Australia is the world's safest country for a woman, according to analysis by consultancy New World Wealth in its 2018 Global Wealth Migration Review.

"Woman safety is one of the best ways to gauge a country's long term wealth growth potential, with a correlation of 92% between historic wealth growth and woman safety levels," the report says.

"This means that wealth growth is boosted by strong levels of woman safety in a country."

The 10 safest countries for women in 2017 were:
Australia
Malta
Iceland
New Zealand
Canada
Poland
Monaco
Israel
USA
South Korea

The rankings are based on the percentage of each country's female population that has been a victim of a serious crimes over the past year.

When asked about the Trump administration’s current push to secure the “ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians, Slotkin push for active American involvement, “The only way that this gets done is through strong American leadership. The only way that the two sides even come to the table is if the U.S. with a very strong lead convenes pushes both sides to make forward progress on the issue. But, if the parties are unwilling to come to the table, then unfortunately we are in a number of additional years with the same conflict with the same problems.”

A new children's program on PA TV called From My Country teaches children that arch-terrorist Abu Jihad, who the PA has bragged was responsible for the murder of at least 125 Israelis, is a role model to be followed.

The opening of the weekly 10 minute program, which has been broadcast twice so far, shows a cube with photos of six different Palestinian personalities. One of them is terrorist Abu Jihad, who orchestrated numerous terror attacks against Israelis, among them the most lethal attack in Israel's history - the Coastal Road Massacre - in which Palestinian terrorists hijacked a bus and murdered 37 civilians, among them 12 children.

Also included among the six personalities promoted to kids is Ghassan Kanafani - a writer and a leader of the terror organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

In each episode, a young PA TV host emphasizes that the program is about "our country," stressing that its beauty "is reflected by great personalities who have given and are giving much to the homeland." Presumably the six people from the opening are among these "great personalities":

Young PA TV host: "Hello my dear friends and welcome to the program From My Country. You certainly know how beautiful our country is: its villages, cities, historical, religious, archaeological, and tourist sites. The most beautiful thing is that all of this beauty of our country is reflected by great personalities who have given and are giving much to the homeland, whether in the political, literary, artistic, or scientific struggle."

The Steinmetz Center asked respondents if they supported a “two-state solution” that would include:

1. A “permanent settlement.” In reality, nobody can guarantee that any settlement would be “permanent.” The Palestinian leader who signs an agreement could be overthrown the next day. Arab leaders are constantly being ousted and replaced by arch-rivals.

2. The agreement would include “demilitarization of the Palestinian state.” This, despite the fact that every Palestinian leader has rejected the idea of demilitarization. Even if they signed such an agreement, what’s the likelihood that they would abide by that? If a “demilitarized” Palestinian state started importing tanks that it claimed were needed for self-defense, Israel would face international condemnation and sanctions if it tried to intervene.

3. There would be “family unification in Israel of 100,000 Palestinian refugees.” Notice the use of the sympathetic term “family unification.” What cruel person would oppose unifying families? More important, the PA’s position has always been that millions of Palestinian “refugees” — not a mere 100,000 — must be allowed to settle in Israel. The 100,000 figure is an illusion that supporters of the Palestinians trot out to try to sell their imaginary deal.

4. “The Palestinian state will fight terror against Israelis.” What a joke. The heart and soul of the Oslo Accords was that the PA would stamp out terrorist groups. Yet here we are, 25 years later, and the PA has never disarmed or outlawed any of the terrorist groups, never extradited any terrorists to Israel, never even expelled terror factions from the PLO, etc. But now, when they have a state, they will suddenly “fight terror?”

So there you have it: The “Palestinian state” that 47 percent of Israeli Jews would favor is a creature of the Steinmetz Center’s imagination. A permanently peaceful, totally demilitarized, terror-fighting Palestinian state that won’t insist on flooding Israel with “refugees.” Who wouldn’t want such a neighbor? Frankly, I’m surprised only 47 percent of Israeli Jews voiced their support.

The Polish Senate said it would vote Wednesday on a controversial Holocaust bill, despite assurances from the country’s prime minister that Israeli concerns would be addressed before steps were taken to pass it into law.

The Polish Senate confirmed in a post to its official Twitter account that the bill, which criminalizes the blaming of Poles for Nazi atrocities committed on Polish soil during the Holocaust, was on the agenda.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki, Sunday night, as the two attempted to set aside a diplomatic spat over the legislation.

Netanyahu has pilloried the law — which prescribes prison time for referring to “Polish death camps” and forbids any mention of Polish complicity in Nazi crimes — as “distortion of the truth, the rewriting of history and the denial of the Holocaust.”

Poland’s interior minister stepped in at the last minute to prevent a planned rally in front of the Israeli Embassy in Warsaw by neo-fascist organizations on Wednesday, as a bitter dispute between Warsaw and Jerusalem over new legislation that would criminalize discussion of Poles who colluded with the Nazi Holocaust continued to fester.

Joachim Brudziński, the interior minister, announced on Wednesday afternoon that the streets around the Israeli Embassy in the Polish capital would remain closed until midnight on Monday, February 5. Brudziński said the planned far-right show of force was a threat to the “security and interests” of the state, overruling a decision by the city authorities in Warsaw on Tuesday to grant a permit for the rally.

Far-right leaders attempted to put a brave face on their decision not to defy the ban, claiming they had concluded independently that the rally should be canceled because of the risk of violence. “Today it is not our intention to have a confrontation with the Polish state,” Robert Winnicki — one of the rally organizers, and a member of the Polish parliament for the ultranationalist Ruch Narodowy (National Movement) — stated on Twitter.

Numerous social media posts promoting the rally on Tuesday described it as a rally against “Antipolonism” — an alleged prejudice against the Polish nation equivalent to racism or antisemitism.

New legislation cosponsored by 61 members of Knesset would make a Polish bill to outlaw talk of Poles’ complicity in the Nazis’ crimes a form of illegal Holocaust denial.

The bill, formulated by MKs from the coalition and the opposition — Itzik Shmuly (Zionist Union), Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid), Robert Ilatov (Yisrael Beytenu), Nurit Koren (Likud) and Bezalel Smotrich (Bayit Yehudi) — seeks to amend the Law for Defense Against Holocaust Denial to state that denying or minimizing the involvement of the Nazi’s helpers and collaborators will also be a crime.

In addition, the amended law would provide legal aid to any Holocaust survivors and educators taking students to death camps who face foreign lawsuits because they recounted what happened in the Holocaust.

The 1986 Law for Defense Against Holocaust Denial states that anyone who publishes denial and minimization of the Holocaust or identification with with crimes against the Jewish People can get five years of jail time.

The Polish senate was expected Wednesday to approve a bill making use of the phrase “Polish death camps” or saying the Polish people were in any way culpable for the Nazis’ crimes against humanity, an offense that carries a three-year prison sentence. The vote was set to take place even though the Polish and Israeli governments plan to negotiate a version of the bill that would be agreeable to both sides.

MK Shmuly said “the Poles and others who may want to copy them should know that the historic truth of the Jewish People is not for sale.”

An Israeli historian of Jewish-Israeli heritage who was awarded in 2012 the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic from the then Polish president for his contribution to promoting the memory—and increasing awareness of—the Polish Righteous Among the Nations, has returned his award in protest against “demonic” legislation that Israel has argued is an attempt to downplay Poland’s role in Nazi atrocities.

The legislation, that has been approved by Poland’s lower house of Parliament, prescribes prison time for defaming the Polish nation by using phrases such as "Polish death camps" to refer to the killing sites Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during World War II.

“This is hypocrisy and a distortion of history, and it’s something I can’t agree with,” Israel Gal said in an interview with Ynet.

Gal, also a scholar of literature, acquired the rights to the book “People and Animals” which tells the story of Jan Żabiński, and his wife Antonina, who saved about three hundred Jews brought out of the Warsaw ghetto in a zoo in the city, and in 2011, he published his Hebrew version of the book.

“I received this award of honor from the then Polish president Bronisław Komorowski through the Polish Embassy,” Gal said. “This brave and humane family saved dozens, perhaps even hundreds of Jews and underground Polish fighters.”

Asked why he had decided to return the award, Gal pointed to the less liberal stance that had gripped the current Polish government.

“I did it because the new government in Poland is acting in an almost completely opposite fashion to the government in 2012, that was a lot more liberal,” Gal responded. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

A Polish TV host has suggested that World War II death camps in Poland be referred to as “Jewish death camps” instead of Polish or German, while a journalist intimated on his program that Jews played a part in the Nazi Final Solution.

The comments have fanned the flames that have already mildly burned relations between Warsaw and Jerusalem after the Polish parliament recently moved to pass legislation that Israel has argued is an attempt to downplay Poland’s role in Nazi atrocities.

The guest of the program aired by TVP2 also slammed Israel for its vociferous opposition to the bill, which prescribes prison time for defaming the Polish nation by using phrases such as "Polish death camps" to refer to the killing sites Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during World War II.

“This narrative is built out of contempt for the facts,” argued Marcin Jerzy Wolski who hosts the Polish public mainstream TV channel operated by TVP.

Discussing an experiment carried out in Germany in which exhaust fumes were pumped into rooms containing monkeys and humans, Wloski and the conservative commentator and author Rafal Aleksander Ziemkiewicz digressed into a conversation about Jews in the Holocaust, gas chambers and how the Nazis improvised as they searched for more efficient methods to murder European Jewry.

The two then segued into an attack of Israeli criticism against the new bill and the “claims” that Poles participated in the Holocaust. Ziemkiewicz also slammed the notion of blaming nations for the actions of individuals.

“Don’t be surprised if someone teaches that the Jewish people crucified Jesus or participated in the Holocaust,” he said. “If we look at the percentage of involvement of countries that took part, Jews also were part of their own destruction.” (h/t Elder of Lobby)

A 93-year-old survivor of Auschwitz stunned the viewers of one of Germany’s most popular political talk shows on Sunday night when — asked to compare the Nazi era with the situation today — she asserted that the two periods had more in common than many people may care to admit.

“I think that Germany was always antisemitic, that has not changed much,” Esther Bejarano — who was enslaved in the infamous “women’s orchestra” of the Auschwitz death camp — told the ARD Network‘s flagship “Anne Will Show.”

Bejarano was one of several guests on an International Holocaust Remembrance Day edition of the show that asked the question, “How antisemitic is Germany today?” Other guests who participated in the candid and often emotional discussion included two government ministers, a prominent human rights advocate and a leading scholar of modern Jewish history.

Much of the show was dedicated to a harrowing interview with Bejarano about her incarceration in Auschwitz. She began by relating that her father had been a stalwart German patriot, convinced that the German people would reject Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. But after the Nazis came to power and prevented the family from emigrating to British Mandatory Palestine, Bejarano was imprisoned in a hard labor camp in Germany, before being deported to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland in April 1943.

One might ask those calling on Israel to “move forward” to explain what they mean. The implication is that the worse Abbas becomes, the more concessions we should provide. In other words, continue appeasing those seeking our destruction.

Instead of commending Pence for distinguishing between good and evil, the Israeli media condemned him for casting all the blame on the Palestinians and none on Israel. While it is undeniable that on occasion Israel has made mistakes, to suggest that both parties are equally at fault and morally equivalent is an utter distortion.

The reality is that for the first time since the creation of the state, we have an American leadership willing to tell the truth.

They have ceased repeating the mantra of equivalence between those striving for peace and separation and those inciting to bloodshed and annihilation.

Above all, for the first time we have an administration distinguishing between good and evil and willing to expose the evil emanating from the Palestinians and their allies.

This is truly a sea change and we should unite to take advantage of this situation which, given the turbulence of American politics, cannot be guaranteed to last forever.

First, he recognizes that Iran now matters more to the Arabs than Palestine. With Iran and Islamic militants threatening the survival of major Arab states, many Arab leaders have quietly decided to align with Israel—dialing down their interest in the Palestinian drama. Consider that President Trump’s plan to move the United States’ embassy in Israel to Jerusalem did not touch off huge protests in Arab capitals or angry editorials in the Arab press. Kushner was one of the strongest voices inside the White House in favor of the long-promised move. Any other mediator would fret that the move would needlessly complicate his job. Kushner knows that Iran has replaced Palestine as the center of Arab interest, and he spotted an opportunity that few in Washington saw.

Second, Kushner realizes that younger Arab generation has a fundamentally different perspective from that of its elders. More than 60 percent of Arabs are too young to remember the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel, and many more regard them as ancient history. Consider an American equivalent; how many millennials are outraged at the fate of South Vietnam? As a result, younger Arabs largely accept Israel’s existence as a settled fact, and generally see trading with its prosperous economy as essential to their own economic growth. I know. I have heard them tell me these things in the privacy of their living rooms. Their septuagenarian leaders do not share their views, and punish younger leaders who try to independently engage with Israelis—which only deepens the divide.

The generation gap is based on practical economic concerns. Young Arabs want well-paying jobs that allow them to marry and start families. They want good schools for the children. Many see no issue with taking an ambulance across the border to an Israeli hospital, unlike their retirement-age relatives who say that they would rather die.

Kushner correctly captured the sentiment of the new Arab generation when he said in July 2017, “We don’t want a history lesson. We’ve read enough books. Let’s focus on, How do you come up with a conclusion to the situation?”

To be sure, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the longest and thorniest conflicts in history. It cannot be resolved quickly or easily. Kushner has publicly acknowledged this, usually adding the idea that new approaches are more likely to bear fruit than old ones.

US Special Envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt on Tuesday evening spoke at a a conference held by the Institute for National Security Studies about American efforts to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

"In Judaism, the word 'peace' is found in the common greeting 'Shalom aleichem.' In the Muslim world, 'Asalam Aleichem,' or 'peace be with you,' is similarly used. And yet, despite the similar emphasis and articulation of peace in their most common greetings, pursuing peace between Israelis and Palestinians can seem a daunting, even impossible task," Greenblatt said.

"I firmly believe that there is a real path towards peace," he emphasized. "Much has changed since my first trip to the region in 1983. At that time, the prevailing interest of the Arab world, with the exception of Egypt, was the rejection of Israel, including calls for its destruction and the very real possibility of war."

Greenblatt noted that today, the atmosphere has changed: "Confronted with an emboldened and aggressive Iran and populations eager for economic opportunity, many leaders understand that Israel is not the problem, and in fact Israel can be part of the solution."

"US President Donald Trump has brought a fresh set of eyes, and energy, to the task of peacemaking. It is clear that President Trump's actions and language have changed expectations about what is possible. He has revitalized the discussion and language of peace in the region."

Saeb Erekat, secretary of the PLO Executive Committee, on Tuesday announced that the "State of Palestine" plans to appeal to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague against U.S. President Donald Trump's peace plan and his recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

In an interview with a Turkish news agency, Erekat said that U.S. policy is contrary to the decisions of international institutions, which regard East Jerusalem as territory that is "occupied" by Israel.

Erekat further stated that the Palestinian Authority (PA) intends to turn once again to the UN Security Council with a request that it recognize it as a full member state in the United Nations.

He claimed that the United States strives to remove Jerusalem from the negotiating table, to dry up UNRWA by reducing financial aid to the organization, to leave the IDF in the Jordan Valley, leave the settlement blocs intact and allow IsrSaael to control the air space and the ports.

He added that according to the American view, only under these conditions would a Palestinian state be declared and its capital would be in the suburbs of Jerusalem.

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley took her Security Council colleagues on a field trip in the US capital, complete with a lunch with President Trump. Did the Monday feel-good adventure make a dent?

Who knows? But it certainly should have — especially when it comes to Iran, which along with North Korea presents the most burning foreign-policy challenge for President Trump.

Haley took the ambassadors to a Washington base, Anacostia-Bolling, to show remnants of missiles shot from Yemen to Saudi Arabian territory that were sent there for examination. It was a compelling presentation: Indeed, one shard clearly displayed a “made in Iran” marking.

The tour demonstrated that the Iranians managed to give missiles to their Yemeni allies, the Houthis. As one council member, Britain’s Acting Ambassador Jonathan Allen, tweeted, Haley provided “clear evidence that #Iran missiles and other weapons [were] used by Houthis in #Yemen.”

That’s a clear violation of two Security Council resolutions. One bans all sales of arms to Yemen. The other forbids Iran to export weapons anywhere.

And that last one, part of Resolution 2231, is crucial for untangling Trump’s Iran dilemma.

Most Security Council members view the Obama-led nuclear pact with Iran as an untouchable piece of successful diplomacy. For Trump and Haley, it’s a deeply flawed deal in need of repair, if not scrapping. But it’s the Security Council’s view that matters.

The United States is encouraging other UN Security Council countries to set aside the nuclear deal loathed by President Donald Trump and focus on cracking down on Iran’s missile and other non-nuclear transgressions, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said Monday.

Haley, who brought fellow Security Council ambassadors on a field trip to Washington, suggested that a concerted global effort to punish Iran for violating Security Council resolutions on ballistic missiles could persuade Trump it was worthwhile to remain in the nuclear deal. She noted that France, a key member of the group that negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal, had recently “started hitting” Iran rhetorically for violating ballistic missile resolutions.

“It’s working,” Haley said after meeting with Trump and the other ambassadors. “They’re starting to realize, ‘If we don’t start talking about the violations, if we don’t call them out, then the US is going to say this whole thing is a sham.'”

An outspoken critic of Iran, Haley brought the other Security Council envoys to a US military base in Washington to view missile parts that the US calls evidence of Iran’s illicit transfer of prohibited missiles to Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Trump administration maintains that fragments from those missiles, recovered in Saudi Arabia after being launched from Yemen by the Houthis, contain markings proving they were Iranian-made, though some security experts have questioned whether the evidence is foolproof.

• The intellectual and political backing given to the "Palestinian resistance" by the European Commission has become the cover for the rampant anti-Semitism and terrorism endemic in Europe today.
  
• Europe has denied Israel the right of self-defense despite the rain of Hizbullah missiles on its innocent civilians in the north. Europe applied double standards and condemned Israel's security fence in 2004 even after Israel suffered more than 1,000 killed in terrorist suicide attacks between 2001 and 2004. European leaders showed that they could easily vote for the worst lies about Israel in the UN General Assembly and other UN bodies.
  
• Israel must make its demands on Europe:
  Recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital
  Combat incitement and anti-Semitism
  Halt the financing of many anti-Israel enterprises
  Ban the textbooks that encourage incitement in schools
  End the EU's illegal building in the territories
  Refuse boycotts or discrimination against Israeli products
  Deny trade and common scientific work with countries that discriminate against Israel
  And promote relationships with those sincerely friendly toward the Jewish state.

Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) head Major General Yoav Mordechai met today with 28 ambassadors of EU countries and dozens of other diplomats as part of the EU Security and Policy Committee.

Maj. Gen. Mordechai spoke with the diplomats on issues related to the Middle East. "I sit before everyone present in this distinguished forum and am amazed that for years no one has spoken and no one in the European Union has addressed the Israeli humanitarian issue," he said.

Mordechai was referring to the European Union's disregard for IDF killed-in-action and hostages in Gaza. "There are two IDF casualties whose bodies have not yet been returned to their families, as well as two Israeli civilians. While we are working to assist the Palestinian population on the humanitarian level, it is only natural that we expect international pressure to solve the Israeli humanitarian issue."

"I demand that you strive to put effective pressure on the terrorist Hamas entity and the Palestinian Authority, which since the reconciliation with Hamas has also been responsible. I say to the European Union and the international community: Live up to your principles, even in terms of respect for international law."

Optimism abounded at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week when U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met for talks.

But when the two leaders spoke to the cameras, one sentence slipped under the media's radar: "Israel will pay for that [the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel]," Trump said. Even though he spoke in the future tense, it was clear we are already paying something. And who knows, perhaps the price was agreed by both sides in advance.

The fact is that the Trump administration has adopted the previous president's policy of forcing Israel to slow and effectively freeze construction in Jerusalem and its environs. Despite Vice President Mike Pence being Israel's greatest friend at the White House, it is clear that even under Trump, the U.S. has not changed its views on the core issue of Jerusalem.

"We're not taking a position on any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem or the resolution of contested borders," Pence said in his Knesset address this month.

The American position is unfortunate, but what is even more troubling is Israel's resigned approach. After all, it was the Jewish presence that determined the borders in Jerusalem in the past, and Jewish homes will ultimately shape its boundaries more than any other variable.

In Abbas' narrative, the Palestinians are "victims of colonialism and Zionism" and therefore cannot be expected to act responsibly. Instead, they should be compensated for their victimhood and struggle to liberate all of Palestine. Israeli Arabs are part of the Palestinian people. The refugees must return to their homes and the State of Israel must be a state for all its citizens, until, as part of a phased plan, it turns into a Palestinian state. Elements of this narrative have been repeated by Abbas for many years. They were featured in his book "Zionism: Beginning and End," which was published in 1977 and again in 2011.

The sign the Joint Arab List members raised implies they believe this false narrative.

And that is the real problem. Clearly, some Israeli Arab voters believe they are part of the Palestinian people before they are part of Israeli society. The extent of this belief's representation among Arab Israelis is uncertain.

Abbas especially warns the Arabs against the normalization of relations between Israel and Arab states. It will be interesting to see if they heed his warnings: His call to suspend ties with the U.S. was ignored, just as east Jerusalem merchants ignored his calls for a general Palestinian strike during Pence's visit.

War is not inevitable. For the last 12 years, Israel, Hezbollah and Iran have been engaging in what one Israeli officer called a “kinetic dialogue,” where both sides try to contain the conflict and not humiliate the other. When, on Jan. 18, 2015, Israel killed an Iranian general and several Hezbollah fighters in Syria, Hezbollah responded by firing a missile at an Israeli Army vehicle along the border, killing two Israeli soldiers. It was the biggest escalation since the 2006 war.

But Israel, after careful thought, chose not to retaliate for the retaliation. Iran and Hezbollah, having made their point, stopped, too. That’s the kinetic dialogue in operation. But how long can that be trusted to work?

Israel, Iran and Hezbollah are all stronger than they were in 2006. But they each also have more to lose by a new rocket war. Israel’s “Silicon Wadi” — its vast network of high-tech companies along its coastal plain — has become a giant growth engine. And Hezbollah and Iran have now assumed virtual control over the Lebanese and Syrian states. No one wants to lose its gains.

That should be a source of optimism. But, alas, there are just too many chances for miscalculation on this crowded 3-D chessboard to be sanguine that the next 12 years will be as quiet as the last 12.

As one Israeli military officer on the Syrian-Israel border remarked to me, “We want to keep the temporary status quo forever, because everything else looks worse.”

Israel must immediately change its strategy and take action against Iran when there are attacks from Hezbollah and Syria, security cabinet member Naftali Bennett said Wednesday at the Institute for National Security Studies conference in Tel Aviv.

Bennett said that for 30 years, Israel made a mistake of targeting, what he called, “mosquitoes” but not “the swamp” and what he called “tentacles” but not “the octopus.”

“Our message to Iran: The era of your immunity while you send others and use your national resources to hurt Israel is over,” Bennett said. “A rocket from Lebanon will be treated like an Iranian rocket. We will not waste our resources and energy fighting in Lebanese towns while you recline your chair and watch.

“We will also not sit idly and watch the accumulation of accurate missiles in Lebanon. Between 2006 and 2012, Hezbollah made a massive leap in the quantities of its rockets, and now has over 130,000. We will not allow it to make a qualitative leap. This strategy means Iran, the Quds Force and the host countries will pay a price.”

Bennett said he was not necessarily referring to armed conflict with Iran and its Quds Force but “war via diplomacy, intelligence, preemptive efforts, technological means, economic sanctions, and – if needed – other means.”

The United States pledged continued support for Lebanon's military on Wednesday, calling it a potential counterweight to Iranian-backed Hezbollah, even as Israel said the two forces were indistinguishable and fair game in any future war.

Such a public difference of opinion between two close allies was remarkable enough, but especially so as it was sounded by senior officials at the same event - an Israeli security conference.

The Lebanese Armed Forces took no part in the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, which killed around 1,200 people in Lebanon and 158 Israelis. It has received more than $1.5 billion in US military assistance since then and, in the last seven years, training and support from US special forces too.

With Hezbollah having helped sway the Syrian civil war in President Bashar Assad's favor, Israel and the United States both worry that the Iranian-backed militia could now broaden its clout in its Lebanese heartland. They disagree on whether the Lebanese army would help or hinder Hezbollah's expansion.

"We will sustain our efforts to support legitimate state security institutions in Lebanon, such as the Lebanese Armed Forces, which is the only legitimate force in Lebanon," David Satterfield, acting assistant US secretary of state, told the conference organized by Tel Aviv University's INSS think-tank.

Establishing a genuine alliance between Israel and Sunni Arab states requires more than shared concern over Iran, the director of the Center for Israel Studies in Amman told an audience in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.

Speaking as part of a panel on regional perspectives on Israel at the annual conference of the Institute for National Security Studies, Abdullah Sawalha said: “Making Iran the only component of this alliance is not enough. If the [Iranian] regime collapses, what will happen between Israel and the Sunni states?”

“For an alliance, we have to build a network of mutual interests: energy, water, technology and so on,” he added.

While National Infrastructure, Water and Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz recently played up budding ties, Sawalha highlighted the current limits of the relationship with Sunni states.

“This rapprochement is very secret, it’s only behind the scenes,” he said. “The Arab states don’t want to do any kind of normalization in public and Israel respects the will of the Arab states. The biggest losers are the people of the region. Unfortunately, the winners are anti-normalization actors, BDS and enemies of peace.”

The level of interaction is also unhealthy for building firm ties, Sawalha said. “We’ve seen interaction between governments but no civil society engagement or people-to-people connections. Without letting our people know about this partnership, Israel and the Sunni states will lose the support of our people and will not be able to make any progress in breaking the barriers between the nations and narrowing the gaps.”

An 8-year-old Jewish boy wearing a kippa was attacked on Tuesday in the suburb of Sarcelles near Paris, in the second assault on Jewish children in the area in three weeks.

Local prosecutors told AFP on Tuesday that it was treating the incident as an anti-Semitic crime.

Prosecutors said the two youths attacked the boy while he was on his way to after-school tutoring on Tuesday, pushing him to the ground and then beating him. According to the victim, the assailants were about 15 years old.

French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the incident Tuesday evening, saying that any attack on a citizen over their religious identity constitutes an attack on the whole Republic.

“An 8-year-old boy was attacked today in Sarcelles. Because he was wearing a kippa. Every time a citizen is attacked because of his age, his appearance or his religion, the whole country is being attacked,” the French leader wrote on his Twitter account.

“And it is the whole country that stands, especially today, alongside the French Jews to fight each of these despicable acts, with them and for them,” he added.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet on Wednesday with visiting German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, whom he refused to meet last April because of Gabriel’s insistence on meeting the far-left NGO Breaking the Silence.

Gabriel arrived in Israel on Tuesday evening for a one-night visit. In addition to meeting Netanyahu, he is scheduled to travel to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and deliver a speech at the INSS annual conference taking place in Tel Aviv.

Since the incident in April, Netanyahu and Gabriel have only spoken briefly on the phone once, when Netanyahu called both him and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in October to thank them for Berlin’s decision to go ahead with the sale of three submarines to Israel.

Gabriel does not have Breaking the Silence on his agenda this trip.

Gabriel triggered a diplomatic incident on his maiden visit to Israel as foreign minister in April by insisting on the Breaking the Silence meeting , even though it was made clear to him that if the meeting took place his planned meeting with Netanyahu would be canceled. The two men did not meet, and Gabriel then refused to take a phone call from the prime minister.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel on Wednesday, he publicly corrected him over Israel’s stance on a two-state solution to its conflict with the Palestinians.

In statements after the meeting, Netanyahu interrupted Gabriel as he talked about a two-state solution to the conflict. Gabriel said he was “very thankful to hear that, of course, also the government of Israel wants to have two states” with secure Israeli borders.

But Netanyahu interjected to reiterate his position that Israel would have to maintain security control in the Palestinian territories under any peace arrangement. “No, that we will control security west of the Jordan (river)… that is, I think, the first condition,” Netanyahu said.

“Whether or not it’s defined as a state when we have the military control is another matter, but I’d rather not discuss labels, but substance,” he added.

The IDF is constantly foiling terror attacks and puts much effort into preventing terrorists from infiltrating Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria. There is no question that IDF forces work hard to prevent terror attacks, but most of the Israeli public, certainly in Judea and Samaria, does not know about many of these foiled attempts and has no idea where the IDF gets its information from.

The technology which helps Israel's security forces prevent terror attacks also provides night vision, and it was procured with the aid of the One Israel Fund and its generous donors, who believe that Israel needs a strong Judea and Samaria.

The One Israel Fund was founded 25 years ago, and works 24 hours a day to provide for all of the needs of Judea and Samaria communities.

All monies donated to the One Israel Fund go straight to security and to provide security forces with the equipment they need in the field. When necessary, funds also go to help communities in need of them.

A Palestinian man planning a terror attack was arrested Wednesday near the West Bank settlement of Negohot holding a knife and a map of the Israeli community, security forces said.

“A short while ago, IDF troops thwarted an attempted terror attack next to the community of Negohot, southwest of Hebron,” the military said in a statement.

“Soldiers apprehended a Palestinian suspect wearing a military-style jacket near the community,” the army said, adding that a knife and a map of the settlement were found in the suspect’s possession.

“The suspect and the found items were transferred to [the] security forces,” the statement said.

The incident comes three days after a pair of Palestinians wearing army uniforms tried to infiltrate the settlement of Itamar in the northern West Bank. One of the suspects was arrested with a pair of binoculars, but no weapons, the IDF said, while the second one fled and was searched for by soldiers in the area between the settlement and the Palestinian village of Beit Furik.

After the attack on thirteen-year-olds in Kutzra in November, Arabs from the village of Urif attacked a children's Tu Bishvat festive planting event that took place this afternoon in Yitzhar, reported 0404 News.

Arabs threw stones, hitting a youth about 18 years old in the head. The youth suffered light injuries and was evacuated to a medical unit to receive medical treatment. An IDF and Border Police force that arrived at the area pushed the Arabs back towards the village.

In November, twenty-five 13-year-olds on a class trip celebrating the Bar Mitzvah of the youngest student were ambushed by dozens of Arabs hurling stones down at them from a ridge overlooking the entrance to a cave in eastern Samaria.

The children were escorted by two armed chaperones – both of them school staff members. The chaperones reported to the IDF that the class was under attack by stone-throwers, but were forced to defend the children by themselves for a full hour before soldiers arrived at the scene.

In the meantime, the hikers came under a barrage of stones and hid in a nearby cave.

Established in 1984, Rewards for Justice, a program of the US State Department has the goal of bringing international terrorists to justice and prevent acts of international terrorism against U.S. persons or property... Since the inception of the Rewards for Justice program in 1984, the United States Government has paid more than $145 million to over 90 people who provided actionable information that put terrorists behind bars or prevented acts of international terrorism worldwide.

Federal criminal charges were announced last March against Ahlam Tamimi, the mastermind of the 2001 Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria massacre. Our daughter Malki, 15, was one of the people, mostly children, killed in that Hamas-driven terror outrage. Tamimi described herself as Hamas' first woman agent.

If you follow our blog, it won't be news to you that Tamimi has been living a celebrity's life in Amman, Jordan since her extorted release from an Israeli prison cell in the 2011 Shalit Deal. She was the only one of the 1,027 terrorists freed in that catastrophic transaction who was sent into "exile" in Jordan. Since she was born in Jordan in 1980 and lived in Jordan, getting her education there until a couple of years before executing the Sbarro attack and went back to living in Jordan today with a cousin who is now her husband, it's not really exile and never was.

Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas's bureau in Ramallah on Tuesday issued a short statement condemning the attack on an American diplomatic vehicle outside the United States consulate in Bethlehem.

The statement said, "The presidency emphasized its absolute opposition to such behavior that deviates from the Palestinian values and roots."

The PA's announcement made no mention of any commitment to arrest and/or prosecute the perpetrators. The PA is fuming at U.S. President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and has declared it would "no longer accept" any peace plan proposed by the United States.

Video footage from Tuesday's incident in Bethlehem showed Palestinian Arabs attacking and throwing objects at a car with American consulate personnel.

The incident came after PA activists, led by representatives of Abbas’s Fatah party, on Saturday held a mock trial for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in Bethlehem.

UN Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov warned on Tuesday that Hamas-controlled Gaza on the verge of "full collapse", AFP reported.

According to Mladenov, a key to saving Gaza from disaster was restoring the government of Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas to power there, a decade after it was forced out by Hamas in a bloody coup.

"Without that Gaza risks exploding in our face again, this time in a far more deadly and violent manner than in the past," Mladenov was quoted as having said at the annual conference of Israel's Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

Abbas's Fatah and Hamas signed a reconciliation deal last October, under which the PA was to have resumed full control of Gaza by December 1.

That deadline was initially put back by 10 days and had later reportedly hit “obstacles”.

Sharp disagreements remain between the sides, particularly over the fate of public employees in Gaza and security control of the enclave.

Gen. Joseph Votel said the United States has no intention of withdrawing coalition forces from the northern Syrian town of Manbij, as Turkish leaders had demanded this weekend. As Turkish forces continued the assault on Afrin, the lead of U.S. Central Command on Monday urged Turkey and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, to recognize each other’s legitimate security concerns but focus on the common enemy of ISIS.

Senior U.S. leaders across the government have been in constant talks with Turkish counterparts during the Afrin assault, saying that the U.S. recognizes Turkey’s problems with the Kurdish terrorist group known as PKK, but refusing to give up any territory liberated by the SDF, which include Kurds.

“It’s not our intention right now” to pull back from Manbij, Votel said in Jordan on Monday. He spoke with two reporters traveling with him through the region, including into Raqqa and other parts of northern Syria.

Meanwhile, Russia has begun hosting talks about Syria’s future. The talks, which are being held in Sochi, include representatives from the Assad regime, Iran, and the United Nations. The United States and Syria’s main opposition group declined to participate. Votel said the U.S. hopes that the Sochi talks help lead all parties back to the Geneva process. “That is where the global legitimacy comes in,” he said. “That’s the gold standard, right there: Geneva.”

The Turkish government has confirmed deploying German Leopard tanks against the Kurdish YPG militia in Syria. Reports of their use in the offensive on the Kurdish-held Afrin region provoked heated debate in Germany.

Turkey has given confirmation that its troops have been using Leopard 2 tanks supplied by Germany during their offensive against Kurdish fighters in the Syrian border region of Afrin, according to a report from the German Ministry for Economic Affairs sent to parliamentarians in Berlin.

The confirmation comes amid a heated debate on German arms exports to crisis regions.
Turkey using German-made tanks in cross-border assault criticized as illegal by German lawmakers

Disputed arms exports

- Pictures of German tanks taking part in the Turkish offensive in Syria began emerging at the start of last week.

- As a result, the German government has put on hold a decision on whether to provide an upgrade to the tanks that has been requested by Turkey.

- Turkey, a NATO partner of Germany, received 354 Leopard 2 tanks from Germany in the 1990s, with the only condition being that it did not sell or give them to any third party.

Turkey invaded Syria "to preserve its territorial integrity."
Black is white.
War is peace. pic.twitter.com/fp1jPRbc9e

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) January 31, 2018

In 1939, when the Nazis rolled into Poland, my aunt, whose name I carry, was forced to strip naked and dig a hole, into which she and the other members of her village were summarily mowed down.

Many in the Western world turned a deaf ear to the cries of my aunt, as well as to those of six million other Jews.

America was exhausted and war weary after having fought World War I, in which approximately 30 million people had been killed, and was in a period of profound isolationism and retreat.

There emerged a charismatic, young, impassioned leader who appealed to his people, stunned by their crushing defeat in WWI, with fiery speeches of reclaiming the pride of the Fatherland.

America heard Hitler’s speeches, and knew they were laced with antisemitism. But Germany was so far away, and the enemy that had been scapegoated was a strange people, with different customs, mere Jews.

This picture is not too dissimilar from what is happening today in northwestern Syria. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is a tyrannical brute, who has made a frequent habit of trampling on the human rights of his own people, with total impunity. Since the failed coup of July 2016, Erdogan continues to conduct arbitrary arrests and purges of academicians, politicians and journalists. Anyone slightly threatening to him is held in prison on trumped-up charges.

Kuwaiti Cleric Muhammad Hammoud Al-Najdi: The Jews Behind World Wars, Brothels, and Casinos pic.twitter.com/PQorzQFDmx

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) January 31, 2018

The new face of Soviet style antisemitism

To legitimise the denial of anti-Jewish racism in Labour, the BBC led with Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi. Naomi is part of the Corbyn cult’s modern day version of the ‘Yevsektsiya‘. A group designed in 1918 to carry the Communist Revolution to the Jewish masses. The Yevsektsiya had the explicit mission of the ‘destruction of traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement, and Hebrew culture’.

Wimborne-Idrissi is part of a small clan. Their names are all known to us, because they are so few, and because the same faces appear in the media so often. Memory is ‘repetition and reinforcement’. Basic weapons in a propaganda war. Whenever a media outlet produces one of these propaganda weapons, it reinforces the idea that the new antisemitism isn’t really racism. It all becomes a ‘Jew v Jew’ thing that nobody understands. Jew bashing becomes a circus event to public applause.

If antisemitism goes wherever anti-Israel activity does, and activists seek to strengthen anti-Israel activity, then a rising antisemitism is a cost that anti-Zionists believe is worth paying. Which is why these Jewish Marxists are so valuable a tool. When you use them in a discussion like the BBC did, you are not trying to have a debate on antisemitism, you are explicitly helping to avoid it.
Without a constituency

These people, the same people, are behind all the anti-Zionist Jewish movements. With names like ‘Free Speech on Israel’, ‘Jewish Voice for Labour’, ‘Jews for Boycotting Jewish goods’. There are more groups than people, with the same people in one order or another, sitting as Chair and Secretary of these groups. When an email or petition is written up, the same names appear on them time after time.

If their social media output is liked or shared at all, it is liked or shared by non-Jews using their material to attack other Jews. When you read the names underneath, they often appear as a ‘who’s who’ of the hard-core antisemitic activists. All being allowed to hide behind the cover of having this Jew as a friend. All of the groups, have far larger non-Jewish support, and only really exist, because the non-Jewish anti-Zionists need the cover.

Trump Derangement Syndrome reached a new low last week, as Jewish leftists in America and Britain waged a brutal assault against Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Britain.

It isn’t only President Donald Trump that the “Resistance” seeks to destroy. And their bloodlust isn’t limited to those who work for him, or even to his voters.

If you so much as help the administration achieve a goal that you believe in, for the “Resistance,” you are a criminal.

Sacks served as Britain’s chief rabbi from 1991 through 2013. He is arguably the most widely respected Jewish religious leader in the English-speaking world.

Sacks stands out for his universal accessibility. His written and oral Torah commentaries appeal to Jewish and non-Jewish religious scholars, and to the Jewish and non-Jewish layman, alike.

During his long tenure as Britain’s chief rabbi, Rabbi Sacks developed close working relationships with Britain’s leaders. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, David Cameron and John Major all sought his guidance during their respective tenures as prime minister. They called on Sacks to help them prepare public comments that touched on themes of his scholarship.

And so, too, did U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.

Last week, Pence gave an extraordinary address before Israel’s Knesset. It isn’t often that a single speech rises to the level of an historic event. But Pence’s address easily crossed the line that separates a great speech from an epic address.

French police on Wednesday detained prominent Swiss Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, a legal source said, months after two women filed rape charges against him.

The Oxford professor was summoned for questioning to a Paris police station and taken into custody “as part of a preliminary inquiry in Paris into rape and assault allegations”, the source said.

Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Islamist movement, has furiously denied rape allegations from two women that emerged late last year, as the Harvey Weinstein scandal unfurled in the US.

Henda Ayari, a feminist activist, says Ramadan raped her in a Paris hotel room in 2012, while an unnamed disabled woman also accused the academic of raping her in a hotel room in Lyon in 2009.

In November, Oxford University announced that 55-year-old Ramadan was taking a leave of absence from his post as professor of contemporary Islamic studies, “by mutual agreement”.

Popular among conservative Muslims and a regular panellist on TV debates in France, Ramadan faces regular accusations from secular critics that he promotes a political form of Islam.

Ayari, a self-described “secular Muslim” who used to practise an ultra-conservative strain of Islam that she has since renounced, detailed her rape allegations in a book published last year, without naming Ramadan.

But in October she said she had decided to name him publicly, encouraged by the thousands of women speaking out against sexual assault and harassment under the “Me Too” online campaign and its French equivalent, “Balance Ton Porc” (Squeal on your pig).

Ayari, who lodged a rape complaint against Ramadan on October 20, charged that for him, “either you wear a veil or you get raped”.

“He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die,” she told Le Parisien newspaper.

In Sons and Soldiers, Bruce Henderson tells the story of young Jewish refugees from the Third Reich who joined the U.S. Army after Pearl Harbor, and whose familiarity with Germany and the German language was put to use by military intelligence. In Racing against History, Rick Richman explains the unsuccessful attempts of three Zionist leaders—Chaim Weizmann, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion—in 1940 to raise a Jewish army in America to fight the Nazis. Reviewing the two books, Matti Friedman finds some familiar themes:

Of the three leaders in Racing against History, Weizmann, [then the head of the Zionist Organization and later the first president of Israel], was the most careful in his public utterances. He grasped the danger of the perception that world war was being waged for Jewish interests and preferred the quiet maneuver. . . . In America, he wrote, even mentioning what was happening to Jews in Europe might be “associated with warmongering.” . . .

[The Revisionist Zionist leader] Jabotinsky, [by contrast], wanted a Jewish army raised immediately and said so, even though the mainstream American Jewish leadership called him a “militarist” and published a pamphlet warning against his views. In the pages of the Forward, its editor Abraham Cahan mocked him as a “naïve person and a great fantasizer.” There was no need for Jabotinsky’s Jewish army, Cahan thought, and the Jewish problem would be solved not by a Jewish state but by an Allied victory and democracy. “If true democracy exists,” [wrote Cahan], “there is no place for anti-Semitism.” In other words, the way forward was to be American citizens and soldiers, like [those described by Henderson].

Recent events in Europe and America would seem to suggest that anti-Semitism does, in fact have a place in democracy. . . . The old idea of “Jewish warmongering,” about which Weizmann was so careful in 1940, is still current, as evidenced by the flap in September over a tweet by Valerie Plame, the former CIA agent, suggesting just that. And though the Zionist plan succeeded and there is a Jewish army, the normalization of the Jews has failed to materialize and their existential fears continue.

Shiloh, where I live with my wife and where my children were raised and grew up since September 1, 1981, is celebrating the 40th anniversary since its founding in 1978. On the 1st of the Hebrew month of Shvat, January 9, 1978, the first 8 families and some Yeshiva students arrived and on the 15th, Tu B'shvat, the public ceremony was held.

At that time, Shmuel Katz ran against Haim Landau as a Minister in the new government, a Land of Israel Movement protest was being held outside the Prime Minister's office, Karnei Shomron's land was being prepared, Arik Sharon was planning expansion in the Rafiah Salient and the government was authorizing a limited settlement plan. The Egyptians arrived in Jerusalem to continue the talks a few days before the founding ceremony with Buhtros Ghali, Ibrahim Kamal and also the American Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Alfred Atherton.

But there is a back story concerning the American administration that should be recalled in connection with the reestablishment of Jewish life in the Hills of Efraim, at the site of the Tabernacle.

Jimmy Carter and his aides were quite opposed to resettlement activity ion Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The Irish Senate has put on hold a controversial bill that would have banned the import of products from Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, after Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney issued a surprising statement saying he opposes the bill.

"Settlement construction is consistently undercutting Palestinians' hope for the future," Coveney said on Tuesday, adding that such construction is "unjust and provocative."

However, he said that despite this view, he opposes the bill, because "there are many countries around the world about which we have serious human rights concerns. We do not seek to prevent trade with those countries, except in very rare circumstances, in accordance with decisions at the EU or U.N. level."

Coveney's suprise announcement came hours before the Senate was supposed to vote to the bill, which includes a five-year prison term for those who violate its provisions. If passed, Ireland would become the first European country to ban settlement products, though several countries already label them. In light of the government's view on the bill, it is unclear whether it will be voted upon any time soon.

In 2015, the European Union approved guidelines to label settlement products. It said the move was meant to differentiate between Israel, a close trade partner, and the settlements, which it considers illegal.

Israel summoned Irish Ambassador Alison Kelly for a meeting on Wednesday over a bill making its way through her country’s Senate to criminalize trade with Israeli firms in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly condemns the Irish legislative initiative, the entire goal of which is to support the BDS movement and harm the State of Israel,” his office said on Tuesday.

“The initiative gives backing to those who seek to boycott Israel and completely contravenes the guiding principles of free trade and justice,” it added.

“Netanyahu instructed that the Irish Ambassador to Israel be summoned to the Foreign Ministry on this matter,” his office said.

Put forward by Sen. Frances Black (Independent), the bill would prohibit trade with “occupied territories” and impose a prison sentence of one to five years for such activity.

The text doesn’t specify Israel, but it was drafted with an eye to taking action against Israeli activity over the pre-1967 lines. All the comments in Tuesday’s Senate debate focused on Israel.

Designed for Political Attack, Not Legislation

The language of the bill applies extremely broad and inscrutable definitions of key terms and promotes discrimination based on categories of religion and national origin. For instance, an “illegal settler” is not a resident of settlements, but a “member of the civilian population” of Israel “who was or is present within the relevant occupied territory.” In other words, every Israeli citizen who crosses the 1949 Armistice Line is defined as an “illegal settler.” “Occupied territory” is determined not by international agreements, law, or litigated cases, but rather by a non-binding advisory opinion requested by the UN General Assembly.

Under the bill, Jerusalem’s Old City and the Kotel (Western Wall of the Temple Mount) are considered to be “occupied territory.” As a result, among many other absurd outcomes, Irish citizens who visit the Jewish Quarter and buy a souvenir to bring back to Ireland, study the Bible, or pray at the Kotel could face jail time and fines.

Participating in tours and other programs conducted in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by Israeli human rights organizations (such as the Irish-government funded Breaking the Silence) would be illegal.

Similarly, an Irish citizen or resident could run afoul of the law if they hail a cab and that cab happens to drive even a centimeter over Green Line, if the driver happens to be “member of the civilian population of Israel.” The bill provides a defense if “the subject of the alleged offence was carried out with the consent of an entity or form of authority which is recognised by the State as being the legitimate authority over that relevant occupied territory.” In other words, a person can only be found innocent if the PLO agrees to waive the prosecution. (Although under the 1993 Oslo Accords, as guaranteed by the international community, Israel is the “recognized… legitimate authority” of East Jerusalem and Area C of the West Bank.)

Taken as a whole, the language in the bill reflects a broader goal of isolating Israel and implementing a discriminatory BDS agenda. References to settlements and “differentiation” are pretexts.

US President Donald Trump vowed on Tuesday night to limit foreign aid to only countries that align themselves with his administration, following up on his threats to suspend funds to countries that refused to support his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The promise of new legislation came toward the end of his first State of the Union address, a landmark annual speech at which the administration typically sets major policy goals for the year to come.

Referencing a United Nations vote in December, in which the world body voted overwhelmingly (128-9) to reject the president’s unilateral move, the president elevated his past rhetoric of withdrawing monetary support for such countries into legislation.

“Dozens of countries voted in the United Nations General Assembly against America’s sovereign right to make this recognition,” Trump said. “In 2016 American taxpayers generously sent those same countries more than $20 billions of dollars in aid. That is why, tonight, I am asking the Congress to pass legislation to help ensure American foreign-assistance dollars always serve American interests, and only go to friends of America, not enemies of America.”

Those who follow the controversies surrounding the United Nations' relief agency for Palestinian refugees shouldn't be surprised by a Trump administration decision to withhold $65 million from the organization. Maybe that could have been avoided if Turtle Bay bothered to investigate years of accusations against the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

The State Department says the money in question — part of America's nearly $364 million annual contribution to UNRWA — is “frozen and being held for future consideration.” The U.S. reportedly wants to see “revisions” in UNRWA operations. There are ample reasons to do so:

• Agency employees have been accused of inciting violence against Israelis.
• A UNRWA campaign used a picture of an 11-year-old girl “from Gaza” in a bombed-out building to portray Israel as an oppressor of Palestinian children. But the monitoring group U.N. Watch exposed the photo as disingenuous; it was shot in Syria.
• Hamas rockets reportedly turned up in a UNRWA Gaza school amid attacks against Israel in 2014.

“Just over the last year alone, UNRWA officials were elected to the leadership of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, UNRWA schools denied the existence of Israel and terror tunnels were dug under UNRWA facilities,” according to Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the U.N.

Amid its deepening standoff with the Palestinians, the Trump administration is considering halting all of its financial aid to the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, and declaring that it rejects the UN criteria under which refugee status is extended to millions of descendants of the original Palestinian refugees, a TV news report said Tuesday.

Hadashot TV news said this “new ultimatum” under consideration by the Trump administration is one of the avenues being explored as the US seeks to press the Palestinian Authority into returning to peace talks with Israel.

The TV report said that State Department sources, asked for confirmation of the report, noted only that President Donald Trump said in Davos last week that all US aid to the Palestinians was under review and that no formal statements were yet being issued.

Hadashot reported that the State Department, having already frozen some $100 million in UNRWA funding, was considering stopping all of its $360-million annual funding for the organization, and instead allocating it to other UN bodies that work with the Palestinians.

At the same time, it further reported that some in the administration and the State Department want to accompany that move with a formal declaration that the US rejects the mandate under which UNRWA operates — according to which Palestinian refugee status is transferred from generation to generation.

When you give humanitarian aid, you don’t check what it is used for. So Europe avoided inquiring about the reasons for the Palestinian distress, like Hamas’ huge investments of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the production of rockets and construction of attack tunnels at the expense of Gaza’s poor residents. No one checked how money from these humanitarian donations went to the Palestinian leaders’ private and secret bank accounts. Europe started asking questions only after receiving proof that the Palestinian Authority was using donations to pay respectable salaries to terrorists who had been convicted and jailed in Israel and to build public institutions and name them after terrorists.

In recent years, the US has been giving the PA some $500 million a year and giving UNWRA $250-400 million. Trump sees this aid as an investment which should yield a good return. Since the rationale for aiding the Palestinians is the existence of a peace process, and the Palestinians are refusing to negotiate, and since they held the same stance during most of Barack Obama’s years in office, the justification for helping them has been dropped. Trump was also offended by the Palestinian boycott of Vice President Mike Pence’s visit and the insults hurled at him by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his people.

Trump’s business approach could challenge Israel too. Part of the American aid is dedicated to the training and maintenance of the Palestinians' security apparatuses. Freezing the aid could sabotage the PA’s security cooperation with Israel, worsen the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and perhaps even lead to a new wave of violence.

The US gives Israel about $3 billion a year in military aid. Trump said Israel would have to give something in return for his Jerusalem announcement and make significant concessions as part of a peace agreement. The business principle will provide him with a heavy leverage of pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he presents his “ultimate deal.”

UN Human Rights Commissioner, Jordan’s Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein, has decided to postpone indefinitely the publication of a "blacklist" of Israeli and international companies operating in Judea and Samaria.

The postponement of publication of the list comes after heavy pressure exerted by the US and Israel on the Commissioner with the assistance of diplomats from other countries.

However, a document issued Wednesday by the commissioner mentioned that 206 Israeli and international companies operating in Judea and Samaria or in contact with businesses operating in the area had been identified.

In recent months, the Human Rights Commission has contacted 64 of the 206 companies.

The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, and the American ambassador to the organization, Nikki Haley, have led the campaign against the blacklist.

Danon harshly condemned the publication of the report today by the UN Human Rights Council which included information on the number of Israeli and international companies operating in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights.

The United Nations human rights body on Wednesday again delayed the publication of a controversial “blacklist” of companies doing business with Israel in territories captured in 1967, amid intense Israeli lobbying to quash the database.

A report from the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, dated January 26, noted that 206 companies are accused of doing business in the settlements, but didn’t list them. The report noted that only 64 of the companies have been contacted about the allegations so far, necessitating a delay in the publication of their names.

The report blamed “limited resources” for the delay and said the roster would eventually be published.

“Once OHCHR has been in contact with all 206 companies, and subject to determinations of their responses and non-responses, OHCHR expects to provide the names of the companies engaged in listed activities in a future update. Before the determinations on the companies are made public, OHCHR will notify the companies concerned,” the report read.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN Danny Danon slammed the publication of the interim report and said he would continue to fight to have the list trashed.

“On the day that the UN is marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the UNHRC has chosen to publicize this information about the number of companies operating in Israel,” Danon said in a statement. “This is a shameful act which will serve as a stain on the UNHRC forever. We will continue to act with our allies and use all the means at our disposal to stop the publication of this disgraceful blacklist.”

The database, intended to list all companies doing business with Israelis situated in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, was first delayed in February 2017, nearly a year after the Human Rights Council passed a resolution calling for it to be created. It was again pushed back in December.

Citing “lack of resources,” the United Nations has delayed the publication of its black list of companies doing business in areas of Israel over the pre-1967 lines.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights had been scheduled to release a data base of those companies by the end of December 2017 to fulfill a mandate the UN Human Rights Council first set in 2016.

But it did not meet that December deadline and in a progress report published Wednesday it stated: “OHCHR was given limited resources to carry out the mandate within the anticipated time frame, which required it to calibrate its research and engagement with companies accordingly.”

“Not all companies about which OHCHR had received information could be contacted by the time of submission of the present report,” the OHCHR stated.

It explained that it had whittled its initial list of 321 companies believed to meet the criteria for inclusion in the data base, down to 206. Out of those it had contacted only 64.

It not provide the names of any of the companies in its report.

In response to the UN High Commissioner’s report, announcing that the proposed UN blacklist will be published in a “future update,” NGO Monitor Legal Advisor Anne Herzberg released the following statement:

“For more than a year, NGO Monitor has repeatedly warned that there are significant due process concerns with the creation of a UN blacklist of companies. In his report and in announcing previous delays, the High Commissioner acknowledged the centrality of these issues.

NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Al Haq, have been advocating for this discriminatory blacklist for many years to advance a BDS agenda. However, this does nothing to further human rights, and the UN should not devote further resources to this charade.”

Click here for NGO Monitor’s position paper (December 2016) on the lack of due process and legal safeguards in the original formulation of the UNHRC initiative. The announcement of the initial delay in February 2017 largely echoes this document.

An Israeli legal rights group said Wednesday it was filing a lawsuit against two New Zealanders for allegedly convincing pop singer Lorde to cancel her performance in Israel in what appears to be the first lawsuit filed under a contentious Israeli anti-boycott law.

The 2011 law opens the door to civil lawsuits against anyone calling for a boycott against Israel, including of lands it has occupied, if that call could knowingly lead to a boycott. The law, which is part of Israel's fight against a global movement calling for boycotts against the Jewish state, allows courts to order defendants to pay damages.

Critics said the law would stifle free expression.

The two New Zealanders, Justine Sachs and Nadia Abu-Shanab, penned an open letter to Lorde last year in which they urged her to "take a stand" and "join the artistic boycott of Israel." The New Zealand singer-songwriter replied to a tweet of the letter saying "Noted! Been speaking (with) many people about this and considering all options. Thank u for educating me i am learning all the time too."

Late last year, Lorde announced she was cancelling her Tel Aviv concert, which had been scheduled for June 2018. With her cancellation she joined a number of international stars who canceled shows in Israel for political reasons, although many have continued to perform despite pressure from activists.

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked a Kansas law barring state contractors from participating in boycotts against Israel, saying the state law violates free speech rights.

U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree wrote in his decision that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the "First Amendment protects the right to participate in a boycott like the one punished by the Kansas law."

Several states have enacted laws in recent years to counter an increasingly visible movement protesting Israel's policies toward Palestinians. Backers of boycotting Israeli companies argue they are defending Palestinian human rights, while boycott critics contend the goal is to destroy the Jewish state.

The judge granted the request from the American Civil Liberties Union to block enforcement of the Kansas law while the case proceeds, saying it is "highly likely" the Kansas law is invalid.

"A desire to prevent discrimination against Israeli businesses is an insufficient public interest to overcome the public's interest in protecting a constitutional right," Crabtree wrote.

The ACLU brought the lawsuit on behalf of Esther Koontz, a math and science curriculum coach at a Wichita public school, who is seeking to overturn the Kansas state law that took effect in July and prohibits the state from entering into contracts with individuals or companies participating in a boycott of Israel.

The Board of Governors at McGill University in Montreal, Canada is considering advising against the use of its resources “to advance social or political causes,” a move that has faced opposition from students supportive of boycotts against Israel.

In a December 12th meeting, the board considered including the language in the mandate of its Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility, which informs the board of the social impact of investments in its 1.6 billion CAD endowment. It also discussed a proposal to review the mandate every five years, rather than the current three.

McGill Students in Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) and Divest McGill warned in The McGill Daily on Monday that such changes “would have effectively destroyed the potential for any divestment campaign in the next five years.”

Divest McGill has sought to pressure the university to withdraw its investments in fossil fuels, while SPHR has called for divestment from companies that “profit from the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories,” in line with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

Representatives from both campus groups disrupted the meeting to ensure the amendments would not pass.

University College London (UCL) members of staff and students have contacted Campaign Against Antisemitism about an extremely disturbing poster depicting the United States trying to restrain a bloodthirsty giant dog emblazoned with a Star of David, eating a smaller animal with the Palestinian flag painted on it.

UCL Friends of Palestine Society, UCL Islamic Society and UCL Marxist Society are hosting a series of events for so-called “Al-Aqsa Week”. This highly-offensive and inappropriate poster is being used to promote a talk hosted by UCL Friends of Palestine Society and UCL Marxist Society on“Trump and Jerusalem: How to stop Imperialism” at 19:00 tomorrow.

Other talks in the series include one called “US Embassy in Jerusalem: What’s the big deal?” on Wednesday and another called “Winning and losing Jerusalem” on Friday.

Campaign Against Antisemitism is writing to the UCL administration, calling for a disciplinary investigation.

An inquiry by UCL in January last year found serious problems in its previous performance, and since then speakers including Miko Peled and eugenicists have been invited to speak at the campus.

Forty anti-Israel students and community organizations plan to protest Wednesday at New York's Penn Station in a show of support for a teenaged Palestinian arrested by Israeli authorities for assaulting two Israeli soldiers.

The "Free Ahed Tamimi" campaign calls for the release of the Palestinian teen who was arrested Dec. 19 for assault after she and her cousin were filmed hitting two IDF soldiers in the West Bank earlier that week. The Tamimi family has claimed that the soldiers Ahed assaulted had shot a relative in the head with a rubber bullet an hour before the filmed incident. In the footage, which went viral, the soldiers are not seen physically responding to Tamimi.

Nerdeen Kiswani, president of the New York City chapter Students for Justice in Palestine, which is co-organizing the Penn Station activity, said in a statement, "We must demand the release of Ahed Tamimi, who is held in Zionist captivity paid for by U.S. tax dollars that funded the soldiers who harassed and shot her family in the first place.

Kiswani has often expressed her support for extremist forms of anti-Israel activism, galvanizing the crowd at a December Times Square rally at which speakers called for the violent end to Israel and celebrating a 2017 track-ramming attack in which four Israeli soldiers were killed as a "F- you" to "settlers."

A local campaigner against the influence of religion on public life averted a crisis today by devising a line of reasoning that characterizes a minor Jewish holiday honoring trees as in fact a subversion of everything trees stand for and therefore another argument to do away with Jewish practice and thought, as opposed to something positive about Judaism.

Alon Kantran, 27, faced a potential conflict of values heading into the holiday, in line with his position that religion, Judaism in particular, has nothing positive to contribute to humanity and must be abolished or abandoned. The fifteenth of the Hebrew month of Shevat, cited by the ancient Mishnah text as “Rosh HaShanah LaIlanot,” the “New Year for Trees,” has become a celebration of trees, especially fruit trees, among Jews, and among the more secular, a day for planting trees and emphasizing ecological concerns. Such a constructive role for Jewish tradition threatened Mr. Kantran’s ethos, and he has for years sought to develop a thesis that would allow him to dismiss or taint the source so as not to be forced to acknowledge a positive role for something with a religious pedigree.

This year, reported the activist, he succeeded in formulating an argument he finds sufficiently compelling. “I’m happy, and a little relieved, I confess, to inform all concerned that I’ve done it,” he announced. “It goes like this: what Judaism actually celebrates on Tu Bishvat isn’t the beauty or symbolism of trees and nature, but human exploitation of trees and nature. It’s all about exploiting different varieties of produce to illustrate or symbolize something alien to the tree’s authentic experience, casting everything in human terms, regardless of the tree’s point of view or wishes.”

A Guardian article by Jason Burke (Cities and terror: an indivisible and brutal relationship, Jan. 29th) on the history of terror attacks in cities around the world – an expansive 2300 word piece which spans hundreds of years – includes a diverse array of examples.

Attacks on London in the mid 19th century by Irish extremists.
Attack on French Parliament in the late 19th century.
Marxist terror in Central and South America in the mid to late 20th century.
Islamist attacks in Africa, on Western targets in the Mid-East and in Western European and US cities in the late 20th century and early 2000s – including the “new” tactic, used by ISIS just last year, of car ramming.

Yet, despite the fact that Burke acknowledges that “the emergence of terrorism as we know it today” begun “in the second half of the 19th century”, his historical overview of modern terror somehow manages to avoid any mention of the thousands of Palestinian terror attacks against Jews in Israeli cities, or Palestinian attacks on Jewish targets in Western cities.

Modern Palestinian terror ‘innovations’, such as the widespread use of suicide bombing – cruelly deployed to maim and murder civilians of all ages in cafes, pizza parlors and bus stops – go unmentioned.

Interestingly, none of the BBC’s coverage of the story mentioned that attempts to pass this bill began several years ago – even though the BBC reported on that topic in 2016.

Oddly too, the BBC’s reporting did not remind audiences of a relevant story the BBC covered in 2016 and early 2017 concerning a museum in Gdansk.

“Poland’s nationalist government has won a court ruling that will enable it to take over a brand new World War Two museum and reshape its exhibition to fit a narrower Polish perspective. […]

The ruling on Tuesday by Warsaw’s Supreme Administrative Court means the Museum of the Second World War will be merged with a yet-to-be built museum on 1 February.

Poland’s Culture Minister, Piotr Glinski, will then be able to nominate his own director who can change the museum’s exhibition to fit the government’s needs. […]

Mr Glinski has said that following the merger the museum will concentrate on more Polish aspects of the war including the country’s defence against the Nazi invasion in 1939.”

Another relevant story reported by the BBC last year was also ignored in this latest coverage.

As we see, rather than building on its previous reporting on attempts by Poland’s current government to dictate a narrative of history, the BBC has elected to present this story through the context-free narrow perspective of the objections of Israeli politicians.

Norway is far from being considered an anti-Semitic country, which is why it is interesting to read the findings of a study by the Norwegian Institute for Holocaust Research and Religious Minorities on Norwegian attitudes toward Jews and Muslims.

The survey was conducted from January to April 2017 and was followed by in-depth interviews with local Jews and Muslims. A similar survey had been conducted six years earlier, and the contrast between the results is remarkable. The worst number: While in 2011 only 3% of Norwegians thought physical attacks on Jews were justified in retribution for Israel's policy in the Palestinian territories, in 2017 that rose to 12%. Among Norwegian Muslims, that figure is 20%.

There are only about 3,000 Jews in Norway, the northernmost Jewish community in the world. The number has never gone higher than that. Meanwhile, an estimated 150,000 Muslims live in Norway, and this could be a low eastimate. A few hundred Jews arrived in the cold nothern country after being expelled from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497. But less than 200 years later, in 1687, King Christian V decided to follow suit and banned Jews from his country, jailing and then expelling the few Jews living in Norway.

In 1814, Sweden and Norway united (in a pact that held until 1905), and their joint constitution included an explicit ban on Jews, with some exemptions. It was only in 1851 that the Norwegian parliament lifted the ban on Jews, allowing them to enter the country and have religious rights on par with those of Christian dissenters.

Austria’s chancellor said Wednesday that one of the country’s controversial nationalist fraternities would be disbanded after it emerged that it had printed song texts celebrating the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities.

The lyrics in the book produced in 1997 by the Germania zu Wiener Neustadt organization included “Step on the gas, old Germanics, we can make it to seven million,” according to media reports.

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust during World War II, many of them in gas chambers. Other songs in the book praised the Waffen SS and Nazi paratroopers behind war crimes committed in Greece.

The scandal took on a political dimension because until recently the vice-chairman of the fraternity was Udo Landbauer, a candidate for the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) in local elections in Lower Austria state last Sunday.

It also put Chancellor Sebastian Kurz under pressure since he had formed a coalition at federal level in December with the anti-immigration, Islamophobic FPOe, giving the party the interior, foreign and defense ministries.

An increasing number of residents from Arab sections of Jerusalem are working in the Jewish parts of the city, leading to a narrowing of the income gap between Jews and Arabs in the city, Bloomberg News reported Monday.

Ro’aa, a 22-year-old sales clerk, explained that she didn’t have success working in the Arab section of the city. “There were no benefits, my salary was always two months late,” she told Bloomberg. “On the Israeli side you get paid more and receive all your benefits, and if they see you are working hard you get promoted.”

According to the report, Ro’aa is emblematic of “an increasing number of young Arabs … finding more professional opportunities in the Jewish quarters of Jerusalem.”

“We want to create a better life for our residents,” Hussam Watad, who runs a community center that offers Hebrew classes in the Arab neighborhood of Beit Hanina told Bloomberg. The center also supports lawsuits to improve the infrastructure in Arab neighborhoods. The goal, Watad said, is “to show a rosier future” to resident of Arab neighborhoods.

Currently some 6,000 Arab residents of Jerusalem are studying Hebrew, and more are registering to attend institutions of higher learning in the Jewish sections of the city. The municipality has established one employment center in east Jerusalem and is planning to build a second one.

Planting the “right kind” of forests extensively in areas that have mostly been neglected in forestation efforts − semi-arid regions in Africa and Australia − could have a measurably positive influence on the climate and help offset a significant portion of human-induced global warming.

This was discovered recently by Weizmann Institute of Science researchers led by Prof. Dan Yakir of the earth and planetary sciences department who used an Israeli forest as a model. The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Forests are considered one of the best means of offsetting global climate change, because they tie up large amounts of carbon. In other words, they have a large biomass compared to other types of plant cover and, since they tend to be long-lived, they keep that carbon tied up for a long time in a process called “carbon sequestration.”

But forests interact with the climate in all sorts of ways – not just through their uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Their color changes the amount of radiation absorbed by the Earth’s surface; and together with evapotranspiration – the movement of water up through the roots to the leaves and out through pores in the leaves – provides the trees with ways of adjusting their internal temperature.

Yakir and his group found that some trees, if they act together on a sufficiently large scale, can also promote cloud formation. So trees not only adapt to a climate, they shape their climate – and ours – as well.

Israel and its global allies, in the US, Europe and the Mediterranean region, must set up regional computer emergency response teams that will work together — a “cyber-protection alliance NATO” — to foil hacking attempts in the civilian sphere that are becoming more and more aggressive, said Erel Margalit, a former Knesset member and high-tech entrepreneur, on Wednesday.

Speaking at the 2018 Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, Margalit, who was a member of the parliament’s task force on civilian cybersecurity, warned that citizens and civilian infrastructures are still very exposed to cyber-threats because there is not enough collaboration between government and private enterprise, and also because the cooperation between “democratic countries isn’t tight enough.”

More cooperation is needed, he said. “Together we stand and divided we are threatened.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an intergovernmental military alliance between North American and European countries in which member states undertake to defend each other if attacked by an external party.

As more and more devices are being connected to the internet and with the greater use of cloud computing, the cyber-attack surface is getting wider, cyber security experts have warned.

Israel has foiled numerous foreign-originated cyber attacks in the past year, Nadav Argaman — the head of the Shin Bet security agency — said on Tuesday.

In remarks given at the Cybertech 2018 TLV conference, Argaman declared, “The State of Israel is one of the leading cyber powers in the world.”

“We, as an organization, have very significant cyber capabilities,” Argaman noted. “Cyber is a main tool for us in our work of thwarting terrorism.”

Israeli authorities inaugurated a nature park on Wednesday near Jerusalem after five years of archaeological excavations at Ein Hanya, the second-largest spring in the Judean Hills and a key site in the history of Christianity. Along with an announcement that the park will open to the public free of charge within months, the Israel Antiquities Authority revealed some major findings at the site, including a column capital typical of royal structures from the First Temple era and one of the oldest coins ever discovered in the Jerusalem area.

Excavations and conservation and development work were conducted between 2012 and 2016 at the site, which is part of the Rephaim Valley National Park and located beyond the Green Line but within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries.

“The result is an extraordinarily beautiful site incorporating archaeology, an ancient landscape and a unique visitor experience,” the IAA said in a statement.

The new findings were publicized for the first time as senior officials participated in a tree-planting ceremony for the Jewish festival of Tu Bishvat and revealed the new nature park.

1. Judaism stipulates four new years celebration — one of them is the New Year for the trees, Tu Bishvat (Arbor Day), the 15th day of the month of Shvat (January 31, 2018).

Tu Bishvat highlights the rejuvination and blooming of trees and the Jewish people. According to Rashi, the leading Jewish Biblical commentator, this date was determined because most of the winter rains are over by Tu Bishvat, sap starts to rise and fruit begins to ripen. The Knesset, was established on Tu Bishvat, 1949.

The other three New Years are the first day of the month of Nissan (the Biblical Exodus — the birth of the Jewish people), the first day of the month of Tishrei (Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year) and the first day of the month of Elul (the tithing of cattle — only if the Temple is rebuilt).

2. The Hebrew word for tree — Etz (עצ) – is the root of the Hebrew words for independence (עצמאות), power (עוצמה), identity/selfhood (עצמיות), essence (עצם) and bones (עצמות).

3. Another Hebrew word for tree is Ilan (אילן), whose root is איל (the awesome/mogul), which is also the Hebrew spelling for the majestic ram. The two letters, אל, mean God and the letter י is an acronym for God.

4. Just like trees, human beings aspire for stability, long-term planning and durability in face of rough times. Rough times forge stronger trees and character.

Older photo of Jewish students at Temple Mount

34 settlers, 45 students from Talmudic institutes, and 14 members of the Israeli occupation police stormed the Al Aqsa Mosque, through the door of the Moroccans, this morning, heavily guarded by the occupation forces.

The attackers carried out exploratory tours in the mosque. Attempts to perform Talmudic rituals were met by worshipers with shouts of indignation,  and the occupation forces arrested one of the worshipers after beating him.

Although the human being is the most sophisticated and capable of all of God’s creations, at our earliest stages we are among the most vulnerable and the most helpless. A newborn giraffe will start walking within an hour of birth; after 10 hours, the baby giraffe will be able to run and keep up with the herd. But it will take years for a human infant to become even partially self-sufficient; until then he will be completely dependent on others for his every need. As a result of this, the child experiences instant gratification; his food will be brought to him, he’ll be bathed and gently tucked in bed, and if he cries, his parents will rush to satisfy his every request.

Responsible parents know there comes a point when the child must learn to fend for himself, when it is permissible – even preferable – to say “No!” Otherwise, that child will likely become a demanding, spoiled, incorrigible brat who will struggle to find his place in society.

This is precisely what has happened to the Palestinians. For 70+ years, through three generations, they have been fed, wet-nursed, coddled and accommodated by a global set of “parents.” Rather than earn their keep and live within their means, they have been handed billions and billions of dollars – much of which has either been stolen by their handlers or illegally used to purchase weapons. Rather than move out of their squalid camps into decent housing – as Israel has offered numerous times – they have been cruelly kept in cramped surroundings by so-called “leaders” who foment their anger and prolong their agony for political and monetary gain. Rather than drop their refugee status and integrate into a variety of countries – as hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews did, and as millions of others are doing today in Europe – they tenaciously cling to their persecution complex as if it were a warm blanket. The misplaced mercy showered upon them has only served to ingrain within them a massive sense of entitlement that is now virtually impossible to eradicate.

So it comes as no surprise that when they finally get a long-overdue “spanking” by a head of state and berated for their atrocious behavior, the Palestinians react like that proverbial spoiled child and throw a tantrum. They threaten, they throw things (stones, Molotov cocktails, etc.), they curse, they break things (like signed agreements and diplomatic relations), they call the president names, they lock themselves in their room or they run and hide under the UN’s and the Europeans’ skirts. In typical infantile behavior, they blame everyone – except themselves – for their problems.

In a recent sermon, Abbas’ advisor stated that “this nation will awaken and uproot evil from its land.”

Mahmoud Abbas' Advisor on Religious and Islamic Affairs and Supreme Shari'ah Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “This nation - I repeat - will awaken together with its clergy, with the religion, with its Quran, with the tradition of its Prophet Muhammad. This nation will awaken and uproot the evil from its land, and it will regain its rights to Jerusalem and Palestine.” [Official PA TV, Jan. 5, 2018]

Although Al-Habbash did not specifically mention Israel in this particular part of his sermon, his prior statements were about Israel and the US’ recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Right before his promise that “evil” will be uprooted, Al-Habbash mocked the US for thinking the world would support his declaration on Jerusalem:

“The entire world has recently had its say in the face of the oppression and arrogance that the American administration is attempting to impose on us and on the world. The world is not for sale or purchase. The world's honor is not for sale... The world said: 'No.' We send our greetings to the peoples of the world that stood with the Palestinian right. We send our greetings to the states, governments, figures, and organizations that stood with the Palestinian right... As for those who have sold themselves cheaply - there is still room on the trash heap of history.”
[Official PA TV, Jan. 5, 2018]

That Al-Habbash refers to Israel as “the evil” is not news. Palestinian Media Watch has exposed that Al-Habbash teaches that Israel is "Satan's project" and believes that Jews represent “evil.”

Relying on the book Fire and Fury, PA TV hosts question if "a man of this mentality is capable of determining the fate of the world?"

As part of the Palestinian Authority and Fatah's anti-US and anti-Trump rhetoric, which Palestinian Media Watch has documented, Fatah in Lebanon posted the above cartoon, questioning the "mental fitness" of US President Trump.

Headline: "The mental fitness of one who does not recognize the Palestinian people and its legal and historical right in Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine, is questionable!"

Text in upper right corner of cartoon: "The publication of a book that casts doubt on Trump's mental fitness."

The cartoon, which refers to the book Fire and Fury (see below) shows an angry Trump saying "I'm a genius." He is holding a lit match to an open book as small Twitter icons are seen rising from the flame. On the page Trump is burning is written: "Mentally deranged." [Falestinona, website of Fatah's Information and Culture Commission in Lebanon, Jan. 20, 2018]

Relying on the book, two hosts on official PA TV similarly cast doubt on Trump's mental capabilities, asking: 'Is a man of this mentality capable of determining the fate of the world... or of Jerusalem?"

The United States on Wednesday put the head of Palestinian terror group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, on its terror blacklist and slapped sanctions on him. The 55-year-old Haniyeh was named head of Hamas in May 2017.

“Haniyeh has close links with Hamas’s military wing and has been a proponent of armed struggle, including against civilians,” the State Department said in a statement. “He has reportedly been involved in terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens. Hamas has been responsible for an estimated 17 American lives killed in terrorist attacks.”

Haniyeh is now on the US Treasury sanctions blacklist, which freezes any US-based assets he may have and bans any US person or company from doing business with him.

Hamas, which is sworn to destroy Israel and has controlled the Gaza Strip for more than a decade, has been on the US terror blacklist since 1997.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (L) and Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip Yahya Sinwar wave during a rally marking the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Islamist terror movement, in Gaza City, on December 14, 2017. (Mohammed Abed/AFP)

The US government also slapped sanctions on Harakat al-Sabireen — a small Gazan terror group that splintered away from the Islamic Jihad and, like Hamas, is close to Iran — and two other groups active in Egypt: Liwa al-Thawra and HASM.

The Palestine Liberation Organization on Thursday condemned the United States’ decision to add the head of the Hamas terror group, Ismail Haniyeh, to its terror blacklist.

“The PLO rejects and condemns the decision,” PLO’s secretary general Saeb Erekat said in a statement on the Fatah party’s official Facebook page.

Erekat also called for solving the problems causing division between Fatah and Hamas, in order to achieve national unity and “preserve the Palestinian national project.”

Israel welcomed the American move.

Yuval Rotem, director general of Israel’s foreign ministry, called the US State Department’s move an “important decision.”

It is “a welcome and necessary step in the fight against global terrorism. More crucial American leadership which other countries should follow,” Rotem wrote on Twitter.

The Trump administration announced on Wednesday a slate of new sanctions on an Iranian-backed terror organization and its top allies in the Hamas movement, according to an announcement that is being viewed as part of an effort to disrupt the Islamic Republic's terror networks operating on the border of Israel.

The sanctions target a lethal Iranian-funded terror outfit based in the Gaza Strip and West Bank territories that has, at Iran's direction, targeted the Jewish state for terror attacks in recent years.

The Trump administration also slapped new sanctions on Ismail Haniyeh, one of the Hamas movement's top political figures who has helped orchestrate and carry out terror attacks on Israel.

The new sanctions represent an effort by the Trump administration to sever the ties between Iran and Hamas militants operating in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which have served as a key plotting ground for militants seeking to target the Jewish state.

The latest round of sanctions target a little-known Iranian-backed terror cell known as Harakat al-Sabireen, which first made noticeable inroads in the Gaza strip in early 2016 with the backing of Hamas, the Washington Free Beacon first reported.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday said Israel will retain security control over the Palestinians as part of any future peace deal, deepening Palestinian fears that Israel and the administration of President Donald Trump are colluding on a proposal that will fall far short of their dreams of independence.

Netanyahu's statement exposed a deepening rift that has emerged between the US and Israel on one hand, and the Palestinians and the Europeans on the other, ahead of an expected peace push by the Trump administration. Those disagreements could complicate things for the US team.

Since taking office, President Trump has distanced himself somewhat from the two-state solution—the outcome favored by the international community, including Trump's predecessors, for the past two decades.

Instead, he has said he would support Palestinian independence only if Israel agrees. The European Union, meanwhile, along with the rest of the international community, remains committed to the two-state solution.

These differences were evident at a meeting Wednesday between Netanyahu and German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel.

In an awkward exchange, Gabriel said his country is "very much in favor" of the two-state solution. "I was very thankful to hear that of course also the government of Israel wants to have two states, but (with secure) borders," he said.

President Trump's first State of the Union address was not heavy on national security issues. It did, however, make one critical point: In reviewing the international achievements of his first year in office, Trump was abundantly clear that the Obama era is over. Primarily retrospective assessments like Trump's are perfectly legitimate for a president finishing his initial year, especially given what his policies are replacing.

Gone was President Obama's self-congratulatory moral posturing, replaced by a concrete list of accomplishments that will inevitably increase the power of America's presence in the world. Trump's policy is not only not isolationist — as many of his opponents (and a few misguided supporters) contend — his pursuit of Ronald Reagan's "peace through strength" approach actually demonstrates that Obama's detached, ethereal retreat from American assertiveness internationally amounted to the real isolationism.

Most importantly, Trump again committed to palpably more robust military budgets and an end to the budget-sequester mechanism, the worst political mistake made by Republicans in Congress in living memory. Sequestration procedures were liberal dreams come true, forcing wasteful increases in domestic programs in order to obtain critical military funding. The sooner this whole embarrassing exercise is behind us, the better.

As Secretary of Defense James Mattis frequently points out, harking back to Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous comment, there cannot be an adequate American foreign policy without an adequate defense policy.

Politicians from across the Israeli political spectrum slammed the Polish Senate's decision Thursday to criminalize suggesting Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

A short statement from the Foreign Ministry on behalf of the State of Israel said that the country opposes the decision of the Polish Senate.

"No law will change the facts," the statement said in response to the bill, which many Israeli politicians see as trying to amend history.

Senior diplomatic sources expressed “deep disappointment” at the decision by the Polish Senate, especially since relations between the the two countries is important to both of them.

The sources also said the passage of the law was against the “sprit of the conversation” between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Polish counterpart Sunday night in which they agreed to set up teams to discuss the issue.
Israelis condemn Polish law that bans using the phrase "Polish death camps"

Minister of Intelligence and Transportation Israel Katz called on Netanyahu to immediately recall the Israeli Ambassador to Poland for consultations in Israel.

"The law passed by the Polish government is severe and constitutes a brushing off its own responsibility and a denial of Poland's part in the Holocaust against the Jews," Katz said. "In the balance between political considerations and moral considerations, there must be a clear decision - perpetuating the memory of Holocaust victims over any other consideration."

New legislation cosponsored by 61 members of Knesset would make a Polish bill to outlaw talk of Poles’ complicity in the Nazis’ crimes a form of illegal Holocaust denial.

The bill, formulated by MKs from the coalition and the opposition – Itzik Shmuly (Zionist Union), Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid), Robert Ilatov (Yisrael Beytenu), Nurit Koren (Likud) and Bezalel Smotrich (Bayit Yehudi) – seeks to amend the Law for Defense Against Holocaust Denial to state that denying or minimizing the involvement of the Nazi’s helpers and collaborators will also be a crime.

In addition, the amended law would provide legal aid to any Holocaust survivors and educators taking students to death camps who face foreign lawsuits because they recounted what happened in the Holocaust.

The 1986 Law for Defense Against Holocaust Denial states that anyone who publishes denial and minimization of the Holocaust or other crimes against the Jewish people can get five years of jail time.

The Polish Senate was expected Wednesday to approve a bill that would make using the phrase “Polish death camps” or saying the Polish people were in any way culpable for the Nazis’ crimes against humanity an offense that carries a three-year prison sentence. The vote was set to take place even though the Polish and Israeli governments plan to negotiate a version of the bill that would be agreeable to both sides.

Shmuly said: “The Poles, and others who may want to copy them, should know that the historical truth of the Jewish people is not for sale.”

Polish lawmakers approved draft legislation on Thursday penalizing suggestions of any complicity by Poland in the Nazi Holocaust on its soil during World War II, defying criticism by Israel and the United States.

The proposal has triggered a diplomatic spat between Israel and Warsaw's conservative government since its initial approval in the lower house of parliament last week, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comparing it to an effort to change history.

The United States asked Poland to rethink plans to enact proposed legislation regulating Holocaust speech that has sparked a diplomatic dispute with Israel, arguing Wednesday that if it passes it could hurt freedom of speech as well as strategic relationships.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert voiced her government's concerns as the Polish Senate was preparing to approve the bill, a step that would put it closer to becoming law. The measure would next need to be signed into law by the president, who supports it.

The National Library of Israel published this week handwritten messages about the destruction of Poland’s Jews scrawled on envelopes sent via the Polish postal service between September 1940 and May 1941.

The letters were brought to the National Library six months ago by Joseph Weichert, the son of Michal Weichert, who was in the Warsaw and Krakow ghettos during World War II. From 1940 to 1942, he headed the Jewish Social Self-Help committee which organized social assistance for Jews in camps and ghettos.

While many documents that had been in Weichert’s possession have been stored at the library’s archives for years, the letters are relatively new to them. The library released them to the media in a week when the subject of the Polish people’s role in the Holocaust has made waves, after Poland advanced legislation to criminalize statements suggesting the country bears responsibility for crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany.

“Now is the time to give you this historic item,” Weichert’s son told archivists. “It is important for the world to know the story and remember, and also to know that the Poles were partners in atrocities of the Germans during the Holocaust and knew about the atrocities.”

He gave the archivists an album of 59 envelopes sent between September 1940 and May 1941 to various branches of the committee. All the letters Michal had sent out were returned to sender, with various notes written on them. According to translations of the texts by Josef Weichert, these included messages reading: “The Jews have been expelled” and “The Jewish Council no longer exists.”

“There is no doubt that the Polish postmen were well aware of the fate of the recipients, whose letters were returned to sender,” remarked National Library archivist Dr. Gil Weissblei.

Britain's Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson addressed the Conservative Friends of Israel's Annual Parliamentary Reception on Tuesday.

Williamson praised Israel as a "beacon of light and hope, in a region where there is so much hatred and hurt. We shouldn't underestimate how difficult it is to keep that light bright and burning."
Speaking of his visit to the country as a teenager, Williamson said: "I didn't quite know what to expect of Israel. What I found was a liberal, free, exciting country that was so at ease with itself, a country that absorbed and welcomed so many people. That made an enormous impression upon me."
Williamson condemned the often "completely unreasonable...sheer simple hatred" channeled towards Israel. "If we are not there to stand up for a country, whose views and ideals are so close, or are simply our own, what are we as a nation? What are we in politics, if we cannot accept and celebrate the wonderful blooming of democracy that is Israel."
"Britain and Israel have an amazing relationship....It's a relationship of partners. We learn a lot from Israel and I hope that Israeli forces also [learn] a little from us. It's a partnership of equals. A partnership of friends."
"Britain will always be there to work with you, support you, and be one of your closest and best friends. Our relationship with [Israel] is the cornerstone of so much of what we do in the Middle East."

Apparently, Hezbollah has a short memory. Israel caused extensive damage to southern Lebanon during the 34-day Second Lebanon War of 2006. More than a thousand Lebanese, most of them Hezbollah fighters, were killed, and over 5,000 Lebanese were wounded.

Perhaps Hezbollah truly believes that it has the capabilities to overcome Israel. This might be because the Shi’ite group overvalues the experience it has accrued from fighting alongside the Assad regime, Iran and Russia in Syria. Hezbollah’s naval forces are reportedly receiving tactical support from Iran, which is also involved in the fighting in Yemen.

Or it might be because since 2006 Hezbollah has been assiduously building it rocket arsenal, including missiles that can reach central Israel; developing an intricate tunnel system, complete with ventilation, electricity and rocket launchers; and, because it is no longer bogged down in Syria, it can mobilize almost 30,000 fighters.

Whatever the reason, Hezbollah is dangerously overestimating its military capabilities, which makes it prone to stupid actions that are liable to drag southern Lebanon into another war.

It is not too late for countries such as Russia and the US to avert another destructive conflagration in Lebanon that would force Israel to reestablish deterrence with Hezbollah at a terrible price to the Lebanese people. For this to happen, however, there must be a clear recognition that Iran and its proxy Hezbollah are the ones escalating the conflict.

In any event, if or when war breaks out again on the northern border, world leaders will not be able to say they were not warned.

US forces are deploying in Israel ahead of a large-scale joint Israel-US military exercise, due to start next week, which will simulate a major conflict in which Israel is attacked with thousands of missiles.

The biennial Juniper Cobra military exercise, which is being held for the ninth time, will take place amid an escalation of rhetoric between Israel and the Hezbollah terrorist group in southern Lebanon, which is believed to have an arsenal of between 100,000 and 150,000 short-, medium- and long-range missiles and a fighting force of some 50,000 soldiers, including reservists.

The Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which seeks Israel’s destruction, has reportedly been threatening to open fire at IDF soldiers if Israel does not halt the construction of a barrier it is building along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said Wednesday that should war erupt again with Lebanon, Beirut would “pay the full price” for Iran’s entrenchment in the country, and that if the citizens of Tel Aviv are forced into bomb shelters “all of Beirut will be in bomb shelters.”

The drill set to start next week will simulate thousands of missiles, launched from several fronts, being fired into the Israeli homefront, a Channel 10 news report said Wednesday.

Lebanon issued an offshore oil and gas exploration tender on the country’s maritime border on Wednesday, prompting a war of words with Israel, which has laid claim to one of the fields in question.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman called the move “very provocative” and suggested that Lebanon had put out a tender to international groups for a gas field “that is by all accounts ours.”

His comments drew sharp condemnation from Hezbollah and Lebanese officials, including Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who described the statement as a “blatant provocation that Lebanon rejects.”

He said Lieberman’s claim was “invalid in form and substance” and that the Lebanese government would follow the tender up “with the competent international parties to assert its legitimate right to act in its territorial waters.”

Lebanon last year approved the licenses for an international consortium led by France’s Total, Italy’s ENI and Russia’s Novatek to move forward with offshore oil and gas development for two of five blocks in the Mediterranean Sea, including one known as Block 9 that is disputed in part with Israel.

Liberation of the Islamic land of Palestine from the infidel Zionists remains the sacred duty of all Muslims, regardless of local nationality. That is why it ultimately does not matter how many Lebanese must die in the process of realizing that dream.

I write this in response to ongoing rhetoric accusing me and my movement of placing Iran’s Shiite conquest ambitions above the interests of my country, accusations that flow either from ignorance or malice, perhaps both. In fact, the interests of Lebanon appear nowhere in my hierarchy of considerations, making that accusation nonsensical.

Of course the welfare of the inhabitants of Lebanon does not go unnoticed or unconsidered, just not as a value in itself. When I remarked, after our disastrous war with the Zionists almost twelve years ago, that had I known in advance the Zionist response would be as destructive as it indeed was, I would not have launched the war, it was not an expression of care for the people of Lebanon, but a calculated acknowledgement that Hezbollah could only go so far in prosecuting a conflict without losing its grip on the country as the punishment became too much for the populace to bear. Let that be clear.

We do have to couch our rhetoric in terms that imply, or even declare outright, that we act for Lebanon’s benefit, but let us also be clear on the fact that the majority of Lebanon’s inhabitants hold a very different understanding of “Lebanon’s benefit” from the one we use. They, naturally, associate the term with prosperity, security, and serenity, whereas we define it only in terms of how well Lebanon benefits Iran’s regional ambitions.

The Bulgarian state prosecution has decided not to charge Hezbollah with involvement in the 2012 bomb attack at the Burgas airport that killed five Israelis and their Bulgarian bus driver and wounded 32 other Israelis, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

Instead, the prosecutor indicted the two men allegedly involved in the attack as if they were terrorists or even regular criminals who acted without connection to an organization. The word “Hezbollah” does not appear in the indictment.

In addition, the indictment does not mention standard terrorism offenses such as “acting as part of a terrorist organization” or connecting the murder offense to terrorism. Instead, it makes a brief reference to Bulgarian Penal Code Section 108(a) regarding disturbing the public order.

Under Section 108(a), anyone who by causing a “disturbance or fear among the population” or who threatens or forces “a competent authority... to perform or omit part of his/her duties, commits a crime,” in addition to other crimes they may have committed.

Sources close to the case say that when the Bulgarian prosecutor on the case was confronted with these anomalies, he claimed that no one provided him with evidence demonstrating Hezbollah’s involvement.

Israel said it would allow power generators to be taken into the Gaza Strip to ease the humanitarian crisis plaguing the Palestinian enclave, Israel Radio reported Thursday.

The approval was promised by Israeli officials Wednesday in an emergency meeting in Brussels of an international committee coordinating Palestinian development aid and political efforts. Government ministers from Israel and Egypt, as well as the Palestinian prime minister and a US senior official, attended the talks.

The report said that Israel will allow in the generators but has insisted on a series of security measures to ensure that they are not misused by Hamas and other terror groups.

Regional Cooperation Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told reporters that Israel has plans for a series of projects such as electricity grid expansion, sewage treatment and a desalination plant for the impoverished Gaza Strip, but wants international money to fund it.

Fifty-two Israeli and Palestinian Authority (PA) Arabs, victims of torture at the hands of the PA, have recently won a lawsuit filed against the PA. A report by Yoni Ozery of the Institute of Zionist Strategies says that their lawyer approached a number of human rights organizations to provide medical specialists to help determine their damages for the next stage of the legal process. The response they received, according to the report, suggests that assistance from such groups would only be forthcoming for parties suing Israel.

In April 2017, Judge Moshe Yair Drori of the Jerusalem District Court ruled in the case dealing with the abduction, imprisonment, torture, rape, and murder of 52 Arabs suspected of collaborating with Israel. Drori held the Palestinian Authority responsible for damages they suffered.

According to Ozery, the victims represented in the trial have subsequently encountered difficulty in determining the level of compensation, being unable to locate and finance doctors willing to provide them with the professional assessment necessary for determining disability levels.

As a result, the law office representing the plaintiffs approached several human rights organizations, requesting assistance in finding specialists in a range of medical fields. The only response forthcoming to their appeal came from the Blue and White Human Rights Movement of the Institute for Zionist Strategies.

"The court's verdict published this July reveals an in-depth account of each of the plaintiffs and his circumstances. The resulting picture is one of widespread detentions throughout Judea and Samaria of those suspected of collaborating with Israel. The vicious torture described by the plaintiffs included beatings with metal wires and rubber pipes, cigarette burns, being hung for hours, and sleep- and food-deprivation. As a result, the plaintiffs sustained severe damage to both their physical and mental health," the report said.

Palestinian Authority security forces have arrested seven Palestinians in connection with the explosive devices that were discovered last week near the West Bank city of Tulkarem, Palestinian sources disclosed on Wednesday.

The roadside bombs were discovered after a Palestinian driver who spotted suspicious objects on a road between the villages of Ilar and Saidah, north of Tulkarem, alerted PA security forces.

PA sappers safely dismantled 12 improvised explosive devices, each weighing between 20 and 30 kilograms. The roadside bombs were apparently intended for use against IDF military vehicles passing the area.

The sources identified the detainees as Mujahed Shadid, As’ad Shadid, Sara’ Raddad, Ahmed Al-Haj, Fadi Raddad, Amer Abdel Ghani and Mohammed Yunis.

The sources said that the suspects are affiliated with Hamas and some had previously been arrested or interrogated by the PA security forces.

The palestinians are constantly accusing Israel of cultural appropriation (especially when it comes to food) – which is the utmost chutzpah, considering that is what they’ve done with our prophets and holy sites.

But now they’ve stepped their appropriation of Jewish culture up a notch.

Matchmaker, matchmaker, light me a fuse..

A member of the Hamas terror group was killed while working on a tunnel in the Gaza Strip, the organization said Wednesday.

The group said Mahmoud Hay al-Safadi, 31, died while at work on a “resistance tunnel.” It did not say how he was killed or where the tunnel was located.

Safadi, from Gaza City, was a member of the group’s armed Qassam brigades wing. Hamas is the de facto ruler of Gaza.

Hamas did not blame Israel for the death, indicating Safadi may have been killed in some sort of underground accident. No other injuries were reported, and there was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.

Israel has been working to thwart a network of tunnels dug under the Gaza border and meant to be used for attacks in Israeli territory, according to military officials. The country has been building what it calls a subterranean barrier meant to block the tunnels, and has also worked to discover and destroy them using bombs and other unspecified means.

Officials in the Palestinian Authority confessed embarrassment today upon realizing that after they had declared tomorrow a Day of Rage, they discovered the date had already been declared several weeks ago as a different Day of Rage.

Nabil Aburdeineh, and adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, admitted to reporters the staff at the Muqat’a, the presidential compound, has been working overtime on damage-control since uncovering the foul-up early this morning.

“We had a Day of Rage set on the calendar over some perceived slight, I think by an American official, a couple of weeks ago already,” explained Aburdeineh. “For technical reasons, at the time we couldn’t hold the Day of Rage that week, if I recall correctly because it was on such short notice. Since Fridays are the ideal day for a Day of Rage, we of course skipped all of last week and looked only at last Friday, but then I think that turned out to be the day some important Fatah official was marrying off a son and everyone was supposed to be in attendance, so it was pushed back another week. But then we forgot about it.”

“So then after [US Vice President Michael] Pence came out here and waved the Trump administration’s new hard line against us in our faces, we had no choice,” he continued. “I mean, what other possible course of action did we have? We certainly haven’t conditioned our people to do something other than have violent outbursts. There really was no other option here. But we forgot to check the calendar properly, and everyone up and forgot we’d already scheduled a Day of Rage for this Friday, and, well, here we are.”

As part of the boycott declared on Qatar some six months ago by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt,[1] these countries drew up three lists of organizations and people who they say have ties to terror and are supported by Qatar. One of the organizations included on the third list, issued in November this year, is the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), headed by Sheikh Yousuf al-Qaradawi, who serves as an important source of authority for the Muslim Brotherhood.[2] Al-Qaradawi himself, who was born in Egypt but has been living in Qatar since the 1960s, is included on the first list, issued in June this year.[3]

In his column in the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, the daily's former editor, 'Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, justified the inclusion of the IUMS on the terror list, and in fact stated that this should have been done long ago.[4] He accused the IUMS, and Qatar, which sponsors it, of spreading jihadi discourse, encouraging terror organizations by providing them with ideological justification for their actions, and fighting the voices of moderate Islam. As an example he noted that, unlike the Saudi Salafi clerics, who prohibited terror operations as early as the 1990s, the IUMS and its head, Al-Qaradawi, have justified these operations and continue to do so. He added that, were it not for this encouragement and for Qatar's sponsorship, organizations like Al-Qaeda and ISIS probably wouldn't have existed today.

It should be mentioned that MEMRI has published extensively on the extremism of Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradawi. The European Council for Fatwa and Research,[5] founded in 1997 by Al-Qaradawi and his then deputy, Sheikh Faisal Maulawi,[6] incited to commit suicide operations,[7] and Al-Qaradawi himself condoned such operations, and even expressed a hope to "die a virtuous death like a jihad warrior, with the head severed from the body." [8]Al-Qaradaw and the council were supported by former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who defended the sheikh and claimed that his ideology was far from extremist.[9]

In Iran, a young woman with a growing Twitter reputation as the world’s bravest proponent of women’s rights is now reported to be facing serious criminal charges in that repressive theocracy for a single act of peaceful defiance -- appearing in public without a head scarf.

A December 27 video of her flouting Iran’s compulsory veiling of women went viral during recent anti-regime demonstrations there. On Tehran’s busy Enghelab Street, she is seen standing on a concrete post, head uncovered, while solemnly waving a white scarf affixed to a stick, like a flag. Poignantly, the street’s Persian name means “Revolution.”

The image of this unnamed woman emerged on social media as a veritable icon of the leaderless economic protests, even though her solitary act of defiance was independent of them. Iranian social media lit up about her again last week with news of her arrest and impending prosecution. She isn’t the first woman to go public there without a hijab, but she’s certainly the most prominent.

Who is this brave woman and what is her fate?

Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh has revealed on Twitter that the woman is a 31-year-old mother of a 19-month-old baby. Others tweeted her name as Vida Movahed, but this is not confirmed. She was apprehended on the spot, released, rearrested and then on January 28, after last week’s Twitter storm, released again.

An Iranian-American dual citizen and his wife have been sentenced to 27 and 16 years in jail respectively, the husband said in a letter from prison published on human rights websites.

Karan Vafadari, a US citizen, and Afarin Neyssari, a US permanent resident, were arrested in July 2016. They own an art gallery, and they were first accused of hosting mixed-gender parties for foreign diplomats and possessing alcoholic drinks at home.

However, they later faced more serious charges, including “espionage,” “attempt to overthrow the regime” and “conferring to conspire against national security”, their family said in a petition in 2017.

In a letter from Evin Prison published on Tuesday by the Center for Human Rights in Iran, Vafadari said the couple were sentenced last week by a Revolutionary Court in Tehran, but the “baseless security accusations” had been dropped. He called the verdict “unjust and tyrannical.”

It was not clear what charges the couple were convicted of. Iran’s judiciary was not immediately available for comment.

The couple will have 21 days to appeal the verdict.

Vafadari belongs to the Zoroastrian faith, a religious minority in Iran whose members are allowed to drink liquor discreetly in the privacy of their homes.

As images of Iranian women holding their hijabs aloft spread on social media, an influential activist said women are symbolically rejecting the wider "interference of religion" in their lives.

"We are fighting against the most visible symbol of oppression," said Masih Alinejad, who hosts the website My Stealthy Freedom where women in Iran post photos of themselves without hijabs.

Under Iran's Islamic law, imposed after the 1979 revolution, women are obliged to cover their hair with a scarf, known as a hijab, and wear long, loose-fitting clothes. Violators are publicly admonished, fined or arrested.

"These women are saying, 'It is enough - it is the 21st century and we want to be our true selves,'" the Iranian activist told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The trend picked up momentum after video and images were posted online of one woman waving a white scarf on a stick in December - a day before demonstrations erupted against economic conditions in eastern Iran, said Alinejad.

More and more incredibly brave Iranian women are risking imprisonment by defying the law to wear mandatory hejab. They deserve international solidarity. pic.twitter.com/IpVEEXt9jo

— Karim Sadjadpour (@ksadjadpour) January 29, 2018

The annual Holocaust remembrance events, whether in the UN or in individual countries, held on and around the official, international day of remembrance on January 27, have now passed, until next year.

The hollow and disingenuous lip-service payed by international leaders to the greatest tragedy that has befallen the Jewish people, has passed.

The annual “day in the sun” of professors, Holocaust researchers and experts, whether in research centers in Israeli universities or elsewhere, is over until next year.

Life must go on.

The international community can now get back to its routine and regular agenda of political correctness. It can get back to ignoring and sidestepping the most tragic violations of human rights in the centers of conflict in Syria, Africa and elsewhere.

The UN and the EU and their organs can return to adopting meaningless and futile political resolutions, generated by political groupings with specific political agendas that achieve nothing other than to fan the embers of hatred and antisemitism.

The world can now get back to pandering to autocratic regimes, to ayatollahs and to artificial leaders, purveyors of incitement and hatred that seek, through their actions and words, to sow the seeds of the next Holocaust.

[The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.]
Even more disturbing is the role of UNICEF — which was created to help children around the world. In 2013, UNICEF’s “copy and paste” version of the unverifiable and false claims made by NGOs like DCIP (based on “affidavits” that officials cannot understand or verify) gave them a UN seal of approval and significant legitimacy. In 2015, after Israeli officials demonstrated the systematic errors, and the degree to which their treatment of minors involved in illegal activities is consistent with international standards, the UNICEF office in Jerusalem acknowledged the falsehoods in discussions with Israeli officials. But in public, where the propaganda wars are waged, the UN organization and its NGO allies continue to quote the original.

Joining DCIP and UNICEF in this cynical campaign are the American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International, the so-called Jewish Voice for Peace, and the “Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel” (EAPPI) — which brings activists for three months to “witness” the suffering of Palestinian children and is run by the notoriously anti-Israel World Council of Churches.

In addition to adding its prestige to political warfare that exploits children, and laundering the false allegations targeting Israel, UNICEF funds a number of the organizations in this unholy alliance, including DCI-P and EAPPI. Together, their goal is the get the UN Secretary General to add the IDF to the notorious group of warlords and failed states listed under the Children and Armed Conflict resolution, which includes ISIS and Boko Haram. Although UNICEF officials claim to be uninvolved in this effort, they are the ones who select the NGOs in their “working group” and in provide funding to DCI-P and EAPPI.

As a result of these factors, UNICEF’s reports on Israel are far more bellicose in comparison to other Middle Eastern countries. The allegations of “widespread and systematic abuse” echo the definition of crimes against humanity in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. UNICEF does not employ similar language in other conflict situations, sharpening the conclusion that the organization singles out Israel for political, rather than substantive reasons.

Countering the cynical “child mistreatment” propaganda requires highlighting the foundation of lies, and the naming and shaming of the participants, including the NGOs. In parallel, UNICEF officials and donors, including the US, Canadian, Japanese and European governments, must be pressed to review funding and move to end this complicity. The individuals and foundations who give generously to UNICEF under the illusion that unlike other UN bodies, this one actually acts morally, should reconsider. If UNICEF officials are seriously concerned about protecting children like Ahed Tamimi, as well as the Israeli child victims the ongoing terror war, they should keep far away from such exploitation.

Perhaps as disturbing as the resurgence of anti-Semitism on the hard left is the reluctance of leftists who aren’t anti-Semites to acknowledge it. This reluctance, argues John-Paul Pagano, stems directly from trends in left-wing thinking that have created a special blindness to the hatred of Jews.

[This] erasure of anti-Semitism . . . exposes a huge moral failure at the heart of the modern left. Under the enveloping paradigm of “intersectionality,” people are granularly defined by their various identities—except for white Jews, whose Jewishness is often overwritten by their skin color. . . .

[I]n a key sense, regular racism, [directed] against blacks and Latinos for example, is the opposite of anti-Semitism. [This sort of bigotry] comes from white people believing they are superior to people of [other races]. But the hatred of Jews stems from the belief that Jews are a cabal with supernatural, [or near-supernatural], powers. . . . Whereas the white racist regards blacks as inferior, the anti-Semite imagines that Jews have preternatural power to afflict humankind. . . . If Jews have power, then “punching up” at Jews is a form of “speaking truth to power”—a form of speech of which the left is currently enamored. In other words, it is because anti-Semitism pretends to strike at power that the left cannot see it, and is doomed to erase—and even reproduce—its tropes. . . .

Above all else, anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about the maleficent Jewish elite. And it’s this that makes it easy to disguise anti-Semitism as a “politics of liberation,” or at least, to embed it quietly in efforts for social justice. You can see this in the resuscitated efforts of groups like Black4Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace to portray Israel and America as bastions of capitalist white supremacy that collude to brutalize “people of color.” . . .

When the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas delivered his recent rant of over two hours to assembled Palestinian leaders, he alleged wild conspiracies, . . . [declaring] that “Israel has imported frightening amounts of drugs in order to destroy our younger generation.” In response, the [lobbying] group J Street, after rejecting “the divisive and inflammatory rhetoric used by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,” complained that Donald Trump had provoked Abbas to despair [rather than acknowledging that Abbas has thought and said such things about Jews for his entire career].

The Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch condemned the U.N. election of Turkey as Vice-Chair of the committee that accredits and oversees the work of non-governmental human rights groups at the world body, noting that the Erdogan regime arrests, jails and persecutes human rights activists, journalists and students.

“Electing Turkey’s Erdogan regime to oversee the work of human rights activists at the U.N. is like picking the fox to guard the henhouse, as he is still wiping the feathers off his mouth from his last meal,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.

“This election is absurd, and casts a shadow upon the reputation of the United Nations as a whole,” said Neuer.

The diplomat elected on January 29th to represent the Erdogan regime on the committee was Ceren Hande Özgür.

“It underscores the degree to which this vital committee—which has the power to suspend the U.N. credentials of human rights groups—has been hijacked by the world’s worst dictatorships.”

The leader of the Anti-Defamation League has called on former President Barack Obama to again denounce Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

The request by Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s national director, follows the release of a photo taken of the two men in 2005, when Obama was a US senator from Illinois and a rising political star.

“Over his career, @barackobama has denounced the bigotry of Farrakhan. Time to do so again,” Greenblatt tweeted Sunday. “Leaders always should make sure that there’s no doubt: America is no place for those who advocate #antisemitism or hate.”

The Trice Edney News Wire first published the photo on Jan. 20 and quotes the photographer, Askia Muhammad, as saying that after snapping the picture at a meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus, an unidentified member of the caucus asked him immediately not to run the photo. As there was already talk in 2005 of Obama running for president, Muhammad said he and others did not want to harm the Democrat’s chances.

Farrakhan expressed support for Obama’s candidacy in 2008, and Obama’s pastor at the time, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had praised Farrakhan on multiple occasions. That made Farrakhan an issue during the primaries campaign that year, and Obama’s rival at the time, Hillary Clinton, called on him to repudiate Farrakhan. Obama did so during a primaries debate.

Glenn R. Simpson, the co-founder of the controversial opposition research firm Fusion GPS, espoused a conspiracy theory claiming that Vladimir Putin “essentially took over the Russian Jewish community” and that Putin uses “the Jewish Diaspora” as a route for Russian influence.

Simpson’s outlandish claim was made during testimony on November 14 before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, a transcript of which was released two weeks ago. His statements, which arguably contain anti-Semitic undertones, were almost entirely ignored by the news media.

The claims may offer a window into the conspiratorial thinking of the firm behind the infamous, largely discredited 35-page anti-Trump dossier alleging unsubstantiated collusion between Russia and President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

During testimony, Simpson stated, “I am sort of thinking back to one of the other questions that Congressman Schiff asked about, things to look at.” Simpson was referring to requests from Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who repeatedly asked the Fusion GPS co-founder during the testimony for recommendations of whom to subpoena or items to investigate as part of the Russia collusion probe.

Simpson then delved into his Putin-Jewish conspiracy. “And it’s kind of an uncomfortable — I don’t know really how to put it, but there is a lot of — Putin seems to be very interested in the Jewish Diaspora.”

“And there seems to be, especially, the sort of Orthodox or ultra-religious or conservative, and there is a definitely something interesting to all that,” Simpson stated. “Chabad, in particular, is a subject that is curious and interesting.”

Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has helped to fuel a record number of attacks on the Jewish community, a charity has warned.

The Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors anti-Semitism, recorded 1,382 anti-Semitic incidents nationwide in 2017 which they said was “unprecedented”.

This was the highest tally the organisation has registered for a calendar year since it began gathering the data in 1984. The figure was up by 3 per cent compared with 1,346 in 2016, which had itself been a record annual total.

“The high incident levels throughout 2017 continued the pattern of 2016 in which high incident numbers were sustained by a combination of factors, including an increase in all forms of recorded hate crime and publicity regarding alleged anti-Semitism in the Labour Party,” the report said.

These factors may have caused higher levels of incidents as well as encouraging more reporting of anti-Semitic incidents from victims and witnesses in the Jewish community, the CST said.

The most common single type of incident in 2017 involved verbal abuse randomly directed at Jewish people in public. Three-quarters of all the anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in Greater London and Greater Manchester, where the two largest Jewish communities in the UK are located.

"Often increases in anti-Semitic incidents have been attributable to reactions to specific trigger events that cause identifiable, short-term spikes in incident levels,” the CST's report found.

"However, this was not the case in 2017. Instead, it appears that the factors that led to a general, sustained high level of anti-Semitic incidents in 2016 have continued throughout much of 2017."

In advance of the 37th Council session (February 26 – March 23, 2018), the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has released a report on the “BDS blacklist” of companies that do business with Israelis over the 1949 Armistice Line. Pursuant to UNHRC Resolution 31/36, promoted by the dictatorships that dominate the Council, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is tasked with preparing a database of business enterprises that are allegedly committing human rights violations against Palestinians by operating in Israeli settlements.

The report, submitted by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, provides important details on the flawed process and the difficulties inherent in creating a list of companies to be targeted by this form of BDS. Most importantly, the database will only be published “in a future update”; a specific date or time frame is not provided.

Concerns about due process for the companies involved, which resulted in an initial delay of one-year when raised by NGO Monitor in January 2017, are highlighted in the report.

Furthermore, the question of whether the UNHRC has sufficient funds to assess the credibility of allegations related to such a database is also raised.

The United Nations human rights office said on Wednesday it had identified 206 companies doing business linked to Israeli settlements in the West Bank and it urged them to avoid any complicity in “pervasive” violations against Palestinians.

Israel fears that companies listed on any UN “blacklist” could be targeted for boycotts or divestment aimed at stepping up pressure over its settlements, which most countries and the world body view as illegal.

“Businesses play a central role in furthering the establishment, maintenance and expansion of Israeli settlements,” the UN report said.

“In doing so, they are contributing to Israel’s confiscation of land, facilitate the transfer of its population into the Occupied Palestinian Territory and are involved in the exploitation of Palestine’s natural resources,” it said.

The majority of the companies, or 143, are domiciled in Israel or the settlements, followed by 22 in the United States, it said. The remainder are based in 19 other countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, France and Britain.

The UN report did not name the companies and said that its database was not yet complete.

Israel’s ambassador, Aviva Raz Shechter, said her government was still studying the report, launched by a resolution of the UN Human Rights Council in March 2016, but rejected the concept as “fundamentally illegitimate.”

The US said it plans to remain in the United Nations Human Rights Council after publication was delayed of a list of companies doing business over the pre-1967 Green Line.

The Trump administration had previously threatened to leave the council unless it ended its biased treatment of Israel, including the publication of the database.

“The US remains a member of the Human Rights Council and intends to be fully engaged at the upcoming March session,” a US official told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights had been scheduled to release a database of those companies by the end of 2017, as mandated by the UNHRC in 2016.

But it did not meet that December deadline and in a progress report published on Wednesday stated: “OHCHR was given limited resources to carry out the mandate within the anticipated time frame, which required it to calibrate its research and engagement with companies accordingly.”

“Not all companies about which OHCHR had received information could be contacted by the time of submission of the present report,” the office wrote.

It explained that it whittled down an initial list of 321 companies believed to meet the criteria for inclusion in the database down to 206. Out of those, it had contacted only 64.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Wednesday slammed a UN report on 206 companies with ties to Israeli settlements as “a waste of time and resources” that showed an “anti-Israeli obsession.”

The office of the UN high commissioner for human rights released the report that did not name the companies but could pave the way to a “blacklist” of businesses that Israeli officials fear would be targeted for an international boycott.

“This whole issue is outside the bounds of the High Commissioner for Human Rights office’s mandate and is a waste of time and resources,” Haley said in a statement.

The report was in response to a resolution adopted in 2016 by the UN Human Rights Council that called for the creation of database of all companies doing business with the Israeli settlements, which the United Nations considers illegal under international law.

“While we note that they wisely refrained from listing individual companies, the fact that the report was issued at all is yet another reminder of the Council’s anti-Israel obsession,” said Haley.

In Washington, the State Department lashed out at "such biased and politicized actions taken against Israel."

"We have not provided, and will not provide, any information or support to the Office of the High Commissioner in this process," the U.S. statement said. "We strongly urge other countries to do the same."

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said an Israeli and U.S. pressure campaign to block publication of the company names violates international law.

"We call upon the secretary-general of the U.N. to publish the names of the companies that are doing business with the settlements," he said. "Settlements are illegal according to international law and thus companies doing business with it should be known because what they are doing is illegal."

Advocacy group Human Rights Watch urged more resources for the rights office to continue its work.

"Today's report shows progress in identifying and communicating with companies that contribute to serious abuses in Israeli settlements in the West Bank," said Sari Bashi, Israel and Palestine advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

Eugene Kontorovich, head of International Law at the Kohelet Policy Forum, a conservative think-tank in Jerusalem, said no international law was being violated by countries who do business in occupied lands, including in the settlements, and said Israel was being singled out unfairly.

"The U.N. Human Rights Council is supposed to be about human rights, not Israeli wrongs, so to create a report just about Israel seems to go against its own mission," he said.

Could one reason for the discrepancy be complacency and passivity on the part of those who cherish tolerance and peaceful coexistence? Groups harboring antisemitism, whether politically or irrationally motivated, tend to be activists who deliberately strategize to foment cultural or religious war. Fueled by hate, they often are aggressive and vociferous, building or infiltrating political and societal structures, to include colleges and universities – seeking influence and allies to spread their message and drive their agenda.

One such group is Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). While it promotes itself as standing for human rights, it advocates for the destruction of Israel, embraces known terrorists as people to be admired and on university and college campuses creates a hostile atmosphere by intimidating and bullying Jewish students and those who express pro-Israel views.

Due to a lack of knowledge of the driving core values of this organization, its influence is growing as liberal academics and others buy into its sugar-coated rhetoric. A case in point is one liberal Democrat senator from South Carolina who is standing in the way of the passage of a bill which would clearly define antisemitism. He’s doing so because he is a supporter of SJP.

You’re probably wondering how this is possible in a state that is pro-Israel. Well, not only is he a state senator, he is also a liberal academic who needs to do a bit of homework on SJP.

Political, judicial, academic and media elites wield undue influence over schools, government, the courts, and information. Islamic State (ISIS) was quick to learn that lesson and we here in America must learn it too, and quickly – especially those in the churches, the legislatures, our institutions of higher learning and the courts.

Words have power and words make a difference – spoken or written, for good or for evil. Complacency and ignorance are humanity’s worst enemies. To remain silent creates fertile ground in which antisemites can smear the Jew through evil words and evil deeds. Who cares? Civilized people care.

Personally, I was startled when I first saw the book’s cover, though for a completely different reason. When I saw the cute Palestinian girl, I thought, “hey – I’ve seen that kid before!” The odd thing was that I remembered her as Jew.

Just about 100 years ago, a series of postcards was printed in Russia that imagined children as political actors representing different political parties and orientations that had entered the political lexicon during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Bolsheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Capitalists, and the Anarchists, among others, were all drawn by famed illustrator Vladimir Taburin as adorable children dressed in a representative ideological garb.

Among them was a postcard representing the Bund, the revolutionary Jewish socialist party. A small, slightly chubby, doe-eyed, rosy-cheeked, boy with dark curly hair – an intentionally Jewish-looking child within the blond world of Russian politics, was drawn to represent the pre-eminent Jewish political party of the day. When I saw the P is for Palestine girl’s face, I immediately thought of the pistol-packing Bundist boychik. They were practically the same.

The similarities are, without doubt, purely coincidental. But the likenesses are pretty remarkable. An interesting side note is that neither image was drawn by a Jew or a Palestinian and both represent a type of idealized othering.

By now it’s a bit glib to say that Jews and Palestinians have something in common, even if it might really be true. Jews once fought for civil rights with bombs and guns as well. But don’t expect either side to focus on the similarities in either of their histories, current situations, or even their dark, curly hair.

The Jewish parents who complained about the book in the first place did the authors a great favor by giving them heaps of free publicity. Those supporting the Palestinian side smartly grabbed it and ran. Sadly, the only loser in the equation is Book Culture, which only wants to sell books. Who knew the children’s section of the bookstore could be such a minefield?

Vladimir Taburin, the artist who, 101 years ago, drew the revolutionary postcards of political actors as children, knew exactly what he was doing: It’s the adults in our world that are responsible for most childish of tantrums.

Why are Google and YouTube sponsoring a day-long symposium featuring a roster of speakers including known Islamist anti-Semites, as well as known militant Islamists who are long time Israel bashers and Hamas supporters? And why are Google and YouTube providing a forum for Islamists who approve of Sharia-imposed "death by stoning?"

This Wednesday's online conference by the British-based Imams Online features a rogues' gallery of Islamists and virulently anti-Semitic, anti-Israel speakers – and it's all being done "in official partnership with Google and YouTube.

One of the conference's three primary goals is "Tackling Rising Islamophobia and the Far Right Threat."

"Islamophobe is what politically correct bullies call people like you and me when we call out radical Islam for what it is," says Muslim reformist Raheel Raza. "...They actually call me, a practicing Muslim woman, an Islamophobe. Why? Because I speak out against radical Islam."

But spreading the false claim of rising Islamophobia actually can be seen as a national security threat. This is because that concept is based upon the false notion that there is a Western conspiracy against Islam – and that is the primary claim and motivation that induces jihadi terrorist attacks on western targets.

"Islamists hope to insulate themselves from charges of supporting jihadi violence by shooting off accusations of 'Islamophobia,'" Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes, himself smeared as an "Islamophobe," told the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT). "Sadly, not only do many not-too-bright individuals of good will fall for this deception, but in the process, this ploy becomes a national security threat by confirming jihadi paranoia about the world being out to destroy Islam."

At the end of 2017, a monumental piece of legislation to curb anti-American and anti-Israel biases on college campuses was passed by the House Committee on Education and Workforce. The Higher Education Act (HEA) — last reauthorized in 2008, and now renamed the “PROSPER Act” — is the primary federal law governing higher education. Within the law is a statute called Title VI, which includes a section that provides grants for international and foreign language studies.

Unfortunately, for many decades, some of these grants have supported a number of professors and programs on university campuses that espouse anti-American, anti-Israel — and at times — antisemitic viewpoints, in violation of federal law. The new language within Title VI of the PROSPER Act, included by the House committee, seeks to remedy these biases.

On January 25, a group of 14 Jewish, educational and civil rights organizations sent a letter to Chairman Lamar Alexander (R, TN) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D, WA) of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, urging the committee to adopt the new Title VI language that is included within the PROSPER Act.

The original intent of Title VI of HEA was to prepare students to serve the national security needs of the United States, by funding foreign language and area studies programs at universities. These area studies programs, known as National Resource Centers (NRCs), receive millions of US taxpayer dollars each year. However, research shows that these funds are largely misused and abused by their recipients.

Prominent Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan remained in custody in Paris on Thursday after spending a night behind bars over rape allegations that emerged in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

The Oxford professor was taken into custody on Wednesday as part of a preliminary inquiry in Paris into rape and assault allegations, with a legal source saying investigators wanted to question him further on Thursday morning.

Ramadan, a Swiss national whose grandfather founded Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Islamist movement, has furiously denied separate accusations from two Muslim women that he raped them in French hotel rooms in 2009 and 2012.

A regular face on French television, the 55-year-old academic is the most prominent figure to be held in France over the sexual assault and harassment claims that have rippled around the world as a result of the online “Me Too” campaign.

Henda Ayari, a feminist activist who used to practice a conservative strain of Islam, had described being raped in a book published in 2016, without naming her attacker.

The South African Zionist Federation has condemned the boycott calls by anti-Israel groups of the Davis Cup “tie-in” tennis matches between South Africa and Israel, scheduled to take place over Friday and Saturday.

“It comes as no surprise that the likes of BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions South Africa], PSA [Palestine Solidarity Alliance], PSC [Palestine Solidarity Committee] and the NC4P [National Coalition 4 Peace] have banded together to call for a public boycott to ‘smash’ Israel at the SA Tennis courts,” SAZF chairman Ben Swartz said.

“In a typical stance of vicious recourse, the call for protest by the aforementioned organizations, paired with a visual of a demonstrator wearing a gas mask and hitting a smoke bomb with a tennis racket, was posted across social media,” he said.

“This continued, destructive, disruptive, aggressive and nonsensical behavior breeds amongst those that are easily manipulated to hate, without understanding the real facts. They leech onto any event in which they feel they can influence their blind followers, leading them down a dark path of hate-fueled lies and misinformation.”

Swartz questioned how this behavior allows for peaceful negotiations and a way forward, “which they continuously blame everyone else but themselves for obstructing.”

“We implore the broader public not to be persuaded by extremist behavior [of] those who propose these boycotts – which often leads to violence,” he continued.

The proliferation white supremacist propaganda on US college campuses has seen a dramatic increase since the fall of 2016, according to a new report released by the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday.

The ADL describes the new statistics as “alarming,”and noted its Center on Extremism recorded 346 incidents where white supremacists have used fliers, stickers, banners, and posters to spread their message since September 1, 2016.

These incidents targeted 216 college campuses -- from Ivy League schools to local community colleges -- in 44 states and Washington, D.C.

During the fall semester of 2017 (Sept. 1 through Dec. 31), there were 147 such incidents, a staggering 258% increase over the 41 incidents that took place during the fall semester of 2016.

“White supremacists are targeting college campuses like never before,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said.

“They see campuses as a fertile recruiting ground, as evident by the unprecedented volume of propagandist activity designed to recruit young people to support their vile ideology.”

Clearly both those headlines and presentations suggest to BBC audiences that Ahed Tamimi has been charged with terrorism following her assault of a soldier – but that disingenuous implication is false.

The twelve charges against Ahed Tamimi do however include one count of incitement that relates to a video put out by her mother on social media in which Ahed Tamimi’s “message to the world” – as it was described by her mother – was:

“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”

The BBC knows about that charge and has mentioned it in two previously aired radio reports.

“Now there are 12 charges against Ahed Tamimi. She’s appeared before a military court. These relate to six different incidents. She’s charged with 5 counts of assaulting soldiers, also with throwing rocks, incitement to violence…” Yolande Knell, BBC World Service radio, 1/1/18

“Maurice Hirsch used to be the IDF chief prosecutor for the West Bank. He says the more serious charges against Ahed involved her alleged online call for more action to support the Palestinian cause – from protests to what she calls martyrdom operations. […]

[Hirsch]: One of the main counts of the indictment is really incitement – publicly calling for others to commit other terrorist attacks.” Yolande Knell, BBC Radio 4, 8/1/18

Jeremy Bowen, however, chose to conceal Tamimi’s statement calling for violence – and the resulting charge – from viewers of both his filmed reports.

Of the 120 Knesset members the BBC could have interviewed for an Israeli point of view on Ahed Tamimi’s trial, Jeremy Bowen chose a disgraced, provocative politician and well-known enfant terrible, Oren Hazan.

Viewers of “Is a Slap an Act of Terror?” on the prime time BBC News at Ten, wouldn’t be aware that Hazan, a Likud MK, has a history of disgraceful PR stunts and character issues, or that he had been suspended from the Knesset the same day the segment aired.

This was not a random selection made by Bowen, the BBC’s Mideast editor. Hazan’s history includes:

• Threatening Palestinians visiting imprisoned relatives.
• Accepting a Jordanian lawmaker’s challenge to a fist fight (called off only by the personal intervention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu).
• Sparking the ire of Israelis and French Jews by endorsing far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.
• Breaking protocol to take a selfie with President Donald Trump.
• Suspended from the Knesset for mocking another lawmaker’s disability.
• When Hazan sued Israeli Channel 2 for a report accusing him of pimping prostitutes and both using and dealing hard drugs while managing a casino in Bulgaria, the judge ruled there was sufficient evidence of the drug use and pimping, and that Channel 2’s only error was saying Hazan had dealt drugs.

In response to communication from CAMERA, editors commendably amended the digital edition, removing the false reference to a prohibition against marking the Nakba. The revised text now accurately states:

I am not comparing the Holocaust to the Nakba, neither in scope nor intent. However, should remember that Israel, too, via the offices of Culture Minister Miri Regev, is doing everything in its power to deny funding for organizations that nonetheless wish to commemorate the Nakba.

(Regev's efforts, whatever one may think of them, concern only state funding, and not other sources of funding.)

In addition, editors commendably appended the following note to the bottom of the article alerting readers to the change.

The correction has yet to appear in the print edition. In addition, as of this writing, a relic of the original error continues to appear in the Op-Ed's last paragraph, which incorrectly states:

So long as Israel turns its back on the Palestinians’ pain and forbids them to make their voices heard legally, peace in our region will not be possible.

CAMERA continues to urge Haaretz to correct the last paragraph.

CAMERA's Israel office yesterday prompted improvement of a brief Associated Press article yesterday which initially omitted the fact that one of two Jordanians fatally shot by an Israeli embassy guard had first attacked the Israeli ("Israel gradually reopens embassy in Jordan after end of spat").

The original wording (7:40 am GMT) had stated:

The embassy was closed after a shooting last summer there in which two Jordanians were killed. Israel's ambassador returned to Israel along with the guard involved in the shooting. The guard claimed self-defense and received a hero's welcome at home, angering Jordanians.

CAMERA contacted the Associated Press, noting that the news agency's coverage from July, with just a few words, noted that one of the Jordanians attacked the Israeli, prompting the shooting: "On Sunday, a guard at the Israeli Embassy in Jordan shot dead two Jordanians after one attacked him with a screw driver" ("Analysis: Jerusalem shrine crisis hardens leaders' positions," July 30, emphasis added).

Jordan's Public Security Directorate itself acknowledged that one of the Jordanians attacked the Israeli guard, stating: "the son of carpentry owner attacked the Israeli diplomat who responded by shooting the carpenters the apartment owner" [sic].

In response, AP commendably updated the story (9:30 AM GMT), adding the key information that one of the Jordanians attacked the Israeli guard with a screw driver. The improved text states:

The embassy was closed after a shooting last summer there in which an Israeli guard shot and killed two Jordanians after one attacked him with a screw driver.

The number of anti-Semitic attacks recorded in the United Kingdom rose slightly in 2017 to 1,382 cases, marking a new all-time record.

The 3 percent increase in 2017 over the previous year was recorded in the annual report of the Community Security Trust, or CST, which is British Jewry’s largest watchdog on anti-Semitism.

In the report published Thursday, CST recorded a 34-percent increase in the number of violent anti-Semitic assaults, from 108 in 2016 to 145 in 2017.

The most common single type of incident recorded by CST in 2017 involved verbal abuse randomly directed at visibly Jewish people in public, accounting for a quarter of the annual tally, or 356 incidents.

CST has recorded anti-Semitic incidents since 1984. In 2013, the watchdog recorded only 535 incidents. That figure more than doubled in 2014, when Israel launched a military campaign against Hamas in Gaza. The 2015 tally comprised 960 incidents, followed by an increase to 1,346 cases in 2016.

In 420 cases recorded last year, witnesses gave descriptions of the alleged perpetrators. In those cases, 57 percent were described as Europeans and 25 percent as Arab or black.

One of France’s leading Jewish figures has sharply criticized what he described as media indifference to the news on Wednesday of the country’s latest antisemitic outrage, in which an 8-year-old kippah-wearing Jewish boy was subjected to a brutal attack.

The incident took place on Monday in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, where a significant Jewish community lives among a much larger population of Muslims from the Middle East and Africa. The suspects — believed to be around age 15 — were hidden behind garbage cans and attacked the boy as he walked alone to a tutoring class. They pushed the boy to the ground and punched and kicked him, running off without stealing any of the items he was carrying. The boy is reported to be physically stable, but suffering from shock.

French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the assault as an “attack on the Republic,” while Interior Minister Gérard Collomb condemned what he called a “cowardly aggression.” But the reporting of the incident in the media led one influential Jewish figure to wonder aloud on Wednesday whether French journalists had genuinely understood the gravity of the attack.

“This morning, I turned on my radio and I heard the following comment: ‘The Jewish community is in shock,'” Marc Knobel — a historian and the director of studies at CRIF, the French-Jewish communal body — wrote on the CRIF website.

“Does it concern only the Jewish community when an 8-year-old child is assaulted because he wears a kippah and is a Jew?” Knobel asked pointedly.

“Why should only Jews react and feel concerned by such an assault?” Knobel continued. “Should the nation be insensitive when children are assaulted — black, white, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, other?”

Austrian police have found a hoard of Nazi memorabilia in the home of a Social Democrat politician, who has been arrested on suspicion of sexually abusing his grandchildren, only days after a regional election.

The unnamed Social Democrat (SPÖ) was arrested last Thursday by police in the region of Lower Austria in connection with child abuse that is said to have gone on for several years. Once police searched the man’s home, they found a number of weapons, including hand grenades, and Nazi memorabilia, including uniforms, Kronen Zeitung reports.

Prosecutor Leopold Bien said that investigators were still trying to determine whether the politician, said to be in his mid-50s, was merely a collector of Nazi artefacts or whether he held sympathies for the National Socialist ideology.

The arrest came shortly before the regional elections in Lower Austria which were held over the weekend and saw a landslide win for the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) of Sebastian Kurz.

B’nai Brith Canada has filed a complaint with the Calgary Police Service over the virulently antisemitic content being promoted by a group, Muslims in Calgary, on its website and Facebook page.

On Wednesday, a concerned community member alerted B’nai Brith to an article posted by the group on Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which the author denies that six-million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, claiming that the Holocaust has been exaggerated by Jews in order to attract global sympathy.

The author of the article is none other than David Duke, a U.S. white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Other posts made by Muslims in Calgary in January describe Israel as “a scourge, a cancer that needs to be dealt with” and tout infographics designed by Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group committed to murdering Jews worldwide. Ironically, this antisemitic material is interspersed with other posts decrying anti-Muslim hatred in Canada.

The Muslims in Calgary website solicits funds for four mosques in the Calgary area, including one run by the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC). In October, B’nai Brith filed a complaint with Vancouver police and relevant Canadian authorities after an imam at a local MAC mosque referred to Israelis as “an impure gang” and urged his congregants to send “money, weapons and expertise” to the Palestinians for use against Israel.

Bulgarian Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova met on Monday with Energy and Water Minister Yuval Steinitz and informed him that her country was interested in buying natural gas from Israel, which it would receive via Greece's connection to the Israel-Europe undersea pipeline.

Petkova announced that Bulgaria, in conjunction with the Greek government, was planning to build a gas pipeline connecting it to the EastMed Pipeline Project. She also invited Steinitz to attend a summit of European energy ministers in Bulgaria this coming April.

Additionally, the European Union is allotting €35 million ($43 million) to better explore the route of the natural gas pipeline from Israel to Europe.

The pipeline, which will be about 2,200 kilometers (1,400 miles) long, will extend from Israel's offshore Leviathan reservoir to Cyprus, Greece and Italy.

For the EU, the decision to invest the considerable sum illustrates the importance of importing Israeli gas and building the undersea pipeline.

The world is about to revolve around Pyongyang, a mountainous county in the northern half of South Korea, for the upcoming Winter Olympics.

Jewish fans won’t have quite as many standout athletes to cheer for this year as they did in 2016, when multiple American members of the tribe won medals at the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. But there are several compelling Jewish stories to catch up on before the action starts.

Israel is sending its largest team ever.

Before this year, the largest Israeli delegation at a Winter Olympics was five. That shouldn’t sound too surprising, given that over 60 percent of the country’s landscape is desert, and it isn’t the best place for winter sports training.

This year, however, the record will double.

Seven of Israel’s 10 representatives will compete in figure skating. That group is anchored by Alexei Bychenko, who in 2016 became the first skater to earn a medal for Israel at a European Championships event. Bychenko, 29, who skated for Ukraine until 2009 and has been ranked as one of the top 10 male skaters in the world, is likely Israel’s best chance to win a medal (and like US Jewish gymnast Aly Raisman, Bychenko has been known to perform to “Hava Nagila”).

The Jewish state is sending another kind of skater, too — the faster kind. Vladislav Bykanov, who won a bronze medal earlier this month at the European Championships, will compete in speed skating. Itamar Biran, a 19-year-old born in London, will represent Israel in alpine skiing.

When Hurricane Maria pummeled the Caribbean islands and Puerto Rico last September, most of the island’s infrastructure, buildings and homes were destroyed. Almost half a year later, the damage to Puerto Rico’s water system still poses a looming health crisis for island residents exposed to contaminated water.

Israeli NGO IsraAID distributed and set up water filters in the most affected places, and trained local people how to use them.

Now, the emergency response team is getting some unlikely assistance from 11-year-old Meital Sternthal, an Israeli-American sixth-grader from Modi’in, Israel. In honor of her upcoming bat mitzvah, Meital is hand-making and selling textile bags to raise money to help IsraAID’s team in Puerto Rico provide safe water to the communities affected by the hurricane.

She founded PuertoTiko (tik means bag in Hebrew) to combine her passion for sewing along with her desire to contribute to the Caribbean’s recovery efforts. Her goal is to use 100 percent of the proceeds to raise $4,000 to purchase 100 water filters, including equipment and installation.

To date she has reached 50% of her goal through bag sales and additional donations. Also on offer are baby bibs, pencil cases and tissue holders.

Former fencer Dan Alon passed away Wednesday, over 45 years after surviving the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich.

The 72-year-old died of cancer and left behind a wife and three children.

Alon was present on September 15, 1972, when 11 Israelis were taken hostage by the Black September Palestinian terror group. Two of the Israelis were murdered in the Olympic village and the nine others were executed at the airport; a German policeman was killed in a shootout with the terrorists during a botched rescue attempt.

Alon, who was 27 at the time, was asleep when the terrorist broke into the hotel rooms of the Israeli athletes. He woke up to noises which he initially thought were coming from other celebratory delegations.

When he realized what was unfolding, he jumped out of bed. The fencer, who spoke German, overheard the Palestinians demanding authorities release 200 terrorists in exchange for the Israeli hostages.

Upon recognizing his likely fate, Alon gathered four other athletes — also unseen by the terrorists — and the group jumped from a balcony, landing near the gathering German police forces.

Actors Hugh Grant and Viggo Mortensen are among more than 25 celebrities and public figures expressing "horror" over President Donald Trump's decision to cut funding to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, an advocacy group said Thursday.

"The real target of this lethal attack is the Palestinian people themselves," the group said in a joint statement. "It has been launched with the clear aim of dismantling their rights, by dismantling the institution that is charged with protecting them."

Actresses Gillian Anderson, Olivia Wilde, Emma Thompson and Tilda Swinton were also among the signatories.

Antisemitic hate crimes in the UK have hit a record high, new figures show, prompting calls for more “visible and frequent” prosecutions for such incidents.

The Jewish community was targeted at a rate of nearly four times a day last year, according to statistics from the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity that monitors antisemitism, which recorded 1,382 antisemitic incidents nationwide in 2017.

This was the highest tally the organisation has registered for a calendar year since it began gathering the data in 1984, with the figure up by 3 per cent compared with 2016 – which had itself been a record annual total.

A breakdown of the crimes shows the number of violent antisemitic assaults increased by more than a third (34 per cent), from 108 in 2016 to 145. Three-quarters of all the antisemitic incidents were recorded in Greater London and Greater Manchester, where the two largest Jewish communities in the UK are located.

The most common single type of incident in 2017 involved verbal abuse randomly directed at Jewish people in public, the figures show.

 Of the 221 antisemitic incidents in 2017 showing ideological motivation or beliefs as well as antisemitism, 140 showed far right motivation or beliefs; 67 showed anti-Israel motivation or beliefs; and 14 showed Islamist motivation or beliefs.

There were 145 violent antisemitic assaults reported to CST in 2017, an increase of 34 per cent from the 108 violent incidents recorded in 2016 and the highest number CST has ever recorded in this category. The previous record high was 121 antisemitic assaults in 2009. A wide spectrum of incidents falls within the category of Assault, from minor acts to more violent ones. 

 It is likely that there is significant under-reporting of antisemitic incidents to both CST and the Police, and that the number of antisemitic incidents that took place is significantly higher than the number recorded in this report. A 2013 survey of Jewish experiences and perceptions of antisemitism in the EU found that 72 per cent of British Jews who had experienced antisemitic harassment over the previous five years had not reported it to the Police or to any other organisation; 57 per cent of British Jews who had experienced antisemitic violence or the threat of violence had not reported it; and 46 per cent of British Jews who had suffered antisemitic vandalism to their home or car had not reported it (despite this, UK reporting rates were the highest of the eight countries polled). The same survey also found that, over the previous 12 months, 21 per cent of British Jews had suffered antisemitic harassment, three per cent had suffered antisemitic violence or the threat of violence and two per cent had experienced antisemitic vandalism to their home or car.

Mahmoud Abbas, from website of the President of the Russian Federation

Time has come for Israel and the US to tell PLO that the game is up. With or without Abbas, PLO is a dead man walking and is in no position to demand anything from anyone. Only a mad megalomaniac despot living in fantasyland, issues threats to powerful nations like the US and Israel.

They [the Palestinian Authority] actually are losing all the direction. They have no idea what to do now because they have no agenda. Everything which they believed in turned out to be actually nothing and this frustration I think will bring the end of the Palestinian Authority.

But even in this environment, Mahmoud Abbas, the 82-year-old Palestinian president, cannot escape responsibility for failure. His government is now widely seen as a corrupt gerontocracy. It is inept, remote, self-serving and ever more authoritarian. Elected to a four-year term in January 2005, he’s entering the 14th year of a largely unaccountable presidency.

Official Portrait of President Donald Trump

[W]e delivered a letter today to UNRWA, the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East – UNRWA. We committed a voluntary contribution of $60 million for 2018 so far. This will be divided into tranches. Sixty million is what we have indicated as the first available tranche. That money is going to sustain schools and health services to ensure that teachers and also health care providers can be paid their salaries. One of the reasons we decided to do this is that we felt that not providing that money would run the risk of having the organization and the people there run out of funds and that those entities would have to be potentially closed down.

...We have people on the ground who take a look at some of the UNRWA activities and things they do, how the money is being spent. And one of the things this administration would like to do, just as we talk about UN reform, is take a look at UNRWA, trying to make sure that the money is best spent and best spent so that people can get the services, whether it’s school or the health care services, that they need.

Asked about the decision, the State Department said deliberations are ongoing about how to move forward. This presents a tremendous opportunity, but it will take more bold action by the White House. The administration must continue to hold the Palestinians accountable for their rejectionism.

Like Trump's December move on Jerusalem, this represents a bold step that is long overdue. UNRWA, the UN's Palestinian refugee agency, long has needed reform, but with Palestinian leadership unwilling to even feign serious commitment to peace, it's probably time to scrap the agency altogether. It stands in the way of peace.

• Trump said he was removing the issue of Jerusalem as a negotiating point: "They never got past Jerusalem. We took it off the table. We don’t have to talk about it anymore” -- contrary to what he originally said in December.
• At the same time, Trump made clear removing Jerusalem from the negotiations would eventually require a concession from the Israeli side. He told Netanyahu, “You won one point, and you’ll give up some other points later on in the negotiation — if it ever takes place. I don’t know that it ever will take place.”
• Trump said that the millions the US gives to the Palestinian Authority each year is on the table and would no longer be considered automatic - especially in the face of the Arab refusal to meet with Vice President Pence when he visited Israel.

All assets belonging to Haniyeh under US jurisdiction will be frozen. This designation allows us to dry up the sources of funding and kick them out of the international financial system. We don’t want to only stop the bomber, but the person who buys the bombs.

The Middle East Forum welcomes reports that the Trump administration might "refuse to accept UNRWA's special status for 'Palestine refugees,'" and suspend all U.S. government funding of the group.

The Forum has long sought the end of U.S. recognition of fake Palestinian refugees who never lived in what is today Israel, removing a source of irredentism and terrorism.

On Tuesday in Bethlehem, the Palestinians demonstrated the choice the Americans now face in their dealings with Fatah – the supposedly moderate PLO faction that controls the Palestinian Authority and the PLO. President Donald Trump and his advisers can play by Fatah’s rules or they can walk away.

On Tuesday a delegation of diplomats from the US Consulate in Jerusalem came to Bethlehem to participate in a meeting of the local chamber of commerce. When they arrived in the city, Fatah members attacked them. Their vehicles with diplomatic license plates were pelted with tomatoes and eggs by a mob of protesters calling out anti-American slogans.

After the Americans entered the hall where the meeting was scheduled to take place, some of the rioters barged in. They held placards condemning America and they shouted, “Americans Out!”

Some of the demonstrators cursed the Palestinians present, accusing them of treason for participating in a meeting with Americans. According to the news reports, the scene became tense and violent. The American officials beat a speedy retreat. As they departed the city, the Fatah rioters continued attacking their cars, kicking them and throwing eggs at them, until they were gone.

The attack on Tuesday was a natural progression.

On Saturday, Fatah members in Bethlehem-area UN camps convened to carry out a very public “people’s tribunal.” Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were tried for “racism” and “bias” against the Palestinians.

The “tribunal” found them guilty and sentenced the president and vice president to death by hanging. Their bodies, the “judges” decided, were to be burned.

In the event, the crowd burned effigies of Trump and Pence.
The implication of the “trial” was clear. Americans like Israelis should be killed.

A year ago it looked like Donald Trump was going to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Some of his closest advisers pushed for it. U.S. allies like Egypt quietly made the case too. Many Republicans in Congress also believed the movement that created political Islam should be treated like al Qaeda.

It didn't happen. Trump administration officials tell me the initial proposal last year to designate the entire Muslim Brotherhood, which includes chapters and offshoots in countries all over the world, stalled out. By the time the White House approved its national security strategy in December, it didn't even mention the Muslim Brotherhood by name.

Instead the Trump administration has settled on a more refined approach, seeking to designate violent chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists, but not going after the entire organization. As the national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, told reporters in December: "We will be evaluating each organization on its own terms. The organization is not monolithic or homogenous."

In some ways this approach is not new. The Obama administration managed to reach out to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the Arab Spring in 2011, and nonetheless treat its Palestinian wing, Hamas, as terrorists. There are no plans for the Trump administration to attempt to find common ground with the Muslim Brotherhood, U.S. officials tell me. But the administration is getting more aggressive against the Brotherhood's violent affiliates.

The evidence linking Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah to the 2012 bomb attack in Burgas, Bulgaria, is undeniable.

Yet, astoundingly, the Bulgarian state prosecution does not even mention the word “Hezbollah” in its indictment of the two living men allegedly involved in the attack. Nor does the indictment mention that the bombing, which left five Israelis and their Bulgarian bus driver dead and 32 Israelis wounded, was an act of terrorism.

Why would Bulgaria’s prosecutor leave out the terrorist dimension of the attack and omit the involvement of Hezbollah?

Tsvetan Tsvetanov, Bulgaria’s interior minister at the time of the attack, announced in 2012, “We have established that the two [accused] were members of the militant wing of the Hezbollah.” He added, “There is data showing the financing and connection between Hezbollah and the two suspects.” Tsvetanov’s successor made similar comments.

In 2013, then-foreign minister of Bulgaria Nikolay Mladenov said the government would not have issued a statement linking Hezbollah to the Burgas bombing if it did not have evidence.

Europol, which coordinates policing across the 27 European Union states, has linked Hezbollah to the attack. So has the US.
Three Hezbollah terrorists were involved: the bomber, Lebanese-French national Muhammad Hassan El-Husseini, who died in the explosion, and two additional suspects: Lebanese-Australian Meliad Farah and Lebanese-Canadian Hassan El Hajj Hassan, who fled to Lebanon where the country’s political leaders have ignored Bulgaria’s extradition requests.

The Bulgarian prosecutor’s strange unwillingness to implicate Hezbollah in the bombing is reminiscent of a recent Politico report on the Obama administration’s purported intentional obstruction of investigations by the US’s Drug Enforcement Administration into drug trafficking and money laundering by Hezbollah.

According to the Politico report, in its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran and out of a realization that going after Hezbollah at a time when the US was negotiating with its patron might kill the deal, the Obama administration purposely stymied the investigations, which were code-named Project Cassandra.

For many years, Palestinians and their supporters around the world have been condemning Israel for arresting suspected terrorists without trial.

It turns out, however, that the Palestinian Authority (PA) also has a similar policy that permits one of its senior officials to order the arrest of any Palestinian, regardless of the nature of the offense he or she commits.

Israel holds suspected terrorists in "administrative detention" on the basis of laws such as: Israeli Military Order regarding no. 1651 Security Provisions, Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law and Defense (Emergency) Regulations, a law that replaces the emergency laws from the period of the British Mandate of Palestine (1920-1948).

It is worth noting that Israeli citizens, and not only Palestinians, have also been held in "administrative detention" over the past few decades. This means that Israel does not distinguish between a Palestinian and an Israeli when it comes to combatting terrorism.

While the campaign against Israel's "administrative detentions" has been going on, the Palestinian Authority has been, according to Palestinian human rights activists and lawyers, conducting unlawful and arbitrary arrests against its own constituents.

Once again, the double standards of the Palestinians and their international supporters have been exposed.

A decade ago, Israelis gave little thought to the issue of illegal immigration.

In 2006, there were 2,766 illegal migrants in Israel, nearly all of them from Eritrea and Sudan, who had entered Israel through its then-open, 150-mile border with Egypt.

In 2007, the dam of illegal immigration burst.

According to Israel’s Immigration and Population Authority, 5,179 African migrants – predominantly from Eritrea and Sudan — entered Israel from Egypt in 2007. The illegal migration reached its peak in 2011, when 17,281 arrived.

When you consider that in 2011, Israel’s total population stood at 7.7 million, that means that as a portion of its total population, Israel absorbed 95 times more illegal aliens that year than Spain did.

The illegal aliens settled overwhelmingly in poor neighborhoods in Tel Aviv. Violent crime in the areas skyrocketed with their arrival. Sexual offenses in neighborhoods with high percentages of African migrants were 3.5 times higher than in their rates in the general population. Violent crime was 2.5 times higher. Robberies occurred six times more often.

A survey of area residents taken by the Israeli police in 2015 showed that only 38 percent felt secure outside their homes after dark. Only 43 percent felt safe in their homes after dark.

Ron Jager, an IDF veteran and former Commander of Israel’s Central Psychiatric Military Clinic for Reserve Soldiers, has written an insightful piece comparing the unhinged and slanderous attempts to oust President Donald Trump with the unhinged and slanderous attempts to oust Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Jager notes:

“The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has lead Israel to become a world leader of innovation, a nation at peace with the majority of the Muslim Sunni nations, a country where the life expectancy is one of the world’s longest, and affordable healthcare and education for average citizens. In America, after the first year of a totally unexpected Trump Presidency; domestically, the passage of the tax reform bill is already resulting in increased economic activity and the repatriation of companies, reserves and jobs, just as promised during the election… As far as foreign policies: rather than attacking friends and allies and supporting enemies, the reverse is now the situation.”

Yet both are the victims of “deep primal hatred that has permeated the public discourse trampling every accepted norm and the basic concept of fairness and the democratic idea of innocent until proven guilty… This rage, this hatred of President Trump or Prime Minister Netanyahu permits us to keep alive the idea that everything is really much more simple, if only these leaders would go way either voluntarily or if necessary by force.”

Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a distinguished specialist in the Middle East, recently published an article arguing that Israel can never win its neighbors' acceptance. This conclusion flies directly in the face of the Israel Victory Project I have proposed, which is about gaining precisely that acceptance. Kedar's analysis calls for a reply.

Kedar makes two arguments, religious and nationalist, to support his conclusion: "The religious reason is rooted in Islam's conception of itself as a faith whose mission is to bring both Judaism and Christianity to an end and inherit all that was once Jewish or Christian: land, places of worship, and people. ... [That] Jews now attempt to pray on the Temple Mount, suggest[s] that Judaism has returned to being an active, living, and even dynamic religion. This brings the very raison d'être of Islam into question. … Muslims loyal to their religion and aware of this danger cannot possibly accept the existence of a Jewish state, not even a tiny one on the Tel Aviv coast."

The nationalist motive involves the Palestinian national movement being "wholly based on the negation of the Jewish people's right to its land and state." Therefore, it seeks "an Arab state on Israel's ruins, not alongside it."

Combining these two motivations, he concludes that "Arabs and Muslims are incapable of accepting Israel as the Jewish state."

In response – and this is the key point – Kedar says Israel should "tell them in no uncertain terms that Jerusalem belongs to the Jews and they are going to have to learn to live with it." Extrapolated out, he is advising that Israel should assert itself as the Jewish state to Arabs and Muslims.

Last week, US President Donald Trump acknowledged that the Israeli-Palestinian peace deal he hoped to facilitate might not actually come to pass.

Due to Ramallah’s anger over his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, negotiations prerequisite to such an agreement may never actually get off the ground, he admitted at a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“I don’t know that it ever will take place,” Trump said.

His trusted Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, however, continues to soldier on, traveling the world promoting the president’s stated quest — which some would call quixotic — for the ultimate deal.

Greenblatt loyally and firmly defends the administration’s Jerusalem move, but his work with the parties on the ground appears to take a different tack than Trump.

While the president says Jerusalem is “off the table,” his envoy this week stressed once more that the administration is not taking a position on borders and that the status quo at the holy sites should remain untouched.

Trump last week threatened to dramatically cut financial aid to the uncooperative Palestinian Authority, arguing that those who castigate US policy should not expect generous handouts.

The two leading Palestinian factions missed another deadline Thursday to implement a reconciliation deal, potentially burying the accord aimed at ending their decade-long split.

The Hamas terror group was to hand over power in the Gaza Strip by December to the Palestinian Authority, led by the Fatah movement.

But the handover was missed and a February 1 deadline for solving the issue of two movements’ rival civil services passed Thursday with no progress in sight.

While small changes have occurred since the deal was signed in October — notably the handing over of Gaza’s borders to the PA — Hamas remains firmly in charge in Gaza.

Hamas and Fatah traded blame for what could turn out to be a gradual abandoning of the accord.

Senior Hamas official Bassem Naim said the Fatah-led PA had backed away from the deal “without clear reasons,” while Fayez Abu Eita, a Fatah official in Gaza, called for Hamas to respect the deal.

As Israel's ambassador to Washington and, later, as a member of its government, I held many conversations with Arab diplomats, ministers, journalists and businessmen from Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf States. All candidly offered their views on the Middle East and, without exception, all believed that America was secretly allied with Iran.

These leaders had a long list of evidence. Fighting Iran's enemies such as Saddam Hussein, ISIS and the Taliban, while refusing to stop Iranian conquests in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, was presented as proof of Washington's collusion with Tehran.

Further confirmation was seen in America's failure to support the June 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, to meaningfully punish the ayatollahs for supporting terror (beyond sanctions) and to prevent them from developing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the West. From leading mass chants of "Death to America" to killing many hundreds of US soldiers, Iranian aggression -- so my Arab interlocutors held -- would never elicit a strong American response.

Yet no evidence was more damning than the Iranian nuclear deal. Instead of presenting Iran's regime with the choice between retaining the nuclear infrastructure unnecessary for a civilian energy program and survival, international negotiators, led by the United States, guaranteed both. By lifting sanctions and reopening Iran to international business, the deal enabled the regime to overcome financial crises and more brutally suppress its domestic opponents.

And rather than dismantling Iran's nuclear infrastructure, the deal preserved it intact and even permitted research and development of far more advanced centrifuges. Under the deal's "sunset clauses," the restrictions on enrichment will expire in eight to 10 years, at which time Iran will be able to produce enough uranium for dozens of nuclear weapons in a very short time.

If there is anyone who still needed proof of the shift in White House policies, the U.S. State Department announced Wednesday that it was designating Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh a terrorist. The move proved that there really is a new sheriff in town, one who means what he says, who will not be disrespected, and who shoots first and talks second.

The American move against Haniyeh is largely symbolic, as it is safe to assume that he has no assets in the U.S. for the administration to seize.
One may wonder why someone like Haniyeh was not placed on the global terror watch list sooner, but the message from Washington is loud and clear: Haniyeh and Hamas are part of the problem, not the solution. The Trump administration has no intention of "embracing" Hamas and fostering dialogue in hopes that someday the Islamist terrorist group would change its tune and become moderate.

The Trump administration sees Hamas for what it is – a terrorist organization that targets civilians and seeks to undermine Washington's attempts to advance the Middle East peace process.

There seems to be a direct link between the decision to cut American aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which only perpetuates the Palestinian refugees' issue and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Haniyeh's designation.

President Trump’s public diplomacy, from his first days in office to his State of the Union speech earlier this week, often appears inspired by the immortal words of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna in 1814: “If it goes without saying, it would go better by saying it.”

It goes without saying that Arab governments should unite against Iran, whose armed proxies are wreaking havoc on Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. So President Trump went to Saudi Arabia last May and said it. Led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Arab governments are today beginning to do just that (notably turning against Qatar because of its Iran ties) and stepping up covert cooperation with Israel.

It goes without saying that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, so President Trump said it on December 6, announcing the relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Last week, Vice President Pence announced that the relocation will take place before the end of next year, while a permanent embassy is being built. Dashing Palestinian dreams of a united Jerusalem under Arab rule has removed a key hurdle to serious negotiations.

It goes without saying that the United States shouldn’t give aid to an entity seeking the destruction of the Jewish state. So, on January 25 in Davos, President Trump threatened to cut off financial aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) unless its leaders “sit down and negotiate peace.” This is the fourth attempt in the last eight weeks to pressure PA President Mahmoud Abbas merely to sit down at the table with Israel.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will address the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 20 during its monthly meeting on the Middle East amid continuing Palestinian rejection of direct talks with Israel, as well as the US role in brokering future negotiations.

In the weeks since US President Donald Trump announced American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on Dec. 6, Abbas has said he will ask the Security Council to grant full UN membership to a Palestinian state. In addresses to Arab and African leaders over the last month, the PA president said he will only accept an internationally-backed panel to broker any peace talks with Israel.

Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, condemned the invitation to Abbas. “After disseminating antisemitic messages in recent speeches, Mahmoud Abbas is now seeking to put an end to any possibility of negotiations with Israel,” Danon said. “By continuing to act against the United States and seeking unilateral action against Israel, Abbas is completely misreading today’s reality and harming the prospects for a better future for his people.”

Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN, told the Security Council last week that Abbas lacked “the courage and the will to seek peace.”

But Kuwait – a non-permanent member currently serving as the President of the Security Council – defended the invitation to Abbas.

Kuwait has challenged the US at the United Nations over its stance on Palestinian statehood and its declaration that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital.

It has invited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to address the UN Security Council at a February 20 meeting and former US president Jimmy Carter to address an informal UNSC gathering known as an Arria Formula meeting on February 22.

Kuwaiti Ambassador Mansour al-Otaibi, who holds the rotating position of UNSC president this month, announced these steps at a press conference on Thursday afternoon in New York.

Abbas has confirmed his attendance but Carter has yet to accept the invitation.

UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland and former UNRWA chief Karen AbuZayd are also expected to speak at the Arria Formula meeting, the third such gathering on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the last three years.

Of Carter, al-Otaibi said that his position against Israeli settlements and its presence in the West Bank was well known and that he had an important role to play in the peace process.

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon said Thursday that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is crippling prospects for Middle East peace after announcing that he intends to speak before the UN Security Council later this month.

“After disseminating antisemitic messages in recent speeches, Mahmoud Abbas is now seeking to put an end to any possibility of negotiations with Israel,” said Danon.

“By continuing to act against the United States and seeking unilateral action against Israel, Abbas is completely misreading today’s reality and harming the prospects for a better future for his people,” he continued.

Danon’s comments come after the Palestinian leader announced Thursday that he would seek an audience with the Security Council on February 20, during the UN body's monthly meeting on the situation in the Middle East, amid strained relations with the US administration.

The US' decision to put the head of the Hamas terrorist organization Ismail Haniyeh on its terror blacklist is an essential step towards "drying up" Hamas' recourses, US Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism Nathan Sales explained in an interview with Ynet on Thursday.

The blacklisting, announced on Wednesday, targeted Haniyeh alongside Harakat al-Sabireen—a small Gazan terror group that splintered away from the Islamic Jihad and, like Hamas, is backed by Iran—and two other terror groups active in Egypt: Liwa al-Thawra and HASM.

"As a result of these designations, these individuals and groups will be frozen out of the international financial system, their assets will be frozen," Sales noted.

"In addition, it is a crime under US law for people to engage in transactions with these designated terrorists, and finally, these individuals will not be permitted to enter the United States."

Iran, publically being Hamas' biggest financial supporter, will thusly be declared in violation of US law. Sales noted this was in no way unintentional.

"The United States is under no illusions about Iran's malign intentions in the region, nor are we under any illusions about its ability to project its power and to shed blood around the world," he stated, adding Iran' actions and ambitions of regional hegemony can, and must, be thwarted.

"Iran can be stopped. Iran is not invincible," he said, explaining that Iran is actually "vulnerable … because it has chosen to use an illegitimate tool, like terrorism, to spread blood and disorder around the world," clearly leaving their fingerprints, such as with their support of the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the Houthi insurgency in the war in Yemen.

On Jan. 31, 2018 the United States State Department announced that top Hamas operative Ismail Haniyeh was now listed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT). Less than twenty-four hours later, the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) chief “peace negotiator,” Saeb Erekat, decried the United States’ decision. Hamas is a U.S.-designated terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip and calls for the destruction of Israel.

In a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) press statement, Erekat said that the “PLO rejects and condemns the U.S. finance department's decision to add Islamic Hamas movement chief Ismail Haniyeh to the terrorist list." Both the PLO and the PA, which rules the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), are dominated by the Fatah movement and led by Mahmoud Abbas. All three entities, as well as Abbas, are frequently labeled “moderate” by the press.

The State Department noted that Haniyeh “has been involved in terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens” and “Hamas has been responsible for an estimated 17 American lives killed in terrorist attacks.” Haniyeh is the head of the terror group’s so-called “political bureau.” As Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. Treasury Department terror analyst, noted in his 2006 book Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, all factions of Hamas are closely intertwined; claims that the political branch does not coordinate with the so-called “military bureau” that carries out attacks are false.

As CAMERA has highlighted, Haniyeh has repeatedly called for a “holy war by the Palestinian people” against Israel. He has rejected claims—often pushed by the media and others—that “despair” is the motive for Palestinian anti-Jewish violence (“Hamas: ‘Despair’ Is Not the Reason for Palestinian Violence,” Jan. 26, 2016). More recently, following the United States’ Dec. 6, 2017 announcement that it would implement the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, Haniyeh called for a third intifada (violent uprising). The second intifada (2000-05) resulted in the murder of more than 1,000 Israelis.

The Turkish government denounced the Trump administration’s blacklisting of a senior Hamas terrorist in the Gaza Strip this week, warning that the move could “undermine” the peace process and interfere with Turkish activities in Gaza.

Earlier this week, the US State Department and Treasury Department placed Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh on their terror watch lists – effectively sanctioning the Hamas leader by freezing his assets and barring US citizens or companies operating in the US from doing business with him. The Hamas organization has been on America’s terror blacklist since 1997.

Haniyeh replaced the exiled former Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in May of 2017.

On Thursday, the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah faction blasted the Trump administration’s decision to sanction Haniyeh, and called for “national unity” between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Gaza-based Hamas terror group.

A former member of the Knesset claimed Wednesday that computers belonging to the German Thyssenkrupp company were breached by a hacker who managed “to steal secrets and blueprints of the submarines that were developed in Germany for Israeli use.”

Erel Margalit, also a high-tech and social entrepreneur who served as an MK for the Labor Party between 2015 and 2017, presented the charges during a cybertech conference held in Tel Aviv where he warned that the world’s exposure to cyber attacks can drastically harm Israel’s security.

According to Margalit, a hacker broke into the Thyssenkrupp computers in 2016 when Israel was ordering its strategic submarines from Germany.

“So as much as Israel can protect itself and as much as any country can protect itself, when it’s dealing with other countries that has to deal with it, it needs to be sure that the protection works and that’s why we need a higher level of cooperation,” he told his audience at the conference.

Margalit, founder and chairman of JVP, also suggested that details about the corvettes purchased by Israel to protect its waters may have fallen into Iranian hands.

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees is asking Arab nations for funds in the wake of the Trump administration's cut of tens of millions of dollars of aid money.

UNRWA Commissioner Pierre Krahenbuhl spoke to an Arab League meeting of foreign ministers in Cairo on Thursday and said the U.S. cut "is the most severe crisis" in the agency's history.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which serves 5 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants, had a budget of over $1 billion last year. The agency is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions from U.N. member states, with aid from the U.S., its largest donor, accounting for a third of its total budget. The Trump administration withheld half of the first installment of payments this year, demanding financial reforms as a condition for future aid.

Last week, Krahenbuhl suggested that politics, notably the U.S.'s December decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, were at play.

Also at Thursday's Arab League meeting, Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said the cut in U.S. funding for UNRWA will put the stability and security of the region at risk.

There is a crisis brewing to Israel's south in the Red Sea area where at least a half a dozen countries are scrambling for influence, seeking bases and positioning themselves in the event of a future conflict. Iran is seeking positions of strength along the entire Red Sea, from the Suez Canal in the north down to Bab-el-Mandeb, the outlet of the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean. In the 1990s, the Iranians deployed their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Port Sudan and Sudan became a conduit for moving Iranian weapons into Egypt, to the Sinai Peninsula, and ultimately to Gaza where they were used by Hamas and other pro-Iranian organizations.

In the critical Bab-el-Mandeb straights, the naval choke point at the bottom of the Red Sea, Iran has been using the Houthi militias, which are its proxies in the Yemen war. And it may get to a point where the Iranians will seek to block the flow of naval traffic through this sensitive point.

Of all the nations that are positioning themselves in the Horn of Africa, like Iran, the U.S., Turkey, France, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia, careful attention should be given to the presence of China in Djibouti where China has constructed one of its first naval bases at the gateway to the Middle East. Given the interests of all the actors appearing now in the Red Sea, the whole region has become far more combustible than it was in the past.

The Jerusalem Municipality recently informed the Prime Minister's Office and the Finance, Foreign and Interior ministries that it plans to begin collecting about 650 million shekels ($190 million) in unpaid property taxes from 887 church and U.N.-owned properties across the city.

The move will not apply to actual houses of worship, which are exempt from municipal property taxes, but to assets owned by the churches that are used for purposes other than prayer, some of them commercial.

To date, the state has demanded that the municipality refrain from collecting these debts, in light of previous agreements with the churches.

However, the city has obtained the legal opinion of international law expert Professor Gabriel Halevi, who examined in depth the legal aspects of church institutions and the U.N.'s obligation toward the Jerusalem Municipality. Halevi found unequivocally that there is no grounding for the state's position, that the agreements between the state and the churches do not apply to the Jerusalem Municipality, and that the municipality is required by law to collect the debts.

Israeli Air Force aircraft attacked a Hamas position in the northern Gaza Strip early Friday morning in response to a rocket attack several hours earlier, the army said.

“The IDF sees the Hamas terror group as the sole party responsible for what takes place in the Gaza Strip and for what emanates from it,” an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson said.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage in the strike.

It wasn’t clear whether the rocket fired from the Gaza Strip toward Israel Thursday night had landed in Israeli territory, the army said earlier.

No rocket sirens were triggered, indicating the projectile was not headed for a populated area in Israel.

No impact site was immediately identified, and the Israeli military said it was investigating.

On Monday, sirens sounded near the Gaza border, but no rocket impact site was found, and the IDF said it was possible the sirens had been a false alarm.

Israeli soldiers arrested four Palestinian suspects, one of them armed, who entered Israel from the southern Gaza Strip on Thursday evening, the army said.

According to the military, one of the suspects was carrying a grenade and two knives when he was arrested.

While it has not been uncommon for Palestinians to illegally cross into Israel from Gaza in recent years, it is generally done by individuals or in pairs, rarely in groups as large as on Thursday.

An army spokesperson said the suspects were under IDF surveillance from before they crossed the security fence surrounding the Gaza Strip.

They were arrested a short time after they entered Israeli territory, he said.

The suspects’ intentions were not immediately clear. There have been cases of Gazans entering Israel with weapons not to carry out attacks, but in order to be arrested and sent to prison, rather than remain in the beleaguered coastal enclave, which is run by the Hamas terrorist group.

“The suspects were apprehended and transferred to security forces for further questioning,” the Israel Defense Forces said.

According to figures revealed to the Hebrew Walla news site, in both 2016 and 2017 approximately 60 Palestinians entered Israel from Gaza.

Syrian media reported that Israel targeted several positions belonging to an Islamic State group affiliate in southern Syrian on Thursday.

The alleged airstrikes were said to have taken place during an offensive by rebel groups against the Islamic State-affiliated group, known as the Khalid ibn al-Walid Army, in the area around the city of Daraa.

Zaman Al Wasl, a pro-rebel outlet, quoted local activists as saying the “Israeli Air Force has been pounding [Islamic State] bastions” during the attack.

Additional Syrian opposition outlets specified that four surface-to-surface missiles were launched at Khalid ibn al-Walid Army positions.

This could not be immediately verified.

The Israeli military does not comment on reports of its alleged activities in Syria.

Israel has maintained a public policy of limited intervention in the Syrian civil war.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett has ordered that his ministry stop paying for high school students preparing for their military service to see a play that ministry officials say portrays IDF soldiers as war criminals.

The play "The Admission" was added to the basket of cultural activities the Education Ministry provides 11th- and 12th-grade students last May. Its plot centers on a young Jewish professor who is confronted with an Arab family's accusations that his father was involved in the killing of their relatives and the expulsion of some of their village's residents during the 1948 War of Independence.

According to the website of the Arab-Hebrew Theater, where the play is now being performed, the script was inspired by the 1948 conquest of the Arab village of Tantura by IDF forces and by "the dispute among a number of Israeli historians as to the possibility that during the conquest IDF soldiers carried out a massacre of village residents."

The play has been harshly criticized by bereaved families and external organizations, who say it depicts IDF soldiers as murderers. Critics say the play is based upon events that never took place and warn that students may believe this false misrepresentation of what transpired.

At the meeting of the PLO Central Committee on January 14, 2018, in Ramallah, followers of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas removed from the dais a very senior Fatah official from east Jerusalem after he began to criticize the PA for its behavior toward east Jerusalem. When he started to say that the PLO “proclaims its devotion to Jerusalem,” but ignores the city’s needs and has not given its activists a suitable place in the leadership, Abbas’ ushers mounted the stage and removed the senior PLO figure. Sources say that, while there was an altercation between top PLO officials, none of those present protested or opposed the action.

Although confirmation of this incident could not be obtained, more than one source reported the story, and it has had an impact on east Jerusalem’s relations with Ramallah.

In previous cases, when senior officials from the West Bank came to the protesters at Lion’s Gate during the metal-detector crisis, these same West Bank officials were driven away with shouts. When senior officials from Ramallah came to the Al-Aqsa compound without a security escort, the worshippers ejected them amid threats. The Muqata headquarters refused to give the Fatah Tanzim in Jerusalem special budgets for waging the struggle against the “Judaization of the city.”

East Jerusalem, for its part, did not join the large-scale strike that Ramallah declared in protest of Vice-President Pence’s visit.

Holocaust Denial by Egyptian TV Host: It Is the "Greatest Lie in History"; Gas Chambers Were Used to Disinfect Clothes https://t.co/pVX81eiA3B

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) February 2, 2018

Tehran police have arrested 29 women for appearing in public without a headscarf as protests against the dress code in force since the Islamic revolution of 1979 intensify, Iranian media reported Friday.

Those arrested were accused of public order offenses and referred to the state prosecutor’s office, the Fars, ILNA and Tasnim news agencies reported without elaborating.

Chief prosecutor Mohammad Jafar Montazeri had played down the escalating protests on Wednesday, saying they were “trivial” and “childish” moves possibly incited by foreigners.

He had been asked about a woman detained earlier this week for standing on a pillar box in a busy street without the mandatory headscarf.

Unprecedented images of at least 11 women protesting the same way had been widely shared on social media.

The authorities in Saudi Arabia have ordered the arrest of a couple filmed dancing in the street.

In the footage, a man and woman can be seen performing on the street pavement, while by-standers who are gathered around them film them on their phones.

The conservative desert kingdom has strict rules about gender segregation though moves have begun to liberalise laws, including allowing women to drive.

But the videos prompted the governor of Asir province, Prince Faisal bin Khaled, to order a investigation into the video that captured a couple dancing in a street in the city of Abha, in the south-west of the country,Okaz newspaper reported.

What is your impression of the reaction to Ahed Tamimi’s slapping of an Israeli soldier?

Gottlieb: The response to Ahed Tamimi’s slap by many Jewish people reveals the sexist and racist attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that impact a large portion of the Jewish community. The vile accusations against this child are stunning. Their purpose is to flip the script on Palestinian suffering and blame the victim instead of assuming responsibility.

I wonder: who would not slap a soldier after years of trauma as a result of recurring night invasions, administrative detentions with no possibility for justice or a fair hearing, daily destruction of village houses, and direct assaults, one of which targets your cousin in the head?

If there were any doubt about the need for Congress to pass the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, it was erased yesterday when the United Nations’ Office for the High Commissioner on Human Rights issued a report about companies doing business in the West Bank. The Geneva-based UN agency said it was examining the activities of 206 companies that are connected to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. Though it didn’t name the companies, the intent was clear. The goal of the effort is to establish a list endorsed by the international community that would make it possible to boycott the 143 Israeli and 22 U.S companies cited as well as others.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein. Credit: U.N. Photo/Pierre Albouy.

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley was right to denounce the step as a waste of time and evidence of the UN’s anti-Israel obsession. But with this step, Congress’s obligation is also made clear. If it doesn’t pass the bill updating and expanding existing legislation banning discriminatory commercial boycotts of Israel, some Americans will be effectively boxed out of international commerce.

But while this ought to add urgency to the effort to pass a law that will stop the BDS — boycott, divest, sanction — movement from discriminating against Israelis and Jews in this fashion, the campaign on its behalf is bogged down by two deceptive arguments.

The first is the claim that boycotts of the settlements are both legally and morally distinct from boycotts of Israel as a whole.

The second is the assertion that the Anti-Boycott Act is an attempt to prohibit constitutionally protected free speech.

Both are fallacies.

The fury was because many don’t accept that antisemitism is utterly deranged. Unspeakably, they believe the bad stuff said about the Jews is actually true and that the Holocaust has unjustly shielded them from rational complaint.

That’s why, when Jews call the anti-Israel madness “the new antisemitism,” they are accused of trying to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel. Their accusers actually think that claims such as the Jews have too much power/manipulate American foreign policy/further their own interests at the expense of others’ lives and so on are merely criticisms of true Jewish characteristics.

It was not enough, however, for other groups just to claim victim status. They had to knock the Jews off their victim perch altogether.

That’s because the Jews really are the world’s ultimate victims. So false “victims” had to deny Jewish victimization order to continue their dishonest leverage of guilt. Those who have made most murderous use of this strategy are of course the “Palestinians.”

So antisemitism, the most lethal bigotry in the world, became the prejudice that dare not speak its name. Those who continued to draw attention to it found themselves either ignored or deplored. Those who connived at or gave cover to it came to dominate the universities and media and culture – and one became president of the United States for eight years.

And now some of those who supported him are shocked – shocked! – to discover that their hero had feet of poisoned clay.

A pro-Israel organization that found its nonprofit status subjected to undue scrutiny by the Obama administration's IRS as a result of its advocacy on the Jewish state's behalf reached a settlement Thursday with the Department of Justice that included a formal apology from the U.S. government for subjecting the group to unfair treatment, according to an announcement.

The Trump administration's DOJ announced Tuesday that it had reached a settlement with Z Street, a conservative pro-Israel advocacy group that sued the government over allegations the Obama administration subjected the organization to unfair scrutiny as a result of its pro-Israel views. Z Street was just one of several conservative organizations to sue the U.S. government.

The case had been locked in court since 2015, when judges rejected the Obama administration's claims that it did not act improperly.

"Z Street alleged that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) applied heightened scrutiny to applications for tax-exempt status received from organizations connected in any way to Israel, and applied this policy to Z Street's application, resulting in delay," the Justice Department announced in a press release. "The settlement agreement includes an apology from the IRS to Z Street for the delayed processing of the group's application for tax-exempt status."

DOJ lawyers issued a formal apology to the group over its unfair treatment and vowed equal treatment for groups of all political stripes.

Reverend Rosemary Fletcher and I have never met before. Nor have I been inside her church. When I arrived yesterday, about 50 people sat waiting for the event to begin. Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) literature was spread over two tables near the entrance. The PSC have no interest in truth or peace whatsoever. They still have 9/11 truthers and Holocaust Deniers turning up at their AGM. When you see PSC literature inside a church then you know you are inside enemy territory.

The talk was delivered by Tim Coldicott and lasted about 45 minutes. Tim is a perfect presenter for a church audience. He is well presented, well-spoken and looks like a caring and learned man. Presentation counts, especially if you need people to buy heavily into the content.

From the moment that Coldicott began to speak, to the moment he finished, he fed the audience an unforgivable and disgraceful demonisation of Israelis and Zionist history. I am used to distortion, I am also used to a heavy bias, or someone overcooking the Palestinian perspective of things. But this was more than that. Coldicott dehumanised the Israeli Jews, he ripped history apart, he scrubbed clean the streets of all Jewish blood and placed lie on-top of lie in an attempt to convince the audience, that to save Israelis from themselves, they simply had to destroy the Jewish state.

A judge in Paris scrapped hate crime charges from the indictment of a murder suspect who confessed to killing his Jewish neighbor.

The move came amid a rise in reported violent anti-Semitic attacks in France.

The Paris Prosecutor’s office said it would appeal the dismissal Monday of the aggravated element of a hate crime in the trial of Kobili Traore, a 28-year-old Muslim man who on April 4 threw his neighbor, Sarah Halimi, to her death from the window of her third-story apartment.

The charge of murder aggravated by racial hatred was excluded from what is now the indictment against Traore by the examining magistrate — a function designed to oversee prosecutors and intercept flawed indictments before they form the basis of an active trial.

Francis Kalifat, president of the Jewish umbrella group CRIF, told Le Parisien daily that the examining magistrate’s move was “an insult” to Halimi’s memory.

Separately, the Interior Ministry of France on Wednesday reported a 7.2 percent decrease in 2017 in the number of anti-Semitic attacks in the country over 2016. The ministry recorded 311 cases. But of those, 97 were classified as violent assaults – a 25 percent increase over 2016, Le Figaro reported.

That doesn’t excuse the massacre of Jews at Kielce or at Jedwabne in 1941. But Jews who are quick to lump the Poles in with the Germans need to understand there is a reason why Poles consider themselves to be victims, not perpetrators. Moreover, Poland’s victimization didn’t begin in 1939, but stretched back centuries as the great powers treated it as a pawn in their wars and alliances.

A willingness to dive back into conflict with Poland over the Holocaust ignores the enormous progress that was made to bridge the gap between the two nations in the postwar era. The heroic efforts of the late Pope John Paul II to combat endemic anti-Semitism both in his own nation and among Catholics everywhere deserve to be remembered with honor. The post-Cold War government of Poland also should be given credit for maintaining strong and friendly relations with Israel, something confirmed by its recent refusal to support the United Nations resolution condemning President Donald Trump’s stand on Jerusalem. Support for and interest in Jewish culture among Poles also testifies to the way Poland is changing.

Jews and Poles don’t need to be enemies anymore. To the contrary, given Poland’s delicate strategic situation and the ongoing attacks on Israel, they have much in common. So rather than engage in mutual condemnations, Jewish critics of the new law should speak with the same understanding and compassion for Polish suffering and sensibilities that they demand for their history.

The Polish Holocaust law is a foolish mistake. Like other nations, including Israel, they’d do better to avoid bills infringing even on hateful speech. But more than that, it would be a pity if arguments about history were to undo the progress that has been made to heal the historic rift between Jews and Poles.

The head of Israel’s Education Ministry said Thursday Israel will not halt high school student trips to Poland and that tour organizers will not be muzzled by a controversial Polish bill that prohibits blaming wartime Poles for the Holocaust atrocities committed by the Nazi regime.

The bill, which prescribes a prison sentence for anyone who refers to “Polish death camps” and forbids mention of Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust, has been pilloried by Israel as a form of historical distortion.

Speaking to Hadashot News, minister director Shmuel Abuav defiantly stressed that trips will continue and “the guides will tell the truth as it happened.”

He pointed to new curricula drafted by the ministry in response to the Polish bill, which examines the murders of over 2,000 Jews by Poles before and after World War II.

“No law will silence the instructors and guides, or the story we must tell the younger generation,” Abuav told the television station.

Some 40,000 Israeli high school students will visit Poland this year for purposes of Holocaust commemoration, he noted. The students visit Nazi sites associated with the genocide of European Jewry such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp site.

On March 24, 2016, at its 31st session, the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) adopted resolution 31/36 entitled “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.”

The resolution requested the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, in close consultation with the Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, to produce a database of all business enterprises that “directly and indirectly, enabled, facilitated and profited from the construction and growth of the settlements.” The database is to be updated annually.

The High Commissioner was instructed to submit the data in the form of a report to the Council at its March 2017 session, but he asked for the deadline to be delayed until December 2017. This deadline was missed by a month, and the report was submitted on January 26, 2018, but the database itself was not included due to a lack of resources, wrote the High Commissioner. His office identified 206 companies that fit the criteria of Resolution 31/36, but the office had not been able to communicate with all of them and expected the database would be published at some future date

Irish Ambassador to Israel Alison Kelly has told officials in Jerusalem that the Government does not support an initiative to ban the sale of goods from West Bank settlements.

Ms Kelly was summoned to the foreign ministry on Wednesday for what was termed a “clarification”, even though the Seanad voted on Tuesday night to indefinitely postpone a vote on the private member’s Bill introduced by Senator Frances Black to criminalise the sale of settlement products.

It was stressed at the meeting that the Bill was a private initiative and did not have the backing of the Government.

The proposal, Ms Kelly said, was not part of the BDS (boycott, disinvestment, sanctions) campaign which the Government opposes.

Rodica Rodian-Gordon, the Israeli foreign ministry’s deputy director general for western Europe, underscored Israel’s opposition to the Bill and said any measure promoting a boycott of settlement products could be considered a BDS Bill.

A European Union report lambastes Israel for tourism development in and around the Old City of Jerusalem.

The report from the EU’s heads of missions in Jerusalem and leaked to British daily The Guardian, describes archaeological sites in and near the Old City, including in Silwan’s City of David and in a planned cable car from the First Station to Mt. Zion to the Old City’s Dung Gate, “as a political tool to modify the historical narrative and to support, legitimize, and expand settlements.”

That historical narrative the report says is being advanced by Israeli tourism development in the area was based on the claim of “historic continuity of the Jewish presence in the area at the expense of other religions and cultures.”

“East Jerusalem is the only place where Israeli national parks are declared on populated neighborhoods,” the Guardian quotes the report as saying, a reference to the growth and development of the City of David site atop the earliest known settlement areas in ancient Jerusalem. Critics say the development of the site, which is a popular tourist destination, is part of a process of displacing the Palestinian residents in the area, which is part of the larger Arab neighborhood of Silwan.

The report charges that the Elad organization, which runs the City of David Site, promotes “an exclusively Jewish narrative, while detaching the place from its Palestinian surroundings.

The complainants – who live just 900 metres from the mosque – said they felt affected by the muezzin’s reputation for being against religious freedom. Their legal counsel stated: “This lawsuit is not only about the loudspeaker permit, but in particular about the inherent messages that are publicly distributed in the muezzin call.”

“It’s a chant in a key that’s disturbing to us, but it’s all about the content of the call, which sets Allah above our God as a Christian, and I as a Christian who grew up in a Christian environment do not accept it,” the newspaper quoted the 69-year-old plaintiff.

According to the Westfalen Post, a Christian Syrian neighbor of the mosque also complained about the Muezzin calls, but was “massively threatened” by his Muslim neighbors and withdrew his complaint.

The muezzin call violates the permit’s mandated prohibition on disseminating “negative religious liberties,” the attorney argued, meaning that no one should be coerced into any particular faith – which the attorney argued is the case with the muezzin call, asserting an Islamic call to public prayer is made at the expense of other religions.

Israel has approached the same problem by the simple measure of limiting calls to prayers from mosques, including one restriction prohibiting the use of loudspeakers at all hours.

Supporters say the restriction is needed to prevent daily disturbance to the lives of hundreds of thousands Israelis.

Three young staffers at the Palestine Post that day in 1948; three lives spared.

Alexander Zvielli, Mordecai Chertoff and Marlin Levin were all at work on the evening of February 1 that year. In separate interviews before they all passed away over the last decade, they recalled the harrowing attack that claimed four lives.

“At 24, nothing can happen to you,” Chertoff told The Jerusalem Post in 2010, reminiscing about the time when his life story and Israel’s history ran on the same path without a road map. “You’re immune to every illness, every bullet.”

That immunity includes surviving unscathed the deadly explosion of a stolen British army truck loaded with a half-ton of TNT planted by Arab terrorists, outside the Post’s offices on Hasolel Street (now Havatzelet Street), just off Zion Square. The blast killed four people, including three Post employees, wounded several dozen and destroyed the two adjacent buildings.

“I remember that Marlin Levin, an editor, was sitting in someone else’s chair who had gone to Tel Aviv that day,” said Chertoff. “When the explosion came, a piece of metal from the window came flying across where Marlin would have usually been sitting. It would have taken his head off.”

One employee died immediately, and Chertoff said that two others later succumbed to their wounds.

Fourteen advocacy organizations are calling for federal funding to Middle East studies centers to be pulled if the programs do not end their anti-Israel and anti-American "indoctrination."

The letter to the Senate HELP Committee charge that the 16 Middle East studies centers receiving funding under Title VI of the Higher Education Opportunities Act are "being misused to promote biased, one-sided, and anti-Israel programming," in violation of a requirement for the programs to "reflect diverse perspectives and a wide range of views."

Title VI funding was rolled out in 1958, a product of the Cold War era effort by the Department of Education to ensure Americans obtained sufficient knowledge in foreign language and international studies to respond to national security threats. The diversity requirement was added in 2008.

The coalition of Jewish and Zionist organizations behind the letter are advocating for the Senate to approve provisions adopted in the House's reformed Higher Education Act, passed in December as the PROSPER Act, which call for institutions to adequately assure it will adhere to the diversity policy and for a modified evaluation policy to be instituted to ensure compliance.

Title VI-funded Middle East programs include those at Georgetown University, whose center has been dubbed the "Islamic outpost on the Potomac," and Columbia University, where Middle East studies professors are currently boycotting a bookstore for its recognition of Israel's right to exist.

Sarah Stern, president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, was insistent that centers must lose their federal funding if they do not make a "concerted effort to diversify."

Two Jewish students are pursuing a civil rights lawsuit against San Francisco State University for alleged discrimination that left them feeling threatened and alienated from campus life.

“SFSU has a long and documented history of institutionalized anti-Semitism,” charged the complaint, filed Tuesday in the Superior Court of San Francisco on behalf of students Charles Volk and Liam Kern.

The lawsuit, which also targets the Board of Trustees of the California State University (CSU), warned that Jews at SFSU are “often afraid to wear Stars of David or yarmulkes.”

“Jews on campus face racist slurs and epithets,” asserted the plaintiffs, who are represented by attorneys from The Lawfare Project — a nonprofit focused on cases alleging antisemitic discrimination — and the legal firm Winston & Strawn.

SFSU’s Jewish community is confronted with “blood libels that can be traced directly to the notoriously hateful forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the complaint continued, “displays and events on campus that equate them with Nazis and baby murderers; deprivations of their rights to speak, listen, and assemble; threats, harassment, intimidation, and bullying.”

Right before New Year, SSI hosted our third national conference in San Diego, California. Our student leaders from all across the country came to meet each other and learn how to be even more proactive and a better representative of the Jewish State. Our own background or which campus or city we came from did not matter as we all gathered around the factor that unites us, the care and passion for Israel. As one student wrote in her reaction to the conference, “prior to the conference I always cared about Israel, but now I am a proud Zionist”.

What started as an idea of a few students in Minnesota, is today the largest pro-Israel grassroots student movement that was built from the campus grounds and up. Just like in the past years Students Supporting Israel was an organization that changed the way pro-Israel students on campus operate, in the years to come Students Supporting Israel will be the organization to raise the next generation of Zionist, community and political leaders.

We hope that future students will have the ability to step into their college campuses knowing that we are the ones who control the conversation, and that this future generation of leaders will not remember a time when Israel was losing its image in the academia due to the lack of grassroots work. The new generation of activists created by SSI will continue to inspire their communities by nonstop work, creative minds, unlimited passion, freedom of expression and no fear.

As it's often applied today, intersectionality is a convenient shortcut that tells its adherents what to think, and relieves them of the burden of learning about and thinking through issues for themselves. Such a shortcut may be attractive to those who lack the time, will or intellectual curiosity to make informed decisions. Once you know you support women's rights, or are against racism, or believe in rights for LGBTQ people, you need not bother delving through centuries of history of Muslim-Jewish relations, or the history of the land that was named Palestine by a colonial power, or even two decades of negotiations since Oslo. You can ignore the fact that it is Jews that are indigenous to the region, and that for over a millennium, Jews and Christians who lived in Muslim-majority lands lived as second class citizens in a kind of Middle Eastern Jim Crow. While Crenshaw originally pushed people to think harder about issues, to dig deeper and learn more, when it comes to Israel, today's intersectionalists push people to think and learn less.

Which brings us back to Teen Vogue. Its outgoing Editor-In-Chief Elaine Welteroth's background is as a fashion and beauty editor. (She is leaving, apparently, to pursue a career in acting.) Emma Sarran Webster, the author of the March article that purported to be a summary of “What You Need to Know” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also, as CAMERA wrote previously, billed herself as an expert on health and beauty with a “deep love for social media and cat videos.” Isis Briones, the writer who interviewed Khatahbeh, and who wrote about the model Amena Khan, mainly covers celebrity gossip.

Yet, despite employing writers with no expertise in the area, the magazine has determinedly pursued an anti-Israel agenda. Teen Vogue is not interested in presenting a balanced view of the issues, in which the point of view of both Israeli and Palestinian women and girls are taken into account, so that its young readers may come to their own conclusions. Teen Vogue, apparently, doesn't trust that its readers will come to what it has already decided is the correct position.

In 2014 Crenshaw told The New Statesman that she coined the term intersectionality to address “invisibilities” in feminism. As CAMERA demonstrates daily, it is the suffering of Israelis – Jewish and non-Jewish, women and men – that is invisible in today's media landscape, including in the pages of Teen Vogue.

If Teen Vogue wants to be taken seriously as a publication that goes beyond fashion and celebrity gossip, its next editor will need to better educate herself or himself so that the magazine can present a balanced point of view and inform, rather than indoctrinate, its readers.

Keith Woodard is proud to be an American. An Air Force veteran, he flies the Stars and Stripes outside his West Ashley, South Carolina home, illuminated by spotlights. He’s also proud to be Jewish, which is why he flies the Israeli flag as well. The latter, however, seems to have incensed his developer-run community association, which now, according to Woodard, fines him $25 each month.

Just what might Woodard’s transgression be isn’t clear. The developers, Pulte Homes, told The Post and Courier that Woodard’s actions were in violation of the “community’s governing documents that all homeowners agree to when they buy a house,” but Woodard is arguing that the bylaws aren’t specific and that none of his neighbors complained about the Israeli flag.

“If I’m in a position where I don’t want people to know we’re a Jewish family,” he said, “then I’m in the wrong country.”

The homeowners’ association, he said, also gave him trouble when he put up blue holiday lights for Passover, arguing that he had put up Christmas lights out of season. A spokeswoman for Pulte told the newspaper that said Woodard was informed he could submit an application for temporary decorations, adding that “The governing documents does apply to flags, so all homeowners need to submit for approval for flags and any decoration on the exterior of the home.” Woodard, on his end, took to Facebook and urged supporters to call the management company and give them “a piece of your Jewish mind.” God bless America.

How is that a mere 75 years after the Holocaust, after many cities in Europe have once again turned into places where it is an act of bravery for a Jew to walk down the street with a kippah on his head, that so many people in America — including Jews –are so ambivalent to such raw antisemitism?

Can it be political correctness — or the “soft bigotry of low expectations”? Why is it that when white supremacists chant “Jews will not replace us,” that the mainstream media and practically all mainstream Jewish groups and organizations immediately decry the antisemitism? Yet, after five imams call for the murder of the “filthy” Jews, our collective response is so indiscernible that it can’t even be picked up on CNN?

It cannot be politically correct to ignore raw Jew-hatred or calls for genocide — no matter who is making those statements.

The reality is that there are many Muslims, particularly in the US, who find such raw Jew-hatred and incitement repugnant. Therefore, ignoring such hatred simply because the speaker is Muslim is — in and of itself — racist. If we do not ignore white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” (which we shouldn’t), then we certainly should not ignore sermons by racist imams either, particularly those who are trying to incite their congregants to murder Jews.

So, unless the Jewish community in America wants Jewish life in America to start resembling Jewish life in many parts of Europe — where violent attacks against Jewish life and property are becoming ubiquitous — we better start treating all antisemitic rants as equally repugnant, and demanding of all people what we demand of ourselves. After all, does anyone doubt that if a rabbi were caught on tape saying such things in a mainstream synagogue in the US, that he would be fired in under 24 hours? Meanwhile, not one of these five imams have been fired. Not one.

A high-ranking official from Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO) resigned on Thursday, yielding to mounting pressure over his association with a group accused of being neo-Nazis.

The FPO, which says it abandoned Nazi ideology espoused by its founders in the 1950s, entered government last month as a junior partner of Sebastian Kurz’s conservatives after coming third, with 26 percent of votes, in elections in October.

Its top candidate in regional elections in Lower Austria held last Sunday had been fending off a scandal after a newspaper revealed that a fraternity that he used to help lead had distributed a songbook that joked about killing Jews.

Udo Landbauer, re-elected to the regional assembly, initially rejected President Alexander Van der Bellen’s call for him to step down, and his party, many of whose officials are also members of right-wing fraternities, stood by him.

But on Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Freedom Party in Lower Austria confirmed a report by Austrian news agency APA that Landbauer had resigned from all political posts. She declined further comment.

Lawmakers in Iceland submitted legislation on Tuesday that would prohibit male circumcision and make it a crime punishable by up to six years in prison, despite circumcision being a religious imperative in Judaism and Islam.

By introducing the bill, Iceland may have set a dangerous precedent that limits Jewish religious observance, even while Europe is seeing a worrying rise in anti-Semitic attacks.

The bill, which bans "removing sexual organs, in whole or in part," was introduced in Iceland one day after an 8-year-old boy wearing a kippah was attacked in France.

The bill describes circumcision as a "violation" of children's rights that must be categorically banned unless medically justified. Female genital mutilation, sometimes called female circumcision, has been illegal in Iceland since 2005.

Eight members of the Althing, the Icelandic parliament, proposed the bill, which received support in both the coalition and opposition. According to the bill, "Children's rights must always take precedence over the right of parents to raise their children according to religious laws."

The attack on Monday against a Jewish schoolboy indicates France's growing problem with anti-Semitism. In the latest incident, an 8-year-old boy was walking to an evening class just outside Paris when he was set upon by two teenagers.

It’s far from an exceptional case. Earlier this month, a Jewish store in Paris was targeted by arsonists and a 15-year-old Jewish girl had her face slashed around the same neighborhood as where this boy has now been attacked. In another incident last September, a Jewish family was held hostage as a gang ransacked their home looking for hidden jewelry and money (a typical anti-Semitic trope is that Jews horde expensive items).

More brutal attacks have also occurred. In 2012, three children and a teacher were killed in an attack on a Jewish school in southern France. Four innocent people were also murdered in January 2015, when a terrorist stormed a Kosher supermarket.

All of this has led French Jews to take special precautions to protect themselves. They travel in groups for added security and sometimes conceal the testaments of their heritage; avoiding wearing kippahs or Stars of David. In some areas, Jewish community activists have organized self-defense groups to protect their friends and family.

This speaks to something. While we talk much about no-go zones in France, the real problem is not no-go zones, but rather no-man's-land zones: areas free to travel but fraught with perceivable risk. The challenge here is not so much a threat to life, but a perishing of the French right to the pursuit of happiness.

Why does France, a modern democratic society, have such a problem here? A few reasons. First off, France has a distinct problem with the integration of its Muslim youths. The blending of France’s generous welfare state and the relative disinterest of the French social establishment in Muslim social mobility has led young French Muslims to feel detached from their own society. They keep to themselves in homogeneous communities; often poor, run down, gang-controlled tenements, basking in a narrative of victimhood and anger.

Not long ago, the activist far right comprised a motley assortment of anti-Islam groups and individuals rallying in cities across Australia railing against Islamist terrorism, Muslim immigration and the Islamisation of Australia.

Today, the activist far right scene has been sharpened and galvanised into something much bolder, more militant and potentially threatening to Australian society.

Within Australia, the far right contains a wide diversity of views, and is composed of a multitude of groups of varying sizes and aims. Many tend to be active predominantly online or within-house, rather than publicly on the streets.

Out of this melange, three main political streams of thought have emerged in the contemporary activist far right in Australia. These streams may be described as civic “patriots,” nationalists and racialists.

These streams define themselves according to their own idiosyncratic ideas about identity, about who “qualifies” as an Australian and what constitutes the ideal demographic make-up of Australian society. Notions of race and culture, multiculturalism and integration, are pivotal in these streams.

There is some overlap in their beliefs, some membership exchange, and at times a great deal of hostility between them. A brief summary of the underlying ideas and modus operandi of the groups in each stream follows.

The 40,000 soccer fans who packed London’s Stamford Bridge Stadium for Chelsea FC’s Premier League game against AFC Bournemouth on Wednesday took a break from the customary pregame chants for their team and against their rivals and stood silently and respectfully as the home team showcased its new campaign to counter antisemitism.

While the pitch’s center circle was covered by a banner calling for an end to the age-old expressions of Jew-hatred, a video appeared on the stadium’s jumbo screens, launching the Blues’ new tolerance-promoting campaign.

Images of the team’s star players, management, staff and fans, interspersed with prominent figures from Israel and the local and international Jewish community were shown. All those depicted were holding up signs reading “Say No To Antisemitism,” a clear message of support and acceptance for the Jews in the crowd and rejection of the ugliness that is increasingly tarnishing the beautiful game.

Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency first responder organization and Abbott Israel have joined forces with soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo for a new campaign encouraging Israelis to donate blood.

Star Real Madrid player Cristiano Ronaldo, a regular blood donor, is featured in the “BeThe1” campaign, part of a nationwide blood drive that will take place at dozens of blood donation sites across Israel.

Blood donations are vital in order to save lives, but many people are unaware of this until they or their loved ones are in critical need. Few people know that 234 million operations that require blood transfusions take place worldwide annually. In fact, 1 in every 7 people who are hospitalized requires a life-saving blood transfusion.

Whilst 108 million blood units are collected annually across the world, only a small percentage of the billions people who are eligible to donate actually do so. For those requiring a blood transfusion, the need is even greater as the blood has a very short shelf life. It is only by means of a steady, regular stream of volunteer donors that the required supply can be guaranteed.

For this reason, Real Madrid soccer star, Cristiano Ronaldo, has joined Magen David Adom's campaign. Israel's national rescue service along with Abbott Israel are cooperating in order to promote and raise awareness of the subject, as well as encouraging younger members to join the pool of regular donors.

Caitlyn Jenner – the sportsperson formerly known as Bruce Jenner – has been in Ireland. And in a speech about LGBT rights, she mentioned Israel’s stellar human rights record.

“In my community, in the trans community, the L, the G, the B and the T, the T portion is the most underfunded by far. I really judge a people and a country by the way they treat the LGBT community, I just have to say Ireland has done such a good job when it comes to these issues.

“There’s other countries around the world, in fact I’ll be in Israel, who have done a wonderful job in the face of civil rights, when what’s happening in the L, the G, the B or the T, they’ll hang you; it’s an amazing thing.”

Caitlyn is set to receive the Champion of Israel and LGBTQ Rights Award on March 8 in New York. Naturally, this has sent the haters into conniptions.

The United Kingdom “will always be Israel’s friend,” British Secretary of State for Defense Gavin Williamson pledged on Tuesday at a London gathering.

Speaking at the Conservative Friends of Israel’s Annual Parliamentary Reception, Williamson — the 41-year-old MP for South Staffordshire — hailed Israel as a “beacon of light and hope, in a region where there is so much hatred and hurt.”

“We shouldn’t underestimate how difficult it is to keep that light bright and burning” he went on to say.

Williamson asked: “If we are not there to stand up for a country, whose views and ideals are so close, or are simply our own, what are we as a nation? What are we in politics, if we cannot accept and celebrate the wonderful blooming of democracy that is Israel, but instead always turn to a narrative of spite, envy?”

Britain and Israel, Williamson noted, have “a strong and firm relationship of working together. It’s a relationship of partners…It’s a partnership of equals, a partnership of friends.”

Archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar is recognized the world over for her incredible finds in Jerusalem that verify the biblical record. She has a rich history with Herbert W. Armstrong College and theTrumpet.com. The college first dispatched students to Jerusalem to support Eilat in 2006. Since then, dozens of Armstrong students have volunteered on Dr. Mazar’s excavations in both the City of David and the Ophel.

Our history with the Mazar family and Jerusalem archaeology began long before 2006; in fact, it began almost 40 years earlier, in 1968. The relationship began when Herbert W. Armstrong, the chancellor of Ambassador College and the editor in chief of the Plain Truth, visited Jerusalem, met with Israeli authorities, and agreed to support a massive excavation (the “Big Dig”) at the foot of the Temple Mount. From 1968 to 1976, hundreds of Ambassador students traveled to Jerusalem and volunteered on the dig. And guess who was in charge of the “Big Dig” and a close friend of Mr. Armstrong. Benjamin Mazar, Eilat’s grandfather. As a young girl, Eilat Mazar worked closely with the Ambassador students on her grandfather’s dig and has many fond memories of working alongside the “ambassadors.”

Dr. Mazar is currently leading another excavation on the Ophel. As is now custom, Eilat is supported by Armstrong students and alumni: 11, to be exact. I visited Dr. Mazar and the students in Jerusalem last weekend. During the visit, we broke out the microphone and I sat down with Dr. Mazar to discuss the Ophel dig, as well as some of our fondest memories from the past 50 years.

Below is a condensed and slightly edited transcript of our conversation at the Ophel dig site on January 28:

Haim Gouri was perhaps Israel’s best example of its unique brand of warrior-poets, birthed of a search for meaning through the fires of the Jewish people’s traumas and the country’s early wars.

It’s impossible to sum up the life of Gouri, a man of letters who in many ways embodied the competing personalities of Israel — fighters yearning for land but also peace — into a handful of pages, but a day after his death Wednesday, papers try their hand at remembering who he was and what he meant and encapsulating it into the format of a daily.

The tabloids Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth devote a combined dozen pages to Gouri, and through all the remembrances and eulogies there is also a profound sense of loss for a mythological Israel of yore he personified, as if he were the last living breath of those who built the country, especially those of the pre-state Palmach militia. Yedioth Ahronoth, which includes a caricature of him joining other poetic Palmach alums on a cloud, calls him “The last national poet” and Israel Hayom says he was “The last of the giants.”

Haaretz’s straight-up obituary of Gouri notes that “Gouri’s poems were the poems of the Israeli national ethos, and many of his poems became inalienable assets of Israeli culture.”