RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/singling_out_israel.html

The European Union has just announced a proposal that all Israeli products made in contested areas — Samaria, Judea, and other Israeli settlements — would be required to carry consumer warning labels specifying their origin.  This action comes only a few months after Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry uncovered evidence that the E.U. was funding more than a dozen NGOs, including some linked to militant groups that promote the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.

The E.U.’s “official” position is that it does not support or fund BDS.  Yet its failure to act on NGO funding, coupled now with the labeling proposal, reveals the E.U.’s failure to follow its own policy and to actively undermine Israel.  The idea that international law requires economic action against Israel falls flat when the E.U. failed to sanction countries that engaged in human rights violations in occupied territories.

Consider the E.U.’s lack of response to Chinese appropriation of Tibet, to Iranian subjugation and ethnic genocide in Syria, and to the Turkish invasion and more than 40 years of occupation in northern Cyprus.  Given E.U. inaction in these instances, it is glaringly obvious that Israel writer Natan Sharansky’s 3-D definition of anti-Semitism aptly applies.  That is, Israel is unfairly singled out using demonization, delegitimization, and a double standard of judging its actions.

Further, E.U. countries continue to do business with China, Iran, and Turkey despite blatant, glaring human rights violations and occupations in Tibet, Syria, and Northern Cyprus.  A brief review of those actions makes plain the E.U. bias against Israel.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/15/israel-has-a-moral-right-to-block-rashida-tlaib-and-ilhan-omar/

Israeli officials have decided to block U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from entering their country, a reversal of policy that President Donald Trump seems to have prompted.

Should Israel have taken the high road and given two enemies of Israel visas for this propaganda visit? Probably. It usually does. Allowing foes to enter the country reflects the strong liberal values that make Israel a special place in Middle East.

However, the idea that impeding two anti-Semites and Hamas apologists from entering Israel is an attack on democracy, or the United States, or that such a move is accelerating the corrosion of the Democratic Party’s support for Israel, is absurd.

Sen. Bernie Sanders contends that Israel is showing “enormous disrespect to these elected leaders, to the United States Congress, and to the principles of democracy.”

What principle of democracy states that you have to issue visas for illiberal bigots who actively engage in efforts to harm your citizens? If Republican Steve King were denied an entry visa into Mexico, not a single congressperson would stand up for him, not a single presidential candidate would claim that Mexico had insulted the honor of the United States, not a single Democrat would argue that it reflected poorly on Mexican democracy, and not a single liberal pundit would contend that the Mexican-U.S. relationship was being hurt.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Noa-Rothmans-pathetic-embrace-of-

Noa Rothman, the granddaughter of slain Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, was very proud of herself this week for making a pilgrimage to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Rothman, whose famous eulogy at her grandfather’s funeral in 1995 became a worldwide tear-jerker, recently joined former prime minister Ehud Barak’s new party, which merged with Meretz to become the Democratic Union. Though polls suggest that she has little-to-no-chance of becoming a member of Knesset after the September 17 election, since her placement at No. 9 puts her well below the five seats predicted for the left-wing faction, her particular claim to fame gives her party a PR advantage. Or does it?

During the 25 years since Rabin and his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, won a joint Nobel Prize with PLO chief Yasser Arafat for “their efforts to create peace in the Middle East,” Israel has been plagued by an ongoing Palestinian war of attrition against the Jewish state.

Opponents of the very Oslo Accords that created the PA knew all along that Arafat had not changed his terrorist stripes. Indeed, anyone who wasn’t living in la-la land realized that the so-called “peace agreements” were simply a sophisticated stage in the PLO leader’s “plan of phases” to annihilate Israel.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274607/idf-settles-account-murderers-israeli-teen-ari-lieberman

Within 48 hours of the brutal slaying of 18-year-old Dvir Sorek, Israeli security forces swooped in on his killers in the dead of night, while they were asleep. Sorek’s lifeless body was found last Thursday in the early morning hours near the community of Migdal Oz, located in the Judea District just south of Jerusalem. He had just returned from Jerusalem where he purchased gifts for his teachers at the Migdal Oz religious seminary. But Sorek, a talented musician who would have turned 19 in a week, never made it. He was ambushed by two Palestinian Authority Arabs and stabbed repeatedly. Sorek’s grandfather, Rabbi Binyamin Herling, a Holocaust survivor, met a similar grisly fate when he was murdered in a terrorist attack perpetrated by PA Arabs nearly two decades prior.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad praised the attack though they were careful not to claim responsibility. Hamas is the terrorist entity that governs the Gaza Strip and is considered the PA’s main internal political rival. Islamic Jihad is also based in Gaza and maintains the same ideologically extremist positions as its larger Hamas cousin. Both groups are heavily influenced and financed by Iran.

Security forces of various branches instantly began a manhunt for Sorek’s assailants. Army trackers were brought in to determine the attackers’ escape route.  CCTV footage collected from roadside cameras was thoroughly examined for further clues. By Friday evening, the identity of the attackers was known. Israel Defense Force units, aided by Shin Bet agents (Israel’s FBI equivalent) and elements of the border patrol zeroed in on the Arab settlement of Beit Kahil, located southwest of Migdal Oz.

On Saturday at 3 a.m., IDF troops nabbed Nasir and Qasseem Asafra, ages 24 and 30 respectively, in their home. The duo were cousins and were shocked by the breathtaking speed it took to crack the case. Nasir was a member of Hamas. Nasir’s brother Akrama and Qassem’s wife, Ines, were also arrested on suspicion of aiding the terrorists after the attack. The vehicle used by the terrorists was hauled off for further forensic examination. Precise measurements of Asafra house have already been taken in anticipation of its demolition.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/may-dvir-soreks-legacy-be-a-lesson-to-the-jewish-left/

Faced with what they clearly viewed as a contradiction in terms, Israel Prize laureate David Grossman and his fellow peace fantasists were stunned.

The slaughter last week of 19-year-old yeshivah student and Israel Defense Forces’ recruit Dvir Sorek from the Judea and Samaria community of Ofra was not exceptional. Palestinian terrorists with hatred in their hearts and weapons in their hands are integral to the Jewish state’s otherwise vibrant landscape.

But this particular tragedy struck a nationwide nerve even among those who blame the so-called “occupation” for Palestinian violence, and consider citizens like Sorek to be illegally and immorally living in territory that should become part of a future Palestinian state.

One detail of Sorek’s slaying that caused even hard-core leftists to pause was the fact that this “religious settler” was found clutching a book by internationally renowned author David Grossman. The book was among others that Sorek had purchased prior to his brutal murder as end-of-the-year gifts to his rabbis at the Machanayim seminary, an institution that combines Torah study with military service.

Unarmed and in civilian clothes, Sorek was ambushed by his knife-wielding killers as he made his way on foot from the bus stop to his evening class. His failure to arrive sparked the search that led to the discovery of his body six hours later.

http://www.mythsandfacts.org/

Palestine is a name coined by the Romans around 135 CE from the name of a seagoing Aegean people who settled on the coast of Canaan in antiquity – the Philistines. The name was chosen to replace Judea, as a sign that Jewish sovereignty had been eradicated following the Jewish Revolts against Rome. 

In the course of time, the Latin name Philistia was further bastardized into Palistina or Palestine. During the next 2,000 years Palestine was never an independent state belonging to any people, nor did a Palestinian people distinct from other Arabs appear during 1,300 years of Muslim hegemony in Palestine under Arab and Ottoman rule. During that rule, local Arabs were actually considered part of, and subject to, the authority of Greater Syria (Suriyya al-Kubra).

Historically, before the Arabs fabricated the concept of Palestinian peoplehood as an exclusively Arab phenomenon, no such group existed. This is substantiated in countless official British Mandate-vintage documents that speak of the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine – not Jews and Palestinians.

In fact, before local Jews began calling themselves Israelis in 1948 (when the name “Israel” was chosen for the newly-established Jewish State), the term “Palestine” applied almost exclusively to Jews and the institutions founded by new Jewish immigrants in the first half of the 20th century, before the state’s independence. 

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-Palestinian-war-of-attrition-598436

Before treating the symptoms of a disease, one must understand what caused it.

Writing in The Jerusalem Post on July 12, in an article titled “Lessons from Israel’s most forgotten war,” Amotz Asa-El offers an insightful explanation.

“Wars of attrition are not decided by their parties’ balance of troops, arms or resources, but by their balance of spirit,” the article said. “The winner will not be the one left with more land, population or treasure, but the one whose spirit will last longer.”

This explains why Arabs and Palestinians continue to reject Israel’s legitimacy, regardless of the negative consequences and contrary to attempts to “make a deal” to resolve the conflict. The conflict itself defines their raison d’etre, their attempts to destroy Zionism and the State of Israel.

Seen as a “Palestinian war of attrition,” therefore, the conflict is not simply over land or people; it’s about essence – and spirit. For Arabs and Palestinians, any concession is an admission of defeat, humiliation and surrender. It means that all of their sacrifices were in vain, and that the ideal of being a “martyr” (shahid) was false. It means that the Palestinian narrative – “Free Palestine” and “End the occupation” – is a fraud, and that all the resources that were poured into supporting that ideology by the international community – e.g. UNRWA and the “two-state-solution” – were a waste.