ISRAEL Comments turned off

LOSING THE NEGEV-DAVID ISAAC

Posted By on September 3rd, 2018

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.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The banality of lies: In ‘Operation Finale,’ Eichmann’s falsehoods are validated Opening this weekend, the film, focused on the kidnapping of Holocaust ‘architect,’ humanizes its notorious antagonist and allows his deceptions to go unchallenged By Matt Lebovic

Posted By on September 3rd, 2018

https://www.timesofisrael.com/banality-of-truth-in-operation-finale-eichmann-propagated-lies-are-validated/

The new film “Operation Finale” about Adolf Eichmann’s dramatic 1961 capture is technically masterful. It is a shame that audiences aren’t told what is technically the historical truth as well.

Like German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann — who was commonly known as the “architect” of the Holocaust — “Operation Finale” downplays Eichmann’s role in the massive genocide of the Jewish people. Additionally, the film validates his fallacious statements about “ignoring orders” and his supposed attempts to rescue Jews from the death camps.By inspiring empathy for Eichmann and allowing him to minimize his wartime –and pre-war — activities, the producers of “Operation Finale” placed their film at home with Arendt’s seminal work, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” written after his trial.

In her 1963 opus, Arendt blamed European Jews for their own slaughter. She also declared that Eichmann was not motivated by anti-Semitism, and that both he and his evil were “banal,” or unoriginal.

For viewers unfamiliar with Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust, the film’s primary “explanation” takes place during the opening credits, as train schedules, maps, and lists of killing facilities appear in a dramatically scored montage. Throughout the film, Eichmann is referred to as “the man who ran the trains,” and someone who “transported millions to their deaths.” These labels, however, do not express the scope of Eichmann’s 13-year career in the SS.

“I never gave an order to kill a Jew,” said Eichmann in real-life, as well as in the film. His only crime was “aiding and abetting,” said the SS leader. Like Arendt’s book, “Operation Finale” makes Eichmann out to be a neurotic, uninspired master of train schedules.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

David Goldman: A funeral for a World That Never Was

Posted By on September 3rd, 2018

http://www.atimes.com/article/a-funeral-for-a-world-that-never-was/
Senator John McCain’s grand funeral was also a chance for the Establishment to take one step closer to its grave.

Funeral services are not for the benefit of the defunct, who is beyond our praise or condemnation, but for the living, who know before long that they will follow the honored dead into a cold grave.

Senator John McCain’s funeral was the most ostentatious that Washington has accorded except for a president, and much grander than the 2006 funeral of Gerald Ford, for example. The American Establishment took the opportunity to mourn a world that it imagined but never inhabited.

The eulogies for the Arizona senator, to be sure, were a convenient occasion for the Establishment to show its dudgeon at “the pointedly un-invited President Trump,” as the New Yorker noted, calling the event “the biggest resistance meeting yet.”

McCain’s daughter Meghan contrasted what she called her father’s “real greatness” with the “cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice,” a reference to Trump. Politics, though, were less important than the American elite’s collective exercise in self-consolation after the catastrophic failure of its policies and its repudiation by the voters in the 2016 election.

Senator McCain served his country and suffered on its behalf as a prisoner of war, and deserves respect on the occasion of his passing. But the unctuous sea of self-congratulatory declarations of virtue embedded in his obsequies were enough to make the portraits in the Capitol rotunda puke.

Here, for example, is the Chicago Tribune: “Ringing through Washington National Cathedral on a dreary morning were paeans to bipartisanship, compromise and civility of the sort that seem to be under daily assault from all corners of the country, especially from the White House … A common decency. A shared identity and values that transcend ideology, class or race. A toughness that shows itself in battle and service to nation rather than on Twitter. Each of these was touted as a key element of McCain’s epic life.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

On the Palestinian Refugee Issue, President Trump Is Magnificently Right By David P. Goldman

Posted By on September 3rd, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/on-the-palestinian-refugee-issue-president-trump-is-magnificently-right/

President Trump appears to have undertaken a revolution in Middle Eastern diplomacy. Reportedly, the United States will eliminate refugee status for the descendants of Palestinian refugees of 1948, the only group of people anywhere in the world to inherit refugee status. The U.S. also reportedly will eliminate funding for UNRWA, the only UN agency dedicated to a single group of refugees, namely the Palestinian Arabs.

The Times of Israel reports:

The “right of return” is one of the key core issues of dispute in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians claim that five million people — tens of thousands of original refugees from what is today’s Israel, and their millions of descendants — have a “right of return.” Israel rejects the demand, saying that it represents a bid by the Palestinians to destroy Israel by weight of numbers. It says there is no justification for UNRWA’s unique criteria, by which all subsequent generations of descendants of the original refugees are also designated as having refugee status, including those born elsewhere and/or holding citizenship elsewhere; such a designation does not apply to the world’s other refugee populations.

This is long overdue. The 1948 War led to one of the many exchanges of populations during the 20th century — 1.5 million Greeks were expelled from Turkey and 1 million Turks expelled from Greece in 1923, for example. After World War II, 12 million Germans were expelled from the Czech Republic, Poland, and other parts of Eastern Europe, many of whom had lived there for centuries. Millions of Hindus and Muslims moved across the border when Pakistan separated from India upon independence in 1947. None of the transferred populations are treated as refugees, except for the Palestinians.

Roughly equal numbers of Arabs and Jews were displaced as Arab states expelled Jewish populations that in some cases, e.g. Iraq, had lived there for 2,500 years, long before the Arabs. The young Jewish state absorbed almost a million Jewish refugees from Muslim countries while the displaced Arabs were kept in permanent refugee status as a bargaining chip. “Right of return” simply meant Muslim refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state. The so-called peace process in the Middle East always has failed due to the asymmetry of demands: as the Israeli cartoon Dry Bones put it, land for peace means the Arabs want land and the Jews want peace. As long as the Western nations humored the Arab delusion that the Jewish state could be eliminated, the Arab side had no incentive to negotiate. The Arab side refused to accept its defeat in 1948. It is the loser who decides when the war is over, and the message from Washington is, “You lost. Deal with it.”

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

RAY COOK ON ANTI-SEMITISM DISGUISED AS ANTI-ZIONISM *****

Posted By on September 3rd, 2018

‘…. There is an almost obsessive antagonism to Israel and to Jews, making an exception for Jews who actively denounce Israel; Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and the late Hajo Meyer being much cited.

These views do not usually get challenged by other members.

They are permitted by the administrators. Calling the Talmud Satanic is not reasoned criticism of Israel.

The administrators post articles and videos, usually from Mint Press, Russia Today, Palestinian news channels, Evolve, Mondoweiss and Skwawkbox which are universally hostile to Israel.

Within a short space of time, these posts attract comments denigrating Jews in general.

If anyone disagrees, they are abused by other members of the group.

On the few occasions when I have posted something questioning the totally negative coverage of Israel, my comments were deleted by administrators.

The Al-Jazeera film ‘the Lobby’ is posted most days as an educational resource.

The literacy of forum members is diverse. I find it hard to imagine that Tories and Zionists would infiltrate these forums and employ so many different levels of orthographic competence.

It is argued every day on the forums that Israel is murderous, sadistic, criminal and internationally puissant. The videos are not usually clear and one cannot see what is happening in them, so a member will insert a tagline, explaining that the video depicts some monstrous behaviour inflicted on Palestinians by Israelis. I’m not saying that this never happens but that, in the videos shown, anything could be happening. It is like looking at an abstract painting. The explanatory text next to it tells you that the painting shows the artist’s inner turmoil when choosing between a tuna baguette and an avocado wrap. Without the text, one would not know….’

‘It seems the more we Jews complain about antisemitism the more people reveal their distaste for Jews and make every excuse to pooh-pooh, dismiss, ridicule and trash our fears.

If you are Muslim, gay, black, trans, disabled, the same people are tripping over themselves to stand with you to signal their virtue. All the more reason to cherish those who are not Jews yet stand with us in these troubled times.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The White House is at war with reporters, but Trump didn’t start it. By Julie Mason

Posted By on September 3rd, 2018

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/The-White-House-is-at-war-with-reporters-but-13199382.php

President Trump’s sustained war on the news media is loud and destructive and surely must be the worst, most unprecedented attack on the Fourth Estate in modern history.

Not so fast. On a few significant fronts, Trump is following a trail blazed by President Obama in undermining openness and press freedom. And Trump’s newfound willingness to use the Justice Department to surveil journalists and sniff out their sources is right out of the Obama playbook.

Meanwhile, the tweets keep coming. “If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all,” Trump tweeted recently.Since taking office, Trump has had only one, full-length press conference at the White House. His own legal and administrative headaches probably preclude a repeat performance any time soon.

Drawing the most attention are Trump’s darker pronouncements — journalists are “nasty,” they are “enemies of the people,” and maybe some should see their licenses revoked. Journalist Ken Vogel of the New York Times is one of several to receive chilling death threats, apparently from Trump supporters.

“You are the enemy of the people,” a caller said on voicemail shared by Vogel last week. “And although the pen might be mightier than the sword, the pen is not mightier than the AK-47.”

Trump recently escalated from trash-talk to legal action, deploying the Justice Department to seize without notice six years’ worth of email and phone records from four reporters in order to smoke out a source whose information reflected badly on Trump.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Congress waits, waits, waits for Sally Yates documents by Byron York

Posted By on September 3rd, 2018

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/congress-waits-waits-waits-for-sally-yates-documents

Obama appointee Sally Yates was acting attorney general under President Trump for just 10 days — from Jan. 20, 2017 until Jan. 30, 2017 — but by any measure they were consequential days. Even now, two issues from Yates’ brief tenure are still of interest to congressional investigators. One was the series of events that led Yates, in charge of the Justice Department, to reject the president’s executive order temporarily suspending the admittance into the United States of people from some Muslim nations. The second is Yates’ role in the FBI’s questioning, apparently on dubious premises, the president’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, four days into the new administration — questioning that ultimately led to Flynn’s guilty plea in the Trump-Russia investigation.

Both are matters of great public significance and interest — and on both, the Justice Department is refusing to allow the Senate Judiciary Committee access to documents from Yates’ time in office.

On Feb. 23, 2017, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley wrote to Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking for “all emails to, from, copying, or blind-copying Ms. Yates from Jan. 20, 2017, through Jan. 31, 2017.” Grassley also asked for all of Yates’ other correspondence from that period, plus records of her calls and meetings.

The reason Grassley cited — his committee has direct oversight authority over the Justice Department — was that Yates’ order to the Justice Department not to defend the president’s executive order cost the administration precious time as it prepared to fight the inevitable legal challenges. The Department did not have its facts together when a federal judge in Washington state demanded them, setting the stage for the judge to issue a temporary restraining order.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Britain’s Burka Blues: “I’d Like to Thank Boris Johnson” by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on September 3rd, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12947/boris-johnson-burka-blues

“As a Muslim woman, I’d like to thank Boris Johnson for calling out the niqab” — Title of an article by Dr. Qanta Ahmed in The Spectator.

“[T]his is a point that we Muslims seem to be unable to get across to non-Muslims – there is no basis in Islam for the niqab…. That’s why Muslim nations are themselves regulating and banning the niqab and burqa…” — Dr. Qanta Ahmed, The Conversation, January 2017.

Some observers feel that it is especially painful to see Western feminists marching and wearing black face masks in order to protect Muslim women’s right to wear them, but failing to support the rights of other Muslim women who plead not to be forced into them.

We are expected to feel guilty if we dare to question what some Muslim women themselves question: if shariah law is really the most wholesome lifestyle for many women.

“[T]here is no basis in Islam for the niqab…. That’s why Muslim nations are themselves regulating and banning the niqab and burqa…” — Dr. Qanta Ahmed. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

On August 5, Britain’s former Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, published an article in The Daily Telegraph. Entitled “Denmark has got it wrong. Yes, the burka is oppressive and ridiculous – but that’s still no reason to ban it”, the article created a furore both within and outside his own Tory party, and for more than one reason.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey Creating New Tensions with Greece and the US by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on September 3rd, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12946/turkey-greece-tensions

Relations between Washington and Ankara have already deteriorated significantly under Erdogan — as dramatically emphasized by America’s absolutely correct refusal to turn over to Erdogan the man he says is behind Turkey’s 2016 coup attempt, Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim cleric who exiled himself to Pennsylvania almost 20 years ago, as well as by the escalating imbroglio over detained U.S. pastor Andrew Brunson, who is apparently being held as a hostage to force the U.S. to extradite Gülen back to Turkey.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Wess Mitchell recently called Greece, “an anchor of stability in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Balkans.”

Under President Trump, the signs keep growing that the U.S. is more and more likely to see things Greece’s way.

During his state visit to Greece in 2017, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a forceful request that Greece agree to re-negotiate the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Pictured: Erdogan and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Athens on December 7, 2017. (Photo by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s June 24 re-election seems to be leading to heightened tensions between Turkey and Greece. Furthermore, in an eventual confrontation between these two NATO member states, Turkey’s reported interest in purchasing air-defense missiles and fighter jets from Russia, underscored by Turkey’s continued detention of American Christian Pastor Andrew Brunson and the U.S. imposition of sanctions on Turkish officials (as well as Turkish counter-sanctions), may well cause Washington to favor Greece.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

BLACK SOUTH AFRICAN SPEAKS OUT AGAINST ISRAEL APARTHEID LIE-VIDEO

Posted By on September 3rd, 2018

DISPATCHES FROM TOM GROSS-

It is very much worth setting aside time to watch this 8 minute video:

https://youtu.be/U_rUft54VKg
DISPATCHES FROM TOM GROSS-

It is very much worth setting aside time to watch this 8 minute video:

https://youtu.be/U_rUft54VKg

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001790.html

Jamie Mithi of the South African think tank Africans for Peace, speaks out against the “Israel apartheid” lie propagated by many western journalists and academics, which he says not only distorts truth, but insults both Israeli Jews and the real suffering of South Africa’s Black population under the apartheid regime.

Mithi is interviewed by Muhammed Desai who constantly interrupts him when he wants to provide some facts. (In 2013, Desai defended shouts of “Kill the Jews” made by students an anti-Israel protest at Johannesburg’s Wits University.)

Tom Gross adds: Israeli Arabs vote, they serve in parliament, they can travel, they can sleep with whoever they want (providing it is consensual of course), they can be gay, they are represented in virtually every profession in Israel, and an increasing number serve in senior positions. For example, last month an Israeli Arab woman, Prof. Mona Khoury-Kassabri was appointed dean of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s School of Social Work, a major appointment for any woman in the Middle East.

(The Jewish-sounding South African Rebecca Mendelson who Desai quotes to Mithi in the TV clip to say Israel is a “fascist state” sounds like a made up “fake news” person, and I can’t find any reference to her in an internet search.)