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Palestinians: Fake News and “Alternative Facts” by Bassam Tawil

By on March 9th, 2017

There is no shortage of Palestinian and Arab news websites that publish hoaxes, propaganda, lies and disinformation disguised as real news. This garbage is accepted as factual by many Palestinians and other Arabs.

This is a form of incitement to which the West is deaf, largely because journalists working for Western mainstream media do not wish to understand what is being reported in Arabic, or even in English.

Blood libels against Jews were once thought to be part of the dark past. They are not. What do such stories accomplish? Excuses for the murder of Jews.

Another “new” old blood libel that Palestinians have been spreading against Israel claims that Israelis are flooding Palestinian communities with narcotics in order to spread moral corruption and destroy the health of Palestinians. This lie helps Palestinians avoid responsibility for the smuggling of drugs (by Palestinians) into the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt.

That leaves us with some questions: Where is the international community’s exposure of the lies that fuel the Palestinian murder of Jews? And: Will the international community once again in history fail to speak the truth about the murder of Jews?

One after another, young Palestinians continue to carry out terrorist attacks against Jews. Why? We might start at the beginning: the campaign of incitement, indoctrination and lies that Palestinian media outlets wage against Israel. This campaign has poisoned the hearts and minds of millions of Arabs and Muslims. It ought to be no surprise, then, when the poisoned Palestinian youths grab a weapon and set out to do the death-work they are taught to cherish.

The anti-Israel incitement can even be quite subtle. Those injecting the venom do not always issue a direct call for Palestinians to go out and kill Jews. It is enough, for example, to tell Palestinians that Jews are “defiling with their filthy feet” Islamic holy sites, to drive a Palestinian to go out and stab a Jew.

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Shattering the State Department’s Echo Chamber By Sarah N. Stern

By on March 4th, 2017

Most Americans would like to believe that certain ethical qualities are in the mix when shaping American foreign policy, such as intellectual honesty and moral integrity. These qualities, whether part of an individual’s nature or those of national policy, often require some difficult introspection.

Sometimes it even involves the painful admission that one has been wrong. Even if one has been wrong for an extremely long time. And it is human nature that the longer the time, the deeper the resistance to change.

So it is with certain theories that our State Department has clung to for generations now, such as “land for peace.” What we have seen through decades of empirical, and often heartbreaking experience, is that this formula simply hasn’t worked. If the objective is “peace”, one must honestly ask oneself if any of the politically gut-wrenching and internally divisive land withdrawals from the Sinai, Gaza, southern Lebanon and parts of Judea and Samaria, has actually brought us any closer to that objective of peace.

But rather than challenge the premises of this formulation, those in the State Department’s echo chamber simply dig their feet in further and rationalize its failure. Each time there is another excuse. “Israel hasn’t given enough land”, or “Gaza was without a negotiating partner”.

All of the State Department apparatchiks who stubbornly cling to this mantra were one hundred per cent in favor of each of these withdrawals. Then, when those land withdrawal did not bring us closer to the designated objective, they came up with convenient post facto rationalizations.

On Wednesday February 15, five former U.S. ambassadors to Israel, Thomas Pickering, Edward Walker, James Cunningham, William Harrop, and Daniel Kurtzer wrote a letter to the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee casting doubts upon the ability of President Trump’s selection of David Friedman for the position of ambassador to Israel because he has not demonstrated than he has bought into their paradigm, which has proven to be an abject failure, time and time again.

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The Lessons Of The Hamas War Israel’s strategic mistake. Caroline Glick

By on March 3rd, 2017

The State Comptroller’s Report on Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s war with Hamas in the summer of 2014, is exceedingly detailed. The problem is that it addresses the wrong details.

Israel’s problem with Hamas wasn’t its tactics for destroying Hamas’s attack tunnels. Israel faced two challenges in its war with Hamas that summer. The first had to do with the regional and global context of the war. The second had to do with its understanding of its enemy on the ground.

War between Hamas and Israel took place as the Sunni Arab world was steeped a two-pronged existential struggle. On the one hand, Sunni regimes fought jihadist groups that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood movement. On the other, they fought against Iran and its proxies in a bid to block Iran’s moves toward regional hegemony.

On both fronts, the Sunni regimes, led by Egypt under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Saudi regime and the United Arab Emirates, were shocked to discover that the Obama administration was siding with their enemies against them.

If Israel went into the war against Hamas thinking that the Obama administration would treat it differently than it treated the Sunni regimes, it quickly discovered that it was mistaken. From the outset of the battle between Hamas and Israel, the Obama administration supported Hamas against Israel.

America’s support for Hamas was expressed at the earliest stages of the war when then-secretary of state John Kerry demanded that Israel accept an immediate cease-fire based entirely on Hamas’s terms. This demand, in various forms, remained the administration’s position throughout the 50-day war.

Hamas’s terms were impossible for Israel. They included opening the jihadist regime’s land borders with Israel and Egypt, and providing it with open access to the sea. Hamas demanded to be reconnected to the international banking system in order to enable funds to enter Gaza freely from any spot on the globe. Hamas also demanded that Israel release its terrorists from its prisons.

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Why Israel’s Border Fence Worked The security barrier was key, but there’s more to the story. Gideon Israel

By on March 2nd, 2017

Reprinted from Mida.org.il.

From the outset of his campaign, President Trump declared that if elected he would construct a wall along the southern border of the United States to stop illegal immigration. While his intention to build a wall has elicited support, it has also generated criticism pertaining to its effectiveness and justification. Those who support construction of the wall and its effectiveness cite Israel’s example as proof. On the surface, the drastic decrease in illegal immigration to Israel after the security fence’s construction supports this assertion. However, a closer look at the situation shows that there were other factors in reducing illegal immigration which were equally important.

Illegal immigration to Israel from Africa became a major problem beginning in 2007. Until then, approximately 2,700 illegal immigrants had entered Israel through the Egyptian border in the previous decades. Between the years 2007-2012, approximately 61,000 illegal immigrants entered Israel through the Egyptian border, the overwhelming majority coming from Eritrea and Sudan. The border fence was completed in December 2012 and the numbers of illegal immigrants dropped from 10,431 in 2012 to less than 150 in 2013. Furthermore, illegal immigrants entering between 2013-2016 were consistently lower than 150, only with a slight rise in 2015 to 232.

The correlation between these statistics and construction of the border fence indicate that the fence has successfully done the job. However, experts on the subject comment that the other Israeli actions were just as important.

A major problem

The problem of illegal immigration is not only an economic issue but it has also had a devastating effect on some Israeli communities.

Arik Greenstein, deputy editor for MIDA, has written extensively about the negative impact that illegal immigrants have had on south Tel Aviv residents. The influx of illegal immigrants has changed the fabric of what was once a tight knit, warm community. Many residents have moved due to fear and lawlessness. In addition, fear of rape, assault, theft and other crimes have made mundane activities, such as teens walking around after dark, or adults going for a morning jog, nonexistent. Some residents, unable to move due to old age or cost, have become prisoners in their own homes. In these old apartment buildings where residents have lived for decades, illegal immigrants have opened up whorehouses and pirate alcohol factories resulting in constant noise and disruption with no recourse for the buildings’ residents. Additionally, residents have seen their electric and water bills skyrocket, at times, due to makeshift pipes that illegal immigrants have connected to the outside of residents’ homes, thereby stealing electricity and water.

In a 2015 survey conducted for the Israeli police, only 38% of South Tel Aviv residents felt secure when outside their homes after nightfall, only 43% felt safe to even leave their homes at night, and the overall feeling of personal security in the area was 53%. The number of criminal acts reported to the police involving foreigners in Israel has risen since 2006 from 1,779 to approximately 2,600-3,500 cases each year between the years 2011-2015. Foreigners in Israel include not only illegal immigrants, but also foreign workers, tourists and Palestinians.

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This Week in Israeli History: Joseph Trumpeldor and the Battle of Tel Hai

By on March 2nd, 2017

http://www.jpost.com/Blogs/My-Nation-Lives/This-Week-in-Israeli-History-Joseph-Trumpeldor-and-the-Battle-of-Tel-Hai-446621

Joseph Trumpeldor was born in Russia in 1880. After hearing news of the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the teenage Trumpeldor became entranced with the Zionist idea and even opened up a local Zionist club. In 1902 he was drafted to the Russian Army upon the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. During the fighting Trumpeldor lost his left hand to shrapnel, but still insisted on returning to the front lines, reasoning “but I still have my other arm…” He re-entered the war and fell into Japanese captivity after the Russian Army surrendered at Port Arthur. Upon his release, he received four decorations for bravery, making him the highest decorated Jewish soldier in Russia and the first Jew to receive an officer’s commission in the Russian Army.

After the war Trumepldor moved to the Holy Land and worked in agriculture. With the outbreak of World War I, he was expelled by the Ottoman authorities and sought refuge in Egypt where he met Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Together they advocated for the creation of a Jewish unit within the British Army that would assist in liberating the Land of Israel from Turkish rule.

The British were reluctant to accept their proposal and instead formed a transport unit called the Zion Mule Corps that consisted of 650 Jewish soldiers. With Trumpeldor as Deputy Commander, the Zion Mule Corps fought admirably in the Gallipoli Campaign. The Mule Corps’ Commanding Officer, John Henry Patterson, later said of Trumpeldor: “Many of the Zionists whom I thought somewhat lacking in courage showed themselves fearless to a degree when under heavy fire, while Captain Trumpeldor actually revelled in it, and the hotter it became the more he liked it …”

After the Mule Corps was disbanded, Trumpeldor and Jabotinsky travelled to London and successfully lobbied the British government to form the famed Jewish Legion.

At the conclusion of the war Trumepldor returned to British-ruled Mandatory Palestine and assisted in protecting Jewish settlements from marauding Arabs who would often attack and rob them of their day’s labor. One day Trumepldor received word from the village of Tel Hai requesting for backup due to the deteriorating security situation in the region. He immediately rushed to the village with a handful of others to help protect the villagers.

On March 1, 1920, several hundred Arabs arrived at Tel Hai, demanding to search the fort for fleeing French officers. A verbal dispute broke out and a battle ensued. Joseph Trumpledor was killed in the battle along with seven others. When the doctor arrived and asked Trumpeldor how he was feeling, he said his famous last words that were immortalized within the annals of Israeli history: “Never mind, it is good to die for our country.”

Kiryat Shmona (lit. Town of the Eight), one of the largest cities in northern Israel, is named after Joseph Trumpeldor and the seven mighty fighters that perished defending Tel Hai

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Is Israel a Military Superpower? By: Yaakov Katz (Video)

By on March 2nd, 2017

Israel is an exceptional nation, and this is certainly true when it comes to the Israeli military. Tested by war, heroic in its self-defense, Israel is leading the way in developing the most advanced weapons technologies and re-imagining the new realities of the modern battlefield in an ever-changing Middle East. In an important new book—The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower— Jerusalem Post Editor Yaakov Katz tells this story from the front lines of Israeli military innovation and with the analytical eye of a master journalist. He brings us into the fascinating world of Israeli weapons development—from drones to satellites, missile defense systems to cyber warfare—and he looks beyond the technology to consider what Israel’s edge means for its larger geopolitical strategy.

On February 6, 2017, Mr. Katz joined an exclusive audience at the Tikvah Fund for a fascinating exploration of how Israel became a military superpower, and what this means for the future of the Jewish state. He also discussed some of the major developments in current Israeli politics and world affairs, offering his insight as one of Israel’s veteran journalists and keenest analysts.

Press play below to listen to the talk, which can also be downloaded in the iTunes Store or streamed via Stitcher.

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No Obama ‘Legacy’ on Israel By Dan Calic

By on March 2nd, 2017

Donald Trump has been president for just over five weeks. Yet on many fronts there is little doubt a new era has been birthed. One of the most obvious is relations with Israel compared to the previous eight years under Barack Obama.

From the beginning of the Obama administration he was determined to put the U.S. on a different path with regard to the Muslim world. Indeed, the first foreign leader he called was Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Obama even made a point of telling Abbas his was the first call to a foreign leader, emphasizing his intent to signal a new direction for the U.S.

Obama furthered his effort at a new direction by making his first international speech in Cairo. During his speech he lamented about how the Palestinians suffer “humiliation under occupation,” and criticized Israel for building “settlements.”

Plus, throughout his two terms, it was clear Obama did not like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Right up to the bitter end, the Obama administration went out much as it began, with a slap at Israel. The final kick in the stomach was UN resolution 2334, which singled out Israel’s construction of settlements as the main obstacle to peace. Not a word was mentioned about ongoing Palestinian terrorism and murder of innocent Israeli civilians. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the U.S. has veto power and could have killed the resolution. However, knowing this would be his last opportunity to make a statement against Israel, Obama directed the U.S. to abstain from the voting, thus allowing it to pass.

Contrast this against the early stages of the Trump administration. Throughout his campaign he made it clear that the U.S. had treated its closest Middle East ally terribly. Since Trump has taken office, the difference can only be described as startling.

For example, he has called the Iran nuclear deal “the worst deal ever negotiated,” and has already imposed new sanctions on Iran.

His Secretary of State Rex Tillerson criticized former Secretary of State John Kerry for how he handled Israeli-Palestinian issues. “Israel is, always has been, and remains our most important ally in the region” according to Tillerson. He characterized UN resolution 2334 as an effort to “coerce” Israel to change course, further stating, “that will not bring a solution.”

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Not “Your” City—”Everyone’s” City How the Met, in its exhibition Jerusalem 1000-1400 and in its defense against critics of that exhibition, exploits the vocabulary of openness. Edward Rothstein

By on March 1st, 2017

Last fall, the art historian Victoria C. Gardner Coates published an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that the utopian multicultural paradise imagined by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heavenwas being used to promote a particular political position concerning the status of today’s Jerusalem. The exhibition functioned, in her words, “as a highbrow gloss on the movement to define Jerusalem as anything but Jewish, and so to undermine Israel’s sovereignty.”https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2017/03/not-your-city-everyones-city/

Coates’s article provoked a letter to the editor from Thomas P. Campbell, the Metropolitan’s director and chief executive officer (until his sudden resignation in late February). Objecting to Coates’s “extraordinarily narrow perspective,” Campbell assured readers of the Journal that, far from engaging in an anti-Israel “conspiracy”—his word, not hers—the museum’s purpose in mounting this “unprecedented gathering of masterpieces from the three Abrahamic faiths” was simply to “reveal the richly intertwined nature of these various aesthetic traditions at a fascinating moment in Jerusalem’s history.”

“If anyone has chosen to politicize the exhibition,” Campbell concluded, “it is Ms. Coates.”

I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Campbell’s belief in the innocence of his museum’s exhibition, a belief shared by almost all reviewers. On certain subjects, when historical facts and their implications threaten to disrupt one’s more heavenly and comforting visions, the tendentious aspects of such visions simply become invisible: beyond notice, and certainly beyond argument. All the more reason, then, for me to thank the three respondents to my essay—Robert Irwin, Steven Fine, and Maureen Mullarkey—for making even more palpable the weighty historical facts that prove the illusion, or delusion, in Thomas Campbell’s blithe conception of that “fascinating moment in Jerusalem’s history.”

The Met was intent on showing medieval Jerusalem to be, in Irwin’s words, “the capital of a culturally vibrant La La Land,” and no counter-evidence—abundant examples of which are provided by Irwin in his learned and lively response—was permitted to get in the way. Moreover, just as the show’s positive vision of a medieval paradise was open to serious question, so too was its vision of the age’s stock villains; Mullarkey’s acute points about the show’s notion of the singular evil of the Crusades and of Christian rule in the Holy Land provide fodder for a much more extended inquiry.

Perhaps most surprising is how thoroughly the Met ended up distorting not just a proper historical perspective but a proper aesthetic perspective as well. Given how few artifacts in the show were actually from Jerusalem, and given that fewer still could even remotely be considered “masterpieces” (Campbell’s inflated term), the Met cannot be said to have demonstrated, on its own terms, how great cultural glories arose out of this presumed multi-faith experiment in convivencia.

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Political Operatives Pose as Journalists, Human Rights Groups by Bassam Tawil

By on March 1st, 2017

The same activists and organizations were silent when the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces arrested al-Qiq and harassed his family. Amnesty International neglected to mention that al-Qiq has also been targeted by PA security forces and that, in addition to his work as a newsman, he is also affiliated with Hamas. This detail, according to Amnesty, is evidently not significant.

When arrested, such political operatives posing as journalists — and so-called human rights groups, and the mainstream media in the West — get to scream about Israel assaulting freedom of the media. This dirty little game has been played by Palestinian and Western journalists and highly politicized, biased human rights groups for years.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), which is headed by Nasser Abu Baker, did not come out in support of journalist, Sami al-Sai when he was arrested (and tortured) for 20 days in the PA’s notorious Jericho Central Prison. Nor did Amnesty or most human rights organizations come out in defense of al-Sai.

Instead of calling on the PA leadership to release their detained colleague, Abu Baker and the PJS heads issued a statement in which they justified his arrest and defended the PA against charges of torturing him.

Nasser Abu Baker himself is affiliated with the PA’s ruling Fatah faction. Recently, the AFP correspondent even ran (and lost) in the election for Fatah’s Revolutionary Council.

While AFP has been reporting about the detention by Israel of al-Qiq, it has conspicuously failed to report about the plight of al-Sai and his serious charges of torture in PA prison. So a journalist arrested by the PA is not worth a story in an international media outlet, while anyone arrested by Israel gets wide coverage.

Now it is official: double standards, racism, and political activism are an integral part of the modern media.

Two Palestinian journalists are arrested — one by Israel and the other by the Palestinian Authority (PA). The name of the one arrested by Israel is Muhammad al-Qiq. The name of the one arrested by the PA security forces is Sami al-Sai.

Although he is registered as a journalist, al-Qiq was arrested for security-related offenses completely unrelated to his profession. Israel did not arrest him because of his reporting or his writing, but because of his activities on behalf of Hamas. As a student at Bir Zeit University in 2006, al-Qiq was already known to be affiliated with Hamas. He was a member of the Islamic Bloc — a student list belonging to Hamas.

Al-Qiq’s affiliation with Hamas even got him into trouble with the Palestinian Authority; its forces arrested and interrogated him several times in the past few years. The last time his family received a visit from PA security officers was in 2014. Then, officers in plainclothes seized al-Qiq’s laptop and personal documents.

Now, al-Qiq is in Israeli detention, where he has gone on hunger strike in protest against his arrest.

Guess who is campaigning on his behalf and demanding that Israel immediately and unconditionally release him from detention? The same PA that repeatedly arrested and harassed al-Qiq over the past few years.

In addition, human rights organizations and activists have endorsed the case and are now using it to attack Israel. These are the same activists and organizations that were silent when the PA security forces arrested al-Qiq and harassed his family.

One of these organizations is Amnesty International, which issued a statement last week calling on Israel to release the detained “journalist.” Amnesty neglected to mention that al-Qiq has also been targeted by the PA security forces and that, in addition to his work as a newsman, he is also affiliated with Hamas. This detail, according to Amnesty, is evidently not significant.

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End the UNRWA Farce As president, Trump should defund the agency perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem. Sol Stern

By on March 1st, 2017

After President Obama greased the wheels for the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s settlements policy, President-elect Trump tweeted that “things will be different after January 20th.” I didn’t vote for Trump, but for the sake of restoring some sanity to America’s Middle East policies, I fervently hope he fulfills that promise.

To make a real difference, our next president needs to understand how the United Nations’ hostility to the Jewish state is rooted in perverse institutions that have been abetted by previous U.S. administrations. The most glaring example of this is the inaptly named United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). With its $1.3 billion budget (30 percent of which comes from U.S. taxpayers), this agency actually perpetuates the refugee problem it was created to solve, while promoting Palestinian rejectionism and Jew hatred. Trump will soon have the means to drain the UNRWA swamp. If he does so, he would increase the chances of peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

The United Nations created UNRWA with the noblest of intentions. By the time an armistice agreement ended the first Arab-Israeli war in 1949, roughly 700, 000 Palestinians had fled (or were driven) from the territories governed by the new state of Israel. The prevailing view at the time was that refugee problems produced by war were best solved through resettlement in the countries to which the refugees had fled. In the aftermath of World War II, 7 million ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe were the victims of brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns approved by the victorious allied powers. On the Indian subcontinent another 3 million people were uprooted in the violent creation of India and Pakistan. These destitute refugees had to make do in their new host countries with virtually no outside aid. Yet, within a decade, there was no longer a refugee problem in Europe or Asia to trouble the international community.

Unfortunately, the surrounding Arab countries that launched a war of conquest against the Jewish State—Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq—refused to accept any responsibility for the welfare of their Palestinian brothers who were the big losers in the conflict. That’s when the U.N.—led by the United States—generously stepped in. The 1949 General Assembly resolution establishing UNRWA called for “the alleviation of the conditions of starvation and distress among the Palestine refugees.” Yet the resolution also stated that “constructive measures should be undertaken at an early date with a view to the termination of international assistance for relief.” In other words, the new refugee agency’s mission was to be temporary, pending a peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflict.

Flash forward 66 years. The original 700,000 Palestinians leaving Israel have now been magically transformed into a mini-state of 5.6 million “refugees” registered with UNRWA, about half of all the Palestinians living in the world today. The “temporary” U.N. agency has been transformed into a bloated international bureaucracy with a staff of 30,000, almost all of whom are Palestinian refugees themselves (many are activists of Hamas, the Islamist terrorist group).

Less than 5 percent of UNRWA’s clients ever lived in Israel, but the agency’s regulations state that all patrilineal descendants of the original displaced persons shall retain their refugee rights in perpetuity. Nor does UNRWA seem to be troubled by the fact that 40 percent of its camp residents are citizens of Jordan and Lebanon, and shouldn’t even be considered refugees under accepted international law and practice.

The unchecked growth of UNRWA is a classic case in international politics of the economic principle of “moral hazard.” By providing a social welfare safety net, the U.N. enables the Palestinian leadership to undermine efforts to solve the underlying conditions that created the refugee problem in the first place. Palestinian rejectionism is thus rendered risk-free. In turn, UNRWA nurtures Palestinian extremism, yet never is held accountable by the agency’s donor nations, including the United States.

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