[Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News] 02/04 Links Pt2: Barry Rubin's Improbable Journey; Israel & Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert dies 79 ~ EoZ

From Ian:

Today, February 3, marks one year since Barry Rubin, scholar and friend, lost his bout with an aggressive cancer. He was sixty-four. The many tributes published upon his passing celebrated him as a prolific and passionate advocate for his adopted country, Israel, and as a tireless scholar who generated a steady flow of writings and an astonishing array of initiatives: a think tank, several journals, and many conferences. His highly regarded expertise made him the go-to source on the Middle East for journalists, diplomats, and some Israeli public figures.
This was Barry Rubin, the finished product. Had you told me thirty-five years ago, when I first met him, that he would become not only “one of the great intellectual defenders of Israel,” but an Israeli, I would have dismissed you. Nothing would have seemed so improbable.
Barry grew up in northwest Washington to well-to-do parents who strived to assimilate. He later recalled having “no sense of my own history, coming from a family which had tried to obliterate its own past.” Barry had no Zionist upbringing whatsoever—no youth movement, no summer camp, no family trip to Israel. “When I attended one-day-a-week religious school at Washington’s premiere Reform synagogue,” he later wrote, “we were told that Jewish history began with the discovery of the New World. Hebrew was taught without any reference to the existence of the state of Israel.” (Personal experience would inspire the mature Barry to write a book-length critique of Jewish assimilation.)

‘Pugnacious Zionist’ Martin Gilbert was the chronicler of modern Jewry

To the outside world, Sir Martin Gilbert was an eminent historian, a member of Britain’s Iraq Inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot, and – overall – Churchill’s biographer.
But to the Jewish world Martin Gilbert, who died Tuesday, was a passionate Jew and Zionist, a Soviet Jewry campaigner and chronicler of the Holocaust, repeatedly using his forensic skills to unpick telling details of the Jewish experience in the 20th century.
In his last summer vacation from Magdalene College Oxford, in 1959, Gilbert, who described himself as a “pugnacious Zionist” at university, went with a group of friends to visit Treblinka, Auschwitz and Birkenau, seeing “the doors of the huts, flapping in the wind.”
It was an unusual trip to have made at the time, but it undoubtedly sowed the seeds of Gilbert’s life-long, clear-eyed commitment to recording the Holocaust. It eventually led to one of Gilbert’s most popular and accessible books, “The Boys,” the personal stories of 732 concentration camp survivors, men and women, who ultimately made their second homes in Britain.
Even the most assiduous you-never-know-when-it-might-come-in-useful research couldn’t really account for the sheer volume of his work, I noted, wondering how on earth he did it.

Dr. Einat Wilf - Personal Experiences that Have Shaped My Views on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Phyllis Chesler: Sadistic Death Pornography Coming to a Theater Near You

This is a year of sadistic death pornography. For the last eight months, the death artists of ISIS have been enslaving, beheading, tossing gay men out of buildings, and burning Muslims and infidels alive. These gruesome deeds are faithfully, lovingly, preserved via video and released to the world.
The West, and civilized people everywhere, seem unprepared, even shocked, by all this. But why?
The entire 21st century has been characterized by an alarming and exponential rise in anti-Semitism, the beheading of Western journalists; planes being flown into buildings, ships and trains being blown up, Embassies being torched, hotels being taken hostage, children being kidnapped into slavery or used as human shields; by genocides, massacres, grisly crucifixions, human homicide bombs—and all the perpetrators have been Muslims who insisted that they were engaged in holy Jihad against an infidel world (or the wrong kind of “other” Muslim) whose values are anti-Islamic.
King Abdullah of Jordan, like President Obama, insists that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam; that they are a criminal gang of psychopaths. I am sure they are—but they are being empowered by what they view as a religious mandate.
Some say that European Nazis did not represent the values of post-Enlightenment Europe and that Stalin did not represent the values of Marxism.
Whatever the case, the fact that so many good people failed to stop them at the outset, condemned hundreds of millions of innocent people to brutal, untimely deaths.
This can happen again. It is happening again.

Decades of Anti-Israel Hate by Swedish Social Democrats

Mazel added, “Another leading socialist, the late foreign minister Anna Lindh, usually made the most vicious attacks on Israel. Her hatred of Israel can only be described as almost pathological. Under her leadership, Sweden published the greatest number of one-sided condemnations of Israel of any EU country. Lindh was stabbed to death in 2003 by a mentally disturbed Swede of Serbian origin.”
Lindh’s successor as foreign minister, Laila Freivalds, visited Yad Vashem in June 2004 to honor murdered Jews. She then heavily criticized Israel at a meeting with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Freivalds remained silent on the extensive anti-Semitism in Sweden, much of which is of Muslim origin. This phenomenon of paying honor to dead Jews, criticizing Israel, and ignoring or belittling one’s own country’s major delinquencies toward living Jews is common in Europe.

Douglas Murray: Why does the battle for gay rights stop at the borders of Islam?

There are those who believe that the fight for gay rights, or indeed human rights in general, stops at the borders of Islam. Very few people seem to realise that they should not. Of course we have legions of celebrities who are willing to sign letters calling for posthumous pardons for Alan Turing and others. But how do these people select their targets? Well, whenever I ask that question the best answer I hear is that people try to do things in their own societies because that is where they can make most difference. Well, Alan Turing is dead. It is hard to think of anything more tokenistic or pointless than ‘pardoning’ a man after he’s been tormented and many years after he has died. But it is, of course, really really easy.
As for encouraging grass-roots responses on the ground (which is where everybody of course hopes it will come from), for the forseeable future is it hard to see the opportunities for a decent LGBT society to flourish in Isis-held territory. So where are all these people who profess to care about gay rights? Their absence suggests to me that agreement has broadly been reached that religious sensitivities trump human rights, as long as the sensitivities in question are Islamic.

Likud activists file complaint against anti-Netanyahu campaign

David Shayan, the head of the Likud youth activists, filed an official police complaint on Wednesday against the V15 elections campaign, which aims to dissuade Israelis from voting for Likud Chairman and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Shayan provided the Jerusalem police with evidence that raises suspicion of a link between the nonprofit organization OneVoice, which has received U.S. government funding, and V15.
In their complaint, the Likud youth activists demanded that the police investigate the alleged link between the Labor Party and Meretz and this well-funded anti-Netanyahu campaign. The complaint pointed to the Parties Financing Law, which prohibits foreign campaign funding, even if the funding is channeled through nonprofit organizations or other groups.

V-15 Activists in Israel Copy Obama’s 2008 ‘Hope’ Campaign [video]

Hope. Change. They were the heart of Obama’s platform nearly seven years ago.
As seen and heard in the video below, Tel Aviv activists for V15, heavily funded by foreign donations, don’t have much else to say.
Michael Ganoe, a very pro-Israel Christian from West Virginia who hosts a radio show heard in the United States, interviewed activists as part of his Insight to Israel/Hershey’s for Heroes imitative.
Here is a bit of the dialogue between Ganoe and a Tel Aviv activist:
Activist: We stand for the hope to bring more change…. We don’t feel there is any hope.
Ganoe: What is there about the government you do not like?
Activist: We don’t like the cynical use of no hope.
Ganoe: What do you thing is the biggest problem with Israel?
Activist: No hope. There is no hope. There is no way to change
Ganoe: But what are you trying to change?
Activist: We are trying to bring hope.

Congressman: Anti-Netanyahu campaign must return US funding

Congressman Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), co-chairman of the House Republican Israel Caucus, took to Fox News to lambaste the nonprofit organization OneVoice over its alleged meddling in the Israeli elections.
Appearing on "The Kelly File" Monday, Zeldin said OneVoice's apparent cooperation with the V15 campaign to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might be a violation of U.S. law. He said the organization must return the funds it had received from the State Department because these were allegedly being used against the stated purpose of the organization.
"Why are U.S. tax dollars being sent to a nonprofit trying to overthrow an Israeli government," he lamented. "OneVoice, which is a U.S.-taxpayer-funded 501(C)(3) not-for-profit, has partnered with V15 in the effort to oust Netanyahu. OneVoice advertises on their website that they are partners in the State Department, they recently received two State Department grants … and V15 has entered into a contract with a political consulting firm called '270 Strategies' which has over a dozen individuals who worked in leadership positions for Obama's re-election and original election. … We have a lot of great allies but none more stronger than Israel, which is a beacon of freedom of democracy and liberty in a region filled with radical Islamic extremists and state-sponsored terrorism."

Rep. Lee Zeldin on State Department funding Israeli election campaign

'American Israel-Haters are Buying the Government for the Left'

MK Orit Struk (Jewish Home) spoke to Arutz Sheva on Tuesday, discussing the V15 (Victory in 2015) campaign which is bankrolled by foreign NGOs and includes a delegation of campaign staff from US President Barack Obama's campaigning organization - and which aims to prevent Binyamin Netanyahu's re-election as prime minister in upcoming elections.
"While the Zionist Camp (Labor-Hatnua joint party - ed.) says it has no connection to V15, it's clear that there's an organization here that is working to return the left to power," said Struk. "There's a large process here of haters of Israel in Europe and the US who are getting involved in political processes in Israel using a lot of money."
According to the MK, these foreign forces are feeding funds to organizations that "masquerade" as human rights groups, "like the radical leftist organizations 'Breaking the Silence,' 'B'Tzelem,' and 'The Association for Civil Rights in Israel,' and in this way try to get us out of Judea and Samaria."
"In the election days they're doing it with V15 to continue the withdrawal process that started in Oslo," said Struk.

V15 Even Advertises at Drudgereport

Why would V15 place an ad at Drudgereport?
Snapped at 15:20 today.
How much does that cost?
How many Israelis read Drudgereport?
Are they targeting an elite socio-economic sector in Israel?

Arrest warrant for Argentine president found at dead prosecutor’s home

A draft of an arrest warrant for Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was found in the apartment of deceased prosecutor Alberto Nisman, according to a report Tuesday, two weeks after he was found dead under mysterious circumstances.
The document accuses Kirchner of covering up the alleged Iranian involvement in the deadly 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The bombing, which Nisman pinned on Iranian and Hezbollah operatives, left 85 people dead.
The documents, found in Nisman’s garbage by police investigators, also called for the arrest of Foreign Minister Hector Timerman.

Alberto Nisman Death Investigator Claims Bullet Entered From Back of Head, Further Undermining Suicide Claim

Viviana Fein, the top Argentine official investigating the death in mysterious circumstance of Special Prosecutor Alberto Nisman, has radically revised her assessment of how he died, claiming that the deadly bullet entered not through his temple, as originally stated, but two centimeters – around three-quarters of an inch – behind his ear.
If Fein’s latest conclusion is borne out by the facts, it will further weaker the assertion that Nisman’s death was a suicide, since the the bullet’s point of entry strongly suggests that the trigger was pulled by someone else.
Fein’s comments on Argentine radio were reported on Twitter by Gabriel Bracesco, a crime reporter for the Clarín newspaper, who quoted her as saying: “The bullet that killed Nisman didn’t enter through the temple, but two centimeters behind his ear.”
In a follow-up tweet, Bracesco noted that the latest revelation would further undermine the theory that Nisman – who had spent more than a decade investigating the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in which 85 people were murdered, and who, on the eve of his death, accused the Argentine government of actively colluding with Iranian claims of innocence – committed suicide.

Daniel Pipes: 3 French soldiers, 3 sitting ducks

Another Islamist immigrant from Mali named Coulibaly has attacked another Jewish institution in France. The first one, Amedy Coulibaly, murdered four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris on Jan. 9; this second one injured three soldiers on Tuesday as they protected a Jewish community center in Nice.
Police say Moussa Coulibaly, about 30 years old, with a record of theft and violence, and apparently not related to Amedy, pulled a knife about 8 inches long out of a bag, injuring one soldier in the chin, one in the cheek, and one in the forearm.
Coincidentally, I left Nice about four hours before this attack and had passed by that Jewish center a few days earlier, in the course of a tour of Muslim-majority areas in 10 cities across France and Belgium. Those travels brought me repeatedly in proximity to the heavily armed soldiers who protect Jewish institutions and prompted several skeptical conclusions on my part about their presence:

French comedian Dieudonne tried for condoning terror

French comedian Dieudonne told a court Wednesday he condemned last month’s Paris attacks “without any ambiguity” as he stood trial on charges of condoning terrorism over a comment suggesting he sympathized with the gunmen.
The polemicist was arrested on January 14 after saying “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly,” a mix of the slogan “Je suis Charlie” that became a global rallying cry against extremism and the name of one of the gunmen who killed a policewoman and four Jews.
His arrest was one of dozens of cases opened for “condoning terrorism” or “making threats to carry out terrorist acts” after the attackers killed 17 people in the January 7-9 shooting spree that also targeted satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sparking concerns over freedom of expression.

Hamas on Campus: ‘Zionist Lobby’ Can’t Take a Joke

An anti-Israel University of California at Davis student leader claims that she has been unfairly attacked over a pro-Hamas Facebook posting by a group of nebulous “Zionist lobby groups,” according to an article she wrote Tuesday in The California Aggie, the school newspaper.
Azka Fayyaz, a member of the U.C. Davis student senate, has come under fire in recent days after she wrote that “Hamas and Sharia law have taken over UC Davis” following the successful adoption by the student council of a resolution to boycott Israel.
Fayyaz, a member of the student council that voted in favor of the anti-Israel resolution, said that she has been unfairly targeted by “the Zionist lobby groups” since publications including the Washington Free Beacon published her comments.
The U.C. Davis divestment vote caused a controversy after it came to light that Muslim activists on campus heckled pro-Israel students and chanted, “Allahu Akbar” at them.
“If a movement is not controversial, if no one is mad, it’s not strong enough & it’s not worth the fight. Israel will fall insha’Allah,” Fayyaz wrote.
However, Fayyaz said that she is a victim and that her postings were satirical in nature.

In which UC Davis Senator Azka Fayyaz attempts to play victim

Today the Daily Aggie, the school paper of UC Davis contained an op-ed by Azka Fayyaz, entitled "Letter to the community from ASUCD senator Azka Fayyaz". Its not an apology. Azka's a bit upset about her recent notoriety, and wants everyone to know for a certainty, that she is the victim. Really she is.
She writes:
On Thursday, January 29, 2015, after the ASUCD Senate voted “Yes” by a supermajority to pass the Divestment Resolution, I posted a picture with the Pro-Divestment community on my personal Facebook with a satirical caption. Although I made a comment on the picture stating that the caption was satirical, the anti-divestment community conveniently left out the comment from the rest of the picture and took the caption out of context.
Her claim isn’t valid- the comments are posted in context, and there is nothing that indicates that her deeply offensive statements were anything other than her sincere feelings.
It was a screen shot, Azka. If it were edited or altered you'd be able to prove it. Its your Facebook account.

PHOTOS: Vigil for Rasmea Odeh victims at DePaul University

Last night, Tuesday, February 3, 2015, a fundraiser was held at DePaul University honoring and on behalf of convicted supermarket bomber and immigration fraudster Rasmieh (Rasmea) Odeh. Full details and background on the fundraiser here, and on Rasmea’s trials and convictions here.
A vigil was held outside the fundraiser in memory of two Israeli students killed in the bombing, Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner.
It was snowing and a heavy snowfall anticipated, which almost led to cancellation of the vigil, but a group of students persevered and stood out in the cold reciting prayers for peace and remembering.

UCLA Prof: Leave ISIS Alone, They'll Go Away

UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted a panel last Thursday, presenting its perspectives on the Islamic State and its massacre of the Yazidi minority group. The panel was comprised of UCLA Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History James L. Gelvin and Dartmouth College professor Zeynep Turkyilmaz. This department has been under recent attack for its anti- Israel bias.
According to a recent study by the AMCHA initiative, 93% of Israel-related events hosted by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies were anti-Israel and 75% of them contained anti-Semitic material.
Professor Gelvin presented a brief history of how the Islamic State was formed, the differences between the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, and reasons for the group’s success thus far. He went on to explain that Islamic State’s infrastructure would self-destruct without any foreign intervention. Accordingly, he concluded, “In spite of international coalition waging war against the Islamic state, it is extraordinarily fragile and will very likely collapse anyway under its own weight. And finally, as a result of that assertion, I believe that Barack Obama is repeating George W. Bush’s mistake, inflating a minor problem into something that is an existential threat to the United States.”
The gist of the argument seemed to be: America should essentially sit back, relax, and enjoy the show, as innocent American citizens are beheaded on television.

Al-Arian to be Deported Wednesday

Sami Al-Arian, a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)'s governing board during the 1990s, will be deported from the United States Wednesday, a Tampa radio station reports.
WUSF, a public radio affiliate at the university where Al-Arian worked as a tenured computer science professor, cites Al-Arian associates who say he is headed to Turkey.
Al-Arian agreed to leave the country as a condition of his 2006 plea agreement for conspiring to provide goods or services to the PIJ, which President Clinton first named as a terrorist organization in a 1995 executive order.
The deportation ends a 20-year saga for Al-Arian, who was first exposed as a PIJ supporter in the Polk Award winning documentary "Jihad in America" produced by IPT founder and Executive Director Steven Emerson.

Honest Reporting: Should the Holocaust Be Fair Game for the BBC?

HonestReporting.com managing editor Simon Plosker tells VOI's Josh Hasten that the BBC manipulated International Holocaust Remembrance Day by asking if the Holocaust is still relevant today. He also claims that Sky News asked a prominent guest if Israel is to blame for modern-day anti-Semitism.

UK Drops Probe of BBC Reporter’s Anti-Semitism at Paris Unity March

The Board of Deputies of British Jews has condemned a decision by ‘Ofcom’ not to uphold complaints made against BBC reporter Tim Willcox over remarks he made to a French Jewish woman in Paris.
Ofcom is the independent regulator and competition authority for the communications industries in Britain.
The incident took place at the unity march in Paris, held in solidarity with the victims of radical Islamist terror attacks in the city the previous week. The woman was expressing her fears about the rise of anti-Semitism throughout Europe and particularly in France. While speaking with Willcox during his interview at the event, the BBC reporter told the woman, “Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.”
Ofcom ruled the reporter’s remarks were “justified by the context in which they were presented.”

Some background to Rabbi Rubinstein’s recent column about the BBC

Past BBC contributor Rabbi YY Rubinstein recently published a column in the magazine ‘Mishpacha‘ in which he asked “does the BBC have a Jewish problem?”. Whilst the article does not appear to be available at the magazine’s website (a transcript is however available here), a scanned version has been circulated on social media and readers of its opening paragraphs may find some background information helpful.
“The question of whether the BBC suffers from institutional anti-Semitism is not a new one.
Historically, there is not the slightest doubt that it has been guilty in this regard. In fact the BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation) admitted it when Radio 4, a BBC radio station, aired a documentary years ago about the corporations’s role in promoting anti-Semitism in World War ll. It found itself clearly having suffered from “the world’s oldest hatred.”
It is not so willing today, however, to confront the question with nearly the same honesty. Rather, the BBC has resisted, with every trick it can muster, revealing the contents of its own commissioned report, completed on 2004, that judged whether the broadcaster fairly reports on the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
The report to which the writer refers is of course the Balen Report. The prizewinning Radio 4 documentary he mentions (broadcast in 1993) was called ‘The Unspeakable Atrocity’ and The Independent published a review of the programme at the time which makes for spine-chilling reading.

The Guardian imagines a ‘powerful American Jewish lobby’…in the 1940s!

A Jan. 26th article in the Guardian written by Michael White (What would Winston Churchill have made of King Abdullah’s death?) included the following passages:
…Churchill had supported the 1916 Balfour Declaration in favour of a Jewish national homeland, issued for a mixed bag of motives, including wanting Zionist support against the Kaiser but also fashionable self-determination.
Right from the start Palestine’s Arabs got overlooked, but when Britain got a League of Nations mandate there they promptly made their presence loudly felt.
What an imperial burden that proved to be for the fading British imperialists, though Churchill resisted further decolonisation when he returned to power (1951-55). By this time Israel had fought and won its 1948 war of independence against its Arab neighbours and the grim cycle we live with today had begun.
Even in the war Churchill experienced a sharp bit of that. Angry that London appeared to be tilting towards the Arabs – banning local land sales to Jewish immigrants for example – and fearful that [Lord] Balfour’s pledge would be lost, militant Zionists – with the support of the increasingly powerful Jewish lobby in the US – staged attacks on the British regime, culminating in the 1944 murder in Cairo of Lord Moyne, British regional supremo, a friend and cabinet colleague of Churchill’s.
First, the suggestion that the “Jewish lobby” was powerful during WWII is absurd. The American Jewish community during the 30s and 40s was largely weak and divided, lacking the confidence and relative unity that later generations of Jewish leaders would take for granted.

Poll: 61 Percent of Israelis Believe Obama Will Defy Security Objections to Iran Deal

Sixty-one percent of Israeli Jews believe there is a high probability that US President Barack Obama will approve the signing of a nuclear agreement with Iran, even if Israel expressly states that the deal endangers the Jewish state’s security, according to the newly released Peace Index poll by the Israel Democracy Institute.
The US is willing to make concessions in the nuclear talks with Iran in exchange for Iran using its influence to ensure stability in Middle East hotspots such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, Army Radio reported Tuesday.
Regarding March’s Knesset elections, 58 percent of Israeli Jewish respondents in the Peace Index said that a government headed by current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is best suited to deal with Israel’s security issues, compared with 27 percent who prefer a government led by Tzipi Livni and Isaac Herzog on security matters.

EU Concerned Over Report of Major US Concessions to Iranians in Nuclear Negotiations

The US and Iran are nearing a deal which would permit the Tehran regime to maintain as many as 6,500 centrifuges for its nuclear program in exchange for “guaranteeing regional stability,” Israel’s Army radio reported today.
The report cited Israeli officials who quoted European diplomats telling them that the US had agreed to significant concessions to the Iranians in recent negotiations. The report added that the EU is opposed to linking the nuclear issue to the maintenance of stability in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, where Iranian influence has been steadily growing.
The EU diplomats are said to be deeply concerned that the US has been working behind their backs to achieve such a deal, and that this was the main issue discussed at a meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif two weeks ago.

Official Censorship of Iranian Media Increases as Hopes for “Reformer” Rouhani Fade

Although hailed in the West as a potential reformer, the tenure of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has seen freedom of the press in Iran only deteriorate, according to both state officials and reports in the Iranian media.
Tehran MP Ali Motahari said on January 30 that under the Rouhani administration self-censorship has become more common in the media. He stressed that continued pressure from clerics aligned with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the main cause of the strain on the media. Khamenei is the final authority in Iran, with Rouhani having only limited authority.
Motahari said in an interview with the Tasnim website that when the regime is reformist, there will be more pressure to prevent the government’s tendency toward opening the political atmosphere. He stressed that self-censorship becomes more prominent under these conditions as more and more publishing permits get revoked and newspapers shut down. Motahari added that Iran’s Press Supervisory Board has become irrelevant as press outlets are being closed by direct order from the government prosecutor without its input.
The Iranian judiciary has closed down several newspapers and publications without any consultation with the Press Supervisory Board. The two newspapers, Mardum Emruz and Ruzan, are just two of the many newspapers recently closed by the direct action of the Tehran prosecutor’s office.

Turkey: Erdogan calls for change in UN Security Council

Erdogan also repeated his statement that "the world is bigger than five," in reference to the Council's permanent members who can veto any resolution.
The "power of veto" enables any of the five countries to prevent the adoption of any substantive draft resolution, no matter how much international support it may garner.
"You cannot make 196 countries to live with the decisions made by any of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Nobody has the right to do this," he said.
The Turkish president had earlier suggested that the permanent members should be changed periodically, taking into account different ethnicities and religions.
Erdogan also criticized the lack of Muslim voices in the council.

Erdogan wants to be like Queen Elizabeth

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan brushed off criticism that he’s trying to amass sultan-like powers, saying he really just wants to be more like Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
Erdogan told state-run TRT channel on Thursday that his desire for an expanded presidential role would not undermine democracy — and he pointed to the UK as an example.
“In my opinion, even the UK is a semi-presidency. And the dominant element is the Queen,” Erdogan said.
The UK is a constitutional monarchy, governed by a parliamentary system, but its hereditary monarch wields only symbolic power.

Turkish Police carry out raids against Erdogan foes amid claims of wiretapping

Turkish police on Tuesday carried out raids targeting dozens of people suspected of a role in illegal wiretapping, a move local media said was aimed at supporters of President Tayyip Erdogan's ally-turned-foe, US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.
Separately, the interior ministry replaced police chiefs in 21 provinces, according to an announcement published in Turkey's Official Gazette. It was not immediately clear why they were being replaced.
Broadcasters including CNN Turk said the raids, in four provinces including Ankara, were against the "parallel structure", the term Erdogan uses to refer to Gulen's supporters in the judiciary, police and other institutions.

Greek Leftist Group Claims Israeli Embassy Shooting

A Greek far-left group has claimed responsibility for a shooting attack on the Israeli embassy in Athens last December, a police source said Wednesday.
Anti-terrorist police found a text from the People's Fighter Group, contained in a memory stick left in a garbage bin, the source said.
A Greek newspaper had received an anonymous phone call on Tuesday pointing to the location of the text, whose contents have not been made public.
In the December 12 attack, a gunman riding on the back of a motorcycle raked the embassy with at least 54 rounds from a Kalashnikov rifle, police said. Fortunately no one was wounded.

Belgian Jewish leader raps governor’s jihadists-Nazis comparison

A leader of Belgian Jews urged a local governor to take history lessons after the politician likened the treatment of jihadists to how Nazis treated Jews.
Eli Ringer, honorary chairman of the Flemish Region’s Forum of Jewish Organizations, called on Rudi Vervoort, the Socialist minister-president of the Brussels-Capital Region, to “refresh his knowledge of history” after Vervoort mentioned the Nazi treatment of Jews in opposing proposals to strip jihadists who fought in Syria and Iraq of their Belgian nationalities.
“One of the first measures the Nazis took was stripping Jews of their German citizenship,” Vervoort told the De Tijd daily last week. He was commenting on a discussion in Brussels by federal government officials and two other minister-presidents, whose function in Belgium is parallel to that of a governor in other federal countries.

Landmark report shows Italian Jewry fearful of anti-Semitism

Even before this summer’s Gaza war, which spawned a rise in anti-Semitic sentiment across Europe, and recent high-profile attacks on Jewish institutions in Brussels and Paris, over 60 percent of Italian Jews considered anti-Semitism a large or a very large problem in Italy. Additionally, two-thirds believe it has significantly increased in the past five years, according to a new study released Tuesday by the London-based Jewish Policy Research.
The Italy report was published on the JPR website and is called “From Old and New Directions Perceptions and Experiences of Antisemitism Among Jews in Italy.” It is based on data gathered until the end of 2012, a year which saw what is considered a turning point for contemporary European Jewry, the Toulouse massacre at a Jewish day school where Mohammed Merah, a French Muslim man, shot and killed a rabbi and three children.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem demographer Prof. Sergio DellaPergola authored the document together with the senior research fellow at JPR L. D. Staetsky. In an interview with The Times of Israel, DellaPergola explained that the trends portrayed in the survey anticipated and mirror the situation of deep and growing concern about anti-Semitism that is found today — and will likely worsen in the future.

Israeli Company Makes Splash with First Super Bowl Ad

While Bloomberg reports that 80% of Super Bowl ads have no impact on a companies sales, noted that a number of analysts have positive views of Wix. One wrote that he expected the company’s “[m]omentum will continue.”
A website devoted to ranking the Super Bowl commercials ranked Wix as the best Super Bowl commercial this year writing that “Wix blew the competition out of the water with their smart, funny and creative ad.”
In October Wix was named one the hottest Middle Eastern startups by Inc. Magazine.
In Joining the Start-Up Nation Just Got a Lot Easier, which was published in the March 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Ben Cohen observed, “Take Wix as an example: while the bulk of its market is in the U.S., the majority of its staff working in R&D are domiciled in Israel.”

Tablets cast light on Babylonian exile

A little known collection of more than 100 clay tablets in Cuneiform script, dating back to the Babylon Exile some 2,500 years ago, was unveiled this week, allowing a glimpse into the everyday life of one of the most ancient exile communities in the world.
Prof. Wayne Horowitz, one of the archaeologists who studied the tablets, says this is the most important ancient Jewish archive since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The tablets are on display in an exhibition entitled “By the Rivers of Babylon” that opened this week in the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem.
The collection consists mainly of administrative certificates – sales bonds, contracts and addresses, engraved in Akkadian Cuneiform script on clay tablets, some of which were fired in kilns.