[Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News] 02/17 Links Pt2: British artists shun Israel's 'blood money' but accept Britain's; CIA and Anti-Zionism

From Ian:

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Richard Millett: As Jews are murdered why is War On Want handing out fake guns to British students?

With Jews being murdered in France, Belgium and Denmark there’s an ominous feeling that British Jews are awaiting their own round. With that in mind a group of concerned British Jews from Jewish Human Rights Watch protested this morning outside the offices of War On Want in central London.
War On Want is one of Britain’s most respected charities but it is, sadly, now being run by people determined to import the Israeli-Palestinian conflict onto the streets of Britain.
Quite unbelievably, after what has happened this weekend and in Belgium and Paris, War On Want’s current campaign includes handing out fake guns to students to help mark what is sickeningly termed “Israeli Apartheid Week” which begins next week on British university campuses.
Many British Jews are feeling insecure and accuse WOW of helping to spread propaganda and hate against the Jewish State which could well lead to the events of Paris, Belgium and Denmark being repeated in the UK. They are asking: Is War on Want helping to promote a War On Jews?
I questioned John Hilary (see below), WOW’s executive director, about this and other issues as he approached his offices. As you can see Hilary refused to answer my questions about WOW handing out guns to British students, a two-state solution, Israel’s future or the bombing of innocent Israeli civilians by Hamas.

Why, as Jews die, is War On Want handing out fake guns?


Brendan O'Neill: British artists shun Israel’s ‘blood money’ but accept Britain’s

Seven hundred British creatives have signed a pledge saying they will never work in Israel or take the Israeli government’s filthy lucre so long as it continues to wage war in Gaza and kill Palestinians. So why, then, are they happy to take money from the British government, when the British government has in recent years bombed Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and left a trail of destruction and line-up of corpses that make last year’s Israeli clashes in Gaza look like a tea party in comparison? Come on. There must be an answer to this question. What is it? Why shun Israel’s ‘blood money’ but accept Britain’s?
A quick glance at the list of 700 Israel-boycotters reveals numerous people who have built their careers on cash from the coffers of the Iraqi-killing, Afghanistan-repressing British government. There’s Ken Loach, recipient of monies from the government-backed UK Film Council, here chiming in with all the others to say he will ‘accept neither professional invitations to Israel, nor funding from any institutions linked to its government’. So, Ken, why are you happy to accept money from institutions linked to a government that has killed way more people in the Middle East than Israel has?
There’s Mike Leigh, who’s also been funded by the UK Film Council, and who threw a massive hissy fit in 2010 when the Film Council was wound down in its current form and reorganised. Ladies and gentlemen, the principled film-directing doyen of decent Hampsteadites, who makes angry public statements over two things: his implacable, principled refusal to take blood money from the Israeli killing machine and his fury at having his bloody money from the British killing machine taken away from him! What a guy!

Jewish-led UK artists’ boycott greeted with derision

Laura Marks, senior vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, alluded to the timing of the boycott letter, calling it “offensive” in an interview with The Times of Israel.
“There is something ironic in the demand for a cultural boycott and the demand not to engage when the attacks in Copenhagen and Paris were made on people who wanted to express themselves,” Marks said.
Marks claimed a cultural boycott of this sort is also “racist.” “As the APPG report makes clear, negative language towards Jews becomes the norm if you don’t challenge it,” she said.
“How do we change attitudes if people want to close down communications? Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and [these artists are effectively] saying that they will continue to work with all sorts of awful regimes and that Israel is the only one they aren’t going to deal with.”
On Monday, an editorial in The Times weighed in, saying, “The egregious campaigns for a cultural boycott of Israel are stoking ugly, atavistic movements in Europe. These need to be confronted by civilized opinion. Israeli governments are fallible but the Jewish state is a force for democracy in a region that is short of it.”
Chairman of Britain’s Zionist Federation Paul Charney was equally dismissive when speaking with The Times of Israel.
“The signed letter says much more about the myopic views of a small clique of navel-gazers then it does about any wider support for boycotts in this country,” said Charney.

An open letter to ‘Artists for Palestine UK’

Yet, where are your calls to boycott China, which imprisons political dissidents, denies its people the fundamental right of free speech, censors internet use and whose occupation of Tibet is far more draconian than Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians – and which no Chinese leader has ever sought to end?
Why no campaigning against Pakistan, a country that has allowed fundamentalist Islamists to destroy the lives of tens of thousands of women, denied an education and, all-too-often, at the mercy of abusive husbands with no recourse to the law?
Why not a single statement of protest or an expression of condemnation for so many of Israel’s neighbors in the Middle East? Countries like Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Egypt, where, to a lesser or greater extent, religious minorities are persecuted, women are second class citizens, and homosexuals are tortured and killed.
And if you care so much about the Palestinians in particular, why have I never heard a word from you about Hamas, which (according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) deliberately uses its own people – including children – as human shields to protect arms caches and terrorist leaders from Israeli rockets. Why not a crumb of compassion expressed for Palestinian Christians living in fear in Islamist Gaza?
Would you perform in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, increasingly authoritarian, anti-democratic and now aggressively invading its neighbors? I can only assume you would, because I’ve not heard or read a single word from you about boycotting, divesting from, or sanctioning the regime in Moscow.
No, just Israel, with its free press, independent judiciary and democratic government and legislature. A country where an Arab member of parliament can vilify the state that gives him citizenship and pays his salary, and grants him immunity from prosecution as an elected representative.

Edgar Davidson: 700 more artists now boycott Israel (satire)

Along with more than 600 other fellow dead artists, we are announcing today that we will not engage in business-as-usual cultural relations with Israel. We will accept neither professional invitations to Israel, nor funding, from any institutions linked to its government. Although we are all long dead it is perfectly obvious to us that Israel has inflicted upon the Palestinians the most brutal genocide in the history of the world. The human rights organisations Hamas and Islamic Jihad have sadly confirmed this. The genocide has resulted in the Palestinian population only tripling in size in the last 10 years, with the Israelis having the audacity to continue sending millions of tons of food and medicine into Gaza, along with electricity and gas, even while the Palestinians were expressing their democratic right to fire thousands of harmless missiles into Israeli cities. The Israelis disgracefully detain and treat injured Palestinian resistance fighters in their hospitals, and they have also built horrific security fences to stop Palestinians from carrying out their legitimate right to murder Israeli children on buses. And the merciless Israelis have forced Gazans to live in poverty because the 20 billion dollars of charitable aid given by Western countries in the last 5 years all had to be spent on building desperately needed tunnels from Gaza into Israeli kindergartens, to hide the Palestinians' harmless weapons and suicide bombers.

The Early CIA and Its Anti-Zionist Maneuvering

At the turn of the 21st century through today, American involvement in Middle Eastern politics runs through the Central Intelligence Agency. In America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East, historian Hugh Wilford shows this has always been the case.
Wilford methodically traces the lives and work of the agency's three most prominent officers in the Middle East: Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt was the grandson of president Theodore Roosevelt, and the first head of CIA covert action in the region; his cousin, Archie Roosevelt, was a Middle East scholar and chief of the Beirut station; while Miles Copeland was a covert operations specialist who joined the American intelligence enterprise during World War II.
Skillfully drawing on personal papers, autobiographies and other primary sources, Wilford illustrates the diplomatic history that created America's Great Game. More importantly, he underscores the political and ideological dogmas of these individuals – specifically, the rabidly pro-Arab and anti-Zionist views that shaped the CIA in its early years.

German philosopher blamed Jews for 'self-destructing' in Holocaust

In a startling revelation in his so-called “Black Notebooks,” one of Germany’s leading philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, blames the Jews for the Holocaust.
According to an article in last week’s Italian daily Corriere della Sera by Heidegger expert Donatella Di Cesare, “The Shoah was an act of self-destruction by the Jews. This is the view that emerges from the new volume of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks.”
Heidegger wrote during the Holocaust in 1942 that the “community of Jews” is “in the age of the Christian West--the age of metaphysics-- the principle of destruction.” He wrote further: “Only when what is essentially ‘Jewish,’ in the metaphysical sense, combats what is Jewish, is the peak of self-destruction in history reached.”
Heidegger, a towering figure in the school of continental European philosophy who died in 1976,was the rector at the University of Freiburg and summarily dismissed Jewish professors at the outset of the Nazi movement in the 1930s. He was a member of the Nazi Party.

Isi Leibler: Obama's shameless Jewish cheerleaders

While U.S. President Barack Obama determinedly pursues his policy of appeasement, which may enable the world's most dangerous terrorist state to become a nuclear threshold power, some Israelis and American Jews have initiated a campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The campaign calling for the maintenance of bipartisanship toward Israel is in reality undermining the hitherto strong bipartisan congressional opposition to the catastrophic U.S. policy on Iran.
Israeli opposition groups and the anti-Netanyahu media are now concentrating their efforts on discrediting and calling on the prime minister to cancel his address to the joint session of Congress scheduled for March 3.
Disregarding the gravity of the negotiations with Iran -- the underlying reason for the invitation -- they accuse Netanyahu of destroying the U.S.-Israeli relationship by failing to obtain Obama's advance approval to address Congress (which would never have been forthcoming). The White House even falsely alleged that Netanyahu accepted the invitation before they were aware of it.
Labor leader Isaac Herzog, in an irresponsible breach of propriety while attending a conference on security in Munich, slandered the prime minister, calling on "Bibi to act as a patriot … cancel his speech … which was born in sin … and not throw Israel's security under the bus of the elections." The timing of his comments were even more shameful as on that same day and in the same city U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Zarif.

Obama White House Partners with ISIS-Linked Group

A Boston-based hub of terrorism associated with a top Islamic State propagandist and producer of hostage-beheading videos will receive the red carpet treatment at an anti-terrorism conference at the Obama White House this Wednesday.
The so-called Summit on Countering Violent Extremism comes as President Obama seeks formal authorization from Congress to wage war against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL).
The terrorist-friendly Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which is a known front for Islamist terrorist groups, operates mosques in and around Boston.
Social media guru Ahmad Abousamra, who is now the chief propagandist for the Islamic State, attended ISB’s Cambridge mosque. His father was a vice president of the Muslim American Society of Boston. The FBI suspects Abousamra is in charge of Islamic State’s slick English-language propaganda campaign that produces videos of beheadings and various atrocities. The campaign has succeeded in recruiting at least 300 American jihadists and thousands of volunteers from other Western nations.
Long before the Islamic State arrived on the world scene, the Islamic Society of Boston had already long been a hotbed of terrorist activity, according to DiscoverTheNetworks.
ISB was founded by Hamas and Hezbollah supporter Abdurahman Alamoudi, who in 2004 was sentenced to 23 years in prison on terrorism-related charges. ISB’s Cambridge mosque is run by the Muslim American Society, which federal prosecutors say is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi benefactors helped to fund a sister mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC), in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood.
Boston marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev worshiped at ISB’s Cambridge mosque, as did Tarek Mehanna. Mehanna received terrorist training in Yemen and intended to use automatic weapons to inflict mass casualties in a suburban shopping mall near Boston. In 2012 Mahenna received a 17-year prison term for conspiring to aid al-Qaeda. Oussama Ziade, a benefactor of the Boston mosque, was indicted in 2009 for accepting money from al-Qaeda fundraiser Yassin Kadi.

Blair: 'You could lock Israeli-PA negotiators in room for eternity and peace would not come'

Blair, who previously visited Gaza only twice in the more than seven years he has served as the Quartet envoy, went through the Erez Crossing and met with members of the Palestinian unity government, local business and community workers, and families and workers at a UN facility for “internally displaced persons.”
He was in Gaza for several hours.
After the visit he wrote that there were three preconditions to a “successful peace process.”
First, he said, there must be a “dramatic and broad improvement” in the daily lives of Palestinians.
Second, there must be “unified Palestinian politics” that “explicitly is in favor of peace and two states, meaning a sovereign State of Palestine and a secure, accepted State of Israel.”
Third, he said, there must be “an enhanced role for the region, in alliance with the international community, which must step up to share leadership of the issue.” He argued that in all the current “darkness” in the diplomatic process there is one potential ray of hope – the changing region.
Furthermore, he said the international community needs “clarity” from Hamas.
“Are they a Palestinian nationalist movement dedicated to the achievement of a Palestinian State or part of a broader Islamist movement with regional designs that impact governments outside of Gaza? Are they prepared to accept a Palestinian State within 1967 borders or not, with such a state being a final settlement to the conflict?” he asked.

David Singer: The EU's Egregious & Duplicitous West Bank Blunder

Revelations that the European Union (EU) has been acting illegally in funding and facilitating the construction of more than 400 unauthorised buildings in areas in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) under exclusive Israeli control signals the end of:
* negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation under the 1993 Oslo Accords and the 2003 Bush Roadmap and
* the role of the Quartet - America, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union - as mediator in those negotiations
It is hard to conceive any action more likely to undermine trust or prejudge final status issues than the Quartet’s failure to condemn the EU’s own aberrant behaviour and call for an immediate halt to its illegal activities in the West Bank.

Obama's Iran Policy and Israel's Elections

Beyond the personal animosity and the vast difference in worldviews, Obama does not want Netanyahu around because he considers Israel's prime minister a serious spoiler of his most important foreign policy initiative. But it is not only in Washington that Obama considers Netanyahu to be unwelcome. Obama wishes to be rid of Netanyahu in Jerusalem as well. This is not the first time we have been witness to American intervention in Israeli elections; with the White House showing displeasure with Likud candidates, and enlisting Jewish activists and donors for the anti-Netanyahu campaign.
Obama does not want Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel even after a deal is signed with Iran. He has no desire to be exposed to Netanyahu's continued criticism, based on the realization that the proposed deal has many loopholes, or based upon probable Iranian violations of the agreement. He also takes seriously Netanyahu's statement that Israel is not bound by America's unilateral agreements. In Obama's view, a paranoid Netanyahu may still revert to the military option, and thereby destroy his only foreign policy "success."
Obama is probably right on this point. Among the candidates for prime minister in the Israeli elections, only Netanyahu is passionate about Iran, and only Netanyahu would consider ordering the IDF to attack Iranian nuclear installations in defiance of the United States. While the campaign in Israel is focused more on personalities than on issues, the underlying theme of the elections is the Iranian threat and who is best placed and most experienced to tackle this challenge.

Once Again, Abe Foxman and the ADL Oppose Israel

Uncle Abe Foxman is at it again – undermining the democratically elected Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, urged Benjamin Netanyahu to cancel his upcoming March 17 speech to a joint session of Congress about the Iranian nuclear threat, saying that the speech is “….a tragedy of unintended consequences.”
Foxman claimed that the speech, “…has been hijacked by politics. Now is a time to recalibrate, restart, and find a new platform and new timing to take away the distractions.”
What has been hijacked by politics is Foxman’s ADL – which is a left-wing, uber-liberal organization that backs the Democratic party on their policies, irrespective of what is good for the Jews. On domestic and foreign policy issues, the ADL has moved so far away from its purported purpose of combating “anti-Semitism,” that it leaves many wondering what they do.

Likud seeks injunction against V15 group

The motion was filed after Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein ruled that the Central Elections Committee was barred from ruling on a different petition filed by the Likud against V15's activities. As the March 17 elections are only a month away, Jerusalem District Court Zvi Segal has informed the parties he will rule on the motion by Wednesday.
The Victory 2015 campaign explicitly urges voters to replace the current government, but its allegedly clear ties to the leftist parties, as well as the obscure origins of that its multi-million dollar funding, have prompted suspicions that its activities were, in fact, illegal.
State Comptroller Yosef Shapira announced last week that he plans to audit V15 following the elections.
The Likud's motion for an injunction said the party "asks the court to issue an interim order against [V15], which assists the National Union list, but is funded by external elements and not the [Labor and Hatnuah] parties themselves." It further names the Labor party, Meretz, V15 and the OneVoice nongovernmental organization, and asks the court to bar them from "engaging in indirect election propaganda, or financed election propaganda that entails collecting the names and contact information of potential voters, pending a ruling on the main complaint."

A perfect storm brews in the Middle East

The Iran issue will come to a head next month. Netanyahu’s speech to Congress is scheduled for March 3. Israeli elections, in which Netanyahu is running against a coalition of more moderate Israeli politicians, will take place March 17. The deadline for reaching a framework deal in the Iran negotiations is March 24. It’s a month that could shape the future of the Middle East, not to mention the U.S.-Israeli relationship, for years to come.
Iran policy isn’t the only short-circuit between Washington and Jerusalem. The administration also fears that Netanyahu is ignoring a potential new blowup with the Palestinians. U.S. intelligence reports indicate that the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank and has nominal authority now in Gaza, could run out of money as early as next month. If that happened, the United States fears that the civil service and security force in the West Bank could collapse, creating a new crisis for Israel and the region.

Nisman’s legacy

Nisman, putting the pieces together, recognized that Iran’s aggressive ambitions extended beyond Argentina’s Jewish community.
“The AMIA bombing did not constitute an isolated event,” Nisman wrote in an extensive 2013 report on Iran’s terror operations in Latin America.
The AMIA bombing must be “understood as part of a larger effort by Iran to infiltrate Latin America.”
Uruguay’s expulsion last month of an Iranian diplomat for his involvement in placing a bomb near the Israeli Embassy in Montevideo confirmed Nisman’s assessment. “I told you so,” Nisman would have said – had he not been found dead in his apartment with a gunshot to the head on January 18.
Nisman had traced the roots of Iran’s global terror plan to a 1982 seminar in Tehran for Muslim leaders from around the world that, he said, was “a turning point in the regime’s policy for exporting the revolution, including the use of violence and terrorism.” Iranian terrorists have struck in recent years in Bulgaria, India, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, while additional plots were thankfully thwarted in Azerbaijan, Cyprus and Thailand.

Radicals Strap Suicide Belt on MESA

The membership of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has now passed a resolution taking the organization well down the road to endorsing the academic boycott of Israel. The resolution, which passed by a 561–152 margin, urges “MESA program committees to organize discussions at MESA annual meetings, and the MESA Board of Directors to create opportunities over the course of the year that provide platforms for a sustained discussion of the academic boycott and foster careful consideration of an appropriate position for MESA to assume.”
It isn’t too difficult to imagine just what sort of campaign the Israel-haters will launch during this “sustained discussion,” or where it’s likely to lead. And the overwhelming margin in favor of the resolution suggests that this is just where most MESAns want to go.
The vote constitutes a stunning defeat for MESA’s old guard. They invested decades in building MESA as the world’s preeminent professional organization for Middle Eastern studies, and they did it by maintaining at least a façade of scholarly neutrality. That MESA might blow itself up in a suicidal attempt to inflict some (marginal) political damage on Israel is a danger they repeatedly warned against in the closed online members’ forum that preceded the vote.

Honest Reporting: Hey BDSers! Let’s Get Serious!

It is an odd day when I find myself congratulating followers of the BDS movement.
It has been, for too long, painfully obvious that the BDS movement was singling out Israel for attack. It appeared that to the BDS movement, there was some quality about Israel that made it worse than all other countries, facts be damned. I shall leave it to the educated readers of HonestReporting to decide for themselves what about the Jewish state is so objectionable to the BDS movement (hint: it isn’t the “state” part).
As Ari Lesser so eloquently put it, if the BDS movement wanted to have any pretense of intellectual or moral honesty, they had to boycott the rest of the world before they could even begin to launch any sanctions against Israel, whose alleged systematic violations of human rights (emphasis on alleged), even if true (they’re not), would be smaller in both magnitude and criminality than scores of other nations.

Anti-Israel Anglican vicar “temporarily unavailable”

By associating with groups like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Christ at the Checkpoint conference and (most untenable of all) by speaking at conferences in Iran, one of the most persistent and aggressive state persecutors of Christians in the world, Sizer has damaged his own status as a credible Christian voice in the Middle East debate.
As an evangelical Christian myself, it is sad to see a fellow minister sinking to the depths of disseminating ridiculous conspiracy articles that are blatantly anti-semitic.
There is a desperate need for holders of all positions on the Middle East conflict to listen to each other and dialogue instead of indulging in the emotive shouting of meaningless rhetoric that is seen at “pro-Palestine” rallies and meetings.
The detailed listing of all that Rev Sizer is forbidden to do from now on, including preparing background material for others to speak, is an indicator of how little his church hierarchy now trusts his protestations of innocence in propagating anti-Israel and anti-semitic material.
Stephen Sizer has received his “final written warning” and for his sake and the sake of his parishioners I hope he heeds it.

Oops. Did I just honor A terror supporter?

Did you hear the one about the City Councilwoman who’s invited to meet and greet a visiting dignity, she does, and winds up giving her a “citation of honor” — and later learns the dignitary supports and praises Palestinian terror?
The visiting dignitary was Laila Ghannam, the Palestinian District Governor of Ramallah, on the West Bank. The Councilwoman was Maria Quinones-Sanchez, who arrived at a mosque in her district in late January packing a Liberty Bell and the citation (which comes from her office and not from the city).
Sanchez tweeted out Ghannam was the first woman governor of Ramallah, “Women making moves.”
She also posted something on her Facebook account, which was taken down.
Why? After the event, Sanchez learned to her surprise and dismay that Ghannam is on record, and video, praising terrorists who had killed Israeli civilians.

NGO Monitor: San Francisco Anti-Israel Bus Ads’ Link with Terrorism and Antisemitism

The two co-sponsors are:
StopFundingApartheid.org (Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign or SeaMAC)
NoTaxDollarsToIsrael.com: This second co-sponsor (NoTaxDollarsToIsrael.com) is led by Paul Larudee of the Free Palestine Movement (El Cerrito, CA). See details below.
Paul Larudee
The domain ‘NoTaxDollarstoIsrael.com’ is registered to Paul Larudee who is also the website’s administrator.
Larudee’s extremism includes the promotion of antisemitic themes, rationalization and justification of terrorism, and meeting with and receiving a medal of honor from leaders of Hamas. Hamas is listed as terrorist organizations by the EU, the US, the UK, Canada, and many other countries.
Larudee has written of Jewish/Zionist “control” over US “media” and “government”:
Larudee has expressed support for terrorism, euphemistically called “armed resistance”:
In an interview on the Berkeley, California radio station KPFA, Larudee said:
“Although we 2 are totally dedicated to non-violence, we recognize that not everybody that we work with in the Palestinian community is necessarily devoted to non-violence. And under international law, it is permitted for oppressed and occupied peoples to resist using armed resistance. This is permitted and we recognize their right to do so.”

Huffington Post op-ed implicitly justifies attacks on Jews in Europe!

A commentator named Barry Lando published an op-ed at the World Post (a Huffington Post brand) on Feb. 16th titled ‘BiBi Netanyahu: The King of Chutzpah‘. Lando, a former 60 Minutes producer, not only blames Israel for fueling antisemitism in Europe, but actually seems to justify Muslim attacks on Jews!
Here’s the passage, in the putatively “progressive” publication, which blames Israel for antisemitism:
The only word for it is chutzpah: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for European Jews to flee to Israel from the claws of a newly rampant anti-Semitism that is supposedly sweeping Europe.
Why Chutzpah? Because one of the major causes for the upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks in Europe over the past several years have been the actions of Israel--under Netanyahu.
Though Lando’s claim that the Jewish state is responsible for antisemitic attacks in Europe is insidious enough, it actually gets worse, and crosses the line into an implicit justification of racist violence.

Honest Reporting: HR Radio: Pink Floyd, CNN, and another Brian Williams Lie

HonestReporting’s Yarden Frankl runs down the good, the bad, and the truly ugly of media coverage of Israel with VOI’s Josh Hasten. This week — a great take-down of anti-Israel activist Roger Waters, CNN looks to J-Street as a non-biased source, and the story of how Brian Williams and NBC News “framed” a couple whose child was murdered by Palestinian terrorists — even asking the bereaved father to pose with a gun to better look the “settler” part.

Can You Shoot Your Gun for Us?

This example of anti-Israel media bias will stun you. Brian Williams -- the same person who has been suspended by NBC news for lying -- went to speak with an Israeli couple whose son was murdered by Palestinian terrorist. But all he really wanted was footage of crazy, gun-toting settlers.

Germany charges 93-year-old former Nazi

A German court said a 93-year-old man has been charged with 170,000 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he served as an SS guard at the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland.
The defendant, whose name wasn’t disclosed in line with privacy laws, allegedly served in Auschwitz from January 1942 to June 1944, the Detmold state court said in a statement Monday.
He is alleged to have been assigned to the Auschwitz I camp, but also to have helped supervise new prisoners, largely Jews, as they arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the part of the camp complex where most of its 1.1 million victims were killed.
Defense attorney Johannes Salmen said his client has acknowledged being at Auschwitz I, but denies being assigned to Birkenau or being involved in killings.

Lithuanian fascists march near Holocaust execution site

Approximately 500 ultra nationalists, some bearing Nazi swastikas, marched through a Lithuanian city that during the Holocaust saw the region’s most effective massacre of Jews.
Monday’s march through Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city 60 miles from the capital of Vilnius, was the eighth annual event organized by the Lithuanian Nationalist Youth Union on February 16 – one of the Baltic state’s two independence days.
As the marchers assembled at a local park, they were confronted by 20-odd protesters from the local Jewish community and anti-fascist groups who shadowed the marchers in a silent counter-demonstration.
“This march is particularly offensive because it is taking place where locals and Nazis murdered more than 10,000 Jews in one day,” said Dovid Katz, a US-born Jewish scholar of Yiddish who settled in Vilnius 16 years ago and has led protests against the veneration of Nazis in the Baltic States.

Logic Industries lays off Israeli employees for major Arab client

Logic Industries, which makes information technology security software for companies in the natural resources industry, is letting go 250 of the 600 people it employees in Israel, apparently at the behest of a major client from the Gulf, TheMarker has learned.
The company, which is controlled by Mati Kochavi, the entrepreneur and investor also behind security company AGT International, is mainly firing people involved in installing systems. Logic will remain in Israel but limit its local operations to research and development, sources said.
The contract with the key customer will be moved from Logic to AGT, which is based in Zurich and will hire staff to replace the Israelis being laid off. The problem for Logic, sources said, is maintaining contracts with companies based in countries with which Israel has no diplomatic relations.
Employees of the company, based in Kibbutz Yakum, will be sent notices in the next several days to attend a pre-dismissal hearing, as required by law, by the end of the month. The layoffs will entail severance costs of about 35 million shekels ($9 million), or about 100,000 shekels per employee. As many as 100 staff have left in the past 10 months.

Jewish, Arab vendors in New York turf war

Under the headline “Intifooda,” The New York Post reported Sunday that the operators of a kosher food cart in Manhattan have been involved in a bitter turf war with the Egyptian owners of a rival establishment.
According to the report, the Holy Rollers kosher cart, operated by vendors Yisroel Mordowitz and Yosef Salzbank, settled near Rockefeller Center last Monday after wandering the streets of the city in search of a prime spot.
After the first day, Holy Rollers was rolling in money — some $2,000 — from selling its deli fare.
But by Wednesday things turned south, and according to the report, Mordowitz and Salzbank were “under blockade” by the owners of a rival cart, Street Sabrett, which sells halal hot dogs.
“This guy is hungry — hungry for money,” Street Sabrett vendor Mohamed Mossad reportedly yelled as he and almost a dozen other people kept Mordowitz and the kosher cart off the block.
“Why doesn’t he go to 47th Street?” he shouted, a reference to the Diamond District, where kosher food is in high demand. “He’s just coming to this particular spot, and he wants to grab it from me — and kill me, actually. Kill my business.”
Mordowitz told the Post that one of the vendors even shouted, “This is not Palestine!”

Statue unveiled in Paris commemorates Jewish resistance fighter captured, executed by Nazis

Politicians, resistance veterans, Communist Party activists, Jewish leaders and residents of Paris’s 11th Arrondissement gathered on Sunday morning at a little city garden, not far from the Leon Blum square. The veterans were wearing their medals and berets, holding up flags.
They came to honor their friend, Marcel Rajman, executed by the Germans in February 1944, together with 22 other resistance members.
The little garden was named after Rajman several years ago, but on this gray winter morning his comrades came to unveil a statue; inspired by his image on the last day of his life.
“When we came here last year, at the annual commemoration ceremony, I felt that this place needed not only a name, but also a face, an image. I vowed, in the name of all of us, sons and daughters of the deportees, to bring the face of our friend, Marcel, back to his home neighborhood, to bring back his soul.

Veil of Secrecy Surrounds Apple’s CEO Tim Cook’s Trip to Israel

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook took a secret trip to Israel this weekend, arriving in the Jewish state for the inauguration of Apple’s new offices in Herzliya, slated to open on Tuesday, Israel’s Channel 2 reported.
Apple already has offices in Ra’anana and Haifa.
The company’s offices in Herzliya will house over 800 employees, and will include a gourmet restaurant and a fishpond, and will have greenery everywhere. Cook will be speaking at the inaugural event on Tuesday, which will be attended by a thousand of Apple’s employees in Israel.
Apple has been trying to keep Cook’s visit a secret, as part of the general secrecy it is maintaining around the entire event on Tuesday. Senior company employees were instructed not to mention the event. Junior employees were not informed at all and are expected to receive an invitation at the last moment. Apple apparently wants to surprise the employees with Cook’s speech.
While Apple is working to keep everything about the speech a secret, Cook, who plans to stay in Israel for a while, has spent his time dining in Tel-Aviv’s restaurants, enjoying the anonymity, since most people don’t recognize him. In the lead up to the inauguration, Cook has tried to maintain a low public profile, staying with his partner at a boutique hotel in central Tel-Aviv. He spent Saturday visiting the Tel-Aviv Museum, and commented on how impressed he was by the local art, according to the Channel 2 report.

TowerSec’s tech knocks car hackers out of driver’s seat

The age of the connected car is here, and with it comes the age of the hackable car.
With many cars equipped these days with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, XM satellite and even remote unlocking connections, hackers can take control of key components of vehicles, scramble or change data in their computers, or unlock and disable them. This allows them to “raid” a vehicle’s trunk, or hold the driver hostage until they pay a “repair fee.”
Such hacking is no longer the stuff of science fiction, or even a problem that affects only high-end vehicles. A US Senate report issued last week slams carmakers for failing to do anything substantive about the problem. To date, there have been few solutions to protect car owners and drivers from vehicle hacks; the electronic control units (ECUs) that hackers access to make unauthorized changes to the way vehicles work are generally inaccessible, with only the authorized repair shop having the equipment to communicate with these ECUs.
That’s why the solution proffered by Israel’s TowerSec, an automotive cybersecurity supplier, is likely to be extremely popular among drivers and manufacturers, believes Saar Dickman, CEO of TowerSec.

Ancient trove of gold coins found off coast

The largest gold treasure ever found in Israel was discovered by chance off the shore of the ancient port city of Caesarea, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Tuesday.
At least 2,000 gold coins dating back over 1,000 years were found 12 meters underwater by a group of scuba divers earlier in February, who quickly reported the discovery to their the diving club manager, who then called in Israel Antiquities Authority officials.
Antiquities Authority divers, using metal detectors, went back to the site along with the original divers, and uncovered six kilograms worth of golden coins, which had been exposed due to winter storms, according to the authority’s statement.
They expect to find more coins in the area.
“The gold coins are in excellent condition, and despite remaining at the bottom of the sea for over 1,000 years, they did not need any conservation lab treatment,” Robert Cole, a coins expert at the Antiquities Authority said. Some of the coins were bent and had bite marks, indicating a physical authenticity check, according to Cole.

National Geographic picks Tel Aviv for list of ‘world’s top 10 oceanfront cities’

The ultimate travel magazine, National Geographic, has published a new Top 10 list and Tel Aviv is on it. The magazine with the famous yellow rectangular border recently published a list of “10 Top Oceanfront Cities” and included an eclectic choice of “glittering seascapes [that] provide both the backdrop and the beat of these waterfront urban meccas.”
In no particular order, the world’s best oceanfront locations – according to the magazine – are Tel Aviv, Perth, Brisbane, Tallinn, San Diego, St. John’s, Durban, Vladivostok, Marseille, and Portland.
“There’s plenty of room for beach bathing in this modern Israeli city on the Mediterranean. The historic port of Jaffa has found new life in recent years with a vibrant gallery, café, and restaurant scene,” the magazine writes about Tel Aviv.

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Posted By Ian to Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News at 2/17/2015 06:00:00 PM