Modi-Bibi pay homage at Sabarmati ashram. Watch this report on day 4 of Modi-Netanyahu bonhomie.#ShalomNaMoste
LIVE: https://t.co/4fqxBVUizLpic.twitter.com/Vek8BYBMnW

— India Today (@IndiaToday) January 17, 2018

Inside this Indian newspaper, a dairy company used the visit to promote its products:

There are Bibi billboards in the streets:

This editorial cartoon also says volumes:

This is clearly more than a state visit. This is a lovefest between the world's second most populous country (and the country with 10% of the world's Muslims), and the Jewish state.

And it is driving the Israel haters insane.

He also said that since 2012, 80 people had been expelled from France, and dozens more expulsions were underway, without giving further details.
"There is no place ... in France for those who call for and incite hatred in prayer halls or in mosques, and who don't respect certain republican principles, notably equality between men and women," the minister said.
"That is why I took the decision a few months ago to close mosques through the state of emergency, legal measures or administrative measures. About 20 mosques have been closed, and there will be others."

Canadians have no time for terror. But the Senate would never have the gall to suggest that Christian ministers be “certified” to preach in this country, no matter how unschooled in formal theology they might be, how eccentric their views, or how tiny their congregations. The same goes for Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist spiritual leaders.

• Standard 1: Members apply principles of good corporate governance
• Standard 2: Members ensure that services are provided by suitably qualified and or experienced personnel
• Standard 3: There are systems and processes in place to ensure that there are no impediments to the participation in the activities, including governance, for young people
• Standard 4: There are systems and processes in place to ensure that there are no impediments to the participation in the activities, including governance, for women
• Standard 5: Members ensure there are programmes that promote civic responsibility of muslims in the wider society.

But as the first generation of American-born Muslims begins graduating from college in significant numbers, with a swelling tide behind them, some congregations are beginning to seek native imams who can talk about religious and social issues that seem relevant to young people, like dating and drugs. On an even more practical level, they want an imam who can advise them on day-to-day American matters like how to set up a 401(k) plan to funnel the charitable donations known as zakat, which Islam mandates.

Experts say the problem is exacerbated because few immigrant parents want their children to become imams.
“Immigrant parents want their children to become doctors, engineers, computer scientists,” Dr. Bazian said. “If you suggested that they might want their kid to study to become an imam, they would hold a funeral procession.”

"The mosque pulpits in America are out of control, because most of the preachers who lead the prayers in these centers embrace the traditional Islamic rhetoric. Most of them are from the Middle East and are considered to be ulema, or people with superior religious understanding. Their problem is that they are traditional, and the traditional discourse has failed in Arab countries. The proof is that in Islamic societies, Islam has failed to unite the citizens and to prevent violence and the rhetoric of hatred. Unfortunately, we suffer from such imams here in America. They bring the traditional religious discourse with them, and spread it in an environment that is entirely different from where they came from."
...I expect – or I hope – that we in America will export [our] Islam to the Middle East. Society here is cohesive, and people respect one another. Schools are open to all, and there is no religious discrimination, or discrimination against people of color or people who uphold a certain faith. The Muslims in America have the ability and the experience to export that kind of Islam, which we need in the Middle East. We need a tolerant Islam, Islam that loves..."

• Better than the French approach, that is trying to fit Muslims into a particular mold, Al-Hadj sees the American society as providing the answer to the problems apparent with traditional Muslim society both here and abroad.
  
• Instead of looking for funding in the usual way that The Homeland Security Advisory Council suggests, he sees the Islamic societies in the US as providing the funding - and seeing it in their own self-interest to do so.
  
• Most of all, he sees the possibility of creating an Islam here in the US that can then be exported back to the Middle East and bring with it renewed tolerance.

Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US now serving as Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister`s Office, praised President Donald Trump’s recent decision to withhold some $65 million in funding for a United Nations agency which supports self-described ‘Palestinian refugees’, effectively cutting the amount of US money to the agency in half.

Earlier this month, the US froze a $125 million grant to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) – representing one-third of all US aid given to the agency every year.

On Tuesday, a State Department official said that the US had released $60 million to UNRWA, but was withholding the other $65 million, adding that the a “fundamental re-examination” of US aid to UNRWA was needed.

"There is a need to undertake a fundamental re-examination of UNRWA, both in the way it operates and the way it is funded," the official said.

On Wednesday, Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US, now an MK from the Kulanu party and the Deputy Ministry of the Prime Minister’s Office, spoke with Arutz Sheva about President Trump’s decision and the United Nation’s reaction.

While UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed “concern” Tuesday about the American cuts to UNRWA, Oren called Trump’s move “excellent”.

“He [Guterres] is ‘very concerned – well, let him be concerned,” Oren told Arutz Sheva.

“President Trump’s decision to cut funding for UNRWA is an excellent decision, both for us and for the whole Middle East. [UNRWA] is a corrupt and bloated organization that perpetuates a refugee problem that doesn’t exist.”

Given the Arab understanding of Zionism as a temporary historical aberration whose life span is a mere few decades, it made sense for the Palestinians to repeatedly choose to suffer the daily humiliations of living under a military occupation rather than to accept the far greater humiliation of permanent Jewish sovereignty on land they considered exclusively their own. In refusing to end the military occupation by making a permanent peace with Israel, the Arab Palestinians were making a conscious choice that was based on their understanding of Arab history and Islamic ‘justice’. As Arabs and Muslims, the Palestinians were not hapless victims, but rather masters of a historical narrative, at the end of which their resistance and patience would be rewarded with victory, in the form of Zionism’s disappearance. While they might suffer in the interim period, the choice they made was for what they perceived as the far greater good – defeating Zionism and driving away the sovereign Jewish presence from their land.

How to end the occupation: stand fast, stand longer

How can a temporary 50-year military occupation of most of the West Bank by Israel come to an end, if the Muslim, Arab and Palestinian view of history is that 50 years of Israeli occupation matters significantly less than the countdown of the remaining 19 years on the crusader clock? It is necessary to demonstrate to the Muslim-Arab world that their view of history is wrong, and that rather than constituting a second crusader state, Israel is the sovereign state of an indigenous people who have come home. This can only be achieved through Jewish power and persistence over time. And given the vast numerical imbalance between Jews and Arabs, it can only be achieved if those who truly seek peace support the Jewish people in sending the message to the Arab world that the Jewish people are here to stay.

The essence of the conflict between Zionism and the Muslim Arab world is a battle over time, a race of mutual exhaustion. The question that will determine how the conflict is ultimately resolved revolves around who will give up first: will the Zionists give up on their project in the face of unrelenting violent resistance, or will the Muslim Arabs give up on their project of erasing the sovereign Jewish presence in their midst, and finally come to accept it as a part of their history, rather than an affront to it?

Only time will tell.

So if Abbas isn’t planning to retire, why is he cursing Trump and his senior advisors? Why is he recycling anti-Jewish blood libels from the 12th century and announcing that the deals he signed with Israel and the peace process as a whole are dead?

The simple answer is that Abbas is acting as he is because he is certain that he can. This is how he has always acted. There is nothing new in his speech. And he doesn’t think that he will suffer any consequences for behavior.

Abbas expects President Trump to disregard his statements and continue to bankroll his terror-supporting regime in the name of “the peace process,” or “humanitarian assistance” just as Bush and Obama did.

Abbas gave his speech at start of a two-day conference of the PLO’s Central Committee, which he convened to determine a response to President Trump’s announcement on December 6 that for the first time in nearly seventy years, the U.S. recognizes that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital.

Trump’s Jerusalem declaration placed Abbas and his colleagues in a conundrum. On the one hand, his declaration had no practical implications. Trump signed a waiver delaying the transfer of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. No immediate plans have made to move the embassy.

Moreover, the State Department insists that there is no practical significance to Trump’s statement. Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Satterfield told reporters the day after Trump’s announcement that his statement does not change U.S. policy barring American citizens born in Jerusalem from listing Israel as their country of birth on their official documents. Indeed, Satterfield refused to answer a question regarding whether Jerusalem is even in Israel.

On the other hand, simply by recognizing the basic fact that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital and has been Israel’s capital for nearly 70 years, Trump broke with the longstanding U.S. policy of denying observable reality in relation to Israel in order to advance “peace” between Israel and its Arab neighbors. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Caroline Glick, the conservative American-Israeli columnist renowned for her powerful criticisms of the Middle East peace process, has joined Breitbart News.

Glick, the long-serving senior contributing editor and chief columnist for the Jerusalem Post, is one of the world’s most widely-read commentators on Israel and international affairs. She also writes about American politics from a staunchly pro-Israel perspective.

She is the author of several books — including, most recently, The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East (2014), which calls for Israel to annex the West Bank.

Glick, a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), was Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor in 1997 and 1998. In 2003, she covered the Iraq War from the front lines as a journalist embedded with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, and was the first Israeli journalist to report from liberated Baghdad.

She is also the adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC. A recipient of several major journalism awards, Glick travels around the world to advise policymakers about issues relating to global security.

Since his death on 15. Dec. 2017, Ibrahim Abu Thuraya, a 29-year-old former member of the PA Presidential Security Force 17 who lost both his legs and moved around in a wheelchair, has become another Palestinian “Martyr” and hero.

After his death, the Palestinian and international media were quick to blame Israel. However, interviews given by his brother and mother after his death suggest a different conclusion: That Abu Thuraya had decided and actively sought to die.

While the exact circumstances of Abu Thuraya’s death remain unclear, his brother and mother have explained that he parted with them the day before his death, telling them he was “sick of life” and had “decided to die as a Martyr.”

Abu Thuraya’s brother: “Two days ago [Dec. 14, 2017], when my brother sat to eat with us, he said to me: ‘Forgive me, this is the last night that you will see me. You too, mother, forgive me. You too, my brothers, forgive me.’ He kissed my father’s hand and foot and said to him: ‘Forgive me, if I behaved badly to you, forgive me. This is it. This is the last night you are seeing me. My father, I have decided to die as a Martyr (Shahid) because I am sick of life. This is it, I have no legs left, nothing is left. This is it, I want to die and rest from [this] life.’”
[Ruptly (RT), Dec. 16, 2017]

An interview with the coordinator of the Fatah committee for women at the Palestinian universities provided another glimpse into Palestinian education of youth. Madeline Manna - the female coordinator of the committee that is named "Sisters of Dalal" after the female terrorist who led the murder of 37 Israeli civilians - explained that Dalal Mughrabi is a "role model" of female "leadership" for the female Palestinian students:

Official PA TV host: "Let's recall the self-sacrificing operation (i.e., terror attack) carried out by heroic leader and Martyr Dalal Mughrabi who is considered an example of the Palestinian women's struggle."
Madeline Manna, Coordinator, Fatah university committee Sisters of Dalal: "In the Palestinian universities, especially in the Fatah Shabiba [Student Movement], the female student committees were named after Martyr Dalal Mughrabi - Sisters of Dalal - after the Martyr who was the commander of 11 men. We learn leadership from her, and that women always lead... Dalal Mughrabi is a role model, like other heroic female Martyrs in Palestine. We draw willpower and determination from her, and perseverance and [the will to] continue this struggle."[Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, Jan. 1, 2018]

Dalal Mughrabi led the most lethal terror attack in Israel's history, known as the Coastal Road massacre, in 1978, when she and other Fatah terrorists hijacked a bus on Israel's Coastal Highway, murdering 37 civilians, 12 of them children, and wounding over 70.

So how do Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims and Christians feel about claims that:

• The Palestinians are descendants of Abraham.
• The Palestinians are descendants of Canaanites (and Natufians).
• The Palestinians predated the Canaanites.
• Jesus was a Palestinian.
• A Jewish temple never existed on the Temple Mount.

Are Jewish, Muslim and Christian leaders willing to explain the theological and political impact of these assertions? And on a different level, if one’s religious belief can’t be reconciled with a national narrative, what does that say about individual identity? I don’t have any answers.

But there are plenty of questions.

starQuestions for the rabbis: Is there any reason for Jews to feel threatened by these claims? Do comments like these have an impact on interfaith dialogue, and if so, what? What do these kinds of comments mean for the Reform and Conservative rabbis who are generally more supportive of the Palestinians than their Orthodox counterparts? Do they see view Abbas’ comments as overall helpful or hurtful for peace efforts? Does Jewish law’s prohibition on Jews visiting the Temple Mount strengthen Palestinian claims on the holy site?

crescentQuestions for the imams: What exactly does Islam say about God’s promise of the land to Abraham’s descendants? What does Islam say about who Palestinians descended from, and what difference does it make? Does Islam in general — and Palestinians specifically — feel threatened by Jewish descent from Abraham? Is the idea of Palestinian descent from the Canaanites a long-standing Arab idea, or a relatively new assertion in response to modern Zionism? How does Hamas relate to the issue of Palestinian Canaanite identity? Can Muslim clergy in the West Bank or Gaza freely discuss these questions? In terms of of the battle within Islam between extremists and moderates, where do these claims fit in? Islam historically accepted the existence of Jewish temples on the Temple Mount — why has that changed?

crossQuestions for the priests: Is there any reason for Christians to feel threatened by these comments? What does the church have to say about claims that Jesus was a Palestinian and the implication that he was of Canaanite descent? Do Christians feel threatened by the competing Jewish and Muslim claims to the Temple Mount? How do Christians relate to Palestinian Temple denial? It’s been reported that there’s a rift between Christians in the US and the Mideast over the Trump administration’s stance on Jerusalem — particularly that Palestinian Christians are being forced to choose between their religious and national identities. Are Abbas’ comments also forcing Palestinian Christians to make a similar choice? Do Christians around the world have a responsibility to call out Abbas if Palestinian Christians don’t have the freedom to speak out?

In response to President Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital, Palestinan Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas made a bombshell speech on 11 January to the PLO Central Council. Many commentators have condemned his outrageous comments - among other things, asserting that Israel is a colonialist project that has nothing to do with Judaism and that the Jews of Europe preferred to stay and face slaughter in the Nazi Holocaust rather than emigrate to Palestine.

Mahmoud Abbas: outrageous

This blog will focus on Abbas's astonishing claims concerning Mizrahi Jews:
"When they occupied 78% of Palestine, they were only 650,000 Jews. What were they to do? They said: We need Jews. But the Jews refused to come. Ben-Gurion did not want to bring the Jews of the East."

This is a re-statement of the propaganda canard that Israel needed the Mizrahi Jews to populate the land and as a source of cheap labour.
[…]
"He (Ben-Gurion) would say: 'I hate them. They look like Arabs. They look like Arabs, and I don't want them. It will take three or four generations for anything to come of them. I don't want them.'

This fabricated quote by Ben-Gurion contradicts genuine statements he made, such as : "there is no reason to think that Jews from North Africa, Turkey, Egypt, Iran or Aden are fundamentally different from those of Lithuania, Galicia and America. They have deep inside that pioneering spirit..."

In her first official reaction to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's fiery speech this week, US Envoy to the UN Nikki Haley said Washington is "not going to pay to be abused."

Speaking during a wide-ranging interview with Voice of America's Greta Van Susteren, Haley took the PA to task. "Don’t think that you can sit there and say hateful things about us and turn around and write you a check. It’s wrong in every turn," she said.

Abbas effectively threw in the towel over the weekend, offering a scathing speech targeting the US administration generally and President Donald Trump personally by dismissing their peace effort and calling for his “house to be destroyed.”

“Damn your money!” Abbas declared.

Israeli politicians and Jewish American groups decried the speech as a racist diatribe that revealed Abbas’s true colors. The speech included conspiracy theories and fundamental questioning of the existence and justification for a Jewish state. Abbas also reiterated his position that the US could no longer be seen as a fair broker in future peace talks.

"We’re not going to reward bad behavior," Haley said. "Here you’ve got the Palestinians who are basically saying they’re going to cut the US out of the peace process. They’re saying they no longer want to have anything to do with us. They go and take us to the United Nations and try, basically, are very hostile in what they say and what they do. We’re not going to pay to be abused. It doesn’t make sense."

In his desperation, Abbas hurls abuse and in all directions. He has resorted to his old-new strategy of warning us that if his demands are not met, World War III will break out. Abbas would like us to believe that the Palestinian issue should remain at the center of the world's attention -- otherwise, there will be bloodshed and violence on the streets of most countries.

Should anyone take Abbas's threats seriously? The answer is simple: No.

The war to destroy Israel is still in full force. The Palestinians have not brought up a new generation that recognizes Israel's right to exist; on the contrary, they have brought up a generation that believes in jihad and death, one that denies any Biblical Jewish history or links to the Holy Land.

President Donald Trump recently tweeted a clear, long overdue message to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: you can’t have it both ways.

Offended by Trump’s December speech, which clearly left Jerusalem’s final boundaries to be negotiated by both sides, Abbas overreacted with trademark false accusations, and a huffy rebuttal of the US role as peace broker.

Like the proverbial farmer sawing off a tree limb but forgetting he’s sitting on it, Abbas overlooked the billions in US aid funneled to the PA since the mid-’90s, which last year alone totaled more than $730 million in all sectors – economic and humanitarian, security and justice, and UNRWA. Abbas’s tantrum backfired. It’s payback time.

Trump recently tweeted: “We pay the Palestinians hundreds of millions of dollars a year and get no appreciation or respect. They don’t even want to negotiate a long overdue peace treaty with Israel. So why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?” It’s about time America balanced these books.

Tuesday Morning, a bleary-eyed, Mahmoud Abbas, stumbled out of his bedroom in his home in Ramallah, and asked, “I blacked out most of Monday, did I miss anything?” Monday saw the PA president go off on a fiery two-hour rant in which he lashed out at everyone from US President Trump to (surprise surprise) the Jews.

A shocked Abbas explained: “It started with a few shots at lunch, you know, to steady my nerves, but then, before you know it, I’m at the open bar, and then I’m waking up in my own bed with a whopper of a headache and everyone is like: “you said some crazy ass shit yesterday’ “

Among other things, President Abbas alleged that “Israel has imported frightening amounts of drugs in order to destroy our younger generation.” and that it “is a colonialist project that has nothing to do with Jews.”

In a statement to The Mideast Beast, Abbas said “Honest to Allah, I don’t remember jack-shit after lunchtime” and that “luckily the New York Times, and other Western Media were nice enough to leave out the racist parts, that would have been embarrassing.” He was also relieved to hear that, although he had said of American contributions to the PA: “To hell with your money!”, the PA was still cashing American checks to pay terrorists’ salaries as usual.

The Trump administration’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represents what some Mideast experts and Israel advocates are describing as a paradigm shift in Washington, DC — because Trump is acknowledging that Palestinian rejectionism lies at the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The purported paradigm shift comes as the current Palestinian leadership is rejecting American involvement in the peace process. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas said on Sunday that President Trump “took Jerusalem off the table” through the recent US recognition of that city as Israel’s capital. Abbas declared: “We won’t take orders from anyone. We told Trump we will never accept his [peace] plan. His deal of the century is the slap in the face of the century, and we will not accept it.”

The PA leader vowed that he would never give up on efforts to declare a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, and described Israel as “a colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism.”

Abbas was responding not only to Trump’s policy change on Jerusalem, but to the American leader’s recent tweet questioning US financial assistance to the PA. Trump had asked: “With the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?”

In the 25 years since Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, Palestinian terror attacks have killed more than 1,600 Israelis and injured thousands more. The most recent Israeli victim was 35-year-old father of six, Raziel Shevah, who was killed in a drive-by shooting near his home on January 9.

Illustrating a recent shift in American rhetoric on such incidents, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman tweeted the following after the attack: “Hamas praises the killers and PA laws will provide them financial rewards. Look no further to why there is no peace.”

Netanyahu, according to Israeli reporters traveling with him on a trip to India, said on Wednesday: "My solid assessment is that it will go much faster than you think - within a year from now."

Asked about Netanyahu’s comment, Trump told Reuters in an interview that was not the case. "By the end of the year? We’re talking about different scenarios - I mean obviously that would be on a temporary basis. We’re not really looking at that. That's no."

The Israeli official, responding to Trump's remarks, said: "The president and the prime minister are not saying anything different."

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last month the embassy move was "probably no earlier than three years out, and that’s pretty ambitious," a time frame that administration officials have attributed to the logistics of finding and securing a site as well as arranging housing for diplomats.

Germany's Jewish community says raids against suspected Iranian agents show Berlin needs to take a tougher line toward Tehran.

German authorities have searched premises linked to 10 people suspected of conducting espionage activity on behalf of Iranian intelligence. Prosecutors, however, have refused to confirm reports the suspects are linked to the elite Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, responsible for operations outside Iran.

Last week Berlin summoned Iranian Ambassador to Germany Ali Majedi to warn Tehran against spying on individuals and groups with close ties to Israel, calling such acts an unacceptable breach of German law.

The Central Council of Jews said Wednesday that if the suspects are scouting Jewish and Israeli targets in Germany "this mustn't be left unpunished."

Two men allegedly linked to the Hezbollah terrorist organization went on trial in absentia in Bulgaria on Wednesday over a deadly bomb attack on Israeli tourists in Burgas in July of 2012.

The explosion outside Burgas airport's terminal building tore through a tourist bus bound for the popular beach resorts of the nearby Black Sea.

Five Israelis, the vehicle's Bulgarian driver, and the terrorist alleged to have planted the device, Franco-Lebanese national Mohamad Hassan El-Husseini, were killed.

It remains unclear whether Husseini intended to die in the blast or if the device went off by accident.

Bulgarian authorities identified the attacker's alleged accomplices as two Lebanese men with links to the Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist group, named as Australian passport holder Meliad Farah and Canadian citizen Hassan El Hajj Hassan.

Bulgarian authorities believe the suspects fled to Lebanon after the attack and even filed an extradition request to the Lebanese government but their exact whereabouts remain unknown.

Israel’s defense minister during the 1991 Gulf War, Moshe Arens, approved a counterattack on Iraq in 1991 after it fired Scud missiles at Israel.

However, Defense Ministry records newly declassified on Thursday regarding Arens also indicated that his plans were delayed by then US secretary of defense Dick Cheney, who played for time.

The new records, which include interviews with Arens and with then IDF chief-of-staff Dan Shomron, also appear to reveal that behind Arens’ back, Shomron opposed the counterattack when discussing it with then prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.

It was previously known that then US President George H.W. Bush pressured Shamir not to respond to Iraqi Scud attacks, for fear that an Israeli intervention would scuttle the broad anti-Iraq coalition Bush had assembled.

The coalition included a number of Arab countries standing with the US for the first time, and was viewed as a coup by Bush, both for fighting against Iraq and for strategic influence in the region post-war.

US Vice President Mike Pence’s upcoming visit to the Middle East comes at a time of intensely publicized friction between his administration and the Palestinian leadership, posing a dilemma for his Arab hosts — Egypt’s president and Jordan’s king — on how to safeguard their vital ties with Washington without appearing to ignore Palestinian misgivings.

Both countries are heavily dependent on US military and economic aid, and talks with a senior Trump administration official like Pence offer them an opportunity to strengthen those ties.

It’s a tall order given that Pence is visiting at a time of rising anti-US sentiments in the region, stoked by President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The city is home to major holy sites to all three monotheistic religions and its Israeli-annexed eastern sector is sought by the Palestinians as the capital of a future state.

Egypt’s elder statesman, Amr Moussa, warned Arab leaders against altering their longstanding objective: a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. In a jarring article published recently, the former foreign minister and Arab league chief warned that making concessions on the Palestinian issue would be a “gross strategic mistake.”

Israeli leaders praised the work of security forces Thursday after a pre-dawn operation in Jenin killed a Palestinian terrorist believed to be behind last week’s fatal shooting of Israeli rabbi Raziel Shevach.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, currently on a trip to India, hailed the troops and warned any would-be terrorists that Israel would be on their tail.

“We will reach anyone who tries to harm the citizens of Israel and the State of Israel and we will bring them to justice,” the prime minister said.

In the Jenin firefight, Israeli forces killed one Palestinian terrorist, captured another and were still in pursuit of a third, a Border Police spokesman told The Times of Israel.

Hours later, the spokesman said the forces were still scanning the area for the third terrorist and that the operation was still ongoing.

Two Yamam counter-terrorism fighters were wounded, one Palestinian terrorist was killed and another captured after an exchange of gunfire overnight Wednesday in the West Bank city of Jenin, following the January 9 murder of Rabbi Raziel Shevach.

According to Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld, Yamam, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and IDF troops from the Menashe regional division located the terrorist cell believed to be responsible for Shevach’s murder.

“Shortly after midnight we surrounded the area and cordoned it off, Yamam units moved in, and shots were fired,” said Rosenfeld Thursday morning.

“In the gun battle that took place, two Yamam officers were wounded – one seriously and one lightly – and one of the terrorists was shot and killed, while the second terrorist was captured.”

Rosenfeld said both Yamam fighters were flown to an undisclosed hospital.

Police confirmed that the terrorist who was shot and killed was responsible for the killing of Shevach. The second suspect is being questioned, while several other suspects were detained for questioning.

Last night, the IDF killed this palestinian man, Ahmed Jarrar.

Naturally, there are those who are furious Israel killed this well-dressed, respectable looking, happy young man, just like we killed father.

By the way, this was his father Nasser Jarrar.

If this is all you knew, you’d perhaps be thinking Israel was really the bad guy, killing a crippled man and then years later his good son.

Now for the full story.

Young Ahmed was one of the cold-blooded murderers of Rabbi Raziel Shevach (may his memory be a blessing, whose picture, unlike that of Ahmed’s, does not lie as to his true character)

As for his father, he was a senior Hamashole who was involved in plotting a series of suicide attacks in Israel, including a plan to bring down a high-rise building.

He lost his legs and an arm after suffering from a premature explodation – although the usual suspects will tell you it was Israel’s fault.

Hamas spokesmen on Thursday lashed out at security coordination between Israel and the Palestinian Authority after Israeli security forces killed a Palestinian who allegedly was involved in a drive-by shooting attack last week that claimed the life of a rabbi.

Late Wednesday evening, in a firefight in Jenin in the northern West Bank, Israeli security forces killed a Palestinian suspected of being involved in the shooting of Rabbi Razviel Shevach in the Nablus area, the Border Police said.

Hamas Spokesman Abdel Latif al-Qanou said in a statement posted on Facebook, that the incident "could not have happened without information sharing and damned security coordination,” adding that security relationship between Israel and the PA should “be ended.”

Neither the PA nor Israel has said that they worked together in pursuing suspects behind Shevach’s death. However, the PA security forces and Israel are known to cooperate in the West Bank to prevent attacks against Israelis.

Last weekend, a Palestinian security official told The Jerusalem Post that the PA security forces “are constantly trying to prevent attacks like the one that took place in the Nablus area.”

Hamas Spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri also slammed security cooperation, referring to it as “criminal.”

Fatah, the Palestinian faction headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has released this image praising Ahmed Jarrar, the terrorist who murdered Israeli father of six Rabbi Raziel Shevah last week and was himself killed in an IDF raid last night. pic.twitter.com/65XeGVUbp0

— Avi Mayer (@AviMayer) January 18, 2018

Five meters (16 feet) below the ground, about 200 meters (650 feet) inside Israeli territory, lies the entrance to a cramped tunnel whose destruction in October upped the tension around the Gaza Strip, sparking mortar and rocket attacks as well as frequent riots along the security fence surrounding the coastal enclave.

On Thursday, the military allowed journalists to visit the tunnel, which was dug by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group, as well as two construction sites where workers were drilling deep underground to create the reinforced, sensor-laden concrete walls of a massive underground barrier that is meant to surround the Gaza Strip and put an end to the subterranean terror threat once and for all.

In the coming weeks and months, as construction progresses, the military expects to find and destroy several more attack tunnels that enter Israeli territory from Gaza. The subterranean wall it is building will deny Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Gaza-based terrorist groups what is arguably the only strategic weapon they currently possess, a fact that he said is slowly dawning on them.

“It’s just a matter of them becoming aware of it,” the official said.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad attack tunnel began in the Gaza city of Khan Younis, a little over one kilometer (0.6 miles) away from the border with Israel. According to the IDF official, it was dug at a rate of 10 to 20 meters (33 to 66 feet) per day by workers who operated in shifts and had a maximum depth of 28 meters (91 feet).

The tunnel itself wasn’t much to behold. The floor was littered with empty soda bottles and plastic sacks that once held dirt. Jagged pieces of rebar jutted out of the walls. The top of this six-foot-tall reporter’s head brushed against the ceiling. But to the residents of nearby Kibbutz Kissufim, some two kilometers (1.2 miles) away, it could have spelled disaster.

New details have been revealed about the cross-border Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terror tunnel destroyed by the IDF in late October.

The tunnel, which infiltrated about 200 meters into southern Israel and was located only two kilometers from the community of Kissufim, is believed by the IDF to have been intended to be used to attack Kissufim and/or abduct Israeli soldiers.

Several PIJ terrorists worked around the clock except on Friday, digging in shifts. They were able to dig between 10 to 20 meters a day, at a depth of 26 meters below ground aided by electricity, oxygen tanks and water to avoid suffocation. The terrorists did not try to hide the sand which they removed, creating large sand dunes on the Gazan side.

The tunnel was detected using newly implemented advanced technology and was destroyed in a controlled explosion inside Israeli territory but it remains open on the Gazan side, guarded by Hamas terrorists.

During the 2014 war, several soldiers were killed by Hamas terrorists when they emerged from the numerous tunnels they dug into Israel, surprising the IDF and leaving the residents of border communities concerned of possible tunnels beneath their homes. By the time of the last ceasefire, the IDF said it had destroyed 32 tunnels that crossed under the border.

At least six tunnels have been destroyed since the end of the operation, four of which were destroyed since October alone.

Since then, the IDF tried to come up with a response in different ways, but the accomplished results can only be seen now through different steps that were taken simultaneously: The first is the underground obstacle being built around the 65-kilometer border fence. The cost of each kilometer of the obstacle is estimated at around NIS 40 million (roughly $12 million)—a total of about NIS 3 billion—and was expected to be completed during 2016, to provide hermetic defense and cut off every tunnel crossing the fence.

The second step is the classified technological solution which costs around NIS 1.2 billion. Only few people are privy to the secrets of how this classified method works. The reports about it are very limited too, to prevent Hamas from finding out about the method that has made it possible to successfully detect tunnels on Israeli territory—leading to a change in the number of tunnels uncovered recently—as well as their route within the Gaza Strip later on.

The third method is the improved intelligence gathering ability on tunnels excavated on the other side, making it possible to locate the tunnel openings. Furthermore, the Air Force has developed a new ability to accurately neutralize tunnels using ammunition dropped from the air. And there you have it: A solution to a problem which seemed intractable only three-and-a-half years ago.

The results, which are impressive on a global scale, prove that when a decision is made and when the required resources are allotted for its implementation, “the Israeli genius and the Jewish mind found a solution,” as Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Major-General Yoav Mordechai said Sunday.

That’s exactly what was done in the previous decade with the Iron Dome system, which was initiated by then-Defense Minister Amir Peretz against the Hamas rockets—a problem the IDF’s top echelon considered unsolvable at the time.

Now, the defense establishment should start preparing for the next threat, the heavyweight Borkan mortar shells Hezbollah has armed itself with, which have a range of about 5 kilometers but can carry 200 to 500 kilograms of lethal explosives. Since they could cause enormous damage to bases and communities within that range, we should deal with this threat should now rather than wait for the next war and the report that will follow.

The Middle East Media Research Institute reports that the Hamas terror group’s deputy political bureau chief, Saleh al-Arouri, told the Lebanese Al-Quds television network that Iran is the only country providing military support to Hamas to fight the “Israeli entity.”

“On the one hand, there are countries that support Israel, and conspire with it day in and day out, and sacrifice Jerusalem and the holy places, and on the other hand, we have [Iran] which provides aid against the Israeli entity,” said Arouri.

“Who supported the resistance in Lebanon until it drove out the Israeli entity? It was Iran. Who supports the resistance in Gaza and Palestine? Iran,” he added. “Our relations with Iran are based on the fact that Iran is the most hostile country in the world toward the Zionist entity. Iran is the only country that says that this entity is cancerous. This is Iran’s official position….The aid Iran provides to the resistance is not merely symbolic. This is real aid, which is essential for the resistance to continue and be effective.”

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the creation of a new task force to investigate drug trafficking by Hezbollah in the United States. The task force is called the Hezbollah Financing and Narcoterrorism Team.

At first glance, the move looks political – especially considering the media coverage the announcement received. Much of the coverage suggests that the Obama administration scuttled an investigation into Hezbollah in an effort to make nice to Iran. Media coverage, and many pundits, also suggest that the previous administration rationalized that by not ruffling the feathers of Hezbollah, which is one of Iran’s indisputable minions, Iran would be happier with the United States and actively continue negotiations on nuclear affairs and follow through with the nuclear agreement.

There certainly is a political angle here, but there is much more than political machination at stake.

The purpose of the new task force is not just to find out or explain what happened in the past. Its purpose is to shut down any current and future narcoterror related activity, by Hezbollah, from passing through the United States. The beauty of Hezbollah’s narcoterror activities – from their point of view is that they figured out how to use the United States as a thoroughfare for their narcotics money laundering trade.

It is by no means an exaggeration to say that stopping Hezbollah’s narcoterror network will enhance safety in the United States and further secure the larger Western world. An added benefit of shuttering Hezbollah’s money laundering drug activity is that Israel’s security will be significantly improved.

By now it should be abundantly clear to all, as it should have been to the Obama administration, that the profits gained from the hundreds of millions of drug trade dollars Hezbollah receives goes directly into their military coffers. It is that money that engines the murderous terror machine that attacks Israel over its northern border.

Introduction

The Iranian regime is attributing the December 2017-January 2018 popular uprising in the country to two main factors. One is the public's access to the West-based Internet, and the other is the involvement of Iran's enemies, who seek to bring down the Islamic revolutionary regime.

Regime Officials Blame Uprising On Access To The Internet

In addition to the regime's claim that it was the public's access to the West-based Internet that provoked and fanned the flames of the uprising, prominent spokesmen in the ideological camp, such as Ali Jafari, commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and the Kayhan daily, the regime mouthpiece, blamed the government of President Hassan Rohani for the widespread Internet access (Iran has some 80 million residents and approximately 40 million smartphones) and for the lack of control over the Internet.[1]

At a January 3, 2018 press conference, IRGC commander Jafari explained: "The atmosphere of the Internet was not good at all, and some lost control of this atmosphere because of their interests, or because of negligence... The enemies rode quickly over the Internet, with 3,000 new forces, and reached the arena in order to create fitna [civil strife]... They began creating channels on the Internet... The lack of control over the Internet – which is run from outside Iran – and the negligence of those [in the government who are] responsible for control of this [online] atmosphere have exacerbated the rioting. But when we took control of the Internet, we witnessed a decrease in the creation of fitna."[2]

On January 4, 2018, Iranian Prosecutor-General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said: "It is difficult to live without technology and social media, but these technologies must be directed. The Internet is considered to be a source of damage that destroys homes and creates many problems for families and young people, and, unfortunately, no effort is being made to direct it. If we do not think of a solution for the Internet, and for the foreigners' plots, a harsh future awaits us. We must block the active channels that aim to destroy society's morality, to denigrate the sacred values, and to destroy society's security."[3]

The alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United States seems intended to contain the Iranian regime, and not, as falsely advertised by President Barack Obama, to prevent a nuclear program.

Leaders of Western Europe know exactly what the mullahs' regime is, and what its goals and activities are. They know it is the world's main sponsor of Islamic terrorism. They know the disastrous state of Iran's society and economy, but they prefer to play deaf and dumb. All they think about, it seems, are the contracts they sign with the mullahs to get more money. They do not care about the suffering of Iranians; the chaos, massacres and destruction caused by the regime. They know that the nuclear deal is constantly violated by the self-policing regime, and that a nuclear bomb is in the making. They are aware that the regime has close ties with North Korea, and that both are global threats.

The EU's chief diplomat, Federica Mogherini, has hypocritically called "all parties concerned to abstain from violence", as if there were a moral equivalence between unarmed protesters and killer militias with weapons of war. Meanwhile, in Iranian prisons, protesters were being arrested and tortured to death.

Leaders of Western Europe like to boast how they respect human rights, yet they are the ones trampling on them.

The more popular anti-Trump angle is to claim that support for the protesters is futile. “Experts say President Trump’s tweets won’t help Iranians,” said NBC correspondent Matt Bradley in late December. The New York Times op-ed page, in its headline for a piece by former Obama State Department official Philip Gordon, told Trump to “be quiet.” But it was clear from the article that Gordon’s real concern wasn’t the protesters. It was preserving the nuclear deal. “If Mr. Trump blows up the deal and re-imposes sanctions,” he wrote, “he will not be doing the opposition a favor but instead giving Iranians a reason to rally to—rather than work against—the government they might otherwise despise.”

CBS journalist Major Garrett must have been referring to Gordon and other former Obama aides during the December 31 Face the Nation, when he told Lindsey Graham, “Some have said that would be the wrong thing to do because that would give the regime an enemy to point at us again.” A December 31 Los Angeles Times piece made the same point: “Iran’s leaders already are casting Trump’s increasingly effusive expressions of support for the demonstrators as opportunistic meddling and are painting the demonstrators as foreign pawns, adopting a strategy that some analysts say could jeopardize the legitimacy of the protests.” True. On the other hand, I say those analysts are full of baloney. Who’s to decide?

Not the people of Iran, apparently, who are denied agency by both their rulers and a Western chattering class more committed to the defense of President Obama’s legacy than the spread of democracy and freedom.

Now we have 12 apartheid roads for apartheid, which Arabs are prohibited from using. There are cars, planes, airports, hospitals, ambulances, hair salons, pharmacies, ports, restaurants and hotels that Arabs are forbidden to use. Now there is an apartheid system that allows any criminal from the underworld to enjoy the protection of Israeli law, and forbids any Arab even if he is a professor of mathematics.

The State Department never acknowledged having completed the report, sources said, and instead classified it.

"State had neglected to tell Sen. Kirk's office," said one source with knowledge of the situation. "It seems that this was intentional."

Once the report's existence was confirmed, Congress, in a 2017 measure, directed the State Department to provide an unclassified version of the report. This, too, was ignored, sources said.

The report is said to confirm that, as opposed to what UNRWA and its supporters claim, the number of refugees is actually in the tens of thousands, not the millions.

Richard Goldberg, a former deputy chief of staff for Kirk, told the Free Beacon that the UNRWA effort was always about exposing the myth that there are millions of refugees who still require aid.

"This is about basic taxpayer oversight of an agency that gobbles up hundreds of millions of dollars ever year," said Goldberg, the author of the original amendment that required the report. "Are we funding a refugee agency or are we funding a welfare agency that nurtures a culture terrorism and violence?"

"There's a moral difference when it comes to U.S. policy and foreign assistance," said Goldberg, now a senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "American aid for true refugees is one thing; American aid to subsidize a culture of welfare and terrorism is entirely different." (h/t Yenta Press)

Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) on Wednesday spoke with the BBC about the United States’ decision to cut by half the funding it provides to UNRWA, the UN’s agency for “Palestinian refugees”.

Hotovely rejected the interviewer’s assertion that the American decision is counterproductive, saying, “What is really counterproductive is the role of UNRWA in perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

“Back in the 1950s, there were 750,000 Palestinians registered as ‘refugees’. Now, almost 70 years after the war, we’re talking about five million peoples who are registered as ‘refugees’. This is a major failure of the organization which was supposed to resettle those people who lost a war that they started – of course, we’re speaking about their grandparents who started the War of Independence which they lost.”

“There is only one version of history. They started a war after not accepting the idea of the UN Partition Plan. We need to remember that,” she added.

“The Foreign Ministry is very clear about its message: UNRWA should finish its role as an agency which perpetuates fake refugees,” said Hotovely, who also stressed the importance of foreign aid.

“Foreign aid is something that every country should provide according to the needs of the population. We’re absolutely in favor of foreign aid. This is something that is important. Humanitarian aid is important…but you need to make a major distinction between foreign aid which can be delivered by different groups and organizations and the idea that those people are going to keep living a fantasy that they are refugees, because they are not. According to international law, there is no second and third generation to refugee status.”

Last night, at the University of Warwick, Faculty arranged a public talk that accused Israel of eugenics. Let us digest a simple truth. Like with most medical or technological innovations, Israel is a global powerhouse in fertility treatment. Every Israeli citizen, regardless of race, religion or colour, receives equal treatment. If you are Muslim and in need of IVF then no citizenship in the world, guarantees you the sort of world-class treatment that being an Israeli does. If you have doubts, talk to Prof. Foad Azem, I am sure he would be happy to convince you.

Eugenics is defined as ‘a set of beliefs and practices that aims at improving the genetic quality of a human population‘. Eugenics were most famously used as a justification for the racial policies of Nazi Germany. They are clearly associated with the Holocaust. False accusations of eugenics against Israel, places an accusing finger on the biggest victims of 20th century eugenic experiments – the Jews. The Jews are a people who lost one third of their number to genocide. You cannot spread these type of lies, which clearly fall under the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and then ignore complaints about your failure to protect Jewish students. There is something rotten in Warwick.
Dr Siggie Vertommen

The event was a talk by Dr Siggie Vertommen. It was titled ‘Anti-colonial Resistance is Fertile: Sperm Smuggling and Birth Strikes in Palestine/Israel‘. Vertommen is Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. Like many activist academics, Vertommen places her pseudo-science atop a biased and twisted view of Zionism. As Vertommen specialises in ‘the political economy of global fertility chains’ then this is what she places on top of her twisted views of Zionism.

To understand the mindset, Vertommen wrote a piece on the social unrest in Israel in 2011 and 2012. It was published as a chapter in a book. The title was: ‘Help, de onderdrukkers worden onderdrukt! Sociaal protest in Israel‘. This translates as ‘Help, the oppressors are being oppressed‘.

Unpack the title. In Israel, people are oppressors. Not the government, not a political body, not an ideology, but the people. In every other nation, social protests such as this are viewed as being carried out by those fighting for change, as opposition to the status quo. In Israel, they were labelled ‘oppressors’ by Vertommen. It perfectly demonstrates, that for Vertommen, there seems to be no way out for the Israeli whatever their views. It suggests a highly racist mindset.

Puerto Rico is going through a deep economic crisis, mainly due to heavy public debt. This subject has been addressed in numerous articles that explore causes and solutions to the crisis.

Last Monday, Puerto Rico’s largest daily newspaper, El Nuevo Día, published one more of these pieces. Actually, it wasn’t just one more. Penned by Wilda Rodríguez, it stated that “behind closed doors the most enlightened politicians speak of US power as a parallel government organized by the forces of wealth and violence (war machinery) from Wall Street.”

But these “forces of wealth and violence” to which Ms. Rodriguez referred, weren’t merely abstract figures. Ultimately, she singled out a specific culprit, asserting that “the US Congress will finally do what ‘the Jew’ — as the prototype of the real power is vulgarly called — wants.” And “the Jew,” according to Ms. Rodriguez, couldn’t care less about the situation in Puerto Rico, as “he” is “laden with his heavy itinerary of wars and profits.”

To justify and substantiate these charges, the writer resorted to citing the view of an individual in an opinion column published “more than twenty years ago” by the Israeli newspaper Maariv. Although it is a newspaper well-known in Israel, Maariv is not known abroad. Notably, a translation of the article appears on websites such as the one run by David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and a notorious antisemite.

The original column related that the then-US administration included numerous Jews, a fact that was said to underscore positive change from the past. The tenor of the column was essentially ethnic pride on the part of Jews — a group that had often, including in America, been outside the corridors of power. The antisemitic sites that posted the column twisted it, and claimed that it was proof of malevolent Jewish dominance.

Last week, Israel published a list of twenty organisations that support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), whose leaders will not be allowed into Israel. This has led to a furious response from the BDS movement and its supporters, and unsurprisingly, the Guardian and Independent ran articles critical of the decision.

“Israel is increasing its pressure of human rights activists,” says an opinion piece in the Guardian, and similar sentiments were expressed in an article at the Independent, which suggested this would lead to wide-scale banning of human rights observers. However, these articles are misleading as they blur the distinction between BDS and other groups, and thus misrepresent the decision taken by the Israeli government.

The articles lack a very important piece of context: In Israel, tens of anti-government organisations work with complete freedom, documenting (what they perceive to be) flaws in Israeli policy – and Israel, as a free and open democracy, allows for this. The list published last week by the Israeli government does not impact the work of these organisations at all. So, an accurate analysis of the government decision would start with the question – why is BDS different? If Israel allows for anti-government organisations to operate within Israel, why is it banning people affiliated with BDS organisations?

The answer is made clear by seeing what BDS is, in its owns words. In 2005, the initial Palestinian call for BDS was signed by 160 organisations (for the record, many of these organisations, including the first organisation signed onto the call, are terrorist groups).

President Trump’s alleged vulgar remark last week about the homelands of certain immigrants to America has garnered much attention and generated much outrage. Very different, notes Tom Gross, were responses to the comment of the French ambassador to Britain in 2001 when he called Israel a “sh—y little country”:

When Ambassador Daniel Bernard told guests at a dinner hosted by the writer Barbara Amiel . . . that Israel was a “sh—y little country,” some journalists rushed to his defense or even praised him. For example, an article in the Independent by one of the paper’s most prominent columnists, Deborah Orr, described Israel as “sh—y” and “little” no fewer than four times. (At the time, the Independent was winning newspaper-of-the-year awards).

The French ambassador to London is not the American president, of course. But he is nonetheless the official representative of one of the world’s most important countries: a nuclear power, one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council, a G8 member, the land of égalité and fraternité and of a supposedly sophisticated ruling elite. And Bernard was not just any ambassador. He was one of then-French President Jacques Chirac’s closest confidantes, and had previously served as France’s UN ambassador. . . .

Yet when Bernard made his “sh—y” remark, the British and French press seemed to spend more time criticizing the messenger, Barbara Amiel, in whose home the remark was made, than the ambassador. Le Monde ran a front-page attack on Amiel for having had the temerity to reveal the ambassador’s comment. In the Guardian, Matt Wells denounced Amiel as “an arch-Zionist,” but had nothing but sympathy for Bernard who, he claimed “was struggling against a tide of anger from Israel.” In fact the Israeli government hadn’t made a single official comment on the matter at the time Wells’ article was published.

What was Steven Spielberg’s crime? Was it that he filmed parts of the 1993 film Schindler’s List, which tells the story of a German businessman who saved Jews during the Holocaust, in Israel? Was it because he filmed parts of the film Munich, a critical look at the Mossad, in Israel? Maybe it’s because Spielberg donated money to Israel during the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

There are organizations made up of ideological boors that spend their time following these sorts of things and notifying governments sympathetic to the global hate campaign against Israel.

For instance, it was a group calling itself the Campaign to Boycott Supporters of Israel-Lebanon that gave the Lebanese government a heads-up about the planned screening of the newest Spielberg film in Lebanon. This is the same organization that was behind the successful campaign to ban Wonder Woman because Gal Gadot is an Israeli who served in the IDF.

The film that Lebanese were to be deprived of seeing this time, until the ban was overturned on Wednesday, is called The Post. It was directed by Spielberg and tells the story of The Washington Post’s uncovering of the Nixon administration’s lies about the US’s involvement in Vietnam.

Another film banned in Lebanon is Jungle, an Australian film starring Daniel Radcliffe. Lebanon’s censorship apparatchiks have deemed Jungle worthy of a ban because an Israeli, Yossi Ghinsberg, is behind it. The film is based on a book by Ghinsberg relating his experiences trekking through the jungles of Bolivia. Radcliffe recently told an Israeli news channel that he worked hard perfecting his Israeli-tinged English to play Ghinsberg.

In September 2015, the New York Times ran a rather peculiar chart. It was designed to elucidate just why certain Democrats would or would not vote for President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal—and it organized Democratic lawmakers by whether they were Jewish while noting how many Jews resided in their congressional districts. The word “Jewish” was highlighted in yellow. After brief but significant blowback online, the Times removed the “Jewish” indicator. The editor who supervised the chart’s publication was Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor for the newspaper.

Now, two years later, Weisman has published a book about anti-Semitism—and, more specifically, about the supposedly grave threat to Jews springing from the alt-right and the Trump administration. (((Semitism))), for such is the book’s title, suffers from two grave ills. First, Weisman believes that political leftism and Judaism are identical. Second, he knows little or nothing about the political right, in whose camp he places the alt-right movement. Combine these two shortcomings with a heavy dose of self-regard, and you get (((Semitism))): a toxic brew of anti-Israel sentiment, bagels-and-lox cultural Jewishness, and unbridled hostility toward mainstream conservatism, which he lumps together with despicable alt-right anti-Semitism.

According to Weisman, Judaism derives its present-day importance from the way it provides a religious echo to secular leftism. This is his actual opening sentence: “The Jew flourishes when borders come down, when boundaries blur, when walls are destroyed, not erected.” Thus does he describe a people whose binding glue over the millennia is a faith tradition literally designed to separate its adherents from those who are not their co-religionists.

This ethnic-Jew-centric perspective leads Weisman to reject not merely Jewish observance, which he finds parochial and divisive, but the tie between Judaism and Israel, which he subtly titles “The Israel Deception.” He laments: “The American Jewish obsession with Israel has taken our eyes off not only the politics of our own country, the growing gulf between rich and poor, and the rising tide of nationalism but also our own grounding in faith.” He sneers at Jews who promote the “tried and true theme of the little Israeli David squaring off against the giant Arab Goliath.” Weisman believes, like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, that members of both parties are guilty of “kissing the ring” at AIPAC, of “turn[ing] to mush when the subject was Israel.” In fact, Weisman says, the anti-Semitic BDS movement on college campuses “is worrisome as much for what it says about the American Jew’s inextricable links to Israel as for what it says about anti-Semitism.” In his view, “Barack Obama was the apotheosis of liberal internationalism.…The Jew thrived.”

The top two floors of his former home still pocked with bullet holes and memories of a deadly four-day siege, Moshe Holtzberg returned to the Nariman Chabad House in central Mumbai on Thursday to unveil a “living memorial” to his parents killed in a terror attack there over nine years ago.

Surrounded by Indian media — which has affectionately dubbed him “baby Moshe” — family, dignitaries, and the nanny who saved him from the carnage of the November 2008 attacks, Holtzberg, 11, spoke about his return and invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join him again in Mumbai for his bar mitzvah in two years.

“I am returning home. I am returning to where I was nine years ago,” he said. He called the event “festive” and thanked God for his miraculous rescue.

Holtzberg’s parents Gavriel and Rivky were killed along with four other Jews when Pakistani terrorists took over the Jewish community center where they lived on November 26, 2008.

Together with Netanyahu, the 11-year-old unveiled a memorial to those killed. Later making his own quiet dedication, his grandfather Shimon Rosenberg lit a candle for his slain daughter and son-in-law.

In Ahmadebad, tens of thousands of people lined the street, some waving Israeli flags, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sped past, whizzing by massive billboards with his and Indian counterpart Narendra Modi’s faces plastered on them.

In rural Dev Dholera, curious farmers and others craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the prime ministers, and hundreds of young entrepreneurs and business people cheered the leaders like rock stars.

In Sabarkantha, villagers waved at the prime ministers’ helicopters as they came in to land in a former forest that had been cleared to make way for a helipad. Dancers in traditional dress did flips, and farmers told of how many rupees they had made after training at an Israel-funded agricultural center.

Wednesday’s displays of love for Israel and its leaders — some of them seemingly carefully choreographed, some apparently spontaneous — drove home the budding bromance between Netanyahu and Modi, a love affair both hope will also bloom into a tighter business and strategic relationship.

For Modi, who cut his teeth in politics as chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, the visit was seen as personally significant, and while there had been signs welcoming Netanyahu in Delhi, Agra and Mumbai, they were smaller than the massive billboards in the northwestern Indian state.

While in other places, Netanyahu’s motorcade was at best a curiosity, in Gujarat, crowds lined streets, and songs were played in Hebrew in some places.

Muslims in India's eastern Kolkata city staged a protest on Thursday over the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the country.

Netanyahu began a six-day visit to India on Sunday (January 14) hoping to boost trade and defense ties.

Members of a regional group, All Bengal Minority Youth Federation demanded New Delhi to snap all ties with Israel over recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the same.

"We oppose the way in which Israeli Prime Minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) was given a grand welcome in our country. We demand that we should not have any relations with the Israeli President or the Prime Minister. Whatever relations were there relating to business purpose should also be ended," Kamaru Jaman, president of the All Bengal Minority Youth Federation, told Reuters.

The protesters carried posters reading 'Israeli PM Netanyahu is a war criminal' and 'Israel is an illegitimate state' and burnt a banner with photographs of US President Donald Trump and Netanyahu.

The argument for cutting funding to UNRWA is not primarily financial. The United States is an enormously generous donor to UNHCR, providing just under 40 percent of its budget. I hope we maintain that level of funding, and if the administration tries to cut that amount I hope Congress will resist.

The argument for cutting funding to UNRWA instead rests on two pillars.

The first is that UNRWA’s activities repeatedly give rise to concern that it has too many connections to Hamas and to rejectionist ideology.

But even if those flaws were corrected, this would not solve the second and more fundamental problem with UNRWA –which is that it will perpetuate the Palestinian “refugee” problem forever rather than helping to solve it. In this sense, cutting funding to UNRWA is of a piece with the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. That Israel was the sole country in the world not allowed to choose its capital, and have that choice respected, was part of the long assault on Israel’s legitimacy and permanence. Similarly, that the sole group of refugees whom the UN keeps enlarging is Palestinian, and that the only way to remedy this under UN definitions would be to eliminate the State of Israel or have 5 million Palestinian “refugees” move there should simply be unacceptable.

So the Trump administration is once again upsetting the apple cart and defying conventional wisdom when it comes to Israel. And once again it is right to demand change. Perpetuating and enlarging the Palestinian “refugee” crisis has harmed Israel and it has certainly harmed Palestinians. Keeping their grievances alive may have served anti-Israel political ends, but it has brought peace no closer and it has helped prevent generations of Palestinians from leading normal lives. That archipelago of displaced persons and refugee camps that once dotted Europe is long gone now, and the descendants of those who tragically lived in those camps now lead productive and fruitful lives in many countries. One can only wish such a fate for Palestinian refugee camps and for Palestinians. More money for UNRWA won't solve anything.

Below is picture of #UNRWA's dense Balata refugee camp in Nablus. Almost 30K residents. IT MAKES NO SENSE.
1. It's located inside Area A under full control of the Palestinian Authority.
2. Why isn't housing built for them in nearby land?
3. Residents can't vote in Nablus elex 1/2 pic.twitter.com/5oLtk8gyNd

— Lenny Ben-David (@lennybendavid) January 18, 2018

Belgium has stepped in to help out the UN Agency assisting Palestinian refugees with an immediate disbursement of $23 million after the Trump administration suspended $65 million in aid for the international organization.

Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said Wednesday that “for a lot of Palestinian refugees, the UNRWA is the last life buoy.”

De Croo said he was responding to a global fundraising appeal from UNRWA in hopes of making up for funding cuts announced by the United States. The money is Belgium’s allocation for three years but because of the group’s immediate need, De Croo’s office said it will be “disbursed immediately.”

The US provides roughly one-third of UNRWA’s budget, and the agency has warned that it now faces the “most dramatic financial crisis” in its nearly 70-year history. The agency provides health care, education and social services to 5 million Palestinians across the Middle East.

UNRWA’s secretary-general, Pierre Krähenbühl, said the fundraising appeal would begin in the coming days. The agency said it is too soon to say which countries will be approached to fill the void or what services are at risk.

Do you still think Hamas is a friend to Gazans? pic.twitter.com/a3m80nwQRR

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) January 17, 2018

On January 14, 2017, Amnesty International issued a press statement (“Israel Must Release Teenage Palestinian Activist Ahed Tamimi”) claiming, despite damning video footage of 16-year old Ahed Tamimi assaulting soldiers, that “Israeli authorities must release” her. The charges against Tamimi also include incitement to terror, such as a statement that “Whether it is stabbings or suicide bombings or throwing stones, everyone must do his part and we must unite in order for our message to be heard that we want to liberate Palestine” (emphasis added). Nevertheless, Amnesty argues, “Nothing that Ahed Tamimi has done can justify the continuing detention of a 16-year-old girl.”

As an initial matter, Amnesty’s statement is a profoundly dishonest.1 The NGO omits the fact that the court was prepared to conduct a bail hearing immediately after the submission of the indictment on January 1, 2018, but it was Tamimi’s own attorney, Gaby Lasky, who twice asked for delays resulting in the postponement of the hearing until January 15.

Setting aside the fact that Amnesty is either ignorant of the court proceedings or deliberately misleading its readership, Amnesty’s call is an affront to human rights and the rule of law. By assaulting a soldier, among other alleged offenses, Tamimi did, in fact, partake in actions that according to the law would result in her continued detention and trial. Of course, Amnesty ignores and does not condemn the broader context of the weaponization of Palestinian minors by the Palestinian Authority and armed groups to commit violent attacks, failing to hold Palestinians accountable for child abuse, incitement, and recruitment and use of child soldiers.

By praising “Tamimi’s act of defiance” and labeling her an “activist,” Amnesty detracts from any sense of childhood “mental immaturity” that demands “special safeguards and care” (to quote from the Declaration of the Rights of the Child). Similar encouragement from Tamimi’s parents reflects a deeply problematic environment endangering child welfare, yet Amnesty fails to condemn her family for its role in pushing her to violence.

Should a 16-year old minor, indicted for three counts of assault, slingshotting stones at law enforcement officers, and calling for the commission of terrorist attacks including suicide bombings, be released on bail?

A blog published by Bill Van Esveld, Senior Researcher in the Children’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch (HRW), does just that (Israeli Prosecutors Throw Book at Palestinian Child Protestor, HRW Dispatches, January 14, 2018). Van Esveld throws the full weight of this NGO superpower behind a violent child offender, filmed by her mother and streamed live on social media, engaging in assault and incitement.

In the blog, he argues that the only possible outcome of the bail hearing regarding Ahed Tamimi, a 16-year old Palestinian, is to release her. By his account, any other decision would merely point to the inherent discrimination of the Israeli justice system.

In order to reach this outrageous conclusion, Van Esveld attempts to employ legalese that perverts reality and morality, and relies on his presumed ignorance of his readers. This is the same HRW employee who told Al Jazeera, “There’s really no reason why you have to arrest a young child in the first place and detain them,” apparently oblivious to the numerous incidents of minors committing murders and other acts of violent terrorism.

A senior policy adviser to Democratic senator Patty Murray (Wash.) said her office in the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions does "not care about anti-Semitism," according to two people who attended the meeting.

The HELP committee is currently weighing the nomination of Ken Marcus as assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education. Marcus has been the target of an aggressive campaign waged by leading anti-Israel groups seeking to derail his nomination. Marcus has worked to combat the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement on college campuses and is the founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a pro-Israel group.

During a meeting on November 28 with Sarah N. Stern, a former colleague of Marcus and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a senior adviser to Murray on the HELP committee told Stern the committee does not "care about anti-Semitism in this office."

"We don't care about anti-Semitism in this office," Murray's senior adviser said. "We care about transgenders, we care about blacks, we care about Hispanics, we care about gays, we care about lesbians, we care about the disabled."

"We don't care about anti-Semitism in this office," he said.

Amid ongoing concerns over the British Labour Party’s handling of anti-Semitism in its ranks, the party scrapped the candidacy of an activist who said Holocaust victims who “died with dignity must be turning in their graves” over how “Gaza is a ghetto being shelled.”

Michelle Harris was removed Tuesday from the shortlist of potential Labour candidates to represent the Hastings and Rye constituency in the House of Commons, the lower house of the British Parliament, the local branch of the party said in a statement.

In 2014, Harris wrote on Twitter, “I have often said that the Holocaust victims who died with dignity must be turning in their graves at the horrors done in the name of Judaism. Gaza is a ghetto being shelled.”

On Facebook, she posted in 2015 a banner reading: “Pregnant Palestinian women were deliberately shot by Israeli snipers during the recent Gaza genocide.” And in 2016 she accused Israel of “state racism” against Ethiopian Jews.

“The Parliamentary Selection Committee decided to remove Michelle Harris from the shortlist,” the constituency’s statement read. “This was a retrospective decision when new information came to the attention of the committee.” It did not name her vitriol on Israel as the reason for the removal.

For such a Facebook expert, Gwynne’s activity on the social media site is rather eyebrow-raising. Gwynne’s personal account has joined a variety of bonkers, racist and antisemitic group. According to Facebook, Gwynne is a member of:

• Stop Zionist USA: a group dedicated to sharing antisemitic material including pictures comparing Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler, memes which blame Israel for ISIS and spreading Rothschild and Soros conspiracy theories
  
• Truth Is Rising: a nutjob group for conspiracy theorists which has suggested ‘7/7 was an inside job’ and is awash with antisemitic material

Either Gwynne has managed to hide some pretty radical views or – perhaps more likely – he is simply blanket-accepting all the group invitations he gets from randomers. Tell us more about your Facebook expertise, Andrew…

When British MP Alistair Burt was asked in parliament, what action he is taking to ensure that no UK tax-payers money ends up in the pockets of convicted terrorists, Burt was dismissive.

“Well it just doesn’t,” he said lying – and doing so pompously, with a generous dose of empirical arrogance. “We do not give aid to terrorists and the Palestinian Authority knows that.” Smug as a five-year old who grabbed the last seat in Musical Chairs, Burt sat down in a hurry.

Not only was he indifferent, defensible and protective of this scandalous sham, he outright lied by dodging the concept of “fungible money” – one of those phrases thrown around in politics often intended to dazzle, dismiss and deceive ‘The Proletariat.’ Palestinian politicians have appeared on television, even speaking in English, explaining, defending and legitimizing their paying of their “freedom fighters,” with foreign aid.

For a man who has nobly campaigned on behalf of the Yezidi victims of the barbaric ISIS genocide, when it comes to Israeli victims of a barbaric Palestinian Authority, Burt’s denial and protection of this evil entity is extraordinary because of double-standards.

Yet he is not alone in his defense of the indefensible.

The New Orleans City Council wants to reconsider a resolution it passed last week that lends support to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

The resolution to boycott investments with human rights violators, which passed the council on January 11 with all five members present voting in support, mentions neither Israel nor the Palestinian territories, but BDS and anti-Israel activists claimed the passage as a victory for their cause.

Since the vote, however, City Council President Jason Williams and other council members have told the local media that they will move to reconsider the resolution at their next council meeting.

On Wednesday, Williams called for reconsideration of the resolution, saying he was not aware of the boycott movement or its mission when he and the council voted, the New Orleans Advocate reported.

A Lebanese military court handed down a six-month prison sentence to a journalist for presenting views critical of the army, a court official told AFP on Thursday.

Hanin Ghaddar, also a researcher known for her criticism of the powerful Hezbollah movement, was sentenced in absentia on January 10 over an expose at a conference in the United States, the source said.

Her sentence sparked outrage among fellow journalists and academics in Lebanon, where they said free speech and freedom of the press were once again being challenged.

The court official said the ruling found Ghaddar, a US resident, guilty of “defaming the Lebanese army, harming its reputation and accusing it of distinguishing between Lebanese citizens.”

During a conference session in Washington in 2014, a recording of which is available online, she described the situation in Lebanon as “Sunnis being clamped down by Hezbollah and the Lebanese army versus Hezbollah militia being the untouchables.”

Hezbollah is a Shiite organization backed by Iran which is represented in the Lebanese government and has a militia often considered more powerful than the national army itself.

The Russian-Ukrainian political journalism world was stunned, but not particularly surprised, yesterday when a well known pro-Kremlin propaganda outlet published a lengthy anti-Semitic manifesto proclaiming that it was time to “drop the Jew taboo.” Russia Insider, an English language publication with a crankish history of publishing nonsense and propaganda, published the manifesto, which contained a comprehensive litany of the most vile accusations against Jews dating back more than one hundred years. “The unreasonable hostility towards Putin’s Russia, particularly coming from the US and the UK, is very much a Jewish phenomenon, and has been for centuries” the essay stipulated. It contains hundreds more sentences like that in a fourteen point manifesto which seems to have been ripped straight out of the 1930s.

The site`s stock in trade since it began publishing in the autumn of 2014 as part of a Russian government sponsored assault on the cohesion of the Western narrative is a melange of ultra-left, ultra-right, anti-Western and anti-NATO conspiracy theories, some of them going off fairly deep into the woods. Amusingly enough, the website has spent the past three years disseminating alarmist criticism of American and European support for pro- Western reforms by the Kyiv government and vociferously attacking Ukraine for supposedly having been captured by a Neo-Nazi cabal. The site`s content was regularly a shining and egregious example of the recent innovation in this conflict of outright fascists accusing other people of fascism. Such criticism included a 2014 article attacking the veracity of my own work reporting in Ukraine, which could no longer be found on the site as of press time.

The five-thousand-word long hate manifesto was penned by Charles Bausman, the founder of Russia Insider, who is widely known in Russia/Ukraine policy circles as an individual who is often to be found pontificating in the studios of Russia Today. Bausman has been linked by Anton Shekhovtsov, a preeminent expert on Russian state support for extreme right wing groups in Europe, to the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, who is known for his reactionary ultra-Orthodox views and ties to Kremlin operatives and for providing financial assistance to Russian led separatists and covert operations in Eastern Ukraine.

Raleigh, NC Syrian Imam Abdullah Khadra Warns: If We Do Not Awaken, the Zionists Will Destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque to Build Their Fictitious Temple pic.twitter.com/oETb1Tmpqd

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) January 18, 2018

German lawmakers voted Thursday to install a commissioner who would coordinate government activities against anti-Semitism.

The lower house approved by a wide majority a motion proposed by four of the six parliamentary groups to install the official, who would be chosen by independent experts. The center-left Social Democrats called for the commissioner to be installed at the chancellery.

The decision follows a recommendation by a panel of experts and comes amid concern over anti-Semitic incidents during recent pro-Palestinian protests.

Volker Kauder, the parliamentary leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Union bloc, told lawmakers that far-right motives are behind the bulk of anti-Semitic crimes but there’s been a rising number of acts by migrants. He said “we must not allow either of these things.”
Volker Kauder, parliamentary group leader of the CDU/CSU speaks to reporters as he arrives for a meeting with the leaders of the conservative CDU/CSU and Social Democratic Party on January 9, 2018, in Berlin. (AFP Photo/Tobias Schwarz)

Amid growing over anti-Semitism among migrants from Muslim-majority countries, Sawsan Chebli, a Berlin city government official who is Muslim, suggested earlier this month that everyone living in Germany, including migrants, should be obliged to visit a former Nazi concentration camp at least once.

How can Germans overcome their guilt?

Some would argue that, deep down, Germans don’t have true guilt over the Holocaust. They’re just upset that they didn’t succeed.

Very harsh, but how else could one explain how Chancellor Merkel opened the doors, uncontrolled, to hundreds of thousands of people from Muslim countries steeped in Jew-hatred? And the majority of Germans welcomed them?

However, this move and more are often justified by the Holocaust. Letting in the refugees, for example, means that Germany has overcome its xenophobic past. Germany cannot be redeemed from the Holocaust if it doesn’t process its guilt and handle it in healthier ways, and this is where I come to the rescue.

For this new series on Achgut.com, a German political e-zine that is a shining light for German media in its representation of the truth about Israel, I offer the recipe for overcoming Holocaust guilt, and Jews also have a role to play.

A plea for clemency from a 96-year-old German convicted over his role in the murders of 300,000 people at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland has been rejected, German media cited prosecutors as saying on Wednesday.

Oskar Groening, known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” was sentenced to four years in prison in 2015 for being an accessory to murder at Auschwitz. But he has not yet started his sentence due to a dispute about his health.

No one at the prosecutor’s office in Lueneburg, where Groening’s trial took place in 2015, was immediately available for comment when contacted by Reuters.

In December, Germany’s constitutional court ruled Groening must go to jail, rejecting arguments from his lawyers that imprisonment at his advanced age would violate his right to life.

Groening’s court battle was seen as one of the last major trials related to the Holocaust, during which some 6 million Jews were murdered by Adolf Hitler’s regime.

Prosecutors said Groening — who did not kill anyone himself while working at Auschwitz — had helped support the regime responsible for mass murder by sorting bank notes seized from trainloads of arriving Jews.

The Jewish community of Vienna has let it be known that they will not attend Austria’s official Holocaust commemoration ceremony if the far-right Freedom Party (the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs in German, commonly abbreviated as the FPÖ) is also present. “If there will be ministers there for the Freedom Party, and I’m sure there will be, I will not be able to shake their hands, so the Jewish community will not attend,” said Oskar Deutsch, president of the Jewish Community in Vienna.

FPÖ’s list of offenses is damning enough on its own (FPÖ lawmakers pointedly refused to stand for last year’s Kristallnacht commemoration, for one), but of course, the original sin of the FPÖ is its founder, an S.S. officer. The party’s current leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, once said that the persecution of the far-right in Austria was comparable to that faced by Jews during the Nazi era; Die Aula, a far-right magazine with strong links to the FPÖ, recently published an article that asserted that the survivors of the Mauthausen concentration camp were a “national plague” and “criminals.” Twenty out of 51 FPÖ representatives in the National Assembly have been members of part of nationalistic fraternities (Burschenschaften) that ban Jews.

The FPÖ’s vocal support for Israel (even as Israel has refused to deal with the party) and their hardline stance on Muslim immigration is enticing for some; just as Viktor Orban and Marine Le Pen portray themselves as the protectors of the Jewish community from future Muslim violence, FPÖ’s leaders do the same. Also like Orban and Le Pen, they seem to have little intention of owning up to their party’s fundamental anti-Semitism, and Strache himself “used blatantly antisemitic caricatures only a couple of years ago,” according to former Labor Party leader Amir Peretz.

Britain has banned a prominent American Holocaust denier from entering the United Kingdom, the Home Office confirmed Wednesday.

Mark Weber, director of the California-based Institute for Historical Review, has questioned the scale of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed.

"You are the subject of an exclusion decision taken personally by the Home Secretary on April 28, 2015 on Unacceptable Behavior ground," the letter to Weber dated Dec. 22 from Britain's Home Office said.

Prime Minister Theresa May, who became premier in 2016 amid political turmoil prompted by a shock referendum vote to leave the European Union, was Home Secretary at the time of the decision.

May "personally directed that you should be excluded from the United Kingdom on the grounds that your presence here is not conducive to the public good," the decision states.

A Polish court on Wednesday jailed the organizers of an anti-war stunt that saw a dozen people strip naked last year at the former German Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau before one of them slaughtered a lamb.

The court in the southern city of Oswiecim found Belarussians Adam B. and Mikita V. guilty of desecrating a memorial site and of animal cruelty and handed them prison sentences of a year and a half and 14 months respectively.

“Auschwitz is a memorial site, a symbol of martyrdom and a cemetery for thousands of human beings,” said prosecutor Mariusz Slomka.

“We must send a clear signal… that these kinds of stunts should never be repeated.”

Most of the 10 other defendants, aged 20 to 27, were sentenced to community service while one received a fine of 10,000 zloty ($3,000).

The group carried out the unprecedented stunt in March 2017 in front of the camp’s infamous “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes you free”) gate, where they draped a white banner with the word love written in red.

The Israeli Navy's defense systems will soon get an unprecedented upgrade, allowing navy vessels to launch chaff rockets to mislead enemy missiles.

The upgraded system would be able to deal with all kinds of threats—both new and future ones—at sea: From the most advanced anti-ship cruise missiles—such as the Russian P-800 Oniks, also known as Yakhont—to shoulder-fired missiles—including the Russian 9M133 Kornet anti-tank guided missiles, the likes of which have already been fired at ships in the Middle East in recent years.

The system includes an algorithm that identifies and classifies any kind of projectile making its way towards the Israeli missile ship, and then programs a unique diversion plan: chaff rockets are launched from the front deck and create a "wall" over the water of hundreds of metal wires, which mislead the enemy missile into "thinking" this was the Israeli ship. This helps divert the enemy missile, only a minute or two before it was to hit the Israeli ship.


The new system's advanced fire-control radar will know to classify such projectiles as a threat to the ship out of hundreds of other targets in the ship's immediate surroundings.

The first of the missile ships to receive the upgrade is INS Sufa. After a successful test of the system conducted two months ago off the coast of Haifa, the system is expected to be declared operational in the coming weeks.

Coating materials that protect against fire, water or extreme temperatures are nothing new. But an Israeli high-tech paint doesn’t just protect surfaces from the sun. SolCold actually uses the sun’s power to activate a cooling mechanism, effectively providing air conditioning without electricity.

You read that right: This double-layered coating absorbs the hot rays of the sun and re-emits that energy in the form of cold. The hotter the solar radiation the more the coating cools down, making SolCold’s paint a potentially game-changing electricity-free solution for intensely sunny climates such as Africa and Central and South America.

The Herzliya-based startup is raising funds and plans to begin trials within 18 months of closing the Series A round in the first quarter of 2018. Two commercial and one residential building in Israel and Cyprus are waiting to get the trial SolCold treatment.

Meanwhile, SolCold cofounder Gadi Grottas tells ISRAEL21c that the company has received hundreds of inquiries regarding orders and distribution rights — which he estimates to be worth around $100 million — from places including Africa, Australia, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, China, France, India, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Philippines, Turkey and the United States.

SolCold’s product is generating interest for coating anything from chicken coops to cargo ships, malls to stadiums, cars to planes, satellites to hothouses, military equipment to apartment houses.

Sgt. Abraham Ajami, 50, who was wounded while fighting in Lebanon 31 years ago and has since been in a vegetative state, was laid to rest on Wednesday, with dozens of family, friends and former comrades-in-arms coming to pay their respects.

Ajami, who served in the Artillery Corps' Reshef Battalion, was hurt in 1987, when the IDF was in southern Lebanon to create a security buffer zone to protect Israeli communities near the border.

During a firefight in the Lebanese town of Marjayoun, a shell exploded near the back end of the cannon Ajami was operating. He suffered a critical head injury and spent the last 31 years in the hospital in a vegetative state.

Over the past two weeks, he suffered from pneumonia and his medical conditioned worsened. He passed away on Tuesday night, surrounded by family and his many friends.

Ajami received a full military funeral at the Holon Military Cemetery with family, friends, and current soldiers from the Reshef Battalion in attendance.

His sister, Metuka Aspir, said "God had decided to free" her brother from his suffering.

You need adults listening.

— (((Ron Kampeas))) (@kampeas) January 17, 2018

The Israel Policy Forum (IPF), a leading dovish group, declared that Abbas’s “unhinged screed” makes it “impossible to view Abbas as a viable negotiating partner, when he continues to deny the right of the Jewish people to their own national movement and when he continues to insist that the basic recognition of a Jewish homeland is the original sin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, a longtime peace activist and former president of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), told JNS that while he still wants the international community “to keep the possibility of a two-state solution alive,” Abbas’s statements “were outrageous, ignorant and insulting to Jews and civilized people everywhere,” and demonstrate “that progress on the peace front is not possible at the moment.”

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, URJ’s current president, issued a statement warning that Abbas’s remarks “undercut possibilities for a peace process” and “risk a new and very dangerous escalation of tensions.”

Jane Eisner, editor in chief of The Forward and a strong proponent of Palestinian statehood, blasted Abbas in a Jan. 17 editorial. Regarding Abbas’s claims about Israel’s nature and its founding, Eisner wrote, “If Abbas really thinks that is what happened, then he has no business pretending to be a partner for peace. And if he is repeating ugly rhetoric only to please his ever-thinning crowds, then such irresponsibility also disqualifies him.”

Investigative journalist and author Gary Weiss, a former activist in the New Israel Fund, told JNS, “I do not agree that [President Donald] Trump is to blame. That’s absurd. While I disagree with Trump on a great many things, he is simply speaking the truth on Jerusalem. If that causes Abbas to go bananas, that’s a reflection on Abbas, not Trump.”
...
Rabbi Charles A. Kroloff, a member of the J Street Rabbinic Cabinet and vice president for special projects at Hebrew Union College, said that while he hopes “Israeli-Palestinian discussions and cooperation” will continue, Abbas’s statement was “a despicable expression of hatred for Israel and for Jews and a disgusting statement of support for terrorists and their families.” As a result, “he has effectively removed himself near-term as a player in future negotiations,” said Kroloff.

By recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, he explicitly acknowledged the unique historic connection between the Jewish people, Jerusalem and the Land of Israel.

That connection, which predated Islam and the short-lived Arab colonial occupation of the land, destroys the false claim of indigenous Palestinian entitlement upon which the war against Israel has rested.

Trump has also cut in half the funds the US provides for UNRWA, whose unique and false perpetuation of fictional Palestinian refugee status is key to the Arab war against Israel. And if reports are to be believed, his peace plan will offer something well short of a Palestine state.

No less crucially, Abbas realizes that the wider Arab world no longer cares about the Palestinians’ cause. Those Arabs have more urgent considerations, such as stopping Iran from taking over the region, and they need the US and Israel to help them.

The British government is reportedly dumbfounded by Trump’s decision to cancel his visit. Of course it is. Parroting the shallow and vacuous prejudices of the age, it has absolutely no grasp of the significance of the US president it so despises.

Britain now risks being left behind as the world shifts direction. Why should America continue to value its “special relationship” with a Britain that is still fighting the battles it fought so shamefully in 20th-century Palestine to help the Arabs suppress Jewish national self-determination – which even the Arab states no longer support? After that UN vote on Trump and Jerusalem, why should the US think Britain is on its side in the titanic battle for freedom, decency and Western values? And why should President Trump give preferential economic treatment to a country that believes he is quite insane while Mahmoud Abbas is entirely rational? Britain is the mother ship of political liberty and justice in the West. Tragically, though, it has slipped its moral moorings.

Until and unless it puts right its relationship with the Jewish people, it will continue to drift into the gathering storm

And then there is the fact that according to Palestinian surveys, more than a million Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria wish to emigrate. Whole villages around Ramallah are ghost towns because their residents live elsewhere. Why is this not relevant to the likes of Livni and Barak?

Why do the Israeli media fail to report these basic facts rather than make excuses for a tin pot dictator who spends his time inciting the murder of Israelis and pretending that the Palestinians are the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jebusites and the Hittites, all rolled in one?

According to The Jerusalem Post, Trump intended to cut off US funding of UNRWA entirely this week. But US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster convinced to simply reduce it.

According to the Post, “Israel” sided with the trio. But other reports over the past several weeks made clear that whereas Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu supports ending US support for UNRWA, the IDF General Staff opposes the move. Likewise, the IDF has scuttled repeated congressional bids over the years to end US funding of the Palestinian Authority due to its funding of terrorism and its antisemitic incitement.

The arguments are always the same. UNRWA, like Abbas’s security forces, “stabilizes” the situation.

Is there no one else who might “stabilize” the situation better than they do? Where might the Palestinians be today if the US had cut off their terrorism-encrusted leaders 17 years ago? Is there no option other than empowering regimes and institutions that indoctrinate and work toward Israel’s destruction?

Netanyahu responded to Abbas’s diatribe by saying that in a way, Abbas did Israel a favor. He showed that he really doesn’t care how big or small Israel is. He rejects Israel’s right to exist and objects to its existence regardless of its borders.

Netanyahu’s insight is true as far as it goes. But so long as the same failed and vapid elites who gave us the PLO as our peace partner 25 years ago still call the shots, his insight doesn’t go very far at all.

Hamas’s cynical exploitation of a UN-sponsored cease-fire put in place out of humanitarian considerations enabled its terrorists to surprise and kill Lt. Hadar Goldin and St.-Sgt. Oron Shaul in the Gaza Strip in the midst of Operation Protective Edge.

Three-and-half-years later, Hamas is still taking advantage of Israel’s adherence to humanitarian rules as Hamas continues to disregard those same rules and regulations.

Hamas has no qualms about holding the remains of Shaul and Goldin as bargaining chips in direct violation of humanitarian principles. At the same time the terrorist group submits requests to Israel, many of which are approved, to admit Gaza’s residents – some of whom are relatives of Hamas terrorists – to receive medical treatment.

Hamas also expects Israel to allow visits by family and friends to Hamas terrorists incarcerated in Israeli prisons. And when Israel kills Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists, the expectation is that Israel will return these bodies.

The absurdity and injustice of this situation is unbearable for Simcha and Leah Goldin, the parents of Hadar.

The Palestinians are “not serious in truly getting to peace” with Israel, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said in a Voice of America interview with Greta Van Susteren on Wednesday.

Asked about the recently-announced cut of American funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Haley asked, “Why is the United States have to be the only one that bails out everyone? Why do we continue to give the money?”

“You have 120 countries who voted against us [at the UN], that could more than take up the level of debt that UNRWA has,” she continued. “We need to start being smart about the way we spend. We need to start really looking at foreign policy and seeing what the US goals are and where we want to go.”

Watch the full interview with Haley below:

The United States will not provide $45 million in food aid for Palestinians that it pledged last month as part of the West Bank/Gaza Emergency Appeal led by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the State Department said on Thursday.

The State Department had said on Tuesday that Washington would withhold a separate $65 million it had planned to pay the UN agency that serves the Palestinians, saying UNRWA needed to make unspecified reforms.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert denied the withholding of the $65 million was to punish Palestinians, who have been sharply critical of Trump’s announcement last month that he would move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

In a Dec. 15 letter to UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl, State Department Comptroller Eric Hembree had pledged $45 million to the West Bank/Gaza Emergency Appeal.

“The United States plans to make this funding available to UNRWA in early 2018,” according to the letter, seen by Reuters on Thursday. “An additional letter and contribution package confirming this contribution will be sent by or before early January 2018.”

Rex Tillerson’s mission was delicate but not unfamiliar as he phoned US President Donald Trump last week: Persuade the boss to curb his own impulses on yet another potentially explosive national security issue.

Trump had stormed into the new year threatening on Twitter to cut off aid to the Palestinians after little Mideast peace progress. His UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, egged Trump on, pushing him to suspend all of a planned $125 million payment to the UNWRA United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. Tillerson’s State Department and the Pentagon sought to preserve the full amount, fearful about the implications for millions of people and US partner governments in the Middle East.

In a phone call this past Friday, the secretary of state sold the president on a compromise: Give half the money, put the rest on hold. It would allow Trump to say he followed through on a threat, without further destabilizing the Arab world.

For Tillerson, it was a strategy derived by trial and error over a tumultuous first year under a president whose instinct to rip up the traditional playbook continues to shock the foreign policy establishment. It’s fallen to Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster to soften some of Trump’s most dramatic impulses, all while dealing with competing power centers and messy internal arguments that have repeatedly spilled into the open.

I have spoken recently with many experts who have devoted their professional careers to assessing UNRWA operations and effectiveness. All report that UNRWA does not allow any third-party oversight of its curriculum, aside from “government officials” where the school is located (so, for example, Hamas authorities in Gaza, or Palestinian Authority officials in the West Bank).

This is consistent with what Global Affairs confirmed for me on Tuesday, that Canada conducts no independent review of UNRWA. We are, actually, funding UNRWA staff to self-assess — which is precisely the problem. Canada’s claim to ensuring neutrality and fairness is severely compromised as a result.

I am certain you are familiar with the UN Charter, in particular Article 101(3), which requires that all UN staff uphold the highest standards of integrity, a quality that includes fairness and impartiality. This “neutrality” standard is reiterated in staff regulations for UNRWA and UN staff and is publicized on the UNRWA website. Yet, the evidence is blindingly clear that UNRWA has not lived up to this standard.

While I hope you enjoy your visit in Israel and the West Bank, and Canadians are no doubt looking forward to hearing of your findings and observations, I close with one question many of us would most like answered: Why are Canadian funds are being used to foment anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hatred?

Yours truly,

Vivian Bercovici

Vivian Bercovici was Canada’s ambassador to Israel from 2014 to 2016. She lives in Tel Aviv.

Member of the Security Cabinet and Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Resources Yuval Steinitz (Likud) said Thursday that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas "buried" the peace process, adding it will not be possible to renew it as long as he is in charge of the Palestinian Authority.

"(There will be no further negotiations) as long as Abbas is the Palestinian leader, and so long as the moderate Palestinian leadership does not recognize the right of the Jews to a state of their own," Steinitz stated in an interview with Ynet.

The minister said this in light of Abbas'"ignorant" speech at the PLO's Central Council on Sunday, in which he called Israel 'a colonial project,' and his belligerent remarks in Cairo on Wednesday, when he said that the issue of Jerusalem could lead to "war, insecurity and instability if it isn't (the capital of Palestine)."

"Abbas is taking a very radical line," the minister claimed. "It is true that he says he will not take the way of terrorism, but he basically promotes it—with stipends for the families of terrorists who succeeded in killing Israelis.

"This time, though, what he said showed even greater support for acts of violence and terror against Israelis."

Much has been written about Mahmoud Abbas' recent rant attributed as a response to Trump's declaration about Jerusalem. Much has been made about how that rant proves that Abbas is not serious about peace and about how the media systematically ignore the parts that most directly make that point. However, I would like to suggest that Abbas' speech demonstrates the point I have made in the past about why our demand should be for for a three-part declaration:

The Jews are a people
The Jewish people are deeply connected to the Land of Israel in general and Jerusalem in particular
The Pact of Umar has no place in the modern world

It is an open and shut case that Abbas' recent rant contradicts any acceptance of the connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. Therefore, if we present the three-part declaration as our demand to talk, the only justification one could offer for decrying Israel's cutting off talks in the wake of Abbas' rant would be that the three-part declaration is an unreasonable demand.

Countering the notion that it is an unreasonable demand could take some work. The major point in doing so is that failure to make the three-part declaration, or making it and then contradicting it even if less egregiously than in Abbas' recent rant, is demonstration of a belief that Israel's simple existence is an injustice and that any concession to reality is only momentary until reality would not hinder addressing that "injustice."However, the most important part in gaining acceptance for that demand would be to present it.

Yet, a January 14 report by The Washington Post merely referred to the conspiracy-laden diatribe as “combative,” and “brimming with colorful insults.” Only in the final sentence of the final paragraph, in a 711-word article, did the paper state: “In a comment widely reported by Israeli media, he [Abbas] quoted an Egyptian philosopher who had said that Israel’s quest for a national home for the Jewish people is a ‘colonialist project’ that has nothing to do with the Jews (“Palestinian leader attacks Trump, calling his peace deal the ‘slap of the century’).”

As the blogger Elder of Ziyon has noted, this “Egyptian philosopher” is a man named Abdelwahab Elmessiri, whose works include the Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism and Zionism, which, among other things, dismisses the Jewish people’s connection to Israel as irrelevant.

Recent weeks have evidenced similarly poor reporting from the Post.

As CAMERA noted in The Algemeiner, The Washington Post failed to detail Abbas’ December 13, 2017 claim — made before reporters and others attending the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul — that Jews “are really excellent in faking and counterfeiting history.

And sometimes the Post uses more than omissions to provide cover.

A January 5 Post report claimed that Abbas “has rejected armed conflict with Israel.” Yet, as CAMERA pointed out to the Post, Abbas not only incentivizes anti-Jewish violence via payments and other laurels to terrorists, but he has also personally lauded terrorist attacks.

The European Union remained silent on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s controversial address this week in which he accused Europe of having exploited its Jews for a “colonial project,” saying it wouldn’t respond to speeches.

“Our policy is not to comment on comments,” an EU spokesperson in Brussels told The Times of Israel.

“However, the EU reiterates its firm commitment to the two-state solution and to its existing, longstanding policies. A negotiated two-state solution, which fulfills the aspirations of both sides, is the only realistic way of bringing the lasting peace and security that both Israelis and Palestinians deserve,” the spokesperson said Wednesday night.

The EU routinely issues condemnations of Israeli plans to build housing units beyond the 1967 lines, arguing that such moves are illegal under international law and diminish the prospects of peace. The union was also very vocal in condemning the US administration’s December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

It was slow, however, to speak out on recent anti-regime protests in Iran, leading Israeli critics to accuse it of a double standard.

There is an Israeli grand strategy of sorts, and it has been largely successful. It involves caution, vigilance, patience, and looking over the horizon for new partnerships. It has led to what Col. (res.) Dr. Eran Lerman of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies calls a “year of wonders,” with a string of Israeli strategic and diplomatic achievements.

Unfortunately, some progressive activists and politicians prefer to ignore Israel’s impressive achievements, and instead promote a narrative of Israeli blemishes and blunders. They are fixated on the rights of Palestinians, despite the objective problems, as well as on the rights of African infiltrators in Israel, of Bedouin in the Negev, of non-Orthodox Jewish religious denominations in Jerusalem, and so on.

All these are serious issues that require attention and responsible policymaking.

But they have become intersectional causes around which some people rally to confront the Israeli government, explicitly threatening that unless the government bends their way, Israel will lose global support and become an “immoral” or “apartheid” state. That approach generally involves gross simplification and misrepresentation of delicate issues, and is an unacceptable way to relate to Israel.

Sober and caring leaders should reject this approach. They should also cheer up, because Israel is worthy and is winning.

"If he doesn’t want the US as a mediator, he doesn’t want peace," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday about Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's rejection of the US as the go-between in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

"There is no substitute for the United States," Netanyahu told reporters upon landing back in Israel after a five day trip to India.

Netanyahu also addressed the recent thaw in ties with Jordan. He said that Israel “expressed regret” to Jordan over the shooting that took place at the Israeli embassy in Amman last year, but did not apologize.

Netanyahu said Israel will pay reparations to the Jordanian government, but not to the families.

He said that Israeli Ambassador to Jordan Einat Shlain, whom he holds in the highest esteem, will be promoted and reassigned to an another appointment.

Regarding the upcoming visit of US Vice President Mike Pence, Netanyahu said, “This is another expression of the strong ties between Israel and the US, and the very supportive approach of this administration.”

French President Emmanuel Macron is attempting to convince Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas not to reject the peace initiative of U.S. President Donald Trump, Channel 10 News reported on Thursday.

According to the report, Macaron sent his senior political adviser, Aurelien Lechevallier, to a secret visit to Ramallah earlier this week. French diplomats said the move was coordinated with the White House and that the main message was that the PA should give the American peace efforts a chance.

Lechevallier reportedly met with PA intelligence chief Majid Faraj, PLO Executive Committee Secretary Saeb Erekat and other senior officials in Ramallah, stressing that President macron expects the Palestinian leadership to act to prevent violence and remain committed to the two-state solution. His main message, however, was for the PA not to reject Trump’s peace plan.

“Do not reject the Trump plan outright," he told the PA officials. "Give it a chance, maybe you're right, and the plan is bad and unacceptable, but do not blow it up now, do not cancel the Oslo Accords, do not reconsider the recognition of Israel. There will be things you will not like [in the plan], but there may be interesting and positive things for you in it as well. It would be a shame if you threw the plan into the trash before you saw it. Read it first and then decide whether to say no."

News of the French official’s secret visit to Ramallah follows last month’s meeting in Paris between Macron and Abbas, which came several weeks after Trump’s historic recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Mohammed-Faraj al-Ghoul, chairman of the Palestinian Legislative Council's Constitution Committee and one of the senior Hamas figures in Gaza, on Thursday attacked Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas and called on him to step down.

Al-Ghoul noted that Abbas’s term in office is illegitimate since his original term after the elections ended years ago.

He rejected Abbas's claim that the Arab League had extended his term, noting that the Arab League had no authority to extend the term of Arab leaders, and that this question should be determined in accordance with the Palestinian Basic Law, which mandates the transfer of powers to the speaker of the parliament (a member of Hamas) who is supposed to arrange elections within two months.

In order to prevent such a scenario, Al-Ghoul claimed, Abbas deliberately prevents the convening of the Palestinian parliament and refuses to allow the parliament speaker to enter the House of Representatives.

Meanwhile, Hamas spokesman Abdul Latif al-Kanou said that the Palestinian government, which received governmental powers in Gaza following the reconciliation agreement with Hamas, had become a government that had lost its character as a national consensus government and represented a single political stream.

The Trump administration plans to retrofit an existing facility in Jerusalem into an embassy with the goal of moving its staff there from Tel Aviv in 2019, US officials said on Thursday.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal quoted US officials on record, who said the State Department plans to reconfigure an existing consular facility that the US has operated out of Arnona in West Jerusalem since 1948.

Announcing the controversial move last month, US President Donald Trump said he planned on setting forth architects and planners to design a new facility. And his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has told reporters that a formal move would be at least three years off.

But Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is leading the administration’s peace push, have since favored an expedited timetable, the Times reported. Tillerson continues to favor a longer timeframe.

“The secretary’s primary focus is on security,” said Steve Goldstein, undersecretary of state for diplomacy and public affairs, according to the Journal report. “We will not be moving to a new facility.”

The US building girds the Green Line, which served as Israel’s border before the 1967 war.

“We are going to retrofit a building” for a 2019 opening, he continued. “There is no plan for anything temporary.”

Pope Francis has promised to continue pressing for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, while supporting the special status of Jerusalem, independent of any state. He outlined his plan in a missive to the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyib.

In his letter dated Jan. 18, the pope acknowledged an invitation by the imam to an international Conference at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University in support of Jerusalem, taking place in these days when the pontiff is on apostolic journey to Chile and Peru.

“The Holy See will not cease to urgently insist on the need for a resumption of dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians for a negotiated solution aimed at the peaceful coexistence of two States within the borders agreed upon between them and internationally recognized,” he said, “in full respect of the peculiar nature of Jerusalem, whose meaning goes beyond any consideration of territorial matters.”

“Only a special statute, also internationally guaranteed, can preserve its identity,” he said, “and its unique vocation as a place of peace recalled by the sacred places, as well as its universal value, allowing a future of reconciliation and hope for the whole region.”

“I assure you that I shall continue to invoke God for the cause of peace, of a true, real peace,” Francis wrote. “In particular, I raise heartfelt prayers so that the leaders of the nations, and civil and religious authorities everywhere commit themselves to averting new spirals of tension and to support every effort to make concord, justice and security prevail for the peoples of that blessed land that I cherish so much.”

The Al-Azhar International Conference in Egypt concluded on Thursday with the publication of an official declaration announcing the year 2018 as the year of Al-Quds (the Arabic name for Jerusalem –ed.).

The statement stresses that Al-Quds is the eternal capital of the independent state of Palestine, and that Al-Quds is not just “occupied” land or a Palestinian or Arab national issue but an Islamic and Christian holy place and an issue of Islamic and Christian faith.

According to the conference participants, the Arab character of Al-Quds has been a historical fact for thousands of years and "global Zionism" will not be able to falsify the facts since, the statement claimed, the Jebusites built the city in the fourth millennium BCE, long before the advent of Judaism.

In addition, the conference expressed full support for the steadfastness of the "Palestinian people" and the Intifada against the decisions of the American administration and the Israeli government regarding Jerusalem.

The participants in the conference appealed to the "wise" Jews and advised them to look at the periods of time in history in which the Jews were oppressed, except in countries that were under Muslim civilization.

President Trump seeks what he has called "the ultimate deal" for Israel and the Palestinians, one that would be advantageous to both parties. In the business world, a signed deal is final. But agreements between states and peoples are likely to be revisited as national interests change.

There is a crucial difference between such agreements and what transpires in the business world. Peoples have national aspirations that are stronger than any agreement. Those aspirations are not under the control of leaders and cannot be conceded in negotiations.

They continue to arouse passions even when their fulfillment has been deferred. How far, after all, can any people be expected to go in giving up its dreams?

The constraints of reality can indeed bring even ideological leaders to a compromise, but the resulting agreement is always temporary and awaits a strategic shift in which everything will be reconsidered. National passions can be repressed and deferred, but they do not dissipate.

A hundred years after the downfall of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish passion for lands that were under Turkish control before WWI continues to burn and to drive President Erdogan's regional policy.

For the Iranians, the golden age of the kingdom of Darius impels their current logic.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday that relations with Jordan are “back on track” and indicated that he will name a new ambassador to Amman in the coming days.

Israel has not had an ambassador in Jordan since July, when two Jordanians were killed and an Israeli security guard was injured at Israel’s Amman embassy during an apparent altercation between them, whose details are the subject of disagreement between Israel and Jordan. The incident sparked a diplomatic crisis.

“We’ve put relations back on track, and I’m sure both sides have learned lessons,” Netanyahu said. “There is a peace treaty [between our two countries] that is an important interest to both states, and that found expression in the solution that was reached.”

Speaking to reporters as he returned to Israel following a five-day visit to India, Netanyahu, who also serves as Israel’s foreign minister, said former ambassador Einat Schlein would be moved to some other post.

“I will decide on the new ambassador soon. I very much appreciate the former ambassador and that will be shown in her next position,” he said.

A Jordanian government spokesperson said Thursday evening that he had received from Israel an “official memorandum” apologizing for the deaths of two Jordanians in a shooting incident at the Israeli Embassy in Amman in July, and the killing of a Jordanian judge in a separate incident in 2014.

Shortly afterward, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office put out a statement announcing that the embassy, which was closed in the wake of July’s incident, will reopen.

The Jordanian spokesperson, Mohammad Momani, also said Israel had agreed to comply with all the kingdom’s preconditions for resuming regular diplomatic relations between the two sides. Those included, he said, bringing legal action against the Israeli security guard accused of killing the two Jordanians in the embassy compound, and offering financial compensation to all three bereaved Jordanian families.

In its statement Thursday night, the PMO confirmed it had come to an agreement with Jordan over both incidents, and said the embassy will “will return to full activity immediately.” Diverging from the terms announced by Jordan, it said Israeli authorities would come to a decision “in the coming weeks” as to whether the guard, Ziv Moyal, will stand trial over the shooting.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said Friday that the terrorist who managed to escape during the security forces’ raid in Jenin this week in search of the cell that murdered Israeli father-of-six Rabbi Raziel Shevach was ‘living like a fleeing dog… on borrowed time.”

Speaking to reporters outside the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa after visiting the two Border Police officers injured in the operation, Liberman again thanked the security forces behind the raid in the northern West Bank city, saying “it was not a one-time event, but a continuous effort.”

“We will soon get to that same terrorist who managed to escape and settle an account with him. He needs to know that he is currently living like a fleeing dog. He lives on borrowed time, and we will catch him,” the defense minister said.

Earlier Friday, defense officials acknowledged that the head of the terror cell responsible for Shevach’s January 9 murder had managed to escape during the Jenin firefight early Thursday morning.

An IDF soldier was lightly wounded when a Palestinian driver attempted to ram soldiers at a checkpoint near Qasr el Yahud in the West Bank on Friday.

The driver swerved towards the soldiers after they refused him passage at the entrance to the holy site.

The driver attempted to flee to the Allenby Bridge, on the border with Jordan, but was arrested by authorities.

Rescuers Without Borders reported that one IDF soldier suffered a leg injury and was offered first aid.


Qasr el Yahud is a popular baptism site, where Christian pilgrims go to dip in the waters of the Jordan River. It is believed to be the site where Jesus was first baptized by John the Baptist.

However, in one of her final paragraphs Knell presents BBC audiences with a very different interpretation of Tamimi’s call for violence.

“At the end of the online video, Ahed calls for large demonstrations as “the only way to reach results”, but says US President Donald Trump must bear responsibility for any Palestinian violence, including stabbings and suicide attacks.”

Interestingly, a report in the Jerusalem Post shows that Tamimi’s lawyer Gabi Lasky used a remarkably similar claim in court.

“Gaby Lasky, a high-profile human rights lawyer and Meretz activist who is defending Tamimi, told the court Monday that the Palestinian teen mostly was protesting US President Donald Trump’s declaration recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

She said Tamimi’s message was “Trump needs to take responsibility” for a negative decision which led to an outcry of Palestinian protests.”

And that raises the question (not for the first time) of whether Yolande Knell is a reporter or a political activist who compromises the BBC’s reputation for impartiality.

A Palestinian family said it had killed one of its members Friday after Gaza’s Hamas rulers said he aided Israel in killing three of the terrorist group’s commanders.

The family said in a statement that a relative shot Ahmed Barhoum dead, but did not say which family member pulled the trigger. It said they followed developments in the Hamas investigation and believed their son was guilty.

The family noted the relative was arrested and interrogated by the “resistance,” meaning he was detained outside the Palestinian litigation system. There was no immediate statement from Hamas.

The Hamas commanders were killed near the end of the 50-day war with Israel in 2014 during an airstrike on a house.

Hamas has executed dozens of Palestinians for collaboration since seizing Gaza in 2007.

Hamas is investing considerable resources into establishing terrorist infrastructure in Lebanon, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Friday.

The Gaza Strip-based terrorist group "is currently trying to carry out terrorist attacks across Judea and Samaria, as well as develop new fronts, primarily in southern Lebanon. It wants to use that [area] to threaten Israel," Lieberman said.

Hamas, he continued, "is struggling to carry out terrorist attack from Gaza, because it faces a very difficult reality there. We will not tolerate a situation in which on the one hand, Hamas talks about a humanitarian crisis and the need for aid, while on the other hand it orders terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria and tries to establish a terrorist infrastructure in Lebanon.

"The newfound friendship between top Hamas officials and [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah is another thing we're monitoring closely. Every development will meet the proper response," Lieberman said.

The defense minister on Friday visited the two Israel Police special forces who were wounded in a Jenin raid targeting the terrorist cell that murdered Rabbi Raziel Shevach near the Samaria outpost of Havat Gilad last week.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on Friday accused Israel of responsibility for the explosion that wounded a top Hamas official in Lebanon on January 14.

“We expect Lebanese authorities to treat this incident as a serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty,” he said during a televised address to commemorate Hezbollah fighters killed in Syria.

Hamas’s political bureau in Lebanon has also suggested Israel may have been involved in the car bomb that injured Mohammad Hamdan in the city of Sidon, though Israeli ministers have downplayed that possibility.

Nasrallah also denied US allegations that his terror organization deals in narcotics and money laundering, calling the claims “entirely detached from reality.”

Earlier this month the US Justice Department announced the creation of a special task force to investigate what it called “narco-terrorism” by the powerful Lebanese organization.

The news reported earlier this week that German police are seeking ten Iranian agents tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has prompted the American Jewish Committee (AJC) to call on Germany’s foreign ministry to expel Iran’s ambassador, Benjamin Weinthal reported Wednesday in The Jerusalem Post.

Germany’s government protested to Iranian Ambassador Ali Majedi following the conviction of a Pakistani man for spying on Jewish interests in the country. The ambassador was told that “spying on people and institutions with a particular relationship to the state of Israel on German soil is a blatant violation of German law.”

“We expect clear political steps. Diplomatic dialogue alone is not enough here. We need a clear public measure,” said Deidre Berger, director of the AJC’s Berlin office. “The expulsion of the ambassador [Ali Majedi] would be an important first signal.”

The Israeli embassy told the German newspaper, Bild, “we again see how active the Iranian regime in Europe and Germany is. It maintains an infrastructure for terrorism.”

Daniel Schwammenthal, director of the AJC Transatlantic Institute, speaking of the IRGC plot to spy on Jewish and Israeli interests in Germany, assessed that “this is nothing short of a hostile act against an EU member state by the world’s foremost state-sponsor of terrorism. There can be no more business as usual for the EU with Iran.”

While the protests in Iran are disappearing from the headlines, the sources of the resentment that fueled them remain very much present. Is there anything more the U.S. can do to encourage the demonstrators and dissidents? Can pressure on the ayatollahs—whether in the form of sanctions or seeking to contain Iran in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen—further weaken their control over the Iranian people? More broadly, what can be done to reverse eight years of American appeasement of the Islamic Republic? Brian Katulis, Charles Lister, Omri Ceren, and Michael Pregent address these and other questions. (Moderated by Joyce Karam. Video, 82 minutes.)

She has the same name and nationality as the Turkish president, but the similarities stop there. Writer Asli Erdogan is an outspoken critic of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's crackdown on opponents following the failed coup of July 2016.

Having just picked up the Simone de Beauvoir prize for Women’s Freedom in Paris, Erdogan tells FRANCE 24 about the situation facing intellectuals, journalists and students in Turkey – and about her upcoming trial.

"People are afraid to breathe," she says. "Europe only hears about the writers, the journalists. But thousands of university students are in jail for just one tweet."

Lebanon’s intelligence service may have turned the smartphones of thousands of targeted individuals into cyber-spying machines in one of the first known examples of large-scale state hacking of phones rather than computers, researchers say.

Lebanon’s General Directorate of General Security (GDGS) has run more than 10 campaigns since at least 2012 aimed mainly at Android phone users in at least 21 countries, according to a report by mobile security firm Lookout and digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The cyber attacks, which seized control of Android smartphones, allowed the hackers to turn them into victim-monitoring devices and steal any data from them undetected, the researchers said on Thursday. No evidence was found that Apple phone users were targeted, something that may simply reflect the popularity of Android in the Middle East.

The state-backed hackers, dubbed “Dark Caracal” by the report’s authors — after a wild cat native to the Middle East — used phishing attacks and other tricks to lure victims into downloading fake versions of encrypted messaging apps, giving the attackers full control over the devices of unwitting users.

Michael Flossman, the group’s lead security researcher, told Reuters that EFF and Lookout took advantage of the Lebanon cyber spying group’s failure to secure their own command and control servers, creating an opening to connect them back to the GDGS.

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — A Palestinian family said it had killed one of its members Friday after Gaza’s Hamas rulers said he aided Israel in killing three of the terrorist group’s commanders.

The family said in a statement that a relative shot Ahmed Barhoum dead, but did not say which family member pulled the trigger. It said they followed developments in the Hamas investigation and believed their son was guilty.

The family noted the relative was arrested and interrogated by the “resistance,” meaning he was detained outside the Palestinian litigation system. There was no immediate statement from Hamas.

The Western world embraced our book of books and 2,000 years of Christianity have been characterized by an obvious (though one-sided) competition for the title of "the chosen people" and disputes over how to interpret the Bible. But not in India. The Bible holds no significant presence in the history and practice of Hindu culture. They have their own sacred texts, a pantheon of gods and goddesses, their own intricate mythology, philosophy, religious faith, methods of worship and a way of looking at things that is, at times, radically different than ours.

One ancient culture that worships one god versus another ancient culture that sanctifies a vast plurality of gods. Each approach profoundly influences the way of life and character of a culture. That is why there is no anti-Semitic baggage in the history of the relations between our two peoples. The world does not distinguish between Israel and the Jewish people, contrary to what our enemies may mendaciously claim. They say that they "don't hate Jews" only "Zionists." But in India, conversely and positively, they actually don't make the distinction.

Listening to Modi speak, I often heard ancient refrains behind his iron words that echoed the sentiments expressed by our own exiled forefathers – "we were as dreamers"– when they spoke about returning to Zion.

"Then said they among the nations: 'The Lord hath done great things with these" (Psalms 126). In historical terms, "these," meaning us, were ashes and dirt just a moment ago, when we returned to Zion. Now, a nation of 1.3 billion people is actively seeking a partnership with us. Right before our eyes, Israel is turning into a world player.

In one of his speeches, Netanyahu noted our commitment not only to ourselves, but also to serve as a light unto the nations. The rest of the Psalms verse mentioned above talks about what happens to us after the nations express awe at our good fortune. "We rejoiced," the verse says. It is okay to rejoice at Israel's success in the world. For one short minute, let us set aside our well-known Israeli cynicism – the product of many disappointments – and enjoy the moment. We were as dreamers.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu loved every moment of his visit to India: from the warm welcome he received from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to the defense and business pacts they signed, to the visit to the Taj Mahal, to the food.

Yes, Netanyahu confessed repeatedly on the trip, he loves Indian food. He even revealed that his first date with his wife, Sara, 27 years ago, was at the Tandoori restaurant in Tel Aviv.

When Netanyahu comes back, he should celebrate by eating a good old-fashioned Thanksgiving meal – not just because turkey is called tarnegol hodu (literally, both Indian fowl and fowl of thankfulness) in Hebrew, but because he has so much to be thankful for.

This past week might have been the best for Netanyahu of his current term in office. He has had, of course, many, many other trips abroad this term, but none received as positive coverage in the mainstream Hebrew media. After past trips, Netanyahu complained that while he was accomplishing a lot for Israel, the media back home was focusing on minutia involving his family and criminal probes.

This time, Sara Netanyahu’s lawyers were in court while she was in India, but it wasn’t a top story. And Yair Netanyahu stayed home and skipped a trial date, but he was not on the front pages anymore.

Instead, even newspapers normally hostile to the prime minister gave prominence to pictures of him in India, leaving him nothing to kvetch about.

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, he instituted a policy toward Israel called de-hyphenation.

What that meant was simple: India’s relationship with Israel would stand on its own merits, independent and separate from India’s relationship with the Palestinians. It would no longer be India’s relationship with Israel-Palestine, but India’s relationship with Israel, and India’s relationship with the Palestinians.

This policy first became obvious when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Modi at the UN in 2014, soon after the latter’s election.

When it became clear that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas would not be in New York at the same time, there was concern in Jerusalem that the Indians would call off the meeting with Netanyahu, to preserve a holy balance in its ties with Israel and its ties with the Palestinian Authority.

This “de-hyphenation” was even more apparent when Modi came to Israel last July, when Modi came to Jerusalem but did not go to the Palestinian Authority – he did not feel compelled to balance his trip to Jerusalem with one to Ramallah.

Similarly, he is scheduled to travel to the PA next month, and if does go ahead with that trip, he is not expected to visit Israel. Again, the idea is that relations which each side should stand on their own merits.

Hyphenating the ties with Israel – linking them to ties with the Palestinian Authority – essentially prevented India from pursuing a pragmatic policy of what was in India’s best interests.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara Netanyahu attended a special gala event with various noted stars in the Indian film industry such as actress Sara Ali Khan, actor and producer Amitabh Bachchan and former Miss World contestant and actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.

Netanyahu said that the rise of Bollywood is ''a part of India rising as a world power, which goes hand-in-hand with the ascent of Israel as a world leader in technology."

Netanyahu said that innovation is not limited to medicine or space but is also present in the arts. "I think that if we join our forces," he said, "magic will happen."

"We believe in Bollywood, we believe in India, we believe in the relations between India and Israel," he stated. Inspired by the Hollywood celebrities who took a selfie at the Academy Awards, the prime minister invited the Indian celebrities to take a shared picture with him on stage.

Netanyahu is wrapping up a five-day visit to India, during which he criss-crossed the country attending various events related to diplomacy, trade, technology, education and aid.

I fear that these excellent intentions may not achieve much, because at the apex of all international effort lies the UN Human Rights Council, a body now so perverted that it no longer makes sense to support it. What is the use of the UK lobbying other countries and supporting UN resolutions on religious persecution when the UNHRC is peopled with representatives of the most egregious offenders?

My Lords, Iraq is a member of the UNHRC, along with Saudi Arabia, China and Venezuela, to mention just a few of them. When Iraq campaigned for membership of the UNHRC they cited in support the happy condition of the Christian minority. In China, 1.3 billion people are denied freedom of speech, assembly and religion. Tibetans are occupied and tortured. In Russia, dissidents are harassed, arrested and assassinated. Crimea is annexed and Ukraine bombarded. In Saudi Arabia beheadings are at an all-time high. They bomb Yemeni civilians.

The response of the UNHRC is largely silence and the welcoming as members of those atrocious states. Only one country is permanently on the agenda of the UNHRC and that is Israel, targeted by the Arab members in an effort to deflect attention from themselves.

Earlier this year our Government, thankfully, became a torch-bearer for the truth. The British mission blasted the UN body as biased and overly focused on Israel. The UNHRC has breath-taking double standards and is outrageously biased against the only country in the Middle East whose Christian population has grown, namely Israel.

It is time to call out the hypocrisy of the UNHRC, as a preliminary to safeguarding the religious minorities of Iraq and the wider Middle East. Will the Minister ensure that the UK’s place on the UNHRC is, has been, as it was in the past and I hope will be in the future, to tell the truth and defend the persecuted?

The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees said Friday a US decision to freeze tens of millions of dollars in aid resulted from diplomatic disputes rather than the agency’s performance.

The US State Department this week put on hold two planned payments of more than $100 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA.

The State Department denied the freeze was to punish the Palestinian Authority, which has cut ties with US President Donald Trump’s administration following his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, with a spokeswoman saying it was linked to necessary “reform” of UNRWA.

But Pierre Krahenbuhl, the agency’s commissioner general, said it had not been informed by the United States of any new reform demands and had been simply “caught up” in a political dispute.

“I have to look at this as not related to our performance but a decision and a debate that was caught up in the aftermath of what of course was the General Assembly resolution on Jerusalem and other matters,” Krahenbuhl told AFP in an interview in Jerusalem.

“My perception is there is a debate in the US administration about funding to the Palestinians and our funding got caught up in that.”

The United Nations has allowed sexual harassment and assault to flourish in its offices around the world, with accusers ignored and perpetrators free to act with impunity, the Guardian has been told.

Dozens of current and former UN employees described a culture of silence across the organisation and a flawed grievance system that is stacked against victims.
Advertisement

Of the employees interviewed, 15 said they had experienced or reported sexual harassment or assault within the past five years. The alleged offences ranged from verbal harassment to rape.

Seven of the women had formally reported what happened, a route that campaigners say is rarely pursued by victims for fear of losing their job, or in the belief that no action will be taken.

“If you report it, your career is pretty much over, especially if you’re a consultant,” said one consultant, who alleged she was harassed by her supervisor while working for the World Food Programme. “It’s like an unsaid thing.”

The UN conceded that under-reporting is a concern but said the organisation’s secretary general, António Guterres, has “prioritised addressing sexual harassment and upholding the zero tolerance policy”.

In an article in the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, economist Dr. 'Abdallah Al-Radadi opposed the calls to boycott American products and companies in response to U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital. He wrote that boycotts often yield the opposite results from those intended: they help to advertise and increase the popularity and the sales of the thing boycotted. In some cases, he added, they even end up harming the boycotters, as in the case of Arab boycotts on American companies that harmed the livelihood of Arabs workers or franchise holders. He noted that the importance of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa for the Arabs and Muslims cannot be overstated, but a boycott will not help Jerusalem but only hurt Muslims.

The following are excerpts from his article:[1]

"The minute U.S. President Donald Trump announced [his] recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, some activists on social media rushed to market [the idea] of a boycott of American products. The calls started with simple tweets, and developed into infographics presenting well-known American brands like McDonald's, Coca Cola, Burger King and others.

"First of all, let me state that the importance ascribed by Muslims to [Al-Aqsa,] the third most holy mosque after those in Mecca and Medina, and to [Jerusalem], the first direction of prayer, cannot be overstated. Jerusalem has been an Arab capital ever since it was first conquered in 637 by Al-Farouq, 'Umar bin al-Khattab [the second Caliph, who ruled in 634-644]... Muslim blood is a small price to pay for Jerusalem, and it is naïve to think that any Muslim will prioritize a hamburger over Jerusalem.

"[But] as for a boycott of American products, I wonder if it is economically effective. Who will really be hurt by such as boycott, and who will benefit from it? Past economic boycotts have been imposed with a particular intent, only to achieve the opposite effect, as shown by the following examples:

A controversial coroner’s refusal to respect Jewish burial requirements has led some Jews to consider moving house rather than die under her jurisdiction.

Mary Hassell, the head of St Pancras coroner’s court, is being investigated over her unwillingness to grant quick burials to members of the Jewish and Muslim communities in north London.

Such is the distress sparked by Ms Hassell’s policy that families “should wait in line” for the release of relatives’ bodies, that some Jews are now considering moving to other areas of the capital, or making aliyah, to escape her authority. “We are terrified at what this woman is doing to this community,” said Ita Symons, the chief executive of the Agudas Yisrael Housing Association in Stamford Hill.

“I have acquired a burial plot in Jerusalem, and I will, God willing, try and make sure that before I pass away I will not be in this country.

“I shall get onto a plane — even on a stretcher — and I will not let this women get her powers over me.”

Mrs Symons is also the director of the Schonfeld Square care home, where more than 80 elderly Jewish people live.

Anti-Israel groups may be attempting to hijack the Woman's March on Saturday.

In New York Cty, Jewish Voice for Peace, Adalah-NY: Campaign for the Boycott of Israel, Jews Say No! and Women in Black-Union Square are hosting a "FreeAhed" contingent, in support of the young Palestinian woman who called for stabbings and suicide operations against the Jewish, er Zionist people.

Interestingly enough, local activists every bit as committed to the destruction of Israel as Ahed choose not to repeat her message promoting terror and violence.

"Whether it is a stabbing attack or suicide bombing or throwing rocks, everyone needs to do something and unite in order for our message to reach those who want to liberate Palestine”

The New Orleans City Council realized quickly that they had been duped.

From WWLTV:
Members of the New Orleans City Council say they want a do-over after learning they inadvertently stumbled into an international controversy last week.

The council voted 5-0 last Thursday to plan a review of the city’s contracts and investments to ensure that none of them support companies or entities that have violated human, civil or labor rights around the world.
But after belatedly realizing the resolution was part of an international movement to boycott Israel, City Council President Jason Williams and other council members say they will move to reconsider it at their next council meeting.
Speaking to the Advocate, Williams stated

“Let me be very clear to citizens of New Orleans and citizens of the world — this City Council is not anti-Israel. That sentiment is inconsistent with the council's actions and certainly mine personally.... " He said it was a mistake for the council to introduce and vote on the unadvertised measure at the end of a nearly six-hour meeting, as doing so did not give people enough time to voice their opinions.
Note to the BDS movement: If you need to lie about your motives and your intentions to push your agenda, your claim to stand for social justice and civil rights rings hollow.

What is it with the Harvard Kennedy School’s penchant for celebrating dishonorable characters? First came a speaking invitation and fellowship for the traitor formerly known as Bradley Manning. The Kennedy School disinvited Manning following a public outcry in September, but now its leadership has awarded a fellowship to another equally odious figure.

That would be Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian blogger and vehement apologist for the Tehran regime. Last week, the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy named Derakhshan a fellow for the spring semester. The fellowship brings together “experienced journalists and practitioners who focus on some of today’s most pressing issues: race relations, the urban/rural divide, the role of algorithms in society, and climate change, among other topics,” Shorenstein Center Director Nicco Mele said in a news release.

Derakhshan’s fellowship will focus on technology entrepreneurship, presumably drawing on his experience as one of Iran’s first bloggers in the early aughts, work that won him the moniker “the blogfather.” The Shorenstein release presents Derakhshan as a dissident of sorts, who “was imprisoned in Tehran for six years for his writings and online activism.” Yet spending time in the mullahs’ jails doesn’t necessarily make someone a dissident–or worthy of a top journalism fellowship. Derakhshan has spent years viciously assailing real dissidents, and he has a long record of public statements in support of the regime, its leadership and security apparatus, and its conspiratorial and anti-Semitic worldview.

Start with the anti-Semitism. In December 2015, amid the popular frenzy over Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Derakhshan took to his English-language Twitter account (he also maintains a Persian account) to note that the villain of the movie was identified as “Supreme Leader,” which is also the title of Iran’s ruling theocrat. Wrote Derakhshan: “A Supreme Leader in the new star wars [sic]? What is the very pro-Israel J. J. Abrams hinting at?”

The tweet played on the canard, rampant among Iranian Islamists, that Jews use Hollywood influence to plant pro-Israel and anti-Iran messages in the minds of global audiences. In the real world, there is no evidence that J.J. Abrams is “very pro-Israel”–other than his Jewish last name, of course.

A Palestinian activist with a history of making inflammatory anti-Israel statements was invited to make two appearances at the University of Michigan this week, including one held in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Steven Salaita—who gained popularity in 2014 when the University of Illinois rescinded a job offer following exposure of his anti-Israel tweets, such as posting approvingly of Hamas‘s kidnap and murder of three Israeli teens that summer—was invited by the U-M Detroit Center to participate in a MLK Day panel discussion considering if there is "such thing as a proper protest."

The event was co-sponsored by the U-M Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives and the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies.

The following afternoon, on Tuesday, CMENAS gave Salaita a platform to promote his book "Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine," which argues for an alliance of Palestinian and Native American scholar-activists as two indigenous peoples under colonial occupation.

There Salaita said, "Zionism is one of the reasons the world is so shitty today," according to attendees.

Benjamin Gerstein, a Central Student Government representative who attended the program, said Salaita went on to blame the United States-Israel alliance for much of world inequality and turmoil.

"It was very disturbing to hear the existence of the Jewish homeland described as the reason the world is shitty," said Gerstein.

Noura Erakat is an assistant international law professor at George Mason University and the niece of PA negotiator propagandist Saeb Erekat. And like uncle, she is an Israel hater who plays loose with the truth.

A few days ago she tweeted the following in response to this Washington Post article.

I had been trying to think what Erakat meant by “Palestinians put themselves on the map – literally” from 1968-88. She is referring to some way the palestinians paved the way, from 1968, towards their 1988 Declaration of Independence, which was subsequently acknowledged by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 43/177.

The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind up in the skies.
Among the many children of the Six-Day War, the most frightening is international terrorism. Of course, terrorism, including Palestinian terrorism, predated 1967, but the war changed its scope, scale, and very nature. Before the war, Palestinian terrorists struck at targets in Israel, often in cooperation with neighboring states. After the war, the Palestinians used terrorism to internationalize the conflict, hijacking and destroying airplanes, holding diplomats hostage, and even attacking Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Note the meme the letter begins with, which minimizes the violent rock throwing of palestinians (which can, and has, caused serious injuries and even deaths), and implies it is only ever in response to the IDF killing someone (a blatant lie).

But even more than that; these haters are asking to dis-invite an Israeli just because they are Israeli. Victoria Hanna is an religious Jewess, the mother of 3 children. Her parents are from Egypt and Persia – no doubt kicked out or otherwise forced out due to persecution. She performs Aramaic hip hop and rhythmic raps on ancient Hebrew texts. She is not at all political from what I can see, and is not active on social media. Her crime here is being from Israel. She is not part of some conspiracy as they suggest – she just wants to do what she loves, which is performing.

If that is not bigotry, I do not know what is. And that is just assuming their motivation is not antisemitism (which it more often than not is, when it comes to hating on Israel).

Once again, the true face of BDS is revealed. And it is ugly as hell.

Here’s what they don’t tell you when converting to Judaism: Everyone has an opinion on Israel. And once you convert, everyone has an opinion regarding your opinions on Israel.

To say I chose a rather interesting time to convert to Judaism is an understatement. Considering the current political climate, I’ll admit that I braced myself for certain negative reactions to my being Jewish. Being queer, transgender, and Hispanic, I’ve had my share of slurs thrown at me.

My social group and volunteer work are where I find a safe place from the nonsense outside. If things got bad after my conversion, I had this community to turn to. Imagine my surprise, then, to find accusations and anger not from the usual suspects, but from my own progressive communities. To give a few choice examples:

1) My Catholic parents bought me a Star of David necklace to celebrate my conversion. I showed this to someone I had attended numerous LGBT events with. Their response was to call it “pro-apartheid jewelry” and said I was wearing “that star on the Jewish flag.”

2) For about a year, I catalogued footage of humanitarian disasters during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for use by a humanitarian organization. I’m proud of that work. I mentioned my conversion to a few friends who knew me at the time. All immediately asked if I had changed my views on Israeli politics.

3) Whenever I mention my conversion to anyone in my larger social circle, the response is never congratulations. Four out of five times, I’m immediately grilled on my views regarding Israeli policy.

Although the BBC has been telling its audiences that “the Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of a future Palestinian state” for many years, since the US president’s announcement of recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on December 6th 2017 that messaging has been promoted on a variety of BBC platforms on an almost daily basis.

BBC portrayals of the topic usually include the narrative seen in a frequently reused backgrounder on Jerusalem produced by Yolande Knell in which audiences were led to believe that a Palestinian capital in “east Jerusalem” is an already agreed component of the two-state solution rather than a topic to be discussed in final status negotiations.

“Of course, Palestinians see things starkly differently. They want east Jerusalem as their capital.

And that’s part of the long-standing international formula for peace here, known as the “two-state solution”.

Knell also portrayed the two-state solution in terms that dovetail with the PLO’s interpretation of that term.

“Basically the idea that an independent Palestinian state would be created alongside Israel, along the boundaries that existed before 1967, it’s written up in UN resolutions.”

Of course the prime motivation behind Palestinian claims to a capital in the parts of Jerusalem occupied by Jordan between 1948 and 1967 is control over Temple Mount but the BBC repeatedly fails to adequately clarify that important point to its audiences.

Neither does it bother to inform them of the Palestinian Authority’s record on upholding agreements it has already signed with Israel regarding other holy places.

Under the terms of the Oslo Accords, freedom of access to and worship at holy sites was guaranteed.

We know the White House's position on Jerusalem. In late 2017, the U.S. formally recognized the city's status as Israel's capital.

We also know the view of Congress. Over twenty years earlier, a strong bipartisan majority passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which acknowledges that "since 1950, the city of Jerusalem has been the capital of the State of Israel as the capital of Israel" and says the city should be recognized as such.

Now, thanks to leaked phone calls between an Egyptian intelligence officer and several prominent media figures, we know what Egypt thinks. They want to avoid war and to encourage some flexibility on the part of the Palestinians, the officer told his contacts.

And finally, we also know what The New York Times thinks of all that Egyptian moderation. It doesn't seem pleased. In a Dec. 7, front-page article about the leaked conversations, the newspaper it did its part to embarrass the Egyptians, framing the story in a way that casts the government in the harshest of lights, and even fabricating portions of what the Egyptian official said.

Here's what's clear: In the days after the U.S. announcement on Jerusalem, Egypt had taken steps to maintain calm, and went so far as to feed talking points to the media figures, who reportedly complied without hesitatio

Responding to a complaint made by Campaign Against Antisemitism, SoundCloud, the popular music streaming service, has stated that it can see no problem with the antisemitic comments made by actress and fitness studio owner Kelechi Okafor during an episode of her podcast series, “Say Your Mind”.

Ms Okafor caused outrage when she defended recent comments about Jews made by BBC presenter Reggie Yates in which he claimed it was “great” that the young generation of grime music artists is not “managed by some random fat Jewish guy from north west London, they’re managed by their brethren”. In her defence of Mr Yates, Ms Okafor insisted that his comments were truthful, and asserted that that the whole affair demonstrated “the power of a specific community”. She went on to make a series of remarks that relied on classic antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews and money, as well as Jewish power wielded for the exploitation of others.

Ms Okafor said that black entertainers had been “so short changed by the kind of people Reggie Yates describes”, adding that “all sorts of ethnicities” can be capable of this but “the fact is, these men has dominated the industry for decades” and are “taking most of the profits”. She claimed that black artists “are having to work [their] entire arse off while they’re keeping everything”. According to Ms Okafor, grime, RnB, and hip-hop music have been “diluted” by these supposed Jewish music managers who “like blackness as long as it’s making them money”. She claimed that annual commemorations of the Holocaust are more prominent than any memory of the slave trade, saying that these historical events were part of the “power dynamic” she was discussing.

The DIY Network has apologized after one of its hosts made an anti-Semitic remark during an episode that aired on the channel.

“Texas Flip N Move” host Toni Snow made the comment during the show’s season finale, which aired late last week.

“You’re not even gonna bicker a little bit? Jew us down?” Snow asked a participant who was prepared to pay the full asking price for a refurbished school bus.

Snow’s co-host and sister, Donna Snow, did not react to the comment, but just added: “You’re not even gonna blink an eye?”

“Jew down” is a derogatory expression meaning to haggle based on the anti-Semitic perception that Jews are cheap or love money.

In its apology, the DIY Network said that “an inappropriate comment unfortunately made it past our team.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, has appealed to Finnish President Sauli Niinistö to launch an official inquiry into the participation of Finnish volunteers in Holocaust crimes, in the wake of new research on their service in Ukraine in 1941.

Research published in October by Dr. Andre Swanström, chairman of the Finnish Society of Church History, strongly suggests that Finnish volunteers who served in the Viking Division of the Waffen-SS were actively involved in the mass murder of Jews in Ukraine.

Zuroff told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that he was awaiting a response to a letter he sent earlier this month to Niinistö in which he wrote: “I am certain that you would agree that such revelations require a forthright response by the Finnish authorities and appropriate measures to investigate this matter.”

“You might recall that in a similar situation in November 2003, president Halonen immediately initiated the establishment of a commission of inquiry to examine the deportation from Finland of approximately 3,000 foreigners to Nazi Germany, among them Soviet political officers and Jewish prisoners of war, who were thereby sentenced to almost certain death,” he added.

The establishment of that commission resulted in extensive research and the publishing of numerous books on the subject. Zuroff hopes that the same will happen now, following the findings of this latest research.

“All the research until now claims the Finns were not involved in killing the Jews,” he said, noting that Finland protected its own Jewish community.

“And this comes as a total surprise to researchers and society – it’s important,” Zuroff told the Post. “It’s a pattern,” he added, noting that similar revelations were made recently regarding the role played by SS volunteers from Denmark and Norway.

Most anywhere else in Nazi-occupied Europe, an encounter with police would have likely sealed the fate of Jewish refugees like Nissim and Sarah Aladjem and their 10-year-old son, Aron.

Instead, when the family was detained by police in the Muslim nation of Albania 75 years ago, it was the key to their survival.

The family was fleeing Bulgaria when they were detained by five police officers working for the occupation forces. Instead of turning them over to his occupiers, as he should have done with undocumented Jewish aliens, one of the policemen helped the Aladjems find shelter with other locals.

Far from unusual in Albania, the actions of that officer in 1943 — he has not been identified — attest to the prevalence and boldness of the efforts to rescue Jewish refugees in this nation situated northeast of Greece. It is perhaps the only Nazi-occupied country that had more Jews after the Holocaust than before.

Owing partly to what locals call Besa, a local code of honor and neighborly conduct, the rescue and survival of approximately 2,000 Jews by Albanians for decades had remained largely unknown. But thanks to recent studies and films, it is taking its place as a rare ray of light during otherwise dark times.

Cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks is opening a new office and research and development site in Tel Aviv, as its local research team in Israel has “grown significantly” in the past three and a half years.

The Santa-Clara, California-based Palo Alto Networks started operations in Israel in 2014 after it acquired Cyvera; it bought LightCyber in 2017. The new offices will house over 200 employees in development, customer support, sales, DevOps, IT, HR, facilities and finance, the company said in a statement.

Tel Aviv is the only research and development site for Palo Alto Networks outside of its global headquarters in Santa Clara.

The teams in Israel and in the US are expected to grow “significantly” in the coming year, the company said.

“Over the last ten years, our growth has been fueled by the ingenuity, skills, and commitment of our global teams, who remain focused on maintaining trust in the digital age by preventing successful cyberattacks. Our Israel-based team has played a pivotal role here and will continue to do so,” said Mark McLaughlin, chairman and chief executive officer of Palo Alto Networks.

In 1940, as millions of Jews came under Nazi control in the countries conquered by Hitler, and as the route to safety in Palestine remained closed by the British Mandatory power, three of Zionism’s greatest leaders traveled to America. They came at different times, on separate missions, but all three—Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Zionist Organization, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement, and David Ben-Gurion, the Labor Zionist leader who headed the Jewish Agency in Palestine—shared a single goal: to win support in America for a Jewish army to fight the Nazis alongside the British.

This article focuses on Ben-Gurion, the last to come. Writing to his wife Paula before leaving London for the United States, he said he wanted “to see with my own eyes what we can expect from America in wartime.” In particular, he wrote, “I want to know the extent of the contribution America’s Jews are prepared to make for the life of their own people.”

Ben-Gurion would remain in America for four months, on a visit that—like those of his two predecessors—would reveal a great deal not only about American Jews but also about their Zionist visitors. The following brief account draws on Ben-Gurion’s diary, translated into English for the first time, as well as on letters and other contemporaneous documents, most of them previously unpublished.

Economic indicators for Israel showed another successful year in 2017 as, for the first time ever, Israel’s GDP per capita has surpassed that of major industrialized countries such as Britain, Japan and France.

Israel stands out among the nations that won their independence after the Second World War. Despite facing more challenges than virtually any other country, Israel has transformed from a poor and fragile socialist backwater to a first world Start-Up nation of cutting-edge technologies and knowledge during seven brief decades, while fighting for its existence.

The failures of the Arab boycott and later the Boycott Divestment Sanction (BDS) campaign movement to destroy Israel’s economy are no less spectacular than the Muslim Arab failures to defeat Israel in the military battlefields. Israel’s economy is far stronger today than when BDS was launched in 2005.

The Economist publishes an annual global report with numerous data on the countries of the world. In its newly released report, Israel’s GDP per capita has, for the first time ever, surpassed $40,000. According to the Economist’s data, Israel’s GDP per capita grew from $38,127 in 2016 to $44,019 in 2017.

Israel’s economy expanded by 4.4 % during 2017, the highest growth rate among advanced economies. By contrast, the GDP per capita of France was almost $41,000 and nearly $40,000 for Japan.

Stepping into the third floor gallery of New York’s Jewish Museum is like walking into a life size curio cabinet where hundreds of objects, some never before seen, beckon.

Here a model of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem in a bottle, there a newly acquired Torah case donated to the museum from the JFK International Synagogue. There’s a beer stein decorated with a Star of David, and a tiny gold heart given from a son to his mother.

It’s a curators’ conundrum: how to decide what goes on display and what stays boxed away. Ironically, for the staff at the Jewish Museum, knowing there are more than 30,000 objects spanning 4,000 years of history in the museum’s permanent collection makes the process harder.

Curators must avoid repetition — how many pairs of Shabbat candlesticks are just enough to get the point across? And they aim to tell stories through artifacts — so as rare as an object might be, if it doesn’t fit into a particular narrative it won’t be added to the exhibit. All this means only a fraction of the museum’s permanent collection is on display at any given time.

Until now.

For the next year the third floor of the museum will serve as a Jewish cultural attic of sorts, as over 650 works from antiquities to contemporary art are on display — many for the first time.
A model of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in a bottle. (Jewish Museum)

But the new exhibition is about more than the sheer number and breadth of objects in the museum’s inventory. “Scenes from the Collection” reveals how these items fit in to the larger story of how Jewish culture intersects with art.

تصوير جوي لحصن مرحب في خيبر ،الذي فتحه النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم في معركة خيبر ،وكان مقر اليهود بعد اجلائهم من المدينة المنوره pic.twitter.com/EB0Uv363I2

— سطام بن خالد ال سعود (@sattam_al_saud) January 20, 2018

Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city dealt the Palestinian nationalist narrative a serious blow, and gave Israel a kind of insurance policy. This maddens the Arabs who flourished on the dream of destroying Israel during the Oslo years. It has now become clear that a very powerful nation, the US, does not see itself as a partner in that dream — and is even willing to act against it.

The Arabs in general, and particularly the Palestinians, can already see the dominos falling. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and other important states are considering moving their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in recognition that that city is Israel’s capital. In April 2017, even Russian President Vladimir Putin declared his recognition of Western Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city. There was no outcry in response to Putin’s declaration for one simple reason: the Arabs are deathly afraid of Putin after he made crystal clear to what lengths he is willing to go during the war in Syria, and they carefully refrain from reacting to his statements or decisions.

For both religious and nationalist reasons, the Arabs and Muslims are incapable of accepting Israel as the Jewish state that it is.

The question that Israelis, both Jewish and Christian, are forced to ask themselves is whether they are going to recognize the Muslim and Arab problem but tell them in no uncertain terms that Jerusalem belongs to the Jews, and that they are going to have to learn to live with it — or whether they are going to give in to the Arab and Muslim dreamers who refuse to accept the reality that the Jewish religion is alive and well.

The anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement pretends to be working toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians, but in reality, many of its supporters want to destroy Israel as a Jewish state. For this reason, BDS has attracted support from terrorists, convicted killers and antisemites in the US and abroad.

In fact, at many of BDS demonstrations — like ones filmed by the Investigative Project on Terrorism — demonstrators make no secret of their aims. “And the people of Palestine will wipe the Zionist entity (Israel) off all the world maps” one demonstration leader shouts on the IPT-recorded video.

On the same video demonstrators chant: “We don’t want no two-state, we want 48,” referring to 1948, before Israel was created. And for good measure, they chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” meaning a new Palestinian state will go from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and swallow up all of Israel. And yet other chants include: “Death to the peace accords,” “smash the settler Zionist state” and “there is only one solution, intifada revolution.”

Law enforcement officials in the US should keep a close eye on demonstrators like these, knowing that inflammatory antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric often leads to violence. The New York City Police Department and other law enforcement agencies have investigated a number of plots directed specifically at Jewish citizens and institutions.

BDS seeks to isolate Israel from world, ostensibly to protest Israel’s presence in the West Bank and to call for the creation of a Palestinian state. BDS seeks a worldwide boycott against Israeli products, universities and cultural institutions; divestment from companies that provide equipment to the Israeli military; and international economic sanctions against Israel — among other things.

The face of L’Oreal’s new hijab-friendly hair campaign is virulently anti-Israel.

Amena Khan, a blogger and model, was chosen by L’Oreal UK to model for the beauty company’s newest hair product campaign. The campaign features women in hijabs and argues that their products are still useful for people who do not show their hair in public.

“L’Oréal Paris UK are both proud and excited to be launching such a unique and disruptive campaign for the haircare market, a category which in previous years has been perceived as the cliché of beauty advertising,” Adrien Koskas, L’Oréal Paris UK general manager, said about the new campaign. (RELATED: L’Oreal’s New Hair Product Campaign Features Woman In Hijab)

However, a search of Khan’s Twitter account raises questions about the appropriateness of making her the face of the new campaign. Khan frequently espouses anti-Israel views, calling it a “terrorist” and “illegal” state.

“Remember: the brutal murder of Palestinians had been occurring MANY years before the formation of Hamas,” Khan wrote in July of 2014. “Israel’s excuses are blatant lies.”

“Well, under international law, Israel is an illegal state,” she wrote in the same month.

Erekat's report, which I obtained a copy of, is based on the information gathered by the PLO negotiations department and shows the Palestinian understanding of the plan. Senior White House officials dispute Erekat's description of the Trump plan and claim his information is false.

“It is unfortunate that some parties are seeking to prejudice people against our unfinished plan, which the Palestinians have not seen. This outline is false and the Palestinians should not be basing their reaction, public or private, on it. In the meantime, we remain hard at work on the real draft plan that will benefit both sides.”
— Senior White House official
Erekat sent the 92-page report to Abbas and the other officials 10 days ago. Some of the points in the report turned into lines in Abbas's Anti-Trump speech in front of the council few days later.

Here are the main points of the Trump peace plan, according to Erekat's report:

• Jerusalem – The Palestinian capital will be in the suburbs of Jerusalem according to its 1967 borders. Israel will commit to maintain the status quo and maintain freedom of worship in the holy sites in the city.
• Borders - 10% of the West Bank will be annexed by Israel and the other 90% will be the Palestinian state. Erekat wrote that Trump will announce in two to three months that he gives a green light for Israel to annex the big settlement blocks in the West Bank. According the Erekat, the Trump plan also states that the final border line will be drawn in negotiations between the parties.
• Timetable for implementation – According to Erekat, the Trump plan will include a defined and agreed upon timetable for concluding the negotiations. But, he added, the plan will not include a timetable for Israeli withdrawal but only state that the IDF pullout from most of the West Bank will be gradual and follow security benchmarks that the Palestinians will have to reach.

Security arrangements:

• Erekat claims that the Trump plan calls for a joint Israeli-Palestinian security architecture but stresses that Israel will have overriding security responsibility everywhere in the Palestinian state with full security authority.
• According to Erekat, the Trump plan will allow the IDF to maintain its presence on the Jordan river and in strategic points on the West Bank hills in order to keep both states secure.
• Erekat wrote in the report that according to the Trump plan special parts of Ben Gurion airport and Haifa & Ashdod seaports will be designated for Palestinian use but the security responsibility will stay in Israeli hands.
• Erekat added that the Trump plan includes a safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli sovereignty and also states that the border crossings of the future state of Palestine with Egypt and Jordan will be operated by Palestinians but the security will be in Israeli hands.
• According to Erekat, the Trump plan gives Israel control of the airspace, maritime borders and electromagnetic frequencies without harming the needs of the Palestinian state.

The refugees issue – The Trump plan will call for a just solution to the refugees issue in the Palestinian state, without a right of return to Israel, Erekat reports.

Mutual recognition – Erekat wrote that the Trump plan states that the international community will recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people and Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinian people. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

According to the TV channel, Erekat told Abbas that under the US peace plan, Israel would retain 10 percent of the West Bank, although the final borders between an Israeli and Palestinian state would be worked out between the two sides. It did not say which specific areas of the West Bank Israel would keep, though Israel has long maintained that settlement blocs should be part of the country under any future peace deal.

Trump would announce his support for Israeli annexation of 10% of the territory within months. Israel was said to have requested 15%, but was refused.

A timetable would be set for negotiations, though no deadline would be given for an Israeli military withdrawal from the West Bank once a deal was reached: the pace of an Israeli pullout would be determined by the Palestinians’ ability to maintain security.

As part of the deal, the Palestinians would receive control of certain sections of Ben Gurion Airport and the ports of Ashdod and Haifa, although security control would remain with Israel. Furthermore, the sides would establish regular passage between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — under Israeli control.

Regarding the so-called Palestinian right of return, the US proposal outlined by Erekat speaks of a “just solution” for Palestinian refugees that would see them settled in a Palestinian state, without the option to live in Israel.

Countries would recognize Israel as the “national home of the Jewish people,” while a Palestinian state would be the “national home of the Palestinian people,” Channel 10 reported.

The New York Times, in its Twitter feed describing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech saying that the PA would no longer participate in peace talks led by the United States, described Abbas as a “staunch champion of the Oslo Accords.” It was an odd description of Abbas, and appeared nowhere in the actual report, because it is mistaken. Badly.

The Oslo Accords first agreed to in 1993 and later extended by an interim agreement in 1995 provide the basis for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Abbas, during his time in power, has regularly acted in defiance of the terms of the Oslo Accords.

In agreeing to make peace with the Palestinians, Israel changed its longstanding insistence that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was a terrorist organization in exchange for the PLO recognizing Israel’s right to exist and promising to abandon terror. In an exchange of letters prior to the actual agreement, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat committed to having all “outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through negotiations,” confirming “that those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist, and the provisions of the Covenant which are inconsistent with the commitments of this letter are now inoperative and no longer valid,” and rejecting “the use of terrorism and other acts of violence.”

On paper, these commitments look promising; in practice the Palestinians, first under Arafat and, now, under Abbas, have to uphold these basic and necessary commitments.

The Middle East Forum (MEF) think tank announced that it is offering a $1 million donation to UNRWA, the United Nations agency dedicated to Palestinian refugees, following a $65 million funding cut by the US.

The Trump administration announced the cut on Jan. 16. According to the State Department, the US — UNRWA’s largest donor — sent the agency $60 million to keep it operating through the end of the year, but withheld additional planned funding of $65 million and is encouraging other countries to share the burden.

After the US decision, UNRWA called on “people of good will in every corner of the globe where solidarity and partnerships exist for Palestine Refugees” to “join us in responding to this crisis and #FundUNRWA.”

MEF President Daniel Pipes responded to the call by stating, “We are prepared to help UNRWA, conditional on it making some reforms. We are delighted to contribute in solidarity if UNRWA takes steps to end the Palestine refugee problem.”

According to Pipes, the think tank’s $1 million contribution would come with the condition that UNRWA “end the automatic registering in perpetuity to the descendants of refugees, those who hold a nationality, and those who live in their purported homeland, the West Bank and Gaza.”

Arab Israeli lawmakers will boycott Mike Pence’s speech to the Knesset, with the head of a coalition of Arab parties saying Saturday that the US vice president is “dangerous” and has a “messianic vision” that threatens the region.

Pence landed in Egypt Saturday to kick off a Middle East trip that will also include stops in Jordan and Israel, after canceling a December visit due to the passage of US tax reform.

Ahead of his arrival, Joint (Arab) List leader Ayman Odeh said MKs in his party would not attend Pence’s Knesset speech due to US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

In a Twitter post Saturday, Odeh said his party would go through with an earlier promise to skip Pence’s address to the Knesset plenum.

“[Pence] is a dangerous man with a messianic vision that includes the destruction of the entire region,” he also said.

Odeh also attacked Trump, saying he was “even more dangerous” than Pence and a “political pyromaniac” and a “racist” woman-hater. He slammed the US president’s Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts and said Trump “must not have a [political] road map for the region.”

A top Egyptian imam is insisting he will not meet with US Vice President Mike Pence during his upcoming visit to Cairo, due to the “rash and uncalculated” American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

In an interview with CNN Thursday, Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand iman of al-Azhar, said meeting Pence would “tear up my identity” and come across as “contradictory in front of people.”

In the wake of US President Donald Trump’s declaration, Tayeb cancelled a planned meeting with Pence, who will be in Egypt, Jordan and Israel in the coming days. The US vice president had been set to visit the region in December, but his trip was rescheduled amid Congress’s efforts to pass tax reform.

Tayeb, who has urged Trump to reverse his decision, called the recognition an “aggression toward people, countries, cultures and civilizations,” and said it would “feed terrorism in the region.

“Decisions like this one nurture terrorism, create it and propel it forward to act and express itself in methods we all reject,” he told CNN. “When terrorism rises again, the East and West will drown in seas of blood.”

Argentina solemnly marked the third anniversary of the murder of Alberto Nisman on Thursday, with relatives and colleagues of the late federal prosecutor — who spent more than a decade investigating Iran’s responsibility for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires — gathering at La Tablada Jewish cemetery in the Argentine capital in tribute.

Those present at the service included Nisman’s mother, Sara Garfunkel, his daughters Iara and Kala, Argentine Environment Minister Sergio Bergman, Ariel Cohen-Sabbah, the head of the Argentine Jewish communal organization DAIA, and Luis Czyzewski, the father of one of the AMIA victims. Rabbi Marcelo Polakoff led the group in prayers of remembrance.

Nisman had “sacrificed his life in the pursuit of his work,” Czyzewski told the gathering. “From now on, it is up to the judicial system to determine who killed him.”

Nisman’s body was discovered in his Buenos Aires apartment on January 18, 2015 — the day he was due to present before Argentina’s Congress a complaint that charged the former government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of colluding with Iran to secure the lifting of six “Red Notices,” issued by the global law enforcement agency Interpol, for the capture of the Iranian operatives wanted in connection with the AMIA atrocity.

While Kirchner initially portrayed Nisman’s death as a suicide, a forensic police investigation in 2017 determined that the prosecutor had been murdered, following an assault involving two individuals who broke into his apartment. Many Argentines suspect that Nisman’s killing was ordered from within Kirchner’s office.

Resolutions calling for a “full and just investigation” into the death of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman were introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

In the House, Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Ted Deutch, a Republican and a Democrat, respectively, from Florida, introduced the resolution, they said in a statement Friday, the three-year anniversary of the Jewish prosecutor’s death.

Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., introduced a companion resolution in the Senate, according to the statement.

A federal judge in Argentina said last month that Nisman, who was investigating the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires, was murdered. For nearly three years, Argentina had failed to say definitively whether the shooting of Nisman was murder or suicide.

Nisman’s body was found on Jan. 18, 2015, hours before he was to present evidence to Argentine lawmakers that then-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner covered up Iran’s role in the attack, which left 85 dead and hundreds wounded.

An Argentine court and Western intelligence services believe Iran and Hezbollah were involved, though Tehran denies the claim.

Jordanian media reported Saturday that the Israeli government paid $5 million to the families of Mohammed Jawaedeh and Bashar Hamarneh, the two men who were shot by Israeli security guard Ziv Moyal in July 2017 in what Israel claimed was a nationaattack.

The Israeli government didn't pay the families directly, instead it transferred the funds to the Jordanian government.

The families accepted the compensation and what they saw as an expression of regret by the Israeli government, according to the report.

Money was also given to the family of judge Raid Zaitar, who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers who claimed he tried to grab a weapon from one of the soldiers by force in March 2014.

The Jordanian newspaper Al-Ad reported Saturday that these formal Israeli actions fulfill the Jordanian conditions for the reopening of the Israeli embassy in Jordan.

The newspaper also reported that Israel said it will initiate legal action against the security guard.

The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah on Friday accused Israel of a bomb attack that wounded a member of the Palestinian group Hamas in the Lebanese city of Sidon, calling it an act of aggression.

The Israeli military said it does not comment on foreign reports.

The bomb blast injured the Hamas member on Sunday, destroying his car as he was about to get in.

"The bomb that targeted a Hamas member in Sidon is a dangerous beginning and it is not possible to be silent about it," said Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed Shi'ite Hezbollah.

In a televised address, he said "all indications" pointed to Israel.

The target, Mohamed Hamdan, was not a publicly known Hamas figure in Lebanon. A statement from Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, confirmed he was a member of the group, without detailing his role.

Al-Manar television, run by the Lebanese political and military group Hezbollah, described Hamdan as an important figure in Hamas, adding that he appeared to have a security role and was being tracked by Israel.

Hezbollah criticized the Lebanese government on Friday for allowing cinemas to screen Steven Spielberg’s film “The Post” despite calls for a ban because of the director’s links to Israel.

The movie premiered in Beirut this week after Lebanon’s interior minister ruled against any ban.

Activists in Lebanon had campaigned against the film because Spielberg gave funds to Israel during its 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The two countries are officially enemy states.

“We reject this decision. We consider it a mistake,” said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iran-backed Shi’ite terrorist group.

“This man announced his support for the Israeli aggression against Lebanon,” Nasrallah said in an address. “He paid Israel from his own money…to kill your children and destroy your houses.”

The parents of a fallen IDF soldier whose body has been held by Hamas for three and a half years have called on the Israeli government to not return the body of a Palestinian terrorist killed in a shootout in Jenin this week, the Hebrew news site Mako reported on Friday.

In a letter sent to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Simha and Leah Goldin — the parents of late IDF Lt. Hadar Goldin — wrote, “Hamas does not act in accordance with international and is holding slain IDF soldiers in a pirated and inhumane manner.”

“The non-release of terrorists’ bodies will send a clear message to Hamas leadership that Israeli policy has changed and the humanitarian gestures from us have ended until the return of Hadar and Oron [a reference to Staff. Sgt. Oron Shaul, another IDF soldier who fell in battle in Gaza in the summer of 2014 and whose body is in Hamas’ possession],” they continued.

In an interview with The Algemeiner last year, Leah Goldin said, “Bringing a soldier back to Israel to burial is, first and foremost, a humanitarian issue. This is an important value in all religions. It’s about human dignity.”

The Palestinian Authority on Saturday called on the International Criminal Court in The Hague to execute its authority to prevent crimes it said were being perpetrated against the Palestinian people, particularly children.

Marking three years since ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda launched a “preliminary examination into the situation in Palestine,” PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki issued a letter to the prosecutor in which he denounced what he described as an escalation of unlawful practices by Israel, the PA’s official Wafa news agency reported.

Preliminary examinations establish whether there is probable cause to conduct a full criminal investigation and whether the court has jurisdiction. Such probes can drag on for years.

Earlier this month Israel’s National Security Council reportedly warned members of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the ICC could this year move from the examination phase and open investigations into the 2014 Gaza war, as well as West Bank settlement construction.

A leading legislative architect of previous sanctions against Iran has described the proposed Congressional legislation as the “gold standard” in fixing the weaknesses in the nuclear deal with Iran that President Donald Trump demanded last week, Axios reported on Thursday.

Richard Goldberg, a onetime aide to former Sen. Mark Kirk (R – Ill.), said of the proposed legislation authored by Rep. Peter Roskam (R – Ill.), “The Roskam legislation is the gold standard for how to fix the Iran deal when it comes to ballistic missiles. The UN Security Council called on Iran to halt any activity related to nuclear capable ballistic missiles — and this legislation mandates a snapback of all our toughest sanctions if Iran violates that Security Council directive.”

While it is expected that most Democrats and some Republicans will object to the proposed legislation, Axios described the Roskam bill as the “last chance” for Congress to prevent Trump from leaving the deal unilaterally.

The proposed legislation addressed a number of weaknesses that Trump identified last week as needing to be strengthened: a complete ban on Iran’s ballistic missile development, permanently keeping Iran’s breakout time for a nuclear weapon at a year or more, insisting on “anytime, anywhere” inspections to avoid Iran blocking access to its military sites, and imposing more sanctions on Iran for its terror support and human rights abuses.

Keeping Iran’s breakout time to being at least a year addresses the problem of “sunset clauses,” which would allow the Islamic Republic to legally have an industrial nuclear enrichment program by the end of the deal. In April 2015, President Barack Obama acknowledged that according to its terms Iran’s breakout time would be “near zero” by the end of the deal.

Marcus’s crime here is that he wrote a letter urging, among other things, that some of the students responsible be disciplined for their behavior. We are supposed to believe, I suppose, that this letter is a sign that Marcus has an authoritarian streak. But in fact, the student judiciary at UW-Madison, not exactly a bastion of the alt-right, determined that, in the case in question, “Jewish students were the subject of discrimination by their elected representatives.” Although no students were disciplined, one representative was ordered to issue an apology while another was urged to apologize and attend a training course on religious tolerance.

In other words, if the New York Times is to be believed, Democrats stood against Marcus because he is not far enough to the left of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the most left-leaning universities in a universe of left-leaning higher education institutions. He is just too damned hard on anti-Semitism.

To be sure, Marcus has also been criticized for failing to adopt the Obama administration’s deeply controversial positions on how schools should handle sexual assault allegations and for having–as nearly any Republican appointee in any of the past several administrations would have–reservations about affirmative action policies. But, in his capacity as president of the Brandeis Center, Marcus is best known for being a tireless opponent of anti-Semitism. The Brandeis Center has also condemned hatred of and violence against Muslims. The Times acknowledged that, during his stint in the Bush administration, Marcus “reinforced protections for women and Jews as well as Muslims and Sikhs who faced religious discrimination in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

The Democrats knew that they did not have the votes to block Marcus. So their vote was symbolic. But what does it symbolize that a mainstream Republican appointee with an extraordinary record of combating anti-Semitism, and a respectable record of combating other forms of discrimination and hatred, merited not one Democratic vote? The only answer I can think of is this: It is all right to say you are against anti-Semitism, but it is unacceptable to act too vigorously against it. Such action offends those on the left who will tolerate no opposition to their mission to demonize the Jewish state. Democrats, sure of their Jews, seem determined to hold on to those who do Jews harm.

Martin Luther King Day earlier this week gave rise to many pro-Israel memes on social media, pointing out MLK’s support for Israel. They were along the lines of the following:

Of course, this is highly inconvenient for the haters, especially those like Linda Sarsour trying to invoke intersectionality to drum up support for her bankrupt palestinian cause.

But not to worry! Some, like Richard Silverstein, found a solution: claim he would have renounced his pro-Israel position had he lived.

Martin Luther King and the Israel Fraud: why the Israel Lobby persists in manufacturing Israel quotes he never delivered or offering real quotes he would surely renounce had he lived. https://t.co/wF6uA3Dtm9pic.twitter.com/D0yzNZV98K

— Tikun Olam (@richards1052) January 16, 2018

This leads to a long-winded blog post. I’ll save you the hassle and reproduce Silverstein’s conclusion:
If, as Irving Kristol once said, a neocon is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality; then BDS supporters are liberal Zionists who’ve been mugged by Israeli reality (i.e. racism, Occupation and apartheid). King too would not have been blind to this phenomenon.

Finally, Black Zionist shills like Chloe Valdary and other pro-Israel advocates who quote King approvingly this Martin Luther King Day offer a Madame Tussaud version of this great man. When he lived, his thinking was not embalmed in wax or history. It changed and developed as circumstances required. That’s why King would far more likely have followed a path staked out by Nelson Mandela, who wholeheartedly endorsed Palestinian national rights.

Silverstein’s position is as condescending as it is fallacious. But to be expected from a person who thinks it is ok to disparage African-Americans.

A Jewish Labour group has criticized the UK opposition party for failing to deal with a number of incidents of anti-Semitism, saying that Labour did not appear serious about tackling anti-Semitism in the party’s ranks.

Jeremy Newmark, the head of the Jewish Labour Movement, said the lack of action in dealing with the recent cases raises concerns over whether the party has internalized the findings of a report on anti-Semitism in Labour, The Guardian reported Saturday.

That probe, which was led by Labour Peer Shami Chakrabarti, was criticized by the British Jewish community for downplaying anti-Semitism within the party.

“We remain seriously concerned about what is now a vast backlog of cases involving alleged anti-Semitism that appear to be stuck in the system, in some cases for over a year,” said Newmark, according The Guardian. “That is not a good indicator of the party having embraced Shami Chakrabarti’s imperative to adopt a gold standard in dealing with antisemitism.”

“We will be closely monitoring the outcomes of a number of high-profile cases due to be determined by the national constitutional committee over the weeks ahead. These include former Momentum vice-chair Jackie Walker and [activist] Marc Wadsworth,” said Newmark.

John McDonnell will share a platform with controversial ousted NUS chief Malia Bouattia at an event in Parliament next month. Divisive Bouattia boasts a catalogue of eyebrow-raising views. She:

• Received an open letter from Jewish societies in 48 universities, demanding she explain the numerous allegations of anti-Semitism levelled at her;
• Suggested the government’s anti-terror Prevent programme is backed by a “Zionist lobby“;
• Spoke at an event alongside Leila Khaled, a terrorist hijacker; Bouattia used her platform to defend armed struggle. She also lashed out against the “mainstream Zionist led media outlets”;
• Spearheaded the scrapping of an NUS motion that proposed the organisation should condemn ISIS, on the grounds that it was “islamophobic”;
• Was celebrated by Jihadi John apologist group CAGE;
• Called her own university, Birmingham, “something of a Zionist outpost”;
• Claimed the EU’s definition of anti-semitism is “ominous”.

Outrage at Bouattia among NUS members and officers led to a widespread campaign which saw student unions disaffiliate from the organisation. McDonnell will speak alongside her at the launch of a new Corbynista book, For The Many: Preparing Labour for Power in February. Also at the event will be newly time-rich Chris Williamson. McDonnell’s spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. Jezza will be feeling left out…

As many readers will know by now, Alan Hart is no more. Aged 75, the (non-Jewish) inveterate Israel-demoniser, whose Twitter page shows that he was tweeting anti-Israel propaganda almost to the end, shuffled off this mortal coil last week, deeply mourned by inveterate Israel-demoniser Gilad Atzmon (see, for instance, here) and others of that ilk.

Hart (Arafat's biographer and author of the odious 2010 book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews) was a former newspaper journalist, chief Middle East correspondent for Independent Television News (ITN), and presenter of the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Panorama. He became a regular on Iran's satellite news channel Press TV, delighting his masters with his diatribes against the Jewish State and its supporters.

Wikipedia's article about him (which provides footnoted sources) tells us of such sentiments of his as:
"The colonial enterprise that Zionism is has corrupted everything it touched, beginning with the United Nations and including the mainstream media, what passes for democracy in the Western world (America especially) and Judaism itself"

An advance copy of the draft bill, leaked by CDU members, reveals that the legislation focuses mostly on stepping up punitive measures against migrants and refugees involved in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel activity. According to the bill's authors, those who do not accept Jewish life in Germany or the right of Israel to exist have no place in Germany.

Under the bill, which represents a significant shift in Germany's attitude toward the anti-Semitism that runs rampant among Arab and Muslim immigrants, migrants and refugees involved in anti-Semitic incitement or activity will be stripped of their residency rights. However, violators will not be immediately deported, in fact, deportation would not be guaranteed. In addition, the revocation of residency rights would also be subject to legal contest.

The German legal establishment's problematic approach toward the issue of anti-Semitism was demonstrated this week in the city of Wuppertal, when the high court upheld a lower court's ruling defining the firebombing of a synagogue as a criminal, rather than an anti-Semitic act.

The firebombing in question was perpetrated by a group of three young Palestinians living in Germany in the summer of 2014, as Operation Protective Edge was raging in Gaza. Anti-Semitic riots were raging across Germany, drawing mainly Arab and Muslim crowds. The law enforcement authorities failed to respond in any way.

When the perpetrators who hurled Molotov cocktails at a synagogue in Wuppertal were apprehended, they claimed it was an act of "protest against Israeli policy" and not, heaven forbid, and act of anti-Semitism, which would result in harsher punishment.

The German judges sided with the perpetrators' arguments time and time again, despite vocal protests from the German Jewish community.

A new documentary promises to release never-before seen evidence on the plot by a group of Holocaust survivors to poison hundreds of thousands of Germans in an act of revenge after World War II.

The film “Holocaust: The Revenge Plot” revolves around tapes of resistance fighter and later-poet Abba Kovner detailing his recollections of the plan, according to Britian’s Channel 4, which commissioned the documentary.

The tapes were recorded in 1985 as Kovner was dying from cancer and explore the 1946 plans to poison the water supplies in several German cities, and a second plot to kill thousands of SS officers being held in an American prisoner camp.

Kovner is said to reveal how his secret organization, codenamed Nakam (Hebrew for vengeance), infiltrated the waterworks of Hamburg, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and Munich in order to poison the water supply with arsenic.

But there were deep reservations even among the Avengers that such an operation would kill innocent Germans and undermine international support for the establishment of Israel. Either way, when Kovner sailed for Europe with the poison, he drew suspicion from British authorities and was forced to toss it overboard before he was arrested.

People with knowledge of Jewish restitution issues argue that it is not a question of blame, but simply a matter of recognizing the fact that the Polish state and many of its citizens benefited materially from the post-war absence of Polish Jewry, whatever the circumstances of their death or departure.

“Considering Poland was not a welcoming place after the war for Jewish survivors with some pogroms and waves of expulsions, many Jews may have left before the Communists got around to the nationalization of their property so would be disqualified from claiming [under the present proposals], as they had already departed,” said David Tilles. “The Communists nationalized properties, nationalized industries, many of which were owned before the war by Polish Jews. Those assets have been transferred from government to government. After the fall of Communism they privatized some and pocketed the money, sometimes they may have sold them at underpriced levels to their friends, there were also Jewish schools that are now state schools, Jewish hospitals established by the Jewish community but are now in state ownership.”

As Schudrich puts it, “The Polish state is being sued for my bicycle because they have my bicycle. It’s not because the Germans have my bicycle, the Polish government has my bicycle!”

Whilst noting the importance of acknowledging the specific circumstances of many Holocaust survivors and their heirs, however, advocates reject the idea of restitution as somehow solely a “Jewish issue,” suggesting it is an unhelpful way for anyone to look at it. A comprehensive restitution law that takes into consideration a range of perspectives and circumstances, they argue, is the fairest resolution for Poles and non-Poles, Jews and non-Jews alike.

“It’s both a Polish issue and a Jewish issue, and it’s as much a moral and historical issue as it is financial,” said Gideon Taylor, of the World Jewish Restitution Organization. “It’s the history of Polish Jewry. A house that stood in Poland—a family lived in that house. A shop—it was their shop. A synagogue—it was where they prayed. To ignore those claims, to exclude those people, is to reject that history, it’s to reject what was. That’s why it’s deep, that’s why it’s important, that’s why it matters.”

A US website for gun enthusiasts is selling Holocaust-style Star of David patches to its clientele, encouraging them to wear them to highlight their perceived persecution by liberals.

The website “Tactical Shit” is offering a yellow star badge with the words “Gun Owner” emblazoned upon it, replacing “Jew.”

The website explains: “We do not invoke this historical symbol lightly. The similarities of the current attitude of the legislative environment and the systematic persecution that this star represents are uncanny. There’s no difference.”

It goes on to claim the product “is a strong reminder of how quickly an unarmed society can be toppled by a dictatorship. How have we reached this point? How has the persecution of a single group of people become so socially acceptable? Well, to us, it’s not. It’s time to remind these people of history. Line in the sand: drawn.”

A final addendum notes that “this patch will fray nicely at the edges with usage (intentionally).”

New technology for cars drew big crowds at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
Foresight Doron Cohadier

A company called Foresight, which listed on the Nasdaq in the spring of 2017 has seen its shares jump and drop since going public. But in the last month the stock has seen a dramatic turn around, rising 35 percent in the month before the signature electronics show on the Vegas strip.

Israel based Foresight gave CNBC a test drive, to demonstrate what it's like behind the wheel.
Foresight Demo One

The company separates itself with a unique technology using a system of "stereo cameras" to detect threats. "We're using technology mainly based on a combination of visible light and infrared vision in order to increase the visibility of drivers, beyond what human beings can see" said Foresight's Vice President of Business Development Doron Cohadier.

Cohadier previously worked at Israeli defense contractor Elbit before coming to the start-up, where he gained valuable experience working with complicated multi-system projects.

In a move that could alleviate India’s deadly drought problem, the country’s Tata corporation signed a memorandum of understanding with an Israeli firm that specializes in extracting drinking water from the air.

Watergen and Tata representatives signed the document in New Delhi during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to India this week, the Israeli firm said in a statement. The memorandum seeks to create a mutual entity in India to manufacture Watergen units. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Watergen’s president, Mikhael Mirilashvili, showcased his company’s plan for solving the water crisis in India by 2022 to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during Modi’s visit to Israel.

Watergen’s two models of atmospheric water generators can extract up to 6,000 liters of water from the air every day, depending on the air humidity, the company said. The medium scale units produce up to 600 liters of water daily.

In the framework of the memorandum, a pilot program featuring the midsize unit will be set up this year in India. Last year, Watergen instituted a GEN-350G pilot in New Delhi’s Connaught Place, where nearly 2,000 people received drinking water from the air every day, the firm said. Some of the units can operate on solar energy.

The Tata-Watergen agreement is one of at least nine deals sealed during the visit, in which businessmen from Israel accompanied Netanyahu.

It’s no coincidence that Harvard and UCLA chose experienced Israelis to direct their technology-transfer offices. Cash-strapped universities urgently need to streamline the transfer of inventions from lab bench to market, and Israeli TTOs have a remarkable track record of generating more revenue from IP sales than any other country except the United States.

“Universities are reinventing themselves as micro environments for innovation and entrepreneurship. A university that can’t demonstrate its impact on industry and the marketplace will become less relevant in the future,” says Benjamin Soffer, chairman of Israel Tech Transfer Network.

Soffer, who frequently hosts TTO officials from top universities in the United States, Europe and the Far East, also heads the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s T3 TTO, which encompasses two technology incubators and 90 spinoff companies including ReWalk Robotics and Mazor Robotics.

The Technion’s net research budget of roughly $90 million pales in comparison to MIT’s $1.5 billion, yet its income from commercialization of research is similar, says Soffer.

“Even more remarkable, the combined research budget of all Israeli universities is half the research budget of MIT. This is validation of the strength of the technology we produce.”

Soffer says Israel’s startup ecosystem provides an efficient “packaging” system for the flood of innovation from universities and military tech units.

Q: If Egypt and Saudi Arabia are making a regional peace plan, what do you do?
A: We will not do anything. Our decision is clear. We never want to expand the front of our enemies. Our main enemy is the Israeli occupation and the American policy that advocates it. We have no other enemy. We seek to have positive relations with all, with our Arab nation and with the world. If the Arab nations have another position on our cause we leave it to their people and do not open a battle with them.

If UNRWA were defunded by the US in this dramatic, sudden, and unplanned way, it would be forced to suspend within a few months most of its services to nearly 5 million Palestinian refugees. Half a million children in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon would be without schools, consigning them to the already volatile streets at a time when extremists are in full recruitment mode.

Has the US, and Israel for that matter, thought this through? Do they really want 270,000 children in Gaza attending Hamas-run schools? Does Washington really know what it is doing?

The impact of all these cuts on the political stability in the Middle East is incalculable. Such a move would produce instability affecting some of the key strategic allies of the US, the EU and the UK in the Middle East. Jordan, for instance, has been touted as a beacon of stability in a region that is still reeling from the convulsions of the Arab spring, the Syrian civil war and the Saudi Arabian-Iranian proxy wars.
Yet Jordan is host to 2 million Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA. It would be unable to cope with replacing the services provided by UNRWA, with the result that its already high unemployment rate would rocket, poverty – already widespread – would accelerate and, with school-age children on the streets, protests would inevitably ensue, threatening the viability of the government. 

There are also long-term costs. Apart from such a decision further sidelining the US from resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and thus lessening its ability to influence the shape of the outcome, one lesson learned from the Middle East since 9/11 is that tearing down institutions is easy. Rebuilding them is exponentially more costly in terms of lives and money.
Once the human capital of teachers, doctors, accountants, administrators, social workers and lawyers accumulated over decades is dispersed or degraded, it will take years to marshal the skills and expertise again to run societies and communities.

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, founder and editor-in-chief of MuslimGirl—an online magazine where “Muslim women talk back” to combat “misconceptions surrounding Islam”—made headlines last week when she turned down an award from multinational beauty giant Revlon because of the company’s engagement with Israeli actress Gal Gadot.

“I cannot accept this award from Revlon with Gal Gadot as the ambassador,” Al-Khatahtbeh announced in a statement on Twitter. “Her vocal support of the Israel Defense Forces’ actions in Palestine goes against MuslimGirl’s morals and values.”

The rejection, of course, is well within Al-Khatahtbeh’s rights, but it’s also an invitation to examine precisely what MuslimGirl’s morals and values truly are. A good place to start may be a piece, published by MuslimGirl in 2016, entitled “Israel’s Organ Harvesting and the UK’s BDS Movement”.

Written by “Yelena,” a mysterious doula from San Francisco, the piece is mostly a rehash of professional anti-Semite Alison Weir’s riff on the blood-libel—a conspiracy theory in which Israel occupies Palestinian territory in order to murder the locals and loot their body parts. But like all knockoffs, the piece’s craftsmanship is poor, so Yelena’s version is helpful in that it sheds Weir’s usual scrupulosness and directly cites anti-Semites as sources. What sources does “Yelena” offer to document the ghoulish crimes of which she accuses the Jewish state? These include Iran’s PressTV and 9/11 Truther Michel Chussodovsky’s conspiracist web site, GlobalResearch. Both are classic “fake news” media, distributing anti-Jewish conspiracy theories by the shipping container throughout the Internet. Most troubling, however, is the article’s quotation of retired Cal State psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, a darling of far-Right anti-Semites, who couches standard white-supremacist teachings about Jewish “white genocide” in trappings of evolutionary psychology. Here’s what “Yelena” took from MacDonald: “Organized American Jewish lobbying groups and deeply committed Jews in the media are behind the pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy that is leading to war against virtually the entire Arab world.”

The Forward: Why MuslimGirl’s Rejection Of Gal Gadot Is A Good Thing

In the pages of The New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen concludes that Israel is a racist country.

His logic?

Shuhada, a road within Hebron, a particularly violent area in the West Bank, is closed except to those passing through security checks, and sometimes closed to the public entirely.

In almost every country and language in the world, this type of security arrangement is referred to as a “sterile area,” meaning that it is kept free of potential security threats. In fact, the term “sterile area” is used around the globe in airport security, domestic crowd control, and military operations.

But Cohen has unilaterally decided that in Israel, and only in Israel, that word means racism:

The Israel Defense Forces refer to “tzir sterili,” or sterile roads, because no Palestinian is allowed on them, whether in a car or on foot…. Jews did not go to the Holy Land to deploy for another people the biological metaphors of classic racism that accompanied their persecution over centuries. But the exercise of overwhelming power is corrupting, to the point that “sterile” streets, presumably freed of disease-ridden natives, enter the lexicon.

Presumably?

By Cohen’s logic, governments around the world presumably consider all air travellers to be “disease-ridden natives,” as well as football fans, local residents in military towns, anyone who attends a presidential speech, and more.

But no, Cohen’s presumptions apply only to Israel. Even when Israel uses exactly the same terminology as…well, everyone.

Absolutely nothing in White’s argument even slightly undermines the argument that descendants of refugees are not real refugees, that Palestinians are the only people in the world given the right to bestow “refugee” status and benefits to their descendants (and their descendants, in perpetuity), and that that there are only 20,000 or so real refugees from 1948 remaining.

The one example he provides from a UNHCR report, noting that some Afghans have been refugees in Pakistan for 30 years, does not contradict the fact that these Afghan refugees can not pass on their refugee status to children who were born in the host country and never lived in their parent’s country of birth.

He’s right that the mere “passage of time” shouldn’t necessarily remove refugee status from a genuine refugee, but dying most certainly should.

Remarkably, not only does UNRWA still legitimise and defend the “right of return” and resist resettlement of Palestinian “refugees”, but consider, as refugees, people of Palestinian descent who are citizens of new states (like Jordan or Lebanon), and even Palestinian citizens of Palestinian ruled territories in the West Bank and Gaza.

As we’ve argued previously, if UNRWA’s definition was applied to the 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands between 1945 and 1967, it would make millions of Israeli Jews (who are descendants of those 800,000 refugees) eligible for UNRWA-style refugee status and benefits.

There are good humanitarian-based arguments for maintaining current UNRWA funding until a long-term solution can be found, but there can be no serious argument to maintain the fiction that there are over 5 million actual Palestinian refugees and that these non-refugees of Palestinian descent should be “repatriated” to a place they never once stepped foot.

Indian-born British Jewish artist Anish Kapoor announced earlier this month that he would be donating the $1 million Genesis Prize he was awarded last year to five nongovernmental organizations that help refugees.

Let's hope his donation will help hundreds or thousands of people forced to flee from civil wars and mass killings, as has been the case in many third-world countries.

Kapoor is famous for his large sculptures that both reflect reality but also distort it through fascinating arrangements of mirrors.

Some 40 to 50 million people worldwide have had to flee their homelands because of mortal danger. They are real refugees, who had to leave their homes not in search of better living conditions but because their affiliations with certain ethnic groups or religions turned them into walking targets by other ethnic or religious groups.

Millions of Kurds fled Iraq during the rule of Saddam Hussein. Other ethno-religious groups had to flee parts of Iraq when the Islamic State thugs took over a few years ago. The civil war in Syria has led millions to leave, knowing that staying there under the rule of a hostile ethnic group would have meant certain death. There are no good guys and bad guys there – the Sunnis and the Shiites have shown the same ability to be evil and slaughter civilians.

Review: 'Industry of Lies: Media, Academia, and the Israeli-Arab Conflict' by Ben-Dror Yemini

"Seventy years after the Holocaust, which saw Nazi Germany propaganda turn the entire Jewish people into a monster threatening the world, a new industry of lies has arisen. … But this time it is not the goose-stepping Nazis pushing the lies. It is liberal-minded academics, intellectuals, and human rights activists."

So writes Ben-Dror Yemini, an Israeli journalist and former opinion page editor of Maariv, who thoroughly debunks these defamations in Industry of Lies. Yemini is at his best when he stands long-held assumptions on their head. Thus Israel has often been accused of forcibly evicting the Arabs from Palestine in 1948 in what the Arabs term the Naqba or "catastrophe." Yemini not only shows this is nonsense (the Arabs mostly fled at the behest of their own leaders), but he puts Israel's accusers in the dock. He describes the Jewish Naqba—a forcible eviction that actually happened—in which some 800,000 Jews were driven from Arab lands and their property stolen.

Similarly, while debunking accusations that Israel practices apartheid, Yemini talks about Arab apartheid, which Arabs practice against their Palestinian brethren. Arab countries from Egypt to Lebanon force Palestinian Arabs into ghettoes, deny them citizenship, and restrict their employment, all to keep the refugee problem alive for use as a weapon with which to bludgeon Israel.

What Yemini calls the "Big Lie" is that Israel carries out genocide. "If a Palestinian was killed for every time the word ‘extermination' is used in relation to Israel, there would indeed not be a soul left." Yemini's strength is in focusing on the context Israel's detractors ignore. He points out that huge numbers are killed annually in conflicts around the planet, while the world barely notices. But although the relative contribution of the Israeli-Arab conflict to violence and to the number of refugees worldwide is marginal, Israel "has mysteriously become ‘the most dangerous country to world peace.' The focus on it is nothing short of obsessive."

Over 200 Columbia University faculty, students, and alumni have pledged to boycott a New York bookstore after its owners apologized for promoting and selling a children's book that praised Palestinian violence against Israel.

The petition condemns Book Culture, an independent bookstore with a location near Columbia, for apologizing after Jewish and non-Jewish communities objected to its selling P is for Palestine by Golbarg Bashi, a book for young children that glorified the intifada.

The petition, first reported by Campus Reform, includes a refusal to buy books from or order course materials through Book Culture and a promise by faculty to remove their course books from the store.

The petition calls on the bookstore owners to "retract their statement and issue an apology for choosing to participate in the censorship and slander of already-underrepresented Palestinian voices."

The co-owners of Book Culture, Chris Doeblin, Annie Hedrick, and Rick MacArthur, apologized in a statement published Nov. 29 on the website of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue for the "pain and distress" caused by its funding the publication of and hosting an event for author Golbarg Bashi‘s book.

PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s extraordinary two-hour-long anti-American and Jew-hating diatribe delivered on January 14 must inevitably see:

Israel refusing to resume negotiations with the PLO

Another Arab partner replacing the PLO to negotiate with Israel in implementing President Trump’s eagerly-awaited ultimate deal.

The viciousness and vindictiveness of Abbas’s attack on the internationally-recognised legal right of the Jewish people to its own independent State – as endorsed by:

· the United Nations (“UN”) 1947 Partition Plan
· the European Union (“EU”) 1980 Venice Declaration
· UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338
· The 1993 Oslo Accords
· President Bush’s 2003 Road Map - supported by both the UN and the EU

requires the UN and EU to unequivocally reject Abbas’s racist, false and misleading claims.

Abbas’s speech was delivered at what has been described as “a Palestinian Central Council meeting in Ramallah”.

In fact it was a very well stage-managed event involving the attendance of some 80 of the 132 Councillors and about 500 other persons. One vacant seat was reserved for the “Republic of Lithuania”. Diplomats from other countries were undoubtedly present.

The backdrop included two huge screens each containing five maps of Palestine from 1947 onwards – conveniently excluding 78% of Palestine – today called Jordan - granted independence by Great Britain in 1946.

“Damn your dollars!” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas railed at the United States and President Trump during his recent maniacal tirade.

Well, OK: On Tuesday, Team Trump took him at his word, cutting $65 million of the $125 million Washington sends to the UN outfit that handles Palestinian aid, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

Hey, Trump had warned Abbas long ago that PA funding was at risk if its leaders refused to engage in peace talks with Israel.

And Abbas’ 2 ½-hour rant in Ramallah pretty conclusively showed that he’s not remotely ready to do that.

First, he again specifically rejected any thought of playing along with the latest US effort to restart negotiations: “We told Trump we will not accept his project, the ‘deal of the century,’ which has become the ‘slap of the century’ ” — referring to US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

More, he denied the Jewish state’s legitimacy, claiming, “Israel is a colonialist project that has nothing to do with Jews.” How can Israel bargain with a guy who insists the Jews have no links at all to the Holy Land?

For many years, the Arabs believed that in all aspects of their struggle against Israel time was on their side and all they had to do was wait for victory over Israel to eventually fall into their laps.

But the majority of Arab states, the first among them Egypt under former President Anwar Sadat, have come to understand that time is actually on Israel's side and that every day that passes without peace prevents them from treating their problems at home and ultimately inches them, not Israel, closer to social and economic ruin.

The Palestinians, and we must admit quite a few Israelis along with them, have steadfastly held to the belief that the passing of time without a peace agreement works against Israel, and that thus it was to their advantage to avoid making tough decisions and painful concessions for the sake of peace in the hopes that Israel would blink or collapse first, or that the international community would force Israel to accept the Palestinian position.

U.S. President Donald Trump's efforts, buoyed by Egypt and even Saudi Arabia, to think outside the box and try to dismantle some of the landmines blocking the path to peace – such as the Jerusalem question – has thrown Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas off balance and undermined his faith that all he has to do is wait, until the end of time if need be, for the conflict to be resolved according to his demands.

Abbas' response was to declare diplomatic war on the United States under Trump. In doing so, however, he is squandering an opportunity that likely will not reappear, to entrust the diplomatic process to the only player who can move such a process forward. Abbas can cry his crocodile tears on the EU's shoulders, but the only country that can truly help the Palestinians, and which in actuality has helped them more than anyone else to this point (diplomatically and financially), is the United States.

Speaking ahead of the arrival of US Vice President Mike Pence in Israel on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there can be no progress toward peace in the region without the US playing a leading role.

His comments come with the Palestinians and other prominent Arabs refusing to meet with US officials in anger over President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“This evening a great friend of the State of Israel, a true friend, US Vice President Mike Pence, will arrive in Israel,” Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting.

“We shall discuss efforts by the Trump administration to hinder Iran’s aggression and the Iranian nuclear program, and of course to promote security and peace in the region,” Netanyahu said. “Anyone who truly strives to achieve those goals knows there is no alternative to the leadership of the US.”

Highlights from Pence’s trip will include visits to the Western Wall and the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, as well as a speech at a special plenary session in the Knesset which Arab lawmakers have said they will boycott.

Netanyahu called the boycott plans a “disgrace.”

A senior Fatah official on Sunday called for a general strike later this week to protest US President Donald Trump changes to American policy on Jerusalem, official Palestinian Authority radio reported.

On December 6, Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and initiated the relocation of the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to the city, breaking with decades of American policy and infuriating the Palestinian leadership.

Fatah Central Committee member Jamal Muhaisen, who is responsible for overseeing his party’s local cadres, urged Palestinians in “all sectors and government institutions,” except for those who work for in healthcare and education, to strike on Tuesday.

Munir Jaghoub, a Fatah spokesman, said the strike was planned to coincide with US Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to the region.

Protesters rallied in Amman on Saturday, ahead of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence's arrival in the Jordanian capital, saying he was "not welcome."

Almost 70 people gathered near the U.S. Embassy in Amman, holding banners and shouting slogans in protest against the visit. The protests have been fueled by President Donald Trump's Dec. 6 recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a decision strongly supported by Pence.

The vice president arrived in Amman late Saturday to meet with Jordan's King Abdullah, after first visiting Egypt, where he met in Cairo with President Abdel Fatah el-Sissi.

From Jordan, he will travel to neighboring Israel, where he will hold talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the White House said in a statement earlier this month.

Jordan’s king appealed Sunday to US Vice President Mike Pence to “rebuild trust and confidence” in the possibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, following fallout from the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Pence, in turn, tried to reassure the King Abdullah II that the Trump administration remains committed to restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and views Jordan as a central player.

The vice president also said that “the United States of America remains committed, if the parties agree, to a two-state solution.” Such a caveat deviates from longstanding US support for a two-state solution as the only possible outcome of any peace deal.

Trump’s pivot on Jerusalem last month infuriated the Palestinians, who seek the Israeli-annexed eastern sector of the city as a future capital. They accused the US of siding with Israel and said Washington can no longer serve as a mediator.

In remarks during talks with US Vice Mike Pence in Amman, the king said the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a two-state one.

"The US decision on Jerusalem ...does not come as a result of a comprehensive settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict," the monarch told Pence at the start of the talks in the royal palace.

Jordan lost east Jerusalem and the West Bank to Israel during the Arab-Israeli war in 1967.

Pence was in Amman on the second leg of a three-country tour that concludes in Israel.

In comments delivered in Egypt, he said Washington would support a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians if the two sides agreed to it.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday thanked the United States for its “behind-the-scenes efforts” to solve Israel’s diplomatic standoff with Jordan over a shooting incident at the Israeli embassy in Amman.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his appreciation to [Jared] Kushner and [Jason] Greenblatt for their behind-the-scenes efforts, which helped solve the crisis,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.

Following the July incident, in which an Israeli security guard shot dead two Jordanians after one allegedly attacked him, Jordan had prevented Israel from reopening its embassy or returning its ambassador to Amman in protest of the warm reception given to the guard and embassy staff upon their return to Israel in the immediate aftermath of the incident.

Israel will pay $5 million in compensation to the families, diplomats in Jordan told the al-Rai newspaper Saturday. Israeli officials have previously said an undisclosed sum would be paid to the Jordanian government and not to the families. The paper reported that the sum will be transferred by Jordan’s leaders to the families.

Israel will not prosecute a guard from its embassy in Amman who killed two Jordanians in July, as had long been demanded by the kingdom, two Israeli sources said on Sunday.

Instead, the Foreign Ministry and Shin Bet security agency will review protocols surrounding the actions taken by the guard, and his conduct, "and share the results with the Jordanians," a diplomatic source said.

The killings led to a rift between the countries, which both said last week had been mended.

Jordan said Israel had apologized for the embassy deaths, would compensate the victims' next of kin and "implement and follow up legal measures" in the case.

Jordanian officials were not immediately available to comment on the diplomatic source's account. Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman declined comment.

Amman had previously demanded a homicide trial for the guard, whose repatriation under diplomatic immunity and hero's welcome by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angered Jordanians.

The Netherlands and Belgium pledged a total of $38 million for the UN agency that provides aid to Palestinians following US funding cuts of $110 million.

Belgium’s government pledged $23.3 million in extra funding for UNRWA and the Dutch government said it would fast-track another $15 million in funding.

The United States announced its cuts on Thursday. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters that a $45 million payment pledged for the UNRWA food aid program would not go through for the time being. Earlier this week, the US said it would freeze $65 million pledged to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, transferring only $60 million.

According to UNRWA, the United States provided more than $350 million in aid to the organization in 2017.

In the Netherlands, International Aid Minister Sigrid Kaag, who used to work for UNRWA and is married to a Palestinian former Cabinet minister, said she would make available immediately her country’s annual budget of $15 million for UNRWA, which was planned to be dispensed in several payments.

Three lawmakers, including one from the ruling People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, submitted questions to Kaag in parliament this week about the decision.

“Why are you fast-tracking funding for UNRWA when there are so many potential groups with urgent needs?” they asked.

The growth rate among Israeli settlers in the West Bank declined last year for the sixth consecutive year, but remained above the national average, according to government statistics seen by The Times of Israel on Sunday.

The number of Israelis living over the Green Line increased by 14,299, or 3.4 percent, in 2017, demographics information gathered by the Interior Ministry’s Population Immigration and Border Authority (PIBA) showed.

In 2016, the population increased by 15,765 or 3.9%.

The figures do not cover Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which Israel, as opposed to the international community, does not consider settlements.

While the growth rate among Israeli settlers has not risen since 2012, the 3.4% figure from 2017 was still higher than the national average, which stood at 2% in the past year.

You have already seen the infamous video of Ahed “Shirley Temper” Tamimi and her cousin Nour Tamimi violently attacking IDF soldiers, video that was filmed by her own mother Nariman Tamimi.

According to this Times of Israel report:
While Nariman was also charged with aggravated assault, footage from the incident did not appear to show the mother doing anything beyond pushing the soldiers off the family’s property.
But a very observant Israellycool reader noticed Nariman speaking softly right before Ahed and Nour went and starting attacking the soldiers. It has been confirmed by two Arabic speakers that she was saying “utrodo” (“اطرد”), which means kick them out/expel them.

In other words, Nariman deliberately told her young daughter Ahed and cousin Nour to go down there and start trouble with the soldiers, in order to kick them off the property.

Filming her young daughter attacking soldiers is bad enough; but actually instructing her to do so is even worse child abuse.

What kind of mother would treat their child like this?

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin accused the Hamas terrorist organization Sunday of turning hospitals and other civilian buildings in the Gaza Strip into terror bases.

President Rivlin visited the headquarters of the Gaza Regional Division of the IDF Sunday. He then toured the new neighborhood being built at Kibbutz Nirim, and met with some 250 students and residents at the Nofei Habesor School.

Rivlin received a briefing on the current challenges in the sector from Deputy Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi, Southern Command Commander Major General Eyal Zamir and Gaza Division Commander Brigadier General Yehuda Fuchs who accompanied the visit.

"I am coming to you now from meetings with the security forces and from operational surveys," Rivlin said. "We fought for the houses, the kindergartens and the schools, the paths and the fields. It was a war for our existence and daily life."

The president said that Israel remains at war with the Hamas terrorist organization which rules the Gaza Strip. "The campaign is over, but the war is not. The mission of the State of Israel has not been completed. We are fighting a terrorist organization that is cruel, extremist, and murderous. It is a terrorist organization that devotes no thought to the future and well-being of Israel, the people of Gaza, and for whom "reconciliation" of one kind or another is only a step towards advancing the war. It is a terrorist organization that does not recognize our existence and whose goal is to destroy and destroy the State of Israel."

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has warned Israel against continued construction of a wall along its border with Lebanon, after Beirut said the project was undermining peace.

“After liberating the Lebanese occupied territories from the Zionist enemy in 2000, the UN demarcation of the national border with the Palestinian territories left 13 controversial positions, and the Lebanese government informed the UNIFIL about its rejection for any Israeli measure in this concern,” Nasrallah was quoted by Hezbollah website al-Manar as saying.

“The Islamic Resistance backs the Lebanese government and army, and the Zionists must take Lebanon’s warning seriously,” he continued.

On Friday, Lebanese President Michel Aoun met in Beirut with UNIFIL Head of Mission and Force Commander Maj.-Gen. Michael Beary and stressed that a border fence within the demarcated Blue Line “isn’t compatible with the efforts that [UNIFIL] is exerting in cooperation with the Lebanese Army to preserve security and stability along the southern border.”

Iranian MP Mojtaba Zolnour: Nothing Will Be Left of Israel following the First Wave of Hizbullah Missiles pic.twitter.com/6ZYX2eUfJq

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) January 21, 2018

The case for evicting Turkey from NATO got stronger this week.

First, the United States announced the backing of a Kurdish security force—the People’s Protection Units, or YPG—in Rojava, the quasi-independent Kurdish region in northeastern Syria along the Turkish border. Then Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he will “strangle” that American-backed force “before it’s even born.” Russia, Iran and Syria’s Assad regime are standing with Erdogan.

The YPG, along with the multiethnic Syrian Democratic Forces which the YPG dominates, are the only armed groups indigenous to Syria that are willing and able to take on ISIS and win, and they’re the only significant armed faction in Syria’s dizzying civil war that isn’t ideologically hostile to the West. In October of last year, they finally liberated Raqqa, the “capital” of the ISIS “caliphate,” while the Russian and Syrian militaries were busy pounding rebels instead in the west.

The Turks would rather have the Assad regime—and by extension Russia, Iran and Hezbollah—rule over the Syrian Kurds whom they consider terrorists. The United States is “building an army of terror” along the southern border, Erdogan says. “Either you take off your flags on those terrorist organisations, or we will have to hand those flags over to you, Don’t force us to bury in the ground those who are with terrorists…Our operations will continue until not a single terrorist remains along our borders, let alone 30,000 of them.”

This is not how a NATO ally behaves. It’s how an enemy state behaves. There is truly no getting around this. We can argue all we want—and I have—that keeping Turkey in NATO is better than kicking Turkey out of NATO because it’s better to deal with a troublesome country inside an ostensibly friendly framework than outside one.

A Palestinian women’s group pulled out of the Women’s March Los Angeles over the inclusion of Jewish actress Scarlett Johansson as a featured speaker.

Several other pro-Palestinian groups also boycotted the march held on Saturday, one of dozens that took place across the United States to fight for women’s rights and progressive causes. The first march held last year took place in cities around the world the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The Palestinian American Women’s Association cited in a post on Facebook Johansson’s “unapologetic support of illegal settlements in the West Bank, a human rights violation recognized by the international community whose calls only led to a reaffirmation of her position, sending a clear message that Palestinian voices and human rights for Palestinians do not matter.”

Johansson is a former spokeswoman for SodaStream, whose main plant was formerly located in the West Bank. The plant was moved to the Negev Desert in southern Israel in 2015, where it employs 1,400 employees, one-third of them Bedouin Arabs. More than 70 of the West Bank Palestinians who worked for the company when it was located in Maale Adumim, also work at the new plant.

Johansson resigned as a goodwill ambassador for Oxfam, which supports boycotting West Bank settlements, over her employment by Soda Stream.

New Orleans Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell has walked back her support for a resolution she authored and supported that lends support to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

The resolution to boycott investments with human rights violators, which passed the New Orleans City Council on January 11, with all five members present voting in support, mentions neither Israel nor the Palestinian territories, but BDS and anti-Israel activists claimed the passage as a victory for their cause.

Cantrell was not present for the vote on the resolution, which she wrote and introduced as part of her Welcoming Cities initiative, reportedly in collaboration with the New Orleans Palestinian Solidarity Committee.

In a statement issued on Saturday, Cantrell said she would support the council in its plans to reconsider and withdraw the resolution.

On Wednesday City Council President Jason Williams called for reconsideration of the resolution, saying he was not aware of the boycott movement or its mission when he and the council voted, the New Orleans Advocate reported. Other council members have told the local media that they will move to reconsider the resolution at their next council meeting.

“After extensive discussion and deliberation about the impact of this resolution, I can say that the unintended impact does not reflect my commitment to inclusivity, diversity, and respect and support for civil rights, human rights and freedoms of all New Orleanians,” Cantrell, who takes office in four months, said in her statement.

Whoever believes that BDS is for LGTB rights or women’s rights is naïve, to say the least. BDS is emotionally manipulative. By juxtaposing images of suffering kids, intimidating artists who visit Israel, referring to UN resolutions as their legal validation and neglecting to mention that those resolutions are non-binding – it is winning people over who often cannot not even point to Israel on a map.

How do we fight this far too well-organized media bash? First, we need to acknowledge that is difficult. It is difficult because the Arab-led media backs it up, because today even the UN backs it up, because it works as a spreading net. No matter the name of the NGO, they all have one aim: to go against Israel (at a minimum). If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it as the truth.

On the other hand, pro-Israel organizations, NGOs and influencers often fight alone.

When an influencer stands against BDS, he or she is accused of being a propaganda machine of the Jewish hasbara, or public diplomacy. If the influencer is Jewish it is even worse, as being Jewish means you are not credible.

If the influencer is not Jewish, the person is said to be paid to spread propaganda the Israelis prescribed.

But I see another disheartening challenge: While in general pro-Israel voices have the same good intentions and fight with their own tools, oftentimes they compete for slightly different desired outcome, which results in a weakening of the power of one strong voice – something BDS has.

While the BDS movement is certainly not succeeding in the way it hopes, it still poses a danger of brainwashing the generation to come. This why we need to keep fighting back – with one strong voice, together.

On Friday I posted about the New Zealand BDS-holes who were calling on organizers of the March 2018 WOMAD festival to dis-invite Victoria Hanna -for the crime of being Israeli.

The scum and villainy who penned the letter are:
John Minto
Debbie Abbas
Roger Fowler
Janfrie Wakim

Since I published the post, I have learned more about some of these people. And not surprisingly, they are vile.
John Minto

A veteran “political activist”, Minto has defended burning the Israeli flag.

“I can’t see what the problem is,” Minto said. “Flags have been burnt in demonstrations and protests for hundreds of years so it’s no big deal.”

He has also compared Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto.

Roger Fowler
Roger Fowler is the spokesperson for Kia Ora Gaza, shown to be a hate group.

1. Kia Ora Gaza supports terrorism
Kia Ora Gaza has recently affirmed its support for a third intifada. In other words, it supports thecurrent wave of knife attacks, car rammings and shootings aimed at Israeli civilians; parents murdered in front of their children, a 13 year old boy stabbed on his bike, a Rabbi run down by a car and then hacked to death with a meat cleaver. Kia Ora Gaza justifies all of these attacks as a legitimate response to “occupation”, and considers stabbing an elderly person, or a 13 year-old boy “an act of self defence”.

2. Kia Ora Gaza promotes anti-Semitic libels
The “blood libel” has been used for centuries to justify and incite mob violence and pogroms against Jews. In the Middle Ages it was said that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes. These days, replace “the Jews” with “Israel” (the Jewish State) and we see a whole new type of blood libel. Many of these are being spread by Kia Ora Gaza. Recently, for example, Kia Ora Gaza has been posting articles with the bizarre and fraudulent accusation that Israel has been harvesting organs from dead Palestinians.

Israel’s newly released annual report on global antisemitism has drawn attention to rising Jew-hatred in several notable areas, particularly in Europe.

Presenting on Sunday to the Israeli government, Minister of Diaspora Affairs Naftali Bennett stated, “We must act with all available tools against current antisemitism to ensure the security of the Jewish people, in Israel and the Diaspora.”

Among other findings, the report — released ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 — highlighted results from a May 2017 Pew Research Center survey of 18 European countries which revealed that 30 percent of respondents would not want Jews as neighbors, while 20 percent are not interested in accepting Jews into their countries. In Romania and Poland — two European countries with relatively strong bilateral ties to Israel — 22 percent and 18 percent of local respondents, respectively, would like to revoke the citizenship of local Jews.

More than 50 percent of refugees in Western Europe hold antisemitic views and opinions, according to the report, which noted a 30-percent increase in the number of antisemitic events in the UK, with a 78-percent increase in physical attacks.
January 21, 2018 1:38 pm
0
Israeli PM Netanyahu Welcomes ‘Great Friend of Israel’ US Vice President Mike Pence on Official Visit

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warmly welcomed the arrival in Israel on Sunday of US Vice President Mike Pence. "This evening...

Israel’s report noted that a new annotated edition of Adolf Hitler’s antisemitic manifesto “Mein Kampf” has become a bestseller in Germany. Antisemitic incidents are also on the rise in that country.

Eva Lavi, the youngest living Holocaust survivor saved by German industrialist Oskar Schindler, will participate in a ceremony marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the United Nations headquarters in New York on Jan. 31.

At the ceremony, Lavi will share the story of her family's rescue by being placed on Schindler's famous list, along with some 1,100 other Jews.

Nazi party member Schindler and his wife, Emilie, were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations for their heroic actions during World War II. The story of how he compiled a list of Jews employed first in his enamelware factory in Krakow and then in his armaments factory in occupied Cezchoslovakia, saving them from being sent to the Auschwitz death camp, was the subject of a Booker Prize-winning book by Thomas Keneally, "Schindler's Ark," and then of director Steven Spielberg's Academy Award-winning 1993 film "Schindler's List."

Lavi, then a young child, and her parents, Fela and Wolf Ratz (Rac), were on Schindler's list as metalworkers.

Now 80, Lavi said in an interview with Israel Hayom, "My mother always told me never believe anyone and to always hide when someone comes around, and I hid well. I didn't cry, I didn't make a sound, and in the end, I survived."

In one of his essays Henry James remarked that "Life is , in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong...goodness very apt to be weak."

Recognizing that this is not illusion, it is heartening that individuals, rare though they might be, devote their life to one essential task, displaying the strength of goodness in fighting the battle against evil and injustice, roguery and villainous men.

High on the list of those who dedicated their life to this battle are an incomprobable couple, a French Jew born in Romania and a Protestant German, daughter of a man who fought in the Wehrmacht in World War II, but was not a Nazi.

A new book, Hunting the Truth: the Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, reminds us of this couple whose activity was in hunting, exposing and helping bring to justice Nazi crimimals and French collaborators and participants in the Holocaust, the memory of which they perpetuated.

The couple pointed out and fought antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere, and also modern day acts of genocide, such as that against Bosnian Muslims in 1996, all over the world. The Memoirs, written in alternating voices, relates the story of their exploits, if not always presented elegantly. But the very appearance of this book is a reminder of problems not only of the dark years in wartime Europe but also still at large in contemporary France.

Serge, born in Bucharest in 1935, was brought to France as a child and lived in Nice. His father was arrested by the Gestapo on September 30, 1943, sent to Auschwitz where he died at age 39.

Serge who had hidden behind a false wall in a cupboard when his father was arrested, was saved from capture by help from a charity organization, and members of the Resistance. Beate, born in Berlin, Germany in 1939, was the daughter of an insurance agent. The couple had improbably met in a Paris metro station, and spent their lives together creating the family business of tracking down evil criminals.

A British MP has spoken movingly of how the Holocaust tore apart his family and left memories “seared” into him after he learned that the Nazis experimented on a relative.

Labour’s Alex Sobel (Leeds North West), speaking during a debate focused on Holocaust Memorial Day, said the Holocaust still casts a “dark spectre” over his family with “all the relatives I never met, that never survived, the children they never had.”

Mr. Sobel, who won the Leeds North West seat for Labour at last year’s general election, said:

I remember as a young child sitting in my great aunt’s kitchen in Tel Aviv, seeing the numbers tattooed on her arm and asking my father why – she was in the camps.

She didn’t have her own children or grandchildren, I had no aunts and uncles or cousins to play with, because the Nazis experimented on her and she couldn’t have children.

This hollow shell casts a dark spectre over my family – all the relatives I never met, that never survived, the children they never had.

This is my own living memory of what happened and this is seared into me, when I make my own judgments politically, when genocide comes now to the Rohingya, to the Yazidi, round the world.

But not just that, but when thinking about decisions more locally.

Daniel Kawczynski, Conservative MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham, said the role of Christians who gave their lives to save Jewish families during the Shoah should also be honoured.

His great-uncle, Jan Kawczynski, had hid Jewish families on his estate, he said.