[Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News] 06/26 Links Pt2: As Europe slides into a Dark Age, Jews must review their future; Z Street and the IRS ~ EoZ

From Ian:

Isi Leibler: As Europe slides into a Dark Age, Jews must review their future

Recent developments signal that the prospect of Europe sliding into a new Dark Age is now a horrifying reality. It is as though all the elements negating the open society have been blended into a witches’ brew to undermine Europe’s liberal cultural ethos.
First in line to suffer are the Jews, attacked from all sides, isolated, friendless and unable to adequately defend themselves. Their greatest threat is the rabidly anti-Semitic Muslims supported by anti-Semites from the far Left. This unholy alliance of religious and secular extremists employs radical anti-Israelism as a surrogate for traditional anti-Semitism and is now a fixture at Hezbollah and anti-Israeli demonstrations, where they wave placards and shamelessly accuse Israelis of emulating Nazis.

A Pro-Israel Arab Londoner At A Palestine Solidarity Campaign Meeting (video)

Here's the indefatigable young Arab supporter of Israel who calls himself Orim Shimshon; he introduces the video thus:
"I went to a meeting by Hamas/Palestinian supporters in a conference room in the British Library. No longer shall I wait for Q and A to speak. I decided to resort to different tactics. Rather than heckling the director (Sarah Colborne, who was at the podium speaking as I went up; she is the director of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign), I brought signs instead, so people can read and respond rather then talking over each other!"
Note the repetitive question he's asked by PSC heavies as he's escorted out; note too the racist insults that he's been subjected to on this video's YouTube page. (h/t Yenta Press)

Palestinian supporters shocked by one supporter of Israel at a Hamas meeting

The Universal Answer: Boycott Israel

Since virtually everything that is wrong in the world is Israel’s fault, we have no choice but to boycott Israel or at least follow those brave Presbyterians and disinvest. Reading the world media, I have to believe that Israel, like Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes, is a spider weaving an immense and complex web of evil and criminality. Okay, if that seems just a little over the top, how about the premise that the suffering and death in the Muslim World is directly attributable to Israel’s policies and existence?
Take Black September when nearly 15,000 Palestinians were slaughtered. A true moral outrage. The world’s response? Hate Israel. But the killing was done by King Hussein of Jordan and his Hashemite Bedouin army. Still, that doesn’t fit the narrative, so boycott Israel.

Would The Met Broadcast ‘Innocence Of Muslims’?

Would an opera portraying the death of Mohammad be acceptable? Does the Met think that condemning the “Innocence of Muslims” was wrong? The Metropolitan Opera issued a statement saying that the opera “looks for humanity in the terrorists.” One wonders how anyone can produce an opera about the murder of an innocent man and justify seeking his murderers’ humanity? Despicable and gross.
An American teenager was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists in Israel recently. Will the Met also exploit that situation and seek the humanity of the abductors. Terror knows no boundaries – and “Death of Klinghoffer” must be cancelled.

Chloe Valdary: The Death of a Black Man

Ah yes, you, you will be the one who would have started it all. You will become prominent in all the great elite circles. You will be the one to be called upon to dine with great statesman and will be welcomed into high society. They will beg you to be friends with them and ask you of your methods on how to wipe out those greedy murderous insolent baboon blacks. Lead them! They want to become just like you; you are the savior who can inspire them! Professors in universities will study your methods for their research. You will rally their cause.
They will build statues in your name. They will produce films in your honor. Your lynchings will make for glorious scenes in cinema that will tell the grand story of the birth of a nation. They will even commission operas to depict this epic of the White Race. Notable composers will complete the score. They will include the epithets you once hurled at the bleating baboons in their librettos. You will be the talk of the town. All will rise to see this grand opera wherever it is shown in America. You will be an icon.
....
The above should stir and infuriate you. But this is no hypothetical -- not the events I describe, nor the positive portrayal of racist murderers on a notable stage. The esteemed New York Metropolitan Opera plans to present a production entitled, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which pays tribute not to the victim of a vicious lynching, but rather to those who lynched him. Not only should this spark outrage within you, it should move you to action. Call the Met and tell them that this sort of propping up of 21st century klansmen and celebration of the massacre of Jews is unacceptable:

U.N. Dictatorships Fail to Stop Critique of Inaction on Human Rights

The 2014 Catalog of U.N. Inaction
on Global Human Rights Abuses
Thank you, Mr. President.
The members of this Council have been mandated by the international community to protect victims of human rights violations around the world. Is the Council living up to its mandate?
Let us consider the most fundamental of all human rights—the right to life—by examining what has happened in the world, over the past 12 months:

Andrew Bolt: This self-loathing insults Australian values

THE Sydney Opera House is Australia’s most iconic building. And on its stage in August was to be a taxpayer-funded talk: “Honour killings are morally justified.”
Be clear: the title is not a question but a statement.
Yes, in the heart of Australia we are now to rationalise the strangling, stoning, burning, beating or shooting of daughters and wives for supposedly shaming their men.
There hasn’t been such a startling symbol of our cultural elite’s loathing of our society and its weakening of our resistance to barbarity. Our civilisation is being betrayed.
In this case, Uthman Badar was invited by Sydney Opera House and the St James Ethics Centre for their Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and planned to attack critics of honour killings as the usual “secular (white) Westerner”, wickedly using these murders as a symbol of “everything that is allegedly wrong with the other culture”. Note: honour killings are only “allegedly wrong”.

Australian Muslim group says West worse than ISIS

Young Australian Muslims of Hizb ut-Tahrir say the ISIS terrorist group - which releases propaganda videos showing them shooting and beheading other Muslims - aren’t as bad the West. In fact, the West is the “root problem” and Muslims must “react” to it:

Caroline Glick: Turkey’s high-risk power play

For most Westerners, Turkey is a hard nut to crack.
How can you understand a state sponsor of terrorism that is also a member of NATO?
How can you explain Turkey’s facilitation of Kurdish independence in Iraq in light of Turkey’s hundred-year opposition to Kurdish independence?
What is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan trying to accomplish here?
Is he nuts?

Mike Lumish: Dear Professor Fred Astren, Why Does San Francisco State University Support Violence Against Jews?

The very last thing in this world that professor Abdulhadi cares about is “universal human rights.”
How else to explain that she recently went on a solidarity tour throughout Israel, and environs, meeting with plane hijackers and those who seek the slaughter of the Jewish people?
San Francisco State has got major problems and, as a Jew and an alum, I very much resent the fact that the university administration, and President Wong, are standing behind the terrorist professor Rabab Abdulhadi.
She was the adviser to the General Union of Palestine Students who, just last year, called directly for the murder of “colonizers,” by which they meant Jews in Israel, and who the university gave $7,000 of taxpayer money to meet with racist plane hijacker, Leila Khaled, not for academic purposes, but, according to Tammi Benjamin, of the AMCHA Institute, for purposes of political outreach.

CA Professors: State Money Should Not Be Used For Personal Political Agendas And Meetings with Terrorists

As San Francisco State University continues to stand with radical professor Rabab Abdulhadi and her "Palestine solidarity tour," a number of professors from the University of California at San Diego have addressed their concerns to California State Controller John Chiang. Below is the full text of the letter the professors sent concerning the potential misuse of $7,000 of US taxpayer money on Professor Abdulhadi's trip that involved meeting with two terrorists:

SFSU President's Inaction 'Dangerous For All of Us' Says Victim of Palestinian Terror

After San Francisco State University president Leslie Wong stood with the pro-terror trip organized by a university professor using United States taxpayer money, one victim of Palestinian terror is speaking out. Sarri Singer, a victim of Palestinian terror, warned that the school's inaction is "dangerous for all of us."
"[I]t angers me that those in academia who are influencing the next generation of leaders can justify meeting with terrorists," she told TruthRevolt. "I think taxpayers do not understand what is really going on around the world and we all need to wake up and see what is happening."

France warns citizens against doing business in settlements

Italy and Spain are expected to publish similar messages in the coming days, in the wake of failed Israeli-Palestinians negotiations and new settlement construction tenders.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told The Times of Israel that the warning was nothing new.
“This is a well known EU position on this particular issue. Here we can see again the deep confusion of the EU policy on this as they appear to be warning their citizens of legal consequences without hinting at the slightest relevant legal reference,” he said.

Z Street at center of IRS email scandal

Z Street is a pro-Israel organization whose application for a tax exemption was denied in 2009 after it was asked whether it supports the 'occupation.' Z Street sued the IRS (never cross a couple where both spouses are lawyers :-), and now finds itself at the center of a major scandal in the US involving 'lost' IRS emails.
In 2009 a pro-Israel group called Z Street applied to the IRS for tax-exempt status. When the process was delayed, an IRS agent told the group that its application was undergoing special review because "these cases are being sent to a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization's activities contradict the Administration's public policies." In August 2010 Z Street sued the IRS on grounds that this selective processing of its application amounted to viewpoint discrimination. (h/t Yenta Press)

The Presbyterian Church and the Ku Klux Klan

David Duke’s endorsement will undoubtedly embarrass the Presbyterian Church, since it underscores the anti-Semitic character of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Regardless of the Presbyterian delegates’ intentions, they have made common cause with a global movement that aims to marginalize and delegitimize the Jewish state. In this sense, the BDS movement continues longstanding efforts to marginalize and delegitimize the Jewish people.
The connections between BDS and anti-Semitism have not been lost on the Presbyterian Church. The divestment resolution (Resolution 04-09) contains an unusual formal comment by the Church’s Advocacy Committee for Racial and Ethnic Concerns (ACREC). In this statement, ACREC addressed the anti-Semitism charge explicitly, endorsing the unusual argument the Jewish community should “suspend their campaigns against anti-Semitism indefinitely” in order to focus exclusively on the Palestinians. In other words, their official position is that it does not matter whether their resolution is anti-Semitic, since anti-Semitism is not as important as Jewish organizations say it is.

Jews Who Aid the War on Israel

As Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the former leader of the Reform movement aptly stated this week in Haaretz, JVP cloaks their own extremist principles in ambiguous language in order to try and represent themselves as just one more liberal Jewish group. Indeed, its position is even more radical than the final resolutions passed by the Presbyterians since it wholeheartedly backs BDS on all of Israel, not just a few American companies and neither supports a two-state solution nor the Jewish state’s right to exist.
By assisting the BDS movement in this manner, JVP gains press attention from papers like the New York Times and faux respectability from left-wing Christians who embrace it as a “partner” that somehow represents Jews. But the point about the farce that played out at the Presbyterian GA in Detroit is, as Yoffie rightly points out, that this group represents very few Jews and takes positions that are anathema to the entire spectrum of the organized Jewish world.
Just as Presbyterians should know they are making a crucial mistake in embracing JVP, so, too, do Jewish communities and Hillel groups on campuses err in allowing this group to join community relations councils or to be represented in campus councils.

France orders extradition of Jewish museum attack suspect

The court in Versailles, west of Paris, said Franco-Algerian Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, who was detained several days after the attack, should be handed over to Belgian authorities for “killings with a terrorist connotation.”
The decision was in line with a European warrant issued for Nemmouche’s arrest.
The suspect had initially said he was not opposed to his transfer to Belgium as long as he had assurances he would not be sent on to a third country, but then decided to contest the extradition.

EU officials, Jewish leaders mark 30 days since Brussels attack

The memorial event Wednesday (video here) was attended by over 20 ambassadors to the European Union, the acting president of the European Parliament, the deputy prime minister of Belgium, the US ambassador to the EU and the head of Belgium’s Muslim community.
“We are here today pay tribute to four innocents who lost their life due to actions of one man, this act was not just against peaceful individual but an attack towards our European values,” said acting Acting President of the European Parliament Gianni Pittella.

Philly synagogue sprayed with swastikas

Members of the Congregations of Ner Zedek discovered two large swastikas spray painted on the synagogue building on Monday when they arrived for daily morning prayers, according to the Jewish Exponent.
In recent weeks a rock was thrown through a glass panel on a synagogue door, the newspaper reported. Swastikas also were spray painted on the building a few years ago.

Farewell to Fouad Ajami, Great Scholar of the Arabs, Truth-Teller, My Mo’allem

Fouad Ajami, who died this week at age 68, was a man of two worlds; a bridge between two cultures, and he spoke truth to both. His words were never welcomed in the cultural salons of Beirut and Cairo and are unfashionable today in the halls of power in Washington—in large part because words of criticism are never popular. He was a man excommunicated by his brethren. After all, he had committed the worst of sins: Instead of following the herd and blaming the ills of the region on the foreigner, he had written in the opening pages of his 1981 book The Arab Predicament that “the wounds that mattered were self-inflicted wounds.”
For those who continue on the old path, there is something especially threatening in the man who leaves the pack. He knows the old ways well; he had once made the same arguments, even taught them to others. Worse yet is the question his change of convictions poses: If it happened to him, if he now questions our revealed truths, does that make them weak or untrue? These are challenging questions. They are questions better left unasked. Old friends are soon turned into the worst enemies; sometimes the deeper the relationship the larger the wound and the bitterness it leaves.

Futuristic skytrain track to be built near Tel Aviv

SkyTran, based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, hopes to one day build a full working system in Tel Aviv.
“The support afforded by IAI is a breakthrough for skyTran,” Sanders said. “IAI, as a world-class designer of aircraft and avionics, is the perfect partner to take skyTran from concept to construct.”
The Israel Aerospace Industries campus near Tel Aviv will soon host an experimental new method of urban travel, developed by a company that wants to change how people get around large cities.
The skyTran system uses high speed two-person ‘pods’ that levitate on a magnetic field to keep them floating above a track.

Israeli ‘mini-farm’ could feed third world hungry

Project co-creator Nitzan Solan says the Livingbox “is the perfect system, because it lets anyone anywhere grow vegetables without the need for fertile soil, or running water and electricity, and with minimal farming skills. It could help feed people in the developing world, providing them with access to fresh, nutritious food, while helping them maintain a clean environment.”
Once it’s set up, the system is self-sustaining. Still to be determined, is the initial price, though the team pledges to keep it reasonable.

Iran Gets World Cup Support From Unlikely Fans

Motai, who spoke by phone before the game, said that most Iranian soccer fans in Israel watch games at home rather than coming together in public places. The bar meet up Wednesday for the Bosnia-Herzegovina game was conceived as a media event by peace activists who have sought to foster ties between the two countries with the Israel-Loves-Iran Facebook page.
“The idea is to show solidarity from the Israeli side,” said Ronny Edry, who set up the Facebook page two years ago, and continues to promote communication between the sides over social media. “It’s pretty easy through sports.”
In fact, several days earlier a group of partying Iranian soccer fans in Brazil for the World Cup pre-empted Mr. Edry’s move. When approached by a Israeli television reporter, one fan bellowed “Israel good! Israel good!” and then kissed the reporter while another fan insisted, “Israel and Iran are brothers.” (h/t IsraellyCool)

Taglit-Birthright Israel Celebrates 400,000th Participant

With over 4,000 young Jews hailing from the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Brazil, France and Britain in the audience, Taglit-Birthright Israel celebrated the arrival of the program’s 400,000th participant in a festive ceremony at the Caesarea Amphitheater on Tuesday.
The Zionist project, founded 14 years ago, takes young Jews from around the world on a 10-day trip to Israel, free of charge. Since its inception, over 70,000 Israelis have also participated in the programs as counselors and guides.

The Myth of Ethnic Inequality in Israel

It is commonplace to attribute much of Israel's domestic tensions to supposed Jewish discrimination against the country's Arab citizens. Nearly every Israeli Arab nongovernmental organization insists that such discrimination characterizes the Jewish state in general and its labor markets in particular. The Israeli media routinely interview Israeli Arabs (and non-Ashkenazi Jews) who claim to have been victims of discrimination. These allegeations are echoed by Jewish Israeli academics, think tanks, and journalists, especially on the political Left, not to mention the international anti-Israel movement and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign. Indeed, the U.S. Department of State has even joined the growing outcry concerning Israel's alleged racist discrimination against its Arab citizens. Of course, in reality, Israel is the only Middle Eastern entity that is not an apartheid regime, and the apartheid slander holds no water whatsoever save in the minds of the Jewish state's enemies and defamers. Yet discrimination is a scientifically empirical question subject to testing and not a matter of subjective personal opinion. Stripping away the venomous anti-Israel rhetoric, the legitimate question remains whether and how much discrimination really exists in Israel.