On August 14, a number of leaked documents from the Open Society Foundations – a political framework funded by George Soros – were posted anonymously on the DC Leaks website. The material covered many different aspects of this activity around the world. For background information on OSF and other Soros funding mechanisms, see Bad Investment: The Philanthropy of George Soros and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (How Soros-funded Groups Increase Tensions in a Troubled Region), Alexander H. Joffe and Gerald M. Steinberg, NGO Monitor, 2013.
OSF’s declared objective is “to work to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable and open to the participation of all people.” This is the basis for OSF’s often intrusive activities in both closed and democratic societies, including large scale funding of political NGOs.
A number of these as yet unverified documents deal with OSF’s grants to political NGOs through its “Arab Regional Office (ARO) – Palestinian Citizens of Israel” department. Headed by Ammar Abu Zayyad, the ARO is one of a number of funding mechanisms for Israeli and Palestinian NGO’s in the OSF network.
The secrecy and lack of transparency inherent in the OSF’s activities is highlighted in the ARO documents: “For a variety of reasons, we wanted to construct a diversified portfolio of grants dealing with Israel and Palestine, funding both Israeli Jewish and PCI (Palestinian Citizens of Israel) groups as well as building a portfolio of Palestinian grants and in all cases to maintain a low profile and relative distance—particularly on the advocacy front.”

Hacked emails show that the Open Society Foundations led by Jewish billionaire George Soros have as an objective “challenging Israel’s racist and anti-democratic policies” in international forums, in part by questioning Israel’s reputation as a democracy.
The documents are available on a website, reportedly backed by Russia, that uses anti-Semitic stereotypes to attack Soros.
They reveal that Open Society, which was founded and is chaired by the hedge fund billionaire and philanthropist, gave nearly $10 million since 2001 to groups advancing the rights of Arab Israelis, with an emphasis in recent years on countering what one document says are Israel’s “restrictive measures” against minorities.
“In recent years the radicalization of public opinion and consecutive Israeli right-wing governments have resulted in more restrictive measures against Palestinians within Israel,” a Sept. 1, 2015 review of Open Society’s Arab Regional Office’s work said.
It cites as an example the Jewish Nation State bill, advanced by its sponsors to entrench Israel’s Jewish status, but decried by some Arab Israelis as further marginalizing non-Jewish minorities. The bill has yet to pass.
Among achievements listed in the document, the Arab Regional Office includes increased advocacy by “Palestinian citizens of Israel,” or PCI, in international forums, challenging Israel’s “racist” policies in the face of its reputation as a democracy.

There’s a solitary man at the financial center of the Ferguson protest movement. No, it’s not victim Michael Brown or Officer Darren Wilson. It’s not even the Rev. Al Sharpton, despite his ubiquitous campaign on TV and the streets.
Rather, it’s liberal billionaire George Soros, who has built a business empire that dominates across the ocean in Europe while forging a political machine powered by nonprofit foundations that impacts American politics and policy, not unlike what he did with MoveOn.org.
Mr. Soros spurred the Ferguson protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across the U.S., according to interviews with key players and financial records reviewed by The Washington Times.
In all, Mr. Soros gave at least $33 million in one year to support already-established groups that emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground activists in Ferguson, according to the most recent tax filings of his nonprofit Open Society Foundations.

Stein’s claim that Clinton-esque neoliberal policies somehow had anything to do with Nazism was not only ahistorical and nonsensical, it cheapened the Holocaust to make a dishonest political point.
But casting Nazi aspersions on the Clintons and doubts on vaccines and Wi-Fi are not the only conspiracy theories Stein has laundered into the mainstream. She has even peddled misinformation about her prospects to her own supporters in requests for campaign cash:
Meanwhile, earlier this year, Stein’s running mate, Ajamu Baraka, contributed an essay to a volume edited by Holocaust denier and 9/11 truther Kevin Barrett. The anthology’s title? Another False Flag? Bloody Tracks from Paris to San Bernadino. A veritable who’s who of bigots and conspiracy theorists, the book posits that the Charlie Hebdo attacks and many others were perpetrated by the CIA and Mossad.
She has whitewashed abusive dictators and despots. In December 2015, Stein visited Moscow, where she publicly denounced American foreign policy, then personally dined with Vladimir Putin. At no point did Stein criticize the Russian leader for his repressive regime and in particular its cruel treatment of LGBT people.
This tendency to turn a blind eye to the abuses of despots is shared by Stein’s hand-picked running mate, Baraka, who deemed Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria who has murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people, to be a man with democratic legitimacy.

In a landslide vote, 92 percent of the Jewish Labour Movement has nominated Owen Smith for the Labour leadership.
Smith, the Welsh MP, is challenging Jeremy Corbyn for the party leadership. In the same vote, Corbyn received just 4% of the vote while 4% voted for 'no nomination.'
Smith had resigned earlier this year from Corbyn's shadow cabinet before challenging for the leadership. This has caused tensions between the two as Corbyn has criticized Smith for causing disunity within the Labour Party.
Corbyn has faced several incidents of anti-Semitism in the party since taking over as leader in September of 2015.
This led to Smith mentioning to the BBC in July: "We have had a massive problem recently with misogyny and intolerance in the party, anti-Semitism, racism and the awful way in which women in the Labour movement have been treated. It's been appalling to witness this, heart-breaking."

THIS IS A GUEST POST BY DHAIBHIDH C MHAC DHUIHDHLHEIGH OF THE LENINIST VANGUARD (DRUMNADROCHIT CHAPTER).
Greetings all. Apparently someone is objecting to the unauthorized dissemination of this publicly accessible image. Being a responsible blog, we would not dream of displaying an private personal photograph without appropriate consent.
So here is a screengrab of a webpage which does have consent.
Payment of two shekels?

World Vision's reports on the operation of its Jerusalem office, which serves the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, indicate that between 2007 and 2015 it spent at least $70 million and probably more helping the Palestinians. How much of this sum was spent in Gaza is unreported, but given that this territory was the scene of numerous wars, World Vision's figure of $22.5 million seems a bit low, especially in light of the organization's regular boasts about how much it has been able to improve the lives of the children it helps.
To re-establish its credibility, World Vision must open up its books for inspection, not just to outside auditors, but to its donors and supporters throughout the world. Telling us that the books have been audited is not good enough -- Bernie Madoff said the same thing. It is time for World Vision to show us the books.
The organization is also going to have to reset its moral compass when dealing with Hamas. Over the course of the past few decades, key World Vision staffers have whitewashed Hamas' crimes against children in the Gaza Strip, while demonizing Israel. Tom Getman, who worked for World Vision for 25 years, first in Jerusalem and then in Washington, was one of the worst offenders. During the Second Intifada, Getman wrote, "It is being suggested by several journalists that a purposed ethnic cleansing is the last gasping effort of a dying Zionist vision in order to sign a death warrant to a parallel viable Palestinian state." What Getman failed to acknowledge is that it is Palestinian leaders, Hamas especially, that deny Israel's legitimacy, not the other way around.
Another example of World Vision's moral obtuseness came in 2009, when the organization's office in Jerusalem issued a report about fighting between Hamas and Israel that among other things called on Israel to relax its blockade of the Gaza Strip, but made no demands on Hamas whatsoever. Asking Hamas to stop firing rockets at civilians in Israel would seem to be a reasonable demand for a child advocacy and welfare organization, but World Vision said nothing.
World Vision needs to get its house in order, and fast.

In 2014, World Vision (WV) noted with pride on its website that Mohammed Khalil El Halabi had been named a United Nations humanitarian hero for his work leading the international evangelical Christian mega-charity in Gaza, the Hamas-controlled Palestinian territory.
A year later, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), a right-leaning Israeli think tank, produced a lengthy white paper on WV's work in Gaza. It asserted that WV promoted "an anti-Israel narrative in order to obscure the role of Hamas in creating a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. By serving as a conduit of misinformation about the Arab-Israel conflict, World Vision increases its income as it assists Hamas in its propaganda war against the Jewish state."
Neither the WV web post or the JPPA report received meaningful news media attention. That's as you might expect. In-house employee praise or white papers by groups with an obvious dog in the fight -- particularly those right-of-center on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- tend to gain little traction with mainstream journalistic professionals.
Here's what does receive attention: Last week, Halabi was charged by Israel with being a Hamas agent who diverted significant WV funds to the Sunni Islamist Palestinian group that the United States and other nations have labeled a terrorist group.
WV is based in the Seattle area, so let's also see what the hometown newspaper did. Lacking its own international resources, the Seattle Times fell back on the time-honored journalistic slight-of-hand of having a staffer add a local veneer to a rewrite of wire reports. Been there, done that.

In a Letter to the Editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Bishop Lawrence M. Wooten, President of the Ecumenical Leadership Council of St. Louis, wrote,
Bishop Lawrence WootenWe sincerely recognize the value of law enforcement officers and realize that the majority are devoted public servants. However, we also believe that Black Lives Matter plays a vital role in addressing racially driven police abuse in America.
Recently, Black Lives Matter issued a platform of demands. One of the demands called for the elimination of U.S. aid to Israel. Their argument is that Israel is an apartheid state perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians. Most of the platform’s readers are likely unaware that its Israel/Palestine section was written by an activist who was born and raised as a Jew, although Rachel Gilmer says she no longer identifies as Jewish.
The Ecumenical Leadership Council of Missouri, representing hundreds of predominantly African-American churches throughout the state, rejects without hesitation any notion or assertion that Israel operates as an apartheid country. We embrace our Jewish brethren in America and respect Israel as a Jewish state.
Thank you to Bishop Wooten and to those with whom he consulted to prepare this statement.
This is especially significant because it was in Ferguson, Missouri that Black Lives Matter gained national attention, and it was during the protests in that city that anti-Israel activists began their mission to coopt the BLM movement. Bishop Wooten has also been involved in community empowerment efforts in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests and he has a street named after him.
It remains to be seen whether others will follow.

The new school year is approaching. Jewish students are returning to campus or starting their university adventure. Unfortunately, rather than simply celebrating, we also must gird for another fight over the nefarious movement to boycott democratic Israel.
While this remains a golden age for Jews on campus, with Jews feeling more comfortable than ever in the university, the anti-Israel obsession on campus is mushrooming. In an age of ISIS and lone wolf terrorists, with Iran aspiring to go nuclear and Russia busy manipulating U.S. elections, somehow Israel is considered the world’s big problem. There are four essential moves to make in fighting this scourge.
First, don’t let the haters win by making the conversation about Israel solely about boycotts, delegitimization and anti-Zionism. We need a new Zionist conversation on campus, building on the excitement that Israel trips generate and looking at Israel as an inspiration and a model of three-dimensional Jewish living rooted in the past, seeking meaning in the present and building toward a better future. We should use a new appreciation of Israel to revitalize our Jewish identities, and look at Judaism as a process of becoming not just being, as well as one of growing, stretching and challenging assumptions, values and lazy habits of thought. If we start by seeing Zionism as the movement to improve Israel and create a new Jew – one who’s prouder, stronger, freer, more comfortable, more self-critical and more dynamic – we can start looking at Israel, Zionism and Judaism as opportunities, not burdens.
Next, once we solidify our ties to Israel, we will indeed naturally, easily and happily defend it. Don’t claim Israel is perfect – no country is. But Israel is eminently defendable. Make the democracy argument, that as one of the few countries in the world with free elections, free press and free thought, it has built-in mechanisms for self-improvement. Make the peace-making argument, that it’s a country surrounded by enemies, one that has repeatedly made risks for peace and responds better to encouragement than delegitimization, meaning that all these libels against Israel make matters worse.

You wrote that you understand Jewish students who are saying “Why should Jewish students have to work that bit harder to have their voices heard?” But here’s the thing. You are how we make our voices heard.
When Jewish students overwhelmingly say “we want to disaffiliate” and UJS’ response is “Jewish students must not walk away from NUS”, it isn’t Malia silencing our voices, it’s you.
Six months have gone by since the election.
Six months in which Malia has failed to renounce her earlier support of violence against Israeli civilians, who are friends and family to many of us here in the UK.
Six months in which anti-Semitic, anti-LGBT, anti-feminist groups such as CAGE have continued to be welcomed onto our campuses by NUS executives.
Six months in which the situation of Jewish students has only gotten worse.
I know I’ve asked both of you a lot of questions already, but allow me just one more. Where is your red line? What will it take for you to stand up and say “NUS has gone too far, and now we’re going to make a stand”?
I look forward to hearing from you.

Attorney Doron Nir Tzvi, from the Lavi organization submitted an urgent request to the director-general of the Defense Ministry, Gen. (ret.) Ehud Adam, to bar access to IDF bases to lecturers from organizations financed by The New Israel Fund, the Hartman Institute and Binah and to prevent them from speaking to officers.
Nir Tzvi cited statements made by these lecturers which he said were tantamount to incitement against elected officials and contended that their conduct was offensive to entire sectors of the Israeli public.
“Their ways are completely counter to the spirit of the IDF and democratic values…and the connection with them such be severed,” he said in a statement.
Nir Tzvi quoted Daniel Hartman, head of the Hartman Institute, who said in a recent interview: “If only the problem was just Netanyahu. So yes, Bibi is living in Germany of 1938, but the challenge is one of education- to deal with the distorted roots in the society.”
In another context, Hartman said that “Israel appears to the world as the realization of anti-Semitic stereotypes, and exposes Jews in the Diaspora to criticism from their neighbors who connect the state of Israel with Jews who support it.”

Dr. Mazen Kahel, the head of the European campaign aimed at breaking Israel's naval blockade on Gaza, provided more details on a planned women's flotilla to Gaza, first announced in March.
Speaking to Hamas's Palestine newspaper on Saturday, Kahel said that two ships will set sail from Spain towards Gaza in late September or early October.
He added that 25 women will be on board the two ships, including political activists, lawyers and parliamentarians.
The flotilla will last for about a week and its goal, according to Kahel, is first and foremost to raise awareness about the issue of the blockade on Gaza and to show support for Palestinian women.
MK Hanin Zoabi (Joint List) was previously reported to be one of the participants on the women's flotilla.

A legislator earning a living from the coffers of the Jewish State called on other countries, individuals, and entities today not to do business or have normal relations with that state.
Basel Ghattas, a lawmaker from the Joint List delegation to the Israeli parliament, addressed a conference in this Canadian city that had already had the government in Ottawa withdraw its support and participation because of the event’s anti-Israel agenda. Ghattas, who also participated in the controversial Mavi Marmara flotilla to Gaza to challenge Israel’s blockade of the coastal territory, urged his audience to disengage from Israel to pressure the country and challenge its legitimacy. In the meantime, the lawmaker is paid tens of thousands of shekels each month as his salary for serving in the legislature, plus benefits.
“The moral step is to boycott this racist entity,” the MK argued, his words generating applause from the audience. “It is incumbent on every person of conscience to withdraw from dealings with the State of Israel, its institutions, and its representatives, no matter how lucrative such dealings may be.”
Ghattas was cheered by Omar Barghouti, a Boycott, Divest, Sanctions activist who earned an advanced degree from Tel Aviv University while campaigning for BDS. “Mr, Ghattas cogently argued for what I and my colleagues have been urging for many years,” he said.

Here’s the headline accompanying an Agence France Presse (AFP) article, on an incident at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, published at the Daily Mail on Aug. 15th.

(We wish to note that this represents the original AFP headline.)
First, the characterization of the Jews who visited the site yesterday on Tisha B’Av as ‘radical’ (without quotes) in the headline (and in the opening sentence) uncritically accepts – as a fact – the Jordanian statement as detailed in the 5th paragraph of the article:

As was noted here a few days ago, on August 10th BBC audiences were inaccurately told that the Dead Sea lies on the border of a country called Palestine.
Following communication from BBC Watch, the article was amended and the passage which previously stated “Few are more famous than the Dead Sea, nestled on the borders of Jordan, Israel and Palestine” now reads as follows:
We commend BBC Earth for that quick correction.

The West African nation of Togo is taking the lead in organizing an Israeli-African “security and development” summit, which it offered to host in its capital next year, The Jerusalem Post reported on Friday.
News of the summit first emerged after Togo’s President Faure Gnassingbe met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli President Reuven Rivlin following his arrival in Jerusalem last week. Netanyahu is expected to attend the proposed forum in Togo, as well as a meeting of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Nigeria later this year.
A diplomatic source who spoke to the Post explained that Togo views itself as a good friend of Israel and “wants to become a hub of friendship between west Africa and Israel.” By arranging the summit, Togo will gain “credibility and influence in helping Israel come back to the entire region, not only on the political side, but on the business side as well,” the source added.
When asked if Togo feared retribution from North African or Arab states for seeking closer ties with Israel, the source noted that “Togo is a small country and is not getting billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Muslim population in the country is small and not active, so the political risk is low.”

Anyone who was at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque during the Sukkot holiday of 2006 will remember the sight of the city’s quiet, highbrow arthouse cinema jam-packed with people, many of them teenagers in costumes (the term “cosplay” hadn’t made it to the local fan community yet) trying to catch a glimpse of the festival’s guest of honor, some (especially the teenage girls) screaming in excitement whenever he passed by.
I remember being asked by someone—a security guard, I think—just what this guy did to get this kind of attention, and if he’s some kind of a rock star.
“No, he’s a writer,” I said.
“Ah, a writer,” said that person who asked me the question in a rather skeptical voice.
The festival was the ICon, Israel’s annual science fiction and fantasy convention. The guest of honor was novelist and comics writer extraordinaire Neil Gaiman. One of the special events held as part of the 2006 festival was a celebration of the 10th anniversary of The Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy, one of ICon’s co-organizers. It was a modest event, consisting of several speeches, some amusing stage-sketches, video greetings from foreign authors and an appearance by Gaiman. But it was enough for the society members present in the auditorium to feel some sort of a collective pat on the back. They made it. For 10 years the society has been a home to genre fans, and keeping any kind of cultural activity going on in Israel for so long is an achievement in its own right, let alone an activity that promotes thinking beyond the limits of the here and now—limits that sometimes appear to be almost sacred to Israeli society at large.
A decade later, the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy is still here—and what seemed amazing in 2006 seems almost mundane today. Jam-packed lobbies are a regular sight at the annual ICon festival and the Olamot convention held during Passover. Nobody raises an eyebrow when costumed visitors of either ICon or Olamot sit down for a drink or lunch at one of the many coffee shops and restaurants along the HaArba’a street (where both events are held).

They sound like your average religious Zionist couple in Israel: she serves in the Jewish state’s national service and he is an army combat veteran. Except they are both Muslim Arabs, and she, Bara’a Abed, is from East Jerusalem while her husband (unnamed) is from a village in the north.
Abed, 20, who now does works as a volunteer in an Israeli Interior Ministry office, is part of a fast-growing community of young Arabs who are eschewing decades of anti-normalization with the majority-Jewish Israeli government to both give back and receive from the state.
Historically, nearly all national service participants were Jewish religious-Zionist women, who wanted to serve their country but for religious reasons didn’t want to be in the army. Such women receive near-automatic exemptions from the military, though the last several years have seen a large increase in those choosing to serve in the IDF.
Six years ago, only 600 non-Jews served in Israel’s national service program, in which participants volunteer for one to two years in public institutions like schools, hospitals, courts or health clinics.
Presently, 4,500 non-Jews are doing national service, of whom 100 are from East Jerusalem. That total is three times more than those coming from the ultra-Orthodox community (1,500), most of whom are men obtained a religious exemption from the army but still wanted to serve their country. There are also 8,500 religious Zionists doing national service, mostly women.
Non-Jewish Israelis, mostly Arab, constitute around 20% of the country’s 8.6 million citizens.

Nearly everyone knows about ReWalk, the revolutionary robotic exoskeleton invented in Israel that allows paraplegics to stand, walk and even navigate steps and run marathons.
Ironically, ReWalk inventor Amit Goffer cannot use his own device because he is a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down following an accident in 1997.
But last summer he was finally able to leave home in an upright position, riding the most recent of his inventions — the alpha model of the UPnRIDE.
The first commercial model, UPnRIDE 1.0, will be unveiled at the Rehacare International trade fair in Düsseldorf at the end of September.
“I have had a long-standing vision that all people confined to a wheelchair should have access to enhanced mobility, and enjoy the many health benefits associated with the ability to transition to a standing position,” Goffer said. “With the introduction of UPnRIDE, that dream has become a reality.”
The UPnRIDE mobility device is suitable for most wheelchair and scooter users, including paraplegics, quadriplegics and people suffering from multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy or traumatic brain injury.

A baby boy born in Afghanistan with multiple heart defects received life-saving surgery in Israel thanks to a Facebook friendship and a covert operation that traversed enemy borders and diplomatic lines.
Yehia was born to Afghani parents in Peshawar, Pakistan, with major heart defects, The New York Times reported. His parents had no way of paying for the surgery needed to save his life.
During a trip to their homeland they spoke with an English-speaking relative, Farhad Zaheer, living in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, who reached out on social media to his contacts. Anna Mussman, 69, a daughter of Holocaust survivors living in Israel, answered his call. According to the Times report, Zaheer remembered Mussman because she had commented kindly on his previous posts.
Mussman contacted Simon Fisher, executive director of the Israeli charity Save a Child’s Heart. “I realize helping a child from a country which Israel has no diplomatic relations is not easy, but perhaps possible,” she emailed him. “Thanks so much and Shabbat Shalom.”
It was not simple to arrange, and involved calling in all sorts of favors and using many different contacts, but ultimately Yehia was brought to Holon’s Wolfson Medical Center, and was operated on in an eight-hour surgery.

The Technion- Israel Institute of Technology was ranked 69th among the world’s leading universities, up from 77th place in 2015, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) released on Monday.
The ARWU is largely considered one of the most objective and most important ranking of the world's leading universities. Since 2003, the annual report, conducted by researchers at the Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CWCU) in China, publishes the world's top 500 universities from more than 1,200 ranked.
The Technion surpassed the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to become the leading Israeli institution on the list. The Hebrew University was still ranked among the top 100 but dropped 20 points from the previous year to 87th place.
The Weizmann Institute of Science ranked in the top 101-150, while Tel Aviv University ranked in the top 151-200 universities in the world. Ben Gurion University of the Negev ranked in the top 401-500. Bar Ilan University and Haifa University did not make the list in 2016.

An ancient ballista ball used by Jewish warriors fighting against the Roman Empire in the Judean Hills during the legendary Bar Kokhba revolt has been unearthed by high school students in Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem.
The rebellion, led by Simon Bar Kokhba between 132-136 CE, was also known as the Third Jewish Revolt, because it was the final of three Jewish uprisings against the Romans due to religious and political persecution.
It is estimated that over 580,000 Jews died during the revolt, resulting in a massive depopulation of the Jewish communities inhabiting the Judean Hills. Many survivors of the battle were sold into slavery by Roman captors.
On Monday, Yoran Rosenthal, director of the Kfar Etzion Field School, said the stone ball fashioned for a ballista, or catapult, was discovered by students during an annual excavation in Gush Etzion led by school counselors shortly before Tisha B’Av.
“This is a discovery of historic magnitude because this battle was the last battle fought by a Jewish army in Israel until modern times,” said Rosenthal, noting that the discovery is of great interest to archeologists.
“This finding serves as a mute testimony to the persistent struggle that took place there,” he continued. “The battle that took place there is said to have been fought by brave warriors, and shows the power and greatness of the Jewish fighters.”
According to Rosenthal, several school counselors helped students from around the country who gathered for the annual trip searching for evidence of the historic uprising.

Over the past month, the Saudi press has featured a number of highly unusual articles harshly critical of the antisemitic discourse in Arab and Muslim society, and calling to avoid its generalizations regarding the Jews. The articles argued that Koranic passages against the Jews only applied to specific groups during specific time periods, and should not be applied to Jews in general. They added that blind hatred of Jews everywhere has prevented Arabs and Muslims from learning the lessons of Jewish experience and advancement.

It should be mentioned that these articles came against the backdrop of a heated debate in Saudi Arabia over the issue of normalizing relations with Israel, which erupted after a July 2016 visit to Israel by a Saudi delegation headed by Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Anwar Eshki, chairman of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies in Jeddah, and the publication of photos of the delegation with Israeli politicians. While Eshki claimed that he represented only himself and that "official Saudi elements did not know of the meeting in advance, as it was of a personal nature" and was the result of an invitation by the Palestinian Authority, he stressed that "the kingdom does not prevent anyone from holding such visits." He also did not rule out indirect Israeli-Saudi intelligence cooperation as part of efforts to combat terrorism.[1]

The visit, which was seen as a Saudi step towards normalizing relations with Israel, sparked harsh criticism inside and outside the kingdom. Several hashtags attacking the visit were launched on social networks, including "Saudis Against Normalization."[2] Likely as a response to the criticism, the Saudi Foreign Ministry distanced itself from Eshki, arguing that "people like Anwar Eshki do not represent us, have no ties to any governmental elements, and do not reflect the positions of the Saudi government."[3]

However, despite this statement, and despite the Saudi regime's denial that the visit heralded normalization with Israel, the publication of Saudi articles attacking antisemitic discourse specifically at this time is no coincidence, and is likely meant to lay the groundwork for public acceptance in the country of normalized relations with Israel.

An estimated 15 percent of Palestinians have been officially recorded as suffering from diabetes, compared with a global average of nine percent. But Abu al-Halaweh believes the real number in Palestine is higher - more than 20 percent.
"In the surrounding areas of Yatta, we believe half of the adult population has Type 2 diabetes. But many of them don't know they have it," he told Al Jazeera, blaming the region's high unemployment rates and lack of education for the increased rates.
The Israeli occupation has exacerbated the diabetes crisis in a number of ways, "especially the psychological stress that comes from it", Abu al-Halaweh added.
"People in Gaza or Palestinian refugees suffer from an even poorer diet," he said, noting that one-third of Palestinians are considered to be short of food."They may not have nutritional deficits in terms of calories, but the food aid they receive can be pallets of canned tuna eaten for weeks. Such an unvaried diet is not optimal."
The mobile clinic roaming the streets of the occupied West Bank is the only such service in Palestine for screening and treating diabetes patients. It also functions as a tool for educating Palestinians about the dangers of diabetes.

The following cartoon was posted on the official Fatah Facebook page.
They seem to be taking a swipe at Hamas for misusing funds earmarked for humanitarian organizations like World Vision and the UN.
Interestingly enough, even though they post everything in Arabic, they accompanied the cartoon with the words “No comment” in English – clearly aiming it at an international audience.
They have also posted the following – again with an English description.
This all follows their biting video response to the Hamas video showing how great life in Gaza is.
Fatah are clearly on the warpath against Hamas. One can only hope this goes beyond social media and leads to a terrorists vs terrorists war of epic proportions.
My only concern is whether I have enough popcorn in the house.

Israel’s security services broke up two terror cells, which had been created by the Hezbollah terrorist organization, arresting nine suspected members over the past few months, officials revealed Tuesday.
Hezbollah operatives from the group’s Unit 133 — its foreign operations unit — working out of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip recruited members in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and within Israel through social media sites, notably Facebook, the Shin Bet security service said.
The terror cells had planned to carry out suicide bombings and ambush IDF patrols in the West Bank. They received funding from Hezbollah, and some members had begun preparing explosive devices for use in attacks, the Shin Bet says.
“The Hezbollah organization has recently made it a priority to try to spark terror acts, doing so from far away, while attempting to not clearly expressing its involvement,” the Shin Bet said in a statement.
The terror operatives were arrested earlier this summer, but information about the case was kept under a court-issued gag order. The Shin Bet has credited their operation with thwarting a number of terror attacks against Israeli targets in the West Bank and Israel.
According to Israel’s security forces, the ringleader of the West Bank terror cell was Mustafa Kamal Hindi, 18, a resident of Qalqilya.
During his interrogation, Hindi told interrogators that he’d been recruited through a Facebook page, “Palestine the Free,” where Hezbollah posted “anti-Israel and pro-jihad content,” the Shin Bet said.

In the wake of confounded attempts by Hezbollah to instigate terror attacks within Israel, the Israeli representative to the UN, Dani Danon, called on the UN Security Commision to officially define Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
"Hezbollah terrorists are working as representatives of the Iranian regime, threatening not only Israel, but stability in Syria, Lebanon and the entire region," Danon said.
Danon emphasized that "Hezbollah needs to know that every terror act it does will have serious repercussions for the organization."
He urged the international community to condemn the organization, saying: "the international community must condemn attempts by Hezbollah to hurt innocent Israeli citizens; the UN Security Commission must proclaim them a terror organization."

A little more scrutiny in vetting an interview offer from the "international media" would likely have prevented the embarrassment felt by Israeli leaders who were tricked into speaking to a journalist working on behalf of the South-Lebanese terror organization.
Monni's Hezbollah handlers attempted to stand by him, claiming he was sent to perform the interviews due to his connections with the Israeli top brass. We found a hook, they explained. The interviewees didn't check his background with thoroughly enough, and the interviewer didn't see the full picture either.
Michele Monni is on his way out. He's already been suspended from his position at Italian news agency ANSA. This was the position that allowed him to receive a journalist certificate from the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO) in Jereusalem. When he took the job – whether he knew he'd be working for Hezbollah or not – he did not inform his superiors or ask their permission.
I assume that expressions of contrition will not help Monni in his disciplinary hearing. He acted dishonestly. When he requested the interviews (with the aid of an Israeli official with ties to the media), he made two promises: The first was that the interviews would be shown on the BBC and Al-Jazeera. The second was that it would be broadcast on "international media" outlets. It just so happened that politicians, experts, and one IDF major general casually fell into the trap. Who would give up an opportunity to speak to the "international media," after all?

In my last post, I discussed how Palestinian culture encourages suicidal youngsters to kill by offering a simple bargain: Murder a Jew, and you instantly become a hero. While the West has long turned a blind eye to this behavior, its refusal to look reality in the face is now coming back to haunt it. For today, the Islamic State is making the very same tempting offer to distraught Muslims in Western countries–murder a Westerner, and you can instantly become a hero instead of a failure.
It’s no accident that several recent terror attacks in Western countries have been carried out by people who apparently had histories of mental illness, including Nice, Orlando, and several attacks in Germany. Nor is it any accident that the Islamic State is cultivating such people. As with many other terrorist techniques pioneered by the Palestinians, ISIS has copied this one precisely because it proved successful–and not just as a means of recruiting assailants.
This tactic also serves two other important purposes. First, it encourages an already strong Western tendency to ignore the terrorists’ true aims. I discussed this with regard to the Palestinians in my previous post; a classic example concerning the Islamic State was Kenan Malik’s op-ed in the New York Times on Tuesday. “In the past, groups employing terrorism, such as the Irish Republican Army or the Palestine Liberation Organization, were driven by specific political aims: a united Ireland or an independent Palestine,” Malik wrote. “Jihadists are different. They have little or no explicit political aim but are driven by a visceral hatred of the West.”
In reality, Islamic State is quite open about its aims: It wants to destroy the West and establish a global Islamic caliphate. Indeed, being open about its goals is part of how it attracts new recruits, just as Palestinian organizations attract support by boasting of their efforts to destroy the Jewish state. But at the same time, both the Palestinians and ISIS would prefer that the West not take their goals too seriously since, if it did, it might stop supporting the Palestinians or actually get serious about destroying ISIS.

Waving flags and singing songs, hundreds of people turned up at Ben-Gurion International Airport late Monday to welcome Israel’s Olympic medal-winning judokas back home.
“I didn’t expect so much craziness,”Yarden Gerbi said upon landing, according to news site Ynet, which reported nearly 1,000 celebrants who came out to the airport outside Tel Aviv.
Gerbi and Or Sasson both took away bronze medals in judo in Rio, Israel eighth and ninth medals ever, instantly transforming the two into national heroes.
Entering the cavernous airport arrivals hall, Gerbi and Sasson were showered with flowers, as well-wishers waved flags, sang patriotic songs and held up pictures and posters with the two winners, stopping them every few moments for a selfy or a hug.
“I think I dropped to 57 kilos just from all the craziness here,” said Gerbi, who competed in the 63-kilogram category. “I had a few days of quiet in Rio as I took in the accomplishment. My next dream is some vacation.”

Egyptian judoka Islam el-Shehaby, who refused to shake hands with an Israeli athlete after a match, has been reprimanded by the IOC and sent home by the Egyptian delegation. The IOC said that el-Shehaby's actions were against the values the Olympic Games stands for, and that Egypt needs to do a better job educating its athletes about the meaning of the Games.
"The Disciplinary Commission (DC) considered that his behavior at the end of the competition was contrary to the rules of fair play and against the spirit of friendship embodied in the Olympic Values," the IOC said.
"The DC issued a 'severe reprimand for inappropriate behavior' to the athlete. It noted....the shaking of hands after a match is not in the competition rules of the International Judo Federation."
"As well as a severe reprimand, the DC has asked the Egyptian Olympic Committee to ensure in future that all their athletes receive proper education on the Olympic Values before coming to the Olympic Games," the IOC said.
On Twitter, fans encouraged el-Shehaby to forfeit the entire match to avoid fighting an Israeli. El-Shehaby defended not shaking hands after the match, saying he wouldn't shake hands with anyone who represented Israel for "personal reasons."
Egypt officially recognized Israel in 1979.
Honestly, good on the IOC for standing up for athletes. The games are not a time for political statements.

A serious journalist who wished to provide an analysis to news consumers on the recent Olympic scandal involving an Egyptian judoka who refused to shake the hand of his Israeli competitor may have contextualized the incident by noting endemic Egyptian antisemitism. Indeed, though Cairo and Jerusalem signed a peace agreement in 1979, and ties between the two countries (on the governmental level) have never been closer, there is little if any sign that Egyptian animosity towards Jews – not just Israelis, but Jews qua Jews – has waned.
In 2011, a Pew Global poll revealed that only 2% of Egyptians had favorable attitudes towards Jews.
More recently, an ADL commissioned poll reported that 75% of Egyptians held antisemitic views – a sign of an entrenched hatred that persists despite the fact that there are almost no Jews left in the country.
Yet, remarkably, the Economist’s “N.P.” (presumably Nicolas Pelham), in ‘Politics hogs the Olympic spotlight‘, Aug. 15, ignores Egyptian antisemitism in his report on the conduct of the Egyptian athlete, and does his best to turn the story into one of Israeli hypocrisy.
Signs of Pelham’s impatience with Israeli ‘claims’ of Egyptian racism are evident throughout the article. After citing additional examples of athletes from Egypt (and other Arab countries) refusing to compete with – or otherwise showing disdain towards – Israeli athletes, Pelham derides the suggestion that Israelis are the victims, mocking those “Israeli athletes” who “might cheer the free pass they gain when Arabs refuse to compete against them“.
“Free pass”? For which crimes do Israeli athletes require such impunity?

In a sports story on the Egyptian judoka who refused to shake hands with his Israeli opponent, The New York Times misleadingly depicts a pattern of anti-Israel hostility on the part of Muslim and Arab Olympians as "animosity between Israeli and other Middle Eastern athletes," as if the two sides are equally engaged in hostile acts directed against the other side. In his Aug. 13 article about Islam El Shehaby's snub of Or Sasson ("Egyptian Refuses Handshake After Losing to Israeli"), Victor Mather writes:
There is a history of animosity between Israeli and other Middle Eastern athletes at the Olympics, including in judo.
Mather helpfully goes on to cite examples, all of which tellingly point to one directional hostility: Arab and Muslim athletes snubbing Israeli competitors. First, he cites last week's incident in a Lebanese team prevented an Israeli team for boarding a bus. Then, he notes that last Tuesday, a Saudi judo player forfeited a match, reportedly to avoid competing against an Israeli. Finally, The Times' Mather cites a 2004 incident in which Iranian judoka Arash Miresmaeili apparently binged in order to be disqualified so as to not to face off against an Israeli.
Indeed, Israeli Olympians are consistently on the receiving end of Arab and Muslim animosity so why misleadingly characterize the hostility as "animosity between Israeli and other Middle Eastern athletes"?

The Jerusalem bureau chief for Reuters deleted a tweet he posted last week about the plight of Palestinian athletes, after engaging in an exchange with pro-Israel blogger Elder of Ziyon.
Luke Baker erased a claim he made last Thursday that Palestinian leaders oppose letting Palestinian athletes train in Israel.
This was an apparent reference to reports by media outlets such as Mondoweiss, that “Mary al Atrash, a 22-year-old swimmer from Beit Sahour in the West Bank who was part of the largest delegation Palestine has ever sent to the Olympic Games…[had] difficulties to train in a swimming pool that does not match the Olympic standards, and explained that although she technically lives close to Jerusalem, where such swimming pools, exist, she could not go there to train.”
It turned out, however, that Atrash had never applied for an Israeli entry permit, possibly due to a Palestinian Authority anti-normalization policy.
Baker then modified his comment to: “The conflict is the responsibility of both Israel and the Palestinians, who have opposed letting athletes train in Israel.”

Canada needs to revamp its approach to Islamic extremism if it hopes to prevent another homegrown radical from setting off a bomb, says the founder of an international anti-radicalization think tank.
In an exclusive interview with Postmedia, Maajid Nawaz - a former Islamist radical and founder of the U.K.-based Quilliam Foundation - called for a society-wide effort to undercut the intellectual and theological planks of Islamist and jihadist ideology.
“There certainly needs to be training. Counter-radicalization training involves de-radicalization training on how to disengage somebody from the theory of violence, and it involves taking them beyond that actually and discrediting the theory of Islamism in their minds,” said Nawaz.
“A lot of this, Muslims simply don’t know.”
Nawaz was in Niagara Falls Saturday to address the third annual Non-Conference at the Americana hotel as the event’s keynote speaker.
Although the event was billed as a conference for non-believers, Nawaz, a Muslim seeking to reform the faith, told his audience he looked upon them as allies in combating radicalization.

Barack Obama likes to credit himself with getting America to step back from the abyss of the Middle East. When he shops around the story of his legacy, the president says he was proudest of his decision not to follow the "Washington playbook" and commit to toppling the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
It would be a fitting story to tell of the man who ascended to the presidency while simultaneously winning a Nobel Peace Prize. Obama returns America's sword to its sheath, and earns the praise of his fans and admirers. Just as he passed on a better economy to his successor than the one he inherited from Bush, so he passed on a safer world.
Unfortunately this story is a lie from end to end. The world the next president will inherit is full of traps.
In Afghanistan, Obama has slowed down the pace of withdrawing troops. Corruption is rife, and there seems to be no progress on talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. The latter has gained momentum and re-captured parts of the countryside. A continued drawdown after Obama's presidency may make his successor appear to be running from the Taliban.
In Iraq, American special forces are back on the ground as the U.S conducts airstrikes against ISIS. Although the U.S. seems to be sending ISIS into a smaller corner of the country, Iraq's political settlement is as shaky as ever, with Shia Muslims threatening to revolt.
In Syria, the U.S. wants to force Assad out of peace negotiations, and so acts to strengthen various rebel groups. The civil war is thus extended indefinitely, leading to increasing death totals. Russia acts to shore up Assad in negotiations, making Syria look more and more like a proxy war between two global nuclear powers.

Several years after former President George W. Bush facilitated South Sudan’s long-awaited independence, the young nation has fallen, once again, victim to what amounts to a civil war. Sectarian violence fueled by ethnic divisions are tearing the country apart, once-again, as President Salva Kiir’s central government in Juba struggles to fend off long-time rival and former vice president Riek Machar’s paramilitary force stationed outside the city. The international community has so far failed to respond to reports of mass violence. In fact, the UN is actively turning a blind-eye to the war’s most desperate victims: women.
As the conflict escalates and the country descends into chaos, sectarian militias have fallen back on primal savagery, exercising control over women’s bodies to establish some ill-conceived notion of power.
One case in particular illustrates the horror inflicted upon South Sudan’s most vulnerable victims.
Nearly one month ago several women were gang-raped at a “safe house” by soldiers celebrating their victory over opposition forces. One of the women was raped by 15 different soldiers. The disturbing attack occurred in the Terrain hotel complex, less than one-mile away from a UN peacekeeping force. Despite a deafening cry for help, the United Nations refused to respond, allowing the soldiers to indulge, openly, in sexual violence against their female victims.

The German bank KfW is funding a waste treatment plant in Samaria - on condition that it only serve the Arab population, the Legal Forum for Israel said on Tuesday.
According to the Forum, this same bank perviously funded the establishment of a water purification plant which has been noted for polluting the water flowing through the nearby valley of Wadi Kelt.
The Legal Forum warns that the establishment of the new waste treatment plant near the Jewish community of Rimonim will cause serious damage to a nearby archaeological site dating to biblical times.
Yesterday, the Knesset held a hearing which addressed an incident this week during which Palestinian Authority police opened fire after a confrontation at the site of the new building plans.
Although the Legal Forum and other environmentalist groups have repeatedly appealed to the Civil Administration to stop the construction plans, so far, the Administration has rejected their claims.

Saeb Erekat, secretary of the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) Executive Committee, announced on Monday that the Palestinian Authority (PA) transferred to the International Criminal Court in the Hague a detailed file concerning Israeli “settlements”.
In a radio interview Erekat expressed hope that the court will soon decide to open a criminal investigation into the "settlement crimes".
“Palestine” officially joined the ICC on April 1, 2015, and immediately filed a series of legal complaints with the court, including a claim that Israeli “settlements” are “an ongoing war crime”. Additional complaints revolve around the war in Gaza in 2014, the issue of terrorist prisoners in Israel, and others.
Palestinian Arab non-governmental organizations, collaborating with Israeli organizations, have submitted evidence of Israel's alleged “crimes” against civilians and UNRWA schools in Gaza in the summer of 2014.
Erekat's announcement comes after a recent report that the PA is mulling more lawsuits against Israel at the ICC.
In his remarks Monday, Erekat also called on international institutions to act to halt the Israeli moves which harm peace and a two-state solution.
He added that the PA sent letters to various countries regarding the unprecedented “settlement activities” which takes place in parallel to the “settlers' daily attacks against the Al Aqsa Mosque, the confiscation of land and intensifying attacks against the Palestinian people.”

International condemnation followed the Hebrews’ military operation to free prisoners taken by the Canaanite ruler of Arad this week, an action deemed out of proportion to the situation.
In Resolution -2133 the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to condemn the nation for its raid on Canaanite territory after the king of Arad attacked them and captured an unknown number of prisoners. The raid wiped out the cities and towns from which the Arad kingdom launched their attack, and succeeded in freeing the captives, but the Council believed the operation use excessive force and could not be justified under laws of armed conflict expected to come into effect only 3,300 years from now. The United States and Great Britain abstained from the vote, declining to use their vetoes, in a move largely seen as a rebuke to the Israelites for not allowing themselves to be attacked with impunity.
“The ruthlessness of the retaliatory attack cannot be justified,” read the resolution, which was drafted by France. “We call on the Israelite nation and its leader Moses to withdraw at once from the areas it occupies.” The Israelites as yet occupy no territory, but have declared they aim to take up residence in the area presently known as the Land of Canaan.
Numerous UN envoys expressed satisfaction that the resolution passed, but urged further action to prevent more violations. “The Israelites need to be hit with military and economic sanctions, at the very least,” argued EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. “They have to understand this is no way to act in the community of nations. My colleagues and I are concerned that only a firm response will discourage such behavior.”

Politicians on Monday afternoon dedicated a new mall for settlers and Palestinians at the Gush Etzion junction, an area that has been a hot spot for terrorist attacks during the last year.
“The opening of this mall sends an unequivocal message to our enemies that you won’t break us,” said MK Nurit Koren (Likud).
“I hope the mall will be a symbol of co-existence based on economic peace,” Koren said.
She spoke at the small ribbon-cutting ceremony on the top floor of the three-story, 5,000-meter structure with 15 shops, including a clothing outlet and a home goods retailer from the well-known FOX chain.
Below the ceremony, on the second floor, Muslim women wearing hijabs and traditional dress, shopped along side religious Jewish women in skirts and scarves tied over their hair.

Joint List MK Basel Ghattas should be sanctioned for calling for a boycott of Israel at a far-left conference in Montreal, Yisrael Beytenu MK Oded Forer said Monday, reacting to the lead story in The Jerusalem Post.
The lawmaker from Balad, one of the four parties that make up the Joint List, called Israel an oppressive, racist and apartheid state. He said he is pessimistic that there will be peace soon, and international sanctions were the most effective way to combat Israel.
“The theater of the absurd in the Knesset continues and the Joint List continues to prove that its MKs do not belong in the Knesset,” Forer said. “A member of parliament calling Israel racist and calling upon countries to boycott and sanction it is an unheard of act in any sane country in the world. It is not only delusional, it is against the law.”
Forer said he checked the laws prohibiting action that would harm Israel via boycotts and he intends to ask the finance minister to remove special tax status from any organization connected directly or indirectly to Ghattas.

The parents of Hallel Yaffa Ariel, a 13-year-old girl who was murdered by a terrorist in her Kiryat Arba home on June 29, said this week that razing the terrorist's home was not enough.
On Thursday, the home of 17-year-old Mohammed Tarayreh, from the Palestinian village of Bani Naim, near Hebron, was demolished in retaliation for the late June attack. Tarayreh himself was killed shortly following the attack by Kiryat Arba security personnel as he was attempting to flee the scene.
"The terrorist's family should be deported. We need to generate a reality where terror is entirely not worth the cost," said Rina, Hallel Yaffa's mother. "The ownership of every house like this should automatically be transferred into Jewish hands. The current situation is ridiculous: The terrorist's family is not deported, the house isn't fully demolished, and the areas that we [Jews] can settle aren't being settled. These things actually encourage terrorism."
Amichai, Hallel Yaffa's father, added, "I would prefer that the State of Israel seize the terrorists' property rather than demolishing it. It would serve as a bigger deterrent."

The Sbarro massacre, a Palestinian terror attack in a Jerusalem family restaurant, in which 15 civilians were murdered, including 8 children and a pregnant woman, and 130 wounded.
Ahlam Tamimi, a terrorist who helped plan the attack, has no regrets. Watch her chilling reaction at the end of this video.

Some 35 Palestinians were wounded in clashes with IDF troops in the southern West Bank on Tuesday, according to Palestinian medical officials.
The clashes erupted when a large convoy of Israeli military vehicles entered the al-Fawar refugee camp, near the flashpoint city of Hebron, witnesses said.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said live fire struck about 10 people after rioters threw large rocks at Israeli troops. It says the 25 others were struck by rubber bullets.
The IDF said its forces were on an overnight operation “to uncover weaponry” in the camp, when “dozens of Palestinians hurled IEDs (improvised explosive devices), blocks and rocks” at them.

A coalition of Palestinian Arab organizations on Monday called for a “Day of Rage” of popular protests in “all districts of the homeland” to take place this coming Thursday.
The reason for the “Day of Rage” is to protest the Israeli policy towards hunger striking Palestinian Arab terrorists prisoners and to demand their release.
Palestinian Arabs were asked to confront IDF soldiers and Judea and Samaria residents in military checkpoints, in their communities and at other points of friction.
In a meeting held in Ramallah on Monday, the representatives of the national and Islamic Palestinian Arab organizations called on the Palestinian public to also confront IDF troops on Friday in protest of Israel “harming” the Al-Aqsa mosque, administrative detentions and the treatment of the prisoners.
The Palestinian organizations expressed opposition to any manifestation of normalization with the "occupation" and called on Arab countries to boycott Israel and to refuse to have any relations with it - visible or covert.

Gazan businessmen staged a protest at a crossing point Monday over what they said was the mass cancellation of travel permits by Israel, which they blamed for suffocating trade.
Palestinians accuse the Jewish state of having scrapped hundreds of travel documents allowing them to enter Israel and the West Bank as well as other countries for trade.
The permits are crucial to the economy of the impoverished Gaza Strip, which some international official say is on the brink of collapse after 10-years of Israeli and Egyptian blockades, imposed following the take over of the enclave by Hamas, considered a terror group by Israel and most Western governments.
Israel, which allows hundreds of trucks into the Strip each day, says the blockade, which restricts shipments on certain items, is necessary to prevent Hamas and other terror groups from rebuilding its military infrastructure, including rockets and a network of tunnels.

The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas announced that one of its operatives was electrocuted to death while working on a tunnel in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, Israel Army Radio reported. The news comes as residents of Gaza who seek to rebuild their homes face difficulty in securing the necessary electricity and other resources, which are routinely appropriated by Hamas.
Israel was forced to increase the amount of electricity it sends to Gaza in June after repeated shutdowns at Gaza’s only power plant due to a payment dispute between Hamas and Fatah. Because of this infighting, Gaza residents usually only have six to eight hours of electricity per day. The lack of power has also caused failures at Gaza’s new $100 million sewage treatment facility, which was built with financing from the World Bank.
Hamas’ mismanagement and misappropriation of resources meant for civilian construction have increasingly come into the spotlight in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the Shin Bet charged Mohammad el-Halabi, the Gaza director for the international charity World Vision, of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas. El-Halabi admitted under interrogation to diverting World Vision funds to Hamas for the purpose of purchasing weapons and building terror tunnels and military bases.

Barack Obama’s cash transfer to Iran of $400 million to trigger the release of four American hostages highlights yet again the strategic errors infecting his entire policy regarding Tehran’s ayatollahs.
Abject and humiliating though it was, however, the real lessons of the January ransom payment are even broader. Obama’s view of the world — and America’s place in it — is fundamentally flawed, as is that of his former secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. To avoid further significant harm to the United States, we should reject their grand strategy at the first opportunity, starting with abrogating the Vienna nuclear-weapons agreement.
Obama tried to minimize the significance of the cash transfer (itself only a “down payment” on the $1.7 billion settlement of a long-standing dispute), decoupling it both from the hostage release and the Vienna pact. He knew that pictures of pallets of shrink-wrapped foreign currency being delivered to the world’s largest funder of international terrorism would unravel nearly eight years of his appeasement policy and devastate his carefully-cultivated image.
Endless media interviews by Obama’s press flacks intoning that the payment was not a quid pro quo for freeing some (but not all) of the Americans kidnapped by Iran actually reduced administration credibility both on the deal and more generally. Moreover, the ransom-for-hostages swap was not even the first secret side-deal to the Vienna accord. Just weeks before, we learned of another agreement to allow Iran to swap out its existing uranium-enrichment centrifuges for more-efficient, more-productive centrifuges without violating the supposed commitments to limit its nuclear activities.
One wonders what else might yet emerge.

A video released last week of a man convicted of smuggling military equipment to Iran has shed new light on the activities of the Iranian national and six Iranian-Americans who were released by the U.S. as part of a deal to free several of its citizens from Iranian captivity, ABC News reported on Friday.
The undercover video shows Arash Ghahreman and an associate, Ergun Yildiz, discussing the potential sale of sensitive equipment to Iran with two suppliers, who were actually undercover agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Ghahreman was convicted in April 2015 and sentenced to six and a half years in prison for his involvement in the plot. He was one of seven convicted smugglers who were released by U.S. authorities in January for the release Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, former Marine Amir Hekmati, and several others by Iran. The U.S. transferred $400 million in cash to Iran at the time, despite the objections of the Justice Department, which warned that the payment looked like a ransom.

Nowhere has Iran made greater strides in indigenous military technology than with unmanned aerial vehicles. It flew its first UAV, a crude surveillance drone, over Iraqi trenches in the latter part of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War and in recent years has worked satellite-GPS guidance so as to no longer rely on line-of-sight operations. It has also armed drones with missiles and crafted others for kamikaze operations. Now, Iranian authorities have announced a new capability: counter-electronics and jamming. While the Iranian military might gear these to enemy communications or seek to blind other drones, Iran’s willingness to share UAVs and technology with Hezbollah and other terrorist groups might mean new threats to civilian air traffic in the region.
Consider Bahrain, for example. Iranian leaders have threatened Bahrain openly since 2007, but they have become particularly blunt and virulent with their threats over the past two months. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, for example, suggested he would “remove the barrier” to “radical and armed movements.” The Bahraini opposition has long sought to wage economic warfare against the island because of its discrimination and repression of Shi’ites. Hence, it has encouraged multinational firms to leave Manama and has also protested the Bahrain Grand Prix. Gulf Air, Bahrain’s national airlines, might not have the reach of Emirates or Qatar Airlines, but it still brings significant revenue to the island. Could Iranian drones—operated directly by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or by proxy—be used to temporarily jam air traffic communications over the island’s airport? No accident need occur—just news of the incident would cripple air traffic into Manama.
Or, consider Israel: The Federal Aviation Administration briefly banned U.S. airliners from flying into Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport after Hamas fired a rocket in the direction of the airport. That ban was likely a political decision on the part of the Obama White House and basically rewarded terrorism and put a target over the facility. Hezbollah has already used drones to overfly Israel. Might the Iranian-sponsored proxy try to jam communications with airliners descending into Israel?

Russian bombers based in Iran on Tuesday struck militant targets inside Syria, the Russian Defense Ministry said, after Moscow deployed Russian aircraft to an Iranian air force base to widen its campaign in Syria.
The ministry said the strikes, by Tupolev-22M3 long-range bombers and Sukhoi-34 fighter bombers, were launched from Iran's Hamadan air base.
It is thought to be the first time that Russia has struck targets inside Syria from Iran since it launched a bombing campaign to support Syrian President Bashar Assad in September last year.
The move shows Russia is expanding its role and presence in the Middle East and comes amid Russian media reports Moscow has asked Iran and Iraq for permission to fire cruise missiles at Syrian targets across their territory from the Caspian Sea.

Iranian sports fan and activist Darya Safai returned to the Olympic volleyball venue Monday repeating her message and hoping the whole world hears: “Let Iranian Women Enter Their Stadiums.”
After discussions with about a half-dozen venue officials leading up to the Iran men’s team’s match with defending champion Russia, she was allowed to stay and hold her sign in a front-row, courtside seat.
“They said I can stay. I am here to stay,” she said.
On Saturday, she was in tears when security officials told her she would have to leave if she kept it. Olympic officials do not allow political statements at the games, though the 41-year-old Safai insists “it’s a gender message.”
Her tears were of joy Monday, when Iran lost in straight sets but her voice was heard. She posed for photos with fans, giving the thumbs-up sign and a peace sign.
“This sign to me, it means a lot,” said Safai, born in Tehran but living in Belgium. “The people protect me.”

World Vision officials have professed to be “shocked” by the arrest in Israel last week of Mohammed El-Halabi, the head of the megacharity’s Gaza operations. Mr. Halabi is accused of repurposing over the course of 10 years up to $7.2 million a year, in cash and materials, to Hamas. That’s approximately 60% of World Vision’s total aid to Gaza.
The broader problem is that due diligence for humanitarian aid in war and terror zones requires the allocation of significant resources and a professional staff capable of detaching itself from the pressures and sympathies of the local environment. World Vision, like most aid groups operating in Gaza, clearly failed in this respect.
World Vision’s troubles in Gaza reflect the broader moral failures of the humanitarian-aid industry. The narrow vision of aid workers contribute to a willful blindness to terrorism. The competition for publicity and donations results in alliances with brutal regimes and corrupt warlords. But thanks to the NGO “halo effect,” many donors also neglect due diligence, instead relying on the pure reputation of the recipient organization.
Aid groups also need to obtain and use intelligence information, particularly regarding employees and their activities. Some of this can be developed internally, and some can be purchased from consulting firms. And instead of adopting the Palestinian culture of noncooperation with Israeli security, it is in the interests of these organizations to quietly open channels of communication and information sharing.

The liberal dread of being labelled Islamophobic, a penchant for tolerating the intolerant, combined with the fear of provoking violence, has effectively silenced intelligent debate about the rise of political Islam in Europe and its impact on secular democratic politics. Over the past decade, not only the media but also the art world has opted for collusion and self-censorship.
The combination of Islamophobia, balance and the omnipresent threat of violence means that it has become impossible to organise a conference or even a debate on political Islam and freedom of expression on a British or Australian campus. The preoccupation with “safe spaces” on Western campuses, along with the fact that the Gulf States endow chairs in Islamic Studies at Oxford, Princeton and Griffith University in Australia further inhibits discussion. Of 198 member states of the UN, ninety-four have blasphemy laws and the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation regularly pushes for the UN Human Rights Council to recognise the defamation of religion.
The rising price of political freedom, it seems, is too high for many Western governments to pay. The long war for cultural freedom which began in 1989 is in serious danger of being lost. As Karl Popper observed of an earlier totalitarian threat to the open society, “If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” We should therefore claim “in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant”. Unfortunately, this argument does not gets much air-time, let alone political support.
The UK media and the national student union now consider any mention of inconvenient facts about vote rigging in Asian, primarily Muslim communities, or the imposition of sharia law in some UK communities, as “Islamophobic”. Thus the Guardian, the BBC and academe ignore or condone the profound change in the character and conduct of UK politics that the resistible rise of Sadiq Khan and Naz Shah intimates.
“Life imitates art, far more than art imitates life,” Oscar concluded his essay on lying. Yet the slow-motion collision of mainstream Islam with the multicultural transnational Left has led to a Ben Abbes-style transformation of liberal democratic London into a progressively illiberal, Islamophile Londonistan that exceeds even Houellebecq’s fervid imagination.

These guys are a breath of fresh air.
Nothing Left - Episode 112 - 8/16/16
Rev Willem Glashouwer & Andrew Tucker (Christians for Israel)
Aussie Dave (Israellycool)
Julie Nathan (Executive Council of Australian Jewry)
Michael Kuttner (The Israel Resource News Agency)
Isi Leibler (Jerusalem Post)

"It pains me to have to admit this but anti-Semitism is not just tolerated in some sections of the British Muslim community; it is routine and commonplace. Any Muslims reading this article – if they are honest with themselves – will know instantly what I am referring to. It is our dirty little secret. You could call it the banality of Muslim anti-Semitism."— Mehdi Hasan, The New Statesman.
"There isn't much of a desire to do anything about it [the problem of antisemitism]. It should also be said that the so-called interfaith outreach work... achieves almost nothing. A couple of old bearded men get together and agree on some dietary thing they've got in common, but it doesn't solve the fact that anti-Semitism mainly comes from Muslim communities these days. ... that that's taught in many mosques and many Muslim schools..."— Douglas Murray, British commentator.
The question that arises is, are the elites of Sweden in general suffering from a case of Stockholm syndrome? Are we encouraging our adversaries to Islamize Sweden, which in the long run, might result in the abolition of freedom of religion, forcing Jews and Christians to live as dhimmis [subjugated citizens] in humiliation?
If by allowing hundreds of thousands of Muslims to settle here -- people much more hateful of Jews than the average German during the Nazi era -- are we not in fact paving the way for another Holocaust?

A segment of Christians is actually trying to delude the world into thinking the absurd: that the ancient Jews of Canaan and Judea are "colonialists" who are "illegally occupying" their own native land.
Seemingly undeterred by their 2016 defeats, the Christian anti-Israel coalitions are regrouping for their next attacks, while pro-Israel Christian Zionist organizations -- including Christians United for Israel (CUFI), Friends of Israel (FOI), International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem (ICEJ) and Bridges for Peace, among others, continue to speak out and teach the facts and the truth about Israel to Christians throughout the U.S. and Europe.
Still, the Bible gives us hope and assurance that there is a future day when Israel will be able to bask in the elusive peace it demonstrably continues to offer those who are trying to destroy it.

Much has changed in Crown Heights in the past 25 years, since the accidental death of a black boy touched off three days of rioting in which black youths attacked religious Jews in the Brooklyn neighborhood.
Many called it a riot. Some Jews call the events of Aug.19-21, 1991, a pogrom. And some blacks call it an uprising.
Yankel Rosenbaum, a graduate student affiliated with the area's prominent Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, was killed when a group of black men stabbed and beat him, shattering his skull. Cars were overturned and set aflame. Bricks were thrown. Residents and reporters were pulled from cars and beaten. Stores were looted.
The violence left anguish in both communities, but also led to high-profile community programs intended to create racial reconciliation, many of which have since shut down.
And some scars, on both sides of the racial divide, have yet to completely heal.
But today is a very different time in Crown Heights, where charming limestone row houses line side streets and prewar apartment buildings sit tall on the avenues. A growing number of young professionals are moving in from pricier parts of Brownstone Brooklyn and Manhattan in search of more affordable rents. Fancy boutiques and coffee shops are proliferating. There’s even a Starbucks.
Today there is less open hostility between blacks and Jews, residents say, though still a high degree of separation, misunderstanding and suspicion. But there is far better communication between leaders of the respective communities, who are quick to quell misinformation when conflict occurs – which was part of what fed the rioting, according to a state-commissioned report issued in 1993.
And today, Crown Heights’ blacks and Jews share a common adversary: gentrification.

Former Times reporter looks back on coverage of the event, and what went wrong.
Yet, when I picked up the paper, the article I read was not the story I had reported. I saw headlines that described the riots in terms solely of race. “Two Deaths Ignite Racial Clash in Tense Brooklyn Neighborhood,” the Times headline said. And, worse, I read an opening paragraph, what journalists call a “lead,” that was simply untrue:
“Hasidim and blacks clashed in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn through the day and into the night yesterday.”
In all my reporting during the riots I never saw — or heard of — any violence by Jews against blacks. But the Times was dedicated to this version of events: blacks and Jews clashing amid racial tensions. To show Jewish culpability in the riots, the paper even ran a picture — laughable even at the time — of a chasidic man brandishing an open umbrella before a police officer in riot gear. The caption read: “A police officer scuffling with a Hasidic man yesterday on President Street.”
I was outraged but I held my tongue. I was a loyal Times employee and deferred to my editors. I figured that other reporters on the streets were witnessing parts of the story I was not seeing.
But then I reached my breaking point. On Aug. 21, as I stood in a group of chasidic men in front of the Lubavitch headquarters, a group of demonstrators were coming down Eastern Parkway. “Heil Hitler,” they chanted. “Death to the Jews.”
Police in riot gear stood nearby but did nothing.

Donald Trump said he would test would-be immigrants for anti-Semitic beliefs and that Israel would be a key ally in defeating radical Islam, unveiling a proposal for radically stepped up vetting measures for potential immigrants in a policy address Monday.
Speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, the Republican presidential nominee outlined national security policies that included what he called “extreme vetting” for would-be immigrants, including for those who would reject what he described as American values of tolerance.
“We should only admit into this country those who share our values and respect our people,” Trump ventured, promising to temporarily suspend immigration from “the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world” that export terrorism.
“In the Cold War, we had an ideological screening test. The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today. I call it extreme vetting.”

According to one document, for example, the Arab Regional Office Presidential Portfolio Review, dated August 6, 2015, the Soros network has given $2,688,561 in 14 grants since 2001 to Adalah. A self-described “independent human rights organization” that has been instrumental in accusing Israel of war crimes on numerous occasions in international forums, Adalah has called on governments the world over to sever or downgrade their diplomatic relations with Israel. An additional $1,083,000 in nine grants since 2003 went to I’lam, a Nazareth-based Palestinian media center. In a 2014 publication about the Nakba—the name Palestinians give the creation of the state of Israel, literally meaning “catastrophe”—the center accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and argued that “the practical meaning of the Nakba undermines the moral and ethical foundation of Zionism and, hence, of the State of Israel.” Other similar-minded organizations received similarly large grants, sometimes through the auspices of another Soros grantee, the New Israel Fund, which supported many of the same NGOs.
But perhaps more instructive than the list of grantees itself is Arab Regional Office’s 2014 portfolio review document of the Palestine/Israel international advocacy portfolio, a deep and candid dive into the Soros network’s goals and ambitions in the region.
The ARO, the report indicates, was motivated in part by what it perceived as “a particular shift in political dynamics particularly in the US reflected by the publication of the Walt and Mearsheimer article ‘The Israel Lobby’ in Spring 2006 which pointed out the lobby’s role in, among other things, influencing the Iraq invasion.” Another encouraging shift, according to the report, is the rise of the international movement to boycott Israel: “A number of factors make this a good moment to review this portfolio,” it reads, “including some new or improved opportunities we may choose to exploit. In recent years there’s been heightened international solidarity around Palestinians’ rights, the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other economic levers, and increased use and traction of arts and culture by Palestinians as a means to raise awareness of violations and the impact of the conflict.”
Rather than try and impact the conflict, however, by supporting organizations working to directly persuade the concerned parties—namely, Israelis and Palestinians—of the necessity of more equitable conditions for the benefit of both sides, the Open Society Foundations, ironically, took a much less democratic approach and instead focused exclusively on exerting outside pressure on the Israeli government.

While Donald Trump continues to be blasted in the mainstream media for calling President Barack Obama the "founder of ISIS," a left-wing organization that is funded in part by George Soros is blaming both President Obama and Hillary Clinton for setting the stage for ISIS.
In a piece published by Pro Publica and the Washington Post, the writers claim a series of decisions by the State Department, the White House and Congress -- but almost all implemented by Clinton's state department -- helped give rise to ISIS:
A State Department team that administered the cuts under White House direction eventually ended up with a $1.6 billion surplus — money initially appropriated for Iraq that was freed for use in other conflict zones, including Libya, officials and documents say.
The downscaling was done over the objections of U.S. military leaders on the ground, who said the slashing of key assistance programs — in a few cases, by more than 90 percent — left the U.S. government increasingly in the dark about developments outside the Iraqi capital. Some former officers who managed Iraqi aid programs say the cuts were a factor in the slow deterioration of Iraq’s security forces in the months before the Islamic State’s 2014 assault.

A leaked memo from left-wing financier George Soros’s Open Society Foundations argues that Europe’s refugee crisis should be accepted as a “new normal,” and that the refugee crisis means “new opportunities” for Soros’ organization to influence immigration policies on a global scale.
OSF program officer Anna Crowley and program specialist Katin Rosin co-authored the May 12 memo, titled “Migration Governance and Enforcement Portfolio Review.” The memo focuses on an OSF program called the International Migration Initiative, which aims to influence immigration policy.
The nine-page review makes three key points: OSF — which doles out millions to left-wing causes — has been successful at influencing global immigration policy; Europe’s refugee crisis presents “new opportunities” for the organization to influence global immigration policy; and the refugee crisis is the “new normal.”
One of the purposes of the review, Crowley and Rosin write in the introduction, is to “consider the effectiveness of the approaches we have used to achieve change at the international level.”

In the memo, Open Society Foundations (OSF) executives lamented that progressive groups and members of the Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian-American (AMEMSA) community lacked “high quality opposition research” to combat “anti-Muslim xenophobia and to promote tolerance.”
To close that gap, OSF sought to provide a $200,000 grant to CAP, which was founded in 2003 by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.
The CAP project, called the Examining Anti-Muslim Bigotry Project, set out to engage progressives and journalists to raise awareness about the critics of radical Islam. In addition to Geller, Gaffney and Spencer, CAP planned to “research and track” the activities of David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Cliff May and Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“CAP’s first step will be to interview and engage journalists, researchers, academics, and leaders in the anti-hate movement who are researching and writing on Islamophobia, and to develop a roster of knowledgeable and credible experts to whom journalists and policymakers can turn for information,” it continues.
OSF did fund CAP’s project. Its 2011 tax filings show that it gave CAP the $200,000 grant as well as two others totaling $500,000.
According to the OSF document, which was published on a new website called DCLeaks, CAP would also explore the interactions of groups of conservative think tanks, pundits and politicians which were part of the so-called Islamophobia movement.

Thus spake thy Lord and King George Soros: thou shalt construct for Me an Echo Chamber, of the finest pundits and plausible diversity. And the Chamber shall be 1600 cubits by 1600 cubits, that it may match My house on Pennsylvania Avenue, from which shall issue by My servants proclamations in support of My goals and condemnations of those opposed to My goals.
Verily, My goals are not your goals; for as the snow and rain come down from the heavens, not to return until they have sprouted on My land My political will, so, too, My money shall cultivate a tandem of experts predisposed to echo My desired policy goals, thus saith thy Lord George Soros.
Thou shalt build the echo chamber of politicians, businessmen, commentators, and Non-Governmental Organizations with established credibility to put forth My desires as the highest interest of the Land, that it may please Me and I may share My wealth with thee and thy puny dependents.
Take heed and watch thyself, for if thou strayest from My message of Israeli perfidy and Muslim virtue, My wrath shall be kindled against thee with the fire of Persian atomic weapons. Thy children will be orphaned and thy wives shall be widowed, for I am a jealous God Who tolerateth not dissent in the ranks of My empire. The wind of political correctness shall sweep thee away into social oblivion, and never shalt thou again find work in this town, thus saith George Soros.

The acceptance of a working definition of anti-Semitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in May 2016 was a major event in exposing this ancient hatred. For the definition to be accepted, the IHRA required the agreement of the 31 member states of the organization, among which 24 are members of the European Union. One can now analyze the statements and publications of a person or organization for anti-Semitism by comparing them to the definition and the examples of anti-Semitism mentioned in the IHRA document.
One can apply this definition for instance to the frequent anti-Semitic slurs by Lady Jenny Tonge. Tonge is an independent member of the UK House of Lords and was previously an MP of the Liberal Party. Over the years, she has accused the Israel lobby of conspiracies, Israel of being responsible for suicide bombings in Iraq, as well as calling the treatment of Palestinians by Israel “the root cause of terrorism worldwide.” Tonge has also said that “Israel is not going to be there forever.” Other statements she has made include that the Jews should be “ashamed of themselves” for not stopping Israel. All of these are anti-Semitic slurs which are included in the examples of anti-Semitism accompanying the IHRA definition.
Yet, when analyzing Tonge’s statements, one realizes that the definition of anti-Semitism, like any other definition, has its limits. This has two major aspects. The first is that the definition cannot list all examples of anti-Semitism. For instance, the definition says that it is anti-Semitic to draw “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” It does not, however, mention comparing Israel to Islamic State (ISIS). This Islamic terror organization is currently a model for absolute evil.
Jeremy Corbyn, the extreme-left leader of the British Labour Party, has indirectly made such a comparison during the official presentation of the Chakrabarti Report on Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and Racism in the Labour Party. It is not clear that Corbyn’s remark meets the definition of anti-Semitism. Yet former UK chief rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks rightly called Corbyn’s statement “demonization of the highest order.”
The second aspect outside the IHRA definition concerns a large number of other acts and statements on its periphery. For instance, Lady Tonge brought the Palestinian Muslim cleric Raed Salah to the British Parliament. He has propagated the libel that Jews use the blood of non-Jews to bake their Shabbat bread.

Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn have suggested that the judge in the Labour membership case may have been influenced by his "Zionist" background.
Lord Justice Jack Beatson ruled in the Court of Appeal on Friday that Labour had the right to block new members from voting in the leadership contest between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith.
The decision affects around 130,000 party members, most of them thought to be Corbynites.
Mr Corbyn's campaign team attacked it as wrong "both legally and democratically".
After the ruling, messages were posted on Twitter questioning Justice Beatson’s competence because he was "born in Israel".
A tweet from the account of Davidgeorgeking, a Corbyn supporter, said: “I don't know if this is true but the appeal court judge in Labour V Labour case today was (I'm told) born in Israel!”
The tweet cited a post from Ian R Millard referring to a “cuckoos in the nest Israel lobby”.
The account in the name of Ian Millard includes photos of Adolf Hitler and a message backing National Socialism.
In response, tweets from the account of a Leicester man called Safraan, said the judge "was born in Haifa- Israeli occupied Palestine”, adding: “Its quite apparent that Beatson, LJ. is a Zionist!” and using the slur term “Zio”.
The tweets also noted that the judge “went to a Jewish boarding school”.

Get Up! is an Aussie organisation that describes itself as politically progressive and supports "social justice".
On the Facebook page of its national director, Paul Oosting, it's described as "a people-powered social movement".
The sort of issues that turn its members on can be seen here
As reported (behind a paywall) in today's The Australian by senior writer Sharri Markson:
'A director of activist group GetUp! supports a boycott of ­Israeli products and wants to “force Israel into a perennial state of existential anxiety”.
Fresh from revelations GetUp! chairwoman Sarah Maddison campaigned for the Greens during the federal election, comes news that another board member, Sara Saleh, publicly supports the Boycott ­Divestment Sanctions movement on Twitter.
In a speech in March, Ms Saleh said the media fabricated news in support of Israel and claimed Israeli soldiers were banned from taking their phones into Gaza so they could not post to Facebook photos of them doing unspeakable things to dead Palestinians.
“It would come then as no surprise that after years of indoctrination, most Western news outlets are biased in favour of ­Israel, skewed at best, one-sided at worst in their media reports,” Ms Saleh said, adding this ­included “fabrication of news”.

Israel should take a good hard look at how it allocates its foreign policy budgets, incoming Deputy Minister Michael Oren said, suggesting that Jerusalem’s traditional focus on Western Europe comes at the expense of developing ties with African and Latin American countries.
“Only four percent — get this: only four percent — of our Foreign Ministry’s budget goes to Africa. Only 14 percent goes to Latin America. I’d like to take a close look at our global priorities,” Oren told The Times of Israel this week.
On the other hand, a whopping 33 percent of the ministry’s budget is spent on Western Europe, added Oren. “If were to double that sum, how much change in Europe’s policy can we expect in response to that? And the answer to that would be not very much. Maybe not at all. But if we were to double the four percent that we invest in Africa to eight percent, I think we’d see a very substantive movement indeed.”

The international boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel, falsely cloaked under the banner of justice, is just the latest morally bankrupt, hate-filled and all-too-often anti-Semitic movement waged against Israel and the Jewish people.
BDS has attempted to position itself as a purely nonviolent movement that holds the moral high ground and that seeks to isolate Israel economically and diplomatically, misguidedly drawing its inspiration from the South Africa anti-apartheid movement.
But here is the bottom line. BDS will fail, miserably. It is its destiny.
History and context matter, but to BDS supporters those parameters are unnecessary. To BDS supporters, it is irrelevant that the West Bank came under Israeli control in a defensive war, or that Israel has signed peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, given back the Sinai and unilaterally withdrawn from Lebanon and Gaza. Any evidence that Israel wants peace is dismissed. BDSers are blinded by their own rhetoric; when people are exposed to this hypocrisy, BDS loses its limited legitimacy and the power of its sloganeering.
Americans, in particular, widely understand the Middle East is complex and the BDS argument absurd. They can differentiate between a democratic nation that despite its imperfections has historically seized opportunities for peace and the bloodthirsty terrorism that has been perpetuated against Israeli citizens. Americans know that each of Israel’s peace offers has been refused.

The Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign (SeaMAC) has launched a new ad on buses in San Francisco with the slogan “Boycott Israel Until Palestinians Have Equal Rights.” The ad is not clear as to which Palestinians are bereft of those equal rights: are they the ones being repressed by Hamas that steals their charity funds, diverting them to luxury homes for Hamas bigwigs and to terror tunnels aimed at kidnapping and murdering Israeli civilians? Are they the ones struggling to make it under an incompetent, corrupt PLO-run Palestinian Authority, that hasn’t run a national election in almost ten years? Or are they Israeli Arabs, with a representation in the Knesset that matches their 20% of the population, democratic freedoms and access to higher education? Or is it too much to ask a bus ad for specifics?
The ambiguous bus ad will run for four weeks, according to a SeaMAC press release. The ad includes the slogan “Stop Anti-Boycott Legislation” and features a list of historic boycotts, including the Boston Tea Party, segregated buses in Montgomery in 1956, and South Africa’s apartheid regime.
“Advocates for Israel’s apartheid are trying to persuade state and national legislatures to outlaw the right to boycott against social injustice in Israel,” said Edward Mast, volunteer board member of SeaMAC. Of course, Israel does not have an apartheid system — the Arab member of the Supreme Court would never approve of it, nor would the thousands of Arab students in Israel’s universities, thousands of Arab doctors and lawyers, and Israeli Arabs from all walks of life who participate in a free Israeli society. It’s not a problem-free society, but compared to the neighborhood it is pretty impressive.
Mast, however, sees attempts to seek legal means of stopping his campaign of lies as an “attack on free speech … one more example of demanding special treatment for the State of Israel.”

The BBC claimed in its July 2 article that, during the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas, Wiesel charged Israel with genocide:
Two years ago, Elie Wiesel, together with 300 Holocaust survivors, criticised Israel because of its attack on Gaza, and accused the Israeli government of genocide.
Wiesel made no such accusation. He did, though, criticize Hamas during that war for its use of human shields.
And in fact, it was precisely because Wiesel went after Hamas that a group calling itself the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) published an advertisement — the statement cited in the BBC Persian story — attacking Wiesel and charging Israel with a "massacre." (It does not, however, accuse Israel of genocide.)
Following communication from BBC Watch, the erroneous paragraph has been amended and a footnote has been added to the article that reads:
“Clarification: In the first version of this article it was written by mistake that Elie Wiesel was a signatory to a letter that accused the government of Israel with genocide. Hereby the mistake is corrected.”

The 105-year-old former secretary and stenographer of Nazi propaganda mastermind Joseph Goebbels described her role promoting the evil regime’s war machine as “just another job” in an interview with The Guardian on Monday.
Brunhilde Pomsel — who was one of Goebbels’ five personal assistants — spent more than 30 hours with Guardian reporter Kate Connolly, and their conversations were the source of “A German Life,” which recently premiered at the Munich Film Festival.
Pomsel readily admitted to manipulating statistics of fallen German soldiers, so that the casualty rates wouldn’t appear high to the public. She also said she was tasked with inflating the number of rapes the Red Army had carried out against German women.
One story she told was of being handed the file on Sophie School, an anti-Nazi activist and student who was executed for treason in February 1943, after distributing anti-war fliers at the University of Munich.
“I was told by one of Goebbels’ special advisers to put it in the safe, and not to look at it,” Pomsel stated. “So I didn’t, and was quite pleased with myself that he trusted me, and that my keenness to honor that trust was stronger than my curiosity to open that file.”
“But really, I didn’t do anything other than type in Goebbels’ office,” she said.
To Connolly, Pomsel appeared “unrepentant…it seems as if she even takes something restorative from her insistence that she simply acted the same way as most other Germans.”

A “satirical” tour bus in the Czech Republic advertising the Nazi death camp Auschwitz as a fun holiday destination has been condemned by Holocaust survivors and local Jewish leaders.
The camp’s infamous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work makes free”) is seen emblazoned on the side of the double-decker bus alongside a large Star of David and images of real Jewish victims murdered by Nazi Germany.
Text along the side of the bus cheerfully urges people to “Come to Auschwitz — A journey through emotions,” and “Our guides speak Czech!”
The bus was originally made as a film prop for a satirical movie by Czech director Vit Klusak examining the emerging Holocaust tourist industry in Eastern Europe.
However, after filming was completed the bus was sold to a local tour company that has refused to remove the decorations.

In an unusual gesture, the president of Poland published a long statement eulogizing a Holocaust survivor who was among a handful of people to have escaped the Nazi death camp at Sobibor in the country’s east.
Andrzej Duda published his 650-word eulogy of Philip Bialowitz on the president’s official website on Friday. Bialowitz, who died August 6 in his home in Florida at age 90, was the last Polish Jewish survivor of the Sobibor camp.
“We are saying goodbye to an ardent advocate of mutual friendship and respect among nations, religions and world views,” Duda wrote about Bialowitz. His death, Duda added, marks the passing of a “person who did much to ensure that the crime of the Holocaust forever remains a closed chapter of history. So that nobody, under no circumstances, experiences it ever again.“
Bialowitz and his older brother, Symcha, escaped from Sobibor along with 300 other Jewish prisoners after staging a well-planned rebellion in which the death camp’s German guards were killed. Most of the prisoners were recaptured and killed, but the brothers Bialowitz were among a few dozen who got away. Symcha Bialowitz died in Israel in 2014.

The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, or The Fellowship, said that in the last two weeks they have been flooded with hundreds of calls from Ukrainian Jews inquiring about immigrating to Israel as a result of increased tensions with Russia.
In the past month alone, The Fellowship, known for helping Jews immigrate to Israel, has received more than 1,700 inquiries (over 1,000 emails and 720 phone calls) from Jews in the Ukraine in their office in Kiev, the organization said.
There are 260,000 Jews living in the Ukraine. About 5,000 are eligible for emigration who live in the Donbass region, which has been experiencing violence and unrest since March 2014, when government troops began fighting pro-Russian rebels, following the Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
“The plight of the Jewish people in Ukraine is deteriorating,” said Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder and president of The Fellowship. “Our support for them will mean the difference between life and death, whether we’re providing critical aid such as food and medicine or helping those who wish to immigrate to Israel.”

For the elderly, a fall can alter life permanently. In the US alone, over 700,000 people 65 and older are hospitalized because of a fall, according to the Centers for Disease Control; 250,000 of them are treated for a hip fracture. Any person caring for an elderly loved one will tell you that after a bad fall, the next step is likely to be a nursing home.
Preventing such events, then, could save a lot of misery and a lot of money that would go to treatment for the injury as well as care for the elderly person who may never overcome the damage sustained in the fall.
Researchers at the Sackler Medical School of Tel Aviv University have been studying this problem, and a team led by that institution’s Dr. Anat Mirelman believes that it may have found a way to help prevent or reduce the numbers of those falls.
“Our approach combines treadmill exercise and virtual reality to help improve both physical mobility and cognitive aspects that are important for safe walking. We found that virtual reality plus treadmill training helped to reduce fall frequency and fall risk for at least six months after training,” said Mirelman.

A stone’s throw away from the buzzing metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City, south Vietnam’s array of small dairy farms sit tucked away among muddy dirt paths and lush fields of elephant grass – clinging to cultivation practices from decades ago.
But with milk yield and quality lagging far below accepted standards, one Israeli-owned company hopes to revolutionize the sector.
“In Vietnam, more than 60 percent of the dairy industry is small household farmers – somewhere between four cows and 70 cows,” Ronen Zexer, a co-founder of a new enterprise called Smart Feed Solutions, told The Jerusalem Post on a Skype call last week.
“These farms are utilizing technology and know-how that is equivalent to Israel back in the 1940s and 1950s,” Zexer said. “These farmers do not have access to technology and to know-how and to the progress that was made in the dairy industry. At the same time, they need to compete in the market.”
Zexer, who in the past served as CEO of the dairy technology leader Afimilk and has consulted for the Israeli-Vietnamese TH Milk mega project, is heading a co-investment between Israeli and Dutch entrepreneurs in a new approach to the challenges of the dairy industry in developing countries.

Two graduates of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem won first place for design in a major US animation festival.
“Scapegoat,” a short film by Gal Haklay and Shulamit Tager, won first prize in the original design category at the 13th annual Animation Block Party Awards, Bezalel announced Monday. The Animation Block Party is a showcase for independent, professional and student animation.
The Israeli pair were among 100 participants selected for the festival, held in Brooklyn, New York July 28-31. The two earned Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees from the Israeli art school.
“We are proud of our students’ great achievements as they creatively represent the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design around the world,” Dudu Mezach, head of Bezalel’s Screen Based Arts Department, said in a statement. “The successes of our students reflect their excellent work during their studies at Bezalel, and we wish them every success in their future endeavors.”

Israeli government officials have announced further measures against nonviolent actions by civil society. During the First Intifada, the Israeli occupation authorities deported non-violent activists and tried to prevent any peaceful demonstration against the imposed and oppressive policies. Nowadays, Israel, with some international support, is trying to quash a growing solidarity movement with the Palestinian cause for freedom and independence.

Over the past year, the Israeli government and other organizations have conducted a campaign against any expression of disapproval of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, its crimes and its racist policies. Palestinian human rights organizations, such as Al Haq, have been victims of orchestrated efforts aimed at jeopardizing their funding, including vicious attacks and hateful incitement that has led to death threats against some of their employees.

Regrettably, this campaign against Palestinian civil society and partners has been somehow accepted and even encouraged by some members of the international community. We were astonished to see an official European Union presence at two anti-BDS conferences, with the EU representative to Tel Aviv not only praising Israel for its “human rights record,” but also by publicly stating that “settlement products are welcome in European markets.”

“No, we do not support the boycott of Israel,” the Palestinian leader told a group of South African reporters on Monday. “But we ask everyone to boycott the products of the settlements. Because the settlements are in our territories. It is illegal.

“And the Israelis should first of all stop building in our territories, should stop everything in our territories,” he stated, according to South African media outlet The Star.

“But we do not ask anyone to boycott Israel itself,” he reiterated. “We have relations with Israel, we have mutual recognition of Israel.”

Yehia — whose father spoke on the condition that the family name not be published for fear of a backlash if it became known he had taken the boy to Israel for treatment— is the first Afghan treated by Save a Child’s Heart in its 20 years of operations. About half the charity’s 4,000 patients have been Palestinian; 200 others were children from Iraq and Syria, and the roster includes patients from Tanzania, Ethiopia and Moldova.

Tony Laurance, head of a group called Medical Aid for Palestine, said that while providing children “world-class surgery” was “an unequivocal good,” it should not obscure the broader impact of Israeli policies on medical care for Palestinians. Gaza hospitals are perennially short of medicine, equipment and well-trained staff because of Israeli restrictions on travel and trade, and many Gaza residents struggle to get exit permits for care outside the territory.

“What gets up my nose,” Mr. Laurance said, “is that it presents an image of Israel that betrays the reality.”

So farewell then Anjem Choudary. At least for a few years. Britain’s biggest loudmouth Islamist has finally been convicted in the UK for encouraging support for Isis. He now faces up to ten years in prison.
There have been reporting restrictions on his conviction for several weeks now, as we waited for the conclusion of the trial of his associate Mohammed Mizanur Rahman. But now it’s over. At least for a while. There is much to say, but allow me one particular reflection for now.
Like his mentor and predecessor Omar Bakri Mohammed, Anjem Choudary was always a subject of enormous interest in Britain and abroad. Indeed you could argue that for some years now he has been Britain’s most famous Muslim. Most Muslims understandably hated this, but so did everybody else. I once ground my teeth hearing him introduced by a foreign interviewer as ‘leading British Imam Anjem Choudary.’ He was regularly invited onto television and gave other media interviews liberally, as it were.
Which was understandable because he was the perfect go-to guy. Where others ‘ummed’, ‘ah-ed’ and talked of ‘context’ Choudary could be relied upon to give his fundamentalist views straight up. Yet as a trained solicitor he knew where the lines were and carefully stepped away when he felt you encouraging him over them. This was always done in the mutual awareness that his views lay a long way over that line. Whenever people – especially Muslims – assured me that Choudary was merely a joker I always reminded them that in that case he was a joker with a particularly unfunny contacts book.
But all of this presented a problem for the media. You couldn’t avoid him – as some people insisted the media do – not least because (as with the murderers of Lee Rigby) he had a tendency to know the terrorists who were the story. But each non-avoidance of course also made him grow, which among other things risked further flagging him up for anybody attracted to his kind of extremism. But could someone so outspoken seriously be at the centre of anything? Surely every movement and word was listened into by someone?

The hate-filled circle around Anjem Choudary has been a breeding ground for the Islamic extremism which has plagued Britain in the last two decades.
Former law-student Choudary, who previously called for adulterers to be stoned to death and branded UK troops 'cowards', has always hidden behind free speech rules whenever challenged by the authorities.
But the group he helped to set up have been linked to a series of terrorist attacks, as easily-influenced young men became inspired by his twisted vision of jihad.
The best known of his disciples was Muslim convert Michael Adebolajo, who, along with Michael Adebowale, attacked Fusilier Lee Rigby with a meat cleaver in Woolwich in 2013 in a murder which shocked the country.
Adebolajo was a supporter of Choudary's al-Muhajiroun group and was pictured standing behind the hate preacher in 2007.
After the incident, Choudary said Adebolajo was 'a practising Muslim and a family man' who he was 'proud of'.
But he denied encouraging the killer to carry out the attack, insisting he was 'channeling the energy of the youth through demonstrations and processions'.

The biggest problem, according to the United Nations, is funding shortfalls. Only about 50% of promised donor aid – about 1.4 billion — was disbursed as of the end of March, according to the latest World Bank report. Among among large donors, the U.S. had transferred all of the $200 million it pledged, but Persian Gulf countries such as Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia had transferred only 15% or less of their pledges . . .
Gazans blame everyone for the bleak state of affairs: the Israeli military, which keeps the territory under a strict blockade; Arab governments, which have not sent pledged aid on time; and even their own leaders.
In private conversations in cafes and on social media, Gazans say they’re anxious that Hamas’ effort to rebuild its cross-border attack tunnels will one day bring new Israeli destruction to border areas like Shajaiya. They also gripe that the Gaza government has prioritized rebuilding homes of Hamas insiders and mosques.
“There’s great corruption in the reconstruction,’’ said Nawati. “Why is my house not there, I haven’t gotten a clear answer.”

If something bad happens to Jews or the Jewish state there are some, inexplicably, in British media or politics who cannot pass up the opportunity to use it against the former.
Ex-Liberal Democrat MP felt that the Jews hadn’t learned from the Holocaust. When an Egyptian judoka lost to his Israeli opponent in Rio and promptly refused to shake his hand The Economist used the opportunity to attack Israel as being an “apartheid” state.
Now, after the arrest of World Vision’s Gaza director Mohammad Halabi on allegations of diverting tens of millions of dollars to Hamas Dr Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, secretary general and CEO of CIVICAS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, uses the arrest as an opportunity to attack Israel’s new transparency law.
This new law obligates NGOs that receive more than 50% of their funding from foreign governments or organisations to report where the funding derives from. It doesn’t restrict their activities at all.
In an age of calls for more transparency this can hardly be classed as controversial especially when there are NGOs whose main objective for operating within the Jewish state is merely to destroy it.
But for Sriskandarajah it seems it is controversial. He sees the recent arrests of Halabi and Waheed al Borsh, a UN worker accused of diverting aid resources to help building a jetty for Hamas, as part “of systematic efforts by Israeli authorities to intimidate and undermine civil society”.

Here is a case where a UN agency actually violates the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, which states “children… should not be forced or recruited to take part in a war or join the armed forces.”
Yet all this is occurs in the public domain, without a peep from 38 nations that donate huge sums each year to UNRWA, with the notable exception of Canada.
Ottawa suspended aid to the UNRWA general fund in 2008, in response to a report commissioned by the European Parliament, which documented how Hamas was elected to run the UNRWA teachers association and the UNRWA workers association. Now there is a move in the new Canadian government to restore Canadian tax dollars to the general fund of UNRWA.
Yet binding legislation — passed by the US Congress and requiring UNRWA to vet personnel to determine if there are terrorists on its payroll — is ignored. UNRWA simply refuses to vet personnel in its facilities, which operate in the areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority, and no one, including the US, is asking it to do so.
After the March 2009 election, when Hamas was again elected to run the UNRWA workers union and UNRWA teachers association in Gaza, Congress asked newly appointed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for comment on whether she would demand the removal of terrorists from the organization’s payroll. Amazingly, Clinton told Congress that there was no evidence of Taliban activity in UNRWA – even though Taliban have never played a role in that part of the Middle East.
In her four years as secretary of state, Clinton did nothing to impede Hamas domination of US-funded UNRWA facilities. The US Congressional Research Service reports that the US has never asked if UNRWA humanitarian funds wind up in the hands of Hamas, or if Hamas is present in UNRWA. Yet UNRWA remains in violation of US penal code § 2339B — providing material support or resources to a designated FTO.
The Hamas Minister of Religion told us on camera,“Hamas’ relationship with UNRWA is good, very good! We assist UNRWA, and Hamas cooperates with UNRWA on many levels. Now a direct connection exists between UNRWA and Hamas.”

In Munich we saw Israelis and Jews slaughtered on prime time television. As we brought our dead athletes home for burial the Games barely missed a beat and, today, a non-state of Palestine participates even as they reject the notion of living in peace alongside the Jewish state of Israel, and even as the Israeli athletes gather at the Olympic Village to remember our fallen sporting heroes, slaughtered by the Palestinian terrorists that invaded the Olympic Village to seek out and kill Israelis.
Even so, we turn up to participate in the spirit of the Olympics to show the world, and ourselves, our finest sporting face, even as the door of the shared bus with the Lebanese delegation is slammed in our face, or when the Saudis refuse to compete with us, or when the Egyptians, who are supposed to have signed a peace agreement with us, refuse to shake our hand.
Was it coincidence that this Egyptian’s name was Islam?
Despite all this rejection, and the inability of the Olympic Organizing Committee to stamp out the unsporting hate that is an anathema to the raison d’etre of the Olympic movement, Israel will continue to show up, strive to do our best and, where possible, to win medals and bring pride to our nation and to the Jewish People.

No, you didn’t misread that headline. The 2016 Rio Olympics does in fact show that there is no Arab-Israel Conflict.
How can this be, you ask?
The Lebanese team refused to travel in the same bus as Team Israel and with its coach going so far as to physically prevent any Israelis from entering and contaminating the bus with their presence.
A Saudi Judoka forfeited a match in order to avoid competing against an Israeli later on.
Egyptian Judoka Islam el-Shahaby, after losing to Israeli Or Sasson, refused bow or shake his hand (he was eventually forced back into the ring to bow).
What’s more, this is not even close to the first time that Arab and Muslim athletes and celebrities have discriminated against Israelis. Whether it is preventing Israeli sailing teams from competing in races that determine positioning for major international competitions, a Syrian boxer, actually claiming that he couldn’t compete against Israelis since “they kill Syrians” while his own government murders hundreds of thousands of Syrians itself, or even claiming that a selfie with a fellow Israeli beauty pageant contestant was an “illegal photobomb,” as long as there has been an Israel (well actually even before then), there were Arabs and Muslims who went to extreme lengths to discriminate against it. And that isn’t even counting when Palestinian terrorists, financed by
If all of this is going on, how exactly is no Arab-Israel conflict?
It’s simple: if there is a conflict, there are two opposing sides with opposing goals. Such a conflict requires mutual hatred and rejection.

Referring to the Egyptian judoka who refused to shake the hand of the Israeli Bronze winner Or Sasson, The Economist callously exploits the Munich Olympics massacre, saying “Mr El Shahaby’s snub seems mere tokenism compared to the bullets that killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972,” but “nonetheless” Israel criticized his bad sportsmanship.
Does that mean Israel should just accept the Rio snub simply because it wasn’t murder?
Would The Economist say such a thing about anyone else being targeted for their race, religion or nationality?
The article goes on:
"Israel’s holier-than-thou protestations, though, risk sounding shrill."
Holier than thou?!
It is not the Israeli athletes who are blocking the Lebanese from sitting on the same bus or dropping out of matches to avoid playing Arabs. It’s the complete opposite. Sasson reached out his hand to his Egyptian opponent in a gesture of respect, and what a message it could have been for Israelis and Egyptians. But just like throughout history, the Arab spurned the Israeli gesture.

Egypt’s judo federation denied on Tuesday that its Olympic competitor Islam El Shehaby had been sent home for refusing to shake the hand of an Israeli opponent.
An International Olympic Committee spokesman said Monday that the Egyptian Olympic Committee “strongly condemned the actions of Mr Islam El Shehaby and has sent him home.”
The Egyptian judoka raised a storm at the judo by refusing to shake hands, and at first refusing to bow, after losing to Israel’s Or Sasson. He was reprimanded by an Olympic disciplinary commission.
Egyptian judo federation president Sameh Moubasher told AFP that El Shehaby “was not sent home.”
“He returned with his colleagues. The whole judo team returned yesterday at dawn,” he said.

An article by BBC Sport titled “Rio Olympics 2016: Egyptian judoka Islam El Shehaby sent home for handshake snub” appeared on the BBC News website’s homepage and Middle East page on August 15th. Readers of the report were told that:Egyptian judoka story
“The Egyptian had come under pressure from some conservative voices in his homeland to withdraw from the bout.”
The same euphemistic statement appeared three days earlier in BBC Sport’s previous article on the same topic (in which, at the time of writing, the Israeli judoka’s name has still not been corrected).
Clearly the BBC’s portrayal of “conservative voices” is not conducive to full audience understanding of the story. It would of course be very surprising to see the BBC describe anyone urging an athlete not to compete against a gay or black opponent as “conservative” and such bigotry portrayed as a ‘traditional value’.
But – not for the first time – we see that the BBC is reluctant to explain discriminatory Islamist ideology to its audiences in clear and precise language.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has signed legislation that would bar the state’s public pension fund from investing with companies that boycott Israel.
The Republican governor, a key backer of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, signed the legislation Tuesday.
The legislation, passed with overwhelming support in the Democrat-led Legislature in June, prohibits state agencies from investing in pension and annuity funds of companies that engage in political boycotts of the Jewish State.
The measure is part of a broader effort to oppose the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) that targets Israel and Israeli businesses.
The legislation requires the State Investment Council, which manages more than $80 billion in pension assets, to identify any potential investments in companies with Israeli boycotts and to divest from them.
Other states to have passed similar legislation or executive measures against BDS include New York, Georgia, South Carolina, Illinois and Colorado.

The Trump campaign has launched a Hebrew-language Twitter feed, aiming to boost support for the GOP presidential nominee in Israel and raising an interesting question: Just how many potential US voters in Israel don’t speak English?
The feed, launched Monday night, is named “Campaign Trump b’Yisrael,” and uses the generic handle @USAISRAEL2016, though a quick search shows that the campaign could have chosen, say, @TrumpIsrael2016. Or @TrumpAviv.
In its first 19 hours of existence, the feed tweeted five times, and had 65 followers. One tweet was a pro-Israel quote from Trump’s Monday speech on foreign policy, where he said, “We will work side by side with our friends in the Middle East, including our greatest ally, Israel.”
Another was a link to a Hebrew-language article about the campaign’s efforts to woo American voters in Israel.

US President Barack Obama will probably deliver a final speech on the Mideast before leaving office in January, though he is unlikely to translate the principles of that speech into a UN Security Council resolution, according to veteran US Mideast negotiator Dennis Ross.
Speaking Monday at a symposium in Washington sponsored by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Ross said that while it is unlikely Obama wants to launch a big diplomatic initiative before his term ends, a speech laying out the parameters of a Mideast accord was likely, and something Obama would see as his Mideast “legacy.”
Ross, who dealt with Middle East issues under George H.W. Bush as well as under Bill Clinton and Obama, said the president feels that if he sets down a set of parameters about how the conflict could be resolved – even if neither side would accept those guidelines – “over time the rest of the international community and the Israelis and Palestinians will come to realize that these are the only parameters that will actually work.”

For the first time, the US State Department has explicitly accused the Palestinian Authority (PA) of promoting antisemitism, a signal Jewish groups are hoping will lead to change in US policy.
According to a newly released State Department annual report on international religious freedom, official PA media “carried religiously intolerant material,” citing Palestinian television programs that called Jews “evil” or “denied a historical Jewish presence in Jerusalem.”
Previously, US officials labeled the PA denial of Jewish ties to Jerusalem as “material criticizing the Israeli occupation,” but stopped short of calling it antisemitism. Arab media channels that carried the antisemitic content were “nonofficial PA and nonmainstream,” according to last year’s report.
The Obama administration no longer claims that the PA is working “to control and eliminate” expressions of antisemitism in its media outlets. Officials dropped an assertion made in previous years that the PA acted to “prevent preaching” of “sermons with intolerant or antisemitic messages.”

Turkey on Wednesday submitted to parliament a deal to normalize ties with Israel delayed by the July 15 military coup attempt, the state-run Anadolu news agency said.
The agreement has been forwarded to parliament for ratification before the legislative body goes into summer recess later this month.
In June, Turkey and Israel signed a deal to restore their ties, which hit an all-time low after the 2010 raid by Israeli commandos on a Gaza-bound Turkish flotilla that left 10 Turks dead and several IDF soldiers wounded.
The text of the agreement submitted to parliament reaffirms that Israel will pay Turkey $20 million in compensation within 25 days.
The legal case targeting the Israeli commandos who staged the raid will also be dropped, the report said.
Israeli cabinet ministers in June approved the deal reached with Turkey, leaving Ankara to make the final ratification step.

A French citizen with family ties to the jihadists who attacked the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper in Paris last year will be extradited to France to face terror charges, a Bulgarian court ruled Tuesday.
Mourad Hamyd, 20, whose sister was married to Charlie Hebdo gunman Cherif Kouachi, was barred from entering Turkey late last month — allegedly after trying to join the Islamic State in Syria — and handed over to Bulgaria’s border authorities.
On January 7 2015, the al-Qaeda-linked Kouachi brothers killed 12 people at the headquarters of the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in Paris. Their accomplice, IS-linked Amedy Coulibaly, killed a French policewoman a day later and four Jewish men during a siege of a kosher supermarket in Paris a day after that.
France requested Hamyd’s extradition on July 29, accusing him of “conspiring to prepare of acts of terrorism.”

During Operation Protective Edge, Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives carried out a number of attacks in Israeli territory using cross-border tunnels. Terrorists attacked an IDF pillbox tower near Nahal Oz, killing five soldiers. On August 1, 2014, a Hamas force violated the cease-fire, killing three Givati Brigade soldiers, and escaped through an offensive tunnel to Rafah, taking with them the body of Lt. Hadar Goldin. A total of 34 cross-border tunnels used by Hamas were destroyed. The tunnels detected by the IDF during Operation Protective Edge were complex, each with a number of entry and exit shafts. The main tunnel route was often split, and sometimes there were parallel routes. For this reason, dealing with the tunnels was no simple task.
As soon as a tunnel was detected, IDF forces took action to isolate the operating area and detect additional shafts and branches. The Special Operations Engineering Unit planted explosives in order to demolish the tunnel. A number of methods were used to demolish tunnels during Operation Protective Edge, including aerial bombardment using JDAM bombs (called “kinetic drilling”), using water to make the tunnel collapse, and using liquid explosives. In retrospect, the IDF learned that aerial bombardment of the tunnel shafts made it harder to detect the tunnels themselves.
The tunnels have been classified as a strategic threat, with the impression given that this is the gravest threat facing Israel. Arguments have since been made that the defense establishment is responsible for a strategic failure, and there have even been demands for an investigative commission on the matter. There is no doubt that the tunnels are a serious problem. Despite the great public attention paid to the problem of subterranean warfare, this does not mean that subterranean warfare is the major strategic threat to Israel. It is merely one of many kinds of warfare. In other words, the issue is currently in the headlines, but long-term thinking should not be distracted by momentary criticism.

It should come as no surprise that Hezbollah is operating a terrorist network in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Despite the strong mutual deterrence along Israel's border with Lebanon, and despite Hezbollah's deep involvement in the Syrian quagmire, the Shiite terrorist organization has not for one second abandoned its jihadist ideology or its efforts to harm Israel in a variety of ways and arenas.
The organization's preferred modus operandi is to recruit Arab Israelis for terrorist purposes. The reason is clear: A blue Israeli identification card allows the holder access to (almost) anywhere in Israel, and it is certainly conducive to effective intelligence gathering. Due to the difficulty in identifying candidates for recruitment, Hezbollah occasionally uses criminal networks as a terror platform. Two such cells -- which were involved in drug dealing but were also utilized to smuggle weapons -- were exposed by the Shin Bet security agency in 2012 and 2014. In one of the cases, sophisticated bombs had already been smuggled into Israel.
An alternative recruitment method, albeit less preferable to Hezbollah, is to approach residents of the West Bank. These individuals are recruited directly from Lebanon, or by Hezbollah agents operating out of the Gaza Strip (with the full knowledge of Hamas). While they are easier to recruit than Arab Israelis, the odds of success are far smaller both because of their access limitations and because of the Shin Bet's encompassing intelligence umbrella there, which has enabled the Israeli security agency to thwart a high percentage of planned terrorist attacks.

Israeli security forces arrested a man suspected of stabbing an 18-year old yeshiva student on the Mount of Olives last Thursday.
The suspect, Ahmad Naim A-Ashair, is a 19-year-old terrorist from the A-Tur neighborhood in Jerusalem.
Police captured A-Ashair on Tuesday, though the arrest was not cleared for publication until Wednesday afternoon.
Forces were able to apprehend A-Ashair based on information gathered from intelligence sources. The 18-year-old victim of the attack suffered light to moderate injuries.
Upon investigation, the terrorist revealed that he had stabbed the yeshiva student with a board sharpened at its edge.
In addition, it was revealed that the terrorist had previously been involved in firebomb attacks and had hurled explosives at security forces.

IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot on Tuesday urged Knesset lawmakers to complete Israel’s security barrier along the Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank to prevent the thousands of Palestinians who enter Israel illegally each day and reduce the recent surge in terror attacks.
At a Knesset State Control Committee meeting, Eisenkot said that Palestinians “view terrorism as a political, social and religious tool to advance political goals,” and attacks were a “daily occurrence that we are grappling with in Judea and Samaria,” using the alternate, biblical name for the West Bank.
Eisenkot highlighted the security risks posed by the porous fence and walled barrier, and said that an estimated 50,000-60,000 Palestinians illegally enter Israel each day.
In contrast, the IDF chief said Israeli security forces only manage to arrest approximately 4,300 permit-less Palestinians per year, and that 44 percent of the terror attacks carried out in the recent upsurge in violence were in some way connected to Palestinians who were in Israel illegally.

A Palestinian teenager wounded during clashes with Israeli troops in the southern West Bank on Tuesday died of his wounds, according to Palestinian medical officials.
“Mohammed Abu Hashash, 17, died after he was shot in the chest during clashes with [Israeli forces] in the Fawwar camp,” the Palestinian health ministry said in a statement.
Earlier Palestinian medical officials said some 35 Palestinians were wounded in the clashes in the al-Fawar refugee camp, as the IDF carried out an overnight operation to uncover weapons and ammunition.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said live fire struck about 10 people after rioters threw large rocks at Israeli troops. It says the 25 others were struck by rubber bullets.
The IDF said its forces were on an overnight operation “to uncover weaponry” in the camp, when “dozens of Palestinians hurled IEDs (improvised explosive devices), blocks and rocks” at them.

Security forces arrested a top West Bank Hamas official overnight Tuesday, drawing accusations from the Gaza-based terror group that Israel is meddling in the upcoming Palestinian municipal elections.
Hussein Abu Kweik was arrested at his home in the el-Amari refugee camp near Ramallah, the Shin Bet security agency said in a statement.
Abu Kweik is Hamas’s main West Bank campaigner in the elections, which are slated for October 8. Last week, he was appointed Hamas’s only representative to the PA’s central elections commission, which is overseeing the elections.
He was arrested in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet “for his involvement in security-related activities that presented a threat to security in the area,” the Shin Bet said.
Specifically, Abu Kweik is suspected of “incitement,” the security service said. However, additional allegations may be brought against the senior Hamas official following his interrogation, it added.

Ten years ago, following the ceasefire that ended Israel’s second Lebanon war, the Security Council issued Resolution 1701, which increased the size and capabilities of the UN International Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)—first established in 1978 during that country’s civil war—and gave it a new mandate to ensure quiet on the Israel-Lebanon border. UNIFIL, writes Assaf Orion, has in fact succeeded at preventing the sort of minor incident between the two countries’ armies that could spark a war. However, it has done little to keep Hizballah and other terrorist groups from attacking Israel:
Since the end of the war, more than twenty incidents of rocket fire from Lebanon into Israel have been recorded, most apparently by organizations other than Hizballah. . . . . In recent years, [though], several Hizballah attacks from Lebanese soil were aimed at the IDF, including explosive devices in the Mount Dov sector and anti-tank guided missiles, which in January 2015 killed two IDF soldiers. (In that incident, a Spanish UNIFIL member was killed by IDF return fire.) While UNIFIL participated in the efforts to contain these incidents and prevent escalation, it failed to prevent them from occurring in the first place and also failed to prevent the basic conditions that made them possible, even when specifically warned in advance. . . .
Since the end of the war, not only has nothing been done [to create] a situation in which UNIFIL’s area of responsibility . . . is “free of any armed personnel, assets, or weapons, other than those of the government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL” [to quote the language of Resolution 1701], but Hizballah has beefed up, broadened, deepened, and increased its military deployment in southern Lebanon and elsewhere in the country.

A Washington Post writer who recently claimed that a $400 million cash payment to Iran was “American diplomacy at its finest” failed to disclose that he has been on the payroll of an organization that emerged as a chief architect of the White House’s self-described campaign to build a pro-Iran “echo chamber,” according to information obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Allen S. Weiner, a Stanford law professor and contributor to the Post’s opinions section, co-authored a piece arguing in favor of the Obama administration’s decision to pay Iran $400 million in hard currency in what many described as a “ransom payment” for the release of several U.S. hostages.
Weiner and the Post failed to disclose that the writer has long been on the payroll of the Ploughshares Fund, an organization recently exposed as a key cog in a White House-orchestrated campaign to build what it called a pro-Iran “echo chamber.”
Ploughshares provided millions of dollars to writers and experts who publicly pushed for last summer’s nuclear deal with Iran. Senior White House officials subsequently cited the group as its top pro-Iran ally.

Between the dates of 17th of July–15th of August; the number of mainstream newspapers who directly linked the “Coup Attempt” to Jews and/or Israel is 76.
Demonisation of Jews and Israel is a constant concept used in the Turkish written media. And on social media…. I don’t even want to go there…
Latest news is suggesting that Fetullah Gülen’s mother’s name is Jewish and the “Üst Akıl” – so called “Supreme mentality” which consists of Jewish and Zionist and Masonic teachings are behind everything.

A confidential German Interior Ministry report accusing the Turkish government of supporting terrorism across the Middle East was leaked to the German broadcaster ARD Tuesday. According to the document, the Erdogan regime supports Hamas, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and several Islamist rebel groups in Syria. The document was originally provided by the Bundestag to the leftwing party Die Linke.
ARD cited the document as saying that “the many expressions of solidarity and support actions by the ruling AKP and President Erdogan for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and groups of armed Islamist opposition in Syria emphasize their ideological affinity with the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Founded in 1928 and inspired by the fascistic ideology of the time, the Muslim Brotherhood has been the largest, best-organized, and most disciplined Suni opposition force in Egypt and in other countries — to the point where, for a brief moment in 2011-12, it captured the Egyptian presidency. In 2006, Hamas, an offshoot of the MB, captured the Gaza Strip where it remains the sole sovereign.
The leaked German report says Ankara has deepened its ties with the MB, Hamas and the Syrian groups and is serving as their “platform for action” in the region.

Professor Moshe Sharon, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, took part on Sunday in the Holy Temple Conferences held by the Movement for Temple Renewal with the participation of leading temple-oriented organizations.

During the conference, which took place in the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem, Prof. Sharon warned against Islamic revisionist history, and explained the Islamic worldview of history and geography.

Peace in Islam can exist only within the Islamic world; peace can only be between Moslem and Moslem.

With the non-Moslem world or non-Moslem opponents, there can be only one solution - a cease fire until Moslems can gain more power. It is an eternal war until the end of days. Peace can only come if the Islamic side wins. The two civilizations can only have periods of cease-fires. And this idea of cease-fire is based on a very important historical precedent, which, incidentally, Yasser Arafat referred to when he spoke in Johannesburg after he signed the Oslo agreement with Israel.

Let me remind you that the document speaks of peace - you wouldn't believe that you are reading! You would think that you were reading some science fiction piece. I mean when you read it, you can't believe that this was signed by Israelis who are actually acquainted with Islamic policies and civilization.

A few weeks after the Oslo agreement was signed, Arafat went to Johannesburg, and in a mosque there he made a speech in which he apologized, saying, "Do you think I signed something with the Jews which is contrary to the rules of Islam?" (I have obtained a copy of Arafat's recorded speech so I heard it from his own mouth.) Arafat continued, "That's not so. I'm doing exactly what the prophet Mohammed did."

Whatever the prophet is supposed have done becomes a precedent. What Arafat was saying was, "Remember the story of Hodaybiya." The prophet had made an agreement there with the tribe of Kuraish for 10 years. But then he trained 10,000 soldiers and within two years marched on their city of Mecca. He, of course, found some kind of pretext.

Thus, in Islamic jurisdiction, it became a legal precedent which states that you are only allowed to make peace for a maximum of 10 years. Secondly, at the first instance that you are able, you must renew the jihad [thus breaking the "peace" agreement].

In Israel, it has taken over 50 years in this country for our people to understand that they cannot speak about [permanent] peace with Moslems. It will take another 50 years for the western world to understand that they have got a state of war with the Islamic civilization that is virile and strong. This should be understood: When we talk about war and peace, we are not talking in Belgium, French, English, or German terms. We are talking about war and peace in Islamic terms.

What makes Islam accept cease-fire? Only one thing - when the enemy is too strong. It is a tactical choice.

Sometimes, he may have to agree to a cease-fire in the most humiliating conditions. It's allowed because Mohammed accepted a cease-fire under humiliating conditions. That's what Arafat said to them in Johannesburg. When western policy makers hear these things, they answer, "What are you talking about? You are in the Middle Ages. You don't understand the mechanisms of politics."

Which mechanisms of politics? There are no mechanisms of politics where power is. And I want to tell you one thing - we haven't seen the end of it, because the minute a radical Moslem power has atomic, chemical or biological weapons, they will use it. I have no doubt about that.

Now, since we face war and we know that we cannot get more than an impermanent cease-fire, one has to ask himself what is the major component of an Israeli/Arab cease-fire. It is that the Islamic side is weak and your side is strong. The relations between Israel and the Arab world in the last 50 years since the establishment of our State has been based only on this idea, the deterrent power.

The reason that we have what we have in Yugoslavia and other places is because Islam succeeded into entering these countries. Wherever you have Islam, you will have war. It grows out of the attitude of Islamic civilization.

What are the poor people in the Philippines being killed for? What's happening between Pakistan and India?

Furthermore, there is another fact that must be remembered. The Islamic world has not only the attitude of open war, but there's also war by infiltration.

One of the things which the western world is not paying enough attention to is the tremendous growth of Islamic power in the western world.

Courts have also found that restrictions requiring prisoners to violate the Sabbath or other religious duties violate the First Amendment. McEachin v. McGuinnis, 357 F.3d 197, 204-05 (2d Cir. 2004) (intentionally giving Muslim prisoner an order during prayer may violate First Amendment); Love v. Reed, 216 F.3d 682 (8th Cir. 2000) (failure to provide inmate with food from the prison’s kitchen on Saturday for his consumption on Sunday violates the Establishment Clause where the inmate’s sincerely held religious belief prevented him from leaving his cell or working on the Sabbath, or eating food prepared by others on that day); Hayes v. Long, 72 F.3d 70 (8th Cir. 1995) (requiring Muslim prisoner to handle pork violated First Amendment); Murphy v. Carroll, 202 F. Supp. 2d 421, 423-25 (D. Md. 2002) (prison officials’ designation of Saturday as cell-cleaning day violated Free Exercise rights of Orthodox Jewish prisoner).

Our efforts to honor Sabbath day despite the Crusaders, despite the Inquisition, despite the Holocaust makes it rankle all the more that the courts have played fast and easy with this, our cherished observance. They have deemed our Jewish Sabbath not important enough for them to stop playing this game with Jonathan Pollard, in which they rob him of everything he cares about, by making him break Shabbos.

Or maybe it's the complete opposite of that: they want to break him.

Funding groups like Breaking the Silence is not an accident. As the 2013 leaked report says: "Our theory of change was based on strengthening the advocacy efforts of civil society organizations and platforms in order to maintain sustained and targeted international advocacy that would oblige the international community (mostly Europe and America) to act and to hold Israel accountable to its obligations under the international law."
In Obama's first term, this meant pushing for Israelis to be "held accountable" for the 2008-9 Gaza War, when Israel barraged Hamas positions interspersed in the civilian population. The foundation's Washington office arranged meetings in 2010 with Richard Goldstone, the author of a report that said Israel may have sought out civilian casualties. Goldstone recanted in 2011, saying the report was used to demonize Israel.
In this respect, Open Society is treating Israel the way it treats autocratic countries like Russia or Iran, as an adversarial abuser of human rights. In the case of Iran though, the group has also supported Obama's outreach to the country. "Human rights defense work remains an important priority for the Iran Program," a 2014 program summary says. "But should not be pursued to the exclusion of all other work, including work on supporting better policy outcomes such as support for a nuclear deal with Iran." In 2009, the Open Society Policy Center in Washington worked with other groups to open relations with Iran, and in 2015 the nuclear deal was signed.
There has been little progress on Open Society's goal of pressuring Israel. Eight years into the Obama administration, the organization has certainly not isolated Israel as a rogue state, and it's unclear what the threat of doing so has accomplished. While Obama has been more public than any of his predecessors in condemning Israeli settlements, he has also strengthened the U.S.-Israeli military bond. The U.S. today is close to signing a new 10-year extension of the defense subsidy to Israel. Obama's advisers promise it will be the most generous aid package in U.S. history. Meanwhile, the peace process has been dormant for more than a year.
This is not to say Israel doesn't have its problems. It faces boycotts on college campuses and frosty relations in Europe, and some businesses are wary of investing in the West Bank. But in a Middle East upended by civil war and revolution, the region's one open society has not become a pariah or ended its occupation of the West Bank. Despite the best efforts of George Soros and his foundations.

I rubbed my eyes with incredulity when I read the bizarre statements emanating from Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), one of the most powerful American Jewish organizations whose principal mandate is to combat anti-Semitism.
A few months ago I was drawn into a heated dispute with Greenblatt after criticizing an address he delivered to J Street students which included implicit criticisms of Israeli government policy and a failure to urge J Street to cease demonizing Israel and canvassing the US government to intensify pressure against the Jewish state.
Instead, he should have encouraged them to engage in the battle against the mushrooming anti-Semitism proliferating on campus. Greenblatt responded that he was “impressed” with these students and felt that they were “the future Jewish leaders of our community.”
But more recently, Greenblatt appears to have entirely lost the plot, behaving as though he remained employed by the Obama administration.
He was entirely out of line in his condemnation of the Republican platform as “anti-Zionist” for omitting reference to a two-state solution.
One can disagree about a two-state policy, but for an American Jewish organization which must remain bipartisan and should be concentrating on anti-Semitism, to issue such a statement breaches all conventions. It is totally beyond the ADL’s mandate to involve itself in such partisan political issues.

Young Labour’s International Officer Abdi-Aziz Suleiman sparked a furore over the weekend when he appeared on the Iranian state-run Press TV to defend Corbyn. He has previous. In another Press TV interview, Suleiman rails against “dedicated Zionists” and rants about Israel. When he was called out, he responded by arguing Israeli media should be boycotted instead. What does the Momentum-backed Corbynista get up to in his spare time? The above image of Suleiman brandishing a gun, finger curled around the trigger, has been circulating in Labour circles. He reassures Guido he was just on holiday in America. Glad to hear he’s not taking the whole Jezbollah thing too seriously…

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated outside of a peace festival featuring Jewish and Arab Israeli performers in Edinburgh, Scotland on Wednesday, calling out to those entering the venue, "Your tickets are covered in Palestinian blood."
The one-day, International Shalom Festival, was part of the Edinburgh Fringe, the world's biggest arts festival, which is taking place throughout August. The Shalom festival sought to bring together both Jews and Arabs in order to "build cultural bridges with Israel," according to pro-Israeli NGO StandWithUs, which organized the event.
However, the festival intended to build bridges was met by a boycott effort from the pro-Palestinian activists who shouted anti-Israel slogans and attempted to prevent patrons from entering the event, Tamir Oren, StandWithUs UK's director of public affairs who was present at the event said.
Police were called to the scene to keep the peace, and no injuries or arrests were initially reported.
Ariel, an Israeli artist performing at the festival, said that the protest against the festival was "sad" because "artists came from Israel and Arab countries with the goal of building a bridge, and we have here people who are not interested in coming together."

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has signed a bill banning the state's pension fund from investing in companies that boycott Israel. New Jersey's annual trade with Israel amounts to $1.3 billion.
The legislation, signed Tuesday night, will force the New Jersey State Investment Council to seek out, identify, and divest from companies that participate in the boycott movement. The council oversees more than $80 billion in pension funds. Firms providing humanitarian assistance to Palestinians through various organizations are exempt from the ban unless the organization participates in the prohibited boycotts.
Christie criticized U.S. President Barack Obama for being at odds with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying, "Israel is the beacon of democracy in a region that is constantly in turmoil." He also called Israel the "one, true, and best friend" of the United States.
In February, Obama released a statement accompanying a trade deal saying that his administration "strongly opposed" efforts to boycott Israel.

PLO Secretary-General Saeb Erekat expressed dismay at the European Union for failing to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel on Tuesday.
In an op-ed penned for Newsweek, Erekat said that the Palestinians had been "astonished" to see official EU representation at two recent anti-BDS conferences. Erekat claimed that the EU representative to Israel had both praised the Jewish state for its human rights record and stated that "settlement products are welcome in European markets.”
Erekat called on EU representatives, such as foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, to reverse statements to the effect that "no concrete actions" would be taken against Israeli "violations" of international law.
Singling out the UK's decision to criminalize boycott campaigns against Israel, Erekat said that the Palestinians would no longer accept empty statements of support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, "while granting immunity to Israeli crimes and systematic violations of international law."

I have been searching for evidence that supporters of the academic boycott of Israel will now launch an academic boycott of Turkey in light of the widespread purge of Turkish academia after the failed coup, destruction of civil society including the judiciary and media, suppression of Kurdish self-determination, and complicity in the Syrian civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands, among other offenses.
But so far, no luck in my search, just some hot air by American academics expressing outrage:

• Internet hunt: Find anti-Israel academic boycotters also boycotting Turkey
• American Studies Association discussing possible academic boycott of Turkey, but why stop there?
• Will anti-Israel academic boycotters now also boycott Turkish universities?

That purge now has passed 5,300 employees of Turkish higher ed, as reported by Inside Higher Ed:
Turkey’s Council of Higher Education announced Friday that a total of 5,342 university employees have been suspended since the July 15 coup attempt, according to reports in theDaily Sabah and The Hurriyet Daily News. A total of 4,225 academics and 1,117 administrative staff at public and private universities have reportedly been suspended from their positions as part of the government’s investigations into the failed coup. Many international higher education groups have expressed concerns about the government’s purges of the higher education sector.

Garbage front woman Shirley Manson on Tuesday forcefully rejected calls from Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) supporters to cancel their two-night gig in Israel.
“We as a band have been getting a bit of flack for coming to play Israel,” Manson told a rapt audience at the Amphi Shuni theater in Binyamina.
Manson, clad in brick-patterned tights with her pink hair pulled up in a bun, continued: “People are very very quick to make judgments and they know nothing, necessarily, about all the facts. But we in Garbage believe completely and entirely in tolerance and kindness and respect. We believe in non-violence, we believe in compromise and we believe in discourse and intelligent debate.”
Before taking the stage, Manson elaborated the band’s thinking in a Facebook post.
“As a musician I hold on to my right to travel to Israel and not be accused of denying the State of Palestine or of being on one side of the conflict over another. This is NOT the case. I know enough to understand that I don’t know enough about much,” she wrote. “I stand in the middle, hoping that peace prevails and the art of negotiation and compromise is practiced.

A high school student, with help from the pro-Israel activist group StandWithUs, has won a formal probe against his Houston public school which refused to put an end to harassment of Jewish students by anti-Israel students identifying with Hamas. The anti-Israel students have replaced hung Israeli flags with Palestinian and Iranian flags, and have called for an intifada.
The incident is part of an increase in anti-Israel activity on high school and college campuses in the US, but has some extra shock value coming from the generally very pro-Israel state of Texas.
In November 2015, anti-Israel students at Eliav Terk’s public high school in Houston (Carnegie Vanguard High School) tore down Israeli flags during an international festival, replacing them with Palestinian and Iranian flags.
They then “ran around school wearing Hamas-affiliated scarves,” saying “Jerusalem is Ours” and “We’re coming for It,” while waving a large Palestinian flag, a statement from Stand- WithUs noted.

Of 941 incidents of anti-Semitism in the U.S. in 2015, some 90 took place on university campuses, says advocacy group • Declining global interest in the Palestinian issue is "driving the Palestinian Authority and its supporters crazy," says Likud MK.
The Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday held a special session on the growing targeting of Jewish students in the U.S. by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
The meeting was called by MKs Anat Berko (Likud) and Nachman Shai (Zionist Union) following a June 16 report in Israel Hayom, which found that Jewish students in renowned American universities, including NYU, the University of Pennsylvania, Connecticut College, the University of Oklahoma, Harvard, Claremont College in Los Angeles, and Vassar College in New York, to name a few, were being harassed by pro-Palestinian and BDS activists.
In some schools, Students for Justice in Palestine activists taped fake eviction notices on the doors of Jewish students' dorm rooms, and threatened to forcibly evict them if they refused to leave.
While the schools profess to oppose any anti-Israeli activity, they have done nothing against those accusing Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes.
"BDS is a wave of anti-Semitism against Jews, which unfortunately has been taking place on so-called enlightened campuses [in the U.S.]," committee Chairman MK Avi Dichter (Likud) said.

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a pro-Palestinian student advocacy group, denied that it has been compiling data on Jewish students on college campuses in North America. Two pro-Israel groups active on campus also said they had no knowledge of such behavior.
Their comments came after Israel Radio reported on Tuesday that information on the alleged SJP activity was presented to members of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, which met to discuss efforts to boycott Israel by anti-Israel groups at US colleges. The radio report, which The Times of Israel subsequently reported, said the committee had vowed to work against the marking out of Jewish students.
Knesset member Anat Berko (Likud), one of the MKs who initiated the session, specified in an Israel Radio interview after the committee meeting that SJP has been collecting information on where Jews live at New York University among others. Asked by the (Hebrew-language) interviewer (at approx 23:00) about the “personal marking out of Jewish students,” Berko said the committee was told “about the marking out of Jewish dorms, of rooms of Jewish students (on campus), for example at New York University and other campuses.” She cited information from Miluimnikim BaHazit (Reservists On Duty), a pro-Israel advocacy group of IDF veterans.
The National Students for Justice in Palestine later told The Forward it had “never heard of such cases,” but said “all SJP chapters on campuses across the country are autonomously run.”

For those who don’t know, the NHS (National Health Service) is the publicly funded healthcare system for England. Teva is an Israeli multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Petah Tikva and is the largest generic drug manufacturer in the world. They are responsible for many life-saving drugs, and hold patents on multiple drugs including Copaxone, a specialty drug for the treatment of multiple sclerosis (now the world’s best selling MS drug), and Azilect (sold as Agilect in some countries) for treatment of Parkinson’s disease.
So, yes, FoAq, next time you are lying in an NHS hospital after a serious health scare, feel free to boycott the drugs they will try to administer to you in order to save your life.

As a casual observer of German and European media, regular display of anti-Israel bias doesn’t surprise me anymore. But the report aired Sunday by German’s state-run broadcaster Tagesschau (ARD) during prime time was disturbingly biased — even by usual European standards. A video report titled “Dry Faucets in West Bank” was broadcasted on Germany’s most watched news show. The video clip accused Israel of ‘rationing the water supply’ of the Palestinian and diverting water resources to the neighbouring ‘Israeli settlements’.
The report narrated by ARD’s Israel correspondent Markus Rosch talks to a resident of a small Arab town of Salfit, who says, “We need water to live. Now there isn’t any. How can this go on like this?” The camera then switches to his little daughter who says she can’t go the holiday camps anymore due to water scarcity.
The story would be heartbreakingly tragic; if only it were true.
To check the facts, correspondent Markus Rosch doesn’t feel the need to consult any Israeli official or expert. He instead goes to Clemens Messerschmid, a German hydrologist based in the region. Messerschmidt is quick to blames this ‘water scarcity’ on — no prizes for guessing this one rights — the ‘Occupation’.
According German media watchdog Honestly Concerned, Messerschmid is the same genius scientist who in 2014 accused Israel of flooding Gaza by opening the gates of its dams that were built for the sole purpose of flooding Gaza. Not just Arab media, but even some reputed Western media outlets ran wild with the story of apocalyptic ‘Gaza Floods’. Later Al Jazeera and other news outlets were forced to retract their articles after the story was exposed as hoax.

As has consistently been the case for many months, there was no BBC coverage of these latest smuggling attempts. That of course means that when the BBC states (as it frequently does) that “Israel says” that the restrictions on the import of weapons and dual-use goods into the Gaza Strip are for reasons of security, audiences have an insufficient understanding of the background and the facts to be able to put that statement – and the restrictions themselves – into the correct context.

Gavin Gross, a New York native who now lives in Israel, is a former director of public affairs at the British Zionist Federation, and is a member of HonestReporting’s Israeli amutah (non-profit governing committee).
Anyone who has visited or studied Israel knows that it can be a very tempestuous and argumentative place, with a wide range of hotly expressed opinions. Members of Israel’s national parliament, the Knesset, often descend into finger pointing and shouting during fierce debates. In the same way, Israel’s media shares a similar reputation for its boisterous, wide-ranging and no-holds-barred approach to reporting, politics and opinion.
Despite this, the New York Times recently published an opinion piece by Ruth Margalit which makes serious allegations about Israel’s media landscape, entitled “How Benjamin Netanyahu Is Crushing Israel’s Free Press.”
Is that a fair and accurate assessment, or wildly exaggerated?
While there are some troubling issues (more on that below), Margalit’s wrong on several counts.

One hundred and twenty years ago, on August 18, 1896, the precociously ambitious 28-year-old publisher of the Chattanooga Times, Adolph S. Ochs, purchased the financially flailing New York Times. Rejecting the sensationalist “yellow journalism” of its competitors, Ochs preferred a “clean, dignified and trustworthy” newspaper that would, in the enduring front-page motto that he introduced two months later, provide “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
Six months previously, a Jewish lawyer-turned-journalist named Theodor Herzl had published a pamphlet entitled Der Judenstaat, propelling Zionism to world attention. In its first mention of Herzl the Times identified him as “originator of the Zionist scheme.” With the approaching Zionist conference in Basel in August 1897, it paid closer attention to “The Jewish State Idea,” warily wondering “is it feasible”?
In Europe and the United States, the Times concluded, “There are many Jews who oppose the founding of this State on the ground that it could only be a small, weak State, existing by sufferance.” It was also “urged” – although the Times did not identify those doing the urging – “that Israel’s mission is no longer political, but purely and simply religious, and that the establishment of the State would do incalculable harm, and could do no good.” Indeed, it would inevitably raise the lurking menace of dual loyalty that has haunted the Times ever since.

Public school teachers in Israel preparing for the 2016-2017 school year have discovered that the neither the Ministry of Education nor local governments have included anti-Arab incitement in the curriculum, a teachers’ union representative said today.
Primary and secondary educators conducting meetings and preparing lesson plans for the coming academic year are reporting that they are not expected to teach the glories of killing or abusing ethnic minorities, and that no local or governmental mandates bind them to instilling in their students a drive to oppress or kill Palestinians in particular, says Avi Uss, a union spokesman.
“Anyone consuming international media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict is going to be rightly shocked,” commented Uss. “That includes a good number of our teachers, who of course are some of the best, well-rounded, dedicated educators on the planet. Imagine their surprise to discover that, despite the media’s efforts at balance, which requires portraying Israeli and Palestinian societies as two sides of the same violent coin, their own government and culture do not expect of them to dehumanize the other.”
“This goes against everything I’ve been taught by The Guardian and Haaretz,” worried Hasa Ta, a Tel Aviv literature teacher. “I’m not sure how well equipped I can claim to be for my mission as an educator if the Ministry of Education doesn’t match its expectations to the ones created by the BBC and the Times of London.”

The Daily Mail reports: An Israeli man has accused a Chilean border official of defacing his passport with pro-Palestinian words and a rude drawing.
Tal Y’aakobi, from Rosh HaAyin claims the member of staff drew a penis and the phrase ‘Viva Palestinia’, which translates as ‘Long Live Palestine,’ on his travel document while he was crossing the border from Argentina during a holiday.
The 25-year-old man alleges that he was held for an hour and a half by hostile staff when trying to cross the border.
He believes that the drawing was written on one of the pages of his passport at this time. But because the scribble was hidden inside the document, he says that he didn’t notice it until four days later.
Y’aakobi was then forced to spend £200 on replacing his passport when he returned to Israel after his holiday.

A video depicting German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel giving the middle finger to a group of neo-Nazi-linked demonstrators has recently drawn uproarious attention.
While visiting northwestern Germany's Lower Saxony region on Friday, a group of masked far-right protesters bombarded the German official while holding banners and shouting slogans accusing him of being a "traitor," AFP reported Wednesday.
Gabriel's Social Democrat party reportedly confirmed the authenticity of the footage uploaded to social media by a youth branch of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) group - which Germany has sought to ban.
The group allegedly accosted Gabriel during an election campaign event, apparently decrying him for distancing himself from the policies of his Nazi father.

The FDA has approved a new therapeutic contact lens that will help treat corneal edema, a common eye condition in adults that causes swelling, a build-up of fluid, blurred vision, haziness and scarring. EyeYon, the Israeli company responsible for this development, created these special lenses in an effort to increase the amount of time eye drops can remain in the eye in order to help alleviate symptoms of the condition which is common after cataract and corneal transplant surgeries.
“(Drops) are washed out from the center of the cornea a few seconds after the patient blinks,” Nahum Ferera, CEO of EyeYon told The Media Line. “So, this lens has a very unique design that creates a cavity above the center of the cornea that increases contact time (with the eye drop solution).”
This Hyper-CL lens, which is unlike others on the market, has dual base curves, eight small holes and a reservoir above the center of the cornea, which is the part of the eye that deflects light and is responsible for about a third of the eye’s optical power.
The holes in the lens enable the prescribed drops and ointments to seep into the eye under the contact lens, allowing for the extraction of excess fluids from the cornea.
“Your eye has a membrane which is a layer of cells in the cornea which pumps water out of the cornea,” Dr. Brian Marr, associate professor at Memorial Sloan Kettering and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City told The Media Line. “The cornea is like a dry sponge and the only thing that is keeping it dry is this endothelium (membrane of cells).”
When the cornea has too much fluid, vision is affected.

Tel Aviv claims to be the friendliest city in the world for dogs, having the highest number of canines per capita anywhere.
There are roughly 25,000 dogs, which works out to one pet per 17 residents, according to city officials. Pooches have access to 70 public dog parks and special beaches where they can play without a leash.
With a no-kill shelter, a city animal patrol that checks on animal abuse complaints, and 24/7 veterinary services for treating homeless animals, Tel Aviv has prioritized the welfare of dogs.
The city is hosting a first ever day for dogs, The Festival of Dogs of Tel Aviv-Jaffa in the Bnei Dan Park in Ganei Yehoshua on Aug. 26 to include adoption, information on caring for canines and more.

More than 1,000 moviegoers packed San Francisco’s Castro Theatre on July 23 for a screening of the Roger Sherman documentary The Search for Israeli Cuisine sponsored by Amy and Morton Friedkin as part of the annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
Amy Friedkin, president of ISRAEL21c, addressed the sellout crowd that came to an after-movie culinary event at Aaxte with the filmmaker and the film’s host, Israeli-American chef Michael Solomonov, co-sponsored by Moses and Susan Libitzky and ISRAEL21c. Susan Libitzky is an ISRAEL21c board member.
San Francisco chefs Ryan Pollnow (Aaxte), Nick Balla and Cortney Burns (Bar Tartine) and Mourad Lahlou (Mourad and Aziza) paid homage to Solomonov’s award-winning Israeli-influenced cuisine with interpretations of dishes such as shakshuka, lamb kabobs, chicken liver, and latkes with smoked salmon.
Everyone had a great time and was inspired to learn about Israel through the story of its food,” says Nathan Miller, ISRAEL21c’s social media director. “The event gave people another perspective on what makes Israel a unique and special place — not just the food but the people behind the food.”
This theme tied in perfectly with the film’s compelling message and with ISRAEL21c’s mission to expand the conversation about contemporary Israel and its diverse culture, he and Friedkin added.

Automobile manufacturing giant Ford has announced its buyout of Israeli computer vision and machine learning company, SAIPS. The acquisition comes in the wake of the giant car-maker’s pledge to develop driverless cars by 2021.
In a press statement, Ford said it is “investing in or collaborating with four startups to enhance its autonomous vehicle development, doubling its Silicon Valley team and more than doubling its Palo Alto campus.”
The acquisition of the Rehovot-based SAIPS is reportedly in the tens of millions of dollars though no financial details of the buyout were disclosed.
“The next decade will be defined by automation of the automobile, and we see autonomous vehicles as having as significant an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did 100 years ago,” said Mark Fields, Ford president and CEO. “We’re dedicated to putting on the road an autonomous vehicle that can improve safety and solve social and environmental challenges for millions of people – not just those who can afford luxury vehicles.”

Israeli-developed technology took center stage at Intel’s annual Developer Forum in San Francisco Tuesday as the company unveiled its new virtual/augmented reality system, code-named Project Alloy.
The system was introduced by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich in his keynote address at the event as an “all in one, self-contained virtual reality solution made from the ground up.”
Along with the new product, Intel introduced a new term — “merged reality” — which is where the Israeli part of Alloy comes in. While most virtual reality systems today are totally immersive, meaning you can get “lost” in the virtual world, Alloy allows users to integrate elements of the real world in an experience.
“Through merged reality, see your hands, see your friends … see the wall you are about to run into,” according to Intel. “Not only can you see these elements from the real world, but you can use your hands to interact with elements of your virtual world, merging realities.”
Alloy does this using Intel’s RealSense technology, a version of advanced gesture-based computing that allows users to interact with the camera and computers — for example, enabling them to change TV channels by moving their fingers in the air. Developed largely at Intel’s Haifa research labs, RealSense sees the distance between objects and separates objects from the background layers behind them. This visual data provides much better object, facial and gesture recognition than a traditional camera, according to the company, and creates a touch-free interface that responds to hand, arm, and head motions as well as facial expressions.

Barak Bakhar will not be a name familiar to Scottish football's fervent followers. At least not yet.
Bakhar leads his Hapoel Beer Sheva side to Celtic Park on Wednesday for the first leg of their play-off tie with the sole intention of dragging the unheralded club into their first ever Champions League group stage.
It is not something he is just hoping to do - he expects to. And that does not appear to be beyond the popular 36-year-old from Haifa.
While Claudio Ranieri was making global headlines for his odds-defying English Premier League coronation with Leicester City, Bakhar was doing something similar in Israel.
Like Leicester, Beer Sheva are not part of the 'big four' quartet that is made up of powerhouse clubs Maccabi Tel Aviv, Hapoel Tel Aviv, Maccabi Haifa and Beitar Jerusalem.
Yet they emerged top of the pile, two points clear of Hapoel Tel Aviv, who remain the most decorated club in the country.
It was their first championship in 40 years and it shook Israeli football to its core.
This was no accident either. (h/t Zvi)

In his new paper Steinhauer explains that he simulated a black hole event horizon by cooling helium to just above absolute zero (-273.15°C or -59.67°F), and then heating it rapidly to create a barrier impenetrable to sound waves, similar to light from a black hole.
During the experiment, Steinhauer found that tiny particles of energy that formed sound waves did escape his simulated black hole, as Hawking predicted.
“This confirms Hawking’s prediction regarding black hole thermodynamics,” Steinhauer wrote in the introduction to his paper.
The findings were first published in April on the arXiv.org physics site. In order to published in Nature Physics, the research first had to undergo intense peer review, with experts checking if Steinhauer’s observations could be attributed to something else, such as tiny vibrations caused by flaws in the experiment’s design.
According to numerous reports, Steinhauer’s observations on the ground-breaking theory could win Hawking his first Nobel Prize.
Ironically, Hawking supports the academic boycott of Israel, and in 2013 canceled his participation in a Jerusalem conference organized by then-president Shimon Peres.

Resist, my people, resist them.
In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows
And carried the soul in my palm
For an Arab Palestine.
I will not succumb to the “peaceful solution,”
Never lower my flags
Until I evict them from my land.

I cast them aside for a coming time.
Resist, my people, resist them.
Resist the settler’s robbery
And follow the caravan of martyrs.

Resist, my people, resist them.
Resist, my people, resist them.

The Council stresses that it is not permissible for the people of Palestine to migrate and they may not vacate the holy land to the Jews, as the Council emphasizes that staying in their own land is Jihad for the sake of Allah, and to show opposition to the enemy with jihad in the name of Allah gets the reward of the Mujahideen.

4-The Jews do not prevent Muslims from practicing their religion and stopping them from performing acts of worship, but the infidels of Mecca prevented the Mujahideen of the Islamic Jihad from performing their rites.

The Council supports the jihad of our people in Palestine and our brothers in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in every Muslim country and bless their positions overseeing and invite all Muslims to support and support with all their power and capabilities.