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ISRAEL

Associated Press, Hamas Propagandists By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/associated-press-hamas-propagandists/

The news agency has a long, shameful record of regurgitating the terror group’s lies.

As more than 1,500 Hamas rockets were flying toward Israeli cities with the express purpose of murdering civilians, CNN could spare only around four minutes — in total — to cover the topic during an entire week of prime time. Typically, it’s only when the Jewish state begins defending itself that the story gets any real traction.

And, needless to say, the focus got intense after Israel destroyed a twelve-story high-rise building in Gaza that housed foreign press outlets, including the Associated Press. Israel claims that al-Jalaa Tower was home to Hamas military-intelligence assets. It called ahead to warn those inside, so, fortunately, no journalist was killed.

AP CEO Gary Pruitt said that his organization “had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building,” adding, “This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.”

This is nonsense. Pruitt knowingly puts journalists at risk every day he sends them to places such as Gaza, where the ruling regime wages war behind civilians it uses as shields. But how did Pruitt “actively” check? Did he ask Hamas? Did he call the landlord? Did he ring everyone’s bell? And how could we trust that a media outlet that is unable to track down a single Hamas militant shooting Qassam rockets — from dense civilian areas right near its offices — would be able to figure out who was in their building, anyway?

It is, of course, highly probable that Hamas was using journalists as human shields. This is what it does. During the last major outbreak of violence, in 2014, Gaza’s Shifa hospital became “a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders,” who could “be seen in the hallways and offices,” according to the Washington Post — but not the Associated Press, which had around 40 journalists working on the Israeli–Palestinian story, including a number of them filing stories from inside that very hospital.

What Really Is Behind the Latest Burst of Hamas Terror in Israel Like all wars, the real causes are many and lie below the surface. Dov Fischer

https://spectator.org/hamas-terror-israel/

The media of our day always coalesce around a narrative that fits their preconceived worldview. When viewed in a light that “Palestinians” all are “Victims of Color” and that all Israelis are White Supremacists or their next of kin, it is easy to misjudge the Mideast reality underlying present conflict coming from Gaza. That narrative thus preaches that Jews with legally valid property rights in the eastern portion of United Jerusalem are not entitled to advance their legal claims to oust trespassers, Arab or otherwise, from their homes. That same line of reasoning proposes that supposed Israeli belligerence lies beneath the barrage of some 2,000 rockets launched from Gaza and aimed by Hamas at Israel’s civilian population from Ashdod and Ashkelon to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The truth is that a property dispute in the Shimon HaTzaddik/Sheikh Jarrah community of eastern Jerusalem is not the cause of the present war. Jews there owned property since 1875. Their homes and land were stolen from them and their parents and grandparents in 1948, when Jordan’s armies, bent on “ethnic cleansing,” invaded and illegally drove them out. Local Arab squatters moved in, but Jordan refused to recognize the illegal squatters as the land’s new owners. After 1967, when Israel liberated east Jerusalem and reunited the city, the ousted Jewish owners went to court with their documentation to reclaim their seized property. Israel’s courts, which not only are fair but even lean over backwards to favor Arabs in such disputes, repeatedly have held that the Jewish claims are documented and legally valid. As the Jewish landowners were recognized legally, they did not try ousting anyone. Rather, the courts held they could charge rent to the squatters living in their homes, so they did.

Relatively recently, Arab squatters stopped paying rent, so the landlords went to court finally to evict. This happens everywhere in the world when tenants stop paying rent and make clear they will not resume. The verdict on the matter, which has been argued and decided on by Israel’s highest court, was set for announcement on May 10th. That is the whole dispute. This property dispute over Arab Muslims not paying their rent has nothing to do with Hamas launching their current war of more than 2,000 murderous Iranian-supplied rockets aimed indiscriminately at Jewish population centers. The notion that the long-overdue evictions for non-payment of rent caused a war is as absurd as expecting Bulgarian immigrants in California to launch 2,000 rockets aimed at destroying the entire American country in response to local court rulings in Old Town Sacramento backing landlords trying to evict 20 families who won’t pay their rent in a Bulgarian ethnic enclave.

Against that backdrop, Israel is posed with the conundrum of defending itself in a manner that accords with woke expectations of elegance. If rockets are launched against Jewish civilians and other noncombatants from residential apartment buildings, elementary schools, ambulances, and hospitals that Hamas terrorists now control in Gaza, how does one stop the launches — elegantly? Israel cannot just dispatch an Uber or Lyft to the terror launch sites and unplug some wires from wall sockets. They have to extirpate the launchers, the rockets, and the terrorists determined to inflict unspeakable civilian tragedy against millions of Jewish civilians if unstopped.

Responsibility for the Latest Upsurge in Arab-Israeli Violence Goes to US President Joe Biden by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17370/biden-arab-israel-violence

Even Mr Trump’s harshest critics had to concede that, when it came to the Middle East, the Trump era had been a success.

Prior to the latest eruption of hostilities between Israel and Palestinian militants, Mr Biden’s only notable intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian issue had been to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid to the Palestinians, thereby reversing the Trump administration’s decision to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority over its refusal to maintain a dialogue with Washington.

Now, with Palestinian militants once more targeting Israeli civilian areas with rockets and missiles, the folly of Mr Biden’s ill-advised approach to the Middle East has been exposed…. Indeed, the extent of Iran’s military support for Palestinian militants was revealed by an official with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organisation who boasted last week: “The rockets we use to pound Tel Aviv, our weapons, and our food are provided by Iran.”

Mr Biden’s comment, made following a telephone discussion with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, that he expected the violence to end “sooner rather than later” certainly seemed to be more an expression of wishful thinking than a realistic assessment of events unfolding on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Full responsibility for the latest upsurge in Arab-Israeli violence goes to US President Joe Biden as a result of the policies of appeasement and capitulation he has pursued in the Middle East.

When Mr Biden took office in January, the Middle East was enjoying one of its rare moments of optimism, mainly due to the successful approach adopted by his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump.

The Palestinian Propaganda Machine Cranks Into High Gear The facts don’t support the Palestinian narrative, so new “facts” have to be manufactured. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/palestinian-propaganda-machine-cranks-high-gear-robert-spencer/

A supporter of the Palestinian jihad against Israel tweeted Thursday: “Israel is now using white phosphorus on the city of Beit Hanoun in Palestine! It can burn human flesh until it reaches to the bones. White phosphorus is prohibited globally and it’s been considered as a war crime!” Included was a gruesome photo of a woman whose hair had been partially burned off and her face severely burned as well. There was just one minor detail that the tweet omitted to mention: the photo was not from Gaza in May 2021, but from Afghanistan in 2009.

If the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were really as brutal and inhumane as the international media and supporters of the Palestinian jihad (not that there is any significant difference between those two groups) claim, it ought to be easy to find evidence of Israeli atrocities. Instead, such enormities are so thin on the ground that they have to be manufactured in order to shore up the Palestinians’ tenuous (at best) claim to victim status.

Nor is this anything new. It has been going on for years. Israelly Cool reported in February 2020 that Palestinian “journalist” Mustafa Batnain tweeted a “heartbreaking photo from Gaza” depicting a baby inside a cardboard box, presumably the little one’s only shelter amid rampaging, savage, brutal IDF forces. Once again, there was a catch: the photo was actually not from Gaza at all, but from Idomeni, Greece. It’s all in a day’s work for the Palestinian factory of Israeli atrocities.

The photo was just the latest of innumerable examples of the deception that is perpetrated on an industrial scale by Palestinian propagandists in order to make Israel seem to be an oppressive occupying power. The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process details the breadth and sophistication of this deception.

Kristallnacht In Israel Muslim mobs in Lod attack Jews, burn cars and set synagogues on fire. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/kristallnacht-israel-hugh-fitzgerald/

In the middle of Israel, 16 miles outside of Tel Aviv, sits the city of Lod (Lydda). One-third of its population of 77,000 is Arab; it has been a source of local pride that Arabs and Jews have gotten along so well, and that the Arabs have flourished. Starting with an Arab population of 1,600 in Lod in 1949, the Arabs now number 25,700, a colossal increase of more than 1500%. Obviously, living in Lod agrees with them.

But in recent days, Arab mobs in Lod have been roaming the city, attacking Jews, burning cars, throwing petrol bombs into Jewish homes and shops, setting three synagogues on fire..

A report on this grim spectacle is here: “‘Kristallnacht in Lod’: State of emergency as Arab mobs set synagogues on fire,” Times of Israel, May 12, 2021:

Intense Arab rioting broke out in the central Israeli city of Lod late Tuesday, with three synagogues and numerous shops reportedly set on fire, along with dozens of cars. The government declared a state of emergency in the Jewish-Arab city, and urgently dispatched several Border Police companies to work to restore order.

Some residents reported power was cut in their homes and petrol bombs were thrown through their windows, Channel 12 news said, and police acknowledged having to escort some residents from a community center to their homes as Arab mobs marauded in the streets. A local man, 56, was seriously hurt when hit by a slab on his car, and was hospitalized. Another local resident was seriously hurt.

Jewish shops were set on fire, three synagogues burned, gasoline bombs thrown into Jewish homes. It is a miracle that no one so far has burned to death, though several Jews have been seriously wounded by Arabs, and one Arab man was shot dead while attacking Jews. Meanwhile Arab mobs for two days and nights roamed the streets, looking for Jews and Jewish property to attack. Some Jews had to be escorted home by the police, for fear of what might happen to them at the hands of the maddened Muslim marauders.

Why Israel is the Victim The lies behind the terror.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/why-israel-victim-frontpagemagcom/

Editors’ note: Below is the text of David Horowitz’s pamphlet, Why Israel is a Victim. Frontpage editors have deemed it vital to run the pamphlet in our pages today, since it reveals the history that explains Hamas’ current terror against Israel – and the international community’s outrageous bias against the Jewish state.

The Gaza Strip is a narrow corridor of land, 25 miles long and about twice the area of Washington, D.C. situated between the State of Israel and the Mediterranean Sea, and has a small southern border with Egypt. When the U.N. created the State of Israel out of the ruins of the Turkish Empire, in 1948, eight Arab countries launched an attack on the infant regime with the stated goal of destroying it. The attackers included Egypt whose tanks invaded Israel through the Gaza land bridge. In its defensive war against the invaders, Israel emerged triumphant but did not occupy Gaza.

In 1949, Egypt annexed the Strip. In 1967, the Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdel Nasser massed hundreds of thousands of troops on the Israeli border with Gaza and closed the Port of Eilat in an attempt to strangle the Israeli State. Israel struck back and in a “Six Day War” vanquished the Egyptian armies and drove them out of Gaza. After the war, Israel refused to withdraw its armies from Gaza and the West Bank because the Arab invaders, which included Iraq, Jordan and several other states refused to negotiate a formal peace treaty. In the years that followed, a few thousand Jews settled in Gaza.

By 2005 they numbered 8,500, a tiny community compared to the 1.4 million Palestinian Arabs. While they lived in Gaza, the lives of the Jewish settlers were in constant danger, particularly after the formation in Gaza of one the world’s leading terrorist organizations, Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state “from the [Jordan] River to the Sea.”

After the rejection of the Oslo Peace process in 2001 by Yassar Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians launched four years of unrelenting terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. The attacks were led by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an arm of the Palestinian Authority. As a result of the Palestinian rejection of the peace process and the unrelenting terrorism, the Israeli government decided that a secure peace could probably not be negotiated with its Palestinian antagonists. It therefore built a fence along its borders both on the West Bank and Gaza to prevent further infiltration by suicide bombers, a measure which dramatically reduced the attacks. The Israeli government further decided to remove all Jews living in the Gaza Strip and to withdraw the Israeli Defense Forces which protected them. By September 2005, the Israeli government evacuated every Jew who had been living in the Gaza Strip.

The ‘Israel Is a Monster for Bombing the Associated Press’ Office Building in Gaza’ Narrative Just Collapsed

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/05/16/israel-shared-intelligence-to-us-showing-hamas-operated-inside-building-where-ap-aljazeera-had-offices-n2589525?utm_campaign=inarticle

I can’t believe this has to be said, but if you operate out of the same building as a vicious terrorist organization, you’re putting yourself at risk. When that terrorist organization starts lobbing rockets at innocent people in Israel, pushing things towards the brink of war—the danger grows. It’s the nature of journalism in a hot zone. It’s nothing new. The Associated Press operated in Nazi Germany. We’re talking about this because Israel launched an airstrike that leveled a building in Gaza that also contained Al-Jazeera and Associated Press offices. Katie wrote about it yesterday. There’s been outrage. There have been allegations that Israel violated international law. And the news coverage has been predictably trashy (via NBC News):

Press freedom advocates have condemned Saturday’s Israeli airstrike on a Gaza building that housed offices of foreign media, including The Associated Press and Al-Jazeera.

After it was struck by missiles, the 12-story al-Jalaa tower, which was also home to apartments and other offices, collapsed in giant cloud of dust, disrupting coverage of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip that has escalated last week, claiming dozens of lives.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths, and journalists and other tenants were safely evacuated after the Israeli military gave an advance warning of an imminent strike.

Israel’s military has defended targeting the tower, saying that Hamas had a military intelligence office in the building and used journalists as human shields. It has not provided evidence of the intelligence operations in the building, and the AP cast doubt on the claim.

Israel, Hamas, Iran and Biden The U.S. needs to give Israel time to degrade the rocket threat.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-iran-and-biden-11621195618?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

As the latest war between Hamas and Israel enters its second week, the narrative is following a familiar script. Hamas fires rockets at Israeli cities, Israel retaliates by bombing the source of the rockets in Gaza, Hamas plays up the civilian casualties, and the world leans on Israel to stop defending itself.

Let’s hope this isn’t the trap the Biden Administration falls into as the fighting continues. So far the White House has supported Israel’s right to self-defense. But the weekend bombing of a building in Gaza that housed media offices, including reporters from the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, has led to cries of outrage and an admonition from the State Department to Israel about protecting journalists in combat zones.

But who’s really endangering the journalists? Israel’s government says the multistory building was also used by Hamas for intelligence purposes. AP says it had no knowledge of this, but this wasn’t the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Using civilians and journalists as shields is a common Hamas tactic, and Hamas isn’t likely to have shared its plans with Western journalists.

Israel also warned the journalists and others in the building to clear out an hour before the attack. They did and there are no reports of casualties. This also let Hamas’s militants escape, but it shows how far Israel has gone in this conflict to avoid killing civilians. Inevitably there will be mistakes in war, and civilians will die, but it’s remarkable how discriminating Israel’s targeting has been.

The truth to keep in mind is that this conflict was started by Hamas and another radical outfit, Islamic Jihad. They are attempting to kill Israeli civilians with rockets supplied by Iran, or manufactured in Gaza with parts supplied by Iran. Hamas’s rocket arsenal is larger and more sophisticated than ever, and the Israel Defense Forces said that as of Sunday the Islamists had fired some 3,000 rockets into Israel. The miracle is that more Israelis haven’t died, and that’s due in large part to Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system.

A murderous co-operation The public has scant idea of how it is being misled over Israel and the Palestinians Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-murderous-co-operation?token=
Journalists and the Biden administration have been clutching their pearls over Israel’s bombing of what’s been called the “media building” in Gaza City. This was an 11-story tower where outlets such as Associated Press, Agence France Presse, al Jazeera and others had offices.

In the US, President Joe Biden’s press spokesman Jennifer Psaki tweeted that the United States had “communicated directly to the Israelis that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility”. In other words, a public rebuke.

Never let the facts get in the way of a jerking “liberal” knee, eh. So much for Biden’s “staunch support” for Israel in its battle to stop the more than 2800 rockets that have been fired at its civilians from Gaza, and are still coming. For the Israel Defence Force had given the occupants of this “media” building an hour’s warning to evacuate, and accordingly no-one was killed or injured. 

Israel had thus actually ensured the safety not just of the “journalists and independent media” but everyone in that building. This despite what the Israelis say the building actually housed — a Hamas research and development unit, Hamas military intelligence and offices of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. 

Those people too were given an hour to evacuate.  Such is the priority the Israelis give to saving civilian life, they even allow the enemy to escape if it means protecting civilians. (Hamas, by contrast, often force their own civilians to ignore such warnings and stay put in the line of fire where they’ve deliberately placed them, in order to get that all-important western media coverage of child fatalities).

The IDF tweeted that the building was “an important base of operations” for Hamas military intelligence, where it “gathered intel for attacks against Israel, manufactured weapons & positioned equipment to hamper IDF operations”. On a Zoom media briefing last night, the IDF spokesman, Col. Jonathan Conricus, said the building also housed Hamas military technology on which he would give no more details.

A LETTER TO PRESIDENT BIDEN FROM CHRISTIANS AND JEWS UNITED FOR ISRAEL

Christians and Jews United for Israel, Inc. 19 Windward Walk Harwich Port, Massachusetts 02646-1337

 President Joseph R. Biden 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. The White House Washington, D.C. May 14th, 2021 Via president@whitehouse.gov

 Dear President Biden,

We, the board members of Christians and Jews United for Israel Inc., (CJUI) write to you on behalf of our four thousand members to urge you to construct and execute a foreign policy for the Middle East based on the lessons of the past, a realistic view of human nature and the ethical application of strong American leadership. CJUI advocates for Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and for the Judeo-Christian values fundamental to America’s governance.

We encourage you to follow the example of Democratic President Harry S. Truman, who recognized the newborn State of Israel in 1948 against the advice of all the supposed foreign policy experts. President Truman’s moral clarity, coupled with his belief that a Jewish state would survive and thrive, led him to the right decision.

 Similarly, the advice of many so-called experts on the Middle East is wrong today. For fifty years, they have assured us that the road to peace in the Middle East runs though the kleptocrats of Riyadh and is dependent upon Israel giving up land for the promise of peace – an exchange that requires Israel to accept suicidal borders that compromise its security and, as the example of Gaza so clearly demonstrates, does not lead to peace.

 Negotiations for peace will never work with the present Palestinian and HAMAS leadership, who repeatedly demonstrate that they have no intent to negotiate a settlement that allows for Israel’s continued existence. Their genocidal demand for the annihilation of Israel “from the river to the sea,” their diversion of aid to making missiles, their teaching of hate to their children and their indiscriminate launching of hundreds of missiles at population centers shows that they are not partners for peace.

 The thousands of missiles launched by HAMAS is a double war crime. First, by launching their missiles amongst Gazan civilians, using them as human shields and knowing their own civilians will be injured when Israel is compelled to respond.