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Is the Palestinian Authority Preparing for a New Intifada? by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14730/palestinian-authority-new-intifada

Needless to say, none of the Jews visiting the Temple Mount was involved in violence or any kind of “provocation.” The only violence that took place at the holy site came from Palestinians, who attacked the policemen with stones and chairs and hurled insults at the Jewish visitors.

By calling the visits “incursions” and “raids,” the Palestinians are trying to create the false impression that Jews are violently storming an Islamic holy site. The Arabic word Palestinians use to describe the visits: Iktiham (storm or break in). This rhetoric is meant to imply that the “extremist settlers” are carrying out a violent action against innocent Palestinians and their holy sites, thus signaling the Palestinians to rise to defend themselves and their mosque.

In the eyes of Palestinian leaders, Jews are always the “aggressors,” while Palestinians are the perpetual “victims”… in the Palestinian lexicon, a Jew peacefully touring the Temple Mount is an “aggressor,” while a Palestinian who throws stones and chairs at police officers and abuses the visitors is the real “victim.” This is the image Abbas, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are seeking to create in the minds of their people and the rest of the world.

The total number of Palestinians killed in Syria since 2011 now stands at 3,989. Where is the outrage from Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip about that? It is reserved for a Jew peacefully visiting the Temple Mount. For them, such visits are far more important than 250 Palestinian children killed in any Arab country. This sums up the Palestinian leaders’ attitude – ruinous disregard for the lives of their own children, and malign intentions for the Jews and their children.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) spent the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha this week inciting against Israel because of Jewish visits to the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif in Arabic, in Jerusalem. The site is also sacred to Jews and Christians: it is where the First and Second Temples had stood before being destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BCE and by the Romans in 70 CE. (The Western Wall, or so-called Wailing Wall, sacred to Jews, an ancient retaining wall of the Temple Mount, is all that remains of them.)

Depicting the peaceful visits as “incursions by Jewish settlers and extremists,” PA officials and media outlets accused the Israeli government of repeatedly carrying out “provocations and assaults against holy sites in Jerusalem, particularly Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

Mahmoud Habbash, religious affairs adviser to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, went as far as describing the Jews visiting the Temple Mount as “terrorists.” Habbash, who also serves as Supreme Shari’a Judge, also accused the Jewish visitors of “defiling the Haram al-Sharif and provoking the feelings of Muslims.” He further appealed to all Muslims to “defend Al-Aqsa Mosque against Israeli conspiracies and barbaric violations.”

When Britain Died Welcome to Sharia. John Glynn

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274592/when-britain-died-john-glynn

In April of this year, in an article titled “4 Reasons Why London is The Worst,” Maria Ebele had this to say: “London has the reputation of one of the greatest cities in the world. But I’ll let you in on a secret: if you ever want to make friends with a Brit who is not from London, casually drop in conversation that London isn’t your most favourite place in the world. Then sit back and watch. Most likely, you’ll see his or her eyes light up with glee at the opportunity to rip into the nation’s capital.”

The author has a point. Over the past couple of years, more than 340,000 people have moved away from London amid rising levels of knife crime, according to reports. Extortionate property prices and poor air quality are also cited as reasons for people choosing to leave the capital and set up a new life elsewhere in the UK. Obviously, people want a better quality of life; also, people would prefer not to get stabbed.

However, could there be another reason for the mass exodus?

I ask this because London is acquiring an increasingly Islamic face.

In the words of Maulana Syed Raza Rizvi, an eminent preacher in the city, “London is more Islamic than many Muslim countries put together.” Yes, that London, as in the home of red buses and posh accents. The “traditional” picture of London has been replaced with a more worrying one. According to Giulio Meotti, a researcher at the Gatestone Institute, by 2020, “estimates are that the number of Muslims attending prayers will reach at least 683,000, while the number of Christians attending weekly Mass will drop to 679,000.” Next year, Islam looks likely to be the dominant religion in the capital.

Andrew Bostom:Rev. Justin Perkins, American linguist & missionary, 1836 eyewitness to a murderous Persian Muslim blood libel against, & seething Islamic hatred, of Jews.

Rev. Justin Perkins. A Residence of Eight Years in Persia among the Nestorian Christians with Notices of the Muhammedans, New York, 1843; p. 276.

May 20, 1836] Yesterday an unoffending Jew was publicly beheaded and burned in this city. The enraged Mohammedans had, for two or three days, thronged the governor’s palace by thousands, demanding that the whole Jewish population of the city should be put to death to a man. And to appease the mob, the governor delivered up this individual. He was arraigned under the accusation of having murdered a Mohammedan child. The Mohammedans…cherish the belief, (or profess to cherish it,) that the Jews possess an instinctive thirst for human blood, as well as seek human victims for an annual sacrifice.

In this instance, a Mohammedan infant was found dead, before the door of a Jew.

The probability is that the child died a natural death and was thus exposed by interested persons, to rouse public indignation against the poor Jews; and so strong is the hatred of the Mohammedans towards the descendants of Israel, that the stratagem proved entirely successful, as is often the case in Mohammedan countries…The hostility cherished by Mohammedans towards the Jews is inconceivably more bitter than their hatred to Christians. The determined aversion which the Jews early manifested to the religion of the impostor [Muhammad] is still remembered and strongly resented by his followers.

The Longest-Lasting Conspiracy Theory by Denis MacEoin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14412/conspiracy-theory

“To try to defeat an irrational supposition – especially when it is firmly held by its proponents – with a rational explanation is virtually impossible. Any information that does not correspond with the conspiracy theorists’ preferred social, political, or ethnic narrative is ipso facto false. Social scientists have described such theories as having a “self-sealing quality” that makes them “particularly immune to challenge.” — Deborah Lipstadt, Antisemitism Here and Now, 2019 pp 7-8.

The lies about the State of Israel are amplified in the West through the “mainstream media”, such as: The New York Times, The New Yorker, the BBC, The Guardian, MSNBC, and CNN. Churches join in, and of course the United Nations, as well as so-called human rights organizations where pretty well anything goes: The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.

This bias is well monitored by a number of websites that work to identify their inaccuracies and deliberate distortions about Israel, the IDF, or Palestinian terrorism. CAMERA, Honest Reporting, UK Media Watch, and BBC Watch all dissect bad reportage, and contact editors to request corrections.

How often have we seen commentary concerning the situation in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, made with intensity even passion which purport to tell readers the “facts” about Israel? They often narrate falsehoods that might put to shame a string of fraudsters, conmen and conspiracy theorists.

It seems, at times, that there is no limit to anti-Semitic modern fantasies about the Jewish state of Israel that overwhelm the even older libels about Jews controlling world affairs, as in the totally fraudulent forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Today, we are given to believe that it is Muslim Palestinian children who are slain by sneering Zionists and that the government of Israel works hand in hand with a global network of Christians and Jewish bankers, politicians, and media bosses.

It is not surprising to see ordinary folk taken in by anti-Semitic meanderings and anti-Israel fiction. A 2015 study by Chicago political scientists, J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, provided evidence that belief in conspiracies and other falsehoods is widespread even in the United States:

Using four nationally representative surveys, sampled between 2006 and 2011, we find that half of the American public consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory and that many popular conspiracy theories are differentiated along ideological and anomic dimensions. In contrast with many theoretical speculations, we do not find conspiracism to be a product of greater authoritarianism, ignorance, or political conservatism. Rather, the likelihood of supporting conspiracy theories is strongly predicted by a willingness to believe in other unseen, intentional forces and an attraction to Manichean narratives. These findings both demonstrate the widespread allure of conspiracy theories as political explanations and offer new perspectives on the forces that shape mass opinion and American political culture.

Iran: Using Torture, Execution to Defy Human Rights by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14677/iran-torture-execution

“[T]orture is widely used against suspects after their arrest and in the pre-trial phase in order to extract a confession,” in spite of the fact that “Article 38 of the Iranian Constitution bans all forms of torture and forced confessions.” — Latest Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran, Iran Human Rights.

“In 2014, a man who had confessed to the crime but was absolved of all charges 48 hours before his execution was to be carried out was asked as to why he had confessed to a murder he had not committed. He answered: ‘They beat me up so much that I thought if I don’t provide a false confession I would die during the interrogation.'” — Latest Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran, Iran Human Rights.

“So far in 2019 [just the last six months] at least 140 people have been executed and 80% of them were charged with murder. At least two of them were juveniles, under the age of 18.” — Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, a neuroscientist who fled to Norway from Iran, to Gatestone Institute.

“The escalation of military tension is something that the Iranian authorities are seeking, as a way of diverting all the world’s attention to the Persian Gulf, thus enabling them to get away with abusing their own people. Leaders of the Islamic Republic consider the freedom-seeking Iranian people as their main threat.” — Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam to Gatestone Institute.

More than a dozen political prisoners in Iran recently launched a hunger strike to protest the unspeakable conditions under which they have been living since their incarceration for civil-rights activities, according to Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, spokesperson for the NGO, Iran Human Rights (IHR).

How Trump Started a Civil War Between Hamas and a UN Agency A civil war in UNRWA. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274492/how-trump-started-civil-war-between-hamas-and-un-daniel-greenfield

Even within the United Nations, a sprawling multinational bureaucracy linked by luxury dining, corruption and complicity in terrorism, the UNRWA stands out for waste, corruption and terror.

The UNRWA’s abbreviation leaves out its full title, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, and its heavy focus on Gaza. The UNRWA classifies 1.4 million or 73% of the people living in Gaza as “refugees” even though it’s an independent territory run by Hamas.

There are really two UNRWA agencies. One is a UN agency run by a small number of international staffers. Another is an arm of Hamas which employs thousands of “Palestinians”. Many if not most of these are members of Hamas. Some, like Suhail al-Hindi, the former head of the UNRWA union, who was also a member of Hamas’ leadership, serve in the upper echelons of the terror group.

While a handful of European UN employees act as the public face of UNRWA, the actual agency is run by Hamas operatives who control its schools, using them to recruit and to store weapons. The union representing UNRWA employees is controlled by Hamas and its employees implement Hamas policies.

Hamas had announced as much when its newspaper responded to a call to fire UNRWA Hamas members by writing, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance.’”

The Coming Migration out of Sub-Saharan Africa By Christopher Caldwell

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/08/26/the-coming-migration-out-of-sub-saharan-africa/

It could send millions to Europe

Almost the entire population of Italy, it seems, spent the last week of June watching a boat arrive from across the Mediterranean. It was the Sea-Watch 3, a Netherlands-registered ship funded by progressive philanthropists and captained by Carola Rackete, a 31-year-old German climate-change activist. Rackete radioed that she was carrying 42 African refugees rescued at sea who were in desperate health. Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini holds that such ships rendezvous with traffickers just off the Libyan coast, and are really less interested in rescuing sailors than in transporting illegal immigrants to Europe en masse. “Taxis,” he has called them. And indeed, Rackete had been doodling about at the edge of Italy’s territorial waters for several days, charting a course less consistent with any health emergency than with a wish to land her human cargo in the European Union, where it is easy to apply for political asylum and where even those whose applications are rejected are almost never deported. Since his Lega party began sharing power in a populist coalition a year ago, Salvini’s decision to close Italy’s ports to such ships has made him the country’s most popular politician by a mile — and arguably, though he is still only a cabinet minister, the leader of the Western European political Right.

This time Salvini failed. Rackete broke through a line of Coast Guard ships in the pre-dawn hours of June 29 and made port on the island of Lampedusa, allegedly ramming a customs ship in the process, a maneuver for which she was arrested. Italians were riveted to their smartphones and TV sets. A good number of Lampedusans even lined the docks in the middle of the night to holler their wish that she be prosecuted — and worse. But when “Carola,” as she was increasingly known to the public, was released in early July, a crowd of supporters waved signs with handmade hearts. She still faces criminal charges. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s foreign minister, the Social Democrat Heiko Maas, backed Rackete against the Italian authorities. “Saving human lives is no crime,” he said. 

Killing Free Speech in Canada by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14570/killing-free-speech-canada
As has become standard in such cases, the charter contains no definition of what constitutes “hate”, making it a catchall for whatever the Canadian government deems politically inopportune. This is all exhaustingly familiar by now: Germany already has legislation that requires social media platforms to censor their users. France is working on it.

The Conservative members of the committee… recommended instead that sanctions regarding hate crimes online or elsewhere should be dealt with under the appropriate sections of the Criminal Code. They also recommended that “The definition of ‘hate’ under the Criminal Code be limited to where a threat of violence, or incitement to violence, is directed against an identifiable group” and that “rather than attempting to control speech and ideas, the Government explore appropriate security measures to address all three elements of a threat: intent, capability and opportunity”.

“Sickening ideologies which encourage individuals to take the lives of their fellow human beings have faced a concerning proliferation both at home and around the world. Yet sadly, Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Members of this Committee have tried to use these troubling events as a way to bolster their political fortunes. They have tried to paint anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their narrow value set as an extremist.” – Conservative Party dissenting opinion in “Taking Action to End Online Hate”.

In May, Canada launched a so-called Digital Charter, meant to promote “trust in a digital world”. The charter contains ten principles, three of which deal with “hate speech and disinformation”.

The charter, said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, will target fake news and hate speech online. “The platforms are failing their users, and they’re failing our citizens,” he said. “They have to step up in a major way to counter disinformation. And if they don’t, we will hold them to account and there will be meaningful financial consequences.”

UK and US: Toxic Politics by Andrew Ash

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14717/britain-us-toxic-politics

What neither side of this transatlantic tag-team seems to realise is that by putting into words their apparent hatred of the West and its allies, they are exposing themselves as antagonists of the very freedoms that enable them to speak or have economic opportunity without fear of reprisal — freedoms they would never have in Somalia, the Palestinian territories, or many of the tyrannies entrenched on the planet.

What voters can see is that those are the very freedoms that these politicians might try to take away from them, too, if their policies were adopted.

By refusing to rein in his support for a variety of dubious ideas and bedfellows, Corbyn has seen his popularity dwindle to almost nothing, and turn the Labour Party into a brand that even formerly like-minded outlets now call toxic.

In the often staid world of politics, the allure of the outsider appeals to a desire for change. Sometimes all it takes to impress the public in today’s political climate is to look and sound the part.

The rise and continuing slide of UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, however, is a good example of what happens when the vote-hungry-courting of a certain demographic backfires, something that his far-left US counterparts — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley & Rashida Tlaib — the newly minted “Squad” — might do well to take on board.

Propelled to into the limelight by the same anti-economic-freedom wave, Ocasio-Cortez & Co, despite the age gap, share more in common with Jeremy Corbyn than the other white-haired Socialist, Bernie Sanders, ever did.

As a long-time outspoken ambassador for a variety of unsavoury organisations, whose interests clearly sit at odds with those of the UK, Corbyn has succeeded in alienating himself — and his party — from both traditional Labour voters and mainstream politics. For all of his frenzied endeavours to sound relevant, his efforts seem to have backfired. Instead of focusing his attention on Britain’s infrastructure or the needs of the working class — the very people Labour traditionally represented — Corbyn’s adoption of the populist-progressive memes of the day, and his allying himself to too many “controversial” causes, has resulted in his becoming sidelined. As a result, Boris Johnson, is almost certain to remain prime minister for the foreseeable future.

China Agrees to Restart Trade Talks as White House Delays New Tariffs By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/china-agrees-to-restart-trade-talks-as-white-house-delays-new-tariffs/

After several weeks in which negotiations over a potential trade deal between the world’s two largest economies had stalled, Chinese and U.S. officials spoke over the phone Tuesday, with China’s Ministry of Commerce announcing afterward that the two powers plan to speak again in the coming weeks.

“Both sides agree to talk again on the phone within two weeks,” the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement.

Chinese vice premier Liu He spoke Tuesday night with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, according to the statement. They were joined by Chinese commerce minister Zhong Shan and Central Bank governor Yi Gang.

News of the reignited negotiations came as Lighthizer’s office announced the U.S. will delay a planned 10 percent tariff on $300 billion of Chinese imports.