01/28 Links: Netanyahu: Trump right about building wall, ‘great success’ in Israel; Meet the Jews in the Trump administration ~ EoZ

From Ian:

The Obama administration's hostility toward Israel made clear the danger of a two-state solution • The Palestinians do not want to live alongside us, they want to steal the entire land of Israel • It is time to revive Menachem Begin's autonomy framework.
1. The two-state solution is dead. Its chief undertaker was then-U.S. President Barack Obama and his emissary, Secretary of State John Kerry. The signal was given at the speech in Cairo in 2009, wherein Obama accepted the left-wing narrative, according to which the West is to blame for the ills of Islam. Because of colonialism, because of orientalism. The poor Arabs are not to blame. As part of his apology, Obama also accepted the Muslim stance (invented in the West) regarding Israel: Israel's right to exist stems from the persecution that the Jewish people have suffered, most notably in the Holocaust. The continuation of that idea -- which Obama did not say, but stems from it -- as it can be found in the writings of certain thinkers, is that the Palestinians are "the real victims of the Holocaust."
A year and a half after the speech, the Arab Spring erupted and the Middle East began to dismantle the nationalistic structures shaped by colonialist powers in favor of a return to tribal and clan structures. The Obama administration embraced the protesters in Egypt and supported the transfer of rule to a Muslim Brotherhood representative. He also embraced Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
On the other hand, he did not interfere with the 2009 election fraud in Iran, which took place about a week after the Cairo speech. About a year ago, I published a conversation with exiled Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who had been the spokesman for former Iranian Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leader of the Green Revolution that protested the fraud. He spoke of the cry for help to Obama's people, who denied them as much: "The people who went out into the streets in Iran said to Obama: 'Are you with them or with us?' Obama was with them, because he did not care who was in power -- that is what I was told."
For Israel, the speech signaled an ominous change in the U.S. relationship with the struggle for this land. It is true that all the previous administrations supported a Palestinian state, but they did so out of geopolitical considerations and American interests. Obama's support for a Palestinian state was first and foremost conceptual, or perhaps ideological, and relied on moral claims. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Caroline Glick On American Jewry by Yiboneh Identify Jewishly (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Yiboneh Jerusalem 'Jerusalem shall be built' was honored to host and present to the Jerusalem community Caroline Glick who spoke about contemporary issues facing the identity of the Jewish nation in general and those of the west in particular.
Guaranteed to be an eye opener for many and a night to leave your comfort zone.

Shaked: Anti-Semitism killing Jews, not stalled peace talks

Jews are being murdered today because of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and incitement to terrorism, not because of Palestinian frustration over stalled peace talks, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked told foreign ambassadors in central Israel on Friday.
Her comments came on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marked on January 27 every year, the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in 1945.
Shaked, of the right-wing Jewish Home party, told attendees at a memorial service at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak, near Netanya, that it is clear that Israel is not the problem in the troubled Middle East, but rather the solution, Israel Radio reported.
She urged the ambassadors to join the war against incitement, terrorism and racism.
“The fact that the world closes its eyes to Iranian aid to the genocide in Syria, and chooses to repeatedly condemn the only country in the Middle East that really values human life is a sign of the world’s double standard and its unwillingness to deal with evil,” she said.

The tragedy of the ‘Egoz’ and the story of Moroccan Jewry’s return to Israel

On January 10, 1961, 44 Jews stood in the freezing night on El-Hociema beach in northern Morocco, waiting for a boat. They had traveled from Casablanca, taking with them only the barest essentials, as they had been instructed by the Mossad. As the boat approached, they could barely make out the word “Pisces” – changed to “Egoz”in Hebrew, on the boat’s renovated hull. After 12 undercover voyages bringing Jews to Israel via Gibraltar, the boat had undergone massive renovations to make it seaworthy. Still, there were doubts it was fit for the journey, but there were no other boats to be had and the need was great. Forty-four men, women and children boarded the boat, dreaming of seeing Israeli shores. Forty-four men, women and children drowned two hours later.
The danger of the trip to Israel was not lost on the passengers of the Egoz. Thousands of Moroccan Jews had been making the perilous journey even before the reestablishment of the Jewish state. Throughout the centuries of Diaspora the yearning to return to Israel had been a central part of the ethos of the Muslim world’s Jews. After Israel’s decisive victory in the War of Independence, the Arab world intensified the persecution of Jews by seizing lands and properties, boycotting Jewish businesses and banning them from leaving the country lest they return to Israel. This wave of persecution created over 850,000 Jewish refugees who then became citizens of the young Jewish state.
In Morocco, the story was a bit different.
King Mohammed the Fifth, who some say had favorable views of his kingdom’s Jewry, continued to allow aliya. Moroccan Jews, raised on passionate Zionist ideals, had been making aliya in great numbers – over 72,000 Moroccan Jews made aliya between 1948 and 1955 – and still over 200,00 Jews remained in Morocco.
In 1956, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser began pressuring Morocco to stop allowing Jewish return, reportedly saying to king Mohammed “every Jew you allow to leave becomes a soldier.” In the days of the War of Attrition and rising Pan-Arabism, king Mohammed could not refuse president Nasser, and the aliya efforts went underground. Secret immigration continued, with Moroccan authorities unofficially adopting a very lax enforcement policy.
By 1961, over 30,000 more Jews made the perilous journey from Morocco to Israel, weathering freezing seas and subhuman conditions in their hope to reach the Promised Land.

Netanyahu: Trump right about building wall, ‘great success’ in Israel

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday welcomed praise from Donald Trump for Israel’s security barrier, writing on Twitter that the US president “is right” about walls preventing illegal immigration.
Referring to a second barrier, the recently built fence along Israel’s border with Egypt, the prime minister said the measure had been a “great success” in keeping out migrants, who mainly came from African nations.
“President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea,” Netanyahu wrote in English on Twitter, Trump’s preferred method of communication. The prime minister ended his tweet with emojis of the Israeli and American flags.
In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump appeared to be touting Israel’s West Bank security barrier as an example of a successful deterrent to unlawful entry into a country. Israel built the barrier — a combination of fence, concrete wall and sophisticated sensors — in response to the massive wave of deadly Palestinian terrorism that hit the country during the Second Intifada at the start of the millennium, with suicide bombers traveling the short distances into Israel to carry out murderous attacks, and it saw a dramatic fall in suicide bombings.

In Holocaust day statement that omits Jews, Trump vows to spread tolerance

In his first statement about the Holocaust as president, Donald Trump vowed to make “love and tolerance prevalent throughout the world” and made no mention of Jews.
“It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust,” Trump said in a statement on Friday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.”
But, he added, “We know that in the darkest hours of humanity, light shines the brightest. As we remember those who died, we are deeply grateful to those who risked their lives to save the innocent.”
In the name of the perished, Trump wrote, “I pledge to do everything in my power throughout my Presidency, and my life, to ensure that the forces of evil never again defeat the powers of good.”
Trump’s omission of Jews follows the commemorative last year by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who came in for criticism by Jewish groups, including the Zionist Organization of America, for delivering a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day that similarly failed to mention Jews.

How Israeli politicians delayed the embassy moving to Jerusalem

Strategies were changing. By Wednesday, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a close adviser to Trump, told The Jerusalem Post’s Herb Keinon that while the president still supported moving the embassy, “now that he is in office, there are a lot more facts and arguments and people you have to consult with before you make a final decision, and it is a more deliberative process.”
I don’t know if Trump ever really intended to move the embassy to Jerusalem, or if he was doing what many of his predecessors had done before him – making a campaign promise that would never be fulfilled. Either way, the celebrations in Israel could not have helped. Public talk does not increase the chance of the embassy moving. It does the opposite.
These politicians failed to remember what Begin did with the Golan. He didn’t talk about it or celebrate the possible news in the media. This wasn’t a political campaign for him. He wasn’t looking to score points with the Likud central committee or the Bayit Yehudi electorate. He kept quiet until the moment it was in the Knesset, and then, in three quick votes, annexed the Golan. Good things, Begin understood, happen quickly and quietly.
Does this mean that Trump won’t move the embassy? I don’t know. On the one hand, it is a grave injustice that the world refuses to recognize Israel’s sovereign rights over its capital city. Jerusalem has been at the heart of the Jewish nation for three thousand years, and there really is no reason world embassies cannot be in western Jerusalem, part of the State of Israel since 1948.

Meet the Jews in the Trump administration

American Jews are watching the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency with both fear and hope.
Many have expressed worries about some of his supporters’ ties to the so-called “alt-right” movement, whose followers traffic variously in white nationalism, anti-immigration sentiment, anti-Semitism and a disdain for “political correctness.” Those fears intensified when Trump named as his chief strategist Stephen Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, a site Bannon once referred to as a “platform” of the alt-right.
Trump’s strongly conservative Cabinet picks also back policies on health care, the environment, abortion and civil rights often diametrically opposed to the views of most Jewish voters. Yet others have praised Trump’s stance on Israel and his nomination of David Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer who supports West Bank settlement construction and has expressed doubts about the two-state solution, as US ambassador to Israel.
Trump won 24 percent of the Jewish vote, with especially strong support in the Orthodox community.
Here is a look at the president’s Jewish advisers who will be helping to shape US policy for the next four years.

‘Israel no longer in top five issues influencing American Jewish voters’

Israel is no longer in the top five issues that influence American Jewish voters, according to a new study released by The Ruderman Family Foundation on Thursday.
The report, titled “Israel - a Unifying or a Divisive Issue among American Jews?" was published by the Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies at the University of Haifa and written by Alon Pinkas, former Consul General of Israel in New York and foreign policy advisor to four previous Israeli Foreign Ministers.
In the academic paper, Pinkas stated that Israel plays neither a “distinctively unifying nor patently divisive role” in American-Jewish life. In examining the relationship between Israel and US Jews historically, Pinkas found that “As Jews got closer to Israel, two diverging trends appeared: the relationship and affiliation grew stronger, but so did the criticism and disillusionment.”
Looking forward to today, Pinkas noted that while the bond between American Jews and Israel remains strong, the “ties are fraying.”

DaphneAnson: A Palestine-born Scholar of Islam's Advice for President Trump (video)

"Dear Mr President," begins the following video, an address in the form of an Open Letter by Professor Sami Aldeeb, a much-published Swiss scholar of Islam who happens to be of Palestinian Christian background.
'Your country, like Europe, the region where I come from, and the world are facing the rise of violence in particular by various Islamic terrorist groups. This violence is one of the causes of immigrant waves breaking on the shores of Europe, the US and other countries. In your statements, you highlighted these two issues.
You described “radical Islamic terrorism” as an “evil” unseen before, adding that it should be just “eradicated off the face of the earth”: “we gonna end it. It’s time. It’s time right now to end it”. But you have not said how you will achieve this goal. You also called Angela Merkel’s open door policy to refugees a “catastrophic mistake”, saying that Berlin, instead of hosting refugees, would have done better to advocate more for the creation of no-fly zones in Syria in order to protect the local population from the bombing. “The gulf states should have had to pay for them. After all, they have money like hardly anyone else has”.
Let me give you my humble opinion on these two issues.
Regarding radical Islamic terrorism, it is certainly necessary to fight it with weapons, but weapons alone will not suffice. It is also particularly important to eliminate the ideology on which radical Islamic terrorism is based, namely the Islamic ideology. To take adequate action we must call things by their name.

New Secretary of Defense Reaffirms U.S. Commitment to Israel’s Security

New American Secretary of Defense James Mattis offered “his unwavering commitment to Israel’s security” in a call on Thursday to Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, the Department of Defense stated in an official summary.
By calling his Israeli counterpart during his first week in office, Mattis meant to “emphasize his intent to advance the U.S.-Israeli defense relationship and to protect Israel’s qualitative military edge,” the statement explained.
Mattis and Liberman discussed the defense challenges in the Middle East and the shared need to develop “common approaches” to meet those challenges. They also expressed interest in meeting in the near future.

Trump’s new UN envoy: ‘For those who don’t have our backs, we’re taking names’

Washington’s new ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, vowed Friday to show US strength in global affairs and delivered a blunt warning to opponents of President Donald Trump’s policies.
“For those who don’t have our backs, we’re taking names,” Haley told reporters at she arrived at UN headquarters for her first meeting with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
“We will make points to respond to that accordingly.”
“Our goal with the administration is to show value at the UN, and the way that we will show value is to show our strength, show our voice, have the backs of our allies and make sure that our allies have our back as well,” she said.
The comments also implied criticism of the previous Obama administration, which abstained last month on a resolution that branded Israel’s settlements illegal and Jerusalem’s Old City occupied Palestinian territory. By choosing not to use its veto, the administration enabled the motion to pass, drawing an accusation from a furious Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the US had “ambushed” Israel “shamefully.”
The former South Carolina governor made her first remarks at UN headquarters before presenting her diplomatic credentials to Guterres.

New initiative to challenge UNRWA

The Center for Near East Policy Research (CNEPR) opened a new office near the United Nations headquarters in New York City on Thursday. The center will promote its UNRWA Reform Initiative out of the new office.
The UNRWA Reform Initiative seeks to change how UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, operates.
UNRWA exists to serve the Arab refugees from Israel's War of Independence, when the armies of five Arab nations invaded the nascent Jewish State in an attempt to destroy it. Many of them left Israel after Arab radio broadcasts told them to leave their homes, promising they would return shortly, after the Jews were wiped out. Some fled in fear or were told to leave their homes by Israeli forces fighting nearby.
UNRWA is the only UN organization which is dedicated to a single group of refugees. All the other millions of refugees in the world fall under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

British PM Theresa May Receives Resounding Applause From Republican Lawmakers for Call to Defend Israel’s Security

British Prime Minister Theresa May received resounding applause and a standing ovation from Republican lawmakers gathered at a party retreat in Philadelphia on Thursday when she issued a call to protect Israel.
“Whether it is the security of Israel in the Middle East or Estonia in the Baltic states, we must always stand up for our friends and allies in democratic countries that find themselves in tough neighborhoods too,” May said.
Earlier in her speech, May — the head of the UK’s Conservative Party — declared, “We, our two countries together, have a joint responsibility to lead. Because when others step up as we step back, it is bad for America, for Britain and the world.”
“It is in our interests — those of Britain and America together — to stand strong together to defend our values, our interests and the very ideas in which we believe,” she went on to say.
On Friday, May met with new US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington DC.
In December, the UK voted in favor of the anti-Israeli settlement resolution passed by the UN Security Council. However, May also criticized former US Secretary of State John Kerry for his subsequent speech in which he assailed the Jewish state’s settlement policies.

YIKES: Tulsi Gabbard's Syria Trip Financed By Syrian Nazis

Controversy erupted when Hawaii congressman Tulsi Gabbard visited Syria and Lebanon this week. During her visit, she met with Bashar Al-Assad, who is responsible for the civil war that murdered half a million people over the past six years. Initially, Gabbard refused to disclose who financed the trip and her press secretary only indicated that it was not paid for with American tax dollars. However, The Daily Beast revealed that it was sponsored by an organization called the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services, or AACCESS-Ohio for short.
Accompanying Gabbard in Syria were former Congressman Dennis Kucinich and two men named Elie and Bassam Khawam. Bassam Khawam is the executive director of ACCESS-Ohio. While Gabbard states these men are "peace advocates," The Daily Beast revealed the following information about the Khawam brothers:
In truth, Bassam and Elie Khawam are both officials in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a political party and paramilitary organization founded in Lebanon in 1932, and currently actively engaged in the Syrian civil war on the side of the Assad regime.
The SSNP is best described as the Nazi party of Syria. The party has a long history of terrorism against the West and within the region spanning decades. Founded in 1932, the SSNP was one of Nazi Germany's earliest and passionate supporters.

Arab Leaders to Trump on Muslim Ban: ‘Oh Cool, You Just Meant the Poor Muslims’ (satire)

Arab leaders have expressed relief as details of President Trumps ‘Muslim Ban’ have been released.
King Salman of Saudi Arabia commented, “Oh I’m completely chill with this now. I mean who wouldn’t want to keep all those Yemeni crazies out of your country. That’s really just what we’re doing ourselves, just more with bombs than visas. And those Iraqis, am I right? Always wanting to come to our country and wanting to fly airplanes into our cities. Can I get a ‘hell no’?”
Sheikh Tamim, the Emir of Qatar, also noted his relief, “President Trump has hit the nail on the head by banning those Syrians with their history of allowing terrorist organizations to open embassies on their soil. I mean what kind of dicks would do something like that?”

CAMERA: NBC Furthers Palestinian Narrative

While some journalists may now respond that UN Security Council Resolution 2334 designates the area “Palestinian land,” and that their terminology is therefore valid, this is not the case. As CAMERA’s Alex Safian has written, UNSC Resolution 2334 “does not change the legal landscape,” and is not enforceable, because it was passed under Chapter 6 not Chapter 7, of the UN Charter. Moreover, it has also been argued that UNSC Resolution 2334 is itself in violation of Article 80 of the UN Charter, and therefore invalid under international law. Article 80 affirms Jewish rights under the 1922 League of Nations Mandate to settle in any part of what was then the British Mandate for Palestine, including all of Jerusalem as well as what is today called the West Bank.
Finally, Stelloh repeats that “Palestinians see” eastern Jerusalem “as the capital of their future state,” but ignores the fact that the Palestinian claim to Jerusalem is tenuous at best. While there may be a religious connection between Islam and Jerusalem, there is no historical or legal basis for a specifically Palestinian claim on Jerusalem. In the city’s 3000-year history, it has never been under Palestinian sovereignty. The Israeli claim to Jerusalem, in contrast, rests on international law as well as archeological evidence of historical Jewish sovereignty over the city.
NBC’s selective omissions present a distorted view of the issues surrounding Jerusalem, and fail to provide readers with the necessary context to understand the issuance of building permits in Israel’s capital.

ALTERNATIVE FACTS: The Economist Butchers History Of Palestinian-Arab Intifadas

From the start, The Economist insinuates that the First Intifada started with "beatings by Israeli soldiers injuring thousands of Palestinian children." This is not true. While many state that the intifada started when an Israeli truck ran over Palestinian-Arab refugees in Gaza, Palestinian-Arab terrorist attacks happened prior to the aforementioned incident and created tensions between Israelis and the Palestinian-Arabs. Furthermore, that sentence insinuates that the violence during the First Intifada was predominately on the Israelis' part. That is also false. Approximately 200 Israelis were killed by Palestinian-Arab terrorism during the intifada. If The Economist wanted to be honest about the event, then it would have addressed the genocidal character of Palestinian-Arab terrorists.
The main falsehood that The Economist promulgates is how the Second Intifada started. According to their alternative facts, Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount sparked the intifada. In fact, Palestine Liberation Organization leader and career terrorist Yassar Arafat planned the intifada long before Sharon's visit, provided arms to the genocidal terrorist group Hamas, and sparked the intifada not long after the Camp David talks collapsed under President Bill Clinton's presidency. In short, the Palestinian-Arab leadership saw Sharon's visit as an opportunity to start a bloody wave of terrorism that subsequently led to the current security situation in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.
If The Economist wants to deal in alternative facts, then it should not be surprised if it joins CNN on the list of fake news propagators.

'Abbas, Hollande to meet to continue work of Paris peace conference'

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and French President Francois Hollande will meet in two weeks to follow up on the results of the international conference which took place in Paris on January 15, the PA president said on Wednesday.
Speaking before a meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, Abbas said that he will travel to France on February 7 to thank Hollande and “set into place a clear and defined [international] mechanism,” Wafa, the official PA news agency, reported.
Despite the Palestinian leadership’s repeated calls for the creation of an intentional mechanism to monitor the peace process in the weeks prior to the conference, the concluding statement of the Paris parley made no mention of one.
Ahmad Majdalani, a close advisor to Abbas, told The Jerusalem Post, that the PA President and Hollande are meeting to continue the work of the international conference.
“The Paris conference did not end on January 15; there are additional steps that need to be taken by the participants in the conference,” Majdalani, who is also a PLO Executive Committee member, said.

Palestinians Pledge to Donate 200 Million Dollar American Aid Package to the EPA (satire)

The Palestinian Authority has pledged that if Donald Trump releases the 200 million dollars in foreign aid approved by Former President Obama, they will immediately retransfer it back into the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Citing the President’s recent measures to curb all new grants going to the EPA, PA spokesman Mahmoud Al-Tabarani has cited the “desperate need” to continue to fund the struggling organization. “The whole world needs America to not fuck this one up,” he was quoted as saying.
Even though the PA desperately lacks funds, it was decided at the highest levels of leadership that someone needs to take responsibility for the environment. Citing how important climate change was to all of humanity, Al-Tabarani further stated that Palestinians will just have to bear the brunt, so long as the current US administration willfully chooses to deny science.

Palestinian family ‘was first to help bus crash victims, call police’

A Palestinian family was the first to rush to the scene of a fatal West Bank bus crash on Thursday night, called police and administered aid to victims under pouring rain until rescue forces arrived, the Ynet news website reported Friday.
Cpt. Sivan Raviv, the medical officer of the IDF’s Binyamin Brigade, told Ynet that members of the family helped save the lives of some of the bus’s Israeli passengers.
“Usually we are scrambled to a scene after calls from the regional hotline on such accidents. This time it was members of the Palestinian family who called police quickly to report the accident,” Raviv said.
“They didn’t think about it or consider it,” Raviv added. “They saw saving lives as their first priority. When we got there we saw the family trying to extract passengers and treating them.”

Haniyeh returns to Gaza after 5 months abroad

Hamas Politburo Deputy Chairman Ismail Haniyeh returned to Gaza Friday after spending most of the past five months in the gulf state of Qatar.
Haniyeh and another senior Hamas official, Rouhi Mushtaha, passed through the Rafah crossing along the Egyptian-Gaza border, which Egyptian authorities opened in an exceptional circumstance to allow for the two Hamas leaders’ passage.
A motorcade of cars brought Haniyeh to his home in the Shati refugee camp, where he held an impromptu press conference.
Haniyeh, who visited Cairo for the first time since 2013 to meet Egyptian officials on his way back to the strip, said that he is hopeful about the future of Egyptian-Hamas relations.

Mossad Unleashes Giant Kraken against Gazan Fishing Ships (satire)

The Mossad, Israel’s international espionage agency has released a highly trained Kraken to harass and destroy Gazan fishing ships. In a statement released by a Mossad spokesperson, they admitted to previously training sharks to attack Egyptians in the Red sea, as well as eagles to spy on Hezbollah, and of course Flipper Goldstein, the Mossad dolphin to spy on Hamas. The spokesman explained, “Honestly, the naval blockade and constant searching of fishing vessels are getting old and we were really looking to bump things up to the next level, you know, something more exciting for everyone.”
“We’ve kind of taken the next natural step, which is to begin training massive sea monsters to carry out or bidding. After feeding the Kraken untold numbers of Palestinian prisoners for well over a year, it’s developed a genuine taste for them. So we assume it will be effective. Sharks can kill one or two people before they clear the beach, but a Zionist-trained weaponized Kraken can pursue Palestinians all the way to their homes, which of course is the plan.”
The Kraken will be first introduced in the Mediterranean, but if successful it will be released in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf as well. Because of its absolute safety from hackers, a smaller, more streamlined Kraken will be used to transfer messages undersea from occupied Washington D.C. back to its Zionist overlords.

Guido Fawkes: Jackie Walker Doubles Down on Holocaust Memorial Day

Jackie Walker was suspended by Labour for, among other things, her comments about Holocaust Memorial Day. She has doubled down today, this year’s HMD, complaining that the event does not acknowledge other genocides.

As anyone can see on the HMD website, and as Jackie knows, it does. She really is quite mad.

Citing ‘foreign policy interests,’ Switzerland withholds data on BDS funding

Citing a desire to avoid harming the foreign relations interests of Switzerland, the country’s foreign ministry is withholding information on Swiss funding for promoters of boycotts against Israel.
An official from the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs sent the unusual refusal and its reasoning earlier this month to NGO Monitor, an Israel-based organization that compiles and publishes information on funding for organizations that describe themselves as human rights groups and other nongovernmental entities active in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
NGO Monitor in October requested the Swiss Foreign Ministry hand over information on its allocation of funds to NIRAS Natura AB, a Swedish-based firm that handles the ministry’s funding to the Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Secretariat. Set up by Switzerland and three other European countries, the secretariat funds Palestinian organizations, including ones that promote boycotts.
But the Swiss Foreign Ministry declined to hand over the information to NGO Monitor and to another party that had expressed interest in the funding.

'No more Nazis!': The moment a flash mob of protesters surround a Holocaust denier who wears a swastika armband at the University of Florida

Dozens of students surrounded Michael Dewitz, 34, chanting 'no more Nazis, ever again' and 'go home Nazis'
Demonstration was sparked after Dewitz turned up wearing a swastika armband
Three-hour protest only ended after police escorted Dewitz away from crowd
He claims that he was later attacked by two men who stole his armband
Dewitz claims he wore the homemade swastika armband as a social experiment
But he went onto praise the Nazi party saying that they 'saved the world'
The 34-year-old also questioned whether the Holocaust ever occurred

Belgians who chanted about Jewish massacre indicted

Three men were indicted in Belgium for chanting in Arabic at an anti-Israel rally about a site where Muslims are believed to have massacred Jews centuries ago.
Two organizers of the Antwerp rally in July 2014 and a participant had cried out “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning,” the Gazet van Antwerp reported Tuesday about their indictment this week. The cry relates to an event in the seventh century when Muslims massacred and expelled Jews from the town of Khaybar, in modern-day Saudi Arabia.
The Forum of Jewish Organization of Flanders filed a complaint against the men based on videos showing them chanting the slogan at the rally.
The defendants, identified only as Youssef R., Suhail A. and Marc D.Q., are denying the chant was incitement to hatred. The verdict is expected next month.

Haunting Twitter feed remembers Jewish refugees turned away by US

In May 1939, as the Holocaust was beginning, the United States turned away the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 mostly Jewish refugees from Europe. Returning to Europe, 288 were taken in by Great Britain; of those trapped in Western Europe when Germany conquered the continent, 254 died.
Now a Twitter feed is recalling their names and their deaths, one by one.
@Stl_Manifest, launched Friday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, goes line by line through the ship’s manifest, or list of passengers, then tells how each passenger was killed. Some of the posts include photos.
The St. Louis set sail from Hamburg carrying 937 Jewish refugees on May 23, 1939. Twenty-nine were able to disembark in Havana, though the Cuban government wouldn’t allow the rest to enter. Subsequent appeals to the United States to let the refugees enter through Miami were rejected. A 1924 law severely restricted immigration from Germany, and anti-immigrant sentiment was prevalent in the United States at the time.

A star-studded ‘Night’ to honor Elie Wiesel in New York

Millions have read Elie Wiesel’s landmark Holocaust memoir “Night.” When Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club in 2006, she turned it into an instant bestseller and countless students continue to read it as part of their high school curriculums.
But seldom is the slim volume about the author’s experiences in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald Nazi concentration camps read aloud.
A special event in New York on Sunday marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day (which takes place two days earlier on January 27) with a wide array of artists, actors, writers, community leaders, government officials, students, Holocaust survivors and survivors of other genocides. They will honor the memory of the late Wiesel in a unique community reading of “Night” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
Co-presented by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, the reading will take place over five hours in the museum’s Edmond J. Safra Hall. It will be simulcast throughout the museum’s galleries and streamed via the internet to online viewers around the world. On-stage participants will take turns reading at least one page from the 116-page work. Most of the readers will read in English, and some will read parts of the text in Yiddish and French, in a nod to the languages in which “Night” was published before its translation to English and some 30 other languages.
Abraham H. Foxman, director of the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and former Anti-Defamation League national director, was instrumental in organizing the event honoring Wiesel, who died last July 2 aged 87.

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