The Racism Crisis Center is modeled after the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Alabama. Like the SPLC, IRAC will use litigation to protect the rights of minorities in Israel by elevating the voices of victims of racism and discrimination.

The Racism Crisis Center will provide support in cases of discrimination, hate speech, and hate crimes against minority populations, and collect data on the growing phenomenon of racism in Israel. The center provides support to victims of all backgrounds: Arab, Ethiopian Jews, Russian Jews, Mizrahi Jews, asylum seekers and migrant workers, and provides services in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Amharic and English.

Sudan's minister of investment inspired controversy on Sunday when he called on Khartoum to normalise relations with Israel.

Mubarak al-Fadil al-Mahdi made the comments on national television, while also accusing the Palestinian people of "selling out".

"They sold their land [to Israelis]," he said.

"One can agree with the Israelis or disagree with them, but they have a democratic regime," he added.

According to Mahdi, his words were representative of his contemporaries in the ruling elite. The minister claimed there had been a shift in political opinion with regards to normalising relations with Israel since January.

"The issue was discussed during the Sudan National Dialogue Conference," the minister said, adding that a number of ministers voted to change foreign policy towards Israel.

The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) Wednesday has expressed deep regret over statements by Sudan’s Investment Minister Mubarak al-Fadil al-Mahdi in which he called to normalize Sudan’s relations with Israel.

Mubarak al-Fadil (ASHRAF SHAZLY/AFP/Getty Images)

In a press release on Wednesday, Hamas expressed deep regret over what it described as “proactive and racist remarks” by al-Mahdi, saying his statements are “against the Palestinian people, Hamas and our valiant resistance”.

Hamas pointed out that al-Mahdi’s statements are not in line with the “values, principles and authenticity of the Sudanese people who love Palestine and support the resistance”.

It called on the Sudanese government, people and political parties to denounce these statements which contradict with Sudan’s “honourable stances towards the Palestinian issue and the legitimate rights of our people”.

It is hard to feel sorry for Lebanese-Swede Amanda Hanna, who was stripped ‎of her Miss Lebanon Emigrant 2017 title this week -- some nine days after ‎being crowned in the annual expat beauty pageant -- when it was discovered ‎that she had visited Israel last year as part of an academic tour.‎
Hanna, who expressed her gratitude on Facebook at having won the August 12 ‎finals, was declared unfit to fill the role of best-looking Lebanese expat in a ‎statement released by the organizers of the event, held in Dhour El Choueir. ‎‎"After communicating our decision with Lebanon's minister of tourism," the ‎communique read, "he decided that Hanna should be stripped of her title ‎because her visit to Israel violates our country's laws."‎
Hanna should have known this was going to happen, and not only because ‎Lebanon is the Jewish state's sworn enemy. Indeed, had she done her ‎homework, she would have learned that any contact with Israelis in Lebanon is ‎punishable by imprisonment. She also might have discovered that the movie ‎‎"Wonder Woman" was banned from its theaters because it stars Israeli actress ‎Gal Gadot. A simple Google search, too, would have revealed that Miss ‎Lebanon Saly Greige came under heavy fire two and half years ago for ‎appearing in a selfie with Miss Israel, Doron Matalon, during the Miss ‎Universe pageant in Miami. After Matalon posted the photo (of herself with ‎Miss Slovenia, Miss Japan and Greige) on Instagram, Greige was criticized ‎widely in her country for being a traitor. To defend herself against the ‎accusations, Greige said that she had been taking a photo with Miss Slovenia ‎and Miss Japan, when suddenly "Miss Israel jumped in."‎

Soros put $26.5 million in the Climate Policy Initiative, a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to achieving “low-carbon growth.”
But Soros’ other investments fly in the face of environmental advocates who insist fossil fuels are creating the problem of man-made global warming. Soros, for example, has a $4.4 million stake in Peabody Energy, the largest private sector coal company in the world, which generates 10 percent of U.S. electricity.
He also invested $5.9 million in Key Energy Services, $12.9 million in Plains GP Holdings, and $5.4 million in California Resources, all involved in oil and natural gas extraction.
There are also carbon investments Soros made with Quantum, his “family” investment firm. In 2011, the billionaire removed all outside investors from Quantum and converted it into a family company specifically to avoid reporting requirements under the Dodd-Frank Act, which was passed by the Obama administration.
Quantum invests in San Leon Energy, an oil and natural gas company with two licenses to drill for oil in the Western Sahara, a territory Morocco has occupied since Spain abandoned it as a colony in the 1970s.
A U.N. Security Council legal advisor concluded in 2002 that Morocco had no energy and mineral exploration rights in the Western Sahara and that its extractive ores should be solely “for the benefit of the peoples of those territories, on their behalf or in consultation with their representatives.”
Eugene Kontorovich, an international legal authority, concluded in a Columbia University report, “Morocco’s presence in the territory is in violation of a (1975) Security Council demand for a withdrawal.”
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Erik Hagen, a board member of the Western Sahara Resource Watch, a human rights group in the region, told TheDCNF of his meeting with Quantum executives in which he raised their investment in the Western Sahara. “I’ve been working on investor contact for 16 years, and I’ve never had a more unpleasant investor meeting than with Quantum,” he said.

These land disputes also take on religious significance, just as they do with Jerusalem – where I too have visited on pilgrimage.
Every year, thousands of Indian Sikh pilgrims arrive in Pakistan’s Lahore to participate in religious and cultural rituals marking the birth anniversary of their most important saint, Baba Guru Nanak Dev Jee who was born in what is now Pakistani Lahore.
There, an old Sikh temple still stands next to the Badshahi Mosque, two other sights that are well worth seeing.
Many Sikhs never truly overcame the loss of control over their holy sites, sparking a Khalistan independence movement, and in one case leading to the assassination of India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguard.
And yet, there are no calls to boycott Pakistan by the far-left and their Islamist fellow-travellers.
No fashionable movement exists to shame musicians who choose to perform there, no blockade of speakers at universities and no protests decrying the ‘historic injustices’ of the Punjabis.
The truth is, there is absolutely nothing that can be said of Israel, that cannot be said of Pakistan.
This incessant focus by us Muslims on the state of Israel – even as jihadists burn everything around us – is the perennial ‘whatabout’ excuse used to distract us from considering self-scrutiny and introspection.
It is precisely this lack of internal criticism that is allowing Muslim-majority societies to fall apart at the seams while we insist that everyone else is worse than us.
We Muslims have become the totally self-unaware cry-bully in the school playground.
That child who everyone is scared of upsetting, but no-one really likes.

In April 2017 the social democratic German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel decided to meet with Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem, two Israeli NGOs, while he was visiting Israel. He did so knowing that this would result in the Israeli prime minster refusing to meet with him. Self-confessed Israeli ‘leftist’ Gadi Taub examines the political meaning of ‘the Gabriel Affair’. Why did the prime minister make it a matter of ‘B’Tselem or me’ and was he right to do so? How should Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem be characterised – as legitimate human rights organisations or as demonisers of the State of Israel? And what should be the proper relationship between human rights advocacy and the unresolved national question in Israel and Palestine?
Most Israelis assume – or at least they did until very recently – that Germany is a steadfast friend of Israel. They therefore find it hard to imagine that it would actively support organisations which contribute to the campaign to delegitimise Israel’s right to exist. But all that may have changed after the debacle in April between German Foreign Minister, Sigmar Gabriel, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Gabriel, on the occasion of an official visit for Holocaust Memorial Day, announced that he would meet the representatives of two radical left-wing civil society organisations – Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem. When Netanyahu said that if those meetings went ahead he would boycott the visit and refuse to meet Gabriel, many thought he was overreacting. Few, however, expected Gabriel to choose those two organisations over Israel’s prime minster (and acting foreign minister). And when he did, things began to appear in a new light. It no longer seemed that the German foreign minister made an honest mistake, not knowing how controversial these organisations were among Israelis. It appeared, instead, that he knew exactly what he was doing and that it was us, the Israeli public, who had made a mistake in our assumptions about German-Israeli relations.
Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem are not considered by many Israelis to be honest human rights watchdogs. Rather, many suspect that they abuse the issue of human rights in the service of a worldwide campaign to demonise Israel. That a German minister would insist on lending support to those who are considered by many to be part of the campaign to deny the right of Jews to self-determination was so bewildering that it took a while to register. And when it did, Netanyahu found support for his unusual move even from people far beyond his constituency. Many suspected that the minister went to visit those specific organisations not despite the fact that they are so useful to those who demonise us, but precisely because of that fact. And this suspicion seemed to gain validity as the affair progressed.

In the late 1920s, a Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin began developing the idea that international law ought to criminalize attempts to slaughter en masse members of a particular people. He formulated the term “genocide” in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, and his tireless postwar efforts led to the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. While Lemkin has been the subject of numerous biographies and studies—and was made into something of a hero by Washington’s former UN ambassador Samantha Power—these have uniformly failed to note Lemkin’s enthusiastic involvement in the Zionist movement, depicting him instead either as a cosmopolitan without national loyalties or as having been influenced by such non-Zionist Jewish movements as the Bund. Now James Loeffler explains how Lemkin’s Zionism contributed to his ideas about genocide—and how Lemkin himself participated in covering up this part of his past:
Because their political horizon extended beyond Europe into the global sphere, [many pre-World War II] Zionists turned to international law in search of a middle way that combined [advocating for Jewish rights in both] Palestine and Eastern Europe, nationalism and internationalism, Jewish particularity and cultural pluralism into a vision of international law. . . . [B]y recognizing the Jewish people as a rights-bearing collective, [these] Zionist internationalists argued, international law could help tie together the global Jewish Diaspora into a coherent, legally recognized nation. . . .
[But why] would the man who invented the concept of genocide [based on] his Jewish past deliberately hide the political sources of his legal imagination? The answer is that Lemkin well understood that Zionist advocacy for international law risked accusations of politicization. He had already encountered Polish anti-Semitism, with its ideological fixation on Zionism as an anti-Polish conspiracy. . . .
It was not only Jewish-Polish relations in Eastern Europe but also Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine that followed Lemkin into the UN. . . . Desperate for Arab and Muslim votes, Lemkin evidently feared the politicization that would come if he or his law were publicly identified with Zionism. The disavowal of his past politics formed part of a larger attempt to dodge charges of Jewish nationalist politics that might imperil his project. . . .

A series where I bring to you news from the archives and historical documents to debunk common misconceptions about the Middle East conflict.
On May 19, 1957, James A Pike, a self-confessed non-Zionist, wrote a piece in the New York Times describing the palestinian refugee issue and possible solutions. It is a revealing and important read, given it acknowledges the situation is not as the haters claim (that Israel expelled the palestinian Arabs).
Note in particular:

• The quoted number of refugees – way less than UNRWA’s number of 5 million that is based on a definition including descendants
• The reasons for the Arabs fleeing Israel – including threats by their fellow Arabs, and hopes they could return after Israel was vanquished
• Those who were scared of Israel based it on the actions of Jewish fighters not acting in an official capacity, who acted partly due to fear of a fifth column
• The Arabs who stayed in Israel fared well
• Arab opposition to resettlement of the refugees and the use of the refugees as political pawns
• An acknowledgement that Israel could not take in the refugees, given our size and the fact they would be a fifth column
• The instability refugees caused Jordan
• Israel’s efforts in resettling 400,00 Jews from Arab lands

The Islamist attacks against Spain, Finland and Germany unmasked the central problem: Pacifism will not protect Europe from either Islamization or terror attacks. Spain and Germany were, in fact, among the most reluctant countries in Europe to take an active role in the anti-ISIS coalition.
The Spanish press did not participate in a discussion of the Mohammed cartoons; no Spanish writer was accused of "Islamophobia" and no Spanish personality was put under police protection for "criticizing Islam". It seemed as if Spain were not even interested in what was at stake in Islamist attacks on Europe's very existence. No Spanish city made headlines for having multicultural ghettos, as in France and Britain. The attack in Barcelona should have ended this illusion. Terrorists do not need an excuse to butcher "infidels".
The sad conclusion seems to be that that jihadists do not need a "reason" to kill Westerners. They attack equally France, which conducts military operations in the Middle East and North Africa, and countries such as Spain and Germany, which are neutral.

The Barcelona and Cambrils attacks are the most serious terrorist attacks in Spain since the March 11, 2004 bombing of trains in the Atocha railway station in Madrid, in which 198 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded. It should be stressed that since then, Spanish police and security services have been very efficient in foiling dozens of planned terrorist attacks and arresting hundreds of Islamist and jihadi terrorists.
Spanish police warned about a year ago that internal channels used by jihadists had intensified the dissemination of videos with tutorials that explained step by step how to use vehicles loaded with butane gas bottles to cause the greatest possible damage. On June 24, 2017, for instance, ISIS’s Nasher News Agency published posters calling for stabbings and vehicular attacks.
Before the Barcelona attacks, 51 suspected jihadists had already been detained in Spain this year, while 69 were detained last year and 75 were detained in 2015, according to El Pais.
The Catalan cell was most probably a local one, based on family (four pairs of brothers), personal and neighborhood relations. At least two members had petty criminal records. They were under the influence of the older imam, living in the small, almost secluded environment of an immigrant community in a small provincial town.
It seems they didn’t have serious previous training, which explains the “work accident” with explosives. More interestingly they apparently didn’t access to firearms.
The important points in the investigation now will be to track the visits to Morocco by Imam Es Satty and Moussa Oukabir and possible links to jihadists in Belgium and in France. It is well known that some 2,500 Moroccans have fought in Syria and Iraq; many have returned and many if not most of the jihadists involved in terrorist plots on Spanish soil were of Moroccan origin.

Dutch police investigating a terror threat that prompted the cancellation of a concert by an American rock band in Rotterdam arrested a 22-year-old man in the early hours of Thursday.
Spokesman Roland Ekkers told The Associated Press the man was detained by a team in the province of Brabant, a sprawling region south of Rotterdam. The exact location of the man’s detention was not immediately released.
“He is in custody and will be questioned about the threat in Rotterdam,” police said in a statement, adding that they conducted a thorough search of his home. Dutch police do not generally release identities or other details of suspects in criminal investigations.
Meanwhile, police said the driver of a Spain-registered white van carrying a number of gas canisters that was stopped Wednesday night close to the Maassilo concert venue — where the band Allah-Las had been due to perform — is unlikely to be a suspect in the threat probe.
In a statement, police said the man was possibly drunk and will be questioned later Thursday.
Explosives experts checked his van and found nothing suspicious beyond the gas canisters, according to the police statement.

Mayor of Venice Luigi Brugnaro has caused controversy after releasing a statement saying that anyone who shouts “Allahu Akbar” in the city’s most famous tourist area can expect to be shot.
The Venice mayor made the statement Wednesday after calling for more security and better precautions to prevent terrorist attacks in the northern Italian city which sees millions of visitors per year.
Mayor Brugnaro pulled no punches saying: “We have to fight terrorism in Italy and raise the security precautions here.”
He added: “If someone runs in the square and shouts ‘Allahu Akbar,’ he will be immediately shot,” Die Presse reports.
“If you want to kill me, I will defend myself and in Venice we defend ourselves,” Brugnaro said.
He then noted that police in the city had already foiled a terror plot in March when they discovered that three Islamic extremists were planning to indiscriminately attack locals and tourists at the famous Rialto bridge by blowing it up.

European Union officials hoping to demonstrate to the United Kingdom the folly of its decision to leave the Union plan to drive home the point by dispatching terrorists to attack major British cities, aides to the officials disclosed today.
Senior EU officeholders adopted a proposal today to train Muslim immigrants to Europe in the use of firearms, explosives, and chemical weapons, for purposes of sending the trainees to Britain to commit acts of political violence as a demonstration to London that the referendum last year to pursue departure from the Continental union was ill-advised, and compromises British security.
At an informal meeting of aides and journalists, the aides to European Union officials detailed some of the plans for the operations, but declined to specify numbers or scheduling, citing security concerns. They chose terrorism specifically, they stressed, to highlight the argument that Britain would suffer from a loss of security coordination with other members of the EU upon her departure from it.
“Britain boasts one of the world’s most advanced and capable intelligence apparatuses,” acknowledged an aide to European Council President Donald Tusk who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Mere assertion that leaving the EU would hurt Britain’s security in terms of terrorist activity because of the loss of security coordination with the EU proved insufficient to convince them otherwise, and understandably so – the EU depends on British intelligence more than Britain depends on EU intelligence gathering. So the only way to prove them wrong would be to conduct actual terrorist operations in Britain directly related to Brexit. That is what we will do.”

Haim Saban — the Israeli-American media mogul who backed Hillary Clinton in the presidential election — has come to the defense of President Donald Trump, saying “he’s not an anti-Semite.”
“I disagree with the president with what appears to be a moral equivalence being drawn between the Nazis, who are shouting, ‘Kill the Jews,’ and the protesters who came to counter that statement,” the billionaire Univision chairman told The Hollywood Reporter, referencing Trump’s remarks in which he condemned the neo-Nazis and white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“I do not believe that President Trump is a Nazi or anti-Semite,” said Saban, a Democratic party mega-donor who has slammed former President Obama’s “biased” action on Israel and who has reportedly called Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) an “anti-Semite and anti-Israel individual.”
After defending President Trump, Saban said Black Lives Matter “is clearly an anti-Semitic, anti-Israel group,” noting the organization’s official policy platform — crafted by more than 50 organizations, known as the Movement for Black Lives — calls Israel “an apartheid state” responsible for “genocide.”
Saban was one of the biggest Hollywood contributors to Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid, having donated at least $10 million in total both to Clinton directly and through various Democratic fundraising groups.

Amid reports by German journalists stating that their nation's media has become a "government outlet which suppresses critical views", German media's open dislike for US President Donald Trump has reached a new level of invective, with the Stern weekly explicitly comparing the US President to Adolf Hitler in a photo-montage published on yesterday's cover portraying Trump enwrapped in a US flag while brandishing a Nazi salute. The headline is a play on words turning Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to "Sein Kampf" - His Struggle.
The lead article refers to President Trump's alleged ties with the neo-Nazi right in the United States following the events in Charlottesville. The subtitle reads, "Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, Racism - How Trump spreads hatred in the United States."
The German weekly's cover has already aroused strong criticism, especially among American conservatives. In social networks, too, criticism of the "pointlessness" of the title page and the trivialization of Hitler's crimes is excoriated: "Can you not criticize Trump without comparing him to Hitler?" And "Who is spreading hatred here?" are representative of responses by German journalists and various other organizations.

The Nazi punching debate (is it OK to punch a Nazi?) went viral in January after a liberal protester slugged white supremacist Richard Spencer in the face during President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It was reignited this month following brawls between far-right nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, and counterprotesters, including some associated with the combative Antifa movement.
Although most eyewitness accounts of the events in Charlottesville pin much of the blame for the violence on the far-right marchers, and a counterprotester was killed by a car driven by a suspected white supremacist, critics like attorney Alan Dershowitz disapproved of the “anti-fascists” who showed up at the rallies.
“They use violence, and just because they’re opposed to fascism and to some of these [Confederate] monuments shouldn’t make them heroes of the liberals,” he said on “Fox & Friends.”
But whether it’s OK to confront hatred with violence is not a new topic of conversation. The question was debated in the 1930s among American Jews, who were faced with both the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Nazi sympathizers at home.
One hotbed for the debate was Newark, New Jersey, home to a large German-American population and a fair share of supporters of the Nazi cause. Though only around 5 percent of the city’s German-American population of some 45,000 sympathized with the Nazis, they made it known, said Warren Grover, a historian and the author of the 2003 book “Nazis in Newark.”
Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Jews in Newark saw Nazi-sympathizers marching down their city’s streets.

And in both Prague and Berlin, and throughout Europe, there are Stolpersteine (literally “stumbling stones”), little blocks of brass embedded in the cobblestones in front of the former homes of Holocaust victims. The creation of German artist Gunter Demnig, who installs them all himself, Stolpersteine are in sidewalks in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and Ukraine. As of April 2017, there were over 61,000 of them in about 1,200 places. Tablet’s writer who hated the Memorial to the Murdered Jews loved the Stolpersteine for their specificity … but again, not everyone appreciates them. A couple in Amsterdam issued numerous legal challenges to get one removed from in front of their house. (At various times they said it reminded them of a previous resident’s murder in an uncomfortable way, drew crowds that compromised their privacy, “compromised the atmosphere” of their expensive neighborhood, lowered property values, and reminded them of their dead child.) Munich has no Stolpersteine at all because the leader of the local Jewish community there feels that allowing people to walk on the names of the murdered is a further insult to them. Stolpersteine, like all other monuments to Jews, have been defaced with scratches, black paint, and reminders of the neo-Nazi “14 words.” And again, there are people who simply don’t know what they are. Unlike the Monument to the Murdered Jews, they’re a cinch to step over without seeing. A Times of Israel writer noted in an investigation last week that while most residents of a Salzburg neighborhood knew what the Stolpersteine were, three dozen tourists surveyed did not. Most didn’t see them at all.
I love the Stolpersteine. They remind me of my beloved CHALK, the more recent initiative to write the names and ages of victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in chalk in front of the places they used to live, along with the date of their death: March 25, 1911. The power of CHALK is in both its impermanence (the chalk washes away) and its permanence (we do this every year), forcing us to remember anew. It’s specific in its tribute to these (mostly young, mostly female, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrant) victims, but sweeping in its demand that we not become complacent about memory, activism, immigration protections, workplace safety, and labor rights.
Not every memorial works for everyone. We respond to art, discomfort, and demands for action differently. We grieve differently. That’s why we need the Topography of Terrors, the Memorials to the Murdered Jews, the Stolpersteine. There is no right way to mourn or feel.
What we don’t need are monuments to hate. Statues of Confederate leaders and Judensau (traditional sculptures common in medieval European cities that show Jews sucking the nipples of pigs, having sex with pigs, and eating the shit of pigs) belong in museums, but not in town squares or on public buildings. It’s wrong to erase our shameful history … but it’s wrong to celebrate it, too.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I am all for a good statue removal, whether under the blazing sun or, as in Baltimore and Austin, under cover of darkness. I have always wondered why those of us in Union states have so long colluded in the pretense that Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other secessionists were heroes, rather than what they obviously were: traitors. And I am down with a sensible renaming, too: John C. Calhoun was a bad man, and there is no reason that, having made a mistake, a school like Yale shouldn’t correct it. There’s no statute of limitations on coming to one’s senses.
But when it comes to the recent, boneheaded call for New York City to remove all memorials to Peter Stuyvesant, the 17th-century Dutch leader of the New Amsterdam colony, I have to draw the line. Of course, Shurat HaDin, the Israeli legal organization that is winning some nice press coverage by pushing this absurd line, is right to point out that Stuyvesant was an anti-Semite: he didn’t want Jews to settle on Manhattan island, and he slapped them with a special Jew-tax. He also wasn’t so nice to the Indians. A bad dude, we can agree.
But is that any reason to take down the statue in Stuyvesant Park? Or to rename the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant—about which Big Daddy Kane rapped, about which Billy Joel sang? What about Stuyvesant Town, the East Side housing complex whose residential dramatis personae has included David Brooks and David Axelrod, Robert Siegel and Paul Reiser and Frank McCourt and Mary Higgins Clark and Howard Cosell? Will it be renamed De Blasio Mews? Or, as the Israeli right-wingers behind this fringe effort might have it, Jabotinsky Towers?
Whether in Stuyvesant Park, Bed-Stuy, or Stuy Town, New Yorkers have made the old hoary anti-Semite’s name their own. Peter Stuyvesant doesn’t own it anymore. New Yorkers do. And, I would argue, some non-New Yorkers too. I’m thinking about my children, whose great-grandfather, grandfather, and mother were all educated at the Stuy-viest of all the Stuy-named places, Stuyvesant High School. Here’s an institution, this elite public school, that has educated Jew after Jew after Jew: not just Dick Morris but David Axelrod, not just director Joe Mankiewicz but economist Robert Fogel. And Gary Shteyngart and Ron Silver and super-agent Bernie Brillstein and sports-book fixer Jack Molinas. I could go on. Okay, I will: convicted spy Morton Sobell.

Because 2017 continues to be a year of Rod Serling-esque weirdness, the latest group in the ongoing battle of the left and the alt-right in America are the Juggalos.
If you are unfamiliar with the Juggalos (or Jugalettes, for women), they are devotees of a hip-hop group known as Insane Clown Posse, comprised of white men who paint their faces to look like mildly scary clowns and bear monikers like Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. ICP is so important to its fans that true believers have formed a subculture; there are Juggalo gatherings, fashions, rituals, etc. Juggalos don’t have a great reputation; their music of choice is mocked in the mainstream, and their deliberately crass behavior, coupled with the prevalence of Juggalos coming from poor, uneducated backgrounds means that they’re often the subject of derision. The FBI even categorized them as a violent gang.
But now, the Juggalos’ time for redemption has come. The group, led by the band members, have decried the recent events in Charlottesville and throughout the U.S., and in response to their ongoing struggle with the FBI, determined to march on Washington— the same day as the Donald Trump rally.
Reports have pointed out that for all of ICP’s flaw, the signs of their anti-Fascism were already there. Despite the performers and most of the fans being white, they’ve burned a confederate flag onstage, they decry racism in their lyrics, etc. But there’s one other important detail to their unlikely rise as heroes.
One of the most sacred events at ICP concerts is a sort of communion known as the “Faygo Shower.” Basically, band members spray members of the audience with soda.
But not just any soda. Faygo is a soda brand local to Detroit, where ICP originated— they even reference the soft drink in their lyrics. And so, as part of their devotion to Juggalo life, fans drink the stuff by the bucketful. Faygo tries to keep a healthy distance from Juggalos, but the company certainly benefited from the face-painted consumers.
ICP has helped a company thrive, a company started by Jewish immigrants.

The City University of New York (CUNY) system has awarded one of its top faculty honors to a leading proponent of the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.
Beth Baron, co-founder and director of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, has been named a "Distinguished Professor" of City College of New York (CCNY).
According to the nomination guidelines, the title is an "honor … granted solely in recognition of the quality and impact of a nominee's scholarship." The CUNY Board of Trustees bestow the title, which comes with a nearly $30,000 salary increase, on "exceptional individuals" when attempting to "recruit or retain outstanding faculty." Currently, 152 faculty hold the distinction.
Baron—president of the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA), the largest professional organization for academics studying the region—promised her personal support in 2014 for the BDS movement, signing a "pledge not to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli academic institutions, not to teach at or to attend conferences and other events at such institutions, and not to publish in academic journals based in Israel."
Under Baron, MESA has issued dozens of letters to Israeli and North American officials protesting anti-BDS legislation; taking issue with the definition of anti-Semitism that includes demonizing, delegitimizing, or holding Israel to a double standard; and arguing against administrative investigations into anti-Israel student groups who have been accused of violating disciplinary codes or anti-Semitic behavior.
Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, said that, under Baron, MESA has "set the groundwork to pass a boycott of Israel at their national conference in November."

Students at a prestigious independent school in Atlanta are reaching the end of a hot summer embroiled in a controversy around Mein Kampf — the rambling political manifesto and memoir composed by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler from his cell in Germany’s Landsberg prison in 1924.
Hitler’s book was among those selected by students at the Galloway School for their summer book club reading, as part of their efforts — as senior staff at the school told The Algemeiner — to understand the Holocaust, as well as the wider question of how modern political leaders present their ideas.
But earlier this month, leading Jewish bloggers reported that the summer book club’s website was hosting a summary publisher’s blurb of Mein Kampf that described Hitler’s worldview as “an interesting interpretation of politics, people, and foreign policy matters.”
The description – which was removed from the site once school staff were alerted to its content – also claimed that “Mein Kampf is often portrayed as nothing more than an Anti-Semitic (sic) work, however only 6% of it even talks about the Jews. The rest contains Hitler’s ideas and beliefs for a greater nation plus his plan on how to accomplish that goal.” Later on, it added, “Germany did not follow Hitler because he was a racist, they followed him because he promised a great future, and Mein Kampf is where he promised that great future.”

If there was any remaining doubt that the New York Times is biased specifically against traditional Judaism and not merely against all religions, the Times’ latest outrage — an adoring profile of an Anglican priest and writer of operas named Alice Goodman — ought to extinguish it.
The Times article begins on the front of the paper’s arts section, accompanied by a large color photograph of Goodman in Christian clerical garb. It jumps inside the section, where it occupies more than the top half of a full page and is accompanied by another three photographs. When was the last time a rabbi got such adoring or extensive treatment from the Times?
The article reports that Goodman “seemed to vanish from the scene after her subsequent collaboration with Mr. Adams and Mr. Sellars, the still-controversial ‘Death of Klinghoffer.’ Raised Jewish, she converted to Christianity in 1989 and in 2001 was ordained an Anglican priest in England.”
Why is the “Death of Klinghoffer” “controversial”? The Times further explains:
In 1991, the “Nixon” team created “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which addressed the real-life hijacking of a cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists and their murder of a Jewish-American passenger in a wheelchair. Much of the action is stylized, but the opera has been dogged since its premiere by accusations that it is problematic, and even anti-Semitic, in its attempt to depict the deep historical roots of the terrorists’ anger.

Last year the BBC launched a project called ‘BBC Teach’ which it describes as follows:
“With the increased use of the internet in classrooms, teachers now have unprecedented access to a whole range of resources to help with delivering the curriculum. While there is plenty of content available to access, teachers come to the BBC because we are a trusted brand and recognised provider of quality teaching resources. We wish to build on our reputation with BBC Teach, a new and exciting platform for schools and teachers.
BBC Teach aims to support teachers by curating the best of BBC videos, clips and other curriculum-related resources for use in the classroom. The BBC Teach brand is a dedicated teaching resource site hosted on YouTube.”
Along with lots of other material, the BBC Teach website currently offers a new series titled “A to Z of Religions and Beliefs” that is described as “an animated A to Z guide exploring and introducing a variety of religious topics for students aged 11 – 14”.
One would of course expect material touted as “quality teaching resources” produced by a self-described “trusted brand” to take particular care to be accurate and impartial and to refrain from propagating archaic religious stereotypes. That, however, is not the case in all the videos in that series.
In the video titled “J is for Jesus“, the target audience of 11 to 14 year-olds is told that the Jews:
“…turned against him [Jesus] and had him executed by the Romans; nailed to a cross.”
The video titled “T is for Temples” tells viewers that:
“Centuries later the Jewish people were able to rebuild, only to have the Second Temple destroyed by the Roman as punishment for a rebellion. But a small part – the Western Wall – still stands and it is the most sacred place for Jewish people.”
The Western Wall is of course not a “part” of the Second Temple but a section of the retaining wall of the plaza on which the Temple stood. Neither is it “the most sacred place for Jewish people”: that title belongs to Temple Mount.

A student from a private high school was expelled and four others suspended after a photo was posted on social media showing them playing a game of “Jews vs. Nazis” beer pong.
The student who hosted the party earlier this month was suspended and will be able to reapply to the school.
The students are seniors at The Lovett School. Two other students who were watching the game but not playing were banned from extracurricular activities during the first two weeks of the new school year, the daily Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Some 19 current seniors at the Lovett school, three alumni and 10 other students and graduates attended the party. Some of the students at the party, where beer was served and was part of the game, were minors.

Retired insurance professional Robert Blum, now 91, was a 14-year-old high school student in the Algerian capital Algiers in the early 1940s when he was expelled from his school for being Jewish.
Algeria, under the control of Vichy France at the time, was introducing a series of anti-Semitic laws which stripped Jews of their French citizenship, barred Jewish children from public schools, and prevented Jewish doctors, lawyers, pharmacists and other professionals from working in their trades.
Now the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also known as the Claims Conference, is making the case to the German government that it should compensate Jews who were in Algeria at the time of the Shoah.
“It was obviously not like the camps in Poland, but it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t persecution — and on that basis we believe that people are entitled to compensation,” said Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Claims Conference.
There were approximately 130,000 Jews in Algeria during World War II, and it is estimated that about 25,000 of them are still living — mostly in France, Schneider said.
As far as Blum remembers, being kicked out of the government school wasn’t so bad — he just had to go to a different school nearby, where all the students and teachers were Jewish. The Jewish school was not far from the French school, so he could still spend time with his old schoolmates.

A Jewish cemetery in western Ukraine was vandalized, with some 20 headstones toppled or smashed, the Chabad Hasidic group said Wednesday.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Wilhelm, the Chabad rabbi of Uzhgorod, called on Ukrainian authorities to investigate the vandalism in the city of Svaliava, which he said has been ignored.
Wilhelm also called on Ukrainian Jewish leaders to further push Ukrainian officials to combat anti-Semitism in the country.
Twenty percent of Svaliava’s population was Jewish heading into World War II, but the entire Jewish population was rounded up during the war by Hungarian troops and sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
The cemetery and the building of a former synagogue are all that remains of the Jewish presence in the city, according to Chabad.

To help bridge the linguistic divide between jargon-spouting scientists and people outside their field, Israeli researchers have developed a web translator that will go through their writing, flag esoteric words and terms, and suggest more common replacements.
With the help of the “De-Jargonizer,” developed by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and HIT–Holon Institute of Technology, a “myocardial infarction” becomes a “heart attack,” “aspirate” becomes “breathe,” “thoracic cavity” becomes “chest,” and so on.
The De-Jargonizer is based on deep scientific studies that analyzing some 5,000 scientific papers for word usage based on a corpus of over 90 million words published on the BBC’s website in 2012–2015 (American spellings for the same words, like colours/colors, were added to the corpus). Words were classified based on their frequency of usage – rated for high-, mid-, and low-level frequency of usage, with the latter classified as jargon.
Words were also divided into families (words with the same roots), compared for frequency of use (“basis,” for example, was found to be commonly used, but “basely” a low-frequency usage word). Words in the same family – with similar meanings, but different usage frequencies – that were high-frequency were used to replace low-frequency words where possible. When text is uploaded or pasted into the De-Jargonizer, the algorithm color-codes words in the text as either frequent (black text), intermediate-level general vocabulary (orange), or jargon (red).

Yosef ben Levy Ha-Ivri was a Spanish Jew who converted to Catholicism in 1492, just before Ferdinand and Isabella’s decree banishing Jews from the country went into effect. Shortly thereafter—now using the name Luis de Torres—he joined Christopher Columbus on his voyage across the Atlantic; legend has it that Columbus thought de Torres’s knowledge of Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages might be helpful in communicating with the natives. Less than a year after their arrival, de Torres died on the island of Cuba, the first known Jewish resident of the New World.
Over the centuries, several waves of Jewish immigrants came to the island: first conversos, later American Jews, then Sephardim from Turkey, and finally Ashkenazim fleeing the Holocaust. Although Fidel Castro encouraged rumors that he was a descendant of conversos, his official treatment of Jews told a different story, as Irene Shaland explains in her brief history of Jewish life in Cuba:
Unlike the Soviet Union [after World War II], Castro’s domestic policies tended not to be anti-Semitic. The gravest threat to all Cubans, including Cuban Jews, was the revolutionary implementation of socialism—“Socialism or Death” as Castro and his comrade Che Guevara termed it—that entirely destroyed the Cuban economy. Entrepreneurs and the middle class were wiped out, which of course meant that many Jews lost everything.
All Cubans who fled the catastrophe being inflicted on their country were declared traitors and enemies of the revolutionary state. Out of nearly 15,000 Jews, fewer than 1,000 remained. Those thought to be religious activists were sent to labor camps created specifically for religious people, gays, exit applicants, and political dissidents. The new constitution stated that any religion was illegal as a manifestation of counter-revolutionary attitudes and actions. Most synagogues and Jewish schools were closed or abandoned, and as the totalitarian state asserted itself, the Jews had to . . . assimilate and adapt. They were not Jews anymore, but Cuban citizens and comrades.
And like the rest of the Cubans, they had to get used to poverty and rations, revolutionary atheism, and fear of political persecution. They also had to face ferocious anti-Israel propaganda, including anti-Semitic cartoons in state-controlled media, especially after Castro broke off diplomatic relations with Israel in 1973. . . .

Three Israelis -- Teddy Sagi, Gil Shwed and Adam Neumann -- feature prominently on Forbes magazine's third annual list of 100 richest high-tech billionaires in the world for 2017.
Teddy Sagi, the founder and owner of gambling software developer Playtech, is the richest Israeli on the list in 69th place. Sagi has an estimated net worth of $3.6 billion.
He founded Playtech in 1999 and has built it into a nearly $700 million operation. Sagi sold a 12% slice of Playtech for almost $400 million in 2016; he still owns about 21% of the company. He is currently ranked 630th on Forbes' list of wealthiest billionaires.
Shwed, the founder of cybersecurity software giant Check Point, is 85th on the tech list ,with an estimated net worth of $2.9 billion. Shwed, considered the inventor of the modern firewall, founded Check Point in 1993 with Shlomo Kramer and Marius Nacht.
He ranks 717th on Forbes' list of wealthiest billionaires.
Neumann, who cofounded and serves as the CEO of communal work space giant WeWork, has an estimated net worth of $2.6 billion and is 93rd on the tech list.
WeWork, founded in 2010, rents out offices in over 40 cities around the world, providing perks like arcade rooms and beer kegs.
Neumann is number 814 on Forbes' list of wealthiest billionaires.

Some 150 leaders from the Chicago-area Jewish community gathered on Sunday, Aug. 20, at the North Shore home of Cindy and Izzy Levyfor the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) Central Region Summer Benefit, raising a record $7.5 million to support education and well-being programs for Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.
The exclusive afternoon event featured special guest speaker IDF Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Avi Mizrachi, who commanded Israel’s ground forces and technology and logistics branch and now works for a top Israeli defense electronics contractor.
Also speaking at the event were Sgt. 1st Class (Res.) Barak, Staff Sgt. (Res.) Avishay, and Staff Sgt. (Res.) Idan, who are all IDF combat veterans of modest means whose college educations are sponsored through FIDF’s IMPACT! Scholarship Program.
“I wanted to give a special thanks to all who support FIDF’s IMPACT! Program,” said Izzy Levy. “These veterans don’t have the means to pursue higher education. They find it incredible that all of you here today, despite being thousands of miles across the ocean, will support them and help provide for their futures, and the future of Israel.”
“It is so important for Israeli soldiers to know that they have people like you who love them, and care about their well-being,” said FIDF National Director and CEO Maj. Gen. (Res.) Meir Klifi-Amir. “I can’t tell you how much it boosts their morale to know that they will be able to pursue education thanks to you – or to see the names of FIDF supporters on construction projects for well-being and recreation centers on their bases across Israel. It really means the world to them.”

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were not planned and directed from Afghanistan, as US President Donald Trump has claimed; rather, they were orchestrated by certain elements in Washington, DC and Tel Aviv, says Dr. Kevin Barrett, an American academic who has been studying the events of 9/11 since late 2003.
“[The] Zionist coup d'etat of 9/11 was done by the combination of Israelis and neo-conservative Americans along with hard-line right-wingers in the American military and the intelligence establishment who pulled off this coup d'etat in America,” Dr. Barrett said.
...Now Donald Trump, who has expressed skepticism about [9/11] in the past, and who drove (Jeb) Bush out of the presidential nomination by attacking (George W.) Bush, his brother, as the likely culprit or at least someone who is responsible for 9/11—now Trump who we all hoped might be an ‘irresponsible’ truth teller, that is, someone who would tell the incredibly subversive truth about what has really happened to America since the false flag attack of September 11th—all those hopes are now dashed,” he noted.
Dr. Barrett said now “Trump is clearly under the control of the elements of the Deep State that murdered three thousand Americans in an act of high treason on September 11, 2001.”

Left-wing Jewish group J Street attacked the Trump administration on Thursday for refusing to endorse a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In a statement sent by email, with the headline "Trump Admin becoming Obstacle to Middle East Peace," the group's president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, said that by taking up such a stance, the administration was hurting its own efforts to reach peace.
Ben-Ami's statement came after a spokeswoman for the State Department, Heather Nauert, said on Wednesday that the administration is not endorsing any specific formulas for ending the conflict, because that could create "bias towards one side or the other." Nauert was responding to a question about the two-state solution during her daily press briefing.
The State Department's spokeswoman "displayed dangerous ignorance about the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what it will take to end it," Ben-Ami said.
He added that, "The Trump administration has spoken often of its desire to broker a comprehensive and transformative peace agreement in the Middle East. Early steps taken by the special envoy and others suggested a real interest in constructing a viable approach to achieving that objective. But there is no way to accomplish that goal without a two-state solution."

"We very much appreciate the efforts of President Trump, who announced from the beginning that he will work to reach a historic peace deal and has repeated this more than once during the meetings we held in Washington, Riyadh and Bethlehem," Abbas said before his meeting with Kushner.
"I want to stress that the American delegations is working for peace and we will work with them to reach what Trump calls a peace deal. We know things are hard and complicated, but nothing is impossible if you put in an honest effort," he said.

[

Matthew] Heimbach, a 26-year-old Indiana resident, is an emerging leader of the white nationalist movement in the United States. He has appeared with and supported the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Terror Network and a variety of Nazi organizations, according to news articles and reports from the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Heimbach was involved in the planning for a 2013 Nazi rally in Kansas City to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht occurred on the night of Nov. 9, 1938, when paramilitary civilians associated with the Nazi Party rampaged through German streets, destroying and ransacking Jewish homes, synagogues, schools and businesses.

In 2014, Heimbach was a keynote speaker at Stormfront’s “Death to America” meeting in the Smoky Mountains. In that speech, Heimbach repeated tired old theories about a Jewish control of the federal government and international banking. But he went even further, arguing that the United States was created as part of Jewish/Freemason conspiracy.

Heimbach also allied his group with the Aryan National Alliance. At a joint meeting in Salem, Ohio, Heimbach said, “We must support the creation of an ethno-state.”

In 2014 he said: “When the Jews are strong, the Jewish people engage their supposed foes with cold-blooded cruelty. This is why we must understand a unity between those who struggle against the Zionist State and International Jewry here in the West and those on the streets of Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon. We face the exact same enemy, one who doesn’t care if they kill our women, children, and elderly. We are facing a truly Satanic enemy, one that cannot be understood except through the lens of Christianity and Christian prophecy.”

In November 2015, the European Union issued guidelines for labeling products made on land Europe considers occupied by Israel. This included products made in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Israel, naturally, claimed that the move was discriminatory and denounced it as a political move aimed at pressuring the country into making concessions to the Palestinian Authority. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the decision “hypocritical and a double standard.”
A few months later, I happened to meet the European Union’s Ambassador to Israel Lars Faaborg-Andersen and asked him a simple question. Let’s assume, I said, that labeling products in the West Bank and east Jerusalem is understandable. Those are territories in dispute between Israel and the Palestinians and their status will need to wait to be resolved in a comprehensive peace agreement between the sides.
“But what about the Golan,” I asked. “Who exactly does the EU want Israel to give it back to?” My question referred to the ongoing civil war in Syria, which erupted in 2011 and has seen the rise of ISIS, and al-Qaida as well as the entrance of Iran and Hezbollah into the country, now the focus of Netanyahu’s most recent diplomatic efforts. I did not receive an answer but the question lingers still today as just one example of how Europe lacks a clear understanding of the Middle East.
I mention this story since on Tuesday, in a final briefing to the press before leaving the country after four years as the EU envoy, Faaborg-Andersen said that Israel can learn from Europe how to effectively combat terrorism.
“Fighting terrorism,” he said, “is an endeavor that requires the whole tool box of instruments.” One of those tools, he went on to explain, is a “strong security dimension,” which Israel uses effectively. But, he added, there are other aspects involved as well, including “de-radicalization,” working with social services, and education.
Now that is an interesting idea considering how many of the terrorist attacks perpetrated in Europe are carried out by citizens, some born and bred in their respective countries. In Israel, a small percentage of the attacks - like the recent one at the Temple Mount - are carried out by Israeli Arabs. Most are perpetrated by Palestinians.
Looking at the numbers this is an even stranger idea. According to EUROPOL, the EU agency for law enforcement cooperation, 142 people were killed in terrorist attacks in EU member states in 2016. In Israel, on the other hand, 17 people were killed. While 2017 is not yet over, the discrepancy is stark. In Israel 12 people have been killed, nine of them soldiers and policemen, while in EU member states there are already nearly 60 people who have been killed in Islamic terrorist attacks.
While the numbers don’t tell the full story, they are definitely part of it. So what exactly was Faaborg-Andersen referring to? Richard Kemp, the former British military officer and staunch defender of Israel, called Faaborg-Andersen’s statements “chutzpah,” citing the numerical discrepancy.“Not only does Israel have nothing to learn from the EU,” Kemp said, “but the EU is guilty of encouraging terrorism in Israel.”

Letter to the editor of The Times, published 24 August 2017. © Richard Kemp
The leaked Home Office report (Aug 23) warning of an increased terrorist risk to the UK after Brexit is pure fiction. The opposite is true: Britain will be safer after Brexit.
No longer will we have to allow known terrorist suspects who are EU citizens to enter the UK as we do now. We should not forget that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Belgian ringleader of the November 2015 Paris attacks in which 130 people were killed, travelled freely to Britain beforehand despite being known to be involved in extremism. Such is the EU’s security regime that he boasted in Islamic State propaganda of being able to travel unnoticed into and around Europe.
The report says that security co-operation would be ‘less effective or slower’ once Britain left the EU. Why should it be? The UK has the most effective counter-terrorism operational capability in Europe with the most extensive liaison relationships in countries from where the greatest Islamic terrorist threats emanate.
Our intelligence services have prevented numerous terrorist attacks in the UK and elsewhere in the EU in recent years. In the fight against terrorism the EU needs us far more than we need them.
Colonel Richard Kemp
Former commander of British forces in Afghanistan

According to Vox, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is one of the "most violent" in the world.
Vox gained notoriety when it reported that Israel limits traffic on the bridge connecting the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In fact, Israel doesn't limit traffic on the bridge because the bridge doesn't exist.
In this week's story about Palestinian infighting, journalist Shira Rubin writes that the battle between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas "has major stakes for one of the world’s longest-running, and most violent, political disputes."
Is that a fair characterization? A recent Reuters overview shows that, even during the he bloodiest year of Arab-Israeli fighting in decades, 2014, the number of casualties in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank paled in comparison to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan, Pakistan, Sudan, Ukraine, Somalia, Central African Republic, and Libya. The 2014 Gaza conflict accounted for about 2,000 of 100,000 battle-related deaths worldwide that year. (The graphic along the left margin, by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), shows the fatalities from Arab-Israeli fighting in the context of 2014's conflicts worldwide.)
And again, 2014 was an an outlier. A year earlier, in 2013, fewer than 50 people were killed in Israeli-Palestinian fighting, less than 0.1 percent of the 70,000 killed in the rest of the world's conflicts. In 2015, there were roughly 150 killed as a result of violence in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and 100,000 fatalities from conflict worldwide. You can check out PRIO's graphic of 2016's most deadly conflicts on page three of this document. Can Vox find Israel on the chart?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the author who goes by the pen-name Ibn Warraq are apostate Muslims who have bravely written about the threat that jihadism poses to Western civilization, and have sharply criticized Western leaders for obfuscating this threat by adhering to “politically correct” taboos and pieties. Reviewing recent books by each of these authors, Fred Siegel and Sol Stern argue for the necessity of fighting a cultural and intellectual battle against radical Islam, and use the experience of the cold war as a model:
The international Communist movement was adept at advancing Soviet imperial interests through the use of front groups—student organizations, labor unions, artists’ associations—operating freely within the Western democracies. These “progressive” organizations peddled innocent-sounding slogans about the need for disarmament, world peace, and social justice, while covering up the fact that they had been penetrated by Communist fellow travelers and agents of influence and were actively abetting Soviet expansionism. [In similar fashion], Hirsi Ali unequivocally identifies seemingly innocent-sounding Muslim groups as agents of an Islamist agenda. . . .
[During the cold war], while the U.S. and its allies “contained” the Soviet military threat, they . . . vigorously pursued the anti-Communist struggle in the political, economic, and cultural spheres. . . . [T]he Truman administration created a program to mobilize pro-democracy civic groups in the U.S. and Europe to oppose the Communist propaganda machine. . . . [T]he CIA covertly funded some of these groups. . . . [T]here is little question that bolstering the pro-democracy groups, particularly in confronting the far more sinister and clandestine foreign operations carried out by the Comintern and KGB, paid off in the life-and-death struggle against Soviet totalitarianism.
In their latest works, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq have produced a call to action in the United States and the free world. . . . Now is the time for the U.S. and other Western democracies to recognize that combating Islamist terrorism by military means alone will not work, and that a full-scale cultural counterattack is needed to convince Westerners of the danger—and to convince Muslims in the West that Islamism is a dead end for their own communities as well as for the entire Muslim world.

There has been an unprecedented development this year in the Islamists’ war on the West. For the first time their foot soldiers are singling out women to kill. Women have been the victims of terrorism before, murdered by paramilitary organisations such as ETA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the IRA, because of their uniform or their beliefs, or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but never solely because of their sex.
In the era when Islamic terror groups hijacked aircraft it was rare that women were harmed. When a Trans World Airlines jet was hijacked in 1985, for example, the terrorists released all the women and children, including the Americans. When a similar fate befell an Air France airliner at the same airport in Algiers nine years later, the Islamists handed out veils to the females passengers but executed only male hostages.
But this year Islamists are specifically targeting women. When Salman Abedi detonated his suicide bomb at the Ariana Grande concert in May, killing seventeen females (and five males), he did so knowing it would be full of teenage girls and young women. In July, two German women were fatally stabbed by an Egyptian man at the Red Sea resort of Hurghada. This attack bore similarities to Saturday’s outrage in the Finnish city of Turku, where an 18-year-old Moroccan allegedly stabbed eight women, two of whom died. Two days earlier, the only fatality in an Islamist attack at Cambrils was a 61-year-old woman.
The Islamists are deliberately targeting women because in their minds they represent empowerment and enlightenment, and also immodesty. Three young women were among the eight people stabbed to death during the London Bridge attack in June, and many more were wounded, including an Australian, who recalled her attacker screamed “Stop living this life” as he slashed at her throat.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was attacked by the media for not jumping on the bandwagon and condemning US President Donald Trump for his response to the far-right and far-left rioters in Charlottesville earlier this month. It may be that he held his tongue because he saw nothing to gain from attacking a friendly president. But it is also reasonable to assume that Netanyahu held his tongue because he empathizes with Trump. More than any leader in the world, Netanyahu understands what Trump is going through. He’s been there himself – and in many ways, is still there. Netanyahu has never enjoyed a day in office when Israel’s unelected elites weren’t at war with him.
From a comparative perspective, Netanyahu’s experiences in his first term in office, from 1996 until 1999, are most similar to Trump’s current position. His 1996 victory over incumbent prime minister Shimon Peres shocked the political class no less than the American political class was stunned by Trump’s victory. And this makes sense. The historical context of Israel’s 1996 election and the US elections last year were strikingly similar.
In 1992, Israel’s elites, the doves who controlled all aspects of the governing apparatuses, including the security services, universities, government bureaucracies, state prosecution, Supreme Court, media and entertainment industry, were seized with collective euphoria when the Labor Party under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres won Israel’s Left its first clear-cut political victory since 1974. Rabin and Peres proceeded to form the most dovish governing coalition in Israel’s history.
Then in 1993, after secret negotiations in Oslo, they shocked the public with the announcement that they had decided to cut a deal with Israel’s arch enemy, the PLO, a terrorist organization pledged to Israel’s destruction.
The elites, who fancied themselves the guardians of Israel’s democracy, had no problem with the fact that the most radical policy ever adopted by any government, one fraught with dangers for the nation and the state, was embarked upon with no public debate or deliberation.

Allow me a moment of pride: The hot new criticism of my fellow Jews is that we don’t complain enough.
Really. A host of pundits, concerned about President Trump’s baffling unwillingness to single out neo-Nazis for criticism, are turning to the American Jewish community and pleading: Would it kill you to maybe kvetch a bit?
The idea we haven’t protested is bonkers, but more important, the left’s campaign to get all Jews to publicly denounce Trump has taken a profoundly dangerous and ugly turn. And it needs to stop.
On Tuesday, the Washington Examiner reported that a coalition of left-leaning Jewish organizations have decided to lead by example. The groups had organized a conference call with President Barack Obama each year just before the High Holy Days, but this year, ostensibly because of Trump’s atrocious response to the violence in Charlottesville, their leaders chose to boycott the call.
To be clear, the call was generally a heavily politicized event at which the liberal groups and the liberal president pushed liberal policies under the guise of faith. Indeed, one of the groups is the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, which (the inside joke goes) has long been split between its political wing and its political wing.
But as rabbis and community leaders, they are clearing a path for others to follow. And they’re far from lone voices.
Late last week, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank took aim at a trio of Jews serving Trump: the president’s top economic adviser, treasury secretary and son-in-law. “What Gary Cohn, Steven Mnuchin and Jared Kushner did last week — or, rather, what they didn’t do — is a shanda,” he wrote, using the Yiddish word for shame. Specifically, they didn’t publicly trash their boss.

A Jordanian TV channel recently aired a program about the Rothschild family, according to which it was "the founder of the United States" and owned much of the world's resources, media, and banks. The show included an interview with Jordanian economic analyst Mohammad Sami Abugoush, who said that "any leader who refused to deal with the Rothschilds would be assassinated." Abugoush and TV host Rita Altaji agreed that it was Rothschild, and not President Macron, who ruled France, and that "even the U.S. and the mighty British royal family do not rule Britain."She and her guest concurred that the Rothschilds assassinated U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Kennedy, Garfield, Harrison, Tyler, and Jackson. Abugoush further said that the Jews control the weapon, pharmaceutical, shipping, and agricultural industries, and are withholding the cure for cancer and AIDS from the world in order to make a profit. The show aired on Altaghier TV on June 24.

Opinions expressed by Hanna about her positive experiences with Israel and Israelis are immediately stifled.
Not only do women like Hanna have to objectify their bodies, they also have to subordinate their minds and beliefs to Lebanese propaganda.
Rima Fakih, the first Muslim to win the Miss USA crown, nearly lost her title due to allegations that she partied too much and engaged in pole dancing.
Fakih, who was born in Lebanon to a Shi’ite family but chose to convert to Christianity for marriage, sought to dissuade people from seeing Miss USA as an ideal.
“Miss USA is not like ‘world peace’ and all that..., she is a real human being who can make her own decisions.”
There is much about beauty pageants that is distasteful.
But Lebanon has turned objectification into an art form. It is an opportunity to not only objectify women but to deprive them of autonomy of thought and mind.
Fakih is undoubtedly happy to be living in a country that allows her broad freedoms. Hanna is probably asking herself why she left Sweden.

Since the Middle East events of 2011 (mislabeled "the Arab Spring"), the region has been in turmoil. The inability of the Arab statist structures to overcome domestic cleavages became very clear. Even before 2011, Lebanon, Iraq, Somalia, as well as the Palestinian Authority failed to hold together. After 2011, Syria and Yemen descended into a state of civil war. Similarly, Egypt underwent a political crisis, allowing for the emergence of an Islamist regime. It took a year for a military coup to restore the praetorian ancient regime. All Arab republican regimes were under stress. While the monarchies weathered the political storm, their future stability is not guaranteed.
Growing Islamist influence put additional pressure on the Arab states. The quick rise of the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq was the most dramatic expression of this phenomenon that spread beyond the borders of the Middle East. Despite its expected military defeat, the ideology behind the establishment of an Islamic caliphate and variants of radical Islam remain resonant in many Muslim quarters. Therefore, the pockets containing ISIS and al-Qaida followers, as well as the stronger Muslim Brotherhood are likely to continue to challenge peace and stability in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The Sunni-Shiite divide, a constant feature of Middle Eastern politics, has become more dominant as Iran becomes increasingly feared. The 2015 nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) between Iran and world powers has been generally viewed in the Middle East as an Iranian (Shiite, Persian) diplomatic victory. Shiite-dominated Iraq (excluding the Kurdish region) turned into an Iranian satellite as well, while the military involvement of Iran and its proxies on behalf of Syrian President Bashar Assad in Syria appears to achieve the completion of a Shiite corridor from Iran to the Mediterranean. Iran continues its long-range missile program unabated and makes progress even in the nuclear arena within the limits of the flawed JCPOA. Its proxies rule Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, and Sanaa, signaling increasing Iranian clout.

The Israelis whose lives are at stake and the authentic U.S. pro-Israel community have long understood that a Palestinian Arab state would be a Hamas-Fatah-ISIS-Iranian regime terrorist state that endangers Israel’s heartland.
Such a state would be a launching pad for non-stop attacks on innocent Israeli civilians. Indeed, the Maagar-Mochot poll in January found that Israelis overwhelmingly (by a 10 to 1 margin) support Israeli sovereignty in Judea/Samaria and oppose a Palestinian Arab state. (Judea/Samaria is the accurate name for the area Jordan renamed the “West Bank.”)
Similarly, a Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs poll in March found that Israelis are overwhelmingly (by a 12 to 1 margin) concerned that if Israel gave up security control of Judea/Samaria, that the Palestinian Arabs will build attack tunnels. And the implications go far beyond Israel. A Palestinian Arab terror state is likely to push Jordan and the entire Middle East into complete chaos. (Also remember, there was never an Arab sovereign State in Judea and Samaria. Even the name “Palestine” is a Roman name, not an Arab name. Arabs can’t even pronounce the letter “P.” When the Romans captured Judea and Samaria and murdered or drove the Jews out of their ancient homeland they renamed it Palestine after the enemy of the Jews, the Philistines.)
Thus, earlier this year, we were thrilled that President Trump refused to parrot the irrational, dangerous mantra that a Palestinian state is the only option for peace (the so-called two State solution, a misnomer since Israel is already a State). We were glad to see President Trump wisely speak instead about real peace and creative solutions; and demand that the Palestinian Authority (PA) must stop teaching “tremendous hate” to their children in PA schools; stop naming Arab schools, streets, sports teams, and tournaments after Jew-killers; recognize Israel as the Jewish State; stop paying Palestinian Arab terrorists to murder Jews; and revoke the PA law authorizing the PA’s horrendous $350 million per year of “pay to slay” payments.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas set aside weeks of widespread and vocal pessimism over US peace efforts, saying that a deal with Israel is not impossible during a meeting with senior White House adviser Jared Kushner Thursday.
Meeting with Kushner and other US officials in Ramallah, Abbas expressed optimism that a deal could be reached, despite complaints from the PA in recent days over a lack of seriousness from the White House in its efforts to broker an elusive agreement.
“We know that the this issue is difficult and complex, but nothing is impossible in the face of good efforts,” Abbas said during the parley with Kushner, according to official PA news outlet Wafa.
Kushner, who is also Trump’s son-in-law, arrived in Israel Wednesday evening as part of a trip to the region aimed at looking for way to jumpstart peace talks. Kushner is accompanied on the trip by peace envoy Jason Greenblatt and Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategy Dina Powell. They met earlier Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

US President Donald Trump’s delegation that met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday provided no clarity on its positions regarding the two-state solution or settlements, Ahmad Majdalani, a close confidante of the PA president said on Friday.
“The American delegation did not explain its position on two states or settlement construction,” Majdalani told The Jerusalem Post. “They only asked for more time to carry out consultations.”
Senior Trump adviser Jared Kushner, special representative for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt and deputy national security advisor Dina Powell held talks with PA president in Ramallah on Thursday after meeting with a number Middle East leaders in the past several days.
Majdalani added that the Palestinians “consider giving the Americans additional time for consultations without them taking clear positions as a green light for [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu to destroy the two-state solution and impose facts on the ground through settlement building.”

Australia is open to the idea of having a new, formal diplomatic presence in Jerusalem, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told a group of Jewish community leaders.
Bishop said Australia would happily follow Britain if it opened a High Commission or a consulate in the capital, and it could “look at” stationing diplomats there.
“In Morocco we bunked in with the British. We have our door and our flag here (at the front) and the British flag and door at the back and we share the back-of-house costs, because all countries need to be represented everywhere,” she said. “We bunk in with the Canadians every now and again, the Brits are trying to pile on top of us in Bali and we’ve got the Brits in with us in Wellington.
“I hate to put it in that context, but let me have a look at what is happening in West Jerusalem. If there is a British High Commission there or a consulate of some description we can look at that.”
Bishop was responding to a question from Zionism Victoria immediate past president Sam Tatarka. According to the Australian Jewish News (AJN), he asked if Australia would open a consulate or high commission in West Jerusalem.
Mr. Tatarka said if Australia did establish a presence in Jerusalem, it would make a statement to the world. “The location, in terms of sharing with another country, is not important,” he told the AJN.
“If Australia were to establish a formal diplomatic presence in Jerusalem it would be perceived internationally as a significant step.”

The former head of the Israeli Air Force, Major-General Amir Eshel has revealed that Russian aircrafts have entered Israeli airspace “many times” during the Syrian civil war in an exclusive interview with Haaretz newspaper.
In an extensive interview with Amos Harel, Eshel spoke at length about the Israeli Air Force’s increasing capability, the missile threat from Hezbollah, and the IAF’s regional cooperation.
Eshel discussed the mechanism that Israel has set up after the Russians deployed in Syria in 2015 in order to reduce the possibility of a serious confrontation with Russian aircrafts.
He said, “There’s something technical here, and there are leaders’ directives, and trust. We don’t intend to harm the Russians, and we do everything to avoid harming them. They understand why we are taking action. They don’t agree or give us authorization, but I think they understand what Israel is doing. It is fighting terrorism, preventing the delivery of means of combat.”
Eshel spoke about the importance of real-time communication between the two air forces. With regards to the Russians entering Israeli air space, Esher said that “there were situations in which we contacted them in real time and said that there had been a mistake, and they immediately responded and corrected. That’s alright. We have not seen provocations.”

Last week, the chief of staff of the Iranian military traveled to Ankara, where he met with his Turkish counterparts and apparently arrived at a strategic agreement, to be finalized during a reciprocal visit to Tehran. Turkey also announced recently that a delegation of senior Russian officials will soon be arriving to discuss cooperation among all three countries. According to reports in the Iranian press, writes Amir Taheri, this would involve working together to repress Kurdish national aspirations in the area that includes part of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. And that’s just the beginning:
[Turkey wants] to promote a regional alliance that could eventually include Iran, Russia, and Iraq. The idea is that such an alliance, though limited in scope, would leave little space for the U.S.-led Western powers and their regional Arab allies to regain the influence they had enjoyed in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman empire over a century ago.
That, in turn, would give Turkey a big voice in the Levant as a springboard for a greater projection of power across the Middle East. . . .
[Likewise], Tehran believes the future of Syria must be determined by Iran, Turkey, and Russia to the exclusion of the U.S. and its Arab allies, [not to mention Israel]. . . . Don’t be surprised if Iran presents the new informal alliance as Russia and Turkey joining “The Resistance Front” led from Tehran. . . .
Is an Iran-Turkey-Russia triangle really taking shape? To judge by noises made in Tehran, Ankara, and Moscow, the answer must be yes. However, the three remain strange bedfellows, with contradictory positions and conflicting interests. In other words, between the cup and the lip there may be many a slip.

A group of Israeli Knesset members returned from a visit to South Africa this week, the first-ever such delegation of lawmakers to visit the country, the Jewish Agency said in a statement Thursday.
During their trip, the lawmakers met with a number of South African political figures, including former president Kgalema Motlanthe and African Union chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, President Jacob Zuma’s ex-wife and a possible candidate to replace him as the head of the African National Congress party in the next elections.
In addition to officials from the ruling ANC, the Israeli delegation also met with figures from the opposition Democratic Alliance, including party leader Mmusi Maimane, who visited Israel in January.
Maimane came under fire from the ANC for his trip to Israel, with the party of Nelson Mandela accusing him of supporting Israeli “apartheid.”
The Israeli MKs also met with Jewish community leaders in Johannesburg and Cape Town and visited a number of Jewish sites.

U.S. President Donald Trump called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Thursday and said he was keen to overcome any obstacles in the way of cooperation, just days after the U.S. said it would withhold some financial aid to Egypt.
“President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi received a phone call tonight from U.S. President Donald Trump who affirmed the strength of the friendship between Egypt and the United States and expressed his keenness on continuing to develop the relationship and overcome any obstacles that might affect it,” Sisi’s office said in a statement late on Thursday.
On Tuesday, two U.S. sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that Washington had decided to deny Egypt $95.7 million in aid and to delay a further $195 million because it had failed to make progress on respecting human rights and democracy.
Egypt, an important regional partner for the United States because of its control of the Suez Canal and its border with Israel, receives $1.3 billion in aid annually and was critical of the U.S. decision.
Its foreign ministry said on Wednesday that the decision to withhold aid reflected “poor judgment” and that it could have “negative implications” on achieving common goals and interests between the two countries.

Accused of heresy by Islamist extremists and targeted by the authorities, members of Algeria’s tiny Ahmadi community say they have been forced to go underground to worship.
Abderahmane, a 42-year-old trader from Kabylie in northern Algeria, joined the reformist Islamic movement after years as an ultra-conservative Salafist.
People he once called friends reported him to the local imam, who publicly denounced him as an unbeliever.
The imam went on to urge worshippers not to let their children play with Ahmadi children.
“My sister’s engagement was canceled because her fiance was told I was an unbeliever,” Abderahmane said, still wearing a well-trimmed beard, a long cotton shirt, and three-quarter-length trousers — the garb of his former life as a Salafist.

Israel must rebuild the two modular Palestinian schools it demolished, the European Union said as it condemned the IDF actions against illegal Palestinian and Beduin construction in Area C of the West Bank.
“Every child has the right to safe access to education and states have an obligation to protect, respect and fulfill this right, by ensuring that schools are inviolable safe spaces for children,” the EU said on Thursday in a statement put out by its offices in Jerusalem and Ramallah.
It spoke up after the Civil Administration demolished a modular kindergarten on Sunday in the Beduin herding village of Badu al-Baba near the town of al-Eizariya just outside of Jerusalem. On Tuesday it took down a modular elementary school in the Palestinian village of Jubbet ad-Dib close to Bethlehem.
Both schools were built with EU funding, but without permits, which are difficult for Palestinians to obtain from the Civil Administration.
Parent Fadia Awash, who also head the Woman’s Society from the nearby Palestinian town of Beit Tamir said the school had been built on private Palestinian property. It was designed to service local children who otherwise were walking three kilometers to the nearest school.
On Wednesday and Thursday, many of the 80 school children originally designated to the school arrived at the site anyway for class.
A tent has been placed on one of the cement slabs where the modular classroom had stood.

With the new school year set to begin Sept. 1, the Jerusalem Municipality and the Education Ministry have decided to tackle the issue of anti-Israel incitement in Palestinian-run east Jerusalem schools by distributing Israeli schoolbooks free for the schools to use, rather than Palestinian Authority school materials.
The decision comes after Israel Hayom reported that while schoolbooks from the Palestinian Authority, some of which are filled with incitement against Israel and Jews, are distributed at no cost to pupils in east Jerusalem, Israeli schoolbooks have to be purchased. Many school districts in Israel still require parents to purchase their children's schoolbooks rather than issuing books to pupils on a loan basis.
Parents in east Jerusalem said the cost factor was creating an absurd situation in which rather than being encouraged to send their children to Israeli schools, they were being incentivized to opt for Palestinian schools and the Palestinian curriculum, which preaches hatred and incites violence.
On Thursday, the Jerusalem District Police announced that they had stopped a shipment of books at one of the gates to the Old City after police officers spotted Palestinian flags on the book covers, as well as stamps indicating that the books had been sent to Jerusalem from the PA.
A review of some of the Palestinian textbooks to be used this year shows that, for example, the grammar books for 12th graders refer to Israelis as "invasive snakes." An 11th-grade current events text states that "drug use is particularly notable in a few areas in Palestinian society, because they [drugs] are encouraged and distributed to Palestinian youth by the Israeli occupation, which seeks to morally corrupt them."

Exactly two years ago, a senior official at the US State Department called me a liar to my face. He informed me that all the work that we had done on the Palestinian Authority textbooks used by UNRWA was one great fabrication, that the US government had checked out the PA textbooks used by UNRWA, and that they met the highest standards of peace education.
Six months later, the White House issued a statement in a similar vein to a colleague in DC: “While there is still work to be done, the Palestinian government has made significant progress in reducing inflammatory rhetoric and revising official textbooks. Over the past few years, the PA has helped improve the Palestinian curriculum, including textbooks that discuss human rights and the Holocaust, which has contributed to a better education for young Palestinians.”
To respond to this, I asked my staff to purchase all PA textbooks used by UNRWA and to translate all the books, so that we could hand the results to the US Congress and to the Israeli Knesset.
One of the ironies is that USAID in Ramallah wrote to us, saying that the US never examines the PA textbooks used by UNRWA…despite the fact that the US donates $400 million each year to UNRWA – one third of the UNRWA budget.
As a sneak preview, here are some items taken from the new PA Schoolbooks used in UNRWA schools, in the new school year that commences next week.

It is midnight on a cold winter night in the Syrian part of the Golan Heights. A strange caravan wends its way along a rocky path toward a secret location on the border with Israel. Mothers in hijabs and parkas carry babies and small children swathed in bandages.
Some children, crudely bandaged, ride in panniers slung over donkeys. Many have no accompanying parents because they are dead. There are wounded men, too, limping along, helped by their friends.
The procession walks silently. Finally, they reach the border. Awaiting them is an IDF medical team that quickly administers first aid, stabilizes the wounded and puts them into ambulances that speed off, sirens screaming, to hospitals in Nahariya and Safed. Soon, teams of nurses and doctors begin to heal the enemy – rebuilding faces and hands and treating wounds that are almost indescribable.
The “enemy?” To the Israeli medical teams, these are simply human beings who have been bombed, gassed, shot, sniped, mortared and maimed by their countrymen, who call them terrorists and supporters of terrorism.
Syria is still at war with Israel. So, this is a rare instance where a nation treats the wounded of a neighboring country that seeks its destruction, heals them and sends them home.
The Israeli government has decided not to let in Syrian refugees, but in 2013 it did decide to treat the wounded from its neighbor to the north.
As a result, some 3,000 wounded Syrians, a third of them children, have been treated by Israel, including some 1,700 at the Galilee Medical Center, or GMC, in Nahariya.
And more arrive every day.

Tens of thousands of Syrian civilians living on the Golan border are “between the hammer and the anvil,” hemmed in on one side by pro-regime fighters on one side and the Islamic State on the other, a commander of a Syrian rebel militia said Wednesday.
The Syrian commander, who would only go by his nom de guerre, Abu Hamad, said his group’s cooperation with Israel made it the target of criticism from the Iran-funded militias that are fighting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar Assad, but humanitarian concerns superseded old hatreds.
“The Shiite militias claim we are traitors,” he said during a video conference with journalists, speaking through Skype from a well-furnished shack in the Quneitra area in the Syrian Golan to reporters at the offices of MediaCentral in Jerusalem.
Abu Hamad, who kept his face covered in order to protect his identity, also commented on the purported ceasefire that was brokered by the United States and Russia, saying that it was an empty declaration and that the fighting continues despite it.
According to the rebel commander, the only thing limiting the warfare is his group’s depleting stores of materiel.
Earlier this summer, the Israeli military revealed the scope of its humanitarian assistance to Syrians living on the Golan border.

A Palestinian band hailing from east Jerusalem and Bethlehem says Ben-Gurion Airport security has sabotaged its UK tour by detaining an electric guitar.
Apo Sahagian, the lead singer of Apo and the Apostles, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that airport authorities have been holding his guitar for days without releasing it.
“The B-G security detained my electric guitar for further ‘security’ checks’ due to ‘security’ reasons,” Sahagian wrote via email from London. “They said it would be on the next flight.”
But more than 48 hours later, the musician has not seen his guitar, and nobody will admit they are holding it.
“I’ve been calling easyJet and they’ve been saying that the guitar is still in Israeli security and has not been released,” Sahagian said. He said that some of his friends who have been looking into the situation told him Ben-Gurion staff insist they passed it on to easy- Jet, and the airline insists it doesn’t have it.
Ofer Lefler, the spokesman for the Airports Authority, said the guitar was taken for additional screening, "but was then immediately turned over to the airline." Lefler said according to the Israeli ground handling services, the guitar has been transferred to London."

Israeli security forces found an M16 rifle in a home in the central West Bank village of Wadi Siman early Friday.
The firearm’s owner was arrested, the IDF said.
Israeli security agencies have been cracking down on firearms smuggling in the West Bank over the past year, as well as on workshops in Palestinian cities used to manufacture improvised Carlo-style rifles.
In a separate overnight raid in the West Bank, security forces detained a Palestinian man suspected of taking part in violent protests, according to a statement from the army.
He was arrested in the village of Bayt Fajr, near Bethlehem.

The United Nations on Thursday gave Gaza $2.5 million in humanitarian aid to help with their water and fuel crisis.
The funds come as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is threatening to gradually cut funding to Gaza if Hamas fails to allow Fatah to return to the Strip.
Some 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza have been hostage for the last four months to the power play between Fatah and Hamas, as Abbas seek to regain control of the Strip 10 years after Hamas ousted his party in a bloody coup.
In July the UN issued an urgent appeal for $25 million, but to date only 30% of that sum has bene funded.
There is a “serious decline in living conditions in Gaza continues” said UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid and Development Activities, Robert Piper. “The humanitarian plight and the human rights of Gaza’s civilian population - over half of them children – appear to have disappeared from view” he added.
Some of the UN funds will pay for fuel for the generators that are helping run 190 health, water and sanitation installations.

France said Wednesday it wants the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon to stick to its current mandate, opposing US calls to strengthen the force’s authority to deal with arms movements by Hezbollah, the Shiite terrorist militia.
Anne Gueguen, France’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, told reporters her government saw no need to change the 2006 Security Council resolution that sets the mission’s current mandate, which expires at the end of August.
“We want to keep the mandate as such,” she said, adding that “does mean there won’t be any change in the resolution.”
The 10,500-strong United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon has been in southern Lebanon since 1978, when it was charged with confirming the withdrawal of Israeli forces from a demilitarized zone between the two countries.

With Iran seemingly gaining more and more power in Syria, Israel has to take action to ensure Tehran will never make it to the Israel-Syrian border. This plan must include a multi-layered approach that will enlist the US, Russia and Syrian allies, as well as the understanding that an overt confrontation between Israel and Iranian forces will mean nothing short of war.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Moscow visit on Wednesday can be seen to signal a change for the worse and a significant, national security risk in the making. The civil war in Syria is nearing an end, and it appears that the coalition of President Bashar al-Assad, Hezbollah, Iran and Russia has won. If this victory would lead solely to the stability of Assad's regime, Israel should have been able to accept this. The problem is that Iran demands compensation for the many resources it invested in the war: already the de facto ruler in Lebanon through its control over Hezbollah, Iran is now looking to recreate a similar power dynamic for itself in Syria.
In concrete terms, the Iranians want to establish a second Hezbollah, a force of Shiite militias that will be deployed on the Golan Heights along the border with Israel, and which will get its instructions from Tehran. When such a situation occurs, any confrontation with Hezbollah will lead to a wider confrontation that will include the Syrian arena. Moreover, Assad, who, weakened, finds himself grateful to Iran, will be committed to helping in this endeavor. As such, a confrontation with Hezbollah could quickly lead to a full-scale war between Israel and Syria.

Several prominent U.S. companies that have distanced themselves from the Trump administration over its response to the recent violence in Charlottesville, Va., continue to do business with the extremist Iranian regime, sparking accusations of hypocrisy from a leading advocacy group that works to expose Iran's global atrocities.
Major U.S. companies such as airplane manufacturer Boeing, General Electric, and industrial company Caterpillar all issued public statements distancing themselves from President Donald Trump over what they viewed as his failure to adequately condemn the recent riots in Charlottesville, where far-right white nationalists and neo-Nazis clashed with leftist counter-protestors.
While each company was quick to distance itself from the Trump administration and condemn the open racism and bigotry on display in Charlottesville, all three of the corporations continue to do business with Iran, an openly anti-Semitic regime that threatens to murder Jewish people and endorses leading racists such as David Duke.
All of these corporations also have refused to sign on to pledges to refrain from doing business with Iran due to the regime's pursuit of nuclear arms and continued sponsorship of terrorism, including operations targeting U.S. forces.
The failure of these companies to shun business with Iran has prompted criticism by United Against Nuclear Iran, or UANI, a prominent watchdog organization working to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
These companies have thus far declined to sign a UANI-sponsored pledge from business leaders to cut business ties to Iran.

People do not understand what it means to leave Iran inside of Syria as currently envisioned by the Great Powers.
The Iranians established themselves in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon back in 1982 and in a few short years established Hizbullah, a guerrilla army that accepted the idea of Iranian domination and leadership of all Muslims. It served as a surrogate for Iran in the Middle East.
It was originally thought that if Israel withdrew from Lebanon, the Hizbullah problem would go away. But Israel did withdraw from Lebanon in 2000 and the Hizbullah threat only got worse because it had nothing to do with Israel. It had everything to do with Iranian regional ambitions.
Years ago, when the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was sitting with a high-level American official, he criticized U.S. policy in Iraq for having recreated the Safavid Empire. The Safavid Empire was the Persian Empire back in the 16th century.
It was then that Persian control stretched over parts of Syria; it covered Iraq including Baghdad; it went south into the Persian Gulf; it included the island of Bahrain; it stretched into half of Afghanistan and into what used to be referred to as Soviet Central Asia. This was a huge state that still exists in the fond memories of many in the Iranian leadership.
Just as Lebanon became a base for Iranian operations across the Middle East, leaving Iranian forces in Syria will create a challenge on a much greater scale. This will pose a direct threat to the future security of Israel as well as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
The bottom line is: Iranian forces must be withdrawn from Syria back to Iran. If the Great Powers leave Iran in Syria, they are setting the stage for the next great crisis in the Middle East, which will be far larger than anything we have seen until now.

Yet many on the left have justified their behavior as a necessary counter to the white supremacists and alt-righters. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) justified the violence by appealing to the evils of the neo-Nazis. Professor N.D.B. Connolly of Johns Hopkins University wrote in the pages of The Washington Post that the time for nonviolence had ended — that it was time to “throw rocks.” Dartmouth University historian Mark Bray defended antifa by stating that the group makes an “ethically consistent, historically informed argument for fighting Nazis before it’s too late.”
This is appalling stuff unless the Nazis are actually getting violent. Words aren’t violence. A free society relies on that distinction to function properly — as Max Weber stated, the purpose of civilization is to hand over the role of protection of rights to a state that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Breaking that pact destroys the social fabric.
Now, most liberals — as opposed to leftists — don’t support antifa. Even Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) denounced antifa’s tactics in Berkeley, for example. But in response to some on the left’s defense of antifa and their attempt to broaden the Nazi label to include large swaths of conservatives, too many people on the right have fallen into the trap of defending bad behavior of its own. Instead of disassociating clearly and universally from President Trump’s comments, the right has glommed onto the grain of truth embedded in them — that antifa is violent — in order to shrug at the whole.
The result of all of this: the unanimity that existed regarding racism and violence has been shattered. And all so that political figures can make hay by castigating large groups of people who hate Nazism and violence.
Let’s restore the unanimity. Nazism is bad and unjustifiable. Violence against those who are not acting violently is bad and unjustifiable. That’s not whataboutism. That’s truth.
If we can’t agree on those basic principles, we’re not going to be able to share a country.

Think the ZOA is just as bad as Hezbollah? Believe The New York Times secretly harbors white supremacists? We have just the column for you.
Here are 19 people Jews should actually be more worried about than Linda Sarsour… Morton Klein; Ayatollah Khamanei (The Forward, August 3, 2017)
During the course of my conversations with several senior ayatollahs and prominent political and government officials, it became clear that there is high-placed dissent to the official line against Israel. No one had anything warm to say about the Jewish state. But pressed as to whether it was Israel’s policies or its very existence to which they objected, several were adamant: It’s Israel’s policies. (The Forward, August 12, 2015)
There is no shortage of think pieces these days — many from Jews — accusing the left of divisiveness and hate. Bari Weiss’ “When Progressives Embrace Hate” and Ann Lewis’ “I Did Not March for Hate” are two of the latest examples of white Jewish leaders employing the same talking points the white nationalist movement uses to attack Palestinian Muslims and Black people. (The Forward, August 22, 2017)
Richard Spencer Might Be The Worst Person In America. But He Might Also Be Right About Israel. (The Forward, August 17, 2017)
Introducing the latest column from The Forward, by Hannah Virtuestein, New York’s most woke social diarist. She can be reached here:
Javad Zarif is an honorary Jew in my book. Such a Mensch. Even with his busy schedule he agreed to come all the way out to Brooklyn to address our chapter of Iranian Centrifuges Matter. He’s right too. Netanyahu and the Likud in Israel are just a bunch of Chazars. That’s right. Iran’s foreign minister speaks Yiddish. I wish Bubbe was still alive, She’d like him.
Here’s my dilemma. I want to invite Linda Sarsour to our social justice Shabbaton at B’nai Ramallah, but the community can’t agree to separate seating by gender. I argued that we can support our Muslim sisters and still hold the line on gender equality. Rebecca Cohen-Shabazz and Running Deer Goldmanberg told me I was being problematic and Islamophobic. Double whammy! I wish I had more Muslim friends to dialogue with on this.
I wish more blue checkmarks on twitter would get behind my petition to require incoming Brandeis students to take a course on the Muslim Brotherhood, Queer Liberation and Climate Change in the Era of Netanyahu.

In a few weeks, a new intake of students will arrive, all fresh-faced and excited, at universities around the country. They’ll be thrilled at the prospect of escaping the wagging finger of mum and dad, eager to absorb new ideas. But I’m afraid they are in for a rude awakening. Unless they’re very fortunate, they will soon find themselves enveloped in a world that’s more censorious than stimulating and taught not to question ideas but to learn by heart the progressive creed. It will take a brave and resilient youngster to survive university with their intellectual curiosity intact.
Every aspect of campus life, from what you can say to how you should party, is minutely policed by what I called the Stepford Students in this magazine three years ago. ‘No Platform’ policies strictly govern who can speak on campus. Anybody, no matter what their political background or supposedly liberal credentials, can find themselves shunted off campus for having the wrong opinion in the eyes of the Stasi of student politics.
‘Safe Spaces’, controversy-free zones where students who find the real world brutalising can weep and hug ‘emotional support animals’ (this is not a joke), are almost compulsory. Newspapers are blacklisted: a growing number of student unions have banned the Sun, Mail and Express on the jumped-up basis that they’re racist and sexist and thus ‘harmful’. In the last academic year, even students at City University in London, famed for its journalism school, slapped a ban on tabloids. A journalism uni where you can’t read popular journalism? Thanks to the youthful jackboots of the National Union of Students, and the lily-livered vice-chancellors who bow down to them, the list of the undoable, unsayable and unthinkable grows longer every year. The adults have gone AWOL.
Any student society whose worldview isn’t a carbon copy of that of the NUS lives under permanent threat of censorship. Israel Society events are shouted down, pro-life groups are denied space at freshers’ fairs. At University College London, a Nietzsche Society was banned for fear it might stoke far-right thinking. Thus Spake the Censor.

Since the violence in Charlottesville 10 days ago, when white supremacists left one young woman dead and 19 others injured, the Southern Poverty Law Center has hit the jackpot. The Alabama-based nonprofit is set to receive millions of dollars in donations from some of the nation’s deepest of pockets. Apple pledged $1 million. JP Morgan Chase & Co.: half a million. George and Amal Clooney even got in on the action, promising to donate another $1 million.
Like every other decent American, I was outraged that the president of the United States equivocated in condemning neo-Nazi activity in this country. Nazism — not to mention white supremacy and racial bigotry — has no place in a civilized society.
But is donating money to the S.P.L.C. the best way to combat this poison? I think not. If Tim Cook and Jamie Dimon had done their due diligence, they would know that the S.P.L.C. is an organization that has lost its way, smearing people who are fighting for liberty and turning a blind eye to an ideology and political movement that has much in common with Nazism.
I am a black woman, a feminist and a former Muslim who has consistently opposed political violence. The price for expressing my beliefs has been high: I must travel with armed security at all times. My friend and collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered in broad daylight.
Yet the S.P.L.C. has the audacity to label me an “extremist,” including my name in a “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” that it published on its website last October.

Arab violence against Jews is often alleged to have begun with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 or as a result of Israel's capture in 1967 of territories occupied by Jordan. But even before the Mandate for Palestine was assigned to Great Britain by the Allies at the San Remo Conference (April 1920) and endorsed by the League of Nations (July 1922), Palestinian Arabs were carrying out organized attacks against Jewish communities in Palestine. Systematic violence began in early 1920 with murderous assaults by groups of local Arabs against settlements in the north and by Muslim pilgrims against Jerusalem's Jews. Again in 1921, Arab rioters attacked Jews in Jaffa and its environs. The primary agitator behind these attacks was Haj Amin al Husseini, who marshalled Arab discontent over Jewish immigration into violent riots.
In 1929, Husseini and his associates fomented a violent jihad as they called upon Muslims to "defend" their holy places from the Jews. As a result, pogroms were carried out across Palestine. Arab villagers sympathetic to Jews were often targets of murderous attacks by their Arab brethren as well. British forces were sharply criticized for not policing the territory adequately, for sympathizing with the Arabs, and for standing by and allowing havoc to be wreaked upon Jewish communities in Palestine.
In 1936, the Arab Higher Committee, led by Grand Mufti Husseini, launched a campaign of anti-Jewish violence across Palestine. Accompanied by a six-month-long strike, the campaign became known as "The Arab Revolt." As the British increasingly became targets of Arab violence, they used massive force to suppress the aggression. The revolt was finally quashed in 1939. The resulting White Paper of 1939 reversed British commitment to a Jewish State (the raison d'etre of the Mandate) and drastically limited Jewish immigration into Palestine.

The Anti-Defamation League’s current counter-offensive against the US far-right is facing a coordinated campaign of online “trolling” from BDS activists pushing the message that Zionism is akin to “white nationalism,” an ADL official told The Algemeiner on Friday.
The campaign began on August 17 — five days after a violent show of force by ultra right-wing groups in Charlottesville, Virginia — when a staff member of “Jewish Voice for Peace,” an extremist organization whose goal is the dismantlement of the State of Israel, penned a veiled endorsement of white nationalist Richard Spencer in The Forward newspaper.
Spencer is one of the leading figures of the so-called “alt-right,” whose views blend discredited theories about race with white pride identity politics. But after describing Spencer as possibly the “worst person” in America, the JVP staffer, Naomi Dann, hailed him for being “being right about Israel.”
Noting that Spencer — who has a talent for catchphrases — had referred to himself as a “white Zionist” in an interview with Israeli TV following the Charlottesville violence, Dann enthusiastically echoed this view, going on to describe Israel as a racially-based state built upon Jewish colonial privilege, and therefore one that Spencer would identify with.
An ADL official told The Algemeiner that Dann’s article had provoked outrage at the organization. “We felt we had to speak out,” the official said.”Here was a JVP member actually using words from the mouth of a white supremacist to make the case that Israel’s actions toward Palestinians are equivalent to white supremacy.”

Outside of Israel, particularly among groups and individuals who promote BDS and the “war crimes” campaigns, Michael Sfard is a particularly prestigious and influential figure. An attorney, Sfard represents groups like Yesh Din and Breaking the Silence, as well as engaging in his own political and legal activism, even serving as a paid expert witness for the PLO.
But for someone who claims a pure moral agenda, he’s not very careful about his allies. In speaking at an event sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Sfard crossed blatant moral red lines (Yishai Friedman, Makor Rishon, 11/08/17). These two NGOs participate in or lead almost every single anti-Israel campaign taking place in the US.
Recent JVP campaigns have morphed into direct and unmistakable anti-Semitism — which should make Sfard and his funders, both American and European, denounce any contacts or cooperation. JVP’s “Deadly Exchange” platform seeks to sabotage joint Israeli-American security training programs by alleging that they are implicated to the mistreatment of minorities by US law enforcement officials. To suggest that Israel is in any way responsible for the sometimes centuries-old tensions surrounding policing in America is not only willfully ignorant of history, but in parallel to the KKK, exploits the image of a villainous Zionist cabal.
JVP takes this conspiracy one step further and bizarrely attacks American Jewish organizations for these collaborations. The group’s “Deadly Exchange” website even urges its supporters to “Hold accountable the Jewish institutions who run and fund the deadly exchange.” The suggestion that the American Jewish community makes policy for local and federal law enforcement agencies, and is therefore responsible for abuses in Ferguson or Standing Rock would be laughable if not for its dangerous scapegoating of American Jews.

Ilana Herman, a senior at the New World School of the Arts in Miami, knows full well why it's important for StandWithUs, the international Israel education organization, to have a presence on local high school campuses.
Herman is one of six South Florida high school interns for StandWithUs (SWU) who will spread pro-Israel messages on their campuses and in their communities following the recent StandWithUs High School Intern Conference in Los Angeles.
"I had a U.S. history teacher who brought up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while telling us about the Oslo Accords," Herman said. "This teacher claimed that Palestine was a country and that Israelis were stealing land from the Palestinians — convincing my class that Israelis were horrible, selfish monsters.
"I wanted to say something, but felt that I wasn't educated enough to have a debate with her. I was upset and uncertain how to proceed."
Herman then contacted Rayna Rose Exelbierd, SWU Southeast Region high school coordinator, to ask advice. Herman ended up becoming involved with SWU as a high school intern and going on the recent conference.
"I was most surprised about how educated students were about politics in the Middle East," Herman said. "Seeing students with so much background on this subject inspired me to want to learn more myself."
"I feel that I have come out of this conference filled with confidence and the ability to combat anti-Semitism in high school and college," Herman continued. "I think that students need to understand that Israel is not the bad guy in this conflict. Israel has made numerous attempts at making peace with the Palestinians by giving up land and the Palestinians have refused."

The city of Frankfurt passed a historic bill on Friday outlawing municipal funding and rooms for BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) activities targeting the Jewish state.
Uwe Becker, the deputy mayor and city treasurer for Frankfurt, who initiated and steered the bill to passage, told The Jerusalem Post: "The BDS-movement does not only strongly resemble the 'Don´t buy from Jews' argumentation of former times of the National Socialists, but the movement is built on the same toxic ground and it is poisoning the social climate in the same dangerous way.
BDS strongly attacks the fundamental basis of the legitimation of the Jewish State and takes the detour via antizionism to spread antisemitism." Beck added:"That´s why we decided to ban any municipal funding or the renting of rooms for any activities of groups or individuals, who support the antisemitic BDS movement. We also instructed our city-owned companies and called upon private landlords to act in the same way."
The anti-BDS bill will now be sent to the city parliament for a vote. Becker said with today's backing of the city government, the bill "has already gained the necessary support." The city parliament is slated to vote on the bill in a few weeks.

Several artists pulled out of a popular Berlin music festival because the Israeli Embassy in Germany provided a financial contribution.
The three-day Berlin Pop-Kultur festival, which runs through Friday, accepted 500 euros, or nearly $600, from the Israeli diplomatic mission.
Israeli artists are among the 70 acts scheduled to perform at the festival.
Four artists from Arab countries including Syria and Egypt pulled out last week, as well as bands from Tunisia and Britain, identified by the Electronic Intifada as Mohammad Abu Hajar of Syria’s Mazzaj Rap Band; Egypt’s Islam Chipsy; Syrian DJ Hello Psychaleppo; Tunisian singer-songwriter Emel Mathlouthi and British experimental dance music collaboration Iklan ft. Law Holt.
The latest band to announce it was quitting the festival — on Wednesday, its first day — was the Scottish hip hop and rap group Young Fathers. In a statement on Twitter, the group called its move “a tiny act on our behalf in the grand scale of things but one we still believe is worth it.” Young Fathers noted the Israeli government’s logo on the list of festival partners and the group’s solidarity with the Palestinian people.
American musician Thurston Moore, a former member of Sonic Youth, called on the festival to cancel the Israeli Embassy sponsorship “in solidarity with [the] Palestinian call for cultural boycott,” according to Electronic Intifada.

Scrutinising the Facebook associations of Canadian MP Niki Ashton (New Democratic Party), who recently on the campaign trail disavowed the support of a Holocaust-denying Muslim publisher, Sheila Gunn Reid of the imperilled Rebel.media is convinced that while antisemitism i entrenched on the fringes of the Far Right movement, it flourishes on the Left, where it lurks behind the banner of 'Peace and Justice':

For more on the troubles besetting The Rebel, here's Ezra Levant, who stresses that he and his cohorts are emphatically not alt-right, white supremacist, or antisemitic:

In his dystopian novel 1984, the British author George Orwell famously wrote: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
In a similar vein, a recent USA Today report that details anti-Jewish violence is headlined “Palestinians give peaceful protest a chance.”
In reality, the August 3, 2017, dispatch, by special correspondent Noga Tarnoplsky, reported the complete opposite.
The article covered Palestinian Arab objections to Israeli efforts to increase security measures at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which sits on the Temple Mount — Judaism’s holiest site.
Israeli authorities sought to install metal detectors at the site after a July 14, 2017, terror attack in which three Arab Israelis murdered two Israeli policemen with weapons hidden in the mosque. Holy sites of all faiths around the world employ similar security measures.
Yet the Palestinians reacted to the announcement of measures designed to protect both them and Israelis from violence — with violence.
As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) and others have detailed, Palestinian authorities employed the so-called “Al-Aqsa libel” — claiming that Jews held secret designs to “destroy” or “defile” the mosque — to incite anti-Jewish violence.

Twitter thread genius Thomas Wictor has become the latest victim of the liberal-left tech sector’s war on free speech.
YouTube has suspended his account — allegedly because he violated their “terms of use”; but really, he suspects, for the crime of being a Trump supporter who speaks unpalatable truths about leftist evils.
If you’re unfamiliar with Thomas Wictor, you’re missing a treat. He’s a Venezuelan-born recluse with a rich and varied past who, besides being the world’s greatest (and only) expert on World War I flamethrowers, also happens to produce some of the most fascinating Twitter threads and social media video commentary you will ever see on subjects ranging from Antifa to Pallywood to what’s really going on in Syria and Iraq.
Some of his output is so kooky and recondite that, quite possibly, it strays into the realm of conspiracy theory.
But with Wictor you can never be quite sure because his exposition is so thorough and well-documented.
One of his specialties is forensic video analysis. This is how I first came across him, a few years back, when I wrote my first Breitbart News story based on his research. It concerned the four Palestinian boys supposedly blown up on a beach by Israeli artillery during the last Gaza conflict — but really, or so Wictor claimed, murdered by Hamas who then exploited the dead children for propaganda purposes.

This week’s cover of a popular German news magazine depicting US President Donald Trump draped in the American flag while giving a stiff-armed Nazi salute drew sharp criticism from a prominent Jewish group.
Stern magazine’s illustration was part of a cover story headlined “Sein Kampf,” which translates as “His Struggle” and is a play on Adolf Hitler’s infamous “Mein Kampf.”
Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center said it has been “outspoken in criticizing President Trump for failing to make a distinction between Nazis and KKK protesters and those who opposed them” but “the depiction of the president as a latter-day Hitler by a major German publication is untrue and beyond the pale.”
It said “Germans must surely know that by misappropriating” Nazi symbols, “they belittle and becloud” past crimes.

The International Business Times reports:
Whoever came up with the headline clearly didn’t read the actual story, which states:
Israeli broadcaster Channel Two reported that most of the people on the list are Arab Israelis. … But two of the Isis recruits on the list are reportedly Jews who have converted to Islam, according to the Times of Israel.
So most of the “Jews fighting for ISIS” aren’t Jews but Arabs, and the two ISIS “Jews” no longer identify as being Jewish.
The headline writer has simply assumed, incorrectly, that all Israelis are Jews. The result is an inflammatory headline that falsely associates Jews with a murderous Islamist terror organization.

UPDATE
Shortly after the publication of this critique, the IBT amended the headline to more accurately reflect the story. We commend the IBT for taking prompt action.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has been imprisoning and harassing Palestinian journalists. And many major U.S. outlets have failed to cover the repression.
The PA’s General Intelligence Service arrested five Palestinian journalists on Aug. 8, 2017. They were held on suspicion of “leaking sensitive information to hostile authorities,” according to a Jerusalem Post report (“Palestinian Authority arrests five journalists for ‘leaking’ sensitive information,” August 9). All five were arrested on the same night. Two of the “journalists,” Tariq Abu Zayd and Ahmad Halaika, work for al-Aqsa TV, a propaganda outlet for Hamas, a rival of the Fatah movement that dominates the PA. The other three were Qutaiba Kasem of the Asdaa website, Amer Abu Arafa of the Shebab news agency, and Mamdouh Hamamreh of the pro-Hamas al-Quds television.
The Jerusalem Post quoted an anonymous who Palestinian journalist who speculated, “The arrests might be aimed at pressuring Hamas to release Fouad Jaradah, a reporter for the PA’s Palestine TV, who was arrested in Gaza on June 8 and was later accused of collaborating with the authority.” The paper also highlighted that the arrests came on the heel of increased PA repression of journalists, including the June 2017 decision to block access to websites that support Hamas or Muhammad Dahlan, a rival who was exiled by PA President Mahmoud Abbas several years ago.
The families of those arrested by the PA characterized the detention as Abbas’ “revenge,” Ha’aretz noted.

Continued outrage over the rally of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, has scuttled plans by an upstate New York gun show organizer to display a writing desk used by Adolf Hitler.
The show organizer planned to display the desk, a chair and a valet stand from Hitler’s Munich apartment at the two-day show at the Saratoga Springs City Center that begins Sept. 2.
But center executive Director Ryan McMahon nixed the plan after getting complaints from the community.
Show organizer David Petronis says the furniture will still, however, be going up for auction in Ohio.
The New Eastcoast Arms Collectors Associates has held the gun show for years.
This year’s show also is to include the display of a Confederate general’s frock coat and other Civil War memorabilia.

Parents of children born with Tay-Sachs disease talk about “three deaths.”
There is the moment when parents first learn that their child has been diagnosed with the fatal disease. Then there is the moment when the child’s condition has deteriorated so badly — blind, paralyzed, non-responsive — that he or she has to be hospitalized. Then there’s the moment, usually by age 5, when the child finally dies.
There used to be an entire hospital unit — 16 or 17 beds at Kingsbook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn — devoted to taking care of these children. It was often full, with a waiting list that admitted new patients only when someone else’s child had died.
But by the late 1990s that unit was totally empty, and it eventually shut down. Its closure was a visible symbol of one of the most dramatic Jewish success stories of the past 50 years: the near-eradication of a deadly genetic disease.
Since the ‘70s, the incidence of Tay-Sachs has fallen by more than 90 percent among Jews, thanks to a combination of scientific advances and volunteer community activism that brought screening for the disease into synagogues, Jewish community centers and, eventually, routine medical care.
Until 1969, when doctors discovered the enzyme that made testing possible to determine whether parents were carriers of Tay-Sachs, 50 to 60 affected Jewish children were born each year in the United States and Canada. After mass screenings began in 1971, the numbers declined to two to five Jewish births a year, said Karen Zeiger, whose first child died of Tay-Sachs.

Basketball legend Mickey Berkowitz on Wednesday capped his illustrious career by becoming the first Israeli player to be selected into the International Basketball Federation Hall of Fame.
Berkowitz, the second Israeli to be named to the FIBA Hall of Fame after journalist and former sports official Noah Klieger, will be inducted during a special ceremony on Sept. 30 at FIBA headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
Widely considered the greatest Israeli basketball player of all time, Berkowitz won 16 Israeli championships, 13 State Cups and two European cups while playing with Maccabi Tel Aviv. He also led the Israeli national team to second place at the 1979 European Championships.
Joining Berkowitz in this year's Hall of Fame class are: Shaquille O'Neal (U.S.), Toni Kukoc (Croatia), Rajiza Mujanovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Pero Cameron (New Zealand) and Valdis Valters (Latvia). Coaching great Dusan Ivkovic (Serbia) will also be inducted.
They were selected from a list of more than 150 candidates.
The American "Dream Team," which won the gold medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, will also be inducted on the 25th anniversary of its historic appearance.

On July 9, 1943, newly-elected member of the Irish parliament Oliver Flanagan rose to make his maiden speech.
“There is one thing that Germany did and that was to rout the Jews out of their country,” he declared, saying that Ireland should follow suit. “They crucified our savior 1,900 years ago and they are crucifying us every day of the week.”
No one objected to Flanagan’s words. Certainly, his constituents did not appear unduly concerned. A year later, Flanagan was re-elected to the Dail, Ireland’s lower house of parliament, with twice as many votes as he had previously received.
He would continue to hold the seat for the next four decades, and, rising through the ranks of the Fine Gael party, would go on to serve in the government and enjoy a brief stint as Ireland’s Minister of Defense in the 1970s.
Shortly after that now notorious speech, Flanagan was on his feet again in the Dail, questioning the Irish prime minister on plans for the country to take in 500 Jewish children from France. Under pressure, Éamon de Valera denied that the children were Jewish. Flanagan’s intervention, however, had the desired effect and the political row he had helped to stoke ensured that Ireland ultimately opted to leave the children to their fate.
While the virulence of Flanagan’s anti-Semitism may have been unusual, Ireland, which adopted a position of neutrality during the war, displayed precious little sympathy for Europe’s persecuted Jews. As Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times has argued, Irish policy was “infected with a toxic combination of anti-Semitism and self-pity.”

A lonely monkey at an Israeli zoo has found a way to soothe her maternal urges: by adopting a chicken.
Niv, an Indonesian black macaque, has spent the past week caressing, cleaning and playing with the bird at the Ramat Gan Safari Park near Tel Aviv.
“It seems that Niv, who is four years old and has reached the age of sexual maturity, has difficulty finding a partner,” the zoo’s spokeswoman Mor Porat said.
“This probably explains the maternal instinct she expresses to this chicken,” he said.
The bird, which doesn’t have a name, could easily escape through the bars but chooses to stay near Niv.
“These kinds of relationships are rare,” Porat told AFP. “Sometimes macaques kill and eat chickens that enter their pens or play with them until they die.”

The Venus research satellite, operated by the Israel Space Agency at the Science and Technology Ministry, transmitted its first images from outer space on Wednesday, among them images of the Jerusalem area.
The state-of-the-art imagery makes it possible to see Jerusalem and its environs with unprecedented quality.
The Jerusalem area is prone to brush fires, particularly during dry seasons. The information Venus provides will help scientists develop new methods of characterizing the area’s ecosystem, understand and reduce risk factors for the fires, and study the effects of global warming.
“The beauty of Jerusalem can also be seen from outer space,” Israeli Science and Technology Minister Ofir Akunis said. “This is just the beginning. In the coming years all of humanity will benefit from these images, which will help trailblazing research in the fields of environment protection, earth sciences, water and food.”
The Venus satellite was launched on Aug. 1 from French Guyana, with its mission to last three and a half years. It is a joint project between Israel and France’s National Center for Space Studies. The satellite was built by Israel Aerospace Industries and includes a sophisticated Elbit Systems-designed camera capable of snapping photos on 12 different wavelengths, and a new electric engine developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

After an 8-year-old girl picked up her little sister from kindergarten, she picked up a little something else from the ground on her way back home — an extremely rare 2,000-year-old “half-shekel” coin.
When she returned to her home in the settlement of Halamish that day last May, Hallel Halevy did a Google search for “ancient coins” and came up with something that looked like a match. So, she of course put it in her special little box where she kept her prized little mirror and her favorite necklace. “Childhood treasures,” laughed Hallel, a rising fourth grader, in conversation with The Times of Israel on Thursday.
And there the coin stayed until about a week ago, when her 11-year-old sister glimpsed it and advised her to show their father.
“I recognized that it may be a genuine ancient coin,” said father Shimon, a lawyer. But lacking the proper education to confirm it, he took a picture on his cell phone and sent it to the wife of a local scholar, Bar-Ilan University Prof. Zohar Amar.
Amar, a historian of ancient Land of Israel flora and fauna, had actually written an essay on the wine presses in the nearby archaeological site, Chubalta, near which the coin was found. Amar was intrigued by what he saw and asked Shimon to bring the coin to his house so he and his wife, Tamar, who is also knowledgable on such subjects, could study it.
At first glance, the Amar couple thought it was a rare full shekel coin, minted by Jews during the Great Jewish Revolt against the Romans prior to the destruction of the Second Temple. They were partly right.

Turns out they did have her in Israel, and Gadot immediately realized the opportunity she was being handed, both as an actor and as a feminist. "I've had my moments where I've felt like men were misbehaving – nothing sexual, but inappropriate in a sexist way. Dismissive. Life wasn't always rosy and peachy for me as a woman in the world." Even after she landed the role, she was worried about being thought weak, so she waited to tell her Justice League co-stars that she was pregnant. "I didn't want attention," she says. "The default should be that women get the job done, but there's a long way to go and a lot of reprogramming that needs to be done to both genders."
Nor was it immaterial that Wonder Woman – who, Gadot says, "stands for love and hope and acceptance and fighting evil"– debuted in 1941, the year America entered World War II. While Gadot's father is a sixth-generation Israeli, her mother's mother escaped Europe just before the war. Her mother's father, who was 13 when the Nazis came to his native Czechoslovakia, was not so lucky. His father died in the army. The rest of his family was sent to Auschwitz, where his mother and brother died in the gas chambers. After the war, he made his way to Israel alone. "His entire family was murdered – it's unthinkable," says Gadot. "He affected me a lot. After all the horrors he'd seen, he was like this damaged bird, but he was always hopeful and positive and full of love. If I was raised in a place where these values were not so strong, things would be different. But it was very easy for me to relate to everything that Wonder Woman stands for."
Now, Wonder Woman was Gadot's story to tell, and she and director Patty Jenkins were obsessive about getting it right. "It was almost emotional, because we were so united in our desire to make something so delightful that people didn't mind also talking about this deeper issue," says Jenkins. Gadot had trained for eight months to put on muscle – "Strength is not something you can fake"– but she also felt that the most feminist approach would be for Wonder Woman to remain feminine, to be strong because of, rather in spite of, being a woman. "I didn't want to play the cold-hearted warrior. We didn't want to fall into the clichés." Instead, she and Jenkins thought long and hard about how a woman raised only by women would respond when plunked into a world dominated by men.

Israeli actress Gal Gadot had an easy time relating to what Wonder Woman — the superhero she plays on the big screen — stands for because of what her late Holocaust survivor grandfather taught her, she told Rolling Stone magazine in its latest issue.
Gal Gadot on the latest cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Photo: Screenshot.
Gadot’s grandfather was 13 when Nazis invaded his native country of Czechoslovakia. His father died in the army while the rest of his family was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where his mother and brother died in the gas chambers. After the war, Gadot’s grandfather traveled alone to Israel.
“His entire family was murdered — it’s unthinkable,” Gadot told Rolling Stone. “He affected me a lot. After all the horrors he’d seen, he was like this damaged bird, but he was always hopeful and positive and full of love. If I was raised in a place where these values were not so strong, things would be different. It was very easy for me to relate to everything that Wonder Woman stands for.”
She added that the Amazonian superhero represented “love and hope and acceptance and fighting evil.”
Gadot shared a photo of her grandfather and a tribute to him on Instagram in April in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The behaviour of the police was strange enough throughout this tragic night. Further questions were soon to be raised about the handling of the case. First, while the murder and its circumstances were reported almost instantly within the Jewish community and by the press agency AFP, the mainstream media didn’t mention it at all for two days until BFMTV, a 24-hour news channel, quoted at least one AFP dispatch on April 6 on its website.
Likewise, very little was shown or said about a protest march by 1,000 people in the Vaucouleurs Street neighbourhood on April 9. Considering the enormity of the crime, the reporting remained bafflingly low-key.
Things changed only after Sarah Halimi’s relatives and their lawyers convened a press conference on May 22 with the support of Jewish community leaders.
On June 1, 17 prominent French intellectuals, from philosophers Alain Finkielkraut, Marcel Gauchet, and Michel Onfray, to historians Jacques Julliard and Georges Bensoussan, to demographer Michèle Tribalat and sociologist Jean-Pierre Le Goff, called for “full light” in the Halimi case — the very words President Macron would later use — in a collective statement published by Le Figaro. From then on, the mainstream media devoted more space to the case, and, ironically, wondered why they had not paid it more attention earlier.
Axel Roux, a journalist for Le Journal du Dimanche, a widely read Sunday paper, admitted on June 4 that when he started investigating the case, he was “stunned” by the paucity of the media archives and the “minimalist” approach taken by his profession.
No less disturbing was the public officials’ silence. French members of the cabinet or government officials usually react to such crimes ex officio. Some may even take a more personal stand.
For instance, President Macron tweeted on August 14 his concern for the victims and their relatives just a few hours after a car ran into a pizzeria and killed a 13-year-old girl.
No such reactions occurred after Sarah Halimi’s murder, even though the Minister of the Interior granted an emergency audience to the leaders of the Jewish community. Neither did the political class comment publicly, except for the then National Front presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, who made an indirect statement on April 11.
Third, there is the legal angle. The issue of the attacker’s sanity, and thus of his penal responsibility, was left undecided for more than four months, and is still pending. Dr Daniel Zagury, the noted psychiatric expert commissioned to deal with the case, is due to submit his report by the end of August.
Kobili Traore was first sent to two psychiatric hospitals. It was only on July 11 that he was formally indicted for murder and kidnapping and transferred to the Fresnes prison.

To some of us, it is hardly a secret that anti-Semitic violence is on the rise in Europe, or that the chief perpetrators are Muslims. But many politicians and news media have been so indefatigable in their efforts to obscure this uncomfortable fact that one is always grateful for official -- or, at least, semi-official -- confirmation of what everyone already knows.
It is a pleasure, then, to report that a new study, Antisemitic Violence in Europe, 2005-2015 -- written by Johannes Due Enstad of the Oslo-based Center for Studies of the Holocaust and the University of Oslo, and jointly published by both institutions -- is refreshingly, even startlingly, honest about its subject. Enstad notes that while anti-Semitic violence has declined in the U.S. since 1994, it has been on the rise worldwide. That, of course, includes Europe -- most of it, anyway.
Examining statistics from France, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Russia, Enstad points out that one of these seven countries "clearly stands out with a very low number" of anti-Semitic incidents despite its "relatively large Jewish population"; the country in question, he adds, "is also the only case in which there is little to indicate that Jews avoid displaying their identity in public." In addition, it is the only one of the six countries in which the majority of perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence are not Muslims. Which country is Enstad referring to? Russia.
That Russia is relatively free of anti-Semitic violence may sound surprising to anyone familiar with the words Cossack and refusenik, but it actually makes sense. Would-be Jew-bashers in Russia know that if they're arrested for committing acts of violence, the consequences won't be pretty. In western Europe, by contrast, the courts are lenient, the terms of confinement short, and the prisons extremely comfortable. And while Muslims know that they are a protected class in Western Europe, able to commit all kinds of transgressions with near-impunity, that is far from being the case in Putin's Russia.

Immediately after last week's terrorist attack in Barcelona, a pro-Islamic State website ?posted a video from the scene along with a message in Arabic saying, "Terror is ?filling the hearts of the Crusader in the land of Andalusia."?
Let's unpack that. "Crusader" is a term jihadists use, pejoratively, for ?Christians. More specifically, of course, it refers to the Christian soldiers who ?fought a series of wars, beginning in 1095, to recover Jerusalem and other ?parts of the Holy Land from the Muslim armies that had burst out of Arabia ?four centuries earlier. ?
Andalusia indicates the territories of the Iberian Peninsula that were conquered ?by Muslim armies from North Africa beginning in 711. The Reconquista, a war ?waged by Christians to recover those territories, ended in 1492. ?
Here's the larger point: To those discomfited by theological or even ideological ?explanations for most modern terrorism, one alternative explanation is this: ?The killers are revanchists. Their motivation is to reverse territorial losses. ?
They have suffered such losses, they believe, in Europe, the Middle East and ?Asia. The want to fill "the hearts" of the "others" now living in such lands with ?terror in order to drive them out or at least relegate them to inferior status. In ?other words, these revanchists also are supremacists.?
In the longer term, their goal is grander. Finland, which also suffered a terrorist ?attack last week, was never part of a caliphate or Islamic empire. ?Islamic State publishes an online magazine called Rumiyah, Arabic for Rome, ?which they believe must be conquered by Muslims, as was the Christian ?capital of Constantinople (now Istanbul). But priority goes to formerly Muslim ?lands.?

In Tuesday's speech, President Trump denounced the flow of U.S. money to Pakistan while that nation harbors terrorists. South Asian Islamism is an enormous problem, and yet a great deal of the discussion in America surrounding Islamism focuses on the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood.
But the Muslim Brotherhood is far from the only Islamist network in the United States; it is simply the best known. Other Islamist movements also benefit from government ignorance about the diversity of Islam and Islamism across the globe. The South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), for instance, has received millions from the U.S. taxpayer for its powerful network of charities and welfare services, which are designed to obtain external funding as well as legitimize JI as a representative voice of Muslims, in both America and South Asia.
Although JI has its own ideologues, literature, and infrastructure, it is often described as the South Asian "cousin" of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qazi Ahmad Hussain, head of JI in Pakistan, has declared: "We consider ourselves as an integral part of the Brotherhood and the Islamic movement in Egypt....Our nation is one."
JI's history is bloody. During the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh, JI fighters helped Pakistani forces massacre hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis seeking independence from Pakistan.
Several JI leaders guilty of these war crimes fled to the West, where they helped establish JI organizations that operated as community leadership groups. Two western JI leaders have since been sentenced to death in absentia for these killings by a war-crimes tribunal.
One of those convicted, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, served as a leading official of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a prominent American Muslim organization. Twice a year, ICNA jointly hosts a conference with the Muslim American Society (MAS), a leading Muslim Brotherhood institution. Unsurprisingly, these conferences are filled with extremist preachers. Ahmed Taha, an ICNA-MAS official who organized their conference in December, has republished posts on social media stating: "O Muslim, O servant of God. There is a Jew behind me, come kill him."
Despite its long history of extremism, in 2016 ICNA received $1.3 million of taxpayers' money as part of a grant awarded by the Department of Homeland Security.

The US delegation headed by White House adviser Jared Kushner told Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas that there is no reason to freeze building in Judea and Samaria.
According to al-Hayat, Abbas requested the US pressure Israel to freeze Jewish building in Judea and Samaria either fully or partially. This, Abbas said, is one of the preconditions necessary for peace talks.
Kushner, together with US Special Middle East Envoy Jason Greenblatt, told Abbas they have no intention of requesting Israel freeze building. This, they explained is for two reasons: 1) The talks must be held without preconditions, and 2) Israel has compromised much for the sake of the PA, but the PA has not taken steps to build confidence and has, in fact, acted in the opposite manner.
They also told Abbas that even though they believe the two-state solution is ideal, talks must be held without preconditions and the exact borders should be negotiated between the two sides.
The PA publicly praised the US delegation and said, "We appreciate the US' activities to further peace and work with us towards that goal. However, this is a difficult and complex issue.

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas told the United States that he will continue to pay terrorists' families for terror attacks against Jews.
"I do not intend to cease paying salaries to the families of prisoners and martyrs, even if it means I lose my position," Abbas told Kan 11. "I will continue paying their salaries until my dying day."
US Special Middle East Envoy Jason Greenblatt and US President Donald Trump's son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner on Thursday met Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Later, they met Abbas in his Ramallah headquarters.

The Zionist regime of Israel will not exist in 25 years, the Commander of the Iranian army, Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi said on Friday.
Speaking at a cultural event in the city of Qom and quoted by the Tasnim news agency, Mousavi stated that Iran will be the side which decides how to end a war, if one were to break out against the country.
Mousavi described Iran as a “symbol of resistance” against global hegemony, saying the world has now realized that it is impossible to try military engagement with Iran.
The Iranian general is hardly the only Iranian official to have threatened Israel. In December, the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated that Israel could be destroyed within 25 years through a united “Palestinian struggle”.
“The Zionist regime -- as we have already said -- will cease to exist in the next 25 years if there is a collective and united struggle by the Palestinians and the Muslims against the Zionists,” he said.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations on Saturday called on the Security Council to address the Hezbollah terror group’s “weapons buildup’ in southern Lebanon, echoing comments made by the United States envoy to the UN.
“US Ambassador Haley is correct. UNIFIL cannot continue to remain blind to the weapons buildup in southern Lebanon and they must put an end to Hezbollah’s Security Council violations to ensure calm in our region,” Danny Danon said, referring to the UN force tasked with keeping the peace on Lebanon’s southern border with Israel.
“I call on the Security Council to adopt a more robust UNFIL mandate that will address the serious security threats posed by Hezbollah,” he added.
Dannon’s comments mirrored those made Nikki Haley on Friday, in which she accused the commander of UNIFIL of of turning a blind eye to Hezbollah weapons smuggling.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Friday called for nuclear inspectors to be granted access to Iranian military bases, Reuters reported.
She urged the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to use all its authority to ensure Tehran’s compliance with the nuclear deal it signed with world powers in 2015.
“I have good confidence in the IAEA, but they are dealing with a country that has a clear history of lying and pursuing covert nuclear programs,” Haley told a news conference after returning from a trip to Vienna, where the IAEA is based, according to Reuters.
”We are encouraging the IAEA to use all the authorities they have and to pursue every angle possible “to verify compliance with the nuclear deal,” she added.
Haley made her comments at the United Nations after returning from the visit to Vienna, where she met with IAEA as part of President Donald Trump’s review of the Iran nuclear deal made by former President Barack Obama.

Three months after indefinitely delaying the potential move of the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, President Donald Trump has retained another core policy of preceding administrations by promising that annual American funding of $300 million to a UN agency that caters solely to Palestinian refugees will not be halted, Foreign Policy reported this week.
“Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, has privately assured the UN Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, that the United States, which provides more than $300 million to the agency each year, will maintain its current levels of funding to the organization,” the journal reported. “‘America has long been committed to funding UNRWA’s important mission, and that will continue,’ said one official at the U.S. mission to the United Nations.”
Foreign Policy noted that the US pledge runs “contrary to the administration’s push to rein in spending on UN relief programs elsewhere. It reflects growing concern that the imposition of sharp cuts to Palestinian relief programs could thwart the White House campaign to restart Middle East peace talks, and inject further political instability in a region that stands permanently perched on the brink of political upheaval.”
The decision also puts the US sharply at odds with the Israeli government. While Israel has historically recognized the stabilizing role played by UNRWA in providing key services to the 750,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants — who now number around five million people — more recently, it has urged that the agency be dissolved into the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which caters to the remainder of the world’s current 65 million refugees.

Canada announced on Thursday it will donate up to $25 million to the United Nations Relief and Works (UNRWA) which helps so-called “Palestinian refugees”, its Minister of International Development and Marie-Claude Bibeau said on Thursday.
B'nai Brith Canada expressed concerns over the move, saying it would share those concerns with the Canadian government.
"Palestinian refugees deserve the right to be able to go to a school, receive proper health care and get other basic services. Canada’s renewed engagement is part of our long-standing commitment to a more peaceful and stable region," Bibeau said on Thursday in a statement quoted by the Sputnik news agency.
The bulk of Canada's aid package to UNRWA — $20 million — will go toward helping UNRWA provide basic education, health and livelihood needs for millions of Palestinian refugees, particularly women and children, the statement said.
The remaining $5 million in assistance will go toward UNRWA's Syria Emergency Appeal, which provides life-saving assistance to more than 480,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria and Lebanon, added Bibeau.

Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Chairman Stephen Greenberg and Executive Vice Chairman and CEO Malcolm Hoenlein called on United High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein not to disseminate an anti-Israel "blacklist" of businesses in Judea and Samaria harming Jews who live or own companies in the area.
The blatantly discriminatory "blacklist" was compiled pursuant to a resolution adopted by the Human Rights Council in March 2016. It ignores the thousands of Arab families in Judea and Samaria who are employed by the Israeli businesses.
At the time the resolution was passed, the Conference of Presidents leaders called it "a further stain on the legitimacy of the Human Rights Council."
This resolution "stands as yet another insult to the millions of victims of human rights violations around the world whose desperate plight the Council has neither the inclination nor the time to address because of its lopsided focus on Israel," they said.
Greenberg and Hoenlein added that "the resolution is one of the most repugnant examples of the Council’s abusive manipulation of human rights principles to target Israel and should be repudiated."

This summer, the Chinese navy set up a naval base in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa—Beijing’s first-ever overseas naval base. Its location atop the Mandeb Strait, between Yemen and Africa, allows China to guard a waterway that is crucial for both its oil imports and its exports to Europe. Gideon Elazar comments:
The establishment of the base follows several years of increasing Chinese involvement in Africa and the Middle East. . . . The Chinese vision of a new maritime Silk Road is closely related to the official celebration of Zheng He, the early 15th-century [Muslim] admiral who brought China fame and power through his voyages in Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean to Africa. . . . Zheng He’s voyages are frequently noted as a symbol of a world order based on trade rather than violence and controlled by the benevolent hegemony of the Chinese imperial court.
In Chinese publications of recent years, Zheng He’s fleets are glorified as a tool of regional economic growth, scientific research, peaceful cultural exchange, and universal friendship. It is worth noting that while Zheng He’s voyages collected treasures (such as the famous giraffe brought back for the Imperial Court from Africa), its main objective was to display the Ming dynasty’s power and dominance and to collect tribute from local rulers. Indeed, a number of rulers who refused to recognize the hegemony of the Chinese emperor were punished and taken back to China as prisoners.
Zheng is particularly poignant as he is often perceived as both a testament to Chinese greatness and a symbol of China’s missed opportunities. The dismantling of his ships and shipyards by the Ming emperors is widely perceived as one of the causes of the gradual decline of Chinese power and the eventual rise of the West. The reference to Zheng He and the Silk Road can therefore be seen as implying that the mistake made 500 years ago is now being corrected, as the Middle Kingdom returns to its former centrality.

Israel’s security services last month recorded 222 terrorist attacks against Israelis, the highest number in any month since December 2015.
The attacks resulted in the killing of five Israelis, two soldiers and three civilians, and the wounding of seven, according to the Israel Security Agency’s monthly report on July, published earlier this week.
The tally for July was more than double the 94 attacks recorded in June and nearly double the average of 121 attacks per month from January 2016 onward. The Israel Security Agency (Shabak) recorded a total of 2,314 attacks during that period, in which 33 victims died and 223 were wounded.
Last month was among the deadliest in that period in terms of terrorist attack fatalities, second only to November 2015 when terrorists murdered 10 Israelis.
The surge in attacks in July occurred after three Muslim terrorists murdered two Druze policemen on the Temple Mount.

Salah Hamouri, who served time for attempting to assassinate a leader and for his membership in a terrorist organization, was re-arrested on Wednesday, according to French media reports.
Hamouri, who is half-French, was arrested on charges of engagement with illegal political organizations in a pre-dawn raid on his home in east Jerusalem. He remains in police custody.
In 2005, Hamouri was arrested for planning to assassinate Ovadia Yosef, the founder of the ultra-orthodox party Shas, and for his involvement with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He remained in prison for three years before his trial, and then spent a subsequent five years in jail. He was one of the 1,027 prisoners who was freed during the 2011 prisoner exchange in which Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit returned home after five years in captivity in Gaza.
The French consulate in Jerusalem said they were reviewing the case closely with their associates in Paris. A diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also told a reporter at Le Monde that the consulate's staff were working to provide consular assistance and legal representation to Hamouri.
Hamouri's wife - who has been banned from entering Israel- posted a plea on her Facebook page asking France to "act with conviction in protecting and ensuring the release of [its] fellow citizen who once again is suffering from Israeli arbitrariness."

The Palestinian Authority has suspended plans to force more than 6,000 of its employees in the Gaza Strip into early retirement, prime minister Rami Hamdallah said on Saturday.
The move was announced last month and seen as the latest attempt to squeeze the Hamas terror group, which rules Gaza.
Many of the workers are in the health and education ministries, and aid officials are very concerned about the implications for the two million inhabitants of the impoverished coastal territory.
“We decided, in consultation with President Mahmoud Abbas, to allow education and health employees who were recently (asked) to retire early to continue their work in the ministry,” a statement from Hamdallah on the official Palestinian news agency Wafa said.
It did not say whether all 6,150 employees would now be kept on, but said the decision had been taken to “ensure the provision of services to citizens in the strip”.

In a video released on Wednesday, ISIS for the first time used a child of purported US origin to openly threaten the United States.
The boy's message seems to be a prepared speech, and mentions US President Donald Trump by name. In it, he warns that ISIS' battle will "not end" in Raqqa or Mosul but rather "in your lands."
"So get ready, for the fighting has just begun," the boy emphasized.
According to ISIS, the 10-year-old boy arrived in Syria with his mother two years ago. His father, they claim, is a member of the US military and fought in Iraq.
None of these claims have been proven true.
State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said the video was "depraved," regardless of whether or not the boy is indeed a US citizen.
"It's another example of how wrong and evil ISIS is," she said.

In an interview with a sports outlet on Thursday, Lebanese-American porn star-turned sports blogger Mia Khalifa announced that she has been receiving death threats from ISIS.
Khalifa said that ISIS members have posted photos of her, bloodied and beheaded, on social media outlets. While she said the posts worry her, she doesn't want to "show weakness...that's exactly what they're looking for."
Khalifa is no stranger to threats and criticism. Estranged from her parents after she began her work in the porn industry, she has been the center of national scandals in Lebanon. Formerly the most popular star on the site PornHub, she has been denounced by politicians and private citizens alike.
She was born in Beirut and lived there until her family relocated to the United States when she was ten. Originating from a majority-Muslim country, her profession has earned her considerable scorn.
Khalifa, who is Christian, came under intense scrutiny for a sexual video in which she wore a hijab. Saying the scene was satirical, she said she was surprised about the anger that came from viewers.

As the Syrian regime reverses its military losses in much of the country's strategically important west and foreign states cut support for rebel forces, diplomats from Washington to Riyadh are asking representatives of Syria's opposition to come to terms with President Bashar Assad's political survival.
With the country's civil war more than halfway through its seventh year, Assad and his allies are now in control of Syria's four largest cities and its Mediterranean coast. Helped by Russian air power and Iranian-sponsored militias, pro-government forces are marching steadily across the energy-rich Homs province to reach the Euphrates River valley.
Western and regional rebel patrons, currently more focused on advancing their own interests rather than on accomplishing regime change, are shifting their alliances and have ceased calling on Assad to step down.
"There is no conceivable military alignment that's going to be able to remove him," said former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, now a fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
"Everyone, including the U.S., has recognized that Assad is staying."

This month, the peer-reviewed Institute of Transportation Engineers Journal released its latest issue, an event normally of little interest to laypeople. The volume featured a seemingly anodyne article entitled, “Evaluation of Road Safety Based on Geometric Design Consistency Using Smart Phone GPS.” But upon closer inspection, one of its authors stood out: The piece was co-written by Shahriar Afandizadeh Zargari, Reza Jalalkamali, and … Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Ahmadinejad—the notorious homophobe, anti-Semite, Holocaust denier, 9/11 truther, and former president of Iran widely thought to have employed electoral fraud in his reelection bid—was credited merely as “a faculty member of Iran University of Science and Technology” whose “research interest focuses on road and transportation” with “20 years of experience in this field.” Ahmadinejad does indeed possess a doctorate in civil engineering.
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Soon after the article appeared in print, however, it disappeared from the journal’s web site entirely. I reached out to ITE’s executive director, Jeffrey Paniati, and he explained what had transpired. “The article has been retracted from our electronic edition of the publication pending review by the ITE Board of Directors,” he said. “Mr. Ahmadinejad’s affiliation with the government of Iran was not identified when the article was submitted and the ITE leadership is reviewing our policies and procedures with regard to review and acceptance of articles for the ITE Journal. It will be a number of months before this review is completed.”
The retraction of Ahmadinejad’s piece comes amidst somewhat similar occurrences in professional settings in the United States, where individuals who marched in the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville have returned home only to be fired by their employers. Many seem increasingly unwilling to be involved with those who espouse hateful views, whether the person is a member of the alt-right or the former head of an oppressive regime.

Speaking on the Al-Jazeera network's "Opposite Direction" talk show on July 11, Libyan expat Dr. Hadi Shalouf, a former member of the ICC, said that the Arab peoples are not used to democracy and are not ready for it. The other guest on the show, Syrian journalist Khalil Al-Miqdad, said that many of the Arab rulers had foreign roots and that the American invasion of Iraq was a conspiracy. "According to the Torah, Judaism, and the clash of civilizations, Israel can only survive if Iraq ceases to exist," he said. Dr. Shalouf countered that the problem lies with the Arab peoples and that the internal crises plaguing the Arab world were local, not foreign, products. "We are living in the Dark Ages," he said. "Our peoples need a long period of time in order to awaken from their slumber and lay the foundations [of democracy]."

A judge in Belarus cleared the way for the construction of apartments atop two former Jewish cemeteries.
Separately, unidentified individuals smashed 24 headstones in a Jewish cemetery in Ukraine.
Eduard Dolinsky, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, in a statement wrote that the incident in Ukraine was discovered Tuesday at the Jewish cemetery of Svaliava in the country’s west. The incident was reported to police, who currently have no suspects.
Earlier this month, a mass grave was discovered during construction near the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk. Locals initially ignored the find because they assumed the bones belonged to Jews buried in a nearby cemetery, Radio Svoboda reported, but the works were stopped because the bones were thought to be of non-Jews purged by communist authorities.
On Monday, the Tsentralny District Court in Belarus allowed the planned construction of the apartments on the former Jewish cemetery in the eastern city of Gomel, saying it lacks the jurisdiction to take any action, Radio Svoboda reported.
The judge was ruling on a motion seeking an injunction against the construction filed by Yakov Goodman, a Jewish-American activist for the preservation of Jewish heritage sites in his native Belarus. Local authorities last year approved a project for the construction of two luxury apartment buildings on the grounds of a former cemetery on Sozhskaya Street.

A radical Muslim cleric who was convicted of stirring up racial hatred in Britain and deported to Jamaica was indicted Friday in New York on charges of recruiting would-be terrorists.
Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal was arrested in Jamaica.
Jamaica’s Ministry of National Security said that el-Faisal was arrested in the capital of Kingston and taken to his house in the nearby parish of St. Catherine, where police executed a search warrant. Authorities in Jamaica said el-Faisal is scheduled to appear later in court, although they did not provide a date. He is expected to be extradited to New York after his court appearance in Jamaica.
El-Faisal was arrested after a months-long sting carried out by an undercover New York Police Department officer who communicated with him by email, text and video chat.
According to the Manhattan district attorney, el-Faisal offered to help the undercover officer travel to the Middle East and join fighters with the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS.

In 1943, Columbia Pictures produced Hollywood’s first Holocaust film, None Shall Escape, which tells the story of Wilhelm Grimm’s transformation from likable schoolteacher to embittered World War I veteran to SS officer. After decades of obscurity, the movie has returned to circulation. Thomas Doherty describes the climactic scene, in which Grimm presides over the deportation of the Jews from a Polish village:
Shot in noirish night-for-night photography, the deportation sequence shows the Jews of the village, and a shipment from Warsaw, being herded into box cars for transport to what can only be a death camp, not a concentration camp; the wails of the terrified victims ring out on the soundtrack. Grimm orders the rabbi to quiet his people, but the man has no intention of facilitating the Nazi depredations. Richard Hale, the actor who plays the rabbi, would later accrue countless credits as a character actor in film and television, but he never again commanded a moment so powerfully as in this, his first screen role. Framed in close-up, with minimal cutaways, he delivers a searing indictment of anti-Semitism—and a rousing call to arms. . . .
The Jews, [inspired by his words], run from the box cars and attack their guards, but the cause is hopeless: in an extended and excruciating bloodbath, the rebels are mowed down by Nazi machine guns. After the massacre, the unbowed rabbi tells Grimm, “We will never die—it will be you, all of you!”
Grimm shoots him point-blank in the stomach, but the rabbi is a hard man to kill. As the camera scans the bodies strewn on the ground and in the boxcars, he stands up and recites kaddish over his people.
The movie ends with a courtroom scene, where an unrepentant Grimm is on trial for his actions:

Are you ready for violet-colored potatoes? How about orange tobacco? Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science have figured out how to produce betalain pigments in plants and flowers that don’t normally have them.
If you’re thinking, “Who needs violet tomatoes?” you should know that red-violet and yellow betalain pigments contain healthful antioxidant properties. They’re also the basis for natural food dyes for products such as strawberry yogurt.
Antioxidant activity is 60 percent higher in betalain-producing tomatoes than in average ones, said Prof. Asaph Aharoni of Weizmann’s Plant and Environmental Sciences Department, who teamed up with Dr. Guy Polturak for the pigment research.
“Our findings may in the future be used to fortify a wide variety of crops with betalains in order to increase their nutritional value,” he said.
Betalain pigments also protect plants against gray mold, which annually causes crop losses worth billions of dollars. The Weizmann study showed that resistance to gray mold rose by 90 percent in plants engineered to make betalains.

Doctors at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem have developed a new method to monitor tumors without injecting patients with radioactive substances or exposing them to ionizing radiation. The method, reported in a study in the Nature Communications journal on Thursday, was developed by the director of the Center for Hyperpolarized MRI Molecular, Rachel Katz-Brull, and her team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Katz-Brull was able to show that using magnetic resonance imaging, the nucleus of a phosphorous atom can alert doctors to suspicious acidity levels in the body and hence to the existence of a possible tumor. The researchers used a special technique that allowed them to identify the nucleus more easily and more quickly, enabling it to appear to "shine" 10,000 times more brightly than normal.
"This diagnostic tool relates to the metabolic activity of the cells in a tumor or other in other tissue that may be suspicious," Katz-Brull said. "It may provide a better way to determine whether tumors are malignant or benign and help test the efficacy of treatment."

On the night of Rosh Hashanah, thousands of people will leave work, gather in congregations across the globe and worship God, the ruler of the world. Ten days later they will begin a fast and gather again to pray, this time atoning for their sins.
On both occasions they will praise Jesus Christ and pray for his return.
They are not Jews, nor are they Jews for Jesus. Rather, these congregants are members of an evangelical Christian movement called the Living Church of God. On the days Jews know as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, these Christians celebrate what they call the Feast of Trumpets and Day of Atonement.
“We’re not trying to be Jewish,” said Dexter Wakefield, a Living Church minister and the church’s spokesman. “We’re obeying God’s commandments. The holy days have great meaning for the Christians who keep them.”
Living Church of God is one of a few evangelical groups that observes Christianity as it believes Jesus observed it, according to the dictates of the Hebrew Bible. That means no Christmas and no Easter — holidays the church rejects as pagan in origin. It also means that members observe their Sabbath like the Jews: from Friday night to Saturday night. The mainstream Christian custom of observing the Sabbath on Sunday, they believe, is another deviation from the authentic Christianity of Christ.

American comedian and talk show host Conan O’Brien, who arrived in Israel to film a television special on the country, posted a video of himself to Twitter “brushing up” on his Hebrew.
In the video, which he filmed in an airplane bathroom en route to Israel, O’Brien points to a number of objects in the lavatory in order to “prove” he is on an El Al flight.
Starting with the lid of the trash can, on which is written “towel disposal” in English, O’Brien points to the Hebrew letters and says “and you can see right here, going the other way, towel disposal.”
“I actually recognize that from the Old Testament when Moses tells his people to listen to the commandments and also dispose of your towels,” he quips.
“He was a real neatnick,” O’Brien says of Moses. “Dispose of those towels he said.”

It’s an operation that only takes one hour, but it allows hundreds of children to face the future with a smile.
That’s the contribution of two plastic surgeons from the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, who recently returned from Africa where they were on a mission to correct facial deformities in local children.
Doctors Omri Emodi, a craniofacial surgeon, and Zach Sharony, a plastic surgeon, were working in Ghana on a mission organized by Operation Smile, a US based humanitarian organization, along with a team of surgeons and medical staff from 12 countries.
“If a child has a facial deformity, it can affect eating, drinking, speaking and, of course, his or her own self-image,” explained Emodi. “You walk with a sign on you, especially in Africa. You could easily be an outcast.”
Their patients ranged in age from a few months old to young men and women in their 20s. They came from all over Ghana, some as far as 500 miles away. Most of the operations were on cleft lips and palates, while others dealt with more complex surgeries on facial deformities

Guy Stern’s on-the-job training began 10 minutes after he landed at Omaha Beach — one of the Allied entry points into Normandy in 1944.
Three days earlier, the Allies had invaded Normandy on D-Day. The first German prisoner Stern, a recent graduate of an US Army interrogation training program, questioned was a sergeant from an artillery unit.
“I started asking questions: ‘Where is your company located?’” recalled Stern. Today 95, Stern still works at the Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, after an illustrious career in higher education. “He refused to talk. My feelings were that I was a failure.”
Then “an artillery shell [came] over,” said Stern. “We both hit the ground… After the shell explosion, there was a bit of dust. I got up immediately and told him to get up.
“He, of course, as an experienced soldier, [knew that if there was] one artillery shell, there was no reason not to think a second or third would follow. He must have been under the illusion that I was a death-defying soldier. He got up.”
Stern noted that “the fact that I was so ‘courageous,’ as he thought, was nothing more than inexperience. He was still lying on the ground… He got up again, and started answering the questions. I [thought to myself], ‘OK, you can do your job.’”
Stern and his fellow program graduates did their job in unique circumstances: They were German and Austrian Jews who had escaped the Nazis for the United States. Many of them, including Stern, left behind cherished family members. After World War II broke out, they used their knowledge of German language and culture as US army interrogators.

James Cameron did as white people so often do this week: he opened his mouth to share an unsolicited opinion when he could have as easily kept his mouth shut. In an interview with The Guardian on Thursday, the director called the first superhero movie directed by a woman and starring a female lead a “step backwards” for women. I agree – but for different reasons.

“All of the self-congratulatory back-patting Hollywood’s been doing over Wonder Woman has been so misguided,” Cameron said about the film. “She’s an objectified icon, and it’s just male Hollywood doing the same old thing! I’m not saying I didn’t like the movie but, to me, it’s a step backwards.” Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins fired back on Twitter Thursday night, saying female characters don’t need to always be “hard, tough, and troubled to be strong.” Jenkins added: “There is no right or wrong kind of powerful woman […and the film’s female audience] can surely choose and judge their own icons of progress.” Feminist twittersphere ripped into Cameron and gave Jenkins a standing ovation for her clapback.

Cameron wasn’t totally off-base in his comment: Wonder Woman — and lead actress Gal Gadot — are super sexualized; and the film’s success is undoubtedly tied to Gadot meeting gross beauty standards. There is a reason Jezebel asked this week if Gadot — but not a fat, disabled, or Muslim woman for example — could be cast as the next James Bond. But Cameron’s arrogance in thinking his opinion was relevant, reports of his own extremely controlling behavior around women, and the general lack of nuance in his comment makes him sound like a total buffoon. And I’m not mad about the internet going after buffoons.

What does piss me off though are the droves of feminists cheerleading Gadot in response. Women whose response to shitty old white dudes is to celebrate women who champion occupation and genocide. Women who think that experiencing sexism (or simply being a woman) is somehow sufficient for becoming an icon of progress. Jenkins assertion — that there is no right or wrong kind of powerful woman — is woefully oblivious and/or more likely, reveals a cruel disregard for the violence people of color experience at the hands of white women. There are certainly wrong ways to be a powerful woman; advocating for occupation, genocide, and colonialism, for example, fall squarely into that bucket. It is absurd to suggest otherwise.

I could care less about what James Cameron thinks of Wonder Woman’s attractiveness. But I do care about self-proclaimed feminists throwing their weight time and time again behind women who stand for state violence. IDGAF if Wonder Woman was a blockbuster directed by a woman. If its lead actress champions genocide and opposes Palestinian liberation, Wonder Woman is a step backwards for all women.

@feministing editor @mahrohj attacks 2 women in white-male-dominated Hollywood industry and claims to be feminist. What I can't understand is why Jahangiri fights against the women that made it- in a movie about important women. Jahangiri does it in most bigoted way- saying Gadot has no rights because of her nationality. Yes. She's an Israeli Jew so apparently she has no rights. Fake @mahrohj has the chutzpah to call herself a civil rights fighter while judging a woman because of her ethnicity, nationality and religion. Using the same standards of phony feminism she herself should be fought against because of her country's misconduct. But @mahrohj is so fake, it's easier for her to type BS about Middle Eastern woman from a Starbucks in DC, sipping almond latte. IN DC!!!

You need to celebrate a feminist-movie by @PattyJenks, a successful female director in male-dominated Hollywood, and @GalGadot a Middle East woman who made it. Instead bigotry blinds you, fills you with hate that you attack two women that made a successful movie about a powerful woman - and claim "feminism"....Seriously?

Violence against Muslim women — domestically or abroad — has not been entirely ignored by white feminists. In many ways, it’s been obsessed over. FGM, honor killings, acid attacks, sexual violence within insular Muslim communities are recognized, discussed, and fetishized. Much has been written on the problematic ways in which this obsession happens. How this discourse is instrumentalized by colonial and imperial projects. How it strips Muslim women of their contexts and intricacies. How it projects white egos onto brown and black women’s bodies.

What I want to comment on here though is not the ways in which white feminists obsess over us, but the moments in which they don’t. Hypervisibility has an insidious counterpart: “the singular obsession with private violence against ‘oppressed’ women by their ‘patriarchal’ husbands often excuses public violence perpetrated by others motivated by both Islamophobia and sexism,” explains Barbara Perry at the University of Ontario. ...

Why do white feminists only discuss violence against Muslim women when it is perpetrated by Muslim men?

In November 2013, Elena Zakusilo, a Ukrainian Jewish woman, appeared on the Ukrainian TV show "Lie Detector", revealing that she worked for the Israeli army and continued to do so.

"The first time I killed was difficult for me. I threw the weapon and said I wasn't going anywhere. But I went," she said and admitted to having killed civilians, including children.

As thousands of foreign 'lone soldiers' are serving in the Israeli military, Al Jazeera went to find out how and why Israel encourages volunteers from the Jewish diaspora and beyond to work in its army, both as paid soldiers on the front line and volunteers in non-combat roles.
What drives foreigners to join an army which is sometimes heavily criticised for its human rights violations? 

Palestine controlled the British Empire's lines of communications to the Far East. France, Britain's main ally in the war against Germany, was also a rival for influence in Palestine.
Under the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, the two countries divided up the Middle East into zones of influence but compromised on an international administration for Palestine. By helping the Zionists to take over Palestine, the British hoped to secure a dominant presence in the area and to exclude the French. The French called the British "Perfidious Albion". The Balfour Declaration was a prime example of this perennial perfidy.

 The French expressed a general sympathy for Zionism, but [Nahum] Sokolow then had the bold temerity to ask for it in writing. And he received it. On June 4, 1917, Cambon issued him a letter (on the prime minister’s authority), which not only anticipated the Balfour Declaration but cleared the way for it.
The Cambon letter, almost as forgotten as Sokolow, was addressed to him and is worth quoting in full:
You were good enough to present the project to which you are devoting your efforts, which has for its object the development of Jewish colonization in Palestine. You consider that, circumstances permitting, and the independence of the Holy Places being safeguarded on the other hand, it would be a deed of justice and of reparation to assist, by the protection of the Allied Powers, in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality [nationalité juive] in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago.
The French government, which entered this present war to defend a people wrongly attacked, and which continues the struggle to assure the victory of right over might, can but feel sympathy for your cause, the triumph of which is bound up with that of the Allies.
I am happy to give you herewith such assurance.
As Weizmann’s biographer Jehuda Reinharz has noted, the Cambon letter “in content and form was much more favorable to the Zionists than the watered-down formula of the Balfour Declaration” that followed it. The French accepted a rationale in terms of “justice” and “reparation,” and acknowledged the historical Jewish tie to the land.

Britain compounded its original mistake by writing the terms of the Balfour Declaration into the League of Nations' mandate for Palestine. What had been a mere promise by one great power to a minor ally now became a legally binding international instrument.

The Balfour Declaration is an historic statement for which HMG does not intend to apologise. We are proud of our role in creating the state of Israel.
The declaration was written in a world of competing imperial powers, in the midst of the First World War and in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire. In that context, establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in the land to which they had such strong historical and religious ties was the right and moral thing to do, particularly against the background of centuries of persecution.
Much has happened since 1917. We recognise that the declaration should have called for the protection of political rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine, particularly their right to self-determination. However, the important thing now is to look forward and establish security and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians through a lasting peace.

What do the terrorist group Hamas and the anti-violence group Black Lives Matter have in common? What does the democracy of Israel have in common with the anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan? What does the Islamic Republic of Iran, which throws gays off rooftops, have in common with gay rights activists? What do feminists have in common with radical Islamic sexists who support the honor killing and genital mutilation of women? Nothing of course. Unless you subscribe to the pseudo-academic concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality — the radical academic theory, which holds that all forms of social oppression are inexorably linked — has become a code word for anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bigotry.
Nowhere has adoption of this radical paradigm been more pronounced than on college campuses where, in the name of "identity politics" and "solidarity," intersectionality has forced artificial coalitions between causes that have nothing to do with each other except a hatred for their fellow students who are "privileged" because they are white, heterosexual, male and especially Jewish.
Students at the University of Illinois recently took to social media to express their distress after flyers were plastered around campus calling for the "end of Jewish privilege." The flyer stated in bold letters that: "ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege." The posters had outlines of silhouettes with Stars of David printed out, and an arrow pointing to them with the accompanying caption "the 1%." Although some of the posters identified Black Lives Matter as sponsors, it is not clear whether they were distributed by extreme right-wing groups using hard-left anti-Semitic tropes or by hard-left anti-Semites. In some respects, it does not really matter because many on the hard-right and hard-left share a disdain for Jews, their nation state and so called "Jewish privilege."
The very concept of "privilege"– the idea that white people benefit from certain privileges in Western society, compared to non-whites living in the same social, political and economic environment – has a long and complex history in the United States. The subjugation of black Americans, and other non-whites, is an endemic problem that requires far-reaching legislative and grassroots action. By attributing this domestic social problem to so-called "Jewish privilege," radicals are engaging in traditional economic anti-Semitism; attributing far-reaching societal problems to Jewish status, occupation or economic performance.

Retired British colonel Richard Kemp, the well-respected former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and a staunch defender of Israel, called Faaborg-Andersen’s statements “chutzpah.” “Not only does Israel have nothing to learn from the EU,” Kemp said, “but the EU is guilty of encouraging terrorism in Israel.”
He was apparently referring to the EU’s timid kowtowing to the narrative espoused by Abbas, while ignoring the effects of his ongoing incitement of terrorists, whom he reimburses for their “heroic martyrdom” by paying both them and their families millions of dollars in stipends.
In France the deadly terrorist attack on the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery store in Paris in 2015 sounded the red alert for the country’s Jewish communities and those of its neighbors throughout Europe. Today, security personnel take a more holistic approach, making rounds among Jewish schools and synagogues instead of being permanently stationed in front of them as was previously the case.
The French government’s deployment of soldiers in a more flexible way reflects an attempt to protect more potential targets, which now include virtually every pedestrian, whether in the capital or on the beach in Nice. Perhaps the holistic approach to defense is more democratic, since Jews are no longer the specific target of terrorism in an age where everyone is vulnerable.
As a security expert from the European Jewish Congress told The Jerusalem Post recently, “Today the aim of the attackers is to make as much damage as possible without checking who the people are,” he said, pointing to the recent terrorist attack on Barcelona’s bustling Las Ramblas pedestrian boulevard. “Today if a Jew, Muslim or Christian walks in the street, they can get hit in the same way. Everyone is a target.”

The nuclear agreement—misleadingly presented to the world as the lesser of evils—allowed Iran to grow rich and expand its influence in the region. Now, Tehran is taking over Syria, and the distant enemy is coming closer to Israel.
Iran is taking over Syria. The distant enemy is coming closer. The US is out of the picture. Those who put their trust in the new world sheriff, Donald Trump, have to admit he appears to be far more concerned with the American media than the Iranian imperialism. That is who he is.
The world's sheriff is not whoever has more power—the United States has a lot more—but whoever uses the power he has.
Netanyahu had to go to Vladimir Putin this week again for another round of talks with the Russian leader during his vacation in Sochi. It's not clear whether Putin is going to stop the Iranian threat. It is clear, however, that he's the only one there is any point in talking to.ISIS has been defeated on the ground. Over the last year, its fighters have been pushed out of Mosul in Iraq, and in the coming year, probably, they'll also be pushed out of Syria's Raqqa, the caliphate's capital. The problem is that the alternative for ISIS on the ground—Iran and Hezbollah—is just as bad.

Women hijacking planes and murdering Israeli civilians are “wonderful acts of heroism,” according to a Palestinian psychologist interviewed on the official PA TV program Our Ethics. Citing the female “heroes” she felt were examples for other Palestinian women, psychologist Jultan Hijazi mentioned Laila Khaled, who participated in 2 plane hijackings, Dalal Mughrabi who led a bus hijacking and the murder of 37, Fatima Barnawi who placed a bomb in a cinema, and the “mother of Martyr Muhammad Farahat,” who led her son to his terror attack that murdered five young students (for more information about these terrorists, see below).
After citing these and other examples of Palestinian women involved in terror and murder, the Palestinian psychologist indicated their importance for youth because “women carry out a large role in the children's psychological preparation.” It seems that according to Hijazi, having murderers as role models is important for Palestinian children.
The following is an excerpt from the PA TV interview with Palestinian psychologist Jultan Hijazi:
Psychologist Jultan Hijazi: "After 1967, the role of women evolved from an institutional stage to a stage of struggle and self-sacrifice. We saw many examples of this, such as Laila Khaled (i.e., participated in 2 plane hijackings), Dalal Mughrabi (i.e., led murder of 37), and Fatima Barnawi (i.e., placed bomb in cinema) who was the first female Palestinian prisoner. These women, through their operations, recorded wonderful acts of heroism that the generations still see as an example... The women also had a role in the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2015 (i.e., terror wave, 2015-2016), and we saw how women attacked the Israeli soldiers at checkpoints in stabbing operations... I want to mention the mother of Martyr Muhammad Farahat (i.e., murdered 5), a Martyr from Gaza. In 2002, I think, she led him to the gate of the Israeli settlement where he carried out a military operation and killed several soldiers (sic., murdered 5 students)... As a mother, I am incapable of doing what she did, but she constitutes an example for the struggle, and she succeeded in strengthening the national values... Women carry out a large role in the children's psychological preparation."
[Official PA TV, Our Ethics, Aug. 4, 2017]

Official PA TV host 1: "Let's talk about Sultan Abu Al-Haj, a Palestinian boxer who refused to compete with an Israeli boxer and lost a bronze medal."
Host 2: "Sultan, why did you make this decision? You lost a medal!"
Palestinian boxer Sultan Abu Al-Haj: "I didn't make the decision. My trainers and the [Palestinian] Olympic Committee made the decision, and as a competitor I cannot oppose them... The decision was reached that it is forbidden to compete with [Israelis], because it's beneath our dignity to compete with them and recognize them as (sic) the State of Israel."
[Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, Aug. 17, 2017]
Palestinian boxer Sultan Abu Al-Haj was ordered by the Palestinian Olympic Committee to forfeit his match against Israeli Druze boxer Amit Madah on Aug. 8, 2017 in the under 54 kg division at the Youth Muay Thai World Championships in Bangkok, Thailand. This was the first time that the Palestinian Authority sent an athlete to compete in this tournament.

The Iranian Football Federation has excluded captain Masoud Shojaei for the soccer World Cup qualifiers against South Korea and Syria but denies it is punishment for playing against an Israeli club.
Shojaei and his compatriot Ehsan Haji Safi came in for criticism in Iran when they turned out for their Greek side Panionios in an August 3 home Europa League qualifier against Maccabi Tel Aviv.
Sunday’s squad, announced by Iran’s Portuguese coach Carlos Queiroz on Facebook, included Ehsan Haji Safi but omitted Shojaei.
The initial reaction from Deputy Sports Minister Mohammad Reza Davarzani suggested the pair would both be banned for violating the country’s “red line.” They broke a tradition of the taboo of appearing against Israeli athletes, which Iran interprets as recognition of the Jewish state.

Remember the $24 million Palestinian Museum that opened last year, somewhat appropriately empty of exhibits?
Over a year later, they finally have their first exhibit – an exhibit also symbolic of the palestinian identity.
The Palestinian Museum launched its inaugural exhibition Saturday with a highly political art show focusing on Israel’s occupation of east Jerusalem.
“Jerusalem Lives” opens to the public on Sunday in the university town of Birzeit near Ramallah, the Palestinian political capital in the occupied West Bank.
—
A press preview on Saturday of “Jerusalem Lives” displayed works ranging from the abstract to the overtly political.
In one room, a four-wall photographic panorama surrounds visitors with images of the ring of Israeli settlements around Jerusalem.
In the garden, a green staircase climbs skywards from inside a mesh cage, seemingly referencing the confinement of the Palestinians by Israel’s occupation.
But the symbolism of the staircase, coming to a dead end in mid-air, is open to interpretation.
In other words, they could not even open with an exhibit representing their identity. Everything is about opposing Israel’s history.

It’s just over a week since 15 people were killed in an Islamist attack in Barcelona, Spain. It appears that the person who organised the cell involved in that attack was an Imam called Abdelbaki Es Satty. In the days that have followed we have also learned that the country only narrowly avoided a far worse assault, and that the cell who were subsequently involved in a shoot-out with police had been planning to blow up a set of Spanish monuments including Antoni Gaudi’s masterpiece, the church of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
Last night there were only two attacks in Europe. In the centre of Brussels a Somali-born man shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘Allah is Greatest’) attacked soldiers with a machete before being shot dead. And in London, outside Buckingham Palace a man from Luton shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ was restrained by police before he was able to cause more than minor injuries to them with the machete he was carrying.
There could be any number of explanations for these attacks, as with so many attacks before them. It could be that the perpetrators suffered the famous problem of low blood-sugar levels which have been known to cause attacks of this kind in the past. Or it could be that these are simply further cases of people making their objections to Spanish, Belgian and British foreign policy clear in a more effusive manner than is normally deemed acceptable.
But the important thing to remember about these attacks is that they are just like the weather. Unlike other types of violence, these solitary events must be seen as indicative of absolutely nothing, with no further investigation into anything that might lie behind them. They are just strange eruptions which occasionally happen and have no connections to anything, anywhere or anyone.

London authorities detained a 26-year-old man late Friday after he brandished a sword and repeatedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” outside of Buckingham Palace.
Metropolitan police said he intentionally drove into a restricted area and parked himself near a police van. After three unarmed policemen approached him, a struggled ensued, and he was brought down using pepper spray. Two separate officers were injured with cuts to their hands.
The incident is being treated as a terrorism investigation, Metropolitan police counterterrorism commander Commander Dean Haydon confirmed in a Saturday statement. British authorities remain on high alert after a slew of terrorist attacks throughout 2017.

The man that stabbed a Belgian soldier Friday was reportedly a “soldier of the Islamic State,” according to the terrorist organization’s news agency.
The man, a Belgian citizen of Somali origin, rushed a group of soldiers near the Grand Palace in Brussels Friday evening. He shouted “Allahu Akbar” before stabbing one of the soldiers, at which point the others opened fire on the attacker. The 30-year-old man died on the way to the hospital.
While the man reportedly had no prior connection to terrorist activity before the attack, ISIS’ Amaq News Agency has claimed that he was a member of the global terrorist network, according to the SITE Intel Group, which monitors jihadi activity worldwide. Authorities are investigating the attack as “attempted terrorist murder.”
“The executor of the stabbing operation in Brussels is a soldier of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in response to calls for attacks against coalition states,” the Amaq report explained.

Some basic assumptions that have governed Middle East diplomacy over the last quarter century — such as the need for a Palestinian state in the West Bank — are being questioned by more and more people in Congress, the chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Committee told The Jerusalem Post.
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), who left Israel on Saturday night after a week here as part of a delegation of five congressmen and one senator brought by the US Israel Education Association, said: “There is a sense in Congress that it is maybe time to look a little broader outside the box” at other possible solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The USIEA is Christian-based organization that defines as one of its goals sponsoring educational tours to Israel with congressmen. What make it unique, is that it takes the delegations to the settlements – something the organization’s website says is not allowed when the congressmen go on official US-sponsored visits.
The delegation spent much of a day in Ariel, and also toured Hebron. In addition, the group met on Tuesday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“My view is that some of the assumptions that we have all operated under for a long time – that there has to be a two-state solution, a Palestinian state on the West Bank – some of those assumptions are now being questioned,” said Thornberry.

Crossing the Rubicon
On Wednesday, at a U.S. State Department press briefing, the Rubicon was finally crossed. Responding to a question regarding Israeli-Palestinian ‎peace, spokeswoman Heather Nauert said, "We want to work toward a peace that both sides can agree to and both sides find ‎sustainable. ... We believe that both parties should be able to find a workable solution that works for ‎both of them. We are not going to state what the outcome has to be. ... It's been many, many decades, ‎as you well know, that the parties have not been able to come to any kind of good agreement and ‎sustainable solution to this. So we leave it up to them to be able to work through that."‎
This is the most constructive statement I have heard about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in decades. ‎For the last several years, the "experts" have been saying, "We all know what a solution to the ‎Palestinian-Israeli conflict looks like."‎
If anyone ever took the time to listen to the parties themselves, and examine the cultural context in ‎which these words are spoken, they would immediately understand that the single most critical litmus ‎test for determining a negotiating partner's real intentions is not what they say to visiting diplomats ‎and journalists in English, but what they say among themselves in their own language, and in particular, what they ‎teach their children. ‎
According to John Calvin (formerly "Jonaid Salameh," before his conversion to Christianity), an EMET fellow who was born in Nablus, from the very earliest age, he ‎was taught there would not be two states, but one state called Palestine. An important slogan on everyone's tongue in the disputed territories is "Lama neharherah," meaning "When we free ‎it" -- and "it" is all of Israel.

A plea to the secretary general
Dear Antonio Guterres,
You are not the average U.N. secretary general. An engineer by profession, you understand that the world belongs to those who build, not those who destroy. As a member of Portugal's Social Democratic Party, you believe in an open society founded on brotherhood and mutual support, not closed, religious and patriarchal societies. As a genuine human rights activist who served as the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, you know the most serious problems are the ones that should be addressed first.
Everything in your life has led you to this point. You can be the man who changes the United Nations for the better. Your upcoming trip to Israel will be your first test. Will the impressive work you have done and the moral conscience you have cultivated throughout your entire life come out the victor, or will the nefarious states attempting to take control of this failed organization cast their shadow over you, too?
So, Mr. Guterres, please spare us the diplomatic cliches we hear every time some senior U.N. official makes a visit. You must end the double standard, which is in effect a triple standard, by which there is one standard for democracies, another standard for dictatorships and a totally different standard for Israel. You must change the institutionalized discrimination against Israel at the U.N. with action, not words.

Palestinian officials believe that US President Donald Trump will lay out a plan in the coming months on reaching an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal as part of his administration’s efforts to revive peace talks between the sides, according to a Sunday report.
During a meeting in Ramallah Thursday, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that Trump would present the plan in the next three to four months in exchange for the Palestinian leader abandoning efforts to pursue statehood in international bodies, the Israel Hayom daily reported Sunday, citing an unnamed Palestinian official.
The paper said Abbas agreed to Kushner’s proposal, but demanded that Trump personally commit to the US peace plan, setting a meeting between the two leaders during the UN General Assembly in September.
The US plan would include a set timetable for talks, which would focus on the so-called core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Palestinian official said.
The report of the planned US proposal came amid recent signs of disillusionment from Abbas over US peace efforts.

A senior White House official vehemently denied on Saturday reports that a US delegation tasked with trying to jumpstart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that a West Bank settlement freeze was impossible and would result in the toppling of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
“This is nonsense,” a senior administration official told The Times of Israel. “These comments were never made.”
The pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat reported earlier on Saturday that the Trump team, led by senior adviser Jared Kushner, told Abbas during a Thursday meeting in Ramallah that getting Israel to place a moratorium on settlement construction could not be a precondition for resumed peace talks and that building would continue.
Kushner, who is also Trump’s son-in-law, along with peace envoy Jason Greenblatt and Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategy Dina Powell, met with Abbas on Thursday as part of a trip to the region aimed at looking at trying to renew peace negotiations, which Trump himself has labeled a “top priority” for the administration.

U.S. President Donald Trump's senior adviser Jared Kushner asked Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during their meeting in Ramallah on Thursday to freeze diplomatic initiatives against Israel for a period of some four months, in exchange for an American commitment to submit a comprehensive diplomatic plan within that time frame to kick-start the moribund peace process, a senior Palestinian official told Israel Hayom over the weekend.
Kushner was accompanied by Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt and Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell during the meeting with Abbas.
According to the Palestinian official, the Trump administration intends to formulate a diplomatic plan of action that will include a set timetable for the parties to discuss most of the conflict's core issues. As stated, the administration has conditioned its efforts on the Palestinians'"silence" on the diplomatic front against Israel.
Abbas agreed in principle to Kushner's request, but asked for Trump's personal guarantee and commitment to the plan and the two-state vision. Kushner and Abbas decided that Trump and the PA president would meet at the annual gathering of the United Nations General Assembly in New York this coming September, and that during that meeting the U.S. president will promise to present the American road map for peace currently in the works.
Trump announced via his Twitter account that he plans to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the gathering of the General Assembly, while the Palestinian source told Israel Hayom that a meeting between all three leaders in New York was a possibility.

Israel is to tell UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres during his first visit to the country this week it will “no longer tolerate anti-Israel bias” at the international body, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said Sunday.
Guterres is set to land in Israel Sunday night for a three-day visit that will include meetings with senior Israeli officials in Jerusalem and Palestinian officials in the West Bank, as well as a stop in the Gaza Strip, where the United Nations runs a major Palestinian aid program. The visit will be his first to the region since taking the helm at the UN in January.
Briefing journalists ahead of the trip, Hotovely said two key issues would be addressed during the visit: ending “anti-Israel bias” at the 193-nation organization, and changing the UNIFIL mandate for UN activities on Israel’s northern border.
“We are seeking a dramatic change in the way the UN treats Israel. It’s time to place the issue squarely on the table and address it head-on,” Hotovely said, threatening funding cuts for the body if changes were not implemented.

An Israeli man who was seriously wounded in a terror attack earlier this month has been released from the hospital, with doctors predicting he will make a full recovery, this just weeks after he almost lost his life.
Niv Nehemia, 42, was stabbed 15 times by a 19-year-old Arab terrorist in a Yavneh supermarket on August 2nd.
The terrorist, a Palestinian Authority-resident illegally living in Israel, was captured shortly after the attack.
Nehemia was in very serious condition in the attack, and was fighting for his life for days.
On Sunday, Nehemia was discharged from the hospital, three-and-a-half weeks after the attack.
Staff at Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot say Nehemia will underwent a series of difficult operations to stabilize his condition, but is now expected to make a full recovery.

The parents of fallen IDF soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, whose bodies are still being held by Hamas in Gaza since their deaths in the 2014 war in Gaza, railed at Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Sunday.
Liberman had vowed earlier Sunday not to repeat the “mistake” of an earlier prisoner swap, without citing other ways to secure the return the soldiers’ bodies.
“Liberman violated his commitment to the IDF’s code of ethics” by failing to bring back the remains, Simha Goldin, Hadar’s father, charged in a press conference. “We are asking that the cabinet accept our proposal — not to return prisoners, [but rather] to stop visits for Hamas prisoners and to put an end to this summer camp, and to stop humanitarian gestures by Israel and the international community toward Gaza.”
Goldin said that “the reason our requests have not been accepted is because Israel has a weak and cowardly defense minister.”

The Israeli intelligence operatives keeping track of your computer and mobile device activity are scratching their heads at your apparent tendency while playing games not to see moves that are all but staring you in the face, a source within the agency reported today.
A trio of agents stationed at the underground monitoring facility dedicated to tracking users of computers and other online devices have already noticed you miss three obvious moves in the series of solitaire games you have been playing on your smartphone for the last twelve minutes, and remain incredulous that you could fail to to see such glaring opportunities.
“Oh my God he did it again,” commented Agent One, gesturing for his colleagues to come back to the monitoring desk. “See that red nine? It’s been sitting there for six moves while this idiot ignores the black eight that would open up a whole new space to start a new sequence with that king and expose the cards beneath. That’s, what, like the thirteenth time this week?”
“Holy cow, AGAIN,” yelled Agent Two twenty minutes later. “It’s like this moron has gone blind – look, you see the king on top of the rightmost pile just waiting to move into that available space in the middle? What kind of incompetent boob is this clown?”

Special intelligence forces of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, have foiled an attempt by six Hamas militants to join Wilyat Sinai, the Egyptian branch of the Islamic State, a Hamas security source told Breitbart Jerusalem.
According to the source, two of those arrested are members of the al-Qassam Brigades’ unit of elite fighters and another is a naval commando. Two others are regular Hamas members and the last of the six was serving in the Hamas security services in the city of Rafah.
The group of six were arrested together, said the source, as they planned to infiltrate Sinai through tunnels in Rafah. They were arrested with Kalashnikov rifles belonging to Hamas in their possession, which they intended to take with them to Sinai. All six were transferred to a prison facility run by the al-Qassam Brigades’ special intelligence and, after initial questioning, are due to be transferred to a prison facility run by Hamas’ Interior Ministry.
The security source in Hamas said that the organization was surprised by group’s plan, which comes after an incident last week in which a Hamas security officer was killed while detaining two jihadists who were trying to infiltrate Sinai.

Memphis' famous Orpheum Theater will swap Gone With the Wind out of its summer film series next year, after customers complained that the classic film, which was released in the late 1930s and is centered around the events of the American Civil War, is too "insensitive" to be shown in theaters today.
According to the Orpheum Theater Group, which selects the features, scrapping Gone With the Wind wasn't merely a precaution — people actually complained that the movie triggered viewers with its overt regressiveness after the Orpheum showed it as part of its 2017 series.
"While title selections for the series are typically made in the spring of each year, the Orpheum has made this determination early in response to specific inquiries from patrons,” a statement from the theater's board read. The Orpheum appreciates feedback on its programming from all members of the mid-south community. The recent screening of Gone With the Wind at the Orpheum on Friday, August 11, 2017, generated numerous comments. The Orpheum carefully reviewed all of them.”
“As an organization whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves’, the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population,” the board concluded.

ESPN refused to acknowledge whether or not it had plans to pull pundit Robert Ley off of the air, despite the fact that he has the same name as an infamous Nazi official.
In an e-mail to ESPN, The Daily Caller asked if the sports broadcasting giant had a plan for dealing with Ley, considering the network had already pulled ESPN college football commentator Robert Lee from broadcasting a Virginia football game because he shares a name with a Confederate general.
Robert Ley was a Nazi official who “was made head of the German workers’ front after Hitler’s accession to power.”
He “supervised the mobilization of foreign as well as German labour for war work” during World War II and committed suicide during the Nuremberg Trials.
ESPN denied the initial report about Lee being pulled because of his name but completely ignored TheDC’s questions about Ley.

So you don’t think I can link Colin Kapaernik’s job prospects to the Palestinian cause? Hold my latte.
Speaking of which, wanna know the best thing about Intersectionality? I can connect anything to anything, especially if that second ‘anything’ happens to be a certain group of Arabs who have lived in the Holy Land for thousands of years. Or since last Wednesday. Whatever. Anyways, when it comes to Intersectionality, the Palestinian cause is like an amazing purse. You can literally match it with anything. Police-minority relations in St. Louis? Check. The plight of American Indians? Check. America’s immigration policies? We got this.
So when I found out that Colin Kapaernik still hadn’t been signed by an NFL team, I immediately said to myself “OMG OMG this is just like Ramallah!” I mean, it’s totally racist. The Constitution guarantees that you can say or do anything you want to and people are still obligated to hire you for the job of your choice [Editor’s note: No. No it doesn’t.].
Listen. Colin deserves a starting Quarterback job on a good team. So what if he trashes the National Anthem and seems to excel more at things that don’t involve, like scoring touchdowns and stuff. And the Palestinians deserve their own State. And the Right of Return. And their very own agency at the UN. And free cable. Because holding people to the consequences of their actions is a micro-aggression. I mean, it’s worse than manspreading.

Berlin's Federal Office for International Cooperation along with the Berlin Municipality are funding the activities of a German humanitarian aid organization that spreads anti-Israel propaganda, Israel Hayom has learned.
Citing Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq's reports on Israel's "water apartheid," German's Water Peace Service has accused Israel of creating harsh living conditions for the Palestinian population by systematically stealing Palestinian water sources.
Al-Haq is involved in the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, and according to NGO Monitor, the group is a world leader in the demonization of Israel that routinely accuses Israel of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity while at the same time defines terrorism as "legitimate acts of resistance."
The emblems of both the Berlin federal office and its municipality appear in the World Peace Service's online campaign against Israel under the slogan "Stop the Water Grabbing."
Among other things, the organization has claimed that "only 300 millimeters [11.8 inches] of rain fall in the Gaza Strip each year, whereas more rain falls in the occupied territories of the West Bank (Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem and Bethlehem) than in Berlin, Paris and London. Since the military conquest, Israel has taken complete control of certain water sources, and Palestinians require licenses to gain access to the water sources. Palestinians' general access to water is consistently shrinking.

Stories where Palestinian children are portrayed as the victims of Israeli malice are extremely damaging to Israel’s image – which is why such stories are so valued by those journalists who wish to promote their own one-sided narrative.
So it was probably a gift for The Independent’s Bethan McKernan to report on the Israeli demolition of Palestinian educational structures before the commencement of the Palestinian school year, not once but twice on consecutive days.

Both stories are virtually identical save for the added bonus of Belgian anger in the follow up.
There are legitimate questions that can be asked concerning Israeli policies. However, while The Independent states that demolitions occurred because the structures had been built without permission, that’s as much as McKernan was prepared to divulge.

Criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a legitimate activity in the opinion pages of a newspaper. Indeed, Israelis themselves can be some of Netanyahu’s fiercest critics.
So while David Rothkopf’s attack on Netanyahu in the Washington Post and comparison with US President Donald Trump may be debatable, it is not beyond the rough and tumble of political discourse.
However, Rothkopf goes one step further in his critique of Israel as a state:

What is Israel’s “majority population” and is Israel suppressing it in order to survive?
According to Israeli population statistics for 2017, the Jewish population makes up 6,484,000 (74.7%); 1,808,000 (20.8%) are Arabs; and, those identified as “others” (non-Arab Christians, Baha’i, etc) make up 4.5% of the population (388,000 people).

Three paintings featuring swastikas were removed from an exhibit at one of Rio’s most traditional cultural centers.
Having paintings with swastikas in them “became even more serious because public school students pay regular visits to the venue,” said Herry Rosenberg, president of the Rio Jewish federation. “We reiterate our commitment to fight continuously any expression of anti-Semitism in our state.”
The exhibit was closed for one day but later reopened without the paintings. The complaint was made though the federation’s WhatsApp channel for reporting anti-Semitic incidents.
In July, Rio Mayor Marcelo Crivella laid the cornerstone of a long-awaited Holocaust memorial in Brazil’s second-largest city.

The Adopt-a-Nazi (Not Really) fundraiser, a response to a far-right “free speech” rally that had been scheduled for San Francisco, reached its $150,000 goal and has topped it.
The campaign, by San Francisco attorney Cody Harris and the Jewish Bar Association of San Francisco, asks visitors to donate a small amount of money to the Southern Poverty Law Center by “sponsoring” each person who had been expected to attend the rally. Some 300 rally-goers had been expected.
The rally that had been scheduled for Saturday night was canceled late Friday by its organizer: a right wing group known as Patriot Prayer led by Joey Gibson of Portland, Oregon.
“It doesn’t seem safe. A lot of people’s lives are going to be in danger,” Gibson said in a post on Facebook. He also said that “tons of extremists” had planned to show up at the rally and that the event had the potential to become “a riot.”
Gibson had announced a news conference on Saturday in downtown San Francisco, but this was also canceled as the group did not have a permit for the venue, a park.
Launched on August 17 with an initial goal of $10,000, the campaign passed that target in 24 hours. The goal was changed to $100,000 and then to $125,000.

An Israeli technology firm has launched in Iceland what it says is the world’s first commercial food delivery route based entirely on unmanned aerial vehicles.
Flytrex has partnered in the Nordic country with the on-demand goods service AHA, to provide the service in the capital of Reykjavík, the Icelandic firm announced Tuesday. AHA is Iceland’s largest online marketplace, according to CNBC.
In 2015, the Reykjavík City Council passed a motion endorsing a blanket boycott of Israel. Amid an outcry over the motion, its language was changed to indicate the boycott would apply only to products from Israeli settlements. It was the first European capital to pass a resolution supporting a boycott of Israel or of its settlements.
“We feel that the cooperation with Flytrex is going to put us at the forefront of the competition in terms of what we can offer to both our retailers and to our customers,” AHA CEO Maron Kristófersson said in a statement.
His coastal city is subdivided by a large bay and several smaller rivers that make the transportation of goods time consuming and cumbersome. Several restaurants and supermarkets subscribe to the services of AHA,

American comedian and talk show host Conan O’Brien kicked off his trip to Israel in Tel Aviv, where he encountered Israelis, the local food and scorching August sun.
In a Facebook video, which was filmed Saturday at the port of Jaffa with the Tel Aviv skyline in the background, O’Brien shared his initial impressions of Israelis.
“Fantastic, really funny nice people,” he said of Israelis, adding that “all the men are incredibly buff and all the women are beautiful.”
O’Brien said his first dinner in Israel was at a Thai restaurant, despite his desire for Israeli food, but shared his excitement over eating shakshuka, a North African dish of eggs and tomatoes, and sampling the Jewish state’s most popular local beer.
“Shakshur?” O’Brien asks, struggling to say the name of the dish, as an Israeli woman standing nearby tells him how to pronounce it.
“You gotta get yourself some shakshuka and get it today,” he said.

From the shores of Gallipoli to the mountains of Afghanistan, Jews have distinguished themselves fighting for Australia. Now, “Jewish Anzacs” by Mark Dapin — the first book of its kind — explores their heroism.
“Anzac” refers to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps of World War I, an outfit that earned lasting fame at the campaign for Gallipoli as they fought fiercely over the Turkish peninsula from 1915 through early 1916.
WWI occupies a significant portion of the book, including the story of General John Monash, who rose to commander-in-chief of the Australian army in 1918.
The only Jew outside Israel to command an army, Monash was “the most famous Jewish-Australian soldier of all time,” Dapin said.
In recent years, Australia has held centenary commemorations for WWI, including a 2014 ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of its outbreak.
Several events and exhibitions during this period have related to the Australian Jewish community, which at 112,000 represents 0.5 percent of the population and is the ninth-largest Jewish community in the world.

The version of “El Maleh Rahamim” sung in official state ceremonies on Memorial Day is a jihadist text that turns fallen Israeli soldiers into shahids. The prayer begins: “God full of mercy, who dwells on high” and continues: “among the holy, the pure and the heroes ... the souls of the soldiers ... who gave their lives for the sanctification of [God] and who with the help of the God of Israel’s wars brought about the rebirth of the nation and the redemption of the land. God is their heritage, may they find rest in the Garden of Eden.”
According to the prayer, Israeli soldiers die in the sanctification of the name God. And thus in fighting and dying, they carried out the commandment that requires them as Jews to give their lives for God. This jihadism is clearly declared in the prayer commemorating the souls of the departed in state ceremonies on Memorial Day. As a result of being holy, the fallen soldiers’ place in the Garden of Eden is assured, and there they will rest. How is this different from the culture of the shahids? A shahid is also someone whose place in Paradise is assured, according to the verse in the Koran: “Think not of those who are slain for the sake of Allah as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord.”
According to “El Maleh Rahamim,” a shahid and a fallen soldier are the same. They both gave their lives for the sake of God, and in exchange, they are both in Paradise. The mentality is identical.

The Executive Council of the Arab League for Education, Culture and Science (ALECSO) condemned the Israeli occupation forces, accompanied by a large number of settlers and members of the Knesset, for opening a synagogue in Baten Al Hawa neighborhood in Silwan, south of Al Aqsa Mosque, along with the misdeeds of the occupation, its settlers, their falsehoods and false claims.The Council said in a statement that the occupation, through its incongruous stories, its settlement tools, its fairy tales and its biblical stories, wants to change the status quo in Jerusalem. The recent targeting of Al-Aqsa Mosque is proof of the occupation's attempt to impose new facts on the ground and undermine the deep culture of Jerusalem. Where the occupation seeks through its repeated attacks and daily violation of all international laws and charters to steal the consciousness of the city through siege, killing and lies.
The Arab Organization called on the international community, human rights organizations, the United Nations and UNESCO to stop the occupation violations and to commit the occupation to the resolutions and confessions of the Arabs of Jerusalem and its components and to stop the series of domination, distortion and fabrication practiced by the occupation to change the city.

Given the contemporary framework in which the matter of antisemitism is discussed, the conflict about how to identify its forms (given that some forms are fugitive) is clearly heightened. The claim that criticisms of the State of Israel are antisemitic is the most highly contested of contemporary views. It is complex and dubious for many reasons. First: what is meant by it? Is it that the person who utters criticisms of Israel nurses antisemitic feelings and, if Jewish, then self-hating ones? That interpretation depends on a psychological insight into the inner workings of the person who expresses such criticisms.But who has access to that psychological interiority? It is an attributed motive, but there is no way to demonstrate whether that speculation is a grounded one. If the antisemitism is understood to be a consequence of the expressed criticism of the State of Israel, then we would have to be able to show in
concrete terms that the criticism of the State of Israel results in discrimination against Jews.

If modern democratic states have to bear criticism, even criticisms about the process by which a state gained legitimation, then it would be odd to claim that those who exercise those democratic rights of critical expression are governed only or predominantly by hatred and prejudice. We could just as easily imagine that someone who criticizes the Israeli state, even the conditions of its founding-coincident with the Nakba, the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians
from their homes-has a passion for justice or wishes to see a polity that embraces equality and freedom for all the people living there. In the case of Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews and their allies come together to demonstrate that Jews must reclaim a politics of social justice, a tradition that is considered to be imperiled by the Israeli state.

So to answer the question, why is antisemitism attributed to those who express criticisms of the Israeli state?, we have to change the terms of the question itself. We have been asking, under what conditions can we decide whether or not the charge of antisemitism is warranted? What if we ask: What does the charge of antisemitism do? ...

When the charge of antisemitism is used to censor or quell open debate and the public exchange of critical views on the State of Israel, then it is not exactly communicating a truth, but seeking to rule out certain perspectives from being heard. 

For activists battling daily against the abuse of antisemitism to stifle free speech on Israel/Palestine, on university campuses and in Jewish religious and communal bodies of all kinds, it may seem something of a luxury to dwell on the reasons why contemporary understanding of antisemitism has become so politicized, bitterly contested, and controversial. 

Preface by Judith Butler

Introduction by Rebecca Vilkomerson

Part I: Histories and Theories of Antisemitism
Antisemitism Redefined: Israel’s Imagined National Narrative of Endless External Threat by Antony Lerman
Palestinian Activism and Christian Antisemitism in the Church  by Walt Davis
Black and Palestinian Lives Matter: Black and Jewish America in the Twenty-First Century by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Intersections of Antisemitism, Racism, and Nationalism: A Sephardi/Mizrahi Perspective by  Ilise Benshushan Cohen
On Antisemitism and Its Uses by Shaul Magid
Antisemitism, Palestine, and the Mizrahi Question by Tallie Ben Daniel

Part II: Confronting Antisemitism and Islamophobia
Trump, the Alt-right, Antisemitism, and Zionism  by Arthur Goldwag
“Our Liberation Is Intertwined”: An Interview with Linda Sarsour
Centering Our Work on Challenging Islamophobia by Donna Nevel
Who Am I to Speak? by Aurora Levins Morales
Captured Narratives by Rev. Graylan Hagler
“We’re Here Because You Were There”: Refugee Rights Advocacy and Antisemitism by Rachel Ida Buff
European Antisemitism: Is It “Happening Again”? by Rabbi Brant Rosen

Part III: Fighting False Charges of Antisemitism
Two Degrees of Separation: Israel, Its Palestinian Victims, and the Fraudulent Use of Antisemitism by Omar Barghouti
A Double-Edged Sword: Palestine Activism and Antisemitism on College Campuses by Kelsey Waxman
This Campus Will Divest! The Specter of Antisemitism and the Stifling of Dissent on College Campuses by Ben Lorber
Antisemitism on the American College Campus in the Age of Corporate Education, Identity Politics, and Power-Blindness by Orian Zakai
Chilling and Censoring of Palestine Advocacy in the United States by Dima Khalidi

Conclusion
Let the Semites End the World! On Decolonial Resistance, Solidarity, and Pluriversal Struggle by Alexander Abbasi
Building toward the Next World by Rabbi Alissa Wise

A Palestinian refugee receives a budget four times larger than a Syrian, Iraqi or African refugee, this according to a study conducted by the Abba Eban Institute of International Diplomacy at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya.

At the end of last week, UNRWA released its annual financial report, which stated that in 2016 the organization spent an average of $246 for each of the 5.3 million Palestinians it defines as refugees, while UNHCR spent only a quarter of that, $58 per refugee.

In addition, the data show that UNRWA employs some 30,000 people, while the World Refugee Agency, which handles tens of millions worldwide, employs only 10,000 people.

Former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor heads the Abba Eban Institute, which formulated a plan of action for structural changes that will improve the treatment of refugees around the world by merging UNRWA into the UNHCR.

"Consolidating the budgets and manpower of both agencies will lead to better treatment of refugees," Prosor said. "In Jordan, for example, there are 44 clinics that treat refugees from the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, out of 233 clinics that are required for this mission. Alongside them are 25 UNRWA clinics that ignore Syrian refugees and care only for Palestinian refugees.

"Uniting the resources of the two agencies will enable more quality and efficient assistance, and contribute to a solution for what that the UN itself has defined as the most serious refugee crisis in history."

Creating deterrence was Israel’s goal in the last three conflicts it fought against Hamas, but that objective has been cast aside. Any future armed clash with Gaza’s Islamist rulers will be guided by a new Israeli objective: that of achieving a crystal clear victory over the enemy.
In past models of conflict, Israel responded to Hamas aggression through the use of force in a way that was designed to punish Hamas and convince it to return to a state of calm. Systematically destroying Hamas’s military capabilities was not an Israeli objective.
Today, while Israel hopes to avoid war, it is preparing for the possibility of a new conflict. War could erupt again in Gaza for a wide range of reasons.
Should hostilities resume, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) plans to make sure the end stage of that clash will be an unmistakable Israeli victory, and that no one will be able to mistake it for a tie or stalemate.
This change in approach has been brewing over the past three years, ever since the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014. That operation was launched by Israel to defend itself against large-scale projectile attacks and cross-border tunnel threats from Gaza. At two months’ duration, it was one of Israel’s most protracted conflicts.
It was also the third large-scale clash fought with Hamas since 2009. At the end of each round of fighting, the military wing of Hamas remained intact, and was able to quickly begin rearming and preparing new capabilities for the next outbreak of hostilities.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman threatened that Israel would respond “with very great force” in a future conflict with the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorist group, during a meeting with the visiting United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Monday.
The defense minister told the UN leader that Hezbollah is “stashing various weapons, including missiles and rockets, that are aimed at Israeli citizens in the homes of residents of the villages and cities along the border.”
Liberman added that Iran was “working to set up factories to manufacture accurate weapons within Lebanon itself.”
According to the defense minister, that situation is “insufferable for the State of Israel, and we are determined to prevent every threat to the security of Israeli citizens.”
The presence of at least two Iranian missile manufacturing facilities was revealed by Israel earlier this summer. On Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Guterres that Iran was also involved in the construction of another missile base in Syria.

Now Iran has an opportunity to establish a new center of influence, not through proxies, as is the case in Gaza, Lebanon or Yemen, but directly by having Iranian forces on the ground. From there, it could establish air force bases, deploy tanks and divisions and amplify, in an unprecedented way, the threat it already poses to the State of Israel.
Under these circumstances, Netanyahu is smartly maneuvering between Washington and Moscow. It is still not clear if he can succeed in getting a commitment, from either party, that Iran will not be allowed to stay, but there are other goals that might be attainable.
Aware that a direct conflict between Israel and Iranian forces in Syria could endanger the Assad regime, Putin might be able to distance Iran from Syria’s southern border with Israel and Jordan. There can also be a Russian-Iranian understanding limiting Iran’s deployment of missiles in Syria. The Russians can justify this by claiming to be interested in maintaining stability and preventing Iran from endangering the Assad regime by opening a front with Israel.
The problem with any deal of this kind is that the Iranians are not a party that can be trusted. They see themselves on the cusp of a historic conquest and will fight to ensure it succeeds.
In the end and like in the past, this may be a case of Israel not being able to rely on anyone but itself. Israel has proven its readiness to act in Syria over the last five years. It may need to continue doing so.

Iran’s advanced S-300 air defense system, delivered by Russia after years of delay, is now “fully integrated” into the air defense network, a senior Iranian air force commander told the country’s state media Sunday.
In an interview with the Tasnim news network, Gen. Abolfazl Sepehri Rad, deputy commander of the Khatam al-Anbia Air Defense Base, said the missile defense system has been stationed across Iran and is ready for “practical operations.”
The general also said that the Iran has launched research programs to manufacture other air defense systems, and that “good results” have been achieved.
Iran had been trying to acquire the S-300 system for years to ward off repeated threats by Israel to bomb its nuclear facilities, but Russia had held off delivery until after a July 2015 nuclear deal between world powers and Iran, in line with UN sanctions imposed over the country’s nuclear program.

A front-page report in the East Jerusalem daily Al-Quds provided details on the August 24, 2017 meeting between Palestinian President Mahmoud 'Abbas and the U.S. delegation headed by U.S. President Donald Trump's advisor and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Citing Israeli journalist Gal Berger,[1] the report said that 'Abbas had told Kushner he would never halt the payments to the families of the Palestinian prisoners and martyrs, even if this cost him the presidency. This statement in fact appeared as the daily's overline, and the report added that it "reflected... the Palestinian anger over the U.S. delegation's focus on this topic."
'Abbas's statement about the payments to prisoners was also highlighted in a special banner posted August 26, on Fatah's official Facebook page.
The following are excerpts from the Al-Quds report and from the Fatah Facebook post.
Al-Quds overline: "The President Stressed He Would Not Stop [Paying] Salaries to Faimiles of Martyrs and Prisoners"
Al-Quds: Anger In PA Over U.S. Delegation's Focus On Topic Of Payments To Families Of Prisoners And Martyrs
The Al-Quds report said: "Western diplomatic sources reveal that, in his meeting with President Mahmoud 'Abbas in Ramallah last Thursday, the U.S. President's advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner stressed the impossibility of halting the settlements in the Palestinian territories, since this would lead to the downfall of the Netanyahu government. President 'Abbas, for his part, stressed his adherence to the two-state solution, and that he would never stop paying salaries to the families of the martyrs and prisoners until his dying day.

PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas seems set once again to embark on another futile journey to the United Nations (UN) seeking recognition of a second Arab state – in addition to Jordan – within the territory comprised in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.
A senior unidentified Palestinian source threatened such action on 21 August:
“If we don’t hear within a month and a half that the American team has stopped talking and started doing, Abbas intends to mobilize anyone and everyone he can for the UN General Assembly session on the establishment of a Palestinian state, regardless of the Israeli and American reactions”
President Trump was quick to respond – State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert telling a press briefing on 23 August in answer to a question as to why America was loath to commit – or recommit - to the two-state solution:
“We are not going to state what the outcome has to be. It has to be workable to both sides. And I think, really, that’s the best view as to not really bias one side over the other, to make sure that they can work through it. It’s been many, many decades, as you well know, that the parties have not been able to come to any kind of good agreement and sustainable solution to this. So we leave it up to them to be able to work that through.”
Negotiations – suspended since April 2014 – extending over the past 24 years between Israel and the PLO have not produced any workable and sustainable solution. Abbas is clearly in no mood to resume those negotiations without preconditions.
A replay of Abbas’s appearance at the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2011 therefore seems inevitable. Israel’s Prime Minister – Benjamin Netanyahu – was quick to point out at that time how automatic majorities at the UN had been used to incite institutionalised hatred against Israel.

Here is a thoughtful analysis of the attempt at peace negotiations:
The problem of Palestine is not one the solution of which will emerge from an accumulation of detailed information. If such had been the case, the problem would have been solved long ago. Few countries have been the subject of so many general or detailed inquiries-official and unofficial-especially during the last decade. The problem is mainly one of human relationship and political rights. Its solution may be reached only through a correct appreciation of the situation as a whole and an endeavour to find a human settlement. In this respect, the opinions of members of an international committee who represent various civilizations and schools of thought and have approached the question from different angles may be of some value.
All the proposed solutions have aimed at resolving, in one manner or another, the Palestinian dilemma: the reconciliation of two diametrically opposed claims, each of which is supported by strong arguments, in a small country of limited resources, and in an atmosphere of great and increasing political and racial tension and conflicting nationalisms…with periods of civil disturbance, particularly in 1921, 1929-1930, 1936-1938 and 1945-1947.
The above quote was written 70 years ago. Say what you want about the US attempts for peace. Slam Trump and his administration. But there is “Nothing new under the sun.” This latest attempt is far from the first to try solve “the problem of Palestine.”
Remember, 70 years ago, there was no Israel, and no settlement building. No one had heard of “the West Bank.” The Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Council cooperated with United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, UNSCOP. However, the Arab Higher Committee charged UNSCOP with being pro-Zionist, and decided to boycott its deliberations. The Arab (please note use of word “Arab” before the re-branding to”Palestinian”) leadership announced a one-day general strike to protest arrival of UNSCOP. Arab opposition figures were threatened with death if they spoke to the UN delegates. Sound familiar?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greeted visiting UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday with blistering criticism of the international body’s treatment of Israel and accused it of failing to prevent arms from being smuggled to Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah terror group.
Netanyahu also claimed that Iran is building sites in Syria and Lebanon for the manufacture of “precision-guided missiles,” with the aim of deploying them against Israel.
Both Hezbollah fighters and Iran have backed President Bashar Assad’s government forces in the civil war that has ravaged Syria.
“Iran is busy turning Syria into a base of military entrenchment, and it wants to use Syria and Lebanon as warfronts against its declared goal to eradicate Israel,” Netanyahu said. “This is something Israel cannot accept. This is something the UN should not accept.”
The Israeli leader offered no specifics to support his allegations.
Guterres arrived on Sunday for a three-day visit to the region, his first since taking office at the beginning of the year. His meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders are aimed at encouraging the resumption of peace talks.
Speaking at a joint press conference with the UN chief, Netanyahu criticized the United Nations, saying that it fails to check Palestinian hate speech, “absurdly denies” Jewish connections to Jerusalem and has not stopped arms from reaching Hezbollah in Lebanon.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres met with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem Monday, following the UN chief’s visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and meeting with President Reuven Rivlin.
Guterres, who was greeted upon his arrival Sunday evening by Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon, is on a three-day visit in the Jewish state as the UN and Israel attempt to “turn a new page” after decades of chilly relations.
During the meeting, Netanyahu expressed the hope that Guterres’ visit to Israel would herald a warming of relations between Israel and the UN.
Netanyahu also touched on the regional threats facing Israel, including Iran hegemony in the Levant.

Calling for the destruction of Israel is modern antisemitism, but criticizing Israel is normal, especially when many in Israel do so as well, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Monday.
Guterres, who arrived in Israel Sunday evening, was speaking before his meeting with President Reuven Rivlin at the president's residence.
After meeting Rivlin, Guterres held a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who said that the UN is failing miserably in its mandate to keep Hezbollah from arming itself.
“I think the most pressing problem we face regards Hezbollah and Syria,” Netanyahu said after welcoming Guterres to his office.
Referring to UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that set the terms for the end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Netanyahu said the UN was mandated with preventing weapons shipments to Hezbollah, but that the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon has not even reported one of the “tens of thousands of weapons smuggling into Lebanon for Hezbollah, contrary to 1701.”
Guterres responded that “I will do everything in my capacity to make sure that UNIFIL fully meets its mandate.”

UN Secretary-General H.E. António Guterres arrived on Monday to the the Grove of Nations in Jerusalem, as a guest of KKL-JNF World Chairman, Mr. Daniel Atar.
Together with Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon and Atar, Guterres planted a tree in a formal ceremony.
This marks the first visit of Secretary General Guterres since taking office on January 1, and follows the words of support he expressed last April in front of the General Assembly of the World Jewish Congress where he said that, “The modern form of anti-Semitism is the denial of the existence of the state of Israel”.
The Grove of Nations was established by KKL-JNF and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2005 in the Jerusalem Forest. It is part of the Olive Tree Route, an initiative led by UNESCO and the Council of Europe to establish an olive tree route around the entire Mediterranean basin, expressing the common desire for peace and co-existence.
Since its establishment, over 100 world leaders have planted a tree in the Grove of Nations as a symbol of peace, cooperation, friendship, life and continuity. Among the world leaders who took part in the planting ceremony in the past are Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Italian President Sergio Mattarella, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others.

Zionist Union leaders reinforced Israeli President Rivlin's concerns about anti-Israel bias at the United Nations in a meeting with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Monday.
"It is important that [Guterres'] voice be heard against antisemitism — as the head of the organization that was founded under the command 'never again,'" MK Tzipi Livni said in Jerusalem.
Livni, Zionist Union Chairman Avi Gabbay and opposition leader Isaac Herzog pressed Guterres on issues ranging from growing Iranian influence in the region to weapons smuggling in southern Lebanon.
At the start of the meeting, Herzog demanded that the UN pressure Hamas to return the bodies of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, who were killed in action by the terrorist group during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, to Israel. Herzog also requested the UN assist in the release of Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who are believed to be held captive in Gaza. Both men suffer from mental illness and are believed to have wandered across the border — Mengistu in September 2014 and Sayed in April 2015.
"Hamas deliberately abuses families and violates all basic human rights by not providing information about the situation of the abducted soldiers and preventing access by the Red Cross to their place of concealment," Herzog said.

As of last night, we were told that no replacement of SecState Rex Tillerson is imminent. But some switcheroo may happen sooner than expected, given the jaw-dropping reporting by Axios' Jonathan Swan last evening in his weekly Sneak Peek newsletter:
Trump is getting more and more fed up with Tillerson and recently said: "Rex just doesn't get it, he's totally establishment in his thinking."
One possible scenario for replacing Tillerson: U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley moves to Foggy Bottom. Then Deputy Secretary National Security Adviser Dina Powell could be promoted to Haley's job in New York, where Powell's family lives.
Keep reading ... words
On "Fox News Sunday," Tillerson became the second top Trump official in three days (after economic adviser Gary Cohn) to distance himself on-record from Trump's Charlottesville response:

• Tillerson: "I don't believe anyone doubts the American people's values or the commitment of the American government or the government's agencies to advancing those values and defending those values."
• Chris Wallace: "And the president's values?"
• Tillerson: "The president speaks for himself, Chris."
• Wallace: "Are you separating yourself from that, sir?"
• Tillerson: "I've made my own comments as to our vales as well in a speech I gave to the State Department this past week."

Responding to Swan's article, Philippe Reines, a top State Department official under Hillary Clinton, tweeted: "Going out in a limb here but I don't think Rex gives a damn anymore what the President & White House thinks of him."

The Zionist Organization of America’s August 2017 report detailed US National Security Chief General H.R. McMaster’s troubling record regarding Iran, Israel and radical Islamist terrorism. McMaster’s statements and actions appear to be diametrically opposed to President Donald Trump’s support for Israel, opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and determination to name and combat radical Islamist terrorism.
Critics of ZOA’s report have failed to show that ZOA’s report was wrong in any substantive respect. The criticisms have amounted to name-calling against ZOA, and McMaster’s friends vouching for his character — which is irrelevant to the vital policy issues addressed in ZOA’s report.
McMaster reportedly wrongly refers to the existence of a Palestinian state before 1947 — when no Palestinian state ever existed, and maligns Israel as an “illegitimate,” “occupying power.” In fact, Israel’s re-establishment in 1948 and her self-defensive capture of Judea/Samaria (West Bank) in 1967 were both legal under binding international law, and deprived no country of its sovereign territory.
McMaster wrongly claimed that President Trump would recognize “Palestinian self determination” during his visit to Israel; reportedly opposed President Trump’s visit to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, refused to state that the Western Wall is in Israel, and insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not accompany President Trump to the Western Wall.
And alarmingly, when Israel installed metal detectors at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount after Palestinian terrorists smuggled in firearms and murdered two Israeli policemen, McMaster, according to a senior defense official, described this as “just another excuse by the Israelis to repress the Arabs.”

Sebastian Gorka, a senior staffer at the White House until last week, came to the defense on Sunday of H.R. McMaster, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser who last month endured a far-right campaign against him over his posture toward Israel.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Gorka said he had not once heard H.R. McMaster speak critically of the state in his six months since taking office.
“I’m not here to feed stories of palace intrigue – I hate that, and I’m still loyal to the president and his agenda,” Gorka said. But “I have never heard Gen. McMaster say things that are anti-Israeli. I’ve never heard that.”
Gorka did, however, offer harsh criticism of McMaster’s stance toward Islamists, speaking of the violent extremism as a problem inherent to Islam itself.
McMaster “sees the threat of Islam through an Obama administration lens, meaning that religion has nothing to do with the war we are in,” Gorka said. “He believes – and he told me in his office – that all of these people are just criminals. That is simply wrong.”
Gorka was the subject of a series of news reports early in his tenure in the administration over his ties to Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian political party with historic ties to Nazi Germany.
He said the subject never came up “openly” among White House staff.

Senior members of the Trump administration and Israeli officials renewed talks over the possibility of moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a promise repeatedly made by the president in the 2016 election campaign, during high-level meetings in Israel last week, the Times of Israel has learned.
Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, peace envoy Jason Greenblatt and Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategy Dina Powell met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday as part of a visit to the region in a bid to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.
During that meeting, the embassy move “was brought up by both sides as part of a productive broad conversation about a number of issues,” a US source familiar with the discussions said Sunday, declining to reveal the specifics of discussion.
Trump backtracked on the pledge in June, signing a waiver which pushed off moving the embassy for at least another six months.
“Needless to say, the administration’s policy is ‘when not if,'” the source added, referring to statements US officials made when signing the waiver promising that the move would take place during Trump’s presidency.

In a meeting this month with Republican Members of Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to express support for moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, according to one of the participants Representative Lloyd Smucker (R-PA). The Pennsylvania lawmaker told Jewish Insider that Netanyahu “believes is that it could easily be done. In his (Netanyahu) words: We already have a consulate in Jerusalem. It’s a matter of just changing the sign to make it the Embassy.”
While President Donald Trump repeatedly urged the transfer of the Embassy to Jerusalem during his 2016 election campaign, the real estate mogul turned commander in chief signed a national security waiver on June 1 keeping the U.S. diplomatic compound in Tel Aviv.
“President Trump made this decision to maximize the chances of successfully negotiating a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, fulfilling his solemn obligation to defend America’s national security interests,” the White House noted in a statement at the time.
The Israeli leader raised the issue of the Embassy in response to a question by Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE). According to Rep. Smucker’s recollection of the meeting, Netanyahu “believes that there wouldn’t be a lot of pushback in the event that we do that.”

The special negotiator on hostages and missing persons in the Prime Minister's Office, Col. (res.) Lior Lotan, who resigned last week, was dissatisfied with how Operation Protective Edge of 2014 ended, and believes that Israel should have been much more aggressive, changing the "prisoner equation."
In recordings broadcast on Army Radio Monday, Lotan is heard saying, "I don't think that a war should end with a 2:0 abduction [ratio] by the enemy. If we have one soldier captured, [the war] should end with 200:1 -- if two of ours are captured, 400 of theirs; if three, then 600 [of theirs.]"
Lotan is also heard saying that "this isn't to say that this is the answer to the problems, but the equation will be different. The army has suggested a lot of operational ideas ... and I want to fill our bag on the matter of captives."
At a later point in the recording, Lotan says, "This is an idea that the IDF must improve on after Protective Edge. The chief of staff has thrown down the gauntlet. The chief of staff is not only committed, he really understands the issue. I think these are things the army should deal with."
It was unclear exactly when or in what context Lotan was recorded.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Monday cautioned that there was no easy way for Israel to secure the return of fallen soldiers or Israelis held by Hamas, short of capitulation to the terror group’s demands or reoccupying the Gaza Strip.
Any other solution, Liberman told The Times of Israel, will require patience.
Liberman was responding to the media storm that followed comments he made Sunday, in which he said that Israel must not repeat the “mistake” of releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange for captives held by Hamas.
The defense minister stressed that public and media pressure only weakens Israel’s position. He said that Israel needs to change tack and stop releasing Palestinian security prisoners in exchange for captive Israelis.
“The time has come to flip the script that began with the Jibril deal that saw those released initiate and carry out the First Intifada, and through the Shalit deal, whose freed [prisoners] set the tone for Hamas in Gaza, including the organization’s leader Yahya Sinwar. Those released in the Shalit deal are responsible for the murder of Israelis,” Liberman said.

The terrorist responsible for carrying out a stabbing attack in a Shufersal supermarket in Yavne and who seriously wounded Niv Nehamia at the beginning of the month, was indicted for attempted murder Monday at the District Court in Lod.
Nineteen-year-old Ismail Ibrahim Ismail Abu Aram from Yatta near Hebron, who stabbed the 43-year-old Nehamia in the chest, neck and head in the supermarket, was inspired to commit an act of “Jihad against the Jewish-Israeli occupation,” according to the indictment, out of a sense of religious conviction.
As part of his increasingly religious observance, the terrorist embarked on a pilgrimage during the last month of Ramadan and remained in Saudi Arabia for twelve days, the indictment states.
It was also noted that Abu Aram left his home and made his way into Israeli territory on August 2 without the required permit and chose to target a man he was already familiar with as his former employer using a knife and pepper spray.
Abu Aram entered the central city of Yavne using public transport. After failing to locate his former employer at an events hall where he once worked, he decided to carry out the attack against another victim using a knife he stole from the supermarket.

In a rare move, a military court convicted five family members of the terrorist who stabbed to death three Israelis in the Halamish settlement last month of failing to prevent the attack, the army said Sunday.
On July 21, Omar al-Abed left his home in Kobar and traveled to the nearby settlement. Inside the settlement, he went to the home of the Salomon family, who were celebrating the birth of a grandchild. Al-Abed killed the father, Yosef Salomon, 70, and two of his children, Chaya, 46, and Elad, 36. Yosef’s wife, Tova, sustained several stab wounds to her back, but survived.
According to the Judea Regional Court, the family members “knew of [al-Abed’s] intention to carry out the attack and did not work to inform the security services as needed to prevent it.”
Two of al-Abed’s brothers and an uncle were sentenced to eight months in prison. His father, Abd al-Jalil, was sentenced to two months in prison.
Abd al-Jalil, who was arrested in an initial raid after the attack, told the Haaretz daily last month that his son’s actions were understandable.

Frimet and Arnold Roth’s 15-year-old daughter Malki was murdered in the August 9, 2001 Hamas terror attack at a busy Sbarro’s Pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem.
Now they’re requesting the public’s help in their effort to bring Ahlam Ahmad Al-Tamimi, the mastermind of the heinous crime, to justice in a U.S. court of law. (Sign up form here.)
As we noted in a recent post, the Jordanian government has refused to extradite Tamimi.
But the bereaved parents believe that they are “getting closer” to their goal of having her stand trial in a U.S. Federal court. They now feel that they “need wide public support” to “help that happen.”
Via an online form at their blog This Ongoing War and at the foundation named in their daughter’s honor (Keren Malki—The Malki Foundation), the Roths are inviting the public to sign on and share their contact information.
They’ll then generate an email list which will be used to share information about the case and “keep supporters in the picture”:

Israel has completed the acquisition of 17 additional F-35 fighter jets from the United States over the weekend. The jets are scheduled to be delivered by late 2024.
The deal was signed by a special Defense Ministry procurement delegation vis-a-vis officials with the Joint Strike Fighter development and acquisition program, which aims to replace a wide range of existing combat aircraft for the United States and its allies.
By December 2017, the Israeli Air Force's Golden Eagle squadron of F-35 jets is expected to number nine aircraft.
The deal, approved by the Diplomatic-Security Cabinet and the Ministerial Committee for Development and Equipping of the Defense Establishment and Intelligence Agencies, effectively completes the procurement of two full F-35 squadrons, as overall, the Defense Ministry has procured 50 fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets.
An IAF official told Israel Hayom that the advanced jets' integration into the air force was "proceeding as planned. But the end of the years, all jets would be fully operational."

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is facing sharp criticism over its attempt to "encroach" on the judicial authority and turn it into a tool in the hands of President Mahmoud Abbas.
Palestinian lawyers, judges and legal experts say that a new bill proposed by the PA government in the West Bank would have a negative impact on the independence and integrity of the judiciary system.
The controversial draft bill aims at amending the law of the judicial authority so that Abbas and his government would be able to tighten their grip over the work of the courts and judges.
The PA leadership's bid to take control over the judicial authority comes on the heels of an ongoing crackdown on the Palestinian media and journalists. In recent weeks, PA security forces have blocked more than 20 news websites and arrested scores of journalists. In addition, Abbas has approved a Cyber Crimes Law that gives his security forces expanded powers to silence his critics on social media.
Protests by Palestinian journalists and some human rights organizations have thus far failed to persuade Abbas to abandon the Cyber Crimes Law and punitive measures against reporters. As of now, Abbas's campaign to muzzle his critics appears to have worked.
Deterred by the new law, which was passed secretly and without consultation with the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and the Palestinian Legislative Council, and the arrest of seven journalists in the past few weeks, many of Abbas's critics are keeping a low profile.

A Palestinian Authority official said Sunday that a lavish presidential palace being built outside of Ramallah would be converted into a national library.
Mohammad Shtayyeh, a member of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, said the decision to turn the complex into a library was made by Abbas, according to the official Wafa news agency.
The complex, which critics said was being built as a personal residence for Abbas, was also slated to serve as a guesthouse for foreign dignitaries, Shtayyeh said.
He added that while construction on the palace itself was complete, work was still being done on the compound’s helipads.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, at the request of the United States, has agreed to mitigate the financial sanctions his government has imposed on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian official said Sunday.
Abbas met Sunday with U.S. Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt and senior presidential adviser Jared Kushner in Ramallah. The meeting was part of Washington's efforts to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, stalled since 2014.
Abbas agreed to halt the Palestinian's diplomatic offensive against Israel for four months, reportedly in exchange for an American commitment to submit a comprehensive plan within that time frame to kick-start the moribund peace process.
As part of the sanctions imposed on Hamas, the Palestinian Authority has suspended the salaries of thousands of Hamas government employees and has also cut its payments for the electricity used in Gaza, plunging the enclave into an energy crisis.
According to a Palestinian source, Sunday's decision to ease the sanctions reflects Abbas' desire to secure reconciliation between the rival Palestinian factions as Washington outlines its plans for the regional peace efforts, so that if Israeli-Palestinian negotiations do resume, Hamas would refrain from undermining it.

The Gaza head of the Islamist terrorist organization Hamas said on Monday it had increased its
military capabilities thanks to newly improved relations with Iran.
In a rare meeting with a small number of journalists, Yahya al-Sinwar said Iran was "the biggest supporter" of Hamas's military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
Hamas, Sinwar said in response to an AFP question, was "developing our military strength in order to liberate Palestine", but he also stressed that the movement did not seek war.
Hamas has run Gaza since 2007 and received Iranian financial and military support for years before it was reduced following a falling out over the Syrian civil war.
Sinwar said relations with Tehran had improved in recent months, with a delegation visiting Tehran.

Political and media figures in the Palestinian Territories have determined who lies behind the flooding in southeastern Texas in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey: Israel and the dams it always opens around Gaza when the rainy season hits the eastern Mediterranean each fall.
Palestinian intelligence, political, and media officials contacted journalists stationed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to apprise them of the revelation, and urged reporters to take the story to the headlines. Only public awareness of the common cause of American and Palestinian suffering can lead to a satisfactory resolution of the problem, they emphasized.
“Every year Israel opens dams and floods our farms and streets,” declared Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza. “Why should anyone be surprised that they would do the same to a US state with an actual city named Palestine? This is not a hard concept to grasp.”
“America should look at who always perpetrates such atrocities,” added Saeb Erekat from Ramallah. “I would advise my friends in the US not to stoop to divisive rhetoric, blaming slow responses or specific officials, since that is what the enemy wants. We Palestinians have been victimized by that scheme for many years – I just wish our rivals in Hamas would realize that and reconcile, which would let us beat them to a pulp once we take over the Gaza Strip again.”

Today, Israelis have absoletely no moral authority, not an iota, to denounce the Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, for the neo-Nazis intend to do in the United States what the Zionists have already done in Israel: the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a model for the white supremacists in the United States. Mass expulsion of Palestinians, the massacre of Palestinians in Deir Yasin and elsewhere: those are the Zionist trademarks the Neo-Nazis hope and wish and strive to replicate in the United States.