Of all the non-Middle East specialists writing on the Middle East, few have been as prolific or as indecipherable as Judith Butler. More than an academic, she has become a pop culture figure. In an age of identity politics, Butler's identity as a Marxist, feminist, lesbian practitioner of critical theory who writes prolifically about gender and transgenderism have made her among the most-interviewed active college professors. But her anti-Israel advocacy has made her a star, and a possible successor to the late Edward Said, another academic whose fame rests more on tendentious scholarship and agitprop than rigorous, objective research.
With a Ph.D. in philosophy and a professorship at UC Berkeley's Comparative Literature department, Butler might have led a career as a big name academic, which is to say very well known by perhaps as much as one tenth of one percent of the American population. But as the face of academe's Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, she reaches and influences a much wider audience.
Butler's turn away from literature and language theory in favor of Middle East politics, criticism of U.S. foreign policy, and demonization of Israel came in a collection of essays titled Precarious Life (2004) in which she focused on the effects of the 9/11 attacks on America. What many people would describe as an atrocity, Butler describes as a "dislocation from first-world privilege, however temporary." Her condemnation of terrorism rings about as hollow as Kofi Annan's or Yassir Arafat's.
Not only is Butler unwilling to condemn Hamas and Hezbollah, her tepid equivocation contains more than a hint of comradery: "Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements." Despite the great admiration that the Left has for Hamas and Hezbollah, neither group shares any of the Left's ideals and anyone claiming otherwise is delusional.

The Israeli English-language newspaper The Jerusalem Post was originally called The Palestine Post. It adopted its current name in 1950, two years after the creation of the state of Israel.
When the paper first appeared in 1932, the word “Palestinian” generally referred to those living in the British Mandate of Palestine. It was viewed by people everywhere as an appropriate word to describe the Jewish minority living in the area.
Languages change. Sometimes a word takes on a meaning that contradicts an earlier definition. Occasionally, different forms of a word reflect both meanings. Think of “awful” and “awesome” in English today. We can be filled with awe because something is terrible (awful) or wonderful (awesome).
In 1947, when “Palestine” still sounded like it might refer to a Jewish state, the United Nations voted to divide the territory into two countries: one Jewish and one Arab. The UN intended to create two independent states that would live together in peace and harmony.
One of the two halves — Israel — accepted its independence. The other side did not. On the day that Britain left and Israel declared its independence, five Arab nations invaded the whole territory, with the intent of conquering, and destroying, the Jewish half. Besides pushing the Jews into the sea, it was not clear what they wanted to do with the actual territory had they been victorious. Yet when the war was over and Israel controlled more land than the UN planned to give it, the remaining Arab territory went to Jordan and Egypt. There was no movement for an independent Palestinian Arab state.

In 2016, Brandeis University hired an anti-Semitic Islamist formerly linked to al-Qaeda to teach students about Islam.
Brandeis offered Boston-based cleric Suheil Laher a job in its Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department despite his long history of involvement with extremist causes. That history includes his leadership of a now-defunct charity that raised funds for jihadist causes in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan.
This academic year, Laher is teaching two courses at Brandeis: “Introduction to the Qu’ran” and “Muhammad: Life, Teachings, and Legacy.” Given Laher’s past, what strain of Islam is he likely to promote?
Before Brandeis, Laher was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Muslim chaplain for almost twenty years. While at MIT, he also served, from 2000, as head of a Boston-based charity named CARE International (not to be confused with the current charity of the same name). Originally named the “Al Kifah Refugee Center,” the charity was founded by Abdullah Azzam, a founding member of al-Qaeda and a mentor to Osama Bin Laden.

The July 4, 1976 Entebbe rescue and the October 18, 1977 Mogadishu raid against terrorist plane hijackers by Israeli and German commandos respectively are two of the most dramatic kidnapping rescues in modern history. But for Matan Vilnai – former minister, ambassador, and IDF general who was the deputy commander of the Entebbe rescue – the most tense moment of all was trying to land the commando force without authorization in Uganda, thousands of miles from Israel.
“The first critical moment was when we needed to land a group of heavy airplanes, which was already suspicious, because usually groups of airplanes do not fly together…and there was no GPS like today,” Vilnai told The Jerusalem Post on Monday during a two-day Hebrew University of Jerusalem conference on the 40th anniversary of the two rescues.
Vilnai said it was “critical that there were no injuries” during the landing, noting that in many operations, including the famous Bin Laden assassination, even top special forces pilots end up crashing aircraft or helicopters because of the uniquely difficult covert conditions for landing.
As the landings progressed, the flight control tower started “asking in African English: who are you and we all started to give ideas of what to say to the commander.”
“The eight Sayeret Matkal (special forces) under my command along with Doron Almog (a future major general) were on the first airplane to land, with lighting, but the second airplane had to land in a blackout,” said Vilnai.
He credited the operation’s commander and sole IDF casualty, Lt.-Col. Yoni Netanyahu, for giving critical orders as they got off the Hercules transport – orders which he said likely led to Netanyahu’s death from a sniper who likely noted his hand signals, which distinguished him as the senior officer.

Israel’s embassy and leading deputies in the German parliament slammed a Max Planck Institute branch for stoking hatred of Israel and Jews with a series of lectures from a pro-Hezbollah US academic who trivialized the Holocaust and is popular among neo-Nazis.
“It is outrageous that a distinguished German institution [Max Planck Institute branch in Halle] gives a stage to someone who spreads, in the best case, science fiction, and in the worst, pure incitement against Israel. Supporting [Norman] Finkelstein to maintain his academic facade is highly dangerous and an abuse of the scientific standards,” the Israeli Embassy in Berlin told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
Michaela Engelmeier, a Social Democratic deputy in the Bundestag, told the Post she was astonished that “with our history it is possible to welcome academics who play down the Nazi regime’s murder of six million Jews and present it as trivial.”
She added that the fact that the anti-Israel academic is delivering talks close to International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 is “especially insensitive.”
She urged the Max Planck Institute to cancel next week’s Finkelstein lecture titled “Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom.”

Two senators introduced a bill to protect to state and local governments passing anti-BDS legislation from lawsuits.
On Tuesday, Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., introduced the Combating BDS Act, which would increase legal protection for state and local governments that ban, limit or divest from companies “engaged in commerce-related or investment-related BDS activity targeting Israel.”
Under the measure, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activity includes boycotting or limiting business with those in Israel and “Israeli-controlled territories.”
The bill is an updated version of a measure introduced in February by Manchin and Mark Kirk, a Republican senator from Illinois who was defeated in November.
Among the bill’s 17 co-sponsors are Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and Benjamin Cardin, D-Md.
Manchin praised the bill as a way to protect American and Israeli security and economic priorities in a statement announcing the bill.

On the wall of the bar beneath SOAS’s student union is a quote from the Chinese civil rights lawyer Ni Yulan, entreating us all to “strive for equality”. This is at the heart of what the union considers its mission. Its executive includes both a “people of colour officer” and two anti-racism officers, while one of its four co-presidents is tasked with addressing “equality and liberation”.
Earlier this week the union was again in the headlines for its efforts to address racial inequality. In a report called Degrees of Racism the student union asked that “all academics must be prepared to acknowledge... they are capable of racism”.
A proudly-progressive stance is part of SOAS’s draw. Russell Brand and political activists are among its current student body, alongside more typical students (one on SOAS steps was debating the merits of cigarettes versus spliffs when I visited), while Jemima Khan received her MA there in 2003. The school is diverse: its 5,900 students hail from 133 countries, and it likes to celebrate this diversity.
But according to Avrahum Sanger, president of SOAS’s Jewish Society (JSoc), there is a minority that doesn’t feel able to express itself. He believes there is an anti-Semitic sickness in the heart of Bloomsbury.

Things seem to be going from bad to worse for antisemite Anthony Hall, with the university that suspended him now moving forward with a complaint to the Alberta Human Rights Commission.
The University of Lethbridge is moving ahead with a complaint to the Alberta Human Rights Commission in regards to one of their professors who has been suspended without pay.
Anthony Hall is a tenured member within the U of L’s Faculty of Arts and Science. He teaches Globalization Studies at the university and has a history of activism.
Hall has been criticized for spreading conspiracy theories and angered Jewish groups over many of his public statements.
In October, the university suspended Hall without pay over concerns that he contravened section 3 of the Alberta Human Rights Act.

A conference that questions Israel’s legitimacy cannot constitute anti-Semitism, according to one of its speakers, John Reynolds, writing in the Irish Times. The fact that he is both a speaker at the conference and on its organizing committee are omitted from the article, displaying a lack of journalistic transparency from Reynolds and the Irish Times. The paper also has a history of publishing extreme anti-Israel articles, with one journalist saying she’s “not interacting with Zionists anymore” in response to criticism of an article of hers.
The conference is due to take place at University College Cork in Ireland, after being cancelled last year due to security concerns when it was originally meant to be held at the University of Southampton. It was roundly condemned by Jewish leaders and groups, Members of Parliament who called it a “one-sided diatribe,” and a Zionist Federation petition that garnered 6,700 signatures.
Reynolds suggests that the Israeli government attempts to stifle criticism by saying that “to criticise the state of Israel is to demonise Jewish people.” Actually Israel considers demonizing the Jewish state with lies and denying its right to exist as demonizing the Jewish people – which is what the conference does. He dismisses the Israeli embassy’s concerns that it will propagate hatred, as he says the speakers are “established scholars… committed to critical thinking and the promotion of anti-racism.”
But Reynolds himself is a former legal researcher for Al-Haq, a Palestinian NGO involved in libel, BDS and “lawfare” campaigns against Israel, and has defended rocket attacks and “resistance” against Israel as understandable.

Over the weekend, UC Berkeley computers, printers and faxes throughout the campus were found with flyers described as "anti-Semitic and homophobic". The flyers included swastikas and pro-Nazi propaganda.
Because the sender exploited open source printers and fax machines that were legally accessed via the internet and the machines were not hacked, this act is not considered a hate crime. There was a similar incident in March of 2016 targeting Berkeley and other universities across the country.
UC police Sgt. Sabrina Reich speaking to the East Bay Times said that UC’s Internet Services and Technology Department has been communicating with the offices and departments on campus to “provide information on how to update the settings on (the machines) so they can be better secured on the network.”
“This is not something we welcome in our community,”

A graduate student at the University of Toronto, who teaches courses at the school, has harassed Jews and supporters of Israel on social media, using the pejorative “Zios” to refer to advocates of the Jewish state, the British activist group Never Again UK reported this week.
Tadhg Morris, who is pursuing his doctorate and is listed as an instructor in the Celtic studies department on the St. Michael’s College campus, caught the attention of Never Again UK when he began to “bully” the group online. “[He]…uses [T]witter to vent out his rage” when he is “no longer [able to] suppress his anti-Semitism,” it said.
Morris — a self-described “disgruntled old lefty,” whose Facebook cover photo is a 1959 picture of the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro waving a rifle — has called Twitter users “Zio f***wit,” and referred to the Jewish state’s military as the “IOF,” standing for “Israel occupation forces.”
Never Again UK also reported an online assault by Morris against Ari Fleischer, who served as White House press secretary for the Bush administration. Replying to a tweet by Fleischer, who is Jewish, about the deadly Jan. 7 terrorist attack at the Fort Lauderdale airport, Morris wrote, “And the f****er missed you.”

Watchdogs lauded the recent decision by a New York academic institution to prevent a notoriously anti-Israel group from organizing on its campus.
AMCHA Initiative co-founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and others told The Algemeiner on Wednesday that Fordham University’s preemptive measure indicates that its administrators grasp “the hateful precedent” that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has set elsewhere.
“Most officials at other schools do not understand what our research has clearly revealed: that the presence of an SJP or a like-minded chapter committed to opposing the existence of the Jewish state has a particularly serious impact on Jewish students,” she said. “Nor do they end up doing anything about the harmful behavior when it is exhibited.”
Aviva Slomich, international campus director for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), called it both “reasonable and commendable that Fordham is not permitting SJP to spread its hatred there.”
“SJP and its affiliates promote extreme anti-Israel propaganda; harass students and faculty members — Jewish and non-Jewish — who are known to support Israel; and are responsible for the rise of antisemitism,” she said. “How can such a group be allowed to have a presence on campus?”

News organizations get a lot of their content from outside companies these days, so you probably don’t realize just how much of your news actually comes from Reuters, behind the scenes. But Reuters employees don’t always follow their company’s own rules: including its Jerusalem bureau chief. Is it any wonder we see so much bias?
Here is our critique of Jerusalem Bureau Chief Luke Baker, as referenced in the video.
And here is the interview with Reuters President and Chief Editor Stephen J. Adler.
You may also be interested in the Reuters code of ethics.

News organizations get a lot of their content from outside companies these days, so you probably don't realize just how much of your news actually comes from Reuters, behind the scenes. But Reuters employees don't always follow their company's own rules: including it Jerusalem bureau chief. Is it any wonder we see so much bias?

Before we properly examine a Guardian article (The two-state solution in the Middle East: Everything you need to know, Dec. 28th) by the paper’s former Jerusalem correspondent Harriet Sherwood, let’s first provide a short textual analysis:
In an article putatively providing readers with ‘everything you need to know about the two state solution but were afraid to ask’, here’s a count of the number of times the following words were used in the text, headline and strap line:
Settlements (4); Hamas (1); Terrorism (0); Rockets (0); Incitement (0); Extremism (0); Antisemitism (0)
As you’ll see, the appearance or absence of these words are crucial to understanding how Harriet Sherwood misleads readers over the failure of the two parties to achieve an agreement.

The lead story in the January 13th edition of the BBC World Service radio programme ‘Newshour’ was introduced by presenter Paul Henley as follows:
“First; not for the first time, Syria has accused Israel of military aggression, blaming it for a series of explosions at a military airport on the outskirts of Damascus. The Syrian government said it had been a flagrant attack and that there would be repercussions. Their stance was possibly born of a new-found sense of confidence that things in Syria are going the way of the Assad government. Russian involvement in the war has been hugely important and the possibility of a more Moscow-friendly White House come the end of this month will be greeted with delight in Damascus. I’ve been talking to our Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen who’s on route from the Syrian capital to Aleppo; was he surprised by these accusations of an Israeli military strike in Damascus?”
The idea that the Syrian regime’s response to this incident is any different to the statements it has put out previously on similar occasions is of course not supported by reality. The term ‘flagrant’ was used by Assad spokespeople back in 2013 and the Syrian regime has threatened retaliation against Israel in the past.

Al Jazeera recently had a debate on the rampant antisemitism on the Left.
Naturally, the only people invited to engage in this debate were either pro-palestinian, or from the Left when it comes to Israel, being:

• Jonathan Freedland, a frequent critic of Israel
• Anti-Israel “Palestinian-American” human rights lawyer Noura Erakat
• Lisa Goldman, a former olah to Israel who became extremely anti-Israel over the years and left Israel for New York, where she now never misses an opportunity to trash her former place of residence

I am posting it because it is a great example of the kind of mental gymnastics the anti-Israel side engages in to justify their position. Notice their attempt to somehow distinguish between “theoretical” Zionism and Zionism in practice. My head literally hurts.
You also have to love how Goldman’s reflexive response to the idea that there is antisemitism on the Left is “The real antisemitism comes from the Right!” Deflection much?

At least 32 Jewish Community Centers across the United States were subjected to bomb threats on Wednesday, less than ten days after 16 more JCCs were evacuated after similar threats.
JCCs and other Jewish institutions were targeted in the Boston, Miami, Detroit, Cincinnati, Nashville, Minneapolis, and Orlando metro areas, among others. The Anti-Defamation League reported threats in 16 states: Alabama, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.
Paul Goldenberg, the director of Secure Community Networks, which is associated with the Jewish Federations of North America and advises Jewish institutions on security matters, explained to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that some institutions were shut down while others stayed open, depending on the determinations of local law enforcement. “It’s the second salvo in 10 days, we’re asking people to ensure they stay in contact with local law enforcement,” he said.
“Bomb threats to Jewish communities are nothing new,” Goldenberg added in a phone interview with Reuters. “What’s extraordinary is that we had so many in such a short period of time.”

An early enthusiast of fascism, Giorgio Perlasca volunteered to fight for Italian forces in Ethiopia in 1935 and then went to Spain to fight for Francisco Franco. But after returning to Italy in 1939, he quickly became disillusioned with Mussolini and, to avoid military service, found himself a job procuring livestock for the Italian army, which involved traveling around southeastern Europe. His travels made him aware of—and deeply troubled by—what was happening to the Jews. After Mussolini’s fall in 1943, he found himself in Budapest. Elizabeth Salthouse writes:
[I]n late 1944, the Spanish consul to Budapest beat a hasty retreat to Switzerland leaving behind empty offices, his official consulate seals, Jewish staff, and hundreds of Jews desperate for Spanish protection. . . .
Unbeknownst to the Germans, the Spanish consulate had been quietly sheltering Hungarian Jews in eight apartment blocks under its control, but the rescue effort was jeopardized by the consul’s departure. And so Giorgio “Jorge” Perlasca stepped in, brazenly convincing Hungarian authorities that he was now the Spanish ambassador with all the powers that went with the title.

Gilat Satellite Networks, an Israeli leader in satellite networking technology, solutions and services, announced today a strategic partnership with Air Esurfing, a fully owned subsidiary of Air Media Group, to transform the domestic in-flight connectivity market in China. The partners intend to utilize China’s Ka-band HTS capacity for domestic IFC services over mainland China.
“We have chosen to collaborate with Gilat due to its proven presence in China and its technological leadership in mobility baseband as well as Aero antenna terminals for IFC,” said Zhou Hong, General Manager Air Esurfing. “We see in Gilat the perfect partner to open the door for IFC in the domestic Chinese market and are excited about the joint opportunity.”
Gilat and Air Esurfing will deliver broadband connectivity to airlines throughout China.
Gilat will leverage its multi-service HTS platform that will operate with ChinaSatcom’s Ka-band capacity planned to be launched sometime in 2017. Gilat’s solution will enable continuous service exceeding 100Mbps and servicing many dozens of passengers per aircraft.

American actor Leonardo DiCaprio took to Instagram on Thursday to post a photo of a future Israeli power plant that is expected to boast the tallest solar thermal tower in the world.
“The arid landscape of Israel’s Negev Desert will look like a futuristic movie in the near future,” DiCaprio captioned the photo. “The country is building the tallest solar thermal tower in the world above its dusty sands. Surrounded by 50,000 mirrors, the 250-meters high tower should be able to produce enough power for about 5% of Israel’s population when it’s concluded.
“The sunlight will be reflected by the mirrors to a boiler at the top of the tower,” DiCaprio’s post continued. “The boiler will then be able to convert them and heat water to steam to turn the turbine in a conventional power plant.”
DiCaprio was referring to the 121-megawatt Ashalim Solar Thermal Power Station, which is currently under construction in the Negev. Slated to go online at the end of 2017, the project is one of the largest of its type in the world and the first concentrated solar power plant to be built in Israel.

The prospectus shows that of the power stations owned by the Idan Ofer controlled company in 11 countries, the OPC plant in the Negev is easily the most profitable.
Kenon Holdings (TASE: KEN; NYSE; KEN) unit IC Power Pte. Ltd. (ICP) (IC stands for Israel Corporation) has filed a prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The company did not disclose details about the offering but back in 2015 when the company first spoke of an IPO its plan was to raise $400 million, at a company value of $1.5 billion.
ICP is the main asset of Kenon, which is controlled by Idan Ofer, and has a market cap of $591 million. ICP owns a string of power stations in 11 countries, mainly in Central and South America, with three of the power stations in Peru supplying 2,189 megawatt. The company also has two power stations in El Salvador (210 megawatt), one in Chile (140 megawatt), one in Guatemala (179 megawatt), two in Panama (126 megawatt), one in the Dominican Republic (67 megawatt), three in Nicaragua (185 megawatt), one in Bolivia (228 megawatt), one in Colombia (31 megawatt) and one in Jamaica (60 megawatt).

A copy of the Pentateuch printed in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1491 and a Venetian prayer book on parchment printed in 1549 are among the many treasures of the Valmadonna Trust Library, a collection of rare Jewish tests and manuscripts the National Library of Israel has acquired, the library announced Wednesday.
Collector Jack Lunzer started amassing the Valmadonna Trust Library over 60 years ago. The collection grew to contain over 10,000 works that chart the spread of Hebrew printing and the global dissemination of Jewish culture. Some of the standout items include an incunabula (pre-1500 print) of the Pentateuch printed in Lisbon in 1491; one of only two surviving copies of the version of the Passover Haggadah that was printed in Prague in 1556; an Ashkenazi siddur (prayer book) printed on parchment in Venice in 1549; and over 550 broadsheets printed throughout the Jewish world from the 16th to the 20th century: calendars, notices by local governments to the Jewish communities, and Hebrew alphabet study tables.
The collection was purchased at a private sale at Sotheby's New York, in conjunction with collectors of archaeological artifacts, books, and Judaica Dr. David and Jemima Jeselsohn, as well as a donation from the Haim and Hana Solomon Fund.

Israeli and Jewish American humanitarian aid organizations have launched an emergency mission to deliver warm clothing to Syrian refugees suffering from sub-zero temperatures and heavy snowfall in Greece. The extreme wintry weather has made life in the refugee camps even more difficult than usual.
The non-governmental international humanitarian aid organizations, Amaliah (based in New York) and iAID (based in Tel Aviv) are currently in Greece with a team of five Israeli and Jewish American relief workers. The relief workers are bringing winter clothing and blankets to refugees on the island of Lesbos.
The 1.5 tons of supplies were gathered via donations from ordinary Israelis and sorted, packed, and readied for shipment.

A recent ad by tech giant Intel starring New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady highlights video technology developed by Israel’s Replay Technologies that will be used by FOX Sports in its upcoming Super Bowl broadcast.
Intel’s “Be the Player” technology will provide viewers with 360-degree replays of key moments in the game.
Using the tagline “Intel 360 Replay makes anything look epic,” the commercial features triumphal music and dramatic views of Tom Brady getting out of bed, brushing his teeth and eating a dropped pancake off of the floor.
The “freeD” system developed by Replay allows broadcasters to freeze video, rotate the angle of view and zoom in on the action. It has been used in other sporting events, including NBA and Olympics games.
For the Super Bowl, 38 cameras were installed throughout the stadium for the 360-degree reconstructions. Each clip will be around 15-30 seconds long and is around one terabyte of data.
The technology was developed by Replay Technologies, founded in Israel in 2011. Replay specializes in seamless 3D video rendering, allowing a viewer to see a scene from any angle as it would be seen live.

Wix.com, the Tel Aviv-based do-it-yourself website development company, on Wednesday said it would once again broadcast a commercial during the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 7.
The 30-second spot, which will be broadcast in the fourth quarter of the NFL final, will be part of a campaign Wix will launch using YouTube Live and Facebook Live, the company said.
The campaign will showcase a series of shorts featuring Israeli actress and model Gal Gadot, who plays the title role in the not-yet-released 2017 film “Wonder Woman,” and her “The Fast and the Furious” colleague English actor Jason Statham.
One of the shorts produced will be the 30-second commercial that will be broadcast during the Super Bowl, Wix said.

January 17, 2017 (Tevet 19 on the Jewish calendar) marked 115 years since Keren Kayemet Le’Israel-Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) was founded in 1901 at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel.
On that same date in 1878, the first furrow had been dug in Petah Tikva, symbolically beginning the replanting and revitalization of the land of Israel for which KKL-JNF would become so well known.
Though the organization grew to include many projects in sustainability, education, tourism, agriculture, road and reservoir development and even programs in other countries to share Israeli expertise, KKL-JNF remains synonymous with planting trees.
Responsible for about 400,000 acres of forests and natural woodlands in cooperation with the Israeli government, KKL-JNF has planted some 240 million trees in the past 115 years. All these trees help mitigate effects of climate change, prevent soil erosion and desertification, create green lungs around residential areas, and promote biodiversity.
Lots of people from across the world relish the opportunity not just to contribute to afforesting Israel but to come and plant trees with their own hands.

IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Golan, Turkish Chief of Staff Akar

IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Major General Yair Golan was in Brussels for the official opening of the Israeli office at NATO headquarters after it was decided that the two sides should have a closer working relationship. Roni Leshno Yaar, who submitted his credentials to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, is the first Israeli representative to NATO since the Jewish state was accepted as a partner to the organization (not a member).

In a joint meeting between the ambassador, Maj. Gen. Golan, and NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller, the Deputy Secretary said “here in NATO, we understand that Israel shares our values, and is an active and beneficial partner for Mediterranean dialogue.”

The meeting was an impressive show of support for Israel, with Maj. Gen. Golan being the highest ranking Israeli official to meet with NATO representatives. 

Several Arab military heads were also at the NATO meeting in Brussels, and also met with Golan on the sidelines. Arab countries represented at the meeting were Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, Morocco, Tunisia, and others. Discussions were held on the fight against terror amongst other subjects.

Usually, an Israeli Ambassador would make clear any reservations and the Conservative Friends of Israel would weigh in with its own view. But almost the entire Westminster village had disappeared for Christmas. Lord Polak, CFI honorary president, was in Florida and Mark Regev, the Israeli Ambassador, was out of the country on holiday. A series of juniors were in charge. None appeared to grasp the storm about to break.
When the resolution passed and the Jewish community realised what the government had done, however, there was apoplexy in Downing Street. A source told me: “Number 10 took its eye off the ball. They screwed up badly.”
My Whitehall contacts were adamant at the time that this was a change of policy and that Number 10 had been kept fully in the loop. That week, the JC’s front page story emphasised Number 10’s role. This only added to the anger with FCO officials.
The damage of 2334 was already done. But there was a determination — not least from Nick Timothy, Mrs May’s joint chief of staff — to show this was not indicative of a new policy. Number 10 decided it would take the first opportunity to unravel the UN mess.
The opportunity presented itself almost immediately. Five days after the UN vote, John Kerry launched a withering attack on the Israeli government in a speech at the State Department. But if that was unprecedented, so was the response from Number 10 — a direct and unambiguous dismissal of Mr Kerry’s speech.

Syria is on fire. South Sudan is unraveling. Russia is invading Eastern European states. But guess what President Obama decided to focus on in his last press conference as leader of the free world? Yup, Israel, the one and only Jewish State in the world. And by now we know that whenever Obama talks Israel it’s never a good thing.
In a parting shot to Israel on Wednesday, Obama questioned went so far as to question the viability of the Zionist project itself.
"I don't see how this issue gets resolved in a way that maintains Israel as both Jewish and a democracy if there are not two states," he croaked.
Obama’s comments come just a few weeks after he directed UN Ambassador Samantha Power to abstain from an egregiously anti-Israel UN Security Council resolution which labeled the Old City in Jerusalem, the Western Wall, and the Jewish Quarter illegally-occupied territory.
Not only did Obama refuse to concede any territory to his critics, but he ardently defended his administration’s decision to stab Israel in the waning days of his presidency.
"The goal of the UN resolution was to say the growth of the settlements will increasingly make a two-state solution impossible," he argued at the White House press conference. "It was important for us to send a signal, a wakeup call that this moment may be passing."
Obama knows full well, however, that the anti-Israel venom circulating across the Oval Office will soon be replaced by something else. On Friday, President-elect Donald Trump will take the oath of office and take hold of the levers of power. He has already signaled a staunchly pro-Israel stance, appointing an advocate as ambassador to Israel who believes that the US embassy in Tel Aviv should be moved to Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem Embassy Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1995, states that Jerusalem should remain a united city, that it should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel and that the U.S. Embassy should be moved there from Tel Aviv.
Every U.S. President has signed the waiver contained in the law which extends by an additional six months the time by which the embassy must be moved.
President Trump and several insiders close to him, including David M. Friedman, the man nominated to become the new U.S. Ambassador to Israel, has stated that under this president the embassy will be moved to Jerusalem.
It is unclear where, exactly, the Obama administration considered Israel’s capital to be – there were no public declarations that Tel Aviv was considered Israel’s capital. And, of course, President Obama and his State Department made it clear in the recent past that not only did they not consider Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel, they did not even consider Jerusalem to be part of Israel.
An enterprising Jerusalem builder has made his glee public about the stated policy of the incoming U.S. administration.

The inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States is likely to lead to a major transformation of U.S. Middle East policy. Many of the assumptions that accompanied the years of President Barack Obama will no longer be held by American policymakers.
But equally important, many elements that had in the past been fundamentals of U.S. policy and had been forgotten, and had not been part of the repertoire of the White House in the last eight years, could be reintroduced.
The first element involves Israel’s future border. Ever since 1967 when Israel captured the West Bank in the Six-Day War, the question of Israel’s future borders was governed by UN Security Council Resolution 242, which talks about an Israeli withdrawal from territories – not all the territories – to secure and recognized boundaries.
Now some people think that’s being very picayune with the language. But in fact the decision on the language of 242 was decided at the highest levels of the U.S. government, by President Lyndon Baines Johnson himself. And that language was preserved by successive U.S. presidents and secretaries of state.
For example, the Reagan administration in 1988, through its Secretary of State George Shultz, talked about the fact that Israel would never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in a letter to Israel in 1997, spoke about Israel getting “defensible borders,” and that idea was enshrined in 2004 by President George W. Bush in a letter to Ariel Sharon that was approved by both houses of Congress.
Unfortunately, over the last eight years, Israel’s recognized rights have been eroded, culminating in the most recent UN resolution on December 23, 2016, on which the U.S. abstained, which made constant reference to the 1967 lines as its primary point of reference.

Much of the international community supports the idea of solving the Israeli-Arab conflict with "two states for two peoples," a commonly used phrase that refers to a state for the Palestinians alongside a state for the Jews. As President Barack Obama put it in 2011, "The ultimate goal is two states for two people: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people and the State of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people."
According to a recent New York Times article, entitled "The Two-State Solution: What It Is and Why It Hasn't Happened," the Palestinian Authority government is among those parties that officially support the idea.
What do Palestinian leaders actually say? "Never." Even the less extreme portion of the divided Palestinian leadership, the West Bank-based government that has accepted the broader idea of a "two-state solution," hasn't been shy in rejecting the more specific principle of two states for two peoples. Sure, they consent to two states. But while they insist one of those states must be an Arab and Islamic state of Palestine, they refuse to accept that the other one is a Jewish state.

In Britain, Mrs. May’s tough-minded approach to Brexit closely followed her startling reversal of decades of British foreign policy by suddenly defending Israel against its enemies. Not only did she refuse to sign the statement issued by last weekend’s anti-Israel Paris conference, but she vetoed its attempted endorsement by the EU Foreign Affairs Council.
Yet only a few weeks previously, her government had played a key role in pushing through the UN Security Council’s Israel-bashing Resolution 2334. So what changed? Britain is hoping to pull off an all-important trade deal with the US. This would hugely strengthen its hand in its negotiations with the EU over Brexit. So a cynic would conclude that Britain is merely dancing to the tune of a new, very pro-Israel president.
There may be more to it than that. There are reports that Mrs. May was blindsided by her own Foreign Office over Resolution 2334. She is known to have genuinely warm feelings toward Israel and the Jewish people.
She may, though, also be largely ignorant of Middle East history and Britain’s shameful record within it. So it’s possible that she was indeed shocked by Resolution 2334 and is determined to promote a pro-Israel policy because she believes in it.
If so, this is all of great significance. For if a country gets Israel right, the chances are it will get other big things right too. The essence of the Israel-Arab impasse is the struggle between good and bad, victim and oppressor, truth and lies. Like the Obama administration, Britain has for decades been on the wrong side of that critical divide. Now Mr. Trump and Mrs. May might change that.
The reason is the forces that have propelled both of them to power. Through Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, both the British and American publics expressed a strong desire to reassert their national identity, defend their nation against its enemies and uphold reality-checks, accountability and common sense against the ideologues whose onslaught against truth and Western values has never been stopped until now.
In other words, far from the imminent demise of civilization we may be looking at its salvation.
On the other hand it may all have gone pear-shaped by Monday. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

It’s springtime for Israel’s relations with the Anglosphere. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu loves to talk about burgeoning ties with the Arab world, but in the months and years ahead, a newly formed pro-Israel triumvirate of English-speaking countries looks set to form the backbone of international support for the Jewish state.
The first and most important indication of this trend is, of course, the change in the White House. Arriving on Friday, the Donald Trump administration has made plain its intention to shut out the public daylight that Barack Obama introduced between Washington and Jerusalem, vowing all but total support for Netanyahu’s policies.
In addition, the United Kingdom has in recent weeks surprisingly and dramatically aligned itself with Jerusalem, defying European and even global consensus.
Completing the pro-Israel trio is Australia, which has long been exceptionally friendly toward Israel but recently reached new heights in opposing anti-Israel measures embraced by the rest of the world.
Canada is a fourth English-speaking country that is staunchly pro-Israel, but as opposed to the US, the UK and Australia, it has remained silent on the dramatic diplomatic developments of recent weeks. The two odd countries out are Ireland and New Zealand, whose relations with Jerusalem remain tense.

For many Jews, the primary threat comes from the far left, which seeks to isolate and demonize Israel. For other Jews, though, the threat comes from the far right, revitalized and legitimized by Trump’s rise. There is ample hypocrisy on both left and right. Who could have imagined that left-wing Jews, who ridiculed Prime Minister Netanyahu for comparing the threat of a nuclear Iran to the 1930s, would invoke the ’30s in response to an American election, however traumatic? And who could have imagined that right-wing Jews, who constantly warn their fellow Jews against passivity in the face of threat, would dismiss the seriousness of anti-Semitic expressions only because those emerge from their political camp?
American Jews need to resist the temptation of totally identifying their preferred president with Jewish interests and values. Revering any American president as an honorary member of the tribe risks debasing Jewish identity and communal discourse. Like Obama, Trump will pursue his own agenda – sometimes overlapping with a Jewish agenda, and sometimes fatefully clashing.
Obama’s legacy is a decimated Middle East, along with the unleashing of an imperial Iran that remains on the nuclear threshold. As for Trump, he has already created a legacy – a vulgarized politics, a society poisoned against itself. Candidate Trump declared war against precisely those pluralistic values that have allowed American Jewry to become the most successful Diaspora in Jewish history.
Neither man is worthy of Jewish adulation. In the era of “Jewish” presidents, American Jews need to avoid the dangers of a treacherous philo-Semitism and maintain the integrity of their communal discourse.

Thank God he won’t be president again.
Obama’s fixation on the settlements makes it clear that Israel is the source of the problems with the Arabs living in it’s midst.
In his mindset, it is not Arab terrorism – it is Jewish intransigence.
Good riddance of the worst foreign policy president in recent memory.

The United Kingdom refused to endorse the Joint Declaration.
It is incredible that the other twelve Security Council member States present – especially the five permanent members – could approve the terms of the Joint Declaration that so materially changes what they voted for or abstained on just three weeks earlier.
They obviously engaged in cherry picking bits and pieces of Resolution 2334 that they had rushed through with unseemly haste and now have second thoughts on.
A new agreed negotiating framework for any two-State solution now needs to be constructed to replace the trashed Quartet Roadmap.
The Security Council looks decidedly stupid and increasingly irrelevant.

One day prior to his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump made an appearance at a candlelight dinner for donors in Union Station on Thursday, promising "four incredible years" and celebrating his surprise November victory.
"So I just want to thank everybody. We're going to have four incredible years. It's going to be something special," Trump said to supporters in attendance.
In his speech Trump warmly turned to his daughter Ivanka who was listening in the audience and thanked her for her support throughout his race for presidency: "In the audience we have a very special person who worked very hard, who married very well- my daughter Ivanka."
The President-elect went on to talk about his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is slated to become a senior White House advisor working on trade and the Middle East in a rare case of a close presidential family member taking a major job. "I sort of stole her husband," Trump joked.

No one should have any illusions; the Trump administration is not going to give Israel a blank check on the settlements.
But it is unlikely to view them – and Jewish construction in Jerusalem – with the same animosity as did Obama, Kerry and many world leaders. And this, as well as seeing Iran through a similar prism, will remove constant points of friction.
Though Trump is difficult to predict, and the positions of some of his key national security team on Israel are enigmatic – for instance, the positions of Rex Tillerson at the State Department and James Mattis in the Pentagon – he has also surrounded himself with people who are strongly supportive of the current Israeli government, starting with vice president Mike Pence, and including Kushner; Nikki Haley, his nominee as envoy to the UN; Jason Greenblatt, his designated pick as special representative for international negotiations; and David Friedman, his appointee as ambassador to Israel.
In Trump’s inner circle, therefore, there will be people who will advocate for the policies championed by the current government of Israel to a degree that was sorely lacking in the Obama administration, at least since Dennis Ross left the White House as a key Middle East adviser in 2011.
“I can’t wait to start working with Israel,” Trump told Israel Hayom this week. “This weekend, relations between us officially begin.”
In other words, a new day. The expectation and hope in Jerusalem is that when it comes to Israel and the Middle East, this new day will also be a better one.

The Jerusalem Post reports: In a full throttled attack against US President Barack Obama, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat on Thursday released a video statement accusing the outgoing president of “surrendering to the Iranian’s and radical Islam,” as well as “abandoning Israel.”
While Barkat has made no secret of his opposition to the Obama Administration’s policies toward Israel, in the brief video he uses perhaps his strongest language to date to condemn the American president, and beseech all Israeli’s to support President-elect Donald Trump.
The video, emailed to Israelis with an accompanying letter of support for Trump, comes one day before the president-elect’s inauguration, as he doubles-down on his promise to relocate the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in multiple interviews with Israeli news publications.

The Obama administration has linked U.S. law enforcement with their Cuban counterparts in a partnership “on counternarcotics, counterterrorism, legal cooperation, and money laundering,” according to a statement from the U.S. embassy in Havana.
Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes — chief proponent of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA), or the Iran nuclear deal — attended the signing of the “U.S.-Cuba Law Enforcement Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)” in Havana. Rhodes has previously told reporters he and the administration are looking to bind the administration of incoming President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a hardline anti-communist platform, into as many agreements with Cuba as possible.
“I think what we were trying to do is to create as much momentum for the policy so as to make it irreversible, to enlist as many stakeholders as we could in the policy so as to make it irreversible,” USA Today quotes Rhodes as saying.

Yesterday, Ambassador Daniel Shapiro held his final official meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It marked the close of a farewell tour for Obama’s handpicked envoy to the Jewish state, and the conclusion of a five-year ambassadorial term that saw tremendous tension in the U.S.-Israel relationship. But you’d never have known of that tumult from the cordial nature of Shapiro’s last rendezvous with Netanyahu, or from the warm send-off he has received in Israel even from many on the Israeli right who have strongly opposed the Obama administration’s policy in the region.
How did Shapiro manage this remarkable feat of diplomacy in a country as fractious and contentious as Israel? It wasn’t by deviating from his boss’s positions. There was never any daylight between Shapiro’s pronouncements and Obama’s, no matter how unpopular the stance. As ambassador, Shapiro forcefully defended the Iran deal and criticized settlement expansion. Indeed, he was instrumental in formulating some of those administration positions as an adviser to Obama on Middle East matters since 2007. But he nonetheless won over Israelis across the political spectrum through determined outreach and his demonstrable concern and care for the Jewish state.
A fluent Hebrew speaker, Shapiro didn’t restrict himself to traditional diplomatic channels. He quickly made himself a fixture in Israeli media, speaking to Israelis in their own language and in their own homes, from mainstream radio outlets to niche ultra-Orthodox Jewish networks. He posted regularly on Twitter and Facebook in Hebrew, interacting with everyday citizens online. He recorded Hebrew holiday greetings for YouTube. He even went on Matzav ha-Uma (“State of the Union”), one of Israel’s premier late night comedy shows, where he was interrogated by the hosts in rapid-fire Hebrew. Humor is perhaps the hardest thing for foreign language speakers to pick up, given the differences in cultural frames of reference and the difficulty of catching quips like double entendres, but Shapiro acquitted himself with aplomb.

Sources have confirmed that Israel will apply for NATO membership later this week, “just to see the look on people’s faces.”
We caught up with the playful Zionist troublemaker, as it was preparing the documentation and sipping cocktails at its seaside retreat outside of Tel Aviv. Israel commented, “I’ve got to be honest, with this ceasefire holding with the Palestinians, I’m just looking for other outlets for my kooky sense of humor. And also, I really need to keep those guys and gals of the IDF fully occupied; the last thing I need is them getting all ‘Coup d’état’ on me.”
“I reckon if we can get all the signatures and bureaucracy hammered out this week, the 36th Armored Division can be in Germany by the summer holidays. From there it’s really just a quick road-march through Poland, and given the order, we can be in Moscow before the snow starts. Trust me we’ll be bringing extra warm socks; we’ve learnt from the man with the silly mustache”

The president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) was in Rome in the week-end to try to get the Pope, almost the ultimate super soft power, to support his cause. This diplomatic effort came after a new terrorist attack in Israel, when a truck rammed innocent bystanders, followed by a rally in Gaza to support it. These are all signs of the extreme weakness of some Palestinians and of madness in applauding terrorism.
There is madness in a very technical sense, as in losing touch with reality, because the whole regional situation has shifted, and not only because of the war in Syria or Iraq.
The Chinese plan for a new Silk Road in fact is creating completely new dynamics in the Middle East that are already changing the balance of power in the region.
The present balance of power is the historical legacy of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the fall of the Roman Empire in the east.
The Turks then posed for the first time since the height of the Roman Empire’s power a monopoly on the lucrative trade with the Indies and the Far East. The ambition was so real that the sultan took on the title of Roman emperor and proceeded to move west by pushing for a conquest of the Mediterranean. The effort effectively ended only in 1683, when Turkish forces were defeated around Vienna. But in the 230 years between the conquests of Constantinople and Vienna the whole world changed, unbeknownst to the Mediterranean players.

The Palestinian Authority continues to threaten violence as part of its intensive campaign to prevent US President-elect Donald Trump from moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. The official PA daily printed the above cartoon, entitled "Transferring the embassy," which shows Trump using a golf club to putt a lit bomb into a hole as if it were a golf ball. A dove symbolizing peace is looking out of the hole, next to which stands a flag with "Jerusalem" written on it in Arabic and English. [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 18, 2017]
PA Chairman Abbas stated explicitly that if Trump moves the embassy, it will "destroy the peace process":
"We want to hear what he says when he enters the White House - but if this step is taken, it will destroy the peace process."
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 19, 2017]
"Transferring the embassy will be not just provocative but beyond provocative, and will harm the entire peace process.'"
[WAFA, official PA news agency, Jan. 17, 2017]
Palestinian Media Watch has reported at length on the threats and warnings of PA and Fatah leaders that religious war will break out, should Trump follow through on his promise.

On Nov. 16, 2014, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) took the unusual step of designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Muslim American Society (MAS) – as terrorist organizations.
They were among 83 groups named for their connections to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
This outraged CAIR officials, who immediately began efforts to get their organization removed from the list. They found a powerful ally in Secretary of State John Kerry, who authorized State Department officials to meet regularly with UAE officials to lobby on behalf of CAIR and MAS.
CAIR already had a sympathetic ear in the Obama administration, including the State Department, that had openly embraced and legitimized the entire spectrum of radical Islamist groups falsely posing as religious or civil rights groups, which both CAIR and MAS had done.

Israel denounced Friday the “cynical exploitation” of Belgium’s judicial system, after Belgian prosecutors confirmed they wanted to question a former Israeli minister over war crimes allegations.
Tzipi Livni, currently a Knesset member with the center-left Zionist Union opposition party, was expected to visit Brussels next week to meet Jewish leaders in the city but “cancelled three or four days before,” a spokesman for the event said.
He said the cancellation was for “personal reasons.”
Local newspaper Le Soir said prosecutors had been hoping to question Livni over allegations of war crimes in the 2008-9 Israeli war in Gaza, when she was foreign minister.
“We wanted to take advantage of her visit to try to advance the investigation,” a spokesman for Belgium’s federal prosecutor Thierry Werts said.
Livni’s spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment from AFP, but the Foreign Ministry reacted strongly.

Op-ed: The words ‘racism’ and discrimination’ are the only thing radical leftist speakers can say about the Umm al-Hiran evacuation. Ignoring the facts, they are turning their battle against Israel into a battle against Israel’s ‘racism.’
The left-wing bodies operated a worldwide anti-Israel propaganda machine. Haaretz published countless articles against the state. When it was presented with an article refuting the claims, it refused to publish it. Freedom of speech is reserved for one opinion only. The Rabbis for Human Rights organization outdid itself by releasing an incitement film titled “Fiddler with no Roof.” It works. Even the European Parliament adopted an anti-Israel resolution in regards to the Bedouin. Army Radio broadcaster Khen Elmaleh wrote on Facebook on Wednesday, “I would have run over a policeman too had I been forcibly evacuated from my home.”
Terror receives justifications. A significant number of the people interviewed about the issue on the public media Wednesday revealed complete ignorance of the facts. Brainwashing wins. It leads to violence and to bloodshed. On Wednesday, we received further sad proof of that.
And one more thing. In my conversations with the locals, I got the impression that they were ready for an arrangement which would allow the Yatir residents to stay where they are while evacuating the few homes in Umm al-Hiran. The situation on the ground may justify such an arrangement, despite the court rulings. But their willingness likely comes up against the inciters from Balad, the Islamic Movement and radical bodies. They don’t want an arrangement. They are not in favor of the Bedouins. They are against Israel.

As President-elect Donald Trump is expected to officially be sworn into office later on Friday, the Israeli security establishment is preparing for possible altercations and clashes with Palestinian demonstrators.
The incoming American president has already declared in recent months his intention to follow through on several moves that are distinctly opposed to the Palestinian agenda in the region, with Palestinian political ranks vehemently protesting one specific move: his decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Trump's inauguration ceremony, which is slated to begin at 11:30 a.m. (EST) with some 900,000 participants in attendance, has already caused a rising in tensions in the West Bank and is expected to stir further unrest. Sources from the security establishment were quoted as saying on Friday that "we are preparing for an escalation in light of the elected president's speech. We understand that his statements can exacerbate the situation in the field."
The same sources also pointed an accusatory finger in the directions of Israeli as well as Palestinian politicians and leaders, adding that "politicians' public statements could also potentially further fan the flames."

A group of Israeli settlers, including three off-duty soldiers, were rescued by the mayor of a Palestinian village in the northern West Bank on Friday after they entered the area for as-yet-unknown reasons and were quickly set upon by local residents, the army said.
The four Israelis entered the village of Qusra, east of Ariel, on Friday morning. Once inside the village, residents of the hamlet surrounded the group and began throwing rocks at them, according to the Israel Defense Forces.
In response, the armed Israelis fired shots into the air.
The mayor of the village, Abdul Azeem al-Wadi, along with an activist from the Rabbis for Human Rights organization stepped in to rescue and detain the four settlers — who apparently came from the nearby Esh Kodesh outpost — for their own safety, according to Rabbis for Human Rights.
The group was then handed over to Israeli security forces, the army said.

A major Palestinian rights organization expressed concern Thursday after the Hamas-led authorities in Gaza imposed new restrictions on travel for businessmen.
A new circular will restrict businesspeople from leaving Gaza through the Erez crossing into Israel unless they have paid all their water, electricity and other bills, the interior ministry recently announced.
The Independent Commission for Human Rights, a Palestinian NGO, said the move was a threat to Gazans’ freedom of movement, calling it “contrary to law.”
“It is a serious encroachment on the right of movement and travel,” a statement said.
Iyad al-Bozum, a spokesman for the Hamas-run interior ministry, argued the restrictions were necessary at a time when Gaza was suffering from huge shortages.
“It is not reasonable that businessmen and traders are well off but don’t pay their bills,” he told AFP.

There’s a train of thought among right-thinking people in London at the moment that Israel is culpable; that it is responsible for all the ills of the Palestinians, all the woes of the Middle East. If it weren’t for Israel, they say, the world would be a better place. If you go to a dinner party you can hear things that wouldn’t have sounded unfamiliar in 1930s Germany. They say they’re just ‘anti-Zionist’ but to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic. No one is anti- any other country. No one questions, say, Iran’s right to exist.
I’ve voted Labour in the past, but these days people in the Labour party all too often say things about Jews having big noses, or controlling the media, or somehow engineering the attack on the World Trade Center. Israel is behind Isis, they say. At demonstrations people hold up placards that say Hitler was right. Those words, exactly. Much of Labour barely raises an eyebrow.
If only those people who wish ill on Israel, on Jews, could know what it’s like to hear their hatred — to live in London and hear that Jews are the puppet-masters of the world, that Israel only helps in disaster zones to harvest organs. My father would have known. He spent time in the 1940s in Nazi concentration camps, because he was Jewish. His parents and sister were murdered for the same reason. My father would feel the same dread chill, and know — first-hand — where all this blame and hatred of Jews leads. If you think I exaggerate, then tell me; where do you think it leads? It may be only the first ugly murmur, from stupid people, but it won’t end there.
I’ve been to Tel Aviv four times in five years, and it seems to me a place of positive things: hope, investment in the future, strength and patience and humour. This is why I’m thinking of moving.

This was my first anti-Israel university event of 2017. The start of an extremely busy time in the annual calendar. Apartheid Week, an intensive period of vicious anti-Israel activity on campus is only a month away. To highlight this intensity, this was one of only three events taking place I could have chosen. The other two were at SOAS, and Salisbury.
It was also my first event since Al -Jazeera launched a visible attack on British Jews, via an undercover operation driven from within a deeply antisemitic paradigm. As I pointed out at the time, even though sane people watched the show and saw nothing, for the antisemite, the show was the delivery of proof of Jewish conspiracy. So how would this play out on the UK campus?
The event itself was at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) campus, ‘discussing the BDS movement, its impact and importance’. Hosted by the QMUL Friends of Palestine Society, it was a Friends of Al Aqsa (FOA) event, and a bag of FOA material was handed out to all attendees.
On the panel was Ben White, Malaka Mohammed, Prof. Moshe Machover and Shamiul Joarder. The range of hate that lines up against Israel. Islamic thought, the Palestinian, the Marxist Jew, and well, the other, the British guy who attaches himself to Islamic thought and Jewish Marxists, to push a highly dubious and quintessentially hypocritical humanitarian cause.
The evening began with a short clip. I have provided just 10 seconds below, all that is needed to highlight the disgraceful distortion of history that is behind the BDS campaign:

Resolution 2334 was as sickening a surrender to the Arab-Muslim jihad in the name of "peace," as was the surrender of UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to Adolf Hitler at Munich in September 1938.
The UN before 1967 did not refer to the West Bank and Gaza as "occupied" territories when they were "occupied" by Egypt and Jordan after the 1948-49 war, which the Arab states launched against Israel. The Arab states then were the "occupiers" of parts of Palestine west of Jordan until 1967, and rejected any notion of Jews having a historic connection with Palestine, which they claimed was an integral part of Arab lands.
From the time of the Balfour Declaration and the League's Mandate for Palestine until the UN Resolution 181 (1947), reference to Palestine meant land with historic connection to the Jewish people. It was on this basis that the Jews' (Zionist) claim to reconstitute their national home was given legal recognition by the League, which the UN, as its successor, was legally bound to protect.
From the Arab perspective of religion and politics there never was a "Palestinian" people, or nation, distinct and separate from Arabs as a people or nation. The jihad called by the Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini against Jews in Palestine after 1921 was in the name of "Arabs" and Islam, and it has so remained since. According to the Hamas charter, "the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Trust] upon all Muslim generations till the day of Resurrection."
Jerusalem, its principal city, was built by King David, a Jew, some ten centuries earlier.

I have supported the ANC for decades, and thus far resisted the temptation to call out the organisation with regard to its foreign policy towards Israel, but now my silence borders on sinful. The policy is disturbing because it disregards the fundamental prerequisites of foreign policy – clarity, transparency and consistency.
It has become the norm to publicly castigate Israel as a reliable scapegoat and thus redirect the public’s attention elsewhere, which is exactly what transpired soon after the ANC’s January 8 statement.
The ANC’s view on Israel is divorced from history and reality; and this is surprising, given our own recent history of dispossession.
Any people that have ever felt the yolk of colonialism should understand the plight of the Jewish people in Israel. Colonial empires thrived on dispossessing indigenous people of their land, and the only difference between us Africans and the Jews is that we were internally displaced, while the Jewish people were dispossessed and exiled.
Is it illegal or undesirable for Jewish exiles to return to their ancestral homeland, and do exiles forfeit their right to do so because they fled persecution? In the case of Israel, the world deems this undesirable – but then how is it possible for our president, Jacob Zuma, and others in the liberation movement to return from exile in 1990, yet condemn Israel for settlements and occupation?
The ANC singles out Israel for special attention based on a false pretext, yet it endorses the One China Policy – which treats Taiwan and Tibet as mere provinces of China. The Dalai Lama has been in exile since 1959, yet both the ANC and our government do not support the aspirations of the Tibetan people. The same applied when Russia annexed Crimea.

Over the past week, Israel was subjected to the diplomatic equivalent of a lynch mob in Paris. It received unexpected assistance from Britain, which twice in two days departed from its traditional anti-Israel stance and blocked the Paris conference’s anti-Israel declaration from being adopted as the official position of the European Union.
Also over the past week, outgoing US President Barack Obama, outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry and outgoing UN Ambassador Samantha Power used their final appearances in office to blast Israel.
On the other hand, President-elect Donald Trump and his team played a key role in bringing about Britain’s change of heart toward Israel.
While these events have been widely covered by the foreign media, they have barely been mentioned in the Hebrew broadcast media, from which the majority of Israelis receive their news.
Instead, led by Channel 2 with its monopoly ratings share, the local media spent the past week covering almost nothing but the criminal probes being carried out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While America is Israel’s most important ally, it is not her only one. Fretful news stories of Israel’s impending isolation ignore that the nation’s diplomatic position is stronger today than it’s been in years, even among sworn enemies who understand the real threats to their regimes (not to mention their necks). Similarly, Israel’s growing success beyond politics (in areas like business, technology, medicine, academia and the arts) means that alliances now reach well beyond politics: into commerce, science, the academy and other important components of civil society. Indeed, it is only because of Israel’s success that there are so many products the BDSers can boycott, and so much investment they’re fighting to end.
So in addition to increasing support within the different branches and levels of American government, Israel must continue to expand friendships and relationships across the planet, regardless of how things play out in American politics (over which Israel and her supporters have little to no control) over the coming years.
With regard to what we can and cannot impact, remember that Israel’s greatest achievements and triumphs (the creation of the state, in-gathering of exiles, victory against overwhelming odds in the wars of 1948 and 1967) all took place before the current alliance with the US came into being in the 1970s. This is not to diminish the criticality of that alliance for a small nation still targeted by much larger and more powerful enemies. But it does point out that things tend to go best for the Jews when we count on ourselves, rather than others, and take responsibility for our own history – if for no other reason than our own self-respect.

Jerusalem and Ankara may have restored diplomatic relations in 2016, but the long-awaited thaw won’t see the return anytime soon of one of the most important ancient Hebrew inscriptions, found in Jerusalem and currently held in Istanbul, Israeli officials say.
The Siloam Inscription, a 2,700-year-old ancient Hebrew text that provides concrete historical support for a Biblical event, is one of three ancient Jewish inscriptions unearthed in the Holy Land currently owned by the Istanbul Archaeology Museum.
Despite an emphatic speech in October proclaiming the Siloam inscription’s significance to Jerusalem and the Jewish people, and the newly restored diplomatic relations with Turkey, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken no steps to secure the artifact’s repatriation, his office confirmed to The Times of Israel.
The ancient Hebrew text was discovered in 1880 in a tunnel hewn into a limestone hillside outside the Old City sometime in the late 8th century BCE.

By the time US President Barack Obama reads this editorial he will be winding up the last few hours of his presidency. During his last days in office, Obama has used his clemency power to commute the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, a former US Army analyst who was convicted of espionage in July 2013 by a military court after she turned over a massive cache of defense and diplomatic records to the organization WikiLeaks.
Obama has granted a total of 1,385 commutations, establishing himself as the most clement president in recent history. Obama has issued the most combined commutations and pardons of any president since Harry Truman, and more than Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes combined.
We are asking Obama to consider one more commutation – that of Jonathan Pollard, a US Navy civilian intelligence analyst who spied for Israel over a span of 18 months in the 1980s.
Pollard has paid his price. Before being paroled in 2015 and placed under highly restrictive conditions, he spent more than 10,000 days in a series of maximum and medium-security prisons. After being sentenced, he was incarcerated in a federal prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri, where he was reportedly “routinely deprived of his clothing and his eyeglasses in attempts to humiliate and ‘break’ him.”
In 1988, he was transferred to a maximum security prison in Marion, Illinois, where he remained in solitary confinement until 1993, when he was moved to a medium- security facility in Butner, North Carolina.
What’s more, Pollard was never tried in a court of law.

In a forceful, uncompromising inauguration address, US President Donald Trump placed the battle against Islamic extremism at the heart of his foreign policy as he took office on Friday, vowing to work with allies to destroy the jihadist threat.
“We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones, and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth,” he declared.
That focus conformed strongly with the mindset of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who tweeted his congratulations “to my friend President Trump” even before the 45th president had been sworn in.
Trump’s predecessors George W. Bush — who invaded Afghanistan and ousted the Taliban regime — and Barack Obama — who ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden — also fought extremism. But Trump has gone further than both in his use of language, suggesting that he sees the fight as a civilizational battle between America and a threat springing from the Islamic faith itself.

An investigation by the Regavim organization, which works to ensure that Israeli sovereignty is enforced over State-owned land, has revealed that part of the UN compound in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood of Jerusalem lies on State-owned land, and that, therefore, the government can cancel the UN’s permit to reside there any time that it wishes.
The organization presented aerial pictures which prove that the UN compound infringes on about 8 acres of State-owned land which are not part of the original compound granted to the UN for its use. The Jerusalem municipality has confirmed that there are deviations at the site from the original plan, and that Police are checking the matter.
Minister of Jerusalem Affairs and Environmental Protection Zeev Elkin said this morning during an interview with Radio Tel Aviv: “I ordered a check, and it appears that there is a problem there. The time has come for Israel to stop allowing itself to get beaten up by the UN, including the option of [evicting the UN from the premises].”
Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely promised: “The matter will be checked in the Foreign Ministry with respect to possible steps that can be taken against the UN agencies, following the Security Council decision against settlements.”

A California student who previously believed Israel was “akin to an apartheid state” had a complete about-face after visiting the country, San Diego State University’s independent student newspaper The Daily Aztec reported on Wednesday.
According to the report, SDSU political science and international security and conflict resolution senior Erin Gonzalez said she had expected the worst before her trip, but discovered the place wasn’t at all as she had envisioned. Rather, she encountered a society that embraces all religions and cultures, she said.
Gonzalez, who is not Jewish, traveled to Israel as part of a “Fact Finders” program, hosted by the school’s Hillel chapter, to enable SDSU students to experience the country and learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Gonzalez told The Daily Aztec that the experience also totally altered her perspective on Israeli settlements.
“Although the global community, and recently the United Nations, condemned [them] as both internationally illegal and an impediment to peace, I no longer see it that way,” she said, adding that she was surprised to discover that many Palestinians benefit from the settlement community, through employment opportunities and government benefits.

In early December, Professors Cary Nelson and David Greenberg wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about the “anti-normalization” tactic that has been widely adopted by proponents of the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel (“BDS”). As they explained, the tactic consists of preventing pro-Israel or anti-boycott arguments from even being heard, and includes shouting down speakers, or preventing speakers from even appearing on campus.
That’s what we saw when a CAMERA event at University College London last fall was disrupted, with one BDS leader present admitting that his true goal was to prevent future pro-Israel speakers from coming to that campus.
While the rationale provided for utilizing these measures is to reject any contacts between Israelis and Palestinians that “treat both parties as having legitimate grievances and aspirations,” this argument is specious. It’s illogical to ask people to take it on faith that Israelis have no legitimate grievances or aspirations. Equally striking is the fervor with which Nelson and Greenberg reported that the new BDS strategy is being pursued.
As I’ve written on CAMERA’s In Focus blog, only one conclusion can be drawn from these actions: that those setting the BDS agenda understand that the only way they win the argument is when the pro-Israel side does not have an opportunity to present its case.

A largely forgotten landmark 2013 French court ruling has received renewed attention this week following the international diplomatic summit held in Paris last Sunday at which Israeli settlements were portrayed as illegal.
In an editorial published on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “The conference was a failure, but the conferees could have helped themselves by first checking what French courts have to say about those settlements before scoring Israel again…In 2013 the French Court of Appeals in Versailles ruled that, contrary to Palestinian arguments, Jewish settlements don’t violate the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition against an occupying power transferring ‘its civilian population into the territory it occupies.’ The law, the court held, bars government efforts to transfer populations. But it doesn’t bar private individuals settling in the disputed territories.”
The Wall Street Journal was referring to the ruling on a lawsuit — detailed here — that was filed by the Palestinian Authority against two French companies that took part in the construction of the light rail line in Jerusalem — which traverses areas the Palestinians hope will be part of the capital city of their potential future state.

Over the last decade, the numbers of Chinese and Indian students at American universities have substantially increased. At the same time, faculty and students have campaigned to boycott China and India over the status of Tibet and Kashmir, to reject Chinese and Indian funding, and to shun collaboration with individual Chinese and Indian researchers. There have been organized assaults upon Chinese guest speakers and propaganda campaigns inciting students to purge universities of Chinese or Indian “influence,” including that of American citizens with a Chinese or Indian background. When students of Indian background object, they are informed that, wittingly or not, they are part of a global Hindu conspiracy.
Of course, none of this has happened. It is almost inconceivable that any of it would happen. All of this, however, has been directed against the State of Israel, and against American Jewish students, since the inception of bds, the campaign for “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” against the Jewish state. This dubious selectivity is one unique aspect of bds. Another is the scale of its ambition. Generally, the introversions of Social Justice stop well before the water’s edge. There are global issues, most notably and vaguely the environment, but bds is the only form of campus activism to attack a single state internationally—and a single group domestically.
bds activists seek to curtail the freedom of others.
bds seeks to transform the atmosphere of university intellectual and social life, in order to effect changes in government and business policy. bds activists seek to control the intellectual environment, to create a “safe space” for the indoctrination of a biased and often false view of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thus, the practice of bds tends towards the abuse of free speech, in that bds activists frequently seek to curtail the freedom of others.

An emergency motion aimed at protecting Jews at a British university notorious for its radical anti-Israel activism will be brought before the school’s student union on Tuesday, its initiator told The Algemeiner.
Avrahum Sanger, president of the Jewish Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, explained that the resolution he drafted seeks to tackle “issues that concern the welfare of Jewish students or make it difficult for them to both practice their religion and fully participate in university” – due, for example, to a lack of kosher food; scheduling that conflicts with Shabbat and Jewish holidays; and the silencing and marginalization of Jewish voices on campus.
Sanger recently told UK’s The Evening Standard that his peers at the school are “scared” to be recognizably Jewish, and refrain from wearing stars of David or speaking Hebrew in public. Sanger said that the intensely politically active student body is decidedly anti-Israel, promoting views that — as The Algemeiner has extensively reported — the US State Department has defined as antisemitic.
A spokesperson at SOAS said that the school is “very concerned to hear that any student is afraid to openly express their faith or belief.”
“We aim to be inclusive of all students of faith and we welcome suggestions about how to best achieve this,” the spokesperson told The Algemeiner.

I had never heard the acronym Soas before I started work at the BBC, almost 30 years ago. But as a very young producer at the corporation I was asked to fix up a story about something appalling happening in Africa — I can’t remember exactly what. Famine or cannibalism maybe. Or perhaps one mitigated by the other. The senior producer told me to get someone from Soas to explain it all. What’s Soas, I asked?
‘The School of Oriental and African Studies,’ I was informed. ‘It’s in London. It’s basically a place where we try to work out what on earth the natives are up to now.’
It was a different BBC back then. I was based in the old Broadcasting House, at the top of Regent Street. An eight-floor building — the first seven floors pretty much exclusively white. But then loads of black people working on the top floor — that was the canteen. By the time I left the BBC in 2004 things had changed markedly. The canteen was still staffed almost exclusively by black people. But now there were lots of black people several floors lower down, not serving food at all — in the ‘Community Affairs Unit’. Progress, then, of a kind.
I suspect Soas has changed quite a bit, too. As far as I can discern, it now seems to be a place for castigating whitey and especially British whitey. Fair enough — I suppose we need castigating, and it’s good for the soul. But it has got itself in the news recently as a consequence of the demands of its students’ union, which has outflanked even the students’ unions of Oxford and University College London in the cretin stakes. Which takes some doing.

Six elected officials from the Miami area on Wednesday harshly condemned recent acts of vandalism committed near local Jewish businesses by supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which they blasted as an “anti-Semitic and anti-Israel” ploy to undermine peace prospects.
In a letter to Miami Police Commander Albert Guerra, officials including Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado, Bal Harbour Mayor Gabriel Groisman, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine, Miami Commissioner Francis Suarez, and Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez denounced the defacement of public property in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood with hundreds of spray-painted “BDS” stamps, which were first spotted on November 15. The letter was also signed by Sharona Whisler, executive director of the Zionist Organization of America’s Florida chapter.
The stamps were concentrated in an area with many Jewish-owned businesses, including some with mezuzot on their doorways, and were reported to the Miami Police Department by local businessman and activist Joe Zevuloni. A video taken by Zevuloni and embedded below shows some of the stamps sprayed in front of an Israeli-owned store.
The incident is being investigated as a hate crime, a decision the officials said they “strongly support.”

The caption reads:
A historic high-rise and symbol of modernity, the 17-story Plasco was built by Jewish plastics tycoon Habib Elghanian.
I cannot find a reason to mention he is Jewish in the caption besides implying his guilt in this affair. And even if that wasn’t the case, mentioning it will certainly help with the proliferation of the usual kinds of conspiracy theories.
The report actually mentions he was executed back in 1979..for guess what.
It also stood out for its builder: a Jewish plastics tycoon, Habib Elghanian, who was executed in the months after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran’s ruling mullahs accused Elghanian, the head of a prominent association of Jewish Iranians, of spying for Israel, which triggered an exodus of Jews from the country.

I’m willing to bet the theory that this “Zionist” somehow rigged the building to kill people will gain traction.

Predictably, Knell’s response had the history of the millennia-old city beginning just fifty years ago, with no mention of the preceding 19-year Jordanian occupation of parts of Jerusalem.
Knell: “That’s right and Jerusalem has proven time and time again to be one of the most explosive issues; one of the most difficult issues to solve in this decades-old conflict, not least because of its holy sites for Jews, Muslims and Christians. And of course Israel captured the east of the city – which includes the Old City – in 1967 in the Middle East war. It went on to annex East Jerusalem, declare all of Jerusalem its united, eternal capital – although that’s never been recognised internationally. And the Palestinians are basically saying that any move for a US embassy – bringing it from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – would kill the two-state solution; this long-standing goal of international policy on this conflict. It’s enshrined in UN resolutions: the idea of creating a Palestinian state to live peacefully alongside Israel. It will be based in Gaza, the West Bank and have East Jerusalem as its capital.”
Stourton: “I think I’m right in saying the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has been in the Vatican this weekend. He’s been talking about some of this, hasn’t he?”
In her response to that question, Knell introduced the falsehood of “pre-1967 borders” – a concept which not only does not exist, but was specifically and deliberately rejected by the parties to the 1949 Armistice Agreement.

On January 16th the BBC News website published an article titled “Egypt court upholds ruling halting transfer of islands to Saudi Arabia“. Included in that report was an insert of background information titled “Why the Red Sea islands matter”, which previously appeared in an article concerning the same story in June 2016.tiran-art-jan-17
The insert includes the following context-free information:
“Israel captured the islands in 1956 and 1967, subsequently returning them to Egypt both times”
As was noted here over six months ago:
“The BBC did not bother to inform readers why that was the case.
“In 1949, Egypt established itself on two small and deserted islands in the straits that had never belonged to it – Tiran and Sanafir. Later, they were leased to it by Saudi Arabia. In January 1950, Egypt assured the United States Government that the occupation of the islands was in no way intended to interfere with shipping in the waters of the gulf. But soon Egypt broke its word, fortified the entrance to the straits and blockaded Israel.

Twenty-seven Jewish community centers in 17 U.S. states reported receiving false telephone bomb threats on Wednesday, prompting evacuations and an FBI probe into the second wave of hoax attacks to target American Jewish facilities this month.
The Jewish Community Centers Association of North America, a network of health and education centers, said the threatened organizations were working with police and many had resumed operations after no bombs were found nor injuries reported, as was the case after the earlier series of threats on Jan. 9.
No one claimed responsibility for the calls on Wednesday nor nine days ago, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has not named any suspects nor described a likely motive.
The FBI and the Justice Department are investigating possible civil rights violations in connection with threats, the FBI said in a statement.
"The FBI will collect all available facts and evidence, and will ensure this matter is investigated in a fair, thorough and impartial manner," the statement said.

The Anti-Defamation league on Thursday issued a security advisory to Jewish institutions across the US, after a series of bomb threats to some 30 Jewish community centers in 17 states.
It was the second wave of such mass disruption in two weeks.
The NGO said that while the threats did not appear to be credible, it nonetheless urged communal establishments to take serious measures.
The ADL received reports of bomb threats at community centers in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
“We are recommending that Jewish communal institutions review their security procedures and remain in close contact with law enforcement,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL’s CEO. “While each incident needs to be taken seriously and investigated closely, thus far we are not aware of any of these threats being substantiated.
“Federal authorities and local police departments should be commended for their rapid response to these incidents,” he added. “We remain in close contact with law enforcement and are offering our support and resources to local community centers.”

A Belgian court on Friday upheld French comedian Dieudonne's two-month jail sentence for incitement to hatred over anti-Semitic comments during a show in Belgium, a lawyer said.
Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala, who has faced similar court cases in France, also had his 9,000-euro ($9,566) fine confirmed by the appeals court in the eastern city of Liege, said Eric Lemmens, a lawyer for Belgium's Jewish organizations.
"The appeals court in Liege upheld the verdict from criminal court in Liege," Lemmens told AFP.
He said the court warned the comedian he would be sentenced to "three extra months in prison if he fails to pay the fine."

Hundreds of thousands of selfies featuring smiling, yoga-posing, laughing people, all while visiting the 2,711 concrete slabs at the Holocaust Denkmal Berlin memorial have recently surfaced on multiple social media platforms.
The pictures in question are part of Yolocuast, an artistic initiative led by Shahak Shapira, an Israeli satirist and author who takes the images, all publicly posted on social media such as Facebook and Instagram, and edits the back drop to Nazi extermination camps.
Shapira's project serves as an artistic critique of individuals who visit sites commemorating the genocide of six millions Jews during World War II and then proceed to post pictures of themselves smiling and appearing to have a good time.
The artist named his project "Yolocaust" in an ironic word play on the word Holocaust and the term YOLO, short for "you only live once," a popular, life-affirming message people often add to their social media posts in the form of a hashtag.
The Yolocaust site describes the project as exploring "commemorative culture by combining selfies from the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin with footage from Nazi extermination camps."

A few weeks ago, I posted about the planned Neo Nazi march in Whitefish Montana, with a Hamas-hole as a keynote speaker.
It turns out, the hater trying to organize it was unable to secure a permit (perhaps because he spelt his name wrong on the application form?), and will try again for next month.
But out of this story comes some light. The Whitefish police force has performed a wonderful gesture of solidarity with the Jewish community by having a mezuzah affixed to the outside door of the police station.
Bonus: the mezuzah is from Jerusalem, made of Jerusalem stone!

Two years after the death of Alberto Nisman, organizers of tributes to the deceased prosecutor appear hopeful that the circumstances of his death will be clarified.
Tributes were held both in Argentina and Israel on Wednesday for Nisman, who was found dead at his home in the Argentine capital in January, 2015, in the midst of his investigation into the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center.
“There is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel,” prosecutor German Moldes said Wednesday at a vigil in Buenos Aires. Moldes was one of the three speakers who addressed a crowd in front of the prosecutor’s unit that Nisman had led.
Moldes said that his colleague, Eduardo Taiano, who is leading the investigation into Nisman’s death, has received death threats over the ongoing investigation.
“We must continue working for the truth. How we will give up if Taiano who receives threats on his life does not give up,” Moldes told the crowd of more than 1,000 people.

For almost 15 years, ISRAEL21c has been writing stories about the incredible international aid work that Israel carries out overseas.
Whether it’s in response to an earthquake or other natural or manmade disaster, Israeli aid volunteers from the government, the army and nonprofit NGOs have been quick to respond, often reaching the disaster area before relief teams arrive from other nations.
Despite its tiny size, Israel is also involved in long-term educational, environmental and healthcare missions in countries including Kenya, Nepal, Japan, China, Vietnam, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Turkmenistan, Haiti, and Papua New Guinea.
Israel even helps the citizens of some enemy nations, treating refugees across the world, helping Syrians wounded in the civil war, or bringing children to Israel for lifesaving surgery.
And yet despite so many missions, little is known about the incredible aid work carried out by Israel. A year ago, ISRAEL21c decided to do something about that and created the Israel Aid Map. It’s a phenomenal way to show people the extent and breadth of aid from Israel.

We already knew KISS frontman Gene Simmons was a staunch supporter of Israel. So no surprises he would come out and say these things on Varney & Co earlier this month.

Kerry told CBS News, that should Trump move the embassy, “You’d have an explosion – an absolute explosion in the region, not just in the West Bank and perhaps even in Israel itself, but throughout the region. The Arab world has enormous interest in the Haram al-Sharif, as it is called; the Temple Mount, the Dome [of the Rock], and it is a holy site for the Arab world.”
Let’s put aside that no one is suggesting moving the embassy to disputed portions of Jerusalem, but rather to West Jerusalem which is an undisputed part of Israel proper. And also forget for the moment that the peace process has hardly advanced since Palestinian chairman Mahmoud Abbas turned down Israel’s 2008 peace offer. Could Kerry be correct? And should the Arab diplomats warning behind-the-scenes of dire consequences be believed?
Here, history should inform. Prior to both 1991 Operation Desert Storm, and then again ahead of the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom, many diplomats and analysts—including some quoted in the most recent articles—suggested that U.S. forces entering the Arab world would spark protests and riots. But, in both cases, demonstrations largely fizzled. Those that did occur were often state-sponsored. What brought Arabs into the streets was not questions of war and peace in Israel but largely local issues—a vendor’s self-immolation in Tunisia and a blogger’s death under torture in Egypt.
Simply put, the threat that moving the embassy to Jerusalem will spark chaos in Jordan and Egypt is overblown, an excuse more manufactured than real.

A regional court’s affirmation this month of a decision asserting that the arson at a synagogue in the city of Wuppertal in July 2014 was not motivated by antisemitism but was merely a plea by three Palestinians to criticize Israel catapulted the deficiencies of Germany’s judicial system into the spotlight.
While some mainstream political parties, such as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, have classified the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement as antisemitic, and German banks have pulled the plug on BDS accounts, judges in the Federal Republic have moved in a radically different direction.
A series of recent court cases has raised the profoundly disturbing impression that German justice is stacked in favor of alleged antisemites. Commenting on the Wuppertal case, the Israeli Embassy in Berlin told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday: “One of the facades of antisemitism is being anti-Israel. We recommend not to fall into this trap. Any attempt to link a sovereign state that wants to defend itself with religion is a double-edged sword that can become quickly dangerous as well for other groups of society.”
The Wuppertal lower court decision defended the reasoning of the three men – Muhammad E., 31, Ismail A., 26, and Muhammad A., 20 – who, according to the judiciary’s opinion, sought, via torching a synagogue, “to clearly draw attention to the blazing conflict between Israel and Palestinians” during Operation Protective Edge in 2014.

The morning of the coordinated attack on Israel, US assessments flipped from presuming war was not on the horizon to frantic attempts to prevent Syria and Egypt from attacking the Jewish state, which was warned off any preemptive strike.
Amongst the tens of thousands of CIA documents put online, one can find the American intelligence assessment regarding the possibility of a war between Israel and its neighbors in 1973 and how the then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger acted when he received the information that Egypt and Syria were intending to begin the Yom Kippur War.
In the daily intelligence briefing submitted to the then-US President, Richard Nixon, on the day that the war broke out, it was reported, "Both the Israelis and the Arabs are becoming increasingly concerned about their adversaries' military activities, but neither side seems bent on starting hostilities."
A CIA document from October 6, the day the war broke out, reported that six Soviet military planes "flew to Damascus yesterday. In addition a Soviet jet transport normally used for VIPs made two round-trip flights to Cairo. The air-lift continues today. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Did an anti-Zionist filmmaker from Oxford masquerade as his political opposite to get internships at lobbying outfits?
Last summer, a spritely presence enlivened the small and often dull circles of Washington’s Israel-advocacy community. A young man named Antoine Kleinfeld arrived from Oxford, where he was a student. He spoke with a tony North London accent and dressed crisply. He was fluent in six languages, including Yiddish and Hebrew, and regaled his new friends with stories about his hobby, international hitchhiking, which had taken him, he said, to 80 countries the world over.
It was precisely the sort of pastime, costly and eccentric, for which the British upper classes are known, and Kleinfeld, true to form, seemed the perfect gentleman, throwing parties in his lavish apartment and ingratiating himself by sending thoughtful notes and text messages to everyone he met. Over several months, between June of 2016 and January of this year, he cultivated a relationship with several pro-Israel organizations in D.C., becoming one of the town’s best-liked Zionist activists.
There was only one problem: Antoine Kleinfeld isn’t a Zionist. He isn’t even Antoine Kleinfeld. His name, several sources have told Tablet, is James Anthony Kleinfeld, a pro-Palestinian filmmaker who, it seems, embedded himself with the Washington pro-Israel crowd, surreptitiously filming his new associates there in the hope, presumably, of producing a movie—or at least viral clips—that would publicly embarrass them. He has now disappeared. (h/t Yenta Press)

Recent events in the Middle East have proven conclusively the irrelevance of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the misery that mires the Middle East. Continuing inter-tribal bloodshed, hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded, and homeless refugees, destruction of infrastructure and the unfolding implosion of the entire Middle Eastern society has nothing to do with the territorial dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs.
More than that, the standard cant of gatherings such as last weekend’s summit runs contrary to the interests of the Palestinian people, blinded by hate propaganda and shunned by their own Arab brethren. Palestinians have long been betrayed by their leaders, who have found it expedient to maintain a state of war, lest their greed and incompetence become clear for all to see. This trivial real estate dispute was never about the settlements, about a separate state for the Palestinians or Arab refugees. Nor does it hang on ‘occupation’. Not at all. It has always been, since 1948, about the very existence of Israel as a Jewish State.
The obsessive insistence of Western democratic governments on the Jewish settlements being the reason for the war’s existence is a fantasy that contributes to the ongoing tragedy, diverting attention from the real reason for this endless and fruitless war: Arab refusal to accept Israel’s existence.
The 2017 Paris conference was a parting ‘gift’ to Israel by Barack Obama. This conference continued the shameful tradition of people claiming to be ‘friends of Jews’ who betray Jews in their time of need. This conference was never going to foster peace. On the contrary, further escalated mutual hostilities.
However, there is a fundamental difference between the Evian and Paris conferences. This time, the Jews will not go quietly. Never again.

The evolution of UNRWA’s policy on the right of return to fanaticism is clear cut. For over 60 years, there has been no ‘return’ to Israel, and the status quo of the perpetual Palestinian refugee has remained intact. In fact, since the 1950s, Arabs have actually been relocating to UNWRA run camps to capitalize on free services and ‘education’, contrary the organization’s alleged goal. Other ‘refugees’ living in the Shu’fat camp hold Jerusalem IDs, yet actively choose to live in the camps while paradoxically teaching their children to chant “We will return to Jerusalem”. The right of return to Palestinian refugees is clearly predicated on the notion that relocation is contingent on Jewish expulsion by means of jihad, in other words a second holocaust.
A new generation of Palestinian children are being taught to understand that their situation is solely Israel’s fault, resulting in a radicalised population determined to vent their frustrations by violent means against the Jewish State. Over the last 60 years, UNWRA has propagated the myth of the eternal Palestinian refugee, functioning as a primary mechanism for the recruitment of future jihadists. If current trends of classroom incitement within UN run schools persist, and donor nations continue to ignore the dire situation, these students will go on to become the next generation of jihadists in the Middle East.
UNWRA needs to be held accountable for the 1.2bn in Western funding they receive each year. Donor countries, including Australia urgently need to review their continuation of aid to this UN sponsored organization. Future funding should be conditional on educational reform, beginning with the dismissal of employees associated with Hamas and the abolition of textbooks inciting jihad. Palestinian children deserve a future built around hope, not one centered around illusions.

For the last decade Israel has had to deal with the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) Movement, whose sanctions included the pulling out of investments from the Jewish state. The movement calls for academic, cultural and economic bodies to cut off relations with Israel.
The supposed goal of the BDS Movement is to force Israel to leave the "Palestinian territories" and to establish a Palestinian state, but the basic real motivation behind the movement's activities is hatred of Israel and of Jews, and the openly expressed desire to rid the Middle East of Israel.
For years the movement seemed relegated to the sidelines and had little influence . However during the last two years, mainly after Operation Protective Edge in Gaza and the negative publicity it engendered, the movement increased its activities, its donations grew significantly and so did the number of its volunteers. The organization's success on North American, Canadian and European academic campuses was especially pronounced, due to the large number of Muslims and Arabs enrolled on campus and the current fashion of putting everything in the context of human rights (as long as we are not talking about Jews, that is), in addition to traditional anti-Semitism and the presenting of Israel as an illegitimate state, scofflaw and a danger to world peace.
The state of Israel, Jews and pro-Israel people the world over realized what the real goal of BDS is and decided to fight it. Israel's government even established official frameworks and allocated funds for this struggle. The anti-BDS activities are on different levels and in various arenas, and Israel has garnered significant successes fighting them. For example: Fifteen states in the USA have passed laws against firms that boycott Israel, in Canada similar laws were passed and in Europe there have been not a few successes in this regard. The question is who will make sure these laws are kept and how will it be done?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached out to the Iranian people on Saturday evening, slamming the regime that he said oppresses them and vowing that aggression by Tehran would top his list of priorities during his first contacts with US President Donald Trump.
In a clip posted on Facebook minutes after Shabbat ended, the prime minister stresses that Israel does not consider the Iranian people to be the enemy, but only the regime that rules them. While stopping short of calling on the Iranians to revolt, he describes a brutal dictatorship preventing them from living the Western lives they ostensibly seek.
“I plan to speak soon with President Trump about how to counter the threat of the Iranian regime, which calls for Israel’s destruction,” Netanyahu says in the video, speaking in English with Persian subtitles.
“But it struck me recently that I’ve spoken a lot about the Iranian regime and not enough about the Iranian people, or for that matter, to the Iranian people. So I hope this message reaches every Iranian — young and old, religious and secular, man and woman.”
The Iranian people prefer to live without fear, enjoying Western freedom and liberties, the prime minister says. “I know you’d want to be able to speak freely, to love who you want without the fear of being tortured or hung from a crane.”

In a forceful, uncompromising inauguration address, US President Donald Trump placed the battle against Islamic extremism at the heart of his foreign policy as he took office on Friday, vowing to work with allies to destroy the jihadist threat.
“We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones, and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth,” he declared, referring to the Islamist terror threat in language that his predecessor always preferred not to use.
That focus conformed strongly with the mindset of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who tweeted his congratulations “to my friend President Trump” even before the 45th president had been sworn in.
Trump’s predecessors George W. Bush — who invaded Afghanistan and ousted the Taliban regime — and Barack Obama — who ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden — also fought extremism. But Trump has gone further than both in his use of language, suggesting that he sees the fight as a civilizational battle between America and a threat springing from the Islamic faith itself.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, offered a prayer at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on Friday, citing a Psalm remembering Zion and Jerusalem.
In his 2-minute prayer, Hier blessed “President Donald J Trump and America, a great nation, “and all of America’s our allies around the world who share our beliefs.”
“By the rivers of Babylon, we wept as we remembered Zion… If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. The do-er of all these shall never falter,” Hier said, citing Psalm 137.
The reference came less than a month after the US abstained in a UN Security Council vote, and chose not to use its veto, allowing through a resolution that slammed Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where Judaism’s holiest sites are located, and designated all territory captured there in the 1967 war as being unlawfully occupied by Israel from the Palestinians.

Israel opened its new office at NATO headquarters on Thursday, a move meant to strengthen ties between Jerusalem and Brussels, Ynet reported.
Roni Leshno Yaar presented his credentials to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, becoming the first Israeli representative to NATO since the Jewish state became a partner of the organization.
“Here in NATO, we understand that Israel shares our values, and is an active and beneficial partner for Mediterranean dialogue,” NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Goettemoeller said.
IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Yair Golan arrived in Belgium for the official opening of the Israeli office, and got together with senior NATO officials during his stay. Golan notably met with the head of the Turkish Armed Forces, Gen. Hulusi Akar, on the sidelines of NATO’s conference for defense chiefs in Brussels. It is believed to be the highest level meeting between Israeli and Turkish military officials since the two countries reestablished relations last year.
Several high-ranking Arab officials were also at the conference, including from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, Morocco, and Tunisia, and some also spoke with Golan on the sidelines.

First the Palestinians hijacked airplanes. Now they hijack agendas.
Its happening again.
We saw this with first with the local anti-war movement. We saw it with Occupy and with Black Lives Matter. And we are seeing it with the anti-Trump protests, as the San Francisco Israeli consulate is targeted in this afternoon’s protest.

The Middle East is a volatile, constantly shifting region. Israel shares borders with Syria, Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, and the Sinai; all of these operational sectors present their own challenges. This update can get you up to speed on the situations, threats, and changes on our borders.
Syria border
Because of the war in Syria, our border is, in a word, unpredictable. In the Syrian Golan, Assad forces, rebels, Hezbollah, and Islamic State factions violently clash on a daily basis. Sometimes the violence spills over the border, threatening the Golan Heights. The IDF is prepared for violence to turn towards us, as it did on November 28, when an ISIS cell attacked Israeli soldiers in the Golan Heights. We maintain a policy of non-involvement in the fighting in Syria, but when our soldiers and civilians are threatened, we will respond accordingly.
Gaza border
Hamas has been building – not schools, hospitals, and homes – but their cross-border tunnel network. They’ve been taking advantage of the relative calm to keep expanding their underground terror infrastructure. Two cross-border tunnels have been found and destroyed by IDF forces in 2016. Over the past year, international aid to Gaza has increased significantly – but that doesn’t mean that Gazan citizens are benefiting from it. Twice in 2016, Hamas has been caught using international aid funds and donations meant for improving the quality of life of Gaza’s civilians and diverting them to terror.
Judea and Samaria
The “lone wolf” attacks of the past year pose an enormous challenge: they’re hard to predict and track. They’re spurred on by incitement, often by established terror groups like Hamas and ISIS, religious occasions, social media, and inspiration from past attacks can cause upticks.
From October 2015 through the end of 2016, Palestinians from Judea and Samaria have carried out 278 shooting, stabbing, car ramming, and bombing attacks against Israelis. Identifying hotbeds of terror and keeping illegal weapons out of the hands of potential terrorists can help prevent these attacks. Israeli forces have seized 445 weapons and 43 weapons manufacturing machines in 2016.
Lebanon border
Our border with Lebanon may seem quiet, but Hezbollah, the Shiite terror group that controls Lebanon’s south, is continuing to prepare for attacks against Israel. Unlike other terror groups, Hezbollah’s size and arsenal rivals that of a conventional army. Their 45,000 soldiers and over 100,000 missiles are embedded in civilian population centers. They regularly violate Resolution 1701, which bars them from possessing arms and from acting as an armed organization separate from the Lebanese Armed Forces.
Sinai border
The Islamic State’s Sinai branch (Wilayat Sinai) threatens us regularly through their publications. They clash violently with Egyptian forces, and have carried out attacks against Israel in the past. In the past five years, they’ve fired rockets into southern Israel, targeted Israeli civilians, and carried out attacks against Israeli forces.
With a knowledge of this deadly threat, the IDF is always training for a potential cross-border attack by the Islamic State. Units like the Caracal Battalion are permanently stationed on the border, and reserve units like Lotar Eilat counter-terror unit are ready at a moment’s notice to defend the local civilian populations.

In a recent Friday sermon in the Gaza Strip, Hamas MP Marwan Abu Ras accused Jews of recruiting prostitutes into the army “in order to lure Arabs into their traps,” and further added that Jewish leaders send “AIDS-infected girls to fornicate with Muslim youths.”
During the sermon, which was delivered on January 6 and was broadcast on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV, Abu Ras also claimed that the Jewish state allowed drugs and tobacco to be smuggled through tunnels into Gaza, while purposefully preventing the entry of essential goods.
“Do you know what commodity enters Gaza in large quantities, with the blessings of the enemy? It is drugs,” said Abu Ras. “Drugs only. The second commodity is tobacco. Those who want to smuggle drugs or tobacco into Gaza can do so freely, but to smuggle a useful commodity into Gaza? That is forbidden.”
According to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the Hamas MP went on to attack Jews at large for spreading “filthy pornographic movies and websites.”

Hamas-Affiliated Palestinian Scholar Bassam Jarrar: The Jews Played a Role in the Economic Collapses of Germany in the 1920s and America in 2008; Allah Turned Them into Apes and Pigs
A virulently antisemitic lecture by pro-Hamas Palestinian scholar Bassam Jarrar was recently posted on a YouTube channel dedicated to his lectures.
In the lecture, titled:
"Why Hitler Burned the Jews and How They Will Come to Their End in 2022," Jarrar finds justifications for the Holocaust, and describes the transformation of the Jews into apes and pigs, according to Islamic tradition.
Jarrar says that in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power, the “schemes” of the Jews had led to the bankruptcy of German banks.
He draws a parallel to the "foul play you saw in America in 2008." He further says that Allah “apparently transformed [the Jews] into chimpanzees, because they are the closest creatures” to humans in their DNA, and that those who were upset about this punishment were then transformed into pigs.
“You don't like becoming apes?! We'll turn you into pigs!” he mocked. The video was posted on December 20.

Egyptian scholar Dr. Yahya Mohammad Abdallah Ismail said in a recent TV interview that there was a dichotomy between "the Islamic East, which was very tolerant, and the European West, which, for its own reasons, abhorred the Jews."
Saying that "the Jews were treated [by Nazism] the same as other nations," Dr. Abdallah, former Dean of Hebrew Language and Literature at Mansoura University, added that although in many European regions, the Jews suffered greatly, "this makes us Muslims confident that we are tolerant and do not infringe upon the rights of others." Dr. Abdallah was speaking on Egypt's Channel 2 on December 2, 2016.

In a mass parade and military display held in Sanaa in support of the Houthi movement, women brandished weapons and vowed to fight the infidels. Within the framework of a campaign called "Forceful against the Infidels", the Niqab-clad women, dressed in black, chanted: "Death to America! Death to Israel! A curse upon the Jews!" The parade was broadcast on the Yemeni Al-Masirah TV channel on January 17.

You may recall late last year when the UN passed the very controversial resolution that condemned Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria as illegal, breaking the longstanding US tradition of defending their best friend Israel’s right to exist and have communities in Judea and Samaria.
Beyond the recent actions of the Obama administration and the UN, there has been an active campaign amongst the regressive anti-semitic left in the western world known as BDS, or Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
BDS affects entrepreneurship, business investment and the economic outlook of many Israelis and Israeli businesses, and in Judea and Samaria in particular, the boycott can have a significant impact.
Nati is fighting back, not only by speaking around the world but by starting his own company called Lev Haolam or the "Heart of the World."
It allows anyone supportive of Israel around the world to buy items made and produced by Israeli’s in Judea and Samaria every month and know they are directly fighting back against BDS.

A front-page story in The New York Times this week reported on a recent international meeting about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The story correctly noted that the Paris meeting culminated with a joint declaration reaffirming international support for a two-state solution to the conflict. But when describing the content of that communiqué, reporters falsely claimed that the document called for a "return to the 1967 boundaries between the Israelis and Palestinians" and "the removal of settlements from the West Bank."
These fabrications come only weeks after the newspaper told readers that the Palestinian Authority accepts the principle of two states for two peoples, when in fact Palestinian leaders say they will "never" accept such a solution.
The Jan. 16 article about the meeting of world leaders got off to an unpromising start when, in the first paragraph, it claimed that Donald Trump has "vowed to support Israel no matter what."
A New York Times advertisement on Twitter promises "fact-based journalism."
When asked about the provenance of this claim, the newspaper told CAMERA it had no specific vow in mind, but rather was referring to Trump's "collective positions." These include his position about a recent UN resolution critical of Israel, his criticism of the Obama administration's Israel policies, and his comments while campaigning, the newspaper indicated.

Officials in Tehran followed British Prime Minister Theresa May’s speech Tuesday with interest, noting that if, as she declared, the UK will remove itself from the European Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran will be more than happy to offset the kingdom’s departure by joining.
May gave an address Tuesday afternoon in which she announced her government’s intention to complete the country’s exit from the Continental union, following last year’s referendum that called for such a move. The Brexit, as it was dubbed, has left other countries in the European Union uncertain as to the future of the arrangement itself, and the government of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has begun to reassure the leaders of Germany and France that Iran will step into the breach created by Brexit.
Already, economic ties between Continental enterprises and Iran have tightened, enabled by last year’s nuclear deal that removed myriad economic sanctions on commercial dealings with Tehran and the businesses under its rule. European aviation giant Airbus has signed a lucrative contract for delivery of passenger and cargo aircraft, and the energy sector promises further development, in addition to the automotive and other consumer industries hungry for new markets. While British contributions to the Union outweigh Iran’s potential by a considerable margin, Tehran’s military and political clout in the Middle East may prove advantageous to an EU looking to expand its commercial relationships into that part of the developing world.

Prominent white supremacist and self-declared leader of the so-called alt-right movement Richard Spencer was sucker-punched in Washington while giving an interview to journalists, near the parade in honor of newly sworn-in President Donald Trump.
“No serious damage,” Spencer said on Twitter, “I can take a punch.”
He later tweeted that if police can’t protect him and others from such attacks, “we will begin protecting ourselves.”
Spencer seemed to be giving his interview in the midst of a protest, one of several, against Trump in Washington on Friday.

Dozens of Swedish Jews said they would skip a Holocaust commemoration event in the southern city of Gothernburg due to the involvement of a nationalist party in organizing it.
The Göteborgs-Posten daily on Wednesday published a full-page ad by some 40 Jews, of which only two were identified by name, about the involvement of the local branch of the Sweden Democrats party in the event scheduled for Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“That the Sweden Democrats, with their ties to both old and new Nazism and xenophobia, are invited to co-organize the memorial ceremony is more than an affront. It is extremely offensive to us as Jews and our history,” wrote co-signatories Lisa Granér, Erik Nilsson and others whose names were not published, citing security fears.
The Sweden Democrats party, which has participated in organizing the Holocaust commemoration in Gothenburg since 2010, is among several Swedish parties that have sanctioned members for making offensive statements about Jews and consistently denied allegations that it condones such behavior.

An international research team studying the HIV virus in Africa concluded that male circumcision significantly curbs the spread of all its variants.
The six researchers of a study titled “Male Circumcision and the Epidemic Emergence of HIV-2 in West Africa” published their findings last month in the scientific journal PLOS, the IPS news agency reported Monday.
Whereas “male circumcision is known to correlate negatively with HIV-1 prevalence in Africa,” they wrote of the most common variant of the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, studies examining this issue for HIV-2, the rarer variant found predominantly in Africa, “are lacking.”
The researchers, working with state funding from Belgium, compiled results from surveys on the prevalence of HIV-2 in 30 cities of all West African countries, and cross-checked those with males circumcision rates of 218 West African ethnic groups.
This study revealed that HIV-2 only formed early substantial focuses in cities with “substantial uncircumcised populations.” Lack of male circumcision in rural areas exposed to bushmeat – meat of wild animals, including primates, that are hunted rather than farmed — “may have had a role in successful HIV-2 emergence,” the researchers also wrote.

I plan to speak soon with President Trump about how to counter the threat of the Iranian regime which calls for Israel's destruction.
But it struck me recently that I've spoken a lot about the Iranian regime and not enough about the Iranian people, or for that matter, to the Iranian people.
So I hope this message reaches every Iranian—young and old, religious and secular, man and woman.
I know you'd prefer to live without fear. I know you'd want to be able to speak freely, to love who you want without the fear of being tortured or hung from a crane. I know you'd like to surf the Web freely and not have to see videos like this one using a virtual private network to circumvent censorship.
You have a proud history. You have a rich culture. Tragically, you are shackled by a theocratic tyranny.
In a free Iran you will once again be able to flourish without limit. But today, a cruel regime is trying to keep you down.
I'll never forget the images of brave young students hungry for change gunned down in the streets of Tehran in 2009; and I'll never forget beautiful Neda Sultan gasping for her last breath on that sidewalk.
This ruthless regime continues to deny you your freedom. It prevents thousands of candidates from competing in elections. It steals money from your poor to fund a mass murderer like Assad.
By calling daily for Israel's destruction, the regime hopes to instill hostility between us.
This is wrong. We are your friend, not your enemy. We've always distinguished between the Iranian people and the Iranian regime.
The regime is cruel – the people are not; the regime is aggressive – the people are warm.
I yearn for the day when Israelis and Iranians can once again visit each other freely in Tehran and Esfahan, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
The fanatics must not win. Their cruelty must not conquer our compassion.
Our two peoples can work together for a more peaceful and hopeful future for both of us. We must defeat terror and tyranny and we must ensure that freedom and friendship win the day.

I am from Iran and I think Israel and Iran have the potential to be the best friend in Middle East. Unfortunately, the Islamic regime works against the mutual interests.

Thank you Mr Netanyahu!
Please help us Iranian people as much as you can to overthrow this tyrannical & despotic regime which through severe corruption, incompetence and mismanagement has brought us nothing but pain, sadness, misery and financial ruin.

I'm from iran and we are you'r friend

im iranian . and we are not your enemy

Long live friendship between  Iranian people and Israel.
We, Iranians,  are children of Cyrus the great,  have nothing against Jews and Israel.  We want peace for all.

i like you . i like israel. i,m iranian

A warm hello from Tehran!
We support peace, we say NO to war! Viva Iran, Viva Israel!

On January 6, Hamas MP Marwan Abu Ras delivered a Friday sermon in Gaza, in which he cited the antisemitic hadith of the trees and the stones and said that the Jews were the "filthiest nation" with "the worst moral values known to Mankind." Abu Ras further said that they were recruiting prostitutes to the ranks of their army "in order to lure Arabs into their traps," that they send "AIDS-infected girls to fornicate with Muslim youths," and that they allow drugs and tobacco to be smuggled through the tunnels into Gaza, while preventing the entry of useful commodities. "Victory is coming soon," he vowed. "Their state is about to disappear." Abu Ras prayed to Allah to "destroy the criminal Jews and those who help and support them, as well as those who engage in security coordination with them!" The sermon was broadcast on Hamas's Al-Aqsa TV.

Marwan Abu Ras: "Who are the [Jews]? They are the filthiest people, the filthiest nation. They have the worst moral values known to Mankind. Whenever a prophet told them something that appealed to them, they followed him. But if a prophet contradicted them, even regarding a most trivial matter, they either called him a liar or killed him. They have never acted in any other way, because their moral values are driven by treachery and betrayal. They do not care about moral values, honesty, or honor. They do not know the meaning of honor. Do you know who the Jews are recruiting to the ranks of their army, an army that will be defeated soon, Allah willing? They are recruiting prostitutes in order to lure Arabs into their traps, and the traps of their intelligence agencies. So if they are recruiting girls in order to trap people, what is left of their moral values?

[...]

"They were the first to spread usury, the first to spread filthy pornographic movies and websites. They lead the pack in the spreading of drugs and alcohol.

[...]
"Do you know what commodity enters Gaza in large quantities, with the blessings of the enemy? It is drugs. Drugs only. The second commodity is tobacco. Those who want to smuggle drugs or tobacco into Gaza can do so freely, but to smuggle a useful commodity into Gaza? That is forbidden.

[...]

"Oh criminal Jews, Allah described your characteristics to us. You cannot remain on our land. We shall never relinquish a single inch of our land. My message to our Islamic nation is: Return to your senses! Know that this enemy is your enemy, just as it is our enemy. I do not understand what goes through the minds of these Arabs. The enemy openly declares that under the guise of tourism, it sends AIDS-infected girls to fornicate with Muslim youths, in order to spread fornication and AIDS among Muslim youth.

[...]

"My brothers, have patience. Victory is coming soon, Allah willing. Their state is about to disappear. We do not know exactly how this will happen, but we know what our Lord and our Prophet have told us. The time for miracles is almost upon us. Some miracles have already happened. We want to hear the stones and trees call the Muslims and say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!' The only exception will be the gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews. My brothers, know that people, stones, and trees all hate [the Jews]. Everyone on Earth hates this filthy nation, a nation extrinsic to Mankind. This fact was elucidated by the Quran and the Sunna.

[...]

"Oh Allah, destroy the criminal Jews and those who help and support them, as well as those who engage in security coordination with them! Oh Allah, strike them with a resounding blow, for they are no match for You. Shake their entity and bring them down. Oh Allah, drive them out of our lands in submission and humiliation! Oh Allah, enable us to kill them!"

Irony: This was RT'd by @Amnesty's Israel/Pal acct @IOTPA - which remains silent towards daily Arab incitement to terror and antisemitism pic.twitter.com/dU4ojtDNrq

— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 20, 2017

Because of my commitment to the integrity of prayer, starting this week (January 16, 2017), I can no longer recite or say amen to the Shabbat prayer for the success of the U.S. President.

So I have drafted a new prayer that I will plan to recite each Shabbat morning. If you also feel it’s important to pray for the U.S. government but also feel you cannot pray for the success of this President, feel free to use this or adapt it as you please. I felt that it was not enough to simply avoid the U.S. President in the prayer for the government but to remind myself of the billions of vulnerable people who are at risk under his rule, and challenge myself each Shabbat to build up the strength for another week of spiritual resistance.

O God and God of our Ancestors, help us with our struggle. We yearn for the success of the American government, to fulfill its righteous mandate to protect its citizens from threats internal and foreign, to fortify the bonds between liberty and justice, to ordain fair treatment under the law, and to expand welfare to all those within its capacity.
We pray that the vision of the prophets—the redemptive power of justice; relief for the poor, welcome for the marginal, protection for the oppressed, care for the sick—and the vision of the Constitution of a more perfect union be brought about. Guide the incoming leader of this country away from his basest instincts, thwart his plans to target certain groups and strengthen white supremacy; for You know, God, that all were created in Your image.
...

And seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to the LORD in its behalf; for in its prosperity you shall prosper.

“He who grants salvation to kings and dominion to rulers, whose kingdom is a kingdom spanning all eternity may he strengthen, bless, and uplift higher and higher our Lord King Fernando.  May the King of Kings redeem his soul from death and in war from the sword.  And may He incline his heart to do good to Israel and to speak good of them wherever they are and let us say Amen.”

In “The Lies They Tell,” Tuvia has turned the guided missile that is himself onto America, the country that has sheltered, housed, fed, and welcomed him, a native Israeli, for nearly four decades.
He expected to like what he found.
He didn’t.
Here’s what happened — and as you read, keep in mind that politically, Tuvia is not easy to pin down. Some of what he says could come from the mouth of someone to the political right; some of what he says could come from a leftist. He would say — he does say — that truth transcends that, and that he looks for truth. Through his own lens, of course.
“I liked the idea of doing a book about America,” Tuvia said. “I wrote a book about Germany that was very critical about Germany. I wrote a book about Israel and I found a lot of anti-Semitism. I needed a change. I came here, to this country, to the goldene medina, with $400 to my name, and I got the chance to form myself from nothing.
“I wanted to say thank you to America. I wanted the chance to travel around America, and write a praise-and-glory book about it. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

These salaries finance terrorism. When perpetrators and their families are rewarded, additional Palestinians contemplating an attack of their own can mark one concern off their list – no matter what happens to them, their family will be cared for. This ensures a steady supply of killers for hire.
When Abbas glorifies terrorists who murder innocent Israelis by referring to them as “holy martyrs” and names streets and public institutions after them, it is no wonder that Palestinian culture reflects this – and that so many young Palestinians are incited to commit acts of terrorism.
This is where Trump can help. America is one of the leading donor nations to the Palestinians. While it is important to help the Palestinians establish institutions and infrastructure needed to one day serve an independent state, the world should require of the Palestinians to first stop these payments.
Stopping these payments will help start a much-needed cultural revolution within Palestinian society. The Palestinian people will finally be told that terrorism does not (literally) pay. This is the first step toward real peace and it is one that Trump can help the Palestinians take.

Linda Sarsour, one of the organizers behind Saturday’s Women’s March, being held in Washington, D.C., was recently spotted at a large Muslim convention in Chicago posing for pictures with an accused financier for Hamas, the terrorist group.
Sarsour, the head of the Arab American Association of New York and an Obama White House “Champion of Change,” was speaking at last month’s 15th annual convention of the Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America.
While there, she posed for a picture with Salah Sarsour, a member of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and former Hamas operative who was jailed in Israel in the 1990s because of his alleged work for the terrorist group.
Salah Sarsour, who is also a board member of American Muslims for Palestine, served as a bodyguard of sorts at the convention for Sumeyye Erdogan Bayraktar, the daughter of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The immediate two aims of the Kairos Document are: 1) to boycott Israel and the Jewish historical connection to the Land of Israel; 2) to neutralize the support of Christian Zionists and any other Christians for Israel.
The World Council of Churches (WCC) Secretariat targets Israel's tourist industry and aspires to re-direct pilgrims from Israel to the Palestinian area, and to guide pilgrims from having a positive outlook on Israel to having negative reactions to the Jewish State.
Many faithful Christians, including a good portion of the fine Lutheran Church of Hannover, are hardly aware of the degree of deception employed by the WCC Secretariat. They would be scandalized to know that they were being used for the Secretariat's scheme of nationalism and anti-Semitism.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told cabinet ministers Sunday that he was prepared to give the Palestinians a “state minus.”
“What I’m willing to give the Palestinians,” the prime minister said in the weekly meeting, according to Hebrew reports, “is not exactly a state with full authority, rather a state minus. This is why the Palestinians do not agree.”
Netanyahu did not elaborate further. In the past, the prime minister has said that he would be in favor of a demilitarized Palestinian state if the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Netanyahu was responding to Science Minister Ofir Akunis (Likud), who told the ministers that he opposes the prime minister’s position and rejects a two-state solution. The minister insisted that this is also the official stance of the Likud party, according to the Haaretz daily.
“If you would listen to the details of my position I’m sure that you would not oppose it,” the prime minister told Akunis.
Palestinian official Mustafa Barghouti slammed Netanyahu’s comments in an interview with the Palestine News Network.

President Reuven Rivlin sent a letter to incoming US President Donald Trump on Saturday evening, congratulating him on his inauguration the day before and inviting him to visit Israel.
“Mr. President, as a longstanding friend of the State of Israel, you now stand as leader of the free world, and of Israel’s most important and closest ally,” Rivlin wrote.
“The alliance between our states and our nations is not solely based on friendship. It is rooted in our shared values and longstanding commitment to freedom, liberty, and democracy — the foundation stones of our societies.”
Rivlin thanked his new American counterpart for the support and friendship of the American people and expressed his hope that the special relationship and cooperation between the two countries “will continue to flourish and grow stronger.”
“On behalf of our people, I wish you and your administration much success, and take this opportunity to extend to you an invitation to visit the State of Israel and be our guest in Jerusalem,” Rivlin’s letter concluded.
Meanwhile, Education Minister Naftali Bennett took to Twitter on Saturday evening, hailing “a new diplomatic era.”

Newly inaugurated US President Donald Trump will announce on Monday the upcoming relocation of the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an unnamed source told a top Israeli political reporter on Sunday.
Channel 2’s Amit Segal cited a “local little birdie” as saying the announcement would be made on Monday morning Washington, DC time. However, Segal noted, “There is no confirmation of this.”
During his election campaign, Trump promised to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US Embassy accordingly. On Thursday — a day before Trump’s inauguration — then-incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters to “stay tuned” for an imminent announcement from the new administration about the potential embassy move.
After he was chosen in December to serve as Trump’s ambassador to the Jewish state, attorney David Friedman said, “I intend to work tirelessly to strengthen the unbreakable bond between our two countries and advance the cause of peace within the region, and look forward to doing this from the US Embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”
According to media reports, Friedman will live in an apartment he owns in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh neighborhood, rather than move into the official ambassador’s residence in Herzliya.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordanian King Abdullah II met in Amman on Sunday to coordinate moves against the possible relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
“Abbas and King Abdullah II discussed the possible ramifications of moving the American Embassy to occupied Jerusalem and agreed to take a number of measures if the embassy is relocated,” Wafa, the official PA news site, reported Sunday afternoon.
The Palestinian leadership launched a campaign two weeks ago to appeal to the world against the possible relocation of the US Embassy.
Abbas sent letters to US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, UK Prime Minister Theresa May, and many other world leaders, warning that relocating would have “disastrous” consequences and spell the “destruction of the peace process.”
Trump said on Thursday that he plans to follow through with his campaign promise to relocate the embassy.

Palestinian leaders warned that if the king of Israel moves forward with his plan to establish Jerusalem as the national capital as announced, the region will explode in violence.
President Mahmoud Abbas and several senior officials of the Palestinian Authority joined heads of the militant movement Hamas in issuing separate threats to the effect that any move to assert Jewish sovereignty over the holy city would spark riots and bloodshed throughout the Muslim world. David has reigned from Hebron for seven years.
The Davidic administration announced last year that it plans to relocate from the Judean capital of Hebron to Jerusalem, a historic city that straddles the border between the territories of Judah and Benjamin. Bureaucratic work toward implementation of the move began in recent weeks, prompting Palestinian leaders to caution that any such relocation would constitute an affront to the entire Islamic nation, and would result in attacks on the interests of Israel’s allies all over the world.
David chose Jerusalem for several reasons, explained spokesman Ahitophel. “His Highness seeks first of all to unite the Twelve Tribes, and therefore decided to move his administrative center from the heartland of Judah in the South to a spot closer to the other tribal territories,” he told reporters. “Beyond that, the entire people’s ties to Jerusalem go back to the Binding of Isaac and the spot on which Jacob had his first prophetic revelation. Tradition also tells us that humanity was created from earth taken from a spot on that very hilltop, and that the creation of the world itself began from there. It is only fitting that Jerusalem constitute physically what it has always meant to Israel spiritually.”

The Anti Defamation League said Sunday that it was "outraged and saddened by the antisemitism leveled at Rabbi Marvin Hier" after the blessing he delivered at the inauguration of US President Donald Trump on Friday.
Rabbi Marvin Hier is the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism. He was the target of hundreds of antisemitic messages posted on social media during and following his recitation, including antisemitic caricatures of him and hate speech from white supremacists.
“For Jew haters, it was a perfect storm,” the Wiesenthal Center’s associate dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper told The Jerusalem Post Sunday, noting that IT staff working for his center alone had removed hundreds of antisemitic messages.
“Obviously a lot of people who don’t like Jews had a tough time seeing a Jew stand up proudly before the world,” Cooper said.” To have a Jew wearing a kippa on an international stage and a declared and well-known Zionist - from the far left to the far right a lot of people were very angry.”

On Friday’s broadcast of PBS’ “Washington Week,” New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker stated that in Israel, President Donald Trump is “very popular,” and the view is “He’s going to support them, finally…after eight years of Barack Obama, who they did not feel was supportive.”
Baker said that there’s “a real trepidation out and around the world, particularly in Europe,” about a Trump presidency, and Trump is viewed in some parts of the Middle East with “wariness”
He added, “Israel, though – he’s very popular, I have to say. I just got back from Jerusalem. That’s certainly one place in the world that they see his arrival as a good thing. He’s going to support them, finally, in their view, after eight years of Barack Obama, who they did not feel was supportive.”

Several hundred demonstrators shut down four lanes of traffic on a central boulevard outside the US embassy in Mexico City on Saturday, in one of hundreds of rallies held worldwide to protest the election of US President Donald Trump, who took office on Friday.
They held up signs such as “Nasty women keep fighting” and “Girls just wanna have fundamental rights.”
One activist at the rally was dressed in Nazi concentration camp uniform.
The Mexican capital is home to a sizable population of U.S. citizens, and many in the crowd were Americans.

The state has reportedly granted two Israeli banks immunity from lawsuits accusing them of financing terrorism, in a bid to prevent them from ending cooperation with Palestinian banks.
According to a report Sunday in the Haaretz daily, the unusual decision was taken by the cabinet last week out of concern that if Israeli banks end the crucial financial services they supply to their Palestinian counterparts, it could lead to the collapse of the Palestinian banking system and even the Palestinian Authority.
The move comes after Israel’s Bank Hapoalim reportedly informed the government last year that it intended to end its services to Palestinian banks out of fears it could face charges from overseas, particularly from the United States, for potentially violating terrorism funding and money laundering laws.
According to the report, Hapoalim is the main bank provider to Palestinian banks of clearing, guarantees and other services that enable them to conduct international trade. Israel Discount Bank also works with the Palestinian banks.

Less than 48 hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as US president, the Jerusalem Municipality’s Local Planning and Building Committee on Sunday approved hundreds of Jewish residential housing units beyond the 1949 Armistice Line.
Housing approvals over the Green Line were previously largely shelved amid heightened tensions between Washington and Jerusalem, which were further exacerbated by the recent UN resolution condemning settlement construction.
Deeming the resolution further evidence that the UN is fundamentally biased against Israel, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat issued a blistering statement against the ruling, and rebuked the Obama administration for abstaining, and pressuring Israel to cease construction.
Moreover, on Thursday the mayor emailed a brief video, accompanied by a letter of support for Trump to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and accused Obama of “surrendering to the Iranian’s and radical Islam,” and “abandoning Israel.”

The Ofer military court on Sunday sentenced a Palestinian man to life in prison and an additional 30 years for the killing of a Jewish man in a 2015 West Bank drive-by shooting.
Abdallah As’hak, of the West Bank village of Silwad, northeast of Ramallah, was also ordered to pay a NIS 325,000 ($85,000) fine for the terror attack in which Malachy Rosenfeld was murdered on June 29, 2015.
Rosenfeld, 25, was killed, and three others were wounded when Hamas terrorists opened fire on their car near the West Bank settlement of Shvut Rachel, north of Ramallah, as they returned home from a basketball game.
As’hak was found guilty of killing Rosenfeld, and the attempted killing of each of the three other Israelis injured in the shooting attack. His specific role in the fatal terror attack was not immediately clear.

As a condition for ending the electricity shortage, Abbas demands that Hamas publicly admit to the mistakes it has made since it forcefully conquered Gaza in 2007. This is a condition Hamas cannot accept, and one can reasonably assume that after some time the electricity crisis will again erupt.
Agreement on a Palestinian national unity government was actually already reached last year in the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation talks in Doha. The dispute, however, centered on the unity government’s platform.
The bone of contention was Hamas’ refusal to accept Fatah’s political platform as the platform of a unity government because it recognizes Israel. A dispute that is no less difficult concerns the payment of the salaries of 40,000 bureaucrats in Gaza whom Hamas added to the ranks of the government after it took Gaza by force in 2007.
The PA regards these bureaucrats as belonging to Hamas and refuses to pay their salaries.
Hence the “Moscow statement” should be taken with a grain of salt. Even though it is a positive statement from the standpoint of all the Palestinian factions, the road to a true Palestinian national reconciliation is long and it is doubtful whether the goal can be reached.
Only this week the Shabak (Israel Security Agency) announced it had arrested a large network of Hamas operatives in Ramallah that was working to undermine the PA’s rule and overthrow it. That is the real goal of Hamas, not a national reconciliation with the PA.

Conditions have greatly deteriorated over the past decade since Hamas, a militant group sworn to Israel's destruction, took power. Hamas and Israel have fought three wars since the 2007 takeover, resulting in heavy damage to Gaza's infrastructure, and an Israeli-Egyptian blockade has slowed reconstruction efforts.
Hamas, an Islamic militant group boycotted by most of the international community, did not participate in the project, and it was not represented at Thursday's ceremony.
A Hamas military training site sits on part of the land allocated for the plant's second phase. Mazen Ghunaim, head of the Palestinian Water Authority, said Hamas promised the site will be moved away in the coming days. The authority is one of the few bodies run by the rival West Bank-based Palestinian Authority that Hamas allows to operate in Gaza.
Other obstacles have included chronic electricity shortages and concerns that the plant could be hit if there is new fighting between Israel and Hamas.

A Hamas operative was killed as a tunnel collapsed in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday, his Islamist movement which rules the Palestinian territory said.
It said Yussef al-Agha died in Khan Yunis in the collapse of a “resistance tunnel,” the type dug for attacks against Israel.
Last year, 22 members of Hamas’s armed wing were killed “preparing equipment,” the majority in a string of tunnel collapses, the terror group said last month.
Gaza terrorists have dug dozens of tunnels, many coming under the border into Israel, to launch attacks against the Jewish state; Israel destroyed many of them during the devastating 2014 war with Hamas. It says Hamas has since been rebuilding the network, and Hamas has bragged about doing so.
Israel and Hamas have fought three wars since 2008 and Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade for a decade, imposed by Israel and Egypt to try to prevent it importing weaponry.
“Attack tunnels” were a key weapon for Hamas during the last conflict in 2014, with a number of raids inside Israeli territory.

Baroness Jenny Tonge is under investigation by the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards. Initially she was under investigation on two counts: alleged failure to act on personal honour and alleged breach of rules on House facilities. However the first charge has been dropped. It needs to be taken up again because she has posted an anti-Semitic article on her Facebook page.
Tonge posted a piece of fake news. Not just fake – anti-semitic. It claims that at a recent conference, Israel’s President Rivlin said:
“The time has come to admit that Israel is a sick society, with an illness that demands treatment … the Israeli Holocaust against the Palestinians is worse than the Nazis I’m not asking if they’ve forgotten how to be Jews, but if they’ve forgotten how to be decent human beings. Have they forgotten how to converse? I think that ‘Holocaust’ against Palestinians is worse than Nazis.”

A conference exploring the legality of the state of Israel is being postponed by the Irish university at which it was scheduled to be held in March, on the grounds that its controversial nature could be disruptive to both students and faculty.
University College Cork’s (UCC) University Management Team (UMT) said in a statement that “security infrastructure and staffing is inadequate to deal with the management of security of the event” — titled “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Exceptionalism and Responsibility”— which has the potential to spark protests.
UCC officials said, however, that they would be willing to reschedule the conference, if certain conditions were met by its organizers. These include a “revised date…which is out of term and not clashing with University examinations,” and funding of any “additional…security costs.”
UMT expressed “disappointment and concern” that it first learned of the conference through “public discourse and social media and not in a formal request for approval or correspondence directly with the University.”
UCC also distanced itself from the conference by saying that it is “not…University-sponsored or promoted,” but rather hosted by “a number of academic staff.”

An academic participating in a seminar on Thursday at a British university accused Jewish students of being “operatives” of a global Zionist conspiracy, UK blogger David Collier reported.
Prof. Moshé Machover, an Israeli-born mathematician and philosopher known for his radical activism and founding of the socialist party Matzpen — who moved to the UK in 1968 — made this assertion and others at the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) event, titled: “Right to Boycott: Should Queen Mary Endorse a Boycott on Israel?”
The seminar was hosted by the QMUL Friends of Palestine Society and sponsored by the British NGO Friends of Al Aqsa, which openly supports Hamas.
Challenged by a “visibly Jewish student” asking him about the hypocrisy of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, Machover responded that the question is what the “Israeli propaganda machine actually breeds its representatives to ask.”

The Finnish organization CMI doled out $18,177 to fund a meeting of the EU and US classified terrorist entity Hamas with the Palestinian Fatah party in Geneva, Switzerland in December, according to a Friday report in the Finland daily Kirkko ja kaupunki.
The Finnish organization Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), which is headed by Finland’s former president Martti Oiva Kalevi Ahtisaari, joined the Swiss government to organize the two day talks to unify the Gaza-based Hamas and the West Bank's Fatah party. The Swiss paid nearly $72,000 for the negotiations.
Prof. Gerald Steinberg, the head of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, told The Jerusalem Post on Friday: ”The ways in which European officials use NGO funding in the chaotic Middle East is very disturbing. This is the new form of colonialism and, as this case involving the governments of Finland and Switzerland shows, NGO activities can be used as a cover by terrorists -- for which there is no excuse.”
He added,”The claim that these activities contribute to peace is both morally unacceptable and baseless -- in decades of ‘negotiations’ involving PLO, Hamas and recently, PFLP officials, none of the Swiss and European efforts have succeeded. Millions of euros, Swiss francs, kroner etc. of taxpayer money are allocated for NGOs every year in top-secret processes without any parliamentary supervision. Nothing useful has been accomplished through these NGO-led talks between Palestinian factions, and it is possible that the process was exploited by the terrorists.”

Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, Piers Corbyn, a climate forecaster and fervent supporter of his brother, has issued his latest long-term prediction on Twitter: that Jewish conspirators and the Royal Family will force Donald Trump into war, just like they did to Hitler.
Piers Corbyn retweeted @whiteknight0011, a notorious neo-Nazi who declared that “They will force Trump in to war What do you think happened to Hitler? Bilderberg CIA IMF Banker Gangsters They are the problem” along with four images.
One shows Lord Jacob Rothschild, the Jewish banker and philanthropist, against the background of a Nazi flag, claiming that he controls the world. A second shows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a puppeteer controlling ISIS through Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, orchestrating the war in Syria and Paris attacks as Lord Rothschild and the Queen look on approvingly. A third image shows the faces of supposed Jewish conspirators who run the world to society’s detriment, proclaiming: “Know your enemy”. The last image shows a family photo of the Royal Family, claiming that they are in cahoots with these Jewish conspirators in committing “the worst genocides, invasions and theft in all history.”
Piers and Jeremy have a long history of political solidarity. Piers has boasted of the family’s anti-racist credentials, but the mask is slipping. The man who now broadcasts that the Jews were responsible for the Second World War, is the same that claimed a Jewish conspiracy against his brother: when Jewish MP Louise Ellman complained of antisemitic attacks against her, Piers Corbyn accused her of using it as a cover for political attack, tweeting: “ABSURD! JC+ All #Corbyns are committed #AntiNazi. #Zionists cant cope with anyone supporting rights for #Palestine”. Brother Jeremy’s response: “He’s not wrong”.

Antonio Guterres, the new United Nations secretary-general, told worshipers at Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue Saturday morning he would be on the front lines of denouncing antisemitism and condemning all forms of expressions of it at a special service in commemoration of the upcoming International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
The Park East Synagogue, led by Rabbi Arthur Schneier, holds the special Shabbat service, to which it invites the UN secretary-general and members of the UN diplomatic corps, annually.
The Holocaust, Guterres told the congregation, was not simply “due to the insanity of a group of Nazis, but the culmination of two millennia of continued hatred and discrimination against Jews.”
“Antisemitism is not a quest about religion, but a manifestation of racism,” the secretary-general stated at what was his very first appearance in New York, outside of the United Nations headquarters.
He added that he is troubled by the “new forms and expressions” of hatred against Jews, which show that “antisemitism is alive and well.”

Jews in North West London suffered a spate of attacks over the Sabbath, the UK-based organization the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) reported on Sunday.
According to the Jewish neighborhood patrol group Shomrim, the first incident occurred at approximately 10:30 pm on Friday night. Recognizably Jewish families walking home from dinners at friends’ houses were pelted with eggs from a moving car on Edgwarebury Lane, Edgware.
The second took place at dawn on Saturday in the same neighborhood. A brick with swastikas and antisemitic slurs drawn on it was hurled through the window of a Jewish family’s home.
The third, involving swastika graffiti on a residential building on Watford Way, Mill Hill, was discovered a while later.
Shomrom London is calling on witnesses to come forward, while the Metropolitan Police Service investigates.

A new study by Harvard Medical School shows that software developed by Israeli startup MedAware helps reduce prescription errors, potentially saving the lives of patients.
Ra’anana-based MedAware has developed software that uses algorithms and machine learning based on data and patterns gathered from thousands of physicians who treat millions of patients. The data is used to identify and give alerts about prescription errors in real time.
The company says its self-learning, self-adaptive system is proven to dramatically reduce healthcare costs while improving patient safety.
The Harvard study analyzed records from almost 800,000 patients to assess the efficacy of MedAware’s software. The report found that MedAware’s technology identifies errors otherwise undetected by current systems in use, minimizes the risks arising from fatigued doctors who are used to getting false alerts from current systems, and reduces prescription errors with high accuracy.
The findings, published on Sunday in the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), showed that MedAware’s technology sets a new standard for prescription alerts and patient safety vis-à-vis traditional safety systems, which only detect a fraction of actual errors, and are not geared up to identify random or complex errors, like prescribing a medication used only in pregnant women for an elderly make, for example.

Mark Pellegrino is an American actor of film and television, best known for his work as Lucifer in Supernatural, Paul Bennett in Dexter, and Jacob in Lost. He is co-founder of The American Capitalist Party.
Itamar Zohar of Ha’aretz is a bad journalist. Why do I say that? Let’s look at it: One of the definitions of journalism, according to Merriam-Webster is:
writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation. AKA objectivity.
A bad journalist is one of the worst traitors to values there can be. Like a cop who uses his status as a protector to steal, or a priest who uses his moral authority to molest the young, the bad journalist uses his place as the standard-bearer of FACT to manipulate public opinion to his own purposes.
To pass off a lie as if it’s a fact or to slander the good, is an unspeakable evil. An evil that a bad journalist is uniquely capable of committing on a mass scale. Now this brings me to Itamar Zohar. Itamar heard there was a story – Some celebrities had been invited to tour Israel under the auspices of an organization called American Voices in Israel and the Minister of Security – and he decided to write about it. The result? A superficial and mean-spirited hit piece attacking the program (in a faux expose) and impugning the character, motivations, and status of the people involved. This all without ever having interviewed a single one of the participants; Without ever witnessing the interactions between the tour guides and the celebs; without investigating why such a program may be vital to Israel or if there have been tangible benefits resulting from the program. No. These would’ve been the actions of a curious mind. A mind devoted to facts, and interested in objectivity. In other words, they would’ve been the actions of a good journalist. Had Itamar been that kind of journalist, the truthful, objective kind, here’s what he would’ve found by blessing us with his presence:
First, he would’ve found that a variety of reasons motivated each entertainer’s reason for being there: Some were there on a religious pilgrimage. Some were agnostics on the conflict over Israel and wanted to know more and see it first hand. Some were apolitical and just wanted to satisfy their curiosity. Some, like me, have been reading about the region for years and are intensely activist in our support of the only free country in the Middle East.

Israel continued in 2016 to enforce severe and discriminatory restrictions on Palestinians’ human rights, to facilitate the transfer of Israeli civilians to the occupied West Bank, and to severely restrict the movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip.

In 2016, a new escalation of violence that began in October 2015 continued, characterized by demonstrations, some violent, in the West Bank and at the Gaza border with Israel that Israeli forces have suppressed, often using live fire. 

There was a wave of stabbings and attempted stabbings by Palestinians against Israeli passersby and security forces, both in the West Bank and Israel, mostly by people acting without the sponsorship of any armed group.

Israeli security forces used lethal force against suspected attackers in more than 150 cases, including in circumstances that suggest excessive force and at times extrajudicial executions.

Overall, between January 1 and October 31, 2016, Palestinians killed at least 11 Israelis, including 2 security officers, and injured 131 Israelis, including 46 security officers, in the West Bank and Israel. Israeli security forces killed at least 94 Palestinians and injured at least 3,203 Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel as of October 31, including suspected assailants, protesters, and bystanders, according to the United Nations.

Israel maintained severe restrictions on the movement of people and goods into and out of Gaza, exacerbated by Egypt’s closure of its own border with Gaza most of the time, 

5:33 Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] mischief is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment,

Fasad (Arabic: فساد‎‎ /fasād/) is an Islamic concept which means spreading mischief in a Muslim land, moral corruption against God, and any form of expression or activity by non-Muslims or apostates of Islam that creates disorder in the Muslim community.
In recent years, the law has been included in the legal code of the Islamic Republics of Pakistan and Iran. In Iran it has been used to prosecute or threaten political opposition figures. 

From the Tafsir of Ibn Kathir, "fasad fi al-ard" is the act of disobedience to God.
In his Tafsir, As-Suddi states that disbelief in Islam, disobeying sharia and acts of disobedience of authority is committing mischief on the earth.

 Sunan Abu Dawud, in 38.4359, confirms that the punishment for fasad under Islam applies to Muslim and non-Muslims.

Three recent events by Fatah and the Palestinian Authority reiterated the Palestinian leadership's endorsement of violence and Martyrdom for Allah as PA ideals.
In the PA's capital Ramallah, Fatah held a parade celebrating the movement's 52nd anniversary. Fatah members marched wearing mock "suicide belts" while their hands held the "detonators," and their faces hidden behind black masks. Other masked men marched with raised knives, Fatah flags, and posters of Mahmoud Abbas. [Fatah-run Awdah TV, Jan. 8, 2017]
Promoting suicide terror is a recurring Fatah parade theme. Last year at the 51st anniversary celebrations it was children who Fatah had march through the streets of Bethlehem wearing black masks and mock suicide belts. [Ma’an, independent Palestinian news agency, Jan. 7, 2016]
At another event marking Palestinian Martyrs' Day in Ramallah, PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah honored "the Martyrs of Palestine," among them terrorist murderers - for "paving the way" with their "sacrifice and struggle":

Check out this interchange on Twitter, documented by the indomitable Chloe Valdary
Linda Sarsour, one of the co-organizers of this weekend's Woman's march is touting Saudi Arabia as a feminist, um, Mecca.
She tweets "10 weeks of PAID maternity leave in Saudi Arabia. Yes paid. And ur worrying about women driving. Puts us to shame"
In response, Israeli Dani Dayan tweets back "Well in Israel women enjoy 14 weeks of PAID maternity leave AND drive".

The Forward have an article claiming Israel-Palestine issues did not hijack the Women’s March on Washington – written before the march even took place! Which tells you all you need to know about how seriously to take the article.
The lack of an Israeli-Palestinian component to the march is notable due to the liberal makeup of the participating organizations and the partnership with several Arab-American and Muslim-American organizations. Linda Sarsour, a prominent New York-based Muslim and human rights activist, is part of the march’s leadership committee.
Needless to say, there was some palestinian hijacking going on (poor choice of words, I know), and Sarsour herself was part of it.

Some liberal internationalists have expressed concern that a Rex Tillerson-led State Department may not stand up enough for human rights (the same crowd, of course, has been rather silent on human rights abuses in Cuba, incredibly portrayed as an Obama administration "accomplishment"). Concern about human rights has also motivated criticism by non-liberal Republicans like Senator Marco Rubio at Tillerson's confirmation hearings.
But even here – without a wholesale discarding of human rights advocacy – a careful, pragmatic rethink may be in order. There is a lot in this field which sometimes seems to be bureaucratic and reactive, without an adequate regard for overall U.S. interests. For example, banning, on human rights grounds, the sale of dual use items – like civilian helicopters – may make the advocacy community feel better, but can hurt American business and jobs and does little good if the country in question can get similar items from China or France or Brazil. And combating the ideological scourge of Salafi-jihadism is also very much a blow for human rights and a service to mankind.
It is entirely possible that a new leadership at State may not be able to implement an ambitious reform agenda at the first federal agency created by George Washington in 1789. They may not be up to the challenge, or an entrenched bureaucracy may stifle change. And change itself can be done badly or be counterproductive. Or a whole range of long neglected short-fused crises may consume all the energies of the new foreign policy team. However, a refit at the State Department is very much an endeavor worth trying, to make it more efficient and more focused on core issues, on national interests and imminent threats, rather than seeking to remake the world in the image of the Acela corridor elite.

According to the reports, Syrian authorities are withholding the bodies of more than 456 Palestinians who died under torture in prison. No one knows exactly where the bodies are being held or why the Syrian authorities are refusing to hand them over to the relatives.
Mainstream media outlets seem to prefer turning a blind eye to the plight of Palestinians living in Arab countries. This evasion harms first and foremost the Palestinians themselves and allows Arab governments to continue their policies of persecution and repression.
It remains to be seen whether the UN Security Council will get its priorities straight and hold an emergency session to discuss the murderous campaign against Palestinians in Syria. Perhaps, somehow, this will overtake "settlement construction" as a topic worthy of world condemnation.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the high-level security cabinet Sunday he will soon announce expanded construction in the settlement blocs and ease all building restrictions in East Jerusalem.
The prime minister said he will remove any political obstacles from regional and local planning committees in order to ease construction in East Jerusalem, according to Hebrew media reports. He added that wide-scale building will soon be green-lighted in the settlement blocs as well.
The prime minister also told ministers that his “vision” is that all of the settlements in the West Bank will ultimately come under Israeli sovereignty in any accommodation, Channel 2 news reported.
Netanyahu’s declaration on Sunday convinced ministers from the settlement-backing Jewish Home party to postpone a cabinet vote on a bill to annex a West Bank settlement on the outskirts of Jerusalem for at least a month, according to the Haaretz newspaper.
The controversial bill, presented by Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennett, would extend Israeli sovereignty to Ma’ale Adumim.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by telephone Sunday for the first time since Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, and the American president invited the prime minister to meet with him in Washington in early February.
The Prime Minister's Office said in a statement that "President Trump invited Prime Minister Netanyahu to come to Washington to meet him in February. A final date for the visit will be set in the days ahead."
The statement also said the two leaders had a "very warm conversation," and that Netanyahu "expressed his desire to work closely with President Trump to forge a common vision and advance peace and security in the region, with no daylight between the United States and Israel."
The two leaders also "discussed the nuclear deal with Iran, the peace process with the Palestinians and other issues," the statement said.
Trump described the discussion with Netanyahu as "very nice" and stressed his "unprecedented commitment" to Israel's security.
"The president and the prime minister agreed to continue to closely consult on a range of regional issues, including addressing the threats posed by Iran," the White House said in a statement after the phone call. "The president stressed that countering ISIL [Islamic State] and other radical Islamic terrorist groups will be a priority for his administration."

During Friday’s inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States, West Bank Arabs burned images of the new world leader, and said supporting the Jewish state was tantamount to backing ISIS in its aim to establish an Islamist caliphate, the non-governmental Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported on Sunday.
Participants in the demonstration — which the report said was disrupted by Israeli police trying to disperse the crowd — told Ma’an that they were sending a message to the incoming administration not to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As sign which they posted on the security barrier separating Israel from the Palestinian Authority (PA) — at the entrance to Bethlehem — where the protest was held, read: “Stop Trump… Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine.”
This protest was similar to ones that preceded Trump’s inauguration. On Thursday, a few hours before incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer told journalists to “stay tuned” for the new administration’s decision about its proposed embassy move, Palestinians took to the streets of three West Bank cities to demonstrate.

Gulf Arab states are quietly applauding the arrival in the White House of a hawkish leader opposed to their adversary Iran, even if they suspect Donald Trump’s short temper and abrasive Tweets may at times heighten tensions in the combustible Middle East.
While many countries around the world listened with concern to his protectionist inaugural address, Gulf Arab officials appear optimistic. They see in Trump a strong president who will shore up Washington’s role as their main strategic partner in a region central to U.S. security and energy interests.
In Gulf Arab eyes, that involves above all checking what they see as a surge of Iranian support for paramilitary allies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon and for fellow Shi’ite Muslims in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s oil-producing Eastern Province.
It also means overlooking for now rhetoric about uniting “the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism” in an address that critics said echoed George W. Bush’s “crusade” against terrorism, a phrase which, for Muslims, evokes barbarous campaigns by medieval Christians against Islam.
Saudi Arabia in particular appears relieved at the departure of Barack Obama, who it felt considered Riyadh’s alliance with Washington less important than negotiating a deal in 2015 to neutralize Iran’s nuclear program.

A senior Hamas official accused Trump of ignorance and of holding positions that lead to regional instability.
Mousa Abu Marzouq, vice-president of the politburo for Hamas, an Islamic terrorist organization based in Gaza, claimed on Sunday that US President Donald Trump’s positions will further destabilize the region and entice Israelis to become more radical.
Marzouq made specific mention of Trump’s plan to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
“The threat to transfer the US Embassy to Jerusalem constitutes an increasing threat, especially as it comes from a state the size of the US,” Marzouq said according to a statement on Hamas’ website.
On Twitter, Marzouq accused Trump of being “ignorant” and an “unwell reader of history” after he pledged to eradicate “radical Islamic terrorism” during his inauguration speech on Friday.

A senior Palestinian official warned Sunday that a move by the Trump administration to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would be perceived as an act of aggression against the entire Muslim world.
“In our opinion moving the embassy to Jerusalem is a declaration of war against Muslims,” Fatah Central Committee member Jibril Rajoub, who also presides over the Palestinian soccer association, told The Times of Israel in an interview.
Rajoub, one of the most powerful figures in Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah party, warned that “it is not inconceivable that the United States will give the Jews the keys to the holy sites in Jerusalem – sites also holy to both Christians and Muslims. If someone among you [Israelis] thinks there won’t be consequences, he is making a grave mistake.”
“We are talking about a dangerous step that won’t bring stability to the ground,” he continued, adding that “it contradicts previous United Nations resolutions and the policy of the United States since 1967.”

Monies to cover the costs of transferring the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem will not require unanticipated use of State Department funds, a spokesman for President Donald Trump announced today, as the expenses will be met through a new program that halves the retirement payments distributed to former government employees with membership in the Democratic Party.
Kellyanne Conway told reporters at a White House press conference that the president intends to maintain existing budgetary constraints even amid the transfer, in keeping with Republican fiscal conservatism. Instead, she explained, each month the roster of Democratic Party members will be compared against the roster of recipients of government pensions, and the entries that appear in both lists will have 50% of the amount due allocated to moving the embassy.
Conway made the remarks in response to reporters’ questions as to the timing, wisdom, and cost of the move. “Now is the time to turn over a new leaf with our strong ally Israel,” she asserted. “The president believes one of the first moves we can make in that regard is the strongly symbolic move of our chief diplomatic facility in the country to its declared capital. For too long, the question of embassies in Jerusalem has been falsely linked to Israel’s rights to the city, rights the president accepts as unassailable. It is unconscionable that successive administrations have bowed to the threat of violence instead of righting this historic wrong.”

Nations from across the Middle East have reportedly condemned Barack Obama and the United States for inaugurating Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America.
In Saudi Arabia, King Salman had called on Obama to appoint a male relative as the next “president” of the US, saying that the peaceful transfer of power from one rival party to the other was a disgusting spectacle. In a rare show of consensus, the Islamic Republic of Iran also condemned the inauguration of Trump saying that it was dangerous to elect a president who does not have the approval of the Supreme Leader of the US: Kim Kardashian.
Additionally Syria’s Bashar al-Assad condemned Obama as a weak leader, unworthy of continuing his rule for neither rigging the election, nor cracking down on the GOP. A spokesperson for the Assad regime noted that it was to be expected that Trump would wrest power from Obama because “the idiots didn’t drop a single barrel bomb full of explosives and chlorine gas on any GOP rallies throughout the course of the campaign.”

As British Prime Minister Theresa May plans a Brexit from the EU, Americans may soon ask what kind of exit we want from another international institution.
In our case, the organization is not the European Union, but the United Nations. Earlier this month, Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced a bill to block taxpayer dollars from going to the UN. These senators, like many Americans, are incensed by a recent anti-Israel resolution adopted by the world body. But the US’ problems with the UN run deeper than one bad resolution. They are endemic to the institution. At some point, our elected leaders will ask whether the time has come not just to defund, but also to depart — and then replace the UN with something better.
That point may come sooner rather than later.
Today — Monday, January 23 — journalist Edwin Black is launching a national conversation about United Nations reform. At a major noon-time event in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, I will be pleased to join Black, US Representative Trent Franks and other concerned leaders in the launch of a new project called “The Covenant of Democratic Nations” (CDN). The event coincides with the first full workday of a new presidential administration. Additional events are planned for New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin, London, Ottawa and many other cities.

Two convoys of at least 100 vehicles each cut across southern and northern Israel on Monday morning on their way to the Knesset in Jerusalem, where they assembled to protest the recent demolitions of homes belonging to Arab citizens, and a deadly incident that occurred during one recent demolition.
The convoys to the Knesset, one of which left from the Arab village of Qalansawe in the north, where 11 homes were recently demolished, and the collective of drivers from the south, is part of a series of protests called by Israel’s Arab leadership, including the Joint (Arab) List faction and the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, following home demolitions last week in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran in the Negev, which sparked violent clashes and the death of a villager and a policeman.
Israeli police have been adamant in their claim that officer Erez Levi, 34, was intentionally killed by a local resident, Yaqoub Mousa Abu Al-Qia’an, whose vehicle slammed into a group of policeman guarding the demolitions.

The Ktziot Prison, Sunday, December 18. Only a few people, including the prison commander and intelligence officer, Deputy Commissioner Dudu Vaknin, were involved in the drama that was about to take place. Knesset Member Basel Ghattas of the Joint List arrived to visit security prisoners and allegedly smuggle cellphones to them. Everything was ready to document the act. Without suspecting a thing, Ghattas fell into the trap that was prepared for him by the security officials.
Following his arrest, the work of the Shin Bet and the Israel Prison Service’s security system received wide coverage. Not much was said about the secret work of the intelligence officers who locate and operate agents in the security prisons, those who work behind the scenes in the most sensitive position in some of the most dangerous places in Israel.
In order to understand how it really works, we brought together for the very first time three intelligence officers of security prisoners: The intelligence officer of the Gilboa Prison (600 security inmates), Chief Superintendent Nissim Finish; the intelligence officer of the Ktziot Prison (2,000 inmates), Deputy Commissioner Dudu Vaknin; and the intelligence officer of the Nafha Prison (750 inmates), Chief Superintendent Yossi Krispel.
The three spoke candidly about their work in the shadow of danger and their daily meetings with arch-murderers, the recruitment of agents in the prison and providing them with protection, the language and codes and the heavy responsibility to prevent and thwart attacks. “It’s an Israeli invention,” they told us. “This is a position that only exists in Israel, and people come here from all over the world for guidance.”

Dozens of Palestinian on Sunday graduated from the Hamas terror group’s military training program in the Gaza Strip, displaying weapons, marching in military formation and burning an Israeli flag in front of crowds of cheering supporters.
The cadets showed off their hand-to-hand combat skills by breaking burning cement blocks with their bare hands at the Gaza City ceremony.
The graduates also staged a mock raid on an “Israeli” military post, in which Hamas forces captured the IDF position and replaced the Israeli flag with a Palestinian one.
A young boy wearing military fatigues then burned the Israeli flag in front of the audience for a dramatic end to the ceremony.

Analysis: The question is not whether the new US administration should stick to the nuclear deal or tear it up, but rather how it should maintain the agreement’s achievements in the near future in order to fix its difficult strategic flaws in the long run. Israel is now being given a second chance to influence the US policy on this issue.
When Donald Trump entered the White House, he will have found a number of important missions on foreign affairs waiting on his desk. The Iranian issue is one of them. The discussion of a recommended strategy vis-à-vis Iran is just around the corner, and the decision must be made between alternatives that are more sophisticated than “supporting” or “opposing” the nuclear agreement. This is also an opportunity for Israel to fix the failures of its conduct in the summer of 2015.
During the election campaign, Trump blatantly opposed the nuclear agreement, threatening to “rip it to shreds,” but in the Senate hearings his nominees for the new administration expressed a more moderate ton. The secretary of defense-designate, Gen. James Mattis, for example, argued that although the agreement was not a good one, the United States had to fulfil its commitments. The designated secretary of state and CIA director emphasized the shortcomings of the agreement but vowed to tightly supervise its implementation and not to take any steps to annul it.

If newly inaugurated US President Donald Trump nixes the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran’s nuclear program will “snap back” and be better off than it was before the July 2015 deal, a top Tehran regime official told Canada’s CBC News in an interview published on Saturday.
The Islamic Republic, Atomic Energy Organization of Iran chief Ali Akbar Salehi declared, will “act appropriately” if Trump moves to kill the nuclear agreement that was reached by Iran and six world powers.
“We can very easily snap back and go back … not only to where we were, but a much higher position technologically speaking,” Salehi told CBC News. “I don’t want to see that day. I don’t want to make a decision in that course, but we are prepared.”
Salehi, according to CBC News, watched Trump’s inauguration address with the expectation that he would talk about Iran or the nuclear deal. Neither was mentioned during the speech — something that Salehi called “positive.”
Trump did, however, vow to “eradicate” radical Islamic terrorism “completely from the face of the earth.”