RUTHFULLY YOURS

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley slammed the United Nations on Tuesday for pushing an investigation into the measures Israel took to secure its border during violent clashes with Hamas-backed insurgents earlier this week. After she concluded her speech, she walked out of the chamber when a Palestinian representative began to speak.

For months, Palestinians have been protesting along the Gaza-Israeli border in objection to Israel’s 70 years in existence. Protestors have been reportedly burning tires in order to create a thick black cloud of smoke that obfuscates them and enables them to carry out acts of violence. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) say Hamas insurgents used the U.S.’s embassy relocation to Jerusalem as an excuse to storm the border and plant explosives. At least 58 Palestinians were killed yesterday, spurring the U.N. to propose investigating the IDF to determine if their actions violated international law — a proposal Haley slammed as preposterous.

An Iranian student group known as the Iranian Justice Seeker Student Movement has been putting up posters offering a $100,000 bounty to anyone who will blow up the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.

The Washington Free Beacon:

“The Student Justice Movement will support anybody who destroy the illegal American embassy in Jerusalem,” the poster states in Farsi, Arabic, and English, according to an independent translation of the propaganda poster provided to the Free Beacon.

There will be a “$100,000 dollar prize for the person who destroys the illegal American embassy in Jerusalem,” the poster states.

The call for an attack on the new embassy is just the latest escalation by hostile Islamic states and leaders who have lashed out at the United States and President Donald Trump for making good on a campaign promise to relocate the embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s declared capital city of Jerusalem.

News of the bomb threat was first reported by the University Student News Network, a regional Farsi-language site that aggregates relevant news briefs.

“The Student Movement for Justice declared, ‘Whoever bombs the embassy’s building will receive a $100,000 award,'” the report states. “It is necessary to mention that the steps by Trump to transfer the US Embassy to Holy Qods [Jerusalem] has led to the anger and hatred of Muslims and liberators throughout the world.'”

“We must revolutionize our religion,” — Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, December, 2014.

“A Muslim is to hate what Allah hates and love what Allah loves. Allah hates the Kafir, therefore, a Muslim is to act accordingly.” — Dr. Bill Warner, “Sharia Law for Non-Muslims,” a publication of the Center for the Study of Political Islam.

“The point is not that these things are written in Islamic scripture, but that people still live by them.” — Bruce Bawer, author.

On April 21, the French daily Le Parisien published a “Manifesto against the new anti-Semitism,” written by Philippe Val, a co-founder and former director of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the target of the 2015 terrorist attack that left 12 employees dead.

The declaration — signed by more than 250 prominent French intellectuals, artists and politicians, among them former President Nicolas Sarkozy – calls on Islamic theologians to remove the verses of the Quran that call for the killing and punishment of Jews, Christians and Muslim non-believers.

The manifesto reads, in part:

“Anti-Semitism is not the business of the Jews. It’s the business of all of us. The French, who have demonstrated their democratic maturity after each Islamist attack, are living through a tragic paradox. Their country has become the arena for murderous anti-Semitism.

“We demand that the fight against this democratic failure that is anti-Semitism becomes a national cause before it’s too late. Before France is no longer France.

Palestinian human rights organizations such as Al-Mezan, along with their many supporters abroad and even within a substantial part of the Jewish diaspora, have turned the very concept of human rights on its head.

Although genuine and widely praised for their advocacy of human rights internationally, even Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation for Human Rights and the humanitarian relief body Oxfam International have reputations of extreme bias against Israel.

What are any of these people doing actually to help the Palestinians — such as creating jobs, assuring good governance, establishing schools, hospitals, health care and dental clinics, safeguarding legal standards, stopping the arrests of journalists or others who dare to criticize the current governments and so on? Rather, the issues they address seem more a rationalization to destroy Israel.

We have seen in Part One of this article how far Western standards of human rights differ from those guaranteed by Islam. One obvious outcome of this disparity is, of course, that citizens of Muslim countries are accorded fewer rights than their counterparts in liberal democracies. Thus, women, girls, gays, members of religious minorities, “blasphemers”, bloggers (notably in Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia) reformers and others may be subjected to partial or total deprival of what the rest of the world considers to be unquestionable or God-given rights. Women may be forced to dress in all-encompassing clothing or hijabs. Minorities may be imprisoned or killed. Women even alleged to have committed adultery – but often just the victims of rape – may be flogged or else stoned to death. LGBT individuals may imprisoned or killed, while bloggers, reformist intellectuals, moderate Qur’an interpreters face flogging and murder by mobs.

How committed is the German government to protecting its Jewish citizens?

Last month’s anti-Semitic beating in Berlin of a yarmulke-wearing, 21-year-old Arab-Israeli student who was testing for himself whether hatred of Jews was rising in Germany prompts questions. Namely, 75 years after the Holocaust, are Jews safe in Deutschland, and how committed is the German government to protecting its Jewish citizens?

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, 500,000 Jews lived in Germany. Today, only 100,000 reside there, and Jewish leaders have warned Jews not to wear kippot to avoid being attacked. Felix Klein, recently appointed by Chancellor Angela Merkel to deal with the surge in anti-Semitism, admits that “Germany has a problem with hatred of Jews.” He adds that regardless of the refugee influx, “around 20% of Germans hold anti-Semitic views, a statistic that has remained stable for years and has never gone.”

Germany’s modern-day incarnation of anti-Semitism exists primarily, but not exclusively, in the demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state. German organizations support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) of Israel despite official statements that condemn BDS as Jew-hatred. In November, NGO Monitor, a watchdog organization that analyzes and reports on NGO activities, discovered that the German government was donating millions of euros to groups promoting BDS, including some groups with ties to a designated terrorist group, the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Meanwhile, at the same time, the German organizations were providing generous entitlements to Muslim refugees, even though the refugees include ISIS-supporters and 13% of them believe that suicide bombings are justified, according to a Pew Research poll.

A French national of Chechen origin stabbed a person to death on the streets of central Paris on Saturday evening and wounded four others, in an assault that French investigators were treating as a terrorist attack.

Police shot and killed the man shortly after the attack began, French authorities said.

Paris prosecutor François Molins said the man yelled “Allahu Akbar!”—“God is great” in Arabic—during the stabbing, indicating the attack was the latest in a string of assaults committed by Islamist extremists in France.

A French judicial official said the man had previously been flagged as a potential terror risk in one of France’s security databases, where the government keeps the names of thousands of people who have expressed sympathy for radical Islam.

Islamic State quickly claimed the assault via its Amaq media service, calling the assailant a “soldier” of the extremist group.

The attack took place near the Palais Garnier, the opulent Parisian ballet and opera house, a neighborhood packed with restaurants and bars that was crowded with Saturday evening revelers. Police cordoned off the area for hours, interviewing witnesses and searching for any potential accomplices of the attacker.

The judicial official described the slain assailant as a French citizen who was born in Chechnya, without releasing his name.

France has been on high alert since January 2015 when gunmen killed 17 in the Paris region, including 12 at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. In November 2015, a team of militants sent by Islamic State from territory it then controlled in Syria killed 130 people in and around Paris, one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history.

Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim region in the south of Russia, has been a major source of foreign fighters in the ranks of Islamic State. Western security officials have also been concerned about radicalization among Chechens living in Europe and the U.S.CONTINUE AT SITE

The U.S. on Monday will officially open its new embassy to Israel in Jerusalem. This will correct a surreal policy whereby, since Israel’s independence 70 years ago, the U.S. and other nations have refused to recognize its sovereignty over its capital city. President Trump announced in December he would reverse the old policy. By moving the embassy he now translates words into deed.

The embassy’s exact location within Jerusalem has gotten much less attention, but it is equally consequential. It will be housed in buildings used by the American Consulate, as well as in an adjacent former hotel purchased by the State Department in 2014. Most of that complex is located on the far side of the armistice line that divided Jerusalem from 1949 to 1967. Thus the embassy site demonstrates that the U.S. not only sees Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but also—consistent with bipartisan calls from Congress—recognizes the city as unified.

The “Green Line” was created in the wake of Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence. Upon the country’s founding, Jordan and its allies invaded, with the goal of preventing the creation of a Jewish state. Although they failed at that goal, the Arab armies did occupy significant territory when the armistice was called, including what is now widely referred to as the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Jordan subsequently expelled all Jews from the areas under its control.

Richard Kemp commanded British forces in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans. He has spent time on the Gaza border in recent weeks, observing the Hamas-orchestrated violence and Israeli military reactions.

The true and malevolent purpose of Hamas’s plan is to incite violence in such a way that the IDF has no choice but to respond with lethal force, killing Gaza civilians.

If that happens, the UN and EU, human rights groups and many Western media organizations will have helped bring it about.

The UN, EU and a range of human rights groups and media organizations have devoted their efforts to unjustly condemning Israel’s actions. If there was genuine concern for human life and human rights among these people, rather than a fixation on unfairly vilifying Israel, they would harshly condemn Hamas.

I predict a riot — and much worse. The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is orchestrating a ‘demonstration’ at the beginning of this week of up to 200,000 people on the Gaza border with Israel, and is intent on turning it into an orgy of death and bloodshed. If that happens, the UN and EU, human rights groups and many Western media organizations will have helped bring it about.

Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, is planning the bloody culmination of six weeks of violence along the border that has so far led to the deaths of around 50 of their own people and wounding of hundreds more. Now they intend to pile the bodies higher still, exploiting what they see as a perfect storm. It is the seventieth anniversary of the creation of the modern State of Israel — a date that Palestinians revile as ‘Nakba’ or ‘Catastrophe’ Day. It coincides with the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, a move abhorrent to those who consider the existence of the Jewish State illegitimate. And it is the beginning of the Islamic festival of Ramadan, a time when violence throughout the Muslim world often spirals.

Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania, in coordination with Israel, blocked a joint EU statement criticizing the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, Axios.com reported on Friday, quoting sources.

Axios recalls that according to European diplomats and Israeli officials, the draft statement circulated in European capitals had three points:

-Jerusalem should be the capital of both states — Israel and the future state of Palestine.
-The final status of Jerusalem should be negotiated and only determined through negotiations between the parties.
-The member states of the EU will not follow the U.S. and will not move their embassies to Jerusalem.

According to European diplomats and Israeli officials, the French and other member states wanted to publish the statement on Friday as a statement by the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini supported by all 28 EU members, but Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania announced they object to the statement and made it impossible to reach the consensus needed to publish it.

“The Hungarians didn’t want to poke Trump in the eye and the Czechs and the Romanians are considering to move their embassies to Jerusalem against the EU position. This is the state of the EU these days,”
a senior diplomat told Axios.

“The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it,” said Joseph Goebbels.

Charlie Brown. Lucy. Football.

North Korea says it will blow up the tunnels and dismantle its nuclear test site prior to the Trump-Kim summit later this month

It’s a coup for peace! Trump triumphant! Novus ordo seclorum!

Is it?

AP:

Kim had already revealed plans to shut down the test site by the end of May during his summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in last month. Analysts say that while the closure of the site is important, it doesn’t represent a material step toward full denuclearization.

“A ceremony for dismantling the nuclear test ground is now scheduled between May 23 and 25,” depending on weather conditions, the Foreign Ministry’s statement said.

It said the North will invite journalists from the United States, South Korea, China, Russia and Britain to witness the dismantling process.

The journalists will be provided with a charter flight from Beijing to the North Korean coastal city of Wonsan, from where they will travel by train to the test site, the statement said.

The ministry said the North will continue to “promote close contacts and dialogue with the neighboring countries and the international society so as to safeguard peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and over the globe.”

Following the Moon-Kim summit, Moon’s office said Kim was willing to disclose the process to international experts, but the North’s statement Saturday didn’t include any mention about allowing experts on the site.

South Korea had no immediate response to the statement.

There’s a reason they were closing the test site anyway: it’s honeycombed with holes made by nuclear explosions.