RUTHFULLY YOURS

A report by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor documented 1,391 cases of Palestinians arbitrarily arrested by the two Palestinian parties, Fatah and Hamas, in 2015.

Systematic torture in Palestinian prisons in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was documented in the report — at least 179 cases of torture in Palestinian Authority (PA) prisons in 2015.

The PA security forces are trained and funded by several Western countries, including the US. This establishes a direct line between these Western donors and the arbitrary arrests, torture and human rights violations that have become the norm in PA-controlled prisons and detention centers.

The report also revealed that the Palestinian Authority regularly disobeys court orders by refusing to release detainees, showing contempt for its courts and judges.

Before our eyes, two police states are being built: one in the West Bank and a second in the Gaza Strip — in the face of talk by international parties of establishing an independent Palestinian state. But the last thing the Palestinians need is another police state.

Palestinians who incite violence against Israel are called Palestinian leaders. Palestinians who beg to differ with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas or one of his friends are called criminals and can expect to be interrogated and/or imprisoned.

On February 8, 2016, the FBI launched its “Don’t Be a Puppet” website. Designed to resemble a video game, the website is an interactive tool for the nation’s schools to prevent susceptible youth from getting recruited online by terrorists. Unfortunately, the released version appears to have suffered from politically-correct retooling that blunts its original purpose of protecting teens from Islamist recruitment.

The website had been scheduled for release last November, but was delayed by complaints from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and others. By asking about participants’ religious beliefs, according to CAIR, the program reinforced anti-Muslim stereotypes and promoted bullying of Muslims students. CAIR’s subtext, which it has repeated many times, is that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS/Islamist violence.

CAIR also argued that the website failed “to deal with the main threat to students, that of school shootings.” This is another regular CAIR trope that translates roughly to (a) Muslims are victims-in-chief of “Islamophobia” and (b) the government should focus on “right-wing extremism” and downplay Islamist violence. This theme has been ably aided and abetted by administration allies like the New America Foundation, but it is untrue. In effect, this criticism appears to assume that every government tool employed to prevent terrorists from harming Americans must target every enemy, foreign and domestic; that otherwise it is “discriminatory.”

“Does anyone in the Arab world know what is happening in Israel? … The answer to the above question is no… Israel has almost disappeared from headlines and many people no longer consider Israel as a threat. This is a reality that we have to learn to live with.

“The day the so-called Arab Spring erupted, Israel became invisible in the Arab media. Arabs are too preoccupied with so many issues plaguing their own lands…

“From referring to Israel as the Zionist enemy, the Arab media changed the tone by calling it the Israeli enemy, then we became aware of the term “hostile Israel” and then it was referred to as state of Israel and now Israel has simply vanished from the Arab media. It appears to be no longer on our radar.

“In the past few decades, we only heard about one enemy of the Arab world – Israel. Ironically, more wars have taken place between Arab countries than between Israel and Arabs. As a matter of fact, wars between the Arab world and Israel are considered less severe compared to wars between the Arab countries and clashes within some Arab countries.

“People are asking as to why during full-scale wars with Israel, we never saw destruction of archeological, historical or religious sites.”

“ISRAEL HAS KNOWN LAW AND ORDER SINCE ITS FIRST DAY, WHILE WE STILL TRY TO COMPREHEND THE MEANING OF BOTH THESE WORDS”

Kuwaiti Columnist Ahmad Al-Sarraf:

“For almost 70 years we have lacked, and continue to lack, all knowledge about Israel, and have learned nothing from it.

“Israel has outdone us in all fields – military, scientific, and cultural – but despite this we have refused to consider the reason for its obvious superiority to us, and have never stopped calling it ‘the monstrous entity’…

“Since its founding, Israel has been committed to democracy, while we refuse to even speak of democracy, let alone adopt it…

“Israel has given its minorities rights that most citizens in most Arab countries do not even dream of. Furthermore, the freedom of worship there exceeds that in any Arab or Islamic country.

“Israel has focused its attention on science, spending large sums on research, while we are still focused on whether drinking camel urine or using it medicinally is actually helpful…

“Israel has known law and order since its first day, while we still try to comprehend the meaning of both these words… The list is long, and the sorrow that accompanies it persists.”

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001591.html

“ISRAEL HAS GIVEN ITS MINORITIES RIGHTS THAT MOST CITIZENS IN OUR ARAB COUNTRIES DO NOT EVEN DREAM OF”

[Notes by Tom Gross]

I attach two unusual op-eds. The first is published today in the Saudi paper Arab News, which is reportedly the most read English-language paper in the Arab world. The second, in Arabic from the Kuwaiti publication Al-Qabas, was published earlier this month. I prepared some extracts first (below) for those who don’t have time to read them in full.

These days much of the media attacks on Israel come from western journalists, not Arab ones. But what is not being widely reported in western media is that the Iranian government is pledging cash rewards for Palestinians that kill Jews. Columnists at The New York Times and elsewhere are too busy celebrating the Iran deal, which will see billions of dollars released to the Iranian regime, to notice many of the things Iran is planning to do with the money.

Iranian foreign ministry official Mohammad Fateh Ali said at a press conference that his government will give sums of $7,000 or $30,000 to Palestinian families of “martyrs of the new intifada” (i.e. those who are continuing to stab Israelis) depending how “successful” they were.

This is in addition to the (diverted European aid money) that the Palestinian Authority already gives them.

Yesterday a 30-year-old father of two became the latest Israeli to die as a result of an unprovoked Palestinian stabbing attack.

“I WILL GROW, I WILL BEAR FRUIT”

Meanwhile the gay Iranian poet Payam Feili has applied for political asylum in Israel.

Feili (who is Muslim) arrived in Israel in December to see his novella, “I Will Grow, I Will Bear Fruit,” staged as a play in Hebrew in Tel Aviv, and has remained in Israel since.

His asylum claim has been reported in The Washington Post and Newsweek but of course the rest of the anti-Israel media are ignoring it since it shines a light on Israeli tolerance.

Homosexuality is illegal in the Islamic Republic and those found guilty of this “crime” are sometimes executed, or sentenced to be whipped.

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad infamously said in a 2007 speech in New York that “in Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like you do in your country. This does not exist in our country.”

— Tom Gross

Is it possible for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to be anything other than anti-Semitic? On January 7, 140 people in Rochester, New York attended a lecture on the topic by Miriam F. Elman, Associate Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. The event was organized and hosted by a local non-profit called Roc4Israel, founded in 2012 expressly to “counter the negative rhetoric towards Israel, expose the rising tide of global anti-Semitism, fight against BDS, and defend Israel’s right to exist.”

As Elman told her audience, “in the Middle Ages Jews were hated for their religion, in the 19th and 20th centuries they were hated for their race and today they are hated for their nation-state.”

Excepting some fringe student groups enthusiastic about boycotting Israel, the BDS movement is mostly absent from the academic scene in Rochester. The president of the University of Rochester, Joel Seligman, is a vocal critic of the movement. And while there are academics in town who sympathize with the movement enough to sign statements, at the moment BDS has no visible academic advocates in Rochester.

Syracuse, NY, located little more than an hour’s drive away, is a different story. Its academic scene has a far more active BDS movement. A group calling itself the Syracuse Peace Council is an active BDS agitator. In May 2015, Cazenovia College hosted BDS factotum Alison Weir (purveyor of the website “If Americans Knew”). Syracuse University itself has some very visible BDS advocates such as Vivian May, Zachary Braiterman, and others.

However, the topic was well-known enough to draw a crowd, on a cold winter’s evening, to an academic lecture. Nearly filling a spacious, tiered-seating auditorium, the audience was far larger than most Political Science or Middle East Studies Colloquia would attract at any of the area colleges.

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon announcement of large financial rewards to Palestinians attacking Israel was made possible by the tens of billions of dollars released to the Islamic terrorist regime in Iran. Accordingly, the family of each Palestinian killed while attacking Israelis will receive $7,000, and those whose house is demolished by the IDF, will be awarded $30,000 each.
It is unlikely that Iran’s latest inducement to terrorism against Israel surprised U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, or President Obama, since both have acknowledged that some of the billions of dollars released to Iran, “will end up in the hands of the IRGC or of other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists.” Indeed, both should be held accountable for knowingly funding terrorism in violation of the Patriot Act. That, however, is not going to happen. Instead, growing Palestinians attacks on Israel will be seen by the Obama administration, as an opportunity to increase its pressure on Israel to agree to a Palestinian terrorist state.
Sadly, like Iran, the U.S. also helps fund the terrorist Palestinian Authority with at least $500 million annually. This is given to the PA in complete disregard to their incitement to and support of terrorist attacks against the Jewish State. And the PA, like Iran, does not hide its sponsorship of terrorist attacks on Israel. Palestinians killed while attacking Israelis are glorified and honored by the PA. Their families receive stipends and other benefits from the PA coffers, which are annually replenished by the U.S. The Obama administration is well aware of this. However, instead of demanding a stop to the PA’s hostilities towards Israel, cutting their aid, or even threatening to do so, Kerry had “urged” Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas last week, for “calm and a decrease in violence, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric,” according to State Department spokesman John Kirby.

There is much confusion in the minds of politicians, journalists, educators, religious leaders and the proverbial “man in the street” about the conflicts and origins of the many wars in the Middle East.

Foremost among these disputes is the seemingly endless Arab-Israel conflict, or what should more realistically be called the Islam-Israel conflict.

This is not a dispute over territory but a war of genocide by followers of Islam against a Jewish state, Israel, and a people who are non-Muslim.

The Arab and Islamic world will never accept the Jewish state even though its historic and ancestral roots in the land precede the 7th century beginnings of Islam by well over 3,000 years. Just read the Bible.

But to better understand the modern origins of the conflict we have to return to the emerging years after the First World War.

The victorious powers, primarily Britain, France and the United States, met in San Remo to carve up the corpse of the defeated Ottoman Turkish Empire, which had occupied the Middle East for 400 years. In so doing, they created artificial borders, which obliterated ancestral, religious and ethnic boundaries and have plagued the area ever since.

On April 25, 1920, one such cartographic invention was the Mandate of Palestine. This included the geographical territory stretching from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea up to the border of the then Mandate of Mesopotamia; later to be renamed Iraq.

No independent or sovereign state called Palestine had ever existed in that territory, nor does one exist today, although a hostile and terrorist entity calling itself the Palestinian Authority occupies land in what is called the West Bank, while the terrorist and junior branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, occupies Gaza. But more of that later.

The name, Palestine, was merely applied to a geographical area; just like other non-state territories in the world – such as Siberia or Patagonia.

A group of students at Cornell University is demanding that the school change the name of its botanical garden from “Cornell Plantations” because apparently, the word “plantation” is always racist.

The idea behind the protest is that the word evokes images of slavery. The demand to change it is just one of many demands in a seven-page document sent to the administration by Cornell Black Students United in November.

And it’s one that’s reportedly actually being considered:

“Our staff and Advisory Council have been considering all aspects of our identity, our name, our mission and how our identity can best reflect what Cornell Plantations is — and does,” Christopher Dunn, director of the gardens, wrote in a piece for the Cornell Daily Sun.

The garden was named “Cornell Plantations” all the way back in 1944, according to a piece in Verdant Views, the plantations’ magazine. But according to Cornell Black Students United, it must be changed now. After all, the group claims that its demands must be met in order for the campus to be “conducive to the overall success of students of color.”

It’s the darkest irony of the year so far. Last week, feminists, alongside many others, were praising the recently deceased Harper Lee and her extraordinary literary achievement. Yet just hours later, they were behaving like Lee’s literary villains, the outraged mob in To Kill a Mockingbird, who are driven by an ugly, singular conviction: that if enough angry people believe a man is guilty of rape, then he is guilty of rape, and to hell with due process.

In their outpouring of belief in pop star Kesha, who claims to have been sexually assaulted but has never had those claims tested or proven, these Lee-celebrating feminists did precisely what Lee’s most immoral characters did: They assumed that a man was guilty of rape on the basis of nothing more than accusation and suspicion.

The Kesha story reveals the irrational rot that has set in within much of modern feminism. Kesha spent months trying to wriggle free from her contract with Sony, on the basis that her producer, Dr. Luke, had previously sexually assaulted her. She said that continuing to work with Sony would cause her “irreparable harm.” But there’s a small problem for Kesha: These claims of rape have never been brought to criminal trial and thus remain unproven. So it’s her word against Dr. Luke’s, and he says her claims are “outright lies.” Understandably, the Manhattan Supreme Court in New York City, which presumably works from the understanding that Dr. Luke, like everyone else, is innocent until proven guilty, has rejected Kesha’s request to be released from her contract.

Feminists don’t think this is understandable. For them, the Kesha-contract lock is a crime against womankind. They’ve got the hashtag #FreeKesha trending on Twitter. And, most strikingly, they’ve rallied around Kesha as a victim of sexual abuse who has now been abused further by the court system. They casually, tyrannically assume that Kesha was sexually assaulted, which of course also has the effect of branding Dr. Luke an assaulter, despite the fact that he has never been tried or convicted of this offense.

Last Thursday, yet again, we learned that pro-Palestinian activists couldn’t care less about Palestinians.

For them, the Palestinians whose rights they claim to champion are nothing more than means to another end.

Our latest lesson came from the University of Chicago.

Last week, Palestinian human rights activist Bassam Eid was abused and threatened by supposedly pro-Palestinian and pro-peace activists as he tried to inform his audience about the state of Palestinian human rights today.

Bassam Eid has dedicated his life to defending the human rights of the Palestinians. From 1967 through 1994, Israel administered the population centers of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. From 1994, with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority until today, the Palestinians have been ruled by the PLO and Hamas.

As a human rights activist, until 1994, Eid directed most of his criticisms against Israel. Since then, Eid has defended Palestinian human rights from abuse at the hands of the PLO and Hamas.

Until 1994, Eid’s human rights activism made him the darling of the far Left. He was a co-director of B’tselem. He was invited to prestigious anti-Israel forums worldwide and given platforms where he presented his accusations against Israel to international acclaim.

But since the PA was formed, those who once upheld him as a hero have turned their backs on him. In so doing, they have shown their true colors.

During his talk at the University of Chicago, those colors came shining through.

Eid talked about the human rights abuses and repression of Palestinians not at the hands of Israel, but at the hands of the PA and Hamas. In other words, Eid held the Palestinian leadership accountable for its failure to respect the rights of the Palestinians it claims to speak for.

This, it turns out, is a big no-no.

Eid was attacked by two distinct groups for daring to hold the Palestinian leadership accountable for its abuses of Palestinian human rights. In their collusion, we see the truth about those who proclaim their commitment to “justice for the Palestinians” on the one hand, and those who proclaim their devotion to “peace” on the other hand.

The first group to attack him was Students for Justice in Palestine. In leading the assault on Eid, SJP members interrupted him, threatened him and demonized him.

“You must never again speak about the Palestinians!,” some yelled in English at a man who has devoted his life to defending Palestinian rights.

In the meantime, other SJP members reportedly threatened Eid in Arabic with physical violence.