrian President Hafez el Assad, daily promised to "drive Israel into the sea." Jews around the world were anxious beyond belief. It was scant more than twenty years since the liberation of the death camps in Europe and the odds were overwhelming that the next cataclysm against our people was soon to begin. In a stunning six-day victory, Israel defeated the combined Arab armies, reunited Jerusalem, took the Golan Heights and made its way to the Suez Canal.
It is difficult for Israel to extricate itself from the obligation of having to send its young people to the territories in uniform to oversee other people's lives. Israel uprooted 8,000 long-time inhabitants of Gaza to make the territory Jew-free with the hope that without an occupation Gaza could transform itself into a Singapore. We know from history that this was a terrible mistake which has exacted an enormous cost on Palestinians and Israelis in terms of suffering, treasure and death.
Some opinion-makers have opined that the Six-Day War was a catastrophe. I cannot agree. It is far better that Israel won the war decisively than were it to have lost the war entirely. It is not hard to imagine the nature of the bloodbath that would have occurred on the streets of an Arab-occupied Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
Israel's adversaries refuse to accept its existence and the existence of Jews living in the Land of Israel. That is the root of the problem, going back more than a hundred years. Once that is solved, everything else will fall into place.
To be honest, there is something crazy about lamenting the fact that we Jews have the power to protect ourselves and that we will no longer be subject to the bullies and murderers who have tormented us. I would rather live with the moral struggle of the past 50 years than die the good death of a martyr to another round of anti-Jewish hatred and violence.

A false narrative about Israel has hijacked progressive minds. We must call people out for their selective social conscience

Simon Wiesenthal was a man of action. Not content to let complacent governments deal with the butchers of the Holocaust, he hunted them and forced them to face justice. In so doing, he announced to the world that from now on, there is a high price to pay for harming Jews.
With his help, the Mossad captured the mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. I was then attending school in neighbouring Uruguay, where Israel’s covert operation caused massive outrage. It was a tense time to be the only Jew in my school. But I felt proud. For the first time in two thousand years, the world understood that if you mess with us, there are consequences. That Jews can — and will — deal with those who intend to harm them. That Jews are no longer at the mercy of their tormentors. That Jews fight back.
I was born in Hungary, where Jew hatred has a long and blood-drenched history. A country whose Jews took comfort in being the most assimilated in Europe. They were convinced that their social status and achievements made them untouchable. Yet, the majority of the Jewish population was massacred in a matter of weeks.
We must learn from the lessons of history, so that our children and their children never face the horrors that my parents witnessed. Today, Jews face two wars. The permanent armed struggle in defence of Israel, a battle that Israel can never afford to lose. And the war of words, throughout the diaspora — and right here in Canada.
Words matter. They are powerful weapons. Words can legitimize the criminal and vilify the just. Words can provide the fuel for hate and the alibi for persecution and violence. Libelous fabrications, like “Israel Apartheid” and “Zionist aggression,” are the pretext for the BDS movement, whose stated objective is the destruction of the Jewish State. Their false narrative has hijacked progressive hearts and minds and become gospel in politically correct circles. It feeds the new wave of Jew hatred sweeping across Europe, where, in many countries, synagogues and Jewish institutions can now only function under military protection. The false narrative thrives on our own campuses, where we must expose its lies and confront it with the most powerful weapon at our disposal, namely, the truth. Because as we know, and as Barbara Kay has written, “what ends in law, often begins in academia.”

05/26 Links Pt2: Manchester, Abbas and evil losers; Phillips: Denial still flows over Londonistan

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Manchester, Abbas and evil losers

Whether the tragic irony was lost on Trump is not clear; his true thoughts about the Islamist tyrants on whom his powerful speech was wasted remain somewhat of a conundrum. While in Bethlehem two days later, however, he did praise Abbas for having "joined the summit and committed to taking firm but necessary steps to fight terrorism and confront its hateful ideology."
This is beyond laughable. Abbas can hardly be counted on to combat a practice he embraces and encourages among his people. Indeed, the Palestinian leader not only promotes stabbings, rammings and bombings targeting Israelis, he pays salaries to the families of perpetrators killed "in action." He also gives his clerics and educators free rein to spread hatred, particularly against Israel.
For instance, as a Middle East Media Research Institute report revealed this week, a mere four days before Abbas welcomed the U.S. president in Bethlehem, a prominent Palestinian imam at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque prayed to Allah to "annihilate Trump and the conspirators," and to "annihilate all the Jews."
The genocidal content of Palestinian sermons is nothing new. Nor is the fact that Abbas holds terrorism dear. According to Palestinian Media Watch, during the month ahead of Trump's Mideast and European "tolerance tour" alone, Abbas, his Fatah faction and the PA glorified 12 terrorists -- 10 of whom murdered 95 people -- and named a street after one of them. Abbas' deputy honored five terrorists responsible for the murder of 38 people. The PA commended the mother of four terrorists, each of whom is serving multiple life sentences. The PA named public squares after two terrorists who kidnapped and murdered an Israeli, with Abbas sending greetings of 'honor and pride' to them. Fatah's youth movement exalted four infamous terrorists in a music video, and the list goes on.
President Trump, beware. Your description of jihadis as "evil losers" fits Abbas and the members of his apparatus to a tee.

Melanie Phillips: Denial still flows over Londonistan

In the wake of the jihadi human bomb attack in Manchester, Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May said: “We struggle to comprehend the warped and twisted mind that sees a room packed with young children not as a scene to cherish but an opportunity for carnage.”
Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “ It is unbelievable that somebody has used a joyful pop concert to kill or seriously injure so many people.”
A headline in the Washington Post read: “In suburban Manchester, a search for what might have motivated the attacker”.
“Struggle to comprehend”? “Unbelievable”? “What might have motivated the attacker”? Really??
In 2006 I published my book Londonistan which analysed the supine response of the British political, legal and religious establishment to Islamic jihadi terrorism and the Islamisation of Britain. What follows below is the concluding chapter of that book. As the army patrols the streets of Britain to guard against further expected terrorist attacks, my warning about the deadly failure to face up to the true nature of the threat facing the west is surely even more urgent today.

Douglas Murray - The Strange Death of Europe [Delingpole]
Douglas Murray on Delingpole's podcast (recorded before the Manchester attack).

Dalia Mogahed is a former Obama administration advisor who directs research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding "focused on empowering the American Muslim Community." She's pretty much what Linda Sarsour has become in recent months - an articulate female defender of Islam using liberal phraseology.

In an op-ed today, Mogahed pretty much says that anyone who asks Muslims to condemn terrorism is an Islamophobe:

There isn’t a mode of communication through which Muslims have not tried to communicate to the world their disgust with terrorism in their name.

But is this a reasonable expectation?

Asking Muslims if they condemn terrorism carried out by a Muslim may seem legitimate to many Americans: “People carry out acts of targeted violence in the name of Islam and as a follower of said religion, how are we to know you don’t agree? We will suspect you until and unless you sufficiently convince us otherwise.”

The question is an accusation of monstrosity — cheering for the literal murder of children — for no other reason than the faith I practice and the way I look.

Imagine if white folks were collectively suspected of condoning the actions of Dylann Roof, who walked into that black church in Charleston and shot and killed African Americans in supposed defense of the white race. Or Anders Behring Breivik, who slaughtered 77 people, mostly children, in Norway in defense of white Christian Europe against brown and black Muslims.

When Robert Lewis Dear Jr. shot and killed three people in a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, I didn’t ask my neighbor, a vocal pro-life evangelical Christian, if she condemned it. I assumed she did — because anyone with the most basic human decency would abhor the murder of innocent people.

Yet this basic assumption of innocence is often denied Americans who are Muslim.

...[S]uspecting someone of something as despicable as condoning the murder of children because of their ethnicity or faith is the definition of bigotry.

It is very interesting that Mogahed makes this argument.

In 2008, Mogahed co-wrote a book with John Esposito called "Who Speaks for Islam?" where she argued, like here, that only a small percentage of Muslims support terror. Using a very strange methodology, they found that only 7% of Muslims worldwide according to Gallup polls were considered "extremist" and the rest were "moderate."

However, when one dug into the numbers - numbers that they did not publish in the book! - it was seen that they defined "extremist" as people who found 9/11 completely justified and hated the US.

If you included the numbers who found the 9/11 attacks to be "mostly" justified (6.5%) or "somewhat" justified (23.1%) then at the time fully 36.6% of Muslims could find some justification for the terror attack in the US on September 11.

Do 36% of whites support Dylann Roof or Anders Breivik? The question is absurd. But Mogahed herself knows that (as of 2007 or so) 36.6% of Muslims supported the most heinous terror attack to some extent.

Mogahed doesn't want you to know this. That's why she wrote an entire book claiming Muslims were moderate based on polling data without including the polling data.

In 2007 a Pew poll found that about one-quarter of young American Muslims believe to some extent that suicide bombings can be justified to defend Islam.

Mogahed knows this statistic as well. She doesn't want you to know.

So, yes, most American Muslims are law abiding citizens and most do not support most terror attacks. But these numbers do not exactly make non-Muslim Americans feel safe.

And I would love to see a poll that asks Muslims worldwide, as well as in the US, whether they consider Palestinian suicide bombers to be "martyrs." I am willing to bet that the number is very close to 50% if not more in the US, and nearly unanimous in the Middle East and Europe. Meaning that suspecting Muslims of condoning the murder of Israeli Jewish kids is not at all bigoted - it is very possibly entirely accurate.

After all, every Arabic language newspaper, even the most moderate, refers to such people as "martyrs." Meaning that they have raised themselves spiritually by getting killed while murdering Jews.

That isn't exactly moderate. Mogahed might even share that opinion.

Mogahed is trying to say that anyone who is frightened of possible Muslim terror attacks is a racist. But she won't tell you that it is a far more rational position than she claims.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

05/26 Links Pt1: Phillips: Trump reframes the Middle East war zone; Krauthammer: Why Middle East Peace Starts in Saudi Arabia

From Ian:

Newsweek Gives Op-Ed To Wife Of Palestinian Terrorist Lamenting Her Husband’s Hunger Strike. He Got Caught Eating Cookies.

In a slap in the face to the Jewish victims of Palestinian terrorism, Newsweek has given a platform to the wife of a convicted murderer. On Thursday, the American news outlet published an op-ed by Fadwa Barghouti, the spouse of Marwan Barghouti, who “was convicted on five counts of murder for the deaths of four Israelis and a Greek monk, as well as attempted murder, conspiracy to murder, and membership of a terrorist organization,” according to the BBC.
While Newsweek has yet to publish sympathetic editorials by the friends, family, and loved ones of like-minded "freedom fighters" Ted Bundy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, or the Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, the publication chose to honor Fadwa Barghouti with a piece entitled, “My Husband Is Starving In An Israeli Jail – We’ll Be Reunited When Palestine Is Free.”
If you take the op-ed at face-value, it comes off as an emotional, nearly elegiac plea to her supposedly heroic husband’s inhumane Israeli captors. To say that Fadwa’s article is grossly misleading would be a profound understatement.
The op-ed is riddled with fabrications and omissions of truth.
First of all, Fadwa’s husband, Marwan, isn’t starving. Far from it. In fact, he’s munching on cookies and candy even as he claims to be carrying out a hunger strike.
As The Daily Wire reported earlier this month, “Israel … released a video allegedly showing [Marwan Barghouti] the leader of an internationally-publicized Palestinian hunger strike, eating cookies and candy in his prison cell.”

Melanie Phillips: Trump reframes the Middle East war zone

The Palestinians will also have got the message loud and clear. Trump called for a resolution of the Palestinian issue, not for a Palestinian state. Standing next to Abbas, Trump linked Palestinian behavior to the Islamic terrorist attack in Manchester this week.
“Peace can never take root,” he said, “in an environment where violence is tolerated, funded and even rewarded.”
In other words, while pointedly commending Abbas for working toward peace “in good faith,” Trump has now set him a bar so high – renouncing the war against Israel – that Abbas will never clear it.
Abbas understands Trump is taking the ground from beneath his feet. The conflict, he claimed, was not about religion but occupation. Put aside the fact that, for Abbas, the whole of Israel is “occupied” land. He knows that reframing the Palestinian issue as a religious war is deadly to that cause.
A few speeches, of course, don’t make a policy. How Trump now acts in the Middle East, and particularly toward Iran, remains to be seen. His presidency itself could crash and burn either from his temperamental flaws or the rolling coup being mounted against him in Washington. And his team contains individuals who are clearly not on the same foreign policy page.
Trump has stamped his authority abroad. Now he has to save his presidency at home and overcome his personal frailties to become the statesman of which his trip has given us the first real signs.

Anne Bayefsky: A Council America Shouldn't Keep

On Thursday a U.S. Senate subcommittee will meet to 'assess' the Human Rights Council. Reconsidering U.S. membership and walking away-now-is the right choice. Successive White Houses have tried and failed to correct the entrenched anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias of the council (and commission) for decades Simply put, the Lilliputians have more votes.
The council has condemned Israel more than any of the other 192 U.N. states, notwithstanding 500,000 dead in Syria, starvation and mass torture in North Korea, and systematic, deadly oppression in Iran. Saudi Arabia and China have used their seats on the council to avoid condemnation altogether. Under a sanctions resolution adopted in March 2016, the council is creating a database of companies that 'directly or indirectly' do business with Israeli settlements. The blacklist is intended to be expansive: Even an ATM in Arab-claimed territory could be enough to land a bank and its business associates on this database. The blacklist threatens to tarnish business reputations, make companies targets for lawfare in European and U.S. courts, and provide fuel for the boycott-and-divestment machinery on college campuses and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the council has no boycott policy for the world's most ruthless regimes.
When Donald Trump became president, the U.S. did not promptly resign from the council but instead attended the March 2017 session. During this meeting, the resolution creating the Israel blacklist was reconfirmed over American objection. Then the U.S. was outvoted on 12 of 15 resolutions and backed into joining the consensus on various other resolutions, including one on 'cultural diversity' cosponsored by the likes of North Korea.
As the Senate subcommittee meets, it will hear the familiar refrain echoed whenever American blank checks to the U.N. are questioned: fight the good fight from the inside; don't cede the territory to enemies; the sole alternative is self-defeating isolationism.
But the answer is straightforward. Belonging to, and paying for, the U.N. Human Rights Council legitimizes those fighting to delegitimize Israel. Equal rights for some cannot be built on unequal rights for Jews. Reform from the inside has failed. America should choose its own partners and methods for making the world a better place. That's real leadership."

The head of the Palestinian Authority Prisoners Affairs, Issa Qaraqe, said today that the hunger strikers in Israeli jails want to be officially considered prisoners of war, which presumably would give them more legal rights, and they also demand to be transferred to prisons inside the territories, a demand that Amnesty has made but that the prisoners have never made before.

The Geneva Conventions are quite clear as to who is entitled to be considered a prisoner of war, and people who are not part of a regular army and who attack civilians without a uniform are clearly not prisoners of war. They get none of the protections that soldiers get.

Also, the terorrists should be careful what they ask for: prisoners of war can be held indefinitely until the conflict is over. They do not have to have a trial to be placed in POW camps. In fact, they are not allowed to be put on trial to begin with except for war crimes. They would lose many of the luxuries they enjoy now like education.

This is another attempt to find an excuse to get the hunger strikers into the world headlines, and the world really doesn't care, just as the world ignored the many previous hunger strikes to get the exact same absurd demands.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

You know how "human rights" groups and "pro-Palestinian" groups love to say that Israel puts Palestinians in Gaza as well as the West Bank in an "open-air prison"?

You know how the media will exhaustively cover any defensive measures Israel does to protect itself from terrorists that live among the Palestinians as "collective punishment"?

You know how Israel's security fence that has saved hundreds or thousands of lives is routinely denounced because it inconveniences some Arabs?

You know how Palestinian leaders will send official complaints to the UN for everything Israel does, or allegedly does, that has the slightest impact on the slightest number of Palestinian Arabs?

Finally, a final question: How much have you read or heard about a literal open-air prison, complete with watchtowers, being built around a Palestinian UNRWA camp in Lebanon that houses some 120,000 people?

From Daily Star Lebanon:

Construction of a controversial concrete wall barrier around the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp has resumed following a brief halt.

The past few weeks have seen a surge in concrete wall’s construction. A security source told The Daily Star that the wall is now “80 percent complete.”

Palestinian officials and popular committee members at the south Lebanon camp have reached tentative agreements following discussions with the army.

However, Palestinian refugees are dealing with various problems due to the wall’s construction. Omm Issam’s home had several of its rooms taken down due to its proximity to the wall.

A source told The Daily Star that the wall will run through “hundreds” of houses.

Abu Yassin, whose home and orange garden are dwarfed by the wall, mockingly says that the wall is now his neighbor.

In November 2016, it was announced that an agreement had been made between the Lebanese Army and the Palestinian factions to construct a wall and erect watchtowers around Ain al-Hilweh, and that the process was well underway.

The move was to maintain security in the camp, which has been rocked by clashes, most recently in April. The nearly six days of continuous clashes left at least 10 dead and over 50 wounded.

Despite an initial agreement between the Lebanese Army and Palestinian factions, opposition to the wall mounted during the construction process, forcing the army to temporarily halt construction.

“The Palestinian factions implicitly agree on it [despite vocal objection later on],” a source told The Daily Star in February.

The hypocrisy is stunning. Palestinian "leaders" agreed to build this prison, and the only ones who oppose it are the actual people affected, who have no voice. (Terror groups like Hamas and PFLP are the only organized groups that opposed the wall. Hezbollah supports it completely as a decision by the Lebanese government to "prevent terrorists from infiltrating the country."

Mahmoud Abbas visited Lebanon in February and did not say a word against this wall.

To be sure, Ain el Hilweh is a violent mess, and a terror group associated with Al Qaeda, Bilal al Badr, has infiltrated the camp and clashes regularly with Palestinian forces (Fatah, PFLP, DFLP) an the Lebanese Army. Tens of thousands of Syrian refugees of Palestinian descent have crammed into the already crowded camp because they cannot be treated like normal refugees thanks to the existence of UNRWA. Lebanon does not allow Palestinians to become citizens even after 70 years of them living in these wretched conditions and has specifically anti-Palestinian laws on the books.

But the silence from NGOs, the UN, Palestinian leaders and world media over what can literally be called a prison, with concrete walls and watchtowers, being built by the Lebanese government, shows how sickeningly hypocritical the entire world is.

No one gives a damn about Palestinians unless Jews can be blamed.

(h/t EBoZ)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

05/25 Links Pt2: The PA, UN, and Norway behind center named after terrorist murderer Dalal Mughrabi; Jerusalem at 50: A 2,000-year-old dream

From Ian:

PMW: The PA, UN, and Norway behind center named after terrorist murderer Dalal Mughrabi

In another show of admiration for terrorist murderers and according to the Palestinian Authority's policy of presenting them as role models for Palestinian youth, the Palestinian NGO "Women's Technical Affairs Committee" (WTAC) has named a youth center for women after the terrorist murderer who led the most lethal attack in Israel's history.
The Dalal Mughrabi Center is a joint initiative of the NGO, the PA, the UN, and the Norwegian government! The center's name sign prominently includes the logos of:
- The PA Ministry of Local Government
- UN Women
- The Norwegian Representative Office to the PA
The center, which was inaugurated last week, is named after the terrorist who in 1978 led a group of terrorists who hijacked a bus and killed 37 Israelis, among them of these 12 children:
Worse still, it is not only the name that glorifies the terrorist murderer, the purpose of the center is to educate about her murderous terror attack to youth. At the inauguration of the center, which is situated in the village of Burqa in the Nablus district, a member of the village council, explained about the center's activities:
"Reem Hajje, a member of the village council, noted that the center will focus especially on the history of the struggle of Martyr Dalal Mughrabi and on presenting it to the youth groups, and that it constitutes the beginning of the launch of enrichment activities regarding the history of the Palestinian struggle." [Ma'an, independent Palestinian news agency, May 15, 2017]

MEMRI: Copenhagen Imam Mundhir Abdallah: We Will Obliterate Israel; Terror Attacks In West Carried Out By Troubled, Desperate Victims Of Western Atrocities

On May 16, 2017, Copenhagen imam Mundhir Abdallah, whose March 31, 2017 Friday sermon calling for the killing of Jews led to government action against him and was covered by media worldwide, addressed an "open political meeting" at the Al-Farouq Mosque. In it, he accused the U.S., and the West in general, of committing atrocities in Muslim countries, thus planting the seed for the terror attacks being carried out in the West. Rejecting criticism of him because of his previous sermon, he insisted that as soon as Muslims regain power, they would "erase" and "obliterate" Israel as well as all U.S. military bases in the region. Westerners, he said, are "machines," living in a "culture of AIDS, drugs, homosexuality, family disintegration, and colonialist control" of wealth. Imam Abdallah posted the address on his personal YouTube channel.
The following is the transcript of Mundhir Abdallah's May 16 address:
"What Islamic Terrorism?! You Are Talking About Several Desperate Individuals And Groups, Which Have Taken Root In The Barbaric Environment You Yourselves Created In Iraq – America Created A Barbaric Environment"
Mundhir Abdallah: "It is no secret that Islam and the Muslims today are subject to the most ferocious Crusader campaign. The West today is leading an all-out war against Islam and the Muslims.
[...]
"[The U.S.] sponsors that criminal [Assad], who perpetrates ignominious atrocities of historic proportions against humanity, and then along comes Trump, talking about fighting Islamic terrorism. What Islamic terrorism?! What Islamic terrorism?! You are talking about several desperate individuals and groups, which have taken root in the barbaric environment you yourselves created in Iraq.

Syria co-sponsors WHO resolution targeting Israel over health in “occupied Syrian Golan”

The annual assembly of the U.N.’s World Health Organization will vote today on a resolution co-sponsored by Syria that targets Israel over “Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.”
This year’s text, co-sponsored by Syria and the Palestinians, along with Algeria, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Kuwait, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Tunisia and Venezuela, removes specific language condemning Israel that was in last year’s resolution — likely as a bid to garner EU support — yet renews the annual shaming of Israel by renewing a special agenda item and mandating a report by WHO’s director-general.
“For the U.N. to allow Syria’s Assad regime to influence its focus on health conditions is absurd,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based UN Watch, a monitoring group accredited with consultative status at the United Nations.
“It is the height of cynicism for Syria to introduce a resolution on the health of Druze residents of the Golan Heights, who in fact live very well under Israeli jurisdiction, even as Assad bombs his own hospitals, ambulances and medical workers. The U.N. should reject the hijacking of its world health agenda by Arab regimes and allied dictatorships like Cuba and Venezuela.”
“Notably, the UN assembly will not address Syrian hospitals being bombed by Syrian and Russian warplanes, or millions of Yemenis denied access to food and water by the Saudi-led bombings and blockade, nor will it pass a resolution on any other country in the world.”

From Hezbollah's Al Manar:

A senior commander in Yemen’s Ansarullah revolutionary movement, Mohamamd Ali Al-Houthi felicitated Hezbollah on the Resistance and Liberation Day.

Al-Houthi, who is the Head of the Revolutionary Council in Yemen, congratulated Hezbollah and the Lebanese resistance on the occasion. “May 25, 2000, is a memorable day in Lebanon’s history, when the Zionist enemy and his collaborators were defeated,” he wrote on his Facebook account.

“Jihad is the major way to become free from tyrants and occupiers,” Al-Houthi wrote on Thursday.

If this is Liberation Day, that means Lebanon is liberated from the Zionist occupation, then why does Hezbollah continue to exist?

Remember, the Houthi slogan on their logo translates to "God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Damn the Jews, Power to Islam." The supposedly not-anti-semitic Shiites in Hezbollah and Iran have never said a negative word about the antisemitism that is baked into the very fabric of the Houthis that they ally with.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Another mass murder in the name of the Islamic jihad, this time in Manchester.

The New York Times counted 13 deadly Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe alone over the past two years. The worst was in Paris on the night of November 13, 2015 in which 130 people were murdered in six coordinated attacks. The Manchester suicide bombing, in which “only” 22 were killed (but then, half of these were children) was the fourth deadliest. In the same time period there were several wholesale jihad-inspired murders in the US, and here in Israel literally hundreds of “retail” terrorist attacks in which 49 people have been killed and 737 injured.

Western responses to this onslaught have consistently missed the point. But before we can evaluate them, we need to ask why the jihadists are killing us. The reasons may not be what we think.

The objective of the jihad is to change our behavior and our society to move it toward an Islamic future. The ultimate goal is that all the nations of the world will live under Islamic rule, according to shari’a (Islamic law). Christians and Jews will be permitted to live as dhimmis (protected people), with limited rights and paying the special tax, the jizya. No other form of religious worship will be permitted, and “polytheists” or “idolaters” like Hindus may have no choice but to convert to Islam or die. Muslims will tell you that this is for our own good, because Islamic society is the best and most just of all possible arrangements, but those of us accustomed to Jewish, Christian or humanistic (Enlightenment) values might disagree.

Jihadists understand that Muslim armies are not capable of conquering the West by force of arms and imposing shari’a. So they are employing a more complicated strategy. Part of it is to increase Muslim populations in the West by migration and by daw’a (persuasion). The massive migrations into Europe, which are primarily of Muslims, may be in part a deliberate strategy and in part a side effect of conflicts and economic pressures in the Middle East and Africa, but they have become the engine of the jihad. Some elements in Europe even encouraged migration, seeing it as an answer to the low birthrates among native Europeans. No matter – the Muslims are there, and are keeping, even intensifying, their commitment to the struggle to propagate Islam.

Even a country like France, which may have as much as 10% of its population Muslims is far from having a Muslim majority which could impose shari’a by democratic means (although probably it would be a case of “one man, one vote, one time.”) So the jihad has to progress by persuading non-Muslims to accept Islam.

Some number of them can be persuaded by the attractions offered by Islam – beautiful mosques, fervent believers – fervent Christians are a rarity in post-Christian Europe – the mystique of an “eastern” faith, the desire to belong to something supra-national, and similar things. We can call this “positive persuasion,” persuasion by the positive properties of the faith.

There is another kind of persuasion, however, which we can call “negative persuasion.” It works by creating pain and fear in the subject, and then presenting the acceptance of Islam as a way to ameliorate the distress. It is similar to the way some military training regimens break the spirit of recruits with cruelty, fatigue and humiliation, and then present the surrender of self to the organization as a way to regain self-respect. Negative persuasion works by inducing Stockholm Syndrome in its subjects, who identify with someone who oppresses them in order to stop the oppression.

Islamic terrorism is a form of negative persuasion. In order to be effective, it must be cruel enough to shock the subjects, which is one reason that Muslim terrorists often choose targets where there are children, like the Manchester bombing or the many acts of Palestinian Arab terrorists in Israel against schools, school buses, kindergartens, discos, and so on. A terrorist act needs to be well-publicized, and is randomized in such a way that an average person will think “that could have been me, or my child.” It is intended to show the power and superiority of Islam, so victims are sometimes humiliated or even tortured. Sometimes, in order to illustrate the terrorist’s power of life or death, terrorists make a selection among their victims, and kill only Jews or non-Muslims, release women, and so on.

A successful major attack is usually followed by a wave of conversions to Islam, as those people who are susceptible to Stockholm Syndrome follow their irrational but emotionally powerful impulse to align themselves with the terrorists, whom they – perhaps subconsciously – feel will no longer hurt them.

In many, perhaps most, people, the syndrome is not strong enough to make them become Muslims. But it does make them more sensitive to Muslim demands and concerns; to accept limitations on speech and expression (as in the case of the Danish Cartoons) that would not otherwise be acceptable; or to take on strongly pro-Muslim political opinions. Much of the staff of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, for example, regularly expresses opinions that are so anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian that the paper is sometimes called “the Palestinian newspaper published in Hebrew.”

Terrorism as negative persuasion is a deliberate strategy used by the PLO. Recently, an acquaintance said that he always worried whenever there were negotiations between Israel and the PLO, because “that’s when the buses start blowing up.” At the same time that they are negotiating, the PLO ramps up terrorism in order to send the message that Israelis would be better off if they submit to its demands.

Given this analysis, how should we react to terrorism like the Manchester bombing? Well, here is a classic example of how not to, from an editorial in the inimitable NY Times (and similar sentiments appeared throughout the “responsible” media):

Meanwhile, as hard as it is amid the shock and the mourning, it is important to recognize this attack for what it is: an attempt to shake Britain — and, by extension, the rest of Europe and the West — to its core, and to provoke a thirst for vengeance and a desire for absolute safety so intense, it will sweep away the most cherished democratic values and the inclusiveness of diverse societies.

The Islamic State wants nothing more than to watch Western democracies embrace its mad version of a holy war pitting Muslims against Christians, the newly arrived against others. This has been the goal of other attacks in Europe. …

In Britain, as in the rest of Europe and in the United States, it is critical that immigrants, especially Muslims, are not stigmatized. As Richard Barrett, former director of global counterterrorism operations at MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, said, “engaging the [Muslim] community and letting the community inform us” is one way “to understand why people do this” and to prevent future attacks.

The editorial is wrong by 180 degrees about the reason for the attack. The last thing the terrorists want is to “provoke a thirst for vengeance.” The opposite: they want to paralyze us with fear so that we will not dare to act to reduce immigration of Muslims, or even to speak freely about Islam. What destroys our “cherished democratic values” is not fighting back, but submission.

The writer warns us not to criticize Islam, Muslims or immigrants; indeed, as Barrett says, let them define the significance of this event for us! And you can bet that they will define it – by explaining that Britain has treated Muslims badly in Iraq and Afghanistan and therefore had it coming, just as Osama Bin Laden blamed 9/11 on American support for Israel.

“The inclusiveness of diverse societies,” which the writer places on the level of “our most cherished democratic values,” is actually a measure of instability when what we are inclusive of are Muslims and Islam.

There is a great deal of concern about whether murderer Salman Abedi was working for Da’esh, which claimed credit for his act. The Times writes that “It is still unclear whether Mr. Abedi acted alone or as part of a network.” And then it continues, “No one yet knows what motivated him to commit such a horrific deed.”

Whether he acted alone is perhaps important to counterterrorism professionals, whose job it is to stop killers like Abedi, but it is irrelevant to the second question, whose answer is obvious.

What motivated him was Islam.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

05/25 Links Pt1: A Terrorist’s Teenage Target; End the Myth That Jerusalem is Holy to Muslims

From Ian:

A Terrorist’s Teenage Target

I was 17 when the bombing happened — just a few years older than many of the kids murdered this Monday night at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. It was June 1, 2001, and I decided to go out to the Dolphinarium, a disco on the beach in Tel Aviv, with three of my friends: Liana, Oksana and Tanya.
We went to that club almost every weekend. It was the summer before our mandatory army service, and we planned to spend it together — dancing, biking, swimming and tanning.
Girls could get in to the club free before midnight — and we didn’t have any money, so we decided to go early. We bought a bottle of cheap vodka from a convenience store and hung out on the beach talking and taking sips until we saw a crowd start to gather outside the door at 11:30 p.m.
Tanya and I got into the line on the left-hand side of the door; Oksana and Liana went to the right so we could all get in faster. Then, at 11:44 p.m., a Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to the club.

Everything went mute. To this day, I don’t know if I lost consciousness. All I know is that I had flown some distance in the air, and everywhere I looked there were dead bodies. It seemed that every single person in that line had been murdered except for me. Liana died on the spot. A total of 21 people were killed, 16 of them were teenagers.

From Manchester to Jerusalem, a War on Our Way of Life

The Ariana Grande concert was not a random target. This was a deliberate and calculated jihadist terrorist attack against a group of people they particularly despise: Western girls and women whose strength, choice, and independence make them feel threatened.
It fits a grim litany of crimes. Soft targets such as nightclubs and concert halls have been targeted before in Paris, Orlando, and Istanbul and it is the sad reality with which Israel has been dealing with for decades. The car rammings, the knife attacks, and other ways to kill infidels. Israel, in many ways, is the ground zero of modern terrorism.
The same ideology responsible for British authorities now having to collect and piece together what is left of the bodies of our children in the heart of Manchester, claimed the lives of 21 Israelis, 16 of them teenagers, when suicide bomber Said Khutari blew himself up at the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv in 2001 at the height of the second intifada. He, too, murdered in the name of Islamic jihad and had ties to Hamas.
Terrorist groups come in different shapes and forms. They operate under their own names and are tied to local contexts. But, ultimately, they are united in the same Islamist fanaticism that leads Hamas to wrap suicide vests around children in Gaza just as it makes Islamic State ban music by sword wherever they go.
Try blaming that on Western foreign policy and you quickly run out of arguments. What connects the dots between terrorist attacks across the world — from Jerusalem to Manchester or Baghdad and Stockholm — is the global jihadist insurgency that has declared war on our way of life.

Europe chose to sacrifice its children to the Islamic Moloch

When did European governments decide that our children, from Nice to Manchester, must be sacrified to radical Islam and that they are to become a photo opportunity for newspapers?
Europe cries over the innocent victims. Then it plunges into its indolent normality and continues chatting.
There is an enemy, it needs to be collared and fought by paying the necessary price to defend freedom and life in the West. And yes, it is a very high price.
Europe must learn to respond the way the Russians did after Beslan, the Ossetian school where Islamic terrorists butchered hundreds of children and innocent people. Or like Israelis did after the attack at the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv. Otherwise, Europe will reach the point where the soldiers of Allah will have to be hunted down, from door to door, as in Mosul and Raqqa.
Is it possible that Europe's leaders have chosen to avoid fighting because they are all childless?
“Est regis tueri cives." It is the king's duty to protect citizens. Or do we think that, to continue enjoy our lazy lifestyle, we must feed the Islamic Moloch, like the god of Carthage, which demanded the sacrifice of children in return for the preservation of the city?

The Jordanian government strongly condemned the "storming" of a a group of "radical Jewish activists" to the Temple Mount, warning Israel of "hurting the feelings of Muslims."

Jordanian Minister for Media Affairs and official government spokesman Mohammad Momani said that "the Jordanian government strongly condemns the blatant Israeli aggression to enable Jewish extremists to storm the Al-Aqsa Mosque yards, as this represents a violation of the sanctity of the place and hurting the feelings of Muslims around the world." .

Israeli police arrested several Jews for attempting to pray on their holiest site, which the Jordanian media reported, but they are blaming Israel anyway.

Momani said that Jordan "holds the Israeli government as the occupying power responsible for compromising the Al-Aqsa Mosque and of encouraging hundreds of settlers to desecrate the area."

This is state-sanctioned antisemitism. Not that anyone in the "human rights" community cares much.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Palestinian terror groups have been very upset over President Trump lumping Hamas in with Al Qaeda, ISIS and Hezbollah in his speech in Riyadh this week.

But Gulf Arab media has not had any problem with it.

Then came this story out of the Gulf:

JEDDAH: Tensions rose in the Gulf on Tuesday after a series of controversial comments attributed to Qatar’s emir, in a row that led to the blocking of Doha-aligned news websites in some neighboring states.
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani’s alleged comments, carried by the official state news agency QNA, apparently saw him endorse Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah — strongly diverging from the stance of Qatar’s Gulf neighbors.
Doha claimed the report was the result of a hacking attack — but its Gulf neighbors responded nonetheless, particularly after the same comments were repeated in more than one language, on more than one outlet and at various times of the day in a manner which makes the story true and the hacking seem less likely.

Was it a hacking attack? There seems to have been a simultaneous and obvious hack of QNA's Twitter account where they reported that Qatar had withdrawn its ambassadors to other Arab Gulf states, so there is a good possibility that this was a sophisticated and coordinated hack.

But practically every word attributed to Al Thani, accurately or not, is in fact true.

Sheikh Tamim also seems to have praised Iran, which even the previous US administration under President Obama labeled as the “biggest state sponsor of terror.”
The emir reportedly said: “There is no wisdom in harboring hostility toward Iran.”
Despite the emir allegedly saying that the relations with Israel are “good,” he went on to describe Hamas — which is designated as a terrorist organization by the US, EU and Israel and is condemned even by Arab countries for firing missiles toward civilians — as the “official representative of Palestinians.”
Despite this apparent endorsement of Hamas, the emir seems to have still refuted allegations of his country supporting terror. Yet many claim Doha supports both Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which is designated a terrorist group by some fellow GCC countries.
The emir reportedly also criticized the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt for waging a campaign against Doha. All three countries are fierce critics of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, the emir seems to have not mentioned Saudi Arabia by name.
He did seem, however, to criticize what he described as “exaggerated” arms deals and said that countries should be spending such funds on development projects. That was an apparent attack on the recent enormous Saudi-US arms deals signed in Riyadh during President Trump’s visit.
The emir is said to have credited Al-Udeid Air Base, which houses the biggest US Air Force base in the region, with protecting Doha from some neighboring countries, without mentioning any names.
Whether the comments attributed to the emir are real or not, much of it reflects what was previously being reported by Qatari media outlets attacking Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain.

I don't think Qatar ever officially supported Hamas to the degree of calling it the official representative of Palestinians - but it might believe that. Qatar has almost alone poured huge amounts of money into the terror group. Hamas' "political head" lives in Qatar. Qatar also has hosted Hamas conferences, including one earlier this month where Qatar helped Hamas try to rehabilitate its image with its new "political document" that didn't change its positions.

And, Qatar has surprisingly good relations with Israel in cooperating with the Jewish state to provide building materials and aid to Gazans, a far higher amount of visible cooperation than other Gulf states.

Qatar maintains strong ties with Iran as well.

While QNA may indeed have been hacked, much of the "news" it reported fairly accurately reflected Qatari policy.

The real news story isn't the hack. It is the Arab reaction. And that reaction shows that the Palestinian terror groups have lost much of their appeal to the Arab nations that used to fund them all generously.

The reactions from the other Gulf states to the incident show that the rest of the Arab world is far more upset over statements of support of Hamas than of statements of "good relations" with Israel!

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.