"You hear conservatives all the time — rightly so, in my opinion — talk about the tone set by people in the Arab world. Palestinian leaders talking about, and the way they talk about Israelis, justifying, in the same way you're doing, no direct link necessarily between what the leader says and the violence against some poor Israeli girl in a pizzeria — but the idea that you’re validating this hatred. You can’t compare the ideology of Hamas with anything else but at the same time, either tone matters or it doesn’t."

We’re teaming up with Jewish Voice For Peace to let CNN President Jeff Zucker know that this kind of casual anti-Arab and Islamophobic bigotry—particularly in the aftermath of an explicitly anti-immigrant mass shooting—is unconscionable.

By inserting Palestinians and Arabs in a conversation about white supremacist violence, Tapper pushed the Islamophobic “terrorist” narrative about Muslims and Arabs that’s been mainstreamed over the past few decades.

Questioning Islam or Muslims is not Islamophobia

It is not appropriate to label all, or even the majority of those, who question Islam and Muslims as Islamophobes. Equally, it is not Islamophobic to denounce crimes committed by individual Muslims or those claiming Islam as a motivation for their actions.

"A critical study of Islam or Muslims is not Islamophobic," former CAIR Research Director Mohamed Nimer wrote in 2007. "Likewise, a disapproving analysis of American history and government is not anti-American... One can disagree with Islam or with what some Muslims do without having to be hateful." [emphasis added]

Closer to home, Sarsour has worked with an interfaith group called The Dialogue Project, through which she has come to understand those who have suffered on the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Her name was Robin, and her son died in one of the suicide bombings in a café,” says Sarsour. “And I never got to meet a person like that, and obviously I'm a mother so just hearing and seeing the emotions of someone who lost their child, obviously I wouldn't want that to happen to anyone, so it made me go home and kind of more look at this not from a political place, but look at — there's human beings being affected by this, too, and I never had that opportunity to really look at that."

She's been plagued by a 2004 article that's been circulating around the internet, an article Sarsour says is untrue.

It claims that at the time, she had family members in Israeli jails with ties to Hamas.

"I can't deny that people related to me have been in Israeli prison,” says Sarsour. “Does that mean that any of them were charged with crimes or they are terrorists or potential suicide bombers? Absolutely not. This is just the reality of Palestinians living under military occupation."

Could an Old Israeli Plan for Peace be America’s New One. Is America about to adopt the Israeli prime minister’s 20-year-old plan for a durable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians?

Of late, a new “villain” was introduced into political discussions about the future of the Middle East. There are those who said that the responsibility for a thousand years of Middle Eastern obstinacy, radicalism, and fundamentalism has now been compressed into one person—namely, me. My critics contended that if only I had been less “obstructionist” in my policies, the convoluted and tortured conflicts of the Middle East would immediately and permanently have settled themselves.

While it is flattering for any person to be told that he wields so much power and influence, I am afraid that I must forgo the compliment. This is not false modesty. The problem of achieving a durable peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is complicated enough. Yet it pales in comparison with the problem of achieving an overall peace in the region. Even after the attainment of peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors, any broader peace in the region will remain threatened by the destabilizing effects of Islamic fundamentalism and Iran and Iraq’s fervent ambition to arm themselves with ballistic missiles and atomic weapons. Let me first say categorically: It is possible for Israel to achieve peace with its Arab neighbors. But if this peace is to endure, it must be built on foundations of security, justice, and above all, truth. Truth has been the first casualty of the Arab campaign against Israel, and a peace built upon half-truths and distortions is one that will eventually be eroded and whittled away by the harsh political winds that blow in the Middle East. A real peace must take into account the true nature of this region, with its endemic antipathies, and offer realistic remedies to the fundamental problem between the Arab world and the Jewish state.

Fundamentally, the problem is not a matter of shifting this or that border by so many kilometers, but reaffirming the fact and right of Israel’s existence. The territorial issue is the linchpin of the negotiations that Israel must conduct with the Palestinian Authority, Syria, and Lebanon. Yet a territorial peace is hampered by the continuing concern that once territories are handed over to the Arab side, they will be used for future assaults to destroy the Jewish state. Many in the Arab world have still not had an irreversible change of heart when it comes to Israel’s existence, and if Israel becomes sufficiently weak the conditioned reflex of seeking our destruction would resurface. Ironically, the ceding of strategic territory to the Arabs might trigger this destructive process by convincing the Arab world that Israel has become vulnerable enough to attack.

That Israel’s existence was a bigger issue than the location of its borders was brought home to me in the first peace negotiations that I attended as a delegate to the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991. In Madrid, the head of the Palestinian delegation delivered a flowery speech calling for the cession of major Israeli population centers to a new Palestinian state and the swamping of the rest of Israel with Arab refugees, while the Syrian foreign minister questioned whether the Jews, not being a nation, had a right to a state of their own in the first place. (And this at a peace conference!) Grievances over disputed lands and disputed waters, on which the conference sponsors hoped the participants would eventually focus their attention, receded into insignificance in the face of such a primal hostility toward Israel’s existence. This part of the conference served to underscore the words of Syria’s defense minister, Mustafa Tlas, who with customary bluntness had summed up the issue one year earlier: “The conflict between the Arab nation and Zionism is over existence, not borders.”

From the book A Durable Peace: Israel and its Place Among the Nations by Benjamin Netanyahu. Copyright © 2000 by Benjamin Netanyahu. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Israelis value security above all else, located as they are in a region filled with people, organizations, and governments that at best do not want them there and in many cases are actively trying to kill them.

In the quarter-century since the Oslo Accords, Israelis and Palestinians have failed to make peace. The responsibility for that failure belongs to the Palestinians.

The Palestinian entity in control of Gaza, the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas, says explicitly that it will never accept Jewish sovereignty and devotes its resources to terrorism against Israel.

Its putatively moderate counterpart in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas, has refused all offers to settle the conflict, which have included substantial territorial concessions.

The PA has never put forward a counteroffer of its own. It has done nothing to build the institutions of statehood other than deploying multiple police forces that repress political opposition. It has generated vile anti-Jewish propaganda that harks back to Europe in the 1930s and has sponsored the murder of Jews by publicly praising and paying the murderers. The Palestinians have thus clearly demonstrated that they are not "a partner for peace."

Assuring the Palestinians that they will pay no price - indeed that they will continue to receive generous Western political and financial support - for their unyielding and indeed violent refusal to accept the legitimacy and permanence of a Jewish state in the Middle East has helped to perpetuate the conflict.

Israel has given to the US much to offset the foreign aid that has allowed Israel to maintain its security edge. And, of course, we appreciate that help and assistance. But, what about the future? I think over the next few years Israel will do its best not to be put in the situation that it was in during the last war in Gaza. Where a president Obama could hold Israel hostage by not allowing them to resupply smart weapons from storage facilities right here in Israel.

The agreement was that in payment for the US storing the tools of war in Israel, Israel would be able to re-arm without asking permission. Going back on that agreement was a surprise for Israel, and taught us a lesson. The lesson is, don't put your best pardner into the position where he can deny you the weapons you need to survive. Recently I read that in preparations for the next war Israel has been manufacturing, and storing bombs, missiles, ammunition, and more so that we don't put ourselves at risk. It is reported that we have 10 times the stored weapons that we had during the 2006 war in Lebanon. In the future, Israel will be less and less dependent upon the largess of the US and foreign aid. I think that we will, however, go into joint venture deals where weapons systems will be developed jointly. The US may supply the bulk of the financing, while Israel supplies the brain power, and real time testing under combat situations.

All of the above says loudly that Israel will be more like a co-equal with the US rather than a small nation dependent on the largess of a larger big brother. Never again will we be put in the position where a mission to destroy a target has to be canceled because we felt compelled to tell the US our plans. And, the US called the target to warn him. This was done by Obama, the leader of our so called greatest allie. We know that Obama isn't unique, there will be another one sometime in the future. For that reason we are more self-reliant than ever and will continue to be so.

The weekend that could have turned out differently if it hadn’t been for one bold move: pic.twitter.com/iYrgwjuv6V

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) August 26, 2019

The terrorist bombing that killed 17-year-old Rina Shnerb on Friday came less than a week after a senior Fatah official called for Fatah's military wing to resume terrorist bombings.

Fatah Movement Revolutionary Council member Hatem Abd Al-Qader demanded that "military activity of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades be renewed," arguing that their activities "constituted a source of pain for the Israeli army at the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada." The Intifada - the 5-year PA terror campaign in which more than 1,100 Israelis were murdered - was characterized by numerous bombings, in particular suicide bombings.

Noting that terror acts are already being carried out from the Gaza Strip, which are being launched by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Abd Al-Qader stated that Fatah likewise is "obligated" to "return to the armed struggle," the PA euphemism for terror. He explained that this must be directed by the Palestinian leadership - "from the top down":
"He emphasized that the nature of the activity in the Gaza Strip is military par-excellence, and that this obligates the Fatah Movement to officially return to the option of armed struggle...
Abd Al-Qader noted that the Sixth Fatah General Conference [in 2009] confirmed the right to resist in all forms, including armed struggle, and did not limit the resistance to a certain type. He also said that he does not believe in popular resistance in the current form, because it must come from the top down and not from the bottom up."
[Donia Al-Watan, independent Palestinian news agency, Aug. 18, 2019]

The fact that what Israeli authorities say was a complex bombing attack at the Danny Spring last week was carried out less than a week after Abd Al-Qader's call for violence and terror shows that Palestinians are already expanding the scope of their terror to include bombings. For a number of years Palestinian terror has been characterized by shootings, stabbings, Molotov cocktails, and car rammings.

But Abd Al-Qader is not a solitary voice in the PA calling for and supporting terror attacks against Israelis. As Palestinian Media Watch has documented for years, PA leaders promote and glorify terrorists and their attacks. For example, Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki honored the family of Omar Abu Laila who stabbed and murdered two Israelis, and wished for them that "Allah reward them." PA Chairman Abbas' deputy in Fatah, Mahmoud Al-Aloul, glorified the same murderer, encouraging other young Palestinians to be like him by stating that "there are thousands" like him.

Earlier this month, the Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) passed a resolution that calls on the US government to subsidize the Palestinian Authority (PA) as it pays salaries to murderers and terrorists serving time in Israeli jails.

Proponents of the resolution, which was passed by the assembly “en banc” (without any debate, along with a number of other resolutions), would likely say that it does not ask the US government to directly subsidize the Palestinian Authority — but instead, calls on Congress to send millions of dollars to Augusta Victoria Hospital (AVH) in East Jerusalem.

Only a grinch could say no to such a thing. Giving money to a hospital is a good thing, right?

The problem is that AVH needs US money because the PA hasn’t been able to pay its bills to the facility.

According to ELCA documents, the Palestinian Authority owes a total of $95 million to a network of six hospitals in East Jerusalem, of which Augusta Victoria is a part. It’s a big deal, because many Palestinians rely on AVH for treatment of chronic illnesses.

A fact-sheet produced by the ELCA states that the hospital “offers specialized care not available in other hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza, including radiation therapy for cancer patients and pediatric hemodialysis” and that “approximately 30 percent of the cancer patients treated at AVH are from Gaza.”

.@UN asked by veteran correspondent Evelyn Leopold if there is "any update on UNRWA, changes in the top leadership, to save UNRWA?"@UN_Spokesperson: "No, no updates to share with you at this point... Nothing that I know of." pic.twitter.com/74mBuMzijb

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) August 27, 2019

Fifty-two years ago, following the Six-Day War, Israel took control of the eastern part of this city. After annexing additional Arab villages to the north and south, it created what we know today as East Jerusalem, where approximately 200,000 Jews and 300,000 Arabs live.

While Israel became the sovereign ruler of these territories, it did not fully integrate East Jerusalem and its Arab residents. A short stroll in the Arab neighborhoods today reveals a dire picture of decades-long neglect and lack of investment by the majority of Israel’s governments: garbage piling up on the streets, residential buildings in disarray, broken sidewalks, playgrounds nowhere to be seen. This neglect, combined with a lack of law enforcement that allows crime and terrorism to breed, intensifies the feeling of insecurity among both Jews and Arabs.

Some argue, in light of the continuous turmoil in eastern Jerusalem, that it would be in Israel’s best interest to wash its hands of this part of the city. A few policymakers have even gone so far as to propose separating from certain hostile neighborhoods and handing them over to the Palestinian Authority. They all base their claims on supposedly Zionist grounds: to ensure that the State of Israel, and its capital in particular, remain predominantly Jewish and secure.

In truth, however, repudiating our responsibilities in East Jerusalem defeats Israel’s Zionist purpose and is incompatible with its national interests. Instead of giving up on East Jerusalem, the Israeli government should work to integrate its Arab population and help this community flourish.

Palestinian terrorists fired four mortar shells at Israel from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, with one of them landing inside Israeli territory, the army said.

In response, an Israeli aircraft bombed a Hamas observation post east of Juhor ad-Dik in the central Gaza Strip, according to the Israel Defense Forces.

No injuries were reported on either side.

The military said one of the shells cleared the border and struck an open field in Israeli territory, causing no damage. Three appeared to have landed inside Gaza.

The shell that hit Israel triggered rocket alert sirens in the area where the mortar landed, the army said.

The volley came amid a flurry of rocket attacks and mutual threats between Israel and terror groups in the Gaza Strip. Israel has accused the Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad of being behind the recent violence from the enclave.

Senior Egyptian intelligence officials invited Hamas leaders to Cairo for talks aimed at restoring calm and a delegation led by two top Hamas members was slated to leave Gaza late on Monday, according to Israel’s Kan public broadcaster.

A delegation from the Islamic Jihad is expected to head to Cairo in the coming days as well.

Hezbollah and its allies are building a case for war and Lebanon’s media and other officials are fueling the tensions with assertions that drones that crashed in Beirut carried bombs. Whether or not the drones carried C4 explosives or that their aim was to carry out a bombing or target an individual is not particularly important because what matters is the calculations going on beneath the surface in Lebanon.

Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun by inferring that the incident marks a kind of “declaration of war” ups the rhetoric and the chances that a green light has been given to Hezbollah to retaliate. The main issue Hezbollah has faced in the past, since Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, is to try to create a legitimate reason for maintaining a massive armed group within a functioning state. It has been able to keep its arsenal, not only because no one can disarm it, but also through claiming it is part of a “resistance” that “defends” Lebanon. As such it claimed after 2000 that it must recover the “Sheba farms” or “Mount Dov” area on the border, a disputed territory with Israel and Syria. Suddenly, a tiny area became the reason for Hezbollah’s existence. This was all a veneer for the real reason of Hezbollah’s existence, which is that as an Iranian proxy and ally which wants the group to continue stockpiling its weapons and building up its infrastructure along Israel’s border to threaten Israel.

Hezbollah doesn’t keep secret its regional ambitions. It fought in the Syrian civil war, it has contact with Shi’ite militias in Iraq, it talks about the Houthis in Yemen as if they are a part of its strategy. It shows images of Al-Aqsa as if it is the main champion of the Palestinian case against US President Donald Trump’s Deal of the Century. At every juncture its role is regional and global. Two small drones, one of which apparently caught on video was far from clandestine, sounding more like a flying washing machine on spin cycle, are merely Hezbollah’s icing on the cake justifying its “right” to respond. This is lip service because Israel uncovered Hezbollah tunnels in December 2018 which showed Hezbollah as having violated the 2006 UN Resolution 1701. So, Aoun says that the drone incident also violates the resolution. This is to create a legal pretext and cover should hostilities begin. Hezbollah and its allies in Lebanon, including President Aoun, are thus already creating the context for the post-war scenario.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Hezbollah terror chief Hassan Nasrallah to “calm down” Tuesday, as Israel braced for a possible retaliation from the Lebanese group in the north despite reported efforts by the US to cool tensions between Beirut and Jerusalem.

“I heard Nasrallah’s speech. I suggest he calm down,” Netanyahu said at a ceremony in Jerusalem.

In a fiery speech Sunday, Nasrallah vowed to exact revenge on the Jewish state following an Israeli strike against a weapons storage facility in Syria on Saturday night that left Hezbollah fighters dead. Israel has also been blamed for the apparent explosion or crash of two drones in a Hezbollah-controlled area of Beirut and an air raid on a Palestinian camp deep inside Lebanon.

Israel said the strike inside Syria had thwarted a plot by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps to launch explosives-laden drones into Israel, overseen by powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, who heads the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’s expeditionary Quds Force.

“[Nasrallah] knows full well that Israel knows how to defend itself well and pay back its enemies in kind. I want to tell him and Lebanon, which hosts this organization that is trying to destroy us, and I say this to Qassem Soleimani: Be careful what you say and be more careful what you do.”

The world must take action to stop Iranian aggression against Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday, against a backdrop of recent security incidents in the Middle East that have raised regional tensions.

“Iran is operating on a broad front to carry out murderous terrorist attacks against the State of Israel,” Netanyahu stated. “Israel will continue to defend its security however that may be necessary.”

“I call on the international community to act immediately so that Iran halts these attacks,” he added.

IAF air strikes in Syria on Saturday night thwarted what Jerusalem said was an Iranian plot to strike sites in northern Israeli with explosive-laden drones.

Last Thursday, Netanyahu hinted of possible Israeli involvement in the recent destruction of Iran-linked weapons depots in Iraq.

And most recently, early Monday morning, the Israeli military reportedly hit targets in Lebanon tied to an Iran-backed Palestinian terror group, the PFLP-GC.

Netanyahu spoke with US Vice President Mike Pence by telephone on Monday. Later, Pence tweeted, “The United States fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself from imminent threats. Under President @realDonaldTrump, America will always stand with Israel!”

Iran is operating on a broad front to carry out murderous terrorist attacks against the State of Israel. Israel will continue to defend its security however that may be necessary.
I call on the international community to act immediately so that Iran halts these attacks. pic.twitter.com/hs3AJnXMLc

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) August 26, 2019

The Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip will join any confrontation between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terror group, the Lebanese satellite television station Al-Mayadeen reported on Tuesday.

The Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Mayadeen quoted an unnamed source in the “Palestinian resistance” in the Gaza Strip as saying: “If war breaks out with Hezbollah, we will be at the front line.”

The source, who was described as a leader of the “Palestinian resistance,” said that Israel “must read the message of our support for the resistance in Lebanon.”

Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Gaza-based groups have condemned Israel’s recent airstrikes in Syrian and Lebanon and voiced support for Hezbollah.

A drone attack on a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut early Sunday that was attributed to Israel targeted the Lebanese terror group’s precision missile project, the British Times newspaper reported Tuesday.

In the predawn hours of Sunday morning, two copter-style drones crashed in the Dahiyeh neighborhood of Beirut, an area of the city known to house Hezbollah members and offices.

One of the unmanned aerial vehicles was reportedly brought down by teenagers who pelted it with rocks. It was recovered by Hezbollah and taken away for study. The other drone exploded while still in the air, causing damage, according to Lebanese officials.

Hezbollah has claimed that its media offices were damaged by the blast.

However, according to the Times, the explosion set fire to two crates that held materials for a Hezbollah program to turn its stock of simple rockets into precision-guided missiles — a project that is of deep concern to Israel as it would significantly increase the threat posed by these projectiles.

One of the crates contained a “computerized control” unit and the other held a specialized industrial mixer that is used to make solid-state fuel, the Times reported, providing no source for the information.

The US Defense Department appeared to distance itself from recent attacks against Shiite militia bases in Iraq attributed to Israel, backing Baghdad’s sovereignty and promising to cooperate with Iraqi investigations.

Baghdad has fumed over a series of mysterious attacks on the Iran-backed Popular Mobilizations Forces recently, which have been attributed to Israel with tacit US support.

“We support Iraqi sovereignty and have repeatedly spoken out against any potential actions by external actors inciting violence in Iraq,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan R. Hoffman said in a statement late Monday.

“The government of Iraq has the right to control their own internal security and protect their democracy.”

Earlier Monday, a powerful bloc in Iraq’s parliament called for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq after the wave of airstrikes blamed on Israel targeted Iran-backed militias in the country.

Bahrain’s foreign minister appeared to back Israel on Monday after it reportedly struck at Iranian and Iran-backed militias’ installations in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in recent days.

Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa’s comment came after Lebanese President Michel Aoun and an Iran-backed powerful Iraqi paramilitary force on Monday both said that the respective strikes on their countries had been a “declaration of war” by Israel.

On Twitter, Khalifa said: “Iran is the one who has declared a war on us, with its Revolutionary Guards Corps, its Lebanese party [Hezbollah in Lebanon], its Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, its Houthi arm in Yemen and others.

“So one who strikes and destroys the piles of their ammunition is not to blame. That is self-defense,” he added.

Khalifa also tweeted a picture of Article 51 of Chapter 7 in the United Nations Charter and said it “very clearly affirms the right of states to self-defense against any threat or aggression.”

Since when was taking action against Iranian terrorist proxies 'attacking four countries,' @Newsweek?!

And since when was the Gaza Strip considered a "country?"#HeadlineFailhttps://t.co/Kgag9grKlzpic.twitter.com/Xk8deUQz3F

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 27, 2019

Remember the armed Palestinians who were killed by the IDF in the northern #Gaza Strip last week? Hamas referred to them as “rebellious youth.” Here is one of the men killed: Mohammed Samir Tramsi. A member of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. #Israelpic.twitter.com/o7WzGdnouZ

— Joe Truzman (@Jtruzmah) August 27, 2019

The IDF began limiting traffic on roads along the Lebanese border over fears of retaliation by Hezbollah as tensions remain high following alleged Israeli attacks.

“In light of an operational status assessment, it was decided that the movement of certain military vehicles on several roads would be possible only on the basis of individual approval and in accordance with the situational assessment of the situation,” the IDF said in a statement given to The Jerusalem Post.

The order was given by the military to all units in the area on Tuesday morning, restricting travel between 0-5 kilometers from the border and ordering all troops to carry weapons and wear protective equipment should their request to drive on the border roads be approved.

The army’s Northern Command has been on high alert since Saturday night after the Israeli Air Force carried out strikes against a cell belonging to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force in Syria which planned to launch armed drones to attack targets in northern Israel.

Israel has been determined to stop Iranian entrenchment is Syria, but it is an Iranian-backed foe in Lebanon that Israel must grapple with the most. Our Emily Rose has the story.

Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said in an August 25, 2019 address that aired on Al-Manar TV (Lebanon) that two Israeli drones entered and carried out an attack in the Mouawad neighborhood in Dahieh, South Beirut the previous night. He said that a two-meter-long reconnaissance drone was downed and subsequently captured by young men who threw stones at it while it was flying low between buildings on a reconnaissance run. He then said that a second drone arrived roughly two minutes later and attacked a house in the area, which he claimed had been a hang-out spot for young Hizbullah members, by crashing into it and exploding. Nasrallah said that there have been similar drone attacks taking place against the PMU in Iraq, and he claimed that these attacks have also been carried out by Israel. He announced that Hizbullah will do whatever it can to prevent such attacks from taking place in Lebanon and that Hizbullah will begin confronting Israeli drones in Lebanon's skies. Furthermore, Nasrallah warned that Israeli soldiers on the Israel-Lebanon border should "stand on a leg and a half" and wait for Hizbullah. In addition, he said that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu will be holding the upcoming Israeli elections over the blood of Israelis since Israel's actions in the region are drawing fire towards Israel from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians. The audience chanted: "We respond to your call, oh Nasrallah!"

IDF forces raided a weapon manufacturing factory on Monday night and confiscated a lathe in Beit Likiya in West Bank.

In a joint effort, IDF forces, Shin Bet, Police and Border Police forces have arrested eight suspects for involvement in terrorist activities, civil terror and violent disturbances of civilian lives.

IDF forces raid a factory with a weapon manufacturing lathe in West BankAll of the suspects were taken for further investigation.

"The IDF will continue its campaign to detect illegal weapons in order to keep residents safe in the area," the IDF Spokesperson's Unit stated.

With this recent decision, Mahmoud Abbas is attempting to shake off his image as a corrupt leader. It will be tough for him to fix the damage. The Palestinian public will not forget that he was the one who approved the unusual salary hike for Hamdallah and his ministers, breaking Palestinian law, to acquire their loyalty and so that they would turn a blind eye to his corruption and that of his two sons, which is well-known in the territories.

Abbas’ associates claim that the decision was the result of the harsh financial crisis suffered by the Palestinian Authority as the result of the cessation of U.S. financial aid and the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to accept tax money from Israel once Israel had deducted the sum paid out by the Palestinian Authority monthly to the families of shahids and terrorists sitting in Israeli jails.

The PA chairman wants to appear as if he is “tightening his belt” because the Palestinian Authority is heading toward a severe economic crisis.

Abbas’ hasty decision shows that he is under heavy pressure, as well as confused. The anger on the Palestinian street continues to mount following recent events on the Temple Mount and in the Wadi al-Hummus neighborhood where Israel razed illegal buildings. The heads of the Palestinian security forces believe that these areas are on the verge of an explosion that could also turn against the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

Mahmoud Abbas will need to take serious steps to convince the Palestinian public that he is not corrupt. However, he has already missed the bus, and he will go down in Palestinian history as a corrupt dictator who created dissension within Palestinian society and never achieved anything in the struggle against Israel.

The Palestinian private sector in the West Bank is thriving, according to a report published on Sunday by the Israeli financial daily Globes, despite the Palestinian Authority’s financial difficulties.

The Palestinian public sector is struggling because until last week the PA refused to receive taxes collected for it by Israel, due to Israel’s deductions of the sums paid by the PA to terrorists and their families. PA leader Mahmoud Abbas has cut salaries of senior PA officials and fired 20 out of 30 advisers, according to the report.

Israel transferred approximately half of the funds last week, amounting to some NIS 2 billion ($570 million).

The private sector, however, is thriving, for a variety of reasons, according to Globes.

Foreign investment and aid is still flowing into the Palestinian territories, according to the report, an in addition exports from the West Bank into Israel are growing. Many Israeli Arabs are also shopping in Palestinian areas in the West Bank.

Another reason for the good economy, according to Globes, is that 130,000 Palestinian workers are employed in Israel, making on average two and a half times the average salary in the territories.

The Islamist movement governing the Gaza Strip that uses kites, helium balloons, and other low-tech conveyances to ignite brush fires and other conflagrations across the border in Israel boasted today that its capabilities have expanded to incinerating precious Brazilian rain forests as well.

A Hamas spokesman told reporters in Gaza City this morning that the wildfires raging in the Amazon Basin began when the movement’s operatives released a barrage of bomb-carrying balloons toward the region in an effort to expand resistance efforts. President Jair Bolsonaro has established close ties with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, making his country a legitimate target in Palestinian and Islamist eyes.

“The Amazon became slated for destruction the moment Bolsonaro expressed support for the Zionist rapist usurpers,” declared Fawzi Barhoum. “People who wish to maintain their cherished natural wonders and resources had better consider that before they establish good relations with Jew- with Zionists. The mighty hand of Allah, through His chosen instrument Hamas, will strike against all those who dare contribute to the despoiling of Palestine and her destruction. We will exact that retribution by destroying her and all who get in the way.”

Trump addressed the press at the closing of the G7 summit. Regarding Iran, Trump reiterated that he was willing to negotiate a new deal, but the bottom line would be that Iran could not have nuclear weapons.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Possibility of Meeting Trump – Only If U.S. Lifts Sanctions, Bows Down to the Iranian People, Recognizes Our Revolution pic.twitter.com/RaS4frvBLf

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) August 27, 2019

Israel is deeply worried by US President Donald Trump’s declared readiness in principle to meet in the near future with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, top ministers were quoted saying on Monday evening. The fear is that the US president will open a dialogue with Iran similar to the ongoing one he has with North Korea, taking pressure off Tehran.

To say that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is uncomfortable with the US president’s newly open-minded stance on Iran “is the understatement of the millennium,” Israel’s Channel 13 reported, quoting what it said were three senior cabinet ministers expressing profound concern that just as Trump has “gotten nowhere” with North Korea, while relieving the economic pressure on Pyongyang, the same would now happen with Iran.

“We have no interest in a negotiations between the United States and Iran,” the TV report quoted one minister saying, “but our capacity to influence and confront Trump is extremely limited.” This, the report went on, was because Trump has “bear-hugged” Netanyahu so tightly that going out against him is deemed impossible.

Former prime minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday said US President Donald Trump’s potential rapprochement with Iran was a “red light” for Israel, and warned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was overly dependent on the US president and made vulnerable by Trump’s erratic policies.

Trump declared Monday at the G7 talks in Biarritz, France, at a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, that he would “certainly agree” to meet Iranian President Hassan Rouhani soon under the “correct circumstances,” and that there was a “really good chance” this would happen.

“I think he’s going to want to meet. I think Iran wants to get this situation straightened out,” Trump added.

He also called Rouhani a “great negotiator,” and indicated he might be open to Iran being offered “a short-term line of credit or loan” to help its economy. “We’re talking about a letter of credit,” he specified. “It would be from numerous countries.” Tehran “may need some money to get over a very rough patch” caused by US economic sanctions, he explained.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif announced on Tuesday that Tehran will further curb its adherence to the international agreement limiting its nuclear program next week unless it can reach an agreement with European powers before then.

“The third phase (of freezing nuclear obligations) will start on September 6,” Zarif told the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung in an interview published Tuesday, according to Iran’s Tasnim news agency.

Iran has accused the EU signatories to the 2015 nuclear deal — Britain, France and Germany — of failing to provide sufficient economic relief since US President Donald Trump pulled out of the accord last May and reimposed sanctions on Tehran.

Trump has faulted the agreement, which was also signed by China and Russia, for not addressing Iran’s ballistic missile program or support of terror proxy groups in the region.

Amid the growing bite of US sanctions, Iran has twice scaled back its commitment to the nuclear deal in recent months and increased its uranium enrichment levels beyond those permitted in the accord. In June the UN’s atomic watchdog did not explicitly state that the Islamic Republic is in compliance, the first time it has not done since the accord was inked.

Iran has sentenced two people, including a British dual national, to 10 years behind bars after convicting them of spying for Israel, the judiciary said on Tuesday.

The claim comes amid reports of a wave of Israeli strikes against Iranian targets and Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and Israeli accusations that Iran had planned a kamikaze drone assault on northern towns.

Anousheh Ashouri, a woman with British and Iranian citizenship, was found guilty of feeding information to Israel’s Mossad spy agency and handed 10 years in jail, Iran’s judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili said.

Ashouri had managed to “transmit a lot of information” to Israel, Esmaili said.

Her sentence included the return of millions of euros she allegedly received from the Mossad.

IRGC Commander-in-Chief General Hossein Salami said in an address that aired on Ofogh TV (Iran) on August 24, 2019 that by saying that American leaders lack wisdom, the U.S. itself has admitted to being "all brawn and no brains." He said that the Americans act only with force and according to a philosophy of injustice, and he said that their lack of spiritual leadership, wisdom, and "charisma-based leadership" will lead to the erosion of America's power, to its gradual decline, and to its eventual extinction. General Salami also said that the Yemenis have been showing mercy to Saudi Arabia by not attacking Saudi cities, and he said that the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Bahrain have become a "scene for the halting and dismantling of the enemy." In addition, General Salami said that Iran's enemies have tried to undo Iran's influence by waging proxy and takfiri wars, but that Iran's influence instead expanded to the point that Iran itself cannot undo the influence of the Islamic Revolution.

On August 22, 2019, IRINN TV (Iran) aired a report about the unveiling of the Iranian-made Bavar 373 long-range air defense system. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who was present at the unveiling, said that the Bavar 373 system is superior to the Russian S-300 system and that it competes with the S-400 system and the American Patriot system. The report said that the Bavar 373 system was designed for Iran's geographical conditions and that it can simultaneously engage six targets with 12 missiles at a range of up to 250 kilometers. Bavar 373's radar system reportedly has a range of 350 kilometers, and can be used "under any weather conditions, and even when the enemy is using chemical, biological, or even nuclear [weapons]... even if the heaviest jammers and electronic systems lock on to it." In addition, the report said that Bavar 373 can launch surface-to-air missiles such as the Sayyad-4 to an altitude of 27,000 meters. Iranian Defense Minister Amir Khatami said that Bavar 373 can be used against strategic and tactical fighter jets and bombers, as well as against stealth planes, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and other targets.

"This All-Iranian System Has A Range Of 300 Kilometers – It Can Cover From Low Altitudes Up To An Altitude Of Approximately 65 Kilometers"

Hassan Rouhani: "I hereby unveil the Bavar 373 all-Iranian long-range air defense system, and I order its incorporation in the country's air defense network, with Allah's blessing."
[...]
Anchor: "This all-Iranian system has a range of 300 kilometers. It can cover from low altitudes up to an altitude of approximately 65 kilometers. Iran joins four countries that have similar systems. The Bavar 373 long-range air defense system was built specifically for Iran's geographical conditions. It competes with similar Russian and American systems, like the S-300 and the Patriot, and it is better than those systems in some cases."
[...]
"This System Is Stronger Than The S-300 And Very Close To The S-400"

Hassan Rouhani: "If I were to compare it to the famous S-300 and S-400 systems, I'd say that it is not an S-300 – it doesn't have an 'S' at the beginning. Its number is neither 300 nor 400. Its number is between 300 and 400. It's 373. In any case, this system is stronger than the S-300 and very close to the S-400."

Amir Tohid Fazel, a hardline Iranian journalist with ties to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has refused to return to Iran and is requesting asylum in Sweden or Norway after accompanying Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on his tour of the Scandinavian region, Iranian newspaper Kayhan reported.

Fazel was political editor for Iran’s Moj news agency and had previously worked for the government-funded Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).

Al Arabiya news agency quoted Moj’s editor-in-chief Amir Mortazavi telling Iranian news site Ensaf News that “[Fazel] was a political editor at the agency and was sent to Sweden with the Foreign Ministry." Mortazavi added that “he has not come to work since going to Sweden.”

Kayhan referred to Fazel as a traitor.

Over the weekend several Iranian news reporters wrote on Twitter that Fazel did not return to Iran and accused the reporter of taking advantage of Zarif and the Foreign Ministry for personal gain, Radio Farda reported.

Fazel cryptically responded on Twitter that, "Everyone can decide for himself. No one knows what happens in the future. Only the short-sighted will speak out of ignorance," without revealing his location.

Bojnurd, Iran Friday Sermon by Abolghasem Yaghoubi: Girls Are Like Ripe Fruit That Should Be Picked Before It Rots, They Should Get Married as Young as Possible pic.twitter.com/jfVGR2lroa

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) August 27, 2019

Anyone who keeps abreast of the growing academic field of Mizrahi/Sephardic studies (Mizrahi: oriental, from the Middle East; Sephardic: originating in pre-Inquisition Spain) cannot help noticing that the vast majority of papers focus on the purported “discrimination” or “racism” of the Ashkenazi establishment.

Typical is this paper by one Sarah Louden, “Israeli Nationalism: the Constructs of Zionism and its Effect on Inter-Jewish Racism, Politics, and Radical Discourse.” It has 455 views, more than any other paper in its genre. It pulls no punches in attacking the “racism” of Zionism. Its sources are almost entirely Mizrahi anti-Zionists like Ella Shohat.

Shohat, a professor at New York University, made her name by applying Edward Said’s theory of “Orientalism” to Israel, claiming that both Mizrahi Jews and the Arabs are victims of the West (Ashkenazim).

Mizrahi Jews and Arabs are assumed to have more in common with each other that Jews from the East have with Jews from the West. The former, Shohat and her ilk contend, were “torn away” from their comfortable “Arab” environment by Zionism and colonialism and turned into involuntary enemies.

These academics widely assume that Mizrahi Jews in Israel support the Likud and right-wing parties to “get their own back” against the Labour-dominated Ashkenazi establishment.

But Louden and those like her hardly ever mention the elephant in the room: The subliminal memory of Arab and Muslim persecution suffered by parents and grandparents driven from the Arab world.

Is is not plausible that Mizrahi Jews view the rocket attacks and bombings afflicting Israel as just the latest chapter in a long history of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism? That they vote Likud because they believe that only the right can deliver the necessary tough response?

The Palestinian Authority in the past two years has lodged dozens of complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague over the Jewish state’s behavior, most recently calling the court’s attention to the approval of 650 new housing units for a village north of Jerusalem. In these instances, Israel has responded with what it terms “informal cooperation,” in which its lawyers meet with court officials to try to convince them that the charges are bogus. Avi Bell argues that this is the wrong approach, and that Jerusalem should instead imitate the U.S., which has successfully stymied equally bogus attempts to prosecute it:

The American strategy [involves] a complete refusal to cooperate with the ICC, anchored in U.S. legislation; a campaign to delegitimize the ICC . . . as an undemocratic, unaccountable, illegitimate institution that endangers the sovereignty of the United States and the constitutional rights of its citizens; and concrete threats against the ICC, beginning with diplomatic and economic sanctions . . . and ending in a threat to liberate Americans with force should they be arrested at the request of the ICC.

The ICC prosecutor, [meanwhile], who has already surrendered to Palestinian demands and opened a preliminary investigation against Israeli “criminals,” can be expected to request permission from the ICC judges to open a full investigation. . . . Israeli lawyers tasked by the government with dealing with the ICC challenge are convinced that legal responses that failed everywhere else in the world will suddenly come to their country’s aid.

Iraq has submitted a list of voluntary pledges in its bid for re-election to a seat on the UN Human Rights Council for 2020-2022. Following are five of Iraq’s most absurd claims, contrasted with the reality.

Iraq’s UN Pledge #1: “Iraq strives to ensure harmony among cultures, religions and civilizations through respect, tolerance and solidarity to eliminate hate speech and disrespect to any kind of cultural differences.”
Reality: When Miss Iraq Sarah Idan took the floor at the UN Human Rights Council to support peace with Israel, the Iraqi Parliament’s Security and Defense Committee reportedly called for her Iraqi citizenship to be revoked, labeling her advocacy a “crime.”

Iraq’s UN Pledge #2: “Iraq emphasizes the role of Civil Society Organizations and other stakeholders as main partners towards developing the work of the Human Rights Council and permit those partners to address the Council on human rights issues.”
Reality: According to a December 2018 report by Minority Rights Group International and the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights, “the outbreak of large-scale popular protests in Basra and other Iraqi cities has led to a wave of violent repression of civilian activists.”

Iraq’s UN Pledge #3: “Iraq reiterates its belief in the universality of Human Rights and the unwavering commitment to its principles, in terms of upholding the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights, in accordance with the mandate of the Human Rights Council.”
Reality: According to Freedom House‘s 2019 listing of Freedom in the World, Iraq is ranked as “Not Free”, with a score of 32/100.

In the opinion of historians interviewed by The Times of Israel, there was not a political motivation behind Adams’ “wish” to see Jews restored to the Holy Land. At the time of the Adams-Noah exchange, there were fewer than 5,000 Jews living in the United States.

“Certainly, there was little in the way of political motivations at play for a retired and weakened John Adams in his observations to Noah,” said University of Michigan’s Goldman.

Regardless of what Adams had in mind as an end-game for Jews returning to Israel, he and the other Founding Fathers were on intimate terms with the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. This is not the case with the White House’s current occupant, according to Stephen Spector, a professor at Stony Brook University.

“It’s hard to speak of another person’s faith or motives definitively, but it seems clear that Trump’s unequivocal support of Israel, including his policy on Jerusalem, did not emerge from his religious convictions,” said Spector, author of the book, “Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism.”

According to Spector, “Some members of the religious right say that [Trump] is a ‘baby Christian,’ but his public statements and behavior do not betray a familiarity with the Bible or the basic tenets of Christianity. Nor was his support for Israel clear in his initial statements about the Middle East.”

For Adams, by way of contrast, the Bible was a lifelong guidebook. In a letter written to his son Quincy — the future president — in 1811, Adams said the Bible has a way of “making you wiser and more virtuous.” The retired president added he reads the Bible as an annual “practice” in self-improvement.

“I have always endeavored to read it with the same spirit and temper of mind, which I now recommend to you: that is, with the intention and desire that it may contribute to my advancement in wisdom and virtue,” wrote Adams.

@MarkRegev from @IsraelinUK gives three reasons why anti-Zionism IS anti-Semitism.

Watch the full J-TV interview -> https://t.co/ZWUTg4BeZLpic.twitter.com/u3NEr071wk

— J-TV: Jewish Ideas. Global Relevance. (@JTVChannel) August 26, 2019

I’m a stickler for sovereignty. Sovereign nations have borders and their leaders decide who gets to cross them. Excluding individuals who are hostile or even just objectionable is common practice. Among those who have not been permitted to come to America: Michael Ben-Ari, a far-right Israeli legislator, and Narendra Modi, accused of doing too little to prevent anti-Muslim riots in 2002, and now India’s current prime minister.

Unless Israel is to be held to a separate and unequal standard, its leaders must enjoy the same right, which they exercised by declining to welcome Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).

The dominant media narrative is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu excluded the two far-left congresswomen in deference to US President Donald Trump, who had tweeted that they “hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.” Perhaps that did influence the prime minister’s thinking, but other factors undoubtedly were weighed as well. Allow me to mention a few.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) invited Omar and Tlaib to join a bipartisan delegation that went to Israel and the West Bank earlier this month. They preferred not to accompany their colleagues.

Separately, the Israeli government granted a request by Tlaib to enter the West Bank to visit relatives, asking only that she not use the occasion to promote boycotts against Israel. She said that there was no deal.

The botched Middle East trip of US Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib has provided pundits and mainstream media endless fodder for blame: President Donald Trump, Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are all targets.

Clearly, the Omar-Tlaib non-visit to Israel has been fraught with missteps – Trump’s coarse tweets, a premature statement by Dermer saying the two would be allowed in, Netanyahu appearing to vacillate on whether to accept them. But no mistake: Omar and Tlaib are the anti-Semitic stars of this fiasco.

First, Israel had every reason and every right to ban Omar and Tlaib:
- Both are anti-Semites. Evidence: Both representatives continue to employ anti-Semitic tropes including Jewish dual loyalties, Jews paying off US politicians and half a dozen more.
- Both support the hateful boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which is clearly anti-Semitic since it denies the right of Jews – unlike any other ethnic group – to self-determination and a nation-state in their ancient homeland.
- Because BDS stands for Israel’s destruction, the movement has been overwhelmingly condemned by Congress, in bipartisan votes. In addition, Israeli legislators recently passed a law barring supporters of BDS from entering Israel, which Israel has every right to enforce.
- Omar and Tlaib reportedly intended to visit Al-Aqsa Mosque atop the Temple Mount, which has been the scene of dozens of spontaneous riots, many violent. Surely the notoriety of these two members of Congress would have provided enough fuel to spark another conflagration.

The accusation now being hurled at Netanyahu is that he harmed Israel’s interests by giving in to Trump. Haaretz commentator Chemi Shalev (who harshly criticized Netanyahu for defying the previous occupant of the White House) even compared the prime minister to a borrower on the grey market whose debts to Trump have grown to the point that he can no longer say no to him.

Indeed, Netanyahu had no choice but to say amen. Israel needs the US president, whomever he may be, and generally accedes to requests from the White House. A notable case was during the Gulf War in 1991, when President George H.W. Bush asked Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir not to respond to 39 missiles that Saddam Hussein had launched at Israel. Although the entire defense establishment, fearing a loss of deterrent power, pushed for a massive response, Shamir opted to go along with the US president’s demand. Israel did not respond.

The reversal in favor of barring the entry of the two US legislators predictably upset some members of the Democratic Party, a factor that was probably taken into account when the decision was made. But the Democratic Congressional leadership is worried about the shift toward the radical left that the “squad” represents (which, in addition to Tlaib and Omar, includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). The leadership fears that if the party moves along with the squad, it will cost them the White House next year.

Israel’s quarrel with the Democrats will likely be brief — not only because the Democratic leadership is not entirely behind the squad, but because it understands Israel’s need to stay on the good side of the American president. That is how it has always been, and it will remain that way if and when a Democratic president is elected. The recent visit to Israel by 41 Democratic members of the House, most of them newcomers to Washington, was much more indicative of Israel’s relations with the Democratic Party than the visit that did not materialize.

It is important to note that Omar and Tlaib are products of intersectional feminism, also known as “Fourth Wave” feminism. They are designated carriers of anti-Israelism in the American government for this precise reason. Feminism cannot be openly questioned in American politics, and they are now the leading representatives in the popular imagination of its most advanced form.

In other words, feminism as it is currently conceived has become the key source of BDS activism. The reason for this is that “intersectionality” has become its prime value, and being virtuous according to this ideology means gesturing toward as many forms of grievance as possible at all times. These “women of color” thus serve as standard bearers of victimized oppression in ways difficult to imagine male representatives doing.

Moreover, both Omar and Tlaib are of course members of the Democratic Party. Until recently a lifelong Democrat myself, I have resigned my membership in a party that harbors anti-Israel bigots, and that I no longer trust to pursue America’s best interests in foreign policy.

Antisemitism is one of the world’s oldest hatreds and, more than that, a paranoid worldview. It has no place in the politics of the greatest nation on earth. Unless and until the Democrats make it clear that they understand this, they will not have my vote. It’s as simple as that.

Unlike Obama’s redline in Syria, this bright line will not be crossed. I look forward to registering my discontent with Islamist Jew-hatred, American style, in 2020.

American Jews are turning their backs on the Democratic party, claims Exodus Movement founder Elizabeth Pipko.

Speaking with The Jerusalem Post, Pipko said that she feels many life-long Democratic Party voters are questioning their loyalty to the party and joining what she calls the sweeping #WalkAway wave, an American movement to abandon liberalism.

“The biggest trigger for people is the obvious disregard that many on the left have recently shown for antisemitic statements and actions,” Pipko told the Post, alarming rhetoric that “only a few years ago would have been immediately condemned.”

Take for example recent statements made by Congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib against Israel and in favor of boycotting the Jewish state, she said.

“The BDS movement is a blatant attempt to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist,” Pipko said. “There is no place for any US elected officials to support a movement that stands against one of our closest allies and one of the freest countries in the world.”

Putting Tlaib’s hypocrisy aside, the most important aspect of Tlaib’s tweet is how she rushed to bring in “the Israeli occupation” and “equal rights.” She was insinuating, loud and clear, that Israeli policies are to blame for the violence.

This is remarkable, because nobody is being “occupied” or “denied rights” at the site where the murder took place. It’s a natural spring in the wilderness. There are no Palestinians there who are being “occupied.” There is no Israeli “settlement” there.

There was one final sentence in Tlaib’s non-condemnation: “Extremism that puts innocent lives at risk moves us no closer to peace.” Notice the words missing from that sentence: “Palestinian” and “terrorism.”

Congresswoman Tlaib could not bring herself to explicitly acknowledge or condemn Palestinians for murdering Jews, nor would she call those murders “terrorism.” Instead, she equivocated, rationalized, and ducked.

A vague phrase such as “extremism that puts innocent lives at risk” is a moral-equivalence word game that Tlaib is playing. Rashida Tlaib managed to issue a “condemnation of Palestinian terrorism” that does not have in it the words “condemn,” “Palestinian,” or “terrorism.” And she managed, once again, to make an utter mockery of the truth.

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders welcomed the endorsement of a union that has embraced the anti-Israel BDS movement.

Sanders announced on Monday that he was "humbled" after the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) voted to endorse him in the 2020 election.

"I am humbled to receive the endorsement of my union brothers and sisters from UE," Sanders said in a statement. "We are running a true working class campaign, which speaks directly to workers and confronts the massive inequality we see in our society today."

UE General President Peter Knowlton cited the socialist Vermont senator's decision to march with striking Pennsylvania workers as a factor in the endorsement.

"From four decades of actively supporting UE members and other workers in Vermont, to his vocal support for our 1,700 members in Erie, Pennsylvania who went on a nine-day strike this past winter, Bernie Sanders has always made it clear which side he is on," Knowlton said in a statement.

In 2015, UE became the first American labor organization to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which seeks to wage economic warfare on Israel. The union said it aimed to "pressure Israel to end the occupation." It passed a resolution accusing Israel of "apartheid," adding that "extremism in Israel has grown more severe."

Political Activist Linda Sarsour took to Twitter on Saturday to call Zionists who protested her speech in North Carolina "disgusting."

The post was in response to North Carolina Representative Graig Meyer, who photographed Ku Klux Klan members protesting in Hillsborough, NC.

Sarsour responded by saying that she spoke in the same location in March and that "not only were they also holding confederate flags, they were joined by right wing Zionists carrying Israeli flags. So disgusting."

The Confederate States of America was a white supremacist unrecognized republic in the 19th century which supported the right of white people to own slaves.

Sarsour has previously been outspoken in her disapproval of the Jewish state, oftentimes referring to land under Israeli occupation as Palestine. She previously appeared to accuse American Jews of dual loyalty to Israel. She claimed that the reason people attack supporters of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is because they "masquerade as progressives but always choose their allegiance to Israel over their commitment to democracy and free speech."

A 1935 letter by Albert Einstein denouncing antisemitism in American academia will be auctioned on Thursday in Los Angeles.

“The hostile attitude of universities towards Jewish teaching staff and students has been increasing perilously, even though it manifests in a genteel or hypocritical manner,” the Nobel Prize recipient wrote.

“Unfortunately, the current Jewish leaders do not comprehend the seriousness of the situation, similar to the German Jews in the time before Hitler. They believe that they are able to put an end to the problem by being silent and disregarding it, and they thus miss the time for creating places of support,” he added, highlighting that establishing Jewish teaching institutions was “an absolute imperative.”

“This is not just true for the functions of the educational system, of course, but in economic and social terms as well…” the scientist further wrote.

In the period between the First and the Second World War, many US universities, especially the most prestigious private ones, imposed quotas on the number of Jewish students they were willing to accept.

The letter was written in German and addressed to Jewish physicist Paul Epstein.

According to a statement by the auction house, Nate D. Sanders Auctions, the bidding will begin at $25,000.

The charge of “Jews-only roads” in the disputed territories is part of the apartheid libel that attempts to portray Israel as a state that discriminates against Arabs on racial or religious grounds. The comparison is made not only with apartheid South Africa but also past racial segregation in the United States.

The charge, however, is false.

There are roads where different populations are separated from each other but this separation is based not on religion, race or ethnicity but on nationality. Jews-only roads simply don’t exist.

As Michael Totten wrote in response to this charge leveled by antisemitic journalist Helen Thomas:
She’s right that no American would tolerate white-only roads. Israelis, likewise, would never tolerate roads for Jews only. That’s why such roads don’t exist.

The roads she’s referring to in the West Bank are Israeli, and they’re not just for Jews. Israeli Arabs can drive on them, and so can non-Jewish foreigners, including Arab and Muslim foreigners. Palestinians were once able to drive on them but have not been allowed to do so since the second intifada, when suicide bombers used them to penetrate Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in order to massacre people.

American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) has emerged as one of the most radical and controversial anti-Israel groups, with a far reach into campuses and anti-Zionist organizations. We have covered the role of AMP in numerous posts dating back several years.

AMP was involved in organizing protests and disruption of the Christians United for Israel Annual Summit in July 2019, which we covered in Investigation: Anti-Israel groups plan disruption of Christians United for Israel Annual Summit. That post has a section devoted to AMP’s origins and leadership, including its role in Students for Justice in Palestine. AMP also co-organized the U.S. Tour for Janna Jihad, Rewarding Palestinian child exploitation: Janna Jihad goes to Congress.

AMP also has been the subject of congressional testimony by Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and reports by the ADL, NGO-Monitor, and Canary Mission.

The Washington Free Beacon is one of our favorite websites, with a long history of investigative journalism. So the Legal Insurrection Foundation was pleased to join with the Free Beacon in an investigation of the role AMP plays as a connector among various anti-Israel groups. (h/t MtTB)

Surely this is the tipping point! https://t.co/cFofKiIBiq

— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) August 27, 2019

Nevertheless, that’s not enough. Over the same period, the Guardian has run precisely zero Israeli book reviews, zero Israeli film reviews, and just one Israeli human interest story. In all, two color pieces about Israel were run in this time: an eerie photo-essay about the Tel Aviv central bus station, and a Sense of Place column in which an Israeli writer tells her grandfather’s story of saving an illegal immigrant. Neither story refers to the Palestinians, certainly not as aggressive or brutal, as some of the Palestinian-perspective articles do. Furthermore, the photo-essay isn’t original piece for the Guardian, but sourced from Reuters.

This lack of balance is made all the more astonishing given that in the last few days, Israel has come under attack twice, but the Guardian has neglected to document both the bombing which claimed the life of 17-year-old Israeli Rina Shnerb on Friday, August 23, and the unprovoked barrage of rockets fired from Gaza at Israel on the evening of August 25.

New organisations have every right to add color to the news by speaking to the people who live on the ground, by reviewing their books and shows, by showing their human side and by laying out their fears and concerns. The Guardian can document Palestinian film, music and literature all it wants, but what’s stopping it from documenting Israeli culture, too? There are books and music aplenty, and some challenging films and documentaries worthy of a wider audience. Our Boys, a ten-part series by America’s HBO and Israel’s Keshet about the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli boys and one Palestinian boy in 2014 provoked strong debate in Israel recently. At the very least it could have covered the critically acclaimed the recently released Netflix film The Red Sea Diving Resort, which details the Mossad’s secret mission to save countless Ethiopian Jews from the jaws of a massacre.

By documenting Palestinian culture and their troubles while totally neglecting to show the lives of their Israeli counterparts, including their legitimate fears and concerns, is to humanize one side while dehumanizing the other. And to do that while neglecting to report on Palestinian attacks on Israelis is to totally misinform readers about the reality of the ongoing conflict.

Youtube is manipulating its algorithm to hide pro-Israel videos and promote pro-Palestinian ones.

If the Palestinians referred to Tel Aviv implying it is Israel's capital, then @Independent@JournoJane should put it in quotations. Otherwise, please correct and refer to Jerusalem as the capital and the place where Israeli government policies are made. https://t.co/aLqakn0HEPpic.twitter.com/dZ2Qaq4smI

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 27, 2019

Guardian journalists were busy all last week writing about Israel, and then abruptly stopped on Friday.

Tom Faber wrote a piece about a Palestinian hip hop duo. His piece was called ‘If Israeli soldiers start shooting, we won’t stop the interview’: Palestinian hip-hop crew BLTNM. Faber must have feared for his life at the prospect of Israeli soldiers walking in during his interview in Ramallah with BLTNM and randomly start shooting.

This reminds me of Matti Friedman‘s observation that Israel is actually one of the most comfortable “war zones” to report from because a journalist can be sitting in a bar in Tel Aviv in the evening, having been at the Gaza border in the morning, being served a cold beer by a beautiful Israeli girl whose brother the journalist had just accused of being a war criminal.

Amanda Forslund and Charlotta Lindblom wrote a piece, based on a six year old study into PTSD in soldiers, accusing the Israeli government of abandoning its soldiers suffering from PTSD.

And Emma Goldberg spoke truth to power when she accused Trump and Netanyahu of being “afraid of letting them (Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar) travel through the country and ground their critiques in first-hand witness accounts of life in the occupied territories…”

A man charged with killing 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue should face the death penalty if convicted, federal prosecutors said in a court filing on Monday.

The US attorney's office in Pittsburgh filed a notice of intent to seek the death penalty against 46-year-old Robert Bowers in last year's attack.

The government filing said that justification for a death sentence included allegations of substantial planning and premeditation, the vulnerability and number of victims, and motivation of religious hostility.

It also listed the injury, harm, and loss caused to the victims and the choice of the Tree of Life synagogue as the site of the attack.

The notice accused Bowers of targeting the worshippers "in order to maximize the devastation, amplify the harm of his crimes, and instill fear within the local, national and international Jewish communities."

Bowers has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial. His lawyers did not return messages seeking comment. A spokeswoman for US Attorney Scott Brady declined to discuss the filing.

Antisemitic graffiti was found scrawled on a synagogue in Newtown, Connecticut, on Saturday.

According to local outlet NewsTimes, police are investigating the defacing of the Adath Israel Synagogue as a hate crime.

Newtown Police Lieutenant Aaron Bahamonde was quoted saying, “As an agency we are extremely disturbed at this act of defacing a house of worship.”

“This serious hate crime will be given the full attention of this agency, while utilizing other law enforcement resources to determine the identity of those responsible,” he added.

“The congregation has been (assured) that enhanced patrols will continue in the area and that there will be a police presence during scheduled services,” he said.

The town has since repainted the synagogue and a $2,500 reward has been offered for the perpetrators.

Amazon in the United Kingdom has stopped selling a line of clothing with a photograph of a Holocaust victim being executed.

The image, known as “The last Jew in Vinnitsa,” shows a Jewish man in the Ukrainian town about to be shot dead by the Einsatzgruppen, or “killing squad,” as he kneels alongside a mass grave consisting of dead bodies, with a group of Nazis watching. The photo dates between mid-1941 and 1943.

Following Israel’s Channel 12 news contacting Amazon UK, the online retailer took down the line of T-shirts, tank tops and hoodies that featured the photo.

The description of the clothing from the retailer, “Harma Art,” is “Choose from our great collection of authentic designs and stand out from the crowd!”

The Amazon store in the United States does not feature the clothing line.

Moroccan Authorities demolished a Holocaust memorial on Monday that was being built by German NGO PixelHELPER in Ait Faska, southeast of Marrakesh.

This comes less than a week after The Jerusalem Post revealed that the Holocaust memorial was in the works.

Founder of PixelHELPER Oliver Bienkowski said that all the installations and artworks that had so far been built “were deliberately destroyed by bulldozers,” and the rainbow blocks at the entrance, which memorialize LGBTQ+ victims of the Holocaust, were also desecrated.

He added that the “water and power lines have been cut.”

“We thought that there was acceptance of Jewish society in Morocco but its not [the case],” he told the Post. “We get a lot of antisemitic and anti LGBTQ+ messages.”

Late on Monday, Moroccan Authorities denied in a press statement that the memorial was being built, adding that such claims were “unfounded.”

“Information conveyed by certain electronic sites and on social networks about the establishment of a project by a foreign national including a museum and several facilities as well as a memorial in the form of art paintings, in the commune of Ait Faska, in Al Haouz province, are without any foundation,” the local authorities of Al Haouz province claimed. “The relevant services in this province have not granted any authorization for the establishment of such a project.”

High-tech employees account for 8.7% of Israel’s workforce, according to data presented by the Israel Innovation Authority, up from 8.3% in 2017.

At mid-2019, the number of salaried tech workers reached 307,000, the authority said in a statement. In absolute terms, the number of tech industry employees grew by some 19,000, despite a drop of some 3,000 in the field of drug manufacturing mainly due to cost-cutting steps at Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., the statement said.

The software industry, where some 14,000 employees were added, is responsible for a large part of the increase.

“High-tech employment is characterized by high productivity and high wages, so it is of great importance to increase the number of employees out of the total number of employees in the economy,” the statement said.

The rise in employment levels in the tech field reflects the high demand for workers in the sector, and has been made possible by a number of steps the government has taken to increase the supply of highly skilled human capital, including training such sidelined populations as the Arabs, the ultra-Orthodox and more women, the statement said.

In response to devastating fires that have been raging in the Amazon rainforest for the past three weeks, Israel is sending a firefighting aircraft with flame-retardant chemicals to Brazil.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro tweeted on August 25 that he’d received a phone call from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offering the equipment to aid the firefighting efforts of the Brazilian armed forces and had gratefully accepted.

Netanyahu tweeted that he told Bolsonaro the flame retardants would be dispatched immediately. The Prime Minister’s Office had no further updates as of today.

Earlier this month, Brazil declared a state of emergency over the rising number of fires in the region. The Amazon, the largest rainforest in the world, is known as the “lungs of the world” for its role in absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. An estimated one million indigenous people and three million species of plants and animals live in the rainforest.

It’s been 100 years since German architects trained in the Bauhaus style immigrated to Tel Aviv, eventually designing more than 400 buildings in the Bauhaus look.

Tel Aviv became known as the White City for its unusual collection of white, unadorned, balconied buildings, winning UNESCO recognition in 2003 as a World Heritage site. The city will celebrate 100 years of its iconic architecture with the grand opening of its official White City Center in September.

The Liebling Haus-White City Center is housed in the Liebling House, designed by architect Dov Karmi in 1936 for brothers Tony and Max Liebling.

The center was co-founded by the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality with the Tel Aviv Foundation and the German government, and will host rooftop viewings, workshops, street parties and tours over the weekend of September 19-21, later serving as a resource center for both residents and visitors to the White City.

During Open House Tel Aviv, the opening weekend of the White City Center, there will be tours of hundreds of Bauhaus homes, private and public buildings, with a focus on some of the best-preserved buildings of the international style. Many of the tours will be available in several languages, for free and open to the public.

A full program of the White City Center celebration is available online.

The Palestinian people are not different from other Greater Syrian (Bilad al-Sham) peoples. They are the result of accumulated ethnic, racial, and religious groups, who once lived, conquered, occupied, and passed through this strip of land. Wars and invasions have never totally replaced the local population in any period of history; they rather added to, mixed with and reformulated the local identity. The Palestinian people are the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jabousites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Aramaeans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, the Crusaders, and the Kurds, who once settled, conquered, occupied or just passed through Palestine. 

The question is whether Palestinians could reflect their identity in a different manner than they do now. I think the answer is yes. The artificial division of Greater Syria was imposed on the people. If there had been no Sykes-Picot Agreement, I am not sure that the Palestinian people would have chosen an independent state as a container of their identity. ...The idea of an independent Palestinian state was raised quite recently; as a matter of fact, the Palestinian national movement continued to market the conflict as an “Arab-Israeli” one and not as a “Palestinian-Israeli” one. The idea of the Palestinian independent state was raised in 1973 in the aftermath of the October War and specific international, regional, and national political developments; in 1974 the idea became the vehicle of the political program of the PLO. Since then and until now (I do not know for how long) Palestinian life has been completely organized according to it.

With the establishment of the PLO and the different resistance organizations, mainly in the 1960s, Palestinian identity went through an intensive politicization process. The PLO exceeded its national and regional importance, reaching wider circles all over the world. With the PLO, the Palestinian identity became “revolutionary” or at least designated as such. The Palestinian became a young man/woman wearing the kufiyya and carrying a machine gun. The PLO faced a complicated challenge, namely how to unify a nation and to develop a shared identity for people(s) living under different political regimes and living in different socio-economic contexts, Jordanian, Egyptian, Israeli, in addition to the regional and international diasporas. The PLO actually implemented different political, cultural, and social programs and worked very hard to strengthen, shape, reshape and develop a national identity, vis-à-vis an Arab identity, with the aim of creating a fighting nation seeking freedom. This, in the mid-sixties, was a dreamed approach, but it led to very tangible results. The shared political aspiration, which was not easy to maintain and to gather people around it, was efficiently used. This aspiration became the major vehicle in forming the current “Palestinian identity”. ...This hard work also led to recognition of the Palestinian people, first by the Arabs and then, slowly, by the rest of the international community. 

First, the security services were able to father the first leads of the details of this heinous crime and its perpetrators, and continue to pursue the investigation to uncover all its circumstances, which we will announce later.

Second, we assure our people of the stability of the security situation in the Gaza Strip, and stress that these suspicious bombings - aimed at shuffling the cards in the internal arena - are isolated incidents that will not affect that situation.

Third: The sinful hands that committed this crime will not go unpunished...

Fourth: We will not allow any party to compromise the security of the citizens of the Gaza Strip, and that all the sinful and suspicious attempts in this regard will fail, and we will strike with an iron hand anyone who tries, under any cover, or by any means.

Fifth: We pledge to our struggling people that the Ministry of Interior and National Security will remain the guardian of the security of Gaza, whatever the sacrifices, and will not rest until we take away from the masterminds of this criminal act, and those behind them.

Sixth: The Zionist occupation and its agents are constantly working to undermine the security and stability situation in Gaza, and they use various methods, and the security services have thwarted many plans, and still stands immune to all suspicious attempts that take different forms and methods.

Seventh: We call upon all sectors of our people and factions to condemn this cowardly act, and stand united in the face of this pariah group, which seeks to provoke chaos and strike the home front and cohesion.

Eighth: We call on the media and social networking activists not to rush with the transmission of news, and only report [news] from official sources. Anyone who spreads rumors and false news is a partner in trying to tamper with security.

It is not likely that Netanyahu has anything to worry about where Trump is concerned, however.

In the first place, the American president said that he had no intention of lifting the sanctions. So, as was the case where his “buddy” in Pyongyang was concerned, no appeasement toward Rouhani is on the horizon.

Secondly, he was adamant that a precondition for any negotiations with Tehran would be its agreement to “no nuclear weapons and no ballistic missiles.”

Third, Rouhani replied by saying that he would not talk to Trump without a lifting of sanctions. The predictable impasse means that there will be no change in the status quo.

No, it’s not Netanyahu who needs to fear a flip-flopping Trump at this stage, but rather the Iranian people. It was they who were just sent a loud and clear message from the White House that the United States would not help them overthrow their evil regime, even indirectly.

It was “déjà vu all over again” for the population that was so brazenly abandoned by the Obama administration in favor of the world’s greatest terror-masters.

Let us hope that Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, is able to persuade his boss that Iranian weapons are only part of the battle. As he and Netanyahu are both keenly aware, without new leadership in Tehran – one not governed by a desire for global Shiite hegemony and jihadi fighters to carry it out – the West cannot rest.

Abdul Hameed Al-Ghabin – “a Saudi writer and a political and tribal figure” – has challenged Jordan to negotiate with Israel on President Trump’s “deal of the century” – or risk losing control of the Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem currently vested in Jordan under the 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty and the Washington Declaration.

Al-Ghabin’s views have – significantly – been published by an Israeli newspaper. Saudi Arabia’s rulers have not condemned Al-Ghabin or disavowed his views – indicating that Al-Ghabin’s message could represent Saudi Arabia’s official position.
Al-Ghabin asserts:
“There is a major issue of contention: the future of the Palestinians and their right to self-determination. It is important and logical to us that Palestinians should have a state at the end of a peace process. However, anti-peace forces litter our region. An example of such a force is, sadly, the Kingdom of Jordan”.

Al-Ghabin asks:
“How can we achieve peace if the Palestinian people remain without a place to call home?”

Al-Ghabin’s answer will assuredly jolt Jordan – and the United Nations – out of their long running historical, geographical and demographical memory loss:
“The answer is simple: Jordan is already 78 per cent of historical Palestine. Jordanians of Palestinian origin constitute more than 80 percent of the population according to U.S. intelligence cables leaked in 2010. Jordan is essentially already the Palestinian Arab state. The only problem is, the king of Jordan refuses to acknowledge this.

Nonetheless, the world will eventually recognize Jordan as the address for Palestinian statehood—and perhaps sooner than we think. We don’t know if the Jordanian royal family will still be in power when Jordan officially becomes Palestine, but we do know that if the royal family leaves and the Palestinian majority takes over, Jordan will officially become their homeland and we Arabs won’t feel guilty normalizing relations with Israel as another regional state.”

The sting in the tail is Al-Ghabin’s warning that Jordan’s custodianship of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem – created under article 9(2) of the Israel- Jordan Peace Treaty – could be ended if Jordan does not play ball.

Al-Ghabin is ruthless in his criticism of Jordan’s monarch – King Abdullah:

Israeli judoka Sagi Muki was named world champion Wednesday, taking the gold medal at the World Judo Championship finals in Tokyo, Japan, and becoming the first male Israeli athlete to receive the top prize.

Muki claimed the gold after defeating Belgium’s Matthias Casse in the finals of the men’s under-81 kilogram weight class.

An emotional Muki fell to the ground after winning, then got up and spread his arms wide to cheers from the audience.

The middleweight champion reached the finals after narrowly defeating Egyptian opponent Mohamed Abdelaal, who refused to shake his hand at the end of the match.

Ahead of the semi-final there were reports that Iran’s Saeid Mollaei, who had also advanced to the penultimate stage, could drop out if he were paired with Muki — although Iran was recently reported to end its longstanding ban on its athletes facing off with Israelis.

The matter was not tested, however, as Mollaei eventually fought, and lost to, Belgium’s Casse while Muki fought Abdelaal.

After the victory, Israel’s national anthem ‘Hatikvah’ was played at the medal ceremony as Muki and Israeli members of the audience sang along.

Muki’s win makes him the first male Israeli to be named world champion. In 2013 Yarden Jarbi won the World Judo Championship in Rio de Janeiro in the women’s under-63 kilogram weight class.

#Israeli Judoka Sagi Muki wins Gold at the World Championships in Tokyo. Mazal tov!!! pic.twitter.com/MFwNdrnHeC

— StandWithUs (@StandWithUs) August 28, 2019

The Iranian Judoka refused to compete against him & the Egyptian refused to shake his hand, but #Israel's #SagiMuki had the best response - winning GOLD at the #JudoWorlds2019, becoming 1st male Israeli world champion!

Mazal Tov Sagi! All of Israel is so proud of you! 🥋🇮🇱🥇 pic.twitter.com/CKIC7xmieN

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) August 28, 2019

WATCH-An emotional Sagi #Muki and the #Hatikvah after winning his first gold medal at the Judo World Championships pic.twitter.com/ycFqQceDpw

— SussexFriendsofIsrael (@SussexFriends) August 28, 2019

Egyptian sore loser refuses to shake Israeli judoka Sagi Muki's hand. pic.twitter.com/OlsYEDvNep

— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) August 28, 2019

It is not yet clear if Abbas will appoint new advisers in place of those who were fired.

Senior Fatah officials report that it is also not certain what Abbas’s announcement means for Mohammed Mustafa, who was Abbas’s economics adviser. Mustafa was also an adviser to Abbas and his two sons on business matters and is considered to be a very close associate of the Abbas family, knowing all of its financial secrets.

With this decision, Abbas is attempting to shake off his image as a corrupt leader, but he faces an uphill battle. The Palestinian public will not soon forget that he was the one who approved the unusual salary hike for Hamdallah and his ministers, breaking Palestinian law, to purchase their loyalty and a blind eye to his corruption and that of his two sons.

Abbas's associates claim the decision was the result of the harsh financial crisis suffered by the PA as the result of the cessation of US financial aid and the PA’s refusal to accept tax money collected for it by Israel.

Abbas wants to appear as if he is “tightening his belt” because the PA is heading toward a severe economic crisis, but his hasty decision shows he is under heavy pressure and confused. Anger on the Palestinian street continues to mount following recent events on the Temple Mount and in the Wadi al-Hummus neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem, where Israel razed illegal buildings. The heads of the Palestinian security forces believe that they are on the verge of an explosion that could also turn against the PA leadership.

When it comes to convincing Palestinian society he is not corrupt, however, Abbas has already missed the bus. He will go down in Palestinian history as a corrupt dictator who created dissent within Palestinian society and achieved nothing in the struggle against Israel.

A new poll published Monday revealed that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and West Bank want control over all of Jerusalem, including its predominantly Jewish western half.

The poll conducted by the Palestine Center for Public Opinion and published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think thank found that half of respondents “strongly agree” with the statement, “We should demand Palestinian rule over all of Jerusalem, east and west, rather than agree to share or divide any part of it with Israel.” Another 25 to 30 percent agree “somewhat” with the idea.

The institute said these numbers “confirm results from a 2017 poll, which went unreported as an ‘outlier’ or statistical anomaly at the time.”

It also noted that “those percentages are about the same for the Palestinians of East Jerusalem, who work and travel freely in the mostly Jewish half of the city west of the 1967 frontier.”

Despite this seemingly extreme position, the poll also found that only a quarter of respondents wanted a new armed conflict with Israel, though two-thirds believed attacks on settlers and Israeli security forces were justified.

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon sent two letters to the United Nations this week requesting immediate action against those who are attacking Israel.

On Wednesday, Danon filed a formal letter of complaint to the United Nations Security Council demanding action against Iran over its repeated attempts to attack Israel from Syria.

On Saturday, the IDF foiled an Iranian attack against Israel. This attempt was neither the “first nor the second major Iranian attack intended to escalate the security situation in the region, guided by Soleimani and the Quds Force,” Danon wrote.

He added that the Syrian regime knowingly allows its territory to be used by Iran and its proxies for terrorist activities, including armed attacks.

“It is imperative that the Security Council acknowledges Syria’s responsibility in this regard and hold it accountable,” Danon wrote.

The United Nations Security Council is expected to renew the yearly mandate of its UNIFIL, its peacekeeping force in Lebanon, this week.

But exclusive video obtained by Fox News shows a peacekeeping patrol under attack by the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hezbollah. An intelligence source confirmed to Fox News the Iranian proxy force was behind the attack.

While the U.N. described the attack in a report, the video and the ensuing chaos following the ambush show how dangerous Hezbollah has made the situation for UNIFIL, or the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.

The video shows groups of men block off the convoy with their cars. Once blocked off several men set upon the vehicles, trying to break in through the windows with hammers and stones.

At one stage, gasoline is poured over the second U.N. armored vehicle and then lit on fire. As it burns one peacekeeper leaves the vehicle while being accosted by the men. Another peacekeeper comes running out from behind the lead armored vehicle with his gun drawn, only to retreat. Another peacekeeper leaves the APV, surrendering his weapon to the terrorists. Men carrying automatic weapons can be seen during the melee.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wife on Tuesday announced that Honduras will open a diplomatic facility in Jerusalem next week and suggested she was responsible for making it happen.

“I’m happy to announce that on Sunday Honduras is opening a diplomatic mission in Jerusalem, a step on the way to an embassy,” Sara Netanyahu said in a Facebook live video with Culture Minister Miri Regev.

The Foreign Ministry confirmed in a statement that Honduras will establish a trade office with diplomatic status and that Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández, accompanied by his wife, will arrive in Israel on Saturday night to participate in the opening ceremony.

The trade office is a first move toward “the future relocation of the Honduras embassy to Jerusalem,” the ministry said.

Sara Netanyahu claimed the development came after her government-funded trip last year to Guatemala, which neighbors Honduras.

“When I visited Guatemala I spoke with [First Lady] Patricia Morales and her husband the president, I asked them to operate vis-a-vis Honduras so it’ll move its embassy to Jerusalem,” she said.

Sara Netanyahu said that during the visit, which included official ceremonies, she attended a lunch party with Jimmy Morales and his wife.

Last Friday, Palestinian terrorists detonated a bomb that killed seventeen-year-old Rina Shnerb, who was hiking with her family, and wounded her father and brother. The attack comes a few weeks after the murder of nineteen-year-old Dvir Sorek by Hamas operatives near a village bus stop. Gershon Hacohen comments:

From the Palestinian perspective, Jews can—perhaps—be permitted to exist in their urban high-rises and engage in their white-collar occupations in high-tech and commerce. That is the Jews’ place. The open spaces, on the other hand—the fields, springs, and pastures—these the Arabs must control. The former prime minister Ehud Barak used the phrase “villa in the jungle” to describe Israel’s existential experience, a metaphor worth examining. In their quest for security, the Jews exist in spaces surrounded by fences—a type of upscale, safe ghetto with boundaries they dare not cross.

On the face of it, the “villa in the jungle” metaphor [suggests] a modern high-tech-like outlook. . . . In practice, it is a direct continuation of the [centuries-old] diasporic Jewish experience of ghettoization, the Pale of Settlement, and denial of agricultural and farming opportunities that Zionism has sought to reverse.

For decades now, the Palestinians have understood the essence of their struggle better than the Jews have understood theirs. The purpose of the Zionist enterprise was clear long ago, and Israelis would be wise to re-embrace it: re-establishment of statehood and full sovereignty in the Jews’ ancestral homeland in its full scope. Not in a small, ghettoized, urban “villa in the jungle.”

Rabbi Eitan Shnerb, who was wounded in an explosion at a natural spring near the Dolev settlement that killed his teenage daughter on Friday, was released from the hospital on Wednesday.

Shnerb’s 17-year old daughter Rina was killed in the terror bombing in the West Bank, and his son, Dvir, was injured.

“I said I will continue to spread light for Rina and over the last few days it’s unbelievable how much light has been spread,” the Walla news site quoted Shnerb as saying. “I told Rina during the attack ‘I won’t ever leave you.’ I knew she was dead, but I said that we will continue to spread light for her.”

Thanking his doctors at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, who he said were engaged in “holy work” as were Israel’s security services, who were working “to catch the killers,” the rabbi called for greater unity among Jews and an increased commitment to Torah.

Shnerb’s son Dvir remains hospitalized but is “progressing very, very nicely,” he said.

Following the recent Israeli attack on Iranian operatives in Syria who were planning an attack against it, and two other attacks attributed to Israel, against Hizbullah in Lebanon and Al-Hashd Al-Sha'bi in Iraq, senior Saudi journalist 'Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, formerly the editor-in-chief of the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat and currently the head of the editorial board of Saudi Arabia's Al-Arabiya TV and Al-Hadath TV,[1] published an article in which he welcomed these attacks. Describing them as "an important political and military development unprecedented in its scope and its daring," Al-Rahsed stressed that these operations played an enormous role in the struggle against Iran and its allies. He also called Israel a major regional player in the international effort to besiege Iran economically, financially and militarily, who manages to embarrass Iran in the international and domestic arena. He ended by stating that defeating Iran is possible if the pressure on it is maintained.

The following are excerpts from his article:[2]
"Within a 24-hour period Israel attacked three countries [by targeting] 'Aqraba, south of Damascus [in Syria], the Iraqi city of Al-Qaim on the Syrian border, and the Southern Dahia in the Lebanese capital [of Beirut]. Although these were limited attacks using the weapon of drones, this is nevertheless an important political and military development unprecedented in its scope and its daring. While Israeli drones are flying through the skies to target Iran, American satellites are tracking Iranian vessels, including oil tankers, impeding their movement across the seas and monitoring the harbors where they anchor. And this is in addition to the expansion of the lists of individuals and companies that have been hit with sanctions for maintaining business ties with Iran.

"Those who claim that the escalation of Israeli [military action] has to do with the [upcoming Israeli] election and is manufactured by [Israeli Prime Minister] Binyamin Netanyahu as part of his bid for reelection, [I say that] this may be one of the motivations behind the three recent attacks, [but not the only motivation]. As a matter of fact, the Israeli presence in the battle arenas is part of its regional strategy, based on intensive attacks on Iran and its militias on Syrian and Iraqi soil, which began over a year ago. These actions have positioned Tel Aviv as a regional player that is no longer viewed [only] in the framework of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but in a wider framework.

We will likely never know the whole story about what happened in Beirut early on Sunday morning, but one thing is for sure: if the explosive drones were Israeli, it was an operation on a level not seen in years.

Israel is staying mum on the reports coming out of Lebanon, as they tend to do. So that leaves the public to rely on stories spun by the IDF’s enemy Hezbollah, and social media.

So let’s go with what we know: Just hours after the Israel Air Force took out an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force cell led by two Hezbollah operatives planning an explosive drone attack against Israel, two DIJ drones appeared in the skies over Dahiyeh. One crashed after being pelted by rocks while the other exploded, wounding three people and causing significant damage to Hezbollah’s media office.

According to Hezbollah, the two drones carried 5.5 kilos of C4 each and were on a “suicide mission” and not reconnaissance or civilian.

While Hezbollah and the Lebanese Armed Forces quickly blamed Israel for the attack, many in Jerusalem blamed Iran. If Iran couldn’t launch their killer drone attack against northern Israel from Syria, why not try from Lebanon? Unlikely.

These DIJ drones are not able to fly too far from their operators on the ground, a few kilometers at best. That would mean that their operators were on the ground in Hezbollah’s stronghold. Such an operation may have risked not only the Israeli assets being captured by the Shi’ite group or LAF, but an all-out war between the two enemy countries.

Could the assets not have done something else? Instead of explosive drones, perhaps a car-bombing or assassination by gunmen with silencers?

The deputy leader of Iran-backed Lebanese terror group Hezbollah on Tuesday night warned that his movement would deliver a “surprise” response in the coming days to a series of alleged Israeli raids.

Tensions between Hezbollah and Israel have skyrocketed since Saturday night, when two of the group’s members were killed in an Israeli strike in Syria, and drones crashed in a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut, in an incident also blamed on Israel. On Monday, Lebanon claimed Israeli drones attacked a Palestinian base in the country’s east.

Israel took credit for the Syria raid, but has not commented on the other strikes. The model of drone used in the Beirut attack has raised considerable questions about their provenance, with analysts suggesting they could be Iranian.

The target of the drone attack in Beirut was an expensive and rare industrial mixing machine used in the creation of solid fuel, and the raid set back the terror group’s plans to develop long-range precision missiles by at least a year, according to Hebrew media reports late Tuesday.

Israel reportedly delayed Hezbollah's missile pogram by a year, but how did the country's military successfully do it? Former Israeli missile program organization chief Uzi Rubin analyzes.

Launching new Persian-language social media accounts, the Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday identified an Iranian general as the mastermind behind a thwarted drone attack against Israel from Syria.

The army said Javad Ghafari, a brigadier general in the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, oversees Iranian forces in Syria and is in charge of Tehran’s efforts to establish a military presence in the country.

“Tens of thousands of Shiites from various nations are operating under Ghafari in Syria,” the IDF said in a statement.

The army said Ghafari was in charge of a cell in Syria that planned to fly explosives-laden drones at Israeli territory, which the IDF thwarted over the weekend.

The statement was the first released by the IDF’s new Persian-language social media channels. The military said its newly launched Instagram, Twitter and Telegram channels were “official information platforms designed for an Iranian audience.”

You don’t need a fancy flowchart to explain Iran’s web of terror in Syria.

But here it is anyway: pic.twitter.com/8b8K30qkku

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) August 27, 2019

An Israeli soldier carefully eyes the narrow, damp tunnel carved from surrounding rock through a tightly strapped black headset.

He is not in one of the attack tunnels built by Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah under the border with Israel, but one of a new generation of soldiers using virtual and augmented reality to train.

In a small computer-lined room, T., a 20-year-old member of Yahalom, or Diamond — the special operations unit of the army’s combat engineering corps — simulates an advance along the narrow passage.

His head sweeps from side to side and up and down, while his hands probe walls invisible to the onlooker.

“We see everything, even falling drops of water,” says the soldier, who cannot be named for security reasons.

“I really feel like I’m there,” he tells AFP. “I feel the humidity, the sense of being stifled.”

The headset displays every detail of the virtual tunnel — a reconstruction of one of several subterranean infiltrations uncovered by the army — allowing instructors to guide T. in real time.

With Hezbollah and Hamas both burrowing underground to try and infiltrate Israel, the IDF is preparing its troops for tunnel warfare with VR goggles and replica tunnels in training facilities. Our Ariel Levin-Waldman has the story.

Months after intentionally plunging the Palestinian economy into financial crisis, the Palestinian Authority has finally agreed to accept two billion shekels from Israel. In order to justify the move to its domestic audience, the PA had to invent an alternative reality, assuming that its population and potentially even the international community would never know the truth.

When Israel implemented its Anti-“Pay for Slay” Law in February 2019 and started deducting from the tax revenues Israel collects and transfers to the PA, 41 million shekels/month amounting to 502 million shekels/year, which is the amount the PA admitted it had spent in 2018 to pay salaries to terrorist prisoners and released terrorists, the PA responded by refusing to accept all the remaining tax revenues. Since making that decision, hundreds of millions of shekels that Israel has collected and was willing to transfer to the PA have been sitting in Israel’s coffers, just waiting for the PA to accept them.

At the time, the PA claimed that accepting the deducted funds would be equivalent to accepting that the arrested Palestinians are terrorists and that the move would have “ominous political consequences, and it will have legal implications for us as an authority, and on the banking sector, and on the beneficiaries and such.”

Now the PA has suddenly agreed to accept two billion shekels from Israel. While making the announcement, PA Civil Affairs Minister Hussein Al-Sheikh, already sowed the seeds of the PA’s alternative reality claiming that the funds were received “after exhausting negotiations” and that the PA would be importing petroleum “without the “blu” tax retroactively for the past 7 months.”

Why are the details about Rina Shnerb's hometown and her age worth mentioning? Because the Palestinian media has again engaged in a campaign of fabrications and lies to justify the terror attack and the murder of an innocent Jewish teenager.

The Palestinian media, however, does not feel comfortable reporting the facts about the terror attack. In the eyes of Palestinian new editors and journalists, Rina was a "settler" and a "soldier." By using such terms, the Palestinians are trying to create the impression that she was not an innocent teenager, but a Jew who lived in a settlement and was even serving in the IDF.

Finally, it is important to note that many Palestinian media outlets and officials continue to refer to Israel as "occupied Palestine." They see zero difference between a Jew living in the West Bank and a Jew living inside Israel. For them, all Jews are settlers and colonizers, and all cities inside Israel -- Tel Aviv, Haifa, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Eilat, as well as Lod, the hometown of Rina -- are "occupied." In the eyes of Palestinians, in fact all of Israel is "occupied" and a "settlement."

When Palestinian terrorists fired three rockets at Sderot on August 25, Palestinian media outlets reported that Sderot is a "settlement." In case anyone had doubts, Sderot is an Israeli city in the Negev Desert, not a "settlement." By using the term "settlement," the Palestinians are again trying to create the impression that a city it is a legitimate target for rocket attacks because it is an "illegal settlement."

After Palestinian LGBT organization al-Qaws announced that it had held a gathering in the West Bank city of Nablus earlier this month to discuss gender pluralism in the city, the group was banned by the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The PA said that the group’s activities were “contrary to the values of Palestinian society” and threatened to arrest its members. Not content with that, the PA proceeded to ban all activities designed to promote LGBT rights in its territory.

And anti-gay prejudice is nothing new in the region.

According to a 2013 Pew survey, for example, in Egypt and the Palestinian territories, over 90 percent of the population considers homosexuality unacceptable. But with this latest ban, the Palestinian LGBT community has lost the very small margin of hope they still maintained that they would not be officially classified as criminals — as they are in many Muslim countries (in a few, homosexuality carries the death penalty).

The champions of the “intersectional” fight against Israeli “oppression,” such as US Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), have remained strangely silent regarding this development, and about the persecution of gays in the Muslim world generally. Nor, it would appear, have they ever heard of the many other forms of oppression common in the Muslim world — for instance, against women.

Hamas has declared a state of emergency and on Wednesday morning began arresting supporters of Islamic State and other Salafist organizations in the Gaza Strip en masse, hours after three policemen were killed in a series of blasts in the coastal enclave, according to Palestinian reports.

An unnamed security source told the BBC that the two explosions that hit police checkpoints near Gaza City on Tuesday evening were the result of suicide bombings carried out by IS and that one of the attackers had previously been detained by Hamas.

Hamas, the Islamic terrorist organization that controls Gaza, has frequently come into conflict with supporters of more extreme jihadist organizations in the strip and recently undertook operations against members of IS. Last year, the group’s Sinai branch declared war on Hamas, terming the group and its supporters “apostates.”

Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry said the first explosion occurred next to a police checkpoint south of Gaza City.

“Two members of the police were martyred as a result of an explosion that took place near a police checkpoint at the Dahdouh intersection,” Hamas-run Interior Ministry spokesman Iyad al-Bozm said.

Three policemen were killed in the Gaza Strip in a series of suicide bombings at the hands of what are believed to be extremist Salafist groups. Hamas initially pointed the finger at Israel, but is not retracting the accusation. Our Jonathan Regev analyzes.

Qais Khazali, the leader of the Iraqi Shiite militia Asa'ib Ahl Al-Haq, said in an August 26, 2019 show on Al-Ahd TV (Iraq) that he believes neither the U.S. nor Iran genuinely want war, but that Israel wants war because it acts in accordance with ideologies and prophecies that have their roots in the Torah. He claimed that Israel wants war because it sees "Babylon" as its greatest enemy, and he said that there are people inside the American government who are advancing this cause. Khazali also said that the U.S. has been focusing its humanitarian aid to Iraq in the Al-Anbar province because it has a plan to cut Al-Anbar away from Iraq and use it to shelter Palestinian refugees. In addition, Khazali claimed that there is a plan for war to break out between Iran and the U.S. before the end of President Trump's first term, and he said that recent Israeli attacks against camps belonging to the Iraqi PMU and Federal Police have been the first steps in this war.

Tensions between Iran and Israel have reached new heights after three events attributed to Israel – attacks on “killer drone” teams in Syria, a drone attack in Beirut, and repeated attacks on weapons in the warehouses of pro-Iran militias in Iraq.

The drone attack in Beirut reportedly destroyed a key component for producing high-grade propellant for precision solid-fueled missiles.

Hizbullah will do whatever it can to retaliate forcefully to Israel’s actions. The intention and desire exist, and the organization’s success in carrying out its reaction is dependent on Hizbullah’s operational capability.

The damage to Iranian interests on Iraqi territory bordering Iran have struck one of the central tenets of Iranian security, to conduct the campaign far away from the borders of Iran on the land axis that it has planned for transporting weapons to Syria and Lebanon.

The alleged Israeli attacks on Iranian assets led to an intense internal discussion within Iran around the ongoing lack of success – especially on the critical front facing Israel – to establish offensive capabilities and to hold a military grip along its border.

Hardline Iranian journalist: Israel “should not be surprised if in the coming days or nights anonymous pilotless aircraft will attack security, military, and nuclear targets of Israel or the port cities and major Zionist centers…. Israel should be prepared for the bitter and harsh news of the incursion and attacks by UAVs on Dimona, Haifa, and Tel Aviv.”

In these sensitive times, retaliation by Iran and/or Hizbullah may shut down any chances for a meeting between President Trump and his Iranian counterpart, President Rouhani.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif invited Iranians in a post on his Instagram to watch a TED talk he gave at an independently organized TEDx event earlier this month on Youtube. Both Instagram and Youtube are banned in the Islamic Republic.

In his TED talk at the TEDx event at the Amirkabir University in Tehran, Zarif discussed "four big mistakes we make in our communications, from small day-to-day talks to negotiation on big global issues," according to the description on the Youtube video of the talk.

YouTube is officially banned within Iran and only well connected companies are allowed to benefit from the video streaming service.

In May, Iran announced that the national information network (ININ), a intranet system that the country is working on, was 80% complete, according to Radio Farda.

IRNA, a state news agency, said that the intranet would offer "high quality, high speed" connections at "low costs."

The intranet is intended to promote Islamic content and raise digital awareness among the public, according to the BBC.

Iran already has blocked access to tens of thousands of sites and services including Twitter and Facebook, although many users use virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxy sites to bypass the filter.

As the United States and Iran continue to trade barbs in a tense international standoff, leading lawmakers are starting to pressure Iranian leaders to consent to new nuclear negotiations that could help ease American sanctions and provide relief for the Iranian people, who have been hardest hit by the international community's economic penalties.

After President Donald Trump extended an olive branch to Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif for talks regarding the country's ongoing work on nuclear weapons and support for regional terrorist organizations, Iranian leaders rejected the offer to hold good faith talks.

Iran's unwillingness to consent to new negotiations is the strongest sign to date that it has no interest in escaping the Trump administration's toughest sanctions, which have isolated the regime, but also have caused economic headache for average Iranian citizens. Trump administration sanctions on Iran have blocked some $10 billion in revenue to Tehran since last November.

Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is one of several leading lawmakers who views Tehran as using its own citizens as pawns in an increasingly lethal standoff with the United States and other Western nations.

"The Iranian people are the real losers, as they are being used as pawns by a despotic and corrupt ruling class," Banks told the Washington Free Beacon. "They are frustrated they have no political or social freedoms, and they suffer under systematic government corruption that takes food out of the mouths of its citizens."

I see your website buries Iran's election to the UN Working Group on Communications on the Status of Women, so here's the video & link to full news story: https://t.co/AMB4n6ilKJ

Why should we care that Iran is now a UN judge on women's rights complaints? Because it means that.. pic.twitter.com/yh6JuQkEl9

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) August 28, 2019

Syrian-American human rights activist Ammar Abdulhamid and Egyptian-American researcher Samuel Tadros discussed Zionism and Israel on an August 15, 2019 show on Al-Hurra TV (United States). Ammar Abdulhamid said that there is a colonialist-imperialist streak in all civilizations and this means that the colonialist aspects of Zionism are not unique. He argued that the Arabs have become nihilistic with regard to Israel because they focused on annihilating Israel instead of building a Palestinian state right from the start. He also said that one cannot ignore the role that Arab Jews played in Israel's establishment and the fact that they did so in order to escape persecution by Muslim Arabs. In addition, Abdulhamid pointed out that the West was not always supportive of Israel, despite Arab claims that the West planted Israel as a foreign cancer in the Middle East. He added that Israel is the most successful and most stable country in the Middle East and it would make no sense for Israel to be annihilated while unstable countries like Egypt and Syria survived.

Samuel Tadros said that Israel is the only country to have successfully resurrected a dead language. He said that the Holocaust proved Theodor Herzl's argument that Zionism is the solution to the fact that other nations will never accept the Jews. Tadros added that the idea that Israel is a foreign cancer planted by the West ignores the historical presence of Jews throughout history in Palestine and the Middle East. Tadros also said that the fact that the Jews successfully established the thriving State of Israel, despite coming from different places and speaking different language, should serve as a "very important lesson to anyone trying to establish a state."

"The Colonialist-Imperialist Streak Is Innate In The Genes Of Nations And Countries, So We Cannot Say That [Zionism] Is Exceptional In This Sense"

Ammar Abdulhamid: "Since ancient times, the human order has been that when a certain tribe or people suffered famine, destitution, or any other problem in a certain region, they would move to another area. If they had to, they would raid your people. If they were allowed to settle in the land, then they did so peacefully. These solutions have always existed. The colonialist-imperialist streak is innate in the genes of nations and countries, so we cannot say that [Zionism] is exceptional in this sense. What is special about this movement is that they collectively moved to another area without taking into consideration the rights of the original people on that land. Here we have a problem, and we will discuss it..."

Samuel Tadros: "And others do believe in the rights of the original people? But I do think that there are some unique aspects [about Zionism]. For example, they resurrected a dead language. Nobody else has done this. The Copts dream of restoring the Coptic language, and the Assyrians dream of preserving their language, but the reality is that languages die. Hebrew is the only successful case of a dead language being resurrected. We do have a certain uniqueness in the Jewish story, compared to other examples."

 Few are the learned here, many are the Christians, and these make themselves distasteful in the public places ...The Christians and the area are predominant here and the mosque devoid of congregations and assemblies.

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez will travel to Israel on Friday to inaugurate a “diplomatic office” in Jerusalem, recognizing the holy city as Israel’s capital.

The diplomatic office in the city will be an extension of Honduras’s Tel Aviv-based embassy.

“For me it’s the recognition that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel,” Hernandez said on Tuesday.

The Honduran foreign ministry said in a statement Israel had proposed that Honduras move its embassy to Jerusalem, which is being “analyzed and evaluated in the international and national context.”

US President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in late 2017 and officially moved the US embassy there last May, sparking a deterioration in relations with the Palestinians.
Honduras’ President Juan Orlando Hernandez speaks at the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington on March 24, 2019. (Screen capture/AIPAC)

Guatemala and Paraguay followed suit while Brazil said it was studying the possibility. Paraguay reversed its decision four months later, after a change in government.

Moving an embassy to Jerusalem is highly contentious. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital, while Palestinians view East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

Most diplomatic missions in Israel are situated in or near Tel Aviv as countries try to maintain a neutral stance over the status of Jerusalem.
(h/t IsaacStorm)

In an August 4, 2019 blog post on the website of the Qatari Al-Jazeera network, Palestinian blogger Ahmad Samir Qannita praised the summer camps held by Hamas's military wing, the 'Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades,[1] and commended Hamas for instilling the values of jihad and resistance in the Gazan youth and raising a "generation that believes in the duty of jihad." He noted that Hamas devotes all its resources, including its official institutions, media and education system, to this goal and that the summer camps for children and teens are an example of this. He noted further that the camps offer the participants – junior high and high school students from all over the Gaza Strip – a comprehensive military training program conducted by professional Al-Qassam fighters and "similar in its intensity to [the training] received by the Palestinian resistance fighters." The program includes the maintenance and use of machine guns and other weapons, live ammunition practice, urban warfare, and the crossing of enemy lines by means of attack tunnels.

The blogger also quoted lines from a militant poem by Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradawi, a major ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood who lives in Qatar and is close to the Qatari regime, which urges the Arab and Muslim nation to produce arms and fighters for the sake of Islam.[2]

The following are excerpts from Qannita's blog post:[3]
"Gaza is not like it was in previous decades, when the jihad activity there was limited to small armed groups that acted in secret, [striving] to carry out high-quality operations against the Zionist occupation forces in complicated security conditions. [Such was the situation] after, in 1996, the Oslo authorities [an epithet for the Palestinian Authority] delivered harsh blows to the armed Palestinian factions, led by Hamas, and persecuted and arrested anyone leaning towards the idea of resistance. The [Palestinian] Authority's security apparatuses even established an army of informers who were tasked with spying and collecting information on young jihad fighters, so as to arrest them and incarcerate them in dungeons, to deter them from fighting the Zionist occupation...

Ahed Tamimi: the Palestinian poster child

While the BBC shows footage of Tamimi attacking an IDF soldier, for which she spent eight months in an Israeli prison, it fails to give any real background on the Palestinian poster girl for terror. For the real tragedy is not Tamimi’s experience with the Israeli military court system (what the BBC terms a “childhood”).

Ahed Tamimi’s entire childhood has been spent in an environment permeated with Palestinian terrorism: terror in which her family has long played an active and prominent role. For example, Ahed’s aunt helped plan the horrific Sbarros Pizza restaurant bombing, and her mother posted anatomically precise tutorials on how to most effectively stab Israelis.

Ironically, this very terrorism is the reason Israel has security measures in the first place.

Related reading: Ahed Tamimi’s Global Propaganda Tour

Since childhood Ahed has learned from her family that all of Israel is occupied Palestinian land, including Tel Aviv, and that she must fight to gain all of it. Hardly a path to peace. And Ahed’s family have placed her personally in danger over and over, for the benefit of cameras.

Her appearance for the BBC is just the latest in a global propaganda tour, milking her iconic status.

This, however, is the real Ahed Tamimi that you won’t see on the BBC:

There are some real doozies here https://t.co/FgazEGJcLn#AhedTamimi#ShirleyTemper

— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) August 28, 2019

Holocaust memorialising is sometimes used as a fig leaf for present-day antisemitism. It’s easy to pay tribute to dead Jews. What seems so much more elusive is support for live ones, particularly those in Israel trying to defend themselves against those who yet again want them killed just because they are Jews.

There is no doubting the government’s generous impulse in wanting to build this memorial. Yet the British government was also a cheerleader for the Obama-brokered 2015 deal that enables Iran, which has waged terrorist warfare against the west and the Jews for 40 years, to build a nuclear weapon after a mere decade or so delay.

Moreover, in supporting the EU’s attempt to bust the Iranian sanctions reimposed by the US last year, the British government is trying to funnel funds once again to a regime openly committed to Holocaust denial and wiping Israel off the map.

Towards this infernal goal, Iran has more than 120,000 missiles pointed at Israel from Lebanon through its proxy Hezbollah. In an act of war thwarted at the weekend by Israeli warplanes, Iran intended to dispatch from Syria its own explosive-laden drones to attack Israel’s northern towns. Yet for a Jew to suggest that Britain might join America in trying to bring the monstrous Iranian regime to heel provokes sneers about an Israeli warmongering agenda from people for whom the threat of another Jewish genocide occasions at best an eye-roll.

In 1929, Arab clerics and politicians provoked riots across Palestine by accusing Jews of plotting to take control of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque. This month marks the 90th anniversary of those riots and Palestinian Authority and Hamas leaders incite violence today using similar falsehoods and ideology.

The 1929 riots destroyed the Jewish community in Hebron. They persuaded Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion that socialist fraternity among Jewish and Arab workers and peasants would not ensure peace. They impelled Palestine's Jews to bolster the Haganah, their underground self-defense group. And they vindicated Zionist warnings against relying on foreigners for security.

Today's conventional wisdom holds that Palestinian-Israeli peace will result from resolving the "final-status issues." This is to assume away profound Muslim religious and Arab national objections to Israel's very existence.

To commemorate the 1929 riots is to refute the common error that the conflict is about the "occupation" that began in 1967. Arab anti-Zionist violence predates not only 1967 but Israel's birth in 1948. It started even before the 1929 Hebron massacre.

Arab rejection of Israel and Zionism emerges from an all-or-nothing view of justice and honor. It has never brooked compromise or moderation. It has justified, indeed demanded, murder of the enemy and destructive sacrifice of Palestinian lives.

Until the Palestinians have a leadership willing to set aside the ideology and cool rather than inflame the passions that spawned the Hebron massacre, the conflict will not be resolved through diplomacy.

On July 18, 1994, a car-bomb struck the headquarters of AMIA—the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, the largest Jewish community center and social-service agency in Buenos Aires—killing 85 people and wounding 300 more. It was the worst single attack on Diaspora Jews since the Holocaust.

A quarter-century later, the perpetrators of this terror attack have still not been brought to justice. And in this month’s Mosaic essay, the renowned Jewish activist Rabbi Avi Weiss tells the story of the shameful cover-up of the AMIA bombing.

As soon as he heard about the attack, Rabbi Weiss packed his bags and traveled to Argentina to be present with the suffering Jewish community there. But he soon found himself confronting the then-president of Argentina, Carlos Menem, and attending a cabinet meeting where it became clear to Rabbi Weiss that the Menem government was not serious about catching and punishing the perpetrators of this horrific crime.

In this week’s podcast, Rabbi Weiss joins Tikvah’s Jonathan Silver to discuss his essay. He recounts his initial trip to Argentina and surreal meeting with President Menem, reflects on his many journeys back to Argentina in the years since the bombing, and offers his thoughts on the complicated role of the Jewish activist who operates outside the corridors of power demanding justice for his people.

Alberto Fernandez, the current frontrunner in Argentina’s upcoming presidential election, has defended his vice presidential nominee — former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner — from the suggestion that she was involved in the murder of federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman in 2015.

Speaking at a public forum in Buenos Aires last Thursday, Fernandez exclaimed, “Cristina was the one most affected by Nisman’s murder.” Several local media outlets covering the event noted that Fernandez rapidly corrected himself after using the word “murder” in relation to Nisman, substituting the words “that death” instead.

Nisman’s body was discovered in the early morning of Jan. 19, 2015 — hours before he was due to unveil a complaint against Kirchner’s government for reaching a pact with Iran despite the ongoing investigation, which he was leading, into the July 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people were murdered and more than 300 wounded in an attack conceived and executed by Iran in collaboration with its Hezbollah terrorist proxy.

Kirchner’s government falsely maintained that Nisman’s assassination was a suicide until an independent police investigation in May 2017 established beyond doubt that the federal prosecutor had been murdered. More recent efforts within Argentina to bring Kirchner — who has served as a senator since losing the 2015 presidential election — to trial over both the AMIA case and Nisman’s murder have come to nothing.

The California Democratic Party’s executive board passed three pro-Israel resolutions on Aug. 25, condemning hatred towards Jews and the State of Israel.

One resolution, which Progressive Zionists of California (PZC) Co-Founder Susan George said “sailed through,” expresses “how antisemitic hate speech harms Jews and other Zionists in the California Democratic Party.”

It states that Zionism is “the human right to self-determination of the Jewish people in their homeland of Israel,” and mentions that antisemitic rhetoric has been “regularly employed by anti-Israel activists both inside and outside the [party] using demeaning and degrading language about Jews and supporters of Israel.”

The resolution also condemns sentiments that “dehumanize or employ stereotypes about Jews, such as that Jews control or wield unusual power over the economy, government or media,” in addition to contending that “Jews do not have a right to self-determination or protections from discrimination accorded to others.”

A second resolution offered backing for “diverse voices targeted by the Trump administration,” including Jews.

Finally, a third resolution approved the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.

At the same time, the California Democratic Party’s legislative committee also voted to support a bill sponsored by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) that advocates for “the human rights of Palestinian children living under Israeli military occupation and [requires] that United States funds do not support military detention, interrogation, abuse or ill-treatment of Palestinian children.”

An audience member connected to the anti-Israel organization IfNotNow accused Rep. Brad Schneider (D., Ill.) of dual loyalty during a town hall with constituents last week.

The organization promoted the video on its Twitter account and blasted Schneider as a "die-hard @AIPAC-nik" who "couldn't even say the word ‘Occupation.'"

"I have family in Israel, as I'm sure that you do, so your Israel policy is of particular concern to me," the audience member, identified by the video's subtitles as "Nathan," said while reading from his phone. "When Donald Trump opposed BDS, moved the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, signed the Taylor Force Act into law, withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, and recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, you celebrated every single one of these moves."

"How is your policy towards Israel different than President Trump's?" he asked Schneider.

"My policy towards Israel is supportive of the U.S.-Israel relationship," Schneider responded. "Israel is without question our best ally in the region. Israel is one of our most important allies in the entire world. So you go down the list, let's start with the embassy. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. If you would talk to Israelis, if they think the U.S. should move its capital to Jerusalem, they would say ‘yes,' and not just the U.S., every country should move their embassy to the capital."

At that point, a man from the crowd shouted out, "That's not what he asked.""You represent American Jews, not Israelis," Nathan added.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ pic.twitter.com/RxKXH2yiL0

— Alex VanNess (@thealexvanness) August 27, 2019

.@JenniferWexton *really* doesn't want to talk about her support for pro-BDS, pro-@jvplive anti-Israel Del. @IbraheemSamirah, who said that giving money to Israel is worse than giving to the *KKK,* among limitless other insane comments #VA10@RJCpic.twitter.com/qi7wyhRMHb

— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) August 27, 2019

President Donald Trump's judicial nominee for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has been subject to a media smear campaign which has distorted his past writings and labeled him a white nationalist, provoking backlash from experts.

Earlier this month, MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow attacked Steven Menashi, Trump's nominee for the open seat on the circuit court, for a 2010 law review article he wrote. Maddow characterized the article, titled "Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy," as a "high-brow argument for racial purity" arguing that democratic nations couldn't function unless they were unified by race.

"Are you talking about what I think you're talking about? Oh yes you are," Maddow said. She added that the article "ends with this sort of war cry about how a country can't work, how definitely democracy can’t work unless the country is defined by a unifying race."

Ed Whelan in National Review explains that Menashi's argument was about national identity and not about "racial purity." Menashi argued, quoting John Stuart Mill, that national identity requires a people "united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others, which make them cooperate with each other more willingly than with other people, [and] desire to be under the same government."

The Wall Street Journal editorial board slammed Maddow for her smears of Menashi.

Timothy Mynett, @IlhanMN campaign strategist and alleged lover, is a walking #BDS-fail! https://t.co/4XnftEiL2p cc: @WeWork

— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) August 28, 2019

The UK’s newly appointed Home Secretary Priti Patel has vowed to stand up to antisemitism following a meeting with British Jewish organizations on Tuesday.

Patel said in a statement late Tuesday night that she was “delighted to meet with the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

“I look forward to working with them to stand up to the threat of antisemitism, and ensure the security and safety of Jewish communities,” she said.

The meeting with the organizations was organized by the board.

They discussed topics that included “tackling antisemitism, countering extremism and safeguarding Jewish interests in the context of Brexit.”

Board of Deputies president Marie van der Zyl, together with Community Security Trust (CST) chairman Gerald Ronson and Jewish Leadership Council vice chairwoman Debra Fox, said in a joint statement that they were, “very pleased to meet the new home secretary and congratulate her on her appointment to this crucial role.

Britain’s Labour party has become “an incubator for anti-Semitism,” a new report has claimed.

Since the election of the party’s hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn in September 2015, Labour members have become “radicalized” about both Israel and Jewish people, according to a study by researcher and blogger David Collier.

In “The British Labour Party: Obsession and Radicalization,” Collier presents evidence of a pattern by which members who had rarely or never commented about the Jewish state, Zionism or Jews prior to Corbyn’s election as leader nearly five years ago began to post about them on scores of occasions afterwards. They often shared anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, denied the existence of Jew-hate within the Labour party and rejected the mainstream media as controlled by “Zionists.”

Mark Gardner, director of communications at the Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Semitism and protects Jewish venues, said Collier’s research showed “the radicalizing effect upon some Labour members of prolonged heated debate on the party’s anti-Semitism problem.”

He labeled it “a sadly inevitable outcome of any such political argument: creating interest where there was none and then people adopting ever stronger positions on it.”

Ten years ago, well-known South African trade unionist Bongani Masuku walked into a classroom at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand and made threats against the Jewish community.

It was March 2009, and it happened to be the in middle of Israel-Apartheid week, where tension between pro-Palestinian students and pro-Israel students on campus swells.

Masuku, who was the spokesman for international relations for the country’s main trade union, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), was addressing an event hosted by the Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Young Communist League.
He told attendees that life for Jews who support Israel would be made “hell.”

During his speech, Masuku also threatened violence against South African Jewish families who had members who were serving or had served in the IDF, adding that Jews who continue to stand with Israel must “not just be encouraged, but forced to leave South Africa.”

Just a month before, in February 2009, Masuku had written a blog post attacking Jews.

“As we struggle to liberate Palestine from the racists, fascists, and Zionists who belong to the era of their friend Hitler,” he wrote. “We must not apologize, every Zionist must be made to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our brothers and sisters in Palestine,” he said.

“We must target them, expose them, and do all that is needed to subject them to perpetual suffering until they withdraw from the land of others and stop their savage attacks on human dignity,” Masuku continued.

“Every Palestinian who suffers is a direct attack on all of us,” he added.

A former medical resident at the Cleveland Clinic who lost her position after scores of anti-Semitic social media that she wrote were exposed, has requested a hearing before the State Medical Board of Ohio.

Lara Kollab was informed last month that following an investigation, including a deposition in which she admitted to authoring the tweets, the medical board would discipline her, in punishments that could range from fines, permanent suspension or limiting her license, the Cleveland Jewish News reported. She is entitled to request a hearing to defend herself.

Kollab apologized in January when the anti-Semitic posts she wrote from 2011 to 2017 came to light.

She said she visited Israel and the Palestinian territories every year as an adolescent and “became incensed at the suffering of the Palestinians under the Israeli occupation.” The posts came because she had “difficulty constructively expressing my intense feelings about what I witnessed in my ancestral land.”

They resurfaced after being publicized by the controversial website Canary Mission, that hosts dossiers on pro-Palestinian student activists, professors and organizations, focusing primarily on North American universities. Among the posts that got the most attention was a tweet from 2012, when she was a medical student, which said: “hahha ewww.. ill purposely give all the yahood [Jews] the wrong meds….”

During the upcoming American Political Science Association’s (APSA) annual conference in Washington, DC, a group of political theorists is expected to discuss a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

While the “Academic Boycott Resolution” will only be discussed and not voted on during the Aug. 31 meeting, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) nonetheless expressed alarm towards the APSA, which was founded in 1903 and is “the leading professional organization for the study of political science and serves more than 11,000 members in more than 100 countries,” according to its website.

In a letter to APSA Executive Director Steven Smith, AEN, which consists of APSA members, expressed concern that the resolution, which is expected to be introduced by APSA’s Organized Section 17, Foundations of Political Theory, will “further a virulently anti-Israel agenda and the goals of the BDS movement” and “not allow a fair discussion of the resolution.”

“Indeed, the resolution’s sponsors have already shown that they are uninterested in debate or dialogue with those opposed to academic boycotts in general and of Israel’s academy in particular,” continued the letter, which was written by AEN’s Chairman Mark Yudof; Executive Director Miriam Elman; and Deputy Executive Director Michael Atkins. All three call for the discussion to be “robust and even-handed.”

Several other academic associations have also considered a boycott of Israel in the past. Most notably the American Studies Association passed a resolution to boycott the Jewish state in 2018, while the Modern Language Association rejected a resolution in 2017.

pic.twitter.com/Wpo7jNC6iP

— Eye On Antisemitism (@AntisemitismEye) August 27, 2019

A 17-year-old Palestinian Harvard freshman was denied entry into the United States on Tuesday, with immigration officers questioning him for hours before cancelling his visa, according to Harvard University newspaper The Crimson.

A resident of Tyre, Lebanon, Ismail B. Ajjawi says he was subjected to interrogations and had his laptop and cellphone searched for five hours before being challenged regarding social media posts made by friends that were deemed by the officials as anti-American.

“I responded that I have no business with such posts and that I didn't like, [s]hare or comment on them and told her that I shouldn't be held responsible for what others post,” he wrote, according to The Crimson. “I have no single post on my timeline discussing politics.”

The immigration officer then decided to cancel his visa and Ajjawi was denied entry into the country.

"Applicants must demonstrate they are admissible into the U.S. by overcoming ALL grounds of inadmissibility including health-related grounds, criminality, security reasons, public charge, labor certification, illegal entrants and immigration violations, documentation requirements, and miscellaneous grounds," wrote US Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Michael S. McCarthy in a letter to Harvard. "This individual was deemed inadmissible to the United States based on information discovered during the CBP inspection.”

Surely the “apartheid” #Israel lie is on life support https://t.co/w39aXcuqCr@Hadassah

— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) August 28, 2019

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., used what many conservatives and Jewish leaders are saying is an antisemitic attack against those working to expose the media, calling in a just-published column those involved in the effort, such as GOP strategist Arthur Schwartz, “termites.”

Schwartz, the only person Pitts, Jr., names as involved in the effort, is a Jewish conservative and ally of President Donald Trump.

The use of the word “termites” echoes antisemitism from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has recently used the word to attack Jewish people.

“A president who has branded journalists ‘enemies of the people’ and news media ‘an evil propaganda machine’ now has working on his behalf an anti-journalism hit squad,” Pitts, Jr., wrote in the column. “These people are nothing less than termites in the woodwork of freedom.”

Mort Klein, the president of America’s oldest pro-Israel group the Zionist Organization of America said in a phone interview on Tuesday evening he believes the comments from Pitts, Jr., are antisemitic. Klein referenced not just Farrakhan’s use of the word “termites” to describe Jewish people, but also when Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) used the same term.

This is the third in a series of posts by CAMERA Arabic (part 1, part 2) exploring how Arabic-language news networks, including those affiliated with Western media outlets, frame the topic of Jews who originate from or live in the Middle East and North Africa by distinguishing between “loyal” Jews and “treacherous” Zionists. All translations, emphases and in-bracket remarks are by CAMERA Arabic unless otherwise specified.

The two previous posts in the series focused on media coverage of Tunisian Jewry. It is a small, Middle Eastern Jewish community, which faces scrutiny from the Arab Muslim majority which questions the former’s “Tunisian patriotism” when issues relating to Israel or “the Zionists” arise. As the two posts demonstrated, those concerns are often uncritically echoed by mainstream media outlets that cover Tunisia, like BBC Arabic (which maintains that it adheres to vital standards of journalism as practiced in the West) and London-based al-Quds al-Arabi (which does not follow Western standards, nor has it ever before).

It was only fitting, then, that the most recent heated debate on the matter (described in detail in the first post) was triggered by Israeli tourists of Tunisian roots who chanted “long live Israel and long live Tunisia!” – strange fish in a discourse that takes the dichotomy between tolerable Judaism and hostile Zionism for granted. Indeed, unlike the couple of thousands of Jews who live in Tunisia and whom the Arabic-speaking media were still able to somehow classify as loyal Arabs, the tens of thousands of Tunisian Jews who currently live in Israel pose a far greater challenge to the narrative they have been promoting all along.

The subject of Jewish communities who lived in the countries of the Arab and Islamic world for centuries, their recent history and their current whereabouts, is still a sensitive subject in Arab society. Therefore, seldom is it discussed openly and fearlessly in Arabic-speaking media outlets.

Note the framing there: Radio 4 listeners are told that it would be any Israeli action to counter the transfer of weapons from Iran to Syria via Iraq which “could destabilise” the latter country rather than the transfer of weapons itself or the presence of Iranian assets in Iraqi militias.

Shah then introduced her sole interviewee – without clarifying that she is not a military correspondent – and while claiming that third hand statements – unverified by the BBC – from anonymous sources constitute “confirmation”.

Shah: “Let’s speak to Allison Kaplan Sommer who is a journalist at the Left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haretz [sic]. Ahm, just what does…what does this tell us that the confirmation of these air strikes have come from US sources?”

Towards the end of the nearly four and a half minute-long item, Shah returned to her earlier framing.

Shah: “…this is believed to be the first Israeli bombing in Iraq in nearly four decades. Do you think that this is a dangerous opening up of a new front?”

When this story first broke the BBC News website promoted unsubstantiated claims concerning Israeli involvement from an inadequately identified senior Iranian asset. The following day those claims were slightly walked back in another report.

Now we see the BBC using anonymous and uncorroborated claims published by another media outlet to promote the framing of the story it obviously wishes to amplify – with blatant disregard for its own editorial standards.

A 64-year-old rabbi, the father-in-law of popular Hasidic singer Benny Friedman, was hit in the head by a stone brick thrown at him while walking Tuesday morning in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Rabbi Avraham Gopin was hospitalized with “a broken nose, missing teeth, stitches on his head and lacerations on his body,” Friedman posted on Twitter. Gopin is a dual Israeli-American citizen, according to Haaretz.

“This morning, at 7:45am, my father in law went for his morning walk, like he always does. Suddenly a man started yelling at him, and started chasing him, holding a huge brick,” Friedman tweeted in a thread that also included a photo of his father-in-law’s bloody tzitit, a ritual garment Orthodox Jewish men typically wear daily under their clothing.

New York City Councilman Chaim Deutch tweeted that the police are investigating the attack as a hate crime.

The Anti-Defamation League said it was offering a reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the assailant.
“Thank Gd, all things considered, my father in law is doing ok,” Friedman tweeted on Tuesday afternoon.

"The Orthodox are the Jews of the Jews. We are othered, shamed, and ridiculed for our religious practices — by non-Orthodox-Jews and non-Jews alike. And that rhetoric often escalates into downright dehumanization." Devastating, by @avitalrachel:https://t.co/otcONs3U54pic.twitter.com/xNspPFd34W

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) August 28, 2019

Anti-Semitic fliers saying that Jews and Israel were behind the 9/11 attacks appeared in Northern California about 30 miles from San Francisco.

The fliers discovered last weekend in Novato, a city of about 52,000 in the North Bay area, were plastered on telephone poles, storefronts and a high school campus. They said Israelis were seen dancing on the site of the collapsed Twin Towers, that a Jewish-Israeli man made billions in insurance money and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the attacks.

At the bottom of the page it says, “Wake up USA!”

Police Chief Adam McGill urged citizens to “stand up to hate,” but told the Marin Independent Journal that the fliers are protected by the First Amendment and there would be no investigation. No group has claimed responsibility for them.

Mayor Eric Lucan joined McGill in condemning the fliers, saying “there is no room for this type of hate speech” in Novato.

A major row between France’s Jewish community and the largest Freemasons organization in the country was averted on Tuesday after a proposed conference resolution that bitterly attacked CRIF, the French Jewish representative body, was withdrawn.

A statement signed by Grand Master Jean-Philippe Hubsch of the Grand Orient de France Masonic order on Monday evening declared: “No, Freemasons are not antisemitic, just as they are not racist or xenophobic.”

The controversial resolution was due to be debated at the Grand Orient’s annual conference in the city of Rouen this weekend. The text urged the boycotting of all events sponsored by CRIF, lambasting the Jewish communal organization for supporting the State of Israel and allegedly identifying with the “politics of the extreme religious right.” It also blamed rising antisemitism in France on CRIF’s alleged acceptance of Israel’s “encroachment” upon “Palestinian territories” in the West Bank.

The resolution became public after individual members of the 53,000-strong Grand Orient order alerted CRIF to its contents. CRIF President Francis Kalifat told Le Figaro newspaper on Tuesday that he had been “amazed and angered” by the resolution.

Kalifat said he had quickly reached out to Hubsch. “He was as devastated as I was,” the French Jewish leader said.

In the mountainous desert of Arizona, an AH-64E helicopter hiding behind 1,600 feet of craggy mountain fires a missile at a target representing a Russian Pantsir medium-range, surface-to-air missile system on the opposite slope.

The Aug. 26 scenario, attended by Defense News, was part of a U.S. Army experiment to achieve greater standoff against enemy threats using the Rafael-manufactured Spike Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) anti-tank, guided missile.

Maneuvering outside of the Russian system’s range, the Apache pilot was able to fire and control the Spike missile. And the Army took its experiment further by having the Apache fly at a low altitude — only a couple hundred feet above the highest obstacle in the desert — when firing the missile.

The service designed the experiment for the Spike missile and the Apache pilot to lose connectivity in the last few seconds of impact to ensure the missile could take over using its automated capability and still take out the threat.

An unmanned system, meanwhile, kept eyes on the target throughout the event, confirming to the pilot the Spike’s successful impact.

Israeli defense technology firms have recently developed systems that can take control of enemy drones to thwart attacks and gather information on them, a report said Wednesday.

The systems hand the operators complete control of the drone, allowing them to land it safely for analysis.

“The system we developed can detect hostile drones at a range of up to 3.5 kilometers (2.17 miles) and take control of about 200 drones simultaneously,” Asaf Lebovitz, product manager in Skylock, one of the companies, told the Haaretz daily.

The report came days after a series of drone-related attacks in neighboring Arab countries that were blamed on Israel. In one of them, the Israel Defense Forces said it had conducted a strike in Syria to thwart an attack by Iranian drones. In other incidents that took place in Lebanon, the IDF made no comment.

Skylock demonstrated its new invention at an event some two months ago, according to the report.

“We set a certain location where we want to gain control of the drone,” Lebovitz said. “We have the ability to disrupt the connection between the drone and the operator, and then gain remote control of it and land it, to check what it is carrying and whom it belongs to.”

Netflix on Wednesday released the trailer for its series on legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen, starring Sacha Baron Cohen.

The six-episode drama “The Spy” tells the story of Cohen, who spied for Israel in Syria in the early 1960s, and the new promo focuses on the personal toll of Cohen’s undercover work as he is forced to lie to loved ones. It also suggests that as the story progresses, Cohen will lose his own ability to distinguish truth from fiction as he assumes his Syrian persona.

The show, which will be released September 6, was written and directed by Israeli Gideon Raff, best known for the Hebrew-language drama series “Hatufim” (Prisoners of War) and its acclaimed US adaptation, “Homeland.”

Mossad agent Cohen was put on trial and executed by Syria for espionage on May 18, 1965, after he successfully infiltrated the Syrian government under the alias Kamel Amin Thaabet for four years. The intelligence he conveyed during that period was credited by then-prime minister Levi Eshkol with having greatly assisted Israel during the Six Day War.

Five decades on, Israel has not given up on retrieving Cohen’s remains from Syria and bringing them to Israel for burial.

Members of the group Jewish Galicia & Bukovina were recently sent to document 16th-century Jewish graves that were unearthed in the town of Busk in western Ukraine.

Dr. Ilia Lurie, a researcher with the organization, told Israel Hayom, "We knew that there was an old grave dating back to 1520 in the Ukrainian town of Busk. The cemetery was apparently built at the end of the 15th century."

The representatives of Jewish Galicia & Bukovina (JCB) were joined by local activists and students from the Herzog College in Jerusalem who have completed a course on European Jewry. Alongside the grave whose existence they were aware of, they were surprised to discover 10 more graves and headstones, which Lurie describes as a "rare find."

"The headstones we discovered were from the 16th century, which was known for riots that destroyed a lot of Jewish symbols and remains," Lurie explained.

Thus far, JCB – whose purpose is to document and make accessible the historic legacy of Jews from Galicia and Bukovina – has documented 15 Jewish cemeteries. These comprise only a small part of the total cemeteries and headstones that existed in these areas. The rest are believed to have been lost.

A synagogue in Moldova that was seized by the Soviet Union almost eight decades ago was reopened on Sunday.

About 300 people attended the reopening of the Wooden Synagogue, or the Lemnaria Synagogue, in the basement of the Kedem Jewish Community Center.

The synagogue was founded in 1835 and seized in 1940.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee opened the community center in 2005 in the building that consisted of the synagogue.

Alexandar Bilinkis, the president of Jewish Community of the Republic of Moldova, along with Alexander Weinstein and Grinshpun Emmanuil, contributed the funds to enable the synagogue’s reopening.

Out of about 3 million people, fewer than 4,000 Jews reside in Moldova (as of 2012), which was party to pogroms and other persecution against Jews during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The earliest written use of the word “Hebrews” may have been found upon an inscribed Moabite altar discovered during ongoing excavations at the biblical site of Atarot (Khirbat Ataruz) in Jordan. The two newly deciphered late 9th century or very early 8th century BCE Moabite inscriptions incised into the cylindrical stone altar serve as tangible historical anchors for a battle of epic proportions.

According to researcher Adam Bean’s Levant article on the find, “An inscribed altar from the Khirbat Ataruz Moabite sanctuary,” the inscriptions offer new insight into the bloody aftermath of the conquest of Atarot that is described in the famed Mesha Stele and in the Bible. In 2 Kings 3:4-5, after the death of King Ahab of Israel (reigned ca. 869-850 BCE), King Mesha of Moab rebelled against Israelite hegemony but was defeated.

The two accounts, however, give opposing victors. In the Mesha Stele narrative, the vengeful Moabite king razes the city and annihilates its inhabitants, only to later repopulate it with other peoples.

Writes Bean, these two new inscriptions — the earliest extant evidence for a distinctive Moabite script — could be Moabite records of tallied booty and a description of the conquered peoples. If his reading is accurate, those peoples could potentially include the Hebrews.

Another BDS Win?! 👍👍‼️@hydroquebec Quebec chooses not to renew a cyber-security contract with Israeli company IEC. @BDS_Quebec has been working for years to pressure Hydro-Quebec to sever the partnership. Congratulations! https://t.co/cIAJTpQ2eA

— CJPME (@CJPME) August 28, 2019

A/HRC/41/G/17
Annex to the letter dated 12 July 2019 from the representatives of Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Comoros, the Congo, Cuba, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, the Philippines, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe and the State of Palestine to the United Nations Office at Geneva addressed to the President of the Human Rights Council 

Mr. President, Madam High Commissioner, 

We, the co-signatories to this letter, reiterate that the work of the United Nations Human Rights Council (IIRC) should be conducted in an objective, transparent, non-selective, constructive, non-confrontational and non-politicized manner. We express our firm opposition to relevant countries' practice of politicizing human rights issues, by naming and shaming, and publicly exerting pressures on other countries. 

We commend China's remarkable achievements in the field of human rights by adhering to the people-centered development philosophy and protecting and promoting human rights through development. We also appreciate China's contributions to the international human rights cause. 

We take note that terrorism, separatism and religious extremism has caused enormous damage to people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, which has seriously infringed upon human rights, including right to life, health and development. Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers. Now safety and security has returned to Xinjiang and the fundamental human rights of people of all ethnic groups there are safeguarded. The past three consecutive years has seen not a single terrorist attack in Xinjiang and people there enjoy a stronger sense of happiness, fulfillment and security. We note with appreciation that human rights are respected and protected in China in the process of counter-terrorism and deradicalization.

 We appreciate China's commitment to openness and transparency. China has invited a number of diplomats, international organizations officials and journalist to Xinjiang to witness the progress of the human rights cause and the outcomes of counter-terrorism and deradicalization there. What they saw and heard in Xinjiang completely contradicted what was reported in the media. We call on relevant countries to refrain from employing unfounded charges against China based on unconfirmed information before they visit Xinjiang. We urge the OHCHR , Treaty Bodies and relevant Special Procedures mandate holders to conduct their work in an objective and impartial manner according to their mandate and with true and genuinely credible information, and value the communication with member states.  

We request that this letter be recorded as an official document of the 41st session of the Human Rights Council and that it be published on the OHCHR website. 

The Republic of Nauru has recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, Israel Foreign Ministry announced on Thursday.

"I commend @Republic_Nauru’s important decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. We will continue to strengthen Jerusalem and to bring about the recognition and opening of diplomatic missions and embassies in our capital," Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz tweeted on Thursday.

In a letter the country’s mission to the UN in New York wrote to the Israeli mission on the matter, it stated: “The Mission of Nauru has the honor to convey the decision of the Government of the Republic of Nauru to formally recognize the City of Jerusalem as the Capital City of the State of Israel.”

The island country from the Pacific joined a small number of other countries who have taken this step in the last several years, including the United States, Guatemala and Honduras. The President of Honduras is due to arrive in Israel this weekend to open a trade office in Jerusalem.

The "Charter of Makkah," unanimously endorsed on May 28, 2019, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, by leading Muslim scholars from 137 nations, offers Muslims guidance on concepts that champion moderate Islam.

"All people, regardless of their different ethnicities, races and nationalities, are equal under God. We reject religious and ethnic claims of 'preference.'"

"Differences among people in their beliefs, cultures and natures are part of God's will and wisdom. Religious and cultural diversity never justifies conflict."

"We recognize and respect the other's legitimate rights and right to existence. We set aside preconceived prejudices, historical animosities, conspiracy theories and erroneous generalizations."

"We should advance laws to deter the promotion of hatred, the instigation of violence and terrorism, or a clash of civilizations, which foster religious and ethnic disputes."

"The empowerment of women should not be undermined by marginalizing their role, disrespecting their dignity, reducing their status, or impeding their opportunities, whether in religious, academic, political or social affairs. Their rights include equality of wages and opportunity."

Braving extremely inclement weather, with a flood-like situation, Singha Bahini, a grassroots organization in India, held a pro-Israel rally in Kolkata, India on August 16, 2019. Over 10,000 people braved the heavy sudden downpour and flooding, which caused bumper-to-bumper traffic and clogged roads. Many thousands more could not make it through the treacherous conditions to the rally site. While the organization SinghaBahini is just a year old, the organizers have been on ground helping in the existential battle for the Hindus in the villages of Eastern India for over a decade.

Pro-Israel rallies are not new to the founder of the organization Devdutta Maji, who was instrumental in organizing two large pro-Israel rallies in India: 20,000 people in 2014 and 70,000 people in 2018. At the rally, demonstrators held placards saying, "We Support the Jewish People in their 2,000-Year-Old Struggle,""India and Israel Friends Forever," and "We Support Israel in Her War against Terrorism."

The rally reflects the positive turn in the India-Israel relationship under the leadership of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. The Indian prime minister visited Israel in July 2017 and Prime Minister Netanyahu reciprocated with a visit to India in 2018. With strong trade ties, people-to-people contact, and rallies in support of Israel as seen recently, ties between India and Israel and between the Hindus and Jews worldwide are expected to strengthen further.

US Special Envoy Jason Greenblatt praised New Zealand for suspending their donations to UNRWA following reports of serious ethics violations and corruption at the agency.

"Good on New Zealand joining Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland in suspending money to UNRWA while corruption investigation is ongoing. UNRWA is a failed system & Palestinians deserve better. More UNRWA donor countries should pay attention," Greenblatt wrote on Twitter Thursday.

New Zealand announced yesterday that it would suspend its aid to UNRWA, which provides assistance to the descendants of Palestinian Arab refugees.

The funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency is on hold until the release of the October report by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services on allegations against the agency including misconduct, corruption, links to terror groups, perpetuation of the Israeli-Arab conflict and anti-Semitism.

“We expect UNRWA to cooperate fully with the investigation under way and to report back on the investigation’s findings and recommendations,” the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in a statement. “The Ministry will review the findings of the UN OIOS report once the investigation is complete and, after that point, will provide advice to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on future funding.”

New Zealand joined Belgium and Switzerland, which suspended their aid to UNRWA last month in light of the investigations.

A 28-year-old Maryland man was indicted Wednesday on a federal terrorism charge for planning a truck terror attack to kill pedestrians at a popular waterfront district near Washington, D.C.

A federal grand jury charged Rondell Henry of Germantown, Md., with attempting to provide material support to ISIS, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.

Henry planned to drive a truck into a large group of pedestrians at National Harbor, a waterfront district in Maryland with restaurants and stores. He was inspired by the 2016 Bastille Day truck attack in Nice, France. That terror attack killed 86 and injured hundreds.

Court documents state that Henry wanted to create "panic and chaos," and he indicated he wanted to do the "same as what happened in France." He was also intent on finding a sizable crowd to attack.

On March 26, Henry walked off his job in Maryland and searched for a large truck to steal. He stole a U-Haul in Virginia "to use it to commit mass murder, in the pattern established by ISIS," according to court documents.

"The defendant, allegedly inspired by ISIS and its violent ideology, stole a vehicle as part of his plan to kill and injure innocent pedestrians," said John C. Demers, assistant attorney general for national security.

Since Syria's attack on Idlib began on April 28:
• 30 aid workers killed
• 48 hospitals & clinics bombed
• 862 civilians killed, including 226 kids & 179 women
• 1850 civilians injured
• 750,000 people forced to flee their homes
• 0 UN Human Rights Council urgent sessions

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) August 28, 2019

The fact that Israel has found it necessary to attack targets so far from its traditional area of military operations close to its immediate borders is indicative of the alarming escalation that has taken place in recent months in the threat Iran poses to Israeli security.

Earlier this week, in Lebanon, an Israeli drone was reported to have bombed a Palestinian base that is said to be funded by Iran. Israeli warplanes were also reported to have bombed Iranian military bases on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus.

The very idea of Washington sitting down with the Iranians at a time when it is continuing to threaten the security of its closest Middle Eastern ally would be unconscionable.

The reality is that there can be no meaningful dialogue between Washington and Tehran on a future deal so long as Iran remains committed to its long-standing policy of seeking the wholesale destruction of the Jewish state.

Washington Post editorial says Israel's strikes on Iranian threats in the region are ginned up attempts by Netanyahu to goose his election numbers, and raise the 1981 Osirak strike https://t.co/wcfOfkDA4J

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) August 28, 2019

On August 24, 2019, two drones crashed in the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut. One exploded in what the Arab News1 called a “botched Israeli drone strike.” Hizbullah media claimed that the attack was against its media offices. Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri described the vehicles as “reconnaissance” drones, and Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned that the incident was “very, very, very dangerous.” Gen. Qasem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force, took to Twitter to label the actions “insane operations.”

The London Times provided some clarification about the targets: “crates believed to contain machinery to mix high-grade propellant for precision-guided missiles.”2

Specifically, the target was an “industrial planetary mixer.” What was unique about this mixer? Some models are available from Chinese companies on the internet for mixing food, cakes, paint, and dough.

The Beirut target was a very special, eight-ton piece of machinery used for the production of solid fuel propellant for precision-guided missiles. Also destroyed was an electronic control system for the machine, packed in a separate crate.

The machine is heavy and delicate and was shipped in heavy wooden crates (without markings and special inscriptions) and anchored to the containers to prevent shocks. It is a complex and expensive process to deliver and install the equipment.

With rockets on the southern border and drone surveillance operations on Hezbollah in the north, Israel remains occupied monitoring threats constantly. Our Jonathan Regev analyzes.

Israel has released information on senior Iranian and Hezbollah militants involved in the terror group’s precision missile project in Lebanon.

The group, which has been working on the expensive and classified project since 2013, has been attempting to build factories to produce precision missiles in South Lebanon, Beirut and the Bekaa under the guidance of senior Iranian officers.

The Iranian officers have been identified as Brig. Gen. Muhammad Hussein-Zada Hejazi, Col. Majid Nuab,Brig. Gen. Ali Asrar Nuruzi.

Hejazi is the Lebanon Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Qud’s Force, responsible for all Iranian activities in the country and in charge of the precision guided missile program. He operates directly under the command of Quds Force Commander Maj.-Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Nuab, an engineer who specializes in surface-to-surface missiles is the technological manager of the project. He actively manages and oversees the precision missile sites in Lebanon. Nuruzi is the Chief Logistic Officer of the IRGC and is in charge of transferring logistical components and equipment from Iran through Syria to the project sites in Lebanon.

Senior Hezbollah militant Fu’ad Shukr, a senior military advisor to Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and member of the group’s highest military body the Jihad Council, is the main Hezbollah militant involved in the project.

DECLASSIFIED: These are the senior Iranian commanders running Hezbollah's precision missile project in Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/4bw24MBoco

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) August 29, 2019

Iran is using its proxy Hezbollah to drag Lebanon into a war.

What is Lebanon doing to stop them? pic.twitter.com/EYCF5fwjcl

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) August 28, 2019

Former Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Sheikholeslam, who has served as Iran's ambassador to Syria, said in an August 27, 2019 interview on Ofogh TV (Iran) that Iran has invested in the "huge defensive and strategic endeavor" of deploying roughly 150,000 missiles in Lebanon, Syria, and the Gaza Strip that are meant to be launched at Israel at Iran's discretion. He said that since the U.S. has defined Israel's national security as part of its own national security, this strategy is Iran's greatest deterrent against both countries, and he claimed that Israel would have certainly attacked Fordow, Bushehr, and Natanz dozens of times were it not for Iran's missiles in these countries. Sheikholeslam went on to say that a ballistic missile launched from Iran would take eight minutes to get to Israel and would be detected by American and NATO radars in the region. In contrast, he explained that missiles launched from Lebanon would start a rapid descent almost as soon as they can be detected and monitored. In addition, Sheikholeslam said that Iran does not intend to drive Israel into the sea or to use nuclear weapons against it. Rather, he said that Iran's military capabilities are exclusively for purposes of deterrence and that Iran simply wants the Zionists to "understand" that they have violated the rights of the Palestinians and to leave the region, especially since they "have citizenship in several European countries anyway."

The UN Security Council is expected to vote Thursday on renewing the mandate of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in Lebanon. The proposed mandate includes calling on the Lebanese government to provide the force with a wider scope in their inspections. It also includes requests to the government for increasing efforts to curtailing weapons smuggling to non-state actors, for example, Hezbollah.

The proposal describes the Hezbollah tunnels exposed by Israel and the government of Lebanon is urged to "carry out all required investigations as fast as possible," a press release issued by the Israeli mission to the UN reported.

Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said that while Israel's interests are represented in the document, "UNIFIL is still required to take responsibility and act with decisive force within its mandate."

MUST WATCH: #Hezbollah terrorists attack #UN peacekeepers in S. Lebanon.
Hezbollah is:
🔺An Iranian terrorist proxy
🔺That endangers civilians in Lebanon and Israel
🔺Bullies #UNIFIL in violation of #UNSCR1701
🔺Poses a grave threat to #Lebanon& regional stability.

via @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/JDvqUs5tMp

— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) August 28, 2019

A drone attack in Beirut attributed to Israel reportedly hit a key component of Hezbollah's precision missile infrastructure. One of the drones struck a high-grade propellant mixer used to improve the accuracy and engine performance of precision-guided missiles and destroyed a remote control machine for rocket guidance, according to a report in Britain's The Times.

Druze living in Israel has long been loyal to the state. But those living in the disputed Golan Heights remain loyal to Syria and see Israel's strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon as unnecessarily aggressive. Our Craig Johnson has the story.

Instigating violence on the Temple Mount, as the PA did (https://t.co/VXcqEWcn5I), requires preparation. The PA prepares by constantly telling the Palestinians that Jews are threatening Al-Aqsa. Here, the official PA daily presents Jews as a snake strangling the Temple Mount. pic.twitter.com/qrHwUCZ3Sl

— Pal Media Watch (@palwatch) August 29, 2019

Why are the details about Rina Shnerb's hometown and her age worth mentioning? Because the Palestinian media has again engaged in a campaign of fabrications and lies to justify the terror attack and the murder of an innocent Jewish teenager.

The Palestinian media, however, does not feel comfortable reporting the facts about the terror attack. In the eyes of Palestinian new editors and journalists, Rina was a "settler" and a "soldier." By using such terms, the Palestinians are trying to create the impression that she was not an innocent teenager, but a Jew who lived in a settlement and was even serving in the IDF.

Finally, it is important to note that many Palestinian media outlets and officials continue to refer to Israel as "occupied Palestine." They see zero difference between a Jew living in the West Bank and a Jew living inside Israel. For them, all Jews are settlers and colonizers, and all cities inside Israel -- Tel Aviv, Haifa, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Eilat, as well as Lod, the hometown of Rina -- are "occupied." In the eyes of Palestinians, in fact all of Israel is "occupied" and a "settlement."

When Palestinian terrorists fired three rockets at Sderot on August 25, Palestinian media outlets reported that Sderot is a "settlement." In case anyone had doubts, Sderot is an Israeli city in the Negev Desert, not a "settlement." By using the term "settlement," the Palestinians are again trying to create the impression that a city it is a legitimate target for rocket attacks because it is an "illegal settlement."

The son of a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group is believed to be behind the bombings that killed three Hamas policeman in Gaza City on Tuesday, Palestinian sources told i24NEWS Arabic.

Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, declared a state of emergency and mobilized forces in a massive manhunt to apprehend suspects behind the midnight attack at two separate police checkpoints inside the coastal enclave.

Hamas security forces in Gaza reportedly believe that two suicide bombers linked to groups affiliated with or "sympathetic" to the Islamic State group were responsible for the deadly attack.

Sources in Gaza said that one of the culprits – a suicide bomber identified as "AGH"– was the son of a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad member.

The assailant was said to be active in the ranks of the terrorist group, but it is not clear if he also had links with extreme Salafi groups or ISIS.

This is Balata refugee camp in Nablus, West Bank. 100% under Palestinian Authority. Street divides between the city and camp. Palestinians in camps have no rights from PA & can’t even buy house in the street across. Why is there still refugees under PA if it’s their own state? pic.twitter.com/mjt0fm5Fej

— Jonathan Elkhoury- جوناثان الخوري (@Jonathan_Elk) August 27, 2019

In the recent years, Al-Azhar has consistently refrained from proclaiming the members of terror organizations, chief of them ISIS, to be infidels. Al-Azhar's position is that, despite the criminal nature of the terrorists' actions, a Muslim who has not renounced the shahada (the declaration of faith proclaiming that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is His Messenger) cannot be accused of heresy; furthermore, the decision to proclaim someone an infidel can only be taken by a sharia judge. Another argument presented is that, if it accused ISIS and its ilk of heresy, Al-Azhar itself would be no different from the terrorists, who readily direct such accusations at their fellow Muslims.

Al-Azhar's position has evoked much criticism in the Egyptian press. This is in addition to the criticism voiced by Egyptian President 'Abd Al-Fattah Al-Sisi against the institute for failing to sufficiently mobilize to renew the religious discourse in Egypt in order to fight extremism.[1]

The criticism against Al-Azhar resurfaced recently following the attack carried out by ISIS in Sinai against Egyptian forces on the morning of Eid Al-Fitr (June 5, 2019), in which an Egyptian officer and seven other servicemen were killed.[2] Karam Gabr, head of Egypt's National Press Authority, wrote in the government daily Al-Akhbar that Al-Azhar's justifications of its refusal to proclaim ISIS infidel were no longer convincing or acceptable. He called on the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayeb, to reconsider the institute's position and amend it, because "faith does not entitle a terrorist to slaughter our children."

As Israeli-Iranian tension escalate, US President Donald Trump indicated at the Group of Seven Summit in Biarritz, France, this week that he is ready to meet with Iran’s leadership.

“If the circumstances were correct or right, I would certainly agree to that. But in the meantime, they have to be good players,” Trump said on Monday at a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, who initiated the idea of a US-Iran summit.

The American president warned, however, that if the Iranians don’t give up their weapons program, “they’re going to be met with really very violent force.”

Despite his decision last year to withdraw from the 2015 Iran deal and renew tough sanctions against Tehran, Trump said Washington isn’t pursuing a regime change in Iran but instead is seeking to achieve “no nuclear weapons, no ballistic missiles.”

“They’re really hurting badly. Their inflation is through the roof. The sanctions are absolutely hurting them horribly. I don’t want to see that. They’re great people. I think there’s a really good chance we will meet,” the president said.

"The Islamic Republic authorities say 'compulsory hijab' is the law and must be obeyed. However, bad laws must be challenged and changed."— Masih Alinejad, Iranian-American journalist and award-winning activist.

"The basis of this tyranny is the religious law that the government has been enforcing since the 1979 revolution. Women are second-class citizens, and essentially slaves in Iran. The international community needs to have the courage to delegitimize religious law and call it out for its tyrannical nature. Just as the free world delegitimized communism during the Cold War, it should do the same to religious law."— Nasrin Mohammadi, author of Ideas and Lashes: The Prison Diary of Akbar Mohammadi, about the torture and death in prison of her late brother; to Gatestone Institute.

"The international community should also focus on Iran, struggle to end that regime and other similar governments across the world. With Iran, it should also point out the corruption, where religion is used as an excuse to steal money and power from the people."— Nasrin Mohammadi.

"But we need support of the international community to raise this issue with Iranian authorities and take action."— Masih Alinejad.

In two articles he published recently in Qatari dailies, Faisal Al-Qassem, a host on the Qatari Al-Jazeera network, harshly attacked the U.S. policy on Iran, which he said serves Iranian interests at the expense of the Gulf countries and Turkey. In the first article, published in the Al-Sharq and Al-Quds Al-Arabi dailies, he wrote that U.S. President Donald Trump's passivity in the face of Iran's recent aggression – i.e., the attacks on oil tankers and downing of a U.S. drone – is part of an American-Iranian game aimed at blackmailing the Gulf countries into paying America for securing the oil shipping lanes. He even hinted that the U.S. itself may be behind some of the attacks on vessels in the Gulf, with the aim of blackmailing not only the Gulf countries but the entire world. In the second article, published in the same papers one week later, Al-Qassem, who is of Syrian origin and opposes Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, accused the West, and especially the U.S., of encouraging the expansion of Shi'ite Iran in the region and particularly in Syria, in order to create a new Middle East in which Iran is the leading player.

The following are excerpts from the two articles:
Trump Refrained From Responding To The Iranian Attacks Because He Wants Countries To Pay For U.S. Protection

In the first article Al-Qassem wrote: "What's happening in the Gulf? The U.S. suddenly appears – or more accurately pretends – to be incapable of protecting the oil shipping lanes and to lack the power or ability to confront Iran's threats. After UAE tankers were attacked off the Al-Fujairah [coast], people expected the U.S. to adopt an iron-fist policy vis-à-vis Iran. But instead of acting against Iran, which [even] hinted that it was behind the attacks, the U.S. remained silent and sufficed with investigating the incident. Since when does the American cowboy remain silent in the face of threats to the life-blood of the global and American economy, namely oil?...

"Several days later, two Japanese oil tankers were directly attacked in the Gulf of Oman, and the U.S. confirmed that its satellites and navy... had documented Iranian boats attacking both vessels. Some people then thought... that this time the U.S. would teach Iran a lesson. But the U.S. again made do with [voicing] vague threats against Iran, while doing nothing. The most absurd thing is that Iran... took a further step this time and downed state-of-the art American drones [sic., refers to the June 20 downing of a U.S. drone], whose value is estimated at $200 million. What did the U.S. do? Its president [Donald Trump] tried to downplay the incident by suggesting that [Iran] may have downed the aircraft by mistake. But Iran embarrassed Trump by proudly declaring that it had done so deliberately...

As Iran’s Rouhani continues to insist that the US lift sanctions before engaging in talks, experts have come to the conclusion that the efforts undertaken by G7 diplomacy may just be wishful thinking, says senior diplomatic correspondent Christian Malard.

A cyberattack by the United States against Iranian computer systems on June 20 “wiped out a critical database used by Iran’s paramilitary arm to plot attacks against oil tankers and degraded Tehran’s ability to covertly target shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf, at least temporarily,” reported The New York Times on Wednesday, citing senior US officials.

The regime has been recovering data wiped out in the attack and attempting to “restart some of the computer systems – including military communications networks – [that were] taken offline,” the officials told the outlet.

The US Cyber Command launched the attack against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in an operation planned weeks in advance, two sources told The Washington Post in June. The attack was coordinated with the US Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.

It was the first attack by the Cyber Command since it was raised to full combatant command in May, according to the report.

After some tensions with oil tankers arose in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. allegedly struck Iran with cyber attacks to prevent further incidents from occurring. Our Owen Alterman analyzes.

Kerman Friday Sermon by Former Iranian Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi: Narrative of "So-Called Holocaust" Should Be Researched; The Jews, Zionism Constitute an Invasive Civilization of Arrogance pic.twitter.com/NtRHhmADgu

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) August 29, 2019

A source in the Palestinian resistance said on Tuesday that the resistance factions in the Gaza Strip will enter the front line upon the outbreak of any war with Hezbollah on the northern front.

"If there is a battle with Hezbollah in the north, the resistance factions in Gaza will enter the confrontation line," the source said.

When Israel barred two US congresswomen from entering the country earlier this month, I initially thought it was a stupid decision. But after hearing the reactions from both American politicians and American Jews, I’ve started to think that it may have been necessary.

This isn’t to deny the substantial damage it has caused. Pro-Israel Democrats felt betrayed and even some pro-Israel Republicans were outraged. Most of the organized Jewish community was horrified. And the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement received media exposure it could never have gained on its own.

But nobody would have felt outraged or betrayed had Israel barred, say, white-supremacist politicians. Thus the underlying message of these reactions was that unlike white supremacism, advocating Israel’s destruction is a legitimate opinion, and is entitled to the same respectful treatment as the view that Israel should continue to exist. Yet, no country can or should treat its own erasure as a legitimate option.

To understand why this was the issue at stake, a brief review of the facts is needed. When Israel originally agreed to allow a visit by Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), it knew that they enthusiastically supported BDS, a movement unambiguously committed to eliminating the Jewish state. It also knew they would use the visit to tar Israel in every possible way.

However, it assumed that they would at least pay lip service to Israel’s existence by following the standard protocol for official visitors – meeting Israeli officials and visiting some Israeli sites. On that assumption, and since the law banning entry to prominent BDS supporters permits exceptions for the sake of Israel’s foreign relations, Israel decided to admit them “out of respect for the US Congress,” as Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer said at the time.

A few days before the visit, however, the proposed itinerary arrived and proved that assumption wrong. Far from paying lip service to Israel’s existence, the trip literally erased the country from the map.

US-Israel relations have been through worse, and they will survive this too. But the incident is worth contextualizing within the US-Israel political framework. Tlaib and Omar displayed remarkable audacity in openly lying about their trip, both in advance and then again after it was canceled. They falsely claimed they were planning to meet Israeli officials when their itinerary included only ‘Palestine’, Palestinians, and supporters of Palestinians.

Tlaib’s actions proved that her visit was never meant to be an impartial trip to the scene of the conflict. Nor was it about seeing her grandmother. The point was to showcase the so-called “occupation.” Such manipulations, compounded by the soft power enjoyed by pro-Palestinian groups, magnify a fictitious reality. They allow those groups to hijack the narrative of peace, justice, and human rights while yearning for Israel’s destruction.

US-Israel relations do not exist in vacuum, and US opinion is neither monolithic nor frozen in time. It has undergone significant shifts since 1948, with some groups becoming more favorable toward Israel and others less so. Nevertheless, as polls illustrate, support for Israel has become an American value, even if some elected officials feel otherwise. Sustaining this requires work and perseverance.

It is a serious challenge to get past the self-delusion and zero-sum exclusion of the BDS worldview, which polarizes American politics regarding Israel, and convey the actual reality of the Middle East. The normalization of antisemitism in American politics and culture – together with our growing collective dependency on technology and the general tone of politics – reduces complex issues to sound bites and drives polarization and ignorance. (h/t IsaacStorm)

In The book, The Trials of Richard Goldstone, Daniel Terris, a friend and admirer, provides us with an in-depth account of a remarkable career.

Goldstone, 80, is a third-generation South African who was born into a Jewish family in Boksburg, near Johannesburg.
In the book, we follow, and are helped to understand, the events and circumstances that led to the emergence of Goldstone as a towering figure in international jurisprudence.

As his legal career progressed in South Africa, where he combated and helped defeat apartheid from within the system, and as chief prosecutor for the UN in bringing the Bosnian Serb political and military leaders to justice, Goldstone proved himself a dedicated advocate of human rights and an unwavering upholder of international humanitarian law.

Terris both describes and explains the challenges that Goldstone faced along the way, and the principles that informed his many decisions – principles that evolved over the course of his career, and have become his legacy.

Then late in the story, when he was already past 70, came the debacle of the Goldstone Report, a pivotal episode in his life and in his career. Terris describes the episode with scrupulous honesty.

It is well known that a couple of years later, Goldstone published an article in The Washington Post containing the key sentence: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” His partial retraction of the report’s conclusions was condemned at the time as “too little, too late,” and in a sense this was true. Yet Terris also highlights the reactions of some in the human rights world who applauded Goldstone’s moral courage in acknowledging when mistakes had been made. “Heroism of the first order,” one editorial called it.

A Facebook campaign ad from a US Republican branch has been slammed as anti-Semitic and “deeply disturbing.”

Titled “A storm is brewing in Rockland,” the video by an upstate New York county’s Republican Party took aim at the large and growing Hasidic Jewish community in the county, the specter of “overdevelopment” and a proposed yeshiva campus.

The video, which appeared to have been removed on Thursday morning, features menacing music, the slogan “If They Win, We Lose” and a warning that “they” will “change our way of life.”

“Aron Wieder and his Ramapo bloc are plotting a takeover,” the video intones, referring to a Hasidic legislator representing a Rockland County town with a large Orthodox population. The ad warns that “chaotic development” and redistricting threaten “our” home, schools, families — and water.

“This video is deeply disturbing and should be removed and condemned immediately by the Rockland County Republican Party,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “To clearly state that members of the Jewish community are a threat to families and our safety and that they must be stopped is despicable and completely unacceptable. Attacking those who are different than we are only breeds hate and makes us weaker. We must all stand together to denounce this hateful video.”

The Republican Party chairman in Rockland County, Lawrence Garvey, defended the video in a Facebook post on the party’s page.

“Regardless of your thoughts of the video, there are facts that cannot be ignored. This is not, nor has it ever been a religious issue. It is an issue of right and wrong,” he wrote. “For those not living in Rockland, it is harder to see a real and unique problem that exists here. The people of Rockland have become desperate for attention to the problems facing our communities and many live every day with the threat of losing their homes and neighborhoods.

“Anyone who dares speak up about overdevelopment, corruption, or education is immediately labeled as anti-Semitic without any concern for facts or without any idea of the true issues at hand.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition in a tweet called the video “absolutely despicable” and “pure anti-Semitism.”

WATCH: a shocking & brazen display of antisemitism!

The Republican Party of Rockland Cty has the audacity to put out this vile trash that amounts to “the Jews are taking over” with “Jewish money and power”!

I expect Dems but more so Republicans to denounce this in full force! pic.twitter.com/5QrZ6uakZK

— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) August 28, 2019

After winning the semifinal judo match, Israeli victor Sagi Muki's Egyptian opponent would not shake his hand for political reasons. Muki discusses with host Jeff Smith.

Marzouk Ali, vice president of the Egyptian Judo Federation who led the Egyptian delegation in the Japan world competition this week, on Thursday explained why his player Mohamed Abdel Aal refused to shake hands with the Israeli who beat him, Sagi Muki, in a semi-final match, saying: “The judge was not fair, in that he should have disqualified Muki. Since he was not disqualified – the Egyptian player left without shaking his hand.”

Ali did not explain why Sagi Muki, who went on to win the gold medal, deserved to be disqualified.

This is not the first time an Egyptian judoka refuses to shake the hand of an Israeli rival who had defeated him. In the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, judoka Islam El Shehaby was thrown twice and lost to Israeli Or Sasson, who later won a bronze medal in the competition. After the match, El Shehaby refused to shake hands with his opponent, after the Israeli winner had bowed to him. As a result of this major breach of judo etiquette, the Egyptian was loudly booed and jeered by the crowd.

In the semi-finals on his way to becoming a judo world champion, Sagi Muki encountered Egyptian judoka Mohamed Abdelaal, who refused to shake Muki's hand at the end of the match.

On Thursday, Vice President of the Egyptian Judo Federation Marzouk Ali commented on the incident, saying that "The loss of judoka Mohammed Abdelaal to the judoka of Israel in the semi-finals was arbitrary injustice."

"The Israeli judoka deserved to be sent off, which did not happen, leading the Egyptian athlete not to shake his hand at the end of the match," Ali claimed.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry was quick to counter Ali's statement, as well as the Iranian judoka's Saeid Mollaei, who was expected not to show up to a match against Muki in case they would happen to compete, saying that, "politics should not be involved in sports."

The Israeli embassy in Cairo published on their Twitter page that, "After forty years of peace and countless handshakes, Israeli judo player Sagi Moki approached Egyptian player Mohamed Abdelaal after defeating him in the semi-finals of the World Judo Championship with a sporting spirit," along with the photo of the Abdelaal walking away from Muki's handshake.

The chairman of the Israel Judo Association said Thursday that Iranian judoka Saeid Mollaei was coerced into throwing his semifinal battle against Belgium’s Matthias Casse a day earlier at the World Judo Championship in Tokyo in order to avoid facing Israel’s Sagi Muki in the final.

In the past Iran has forbidden its athletes to compete against Israelis. In May, the International Judo Federation said it had reached an agreement with Iran to end the boycott, though the head of Iran’s national Olympic committee later denied it.

Mollaei has been accused of faking injuries and intentionally losing fights in the past to avoid facing Muki.

IJO head Moshe Fonti, speaking to Army Radio, said that an hour before Wednesday’s semifinals, the Israeli team heard that Mollaei, ranked No. 1 in the world, “intended to continue the contest, even if he had to face Sagi Muki at the final. We heard he’d asked the head of the Iranian judo association to ensure his family was kept safe.”

A damning new report obtained by Fox News exposes discrimination by Qatar’s Islamist regime targeting Israelis, Egyptians and LGBTQ people ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in the Gulf monarchy.

The report raises serious questions about whether Qatar can comply with the Code of Ethics of FIFA, the international soccer association that governs the world’s biggest single-event sporting competition, held every four years.

Cornerstone Global Associates, a prominent British consulting company, noted in its 12-page report, “FIFA World Cup 2022: Reputational risk and sponsorship,” that “banning fans based on a nationality is a clear breach of the FIFA Code of Ethics.”

“As of June, 2019, Israeli citizens are unable to apply for visas to visit Qatar. The Qatari official website does not list Israel as a country where visas can be applied for, let alone visa-free entry,” Cornerstone wrote.

According to the report, Akbar al Baker, the CEO of Qatar Airways, said in May that Qatar would not issue visas to “its enemies.”

Al Baker was referring to Egyptians.

An ally of Iran’s regime, Qatar is currently the subject of a diplomatic and economic embargo by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

About 10 hours after the horrible murder of 17-year-old Rina Shnerb in a terror attack last Friday, I was curious to see the reaction of the Jewish community. There was widespread condemnation across mainstream and right-wing groups. Among progressive groups more focused on politics and policy, J Street and Americans for Peace Now, unequivocally condemned the attack.

J Street tweeted: “We are heartbroken by this fatal attack near Dolev in the West Bank. Our thoughts are with the victim’s family, two of whom are still in serious condition. This violence must be condemned without equivocation.”

Americans for Peace Now tweeted: “We unequivocally condemn the heinous killing of 17-year-old Israeli Rina Shnerb in a terrorist bombing today in the West Bank, which also seriously injured her 19-year-old brother and father.”

But I saw no such statements from other progressive groups, such as T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights; The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (RAC); Rabbis for Human Rights and The New Israel Fund. Two days later, there was still no reaction. How could that be? Why would they not condemn such a deliberate, depraved act of violence against Jews?

So, I took a closer look at their websites to get a better sense of the Jewish values that animate their work.

Lying Through Omission: Congresswomen Tlaib and Omar made multiple statements about how Israel’s security measures have impacted the lives of the Palestinians. Yet they chose to leave out important details about how these security fences and checkpoints have saved the lives of people in the region. We decided to set the Congresswomen straight.

US President Donald Trump never criticized Jews for “dual loyalty.” The president did the opposite: He urged greater Jewish loyalty to Israel.

Moreover, the president’s statement urging greater loyalty to Israel and the Jewish people was certainly not antisemitic. Rather, it was the opposite of antisemitic; it was philosemitic.

Antisemites depict loyalty to Israel as a negative, and as inconsistent with American interests. By contrast, the president upheld loyalty and caring about Israel as a positive good.

The president’s detractors also ignored the context of President Trump’s statement – namely, the Democratic leadership’s refusal to take action against Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) for their frightening, real and virulent antisemitism.

Moreover, in light of the great friendship that President Trump has repeatedly displayed toward the Jewish people, it is particularly wrong to twist the meaning and intent of his words to malign him.

President Trump has demonstrated with real action as well as words that he is truly the greatest friend that the Jewish people and Jewish state have ever had in the White House. He is pursuing civil rights probes to protect Jewish and pro-Israel students on American college campuses; moved the US Embassy to Israel’s eternal capital Jerusalem; recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; left the Israel-bashing UN Human Rights Council; closed the PLO/Palestinian Authority office in Washington; stopped funding to the terror-supporting PA and UNRWA; withdrew from the catastrophic Iran deal; made numerous strong statements against antisemitism, neo-Nazism and white supremacy; and demanded that the PA must end its incitement of terror and heinous “pay to slay” payments to terrorists to murder Jews and Americans.

In the world of pro-Israel advocacy today, too many people are reluctant to go on the offensive and to respond properly to arguments put forward by anti-Israel activists. Instead of explaining why Israel has a legal right to Judea and Samaria, pro-Israel advocates in America prefer to beat around the bush. They speak out about the wonders of Israeli innovation, how Israel is helping poor people in Haiti and what a great mitzvah Israel did in rescuing Ethiopian Jewry. They only care about spreading good news from Israel, not about responding professionally to arguments put forward by Israel’s adversaries.

And when they are confronted with questions asking why Israel doesn’t withdraw from Judea and Samaria, they say simply that we cannot do so for security reasons or point the finger at Syria, pondering why Israel’s detractors don’t speak out more about what is going on there.

We need to have a moratorium on solutions until we successfully get out the truth about who this land belongs to legallly.
Not too many people in the world of pro-Israel advocacy are willing to confront BDS activists head on and tell them that we are owners of the land under international law, not occupiers. And for this reason, Israel’s public relations has been a dismal failure for we are simply not addressing the issues at hand.

Nevertheless, even though this policy has been a failed strategy, not too many people in the field of pro-Israel advocacy today are considering changing course. The question remains, why so? Mark Vandermaas, who heads Israel Truth Week and is the official lecturer of Canadians for Israel’s Legal Rights, stated in an exclusive interview that too many pro-Israel activists behave like battered women in their advocacy approach.

The appalling failure of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide an American refuge for European Jews confronting the horrors of the Holocaust has long been carefully analyzed and documented by historian Rafael Medoff. Ever since his first book, more than thirty years ago, explored the “deafening silence” of American Jewish leaders in response to the Nazi slaughter, he has probed the evasion in the highest circles of American government and Jewish leadership of the issue of the annihilation of European Jewry.

In his newest book, The Jews Should Keep Quiet, Medoff carefully and scathingly analyzes the collaboration of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, leader of American Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s, with the President revered by American Jews. The dilemma for Wise and his followers, Medoff writes, was whether to speak out against their beloved president’s acquiescence in the Nazi annihilation of European Jewry, thereby jeopardizing their yearning to be recognized as loyal Americans not pushy Jews.

Why, Medoff asks, did Roosevelt do so little to save European Jews? He suppressed immigration, left restrictive quotas unfilled, turned away refugees to the Virgin Islands where they would be willingly accepted, and refused to grant even temporary residence (not citizenship) to desperate Jews fleeing for their lives. His administration would not authorize bombing the railroad and bridges leading to Auschwitz although targets only a few miles away were attacked.

If the president’s indifference to the plight of European Jews seems inexplicable, when so little could have saved so many, how to explain the sycophancy of Rabbi Wise? Founder of the American Jewish Congress and an outspoken Zionist who advocated the fusion of Jewish principles with progressive social and political causes, Wise lavished praise on Roosevelt for his social justice agenda. He was, to be sure, concerned about Roosevelt’s silent response to the worsening plight of European Jews. But at a time of serious economic depression at home he thought it “unfair” to trouble the President with the “lesser problem” across the ocean. Criticizing “court Jews” who were subservient to the president, Wise became prominent among them even as he grasped the mounting danger confronting European Jews.

Born in New York in 1906 and spending his childhood in Ireland and most of his adulthood in Britain, William Joyce has the dubious distinction of being the last person hanged by the United Kingdom for the crime of treason. Joyce left Britain for Germany in 1939, a mere six days before Hitler’s armies invaded Poland, and remained there to broadcast English-language propaganda, the activity that earned him his death sentence. But his fascist sympathies began earlier in 1922, when he joined a pro-Mussolini group in England; in 1937 he left another group, the British Union of Fascists—in part because his anti-Semitism was too extreme even for its leaders—in order to establish the British National Socialist party. Robert Philpot tells his story:

As Martin Pugh writes in his book on British interwar fascism: “Increasingly consumed with a hatred toward Catholics, Communists, and Jews, Joyce saw fascism as the best means of prosecuting his crusade against his and the nation’s enemies.” These hatreds were fueled by a powerful sense of resentment stemming from his own multitude of personal failures. Joyce blamed his inability to complete his master’s degree, for instance, on a Jewish tutor who supposedly stole his research. His rejection for posts in the civil service and Foreign Office were similarly attributed to the malign power exercised by Jews and others.

Joyce’s growing power [in the British Union of Facists]—together with that of the former Labor MP John Beckett and the journalist A.K. Chesterton—accelerated the increasing emphasis the Union of Fascists placed on anti-Semitism. . . . . Joyce [would later] argue for an alliance with Hitler and war against the “twin Jewish manifestations” of Bolshevism and international finance.

Joyce was not entirely the political outsider he made himself out to be. Instead, he was involved with a string of shadowy groups, such as the Nordic League, the Link, and the Right Club, which were frequented by right-wing Tory MPs, members of the aristocracy, and former military officers.

Once in Germany, Joyce’s subversive wartime radio broadcasts—for which he adopted the name “Lord Haw-Haw”—earned him the praise of Joseph Goebbels and a large audience in the UK. After the war, he was identified and captured by the British soldier Geoffrey Perry, né Horst Pinschewer, a Jew who had fled the Third Reich in 1936.

The Guardian has published a long extract from This Land Is Our Land, a new book by author Suketu Mehta. It’s basically a criticism of white civilisation’s fear of “brown and black people reproducing”. Mehta praises Trudeau, Macron and Merkel but attacks Obama, Clinton, Trump, Orban, Poland, Austria and….Israel.

On Israel Mehta writes:
“Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe were the harbinger of today’s global migrants; many of today’s covenants that protect refugees came into existence in response to their predicament. So it is particularly painful to hear that the first army in our time to shoot at people crossing the border looking for asylum was the Israeli army. In 2015, Israeli soldiers fired on African migrants crossing the Egyptian border, wounding a number of them. In December 2017, the Knesset passed a law under which the 40,000 asylum seekers in Israel “will have the option to be imprisoned or leave the country”.”

Mehta is referring to an incident in August 2015 when the IDF shot warnings into the air when a group of Sudanese migrants were trying to cross from Egypt into Israel. One of the potential migrants (who didn’t end up crossing into Israel) had a gun which he was firing at the Egyptian army. When the other migrants still didn’t desist from entering Israel three were shot in the leg, survived and were taken to hospital immediately. The IDF admitted the firing was unjustified and the incident was being investigated by Israel’s military advocate general.

A quick search reveals that in 2010 the UN condemned Egypt for killing 60 migrants at that same border since 2007.

What a shameful episode.
The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network promotes peace by ... wait ...
urging the boycott one of the most pro-peace Israeli politicians around, Tzipi Livni. She is welcome in Ramallah, but — according to APAN — not in Sydney. pic.twitter.com/MTGpIK4h5y

— Dave Sharma (@DaveSharma) August 29, 2019

.@EternallyJewish's thoughts on the #Israel-diaspora relationship https://t.co/HmfITLAftw

— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) August 28, 2019

The third of the programme’s panellists to respond to the question (from 37:24) was the Conservative MEP for South East England Daniel Hannan.

Hannan: “…I think it’s important to look at and learn from things but it’s also important to remember the basis of modernity, the basis of post-enlightenment civilisation, which is that every individual is responsible for himself and that we shouldn’t define people through membership of a group. We should all ultimately stand in defence of our own actions. It’s striking to me that when…very often the kind of people who say ‘well, you know, we need to have reparations or we need to have kind of collective identity on these things’, when the same argument is made in the case of…I dunno…eh…Israel flattening a Palestinian village as a collective punishment, they are quite rightly the first to say ‘well hang on; you don’t do collective guilt. It’s banned by the Geneva Conventions’. And they’re right the second time. So we should never lose sight of the fact that everyone is ultimately responsible for himself.” [emphasis added]

Neither Ritula Shah nor anyone else challenged that highlighted offensive and factually inaccurate statement at the time that it was made. The BBC allowed it to remain in situ in the repeat broadcast and it appears in the archived version of the programme which will be available on demand for a very long time to come, thus leading the BBC’s funding public to wrongly believe that Israel ‘flattens’ Palestinian villages “as a collective punishment”.

Once again we see just how seriously the BBC takes its own editorial guidelines.

The BBC of course did not bother to inform readers that under those so-called “rules of engagement” – i.e. UN SC resolution 1701 – there should be “no authority other than that of the Government of Lebanon” and that previous accords pertaining to “the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon” should have been implemented. Neither were readers told that Hizballah is funded and supplied with weapons (also in violation of that same UN resolution) by a foreign power.

The article continued with more uncritical amplification of quotes from Nasrallah’s speech as well as from the Lebanese president and prime minister (who are of course well aware that their country is held to ransom by the Iranian backed terror group) before unquestioningly promoting what the BBC undoubtedly knows to be a blatant falsehood from Nasrallah:

“Hassan Nasrallah also said the Israeli air strikes south-west of the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Saturday had hit a Hezbollah rest house and not a military facility.”

The article closed with the BBC’s usual unnecessarily qualified portrayal of Iranian activities and more amplification of claims from Iranian assets in Iraq.

“Israel has been so concerned by what it calls Iran’s “military entrenchment” in Syria and shipments of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah that it has conducted hundreds of air strikes in an attempt to thwart them since 2011.

Meanwhile in Iraq, the powerful Iranian-backed paramilitary Popular Mobilisation force again accused Israel of what it said was a drone attack near the Syrian border in Anbar province on Sunday that killed two of its members.”

In other words BBC audiences reading this article found a tepid and euphemistic portrayal of the PFLP-GC terror group along with uncritical repetition of unsubstantiated claims and utter falsehoods from the leader of another terrorist organisation proscribed by the UK government.

Quite how the BBC can claim that such coverage will “build people’s understanding” of the story is beyond belief.

Jews are still routinely being beaten on the streets of New York City. On Aug. 27, a young man heaved a large brick at Abraham Gopin, a 63-year-old member of the Chabad Hasidic community exercising in Lincoln Terrace Park, toward the eastern end of Crown Heights. Gopin was then approached by a man who yelled an anti-Jewish slur and then began punching him before hurling a large paving stone, knocking out Gopin’s front teeth and fracturing his nose. Benny Friedman, a Hasidic musician and Gopin’s son-in-law, tweeted a photo of the victim’s blood-stained tzitzit. “This is absolutely frightening,” Friedman wrote, “and obviously something that a civilization should never tolerate.”

Like others attacked over the past year and even over the past month—including three members of Williamsburg’s Satmar community assaulted the day after Tisha B’Av—there was no mistaking Gopin for a member of any other ethnic or religious group, and no discernible motive or provocation on the attacker’s part, other than his target being a Jew.

The attack on Gopin was especially violent—the brick left a gash large enough to require staples in his forehead. There have been dozens of violent incidents targeting Jews in New York over the past couple of years, but few have produced images of blood-soaked religious objects, an especially visceral reminder of how any outward expression of identity can endanger Jews even in some of the most Jewish places in the most Jewish city in America. And yet the daily experience of anti-Semitism in the city is often more routine. Later on the morning of Gopin’s attack, an East Flatbush resident named Yossi Blachman tweeted, “My 12 year old was just at that park 2 hours ago. As soon as he gets there he sees an Anti Semite talk to his friend pointing at my son saying those F***ing Jews…. he was frightened and immediately left the park.”

When Tablet reached him, Blachman explained that the people who had pointed and cursed at his son were in their teens or early 20s. “It happened to my kid today, but it happens so often,” Blachman added, explaining he’d had almost identical language directed at him near his home one year earlier. “It’s not like a one in a million thing. It’s something that’s happening to people daily.” Still, it was the first time his son had experienced anti-Semitic harassment of this kind, in a place not far from where a man in his mid-60s had been bludgeoned just a few hours earlier.

Hear from the man who was viciously attacked by a violent Antisemite with a huge rock for no other reason than being an identifiable Jew: pic.twitter.com/AEKcfAmHvw

— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) August 28, 2019

Federal authorities announced charges Thursday against an Ohio man accused of threatening a Jewish community center in a video police say shows him shooting a rifle.

Police in New Middletown in northeastern Ohio arrested 20-year-old James Reardon in mid-August after police say he posted a video on Instagram on July 11 of himself shooting a semiautomatic rifle.

The video included sounds of sirens and screaming with the caption: “Police identified the Youngstown Jewish Family Community shooter as local white nationalist.”

A federal charge filed August 19 and unsealed Thursday charges Reardon with transmitting threatening communications via interstate commerce.

Police and FBI officers raided Reardon’s home on August 16.

The Hezbollah mosque in the German city of Münster posted a shocking video in December on its Facebook page, announcing it was proud of terrorism and its allegiance to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an independent, nonpartisan press monitoring organization, first revealed the video and wrote on its website “Poem Recited in a Münster, Germany Shiite Mosque: We Have Pledged Allegiance to Khamenei; We Are Accused of Terrorism and Are Proud of It.”
According to a MEMRI transcription of the video from the Imam Mahdi Zentrum Shi’ite mosque in Münster, a man recited a poem with the lyrics, “We have pledged our allegiance to the Jurisprudent Ruler [Khamenei]. We are soldiers willing to sacrifice our lives for Nasrallah [‘Victory of Allah’]. We belong to the party of Ruhollah [Khomeini]. We have been accused of being terrorists – we are proud of terrorism.

“Listen all nations! Listen, oh Wahhabis! The roaring Arab wave will never retreat. The convoys will not wait long with their march. We will not come to you in small numbers. We will come to you from all over. The brigades will cross [the border] from Yemen, and we will pray in Al-Baqi regardless of the [Sunni] Nasibis [haters]. We are the Shi’ites of Ali Bin Abu Taleb, and will only die free.”

A Dutch Holocaust museum decided not to complain to police about what its former director said were death threats by Jews over his support of Middle Eastern immigrants.

The decision last week by Memorial Center Camp Westerbork followed a heated debate about politicization of the Holocaust’s memory that leaders of Dutch Jewry said featured false accusations against their community by the museum’s former director, Dirk Mulder.

Mulder, who is not Jewish, claimed in April that anti-immigration activists and people from “the Jewish circle” had threatened to kill him over his plans to host an event highlighting the plight of people whom he considers refugees. Jewish community leaders protested the initiative, saying it falsely equates immigrants’ ordeals and the genocide.

The allegation about threats, which Mulder has not publicly retracted, angered some Dutch Jews who doubted its veracity and challenged him to back it up or take it back. Mulder, who has since retired, has not made public any examples of alleged threats. Mulder’s successor, Gerdien Verschoor, told RTV Drenthe last week: “We want to focus on the future and leave this issue behind.”

The largest renewable energy project in Israel, a vast thermo-solar power plant near Ashalim in the Negev, was inaugurated on Thursday at a ceremony attended by Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz and senior government and business officials.

Spanning approximately 390 hectares, larger than the central city of Givatayim, the 121-megawatt solar power facility will supply electricity to approximately 70,000 households in Israel, or approximately 0.75% of all electricity generated in Israel.

The $1.13 billion plant – a public-private partnership (PPP) – was constructed by Negev Energy, a special purpose company held by Shikun & Binui Renewable Energy, Israeli investment fund Noy Fund and Spanish engineering group TSK. The Noy Fund and TSK joined the project in April 2016 after Spanish company Abengoa, a former project partner, went bankrupt.

“If our main purpose in the past was to supply energy for the people in Israel, the Israeli economy and industry, and public health was maybe secondary, we have changed our perspective,” said Steinitz. “The main goal now is to supply energy but also to make it clean and to make sure that we will reduce rather than increase air pollution.”

The power plant, Steinitz said, will contribute significantly to Israel’s target of making 10% of the country’s electricity supply renewable by 2020, and 17% by 2030. At full capacity, the plant will reduce approximately 245,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel sources, equivalent to taking 50,000 vehicles off the road.

Israel is on the road to becoming a global mobility hub, according to a report published earlier this month by the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility (MCFM) of multinational consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

While Israel has no domestic automotive manufacturing activity, in recent years it has become a significant attraction to multinational automakers. According to McKinsey’s analysts, this is in part due to the country’s high expenditure on research and development, and its proficiency in both cybersecurity and artificial intelligence technologies, which are vital technologies for the autonomous and connected vehicle industry.

According to the report, Israel invests well above the OECD average on R&D, up to 4.5 percent of its GDP, compared with the 2.4 percent average. Israel ranked below South Korea (4.6 percent) and above Japan (3.2 percent), Germany (3.0 percent), and the US (2.8 percent). Israel also boasts a high ratio of researchers out of the country’s working population, 17 out of every 1,000 people, according to the report. This is more than in South Korea, Japan, and the US, and more than double the OECD average of eight to 1,000.

According to the report, much of the innovation that occurs in the mobility field is driven by startups, and Israeli startups have gotten a healthy slice of the pie. Since 2010, 40 Israeli mobility-focused startups and an additional 300 startups developing technologies with applications for the auto industry have received investments totaling $18.4 billion. The sum, according to the report, places Israel in fourth place after the US, China, and the UK.

One major takeaway from my first trip to Israel this past June: There’s a certain art to wearing a yarmulke on top of an Afro.

For real, an art.

Having been raised Jewish, I still remembered the snug feel of a kippah on the crown of my head, even though it had been a few years since I’d worn one. So when we went into buildings and areas that observed the custom of covering your head, it wasn’t a big deal.

But for quite a few of my Patriots teammates on the trip with me who had not been raised Jewish, the yarmulke thing was a bit more complicated.

During one of our dinners, Isaiah Wynn accidentally had his yarmulke fall off his head and into his meal. Got it absolutely covered in food. Hummus everywhere. He made a solid effort to clean it off — A+ for effort to him — but, yeah, it wasn’t pretty.

You can also take my guy Brandon King for example. Great person. Huge hair. Could not keep that thing on his head. B-King was struggling with hair clips to no avail for the entire trip. It was one of the great subplots of the entire six-day trip.

For all of us, this was a journey about firsts. It’s not often you get the opportunity to take a first-class trip to an exotic and historic place. It’s even rarer that you get to do it with the guys who you just won a Super Bowl with.

The story of Moroccan Jewry’s immigration to Israel is not simple, beginning many years before the State of Israel was established.
To mark their difficult journey home, as well as the major contributions Moroccan Jewry has made to Israeli society, the World Federation of Moroccan Jewry has organized dozens of events in the forthcoming months for the approximately one million Israeli Jews who are Moroccan or of Moroccan descent.

Toward the end of the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and prior to the signing of the Fez Treaty in 1912 that entailed French protection of Moroccan Jews, there was a mass immigration of Jews from large cities – including Fez, Rabat and Marrakech – to the smaller towns and villages surrounding the cities.

However, the decline in the financial circumstances, overcrowding, and the need to pray in secret to avoid persecution by locals caused some young families to immigrate to Israel. Between 1908 and 1918, some 80 families moved to Tiberius and Jerusalem.
In the years prior to the Holocaust, Moroccan Jews were encouraged to enroll their children in French schools. The community was also prompted to receive a French education and integrate into French culture, as French influence in Morocco began to grow in the early part of the 20th century.

But as the Vichy regime came to power in 1940 and the Holocaust began, the situation for Moroccan Jewry began to change.
Although King Mohammed V is credited with blocking efforts by Vichy officials to impose anti-Jewish legislation upon Morocco and deport the country’s 250,000 Jews to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps in Europe, partial Nazi race measures were put in place in Morocco despite Mohammed’s objection.