RUTHFULLY YOURS

The European Union plans to step up its anti-Israel boycott measures and require farmers based beyond the Green Line to clearly label produce as coming from “the occupied territories,” Israel Hayom learned Thursday.

Farmers in the Jordan Valley were recently informed by two companies that export their produce to the EU that the new directive will take effect in mid April.

One Israeli exporter told Israel Hayom that since the EU made the decision to label settlement products, many clients across Europe have made arrangements to implement the directives.

EU guidelines have left the exact nature of product labeling to the discretion of each member state. For the most part, settlement products imported to the EU are repackaged upon arrival at their destination, and a small sticker is added indicating the West Bank as the goods’ point of origin.

According to the exporter, he was recently approached by several German supermarket chains which told him that Israeli manufacturers must now label their products prominently to indicate to consumers that they were “manufactured in territories occupied by the Israeli government.”

Some German clients have decided to cease importing settlement goods altogether, he said.

Israel Hayom has learned that last week, the Dutch Agriculture Ministry informed importers that settlement products must be clearly labeled before leaving Israel.

The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution on March 2nd that imposes tough new sanctions and tightens some of its existing measures against North Korea (the DPRK). Resolution 2270 (2016) is the Security Council’s strongest response to date to the rogue North Korean regime’s ongoing nuclear and ballistic missile-related test activities in violation of a series of prior Security Council resolutions. The triggering events leading up to this latest resolution were North Korea’s January 2016 nuclear test and February rocket launch. These provocations were too much even for China, North Korea’s closest trading partner, which cooperated constructively with the United States to reach consensus on the resolution’s text after several weeks of negotiations.

President Obama issued a statement following the vote that highlighted his belief in the importance of the resolution: “Today, the international community, speaking with one voice, has sent Pyongyang a simple message: North Korea must abandon these dangerous programs and choose a better path for its people.”

In reality, the latest resolution is just a piece of paper that is unlikely to change North Korea’s behavior. U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, acknowledged that “the true measure of Resolution 2270 will be whether the rigor with which states implement these sanctions matches the rigor we can anticipate the DPRK will apply to attempting to evade them – that’s what they do.”

In fact, unless the United States and its principal allies in the Asian Pacific region and elsewhere are prepared to vigorously enforce the resolution’s terms, including broader restrictions on trade and financial transactions, a more comprehensive arms embargo and the new mandatory cargo inspection regime, North Korea will be more emboldened than ever. Just hours after the Security Council passed Resolution 2270, North Korea showed what it thought of the resolution by firing six short-range projectiles into the sea.

There have been plenty of protests that Israel is “strangling” Gaza with its blockade. That Gaza is an “open air prison” or even a “concentration camp”. The truth is that Hamas is facing restrictions because it’s a terrorist organization that keeps trying to kill people.

The following letter published by Memri also reveals that it’s allied with ISIS in the Sinai is supplying guns and bombs to ISIS.

Anyone who calls for ending restrictions on Gaza is calling for more weapons to be transferred to ISIS. They are a traitor and a terrorist supporter in every possible sense of the word.

On February 24, 2016, a letter from an Islamic State (ISIS) fighter to ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was posted on social media. In it, the fighter strongly protests the close ties and cooperation between ISIS’s Sinai province and Hamas, particularly Hamas’s military wing.

The letter lays out a variety of Islamic objections to the problem that Hamas has not sworn allegiance to the Caliph of the Islamic State, making them apostates, but Hamas and ISIS in the Sinai nevertheless maintain a close working cooperation. It also lists some of the details of the cooperation between ISIS in the Sinai and Hamas.

“1. Sinai province is smuggling weapons for Hamas in Gaza, because of the province’s fighters’ expert knowledge of the [smuggling] routes from Libya, Sudan, and Egypt.

“2. Sinai province depends very much on Hamas and Al-Qassam for weapons and for explosives and ammunition. There are direct and continuous supply routes from Hamas to Sinai province. The Al-Qassam factories operate assembly lines for manufacturing explosive devices and bombs for the Sinai province, but do not stamp the Al-Qassam logo on them, as they usually do.

The Al-Qassam factories produce most particularly the rather famous Kassam rockets, but other weapons as well. So Hamas is supplying bombs for ISIS attacks on Egyptian forces (so you can see why Egypt has been cracking down so hard on Hamas), but it’s possible that some Hamas weapons filter beyond ISIS in Egypt to core ISIS as well. Certainly to ISIS in Libya.

This is a serious problem that merits investigation, much like the IEDs that Iran supplied to Jihadis in Iraq which killed so many American soldiers.

Despite the “official” surveys taken among Palestinians, which show support for Hamas, the residents of the West Bank are terrified that Hamas will gain control and destroy our lives and property, the way they did in the Gaza Strip.

The BDS organizations are trying to boycott products made in the West Bank, which only throws masses of Palestinians out of good jobs in an effort to force Israel into a hasty withdrawal that has no chance of taking place. The Israelis and everyone else remember all too well that the last Israeli withdrawals — from southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip — led to the terrorist takeover of the vacuums created.

Ikrima Sabri, the former Mufti of Jerusalem, often said that Palestinians were better off with the Jews in charge of Al-Aqsa mosque and Jerusalem, because in the future they could be removed and killed off, but if the Crusaders returned to Jerusalem — such as an international commission headed by the French — it would be harder to get rid of them.

During a visit to Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu that now is not time to move forward with the “two-state solution” and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Merkel, evidently seeing Israel as a dam protecting Europe from Islamist extremists, told Netanyahu that while the Germans recognized the terrorist threat faced by Israel, and that a peace process had to be advanced based on two states for two peoples, now was not the right time to take big steps.