While claiming to be investigating Z Street’s funding of terror, the IRS never asked how or where Z Street spent its money. The IRS ultimately granted Z Street’s application, in October 2016, without asking anything about terror, or money, or anything else it hadn’t known in 2010.

As the IRS knew within six weeks of our case being filed, Z Street was sent for special scrutiny by an IRS employee using an outdated list of countries affected by terror. The new list didn’t include Israel. The IRS didn’t resume processing our application after it discovered this error, and it didn’t disclose the error for six years. Because we sued, the IRS froze Z Street’s application. It stayed on ice until August 2016, when a court held the IRS couldn’t get our case thrown out until it processed our application. Two months later we got our exemption.

The “terror” error turns out to have been a pretext. Within weeks of President Obama’s inauguration, IRS and State Department officials began considering whether they could deny or revoke tax-exempt status for organizations that provided material support to Jews living across the Green Line—the nonborder that delineates pre-1967 Israel from the territories Israel acquired in the Six Day War. The theory was that a Jewish presence in those areas is inconsistent with U.S. policy. The IRS drew up lists of such organizations based on information from anti-Israel websites such as Electronic Intifada and MondoWeiss.

The New York Times and the Washington Post ran articles that advanced the policy espoused by the Obama administration and its nonprofit ally, J Street. Unnamed “senior State Department officials” were quoted as saying that Jewish activity over the Green Line isn’t “helpful” to peace efforts. (h/t Esther)

A European Union report leaked to The Guardian newspaper expressed ire over Israeli tourism in and around Jerusalem’s Old City, calling the ongoing development of Jewish infrastructure a form of “touristic settlement.”

The EU Heads of Mission in Jerusalem issued a report warning that the development of Jewish tourism in the ancient City of David, currently located within a heavily populated Palestinian neighborhood, and a planned cable car that would transport tourists from the Western sections of the city to the Western Wall plaza within the Old City, were “a political tool to modify the historical narrative and to support, legitimize, and expand settlements.” The report asserts that the projects promote the “historic continuity of the Jewish presence in the area at the expense of other religions and cultures.”

The cable car, which EU diplomats have dubbed “highly controversial,” is anticipated to be operational by 2020, and is being erected to ease traffic on the narrow streets surrounding Jerusalem’s Old City, and drastically reducing travel time. An estimated 25,000 people are expected to utilize the system per day.

Additionally, the report states that, “critics have described the project as turning the World Heritage site of Jerusalem into a commercial theme park while local Palestinian residents are absent from the narrative being promoted to the visitors.” The further suggested that the cable car project would pose a security threat, as one of the cable car stations would be a little over 420 feet from the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif site administered by the Jordanian Wakf.

Over 30 registered World Heritage sites around the world are accessible via cable car systems.

Nor can liberals claim that opposition to the recognition of Jerusalem merely puts them on the same page as opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Backing for Trump on this point was a consensus issue in Israel for every party with the exception of the very far left and the anti-Zionist Arab factions. With both Labor and the centrist Yesh Atid backing the president’s gesture, it’s hard for Democrats to say they’re simply being liberal Zionists by refusing to acknowledge that Trump did the right thing on Jerusalem.

In that context, it ought to be possible for Democrats to cheer a move that they would have supported had it come from a president from their own party. But in the bifurcated America of 2018, there is no such thing as a bipartisan issue anymore. Though Trump’s relentless trolling of his opponents on Twitter has exacerbated this trend, Democratic opposition to the president is so deep and bitter that they feel that endorsing anything he does legitimizes his presidency. Since their base is hoping a Democratic win in the November midterms will lead to impeachment, Jerusalem is just one more issue on which they will never give Trump credit, even if many of them don’t disagree with him.

There are reasons why Democrats are drifting away from Israel that have nothing to do with Trump. But the more their leaders send signals that treat pro-Israel gestures as being unacceptable if they mean applauding Trump, the worse it will get.

It was a disconcerting sight when Democrats all sat while Republicans stood to applaud the mention of Jerusalem as well as Trump’s vow to cut off aid to those — like the Palestinians — who oppose US policy. But friends of Israel shouldn’t draw too many conclusions from it. So long as Trump is president, their opposition to his reversal of Obama’s daylight policy is rooted in partisanship and not necessarily animus toward Israel. It will be up to Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — who was one of the few who did stand for Jerusalem — to help their party separate its emotions about Trump from Israel. But so long as Trump is sticking close to Israel, this won’t be the last time that Democrats send the country a message that this is not an issue on which they are prepared to set aside partisan feuds.

Germany’s foreign minister said Saturday that Germany and only Germany was responsible for the Holocaust as it sought to reassure Poland that Berlin would condemn distortions of history such as descriptions of Nazi camps in occupied Poland as “Polish concentration camps.”

A proposed new law in Poland would outlaw publicly and falsely attributing Nazi Germany’s crimes in World War II to the Polish nation. The US has joined Israel in criticizing it, saying it would impact free expression.

“This organized mass murder was carried out by our country and no one else. Individual collaborators change nothing about that,” said German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel.

“We are convinced that only carefully appraising our own history can bring reconciliation. That includes people who had to experience the intolerable suffering of the Holocaust being able to speak unrestrictedly about this suffering,” said Gabriel.

Earlier Saturday, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawieck admitted the legislation could have been timed and presented better, but he insisted that the law is needed to protect the truth of Poland’s wartime history.

In a direct response to a bill passed by Polish legislators criminalizing terms that link Poland to any involvement of the heinous crimes in the Holocaust, 61 members of Israel’s Knesset cosponsored new legislation whereby exonerating Polish involvement in crimes against humanity during World War II will be considered a form of illegal Holocaust denial.

Israel’s Law for Defense Against Holocaust Denial already criminalizes denial or minimization of crimes against the Jewish people in the Holocaust, and is punishable with up to five years in jail.

The bill was cosponsored by parliamentarians from parties across Israel’s broad political spectrum, with participating Knesset members from the Likud, HaBayit HaYehudi, Zionist Union, Yisrael Beitenu and Yesh Atid parties.

Included in the bill is an amendment that would provide legal aid to any Holocaust survivor or educator who is charged with breaking any foreign law for recounting facts or personal accounts from World War II, including any information that proves Polish complicity.

The Polish Senate passed a bill Wednesday making use of the phrase “Polish death camps” or any language suggesting Poland had any responsibility for crimes against the Jewish people during the Holocaust illegal, carrying a maximum 3-year prison sentence.

A chief rabbi of Ukraine called on the Israeli government to suspend school trips to Poland and have them in his country because of Warsaw’s new bill on Nazi crimes.

Rabbi Moshe Azman made the suggestion in a letter he sent to Education Minister Naftali Bennett on Thursday, a day after the Polish Senate passed a measure that proposes to outlaw rhetoric in which Poland is blamed for Nazi crimes.

The State of Israel and many Jewish organizations, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Yad Vashem and the European Jewish Congress, say the legislation risks blurring historical truth, as many Poles participated as individuals or as members of some resistance militias in murdering Jews or betraying them to the Nazi occupation forces. They also acknowledge that Polish authorities were not part of the Nazi campaign of annihilation against the Jews during the Holocaust.

Following the bill in Poland to “forbid telling the truth on what happened during the Holocaust in Poland,” Azman wrote, “I urge you to cancel the March of the Living for Israeli school students.” The march brings individuals from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust.

Israel’s embassy in Warsaw on Friday denounced what it said was a “wave of anti-Semitic statements” sweeping across Poland, many of them directed at the Israeli ambassador, in the midst of a diplomatic row over Polish complicity in Holocaust atrocities and the freedom to debate the issue.

On Wednesday night, the Polish Senate voted in favor of a controversial law which sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term for anyone who refers to Nazi German death camps as Polish or accuses the Polish nation or state of complicity in the Third Reich’s crimes.

“In the last few days we could not help but notice a wave of anti-Semitic statements, reaching the Embassy through all channels of communication. Many of them targeted Ambassador Anna Azari personally,” the embassy said in a statement on its website.

“We have restrained ourselves from reaction, but we feel we should no more. Anti-Semitic statements are overflowing the internet channels in Poland, but they have become present on the mainstream media too, especially on (public broadcaster station) TVP Info.

Polish President Andrzej Duda is facing the most controversial decision of his political career, after his country’s Senate passed this week the widely-censured “Holocaust Law” that criminalizes any discussion of Polish complicity with the Nazi Holocaust.

Duda is now at the beginning of a 21-day period in which he has to choose whether to sign the bill, veto it, or refer it to Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal.

One of Duda’s advisers, Prof. Andrzej Zybertowicz, told Polish station Radio Plus on Friday that the law was discussed at a meeting with the president on Thursday. While Duda was an early advocate of the law — telling an audience in Jerusalem during an official visit in January 2017, “We did not make the Holocaust. We were conquered by the Germans. We had no free choice” — his adviser implied that the Polish leader did not regard the historical record as the only issue to consider.

Duda understood that his decision had to ensure that “the interests of Poland, our security and our international status are balanced,” Prof. Zybertowicz said.

Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz admitted on Friday that relations with Israel had been strained as a result of the dispute over the legislation. But, he underlined, “charging the Polish state with the responsibility for the Holocaust is an activity that must be stopped.”

Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan was charged with rape on Friday, a judicial source said, following claims by two women that he assaulted them in French hotel rooms in 2009 and 2012.

Ramadan, who was arrested by French police on January 28, has now been charged with connected charges of rape and rape of a vulnerable person, a judicial source said.

The accused, a Swiss citizen and the grandson of the founder of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Islamist movement, has furiously denied rape allegations from two women, which emerged late last year, as the Harvey Weinstein scandal unfurled in the US.

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".

‘He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die’

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.

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.

The Trump administration may publicly unveil its Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal even if the Palestinian Authority maintains its refusal to resume talks brokered by the US, an Israeli TV report said Thursday.

The Channel 10 news report quoted senior officials in the US administration as saying that “all the relevant countries that support a peace agreement are still waiting for our plan. They want to work with us and they understand that there is no substitute for the United States as mediator.”

The report, which said a final decision had yet to be made by the administration on when or whether to present its proposal, came after Jason Greenblatt, President Donald Trump’s top Middle East peace negotiator, said in two speeches this week that efforts to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace were still underway and urged the Palestinians to return to the table.

The unnamed US officials said one reason for publicizing the plan would be so that the international community would see its provisions.

Trump said in Davos, Switzerland, last week, that the US has “a proposal for peace. It’s a great proposal for the Palestinians. I think it’s a very good proposal for Israel.”

He added, “I hope the Palestinians want to make peace. And if they do, everybody’s going to be very happy in the end.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ recent tirade against U.S. President Donald Trump was prompted by a stipulation in Washington’s peace plan that seeks to reduce the role the PA plays in Jerusalem, Israel Hayom learned on Wednesday.

Relations between Washington and Ramallah have sunk to a new low following Trump’s Dec. 6 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. On Jan. 14, in a fiery, two-hour speech before supporters in Ramallah, Abbas railed against Trump, castigating him for his treatment of the Palestinians and warning that the Palestinian leadership will have no problem rejecting an unacceptable peace plan.

The Palestinian leader’s wrath was reportedly evoked by an American proposal to set Abu Dis as the capital of a future Palestinian state, instead of east Jerusalem, as the PA demand.

Due to its proximity to the Old City, following the 1993 Oslo Accords the Palestinian Authority established a series of government institutions in Abu Dis, including a Palestinian parliament building. However, the Palestinians have refused to shutter government institutions elsewhere in Jerusalem, such as Orient House near Damascus Gate.

“It is unfortunate that the Palestinian leadership is seeking to prejudice people against our unfinished plan, which they have not seen. We do not know what they claim to have seen,” a White House official told Israel Hayom.

“We will present proposals directly to the Israelis and the Palestinians at the appropriate time and under the right conditions. In the meantime, we will remain hard at work on a draft plan that benefits both sides while some prejudge and undermine efforts to achieving lasting peace,” he said.

The Palestinian Authority on Friday dismissed US claims that President Mahmoud Abbas was refusing to return to the negotiating table with Israel.

On Thursday, Channel 10 quoted senior US officials as saying that the White House was considering presenting US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan even if the crisis with the PA continues and Abbas refuses to come to the negotiating table.

Relations between the US administration and the PA have been strained since Trump’s December 6 announcement recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Abbas and senior PA officials have since stated that the US was no longer qualified to play any role in a Middle East peace process because of its “bias” in favor of Israel, and the PA has refused all substantive contacts with the Trump administration.

The Palestinians’ strong and swift reaction to Thursday’s report is seen as yet another sign of mounting tensions between the PA leadership and the Trump administration.

The Trump administration on Friday announced it will continue much of the Obama administration’s nuclear weapons policy, but take a more aggressive stance toward Russia. It said Russia must be convinced it would face “unacceptably dire costs” if it were to threaten even a limited nuclear attack in Europe.

The sweeping review of US nuclear policy does not call for any net increase in strategic nuclear weapons — a position that stands in contrast to President Donald Trump’s statement, in a tweet shortly before he took office, that the US “must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” In his State of the Union address Tuesday, he made no mention of expansion, though he said the arsenal must deter acts of aggression.

A 74-page report summarizing the review’s findings calls North Korea a “clear and grave threat” to the US and its allies. It asserts that any North Korean nuclear attack against the US or its allies will result in “the end of that regime.”

It also cast China as a potential nuclear adversary, saying the US arsenal is tailored to “prevent Beijing from mistakenly concluding” that it could gain advantage by using its nuclear weapons in Asia, or that “any use of nuclear weapons, however limited, is acceptable.”

The Trump administration attacked Hezbollah’s financial network on Friday by imposing sanctions on six people and seven entities in an effort to turn back Iran’s influence in the Middle East and beyond.

“The administration is determined to expose and disrupt Hezbollah’s networks, including those across the Middle East and West Africa, used to fund their illicit operations,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in announcing the penalties under financial regulations targeting the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorist group.

The six sanctioned individuals included five Lebanese and one Iraqi, most of them linked to Al-Inmaa Engineering and Contracting, the Treasury Department said. The seven entities were firms based in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Lebanon and Ghana, the statement said.

Senior Trump administration officials said the sanctions were part of an aggressive move against Hezbollah to try to limit the influence of Iran, which gives the group about $700 million a year to help finance its activities.

The officials, briefing reporters at the White House on condition of anonymity, said the Trump administration was working to reverse what it considers a more lackadaisical approach toward Hezbollah by Democratic President Barack Obama after the 2015 Iran nuclear deal went into effect.

More such targeted sanctions are expected in the months ahead, they said.

The officials said Hezbollah was already under financial strain as it continued to pay for costly operations in Syria and Yemen. The goal was to get European allies to join the United States in increasing pressure on the group, they said.

Israeli drones, fighter jets, and helicopter gunships have carried out more than 100 airstrikes against Islamic State-affiliated terrorists in the Sinai, in a bid to help Egypt deal with the jihadist insurgency in the peninsula, the New York Times reported Saturday.

Israel, alarmed at the threat across the border, agreed to take action with the blessing of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, as Egypt struggled to deal with the violent uprising that has killed hundreds of Egyptian security forces and civilians, the report said. “Once enemies in three wars, then antagonists in an uneasy peace, Egypt and Israel are now secret allies in a covert war against a common foe,” said the paper.

While security coordination between Jerusalem and Cairo is known to be close, the ties are still unpopular in Egypt, despite nearly three decades of peace. In order to keep the cooperation quiet, the Israeli aircraft are often unmarked and sometimes use indirect routes in a bid to cover up the origin of the strikes, the report said.

The report said Sissi had kept the Israeli strikes secret, only letting a small group of military and intelligence officials in on the cooperation, and has kept northern Sinai a closed military area, barring reporters from the region.

Israeli security forces surrounded two houses in the West Bank village of Burqin on Saturday as they continued the hunt for the terrorist suspected of the killing of an Israeli rabbi last month, Palestinian media reported.

Footage shared widely on Palestinian social media showed a convoy of IDF bulldozers and other demolition vehicles driving into the village west of Jenin.

In a Saturday evening statement, the IDF acknowledged the raid was part of the hunt for the killers of Rabbi Raziel Shevach but gave no detials beyond saying that security forces had apprehended several suspects during raids over the weekend.

“The investigation of the attack and operational activities in the village of Burqin, West of Jenin and the Jenin refugee camp, are ongoing,” the statement concluded.

Palestinian media outlets reported that Israeli forces were threatening to demolish the homes if the owners did not turn over Ahmad Nassar Jarrar — the suspected leader of the terror cell that shot and killed 35-year-old father of six Rabbi Raziel Shevach on January 9, as he drove on a highway near his home in the Havat Gilad outpost.

Even ignoring the choice of guest speaker at an annual gala for an organisation that still laughingly claims it is 'pro-Israel' this is really appalling....

An Israeli who strayed into a Palestinian suburb of Jerusalem Friday was attacked and his car was torched by angry residents.

Palestinian security forces in Abu Dis protected the lightly wounded man and handed him over to Israeli authorities. He was taken to a Jerusalem hospital.

Several Palestinians were reportedly injured in the riots during confrontations with Israeli forces who arrived at the scene.

The military said around 200 rioters “hurled rocks, burned the civilian’s vehicle and blocked his exit from the town. IDF and Border Police forces entered the town in coordination with (Palestinians) and extracted the civilian.”

It was not immediately clear whether the man had entered Abu Dis on purpose or by accident.

They work around the clock, day and night, in three shifts, except Friday, the Muslim holy day. In each shift, there are dozens of diggers who move 10 to 20 meters a day. They dig with small drills, shovels and their bare hands. They work underground at 30 or even 40 meters below the surface and are supplied with electricity, water, air and oxygen tanks to avoid suffocation. Visiting one of the tunnels reveals a planned structure, supported by cement panels and cement bows. No doubt, the diggers are brave and risk their lives.

The tunnel I visited is nearly 2 kilometers long and was built by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a smaller group than Hamas, which has been ruling Gaza with an iron fist since it came to power in a military coup, toppling the Palestinian Authority in 2007.

Navigating underground in the right direction is not an easy task. And the right direction is Israel.

Digging tunnels has been one of the specialties of Hamas in Gaza. The tunnels have served two purposes. One is to smuggle goods and weapons from Sinai, with the help of the local branch of ISIS, to Gaza. The second aim is to use the tunnels to infiltrate into Israel.

Together with rockets, the tunnels have served as the most important strategic measures against Israel. During the last war (“Operation Protective Edge”) in the summer of 2014, Hamas managed to surprise the IDF by penetrating Israel via the tunnels twice and causing both casualties and damage. By the end of the war, which lasted nearly two months, the IDF had exposed and destroyed 31 tunnels.

Iraqi Official: The Resistance Aims To Preserve The Current Regimes; Its Most Important Goal Is To Liberate Palestine; The Palestinian Factions, Led By Iranian Qods Force Commander Soleimani, Await Zero Hour For Liberating Palestine https://t.co/KRx2Q4XSKbpic.twitter.com/VxNAKVA6iP

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) February 2, 2018

Ebrahim Raisi, Associate And Designated Heir Of Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei, At Lebanon-Israel Border: 'Soon We Will Witness The Liberation Of Jerusalem'https://t.co/Tk3tqCS6Hjpic.twitter.com/ASHloVphZO

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) February 2, 2018

One famous example used to demonstrate this point has been the story of Rahmaan Mohammadi?—?a young Muslim who (he says) was referred to Prevent for his support for Palestine. Indeed it has been widely reported that he was referred to Prevent by his college off the basis of a pro Palestine badge he was wearing.

He has become the anti Prevent poster-boy. He was taken across the country speaking at Stop The War Coalition events, NUS ‘Students Not Suspects’ events alongside Moazzam Begg and Malia ‘Zionist outpost’ Bouattia.

His story has been covered by the Guardian, BBC, Times, Sky News, Vice, Buzzfeed, and many others. This has all put Rahmaan in good stead and is now even a contributor to Putin’s mouthpiece?—?Russia Today. It is clear that Rahmaan’s story shot him to stardom within the anti-prevent lobby and as a result Rahmaan even managed to bag himself a position on the NUS’s National Executive Council.

His college disputed the widely-reported reasons for Rahmaan’s Prevent referral in an article published in the local paper but no one paid any attention to that;

A look at his posts from the time indicate his referral to Prevent was entirely legitimate. These are some of the views he was posting around the time of his Prevent referral and after.

1. Rahmaan’s profile picture in May 2014 was of Hezbollah fighters. Hezbollah’s military wing is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK, European Union and many other countries.
2. The British army are “terrorists” according to Rahmaan.
3. Rahmaan takes issue with “The Jewish Zuckerberg” and thinks British and American intelligence services should “go kill themselves”:
4. Rahmaan is happy that the Islamic State were “finally” targeting Israel:
5. It’s not just Jews he takes issue with:
6. Support for the butcher of Syria?—?Bashar Al Assad:

With a record like this there’s every chance Rahmaan will go on to be NUS President in a couple of years.

Minister Gilad Erdan demanded that a German bank close an account that enables an anti-Zionist organization to raise funds to boycott the Jewish state and spread antisemitism.

“As minister of strategic affairs, I am leading an international campaign to defend Israel from the BDS movement’s hateful attacks against Israel’s right to exist. This stance against BDS has been adopted by our close friends in Germany, including the CDU [Christian Democratic Union] and municipalities such as Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich. I call on the Bank for Social Economy to join the many German institutions, leaders and citizens who are uniting to reject the discriminatory and antisemitic boycott movement against Israel,” Erdan told The Jerusalem Post last Sunday.

The Bank for Social Economy (Bank für Sozialwirtschaft) operates an account for the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East. In response to Jerusalem’s January ban on entry to Israel of representatives of 20 organizations that advocate a boycott of the Jewish state, Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East wrote in an open letter to Erdan: “Among the list of banned organizations is our sister organization Jewish Voice for Peace in the US, with whom we share many values and political goals, and for whom we have the highest regard.”

The US-based Jewish Voice for Peace hosted the convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh at its spring 2017 conference in Chicago. The head of the NGO said at the time that JVP was “honored to hear from her.”

Odeh, a former member of the US- and EU-classified terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was responsible for a 1969 bombing that murdered two students, Leon Kanner and Eddie Joffe, in a Jerusalem supermarket. She pleaded guilty in 2017 to US naturalization fraud and was deported in September to Jordan because she had lied about her terrorism conviction when she entered the US.

So maybe the image above is a bit of an overstatement. But for some reason, the New York Times can't seem to get it right when explaining BDS activism to readers.

BDS stands for boycott, divestment, and sanctions, and the self-styled "BDS Movement" we tend to hear about today focuses squarely on Israel, aiming to batter the Jewish state with those tools until it ceases to exist.

But in an article yesterday, the Times referred to a "movement in the United States, Europe and elsewhere to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel primarily in protest against its settlement and security practices in the West Bank. The movement is known as B.D.S."

But these are hardly the "primary" motivations of BDS advocacy. The BDS Movement's own website lists three central demands, which include an Israeli withdrawal, not only from the West Bank but also from the Golan Heights, along with the Jewish Quarter and other parts of Jerusalem. It calls for the "dismantling" of Israel's security barrier, which was built to prevent suicide bombers from reaching Israeli towns and which for much of its rout lies in Israel and not the West Bank. It insists on a change to Israel's alleged treatment of Arabs living withing Israel. And it calls for an influx of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Israel, which is widely understood as a way to demographically eliminate the Jewish state.

Despite what the Times told its readers, not one of the three demands refers to settlements, and each of them focus focus on more than the West Bank, and on more than "settlement and security practices."

The takeaway is clear. The AMCHA Initiative, a group that combats antisemitism on campus, states that BDS "aims to demonize, delegitimize, and destroy the Jewish nature of Israel, with the result of denying to Jews their right of national self-determination."

In The Washington Post’s recent article titled “Israel’s official assassination machine,” Glenn Frankel reviews the book, Rise And Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, by Ronen Bergman.

The thesis of the book (and the review) is that, “Since World War II … the Jewish state and its pre-state paramilitary organizations have assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world — some 2,300 ‘targeted killing operations.’”

Israel is repeatedly subjected to war and terrorism, probably more-so than any other country in the Western world. Would it be preferable to Messrs. Bergman and Frankel for Israel to respond the way that other countries have done during similar conflicts — by leveling cities with carpet bombings, or strafing villages with napalm? Or how about dropping bombs laden with poison gas — as Syrian leader Bashar Assad did to his own people, with more than 500,000 total dead as of this writing?

Or what about copying Saddam Hussein’s aggression in 1988, when his army dropped bombs with poisonous gas, killing 20,000 Kurds? King Hussein of Jordan killed several thousand Palestinians from late 1970-71, during an uprising known as Black September. There was a genocide in Rwanda, where upwards of a million people were murdered in 1994. And in Darfur, the UN estimates that 300,000 were murdered. Are these kinds of policies preferable?

But according to The Washington Post, Israel — or as the Post‘s book review referred to it, the “Jewish State” — is the “assassination machine.” Doesn’t the Post see how targeting individual terrorists is more humane than wiping out entire towns or cities?

A new documentary about the scale of Nazi medical experiments has reopened old wounds in France as one of the country’s leading universities investigates whether its stores still contain the remains of some Jewish victims.

Dr. Michel Cymes, the star of a French television medical advice program, believes that the remains of some of the 86 Jews tortured and mutilated by SS doctor August Hirt may still be in the anatomy collection of the University of Strasbourg.

He first raised the theory in his 2015 bestseller, “Hippocrates in Hell”, and repeated the claim in a new film of the same name shown on French TV this week.

The documentary, which trended on Twitter after it was broadcast, raised awkward questions about how part of the “Jewish skeleton collection” Hirt assembled at the university during the war may have survived in its stores.

The remains of Jews on which Hirt tested mustard gas at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp near the Alastian city were supposed to have been buried after it was liberated in 1944.

But after Cymes’s claims, the university is now conducting an inquiry using outside experts into the contents of 20 boxes found in its collection which bear Hirt’s name.

Germany’s senate on Friday asked the constitutional court to ban state funding for the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), the country’s longest-established neo-Nazi group, responding to concerns at growing nationalism in parts of the country.

Scarred by memories of the collapse of democracy in the 1930s amid the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, Germany has some of the strictest laws on political extremism in the world, with rules allowing the banning of anti-democratic parties.

Members of the upper house, which represents Germany’s 16 federal states, voted unanimously in favor of an application to the constitutional court to stop the financing.

“Ours is a democracy based on debate, but it must also be defended,” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, premier of the state of Saarland, told the chamber.

Friday’s vote came four months after a national election in which the Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the first far-right party to enter parliament in decades.

Parties that win election to public office in Germany become eligible for generous public financing, designed to fund party organizations and think tanks to raise the quality of policy and public debate.

The NPD’s lone member of the European Parliament made the party eligible for around a million euros of public funding in 2016. The party, which sees immigration as a danger to the “survival of the German people in its Central European Lebensraum,” is no longer in any regional parliament.

Mobile games developer Playtika Ltd said on Monday it was setting up a new business, which plans to invest up to $400 million in Israeli digital entertainment and consumer internet firms as well as games companies globally.

Playtika Growth Investments will target companies that are already profitable or near break-even and have proven business models and products, the company said, noting that portfolio companies will have access to Playtika’s marketing, analytics, technology and product teams.

Playtika, which has spent over $300 million buying more than 10 companies since it was founded in 2010, was acquired in 2016 by a Chinese private equity consortium led by Giant Network Group for $4.4 billion.

The Israel-based maker of casino-style games, such as Slotomania, for social networks has annual revenue of more than $1.1 billion and employs over 1,700 people in 10 countries. It has 20 million monthly active users.

Eric Rapps, managing director of Playtika Growth, told Reuters that a “very significant majority” of the $400 million will be invested in Israel.

As Hurricane Harvey ripped through Houston last August, the trauma didn’t even spare those whose job is to help others cope. One social worker, barricaded on the second floor of her house, watched in horror as water and mud flooded her first floor. Another was stuck in a closet with her dog for 24 hours.

Many mental-health professionals felt helpless or guilty for their inability to respond to people in need as they usually would. And other professionals, such as educators, did not feel adequately prepared to tend psychological wounds among those they work with.

Israel, as always, was quick to send various forms of immediate support to Houston. But the Israel Trauma Coalition (ITC) knew from experience in Israel and many other countries that a long process of healing was only beginning. The organization reached out to Houston’s Jewish Family Services in September.

“They said they’d like to do their ‘train the trainer’ model in their method of helping people deal with trauma,” says JFS Houston Special Projects Coordinator Gittel Francis.

With funding from the UJA Federation of New York, three ITC personnel flew over to meet with representatives of about 15 social-services agencies in Houston. They explained that their training model involves nine full days spread over a six-month or year-long period. But the time was not yet right.

“At that point we were still in the throes of disaster. Schools were just opening up again and people, including at our agency, were just getting back to normal life,” says Francis.

A story of starch, political will, and mistaken identity.

With apologies to Linda Richman, the big-haired, Yiddish-spouting yenta that Mike Myers brought to life on Saturday Night Live, Israeli couscous is neither Israeli nor couscous: Discuss. True, the chewy, spherical starch has an Israeli pedigree and is widely served there today, particularly to children. But “at the end of the day, it is not actually couscous,” says Leetal Arazi. “It’s pasta.” As a co-owner of New York Shuk, a Brooklyn-based company that made its name teaching novices how to hand-roll authentic semolina couscous at home, she should know.

Furthermore, no Israeli home cook has ever called the dish—which is typically served dressed with heaps of fried onion or a basic tomato sauce—Israeli couscous. That name, just like French toast or Italian dressing, is a figment of the American culinary imagination. (More on that in a moment.)

In Israel, the dish is called ptitim, which translates roughly from Hebrew to “little crumbles.” It was created by the Osem food company in the early 1950s at the behest of then prime minister David Ben-Gurion. At the time, the modern state of Israel was essentially in a startup phase, and resources were scarce: As Gil Marks writes in The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, “the government imposed a period of national belt-tightening and rationing known as tzena (austerity).”

The Palestine Liberation Organization’s top leadership opened the way to suspending its recognition of Israel on Saturday, but stopped short of ordering the drastic measure immediately.

Withdrawing the PLO’s 1988 recognition would threaten decades of Israeli relations with the moderate Palestinian leadership and raise doubts over security coordination between the two.

It would also be seen as a fatal blow to the two-state solution.

The PLO’s Executive Committee released a statement after a three-hour meeting Saturday saying it would set up a committee to study the derecognition move.

The body also called for the Palestinian Authority to cut off all ties with Israel, including security coordination in the West Bank.

The executive committee urged Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to “immediately start preparing plans and projects for disengagement steps with the Israeli occupation government at the political, administrative, economic, and security levels.”

The disengagement plans will be presented to the PLO Executive Committee for approval, the statement said, without setting a deadline.

A decision by the Jordanian government to open administrative offices in Jerusalem that will allow residents of the holy city to renew their documents including their passports has been well received by Jerusalem’s Palestinians who hold Jordanian travel documents.

Palestinians living in Jerusalem are considered residents of the city yet they are not citizens of any state. They are neither citizens of Palestine, Israel nor Jordan, but are allowed to carry Jordanian travel documents. In the past, Palestinians in Jerusalem needing to renew a travel document or file a birth or marriage certificate had to travel across the King Hussein Bridge to Jordanian Interior Ministry offices in Amman. Israeli-issued permits to exit across the bridge (costing NIS 230) and an exit tax (around NIS 180) amount to around $120 per person. The fee for a passport is JD200 ($282). Some of these costly fees can be removed or reduced simply by bureaucratic decisions of the various parties responsible for the bridge crossings.

Fawaz Shahwan, head of the Civil Affairs Department at the Interior Ministry, said on Jordanian state television on January 22 that Jerusalemites will soon be able to process personal documents without having to travel to Jordan to do so.

Shahwan described the change in Jordanian policy “as part of King Abdullah’s interest in Jerusalem’s holy places and the people of Jerusalem, these services are being made to help strengthen the steadfastness of the people of Jerusalem in their city”.

In February 2016, BDS South Africa praised a decision to cancel a water crisis conference that was scheduled to take place in Johannesburg.

BDS South Africa said at the time it was pleased “the rug has been pulled from the Israeli ambassador, who will not be able to exploit our very serious water crises for his own cheap publicity and whitewashing of his regime. Israel water technology is not unique or special; such technology is widely available through other more friendly countries.”

Two years later, South Africa is experiencing a major water crisis. Unless a last-minute solution is found, Cape Town will soon have the dubious honor of becoming one of the few – if not the first – developed cities in the world to run out of water.

On April 12, known as “Day Zero,” water reservoirs across the city are expected to hit 13.5% of capacity – at which point, according to Mayor Patricia de Lille, taps will be turned off and severe rationing will begin.

Once “Day Zero” hits, Cape Town’s 3.7 million residents will have to travel to one of 200 water collection points to collect their daily water rations: 25 liters per person.

If, two years ago, or even earlier, South Africa had put aside its self-defeating boycott of Israel, could it have avoided “Day Zero”? Perhaps. What is undeniable is that South Africa is in no position to refuse help from Israel, a world leader in desalination, water recycling, water preservation and irrigation.

The Z Street application was at first delayed, then frozen, because the IRS claimed as a defense, that Israel was viewed as a “terrorist entity,” and a country “with terrorism.”

Many of us suspected that Obama’s administration had politicized Homeland Security, the DOJ, the FBI, and the American relationship to the United Nations in ways that favored Islamism, Islamic terrorism, Palestine, Iran, and that demonized Zionism and Israel’s attempts at self-defense.

Z STREET”s successful lawsuit exposes how the Obama administration, through its power to grant or withhold tax-exempt status to groups, politicized and corrupted a policy of even-handedness, transparency, and accountability at the IRS.

Like the Western media, professoriate, international organizations, and very much like an Islamic world view, the American IRS viewed Israel, especially Israelis who lived “across the Green Line—the nonborder that delineates pre-1967 Israel from the territories it acquired in the Six Day War” as related to “terrorism” or as “terrorists.”

According to Marcus, "Our own investigation disclosed that between 2009 and 2016, while Z STREET’s application was stalled, the IRS needed no special scrutiny to grant numerous applications for tax-exempt status that explicitly proclaimed donations would be spent in Gaza—a territory formally under the jurisdiction of Hamas, which the U.S. State Department designates as a terror organization."

According to Marcus, in a personal interview, the following is merely a sampling of not-for-profits, which she obtained via Guidestar; the IRS had okayed these “charities” during the period that Z STREET’s application remained pending.

If Republican lawmakers held strategy sessions with David Duke, the party would be held to account.

Hillary Clinton tried to make Louis Farrakhan an issue when she ran against Barack Obama in 2008. The Nation of Islam leader—infamous for calling Judaism a “gutter religion”—had praised the future president as “the hope of the entire world.” In a February debate, Mrs. Clinton demanded that Mr. Obama reject Mr. Farrakhan’s support, insisting: “There’s a difference between denouncing and rejecting.” Mr. Obama obliged and added: “There’s no formal offer of help from Minister Farrakhan that would involve me rejecting it.”

Three years earlier, Mr. Obama posed for a photo with Mr. Farrakhan at a Congressional Black Caucus gathering. The photographer, journalist Askia Muhammad, told the liberal site Talking Points Memo that a CBC staffer contacted him “sort of in a panic” about the photo. “I promised and made arrangements to give the picture to Leonard Farrakhan, ” Louis Farrakhan’s son-in-law and chief of staff. But he kept a copy, which he released last week.

Mrs. Clinton might have become president had the photo come out a decade earlier. It isn’t clear from the photo to what degree Mr. Obama was associated with Mr. Farrakhan. But the Congressional Black Caucus’s association is scandalous. Its members have met with Mr. Farrakhan on at least one other occasion.

The volumes confirm a long-rumored mutual non-aggression pact between authorities in Rome and the PLO, which led Italian authorities to allow terrorists behind the hijacking of the Italian liner Achille Lauro to escape in 1985.
Suha Arafat, wife of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, greets Achille Lauro hijacking mastermind Abul Abbas, before the start of the first session of the Palestinian National Council in Gaza City, April 22, 1996. (AP/Adel Hana)

Following the hijacking, in which wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer was killed, a standoff ensued between Italian and US authorities over attempts to have the attackers brought to justice.

According to the diaries, then foreign minister Giulio Andreotti allowed hijacking mastermind Muhammad Zaidan, who went by the nom de guerre Abul Abbas, to escape US extradition and flee from Rome to Yugoslavia.
Leon Klinghoffer, 1916-1985 (screen capture: Youtube)

This followed a deal between Palestinians and Italian authorities over a decade earlier by which Palestinians would not carry out on attacks in Italy and Palestinian terrorists from the PLO, PFLP and other factions could have free movement throughout the country.

“Italy is a Palestinian shore of the Mediterranean,” Arafat wrote.

Senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat on Saturday accused the Trump administration of trying depose the Palestinian leadership in a “coup” and told the “impudent” US envoy to the United Nations Nikki Haley she should “shut up” with her criticism of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Erekat, who has led the Palestinian peace negotiations and is secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, singled out Haley, who slammed Abbas for a recent speech that was full of anti-Semitic tropes.

Erekat said that Haley’s “impudence” has gone as far as calling for removing Abbas from power.

“She called for overthrowing the democratically elected Palestinian president,” Erekat complained in an interview with the Palestinian Al-Watan Voice news website.

“This is the president who led the peace process and promoted the principle of the two-state solution,” Erekat said, referring to Abbas. “Now this [US] ambassador is accusing him of lacking courage, and is calling for replacing him.”

Only the Palestinian people have that right, he said. “The Palestinian people are loyal to their martyrs, prisoners, wounded, struggles, steadfastness, and heroism. This is the reality. The Palestinians are the only ones who are entitled to hold their leaders accountable.”

What would have happened if a Muslim child had been beaten on a street?

What would have happened if a Muslim girl had been shot in the face with two schoolmates and her father, an imam?

What would have happened if a Muslim woman had been thrown out of the window?

What would have happened if a young Muslim who was selling mobile phones had been tortured and burned?

What would have happened if a mob had entered the homes of Muslims, had raped the women and stolen everything?

What would happen if 40,000 Muslims had escaped in fear?

What would have happened if four Muslims had been murdered in a halal shop?

What would happen if all the Muslim schools and mosques had to be protected by the army?

In France, radical Muslims killed a slew of people merely for publishing a cartoon about their Prophet. Can you imagine what would have happened if all the events listed above would have take place?

All this is happening in France right now, but the victims are all Jewish. Jewish boys beaten in the public square for wearing a kippah, Jewish schools protected as if they are bunkers, Jews murdered, one tenth of the French Jewish population who fled or moved, Jews burned to death....

A young Palestinian-American is the driving force behind a nascent #MeToo movement in this patriarchal corner of the world, selling T-shirts, hoodies and denim jackets with the slogan “Not Your Habibti (darling)” as a retort for catcalls and writing down women’s complaints from her perch in a West Bank square.

Yasmeen Mjalli wants to encourage Palestinian society to confront sexual harassment, a largely taboo subject.

“What I am doing is to start a conversation that people are really afraid to have,” said Mjalli as she put her merchandise on hangers in a clothing store.

The 21-year-old has faced backlash from conservatives and from some activists who say fighting Israel’s occupation is the priority for Palestinians.

Her parents, who grew up in a Palestinian farming town, immigrated to the United States and returned to the West Bank five years ago, weren’t pleased, either.

“To be able to have peace with them, I have to check my feminism at the door, which is very difficult because that’s really who I am,” said Mjalli, who moved to the West Bank last year, after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a degree in art history.

Mjalli and other activists say that starting a conversation about sexual harassment doesn’t mean copying the #MeToo movement in the United States, where victims are speaking out in growing numbers.

Cultural differences require a different approach. (h/t Saigon N)

To fight ISIS, the Egyptians needed the long and apparently covert arm of the Israeli Air Force which, incidentally, has not been active only in the south. Just last year, former Air Force chief Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel revealed that the air force had carried out over 100 missions in Syria as well, the majority of which were also kept out of the public eye.

Still, a word of caution is in order. If the reports about Israeli-Egyptian cooperation are accurate, the development would certainly be conducive toward bolstering the Egyptian security establishment's commitment to peace, and even its partnership with Israel. However, these reports have little hope of swaying public opinion in Egypt. It certainly doesn't have the power to advance the cold peace, currently characterized purely by shared interests and military cooperation, beyond the boundaries of the military institutions involved in it today.

For this reason, in particular, it is important to take note of another New York Times exposé, revealing that former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry proposed that within the framework of efforts to finalize an Israel-Palestinian peace deal, Cairo and Amman would assume security responsibility for Israel. This idea is impractical, even delusional. It demonstrates yet again a detachment from reality and a blind pursuit of wishful thinking. After all, Israeli-Egyptian cooperation, as it is portrayed in the New York Times article, rests on Israel's operational and intelligence gathering capabilities and on Egypt's desire, not to mention its need, to utilize them. The distance between this utilitarian relationship and Egypt and Jordan ever coming to Israel's defense, therefore, is still significant.

A delegation of senior Russian security officials visiting Israel this week reportedly sought to dissuade Jerusalem from striking Iranian and Hezbollah weapons facilities in Syria and Lebanon.

According to the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat, quoted by Israel’s Channel 10 news, the purpose of Wednesday’s visit, headed by Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, was Moscow’s desire to discourage Israeli intervention across the border, Channel 10 news reported.

The Russian delegation, which also included deputy ministers, army generals and intelligence officers, held talks with Israel’s National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat as well as heads of Israel’s National Security Council and top military, defense and intelligence officials.

Patrushev himself met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel has been negotiating with the United States and Russia, the main brokers in Syria, to keep Iran-backed Shiite militias and the Hezbollah terrorist group away from the border.

Netanyahu, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman and others have all said that Israel’s policy is to target shipments of advanced weaponry, including accurate long-range missiles, that are heading to or in the possession of Hezbollah. Foreign media reports have attributed dozens of airstrikes on Iranian-linked targets in Syria to Israel.

Last week’s visit by the Russian officials came on the heels of Netanyahu’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow to discuss Iranian military entrenchment in the region.

Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros is behind the public campaign against the government's plan to deport Sudanese and Eritrean migrants to a third country in Africa, widely believed to be Rwanda, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.

Channel 10 reported that Netanyahu made the comments at the weekly meeting of the Likud ministers. According to the report, Netanyahu said former US president Barack Obama “deported two million infiltrators, and no one said anything.”

The comments came in reply to Science Minister Ofir Akunis, who claimed that foreign governments were behind the campaign to prevent the deportations.

Soros, who is Jewish, is a strident critic of Israel and has supported a number of NGOs with radical left-wing agendas, such as Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, Yesh Din and al-Haq.

A few days ago, I posted what we were told was the response of the Palestinian representative to Nikki Haley announcing that US will be cutting aid to the palestinians. My souce? This viral tweet:

It turns out this was fake. The video is actually from 2013, and shows past Arab idol winner Mohammed Assaf at the UN for International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

The guy who tweeted the original has since blamed it on his brand of humor.

sraeli judges ruled on Sunday that a Jewish settler killed by a Palestinian with whom she was in a relationship was the victim of a political attack rather than a personal one.

Michal Halimi, 29, who was two months pregnant at the time of her death, went missing last May. Her body was discovered outside Tel Aviv in August, and Israeli police arrested Mohammed Harouf, a Palestinian.

Harouf, 30, said in a televised statement to the court in August that he had targeted Halimi “to free prisoners”. His lawyer, Elad Rath, said that Harouf's plan had been to abduct Halimi and swap her for Palestinians held in Israeli jails, but that when she resisted he strangled and bludgeoned her to death.

Halimi was married and lived in the settlement of Adam in the occupied West Bank. Harouf, from Nablus, was working as a gardener in Holon, south of Tel Aviv, on the day of the murder.

Israeli prosecutors initially treated the case as non-political. Israeli media reprinted a photograph that had circulated on Facebook of Halimi and Harouf embracing and smiling.

But on Sunday, prosecutors agreed to a plea bargain under which Harouf will serve a life sentence for murder.

The cabinet on Sunday voted unanimously to begin the process of legalizing the Havat Gilad outpost less than a month after the murder of resident Raziel Shevach.

The approved proposal declares the government’s intention to establish the hilltop community southeast of Nablus as a full-fledged settlement “on lands that are privately owned by Israelis or state lands.”

The proposal authorized Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman to instruct relevant government bodies to examine the legal aspects of recognizing Havat Gilad as an official settlement. It also tasked the Finance Ministry with auditing the financial costs of establishing a new settlement.

On January 9, Shevach was gunned down by Palestinian terrorists while on his way home to the northern West Bank outpost. Even before the burial of the 35-year-old rabbi and father of six, settler leaders and right-wing lawmakers began to call for the outpost to be legalized in response to the attack.

Addressing the cabinet at the start of its weekly meeting on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had just gotten off the phone with Shevach’s widow, Yael, whom he briefed on the government’s two-pronged response to her husband’s murder.

IDF troops and Shin Bet security agency officers on Saturday raided the Palestinian town of Burqin, west of Jenin, in a search for Ahmed Jarrar, the leader of the terrorist cell that murdered Rabbi Raziel Shevach near the Samaria outpost of Havat Gilad last month. One Palestinian suspected as an accomplice was arrested in the raid.

Jarrar, a member of Hamas' Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, is the son of Hamas commander Nasser Jarrar, killed by Israeli forces in 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada.

The younger Jarrar was believed to have been killed in a Jan. 18 raid in Jenin, where two members of the cell were arrested and a third killed, but the defense establishment soon learned he managed to escape, becoming the subject of a massive IDF manhunt.

"Since the Jan. 9 shooting attack near Havat Gilad, IDF and Shin Bet forces have been investigating the incident and working to arrest the terrorists and their accomplices," the IDF Spokesperson's Unit said in a statement.

"Over the past month, several Palestinians have been arrested on suspicion of collaborating with the terrorists who carried out the attack. Yesterday [Saturday] IDF, Shin Bet and Border Police forces arrested several additional suspects. A riot erupted during the operation and the troops used crowd control measures to restore order. The investigation is ongoing."

Palestinian media reported that Israeli troops used live fire during the riot, during which dozens of Palestinians clashed with IDF and Border Police forces.

Israeli authorities at the Kerem Shalom Crossing foiled an attempt to smuggle into the Gaza Strip explosive components for long-range projectiles hidden inside packages of medical supplies, the Defense Ministry said in a statement Sunday morning.

The explosive material was intercepted by security authorities this past week after crates with containers of medical equipment destined for the Strip were removed and packages inside the containers were taken to a laboratory for additional testing.

The laboratory test was carried out using advanced equipment that checks a wide range of materials such as gases, liquids, powders, solids, metals and other materials.

The materials seized by authorities were then identified as a central component in the preparation of explosive charges and in the high-trajectory projectiles fired toward Israel from the Gaza Strip.

The laboratory that identified the materials removed in the medical shipment was set up several months ago at the Kerem Shalom crossing in order to locate contraband whose entry into the Strip is forbidden for fear of reaching terrorist groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

The laboratory is a joint project of the Crossings Authority, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and the Israel Police’s crossing department, whose operational purpose is to identify the type of material within a short period of time.

Citing Islamic law, Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, head of the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem, rejected any possibility of Palestinian Arab concession on the so-called "right of return" of fourth generation Palestinian Arab "refugees."

In a sermon delivered at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on February 2, Sabri said that the “Palestinian refugees” had the right to return to their homes in “the 1948 territories,” according to the Palestinian Arab newspaper Felesteen.

"The refugee is the one who was expelled from his home and his land and the term refugee applies to the children and grandchildren, and that is the religious Islamic meaning [of the word refugee], because the rights of the refugee and his property exist and hold in future generations via inheritance according to Islamic law," Sabri said.

Sabri added that "there will be no relinquishing of the religious right" and that the “refugee problem” will exist until the the descendants return to the homes and lands from which their parents and grandparents were “expelled.”

UNRWA must exist until the “Palestinian refugees” and their descendants return to their homes, Sabri said, adding that the US decision to cut aid to the organization was expected in light of the existing “plot to eliminate the Palestinian problem.” As such, he said that Arab and Islamic countries should transfer financial aid to UNRWA.

Egyptian MP Nashwa Al-Dib: Abolish the "Shameful" Peace Accords; Zionists Have Been "Sucking the Blood of the Children" pic.twitter.com/foWjQ4So26

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) February 4, 2018

Syrian rebels shot down a Russian warplane on Saturday and killed its pilot on the ground after he ejected from the plane, Russia’s defense ministry and Syrian rebels said.

The SU-25 came down in an area of northern Idlib province that has seen heavy air strikes and fighting on the ground between Syria’s government forces backed by Russia and Iran, and rebel groups opposed to President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrians opposed to Assad see Russia as an invading force they blame for the deaths of thousands of civilians since Moscow joined the war on the side of the government in 2015.

The US State Department said it had seen reports about the incident and allegations that the United States provided missiles to groups in Syria.

“The United States has never provided MANPAD missiles to any group in Syria, and we are deeply concerned that such weapons are being used,” said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert. “The solution to the violence is a return to the Geneva process as soon as possible and we call on Russia to live up to its commitments in that regards.”

The Russian plane was shot down over the town of Khan al-Subl near the city of Saraqeb, close to a major highway where the Syrian army and Iranian-backed militias are trying to advance, a rebel source said.

Although the Russian pilot escaped the crash, he was killed by rebels who had tried to capture him, the source said.

Movie producer Jozef Ercevik Amado sits at a bar in central Istanbul stressing how, as a Jewish Turk, he can live his daily life without any fear.

But the backlash to the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has made some in the Jewish community feel unsettled.

“There are all these Israeli consulate protests and that’s not something that I enjoy… it’s scary,” Amado says.

He says that some of his fellow citizens who talk to him believe he isn’t fully Turkish.

“I think the essence of the problem is with otherness or foreignness… There’s this hospitality in Turkey, incredible hospitality, but then when you hit the wall, for some reason, that you don’t belong in that conversation or there, then it’s something different.”

The Jewish minority – believed to number around 15,000 – has been under threat for decades, including deadly terrorist attacks targeting synagogues in Istanbul. But the Turkish government’s shift toward greater Muslim conservatism has put the minority under the spotlight. That shift has only strengthened since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took a strong stance against the US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

New Jersey's government worker pension fund will divest from a Danish bank that officials say is boycotting Israeli businesses.

The State Legislature in 2016 passed and then-Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, signed a law requiring that the pension fund divest from any companies intentionally boycotting Israeli goods and services. NJ.com reports the State Association of Jewish Federations had argued last year that Danske Bank was refusing to do business with two Israeli defense companies.

Investment Division Director Chris McDonough said in December that Danske was intentionally working to limit commercial relations with Israel.

Danske spokesman Kenni Leth said the bank was not boycotting Israel or Israeli companies but had a list of companies it said "do not meet the requirements of responsible investment principles."

Claims of anti-Semitism and misogyny in the Labour party are “only a problem because the right wing media try to make it a problem,” according to the UK’s top trade union leader.

Len McCluskey of Unite was recorded delivering a speech at a Resolution Foundation event saying allegations of misogyny and anti-Semitism were simply intended to portray Labour as “a toxic party.”

The Daily Telegraph reports the key ally of Jeremy Corbyn said:

Let’s not kind of highlight too much division as though it’s a problem. It’s a problem because the right wing media try to make it a problem.

That’s why we’ve had all the stuff flowing around about misogyny and anti-Semitism in the Labour party to try and create an image that the Labour party is somehow a toxic party.

Following the event, Mr McCluskey later tweeted: “The media try to create more of a division than there is in our movement. @UKLabour the biggest party in Europe. Of course, there will be a range of views. But we deal with each other in a respectful manner and accept the majority view #newpolitics @resfoundation”

A Unite spokesman said Mr. McCluskey comments were a result of him responding to a question about division.

“He then went on to stress the need for people to treat one another in a respectful manner,” he said. “Len McCluskey and Unite have always been clear that anti-semitism is an evil which must be combatted wherever it emerges, including within the Labour Party.”

Accusations of anti-Semism against the Labour party are nothing new and go back to the most recent Labour party conference and before that.

Once upon a time there was a group called BDS Amsterdam, who used the image of Anne Frank as their Twitter profile image.

The group still seems to be around, but there is now also a group from the same area called BDS Nederland, who seem to want to outdo their predecessors when it comes to antisemitism and offensiveness.

I mean, sure, they can minimize the Holocaust with the best of them

and make Holocaust comparisons

but they’ll see BDS Amsterdam and raise them an antisemitic blood libel

But that’s not all. Like other antisemites before them, they like to cast aspersions on our geneology

There are few journalistic lapses more obvious and unprofessional than simply making up a statement by a public figure. Yet Newsweek’s serial offender Tom O’Connor has done exactly that: again.

In his Newsweek article entitled, “Middle East’s Next Oil War? Israel Threatens Lebanon Over Hezbollah and Natural Gas,” O’Connor fantasizes that at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) conference on January 29:

Israel has threatened to invade Lebanon amid a recent spat over natural resources and militant groups that, once again, raised tensions between the longtime foes.

He then claims that at the same conference Israel’s Minister of Defense, Avigdor Liberman:

…threatened to wage a full-scale war against Lebanon if Hezbollah launched any attacks against Israel.

This is about to be the simplest news critique I’ve ever written:

Liberman never said that. Period.

Bauer is a prolific Holocaust scholar, and his evocation of this Holocaust term in the context of Israeli policy towards migrants has an enormous impact – one which reinforces the desired Nazi analogy.

However, it appears to be a false quote.

The origins are most likely a Haaretz op-ed about the migrant crisis penned by Bauer on Jan. 27. However, the words “modern concentration camps” do not appear in either the English or Hebrew version of the op-ed. At one point in the Hebrew op-ed, Bauer uses the word Ma’abarot, which refers to the Israeli absorption camps for Jewish refugees in the 1950s, in a context suggesting that such camps would be preferable to the detentions centers where migrants are currently being held. (In the English op-ed, editors translated Ma’abarot to “transit camp”.)

There is no Nazi analogy anywhere in Bauer’s op-ed.

We also contacted Mr. Bauer by email, to ask him if he’s ever used the term “modern concentration camps”, at any time, to characterize the detention of African migrants. Bauer promptly replied to our email and flatly denied ever using any version of the term.

We’ve contacted Economist editors asking for a correction.

The self-styled “journalist” Roshan Salih is troubled by Holocaust denial. Very troubled. You see, some people really don’t like it and speak up about it. Ashitha Nagesh, for example, writing in Metro.

This is infuriating. Salih knows what is really going on:

Please take a read of this Israeli govt press release, oh sorry I mean article https://t.co/EAxbQbmZzY

— Roshan M Salih (@RmSalih) January 31, 2018

So now you know. Holocaust denial is not a horror. Those whose who loathe it are the real problem. They are “Zionist” agents.

Antisemites are disgusting. Roshan, though, is in a class of his own, the antisemites’ antisemite.

For his next trick, perhaps he could interview former KKK leader and racists’ racist David Duke, long a favourite of his employers, the poisonous Iranian propaganda channel RePress TV.

“When I stopped working in 2010, the National Archive proposed that I study the Central Archive of the Post-war Special Court. These contain the investigation and punishment files of the Dutch citizens who most strongly collaborated with German occupiers.

“In 2000 this not very orderly archive became publicly accessible and thus available for research. My earlier research there led to my 2002 book, 'Kopgeld, Nederlandse premiejagers op zoek naar Joden. (Money per head, Dutch premium hunters searching for Jews)'. After reading the first individual files I had to go outside for some fresh air. These documents contain such horrible things that I asked myself ‘How is it possible that this is not generally known?’

Ad van Liempt, journalist and historian, was born in 1949 in Utrecht. He has written 21 books. Several of these concern the Second World War.

“Hanns Albin Rauter, an Austrian, was the highest SS officer in the Netherlands. He proposed offering premiums for arresting Jews in a cable to Heinrich Himmler, the SS’ highest commander. Giving such premiums to specific Jew-hunters, -- policemen and volunteering citizens -- has, as far as I know, not taken place in any other country. This partly explains the relatively high number of Jews arrested in the Netherlands.

Senate hopeful Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff pardoned by US President Donald Trump after his conviction in a racial-profiling case, said he did not realize he had given an interview to a publication that peddles anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

Arpaio’s statement posted on Twitter on Thursday was a virtual repeat of the statement he issued to the press in 2014, after speaking with the same publication.

The Washington Post uncovered five instances when Arpaio spoke to the publication, the American Free Press.

“It was brought to my attention I gave interview to publication that supports antisemitism; I was unaware and don’t support that view point,” Arpaio said Thursday.

Spine and heart surgeons will use augmented reality (AR) to simplify complex procedures. Autistic children will get relief from sensory overload with a calming virtual reality (VR) system.

These and other scenarios are made possible by Israeli innovations tapping into the tremendous potential of AR and VR for healing and wellbeing.

The methods are similar: AR superimposes static and moving images to enhance an actual environment, while VR immerses the viewer in a simulated three-dimensional environment.

“Israel is on the frontlines in some areas of this technology,” says Orit Elion, a professor of physical therapy at Israel’s Ariel University, which hosted a conference last year to strengthen cooperation between AR and VR developers and researchers for health applications.

Elion helped develop a VR-based tele-rehab service at the Gertner Institute of Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, now used across Israel to enable monitored home physical or occupational therapy sessions for patients living far from healthcare centers.

International financial services and credit rating agency Standard & Poor's reaffirmed on Friday Israel's global credit ratings and economic outlook, giving it an A+ score.

The agency further said that the continued reduction of the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio and decreased geopolitical risks may support a higher credit rating for Israel in the future. According to S&P economists, Israel's credit rating could have been higher, potentially reaching the AA level.

The highest credit rating S&P awards is AAA.

The Bank of Israel predicted the economy would grow by 3.4% this year and by 3.5% in 2019. S&P offered a more conservative assessment, saying the Israeli economy is likely to grow by 3.1% a year between 2018 and 2021 as a result of an increase in private consumption, corporate investments and the strong performance of the services sector, which enjoys monetary flexibility.

S&P's report noted that the growth forecast defeats Israel's own remarkable economic performance since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008.

Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon welcomed the decision, saying, "Israel ended 2017 as one of the strongest and leading economies in the world with excellent macro data. Unemployment is at its lowest rate in 40 years, the debt-to-GDP ratio has dropped to an all-time low and the deficit is much lower than planned."

The entire Islamic nation looks upon this stupid American step with fury , because Ismail Haniyeh is a legitimate religious and ideological leader whose standing is equal to that of the heroic martyr Saddam Hussein in the eyes of the Arabs and Muslims. He conducted many wars against the Zionist enemy and he is a great leader...and he is the one who will determine the timing of the next battle. Tel-Aviv should expect a good dose of rockets, such that compared to it, the rockets of Saddam - with all their importance - are a game, nothing more. Haniyeh's slogan is "Khaybar, Khaybar oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return", and tomorrow is close for those who wait for it, oh Netanyahu, you Jewish dog, and Trump, you Roman dog. 

ONCE a Muslim woman was teased by Jews in the Jewish quarter of what was then Byzantine bordering the Muslim empire. The Jews pulled at her 'hijab' and mocked her in a most ignoble manner. 

She cried and wrote to the Caliph addressing him in her letter, "Ya Mu'tasimah!" (Al-Mu'tasim Billah of the Abbasid Dynasty, 794-842 AD) and told him of what had happened. When the Caliph heard of this news, he was so outraged he dropped the cup of water he was drinking. 

Immediately, Caliph Mu'tasim wrote back to the Roman Emperor of Byzantine, saying: "Ya kalb ar-Rum! (Oh you Roman dog!) I have an army of men that stretch from where I stand (Baghdad) to where you stand (Constantinople), who love to fight and die as much as your men love to live." 

He then commanded to deploy a massive army to retaliate against the Romans.

Statement by acting Humanitarian Coordinator for the oPt, Roberto Valent, on the Israeli authorities’ destruction of donor-funded classrooms in the Palestinian community of Abu Nuwar I am deeply concerned by the Israeli authorities’ demolition this morning of two donor-funded classrooms (3rd and 4th grade), serving 26 Palestinian school children in the Bedouin and refugee community of Abu Nuwar, located in Area C on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The demolition was carried out on grounds of lack of Israeli-issued permits, which are nearly impossible to obtain.
 
Abu Nuwar is one of the most vulnerable communities in need of humanitarian assistance in the occupied West Bank. The conditions it faces also represent those of many Palestinian communities, where a combination of Israeli policies and practices –including demolitions and restricted access to basic services, such as education – have created a coercive environment that violates the human rights of residents and generates a risk of forcible transfer. This is the sixth demolition or confiscation incident in Abu Nuwar school by the Israeli authorities since February 2016.

Abu Nuwar is a Palestinian Bedouin community in Area C, with approximately 670 Palestinian residents (88% refugees), part of whom reside in the community on a seasonal basis. The community is one of the 46 Bedouin communities in the central West Bank at-risk of forcible transfer because of the coercive environment exerted on them, including a “relocation” plan advanced by the Israeli authorities. It is also one of the 18 Palestinian Bedouin communities in the eastern Jerusalem governorate that are located in, or next to an area slated for the E1 settlement plan, aimed at creating a continuous built-up area between Ma’ale Adumim settlement and East Jerusalem. 

International humanitarian law prohibits the individual or mass forcible transfer of the population of an occupied territory regardless of the motive. Such transfer is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention thus involving individual criminal responsibility. The destruction of property in an occupied territory is also prohibited, unless absolutely required for military operations.

American envoy Jason Greenblatt lashed out at Iran and at Hamas on Sunday over their efforts to destabilize the Middle East.

"Hamas should be improving the lives of those it purports to govern, but instead chooses to increase violence and cause misery for the people of Gaza," U.S. President Donald Trump's Special Representative for International Negotiations tweeted Sunday.

The tweet included a link to a Jerusalem Post article about a recently foiled effort by Hamas to smuggle large amounts of explosives disguised as medical supplies into the Gaza Strip.

"Imagine what the people of Gaza could do with the $100 million Iran gives Hamas annually that Hamas uses for weapons and tunnels to attack Israel!" Greenblatt tweeted.

He also demanded that Hamas return the remains of two Israeli soldiers – Lt. Hadar Goldin and Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul – that the organization has been holding in Gaza since Operation Protective Edge in mid-2014. As well as the bodies of the two soldiers, Hamas is believed to be holding three Israeli civilians who crossed into Gaza voluntarily.

"Hamas must also permit the release of Israeli civilians Avraham Abera Mengistu, Hisham al-Sayed and Juma Ibrahim Abu Ghanima," Greenblatt tweeted.

Fatah's Bethlehem branch honored terrorist Raed Al-Karmi who was responsible for the murders of 9 Israelis during the PA's terror campaign, 2000-2005 (the second Intifada). In several posts on Facebook, Fatah posted photos of the terrorist wearing a military uniform and brandishing assault rifles. The photo above was posted with text in which Fatah highlights "the killing of more than 126 Zionists," and refers to the many murders of Israelis during the terror campaign:

Posted text: "Raed Al-Karmi, a commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades (i.e., Fatah's military wing) who prevented the settlers from moving around.

When Raed Al-Karmi died as a Martyr (Shahid), the response to his assassination was the killing of more than 126 Zionists and the wounding of many of them by bullets of the Raed Al-Karmi squads of the Fatah Movement Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades
Praise to the Martyrs who are more precious than all of us together"
[Facebook page of the Fatah Movement - Bethlehem Branch, Jan. 14, 2018]

Posted text: "Tomorrow, Jan. 14 [2018], is the anniversary of the death as a Martyr of the eagle of the [Al-Aqsa Martyrs'] Brigades, Raed Sa'id Al-Karmi May Allah wrap his soul in thousands of mercies Master of the quick response"
[Facebook page of the Fatah Movement - Bethlehem Branch, Jan. 13, 2018]

In another post glorifying Al-Karmi, Fatah also honored two of the planners of the Olympic massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972:

The image shows terrorists Salah Khalaf and Fakhri Al-Omari of the Black September terror organization that murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and Raed Al-Karmi, and Hayel Abd Al-Hamid (clockwise from the top). Al-Karmi is carrying an assault rifle.

It is no secret that new and surprising alliances have been formed between Israel and a number of Arab states in the region.

Iran has been killing Arab Sunnis and taking control of their land in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq. Islamic State and other proponents of political Islam have posed a threat to regimes in Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt, to name a few.

Israel, with its military capabilities, extensive intelligence and advanced technologies, is viewed by many Arab regimes in the region as an important and perhaps even an essential ally in the fight against Islamists, whether they be Sunnis or Shi’ites.

The New York Times revealed yet another example of how Israel has proven to be critical to continued regional stability. According a report published over the weekend, for more than two years, unmarked Israeli drones, helicopters and jets have been carrying out clandestine attacks – over 100 of them – against Islamists operating in Sinai, in full coordination with Egypt’s military regime headed by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

The cooperation serves both Egyptian and Israeli interests, according to the Times report. For Egypt, the Israeli military involvement is critical for the successful fight against Ansar Beit al-Maqdis and other Islamist terrorist groups operating in the Sinai.

Before Israel’s reported involvement, it seemed that Egypt was losing the battle. On July 1, 2015, Islamists briefly captured control of the northern Sinai town Sheikh Zuweid. In October of the same year, the terrorists shot down a Russian charter jet, killing all 224 people aboard. The air strikes – which according to the report, Israel launched at the end of 2015 – tipped the tide in favor of the Egyptians, say American sources quoted by the Times.

Israel, meanwhile, has a vested interest in ensuring that Islamists are prevented from taking control of Sinai, which is located on Israel’s southern border.

An Israeli man was stabbed to death on Monday afternoon in a terrorist attack at a hitchhiking post at an entrance to the West Bank city of Ariel.

The Palestinian assailant was able to flee the scene, despite being pursued by an IDF officer.

Israeli troops began conducting searches in the area in an effort to track down the attacker.

Later on Monday, the fatality was identified as Itamar Ben Gal, a 29-year-old married father of four from Har Bracha.

Ben Gal, who was a teacher, will be laid to rest on Tuesday morning.

At a Likud faction meeting on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his condolences to Ben Gal’s family and vowed to bring the perpetrator of the attack to justice.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon called on the Security Council to condemn today’s terror attack in Ariel, Israel.

“The Palestinian leadership must be held accountable for today’s horrific murder in Israel. This terror attack is the direct result of incitement and payments to terrorists by the Palestinian Authority,” Ambassador Danon said.

“Instead of inviting Mahmoud Abbas to address the Security Council to disseminate lies and hate, the Council should unequivocally condemn this attack and demand that he stop paying stipends to terrorists,” the Ambassador concluded.

The attack transpired when the terrorist approached a popular hitchhikers spot at the entrance to the city and stabbed the victim before fleeing the scene.

An IDF officer at the scene who identified the terrorist began chasing him in his car, even hitting him, but the terrorist still managed to get into a vehicle and escape.

29-year-old Itamar Ben-Gal of the Samaria community of Har Bracha was murdered in the attack.

The Hamas terror group said a stabbing attack that killed 29-year-old Itamar Ben-Gal in the northern West Bank on Monday was an act of resistance to US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“Hamas welcomes such successful operations,” the terror group’s spokesman Abdel Latif Qanu said in a statement.”We wish the perpetrators and the resistance men in the West Bank all safety.”

The Ynet news site quoted a second Hamas spokesman who said that the attack demonstrated “the intifada is continuing.”

The Hamas spokesman also called for an end to security coordination between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Islamic Jihad and two other Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip also applauded the stabbing attack, and called on Palestinians to step up their “resistance” against Israel.

The victim was identified as Itamar Ben Gal, 29, from the settlement of Har Bracha. The father of four was a rabbi and teacher in the northern West Bank community.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the terror attack and vowed that Israel would capture the perpetrator, who fled the scene.

Truth will out.
Forget religion.
Forget history.
Forget archaeology.
Forget international law.

Anshel Pffefer of Haaretz explains, on the background of ISIS in Sinai, why Israel must retain control of Judea and Samaria:

Airstrikes alone, no matter who carries them out, are not enough to wipe out ISIS in Sinai. Before ISIS came along, the original group, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, was a local insurgency made up of disgruntled members of local Bedouin tribes, reinforced by Islamists who had fled Cairo and other cities. They are fighting on home turf, among their own people; they know how to blend into the villages and mountains.The Egyptian army...[is] not equipped and trained to fight an asymmetrical battle in terrain where they are regarded by many as foreign occupiers...The army barely manages to control the main coastal road and at night the soldiers cower in their armored vehicles.

By the end of 2016, airstrikes had decimated ISIS’ fighters; they were down to about 300 men and their leader was killed. But the Egyptian army failed to pursue its advantage on the ground...Just as in last year’s battles of Mosul and Raqqa it took a ground force to finally rout ISIS from its main strongholds, so too Israeli air support and aid from the U.S. and other Western states will not be enough to defeat Wiliyat Sinai unless Egypt’s own forces begin pursuing the insurgents on the ground.

Air control insufficient. Ground control paramount. So simple.

Oh, and one really not need to forget religion, history, archaeology and international law. Or other elements justifying Israel's continued control over Judea and Samaria.

The United States and Argentina are to work together more closely to cut off Lebanese Hezbollah’s funding networks in Latin America, both nations’ top diplomats said Sunday.

Argentina has a large Lebanese expatriate population and US authorities suspect groups within it of raising funds through organized crime to support the Iranian-backed terror movement.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in Buenos Aires for talks with his Argentinian counterpart Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie, and afterward they confirmed that the issue had come up.

“With respect to Hezbollah, we also did speak today in our discussion about all of the region about how we must all jointly go after these transnational criminal organizations — narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, smuggling, money laundering — because we see the connections to terrorist financing organizations as well,” Tillerson said.

“And we did specifically discuss the presence of Lebanese Hezbollah in this hemisphere, which is raising funds, obviously, to support its terrorist activities.

“So it is something that we jointly agree we need to attack and eliminate,” Tillerson said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday stressed the importance of accurately portraying the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people during World War II, subtly admonishing Warsaw for advancing a law that would criminalize accusing the Polish nation of complicity in Nazi crimes.

“The truth about the Holocaust must always be studied, it must always be remembered,” he told foreign diplomats at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. “Israel works closely with our partners around the world to defend and to reveal the truth about the Holocaust. We expect to do that with every country, including Poland.”

Future generations must internalize the lesson of the Holocaust, Netanyahu said. “I think the most important lesson for all humanity is that hatred, extreme ideologies — these must always be confronted early, when there is time to nip them in the bud.”

“We Jews have learned to believe our enemies when they call for our annihilation. We learned that we must be able to defend ourselves by ourselves against any potential threat. The State of Israel not only has internalized these lessons, we practice it,” he said in apparent reference to Israel’s current arch-foe Iran, which sponsors terror groups and has repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction .

Israel extends its hand in peace to all its neighbors, he added. “But we are forever conscious of the danger to us, and to the rest of mankind, of those who want to exterminate us. Ultimately, they exterminate the world we all want to keep and cherish.”

Netanyahu was speaking at ceremony honoring foreign diplomats who saved Jews during World War II.

The German government has agreed to recognize some 25,000 Jewish Algerians as Holocaust survivors eligible for compensation, and they will be able to apply for a one-time grant later this year, a survivors rights organization announced Monday.

Jews who lived in Algeria between July 1940 and November 1942, and who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, will be eligible for the one-time payment of €2,556.46 ($3,183), said the Conference on Material Claims Against Germany, an international Jewish group that distributes Holocaust compensation funds on behalf of the German government.

“This is a long overdue recognition for a large group of Jews in Algeria who suffered anti-Jewish measures by Nazi allies like the Vichy Regime,” said Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference. “The Vichy government subjected these people to restrictions on education, political life, participation in civil society and employment, abolishing French citizenship and singling them out only because they were Jews.”

The French Vichy regime ruled parts of France and the French colonies between 1940 and 1944 and collaborated with the Nazi German occupiers.

Negotiations between the Claims Conference and the German government over recognition of the Algerian survivors began in August 2017.

The new U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) document on the Middle East, released in December, recognizes that an unfavorable balance of regional power in the Middle East adversely affects U.S. interests. The document cautions that disengagement from the Middle East will not shield the U.S. from a spillover of the region's problems.

The priority actions outlined in the NSS center around retaining an American military presence, shoring up partnerships, sustaining Iraq's independence, seeking a settlement of the Syrian civil war, denying Iran its nuclear and regional aspirations, and promoting an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

The NSS makes clear that the U.S. is not disengaging from the Middle East. It breaks from the previous administration's perception of Iran as part of the solution to regional instability, instead squarely defining Tehran as a major contributor to the region's problems. American leadership is working to contain and roll back Iran's malign influence and nuclear ambitions. This is a primary Israeli interest.

The convergence of views regarding Iran increases the potential for U.S.-Israel dialogue and the coordination of efforts to counter malign Iranian activities in the Middle East. Gone are the assumptions that support for Israel comes with high costs from the Arab world and that resolving the Palestinian conflict is key to improving U.S. standing in the region.

Last week's Institute for National Security Studies Conference was impressive by any international standard. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was of course a major topic of discussion, though no breakthrough idea was presented beyond the land distribution paradigm.

The most pertinent remark came from panelist and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who asked how it could be that a country as creative as Israel has not come up with a more innovative idea for solving the conflict beyond repeating its desire to separate from the Palestinians.

Professor Yariv Marmor of the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, taught me that to think outside the box, you need first to be familiar with the box, and with the lid in particular.

Four assumptions keep the lid on the box, and have been kept there by every American administration since the Clinton era:
1. The solution to the conflict must be geographically confined to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
2. The solution demands the establishment of a fully sovereign Palestinian state.
3. The border should be based on the 1967 borders, with minor corrections.
4. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip must be one political entity.

These assumptions leave no room for negotiation and can only result in a dead end in talks.

President Trump’s State of the Union address was mainly met in stony silence by the Democrats as their Republican rivals continually jumped to their feet to loudly applaud the President’s many achievements at home and overseas during the past twelve months.

Sustained Republican applause greeted Trump’s statement:
“Last month, I also took an action endorsed unanimously by the U.S. Senate just months before. I recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”

Yet the Democrats chose not to stand and applaud this special moment that was theirs as much as the Republicans, President Trump unreservedly acknowledging the Senate’s pivotal role in his historic Jerusalem Declaration.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) intends to go on an offensive against Israel at the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC), according to a report by Al Jazeera.

Following a meeting of the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization Saturday night, the group has stated that Palestinians must “begin devising plans to disengage from the Israeli occupation authorities at the political, security, economic and administrative levels…”

The Palestinian news agency Wafa reports that the PLO’s executive committee seeks to “suspend recognition of Israel until the latter recognizes the State of Palestine on the 1967 borders, repeals the decision to annex East Jerusalem and halts settlement activities.”

In a threat to halt ongoing security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the PLO executive committee called on the Palestinian Authority to “define security relations between the Palestinians and the Israeli occupation.”

Slovenia has postponed a controversial vote on recognizing Palestinian statehood.

Slovenia’s STA press agency reported that the parliament’s Foreign Policy Committee suspended a session on the recognition of Palestinian statehood on Wednesday, pending an official government position on the issue. Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec said that the government will likely discuss the issue next week.

Earlier this month, Erjavec said that Slovenian recognition would “strengthen Palestine’s negotiation in the Middle East peace process.”

Israel has urged Slovenia against recognizing Palestinian statehood. According to Israel’s Channel 10, Israeli Ambassador to Slovenia Eyal Sila warned Speaker of the Slovenian Parliament Milan Brglez and the chair of the Foreign Policy Committee Jozef Horvat against the move.

While Sweden is currently the only country to recognize Palestinian statehood since joining the European Union, several Eastern European countries – Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania – all recognized Palestine as a state before joining the EU, as well as Malta and Cyprus.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with Pope Francis in Rome on Sunday for talks that were expected to center on Jerusalem and U.S. President Donald Trump's official recognition of the city as the capital of Israel.

Erdogan's visit is the first to the Vatican by a Turkish president in 59 years.

Erdogan clashed with the pope in 2015, when Francis became the first head of the Roman Catholic Church to publicly label the 1915 killing of as many as 1.5 million Armenians "genocide"– something Turkey has categorically denied.

But the two men have found common ground over Jerusalem, speaking by phone after Trump made his announcement in December and agreeing that any change to the city's status should be avoided.

Before leaving Turkey, Erdogan said the U.S. had isolated itself with its stance on Jerusalem, saying it was "alone" in recognizing it as Israel's capital. Palestinians were outraged by Trump's Dec. 6 declaration as they envision east Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state.

Speaking to reporters in Istanbul, Erdogan called for the recognition of Jerusalem "as the capital of Palestine," saying, "This is the point that is to be reached. We are now working for this."

Will the capital of the Jewish state have an Arab majority in the near future?

Israel’s National Security Council is weighing various options for preserving Jerusalem’s shrinking Jewish majority, as experts warn that an ongoing flood of Arab migration into the city from the Palestinian Authority will completely reshape the demographic balance in the holy city.

Jews have constituted a majority of Jerusalem’s population going back at least to the 19th century. In 1944, as the Second World War raged on and a full four years before Israel achieved independence, Jews made up about 62% of the city’s total population.

Following the city’s reunification under Israeli sovereignty in 1967, three out of every four Jerusalemites were Jewish.

Over the past half century, however, the demographic balance in the Israeli capital has shifted dramatically, with a net Jewish migration out of the city and Arab migration into Jerusalem.

While Jews made up 72% of the city’s population in 1980 and 68% in 2000, over the past fifteen years, the demographic shift has accelerated dramatically. Despite the city’s large Orthodox Jewish population and relatively high fertility rate, from 2000 to 2015, the Jewish population increased by just 17%, due to the net migration of Jews out of the city as housing prices there skyrocketed.

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, the city’s Jewish majority fell to just 61% in 2015. Senior Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs researcher Nadav Shragai warns that since 2015, that figure has fallen even further, dropping below 60%.

As the war drums beat on Israel’s southern front, Israel’s navy sees an increased threat from the serious developments by Hamas in the underwater domain.

“Hamas sees potential in the sea like they saw potential in their tunnels,” a senior Naval officer said on Monday.

Israel’s Navy has in recent years understood that sea-based terror attacks can also come from under the water, a threat that has grown since the last conflict with Hamas in 2014.

During Operation Protective Edge, five Hamas frogmen (naval commandos) tried to infiltrate Kibbutz Zikim before they were engaged and killed by the IDF. In the last three years since the conflict Hamas has significantly expanded their naval commando unit with a reported 1,500 frogmen.

Since 2014 Israel has foiled multiple attempts to smuggle wetsuits and other gear into the Hamas-controlled enclave but officials are still concerned that the group has gotten their hands on technology such as underwater "scooters" which can bring the commandos further out to sea in order to attack Israeli interests.

Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah has recently purchased over 100 acres of land adjacent to Lebanon's Chouf Mountains for the purpose of storing missiles and weapons it has amassed with Iranian and Syrian assistance in special fortified compounds there, according to a report in Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida on Sunday.

Senior Arab officials told the newspaper the lands purchased by Hezbollah are located in an overwhelmingly Druze area of Lebanon, which Hezbollah believes the Israel Air Force would be wary of attacking.

According to U.N. Resolution 1701, passed in 2006, Hezbollah is prohibited from engaging in any type of military activity south of the Litani River, including storing ammunition in the Shiite villages its controls in the country's south. The Chouf Mountains are north of the river and so technically the weapons buildup there is not in violation of the resolution.

In recent years, Israel has avoided attacking Hezbollah weapons convoys inside Lebanon so as not to provide the organization with an excuse to attack Israel.

The newspaper also reported that,during their most recent meeting in Moscow, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Russian President Vladmir Putin to relay a message to Hezbollah and Iran that Israel would not allow Iran to establish itself militarily in southern Lebanon near the border or construct missile factories and weapons storage sites north or south of the Litani River.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman declared on Monday that there was no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and rejected news reports signaling Israel could send direct aid to the coastal enclave to prevent mounting economic woes from triggering full-out war.

Opposition leaders, meanwhile, were calling on the Israeli government to immediately intervene in Gaza.

“The situation in Gaza is indeed difficult,” conceded Liberman at the weekly meeting of his Yisrael Beytenu faction in the Knesset, and the economic situation “must be dealt with.”

“But there is no humanitarian crisis,” he added, emphasizing that he was speaking on behalf of the entire defense establishment, including COGAT, the Defense Ministry agency that administers the crossings into Gaza; and the Shin Bet security agency.

Israel will not impede any internationally funded projects designed to improve the quality of life for Gazans, said Liberman. But, he added, “We will not spend a penny from the Israeli budget. I refuse to allow any penny of Israeli tax money to go to the Strip. There are enough wealthy Arab countries.”

A number of Israel hate sites are disseminating the following video and caption

Yesterday, more than a dozen of heavily armed #Israeli Occupiers surrounded a little #Palestinian boy and detained him with his father in Occupied Hebron.

Although they can’t seem to make up their mind whether it is from yesterday (like the above), or today

🇵🇸 #Palestine : Israeli Occupation soldiers detain a #child and his #father in the old #city of Hebron today . pic.twitter.com/d4ABtEedR7

— Shehab News (@ShehabAgencyEn) February 4, 2018

Leaving the inconsistent dates aside for a second, note that the video merely shows a boy very casually standing near some soldiers, before sitting next to an adult (perhaps his father). There is no suggestion he is being detained or is there against his will. In fact, his whole demeanor is that of a very relaxed child – he certainly does not seem at all afraid of the soldiers, who themselves seem almost indifferent to his presence.

Not only that, but there is no report of IDF soldiers detaining a small child in Hebron – if it did happen, you can be sure a whole host of anti-Israel sites would be all over the story.

Palestinians on Sunday strongly denounced an Israeli decision to collect taxes from churches and United Nations agencies in Jerusalem, saying the move was aimed at “emptying” the city of its Arab residents and Christian holy sites.

Some Palestinian officials even went as far as linking the decision to US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“This is a new aggression against our occupied capital, Jerusalem,” said Yusef Al-Mahmoud, spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority government in Ramallah. “The decision is designed to further strangulate our people [in Jerusalem] to fulfill the occupation authorities’ illusions of displacing them.”

The Jerusalem municipality has handed out fines totaling millions of dollars to properties owned by the UN and by churches, citing a new legal opinion that says the properties are not legally defined as places of worship and therefore aren’t entitled to exemptions from the property tax.

The municipality said on Sunday that it has started collecting over NIS 650 million ($188 million) from some 887 properties in Jerusalem belonging to various churches and UN agencies.

Former Palestinian Authority intelligence chief Tawfik Tirawi has filed a complaint with the authority’s Attorney-General Ahmad Barak against PA security forces and two Palestinian telecommunications companies for allegedly wiretapping his cellphones.

“I submitted a complaint against them on January 29, 2018 for spying on and listening into my phone calls,” Tirawi told The Jerusalem Post on Monday in a phone call.

According to Farid Atrash, a Palestinian lawyer who works on human rights issues, PA law states that authorities can wiretap Palestinians only after a court has granted them such power.

Tirawi said the security services have no reason to wiretap his phone and have not received legal permission to undertake such a measure.

“What they are doing is a violation of the law,” he said.

In a January 21, 2018 article in Hamas's mouthpiece Al-Risala, 'Imad Al-'Afana, journalist and former secretary general of Hamas's faction in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), calls on the movement to expand its target bank and its arena of operations in its fight with Israel. He wrote that the balance of deterrence that long existed between Israel and Hamas has collapsed because Hamas has stopped responding with sufficient force to offensive action by Israel, such as the bombing of Hamas tunnels and facilities and the attempted targeted killing of its operatives. He added that, in order to restore the balance of deterrence, Hamas must change its mode of operation, which has become predictable, and respond to Israeli attacks in unexpected ways, including by attacking Israeli targets abroad and by "moving the conflict into the enemy's territory and the into heart of its bases, settlements and airports – not only on the Gaza border but in the Zionist rear."
The following are excerpts from his article:

"Almost all observers agree that the occupation has long since begun its fourth war in Gaza, but without declaring it. Over the past few months, those who are following the matter have counted some 40 enemy attacks on resistance individuals, sites, and resources in the Gaza Strip. [This war] did not begin with the crime of the assassination of the martyr Mazen Fuqaha, carried out by the agents [of the enemy]... which was just like the crime of the assassination of Al-Mabhouh in the UAE. [These crimes] arouse fears that the enemy is repeating similar scenarios in other arenas, in order to assassinate commanders of the resistance without raising a hue and cry. [This is also] exactly what happened with the assassination attempt several days ago against Hamas activist Abu Hamza Hamdan, whose car was blown up in Sidon. [And the war will] not end with the enemy's official declaration, in a military communique, of war against resistance sites, manifest in blowing up the strategic tunnels in eastern Rafah, which, it claimed, passed under the Sufa border crossing, nor its declaration of the existence of additional tunnels whose destruction, one after the other, it would announce.

"The period between these two incidents was rife [with attacks, such as] the attack on the Islamic Jihad tunnel late last year, the attack in late November and late December on important sites, resources, and strategic surprises [for the enemy that had been prepared by Hamas's 'Izz Al-Din] Al-Qassam brigades.

An Egyptian MP called for revoking his country’s “shameful” peace deal with Israel and accused Israelis of “sucking the blood of the children.”

“We will never be cured unless we abolish that shameful agreement,” Nashwa Al-Dib said in a TV debate last month, according to a translation Monday from the Middle East Media Research Institute.

“We have been demanding this for a long time now. All the Egyptians and all the Arabs oppose the Zionist entity,” she added.

Al-Dib said Egyptian children must be raised to know “our number one enemy is the Zionist entity.”

“Our schoolbooks should go back to referring to it as the ‘Zionist entity,’ and not as the ‘Hebrew state,’ and so on and so forth,” she said.

“They must use these terms in order to teach our children that this entity is a plunderer of the land, the honor, the holy places, and the resources, and that they have been sucking the blood of the children.”

She also accused Israel of “killing our martyrs, our children, our youth, and our mothers for many years.”

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's uncompromising war on terrorism, especially along the border with the Gaza Strip, seems to be bearing fruit. Egypt says the closing down of the tunnels is part of a crackdown against Islamist militants in the Sinai Peninsula and their supporters in the Palestinian territory of Gaza Strip. As a result of this war, which began in 2013, shortly after el-Sisi came to power, with the destruction of hundreds of smuggling tunnels along the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, Hamas and other armed groups are now more isolated than ever.

President el-Sisi has shown real determination in his war to drain the swamps of terrorists. The tough measures he has taken along the border with the Gaza Strip have proven to be effective.

The destruction of these tunnels will be a major counter-terrorism move, reducing the motivation and capability of Hamas to initiate new offensive from Gaza Strip against Israel. Reliance on the tunnels seems to have progressively declined, and Hamas has also been unable to acquire more weapons and ammunition, owing to the ongoing Egyptian campaign to eliminate the tunnels.

At least 20 people were killed in a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria late Sunday night, Arab news outlets reported Monday.

Syrian human rights organizations told The Associated Press just before midnight Sunday that the rebel-held town of Saraqeb (Saraqib) in Syria’s Idlib province near the border with Turkey was subjected to a chemical weapons attack.

Arab media outlets reported early Monday morning that a number of victims in the attack had succumbed to their injuries At least 20 people, including women and children, have reportedly died after being exposed to chlorine gas during the attack on Saraqeb.

American Defense Secretary Jim Mattis warned Syria just days before the apparent attack against using chemical weapons.

"You have all seen how we reacted to that, so they'd be ill advised to go back to violating the chemical convention,” said Mattis, referring to the April 2017 US missile strike on a Syrian airbase following a chemical attack blamed on the Syrian regime in Khan Sheikhun.

A Russian warplane was shot down over the Idlib province over the weekend, with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham Islamist rebel group claiming responsibility.

"We were able to bring down the Russian warplane with a shoulder-fired missile above Saraqib in Idlib this afternoon," said Mahmoud al-Turkmani.

Israel is a member of a secret intelligence collection and sharing operation made up of 21 nations targeting European jihadis returning home from fighting in Syria with the Islamic State group, German daily Der Spiegel reported Sunday.

Naming Germany as another of the members, the newspaper said that the anti-terror operation was known as “Gallant Phoenix” and was being led from a US Joint Special Operations Command center in Jordan.

The operation is focused on collecting documents, data, DNA traces and fingerprints that have been retrieved from former IS strongholds and comparing them with intelligence already acquired by other countries in the pact, the report said, while only naming Germany and Israel as members.

An estimated 40,000 people traveled from around the world to take up arms for the Islamic State group as it occupied territory in Syria and Iraq and declared a caliphate in 2014.

Football was introduced to Palestine by the British military during its occupation of the territory in World War I. After the war, the sport's development was continued by "European Jews who had been exposed to soccer in their native countries".[2] Palestinian Arabs, specifically those of Islamic beliefs, refrained from participating in football's early formation due to their resistance to "Western cultural institutions".[3]
The Eretz Israel Football Association was founded in August 1928 and applied for membership in FIFA. It was accepted to FIFA on 6 June 1929 as the Eretz Israel Football Association.[4][5] It was the first of 14 sports organizations which absorbed hundreds of leading sportsmen who immigrated in the wake of antisemitism in Europe.[6]
Mandatory Palestine end up playing five international games before the end of the British Mandate in 1948 which resulted in Israel independence. During those five games, the national team fielded only Jewish players. Three anthems were played before each match: the British "God Save the Queen", the Jewish (and future Israeli) "Hatikvah" and the opposing team's anthem.[7]
In 1948 the team became, officially, the national team of Israel.

Coach:  Egon Pollak,  Shimon Ratner

Player	Position
Willy Berger	GK
Avraham Reznik	DF
Pinhas Fiedler	DF
Zalman Friedmann	MF
Gdalyahu Fuchs	MF
Yohanan Sukenik	MF
Amnon Harlap	FW
Perry Kraus	-
Paul Kastenbaum	-
Haim Reich	-
Avraham Nudelman	FW
David Weinberg	-
Yaacov Levi-Meir	-
Yaacov Zelibanski	-

The attempt by anti-Israel elements in Ireland to promote legislation that would define economic relations with Jews beyond the pre-1967 armistice line as a criminal offense was unfortunately nothing new. What separated the Irish attempt at a boycott of Israel was a remark by one of the country's officials who promoted the legislation, Senator David Norris. Norris, who for some reason considers himself an Israel "expert," accused Russian immigrants to Israel of ruining the country by making it lean to the political Right.

The similarities between Norris' statement and the beliefs of many on the Israeli Left regarding Israeli Jews from the former Soviet Union are astonishing. Norris, a one-time leading presidential candidate in Ireland, has been riding the wave of anti-Israel propaganda in recent years and prides himself on being anti-Zionist. Israel's haters can at times correctly identify historic milestones. After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day. And so, I am happy to confirm the assessment of Norris, the "expert," that aliyah from the former Soviet Union has, in fact, changed the face of the only democratic country in the Middle East. This huge wave of immigration was the end of the dream of the Irish senator and his ilk of witnessing the dissolution of Zionist Israel.

Before the mass arrival of Soviet Jews, many believed the future of Zionism was in question, if only for demographic reasons. While the Israelis saw this as a threat and the Arabs and their supporters saw this as a blessing, both sides were correct in their assessments. Late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's boast that the womb of the Arab woman was his strongest weapon against the Jews was not disconnected from reality. But immigration from the former Soviet Union served to remove the demographic issue from the agenda. The Jewish majority achieved as a result of this mass immigration allows us to now smile at the bleak predictions in the 1980s of our demise. It was God's gift of immigration that allowed Israel's population to instantaneously increase by 20%, solving numerous problems affecting every aspect of life, from guaranteeing there would be enough recruits for the Israel Defense Forces to providing a solution to the lack of medical, education and elite technology experts.

In his reflections on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the British novelist and essayist Howard Jacobson urges Jews not to internalize the messages of today’s anti-Semitism, which so often come in the form of anti-Zionism:

The modern anti-Semite is more subtle than his great-grandparents. He doesn’t smash our windows or our bones. He insinuates himself into consciences that are already troubled and works on spirits that are already half-broken. And we are too responsive to his serpent insinuations. When the history of Jew-hating in our time comes to be written, Jewish collusion in it will feature heavily. . . .

To the question, . . . “How do any of us, as Jews, fulfill the great task imposed on us [by the memory of the Holocaust]?,” here is my part-answer: stop apologizing and resist the sirens who would lure you onto the rocks of guilt and self-dislike, singing of Jewish materialism, Jewish legalism, Jewish exclusivism, Jewish supremacism, Jewish imperialism, Zionism. . . .

[A]lthough we intone the words “never again”—now as a prayer, now as a supplication, now as a commitment—we cannot rid ourselves of the fear that it, or something like it, might indeed happen again. . . . [W]e now accept that it was wild fantasy to hope that after the Holocaust we’d be left alone. . . . But we thought anti-Semitism itself might take a short break. . . . What no one could have expected was the speed with which they found a way round any such compunctions, not least by denying that anything had happened at all. Holocaust—what Holocaust? . . .

But it’s not those obsessive “deniers” who trouble Jacobson the most; rather it’s those who wish to relativize the Holocaust by means of invidious comparisons:

Last weekend I, along with many around the world, commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day. As editor of the country’s leading Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, it is a memorial of particular significance.

Through editing the newspaper, I am confronted daily with the legacy of that unique evil, including the suppression of debate, the distortion of truth and even the burning of books at the heart of that terrible chapter in our history.

I know, too, that the Third Reich’s totalitarian impulse – that only one type of question and one type of answer are legitimate, and all else must be extinguished – is far from unique because repressive regimes the world over continue to ban freedom of enquiry and freedom of expression.

We must be on our guard.

If we close our minds to ideas that upset us, the long-term consequence is that our minds will atrophy. We will no longer be able to think for ourselves, writes Stephen Pollard (photograph of Hitler Youth members burning books, dated 1938)

You might wonder, then, what Friday night’s attack on Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg as he attempted to give a talk to students has to do with this. Or last week’s decision – now reversed in the face of near-universal outrage – by Manchester Art Gallery to remove a pre-Raphaelite painting featuring mild nudity, Hylas And The Nymphs.

These are both an attempt to silence a view because it offends some people. It is for good reason that a new word entered the Oxford English Dictionary last month: a snowflake is ‘an overly sensitive or easily offended person’.

Why would I be friends with someone who grew up in radical Islamic, antisemitic Egypt? Well, Hussein Aboubakr, whom I met at a recent StandWithUs conference, is different from the rest.

Born in 1989 to a traditional, middle-class Muslim family in Cairo, Hussein relates that he was taught the following narrative – by his parents, in the mosque, in school and via television: “The Muslims are superior to all, with the best values, ethics, traditions and heritage. Anything in the world which is not a direct product of theirs is inferior. Western culture is the infidel, but the super villains are the Jews who are the incarnation and epitome of evil, who seek to destroy all that is good in the world.

These ‘Zionist pigs’ who control the banks, the media and all politics enjoy drinking Muslim blood from the Muslim children they kill. They are the descendants of apes and pigs, and the final redemption will come when we kill all Jews.”

Hussein saw these messages on television regularly, and he recalls how the movies of his childhood were filled with Jewish villains who were stopped by the good Egyptians. The No. 1 comic book character was “Man of the Impossible,” who went around the world destroying Zionist conspiracies. These stories – filled with mythology and fantasy – were captivating for young children, and Hussein took them for granted as truth.

All Egyptian children dreamed of playing their role in this epic battle of good versus evil. Obsessed with the super-villain Jews, Hussein also wanted to contribute to winning this war, so he decided to use his smarts and love for computers toward this end. He resolved to study Hebrew via the Internet, and to then infiltrate these evil plans and provide logistical support to the physical war against the Jews and Israel.

After Hussein learned Hebrew, he began doing research about the Jewish people, and was completely shocked by Jewish history: Here was an ancient Middle Eastern nation indigenous to the Land of Israel, with an ancient connection to Jerusalem. Hussein began to see Jews as people and began reading about the history of antisemitism, which he calls “blind hatred toward the Jews for no reason.”

And then Hussein took a step back, looked as his parents and society around him and asked himself: “Isn’t this antisemitism? Isn’t this blind hatred?”

The Passfield White Paper was the Labour government’s response to the Shaw inquiry into the August 1929 disturbances in Palestine. Shaw recommended that the government issue a clear statement of the policy they intended to pursue in Palestine, revise immigration policy ‘with the object of preventing a repetition of the excessive [Jewish] immigration of 1925 and 1926’ and announce an enquiry into the possibilities of land development in Palestine.[2]

The White Paper stated that while the British government did intend to fulfil its obligations to both Arabs and Jews, treating them both equally in Palestine, the development of a Jewish national home in Palestine was not considered central to the British Mandate. It also proposed that in future the Jews would need the approval of the British authorities before purchasing any additional land.

The Arabs saw the White Paper as vindication for their demands to halt Jewish immigration and land sales whilst the Jews viewed it as the British government reversing their support for the Balfour Declaration and the aims of the Mandate. There was an immediate international outcry which claimed that the proposals in the White Paper flouted the Mandate and demanded its withdrawal. The Zionists considered that the tone of the White Paper was decidedly anti-Jewish as it criticised both the Histadrut and the Jewish Agency for promoting the employment of Jewish-only labour. The primary aim of the Histadrut was the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and all its activities were executed with this goal in mind. As the Histadrut was responsible for bringing Jewish immigrants to Palestine and finding work for them it promoted from 1928 onwards a Jewish-only labour policy. When it lent money or leased land for agricultural enterprises, it often inserted clauses insisting on the hire of Jewish labour only. With the booming economy in Palestine in the early 1930s this policy was only partially successful, but became more effective after 1936 when the political situation changed with the Arab general strike and rebellion.

As Britain’s economy was still in a poor state in 1928, 10 years after the First World War had ended, it was thought that support for the Labour Party would increase at the next general election and that the Labour Party might even be able to form the next government. This possibility was of concern to the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) and its leader Chaim Weitzman, as their main political contacts in Parliament were members of the Liberal Party. The WZO did not have the same level of support or connections in the Labour Party. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, saw that this was an opportunity for him to play a greater part in the work of the WZO, which had been previously denied to him, as the Histadrut, the Jewish labour movement in Palestine, already had good connections with the British Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

Hundreds of attorneys from Israel and around the world are expected to attend the first international conference aimed at combating the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, set to be held in Jerusalem next week.

Participants will discuss consolidating legal strategies to fight BDS and establishing a unified international network to further their efforts.

The conference is the result of a joint partnership between the Israel Bar Association, the Strategic Affairs Ministry and the International Legal Foundation. Among those expected to take part in the conference are Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, Chief Justice Esther Hayut and Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit.

Attorney Pascal Markowicz, a board member of the umbrella group of French Jewish communities and one of the pioneers in the fight against BDS, is also set to attend the conference.

In an interview with Israel Hayom, Markowicz called on the Israeli government to fight BDS and the delegitimization of Israel as it would a military campaign.

"It is premature to say that Israel has won the battle against BDS. We are on the right path because more and more countries admit practical steps must be taken against this movement. This is a strategic and political war that must be waged like any military war," he said.

Markowicz said Israel should respond to actions of the boycott movement just as it would to missile fire at its territory.

“‘I would have killed all the jews in the world,But I kept some to show the world why I killed them’ -Hitler- #PrayForGaza #PrayForPalestina."
--SJP UWM Activist

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is that time of the year when politicians, pundits and university presidents pretend to care about the mass murder of six million Jews.

And then they spend the other 364 days palling around with their modern counterparts.

In South Carolina, Senator Brad Hutto, a state senator, had managed to singlehandedly stall an anti-Semitism bill to protect Students for Justice in Palestine, an anti-Semitic hate group. Hutto had been the Democrat choice to run against Senator Lindsay Graham. And here was the Democrat’s choice to represent South Carolina in the United States Senate doing everything he could to prevent his state from passing a bill to reject anti-Semitism in time for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

The SJP chapter at the University of South Carolina sent Senator Hutto a message that began, "Thank you for your opposition to the Anti-Semitism bill."

Senator Hutto has been fighting the anti-Semitism bill for at least a year.

Why would Students for Justice in Palestine and its political allies on the left oppose an anti-Semitism bill? The obvious answer is that the campus hate group has a long history of anti-Semitism.

Comparing Israel to that racist regime denigrates the suffering of the victims of apartheid and belittles them yet again. Apartheid is unique to the South African experience.

South Africa calling Israel an apartheid state represents an inherent danger. While we know that this is a completely false narrative designed to give a tailwind to the BDS movement and other detractors of the Jewish state, the lie has an impact. The apartheid analogy is the central charge around which BDS has built its campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel. BDS is well aware that by comparing the Jewish state to apartheid South Africa, the former will be treated like a pariah in the family of nations. South Africa, by giving the stamp of approval to these accusations, allows this false narrative to flourish in the greater global consciousness.

The enormous tragedy here is that South Africa and Israel share a lot in common and the Jewish state is perfectly poised to help combat some of the great challenges the country is facing. Both countries have overcome tragic histories; both countries are mosaics of multiculturalism and both countries face challenges posed by water shortages. As Israel is lauded over ground-breaking advances in water technology, so South Africa is committing water suicide by refusing the help offered. It would appear that many in the South African government would rather their constituents suffer than accept the help available.

Despite all of this, there is a massive groundswell of support for Israel in South Africa. King Goodwill Zwelithini of the Zulu nation spoke out about the importance of bilateral ties between the two countries and how South Africans could benefit. The sentiment was echoed by the African Christian Democratic Party’s Rev Kenneth Meshoe and many others who advocate for closer ties and have excoriated the ANC-led government for its shortsightedness and downright venom.

It would be in South Africa’s best interest to retire from its role as ringleader in the theater of the absurd and get down to the serious business of contributing towards a more positive future. For both countries.

This is an image that can serve as a poster for any future vigils/protests at Reem's bakery/cafe that Oldschool was kind enough to put together. I will pass this off to some of the others this week.

Many thanks, School.

A man who defended a late British Labour politician for saying former Prime Minister Tony Blair had been “unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers” is among several activists recently offered readmission to the Labour party, the British Jewish Chronicle reported Sunday.

The activist, Mike Sivier, was suspended by the party last year for remarks he made about Jews and Zionism, including a claim that he could not comment on whether thousands or millions of Jews died in the Holocaust. He said, “I don’t know” when asked about that.

In a post on his website, Sivier had said “it may be entirely justified” for former Scottish Linlithgow MP Tam Dalyell to remark that Blair had been unduly influenced by “a cabal of Jewish advisers”.

Sivier is also the author of The Livingstone Presumption, a book defending former London mayor Ken Livingstone’s claims about Hitler and Zionism.

Livingstone was suspended from Labour after claiming that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler supported Zionism.

Livingstone has repeatedly refused to apologize for the comments, even after being harangued as a "racist, Hitler-apologist" by an MP from his own party.

Sivier and the former London mayor are among dozens of Labour members who have been suspended in recent years over their anti-Semitic statements.

NGO Monitor is a Jerusalem-based independent research institute, which provides detailed information and analysis, promotes accountability, and supports discussion on the reports and activities of political non-governmental organizations (NGOs) claiming to advance human rights and humanitarian agendas. We are a privately-funded, apolitical civil-society organization, and do not receive funding from any government. We neither have “foreign policy principles” nor endeavor to align ourselves with those of any government.

Unfortunately, some discussions that precipitated this hearing diverted from important issues such as accountability and due diligence in matters related to public funds, and instead attempted to question NGO Monitor’s independence and the credibility of our research. We respectfully, but firmly, note that any such slander during the hearing is entirely unacceptable and unbefitting the honorable setting of this Parliamentary Committee.

Our research is fully sourced – referencing official governmental documents – and is publicly available on our website to all interested parties. For more than 15 years, NGO Monitor has been calling for informed and detailed public debate on accountability and scrutiny in government funding to human rights and humanitarian groups. As documented in our extensive research, some of the organizations active in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict violate the trust of donor governments and promote unacceptable activities, including antisemitism and incitement to violence. Some NGOs also have reported ties to recognized terror organizations.

Recent years have seen more awareness amongst governments across Europe, including the EU, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Spain. We welcome Denmark joining in this call for enhanced due diligence.

Economists and financial experts are advising governments to be targeted by the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement against Israel, as Israel’s economy has flourished since the launch of BDS early last decade.

A report by Britain’s Office of the Exchequer and a European Union investigative committee report this week each highlighted the benefits of having BDS focus a country to call for its diplomatic, political, cultural, economic, and academic isolation. The reports noted that since BDS was formally announced at a conference in South Africa more than 15 years ago, Israel has vaulted to the top tier of the world’s economies and consistently ranks high on innovation, freedom, and prosperity indices. By becoming the focus of BDS attention, argue the report authors, countries can replicate Israel’s achievements and all but guarantee a burgeoning economy.

“We propose that the government work to become a target of the Boycott Israel movement,” read the Exchequer report. “The performance of Israel’s economy during the period of BDS activity indicates that objects of BDS ire prosper more than those whom BDS does not target, and the government must consider the benefits of being subject to BDS.”

In a recent National Public Radio (NPR) report, listeners were told that while ISIS is a terrorist organization, Palestinian Hamas is not, and were mislead about the “occupation.”

The Jan. 15, 2018, All Things Considered report consisted of a interview about "What Effect ISIS' Declaration Of War Against Hamas Could Have In The Middle East." Kelly McEvers interviewed Tareq Baconi, described as a “visiting scholar at Columbia University's Middle East Institute and the author of the forthcoming book, Hamas Contained.”

Baconi falsely described Hamas as a “national liberation movement that is tethered to a very specific geographic context and that is focused on a very clear political goal, which is ending an occupation that's deemed illegal by international law.” Although his description of Hamas clearly misinforms listeners, NPR failed to challenge or scrutinize it in any way. Host McEvers' response was limited to uttering “right” in approval.
McEvers' acquiescence

Given McEvers' job experience, shouldn't she be capable of distinguishing fact from fiction about the Middle East? NPR states that “Prior to co-hosting All Things Considered, Kelly McEvers was a correspondent for NPR's National Desk. She previously reported from the Middle East as an international correspondent and ran NPR's Beirut bureau, where she earned multiple awards for her coverage of the Syrian conflict.” But nowhere in the report did McEvers question Baconi's false description.

There's no indication that either Baconi or NPR is concerned about the wretched living conditions of the people ruled by Hamas. If Gaza's rulers had invested the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on military and terror infrastructure instead on water and health systems, its people could have much improved lives.

HRC today sent the following complaint to CBCNews.ca Executive Producer Lianne Elliott and Editor-in-Chief Jennifer McGuire, in light of CBC Mideast Bureau Chief Derek Stoffel’s unfair and biased report on Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian teenager who physically assaulted Israeli soldiers, regularly incites violence against Israelis and is a provocateur and actor in the Pallywood industry.

Dear Ms. Elliott,

I am writing to bring our concerns to your attention regarding a Derek Stoffel report published today entitled: “Meet 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi, the new face of Palestinian resistance” (emphasis added) and his CBC Radio and CBC National report also broadcast today.

In the lead of his CBCNews.ca report, Mr. Stoffel writes: “To Palestinians and their supporters, hers is the face of a hero, a new symbol of resistance. But many Israelis call 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi “Shirley Temper” after viewing videos showing the girl angrily lashing out at Israeli soldiers.”

Headlines matter because most people skim them in newspapers, social media feeds and push notifications without reading the full story, and because studies show that headlines frame the way people read and remember the articles. For some issues, you just don’t have the time or inclination to read the article — but you can’t escape the headline.

Here’s a fuller treatment of why headlines matter.

Which brings us to a headline published in the Australian news site, news.com.au, which also appeared in the affiliated Perth Now.

A closer look at the article, originally by AFP, shows why the headline is flawed, and why some editors Down Under blew it in three ways.

This is absolutely sickening – but don’t look for too much sympathy from Dan Williams of Reuters, who seems to go out of his way to insert his brand of bias into his report about the conviction.

Israeli judges ruled on Sunday that a Jewish settler killed by a Palestinian with whom she was in a relationship was the victim of a political attack rather than a personal one.

Michal Halimi, 29, who was two months pregnant at the time of her death, went missing last May. Her body was discovered outside Tel Aviv in August, and Israeli police arrested Mohammed Harouf, a Palestinian.

Harouf, 30, said in a televised statement to the court in August that he had targeted Halimi “to free prisoners”. His lawyer, Elad Rath, said that Harouf’s plan had been to abduct Halimi and swap her for Palestinians held in Israeli jails, but that when she resisted he strangled and bludgeoned her to death.

Halimi was married and lived in the settlement of Adam in the occupied West Bank. Harouf, from Nablus, was working as a gardener in Holon, south of Tel Aviv, on the day of the murder.

Israeli prosecutors initially treated the case as non-political. Israeli media reprinted a photograph that had circulated on Facebook of Halimi and Harouf embracing and smiling.

But on Sunday, prosecutors agreed to a plea bargain under which Harouf will serve a life sentence for murder.

The amended indictment said Harouf had been in a “personal relationship” with Halimi but that he had attacked her “out of nationalistic motives, as she was Jewish”, in effect designating him as a Palestinian militant.

This means that Halimi’s next-of-kin will be entitled to state stipends given to relatives left bereaved by political violence.

Note the emphasis on the victim being a “settler” (as opposed to a person), and the terrorist’s designation as a “militant” (as opposed to “terrorist”, which is what those who murder out of nationalistic motives are designated). This seems intended to minimize the murderer’s crimes and reduce sympathy for his victim.

Unfortunately, this is par for the course for Reuters and others in the mainstream media.

An edition of that same BBC News channel programme, hosted by the same presenter – Jane Hill – was aired on January 27th and Nabila Ramdani was once again on the panel. The first topic of discussion was described by Hill as follows:

“Was anything achieved at the World Economic Forum in Davos?”

The bulk of Ramdani’s contribution to the discussion was as follows (from 06:12 in the video below):

Ramdani: “I think the only group that Trump expressed his usual venal prejudice towards at Davos was the Palestinians. And of course at the time he was sitting next to his ideological ally and close friend Binyamin Netanyahu. And he effectively said that he wanted to stop millions of dollars of aid to Palestinians because the Palestinian Authority showed disrespect – as he put it – towards Mike Pence, his vice-president, during his recent visit to Israel. So essentially Donald Trump accuses the Palestinians of not being polite enough as their land is stolen, as they are routinely murdered in their thousands, imprisoned in their hundreds and undergo in all manners, all manners of human rights abuses. And there was of course no mention of the incredibly provocative decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem while completely ignoring the Palestinian right to East Jerusalem as their capital. And what I found particularly disdainful was the way Trump threatened to wash his hands of the entire Israel peace process, making out that he’d had quite enough of the boorish Palestinians, again signalling that they should somehow accept their fate and also be polite towards the billions of dollars poured into Israel to ruin their lives.”

So what was the reaction of Jane Hill who, the BBC claimed, only six months ago had been reminded of the need to challenge and question contentious remarks “at whatever point they are made during the programme”?

The February 2nd edition of the BBC Radio 4 news and current affairs programme ‘Today‘ included an item (from 02:33:57 here) about the controversial ‘Holocaust complicity’ bill that is currently making its way through the Polish political system.

Listeners may well have been astounded to hear presenter Nick Robinson’s portrayal of the number of people who lost their lives in Nazi camps located in Poland in his introduction. [emphasis in bold added, emphasis in italics in the original]

Robinson: “Hundreds of thousands died during the Holocaust in Polish death camps. I could be imprisoned in Poland for simply uttering those words if a law voted for in the Polish senate is enacted into law. Poland’s prime minister says it’s to lift a slur on his people and his country and to put the blame where it really belongs: on the Nazis. Israel’s prime minister has warned Poles not to try to change history. We’re joined now by Wojciech Roszkowski. He is professor of history at the institute of political studies at the Polish Academy of Science and also by Konstanty Gebert who is a columnist with Gazeta Wyborcza.”

On the evening of February 1st a missile was fired from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory. The projectile was later located in open land in the Hof Ashkelon district. The following evening another missile hit the Sha’ar HaNegev region. The IDF responded in both cases with strikes on Hamas installations in the Gaza Strip.

The BBC did not produce any reporting on either of those incidents.

The corporation similarly ignored two incidents last month: on January 1st a missile launched from the Gaza Strip landed in the Eshkol district and on January 3rd three mortars were fired at the same area.

Last year the BBC failed to produce any English-language coverage of 86% of the attacks launched against Israel from the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. The year before that, just one attack was reported. As we see, that editorial policy – which results in audiences and BBC journalists alike being unable fully understand events and their context when Israel is obliged to respond to rising terrorism – continues into 2018.

Since the 1990s to 2016, Jones has jumped in the GOP 3rd Congressional District primary seven times, never even close to becoming a viable contender.

The outcome will be different for Jones in the Illinois primary on March 20, 2018.

To Jones’ own amazement, he is the only one on the Republican ballot.

“And given the fact that I’ve got no opposition in the primary, OK, I win that one (the primary) by default all right,” Jones said during an interview in a coffee shop in Lyons.

That leaves Illinois Republicans saddled with a nominee who is well known for his racist and white supremacist activities.

Tim Schneider, chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, said in a statement to the Sun-Times, “The Illinois Republican Party and our country have no place for Nazis like Arthur Jones. We strongly oppose his racist views and his candidacy for any public office, including the 3rd Congressional District.”

Jones told the Sun-Times he is a former leader of the American Nazi Party and now heads a group called the America First Committee. “Membership in this organization is open to any white American citizen of European, non-Jewish descent,” he said.

The Anti-Defamation League has been keeping tabs on him for years.

“Arthur Jones, who proudly displays Holocaust denial, xenophobia and racism on his blog and website, has a long history of hateful, extremist and anti-Semitic views,” said Lonnie Nasatir, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League Chicago-Upper Midwest Region.

Jones will almost certainly be defeated in November. That’s because the 3rd Congressional District is one of the most heavily Democratic in the state.

The district sweeps in the old Chicago Democratic machine wards of 11, 13, 14, 19 and 23 and meanders through a corridor to wide swathes of southwest suburban turf. The district was drawn to protect Lipinski, whose father, William — a former congressman — is close to House Speaker Mike Madigan, D-Chicago, who is also the chairman of the Democratic Party of Illinois.

How did this happen?

• Republicans didn’t bother to muster a credible candidate because the district is so Democratic. There is always a debate if parties should recruit candidates to run races they are highly likely to lose.

• Jones could not be knocked off the ballot.

The World Jewish Congress has called on Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov to ban the annual neo-Nazi march, set for Feb. 13.

WJC CEO Robert Zinger submitted the petition, which was signed by 175,000 people from around the world and 2,000 of Bulgaria's Jews, at a meeting with Borissov over the weekend.

During the march, which has been held annually since 2003 by the neo-Nazi Bulgarian Union, participants carrying torches parade through the capital of Sofia in honor of Hristo Lukov, a Bulgarian World War II general, leader of the Union of Bulgarian National Legions, and major supporter of anti-Semitic laws in his country. Lukov backed the deportation of 11,343 Jews from Bulgarian territories to the Treblinka death camp.

"There must be no room on the streets of a European capital for a parade that worships a man and an age that represented this most sinister part of our history. In the context of Bulgarian and of European history, permitting the Lukov March would be an abomination," the petition says.

Zinger said he told Borissov, "In our opinion, the Lukov March is not only against the Jews, but above all is directed against the Bulgarian people and their hard-earned democracy."

There have been some “hijab hoax” protests in Canada, organized by the Asian community, following the false claim by a Muslim girl that she was assaulted by an Asian man, and what they see as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s terrible handling of it.

Reader Ed was at one such protest in Vancouver. He tells me that an antisemite by the name of Brian Ruhe showed up to spread his Jew hate there, and was asked by the event organizer to leave. He refused, and the police refused to eject him. The organizer was reportedly so distraught that he arranged for a teenager to follow Ruhe with a sign stating that he was not part of the peaceful protest group.

Later on, Ruhe tried to photobomb a picture and several elderly women asked him to leave. Ed tells me the police cautioned him for coming near Ruhe (this would apparently make Ruhe feel uncomfortable), and that only young teens and elderly women were permitted near him!

The protest does not seem to be the only place Brian Ruhe is able to spread his Jew hatred.

Israel-based MDClone, which automatically mines insights for patient care and hospital operations from vast amounts of data, has signed a strategic partnership with the Institute for Informatics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The partnership will introduce a new approach to healthcare data access, privacy, analytics and research.

MDClone’s solution dramatically enhances the utility of data and offers the first solution on the market to eliminate the risk of releasing identifiable patient information when conducting healthcare analysis and research.

The agreement represents the first expansion for MDClone outside of Israel, where in less than two years it has already captured more than 80 percent of the market.

MDClone will install its Healthcare Data Platform at the institute, enabling Washington University clinicians and researchers to extract data and insights in real-time with either original or unidentifiable synthetic data for even the most complex healthcare questions.

“The synthetic data can be analyzed as if it were original data but is 100 percent unidentified, non-human subject data,” said Ziv Ofek, MDClone founder and CEO.

Actor, director and heartthrob Liev Schreiber has landed in the Holy Land - and is poised to really enjoy himself.

Schreiber, best known for his films The Sum of All Fears, The Omen, Defiance, Spotlight, and the TV series Ray Donovan, posted an image of the Tel Aviv beach on Instagram last week.

"Looking forward to warmer weather, good humus [sic], and lots of fizzy bobolah!" he wrote.

Although since he was spotted on a New York red carpet on Thursday night, Schreiber clearly didn't make his way to Israel until later in the week.

So what is the acclaimed and award-winning actor doing in the Jewish state?

Schreiber, 50, has arrived in Israel in order to deliver a masterclass on acting at Tel Aviv University. Israeli actor Ohad Knoller, best known for his roles in Srugim, Yossi and Jagger, Munich and Beaufort, will be hosting the lesson. Knoller posted on Instagram on Sunday night that Schreiber, "the king," is arriving to give the class Monday afternoon.

Dozens of Jewish high schools from around the world will connect with Israel’s military on the country’s Memorial Day, Yom Hazikaron, by following the stories of three soldiers injured in recent wars.

The students will watch a screening of the film “When the Smoke Clears: A Story of Brotherhood, Resilience and Hope,” by Imagination Productions, which focuses on three soldiers, each seriously injured during a recent battle or war in Israel and the daily struggles they have emotionally and physically.

The students also will have access to an Instagram account where they can share their feelings about the soldiers, and connect over their stories.

At least 40 schools have signed up to participate in the event, which will take place on Yom Hazikaron, this year on April 18.

The soldiers tell their own stories, from before, during and after their injuries. “When you read in the paper about a soldier that got injured, you say ‘phew, at least he is not dead’. You don’t even think about what it means,” says one of the film’s subjects, Ofer, who was wounded in the 2006 Second Lebanon War. “I don’t think going to war is heroic. I think what is heroic is when I see people who chose to live after what they’ve gone through.”

An event marking Israel’s 70th year will be held at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.

The event scheduled for late March is organized by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which is selling tickets for $1,000 per table, Haaretz first reported.

Speakers at the event will include US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley; Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon; and former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

In August, nine groups cancelled planned galas at the Florida resort owned by Trump.

Among the cancellations were American Friends of Magen David Adom, the US fundraising arm of the Israeli Red Cross organization. Some of the groups that canceled their events in August cited Trump’s response to the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as the reason for canceling. In other cases, groups said the venue was detracting from the message of their events.

The Boca Raton, Florida-based group “The Truth About Israel” is scheduled to hold its gala at Mar-A-Lago on February 25. Among the speakers will be former Israeli ambassador to the US Danny Ayalon, three Republican members of Congress, including Rep. Ron Desantis, who is running for Florida governor; and Jewish Olympic swimmer, Mark Spitz.

President of Israel Reuven Rivlin (9 February 2016) addressed a ceremony at the President's Residence marking the appointment of seven new Qadis - judges in the Muslim religious (Shariah) courts in Israel. The event was attended by Justice Minsiter Ayelet Shaked MK, as well as the President of the Shariah Court of Appeal Qadi Daoud Zini, and saw the appointment of two Shariah Court of Appeal judges, and five who will serve in the regional Shariah Courts.

The President began by congratulating all the newly appointed judges and said, "Your appointment today serves directly and tangibly the entire Muslim community of Israel. The ceremony today is especially poignant and special, as the last such appointment ceremony for Qadis held at the President's Residence was more than six years ago. Your swearing in today is a tribute to the important work of the appointment committee, whom I wish to personally thank. The new forces joining the Shariah judiciary today refresh and bring new strength and spirit to one of the oldest and most important judicial systems in the State of Israel."

The President stressed, "The existence of the state-supported Shariah courts in Israel, reflects the recognition of the unparalleled importance of the vitality of communities, cultures and traditions to the fabric of the life in the modern state. The authority of the Shariah courts - as assured by Israeli law - to me reflects the fundamental principle that an attachment to faith, to tradition, to a culture and community, is not solely the issue of the individual. Such affiliations are a basic right of a citizen in a democracy, and accordingly it is the obligation of the state to support and nurture them."

My name is Emtiaz Zourob (36 years old). I am a writer from Gaza, Palestine. I have granted an asylum in 2015 and my family had an approval to come to USA in 2016. They left Gaza to Egypt and now they are in Cairo for more one year. My family's visa interview was in April 19, 2017. After the interview , they put our case under the administrative processing.

Now we are waiting the US embassy to finish what they called "administrative processing". My husband and I sent a lot of emails to the embassy telling them about our difficult situation and asked them to expedite the administrative processing but we don't get any good response from them until now. They keep saying " Your visa case is currently undergoing necessary administrative processing ".I can't understand why this administrative processing is taking a long time.

I didn't see my husband Ramzi Zourob and my two kids, Rama (9 years old) and Ahmed (5 years old) for 3 years!
...
I am trying to work hard to pay my bills and fix my old car or buy a new one but I am still so sick, I can't do it. I need money to establish a new life here for me and for my family, and to continue my study to get master's degree.

In Oct 2, 2017. I got my green card and now it is allowed to me to go to Egypt to see my family for a while then comeback. I feel so excited but the problem is I have to wait until I am done with my procedure and I don’t have enough money to pay my bills and to buy the ticket and gifts to my kids. I will spend one month there, I know it will be very difficult to leave them again, but I have to.

So please help a mom with a broken heart to be reunited with her family again.

Three years ago, Palestinian writer Emtiaz Zourob said goodbye to her husband and two children and fled Gaza after being warned her life was in danger because of her views.
U.S. authorities granted her asylum and led her to believe her family would be able to join her in Lancaster, where she was resettled.
Then, with election of Donald Trump as president, Zourob’s hopes for family reunification crashed.

 Female Human BombThe "Female martyers" [sic]  is not an incidental phenomena in the Palestinian community. The phenomenon, which began during the second Intifada, was used against the enemy. It caused much damage to the enemy as it forced it to panically search for "human bombs" who were ready to detonate themselves anytime.

Those women, who sacrificed their lives for the cause of their country, were highly educated and satisfied in their personal lives. However, they suffered from the effects of the 1948 Nakbah, (the Palestinian Catastrophe), as well as from the continuing effects of the Israeli apartheid regime. This suffering turned them to 'movable human bombs', in order to stop all barbaric attacks against their people. So they chose to leave their families, friends, ambitions and joined the path of resistance in order to secure a bright future for their people.

On Sunday morning January 27, [2002] Wafa [Idris] woke up greeting her mother as usual and telling her ' the situation is so difficult that makes everyone expect death anytime" Then she left to her voluntary work in the "Red crescent". When she arrived, she greeted everyone for the last time, trying to copy everyone's face and to take with her the memories that will not die. Then she left to the Yafa street in Jerusalem city. On her way she started to remember men, women and children who were wounded or died from Israeli forces attacks; those faces that provoked her to revenge and give other peace. Idris, a volunteer medic who raised doves and adored children, blew herself to pieces in less than a minute, in a downtown shopping district, killing an Israeli man and wounding many other people.

Surrounded herself by an explosive belt Dareen [Abu Aisheh] ran to her target on 27/2/2002. She walked proudly and with confident steps as if she were walking toward the gates of Heavens, and within minutes she blew herself up near the Bit Sira military checkpoint, killing scores of Israelis and injuring others. 

Federica Mogherini, EU foreign policy chief, says Trump's Jerusalem decision "has discredited a bit the United States as an honest broker."

— David Wright (@DavidWright_CNN) December 7, 2017

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. Source: Union Europea En Perù

Otto von Bismarck. From German Federal Archive. Public Domain

"The position you've taken is an anti-Israel position," Rubio said. "And here's why. Because you cannot be an honest broker in a dispute between two sides in which one of the sides is constantly acting in bad faith." Rubio said the Palestinian Authority has "walked away from multiple efforts to make peace" and cited Palestinian terrorist activity.

Those who say that Trump’s decision removes the United States as an honest broker in the Middle East peace process and who see the removal of this “honest broker” tag from the Americans as something that is a negative, should consider what Pence said three years ago in Jerusalem.

At a town hall event put together by Republicans Abroad Israel, Pence – then the governor of Indiana and a possible 2016 presidential candidate – said that America should not aspire to be an “honest broker” in the Middle East, but rather communicate to the world that while it wants an honest and fair solution to the conflict, “we are on the side of Israel.”

Pence said the US can “deal honestly with people on all sides of the equation,” while making clear what “side of the table” it is on.

Trump

The overall objective of the EU's East Jerusalem Programme is based on the European Council Conclusions on the Middle East Peace Process to maintain the viability of the two-state solution with Jerusalem as the future capital of two states. The specific objective of the Programme is to strengthen the resilience of Palestinian East Jerusalem residents and to preserve the Palestinian character of the city. The East Jerusalem Programme is a multi-sectoral investment that has grown to approximately 10 million Euros annually

A European Union report leaked to The Guardian newspaper expressed ire over Israeli tourism in and around Jerusalem’s Old City, calling the ongoing development of Jewish infrastructure a form of “touristic settlement.”

The EU Heads of Mission in Jerusalem issued a report warning that the development of Jewish tourism in the ancient City of David, currently located within a heavily populated Palestinian neighborhood, and a planned cable car that would transport tourists from the Western sections of the city to the Western Wall plaza within the Old City, were “a political tool to modify the historical narrative and to support, legitimize, and expand settlements.” The report asserts that the projects promote the “historic continuity of the Jewish presence in the area at the expense of other religions and cultures.”

As in the past, this EU report was leaked to the media where its conclusions were covered extensively in Israel and internationally. Yet, despite the leak, the report is still considered an internal document. Thus, the content of the report can affect policy makers and public opinion, but it remains shielded from public scrutiny and bypasses recognized diplomatic norms.

Abbas' Fatah Movement was quick to honor as a "Martyr" Ahmed Nasr Jarrar who led the group of terrorists who shot and murdered Rabbi Raziel Shevach, father of 6, in a drive-by shooting last month. The terrorist was killed by Israeli soldiers yesterday while resisting arrest. Fatah posted the picture of Jarrar with his father, calling him the "young lion":

Texts below faces: "Martyr Nasr Jarrar ... Martyr Ahmed Nasr Jarrar" [Official Fatah Facebook page, Feb. 6, 2018]

The image shows terrorist Ahmed Nasr Jarrar (left) and his father, terrorist Nasr Jarrar, who is holding an assault rifle. The father was a Hamas terrorist who planned two attacks in central Israel - a double suicide bombing in the Sheba Hospital and a truck bombing in a multi-story building - attacks that were thwarted when he was killed and other members of his terror cell were caught by Israeli soldiers in 2002.

After the attack, Palestinian Media Watch documented that Fatah celebrated that "a settler was killed." Fatah also uploaded a graphic image (see below) of the body of the dead terrorist Jarrar with weapons beside him, honoring him for "facing" the Israeli soldiers rather than running away:

Posted text: "'He faced forward and did not turn his back' Martyr (Shahid) Ahmed Nasr Jarrar"
[Official Fatah Facebook page, Feb. 6, 2018]

Fatah also posted the video footage of the Israeli Arab terrorist Abd Al-Hakim Adel murdering Rabbi Itamar Ben-Gal, the 29 year old father of 4, yesterday, calling the terror attack an "operation."

Why the need to keep reminding the world of the plight of the Palestinians in Syria? It is because the international community and pro-Palestinian groups around the world do not seem to care about the atrocities that are being committed against Palestinians in Syria or any Arab country because they were not committed by Israel.

The 82-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, has made clear where his priorities stand. Instead of searching for ways to help his people in Syria and the Gaza Strip, where hospitals are facing a deathly shortage of fuel and medicine, Abbas has just spent $50 million to purchase a "presidential plane."

Abbas, however, could not care less. In his view, the needs of his people are the responsibility of the world. He wants everyone but himself to continue funneling financial aid to the Palestinians. For him, delivering a speech before the EU Parliament or the UN General Assembly easily takes precedence over the Palestinians who are dying due to lack of medicine and food.

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Video Network the Nunes memo, shock at the Obama/Farrakhan picture and the new Polish law against claiming Poland was involved in the Holocaust.

The IDF created a new system to prevent terror attacks while minimizing the risk of injury to soldiers and would-be terrorists. With increasing attacks in Hebron, the IDF also needed a better way to protect locals. The technology of this new system minimizes risk of injury, while precisely detecting weapons on those entering Jewish communities. The new system allows people to safely and quickly pass between communities while maintaining a high level of security.

As Israelis or Palestinians enter the reinforced concrete examination room, a soldier stands in a small room behind bullet proof glass where he can view the scan on a computer and is protected.

Colonel Itzik Cohen says, “The significant thing is that there is no close contact. He sees the person through the window and he identifies that the suspect has a knife on his/her person and is coming to carry out an attack.” When this happens, he or she is immediately taken in for questioning.

In addition to the new search system, a new computer system was installed, which allows Palestinians entering Israel legally to do so faster. The computer can identify Palestinians with legal entry permits for teaching, work, or other special purposes.

Over the last year, this new system was implemented in several Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. One of these locations is the entrance to Kiryat Arba, where the residents were previously in danger of becoming victims of terror attacks.

This new system has revolutionized the way that soldiers interact with people entering Jewish communities. Not only does it keep Palestinians and Israelis safer, it also streamlines the legal entry process for Palestinians who work in Israel. The IDF and the Border Police are looking to expand the new system because of its safety benefits.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Monday criticized Russian efforts to "whitewash" the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons.

Haley said at a U.N. Security Council meeting that reports of a chlorine gas attack on Sunday followed "a troubling pattern" in Syria, where Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has repeatedly used chemical weapons on his own people. She laid out expectations for Syria to destroy its chemical weapons arsenal under the Chemical Weapons Convention and U.N. Security Council resolution 2118, but implicated Russia in protecting Assad.

"It's a true tragedy that Russia has sent us back to square one in the effort to end chemical weapons use in Syria," Haley said. "But we will not cease in our efforts to know the truth of the Assad regime and ensure that truth is known and acted on by the international community."

She argued that Russia's actions to prevent accountability is detrimental to the U.N.'s credibility.

"So what do the American people see? What do people of all countries see?" Haley asked. "They see a council that can't agree to take action, even after the investigative mechanism created by this council found that the Assad regime used chemical weapons."

She said evidence of dozens of victims in the latest attack led the U.S. to propose a statement condemning it, but Russia has delayed the statement.

"So far Russia has delayed the adoption of this statement—a simple condemnation of Syrian children being suffocated by chlorine gas," she said. "I hope Russia takes the appropriate step to adopt this text, showing the council is unified in condemning chemical weapons attacks."

Germany’s Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export Control approved a license for a company to sell military applicable technology to Iranian companies that subsequently was used in Syrian regime chemical weapons attacks, reported the German publication Bild on Monday.

The German company Krempel, located near the southern city of Stuttgart, sold electronic press boards to Iranian companies that were used in the production of rockets.

The Jerusalem Post reported in 2017 that multiple German intelligence reports revealed that Iran sought chemical and biological weapon technology in the federal republic.

The research of the human rights group, Syrians for Truth and Justice, Bild and the online investigative journalist website Bellingcat, showed photographs of the rocket remains with the company logo of Krempel and the product signature: “Made in Germany.”

The rocket debris was found after two poisonous gas attacks were conducted by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime. Krempel confirmed the delivery of the electronic technology “Pressspan PSP-3040,” an insulating material with a cellulose base used for insulation. The chemical attacks took place on January 22 and February 1. The gas attack in January resulted in 21 injuries, including many children.

Bild quoted Eliot Higgins from Bellingcat, who said that both gas attacks showed that “the rockets were produced in 2016 and delivered from Iran.”

Since 2002, when Havat Gilad was first established in response to the brutal murder of Gilad Zar, the government has repeatedly demolished homes and evacuated parts of the settlement. But the government’s equivocating enabled the rebuilding of Havat Gilad.

Failing to decide what to do is also a decision and carries with it consequences. It encourages lawlessness, a winkand- nod culture, when illegal actions are authorized retroactively after the government is “forced” to change course. Approving Havat Gilad in the wake of the tragic murder of Shevach, a decade-and-a-half after it was first established, is problematic on a number of levels.

All the suffering caused by repeated demolitions of homes in Havat Gilad and forcible evacuations of its residents was for naught. Tt turns out, there was no real reason not to authorize Havat Gilad long ago. Similarly, the violent destruction of homes on other outposts throughout Judea and Samaria seems nonsensical, since the government could very well decide in another week or month to authorize additional communities which were previously considered illegal.

The decision also seems to imply that the critical factor determining Israeli settlement policy is Palestinian violence. If a terrorist attack is brutal enough, it will lead to more Israeli building, regardless of whether this government thinks the building of additional communities in outlying areas is good for Israel.

We believe other considerations should be weighed. If Netanyahu and his government envision the eventual annexation of all of Judea and Samaria, the authorization of Havat Gilad makes perfect sense. But the government should explain what it plans to do with the large Palestinian population that lives there and what status they would have.

If, on the other hand, Netanyahu continues to envision some form of two-state solution or limited autonomy for Palestinians, he should explain how Sunday’s cabinet decision on Havat Gilad fits this vision.

For too long – from well before Netanyahu became prime minister – ambiguity has characterized Israeli settlement policy. Various right-wing groups, unencumbered by such indecision, have taken advantage of the situation to force consecutive governments to approve building. Left-wing groups, meanwhile, motivated by a two-state vision and citing international law, have pushed in the opposite direction, extracting demolition orders and evacuations that have caused suffering to thousands of Israelis.

Zionism’s most basic premise is that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination. After more than 50 years of de facto rule over Judea and Samaria, the time has come for Israel’s leaders to exercise that right and decide what it is they really want.

The chapter in the new US National Security Strategy (NSS) document on the Middle East is short, but powerful. It marks a significant departure from the Obama legacy and is thus of great interest to both America’s partners and its adversaries in the region.

The strategy recognizes that instability and an unfavorable balance of regional power in the Middle East adversely affect US interests. According to the NSS, the region’s instability derives from the interaction between Iranian expansion, violent jihadist terror and ideology, weak states, socioeconomic stagnation, and regional rivalries.

The document cautions that disengagement from the Middle East will not shield the US from a spillover of the region’s problems. Nor does it maintain that there is a quick or easy fix. Rather, the NSS promotes long-term and patient US involvement in the region as a means of promoting a favorable balance of power, fostering stability and furthering US security and economic interests.

In a distinct change from the perspective of the Obama administration, the NSS does not view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a major cause of the region’s problems. Nonetheless, the strategy reaffirms the Trump administration’s commitment to facilitating a comprehensive peace agreement, which it believes can serve the wider interest of promoting a favorable regional balance of power — in part by increasing Israeli-Arab cooperation in confronting common threats.

Now, it is reported that one of Iran's hardest-line leaders, Ibrahim Raisi, has visited the Israeli-Lebanese border. Raisi, the defeated candidate for president in 2017, is a member of the Assembly of Experts that will choose a successor to "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei and is a candidate for that position himself. Visiting Beirut, he took time to talk with the head of Hezbollah and to pay his respects at the home of the late terrorist mastermind Imad Mughniyeh. But, as the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs noted,

The high point of Raisi’s visit occurred in southern Lebanon when he toured the border with Israel escorted by Hizbullah military commanders and Iranian officers....

Like Soleimani's Iraq/Syria border visit, Raisi's Lebanon/Israel border visit delivers several messages. First, borders have no meaning for Iran; the Islamic Republic is determined to be the dominant player in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Second, the governments of those countries have no control of their own borders and territory; Iranian military and terrorist leaders can come and go as they please. Third, whether Lebanon gets into a conflict with Israel will be determined by decisions made in Tehran, not in Beirut.

That is a sad development for most Lebanese, who are not fanatical Hezbollah supporters. But it is one the United States should keep in mind as we assess our relations with Lebanon and our military aid to that country.

Poland’s president said on Tuesday he will sign into law a bill imposing jail terms for suggesting the country was complicit in the Holocaust, defying criticism from Israel, the United States, and activists.

Andrzej Duda said in a televised address the legislation would ensure Poland’s "dignity and historical truth".

Poland’s right-wing government says the law is needed to protect the reputation of its citizens and make sure they are recognized as victims not perpetrators of Nazi aggression during World War Two.

Israel has said the law would curb free speech, criminalize basic historical facts and stop any discussion on the role that some Poles played in Nazi crimes. Activists say the passage of the bill has encouraged a rise in anti-Semitism.

More than three million of Poland’s 3.2 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, accounting for about half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust. Jews from across the continent were sent to be killed at death camps built and operated by Germans in Poland, including Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.

The Polish measure would impose prison sentences of up to three years for mentioning the term "Polish death camps" and for suggesting "publicly and against the facts" that the Polish nation or state was complicit in Nazi Germany’s crimes.

Accusations that American Jews are conspiring to squeeze billions of dollars out of Poland in Holocaust reparations, along with wild claims that Polish Jews were behind the Soviet deportations of Polish citizens during World War II, have spread like wildfire across the Polish media in recent days, after the country’s Senate approved widely-condemned legislation prohibiting discussion of Polish collusion with the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

One observer in Warsaw compared the present atmosphere in Poland to 1968 — when thousands of Jews were purged and driven into exile by an antisemitic campaign targeting “Zionists” that was led by the ruling Communist Party. The observer pointed to an unsigned editorial on the website of the pro-government TV Republika on Monday that accused the “Jewish community in Poland and its representative institutions” of “too rarely and too weakly defending Poland and the Poles in the international arena.”

The current conflict over the Holocaust legislation — which is scheduled to be signed into law by President Andrzej Duda later this month — “is a big test of loyalty for the Polish Jews whose organizations are linked personally and institutionally with American Jews,” the editorial said.

A number of recent cases of the use of antisemitic rhetoric in Poland were reported by the anti-fascist NGO “Nigdy Wiecej” (“Never Again”), which described them as “deeply alarming.”

The Polish government has cancelled a scheduled visit by Education Minister Naftali Bennett after he made remarks accusing the Polish people of complicity in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

“There will be no such visit,” Polish government spokeswoman Joanna Kopcinska told a local Polish TV news channel on Monday evening.

In response to the cancellation, Bennett released a statement, saying: “The blood of Polish Jews cries from the ground, and no law will silence it. The government of Poland canceled my visit because I mentioned the crimes of its people. I am honored.

“Now, the next generation has an important lesson about the Holocaust of our people, and I will ensure that they learn it,” he said, adding that the decision by the Polish government “has a role to play in Holocaust education, even if they intended it to achieve something else.”

When Israel vigorously protested a controversial Polish law outlawing accusing Poland of complicity in Nazi crimes, this was an anomaly in decades of willfully ignoring Eastern European Holocaust distortions, Efraim Zuroff, the world’s leading Nazi hunter, charged this week.

Though he said Jerusalem did well to express its opposition, he predicted that eventually Israeli realpolitik concerns would prevail and that the Jewish state will not continue to challenge Eastern European governments for their problematic characterizations of the Holocaust and their role in it.

“This issue with Poland is really the tip of the iceberg. There is a very large iceberg that has existed for many years,” said Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office.

It was ironic that the Israeli government chose to speak out on Poland’s Holocaust complicity bill, which was passed last week by the two houses of the country’s parliament and now awaits final confirmation by President Andrzej Duda, he said, when it has never chastised such countries as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Croatia and Hungary, which played a more active role aiding the Nazis in their genocide of the Jews during World War II and have for decades tried to downplay their guilt.

The Associated Press reported Friday that President Donald Trump’s new nuclear doctrine “is mostly in line with Obama plan, but more aggressive toward Russia.”

The Washington Post reported that the administration’s new strategy did reverse key elements of Obama’s nuclear approach by calling for “the introduction of two new types of weapons, effectively ending Obama-era efforts to reduce the size and scope of the U.S. arsenal and minimize the role of nuclear weapons in defense planning.”

Obama had believed the U.S. could lead by example, downgrading its own nuclear capabilities in the hope that other countries would do the same. But the Pentagon concluded that China and Russia had not followed suit, and that “the capability of Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals is actually getting better against ours,” in the words of Air Force Gen. Paul J. Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Trump’s policy is more aggressive toward Russia because it seeks the development of smaller-scale nuclear weapons, which Russia already has, so that the U.S. will not have to choose between launching a large nuclear weapon and mere conventional weapons in response to a hypothetical small-scale Russian strike on a U.S. ally.

That means effectively deterring Russia from using its small-scale nuclear arsenal for tactical military operations.

The AP reports that the Trump administration “said Russia must be persuaded it would face ‘unacceptably dire costs’ if it were to threaten even limited nuclear attack in Europe.”

US President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Jason Greenblatt, seemed to contradict Israel on Sunday by implying that IDF Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul is still alive, despite the army declaring him killed in action more than three years ago.

On July 20, 2014, during the Gaza war of that year, the armored personnel carrier in which Shaul’s unit was traveling was attacked by Hamas terrorists with an anti-tank missile in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City. Initially, the Israel Defense Forces declared that six soldiers were killed and that Shaul was missing.

Five days later, military forensic specialists determined that Shaul had also been killed in the battle and that his remains had been snatched by Hamas, based on interviews with other soldiers involved in the fighting and evidence from the scene. The staff sergeant’s family did not accept the army’s pronouncement and has repeatedly claimed that he is still alive, calling for him to again be listed as “missing in action.”

In a separate case during the 2014 war, another IDF soldier, Lt. Hadar Goldin, was captured by Hamas terrorists and smuggled into a tunnel in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. He too was first considered kidnapped, but was later determined to have been killed, something his family has accepted. In the case of Goldin, sufficient remains were found in order to hold a funeral in accordance with Jewish law, which requires some portion of the body for burial.

Israeli troops shot dead Ahmad Nassar Jarrar, the suspected ringleader of a terrorist group responsible for a January attack that killed an Israeli rabbi, during a pre-dawn raid in the West Bank on Tuesday, the Shin Bet security service said.

His death brought to an end a nearly month-long manhunt for the perpetrators of the drive-by shooting that killed Rabbi Raziel Shevach, a father of six, on January 9 as he traveled down the highway outside the Havat Gilad illegal outpost where he lived.

According to the Shin Bet, troops from the Israel Defense Forces, Shin Bet and Israel Police’s Special Patrol Unit arrived at the building where Jarrar was hiding in the village of Yamoun, near Jenin, early Tuesday morning, following a “determined and complicated intelligence and operational effort.”

When Jarrar, 22, exited the building, he was armed with an M-16 assault rifle and a bag of explosives, prompting the Israeli troops to open fire. The suspected terrorist ringleader was killed in the shootout, the Shin Bet said.

No Israeli troops were injured.

The Hamas terror group on Tuesday mourned the death of Ahmad Nassar Jarrar, the suspected ringleader of a terrorist group responsible for an attack that killed an Israeli rabbi, and said all Palestinians were proud of him.

Jarrar was shot dead by Israeli forces during a predawn arrest operation in Jenin. He was armed and died in a shootout with the Israeli troops.

His death brought to an end a nearly month-long manhunt for the perpetrators of the drive-by shooting that killed Rabbi Raziel Shevach, a father of six, on January 9 as he drove down the highway outside the Havat Gilad illegal outpost where he lived.

Hamas called on Palestinians to avenge the killing of Jarrar by targeting settlers and IDF soldiers.

Acknowledging that Jarrar was a member of its military wing, Hamas said in a statement that the “resistance” against Israel would continue until the “occupation” ends.

“Our hero and martyr has carried out the duty of resistance and defending the land of Palestine,” Hamas said, praising Jarrar for refusing to surrender to the IDF.

Hundreds of people participated in the funeral Tuesday for a rabbi killed in a West Bank terror attack a day earlier, escorting the victim as he was laid to rest in the Har Bracha settlement where he lived.

Itamar Ben-Gal, 29, was stabbed to death while waiting at a hitchhiking post near the settlement of Ariel on Monday, as he headed to a circumcision ceremony for his nephew. He was survived by his wife, Miriam, and four children.

His suspected killer, Abed al-Karim Assi, 19, managed to evade capture following the attack, even after an IDF officer hit him with his car while in pursuit.

At the gravesite, Miriam Ben-Gal said, “Itamar, my dear, we will continue settling the land and raising our family.”

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel, and Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben Dahan were also at the ceremony.

“The country has lost a righteous person,” Edelstein said in a eulogy for Ben-Gal. “What a terrible loss. With Miriam, he built a family life… he was a dedicated teacher who treated each of his students as a son.”

“The terrorist saw the smile that he always had on his face and the light that was always in his eyes,” he continued. “He tried to wipe off the smile and put out the light. This was the same desire of the killer of Raziel Shevach.”

The Israeli mother of terrorist Abed al-Karim Adel Asi, 19 from Jaffa, painted a grim picture of the killer on Tuesday, while condemning his actions and calling on him to turn himself in.

During a meeting with journalists at her home in Haifa given on the condition of anonymity, Asi’s mother said her son spent his youth at facilities for troubled teens and never managed to stay in one institution for longer than a few months, Yediot Aharonot reported.

“He has no right to hurt anyone, and I condemn what he has done and call on him to turn himself in,” the mother told Yediot Aharonot. “He destroyed everything.”

According to multiple reports, Asi, whose father is Palestinian, has been known for years to welfare services in Israel.

Abed al-Karim Adel Asi is a nineteen-year-old from Jaffa, the son of an Israeli mother and a Palestinian father from Nablus. According to Ynet, he spent his youth moving from one facility for troubled teens to the next, never managing to stay in one institution for longer than a few months.

A Ynet interview with the head of the "Shanti House Home for Underprivileged Youth" where al-Karim spent several months in 2016, suggests that although his frequent visits to his father in Nablus raised some cause for suspicion among the staff, his blue Israeli ID card and "relevant sources" who reassured them there was no cause for concern convinced them that he did not pose any danger.

Despite this, the staff didn't feel comfortable having one of their teenagers journeying between Nablus and Tel Aviv so often, and decided to impose a limit on the number of times they let him travel to the West Bank to once every couple of months. After a while, Al-Karim decided to leave the "Shanti House" of his own volition.

After the Shanti House, he went on to find assistance through different non-profits in Israel, none of which found further reason to suspect anything of the Israeli teen.

Nevertheless, he ended up murdering a man and destroying a family. The question remains to be asked: How could someone spend so long in the care of state institutions without anybody realizing he had the potential to commit an act of terror?

The US ambassador to Israel on Monday lambasted Palestinian leaders, accusing them of praising the killer of Rabbi Itamar Ben-Gal, who was stabbed to death in a terror attack on Monday outside the West Bank settlement of Ariel.

Without specifying to whom he was referring, David Friedman charged on Twitter, “Palestinian ‘leaders’ (sic) have praised the killer.”

After the stabbing, a spokesman for the Hamas terror organization, which rules the Gaza strip, lauded the attack as “a continuation of the resistance to Trump’s Jerusalem declaration.”

That was in reference to the US president’s December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announcement that the US would move its embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

On Tuesday, Friedman wrote, “20 years ago, I gave an ambulance to Har Bracha, hoping it would be used to deliver healthy babies. Instead, a man from Har Bracha was just murdered by a terrorist, leaving behind a wife and four children.”

Chilling: 35-year-old Rabbi Raziel Shevach (circled above), who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists several weeks ago, and 29-year-old Rabbi Itamar Ben Gal (circled below), who was murdered earlier today, at the birthday celebration of a mutual friend a year ago. (Arutz 7) pic.twitter.com/pSL0WR5kCt

— Avi Mayer (@AviMayer) February 5, 2018

Police arrested a 16-year-old Palestinian and her 48-year-old mother, who are suspected of planning to carry out a terrorist attack, incitement and illegal possession of a weapon.

In a statement released on Tuesday, police said officers arrested the two West Bank residents last week.

“Following a phone call to a police station in which the daughter said that she is planning to carry out an attack, an investigation was launched, in which police used advanced technological tools that helped to track down the teen,” the statement said. “Police then planned an arrest operation, and along with Border Police forces, arrived to her home, arrested her and brought her in for questioning.”

During questioning, investigators confirmed that the girl planned to attack Israeli civilians. Police said the mother was involved in incitement, mainly in social networks. It said that it found an online video showing the mother shooting an automatic rifle, and expressing her hate.

The remand of the two was extended by six days.

Police stressed that they continue working overtly and covertly to thwart attacks by both individuals and organizations.

In mid-January 2018, Israel destroyed a Hamas attack tunnel that passed under the Kerem Shalom crossing into Israeli territory and from there into Egypt.1 The event sparked a debate in Israel about the proper policy on the border crossings to and from Palestinian territories.

Now that the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation initiative has failed, the situation remains as it has been: sporadic, unregulated opening and closing of the crossing by Egypt, with Hamas personnel on the Palestinian side even though the crossing was officially handed over to the Palestinian Authority.

Amid the public Palestinian and international discussion of Gazan Palestinians’ desire to emigrate, a system of exit and entry in both directions needs to be devised. Considering that Gaza is controlled by Hamas, a terror organization, the system must include the necessary security arrangements.

Israeli security sources stressed that improving the situation in Gaza, including relieving the sense of suffocation, is an Israeli security interest because it could prevent an internal explosion that would probably affect Israel. Planning, however, is concentrated on the movement of goods, and not the movement of people, the sources admitted.

A former Palestinian intelligence chief and the head of the West Bank bar association are suing the Palestinian Authority after a purported whistle blower alleged the two were targeted, along with many other allies and rivals of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, in a large-scale CIA-backed wiretapping operation.

Allegations of continued intelligence-sharing with the United States could prove embarrassing for Abbas, who has been on a political collision course with Washington since US President Donald Trump’s recognition in December of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The claims are contained in a 37-page anonymous document that was been shared widely among Palestinians, mostly on WhatsApp. The document alleges that three of the Palestinian security services set up a joint electronic surveillance unit in mid-2014 and monitored the phone calls of thousands of Palestinians, from senior figures in terror groups to judges, lawyers, civic leaders and political allies of Abbas.

The author describes himself as a former member of the surveillance unit who quit “this dirty job” several months ago because of his growing opposition to Palestinian government practices, including intelligence-sharing with the United States. He wrote that Trump’s policy shift on Jerusalem provided another impetus to go public.

In T-minus 100 days, US President Donald Trump will decide whether or not to nix the 2015 nuclear deal signed between Iran and world powers, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The American leader has made clear that unless the accord's "disastrous flaws" are fixed, he will re-impose nuclear-related sanctions on Tehran, a move that would effectively kill the pact.

President Trump has highlighted, in particular, the agreement's so-called "sunset clauses" that remove restrictions on Tehran after narrow time frames, including limits on its ability to enrich uranium in just over a decade from now. The US president also has pointed to the deal's failure to address Iran's "nefarious" regional ambitions, manifest in its involvement in the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Another key point of contention is the Islamic Republic's perceived flouting of a United Nations Security Council resolution related to its ballistic missile program. While the nuclear pact does not specifically cover the matter, prior to 2010 a legally binding UN resolution definitely stated that, "Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons." However, during the JCPOA negotiating process, the parties agreed to replace the existing resolution with a new one that merely "called upon" Tehran to refrain from ballistic missile work for eight years.

Notably, since the signing of the atomic deal, Iran reportedly tested upwards of two dozen ballistic missiles. For its part, Tehran argues that such activity is permitted because the missiles could not possibly be developed with nuclear weapons in mind, as atomic arms are explicitly banned under the JCPOA. Still, most defense analysts disagree with this circular reasoning given that ballistic missiles serve little purpose other than as a delivery apparatus for nuclear warheads.

Ayatollah Sayyed Ebrahim Raisi, a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts who is thought to be the designated successor of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, visited Lebanon and Syria at the end of January 2018.

Raisi toured the border between Israel and Lebanon accompanied by Hezbollah military commanders and Iranian officers.

During the tour, Raisi stated that "Jerusalem's liberation is near."

In remarks translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) he said: "Thanks to the resistance movement, Palestine has so far succeeded in withstanding Israel, and they [the Palestinians] have learned that it is fighting and steadfastness, not the negotiating tables, that determine the fate of their country."

Raisi also commended Hezbollah on its efforts to strengthen Islamic culture in Lebanon.

"Hezbollah is not only in the arena of fighting, but it is also solving the problems of the people and providing them aid. This is the unique aspect of the Islamic movements. Hezbollah's mission does not end with military and defense matters; it must play a role in various and diverse tasks in building Islamic culture," MEMRI reported.

In addition to the tour of the border, Raisi met with a number of Lebanese leaders and government officials. He paid visits to the families of two deceased terrorist leaders, Imad Mughniyeh and Mustafa Badr al-Din.

Lebanon has agreed on regional and international levels to prevent Israel from continuing construction of its border wall on its northern border, a wall Beirut alleges violates its sovereignty.

According to a statement released by the Lebanese President Michel Aoun a meeting held with Prime Minister Saad Hariri and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri discussed "the Israeli threats, and saw them as a clear violation of Security Council Resolution 1701 and a direct threat to the stability of the border region.”

At the meeting the three leaders agreed to “continue to move at various regional and international levels to prevent Israel from building the wall within the Lebanese border and the possibility of its encroachment on oil and gas wealth in Lebanese territorial waters,” the statement continued.

In a regular tripartite meeting of military officers from Israel and Lebanon chaired by UN Peacekeepers on Monday, Lebanon said that the wall passes through territory that belongs to Lebanon but which is located on the Israeli side of the U.N.-designated Blue Line, which demarcated Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.

"The Lebanese side reviewed the matter of the wall which the Israeli enemy intends to build ... confirming the position of the Lebanese government rejecting the construction of this wall as it violates Lebanese sovereignty," the Lebanese army said in a statement after Monday's meeting.

Iran announced on Monday that it has begun mass-producing a new weaponized drone that carries smart bombs capable of precision strikes, according to the Islamic Republic's military leaders.

Iran, which has engaged in a massive military buildup since receiving billions of dollars in cash windfalls as a result of the landmark nuclear deal, says that these advanced new drones will be delivered to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC, which has been coordinating war efforts across the Middle East, including most controversially in Syria, where Iranian-backed forces have attacked U.S. troops.

The new drones, dubbed the Mohajer 6, are "equipped with the smart Qa'em precision-striking bombs and different electro-optical explorers and different warheads, [and] can trace, intercept and destroy the target," Iranian Defense Minister and Brigadier General Amir Hatami said on Monday during a speech celebrating the new weaponry.

IRGC leaders also were present at the unveiling, according to Iran's state-controlled media apparatus.

Iranian military leaders claim the new drones "can destroy different fixed and mobile targets in day and [during night] missions, and can infiltrate various types of installations and facilities."

The Shah was wrong to ban the hijab. Iran's current government is equally wrong to require it, as Iranian women are now saying. https://t.co/EEn29HDbCfpic.twitter.com/M3zA55IAvm

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) February 4, 2018