DISPATCHES FROM TOM GROSS
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/
CONTENTS
1. ISIS cartoon shows Obama beheaded by Jihadi John
2. Islamic State beheads and shoots 30 Ethiopian Christians in Libya
3. Iran accuses U.S. of creating Islamic State, Boko Haram and the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra front
4. Iran marks Army Day with cries of “Death to Israel, Death to America”
5. An innocent abroad who pays $100,000 for a $100 carpet
6. Israeli-Arab leader: Holocaust “unparalleled” event in human “evil”
7. Abbas’s Palestinian Authority again denies Holocaust
8. MK Zoabi continues to promote “Israeli Apartheid” slur internationally despite re-election
9. Israeli-Arab writer: My teenage daughter has Holocaust-denying teacher in Chicago high school
10. FBI Director: “Why I require FBI agents to visit the Holocaust Museum”
11. Participants at London conference “sniggered at the mention of ashes rising from the death camp crematoria”
12. UK Green Party Deputy Leader threatens Jews
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
ISLAMIC STATE VIDEO CARTOON SHOWS OBAMA BEHEADED BY JIHADI JOHN
Calling U.S. President Barack Obama the “mule of the Jews,” ISIS has released a video cartoon posted on the Internet showing Obama begging for mercy before being beheaded by ISIS executioner Jihadi John. At the end of the cartoon, Obama is shown awakening from his nightmare and fleeing the room.
The accompanying text runs as follows:
“Obama” weeping, his head is held by “Jihadi John” wielding a knife.
“Jihadi John”: Shut up mule!
Jihadi John lets go of Obama, who faints.
The knife has been craving for Obama’s stinky blood, and today Allah gave us power to capture the mule of the Jews. Speak mule:
“Obama” (in a childish voice): Dad! Jihadi John is going to slaughter me. Save me! Save me!
“Jihadi John” decapitates “Obama” with his knife.
“Obama’s body with a severed head is sprawled in a puddle of blood.
“Obama” is sitting in the “Oval Office” with a framed skyline of a US city. He starts to cry and escapes the office.
Title: “The End”
▪ Rather than direct readers to various Isis/Jihadi websites where the film is posted, if you want to watch it, I would recommend viewing it at the website of the pro-democracy group Memri, here.
ISLAMIC STATE BEHEADS AND SHOOTS 30 ETHIOPIAN CHRISTIANS IN LIBYA
A video that the Islamic State said they made and that was posted on social media sites yesterday, shows Islamic executioners shooting and beheading 30 Ethiopian Christians in Libya.
In the video, the Islamists call Christians “crusaders” who they claim want to kill Muslims. 15 Christians are shown being beheaded on a beach and another group of 15 are shot in the head in an area of scrubland. In the video, a stretch of beach turns red with their blood.
Both groups of men are referred to in a subtitle as “worshippers of the cross belonging to the hostile Ethiopian church”. One of the beheaders looks at the camera and says: “To the nation of the cross: We are now back again.”
The video concludes with a warning that Christians will not be safe unless they embrace Islam or pay protection money (a “jizya” tax to Muslims of the kind that Jews and Christians were historically forced to pay in many parts of the Arab world).
The video then shows scenes of Isis fighters destroying churches, crosses and paintings depicting the Virgin Mary.
The video has the same level of highly professional production as many other IS videos have had.
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▪ Italian police last week charged a group of Muslim migrants with murder after they threw at least 12 Christians overboard to their deaths during their Mediterranean crossing.
▪ An Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility for the killing of three Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai, the Egyptian Independent newspaper reported today.
IRAN ACCUSES U.S. OF CREATING ISLAMIC STATE, BOKO HARAM AND THE AL-QAEDA LINKED AL-NUSRA FRONT
The commander of Iran’s ground forces, Brigadier General Ahmad Reza Pourdastan, on Friday accused the United States of creating the Islamic State, Boko Haram and al-Nusra front.
“The ISIL [Islamic State], Boko Haram and al-Nusrah have been created in line with the U.S. strategy of religion against religion, which seeks to impair the divine face of Islam,” Iran’s official Fars news agency reported Pourdastan as saying.
“The American and European people’s high tendency towards Islam and (the need for) protection of the Zionist regime’s security have caused the U.S. to create the terrorist groups,” he added, in an address to students at Tehran University.
A senior adviser to the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made similar accusations earlier last week. Khamenei’s director for international affairs, Ali Akbar Velayati, said the three groups [IS, Boko Haram and al-Nusra] were all “the protégés of the Americans.”
Khamenei himself has continued to call for “Death to America,” even as President Obama says Khamenei is a leader he can trust to keep his word on a largely unverifiable nuclear weapons deal.
As reported in these dispatches earlier this month, a senior Iranian military commander recently declared that Israel’s destruction was “non-negotiable.”
Last week, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the West was “delusional” if it thought capitulating to Iran would stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons.
IRAN MARKS ARMY DAY WITH CRIES OF ‘DEATH TO ISRAEL, DEATH TO AMERICA’
Iran on Saturday marked Army Day with a massive military parade south of the capital Tehran which featured new weapons systems, as well as a truck carrying a gigantic banner reading “Death to Israel.”
A televised broadcast of the parade was punctuated by repeated cries of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” reported the Associated Press.
“Those in Tel Aviv and Haifa will not sleep at night, not one person,” the announcer on Iranian national television said during the broadcast, as heavy trucks carrying armored personnel carriers rolled past.
Among those speaking at the event was President Hassan Rouhani, who commentators and correspondents for the New York Times, Guardian and BBC never seem to tire of trying to persuade themselves and the general public, is a “moderate”.
Among the weapons systems paraded past dignitaries was a domestically produced version of the Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missile, the Bavar 373.
Russia announced last week that it would supply the S-300s to Iran. Russia’s announcement was bitterly denounced by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who telephoned President Vladimir Putin to ask him to cancel the shipment.
AN INNOCENT ABROAD WHO PAYS $100,000 FOR A $100 CARPET
Former secretary of state James Baker (who is no admirer of Benjamin Netanyahu) became the latest senior U.S. politician to voice serious misgivings about Obama’s proposed Iran deal. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Baker said: “There are substantial misunderstandings about a deal the administration has hailed as ‘an historic understanding.’ Clearly, much work must be done [before we should consider signing it].”
And leading foreign policy expert Max Boot wrote this morning in a piece titled “Innocent Abroad: Obama’s Iran Disaster”: “I’m guessing that President Obama, despite his roots in Kenya and Indonesia, has never negotiated for a carpet or anything else in a Middle Eastern bazaar. If his negotiations with Iran are any indication, he is the kind of innocent abroad who pays $100,000 for a carpet that’s worth $100.
“Already his talks with Iran have been characterized by American concession after American concession. Talks that started with the express goal of dismantling the Iranian nuclear program and exporting their stockpile of enriched uranium are ending up with the program wholly intact and the enriched uranium still in Iran..
“But that still isn’t enough for the rapacious mullahs. Among other conditions, they are demanding that sanctions be lifted the minute the agreement gets signed. Obama has been insisting that the U.S. would lift sanctions only in stages, as Iranian compliance is verified. But on Friday Obama signaled that he is willing to make preemptive concessions on this issue so as to ensure that a deal gets done by his artificial deadline of the end of June….
“And that’s just what Obama is saying in mid-April. Imagine what will happen after the Iranian negotiators inform Secretary of State Kerry that $50 billion isn’t enough…”
ISRAELI-ARAB LEADER: HOLOCAUST “UNPARALLELED” EVENT IN HUMAN “EVIL”
The head of the Joint (Arab) List in the Israeli Knesset, Ayman Odeh, has said that “The Holocaust is an event without parallel. Anyone who denies any part of it… is directly connected to a mechanism of evil”. He called on Arab-Israeli citizens to participate in the national moment of silence on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, and criticized Arabs who made fun of it or denied it.
“As chairman of the Joint List, I call on the entire population – especially the Arab population – to stand at attention during the siren,” Odeh told Israel’s Channel 10 TV.
The MK said Arab-Israelis have a responsibility to both respect and understand the full extent of the Holocaust. Odeh added that Jewish-Israelis also need to learn more about the history of the Arabs.
Tom Gross adds: I suggested to some people in the Israel’s prime minister’s office, after last month’s Israeli election, that Benjamin Netanyahu (whose last government did more than any other previous Israeli government in terms of investment in the Arab sector) might wish to offer Ayman Odeh a cabinet post, perhaps in charge of Arab affairs, in his new government, even if the Joint List were not to formally join the government. I still hope that might be a possibility.
ABBAS’S PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY AGAIN DENIES HOLOCAUST
Odeh’s remarks are particularly significant considering that in nearby Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority continues to propagate Holocaust denial.
Sometimes the official (and partially EU-funded) Palestinian media denies the Holocaust altogether, at other times it engages in Holocaust inversion (claiming the Jews are the real Nazis), or Holocaust revisionism.
For example, to mark Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, an editorial in the official paper of the Palestinian Authority, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (on April 18) maintained that the Israeli claim that 6 million Jews died in Holocaust was a lie and that “only 1-2 million Jews died during the Holocaust.” (In fact, new research in recent years unearthing further killing fields and mass graves in Ukraine makes 6.5 million a more accurate figure for the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.)
The PA daily added that Zionists orchestrated their own genocide to gain international sympathy.
Though he continues to be romanticized by many writers for the New York Times and other western media, it should be remembered that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (now in the 11th year of his four year-term) wrote a doctoral thesis denying the Holocaust.
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▪ Police have confirmed that the car attack in Jerusalem last week on young Jews returning home by bus after attending a Holocaust Memorial event, was a deliberate terror attack. The driver, 37-year-old Khaled Koutineh, ploughed his car into waiting commuters killing 25-year-old Shalom Cherki and severely injuring a 20-year-old woman, Shira Klein.
MK ZOABI CONTINUES TO PROMOTE “ISRAELI APARTHEID” SLUR INTERNATIONALLY DESPITE RE-ELECTION
Not all members of the Israeli Knesset (MKs) for the Joint List are as accommodating as Ayman Odeh.
For example, radical MK Hanin Zoabi continues to fly around the world as a guest of Western NGOs, claiming that Israel is an apartheid state, despite the fact that she, an Israeli-Arab, has been reelected to the Knesset. One wonders if she understands what apartheid was actually like for Black South Africans.
This week she is the featured speaker at an anti-Israel event for students at New York University titled “Israeli Racism and Apartheid: An Insider’s View – A Talk with Parliament Member Hanin Zoabi”. (The title of the talk fails to mention which parliament she is a member of.)
Her past outrageous comments, for which she has been criticized, include the claim that Israel itself was behind the murder of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in 2012. (For more on that suicide attack, please see Her final call: “I just found out I’m pregnant at last”. )
ISRAELI-ARAB WRITER: MY TEENAGE DAUGHTER HAS HOLOCAUST-DENYING TEACHER IN CHICAGO HIGH SCHOOL
Sayed Kashua, an Israeli-Arab who writes a weekly column for Haaretz, and is presently living and working in Chicago, wrote in his Haaretz column this past weekend that his teenage daughter told him she was upset that her history teacher in her Chicago area public high school, claimed that there were no gas chambers. Her teacher told pupils that there was only treatment for lice and that six million people were not killed in World War II – they were just hungry since no one had food then. Kashua did not name the teacher but said he was a white man.
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Tom Gross adds: Online Holocaust denial is spreading fast, according to experts, especially in regions such as Latin America.
On Friday, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls pledged 100 million euro (US$ 107 million) to finance a plan to fight racism and anti-Semitism, especially in schools. “French Jews should not be afraid of being Jewish,” said Valls. “French Muslims should not be ashamed of being Muslims.”
And on Thursday, Twitter announced it would be cracking down on racist and anti-Semitic posts and threats, saying it would triple its response team, aiming to combat “abuse without chilling or silencing speech”.
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The Moroccan authorities have announced they will ban a scheduled show on April 29 in Casablanca by the French anti-Semitic “comedian” Dieudonne. Dieudonne has more than 10 convictions in France for inciting racial hate against Jews.
Dieudonne’s current show, titled “The Impure Beast,” contains profanities connected to Ilan Halimi, a young Parisian Jewish phone salesman tortured and murdered in 2006 by a gang of kidnappers that targeted him because he was Jewish.
“If I knock down a Jewish journalist, it will be a serious thing,” Dieudonne said on stage. “They will reopen the Nuremberg trials. They will even exhume Ilan Halimi. They’re going to find my DNA in his asshole.”
FBI DIRECTOR: “WHY I REQUIRE FBI AGENTS TO VISIT THE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM”
FBI Director James B. Comey (in the Washington Post April 16, 2015,):
“The Holocaust is the most significant event in human history… one that simply defies words and challenges meaning. I was born into an Irish Catholic family in this great, wonderful and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me…
“It is our duty, our obligation, to make sure some good comes from unimaginable bad… That is why I send our agents and our analysts to the Holocaust Museum. I want them to stare at us and realize our capacity for rationalization and moral surrender…That is the only path to the responsible exercise of power.”
You can read the full Washington Post piece, which is adapted from a speech given last Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, here.
PARTICIPANTS AT LONDON CONFERENCE “SNIGGERED AT THE MENTION OF ASHES RISING FROM THE DEATH CAMP CREMATORIA”
Yesterday, the British newspaper The Mail on Sunday (sister paper of the Daily Mail) revealed that at least 113 Holocaust deniers gathered in London for a secret conference in the Orient Suite in London’s four-star Grosvenor Hotel.
Among the speakers were people from the UK, Spain, Canada and the U.S.
Questions are being asked why the British government has refused entry visas to the UK for bloggers such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, but allowed into the country genuine-hate mongers such as Mark Weber, the California-based head of the Holocaust-denial organization Institute for Historical Review, who told the conference “No task is more important or pressing than to identify, counter and break [the Jews]”.
One of the conference organizers was a former art teacher from an elite British private school who claims the Jews are waging a “war against Germany.”
Britain is one of the European countries where Holocaust denial is not illegal.
According to reports, Holocaust denial is illegal in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Switzerland.
UK GREEN PARTY DEPUTY LEADER THREATENS JEWS
As part of her campaign to win seats in the forthcoming British elections, the leader of the UK Green Party, Natalie Bennett, has singled out Israel, and Israel alone from all the world’s countries, for boycott.
Bennett last week affirmed her support for boycotts of Israeli artists, musicians and academics.
Interestingly, Bennett who was born and grew up in Australia and has happily travelled to dictatorships all over Asia, has refused to ever go to Israel to see the reality of the situation there for herself.
Meanwhile, Tanya Williams, the Green Party’s candidate for London’s Twickenham constituency, called Israel “a racist and apartheid state” on Tuesday, and the deputy leader of the party, Shahrar Ali said: “Just because you observe the niceties of Holocaust Memorial Day it does not mean you have learned the lessons of history.”’
It is worth watching this one-minute video extract of the Green Party deputy leader threatening British Jews for supporting Israel.
The Green Party remains a relatively small party, but its support on the British left has grown recently.
This dispatch will also soon be posted here: IS cartoon shows Obama beheaded by Jihadi John (& leading Israeli-Arab: Holocaust is unparalleled)
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