08/24 Links Pt2: Russian 'documentary' claims Jews behind Titanic, Chernobyl and 9/11; BDS encounters a fight in Europe ~ EoZ

From Ian:

Anniversary of 1929 Hebron Massacre and Ethnic Cleansing of Jews

Hebron is a hot spot in many ways. Hebron and its immediately surrounding Arab areas are the single largest source of terror attacks during the so-called Knife or Stabbing Intifada.
It’s also a place where anti-Zionist and left-wing “liberal Zionist” American Jews love to gather to protest the Jewish “settlers” who live in a tiny section of the city. That section is under Israeli military control by agreement with the Palestinian Authority, with good reason. Hebron has a long history of violence directed at Jews.
Hebron also is the place of the Cave of the Patriarchs, which I visited in 2015.
Hebron had one of if not the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, dating back several hundred years at least. Until 1929.
On August 23, 1929, the Arabs attacked the Jews of Hebron along with numerous other Jewish communities.
But in Hebron it was particularly vicious. It was a blood frenzy in which the Jews were set upon with particular glee and slaughtered with knives, machetes and anything else available.

David Collier: HGSS, Jewish News and Yachad, shutting the mouths of the London Zionists

A Jewish newspaper in the UK smears a Zionist movement in a badly researched hatchet job, a London synagogue bows down to pressure and cancels a Zionist event. A scene from an antisemitic horror movie? No, this is the actual state of affairs ofJewish London in 2016. Read on for a Beyond the Great Divide exclusive:
Questions now need to be asked about just where British Jewry is heading. Are the ‘red fascists’ taking hold in our community?Background
Over the last few months, I have received several invitations from grassroots activist group ‘Campaign 4 Truth‘. Some of the speakers have been impressive. ‘Campaign 4 Truth’ are unashamedly Zionist. I only wish more of our established ewish community bodies could take a page from some of the grassroots groups and proudly wave the Israeli flag.
One of the more recent invites was for an event with an Israeli organisation called ‘Im Tirtzu’ that was due to take place on September 11th. It was scheduled to be held at HGSS, the ‘orthodox’ ‘United’ Hampstead Garden Suburb Synagogue.
Im Tirtzu
Like many of the groups currently campaigning against the delegitimisation of Israel, ‘Im Tirtzu’ are not without their critics. Just a few months ago, a horrendous name and shame campaign backfired badly, and brought criticism against ‘Im Tirtzu’ from across the political spectrum. The main focus of ‘Im Tirtzu’s’ campaigns are the NGO’s that sit to the very left of the Israeli political spectrum. Groups that are now under the microscope, such as B’tselem, Breaking the Silence and more importantly the donors that enable the activities of these groups. In the opening paragraph on the Wiki page for ‘Im Tirtzu’, it says this:
“Im Tirtzu is mostly known for its campaign against the New Israel Fund, foreign government-funded NGOs, and alleged bias in university curriculum”.
No surprise then that the Chief Executive of the New Israel Fund, Adam Ognall, appears to be a primary source for the article in the Jewish News.

Russian 'documentary' claims Jews behind Titanic, Chernobyl and 9/11

A documentary recently aired on a Russian television station with a potential reach of 100 million viewers laid blame for some of history's greatest calamities at the feet of the Jews.
According to The Jewish Chronicle, the short film, which aired on Russia's REN TV, claimed that Jews were behind the sinking of the Titanic, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and the September 11 terror attacks.
The new version of the documentary was updated from a 2012 broadcast which had claimed that 300 Jews, Illuminati and Freemasons had plotted to sink the Titanic in order to sow chaos and conquer the world.
The updated broadcast aired on the private network added the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to the conspiracy, along with 9/11 and Chernobyl.
Russia's Ministry of Education and Science has previously condemned REN TV's "documentaries" as "the most harmful pseudoscientific project (for spreading of myths, delusions and superstitions)," according to the Chronicle.

A Dirty Business: The Attack on Michael Weiss

Richard Silverstein, a blogger, has written a hit piece. This description, which may seem at first intemperate, is entirely merited. The article Silverstein wrote, which was published on a fringe website, The Unz Review, a week ago, has little in the way of a narrative thread. Its genesis can be attributed, one can safely assume, to Silverstein’s hatred of one man: Michael Weiss, a writer and journalist, co-author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, and an editor at The Daily Beast. Weiss is seen to represent something Silverstein hates – a slightly intangible collection of leftist, Zionist, ‘neoconservative’ (of which more later) and other positions, including, apparently, Weiss’ pledged support for ‘socialize[d] healthcare’.
His hatred for Weiss firmly established, all Silverstein needed to do was to find a subject upon which he could prop his pre-existing enmity. He appears to have found one, something which has aroused attention from some, as well as supportive messages from Julian Assange of WikiLeaks; Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, who called it a ‘MUST READ’; and a whole host of passive endorsements in the form of retweets from Glenn Greenwald, Reza Aslan and so on. The subject Silverstein claims to elucidate is the emergence of an ‘Iran-U.S. Hardline Nexus That Led [an] Iranian-American to Evin Prison’. It’s a strong claim, and one which dissolves, like a sugar cube dropped into a warm beverage, upon coming into contact with reality.
Hate is the correct word here, and it is an operative one. Without Silverstein’s hatred of Weiss, the piece would not exist. It holds no independent merit; it seems to contain little in the way of truth, and nothing in the way of worthwhile analysis.
This is one of a species of pieces, commonly (but not exclusively) written by those on the far-Left of the political spectrum, which see in every connection a suspicious interaction, consider every association the precursor to nefarious activity, and view every insinuation, no matter how tired or nebulous, as worth repeating.

The van der Horst affair

Ten years ago, the censoring of a lecture at Utrecht University on Muslim anti-Semitism reached the international media. The victim of this censorship, Professor Pieter van der Horst, was a leading internationally known academic who taught early Christianity and Judaism at the university. He was also a member of the Royal Dutch Academy, whose members are the Netherlands’ leading scholars.
On 16 June 2006, Van der Horst gave his farewell lecture on the topic of “The Myth of Jewish Cannibalism.” In it, he drew a historical line from the more than two millennia old pre-Christian Greek anti-Semitism to the popularity of the anti-Jewish blood libel in the contemporary Arab world. That same day, the Dutch Jewish weekly NIW wrote that the lecture’s text had been severely censored by the university’s rector. Van der Horst later confirmed this claim in an article entitled “Tying Down Academic Freedom” in the Wall Street Journal.
In it, Van der Horst mentioned that as a result of academic pressure he felt forced to delete parts of the lecture. For example, he eliminated the following paragraph: “Much of the (contemporary) Islamic vilification of Jews has its roots in German fascism. Hitler’s Mein Kampf has been on the best-seller lists in many Middle Eastern countries. The sympathy for Nazism goes back to the Führer’s days. Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Huseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, even closely collaborated with Hitler. He spent the war years in Berlin and visited Auschwitz, a trip that inspired his plans to build a concentration camp in Palestine.”
Before the lecture’s date Van der Horst was called by the university’s Rector Magnificus Willem Hendrik Gispen, to appear before a committee in which told him that the university had to protect him from himself. If he did not delete the references to Islamic anti-Semitism he might be threatened by violent Muslim groups. He would also damage the university’s ability to build bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims. To add insult to injury, the committee had the effrontery to claim that the scholarly level of Van der Horst’s lecture was poor.

How Paris public schools became no-go zones for Jews

Twenty-five years after he graduated from a public high school in the French capital, Stephane Tayar recalls favorably his time in one of the world’s most thorough education systems.
As for many other French Jews his age, the state-subsidized upbringing has worked out well for Tayar, a 43-year-old communications and computers specialist. Eloquent but down to earth, he seems as comfortable discussing the complexities of French society as he is adept at fighting — curses, threats and all — for his motorcycle’s place in the brutal traffic here.
“You learn to get along with all kinds of people – Muslims, Christians, poor, rich,” Tayar said in recalling his school years. “You debate, you study, you get into fistfights. It’s a pretty round education.”
But when the time came for Tayar and his wife to enroll their own boy and girl, the couple opted for Jewish institutions — part of a network of dozens of private establishments with state recognition, hefty tuition and student bodies that are made up almost exclusively of Jews.
“Enrolling a Jewish kid into a public school was normal when I was growing up,” Tayar said in a recent interview as he waited with two helmets in hand to pick up his youngest from her Jewish elementary school in eastern Paris. “Nowadays forget it; no longer realistically possible. Anti-Semitic bullying means it would be too damaging for any Jewish kid you put there.”
This common impression and growing religiosity among Jews in France are responsible for the departure from public schools of tens of thousands of young French and Belgian Jews, who at a time of unprecedented sectarian tensions in their countries are being brought up in a far more insular fashion than previous generations.

A George Soros-Funded Palestinian Media Outlet Runs Anti-Semitic Article Series

Last week, a trove of hacked documents was released detailing the international operations of billionaire George Soros. The leak’s contents offered a window into the activism of one of the world’s most powerful liberal elites. Among the many items revealed in the tranche was the substantial web of Israel/Palestine organizations funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF)—most critical of Israeli policy, and some critical of the Jewish state’s right to exist. One of the grantees listed was Wattan News, a Palestinian media outlet with over 2.7 million followers on Facebook, which received a hefty $405,000 from OSF from 2012 to 2014. An inquiry to OSF confirmed that Wattan remains a grantee today.
That same Wattan News, several bloggers soon observed, has been publishing anti-Semitic content in the form of an article series advocating “anti-Zionism” that has run for the past month. The first installment pushed the discredited conspiracy theory that today’s Jews are frauds who are descended from a people known as the Khazars, and then stole the mantle of the true Jews. (Thus, today’s Jews are not really the subjects of the Bible or native to the Middle East.) The second piece claimed that the Jews invented the myth of being a “chosen people” to manipulate and extort the gentiles. The third piece denied the historical Jewish connection to the land of Israel entirely. The fourth piece explicitly denied the Holocaust, citing notorious anti-Semites and deniers like David Irving and Ernst Zundel. Collectively, the series essentially denied Jewish peoplehood, history, and suffering.
On Monday, Tablet informed OSF that Wattan was distributing these anti-Semitic articles and asked the organization for comment. Soon after, the pieces were taken down from Wattan’s website, although no correction or apology was posted to educate misled readers. This morning, OSF issued the following statement condemning Wattan and promising better oversight in the future, though it did not withdraw funding:

London’s Muslim mayor hit with anti-Semitic abuse for opposing Corbyn

London Mayor Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of a European capital city, has been bombarded with anti-Semitic messages since he said he would not support Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party leadership election.
Several of the messages suggested that he had been influenced by Jews, the London-based news website Jewishnews.uk reported.
The mayor “spends his time writing articles to help his masters in Tel Aviv,” read one tweet.
“Who owns you @sadiqkhan?” read another, which included a photo of Khan wearing a kippah while eating matzah at a Jewish community event.
Last week, Khan threw his support behind Owen Smith, who has been a Parliament member since 2010 and is Corbyn’s only challenger for the party leadership. Smith previously worked as a radio and television producer for the BBC.
Khan, a Labour member, wrote an op-ed published Saturday in The Guardian newspaper in support of Smith. He said in the London-based daily that if Corbyn remained party leader, Labour would be unlikely to win the next general election. Khan also said Corbyn “has already proved that he is unable to organize an effective team, and has failed to win the trust and respect of the British people.”

UK agency: No aid for charity accused of Hamas funding

The British Department for International Development, a UK government aid agency, said Tuesday that it does not fund the global charity World Vision’s Gaza Strip branch and will not consider awarding it grant money after Israel accused its director of funneling funds to the terror group Hamas.
The move followed decisions by Germany and Australia earlier this month to suspend donations to the international Christian charity over the allegations by Israel.
In a letter to the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, secretary of state for development aid Priti Patel said she was “deeply concerned” by the allegations leveled against World Vision and was “taking the matter extremely seriously.”
“DFID does not provide any current funding to World Vision operations in Gaza, or in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) more widely,” she wrote in the letter, a response to a query from the Jewish Leadership Council and Board of Deputies.
“We have written to World Vision to inform them that we will not consider any future funding to their work in the OPTs until World Vision has completed its audit and we have had the opportunity to fully consider our position,” she added.

Forging Alliances to Defeat BDS

In warfare, few things represent a double-edged sword more than an alliance (except, perhaps, an actual double-edged sword).
On the positive side, if you want to double the size of your army without having to recruit, train or equip a single solider, all you need to do is sign an alliance deal with someone with an equally large military force and voila! Instant scale!
But if the soldiers in that army you just allied with carry different weapons, fire different caliber ammunition, or speak a different language from the fighters in your ranks, suddenly this alliance comes at a cost in terms of logistics you didn’t have to previously bear. Even without those organizational challenges, if your allies fight using unfamiliar tactics, or are led by people whose goals overlap but are not identical to your own, suddenly ensuring everyone in that alliance fights in common cause becomes a job you didn’t have to do when you fought alone.
Alliances travel under different names in different areas of human endeavor. Businesspeople forge partnerships while political actors put together coalitions. But the nature, including the positives and negatives of establishing and maintaining alliances, remain the same regardless of what they are called.
The virtue of alliances, or coalitions, in democratic politics is obvious given that victory tends to go to those who can muster the most votes. This is why we often bemoan the fact that our opponents in the BDS propaganda wars seem to be more effective than we are in building bridges to other campus groups, especially minority groups who come out to support divestment initiatives pitched by organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
But to understand why this might be a misguided concern, you have to get past the numbers and look into the nature of the groups that are forming coalitions against Israel on campus.

BDS encounters a fight in Europe

The student council at Germany's Leipzig University has decided to fight the movement to boycott and isolate Israel, an unprecedented move by any standard. Over the last few decades, the university scene in Western Europe hasn't been particularly encouraging for Israel. Countless student groups have condemned the Jewish state and adopted the mendacious narrative propagated by our enemies. Campuses have frequently turned into hotbeds of hatred toward Israel; the term "Zionist" has become an insult; and pro-Palestinian activists enjoy near-automatic support. Things have reached the point of actual danger. Anti-Israeli brainwashing has made an entire generation of European university graduates the victims of a wild campaign to delegitimize Israel.
And all of a sudden we have this decision by the Leipzig students, who, for the first time, are calling a spade a spade. The wording of the student council's decision calls the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement an anti-Semitic movement and determines that it is designed to bring about the destruction of Israel. Very surprisingly, the socialist-democratic student group at the same university supported that wording, which means that the battle for Israel's image and our interests isn't lost yet, even among the European Left.
Indeed, there is no such thing as a doomed battle. True, many baseless accusations -- such as accusing Israel of "occupation" -- have taken root in Western consciousness. But concentrated, determined efforts can break down even the most deeply-rooted accusations. That's what happened in the U.S. Republican Party, which changed its official platform adding pro-Israel language and removing the demand to establish a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria. Sooner or later, the same thing will happen in Europe, if Israel continues to insist that it is just. After all, I have yet to encounter a fair European who, after I laid out the facts for him, continued to argue that the blame for the Middle East conflict fell squarely on Israel.

Jewish Student Files Complaint Against Houston High School for Failing to Discipline Antisemitic Activists (INTERVIEW)

A Jewish student who filed a discrimination complaint against his high school accused administrators of not taking his grievances seriously because they were “mixing their political bias and their roles as disciplinarians.”
Eliav Terk — a recent graduate of Carnegie Vanguard High School in Houston, Texas — told The Algemeiner on Tuesday that, during a nine-month controversy surrounding the actions of anti-Israel classmates, “The administration systematically attempted to silence me and disregard my complaint.”
Terk was referring to an event that took place last November, during the public school’s annual International Festival. At the fair, Terk recounted, Israeli flags on display were torn down or covered with Palestinian and Iranian flags. In addition, he said, several students wore Hamas-affiliated scarves and waved Palestinian flags while chanting, “Jerusalem is ours” and, “We’re coming for it.” Following the incident, Terk said, one student posted an antisemitic cartoon on Twitter, calling for an intifada against Israel.

McGill Student Warns Incoming Freshmen About ‘Disheartening’ Reality of Being Jewish on Campus

A Canadian Jewish student issued a warning Tuesday to incoming pro-Israel freshmen on the harsh reality they will likely face on campus for their religious and political identities.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Molly Harris — a third-year McGill University student — wrote about being singled out by anti-Israel groups and many of her “liberal peers” for her campus advocacy on behalf of the Jewish state.
“I’ve been called a ‘Zionist b***h.’ I’ve been told several times that Jews haven’t suffered…I’ve seen my friends mocked for their Judaism in crude, hateful language on popular anonymous social media platforms,” Harris wrote.
During one attempt to raise awareness about campus antisemitism, Harris said, she was told by a student publication that the topic had already been covered in the “mainstream Zionist media.”
Harris warned that social-justice organizations — which, she said, share many values with the Jewish community — have aligned themselves with the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and have “excluded” Jewish students from their ranks.
She stated that activists continue to “propagate the idea that Zionism underpins many of the world’s problems, as well as claim that Jews have no right to feel connected to Israel and that any Jew who does feel a connection to his or her religious homeland is part of the problem.”
“As a Zionist, this can be extremely disheartening — why should you be alienated from a cause because you believe Israel has a right to exist?” she wrote.

Catholic school suspends pro-Palestinian teacher

The Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board, located west of Toronto, suspended teacher Nadia Shoufani after she demanded support "in any form" for Palestinian efforts against Israel.
The board says Shoufani, a teacher at St. Catherine of Siena school, has been suspended with pay pending further investigation by the board.
According to the board, concerns were raised by “the community and public at large” over Shoufani’s “professional conduct.” It added that those issues have been brought to the attention of the Ontario College of Teachers for investigation and review.
The Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association (OECTA), which is representing Shoufani during the investigation, believes the suspension is excessive.
"I want to clarify that Ms. Shoufani has not been suspended due to her personal or professional conduct, but as a result of a perceived lack of compliance with the board's investigation process," OECTA president Ann Hawkins said in an email.
The Missisauga teacher raised concerns after she made a speech at an Al-Quds Day event at Queen's Park on July 2.

WA Liberal Party Rejects the BDS Movement

The WA [Western Australia] Liberal Party [Conservative] unanimously passed a motion at its annual State Conference rejecting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The motion specifically called on the Federal Government to
"condemn any attempts by Australian organisations, groups or individuals to promote the BDS movement at home or abroad as well as take measures to prohibit such organisations from receiving support from or be associated with public agencies or government departments".
State Vice President Anthony Spagnolo applauded the motion stating:
“The BDS movement hurts Jewish businesses and further divides people instead of working towards a peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The unanimous passing of this motion is testament to the WA Liberal Party’s longstanding support for the State of Israel.”

Celtic fans raise over £136,000 for 'Palestine' after Israel match debacle

Celtic fans have so far raised over £136,000 in two days for Palestinian charities after the club received a disciplinary charge from the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).
Last week, fans of Scotland’s Celtic soccer team staged a protest, organized by Green Brigade fans, against Israel when their team faced off with Hapoel Beersheba in the Champions League.
The fans waved more than a 100 Palestinian flags at the match last week in spite of prior warnings, breaching UEFA rules on political statements at matches.
The online 'gofundme' fundraising page was launched shortly after the charge from UEFA and shared via social media as #MatchTheFineForPalestine.
UEFA considers the Palestinian flag an "illicit banner" and according to the group's rules and regulations, bans all messages that are of a "political, ideological, religious, offensive or provocative nature."

BBC News website promotes anti-Israel activists’ fund raising

On the afternoon of August 22nd an article published on the BBC News website’s regional ‘Glasgow & West’ page was also cross-posted on the Middle East page.
Currently titled “Celtic fans raise £85,000 ‘for Palestine’ after Uefa charge” (and with its date stamp having been changed), the article states:Celtic art
“Palestinian flags were waved around Celtic Park during the Champions League match on Wednesday night.
Uefa later charged the club over an “illicit banner” display.”
Readers are not informed that:
“UEFA said the flag display constituted an “illicit banner,” under a rule which bans “messages that are of a political, ideological, religious, offensive or provocative nature.””

Merkel party politician: Green Party minister ignored anti-Semitism at university

A leading state politician from the Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, slammed a Green Party minister in the state of Lower Saxony for failing to rope in an allegedly anti-Semitic seminar at HAWK University.
The German DPA wire service reported on Monday that Jörg Hillmer, deputy representative of the CDU in the Lower Saxony parliament, is investigating allegations that HAWK offered a seminar propagating modern Jew-hatred in targeting Israel for at least 10 years.
According to a statement on Thursday, Hillmer said that “an expert a year ago already determined that a seminar at HAWK conveyed a deeply anti-Israel – and in parts anti-Semitic – world view.” He asked: “How can the minister tolerate this when she says at the same time there is no place for anti-Semitism at our universities?” He was referring to Dr. Gabriele Heinen- Kljajic, the Green Party minister responsible for science and culture in Lower Saxony.
HAWK is the German-language abbreviation for University of Applied Sciences and Arts, which is located Hildesheim, Lower Saxony. The seminar taught students that Israel was a “dehumanized“ society and an apartheid state, and that Israeli soldiers harvested Palestinian body organs.
An aide to Heinen-Kljajic disputed Hillmer’s claim, saying on Monday that all of the referrals were taken seriously.

First BBC English language report on a Gaza missile attack in eight months

As regular readers are aware, the majority of the missile fire directed at Israeli civilian communities since the end of the 2014 conflict has been ignored by the BBC. This article is the first English language report on missile fire since the beginning of 2016, despite the fact that seven previous attacks have taken place in that time. BBC audiences have certainly not been provided with any reporting in the last two years on how the people who live near the border with the Gaza Strip cope with the continuing attacks, despite the fact that the corporation’s Jerusalem bureau is less than an hour and a half’s drive from Sderot.
The corporation’s public purposes remit commits it to “giving insight into the way people live in other countries” and building “understanding of international issues”. The BBC apparently believes that on this particular issue it can meet those obligations by producing one belated report in eight months which includes a generalised portrayal of ‘periodic’ missile fire rather than providing audiences with the readily available concrete statistical information.

After CAMERA Informs Editors of Error, NY Times Corrects on Medicines to Gaza

In an otherwise informative and moving story about efforts to transport a sick Afghan baby to Israeli for life-saving surgery, reporter Diaa Hadid asserted that "Gaza hospitals are perennially short of medicine, equipment and well-trained staff because of Israeli restrictions on travel and trade, and many Gaza residents struggle to get exit permits for care outside the territory" (Aug. 14, 2016, "Unlikely Facebook Friendship Saves Afghan Baby With Heart Defect").
CAMERA informed editors it is untrue that "Israeli restrictions on travel and trade" extend to medicine and most medical equipment.
As Gisha, hardly a source sympathetic to Israeli policies on Gaza, notes: "Currently, Israel allows the entrance of all civilian goods into the Gaza Strip, with the exception of a list of materials defined as 'dual-use,' which, according to Israel, can be used for military purposes." Gisha's separate page on dual-use items notes that x-ray machines are in the list of such restricted items, but does not include any other medical equipment.

Star Columnist Linda McQuaig Defends BDS in Smear Attack Against Israel

Writing in the Toronto Star today, columnist Linda McQuaig argued that “Elizabeth May shouldn’t run away from BDS” but should instead embrace it when saying that “It would take a leader with independence and courage to pressure Israel to end its military occupation – someone like Elizabeth May.”
According to McQuaig, a self proclaimed “journalist and author”: “Whether you agree with the boycott strategy or not, it is a peaceful way to protest a serious violation of human rights: the fact that millions of Palestinians have been living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza for almost 50 years, with Israel effectively annexing their land.”
(This is the same Linda McQuaig who in 2010 abhorrently likened Israel’s killing of 9 anti-Israel activists who initiated violence against interdicting Israeli forces on the Mavi Marmara flotilla vessel, to the brutal murder of an innocent Jewish-American on the Achile Lauro liner by Palestinian terrorists.)
To wit, why is the Green Party of Canada being more pro-Palestinian, than the Palestinians themselves? Consider the following words spoken by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas: “No, we do not support the boycott of Israel… We do not ask anyone to boycott Israel itself… we have relations with Israel. We have mutual recognition of Israel.”

Anti-Semitic graffiti painted at DC intersection for 5th time

Anti-Semitic graffiti has appeared for the fifth time this month at one of the busiest intersections in the Chinatown section of Washington, DC.
Earlier this month, vandals repeatedly painted the word “Jew” on the images of rats appearing on an outdoor Chinese Zodiac public art display. On Monday, swastikas were discovered painted on the street nearby, the DCist news website reported.
Maintenance crews employed by DowntownDC, a private nonprofit that encourages business in the city center, have repeatedly cleaned the graffiti, including the swastikas from Monday.
A swastika also was drawn on the door of a corner Starbucks, according to the report.
D.C. Police are offering a $1,000 reward through Crime Solvers for information that leads to an arrest or conviction in the graffiti. The incidents are being investigated as suspected hate crimes.

Killing Reinhard Heydrich

What do those who bravely resist oppression owe their fellow men living under totalitarian rule? That is the question posed by the new World War II film Anthropoid, which thrillingly depicts the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich— the Nazi leader assigned by Adolf Hitler personally to rule the occupied Czech lands—and its tragic aftermath. Long after the Third Reich’s collapse, there exists a natural tendency to venerate any and all acts of resistance against that evil regime, even the most hopeless. No one questions the doomed Jews who took part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which, even if it had succeeded in its limited goals of opening the city’s gates, would have been quashed by the Nazis all the same. But what if an individual deed incurs human costs—in the form of widescale, murderous retribution—that, at least judging by the number of victims, seemingly outweighs the benefits? While Anthropoid (the name of the mission to kill Heydrich) ultimately judges his assassination to have been both morally and strategically just, it does so in highly nuanced fashion, humanizing the more quiescent characters in a way that neither paints them as cowards nor detracts from the heroism of the film’s daring protagonists.
Anthropoid begins in the snowy forests outside Prague in late December 1941. Czech military officer Ján Kubiš (Jamie Dornan) and his Slovak accomplice, Josef Gabcík (Cillian Murphy), parachute into Czechoslovakia from an RAF plane. Two years earlier, after the German invasion of their homeland, the men had escaped to Britain, where they trained with the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine organization that supported resistance movements in occupied Europe. At the same time, Heydrich, deputy of the SS and chief of the Reich Main Security Office, was head of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Slovakia having been rendered a collaborationist puppet regime under the rule of the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso) for only four months. Yet in that short period, the slim-featured, 37-year-old Nazi had already earned the monikers “Butcher of Prague” and “the Blond Beast.” A creator of the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units that would go on to murder 2 million people in the fields of Eastern Europe, Heydrich would soon convene the Wannsee conference, where Hitler’s top lieutenants devised the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
After a harrowing encounter with a pair of woodland Czech Nazi informants, Kubiš and Gabcík eventually make their way to Prague, where they connect with what’s left of the demoralized underground. When they explain that their mission, ordered by the Czech government-in-exile, is to kill the most senior Nazi officer in occupied Czechoslovakia, they are met with incredulity. The group’s leaders send a coded message back to their comrades safely ensconced in London, imploring them to take into consideration the price that they, Czechs living under Nazi occupation, would inevitably have to pay as a result of their scheme. In an actual dispatch, the underground leaders asked if Operation Anthropoid’s target could be switched from Heydrich to a Czech quisling, thereby lessening the severity of Nazi reprisal. “I fear Czechoslovakia will be wiped from the map,” one of the underground leaders tells the young men.

Herzliya’s IDC, Mayo Clinic join forces for new medical tech

Experts from the US nonprofit medical practice and research center Mayo Clinic will join forces with the entrepreneurship program of IDC Herzliya and lead a push to develop and implement new medical technologies.
The cooperation will be led by Amir Lerman, a professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic and director of its cardiovascular research center, who was recently appointed to head the clinic’s new initiative of investment and cooperation with Israeli companies and technologies.
“The cooperation with Mayo Clinic will expose students to the forefront of technology and innovation, and pinpoint the issues facing health systems worldwide,” said Nava Swersky Sofer, managing director of IDCBeyond, the entrepreneurship program of the Herzliya-based private university. “This cooperation opens a number of possibilities for entrepreneurship students, from exploring new horizons to establishing innovative ventures.”
The new IDCBeyond program will include multi-disciplinary studies in the fields of technology, biomedicine, globalization and sustainability. This will be followed by an ideation process and the setting up of new ventures, with the help of mentors from academia and industry, within six months.

Chinese co buys Israeli co Spacecom for $285m

Shaul Elovitch has sold Spacecom, which operates the AMOS communications satellites, to Beijing Xinwei Technology.
Spacecom Satellite Communications Ltd. (TASE:SCC) notified the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) that it is to be fully acquired by Luxembourg Space Telecommunications for $285 million. Luxembourg Space Telecommunications is owned by Chinese communications company Beijing Xinwei Technology.
Spacecom, which operates the AMOS series of communications satellites, is owned by Eurocom Group, which is controlled by Bezeq Israeli Telecommunication Co. Ltd. (TASE: BEZQ) controlling shareholder Shaul Elovitch.
The price being paid was a 30% premium on the share's market price yesterday morning when Spacecom first reported it was in talks to be sold for $285 million.

Orthodox Jewish ‘Law & Order’ actor Steven Hill dies at 94

Steven Hill, an Orthodox Jewish actor best known for playing a Jewish Manhattan district attorney on the hit TV series “Law & Order,” has died at 94.
Hill, who sacrificed numerous career opportunities in order to observe Shabbat, died Tuesday in Monsey, New York, Hollywood Reporter said, citing Hill’s son, Rabbi Yehoshua Hill.
The New York Times cited Hill’s daughter, Sarah Gobioff, in reporting that Hill lived in Monsey, a heavily Orthodox Jewish area in suburban Rockland County, but died in Manhattan.
On NBC’s “Law & Order,” Hill played District Attorney Adam Schiff for more than 225 episodes from 1990 to 2000, earning two Emmy nominations for outstanding actor in a drama series. Schiff was loosely modeled on longtime Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, who also was Jewish.
In a 1996 interview with The Washington Post cited in the Times obituary, “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf called Hill “the Talmudic influence on the entire zeitgeist of the series.”
“Steven has more moral authority than anyone else on episodic TV,” Wolf said.

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