The Palestinian Authority continues to incite violence. Following yesterday's visit by Israeli leaders to Hebron, the PA is now saying that Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's presence there was an act of "obvious war" and that he "defiled" the city:
"The [PA] Ministry of Religious Affairs emphasized that [Israeli] occupation Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu]'s defilement of Hebron and the Ibrahimi Mosque (i.e., Cave of the Patriarchs) is nothing but obvious war, in which he has declared his blatant hatred towards the Palestinian presence in Hebron and the Ibrahimi Mosque, which is a purely Islamic mosque."
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Sept. 5, 2019]

Palestinian Media Watch reported yesterday that the PA might want to launch a new wave of terror since the PA ministry, prior to Netanyahu's visit, compared it to then opposition leader Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in 2000, which Arafat exploited to ignite the PA's 5-year terror campaign - the Intifada - in which more than 1,100 Israelis were murdered in terror attacks.

This hate speech and these messages of incitement to violence from the PA are continuing. The Palestinian Arab Front, which is a member of the PLO, called Netanyahu's visit to the Cave of the Patriarchs a "defilement" and "a clear declaration of war." The organization further incited violence, calling for "a popular response," promising that its "fighting people will not sit idly by":
"The Palestinian Arab Front said that Netanyahu's invasion of the Ibrahimi Mosque and defilement of it constitute a clear declaration of war and contempt for the Muslims' sensibilities... It called for a popular response that will be at the level of the crime the occupation forces are committing. The front added: 'Our fighting people will not sit idly by before the defilement of its holy sites. The occupation bears full responsibility for this crime. [Our people] will defend its holy sites with all its strength.'"
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Sept. 5, 2019]

Yesterday, the PA Ministry of Foreign Affairs called Netanyahu's visit "a provocative colonialist and racist visit" and "warned against the dangers and consequences" of it. [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Sept. 4, 2019]

PA's Supreme Shari'ah Judge of Palestine Mahmoud Al-Habbash likewise used this opportunity to incite violence against Israelis, and he also compared it to Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount.

Last month, CAMERA took Reuters to task for English-language captions which described Jews visiting the Temple Mount as “worshippers,” despite the fact that Jews are strictly prohibited from praying or carrying out any other religious rituals at the site, Judaism’s most sacred. A review by CAMERA Arabic has found that many Arabic-language reports from Western media outlets including Sky News, CNN, BBC, al-Hurra, Independent Arabia, Reuters and France 24 commonly employ even more extreme and unfounded language, falsely calling Jews who visit the Temple Mount, or intend to visit, “settlers” or “extremists.” (All translations that follow are by CAMERA Arabic.)

Thus, for example, a France 24 broadcast misidentified Jewish visitors who visited the Temple Mount on Tisha B’Av, a solemn fast day commemorating the destruction of the Jewish temples, as settlers (“Clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli police in the al-Aqsa mosque plaza coincide with the prayer of Eid,” Aug. 11, at 0:51.)

Likewise, Al Hurra, a U.S.-based public media outlet, reported that Prime Minister Netanyahu decided not to allow “settlers” to carry out an “intrusion” or “storming” of the “al-Aqsa mosque” (“Clashes in al-Aqsa between worshippers and the Israeli police,” Aug. 11). Of course, the Jewish visitors never entered the mosque itself, and only walked around the compound outside the mosque.

BBC similarly referred to “extremist Jewish groups” and “Jewish extremists (“The al-Aqsa Mosque: clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians after Eid al-Adha’s prayer”, Aug. 11) and CNN and the Independent went with the false headlines, respectively: “Dozens of settlers intrude/storm into al-Aqsa Mosque under IDF guard,” Aug. 4. and “An Israeli minister storms/intrudes al-Aqsa under guard, heading [a group] of settlers,” July 3 (screen shot at left). Reuters, a leading wire service, also employed the “intrusion/storming” language (“Extremist Jews’ visit stokes Palestinians’ anger in the al-Aqsa Mosque compound”, June 2, video, 0:51) and wrongly reported that the Jews entered the al-Aqsa mosque.

Following the military escalation between Israel and Hizbullah in the last two weeks – which included the August 25, 2019 Israeli drone attack on the Dahia, Hizbullah's stronghold in Beirut; threats of retaliation by Hizbullah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, and Hizbullah's September 1, 2019 firing of anti-tank missiles into northern Israel – writers in the Saudi press published articles attacking Hizbullah and Nasrallah. The writers accused Hizbullah of dragging Lebanon into confrontations with Israel to serve the Iranian agenda and thereby harming Lebanon and its economy and perpetrating treason against it. They also wrote that Hizbullah has turned Beirut into a military base and taken over Lebanon's vital centers of power, and called to restore sovereignty to the Lebanese government, so that it will be the only force in Lebanon authorized to make decisions on war and peace.

The following are excerpts from their articles:
Senior Journalist 'Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed: Hizbullah Is The Problem, Not Israel
On September 2, 2019, the day after Hizbullah's missile attack on Israel, 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 in the English-language Saudi daily Arab News an article titled "Imagine Lebanon without Hizbullah." In it, he wrote:

"I think there is a group of people who still believe the lies Hezbollah and its leader spout to justify using Lebanon in this week’s attack against Israel. At the same time, I doubt there are any people, even from within this group, who agree with Hezbollah’s actions and the damage the group causes Lebanon while using excuses that no longer convince anyone.

"Hezbollah has given years of ethnic, patriotic and religious excuses, from the liberation of the south to the protection of religious places and the Syrian Shebaa Farms. Because of Hezbollah, Lebanon is beleaguered internationally in its financial transactions and trade and tourism, while nationally it is held captive and controlled, from the airport to the house of government...

"Hezbollah is the only cause of the state’s low income and political bullying...

Teachers are instructed to encourage their students to express their feelings vis-à-vis demonizing cases appearing in stories that are taught in class.

The overall picture is gloomy. Everything is tied to a fixed idea that the "other" is the source of their misfortune and, thus, that "other" should be eliminated. The part of the curriculum that refers to the conflict is built on war, not on peace and coexistence, and delegitimization and demonization are its main pillars.

This way, the Palestinian educators are imposing on their students a bleak future of hatred and misery, with no hope other than becoming a martyr in an endless struggle that is bound to bring pain and distress for years to come.

From the teachers' guides we understand how the students are manipulated to walk along a premeditated course of getting the one-sided information, internalizing it, creating the appropriate feelings around it and thus becoming a blind tool in the hands of the system. No self-criticism, no attempt to trace some other sources of information that would raise questions, lead to deeper understanding and – in fact – build a healthy thinking person that would contribute to the wellbeing of his or her own society.

A whole generation is thus being lost. The Palestinian Authority that has been existent for over 25 years by now is responsible for this situation. But its responsibility is shared to a great extent by non-Palestinian Arab actors. Chief among these is UNRWA that uses in its schools in the' West Bank' and Gaza the PA educational material without the slightest effort to live up to the UN standards of peace education and to the expressed UN goal of solving the Middle East conflict peacefully.

Thus, instead of caring for the safety and wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab students under its sponsorship, it participates in the PA endeavor of turning them into gun fodder of the ongoing conflict.

Instead of working towards the ending of the conflict, UNRWA's educational system and the donor states that sustain it contribute to its perpetuation. The protracted misery and distress of the Palestinian Arab youth will remain their fault.

Click here for full report.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday welcomed his Israeli counterpart to 10 Downing Street for a brief meeting, during which he stressed that London seeks a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Of course the UK is still supporting all efforts to reach a solution to the Middle East peace process and a two-state solution,” Johnson told Netanyahu during the very short public part of the meeting.

“Well, I’d like to talk to you about that too,” the Israeli premier replied.

Netanyahu has for some time now refrained from endorsing Palestinian statehood. Instead, he has vowed to apply Israeli law in all Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a move analysts say would make a future two-state solution impossible.

Earlier during their meeting, Netanyahu indicated he had come to London mainly to discuss Iran’s increasing regional aggression.

“I want to say that you’ve been a great friend of the Jewish people and Israel. I applaud your staunch stance against anti-Semitism and your support for Israel’s security,” Netanyahu said.

“It’s not that we lack challenges. We have the challenge of Iran’s aggression and terrorism, and I’d like to talk to you about how we can work together to counter these things for the benefit of peace,” he went on.

Thank you @POTUS-it’s been the honor of a lifetime. So grateful to have worked on the potential to improve the lives of millions of Israelis, Palestinians &others. Thank you to my incredible wife/amazing children for their encouragement & to my many colleagues for all their help! https://t.co/XhjE8QLxjH

— Jason D. Greenblatt (@jdgreenblatt45) September 5, 2019

The ties that bind the US-Israel relationship have been the subject of intense scrutiny over the years. The economic and military aid provided to Israel by the United States has been analyzed by experts, chronicled by historians and been the basis for op-eds by pundits, peers and politicians.

Through it all, the main messages remain the same: the United States-Israel relationship remains solid with its base in bipartisan shared values and the shared strategic interests of both nations.
US aid to Israel: The numbers

American foreign aid amounts to less than a single percentage point of the American economy. Foreign aid and foreign military support remains a cornerstone of American foreign policy and Israel but one of many nations on the receiving end.

For 2017, fiscal data published on the official American government website showed that out of a total of $49 billion in US foreign aid Israel received $3.2 billion. In the same year Arab and Muslim countries received more than $20 billion of American taxpayer money. The biggest recipients were Afghanistan with $5.7 billion followed by Kuwait with $4.5 billion and Iraq with $3.7 billion.

The US used to provide Israel with economic aid as its infrastructure and economy developed. However, that aid did its job and was phased out by 2008 when Israel joined the ranks of fully industrialized nations. The “startup nation” is considered an economic powerhouse with low unemployment and a high GDP.

For a year, Turkey has threatened a military operation into eastern Syria, an area that is controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who are partners of the US-led coalition against ISIS. In the absence of a new military adventure for Ankara’s government, Turkey’s leader has decided to threaten to send refugees to Europe, in a replay of 2015. This callous and cynical threat won’t sit well with Syrian refugees in Turkey, who increasingly see themselves as being used as a tool by the government while being abandoned in Idlib.

In a series of comments a day after Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan implied the country had a right to nuclear weapons, he has now said Turkey must be given a “safe zone” in eastern Syria or “we will have to open the gates [to Europe]. Either you support us or no one should feel sorry. We would like to host one million refugees in the safe zone.”

The comment reveals how Turkey now views its policies among Idlib, Moscow, eastern Syria, the US and Europe as all linked.

For instance, Turkey had sought out Russian air defense S-400s as part of a kind of brinkmanship with the US, hoping to pressure the US to leave eastern Syria. Then when Russia actually sent parts of the S-400 to Turkey in July – and the US appeared to end Turkey’s role in the F-35 program – Turkey changed its narrative to claiming that it could still acquire the US Patriot air defense system and the S-400. The Patriot deal, which Washington had signed off on in the fall of 2018, now seems dead as well.

Turkey also thought that it could switch from the F-35 to the Russian SU-35 and Su-57, and Erdogan went to see Russian President Vladimir Putin in late August, when they ate ice cream and joked. But Syrians in Idlib were facing a new Assad regime offensive, backed by Russia, and the Syrians were angered that Turkish observation posts in northern Syria were not doing anything but observing their defeat.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that it was unacceptable that Turkey was barred from having nuclear weapons while other nations in the region had them.

“Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads, not one or two. But (they tell us) we can’t have them. This, I cannot accept,” the Reuters news agency quoted him as telling his ruling AK Party members in the eastern city of Sivas.

“There is no developed nation in the world that doesn’t have them,” Erdogan said, even though most developed nations do not have nuclear weapons.

Under international treaties only the US, Russia, the UK, France and China could have nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan and North Korea later developed them too. South Africa had several atomic bombs but dismantled them when it became a democracy.

Israel is also believed to have nuclear weapons, a fact alluded to by Erdogan.

“We have Israel nearby, as almost neighbors. They scare (other nations) by possessing these. No one can touch them.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a September 4, 2019 speech that was aired by the Anadolu News Agency (Turkey) that he cannot accept a situation in which "almost all the developed countries" have missiles with nuclear warheads while Turkey is not allowed to have them. He said that Turkey is "continuing its work," and he criticized the world for opposing Turkey's acquisition of the S-400 air defense system. In addition, Erdogan reassured the audience that Turkey's S-400 system will be finished by April of 2020.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan questioned Israel's right to have nuclear weapons while Turkey does not possess such weapons. He also claimed that all developed countries possessed them? Is he right? Why would he make such a comment? Our Daniel Tsemach analyzes.

The murder of Rina Shnerb in a Palestinian terror attack as she was hiking with her family received only limited coverage in Arabic-speaking media outlets in the west, not unlike the case of the Guardian that was already discussed at this blog.

For example, Sky News Arabia – a venture between UK-based Sky News and UAE-based Abu Dhabi Media Investment Corp – did not address the attack directly at all. However, after three days, in a report entitled “Israel avenges the ‘Dolev attack’ with 300 houses in the settlements”, it chose to describe the innocent victim of the attack as “a settler”, without even including her name. Schnerb, it should be noted, was not a settler at all, as she lived in the city of Lod – inside Israel’s internationally recognized boundaries.

The considerations that have so far guided Hezbollah's calculated retaliation on September 1, 2019 following Israel’s strikes, and the August 25 drone strike in Beirut in particular, reflect its character as an organization with multiple identities - all of which influence its decision making. Hezbollah simultaneously constitutes a pivotal link in the regional "resistance axis" led by Iran; a Lebanese "resistance" movement and "defender of Lebanon"; and an organization within Lebanon that preserves its independent identity and autonomous decision making. Even as Hezbollah is involved in the overarching "resistance axis" against Israel, its commitment to the Lebanese state serves as a restraint. In its brief round of fighting with Israel, Hezbollah, which seeks to avoid broadening the confrontation to a war ruinous for both Lebanon and itself, behaved like a careful state-like actor. At the same time, in its response to the Israeli strikes, Hezbollah laid down a red line whereby it will not tolerate further strikes within Lebanon's borders, and that any such action will prompt a harsher response - something of a signal to Israel that it should take this possibility into account when mulling operations in Lebanon. In the circumstances created, Israel has several alternatives: avoiding further military action within Lebanon's borders; continued "campaign between wars" activity in Lebanon, accompanied by the risk of escalation into a broad conflict; and a "preemptive strike" - a broad operation against Hezbollah aimed at significantly damaging Hezbollah's precision missile capabilities and force buildup.

The anti-tank missile fire by Hezbollah at IDF forces in the Avivim area on September 1, 2019 was, in the view of Hassan Nasrallah, required, given his public statements on his intention to respond. Nonetheless, Nasrallah is not interested in an all-out war with Israel at this time. Hezbollah claimed that the attack on a military vehicle in Avivim was a response to the killing of two of its operatives in the Israeli strike on August 24 on Akraba, south of Damascus. This claim implies that the limited round of fighting with Israel has ended, while still letting Hezbollah retain the option of another strike, as Nasrallah explained (September 2). With that said, the main motive for the decision to respond was Nasrallah's fear that the drone attack in Beirut's Dahiyeh quarter on August 25 would serve as a precedent for further Israeli attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. The objective of the response was thus to restore the balance of deterrence with Israel and reassert rules of the game observed since 2006, under which any Israeli action within Lebanon's borders will prompt a response by Hezbollah.

Hezbollah's Multiple Identities
Recent events in the conflict theater between Hezbollah and Israel demonstrate the multiple identities that Hezbollah finds itself in – primarily between its identity as a patriotic Shiite Lebanese organization and its identity as a Shiite organization aligned with the Iranian Islamic Revolution that supports Iran and is supported by it. Hezbollah is a pivotal component in the Shiite Islamist "resistance axis" across the Middle East, in which Nasrallah has of late been wont to include, beyond its familiar partners - Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon - Hamas and Islamic Jihad (both Sunni) as well, in addition to the Houthis in Yemen.

At the same time, Hezbollah is a multi-faceted, autonomous organization in Lebanon. It is a political movement that in recent years has deepened its integration in the Lebanese government system; an economic organization; and a social movement that attends to the welfare of the Shiite population in Lebanon. It has at its disposal a strong and independent military with an operational arm that carries out terrorism and is also involved in crime, and it is a religious and a cultural movement. These various identities form a complex dynamic within Hezbollah’s decision making process, such that they coexist mostly in harmony, but at times reveal the contradiction between them.

Tensions have recently flared on Israel's border with Lebanon after Hezbollah, a terror organization backed by Iran, fired rockets into Israel.

Hezbollah has been developing a precision-guided missile project specifically targeting Israelis. If completed, Hezbollah would be able to fire anywhere in Israel with pinpoint accuracy.

Hezbollah used its Al-Manar television network on Monday to broadcast footage that it claims shows a missile strike targeting an Israeli military vehicle a day earlier. The attack followed a series of reported Israeli strikes targeting Iranian and Hezbollah infrastructure in Syria and Lebanon.

Sharing the footage allows Hezbollah to save face among its supporters, and signal its resolve to the far more powerful Israeli military. But beyond propaganda and deterrence efforts, Hezbollah exploits its global media empire to strengthen a “resistance society” in Lebanon and cultivate new bases of support throughout the world, according to a new Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center report.

Hezbollah’s media domain is just one component of the terror group’s infrastructure, along with its military wing, global terrorist apparatus, and vast network of social institutions spread across Lebanese society.

Iran funds most of Al-Manar‘s budget, which runs into the tens of millions of dollars. While it generates little advertising revenue, the outlet is considered the most vital part of Hezbollah’s extensive media empire. Hezbollah broadcasts propaganda around the world in four languages, primarily targeting the Lebanese population, followed by the Arab and Muslim world. But target audiences in the West are not immune. Hezbollah outlets operate in English- and French-speaking countries, and even some Latin America states. Some countries’ efforts to bar the channels have been circumvented, as Hezbollah now relies on Russian and Indonesian satellite services to continue its broadcasts worldwide.

American security assistance generally is predicated on the principle that a smaller or poorer country that has US equipment and training will be better able to defend common interests than one that doesn’t. Sometimes it works that way. But sometimes it puts the US in bed with people who want our weapons and training, but do not share our bottom line — their enemy is not ours; their rules of engagement are not ours; their government, in fact, is not a friend of ours, but maybe if we reward it thoroughly enough, it won’t actively oppose our interests.

In that latter category is Lebanon.

As Hezbollah has announced it is preparing to attack Israel, we must consider the role of the United States in arming and training the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), the national army of Lebanon that technically is an arm of the Hezbollah-dominated government in Beirut.

Lebanon is not a functional country, and there are those — the Assad family in Syria, for example — who don’t think it should be a country at all. Syria didn’t recognize the independence of Lebanon until 2008, after a 29-year occupation that ended in 2005. By law, power is shared among religious and ethnic groups — 19 in the current parliament.

Hezbollah, created, armed, and run by Iran as a Shiite supremacist military force, has both the majority in the political cabinet in Beirut and a separate, private army complete with precision missiles and rule-making authority in the southern part of the country. Lebanon has little economy, but Hezbollah runs rackets — mostly arms and drugs in South America — and kills people in Europe, as well as Jews and Israelis around the world.

Hundreds of Palestinians demonstrated in the West Bank on Wednesday to demand legal protection for women after a 21-year-old woman died last month in what rights groups say was an honor killing.

A Palestinian Authority investigation is underway into the death of Isra’a Ghrayeb, a make-up artist who activists say was beaten by male relatives after a video posted on Instagram allegedly showed a meeting between her and a man who had proposed to her.

According to Palestinian media reports, Ghrayeb sustained serious spinal injuries after falling from a balcony in her home in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, while trying to escape an assault by her brothers. She died on Aug. 22.

At least 18 Palestinian women have been killed this year by family members angered at perceived damage to their honor, which may involve fraternizing with men or any infringement of conservative values regarding women, according to the General Union of Palestinian Women and Feminist Institutions.

Ghrayeb’s family has denied the accusations. They said in a statement that Ghrayeb had a “mental condition” and died “after she had a heart attack, following an accidental fall into the (family’s) courtyard.

The circumstances surrounding Ghrayeb’s death have stirred outrage within the Palestinian territories and on social media, with rights activists demanding action against the alleged perpetrators and legal protection for women under the hashtag #JustceforIsraa.

Hundreds of Palestinian refugees, waving Palestinian and Canadian flags, gathered outside the Canadian Embassy in Beirut on Thursday, requesting asylum in the North American country.

Many among the group lamented the deteriorating economic and living conditions in Lebanon and said they wanted a more dignified life.

The periodic protests outside the embassy on the coastal highway north of Beirut began a few weeks ago, after a crackdown on undocumented foreign labor by Lebanese authorities.

There are tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants in Lebanon. Most of them live in squalid camps with no access to public services, limited employment opportunities and no rights to ownership.

The protesters gathered on Thursday also decried what they say is widespread corruption at the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA.

Mahmoud Habbash, a senior PA official who serves as President Abbas' Advisor on Religious and Islamic Affairs and as the Chairman of the Supreme Council for Shari'a Justice, said in an August 6, 2019 interview on the Syrian News Channel that normalizing relations with Israel constitutes treason as long as Israel is occupying Palestine and the Golan Heights. He also claimed that takfiri Islamic ideologies that encourage extremism, terrorism, and an Islamic state, which he said are completely different from Islam, were manufactured by the West as part of a conspiracy to tear the Arab and Islamic nations to shreds and to justify Zionism and the existence of a Jewish state.

Most of Israel's current security challenges stem from Iran's aspirations for hegemony over the Middle East. To counter such threats, Israel's defense operations have been augmented by what the Israel Defense Forces call the "Campaign Between Wars" (CBW).

The nature of the threats to Israel's security have changed profoundly with the weakening of Arab states and their militaries. The rise of new challenges and the destruction wrought by the 2006 Lebanon war spurred the IDF to develop a concept of integrated, low-intensity, preemptive warfare.

The CBW strives for proactive, offensive actions based on extremely high-quality intelligence and clandestine efforts. The strategy's main goals are to delay war and deter enemies by constantly weakening their force buildup processes and damaging their assets and capabilities.

In Syria, the IDF has sought to prevent Iran from entrenching itself and its foreign proxies, deploying advanced weapons capabilities, and turning the Golan Heights into another front for striking Israel.

In Lebanon, the IDF has demolished the Hizbullah/Qods Force plan to attack the Galilee through underground tunnels, and is preventing the development of precision missile capabilities that would pose a serious strategic threat to Israel.

Israel has also made substantial contributions to the regional campaign against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

Israel's military and political leadership are well aware of the risks of a wider military confrontation or even full-scale war. Accordingly, Israel has implemented a stringent risk-management process to account for potentially rapid escalation. As ever, Israel must continue operating under the ancient adage: "If you want peace, prepare for war."

Israeli officials are currently considering the possibility of conducting a military strike on Iran, with or without the approval of the United States, The New York Times reported Wednesday. They believe US President Donald Trump could decide not to stand in the way of such an attack, unlike his predecessor Barack Obama, the paper reported Wednesday in an exposé that detailed the lows and highs of the Israel-US relationship in the face-off against the Islamic Republic over the past decade.

“Once again, more than a decade after they first raised the subject with American officials, Israeli officials have been considering the possibility of a unilateral strike against Iran,” said the report. “Unlike with Bush and Obama, there is greater confidence that Trump wouldn’t stand in the way.”

The report, “The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran,” which focused on Israeli-US efforts to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons, did not specify which targets Israel was now said to be contemplating attacking. It noted that “hawks in Israel and America have spent more than a decade agitating for war against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program,” and asked: “Will Trump finally deliver?”

“The threat of war could be a bluff, or an election ploy,” it added. “But it also represents a dangerous confluence of interests: an American president often reluctant to use military force and an Israeli prime minister looking to deal with unfinished business.”

Iran's president has promised to begin rebuilding the country's nuclear R&D and centrifuges as part of a rollback on the JCPOA (nuclear deal) commitments. What does it mean in the grand scheme of things? Our Daniel Tsemach analyzes.

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says he predicted years ago that Iran would escalate its provocations against the United States — and he partly blames the Obama administration’s anemic reaction to an Iranian plot to bomb a restaurant in Washington, D.C.

In his just-released book, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, Mattis details his time as leader of U.S. Central Command from 2010 to 2013, overseeing military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. “From my first day at CENTCOM, I knew we faced two principal adversaries: stateless Sunni Islamist terrorists and the revolutionary Shiite regime of Iran, the most destabilizing country in the region,” he writes. “Iran was by far the more deadly of the two threats.”

That’s not how the president under whom Mattis served saw it, though, and Barack Obama eventually fired the storied Marine general for what Mattis believes were his insistent warnings about the Iranian threat.

Mattis says Washington didn’t even inform him when Iran committed an “act of war” on American soil.

The duty officer at his Tampa, Florida, headquarters on Oct. 11, 2011 told him that the attorney general and FBI director had held a press conference to announce the arrest of two Iranians who had planned a bomb attack on Cafe Milano, a high-end restaurant in Washington that was a favorite of the rich and famous, including Saudi Arabia’s ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir.

As Mattis writes, “Attorney General Eric Holder said the bombing plot was ‘directed and approved by elements of the Iranian government and, specifically, senior members of the Qods Force.’ The Qods were the Special Operations Force of the Revolutionary Guards, reporting to the top of the Iranian government.”

The United States on Wednesday blacklisted an “oil-for-terror” network of firms, ships and individuals allegedly directed by Iran‘s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for supplying Syria with oil worth hundreds of millions of dollars in breach of US sanctions.

Washington also issued a new international shipping advisory about IRGC’s use of “deceptive practices” to violate US sanctions on Iranian oil sales and warned that those doing business with blacklisted entities “are now exposed to US sanctions,” said State Department official Brian Hook, who oversees Iran policy.

Hook also announced that the United States would offer a reward of up to $15 million for information that disrupts the financial operations of the IRGC and its elite foreign paramilitary and espionage arm, the Quds Force.

The steps intensified a US “maximum pressure” campaign aimed at eliminating Iran‘s oil exports, its main source of income. It will likely intensify tensions that erupted with President Donald Trump’s withdrawal last year from a multilateral accord designed to stop Tehran from producing nuclear weapons.

Iran has been gradually reducing its compliance with the 2015 agreement in a bid to pressure European countries to compensate it for the severe damage done to its economy by multiple rounds of US sanctions. Tehran was expected to announce further breaches sometime this month.

The 10 individuals blacklisted on Wednesday included Rostam Qasemi, a former Iranian oil minister, and his son, the US Treasury Department said in a statement.

Calling all bankers, traders, ship captains, and crews: today’s expansion of @Rewards4Justice adds another tool to stop oil-for-cash schemes used by the IRGC and Quds Force to fund global terrorism. https://t.co/rL8GqBLZzF

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) September 4, 2019

The EU on Thursday urged Iran to reverse its scale-back of commitments to the 2015 nuclear accord, after the Islamic Republic announced a day earlier it would no longer limit its atomic research.

European Commission spokesman Carlos Martin Ruiz de Gordejuela told a media briefing in Brussels that the decision was “inconsistent” with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal’s official name.

“And in this context we urge Iran to reverse these steps and refrain from further measures that undermine the nuclear deal,” he said.

Iran has been progressively pulling back from the terms of the 2015 deal as it comes under intensifying sanctions pressure from the United States, which exited the accord under US President Donald Trump.

The remaining powers — Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — are seeking to keep the deal alive. The European powers are trying to reduce US-Iran tensions, but Washington and Tehran have been hardening their positions in recent months.

A senior US official on Wednesday ruled out issuing waivers to Iran sanctions to permit a French-proposed credit line, which Tehran says could bring it back to full compliance with the nuclear deal.

"We can't make it any more clear that we are committed to this campaign of maximum pressure and we are not looking to grant any exceptions or waivers," Brian Hook, the State Department coordinator on Iran, told reporters.

He added, however, that he has not yet seen a "concrete" French proposal and could therefore not comment on the idea.

French President Emmanuel Macron has been seeking to ease soaring tensions by bringing some economic relief to Iran and last month appeared to draw President Donald Trump's interest when Macron said he hoped to arrange a summit between the US leader and his counterpart Hassan Rouhani.

Iliyas Umakhanov, the Deputy Speaker of Russia's Federation Council, said in a September 3, 2019 interview on Channel 5 TV (Iran) that the behavior of the U.S. and President Trump resembles street brawling, bullying, and hooliganism, which he said can only by "cured" by force and determination. He said that he understands why Iran has decided to renew uranium enrichment, and he expressed support for a peaceful Iranian nuclear program. In addition, Umakhanov expressed hope that relations between Russia and Iran will remain peaceful and strategic rather than tactical. He avoided specifically answering how Russia would respond if Iran withdrew from the JCPOA, and he said that the Arab countries along the Persian Gulf would have to be very stupid to listen to the U.S. and fight a war against Iran. When asked what Russia's response would be if war breaks out between Iran and the United States, Umakhanov said: "I volunteer for the war."

Questionable description of recent events by @khalafroula in the @FT.

- Iran sending weaponry hundreds of miles to threaten Israel's border - not mentioned
- The downed drones are believed to be Iranian, not Israeli
- Stopping an imminent drone attack is defense, not aggression pic.twitter.com/1O8PYTNtMr

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) September 5, 2019

It's been 40 years since I've been to Iran. I’d love to return. At present, that seems inadvisable.

I went there as a reporter, in the early months of 1979, a time of revolution, a time when many Iranians, perhaps most, hoped they might soon be freer than they had been under the shah, and more prosperous, too.

My media colleagues regarded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, as an avatar of authentic Third World spirituality and social justice. The US ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan, compared him to Mahatma Gandhi.

I left Iran before summer, and by fall it was clear that Iran’s new rulers were achieving little – unless forcing women to cover up can be considered an achievement. In an attempt to reignite revolutionary fervor, militant young followers of Khomeini seized the American Embassy and took American diplomats hostage.

Though a more blatant violation of international law is hard to imagine, an effective response was not forthcoming. Khomeini famously concluded: “America cannot do a damn thing against us.”

Confident of that assessment, the Islamic republic went on to become the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, eventually providing “nearly a billion dollars a year” to favored asymmetric combatants, according to the State Department. The regime has been behind terrorist attacks and assassination plots in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and the US.

A young Iranian woman set herself on fire to protest what she was told could be up to six months of jail time for watching a men's soccer game. She attempted to disguise herself in men's clothing, but was discovered, arrested and charged with violating modesty laws. The Iranian Rokna news agency, has only named the woman as "Sahar," the Telegraph reported.

"The 29-year-old is suffering from third-degree burns, and is currently under life support," said the CEO of Motahari Emergency and Burns Hospital, according to Radio Farda. Sahar reportedly suffered from burns on 90% of her body.

Rokna reported that Sahar's sister said, "They detained my sister on March 12, 2019, when she tried to enter Azadi Stadium, and watch Tehran's Esteqlal soccer club home match against the United Arab Emirates' Al Ain, FC."

This incident comes almost three weeks after Iran, under international pressure, released a group of women who were arrested for watching a men's soccer match. The women disguised themselves as men, just as Sahar did, but failed to fool Iranian officials.

Iran has consistently faced international scrutiny regarding its modesty laws. According to the Telegraph, Iran says that women watching men's soccer promotes promiscuity.

Al-Shyoukhi considered the Israeli measures against the Jordanian dinar a real massacre committed by the Zionist occupation against the Jordanian dinar and the right of its place in Palestine and the Jordanian economy and the Palestinian national economy at the same time, especially since the Jordanian dinar was the currency in our Palestinian areas before Israel occupied Palestine.

THE LEGALLY fraudulent concept of OPT was introduced by the International Committee of the Red Cross in the early 1970s and was adopted by the international community as a way of defining the status of “the territories” and denouncing “Israeli occupation.”

Rather than describe what now exists as “occupation,” however, a different terminology would be more creative and productive for both sides. One could refer to what the Torah calls “possession,” (reshut – the exercise of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel). Another possibility would be to refer to the Israeli presence, instead of to “occupation.” This would describe realistically what exists, without referring to a political term that has legal and moral implications. And, it would emphasize that Israeli Jews also have legitimate “humanitarian” and legal rights to build and protect their homeland.

Moreover, as of March 13, 2019, the US State Department erased the word “occupation” from its description of the Golan Heights and areas claimed by Palestinians. Instead, it refers to them as being “under Israel control.” Last week, the State Department also removed the Palestinian Authority from its list of countries.

The truth is that evacuating Jews and destroying Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria would accomplish nothing. It would not satisfy the PLO/PA/Hamas goal of destroying Israel. It would not change their basic narrative – “the Nakba,” or “catastrophe” – of Israel’s establishment in 1948, nor would it satisfy their demand for “the right of return” of Arabs who left “Palestine” and live in UNRWA-sponsored towns in Lebanon and Syria. It would not “Liberate Palestine, from the river to the sea!”

Creating another “Palestinian state” – in addition to Jordan – would not eliminate terrorism: It would encourage and enhance it. Another Palestinian state would not promote peace: It would provide the catalyst for war and it would destabilize the entire region. Ironically, it would prevent the emergence of any moderate, democratic Palestinian group that seeks accommodation with and acceptance of Israel.

Israeli leftists need a reality check and honest self-examination: what purpose do they serve?

The UN in Geneva confirmed it is censoring a human rights complaint on China’s mass incarceration of Uighurs that was filed by a cross-regional coalition of more than 100 UN-accredited non-governmental organizations from numerous countries including Brazil, Canada, France, India, Indonesia, Germany, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom and the United States.

United Nations Watch, a Swiss non-governmental organization, filed the joint complaint on June 4th to be circulated as an official UN document, following the standard protocol outlined by the UN human rights council’s guidelines on NGO written submissions.

The letter by 135 NGOs urges UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and High Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet to condemn China’s escalating abuse of UN rules to censor, interrupt and block references at the world body to its detention of an estimated 1 million Muslim Uighurs.

The joint complaint references an incident in March, widely shared on social media, in which UN Watch director Hillel Neuer took the floor at the UN Human Rights Council to condemn China’s abuses of Uighur Muslims. Neuer was interrupted three times by the Communist regime’s delegates in an attempt to shut down his testimony.

As noted in the complaint, UNHRC President Coly Seck of Senegal urged Neuer to “stick to the agenda item” on racial discrimination, implying that China’s abuses against Muslim Uighurs did not qualify. Later in the debate, however, Seck told China to “prevent disturbing the proceedings of the room the next time.”

When UN Watch submitted the joint complaint by 125 NGOs about the incident, the UNHRC secretariat—in a break from past practice—refused to publish it, together with four other submissions.

U.S. Amb. @RichardGrenell: China’s “willful disregard of its commitments” to Hong Kong, the U.N. & World Trade Organization, along with human rights abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang, show China’s communist party “stands against the values Germany cherishes.” https://t.co/bSw1FToEm2

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) September 4, 2019

The People’s Republic of China stepped away today from an anticipated policy that would convert its 1.4 billion citizens into Jews after realizing that the numerous Muslim-majority states and entities giving its abuse of the Muslim Uighur minority political and diplomatic cover will likely withdraw their support for that abuse once the perpetrators are Jews.

The Ministry of the Interior issued a statement Thursday morning announcing the cancellation, effective immediately, of a five-year plan to impose Judaism on the entire population as a way to buttress China’s financial and banking prowess. The plan, developed in 2015, aimed to leverage the longtime association of Jewishness with money management excellence, but now the administration of President Xi Jinping has reversed course upon determining that certain unacceptable consequences will accrue from such a move, most dire among them that the many governments now endorsing China’s suppression of Uighur religious and ethnic identity will reverse those decisions when the country becomes Jewish instead of atheist and anti-religion.

“A reassessment of the risks led the government to decide against adopting Judaism for China in the end,” the statement read. “While financial and economic prowess will serve the people of China, especially in the shadow of unjust American tariffs, our strategic needs point to greater engagement with the Muslim world. Alienating those dozens of countries that produce natural resources China needs will negate, or possibly worse, whatever economic benefit the people stand to gain from Jewish banking aptitude. China will therefore continue to ‘reeducate’ Uighur Muslims, intern them in concentration camps. suppress their indigenous culture, and restrict their rights even more than other Chinese citizens, but will do so under a banner that claims no religion, no opiate of the masses.”

UN Watch has put together a compendium of clippings that shows actual film clips of the president of the Human Rights Council, Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, thanking various diplomats for their testimony. He thanks a speaker for Zimbabwe talking about the ignorance of a delegate who has criticized human rights under President Mugabe. He thanks the delegate from Cuba for insulting a human rights expert who exposed abuses of the communist regime. When the permanent observer of Palestine asserts that the one that has a "monopoly on human rights violations" is Israel, which, he adds, is the darling of not only the ambassadors of America and Canada but also of the human rights commissioner, Louise Arbour, the observer is thanked by Mr. de Alba. On the clip one can see Mr. de Alba thanking the delegation of Sudan for a statement saying that reports of violence against women in Darfur have been "exaggerated." Then one can watch and hear an envoy from Nigeria assert that "stoning under Sharia law for unnatural sexual acts … should not be equated with extrajudicial killings …" Or watch an envoy of Iran defend the Holocaust denial conference. Or watch a defense of the Hezbollah terrorist organization.

Until fairly recently, the understanding that Jesus was a Jew was generally unchallenged. In recent years, however, a new generation of anti-Israel activists and academics are now trying to claim that actually Jesus wasn’t just a Jew, but a Palestinian.

First, let’s back up a little. The last century has seen many schools of thought aimed at forcing us to question our basic beliefs. Some of these have led to great advances: the beliefs that women should have equal rights, that black people should have equal rights, that homophobia has no place in modern-society. All worthy causes. Others have challenged long-held conceptions, that “drinking is manly” or that women should be paid less than men.

One of the conceptions challenged in recent years is the almost universal depiction of Jesus as white. Given that Jesus is described as living in the Holy Land, this would make him a native of the Middle East. In other words, there’s every reason to be concerned that depictions of Jesus as fair-skinned are inaccurate.

If only things ended there. A radical core of activists now seem bent on co-opting “brown” identity and excluding Jews, thus denying the historical truth that Jesus was in fact Jewish.

So… was Jesus a Jew or was he a Palestinian?
For the benefit of anyone exposed to this false claim, a brief recap of history is in order:

Jesus was born in Judea, a client kingdom of the Roman Empire, and identified as a Jew. Jews living there at the time would most likely have described themselves as living in the Land of Israel. Anyone referring to “Palestine” in the first century C.E. would have earned themselves strange look, especially from the indigenous Aramaic-speaking Jews. The land was subject to all the religious laws in Judaism that apply in Land of Israel.

A century later, the area was renamed. After a Jewish revolt was crushed in the 2nd Century CE, the vast majority of Jews were exiled and the Roman emperor Hadrian subsequently had the region entitled “Syria Palestina” after the Jews’ ancient enemies, the Philistines, in an antagonistic move designed to demonstrate that the Jews were no longer owners of the land.

Put simply, an Aramaic-speaking Jew living a century before this change of name would never have called himself Palestinian.

A mosaic depicting fish, birds and baskets of what may be bread, newly uncovered near the Sea of Galilee, may commemorate the historic location of the miracle recorded in the New Testament in which Jesus miraculously feeds a multitude, according to the lead archaeologist at the site, Haifa University’s Dr. Michael Eisenberg.

The colorful mosaic was uncovered in the ongoing Hippos-Sussita Excavation Project at the Sussita National Park’s South-West or Burnt Church. The 15-meter by 10-meter mosaic carpet is bursting with fish, birds and 12 baskets filled with fruit, flowers and — arguably — bread. The traditional location of the miracle is across the sea at the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish in Tabgha, which houses a famous mosaic depicting two fish on either side of what is thought to be a bread basket.

It is the Sussita church’s combination of fish and bread baskets that has led Eisenberg to believe that the mosaic could be a record of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes and a clue hinting at a historic location for the feat.

In conversation with The Times of Israel on Wednesday, Eisenberg said that this miracle, as well as a multitude of Jesus’s other miracles, occurred under the direct gaze of the church — located near the shores of the Sea of Galilee. He believes that they are all symbolically depicted in the mosaic.

“The symbolism behind [the mosaic] and the position of the church in the perfect place, overlooking Sea of Galilee where most of his miracles took place, means I’m rather sure that the people recognized and interacted with the geographic, physical places where the miracles occurred,” he said.

A new layer to the ancient Philistine city of Gath has been uncovered in an archaeological excavation that has the potential to re-contextualize much of biblical history.

Known to historians as part of the Pentapolis of Philistine cities – a group of five cities consisting of Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gath, Ekron and Gaza – Gath is best known for being the home of the giant Goliath, whom the future King David famously slew in one of the most iconic moments in biblical history.

However, after 23 years of excavations, new evidence reveals that the city’s size far exceeded previous assumptions and understandings.

“It was assumed the city reached its large size during the 10th and ninth century BCE,” Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University explained to the Daily Star. “It now appears that the early Iron Age city – 11th century BCE and perhaps before – may have been even bigger and more impressive.”

The archaeologist believes that the large size of the city and the monuments that remained may have helped contribute to the legends of giants among the Philistines and others.

For four years now, the vast majority of the UK’s Jewish community has made it clear that they will not countenance voting for Jeremy Corbyn in a general election. They have pointed to Mr Corbyn’s associations with Jew haters, Holocaust deniers and terrorist groups with genocidal antisemitic agendas.

At best, what they have received from a significant percentage of Labour members is total indifference or denial. At worst, they have suffered vicious attacks on their character, attacks which very frequently have veered into antisemitic territory.

Now, however, it seems likely that at some point in the near future there will be another general election. And suddenly, many Jewish voters reiterating what they have been saying for years have been met by a surge of indignation. Apparently, if Jews do not vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, they will be voting for “Fascism”. Jews are being told, (apparently without a trace of the English irony Mr Corbyn thinks we’re unable to understand), to “study history”.

At the risk of pointing out what should be unbelievably obvious, Jewish history has shown that when someone says they hate you and want to kill you, you should believe them. And when a politician hangs around such people for decades and speaks of them in glowing terms, as Jeremy Corbyn has, you do not want to vote for their party. Ever.

The Labour Party’s parliamentary candidate for Finchley and Golders Green has said she did not mean to claim that antisemitism has been “whipped up” and “weaponised by certain media commentators”. Instead, she claims that she just meant that the “far-right” has “weaponised” antisemitism.

Sara Conway, who is currently a Labour councillor in Barnet representing Burnt Oak, had said that she was “not trying to dismiss or push back on anything at all but I think there has been an element…of the press and right-wing commentators that has drummed this up to such a level that it then becomes, if you look on Twitter, an endless back and forth that doesn’t work”.

Ms Conway noted that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has launched a full statutory investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party, which was opened following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.

However Ms Conway has now sought to clarify her language, tweeting: “I used the wrong word by saying weaponised. I was referring to far-right commentators particularly on Twitter who use this issue as a political football to create polarisation and division. Antisemitism is a very real problem and I was in no way referring those of us fighting it.”

A report published on Wednesday by Amnesty International claims that "Israeli Arabs elected to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, are being targeted by discriminatory regulations and legislation that undermine their ability to represent and defend the rights of the Israeli Arabic minority population in Israel."

The report details ways in which the right to freedom of expression of Israeli Arabic members of the Knesset (MKs) has been threatened by discriminatory legislative changes, proposed bills and Knesset regulations. It also highlights alleginflammatory rhetoric used by Israeli government ministers to stigmatize Israeli Arabic MKs and exposes how bills put forward by Israeli Arabic MKs have been unfairly disqualified on discriminatory grounds.

“Israeli Arabic members of the Knesset in Israel are increasingly facing discriminatory attacks. Despite being democratically elected like their Jewish Israeli counterparts, Israeli Arabic MKs are the target of deep-rooted discrimination and undue restrictions that hamstring their ability to speak out in defence of the rights of the Israeli Arabic people,” said Saleh Higazi, Deputy Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International.

The report claims that "With Israel systematically committing human rights violations against Israeli Arabs in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, it is vital that Israeli Arabic voices in parliament are heard, considered and respected.”

A resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions at the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) annual conference in Washington, DC, was thwarted on Saturday.

“Proponents of an anti #Israel academic boycott resolution (& its obnoxious accompanying FAQ) lost spectacularly last night at #APSA19. 120+ packed the room, the vast majority opposed. There will be no further action or vote. #bdsfail,” tweeted Miriam Elman, executive director of Academic Engagement Network (AEN), an organization of American college and university faculty opposing the BDS movement, on Sunday.

Although the “Academic Boycott Resolution” was going to be only discussed and not voted on during the Aug. 31 meeting, 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.

Ahead of the conference, AEN, which consists of APSA members, expressed concern that the resolution introduced by APSA’s Organized Section 17, Foundations of Political Theory, would “further a virulently anti-Israel agenda and the goals of the BDS movement” and “not allow a fair discussion of the resolution.”

BBC Two has come under fire for featuring in a new documentary an activist who defended the anti-Semitic spray-painting of a Warsaw Ghetto wall.

Novara Media senior editor Ash Sarkar is included in the three-part program “Rise of the Nazis,” which premiered on Monday.

In September 2018, the self-proclaimed Communist and BDS supporter expressed “solidarity” with those who spray-painted “free Gaza and Palestine, liberate all ghettos” on one of the last remaining parts of the Warsaw Ghetto wall. She denied the defacement was anti-Semitic.

Jewish historian and professor Sir Simon Schama called Sarkar’s inclusion in the documentary “really appalling.”

someone should have had editorial second thought! Really appalling https://t.co/ZZ2pii5muE

— Simon Schama (@simon_schama) September 2, 2019

British-Jewish actress Tracy Ann Oberman told Patrick Holland, BBC Two’s channel editor, “as someone who lost famiky [sic] during The Rise of The Nazis I am deeply disturbed that of all knowledgable [sic] experts/historians, you use Ash Sakar a woman who endorsed the spray painting of the remaining WatsawGhetto [sic] wall-an open grave for our families. Why?”

She labeled Sarkar “a momentum propagandist” and told BBC to “rethink your ‘experts’ please. Too much insensitivity and lack of diligence on this. I’m sure @BBCTwo didn’t mean to cause offence with this Sakar booking but it has and it makes a mockery of the subject matter.”

On Aug. 23, The Jewish Chronicle (JC), Britain’s largest Jewish newspaper and one of the oldest Jewish papers in the world, published an apology and handed 50,000 pounds (more than $60,000) to Interpal, a British Muslim charity linked closely to Hamas, the murderous Palestinian terrorist organization in Gaza.

The apology and the payout come in the wake of a March 2019 article in the JC (since taken down), in which journalist Orlando Radice reported that Interpal was itself “deemed by the US a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization in 2003.” Radice also claimed that the chairman of Interpal, Ibrahim Hewitt, “has been widely described as an Islamic extremist who believes that adulterers should be stoned to death and has compared gay people with pedophiles.”

The JC is not the first publication to end up paying money to Interpal to avoid a lawsuit. In June 2019, the Daily Mail and Mail Online gave the charity more than $145,000.

In this specific case, what did the JC get wrong? What exactly is Interpal? And why has the newspaper now handed over $60,000 to a charity considered by the U.S. government to be a terrorist organization? (h/t IsaacStorm)

Leif Olson, a religious Christian who had clearly intended his messages to mock anti-Semites, resigned last Friday after Ben Penn of Bloomberg had maligned him by accusing him of posting the anti-Semitic messages, twisting what Olson said and reporting him to the Department of Labor. As The Daily Wire’s Josh Hammer wrote in a piece ferociously denouncing Penn for his shoddy journalism and clearly partisan attack:

Penn flagged for DOL a transparently sarcastic Facebook post of Olson's dating back to the much-ballyhooed August 2016 Paul Ryan/Paul Nehlen Republican primary race in Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District … Paul Nehlen, the reader may recall, was a vile alt-right anti-Semite whose failed insurgent bid to supplant Paul Ryan was vociferously backed by Breitbart and other nationalist populist figures. Prior to his later being banned outright from Twitter in 2018 due to serial peddling of Jew-hatred, Nehlen became notorious for promoting on the platform a list of Jewish journalistic conspiracists against him.

After Ryan destroyed Nehlen in the primary, winning 84% of the vote, Olson sarcastically mocked Nehlen and his alt-right supporters. Penn took Olson’s quotes out of context, alerted the Department of Labor, and voila! he had a political scalp. Penn’s motivation seemed clear enough; he tweeted, "Lost in all of this is that Olson was part of a team of political appointees tasked with the heavy lift of drafting wage-hour regulations that are high priorities for Trump White House, business community. They're now down one adviser."

Penn was roundly condemned across the political spectrum, as Hammer and Twitchy pointed out. Hammer noted, "Conservatives ought to be up in arms that DOL, a prominent department of the Trump administration, is so unwilling to defend its own appointees against manufactured smear campaigns."

For centuries, Jews were deprived—at unimaginable cost—of that most basic right: self-defense. Today, the Jewish nation is subjected to impossible standards of self-defense by press and policymakers, as an Aug. 27, 2019 Washington Post editorial illustrates.

In the Post’s column “The hype over possible U.S.-Iran talks obscured something much more ominous,” the editorial board fretted over “another escalation in Iran-related tensions across the Middle East, this time driven by Israel.”

Citing recent Israeli strikes against Iranian proxies in the region, the newspaper conceded that “Israel has a right to defend itself against Iranian attacks” emanating from Syria. However, the Post faulted the Jewish state for targeting Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. It notes with alarm the “expansion of what has been a mostly measured and covert Israeli campaign” in a country where “some 5,000 U.S. troops are still based…and could be targets for Iranian reprisals.”

In other words: the Post blamed Israel for defending itself. The newspaper doesn’t blame the aggressor, Iran—long considered the preeminent state sponsor of terror by the U.S. State Department and others—for plotting attacks against the Jewish state. Nor does the editorial board bother to note that Iranian proxies and their allies in Iraq and Lebanon receive U.S. taxpayer support, as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) has documented.

In its September 3 edition to inaugurate the new school year, the McGill Daily produced content claiming that Zionism is a form of racism and a “colonial establishment”.

This is hardly surprising coming from a “newspaper” which officially bans commentary from pro-Zionist voices. As HRC has said previously, the McGill Daily’s censorship of pro-Zionist opinions has racist overtones and xenophobic dimensions.

The slur that “Zionism is racism” came in 1975 when the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379 slandering Zionism by equating it with racism. Zionism is defined as the Jewish people’s national liberation movement, which holds that Jews, like any other nation, are entitled to a homeland and for the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.

Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel and have lived there, uninterrupted, for over 3,000 years. The Jewish people have a legitimate religious, legal and ancestral claim to the land of Israel. You cannot “occupy” your own land and to present Jews as usurpers denies Jewish rights and Jewish self determination in their historic homeland. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was not a by-product of “colonialism”. In fact, Israel supported the Partition Plan which would have created separate Jewish and Arab states. Sadly, the Arabs rejected the plan and waged war, which caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands who were encouraged by the Arab world to leave the area en masse.

The origins of the so-called Palestinian-Arab “Naqba” were caused by a war of annihilation launched against the nascent Israeli state by neighbouring Arab armies. It was in 1948 that the Arabs refused to establish a state side-by-side with the Jewish one.

As he talks about the recent string of attacks on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, Yosef Rapaport points to a small scar above his right eye.

It’s the remnant of an anti-Semitic attack he experienced 50 years ago as a teenager in Montreal.

“For those of us who look very Jewish, this has been a constant,” said Rapaport, 65, wearing a black hat and suit, as he stood outside an afternoon prayer service in the heavily Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park. “You shrug your shoulders. It’s like a constant background.”

That same afternoon, New York City’s new Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes opened months ahead of schedule. The timeline was advanced in part because of a recent string of attacks on visibly Jewish people in Brooklyn.

At least three came in a week:

* On Aug. 31, an assailant hit a Jewish man with a belt outside a synagogue.

* On Aug. 29, an assailant threw rocks at a Jewish man while the victim was in his truck.

* On Aug. 27, a Jewish man was struck with a paving stone as he exercised in a park.

According to New York Police Department statistics from early June, there have been 110 hate crimes against Jews in 2019, ranging from assaults to anti-Semitic graffiti. That’s nearly double the previous year’s figure.

More than half of hate crimes reported this year in New York City are anti-Semitic, NYPD officials said Wednesday, according to CNN.

According to the latest numbers, reported through September 1, anti-Semitic hate crimes in NYC are up 63% this year from last year, with 152 anti-Semitic hate crimes reported this year so far, compared to 93 over the same period last year.

A total of 290 hate crimes have been reported in NYC this year so far compared to 205 last year.

Arrests over hate crimes were also up this year, with 135 arrests made this year compared to 108 over the same period last year.

Bahadir Yenisehirlioglu, a Turkish actor who played the protagonist role in the antisemitic Turkish TV series Payitaht: Abdülhamid (The Last Emperor), said in an August 25, 2019 interview on TRT Arabic TV (Turkey) that the Torah has been falsified by the Jewish rabbis. He claimed that they have turned it into an ideological and politicized book that espouses Zionism by saying that the Jews are the Chosen People and that other nations exist to be the Jews' slaves. Yenisehirlioglu said that Jews who believe in Zionism are different from those who do not, and he criticized Israel for treating the Palestinians in what he said was a Nazi-like fashion. He further claimed that Israel is imprisoning Palestinian children and sterilizing them by exposing them to concentrated radiation. He added that Israel's expansionist policy has been enabled by American support.

A searing adaptation of one of most controversial books about the Holocaust divided critics at the Venice film festival Wednesday, with some fighting each other in the dark to get out of its first screening.

“The Painted Bird,” based on Jerzy Kosinski’s highly contentious 1965 novel about a Jewish boy surviving the worst human nature can inflict on him in an unnamed Eastern European country, was hailed as a masterpiece by some and an unwatchable ordeal by others.

But its staggering central performance from nine-year-old Czech Roma boy Petr Kotlar — who witnesses a panoply of depravity from incest, bestiality and rape to mutilation and murder — has had co-stars Harvey Keitel and Stellan Skarsgard as well as the critics in raptures.

That did not stop some running for the exits at its first screening.

In the very first scene, the boy’s pet ferret is taken from him by boorish peasants and burned alive.

The Hollywood Reporter called the black-and-white epic “heart-wrenching… and the ideal film treatment” of the novel, which itself sparked outrage in Kosinski’s native Poland when the writer first hinted that the story was autobiographical.

Eighty years have passed since the start of the World War Two on September 1, 1939, an anniversary being marked by Yad Vashem with a new online exhibition, portraying the experiences of a dozen Jewish families in those first months, when they had no way of knowing the events that were going to unfold.

The exhibition, “1939: Jewish Families on the Brink of War,” describes the progression of the war using Holocaust-era documents, photographs and artifacts from Yad Vashem’s archives, many which were donated by Holocaust survivors and families.

One diary entry, written by Mira Zabludowski in September 1939, records her thoughts during the first months of the German occupation of Warsaw. She had already immigrated to pre-state Palestine and was visiting her parents in Warsaw at the time the war broke out.

“The time is 4:00 p.m. The sound of artillery fire has been going on nonstop for twenty hours. The noise of machine guns and the thunder of the planes overhead have been reverberating in the air and increase the terror. My ears and head ache. You can’t hear what’s being said. Just boom! Boom! Boom! A block of houses in the city center is on fire. Suddenly there is a terrible noise, then moans and screams — houses collapse in the old city and we run to save those buried alive under the rubble. Suddenly the sky darkened — a cloud of smoke descended over the city.”

Zabludowski escaped Poland and made her way back to Israel. Her father died in July 1940 in Warsaw while her mother was deported along with other family members to Treblinka.

SEC stands for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. They are the US government watchdog of American corporate finance. If a corporate body knowingly fails to disclose a risk that the SEC believes its corporate executives knew should have been disclosed to shareholders or bondholders, they can put the executives and their attortneys into jail.

In short, any stock or bond to be sold or traded on an American exchange needs to satisfy the SEC’s financial risk disclosure requirements, or face civil or criminal jeopardy.

How are the SEC disclosure requirements relevant to Israel’s safety and security? Saudi Arabia is about to bring to market its 2 Trillion Dollar initial public offering (IPO). And, if one simply looks at the Middle East, one quickly understands that Saudi Arabia’s and ARAMCO’s security relies solely on the safety and security of Israel.

Without Israel, Saudi Arabia and ARAMCO are finished, and using Mr. Hinman’s analysis, if a corporation must disclose something as ephemeral as a financial risk from BREXIT, then surely Saudi’s ARAMCO IPO must disclose the catastrophic risk if Israel is at risk.

Israeli electric airplane startup Eviation is being merged into Clermont Aerospace, part of the international Clermont Group of healthcare, financial services and aerospace businesses headquartered in Singapore.

Another Clermont Aerospace company, magniX of Canada, will build the electric engine for Eviation’s Alice commuter aircraft unveiled last June at the Paris Air Show.

The streamlined plane, scheduled for commercial use by 2022, is designed to take nine passengers up to 650 miles – approximately the distance from London to Zurich, or New York to Detroit.

Eviation CEO Omer Bar-Yohay said that 2019 “has been a pivotal year for everyone at the company – we debuted our first electric airplane, announced a partnership with magniX and secured our first commercial contract with Cape Air. Clermont’s investment and expertise in business-building will enable us to accelerate our growth and take Eviation to new heights.”

Clermont Chairman Richard F. Chandler commented, “Air travel connects cultures and communities but remains inefficient, polluting and expensive. Through Eviation and magniX, we are leading the development of affordable and environmentally friendly electric flight.”

British actress Bonnie Wright, best known for playing the role of Ginny Weasley in the “Harry Potter” film series, is visiting Israel for her friend’s wedding and posted photos from her trip on social media.

Wright, 28, shared photos on Instagram on Wednesday of her in Tel Aviv overlooking the ocean while holding a glass of wine.

She captioned the series of shots “here for love #maya4flower.” The hashtag is a reference to her engaged friend Maya, who is getting married in the Jewish state on Thursday.

The actress also shared a photo of her friend on her Instagram story and said they were in Israel to celebrate the “bride to be.”

We’ve all heard about the unfortunate security situation in the 50 or so communities that border Gaza in southern Israel’s Western Negev, but did you know that there’s also a lot of interesting and fun activities there that make this a most unusual and rewarding place to visit?

Incoming rockets and incendiary terror may be the order of the day sometimes, but the rest of the time the communities in the Gaza Envelope (Otef Aza, in Hebrew), offer a different pace of life and an opportunity to experience Israel in an alternative, and often meaningful way.

Aside from opportunities to learn more about daily life in Sderot and the surrounding villages, or to see peace projects at work, there are ostrich farms, wineries and cheese tastings that will all help you leave a little bit of your heart in a place that needs it sorely.

We’ve gathered up the best experiences the area has to offer to bring you a list of 10 great reasons to visit Israel’s Gaza border communities — some of them are serious and hard hitting, others lighthearted, uplifting, and fun.

Near the end of World War II, Czechoslovakia’s Avia Company retooled one of its factories to produce Messerschmitts for the Luftwaffe. Avia kept making fighter planes after the war ended, but, having lost access to the German-made engines, had to redesign the aircraft with different parts, creating the S-199, an awkward hybrid used by the Czech air force. In 1948, with war on the horizon, the Haganah—unable to buy arms from the U.S., Britain, or the Soviet Union—became the only other military to purchase the S-199. Robert Gandt writes:

The first band of volunteers—two Americans, one South African, seven native Israelis—arrived at the Ceské Budejovice air base on May 11, 1948. Lou Lenart, a wiry former U.S. Marine Corps pilot, made the group’s first flight in the S-199. It was nearly his last. Lenart recalled, “The big paddle-bladed propeller produced so much left-pulling torque that the first time I tried to take off, the plane ran away from me clear off the runway, through a fence, and over a cliff.”

To the volunteer pilots, the Czech fighter seemed to have a vicious streak, like an attack dog turning on its handler. The narrow landing gear made the S-199 difficult to keep aligned during takeoff. Directional control was made even worse by the enormous torque of the propeller. . . . The volunteers had barely begun training when, on May 15, the radio in their Czech quarters broadcast the news that Israel’s war of survival had begun.

Learning that Arab planes had bombed Tel Aviv, the pilots, with hardly any training, disassembled and packed the planes and went to fight for their country, where the aircraft were reassembled at the Ekron airfield.

They acted with arrogance on earth, slaughtering our sons and leaving our women alive, and the plotting of the Jews is just delusions. Crime is their quality/attribute, killing is their language, destroying homes is their custom, uprooting trees is their habit. Jewish personalities epitomize crime and arrogance, but in this web portal we will get to know them from up close. 

The  [Ibziq Mixed Primary] school is the tenth in a string of “Al-Tahadi” or “challenge” schools established by the Palestinian Authority in the Israeli-controlled Area C of the occupied West Bank, staff told Defense for Children International - Palestine. The central goal of these schools is to ensure access to education and“support the steadfastness” of Area C residents. Al-Tahadi schools are usually small in size and placed in marginalized, rural communities or those facing large vulnerability factors from Israeli forces or settlements.

 The Hamas movement hailed on Friday the decision of a European court to cancel the listing of Hamas and its armed wing al-Qassam Brigades from the world's list of terrorism.

Hazem Qassem, Hamas spokesman in Gaza told Xinhua that the decision to remove Hamas and its armed wing from the world's terrorist list "is positive and a right step in the right direction."
...

According to local websites close to Hamas on Friday, the movement's attorney in Europe, Khaled al-Showly, said that the European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg decided on Thursday to remove Hamas movement and its armed wing al-Qassam Brigades from the world's list of terrorism.

He also said that the decision of the court is not final, but the previous decisions on the reinsertion of Hamas and its military wing on terrorist lists "are null and void."

Although the new ruling overturned the decisions in some form, it does not include the decisions made in 2019, which have not been appealed, and the new provision has nothing to do with the basic case in which the first judgment of the Court of First Instance was issued on 17 December 2014, which It remains subject to appeal to the European Court of Justice. 

Should Israel and the US sign a mutual defense treaty? Every few years, this perennial question is raised. And every few years, it is set aside.

In 2000 then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak made signing a mutual defense treaty with the US a central component of his national security strategy. That year, as Barak sought to sell the public his plan to give the Temple Mount to Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Judea and Samaria to Arafat’s terror armies, he presented the option of signing a mutual defense pact with the US as a reasonable payoff for Israel’s sacrifice for peace.

Barak’s thinking was clear.

True, if the PLO boss had accepted Barak’s peace offer Israel would have been left without its capital and without defensible borders. But there was no reason to worry. The Marines would protect us. At the heart of Barak’s vision of a mutual defense treaty stood his unwillingness to bear the burdens of freedom, power and sovereignty.

The present round of chatter about the prospect of achieving a US-Israel defense treaty was initiated by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). In opposition to the view of the majority of Israelis and of the 2016 Republican Party platform, Graham insists on maintaining allegiance to the so-called “two-state solution,” despite its hundred-year record of continuous failure.

Still, Graham is no foe of Israeli sovereignty and military might. To the contrary. Graham played a decisive role in convincing President Donald Trump to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. So it is inconceivable that Graham shares Barak’s post-Zionist vision of a defenseless Israel protected by Uncle Sam.

Moreover, according to media reports, ahead of the September 17 election Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making an effort to convince President Trump to make a statement in favor of a new US-Israel defense treaty. Since Netanyahu’s diplomatic policies and his strategic vision of Israel are diametrically opposed to those Barak advanced, it is impossible to imagine that Netanyahu shares Barak’s vision of the purpose of a defense treaty.

What then could be the purpose of a defense treaty? What sort of rearrangement of Israel’s defense ties with the US would advance those ties to both countries’ mutual advantage?

Marrying Israel’s know-how, experience, and innovation with Egypt’s abundant cheap manpower (Egypt’s per capita gross domestic product is about 6% of Israel's) and its hunger to excel after generations of decline and a looming water crisis, promises to bear fruit for both countries.

Of course, cooperation to enhance security and stability will remain paramount. However, imagine the dividends in the not-distant future in tourism and trade if you combine Egypt's and Israel's abundant antiquities, beautiful beaches, delicious cuisines, and rich histories as cradles of civilization and of the world's main monotheistic religions.

Cooperation with Israel's first-rate universities and advanced hospitals could give Egypt's educational and medical facilities a significant boost. Egypt's youth are thirsty for the knowledge, training, and skills that would maximize their productivity. Moreover, because the rapidly increasing populations of Ethiopia and Sudan need more Nile water for their own agriculture and development, Egypt – which is downstream – must learn to use the river wisely. Water conservation, reclamation, purification, distribution, and irrigation techniques, as well as desalination plants on the Mediterranean, are needed to ensure that Egyptians have access to abundant, clean drinking water. Israel is the most experienced country on earth in water technology.

Unfortunately, an enduring Israeli-Palestinian peace seems far off. But ultimately, the time will come when a new Palestinian leadership realizes that Israel is a mature, respected country and a potential ally to them. Egypt could then play a pivotal role in bringing the sides together in mutual acceptance and productive coexistence.

In a world accustomed to thinking in zero-sum terms – where one side's gain is another side's loss – the time has come for a win-win proposition. But the successful implementation of cooperative Israeli-Egyptian ventures requires working diligently on the building of mutual trust. Such ventures would directly benefit both countries and, as a secondary dividend, reduce anti-Semitism and other forms of extremism and contribute to regional peace.

Buried in a recent report from the International Atomic Energy Agency is: "Iran's implementation of its Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol require[s] full and timely cooperation by Iran. The Agency continues to pursue this objective with Iran." That's an exquisite way of saying that Iran is stonewalling the agency.

Last September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly that Iran had a "secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and material from Iran's secret nuclear weapons program" on the outskirts of Tehran in a village called Turquz Abad. He urged IAEA chief Yukiya Amano to "inspect this atomic warehouse immediately."

The IAEA only got around to inspecting the site earlier this year, long after the suspicious materials had vanished. But nuclear inspectors were nonetheless able to detect radioactive particles, corroborating Israeli claims about the purpose of the warehouse.

The agency's unwillingness to follow up promptly and effectively on Israel's allegations, along with its reluctance to disclose what it found, inspire little confidence in the quality of its inspections and even less in its willingness to call out cheating.

Moreover, Iran's hiding of nuclear materials is further evidence that Tehran was in violation of the nuclear deal from the moment it was signed. "If Iranians aren't cooperating, it tells you that potentially they are hiding more," notes David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security.

If those who fear an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear sites are serious about averting it, they could play a helpful part by demanding more credible inspections and honest reporting from the IAEA, starting with a thorough accounting for what went mysteriously missing from Turquz Abad.

An excerpt from Seth Frantzman’s forthcoming book, ‘After ISIS: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East’
“They are the exporter of instability across the region,” US Secretary of Defense Mattis, his voice gruff and no-nonsense as usual, said in late July 2018. He was talking about Iran. On Syria, he quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Keep your eye on the ball.” There were some nations, such as Russia and Iran, keeping Assad in power. “Our job is to try to find a way in the midst of this chaos to help the innocent people.” To do that the US wanted to “get stability in northeast Syria. This starts with destroying ISIS. They are not destroyed yet. It’s not over yet. It’s going to be a lot longer, tougher fight.” In the midst of the last days of the war on ISIS, global and regional powers were jockeying to see who would win the peace. Trump, Putin, Rouhani, Erdogan, MBS and Netanyahu were all watching closely.

Since February 2018, the US had begun to concentrate on “stabilization” in Syria. But it was doing that at the same time that it hunted down the remnants of ISIS. “We are almost complete with liberation of the physical caliphate,” Maj. Gen. James Jarrard, commander of special operations in Syria, said. He praised the Syrian Democratic Forces as “great partners who have done a phenomenal job liberating terrain.”

The challenge was that these partner forces, made up of Kurds and Arabs from various units, including the YPG, had a slog ahead to defeat the ISIS remnants. In the Euphrates Valley near Iraq, “once you liberate terrain it’s not over. ISIS and al Qaeda are experts at blending in to the population and remain in a cellular structure and commit activities that delegitimize governance.” So the US was training local security forces in the “near term,” to give the local government breathing space to stabilize the countryside.

There was also a lot of reconstruction to be done and clearing thousands of IEDs. Jarrard said in February 2018 that in Raqqa, Manbij and Tabqa, it could take up to ten years to clear all the mines left behind. “That is the biggest inhibitor to all the other stabilization efforts because of the dangers of working in areas not cleared of IEDs. It’s a bit of a Catch-22 because the US wants to help the local people have security to get their agriculture developed and start earning a living, while the coalition wants the US State Department donors to set down foundations under a program called START Forward. You can’t have security if you can’t clear IEDs, and you can’t clear IEDs until the financial support is flowing to equip people to do it. Getting the financial support requires security and stabilization,” the American officer said.

The European Union hands the Palestinian Authority $404 million USD per year, with most allotted for its education ministry. In addition, the EU contributed $178 million USD to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian “refugees” and their descendants (Canada gave $25 million in 2018), much of which goes to funding its schools and related programs where Palestinian children are indoctrinated with anti-Jewish and anti-Israel, terrorist propaganda.

In a report released by the NGO IMPACT-se (Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education) in April 2019, the organization found new Palestinian textbooks to be more radical than in the past, containing incitement and rejection of peace with Israel. The report found that the new curriculum “deliberately omits any discussion of peace education or reference to any Jewish presence in Palestine before 1948.” “Most troubling, there is a systematic insertion of violence, martyrdom and jihad across all grades and subjects in a more extensive and sophisticated manner, embracing a full spectrum of extreme nationalist ideas and Islamist ideologies that extend even into the teaching of science and mathematics.”

In a statement released on April 24, 2019 in response to the IMPACT-se report, the EU announced its intentions to conduct an examination of the new Palestinian school textbooks. The study will be carried out by an “independent and internationally recognized research institute” with the aim of “identifying possible incitement to hatred and violence and any possible lack of compliance with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) standards of peace and tolerance in education.”

This pervasive incitement of hatred and violence against Israel in Palestinian society has many faces, ultimately beginning with the complete denial of the very existence of the State of Israel. Maps in schools and universities in the west bank and Gaza do not even bear the name of Israel, nor a large number of its cities and towns. Palestinian officials and religious leaders frequently deny the thousands of years of Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, promoting a narrative that disavows any Jewish rights to the Jewish historical homeland.

This ubiquitous antipathy is also exemplified by their hero worship and glorification of terrorists. Palestinian inciters extol the deeds of terrorists, naming schools and football teams in their honour and holding them up as models to be emulated. In this environment, Palestinian children are raised to honour terrorists and to seek ‘martyrdom’ through Jihad.

To take a quote from Somali-born Dutch-American activist and scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s brilliant, must read opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on July 12, “hate is hard to unlearn without coming to terms with how you learned it.” Until the Palestinians learn how to come to terms with the existence of the Jewish state of Israel, how can we ever expect to deviate from the status quo and achieve a solution that will lead to lasting peace in the region?

The Area C Palestinian boom advances without any coordination with Israelis about land use, security, environmental impacts or close proximity to Jewish villages. The PA’s 2014 Roots Project greatly accelerated the entire process. Thus, European governments and the PA have completed the shredding of the already weakened Oslo agreements.

Most of the new Area C settlements are not natural Arab urban growth or urban sprawl. Rather, they are often strategically scattered to effectively carve up Area C, sometimes to surround Jewish villages and sometimes to push onto Israeli nature or military reserves.

In many instances, Arab residents from Areas A and B are bused in, encouraged by incentives to relocate or start a second home in the new settlements. Some structures are makeshift, festooned with the logo of the European Union. Some are multi-floor office centers. Others turn out to be palatial homes. The gamut of construction styles can be seen.

In several cases, the illegal constructions are deliberately established on Israeli military reserves. Since the 1970s, Israel Defense Forces have maintained military training and firing ranges, such as Firing Zone 918. That zone now has illegal settlements.

One road, dubbed Smuggler’s Route, courses through the hills from the Palestinian city of Yatta all the way to the Arad Valley in the Negev Desert.

In prior years, Israel’s Civil Administration boasted of its many Palestinian construction permits. A glowing report cites 328 projects authorized during 2011 and 2012. That number has drastically diminished because Area C Palestinians no longer apply for permits; they deny Israel’s right to issue them. Now, they just start building.

Jason Greenblatt, US special envoy to the Middle East and architect behind the “Deal of the Century,” is leaving the administration, the White House announced on Thursday.

He will stay in his role over the next few weeks until President Donald Trump unveils his peace plan, expected sometime after the election on September 17. Greenblatt is then expected to return to his family in New Jersey.
Avi Berkowitz, deputy assistant to the president, and Brian Hook, special representative for Iran, will take on an increased role on the team after Greenblatt’s departure.

An administration official said that Greenblatt originally intended to join the administration for two years to analyze the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to draft “a realistic and implementable vision to help solve the conflict and to help develop relationships between Israel and [countries in] the region.”

It is unclear what Greenblatt will do after leaving the administration.

Greenblatt has made numerous trips to Israel, the Palestinian territories and the Middle East since taking office nearly three years ago. His Twitter feed has been a regular source of news on his visits, and he has positioned himself as a staunch defender of Israel.

If up until now it was the Israeli election season – in fact, two Israeli election seasons – that prevented the release of the plan, with the Administration apparently reticent to do anything that might make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's difficult political situation even more difficult, now the American election calendar comes into play.

Though every US president has a dream of going down in history as the man who brokered an Israeli-Arab peace deal, Trump and his team have to be asking themselves now what they have to gain politically from releasing the plan just a year before the presidential election, with little chance that it will lead to a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate since the Palestinians have already rejected the plan, sight unseen.

Moreover, if the plan calls for any kind of Israeli territorial concessions, that would not go over well with a large part of Trump's Evangelical base who are opposed to any such move.

If the Trump team could get a guarantee beforehand from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Persian Gulf countries that they would publicly back the plan – even if the Palestinians reject it – then that could compel the administration to go forward.

But not knowing whether or not Trump will be re-elected, what Arab leader is going to stick out his neck publicly to support the plan over Palestinian objections? If there were assurances that Trump would be around for another four years, that would be one thing. But what if he is not, and a new president takes office who doesn't back the plan and decides to go in a different direction. Then the Arab leaders will be seen by many in their own countries as traitors to the Palestinian cause, even as the plan they went out on a limb to support might be buried.

On the other hand, there are some who argue that the plan may be presented by this strongly pro-Israeli administration precisely because there is no guarantee of another term for Trump, and it is important for people like Greenblatt, Kushner, US Ambassador David Friedman, Vice President Mike Pence, National Security Advisor John Boloton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to set down a marker on this issue before they leave office.

Jason Greenblatt’s announcement of his resignation from the Trump administration on Thursday left an opening for a Mideast peace envoy in Jerusalem.

With Israel only 12 days away from its next election, and the White House having said it will unveil its peace plan shortly afterwards, the position was quickly filled by one of the few insiders to the secretive process.

Avi Berkowitz, a longtime ally of Jared Kushner and one of his top assistants in Washington, will assume Greenblatt’s role once the Trump envoy officially steps down in the coming weeks, after the release of the peace proposal, the White House said.

Greenblatt, a former lawyer with the Trump Organization, has been working for the last two and a half years on the administration’s peace plan together with Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior assistant.

The Jewish Berkowitz, 30, has participated in a number of sensitive meetings on the administration’s Israel policy, including talks on the decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.

In February, he traveled with Kushner throughout the region, including to Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, in preparation for publication of the administration’s peace plan.

Despite his quick rise in US President Donald Trump’s White House, he is relatively new to politi

U.S. envoy Jason Greenblatt is leaving his post before negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians have even started. One reason peace is not around the corner is that there is no Palestinian leader at the moment with the democratic credibility to negotiate it even if he were so inclined. Mahmoud Abbas, 83, is currently serving the 14th year of a four-year term as president of the Palestinian Authority. Moreover, Gaza remains under the sovereignty of Hamas, which rejects any Jewish state.

Even if Abbas negotiated a deal, there is little reason to believe most Palestinians would accept it. A recent poll by the Aman Coalition for Accountability and Integrity found that 91% of Palestinians said they do not trust the PA. Given that, noted Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, it's difficult to see how its leaders will have the legitimacy to make any concessions.

Privately, U.S. officials understand that there will have to be governance and anti-corruption reform for a future Palestinian state to be viable.

Barack Obama was so radical in his views about Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged shellshocked, ashen faced and traumatized after his first White House meeting with the newly-elected president in May 2009, according to an adviser who was present.

The detail was contained in an extensive New York Times Magazine story titled “The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran.” The story says it is based on accounts with “dozens of current and former American, Israeli and European officials,” including many top officials cited on the record such as Netanyahu himself.

One section cites Uzi Arad, a former top Netanyahu adviser, describing the scene after Netanyahu emerged from his first private Oval Office meeting with Obama. The section also quotes Netanyahu confirming that Obama “adopted most of the Palestinian narrative.”

The Times reported:
During their first meeting in the White House in May 2009, anxious aides waited outside the Oval Office as the two leaders met alone. It was an interminable meeting, and some may have figured that the savvy, experienced Israeli prime minister was lecturing the young American president about the Palestinians and the hard truths of Israeli security.

But when the door opened, it was Netanyahu who appeared shellshocked, Arad recalls: “Bibi did not say anything, but he looked ashen.” It was hours later when he told aides that Obama had attacked him and implored him — actually demanded him, in Netanyahu’s view — to freeze Israel’s settlements in the West Bank right away, with “not a single brick” added in the future, according to an Israeli official with direct knowledge of the meeting. “Bibi left that place traumatized,” Arad says.

Speaking now, Netanyahu says that “Obama came from another direction, one that adopted most of the Palestinian narrative,” and ruefully cites the “not a single brick” line to argue that the American president was against him from the very beginning. (A former Obama-administration official with knowledge of the White House meeting says that Obama did not in fact use that phrase.)

It is instrumental that the ex-Obama official only denied using the “not a single brick” phrase in relation to Israeli settlements but did not deny that the former president, as Netanyahu put it, “adopted most of the Palestinian narrative.” Nor did the ex-Obama official deny the description of Obama using the meeting to demand a complete halt to all Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria, which houses historic Jewish communities.

The Times reported that Obama saw the JCPOA as the “centerpiece of his foreign-policy legacy.” For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, the newspaper reported that the deal would, according to The Times’ characterization, “be the ultimate betrayal — Israel’s closest ally negotiating behind its back with its most bitter enemy.”

The newspaper reported that in the lead up to the talks, the Obama administration spied on Israeli military movements near Iran.

The Times reported:

Obama took the possibility of a sudden Israeli strike seriously. American spy satellites watched Israeli drones take off from bases in Azerbaijan and fly south over the Iranian border — taking extensive pictures of Iran’s nuclear sites and probing whether Iranian air defenses spotted the intrusion. American military leaders made guesses about whether the Israelis might choose a time of the month when the light was higher or lower, or a time of the year when sandstorms occur more or less regularly. Military planners ran war games to forecast how Tehran might respond to an Israeli strike and how America should respond in return: Would Iran assume that any attack had been blessed by the United States and hit American military forces in the Middle East? The results were dismal: The Israeli strikes dealt only minor setbacks to Iran’s nuclear program, and the United States was enmeshed in yet another war in the Middle East.

This is not the Obama administration’s only alleged surveillance actions concerning the nuclear deal. Another action reportedly spied on American citizens.

In 2015, The Wall Street Journal cited current and former U.S. officials at the time divulging that U.S. surveillance programs captured communications between members of Congress and Israeli leaders, providing intelligence information about Israeli efforts to lobby against the JCPOA.

Former Texas representative and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke said on Wednesday that US President Donald Trump has turned the US-Israel relationship into a partisan issue.

“Certainly the president is trying to [turn Israel into a partisan issue]; I don’t think he’ll be successful in that,” he told Haartez at the LGBTQ synagogue Beit Simchat Torah in Manhattan. “Certainly Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu has tried to do that [with] the lack of respect that he showed to President [Barack] Obama, the partisan politics in which he’s participated here in the United States.”

“But we don’t have to accept that, and I don’t,” he added.

O’Rourke, who in April called Netanyahu “racist” in response to a campaign pledge to annex parts of Judea and Samaria if he were to win re-election that month, said that “I would do everything I could to work with Prime Minister Netanyahu if he is in power and if I am lucky enough to serve as president, and to support the US-Israel relationship.”

However, he continued, “that is not mutually exclusive to ensuring that the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people is not compromised or undermined or ended all together, functionally and for all practical purposes, as an annexation would do.”

Who would have thought 19 years ago that Israeli public sector lawyers would be teaching NATO lawyers about how to combat lawfare?

The Jerusalem Post has learned that dating back to March 2018, NATO started to ask Israeli lawyers from the Justice Ministry and the IDF’s international law divisions to assist it with dealing with legal proceedings arising from asymmetric warfare situations.

Israel has unique experience both operationally and in explaining its side of the story in foreign courts in fighting asymmetrical warfare.

In those foreign courts, Israel explains how it often confronts adversaries who systematically use human shields, fight from civilian locations and run roughshod on the laws of war.

Based on this experience, NATO turned to Israel for assistance with some of its own recent lawfare challenges now that it is more often dealing with asymmetrical warfare situations, and this past May, NATO gave awards to some Israeli legal officials involved in the dialogue.

The US on Thursday blocked a UN Security Council statement on tensions between Israel and Hezbollah that did not single out violence by the Lebanese terror group, forcing the text to be scrapped, according to diplomatic sources.

In the first version of the six-point text, seen by AFP, council members expressed “deep concern at the recent incidents” during a flare-up between the sides across the “Blue Line” border.

The draft, drawn up by France, added that “members of the security council condemned all violations of the Blue Line, both by air and ground, and strongly calls upon all parties to respect the cessation of hostilities.”

According to diplomats, Washington blocked the statement twice, calling for Hezbollah to be specifically condemned in the text.

The US said it was impossible for it to back any statement putting Israel’s right to self-determination on an equal footing with Hezbollah, which it considers a terrorist organization, a diplomat explained.

Several other members of the security council objected to the US stance, and the text was eventually abandoned.

Both sides claimed victory, and even though the military has removed all restrictions for residents in the North, we are still waiting for one more attack by Hezbollah.

A humiliated Hassan Nasrallah promised that it would happen, warning that the group no longer has redlines following Israel’s strike in Syria and the alleged Israeli drone in their heartland, the Beirut neighborhood of Dahiyeh two weeks ago.

“Remember this day,” he said in a speech on Monday evening. “This is the start of a new phase.”

While the group retaliated for Syria, the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International’s news channel reported that Hezbollah warned that “retaliation over drones will be in kind, and will be at its own time and according to its own circumstances.”

Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, the former head of IDF Military Intelligence, told The Jerusalem Post that while Israel hasn’t taken responsibility for the drone attack in Dahiyeh, if the attack was indeed Israeli then it was a message to the group.

“It was not much more than a signal saying that Israel is serious. You need more than 5 kilos of explosives to destroy this project. The attack was signaling that, unlike the past, the IDF won’t let Hezbollah continue its project,” he said.

Hezbollah’s “precision project is considered in Israel casus belli. Israel hasn’t attacked targets in Lebanon, unlike the hundreds of Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria,” Yadlin, who now serves as the head of the Tel Aviv University-affiliated Institute for National Security Studies think tank, explained.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said this week that the episode had ended but had launched a "new phase" in which his Shi'ite Muslim movement would target Israeli drones that breach Lebanon's airspace.

The long-time enemies, who last fought a month-long war in 2006, had been on alert after two drones crashed in a Beirut suburb that Hezbollah largely dominates. Nasrallah deemed the Aug. 25 incident an Israeli attack.

Aoun, a political ally of Hezbollah, has likened the crash of the drones, including one that exploded, to a "declaration of war".

"Any attack on Lebanon's sovereignty ... will be met with legitimate self-defence which Israel will bear all the consequences of," Aoun's office cited him as saying on Friday in a meeting with U.N. Special Coordinator for Lebanon Jan Kubis.

An Israeli teen who was wounded in a Palestinian terror attack last month received his EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) certification on Thursday, only days after being released from the hospital.

Dvir Shnerb, 19, was seriously injured in the August 23 attack, which killed his sister, Rina, 17, and injured his father. The family, from Lod, were hiking at the Ein Bubin spring near the West Bank settlement of Dolev, east of Modiin, when an explosive device detonated in their path.

Shnerb received his certification in Tel Aviv from Magen David Adom.

“Today we are finishing a course which we all began for one reason — the desire to save lives,” Dvir said. “We never really think about who our patient is, what their life has been like until now, or what their life will be like after. But this week, I learned that saving lives is not only saving who our patient was, but it’s also saving their future.”

MDA dedicated Shnerb’s training cohort in Rina’s memory.

For five years, Israeli citizen Avera Mengistu has been held in Gaza by Hamas terrorists. Hamas has denied Avera, who has a serious mental health condition, access to medical and psychological treatment violating all humanitarian norms. Hamas is also currently holding another Israeli national and the bodies of two Israeli soldiers hostage. The international community must act to free Avera and the other Israeli victims being held captive by Hamas.

The municipality of Asira ash-Shamaliya, north of Shechem (Nablus), is probing the possibility of declaring the altar of Joshua Ben-Nun, on Mount Ebal, a Palestinian heritage site.

Engineers from the municipality and Shechem district have recently toured the site, equipped with plans and maps.

The Palestinian Authority’s (PA) Governor of Shechem Ibrahim Ramadan, accompanied by a delegation from the PA’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, took part in a tour of the site in July, claiming the site is “threatened by the occupation and settlers.”

The mayor of Asira ash-Shamaliya Hazzem Yassin stated in an interview with TPS that he is “under no obligation to comment on city plans and certainly not on the site, which the Jews took ownership of, although they have no proof of it being a Jewish site.”

The Book of Joshua describes how Joshua Ben-Nun, the Israelite leader, built an altar on Mount Ebal, acting on instructions from Moses, after the Israelites had crossed into the Land of Israel.

The European Union wants the world to welcome Iran back into the international community because as far as the Europeans are concerned, it appears that the stronger Iran is, the better: a renewed Iran would further Europe's hope of seeing Israel and the Jews wiped off the face of the earth. Heard just a few months ago were calls such as, "send Jews to the ovens,""Hitler didn't finish the job," and "kill the Jews."

The Trump administration has created the impression in the Arab and Muslim world that it is ready to beg the leaders of Iran to engage in direct negotiations with Washington. This approach is exceptionally harmful to US interests: it sends a message to many Arabs and Muslims that Americans are prepared to surrender again and humiliate themselves for the sake of any kind of deal with the Iranians. As Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said last month, America should "bow down" to Iran. Seems it is.

Advice to the Trump administration is: Stay strong. As Osama bin Laden correctly observed, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse."

Strength and more strength is the only way to earn the respect of those running the show in Beijing, Kabul, Moscow, Pyongyang, and especially in Tehran, Gaza and Beirut.

The US Treasury Department on Thursday warned that anyone around the world who helps fuel Iranian vessels blacklisted by Washington runs the risk of being designated as well.

The Treasury Department blacklisted the Adrian Darya, a tanker at the center of a confrontation between Washington and Tehran, on Aug. 30.

Washington has warned that it would regard any assistance given to the ship as support for a terrorist group, namely, Iran‘s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The US State Department has also said that any oil delivery to Syria from the tanker “enables the terrorism” of President Bashar al-Assad.

The ship, formerly called Grace 1, was detained by Britain off Gibraltar in July due to British suspicion it was carrying Iranian oil to Syria in violation of European Union sanctions.

In an update to its frequently asked questions, or FAQs, on Iran sanctions on its website, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, said “the bunkering by non-US persons of an Iranian vessel that has been identified as blocked property of an Iranian person … and the making of related payments for these bunkering services — risk being designated themselves.”

The French allure to Iran is mainly anti-Israel in nature, because it means that Tehran is given a further green light to establish itself on the northern axis. That means more military bases in Iraq and Syria, more aid for Hezbollah, more funding for Qasem Soleimani – the regime's commander of extraterritorial operations in the Revolutionary Guard.

It has become clear in the last three years that the Iranian leadership couldn't care less about the welfare of their people.

The financial benefits Iran received after the sanctions were lifted were all directed to the development of ballistic missiles and the evil forces of Soleimani and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The French offer still depends on the approval of the Americans, but the White House is yet to respond, and it is worrying.

Israel should not encourage any form of conflict. The dilemma at hand isn't between conflict and agreement, and it also wasn't the case back in 2015.

The dilemma was, and still is, between an agreement and continued sanctions; the superpowers' demands should also include reducing Iran's regional interference. The Iranian threat will only grow without clear conditions.

Macron's conciliatory behavior threatens not only Israel. It has already added tens of thousands of casualties in the different conflicts in which Iran is involved, including Syria and Yemen.

We must prevent this French kiss of death.

When world leaders gathered at the G7 conference in August, the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani mentioned his willingness to meet with his American counterpart. Shortly thereafter, Amir Taheri received a late-night phone call from a contact claiming that, if President Trump would take up the offer, he could hand a major victory to the “moderates”—led by Rouhani—over the “hardliners”—ostensibly led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Taheri explains how this unsubstantiated interpretation of Tehran’s politics is as old as the Islamic Republic itself:

Weeks after the mullahs seized power in 1979, the Carter administration identified Mehdi Bazargan, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s first prime minister, as “the man with whom we can work.” After he was kicked out, attention was turned to more ephemeral figures. . . . With Khomeini supposedly too old to last long, these were the men who would shape Iran’s Thermidor, emerging from the reign of terror. Fariba Adelkhah, then a young researcher in Paris, and later an ardent apologist for the Islamic Republic, even wrote a book bearing the title Iranian Thermidor. She is now a hostage in Tehran held by the very men she had so passionately defended in the French media.

Both President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair told me at different times that they had identified “men with whom we can work” in Tehran and that the key to success was getting rid of Khamenei and his “hardliners.”

Western analysts and their imitators inside Iran missed two crucial points. The first was that, like most revolutionary regimes, the Khomeinists had no mechanism for reform in the direction desired by the Iranian middle classes and the Western powers. Thus, even if its leaders tried to introduce reforms, they would be doomed to failure. . . . The second point Western powers ignore is that Iranians today are divided into two broad camps. . . . One camp consists of those, perhaps even a majority today, who are disillusioned with the Islamic Revolution and seek ways of [bringing it to an end] as soon as possible. . . . In the second camp, we find all those who, for different reasons, are still committed to the Khomeinist revolution.

Lebanese Researcher Riyadh Eid: Macron's Wife Is a Rothschild; French Initiative to Keep Iran in the JCPOA Comes from "Jewish Capitalism" pic.twitter.com/sIjMwlCa4k

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) September 6, 2019

There is a strong argument that Turkey's plan is not a violation of Geneva Conventions, but the problem is it is inconsistent with everything UN et al (and Turkey of course) have said about Israel.

— Eugene Kontorovich (@EVKontorovich) September 5, 2019

Swiss-born Turkish basketball star, currently of the Boston Celtics, sits down with Tal Heinrich and Eric Landskroner to discuss his latest ambitions on and off the court, as well as the backlash endured for speaking out against his country's leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Claiming that he could not continue to defend his country from aggressive reporting with conventional weapons alone, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hinted that he may begin developing nuclear arms for his war on the country’s press.

“Every other developed nation in the world has nuclear weapons,” Erdoğan said. “But we are left to battle hostile reporters with guns, knives, chainsaws, choke pears, racks, flamethrowers, iron maidens, and hot pokers.”

While Turkey has become one of the world’s most prolific jailers of journalists, its increasingly powerful president has lamented the difficulty of tracking down, arresting and torturing reporters one at a time. With a nuclear weapon, Erdoğan explained, the government could target hotbeds of journalist activity and take out hundreds or thousands of reporters at once.

“We can’t all deal with the media by just screaming at newspaper owners’ wives,” he noted.

Saudi Arabia recently published its new school textbooks for the 2019 school year. Following the publication of the books Dr. Suhaila Zain Al-'Abidin Hamad, a researcher of Islam and the daughter of Sheikh Zain Al-'Abidin Hamad (d. 1975), a former imam and preacher at the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, published an article in which she opposed the inclusion in the high school curriculum of a hadith (tradition attributed to the Prophet) which calls for fighting the non-Muslims until they convert to Islam. Writing in the Al-Madina daily, she argued that the hadith is not authentic because it contradicts the Quran, and said that it has been included in the curriculum only because it is quoted in the two most important Sunni collections of hadiths, Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, which grants it credibility in the eyes of many.

Hamad noted that Muslim jurisprudents have used this hadith to issue fatwas condoning the killing of all non-Muslims, and of Muslims who do not fulfill all the commandments of Islam, and calling to fight them until Islam is the religion of the entire world. Furthermore, she said, the Islamic State (ISIS) has used it and the fatwas based upon it to justify its acts of terror.

The following are translated excerpts from Hamad's article:[1]
"[According to a hadith, the Prophet said:] 'I have been commanded to fight against people until they testify that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and fulfill the obligation of prayer, and pay the zakat; and if they do it, their lives and property are guaranteed my protection on condition that [they conduct themselves] according to the law of Islam, and [on Judgement Day] Allah [will determine] their fate.'

Iraqi News Bulletin on September 11, 2001: The Heart of Evil Has Been Struck; Whoever Carried out the Attack Had Had Enough of Hostile American Policy (Archival) pic.twitter.com/Nuzod0lVHY

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) September 6, 2019

The Amnesty report is not yet out and already Amnesty International have lost the input of a terrorist sympathiser. Yesterday, I released a teaser. The report is entering the final stage and is almost ready for final editing. With the information gathering stage behind me, I felt confident enough to release one item – about the true face of an Amnesty consultant in Gaza.
The Amnesty Consultant

Hind Khoudary worked as an Amnesty Research Consultant in Gaza:

Since the regular violence erupted on the Gaza border again, Hind has been a popular ‘journalist’, used by different media outlets worldwide. Amnesty pushed their ‘consultant’ too, using iconic images of her to turn her into some type of hero:

Like most propagandists her English output was always moderated, to show a ‘peaceful’ face to the west. She was also photogenic. Hind came across as a presentable, articulate, friendly, young, peace-seeking, progressive and is the type of ‘reporter’ western media outlets love. She spoke long and hard about the awful situation and how she just wants her ‘freedom’.

As is fitting of her role, she embellished her articles with endless tragic human-interest items which may or may not have been invented. When it came to the ‘Great March of Return’ Hind never saw a gun on the Hamas side. She spoke of the ‘tolerant’ Gazans who accept people who are different, reminding people that Palestinians are always so accommodating and peaceful. This balderdash has been swallowed whole by western media and Amnesty International are so embedded inside this false narrative, they regurgitated her poppycock verbatim.

Hind’s Arabic content was somewhat different. For example, she retweeted this which followed a thwarted terrorist attack. It talks about the Gazan casualties, but calls them ‘martyrs’. Notice the glorification of the violence. There is apparently nothing better than entering ‘paradise’ with machine guns:

There was this one too, as she retweeted the video of the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah’s when he made a recent threat against Israel.

The brutal murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir by three extremist Jews is a story that deserves to be told. The same can be said for the account of the swift and efficient manner in which his murderers were tracked down by Israel's security services, and ultimately convicted and given harsh sentences. Yet the kidnapping and murder of the Palestinian Arab resident of Jerusalem in June 2014 is the exclusive focus of the HBO series "Our Boys."

Documenting the transgressions of a few Jews, as well as the diligent efforts of their compatriots to catch and punish them, is no insult to the Jewish people. But many who usually take special pride in seeing Israeli TV shows get such wide exposure aren't cheering "Our Boys."

In June 2014, a Hamas terror cell operating in the West Bank kidnapped three Israeli teenage boys and murdered them in cold blood. The discovery of their bodies after an 18-day search was a shocking reminder of the brutality of Israel's enemies. In response, three Jews violated not merely the laws of Israel, but of their faith. They kidnapped a random Arab boy and killed him in a manner that provoked outrage and shame.

Hamas then escalated the conflict with 50 days of war that forced much of Israel's population to spend their days dashing in and out of air-raid shelters, including in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. So Israelis can be forgiven for thinking that there is something wrong with the fact that the sole focus of the only international television show that seeks to depict these events rests on the murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir.

The point of each episode is to depict the two sides of the conflict as morally equivalent. "Our Boys" doesn't mention that while Khdeir's killers are reviled by almost all Israelis and locked away (two received life terms), Palestinians treat those who murder Jews as heroes. They even get generous pensions from the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority as a reward for their evil deeds. That is truly outrageous.

Nasser believed he could count on the United States for assistance with wrestling control of the canal from the British and with the finances of the project. But when the US turned him down, Nasser turned to the Soviets for help. The Soviet Union not only helped finance the project but also gave Egypt weapons for its army alongside military advisers to train the Egyptian military. Backed by the Soviet Union, Nasser evicted Britain from the Suez Canal with ease, declared it a possession of Egypt, and quickly gained fame and supremacy as a leader in the Arab world.

Armed with his alliance with the Soviet Union which was already anti-Israel, and with the sights of the Arab world upon him, Nasser quickly turned to confront Israel.

Instead of attacking Israel with his full army, Nasser came up with a tactic which is still being used against Israel today. In the early 1950s, not long after Israel thought it could enjoy a respite from the War of Independence, he organized, armed and supported terrorists, called “Fedayeen,” to cross the border and terrorize Israelis – blowing up farms, planting land mines, and even entering schools to shoot Jewish children. The philosophy was to attack, hurt and demoralize Israel without starting an actual war. Israel would have no choice but to retaliate and that retaliation would be the justification for the next terror attack as retribution for Israel’s actions. This created a “cycle of violence” which cost Israel in lives, money, and focus, and served Nasser’s plan of partnering with the Soviet Union and showing the Arab world his strength.

Egypt was not Israel’s only problem following the War of Independence. The Syrians continuously shelled northern Israeli towns from the Golan Heights, forcing Israelis to sleep in bunkers and leaving Israel with no choice but to respond – continuing the cycle of violence. Jordanian snipers would regularly shoot at Jewish civilians from the Old City of Jerusalem which they controlled. Israel even had to construct its residential buildings with no windows facing the Jordanian controlled areas.

Thus, the new Jewish state was under a continuous state of attack and to make things even worse, when Israel would respond – against Egypt, Syria, or Jordan – the United Nations would condemn Israel for instigating violence and inflaming the region.

Failure to uphold promises to respect the rules makes a mockery of that spirit. Iran forced Mollaei to throw a match even though the International Judo Federation and the National Olympic Committee of Iran reached an agreement in May, in which Tehran agreed to “fully respect the Olympic Charter and its nondiscrimination principle,” thus paving the way for Iranian athletes to compete against Israeli athletes.

In a video that went viral, Mollaei can be seen backstage in tears, after taking the phone call from Iran telling him to quit. He flew to Germany afterward, now afraid to return to Iran.

Marius Vizer, head of the International Judo Federation, is trying to do something about it. As a gesture of support that should be given full praise, the IJF changed its Twitter name this week to #ISupportMollaei. And the International Olympic Committee is expected to allow Mollaei to compete in the Olympics under the Olympic flag.

In his interview with the Post, Muki said he has two dreams: “One is to win the gold medal at the Olympics. But I also dream to compete against Mollaei – and it doesn’t matter who wins. I want to shake his hand, give him a hug. This way, we will not only show honor for each other, but together we can show that sport is above everything else.”

After Muki won the gold and posted it on Instagram, Mollaei wrote: “Congratulations champion.”

“Thank you,” responded Muki. “You are an inspiration as a person and as an athlete.”

This week, the Israel Judo Association extended an invitation to the Iranian athlete to come compete at the Tel Aviv Grand Prix 2019 in January. What an honor and pleasure it would be for Israel to host this athlete, and for Muki to fulfill his dream.

The Israel advocacy group StandWithUs called on the international soccer governing FIFA to ensure Israelis would be allowed to visit Qatar during the World Cup tournament in 2022.

The organization made the plea after it was revealed that Israel was not included in the online list of countries from which foreigners can obtain an entry visa to the Arab state for the purpose of attending the soccer competition.

Qatar has no official relations with Israel and Israelis are generally not allowed to enter its territory. But the FIFA Ethics Code prohibits host countries from discriminating fans based on their nationality during official sporting events.

“We call upon FIFA not to score an own goal and to uphold their code of ethics, which is premised on protecting international football from ‘illegal, immoral or unethical’ practices. If Qatar is allowed to ban fans on the basis of national origin, this would be a clear violation of FIFA’s guidelines,” CEO and Co-Founder of StandWithUs Roz Rothstein said.

Jewish university students are under constant attack for expressing any support for Israel. Radical activists are working to insert anti-Israel and antisemitic ideas into curricula to indoctrinate high school students. America’s Congressional delegation now includes representatives of the Islamic-leftist alliance who are driven to demonize Israel and spread age-old antisemitic stereotypes. Radical antisemites are growing bolder, less censored and less afraid to share their hateful views with the world through digital and social media.

In the decades following the Holocaust, “Never Again” was repeated by millions who had no idea they needed to do something about it. Somehow, in front of our eyes, “Never Again” is becoming “Again and Again” as radical movements that threaten all Americans but are united in their hatred toward Jews are growing stronger in broad daylight.

Antisemitism is growing, and it’s going to get much worse. A perfect storm of circumstances is elevating the dangers significantly. Jew-haters are taking advantage of the radicalization of our society, utilizing the biased mainstream and social media to amplify their message and enjoy unparalleled access to weapons to attack our communities in frightening ways.

How did we get to this place?
Jew-hating looks different today than it did in the past. In medieval times, people hated Jews because of their religion. In the 20th century, Nazism viewed Jews as a race to be eradicated. Today, the new antisemitism, fueled by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, is disguised as hatred toward Israel – the world’s only Jewish state.

However, with the assistance of many useful idiots – some of them Jews – the BDS movement promotes hatred toward all Jews globally, radicalizes all the extreme movements and promotes violence against Jews and other minorities.

With new allies across the political spectrum, Jew-haters have found friends in unlikely places. Antisemitism no longer comes from fringe groups. Instead, an alliance of Jew-haters has been forged by the radical Left, radical Muslims and the radical Right. This three-headed monster of bigotry is best exemplified in the unlikely alliance between white supremacist David Duke and Rep. Ilhan Omar.

An activist has been expelled from the Labour Party for sending antisemitic messages on social media using the Twitter handle “@CorbynBoy” and minimising the antisemitism crisis engulfing the Party.

Ian Humphries, until recently a member of the East Devon Constituency Labour Party, sent messages accusing the Labour MP Jess Phillips of having taken £1 million from the “Israeli lobby”. He also asked another MP, Luciana Berger, who left the Labour Party over antisemitism, “do you agree in killing all the PALISTINIONS [sic]?” adding, “It’s a simple answer — yes or no? If you don’t reply I will take this as a yes…you agree with Palistine [sic] genocide by the Israeli government.”

Mr Humphries is also alleged to have written that the “BBC is run by the Conservative Party and the Israel lobby” and that “Tories just keep giving away money to the rich, as just to keep Murdoch and the Rothschilds happy [sic].”

Ms Phillips reported that in his messages Mr Humphries said that allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party were “bourgeois lies and propaganda”. She said that his messages constituted “very clear antisemitism”.

Eighty Jewish and pro-Israel groups signed a letter sent on Tuesday to the chancellor and general counsel of California State University that demands answers about a professor’s continued use of the school’s name to spread anti-Semitism and false propaganda against the State of Israel.

The AMCHA-coordinated letter drew attention to a post on the Facebook page of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora’s Program (AMED) in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, part of the CSU system. The posting asks readers to donate funds for AMED director Rabab Abdulhadi’s personal lawsuit against SFSU and to fight the “Israel Lobby.”

A similar letter was sent more than a month ago about Abdulhadi’s post on the same Facebook page that said “Zionism = Racism” and called for support of the anti-Israel BDS movement. The post violated California law that prohibits the use of SFSU’s name to promote a boycott or other political activity.

The groups said in their letter that a university-related academic program should not be allowed to use its departmental logo and the SFSU name “to disseminate politically motivated and hate-filled messages.”

The Charlemagne Institute is a conservative nonprofit with a lofty goal: “Defending and advancing western civilization” and “lay[ing] the intellectual groundwork for a great awakening.”

What does that mean, exactly? Hard to say. The Bloomington group describes itself as an educational foundation based in the “Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman Tradition,” according to its website. But its blog, Intellectual Takeout, focuses a lot more on bashing socialism, worrying about what trans women are going to do to sports, and warning that “political correctness” is ruining our classrooms and “beauty pageants.”

For all the worry about PC culture, there is seemingly a limit to the kinds of speech the institute will allow. Last week, it “parted ways” with its academic internship director: 64-year-old John Elliott. The instigating force was a private email thread known as “Morning Hate,” which Elliott largely steered, according to Splinter News.

Morning Hate was where buttoned-up members of conservative institutions could let their hair down a little and “make their racist opinions known.” Back in 2015, the members were organizing an in-person “hate-up,” and Elliott offered some helpful short hands the group could use in “public places.”

Instead of calling Jewish people “Hebes,” he said, they should call them “Hawaiians.” Instead of calling black people “negroes”—or, in some cases, the N-word—they should call them “Alaskans.” Instead of Adolf Hitler, they should simply say “Our Friend.” (h/t IsaacStorm)

In Tunisia’s upcoming November elections, one activist, Mounir Baatour, tells i24NEWS about trying to change the playing field in his country and for the LGBTQ community. Our Emily Rose has the story.

Two thirds of American Millennials don’t know what Auschwitz was. Countering antisemitism in the long run hinges on addressing a shortcoming in our educational system: Only 12 states mandate Holocaust education in secondary schools; all 50 should.

This summer, Texas and Oregon became the 11th and 12th states to mandate Holocaust education in middle and high schools statewide. Maryland could have become the 13th, but its legislature declined to vote on State Senator Ben Kramer’s bill, the Lessons of the Holocaust and Genocide Act, in the legislative session that ended in April. That was a missed opportunity. Kramer will try again next year.

“For us to be sitting on the sidelines when other states have realized we really need to do something about this, it’s embarrassing,” Kramer told me.

Antisemitic assaults in the US more than doubled last year. The number of incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assaults in K-12 schools tripled between 2015 and last year. The fight against hate will depend on leadership from young Americans. Expecting them to lead that fight without knowing about the Holocaust ties a hand behind their back.

Holocaust education was ingrained in me early. In fourth grade, a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen spoke to our class. I haven’t forgotten his face. Or his story.

An artist at the annual Burning Man festival presented an art exhibit featuring naked dolls being led into ovens at a simulated death camp.

The “Barbie Death Camp and Wine Bistro,” as it is called by the Nevada festival, has led to widespread outrage over what many see as trivialization of the Holocaust. The exhibit featured hundreds of Barbies, some of them crucified on pink crosses and others posed as if being marched into ovens.

It’s the brainchild of a Jewish artist, James Jacoby, according to a report in J. The Jewish News of Northern California.

Jacoby said that he had been putting on the same exhibit for 20 years, and that while he didn’t want to “trigger” anybody, “Burning Man is not a safe space.”

“It’s not Yale University. You don’t get to run and hide from something you don’t like. There’s 1,100 theme camps. If you don’t like ours, go to another one,” he said.

A photo published by the news outlet showed a sign at the exhibit that said “The Mattel co. & Auschwitz Inc. ‘Purveyors of fine lampshades and soap products since 1939’ presents Barbie Death Camp & Wine Bistro.” Mattel, the company that manufactures Barbie, was not involved in the exhibit.

Rabbi Yehuda Pearl, the businessman who introduced the United States to hummus, is now looking to bring that same business acumen to his newest venture: turning trash into a plastic-like material.

Pearl, the founder of the popular hummus brand Sabra, is the co-founder and honorary chairman of UBQ Materials, a company that has patented a process that breaks down regular household waste, including dirty diapers, cottage cheese containers, Friday’s leftover chicken, paper, plastic, cardboard, and all food scraps and turns it into a bio-based thermoplastic, a plastic substitute.

These small pellets, that look and feel like regular plastic, can be integrated into existing manufacturing processes, so that any factory creating plastic products — things like buckets, trash cans, plastic pallets, garden planters, or hard plastic bottles for detergents — can use the UBQ material.

This material will now be available to the public for the first time, in a pilot in central Virginia, which is offering 2,000 households the opportunity to recycle their household waste in recycle bins made of repurposed Israeli trash.

Twelve Israeli cities will seek to boost residents’ welfare by adopting an innovation map set out by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The initiative, to be implemented together with the Interior Ministry and the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. will help municipalities find “creative ways to address complex challenges with limited resources,” said Michael Bloomberg, also the founder of Bloomberg LP, in a statement, at the launch of the program on Wednesday in Tel Aviv.

Called Hazira — the Arena in Hebrew — the program will seek to boost city and civic renewal in 12 municipalities across Israel over the course of five years, by, for example, boosting shared workspaces and entrepreneurial hubs, and creating affordable school lunches. It will build on the Innovation Teams program set up by Bloomberg already running in several cities. cities, with so called i-teams on the ground.

The new program was launched at The Peres Center for Peace and Innovation on Wedensday, attended by mayors and other leaders of the municipal and innovation ecosystem. It featured a video greeting by Michael Bloomberg and speeches by James Anderson, head of Government Innovation programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies; Mordechai Cohen, director general of the Interior Ministry; and Efrat Duvdevani, director general of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. Facebook Israel general manager Adi Soffer-Teeni gave the keynote speech.

The Interior Ministry will publish a call for applications for cities to join the Hazira program. Those that are accepted will hire a chief innovation officer who will work alongside a dedicated team of city employees — a so-called i-team — and will receive technical assistance and support to start implementing changes. The program will help map each city’s innovation strategy, providing specific examples of evidence and consistency of approach, the statement said.

US investors will get the opportunity to learn about Israeli cannabis innovations and meet startup entrepreneurs and researchers at what is being dubbed the “first ever” Israeli Cannabis Investor Symposium, set to take place in New York next week.

iCAN Connect symposium, organized by iCAN, a medical cannabis development firm, will be held on September 12 in New York, targeting those looking for investment opportunities in the cannabis market. The conference also seeks to help speed up cannabis innovation and channel funds from the United States into the Israeli cannabis ecosystem.

The one-day gathering will bring together early stage and mature cannabis companies and their entrepreneurs with qualified investors, family offices, money managers, venture capital firms, private equity funds, and institutional investors, iCAN said in statement.

Talks will describe the cannabis ecosystem and discuss regulation, risks and new therapies in the pipeline.

A private Israeli company on Tuesday inaugurated the largest solar project in the country, the Israeli financial daily Globes reported.

Located in the Negev in southern Israel, the Ashalim solar-energy project is the size of a small town and is currently producing enough energy to power an estimated 70,000 households, according to the report.

Shikun & Binui Holdings Ltd. chief shareholder Naty Saidoff announced the start of Ashalim’s commercial operations at a ceremony attended by Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz.

“Since I assumed office, I have used every possible means to increase the scope of renewable energy production, and by doing so, I expect to meet the government goal of 10% by the end of 2020,” Steinitz said.

“The breakthrough in this field enables us, in addition to stopping the use of coal, to significantly promote the 2030 renewability goal,” he added.

Could thousands of white, armor-clad stormtroopers shouldering blaster rifles soon march in perfect unison through the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv?

Indeed, these Star Wars stormtroopers are a sight in many cities around the world. However, they are not the army of some hostile foreign power, but a corps of a mighty interstellar empire from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

And now that this imperial army has established its first outpost in Israel, this future is certainly possible.The stormtroopers are members of the 501st Legion, one of the largest fandom organizations in the world.

Founded in 1997, the legion – also known as “Vader’s Fist” – is a staple of geek conventions and boasts 14,000 active members across 64 countries on six continents. For the Israeli outpost’s founder, Adam Nahoum, Star Wars has been a major part of his life since he was a child.

Much to her surprise, through her online research and activism, Rettig discovered that she had a number of common values with people living in countries that many would consider hostile to Israel.

“I’m very pro-Israel, myself, so I was on these forums, having these discussions, and then all of a sudden here’s this guy with an Arabic name talking about Zionism and how the Jews are the real inhabitants of the Land of Israel,” Rettig said.

Intrigued, Rettig reached out to members of the Facebook page to hear more. Speaking to a number of new contacts, including Mohamed, she learned that prior to the Islamic conquest of the Maghreb in the 7th and 8th centuries, indigenous Amazigh tribes populated North Africa from Libya all the way to Morocco. She learned that in Morocco, some Amazigh once practiced Judaism, and then Christianity.

Today, there is a small but strong movement in Morocco to revive the region’s 5,000-year-old Amazigh language and culture. Within that movement, many identify with the modern State of Israel and the Jews, whom they see as having faced — and won — their own struggle to live independently in their ancestral homeland.

In conversation with The Times of Israel, Rettig speculated that the Amazigh people’s ancient Jewish history and current struggle with an Arab majority may further entrench the connection between Amazigh and Jew in the movement’s mythology.
A boy raises Amazigh and Israeli flags in unison. (Courtesy)

While it’s unclear exactly how many ancient Amazigh tribes actually observed Judaism, it is certain that Jews coexisted with them for many centuries, said Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, a professor of Middle Eastern and African history at Tel Aviv University and a senior researcher at the Moshe Dayan Center. According to Weitzman, this shared history may go as as far back as the destruction of the First Temple 2,600 years ago.

The head priest of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Church in Halifax, Father Vladimir Tobin, 77, received a letter from Orthodox Church in America Archbishop Irenee, the archbishop of Ottawa and Canada, on Aug. 12, informing him that he is being forcibly retired for delivering a sermon that honored Judaism and Israel.

The sermon mentioned Israel and Judaism in favorable terms, asked congregants to pray for Israel, and reminded the congregation that Jesus was a Jew.

Father Tobin said that when studying the early Christian period at Dalhousie University in Halifax, he realized that early Christians were Jewish and their scripture was the Old Testament.

Father Tobin responded to the archbishop: "It is true that I regularly pray for both Israel and the United States, its armies and its president, and for 'the land of Israel and the armies which protect her.'...The U.S. and Israel are our allies and need our support for peace in the Middle East."

Mohammad Kabiya is a Bedouin Muslim Israeli. "I'm an Israeli citizen, it's my country and I must support it....I get all the services from Israel. Israel protects me as a minority and as a citizen, so I will support my country. I will love it and defend it."

Q: "You served in the Israeli Air Force. Why did you choose to take part in the Israel Defense Forces?"
A: "Here, you said it: 'Israel Defense Forces.' I see myself as an Israeli. I'm part of the State of Israel, so it's an army that defends me, my family, my community, and also my country. The same rocket that is fired by Hamas or Hizbullah and all the terror organizations doesn't distinguish between a Jew or an Arab or me and you."
"Whoever is a terrorist and engages in terrorism...is not my brother....Terrorism is hate, it's destruction, it's cruelty. I'm Muslim - yes. I'm proud of my Islam - yes....I'm an Arab who is proud of his identity....Look at the Arab world. Muslims are killing one another just because one is Shiite and the other is Sunni. In the State of Israel I think that Islam and other religions and other minorities are more protected than in the Arab world."
"We serve together in the IDF shoulder to shoulder, we work together, we walk in the street together...we live together. In a place where you die together you can live together."

Q: "Aren't you scared to express your support for Israel, that someone will kill you?"
A: "No, I'm not scared....My source of strength and bravery to continue and move forward is my family. I'm a member of the Kabiya family, most of whose men served in the IDF. They are officers in elite units. Therefore, it's the opposite. They support the path that I've chosen."

Greenblatt helped change the conversation from one that was just about placing blame on Israel to one that recognized that the Palestinians were just as much to blame for the lack of progress in the peace process, if not more.

The economic summit held in Bahrain in June which was attended by Israelis – including our own Herb Keinon – showed how Greenblatt could skillfully break down barriers and help realign the Middle East with an understanding that Israel is a partner to countries in the Gulf, not an adversary.

On the other hand, Greenblatt’s role and outspoken support of Israel led Palestinians to believe that the US was no longer an “honest” broker in the region. That alone may have buried the so-called “Deal of the Century”.

What will happen with that plan now remains to be seen. Greenblatt might have been the key convener and author of the plan, but it has other architects, including Jared Kushner and Friedman. Will it really come out as the administration says it will after Israel’s election? Will it succeed in bringing the sides together? Or will it automatically be rejected by Abbas’s intransigent government in Ramallah?

Ultimately, no matter how detailed and comprehensive a deal it is, it will face two major problems from the outset. The first is that any peace plan needs to have presidential involvement, without which it will be difficult, if not impossible, to bring the two sides to the table. Trump, who is already deep into his re-election campaign, does not appear to be the type willing to invest the time, effort and personal resources.

The second problem is in Jerusalem and Ramallah, where the leaders – Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas – do not seem interested in negotiating or working on a resolution to the conflict. Netanyahu is never in a rush to get involved in a peace process and Abbas seems to prefer to wait for November 2020 and see who wins the presidential elections. Why rush into something if Trump might be out of the Oval Office in a year?

Greenblatt has played a positive role in this process. As much as he has done though, no one can want peace more than the sides themselves.

Jason Greenblatt, US President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Middle East peace, has announced he’ll be leaving his post.

According to administration officials, Greenblatt’s departure will wait until the US rolls out the political part of its long-awaited peace plan between Israel and the Palestinians sometime after the Israeli national election on September 17. It unveiled the plan’s financial segment last June during a conference in Bahrain.

Greenblatt has been a main pillar of President Trump’s Mideast team. He has worked alongside Trump’s powerful son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

His resignation could throw the future of the troubled peace initiative – it has already been rejected by the Palestinian Authority – into a swirl of ambiguity. The team itself has come to be viewed by the Palestinians as an extension of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s policies.

The PA has yet to officially respond to the news, but a high-ranking official in Ramallah told The Media Line he hoped that Greenblatt’s departure would create an “opportunity” for the White House to “rethink” its policy toward the Palestinians.

“His resignation,” the official said, asking to remain unnamed, “is a result of the growing conviction by the US administration that implementing the plan as originally conceived is not going to be easy. This does not mean that America will abandon attempts to pressure the Palestinian side, but Greenblatt's flight means he does not trust all the promises he and his team have made.”

Becoming a recognized authority in any field is an admirable achievement. Yet when professors pontificate on matters far beyond their expertise, the results can be risible. That's particularly true of academics whose track record in their own field leaves much to be desired.

Which brings us to Juan Cole, Exhibit A for professorial puffery and purple prose.

Breitbart has taken note of the University of Michigan Middle Eastern history professor's latest foray into a subject well beyond his competence: climate science. Never one for wise counsel when hysteria will do, Cole called on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to resign in the wake of Hurricane Dorian because "his inaction on fossil fuels will literally sink Florida."

Moreover, Cole believes studying the Middle East qualifies him for informed comment on the underground liquid gold that made the region rich: oil and, now, natural gas. To boot, being above ground and partaking of the climate on a daily basis, he fancies himself a meteorologist extraordinaire, able to leap logic in a single blog post – a skill at which we'll concede he excels. And if that's not enough, since Florida will "literally sink," we must add geology to his conquests.

As for Breitbart, Cole wasted no time responding to its article by labeling the conservative publication "far, far rightwing reused toilet paper," a "brown shirt rag," and a "racist piece of excrement" that makes "fascist sh** up, riffing on Mein Kampf." One might suspect Cole is a bit fixated on the scatological (calling Freud), but at least the implements at hand are recyclable.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) recently met with a controversial pro-Palestinian organization that has encouraged violence against Israel, justified the use of terrorism against the Jewish state, and has called for the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, according to online postings on social media.

Tlaib, who has been under fire for her hatred of Israel and support for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement was pictured meeting with members of the Palestine Youth Movement during the Arab Texas Festival held recently in Dallas. The PYM organization is known for its vitriolic rhetoric against Israelis and Jews and has been caught in the past glorifying the leaders of anti-Semitic terrorist organizations.

Tlaib's interaction with the group is unlikely to come as a surprise to the pro-Israel community, but is further evidence of her willingness as a member of Congress to associate with some of the most radical and fringe anti-Israel groups.

PYM has a history of anti-Israel activity that has spilled into outright hostility toward the Jewish state. This includes a 2018 event held in San Francisco in which attendees called for Israeli soldiers to be kidnapped, according to a video of that event captured by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or CAMERA.

In Facebook postings PYM has memorialized so-called Palestinian martyrs, or those killed or imprisoned while carrying out terrorist attacks on Israel. At least three of those honored by the organization were known operatives of the Hamas terror group.

Yay, you’ve secured the vote of the pro-sharia, anti-semite demographic! This’ll change everything. 🤦🏽‍♀️ https://t.co/bR6JuvAFJx

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) September 7, 2019

On Thursday, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, who frequently opines on issues pertaining to Jewish politics, anti-Semitism, and Israel, joined "Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler" on One America News Network to discuss the astonishing rise in violent anti-Semitic incidents in New York City in the year 2019.

Over this past week, there have been four violent anti-Semitic assaults in Brooklyn, New York. Wheeler and Hammer discussed why it is the case that anti-Semitic violence may be on the rise and, just as importantly, why political leaders — which, in New York City, are nearly exclusively Democrats — seem to barely be paying attention to the harrowing phenomenon.

Wheeler began by pointing out how "Democrats, on the campaign trail, constantly condemn hatred and bigotry and violence of any kind — and yet, when this [violence] is in their own district and it's anti-Semitism that motivates the violence, we hear nothing from them."

Hammer responded by pointing out just how dangerous the current phenomenon is, and also stressed how it is imperative that, no matter one's personal politics, all forms of anti-Semitism must be treated extremely seriously. Hammer singled out feckless Democratic Party leadership for harboring and nurturing toxic anti-Zionism, but also bluntly stated that anyone not treating all forms of anti-Semitism seriously should "shut up and re-evaluate his priorities," Hammer warned:

Iran is the “central problem” causing instability in the Middle East, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday.

Speaking at Kansas State University, America’s top diplomat noted, “If you look at the conflicts, whether it’s the difficulty that Iraq has in standing up its own sovereign independence, the problem is the Islamic Republic of Iran. If you look at Israel’s security along its northern border, it’s Hezbollah, underwritten by Iran. If you stare at Syria today, it was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that drove Assad’s regime to successfully cause 6 million persons to be displaced from Syria. Today, Houthis in a country called Yemen are launching missiles into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

“The people of Iran are amazing people; the Persian history is staggeringly beautiful and gorgeous,” Pompeo added. “Our mission set has been twofold: first, to create a coalition — Gulf states, the Israelis, European partners, countries from Asia — to take the tension down, to create de-escalatory defense systems. You see what we’re doing in the Strait of Hormuz today, trying to create a situation where there’s less risk that there’ll be conflict. And then the second mission has been to deny the Iranian regime the wealth and resources to inflict their terror campaigns around the world. They are in fact the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. They have an active assassination campaign taking place in European capitals even as we speak. They’re underwriting Hezbollah in Argentina and Brazil. This is a regime that has a revolutionary flavor, and our mission set is to create the conditions where their behavior will change.”

“President Trump has said he’s happy to meet with the Iranian leadership,” he pointed out. “Happy might overstate it a bit, but willing for sure to meet with them because, in the end, we want to resolve this through diplomacy. We would love nothing more than for Iran to come back into the community of nations, to cease its efforts to proliferate nuclear weapon systems, to cease building out missile systems that threaten not only the Middle East but soon Europe as well, and to convince them that conducting terror campaigns in more than a dozen countries is not in their national security interest. It’s been our mission; it’s still a project where there’s a lot of work to do.”

Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany, wrote in a blistering commentary in Die Welt on Friday that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration has no excuse for not outlawing the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah.

Grenell wrote that “The legal authority for a full ban of Hezbollah already exists. In November 2015, Germany’s Federal Administrative Court transferred its settled case-law on Hamas to Hezbollah. According to this decision, the entirety of Hezbollah was found to be directed ‘against the idea of international understanding.’ Among other things, it cited Hezbollah’s call for the extermination of Israel.”

Grenell added, “Germany’s Law on Associations states that such organizations can be banned by the Ministry of Interior, including ones that are domiciled abroad. It was on this basis that the Ministry of Interior banned the political and social activities of ISIS and al Qaeda. These same legal authorities can be used to shut down Hezbollah’s activities in Germany.”

According to 2019 German intelligence reports reviewed by The Jerusalem Post, Merkel’s government allows 1,050 Hezbollah operatives to raise funds, recruit new members and spread jihadi and antisemitic ideologies in the federal republic.

Grenell wrote: “If Germany wants to take a stand against the Assad regime’s violence in Syria and the export of that violence to Europe, Germany can ban Hezbollah in its entirety.”

Margot Wallstrom, the Swedish foreign minister whose tenure has been marked by a serious decline in bilateral ties with Israel, announced on Friday that she was stepping down from her post.

A former United Nations Special Representative dealing with sexual violence in conflicts who also served two stints as a European Union commissioner, Wallstrom was appointed Swedish foreign minister in 2014.

“I have put everything I have into the job of making Sweden safe, respected internationally and appreciated as a partner,” Wallstrom said in a statement. “It is time for me to spend more time with my husband, my children and my grandchildren.”

Wallstrom told Swedish radio she expected Prime Minister Stefan Lofven to announce her successor on Tuesday when he makes his policy declaration as parliament resumes after summer break.

“It seems like an adequate point in time to also say who will succeed me,” she told the public broadcaster.

Throughout her time in the post, Wallstrom was an unsympathetic critic of Israeli policy. A planned visit to Israel was postponed when furious government ministers refused to meet with Wallstrom following her decision in Oct. 2014 to recognize the Palestinian unilateral declaration of statehood. “She would not have received any official meetings in Israel, and it’s not a matter of political perspective, I think that all decision makers in Israel agree that what Sweden did is a highly unfriendly act,” an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson explained at the time.

In Nov. 2015, after the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, Wallstrom opined that the unresolved conflict between Israel and the Palestinians was a key factor in the radicalization of Islamists. Two months later, Wallstrom again roused anger in the Jewish state when she urged an investigation into Israel’s supposed “extrajudicial killings” of Palestinian terrorists — a claim rejected as “delusional” in Jerusalem.

The army on Saturday announced that an initial investigation into the stabbing of two Israelis, attacked after visiting a Palestinian dentist earlier in the day in the West Bank village of Azun, was a terror attack.

“An assailant stabbed two Israeli civilians after they had entered Azun in order to receive medical treatment,” the army said Saturday referring to a village east of Qalqilya in the north of the territory.

The victims were a 60-year-old father, Yosef Perez, who was lightly injured and his teen son, Liber Perez, 17, who was badly hurt.

Liber Perez sustained multiple stab wounds to his upper body in the Saturday morning assault, while the father was lightly hurt on the arm.

The two, residents of the southern Israeli city of Ofakim, were visiting a local dentist for treatment along with the father’s brother when they were accosted by a young Palestinian man, said to be a teen, who asked if they were Jews, they said later Saturday.

There were conflicting reports on how they responded. The uncle told Walla news that they replied in Arabic, telling the young man that they were not Jews, while the father told Channel 12 news that they replied that they were indeed Jewish.

Both said they suddenly spotted a knife in the assailant’s hand during the brief exchange.

The IDF struck several Hamas posts in the Gaza Strip on Friday night, the IDF spokesperson reported.
An IDF tank shelled a Hamas outpost north of Beit Hanoun and an IAF drone stuck a Hamas observation point near Beit Lahia, Palestinian media reported.

The strikes were north of the Gaza Strip and were in response to the rockets fired at Israel earlier on Friday night, according to an IDF press release.

The IDF International Media Spokesperson Jonathan Conricus tweeted that "most of the international media will probably report: 'Israeli military strikes Gaza.' Go figure the logic behind that."

The Palestinian Ministry of Health reported no injuries as a result of the IDF strikes.

Five rockets were fired and air raid sirens heard in Gaza border communities as well as the city of Sderot, no injuries were reported.

Prior to the rocket fire, two Palestinians were killed and 76 others were injured during massive protests along the Gaza border.

A group of Palestinian terrorists piloted an armed drone into Israel from the Gaza Strip on Saturday, the army said in a statement.

The Israel Defense Forces said the drone left an explosive device near the security fence along the border before returning to Gaza.

It said a military vehicle was lightly damaged in the incident.

The IDF said it opened fire at the cell responsible for the drone.

No Israeli soldiers were hurt and there were no immediate reports of Palestinian injuries.

Last month, the IDF said it thwarted an Iranian plot to fly “kamikaze” explosives-laden drones at Israeli territory from Syria.

Saturday’s incident came after Israeli forces attacked several military targets belonging to the Gaza terror group earlier in the day in response to rocket fire from Gaza.

The IDF said it had identified five projectiles that had crossed the border into Israeli territory.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Palestinian terror group Hamas on Saturday that Israel would respond forcefully to any attempt to harm its citizens and soldiers, following two days of violent incidents on and near the Gaza border.

“Hamas is responsible for all aggression emanating from the Gaza Strip. Any attempt to harm our citizens and our soldiers will be met with a forceful response,” Netanyahu said in a statement.

The warning came after a particularly violent weekend in the Gaza border area.

Earlier Saturday, Gaza terrorists piloted an armed drone into Israel, the Israel Defense Forces said. It did not specify if the explosive detonated, but said a military vehicle was lightly damaged in the incident.

The IDF said it opened fire at the cell responsible for the drone. No Israeli soldiers were hurt and there were no immediate reports of Palestinian injuries.

Israeli troops on Saturday detained three Palestinian boys armed with a knife who crossed into Israel from the southern Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement.

“IDF soldiers a short time ago arrested three suspects that crossed the security fence in the south of the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory. The suspects were arrested after IDF forces encircled and scoured the area where they crossed. The suspects will be investigated by security personnel,” the army said.

The IDF later said the suspects were 13-year-olds and had carried a knife with them.

The arrest follows several incidents on the restive border.

On Friday, two Palestinian teens were reportedly killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers along the Gaza border in what the IDF called “especially violent” riots.

The IDF had no immediate comment on the deaths but said some 6,200 Palestinians took part in the weekly “March of Return,” including hundreds who rioted.

More than 6,000 Palestinians rioted on the Israel-Gaza Strip border on Friday in an “especially violent” manner, the IDF said.

The rioters — hurling explosive devices, grenades, firebombs and rocks — damaged the border fence in several locations, according to the Israeli military.

A number of Palestinians were said to have breached the border and briefly crossed into Israeli territory before returning to Gaza. Two were detained on the Israeli side of the border and taken in for questioning.

IDF troops responded with riot-dispersal means. Health officials in Hamas-ruled Gaza said two Palestinian teenagers were killed, and 70 other demonstrators were injured, including 38 by live fire.

Hamas warned that Israel would be “held accountable for these crimes.”

In the past, Gaza-based terror groups have sometimes retaliated for the deaths of Palestinian rioters on the border with rocket fire into southern Israel.

The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog says it has inspectors on the ground in Iran who will be able to look into Tehran’s declaration that it has begun injecting uranium gas into advanced centrifuges in violation of its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

The International Atomic Energy Agency told The Associated Press Saturday it was aware of reports “related to Iran’s centrifuge research and development.”

The Vienna-based IAEA said “agency inspectors are on the ground in Iran and they will report any relevant activities to IAEA headquarters.”

The IAEA’s acting director-general, Cornel Feruta, was traveling Saturday to Iran. The agency said he will meet Sunday with high-ranking officials in Tehran as part of what it said were its “ongoing interactions” related to its monitoring under the nuclear deal. The IAEA, which issues compliance reports, meets in Vienna on Monday.

Earlier Saturday, Iran said it has begun injecting uranium gas into advanced centrifuges, in violation of the historic atomic deal. Behrouz Kamalvandi of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran made the remarks in a news conference carried on live television. He spoke from a podium with advanced centrifuges standing next to him.

The Canadian government said Friday that it would appeal a court decision that said wines produced in West Bank settlements could not be labeled as a product of Israel.

The country’s Federal Court of Appeal would dispute a lower court’s decision regarding the labeling, according to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, a Toronto-based advocacy organization.

Canada’s Federal Court ruled in July that wines produced by Israelis in the West Bank could no longer be labeled as Israeli.

Challenging a previous decision by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Judge Anne L. Mactavish determined that labels describing wines made in the settlements as Israeli products were “false, misleading and deceptive.”

In her ruling, she did not take a position on how exactly such wines should be labeled, saying this was for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to decide.

Mactavish also noted that settlements are not considered part of the State of Israel, as Canada does not recognize Israeli sovereignty beyond the pre-1967 borders.
Jewish workers work at Beit El winery in the Jewish settlement of Beit El in the West Bank, September 4, 2019. (Hillel Maeir/Flash90)

The Canadian case started in early 2017, when David Kattenburg, a Winnipeg-based university lecturer and self-declared “wine lover” filed a complaint with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency about the fact that wines made in Israeli settlements were labeled as “Products of Israel.”

The World Zionist Organization (WZO) on Friday opened a three-day conference in Santiago, the capital of Chile, on the topic of confronting antisemitism in Latin America.

Convened by WZO vice-chair Yaakov Hagoel, the conference will involve 150 Jewish professionals from around the region who will receive briefings from “high-level experts in the field to deal with the growing phenomenon,” the Spanish-language Jewish news outlet Diario Judio reported.

In an interview with the Argentine-Jewish newspaper Iton Gadol prior to the conference, Hagoel said he had encountered many Jews in Latin American countries who “sometimes find symbols and characteristics that at first glance seem completely harmless, but behind them there are clear antisemitic insinuations, hidden images, legends or combinations of these.”

Continued Hagoel: “I think it is of the greatest importance to expose to the general public in social media networks the importance of these symbols and the meaning behind them. Together, we will expose the face of antisemitism and uproot it, because it is not possible for organizations and antisemitic individuals to hide behind seemingly meaningless symbols.”

Hagoel said it was imperative “to respond to each antisemitic incident, to each swastika drawn on the wall, as if someone had been attacked or injured,” adding: “If we wear our Judaism with pride, the antisemites will not mess with us.”

“Free Palestine” was spray-painted on the front door of the largest synagogue in Barcelona.

The vandalism took place Wednesday at the Synagogue of the Jewish Community of Barcelona, the El Nacional website reported Thursday. Police have no suspects.

News of the incident at the main house of worship in the Spanish city prompted much rebuke online.

“Confusing a synagogue with the State of Israel reflects a racist mentality,” Jaume Padrós, president of the Official College of Physicians of Barcelona, wrote on Twitter.

Separately, a court in southern Spain on Monday nullified the adoption of a boycott of Israel as policy in the town of La Rambla, near Cordoba.

The La Rambla City Council had passed a resolution declaring itself a “space free of Israeli apartheid” and a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state, or BDS.

Swastikas were found painted using graffiti on over a dozen houses along several streets in San Pedro, California.

"I cannot believe this happened to my house," said Lilliana Gonzales, a resident of one of the vandalized properties. "It's ugly, it's disgusting and we need to do something about it."

Police are investigating the incident and trying to find the culprit, according to Spectrum News.

A special meeting will be held about the vandalism by community activist Lion Lyons. "Hopefully we can get someone to come forward and put all the guys who did all this mess... to justice," he said.

"God created everyone all equal and we should be able to be nice to each other, happy, content, and just avoid this stupidity," Gonzales concluded.

A neo-Nazi group will demonstrate this month outside the Israeli Embassy in the Hague and the municipality says it has no grounds to ban the protest.

Israel’s embassy, the Dutch Jewish community and various politicians have protested the decision not to prevent the Racial Volunteer Force group from holding the protest on Sept. 28, the AD news site reported Thursday. An online petition against the event has received about 2,000 signatures in two days.

But a spokesperson for Mayor Pauline Krikke told AD there is “no judicial ground” to ban the event, though it has been brought to the attention of the prosecution service for monitoring purposes.

The municipality of the Hague, the seat of the Dutch government, parliament, senate and royal residence, is among the Netherlands’ strictest when it comes to limiting freedoms in favor of public order.

In 2014, the municipality ordered a Jewish resident to remove a sukkah, the ceremonial hut that Jews erect for one week during Sukkot, from outside his doorway.

“We are a liberal country in favor of freedom of expression, but neo-Nazis can’t be tolerated,” Israeli Ambassador Naor Gilon was quoted as saying. “This is tragic for the Netherlands and Europe.”

Employees of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette donated to the Tree of Life synagogue the $15,000 they won for their Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the deadly anti-Semitic shooting there.

The newspaper won the prize in April for its “immersive, compassionate coverage” of the attack, the judges said, the paper wrote Wednesday. A gunman killed 11 people and wounded seven at the Tree of Life on Oct. 27.

Splitting the monetary award among those who had participated in the news coverage “just didn’t seem right,” the report said.

Publisher John Robinson Block suggested to donate the prize money to the Tree of Life to help repair its bullet-riddled temple in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood.

On Aug. 29, in the Post-Gazette newsroom, Executive Editor Keith Burris presented a $15,000 check to Rabbi Jeffrey Myers and Samuel Schachner, president of the congregation.

“We feel bound to you and your congregations – by memory and duty,” Burris said in a speech. “And we offer you, in humility, our service – as scribes and witnesses.”

“Joker,” a daring take on the comic book villain starring Joaquin Phoenix, won the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice film festival Saturday with Roman Polanski’s film about French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus controversially taking second prize.

His voice shaking with emotion, US director Todd Phillips — best known up to now for the slapstick comedy “Very Bad Trip” — paid tribute to Phoenix as “the fiercest and bravest and most open-minded lion that I know.”

“Thank you for trusting me with your insane talents,” he said.

The movie, which The Guardian had described as “one of the boldest Hollywood productions for some time,” has already sparked a heated debate.

And there were audible gasps when director Roman Polanski — a pariah in Hollywood after his rape conviction — was handed the Grand Prix second prize for his Dreyfus Affair drama, “An Officer and a Spy.”

Last September, Ari Fuld died a hero's death after being stabbed by a Palestinian Arab terrorist in Gush Etzion and pursuing his attacker to save others from being harmed before collapsing.

Twenty-six years earlier, Ari had enlisted in the IDF as a lone soldier together with fellow lone soldier Yehoshua Friedberg from Canada. A year later, in 1993, Yehoshua was kidnapped and murdered by Arab terrorists. Ari took it upon himself to always remember Yehoshua, keeping in touch with his family throughout the years.

The last project Ari was working on before his death was creating a hospitality truck to serve IDF soldiers as they travel from one mission to the next in memory of Yehoshua. Unfortunately, Ari didn't have a chance to complete the project before his life was cruelly cut short in the prime of his life.

The next Boomerang Gives project is collaborating with the Ari Fuld Project to complete Ari's last project and raise enough funds for the hospitality truck, which will now be in memory of both Yehoshua and Ari.

For “Borat,” his 2006 film, Sacha Baron Cohen went undercover as a made-up Kazakh journalist who travels America and gets unwitting targets to share his boorish and sometimes bigoted opinions. In his television series “Who Is America,” the Jewish actor creates a variety of characters who manage to get prominent Americans to say shockingly offensive things.

In “The Spy,” he once again goes undercover, but in a very different way. The actor and filmmaker portrays the real-life Eli Cohen, a daring Israeli agent who embedded himself in the upper echelons of Syrian society in the 1960s and provided crucial intelligence to the Jewish state.

Released Friday, the espionage thriller is already getting plenty of buzz.

Here’s a look at the true story.

Eli Cohen was born in 1924 in a Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt. Like many Jews in Arab countries, his family left Egypt after the establishment of the state of Israel as they faced growing anti-Semitism at home. Cohen stayed behind to finish his degree in electronics. He also participated in Zionist activities in Egypt, for which he was at one point arrested, and took part in Israeli spy missions there.

In 1956, was expelled from his native country along with many other Jews. He immigrated to Israel, where he joined military intelligence the following year. He attempted to join the Mossad but was initially rejected. He married Nadia Majald, an immigrant from Iraq, and settled in the coastal city of Bat Yam.

In 1960, he was recruited to join the Mossad for a special mission in which he was to pretend to be a Syrian businessman returning to the country after having lived in Argentina. The goal was to gather intelligence from high-ranking Syrian politicians and military officials.

There are Jews - declaring belonging to the state of the occupying entity and bearing the status of "Israeli" - but who express sympathy for the Palestinians and oppose the policies of their governments, and demand the rights of the Palestinians. These are really puzzling. Some of them are demanding a Palestinian state in the "occupied territories," which they believe are only territories captured in 1967. Others are demanding one bi-national state, in which Palestinians are granted equal rights. Some do not object to the return of Palestinian refugees, often believing that the numbers of returnees will not be so large that they cannot be absorbed.

Those belonging to the “peace camp” or “left” in the entity touch an emotional nerve in us. They address a need in us to see people from the other camp recognize and criticize the many shortcomings there and “do justice to us”. What they say and write certainly affects world opinion more than our own. These activists are sometimes so enthusiastic that Palestinians share their protests and boycotts, and spend time, effort, and sometimes passion for what they do.

But there is a question that confuses our initial impressions: these peace activists in the state of the Zionist entity are all living on Palestinian land, living in homes either built by Palestinians and forcibly displaced, or built on the ruins of Palestinian homes demolished - certainly on Palestinian land. What if the Palestinian owner of the land and the house went and asked them to return his property to him? Will they pack their bags and give him the keys, or will they stay and tell him to leave?

Those who demand a Palestinian state in the territories of '67 (less than a quarter of historic Palestine) want to give the landowners a small room with no furniture at the edge of the garden, and they will be relieved. Those who demand equal Palestinian citizenship want to make their homes in Palestinian homes and confiscated lands “legitimate” and also get rid of reprimand. They ignore - with full and premeditated consciousness - the history of their presence here and its modalities, whose outputs cannot be fair.

Being a citizen of an occupying entity founded on the existential abolition of an entire people can make you nothing but a living member of the body of this entity with its requirements and what it is, which is pulsing with its heart. Returning the rights to the owners will mean giving up the stolen house and the stolen land. Otherwise, your “morality” will be fundamentally false. Perhaps the maximum that these “Israelis” reach is something like: “As long as I have found myself here, no matter how, I may consider myself a partner with the landowner by more than half, and consider giving him half - or even less than a quarter. - Adequate, fair and comfortable compensation for their conscience, from the position of the boss?

I wonder if any of these peaceful people will accept to give the Palestinian owner of the house the roof of the house he occupies to build a floor, or share it half of the house and the garden. I imagine most of them won't. They do not find any contradiction when it is written: “The Israeli activist (so and so) spoke to us from the garden of his house in Haifa”, who certainly has a Palestinian owner, or the land on which he resided. They accept the colonization of historic Palestine as a “fait accompli” that needs only a simple beautification.

We in the Al-Quds Brigades, as we mourn our mujahid martyr, emphasize that the blood of the martyrs will not be wasted, Allah willing, and we pledge to Allah Almighty and then pledge our people and our nation to maintain the path of jihad and martyrdom, and to move forward in the approach of resistance until the liberation of the entire beloved Palestine.

The United States and Israel are very different projects. America’s Declaration of Independence begins “When in the course of human events,” while Israel’s begins “The land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people.” America was created to be a haven to “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” as Emma Lazarus’ poem at the foot of the Statue of Liberty declares, while Israel was intended to be, as the British Balfour Declaration of 1917 notes, “a national home for the Jewish people.”

When we expect Israel to behave as America should, Israel often seems to fall short. And that, more than any of Israel’s actual policies, has long been the root cause of the fraught relationship between American Jews and the Jewish State.

“End the occupation,” American Jews chant. But Israelis are also exhausted by the occupation — they just have no idea how to end it without the West Bank becoming a breeding ground for terrorists, as happened with Gaza once Israel pulled out in 2005. That’s a risk Israelis are not willing to take.

To Israeli ears, when American Jews say, “End the occupation,” it sounds like “Abolish taxes.” It’s a great idea but entirely unrealistic.

American Jews look at Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians as a civil-rights issue. Israelis see it as a survival issue.

A country’s foremost obligation is the protection of its citizens, and any government Israelis elect will understand that. Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians is unlikely to change until the Palestinians declare that they have ended their drive to destroy Israel. That will not happen anytime soon, however, and that is why, should Netanyahu lose, progressive American Jews are in for a grave disappointment.

To be sure, there is much that Israel must do differently in its relationship with American Jews. A healthy relationship between American Jews and Israel is critical for both sides, and both need to alter their rhetoric to rebuild their partnership.

Most important, though, is for American Jews, and Americans at large, to understand that despite all their similarities, America and Israel are radically different endeavors. One was meant to embrace all of humanity, while the other was intended to save the Jewish people. All of the candidates vying to become prime minister understand that. Protecting the state that has revived the Jewish people will always remain, by far, their topmost priority.

This is btw a good example of why the politicization of antisemitism is so dangerous: it’s not merely partisan point scoring—it’s that ppl today completely fail to even understand what antisemitism is. America’s ignorance will be its undoing.

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) September 8, 2019

The story of Hevron also reminds us why a strong military and independent State of Israel are needed for Jews to survive. Ninety years ago, 67 Jews were murdered in a single day. The rioters killed and looted families without making distinctions between long-established residents, including the doctor who treated them compassionately for years, and newcomers, or Zionists and their religious opponents.

The 1929 riots were exceptional in their barbarity and a turning point in modern Jewish-Arab relations. But throughout the Islamic rule over the city, Jews suffered from various forms of discrimination, and most famously were forbidden from entering the building of the Cave of the Patriarchs or even going further than the seventh step leading to it.

Hatred has only grown since the riots. Incitement is alive and well throughout the Palestinian Authority, and it is now coupled with denial of the Jewish history and connection in the area altogether.

Today, Hevron and villages around it are a Hamas stronghold, spreading violence against Jews throughout the 'West Bank'. In the four decades since the reinstallment of the small Jewish community in and around the city, allowed because of the city's significance to Judaism, the violence has continued.

The current mayor, Tayseer Abu Sneineh, himself is among the murderers of six Jews (including two Americans and one Canadian) in a 1980 mass shooting on a Friday night as they returned from prayers — a biographic detail, including the fact that they were shot from the back, he brushed off during his 2017 election campaign. In 2001, 10-month old Shalhevet Pass was intentionally shot in her stroller by a sniper lurking in the hills above the Old City.

Jewish presence in Hevron is more justified than in almost any other place in the world. But under present circumstances, this presence can be ensured only by the Israeli military — the army is all that stands between 1,000 Jews and utter chaos. It is a heavy price to pay in terms of freedom of movement for everybody in the Israeli-held area. But this is a consequence, not the cause, of the Arab refusal to admit the tiny Jewish minority back in the city.

Over eighty percent of Hevron is entirely under Palestinian control and empty of any sort of Jewish presence.

The uneasiness that liberal Zionists feel about the situation in Hevron is legitimate. But the shame is not: Hevron tells us a story that is complex and far from perfect, but it is a vital part of Jewish history from which we should not shy away.

The Palestinian Authority has paid 3,248,900 shekels in financial rewards to the Hamas terrorists who carried out two consecutive suicide attacks on Sept. 9, 2003 (16 years ago tomorrow). The first attack at a bus stop near the Assaf Harofeh Hospital and the Tzrifin military base resulted in the murder of 9 people and the injury of 18. The second attack in Jerusalem's Café Hillel resulted in the murder of 7 people and the injury of 57.

Among the victims of the Café Hillel attack were Dr. David Applebaum and his daughter Nava, who was to be married the day after the attack. American-born Dr. Applebaum was chief of the emergency room and trauma services of Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center and a specialist in emergency medicine. Before the attack he had just participated in a symposium where he taught terror-trauma procedures to medical professionals.

Alon Mizrachi, the security guard of the café who was killed when he identified the suicide bomber and shoved him out as he exploded, thereby saving many other lives, was the uncle of Ziv Mizrachi, an IDF soldier who was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in November 2015.

According to the calculations of Palestinian Media Watch following the PA's own pay scale, the PA has, to date, paid the six terrorists who were arrested and imprisoned for their roles in the attacks, a total of 2,892,500 shekels. The PA has also paid the families of the two suicide bombers - so-called "Martyrs" - a total of 356,400 shekels since the attacks.

While the PA will continue to pay monthly salaries to all of the terrorists, it is noteworthy that the PA just raised the salaries of the two terrorists who prepared the suicide belts to 7,000 shekels/month. Similar to an employee of any company that receives a raise after a certain period of employment, the PA - following PA law - just raised the salaries of these two terrorists as they completed 15 years in prison (they were arrested in July and August 2004). For the last five years the PA paid them 6,000 shekels/month.

Every year or so, some Pakistani citizens write urging their government to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. In February 2018, Pakistani student Mohsin Saleem Ullah wrote: "Pakistanis endorsing better relations [with Israel], put forward their stance that Israel can help the country, not only with computer science, agriculture, electronics, medicine, solar energy and more, but more importantly, with its international relations."[1]

On August 25, 2019, senior Pakistani journalist Kamran Khan kicked up the issue again, tweeting: "High time Pakistan counter nefarious Indian designs with bold foreign policy moves. Our deepest friends making fresh alignments. No permanent friends no enemies. Why can't we openly debate pros cons of opening direct and overt channels of communication with the State of Israel."[2]

There has always been recognition among Pakistani thinking classes that the country must establish diplomatic relations with Israel. However, each time the issue is raised in the media, the Pakistani government buckles under pressure from Islamic clerics and domestic public opinion.

In recent weeks, there is new speculation inside and outside Pakistan that Prime Minister Imran Khan might establish diplomatic relations. However, Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when asked about this by a reporter, rejected the assertion that the country was planning to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.[3] Foreign Office spokesman Dr. Muhammad Faisal stated: "Our policy on Israel is very clear and there is no change to it."[4]

A day later – on August 30, 2019 – Dr. Sughra Sadaf, a freelance Pakistani writer, pressed ahead with this question in an op-ed, advocating the establishment of diplomatic ties between Pakistan and Israel.

One can understand President Donald Trump's wish to leave Afghanistan. There are, however, ways to leave without losing people, respect, and allies. Mr. Trump, instead of leaving unilaterally, while reinforcing the democratically elected government in Kabul without boots on the ground, is unfortunately empowering his Taliban enemy by protracted negotiations, where America makes successive concessions and ultimately throws its Afghan allies under the bus.

Afghan officials are the first to sense that the sellout of the Kabul government is impending, and are scurrying to defect to the Taliban (in July alone there were 800 defections).

As opposed to what many Americans think, Qatar did the US no favors in building the base in the mid-1990s. It needed an American base for its own self-protection and this dependence still persists. Without this base, this Lilliputian energy Gulliver would be taken over by its neighbors (whether Iranian or Saudi) within a day. The US military establishment ignores this reality to its own detriment, and behaves as if America is in Qatar's debt rather than the reverse.

Qatar is already threatening to limit potential operations against Iran from Al-Udeid, should they be needed, and Qatar's Tamim told Rouhani that "only countries [placed] along the coast [of the Persian Gulf] should keep security in the region."

US President Donald Trump tweeted on Saturday night that he canceled planned peace negotiations with the Taliban after they admitted to carrying out an attack in Kabul in which an American soldier and 11 others died.

"Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday," wrote Trump. "Unfortunately, in order to build false leverage, they admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great great soldiers, and 11 other people. I immediately cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations."

"What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?" added Trump. "They didn’t, they only made it worse! If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks, and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway. How many more decades are they willing to fight?"

One of the blasts took the life of 34-year-old US Army Sergeant 1st Class Elis A. Barreto Ortiz from Puerto Rico, bringing the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan this year to 16.

Taliban fighters, who now control more territory than at any time since 2001, launched fresh assaults on the northern cities of Kunduz and Pul-e Khumri over the past week and carried out two major suicide bombings in the capital Kabul.

A Taliban video published earlier this summer justified the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as caused by the "interventionist policies" of the United States.

"This heavy slap on their dark faces was the consequence of their interventionist policies and not our doing," reads a voice in the video showing United Airlines flight 175 hitting the World Trade Center. The video, entitled "Umari Army (6)" was produced by Taliban's official media arm Al-Emara.

The video was shared with the public by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and an article about it was published in the NGO's Long War Journal.

In 2001, Mullah Omar Mohammad, a former leader of the Taliban, gave an interview with Voice of America, in which he, too, explained that "America deserved the 9/11 attacks." That interview was published then by The Guardian.

"Everyone is afraid of America and wants to please it," said Omar, as he confirmed that the Taliban would not give up Osama bin Laden. "But Americans will not be able to prevent such acts like the one that has just occurred because America has taken Islam hostage.

"America has created the evil that is attacking it," added Omar. "The evil will not disappear even if I die and Osama dies and others die. The US should step back and review its policy. It should stop trying to impose its empire on the rest of the world, especially on Islamic countries."

The "Umari Army (6)" video also includes a statement claiming that the Taliban "shall never accept a single occupying soldier," according to the Journal.

The daughter of legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen said Sunday “it hurt” to watch the new Netflix series about her father’s life and execution in Syria, lamenting historical inaccuracies in the adaptation but praising Sacha Baron Cohen’s performance.

“The Spy,” which was released Friday, tells the story of Cohen, who spied for Israel in Syria during the 1960s, providing valuable intelligence that was said to have greatly assisted the Israeli military in the 1967 Six Day War.

Cohen was caught and eventually executed by Syrian authorities in 1965. Israel has for decades worked to retrieve his remains.

“It hurt. It was hard to see the distance from the truth” in some parts of the series, Sophie Ben-Dor said in an interview with Channel 12 news.

Asked to pinpoint what she found not to be reflective of her family’s experience, Ben-Dor said “the ethnic gap,” noting her mother was never a maid as was portrayed in the series.

“This was unnecessary,” she said.

Ben-Dor, who was four years old when her father was killed, said she was pleasantly surprised by actor Cohen’s portrayal.

Here’s a heartfelt apology that was published on Sunday:

“In anticipation of Yom Kippur, I would like to apologize to Yair Trabelsi for hurting him. I uploaded his picture with a caption that did not reflect the true situation. The picture was taken during a terrorist attack that was prevented by Yair as the village security chief, his action did not create violence but prevented it. I didn’t expect that the caption would be interpreted as blaming him for violence. I apologize from the bottom of my heart and ask for his forgiveness.”

Last Wednesday, Moshe “Mossi” Raz, former secretary general of Peace Now and a former Meretz MK, tweeted a 2-year old image showing Yair Trabelsi, the local security coordinator of Karnei Shomron, pointing his weapon at an Arab boy and girl, which Raz captioned: “Violence is chipping away at the foundations of democracy,” suggesting, of course, that the man in the picture was a danger to the rule of law.

It tunred out that Raz had copied a screenshot from a video documenting a serious security incident during which Trabelsi and other Karnei Shomron security personnel foiled the efforts of two young Arab terrorists who had arrived at the entrance to the settlement and attempted to stab a civilian. In fact, the image that Raz screenshot shows an early moment along the incident, with the two terrorists still holding their knives which they later dropped in response to a warning shot.

Five projectiles were launched from the Gaza Strip toward Israel late Friday night, the Israeli military confirmed after rocket warning sirens sounded in the Israeli border town of Sderot and two nearby villages shortly before midnight.

One rocket fell in an open field but there were no injuries, Israeli media reports said.

Israel responded with tank and air strikes on a number of Hamas military targets in the northern Gaza Strip, an Israeli military spokesman said. Palestinian officials said no one was injured.

At the same time, the weekly riots on the Gaza-Israel border continued, with two rioters shot by IDF forces.

An Israeli military spokesman said troops guarding the border on Friday were faced with more than 6,000 demonstrators at several points along the fence, some hurling explosive devices and firebombs.

He said that some briefly managed to cross the fence before returning to Gaza, and that Israeli forces responded with riot dispersal measures.

Egypt, Qatar, and United Nations officials have been working to keep the border calm in recent months.

An Egyptian security delegation entered Gaza to follow up on ceasefire talks with Israel on Sunday, just hours after the Israeli Air Force struck Hamas positions in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for an earlier drone attack against an IDF humvee positioned along the border fence.

According to Palestinian media, the delegation is set to meet with senior Hamas officials in order to deescalate the situation in light of growing violence ahead of the upcoming Israeli elections.

Following weeks of relative quiet along the border, the past weekend saw two Palestinian youth killed by the IDF during Great March of Return Border riots which the IDF called “especially violent in nature.” Five rockets were launched from the Hamas-run enclave on Friday evening and on Saturday a drone flown from the southern Strip attacked an IDF vehicle.

In retaliation for the drone attack the military struck naval combat equipment belonging to the terror group and two military centers for Hamas’s aerial systems in airstrikes in the northern and central Strip which lasted close to an hour.

“The IDF will continue to act against attempts to harm Israeli citizens, and holds the Palestinian terror group Hamas responsible for everything that takes place in the Gaza Strip, and which emanates from there,” the military said in a statement.

Former deputy head of Mossad Ram Ben-Barak discusses with host Yoav Limor on the latest escalation on the Israel-Lebanese border.

After Hezbollah launched an anti-tank missile to an IDF vehicle, the Lebanese celebrated — on and off social media — even though the actual outcome of the event is still under much debate. Take a look.

Following the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1701, at the time perceived as a strongly worded document. It was aimed at not just maintaining the ceasefire, but of strengthening the hands of the government in Beirut by endorsing and calling for the central government to assert control over the entire country.

However, for the most part 1701 has reflected the toothless inability of the international body to take those words and effectively implement them on the ground.

The 2006 war was not between two countries, but between Israel and the terrorist Hezbollah organization headed by Hassan Nasrallah that is funded, trained and armed by Iran. Hezbollah is not under the control of the Lebanese government, is not part of the Lebanese Armed Forces, and thus considers itself not obligated at all to the document. It’s terrorist activities have been documented for years.

Resolution 1701: In Its Own Words

Two paragraphs in the UNSC resolution appeared to have been directly aimed at Hezbollah:
- “security arrangements to prevent the resumption of hostilities, including the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani river of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL …”
- “full implementation of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, and of (UNSC) resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), that require the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, so that, pursuant to the Lebanese cabinet decision of 27 July 2006, there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese State.”

In short, 1701 calls for the disarming of Hezbollah and the deployment of the Lebanese army to exert sovereignty – especially in the south of the country along the Lebanon-Israel border. That area is monitored by UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon that is tasked with monitoring the area and whose heavy presence was intended to dissuade militias.

Lebanese Politician Wehbe Katicha: Israel Would Not Attack Us If We Had a Real Government; We Will Have No Economy So Long as We Have Extralegal Militias pic.twitter.com/mwYSM1Cyvs

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) September 8, 2019

The acting chief of the UN nuclear watchdog policing Iran‘s nuclear deal with major powers, Cornel Feruta, will meet senior Iranian officials in Tehran on Sunday, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Friday.

“The visit is part of ongoing interactions between the IAEA and Iran,” the spokesman said.

The trip comes before a quarterly meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors next week and after an IAEA report suggested Iran‘s cooperation with the agency was less than ideal, saying: “Ongoing interactions between the Agency and Iran … require full and timely cooperation by Iran. The Agency continues to pursue this objective with Iran.”

Iran said on Saturday it was now capable of raising uranium enrichment past the 20% level and had launched advanced centrifuge machines in further breaches of commitments to limit its nuclear activity under a 2015 deal with world powers.

"We have started lifting limitations on our Research and Development imposed by the deal … It will include development of more rapid and advanced centrifuges," Iranian nuclear agency spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi told a televised news conference.

The 2015 pact curbed Iran’s disputed nuclear program in exchange for relief from sanctions, but has unraveled since the United States pulled out of it last year and acted to strangle Iran’s oil trade to push it into wider security concessions.

Since May, Iran has begun to exceed limits on its nuclear capacity set by the pact in retaliation for U.S. pressure on Iran to negotiate restrictions on its ballistic missile program and support for proxy forces around the Middle East.

Iran says its measures are reversible if European signatories to the accord manage to restore its access to foreign trade promised under the nuclear deal but blocked by the reimposition of U.S. sanctions.

The deal capped the level of purity to which Iran can enrich uranium at 3.67 percent – suitable for civilian power generation and far below the 90% threshold of nuclear weapons grade.

Three Iranians who were detained in Cyprus may have been part of a terrorist cell, the blog Intelli Times reported on Sunday.

According to the report, the Iranians were arrested in the town of Paphos and told Cypriot authorities that they had obtained false passports in the Turkish-controlled part of the island after arriving from Turkey, ostensibly for the purpose of seeking employment in Europe.

But local authorities suspect they may actually be part of a plot to carry out terrorist activity, in light of past instances where Iranians who had arrived in Europe under the guise of labor migrants turned out to be affiliated with rogue elements such as Iran's Revolutionary Guards' Qods Force, which serves as Iran's arms for regional aggression.

Earlier this year, a large Qods Force cell was uncovered in France and in the past, the force's members were linked to various terrorist attacks against Israelis in Europe and elsewhere.

Iranian soccer players Masoud Shojaei and Vorya Ghaffouri have spoken out in condemnation of the Islamic Republic following the arrest of a 29-year-old woman after she tried to enter a men's soccer match.

The woman attempted to disguise herself as a man in order to enter the stadium. She was stopped by security forces and then quickly escorted to Qarchak prison, known to be one of the country's more menacing prisons due to "inhumane medical and psychological conditions," according to Radio Farda.

"As we are shocked by the limitations that were set for women in the past, the future generation will also definitely be astonished by [finding out] that women were banned from entering sports arenas in our time," said Shojaei, the captain of the Iranian men's football team on a live Instagram post.

"The origin of such limitations is the rotten and disgusting thinking of the past, and will be incomprehensible for the next generation," he said.

Upon her release, the women known only by the alias "Sara" went to the prosecutor's office to collect her confiscated cellphone, where she learned that she will be given a six-month prison sentence for the infraction, according to Radio Farda.

Political activist Linda Sarsour has been named a surrogate for Bernie Sander’s 2020 US presidential campaign.

Sarsour, a Palestinian-American woman who is a supporter of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, spoke on behalf of Sanders over the weekend in Brooklyn, New York. In a video excerpt of the speech tweeted by the campaign, she is identified as a “Civil Rights Activist, 2020 Bernie Surrogate.”

“At a time of a startling rise in white nationalism and anti-Semitism, I would be so proud to win, but also to make history and elect the first Jewish American president this country has ever seen and for his name to be Bernard Sanders,” Sarsour says in the video.

In the more than a minute-long excerpt, Sarsour also says that Sanders believes in a foreign policy “that sees Palestinians as human beings deserving of human rights and self-determination.” She adds that the candidate does not ask how much foreign policy and heath care and higher education for all will cost, “because only people who don’t believe we deserve these things will ask us how to pay for things like health care, but never ask us how to pay for endless and unjust wars.”

I hope this results in @BernieSanders getting a real a$$ whippin’ in the primaries https://t.co/KGwEIuey16

— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) September 8, 2019

A longtime Labour lawmaker said Saturday he was stepping down from the British parliament in protest of party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s alleged anti-Semitism.

John Mann, 59, said he would not run in the general election and will instead focus his efforts as the United Kingdom’s top adviser on combating anti-Semitism, accusing Corbyn and others on the far-left of helping “normalize” Jew hatred.

“I’m not prepared to stand as an MP with Corbyn as leader,” Mann told the Jewish Chronicle.

The departure is the latest for a party that has been roiled by claims of harboring anti-Semites and doing little to expel them from the party’s ranks. Those charges have intensified since the far-left Corbyn took over the party in 2015, with many longtime supporters defecting in protest or calling for him to step down.

Mann, who told the Chronicle he would remain a member of Labour, accused Corbyn of allowing anti-Semites to “hijack” the party.

“Corbyn has given the green light to the anti-Semites and, having done so, has sat there and done nothing to turn that round,” he told the Sunday Times.

“Every time I go into a meeting with a group of Jewish people, I wince when they raise the issue of the Labour party and Corbyn. It is impossible to overstate the anger that I have about that. He has not just hijacked my political party – he has hijacked its soul and its ethics. I will never forgive him for that.”

An MP for Bassetlaw, outside of Sheffield, since 2001, Mann has been outspoken about combating anti-Semitism and headed the All Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, though he himself is not Jewish.

He was named anti-Semitism czar by former prime minister Theresa May as one of her last acts before stepping down earlier this year, and the role was recently upgraded by her successor Boris Johnson, allowing him to take on the job full time, according to The Guardian.

“The role will allow me to devote 95 percent of my life to fighting the war against antisemitism, rather than the five per cent I was able to devote while working as an MP,” he told the Jewish Chronicle.

Has @RogerWaters been a naughty boy? https://t.co/fLVvMHMH9a

— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) September 7, 2019

Forty-seven years ago, Palestinian terrorists from the Black September organization were responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli athletes after taking them hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

This was how the Associated Press (AP) marked the infamous event on Twitter:

So, according to AP, those responsible were not terrorists but “guerrillas” who were members of a “Palestinian group.”

So far, so insulting.

After receiving a roasting from Twitter users, AP removed the tweet and announced the following:

If you were expecting a new and improved tweet from the AP, prepare to be infuriated as the “correction” turns out to be as shoddy as the original. This is the result:

Having told us that the original tweet was “unclear about who was responsible for the killings,” Black September is still referred to as a “Palestinian group.”

Related reading: What is Terrorism and Why Does its Definition Matter?

But no longer are they “guerrillas.” Instead, in the way that so many media avoid using the term “terrorists” in favor of various interchangeable terminology, this time the chosen description is “gunmen.”

"And in one night of reeducating myself, I became a pro-Palestinian Jew" says @viccsilver. Judging by the unsophisticated anti-Israel hyperbole in her piece, it certainly looks like she didn't spend much time educating herself about the real facts. https://t.co/nnWdymxdad

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) September 8, 2019

The Daily Mail’s coverage of Israel is, by and large, not compromised by the egregious bias found in UK media outlets such as the Guardian and Independent, and editors there are generally amenable to corrections when we point out errors. Nonetheless, their “correction” to a complaint we filed over a map they distributed (to close to a million news consumers) in their Sunday print edition, which falsely listed Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital, is disappointing.

Here’s the section of the map in question, which we originally posted about last week.

Now, here’s the ‘correction’ the Daily Mail published in today’s print edition in response to a complaint filed by UK Media Watch (and countless other followers of our blog):

First, it’s important to note that the UK government map cited by Britain’s national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, which was sent to us by Daily Mail editors in response to our complaint, does NOT, as they claim, list Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital.

Several Israelis were brutally assaulted in Poland after the assailants asked where they were from, the brother of one of the victims alleged on Sunday.

Barak Kashpizky posted to Facebook a pair of pictures of his bloodied twin brother Yotam, taken shortly after the attack, in an account that quickly went viral.

In it, Kashpizky said that Yotam had gone out to a club in Warsaw with several other Israeli students attending a summer semester abroad at the local law school.

At 4 a.m., the Israelis were approached by a group of “Arabic speakers” who asked them if they were from Israel.

“When they answered in the affirmative, they were relentlessly attacked, [in blows] accompanied by shouts of ‘fuck Israel,'” wrote Barak Kashpizky, adding that his brother was briefly knocked unconscious.

In addition to Yotam, who suffered a broken nose from the beating, another Israeli was briefly hospitalized. Both have since been released.

A museum in the Netherlands has banned visitors from taking pictures of an exhibition on design during the Third Reich to prevent any Nazi glorification on social media.

The Design Museum Den Bosch also put extra security in each room of the “Design of the Third Reich” exhibit as it opened Sunday.

Among the items on display are a Volkswagen Beetle, photos from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, films by director Leni Riefenstahl and a sculpture by Arno Breker, one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite artists.

On its website, the museum says the exhibition is aimed at showing the “contribution of design to the development of the evil Nazi ideology.”

According to the Guardian, the exhibit has been criticized by the Association of Dutch Anti-fascists. Members of the local communist party held a protest near the museum’s entrance as it opened Sunday.

Timo de Rijk, the museum’s director, said he assured the protesters the exhibit would not glorify the Nazis.

“They are concerned that maybe we are glorifying it all. I would not be doing this if I thought we were, but I can understand that they are aware of that kind of evil in history,” he told the British newspaper.

Diet Eman, a Dutch woman and resistance fighter who was recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for helping save dozens of Jews, passed away on Tuesday. She was 99.

In 1942, Eman and her boyfriend, Hein Sietsma, gave shelter to a Jewish violinist named Herman in The Hague, The Washington Post reported. From that moment on, Eman became involved in the Dutch underground, helping dozens of Jews.

“In the beginning you have no idea what risk you are taking,” she later told the Sioux City (Iowa) Journal, as reported by The Washington Post. “Then, you’re so deep in it, you can’t go back.”

The Nazis occupied the Netherlands in 1940.

Eman buried weapons in her parents’ garden, translated BBC radio reports to spread forbidden news, and served as a courier. She and Sietsma, who had become her fiancé, joined a small resistance group called Hein, which provided money, ration cards and false documents to Jews on the run.

Eventually, the two were discovered and arrested. At the time of the arrest, Eman was hiding an envelope full of stolen ration cards under her blouse and managed to toss it away, taking advantage of a moment the Gestapo officers were distracted.

She spent some months at the Herzogenbusch concentration camp in Vught, in the southern Netherlands, but resisted interrogations by pretending to be very simple-minded.

Sudanese Religious Affairs Minister Nasr Al-Din Mufreh Invites Jews Who Have Left Sudan to Return, Reclaim Their Citizenship pic.twitter.com/Y3EGhnlMEt

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) September 8, 2019

Ask Sherwood “Sherry” Bassin any question about North American amateur hockey and there’s a good chance he’ll know the answer — little surprise given his near half-century in various leagues and positions: team owner, general manager, coach, interim commissioner and elder statesman. In a sport not known for a surfeit of Jews, Bassin, with his open sense of Jewish pride, is an anomaly, especially given the prominent role he’s long played in amateur hockey.

Even growing up in western Canada in the 1940s and early 1950s, hockey and Jewish identity were central facets of Bassin’s life. The two would have an unlikely convergence years later on distant shores.

For all his success in hockey, it was a formerly undisclosed caper Bassin pulled off 36 years ago that earned him a moment of glory in the Jewish world when it was revealed in the media for the first time last winter.

In the fall of 1982, as general manager of Canada’s national junior hockey team, Bassin was preparing for the 1983 World Junior Hockey Championship that was to run in the then-Soviet Union from late December through January.

Knowing the hardship Soviet Jews faced under the Communist regime, Bassin had heard that synagogues there sorely lacked prayer books and ritual shawls. He soon devised a way to help — but he knew it could only work with the cooperation of the team.
Detroit Red Wings’ Steve Yzerman lifts the Stanley Cup after Detroit swept the Philadelphia Flyers in the best of seven series Saturday, June 7, 1997, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

Bassin first broached his idea with the team’s head coach and players, none of whom were Jewish. His roster included future National Hockey League (NHL) superstars Mario Lemieux and Steve Yzerman. He explained to the team the plight of Soviet Jews and the adversity they faced trying to practice their religion due to government restrictions.

We must be clear and outspoken in exposing the new anti-Semitism. I believe that we can apply a simple test - I call it the "3D" test - to help us distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism.

The first "D" is the test of demonization. When the Jewish state is being demonized; when Israel's actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz - this is anti- Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel.

The second "D" is the test of double standards. When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel's Magen David Adom, alone among the world's ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross - this is anti-Semitism.

The third "D" is the test of delegitimization: when Israel's fundamental right to exist is denied - alone among all peoples in the world - this too is anti-Semitism.

Netanyahu's supporters have tried to expand anti-Semitism to include the “demonization” and “delegitimization” of Israel, but the human rights movement routinely demonizes and deligitimizes governments that systematically persecute and discriminate. https://t.co/7JjMsRYEcRpic.twitter.com/1S0xOhjVyA

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) September 8, 2019

I attended a treatment session by Sheikh Ahmed Nimr for my neighbor in 1998. The patient does not know what is happening because she is in a complete altered state and the jinn is uttered on her tongue. ...The Sheikh goes to each patient and interviews the jinn and reads the Qurans and beats the woman with a stick to get the jinn to leave. The women here don't feel the beatings but the jinn feels it. Most of the jinn were Jews and I was amazed that even the jinn among the Jews persecuted our women. Of course, the jinn is not exorcised from women immediately and comes out only after advanced sessions of treatment and not from the first session or two. There were women who were possessed for many months until the jinn came out of them...

"Six Orphans," protest in Israel against the murder of the Henkins in October 2015

This Sunday, Bassam Al-Sayeh died in an Israeli prison, bringing the number of #Palestinian detainees and prisoners who died from medical negligence by Israeli prison authorities to 64. @IntlCrimCourt@mbacheletpic.twitter.com/gxumk6NuOK

— Palestine PLO-DPDP (@PLO_DPDP) September 8, 2019