RUTHFULLY YOURS

Archaeology has long been used by the state of Israel as a means of demonstrating modern Jewish rights to an old land. Palestinians, for their part, have often resisted these findings, either rejecting them outright or pointing to other ancient artifacts to support their own national claims. In the Holy Land, historical heritage is one of the few truly abundant resources, and it stands at the center of the latest battle in the decades-old conflict.

Last week, the U.N.’s culture and heritage body, Unesco, passed a resolution referring to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount exclusively by its Arabic name—the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary—and only mentioning its significance to Islam. For Muslims, Jerusalem is the third holiest city, behind Mecca and Medina. For Jews, it is the most sacred: Two Jewish temples stood there in antiquity.

The Unesco resolution outraged Israel. The head of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the government body in charge of archaeology and artifacts, likened Unesco to Islamic State in its destruction of cultural heritage. The Palestinian Authority praised the move for preserving the city for the three monotheistic faiths and saw it as a political win, with one official accusing Israel of “using archaeological claims and distortion of facts as a way to legitimize the annexation of occupied east Jerusalem.”

In its more than 3,000 years of habitation, Jerusalem has known many masters, including Canaanites, Judeans, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Hasmoneans, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and Brits. Both Israelis and Palestinians consider Jerusalem the historic center of their national identity and claim it as their capital.

Excavations in Jerusalem, particularly around the Temple Mount, have provoked protests from both sides. Israelis contend that maintenance projects carried out by the Muslim organization that manages the contested site have resulted in the destruction of artifacts and the geological strata critical to modern archaeology. The Palestinians, in turn, claim that Israeli excavations south of the site ignore Muslim history in the pursuit of Jewish artifacts that could be used to lay claim to the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem.

As it happens, just as Unesco was passing its controversial resolution, the Israel Antiquities Authority was holding its annual conference, which focused on new archaeological discoveries around Jerusalem. The finds announced at the gathering included artifacts from limited excavations on the Temple Mount carried out over the past decade in concert with Islamic authorities and a 2,700-year-old papyrus bearing the oldest known reference to Jerusalem in Hebrew outside the Bible.

Although some scholars have raised questions about the authenticity of the ancient text, Israeli politicians immediately pointed to it as incontrovertible proof of the ancient Jewish link to Jerusalem—Unesco be damned. An Israel Antiquities Authority spokeswoman insisted that the timing of the announcement was coincidental. “There is no connection whatsoever, no relevance,” she said. “The conference was planned months in advance.” CONTINUE AT SITE

“It is absolutely true that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism as we have seen it before. This is a new breed. A mixture. It is dangerous and it is scary because this anti-Zionist movement cannot survive without carrying the antisemitism along with it. So for the Jewish Zionist, the vast majority of Jewish people in the world, we become targets. Until someone in a position of power puts a stop to this, preferably through an accepted definition of antisemitism, the vast majority of Jews remain ‘legitimate’ targets of hate crimes.”

Yesterday there was an event at the House of Lords, put together by the Palestine Return Centre (PRC). The evening was hosted by Jenny Tonge.

There were no tickets remaining, but I had to go. The PRC and I have history. It was at one of their events that Gerald Kaufman told tales of Jewish money and Israeli conspiracies. Jenny Tonge needs little introduction. I wanted in. A little back story, a tale or two spun along the way, and I had successfully gate-crashed a party at the Houses of Parliament. Soon I was sitting in the front row of committee room 2A.

As it turned out Tonge was tame, but there was still much to shake me. I go to so many of these events and I am still trying to formulate a complete picture of what it is I am seeing. For example, there is more antisemitism in the air than there was 18 months ago. Much more. I see it on campus, I saw buckets of it at a recent event at Lichfield. I saw it last night at Westminster. A definite increase. But why?

There is no point being directed by anger, nor to lose yourself in the creation of an irrational inhuman enemy. These methods merely provide a lazy way out, a system of avoiding uncomfortable moments of self-reflection. Theirs is a line that can be drawn. Drawn between the civil war in 1948 and those who sit in the House of Lords today demanding an apology from the British government. We can draw the line further back, even beyond the 1917 letter they created this event to discuss.

I look around and feel sorry for the Arabs in the room. They have tied their flag to yet another pole that will only bring additional wasted years, more bloodshed. I cast my mind back to the Arab families I knew so well. Families, friends, in Ramallah, Nablus, Jericho and Bethlehem. In Qalqilya and Tulkarm. These are the choices of the people representing them? It is 16 years since the outbreak of the second ‘intifada’. Since all those bridges were burnt. Another generation wasted. How can you not have sympathy for a desperate people who depend so totally on this, the hopeless cast of a thousand who lead them?
The PRC event

Almost immediately I realised I was not the only Zionist in the room. Jenny Tonge publicly welcomed someone from ‘Israel radio’. I am not sure why she did this. Tonge used the opportunity to score points, by thanking the reporter for the publicity his articles had brought her in the past. Reveling in her own notoriety. But she had also passed warning to everyone present that Zionist ears were in the room. From that moment I knew Jenny Tonge would be on her best behaviour.

The event was to launch the ‘apology for Balfour’ campaign and the central thrust was to discuss activity over the next twelve months. Within a week we can expect to see the launch of an online petition – target 100,000 signatures by late Spring. There are also plans to have a large public demonstration in Trafalgar Square at the time of the 100th anniversary.

Then came the speakers. One introducing himself as a ‘British Palestinian’. What a ‘British Palestinian’ is I have no idea. They are born here. They are British passport holders, not refugees. This one Karl Sabbagh was born in Worcestershire in the early 1940’s, so whatever his family did, they did out of their own self interest. His mother was British, of American and Irish parentage. Karl is willing the international community to create an alliance of power to remove the ‘invaders’ and replace the Jewish state. A mirror image of the Zionist monster he imagines in his head. Karl Sabbagh is on a strange personal mission.

The first two talks were nothing special. The same fare I have heard 1000 times. Balfour was ‘a mistake’. The telling of a narrative held together by sticky tape with a C.S Lewis or Enid Blyton signature. The third talk was by Betty Hunter, Honorary President of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Enough said. There was also a ‘special guest’ speaker, who had not been on the programme. Yakov M. Rabkin, ‘a professor of history at the Université de Montréal’. A rabid anti-Zionist Jew.

Then the audience gets to speak. We leave the scripted, careful talk behind, and open up the room for comment. There were four incidents that I need to describe, to expand on this issue of growing antisemitism. But first, the groundwork:

Europe is currently seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors, initiated in a country which once prided itself on being among the first in the world to throw off clerical intrusion into politics.

By prosecuting Wilders, the courts in Holland are effectively ruling that there is only one correct answer to the question Wilders asked. They are saying that if someone asks you whether you would like more Moroccans or fewer, people must always answer “more,” or he will be committing a crime.

At no point would it occur to me that anyone saying he did not want an endless flow of, say, British people coming into the Netherlands should be prosecuted. Nor would he be.

The long-term implications for Dutch democracy of criminalising a majority opinion are catastrophic. But the trial of Wilders is also a nakedly political move.

The Dutch courts are behaving like a religious court. They are trying to regulate public expression and opinion when it comes to the followers of one religion. In so doing they obviously aspire to keep the peace in the short term, but they cannot possibly realise what trouble they are storing up for our future.

Europe is currently seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors. In Britain, the gymnast Louis Smith has just been suspended for two months by British Gymnastics. This 27-year old sportsman’s career has been put on hold, and potentially ruined, not because of anything to do with athletics but because of something to do with Islam.

Last month a video emerged online of the four-time Olympic medal-winner and a friend getting up to drunken antics after a wedding. The video — taken on Smith’s phone in the early hours of the morning — showed a friend taking a rug off a wall and doing an imitation of Islamic prayer rituals. When the video from Smith’s phone ended up in the hands of a newspaper, there was an immediate investigation, press castigation and public humiliation for the young athlete. Smith — who is himself of mixed race — was forced to parade on daytime television in Britain and deny that he is a racist, bigot or xenophobe. Notoriously liberal figures from the UK media queued up to berate him for getting drunk or for even thinking of taking part in any mockery of religion. This in a country in which Monty Python’s Life of Brian is regularly voted the nation’s favourite comic movie.

After an “investigation,” the British sports authority has now deemed Smith’s behaviour to warrant a removal of funding and a two-month ban from sport. This is the re-entry of blasphemy laws through the back door, where newspapers, daytime chat-shows and sports authorities decide between them that one religion is worthy of particular protection. They do so because they take the religion of Islam uniquely on its own estimation and believe, as well as fear, the warnings of the Islamic blasphemy-police worldwide.

The mainstream media in Western Europe and North America isn’t even pretending to be an objective news source anymore; instead, “journalists” are working openly to quell what looks increasingly, on both sides of the Atlantic, like a popular revolution against the hegemony of the self-appointed political and media aristocracy that seems hell-bent on driving Western civilization over the cliff. And so it’s time for another round of their Two-Minutes Hate against Dutch politician and freedom fighter Geert Wilders.

Wilders has yet again gone on trial in the Netherlands for “hate speech,” and this time the case against him is especially flimsy: as Europe is roiled by the criminal activity of Muslim migrants, he is being accused of “hate speech” for saying that the massive influx of immigrants from Morocco (from which most of the Muslim migrants in the Netherlands come) has to be stopped.

This trial could very easily backfire on the Dutch inquisitors, and make Wilders more popular than ever with the people of the Netherlands and Europe in general, as they are increasingly fed up with the political and media elites’ forcing them to accept a massive influx of Muslim migrants that ensures a future only of civil strife, bloodshed, and Sharia oppression.

Consequently, those elites are trying desperately to shore up their position. Wilders chanted “No more Moroccans” at a rally. The horror! To any sane person, this means “Stop the influx of Moroccan immigrants who only inflate crime rates and welfare rolls.” To the media, which at this point is quite insane, insofar as insanity means an inability or refusal to accept reality, this means “Genocide!”

And so, in this Deutsche Welle (DW) piece by freelance “journalist” Teri Schultz, we’re told that European Parliament lawmaker Cecile Kyenge, who was born in Congo, had “numerous racial slurs – not to mention, bananas, literally – thrown at her, along with suggestions she go back to ‘her country.’” Does this have anything to do with the crime and civil strife that are the foundations for Wilders’ position? Of course not, but Wilders, Schultz tells us, is (of course) “far-right,” that all-purpose and meaningless semaphore that serves only to signal to right-thinking Deutsche Welle readers that Wilders is, as far as the media elites are concerned, unsavory, and must be opposed and shunned, his positions left unexamined.

http://mystealthyfreedom.net/en/

The right for individual Iranian
women to choose whether they want hijab.

In Iran women have to cover their hair in public according to the dress rule enforced after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. My Stealthy Freedom is an online social movement where Iranian women share photos of themselves without wearing the hijab.

My Stealthy Freedom is an online social movement that was started by Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad on May 3, 2014. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 women in Iran have had to cover their hair in public, but many Iranian women and men feel that wearing a hijab in public should be a personal choice. To address this issue we created a Facebook page where women from inside Iran could share photos of themselves not wearing their hijabs. Our website is a living archive of the photos and videos shared with us by these brave women, and the media coverage (both good and bad) that we receive from inside and outside Iran.

Babette Francis is the National & Overseas Co-ordinator of Endeavour Forum Inc., a women’s NGO having special consultative status with the Economic & Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations

If our Foreign Minister had a mind to do something of genuine value for her oppressed sisters, she might consider re-visiting Tehran on a bicycle while wearing leggings and a coat with writing on the back — ‘offences’ that could see an Iranian woman punished, even executed.
In April, 2015, our Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Hon. Julie Bishop, was criticized online by Iranian and other women for wearing a headscarf, and on occasion a hat, during her official visit to Iran; they deplored her decision to not take a stronger stance on the issue of headscarves — voluntary for her but compulsory for women in Iran. Iranian political journalist Masih Alinejad who now lives in the US, is founder of My Stealthy Freedom page and lobbies for freedom for women from wearing the hijab in public. She says that freedom to dress as you choose is also a free speech issue.

Julie Bishop always looks very fetching in photographs, and she looked even more so in her glamourous headscarf which revealed most of her hair, whereas Iranian women are punished if their headscarf does not completely cover their hair. I should mention that women who are privileged to have a personal audience with a Pope in the Vatican, traditionally wear a hat or mantilla, but it is not compulsory, does not conceal their hair, and is a mark of respect to a religious leader, whereas Julie Bishop was meeting with her political counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian Minister for Foreign Affairs, and not a leading cleric.

So I have much sympathy for Masih Alienjad who wrote an open letter on line to Julie Bishop saying, “You were not brave enough to challenge the compulsory hijab rules yet. We hope you will soon. You may say you were respecting Iran’s culture but compulsory hijab is not part of our culture”. Alinejad had previously challenged Ms Bishop to eschew wearing the headscarf in the country, calling it an insult to “human dignity”.

News Corp journalist Victoria Craw further reports that “other women joined in the criticism, with Australian-Iranian woman Moji Joon saying she was ‘quite disappointed Ms Bishop did not use her political position to take a stance for her fellow females.’ Another woman, Jeanie Mac, wrote: ‘The moral support this would have given the women in Iran who are protesting the wearing of compulsory hijab could have been huge. Instead it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth that she cares so little for women’s liberation and human rights.’ Others commented that they were ‘disappointed’ or ‘disgusted’, with some adding they were ashamed the foreign minister did not have the courage to challenge the rule.

Bishop’s visit marked the first official talks between Australia and Iran in 12 years and covered asylum seekers, intelligence and ISIS. She achieved some kind of deal on intelligence-0sharing to help track ISIS fighters, but Iran rejected her request to accept its nationals who have been deported from Australia. Iranians make up about a quarter of the people held in immigration detention centres.

President Obama appears to have been told that if all these secular dictators could be brought down, a magnificent Arab Spring would blossom. This was, it seems, precisely the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood: to get America’s help to topple the dictatorships — then mostly military and secular — but then to replace them with themselves, Islamists.

After Egypt took down the Muslim Brotherhood, the goal of establishing the Islamic Caliphate in Egypt simply moved to Syria, the only Arab nation where a secular Muslim leader had survived the Arab Spring.

Promoting Islam also seems to have been a major factor in Obama’s equation for America. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit, hosting several closed-door conferences on “Defamation of Religion,” to suppress free speech and internationally criminalize any criticism of Islam with fines and prison. She would rather blame terrorism on free speech than on the violent tenets of Islam.

This escalating subversion should be reason enough for all Western democratic countries permanently to part company with the United Nations. Its history of corruption is neither new nor surprising, or that it is run anti-democratic “club of dictators” whose interests are opposite to ours.

The goals of U.S. President Barack Obama in the Middle East ended the rule of most of the “secular” Arab leaders in the area. His views may have come, partly at least, from propaganda on why Muslim people supposedly lacked freedom there. Obama appears to have been told that if all these secular dictators could be brought down, a magnificent Arab Spring would blossom.

This was, it seems, precisely the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood: to get America’s help to topple the dictatorships — then mostly military and secular — but then to replace them with themselves, Islamists.

One of the enduring myths against the Jews is that they played a key role in the slave trade. The British newspaper Independent recently reported that Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of the left-wing Labor Party–linked movement, wrote on her Facebook page: “I’m sure you know, millions more Africans were killed in the African Holocaust and their oppression continues today on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews…and many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Caribbean.”

Her attack now appears on the website of Jews For Justice For Palestinians whose demands include “ending Israel’s illegal occupation and settlement of Palestinian land, including its illegal blockade of Gaza; and [demanding Israel] acknowledge its responsibility in the creation of the Palestinian refugees, and its obligation to negotiate a just, fair and practical resolution of the issue.”

In addition to being accused of having been part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and of owning slaves, Jews are also charged with being involved in creating the Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation, sharecropping, the labor movement, unions and general mistreatment of black people in the U.S.

If we are to respond to this fabrication, we need to know the facts. This canard of Jewish involvement in the slave trade has been debunked by a number of historians as well as the Council of the American Historical Association (AHA). Historian Seymour Drescher, a noted expert on slavery and antislavery movements, found, “It is unlikely that more than a fraction of 1 percent of the twelve million enslaved and relayed Africans were purchased or sold by Jewish merchants even once… At no point along the continuum of the slave trade were Jews numerous enough, rich enough, and powerful enough to affect significantly the structure and flow of the slave trade or to diminish the suffering of its African victims.”