Cast aside from El Salvador’s ruling party, a businessman, former mayor and figure of Palestinian descent surged to a decisive victory by carving an uncustomary path to the top.

Nayib Bukele, a 37-year-old who was dubbed the “millennial mayor” of San Salvador, won around 54 per cent in the election to secure the presidency of this small Central American nation, representing the right-wing party known as Grand Alliance for National Unity. That was after being expelled from the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front party and then prevented from forming his own party.

His victory was not only notable in that he became the first ruler to end a two-party system that had presided over the country since the end of its civil war in 1992, but he became its second-ever leader of Palestinian descent after Tony Sacca, who led from 2004 to 2009.

Around 100,000 Salvadorans with Palestinian ancestry live in the country out of a population of 6.5 million, ranking it as the second highest population of Palestinian descendants in Central America behind Honduras.

The former mayor traces his Palestinians roots to the early 20th century, when many left the cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem to find a new home in El Salvador. Some left for a better life while others were escaping from conscription under Ottoman rule at the time.

In 2011, after the shooting of US representative Gabby Giffords, a Daily Kos blog warned of a new threat the writer called stochastic terrorism: the use of mass media to incite attacks by random nut jobs—acts that are “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” 

إبتكارات إسرائيلية تجعل حياتنا أفضل

هل تعلم أن إسرائيليين اخترعوا جهازًا يحول الهواء إلى ماء وتكنولوجيا تمكن السيارات من القيادة بشكل ذاتي؟ فيما يلي معلومات عن ابتكارات إسرائيلية قد تجعل حياتنا أفضل. pic.twitter.com/gsLdCw2Ezu

— إسرائيل في الخليج (@IsraelintheGCC) February 5, 2019

A bipartisan supermajority in the Senate passed the Combating BDS Act on Tuesday. Yet a few of my colleagues recently echoed false claims made by anti-Israel activists and others that the bill violates Americans' First Amendment rights.

That line of argument is not only wrong but also provides cover for supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, who embrace an international campaign of discriminatory economic warfare against Israel, a fellow democracy and America's strongest ally in the Middle East.

In a high-profile case in 2014, the BDS movement drove the Israeli company SodaStream from the West Bank. Five hundred Palestinian employees were left jobless by the move.

The Combating BDS Act does not prohibit Americans' right to engage in boycotts. It focuses on business entities - not individuals - and, consistent with the Supreme Court, it focuses on conduct, not speech. It does not restrict citizens or associations of citizens from engaging in political speech, including against Israel.

Rather, the bill merely clarifies that entities - such as corporations or companies - have no fundamental right to government contracts and government investment.

"Anti-discrimination restrictions on government contractors are commonplace and a normal requirement for government funding," Eugene Kontorovich, a law professor at George Mason University, notes.

The U.S. Senate approved in a 77-23 vote a bill that codifies $38 billion in defense assistance to Israel and which provides legal cover to states that target the boycott Israel movement.

The bill, sponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., had stirred controversy because a number of Democratic senators said that while they oppose the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, they were also concerned that state laws aimed at BDS impinged on speech freedoms.

Among the Democratic dissenters were declared presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California. Non-declared but likely presidential contenders who voted included Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sherrod Brown of Ohio who voted against; and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota who voted for. The sole Republican voting against was Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Rubio, writing Wednesday in The New York Times, defended the bill against charges that it would violate free speech. Democrats supporting the anti-BDS component included Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

The bill now goes to the U.S. House of Representatives where the Democratic majority will break it up into its components, and its leadership is likely to bury the anti-BDS section while advancing the other components.

In addition to the money for Israel and the proposed anti-BDS laws, the bill intensifies sanctions on Syria’s Assad government and reinforces ties with Jordan.

A look at just one organisation – Al-Haq – headquartered in Ramallah and operating in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), the Netherlands, France, and Northern Europe – indicates the modus operandi that similarly exist in the others.

Al-Haq (established in 1979):

• Has Governmental Sponsors: European Union, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Ireland
• Received Grants from Governmental Sources, 2014-2018: Over $3 million
• Published with a group of French NGOs a report in March 2017 entitled “The Dangerous Liaisons of French Banks with the Israeli Colonization”.
• Leads the legal effort to delegitimize Israel at the International Criminal Court in The Hague

Shawan Jabarin, General Director of Al-Haq since 2006, served as a senior PFLP official in the past and at least until recently maintained close ties with PFLP operatives in Judea and Samaria. Jabarin was tried and convicted for his military activity in the PFLP and has served multiple prison sentences.
Jabarin was described in a 2007 Israeli Supreme Court case by the presiding judge as:
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Some of his time is spent in conducting a human rights organization, and some as an operative in an organization which has no qualms regarding murder and attempted murder, which have no relation whatsoever to rights. Quite the opposite, they reject the most basic right of all, without which there are no other rights, that is, the right to life.”

Three other PFLP members arrested by Israel are also identified as working or having worked for Al-Haq: Ziyad Hmeidan, Zahi Jaradat and Majed Abbadi.

European and American funding of these organisations should be banned, their offices in the USA and EU closed – and those identified as Hamas and PFLP members deported.

Terrorists in suits denigrating and delegitimising Israel in slick racist and ongoing deceptive public relations campaigns of lies and half-truths – can be just as dangerous as terrorists armed to the teeth.

The EU and America must stop being played for suckers by these Jew-hating organisations.

The prime minister's decision to cancel the mandate of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron was criticized by the foreign ministers of the countries that comprise the force, chief among them Norway. Ironically, these same countries – Norway, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland and Turkey – are the most blatant violators of the Oslo Accords, and as has been documented for years, their representatives in Hebron were the first to violate their mandate by targeting the city's Jewish residents and IDF soldiers.

In 1994, at the behest of Yasser Arafat and in coordination with him, the TIPH mandate was created and implemented. With the years, TIPH's stated mission of protecting human rights was exposed as a cover for its political role. Norway, TIPH's chief coordinator and the first country to send observers, is a prime example. In conjunction with Great Britain and the European Union, Norway funds a mechanism for the submission of thousands of anti-Israel petitions, in coordination with the Palestinian Authority, to flood the court system and apply international pressure on Israel. It does this through the Norway Refugee Council, an NGO with an Israeli humanitarian visa that allows it to recruit and train TIPH observers. These observers, who serve in a supposedly neutral body, are recruited by a patently anti-Israel organization.

Norwegian involvement doesn't end there. TIPH's main partners in Hebron are activists from another NGO, the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel, who enter Israel under the guise of tourists, document IDF soldiers in action and return to their home countries to spearhead anti-Israel campaigns. The primary church group that coordinates EAPPI's activities in Israel and across the globe is none other than Norwegian Church Aid, which is also operated and funded by the Norwegian government. In general, a litany of reports has shown that church-affiliated activists and organizations that are involved in anti-Israel activity are also involved in the TIPH mission and the EAPPI.

A senior White House official this week dismissed the concept that the U.S. must be an "honest broker" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as "a vestige of talking points from decades ago.""We don't believe that in order for us to work on a peace effort we need to have an equivalency, where we can only say certain things about Israel if at the same time we also say something about the Palestinians. Not only does that not work, we don't think it's right. We say what's on our mind, we speak the truth. The truth may be uncomfortable for some people. But we cannot solve the conflict without being open and honest."

The official reiterated that meetings with "ordinary Palestinians" were taking place on a regular basis. "They express deep frustration with their leadership. They believe that their leadership has eroded their standing in the world....They want to engage with us and they want to see what is in the plan. They want a better future, and they know the key to that involves the U.S."

"We believe we can put forth a credible, realistic and fair plan that could bring this conflict to an end; to dramatically improve Palestinian lives, maintain Israel's security and allow Israel to integrate into the region in a way that even two years ago no one would have imagined it could."

Israel Resilience Party leader and prime-ministerial hopeful Benny Gantz raised the ire of Israeli right-wingers on Wednesday after his first interview indicated his favorable opinion of the 2005 Gaza Disengagement/Expulsion, in which 8,500 Jews were forcibly removed from Gaza in a unilateral bid to grant Palestinians land for a state.

“The disengagement was born of Israel’s diplomatic policy. The parties involved got very high grades for managing to prevent a rift in the nation as they carried it out,” said Gantz, despite the ongoing resentment on the part of right-wingers, and a long and costly rehabilitation of the Jews who were evacuated.

When the interviewer asked, “So you’re not saddened that we uprooted settlements from there?” Gantz responded that “it was a legal action; it was approved by the government of Israel and carried out by the IDF and the settlers, with great pain but done very well.”

Former residents of the Gaza Jewish community known as Gush Katif suffered severe unemployment and significantly increased rates of divorce and stress-related health problems in the years following their experience.

In an abridged version of the interview published by Ynet and conducted by famed Israeli singer-songwriter Shlomot Artzi and comedian Hanoch Daum, Gantz added that “we have to take its lessons and implement them in other places,” suggesting that he would implement additional forcible evictions of Jews under his leadership.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman, on Wednesday welcomed remarks by former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz about his “openness to a future removal of settlements from the occupied West Bank,” Reuters reported.

In an exclusive interview to Yedioth Aharonoth on Wednesday, Gantz referred to the expulsion of some 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, saying, “It was a legal move that was adopted by the Israeli government and carried out by the IDF and the settlers in a painful but good way. We have to take those lessons and implement them in other places.” (Read also: He Talks! Gantz Urges Applying Gush Katif Expulsion Lessons ‘Elsewhere’)
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Gantz referred directly to the settlements in Judea and Samaria when he said, “We—and Bibi said this in his Bar-Han speech—are not looking for rule over anyone else. We need to find the way not to control other people.”

“It’s encouraging, if he succeeds and he sticks to this opinion,” Abu Rudeineh told Reuters.

What a surprise stooping to personal insults instead of the concerns I raised.
Please address the legitimate concerns I raised that #BDS is actually a clean shop window for dirty terrorist organizations that are abusing the unwitting decent people that actually care. https://t.co/eAETYDEg5n

— LTC (R) Peter Lerner (@LTCPeterLerner) February 6, 2019

The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is set to blast Israel in seven separate reports, including one on Gaza border violence, but has not yet published any plans to release a report on the one million Muslims that China is holding in mass internment camps.

Seventeen NGOs called on the UNHRC this week to send a fact-finding mission to the Xinjiang region of China to investigate the situation.

“The Chinese authorities have detained Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims – outside of any legal process – in ‘political education’ camps for their perceived disloyalty to the government and Chinese Communist Party,” the non-governmental groups said.

“In those camps, they are subjected to forced political indoctrination, renunciation of their faith, mistreatment and, in some cases, torture,” the NGOs stated.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were among the 17 NGOs that spoke out in advance of the UNHRC’s 40th session, which is set to take place in Geneva from February 25 to March 22.

The UNHRC has already published a list of at least 79 reports that will be dealt with at the meeting, including those on human rights situations in other countries such as Malaysia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka. There are also two reports each on Iran and Syria.

No other country has as many reports against it as does Israel.

To ensure this corrupt dictatorship never acquires nuclear weapons, I withdrew the United States from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. And last fall, we put in place the toughest sanctions ever imposed on a country.

We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants death to America and threatens genocide against the Jewish people. We must never ignore the vile poison of anti-Semitism, or those who spread its venomous creed. With one voice, we must confront this hatred anywhere and everywhere it occurs.

Just months ago, 11 Jewish-Americans were viciously murdered in an anti-semitic attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. SWAT Officer Timothy Matson raced into the gunfire and was shot seven times chasing down the killer. Timothy has just had his 12th surgery — but he made the trip to be here with us tonight. Officer Matson: we are forever grateful for your courage in the face of evil.

Tonight, we are also joined by Pittsburgh survivor Judah Samet. He arrived at the synagogue as the massacre began. But not only did Judah narrowly escape death last fall — more than seven decades ago, he narrowly survived the Nazi concentration camps. Today is Judah’s 81st birthday. Judah says he can still remember the exact moment, nearly 75 years ago, after 10 months in a concentration camp, when he and his family were put on a train, and told they were going to another camp. Suddenly the train screeched to a halt. A soldier appeared. Judah’s family braced for the worst. Then, his father cried out with joy: “It’s the Americans.”

A second Holocaust survivor who is here tonight, Joshua Kaufman, was a prisoner at Dachau Concentration Camp. He remembers watching through a hole in the wall of a cattle car as American soldiers rolled in with tanks. “To me,” Joshua recalls, “the American soldiers were proof that God exists, and they came down from the sky.”

I began this evening by honoring three soldiers who fought on D-Day in the Second World War. One of them was Herman Zeitchik. But there is more to Herman’s story. A year after he stormed the beaches of Normandy, Herman was one of those American soldiers who helped liberate Dachau. He was one of the Americans who helped rescue Joshua from that hell on earth. Almost 75 years later, Herman and Joshua are both together in the gallery tonight — seated side-by-side, here in the home of American freedom. Herman and Joshua: your presence this evening honors and uplifts our entire Nation.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday recognized a survivor of the Holocaust and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, which was followed by members of Congress singing him "happy birthday."

Trump delivered the State of the Union address in the House Chamber, where he discussed several issues, including immigration and national security. He also recognized several guests during the address, including Judah Samet.

"He arrived at the synagogue as the massacre began, but not only did Judah escape death last fall, more than seven decades ago he narrowly survived the Nazi concentration camps. Today is Judah's 81st birthday," said Trump, which prompted members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to give him a standing ovation and clap for him. Several members of Congress then started singing "Happy birthday," to him, which resulted in Samet yelling, "thank you!" afterwards.

"They wouldn't do that for me, Judah," Trump joked shortly after they finished their singing.

Samet was four minutes late for worship one Saturday back in October, resulting in him narrowly missing one of the worst massacres of American Jews, according to the Washington Post. He told the Tribune-Review that he was "very honored" to be invited by Trump to the State of the Union.

"[Trump] invited me, I was told, because I represented two of the biggest tragedies for the Jewish people in the last hundred years," Samet said.

In an unusually strong public criticism of its anti-Israel voting at the United Nations, Israel’s ambassador to Germany on Tuesday called on the federal republic “to change its voting behavior.”

The Jerusalem Post asked Israeli Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff on Tuesday via Twitter about his views quoted in a Bild newspaper report that said, “Germany, of all places, regularly sides with the enemies of Israel. In November, Germany voted 16 times in 21 resolutions against Israel. It abstained in four resolutions.”

Issacharoff responded by writing on his Twitter feed, “[I] fully agree with Antje Schippmann’s article in Bild that it’s ‘urgently necessary’ to change German voting behavior in the UNGA on Israel and that Germany should adopt an ‘active leadership role in refocusing the common voting behavior of European partners.”’

The normally tight-lipped ambassador has previously told the Post that he holds private discussions with the German government regarding their support for evading US sanctions against Iran and other anti-Israel actions. However, he has declined to comment on those discussions and has issued no public criticism of Germany’s largely pro-Iran regime trade policy.

Schippmann’s article in Monday’s edition of Bild was titled “Germany in the UN: FDP wants to stop anti-Israel insanity. We can no longer be followers.”

Bild, the country’s largest circulating paper, reported that at a Free Democratic Party (FDP) session in the Bundestag, the party passed a resolution calling for a change in Germany’s voting behavior at the UN. The foreign policy spokesman of the party, Bijan Djir-Sarai and a fellow MP, Frank Müller-Rosentritt, introduced the pro-Israel resolution.

According to the resolution first obtained by the paper, the federal government “should clearly distance itself from one-sided, politically motivated initiatives and alliances.” The resolution said the German government should work to counteract the “political forces in the near and Middle East” which “openly threaten” the Jewish state.

Iran’s foreign minister pushed back Wednesday after US President Donald Trump said his country does “bad, bad things” and appeared to link it to the deadly attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue last year by an American anti-Semite.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that “Iranians — including our Jewish compatriots — are commemorating 40 yrs of progress despite US pressure, just as @realDonaldTrump again makes accusations against us.”

In his State of the Union address, Trump contextualized his Iran policy by castigating the regime for its anti-Semitism.

Iran, he said, “chants death to America and threatens genocide against the Jewish people. We must never ignore the vile poison of anti-Semitism or those who spread its venomous creed.”

The need to take a strong stance against Tehran, the president implied, was evident in the attack at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, in which 11 were killed — believed to be deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in American history.

“Just months ago, 11 Jewish Americans were viciously murdered in an anti-Semitic attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh,” Trump said, as he introduced SWAT officer Timothy Matson, who responded to the scene, and Judah Samet, a Holocaust survivor who also survived the attack.

UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Qarqash: Iran's Presence in Syria Must Be Reduced; Breakthrough in Relations with Israel Should Be Linked to Breakthrough in Peace Process pic.twitter.com/irEcukO2Eu

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) February 6, 2019

The Civil Administration and High Court of Justice could be liable for war crimes for their policies that led to the dispossession of Palestinians from their properties in Area C of the West Bank, the left-wing group B’Tselem charged in a report issued on Wednesday.

The court’s support of Israeli planning policy is tantamount to support for “forcible transfer,” a war crime under international law, the report stated.

“Therefore, the justices of the Supreme Court – along with the prime minister, senior ministers, the chief of staff and other senior military officers – bear personal liability for the commission of such crimes,” B’Tselem said.

The report comes at a time when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under pressure to raze the illegal West Bank Bedouin encampment of Khan al-Ahmar.

Netanyahu has pledged to take down the encampment, but has taken no steps to do so since receiving a warning from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court that such a step could be considered a war crime.

The B’Tselem report looked at a series of steps Israel has taken on both the planning and the judicial levels with regard to Palestinian property rights – steps that allegedly were designed to expropriate Palestinian property. This included reclassifying territory in the West Bank as state land. B’Tselem said this was done in many cases without due process and without allowing the Palestinians involved to file legal objections.

Vandalism and theft continue to plague Israeli farmers: Two weeks ago, beekeeper Yinon Arkin discovered that 20 of his hives had been destroyed three months before the honey was collected. The damage is estimated at tens of thousands of shekels.

Arkin, 34, who lives in the settlement Avigayil in the South Hebron Hills, owns hundreds of hives set up at various locations throughout southern Israel. While this latest attack was not the first time his beehives have been vandalized, it was the first time damage the damage has been so severe.

When Arkin arrived at the hives he maintains at Beit Guvrin, he was shocked to find the honeycomb hacked up, the hives scattered, and hundreds of thousands of dead bees.

Arkin's wife, Achinoam, says that a month ago, the couple had five beehives stolen from another location.

"And two years ago, 10 hives were stolen. Two years ago, 70 hives were stolen from a friend of Yinon's in exactly the same area," she says.

What made the latest theft different, Achinoam explains, was the violence with which the hives were broken. "They hacked up all the honeycomb and threw the frames away across a large area. Just collecting it all took time. There are millions of dead bees left behind."

The hives were located not far from Israel's security barrier and a crossing that leads to the Palestinian village Tarqumiyah. Arkin thinks that the hives were stolen by Palestinians.

Over the past few months, Israeli security forces have noted the growing influence of Islamic Jihad on Hamas. Seeking to avoid problems with Iran, the Hamas leadership feels it has little choice but to follow Islamic Jihad's dictates when dealing with Israel and Egypt. This was exacerbated following the appointment of Ziyad al-Nakhalah as secretary-general of Islamic Jihad in September 2018. Nakhalah replaces Abdullah Ramadan Shalah, who has been in a coma ever since he suffered a stroke in April 2018. Nakhalah was his deputy.

Islamic Jihad and Hamas fully cooperated operationally during armed conflicts with Israel. Yet Islamic Jihad competes with Hamas over Palestinian public opinion, particularly on who was more loyal to the idea of a genuine armed jihad against Israel. In the last few months, Islamic Jihad has transformed from an organization that takes its cues from Hamas to an activist group that initiates its own activities. On Jan. 22, an Islamic Jihad sniper in Gaza shot an IDF officer in the head during a riot along the border fence.

The US-designated terrorist group Hamas has raised bitcoin donations through the largest US crypto exchange, according to an Israeli blockchain intelligence startup Whitestream.

The Israeli financial news site Globes reported on Sunday that Hamas, which controls Gaza, has begun funneling funds through Coinbase.

For the first time, a bitcoin address was publicized for Hamas on Thursday through the cloud-based instant-messaging service Telegram. It was discovered by entrepreneurs Itsik Levy and Uri Bornstein, who “succeeded in decoding the bitcoin transfers on the Hamas address and detecting the Palestinian organization’s actions through the digital wallet of US company Coinbase. Whitestream’s findings were forwarded to the security agencies,” reported Globes.

On Saturday, the same Telegram channel publicized a second bitcoin address that allowed Hamas to accept donations, though it was through a digital wallet apparently not linked to Coinbase. In addition to Coinbase, the second address has so far received funds from the American trading platform Bittrex.

The two bitcoin donation addresses totaled $2,500, according to Levy.

Gazan Academic and Journalist Hussam Al-Dajany: People Can Now Donate to Hamas Using Bitcoin without Fear of Getting Caught pic.twitter.com/qKH9SBPXwL

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) February 6, 2019

Police broke up a riot today at a coffee shop in the de facto Palestinian capital that according to initial reports began when all 15 customers identified themselves as the person whose name the barista had just announced.

Eyewitness accounts indicate that at about nine this morning a worker at the city’s only Starbucks Coffee spoke the name “Slim Shady” into the microphone to summon the person who placed the order. An argument then ensued between two men identifying themselves by that name, whereupon the other dozen or so patrons on the premises joined the cacophony, each one claiming to be the owner of the venti soy macchiato. The barista urged the real Slim Shady to stand up, but the admonishment failed to clarify who ordered the coffee. Police arrived ten minutes later and arrested four men; six customers and the barista sought treatment at a local hospital for light injuries.

“I heard a commotion and got close, but not too close, you know what I mean?” recalled a bystander who gave her name as Minnem. “I could make out some shouting, mostly things like, ‘I’m the real Slim Shady, my ancestors were Slim Shady since the Philistines’ and ‘Impostor! Mine were the real Slim Shady when the Canaanites were here!’ People were pushing and shoving and it was only a matter of time before the stones, knives, and explosives started to feature, so I kept away.”

“It’s kind of what we do,” observed another who gave his name only as Masri, which means “from Egypt.” “We establish our claim to the land or anything else by making the most robust contention we can. Me, for instance, my ancestors evolved here directly from bacteria. Not like one of the people I know who was in the scuffle, whose name is Baghdadi, which I need not tell you is not around here. By the way, I’m actually the real Slim Shady, and whoever ordered coffee using my name is going to hear from me.”

Last week—nine months since the last Lebanese parliamentary elections—Prime Minister Saad Hariri formed a governing coalition. In accordance with Lebanese custom, cabinet seats are distributed among the country’s various religious groups, but the Iran-backed Shiite group Hizballah saw to it that even most non-Shiite ministers were its allies. Tony Badran explains:

Following its victory in the May 2018 parliamentary election, Hizballah . . . laid out its non-negotiable demands and immediately received Hariri’s acquiescence. Namely, Hizballah wanted to control the lucrative ministry of public health. . . . Then Hizballah proceeded to manage the shares of the other sects and parties. The Lebanese Forces, a Christian party, gained seats in the election but Hizballah marginalized it in the government-formation process. . . . Hizballah thus made sure that the defense ministry went to one of its [Christian] allies, Elias Bou Saab. . . .

The government-formation process demonstrated clearly that Hizballah runs the entire political order, underscoring the reality that Lebanon and Hizballah are, in effect, synonymous.

U.S. policy should reflect this reality. It should abandon the fiction that by “strengthening state institutions” it somehow weakens Hizballah. Instead, the Trump administration should freeze all assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces. Moreover, U.S. law requires imposing sanctions on agencies and instrumentalities of foreign states that move money to Hizballah. Lebanon’s ministry of public health now fits this category. The U.S. should thus block international funds to the ministry. While the Lebanese will surely protest that the new minister is not technically a card-carrying member of Hizballah, there is no doubt as to whom he represents. There is similarly little doubt that Hizballah will staff the ministry. Washington must act accordingly.

An Israeli satellite imaging company on Tuesday said it had for the first time detected that a suspected Syrian S-300 air defense system appeared on track to become operational, signaling a possible threat to Israel’s air campaign against Iran in the country.

However, the ImageSat International firm added that there remained significant questions about the anti-aircraft battery’s condition.

Following the downing of a Russian spy plane by Syrian air defenses during an Israeli airstrike in September, Moscow announced it was providing the Syrian military with the advanced S-300 anti-aircraft system. Russia publicly blamed Israel for the loss of the reconnaissance aircraft and its 15 crew members.

The charge was rejected by Jerusalem, which also rebuffed a Russian claim that Israeli fighter jets hid behind the Russian reconnaissance aircraft following their attack.

Russia has said the S-300 platform it was giving Syria following September’s incident would “cool off hot heads” in the region.

Since the system was delivered in October, Russia has been training Syrian forces to operate the powerful air defense platform, reportedly at a base near Masyaf in northwestern Syria.

"European security officials have intercepted communications that suggest an Iranian diplomat was not only involved in an alleged plot last year to bomb a meeting of Tehran opponents outside Paris, but coordinated efforts with colleagues back in Iran, a well-placed western official told The Independent.

The communications between Iranian diplomat Asadollah Asadi and counterparts in Iran were described as text messages, or chats, that have been collected by European intelligence services...

The French case is among several alleged plots carried out by Iranians on European soil that have strained relations between Tehran and European nations, and potentially jeopardised a commitment to uphold the nuclear deal penned in 2015 but abandoned last year by the administration of Donald Trump...

Mr Asadi, who served as diplomat in the Iranian embassy in Vienna, is currently in detention in Belgium, facing terrorism charges. He allegedly handed powerful plastic explosives to a Belgian-Iranian couple to use against a 30 June gathering of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq organisation, or MEK, a bizarre but influential Iranian political cult dedicated to overthrowing the government in Tehran..."

Iran’s oil minister on Tuesday criticized Greece and Italy for not buying its oil despite US waivers and said they had not offered Tehran any explanation for their decision.

The United States granted the two countries exemptions along with six others — Turkey, China, India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — allowing them to temporarily continue buying Iranian oil as Washington reimposed sanctions on Iran’s banking and energy sectors.

“No European country is buying oil from Iran except Turkey,” Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.

“Greece and Italy have been granted exemptions by America, but they don’t buy Iranian oil and they don’t answer our questions,” he said.

Zanganeh said the US sanctions on Iran were more difficult than the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, but said Tehran will not allow the United States to reduce its oil exports to zero.

Iran Presents the Khorramshahr Ballistic Missile: 2,000 KM Range, Can Carry 1800 KG in Up to Three Warheads pic.twitter.com/gATA2MCzSb

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) February 6, 2019

Turkey on Wednesday hit out at President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement that France would make April 24 a “national day of commemoration of the Armenian genocide.”

“We condemn and reject attempts by Macron, who is afflicted by political problems in his own country, to try and save the day by turning historical events into a political matter,” Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said in a statement after the French leader’s announcement on Tuesday.

Macron said Tuesday: “France is, first and foremost, the country that knows how to look history in the face,” during a speech to the Armenian community at a dinner in Paris.

Turkey and Armenia have long been at odds over the treatment of Armenians during World War I.

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their people were killed during the war.

But Turkey – the Ottoman Empire’s successor state – denies that the massacres, imprisonment and forced deportation of Armenians from 1915 amounted to a genocide.

While there is little doubt that hatred of Israel has become the dominant form of anti-Semitism in Europe, its more naked forms persist as well. Manfred Gerstenfeld writes:

Polls by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) show that the evil myth that Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus is alive and well in Europe. It was found that 46 percent of Poles, 38 percent of Hungarians, 21 percent of Danes and Spaniards, and 19 percent of Norwegians and Belgians believe this. So do 18 percent of Austrians and British, 16 percent of the Dutch, 15 percent of Italians, and 14 percent of Germans. Once a belief is so deeply ingrained in a culture, it takes a very long time to flush it out. Rather than disappear, it will change its shape. . . .

From [another] study, it emerged that at least 150 million adult EU citizens agreed with the statement that Israel is conducting “a war of extermination against the Palestinians.” . . . In another new mutation of anti-Semitism, European Jews are now accused of being responsible for Israel’s actions. . . .

The way that ingrained anti-Semitism manifests itself varies not only from subculture to subculture but also from country to country. In January 2014, a mass rally in Paris took place. This “Day of Anger” was not related to any specific Jewish topic, and part of the protest was against French president François Hollande’s economic plans. However, various groups of participants started to shout anti-Semitic slogans. These included, “Jews, France doesn’t belong to you” and [the Holocaust denier] “Faurisson is right,” as well as “the Holocaust was a hoax.”

The same has happened recently in the “Yellow Vest” demonstrations. These are ostensibly a protest against the French president Emmanuel Macron’s decision to raise fuel prices—again, a topic that has nothing to do with Jews. Yet during some of the demonstrations, there have been signs describing Macron as a “whore of the Jews” and as their “puppet.”

Ford's book, The International Jew, became a bestseller in many parts of the world and was cited at the Nuremberg trials as a work that turned many Germans and Austrians into anti-Semitic Nazi leaders and followers. Ford was the single most influential anti-Semite in the first quarter of the 20th century and beyond.

Yet, according to the New York Times, Ford's "name or likeness graces everything from the performing arts center to the manhole covers." Bill McGraw, a historian of Dearborn, has written that "Ford's attacks on Jews were distributed around the world before and after World War II and, alarmingly, they influence budding neo-Nazis today."

The New York Times continues: "But Mr. McGraw also included in his report an article on how Mr. Ford's descendants have consistently supported Jewish charities and cultural organizations..." These descendants should be praised for those contributions and not condemned for the sins of their ancestor. But the truth about Henry Ford must be told -- to the residents of Dearborn and to the world.

Many buildings are named after Henry Ford, who remains Dearborn's favorite son. It's difficult to go anywhere in Dearborn without encountering the Ford name. Even buildings carrying the generic name Ford are based on his deeply flawed legacy. There is too much honoring of Henry Ford and too little educating about the horrible influence he had on promoting anti-Semitism and Nazism.

I'm not one for destroying or removing statues or other historical works of art, but I strongly believe that these images must be accompanied by contemporary descriptions of the evil deeds committed by those portrayed in the art. Removing the Ford name from Dearborn's Ford Community & Performing Arts Center raises more difficult issues. There is no art, just honoring, in the selection of a name for a center. Henry Ford does not deserve to be honored. The question the good people of Dearborn should ask themselves is: What would you do if the center were named after Jefferson Davis? If the answer is that you would remove Davis's name, then you should remove Ford's. There cannot be differences between how anti-Black, anti-gay, anti-women and anti-Jewish practitioners of bigotry are treated. There must be a single standard for historical revisionism.

Please join me in the video below for my latest chat about our crazy world with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired. We discuss the bill which is currently going through the Irish parliament to boycott Israeli goods or services produced in the disputed territories or eastern Jerusalem. You can read what I wrote about this piece of poisonous bigotry here.

We also discuss the latest in the Brexit crisis, in which the EU negotiators have decided to double down on their intransigence by refusing to re-open negotiations with the UK in the hope that the supposed chaos caused by leaving the EU with no deal will cause the British to come crawling back on their knees to accept the terms they have so far rejected. What this tells us is that the Eurocrats not only have the mindset of the mafia but really don’t understand democracy, political liberty or the British national character at all.

Go figure... dozens of conflict zones around the world and @PSCupdates and Corbyn only want a musical boycott of the Jewish state.

See their PSC campaign page: https://t.co/5OFdcFi3GQ#Antisemitism#News@COLRICHARDKEMP@CUFI_UK@mishtal@lucianaberger@margarethodgepic.twitter.com/pETVcF97yq

— Jewish Human Rights Watch (@jhrwatch) February 5, 2019

The protection of BDS as part of Americans' constitutional rights has set off a stormy debate within the ranks of the Democratic Party. Some see the Republican bill as an attempt to drive a wedge between the progressive and centrist wings of the Democrats. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), a Jew who ran for president and has joined the opposition to the bill, explained that even if he personally did not support BDS, it was necessary to protect the "constitutional right" of every American to participate in political activity. Sanders said it was clear to him that the bill violated the First Amendment.

The First Amendment prohibits Congress from passing any law that limits freedom of religion, speech, the press, peaceable assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. It also gives racist and anti-Semitic organizations like the Ku Klux Klan great latitude for incitement. Less than 100 years ago, in 1924, delegates to the Democratic National Convention proposed condemning the racist movement and its violent activity. The proposal was voted down for reasons that included the First Amendment.

No matter what happens with the anti-BDS bill in Congress, the American people must be made aware of the similarities between it and the Ku Klux Klan. The slogan should be: BDS=KKK. They are both anti-Semitic, racist movements and even if a decision is made not to outlaw BDS, despite its anti-Semitic platform and its links to terrorism, it should be marginalized alongside other racist hate groups and not have a place in the mainstream – certainly not in the Democratic Party.

We need to make it clear: BDS is not a boycott organization, it's a movement that wants to deny Jews their right to national self-determination and wipe out the State of Israel. It is a direct continuation of the Arab-Muslim battle against the founding of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. It is not a fight to end the "occupation" or opposing the settlements – it wants the liberate "Palestine" from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The fact that Jews and Israeli citizens belong to the BDS movement does not mean that it is not anti-Semitic. Throughout history, there have always been self-hating Jews.

The most important picture taken during the Pope's trip to the Arab Emirates was the Pontiff's close encounter with the imam of Al Azhar, Ahmed al Tayyeb. They kissed each other after signing a joint declaration which repudiated violence justified “in the name of religion”.

Religion? I don't see any violence today in the name of Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism, while I see a lot in
I don't see any violence today in the name of Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism, while I see a lot in the name of Islam.
the name of Islam. But let's go on.

Tayyeb is the same Islamic religious figure who suspended all dialogue with the Vatican in 2010, after Pope Benedict XVI had dared to ask for respect following a series of devastating attacks on Coptic churches in Egypt. Since then, the condition of Christians in the Islamic world - their numbers, their persecutions, their exiles - has worsened everywhere, in Cairo, in Damascus, in Mosul, in Turkey, in the Philippines, in Pakistan, in Kenya.

So I ask myself: was there really any need for this physical demonstration of affection, for a kiss? Shouldn't dialogue be based on facts, rather than on the effusions and the right but empty words in deference to the cameras? When everyone gets excited, applauds, beats his heels and hands, I think there is something wrong.

And there is something wrong in the double standard of who is called the Pope's friend. Francis kissed an anti-Semite and an Islamist of the worst kind. “The solution to Israeli terror lies in the proliferation of suicide attacks that spread terror into the hearts of Allah's enemies”, said Ahmed al Tayyeb during the Second Intifada. It goes without saying that “the Palestinians have the right to blow up everything they want” (women, children, bars, buses, as long as the victims are Jewish Zionists).

For the imam, the Muslims who convert to Christianity deserve to be killed (he called them “apostates”), anti-Semitism is justified by the Koran and Jerusalem has never been Jewish.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) hesitated Tuesday before calling Israel a U.S. ally and quickly moved away from a CNN reporter when asked about her support for the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

CNN reporter Manu Raju, revealing her office tried to deny him the interview, tracked down Omar, a staunch critic of Israel, after she spoke Tuesday at the left-wing Center for American Progress about religious liberty.

"It's really important for us to get a different lens about what peace in that region could look like, and the kind of difficult conversations we need to have about allies," Omar said.

"Do you think that Israel is an ally or do you think it's an adversary?" Raju asked.

Hesitating slightly, Omar said "Israel is an ally of the United States" and called on allies to live out the same values the U.S. pushes.

"Why do you support BDS?" Raju asked, but Omar immediately walked away.

Asked at CAP what she had learned during recent discussion about anti-Semitism, Omar didn't mention Jews or anti-Semitism in her response.

Answer doesn't mention Jews or anti-Semitism once https://t.co/JEce5ZNUB7

— David Rutz (@DavidRutz) February 5, 2019

Officials from the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Employment have egg on their faces after a photo on Facebook showed them enjoying Israeli soft drinks at one of their meetings, in violation of a PA-imposed boycott. The image, removed soon after it appeared last month, demonstrated that PA officials are not serious about abiding by the demands of the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement that they have asked others to support.

The PA is not alone in its hypocrisy. For almost four years, the United Church of Christ (UCC) – a liberal Protestant church in the US that has assisted anti-normalization extremists in the West Bank in their ongoing propaganda war against Israel – has portrayed itself as part of the BDS movement targeting Israel even as it remained invested in stocks it publicly and loudly declared anathema in a resolution passed by its General Synod in June 2015. The information is all right there in the schedules of investments posted online by the denomination’s money managers. The church’s pension fund still owns millions of dollars in stock in companies banned by the General Synod, and up until recently, no one has said anything.

It’s surreal.

The UCC is like a gun-owner driving around town with shotguns displayed openly in the gun rack of his pickup truck, even after signing, with great fanfare, a no-guns pledge on the steps of town hall. He is just waiting for someone to ask him, “Hey, weren’t you supposed to get rid of those?” And yet, no one asks.

Anti-Israel activists, who claimed victory when the UCC joined the BDS movement, have stayed quiet about the denomination’s continued ownership of the proscribed stocks, as if they knew the whole thing was an act, a con from the beginning.

The charade began on June 30, 2015, when the denomination’s General Synod passed, by a vote of 508 to 124, a resolution calling on the church’s money managers to divest the assets they controlled from stocks that did business with the Jewish state. The argument was that the companies listed – most notably Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola – were complicit in human rights violations in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and that it was immoral for the denomination to earn a profit from their evil deeds. “We ourselves can no longer continue to profit from the violence that is consuming the land that we called holy,” declared Richard Edens, who chaired the committee that brought the divestment resolution to the floor of General Synod.

The state can confiscate ships used in flotillas to break the IDF’s naval blockade of Gaza, the Haifa Court, sitting as a maritime court, has ruled setting a precedent which could deter the flotilla tactic.

The Haifa District Attorney’s Office announced the decision on Wednesday in which Deputy Haifa Court President Ron Sokol had, earlier in the week, approved the state’s request to seize the Zaytouna-Oliva which sailed from Barcelona in a September 2016 “women’s flotilla” to break the blockade.

The Zaytouna-Oliva was taken over by the IDF in October 2016 with the state maintaining a blockade of Gaza for over a decade, saying it has a right to do so under international law because of the ongoing state of war with Hamas which runs Gaza.

The IDF used female soldiers to take over the sailboat to reduce the possibility of friction with the all female crew.

In contrast, various human rights groups, including those involved in flotillas, criticize the blockade as violating international law and causing collective suffering of Gazan civilians.

International bodies which have looked at the issue have split over the blockade’s legality.

Amnesty International Israel is recruiting applicants for Sherut Leumi, Israel National Service.

Solicitations for the positions are live on the website of Shlomit, one of four organizations that handles national service applications.

The discovery of the post caused an uproar among some right-wing activists and nationalists. An organization called Betsalmo has registered a formal complaint with the Authority for National Civic Service, calling on the state to immediately prevent national service volunteers from working with the left-wing NGO.

Last month, Amnesty International, the umbrella organization of Amnesty International Israel, came under fire when it published a report titled “Destination: Occupation” that called on the four largest web vacation booking sites – Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia and TripAdvisor – to boycott West Bank settlements, as well as Jewish listings in east Jerusalem.

In the aftermath of the report, Strategic Affairs and Public Safety Minister Gilad Erdan said he would consider banning non-Israeli Amnesty employees from Israel if the organization continued acting against settlement tourism. He called the report “hypocritical,” saying it spoke in the name of human rights but, in practice, supported an antisemitic and delegitimization campaign against Israel.

Despite all the corrupt, tyrannical theocracies and dictatorships in the Middle East, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) — the academic umbrella organization for the field — aims its harshest criticism at the only democracy in the region: Israel. MESA’s disdain is apparent in the dozens of “advocacy letters” it has directed at Israel since 2001. The latest open letter from its Committee on Academic Freedom to Israel’s government demands an end to the Jewish state’s alleged “arbitrary arrests at and incursions into Palestinian universities” and “the Israeli Army’s harm to students at all levels of education.”

Ignoring the long history of terrorist recruiting on Palestinian campuses and the terrorism committed by Palestinian students under the tutelage of their Hamas and Fatah advisors, MESA falsely portrays Palestinian academics and students as benign.

But MESA’s most disingenuous claim is that Israel harasses peaceful Palestinian students with “arbitrary arrests,” a phrase used three times in the short letter. It also appears on Birzeit University’s Facebook page, where its “Right to Education Campaign condemns arbitrary arrest of Birzeit University’s Head of Student Council.”

So, who are the innocent students MESA would have us believe were “arbitrarily” arrested, while working diligently toward their degrees? One was twenty-four-year-old Birzeit student Omar Al-Kiswani. His Hamas contacts include Yassin Rabie, who was released from an Israeli prison as part of the 2011 deal in which 1,027 terrorists were traded for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Rabie funneled 150,000 euros ($171,000) to Al-Kiswani to “cover Hamas activities at Birzeit University,” according to Shin Bet. Three other Birzeit-Hamas students were arrested in July and August: Issa Shalalda, Omar Ma’soud, and Hazem Hamayel. MESA doesn’t mention them.

In December 2013, the American Studies Association (ASA) became the first, and so far the only, major American academic association to adopt the academic boycott of Israel, part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

As I have documented, the BDS movement is a continuation of the anti-Jewish boycotts of the 1920s and 1930s in the then British Mandate for Palestine, the Arab League boycott of Jewish businesses (even prior to Israel’s independence) and later of Israel, and the gross antisemitic activism at the 2001 Tehran and Durban conferences which launched boycotts in the current form.

The claim that BDS was a response to a 2005 call from Palestinian civil society is a demonstrable lie. That was the cover story to repackage an anti-Jewish boycott in the language of ‘social justice’, as documented in my lecture, The REAL history of the BDS movement:

The fallout from the December 2013 ASA resolution was swift. The ASA action, which is considered a violation of academic freedom by the American Association of University Professors, was condemned by over 250 university presidents and numerous university associations. ASA tried to exclude Israelis from its annual meeting in California, but the threat of legal action caused ASA to back down.

In April 2016, ASA and its leaders were sued in federal court in D.C. by other ASA members, claiming irregularities in the way ASA adopted the boycott.

The absorption of Ethiopian Jews has not been without huge challenges over the years. Nonetheless, it is a source of immense pride that Israel has facilitated the immigration of the community where second and third generation Israelis of Ethiopian descent are making their way as full and valued members of Israeli society.

Of course it would be naive to paint everything as perfect. Ethiopians have suffered from racism and discrimination similar to black populations in other countries, including the US. The Israeli government has also come in for criticism over delays in bringing the remaining Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

The first Ethiopian Jews in the latest wave of immigration landed in Israel to a warm welcome at Ben Gurion Airport.

The Associated Press reported the story:

Media outlets republishing AP content are free to change the original headlines. The Australian‘s headline writers, however, took the AP story and engaged in some blatant editorializing:

The Israel Security Agency’s report on terror attacks (Hebrew) during January 2019 shows that throughout the month a total of 160 incidents took place: 116 in Judea & Samaria, 22 in Jerusalem and 22 in the Gaza Strip sector.

In Judea & Samaria and Jerusalem the agency recorded 112 attacks with petrol bombs, 15 attacks using pipe bombs, four shooting attacks, four stabbing attacks, two attacks using grenades and one attack using a gas cylinder placed inside a burning tyre.

Incidents recorded in the Gaza Strip sector included 2 attacks with petrol bombs, 3 attacks using IEDs, one shooting attack, two grenade attacks and three rocket attacks.

Throughout January three people were wounded in terror attacks. A civilian bus driver was wounded in a shooting attack on a bus on January 5th. On January 9th a civilian was wounded in a stabbing attack in Jerusalem. A member of the security forces was injured in a shooting attack at the border with the Gaza Strip on January 22nd. Neither those incidents nor any of the others which did not result in injuries received any coverage on the BBC News website.

A rocket attack on January 7th was briefly mentioned in a report on another topic but another attack on January 12th was ignored.

In short, the BBC News website reported 0.63% of the Palestinian terror attacks which took place during January 2019.

Yet ANOTHER disgusting libel by @cjwerleman against the Jewish state. Again, I publicly call on him to retract it and issue an apology https://t.co/VwtibAuPqH

— Ozraeli Dave (@Israellycool) February 6, 2019

Two New York congresswomen have introduced bipartisan legislation that would increase federal funding for Holocaust education in America’s schools.

The purpose of the Never Again Education Act, according to Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Elise Stefanik, is to address a “national rise in antisemitism” by attacking its root cause.

“We are at a dangerous moment in time. Antisemitism is on the rise around the world and here at home, and the memory of the Holocaust is fading for far too many Americans,” said Maloney, who represents a significant district of Manhattan. “We can combat this by making sure we teach our students, tomorrow’s leaders, about the horrors of the Holocaust. It is simply not enough to condemn hateful, violent attacks against the Jewish community – we need to be proactive, we need to take action.”

Maloney rallied around the bill with fellow New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler and Jewish leaders in Manhattan on Monday, including leaders of the Center for Jewish History, United Jewish Appeal, The Jewish Community Relations Council and the American Jewish Committee, among others.

Dutch police arrested five soccer supporters for allegedly singing an increasingly popular chant about burning Jews at a match .

The incident, which reflects both growing resolve to punish chanters and the proliferation of antisemitic sports chants, took place near the De Kuip Stadium in Rotterdam on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27.

“My father was in the commandos, my mother was in the SS, together they burned Jews ’cause Jews burn the best,” the suspects chanted, according to the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, a Dutch watchdog on antisemitism known as CIDI. It called the chant a “recurring problem” in a statement.

The suspects, who were fined $570 each, allegedly were cheering for the Feyenoord team of Rotterdam, who won a match over Amsterdam’s Ajax.

Ajax is one of several European soccer teams that are seen as historically Jewish. Fans from rival teams often taunt supporters and players of the supposedly Jewish teams with antisemitic limericks and symbols; the song about burning Jews is seen as among the most offensive of the taunts.

Chelsea Football Club celebrated the first anniversary of its global campaign against antisemitism on Monday night in Tel Aviv with UN ambassadors from around the world, led by Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon.

The idea for the campaign, titled "Say No to Antisemitism," first came from Russian-Israeli owner of the team Roman Abramovich, who suggested that a more intense approach to antisemitism is a necessary move for the club. The project is in affiliation with the World Jewish Congress.

Abramovich's idea stimulated the team to take "a comprehensive approach to tackling antisemitism," according to Chelsea Football Club Chairman Bruce Buck in an October interview with The Jerusalem Post.

The project has no deadline as the team plans on fighting antisemitism as long as it takes.

The team faced an uphill battle in mid-January when they were expected to face disciplinary action over alleged antisemitic chanting by their supporters, according to UEFA.

This did not stop Chelsea FC from using their platform, as well as the already-existing campaign, to show their supporters that there is a better way. "People have been saying things that they have been thinking for many years, but never spoke out loud until now," said Buck, who blamed the rise in antisemitism on populism.

Adam Scott Bellos founded The Israel Innovation Fund (TIIF) to tantalize young adults with what he calls “cultural foreplay” in the form of Israeli wine, art and music.

“Through cutting-edge contemporary culture, lifestyle and travel, young diaspora Jews and non-Jews are discovering new ways to personally connect to the Israeli experience in ways that go far beyond conflict and survival,” says Bellos, a 32-year-old serial entrepreneur living in Tel Aviv since 2012.

“Our vision is to connect people around the world through the vibrancy and creativity of contemporary Israeli culture by bringing Israel to you and then you to Israel.”

A US-registered nonprofit established in July 2017, TIIF invests in commercially viable cultural projects in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and various American cities. A portion of the returns are shared with Israeli nonprofits the TIIF team has pegged as innovative, high-impact and efficient.

TIIF’s flagship project is Wine on the Vine, a modern twist on traditional tree planting.

PostImage_Wine_on_the_Vine_planting_grapevines

The online purchaser can choose to plant any number of grapevines, at $18 each, in any participating Israeli winery and also chooses a participating charity to benefit from the purchase. Later that year, anyone who bought at least five vines is entitled to goods from the chosen winery.

The biggest M&A news out of Israel in January 2019 was London-headquartered private equity firm Bridgepoint Advisers’ $260 million agreement to acquire Miya Water, a subsidiary of Tel Aviv-based Arison Holdings.

Amazon Web Services is acquiring CloudEndure, in a deal estimated at no less than $200 million. The cloud computing company, based in New York with R&D in Ramat Gan, develops business continuity software solutions for disaster recovery, continuous backup and live migration.

Samsung signed a deal to acquire Tel Aviv-based smartphone camera company Corephotonics for a reported, but unconfirmed, sum of $150-$160 million.

Keystone Dental of Massachusetts, the largest independent dental implant company in North America, will merge via a stock-exchange transaction with Paltop Advanced Dental Solutions of Caesarea.

Paltop does precision manufacturing of state-of-the-art digital implant dentistry solutions. Accelmed Growth Partners of Herzliya and New York will add $20 million in capital investment to the merged entity.

Ever chose “X-ray vision” as your choice of a hypothetical superpower?

Israel-based Augmedics Ltd. has developed a set of goggles giving surgeons X-ray-like visualization capabilities.

Augmedics is creating an augmented reality headset for surgical procedures. Called xvision, the headset projects X-ray-like 3D visualization of the patient in real time, allowing surgeons to “see” through the patient’s skin, muscle tissue, and bone.

The imaging is projected onto the surgeons’ retina using the transparent display headset, allowing surgeons to simultaneously look at their patient and see the necessary navigation data without averting their eyes to a remote screen.

The headset is intended for use in surgeries where a reference to a rigid anatomical structure, like the spine or the pelvis, can be identified.

Clinical trials of the headset in minimally invasive spine surgeries have been underway in Israel since August, Augmedics’ CEO Nissan Elimelech said in a Tuesday interview with Calcalist. So far the device has been used in six surgeries.

Streaming giant Hulu has purchased the Israeli TV series Juda, about a Jewish vampire.

Hulu has bought the both the show itself, as well as rights to an American remake of the series.

The show, which first aired in Israel on HOT in 2017, was created, written and stars comedian Zion Baruch. It tells the story of Juda, a small-time Israeli criminal who makes his money playing poker in Romania with funds from bigger-time French criminals. But on a trip to Bucharest, Juda has an unpleasant encounter with a Romanian vampire pretending to be a prostitute, which sets him on a disturbing course of events. Romanian vampires, it turns out, are not allowed to bite Jews, and she has brought shame and misfortune to her family.

The show also features a recurring rabbinic motif and all sorts of references to biblical and Talmudic texts, as well as kabbalistic motifs.

“It is incredibly exciting to be connected to the place that created A Handmaid’s Tale,” Baruch wrote on Instagram on Monday. “Thank you to HOT for believing in me and letting me and director Meni [Yaish] go nuts.”

The show also stars Amos Tamam (Srugim), Ilanit Levi and Yiddish theater legend Mike Burstyn.

Nadav Hanin, HOT’s vice president of content, told Variety that the deal underscored the fact that “excellent content truly has no borders.”

The Shalva Band won’t be competing at this year’s Eurovision. But, thanks to the KAN public broadcaster, it will be appearing at the international song contest after all – in a special appearance during the second semi-final.

A spokeswoman for KAN told The Jerusalem Post Wednesday that it invited the band to appear as an interval act during the show, which will be held live on May 16 in Tel Aviv.

On Tuesday, the musical group – made up mostly of young adults with disabilities - informed TV network Keshet that it would be dropping out of Hakochav Haba, the show that selects Israel’s Eurovision contestant.

Though the group had already earned a spot in the show’s finale, which is set to air live on February 12, The Shalva Band dropped out of the competition for religious reasons. The winner of the show is obligated to participate in a live, filmed rehearsal for the Eurovision finale which will take place on Shabbat, and several members of the group are religiously observant.

Though appeals were made to the European Broadcasting Union to bend its rules, the EBU would not promise any concessions could be made, and The Shalva Band is slated to officially leave Hakochav Haba in an episode airing Thursday evening.

While the Eurovision finale is slated for Saturday night, the competition’s second semi-final held on a Thursday evening, and there are no rehearsals scheduled for Shabbat.

Those who smear anti-Zionists by falsely accusing them of antisemitism understand very well that anti-Zionism means anti-Jewish-nationalism as expressed in the territory of historic Palestine, now subdivided into Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but effectively controlled by the Jewish State.

Zionism is a product of Jewish philosophy and is based on Jewish culture and thought, which has its roots in Judaism. The core purpose of Israel’s settler-colonial Zionist regime is to maintain itself as a Jewish State. Exaggerated or false claims of antisemitism aim to create a climate of fear in which Palestinian legitimate human rights campaigns are stifled.

 Today all around the world, synagogues and rabbis are the ones indoctrinating their communities into worshiping Israel and a tribal, some would say Medieval, identity.

...  Is it anti-Judaism (I won’t say antisemitic because I am not sure I understand what that means anymore) to look into what in the Talmud might be inspiring Chief Rabbis of Israel in his racism and cruelty, in condoning ethnic cleansing and genocide?

Jewish nationalism manifests itself as settler-colonialism. One concept does not exclude the other operative concept in Palestine, namely that Jewish Zionism = Jewish nationalism = Jewish supremacy = Apartheid.

[Phyllis] Bennis pointed out that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, as a case for racial discrimination, can be made based on the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The convention defines racial discrimination in terms of exclusion and restrictions based not only on “race,” but also on color, descent, or national or ethnic origin. Under this definition, Bennis said the case for racial discrimination could be made for Palestinians...

2. This Convention shall not apply to distinctions, exclusions, restrictions or preferences made by a State Party to this Convention between citizens and non-citizens.

Discovery of Altar Ashes at Jerusalem.—Mr. James Finn, Her Majesty's Consul at Jerusalem, to whose intelligent care of literary and antiquarian interests in the Holy Land our readers are indebted for much agreeable information.

Jerusalem, April 2. Outside of this city, towards the north-west, and not far from the Nablus Road and the Tombs of the Kings (so called), are some considerable heaps of blue grey ashes, on which no grass or weeds ever grow. One of them may be 40 ft. in height. They are remarkable objects in themselves, especially as contrasted in colour with the dark olive groves around them. These are commonly believed by the people of the city to be heaps of refuse from the soapboilers' works of former times. Some of our English residents here, having conceived a different idea of their origin, namely, that it was not impossible they should be ashes from the ancient sacrifices, begged of Dr. Roth, of Munich, when here in 1853, to carry away samples for analysis in Germany, which he did; and Dr. Sandreczki has now laid before the literary Society of Jerusalem an account, in English, of a letter received from Dr. Roth on the subject. After some remarks on the beetles and mollusca which he collected in Palestine, and tendering generous offers of assistance, he proceeds thus: "Hitherto it has been questionable whether the two ash-hills without the Damascus Gate have been heaped up from the ashes of the burnt sacrifices, or from the residuum of the produce of potash in the soap manufactories here. Dr. Roth, who had taken with him two samples, states  that their analysis in our famous Liebig's laboratory bears evidence to the supposition that those ashes are the remnant of the burnt sacrifices, because they are chiefly of animal, and not of vegetable origin; and even contain small fragments of bones and teeth burnt to coal; and yet it would be impossible to ascertain the species of the animals to which they belonged.' The analysis exhibits a small percentage of silicic acid, which is never found in the ashes of flesh or bones. Dr. Roth is of opinion that we may account for this circumstance by supposing that the ashes of the meat-offerings in which silicium may be found, were likewise carried off to the hills in question. The samples were taken both from the top and the basis of the larger hill,—not just from the surface, nor from a considerable depth either. Dr. Roth, intends to send the whole account of that analysis, together with a new analysis of the mineral waters near Tiberias.

This almost unexpected result is one that leads to important antiquarian consequences,—not only exciting wonder at the confirmation of Holy Writ, and bringing our feelings back to immediate contact with those of the Aaronic priesthood, but as helping among other facts to determine the course of the ancient walls, since these ashes must have been thrown beyond the wall.— Yours, &c.

"James Finn."

The insertion of the above letter in the Athenaeum called forth the following— The Valley of the Ashes.— 

Referring to the letter from Mr. Finn, Her Majesty's Consul at Jerusalem, whose courtesy and hospitable kindness it has been my privilege to share, 1 beg to make one or two remarks.

I visited Palestine in 1852, it having beforehand been mutually arranged with Dr. Robinson that I should meet him there, and accompany him on his journey. Finding, when I reached the country, that our plans and objects did not coincide, I gave up the arrangement; and thereafter visited almost every place of interest, "from Dan to Beersheba," accompanied only by my Arab attendants.

While at Jerusalem, some remarks of my friend Mr. Caiman, of the London Jews' Society's Hospital there, in reference to the mounds to the west of the Damascus Gate, suggested the probability of the view referred to in Mr. Finn's letter. I proceeded, in company with Mr. Caiman, carefully to examine the mounds; believing that if I were correct in supposing that they were the ashes of the ancient temple sacrifices, proof to that effect might probably be found.

Digging, both at the top and near the base of the largest heap, I was struck with the fact that the whole seemed homogeneous, there being no earth, stones, pottery, or rubbish of other kind apparently mixed with the grey-blue mould. This seemed unfavourable to the popular idea of their being formed from soapboilers' ashes. Continuing to dig, I was greatly interested soon to find among the ashes, (which appeared to me to be animal, though I never have had them analyzed) small portions of bone, still strengthening my belief that I was surrounded by the remains of the burnt-offerings of Israel during a thousand years. But the proof appeared to amount to demonstration when I discovered, a foot or more from the surface, fragments of bone sufficiently large to leave no doubt as to the kind of animal to which they belonged. I have in my possession a number of specimens, among which is one, three inches long, evidently the leg-bone of a sheep or lamb; another, a fragment of the skull or nose-bone; and two others, fragments of ribs, which it seems impossible to mistake for any other but the same animal. The first mentioned of those specimens has marks, in some parts, of having been charred or blackened by the action of the fire.

Since I returned from the East, I have frequently, both privately and in public, mentioned the above circumstances, and my intention to have the ashes analyzed, that it might be ascertained whether they consisted chiefly of animal matter. Further inquiry on this point is rendered unnecessary by the analysis of Dr. Roth, as stated in the letter of Mr. Finn.

While upon the spot, I was also struck with the light which the position of those mounds seemed to throw upon the vexed question of the ancient course of the city wall. It seemed to confirm the theory of Dr. Robinson, that instead of running considerably within the present city boundary, as is contended for by those who maintain the authenticity of the so called Holy Places,—the ancient wall must have run considerably to the westward of the present Damascus Gate, it being most probable that the ashes would be deposited immediately outside the wall, and not carried so far from it as the heaps are now found.

If these ideas be correct, do they not seem to throw light also upon an expression,—to which I am not aware any definite meaning, as to the locality, has ever been attached,—in the boundaries of the city referred to in Jeremiah xxxi. 40 ?—" the valley of the dead bodies, and of the ashes." If by "the valley of the dead bodies" is meant the Valley of Hinnom, it seems likely, from the connexion of the passage, that by "the valley of the ashes," is meant the locality where the ashes are now found. It is not improbable that anciently, when the wall ran close by, there was a descent outside to the westward, accounting for the expression valley, the hollow now being filled up or levelled by the accumulated rubbish of the city's "long desolations."

While I am glad that the attention of others has been directed to this interesting matter, I trust that it may not seem uncalled for thus to advert to it, that I may not seem to be entering into other men's labours, should I ever be able to publish notes of my journey.

I am, &c., William Dickson.

20, George Square, Edinburgh, April 24.

At Tuesday night’s address to the American people, writes Abe Greenwald, the president made multiple pronouncements of particular relevance to the Jewish people—all of them for the good:

President Trump used his State of the Union address in part to celebrate the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, call out Iran on its genocidal hatred of Jews, confront anti-Semitism generally, and tie his conception of American greatness to the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. . . .

For Trump, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was, as he put it, a matter of “principled realism.” Based on that realism, his administration “proudly opened the American embassy in Jerusalem.” Nothing here about both sides having to bend or about Israel now having to “do its part for peace.” The president of the United States simply noted that he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital because it is. And that’s the most powerful thing he could have said on the matter.

The president [also] called Iran “the world’s leading state sponsor of terror” and emphasized that “it is a radical regime.” He went on: “We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants ‘death to America’ and threatens genocide against the Jewish people.” No garbage about make-believe moderate mullahs, no specious conflation of the Iranian people and the regime, no wishful fantasies about Iran’s tyrannical theocracy showing heartening signs, and, finally, no equivocating about the nature of its obsessive anti-Semitism. In all, a welcome return to moral sanity.

Trump talked about a great many other things [as well], but it’s remarkable the extent to which his speech acknowledged, celebrated, and urged on America’s doing right by the Jews. It would be welcome enough if he emphasized such things in an address to an exclusively Jewish audience, but this was a State of the Union speech, and so his words were meant to shape our very understanding of America.

President Donald Trump linked his actions on Iran to the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, pivoting during his State of the Union address from his decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal to a declaration that anti-Semitism must be confronted “anywhere and everywhere it occurs.”

Trump also bookended his speech with references to D-Day, including salutes to troops, among them Jewish-American veterans, who helped liberate Europe, and Holocaust survivors who were liberated thanks to the American-led action. The salutes earned standing ovations.

Containing Iran is fighting antisemitism

“My administration has acted decisively to confront the world’s leading state sponsor of terror: the radical regime in Iran,” Trump said Tuesday evening, delivering his address in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“They do bad, bad things. To ensure this corrupt dictatorship never acquires nuclear weapons, I withdrew the United States from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal,” he said, referring to the 2015 sanctions-relief-for-nuclear-rollback agreement negotiated under President Barack Obama. “And last fall, we put in place the toughest sanctions ever imposed by us on a country.

“We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants death to America and threatens genocide against the Jewish people,” he continued, to applause, mostly from the Republican side. “We must never ignore the vile poison of antisemitism, or those who spread its venomous creed. With one voice, we must confront this hatred anywhere and everywhere it occurs. Just months ago, 11 Jewish Americans were viciously murdered in an anti-Semitic attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.”

The October 2018 shooting, in which 11 people died, was the worst attack on Jews in American history. It was carried out by a man shouting anti-Semitic epithets, and appears to have been principally motivated by hatred of pro-immigration policies favored by HIAS, a Jewish immigration advocacy group. The alleged attacker bought into the notion that migrants from Mexico pose a national security threat, a theme also favored by Trump, who devoted much of his speech Tuesday night to securing the border. There’s no evidence that the attack was related in any way to the Middle East.

Jewish model Elizabeth Pipko kept her work for President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign a secret, fearing she would be ostracized by the liberal fashion world. Last month she came out as pro-Trump, and she's already being called a Nazi.

The 23 year old started off as a volunteer for the campaign, but was eventually hired full-time. Late last year she got married to a man she met on the campaign, and who is already working on Trump's reelection campaign.

The wedding was at Trump's Mar-a-Lago. She said the president didn't make it because he was dealing with negotiations over the government shutdown, but she wore a Make America Great Again hat on the dance floor anyway.

She came forward with her story to the New York Post in January, telling the paper she is "hoping to take part in the reelection in some capacity" and has no plans to hide her support for Trump this time around.

"Now that it’s been two years since the election, I don’t want to keep silent any longer," she said. "Even if that means saying goodbye to modeling forever."

For years, we have heard claims from Israeli officials positing that the global BDS movement to boycott Israel is controlled by extreme individuals who are unconcerned with the human rights of Palestinians which they claim to champion. This week, Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs provided conclusive evidence that the energy of terrorists and their organizations has infiltrated, and is even driving, the BDS activities.

The report reveals direct ties between numerous boycott groups and designated terror organizations such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. "Convicted terrorist operatives who have served prison sentences currently hold senior positions in NGOs which delegitimize and promote the BDS campaign against Israel," reads the report.

Of all the details revealed in the report, one stands out as particularly disturbing: the driving force behind the international BDS efforts is the Ramallah-based BDS National Committee (BNC), which is composed of a coalition of Palestinian terror organizations called the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces (PNIF). In other words, the "executive board" of the BNC is a league of terrorist organizations. Boycott activities throughout the world are effectively being directed and implemented by terror organizations from Ramallah.

Historically, the anti-Semitic dogma underlying Jewish anti-Zionist activity has roots in Soviet and PLO agitation in the United Nations. In 1965, the Soviet Union, the arch anti-Semitic power at the time in the UN General Assembly, refused to recognize anti-Semitism as a form of racism, such as Apartheid or Nazism. The Soviets “set a precedent for linking Zionism and Nazism” as a vengeful move against United States-led counter moves, as historian Joel Fishman points out in his path-breaking article, Disaster of Another Kind.2

The Soviets’ association of Zionism with Nazism as forms of racism, a mere two decades after the Holocaust exterminated six million Jews, paved the way for PLO leader and terrorist Yasser Arafat’s mendacious November, 1974 Zionism is Racism speech, delivered from the podium of the UN General Assembly. Arafat’s anti-Semitic crusade resulted in the Soviet-aligned and Arab and African state backing for UNGA Resolution 3379 approved in November 1975 (and annulled in 1991), affirming that “Zionism is a form of racism…”3

Chaim Herzog, Israeli Ambassador to the UN at the time, declared at the UN General Assembly, “(This resolution is) another manifestation of the bitter anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish hatred which animates Arab society. Who would have believed that in this year, 1975, the malicious falsehoods of the ‘Elders of Zion‘ would be distributed officially by Arab governments?”

This week, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs published a report echoing NGO Monitor's concerns regarding the affiliations and close connections between prominent Palestinian NGOs and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In recent years, based on NGO Monitor’s findings, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland developed clear guidelines preventing funding for these NGOs. These countries also dismantled a joint funding framework that was a key source of capital for the network of PFLP-linked groups.

Host: NGO Monitor Director of Research Yona Schiffmiller

Guest: NGO Monitor Senior Researcher Shaun Sacks

Statements by U.S. officials, including by former U.S. UN ambassador Nikki Haley, regarding the details of the Trump administration’s peace plan have telegraphed the message that its contents are similar to those presented by past administrations. That is, the Trump plan presumes that Israel will give real – irreversible – concessions to the Palestinians in the form of land transfers that will enfeeble and divide it in exchange for a paper peace deal.

The difference, to the extent there is one, between the substance of the Trump plan and its predecessors is that the Trump administration plan envisions peace between Israel and the Palestinians to be forged in the context of a broader peace between Israel and regional Arab states.

And yet, when one considers the ubiquitous hatred for Israel and Jews in Jordan and Egypt, it is clear that formal peace deals do not improve ties between the nations of the Arab world and Israel. If anything, they harm them. So too, when one recognizes that since the basis of the current operational cooperation between Arab states and Israel is a shared interest in diminishing Iran, it becomes clear that once that threat is diminished or defeated, the basis for Israeli-Arab cooperation will disappear.

If that happens after a “peace” is forged, Israel will have endangered its future and weakened its society in an egregious way for nothing. Its formal ties with the likes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE will be reduced to nothing and it will face a renewed threat of pan-Arab aggression after surrendering its defensible borders for a paper peace.

There is a reason that despite the best efforts of every U.S. president since Harry Truman, peace between the Arab world and Israel remains elusive. There is no popular acceptance of Israel in the Arab world. And no Israeli concessions to the Palestinians or Israeli assistance in countering Iran’s aggression will change that.

The first episode of our new podcast, produced in conjunction with the Tikvah Fund, is here. Listen now!

In the decades since Israel’s founding in 1948, the United Nations has been a hostile environment for the Jewish state. For a long time, it has seemed that the best an Israeli UN ambassador could do was to prevent further harm. And Israel has sent some of its ablest defenders—Abba Eban, Chaim Herzog, Benjamin Netanyahu—to do just that.

But Israel’s current UN ambassador has changed the rules of the diplomatic game.

Ambassador Danny Danon was appointed to his current post in 2015, after a career in Zionist activism, the Knesset, and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government. At the UN, he has spent the last three-and-a-half years building coalitions, calling Israel’s enemies to justice, and going on offense.

In this conversation—his first-ever podcast appearance—Ambassador Danon provides an overview of his work at the United Nations. He describes Israel’s relationships with America, Russia, China, and the Gulf States, discusses the strategic challenge of Iran, and reflects on how Israel’s ongoing conflict with the Palestinians affects his work. In this first-person briefing, Ambassador Danon gives us an inside look at Israel’s campaign to strengthen its global diplomatic position.

Israel's Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer on Monday described what he called "a potential threat to Israel and to Jews everywhere" - not from an outside force but from a perilous way of perceiving right and wrong in today's world.

Throughout history, Dermer said, the Jewish people incorporated the internal lesson that "might does not make right.""The danger today is that many think might is inherently wrong, unjust," not consistent with Jewish values.

But in a world where the Jewish state faces enemies committed to its destruction, "it's dangerous for Israel and Jews everywhere to think power is wrong." It just needs to be applied wisely and sparingly.

Israel's need to be strong and defend itself is particularly significant at a time when most Americans want to see the U.S. less involved in military operations overseas, including the Mideast.

Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Dermer noted that the issue of Palestinian statehood is about power, so the questions to ask are: "Would the Palestinian state have an army? What about control of air space so close to Israel?"

Israelis would favor the Palestinians governing themselves but without presenting a threat to Israeli security. In the meantime, Dermer charged that the Palestinian leadership has been more focused on defeating Israel than their right to self-determination.

The United States blocked a draft United Nations Security Council statement on Wednesday that would have expressed regret at Israel’s decision to eject a foreign observer force from the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron, diplomats said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week he would not renew the mandate of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), accusing the observers of unspecified anti-Israel activity.

Norway, which has headed the multi-country observer mission for the past 22 years, said: “The one-sided Israeli decision can mean that the implementation of an important part of the Oslo accords is discontinued.”

The 15-member UN Security Council discussed Israel’s decision behind closed doors on Wednesday at the request of Kuwait and Indonesia, which also drafted the statement. Such a statement has to be agreed by consensus.

UN diplomats said the United States did not believe a council statement on the issue was appropriate.

The draft statement, seen by Reuters, would have also recognized the importance of the TIPH and its “efforts to foster calm in a highly sensitive area and fragile situation on the ground, which risks further deteriorating.”

Just as Israel is sensitive to the image it conveys, so too Poland is sensitive to its perception outside of the country – especially the manner in which it is perceived in Israel.

Poland is rarely presented in a positive light by the Israeli media, a factor that prompted Polish ambassador Marek Magierowski, who is a journalist of long standing, to commission a survey measuring the attitudes of the Israeli public towards Poland.

The report, researched by Keevoon Research Strategy and Communications, was issued Wednesday at a media conference at the Polish Embassy, ahead of next week’s Warsaw summit being co-hosted by the United States. Aimed at promoting peace and security in the Middle East, the summit will also be a forum to consider an unofficial coalition against Iran. During the following week, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki will visit Israel for talks about new horizons in relations between the two countries.

What has irked Poland ever since the end of the Second World War is being charged with blame for the Holocaust, when it was in fact Nazi Germany that invaded Poland and committed many atrocities on Polish soil.

Magierowski does not deny that there were Polish nationals who collaborated with the Germans, but Poles were not Nazis.

There have been so many distortions, he says, that in the course of time, people will forget who started World War II and which country was invaded.

Avigdor Liberman, the Yisrael Beytenu party head and former defense minister, is a Russian spy. How do we know this? Because the former Mossad head Tamir Pardo said so, in an address to Harvard University’s Belfer Center in November, as reported on the center’s internet site. Except that Pardo, who did indeed speak to the Belfer Center, said nothing of the kind, and the center never claimed he did.

Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s older son, visited the UAE at the invitation of German manufacturing giant Siemens in October, met with the crown prince of Dubai, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, and discussed the possibility of investing Netanyahu family assets in the Gulf states. How do we know this? Because the CFO of Siemens Middle East was quoted on the European Coatings website discussing Yair Netanyahu’s visit. Except that the prime minister’s son did not in fact discuss any such investment plans, did not visit Dubai, and was not the subject of any such statement by Siemens on any such website.

These are just two recent examples of fake news stories — things that didn’t happen and weren’t said — that were “reported” on cleverly faked websites.

They were then tweeted out from fake accounts to Israeli journalists in the hope that the reporters, duped, would launder the false stories by publishing them as genuine news items on genuine, widely read news sites.

Sounds worrying? Here are three more recent examples of false stories masquerading as genuine news being disseminated in this and similar ways:

A report that Hatnua leader Tzipi Livni complained in a recent speech at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center that the Mossad badly mishandled matters relating to the Khashoggi affair, with the consequence that a Saudi official who was at the heart of efforts to warm ties between Jerusalem and Riyadh was fired. (Livni issued no such criticism.)

A report that Israel’s ambassador in Sweden was engaging in mediation efforts with Yemen’s Houthis. (He was not.)

And, the Netanyahus again, reports claiming that Sara Netanyahu wears a hidden cross and that son Yair has converted to Christianity. (Needless to say: false information.)

All of these stories struck one or more of the people to whom they were sent as improbable, thus beginning the process by which they were exposed as fake and traced back to the accounts that first tweeted them. None of them seems to have made it into mainstream media. All of them had begun to gain traction, however, including being retweeted by some of their recipients to whole new audiences, before they were stopped in their tracks. (h/t L. King)

Alert sirens sounded Wednesday evening in a number of Gaza border communities as a rocket launched from the Strip exploded in an open field in southern Israel.

The projectile reportedly fell in the area of the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council. There were no reports of damage or injuries in the attack.

In response, an Israeli tank opened fire on a Hamas position in the southern Gaza Strip, the IDF said in a statement.

Earlier in the evening, a rocket fired from northern Gaza toward Israel failed to clear the border and landed inside the coastal strip, according to reports in Hebrew-language media. There were no reports of damage or casualties in that incident.

On Wednesday morning, the Home Front Command tested emergency alert sirens in Jerusalem and some nearby communities.

Ahead of the test, the IDF said that its system tests and exercises are not connected to any particular incident and are often scheduled months in advance.

January saw two rockets launched from Gaza into Israel, neither of which caused damage or injuries. In both cases on January 7 and 12 the IDF responded with strikes in Gaza.

Iran tried to hack Israel's missile-alert system over a year ago, IDF Cyber Defense Division Commander Noam Sha'ar told Israel Hayom.

In an interview with Israel Hayom's weekend magazine, Sha'ar says the cyberattack was successfully repelled by his unit, avoiding potentially catastrophic results. The full interview will be published on Friday.

The Homefront Command's missile alert system is one of the most sensitive parts of Israel's civilian and military infrastructure.

Anyone who gains control over the system can set off sirens at will and can even disable the highly-important features that provide early warning on incoming rockets and missiles.

The attack was detected due to the constant monitoring of an Iranian cyber group, one of dozens run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps with a budget of over 1 billion dollars. It turned out that the group tried to hack several systems in Israel apart from the missile-alert system.

According to Sha'ar, Iran is constantly trying to compromise Israel's sensitive infrastructure, both in and outside the military. He notes that his unit has managed to foil about 130 such attacks, most of which originated with Iranian entities.

Three Palestinians suspected of involvement in a stone-throwing incident that led to the injury of a 9-month-old baby have been detained by Israeli security forces, the Shin Bet security service revealed Thursday.

The suspects, two of whom are minors around the age of 17, were nabbed last month in the village of Sa’ir near Hebron, in a joint operation of the Shin Bet and IDF.

“During their Shin Bet interrogation, it was discovered that the suspects had taken part in the stone-throwing that led to the infant being wounded,” the security service said in a statement.

The December 18 incident took place on the West Bank’s main north-south artery, Route 60, between the settlements of Kiryat Arba and Karmei Tzur. An Israeli mother and father were traveling with their young child, when rocks shattered their windshield glass. The infant was transferred to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center with light injuries.

The Shin Bet described the attack as “massive.”

A 40-year-old Palestinian resident of east Jerusalem was arrested on Thursday after Israel Police, Border Police and the IDF raided his home finding weapons and an improvised explosive.

Police searched the house of the suspect as part of a targeted and planned operation.

"When we searched his room, the police dog found a box containing an improvised pipe bomb, ammunition, an air rifle, a handgun, and other items, including gunpowder and an iron pipe, which can be used to prepare additional pipe bombs," the Israel Police spokesperson said.

"The suspect was arrested and brought for questioning by the police, and tomorrow he will be brought before the court for a hearing," the police added.

The Israel Police said it continues its determined and uncompromising efforts to reach any person who allows himself to possess illegal weapons and, in this case, to produce them himself.

"These means are often used both in resolving internal conflicts and against civilians and security forces. We will act against them in full," the spokesperson said.

A four year old Palestinian child was abandoned by his father at Erez crossing on Tuesday, COGAT [Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories] said in a press release on Thursday, after leaving his child with a stranger the father chose to remain in Israel illegally.

The numbers of Palestinian parents entering Israel with children in need of medical care and abandoning them at Erez Crossing are on the rise, COGAT warns.

"As a father myself I can't understand how a parent leaves his child with stranger," said COGAT head Col. Iyad Sarhan.

"As a man and as a father I hope this terrible thing stops," he said, "and that the people of Gaza will put their children at the top of their priorities."

One of the users of the COGAT Facebook page wrote in Arabic in response to the post by Sarhan "we want to live, Jews, give us work permit."

The Palestinian Authority continues to honor murderer Karim Younes, who is one of the so-called Palestinian "veteran" prisoners and serving time for kidnapping and murdering Israeli soldier Avraham Bromberg in 1980.

This week, PA Minister of Education Sabri Saidam led the way at a ceremony at the PA Ministry of Education. Younes' mother was guest of honor and Minister Saidam stressed that the ceremony was "a gesture of loyalty to prisoner Younes and his family," and "conveyed the greetings of the Palestinian leadership and the [Fatah] Central Committee members to them." [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Feb. 4, 2019]

The minister emphasized the PA's support for murderer Younes and other imprisoned terrorists, calling them "symbols":

Minister Saidam: "The Ministry of Education will remain the most loyal to the national values and to the symbols who have defended the national enterprise."
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Feb. 4, 2019]

The education minister is not alone with his admiration for this murderer. Palestinian Media Watch documented last week that a PA university awarded Younes an honorary certificate, and official PA TV glorified Younes with posters and by interviewing his relatives.

In addition, PA and Fatah chairman Abbas himself appointed Younes to Fatah's Central Committee and hosted Younes' mother and brother as his guests. The PA has also named a square after this murderer.

Constitutional amendments proposed by Egyptian lawmakers would allow President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to stay in power for up to 12 years beyond his current term and boost his control of the judiciary, according to a draft seen by Reuters.

The proposed amendments were submitted to the speaker of parliament on Sunday. Any changes need approval by two-thirds of parliament members, followed by a referendum.

Sisi, a former general, ousted President Mohammed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 after mass protests against his rule and was elected president the following year.

In recent months, speculation has been building that his supporters would seek to amend a constitutional clause according to which he should step down at the end of his second four-year term in 2022.

The amendments submitted on Sunday include an extension of the presidential term to six years from four in article 140 of the constitution, and a “transitional” clause that would reset the clock, potentially allowing Sisi to stay in power until 2034.

“After the expiry of his current term, the President of the Republic may run again in accordance to the amended article 140,” the draft clause says.

The proposed changes also give Sisi new powers over appointing judges and the public prosecutor. They add a second parliamentary chamber known as the Council of Senators, in which the president would appoint one-third of the 250 members.

Sisi’s supporters say extending his term is necessary to allow him more time to implement economic development plans and ensure Egypt’s stability.

“He is doing a lot of projects and people are fighting him from all sides,” said Ayman Abdel Hakim, a lawyer and former civil servant who filed a court case along with 300 Sisi supporters in December demanding that Egypt’s parliament debate the two-term limit and consider changing it.

Reports that Egypt will allocate $71 million to restore Jewish sites are inaccurate and might be part of a wider propaganda campaign aimed at propping up President Abdel al-Fattah al-Sisi, experts familiar with the project argue.

Last month, Egyptian Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani announced that Sisi had earmarked the money to rehabilitate Jewish monuments and houses of worship in the country. He was quoted by local media as saying that this is a priority for Cairo "much like [upholding] Pharaonic, Roman, Islamic and Coptic heritage," and that the government "will not wait for any foreign party to grant finances" for the venture.

The Israeli embassy in Cairo issued a statement welcoming the decision which was reported by numerous Arab and Israeli media outlets. However, the actual allotment remains unclear and will, in fact, go towards restoring Islamic and Christian sites as well.

"[There] was exaggerated coverage to catch the eyes of western media and market Sisi as a tolerant leader,” Haisam Hassanein of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told The Media Line.

To this end, he believes Cairo is seeking to shore up support from policymakers in the United States while encouraging Jews to travel to Egypt in order to boost tourism revenue. Notably, the effort comes ahead of possible constitutional amendments that would allow Sisi to remain in power beyond his two-term limit.

Germany, Britain, and France—the three European parties to the 2015 nuclear agreement—have been working to create a “special-purpose vehicle” that would allow their countries, and the rest of the EU, to trade with the Islamic Republic while avoiding renewed U.S. sanctions. Meanwhile, Iranian diplomats in Europe have been busy plotting assassinations and terrorist attacks, leading to several arrests last year. Amir Taheri explains how Tehran has managed to maintain European solicitousness nonetheless:

The EU’s spokesperson for foreign policy, Federica Mogherini, has devoted most of her immense energies operating as a lobbyist for the Islamic Republic. . . . For almost two years the EU has fostered the illusion in Iran that it can continue doing as it pleases without risking any consequences. . . .

The EU’s special favorable treatment of the Islamic Republic includes keeping mum about over twenty EU citizens currently held as hostages in Tehran. It is also indicated by the mere rap-on-the wrist response of the Europeans to Iran’s latest terrorist operations in four European countries. . . . Europeans, including the British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt, delude themselves in believing that by “working with Iran” they [can] prevent the Islamic Republic from “crossing the red lines.”

The problem is that Iran does not cross those real or imaginary “red lines.” Like the now-defunct Soviet Union in its time, the Islamic Republic’s strategy is to cross only “pink lines,” which constitute 99 percent of the norms of international behavior, whenever possible. [For instance], Iran has no troops in Yemen but manages to keep that tragedy going by helping Houthi rebels hang on to the patch of territory they hold. . . . In Britain alone, the Islamic Republic controls at least a dozen tax-exempt “charities,” often used for financing violent groups around the globe or simply for money laundering.

Part of the EU’s soft spot for the Islamic Republic may be inspired by endemic anti-Americanism, which is present in most European political circles left and right. We saw one example of this latent anti-Americanism last week over the crisis in Venezuela. . . . On Venezuela as on the Islamic Republic in Iran, the European Union must remove its anti-U.S., nowadays presented as only anti-Trump, glasses to see reality.

Iran has failed its second attempt in recent weeks to launch a satellite into space, according to images released by two separate specialized space imaging companies.

On Thursday morning, several images released to US media by DigitalGlobe and Planet, which showed blackened scorch marks consistent with a launch or failed launch of a craft, were seen on a launch pad at the Imam Khomeini Space Center in Iran’s Semnan province.

The pictures are said to have been taken by the specialized companies on Wednesday.

Iran said that it would launch its Doosti, or “Friendship,” satellite into space to mark the 40th Anniversary of the Iranian revolution, which took place in 1979.

Iranian state media and authorities have remained mum on the reports, suggesting that the launch was indeed a failure.

The Iranian authorities arrested 860 journalists in the 30 years following the 1979 revolution, according to leaked files unveiled by a media watchdog Thursday.

Reporters Without Borders said the confidential records for the period from 1979-2009 were provided by whistle-blowers to coincide with Tehran’s marking the 40th anniversary of the Islamic republic’s founding this week.

The file contains some 1.7 million records of judicial procedures, and although people’s professions are not listed, RSF said researchers spent months to compile and verify the names of 860 journalists or citizen-journalists who were arrested or imprisoned.

At least four of them were executed, it said.

“The very existence of this file and its millions of entries show not only the scale of the Iranian regime’s mendacity for years when claiming that its jails were holding no political prisoners or journalists, but also the relentless machinations it used for 40 years to persecute men and women for their opinions or their reporting,” the rights group’s secretary general Christophe Deloire said in a statement.

He added that the findings would be submitted to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet.

The leader of Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah said Wednesday that he is willing to ask Iran to supply the Lebanese military with weapons and aerial defense systems to confront Israeli warplanes and called on Beirut to accept the offer.

“Will the Lebanese government dare to accept the Iranian proposals? Why should Lebanon remain afraid to cooperate with Iran?” Nasrallah said in a televised address marking the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution and the overthrow of the Shah.

“I’m a friend of Iran and I’m willing to bring the Lebanese Army air defense systems from Iran to confront Israel,” Nasrallah said according to Lebanon’s Naharnet news site.

Nasrallah spent over an hour extolling Iran and the Islamic revolution’s political and economic accomplishments.

On February 6, 2019, Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-General of Hizbullah, delivered a speech at an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. He praised Iran for supporting Palestinian, Lebanese, and regional resistance movements, and said that Iran was willing to go as far as necessary to defeat ISIS in Iraq. Nasrallah said that despite some people's attempts to drag the U.S. into a war with Iran, Iran's domestic and regional strength has prevented such a war, and he said that Iran would not stand alone in a war because the fate of the people and the region is linked to the fate of its regime. He said that people would accuse Hizbullah of dragging Lebanon into a war if it shot down Israeli planes in Lebanese airspace and, saying that he has Lebanon's interests in mind, Nasrallah offered to go to Iran and bring the Lebanese army air defenses and whatever else it needs in order to become the strongest military in the region. The speech aired on Al-Manar TV (Lebanon).

In a February 3, 2019 interview on Mayadeen TV (Lebanon), Jaafar Al-Husseini, spokesman for the Iraqi Hizbullah Brigades, said that U.S. President Trump has "gotten the world used to his stupidity" and that the Iraqi Hizbullah Brigades will not allow any American presence in Iraq, especially if the Americans' goal is to prepare an attack against Syria or Iran. He said that they have taken an oath before the free people of the region to "chop off any hand" attempting to harm Syria or Iran. He added that they are watching American movement in Iraq very carefully and that the American forces constitute legitimate targets for the resistance and should be legitimate targets for the Iraqi security forces as well.

To advance their goal of criminalizing the act of being Jewish while present in Judea, Samaria or Jerusalem, Amnesty refers to Israel as an “apartheid regime.”

In so doing, like its fellow antisemitic political groups that pose as human rights organizations, Amnesty distorts the language of human rights and international law to libel Israel. In the real world, Israel is the only human rights respecting democracy in the Middle East.

Apartheid was the South African regime for forced legal separation between whites and blacks and other racial groups, and the subjugation of the latter to lower legal status. Apartheid South Africa forbade blacks from living in white areas unless in domestic servitude. Blacks were forbidden to use white bathrooms, white parks, white movie theaters and white beaches. And, of course, blacks were denied the right to vote. The laws were inherently discriminatory.

Israel’s legal code in contrast rejects any form of discrimination. Minorities in Israel have the same legal rights as Israel’s Jewish majority. And yet, here is Amnesty finding “inherent discrimination” in Israel’s legal code, which allows persons of all ethnicities – including Jews — to open up their homes to tourists.

By asserting a separate legal system for criminalizing Israeli Jews, by applying legal norms against Israeli Jews that are applied to no other group, Amnesty and its fellow antisemitic activist groups that are seeking to institute a quasi-apartheid regime – against Israel.

This is not simply a gross abuse of the very concepts of law and human rights. It is the negation of the concepts of law and human rights. Those who ascribe to Amnesty’s thinking view the law not as an instrument to serve justice blindly but instead is a means to discriminate against hated groups.

It is appalling that Amnesty has stooped this low. And of course, the pit of antisemitism is bottomless, so there is no reason to believe that it won’t go even lower in a month or two.

But the worst part about Amnesty’s galling report is that it shows that the powers-that-be in fake human rights group, with annual budgets in excess of $300 million, think that it is acceptable to wear their Jew-hatred on their sleeve.

In 2002, following an Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin in response to the Passover massacre in Netanya, in which a Palestinian suicide bomber murdered 30 civilians during a celebratory feast, Amnesty accused Israel of carrying out war crimes and massacres of Palestinian civilians. The allegations, promptly reported by the BBC and other news outlets, placed the Palestinian civilian death toll at more than 500. But 52 Palestinians died, the majority of them combatants, along with 23 Israeli soldiers, in fierce urban combat.

False allegations of a massacre made by Amnesty lubricated the machinery of the political campaign against Israel, leading to street protests, campus hearings, reams of condemnations and anti-Israel resolutions across civil society and government.

In 2015, Amnesty was forced into a humiliating admission that it had lobbied the Australian government to accept murderous Lindt Cafe terrorist Man Haron Monis as a genuine refugee.

Last April, Amnesty’s secretary-general called Israel’s democratically elected government “rogue”. In 2010, the head of its Finnish branch called Israel a “scum state”. Its British campaign manager has likened Israel to Islamic State and been condemned for his attacks on Jewish parliamentarians.

Perhaps as revealing as Amnesty’s fixation on Jews living on the “wrong” side of a long-defunct armistice line has been its relative silence on the disturbing trend of rising anti-Semitism. In April 2015, Amnesty UK rejected an initiative to “campaign against anti-semitism in the UK”, as well as “lobby the UK government to tackle the rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Britain” and “monitor anti-Semitism closely”. It was the only proposed resolution at the annual general meeting that was not adopted.

The skewed morality revealed by Amnesty’s obsession with Israel reflects a broader decline in the non-governmental sector. Whereas groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch once led the struggle against Soviet tyranny and actively defended the rights of political prisoners, today they serve an increasingly narrow political agenda, one aligned with anti-Western, anti-capitalist forces. Amnesty’s apparent contempt for Israel, its ho-hum attitude to anti-Semitism, and its inordinate condemnations of democracies all stem from this malaise.

Of course, the settlements are a point of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Indeed, the parties identified settlements as a final status issue in the historic Oslo Accords signed between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel in 1993. It was agreed that the questions of which settlements will be annexed to Israel and which will be dismantled or transferred to Palestinian sovereignty are to be resolved in direct negotiations in the context of a final peace agreement. But the pursuit of peace is not aided by Amnesty’s political manoeuvres and attempts to isolate Israel, which perpetuate conflict by other means.

Why are Labour members not speaking out loud about the need to boycott or overthrow such a regime as Iran, but instead focus all their venom on Israel, a country they demonize on wholly false grounds, especially considering the full IHRA definition of anti-Semitism which Labour has technically adopted -- while reserving the right, however, to criticize Israel as an apartheid or Nazi state?

Whatever its faults, Israel is a utopia for human rights that many self-congratulatory moralists identify as their personal preserve. Israel is the only Middle Eastern country to uphold all the rights the Labour Party claims to hold precious. Yet, Israel is the only country in the world that the Labour party reserves for its censure, while other countries are ignored, mildly rebuked or even cosied up to.

In reality, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have largely governed their own people since 1994, following the signing of the Oslo Accords. The Palestinians, however, continue to go through inconceivable suffering due to the atrocious governance by their own often corrupt and manipulative leaders. They continue to blame Israel and the Jews -- preferable, apparently, to blaming themselves.

"Victimization is the pain-orientated version of privilege. If it suffices to call oneself oppressed in order to be in the right, everyone will fight to occupy that slot."— Pascal Bruckner, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt.

The number of recorded anti-Semitic events rose 16 percent in the last year, to 1,652 incidents around the UK, according to British Jewry’s watchdog and security group.

This represents the highest number of incidents against Jews since Community Security Trust (CST) began keeping track in 1984.

In a report released Thursday, CST said that 2018 marked the third consecutive record high year for reported anti-Semitic incidents. In 2017, there were 1,420 and in 2016, the organization recorded 1,375.

The numbers come after a year that saw Britain’s Labour Party grapple with accusations of anti-Semitism. Almost 150 incidents were linked to the party, according to CST.

According to the CST, the consistently high figures indicate that people who hold anti-Semitic opinions feel more comfortable expressing those views, causing the increased levels of anti-Semitism to now be the standard rather than the exception. In addition, the CST report said, victims or witnesses may be more motivated to report about anti-Semitism they encounter.

The figures reflect what Jewish leaders in the US and Europe have pointed to as an alarming rise in anti-Semitism, much of it linked to the rise of far-right populists. An EU report published in December found some 90 percent of Jews across the Continent felt that anti-Semitism had increased where they live.

The CST report noted a decrease in the overall number of violent assaults reported to the group in 2018, down to 123 violent assaults compared to 149 in 2017. However, this year saw the first case of “Extreme Violence” since 2015, characterized as “any attack potentially causing loss of life of grievous bodily harm.”Full report is available here

This morning, CST published their latest antisemitic incidents report showing that 2018 saw the highest levels of antisemitism on record – an increase, CST noted, driven in large measure by the ongoing Labour Antisemitism row. CST also reported that “Whereas previous high annual totals in 2014 and 2009 were associated with reactions to conflicts involving Israel, there has been no single [Israel-related] trigger event to cause the high annual totals in recent years (2016, 2017 and 2018).

Yet, the Guardian’s report on CST’s latest figures used a photo from Gaza to illustrate the piece, as we noted in a tweet to their photo editor Fiona Shields minutes after it was published.

.@guardian report on CST figures showing highest levels of antisemitism in UK on record illustrated with image of "protests" in Gaza. https://t.co/gA5FIXjxTspic.twitter.com/Ltvh3K7Bf5

— UK Media Watch (@UKMediaWatch) February 7, 2019

In addition to the fact that the photo would misleadingly suggest to many that Israel was the trigger for the spike in antisemitic incidents, it also obfuscates CST’s conclusion that the increase was in large measure due to antisemitism within British politics – particularly, of course, within the Labour Party. This conclusion is consistent with a comprehensive European Union poll of Jews in 12 countries published last year which showed that the highest level of concern about antisemitism in political life was expressed by British Jews — at 84%.

A photo of Jeremy Corbyn, or a screen shot of one the many threatening social media posts by Corbyn supporters to Jewish MKs, to illustrate the Guardian article would have been far more representative of the antisemitism surge than the image from the Gaza border.

Interestingly, this word cloud by CST, composed of the most used words in antisemitic incidents recorded by CST from Facebook and Twitter, shows that “Gaza” in fact ranked extremely low.

Is there a name for the moment something objectionable becomes so mainstream that those responsible can solemnly lament it as a fact of life? I propose that we call it the Formby Point. This week, Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby reportedly told a parliamentary party meeting that it was ‘impossible to eradicate anti-Semitism and it would be dishonest to claim to be able to do so’. Note the sly wording, the subtle distancing; you can almost hear the affected sigh of resignation. The woman who runs an institutionally racist party that refuses to challenge its institutional racism can, with a straight face, regret the inevitability of racism.

As a matter of fact, it is possible to eradicate anti-Semitism from a membership-based organisation. You just revoke the membership of all the anti-Semites. Of course, Formby can’t do this because it would mean sacrificing a tidy sum in monthly subs and having to find a new leader. In a broader sense, no, you can’t eliminate Jew-hatred from the general population but nor can you fully be rid of inequality or poverty or unemployment. That doesn’t mean you don’t try. There used to be an entire political party dedicated to just this proposition.

The Formby Point allows Labour to abdicate responsibility for its own anti-Semitism and for its role in replenishing the reserves of anti-Semitism in the world at large. Here too we have arrived at a tipping point. Anti-Semitism was kept at bay in the decades after the Holocaust. As a result it was channeled through anti-Zionism (the denial of Jewish national rights) and anti-Israelism (the political stigmatisation of the Jewish state). This has been the uneasy truce for the last few decades, tolerated even as a steady growth in anti-Semitism was recorded because it was most loudly expressed as hatred of Israel. (Israel enjoys a unique position as both the dark heart of the international Zionist conspiracy and imposter state that has nothing to do with Jews. It’s the only country you can despise without ever being accused of xenophobia.)

This tawdry peace was only going to hold so long and the outbreak of populism occasioned by the 2008 recession allowed the pretences to be done away with. Refined campus anti-Semitism — Jew-hatred with an Edward Said quote up top — and street-level ‘We are all Hezbollah’ Islamism were limited because they required of their adherents a level of commitment and effort. Popular anti-Semitism is so much more powerful because it is not discrete to a particular sub-group or knowledge base. It is unfiltered, unpretentious contempt for Jews, all the old political, religious and racial canards set free from the constraints of code and metaphor.

Earlier this week Guido reported on the Liberal Democrat candidate for a local by-election in the rotten borough of Tower Hamlets. Their candidate, Abjol Miah, had shared deeply anti-Semitic content including a video by former KKK leader David Duke. He also tweeted alleging Jews are joining ISIS, and “Zionist Jew Bill Maher“.

After Guido’s article, the Lib Dems quietly suspended Miah as a candidate and a member of the party and have suspended their Shadwell campaign altogether. So far the Labour Party look to be sticking by their hate preacher fan candidate in the same election…

The suspension will come as news to Lib Dem MP Tom Brake, who was pictured with Miah just yesterday, after Guido had already revealed his anti-Semitic posts.

Miah has been pretty promiscuous with his party affiliations over the years – he’s stood for George Galloway’s Respect Party, crooked Lutfur Rahmen’s Tower Hamlets First and its successor the People’s Alliance of Tower Hamlets. Despite Miah campaigning for Sadiq Khan, Guido hears that the Labour Party refused to take him on as a candidate. After all that seems like the Lib Dems were the only party who were willing take him on…

Baroness Jenny Tonge: Those who rightly blame Israel for the rise of antisemitism are being silenced by "some people". pic.twitter.com/ujfFZwUCeO

— Adam Holland (@ad_holland) February 7, 2019

i24 News live from NYC with Michelle Makori on the program Clear Cut: on Israel's Elections, State of the Union and a new anti-BDS bill in Congress. Did you know that boycotting Israel is not only antisemitic, but also illegal under the US Constitution? Watch to learn more.

Over the past decade, the Boston suburb of Newton has been beset by controversy over how the conflict in the Middle East is being taught in its public schools.

The concern over anti-Israel bias in the school system began in 2011, when a Newton resident complained to school officials regarding the use of a supplemental text called The Arab World Studies Notebook, which the resident said contained “false and defamatory” anti-Israel sentiment. While the school board eventually removed the textbook, accusations and further evidence of anti-Israel bias within the school system have continued, reaching a fever pitch during a Newton School Committee hearing in late November 2018.

“Unfortunately, faculty and school officials haven’t been open and accountable to the public, including to parents,” said Andrea Levin, executive director of CAMERA, an international fact-checking organization that monitors the media. “At a November public hearing, the school committee voted unanimously against transparency — that is, against allowing the public to know what materials are being used in the classroom.”

While the debate over how to teach the Middle East conflict has consumed this quaint Boston-area suburb, which is home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Massachusetts, there has also been concern that the issues plaguing Newton are part of a wider national trend of anti-Israel sentiment seeping into high school classrooms across the country.

At a January 28 event hosted by CAMERA at the Jewish Community Center in Newton, a panel of experts examined the issues with curriculum in Newton, as well as other instances of anti-Israel bias in K-12 education that may be affecting younger students’ perception of Israel.

The disturbing trend that US public schools are fast becoming a new ground for anti-Israel activism should concern every American — not just the Jewish community.

Non-profit watchdog groups and scholars that track antisemitism have sounded a warning that anti-Israel bias has crept into middle school and high school classrooms around the country.

Jewish organizations have for years tracked anti-Israel activism on university campuses, but now this type of material is reaching our public schools.

The Boston suburb of Newton, which is predominantly Jewish, has been ground zero for anti-Israel bias in public schools for several years. But Newton is not the only place this is going on.

I recently discovered that the Charleston, South Carolina area high school where my son is a student is teaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from material produced by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the anti-Zionist group that promotes the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel. They are major proponents of the BDS movement. There is a body of evidence linking BDS organizations to international terror groups, according to a recent Israeli government report.

The material shown to ninth-graders in the Charleston County School District includes a JVP animated video, an oversimplified depiction of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that’s both historically inaccurate and offensive. The video portrays Israel as the oppressor and Palestinians as victims. It depicts former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat without mentioning that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) is a terrorist group. At the end of the video, students are urged to boycott the State of Israel.

ACOM, a leading pro-Israel group in Spain, has won a court case brought against it by a pro-Palestinian group.

The Committee of Solidarity with the Arab Cause (CSCA) and its attorney, Gonzalo Boye, had pursued legal action against ACOM and its president, Angel Mas, based on the claim that ACOM was an “illegal organization” and Mas was responsible for “incitement to hatred.”

According to an ACOM press release, the case has been “definitively dismissed” by the Provincial Court of Madrid. It could have resulted in a four-year prison sentence for Mas and a ban on ACOM and its activities.

ACOM described CSCA as a “radical organization” that sought to “discriminate against Jews, incite hatred and even glorify terrorism.” It asserted that Boye “was and is a lawyer of drug dealers and terrorists and is a key figure in the legal harassment against Israel, with links to radical Palestinian groups.”

Boye is famous in Spain for his attempt to charge American officials with war crimes related to the George W. Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies, citing alleged torture of Spanish nationals at Guantanamo Bay. In the 1990s, he served six years of a 14-year jail sentence for his involvement with the ETA terrorist group.

.@rogerwaters, you are a hypocrite and a bully. We don't need no education from you https://t.co/LOY8gwlYFL#Venezuela

— Ozraeli Dave (@Israellycool) February 7, 2019

The Independent’s article includes the following:
The CST warned that prevalence of antisemitism in public debate can cause belief that “that the taboo against expressing hostility towards Jews is weakening” adding: “The more people hear and read antisemitic comments and views, the more likely they are to have the confidence to express such views if they hold similar attitudes themselves.”

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was previously slammed for comments that a group of Zionists had “no sense of irony” despite “having lived in this country for a very long time.”

British Jews (and others) will nonetheless note the irony of The Independent’s choice of quotes from the CST report when they take a look at The Independent’s own comments section. There are clear examples of how that media outlet has allowed antisemitic comments and views to proliferate.

Even The Independent’s very story of the CST report includes comments that raise serious questions.

The utter gall displayed by The Independent in allowing the conversation to become so poisonous while at the same time reporting that the normalization of this discourse has directly led to record levels of antisemitism in the UK is truly sickening.

Hebron is best known for the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

It’s where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — along with their wives, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are buried. For thousands of years, Jews have come to pray at their ancestors’ graves. (Jacob’s other wife, Rachel, was buried near Bethlehem and her tomb is also a holy site.)

Arabs too trace their lineage to Abraham, through his son, Ishmael.

Hence, the importance of the Tomb of the Patriarchs to Jews and Muslims.

So if you’re a news service updating a Hebron development that has a tie-in with the Tomb of the Patriarchs, you should be sure to make clear the site is holy to both Jews and Arabs. If you’re new to what’s happening in Hebron, Israel opted not to renew the mandate for the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (here’s why) who have been working as observers in Hebron for more than 20 years. At the United Nations, Indonesia and Kuwait pushed for “international protection” for the Palestinians, but the US foiled the move. Reporting from the UN, the Associated Press wrote:

The Temporary International Presence in Hebron was established in 1994 following Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank city that triggered riots across Palestinian areas.

Given the competing Israeli and Palestinian claims on holy site, it’s irresponsible that this sentence got by the AP editors. Here are three reasons why.

• It’s imbalanced journalism to cite one side’s claim over the other, prejudicing readers.
• The inappropriate use of names is misleading terminology.
• The name changes the context of Baruch Goldstein’s massacre for readers who aren’t familiar with it.

UPDATE: After being contacted by HonestReporting, AP amended its article to reflect Jewish ties to the Tomb of the Patriarchs. It now reads:
The Temporary International Presence in Hebron was established in 1994 following Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank city that triggered riots across Palestinian areas. The mosque is located at the site that is also revered by Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

The New York Times, which favors trade with Iran and Cuba, has recently been throwing its institutional weight behind the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel.

The newspaper published an official Times staff editorial critical of steps to counter the BDS movement. The Times news columns issued a command that readers “celebrate” the election of a BDS-supporting congresswoman. On the op-ed page, one regular columnist, Michelle Alexander, praised a church pension fund’s boycott of five Israeli banks as act of “moral clarity” in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. Another regular Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg, insisted, “Anti-Zionism Isn’t the Same as Anti-Semitism.” Goldberg defended the BDS movement — “a movement of nonviolent resistance,” she called it, ignoring that it operates in parallel and alongside violent terrorism — in a Times podcast.

Now even the Times food section is getting into the BDS act.

It started small, almost imperceptibly. The print Times began identifying its contributor Yotam Ottolenghi as a “British chef,” suppressing his Israeli heritage.

Then, on January 23, 2019, the Times published an article with a recipe for what the newspaper called “pearl couscous with creamy feta and chickpeas.”

Times readers in the comments noted that they were confused by the terminology; previous Times articles calling for that ingredient, like one in 2014 for “spicy couscous salad with tomatoes, green beans, and peppers,” hadn’t been afraid to refer to “Pearl couscous, also called Israeli couscous.” As recently as October 2018, the Times had written, “Pearl couscous, also known as Israeli or giant couscous.”

I previously blogged on how the Arabs-called-Palestinians have turned cuisine into a major issue of ethnic and national identity within the context of the Arab conflict with Israel and Zionism.

Who created falafel.

Which humus is the best.

But now I see this matter has morphed into a sub-issue which I'll call "cuisine geography".

Here:
Palestinian food can be sorted into three categories, she explained: There is the bread- and meat-based cooking of the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem and stretches to the Jordan River. The food of the Galilee, which sits inside Israel and includes cities like Nazareth, closely resembles Levantine cuisine, with its tabbouleh and kibbeh. The cooking of the Gaza Strip, a dense patch bordering Egypt, is largely fish-based and fiery.

First of all, Chef Kalla would be upset that there's no maqloobeh in there.

More importantly, what happened to Jordan? It's not part of 'historic Palestine'?

Most importantly, according to this "Palestine-on-a-Plate" geographic cuisine, the borders of "Palestine" seem to be defined as what one cooks.

Antisemite @cjwerleman projects on to @POTUS@realDonaldTrumphttps://t.co/AmLXbHOG8a

— Ozraeli Dave (@Israellycool) February 7, 2019

Ain't this awkward, @cjwerlemanhttps://t.co/r0QFQ6mlM9

— Ozraeli Dave (@Israellycool) February 7, 2019

Icelandic musician Páll Óskar Hjálmtýsson, who leads an effort to have Iceland withdraw from the Eurovision song contest this year if it is held in Israel, on Wednesday made some “decidedly anti-Semitic remarks” on his country’s national broadcasting radio Rás 1, including this pearl: “The tragedy is that Jews learned nothing from the Holocaust. Instead, they have taken up the exact same policy of their worst enemy.”

According to the Reykjavik Grapevine, thousands of Icelanders support boycotting Eurovision if it takes place in Israel, because support for Eurovision is “tacit support for the Israeli government’s policies regarding the Palestinian people.”

Páll Óskar (“Hjálmtýsson” is a patronymic (it means “son of Hjálmtýr”) and not his family name; he is addressed by his first names, “Páll Óskar”) has probably been the most vocal supporter of the boycott. Except that when he spoke to Rás 1, a little bit of Nazi shone through, when he offered his historical view that “the reason why the rest of Europe has been virtually silent is that Jews have woven themselves into the fabric of Europe in a very sly way for a very long time. It is not at all hip and cool to be pro-Palestine in Britain.”

The rest of Iceland was not amused, and local media became filled with sharp criticism from many Icelanders, to the point that, only a few hours later, Páll Óskar posted an apology and a retraction:
“I admit unreservedly that I put the Israeli government, the Israeli military and the Jewish people under the same hat,” he wrote. “I made judgements and generalizations about Jewish people. … I take full responsibility for these words, take back my remarks about Jewish people, they are wrong and hurtful. I will take responsibility in actions, from this point forward, and will never again speak ill of the Jewish people, wherever in the world they may live.”

More than 30 artworks purportedly created by Adolf Hitler will go up for sale on Saturday at an auction house in Nuremberg.

According to The Washington Post, the Auktionshaus Weidler is set to auction off dozens of works signed or initialed by the Nazi leader. The online catalog for the auction notes that “the items come from Austrian or rather European private ownership, originally from famous artists of the Third Reich, their heirs or from the estates of collectors.”

The works span the period from 1907 to 1936, and the most expensive item is set to begin bidding at €45,000 (NIS 185,600). The auction also includes a nude drawing Hitler made in 1929 of his niece, Geli Raubal, which is slated to begin bidding at €3,500 (NIS 14,400).

In 2015, the same auction house held a sale of Hitler’s works, ultimately selling 14 paintings and drawings. According to The Guardian, those works were sold for a total of €391,000 (NIS 1.6 million); the highest-price work was a painting of a Bavarian castle that sold for €100,000 (NIS 412,000). Over the years, Auktionshaus Weidler has held several similar sales.

Such auctions, while legal in Germany, have always generated controversy. In 2015, the auction house said that among its buyers were investors from China, France, Brazil, Germany and the United Arab Emirates.

The United States Embassy closed its booth at the Cairo International Book Fair due to the presence of antisemitic materials, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported on Wednesday.

Earlier this week, the Jerusalem-based center reported that staples of antisemitic literature were featured in the Egyptian stand at the 2019 Cairo International Book Fair, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford’s International Jew and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

US Embassy Chargé d’Affaires Thomas H. Goldberger responded to the Wiesenthal Center exposé by deciding to close the US booth in protest.

“I immediately contacted the Egyptian government on the phone and in writing to protest the presence of antisemitic materials at the Cairo International Book Fair,” wrote Goldberger in a statement, “and to demand that it take immediate action to remove the materials.”

Considered the most important event in the Arabic publishing world, last year’s book fair drew a crowd of over two million attendees as well as publishers from over 27 countries, according to the London-based newspaper Asharw Al-Awsat.

This year’s fair will take place from January 23 until February 10, with over 700 publishers and the Arab League as the guest of honor.

A yeshiva located in upstate New York was set on fire and swastikas were spray painted on the building.

The incident at the Yeshiva Deah Yoreh, located on a former farm in White Sulphur Springs, occurred on January 28, but was first reported by the Rockland/Westchester Journal News on Wednesday afternoon.

Two barns on the property of the yeshiva, which combines education and farming, were damaged and numerous swastikas were painted on the walls.

The incident is being treated as a hate crime, state police spokesman Steven Nevel told the Journal News.

On February 4, 2019, Pittsburgh imam Naeem Abdullah uploaded a video titled "Setting the Record Straight and Addressing the Slanderous Attacks against Me!" in response to media backlash following MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 7868, particularly a February 2 article by Peter Smith in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette titled "Report Denounces Remarks Of Leader at Small Larimer Mosque." Abdullah's response video had the text "#MEMRISlander" written in the bottom right corner. Addressing Muslims and "anyone who desires to arrive at the truth," Abdullah said that the MEMRI clip about him uses "cherry-picked" clips that are taken out of context in order to stitch together a false narrative that he teaches antisemitism, disrespect for law enforcement, and intolerance of non-Muslims. Abdullah said that it is un-Islamic to be antisemitic, and he explained that he uses the Quranic story about Allah turning some Jews into apes and pigs in order to teach Muslims about obedience to the law and about opposing evil acts. He also said that the Jewish tribes were expelled from Medina for treason, and not because they were Jewish. For Imam Abdullah's statements, see MEMRI TV Clips No. 6976 and No. 6978.

Those whose claims have been approved by the US State Department will be making "additional' payments to those in connection with the Holocaust Deportations Program.

Individuals with approved claims will receive a letter from the State Department notifying the parties that they will get a payment with an additional 97% increase from their original stipend.

The program was established in connection US-France Agreement of Compensation for Certain Victims of Holocaust-Related Deportations from France Who Are Not Covered By French Programs.

In 2014, the program was concluded, after negotiations between France, the State Department's Office for the Legal Adviser (who has administered the claims program since inception) and the State Department's Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues.

The United States is now close completion of concluding the program officially and collected all of the funding from the French government.

"The administration of this claims program was a thorough process to the benefit of those long-denied justice. We applaud the willingness of the French government to address this injustice," lauded the State Department in a released statement.

France was released from the special program under the condition that they provide a lump-sum of $60 million to the State Department, paid over two periods, to administer survivors of deportation, surviving spouses of deportees, and representatives of the estates of survivors and surviving spouses who are no longer living.

The agreed sum will go towards claims for the living and deceased Holocaust victims.

Claims awarded to living survivors of deportations toal around $204,000; living spouses of deportees whose spouse died before 1948, receive $51,000 and a proportionally adjusted amount if said spouse died after 1948.

A 20-strong delegation of senior Thai government officials has arrived in Israel to learn from Israeli expertise and experience in medical cannabis cultivation, and to evaluate possible areas for cooperation between the countries.

Their visit follows both the Israeli government’s decision last week to approve exports of locally-grown medical cannabis to the worldwide legal market and the December 25 decision by Thailand’s military junta-appointed National Legislative Assembly to legalize the use of cannabis for medicinal and research purposes.

The delegation includes three director generals of the Thai Ministry of Health and the entire directorate of the Government Pharmaceutical Organization – the body tasked with cultivating the cannabis plant, transforming it into a drug and marketing it in the state-owned organization’s pharmacies at a subsidized price.

The visit was initiated by Israel’s economic attaché to Bangkok in collaboration with the Health Ministry’s Medical Cannabis Unit, which will facilitate meetings between the delegation and Israeli companies specializing in agriculture, cultivation and producing cannabis extracts.

“The Thai people view Israel as a country of innovation, and we are pleased that the local government has decided to visit Israel at the perfect time in terms of business potential and with a very extensive delegation, in order to examine opportunities for cooperation and learn from the experience that we have accumulated here,” said Dagan Alony, head of the Economic and Trade Office at the Israeli Embassy in Thailand.

“As always, we are putting great effort into promoting Israeli industry abroad generally, and in Thailand in particular,” he said. “This is an excellent opportunity for Israeli companies in the Thai market.”

January 2019 saw a lot of investment activity involving Israeli companies, although no triple-digit investments were posted.

The biggest round for the month was $55 million raised by cybersecurity company Cato Networks from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Aspect Ventures, Greylock Partners, Singtel Innov8 Ventures and USVP Management Company LLC. Tel Aviv-based Cato was founded in 2015 and reports a customer base of over 300 enterprises.

Tel Aviv-based cannabis inhaler developer Syqe Medical raised $50 million from Shavit Capital, PRM Holdings, Martin Bauer Group and another unnamed investor.

EarlySense of Ramat Gan completed a $39 million financing round, with the majority of the funding coming from Hill-Rom, the world’s leading hospital bed manufacturer, and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital. Additional funding came from BlueRed Capital, Israel Innovation Fund, Argos Capital, Hotung Capital, Pitango Venture Capital and JK&B Venture Capital.

EarlySense, which makes a continuous sensing and predictive analytics product for hospital beds, marked 10,000 installed systems and more than one million patients monitored.

GenCell Energy, the Israel-based startup that makes fuel cell-based electricity generators, has entered an accord with Flex Ltd., a global provider of electronics manufacturing services, to mass produce the fuel-cell based generators to meet the “strong growing demand” of customers globally for its products.

GenCell will continue to produce the fuel cells at its facility in Petah Tikva, while Flex will integrate these into generators that will be produced at Flex’s manufacturing facility in Ofakim, Israel, and prepare them for shipping to customers globally, explained Rami Reshef, the CEO of GenCell by phone.

The mass production of GenCell’s products will enable the fuel cell startup to scale up its production from some 100 units a year to some 5,000 a year, Reshef explained, with the firm eyeing as customers electric utilities in the US and Europe. These customers need to provide energy solutions in areas that are often off the electricity grid or who need “a reliable continuous source of backup and off-grid power.” The firm’s alkaline fuel cells are used for applications where the continuous supply of electricity is vital, from telecoms to homeland security and niche automated industries.

GenCell and Flex celebrated the start of their joint operations with a ceremony in Ofakim on Wednesday.

Sun d’Or, an El Al subsidiary, is launching a charter flight connecting Tokyo’s Narita Airport and Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport starting September 13. The flights were officially announced at a press conference at the Embassy of Israel in Tokyo on Wednesday.

The first flight will depart from Tel Aviv at 4:30 p.m. on September 13, and the first return flight will take off from Tokyo on September 14 at 1 p.m. and will arrive in Israel on the same day at 8 p.m., due to the time change. The plane will have 270 seats.

So far, only two such flights each way are scheduled, according to the embassy’s statements and confirmed by a Sun d’Or spokesperson on Wednesday to Calcalist.

In January, Calcalist reported the intention to start operating direct charter flights between the countries during the visit of Japanese Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry Hiroshige Sekō to Israel. The head of the Israel Economic and Trade mission to Japan in Tokyo, Noa Asher, said in a closed-door meeting that two direct charter flights are planned to start operating in September, with the intention of gauging interest in setting up regular flights.

His paternal grandparents were Christian Palestinians from Jerusalem and Bethlehem. His maternal grandparents were also Christians; she a Catholic and he Greek Orthodox. His father later converted to Islam and became an imam. And his wife has Jewish roots.

Meet Nayib Bukele, the president-elect of El Salvador.

The 37-year-old center-right politician, who himself is not very religious but says he believes in Jesus, on Sunday won the Central American country’s presidential elections with 53 percent of the vote, and will take office on June 1.

El Salvador, a country about the size of Israel, with some 7.5 million inhabitants, is not considered a major player in international diplomacy. Nonetheless, Israel has welcomed the potential for a warm bilateral relationship.

“We are looking forward to strengthening relations between the two countries, which has been characterized by friendship over the years,” a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry told The Times of Israel on Wednesday.

In 2015, the Israeli ambassador to El Salvador praised Bukele as a “partner for cooperation,” but besides that very little is known about his views on the Jewish state and the Middle East’s various conflicts.

Still Bukele, who until April 2018 served as mayor of the capital, San Salvador, came to Israel last year on a government-sponsored trip, and is not afraid to talk about it.

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder and president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, passed away suddenly Wednesday afternoon at the age of 67.

The American-Israeli rabbi died from sudden heart failure and his funeral will be held in Jerusalem on Thursday.

Eckstein was an author, philanthropist and activist who served on the boards of various Jewish organizations, including the Joint Distribution Agency, Jewish Agency and Anti-Defamation league.

He brought in $1.4 billion in donations for Israel, mostly from evangelical Christians, since founding the IFCJ in 1983.

In addition to assisting with Jewish immigration to Israel, the organization arranges trips and activities for immigrants inside Israel, job market guidance, child care solutions and help for those in need. The IFCJ also helped lone soldiers — Israel Defense Forces personnel, many of them new immigrants, who either have no family in Israel or are not in contact with their families.

He was honored on May 23, 2017, at a US Congressional tribute event marking Jewish American Heritage Month, for his work to build bridges between Christians and Jews.

Tributes poured in for Eckstein, from both Israel and abroad.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Eckstein “worked very hard to benefit the citizens of Israel and to strengthen the connection between the Christian communities and Israel. May his memory be a blessing.”

President Reuven Rivlin eulogized Eckstein as a “great man, a great Jew and a great Zionist.”

AMMAN — The government on Tuesday warned Israeli occupation authorities against its recurrent attacks on Islamic awqaf employees and Al Aqsa Mosque.

Awqaf Minister Abdul Nasser Abul Bassal, in a statement carried by the Jordan News Agency, Petra, warned against the increasing number of break-ins at Al Aqsa Mosque.

The Israelis are playing with fire, he said.

Citing 5,000 raid incidents in 2005, Abul Bassal added that occupation forces and settlers carried out 30,000 raids in 2018.

Abul Bassal expressed his utmost rejection of these provocative practices and the attacks by extremists and extremist ministers, Knesset members and military personnel, who enter the facilities of the mosque by force of arms.

These acts provoke the feelings of the faithful and Muslims all around the world, he said, calling on the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the Arab League, Arab and Islamic countries, UNESCO and relevant international organisations to pressure Israeli escalatory measures and attacks against Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem to a stop.

He also called for supporting Jordan in the face of Israeli aggressions that, if continued, will take the region to a religious war that His Majesty King Abdullah has always warned against.

In 2016, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, based on a recommendation by the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

At the time, the Forum said that 40 per cent of the estimated 6,700 languages spoken around the world were in danger of disappearing.  The fact that most of these are indigenous languages puts the cultures and knowledge systems to which they belong at risk.

In addition, indigenous peoples are often isolated both politically and socially in the countries they live in, by the geographical location of their communities, their separate histories, cultures, languages and traditions.

And yet, they are not only leaders in protecting the environment, but their languages represent complex systems of knowledge and communication and should be recognized as a strategic national resource for development, peace building and reconciliation.

They also foster and promote unique local cultures, customs and values which have endured for thousands of years. Indigenous languages add to the rich tapestry of global cultural diversity. Without them, the world would be a poorer place.

23 of the books reviewed in the report are being used in our schools and we have reviewed them rigorously under our curriculum framework, which aims to ensure that our curriculum is in line with UN values. In the small number of instances where issues of concern were found, we have created enriched complementary materials for use in our classrooms and we will be rolling out training on this to our teachers in the coming months. UNRWA’s condemnation of all forms of racism is a matter of public record.

Ori Ansbacher, 19, from the West Bank town of Tekoa, was named Friday as the murder victim whose body was found a day earlier on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

President Reuven Rivlin sent a message of condolence to the victim’s family, saying “the heart breaks at the loss of life.”

On Thursday evening, Ansbacher’s body, with “signs of violence” on it, was found in Ein Yael to the south of Jerusalem, police said.

She had been reported missing since early Thursday.

Ansbacher’s parents, Noa and Gadi, told Hebrew-language media their daughter was “a holy soul seeking meaning, with a sensitivity for every person and creature and an infinite desire to correct the world with goodness.”
Israeli security forces search the scene where a body of a 19 year old woman was found in Ein Yael, in the outskirts of Jerusalem, February 8, 2019 Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

One of her high school teachers told Channel 13 news that Ori was “a smart and honest girl with an original and creative intellectual openness. She cared for the environment and was sensitive to others.”

Ansbacher was carrying out a year of national service at a youth center in Jerusalem at the time of her death.

Hundreds of mourners attended on Friday the funeral of Ori Ansbacher, 19, whose body was found a day earlier in the outskirts of Jerusalem. The funeral was held in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, where Ansbacher lived.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement on the murder, saying Ansbacher was killed “with shocking brutality.”

“At this difficult hour we all embrace the Ansbacher family and the people of Tekoa. The security forces are investigating the murder — we will find those responsible for it, and we will bring the matter to justice,” the prime minister pledged.

President Reuven Rivlin sent a message of condolence to the victim’s family, saying “the heart breaks at the loss of life.”

Ansbacher’s sister, Tama, eulogized Ori to the gathered mourners. “Last Saturday you said that you do not believe that you will be 20 years old at the end of the year, and now you have gone. You taught me so much — to sing, to dance with all your light. All the time you tried to fix things and to grow. I love you so much and I’m sorry I didn’t always tell you that, goodbye Ori,” she said.

Ansbacher’s father, Rabbi Gadi Ansbacher, tearfully told mourners that he was at a loss for words.

“I do not believe it, I do not know what to say. I think about you now – how you saw everything so sharp and clearly. In the last year you did it, Ori, you won. You lived a whole life,” he said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed great sorrow at the murder of Ori Ansbacher of Tekoa, who was murdered Thursday in Jerusalem.

"In this difficult hour, all of us embrace the Ansbacher family and their home town of Tekoa. Security forces are investigating the murder; we will find those responsible and bring them to justice," said Netanyahu on social media.

President Reuven Rivlin also mourned Ansbacher's death, saying "the heart shatters when faced with such a loss of life at the peak of bloom, and the pain is too great to bear, Ori's generous doing to help others and her kindness will shine even after her great light was put out."

I get no satisfaction over writing these posts, but I think it is important to expose what the other side is about. May Ori's memory be for a blessing. #Israelhttps://t.co/Qm5eP5XVzM

— Ozraeli Dave (@Israellycool) February 8, 2019

The many examples of glorification of terrorists and terror promotion from all periods cited in this 2018 overview report, demonstrate that Fatah continues to be an active terror-promoting organization and that Facebook allows itself to be a part of that terror promotion.

Facebook rules and regulations
Facebook policy is to prohibit all glorification of terrorists or terrorist acts as well as encouragement and endorsement of violence, as is explicitly written in Facebook's Community Standards:

"We [Facebook] do not allow any organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence, from having a presence on Facebook. This includes organizations or individuals involved in the following:
Terrorist activity
Organized hate
Mass or serial murder
Human trafficking
Organized violence or criminal activity

We also remove content that expresses support or praise for groups, leaders, or individuals involved in these activities."
[Facebook's Community Standards, I. Violence and Criminal Behavior,
2. Dangerous Individuals and Organizations, accessed Feb. 3, 2019]

This report demonstrates that Fatah's Facebook page is repeatedly in violation of Facebook standards and that there can be no justification for Facebook to allow its continued operation.

Conclusion
This Palestinian Media Watch report demonstrates that the Fatah Movement used its official Facebook page throughout 2018 to glorify terror and terrorists, and to support continued Palestinian terror against Israelis. As its fundamental policy, Fatah glorified terrorists from all periods of its history including mass murderers and suicide bombers. Significantly, immediately following terror attacks, Fatah used Facebook to praise the contemporary terror and glorify new terrorists throughout the year. Although Fatah's use of Facebook for these purposes is in direct violation of Facebook's guidelines set out in its Community Standards, Facebook has not deleted these terror glorifying and terror promoting posts, and has not closed down Fatah's Facebook account.

The terror glorification and promotion of violence by Fatah together with Facebook's willingness to be a platform for the dissemination of these messages is a lethal combination. As Palestinians see their colleagues, friends, and neighbors being honored as heroes just days after they have killed Israelis, and as they read that Fatah pledges it will use "all means" including the rifle against Israel, the seeds for future terrorists have been planted.
Click to read the entire report as a PDF

A new report issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) blames the U.S. State Department for misleading Congress in recent years on the steps the Palestinian Authority was supposed to be taking to reduce incitement in PA-sanctioned textbooks.

The report — directed to Sen. James Risch, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism — has been declassified. The push for the document’s declassification was led by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) in the House.

The State Department “submitted required reports to Congress, but one contains inaccurate information, and reports do not include some information that could be useful for Congressional oversight,” the GAO report charges. “We found that State/Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) 2017 report inaccurately described certain UNRWA actions to address textbook content not aligned with UN values.”

Jewish Insider also obtained a copy of the State Department’s reply to the GAO report where they acknowledged their shortcomings. “We agree with GAO’s recommendations that the Department must take additional steps to ensure that its reporting to Congress is accurate, with thorough and relevant information to support effective Congressional decision-making and oversight.”

The State Department admitted to including inaccurate information received orally from UNRWA that they believed to have been accurate at the time but did not verify.

Across the West, millions are now in revolt against this dogma — an uprising that has taken the form of Britain’s Brexit, the election of US President Donald Trump and the rise of parties in mainland Europe standing for national values and defending their country’s borders against mass immigration and Islamization.

Some of these parties, such as Germany’s AfD or Austria’s Freedom Party, have backgrounds or views which should indeed put them beyond the pale. Democratic politicians should enforce red lines against fascists, racist hooligans or present-day antisemites.

But the reason these troubling groups are gaining power is because the entire Western political establishment abandoned the cause of historic cultural identity, creating instead a vacuum to be filled by moral decline and Islamization.

Many Jews think nationalism threatens their safety and interests. They couldn’t be more wrong. The main threat to Jews arises when societies fragment and are no longer confident in their own identity. That’s why antisemitism is now rampant in countries such as Britain, Ireland, France, Sweden and others where liberal universalist dogma holds sway.

To liberals and many Jews, all nationalists are incipient Nazis and antisemites. Untrue, and Holocaust revisionism may be driven by a different impulse. To some of these nationalists, pride in their country means sanitizing its terrible past.

This is reprehensible and wrong, but it’s hardly in the same league as, say, the Palestinian or Iranian agenda of murdering Jews and wiping out Israel.

Yet the Palestinian and Iranian regimes are given a free pass or are even actively supported by many of those who portray Orbán and other European nationalists, who stand against such genocidal antisemitism, as enemies of humanity.

The battle between nationalism and universalism is making for some messy choices and uncomfortable bedfellows. But in these confused and complex times, liberal hypocrisy is perhaps the most deadly charade of all.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives advanced a resolution to end American support for the Saudi-led war against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. A similar resolution is making its way through the Senate. To Evelyn Gordon, this effort is wrongheaded on both strategic and moral grounds:

On the strategic side, let’s start with the fact that [the Houthis,] an organization whose official slogan is “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam” isn’t one Americans should want ruling anything, much less a country whose location enables it to dominate a strategic waterway vital to the global oil industry. And without the Saudi-led coalition, the Houthis would long since have taken over Yemen. In other countries, like Syria and Lebanon, Iranian military and financial aid has repeatedly enabled its proxies to overwhelm the opposition; that this hasn’t yet happened in Yemen is only because there, unlike in Syria and Lebanon, the Saudi coalition has provided its local allies with substantial assistance, including airstrikes.

Second, empowering allies is always better than empowering enemies. Granted, Saudi Arabia is a highly imperfect ally, but it is at least nominally in America’s camp. Iran, by contrast, has been America’s avowed enemy since 1979, and its proxies have been responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of American deaths in Lebanon and Iraq. . . .

Still, how can America possibly support a coalition that’s committing gross human-rights violations in Yemen? The answer is easy: horrible as Riyadh’s behavior is, the Houthis are worse. Thus, by ending support for the Saudi coalition, America would empower an even greater evil.

In the Arab Middle East, known, deservedly, as a global hub and disseminator of anti-Semitism, something is astir of immense interest and importance.

First, the bad news—which is hardly news at all. Even as some Arab leaders are visibly warming toward Israel and Jews, the widespread culture of rejectionism and anti-Semitism persists at key levels of their societies. Ingrained over generations through Arab media, schools, and mosques, and more recently reinforced by Iranian and jihadist propaganda, it permeates Arab establishments and much popular sentiment alike.

As Israel’s “cold peace” with Egypt and Jordan has abundantly shown, official treaties do not, on their own, ameliorate this culture of animosity. And though a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could substantially mitigate the problem, prospects of achieving such a settlement are themselves obstructed by it. From North Africa to the Gulf, opposition to an accommodation with the Jewish state amounts to a check on any rulers inclined toward signing a treaty.

But then there’s the new news: across the region, seeds of an effort to challenge Arab rejectionism and anti-Semitism have unmistakably been sprouting. Beyond official circles, a growing number of Arabs not only view Israel and Jews in a positive light but espouse, openly, a “peace between peoples.” For their part, Israelis and some Jewish activists in the West have developed means of engaging in Arab public discussions, breaching historical barriers to such communication and holding out the promise of forward movement.

Between the spread of positive Arab sentiment and a modest opening for its public expression in Arab media lies the potential for a more coordinated effort to complement and reinforce the warming taking place at the topmost level of international diplomacy. This is an opportunity begging to be seized.

Not only does the Palestinian Authority (PA) operate in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem in ways forbidden by the Oslo Accords, but Hamas, Islamic State (IS), various other Islamist organizations, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the EU all have a presence there. Their activities, writes David Koren, undermine Israeli sovereignty and sometimes encourage violence and unrest. Although the PA does not pose the same immediate danger as the IS cells operating in Jerusalem—which, incidentally, have mostly threatened Arab Christians—it might be the most pernicious force in the city:

The PA exerts extremely heavy pressure on parents registering their children for Israeli matriculation programs [which would qualify them to attend Israeli colleges], seeking to persuade parents to cancel the registration of their children for this program and leave them in the Palestinian matriculation program. The PA and Fatah agents thereby prevent parents and their children from freely deciding on their educational and professional future. . . .

[Moreover], the violent and aggressive discourse instigated by the PA and its agents in eastern Jerusalem against anyone cooperating with the Jerusalem municipality and the Israeli authorities is extreme and unreasonable. Even leaders in the Arab neighborhoods who are in no way “pro-Zionist” are verbally and physically attacked by PA agents for intervening with the Israel authorities in order to improve the residents’ lives. These neighborhood leaders are subjected to social and public blackballing. Such threats and intimidation have included the burning of two Jerusalem municipality community centers in eastern Jerusalem by Fatah members. . . .

As a rule, the PA takes aggressive and violent action to prevent Jerusalemite Arabs from behaving as residents with equal rights and duties. The PA wants to keep them from exercising those rights with Israeli authorities. It seeks to prevent healthy interaction with the Israeli government and its institutions and with Israeli society in general. There is no doubt that the PA ceaselessly undermines the foundations of Jerusalem’s unity and works toward de-facto division of the city by strengthening the Arab residents’ attachment to Ramallah instead of Jerusalem.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and other administration officials are headed to the Middle East later this month to brief diplomats in at least five countries on the economic section of a US proposal for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Kushner, who is US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, will be joined by US Mideast envoy Jason Greenblatt, US envoy on Iran Brian Hook and other administration officials who have worked on the economic part of the plan.

Stops are confirmed in Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Other stops could be added to the trip, according to a White House official.

The plan includes an economic development proposal for Palestinians that foresees major infrastructure and industrial work, particularly in Gaza. For the plan to succeed or even pass the starting gate, it will need at least initial buy-in from both Israel and the Palestinians as well as from the Gulf Arab states, which officials say will be asked to substantially bankroll the economic portion.

Also, Kushner is to participate next Thursday in Warsaw in a discussion to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a senior White House official.

Collins’ death and those of the civil war’s other victims were tragic but less so than the alternative. Imagine for a moment that Collins and his compatriots had not signed the treaty, that the war with the UK had gone on all over Ireland as it did in Ulster for 30 years (1968-1998)… and on… and on…

One need not imagine very hard because there is a case study available of just such a situation – namely, the Palestinians. On multiple occasions over the past hundred years, Palestinians have been offered a state of their own, on condition that they make hard compromises in return. Israel’s 2008 proposal by Ehud Olmert, and 2000 Camp David proposal, and the UN’s 1947 partition plan, all proposed final resolutions that would have created a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state. (Another offer, the UK’s 1937 Peel Commission plan, proposed to create a Palestinian state united with Jordan.) The Palestinians neither accepted any of these offers, nor put forward any proposal of their own.

Why not? Former US Middle East envoy Dennis Ross suggested that Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat “could live with a process, but not with a conclusion… Our great failing was in not creating the earlier tests that would have either exposed Arafat’s inability to ultimately make peace or forced him to prepare his people for compromise.” What Ross seems to imply was that, at the end of the day, Arafat was not willing to compromise Palestinian claims, not willing to share the land, not willing to tell the descendants of Palestinian refugees that they could not “return” to Israel.

Was it purely personal opposition to making the necessary compromises, or was it fear of the consequences? Perhaps both. Arafat, and his successor Mahmoud Abbas, certainly remembered the fate of Anwar Sadat after he made peace with Israel. Perhaps they knew Michael Collins’ story, too.

Birthing a nation is dangerous, not least because it inevitably requires compromise, which may set the willing compromisers against their most extreme partisans. The Palestinian Authority’s ongoing failure to educate for peace — indeed, its opposition to doing so — is both symptom and cause of the strength of the anti-compromise camp.

Last year, Israel’s foreign ministry expelled a Swiss member of the TIPH for slapping a 10-year-old Jewish boy in Hebron. Another TIPH observer was expelled for allegedly slashing tires of an Israeli-owned car in Hebron’s Jewish quarter last year.

Fleisher told Fox News that does not mean both sides cannot coexist. He said the Hebron Jewish community has lived in the ancient city for 3,800 years and said that, “Arabs and Jews will be able to work it out…and things are going to be fine and dandy here without TIPF. Instead, it will be even better than it was before.”

The Palestinian Ambassador to the U.N., Riyad Mansour, was not as optimistic and told reporters outside the Security Council that settler violence had risen in Hebron and called the situation, “very alarming.” He said he hoped that, “the Security Council can rise to the level of taking steps to ensure the safety and protection of the civilian population international law calls for.”

Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia School of Law specializing in constitutional and international law, told Fox News that international criticism saying Israel ended TIPH is “simply wrong.”

“TIPH ended under its own rules. Moreover, the criticism at the U.N. of Israel's decision to not renew the mandate discourages Israel from making any further diplomatic agreements with the PA,” he said. “If it gets slammed when it fully adheres to the terms, what's the point?”

He added that there was never an intent to make it a permanent institution.

“But diplomatic inertia has kept it in place for over two decades,” Kontorovich said. “The force's mission has always been one-sided against Israel...They have violated the terms of their mandate in many ways, and it was time to officially end it.”

The foreign ministers of the five nations that contribute to TIPH – Norway, Turkey, Sweden, Italy and Switzerland – said in a statement they were concerned that the decision would, “have a negative impact on the situation.”

US State Department spokesman Robert Palladino said on Thursday that it was Israel’s right to decide not to renew the mandate of the international observer force in the city of Hevron.

Palladino was asked in a press briefing about the US decision to block a proposed UN Security Council statement expressing regret over Israel's decision to end the mandate of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH).

“The 1997 agreement on the temporary international presence in the city of Hebron clearly states that the consent of both the Israelis and the Palestinians is required in order to extend the mandate and presence of the TIPH. Furthermore, Oslo II and Hebron Protocol of 1997 also stated that the agreement from both sides was necessary for that to continue,” replied the spokesman.

“Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the Israeli decision not to renew, it would be inaccurate to accuse Israel of not having the right to make this decision under the 1997 agreement. This is a sovereign decision and it’s the right of either party to make that agreement,” he stressed.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced last week that he would not renew the mandate of the 64-member team, saying, "We will not allow the continued presence of an international force acting against us.”

@StateDept points out that Israel's non-renewal of TIPH consistent with relevant int'l agreements, so should hardly be criticised. pic.twitter.com/BGSDLV0s5A

— Eugene Kontorovich (@EVKontorovich) February 8, 2019

AIPAC sounded relieved by the substantive Democratic backing in the Senate this week for a controversial pro-Israel bill initiated by Republicans.

The Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act (S.1), which the American Israel Public Affairs Committee said “contains critical pro-Israel provisions,” passed 77-23, earning yeas from every Republican but one, Rand Paul of Kentucky. It codifies $38 billion in defense assistance to Israel and provides legal cover to states that target the boycott Israel movement.

“These provisions — contained in one of the first major bipartisan bills adopted by the Senate this year — pledge security assistance to Israel and clarify that state and local governments have the right to counter boycotts of Israel,” AIPAC explained.

Not only that, the bipartisan numbers were good: Of 47 senators in the Democratic caucus, 25 voted for the measure to 22 against.

The exceptions, however, were notable: Of the seven Senate Democrats who have declared for the presidency or seem poised to, six voted no. Only Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota voted yes.

JTA asked all seven for explanations, and five sent replies. Klobuchar’s staff said she was caught up in hearings, and the office of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., never responded.

The five no voters based their opposition to what has been called an “anti-BDS bill” on free speech concerns about its anti-boycott element, which would provide federal protections for states penalizing boycotters.

Some emphasized their support for the other components of the bill, including the defense assistance for Israel, as well as sanctions targeting Syria’s Assad regime and the reinforcement of the alliance with Jordan.

300+ US servicemen and women have landed in Israel for Juniper Falcon, the main IDF-US exercise of 2019. Side by side, we will strengthen our cooperation and readiness to face mutual threats. 🇺🇸🇮🇱#SquadGoalspic.twitter.com/cZSQnQP5zo

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) February 7, 2019

One in two Israelis has a negative opinion of Poland, although a large majority believe that Poles, too, suffered at the hands of the Nazis, according to a new survey commissioned by the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv.

At the same time, two-thirds of respondents said Poland has been reluctant to admit its complicity in the Holocaust.

The poll, presented to a handful of reporters Thursday in the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv, is an effort by the right-wing government in Warsaw to examine and improve the country’s image in Israel after a recent controversy over the roles of Poles in atrocities against Jews during World War II.

“We commissioned this survey because we know very well that bilateral relations are very important for Poland and for Israel — more important than relations with other countries,” Ambassador Marek Magierowski‏‎ said, opening his remarks in Hebrew.

“We wanted to know if we have to change something in our policy, here at Polish Embassy in Israel, and in the Polish government in Warsaw,” Magierowski added.

Continuing in English, Magierowski‏‎ said he was not surprised by the poll’s findings, adding that in Israel there was “low awareness of what modern-day Poland is.”

Two French journalists on Thursday told a terror trial in Brussels that Mehdi Nemmouche, the main defendant in the May 2014 Jewish museum murders, had imprisoned and tortured them in Syria.

The journalists, who were freed in April 2014, came to the Belgian capital to testify about the character of Nemmouche, a 33-year-old Frenchman, who faces a life sentence if convicted in the murder of four people during the anti-Semitic shooting attack on May 24, 2014.

“I have absolutely no doubt about the fact that Mehdi Nemmouche, who is present here, was my jailer and torturer in Syria under the name of Abu Omar,” former hostage Nicolas Henin told the trial.

His colleague Didier Francois also said he “had no doubt” Nemmouche had held him hostage, along with fellow Frenchmen Edouard Elias and Pierre Torres who were not present Thursday.

Francois said Nemmouche hit him with “around 40 blows of a truncheon,” among other abuses, during the time the journalists were held by the Islamic State in the hospital turned prison.

Israeli security forces thwarted Jordanian weapons smugglers intending to sell weapons to top-ranking Fatah officials in the West Bank, Channel 12 reported on Thursday.

The weapons included 82 assault rifles and 80 guns, the clients are said to be top ranking Fatah officials who are arming supporters ahead of an expected civil-war which will likely take place over leadership when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dies.

While the names of the officials are known to the reporters they were asked by Israel's security services not to make them public, the report said.

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas pledged to continue security cooperation with Israel, despite the United States cutting all security assistance to the PA.

In front of a gathering of Israeli and Palestinian activists on Wednesday, Abbas said that Ramallah has a “joint agreement to fight terrorism” with Israel and “will not violate it” because were the P.A. to do so, “nothing will remain.”

Abbas’s remarks come as the United States officially ceased last week all $60 million in security assistance to the PA in addition to the US Agency for International Development closing its operations in the West Bank and Gaza.

The cut-off in such assistance and the USAID closure occurred in accordance with the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act (ATCA), signed into law in October, that provides protections for American victims of international terrorism.

Israel has reportedly urged the Trump administration to fix the ATCA to preserve the security assistance.

Two Palestinian teenagers were reportedly killed and five Palestinians were injured in clashes along the Gaza-Israel border during the continued weekly March of Return protests, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health reported 14-year-old Hasan Shelbi and an unidentified 18-year-old were killed today by IDF sniper fire during the clashes in the Gaza Strip. Shelbi was shot east to the city of Khan Yunis, which is in the southern region of the Strip.

Roughly 7,000 protesters confronted IDF forces throughout several locations across the Gaza Strip on Friday during the weekly protest.

Protesters charged at IDF positions, threw rocks and makeshift bombs as well as attempted to cut the fence in order to enter Israeli territory. The attempts were thwarted by IDF soldiers.

Palestinians have been staging weekly protests since last March at the border, an enclave controlled by the Islamist militant group Hamas. The enclave's health ministry says that more than 220 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops at the protests. One Israeli soldier has died.

Israel says it has no choice but to use deadly force at the protests to defend the frontier from militants trying to destroy the barrier and infiltrate.

The US military is preparing to withdraw American forces from Syria by the end of April and a significant portion of them will be out by the middle of March, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing current and former US officials.

A US official confirmed the April target to Reuters, saying the withdrawal included a pull-out from the US military base at Tanf, near the Syrian border with Iraq and Jordan.

President Donald Trump announced in December he was pulling all 2,000 US troops out of Syria, saying the battle against Islamic State there was almost won.

The president’s sudden decision surprised many in his own administration as well as coalition allies such as Turkey and an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias that fought Islamic State with US military support.

Washington has been trying to reach agreement with Turkey, which considers the US-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG militia a terrorist organization, for the safety of the YPG fighters after it pulls out. It is also discussing setting up a safe zone along the border to address Turkish security concerns.

Israel has discovered a new ambitious precision missile factory being constructed by Iran in Syria together with the Syrian government and Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, after Israel bombed and destroyed a previous one, an Israeli TV network reported Thursday evening.

The report on Channel 12 said the new factory was recently built near the northwestern city of Safita in hopes that Israel wouldn’t discover it in the location, which is far from previous Iranian sites struck by Israel elsewhere in Syria. The factory is intended to focus on producing precision missiles, dramatically upgrading the threat to Israel from the vast arsenal of rockets and missiles deployed against it in southern Lebanon by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah.

To build it, Channel 12 reported, Iran had to bypass international sanctions on its missile program via a series of straw companies established by Syria’s Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC), a government agency that manufactures weaponry and whose facilities have repeatedly been targeted by Israel in the past.

Those companies — established specifically for that purpose — ordered missile parts from Italy, China and other countries in eastern Asia, the report said. The companies are named the Organization of Technological Industries (OTI) and ANAS Group, according to the report.

Israel has nevertheless discovered, tracked and uncovered the facility, the network said, as part of its effort to thwart Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria.

The Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), al-Qaeda, and Iran’s narco-terrorist proxy Hezbollah maintain a presence on the Western Hemisphere and present an “immediate threat” to the region, a top U.S. commander told lawmakers on Thursday, warning that the jihadi groups could use drug trafficking routes in Latin America to infiltrate the United States.

Adm. Craig Faller, the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) chief, warned:
Established drug trafficking routes and techniques provide opportunities for the illegal movement of other commodities and people—including terrorists. Several years ago, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) dedicated an article to a scenario in which its followers could leverage established trafficking networks to make their way to our border. This remains a potential vulnerability we watch as closely as we can.

Faller’s comments are part of SOUTHCOM’s annual posture statement, presented by the admiral to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday in the form of written testimony. SOUTHCOM is responsible for overseeing U.S. military activities in most of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In the statement, Faller listed violent Islamic extremist groups as a top “immediate threat” facing his area of responsibility (AOR) along with drug cartels and activities by U.S. rivals like Russia, China, and Iran.

A study by a Saudi research center is challenging the notion that jihadi fighters are necessarily disenfranchised and lacking opportunity, with its lead researcher saying Thursday that a new generation of Saudi militants are relatively well-educated, not driven purely by religious ideology and show little interest in suicide missions.

The 40-page study, published by the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in conjunction with the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College in London, looked at 759 Saudi recruits who joined the Islamic State group mostly between 2013 and 2014. That's roughly a third of the overall number of Saudis who fought in Syria. The data was drawn from leaked Islamic State group entry documents.

The Saudi Interior Ministry previously said that 2,500 Saudis had gone to Syria in the years before the kingdom criminalized fighting abroad in early 2014. Only Tunisia sent more foreign fighters. Subsequently, the kingdom was the target of numerous ISIS group attacks that killed dozens of people, as well as in Kuwait.

Researcher Abdullah bin Khaled Al-Saud said the fighters were neither loners nor social outcasts but appear to have been motivated by the heightened sectarianism that began to color the 2011 Syrian revolution as it slid into armed conflict.

A turning point came when Iranian-backed Shiite Hezbollah decisively committed to join the conflict in May 2013 to defend the Syrian government against the mostly Sunni Muslim resistance.

Israel was founded on the land of historic Palestine... the leaders of the Zionist movement planned to achieve this goal soon after they held their first World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897 under the chair of Theodor Herzl, founder of the hateful Zionist movement.

Its planners developed strategic plans to control the world politically, economically, intellectually and through the media. They called these schemes the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which is what the leaders of Israel have been following and implementing with great precision from that date until the present day.

It is wise to review the most important of these satanic protocols. Perhaps we may learn lessons, and see the scope of the wits, intrigues and machinations that our Zionist enemies dream up.

Instead of viewing anti-Semitism against Israelis as the irrational bigotry that it is, the world often attributes it to rational motives, part of a legitimate national struggle.

Western apologists justify violent rioters shouting “Jews, we’re coming to slaughter you!” at the Gaza border, claiming such hateful outbursts are an understandable reaction to the “occupation.” Ditto for the 17-year-old Palestinian who last year murdered Ari Fuld, an Israeli-American Jew, in cold blood.

People who would rightly condemn violence against Jews for ­being Jews as anti-Semitism lose their moral bearings when it comes to Israel, where political, territorial or economic reasons are offered as alibis for what is, at the core, anti-Semitism.

And when Israel is forced to defend itself, world leaders often draw a false moral equivalence ­between a Jewish democracy and its terrorist enemies. Naturally, they blame Israel for any resulting casualties. The inability or unwillingness to unequivocally condemn the anti-Semitic perpetrator is uniquely applied to Israel — the “Jew” among the nations.

Such biased attitudes allow the boycott, divest and sanctions movement to conceal its true goal of destroying the Jewish state. They also enable the likes of Corbyn to normalize overt hostility against Israel, something that was once considered beyond the pale in the West. Finally, elite tolerance for Israel-focused anti-Semitism has led to Jews being ostracized from supposedly “progressive” rallies in the West. You can claim that you find Zionism “creepy” when really you detest Jews.

This new form of anti-Semitism is especially pernicious, as it will bide its time until an ever-changing political climate allows it to ­reveal its true nature and turn on its ultimate target: the Jewish people everywhere.

It is imperative for the world to recognize that, to paraphrase the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., anti-Semitism anywhere is a threat to Jews everywhere. An ­attack against a Jew for being a Jew must be condemned for what it is — bigotry — regardless of whether it occurs in New York, Paris or ­Jerusalem.

American Jewish leaders took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times on Thursday to thank President Donald Trump for his efforts to combat anti-Semitism across the globe and criticize Democrats for their open embrace of causes advocating the destruction of Israel.

The advertisement, signed by more than 50 leading American Jewish voices, comes on the heels of Trump appointing Elan Carr as the new State Department Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism, a post that has become increasingly important in recent years as anti-Semitism and violence against Jews flourishes across the globe, particularly in Europe.

"Thank you, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for the appointment of Mr. Elan Carr as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism," states the ad, which was purchased by the Republican Jewish Coalition.

"Anti-Semitism must be confronted and defeated," the advertisement declares. It also contains a direct quote from Trump in which he declares, "The scourge of anti-Semitism cannot be ignored, cannot be tolerated, and it cannot be allowed to continue."

World Jewish Congress CEO and executive vice president Robert Singer addressed the Conference on Combating Antisemitism in the OSCE Region in Slovakia, which this week brought together political leaders, government representatives, stakeholders in academia, civil society organizations and the media.

Singer related to the survey released late last year by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) that indicated a high sentiment among Jews of feeling targeted by hate. Noting that “extremists on both the far Left and the far Right, antisemites and other lowlifes find common ground when it comes to hatred of Jews,” Singer said: “On the far Right, extremist parties have entered the mainstream, exploiting and manipulating Holocaust memory and glorifying Nazis as part of a nationalist agenda, denying their own antisemitism by claiming to be pro-Israel. On the far Left, disagreement with Israeli government policies has morphed into a disturbing anti-Zionism that seeks to deny the Jewish people the right to a state of their own, and to delegitimize Israel’s very existence. Antisemitism is no longer the extreme. It is mainstream.”

Antisemites have found the Internet to be an effective way of spreading their hate to an unimaginable number of people, Singer continued, noting that this serious threat pales in comparison to the threat Jewish communities around the world face to their physical security – in Bulgaria, Belgium, Denmark and the United States, to name just a few recent examples.

“We must find new ways to reach young people, whatever their nationality or religion, so they will be able to learn the lessons of history’s greatest tragedy,” Singer said, pointing to further statistics released last month by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, which found that one in 20 Britons do not believe that the Holocaust happened, and that 12% think the scale of the genocide has been inflated.

Berlin has become Europe’s capital of antisemitism. Those who have been accustomed to considering Malmö as such were, however, not wrong. Malmö still suffers from major antisemitism. Yet, antisemitic incidents require not only potential perpetrators. These in Malmö come mainly out of parts of the Muslim community. There must also be a sufficient number of Jews to harass.

Berlin, Germany’s largest Jewish community, has well over 30,000 Jews. The Jewish community in Malmö has shrunk to an estimated 500-600. Perhaps the best solution would be to establish different categories of European antisemitism capitals according to the number of Jews.

When the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, spoke a few months ago in Malmö, he was asked by Jewish and non-Jewish leaders to abolish his organization’s travel warning for the town. Rabbi Cooper answered that he would do so when finally one complaint about antisemitism in Malmö would lead to condemnation by a court. Although several years of numerous antisemitic incidents are behind us, this has not yet happened.

The Research and Information Center for Antisemitism in Berlin (RIAS) published a report that said in the first half of 2018, 527 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the German capital. These included 18 attacks, 21 intentional acts of vandalism and 18 threats. In the same period of 2017, 514 incidents were recorded. RIAS mentioned that there is particular reason for concern because of the increased number of attacks and threats.

In March 2018, a Berlin police report revealed that antisemitic crimes in the capital had doubled during the 2013-2017 period. Police sources told the German newspaper Tagesspiegel that the rise in antisemitism was connected to the increased number of migrants from the Middle East living in the city. National Antisemitism Commissioner Felix Klein has also admitted the statistics presented by the RIAS support the feeling among Jews that Muslims are far more involved in antisemitic incidents than official statistics indicate.

The truth, as many commentators have pointed out, is that the flags of all countries who recognised the interim-government of Juan Guaidó – almost two-dozen so far, including most of Europe, The US, Canada, and several other South American countries. So why make it about Israel?

Perhaps it was just a bit of leftie conspiracy nutter click-bait, you might be thinking. But how does that explain the presence of Palestinian flags at today’s protest outside the Bank of England, where a mob of Jeremy Corbyn’s sweaty peons laboured at the emotional work of screeching “No War On Venezuela!” and demanded the Exchequer unfreeze the assets of the falling regime. Maduro desperately needs the money for tank tracks, teargas and rubber bullets. Perhaps his police haven’t shot enough limbs off protesting students yet – as documented by Amnesty International, that well-known alt-right pro-Imperialist shill organisation (as it undoubtedly will soon be dismissed).

But back to the Palestinian flag waving outside the Bank of England. What crazed mind thinks taking a Palestinian flag to a protest involving a social revolution in South America Is relevant and appropriate? I’ll tell you why:

1. It’s outside a bank, so ‘Jews’, right? Running the world, sitting on the pile of gold in the vaults like a nesting Kraken so it can’t be used to feed the starving, or whatever they imagine Maduro needs it for. And how do you frighten Jews? You wave a Palestinian flag at them.
2. They imagine that the Venezuelan issue is one of National Liberation, rather than one in which the National Reserves have been liberated and transferred to the accounts of ordinary Venezuelans with the last name of Chavez or Maduro. And of course the uber-intersectionality is the intersection of righteous liberation causes with Palestine being the star on the tree.
3. Jeremy Corbyn supports the Maduro regime and the flag Jeremy Corbyn is most photographed in front of is not the Union Jack (the flag of the country he hopes to one day become Prime Minister of); and not the Hammer & Sickle (of the country he’s most misty eyed and nostalgic for), but the Palestinian flag. So it is packed into any basic protest utility pack.
4. Lastly, The Canary said the shadowy hand of Israel was behind the “attempted coup” in Venezuela and also that “Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip demonstrated in solidarity with Venezuela’s democratically elected government.”

So there you have it.

Isn’t it interesting that while The Canary has had to make up a story about Israel’s flag flying at anti-Maduro event, there actually is a Palestinian flag at pro-Maduro event. The former fact is easily explained, the latter defies logic unless it it twisted and distorted through a far-left media lens.

UK Labour MP Luciana Berger, who has been outspoken on the issue of antisemitism within her own party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, is facing a no-confidence motion in her constituency.

Berger, who is Jewish, has been the target of extensive criticism and abuse due to her stance against antisemitism and what she believes is Corbyn’s failure to adequately address the issue.

The no-confidence motion, which will be voted on Feb. 17, states, “Wavertree CLP has no confidence in Luciana Berger as our representative in parliament.”

“The UK is in crisis because of the appalling austerity policies of a government that serves the interests of the rich,” it continued. “We need a Labour government under the socialist leadership of our twice-elected leader Jeremy Corbyn. Instead of fighting for a Labour government our MP is continually using the media to criticize the man we all want to be prime minister.”

Wes Streeting, a Labour MP from Ilford North, tweeted in response, “Disgraceful. Motions of solidarity should be brought, not motions of no confidence.”

Journalist Oliver Kamm also weighed in, saying, “Almost all British Jews believe Labour is now led by an antisemite. Evidently Momentum activists in Liverpool Wavertree are intent on entrenching this belief. It won’t help her but I’m a longstanding Labour voter & @lucianaberger has my strong support.”

Former Labour official Adam Langleben reacted in a similar manner, saying, “An attack on @lucianaberger is an attack on all Labour Jews. I and others will be standing with Luciana all the way. I hope that all Labour members will join us in that solidarity.”

“If members deselect any MP due to their opposition to anti-Jewish racism in our party then its over,” he added.

Labour’s anti-Semitism problem has risen to the fore again with Labour members in Luciana Berger’s Liverpool Wavertree constituency tabling a motion of no confidence against her. Incredibly, John McDonnell has responded by pointing the finger of blame at Berger herself, eliciting disbelief from other senior Labour figures. Chuka branded it “totally unacceptable” and Shadow Cabinet Minister Angela Rayner has given Berger her “full support”. Labour’s official responses so far have been woeful…

It now emerges that the local Labour member who proposed one of the (two) no confidence motions, Kenneth Campbell, goes on regular rants about “traitorous Blairites” on Facebook, saying it is “about time [Berger] was exposed for the disruptive Zionist she is” and even claiming that Israel supports ISIS. In another rant he menacingly said that Laura Kuenssberg’s days are “nearing there [sic] end”

When is Labour going to get serious about rooting out the rot of anti-Semitism that has infested the party?

UPDATE: Both motions of no-confidence have been withdrawn by the local Labour Party and the extraordinary meeting has been cancelled…

Dear @LSarsour, you clearly know nothing of Judaism. Because what you stand for goes completely against it https://t.co/o95tgXD40z

— Ozraeli Dave (@Israellycool) February 8, 2019

Who knew that when Israel won the right to host Eurovision 2019, it would ignite controversy in Australia? Australia's entrant will be selected this weekend. At the same time, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Australia will set up shop nearby, demanding that SBS Television boycott Eurovision because it's being held in Israel.

To its credit, SBS responded quickly and definitively. "SBS respects the right for people to express their views and we acknowledge the concerns raised by those opposed to the contest being held in Israel. SBS has been proudly broadcasting Eurovision for 35 years and we will continue to do so because of the spirit of the event in bringing people and cultures together in a celebration of diversity and inclusion through music."

Then there are the principled voices, notably Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who blasted BDS during a historic apology for Canada's refusal to admit Jews fleeing the Holocaust. "Of all the Allied countries, Canada would admit the fewest number of Jews...far fewer than the UK and significantly fewer per capita than the U.S.," Trudeau said. "Of those it let in, 7,000 were labelled prisoners of war and unjustly imprisoned alongside Nazis....Hitler tested the world's resolve...as country after country proved indifferent to the plight of Jewish refugees. He watched as we...denied them entry."

Is it unrealistic to dream that the hypocrisy in singling out the world's only Jewish state for boycott while ignoring some of the most egregious human rights abusers - who also participate in Eurovision - will one day be rendered obsolete?

Eurovision winner Netta Barzilai slammed calls to boycott this year’s contest being held in Israel, saying in a BBC interview on Thursday, “When you boycott light, you spread darkness.”

The contest is typically kept separate from politics, but anti-Israel protesters have called on Eurovision organizers to pull the contest out of Israel and for participants to abstain from performing in the Jewish state, an approach the Israeli singer described as counterproductive.

“Boycotting is preventing light from being spread and when you boycott light, you spread darkness, that is what I think. I believe in a dialogue, I believe in protest, let’s have it, but boycotting isn’t the answer,” Barzilai told the BBC.

Barzilai won the song contest in 2018 with her massively popular ode to female empowerment, “Toy,” giving Israel hosting rights this year. The contest will take place in May in Tel Aviv.

"Boycotting isn't the answer"#Eurovision winner @NettaBarzilai reflects on the calls to boycott #eurovision2019⬇️#100daystoEurovisionpic.twitter.com/WsL2FAwS57

— BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) February 7, 2019

The competition is expected to draw tens of thousands of people and massive media attention to Israel. Anti-Israel protesters have zeroed in on the contest as a target for their boycott demands.

No, @GMB. You started this stupid poll. You can't delete it now because you didn't get the results you wanted. pic.twitter.com/2PEt6bpExg

— The Mossad (@TheMossadIL) February 8, 2019

For the blocked. pic.twitter.com/XoiFG19mjy

— The Mossad (@TheMossadIL) February 8, 2019

It was once considered immoral to divide a city politically and ideologically. Think Berlin and its wall. Now, Ireland wants to divide Jerusalem. Has it not learned anything from Belfast? Jerusalem is a united city where Jews, Christians and Muslims mingle, as any tourist can attest. It is also the capital of the State of Israel. But the Irish legislators want to divide this holy city. They will not sanction and boycott Arab goods and services. They will punish only its Jewish residents. This is anti-Semitic political practice.

Jordan illegally annexed Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) including Jerusalem in 1950. King Hussein, in 1960, called Jerusalem not Palestine but, “the second capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.” Jordan gave Arab refugees who had left their homes by order of the Arab High Command, during the Arab war of annihilation, Jordanian citizenship though they ensured that a specific United Nations refugee agency kept them in refugee camps. While Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria they did nothing to allow these Arabs to return to their homes. Instead, they kept them as political pawns in a cynical diplomatic battle against Israel or, as they told them, until the Arab armies will come and liberate Palestine and drive the Jews into the sea. Hence the war cry we still hear today, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” a slogan for a world without Israel.

The Palestinian movement, although divided against itself, is, at heart, part of that futile Arab war of annihilation against the Jewish State, and they look on the pending Irish bill as simply another shot in their attempts to dislodge Israel.

The malevolent Irish lawmakers can expect heavy blowback from a number of sources, including the EU which has decreed that such discriminatory legislation is against EU principles. It will also be subject to counter sanctions from the US Administration and twenty-seven American states. All have passed stringent laws banning contact with any entity practicing BDS against Israel. State and federal laws may lead to divestments from Irish pension funds, stop trade negotiations with Ireland, and instruct corporations not to invest or do business with entities that conduct discriminatory practices.

This then is the essence of what is likely to occur as a result of this biased, anti-Semitic bill that has cast a terrible stain of the character and reputation of the Irish Parliament that, with this bill, will be speaking in the name of the whole of Ireland.

Shame on them!

I enjoy kosher wine from the Golan Heights and the small candelabrum I use to light candles during the festival of Chanuka was purchased from a stall in the Jewish quarter of the old city of Jerusalem.

That makes me a criminal twice over if this bill boycotting goods manufactured in the West Bank, which was passed by the Dáil, becomes law in the Republic of Ireland.

I would face up to five years in an Irish jail.

And with thousands of Irish citizens visiting Jerusalem each year as pilgrims and holiday makers, I suspect it would not just be me.

This bill treats the Jewish presence at the Western Wall in Jerusalem or at the burial place of the Patriarchs in Hebron, as illegal settlements and doing business with any Jews there is a criminal offence.

Those behind this bill have failed to impose an effective consumer-led boycott against Israel despite over ten years campaigning.

They are therefore turning to abusing the criminal law to impose a partisan anti-Israel point of view.

The Palestinian Authority is corrupt, hasn’t held a democratic election in over a decade, and rewards violence targeted against Israeli citizens by paying those convicted of terrorist crimes.

Hamas, perhaps the largest Palestinian political party, wants to impose a radical Islamist state in place of Israel from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.

These are not matters discussed in the Dail by those who propose this hopelessly one-sided bill.

The anti-Zionist group “Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)” has been described in the mainstream media, at various times, as “an anti-discrimination group”(Boston Globe, Aug. 7, 2015); “an American Jewish group” that has been “critical of Israeli treatment of Palestinians” (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 8, 2018 and Sept. 9, 2015); a “U.S. organization…run by Jewish activists” (Washington Post, July 8, 2018); “an organization that opposes Israel’s policies toward Palestinians and the continued expansion of settlements in the region” (Chicago Tribune, May 5, 2014); and a “liberal group… critical of the right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu …” (New York Times, Dec. 7, 2017).

Is it any wonder, then, that some news consumers think JVP is just a pro-peace organization representing Jewish interests while opposing certain policies of the current Israeli government?

Nothing can be further from the truth: JVP lobbies against Jewish interests, using its “Jewish” label to shield it from accusations of anti-Semitism while it tries to disguise its shameful purpose in the misleading language of peace and human rights. Far from being “inspired by Jewish tradition to work together for peace, social justice and human rights,” as its website sanctimoniously declares, its animus is not directed against any specific Israeli policy or leader as much as it targets support from any headquarters for a Jewish state.

CAMERA’s backgrounder follows with a more detailed look at JVP’s actions, with information on:
JVP’s Acknowledged Goal: Dividing Jews and Eliminating the Jewish State
Peddling Anti-Semitic Tropes and Engaging in Anti-Semitic Actions
Celebrating Terrorists and Partnering With Jew Haters
Attacking Those Who Fight Against Anti-Semitism and Attempting to Alter the Definition of Anti-Semitism
Attempting to Muzzle Free Speech, Alternate Viewpoints and Educational Opportunities
Brainwashing America’s Youth: JVP Pushes BDS in U.S. Public Schools

Shares in South Africa’s largest dairy firm plunged by nearly 10 percent on Thursday, as anti-Israel activists attempted to wreck a $354 million buyout deal with an Israeli-led consortium.

Composed of local, black-owned investment companies and the majority stakeholder, the Tel Aviv-based Central Bottling Co. (CBC), the consortium announced the buyout of South African dairy company Clover on Monday, sending the company’s stock soaring by 21 percent.

But after protests from the influential political lobby in South Africa that advocates for an economic and cultural boycott of Israel, Brimstone Investments, one of the four South African partners in the consortium, said on Thursday that it would “reconsider” its participation in the deal, sending Clover’s share price tumbling.

News of the Israeli-led buyout earlier in the week had been warmly welcomed by South African financial analysts, who are concerned by the sharp decline in foreign direct investment in the country in recent years.

“Yesterday’s South African Rand 4.8 billion takeover offer for Clover Industries by an Israeli-led consortium is notable,” wrote leading financial commentator Douglas Hogg on Tuesday.

Despite ongoing international concerns about South Africa’s business climate, particularly in the politically-sensitive agricultural sector, the offer for Clover showed that “the smart money is returning to SA,” Hogg asserted. “Believe it.”

One in five Americans back boycotting Israel, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll.

“Support by several prominent new Democratic members of the House has raised the profile of the effort to punish Israel economically for its treatment of the Palestinians, but few voters are ready to join in,” Rasmussen said.

The poll found that 41% of likely US voters oppose BDS, while 39% are undecided on the issue.

A Middle East security bill passed by the Senate on Tuesday includes a provision that would allow states to penalize businesses that take part in boycotts of Israel.

The legislation — welcomed by pro-Israel groups — faces an uncertain future in the House of Representatives, partly due to free speech concerns that have been raised by its opponents.

Hey @BDSmovement@jvplive et al, thank you for contributing to #Israel's economy! https://t.co/xNlCFOcCqA

— Ozraeli Dave (@Israellycool) February 7, 2019

On the evening of February 6th a report headlined “US to buy Israeli Iron Dome missile defence system” was published on the BBC News website’s ‘US & Canada’ and ‘Middle East’ pages.

Overall the report’s text gives an accurate account of the story.

“The US military has announced plans to buy and test out Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system.

The system, which uses radar and interceptor missiles to combat incoming threats, has been in use since 2011.

The US Department of Defence has said the system will be used on a test basis, while it assesses options for the military’s long-term needs.”

The report includes a photograph which was originally captioned “Iron Dome anti-missile system fires an interceptor missile as rockets are launched from Gaza towards Israel near the southern city of Sderot, Israel August 9, 2018”.

The BBC however chose to reword that photo’s caption as follows:
“The system, which took billions of dollars to develop, has faced criticism for its cost”.

Criticism from whom? Is that criticism relevant or justified? What is the cost of the system? Is its cost made effective by savings elsewhere? The BBC of course did not bother to answer any of those questions.

A report released this week exposes antisemitic rhetoric used on social media by the far-right activists behind the Lukov March in Bulgaria, a torch-lit ceremony that consists of nationalists and neo-Nazis from across Europe.

The annual February march in Sofia is held in remembrance of Gen. Hristo Lukov, a Nazi ally who sent 11,300 Jews to the Nazi death camp of Treblinka in Poland.

The demonstration’s organizers have claimed not to be antisemitic, but comments displayed on its official Facebook page convey Jew-hatred among advocates against both Bulgarian and worldwide Jewry, according to a report from the World Jewish Congress.

For example, a Facebook post by the organizers, reacting to WJC efforts last year to stop the march, targeted the organization’s CEO and Executive Vice President Robert Singer: “No mister, with a name of a brand of sewing machines, the problem of Bulgaria is not Lukov March. The problem is that there are people with too long noses like you, who are burning with desire, snooping where they do not belong. But be sure that whatever you do, General. Lukov will receive a worthy honor from the Bulgarian youth!”

“More than 50 comments were written on the post by the followers of the page, many objectively anti-Semitic in nature and tone, including: ‘Jews are the ones who sow hate in the world! Crafty and cheeky!’ and ‘These Jews want to be everywhere, they are so busybody. And then they wonder why everyone hates them,’ ” according to the WJC.

A German auction house Thursday scrapped the planned sale of 26 artworks attributed to Adolf Hitler, after doubts emerged about their authenticity just days before they were to go under the hammer.

Five other paintings signed “A. Hitler,” all of them watercolors, will still be auctioned off on Saturday as scheduled, according to the Weidler auction house in the southern city of Nuremberg.

A vase, wicker armchair and table cloth presumed to have belonged to the late Nazi dictator also remain on offer in what Weidler has billed a “special auction.”

“Unfortunately we must inform you that some of the pictures have been dropped because of a review,” the auction house said in a statement.

The move came after prosecutors on Wednesday collected 63 artworks from the Weidler premises bearing the signature “A.H.” or “A. Hitler,” over suspicions the works were not created by Hitler himself.

The US State Department is ready to allot the second half of the $60 million in compensation for survivors deported to Nazi camps via the French rail system, and their spouses and descendants.

Claimants will receive virtually double the amount they were allotted after the governments of the United States and France reached agreement on the $60 million in 2014.

The agreement redressed longstanding claims by survivors who were otherwise unable to obtain reparations limited to French nationals through the French pension system. The SNCF rail system, which is owned by the French government, transported Jews to the death camps during the Holocaust.

The fund, with monies from France but administered by the US government, was available to non-French nationals who are citizens of the United States and any other country that does not have a bilateral reparations agreement with France. (Belgium, Poland, Britain, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are subject to such agreements.)

Officials accelerated initial payments from half the fund to get some compensation to survivors and their spouses while they were still alive, and kept half in reserve for other potential claimants.

A company headquartered in Concord, Massachusetts with Israeli roots is playing an important role in curbing global hunger, saving millions of people from malnutrition, and pulling farmers around the globe out of the cycle of poverty. Its invention is already doing great things, but much more can be done to help the people of the developing world. The Grain Cocoon, a hermetic storage bag, should be a standard arrow in the quiver of every global development agency, including USAID, that works with farmers.

Worldwide, 805 million people are chronically undernourished, and many farmers in the developing world still use burlap sacks to store their goods. Insects can easily infiltrate these bags, often destroying more than half of a farmer’s harvest. When farmers use pesticides, they often lead to extreme sickness and even death. And worse, over time, toxic products also become ineffective.

Inefficient storage techniques result in the loss of roughly 1.3 billion tons of food annually. That’s one-third of all food produced for human consumption, an amount sufficient to feed every starving person in the world. Reducing these losses, experts say, would play a critical role in the fight against world hunger.

Shlomo Navarro came to Israel from Turkey as a young adult in the 1960s. He later became a research entomologist at the Israel Agricultural Research Organization (VOLCANI), a prestigious institute where he worked for many years. As a result of his work, he developed the Grain Cocoon, a large, hermetically sealed bag for rice, grain, spices, and legumes. The bag can hold anywhere from five to 300 tons of grain. It’s made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a strong material that doesn’t tear easily. When farmers seal the bag, it traps bugs and their eggs inside and deprives them of oxygen, suffocating them to death, which makes pesticides unnecessary. On average, Navarro says, the cocoon can save more than 99 percent of a farmer’s crops. It can be used any time after harvest collection, and once grain is placed inside it, the insects generally die within about 10 days. Farmers can easily remove the dead bugs using a sieve or other techniques.

Bamba, a peanut butter-flavored puffed corn snack, is synonymous with Israeli childhood. Generations of Israeli kids grew up eating Bamba — which is considered highly nutritious and is often credited with lowering peanut allergy rates in the country — since it was introduced in the 1960s.

A 2017 blog post by the US National Institute of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins discussing the rise in peanut allergy in the US suggests exposing babies to peanut-containing foods as early as four to six months of age as a means of inoculation. The post lists Bamba as one of the foods shown to reduce the occurrence of peanut allergy.

Now, Bamba manufacturer Osem Group is negotiating with Swiss multinational Nestlé S.A. for a US distribution agreement that will see Bamba become a staple in the diet of US kids. Osem itself is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nestlé. If the agreement is finalized, Bamba will be added to Nestlé’s baby food division, which distributes such popular brands as Gerber and NAN.

A spokeswoman for Osem told Calcalist Thursday that while Osem is working vigorously to market Bamba in North America through its US subsidiary, it is not negotiating with Nestlé over Bamba’s distribution.

Israelis are the world leaders in social media use, with 77 percent of adults using social platforms, and rank second in smartphone ownership, according to a survey published Tuesday.

Younger, better educated and higher income Israelis were more likely to use outlets such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and women more likely than men, according to the Pew Research Center.

Israel edged out South Korea, where 76% of respondents reported using social networks. Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia and the US follow — the latter coming in at 70%.

Israel ranks second in terms of smartphone ownership, with 88% of the population owning a smartphone (98% own a mobile phone of some kind). South Korea has the highest rate, with 95% of adults owning a smartphone.

Worldwide, 76% of people in advanced economies own a smartphone, while only 45% of respondents in emerging economies own one.

Brazil will receive 10 generators that use Israeli technology to produce pure, clean-drinking water from ambient air, according to Brazilian Minister of Science Marcos Cesar Pontes.

The revelation came to light on Tuesday when Pontes was in Israel as part of Brazil’s mission to this year’s Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv.

During his visit, Pontes toured Watergen’s headquarters, where he tasted the fresh water produced by the GEN-350. He also met with Watergen’s president, Dr. Michael Mirilashvili.

Each of the 10 units is a GEN-350 atmospheric water generator, developed by the Israel-based company of Watergen. A single GEN-350 can produce up to 900 liters of water per day.

According to Pontes, the GEN-350s will be installed in schools and hospitals throughout Brazil, particularly in areas that lack safe drinking water.

Weighing just 800 kilograms, the GEN-350 is easily transportable and can be installed anywhere, even in remote places. It is provided with an internal water-treatment system and needs no infrastructure to operate except for electricity.