Their goal is to weaken us bit by bit, to obtain concessions in territory and our responses to terrorism, to weaken our society and our army, to undermine trust in our leadership, to prevent us from preempting military buildups on our borders or the acquisition of game-changing weapons by our enemies, and to paralyze us and ultimately prevent the full deployment of our military capability when it is necessary to defend the country against attack. Ultimately, when the time is ripe, traditional military force will be used to finally achieve their long-term goal of eliminating the Jewish state.
Here are some of the examples of our enemies’ accomplishments:

• The Oslo Accords, which reintroduced the murderous PLO into our country and as a diplomatic factor, which allowed Arafat to implement his “education for murder” system to turn the population of the territories into a hostile force.
• The retreat from South Lebanon, which allowed Hezbollah to gain influence and set the stage for the Second Lebanon War.
• The withdrawal from Gaza, which created a new permanent front for war against Israel, and at the same time gave rise to a multiplicity of diplomatic, legal and propaganda opportunities for our enemies.
• The diplomatic failure after the Second Lebanon War that allowed Hezbollah to build the infrastructure for the next war with little interference, and Israel’s failure to preempt the threat.
• Israel’s allowing the rise of the subversive European-funded NGO system, which has acted and is acting in countless ways to delegitimize the IDF and the state; which has turned our own legal system into a tool to weaken the nation; and which is so well-entrenched now as to have blunted efforts in the Knesset to rein it in.
• The successes of the anti-Israel movement in almost totally taking over the discourse in the academic world in the West – including Israel – both among students and faculty.
• The empowerment of the suicidal Israeli Left in media and the arts.

Most of these are examples of cognitive pressure causing Israel to act against its own interests.
In some areas there is little to be done. We can repudiate the Oslo Accords, but we can’t easily undo the damage done in the PA areas by Arafat’s educational system. On the other hand, we can push back against the pernicious memes that our enemies have introduced into our own culture.
This is a Jewish state, the state of the Jewish people. It isn’t “undemocratic” to believe this. We don’t need to feel guilty about it. The Arabs tried to kill us and prevent the establishment of our state. They failed. This was their nakba. They did it to themselves. The Arab nations screwed them, and are still screwing them. Why do we blame ourselves?

For the mainstream media, explaining Israeli politics is difficult work. A country where the poor and disenfranchised immigrants from the Middle East have traditionally supported the party of the right (Likud) while the wealthy and the upper middle-class of largely European origin are the last strongholds of the political left does not translate easily into American political context. In the United States, political culture is rooted in very different concerns than those of the average Israeli, where security issues and attitudes toward the Arab world still dominate. The temptation to make flawed analogies, it seems, is still irresistible. That led to the New York Times’s attempt to ascribe reactions in Israel to Secretary of State John Kerry’s astonishing attack on the Jewish state last week to a divide between “red state” and “blue state” Israeli voters. The piece not only failed to effectively analyze the Israeli response to the Obama administration but also the reason why the Middle East conflict hasn’t been solved.
New Times Jerusalem bureau chief Peter Baker isn’t entirely wrong when he says that there is a stark divide between left and right in Israel. For some who live in secular and liberal Tel Aviv, what goes in Jerusalem and even along the border with Gaza–let alone West Bank settlements–has sometimes been of little interest. I can recall conversing with Tel Aviv residents about a visit to Sderot in the south eight years ago, which at the time was besieged by Palestinian missile fire, in which they reacted as if I was speaking of what was happening in Afghanistan. The disconnect between the minority who blame their own country for the lack of peace and the majority who correctly see the problem as the function of Palestinian intransigence is great, even if Hamas’s 2014 missile attacks on the secular metropolis erased some of the left’s complacency.
Yet the left-wing establishment that once dominated Israeli politics and society was effectively marginalized by the collapse of the peace process in the carnage of the second intifada. In the wake of the Palestinians’ refusal of an offer of statehood from the last Labor-led government in 2000, the even split between left and right that had characterized Israeli politics since the 1970s was transformed into a new reality in which power rested with a dominant right and an ever-changing roster of centrist parties. The fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now serving his third consecutive term in power and that the only viable alternative comes from Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid Party speaks volumes about how little influence leftist organs like Haaretz have, even as it continues to support attacks on the Jewish state from foreign critics like Kerry.
Even Baker had to acknowledge his red state/blue state analogy falls short because of the decline of the left. Many liberal Israelis took umbrage at Kerry’s speech just as they were appalled by Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009. The one-sided, anti-Israel bias of both speeches, as well as the way Kerry and Obama have worked hard to treat Jewish Jerusalem as being as much of an illegal settlement as the most remote West Bank hilltop settlement, discredited the administration in the eyes of many Israelis. That, and Obama’s appeasement of Iran, only strengthened Netanyahu’s continued hold on power.

Israeli Amos Tversky and his colleague Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman are famous for their research regarding systematic human cognitive bias. Cognitive bias often leads people to decisions that, when fully understood, are irrational by their own standards.
In essence, one creates a reality not based upon objectivity, but influenced by emotions, leading to irrational judgments.
US President Barack Obama, his adviser Ben Rhodes, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Secretary of State John Kerry suffer from a postcolonial cognitive bias. Their reality is that Israeli settlements are the primary cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nothing can disabuse them of this distorted reality, and every event in the region is seen through this biased filter.
Ignoring the facts of Israeli offers for two states over the past 69 years, or a Netanyahu settlement freeze in 2009, allows them to blame Israel for their own repeated diplomatic failures, while ignoring a PLO Charter that still calls for the end of Israel. “The partitioning of Palestine... the establishment of Israel are illegal and null and void, regardless of the loss of time,” it says.
The administration is locked in a paradigm where it is axiomatic that Palestinians are helpless victims, not to be held accountable for their words, their actions and what they preach to their children.

There were moments when it seemed like one of the debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. John Kerry, Clinton’s double, delivers a reasoned speech, backed by facts, about the complexity of the situation, while Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump’s double, responds with a crushing personal attack, filled with insults.
Of the two of them, the more interesting one—and the more important one for our future—is Netanyahu. The things he said in Hebrew were just a short introduction to the speech he gave in English. He spoke to one person only, to Donald Trump.
In the history of the conflict, the exchange of words between them was nothing but a footnote. Kerry said what he had to say and went packing. It feels like graduation time in the White House: The president is in Hawaii, a large part of the staff is on holiday, and the others are busy looking for a job. If something happens following the two speeches, it will happen in one of the international bodies and will be initiated by a different government. The chances for that are not high.
All that is left for us Israelis is to wonder: Why is Kerry going to so much trouble concerning Israel? Doesn’t he have more joyful matters to deal with on the eve of the New Year? And why is it so important for Netanyahu to bite the hand that has fed him loyally, generously, for the past eight years? Where does that get him? What does that get the country he heads?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that possible decisions at the upcoming international peace conference in Paris could turn into another resolution against Israel at the United Nations Security Council.
Netanyahu made the comments at a conference at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem that was attended by several Israeli ambassadors stationed around the globe.
In December, the Security Council passed Resolution 2334 criticizing Israeli settlements as illegal and as an obstacle to peace.
Netanyahu expressed concern that the resolution would encourage the Quartet on Middle East peace, which comprises the United States, European Union, Russia and the U.N., to make a similar decision against Israeli settlements.
"The Paris conference is a hollow conference," Netanyahu said.
"But there are signs they will try turning the decisions there into another Security Council resolution, and these signs are not few in number. Therefore, the first effort we are dealing with right now is to prevent another U.N. resolution, as well as prevent a Quartet decision."

When US Secretary of State John Kerry gave his speech on the Middle East last Wednesday, “he was like a teacher excoriating his diligent students for the dereliction of their delinquent classmates,” the bereaved mother of one of Israel’s best-known fallen soldiers told The Algemeiner on Monday.
Leah Goldin, mother of late IDF Lt. Hadar Goldin — the 23-year-old Givati Brigade fighter who was ambushed and killed and whose body was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on Aug. 1, 2014 after a Kerry-brokered ceasefire went into effect during Operation Protective Edge in Gaza — was not only bemoaning what she called the “harsh” words directed at the Jewish state by America’s outgoing top diplomat, however. She said she actually holds Kerry legally and morally responsible for the death of her son, and for the return of his remains for burial in Israel.
“Hadar was not a victim of war, but of a ceasefire,” Goldin said, spewing forth, in elegant Hebrew, her frustration with Kerry, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and even the Israeli government, which she said has done nothing to apply pressure on the Palestinian terrorist organization that rules the Gaza Strip to hand over her son’s body or on the international community to live up to its “self-proclaimed humanitarian mission.”
“After all, this is a humanitarian cause,” she said.
Not only that, but “Kerry wouldn’t even deign to walk a few feet down the hall to see an exhibit we held at the UN of Hadar’s artwork,” Goldin said, referring to last September, when she and her husband traveled to New York during the General Assembly.

Some of the commentary which followed seemed to somewhat naïvely take Downing Street’s interjection at face value, while to other observers it was just convenient for them to interpret it that way.
The conservative Daily Wire, for instance, reported that Kerry’s speech was “too much to stomach” even for the UK, with its “strong pro-Arabist tilt”. If Arabophile British diplomats found Kerry’s speech overly anti-Israel, it really must have been biased, went the thinking. Yet this misses the point of Britain’s very public disavowal of Kerry’s speech.
Theresa May’s criticism was not a u-turn following the UK’s reported key role in brokering the UN resolution, or in voting for it. PM May has a strong track record on Israel and Jewish issues, as demonstrated in her recent speech at the UK Conservative Friends of Israel annual lunch. That coincided, not incidentally, with her government’s official adoption of a new definition of antisemitism to help tackle new forms of Jew-hatred. Nor was May’s rebuke an attempt to make amends with Netanyahu, after he reportedly cancelled a meeting with his British counterpart on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos later this month. (His office later qualified that the meeting hadn’t been fully firmed up.)
The British PM’s reaction actually had little at all to do with Britain’s stance on Israel or, for that matter, long-standing differences between a traditionally Arab-leaning Foreign Office and a more strategic approach often preferred by No. 10 and the UK defence establishment. The latter tend to be more sensitive to Israel’s unique security challenges. Although with a former ambassador to Israel, Simon McDonald, heading Britain’s diplomatic corps today, it might be worth revisiting some of the old thinking about attitudes to the region that held sway within Whitehall for most of the last century.
London weighed in on the latest rift between Washington and Jerusalem in a manoeuvre aimed squarely at preserving that other much-ballyhooed “special relationship” – Britain’s with America.

Sen. Ted Cruz and two fellow Republicans are pressing the State Department to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Congress passed legislation in 1995 that called for moving the embassy to Jerusalem, but Democratic and Republican administrations alike have declined to enact the change, citing security concerns. The latest measure, introduced Tuesday as the new Congress convened, would withhold funding from the State Department until it makes the move.
“Jerusalem is the eternal and undivided capital of Israel,” Cruz said in a written statement. “Unfortunately, the Obama administration's vendetta against the Jewish state has been so vicious that to even utter this simple truth — let alone the reality that Jerusalem is the appropriate venue for the American embassy in Israel — is shocking in some circles.
"But it is finally time to cut through the double-speak and broken promises and do what Congress said we should do in 1995: formally move our embassy to the capital of our great ally Israel.”
The measure is also sponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Dean Heller of Nevada.

US State Department spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday he was unaware of any efforts by the incoming Trump administration to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
During his election campaign, US President-elect Donald Trump vowed to relocate the embassy, a move that is vehemently opposed by the Arab world and pro-Palestinian supporters and would have significant diplomatic impact. Previous Republican candidates have made the promise without following through.
“We’re not privy to any moves, any decisions or active efforts to go ahead and move the embassy,” Kirby told CNN. “If that’s happening, and I’m certainly in no position to judge, we’re not aware of specific moves that are being made to that end.
“Our position has been and remains that moving the embassy is not constructive to the peace process, it’s not the right thing to do,” he said, adding that that “wise” policy has been also upheld by previous US administrations.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Tuesday he was “disappointed” to learn that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would not attend an international peace conference in Paris scheduled for January 15.
In a meeting with members of Israel’s left-wing Meretz party, Abbas said the recent UN Security Council resolution criticizing West Bank settlements was a welcome step toward “ending the occupation.”
Abbas said he hoped the upcoming Paris summit on the Mideast conflict would further advance that cause.
The Palestinian leader took issue with Israeli leaders’ characterization of Resolution 2334 as being anti-Israeli.
“I’ve looked over the resolution and haven’t found anything against Israel — only against the settlements and the illegal outposts,” Abbas said.
The PA chief also told Meretz members he did not believe US President-elect Donald Trump would move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, despite Trump and his team having made statements to that effect during the campaign as well as after his election win.

US Secretary of State John Kerry’s outline for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was generally welcomed among the moderate Arab Sunni states whose support would be essential to buttress a negotiated solution.
But the official responses in Cairo, Riyadh and Amman seemed calculated to make an impression on the incoming Trump administration rather than to impel any immediate or urgent follow- up on the Kerry proposals. That is not expected given that Kerry and President Barack Obama have only three weeks left in office and Donald Trump has signaled there will be a friendlier approach toward the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Now, with the imminent change in the White House, Kerry’s noble views may very well remain a small footnote in the history books,” The Jordan Times wrote in an editorial Thursday.
Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are to some extent groping in the dark, uncertain about what Trump policies that will impact strongly on their futures will look like. By giving essentially positive responses to Kerry’s proposals, Egypt and Saudi Arabia “are trying to show they are pro-peace, useful and very relevant as mediators and mainstays of the process and trying also to anticipate what the new administration in Washington wishes to do,” says Gabriel Ben-Dor, a Middle East specialist at the University of Haifa.
The countries also have their sites set on being relevant in advance of the January 15 conference bringing together some 70 foreign ministers in Paris whose goal is to reaffirm the necessity of a two-state solution.

A House resolution condemning President Obama’s refusal to veto an anti-Israel U.N. measure was introduced Tuesday with the support of 51 Republican cosponsors but no Democrats.
Rep. Dennis Ross, Florida Republican, submitted the language moments after the start of the 115th Congress. Sen. Jerry Moran, Kansas Republican, is expected to introduce a companion measure in the Senate.
The resolution of disapproval doesn’t mince words, denouncing the president for breaking the nation’s “longstanding commitment to the State of Israel, our strongest ally in the Middle East, by refusing to veto this one-sided and anti-Israel resolution.”
“Instead of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our closest ally and vetoing this dangerous resolution, the U.S., under the direction of President Obama, broke its strong and well-established commitment to Israel,” said Mr. Ross in a statement.
The lack of support so far from House Democrats comes even though at least a half-dozen Democrats criticized the administration’s failure to veto U.N. Security Council Resolution 2234, which labels Israeli settlements as illegal.

Huckabee, a Republican, arrived in Israel Monday as part of a delegation representing the Jewish Chamber of Commerce in the U.S., and is set to leave Thursday.
"Dividing the city of Jerusalem is like asking Solomon to cut the baby in half," Huckabee said during the visit.
"We're here in the first week of a new year to remind the world that Jerusalem is one city, it's not a divided city, never has been, it's been the capital of only one people in all of its history. It's been the capital of the Jewish people."
Huckabee, who met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday before traveling to the Jerusalem suburb of Maaleh Adumim and the controversial Samaria outpost of Amona, lambasted the Dec. 23 Security Council resolution denouncing the settlement enterprise.
The U.N. "embarrassed itself with its recent action," as did the U.S., by not only standing idly by and allowing the resolution pass, but also by "encouraging it to happen," Huckabeee told the Jerusalem Post. "It is not the settlements that are illegitimate, but rather the actions of the U.N. -- it is the one acting without regard to reality."

Sgt. Elor Azaria, who shot an immobilized terrorist last March during a security incident in Hebron, was found guilty by a military court on Wednesday of manslaughter and of conduct unbecoming. Defense attorneys Eyal Besserglick and Ilan Katz immediately said they would appeal the verdict.
Azaria's trial has been one of the most polarizing affairs Israel has seen in recent years. The facts of the case were never disputed, both because the incident was caught on tape, and because of Azaria's own admission that he shot the unconscious terrorist. As a result, the trial hinged on the question of whether Azaria's account of the circumstances leading up to the shooting -- that he felt he and the other soldiers on the scene were in immediate danger -- was true or false.
Judge Col. Maya Heller, presiding over the tumultuous proceedings, stated in her ruling that the evidence presented to the court supported a manslaughter conviction "beyond any doubt."
In a ruling that refuted the defense's arguments one by one, Heller said Azaria's version of the events, which changed several times during the trial, was convoluted and lacked credibility, and that none of his accounts could be supported by the forensic evidence, which she described as having "completely debunked" the defense's argument that the terrorist was dead prior to the shooting.

The family of an IDF soldier convicted Wednesday of manslaughter for shooting dead a disarmed and injured Palestinian attacker burst into tears as the verdict was read out in a courtroom at the IDF’s Tel Aviv headquarters.
Members of IDF Sgt. Elor Azaria’s family reportedly shouted at the justices that the decision was “a disgrace.”
Azaria’s demeanor drastically changed as the judge read the verdict.
Dressed in a green army uniform, he had entered the courtroom smiling, with family members and supporters applauding him.
But he and his family later looked shaken as the judge spoke, with his mother and father huddling together.
After the verdict, his mother, Oshra, yelled, “You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Azaria’s father, Charlie, said after the ruling that “the court had accepted the B’Tselem version,” a reference to the rights group that published a video showing Azaria shooting the assailant, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, in the head nearly 15 minutes after the latter had been shot and wounded as he attempted to stab an IDF soldier in Hebron, on March 24.

However, having said all that, it seems to me that this single incident is being paraded around by opponents of Israel all over the world to push the false narrative that this is how all IDF soldiers act. They are using this as an “example” to tar the rest of the IDF and the Jewish people as being malevolent, hateful and generally evil.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
In fact, I smell hypocrisy here and it stinks to high heaven. When police or military brutality occurs in the U.S., the UK, Australia etc, rarely does it make the international headlines. It remains a local or national story.
As usual, news editors and journalists with an anti-Israel bias are taking the opportunity here to throw mud at Israel by giving this story unnecessary and unwarranted international exposure.
That’s because the enemies of Israel are always looking for opportunities to demonise the Jewish people.
It seems that whenever anything controversial happens in Israel, the world jumps on the Jewish State to find fault with it as a country, as a people and as a democracy.
Military and police brutality happens all over the world. There have been many cases such as this one in the U.S. which didn’t even make international headlines! Of course such brutality and heavy handedness is never justified, but what I’m saying is why the extra coverage compared to other cases in other countries?
It’s time to end the hypocrisy and the anti-Israel bias.

Shortly after IDF Sgt. Elor Azariya was convicted Wednesday afternoon of manslaughter for the killing of a wounded terrorist in Hevron in March of last year, the terrorist’s family announced plans to bring Azariya before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Speaking with Channel 10 on Wednesday after the verdict, al-Sharif’s family said they would seek further prosecution of the convicted soldier.
“We will go to the International [Criminal] Court and make sure that this soldier will be judged in front of the entire world.”

In July 1988, a terrorist attacked Yossi Hadassi, a soldier who had enlisted just three months earlier. Hadassi grappled with the terrorist and managed to kill him. He was awarded a citation of merit from the commander of the Engineering Corps.
Then the media hunt began, backed by the self-righteous Left, which accused the soldier of murder. On May 30, 1989, Yossi Hadassi committed suicide.
That week, the poet Naomi Shemer published a message in Yedioth Ahronoth: "The soldier Yossi Hadassi killed his attacker, and a year later killed himself. It wasn't only Yossi Hadassi who committed suicide; an entire nation is committing suicide. An entire country is defending itself as its investigators, police, and poets drive it mad and convince it that it is a predatory wolf, Goliath, a monster. The intifada is the prelude and the excuse for the destruction of Israel. We are all Yossi Hadassi."
Hadassi's fate touched me. Naomi Shemer's courage touched me, too. She published her message after a decade in which her work had been viciously attacked because she was "right-wing."
I was reminded of that piece when the Azaria affair broke. We've thrown all the problems in Israeli society, the disagreement rooted in debate between Left and Right and the 100-year-old conflict between us and our neighbors, on to the bowed back of the young soldier. The mechanism of national suicide camouflaged as morality, too.

The Israel Defense Forces is the most moral military in the world -- that's our consistent answer to all the collective blood libelers, at home and abroad, who try to drum up delegitimization of Israel, the IDF, and Israel's right to defend itself. It's no lie. It's a fact.
But it obligates us. It obligates the IDF to operate according to its own high moral standards -- the principles of purity of arms and ethical warfare.
The morality of the IDF is not scrutinized based on one aberrant incident or another, but according to what it does generally. But it is also examined in terms of those unusual cases. How does the IDF clarify that the incident was an outlier? How does it ensure that an atypical incident won't repeat itself? How does it treat a soldier who stepped out of bounds?
Intentionally shooting an immobilized terrorist in the head more than 10 minutes after he ceased to present a threat is an act that goes against the values of the IDF and its moral character, and fundamentally contradicts IDF orders. An act like that is more fitting to the kind of army that people like Breaking the Silence, who are working to damage us, are trying to portray with their lies.

Politicians from across the political spectrum called Wednesday for a pardon for an IDF soldier who shot and killed an incapacitated Palestinian assailant, after he was convicted of manslaughter.
The Jaffa Military court convicted Sgt. Elor Azaria, 19, for shooting dead an incapacitated Palestinian who minutes before had stabbed two other soldiers. The decision, which his attorneys slammed as biased, concluded a months-long trial that deeply divided the country.
Azaria’s trial saw politicians and current and former army generals alternately supporting or condemning the soldier’s actions. Many of the army’s top brass, as well as former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, had railed against Azaria’s “unethical” decision to shoot the assailant, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, in the head nearly 15 minutes after the latter was shot and wounded as he attempted to stab an IDF soldier in Hebron.
Azaria was filmed shooting Sharif on March 24, 2016. The footage, which was published online shortly after the incident by the left-wing advocacy group B’Tselem, sparked an intense debate in Israel about military discipline and ethics in the midst of a wave of Palestinian terror attacks that began in September 2015.
Even before the final guilty verdict was read out by the judge, Culture Minister Miri Regev (Likud) called for an immediate pardon for Azaria and accused former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon of abandoning the soldier.

Politicians on the Right and Left were divided in their reactions to the guilty verdict in the trial of Hebron shooter Sgt. Elor Azaria Wednesday.
Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman urged the Israeli public to accept what he called the "difficult" ruling. Liberman stated that it was important for the nation to respect the court's decision, "including those who like the ruling and also those, like me, who like the decision much less."
Culture and Sport Minister Miri Regev said she will work towards his pardon and that there should not have been criminal proceedings against Azaria in the first place.
“If Azaria broke the rules, he should have been called to a disciplinary hearing with the brigade commander,” Regev, a former IDF spokeswoman, stated. “Unfortunately, the primary court in this case was a field court in which commentators and politicians judged Azaria before the military investigation of the event.”

The manslaughter conviction today of an IDF sergeant in the unlawful shooting death of a wounded attacker has human rights activists scratching their heads at the lengthy due process that preceded the judges’ ruling, instead of the automatic assumption that an Israeli solider is a criminal.
Representatives of Btselem, Breaking the Silence, Machsom Watch, Gisha, and several other European-Union-funded human rights groups voiced their shared bewilderment this afternoon that anyone thought a trial was necessary, given that the accused is an Israeli soldier, and therefore by definition a murderous criminal. The organizations were joined in their expressions of confusion by politicians from the Arab Joint List.
Sgt. Elor Azaria was convicted this morning on charges that he violated orders and rules of engagement by shooting an assailant who had already been neutralized. In March of last year, the infantryman shot a Palestinian who minutes earlier had attempted to stab a soldier and was already lying on the ground neutralized. Contradictory testimonies and a weak defense strategy ultimately resulted in a military tribunal finding him guilty, since, in the judges’ assessment, the seriously-injured would-be stabber could no longer be considered an imminent threat, and standing orders prohibited Azaria from opening fire under the circumstances. A representative of Btselem lamented the waste of time that the eight-month investigation and legal process became.
“We could have told you the moment the story happened that the guy is guilty – he’s an Israeli soldier. It’s ontological,” declared Field Coordinator Birke Naukapo. “Only Palestinians or Palestinian-supporting Israelis are entitled to a trial because those are the only people who can conceivably be not guilty. Such an unfortunate waste of time, energy, and resources.”

Major Hagai Ben Ari, who was severely injured by sniper fire in Operation Protective Edge, passed away late Tuesday evening.
Ben Ari, who was 31-years-old when he was inured, was serving as the commander of training in the elite Maglan unit.
The injury occurred on July 21, 2014 during the IDF's ground operation in Gaza.
Ben Ari was hospitalized in a coma and was later brought to his home in the Golan Heights community of Nov, where he died.
He is survived by his wife and three children.

Two border police officers and two Palestinians were wounded when a motorcycle carrying the Palestinians hit the officers on Tuesday.
According to a police report four motorcycles were approaching a checkpoint manned by the Border Police. The police signaled the vehicles to stop, however, three motorcycles allegedly broke through and one of the motorcycles, carrying two passengers, hit two border police.
It is still unclear as to whether the four riders had planned on ramming the checkpoint, however the two injured Palestinians have been detained and police are investigated the possibility of a ramming attack. The other individuals involved were not caught.

"Long years of daily persecution of me and my family turned out to be nothing," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on his Facebook page on Tuesday, after Attorney Generation Avichai Mendelblit announced that he had looked into and closed four of the reviews into alleged wrongdoing by the prime minister, while moving forward with one investigation.
"'Bibi Tours' -- nothing! Claims of illegal campaign funding -- nothing! Claims of tampering with the [Likud primary election] -- nothing! Claims of accepting bribes abroad and flights -- nothing!" the prime minister wrote.
"Will anyone in the media apologize for the thousands of headlines, articles, and broadcast hours by 'investigative journalism at its best,' which turned out to be utter nonsense? Certainly not [Channel 10 reporter Raviv] Drucker."
Netanyahu reiterated his oft-voiced statement on the allegations against him: "Nothing will come of this because there is nothing to find."
However, the affair that has become known as "Case 1,000" is still under review.

A top Hamas official stirred a controversy after called on the Palestinian factions to establish a federal government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Mousa Abu Marzouk (pictured), Hamas’ deputy diplomatic leader, told Alghad TV that a federal government would put an end to the split in the Palestinian leadership. Many Palestinian leaders responded by saying that Marzouk spelled the end of the two-state solution.
Jamil Mizher, a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said that Marzouk’s comments are “dangerous” and contribute to the perpetuation of the status quo, saying the goal of the government he proposes will be to run the internal conflict rather than a future state.
“It’s an attempt to evade the need to establish a unity government that would put an end to the split and prepare for a general election and start building what the occupation destroyed,” he said.
Fatah was also critical of Marzouk. Usama Alqawasmeh, the movement’s spokesman, said that it was an attempt to evade power sharing and perpetuate the split.
“Talking about a federation is even more dangerous than the Israeli plan for a Palestinian state in temporary borders,” he said.

On November 13, 2016, Hizbullah marked its annual Martyr Day by holding its first military parade in a Syrian town, Al-Qusayr, which Hizbullah took over in 2013 following a long and bloody battle with rebel forces, and which has since become the main symbol of the organization's involvement in the Syria war alongside the Assad regime. The parade featured hundreds of fighters in military uniforms, tanks, U.S.-made M113 armored personnel carriers, cannon, machine guns, and an armored regiment. Also marching was the Al-Radwan division, comprising some 10,000 fighters from Hizbullah's "intervention forces" and "special forces" fighting in Syria, which constitute the spearhead of the organization in the country.
By holding this parade at this time and at this location, Hizbullah was informing its rivals, locally and in the region – that is, political players in Lebanon, the Syrian rebels and their Arab supporters, and the West and Israel – that it is now a powerful cross-border military force that can control areas outside Lebanon's borders. The parade did indeed cause a tremendous stir among Hizbullah supporters, as well as among the organization's opponents.
This paper will review the significance and ramifications of the parade in Al-Qusayr and the messages that it sent.

The Islamic Republic will always back nations and groups that fight Israel, a top Iranian official vowed on Tuesday, the Tehran regime-aligned Tasnim news agency reported.
Speaking to reporters in the Iranian capital, Ali Akbar Velayti — a senior adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — said Iran’s “stance is unchanging and that is providing full and continued support for the resistance line, which begins from Iran and passes through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and reaches Palestine.”
Explaining Iran’s ongoing effort to bolster the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, Velayti stated, “Given that Syria is an important link in the chain of resistance, the Islamic Republic of Iran has sided with the country’s people and government since the very beginning of the regional and international conspiracy against Syria, and will continue to do so.”
When Iranian officials speak of “resistance groups,” they are generally referring to Tehran-backed anti-Western and anti-Israel terrorist organizations, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. The term is also used by Iran to describe the Houthis in Yemen, who are receiving Iranian support as they battle for control of that southern Arabian Peninsula country against the Saudi-backed government of Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.

Clearly, if Iran continues to develop long range launch capabilities, it could choose destabilize the entire Middle East region, and directly threaten Israel and Europe.
The rapid development of an advanced system such as the Bavar-3 demonstrates that the Iranians are capable of developing not only defensive but also offensive weapons systems, even as Iran remains prohibited under the present UNSC Resolution 2231 (2015) from developing surface-to-surface nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.
If Iran continues to develop offensive nuclear and long-range ballistic missile capabilities, the international community may be in for an unpleasant surprise -- awakening to find a nuclear-armed Iran protected by sophisticated, hardened air defences. By then, the balance of power in the Middle East will be altered irreversibly.

In November, Iranian naval vessels landed in Durban, South Africa—the closest they have ever gotten to the Atlantic. The Islamic Republic, since 2013, has also engaged in joint naval exercises with Pakistan, India, and China, sending its ships as far as the East China Sea. And more recently it publicized plans to create naval bases in Syria and Yemen. Yoel Guzansky writes:
A base in Syria, if it ever materializes, would stretch Iran’s naval arm to the Mediterranean and strengthen the Iranian military presence near Europe’s shores. It would also help Tehran’s allies in Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria—Hizballah, Hamas, and the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, respectively. A naval base in Syria would enable Iran to transport regular supplies and provide other assistance to Hizballah without being dependent on overland convoys or aerial transport through Iraq or Turkey. The base would also make Iran less dependent on Sudan, [which has been distancing itself from the Islamic Republic] . . .
If left unchecked, Iran could potentially develop the capacity to threaten crucial shipping lanes in the Caspian Sea and the Indian Ocean. As a result, Iran’s recent announcements of its plans to expand its regional presence to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean could spur cooperation between Israel, which is also seeking to curb Iranian influence, and the Arab world. For its part, the United States under President Barack Obama has shied away from confrontation with Iran in almost all instances. The U.S. Navy has chosen not to counter the increasing provocations in the Persian Gulf by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. As of September 2016, there had been 31 “unsafe encounters” with Iranian vessels in the Persian Gulf, up from 23 in 2015, according to the U.S. Navy. The lack of action is costing Washington its credibility as a counterforce to Tehran.
The incoming Trump administration should do more to counter the threat posed by Iran, particularly in the naval arena, where the United States enjoys clear superiority. It should draw firm “redlines” around Iranian naval actions—to ensure that Iran’s provocations won’t be left unanswered and to demonstrate Washington’s resolve.

Governments across the Middle East are confronting the shrinking number of Nazi war criminals with a mixture of resolve and concern, local sources have reported.
Most of the prominent German Nazis implicated in or convicted of crimes against humanity during the Second World War who found refuge in Arab countries in the 1950’s and 60’s have since died peacefully, leaving barely a handful of elderly war criminals for the countries to harbor. Countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, which once boasted a rich tapestry of such fugitives and employed them in advisory capacities in an effort to destroy the Jewish State by military means, now host barely a handful of such men. The most wanted of all, Alois Brunner, reportedly died about the year 2010 in the Syrian capital.
While the Cold War was underway and American focus shifted from bringing Nazi criminals to justice to supporting West Germany as a bulwark against Soviet-led Communist expansionism, Western powers nevertheless made occasional efforts to capture the most egregious offenders. The wanted men commanded units that committed atrocities across Europe during the war, or occupied command positions in arms of the Nazi government and military apparatus that oversaw the Holocaust and other war crimes. Allied officials in postwar Germany often turned a blind eye to the movements of many such suspects and allowed them to reach the safety and protection of regimes hostile to the nascent Israel, even when tipped off by Nazi hunters.
Now, however, more than 70 years after the conclusion of the war, few, if any, known Nazi war criminals remain in those countries, challenging the regimes of those states to find alternatives to the ways they have shown open affinity and support for genocide against the Jews. At the same time, notes Middle East history scholar Juden Raus, the Jews of those countries are similarly dying out or have left in massive emigration waves driven by decades of often-violent persecution.

There is no State of Palestine because the Arabs walked away from the negotiating table in 2000. Choosing instead to start the second intifada. Over 1000 Israelis were murdered
There is no State of Palestine because when Israel withdrew from Gaza and dismantled settlements, Hamas took control and launched rocket attacks. 1000’s of rockets have been fired at Israel.
There is no State of Palestine because in 2008, when Olmert, the Israeli PM, offered one to the Palestinian President, the Palestinians rejected it.
There is no State of Palestine because the Arabs are currently split into warring factions. The same type of divisions as we see exploding elsewhere in the Middle East.
There is no State of Palestine because too many Arabs (not all) simply do not accept, still will not accept, peaceful existence with Israel.
There is no State of Palestine because too many people, are invested in the conflict. This is especially true of the thousands of NGO’s who in a perverse symbiosis report on a conflict that would probably not exist without them.
100 years after Balfour, the UN are still kicking Israel as if somehow the Jewish State holds the key to the end of the conflict. You will not solve this conflict until you are honest about the cause.

We often hear claims that Palestinians are "native" or indigenous to the land of Israel, but does history back this up? It's worth taking a look:

On Montreal's CJAD Radio, UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer was asked if dictatorships should be welcomed to the U.N. Human Rights Council to engage them in dialogue in the hope of reform. Interviewed by Dan Delmar.

Foreign financial support to the Palestinian budget is running at about half the forecast level, the Palestinian Authority prime minister told local media on Tuesday, meaning deep cuts will have to be made to the budget this year.
At its cabinet meeting, the government said it expected to run a budget deficit of 4.12 billion shekels in 2017 ($1.06 billion), approaching 15 percent of gross domestic product.
"We had expected to get $1.2 billion in (external) support and offers but we have only received $640 million so far," Prime Minister Rami Al-Hamdallah told Al-Quds newspaper.
Saudi Arabia has in the past been a reliable supporter of the Palestinians, as have the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, but it has cut back its contributions sharply in recent months.
Normally Saudi pays about $20 million a month into the budget, but it stopped making regular contributions last April, in part to apply pressure on President Mahmoud Abbas to implement political changes.
The European Union and the United States have also reduced direct budget support, preferring instead to fund development programs that target specific areas.

So far, however, only left-wing anti-Semites have tried to oust Jews from universities or organize boycotts of Jewish businesses. Granted, they often hide behind the fig leaf of “anti-Zionism.” But when, for instance, left-wing students burst into a Brooklyn College faculty meeting last year and demanded “Zionists off campus,” does anyone seriously think they were targeting evangelical Christians?
And sometimes, they don’t even bother with the “Zionist” fig leaf. When BDS advocates denied Rachel Beyda a seat on the UCLA student council’s judicial board in 2015, for instance, they did so because they deemed her Jewishness disqualifying in and of itself. True, after a faculty advisor ruled this unacceptable, the council held a revote and elected her. That’s precisely why grassroots hate is so different from the officially sponsored variety. It’s no accident that, as a study released last year shows, campuses where BDS groups are strong also tend to experience more anti-Semitism, because BDS activists are among the main perpetrators of campus anti-Semitism.
Left-wing anti-Semites are a vocal part of the Democratic Party’s base, even if most preferred Bernie Sanders to Clinton. So faced with a non-ideal choice between two candidates who both have anti-Semites in their base, you don’t have to be a racist ultra-nationalist to prefer the one whose supporters aren’t yet engaging in Nazi-style boycotts; you just have to think that protecting Jews’ livelihoods is a higher priority than protecting them from nasty rhetoric.
Rhetoric obviously does matter; every serious genocide scholar considers it the first step on the road to genocide. That’s precisely why Jews have always been so sensitive to anti-Semitic rhetoric, and Jewish Trump supporters are no exception. They’re far from untroubled by alt-right anti-Semitism. They simply consider the left-wing version more troubling still.

An Israeli investigation into school books used by United Nations-run schools in the West Bank were found to consistently delegitimize and demonize the State of Israel.
These textbooks—written by the Palestinian Ministry of Education—are used in schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in both Gaza and the West Bank.
However, the most shocking discovery is that the UN schools don't teach Palestinian children to recognize Israel as a country—not within the 1947 borders, nor any borders at all.
The research was presented by Dr. Arnon Gross who translated the books, and Dr. Ronni Shaked from the Harry Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
In one of the history books, Zionism is defines as a colonialist movement that was founded by European Jews in order to gather Jews from all over the world and to put them in Palestine along with in other neighboring Arab countries. The textbooks argue that the Zionists do this via methods such as immigration and forcing the Arab population off their land.
No mention is made of the religious or historical connection of Jews to the Land of Israel or to Jerusalem in these textbooks used by UNRWA. The schools also make no mention of Jewish holy sites anywhere in their materials—no Western Wall, no Cave of the Patriarchs, and no Rachel's Tomb.
Instead, the textbooks teach that these are all Muslim holy sites which the Jews are trying illegitimately to take control of.

2016 was a bad year for BDS, with setbacks at universities and the state level. But the Obama administration’s unexpected decision to abstain from a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli “settlements” has the potential to dramatically revitalize the BDS movement, particularly in the international arena and the local level.
The furious reactions from the US Congress suggests that Obama’s decision may also prompt a withdrawal of American support for the United Nations. This shows how the BDS movement and its underlying antisemitism work to the detriment of international affairs, and a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The most significant BDS event in December, and possibly all of 2016, was the US decision to abstain from a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli “settlements” as having “no legal validity,” and declaring that the UN would not recognize any changes to the 1949 Armistice Line (the “1967 border”) — except those agreed to through negotiations. The resolution defines all territories east of the “Green Line” as “Palestinian.” One clause specifically calls on states to “to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.”

Democratic countries worked to establish the International Criminal Court to put an end to war crimes in Africa -- and that too quickly veered from that path and directed its fire at Israel.
In a terrible role reversal, the victim was placed in a pillory. Humanitarian law became a joke, exalted principles became pawns in the hands of the worst extremists, and the courts became refuges for people who fan the flames of murderous hatred toward Israel. It seemed the state of the Jewish people would forever remain a permanent defendant in every legal forum. The attempts to harm Israel even reached the judicial system of Israel itself: As Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently stated, Israeli courts have been inundated with petitions and legal proceedings by foreign-funded radical leftist organizations, with the aim of wearing out the system.
Nevertheless, when it became clear that judicial warfare is a fact, ideas to harness the methods in Israel's favor arose. If terrorists' supporters can take advantage of legal loopholes, why not turn the lawfare weapon against them? Non-governmental organizations acting in the spirit of freedom, democracy and human rights took this important role upon themselves. The Shurat Hadin organization began to file claims for compensation from the perpetrators of terrorism, the American Lawfare Project organization successfully proved that the policy of companies in the Arab world to discriminate against Israelis violates U.S. law, and Spain's ACOM lobby group is waging a noble war against every attempt to boycott Israel on the Iberian Peninsula.
The weapon of judicial lawfare can pose a threat in the hands of a trained enemy, but it can also provide new opportunities. Now is the time to learn how to take up arms skillfully and wisely.

By the end of 2016, the United Nations will have adopted 20 resolutions against the state of Israel and four resolutions against all other countries combined. Since 2012, university students in the United States have been almost as aggressive, introducing roughly 100 Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolutions against Israel, and at best a handful of resolutions against all other nations combined.
Judging from this imbalance, it seems that US students consider Israel the world’s foremost human rights violator — worse than Syria, China, Russia, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Sudan, Bangladesh, Libya, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, South Korea, Brunei, Somalia and Saudi Arabia.
Of course, that’s ridiculous. Yet as a result of a sophisticated Palestinian nationalist campaign — plus a hefty dose of antisemitism — it’s modish for students to reserve their most extreme outrage for the US’ chief ally in the Middle East. The pro-Israel side, meanwhile, has proved completely ineffective.
We’re losing, in part, because most pro-Israel organizations have a long history of supporting Israel, not fighting for Israel. They operate on the assumption that the best way to battle BDS is through education — a long-term solution that won’t work in the campus battles as long as pro-Israel faculty and students remain in the minority.

Amidst a hotbed of antisemitism on Middle Tennessee State University’s campus, Dareen Ahmad, a student and a leading active member in the university’s Muslim Student Association, tweeted: “Israel is a terror state, we need a new Hitler,” presumably advocating for another Jewish genocide.
Ahmad has also tweeted: “Preachhh ‘@Bateekhahead: [translated from Arabic] Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dog!!!,’” and followed with another antisemitic tweet: “Omg if i was in falasteen right now id go wave our flag in every zionist kalbs [dogs] face right now!”
Ahmed’s pro-Hitler tweet and antisemitic comments were just a taste of the many sent out by Muslim student activists on the university’s campus. MTSU student Dana Swaies, a well-known representative for the school’s MSA chapter and Muslim Inter-Scholastic Tournament, stated: “May Allah annihilate the Jewish dogs.”
Muslim student Shaden Hamdulla contemplated putting Jews in concentration camps and called for a new Hitler to wipe them out. Hamdulla has also tweeted, “F**k israel and anyone who supports them,” “Wtf is Israel and why is it on my snapchat feed?” and “can they form a ‘Northern israel’ if israel isnt even a real country? inshallah allah provides you with intelligence.”

American actor Kal Penn, best known for playing “Kumar” in the “Harold & Kumar” series, donated his $25,000 winnings from the TV show “MasterChef Celebrity Showdown” to UNRWA — the United Nations refugee agency for Palestinians.
Following his win, Penn said, “Only in America can a guy make tacos on FOX TV, almost lose an eye, and win $25,000 to support Palestinian refugees,” according to a statement on UNRWA’s website.
He added that UNRWA is “a lifeline for so many families that have been struggling for decades to meet their basic needs and achieve their rights.”
Penn, who served in the White House Office of Public Engagement during US President Barack Obama’s first term in office, implored his followers on Twitter to also donate to UNRWA, saying he would write a thank you note to anyone who contributes to the refugee agency.
He currently appears in the political drama TV series “Designated Survivor.”
UNRWA’s US office wrote on Twitter prior to the final episode that “if Kal Penn wins, so do Palestinian refugees.”

A few weeks ago, Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard drew attention to the BBC`s “soft boycott” of Israel. The term, coined by Mr Pollard, describes the tendency at the BBC to report on Israeli innovations and technological breakthroughs, without mentioning that they took place at Israeli institutions and companies.
Most recently, the BBC reported on a breakthrough in cancer treatment by the Weizmann Institute, but the Israeli origins of the research were significantly downplayed.
I wish to further analyse this “soft boycott”, and argue that it is actually multifaceted. There are times when the BBC completely ignores Israel`s connection to a newsworthy company, times when Israel`s connection is significantly downplayed, and times when Israel`s connection is specifically focussed on, in cases which fit a particular agenda and narrative of Israel, as a militaristic and pariah state.

Even as the US Secretary of State was still speaking on the topic of the two-state solution on December 28th, the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘PM’ was already offering coverage of that long speech by John Kerry.pm-28-12
Included in that coverage was analysis (from 05:07 here) from Ian Bremmer of ‘Eurasia Group’ – parts of which might come as something of a surprise to anyone who has been following the news from Israel in recent years – including the thousands of missile attacks from the Gaza Strip and the terror attacks against Israelis which have taken over forty lives and wounded hundreds in the past 15 months.
“Well, in the long-term Kerry’s certainly correct that an imposed one-state solution is no way to build peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But certainly in the short and medium term – and this has been going on for more than just the Obama administrations – the amount of stability that the Israelis presently enjoy with a one-state solution – even if it’s not final – is perfectly fine for them. I mean, even the Israeli Left no longer talks much about a two-state solution because there’s just not much of a Palestinian threat against Israelis these days. They don’t need Palestinian labour. With American defence support Hizballah can’t launch missiles into Israel to threaten Israeli civilians and the extraordinary surveillance – both human surveillance as well as cyber surveillance – the Israelis can do on would-be terrorists in and outside their country has helped to ensure that Israeli security is tantamount [sic]. So I mean the reality is this just isn’t a top priority for many people…”

Today, the Toronto Star published the following two clarification notices after HRC notified the Star that in back-to-back editions on December 28/29, their editors had falsely claimed that Israel supports a “one-state solution” and that it had built “more settlements” in recent years:
On December 28, the Star published a New York Times article with a headline that erroneously claimed that: “Israel to defy UN, build more settlements”
Contrary to this headline given by Star editors, Israel has only approved the building of new homes within existing settlements, they have not vowed to build “more settlements”, there is a stark difference. The lead of this article confirms the veracity of this, as does a body paragraph which says: “The city intends to approve 600 housing units in the predominantly Palestinian eastern section of the town Wednesday, in what a top official called a first installment of 5,600 new homes.”

On December 30th a report titled “Israel warns of New Year terror threat in India” appeared on the BBC News website’s Middle East page.
After telling the story described in the headline, the report went on to inform readers that:
“In 2012, the wife of Israeli diplomat stationed in India was critically wounded in a car bomb attack along with her driver and two others.
The incident sparked diplomatic tensions when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Iran of being behind it – a charge strongly denied by Tehran.”
Well over three years ago, in August 2013, another BBC report included a similar statement concerning that same attack in New Delhi in February 2012:
“The blasts came a day after two bomb attacks targeted Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia.
Israel has accused Iran of orchestrating the attacks, a charge which Iran denies.”

Yesterday, we posted about an inaccurate headline accompanying a Jan. 1st Times of London article by Gregg Carlstrom.

We demonstrated that no Israeli settlers – according to the text of the actual article – had in fact made such comments, and that the only person who did was Israeli Interior Minister (and West Jerusalem resident) Aryeh Deri.
The headline’s claim that “Israeli settlers” hailed Trump as the Jews’ new “Messiah” is completely erroneous.
We complained to Times of London editors (under the terms of the accuracy clause of the editors’ code), and today they responded by revising the headline to more accurately reflect the contents of the article.
Here’s the new headline:

The fact that a new annotated version of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf has become a best-seller in Germany does not need to be cause for alarm, antisemitism experts told The Algemeiner on Tuesday.
“It’s more than understandable that sales of Mein Kampf make people nervous,” Ben Cohen, author of Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism, said. “But we also need to grasp that people read that vile book for different reasons. For historians, for scholars of antisemitism, for those researching totalitarianism, it’s a key text in terms of establishing that Hitler’s war against the Jews was the foundation stone of the Third Reich.”
“Of course, there are others for whom Mein Kampf, with its pornographic antisemitism, is a source of inspiration — however, the editions they read are not annotated by anti-Nazi German historians, but the neo-Nazi versions widely available on the internet,” Cohen continued. “In that sense, the far greater challenge is the impact Mein Kampf has when it’s read not in German, but in Arabic and Turkish, where it helps to fuel an already intense hatred of Jews in those countries and cultures.”
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld — founder of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs think tank’s post-Holocaust and antisemitism program – felt similarly.
“I wouldn’t turn this into a major item of worry, because today the venue of communication of hatred is social media — Twitter and Facebook and these kinds of things,” he said. “I don’t think a 2,000-page book can compete with that as far as the impact of hatred is concerned.”

A prominent American Muslim scholar stated publicly last month that his community is rife with “horrific” antisemitism and racism against non-Muslims — something he said is antithetical to the teachings of Islam, the Canadian Jewish News reported.
Sheikh Hamza Yusuf — co-founder of the Islamic liberal arts school Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California — made this assertion while addressing the Reviving the Islamic Spirit (RIS) conference in Toronto at the end of December. Yusuf bemoaned witnessing fellow Muslims expressing “some of the worst racism,” especially through “anti-Jewish rhetoric.”
Referring to his 20-year relationship with Arab Islamic scholar Sheikh Abdullah Bin Bayyah, Yusuf said he’s “never heard [Bin Bayyah] saying a bad word about Jewish people ever, and yet I’ve heard in our community so many blatant remarks [about Jews].”
According to CJN, Yusuf’s acknowledgement of antisemitism among North American Muslims went unchallenged, unlike other statements he made during his lecture — specifically when he spoke about “black-on-black” violence.
“…[T]here are twice as many whites had been shot by police, but nobody ever shows those videos. It’s the assumption is the police are racist and it’s not always the case, and I think it’s very dangerous again to just broad stroke any police now that shoots a black is immediately considered a racist…the police aren’t all racist, we cannot say that [sic].”
Muslim leaders — among them Abdullah Hakim Quick, a member of the Canadian Council of Imams — reportedly condemned Yusuf, accusing him of “cowardice.”

An anti-Semitic message was spray-painted across the headstone of a Jewish couple buried in the cemetery of a small Indiana town — one of the only headstones bearing a Jewish name.
The words “Fucking Jew” were spray-painted in white across the back of the double headstone, on top of the large Jewish star, in the Scottsburg Cemetery.
Jarin Gladstein, a grandson of the couple, told the local media that he was “livid, upset, sick,” over the desecration.
Two other headstones in the cemetery were later discovered to have been vandalized.
On Monday, Gladstein posted a photo of his grandparents’ headstone on Facebook and in less than 24 hours had received 3,100 likes and other reactions. The photo has been shared nearly 15,000 times.

A swastika was spray-painted on a sign near the entrance to the Reform movement’s rabbinical school in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The white swastika was discovered Tuesday morning on a Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion sign and was reported to the police shortly thereafter, said Rabbi Kenneth Kanter, associate dean and director of the rabbinical school.
The rabbinical school removed the graffiti later in the morning at the police’s recommendation.
Kanter told JTA that the vandalism likely occurred Monday night or Tuesday morning, and that the school was looking at campus security footage.
“We are grateful for the support of the community and police, both locally and nationally, and recognize that this quickly painted swastika is a nuisance and troubling — but in comparison to issues in so many communities and cities around the world this is very small and very minor,” Kanter said.

Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudis, and Iraqi students gathered for a workshop in Amman last week to discuss what to many may seem like a surprising issue; the future of the Hebrew language in the Arab World.
The organizers of the workshop was the Center for Israel Studies in Amman. Founded just two years ago, the center is headed by Dr. Abdullah Swalha, who obtained his doctorate at Cairo University where he studied Jews and Israeli democracy.
The workshop was funded in part by the DC- and Tel Aviv-based Israel Institute, which also took part in the event.
A closing document states that there will be a push to develop Hebrew language studies in the Arab world, understand the content of Hebrew language classes taught at Arab universities, research to what degree understanding Hebrew would help in understanding the State of Israel and Israelis in general, and brainstorming about the challenges, opportunities, and potential risks of learning Hebrew.
There was also a note made about the history of Hebrew studies in these various Arab countries.
It said that various Hebrew studies courses began at Egyptian universities in the 1960s and that there are 13 universities with over 2,500 students who learn about Hebrew in Egypt every year. A similar program began in Iraq in 1969, in Saudi Arabia in 1994, and in Jordan in 2000 at the Yarmouk University.

The Chinese are coming … to build Israeli homes.
Israel and China agreed on the wording of an agreement in Beijing on Wednesday that will pave the way for some 6,000 Chinese construction workers to come and work in Israel within six months.
Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon said the accord, which will be formally signed at the end of February in Jerusalem, was negotiated for the last 18 months and will provide a “boost” to solve the housing crisis.
Housing and Construction Minister Uri Ariel said that the housing market in Israel has suffered over the last few years because of a lack of manpower. This agreement will bring new technology and a skilled workforce, he said.
“The Chinese workers will reduce the construction time, and bring down prices for the benefit of the public,” Ariel said.

Every year, scores of innovative Israeli inventions and technologies are introduced to the market, and 2017 will be no exception.
From medical devices to clean technologies, Israeli companies will unleash a host of unique products.
Pioneering high-tech entrepreneur and investor Yossi Vardi tells ISRAEL21c that smart mobility solutions and drone technologies are two areas in which Israel will dominate this year.
“The ecosystem in mobility is led by Israeli companies such as Mobileye and a number of Israeli companies active in shared driving, like Via and Gett. In 2017, we’ll see more and many car manufacturers visiting Israel to discover our technologies for connected cars and autonomous cars,” he says.
“The interest shown around the world for Israeli technologies just continues to grow,” comments Vardi, who recently organized Israeli innovation festivals in China and London.

Israeli high-tech companies closed 104 exit deals in 2016 for a total of $10 billion, up 12 percent from 2015, a new report by IVC Research Center and law firm Meitar Liquornik Geva Leshem Tal shows.
Exit deals are either merger or acquisitions, investor buyouts, or initial public offerings by firms.
The 2016 exits figure includes 93 merger and acquisition deals, for a value of $8.8 billion, including the $4.4 billion sale of online gaming company Playtika to online Chinese gaming company Giant Interactive group, the largest acquisition that year. Without including the Playtika deal, the exit figures are “substantially lower than in previous years,” said Alon Sahar, partner at Meitar.
“Following several years of growth both in terms of deal numbers and their proceeds, 2016 presents an obvious slowdown,” in exits, said Alon Sahar, partner at Meitar. “It’s impossible to tell whether this is the beginning of a new trend or a natural correction due to significant hikes in previous years. We will need to wait a few quarters to see whether or not the market is facing a profound change.”
There were eight investor buyouts in 2016, totaling $1.22 billion — and three initial public offerings for a total of $15.1 million.

A revolutionary drone aircraft, big enough to carry people, could be whizzing through the skies within a few years, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
Manufacturers of the Cormorant, formerly known as the AirMule, hope to see what has been dubbed a “flying car” on the aviation market by 2020.
The UAV has been in development for 15 years by Yavneh-based Urban Aeronautics, who envision it being used as an air ambulance for tricky rescue missions in tight urban environments or for moving troops around the battlefield.
Weighing in at 1.5 tons, the drone can carry a payload of up to 500 kg (1,100 pounds), uses internal rotors to keep itself aloft and can zoom along at 185 kilometers an hour (115 miles per hour). It can be remotely piloted or set to fly autonomously.
A first solo flight was made in November and, despite some minor glitches, the company considered the sortie a success. It is now aiming to see the Cormorant meet safety and other standards of the US Federal Aviation Administration, an achievement that would open up global markets for the vehicle.

Zionist soldiers and police have been incited by some of the country’s top politicians to ignore protocols when engaging with Palestinians who initiate attacks, Sari Bashi, Human Rights Watch’s ‘Israel/Palestine’ Advocacy Director, said.

In a special report of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, HRW said that “some senior Israeli officials have been encouraging Israeli soldiers and police to kill Palestinians they suspect of attacking Israelis even when they are no longer a threat.”

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanon-based Hezbollah organisation, has threatened to attack Israeli gas facilities which could result in the deaths of up to 800,000 people. The Shia militant leader said the group has the capability to strike the ammonia gas storage tanks in Haifa if the confrontation with Israel escalates.
"Israel knows Hezbollah has missiles and rockets that can strike anywhere in its territory," he said during a televised address in Beirut to mark the deaths of past leaders. "The inhabitants of Haifa are afraid of an attack... that will lead to the death of tens of thousands of inhabitants out of a population of some 800,000. What does this mean? It means that a few missiles on this ammonia site could have the result of a nuclear bomb."

 Hezbollah and Syrian army troops have reportedly killed civilians attempting to flee a Sunni-populated town near the Lebanese border that has been besieged by pro-regime forces since the summer.

“Three civilians, including a pregnant woman and her daughter, were martyred and four other female citizens were injured when regime forces and Lebanon’s Hezbollah opened fire on them in the outskirts of Madaya,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Monday morning.

The monitoring NGO said that a total of five people have died in Madaya the past 24 hours.

“This brought the number of martyrs [killed] in the town since it was surrounded by regime forces and Lebanon’s Hezbollah to at least 23 as a result of IED explosions, sniper fire or poor health [coupled with] lacking sustenance and necessary medical treatment,” the SOHR added.

- Expresses grave objection to United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016);
- Calls for United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 to be repealed or fundamentally altered so that it is no longer one-sided and allows all final status issues toward a two-state solution to be resolved through direct bilateral negotiations between the parties;
- Rejects efforts by outside bodies, including the United Nations Security Council, to impose solutions from the outside that set back the cause of peace;
- Demands that the United States ensure that no action is taken at the Paris Conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict scheduled for January 15, 2017, that imposes an agreement or parameters on the parties;
- Notes that granting membership and statehood standing to the Palestinians at the United Nations, its specialized agencies, and other international institutions outside of the context of a bilateral peace agreement with Israel would cause severe harm to the peace process, and would likely trigger the implementation of penalties under sections 7036 and 7041(j) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016 (division K of Public Law 114–113);
- Rejects any efforts by the United Nations, United Nations agencies, United Nations member states, and other international organizations to use United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 to further isolate Israel through economic or other boycotts or any other measures, and urges the United States Government to take action where needed to counter any attempts to use United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 to further isolate Israel;
- Urges the current presidential administration and all future presidential administrations to uphold the practice of vetoing all United Nations Security Council resolutions that seek to insert the Council into the peace process, recognize unilateral Palestinian actions including declaration of a Palestinian state, or dictate terms and a timeline for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict;
- Reaffirms that it is the policy of the United States to continue to seek a sustainable, just, and secure two-state solution to resolve the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians; and
- Urges the incoming Administration to work with Congress to create conditions that facilitate the resumption of direct, bilateral negotiations without preconditions between Israelis and Palestinians with the goal of achieving a sustainable agreement that is acceptable to both sides 

*   The resolution's assertions that the UNSCR is "one-sided" and "anti-Israel" - and therefore violated relevant provisions of H.Con.Res165 - are also not supported by the fact that the UNSCR expressly condemned "all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror, as well as all acts of provocation, incitement and destruction" and called "upon both parties to act on the basis of international law, including international humanitarian law, and their previous agreements and obligations, to observe calm and restraint, and to refrain from provocative actions, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric."

A similar dynamic is at play with Obama’s execrable maneuver at the U.N. Security Council. The decision to clear the path for a resolution holding that the Western Wall is actually a Palestinian possession is a serious blow to our ally (and our honor) and proof that Obama’s rhetorical support of Israel was always more about political necessity than personal conviction. Even as the move will please some — though by no means all — leftists on the party circuit, it is nevertheless a political gift to the two politicians Obama (probably) detests most: Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump.
For almost eight years, Netanyahu has argued domestically that the deteriorating relationship with the United States isn’t his fault, but Obama’s. The president just settled that argument for him.
Meanwhile, the resolution helps Trump enormously. Simply by taking office while holding what once were conventionally pro-Israel positions, Trump can play the role of Israel’s defender, both domestically and abroad. It is lamentable that Israel is now a partisan issue in America, but Obama ceded the winning side of the issue to his Republican successor.
Much has been written about how Obama has left the Democratic Party and ideological allies in shambles by putting his perceived interests and ego ahead of everything else. As he leaves office, he has turned that domestic story into an international one too.

Ashrawi stated that Kerry gave Israel "a great prize" because he referred to "a Jewish state" - something the Palestinians "have refused and still refuse" to accept. In addition, Ashrawi interpreted Kerry's speech as denying the Palestinian "refugees" the "right of return." The two things are interconnected. The PA knows that were significant numbers of refugees to enter Israel they would turn it into a binational state, which is why the PA refuses to accept Israel as a Jewish state.
PLO Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi: "The six principles that [US Secretary of State John] Kerry presented are undeniable Zionist principles that serve Israeli interests. For example, he spoke about Jerusalem - a capital of two states. He didn't say that East Jerusalem is occupied, but rather that Jerusalem is a capital of two states... Secondly, he said 'a Jewish state,' giving them [Israel] a great prize. We have refused and still refuse to say that Israel is a Jewish state... Even on the issue of the refugees, he [Kerry] automatically denied them the right of return, and said that it is necessary to reach a just solution of compensation and resettling and the like. In other words, there is no right of return." [Official PA TV, State of Politics, Jan. 3, 2017]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Secretary of State John Kerry’s attack on Israel last week represents a vain attempt to deflect attention from the Obama administration’s failed foreign policy. Kerry’s fixation on the Palestinian issue explains why Russia, with one-tenth the GDP of the US, has emerged as the winner in Syria against both US and Israeli interests and why Iran, its ally, has come to control two more Arab capitals by proxy. Instead of promoting core US interests, Kerry has squandered efforts on promoting a two-state solution that has failed to materialize since it was first proposed by the Peel Commission eighty years ago. Hopefully, the next administration will give core US interests their due and find creative ways to deal with the fallout of a Palestinian national movement that has failed for 100 years.
In US Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent speech, in which he attempted to defend Washington’s abstention on the UNSCR resolution against Israeli settlements, he sounded more similar than ever before to the European leaders who reflexively condemn Israel. The similarity is rooted in a predicament shared by both the US under Obama and the EU – a weak and ineffectual foreign policy. Obama’s and Kerry’s “European” orientation has reduced American influence in world affairs to its lowest point since WWII and most certainly since the Vietnam War.
Just as the Europeans cover up their geostrategic weakness by ganging up on Israel, so too have Obama and Kerry zeroed in on Israel and the Palestinian issue as a means of covering up the abysmal failures of their foreign policy. Unfortunately, Israel is saddled with the costs of those foreign policy failures.

....sheer irresponsibility and multiple counterproductive consequences [from] the outburst of anti-Israel actions from US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry in their last days in office ...
At the fag end of his presidency, Obama reversed the longstanding US position of vetoing wildly one-sided anti-Israel resolutions in the UN Security Council. Instead he passed a resolution claiming that every Israeli who lives anywhere beyond the 1967 ceasefire lines is an illegal settler, and that ludicrously blames Israel for the failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and by implication puts that dispute at the centre of the Middle East’s woes. This was followed up by Kerry’s last big speech as Secretary of State, 70 minutes spent lambasting Israel and the settlements.
This is truly an epic cluster mess that will have doleful consequences for a long time. Malcolm Turnbull rightly, and courageously, called out the resolution as “one-sided” and “deeply unsettling” and said, further, “Australia stands with Israel. We support Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.”
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop made equally strong statements. She and the Prime Minister displayed moral clarity and strategic sagacity.
Obama, on the other hand, emerges as his own kind of post-truth president, his undergraduate certainties and left-liberal pieties utterly undisturbed by eight years of Middle East reality. To believe, while hundreds of thousands die in Syria, civil war rages in Iraq, Yemen and Libya collapse, and the sectarian Shia-Sunni hostility rips through the region, that Israel is somehow the central issue in the Middle East is irrational, impervious to facts.

The Washington Post fact-checked U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's recent speech criticizing the settlement enterprise, and found that a number of his claims contained inaccuracies, significant omissions or exaggerations.
Examining Kerry's claim that "every United States administration, Republican and Democratic, has opposed settlements as contrary to the prospects for peace," the Washington Post found that while the overall claim was true, an important nuance was omitted.
"He's wrong to paint all administrations with the same brush, as sometimes the language (such as in the Ronald Reagan years) was as mild as saying settlements were 'not helpful' -- not that they were illegal," the article noted.
It also said that when U.S. President Barack Obama took office, "the Israelis believed they had an agreement with the Bush administration, reached in 2004, to allow for continued settlement growth in areas that Israel would expect to retain in a peace deal," but that the Obama administration refused to acknowledge the deal.
The article also pointed out that, despite his focus on settlements, "Kerry did not mention that during the second Bush administration and the Clinton administration, Palestinian negotiators were said to have rejected proposals from Israeli prime ministers that would have resulted in a Palestinian state after land swaps that allowed the Israelis to keep major settlements." (h/t Elder of Lobby)

It is unfortunate that the six principles US Secretary of State John Kerry laid out for restarting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations received much less attention in his speech 10 days ago than his strident criticism of the settlements, a senior US official said on Thursday.
The official said that the US does not feel a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be imposed, and that Washington continues to believe it can only be reached through negotiations.
Senior White House official Ben Rhodes has said in recent days that the US has no intention in either supporting or abstaining on another UN Security Council resolution on the Middle East. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there are “strong signals” that decisions made at a French Mideast conference on January 15 might then be incorporated into a decision to be brought for endorsement either by the Security Council or the Mideast Quartet.
Kerry's six principles, the official said, were offered in the spirit of efforts to restart negotiations – not impose a solution – and there is much in the principles that Israel could perceive as “gains and wins.”

What the Obama administration can’t get itself to admit is a self-evident fact that has made stability in the Middle East elusive for all these years: sectarian violence.
No act more clearly expresses this seething hatred against the Jewish people as terrorism. In the last few months, the Jewish State has been bombarded by a consistent wave of terror attacks.
Here’s a complete list of terror attacks in Israel…since Thanksgiving.
2016:
1. November 27: ISIS fighters fire mortars and unleash a salvo of bullet at the Israeli Defense Forces stationed near the Golan Heights in an ambush attack. IDF soldiers managed to kill four terrorists. There were no Israeli casualties.
2. December 12: ISIS fighters fire rockets from the Sinai Peninsula aimed at the Israeli border crossing with Egypt. The rockets failed to cross over into Israel. Instead, they landed in Egyptian territory.
3. December 14: A Palestinian lone wolf terrorist stabs two police officers and a 12-year-old boy in the head with a screwdriver in East Jerusalem.
4. December 14: A Palestinian gunman shoots at a vehicle carrying Israelis in Ramallah, West Bank.
5. December 19: A Palestinian gunman shoots at a vehicle carrying Israelis near Ofarim, West Bank.
6. December 23: A Palestinian lone wolf terrorist stabs a 50 year old Israeli man near outside of his home in Efrat, West Bank.
2017:
7. January 3: Several Palestinians riding motorcycles ram through a temporary roadblock, injuring two Israeli border officers.

Israeli-American television mogul and top Democratic donor Haim Saban said he was “deeply disturbed” by the Obama administration’s abstention on a recent United Nations Security Council resolution labeling Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem a “flagrant violation under international law.”
Saban also decried as “one-sided” US Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech the following week, which slammed Israeli settlement construction as the major obstacle to an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
Saban, who has donated tens of millions of dollars to Democrats and pro-Israel causes over the years, said in a statement released by his publicist that “as a longstanding Democrat who has supported and defended President Obama on his treatment of Israel throughout his presidency, I am deeply disturbed by the Administration’s decision not to veto UN Security Council Resolution 2334 and Secretary Kerry’s subsequent one-sided speech.”
He added that rather than promoting peace and serving US interests, “these actions undermine our country’s long-standing support for Israel and harm any long-term prospects for peace, which is in our national interest.”

To ask Israel to give up control of King David’s Temple is equivalent to asking Muslims to give up the Kaaba in Mecca, or for Sikhs to abandon the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Having said that, Israel must end its control of the West Bank east of its security wall and areas in Jerusalem that lie east of the Jewish holy sites.
The Mount of the Olives and areas east of that hill could very well be the capital of a future Palestinian State.
It is in Israel’s own interest that the world sees it ending what the UN says is “occupation”.
There must be clearly defined borders that ensure the Jewish state’s security while the Palestinians have a contiguous country of their own.
As for the UN and its hypocritical moaning over Jewish settlements, perhaps it may want to look beyond its historic anti-Semitism and stop Moroccan settlements in occupied Western Sahara, end Indonesia’s occupation of West Papua and take Pakistan to task for building Chinese settlements in occupied Balochistan.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and incoming Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are among 21 senators who have signed onto legislation that rejects the United Nations Security Council’s Resolution 2334, which calls Israeli construction in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem “illegal.”
The December 23 anti-Israel resolution passed nearly unanimously besides the Obama administration’s decision to break with tradition and abstain from voting instead of vetoing it. Because the United States is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a veto from them would have automatically failed the resoution and prevented it from passing.
The bipartisan legislation rejecting UN Res 2443 was co-authored by Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ben Cardin (D-MD). It also has the support of 10 other Democrats who broke with President Obama and urges all U.S. presidents and their administrations to uphold the American tradition of “vetoing all United Nations Security Council resolutions that seek to insert the Council into the peace process, recognize unilateral Palestinian actions including declaration of a Palestinian state, or dictate terms and a timeline for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Democratic Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Bob Casey (D-PA), Chris Coons (D-DE), Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) also signed the bipartisan measure.
The legislation quotes Obama, who in a 2011 speech before the United Nations General Assembly said, “peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations — if it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now.”

It's unlikely the New Zealand Defence Force top brass were quaking in their boots at the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's threat that New Zealand's actions support for a United Nations Security Council resolution criticising Israel amounted to a "declaration of war".
The prospect of an actual physical invasion of New Zealand by Israel is laughable. Sheer distance, let alone any other issue, makes such an attack unthinkable.
Neither Israel's airlift nor naval capabilities could manage such a stretched deployment, especially as this would almost certainly be a go-it-alone exercise.
Depending on who you listen to, the Netanyahu outburst could be interpreted as Israel feeling as if New Zealand was the one declaring hostilities.
Either way, New Zealand seriously irked Israel by co-sponsoring the resolution condemning Israel's provocative 'settlements' programme, for which Netanyahu warned there would be "consequences" in the Israel-New Zealand relationship.
Far cooler diplomatic relations are inevitable. Israel may withdraw from active involvement in the New Zealand government's five-country working group on small, smart, innovation-driven economies. For Spark's chief executive, Simon Moutter, the momentum achieved in a private sector-led trade mission to Israel last year may be jeopardised.

The office of New Zealand’s foreign minister was vandalized in an apparent retaliation for the country’s sponsorship of a United Nations resolution criticizing Israeli settlements.
Murray McCully’s constituency office in Auckland was spray painted on Wednesday with the words “traitor Jew hater McCully.”
McCully represented New Zealand at the UN when the country sponsored the UN Security Council Resolution 2334 against Israeli settlements along with Malaysia, Venezuela and Senegal.
The resolution says that the settlement enterprise “has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law” and calls for a complete end to all construction in areas Israel captured after the 1967 Six Day War.
It also calls on all states “to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967” — language that Israel fears will lead to a surge in boycott and sanctions efforts, and that an Israeli official warned would provide “a tailwind for terror.”

Netanyahu must consult Trump privately and try to obtain his support on the following core ‎issues:‎
1. A reaffirmed commitment to President George W. Bush's April 2004 letter in which he ‎agreed that the 1949 armistice lines could not serve as the new borders and that the U.S. ‎would recognize the demographic changes justifying Israel retention of the settlement blocs. ‎Bush made this commitment in recognition of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza disengagement. It was ‎unilaterally rescinded by Obama. ‎
2. Formal U.S. endorsement to annex the major settlement blocs, which, prior to Resolution ‎‎2334, all parties acknowledged would always remain part of Israel in a final settlement.‎
3. Recognition of the annexation of the Golan Heights.‎
4. Assurance that the U.S. will exert pressure on Iran. If Trump achieves detente with the Russians, ‎Netanyahu's excellent relationship with Putin could also be leveraged to deter Iran and ‎Hezbollah from stoking the fire against Israel.‎
‎5. Promotion of America's global position in an effort to neutralize the double standards and ‎bias against Israel at the U.N.‎
Finally, he should emphasize that while the majority of Israelis remain adamant that they do ‎not want to annex 3 million Arabs and wish to separate from the Palestinians, a two-‎state policy, as originally conceived, is now not even on the horizon. The U.N. Security Council ‎resolution that Obama facilitated has empowered the radical Palestinian leaders, reinforcing ‎their delusion that Israel is doomed to destruction in stages and that the Jews will follow in the ‎footpath of the Crusaders.‎

The Israeli left should support efforts to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which are both “justified” and would help bolster its legitimacy in the eyes of the Israeli public, Don Futterman argued in Haaretz on Tuesday.
Futterman, the Israel Program Director for the U.S.-based Moriah Fund, noted that the Jewish nation shares “deep emotional, cultural and historical attachments to Jerusalem.”
“It is a tactical error to create even the appearance that the Israeli left cares less about Jerusalem than other Jews do,” he added. “The debate over Jerusalem has to evolve to reflect today’s reality. No one in Israel imagines Jerusalem will not continue to be the capital of our country or the seat of our government, or that Israel would ever turn over control of Jerusalem to an international agency.”
Futterman also noted that the move would be “justified, and not just in terms of finally implementing the 1995 congressional decision to do so.”
“It is one of the quirks of the ongoing appeasement of Arab countries and the Islamic world that the United States and all other nations have kept their embassies in Tel Aviv,” he wrote. “Long after the Arab oil boycott was relocated to the dustbin of history, this historical oddity remains because of the anticipated apocalyptic response; the peace process would be derailed, permanently, or the Islamic world would rise up in revolt.”

President-elect Trump won't get any help from the State Department in implementing Israeli-relation policies opposed by President Obama before his inauguration.
"The short answer is no," State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters. "You have one president at a time."
Obama's team invoked that axiom to justify high-profile foreign policy actions in recent weeks, notably his decisions to sanction Russia over the election year cyberattacks and to allow the United Nations Security Council to condemn Israeli settlement construction. Kirby's statement extended that principle to barring any aid in helping the Trump team prepare to move the United States embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem or recognize Jerusalem as the nation's capital.
"If the next administration wants to move forward, that's certainly their prerogative but under President Obama — and he's still president of the United States — we don't support that and we at the State Department here wouldn't support efforts to move in that direction while we're still in office," Kirby said.

A property agent who has noticed you believe President-elect Donald Trump will make good on his campaign promise to transfer the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem suddenly has a deal for you on a bridge in Brooklyn.
George C. Parker, a broker at a local real estate agency, thinks you make an ideal candidate as a buyer for the 130-year-old Brooklyn Bridge, which connects lower Manhattan with the bridge’s eponymous borough. He came to that conclusion after discovering that you are among the people who take at face value the incoming chief executive’s pronouncement that he will order the State Department to begin moving the diplomatic facility to Israel’s declared capital, in a departure from three successive presidential administrations.
A 1995 Congressional law mandates that the embassy be moved to Jerusalem, the only national capital in which the American Embassy is not located. Presidents Clinton, Bush (the younger), and Obama have each signed a waiver every six months postponing fulfillment of the law, citing national security considerations – despite campaign promises to allow the embassy move. Trump, however, has provided clearer indications than the previous three presidents that he will accept, even endorse, the move, including continued statements to that effect and the appointment of an ambassador to Israel who strongly believes the embassy must be moved to Jerusalem. Given Trump’s history of saying whatever he thinks his audience finds most convincing in order to generate attention or support, Parker has determined that the credulousness with which you accept the embassy promise makes you an ideal client for the purchase of the Brooklyn Bridge.
“I have the documents in my office,” assured Parker. “You can stop by at your convenience and we can have the deal finalized by next week.”

For example, the introduction refers to Israelis "citing religion, history and Israel's security among their reasons" for being the territories versus Palestinians who "see their presence there one of the key obstacles to a peace agreement and the creation of a Palestinian state." Lending weight to this Palestinian perspective is the authors' sweeping suggestion that it is shared by "the rest of the world."
What the authors strategically omit is that Israelis and supporters of the Jewish state around the world see the key obstacle to a peace agreement and the creation of a neighboring Palestinian state as the steadfast refusal by Arabs and Palestinians to accept a Jewish state of any size, within any boundaries, in the region.
Below are the 7 "things" chosen by the NPR editors to misinform their readers:
1. Settlements are growing rapidly
2. Settlements complicate efforts for a two-state solution
3. The distinction between East Jerusalem and the West Bank
4. What does Israel say about settlements?
5. How about the Palestinians?
6. Has Israel ever dismantled settlements?
7. What are the proposed solutions?

The problem with the Azaria decision isn’t with its process but with its premise: a detailed examination of a soldier’s conduct is sensible only if we assume that the victim is entitled to the fundamental protections we award citizens and, in cases of outright war, enemy combatants. But terrorists deserve none of these protections. Having resolved to operate outside the scope of civilized conduct, they sign their own death warrants when they pick up the knife or the gun and set out to murder and maim whomever they happen to meet. The circumstances of their demise hardly matter: whether they are killed in action or executed once neutralized is a matter for technical and internal arbitration, not criminal investigation. Azaria may be guilty of disobeying the army’s open-fire regulations, and if he is he should be punished accordingly, but to convict him as you would someone who had taken the life of an innocent man is a grotesque mockery of justice.
Sadly, too many Israeli politicians and senior officers opted to applaud Azaria’s prosecution as a way of demonstrating to the world that the IDF is truly, as the old talking point had long argued, the world’s most ethical army, with the chief of staff even taking the extreme step of condemning the solider before his trial had even begun. That’s a shame. It’s vital, of course, that the IDF remain impeccably committed to the highest standards of ethical conduct, but it’s far more vital that it win its war against those who work tirelessly to snuff out Israel’s existence. And winning the war on terror means denying the terrorists their chief advantage, namely committing violence and then demanding to be tried and treated fairly because they are, technically speaking, merely civilians.
The United States, for the most part, understands this principle well; it’s why we have such useful tools as drones, and why we run the prison in Guantanamo Bay. Most Israelis understand it as well, which is why hundreds took to the street today to support Azaria and why former generals like Uzi Dayan, Moshe Dayan’s nephew and one of Israel’s most astute military thinkers, testified in the sergeant’s defense. “Terrorists,” Dayan said during the trial, “must die, whether or not they posed a threat at the very moment of their killing.” It’s a lesson Israel can’t afford to ignore.

The trial and today’s conviction of Israeli soldier Elor Azaria is being celebrated by some as an example of how Israel’s justice system has vindicated the honor of the nation. That’s true. Sergeant Azaria was convicted of killing a terrorist who had already been captured and disabled. A video of the shooting appears to prove Azaria is guilty of manslaughter and the court rejected the attempts of his defenders to claim that his actions were appropriate or an effort to save his comrades from a danger that not longer existed.
And yet it must be said that, contrary to the arguments of Israel’s critics, a wave of support inside Israel for the defendant among the general public and many politicians is not an indication that 50 years of “occupation” has destroyed the country’s moral compass. If, despite the evidence that compelled the court to convict Azaria, so many Israelis on both the right and the left view this as more than a simple case of manslaughter, it is not because they are immoral or indifferent to Arab suffering. Rather, it is because the context of this controversy is a brutal war in which Israel’s youth is placed in harm’s way by their country’s foes; not an ordinary criminal case.
The context of the shooting was a brutal stabbing attack on a group of Israeli soldiers by two Palestinians. The terrorists managed to wound one Israeli. One of the assailants was shot dead during the struggle while the other was wounded. The latter, Abed al-Fatah al-Sharif, was lying on the ground seemingly incapacitated when Azaria arrived on the scene six minutes later. While he claimed afterward that he shot al-Sharif because he thought he was still a threat, his comments on the scene seemed to indicate that his motive was revenge for the stabbing of a fellow soldier rather than an effort to avert an imminent danger.

The latest case in point is Sergeant Elor Azaria, an Israeli army medic who was videotaped shooting in the head a wounded Palestinian assailant who was lying on the ground motionless in the West Bank city of Hebron after having stabbed and wounded an Israeli soldier. Some Israelis on the far-right —including the current defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman–celebrated Azaria as a victim whose actions were excusable in the war on terrorism. The Israeli Defense Forces high command took a very different view of this shocking breach of the laws of war. Azaria was court-martialed, and now he has been convicted of manslaughter by a military court.
The court proceedings shredded Azaria’s contradictory defense, with the sergeant’s lawyers telling the court that the man he shot, Abed al-Fatah al-Sharif, “appeared to pose a danger because he was still moving” while also “bringing medical witnesses who asserted that he was already dead by the time Sergeant Azaria shot him in the head.”
Americans know from own experience how difficult it is to hold errant soldiers to account for crimes committed during the course of a conflict. Witness the My Lai Massacre in 1968, when soldiers from the Americal Division murdered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. The only soldier convicted of this terrible crime was Lieutenant William Calley, a platoon leader. Though he was found guilty of 22 counts of murder, he would serve only three and a half years under house arrest, thanks to the misguided leniency extended by President Nixon.
It is never easy and seldom popular to hold soldiers to account. The IDF understands that such discipline is essential in order to keep the military’s honor clean and to maintain the moral high ground over adversaries who violate the most basic laws of war, to say nothing of the tenets of humanity. Israel can hold its head high for holding Sergeant Azaria to account even if it will get no credit from the rest of the world.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday evening said he backs calls to pardon an IDF soldier convicted of manslaughter for shooting dead an incapacitated Palestinian assailant, and described the conclusion of the months-long trial as “a hard and painful day.”
The Jaffa Military court earlier Wednesday convicted Sgt. Elor Azaria, 19, for shooting dead an incapacitated Palestinian who minutes before had stabbed two other soldiers.
The trial deeply divided the country, with politicians and current and former army generals alternately supporting or condemning Azaria’s actions.
Politicians from across the political spectrum responded to the verdict by calling for a presidential pardon to prevent Azaria serving jail time.

Facing calls to pardon an IDF soldier convicted of manslaughter Wednesday, President Reuven Rivlin’s office clarified that defendants, rather than politicians, must apply for clemency, saying he will consider all requests “in accordance with standard practices.”
Politicians from across the political spectrum responded to the verdict by calling for Elor Azaria, 19, to be pardoned after he was found guilty by the Jaffa Military court for shooting and killing an incapacitated Palestinian assailant.
Azaria’s sentencing will take place in just over a week, on January 15, according to the IDF. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years, though analysts expect him to receive less than that.
His defense team has already said it will appeal.

Senior Israeli jurist and defense attorney Yoram Sheftel has joined the defense team of Sgt. Elor Azariya, the IDF soldier convicted Wednesday of manslaughter over the shooting death of an Arab terrorist last March.
In an interview with Army Radio Thursday morning, Sheftel slammed the verdict, saying the court’s decision was disconnected from reality.
“We’re going to tear every key claim in this ruling to shreds and show how it is flawed from beginning to end,” said Sheftel.
“My first impression from the reading of the decision is that it is utterly disconnected from the facts.” (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Most Israelis support granting a pardon to Sgt. Elor Azaria, who was convicted Wednesday of manslaughter and conduct unbecoming over the shooting of an immobilized terrorist during a security incident in Hebron last March, a poll commissioned by Israel Hayom has found.
Some 70% of those polled said they believed Azaria should be pardoned immediately, while 19% opposed a pardon and 11% said they had no opinion.
The survey was conducted by the New Wave Research Institute from a random pool of 500 Jewish Hebrew-speaking Israelis over the age of 18, and has a 4.4% margin of error.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also expressed support for pardoning Azaria.

The army also needs to ask itself “if there are more potential Elor Azarias out there” and do what it can to prevent similar incidents.
“Soldiers and commanders know very well what is expected of them,” Kasher said in a phone briefing organized by The Israel Project after the verdict was delivered.
Kasher added that the IDF would do well to have the operating procedures “written in a more concrete way.”
But these concerns should be kept in proportion, Cohen said, warning against looking to the Azaria incident for “sweeping conclusions” that have relevance outside this particular case.
The judges’ decision to dismiss the Hebron residents’ testimonies doesn’t mean that all Jewish settlers testimonies will be discounted in the future, Cohen said, though he “understands that some people will say that.”
However, both he and Kasher saw this case as an aberration, an individual soldier who acted incorrectly, and not indicative of a systemic problem.
Cohen also brushed off an oft-heard claim that this verdict will make soldiers think twice before firing their weapon when necessary. “The IDF is better trained than that,” he said.

A court case that reverberated across the country on Wednesday may see even greater ripple effects beyond its borders, as far as the International Criminal Court and Israel’s legitimacy are concerned.
At the ICC, Hebron shooter Elor Azaria’s manslaughter conviction may affirm the credibility of Israel’s apparatus for prosecuting its own soldiers.
This is important because it is the decisive issue affecting whether the ICC will dive deeper into the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.
If Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda finds that the IDF properly prosecutes its own for alleged war crimes, then she is barred from intervening, as the ICC is only a court of last resort when a country fails to prosecute its own.

I’m not happy about the conviction for manslaughter of Elor Azaria but I am not surprised. Elor was accused of killing a terrorist who’d carried out a stabbing against another soldier in Hebron. The terrorist had been shot, was lying on the ground and Elor Azaria had then shot him in the head. This became a huge, international incident because anti-Israel NGO B’Tselem very quickly released a video of the incident.
I’ve barely said anything about the case because, very early on, I didn’t like something I saw in the videos. He arrived late on the scene: I worked that out by combining the first two videos in the public domain. When he arrived he was sauntering, not running with purpose. He cocked his weapon while it was pointing at the sky: this is a Hollywood movie move. It is not what trained counter terrorism officers do when there is an imminent threat.
Then he carried on walking (not running) till he had a clear shot past other soldiers who were standing closer than he was and between him and the terrorist. It’s also clear from the time taken to remove the wounded soldier, the terrorist had been lying for some time. By the time Elor shot, the ambulance had left. If the terrorist had a suicide vest he would have detonated. That always looked like a failure of local command to me, but that’s not what this trial was about.
What should happen is a worldwide acknowledgment that the IDF is the most moral army in the world and that it deals with transgressions with the seriousness they deserve.
What will happen is that the Jew hating world will judge Elor Azaria as the representative of all Israelis and even all Jews and will judge all Judaism by his actions.

Why do the headlines matter? As we’ve noted, most people simply skim headlines, both in newspapers and on social media, and do not read most of the actual articles that are presented to them. So for many casual readers who don’t closely follow the Israeli-Arab conflict, all they know about the latest in the Mideast is from the headlines and alerts of articles they don’t read.
The Times of London says that the terrorist was simply a Palestinian:
This type of headline was also repeated by media outlets including:
Irish Times: Israel’s PM wants pardon for soldier who killed Palestinian
International Business Times: Who Is Elor Azaria? Israeli Soldier Convicted Over Death Of Palestinian
Financial Times: Israeli soldier convicted of manslaughter for shooting Palestinian
Channel 4 UK: Israeli soldier convicted over Palestinian death
New York Daily News: Israeli soldier convicted of manslaughter in shooting death of wounded Palestinian man
Meanwhile, The Australian says that the terrorist was a “shot Arab”:

Here’s a quick rundown of problematic headlines, and the response of editors to our complaints.
The Guardian: We complained to editors after they published a story by Peter Beaumont with an accompanying headline (Israeli soldier found guilty of manslaughter after shooting wounded Palestinian) omitting the fact that the “wounded Palestinian” was an attacker. We then tweeted the following:
The Guardian promptly corrected the headline:
2. The Telegraph: We also complained to Telegraph editors for the following headline, which similarly omitted the fact that the wounded Palestinian was an attacker:
However, unlike the Guardian, the Telegraph refused to correct the headline, and offered an explanation which – even after reviewing it a few times – is far from clear.
3. The Independent: Unlike the Guardian and Telegraph, the Indy at least included (in the strap line of their article) the fact that the Palestinian shot by Azaria was an “assailant”. Further, at some point, editors made an improvement to the actual headline, adding the word “attacker”:
4. Times of London: Times of London published an article by Gregg Carlstrom titled “Netanyahu backs soldier guilty of killing Palestinian”.

After an Israeli military court today convicted Israeli soldier Elor Azaria of manslaughter for fatally shooting a wounded Palestinian assailant in Hebron last April, several media outlets published incomplete and misleading headlines, ignoring the fact that Fatah al-Sharif was an assailant while noting only that he was wounded.
Clearly, obscuring the fact that the wounded Palestinian subsequently shot dead is an assailant who just carried out an attack is a gross distortion of the facts surrounding the case. Several months ago, Presspectiva, CAMERA's Hebrew department, called out Haaretz's English edition for repeated headlines failing to identify the wounded Palestinian as an assailant while the Hebrew edition did commendably note the key fact that he was an attacker. Since then, Haaretz's English edition has significantly improved and has routinely identified the wounded Palestinian whom Azaria shot dead as an assailant.
Today, several international media outlets are guilty of publishing similarly misleading headlines. The New York Times' original headline , for instance, was: "Elor Azaria, Israeli Soldier Who Shot Wounded Palestinian, Guilty of Manslaughter."
nyt Azaria headline.
Following CAMERA's communication with The Times, editors promptly revised the headline to reflect the fact that the Palestinian was an assailant. The amended headline reads: "Israeli Soldier Who Shot Wounded Palestinian Assailant Is Convicted of Manslaughter."
nyt azaria amended.
Similarly, AFP's original headline noted that al-Sharif was "prone," but ignored the fact that he was an attacker:

An 18-year-old man serving in the army is not “everyone’s child.” He is a fighter, a soldier, who must dedicate his life to carry out the tasks we give him. We cannot be confused about this.

A UN engineer, who had worked in the Gaza Strip and was indicted in August for abusing his post in order to aid Hamas, was sentenced to seven months in jail on Wednesday after reaching a plea deal with an Israeli court.
The man, Wahid Abdullah al-Bursh, is an employee of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which undertakes such projects as rehabilitating Gaza Strip homes damaged in warfare.
He has worked as a UNDP engineer since 2003 and was tasked with overseeing the demolition of homes and evacuating the waste.
According to a Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) investigation, Bursh was approached shortly after the 2014 Gaza war by Husseini Suleiman, a messenger for senior Hamas commander Abu Anas al-Andor, who asked him to use his position to help the terrorist organization.
He was found guilty of providing “services to an illegal organization without intent to cause harm”, by helping build the naval commando port in the northern Gaza Strip in April and May 2015 and using his authority to transfer to the site 300 tons of construction materials to Hamas.

The U.S. should stop opposing Israeli settlements and start diminishing Iranian power and Arab terrorism.
President Obama’s decision to stab Israel in the back at the United Nations could prove to be a blessing in disguise. Obama’s instinct for radical overreach has achieved a reductio ad absurdum of the whole U.S. framework toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and made it far more difficult for President-elect Trump to embrace that framework without wholesale revision. And that could give us something we don’t have now: a realistic path to peace in Palestine.
Current U.S. policy toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict evolved in support of a goal — the two-state solution — set by President Bill Clinton and formally embraced by President George W. Bush. This goal has become completely disconnected from reality. That is not to say that a two-state solution is not the right ultimate goal; maybe it is. But given the circumstances of today’s Middle East, a negotiated settlement leading to a two-state solution is simply impossible. The combination of Israel’s international isolation, Palestinians’ steadfast commitment to incitement and terrorism, and Iranian ascendancy to regional hegemony and nuclear weapons means that Israel simply can’t risk the concessions that would be necessary for a final settlement of the conflict.
When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the territory immediately became a terrorist safe haven and a platform for missile-fired terrorism. If the same thing happens in the West Bank, which straddles Jerusalem on three sides and abuts most of Israel’s population, it will be the end of Israel. A two-state solution under current circumstances would be suicide. Peace in Palestine requires new circumstances. And the object of U.S. policy should be to create them. Hence, every element of U.S. policy, including the U.S. position on Israeli settlements, should be justifiable as part of a coherent and realistic strategy for getting from here to there.

It’s a vague childhood memory, but the French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy still remembers the first time he was bullied for being Jewish.
“Three idiots in a Paris play yard tell me: ‘You don’t get to have Christmas presents because you’re a dirty Jew and Jews killed Jesus.’ Maybe I cry a bit on the street later, but first I start hitting,” the 68-year-old Levy, who was born in what is today is Algeria but grew up in France, recalled in an interview earlier this month with JTA.
More than half a century later, Levy — a slender man with wavy, gray hair who is one of France’s most recognizable individuals — is still embracing his Jewish identity and confronting anti-Semites.
But since that childhood incident, Muslim extremists have taken anti-Semitism in France from schoolyard taunts to terrorism, with multiple deadly attacks on Jewish targets.
This “return of anti-Semitism,” Levy said, “perhaps” prompted him to pen one of his most Jewish books ever, “The Genius of Judaism.” The English-language translation will be released next month in the United States, and Levy will do a Q&A (with Charlie Rose) at the 92nd Street Y in New York on January 11.
In the book Levy, a non-observant Jew, traces the Jews’ “misunderstanding with the nations” to their definition as a “chosen people.”

In the wake of the attack in Nice, there should have been a fulsome public discussion over what if anything can be done to ensure that people who have been in France for many years -- in some cases their entire lives -- are not indoctrinated to hate the country so much that they drive a truck through a crowded sea-front on Bastille Day.
Or there could have been a wide public debate over whether, with so many radicalised Muslims already in France, it was a wise or foolish idea to continue to import large numbers of Muslims into this already simmering situation.
Merkel seems to hope that with this raising of a burka ban the German public will forgive or forget the fact that here is a political leader so devoid of foresight that she unilaterally chose to allow an extra 1-2% of the population to be added to her country in a single year, mainly Muslim, mainly male and mainly young.
The burka and burkini, like the headscarf, are only issues because millions of people have been allowed, unchecked, into Europe for years. The garment is merely the simplest issue at which to take aim. Far harder are the issues of immigration and integration. It is possible that Europe's politicians cannot answer these questions, because any and all answers would point the finger at their own failings.
The European publics might get fed up with the distraction tactics of talking about garments and instead seek answers to the challenge we now face, as well as retribution at the polls for the politicians who brought us here.

There is no reason to doubt this rise. However, many of these incidents took place just after the atrocities in Paris in January and November, just as previous spikes in anti-Muslim incidents took place after 9/11 and the near-decapitation of Drummer Lee Rigby.
That doesn’t mean they are any less reprehensible — all unprovoked attacks are wrong, on Muslims or anyone else — just that they mostly occur in response to Islamic terrorism rather than being a routine expression of intrinsic prejudice.
Moreover, the 437 figure has to be seen in the context of the size of Britain’s Muslim population, currently estimated at about three million.
Considering the intensity of public rage about Islamist aggression and the refusal by the Muslim world to take any responsibility for it, blaming it instead on “un-Islamic” or “anti-Islamic” forces, the number of hateful incidents against Muslims is thankfully remarkably low.
Now look at the number of attacks on Jews. Excluding social media abuse and threats, the Community Security Trust recorded 765 antisemitic incidents in 2015, with the highest number of violent assaults since 2011. Now put that 765 figure in the context of Britain’s Jewish population, estimated at around 270,000.
In other words, the rate of attacks on Jews proportionate to their population strength is vastly greater than the rate of attacks on Muslims, even though Jews have done nothing at all to provoke the general public. Narrative is not everything. Reality is.

On Thursday police raided an abandoned home in the neighborhood of Halisa, searching for the suspect. According to multiple Hebrew media reports, police suspect nationalistic motivations for the shootings. A Coastal District Police spokesman confirmed that the police have identified a suspect, however, declined to comment on the investigation stating that “all leads are being investigated”.
The first shooting occurred at approximately 9:30 a.m. on Ha’atzma’ut street, where Rabbi Yechiel Illouz, was seriously injured after being shot multiple times and was evacuated to the Rambam Medical Center. The police were attempting to locate the gunman when a second shooting occurred on Hagiborim Street around 10:20 a.m. Kafari, 47, was fatally wounded and pronounced dead on the scene by Magen David Adom medics.
Initially police suspected a criminal motive for the pair of shootings and the victims - who are not known to police as persons of interests - were shot in a case of mistaken identity. Yet, as the case developed nationalistic motivations have become the central suspicion.
’All the evidence points to Guy being murdered, murdered because he was Jewish - a nationalist motivation,” Kafari’s brother in law, Shachar Drori, said at the funeral according to The Jerusalem Post’s sister publication Maariv.
However according to family and friends that spoke with Channel 2 the suspect, whose name remains under gag order, is not the type of person they would expect to commit a murder.

The victim of a suspected terror attack in Haifa was laid to rest Thursday, two days after he was shot dead.
Guy Kafri, 48, was buried in the cemetery in the small town of Ofer, just south of the northern city. His funeral was attended by hundreds of mourners.
Shahar Dror, brother-in-law of the deceased, said in his eulogy that Kafri was killed solely because he was a Jew.
“He was a good man who helped everyone,” Dror told Channel 2. “We don’t understand what happened and hope the police get to the truth and we find out was behind Guy’s murder. He had no enemies.”
Thirty minutes before Kafri was gunned down, Yehiel Iluz, 48, a senior judge on a Haifa rabbinic court for conversion, was moderately wounded in a shooting, also in Haifa, which police are treating as connected.

President Reuven Rivlin on Thursday paid a condolence visit to the family of an Israeli teenager who was killed in a terror attack at an Istanbul club during New Year’s festivities.
Lian Zaher Nasser, 19, from the Arab city of Tira, was killed when a gunman went on a shooting rampage at the exclusive Reina nightclub in the Turkish capital in the early hours of January 1. The attack, which killed 39 people, most of them foreigners, was claimed by the Islamic State terror group.
“We are here to share in your grief and to tell the world that terrorism is terrorism, and we must fight it and not surrender to it,” the president told Nasser’s parents, Lucy and Zaher.
“We heard what an impressive and wonderful girl she was, and we are sorry for your pain,” Rivlin said.
The Nassers told the president that they had warned Lian against traveling to Turkey because of the surge in terror attacks throughout the country in recent months.

Police arrested a group of Hasidic Jews who traveled without escort to the Joshua’s Tomb holy site in the Palestinian village of Kifl Hares early Thursday morning and came under attack by local residents, authorities said.
According to the IDF, 10 members of the Bratslav sect “illegally entered” the village, southwest of Nablus, after midnight on Thursday in order to visit a site that is traditionally believed to be the burial place of the biblical figure Joshua.
At some point during their visit, the men were attacked by residents of the village, who hurled rocks at them and their car.
“IDF troops arrived at the tomb to escort the worshipers safely out of the village,” an army spokesperson said.
Once the soldiers got them out, they handed the 10 men over to police for further questioning, the army said.
Israeli citizens are not allowed to enter parts of the West Bank under Palestinian Authority security control — known as Area A — without escort or prior authorization, as such incursions often result in violence, like in this case.

An indictment was prepared Thursday against a member of Knesset who is charged with smuggling cellphones and coded messages to convicted Palestinian terrorists in an Israeli prison.
MK Basel Ghattas, of the Arab Joint List’s Balad faction, is undergoing a criminal investigation after he was caught on prison surveillance video passing envelopes to the prisoners last month. He was released to house arrest last week, five days after he was arrested.
Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit authorized the indictment, which includes charges of using property to abet terror, fraud, breach of trust, and aggravated fraud.
The indictment will only be filed after a hearing with Ghattas where he, or his lawyer, will be able to present the attorney general with reasons he shouldn’t be charged. Then, or if Ghattas turns down the invitation for a hearing, a final decision on filing the indictment will be made.
According to the paperwork, Ghattas took advantage of his position as a member of Knesset, who is not subject to a body search, during a visit to Ketziot prison where he met with Walid Daka, who received a 37-year sentence for the 1984 abduction and murder of 19-year-old IDF soldier Moshe Tamam. The MK also met with Basel Ben Sulieman Bezre, who is serving a 15-year sentence on a terror conviction.

A Palestinian fisherman went missing Wednesday night after his boat collided with an Israel Navy ship in the waters off the coast of the Gaza Strip, the army said.
The Israel Defense Forces said the incident was an accident caused by sea conditions, while Palestinians claimed the navy vessel had intentionally “attacked” the ship belonging to Muhammad al-Hissi.
Nizar Ayyash, head of the Gaza fishing union, told the Palestinian Ma’an news site that the incident occurred at approximately 10:30 p.m. off the coast of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, and that al-Hissi was reported missing shortly afterward.
Both the Israeli Navy and Palestinian sailors launched searches for al-Hissi, who remained missing as of Thursday afternoon.

Lebanese President Michel Aoun suggested on Wednesday that Israel was responsible for the assassination of a Lebanese businessman in Angola.
At the opening of a cabinet session, Aoun said the Lebanese foreign ministry was looking into the murder of Amine Bakri, a 54-year-old Lebanese businessman.
Barki was killed by gunmen near his workplace Sunday in the Angolan capital Luanda.
“There is information that the Mossad stands behind this operation,” Aoun said.
The Lebanese president did not reveal the nature of the evidence, nor did he declare an alleged motive for the Israeli spy agency to target Bakri.

This is the type of edgy comedy Saturday Night Live would produce, if it had the guts to offend the thought police.
Instead, it’s from the BBC2 show Revolting:
The satirists behind a controversial BBC sketch depicting “The Real Housewives of Isis” have argued that comedians must be allowed to tackle religious fundamentalism.
The sketch is due to feature in the first episode of Revolting, the new BBC2 series by Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein, the duo behind the Bafta-winning The Revolution Will Be Televised.
Shot during a turbulent year, ripe for satire, Revolting’s mix of political stunts and scripted sketches targets racist Brexit voters, Boris Johnson, Southern Trains and the NHS budget deficit.
The most daring sequence is a mock reality show, called The Real Housewives of Isis, which depicts Western women who are groomed online by Islamic extremists.

The Independent claims in a headline that “2016 was ‘deadliest year’ for West Bank children in a decade,” but the misleading report fails to live up to fundamental journalistic standards.
Correspondent Bethan McKernan, who is based in Beirut, uses DCI-Palestine (an anti-Israel advocacy group, more on this group below) to accuse Israel of unnecessarily killing Palestinian youths. To a lesser extent the article quotes Human Rights Watch, which has its own axe to grind with Israel.
McKernan speaks about the period of time from October 2015 to the present, with a particular focus on children.
But she fails to acknowledge that the Palestinians carried out 2,732 terror attacks against Israelis, many perpetrated by minors. This wave of terror was characterized by shootings, stabbings, car rammings, and firebombings. In other words, the spike in Palestinian deaths corresponded with a spike in Palestinian attacks.
Moreover, only 228 Palestinians died in carrying out their attacks. So even when Israelis were under direct and often deadly assault, Palestinian attackers survived over 90 percent of the time.

Israel needs to view the issue of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as a “war” that should be centralized and waged on a massive scale, Breitbart Jerusalem’s bureau chief Aaron Klein told a Knesset plenum on Tuesday.
Klein, who also serves as Breitbart’s senior investigative reporter and hosts the popular weekend talk radio show, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” slammed the United Nations for the recent Security Council resolution condemning settlements as a “flagrant violation of international law.”
“This unprecedented assault at the United Nations is obviously going to put the anti-Semitic, illegitimate, racist, apartheid-supporting Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions BDS campaign on steroids,” Klein warned.
Israel must reevaluate its response to the radical international movement, Klein said, and create a “massive central hub to fight” the movement.
“Fighting BDS really needs to be put in the context of a war. Of a massive battle,” he said.

The Palestinian leadership plans to expand its campaign against settlement activity, focusing on the boycott of settlement products and settlers, a top Palestinian official said.
“We will come back to the settlements issue…not only regarding the labeling of settlement products, but pertaining to the boycott of settlement products,” Riyad al-Maliki, the Palestinian Authority foreign minister told the Jordanian Al-Dustour newspaper on Thursday.
Maliki's statement comes approximately two weeks after the UN Security Council passed a resolution critical of settlements, which said they "have no legal validity."

The head of Portland State University’s only pro-Israel society told Oregon Jewish Life about being “excited [to] move on,” two months after the conclusion of a contentious BDS campaign on campus.
Brennan Thorpe, the president of CHAI and a StandWithUs Emerson Fellow, was referring to the sense of resigned relief he and like-minded peers have been experiencing in the aftermath of the October passage of a pro-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions student government bill that they had spent nearly a year trying to prevent.
Despite their failed efforts to “defen[d] against blatantly antisemitic and anti-Israel lies” spread on campus by BDS activists, they said at the time that they were preparing to get past the disappointment and work on self-empowerment.
“Everyone as a community took a few weeks to deal with all the emotions, the frustration, the sadness,” Thorpe said, adding that many heaved a “sigh of relief” about the battle’s being over.
Thorpe said that his group, CHAI — along with PSU Hillel and the Jewish Student Union — are “planning different Israel-themed events this year…not just to celebrate Israel, but [to] bring Israel to Portland State and to other students.”

The president of APAN (the top photo, rather tellingly showing Arabic poems superimposed on a certain map, was a prize at their annual dinner in 2015) is another cleric with a hostile view of Israel.
He's British-born, Aussie-raised George Browning, former Anglican Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn.
A firm and outspoken BDSer is he.
Yesterday (4 January) a letter by Browning was printed in Brisbane Courier Mail, which has long been one of the most anti-Israel of Australian newspapers.
It's behind a paywall, but is entitled "Malcolm Turnbull is wrong Australia must not side with Israel"
Intended as a riposte to prime minister Turnbull's condemnation of UN Security Council Resolution 2336, it consists of the usual bile, with all the usual Israel-hating disregard for Israeli sufferings, Hamas atrocities, and Arab rejectionism.

At one level, this is just another battle in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) war conducted by anti-Israeli faculty activists against Israel. There have been some successes for BDS, most notably the 4,000 member American Studies Association in December 2013, but the boycott has not been passed by larger faculty associations. That would change if MLA adopted the academic boycott of Israel.
It’s a battle that is destroying the credibility of the Humanities, in particular, at a time when those “soft” subjects are under pressure from lack of job opportunities for graduate students and widespread public mockery and disdain. I’ve always argued that the BDS academic boycott of Israel would destroy the Humanities long before it destroyed Israel.
We’ll cover the MLA voting this weekend, of course.
But there’s a bigger story here, the significance the MLA action takes on after the recent passage of the anti-Israel UN Security Council Resolution 2334.
Public and political outrage over Resolution 2334 has mostly centered on the attempt to strip Jews of their history in and right to even the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the Western Wall. Much like recent UNESCO actions to expunge Jewish history in Jerusalem, UN Resolution 2334 properly is viewed a part of the Arab Muslim refusal to recognize any Jewish nation in any boundary in what they view as Muslim land. That, and not settlements, is the heart of the conflict.
But as I pointed out, Resolution 2334 had another pernicious side that people are only now beginning to recognize, UN Resolution 2334 advances the boycott of Israel:

Today, the Globe and Mail published two corrections in print and online following complaints filed by HonestReporting Canada.
A December 30 editorial falsely asserted that Israel was building “new settlements” and a January 2 letter to the editor erroneously claimed that the new U.S. aid to package to Israel was $10-billion over the next 10 years.
Contrary to the Globe’s editorial, Israel hasn’t built “new settlements” in many years. Instead, Israel has built new homes in existing settlements, what’s commonly referred to as expansion to account for the natural growth of the Israelis who live there. As well, U.S. aid to Israel over the next 10 years will be $38-billion.
Here are the corrections which were published on page A2 today:

As we told the CBC, failure to mention this information may have led CBC readers to wrongly conclude that core funding to UNWRA was at the time cut for strictly political or other purposes.
Ms. Enkin agreed with our perspective by noting the following:
“It is true that this was not the main thrust of the larger article, but the way it is phrased can lead to the impression that the funding was withdrawn because the agency was assisting Palestinians in any way. It is too broad to be clear. The Conservatives ended the funding because there were allegations that it was too closely tied to Hamas. I agree some reference to the Conservative government’s concern that UNWRA had ties to Hamas as the reason for ending the funding would be more accurate and would provide context.”
On another matter, the Ombudsman rejected our contention that it was erroneous for the CBC to claim that Canada considers Israeli settlements as being “illegal”. As we argued, both the United States and Canada does not consider west bank and eastern Jerusalem settlements as being “illegal”. Both have opted instead for the non-legal designation of “illegitimate.”

French Jews accused a left-wing presidential candidate of encouraging Holocaust denial following his comparison of the Nazi persecution of Jews to the situation of French Muslims today.
Vincent Peillon, who is running in the Socialist Party primaries ahead of the elections this year, made the analogy Tuesday during an interview aired by the France 2 television channel.
Peillon, a former education minister who has Jewish origins, was commenting on a question about France’s strict separation between state and religion, referred to in France as “laicite.”
“If some want to use laicite, as has been done in the past, against certain populations … Forty years ago it was the Jews who put on yellow stars. Today, some of our Muslim countrymen are often portrayed as radical Islamists. It is intolerable.”
In a statement Wednesday, CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish communities, accused Peillon of making “statements that only serve those trying to rewrite history.”

An armed neo-Nazi march proposed by a white supremacist website to harass a Montana Jewish community will go forward, the website’s editor said.
Andrew Anglin, who runs the Daily Stormer website, told the ABC-FOX affiliate in Montana that the march on Whitefish will be held January 15, which ironically is Martin Luther King Day.
Whitefish is home to white supremacist leader Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank. Spencer’s mother also lives there. In November, Spencer spoke at a white supremacist event in Washington, DC, celebrating President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in which he called out “Hail Trump!” and was greeted by Nazi salutes.
Spencer has said that he doesn’t believe the march will happen, calling it a joke, according to ABC-FOX Montana, but he has not denounced it.

Swastikas were scrawled on a poster in a Manhattan subway station advertising an exhibit at New York’s Jewish Museum.
The poster, hanging in the Dyckman Street station on the A train line, was found to be defaced with four swastikas, drawn in black marker, on Monday night and “Jewish Museum” crossed out. In addition, several strips of blue tape were affixed to the poster bearing the words “love > hate.”
The subway station is just north of the heavily Jewish Washington Heights neighborhood.
There was a 115 percent increase in bias crimes in New York City in the month following Election Day, with Jews being targeted in 24 of the 43 incidents during that period. The anti-Semitic incidents represented a threefold increase from November 2015, The New York Observer reported.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called on the Ukrainian government to take legal action against marchers who yelled antisemitic slogans, in an event held on New Year’s Day to mark the birthday of Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose followers murdered thousands of Jews at the beginning of the Holocaust.
In a letter sent Wednesday to Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Hennadii Nadolenko by the Center’s director for Eastern European affairs, Holocaust historian and Nazi-hunter Dr. Efraim Zuroff urged legal action against those demonstrators who called for the Jews’ expulsion and noted the participation of Bandera’s followers in Holocaust crimes.
“On New Year’s Day, in the center of Kiev, thousands marched to mark the birthday of Ukrainian nationalist leader Stefan Bandera, whose followers actively participated in the mass murder of Jews during the initial months following the Nazi invasion of Ukraine,” he wrote.
“Even worse, according to media reports, some of the marchers shouted the notorious antisemitic slogan ‘Juden raus’ (Jews out!) in German, which clearly constitutes incitement to antisemitic violence. I urge you to convey our sense of pain and outrage to the Ukrainian government and encourage them to take immediate legal action against those responsible for this antisemitic behavior,” the letter stated.

A historically Jewish neighborhood in Marrakesh will have its original name restored on the orders of King Mohammed VI.
The Essalam neighborhood will be renamed El Mellah, and the original names of the streets and town squares also will be restored, according to reports.
The order comes from the king, following a request by the president of the Jewish community, according to the Moroccan State Press Agency.
The Moroccan Interior Ministry made the announcement on Friday, saying the king made the decision in order to “safeguard the civilizational heritage of the Kingdom as well as the cultural heritage of all the components of Moroccan society.”
Variations of the word “mellah” in Arabic and Hebrew mean “salt.” The Jewish neighborhood was surrounded by a high wall.

Deloitte described Checkmarx as Israel's fastest growing cyber company.
Information security company Checkmarx is preparing for an IPO on Nasdaq, sources inform "Globes." The company's preparations include the appointment of Shmuel Arvatz as CFO. Checkmarx is also recruiting 100 new employees in the very near future, mostly for the company R&D center in the Amot Platinum high-tech tower in Petah Tikva.
Arvatz resigned as CFO of Allot Communications Ltd. (Nasdaq:ALLT; TASE: ALLT) in early December. He was previously CFO of ClickSoftware, another listed company before it was acquired in 2015 for $440 million. Checkmarx CEO Emmanuel Benzaquen appointed Arvatz to promote the planned IPO.
The company reported accelerated expansion over the past year, with substantial contracts being signed with major companies. Checkmarx was listed among Israel's 50 fastest growing companies by global accounting firm Deloitte for the second straight year, and for the second straight year was described as the cyber company with the highest revenue growth rate in Israel. Checkmarx currently has 300 employees, compared with 180 a year ago.

A state in Uruguay recently inaugurated a $20 million video surveillance monitoring center using Israeli technologies from the Israeli company Elbit Systems.
The departamento of Maldonado turned to Israeli technology for the Safe District project, which spans across six municipal authorities including the well-known Punta Del Este tourist resort. The Safe District project will include more than 1,200 cameras and sensors, including vehicle traffic control, laid out at strategic standpoints.
The collected information will be transferred to a control center with unique analytics capabilities, Elbit explained in a statement. The sensors and cameras infrastructure will allow the operators of the control room to obtain real-time data from the field and contact law enforcement officials, including logistics and emergency personnel, in conjunction with an event.
“We are proud to have won this Safe District contract, demonstrating our ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) and HLS (Homeland Security) capabilities. I hope that more customers, with similar needs will follow the Maldonado District and will choose our unique operational solution as the means to maintain the security of both tourists and residents,” said Elad Aharonson, Elbit Systems ISTAR Division’s General Manager.

Israel’s Consumer Physics Inc. has developed, together with Chinese and US partners, the world’s first material-sensing smartphone.
The Israeli startup previously developed the world’s first product scanner to show components, calories and other data for food, pharmaceuticals and plants.
Called the Changhong H2, the phone will be unveiled this week at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show by the Israeli company and Sichuan Changhong Electric Co. (Changhong), a supplier of consumer electronics in Asia and Analog Devices Inc. (ADI), a designer and manufacturer of semiconductor products and solutions.
The collaboration has enabled the integration of Consumer Physics’ breakthrough SCiO material-sensing technology into smartphones. The phone, to be launched this year, will “for the first time in human history” allow consumers to scan materials and immediately receive insights about their underlying chemical composition, the companies said.

In sunny Israel, aside from the ubiquitous solar water heaters adorning the roofs, solar energy supplies only a small percentage of the nation’s power needs, leaving it far behind countries with cloudier and colder climates.
Now the fledgling solar industry is trying to make a leap forward with a large-scale project boasting the world’s tallest solar tower, as a symbol of Israel’s renewal energy ambitions.
With Israel traditionally running its economy on fossil fuels, renewable energy has long been hobbled by bureaucracy and a lack of incentives. But the country is starting to make an effort, setting a goal of generating 10 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, up from the current 2.5%.
The Ashalim project, deep in the Negev desert, is made up of three plots, with a fourth planned for the future, each with a different solar technology. Together, the fields will be Israel’s largest renewable energy project when completed by 2018. They are set to generate some 310 megawatts of power, about 1.6% of the country’s energy needs — enough for about 130,000 households, or roughly 5% of Israel’s population, according to the Israel Electricity Authority.
“It’s the most significant single building block in Israel’s commitment to CO2 reduction and renewable energy,” said Eran Gartner, chief executive of Megalim Solar Power Ltd., which is building one part of the project.
The centerpiece is a solar tower that will be the world’s tallest at 250 meters (820 feet).

The Modern Language Association may soon follow in the footsteps of the American Studies Association, National Women’s Studies Association and other academic groups in boycotting Israeli academic institutions.It has been flirting with an anti-Israel agenda for the past three years, and this Saturday the MLA’s Delegate Assembly could make it official by approving a formal boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) resolution, Inside Higher Ed reports.It’s not the only Israel-related resolution under consideration: There’s another opposing a boycott and a third asking the MLA to “condemn attacks on academic freedom in Palestinian universities, whether they are perpetrated by the Palestinian Authority or by Hamas.”University of Toronto Prof. Rebecca Comay calls it “a matter of urgency” for the MLA to approve the BDS resolution she has proposed:

How can we turn a deaf ear to the appeal of our Palestinian colleagues whose academic rights are being so flagrantly and systematically violated (along with so many other fundamental human rights that are being trampled on a daily basis)? This is a moment where our actions might actually make a difference.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Prof. Rachel Harris, who is circulating the opposing resolution, says the BDS resolution would actually hurt the Arabs who are educated at Israeli institutions.It’s also a huge distraction from more pressing issues for MLA members, such as “adjunctification” and attacks on tenure in Wisconsin, she told Inside Higher Ed:

[T]hese topics are not being addressed because all of the oxygen in the room is being sucked out to engage in this one topic, which does not directly affect the teaching and instruction of languages and literatures and cultures.

Her UIUC colleague Cary Nelson agrees that it’s ludicrous for the MLA to create its own “foreign policy” and thus “divide the membership,” while former MLA President Russell Berman – an anti-boycott cosponsor at Stanford – said the group would be in “breach of contract” if it approved BDS:

I believe that if we were to endorse a boycott, we would be acting specifically against the constitution of the MLA, because the universities we would be boycotting are themselves pursuing the goals of the MLA — that is, the study and teaching and research of modern languages.

Even an approved BDS resolution can be shot down by the MLA executive council if it concludes the resolution violates the “constitutional, legal and fiduciary” obligations of the group. If it sails through the council, the full MLA membership would vote on it.

The Christians are never going to be persuaded that Israel, as I believe, behaves as a rogue state responsible for the merciless slaughter of thousands of Palestinians under the leadership of Netanyahu and the other Israeli Prime Ministers before him because they believe that the Jews are God's chosen people (meaning they can do what they like and it must be God's will), so whatever the crime, they look to excuse the appalling behaviour.
It's impossible for Palestinians to negotiate, no one "negotiates" with Netanyahu, in a normal give and take manner, it's only his way and he cares not one bit for global condemnation of his assault on Palestinians as he has the American neocon Zionist Jews politically behind him and the hoodwinked US taxpayer haplessly funding him to the tune of billions of dollars each year calculated at about $US11 million each day.

Anyone wanting to see the truth of the just how much Palestinian land has been stolen by the Israelis since 1946 should simply use their home PC and google "Palestine map-loss of land" to see that Palestine has virtually been wiped from the face of the earth already, land confiscated, buildings bulldozed and any Palestinian commercial activity on a daily basis continually frustrated by the Israeli military such that Palestinians starve in what was once their homeland.

According to Rabbi Fischmann, "The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon". This is being played out now with the destruction of Iraq and now Syria by the US backing the al-Qaeda rebels as they have now openly admitted.

According to the founding father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, circa 1897, the area of the Jewish State should stretch: "From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates." And according to Rabbi Fischmann, member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, in his 1947 testimony before a UN special committee, "The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon." 

Sir ABDUR RAHMAN (India) : Rabbi Fishman, I do not know the Bible, I do not pretend to know it, but I should like to get information from you, your point of view, and I hope you will enlighten me as to what you have to say in regard to a few matters which I will put to you.

Rabbi Fishman, what was "the Promised Land"?

RABBI FISHMAN: The Promised Land was quite a large one, from the river of Egypt, up to the Euphrates.

No European nation protested against the Islamic colonization of Jewish-Palestinian areas, the expulsion of their Jewish inhabitants and the seizure of their belongings, or against the persecution of Jews in Arab countries.
An artificial Palestinian Arab "people" was created in order to replace the people of Israel. A European army of forger-historians and Arab Christian dhimmis transferred the historic characteristics of the Jews onto them. Names of towns and regions were Islamized: Jerusalem was called Al-Quds and "the West Bank" replaced Judea and Samaria.
Israelis, guilty of existing, were expected to apologize for that, humbly to maintain their enemies and suffer their terrorism without protesting or defending themselves. Their crime? They refused to mingle with and disappear into dhimmitude by giving up their rights and their history to the people created by the Euro-Arab alliance to replace them.
It is the turn of Europeans to see a replacement population be created in their countries, with all the rights that are being taken away from them. It is their turn to be forced to renounce their national, historic, cultural and religious identity, to apologize and take the blame for existing. It is their turn to be forced to monitor their borders and guard their airports, their schools, their trains, their streets and their cities with soldiers. European governments that contemplated the destruction of Israel worked together with the enemies of Israel to destroy their own people, their sovereignty, their security and their freedoms.
The recognition of the legitimacy of Israel's return to its homeland is the essential condition of Islamic peace with the world, because it will abolish the jihadist ideology.

Ya’alon and Eisenkot and his generals have repeatedly offended the public with comparisons of “IDF values” with alleged processes of barbarization, Nazification and ISIS-ization of the public by the likes of Azaria and his supporters.
If there was a specific moment where the military brass abandoned its compact with society once and for all, it came on Tuesday, the day before the military court convicted Azaria of manslaughter. In a speech that day, Eisenkot insisted that IDF soldiers are not “our children.” They are grownups and they are required to obey the orders they receive.
By making this statement the day before the verdict in a case that pitted society against the General Staff, which sided with B’Tselem, Eisenkot told us that the General Staff no longer feels itself obligated by a sacred compact with the people of Israel.
Azaria is the first victim of a General Staff that has decided to cease serving as the people’s army and serve instead as B’Tselem’s army. The call now spreading through the Knesset for Azaria to receive a presidential pardon, while certainly reasonable and desirable, will likely fail to bring about his freedom. For a pardon request to reach President Reuven Rivlin’s desk, it first needs to be stamped by Eisenkot.
A pardon for Azaria would go some way toward repairing the damage the General Staff has done to its relationship with the public. But from Eisenkot’s behavior this week, it is apparent that he feels no need and has no interest in repairing that damage.
As a result, it is likely that Azaria will spend years behind bars for killing the enemy.
Moreover, if nothing forces Eisenkot and his generals to their senses, Azaria will neither be the last nor the greatest victim of their betrayal of the public’s trust. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

This impression was reinforced over the ensuing months by the fact that Eisenkot, in particular, refused to stop talking about the case, while demonstrating shocking insensitivity to the way his comments would sound to most Israelis. The very day before the verdict was issued, for instance, he said, “An 18-year-old man serving in the army is not ‘everyone’s child’ … He is a fighter, a soldier, who must dedicate his life to carry out the tasks we give him.”
Obviously, the second part of that statement is true; the army can’t function if its 18-year-old draftees aren’t treated as soldiers and fighters. But to parents, their child is always “their child,” even after he turns 18 and dons a uniform. And because in Israel, most young men do army service, most parents can imagine their own son in any other soldier’s place. In that sense, Azaria is “everyone’s child,” just as kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit was “everyone’s child.” Israelis therefore overwhelmingly supported freeing 1,027 terrorists to secure his freedom. Israeli parents entrust the army with their most precious possession–their children–and in return, they expect the army to take the best possible care of them that’s consistent with carrying out its military functions.
Thus, when Eisenkot dismissively declared that a soldier isn’t “everyone’s child,” what Israeli parents heard was a refusal to acknowledge that his soldiers are indeed also their children, whose protection must be high on his priority list. And that merely reinforced the impression left by his initial hasty condemnations: In responding to the case, he had given insufficient weight to his responsibility toward his soldiers.
Based on the evidence, I see no reason to think Azaria was in fact convicted unjustly. But from the start, Eisenkot and Ya’alon created the appearance of injustice by routinely speaking out against Azaria when they should simply have kept silent and let the military justice system do its work. The result is that now, many Israelis still aren’t certain Azaria was convicted fairly, and that has translated into overwhelming support for an early pardon.
This case has sowed devastating distrust of both the army’s leadership and its justice system among a large section of the Israeli public. Yet much of that distrust could have been avoided had Ya’alon and Eisenkot simply kept their mouths shut. That neither man proved capable of doing so is a damning indictment of them, and a tragedy for Israel.

Critics of Israel will dismiss the measures more as a function of effective lobbying by AIPAC than a groundswell of pro-Israel opinion. Schumer’s participation will be interpreted as a concession to local New York politics. But the larger story is that groups like J Street, which supports Obama’s stand and can claim to represent the views of the Bernie Sanders/Keith Ellison wing of the Democratic Party, have even less influence in the 115th Congress than they had before.
Obama’s lame duck betrayal will encourage some on the left to continue their efforts to distance the party from its former stance as a staunch backer of the Jewish state. But as much as they like to think that the future of the party is theirs, they remain effectively marginalized. As a minority, the party has bigger priorities than pursuing the former president’s vendetta against Prime Minister Netanyahu. Though many party activists have little affinity for Israel, most House and Senate Democrats still don’t wish to follow Sanders and Ellison down the anti-Israel rabbit hole.
Obama’s popularity and power were enough to force Democrats to treat support for the Iran nuclear deal as a litmus test of loyalty to both the party and the White House despite the opposition of the pro-Israel community. But once he and Secretary of State Kerry leave office this month, there will be little reason for Democrats—especially those already worried about the 2018 midterms—to buck public support for Israel.
Nor will Trump’s ardent embrace of Israel help J Street mobilize Congressional Democrats to back their cause. There will be plenty of better opportunities for the minority party to push back against Trump’s initiatives on health care and a host of other issues. Any attempt to obstruct a move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem or to prevent the new administration from reversing Obama’s effort to back international pressure on Israel will bring few rewards and come at a high price for Democrats. The dismay expressed by Haim Saban and other top donors about the UN vote is a reminder of just how much damage the president might have done to the party’s prospects.
Ellison’s campaign to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee will be the next big test of the strength of the left. But Congress’s rebuke of the departing Obama and Kerry is just one more sign that J Street and its allies are losing rather than gaining ground in 2017.

I am an unwavering proponent of the two-state solution in the Middle East.
And I continue to think that, even battered and bruised, abandoned by some, rejected by others, it is the only solution that, over time, will allow Israel to remain at once the Jewish state conceived by its pioneers and the exemplary democracy whose spirit and institutions 70 years of war, open and otherwise, have not managed to erode.
Yet, inured as I am to disappointment, I was deeply shocked by the circumstances surrounding the adoption by the United Nations Security Council, on December 23, of Resolution 2334, which called upon Israel to “immediately … cease” what some view as the colonization of the occupied Palestinian territories.
I know that news moves fast. Given that fast pace — especially at a moment when the United States has eyes and ears only for the “transition,” for the acts and utterances of the president-elect, for the government that he is setting up, and for his wife, his daughter and little Barron — this story may strike some as already being ancient history. Nevertheless, it has been swirling around in my head for two weeks. And I would like to take a moment to explain why.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the US House of Representatives for declaring a United Nations Security Council resolution to be a “one-sided” obstacle to peace.
“After the anti-Israeli decision at the United Nations,” he tweeted in Hebrew, “yesterday the American Congress accepted a different resolution. The members of congress expressed clear support for Israel and clear opposition to the [UNSC] resolution. Thank you members of Congress, thank you America!”
Netanyahu later issued a video in English praising the vote against the “outrageous” UN resolution, and noting, “Democrats and Republics alike know that the Western Wall isn’t occupied territory.” Thus, “they voted either to repeal the resolution at the UN or change it. And that’s exactly what we intend to do.”
The House resolution was seen as a rejection of the Obama administration, which did not veto December 23’s UNSC Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements as illegal, thus enabling it to pass. Netanyahu has castigated the administration for abstaining in the vote, ridiculed its assertion that all land in Jerusalem and the West Bank captured by Israel in the 1967 war is occupied Palestinian territory, and claimed that the Obama presidency organized the resolution in what he called an “ambush.” The Administration denies this.

Republicans nearly unanimous (233-4), Democrats split (109-76) — Possible DNC Chair Keith Ellison voted NO
The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approves House Resolution 11 (full embed at bottom) which criticizes not only anti-Israel UN Security Council Resolution 2334, but also the U.S. abstention.
It was the criticism of the abstention that split Democrats, with several speakers claiming Republicans were politicizing support for Israel in Congress. Several speakers claimed the Resolution was a swipe at Obama as he was leaving office.
Potential DNC Chair Keith Ellison voted No.
Republicans, by contrast, were almost unanimous.
Speaker Paul Ryan gave the opening speech in support of the House Resolution

On Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) told SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam there was some congressional pushback against “USexit,” the drive to pull the U.S. out of the United Nations after its anti-Israel vote.
“I remember when I was a little kid, I saw these signs on fence posts and stuff: ‘Get Out of the U.N.’ And I thought, you know, that’s a little extreme. Well, the further I’ve gone, the more I’m going, ‘You know what? There was something to that,’” Gohmert said.
“So many dictatorships that are calling the shots, so many violators of human rights that are in charge of human rights – and they’re dictating to what was the freest country in the world, how bad we are and how bad Israel is, when actually, Muslims are more free in Israel than any other country in the area,” he pointed out.
“We’re about to bring up what should be a very noble thing, a resolution basically condemning the U.N. resolution on the Palestinian issue,” Gohmert said. “And yet it says four places in the resolution that we’re for a two-state solution. I’m not. As a Christian, I know what the Book of Joel and other places say, where there’s gonna be a day when the children of Israel do come back to Israel, and then all the nations that have divided Israel will be facing judgment.”

Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) took aim at the Obama administration for failing to stop a United Nations resolution aimed at the nation of Israel condemning settlements in so-called disputed territory.
Cruz alleged the failure to do so was done to advance outgoing President Barack Obama’s legacy, who he described along with Secretary of State John Kerry as an enemy of Israel.
“For decades, the United States has stood an ally of Israel at the United Nations against anti-Semitism,” Cruz said. “And I think Barack Obama did this because he wanted to secure his legacy. And I got to tell you, Sean, I think he has. I think history is going to record Barack Obama and John Kerry as relentless enemies of Israel.”

The imminent arrival at the White House of President- elect Donald Trump is welcomed by many in Israel, particularly by those who identify with the Right. However, the leadership change in Washington is also spurring European states and the present US administration to establish facts on the ground before Trump’s inauguration.
For the Europeans and the Obama administration the goal seems to be to make it more difficult for the Trump administration to honor promises such as moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, or to allow unrestricted housing construction in Judea and Samaria.
These efforts are likely to play out at the Paris Mideast Conference, slated to take place on January 15, five days before Trump takes office.
Preceded by UN Security Council Resolution 2334 on the illegality of the Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem, and by US Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech, which laid out six principles for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Paris summit could lead to another Security Council resolution that dictates the general contour of a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, before Trump takes office.
A day after the Paris meeting, the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council, composed of the foreign ministers of the 28 EU countries, is scheduled to meet in Brussels, and may also issue a statement on the Middle East.

Listen to John Kerry’s speech on the comatose Middle East “peace process,” or follow the serial condemnations against Israel at the United Nations, including the latest Security Council resolution 2334, and you’d think that the biggest sin in the world is that Jews build too much. They build too many houses, too many schools, too many synagogues, too many hospitals, too many roads.
Think about that. The biggest problem with the Jews is not that they go on terror rampages that murder thousands of innocents, or that they jail poets, hang gays or stone women. No, it’s that they build too much.
The reason this Jewish construction is considered such a sin, of course, is that it’s happening inside disputed areas which Israel captured in a defensive war in 1967, when its Arab neighbors did everything they could to throw the Jews into the sea.
One of those disputed areas is East Jerusalem, which includes the Old City and the holiest active site in Judaism, the Western Wall. From the time Israel was created in 1948 until 1967, East Jerusalem was administered by Jordan and became a decrepit and closed place where holy sites were routinely destroyed.
After its liberation by the Jews in 1967, Jerusalem flourished, becoming an open, international city where all religions were honored.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 violates Article 80 of the United Nations Charter and accordingly is illegal in international law.
Any attempt by the Security Council to enforce Resolution 2334 or to pass any new Resolutions based on Resolution 2334 will also be illegal.
Article 80 preserves the legal rights vested in the Jewish people to reconstitute the Jewish National Home within 22 per cent of the territory comprised in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine (“Mandate”). That territory includes what is known today as Area "C" located in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem (“disputed areas").
Resolution 2334 seeks to erase and annul – not preserve – those vested Jewish legal rights in the disputed areas by:

What happens when UN Security Council resolutions are ignored? That depends, really—on whether you are any of 192 other members of the United Nations, or are Israel.
Defenders of Israel often claim that it is treated differently by the United Nations from any other nation. That claim is accurate, and a brief look at Lebanon offers some proof. It continues to violate Security Council resolutions, year after year—but no one complains, and no one ever argues that Lebanon must be punished with boycotts or prosecutions for doing so. In fact they are often congratulated for their defiance.
The United Nations Security Council has been saying for decades that the Government of Lebanon must exercise control of its territory. Resolution 1559 of 2004 “Calls for the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias” and “Supports the extension of the control of the Government of Lebanon over all Lebanese territory.” By “Lebanese militias” the UN was referring to Hezbollah, but dared not speak its name. In any event, the Government of Lebanon did not comply.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you will be aware that United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 was adopted on 23 December 2016. The resolution was adopted in part, because the United States abstained rather than used their veto.
Further, on 28th December, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke in detail of the reasoning behind the US decision. Oddly, considering the UK had just supported the resolution, the UK PM Theresa May was critical of Kerry’s speech.
I do not need to enter into deep discussion over why UN 2334 should have been opposed. Far beyond the one-sided nature of the resolution, UN statements such as these are inter-dependent, building as they do, an ever increasing pile of self-referencing, legally-illiterate and conflict sustaining documentation. Fodder for the anti-Israel lynch mob. For those interested, on Sunday 8th January, there is a public demonstration in London against UK support for the UN vote.
Regardless of your position on different elements of Israeli activity in the West Bank, this resolution should have been shouted down. It is part of a unified effort, working alongside other UN specialized agencies such as UNESCO and UNHRC and UNRWA, that seek to rewrite Jewish history and delegitimise Israel. Can Israel be given a fair hearing at the United Nations? No, it cannot. So what friend of Israel would place Israel into that courtroom?

Israel and the United States share much. They began as pioneer societies and were motivated by ideals. The Pilgrims foresaw the city on a hill. The Zionists longed for a return to a homeland from which Jews had been dispersed since ancient days. The seed of Abraham united two peoples. Students of the American experience delve into political and philosophical tracts. They study economics and the Enlightenment and debate religion’s role in the Founding. Gordis opens by recounting Zionist literature — its poetry and its prose. The movement rose from ghetto and shtetl. The Colonies differed. Zionism reflected Western and Eastern Europe — and insights as fresh as Scripture.
The United States was born in revolution; Israel was reborn under siege. Minutemen gathered at Lexington and Concord; they fought at Bunker Hill. Yorktown turned the world upside down. Israel was greeted by hostility. Its enemies attacked at once. A so-called two state solution could have come into existence in 1948. Israel would have accepted coexistence; its foes did not. In a move of transcendent cynicism and hate, various Arab countries expelled their Jewish residents and simultaneously waged war against their refuge. Israel beat the odds. It has survived other assaults against its integrity. Israelis have suffered formal wars as well as terrorism. Terrorists have targeted Olympic teams and children at play.
In 1967, Israel won a desperate war and reunited Jerusalem. It gained sovereignty it had not sought and has erred while occupying disputed territory. Its record remains superior to the record of its antagonists, nevertheless. Regarding rightness, there is no dispute. We prefer Labor to Likud, Tzipi Livni to Benjamin Netanyahu. The Times-Dispatch stands by Israel. The equation is simple yet strong: “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain. O thou that tellest good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid.”
Obama is wrong.

Commentator Richard Gross's latest missive misleads through omissions, applauding the most recent anti-Israel U.N. vote and blaming Israel for the lack of a peaceful "two state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ("No chance for peace," Dec. 30).
Mr. Gross claims that Israel ignored Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's advice to "resolve the Palestinian issue." But it was the leadership of the Palestinian Authority that rejected U.S. and Israeli offers of statehood in exchange for peace at Camp David in 2000, at Taba in 2001 and after the Annapolis Conference in 2008, among other instances. Had they been accepted, settlements would be a moot point.
Mr. Gross omits that the PA is violating the terms of the Oslo process which created it and under which it still receives international aid. That process called for recognizing Israel and resolving "outstanding issues" in bilateral negotiations with the Jewish state. It also stipulates that the Palestinian leadership cease its incitement to anti-Jewish violence.
Yet no such thing has occurred. In fact, Palestinian "peace negotiator" Saeb Erekat, who met with Secretary of State John Kerry shortly before the recent U.N. vote, said in October 2016 "we bow our heads in admiration and honor" for the acts of "heroism" committed by imprisoned Palestinian terrorists.

At first blush, at least, a Trump presidency promises everything that AIPAC, America’s largest pro-Israel lobbying group, could ever wish for. After eight years of rocky relations between Jerusalem and Washington, Donald Trump promises that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will receive a much friendlier reception in the White House during his administration. The inclusion of Iran hawks such as CIA director Mike Pompeo, Trump’s nominee for CIA director, and defense secretary nominee James Mattis could even spell the end of the nuclear agreement with Iran, especially in light of Tehran’s repeated flirtations with violating the deal.
In reality, Trump poses a string of new problems for AIPAC. “There’s definitely no question that it was better and easier for [AIPAC] if Hillary won,” said one Democratic strategist recently. “Policy is only part of it. It would’ve been an opportunity or their best chance at hitting reset for Democrats.” Instead, after losing its fight against the Iran Deal, the lobbying group must try to stake out an unstable middle ground during an even more polarizing presidency than Obama’s while fending off challenges from its left and right. “In this new world where J Street really is a pro-Israel validator for segments of the Democrats and the Zionist Organization of America is a validator for segments of the Republicans, what’s AIPAC role?” the strategist wondered.
After an appropriate period of reflection and testing the waters, AIPAC may well decide that its role is to continue doing whatever it has been doing. Malcolm Hoenlein, president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, rejects the claim that that losing fight against the Iran Deal constitutes evidence of any larger organizational failure on AIPAC’s part, citing majority opposition to the agreement both in Congress and the American public. “The fundamental premise that people have been operating on is based on a deliberate effort to try to paint this as a defeat for the pro-Israel community, AIPAC, everybody involved … when, in fact, that is not the case,” he said.

Secretary of State John Kerry argued that if Israel does not stop settlement activity and move forward with a two-state solution, the resulting friction will “create very fertile ground for extremists.”
But the fertile soils of Gaza and Ramallah, sowed with potent doses of incitement, have already produced bumper crops of extremism – and it has just as much to do with the Jews over in Tel Aviv or Sderot as it does with the Jews in east Jerusalem or Gush Etzion.
And Kerry charged that the settlements and lack of two-state deal are “allowing a dangerous dynamic to take hold,” but that dangerous dynamic has long had its grip on the peace process in the form of multiple intifadas and evolving terrorist alliances.
Yes, the U.S. condemns and condemns. “We have consistently condemned violence and terrorism and even condemned the Palestinian leadership for not condemning it,” Kerry said with a certain huffiness, a tone that bemoaned how Washington condemns terror until blue in the face – before steering back to settlements.
But it’s that knife intifada, that unifying vow of international terror groups that they are coming for the al-Aqsa mosque, that determination to obliterate Israel that comprise the currently insurmountable main roadblock to a peace process.

The Palestinians — illiberal and reactionary on cherished Western issues like gender equality, homosexuality, religious tolerance and diversity — have grafted their cause to the popular campus agendas of race/class/gender victimization.
Western nations in general do not worry much about assorted non-Western crimes such as genocides, mass cleansings or politically induced famines. Instead, they prefer sermons to other Westerners as a sort of virtue-signaling, without any worries over offending politically correct groups.
Partly, the piling on Israel is due to American leverage over Israel as a recipient of U.S. aid. As a benefactor, the Obama administration expects that Israel must match U.S. generosity with obeisance. Yet the U.S. rarely gives similar “how dare you” lectures to less liberal recipients of American aid, such as the Palestinians for their lack of free elections.
Partly, the cause of global hostility toward Israel is jealousy. If Israel were mired in Venezuela-like chaos, few nations would care. Instead, the image of a proud, successful, Westernized nation as an atoll in a sea of self-inflicted misery is grating to many. And the astounding success of Israel bothers so many failed states that the entire world takes notice.
But partly, the source of anti-Israelism is ancient anti-Semitism.
If Israelis were Egyptians administering Gaza or Jordanians running the West Bank (as during the 1960s), no one would care. The world’s problem is that Israelis are Jews. Thus, Israel earns negative scrutiny that is never extended commensurately to others.
Mr. Obama and his diplomatic team should have known all this. Perhaps they do, but they simply do not care.

New Zealanders are often told that our country punches above its weight internationally.
Unfortunately, in the case of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 regarding the conflict between Israel and Palestinians, Minister of Foreign Affairs Murray McCully has delivered New Zealand an uppercut to its face.
New Zealand co-sponsored the "anti-settlement" resolution with Senegal, Malaysia and Venezuela, hardly bastions of human rights.
With the United States abstaining, the Security Council passed it at its last sitting of 2016 on Christmas Eve.
You don't have to be a fan of Jewish settlements in the West Bank to criticise the resolution.
And there are many people, like me, who support a two-state solution - the co-existence of a secure Jewish state and a viable Palestinian state - who are demoralised by this resolution, believing that it makes that outcome less likely.
The resolution goes well beyond condemning Israel for West Bank settlements. It deems all settlements beyond the 1949 armistice lines a "flagrant violation of international law".
It declares all the land beyond those lines "occupied Palestinian territory". That includes East Jerusalem, where Judaism's holiest site, the Temple Mount, as well as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, are situated.

Democrats have come down with a wicked virus. Somewhere along the way they caught Nazi fever.
It’s not the Nazi fever of the fevered headlines in which Trump is the new Fuhrer and Republicans are the new Third Reich.
The truth is that there’s only one major political party in this country that supports the murder of Jews.
The Democrats demand the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Jerusalem. They fund the mass murder of Jews by nuclear fire, rocket, bullet, bomb and bloody knife. And they collaborate and defend that terror.
President Clinton was the first to openly fund Islamic terrorists killing Jews. Men, women and children across Israel were shot and blown up by terrorists funded by his administration. And when terror victims sought justice, instead of protecting them from Iran, he protected Iran’s dirty money from them.
And he was not the last.

Jordan’s government spokesman warned on Thursday of “catastrophic” repercussions if President-elect Donald Trump makes good on a campaign promise to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
Such a move could affect relations between the US and regional allies, including Jordan, Information Minister Mohammed Momani told The Associated Press, addressing the issue publicly for the first time.
An embassy move would be a “red line” for Jordan, would “inflame the Islamic and Arab streets” and serve as a “gift to extremists,” he said, adding that Jordan would use all possible political and diplomatic means to try and prevent such a decision.
The US considers pro-Western Jordan as an important ally in a turbulent Mideast. The Hashemite kingdom is a key member of a US-led military coalition against ISIS in neighboring Syria and Iraq, and maintains discreet security ties with Israel.
Jordan also has a stake in Jerusalem, serving as custodian of Islam’s third holiest shrine in the city’s eastern sector.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas urged US President-elect Donald Trump on Friday not to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
Abbas on Friday invited Trump to visit and said “We call on you not to implement your statement…because we consider it as an aggressive statement, when you say you want to move the embassy to Jerusalem.”
The PA president said moving the embassy would throw the peace process into a crisis it would not necessarily overcome, according to Israel Radio.
Abbas said any action that affects the status of Jerusalem was a red line the Palestinians would not put up with.

UN Security Council resolution 2334 was not an anti-Israel decision, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on Thursday evening, speaking to a group of some 200 Israeli activists, professors, and former officials.
“UNSC resolution 2334 was not against Israel; it was against settlements, no more, no less,” Abbas told the Israelis, who traveled from all over Israel to meet with the PA president at the Mukata, the PA presidential headquarters in Ramallah. “It did not say Israel is illegitimate; it said settlements are illegitimate."
UNSC resolution 2334, which was passed on December 23, said that settlements “have no legal validity” and constitute an obstacle to peace.
While Palestinian officials have welcomed the resolution, characterizing it as “historic,” Israeli officials have rejected the resolution, calling it “shameful.”
Abbas, who was in good spirits using hand motions as he spoke, added that he and the Palestinian leadership vehemently oppose violence.
“We don’t believe in violence, terrorism, or extremism and we will fight all of [these phenomena] openly and secretly,” Abbas remarked emphatically. “We have no other choice but to live in peace.”

It was November 10th, 1975 when Chaim Herzog , then Israeli ambassador to the UN, denounced UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 that declared Zionism a form of racism, a day that also coincided with the 37th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
History shows the resolution was adopted by a 72-35 vote with 32 abstentions and remained in place until 1991.
And the UN continues to pass outrageous anti-Israel resolutions.

I can't think of any other explanation of why the western media (which consistently ignores terrorist attacks against Israelis) is not only obsessing over this story but is refusing to provide the context of the original terrorist attack. If this story happened in any other country it would be ignored completely.

The visit of this delegation was provocative and the accompanying dances to the music of Talmudic songs called for the establishment of the temple on the ruins of Al-Aqsa Mosque, in front of historic Bab Al Bahrain [square], and before that in the house of a businessman with a number of traders..This provocation caused a deep psychological wound and is blatantly opposed to Arab and Islamic values ​​in support of our brothers the heroic Palestinian people against the arrogance of the Zionists and their obnoxious occupation of the land of Palestine violating all moral and human values.

The House of Representatives expresses its rejection and condemnation of what was done with a number of traders and businessmen in the Kingdom of Bahrain from trying business and social  normalization  with the visiting US delegation. We stress the strong condemnation of the unacceptable behavior, which provoked and embarrassed the Bahraini street which supports the rights of the Palestinian people. The Hebrew dance and songs called for an alleged temple on the ruins of Al-Aqsa and they handed the [Bahrains] the Masonic logo. [This means a menorah - EoZ] The Council reiterated Bahrain's position of rejecting all forms of normalization, communications and establishing relationships with the rapist Israeli entity, and that any move and act opposed to Bahraini law, and the principles of the Bahraini people.

This is because Western progressives inhabit a grotesque universe of mirrors, created by viewing the world through an ideological prism which casts the West as inescapably oppressive and the developing world as its blameless victims.
Crucially, they also see themselves as innately virtuous while everyone who does not view the world through this distorting prism is damned as irredeemably hateful, bigoted and evil.
This, however, is the progressives’ Achilles’ heel. For if they themselves are shown to be supporting actual racism and colonialism, their supposed place on the moral high ground crumbles into dust and they are left with nowhere else to go.
Publicly calling them out in this way for betraying their supposed ideals would bring further benefits. For others would be listening whose minds are not hermetically sealed through ideology or malice.
Those people have no knowledge of the Middle East or Jewish history. They have no idea that the Jews are the only indigenous people of the Land of Israel who are still around; no idea that the Arabs are the historic occupiers; no idea that Israel’s “occupation” is nothing of the kind and that the “settlements” are lawful. They have no idea because no one has ever told them.
The delegitimization of Israel rests on the hijacking of the language so that victims are turned into oppressors and vice versa. We must now reclaim the language for truth and justice.
Palestinian colonialism means the Palestine cause is one that liberals must condemn and shun. Conversely, “progressives” who support Palestinian colonial conquest and the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from their historic homeland are nothing of the kind. It’s time to start letting them know. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Perhaps the most important area of potential cooperation is in the world of cybersecurity. Israeli intelligence gathering is superb, and the integration of the Israeli military with the nation’s robust private-sector security firms is nearly seamless. Israel is also ahead of the U.S. in bringing advancements from the private sector into public hands; the brightest people constantly flow between the military and civilian spheres.
A second zone of potentially enhanced cooperation is in technology and innovation. While we have jointly worked on a variety of defense projects over the years (like the Arrow, which is anti-ballistic-missile technology), this is an area in which we could enhance each other’s efforts considerably. In addition to missile defense, doing more together in advanced avionics (as we did with the F-15), miniaturization (like Israel’s small airborne-warning aircraft) and the production of low-cost battlefield unmanned vehicles (both air and surface) would yield strong results.
Third, we should up our game in terms of intelligence cooperation. The Israeli military and the associated Israeli intelligence services Mossad, Aman and Shin Bet are the best in the Middle East. Working together, they have been ahead of our more segregated sectors on a wide range of trends, including the disintegration of Syria, the events in Egypt and the military and nuclear capability of Iran. Here we need a more open exchange of information between our two countries (especially human intelligence from Israel and overhead sensor data from the U.S.). More liaison officers between military and intelligence commands would help, as would more frequent conferences and dialogue on principles.
Finally, within the opaque world of special forces, we have a great deal we could share with each other. Having the U.S. Special Operations Command constantly operating with Israeli commandos would be of enormous benefit to both forces. Both are expert in battlefield intelligence collection, use of unmanned vehicles, sniper technology and a host of other specialized skills. Setting up a joint special-forces training and innovation center for special operations in Israel would be powerful.
The motto of the crack Israeli paratrooper brigade is simple: “Acharai,” which translates to “Follow me.” The saying stems from the custom of Israeli commanders’ directly leading their troops into battle, even at the most senior levels. For the U.S. in the complex Middle East, we would be well served to follow the Israeli military’s advice on a range of key issues. And likewise, they would benefit greatly from further intelligence, technology and partnership with the U.S. It truly is a case of two nations that are unarguably stronger together–let’s build on what we have to get to the next level.

Former porn star Jenna Jameson will not be deterred from expressing support for Israel despite the abusive messages she has been receiving on Twitter for the past few days, she told The Algemeiner on Thursday.
“The antisemitic comments don’t hurt me whatsoever; all they do is educate my followers and the public about how antisemitism runs rampant on social media,” said Jameson, who finished her conversion to Judaism in 2016. “So by attacking my faith, you prove my plight. I welcome the hateful debates, because I am informed on the Torah due to my recent Orthodox conversion. I’ve been a warrior all my life. Now I am applying my strength to defending the Jewish people and Israel.”
The mother-of-two, with a third on the way, has been flooding her Twitter page not only with support for the Jewish state, but with posts against “Palestine,” which she says does not exist. “Israel was promised to the Jewish people [by] G-d,” she wrote. “Don’t Arabs have enough land? They target the one free-thinking democracy and want to turn it into a wasteland”…”Why does ‘Palestine’ want to drive all Jews into the sea? Why do they want to take over what the Jews have built and ethnically cleanse?”
Jameson, whose husband is Israeli, also defended the IDF, in response to a Twitter user who accused Israeli soldiers of killing “innocent” Palestinians. “I don’t believe in Hamas launching rockets daily at Israel. They made their bed, now they can lie in it…Innocence is relative,” she wrote.

A leading Palestinian spokesperson is telling American television audiences that she rejects the concept of Islamic countries — but an investigation by JNS.org has found that the largest donors to the organization she heads are self-described Islamic countries.
The controversy began with a December 27 CNN appearance by Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, who has served as a spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization for more than two decades.
CNN anchor Don Lemon asked Ashrawi whether the Palestinians are willing “to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.” Ashrawi replied, “If you want to give religion to states, that is against our principles. I don’t recognize Islamic states, Christian states, Jewish states. A state is a state for all its citizens.”
Ashrawi’s statement appears to conflict with the wording of the PA’s own “Constitution of Palestine,” adopted in 2003. Article 4(1) of that document states, “Islam is the official religion in Palestine,” and article 4(2) states, “The principles of Islamic sharia shall be the main source of legislation.”
In response to a request by JNS.org for clarification, Ashrawi responded that Islam was made the official religion of “Palestine” solely “for technical reason — holidays, contractual issues, etc.” She also asserted that the PA constitution “states that Islam is the official religion IN Palestine, which is quite different from saying that Palestine is an Islamic state.” Ashrawi added that while Islamic sharia law is “the main source” of legislation for the PA, it is “not the source of legislation.”

Much has been made of the recent high-level contacts between Israel and Sunni Arab states, including those with which it has no formal relations. But such contacts have been fairly common since the 1990s, even if largely unacknowledged. What is new, writes David Pollock, is the public debate about the subject in the Arabic media:
Particularly noteworthy . . . is a long article in the current issue of the popular and influential pan-Arab weekly al-Majalla, based in London but widely circulated and read in both print and online editions [throughout the Middle East]. This article not only reviews the long history of Arab-Israeli relations, but also cites statements [on the subject] by the Israeli ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer at great length.
Responses [to this article] by Saudi writers are mixed, but some are very vocally in favor of dealing with Israel. . . . Among Egyptian writers, the idea of regular dealings with Israel still excites fierce debate, even after nearly four decades of official peace. . . . [But] even some Egyptian writers and academics most critical of ties to Israel acknowledge that the younger generation, turned against Iran, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood both by their own experience and by their government’s changing positions, is losing some of its animosity toward [the Jewish state]. . . .

The Israeli who was seriously wounded in the truck-ramming attack on an outdoor Christmas market in Berlin last month regained consciousness this week, only to discover that his wife had been killed, the Hebrew news site Walla reported on Thursday.
Speaking for the first time since the incident from his hospital bed in Germany, Rami Elyakim — whose wife, Dalia, 60, was missing for a number of days after the terrorist attack, and was subsequently determined to be among the 12 dead – said he is having a hard time picking up the pieces of his life. Though he said he remembers nothing of the attack itself, he bemoaned the fact that he is now faced with cancelling the next trip that he and his wife had planned to take in the near future.
“Dalia was the love of my life,” he said. “She really was an extraordinary woman.”
He also expressed amazement – along with outraged family members — to hear a rumor that Israel’s National Insurance Institute will not recognize Aliza as a victim of terrorism, but rather as a casualty of a vehicular accident.
Rami’s brother, Ofer Elyakim, complained to Walla that the Israeli authorities have been ignoring Dalia’s case. “No government representative attended her funeral,” he said. “Nobody has taken an interest in whether her insurance is valid. For two weeks, we have been sitting in Berlin at [Rami’s] bedside, and nobody — other than President Reuven Rivlin — has seen fit to take any sort of interest.”

The Civil Administration demolished Wednesday five tents and eight water reservoirs which were constructed without legal permits near the community of Tekoa in the Etzion Bloc (Gush Etzion) south of Jerusalem in response to a petition by the Regavim movement last November.
The movement, which maintains strict surveillance of illegal Arab construction, welcomed the enforcement actions in the Tekoa region and explained that this is a particularly strategic area for the State of Israel.
Over the past year the movement submitted two petitions to the High Court against illegal construction in the Tekoa region - one regarding an illegal road paved using international funding connecting the Arab villages near Tekoa to the Dead Sea. The road was intentionally paved by the Palestinian Authority in the only region where Israel could pave a connecting road between the Etzion Bloc and the Dead Sea.
The second petition was submitted in November 2016 and referred to illegal construction near the aforementioned road with the intention of turning it into an inhabited area which could then de facto be transferred into the hands of the PA, although it is in Area C under Israeli jurisdiction.

The suspect in two separate Haifa shootings, that left one dead and one seriously injured, turned himself in Thursday evening, more than 24 hours after the incident.
Earlier on Thursday, the body of Guy Kafari, 47, who was killed in the shooting on Tuesday was laid to rest in Moshav Ofer. Kafari was killed and Yechiel Illouz, 48, a judge on the Haifa Rabbinical Court was seriously injured in the pair of shootings, which shook the coastal city.
On Thursday police raided an abandoned home in the neighborhood of Halisa, searching for the suspect. According to multiple Hebrew media reports, police suspect nationalistic motivations for the shootings. A Coastal District Police spokesman confirmed that the police have identified a suspect, however, declined to comment on the investigation stating that “all leads are being investigated”.
The first shooting occurred at approximately 9:30 a.m. on Ha’atzma’ut street, where Rabbi Yechiel Illouz, was seriously injured after being shot multiple times and was evacuated to the Rambam Medical Center. The police were attempting to locate the gunman when a second shooting occurred on Hagiborim Street around 10:20 a.m. Kafari, 47, was fatally wounded and pronounced dead on the scene by Magen David Adom medics.

The Hamas terror group is reportedly willing to negotiate the release of two Israeli civilians and the remains of two IDF soldiers held in the Gaza Strip, if Israel releases 60 of the organization’s members from prison as a precondition to talks.
The Gaza-based group is currently holding the remains of IDF soldiers Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul and Lt. Hadar Goldin, who the army says were killed in the 2014 Gaza war, and is also believed to be detaining Avraham Mengistu and Juma Ibrahim Abu Anima, two Israeli men who crossed into Gaza on their own accord.
The Hamas terror group has long demanded Israel first release hundreds of Palestinians who were rearrested after they were freed in the 2011 Shalit deal before it would even enter into negotiations with Israel over a prisoner exchange.
According to a report in the Al-Araby Al-Jadeed newspaper, senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk discussed a prisoner swap with Egyptian officials last week, according to a translation Friday by Israel Radio.

Russia has placed advanced surface-to-surface ballistic missiles in Syria, according to an Israelli satellite imaging company, which published satellite photos of the missile-launchers on Friday.
ImageSat International said its EROS B satellite captured photos of two vehicle-mounted SS-26 “Iskander” missile launchers in northern Syria. The launchers are located in the Syrian army’s Latakia airbase. Two other launchers had also been spotted at the base, it said.
The Iskander is a mid-range missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads, with a range of 400-500 kilometers.
According to the Ynet news website, Russia has previously considered providing Iskander missiles to the Syrian President Bashar Assad, but has refrained from doing so due to Israeli concerns. The weaponry seen in the newly released photos is apparently controlled by Russian forces operating in Syria, and has not been handed over to Assad’s forces.

The predominantly Shiite Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) has been using weapons provided by the United States, Europe, Russia, and Iran to commit war crimes in Iraq, according to the human rights watchdog Amnesty International.
The list of war crimes includes abductions, torture, and killings, committed by the PMU and other militias fighting alongside the Iraqi military against the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL).
Patrick Wilcken, researcher on arms control and human rights at Amnesty International, declared:
The [U.S.-backed] Iraqi authorities have helped to arm and equip the PMU militias and pay their salaries – they must stop turning a blind eye to this systematic pattern of serious human rights violations and war crimes.
Any militiamen fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Iraqi military must be thoroughly and rigorously vetted. Those suspected of committing serious violations must be removed from their ranks, pending judicial investigations and prosecutions. Unaccountable and unruly militias must be either truly brought into the fold and discipline of the armed forces, or disarmed and demobilized completely.

Outgoing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry touted the administration's efforts to curb Iran's nuclear program Thursday, saying the July 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran was "the most rigorous inspection regime that has ever been negotiated."
Kerry, who spoke with reporters in what was his final press conference before he leaves office on Jan. 20, said the deal, known as the The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, "has made the world and our allies safer, including Israel and the Gulf states." According to Kerry, "refusing to negotiate at all, which some advocated, would have left us with two very bad choices: the short-term risk of a nuclear-armed Iran, and yet another conflict in the Middle East. And to be clear -- to be crystal clear -- terminating that agreement now would leave us with those same bad choices."
Also on Thursday, the U.S. State Department published a lengthy document authored by Kerry wrapping up his tenure as America's chief diplomat. The document, called "Exit memo from Secretary Kerry to President Obama" mentioned Kerry's efforts to bring Israel and Palestinians closer together.

Lauding the recent “liberation” of Aleppo as a major defeat for the West in general and the United States in particular, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force boasted about Iran’s prowess in the field of missile and aircraft design and production, the regime-aligned news agency Tasnim reported.
In a speech on Thursday, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh claimed that great strides had been made in the Islamic Republic’s self-sufficient military capabilities, stressing that its efforts and know-how were born out of a need to confront enemy threats, which it takes very seriously. According to Tasnim, Hajizadeh also claimed that all of Tehran’s moves on the this score have been “defensive in nature.”
As The Algemeiner reported in early December, however, in a similar story on Hajizadeh’s highlighting of Iran’s military advances, Tehran’s semi-official state news agency Fars reminded readers of the IRGC’s testing in March of long-range missiles, one of which was adorned with the Hebrew message: “Israel should be wiped off the earth.”
That report came amid daily threats from the Iranian regime to “retaliate” if US President Barack Obama approves the bill that Congress passed to extend the Iran Sanctions Act for an additional 10 years.

Sasha and Malia Obama, the daughters of the outgoing US president, followed Iran’s league in dealing with their father by holding Americans hostage and making demands, all of which the president granted.
The Obama girls successfully concluded negotiations with the president earlier this week after securing a 200% increase in their weekly allowance, using the leverage of four White House staff members held at knifepoint. Once the workers were released Tuesday morning, Secretary of State John Kerry thanked Sasha and Malia for taking such good care of their guests. Malia explicitly acknowledged the influence of Iran’s behavior in the girls’ decision to use hostage-taking as their strategy.
“Dad can be firm, but we’ve figured out how he works, so this was basically a cinch,” she explained. “Sasha and I hatched the plan a few weeks ago when we realized Dad always shrinks from confrontation with forces that present a clear and present danger, such as Iran and Russia. We knew going in that he would give us everything we asked for if we held out long enough and demonstrated our seriousness.”
Analysts noted other close parallels between the First Daughters’ approach and the ongoing attitude of Iran to Obama. “In both cases the president actually wants to give as much as possible to the offending party,” observed Jeffrey Goldberg, “but the optics of the situation don’t allow for direct granting of everything the other party wants. In the case of Sasha and Malia, Obama obviously wants to give his little girls whatever they desire, but he looks like a bad parent who spoils his kids if he just provides everything automatically. And in the case of Iran, he wants to cede Middle East hegemony to them at whatever cost, even the weakening and possible destruction of major allies in the region, but it has to look like the whole thing is the result of a considered policy with mutual benefits – all while Iran does what it wants anyway and suffers no adverse consequences.”

French politicians and community leaders on Thursday marked the two year anniversary since an attack on a Paris Jewish supermarket killed four shoppers.
The January 9, 2015 attack at the Hyper Cacher in eastern Paris came two days after terrorists killed 12 at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a day after a police officer was killed by the same Islamist gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, who stormed the market.
Yoav Hattab, Phillipe Barham, Yohan Cohen, and François-Michel Saada were killed in the siege at the Hyper Cacher market. All four were buried in Jerusalem.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and French Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux on Thursday laid wreaths at the sites of the killings and sang the French national anthem, Reuters reported.
“It’s still important to remember, it’s still important to salute the work done by the security forces who intervened, and it’s still important to show the families, those who are still suffering, that we haven’t forgotten what happened, we haven’t forgotten those who were left behind,” Le Roux said following the ceremonies, according to Reuters.

A councillor from Britain’s Labour party who was suspended after being accused of sharing blood libels online and for saying Israeli Jews should “relocate” to America has been readmitted to the party, the British Jewish News reported on Wednesday.
The councillor, Ilyas Aziz from Nottingham, tweeted on December 31, “Can resume my Labour Party activities now that my suspension lifted. Thanks to all who stood by me in difficult times.”
Aziz, a supporter of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, implied in a Facebook post in 2014 that Israelis should “stop drinking Gaza’s blood,” which he allegedly retweeted from a Muslim youth group.
He has also compared the actions of Israelis towards Palestinian Arabs to the actions of Nazis towards Jews, and said Jews in the Middle East could move to the U.S.
“Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East, in peace pre 1948. Perhaps it would have been wiser to create Israel in America it’s big enough,” he wrote. “They could relocate even now.”
Aziz was suspended after these posts were exposed by the Guido Fawkes political blog.

Jewish students in the UK are calling on the country’s leading Jewish student group to stop “wrongly dismissing” antisemitism on college campuses and fulfill its “commitment to not be ‘apologetic in the face of abuse.’”
In an oped in Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, Jonathan Hunter, co-founder of the Pinsker Center for Zionist Education, and Shlomo Roiter-Jesner, a Cambridge University student who was the target of an antisemitic attack, wrote that they were “surprised and bewildered” to witness Union of Jewish Students (UJS) Campaigns Director Josh Nagli downplay racism against Jews on college campuses in their response to recent claims by parliamentarian Baroness Ruth Deech that this was, in fact, an increasing trend.
According to Nagli, Deech’s warnings that Jewish students are avoiding certain universities due to their antisemitic atmoshphere do a “disservice,” are “inflammatory” and “frankly wrong.” Citing statistics from a 2011 National Jewish Student Survey, Nagli argued, “Antisemitism is not rife at universities.”
The UJS campaigns director, Hunter and Roiter-Jesner wrote, “not only misconstrued Baroness Deech’s comments, but went so far as to completely contradict all statistics,” such as how 42 percent of Jewish students were either witness to or targets of an antisemitic incident.

A representative from the Israeli Embassy in Ireland responded harshly on Wednesday to news of a planned university conference exploring the elimination of the Jewish state.
Referring to “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Exceptionalism and Responsibility” — hosted by University College Cork (UCC) — the representative said it was “incompatible with the values of democracy and goes against the essence of academic discussion.”
Furthermore, the Embassy slammed the organizers of the conference for “promoting an unbalanced agenda within academic institutions that seeks to demonize and delegitimize Israel.”
“The prejudiced approach of such activists serves only to propagate hatred of the state and its people,” the spokesperson told The Algemeiner.
The conference has also aroused the ire of various Jewish and pro-Israel groups across Ireland, who sharply criticized UCC’s decision to host the event.
A spokesman from the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland called the event “an anti-Israel hate-fest,” adding, “Experience has shown that where a narrative aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state is allowed to flourish, antisemitism follows.”

Professor David Feldman is the Director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism in London – the only such academic institute in the UK.
You would think that such an augustly and precisely named body would be part of the solution to the rising incidence of anti-semitism in the UK wouldn’t you ….
Well you’d be wrong. It’s part of the problem. The Institute sees nothing wrong with hosting Israel traducers such as Jacqueline Rose who makes anti-semitic comparisons between Jews and Nazis. In an interview in 2005, Rose said:
“It seems to me that the suffering of a woman on the edge of the pit with her child during the Nazi era, and a Palestinian woman refused access to a hospital through a checkpoint and whose unborn baby dies as a result, is the same”.
And in June 2013 this infelicitously named Institute organised a conference on boycotts, unbelievably featuring two would-be boycotters – John Chalcraft of LSE and Philip Marfleet of University of East London.

Following complaints, a French supermarket store apologized for applying labels reading “made in Israeli settlements” to some of its products.
The labels that appeared last month on pomegranates and Tangerines at the store belonging to the Auchan supermarket chain in the Paris suburb of Kremlin-Bicêtre were the result of a “an error” by an employee, a spokesperson for the chain told the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism.
The bureau, a nonprofit known by its acronym of BNVCA, queried the store along with Bernard Musicant, an activist for the pro-Israel Urgency Collective group, regarding the labels, according to the Actualite Juive newspaper.
In November, the French Economy Ministry’s General Directorate for Competition, Consumption and Fraud Prevention published an advisory circular requiring retailers use the word “colonies,” French for “settlements,” to specify goods originating in Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, which Israel captured in 1967.
In 2015, the European Commission adopted binding regulation requiring such labeling. However, the commission has no recourse against countries that don’t apply the regulations and no lawsuit has been brought to date against a vendor who declined to apply them. France’s major supermarket chains apply no special labeling for settlement goods.

Swastika-like symbols were discovered at five separate locations on the Stanford University campus, San Francisco news website The Mercury News reported.
According to the report, graffiti was part of a spate of a total of 10 cases of antisemitic vandalism in the vicinity of the school, including in residential areas.
Police concluded that though the symbols were drawn incorrectly — with the lines turning in the wrong direction — they were intended to mimic the Nazi insignia, because one of them was accompanied by the words: “No Jews allowed.”
Bill Larson, public information officer for Stanford’s Department of Public Safety, told Mercury News that the first reports of the swastikas were received late last week, though the exact date is not clear — “since the university [was] on winter break closure [from] December 21st until [Wednesday].”
The anti-Jewish graffiti at Stanford is part of a wider phenomenon.

In the immediate aftermath of the bloodbath perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists, the Institute for Palestine Studies showcased a star-studded cast of Palestinian terrorist sympathizers posing as scholars. Without the slightest acknowledgement of the murder of Jewish innocents that hung in the shadow of the event, the panel lamented the “criminalization” of pro-Palestinian activism.
Prior to the seminar, a pleasant older woman initiated a conversation with me. She is from “Palestine” and is in the U.S. visiting her children. One of her sons moved to Lebanon years ago to join the PLO. He’s been “missing” since the Lebanese civil war in 1976. However, she and all her children are “very active” in the Palestinian cause. Her “geography” and “religion” require it.
In an audience packed with pro-Palestinian activists, held at SEIU headquarters in Washington, DC, a panel on the “Legal Assault on Palestinian Rights Activism” began. It was moderated by Rashid Khalidi, an activist of Palestinian descent, whose views are so skewed that the ADL accused him of manipulating history and distorting reality to the point where it is “unrecognizable.” His views on Palestine go well beyond mere support for “oppressed” Palestinians. In past talks, he identified with the PLO so strongly that he repeatedly included himself by stating “we” when discussing the PLO’s agenda. But that didn’t stop Columbia University from making him the head of its Middle East studies division and giving him a professorship teaching classes to unwitting students. Not surprisingly, Khalidi is also good friends with President Barack Obama.
Khalidi started the two hour seminar by asserting that “those who oppose Palestinian rights have a hard time when the story gets out. No one wants to be an advocate of colonization, unequal rights and oppression.” The pro-Palestinian view is exploding in churches, unions, and most of all, on college campuses. According to Khalidi, it is only “ignorance”, “disinformation and misinformation” that leads Americans to hold a “Zionist viewpoint.”

Goldi Steiner and Irving Weisdorf are co chairs of Canadians for Balfour 100, a new organization that aims to obliterate the web of lies and propaganda that demonizes and delegitimates Israel. “Is 2334 legally binding? “they query. “No, even though Israel’s enemies will construe it as such.” What it does do they say is “muddy the waters. It is mischievous and counter- productive and blatantly anti- Semitic.”
According to them, the truth is that Judea and Samaria are legal under international law. Israel a possesses valid title over all the land west of the Jordan River, in an act of international law detailed in the Mandate for Palestine in l922 and incorporated in Article 80 into the UN Charter. Resolution 2334 goes against article 80 and is not legally binding. The Arabs have been the aggressor every time. They began more than five major wars, political and economic boycotts and continuous incitement to hatred and violence, inculcating even their youngest children. Yes there was an occupation – in l948, when two invading Arab armies, Jordan in the West Bank and Egypt in Gaza – occupied territory that they took by acts of violence.
Renanah Gemeiner, one of the organizers of the protest demonstrations had this to say: “The world has been trying to take the Jewish homeland away from the Jews for thousands of years. Before and during WW2, Britain, bound by international law to facilitate Jewish immigration, blocked entry to (then) Palestine, to 6 million doomed Jews, who had nowhere else to go. At the same time they allowed massive illegal Arab immigration. The occupation lie is a continuation of the West’s collusion with Jihad against the Jewish people.”
Torontonians are outraged and will not take this in silence. Two demonstrations to protest the UN resolution and Obama’s collusion are planned. Both will take place on University Ave. across the road from the US Consulate.
On Thursday January 12th, noon -1:30: The organizers have titled it There is no “Occupation”: Only the Jewish People have Biblical, Historical, Legal, National Rights in Israel.
On Sunday January 15, the Occupation Lie demonstration will include the plight of the Yezidis and other non Muslim minorities in Northern Iraq, targeted by ISIS for genocide and virtually ignored by the UN and the West.

AFDI reporter Laura Loomer went on campus to ask Columbia students if they would support Planned Parenthood funding FGM. Of the 20 students asked, only one unequivocally condemned FGM. Most students contended the ritual was all about "choice," completely missing the misogyny attached to the practice young girls and women are pressured into. Most disturbingly, one student argued that age was no issue.
"Regardless of their age?" Loomer followed up, after the student condoned the practice of FGM.
"Oh, absolutely," he answered.
Regardless of their age. Let that sink in.
Watch the AFDI video, below:

The death of Capucci was also reported the previous day on the BBC Arabic website. In that report readers were told that Capucci had been imprisoned for four years rather than two.bbc-arabic-capucci-art
A review of the article by a professional translator shows that – not for the first time – BBC Arabic reported the story using terminology which does not meet the BBC’s supposed standards of impartiality: the politicised language employed is of the type promoted by terror organisations and anti-Israel campaigners.
In the article’s second paragraph Jerusalem as a whole is described as“the occupied city of Jerusalem” and readers are told that Capucci “was arrested by the Israeli occupation forces on charges of supporting the Palestinian resistance…”.

Does Middle East reporting leave you dumbfounded, baffled and befuddled? Us too! It certainly doesn’t help that most articles are as overrun with clichés such as, Syria is with “moderate rebels”. As a service to our long-suffering readers, The Mideast Beast presents the guide that takes a buzzsaw to the buzzwords.
All options are on table – The following options are on the table: giving fiery speeches, expressing disappointment, letting Putin handle it, ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away.
Arab Spring – An Arab season characterized by rising temperatures. And then the temperatures just keep rising and rising and everyone dies while you scream, “That’s not what we meant!” A microcosm for global warming.
Boots on the ground – American military tactic consisting of literally dropping boots on enemy combatants from the air. Surprisingly effective.
Closing in – Retreating in panic. Usage: “Iraqi militias are closing in on the ISIS-controlled city.” “The negotiating parties are closing in on a peaceful resolution.”
Conservative moderates – Any Middle Eastern group producing more oil barrels than decapitated heads.
Moderate conservatives – see Radical terrorists.
Proxy war – A conflict between two regional sides that are backed by remote and powerful shadow entities. Every Middle Eastern conflict since 1263 has been a proxy war between MSNBC and Fox News.
Radical terrorists – Yesterday’s conservative moderates, tomorrow’s historical allies.
Sectarian conflict – A war between two groups so similar in every way that neither can tolerate the existence of the other. Examples: Sunni v. Shia, Yankees v. Red Sox, Tupac v. Biggie.
War on terror – A phonetic distortion of “warrant error”, i.e. an error in deciding that force is warranted.

Julie Nathan is the Research Officer for the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
The annual Report on Antisemitism in Australia for 2016 has been released by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the elected representative national body of the Australian Jewish community.
The ECAJ Report records antisemitism in two broad categories: incidents and discourse.
Perpetrators
For the first time, the report includes information on the ethnic composition of the perpetrators of some types of antisemitic incidents. Of the 91 incidents of assault and abuse in Sydney and Melbourne, there were 43 incidents where the ethnicity of the perpetrator(s) was identified in the reporting of the incident. This information was counted and noted. Many incidents had multiple perpetrators. Assault and abuse in other states were excluded.
The result is that of the 72 perpetrators whose ethnicity was logged, these were composed of 34 Caucasian, 31 Middle Eastern, 5 Maori/Polynesian and 2 African. In terms of percentage, 47% of the perpetrators were Caucasian, 43% Middle Eastern and 61% "Other."
However, the breakdown between Sydney and Melbourne tells a different story. In Sydney, it comprised Caucasian (17 perpetrators) at 39%, and Middle Eastern (22 perpetrators) at 51%. In Melbourne, it comprised Caucasian (17 perpetrators) at 58%, and Middle Eastern (9 perpetrators) at 31%. In both Sydney and Melbourne, "Other" comprised 10%.

By now I imagine you may have read about a young, hate-peddling man named Andrew Anglin, who runs a neo-Nazi website that publishes denigrating things about nonwhite groups of people, like Jews and Muslims and African Americans. Anglin, who believes that Jews are an “international threat” (a term that is maybe his nicest), recently made waves when he told his readers to take action against the Jewish residents of Whitefish, Montana, who have been protesting white supremacists in the area. So when the mother of alt-right leader Richard Spencer claimed the actions of anti-hate groups in the area had caused her to business to suffer, Anglin told his readers to “TAKE ACTION” against the town’s Jewish population—a “vicious, evil race of hate-filled psychopaths.”
Then, likely from the comfort of some café with decent Wi-Fi, Anglin talked of a march in Whitefish in defense of Spencer’s mother and “against Jews, Jewish businesses, and everyone who supports either. We will be busing in skinheads from the Bay Area.” (Spencer called the march a “joke,” and then tried to offer closure but this sure comes across as anything but, e.g. “I will punch back.”) Now, Anglin has filed paperwork with a date (MLK Day, Jan. 16) for an armed march in Whitefish, calling it the “James Earl Ray Day Extravaganza”—an homage to the man who assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. (Montana is an open-carry state.)
So what began as a hateful (yet perfectly legal) march against Jews has now been expanded, apparently, to involve a demonstration against African Americans, too. Anglin has also promised that “a representative of Hamas will be in attendance, and will give a speech about the international threat of the Jews.”

Three people have been arrested in connection with the vandalism of the headstone of a Jewish couple buried in the cemetery of a small Indiana town.
An anonymous tip to police led to the arrests on Tuesday night, according to local news reports in Scottsburg.
Angeliquca Tompkins, 19, and Matthew Terry, 20, are charged with criminal mischief and criminal trespassing; they are being held in the county jail. The third suspect was a female juvenile who was released to the custody of her parents.
The words "F***ing Jew" were spray-painted in white across the back of the double headstone, on top of the large Jewish star, in the Scottsburg Cemetery, one of the few headstones with a Jewish name on it. Two other headstones in the cemetery were later discovered vandalized.

After seven years as dean of Harvard Law School, Martha Minow, a noted legal scholar, expert in human rights and a leader in Jewish causes, will step down at the end of the academic year.
Minow, who began teaching at the law school in 1981, says she will remain on the law school faculty and plans to return to teaching, according to a statement released Tuesday by the law school.
She is credited with diversifying the faculty, staff and student body, programmatic growth and record fundraising. Among the new programs initiated under her term is a Jewish and Israeli law program directed by law school professor Noah Feldman.
Among the students she influenced was President Barack Obama, who in 2009, nominated her to the board of the Legal Services Corp., which she now serves as vice chair. Among her other notable non-academic appointments, Minow served on the Independent International Commission Kosovo.
In the world of Jewish philanthropy, Minow served for four years as board chair of the Charles H. Revson Foundation, and she earned high regard for her leadership in advancing innovation in Jewish education as a board member of the Covenant Foundation. She is a founding member of the Jewish Women’s Archive based in Boston.
Alan Dershowitz praised his former colleague for never shying away from her Jewishness.

The stakes could not have been higher when Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team faced its heavily favored rival, the Russian CSKA Moscow squad, on a neutral court in Belgium in 1977.
The murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and the devastating 1973 Yom Kippur War had cast despairing clouds over Israel during the first half of the decade. It was the height of the Cold War, and the Jewish state’s very survival on the world stage remained in question.
So the Maccabi’s upset triumph over CSKA Moscow — along the team’s road to a European basketball championship — ignited renewed faith and patriotism among Israelis, turning the tide in a turbulent period. Israeli filmmaker Dani Menkin’s new documentary, “On The Map,” recounts the tremendous achievements of a team nobody thought could win, and captures the unique charisma of the players who inspired a nation.
Early in the film, Israeli MK Michael Oren describes the hardships that Israel endured during the 1970s.
“It was a very difficult [time] for Israel, probably the greatest trauma suffered by the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Oren said. His description of the toll that the Yom Kippur War had on Israeli society is particularly telling.

The Jerusalem Post have a nice article on the recent America’s Voices In Israel delegation of celebrities. And by nice I really do mean nice, and not just relative to the nasty article by that D-list Ha’aretz hack.
Read the whole thing, but I’ll highlight this part regarding my friend Mark Pellegrino, who was very much affected by the trip, even though he boasted some strong pro-Israel credentials beforehand.
Pellegrino, who debates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with his followers on Twitter, weighed in on the morality of supporting Israel: “I think that where you stand on this issue [of Israel’s existence], and this could be a naive supposition on my part… tells the world a lot about your moral compass.
“To me, if you stand for freedom and the right of people to live under a structure that promotes liberty, you have a good moral compass, and there’s nothing that I’ve seen here that contradicts that.”

A mother and daughter were left stunned this week by a surprise encounter with the subject of a film they were watching while on a flight this week.
The incident began when renowned historian Deborah Lipstadt, while waiting for takeoff on board an airplane on Tuesday, notified her Facebook followers that among the films offered as part of the in-flight entertainment package was the new movie based on the high-profile libel suit filed against her by Holocaust denier David Irving. She then asked her social media friends if they thought she should introduce herself to fellow passengers watching “Denial.”
As receiving widespread encouragement to do so, she complied, and approached a mother and daughter from Seattle, who were engrossed in the film.
Before revealing her identity to them, Lipstadt, who teaches Holocaust Studies at Emory University, asked for their thoughts on the film. The mother, Lipstadt recounted, responded with “hands on [her] heart, indicating she is so moved she can’t speak.” At that point, Lipstadt told them who she was, leaving the pair “totally overwhelmed.”
In a subsequent Facebook post, Lipstadt said she “loved” meeting the mother and daughter — who is an actress — and was even left “verklempt [Yiddish for choked up with emotion]” by the interaction.