Donate Us

Help us keep this free site alive with a small contribution from you. Select an amount below.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Last year, at Amnesty International's annual conference, the only resolution to be voted down was one calling to fight antisemitism.


Yet Amnesty had no problem spending an estimated $10,000 to buy an ad to support a Palestinian clown in administrative detention - a clown who happens to feature terrorists and support for ethnically cleansing Jews on his Facebook page.

This story is discussed in the latest edition of EoZTV, along with the rallies supporting the Terror Clown throughout Europe.




(There were some sound problems with my microphone, so a few of my words are lost. Not sure why.)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
        

The Hasby Award for Best Speech of 2015 goes to....


Col. Richard Kemp:


This speech was a 40-minute tour de force describing why Israel is right and why so many people today want to demonize it - and its defenders. Kemp is an amazing person with a clear moral conscience. It is sad that these qualities are so rare nowadays.




The popular vote for this category was tied, and then the winner went ahead on the blog vote while the opponent did better on an impromptu Twitter poll I added to possibly break the tie. Since the primary voting is through the blog, the winner is:

George Deek
The Reason I'm an Israeli-Arab Diplomat Not a Palestinian Refugee


Deek is great, as he single-handedly demolishes the "apartheid" libel by his very existence.



Congratulations on the winners!



We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
        

A poster I posted on Twitter last week that got shared fairly widely:





We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
        

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Justifying terrorism
The Anti-Defamation League demanded a clarification from Ban of his remarks, which it called “highly disturbing.”
CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said Ban’s remarks were “incredibly short-sighted.”
Like Lauder, Greenblatt warned of the likely consequences of Ban’s statement: “These comments will not only serve to further embolden Palestinians seeking to attack Israeli civilians, but also undermine the global struggle against terrorism by making inappropriate distinctions and rationalizations.”
Ban did not speak in his own defense, but his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, briefed reporters in New York on Wednesday. “Anyone is free to choose what they like or dislike from the secretary-general’s speeches. Words can continue to be twisted, but the grave reality cannot be obstructed,” he announced.
Moreover, Dujarric added, Ban “stands by every word” in his address to the Security Council. “He condemns the stabbings, vehicle attacks and shootings by Palestinians targeting Israeli civilians,” Dujarric said, repeating that dubious restriction about “targeting Israeli civilians.”
He added, apparently in Ban’s name, that “nothing justifies terrorism.” But this is precisely what his boss attempted to do. Since his spokesman has invited us “to work together to fight the sources and the causes that fuel that terrorism,” we should join the UN in the worldwide campaign it should launch to wipe out anti-Semitism.
David Collier: A letter to the University of Kent – antisemitism on campus
I wish to register a formal complaint against the university of Kent for allowing and promoting antisemitism within campus. In your university I heard mention of the ‘Elders of Zion’. A 100-year-old fake text that details the minutes of a non-existent meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony. It is a forgery responsible for spreading the disease of antisemitism and played a pivotal role everywhere that Jews were persecuted or slaughtered.
Hitler referenced the ‘Elders’ in Mein Kampf and it was taught as a factual document in Nazi schools. It has been claimed that the forgery served as the Nazis’ “warrant for genocide”. You can no more wave the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in my face than you can wave a swastika. There is no ‘context’ that allows for it. What I heard at an event on your campus was raw antisemitism.
Amira Hass said was that what we see today is the result of deliberate planning by a hidden group of Jews called the ‘Elders of Zion’. It was all planned. In a liberal democracy that bends to the will of the elected government, the idea of hidden plans and puppet masters is the stuff of conspiracy theorists. This is a conspiracy about Jews and secret plans for domination. You can listen to the comment itself here:


Richard Millett: I ask my question to Israeli Arab MK visiting London through a torrent of abuse.
So with two minutes left I rose and spoke. I just about managed to ask Dr. Yousef T. Jabareen how could he accuse Israel of oppressing its Arab citizens, of being undemocratic and of so underfunding the Israeli Arab education system when he himself was a Member of Parliament, a lecturer at the University of Haifa and Tel-Hai Academic College, had studied in Washington and was now here in London verbally attacking Israel?
I received such loud boos, hisses and abuse as I stood there that I swiftly took my seat. Needless to say I would have asked the same of Dr Durgham Saif, Professor at Al-Quds University in Abu-Dis, who also studied and lectured in Washington and who is a member of the Israeli Bar Association.
But by then I had already been shouted at by the Baroness for “disrespecting the meeting”.
In fairness to Dr Jabareen he listened to my question and answered, albeit unsatisfactorily. He simply complained that he was not allowed to visit the Al Aqsa Mosque and that many Israeli Arab leaders were banned from leaving Israel.
Meanwhile P21 itself is quickly becoming a hub of hate with constant anti-Israel lectures to the wider public. During the Q&A a young Romanian woman said she loved Jewish culture but not what Israel was doing to the Palestinians and she asked what she could do to help. Malia Bouattia said she should join the BDS movement.
One audience member did ask why we don’t hear from the other side to which Ben White, laughably, responded that Israel’s message is dominant in the media so there is no need to have any balance at events like today’s.



David Horovitz: US espionage and Hamas tunneling highlight malaise in Israeli defenses
Israel professed itself to be “disappointed” but “not surprised” by the revelation Friday that the US and UK have been hacking Israeli air force drone and fighter jet communications for the past 18 years. Excuse me? If this came as no surprise to the Israeli authorities, why didn’t they do anything about it?
Israeli leaders brag endlessly about what a cyber powerhouse we are. And yet our most sophisticated communications, it turns out, have been continually decrypted for the best part of two decades. Tell me, did we not change the encryption process for 20 years? And if we did, was the encryption so amateurish as to present no challenge at all to American and British state hackers?
Some Israeli security sources have been strenuously asserting over the weekend that the breach is of little material consequence — in part because, after all, the US and UK are our allies, not our enemies. In truth, however, the revelations raise all manner of troubling questions and issues.
For a start, they make a mockery of the relentlessly hyped, supposedly unprecedented level of intelligence-sharing between Israel and the United States. In fact, the US clearly does not remotely trust Israel to provide it with full intelligence cooperation. (On Sunday we learned the US and UK even reportedly spied on our missile defense tests.) In fact, the US routinely engages in espionage against the Jewish state. In fact, the US would have known in real time if Israel had gone ahead with its much-threatened strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. One can only wonder how the US, opposing any such strike, would have acted — what practical steps it would have taken — when its spyware told it that the Israelis were gearing up to attack.
Where Providing Water Is a Crime
How do you build a state for people who don’t want it built? That’s the obvious question that emerges from the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Rawabi, the first new Palestinian city. It’s a flagship project that international diplomats routinely laud as a model of Palestinian state-building, but it has won no such praise from fellow Palestinians. Instead, the very people it was meant to benefit are now accusing Rawabi’s founder of collaboration with the enemy for having committed such horrendous crimes – this is not a joke – as providing residents with electricity and running water.
Rawabi was founded with the goal of providing decent, affordable housing for middle-class Palestinians – theoretically a goal that should be welcomed by the Palestinian Authority and its residents, who routinely complain to the international community about how wretched their situation is. From the start, however, the PA did its best to undermine the project; despite repeated promises of support, it refused to provide even the basic infrastructure that most governments routinely provide to new residential developments. Thus as JTA reported last week, Rawabi’s water and sewage system, streets, schools and medical clinic were all financed, like the houses themselves, by entrepreneur Bashar Masri and the Qatari government.
The PA even tried to prevent Rawabi from obtaining running water, by refusing, for five long years, to convene the joint Israeli-Palestinian water committee that’s supposed to approve all new water projects. Rawabi got its water only when Israel finally lost patience and approved its connection to water mains unilaterally.
3 Israelis wounded by PA gunman at West Bank checkpoint
Three Israeli soldiers were wounded on Sunday when a member of the Palestinian Authority security forces opened fire at an IDF checkpoint near Beit El in the West Bank. He was shot dead by forces at the scene.
Magen David Adom emergency services said that two victims were in serious condition with wounds to the neck and thigh, respectively, and one was lightly hurt.
The shooter drove up to the Focus checkpoint in a car, was asked for his ID, and opened fire with a handgun, injuring the three soldiers. Palestinian reports named him as Amjad Sakari, 35, and said he was a member of the Palestinian Authority security forces who was working as a bodyguard for the Ramallah district attorney.
“Forces at the scene responded to the attack and shot the assailant, resulting in his death,” the IDF said in a statement.
US oleh even more motivated to join IDF after terrorist attack
"I'm never scared. Even though I was stabbed, I will give my all to the army," said a 17-year-old pre-military academy student who sustained light wounds on Saturday after being stabbed in the back near Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City.
"God willing, I want to serve in Sayeret Matkal (the IDF's elite reconnaissance unit). This stab wound won't change my plans," said the highly-motivated teenager, who only one month ago immigrated to Israel from New York in order to join the IDF.
Resting in his hospital bed in Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center, he recounted the incident: "I didn't see the terrorist coming. He came from behind and stabbed me. He ran to the right and I ran to the left. There were two [terrorists] there and they both had knives. They looked around 12 or 13 years old. I knew right away that I was stabbed because I saw him with the knife."
His friend, who was with him at the time, added: "We were walking, and then the two guys with the knives came. One of them tried stabbing me and I thought he got me in the back, but it was only his hand. They were chasing after me and my friend.
IDF says it foiled car-ramming attack on West Bank highway
Israeli soldiers thwarted an attempted car-ramming attack on Route 443 in the West Bank north of Jerusalem, the army said Sunday afternoon.
A Palestinian man attempted to run over soldiers manning the Maccabim checkpoint along the major east-west highway, which dips through portions of the West Bank. Troops opened fire on the speeding car, thwarting a potential attack, the IDF said in a statement.
The alleged Palestinian attacker sustained a number of gunshot wounds and was taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital for medical treatment.
Sunday’s attack — the latest in a months-long wave of deadly Palestinian car-rammings, stabbings and shootings — came a day after an Israeli-American teenager was wounded in a stabbing in Jerusalem and four days after an Israeli man was seriously injured in a stabbing in a settlement north of the city.
Route 443, which connects the capital to Tel Aviv and traverses the West Bank for some 15 kilometers, has been the scene of several attacks in recent months, including a deadly stabbing in the settlement of Beit Horon a week ago, and a fatal attack on soldiers at a gas station along the highway in November.
UN chief ‘alarmed’ at Hamas vow to keep building Gaza tunnels, rockets
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed “alarm” Saturday at Hamas’s pledge the day before to keep building attack tunnels from Gaza into Israel and to advance the development of rockets to fire at the Jewish state.
Ban’s remarks came days after he prompted furious criticism from Israel for remarks that the Jewish state allegedly legitimized Palestinian terrorism.
In a statement issued by his spokesperson, the UN chief said remarks and actions like those undertaken by Hamas do “serious disservice” to Gaza’s population, and endanger efforts to rebuild the coastal enclave devastated in three rounds of fighting between Israel and Hamas since 2008.
“Such statements and actions put at risk reconstruction, humanitarian and development efforts by the international community and Palestinian and Israeli authorities. They also do a serious disservice to the long-suffering people of Gaza,” said Ban.
The UN chief also reiterated “his condemnation of terrorism in all its manifestations,” a reference to a row that erupted earlier in the week, when he drew fire in Israel for stating that the current wave of Palestinian violence could be rooted in “frustration.”
German paper uses Nazi language to blame Israel for Palestinian terrorism
An article in the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) has been accused of mimicking Nazi rhetoric by placing the blame for Palestinian terrorism squarely on Israel’s shoulders.
Titled, “Israel suffers for its cycle of revenge,” an article last week by the newspaper’s Israel-based correspondent, Peter Münch, quoted from an interview with Said Zidani, a Palestinian philosophy professor at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, in which he said Palestinians murder Israelis not only out of “desperation but [as] an act of resistance...”
According to the article, Zidani’s remarks did not amount to justifying the violence.
Experts on anti-Semitism thought differently.
“Such headlines project classical anti-Jewish stereotypes onto the Jewish state,” Prof. Monika Schwarz-Friesel told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. Schwarz-Friesel has made an exhaustive study of anti-Semitic language in Germany.
“The stereotype of Jewish revenge/vengefulness is an age-old Judeophobia concept that was articulated by the National Socialists,” she said. Schwarz-Friesel cited the infamous 1943 Posen speeches of SS head Heinrich Himmler calling for the extermination of European Jews. In addition to his call to murder all Jewish adults, Himmler urged the elimination of Jewish children to prevent them from seeking vengeance.
IsraellyCool Ahmad Manasrah Shot Execution Style But Still Alive
Clearly we’re just as good at executions as we are at genocide.
Not long ago Aussie Dave posted about London Jew haters protesting to free Ahmad Manasrah, the 13-year-old palestinian kid who stabbed a Jewish kid his age.
Well it continues now with yet another demo called for outside the Israeli embassy in London:
Shot execution Style by the Israelis and left to die in the middle of the street! no evidence against him he was kicked, abused & lay dieing in a pool of blood from multiple injuries and a headshot wound! Refused ambulance treatment & later tortured to make a false admission of a Crime!
Now he will be illegally trialled as a Adult under the new israeli policy making anyone over 14 years of age an Adult!
So what if Paris recognizes a Palestinian state?
There are two ways to look at the French threat to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state if the stalemate in the peace process persists.
We’ll get to the “it’s a serious challenge for Israel” folks lower down. But those who aren’t overly perturbed by the Paris ultimatum say: So what? Paris is free to convene an international conference to try to break the deadlock and get the two sides to make the concessions necessary for a peace deal. Since this outcome seems unlikely — or more accurately, utterly unrealistic — France can go ahead and recognize a “State of Palestine.” Such a move will be condemned in Jerusalem as unhelpful on the path to peace and celebrated in Ramallah as a great victory against the occupation. But declarations and recognitions change nothing on the ground.
A sovereign Palestinian state was not born in 1988, when Yasser Arafat proclaimed independence, or in 2012, when 139 states voted to grant “Palestine” nonmember observer state status at the United Nations, or in 2015, when the Palestinian flag was raised at UN headquarters in New York.
So French recognition of Palestinian statehood would be merely that: words on a piece of paper, and perhaps a solemn declaration by President Francois Hollande and another stately but ultimately meaningless photo op for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Netanyahu: French bid rewards Palestinian intransigence
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday took France to task for its latest Israeli-Palestinian peace talks pitch, saying the proposal would spur Palestinian inflexibility by guaranteeing recognition of a Palestinian state in advance.
“This will be an incentive for the Palestinians to come and not compromise,” Netanyahu said of the proposal in a press briefing before the start of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius had announced Friday that France would shortly try to convene an international conference with the hope of enabling new Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, but that if the effort hit a dead end, Paris would recognize a Palestinian state regardless.
“The substance of negotiations is compromise and the French initiative, as it has been reported, in effect gives the Palestinians in advance reasons not to do so,” Netanyahu said, adding that he expected the French to take their peace-making efforts seriously. “I believe that we will see a sobering up on this issue. In any case, we will work to bring this about and our position is very clear: We are prepared to enter into direct negotiations without preconditions and without dictated conditions.”
US and Britain snooped on Israeli anti-missile tests
The US and Britain reportedly monitored details of a rocket developed by Israel to test its anti-missile defense systems, as part of a massive eavesdropping program revealed last week.
The Americans and British gathered information about the Black Sparrow missile, which mimics the flight path of an incoming ballistic missile and has been used by Israel in tests of the Arrow and Magic Wand defense systems, the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported Sunday.
It was not clear from the report how the data was obtained or if it was taken directly from intercepted transmissions during flights of the Black Sparrow .
On April 1, 2015, a Black Sparrow was successfully intercepted during a test of the Magic Wand anti-missile system, also known as David’s Sling, the report said.
US envoy deflects spy revelations, touts ‘record’ Israel-US intel ties
US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro declined Friday to discuss revelations that his country and Britain have been spying on Israeli military operations for almost two decades, insisting instead that security cooperation between Jerusalem and Washington is at “an all-time high.”
“I will not relate to intelligence issues,” Shapiro told Channel 10 television in an interview conducted in Hebrew. “I can say that the cooperation between our intelligence services, and all the information and knowledge that we share through these channels is really exceptional, and at an all-time high.”
Israel’s military censor approved for publication earlier Friday that American and British intelligence services have spied on the Israeli air force for at least 18 years, after cracking the IDF’s special encryption system for communication between fighter jets, drones and army bases.
The two countries have reportedly used this access to monitor IDF operations in Gaza, watch for a potential Israeli strike on Iran, and keep tabs on the drone technology that Israel exports. Israel said later Friday it was disappointed but not surprised by the revelations.
The US Mosque Obama Has Chosen For His First Presidential Visit Has Deep Extremist Ties
The Baltimore mosque President Obama has chosen as the first U.S.-based mosque to visit during his presidency has deep ties to extremist elements, including to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The White House announced on Saturday that Obama will visit the Islamic Society of Baltimore (ISB) on Wednesday. He has visited several mosques overseas as president but has resisted visiting one in the homeland. The purpose of the trip, according to the White House, is to “celebrate the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation and reaffirm the importance of religious freedom to our way of life.”
But ISB is a curious choice for Obama’s first domestic visit.
The mosque is a member of a network of mosques controlled by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a Muslim civil rights group named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror case. Several executives with that organization were convicted of sending money to aid the terrorist group Hamas.
PreOccupiedTerritory: Kerry To Female Staff: Wear Burkhas When I Phone Zarif (satire)
US Secretary of State John Kerry ordered the women among his office’s staff to don modest attire in keeping with Islamic sensibilities when he is on his daily phone conversations with Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, Department sources reported today.
Following the Vatican’s expression of religious sensitivity in covering nude statues when President Hassan Rouhani visited the compound last week, Kerry came to the realization that was has been missing from the dynamic of his contacts with his counterpart in Tehran was a demonstration that the US is genuinely interested in accommodating Iran’s interests. According to staff members, the secretary told them that it would be easier for the two diplomats to reach understandings on key issues if he, Kerry, could “really see where Javad is coming from.” As such, they said, the secretary ordered all female State Department employees whose duties cause them to appear regularly in his proximity either to come to the office in a burkha or to keep such a modest outfit at the office for when he must phone Zarif.
“I am sure that each of us desires to maximize empathy and understanding in our dealings with Tehran,” wrote Kerry in a memo distributed to Department staff. “To that end, starting February 1 of this year, all female employees of this department will adorn themselves in the traditional Islamic garment known in many places as the burkha, so that we can adopt the right setting for generating a true meeting of the minds when I converse with my Iranian counterpart. Even such minor inconveniences can go a long way to fostering greater understanding between these two great societies, and I thank you for your cooperation in this regard.” The memo also included a list in the DC area of shops specializing in the sale of such garments.
Anti-Israel movement hijacks MLK Day again
It is a highly racist approach, seeking to exploit racial tensions by portraying Israel — and Israel alone — as the cause of problems it has nothing to do with. As we saw recently in Chicago at an LGBT conference and Oberlin College, because “intersectionality” theory portrays Israel as uniquely evil in the world, the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism quickly blurs.
This year, we are aware of two attempts to co-opt the memory of Dr. King by putting on anti-Israel events as part of MLK Day activities. There likely were many more that we don’t know about.
At George Mason University, the MLK Day Program featured and event by Students Against Israeli Apartheid showing an anti-Israel film.
George Mason’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Multicultural Education (ODIME) tweeted out the event:
That same George Mason office promoted the event on Facebook, with a more detailed poster of the event, which from the logo in the lower right appears to have been produced by George Mason:
At Ithaca College, the MLK Day events were sponsored by the Office of Student Engagement and Multicultural Affairs (OSEMA). One of the events promoted the Black-Palestinian solidarity movement.
Israel Spy Vulture Released by Lebanon, Joins “Breaking the Silence” (satire)
The accused “Mossad Spy Vulture” captured last week in Southern Lebanon has been returned to Israel with the assistance of the United Nations, but that is not the end of the story. The vulture, known as Eddie, has decided to join the controversial IDF veterans group “Breaking the Silence”, known for their whistleblowing activities and testimony against Israel.
Not surprisingly, this move has led to quite a bit of animosity with some of his former comrades from the Animal Kingdom. In fact, Eddie and the famous Mossad Spy Dolphin have been busy trading insults on Social Media for much of the weekend. As the war of words escalated, the Daily Freier was able to speak with Eddie via Skype.
“The dolphin? What a showboat. It was always about him. Not only that, but he was also kind of a racist, always reminding me that as a mammal he was more evolutionarily advanced than I was. What a jerk.” Eddie continued to vent about his former comrades. “Oh and by the way….. All the goofy stories about Israel’s spying animals? 100% True. The kestrel that the Turks put through an X-Ray machine looking for spy equipment? Well they should have looked harder. The hummingbird that was interrogated by a Turkish counter-terrorism team? That was us. The sharks that stalked the beaches off of Sinai? Us again. The wild pigs that ravage the West Bank? We release them every night…… But don’t take my word for it……Just Ask President Abbas!!!!!!! The vulture captured by the Saudis in 2011? He’s my cousin by marriage….but we no longer speak. They’re all feasting on a sheep carcass right now near the Kinneret. But do I get an invite? No. Not that I’m bitter. Being a truth-teller is not an easy path.”
In an effort to move on, Eddie plans to tour University campuses along the East Coast as part of an “Interfaith Dialogue and Reconciliation” tour with the Hamas Bumblebee later this Spring
Palestinian political analyst incites to kill Palestinian Authority President Abbas
A Palestinian professor and political analyst sparked controversy over the weekend when he argued that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas should be executed for violating Fatah's constitution.
Speaking on Palestinian TV on Friday, Abdel Sattar Qassem claimed that "Abu Mazen [Abbas] violates the Palestinian Revolutionary Penal Code issued by the PLO in 1979 and the constitution of the Palestinian Authority." According to Qassem, the Palestinian constitution states that the President of the Palestinian Authority is elected for a four-year term, while Abbas has already served 11 years with no elections. In addition, he claimed that the PLO Penal Code states that any PLO member who implements a policy of rapprochement with Israel or assistance to the Israeli occupation is to be executed.
Qassem's remarks against Abbas aroused furious responses from the Palestinian authority. Palestinian Minister of Waqf and Religious Affairs, Youssef Ideiss, spoke on Palestinian TV after Qassem, claiming that Qassem's remarks, inciting to kill the Palestinian Authority president, might bring about a civil war.
Hamas chief says no support from Iran in years
A senior Hamas official said his Gaza-based terror group has received no support from Iran since 2009, in a leaked phone call published in the Arab media on Sunday.
During the conversation, obtained by London-based daily A-Sharq al-Awsat, Hamas political chief Moussa Abu Marzouk is heard saying of the Iranians that “we haven’t gotten anything from them since 2009, and everything [the Iranians] are saying is a lie.”
The report did not specify when the phone call took place, nor with whom Abu Marzouk was ostensibly speaking.
Iran is widely believed to be funding Hamas, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah group, and other proxy terror groups in the Middle East.
According to Abu Marzouk, whenever the Iranians offered their support, they conditioned it on Hamas acting as mediator to improve ties between the Islamic Republic and Sunni states such as Sudan.
Abu Marzouk also denounced the Iranians for their support of the Houthi rebels in Yemen, describing their role in the conflict there as “negative.”
Iran says it has ‘doubled’ efforts to develop ballistic missiles
Tehran has doubled its efforts to develop its ballistic missile capabilities in reaction to US attempts to stop it, a top Iranian commander said Saturday.
“We doubled our activities and the American demands from Iran had an opposite result,” the country’s Press TV quoted Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ (IRGC) Aerospace Force, as saying.
“Today, the enemies are bringing up the issue of missile-related sanctions and expecting us to back down. But, the IRGC’s reaction to this American demand will be aggressive,” he said.
Hajizadeh said the US was still a dangerous enemy to Iran, despite the signing and recent implementation of a nuclear deal between the sides, and the subsequent removal of many of the international sanctions on the Islamic republic.
Turkey says Russian jet violated its airspace, summons envoy
A Russian SU-34 jet violated Turkish airspace on Friday despite radar warnings, Turkey's foreign ministry said on Saturday, underscoring the bitterness between the two countries involved in Syria's war.
The Russian ambassador was summoned over the incident late on Friday, the statement said, adding that the violation was a clear sign that Russia wanted issues between the two countries to escalate.
"We are making a clear call to the Russian Federation not to violate Turkish airspace, which is also NATO airspace," the statement said.
"We are emphasizing once again that the unwanted consequences of such irresponsible behavior will belong fully to the Russian Federation," it added.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged Russia on Saturday to "take all necessary measures" to ensure NATO airspace was not violated again.
PreOccupiedTerritory: At Least 45 Dead In Unimportant, Non-Israel-Inflicted Bombing (satire)
At least 45 people were killed and dozens more injured in a suburb of the Syrian capital today, in a triple bombing that was not perpetrated by Israel, and will therefore soon disappear from the international consciousness.
A car bomb exploded in Sayeda Zeinab, and then two suicide bombers detonated themselves as rescue work was occurring, according to witnesses cited by Reuters. The location, which boasts the oldest Shiite shrine in Syria, and the carnage, which so far includes 110 wounded, will soon drop out of the news cycle because no international bodies will call for an investigative commission into allegations of war crimes, as the bombing was not conducted by Israel.
Human rights groups such as Amnesty International quickly condemned the bombing, apparently by the Islamic State, as a violation of the Laws of Armed Conflict and of international humanitarian law, then lost interest as other events such as the existence of Israel grabbed their attention. After a flurry of head-shaking and stern words, the organizations determined that no more could be said or done on the matter, since it was not the Jewish State that had committed the atrocity, and that no further formal steps were necessary.
“This is a grave violation of the laws of war and quite likely a crime against humanity,” said Human Rights Watch director Ken Roth. “But by reacting to this event I have already departed from my self-imposed ratio of two anti-Israel tweets for every non-Israel-related tweet, and must now find two more things to criticize about Israel, so please excuse me.”
Vandalism Strikes Twice at Historic Jewish Cemetery in Connecticut
Two acts of vandalism were discovered at a historic Jewish cemetery in Connecticut recently, the Hartford Courant reported on Thursday.
Police were called to the Zion Hill Cemetery in Hartford on Wednesday morning, after an employee of the Association of Jewish Cemeteries was doing an inspection and found 20 headstones knocked over in Dreyfus Lodge, a plot in the cemetery.
A day later, Leonard J. Holtz, former president of Congregation Ados Israel, was walking in the cemetery and discussing the recent vandalism when he discovered 15 monuments that had been knocked down in the congregation’s plot.
Ados Israel, the first Orthodox synagogue in Hartford, closed in 1986 after 121 years. Holtz is a caretaker at the cemeteries where the former congregants are buried. Some of the toppled headstones date back to the 1920s and ’30s
Top Israeli honor eludes Goering’s brother, who heroically saved Jews
An upcoming BBC documentary is set to highlight the remarkable story of Albert Goering — the brother of Nazi minister and air force chief Hermann Goering — who is said to have saved hundreds of Jews and political dissidents during World War II.
However, despite the evidence pointing to Albert’s efforts to enable Jewish people and others to escape the Nazis, he is not in line for nomination as a Righteous Among the Nations, the highest honor bestowed by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Israel’s official Holocaust institute.
“There are indications that Albert Goering had a positive attitude to Jews and that he helped some people, but we do not have sufficient proof, i.e., primary sources, showing that he took extraordinary risks to save Jews from danger of deportation and death,” Yad Vashem told The Times of Israel on Monday.
Reports by the Gestapo, US Army interrogation records and survivor testimonies suggest that the younger Goering risked his life to save victims of the Nazi regime by obtaining exit permits for Jews and transferring their assets out of Germany. For instance, he is said to have secured the release of his Jewish former boss Oskar Pilzer, and to have helped Pilzer and his family escape from Germany. There is evidence Albert Goering also used his family connections to help get Jewish prisoners out of concentration camps, and to prevent the Gestapo from investigating his activities.
Minerva Labs wins inaugural Cybox contest
Cybox, a new contest that will annually select and announce the most innovative cyber defense startup in Israel, picked Minerva Labs as its first winner and the company most likely to make a significant impact on information security.
Minerva Labs — founded in 2014 by Edi Bobritzki, Erez Briman and Omri Moyal — has developed a novel, revolutionary product that protect systems from focused attacks without the need of prior knowledge, intelligence or recognition. In fact, the company’s patent-based solution created a new paradigm (prevention without recognition).
Minerva Labs was one of five companies selected to present its product in the Cybox competition that took place at the Cybertech 2016 conference. CyberTech organizers joined forces with Glilot Capital Partners to launch the Cybox contest.
“In the last years Israel has positioned itself as a source of innovation in the Cyber Security field. The CYBOX Contest will allow the next promising companies to get targeted exposure,” said Arik Kleinstein, CO-Founder & Managing Partners, Glilot Capital Partners.
Israeli screen-printed tights make sexy fashion statement
Dancers in the opening show for the Barneys New York 2014 holiday windows wore Stern Tights.
The “Women Fashion Power” exhibition last year at the London Design Museum was accompanied by a sale of Stern Tights in the museum shop.
Fashion bloggers love them and customers order them from four continents.

Ironically, the creator of the coveted collections of hand-printed luxury tights from Israel is more likely to wear jeans than hosiery.
“I wasn’t a tights person, but since I started making them I hear there aren’t products like mine out there and people want it,” says textile designer Gal Stern in a Skype interview from her Ramat Gan studio.
Israeli virologist hunting for clues to Zika outbreak
Since last May, a Zika virus outbreak in Brazil has coincided with an alarming increase in birth defects including microcephaly, an abnormally small brain.
More than 1.5 million Brazilians are infected, including some 2,000 pregnant women, and the virus is spreading explosively in Colombia, with cases also in El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela and Puerto Rico.
The World Health Organization convened an emergency committee to discuss the pandemic expected to affect three to four million people, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned pregnant women to avoid visiting countries where Zika has been reported.
In response to this deepening crisis, Israeli virologist Dr. Leslie Lobel and a handful of colleagues around the world are stepping up their research of Zika and other arboviruses, so called because they are borne by arthropods, especially mosquitos.
Quality of life in Israel among world's highest, report says
Israel is enjoying relatively high economic growth compared to other nations, according to the biannual report by the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, which OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria was due to present to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday.
The report says that Israel's employment rate is high and increasing, and that per capita income, which stands at an average of $35,000 per year, approaches the per capita income of most advanced countries.
Moreover, the report says that the quality of life in Israel is among the highest enjoyed by OECD member nations. It rated Israel third in quality of life among advanced nations, after Japan and Switzerland.
Israel is better prepared that other OECD nations to deal with an aging population, but public expenditure on pensions is low, according to the report, which also said that Israel's banking and finance sector demonstrated impressive stability.


We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
        





burdenOne of the most hysterical aspects of this political moment in the West is the phenomenon of blatant left-leaning racists who self-righteously claim to stand against racism.

The hypocrisy is both obvious and rich.

The most racist political movement in the West today, aside from political Islam, is western-progressivism, a political movement allegedly, and ironically, grounded in anti-racism. The western-progressive variety of racism, however, is not the old-timey, outright racism of the early-middle twentieth-century. It is not your grandfather's racism. It is not the racism of the Klan or the Nazis, but of what Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld dubbed in 2012 "Humanitarian racism."

Contemporary humanitarian racism is something akin to late nineteenth-century imperial racism wherein the American elite, and others of the wealthy and white-skinned persuasion, told themselves that they had a moral obligation to take care of their "little brown brothers." They called it "white man's burden," Lloyd.

Gerstenfeld writes:
The basic views of humanitarian racists are very similar to those of the ugly type. They may claim, for example, that most contemporary problems of African states result from the colonial period, even if these countries have been independent for many decades. This in fact means that Africans cannot be responsible for their actions. The humanitarian racist’s worldview is as distorted as that of the ugly racist. It is not stated explicitly, but only implicitly in his words.

The humanitarian racist’s conclusion differs, however, from that of the ugly racist. He or she considers that as the non-white or weak cannot be held responsible for their acts, one should look away as often as possible even if they commit major crimes. Ugly racists fortunately can no longer get articles published in mainstream media, but humanitarian racists unfortunately are welcomed by them.
Not only are humanitarian racists welcome in western publishing houses, they are also welcome at the highest levels of western governments, including the White House. The Obama administration, for example, is determinedly racist. Not only is Barack Obama deeply skeptical of Jewish self-determination and self-defense on historically Jewish land, but he also considers people "of color," aside from Jews, to be mere victims of white colonial oppression and, therefore, like small children, not really responsible for their words and behavior.

How else to explain the fact that Obama pats the Iranians on the head, while giving them hundreds of billions of dollars, even as their leadership screeches for the death of America and the genocide of the Jews? How else does one explain the fact that the Obama administration supported the Muslim Brotherhood economically, militarily, and diplomatically, despite the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood not only called for the conquest of Jerusalem, but is the parent organization of al-Qaeda, and thus the grandparent of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)?

And now we have the ongoing spectacle of one of the most anti-Semitic presidents since the UN's recognition of the State of Israel in 1948 constantly telling Jewish people how much he appreciates us and cares for us even as he perpetually kicks Israel in the teeth. This is a president of the United States who, much like Italian princes during the Medieval period, honestly believes that he has every right to tell Jewish people where we may, or may not, be allowed to live.

It is entirely outrageous, obviously anti-Semitic, and almost never commented upon.

And now this racist president of the United States has the temerity to stand up before the international Jewish community, at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on a day set aside for commemoration of the Holocaust, no less, and declares that "we are all Jews."

Well, that is very sweet, but not everyone seems to agree. Writing at Israellycool Varda Epstein tells us:
He was there to commemorate the Holocaust on a day the UN chose to be International Holocaust Day. Just as the President throws Israel under the bus but proves his love for the Jews by giving a speech at a place associated with the Jewish State, so too, the UN created a day to prove its empathy for Jewish victims, while thumbing its nose at Israel, by way of ignoring Israel’s chosen date for this celebration, Yom HaShoah.

And of course, the President’s speech on this day said one thing and meant another. He said:

“We are all Jews, because anti-Semitism is a distillation, an expression of an evil that runs through so much of human history, and if we do not answer that, we do not answer any other form of evil.”

To those who defend the President, these words mean that he identifies with the plight of Jews and is staunch in the fight against antisemitism.

But to people whose critical thinking skills remain intact, the president is saying, “Jews are nothing special. They are no different than anyone else. Antisemitism is not special or unique. It’s just another kind of racism, just a garden variety evil, no different than any other.”
The fact of the matter is that Barack Obama is neither a friend to the Jewish people nor a friend to the Jewish State of Israel. He is, in fact, a racist, but not merely toward Jews, but also toward non-white people, particularly those of the African or Middle Eastern varieties.

Toward us his racism is more traditional and what Gerstenfeld refers to as the "ugly variety." Toward other groups Obama's racism, like western-left racism, more generally, is of the "humanitarian" variety.  There is, however, one thing that Obama's racism toward Jews and toward non-Jewish people "of color" have in common.

They are both characterized by treacly condescension.


Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
        



Last week came the bombshell news that Israeli air footage was being intercepted by US and UK intelligence for years:

The United States and Britain have monitored secret sorties and communications by Israel's air force in a hacking operation dating back to 1998, according to documents attributed to leaks by former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Israel voiced disappointment at the disclosures, which were published on Friday in three media outlets and might further strain relations with Washington after years of feuding over strategies on Iran and the Palestinians.

Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth daily said the U.S. National Security Agency, which specializes in electronic surveillance, and its British counterpart GCHQ spied on Israeli air force missions against the Palestinian enclave Gaza, Syria and Iran.

The spy operation, codenamed "Anarchist", was run out of a Cyprus base and targeted other Middle East states too, it said. Its findings were mirrored by stories in Germany's Der Spiegel news magazine and the online publication The Intercept, which lists Snowden confidant Glenn Greenwald among its associates.
The article in The Intercept that describes how they did it shows a shocking fact - Israel didn't really encrypt the communications. It merely scrambled them in a way that could be unscrambled using public domain tools.
According to GCHQ Anarchist training manuals from 2008, analysts took snapshots of live signals and would process them for “poor quality signals, or for scrambled video.”

The manuals stated that video feeds were scrambled using a method similar to that used to protect the signals of subscriber-only TV channels. Analysts decoded the images using open-source code “freely available on the internet” — a program known as AntiSky. The attack reconstructed the image by brute force, allowing intelligence agents to crack the encryption without knowing the algorithm that had been used to scramble the video.
Encryption is encoding information that cannot be seen without a "key" (or an error in the encryption algorithm.)

But Antisky (named because the original scrambling algorithm was used by UK's Sky network) doesn't decrypt in the real sense of the word. It figures out how to reproduce video scrambled with an algorithm caled Videocrypt. As its documentation describes:
Videocrypt rotates individual lines, or in other words, every line is cut at a secret point in two parts and then both parts are exchanged. I.e. if an original line in the pixtures was

0123456789

(each digit represents one pixel), then the rotated version (here with offset 3) looks like

7890123456

What the first step of the ANTISKY algorithm is doing is only to compare this rotated line in all 10 offsets

7890123456
6789012345
5678901234
...
9012345678
8901234567

with the previous line. The measure of how good this line compares in one particular offset to the previous one is the sum of the products between pixels in the same column. In the output picture, consecutive lines are rotated relative to each other, so that this measure is maximized. The first line is not touched.
Since virtually every line in a video is very similar to the line above it, the Antisky program reshuffles each line of video until is matches as closely as possible the previous line.

This is compute intensive which is why it cannot be used to descramble the signal in real time, but individual shots can be decoded with the right equipment in a few minutes. The leakers published a short manual on exactly what operators need to do to descramble signals using both Antisky and ImageMagick.

What this comes down to is that the Israelis relied on an old technology (at least from 1994) to obfuscate, but not encrypt, the video signals coming from the drones

There is one other leaked document from 2010 that seems to indicate a different method of extracting the signals that had been upgraded to digital, not the analog signals from the earlier drones (and other equipment.) But although that document indicates that they had not been fully successful at decoding all the signals, they were able to decode multiple video streams from the same drone, again indicating that there was no encryption of the signal - the analysts just had to figure out what algorithms were being used to digitize the data, and therefore how to extract each video from a larger data stream.

This is a major screw-up on Israel's part.


We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
        

From BBC:

Two men who were sentenced to life imprisonment alongside Nelson Mandela in South Africa have received the Freedom of the City of London.

Ahmed "Kathy" Kathrada and Denis Goldberg were both jailed because of their activities during the Apartheid period.

Lord Mayor Jeffrey Mountevans said the honour was a "tribute to the noble and fearless fortitude" of the men.

They received the accolade with their defence team at the Guildhall.

The City of London said the men were awarded in recognition of their fight for freedom and racial equality.
Ahmed Kathrada is an unapologetic supporter of Palestinian terrorism, as this 2014 excerpt from BBC's Hardtalk shows:


Speaking in the context of bus bombings and the terror crimes of Marwan Barghouti, Kathrada says that if the Palestinian leaders (which presumably includes Hamas as well as Fatah,) "If they, in their wisdom, resort to violence,  as the only method, I'll support them. ...My support is wholehearted."

Kathrada also says that, in all the years of Palestinian terror, he has not seen a single thing to criticize them about.

This is what is considered a hero by the world nowadays.

(h/t SpotlightingSA)


We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
        

Saturday, January 30, 2016

The latest edition of EoZTV, about the State Department's claim that the regulations that were just published are nothing new...







We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
        

From Ian:

Ben-Dror Yemini: The apartheid myth
Despite the slanderous propaganda against Israel, the Palestinians not only have a parliament, but also higher education institutions, a police force, security forces, a justice system and prisons. Is this apartheid? Thanks to Israeli rule, they're number 1 among university graduates in the Arab world. Is this oppression?
A Kabbalat Shabbat was supposed to take place at the Chicago LGBTQ conference last Friday, but it was canceled by the organizers, and after being hit with criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, the cancelation was canceled. Except that when the Kabbalat Shabbat began, hundreds of hooligans from the forces of progress barged in. It happened, among other reasons, due to the participation of a representative from the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance, Sarah Kala-Meir. The cries of "apartheid" were joined with, as always, the leading slogan: "From Jordan to the sea, Palestine will be free."
The useful idiots, gays and lesbians donning keffiyehs, have never seemed more pathetic. After all, each and every one of them would have been thrown off a tall building, like a bag of potatoes, in nearly every single one of Israel's neighboring countries. But their problem is with Israel.
VIDEO: Ceiling collapses on Palestinians during funeral for Hamas tunnel diggers
Problems appear to be coming in spades for the Islamist group Hamas and its followers in the Gaza Strip.
During a mass funeral for seven Hamas operatives who died after the tunnel in which they were digging collapsed due to the heavy rains that pounded the region earlier this week, a number of Palestinians required medical treatment when the ceiling of a kiosk in Gaza City collapsed under the weight of a number of people who were standing on the rooftop.
The number of people injured was not confirmed. Medical crews rushed to the scene to administer emergency treatment.
The video was taken from Arab sources and posted by 0404, a Hebrew-language Internet news site.
BBC News sidesteps the real issues in Hamas tunnel collapse story
The BBC News website’s reporting of that story – in a January 28th article titled “Gaza: Hamas militants die in tunnel collapse” – focused readers’ attentions on factors other than the core issue of Hamas policies and actions which will inevitably lead to an additional round of conflict.tunnel collapse art
The article fails to adequately distinguish between the smuggling tunnels in the area of the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt and the offensive tunnels constructed under the border with Israel.
“Palestinian militants have used tunnels on Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt to launch attacks on Israel, transport weapons or smuggle goods.”
Despite the fact that the tunnel in this particular story has no connection to smuggling, a relatively large proportion of the article is devoted to that topic.
Once again BBC audiences are steered towards the inaccurate impression that smuggling tunnels are a product of the “blockade” when in fact they pre-date the border restrictions. No effort is made to provide audiences with appropriate context concerning the fact that the restrictions imposed by Israel in 2007 came about because of Hamas’ terrorist activities.
Neither is any effort made to clarify the issue of how Hamas acquired the materials necessary for the rehabilitation of its network of offensive tunnels: an omission which is particularly glaring in light of the fact that the BBC has devoted considerable air-time and column space to the topic of the import of construction materials into the Gaza Strip since the end of the 2014 conflict.



Israeli teen lightly hurt in Jerusalem stabbing attack
A 17-year-old Israeli youth was lightly wounded Saturday afternoon in a stabbing attack at the Damascus Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem.
The Israeli was said to be lightly wounded in the back in the attack, which occurred on Sultan Suleiman Street at around 5:35 p.m.
Initial reports said two attackers fled the scene and were being hunted by security forces. Police later announced the detention of two minors, both residents of East Jerusalem, who matched the descriptions of the attackers. The two were handed over for interrogation.
Both are apparently aged 15, Channel 2 television said.
Magen David Adom paramedics administered emergency first aid at the scene of the attack before evacuating the victim to Hadassah University Hospital on Mount Scopus.
Edgar Davidson: BBC's ludicrous response to my complaint about its report on the murder of Dafna Meir
On 18 January I made a formal complaint to the BBC about its online report on the terrorist attack that killed Dafna Meir. My complaint was based on what I wrote here.
Below is the main part of the response (which failed to address many of the complaints I raised) from Brian Irvine. I have highlighted some especially dubious parts, but the most ludicrous is the whole paragraph in response to the complaint that the BBC never mentions Palestinians as being the perpetrators. Irvine's response is to deny this by pointing to a different report of a different terrorist attack - a report dated 8 days after my complaint - in which he says Palestinians were mentioned as being the perpetrators. So - no need to be accurate in a report so long as you can point to some different report which was accurate. This suggests the BBC's policy is to routinely fail to mention Palestinians as being the perpetrators in its reports of terrorist attacks by Palestinians as long as once in a blue moon this rather salient fact is mentioned (also note that the report he links to was the murder of Shlomit Kreigman - but you would not know this because Shlomit's name is never mentioned - another example, in fact, of the BBC's dehumanisation of Israeli victims).
Israeli minister grants unprecedented interview to Saudi news site
An Israeli government minister granted an unprecedented interview to a Saudi news site on Friday.
In a sign of warming, albeit unofficial, ties between the Jewish state and the House of Saud, Ze’ev Elkin, the minister of immigrant absorption, told the Elaph Arab-language web site on Friday that Israel continues to maintain the status quo at the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem.
Israel and Saudi Arabia’s shared enmity for Iran has created an opening for dialogue, although any communication between government officials is likely to remain secret as Riyadh does not formally recognize “the Zionist entity.”
“Jerusalem is relatively calm in both [the east and the west],” said Elkin, whose ministerial portfolio also includes responsibility for Jerusalem-related affairs. “The wave of incitement this past year generated a wave of terrorism that is almost over in Jerusalem and has spread to Judea and Samaria.”
“Anyone who visits Jerusalem doesn’t see anything abnormal,” the minister told Elaph. “Accusations against Israel of violating the status quo on Temple Mount are false, because the directives from the prime minister are to prevent Jews from praying in Aksa mosque, and this is because it’s against the law.”
France: We will recognize Palestinian state if talks deadlock persists
France warned Friday that it will recognize a Palestinian state if its imminent efforts to end the deadlock in peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians end without result.
“France will engage in the coming weeks in the preparation of an international conference bringing together the parties and their main partners, American, European, Arab, notably to preserve and make happen the solution of two states,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.
France, Fabius said, has a responsibility as a permanent member of the UN Security Council to sustain efforts to reach a two-state solution.
Should efforts to breathe life into the moribund peace process fail, France would move to unilaterally recognize Palestine as a state, Fabius made clear. “And what will happen if this last-ditch attempt at reaching a negotiated solution hits a stumbling block?” he said. “In that case, we will have to live up to our responsibilities and recognize a Palestinian state.”
Israel rejects French ultimatum: ‘This isn’t how one makes peace’
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announced earlier in the day that France would shortly try to convene an international conference, with the hope of enabling new Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, but that if this effort reached a dead end, Paris would recognize a Palestinian state.
“And what will happen if this last-ditch attempt at reaching a negotiated solution hits a stumbling block?” Fabius said. “In that case, we will have to live up to our responsibilities and recognize a Palestinian state.”
Israel rejected the approach. “This is not how one conducts negotiations and not how one makes peace,” an Israeli official was quoted by the Hebrew daily Haaretz as saying.
An unnamed American official also cautiously rejected the French proposal, according to Reuters. “The US position on this issue has been clear. We continue to believe that the preferred path to resolve this conflict is for the parties to reach an agreement on final status issues directly,” the official said.
Abbas welcomes French statehood plan: ‘We will no longer accept occupation’
Speaking at a summit of African nations in Addis Ababa, Abbas blasted the occupation, settlements, and what he said was Israel’s seizure of Palestinian natural resources. He also accused the Israeli government of stalling peace efforts by the international community.
“We cannot accept the current situation, including the occupation and settlements,” he said, the Maariv website reported.
“We have to establish a sovereign state with East Jerusalem as its capital,” he said, according to the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa. “We won’t accept interim or temporary solutions.”
“We won’t return to negotiations just for the sake of negotiating and won’t continue to unilaterally implement previous agreements,” Abbas told the summit. Nor will the Palestinians “accept the theft of our natural resources, and the non-utilization of our lands or investment in them,” he said.
“The region will not enjoy security and stability unless the Israeli occupation and settlement activities end,” Abbas continued. “We will stay here on our land and in our homeland, where we have developed our historical and cultural identity and made humanitarian contributions for thousands of years.”
Report: Hamas naval commando dies at sea during 'jihadi mission'
Hamas affiliated media sources reported on Saturday that one of the group's naval operatives died overnight during a mission at sea opposite the Gaza coast, Israel Radio reported.
Palestinian media initially reported that the deceased was a fisherman who drowned when he fell off his boat.
Israel news outlet Walla named the commando as Hamdi al-Sultan, adding that he died while carrying out a 'jihadi mission.'
The IDF does not comment on incidents that occur outside of Israeli territory.
In September, Hamas announced that another member of its naval commando unit drowned in a training accident off Gaza.
AJC in Berlin urges change in Arab refugees’ anti-democratic values
Amid fears that Muslim refugees’ arrival to Germany may cause problems for local Jews, the American Jewish Committee in Berlin called for a national summit on ways to combat anti-democratic values among the newcomers.
“It is five minutes before midnight, but not yet too late,” said AJC Berlin director Deidre Berger in a statement published Thursday, which calls for holding a national summit on strict educational priorities for refugees.
Approximately 1 million migrants entered Germany in 2015; more than half have asked for asylum. A majority come from Syria and other Muslim countries. Watchdog groups in France and the Netherlands said immigrants who arrived from the 1950s onward and their descendants are responsible for most violent anti-Semitic incidents today, as well as increases in attacks.
Berger’s words echo the concerns of Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who has asked for reassurances that Chancellor Angela Merkel would take Jewish concerns seriously.
War of words: Defeating the distortion of the IDF
My Truth, a group of volunteer IDF reserve soldiers who came together around half-a-year ago to combat the delegitimization of the army conducted by the radical leftist NGO Breaking the Silence, is gearing up to release a report on what actually goes on in the IDF.
One of the main directors of the group, Emanuel Miller, spoke with Arutz Sheva on Wednesday about the new crowdfunding campaign launched in recent days to realize the group's testimony project.
He describes the project as "a formal, comprehensive report, written in Hebrew and English, backed up with video clips, of statements from reserve soldiers about their experiences in the army. With the help of our volunteers, and together with you, we can make the project a reality and help show the real face of the IDF."
Donations to the project can be given here. With 40 days to go as of Wednesday, it is at 39% of its goal of 80,000 shekels (just over $20,100).
Israelly Cool: “My Truth” Breaks The Silence
My Truth, an organisation of IDF reservists who came together over the last half-year to oppose the demonisation and distortions being told about the army by Breaking the Silence, is planning to produce an unprecedented dossier about what actually goes on in the IDF.
Last year, after discovering that Breaking the Silence’s May 2015 report into Operation Protective Edge was filled with half-truths, devoid of context and obsessed over minor Israeli mistakes while neglecting to show the massive humanitarian efforts implemented by the IDF, one reservist by the name of Avihai Shorshan had enough.
Shorshan wrote a Facebook post that went viral overnight. Knowing that IDF soldiers endanger themselves to a large extent due to their requirement to adhere to a strict moral code, he began a Hebrew Facebook page called האמת שלי (HaEmet Sheli) to counter the misleading and damaging statements being told about the army and educate about the way the IDF operates. In just half a year it has already reached the European Parliament, garnered over 23,000 “likes” and representatives of the organisation have been interviewed in the Israeli media dozens of times.
Breaking The Silence is succeeding internationally mostly because of the international community’s willingness to listen to stories that harm Israel’s image. Because of this, My Truth faces an uphill climb and needs support to get the real testimonies out there.
Anti-Israel Groups Team Up to Attack Florida’s Anti-Boycott Legislation
A coalition of pro-BDS groups including Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) have partnered with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in a bid to defeat HB 527, and sent representatives to attend the appropriations committee hearing on Wednesday. According to the Sentinel, some members of SJP told the committee that the bill infringed on their right to free speech. However, as HB 527 does not outlaw boycotts of Israel, but rather establishes that tax-payer money should not be involved in such efforts, the committee rejected their argument.
The coalition also launched a website called “Stop Joe’s Bill” in an attempt to stop passage of the Senate version of the anti-BDS legislation, which is sponsored by state Sen. Joe Negron (R). The website describes BDS as an effort to “shed light on the apartheid conditions” faced by Palestinians, and features a video that calls Israel a “hyper militaristic paraiah state.”
The rhetoric echoes language routinely employed by many of the individual groups in the coalition, which have previously faced charges of whitewashing Palestinian terrorism and engaging in anti-Semitic discrimination.
“SJP and/or its members spend almost all of their energy demonizing Israel, advocating for its eventual destruction, showing an unfortunate affinity for pro-terrorist figures, bullying and intimidating pro-Israel and Jewish students with vicious and sometimes anti-Semitic rhetoric, and even at times engaging in physical violence,” wrote Daniel Mael in the October 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, adding that the group previously sponsored an event featuring a known fundraiser for the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.
Guest Lecturer Shouted Down by Violent, Anti-Israel Protesters on London Campus: Invite Me Back for Stand on Free Speech
The former Shin Bet chief whose lecture at a King’s College London student event earlier this month sparked a violent anti-Israel protest requested to be asked back, the UK’s Jewish Chronicle reported on Wednesday.
Ami Ayalon, previously head of Israel’s internal security service and currently a peace activist and fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, was referring to the January 19 event, co-sponsored by the KCL and London School of Economics Israel Societies, which – as The Algemeiner reported — was disrupted by chants of “Free Palestine,” the throwing of chairs, the breaking of a window, the setting off of fire alarms and a physical assault on one of the organizers.
According to the JC, Ayalon said he should be invited “as soon as possible to show that a person like me can give his speech and open it to a debate… The response should be to show you can do it. In England, you can create such an event that will not be violent and the speaker will have the floor to present his ideas and everyone will be able to oppose his ideas and respond.”
LGBT community wakes up to the BDS evil among it
None of this is happenstance.
Physical intimidation is the key to recent BDS activity, with speakers being shouted down and disrupted. The twisted doctrine of “Intersectionality” of which anti-pinkwashing is one version, makes Israel — and Israel alone — the common link among unrelated wrongs and problems in the world. Intersectionality has become the intellectual foundation of the movement.
That the LBGT community is waking up to what BDS really is, is not surprising. It’s sad that is took an incident like this to make it happen.
BDS Doctors Who Prescribe a Poison Pill for Israel Violate the Hippocratic Oath
Seventy-one British doctors are the most recent group calling for a boycott of Israel. Last week, they signed a letter to the World Medical Association (WMA) requesting the expulsion of the Israeli Medical Association, alleging that Israeli doctors carry out “medical torture” on Palestinian patients.
According to Dr. Ze’ev Feldman, chairman of the Israeli Medical Association World Fellowship, “A boycott of the Israeli Medical Association would prevent Israelis from participating in medical conferences [and] publishing papers in journals, would halt funding of research and joint research endeavors, and prevent membership in other medical associations.”
Whether they are successful or not, other academic networks seeking to exclude Israeli academics from their associations, such as the American Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, and others, aim to delegitimize and marginalize Israeli scholars. This is pernicious enough, but in the parlance of the medical profession it does no physical harm.
On the other hand, the expulsion of the Israeli Medical Association from the WMA, by hindering the “funding of research and joint research endeavors,” would slow down and/or prevent future medical cures from reaching not only the Israeli-Jewish population, but also the Palestinian-Arab population as well as the rest of the global population — which, incidentally, includes the boycotters themselves and their friends and relatives in the United Kingdom.
No, NLRB did not rule that unions could boycott Israel
The National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) decided earlier this month that unions may “endorse” the boycott, divest and sanction (“BDS”) campaign against Israel without running afoul of the National Labor Relations Act’s (the “Act”) ban on so-called “secondary boycotts.” But the case did not affirm that unions actually could engage in the boycott, since that issue was not before the Board.
Nonetheless, some people inaccurately are spinning the decision as the NLRB giving BDS a green light.
The issue arose when the the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (the “Union”) passed a resolution endorsing BDS in August, 2015. The Union is self-consciously radical – its website calls for “aggressive struggle,” blames “bosses and bankers,” and promises that it is “Fighting for Workers’ Rights in the New World Order.” In addition to a slew of posts about BDS and “build[ing] solidarity” with Palestinians, the Union’s Political Action update opposes the TransPacific Partnership, defends Venezuela’s farcical “democracy” and effectively endorses Bernie Sanders:
Dozens of Italian academics call for boycott of Israeli universities
Italian academics have signed a petition calling for a boycott of Israeli universities due to their “notorious complicity” with the country’s “state violence.”
The petition, which was published Wednesday, is signed by 168 Italian academics from more than 50 institutes, including the universities of Rome, Turin and Florence, as well as the European University Institute. The campaign stresses its support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, calling the petition an act of solidarity.
In the statement accompanying the signatures, the campaign denounces “the utter lack of any serious condemnation” of government policy by the Israeli institutes since the creation of the state in 1948.
The petition singles out the Technion, Israel’s Haifa-based institute of technology, which it claims “is involved more than any other university in the Israeli military-industrial complex.” The institute, the blurb continues, “carries out research in a wide range of technologies and weapons used to oppress and attack Palestinians.” It gives as an example Technion research into tunnel-detecting equipment, which it claims is “developed specifically to maintain Israel’s siege on the Gaza Strip.”
Gay Saudi Man Sentenced to Death Really Hopes U.S. College Students Get Their ‘Safe Spaces’ (satire)
Mohammad Mansour, 28, is a gay Saudi Arabian man, which is ironic because he hasn’t been very happy lately. Mansour has been upset because he hasn’t slept well in days, and also, he’s currently being held in a Saudi prison on charges of engaging in “icky, gay stuff.” Though he’s attempted to reach out for help from human rights groups, Mansour recognizes that his case is most likely hopeless, as the world often has trouble criticizing the only country that leaks oil the way people who eat Chipotle leak Chipotle. The key to staying positive, says the Homorabian, is to focus on a cause. In this case, the cause is privileged American college students.
“It just breaks my heart when I see their feelings hurt,” Mansour said via a message given to The Mideast Beast by the prison. “All they want is to have spaces where nothing makes them uncomfortable. I respect that.” But, there are those who think that the situation is a lot like seeing a dog, dressed in his Sunday best, walking down the street on his hind legs with his person wearing the collar and leash – backwards. They even think that it’s a bit like having a superfluously long set up for a joke that’s mediocre at best – sad. These misguided souls seem to think that the students would be better served fighting for the freedom of people like Mansour, rather than pursuing the narcissistic goal of creating a feelings-condom to act as a prophylactic against insult-STDs. But it seems that these students, who in the context of history are among some of the most privileged whiners that have ever lived, are so full up of indignant self-righteousness that they can’t hear Mansour’s cries for help.
The drip drip of politicised geography on BBC Two
Throughout this month BBC Two has been showing a series titled ‘Immortal Egypt’ presented by Egyptologist Professor Joann Fletcher of York University. The fourth and final episode opened with footage of Fletcher in Alexandria, telling audiences that:
“This is about as far north in Egypt as it’s possible to get because out there is the Mediterranean. To my west is Libya; to my east – Palestine and Arabia….”
Libya does indeed of course lie to the west of Egypt but to its east, Egypt has borders with the Gaza Strip and a country called Israel – which the BBC has apparently found fit to inaccurately rebrand as ‘Palestine’.
Is Mart Green Video Gone Baby Gone?
What happened to the 2010 video Little Town of Bethlehem? Has it been taken off the market?
One can only hope.
In November, 2015 CAMERA published an article about Little Town of Bethlehem, written and directed by Jim Hanon. This ugly propagandistic movie was produced by Mart Green, heir to the Hobby Lobby fortune and longtime CEO of Mardel's, a chain of Christian bookstores that he founded. In the article, CAMERA highlighted some of the factual misstatements, omissions and distortions present in this movie.
One of the biggest problems with the movie is that it allows Sami Awad, executive director of the Holy Land Trust to tell viewers that “The First Intifada is a lot like the Civil Rights movement in the U.S.”
This is simply false. The First Intifada was marked by terrible acts of violence that would have been condemned by civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Awad also tells viewers that unemployment increased during the Oslo peace process and that this increase was one of the contributing factors to the growing popularity of the terror organization Hamas prior to the Second Intifada.
In fact, unemployment in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank decreased during Oslo because of increased job opportunities in Israel.
Exciting Contest From The New York Times! Find the Factual Statement in Today’s Diaa Hadid Column! (satire)
Readers of the New York Times are in for a unique treat as the Paper of Record has launched an exciting contest. From now through the end of February, New York Times Middle East Reporter Diaa Hadid places one factual statement in each of her stories and challenges you to find it!
New York Times’ Reader Advocate Margaret Sullivan explained the contest. “Think of this as a ‘Where’s Waldo?’ of the Middle East, except instead of looking for a goofy dork in a striped shirt, you’re looking for something Diaa said that wasn’t hearsay, rumor, cock and bull story, or fantasy!” Ms. Sullivan continued. “This may stop us from having to provide disclaimers and editorial corrections to each of her stories…..Basically, it’s all about context. If we change the narrative from trying to spot the falsehoods in Diaa’s work to trying to find the real stuff, them that is a real win-win across the board.”
Intrepid Times readers who find the factual statement in a given article are entitled to their choice of an NPR totebag, a CD of James Taylor and Carole King live in concert from Tanglewood, or a $20 gift certificate to Zabars.
Pantera singer in Nazi salute storm unrepentant
The former frontman of influential heavy metal band Pantera gave a Nazi-style salute on stage at a star-studded Los Angeles charity concert and appeared to shout “White Power!”
A YouTube clip posted by an audience member showed singer Phil Anselmo raising his arm before seemingly making the offensive remark.
Anselmo, who has refused to apologize for the slur, was standing on a mostly empty stage at the end of a January 22 concert raising money for cancer research.
He had been performing Pantera covers with major stars including Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, who is known for left-leaning politics, and Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo.
Anselmo justified himself in the comments section on YouTube, saying the gesture was an inside joke after the band members had been drinking white wine.
Telemedicine kit lets parents skip germ-ridden waiting rooms
Your preschooler wakes up with an earache and fever. You tell your boss you’ll be late to work, wangle a pediatrician appointment, bundle up the sick kid, sit in a waiting room full of other sick kids, spend five minutes with the doctor, and leave with a prescription and/or orders to return for a follow-up exam.
All parents loathe this scenario, but Israeli dad and healthcare industry entrepreneur Dedi Gilad took the initiative to change it. His vision was a home telemedicine kit to help parents perform standard throat, ear, eye, skin, heart and lung examinations of high enough quality to enable a remote diagnosis by the child’s physician. And it would not be limited only to pediatric patients.
In 2012, Gilad and Ofer Tzadik founded TytoCare and spent nearly three years perfecting the technology and design. The Netanya-based company raised $18.5 million from investors including US drugstore chain Walgreens, and now is beta-testing its user-friendly kits for home and clinical use.
The telehealth platform and home kit includes a modular device with a stethoscope, otoscope and computer-vision camera, along with smart audio-visual guidance to the user. Exam results are transmitted to the patient’s chosen clinician via a HIPAA-compliant secure connection.
Israeli Mining Company Discovers Rare Minerals Near Haifa
Shefa Yamim, an Israeli exploration and mining company, announced that it has discovered rare minerals near Israel’s port city of Haifa.
A report prepared by geologist William Griffin of Australia’s Macquarie University examined the mineral samples of corundum stones sent to him by Shefa Yamim, which found the stones in several sites in the Kishon River. The corundum stones contain a variety of rare minerals, including Moissanite and tistarite.
“Until now, [tistarite] has been found on a single meteorite that came from outer space; this has been the first find in nature in nature of this mineral, whose source is deep inside the Earth,” Shefa Yamim said, Haaretz reported.
Almost half of the components found inside the corundum stones are not yet identifiable. Shefam Yamim’s shares went up 6.5 percent on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange following the company’s announcement on the mineral.
5 Israeli Tech Startups Crushing Their Overseas Competition
If your business is situated in Asia, Europe, or the United States, you already know that the high-tech industry in Israel is a force to be reckoned with — together, this past year, startups in Israel raised $3.58B, not including the 69 that were sold for $5.41B. In fact, according to a recent report by Geektime and Zirra, Israel leads the way (by far!) in investment dollars per capita. It’s not farfetched then, to claim that the high-tech startups and solutions bred in Israel are outshining their competition overseas, not just in terms of investments, but also in innovation and technology, as well. That said, here are six startups in Israel that China, the US, and Europe better watch out for this upcoming year:
Israel’s cyber sector blooms in the desert
A modern metropolis rising from Israel’s Negev desert stands on the front-line of a global war against hacking and cyber crime, fulfilling an ambition of the country’s founding father.
David Ben-Gurion famously said he wanted to make the Negev bloom.
Today, in the streets of Beersheba, a city of 200,000, his dream is taking shape in a form he likely did not anticipate.
Long a poor relation of hyper-modern Tel Aviv, Beersheba has traditionally been a refuge for poor, working class and Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern descent.
But the city in the vast Negev desert of southern Israel has experienced a rapid gentrification since the start of the decade, during which middle class neighborhoods have expanded.
The real estate boom in Beersheba has been fueled by the city’s ambition to be Israel’s cyber capital, especially since the creation of its industrial park CyberSpark.
Two ultra-modern complexes house a dozen Israeli companies, start-ups, venture capital funds and foreign groups such as Lockheed Martin, Deutsche Telekom, Oracle and IBM.
Already, 1,500 technicians, engineers and researchers are hard at work.
Israel honours 10 Slovaks for heroism
Those five families joined 546 brave men and women from Slovakia and almost 26,000 people from all over the world who have received the designation.
The Embassy of the State of Israel in Slovakia published their stories during a ceremony taking place in Bratislava to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. President Andrej Kiska attended the event.
“The stories are about ordinary people that never planned to become heroes and were unprepared to take risky decisions,” Zvi Aviner Vapni, the Israeli ambassador, said at the event. “They were ordinary human beings, but it is precisely their humanity that touches us so, and should serve as a shining example.”
WWII veteran: ‘No cure for anti-Semite, he is born with it’
As part of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jewish World War II veterans were awarded with medals and certificates in recognition for their efforts in the war.
While more Jewish soldiers fought in the Allied armies than in the Russian army, the long-overlooked American Jewish WWII veterans finally received homage last year at the 70th anniversary ceremony held in Israel’s Armored Corps' Memorial Site – the Yad Lashiryon Memorial at Latrun.
However, since many of the veterans are over the age of ninety, they were unable to attend the ceremony in Israel.
Ninety-five-year-old Dan Nadel, past commander of Post 180 of the Jewish war veterans of the United States, spoke to Arutz Sheva at the award ceremony held on Wednesday by the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in World War II.



We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
        

EoZTV Podcast

Powered by Blogger.

follow me

search eoz

Recent posts from other blogs

subscribe via email

comments

Contact

translate

E-Book

source materials

reference sites

multimedia

source materials for Jewish learning

great places to give money

media watch

humor

.

Source materials

Sample Text

EoZ's Most Popular Posts Ever

follow me

Followers


pages

Random Posts

Pages - Menu

Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون

Donate!

Tweets

Compliments

Monthly subscription:
Subscription options

One time donation:

Interesting Blogs

Categories

Best posts of 2016

Blog Archive

compliments

Algemeiner: "Fiercely intelligent and erudite"

Omri: "Elder is one of the best established and most respected members of the jblogosphere..."
Atheist Jew:"Elder of Ziyon probably had the greatest impression on me..."
Soccer Dad: "He undertakes the important task of making sure that his readers learn from history."
AbbaGav: "A truly exceptional blog..."
Judeopundit: "[A] venerable blog-pioneer and beloved patriarchal figure...his blog is indispensable."
Oleh Musings: "The most comprehensive Zionist blog I have seen."
Carl in Jerusalem: "...probably the most under-recognized blog in the JBlogsphere as far as I am concerned."
Aussie Dave: "King of the auto-translation."
The Israel Situation:The Elder manages to write so many great, investigative posts that I am often looking to him for important news on the PalArab (his term for Palestinian Arab) side of things."
Tikun Olam: "Either you are carelessly ignorant or a willful liar and distorter of the truth. Either way, it makes you one mean SOB."
Mondoweiss commenter: "For virulent pro-Zionism (and plain straightforward lies of course) there is nothing much to beat it."
Didi Remez: "Leading wingnut"