The two-day Tehran conference on Palestine, attended by around 700 foreign guests from dozens of countries and representatives of pro-Palestinian organizations, wrapped up on Wednesday with a statement that voiced support for the rights of the Palestinian nation and underlined the need for an end to Israel’s nearly seven decades of occupation.

In the statement, the participants underlined the need for further unity among the Palestinians, and highlighted resistance as the sole solution to the Palestinian issue.   

Addressing the 6th International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada (Uprising) in Tehran on Wednesday, the Iranian president raised the alarm over the Tel Aviv regime’s attempts to normalize relations with certain Arab countries of the region.

“The occupying regime [of Israel], in an attempt to normalize its situation, has for the first time referred to certain Arab countries as its allies against the resistance front, instead of describing them as its enemies," he said.

The Tel Aviv regime "claims that most of the Arab countries are not the enemies of Zionism or opposed to occupation anymore, but that they share the same phobia about resistance,” Rouhani added.

The Iranian president called on the countries of the region to remain vigilant in the face of Israeli plots, and said the Muslim world needs to clarify its position on the issue of Israel’s efforts to normalize its ties with Arab countries.

“Isn’t it time that neighbors once and for all say ‘No’ to war and fratricide?" Rouhani asked, calling for collective efforts to resolve the Palestinian issue, which he described as the Muslim world's major problem.

The men who passed the Balfour Declaration believed that they were not taking away one ethnic community’s land to give to another; instead they were taking away land that had for four centuries since 1517 belonged to the Ottoman Turks, and giving it to a national homeland for the Jews, without prejudicing the rights of the Palestinian Arabs. Both communities were native to the land for centuries, after all.The way that it would work, as Churchill pointed out in his 4 July 1922 speech as Colonial Secretary, was by the development of the League of Nations’territory through irrigation of the Red Sea and electrification of the region, making it for the first time economically and agriculturally possible for everyone to live there. One might today think in the light of later events that that was naive, but it was the way the Cabinet felt about the future of the Mandate. It was idealistic rather than, as anti-Israel activists try to argue, cynical.
By February 1918 Balfour was telling a friend: ‘My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state.’ To his relation Lady Rayleigh he said that July: ‘The Jews were too great a race not to count and they ought to have a place where those who had strong racial idealism could develop on their own lines as a nation and govern themselves.’ And that ‘nothing but the Holy Land would satisfy their aspirations.’ When she pointed out that the ‘the Arabs will make difficulties: they say the land is theirs, they are three to one of the Jews’ he answered ‘But there are difficulties in whatever you do.’ He was even more explicit in August 1919 when he wrote: ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present need, in future hopes, of far profounder importance than the desires and prejudices of the seven hundred thousand Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’ At the end of his life he said that on looking back it was the thing he was proudest to have done.
Today, from Morocco to Afghanistan, from the Caspian Sea to Aden, the 5.25 million square miles of territory belonging to members of the Arab League is home to over 330 million people, whereas Israel covers only eight thousand square miles, and is home to seven million citizens, one-fifth of whom are Arabs. The Jews of the Holy Land are thus surrounded by hostile states 650 times their size in territory and sixty times their population, yet their last, best hope of ending two millennia of international persecution – the State of Israel - has somehow survived. A century on, the Declaration stands as a righteous blow for genius, development, progress and freedom. Foremost among the types of people who admire these phenomena are the Chinese, who should therefore also celebrate the centenary of the Balfour Declaration.

The Jerusalem Hills are one of the most beautiful sights in the world. The peaceful, rolling green hills, thick with trees and vineyards, are world renowned and deeply evocative.
On a clear day you can see for miles at Jerusalem’s Yad Kennedy Memorial in the Aminadav Forest. So I’ve been led to believe. Last Wednesday was not one of those days. In true British style, heavy mist had fallen upon Jerusalem and rain fell relentlessly sideways.
The inclement weather had arrived just in time for me to plant one of the trees awarded to me by Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) to celebrate my recent knighthood. This moving gift was a particular honor for me and I’d been looking forward to this moment.
I first came to Israel in 1980 and fell in love with the place and its people.
Israel is a bastion of democracy in a region plagued by chaos and autocracy.

Odeh has found allies in the Arab-American community in Chicago, where she lives. That’s disheartening, because one would like to think that the Arab-American community is as horrified by Odeh’s terrorism as everyone else is.
As it turns out, though, Odeh’s Arab-American allies have proven rather ineffective. The Arab-American Action Network (AAAN) — a group that Odeh works for — has advanced two arguments in her defense. One is that Odeh “misunderstood” the question on the form; that’s obviously absurd.
The AAAN’s second line of defense is that Odeh confessed to the bombings only after several weeks of “torture” and “sexual abuse” by Israeli interrogators. That, of course, conflicts with the fact that Odeh confessed after just one day in jail. And the AAAN can’t explain the bombs found in Odeh’s apartment, the statements of her co-conspirators or her undisputed involvement with a terrorist group.
So Odeh has been looking for other allies. And she’s found one — on the edges of the Jewish community.
The far-left JVP has announced that Odeh will be one of the featured speakers at its national conference in Chicago at the end of March.
JVP was founded by three undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s ironic that an organization founded by college students should be embracing someone who murdered two college students. I suppose as long as she didn’t murder any members of JVP, they don’t consider her to be the enemy.

The New York Times Wednesday posted an op-ed by Gehad El-Haddad called, "I Am a Member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Not a Terrorist." Well, that's comforting. We were under the distinct impression that the Muslim Brotherhood does in fact have a history of terrorism and is the Ur-mother of all Islamic fundamentalist terror groups today. Good thing the Times corrected us.
It's unclear how a man who claims in the opening sentence that he wrote it "from the darkness of solitary confinement in Egypt’s most notorious prison, where I have been held for more than three years" got an op-ed published in the Times, but let's just move on to the blatant lies contained in the piece itself.
"We are not terrorists," El-Haddad, the official spokesman for the MB begins. "The Muslim Brotherhood’s philosophy is inspired by an understanding of Islam that emphasizes the values of social justice, equality and the rule of law." Well, at least he didn't say that his understanding of Islam emphasizes "peace"; we'll give him points for that.
He went on describe the Brotherhood as "a morally conservative, socially aware grass-roots movement that has dedicated its resources to public service for the past nine decades. Our idea is very simple: We believe that... the test of faith is the good you want to do in the lives of others, and that people working together is the only way to develop a nation, meet the aspirations of its youth and engage the world constructively."
He left out the part about destroying western civilization from within and paving the way for a worldwide caliphate, but I suppose he had to keep the op-ed brief, considering he was writing it in dark solitary confinement in Egypt's most notorious prison.

Participation by journalists in political events, especially those which they are covering, is a serious violation of Agence France-Presse's commitment to "rigorous neutrality" and its pledge that it "is independent of the French government and all other economic or political interests."
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) press release is based on a falsehood: that AFP, relying on "misinformation from Israeli extremist websites," unfairly sanctioned its reporter Nasser Abu Baker, and includes a call to action to hundreds of thousands of journalists. It is evident that there is no truth behind the International Federation of Journalists' lofty "respect for truth."
Nor is there any justice at the IFJ, which pretends to fight for freedom of press and against discrimination, but which provides cover and comfort to Abu Baker, and which, based on that falsehood, actively discriminates against Israeli journalists, denies them their freedom of press, and endangers their lives in the West Bank by sending the message to Palestinian officials and journalists that the Israeli reporters are not welcome there.
That Abu Bakr was a delegate to the Fatah Congress and also ran in the elections was first covered in the Palestinian media. There is nothing inaccurate about that.
The IFJ covered up the fact that its own executive committee member ran for political office, and attacked AFP for supposedly persecuting him with no basis.

In Sweden, comments that object to sexual violence against women in the Quran are prosecuted, but calling homosexuality a "virus" is fine.
Antisemitism has become so socially acceptable in Sweden that anti-Semites can get away with anything, and no one even notices, as Nima Gholam Ali Pour reports.
One of Sweden's main news outlets, in fact, described anti-Semitism as simply a different opinion. Clearly, in the eyes of Swedish authorities, neither homosexuals nor Jews count for much.
Swedish authorities also give large sums of money to organizations that advocate violence and invite hate preachers who support terrorist organizations such as ISIS. One of the speakers SFM hired was Michael Skråmo, who has publicly called on his fellow Muslims to join ISIS and has appeared in propaganda videos, posing with assault rifles alongside his small children.

Over the past few weeks, two of Israel’s largest non-governmental organizations (NGOs) offered radically different visions for the future of human rights advocacy.
On February 9, Haaretz published a lengthy interview with Hagai El-Ad, the executive director of B’Tselem, an organization that documents alleged human rights abuses committed by the Israeli government and army against Palestinians. El-Ad described how his organization has invited European governments and the United Nations to pressure Israel. Within Israel, though, B’Tselem has openly rejected cooperation with the courts and the army, which El-Ad accuses of being complicit in “the occupation.”
By contrast, in a recent email to supporters, Sharon Abraham-Weiss, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), defended petitioning the Supreme Court to assess controversial legislation instead of letting the government “deal with the consequences of its actions.”
“We cannot stand idly by … there are human lives at stake … as a human rights organization we do not need to consider politics, but rather defend rights,” she wrote. (Michael Sfard, a lawyer affiliated with many Israeli NGOs who is working with ACRI on its case, wrote similarly in Haaretz on February 19, although in the past he has been more skeptical about Israeli courts.)
Ironically, Abraham-Weiss replaced El-Ad at ACRI in 2014. El-Ad left in order to implement B’Tselem’s “strategic realignment,” i.e. its embrace of the radical fringe of Israeli politics.

A celebrity Israeli anchor who hosts a morning current-affairs program told an audience at San Diego State University (SDSU) earlier this month about the parental lesson that has stood her in good stead where confronting the challenges of being a Muslim Arab citizen of the Jewish state is concerned, the campus paper The Daily Aztec reported.
Lucy Aharish of Israel’s Channel 2 said that on her first day of school, her mother made her promise always to “be proud of the fact that you’re Arab, that you’re Muslim and that you’re Israeli.”
Aharish – the first Arab newscaster on an Israeli station to present in Hebrew — recounted entering kindergarten in her hometown of Dimona and repeating the mantra. By the fourth day, she said, “I started getting beaten up.” That was when she was five years old.
Thirty years later, she still sees that experience as pivotal. Refusing to allow bullying by her peers to disrupt her education, she said, she made it her mission to excel. “I participated in every single thing in school. And I was the best in every single thing in school.”

US Vice President Mike Pence condemned Wednesday a “vile act of vandalism” at a suburban St. Louis Jewish cemetery where more than 150 headstones were damaged earlier this week.
Pence, speaking to small business owners at a business in the St. Louis suburb of Fenton, Missouri, called the incident a “vile act of vandalism.”
He said he condemned “those who perpetrate it in the strongest possible terms.”
The Chesed Shel Emeth Society cemetery in University City, Missouri, was found Monday with 154 headstones vandalized, many of them toppled over.
Since the vandalism, the cemetery has gotten a show of support from cleanup volunteers, well-wishers and financial contributors from across many faiths.

Vice President Mike Pence makes unannounced visit to damaged gravestones in St. Louis Jewish cemetery. He gave a speech through a loudspeaker.
“People in St. Louis are inspiring the nation,” said Vice President Mike Pence “You are showing the world what America is all about.”
Nearly 200 headstones that were damaged and toppled in the Chesed Shel Emeth Society cemetery in the St. Louis suburb of University City in Missouri. Members of the community have been left rattled.

Exploitation of anti-Semitism by people who never cared about anti-Semitism but now see political opportunity.
The Arab desecration of the Mount of Olives cemetery, including smashing gravestones, continues to this day.
There also is a long history in Europe of Jewish cemetery desecration, including in just the past few years in France and even Belfast, which has a tiny Jewish community.
But it’s not just the Middle East and Europe. Prior to Trump there was a sordid history of desecration of Jewish cemeteries in the U.S. during Obama’s administration as well.
Yet there was no uproar. No mass media attention. No social media frenzy.
Given this long history, why is it only now that the problem is all over the media? We know the answer to that question.
Trump didn’t cause the problem, but Trump is the cause of the media attention. It’s exploitation of anti-Semitism by people who never cared about anti-Semitism but now see political opportunity.

Sarsour says it loudly and clearly.
By helping non-Muslims and marginalized groups, they will be “the staunchest supporters and best defenders of Islam against Islamophobia.”
In other words, showing this kindness and support is a way to get people on the side of Muslims, and not because it is the right thing to do. What’s in it for Islam? The support comes with strings and expectations attached to it. We help you and you will be our future cheerleaders.
Compare this to the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam (the actual concept, and not the corrupted one espoused by Richard Silverstein) which is about doing good deeds because it is the right thing to do.
Sarsour’s fundraising for the Jewish community seems to be a PR stunt straight from her own playbook. And not just for Muslims in general, but also Sarsour personally, who has been reeling from the exposure of her misdeeds, and is engaging in damage control as she prepares herself for what looks like a political career.

Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan attacked the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, after it criticized US President Donald Trump for failing to take a strong stand on antisemitism in the United States.
Trump “has proven time and again his commitment to the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” Dagan said.
It’s “absurd” for the center to “attack the most supportive leader the Jewish people and the state of Israel have ever had.”
He spoke out after the New York-based human rights organization sharply criticized Trump for his delayed response to antisemitic attacks that have occurred in the United States since he took office on January 20.

More than 150 members of Congress signed on to a letter urging federal law enforcement officials to investigate recent bomb threats leveled at Jewish community centers around the country.
Wednesday’s bipartisan letter, initiated by Rep. Joe Crowley (D-New York) and Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Florida), urged the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Attorney General, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “approach this issue with a sense of urgency, and to work in partnership with state and territory governments, local law enforcement officials, JCC Association of North America, individual JCCs, and Jewish community institutions and leaders to address the threat in a holistic manner.”
Since Jan. 9, there have been at least 69 bomb threat incidents at 54 JCCs in 27 states and one Canadian province. All were hoaxes. The latest wave of threats came on Monday, when threats were called in to 11 JCCs.
“We urge the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice to swiftly assess the situation and to advise Congress on what specific steps are being taken, or will be taken, to deter such threats from being made, to identify and prosecute the perpetrators for violations of federal criminal laws, and to enable JCCs to enhance security measures such as physical barriers and guards, in the event that an individual seeks to act upon these threats,” the letter reads.

The New York headquarters of the Anti-Defamation League received a bomb threat on Wednesday morning, the latest Jewish institution to be targeted in a wave of similar scares.
ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt said that the organization treated the anonymous threat seriously, but law enforcement found it to be “not credible.”
“This is not the first time that ADL has been targeted, and it will not deter us in our efforts to combat anti-Semitism and hate against people of all races and religions,” Greenblatt said in a statement.
The threat against the ADL comes days after at least 10 Jewish community centers were hit with bomb threats, forcing many of them to evacuate.
On Tuesday, another bomb threat was emailed to a Jewish center in San Diego.

Toronto police have stepped up patrols of Jewish areas after a series of anti-Semitic messages targeted members of the city’s Jewish community, police said Wednesday.
Yellow Post-it notes with hand-drawn swastikas and anti-Semitic language were stuck on the doors of a Toronto condominium building with many Jewish residents.
At least one of the notes said “No Jews,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported. Also, mezuzahs on the doorposts of several apartments were removed or damaged, including a replacement for one that had been vandalized several days before the incident only hours after it had been mounted.
The mezuzah is a small parchment scroll affixed to the doorpost and containing the text of the “Shema Yisrael” prayer. Religious believers commonly kiss the fixture upon entering or leaving a room or building.

A student activist at University of Washington (UW) told The Algemeiner that campus police have said there is “little they can do” about the vandalization of a display “promoting peace in Israel and Palestine.”
Uri Zvi — a member of a bipartisan pro-Israel student coalition Chai UW — said he was told by officers that the “chances are very, very slim of finding” the unidentified male who ran up to the group’s display of educational materials; behaved in a menacing manner toward the students manning the table; ripped a sign in two; and fled the scene.
The sign, which was made by students affiliated with the left-wing organization J Street, read, “Pro-Palestine, Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace.”
“The officer asked us how much the sign was worth, and it wasn’t much — it was just something we printed ourselves. But it was still destruction of property,” said Zvi, who was not in the immediate area at the time of the incident.
He added that it took nearly an hour for an officer to arrive after the incident was reported.

A popular UK blogger told The Algemeiner that branches of a national anti-Israel organization rife with “hard-core antisemitism” have strategically opened up “wherever there is a large university.”
David Collier — who covers antisemitism in Britain at Beyond the Great Divide, released Wednesday the findings of his two-year investigation into the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), which defines itself as a human rights group — said, “It seems as if university connections are part of the PSC” game plan.
He identified branches near Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury, Exeter, York, Manchester, Sheffield and other schools.
“Remember that, because students have a quick turnover, maintaining campus activism might be a logistical problem,” he said. “I would argue that they clearly see it as important and effective way of sustaining campus activism to place a PSC branch nearby.”
PSC Durham, for example, is described in Collier’s report as “a satellite that uses both the university” and other nearby PSC branches for “logistical survival.”

After regaling reams of Muslims at his sermons with patent paeans to Jewish genocide, the imam claims he simply “misspoke.”
Attempting to salvage any vestiges of his public image, Elkasrawy jumped back to the age-old “I didn’t mean kill ALL the Jews, only the Israelis! Seriously, I am not a genocidal anti-Semite. I’m just anti-Zionist. That’s a perfectly normal political position to hold.”
Masjid Toronto’s website has Elkasrawy listed as a certified Qur’an instructor. His classes run every Thursday, at around 6 PM. Looks like I’ll have to cancel next week’s personal training session!

In his appearance on Tucker Carlson, Fink immediately shot down Johnson’s claims as specious, stating “I’m happy to teach hundreds of students, the bigger class you give me, the happier I am to teach as many as can sit in a room.”
Fink believes that UCLA’s top administrators may be hindering enrollment in his classes because he is unafraid to criticize the University’s dismal record on free speech.
He told Carlson:
I use UCLA quite often as concrete examples in applying these principles…they continuously and consistently trample students’ rights and we can go over some recent examples…
There was an SJP and MSA, two student organizations on campus. There were posters linking them to Hamas. Now the university again came out and criticized these posters as being hateful, offensive, and if students were found involved, they would be brought up on conduct code charges. Again…that violates the First Amendment. UCLA has a viewpoint discriminatory application of its own policies….
Last week in the Daily Bruin there was an anti-Semitic cartoon of the worst sort. It was a standard anti-Semitic trope with Netanyahu with a big nose. And it had the Ten Commandments in the background, ‘Thou shall not steal, Thou shall not murder,’ implying that Israel will murder to achieve itself, not a word from the administration. How is this instance with the cartoon any different than with the poster? It isn’t, it’s just not consistent with their narrative!

Earlier this month, CAMERA sent an alert to our members and posted an article on our website regarding Tavis Smiley and his interview with radical anti-Israel activist Miko Peled, which was aired on PBS. During the interview, Peled made several false claims that were not corrected or challenged by his host. Many of our letter-writers wrote to Smiley, as well as to the PBS Ombudsman, Michael Getler.
Getler responded in a column late last week, in which he linked to our article and discussed our critiques. He agreed that Smiley could have challenged Peled more, and that he “could have bounced some of Peled's most controversial assertions off on his follow-up guest, Rabbi Leder, which Smiley did not do.” Getler also noted that he forwarded CAMERA’s critique to Smiley.
Although Smiley did not respond, he will have hopefully taken the critique under consideration and will think about these issues before bringing similar guests to his show in the future.
In his blog post, Getler also published excerpts from many of the letters that CAMERA members and others sent in. Below are the letters as Getler published them:
The guest, Miko Peled, on the show made so many incorrect assertions that it would take a very long letter to point out all of them. Mr. Smiley, you, as an informed journalist, should have at least questioned, if not corrected, some of them. Peled's description of Israel as an apartheid state has no basis in fact. In an apartheid state the oppressed do not have recourse to the courts nor do they have equal transit and health opportunities. Patently untrue in Israel.

After contact from CAMERA, The Washington Examiner has changed inaccurate wording in a Feb. 10, 2017 dispatch.
That article, by reporter Anna Giaritelli, initially claimed: “Haley's challenge of U.N. Secretary General Antonio Manuel de Oliveira Guterres was one of the harshest statements a U.S. official has made against Palestine in recent years[emphasis added].”
Yet, as CAMERA pointed out to Examiner editors, “Palestine” is not a country.
On February 22, the dispatch was commendably changed to read "Palestinian leadership."

Remarkably, nowhere in the story (including in the photo caption) is the antisemitic placard – depicting the Jewish prime minister as Adolf Hitler – even alluded to. A Times of Israel story about the protest, on the other hand, led with the Hitler sign, in a report titled “Anti-Israel Protesters in Sydney Depict Netanyahu as Hitler”. Australian broadcaster SBS also noted the Hitler comparison in their report on the protest.
Here’s all the Guaridan wrote to describe the nature of the rally:
In the 650-strong crowd, many waved placards and flags and chanted as they moved down Pitt Street and through the central business district as a police helicopter hovered overhead.
Riot police intervened amid tension between different groups. Officers quickly removed a man who approached the crowd yelling “long live Israel”
Let’s conduct a brief thought experiment. Imagine, while Barack Obama was still president, the Guardian covered a right-wing march in which some activists carried large placards depicting Obama as a monkey or an Islamic terrorist. Surely such an unambiguous expression of racism would have been incorporated into the story – if not in the headline (“racism at right-wing protest”), then certainly in the photo caption or body of the text.

An op-ed in the Guardian by George Browning (the former Anglican Bishop of Canberra and the President of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network) concerning the Israeli prime minister’s visit to Australia is full of significant errors and distortions.
Let’s go down the list of the most serious examples in Browning’s oped (Turnbull has clearly chosen: Australia stands alone on Israel, Feb. 18th). They begin in the fifth paragraph, where he criticises Israeli settlements as a “weapon” designed to destroy the two-state solution:
The building of Ma’ale Adumim separated the northern and southern halves of the West Bank.
This claim is, at best, extremely misleading. As you can see from this map (and map below), Ma’ale Adumim does not “separate” the northern and southern halves of the West Bank. Moreover, the peace plan offered by Ehud Olmert (often characterised as the most generous offer the Palestinians would hope to receive) included Ma’ale Adumim within Israel – as did the map proposed by President Clinton at Camp David in 2000-01. As Condoleezza Rice told Palestinian negotiators in 2009, “I don’t think that any Israeli leader is going to cede Ma’ale Adumim”.

Yad Vashem has called on Amazon to remove Holocaust denial books from its online store, accusing the Internet retail giant of facilitating the spread of hate speech.
The appeal came in the form of a letter penned by Yad Vashem’s director of the libraries, Dr. Robert Rozett, to the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.
“It has been clear for many years now that Holocaust denial literature is freely available for purchase over Amazon. Many of the items appear with glowing readers’ reviews and recommendations for further reading in the same vein,” Rozett wrote, attaching to his message several examples of rave reviews of books titled True History of the Holocaust. Did six million really die? and The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry.
Mentioning that Yad Vashem had – in vain – broached the issue with Amazon soon after the latter’s founding, Rozett told The Jerusalem Post that in light of an unfortunate change in climate with more visible antisemitism, “maybe the time is a little more ripe for them to take up the idea that they need to be more careful in what they sell.”

Culture Minister Miri Regev used an impromptu trip to southern Turkey for a basketball game to offer a different kind of trade: Two elephants for an ancient inscription from Jerusalem, currently housed in a Turkish museum, that is considered one of the most important ancient Hebrew inscriptions in existence.
Regev was heard making the offer in a video posted online of an informal Hebrew-Turkish-English chat with Gaziantep mayor Fatma Sahin Wednesday. Regev was in Turkey to accompany the Ironi Nahariya basketball team for a Europe Cup game, after Turkish authorities insisted that a minister be present in order for the team to bring its own armed guards.
In the video, which was posted by Channel 10 reporter Akiva Novick, Sahin, a politician from the ruling AKP party, speaks of her zoo’s elephant problem: it has just one, and it wants more.
“We’re willing to work for it,” the mayor quips.
Regev is heard telling her aides and translators, “We’ll make a deal. We’ll give them the elephants, and they’ll give us the inscription of Hezekiah.”

The Indian government has cleared a $2.5 billion deal for the country's army to buy the Medium Range Surface to Air Defense Missile (MR-SAM) system from Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI), another step towards the signing of the deal with the Israeli company, Indian media reported on Thursday.
The MR-SAM system, jointly developed by India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) in close collaboration with IAI, is a land-based configuration of the long-range surface-to-air missile (LRSAM) or Barak-8 naval air defense system.
Able to shoot down enemy aircraft at a range of 50-70 kilometers, it will help to protect India from enemy aircraft and will replace the country’s aging air defense systems.
Each MR-SAM system includes a command and control system, tracking radar, missiles and mobile launcher systems. The missiles, which can be fired in single or ripple firing modes from a vertical position, are launched in canister configuration, and the launcher will have eight canisterized missiles in two stacks. The system also features an advanced radio frequency (RF) seeker and can determine if the identified target is a friend or if it belongs to an enemy.
According to India Today, the Indian Army “will induct over five regiments of the MR-SAM missile which will have around 40 firing units and over 200 missiles of the system.”

Israel and the Word Bank will sign three agreements in the coming months to cooperate in helping African nations develop their water, cybersecurity, and agriculture capabilities, The Times of Israel reported Wednesday.
“Cooperation with the World Bank is an opportunity for us to showcase some of the capabilities and innovation that Israel can offer to developing countries,” Israeli Economy Minister Eli Cohen said in a statement.
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim visited Israel last week, meeting with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, and Cohen. “We are cooperating on so many projects especially in agriculture and water conservation,” Rivlin said to Kim in their meeting. “Israel is committed to advancements in these fields for all peoples around the world and it is an honor to be your partner for the benefit of all humanity.”
Last year witnessed a series of diplomatic breakthroughs for Israel, especially in Africa. Netanyahu embarked on a historic tour of East Africa, Israel restored diplomatic ties with the Muslim-majority nation of Guinea after a 49-year gap shortly thereafter, and Netanyahu met with 15 African heads of state and ambassadors at the United Nations General Assembly in September.

Imagine Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Guns & Roses front man Axl Rose bumping into each other at the smoked fish table at the Tel Aviv Hilton breakfast buffet.
Whether or not they would have anything in common beyond small talk about pickled sturgeon, that bong dream scenario could conceivably be consummated in Israel when both bands perform at Tel Aviv's Park Hayarkon within 4 days of each other – G&R on July 15 and Radiohead on July 19.
"We're on the map!" Israeli basketball legend Tal Brody exclaimed back in 1977. And while his now iconic statement was referring to Maccabi Tel Aviv's stunning victory in the European Cup Basketball Championship, the phrase also seems applicable to the Israeli international concert industry.
The announcement earlier this month that giant US promoters Live Nation had purchased a majority stake in Tel Aviv’s Bluestone Entertainment and launched Ticketmaster in Israel, is an indication that Israel has arrived as a respected destination for international touring act, BDS efforts be damned.

The announcement Thursday that the partners of the Leviathan gas reservoir will invest $3.75 billion in its development is a devastating blow to the BDS movement, Eli Groner, director-general of the Prime Minister's Office, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
The development of Leviathan, which is scheduled to take about three years, constitutes both the largest energy project and financial investment in Israel in the country's history.
Groner hailed Thursday’s final investment decision (FID) for ending years of bureaucratic squabbles that all but froze Israel's natural gas sector, the country’s largest natural gas resource is officially on the road to development.
"After seven years, after embarrassing delays, the message we're getting today is that Israel is comfortably on its way to achieving full energy security," Groner said. "This is the biggest investment ever in Israel."

The larger part, still untold in all its detail, is of the astounding social and economic progress made by the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli "oppression." At the inception of the occupation, conditions in the territories were quite dire. Life expectancy was low; malnutrition, infectious diseases, and child mortality were rife; and the level of education was very poor. Prior to the 1967 war, fewer than 60 percent of all male adults had been employed, with unemployment among refugees running as high as 83 percent. Within a brief period after the war, Israeli occupation had led to dramatic improvements in general well-being, placing the population of the territories ahead of most of their Arab neighbors.

...During the 1970's, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world-ahead of such "wonders" as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself.[emphasis added]

the Palestinian territories had one of the ten fastest growing economies during the 1970's, just behind Saudi Arabia (which benefited from the oil shock of 1973), and ahead of Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea.

This picture of crisis contrasts sharply with a longer-term view of past development. The Occupied Territories [OT] were among the top ten fastest growing economies in the world during the 1970s period when measured in terms of GNP growth (Figure 2). The expansion in GDP per capita was somewhat lower, but was still large by international standards.

industrial parks which the leadership of the [Israeli] Foreign, Industry and Finance Ministries is planning at this very moment, under total secrecy. The goal: to establish between 8 to 11 such parks on the cease-fire line between Israel and the autonomous areas, which the Palestinian Authority will control within the next few months.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres is the one who envisioned all this, and those close to him say with pride: We are getting closer to Singapore, Taiwan and Hong-Kong, in huge steps.

And then, after the vision arrives to develop the cities Gaza, Dir Al- Balah, Ofakim and Sderot it will be copied in the cease-fire line between Afula and Jenin, to Mt. Hebron and Tul-Karm, and will reach the entrance of Kochav Yair.

Each industrial park will be established for about 10,000 employees, and will sit on 2,000 dunam of land, with considerable financial assistance from foreign investors and also governmental subsidies. The Palestinians will run them, and be its workers, for the most part.

The Romanian port of Constanta, on the Black Sea, was a major embarkation point for Jews attempting to leave Europe for Palestine. Thousands of Jews, desperate to escape the Germans, took the route by boat from Constanta via Turkey to Palestine, despite British immigration restrictions.

In December 1941, in Constanta, 767 Jews boarded a boat named the Struma. They planned to travel to Istanbul, apply for visas to Palestine, and then sail to Palestine. The Struma was unsafe and overcrowded, and lacked adequate sanitary facilities. Despite engine problems, it reached Istanbul on December 16, 1941. There, the passengers were informed they would not get visas to enter Palestine and, furthermore, would not be permitted entry into Turkey.

The boat was kept in quarantine in Istanbul's harbor for more than two months. Turkish authorities denied the passengers permission to land without British agreement to their continued journey to Palestine. On February 23, 1942, the Turkish police towed the boat out to sea and abandoned it. The next day, on February 24, the boat sank. Although the cause of the sinking is not definitively known, it is assumed that it was mistakenly torpedoed by a Soviet submarine. Only one passenger, David Stoliar, survived. 

Two Jewish brothers said they were abducted briefly and beaten by several men in suburban Paris in an incident that ended with one brother having his finger sawed off by an assailant.
The brothers were hospitalized in what was described as a state of shock following the incident Tuesday night in Bondy. A case report published Thursday by the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, or BNVCA, based on a police complaint by the alleged victims did not specify their medical condition.
The kippah-wearing brothers, whose father is a Jewish leader in Bondy, were forced off the main road by another vehicle on to a side street, according to the BNVCA report. While the vehicle was in motion, the driver and a passenger shouted anti-Semitic slogans at the brothers that included “Dirty Jews, You’re going to die!” the father told BNVCA based on the complaint filed by his sons.
The vehicle forced the brothers to stop their car, and they were surrounded by several men whom they described as having a Middle Eastern appearance. The men came out of a hookah café on to the side street, according to the case report published by the news website JSSNews.
The alleged attackers surrounded the brothers, then kicked and punched them repeatedly while threatening that they would be murdered if they moved. One of the alleged attackers then sawed off the finger of one of the brothers.

America and Israel should abrogate Obama’s military assistance package and replace it with a partnership based on US finance of Israeli R&D projects geared toward developing weapons systems and technologies that both the US and Israel require.
The deal should stipulate the modalities for both sides sharing the technologies with third parties, and their rights to use the technologies developed by Israel with US capital for civilian commercial purposes. Israel should be permitted to purchase US platforms based on Israeli-developed technologies.
Such a partnership would enable Israel to ensure that its continued dependence on the US won’t place it at a disadvantage vis-à-vis its enemies such as Iran, which are able to purchase advanced weapons systems from Russia and China. Such a partnership would ensure that both the US and Israel have the systems they need to outpace Chinese and Russian technological advances and develop the weapons systems they need to win tomorrow’s wars.
In his remarks before the Conference of Presidents, Rivlin voiced concern at the fact that Israel has become a partisan football in US politics. His concern is well placed.
Assuming that Israel’s dependence on the US will be a fixed variable for the foreseeable future, Israel needs to consider the best way of ensuring that the alliance will persevere regardless of the partisan attachments of future presidents.
The best way to ensure the resilience of the US-Israel alliance over time is for Israel to transform its military dependence into a mutually beneficial alliance with the US. A new military relationship based on joint technology development rather than Israeli purchase of US platforms is the best way to accomplish that goal, for the benefit of both countries.

Hillel Neuer, Director of UN Watch provides a brief history of the UN Human Rights Council and how it has fallen from its initial high ideals into a political farce.

Israeli authorities have rejected a request from Human Rights Watch to grant a work permit to its regional director, accusing the group of engaging in Palestinian “propaganda,” the group said Friday.
The decision was Israel’s latest step against human rights groups and other advocacy organizations that it accuses of bias against the Jewish state.
Israel’s Interior Ministry issued its ruling this week, some six months after Human Rights Watch asked for permission for its New York-based Israel and Palestine director, Omar Shakir, to be able to work in the country.
In a letter dated Monday, the ministry said the group’s reports “have engaged in politics in the service of Palestinian propaganda, while falsely raising the banner of “human rights.” The decision, it said, was based on a recommendation from Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon called Human Rights Watch a “blatantly hostile anti-Israeli organization whose reports have the sole purpose of harming Israel with no consideration whatsoever for the truth or reality.”
He said “there is no reason” to give a visa to a person or organization that wants to hurt the country.“We are not masochists and there is no reason we should keep doing that,” he said.

In October 2016,HRW hired Omar Shakir, who has been denied a work visa by the Israeli government, to serve as its “Israel and Palestine Country Director.” Shakir is a consistent advocate of a “one-state framework” and strident supporter of BDS (boycotts, divestment, sanctions) tactics.
The most recent HRW campaigns targeting Israel include joining the Palestinian effort to punish Israel at FIFA (the world football body) and promoting a United Nations blacklist of companies that do business with Israel.
In 2009, HRW founder Robert Bernstein published an article in the New York Times (“Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast,” October 19, 2009) strongly criticizing the organization for ignoring severe human rights violations in closed societies, for its anti-Israel bias, and for “issuing reports…that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”
This was triggered by, among other issues, the hiring of a “researcher” who was also an obsessive collector of Nazi memorabilia; using its attacks against Israel and the specter of “pro-Israel pressure groups” to fundraise in Saudi Arabia; and lobbying for the discredited “Goldstone report” on the 2008/9 Gaza war.
“The only ‘shocking’ aspect of this incident is that HRW, despite repeated exposure, continues its unprofessional and obsessive practices,” continued Steinberg. “If HRW and its backers wish to be taken seriously, they need to start acting in a manner consistent with the principles of universal human rights, including with respect to Israel.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he likes the concept of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, expressing his preference on the issue for the first time since sparking international criticism for appearing to back away from the longstanding bedrock of Middle East policy.
But in an interview with Reuters, Trump stopped short of reasserting a U.S. commitment to eventual Palestinian statehood and instead said again that he would be “satisfied with whatever makes both parties happy.”
Trump’s comments put a new twist on a statement he made at a Feb. 15 joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggesting that his administration would no longer insist on the creation of an independent Palestinian state as part of any future peace accord.
It could also send a signal to both sides, as well as the international community, that the principle that has long underpinned U.S.-led peace diplomacy will not be discarded if the Trump administration moves forward, as he has promised, with an initiative to restart long-stalled peace efforts.
“No, I like the two-state solution,” Trump said when asked whether he had backed away from the concept during his joint White House appearance with the right-wing Israeli leader. “But I ultimately like what the both parties like.”
“People have been talking about it for so many years now. It so far hasn’t worked,” he added. But he then repeated his revised position, saying: “I like this two-state solution, but I am satisfied with whatever both parties agree with.”

Vice President Mike Pence spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday evening, where he laid out the new administration’s top priorities.
Speaking to the GOP’s conservative base, Pence took a very strong position in support of the state of Israel. “I’m proud to stand with the president, who stands with our most important ally, the Jewish state,” Pence told the audience of conservative activists.
“Israel’s fight is our fight, its cause is our cause and her values are our values,” the vice president said to a standing ovation.

In Paris last month, diplomats reaffirmed their support for a just, lasting and comprehensive resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So they said.
Yet, they once again failed to discuss the single most important obstacle to attainment of that goal: the insistence of even “moderate” Palestinians of the Fatah party on an alleged “right of return.”
That is the term used to call for the mass migration to Israel of more than 5,000,000 persons of Palestinian Arab ancestry, 99 percent of whom are not refugees but rather descendants of refugees. This “return” would end the existence of Israel as a majority Jewish state and instead establish a Palestinian Arab country “from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.”
The envoys, including then-Secretary of State John Kerry, appeared unmindful of the fact that the United Nations has for the past 67 years maintained an agency meant to provide humanitarian support for the original refugees—now estimated at 50,000 or fewer—but that for decades has compounded the problem. This is the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA. It operates programs offering assistance to all descendants of these refugees along the male line, including these days their great-grandchildren.

The most important statement from the new administration. Clear, concise, simply and devastatingly expressed. Exactly what many of us have been saying for years – and always upbraided and denounced for so doing. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Nikki Haley, the new US ambassador to the UN, who has called out the organisation’s anti-Israel bias:
Well done, Ms Haley. A woman of colour in the supposedly racist and misogynistic Trump administration. Now she‘s said it, we all can, with a bit more confidence. And my guess is that more politicians over here will say it, having been given their cue.

The spokesman for Egypt’s president on Thursday categorically denied Israeli reports that Egypt has proposed giving up part of the Sinai Peninsula for the Palestinians to set up an independent state.
In a statement, Alaa Youssef said the issue has not been discussed or presented “on any level.”
“It’s unimaginable to get into such unrealistic and unacceptable proposals especially in Sinai, which is a dear part of the nation,” he said.
His remarks came at the end of a meeting on Thursday between top commanders of the Egyptian army and police with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in Cairo.
The reports of establishing a Palestinian state in Sinai were first mentioned by Israeli minister-without-portfolio Ayoub Kara (Likud) last Tuesday, causing an outcry in Egypt.

Islamic Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has released a music video calling for the complete annihilation of the Jewish State.
The video is directed toward Jews as its ominous message is delivered in Hebrew. Here’s the clip, courtesy of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF):
“We’ve prepared all sorts of rockets that’ll hit you where you live,” hails the triumphant anthem as the video depicts “qassem10” rockets target the Israeli city of Tel Aviv. “If you’re not already killed, we can hold you captive,” the anthem’s speaker adds.
Throughout the video, Jews with yarmulkes are shown engaged in seemingly routine activities (or what radical Islamists see as Western occupations) as they have their heads blown off.
At one point, the head of an Orthodox Jew is shown impaled on a spike next to a glass of wine presumably filled with blood.
Other scenes show rockets flying across Gaza into Jewish cities marked by Israeli flags.
Say hello to Israel's Palestinian partners in peace.

Despite the recent thawing of ties between Israel and Turkey, Istanbul is set to play host this weekend to a well-attended conference whose speakers and organizers are either affiliated with Hamas or once held senior posts in the Palestinian terror group.
The Conference for Palestinians Abroad is named for the group organizing the event. It has faced vociferous criticism from the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization, who accuse the organizers of undermining the PLO’s position as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
Hamas’s military wing is one of the bodies publicizing the event, slated for Saturday and Sunday, which is also hosting among its speakers members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
One of the leaders of the organizing group is Issam Moustafa Youssef, who the US Treasury Department has said was the head of Hamas’s political bureau at least until mid-2008.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull went out of his way to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu feel welcome during his trip this week.
The pomp and warmth that characterized the reception by the Aussies were extraordinary. In part, this is because Israel and Australia share so much as democracies.
“We have so much in common,” Turnbull said at the start of a press conference in Sydney on Wednesday.
“Shared values, democracy, freedom, the rule of law. Two great democracies – one very small in area, one vast, but each of us big-hearted, generous, committed to freedom.”
In an op-ed for The Australian that appeared on the paper’s front page and was titled “Welcome, Mr Netanyahu: the first Israeli PM to visit Australia,” Turnbull wrote that, though Israel is a nation located in a region “wracked by war,” nevertheless the Jewish state “succeeds as the sole liberal democracy, a world leader in every field of science and technology, its culture of innovation the envy of the world.”
Yet, as noted by Anthony Bergin, senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, more needs to be done to improve cooperation between the two countries.
The time has come for them to take cooperation – particularly in the area of security – beyond public declarations to the level of concrete and regular interaction on a long list of issues.
The two countries lack a high-level military exchange.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that he hoped to triple bilateral trade with Australia as the countries forge closer technology and aviation ties.
Bilateral trade is currently worth about $1 billion a year, with Israel sending less than 1 percent of its exports Down Under and Australian products accounting for just 0.3% of Israel’s imports.
“Our trade is $1 billion. It should be at least double or triple that,” Netanyahu said as he sat for talks with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Australian government ministers in Sydney.
“I’d like to encourage the Australian and Israeli companies to increase in trade,” he said.
“If I did the schlep, they should do it too,” he added, referring to the 14,200-kilometer (8,800-mile) journey between Sydney and Tel Aviv.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on a two-hour detour while en route to Australia from Singapore this week, apparently to avoid airspace belonging to Indonesia, with which Israel does not have formal diplomatic relations.
Netanyahu landed in Sydney on Wednesday for a four-day state visit, the first from a sitting Israeli prime minister, after spending two days in Singapore.
The prime minister’s total time on the El Al flight from Singapore to Sydney was 11 hours and 3 minutes, a journey that usually takes about 8.5 hours, according to flight-tracking site FlightAware.
The El Al flight left Singapore, traveling in an arc over Indonesia, north toward the Philippines, and down over Papua New Guinea before landing in Sydney.

What should Diaspora Jews do? Make the land of their birth greater, or take their talents with them and move to Israel? This tension came across clearly when Netanyahu spoke to the students after Turnbull. Because Netanyahu appreciated what was going on: the need to walk a tightrope between not wanting to be impolite to his host and call for the Jewish students to move to Israel, and wanting to signal the students that – at least in his worldview – their place is in the Jewish homeland.
And this tension was evident in the way each leader related to the great Australian Gen. John Monash.
Turnbull had referred to Monash – who has a village named after him in Israel – a number of times over the past two days, including in his speech to the students.
Monash, he reminded them, was a brilliant Australian general during World War I, a man Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery later described as the most brilliant general on the Western Front.
“He was an Australian Jew, born in Melbourne, son of Polish Jewish immigrants,” Turnbull said. Due to his brilliant victory in the 93-minute Battle of Hamel in northern France, “the tide of war was turned. It was an extraordinary achievement in military history.”
And what was Turnbull’s point in recalling this tale? “In every field, Jewish Australians have led again and again,” he said.
“In science, literature, arts, education, business, politics and more, and of course in war as well. So you are an essential, magnificent part of our great nation. I thank you for it, believe in yourselves,” he added.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu omitted a reference to the two-state solution in a joint declaration Thursday with his Australian counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull. It appeared to be the first formal manifestation of a dramatic scaling back of Israeli support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an idea that for years has been promoted by the international community.
“Both countries re-stated their support for a directly negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Australia affirmed its support for a two-state solution,” read the declaration issued by Netanyahu and Turnbull in Sydney, where the prime minister is on a state visit.
While Israel has not explicitly walked back its previous commitment to accept, in principle, a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, the fact that the statement cited only Australia as backing the two-state solution was telling.

In a rejection of more than two decades of Palestinian foreign policy, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said it might be time for the US and Mexico to give up on their attempt at a two-state solution.
“Listen, we’ve tried having separate states on each side of the Rio Grande, and we ended up with one side sending all its rapists over, and the other side trying to build a wall,” Abbas said during a joint press conference with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. “Two state, one state, I’m happy with whichever one the two sides like, but it seems like two states hasn’t been working out too well.”
Despite longstanding tension, most international observers have supported a partition of the US and Mexico rather than one country comprised of both entities. Even most Americans recognize that annexing Mexico would eventually create a country in which Mexicans make up a majority of citizens.
Abbas, however, was unfazed. Asked how to solve the US-Mexican conflict, Abbas announced that he had put his son-in-law in charge and promised that he’d be the one to reach a “tremendous” deal.

While Arabs maintain their longstanding ethnic majority in the Middle East, it is the non-Arab states—Turkey and Iran—that are the region’s most powerful Muslim forces. Asher Susser explains:
The last two generations have witnessed the steady decline of the Arab states, to the extent that some no longer even exist as the unitary entities they once were, like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. Generally speaking, the Arabs have not modernized successfully. Most Arab states (excluding the oil-rich and less populous Gulf states) suffer in one way or another from a critical imbalance between population and resources resulting in consistently poor economic performance. . . . The erstwhile movers and shakers like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq are but shadows of their former selves. . . .
The void left by Arab weakness has been filled by the non-Arab states of the region. . . . Iran and Turkey, as opposed to most of the Arab states, are not recently established entities and unlike many Arab states are not artificial creations, but large countries of some 80-million people each. They have long histories as sovereign nations, with unique linguistic and cultural identities of their own. . . . Turkish and Iranian nationalism has consequently proved to be considerably more cohesive and politically successful than Arab nationalism.

A leading European counter-terrorism official is facing criticism after claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, are not terrorist groups.
Peter Neumann, an Austrian counter-terrorism official charged with working to combat violent extremism under the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) attracted criticism this week after stating that both the Brotherhood and IRGC are not terrorist groups and should not be formally designated as such.
Neumann's stance elicited criticism from U.S. terror experts who told the Washington Free Beacon that this line of thinking would not help European officials combat a rising threat from radical terrorists, many of whom have become radicalized through extremist doctrines promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood and the theocratic regime in Iran. The position also runs counter to views held by the Trump administration, which has vowed tougher action on radical organizations.
A senior White House official who spoke to the Free Beacon about the matter disclosed that the Trump administration is keeping a keen eye on all of these groups and will not hesitate to take action as the administration works to combat radical groups.
"Like with Muslim Brotherhood, the main argument against designating them as terrorist organisation is that they aren't one," Neumann stated on Twitter Tuesday, a day before he was appointed as a special representative on radicalization for the OSCE.

The New York Times this week continued its month-long campaign against designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization amid reports the Trump administration is debating the possibility of issuing an executive order making such a designation.
Declaring the Brotherhood a terrorist organization would add the U.S. to the growing list of nations to do so, including Muslim countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Times’ crusade culminated in the newspaper’s publication on Wednesday of an oped written from Egyptian prison by Gehad el-Haddad, the official spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood. The oped was splashed on the cover of Thursday’s international edition of the newspaper.
In the piece, Haddad whitewashed the Brotherhood as inspired by an “understanding of Islam that emphasizes the values of social justice, equality and the rule of law.”
“We remain committed to our ideals of community development, social justice and nonviolence,” wrote Haddad.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Friday dismissed criticism by the UN’s human rights agency over the sentence handed to Israeli soldier Elor Azaria, who killed an incapacitated Palestinian stabber in the West Bank last year in March.
Azaria was given an 18-month prison term after a trial which took almost a year to complete.
Liberman said the Human Rights’ Council was “a council not on human rights but on hatred of Israel.”
“Again it has been proven that in the distorted moral compass of the human rights’ council, one bullet fired by Azaria at a terrorist is worse than the millions of bullets killing innocents in Syria, in Libya, in Iraq and in Yemen,” Liberman wrote on his Facebook page.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party, wrote sarcastically on his Facebook page: “Among the 500 thousand people murdered by Assad, the people decapitated by Islamic State and the people hanged by Iran, this must be the central problem in the Middle East.”

A two-day February 18-19, 2017 conference on "Strengthening Arbitration in Jerusalem" in Al-Bireh, sponsored by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud 'Abbas, was attended by legal experts and experts in the field of arbitration. At its conclusion, the conference issued recommendations for expanding the Palestinian judicial authority to all Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, and for shifting conflict arbitration from the Israeli judicial system to a system that will be in accordance with Palestinian law, particularly for conflicts over land in Jerusalem and for all things concerning economic investment in the city.
Among the notable conferees were 'Abba's legal advisor, Hassan Al-'Awri; Palestinian Bar Association (PBA) head Hussein Shabaneh; Palestinian Jerusalem Affairs Minister and PA Jerusalem District Governor 'Adnan Al-Husayn,; and Mohammad Hadieh, founder and chairmen of ACT for Alternate Dispute Resolution and Studies.

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas made new appointments to the Fatah leadership on February 15, 2017, and also named a deputy chairman of the movement. He did not, however, solve the problem of the Palestinian succession struggle for the chairmanship.
With his move, Abbas managed to somewhat calm the disorder at the top level of Fatah, the ruling party. Behind the scenes, however, the succession struggle continues and could even escalate.
Abbas claims that he is in good health and for the time being can continue in his post. Yet senior Fatah officials say that the PA chairman, who has passed the age of 80, will soon have to find a successor, because the relative calm among the movement’s leadership is only temporary and could snap at any moment.
The distancing of Marwan Barghouti (who sits in Israeli prison for the murder of Israelis) from any meaningful position in the Fatah leadership has only intensified the confusion among the movement’s young generation, which supports Barghouti. It is something that Abbas’ opponents – most of all Muhammad Dahlan, who is on excellent terms with Barghouti – will exploit.
Abbas has, indeed, promoted two major Fatah figures to key positions in the leadership.

On February 15, Fatah appointed Mahmoud Al-Aloul as a deputy and possible successor to PA President Mahmoud Abbas: Unfortunately, just like Abbas, Mr. Al-Aloul is a terrorist who has condoned violence against Israelis. And unsurprisingly, the global media — which seems uninterested in reporting unflattering stories about the Palestinians — has largely ignored the news of his selection.
According to a policy brief by analysts Grant Rumley and Evan Charney of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Al-Aloul previously served as an assistant to Palestinian terrorist Khalil al-Wazir, better known by his nom de guerre of Abu Jihad.
Abu Jihad was one of the early founders of the Fatah movement. As Middle East analyst Efraim Karsh noted in his 2003 biography of Yasser Arafat, Abu Jihad oversaw the assassination of US diplomats in Khartoum, Sudan, in March 1973. Abu Jihad was also responsible for perpetrating and planning numerous terrorist attacks against Israelis, including the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, in which 38 civilians, including 11 children, were murdered.
In addition to his involvement in murdering no less then 124 Israelis, Abu Jihad also served as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Fatah’s liaison with the Soviet Union, the Syrian Baathist party and the Muslim Brotherhood.

A senior Hamas official denied on Friday an allegation made by the Foreign Ministry that Suheil al-Hindi, a United Nations Relief Works Agency employee, was elected to the Hamas leadership in Gaza.
“Suheil was not elected to any position nor did he participate in elections for any political party,” the senior Hamas official told The Jerusalem Post. “He has no position in Hamas.”
The Hamas official’s comments followed the publication of a tweet by Foreign Ministry Spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon, which alleged that Hindi, a member of UNRWA’s education staff and the head of the UNRWA employees’ union in Gaza, was elected to the Hamas leadership.
“INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE!! Dr. Sahil al Hindi, senior at #UNWRA Gaza, [was] appointed to #Hamas leadership. Maybe that's how #Hamas looks for funding?!?” Nahshon wrote on Twitter.

Hanin Ghaddar, after interviewing a number of Hizballah fighters and commanders, sees ample evidence of their exasperation with their Iranian patrons, on whose behalf they have been fighting in Syria:
[I]n the early days of the war, the Hizballah-Iran dynamic changed quickly. The group’s commanders had already been working under the supervision of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for years, but [the commander of IRGC’s expeditionary wing Qasem] Soleimani reportedly began micromanaging their military operations to an unprecedented degree. This shift, coupled with Soleimani’s strict command over the consolidated Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani Shiite militias fighting in Syria, highlighted the complex relations between Persian and Arab Shiites. [Shiite] unity has been challenged by deep-rooted Persian-Arab tensions. . . .
Similarly, a number of . . . fighters have complained of being abandoned by their Iranian and Iraqi Shiite allies on the battlefield. Such incidents apparently led to many losses among Hizballah’s ranks, and some fighters subsequently refused to fight under Iranian commanders. Likewise, many interviewees complained about the “stingy” and “arrogant” manner in which Iranians treat Arab fighters.
Meanwhile, Ghaddar writes, Hizballah is losing some of its popularity among its Lebanese Shiite base, with possible consequences for Israel:
One thing that could revive Shiite public support for Hizballah at home is a confrontation with Israel. Although all-out war is not in the cards at the moment, post-Aleppo military operations in Syria have brought Hizballah forces back to Lebanon’s borders, creating an opportunity for renewed anti-Israel rhetoric and provocations.

Should the United States be giving military assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF)? According to the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon (speaking last summer), “In this year alone we provided over $221 million in equipment and training to the Lebanese security forces.” That number presumably includes aid to Lebanon’s police and Internal Security Forces, but given the small size of the country it is a hefty sum.
Lebanon is a friendly country, an ally against jihadi groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, and a sort of democracy. But it is also the home of the terrorist group Hezbollah, which largely dominates its politics and makes its democracy a sometime thing. It’s fair to say that nothing happens in Lebanon without Hezbollah’s approval, no matter how elections turn out.
Lebanon’s new president is legitimizing Hezbollah’s military role–which is independent from control by the Lebanese state (despite repeated UN Security Council resolutions demanding that there be no militias in Lebanon outside state control). The collaboration between Hezbollah and the LAF may be growing: a Times of Israel article on February 12 about the Lebanon/Israel border area said “On the Israeli side, officials are following, almost in astonishment, the deepening cooperation between the Lebanese army and Hezbollah.” Lebanese President Michel Aoun responded by saying of Hezbollah “As long as the Lebanese army is not strong enough to battle Israel … we feel the need for its existence.” When Israel’s UN envoy wrote to the UN Security Council about Hezbollah violations of resolutions concerning Lebanon, the response from Aoun’s office was “Any attempt to hurt Lebanese sovereignty or expose the Lebanese to danger will find the appropriate response.”

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani — touted by many in the West as a “moderate” — hailed on Wednesday the “tireless resistance of [the] Palestinian nation” against Israel.
In a speech delivered at the conclusion of the two-day Sixth International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada in Tehran, Rouhani, according to the semi-official state news agency Mehr, said “intifada” — the Arabic word meaning “tremor” that is most commonly associated around the world with surges of Palestinian violence against Israel — is “a struggle for [survival] and the sole choice by a noble nation to stay and not give up.”
Also on Wednesday, the Tehran Times reported, Rouhani met with Salim Zanoun — chairman of the Palestinian National Council — and said, “The Iranian people have paid high cost for supporting the Palestinians and opposing the Zionist regime of Israel’s actions, however they will continue their supports [sic].”
As reported in The Algemeiner last year, Iran has been making serious attempts to restore its relationship with Hamas — the Islamist Palestinian terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip. Shiite Iran was once a main backer — both financially and militarily — of Sunni Hamas, but ties soured following the outbreak of the Syria conflict in 2011, when they found themselves on opposite sides, and Hamas was forced to abandon its Damascus command post.

The Iranian threat to Israel over the last number of years has been measured either by looking at the capabilities the Iranian armed forces have and are able to employ in any future conflict, and by the intentions that Iran harbors with respect to Israel’s future and its security.
Back in May 2016, the chief strategist for the previous administration, who marketed the Iran agreement to the American public, was Ben Rhodes. He explained that in order to make this agreement palatable in the United States and internationally, he needed to present Iran as a country that was moving in a much more moderate direction. He used the opportunity of the Iranian elections to make this argument. But was it true?
We’ve all seen evidence that Iran’s behavior in the Middle East has become far more dangerous and severe. The Iranian navy is regularly moving throughout the Middle East region, from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, and has even visited the Mediterranean. Iran is testing new generations of missiles, despite the fact that the UN Security Council prohibited this type of activity.
But where we have gotten a real reminder that this analysis of Iranian moderation is completely false is from the statements of Iranian leaders in just the last few months. In fact, we received a reminder that Iranian intentions are unchanged. On February 21, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khomenei, once again referred to Israel as a cancerous tumor in the Middle East that had to be removed. He spoke about the complete liberation of Palestine – which means the complete destruction of Israel. And he called for a holy jihad.

Anti-Semitism is the acceptable form of bigotry on the Left. It’s thinly veiled as “anti-Zionism,” which really is just anti-Semitism with a fancy name, as it opposes the Jewish Indigenous Rights movement. Students are expected to hate Israel in the name of being progressive. Jewish students are painted as privileged racists, unless they disavow Israel and abandon their indigenous struggle in order to assimilate. My people (Muslims) are portrayed as helpless victims of ruthless Jewish aggression. Palestinians become pawns in the game of Jew hatred. The world falls for it. Israel is evil, end of story.
Studies show that a campus with an active Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter is more likely to have anti-Semitic incidents (no surprise there). My university, Binghamton University in New York, is unique in that the pro-Israel voice is the most dominant narrative. We used to have an SJP problem, but to my knowledge, they disbanded after the administration cracked down on their anti-Semitic harassment. Now our Muslim Student Association partners with our Hillel for mosque-synagogue interfaith trips. The Jewish and Muslim communities here are on good terms, because we see each other as people. We don’t allow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to define us.
Universities need to address anti-Semitism on campuses. If there was an Islamophobic incident at a university, you can bet the administration would deal with it much more swiftly. Anti-Semitism is tolerated because of Leftist hypocrisy. Because of the rampant anti-Semitism on university campuses and the racial diversity of students participating in Jew hatred, anti-Semitism is often excused or justified.
Jewish students, you need to be proactive. Don’t wait for an anti-Semitic incident to happen. Don’t wait for an SJP to emerge and fester. Hold an Israel Peace Week or Hebrew Liberation Week. Educate your fellow students. If you don’t speak up, anti-Semites will.
Anti-Semitism is unacceptable, even if it’s trendy.

41 years later, Columbia University students are still equating Zionism with racism.
As part of their annual “Israel Apartheid Week,” the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, in conjunction with Columbia/Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace, are hosting an event Monday, February 27th entitled “Zionists are Racists.”
If you buy into Dr. King’s assessment that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice, then you buy into the idea that as humanity progresses, we sometimes must look back at the actions of the past and recognize that they do not conform to our standards of morality. The very essence of progress is predicated on acknowledging there is a problem which needs addressing.
The students who are hosting this offensive, bigoted, and hateful event are guilty of precisely the opposite. They drag us back to a past that is so shameful, it has already been corrected.
The 1975 United Nations General Assembly resolution that infamously gave the world “Zionism is Racism” was revoked in 1991 with 111 nations voting in favor of its repeal. Twenty-five countries voted against the repeal, including the shining beacons of democracy and equality of Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace are keeping fantastic company.

The fight against antisemitism in the US requires “all hands on deck,” the editor-in-chief of The Algemeiner said during an i24 News appearance on Tuesday.
Dovid Efune called President Donald Trump’s public condemnation of antisemitism earlier in the day a “great beginning” to an expected broader effort to quell the recent surge of anti-Jewish hate incidents — including a spate of telephone bomb threats against Jewish community centers across the country and the desecration of graves at a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis.
“Absolutely, you have to call in the FBI, you’ve got to call in [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions [to investigate the incidents],” Efune said. “These are criminal people doing criminal acts — hateful people, and they have to be brought to justice.”
Referring to critics of Trump who have accused the president of waiting too long to speak out against antisemitism, Efune said, “There is no such thing in this case of too little, too late. He’s [been] in office for a number of weeks, and I think and I hope that he’s just getting started.”
“I think it’s unfair to say…that the president has been dragging his feet,” Efune stated. “I think what we’ve seen here is a president who is reluctant to take commands from anybody, especially from the media, and especially from his political opponents. So really it was a question of finding the right time and place to speak out against antisemitism and we saw that the president found that this morning.”

However, the hard evidence is not yet in, and responsible commentators would do well to be patient. Regrettably, many on the left have leapt on the news for partisan purposes. Taking a cue from de Blasio and Vox, Keith Ellison, the Minnesota congressman and prospective Democratic National Committee chairman, recently tweeted: “Why has it taken [Donald Trump] so long to even say the word ‘anti-Semitism?’ Perhaps it has something to do with placating his base?” Likewise, some have thrilled to the pronouncement of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect that “the Antisemitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have ever seen from any Administration.” Its director, Steven Goldstein, called Trump’s statement “pathetic” during a CNN interview on Tuesday evening.
Few have bothered to note that the Anne Frank Center describes itself as “a progressive voice for social justice”; that Goldstein has spent the bulk of his career heading Garden State Equality, New Jersey’s statewide organization promoting same-sex marriage; or that the Center has never played any significant part in Holocaust-remembrance activities in the U.S. Likewise, the denunciations of Keith Ellison — who was a longtime member of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, from which he did not distance himself until he ran for Congress in 2006 — ring hollow, as do those from progressives who cheer Linda Sarsour (an organizer of January’s Women’s March who has championed anti-Israel terrorism) or the grotesqueries of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
None of this is to let the president off the hook. If it becomes undeniably clear that American Jews face a rising tide of violence to which the president has contributed, every side should call him to account. There is no place for anti-Semitism in the United States. But accusations warrant evidence, and that should be the case no matter who is in the White House. (h/t Jo Shmo)

The comments hit the news like a firebomb: the director of something called the “Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect” said President Donald J. Trump’s condemnation this morning of anti-Semitism is “a Band-Aid on the cancer of anti-Semitism that has infected his own Administration” and a “pathetic asterisk of condescension.” He claimed Trump and his staff have committed “grotesque” acts of anti-Semitism that he declined to specify. If Holocaust experts don’t accept Trump’s remarks, why should anyone?
But executive director Steven Goldstein is not a Holocaust expert, and the Anne Frank Center (a separate group independent of Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House) is not a serious player in the world of Holocaust memory. Of late, it has become a sham organization that is largely a one-man shop to promote Goldstein’s aspirations to be, as he proclaims himself, a “civil rights leader.” Armed with a great organizational title; incendiary but ready-to-print quotes; and a gullible media slavishly lapping it all up, Goldstein is finding tremendous success. (He could not be reached for comment.)
But the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, by and large, isn’t a “thing.” It developed out of an institution founded by the young diarist’s father Otto Frank, and for years was a constant but minor player in the world of Holocaust education and commemoration. Eight months ago, though, it was co-opted by activists best known for their successful fight for gay marriage in New Jersey. (Both Goldstein and his deputy held their current titles at the gay group Garden State Equality.)

For more than 18 months, questions surrounding the Beverly J. Martin Elementary School’s (BJM) invitation to notorious anti-Semite and Israel hater Bassem Tamimi, have gone unanswered. However, after the school and the Ithaca City School District were forced to comply with a court order compelling the production of records and communications, including video evidence, arising from Cornell University Law Professor Bill Jacobson’s personal Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) battle, the LP’s worst fears were confirmed: A New York public elementary school had hosted rabid anti-Israel activist Bassem Tamimi in a presentation to third graders, ages 8-9, in which he indoctrinated them with hate for Jewish people and the Jewish state, with the self-identified goal of building the next generation of “freedom fighters for Palestine.”
The LP sent a detailed letter to MaryEllen Elia, New York’s Commissioner of Education, as well as Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents, Betty Rosa, and Regent James Tallon, who oversees the Ithaca jurisdiction. It is crystal clear that the nature and content of the Tamimi event was unequivocally developmentally inappropriate for elementary school students–and frankly, unsuitable for any audience, considering its rampant factual and historical inaccuracies.
Bassem Tamimi is the cousin of Ahlem Tamimi, the mastermind of the suicide-homicide bombing of the Sbarro Pizzeria in Jerusalem in which 15 innocent civilians (including 7 children) were murdered and more than 130 injured. Bassem is known for the manner in which he exploits his son, Mohammed, pushing him both literally and figuratively toward Israeli soldiers at checkpoints in disputed territories, teaching Mohammed and other children to provoke the soldiers by approaching threateningly and often throwing rocks that injure the soldiers and the innocent Palestinian civilians traveling through those checkpoints. The goal of the exercise is to capture any potential Israeli
defensive response on video, create propaganda films with the footage, and distribute them, out of context, for international consumption. Most importantly, since the date of his presentation to New York’s children, Tamimi’s U.S. visa has been revoked–a result of the exposure of evidence proving that Tamimi lied on his visa application regarding his status as a convicted criminal by a foreign government.

Since President Donald Trump assumed office last month, the liberal Middle East advocacy group J Street has been grappling with a new reality.
No longer does it have a White House that is sympathetic to the goals on which it was founded, that is listening to what it has to say, and that is vocally emphatic about pursuing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Instead, it faces a president who nominated David Friedman to be his ambassador to Israel, a man who boasted about removing support for two states from the Republican platform in November and who once referred to the group’s supporters as “worse than kapos” (Jews who aided Nazis in the Holocaust), a president who last week upended decades of American foreign policy by not insisting on the two-state formula as the only way to resolve the conflict. (In a Thursday interview with Reuters, Trump clarified that he likes the two-state solution but is open to “whatever both parties agree with.”)
For the first time since its 2007 founding, J Street is learning what it’s like to be in the political wilderness with no allies in the administration, an unfamiliar landscape that leaves it with challenges for advancing its goals but also opportunities for advancing the organization, according to several prominent Jewish Democratic activists in Washington.
“They no longer have access to the State Department, the White House and most probably not the new US ambassador,” Susan Turnbull, former chair of the Jewish Public Affairs Committee and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, told The Times of Israel. “They are not going to be involved in conversations at that level for the immediate future. It appears that they will not be in a position to influence any administration decisions.”

South Carolina lawmakers are considering a new bill to help school administrators better combat antisemitism at state universities, making their state the latest to tackle the phenomenon.
The bill, H.3643, ensures legal protections for Jewish students by using the US State Department’s definition of antisemitism, while providing South Carolina’s state universities with the means to fight anti-Jewish discrimination.
“According to the latest FBI tracking, there were more Jewish hate crime victims than victims of all other religious groups combined. And nowhere is this problem worse than on college campuses, where antisemitism is spiking at an alarming rate coast to coast,” said Kenneth L. Marcus, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which has endorsed the South Carolina legislation. Marcus helped to draft the policy under which the US Department of Education investigates antisemitism claims.
“We are grateful to South Carolina Representative Alan D. Clemmons for his leadership in the national fight to combat escalating antisemitism,” added Marcus.
In testimony to the South Carolina subcommittee considering the bill, Marcus said that the measure would “provide much-needed clarity, especially about assaults, vandalism, and other illegal conduct that is motivated by a hatred of Jews.”

CPAC 2017 has shown its support for Israel in numerous ways, but the panel on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) provided excellent points to defeat the movement.
“BDS isn’t about taking Israel out of business,” said Lisa Daftari from Foreign Desk News. “It’s about taking Israel off the map.”
Sander Gerber, fellow at the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs, and Erielle Davidson of the Hoover Institution joined Daftari on the panel moderated by Ned Ryun from American Majority.
All three panelists stressed the importance of linking the Palestinian Authority to the BDS movement. Most people concentrate on Hamas, but those who do not pay attention to the subject, do not know the terror that the PA spreads on Israel.
Daftari also spoke about her experiences in Syria, where she recently traveled to and interviewed injured Syrians in hospitals. Israelis have treated these soldiers and even saved a few from certain death.
That has not changed those Syrians’ minds, though. She asked one and he said, “Israelis still have horns.”

Posters questioning the Jewish death toll in the Holocaust were found last week on the campus of the University of Calgary in Canada, the student newspaper The Gauntlet reported.
The posters asked, “If the ‘5 million’ didn’t die, did the ‘6 million’ really die?” — referring to the ongoing debate over the number of non-Jews killed in the Holocaust as a way of expressing skepticism about Jewish casualties.
The fliers featured excerpts from a recent article by Jewish Telegraphic Agency Washington, DC Bureau Chief Ron Kampeas, entitled “‘Remember the 11 million’? Why an inflated victims tally irks Holocaust historians.”
They also pointed readers to the works of some notorious Holocaust deniers such as Ernst Zundel and Robert Faurisson.
Maureen Hiebert, a political science professor at the university who specializes in genocide studies, told the student newspaper that the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), which took credit for the posters, is a “website for Holocaust deniers, although it says the site is dedicated to those who wish to debate what they dismiss as ‘Holocaust orthodoxy.’”

McGill University’s Arts Undergraduate Society has voted not to impeach Igor “Punch a Zionist” Sadikov, even after McGill’s president got involved and requested it. (hat tip: George)
McGill University’s Arts Undergraduate Society voted not to impeach Igor Sadikov for his “’punch a Zionist today” tweet earlier this month.
On Wednesday evening, the society voted 22-16 with seven abstentions on the fate of Sadikov, also a member of the student legislative council at the Montreal university.
Since his original post on Feb. 6, Sadikov has refused to resign from the McGill Student Society while issuing carefully worded “apologies” and calling his tweet a “misguided joke.”
“Many of my constituents and fellow students, and some of my friends, adhere to Zionist ideology,” he said in a statement Wednesday to the Arts Undergraduate Society. “I am Jewish myself.”
Sadikov, 22, who supports the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, said he was targeting a “political philosophy,” not Jews.

Following David Collier's detailed exposure of the anti-semitism endemic throughout the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, it seems I might have to remove the 'satire' classification from this piece posted in 2015.
Starting Monday We will be holding a ‘lock-in’ outside the Jones's bungalow in Frinton Mews. We will peacefully stop anybody leaving or entering the bungalow until the Jones’s cancel their cruise booking and donate all of the money for the trip (plus an additional donation of £28,000) to the Palestine Foundation for Homicide Bombers.
Tuesday: We are planning a new peaceful tactic called a “scream-in die-in” at Tesco Express on the High Road. Although we succeeded in banning all Zionist products from the store two years ago, the store manager has refused our reasonable request to donate 93% of all future profits from the store to the Palestine Training Centre for Teenage Stabbers. By starving this superb training Centre of desperately needed funding, Tesco is directly contributing to the brutal murder of 1000 Palestinian babies every day by the Zionist occupation forces. Hence the "scream-in die in" will simulate these murders. Our members will scream for 2 hours and then lie on the floor pretending to be dead babies.
Wednesday: At Frinton Town Hall we will be debating the motion "Zionism is ten times worse than Nazism". Speaking for the motion is the esteemed scholar Farooq Hitler Hussain from the Iranian Academy of Anti-Zionism. To demonstrate our fair-mindedness we have invited a Jewess (Hannah Dumbfeld of the Jewish pro-peace Yucked organisation) who will propose the counter-motion "Zionism is only a little bit worse than Nazism".

Triple J is a government-funded, national Australian radio station, part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, intended to appeal to listeners between the ages of 18 and 25. With Israeli PM Netanyahu’s visit to Australia this week, Triple J’s “Hack” program provides a guide to the two-state solution, in an attempt to clear up any confusion for younger people. (Given ABC’s overall responsibility for the radio station and its programming, we will refer to ABC from here on in.)
ABC’s guide states that “We’re not going to go deep on the history today.” That’s something of an understatement as ABC then proceeds to take advantage of younger readers’ susceptible minds in order to adopt the Palestinians’ favored and distorted version of history and the conflict.
War “Broke Out?”
The article explains that in 1947, the UN proposed two states for the land that was then occupied by the British: one Arab and one Jewish.
But, the Arab side wasn’t happy with the deal: the Jewish settlers in the region were about one-third of the population but were given over half of the land.
So already the ABC’s revised history of the conflict suggests that Jews were not indigenous to the region, and the Arabs had more of a right to the land. In fact there has been an uninterrupted Jewish presence in the Holy Land for 3,000 years. After the Holocaust, of course, the number of Jews in the land increased with the arrival of Jewish survivors.

There's a peculiar juxtaposition in yesterday's front page New York Times story, contrasting how Israel and Hamas supposedly view the possibility of renewed confrontation. The insinuation seems to be that Israelis are seeking war, while Hamas is seeking to put it off.
Here's what the story says is happening "on the Israeli side":
On the Israeli side, the political right talks of a new war in the spring over Hamas’s rearming and expresses a desire to inflict a decisive blow. …
Sounds like they're chomping at the bit.
Then there's Hamas. The piece does note that the group's new leader is "hard-line," and that weapons are "presumably" being constructed in, and smuggled into, the Gaza Strip. But regarding attitudes toward renewed fighting, we're told that its leaders are seeking to "put off as long as possible what they see as the next inevitable war":

Relationships between Jews and Catholics have been historically uneasy. And why have relationships between Jews and Catholics been historically uneasy? As The New York Times helpfully informs us, both sides are at fault.
Here’s how the paper of record’s Elisabetta Povoledo put it in a piece about a new joint exhibit arranged by Rome’s Jewish Museum and the Vatican: “Jews and Catholics have a long history of mutual suspicion and conflict, but relations between the two religions have been increasingly positive.”
Increasingly positive is a good thing, especially given how much mutual conflict there’s been. Remember the Jewish Inquisition? Or the Catholic ghettos those meanie rabbis set up all across Europe? Or the time when armed Jewish crusaders stomped across England and France and Germany and left many of the Church’s innocent adherents dead? No wonder we’ve so much mutual suspicion!

On February 17, PostMedia editorial cartoonist Andy Donato penned the following caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Donald Trump that depicted Trump as a talking dummy – a puppet and Netanyahu as the ventriloquist puppetmaster, who hand-manipulates Trump with the pull of a string. The cartoon was published in several publications including the Toronto Sun, Ottawa Sun, and Winnipeg Sun.
Was cartoonist Donato implying, intentionally or not, that Israel controls American foreign policy, a classic Jewish conspiracy theory? Did his use of yellow Jewish Star’s of David (used by the Nazis to identify Jews) invoke Holocaust-era imagery?

Last October we documented a case in which the same story was presented with differing headlines on the BBC’s English language and Arabic language websites.
The practice reappeared on February 21st in reports concerning the sentencing of the Israeli soldier Elor Azaria.
Visitors to the BBC’s English language website found an article titled “Israeli soldier gets 18 months for killing wounded Palestinian attacker” and while the word terrorism was absent from the report, the opening paragraph also used the term “attacker”.
“An Israeli soldier who killed a wounded Palestinian attacker in a high-profile case that split opinion across the country has been jailed for 18 months.”
In contrast, the word “attacker” did not appear in the headline of the Arabic language version of same story which was published on the BBC Arabic website under the title “Israeli soldier sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for killing wounded Palestinian”.

As we have seen in previous posts, the BBC’s description of the man killed by Elor Azaria in Hebron last March have ranged from “Palestinian attacker” through “wounded Palestinian” to simply non-existent. None of the BBC’s reports used the word terrorist.today-21-2
BBC Radio 4, however, came up with different terminology.
Listeners to the 06:30 news bulletin in the February 21st edition of the ‘Today’ programme heard the following report (from 32:49 here) from newsreader Kathy Clugston:
“A military court in Israel is due to sentence a soldier for the killing of a wounded Palestinian fighter. Elor Azaria was convicted of manslaughter last month in a case that’s caused division and strong feeling in Israel. He shot dead a man who was injured after he tried to kill members of the Israeli army.”

The first paragraph of a New York Times opinion piece inaccurately portrays Judaism as opposed to organ donation.
The Times article, by Ariana Tobin, an “engagement reporter” at the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, begins:
When it comes to death, my family honors all of the Ashkenazi Jewish traditions:…When I got my driver’s license at 16, my mom asked me not to sign the organ donor card because Jews are supposed to be laid to rest in one piece. When I turned 18 and signed it anyway, I couldn’t stop imagining her face when she found out after I’d died in a car accident.
Never mind that Ms. Tobin’s mother isn’t given an opportunity in the Times to offer her side of that story. The anecdote could easily leave Times readers with a false impression.
In fact, while the issue isn’t without complication or controversy, various authorities in Judaism not only do permit organ donation but even encourage it.
Israel’s ministry of health maintains an English-language website contending that “organ donation joins together the highest commandment of life saving and bestowing kindness.”

The city of Warsaw has begun publishing a list of properties that can be legally claimed by their pre-World War II owners — among them Holocaust survivors and their families — but only if they act quickly.
Nearly 50 properties were published Wednesday that can be returned to original owners or their heirs who can prove claims, and more are expected to follow.
The list is the result of a controversial 2016 law that gives original owners of properties seized by the communists six months to come forward, with the clock starting when the lists are published. Any properties not claimed within six months will be permanently transferred to the city.
Gideon Taylor of the World Jewish Restitution Organization urged authorities to notify potential claimants and to “extend the very short deadline.”
“It is unfair for claimants – particularly those who now live outside of Poland – to lose this last opportunity to reconnect with their past because of the administrative complexity of this law,” said Taylor, the organization’s chair of operations.

An influential French blogger has come in for heavy criticism after thousands of antisemitic, threatening and homophobic tweets he published under a pseudonym resurfaced over the weekend, sparking fierce debate.
The tweets included threats against Front National leader Marine Le Pen, who he threatened to kill, but their author Medhi Meklat, 24, and his supporters have shrugged them off as a joke.
“I am going to slit your throat Muslim style” read the tweet threatening Le Pen. Another called for “Hitler to kill all the Jews”, while a third said he wanted to “rape” former Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief Charb, one of the victims of the January 2015 terror attacks, with a “Laguiole knife”.
The tweets were published under the pseudonym ‘Marcelin Deschamps’, described by Meklat as a “shameful”, “fictional character” whose thoughts were “quite the opposite” of his own.”
But they remained on the account after Meklat switched it to his name in 2015. This weekend they were outed by a fellow Twitter user who was outraged after seeing Meklat on TV promoting his new book, Le Monde has reported.

The Celtic cross tattoo on Shannon Martinez’s leg gives away her past.
A victim of sexual assault at age 14 and never quite able to meet her parents’ expectations, Martinez sought out other angry teens. By 16, she was a skinhead spouting white supremacist rhetoric, giving stiff-armed Nazi salutes and tagging public property with swastikas. She favored racist fashion statements — like the symbol on her right calf.
Fortified by the love of an adopted family, Martinez left the skinheads behind. Today she’s helping others do the same as part of an emerging US movement that helps people quit hate organizations.
Modeled loosely upon organizations that formed in Europe years ago to combat extremism, groups and individuals are offering counseling, education and understanding to extremists seeking a way out.
Now a 42-year-old mom who homeschools her kids at their house in Georgia, Martinez volunteers with Life After Hate, a leading organization dedicated to helping people leave white supremacy. On Facebook, she shares her story with others who’ve left or are looking to leave extremism.

Less than a week before the Jewish Agency Board of Governors is scheduled to convene in Tel Aviv for its annual conference, the head of its French delegation said aliya rates continue to soar in France, amid ongoing antisemitism and the agency’s outreach and education efforts.
During an interview with Daniel Benhaim, who oversees the agency’s offices in France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and Spain, he said France’s 450,000 Jews are undergoing a considerable exodus from a country rife with intolerance.
According to Benhaim, the agency is involved in a multitiered effort to educate a new generation of French Jews about their history, protect the greater Jewish community and provide the means for olim to safely come to Israel.
“Our actions are presently directed in two directions,” said Benhaim by phone on Wednesday from his Paris office. “The first one is all our activity toward aliya.”

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian today met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bolster technology ties between the two ‘Startup States’.
Following the meeting, Ms Berejiklian announced that a groundbreaking knowledgesharing program, which saw eight NSW fintech startups travel to the Austrade Tel Aviv Landing Pad in 2016, would continue in 2017.
Ms Berejiklian said the program’s continuation was a “win-win for both NSW and Israel”.
“Israel leads the world in startup innovation and NSW leads the way here at home so
we are ideally matched to collaborate,” Ms Berejiklian said.
“In 2017 NSW will send a second delegation of NSW startups to Tel Aviv to be mentored by Israel’s experts, meet investors and then bring what they learn back to NSW – Australia’s ‘Startup State’.
“I was delighted today to discuss our important relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu who this week spoke of his desire to strengthen business ties and trade links between our nations.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved on Thursday a $2.5 billion deal to acquire an Israeli aerial defense system for his country’s military, the Mail Today newspaper reported.
According to the report, India plans to use the medium-range surface-to-air missile system (MR-SAM) to defend its airspace from “enemy aircraft, drones, surveillance aircraft and AWACS planes.” The system — jointly developed by Israel Aerospace Industries and India’s Defense Research and Development Organization — is a land-based version of the Barak 8.
The deal will see the Indian Army receive 40 units of the system, which will be ready for deployment by 2023.
Israel and India are currently celebrating the 25th anniversary of the 1992 establishment of full diplomatic ties between the two countries. They currently enjoy a burgeoning relationship, particularly in the defense field.
In November, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin traveled to India, just over a year after his Indian counterpart, President Pranab Mukherjee, visited Israel.

On a sunny morning in February 2016, Sami Solmaz, a Kurdish filmmaker from Turkey, took a ride with Kurdish forces from the Iraqi town of Sinjar to the front lines. He spent the day filming gun battles between Kurdish fighters and the Islamic State militant group for a documentary he was making on ISIS attacks against religious minorities. That afternoon, as he was heading back to town, he heard a soldier’s voice crackle over his driver’s radio: “Be careful! ISIS is firing chlorine bombs into Sinjar.”
The militant group had been launching homemade rockets filled with chemicals toward Sinjar since Kurdish forces pushed them out of the town in late 2015. Earlier in February, a chemical attack in Sinjar had left Kurdish fighters sick, and Solmaz knew it was best to stay away. The only problem: His driver’s car was in town, and so they decided to hurry back and retrieve it. “We were only there 10 minutes, but you could smell [the gas],” he tells Newsweek.
On his way out of Sinjar, Solmaz’s face began to swell and his throat started to burn as he drove toward the Iraqi city of Duhok, where he fell into a deep sleep at his sister’s apartment and awoke more than 20 hours later. When he was feeling better, he emailed Jason Guberman, the director of Digital Heritage Mapping, a nonprofit he’d been helping in New York, to apologize for slipping out of touch.
Guberman was relying on Solmaz, an atheist from a Muslim family, to document Jewish heritage sites—from synagogues and cemeteries to ruins of schools, houses and community centers Jews once used in the Middle East and North Africa. For years, his staff and a rotating cast of about a dozen interns and volunteers have been racing to create digital records of Jewish sites. The project’s name is Diarna, which means “our home” in Judeo-Arabic. As wars in the region destroy these sites, Guberman’s team is running out of time.

From the moment Yacub was born, he lived at death’s door. His father, a wheat and rice farmer from Baghlan Province in northern Afghanistan, who was unable to afford the surgery he needed, left his son’s fate in God’s hands. He never imagined that, through a near miraculous path paved by a few Facebook friends, his child’s life would ultimately be saved by the hand of an Israeli surgeon.
For the first three months, no doctor could diagnose the problem. Yacub hardly ate, he didn’t grow, and he cried constantly. His father eventually found a German clinic in Kabul where doctors said the baby would need heart surgery in India: Yacub was suffering from Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF), a congenital heart disease that prevents blood from getting to the lungs and oxidizing.
But the father didn’t have the money for the journey to India or for the surgery.
When the Afghan baby, now two years old, arrived at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport on February 14, his skin was a pale blue. He was “half-dead,” according to Dr. Hagi Dekel, the Israeli cardiac surgeon who operated on him hours later at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon.

Dr. Anis Qassem: We demad our right to be part of the PLO. We must work towards destruction of Oslo Accords. pic.twitter.com/h83dtFiUmh

— Middle East Monitor (@MiddleEastMnt) February 25, 2017

Dr. Salman Abu Sitta: We should purge #Palestine through democratic elections. https://t.co/MxTKpYpIvKpic.twitter.com/w75FxrC8iH

— Middle East Monitor (@MiddleEastMnt) February 25, 2017

Dr. Salman Abu Sitta: 7 million #Palestinian children have been born since Oslo Accords. https://t.co/MxTKpYpIvKpic.twitter.com/OZ9fUbbhiN

— Middle East Monitor (@MiddleEastMnt) February 25, 2017

Tomorrow the Democratic National Committee (DNC) will have to choose the direction of the Democratic Party, as well as its likely composition. It will be among the most important choices the DNC has ever had to make. There has been a powerful push from the hard-left of the Democratic Party, led by senator Bernie Sanders, to elect Keith Ellison chairman. If he is elected, I will quit the party after 60 years of loyal association and voting. I will become an independent, continuing to vote for the best candidates, most of whom, I assume, will still be Democrats. But I will not contribute to the DNC or support it as an institution. My loyalty to my country and my principles and my heritage exceeds any loyalty to my party. I will urge other like-minded people – centrist liberals – to follow my lead and quit the Democratic Party if Ellison is elected Chairman. We will not be leaving the Democratic Party we have long supported. The Democratic Party will be leaving us!
Let me explain the reasons for this difficult decision on my part. Ellison has a long history of sordid association with anti-Semitism. He worked closely with and supported one of a handful of the most notorious and public anti-Semites in our country: The Reverend Louis Farrakhan. And he worked with Farrakhan at the very time this anti-Semite was publicly describing Judaism as a “gutter religion” and insisting that the Jews were a primary force in the African slave trade. Ellison has publicly stated that he was unaware of Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism. That is not a credible statement. Everyone was aware of Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism. Farrakhan did not try to hide it. Indeed he proclaimed it on every occasion. Ellison is either lying or he willfully blinded himself to what was obvious to everyone else. Neither of these qualities makes him suitable to be the next Chairman of the DNC.
Moreover, Ellison himself has made anti-Semitic statements. A prominent lawyer, with significant credibility, told me that while he was a law student, Ellison approached her and said he could not respect her, because she was a Jew and because she was a woman who should not be at a law school. This woman immediately disclosed that anti-Semitic and anti-feminist statement to her husband and friends, and I believe she is telling the truth.

BDS campaigners and the UN love to target Israel, but their hypocrisy only increases as these self-proclaimed defenders of human rights ignore the atrocities in Syria.
IT’S WIDELY known that Israel is often singled out for criticism and held to an unfair double standard. Nowhere is this more evident than in the relentless Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns seeking to vilify Israel and in the annual adoption of numerous one-sided anti-Israel UN resolutions.
Now, when compared to the worsening atrocities in Syria, the assault on the Jewish state may have surpassed all previous levels of hypocrisy and absurdity.
In December, in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, for example, local pro-BDS groups were actively mobilizing. They were galvanized by what they consider to be the most serious human rights issue in the world, comprising, they say, the destruction of communities, homes and lives.
You’re probably thinking this urgent problem must be the humanitarian crisis in Syria and that this was a call to action against a despotic genocidal regime. You would be wrong, however.
This campaign wasn’t about Syrian President Bashar Assad or his Russian and Iranian enablers. Rather, it was a call to action targeting the American corporation Caterpillar Inc. and, by extension, Israel, which uses Caterpillar bulldozers for military purposes.

French Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux on Friday expressed “indignation” over an attack on two Jewish brothers earlier this week, and said all means will be used to find the perpetrators.
According to French paper Le Parisien, the brothers, 29 and 17 years old, who were wearing kippot (yarmulkes), were attacked in Bondy, a northeastern suburb of Paris.
They were driving in a car when they were drawn into an argument with the travelers of another car — reportedly a father and son — at a red light.
One of the occupants of the other vehicle yelled at them “I will kill you, you dirty Jew,” the victims said, according to French media reports.
They were forced to a stop outside a bar, where five or six others came to help their assailants, one of the brothers told Israel’s Channel 2 news.

French prosecutors decided to omit any reference to hate crimes from the indictment of four men suspected of rape and robbery at a suburban Paris home they acknowledged was targeted because it belonged to Jews, JTA reported on Wednesday.
The incident occurred in 2014 in Creteil, when the men who were armed with a pistol and a shotgun stormed the home of a young Jewish couple, raped the woman and stole jewelry and bank cards while uttering anti-Semitic insults.
Both Prime Minister Manuel Valls and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve saw the incident as anti-Semitic. Valls wrote on Twitter that “the horror of Creteil is a deplorable example of how the fight against anti-Semitism is a constant fight.”
Cazeneuve said in a statement following the incident that the "anti-Semitic nature (of the attack) seems proven," adding that the assailants "started with the idea that being Jewish means having money."
But despite all signs pointing to the attack being anti-Semitic, the handling judge of inquiry decided against including hate crime charges.

In these times, it is dangerous to suggest thought experiments, but I will throw caution to the wind. I wonder if those who agree with Steven Goldstein of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, when he said that Trump’s Feb. 21 condemnation of anti-Semitism was a “band-aid on the cancer of anti-Semitism that has infected his own administration,” would have similar qualms about Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American activist in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign who is rapidly achieving iconic status in the protest movement that has coalesced around Trump’s election.
Sarsour and her Muslim activist colleagues raised more than $100,000 for the repair of the desecrated Chesed Shel Emeth cemetery in St. Louis, earning plaudits from nearly every mainstream media outlet and winning the endorsement of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. In publicity terms, it was an unbelievably smart move; by the time news of Sarsour’s initiative broke, her critics were immediately placed in the uncomfortable position of questioning her motives at just the time that she reached out to the Jewish community.
But if Kenneth Marcus is right that patterns of speech and action determine what constitutes anti-Semitism, then Sarsour’s past denunciations of Zionism, and her support for a solution to the Palestinian issue based on the elimination of Jewish sovereignty, at least warrant a critical examination of the politics behind her cemetery gesture. It is easy, after all, to be empathetic and kind to dead Jews and their memories, whether in Poland or Missouri—and far harder to deal with the ones who are still alive, and who regard Sarsour’s “one state of Palestine” fantasies as sinister code for a solution that would need to be imposed, in all likelihood through violent conquest, on the Jews of Israel.
Can the enemies of Israel be, at the same time, the friends of Jewish communities outside the Jewish state? Conversely, do friends of Israel get a pass when they play down or outright deny the presence of anti-Semites among their political allies? Why should Sarsour be acceptable to the Jewish community, but not Richard Spencer, the pudgy racist at the helm of the so-called National Policy Institute? Are we that easily taken in? I fear the answer is yes.

Have you ever heard the name, Linda Sarsour? If you don’t know who this woman is, you should.
Sarsour is a Palestinian-American activist, and the executive director of the Arab-American Association of New York.
Sarsour is one of the women who organized the Women’s March on Washington back in January. She is being championed as a beacon of light for women’s rights and a new leader of the modern feminist movement.
Sarsour has been endorsed by the likes of Amnesty International, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Black Lives Matter (BLM), Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Keith Ellison, Van Jones, Sally Kohn, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Shaun King and Russell Simmons.
But who is Linda Sarsour, really? Some interesting facts and statements from and about her can be unearthed with some digging.
As soon as Sarsour realized that she was going to be put forth as a leader of the modern feminist movement, she began deleting tweets that she had previously posted to Twitter.
Here’s a tweet that she sent out in 2011. Besides the tweet being severely anti-woman - the one thing that people should take into account is who Sarsour is talking about: Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ali is the founder of the AHA Foundation. The foundation focuses on women’s rights and Ali actively campaigns against the very thing Sarsour said she wanted to do to Ali...female genital mutilation.

The media is ignoring a growing and disturbing trend amongst left-leaning Americans as they form unholy alliances with anti-Semites. According to the Observer's Paul Miller, even lazy reporters wouldn't have to look too far to find evidence of such partnerships. After all, the leftists obviously don't try to hide it; in fact, they do it right out there in plain sight.
First, meet Rasmea Odeh, a convicted terrorist who spent ten years in prison after masterminding a terror plot that killed Hebrew University students Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner in Jerusalem. After spending ten years in prison, she was released in a prisoner swap and later convicted of trying blow up the British consulate. But that didn't stop these things from happening:
1. Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) stood next to this convicted terrorist while discussing President Donald Trumps travel ban in Chicago.
2. Morehouse College's Professor of African American Studies, Marc Lamont Hill, allied with Odeh and Dream Defenders, which “embraces anti-Semitism and engages with terrorists.”
3. Next month, the anti-Israel advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace will feature Odeh at their National Member Meeting.

During the Donald Trump era, America “will stand with Israel,” Vice President Mike Pence vowed on Thursday during his address to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.
“Israel’s fight is our fight, her cause is our cause and her values are our values,” Pence said, prompting a standing ovation. “I’m proud to stand with the president, who stands with our most important ally, the Jewish state of Israel.”
Pence’s CPAC appearance came a day after he stopped at a recently vandalized Jewish cemetery in Missouri and lent a helping hand in the cleanup effort.
One panel discussion at CPAC on Thursday was titled, “Is BDS BS? The Left’s Attack on Israel.” It was moderated by Ned Ryun, the CEO of the American Majority organization.
“BDS isn’t about taking Israel out of business,” Lisa Daftari — editor-in-chief of The Foreign Desk — said, according to the Legal Insurrection blog. “It’s about taking Israel off the map.”

US Vice President Mike Pence took to Twitter on Saturday morning to express his country's support of its long-standing ally.
Stating that the White House administration intends to extend its support of Israel past US borders (and probably alluding to American backing of Israel at the UN as well as in the on-going discussions regarding Arab-Israeli negotiations), Pence penned a Twitter post that excited Israeli officials as well as pro-Israel activists worldwide, especially in light of the wave of antisemitic incidents that have plagued the US in recent weeks.
Pence's post was received warmly, until multiple of his 2.9 million followers noticed an embarrassing mistake in the post. The vice president used an emoji meant to represent the Israeli flag, but had instead posted an emoji of the Nicaragua flag.
"Our support for the Jewish people doesn't end at our nation's border," Pence wrote and promised that "under POTUS, the world will know America stands with Israel."

Congress could back her up. Last year $9.2 billion of American tax dollars went to the U.N.-$659 million to cover 22% of the U.N.'s annual operating budget, $2.6 billion toward peacekeeping and a 'voluntary' contribution of $5.9 billion...
A new U.S. administration and new U.N. secretary-general provide a golden opportunity to help the U.N. return to its core values, challenge its inefficiency, and halt its frequent attacks on American values and allies. The message should be clear: the U.N. must reform or the U.S. could cut its funding. An action plan along these lines involves three stages:
• Transparency. Ms. Haley should appoint a special delegate to the U.N. budgetary committee, to monitor the purposes for which the U.N. and its agencies are using American funding. The U.N. currently has no obligation to provide its funders with detailed annual reports on the use of their funds based on global accounting standards and supervised by a third-party auditor. The relationship is based on 'expectations' to report and 'appreciation' of efforts. That's not good enough for a small business filing its taxes. For an organization spending billions it's ridiculous.
• Diligence. A decade ago, after revelations of systemic abuse, the U.S. launched the U.N. Transparency and Accountability Initiative. It turned out to be all bark, no bite. Things got worse. Institutions like the Human Rights Council remained hijacked by human-rights violators like Cuba, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Congress should reinvigorate the initiative, launching a new phase under which it will work alongside an independent investigator to ensure that U.N. agencies are upholding their mission statements in keeping with U.S. standards, interests and values.
• Accountability. The idea that the U.N. can police itself is a fantasy, but the states that fund it can demand a higher standard. The U.S. should flex its financial muscle. Where performance is lackluster, inefficient, corrupt or abhorrent, America could demand rapid reform. If there is no improvement, Congress must be able to withdraw funding..."

Israeli politicians on Friday blasted the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) after its representative criticized the sentencing of soldier Elor Azariya, who was convicted of manslaughter for shooting a wounded terrorist and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
UN human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said the sentence imposed on Azariya was “excessively lenient.”
"We are deeply disturbed at the lenient sentence given by the Tel Aviv Military Court earlier this week to an Israeli soldier convicted of unlawfully killing a wounded Palestinian in an apparent extrajudicial execution of an unarmed man who clearly posed no imminent threat," she told a news briefing in Geneva.
Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman blasted the comments later on Friday.
"The twisted moral compass of the Human Rights Council is proven yet again. One bullet fired by Azariya at a terrorist is more serious than the millions of bullets that are used to murder innocent people in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen. As usual, it is the Council of Hatred of Israel and not the Human Rights Council," said Liberman.

Russia is ready to veto a draft resolution calling for sanctions against Syria over the use of chemical weapons on civilians, its deputy UN ambassador said on Friday.
"There is an argument that the resolution itself contradicts the fundamental principle of presumption of innocence before the investigation is over," said Vladimir Safronkov after a Security Council meeting to discuss the text, according to Reuters.
A diplomat said on Thursday that the Security Council will likely vote on a resolution sanctioning Syrian officials over chemical weapons attacks as early as next week.
The resolution, if it passes, would blacklist 11 Syrian military commanders and officials and also seeks to ban the sale or supply of helicopters to the Syrian government, as well as blacklist 10 government and related entities involved in the development and production of chemical weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

Iran’s nuclear chief said Saturday that the country had requested to buy 950 tons of uranium concentrate from Kazakhstan over the next three years to help develop its civil reactor program.
The request has been made to the body that oversees the nuclear deal signed between Iran and world powers in 2015.
Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, told the ISNA news agency that the purchase was supposed to happen “within three years.”
“650 tons will enter the country in two consignments and 300 tons will enter Iran in the third year,” he said.

A Christian IDF soldier has received death threats from opponents of the service of Arabs in the IDF, the Mako Hebrew news site reported.
The soldier received a threatening message on his Facebook page. "We know who you are, where you serve and where your parents live. When you finish your patrol of the old city, we will wait for you at the mosque, where we will stab you."
Other Christian and Arab soldiers have also faced incitement and threats. A recently opened Facebook page features Christian Arab soldiers, along with the personal details of the soldiers and their families. The soldiers become victims of incitement and harassment, including being called traitors to the Arab community. The harassment can include death threats.
"This will end in murder," one Christian soldier said in a report on the campaign of incitement against Christians who serve in the IDF two years ago. "The state has to wake up and prosecute those agitators who threaten [Christian soldiers] before it's too late."

The Palestinian Authority (PA) on Thursday blasted as “terrorism” Israel’s decision to close an Arab elementary school in Jerusalem due to its spreading of incitement.
The Al Nkhba School in the Sur Baher neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem was ordered to be closed after it was discovered that the school had been established by officials affiliated with the Hamas terrorist organization, and that the curriculum included severe incitement against the State of Israel.
The PA’s public diplomacy bureau said in response that the closure was yet another part of Israel’s “terrorist activities”, adding that Israel’s claims that there was incitement in the school’s curriculum were “lies”.
The statement claimed that Israel is systematically working against Palestinian Arab educational institutions as evidenced by demolition of buildings, attempts to impose the "poisonous" Israeli curriculum on the schools, breaking into school buildings, and killing and detention of teachers and students.

Ashraf al-Ajami, the former Palestinian Authority's minister for Prisoners Affairs, said on Saturday that the terror organization currently ruling in the Gaza Strip was "willing to go back to the 1967 borders."
Al-Ajami made this statement as a guest and a speaker at a cultural event held in the city of Acre and hosted by the Keshet NGO, an Arab-Jewish nonprofit organization he helped found.
"I'm speaking here on behalf of the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization]- the exclusive representative of the Palestinian People," al-Ajami opened by saying, and went on to add that the Palestinian Authority was "willing [to accept] a demilitarized and unarmed state, a normalization of the relations and an end to the conflict."
Elaborating on the Palestinians' willingness to collaborate with Israel for the joint purpose of reaching a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, al-Ajami also said that the diplomatic inclination for a dialogue was not limited to the Palestinian Authority, and also extended to Hamas. "Hamas, too, is willing to go back to the '67 borders. We'll reach an agreement for two states, the Palestinians will go into elections, Fatah as well as Hamas, and there will be one rule."

Hamas has accused the Egyptian military for the deaths of three Palestinians in a tunnel beneath the Gaza-Sinai border on Saturday.
The three died in a smuggling tunnel between the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula early Saturday, and five were injured, after the group inhaled toxic gas during attempts to repair the tunnel.
The tunnel was destroyed in an Egyptian army border operation in Rafah, and the Palestinians were working to rebuild it when they were exposed to the gas.
Hamas condemned the “Egyptian operation” in a statement, saying the eight were part of a group trying to renew operations in the tunnel.
“There’s no no justification for the use of such dangerous methods against civilians under siege,” the terror group said.

Israel said an American employee of Human Rights Watch may enter the country on a tourist visa and should reapply for a work visa, days after barring his entry for alleged anti-Israel bias.
“This is to clarify that the HRW representative may enter Israel with a tourist visa,” said Itai Bar-Dov, the spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Washington. “With regard to the working visa, this may be reconsidered if the organization appeals the Ministry of Interior decision.”
The Interior Ministry issued its ruling this week, some six months after Human Rights Watch asked for permission for its New York-based Israel and Palestine director, Omar Shakir, to be able to work in the country.
The decision was Israel’s latest step against human rights groups and other advocacy organizations that it accuses of bias against the Jewish state.

An Israeli government representative slammed the BDS movement on Friday for falsely implying that a prominent US literary society had decided to boycott the Jewish state.
Shimon Mercer-Wood — spokesman and consul for media affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York — was referring to an Adalah-NY press release that heralded the lack of Israeli government funding for PEN America’s 2017 World Voices Festival — an annual New York event that Israel had been a sponsor of in recent years.
Adalah-NY claimed that this was the result of “a campaign and a call supported by leading literary figures asking the organization to reject Israeli government sponsorship.”
PEN America has faced pressure from pro-Palestinian activists to forgo Israeli funding. However, there is no evidence that BDS had anything to do with this year’s sponsorship setup and PEN America has publicly stated its opposition to boycotts.
“Attempts to single-out and discriminate against one country and its people, by restricting freedom of speech and stifling cultural dialogue, are occasionally made even in a multicultural and tolerant city like NYC,” Mercer-Wood told The Algemeiner. “Fortunately, PEN has made very clear its opposition to such attempts. The repeated and pathetic attempts of the so-called ‘boycott movement’ at creating an illusion to the contrary speak to their desperation and lack of integrity.”

It was recently revealed that the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) had cancelled a panel discussion featuring Ben White which had been scheduled to take place as part of ‘Israel Apartheid Week’. Here’s is the explanation:
But a spokesperson for the university said “Debunking Misconceptions on Palestine” contravened the definition of antisemitism adopted by the government and was “unlawful”.
In a statement on behalf of the university in Preston, Lancashire, the spokesperson said: “The UK government has formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s new definition of what constitutes antisemitism.
“We believe the proposed talk contravenes the new definition and furthermore breaches university protocols for such events, where we require assurances of a balanced view or a panel of speakers representing all interests.”
He added: “In this instance our procedures determined that the proposed event would not be lawful and therefore it will not proceed as planned.”

The Terrorism and Security Experts of Canada (TSEC Network) published a report titled "Is the Muslim Student Association of Canada/USA a Recruiting Point for Extremism?,"in which they ask and answer the questions, "What is the Muslim Student Association? Where did it come from? Who founded it? Is it just a coincidence that so many extremist have come from its alumni? Or is something going on?" Their conclusion? Something's going on.
The report begins by noting that the Muslim Students Association (MSA) of the United States and Canada was established in 1963 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood at the University of Illinois:
Its creation was the result of Saudi Arabia-backed efforts to create a network of international Islamic organizations in order to spread its Wahhabist ideology. It was essentially “an arm of the Saudi-funded, Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Muslim World League. Since its inception, the MSA has emerged as the leading and most influential Islamic student organization in North America. Today, there are nearly six hundred MSA chapters in the United States and Canada.
The report goes on to investigate the key principles of the MSA and to establish "its clear nexus to the MB and its adherent organizations." It proceeds to examine the MSA's "rampant anti-US, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric both on and off campus" and to "analyze the manner in which the MSA provides material support to terrorism travel." It demonstrates conclusively that "current and former members of the MSA account for a significant share of individuals who have left home to join in terror related activities abroad."

Igor Sadikov, the student politician who called on his Twitter followers to “punch a Zionist today,” stepped down as a director of McGill University’s student government one day after the university’s Arts Undergraduate Society voted against impeaching him.
The 22-year-old political science student blamed “interference” by the McGill administration, he said in a statement Thursday.
“My continued membership on the [Board of Directors] is, at this juncture, a legal liability for the Society,” he said in the statement.
Sadikov’s decision buoyed the spirits of pro-Israel students and Jewish organizations. The Twitter controversy continued to roil the campus for nearly three weeks, with the pro-Israel side saying Sadikov incited violence with his tweet while Sadikov characterized the controversy as a “misguided joke.”

Confirming that its members are in Israel, Coldplay nonetheless denied a TV report Friday that the band was here finalizing plans for shows for Israelis and Palestinians this coming November, saying no concert was scheduled and that no contract had been signed.
Chris Martin tweeted Friday on the Coldplay account that he and his bandmates were “in Israel and Palestine to listen and learn, that’s all.”
Channel 2 reported Friday that Martin was visiting Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Jericho and Rawabi to finalize venues for the shows and that tickets would go on sale soon.
Coldplay had last month said through a representative that earlier reports on upcoming shows in Israel or the West Bank were false. Channel 2 had reported that unprecedented joint concerts were scheduled for November 3 and November 4, at an outdoor location north of the Dead Sea, and that tickets would be sold both in Israel and in the Palestinian territories.
Martin said Friday that “there is no concert scheduled; we are just having an enlightening trip to learn about the area.”
“The articles suggesting that we have a signed contract are incorrect,” he wrote.

The number of female soldiers serving in combat roles in the IDF Ground Forces jumped 350% from 2015 to 2016, Israel Defense reported on Thursday.
The IDF, the report said, has been seeking ways to boost its number of female fighters. A total of 1,300 women now serve in Ground Forces combat units, according to the report.
Figures unveiled at a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting last month showed that 2,800 women were set to serve in combat roles throughout the entire military in 2017.
Brig. Gen. Eran Shani — head of the Planning Brigade and Manpower Administration in the IDF Personnel Directorate — told committee members, “As we are an army of the people, we aspire to integrate all population sectors and allow the greatest possible equality of opportunities. We have expanded the number of roles open to women, which now comprise 90 percent of all service positions in the IDF.”
The military, Shani noted, was working to establish its first-ever training base for mixed-gender battalions.

Another member of the project, Limor Sevillia, served in the IDF for 5 years as a combat engineer and came out as a lesbian in front of her soldiers. Sevillia, who still serves in the reserves as a company commander, told The Post that she is passionate about helping other LGBT and female combat soldiers and that she plans to be one of the mentors for LGBT and female combat soldiers.
Regev Barak, another member of the organization, told The Post following the event that the challenges facing women and LGBT members are “tougher than what others face.”
“We need to make sure that the best people protect the state of Israel, in the best roles that they are suited for. It’s all about abilities. If a woman has the ability and qualifications to be a high-ranking officer in the army, she should. It’s the same with LGBT soldiers. It’s all about a person’s ability, not gender or sexual orientation.”
And that’s exactly what Nahmany and the project hopes to get across to those who are working to keep LGBT or women out of the army.
“The LGBT community has come along way in 20 years,” Nahmany told The Post, “we are serving in the army, we are dying for our country and now it’s time to take our country back.”
“For the first time we are saying that the LGBT community and women are strong. We are not asking for any help. We are fighting extremism and anyone who wants to do the same, you are welcome to join us.

A luxury hotel in the southern Israeli resort town of Eilat was ranked first in the region and 25th internationally by a well-known travel website that provides reviews from tourists around the world.
The Herods Vitalis Spa Hotel headed TripAdvisor‘s 2017 list of the “Top 25 Hotels in the Middle East,” ahead of hotels in Tel Aviv, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and elsewhere.
In addition, Eilat is the only Mideast location to make the website’s “top 10 destinations in the world on the rise” list. The city is described by TripAdvisor as follows:
Charming Eilat is one of Israel’s most popular resort cities. Nestled at the northern tip of the Red Sea, Eilat’s warm, clear waters are a huge draw for divers, while the reefs of Coral Beach Nature Reserve are perfect for snorkelers. Above sea level, the ancient copper mines of Timna National Park are begging to be explored, as are the shops, bars and restaurants of the seaside promenade.

Activists have vowed that 2017 will be a year of “increased activism” against Jordanian normalisation of ties with Israel, with a particular focus on the two countries’ recent gas deal.

Activists from anti-normalisation campaigns have marked the beginning of what they predict will be an “eventful year” of activism, aimed at cancelling the gas deal with Israel and forcing the resignation of the government.

They said 2017 will be a period of concerted “anti-normalisation” activities which Jordanians from all backgrounds engage in,  including protests against the gas deal, both on campuses and in the streets.

Mohammad Absi, head of the anti-normalisation campaign, said the normalisation process started in 1994, when the government signed the Wadi Araba peace treaty with Israel.

“Despite [consecutive] governments promoting and reinforcing the idea of normalisation, people had the choice to ignore it. But with the gas deal, people do not have that choice anymore,” he told The Jordan Times in a recent interview.

After collecting signatures for a petition in Amman, Irbid, Karak and Balqa, and organising demonstrations to voice “the people’s rejection of normalisation”, Absi said the campaign will highlight issues related to the Jordanian workforce in Eilat, in order to protest normalised relations with Israel.

“2016 was a year that saw normalisation thoroughly endorsed, with many documents and papers promoting engaging in trade and tourism with the Zionists. This year, we aim to increase efforts to cancel the gas deal signed with the Israeli government,” he added.

As part of a series of events planned this year, activists from different political parties on Friday organised a march in front of Al Husseini Mosque in downtown Amman to protest recent price hikes and the gas deal.

TEHRAN, Feb. 23 (MNA) – Palestine Intifada Conference secretary general has said non-governmental organizations could play a vital role in strengthening the Resistance movement.
Hossain Amir-Abdollahian, Parliament’s Director General for Foreign Affairs, made the remarks in the closing ceremony of ‘International Conference for Activists and NGOs Supporting Palestine’ on Thursday in Tehran.

“Today we hosted four committees including Iranian and foreign NGOs, Youth, Parliaments and Resistance in the conference,” the official said expressing gratitude to attendees and organizers.

Former diplomat underlined that Resistance is the most important effort to be done for Palestine “Resistance would be extended to occupied territories and we urge NGOs to play more active role in realizing the objectives of the conference.”

Amir-Abdollahian announced the formation of a supreme committee comprising of 25 memebers including senior Palestinian officials, Palestinian NGOs, non-Palestinian NGOs and fellows from interested countries’ parliaments; “the committee would be in charge of taking measures and stances on the basis of needs of the region and Palestine and pursue the adopted policies in Palestine Intifada Conference precisely and fast.”

The event passed successfully. I was surprised by the amount of students that engaged. Israeli chocolate was handed around, very few SOAS students refused. I think it highlights how minority opinion is allowed to rule over everyone, even in (especially in?) the most hostile of environments.
I did what I normally do, and wandered. Listening to the exchanges between Israelis, and some of those, who in a few short days, will be screaming about the ‘Apartheid state’. I had a few interesting exchanges, but not many. The SOAS Palestinian Society had set up an ‘opposition stall’, but they were ineffective. However, the message I want to deliver today is not about the successful event, but rather to tell a short story through one Palestinian SOAS student I met there.
Hope not Hate
As I was considering that the majority of feedback I was hearing was positive, I came across two of the Israeli girls talking to someone who identified as a Palestinian SOAS student. I listened intently for about 10 minutes. Question, answer; another question another answer. But this was a two way street and the Israelis were interested in asking questions too. It proved to be an opportunity for real dialogue between two groups of people, who are normally unable to engage properly. Exactly what we should be used to seeing on campus. After a while, I said to the Palestinian student that I wished there were more like him, and went away.
Shortly after this, he left the crowd where the Israelis stood. I saw him begin to make his way back into the SOAS building. A couple of girls from the SOAS Palestinian Society stall were clearly unhappy that a SOAS student, and a Palestinian one, had spoken to the ‘enemy’. So they approached him to bring him into line.
This is the exchange:

The Trump administration may soon back Israel on its claim of UN bias and pull out of the organization's Human Rights Council, Politico reported on Saturday.
According to the report, the administration is not expected to withdraw ahead of the council’s next session that begins on Monday, but discussion of the option has already begun and is expected to include input from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and President Donald Trump.
The administration regards the Council as being inherently anti-Israel which is the main reason for the consideration for pulling out of the international body, according to the report.
The news site also reported that in private conversations, Secretary Tillerson has expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the Council.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner did not confirm whether the issue was being considered and would only say that "our delegation will be fully involved in the work of the HRC session which starts Monday." (h/t Yenta Press)

There’s a reason that France, Russia, China and every other world power invests time, money and political capital to campaign for a seat at the U.N. Human Rights Council: to gain influence in a consequential world body.
Like it or not, the UNHRC’s decisions, translated into every language, influence the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
If the U.S. wants to be a winner, it would be foolish to abandon the coveted 3-year term that it just won a few months ago. When the U.S. left from 2006 to 2009, nothing got better; the UNHRC only got worse, and it began sending its anti-Israel reports to the International Criminal Court.
Here’s what UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer said before the U.S. Congress in testimony earlier this month:

Many remember the euphoria that followed Israel’s total victory in the Six Day War of June 5, 1967. Surprisingly, very few recall the United Nations was one of the primary causes of that war.
On May 17, 1967 “[t]he Egyptian chief of staff, Gen. Mohamed Fawzy, called today for the immediate withdrawal of United Nations peace-keeping force” from the Gaza (NYTimes). On May 18, 1967, U.N. Secretary General U Thant announced he “decided to withdraw the United Nations Emergency Force from the armistice line between Israel and the United Arab Republic [Egypt]” (NYTimes). “Through the Secretariat, he announced only that he had been asked to remove the force, which has served since November, 1956, as a buffer between Israeli and Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip and on the armistice line that runs from there across the Sinai Peninsula” (ibid).
That said “it had gone to the Middle East with Cairo’s consent and that ‘as a peace-keeping force it could not remain if that consent were withdrawn or if the conditions under which it operated were so qualified that the force was unable to function effectively'” (ibid). Paradoxically on May 27, 1967, “Thant asked the Security Council today to remind Israel and her Arab neighbors that under an existing resolution the Council could use a blockade or other measures to suppress any violation of their 1949 armistice” (NYTimes). On June 5, 1967, Thant gave another reason for the withdrawal: “From a practical point of view, he said, to have delayed would have endangered the lives of members of the international force, supplied by Brazil, Canada, Denmark, India, Norway, Sweden and Yugoslavia” (NYTimes).

The Palestine Liberation Organization’s envoy to Tehran said he hopes Iran will produce 1,000 nuclear bombs, adding that Israel is “truly terrified” of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.
Although he did not explicitly call for Iran to use a nuclear bomb against Israel, Salah al-Zawawi told the Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese television station Al-Manar in an interview on February 20 that “if Iran produces a nuclear bomb — and I pray to Allah that Iran will produce 1,000 nuclear bombs,” he hopes “it will be used to defend, at the very least, the Islamic Republic and its principles,” according to a translation by watchdog group MEMRI.
Iran has denied seeking to produce nuclear weapons and signed a 2015 agreement with world powers that puts in place limitations on its nuclear program. At the same time, the Islamic Republic has continued to develop missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads and a number of senior Iranian officials have called repeatedly for Israel’s “annihilation,” including its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
During the interview, Zawawi also said Israel is part of a “Western enterprise” whose “goal is to establish the Greater Israel, which would control disintegrated Arab and Islamic countries.”
“This way, our enemy, along with its defenders and masters, would complete their plan to turn us into servants, if not slaves, in this region, and to plunder our resources,” he said, adding that “this is happening today in our Islamic world.”
In a 2014 interview, Zawawi called for Iran to support the Palestinians in order to help bring about “Israel’s annihilation,” maintaining Israel is a “fake regime” created by the “US and Western countries.”

The Trump administration is working to strengthen ties between Israel and moderate Sunni states in the region for the purpose of advancing the prospects of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, said Intelligence Minister Israel Katz (Likud).
In an interview with the Washington Post published Sunday, Katz acknowledged that Israel has relations with certain unnamed Sunni Arab countries that have no official peace deal or diplomatic ties with Jerusalem.
The minister indicated that due to the relative weakness of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and recent changes within the Hamas leadership, a direct approach has become increasingly difficult.
Therefore, he said he has been pushing his vision for achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians which involved a multilayered regional approach with coordination between moderate Arab states along with moderate Palestinians.
Katz explained that one aspect of bolstering the Israeli-Sunni alliance consisted of uniting in the fight against extremist groups wreaking havoc in the region, such as Islamic State and al-Qaida along with the Shi'ite axis of Iran and Hezbollah.
The new White House administration's shift on the Middle East conflict has provided Israel with mechanisms and backing in order to strengthen security cooperation with Sunni states, Katz told the Washington Post.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to hold a meeting Sunday morning with Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who last week said there would be no peace if a Palestinian state was unilaterally foisted on Israel, before boarding his plane for a more than 20-hour return flight to Israel.
Bishop’s comments about a Palestinian state came during her visit to Washington as two former Australian prime ministers from the opposition Labor Party called on Australia to recognize a Palestinian state.
The meeting with Netanyahu comes shortly after she returned from a trip that took her to Great Britain and Ireland, in addition to meetings with US Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Playing down the now notorious first phone call between US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Bishop said the relations between the two countries were as close as ever.
Netanyahu met Friday with opposition leader Bill Shorten, whose party – as a result of Netanyahu’s visit – is publicly debating what its policy should be on Israel; while some Labor luminaries, such as former prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Bob Hawke, are pushing a more pro-Palestinian policy, others on the party’s right flank, such as MPs Michael Danby and Mark Dreyfus, are pushing back.
The issue is expected to be debated at next year’s party conference.

Australia is willing to be an “important player” in keeping pressure on the International Criminal Court so it is not used as a vehicle to attack Israel, a senior diplomatic official said Sunday, shortly after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.
Bishop, according to the official, committed Australia to continue defending Israel in hostile international forums, as it has done until now.
The official said Netanyahu was trying to put together a group of nations that – in addition to the US under President Donald Trump – would both take a more aggressive tone against Iran, and also block efforts to castigate Israel in various international forums.
Netanyahu met Bishop shortly before leaving Australia after a five day visit. In that meeting, he raised the idea of “Gaza First” to illustrate how unrealistic it was at this time to talk about a Palestinian state.

Israel will never relinquish security control of the entirety of the West Bank, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop on Sunday.
Netanyahu was answering Bishop, who had asked him what he meant when he spoke of supporting a “Palestinian state,” according to a report by Israel Radio about the meeting between the two.
According to a source close to the prime minister, Netanyahu told Bishop that Israel’s insistence on security control stemmed from the failures of international forces to protect the country from past acts of aggression by its neighbors.
The source spoke during a briefing Sunday for Israeli reporters accompanying Netanyahu on a state visit to Australia, the first for a serving Israeli prime minister.
The visit was “wonderful,” Netanyahu said Sunday just before he boarded the plane for the long flight back to Israel.

At least 154 French parliament members have signed on to a letter directed at French President Francois Hollande, calling on him to recognize the Palestinian Authority as a sovereign state.
Hollande, who declined to run for reelection after his approval rating sank to just 4% in November, will leave office after presidential elections in April (first round) and May (runoff).
But pro-Palestinian Authority lawmakers are hoping to prod the Socialist Party incumbent to take one final, dramatic act on the Israeli-Arab conflict before leaving office.
"France must demonstrate its determination to break the deadlock on the conflict by solemnly reaffirming, in the name of the inalienable right of self-determination, that the Palestinian people are entitled to a State,” the joint letter to Hollande reads.
"Mr. President, show yourself up to the challenge and do not miss this rendezvous with history, recognizing the State of Palestine now.”
The letter comes a year after the Hollande government’s failed push for a Middle East peace summit in Paris, which was hoped to reach a framework for a final status agreement and include representatives from both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

J Street’s national conference, which formally gets under way on Sunday after an opening function Saturday night, will host a slew of prominent liberal Democrats, numerous members of Congress, a handful of Knesset members and no Republican speakers.
The speaking lineup for the liberal Jewish lobby group’s sixth confab — which runs from February 26-28 at the Washington Convention Center — includes three senators and three House members; four Knesset members and one Palestinian Authority official; one former US secretary of state and one former US negotiator on Israeli-Palestinian peace; many Democrats but no members of the Trump administration.
Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson were invited but did not respond. (Secretary of state John Kerry and vice president Joe Biden spoke at last year’s conference.)
One of the most notable figures attending is Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats and who ran an insurgent campaign for the party’s nomination in 2016. Many pundits consider him to be the current leader of the US progressive movement.

Former labor secretary Tom Perez was elected as the Democratic National Committee’s new chairman Saturday, narrowly defeating his chief rival, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, after a contentious campaign. Perez immediately named Ellison his deputy.
The four-month race drew controversy over the Minnesota legislator’s past record of associations with known anti-Semitic figures and critical stances on Israel. His alliance with much of the progressive wing of the party threatened to divide the Democrats as they seek to revitalize themselves after tough losses in the 2016 election.
In his first act as DNC leader, Perez appointed Ellison his deputy chair, a move that sought to unify the party and prevent — or, at the least, alleviate — continued infighting. “I look forward to helping the Democratic Party in any way that I can,” Ellison said in a statement.
Perez, the first Latino to hold the post, edged Ellison on the second round of voting by Democratic National Committee members gathered in Atlanta.

A Palestinian woman was convicted on Sunday of assaulting an Israeli legislator during the Knesset member’s November 2014 visit to the Temple Mount.
The indictment from the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court said Sahar Natshe shouted “go away” and “Allahu Akbar” as she pushed Shuli Moalem-Refaeli (Jewish Home), in an attempt to prevent the MK from entering the compound.
Footage from the incident does not show Natshe making contact with Moalem-Refaeli, but the Palestinian woman can be heard screaming, along with a number of other women, at the Israeli legislator who continues walking across the compound, unfazed.

Hamas has raided weapons caches of Islamic State-affiliated groups in the Gaza Strip in the wake of several rockets fired from Sinai into Israel, a top jihadi militant affiliated with IS ideology told Breitbart Jerusalem.
Abu Bakr Almaqdesi said that about 250 rockets and dozens of rifles have been confiscated, in addition to the arrest of their supposed owners.
The arsenal ranged between smaller rockets, with a range of 5-7 kilometers, to Grad rockets that are capable of reaching Tel Aviv, he claimed.
In addition, more than 60 AK-47 rifles were confiscated, the jihadist said. “But the so-called Muslims didn’t make do with depriving the mujahedeen of their arms,” he said, referring to Hamas, “they confiscated their personal computers, mobile phones and motorcycles as well. They even took Islamic State flags.”
He said Hamas insists on keeping hundreds of jihadists in detention. “Only 17 have been released under severe restrictions, and for a $1000 bail each – more than most of our brothers in Gaza can afford.”

MEMRI TV has translated a recently-broadcast BBC Arabia TV report on restaurants in Gaza.
It needs to be seen to be believed. Highlights include:

• The food. Man, it looks delicious
• A man in a Dubai hat claiming the people of Gaza love life (I assume he is referring to the x% that don’t support or actively send their children or themselves into Israel to blow themselves up or otherwise commit a terror attack expecting to be killed)
• “Dubai” continuing to explain the scenes we are seeing are “a way to escape the bitter reality of the people of Gaza” (you can’t make this stuff up)
• The woman who clearly had a lot of plastic surgery
• 100 shekels for 3 coffees or $250-$300 for 3 dinners (way more than most Israelis would spend)

Financial institutions in the US and Spain are under fire for providing accounts to the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, which promotes a boycott of Israel and defends Iran’s nuclear program.
Renowned Harvard University jurist Alan Dershowitz told The Jerusalem Post on Friday: “The organization [IADL] was founded as a communist front and supported financially by the Soviet Union. It is anti-democratic to its core and supportive of terrorism and repression. No decent person or institution should be associated with or supportive of its anti-democratic agenda and actions.”
IADL states on a pro-Palestinian website that it “supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement to boycott Israeli products as well as businesses which support the Occupation, and to sanction Israel for its crimes.”
IADL’s own website solicits donations and lists accounts with Comerica Bank in Michigan and the Spanish bank Caixa d’Est Alvis (Caixa d’Estalvis i Pensions de Barcelona). The latter bank has been renamed La Caixa.
Wayne Mielke, a spokesman at Comerica’s headquarters in Dallas, told the Post, “Comerica Bank as with all other financial institutions in the United States is legally and duty bound to protect the privacy of its clients. Accordingly, we don’t discuss customer relationships with third parties.” He added, “Please know that we have a robust compliance program at the bank to ensure that the customers who bank with us are legally entitled to have a bank account.”

Spurred in part by a spate of controversies over anti-Semitism in one of the state’s towns, Montana lawmakers advanced a bill Saturday that pledges solidarity with Israel by refusing to do business with firms boycotting the Middle Eastern country.
Republican House Speaker Austin Knudsen of Culbertson said his bill allows Montana to stand in solidarity with Israel. His bill “sends the message that we will not send our taxpayer dollars to companies which chose to participate in the boycotting and sanctioning of one of our nation’s strongest allies,” Knudson said.
The bill would direct the Montana Board of Investments to sever ties with companies supporting a pro-Palestinian movement to boycott Israel. It would also bar public agencies — including counties, cities and towns — from doing businesses with companies that don’t agree to certify in writing that they are not engaged in a boycott of Israel.
Opponents said the bill is well-intentioned but a potential infringement on free speech. Some argued Montana should stay out of global politics.
Nevertheless, the House endorsed the measure 59-41 on preliminary vote. In doing so, Montana is seeking to join other states that have passed similar bills.

Activists at the University of Georgia (UGA) were forcibly removed from a lecture hall where they were disrupting a talk by two Israeli soldiers, footage of the event obtained by The Algemeiner revealed.
Some 20 members of the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) were escorted out of the room by armed guards for causing the commotion, which began mere minutes into the event, when one protester yelled, “In 2014, Israel killed more than 500 Palestinian children. The occupation is terrorism.” At this point, he and others – some wearing keffiyehs — dropped photos of dead children at the speakers’ feet.
Neta Kanny — senior adviser of Dawgs for Israel and a StandWithUs Emerson Fellow, who helped organize the hosting of the soldiers, described the atmosphere in the room during the protests as “tense, yet calm.”
“Many of the students in the crowd have attended this event in the past, which has been previously protested, and were expecting some level of disruption,” she told The Algemeiner. “So this year, I ensured we would have security in the room.”
“Our reserve and respect attested to our unity as pro-Israel students at UGA, and that even under such circumstances, we welcome everyone to attend such events in hopes of engaging in discussion,” she said.

Here’s the left’s next great idea for bringing down President Trump: another women’s march. Which means another public instance of Trump haters shouting slogans to one another and mistaking it for constructive politics. What progressives need to defeat Trump is outreach, but all they have is outrage.
On March 8, organizers seem to be aiming for a different vibe than the librarians-in-pussy-hats element that made the first women’s march after Trump’s inauguration so adorable.
Instead of milling around Washington, organizers have in mind a “general strike” called the Day without a Woman. In a manifesto published in The Guardian on Feb. 6, the brains behind the movement are calling for a “new wave of militant feminist struggle.” That’s right: militant, not peaceful.
The document was co-authored by, among others, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a convicted terrorist. Odeh, a Palestinian, was convicted in Israel in 1970 for her part in two terrorist bombings, one of which killed two students while they were shopping for groceries. She spent 10 years in prison for her crimes. She then managed to become a US citizen in 2004 by lying about her past (great detective work, INS: Next time, use Google) but was subsequently convicted, in 2014, of immigration fraud for the falsehoods. However, she won the right to a new trial (set for this spring) by claiming she had been suffering from PTSD at the time she lied on her application. Oh, and in her time as a citizen, she worked for a while as an ObamaCare navigator. (h/t JINO-57)

A pre-school teacher fired this week for encouraging followers to “kill some Jews” on social media prior to her employment expressed great remorse on Thursday.
Nancy Salem told the local Arlington news station CBS11 that she made her “racist and antisemitic” comments when she was a teenager [in 2013 at College], and “are not a reflection of the beliefs I hold today.”
“These statements were made at a time when I was not strong in my faith; nor do they reflect the family values of inclusivity and respect for all faiths that my parents have worked very hard to instill in us,” she said.
The young “often get involved with individuals that influence their behaviors and not always for the better, and I deeply regret having been influenced in such a way,” Salem said, adding that it “does not excuse my actions and I am truly sorry for the pain and hurt my words caused, especially to members of the Jewish faith.”
Citing her Muslim-American and Palestinian heritage, Salem said, “I am all too accustomed to being bullied and the target of hate speech, so the fact that I made such statements is even more offensive, because I should have known and acted with more compassion.” [translation I got caught being a bigot but I'm still going to claim I'm a victim]

Dozens of flyers calling on Ryerson University to fire teaching assistant Ayman Elkasrawy were plastered around campus on Friday (February 24, 2017) before they were taken down by campus security.
In 2016, Elkasrawy, who also serves as an imam at Masjid Toronto mosque which is affiliated with the Muslim Association of Canada, led a Ramadan service at the mosque during which he prayed to Allah to give Muslims victory over the infidels, to slay the enemies of Islam “one by one and spare not one of them”, and to “purify Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews”.
The flyers, which were signed by a group calling itself Ryerson Against Racism, urged Ryerson administration to fire Elkasrawy for making “extremely hateful statements about Jews”.
Following the CIJnews exposé on Masjid Toronto, B’nai Brith Canada – a leading Jewish human rights advocacy organization – contacted Ryerson to demand that swift action be taken against Elkasrawy for anti-Jewish comments he made at the mosque. “There is no place for someone who describes Jews as “filth” as a teaching assistant at a Canadian university, especially when this anti-Semitism is disguised as a pious religious expression”, B’nai Brith’s campus coordinator wrote in a statement.

The veil of secrecy around British band Coldplay and the prospect of them performing in Israel continues, with lead singer Chris Martin denying they are in Israel finalizing concert venues.
Even though some BDS-holes are taking this as some kind of victory, it isn’t.

• Coldplay clearly recognized Israel in their tweet
• While in Israel, they are presumably purchasing Israeli goods and services. Not a boycott.
• In Israel to “listen and learn” is a good thing, and not something BDS-holes generally support, since there is a correlation between depth of knowledge about the conflict and tendency to support Israel

A Guardian/Reuters report (Palestinians in raptures as as Yaqoub Shaheen wins Arab Idol TV contest, Feb. 26th) focuses on a Palestinian from Bethlehem who won this year’s Arab Idol.
Palestinians have taken to the street to celebrate the victory of their compatriot Yaqoub Shaheen in the hugely popular Middle East television talent show Arab Idol.
This year’s final, filmed in Lebanon, was between a Yemeni, Ammar Mohammed, and two Palestinian competitors, Shaheen from Bethlehem and Ameer Dandan.
Here’s the problem: contrary to the Guardian’s suggestion, runner-up Ameer Dandan is actually an Israeli born resident of the US. He’s from Majd al-Krum in the Upper Galilee and is currently a university student in New Jersey.

Jews from Belgium’s Flemish Region said they “lost all confidence” in the country’s anti-racism authority over its lawyer’s defense of a Palestinian-Arab man whom the lawyer helped convict for hate speech over calls to slaughter Jews.
The unusual rebuke Thursday by the Forum of Jewish Organization of Flanders came after the Jewish weekly Joods Actueel published a leaked email written by Johan Otte, a judicial expert of the Interfederal Centre for Equal Opportunities, or UNIA, condemning Tuesday's conviction for incitement to violence by a criminal tribunal in Antwerp. In 2014, the man shouted anti-Semitic slogans during a protest rally in that city.
The Belgian Palestinian, according to the media in Belgium, was given a six-month suspended sentence. Two co-defendants were acquitted.
Otte’s rebuke called the sentence “distorted justice instead of true justice,” even though UNIA was one of two complainants who had initiated the trial. The other party was the Flemish Jewish forum.
“The email clearly illustrates that UNIA’s sympathy lies with the perpetrator over his would-be victims,” the Jewish group wrote in its statement.

Israel’s official Holocaust memorial has asked Amazon to stop selling literature on its site that denies the genocide of 6 million Jews during World War II and otherwise promotes anti-Semitism.
Yad Vashem’s director of libraries Robert Rozett said he has dispatched a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos offering his assistance to “curb the spread of hatred.”
Rozett said Sunday that Yad Vashem has approached Amazon before on the subject but the internet retailing giant insisted it would not halt sales of offensive and inciting material, citing freedom of information. Rozett says he hoped that given the recent spike in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, particularly a vandalism attack on a Jewish cemetery near St. Louis, Amazon would reconsider its position.
He said he has yet to hear back.

A telephone which allegedly was used by Adolf Hitler - sold at auction last week for £195,000 (£243,000) - has been declared a 'definite fake' by an expert.
The bright-red swastika-engraved telephone, upon which the Fuehrer allegedly issued some of his most terrible orders sealing the fate of millions, is bogus, according to Frank Gnegel, head of collections at the Frankfurt Museum of Communications.
He highlights 'oddities' in the phone's construction and quality.
'The actual telephone was manufactured by Siemens & Halske, but the handset comes from an English telephone,' he noted. 'Such phones were never produced this way. It must have been assembled later in England.'

What is this secret weapon? Pentagon officials aren’t saying, but here are some clues.
The U.S. Air Force awarded a mysterious contract to an Israeli firm for equipment to counter small drones like the ones used by Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.
But service officials will not disclose the type of system and whether it uses electronic jamming, conventional missiles, a combination of both, or some other method to down enemy drones.
Here’s what we know: The Air Force awarded ELTA North America Inc. — a U.S. subsidiary of Israeli Aerospace Industries — a $15.6 million contract for “counter-unmanned aerial systems.” The contract announcement specifically references “21 Man Portable Aerial Defense System kits,” which will be delivered by July 28.

Israel-based international humanitarian aid group, iAID, has announced that it will be providing solar panels to a Yazidi refugee camp in northern Iraq to help 330 families access electricity.
“Persecuted Yazidi families living in horrible conditions in remote regions on the mountains of northern Iraq will receive [solar panels] which will be used to help provide lights in over 330 family tents and in bathroom and shower structures so to prevent gender-based violence,” Shachar Zahavi, founder of iAID, said in a statement.
The solar electricity will also help charge mobile phones and other appliances.
Zahavi said iAID’s mission is to “connect innovative solutions, technology and humanitarian aid to communities in need worldwide.”

A 60-year-old Palestinian from Bethlehem who suffered from severe essential tremor (ET) has been discharged from Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center after undergoing a highly unusual brain ablation, rather than major brain surgery. He is now able to return to work at his restaurant.
A few years ago, Rambam was the first hospital in Israel and one of the first in the world to perform the painless procedure; now the hospital has performed the procedure on a Palestinian for the first time. It involves using an MRI-guided ultrasound, developed by the Insightec company at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The technique was introduced in the US only last year, but dozens of the procedures have already been carried out at Rambam, which was a beta site for Insightec’s technology.
The technique, which uses heat ablation on deep-seated brain tissue through an intact skull, was made possible with Israeli technology originally developed to remove myomas, benign fibroid growths in the uterus, but was later applied abroad to ET, which manifests due to a malfunction in the brain. The therapy was made possible by the integration of MRI guidance and the heating of the tissue using focused ultrasound.

Doctors at Western Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya have successfully treated a seven- year-old boy from Ethiopia whose head and face were severely mauled by a wild spotted hyena.
Brought to Israel and treated here for humanitarian reasons, he has recovered and his functional and cosmetic outcome is “acceptable,” the doctors stated.
The unusual case was presented in the latest issue of Israel Medical Association Journal by doctors Ido Lavee, Rojjer Najjar, Patrick Ben-Meir, Eyal Sela, Yanir Kassif and Omri Emodi.
The boy’s head was unrecognizable when he arrived in the hospital, where he was treated in the plastic surgery, otolaryngology, ophthalmology and maxillofacial departments. He had barely survived the attack.
“His face was severely mutilated, and he was hospitalized at the Addis Ababa Medial Center for several months. As a unique humanitarian act, this child was transferred to the plastic surgery department at Galilee Medical Center, with the aid of the Israeli Embassy, a Jewish organization in the US, a local Ethiopian church and an Ethiopian Muslim organization.”

My guess would be that we are extremely popular, thus many advertisements like to hitchhike when the word Israel is mentioned. Your iPhone gets chocked up with the cookies.
Of course, to check my theory, you’d need to write something good about Israel and see if the consequences are the same. Would this reflect badly on your health?

If you send your iPhone to the Mossad for repair, they will fix this problem.

You may be aware that we just held our annual Meeting of the Elders of Zion. One of the issues we were grappling with was people criticizing us. One especially sleazy technology controller came up with a strategy to combat this.
Every time someone criticizes Israel or Jews, we will make their device slow down a bit. Eventually, they will either stop, or their phone will stop for them.
Of course this was with Donald Trump’s approval.

Maybe your phone is tired of you criticizing Israel online. Try to criticize Palestine and see if it goes faster, you never know.

It's because Apple is founded by the Illuminati and the Illuminati’s aim is to establish a Jewish world government so they slow down people’s iPhones so that these people don't mess with the Illuminati’s plan to establish a Jewish world government.
I hope you're now enlightened.

Wrapping the phone in tin foil will solve the problem. Use the same foil that you use to make your hats. 

“Allegations have been circulating in conventional and social media networks about an UNRWA staff member being elected to political office in Gaza,” said UNRWA spokesperson Christopher Gunness in a press statement on Gaza neutrality issue.

“As soon as the allegations came to UNRWA's attention, the Agency undertook a preliminary investigation, including discussing the allegations with the staff member. Based on the due diligence carried out by the Agency to date, UNRWA has neither uncovered nor received evidence to contradict the staff member's denial that he was elected to political office,” the statement read.

UNRWA reported Sohail Al-Hindi as rejecting the news about his name appearing amongst the winning list of the Hamas political bureau in Gaza, saying: "I have no relation whatsoever with the issue".

A United Nations agency said on Sunday it was suspending a Gaza staffer accused of being politically active in the terror group Hamas, which rules the coastal strip.

UNRWA, the UN agency in charge of Palestinian refugees, said the decision had already been taken ahead of an Israeli call earlier Sunday to fire Suhail al-Hindi, head of the agency’s staff union.

“Before that communication, and in light of our ongoing independent internal investigation, we had been presented with substantial information from a number of sources, which led us to take the decision this afternoon to suspend Suhail al Hindi, pending the outcome of our investigation,” UNRWA spokeswoman Chris Gunness wrote.

Secretary-General of International Conference in Support of Palestinian Intifada (Uprising) Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said on Saturday that the issue of Palestine should be kept alive as the major issue of the Islamic world.

Supporting the Palestinian nation and countering aggression of the Zionist Israel will effectively contribute to the security of the entire region, added Amir-Abdollahian.

 He made the remarks in a meeting here with the visiting wife of the Palestinian commander Martyr Qantar, a high-profile Lebanese ... killed by the Zionist regime's airstrike on a residential building in Jaramana near the Syrian capital in 2015.

Qantar’s wife, Zeinab Barjavi is in Tehran as one of the guests of the International Conference on the Palestinian Intifada which was held in the Iranian capital on Feb 21-22.

“Martyr Qantar who spent three decades of his life in the Zionist regime’s prisons is considered a role model for patience, resistance and self-sacrifice,” Amir-Abdollahian said.

A Palestinian woman was convicted on Sunday of assaulting an Israeli legislator during the Knesset member’s November 2014 visit to the Temple Mount.

The indictment from the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court said Sahar Natshe shouted “go away” and “Allahu Akbar” as she pushed Shuli Moalem-Refaeli (Jewish Home), in an attempt to prevent the MK from entering the compound.