RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271245/quaker-event-promotes-blood-libels-against-israel-andrew-harrod

“This is not prison; this is a genocide,” stated an audience member following August 29 movie screenings concerning the Gaza Strip at the Washington, DC office of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). Typifying the Israel-hating audience of about 25 that filled FCNL’s small Capitol Hill presentation room, this woman’s comments demonstrated how Quakers at FCNL and beyond have joined the global demonization of Israel.

The woman, a self-professed member of the radical anti-Israel organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), “was totally sickened” by the evening’s viewings of Gaza in Context and Gaza: A Gaping Wound. These two films formed the latest presentation of Voices from the Holy Land (VFHL), a Washington, DC-area film club that unites local members of Israel’s enemies such as JVP and is well-known to this author. Gaza’s ruling Hamas terrorists could not have been more pleased with VFHL’s pseudo-documentaries depicting victimized Palestinians and fiendish Zionists, as the JVP woman declared, “I just want to stand up and salute every Palestinian.”

Such bias belied the supposed objectivity of the evening’s introduction by VFHL’s Deepak Kenkeremath, a member of Manassas Presbyterian Church in Virginia. The “mainstream media” discusses Gaza in terms of “words and phrases like terrorists, and Hamas, and rockets, and suicide bombers, and Israeli Defense Forces,” he stated. Somehow the evening’s agitprop sought to expose a deeper, hidden truth behind the clear meaning of these plain words, and give “context for understanding what is going on in Gaza right now.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12920/abbas-arafat-mistakes

The question that needs to be asked is: Is it Palestinian public opinion, brought on by decades of incitement, that is pressuring Abbas into embarking on his anti-peace and anti-Israel rhetoric?
Abbas has chosen to endorse a legacy that he himself denounced in 2011. This legacy does not consider the lack of a Palestinian state to be the problem, but the existence of a Jewish and democratic state. It is a legacy that does not believe in peace with Israel but peace without Israel.

The majority of Abbas’s people do not trust him, are dissatisfied with his leadership, and demand that he resign. He is unable and unwilling to help his people abandon nationalist and Islamist delusions and myths representing outdated objectives, beliefs, and rhetoric. At this point, he cannot grow out of them. In short, Abbas has duplicated the mistakes of Arafat.

Why did Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently reject an offer to meet with White House advisors Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt?

According to a report in the London-based, Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat, Abbas viewed the reported offer as an attempt by the Americans to push the Palestinians into agreeing to a peace process favorable to Israel.

Abbas and his PA leadership have been boycotting the US administration since President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017.

Abbas’s refusal to meet with the Trump envoys did not come as a surprise. In fact, in light of his anti-Israel rhetoric in the past few months, the Palestinian leader’s decision was expected.

Consider, for example, what Abbas said in an address to the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in January 2018, in which he approvingly quoted Egyptian intellectual Abdel-Wahab El-Messiri’s denial of the 3,000-year Jewish connection to Israel:

“The functional nature of Israel means that it was evoked by colonialism in order to fulfill a specific function, and thus it constitutes a colonialist enterprise that has nothing to do with Judaism.”

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/misrepresentation-israels-democracy/

Early in the morning of July 19, after eight hours of debate, the Knesset passed by a vote of 62–55 (with two abstentions) a law codifying Israel’s status as the national home of the Jewish people. First introduced in 2011 by the centrist Kadima Party, the so-called nation-state bill joined more than a dozen “Basic Laws” that now function as Israel’s unwritten constitution. Its 11 paragraphs mostly restate long-operative principles of Israeli democracy: Hebrew is the national language, “Hatikvah” is the national anthem, the menorah is the national emblem, Jerusalem is the nation’s capital, and Israel is where the self-determination of the Jewish nation is exercised.

One might find it surprising that such generalities would provoke a global outcry. Then again, Israel and selective indignation seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. Criticisms run the gamut from saying the law is unnecessary and provocative to saying it’s racist and anti-democratic. The Israeli left, in alliance with Israel’s minority Arabs and Druze, has marched in the streets. Institutions of the Jewish Diaspora have called for the law’s repeal. They have found themselves, rather uneasily, on the same side of the debate as anti-Zionists and Israel-haters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in Muslim capitals, and in the EU and UN. “The spirit of Hitler, which led the world to a great catastrophe, has found its resurgence among some of Israel’s leaders,” said Turkey’s Recep Tayip Erdogan.

Leaving aside anti-Semites such as Erdogan, reasonable people and friends of Israel may disagree about the necessity and utility of the nation-state law. Such disagreement, however, ought to be based on facts. And facts have been sorely lacking in recent discussions of Israel—thanks to an uninformed, biased, and one-sided media. Major journalistic institutions have become so wedded to a pro-Palestinian, anti–Benjamin Netanyahu narrative, in which Israel is part of a global trend toward nationalist authoritarian populism, that they have abdicated any responsibility for presenting the news in a dispassionate and balanced manner. The shameful result of this inflammatory coverage is the normalization of anti-Israel rhetoric and policies and widening divisions between Israel and the Diaspora.

https://freebeacon.com/issues/losing-the-negev/

“The Bedouin need to understand that we live in a country of law,” said Yoav Galant, minister of construction and housing, on Wednesday, sending a warning shot across the bow of local leaders in an otherwise festive occasion to celebrate the opening of the first-ever Bedouin country club in the city of Rahat in the Negev. “Whoever resides legally can enjoy this country club, public and cultural institutions, and everything else we at the office of construction and housing build,” he said.

The problem is that illegal Bedouin encampments stretch for miles across the Negev. There are 64,000 illegal structures with 2,000 new ones added each year. In 2012, Israel established a special police division to deal with the problem. Their demolitions can’t keep up with construction.

“It really is a question of sovereignty,” said Naomi Kahn, director of the international division of Regavim, an Israeli organization focusing on land issues. “Israel may be powerful but it’s hesitant to use that power.” She cites as an example Route 6, one of the country’s main arteries, which ends abruptly in the Negev because Bedouin have camped out on its planned route. As a result, there’s a large military complex in the south without a major road or train to service it, she says.

Regavim estimates that only a fraction of the Negev’s Bedouin, or 55,000 people, actually live in these illegal settlement clusters, equivalent to one-sixth of one percent of Israel’s population.

Yet, they take up over 520,000 dunams, or some 130,000 acres. “These facts are almost impossible to grasp, especially when compared to the total area of land available for civilian use in Israel, some 11 million dunams,” a Regavim report notes.

Senior statesmen have drawn attention to the problem for decades. Committees have been established, plans formed, reports issued. Yet successive Israeli governments have failed to act, making the problem two-fold—not only are the Bedouin uninterested in obeying Israel’s land laws, but the state appears impotent in enforcing them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271199/pigs-palestine-anti-israel-left-spreads-anti-daniel-greenfield

Combatants for Peace, an anti-Israel group widely touted by the media, has been accusing Jews of attacking Muslim settlers in Israel by releasing the pigs.

Or the boars.

An undercover video by the pro-Israel group Ad Kann showcased a Combatants for Peace tour that included claims that Jewish “settlers” ship in wild pigs by trucks to Muslim settlements in Israel.

“We saw the truck bringing pigs. An Israeli truck carrying boars,” was the claim.

The pigs were allegedly coming from the town of Alei Zahav (Golden Leaves), which has a population of 1,643 people, and about half of them are Orthodox Jews, who are unlikely to harbor many pigs. Its Facebook page features horses grazing in a paddock without so much as a pig in a poke.

But while Alei Zahav’s residents busy themselves with community events and charity projects, a Bar Mitzvah and a children’s dance recital, a multinational conglomeration of radical groups has been accusing them of building a “giant settlement” and now of shipping around trucks full of wild pigs.

Combatants for Peace is funded by the Swiss government, a German foundation named after Rosa Luxemburg, a co-founder of the Communist Spartacus League, and the New Israel Fund. That may seem like an odd bunch to get together and fund accusations of Jewish pig warfare, but it isn’t really.

Israel’s motley of wealthy anti-Israel groups are funded by the Europeans and the New Israel Fund. The NIF basically operates as a slush fund for a variety of hostile groups that range from supporting BDS to involvement in terrorism.

And who funds the NIF? George Soros, Obama’s State Department and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.