Showing posts with label nftp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nftp. Show all posts

Monday, June 11, 2018

  • Monday, June 11, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon


From Israel Hayom last week:

The Israeli government on Thursday unveiled what it billed as a groundbreaking program to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in long-neglected Palestinian neighborhoods of east Jerusalem.

The "Leading Change" program aims to reduce the huge social gaps between the Arab and Jewish populations in the capital.

Palestinian neighborhoods suffer from poor infrastructure, neglect and subpar public services, and nearly 80% of the city's Palestinian families live in poverty.

The program will invest 2 billion shekels ($560 million) in three core areas: education, infrastructure, and helping Palestinian women enter the workforce. The funds will be spent on a variety of programs, including nine pilot projects in the coming five years, with the aim of attracting further government and private investment down the road.

Various government ministries, along with the Jerusalem Municipality, will carry out the program, which was launched at a ceremony at President Reuven Rivlin's official residence on Thursday.

Rivlin praised what he called "the most comprehensive attempt by the government to date to narrow the gaps and to develop the economy" of east Jerusalem, which has experienced "lost generations" over the decades.
Since this is exactly opposite of the worldwide meme of how Israel neglects its Arab population, this story will not be mentioned by the media.

Even Netanyahu's critics who call him a racist grudgingly admit that he has spent a lot of money helping the economy of the Arab sector in Israel.

However, there is some potential on this story being picked up by the Israel haters, where they will spin it to say that Israel is spending money in order to annex "East" Jerusalem.

Once that message gets out there, then international reporters will find an angle to report on this story while continuing to demonize Israel.


(h/t Yoel)




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Saturday, January 28, 2017

  • Saturday, January 28, 2017
  • Elder of Ziyon
From the Fatah Facebook page:



This is Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber, who detonated her backpack with a 22-pound bomb on January 28, 2002, killed an 80-year old Israeli Pinhas Tokatli and injured over 150 more.



Fatah celebrates Idris as a heroine, and the world continues to ignore the daily incitement and glorification of terror done by the "moderate" Palestinians.

Yesterday's New York Times had an op-ed celebrating the "non-violent resistance" of Palestinian activists, but of course no one asks these "non-violent" people if they support people like Wafa Idris or condemn her. Their answers wouldn't fit in with the image that the writers want to portray, and stories like this one of how Fatah explicitly celebrates the murder of an 81-year old amateur painter who was returning from buying supplies are simply not reported.

UPDATE: The official Palestinian Authority news agency Wafa has an article about the role of women in Palestinian society that mentions Idris (along with other female terrorists) as shining examples for women to follow. This is the voice of the PA, mirroring that of Fatah.



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Friday, January 06, 2017

  • Friday, January 06, 2017
  • Elder of Ziyon
The backlash from the videos of Jewish Americans dancing in Bahrain keeps snowballing.

A dozen "civil society" institutions condemned the dancing, saying:

The visit of this delegation was provocative and the accompanying dances to the music of Talmudic songs called for the establishment of the temple on the ruins of Al-Aqsa Mosque, in front of historic Bab Al Bahrain [square], and before that in the house of a businessman with a number of traders..This provocation caused a deep psychological wound and is blatantly opposed to Arab and Islamic values ​​in support of our brothers the heroic Palestinian people against the arrogance of the Zionists and their obnoxious occupation of the land of Palestine violating all moral and human values.
The the Bahrain Council of Representatives sent out a series of tweets denouncing the event.

The House of Representatives expresses its rejection and condemnation of what was done with a number of traders and businessmen in the Kingdom of Bahrain from trying business and social  normalization  with the visiting US delegation. We stress the strong condemnation of the unacceptable behavior, which provoked and embarrassed the Bahraini street which supports the rights of the Palestinian people. The Hebrew dance and songs called for an alleged temple on the ruins of Al-Aqsa and they handed the [Bahrains] the Masonic logo. [This means a menorah - EoZ]  The Council reiterated Bahrain's position of rejecting all forms of normalization, communications and establishing relationships with the rapist Israeli entity, and that any move and act opposed to Bahraini law, and the principles of the Bahraini people.

I reported the story and video about the Jewish delegation to Bahrain days before the media caught up. And no one else is reporting about the backlash yet either besides me.

Which is why you are a reader of EoZ.

Shabbat Shalom!





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Sunday, August 21, 2016

A great catch from the Tayara Herzl blog based on a story I posted earlier:

Holocaust-denying articles have been popping up on El Badil, an Egyptian news site. But, as Elder of Ziyon notes:

Part one denies that Jews are a people altogether, claims that Ashkenazic Jews are Khazars,

Part two says that the Jews use the myth of being called “the chosen people” to manipulate the world to do their bidding.

Part three denies that Israel is the Promised Land, and says Jews have no particular historic attachment to the land.

Part four, published yesterday, denies the Holocaust, quoting famous Holocaust deniers like Fred Leuchter, David Irving and Ernst Zundel. It claims that “experts” like Leuchter proved that there couldn’t have been any gas chambers and that there were only 3 million Jews in Europe before World War II.

Wattan News, a Palestinian TV network, has been republishing these articles.
That last sentence is a real shocker. Wattan News, for those who don’t know, was just revealed to be one of the sites George Soros’s Arab Regional Office funds. In a March 2014 portfolio review, it was revealed that $405,000 was given to Wattan TV between 2012-2014 by Soros. That was over 15 percent of Wattan TV’s budget.

We can’t know for sure if Soros is still funding Wattan TV, as he did from 2012-2014, because that is when the last document regarding funding ends. But it is possible that Soros is funding a Holocaust-denying Palestinian news website, which would only further prove that he cares more about demonizing Israel than spreading facts.

Sure enough, Wattan is listed in the Open Society Foundation DCLeaks document as "an independent, non-profit Palestinian TV station that was established in 1996 by Palestinian civil society organizations. It is owned and operated by a consortium of NGOs- Medical Relief Society, Palestinian Hydrology Group, and Palestinian Relief Committee-and is governed by a board of directors in a transparent manner. " Its purpose is described as "to provide quality, public interest news and programming to Palestinian communities in the West Bank, Gaza, and in the Diaspora through TV and online platforms."

And we now know that this news and programming includes the worst kind of antisemitism including Holocaust denial.




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Thursday, August 18, 2016

  • Thursday, August 18, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
  • ,
Here are the first paragraphs of a section on terrorism written in the textbook  World Regional Geography (with Subregions), 4th edition by Lydia Mihelic Pulsipher, Alex Pulsipher, and Conrad M. Goodwin, published by Macmillan:

This section seems to be gone from the 6th edition. 


Seriously? The first modern terrorist attack in the Middle East was done by Jews? Whether the King David bombing - targeting a military headquarters - was terror is debatable, but it was by no means the first terror attack in the region. What was the 1929 massacres of Jewish civilians if not terrorism? What about the many terror attacks perpetrated by the Black Hand, the terror group founded by Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam in the late 1920s to kill Jews and the British in Palestine? (Outside the region, there were many terror groups in the 19th century, including in the Ottoman Empire and the US.)

But this passage is much worse than that. It justifies Palestinian terrorism and Arab aggression (saying that Israel provoked each war - yes, I guess that if breathing is provocation, this may be true.)

It says that Israel was created on "Palestinian lands," a falsehood that is seen throughout the textbook as the headline on this page shows:


They were "Palestinian" lands? What contemporaneous source from before 1948 ever referred them to them that way?  (The book makes the same claim in several other places, like page 49, and most egregiously on page 38 where the claim is that the land "belonged to Palestinians," which is false in every sense.) (These claims don't seem to be in the 6th edition. Instead, the newer edition refers to the territories Israel gained in 1967 as "Palestinian lands" rather than lands controlled by Jordan and Egypt.)



The outrageous lies don't end there. The caption beneath the maps on page above says that it was the "Jewish settlers" who didn't agree to the 1947 UN partition plan, and they started a war themselves - exactly 180 degrees from the truth.  (The 6th edition has the identical caption under the map, although the text is more accurate.)

Another section, filled with the usual anti-Israel propaganda,  claims that "thousands of Palestinians have been displaced" by Jewish settlements. This is another absolute lie, the vast majority of Jewish communities did not displace a single person, and in the rare cases that they did, it was because the land belongs to Jews either to begin with or via purchase.

There is plenty of other bias to be seen in that page, such as the bizarre opinion that Israel "negated" its withdrawal from Gaza by imposing a blockade - without mentioning Hamas or rockets.

This section is verbatim in the 6th edition as well.
The separation barrier's purpose to stop terror attacks isn't mentioned, the authors make it appear that the barrier was built to grab land (without mentioning the any settlements that are on the east side of the fence.)

Also, as far as I can tell, the figure of 30,000 farmers separated from their land is fiction. The best number I can glean is that there are a total of about 120,000 Palestinians who work in agriculture in both the West Bank and Gaza, the idea that such a high percentage happen to farm on lands that happen to be divided by a fence is simply incredible. I would love to know the source for this.

What is clear is that the authors have an anti-Israel bias in this textbook, and that many of the facts that they are teaching students are simply lies.

The main author is roundly criticized by her students for her intolerance for other opinions and her liberal/socialist, anti-American stance.

The book was published by WH Freeman which is owned by Macmillan. You can contact Macmillan Education at this webpage.

(h/t @nevillechmbrln)

UPDATE: I got a copy of the 6th edition, which removed some of the examples here but kept others, annotated in the post.

UPDATE 2: See my detailed discussion of the 6th edition.


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Wednesday, August 17, 2016


Diaa Hadid in the New York Times has written some surprisingly good articles in recent weeks. Earlier this week she wrote one about how Israeli doctors, through the Save a Child's Heart program, saved the life of an Afghan boy in Pakistan with a heart defect.

I've written about SACH in the past and even visited them. It is a great organization that is happy to help whenever it can. It is not political and does only good.

For the most part, Hadid's article is positive, describing how the child, Yehia, managed to get to Israel and be helped. She give background on the organization:
Yehia — whose father spoke on the condition that the family name not be published for fear of a backlash if it became known he had taken the boy to Israel for treatment — is the first Afghan treated by Save a Child’s Heart in its 20 years of operations. About half the charity’s 4,000 patients have been Palestinian; 200 others were children from Iraq and Syria, and the roster includes patients from Tanzania, Ethiopia and Moldova.

But she cannot resist finding someone to accuse the dedicated doctors of SACH of "med-washing:"

Tony Laurance, head of a group called Medical Aid for Palestine, said that while providing children “world-class surgery” was “an unequivocal good,” it should not obscure the broader impact of Israeli policies on medical care for Palestinians. 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.

What gets up my nose,” Mr. Laurance said, “is that it presents an image of Israel that betrays the reality.”
Israeli doctors saving Muslim lives "gets up his nose" because it "betrays reality"? Laurance is saying that positive articles about Israel must not be published because they blunt the impact of the unrelenting anti-Israel propaganda that he and his organization pushes.

Laurance's idea of "reality" is that Gaza suffers shortages of medicine and equipment because of Israeli policies, a statement that Hadid does not check. It is unequivocally false. While a tiny percentage of medical equipment going into Gaza may be delayed because it could be considered dual-use, if it is legitimate it gets through. And there are no restrictions on medicines altogether. Teh medicine restrictions are because of infighting between Hamas and Fatah, plus Hamas stealing aid. It has nothing to do with Israel.

Laurance lied, and Hadid allowed the lie to be published unchallenged in the New York Times.

Even his statement about "many Gaza residents struggle to get exit permits " is skewed. I have no doubt that there is paperwork to complete and approvals involved, but they are traveling to another country - the restrictions are not any worse than with most international travel. Beyond that, Mr. Laurance conveniently decides not to say a word about that other country that borders Gaza, an Arab country, that refuses virtually all patients from entering. Which calls into question the true interest he has in Medical Aid for Palestinians (the actual name of the organization) - how much of it is altruistic and how much is political?

There was no reason to include his mini-diatribe in the article, and in fact it is a jarring departure from the tone of the rest of the article. But what is worse is that the casual reader would think that the NYT agrees that Israel restricts medical aid to Gaza.

(h/t EBoZ)



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Friday, July 29, 2016

  • Friday, July 29, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
  • ,


Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, is the only sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court, on five counts of crimes against humanity (murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape.)

This week, the government of Mahmoud Abbas, in its weekly cabinet meeting, announced:
The Council welcomed the agreement between Mr. President, Mahmoud Abbas, and his Sudanese counterpart Omar al-Bashir, on the establishment of a joint ministerial committee between the two countries. Four agreements were signed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs with Sudanese officials: a political consultation agreement, a convention on the Joint Ministerial Committee, a protocol of political consultation and the Convention on General Education and the Convention on Cultural and Academic Cooperation in the field of higher education between the two countries, stressing that these signed agreements will lead to the strengthening of relations and increasing cooperation between the two countries for the benefit of the two brotherly peoples.

For some reason this wasn't considered to be newsworthy.

Even the "human rights" NGOs who are agitating to have Bashir arrested have nothing bad to say about Mahmoud Abbas treating him like  a respected head of state.


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Monday, June 20, 2016

  • Monday, June 20, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
Al Soava is a set of sandy hills right outside Rafah that residents have turned into a recreation area. Kids fly kites and run up and down the dunes as families picnic.

Vendors go around selling toys, snacks and drinks for the people taking a break.  It is apparently the only open space easily accessible to residents of Rafah.

Hamas has started to flatten the dunes in order to give the land to its employees who haven't been paid for three years.

One Gazan complained bitterly, saying "Al Soava is park that dozens of families flock to a day. It is an escape from their homes, as most of them are poor, who cannot afford to go to the expensive beachfront chalets and cafeterias. These golden sands is the only place for fun and happiness for their children. "

That Gazan refused to give his name for fear of being arrested by Hamas.

Hamas is naming the new neighborhood "Attar," after Raed Attar, a top-ranking terrorist who was killed by Israel in August 2014.




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Tuesday, June 14, 2016


The official Palestinian Wafa news agency reports:
The head of the State of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas spoke about the need to stop violations against Al Aqsa Mosque, stressing that it is a red line that can not be tolerated in the face of the suffering of daily attacks and violations by the occupation forces and settlers.
The PA Ministry of Information says that any Jews that visit the holiest spot in Judaism are doubling their "terrorism" by visiting during Ramadan, that Israel is "waging war on holy sites" and is disregarding the feelings of Muslims by entering the site. The ministry requested that UNESCO put pressure on Israel to stop its "religious terrorism" and "prevent the establishment of Talmudic rituals in the Haram al Sharif."

Nothing is being said against Christians peacefully visiting the site. Only Jews must be banned, and now Abbas is saying that such a ban on Jews is a red line before any peace agreement is made.

Abbas is demanding that the world support his antisemitism as a prerequisite for "peace." 

This joins his demand that Israel release all Arab terrorists from prison before any "peace" agreement could be signed.

Which means that Abbas is telling the world that the state that he is demanding will enforce terror-supporting and antisemitic policies.

And still not one Western nation or major Western media outlet is willing to publicly call their "moderate peacemaker" out for what he explicitly says.

The Ministry of Information also complained about the fact that during the Shavuot holiday, Muslims are not allowed to visit the "Ibrahimi Mosque" in Hebron. This is a long standing agreement where the Cave of the Patriarchs is used exclusively by either Jews or Muslims for an equal number of days every year, and the spaces are divided between Jews and Muslims the rest of the year.

When Abbas says he wants a return to the "status quo" on the holy sites, he means the status quo of when Jordan didn't allow a single Jew to visit any of Judaism's holy sites in Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem or elsewhere.

Antisemitism is part and parcel of the Palestinian Authority's official policies.



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Tuesday, June 07, 2016



UNRWA  together with the American University of Beirut released a 240 page report on the situation of Palestinians in Lebanon, both the population that has been there since 1948 and the more recent refugees from Syria.

While it correctly mentions the institutionalized discrimination against them, it obscures one important point:

More than 67 years after their initial presence in Lebanon, Palestine refugees are still considered as foreigners under Lebanese law, which does not grant them any special legal status and deprives them from basic rights enjoyed by the Lebanese. This prolonged foreigner status mainly stems from the strong rejection by the Lebanese authorities of the naturalization of Palestine refugees, which is sometimes used as justification for the various discriminatory policies against them. On a political level, Palestine refugees have also opposed naturalization. Accordingly, despite their longstanding presence in the country as refugees, PRL remain excluded from key aspects of social, political, and economic life. They face legal and institutional discrimination; they are denied the right to own property and face restrictive employment measures such as a ban from some liberal and syndicate professions. 
Palestine refugees in Lebanon (PRL) face one of the worst socioeconomic conditions in the region, and these have been deteriorating given the country’s weakening socioeconomic situation and the prolonged Syria crisis. A little short of two thirds of the PRL population is poor, a proportion that has not changed since 2010, and the discriminatory laws against them hinder their ability to improve their living conditions and livelihoods. Decaying infrastructure, a dearth of recreational spaces, insufficient access to roads, deteriorated water and sewage treatment systems, contaminated water, and jerry-rigged electrical wires along with open drainage ditches paint a gloomy picture of camps where over 63 per cent of PRL reside. 
UNRWA is not being entirely truthful when it says "On a political level, Palestine refugees have also opposed naturalization." Yes, self-appointed leaders keep saying that they don't want to become citizens in order to keep the dream of destroying Israel through "return" alive, but in reality Palestinians in Lebanon are clamoring to become citizens and whenever a loophole opens up, tens of thousands of them apply.

The report also admits that UNRWA inflates the figures of "refugees" in Lebanon, keeping hundreds of thousands on its rolls who no longer live in Lebanon:

Some 495,985 Palestine refugees are registered with UNRWA in Lebanon.58 However, it is estimated that the actual number of Palestine refugees who still reside in the country ranges between 260,000 and 280,000 following the results of the 2010 socioeconomic survey conducted jointly by UNRWA and AUB.
UNRWA has no mechanism to remove people from its list of "refugees" so even the ones who live permanently in Europe are considered "refugees" - phantoms who are still useful in agitating against Israel.

The report issues no recommendations as to how to fix the situation. Lebanese discrimination and apartheid is considered normal and not worth making a stink about. Because Lebanon might respond by making things worse.

Unlike other UNRWA reports, this one has barely been mentioned in the media and certainly hasn't been publicized much by UNRWA. Mostly because Israel cannot be blamed for Lebanese discrimination against Palestinians.

So this report will sink into obscurity, and do nothing to help the actual lives of actual Arab who remain as pawns between their leaders, Lebanese leaders, the Arab world, UNRWA and the anti-Israel Westerners who claim to care about Palestinians but whose concern doesn't go beyond blaming everything on Israel.



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  • Tuesday, June 07, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon


Al Masry al Youm is a well-respected, independent newspaper in Egypt. It is considered liberal and it appeals to Arab intellectuals. Part of the reason it was founded in 2002 was as a reaction to the tabloid-type sensationalist stories in other Egyptian media. It is the 20th most popular website in Egypt. It also has an English edition called Egypt Independent.

On Monday, it published an op-ed by Salah Montasser, himself a well-known and respected writer, that minimizes, and then justifies, the Holocaust.

The Jews promote and drive the discussion by accusing German leader Adolf Hitler, who took over the leadership of Germany in 1933, killed a large number of Jews. They claim some proof that he killed six million Jews, a figure that seems impossible in its size, but Jewish propaganda was able to publish and implant that figure. But the question that no one asks, and perhaps they do not allow, is: why did Hitler do what he did to the Jews?

A friend of mine sent me a recording from a German expert speaking in English to address the question: What did the Jews do to cause Hitler's revenge on them?

Under the Third Reich between 100,000 and 600,000 Jews were directly or indirectly killed by the Nationalist Party, a figure that despite its size is much lower when compared to the victims of the Algerian war of independence with France, and the victims of the Palestinians at the hands of the Jews, and what Americans, British and the Russians have done in killing people by the millions.

So what did the Jews do in Germany? Indeed, since 1850, Jews dominated the top posts in the German Reich at that time, they made three dramatic changes to Germany.

First, understand they were a minority that did not exceed 2% of the German population. When Hitler came to power in 1933 there were about 500 thousand Jews among the 60 million Germans. But this small minority succeeded in controlling 50% of the media and consituted 70% of judges and imposed their presence in the press, film and theater, as well as literature. During their control there were economic meltdowns that occurred to the banks in the period between 1870 and 1920.

At that time, caused in several economic collapses. This is not a Nazi propaganda speech but the words of the Jews themselves. In this period millions of Germans lost their savings and investment opportunities because of the Jewish gangs banks.

The other point was their influence on the psychology of the Germans, which is the most dangerous factor at all. They planted in the press and media, theater, and literature, a culture of moral degradation. The first theaters of homosexuality were in Berlin in the twenties, the first pornographic performances were in 1880 and 1890 at the hands of Jewish authors .. .. adultery, homosexuality .. all kinds of sexual obsession .. art is decadent morality. This absurd art that is today called Modern Art. All of this has been paid and planted by the Jews.

This created a state of anger and revolution within the German society as they wrote graffiti mocking of Christianity and make fun of Jesus, just as Salman Rushdie did with the Muslims.

The Nazis, of course, benefited from this anger and revolution. When Adolf Hitler came to power the population of unemployed has reached six million Germans. Hitler was able to in two years (from 1933 to 1935) to employ them all. Six million jobs in two years, a stunning achievement. That is why the Jews wanted to tarnish the success of the Hitler, and said that if Hitler had created six million jobs, it is because he burned six million Jews. And Jewish propaganda triumphed and even become prevalent in all the media that six million Jews were victims of Hitler, while all the number of Jews in Germany was less than a quarter of that number who they say that Hitler burned!
This is the kind of thing that the mainstream Arab press publishes every damn week. But it is kryptonite to speak about institutional antisemitism among Arabs - you will have far more Western articles about how they are only anti-Zionist and how much they love Jews than you will have about this lying, sickening filth that literate, supposedly liberal Egyptians are spoon fed all the time.

Where is the New York Times or AP or Reuters? Why aren't stories like this considered news?

The only way to change Arab attitudes is by exposing it and shaming them. And that is exactly what the major media refuse to do.

They have nothing against shaming Christians or Jews, Europeans or Americans. Any Westerner who would write such a piece of garbage would be blacklisted instantly and forever. But Arabs and Muslims are expected to be bigots, and therefore their bigotry isn't news, and Arabs who insist to Western media that they distinguish between Zionists and Jews are never challenged.

By treating Arabs as if they are inherently bigoted, the news media proves that it is not only the Arabs that are bigoted.



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Monday, June 06, 2016

Religion, Politics and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief
Asaf Romirowsky & Alexander H. Joffe

This is a meticulously researched book that concentrates on a very small bit of history: the time period from 1948-50 when the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, was organizing refugee relief in Gaza.

Before UNRWA, the UN created the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR). It outsourced refugee relief to three other groups: the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League of Red Cross Societies, and the AFSC, which had won accolades for its non-political relief activities during the 1930s and 1940s.

The AFSC was in charge of relief for some 200,000 refugees in Gaza. Even though it was not fully successful in keeping itself above the fray of Middle East politics, it did an admirable job with very few resources in providing food, medical care and even education to this huge population that fled Israel. In fact, the 25,000 native Gazans were in worse financial shape than their 200,000 forced guests.

The AFSC initially wanted the refugees to be repatriated to Israel, but eventually it accepted that the majority would have to be resettled in Arab countries. Of course, the Arab countries did not want to settle them.

The AFSC is interesting in a number of ways. The Quakers, alone among the UNRPR NGOs, actually tried and to a large extent succeeded in performing a census of the refugee population, foiling the elaborate schemes that the Arabs used to inflate the numbers of members of their families (sending kids from one home to another to be counted multiple times, not registering deaths, and so forth) in order to maintain a fair and equitable distribution system. Even so, they allowed some additional food parcels to be distributed, as the food rations created a mini-industry of trade in the camps.

An AFSC member realized early on that some 200,000 of the then-assumed 670,000-700,000 refugees were not refugees at all, having lived on the other side of the Green Line the entire time, but they applied for refugee relief to take advantage of the free food.

The group also emphatically did not want to be stuck in the Middle East forever. They set a deadline by which they would leave, and UNRWA exists partially because of that ultimatum. The AFSC was keenly aware of the facts that the refugees themselves did not want to resettle at that time, and their desire to "return" was predicated on Israel being destroyed first. The refugees also felt that the aid that they were receiving was their right, and they blamed the UN as being responsible for their homelessness and therefore responsible to house and feed them until they return victoriously to their homes.

The AFSC quickly realized that this was a quagmire that they did not want any part of. The AFSC noted, prophetically, that withdrawing aid is actually the best thing that could happen to the refugees as the alternative of perpetual aid "contributes to the moral degeneration of the refugees and may also, by its palliative effects, militate against a swift political settlement of the problem."

As they left and handed over the reins of Gaza relief to UNRWA, the FSC members naively thought that now a professional organization would be able to do things that they could not - but they quickly realized that UNRWA officials were completely incompetent and often political hires who thought that the assignment was to drink scotch all day with Egyptian officials.

For a short time the AFSC was an UNRWA contractor to help the transition. One mentioned in a letter that the Egyptians had taken over the education of the Palestinian children under UNRWA in 1950, where "the kids are learning reading, writing and bombing tactics."

The AFSC is also, as the authors point out, a precursor to today's powerful and very political NGOs. The Committee itself became very political in the decades since, taking on US involvement in Vietnam and the Cold War, and in recent decades they became implacably anti-Israel, which some but not all of their volunteers were in 1948.

The book is dense with facts and footnotes, and it is often difficult to keep track of all the players. It places the AFSC in context of the many American, mostly Protestant groups with ties to the Middle East, whose members were often antisemitic (and many of whom ended up working for the State Department.) But it tells a story that simply had not been previously told about the history of the refugee problem and how it turned from something that might have been solvable into today's intractable problem of descendants of the original refugees still stateless, still pawns and still believing that they are entitled to free food, medicine and education forever.




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Friday, June 03, 2016

  • Friday, June 03, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
Fatah media reports that Hamas arrested five members of the Presidential Guard for "collaborating" with Palestinian Authority that it claims it is unified with.

On Wednesday morning, Hamas reportedly arrested Mohammed Ghazi Khitab, Isaac Ibrahim Abdullah Hussein, Shadi Alslol, Hatem Yousef Mohammed Hasanat, and Mohammed Abdul Rahman Ibrahim Mattar.

The story goes on to accuse Hamas of building secret, underground prisons specifically for political opponents, where they routinely engage in torture. Some are in the basements of mosques which are soundproofed so that the residents nearby don't hear the screams.

Fatah media is even less trustworthy than Hamas media, but the arrests and charges of torture are probably true.



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  • Friday, June 03, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Miriam Goodman on Facebook:

Now this is Israel...and her people!

Following an announcement that there was no minyan (quorum) to accompany Holocaust survivor Fernand Pavel Klitz, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, hundreds of people came to his funeral. They came from all over the country . Secular, religious and ultra-Orthodox. Old and young. School children
The burial society motorcycles escorted the procession and the coffin was carried by IDF officers and soldiers who came on their own initiative.



While this is impressive, it also points to a problem: people should worry more about these incredible survivors while they are still alive. so they wouldn't die alone.



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  • Friday, June 03, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
One of the cartoons winning an award in Iran's Holocaust cartoon contest


There was a joke that Jews told each other during the Holocaust:

An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? Asks the one? Why the Jews? asks the other.

I was reminded of this by the announcement of the latest Iranian antisemitic cartoon contest, coming on the heels of the Holocaust cartoon contest:

An Iranian museum on Tuesday kicked off a “Zionist caliphate” cartoon contest, with “Zionism, terrorism and racism” and “ISIL terrorism and genocide in the name of religion and to the benefit of the Zionists” the designated themes.

The contest by Iranian Cultural-Art Masaf Institute will offer one $5,000 award for best cartoon, $1,000 for best caricature and four $500 awards to the other top entries, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

In its portrait session, participants are asked to focus on Theodor Herzl and Queen Elizabeth. The competition is dedicated to the “Nakba,” or displacement of Palestinians in 1948 with the establishment of the State of Israel, according to the report.
Why Queen Elizabeth?

The answer is probably because they are using her as a representative for responsibility for the Balfour Declaration, but my point is that hate against Jews remains as arbitrary and deadly now as it was during the coining of the first joke. But hating Israel is now considered as considered "obvious" as hating Jews was a couple of generations ago, because Israel in the 21st century has become the proxy for Jews as they were looked upon in the 1940s.

(UPDATE: See L_King in the comments for a probably better reason why Queen Elizabeth is singled out.)


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  • Friday, June 03, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon


Daniel Seidemann is a left-wing  expert on Jerusalem who heads Terrestrial Jerusalem, an NGO that (in partnership with Peace Now) documents everything that happens in the holy city that could, in its view, jeopardize the peace process.

Seidemann was upset at Bibi Netanyahu saying that Jerusalem will remain under Jewish control.




QED is the abbreviation for quod erat demonstrandum, a Latin phrase that he slightly misuses as it is meant to say that the initial proposition has been proven by the (usually mathematical) proof that follows, ending in a restatement of the original statement. In this case, Seidemann claims that Bibi's saying that Jerusalem will remain under Israeli sovereignty is proof that he isn't interested in a two-state solution.

I responded with a simple question:



Even though this question was tweeted to him a dozen times, he refused to answer.

Because there is no answer. The reason that Jerusalem is considered an integral part of any Palestinian state is only because the Arabs insist on it, not because the state could not exist without Jerusalem as its capital.

Somehow, 190 other nations manage to exist without Jerusalem as their capitals.

 In reality, there is no relationship between two states and Israel having control of Jerusalem. The link between "Palestine" and Jerusalem is artificial and was created after 1967. No one demanded a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital before Israel redeemed the city in 1967.

In the West, people say that a Palestinian state is necessary to end the demographic threat to Israel, to allow Palestinians to no longer be stateless, to end the conflict permanently, and a host of other reasons. But what is the real reason why Palestinians insist that Jerusalem must be part of their state? After all, all of the other issues would be solved at least as well, and in fact much easier, if that demand is not met. The more one cares about a two-state solution, the more one should want to pressure Palestinians to drop their demand for Jerusalem.

In fact, there is another demand that Palestinians insist on just as adamantly as a precondition for statehood, the so-called "right of return." The West pooh-poohs that demand but in Arabic it is considered as critical as land and Jerusalem and the other conditions Abbas places on any negotiations.

If Palestinians are so desperate for a state, then how come they are in a position to demand things like Jerusalem and "return" that have nothing to do with statehood?

Moreover, why is the Arab demand for the holy sites in Jerusalem considered sacrosanct and the Jewish demand to keep those sites - which by any measure is much stronger, historically and religiously as well as practically - considered a blow to peace?

The Arabs want Jerusalem not because of their historic ties to the city (which they largely ignored when Muslims controlled it) but because they know that Israel without Jerusalem is just another secular state, and they want to sever Israel's ties to its Jewish history. Jerusalem (and to a lesser extent Hebron and Bethlehem and Bet El and other towns) is what proves Jews have historic, religious and cultural ties to the region and have had those ties for thousands of years. Arabs want those ties to be cut.

That is why they demand Jerusalem as a prerequisite to "peace" - it is really a prerequisite to the next stage of the destruction of the Jewish state.

That is why there is nothing inconsistent between everything Abbas is doing and Yasir Arafat's "phased" plan to destroy Israel in stages. This is why Mahmoud Abbas publishes on his website, today,  his book that says

Zionism began as an alien thing and it will end as an alien thing. It seemed to us (i.e. Palestinians) as a predestined matter, and its end has become a predestined matter. Both the Jews and us are its victims. We and the Jews will guarantee its destruction, so we will live after it as we have lived before it in a wide homeland full of resources which are enough for everyone and grants everyone wellness, love and equality.
Arabs aren't afraid of Jews like Seidemann who say they want to give up Jerusalem for peace. They are afraid of Jews - even secular Jews like Netanyahu - who would rather die than lose the Old City.

Beggars can't be choosers, yet Palestinians who are supposedly living in stateless misery are making preconditions for a state that have nothing to do with statehood.

Because their goal isn't the creation of a state but the destruction of one.

And the proof is because they insist, without a shred of proof, that there can be no Palestinian state without Jerusalem.

QED.




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Thursday, June 02, 2016


I have been talking about Ali Gad's series of articles at Al Ahram, Egypt's most highly circulated newspaper. He is pretending to prove that Jews have been plotting to take over the world since Talmudic times.

Part 4 was published last week, and Ali Gad said that Jews orchestrated World War II and other wars for economic reasons.

In part 5, published today, Gad says

[Jews] seek to demolish the governments in all countries, and replace them with Jewish autocratic governments, and create the environment for this, including: the temptation of kings and rulers against persecuted peoples, and the lure of the peoples to rebel against them, using the principles of liberty, equality and the like, with a particular interpretation meant to hurt both sides, and trying to keep all of government power and strength against the hostile people, and to keep both of them in the permanent fear of the other, and the corruption of government and leaders of the people... The most important elements of control are throwing the seeds of discord and unrest in all countries by secret political, religious, artistic and sports associations and Masonic lodges and clubs of different activities, and move the nations of tolerance to political and religious extremism...all this with a stick to keep the Jewish nation above the fray, according to the protocols, making people into herds of cattle, while international leaders are only pawns in the hands of Jews...
This is what is being published in mainstream Egyptian media. Today and every week. From a country that gets billions of dollars in international aid.

But this is not newsworthy, apparently.



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  • Thursday, June 02, 2016
  • Elder of Ziyon
One of the advisors for the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is NYU sociologist Andrew Ross.

It is no surprise to find out that Ross is yet another academic fraud. It took me about two minutes to find this among his writings for an academic labor journal:

The recent ugly backlash against the American Studies Association’s (ASA) decision to join the boycott of Israeli universities should have surprised no one. ...The tactics of intimidation and thuggery deployed by some organized supporters of Israeli policy should remind us of the military violence at the heart of the colonial occupation in Palestine. Indeed, that is the unspoken intention behind these threats. Somewhere behind all of the bullying and verbal posturing lies the metallic decree of armed force.

Yes, this esteemed academic says that if you oppose discrimination against the Jewish state, you are effectively threatening to shoot BDSers point-blank with Merkava tanks.

The funny thing is that Andrew Ross was the editor of Social Text in 1996, when that journal was the victim of a brilliant hoax to prove that people like Andrew Ross have literally no concept of reality.

As Wikipedia notes:
From 1986 to 2000, Ross served on the editorial collective of Duke University's journal Social Text. In 1996 he was one of the journal's editors who published a paper byAlan Sokal professing to show connections between physics and post-modern theory, and which was later revealed by Sokal to be a hoax meant to expose the low academic standards of "post-modernism" (see Sokal affair). Ross was among the editors of Social Text who were awarded the 1996 Ignoble Prize for Literature for his part in being taken in by the hoax.[1]Ross's involvement in the Sokal hoax gave rise to criticism from outside the area of his academic specialisation. In an article in Nature {Published in Nature, 9 July 1998, vol. 394, pp. 141–143} Richard Dawkins said [2] "Ross has the boorish, tenured confidence to say things like, "I am glad to be rid of English departments. I hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who love literature"; and the yahooish complacency to begin a book on 'science studies' with these words: "This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them."
Sokai wrote:
The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social Textliked my article because they liked its conclusion: that ``the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project.'' They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion.

This is the entire modus operandi of the anti-Israel crowd. They choose the conclusion first - that the Jewish state is a uniquely evil regime - and then they believe or fabricate any evidence, no matter how tendentious, to support their foregone conclusion. This is why you cannot argue with them: facts are inconvenient obstacles to their sacred goals.

It is no wonder that someone for whom opinion trumps truth is someone who is active in attacking the only state in the Middle East with true academic freedom.

(h/t David Abrams)



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