Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, October 19, 2014

10/19 Links: Why Europe Is Irrational About Israel; ASA pretends to partially drop Israel boycott

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: New York Times post – There should be no Palestinian state

The New York Times online debating forum Room For Debate asked me to participate in an online forum regarding the rationale for recognizing the non-existent state of Palestine.
Here’s what I wrote:
When Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven announced his decision to recognize the non-existent state of “Palestine” earlier this month, he inadvertently gave the game away.
Lofven said, “A two-state solution requires mutual recognition and a will to peaceful coexistence. Sweden will therefore recognize the State of Palestine.”
The Palestinians refuse to recognize or peacefully coexist with the State of Israel.
Like his coalition partner Hamas terror master Khaled Mashaal, and despite his sweet talk to Western audiences, PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas has pledged, repeatedly, over decades that he will never, ever recognize Israel. During his speech to the UN General Assembly last month he reverted to PLO language from the 1970s, referring to Israel repeatedly as “the occupying Power,” and “the racist occupying State.”
So when Lofven recognized “Palestine,” he joined the Palestinian campaign to destroy Israel. He used the language of the “two-state solution,” to reject the Jewish state.

Eugene Kontorovich: ASA pretends to partially drop Israel boycott

Stephens tried to mislead me about the ASA’s policy, and is likely trying to mislead the Westin. The clear policy is to restrict participation by Israeli scholars in a way that no other nationality is subject to.
Even the belated claim to waive the boycott for the annual conference would not preempt legal liability. Academic conferences are organized, scheduled and registered months in advance. The discriminatory effects of their policy have already been realized. The fact that the policy was selectively not enforced for one Israeli academic (Mohammed Wattad of Zefat College School of Law) on the program does not mean it was not otherwise enforced.
However, the ASA’s attempts to deny their policy, and then belatedly modify it on an ad hoc basis says little for their integrity. Having adopted their boycott to much public fanfare, they want to be able to quietly deny it – when it suits them.
Their reaction also suggests they understand the weakness of their legal position.

Why Europe Is Irrational About Israel

Coming soon after Sweden’s recognition of a non-existent state of Palestine, the British Parliament’s 274-to-12 resolution to recognize “Palestine” flags a sea-change in European sentiment towards Israel. France is thinking of following suit. The European Community bureaucracy, meanwhile, has readied sanctions against Israel. One remonstrates in vain. The Gaza War should have taught the world that Israel cannot cede territory to Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 10th year of a 4-year term. Hamas has the support of 55% of West Bank Palestinians vs. just 38% for Abbas, and Hamas openly brags that it could destroy Israel more easily from firing positions in the West Bank. Only the Israeli military keeps Abbas in power; without the Israelis Hamas would displace Abbas in the West Bank as easily as it did in Gaza; and a Hamas government in the West Bank would make war on Israel, with horrifying consequences.
To propose immediate Palestinian statehood under these circumstances is psychotic, to call the matter by its right name. The Europeans, along with the United Nations and the Obama administration on most working days, refuse to take reality into account. When someone tells you that Martians are transmitting radio waves into his brain, or that Elvis Presley really is the pope rather than an Argentine Jesuit, one doesn’t enquire into the merits of the argument. Rather, one considers the cause of the insanity.
The Europeans hate Israel with the passion of derangement. Why? Well, one might argue that the Europeans always have hated Jews; they were sorry they hated Jews for a while after the Holocaust, but they have gotten over that and hate us again. Some analysts used to cite Arab commercial influence in European capitals, but today Egypt and implicitly Saudi Arabia are closer to Jerusalem’s point of view than Ramallah’s. Large Muslim populations in Europe constitute a pressure group for anti-Israel policies, but that does not explain the utter incapacity of the European elite to absorb the most elementary facts of the situation.

This is based on an earlier piece Mike wrote.

I should also mention that the Metallica-type graphic below was done by Daughter of Ziyon a few years back.

In the discussion around the ongoing Arab-Israel conflict there are, depending on one's perspective, good people and bad people. If one is an anti-Semitic anti-Zionist the bad people are called "Zionists." These Zionists are thought to be an unusually horrid breed of people who hold nefarious intent toward Arabs and bolster a particularly extreme, if not fascistic, form of ethnic nationalism.

The funny thing is, and what no one ever says, is that Zionism, as a political movement, is over with. It's done. What Zionism really was, of course, was the movement for Jewish national liberation and it fulfilled itself in May of 1948 when Israel was recognized by the UN as a state. It should be noted, by the way, that the UN did not create Israel. People often say this, but it is not true. Israel was not created by well-meaning pencil pushers in the UN, but by Jewish people (and some non-Jewish people) on the ground.

Between the end of the 19th century and 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews built that country from nothing. It was swampland and desert, but they worked that land. They grew the crops and developed the farms and created the infrastructure, political and material, necessary for a state. All that the UN did was recognize a condition that already existed, the condition of Jewish statehood.

Those people were Zionists. That is, those people, those Jewish farmers and Jewish laborers and Jewish politicians, those people were Zionists. They dreamed of creating a national homeland for the Jewish people on historically Jewish land and went about doing precisely that.

I am not a Zionist because I was born too late to have anything to do with the Zionist project of building a state. By the time that I came around the state was already built. The truth of the matter is that most Jews who care about Israel do not necessarily think of themselves as Zionists. When I was growing up, in an American middle class home wherein we supported Israel, we almost never even used that word.

I do not recall my folks, or their friends, ever referring to themselves as Zionists. We were just American Jews who supported Israel. We did not require a separate name for ourselves any more than American Italians who support Italy get some specific name or Chinese Americans who care about China have some separate and specific name for themselves.

More and more the word "Zionist" is little more than an epithet spit at Jews who happen to be supportive of Israel. That's what Zionism really is today. It is the word that our enemies use to isolate us and separate us out from other people. It is an identifying mark at this point. It is the yellow star and in the mouths of hate-filled anti-Zionist progressives, a stigma.

Zionists are the category of people whom it is OK to hate on the progressive-left. Where it was, once upon a time, socially acceptable to hate Jews that is no longer the case among people who consider themselves contemporary-left anti-racists.

Progressives do not hate Jews because that would be racist.

Instead the socially acceptable category of people to hate is not Jews, but Zionists. You cannot openly hate on Jews in polite society. (Is that still the case?) But you can hate on Zionists. And just because the vast majority of Jews happen to be Zionists represents no reason not to despise Zionists because these insidious people are promoting... or so we are often told... a truly virulent form of racist imperialism and colonialism resulting in the ethnic cleansing and oppression of those icons of pure victim-hood, the "Palestinian" people.

That is what Zionism means in the mouths of the anti-Zionist progressive-left.

The oppressor.

The Jew as oppressor.

That is what they mean when they call us Zionists.

Nobody ever talks about it but anyone who follows the never-ending conflict cannot possibly miss this. It is a fundamental, central, yet unspoken within the discussion. They have conjured up an entire class of evil people, Zionists, and anyone who defends Israel from their never-ending defamation becomes one of these insidious beings.

And this is why anti-Zionism represents the new anti-Semitism.

And what a shame that this time around it is coming at us from the Left.

Shame. Shame. Shame.

{Sad, really.}

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

Today's fake PCHR "civilian"

I have not been actively looking for these lately, but today Islamic Jihad put out an obituary on one of its members killed during Operation Protective Edge, Abdul Majeed Abdullah Abdul Majeed Aidi.

Look how devout he is!

Aidi was described as a civilian by the PCHR on July 26: (they say 13 out of 18 killed in Gaza City that day were civilians and he is not listed as one of the five militants.)

At approximately 20:30, a number of Israeli artillery shells hit a house belonging to ‘Abdullah Ibrahim Abu Leila, 51, in al-Zaytoun neighborhood. As a result, Avu Leila was killed together with 3 other persons who were in the house: Abdul Majid ‘Abdullah al-‘Aaidi, 36; Mohammed ‘Abdul Nasser Abu Zaina, 22; and Yousef Kamal Mohammed al-Wassifi, 23.

Swastikas have been found spray-painted on the Temple Mount.

Police opened an investigation Sunday after graffiti was found in the Temple Mount compound depicting a swastika as the equivalent of a Star of David.

The incident came on the heels of a call by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for Palestinians to defend the Temple Mount, the location of the al-Aqsa mosque and the site of heated clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces over the past several weeks.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said authorities had opened a probe into the incident after finding at least three instances of the graffiti daubed on the floor inside the holy site.

Pictures posted online by the Israeli news portal 0404 showed two different places where the symbols had been painted in blue, one on stairs leading to the Temple Mount and another in an unidentified location.

On Friday, Abbas called for Jews to be barred from the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism and home to a mosque and shrine revered by Muslims as well, and said Palestinians should defend the site.

“It is our sacred place, al-Aqsa [mosque] is ours, this Noble Sanctuary is ours. They have no right to go there and desecrate it,” Abbas said.

"That's our job!"

The 0404 site says that at least five swastikas were found.

On Friday, "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas gave a speech telling Palestinian Arabs to do everything necessary to physically prevent Jews from visiting their holiest site:

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas yesterday called on his people to prevent Israeli settlers from entering Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al Aqsa mosque and use “all means” to protect the site.

“It is not enough to say the settlers came, but they must be barred from entering the compound by any means. This is our Aqsa... and they have no right to enter it and desecrate it,” Abbas said.

On Saturday, Abbas said he wants international law to enforce a ban on Jews from visiting the Temple Mount:

We must refer to basic principles, namely Jerusalem, which is exposed to attacks by settlers intent to partition the Haram al-Sharif temporally and spatially, and we know the meaning of this; there were many attacks on Al Aqsa repulsed by religious leaders who are in the compound, but I say to our people in Jerusalem and the West Bank: We are all stationed in the Al Aqsa and will not allow settlers to trample on the Haram and we will take international legal action in this direction.

Last year I wrote a brief survey of international law and the Temple Mount:

Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says:

Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.

In addition, Article 20 seems to prohibit the insults and incitement that Muslims engage in towards Jews on the Temple Mount:

1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.

2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.

Moreover, the UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief is filled with articles that would prohibit banning Jews from the Temple Mount:

No one shall be subject to discrimination by any State, institution, group of persons, or person on grounds of religion or other beliefs.

For the purposes of the present Declaration, the expression "intolerance and discrimination based on religion or belief" means any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on religion or belief and having as its purpose or as its effect nullification or impairment of the recognition, enjoyment or exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms on an equal basis.

Discrimination between human beings on grounds of religion or belief constitutes an affront to human dignity and a disavowal of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and shall be condemned as a violation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enunciated in detail in the International Covenants on Human Rights, and as an obstacle to friendly and peaceful relations between nations.

All States shall take effective measures to prevent and eliminate discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief in the recognition, exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms in all fields of civil, economic, political, social and cultural life.

All States shall make all efforts to enact or rescind legislation where necessary to prohibit any such discrimination, and to take all appropriate measures to combat intolerance on the grounds of religion or other beliefs in this matter.

From these articles it appears that Israel is obligated to allow Jews to visit and pray there, and to protect them from those who want to take away their rights.

It is true that this same declaration says:

Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.

But this clause is referring to cases where the practitioners of the religion are the ones who are a danger to others, not when the others are so intolerant that they threaten violence. To invoke this paragraph to deny Jews' rights to the Temple Mount (which I suspect human rights organizations would do if pressed) would make the rest of that declaration a mockery.

Of course, we will never hear Human Rights Watch or Amnesty or the UN dare to defend the Jewish right to worship on the Temple Mount. Because according to those "human rights" bodies, Jews who want to do so are not considered to be worthy of protection by international law.

If Palestinians called people "jungle bunnies" would any "progressives" speak out?

Last Wednesday, during the clashes in Jerusalem's Old City as police protected Jews from being attacked by crazed Muslims who were incensed at the very thought of Jews walking freely around the holy city, one Muslim woman attacked an Israeli police officer who happens to be a black woman.

The caption for this video on the PalInfo Facebook page was "In Jerusalem [a woman] hits and pulls the hair of an African Zionist soldier who came from the jungles of Africa to kill and desecrate our holy places."

PalInfo is a popular media website that has been around for years and is pro-Hamas.

Naturally, no one seems too concerned at the explicit racism of Arab media. Because Western "progressives" - who seize on any example of Israeli racism they can find, real or imagined - think that Arabs can't be expected to act any better. They are only Arabs, after all.

Which means that we have identified two groups of racists here.

(h/t Bob Knot)

10/18 Links: Student Union Refuses to Commemorate Holocaust; The UN's terrorism apologists

From Ian:

London Student Union Refuses to Commemorate Holocaust

In yet another controversial decision, the Goldsmiths College Students' Union has rejected, by a margin of around 60 to 1, a motion to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day and all victims of genocide.
Education officer Sarah El-Alfy urged students to vote against the proposal, rejecting it as "Eurocentric" and "colonialist".
One unnamed student added that, "The motion would force people to remember things they may not want to remember," whilst another added argued that as the Union was "anti-Zionist" she couldn’t commemorate the Holocaust.
This follows news that the NUS voted against a motion condemning ISIS and supporting the Kurdish resistance as to do so would be Islamophobic.
The Tab reports that Goldsmiths Student Union President Howard Littler responded by saying, "Someone brought up Israel-Palestine out of the blue but I made a point of information and said I didn’t want to conflate the two," further commenting that the controversy was just a "storm in a teacup."
The motion called on the Union to recognise the “unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, of the other genocides, of totalitarianism and racial hatred,” adding that, “commemorating the victims of genocide, racial hatred and totalitarianism, and promoting public awareness of these crimes against humanity, is essential to sustaining and defending democratic culture and civil society, especially in the face of a resurgence of neo-fascism, racial hatred and neo-Stalinism across Europe.”

Anne Bayefsky: The UN's terrorism apologists

Over the past week, the UN’s top legal committee — a General Assembly body where all 193 states are represented — met to discuss terrorism. The webcasts are broadcast globally in multiple languages. The documents are translated and disseminated on a mammoth website free of charge.
It’s a two-step charade. First, since the UN has no definition of terrorism, state sponsors of terrorism happily denounce “terrorism” at the very same time as they promote it. Second, the terrorist funders and weapons suppliers redirect the world’s attention to the supposed “root causes” of terrorism.
Conveniently, the catalog of root causes of terrorism dreamed up in these circles never includes religiously driven bigotry doled out by anti-Semites and misogynist, homophobic sociopaths — whose need to torture, rape and kill requires no deep explanation.
A quick moral inversion, and the terrorist becomes the victim.
The UN was full of such dangerous canards last week.
All 56 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation have signed on to the Islamic Convention on Combating International Terrorism, which gives a green light to killing Israelis, Americans and anybody else deemed fair game. The treaty says: “Peoples’ struggle, including armed struggle against foreign occupation, aggression, colonialism and hegemony, aimed at liberation and self-determination . . . shall not be considered a terrorist crime.”

Douglas Murray: UK Votes Overwhelmingly for a Racist, Terrorist, Apartheid State

Before coming to the alarming parts of this, let me break the good news. The motion is non-binding, having been proposed not by the government but by backbench MPs. Secondly the coalition government officially made it a "matter of conscience" vote, though behind the scenes advised its own MPs to stay away and so abstain from the vote. Thirdly the UK government announced in advance of the vote that if the result of the vote was a passing of the motion then the UK government would not accept the vote as in any way binding.
Now the bad news. The Labour opposition whipped the vote. That is they ordered their MPs (albeit under the weakest "one-line" whip) to vote for the recognition of a Palestinian state. Secondly, despite the much-vaunted "Israeli lobby" claims made by anti-Israel campaigners, very few British MPs felt compelled to turn up and offer a coherent explanation of why a unilaterally-declared Palestinian state would be a disaster. And thirdly, of course, all this means that on Monday night British MPs voted for the creation of a racist, terrorist state. This is a point that is worth dwelling on.
Because of course the House of Commons is filled with people who would like to flaunt their anti-racist credentials. Some of them have spent years running off the moral capital of having opposed the racist apartheid state of South Africa. And as we know – and as we saw again in the recent debate over whether or not Britain should join the international campaign against ISIS – there are plenty of MPs who like to show that they are tough on terrorists. Yet here they were on Monday night trying to will into existence – against the will of the only relevant negotiating partner on the ground – a state which in the words of Palestinian Authority [PA] Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, speaking last year, "Would not see the presence of a single Israeli - civilian or soldier - on our lands."

Chag Sameach...again

Last year I posted some historic Israeli Simchat Torah flags for the coming holiday. Here are some more from the same article.

This is from the 1950s, showing various mitzvot associated with the Hebrew month of Tishrei. It also shows kids dancing with torches, which was a common custom at the time in some communities.

This flag is from the 1970s and celebrated diversity before it became a trendy buzzword, showing kids in both Ashkenazic and traditional Oriental and Persian dress.

Anyway, I want to wish everyone a chag sameach. After sunset tonight I will not be posting until at least Saturday night. This is the price I pay for living outside Israel.

10/15 Links Pt2: Islamic Help funds Hamas charitable front; Tear Down this Opera

From Ian:

Islamic Help funds Hamas charitable front

Islamic Help, a large British charity, has revealed that it is funding projects run by the Gaza-based Al-Falah Benevolent Society (a.k.a. Al-Falah Society or Al-Falah Charitable Society), which, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre, is one of “Hamas’s charitable societies”.
Al-Falah is run by Ramadan Tamboura (aka Ramadan Tanbura), whom Ha’aretz newspaper describes as a “a well-known Hamas figure”. One of Al-Falah’s Directors, Jamal Hamdi al-Haddad, also manages one of Hamas’ Hebrew-language education programmes, entitled “Know Your Enemy”.
A number of extremist charities have also funded Al Falah, including: Interpal, a British charity banned under US law as a terrorist organisation; the Muslim World League, a Saudi charity that promotes fundamentalist Islam and is accused of providing financial support to a considerable number of terrorist organisations; the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a Saudi-funded youth organisation that published anti-Shia and anti-Jewish literature; and Children in Deen, a British ‘aid convoy’ charity which was used by British suicide bomber Abdul Waheed Majeed to travel to war-torn Syria in 2013.
Islamic Help also funds the Islamic Society of Gaza, a Hamas-run organisation whose leading officials have included Ahmad Bahr, a senior Hamas leader who has said: “Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one.”

Will Westin Bonaventure permit anti-Israel discrimination on its premises?

The ASA is having its annual meeting in Los Angeles in early November at the Westin Bonaventure. The ASA has stated that it will apply its boycott rules to exclude from the conference Israeli academic institutions and any individual Israeli academics who are there on behalf of their institutions or who hold administrative capacity (e.g. Dean). Only individual Israelis who pass the test of not being there in a representative capacity will be allowed to attend.
These rules are unique to Israelis, and constitute national origin discrimination and potentially religious discrimination in violation of California’s expansive anti-discrimination and public accommodation laws. That puts the Westin Bonaventure at legal risk, because those discriminatory rules are being applied at a conference on its premises.
The American Center for Law and Justice, headed by Jay Sekulow, has sent a letter to the Westin Bonaventure, its owner and operating management, alerting them to the Westin Bonaventure’s legal risk and obligations.

Sound and Fury on the Israeli Left

Anyone who is unfamiliar with the rhetoric of the Israeli left might want to check out responses from Peace Now and Haaretz to the recent purchase of homes in Jerusalem – by Jews. With predictable frenzy they anticipated the imminent collapse of morality in the Jewish state after Jews moved into their new homes in Silwan, a few meters south of the Old City, duly purchased from a willing Arab seller. Arab property owners in Silwan denied any sale and initiated “legal procedures” to nullify it.
“The implication of this offensive act,” declared Peace Now, “has far reaching consequences.” With a mastery of arithmetic that would make any third-grader proud, it reported that 6 buildings, comprising 20 housing units, could increase “the settler presence” by 35%, enlarging the number of Jews by one hundred. For Peace Now, that is a shanda of monumental proportions, posing a severe threat to the population of Silwan, which already includes 500 Jews – and 50,000 Arabs. This “unjust and dangerous reality” climaxes more than twenty years during which “the Israeli government and police are allowing and supporting” settlements.
An editorial in Haaretz (October 10) condemned the occupancy by “dozens of Jewish settlers” in an “East Jerusalem Arab neighborhood” as proof that Prime Minister Netanyahu is “an enthusiastic supporter of annexing the territories and of handing the State of Israel . . . to the settlers.” The “seizure” of homes in Silwan was “another nail in the coffin of the peace process” – which, Haaretz concluded, was its intended purpose. But Israel’s “illegitimate colonialist policies” would surely “infuriate not only the Arab world but also Israel’s closest friends.” House buying in Jerusalem (but only by Jews) was “a destructive move,” which “could exacerbate the tense situation and spark another round of violence.”

Homemade (fireworks) rocket launcher in Jerusalem

This must be part of the "peaceful resistance" that Mahmoud Abbas loves to praise.

More from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

London, October 15 - Following a vote in the House of Commons Monday to grant symbolic recognition to a Palestinian state, Parliament passed a similar non-binding motion to grant the same recognition to the Pétain government of Nazi-occupied France.

The vote, which passed by the same 274-12 margin as the Palestine recognition measure, does not officially change government policy on theVichy state. Its symbolic nature functions primarily as a diplomatic and political statement, and does not require the Conservative government headed by David Cameron to issue such recognition. It was intended to prod warring factions to sit at the negotiating table, in the same way that recognizing Palestine is supposed to demonstrate that intransigence in negotiations is rewarded.

By favoring recognition for the Pétain government based in Vichy, Parliament thus intends to get the Free French and other anti-Nazi resistance organizations to soften their positions. The latter have been fighting to oust the Wehrmacht from areas of France they occupied in 1940, but Parliament and other international bodies would rather see them compromise, perhaps by getting the resistance movements to allow the Nazis to torture, imprison, and execute at least some citizens.

Compromise with Nazi Germany has worked well before, notes MP Ed Miliband of Labor. "Once Prime Minister Chamberlain came back from the Continent with piece of paper that guaranteed Peace in Our Time by letting Hitler have the Sudetenland, we got a full year before actual war broke out," he says. "If we can get the French to agree to roll over now, we might get as much as eight months of quiet on the western front."

Debate preceding the vote features speaker after speaker denouncing the behavior of the resistance groups, calling their actions "terrorism" and their treatment of German fighters as "barbaric." "We cannot in good conscience allow the French resistance to continue treating the Nazis with such consistent inhumanity and not face consequences," said Labor MP Joseph Goebbels of Berlin. "They must be taught a lesson."

French officials downplayed the significance of the vote, dismissing it as posturing. "The British have been making meaningless proclamations for some time now," said Free French leader Charles de Gaulle. "Remember the Balfour Declaration?"

10/15 Links Pt1: Support Allies, Not Terrorists; 'Palestinians want to destroy the Jewish state'

From Ian:

Support Allies, Not Terrorists

For the moment and against the odds, Kobani stands. Kurdish men and women, abandoned by the United States and watched but not aided by Turkey, hold the line against the sweep of ISIS across Iraq and Syria; one little point of heroism that may be gone by the time you read this. ISIS, on the other hand -- well-financed, armed, vicious, and fighting on toward Baghdad -- will assuredly not be gone.
So the Cairo meeting of Secretary of State John Kerry with UN General Secretary Ban Ki Moon and representatives of the EU, Qatar and Britain this weekend was probably a good thing, right? Just last week, a UN envoy was worried that massacres at Kobani would rival Srebrenica in the Bosnian war. Coordinated with President Obama and NSC, State and DOD meetings in Washington, an international meeting might decide a) how to take immediate steps to protect the tens of thousands of people left in the unfortunate city, b) how to pressure the Turks to provide serious support, and c) how the U.S. "air only" war plan needs to be revised in the absence of "allied" troops on the ground.
Since no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, and this one survived less well than others, there is no shame in moving to Plan B. Except they were not discussing Kobani.
They were trying to raise $4 billion for the Gaza Strip, to remove the evidence of Hamas's rocket war against Israel and its own people. Israel was not represented.
The Cairo meeting, the brainchild of Egyptian President Sisi, appealed to Kerry, who appears still to think Palestinians hold the key to glory if not peace. Qatar pledged $1 billion, the U.S. $213 million, the UK $32 million and the EU 450 million Euros. In the court of international organizational politics, Kobani loses and the Palestinians, including the terrorist group Hamas, win.

UN and British hypocrisy

When he became U.N. secretary-general in 2007, Ban Ki-moon made clear he intended to restore the trust in the institution that had been lost. Ban has not fulfilled his goal. Hypocrisy and trust have never gone hand in hand. The only narrative that unites most nations represented at the U.N. is hatred of Israel.
The world is in turmoil, thousands of people are dying daily in bloody wars and the U.S. president admits the world is out of control, but Ban's main preoccupation is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nothing is easier or more popular to do than to blame Israel for all of the world's woes.
Ban undoubtedly saw difficult scenes in Gaza when he visited there on Tuesday. War is not a pleasant thing. If not for the Iron Dome, Ban would have seen similar scenes in Israel. With its massive rocket fire, Hamas sought to wreak death and destruction inside Israel. One would expect a decent and honest person to say, loud and clear, who caused the destruction in Gaza. It is not enough to merely say, in a weak voice, that Hamas is partly responsible, as Ban certainly knows that the international media will ignore his comments on Hamas and focus on the blame he placed on Israel.

'Palestinians want to destroy the Jewish state'

No one wants to be in Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon's shoes. The man who sits at the top of Israel's defense pyramid, approves all operational plans and has intimate knowledge of all the threats on all the fronts also has to deal with demands for cuts in the defense budget and with painful encounters with families of soldiers who were killed or wounded in battle. Less than two months after the conclusion of Operation Protective Edge, Israel's latest confrontation in Gaza, Ya'alon takes time for his first in-depth post-war media interview.
"I am morally at peace with the decisions we have made," the defense minister says as he explains the moral dilemmas he faced during the fighting. The objective was to target terrorists, but in reality many civilians -- Palestinians who are not fighters -- were hurt. "When I examine whether force needs to be used, I put myself to three tests: the first test is whether I would be able to look at myself in the mirror after the bombing or the operation that I would have approved. Then, I examine the situation from a legal perspective, in terms of our law as well as international law. If everyone were to participate in the discussions surrounding the approval of an operation, they would see for themselves that we deal with very complex dilemmas, like when to shoot, like the principle of 'thou shalt not kill,' or the sanctity of life, versus the notion that 'if someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.' And yes, I am at peace with the decisions we made during the course of Operation Protective Edge.
"We examine the proportionality and the morality and the sanctity of life on all sides, but the enemy does not adhere to international law or honor the morality of the value of human life, even toward their own fighters and civilians, who are sent to the front lines. The dilemmas are very difficult. Then the U.N. comes along and wants to investigate us. There is obvious hypocrisy here; they should investigate Hamas, but it is easier to criticize and attack us. There is a combination of hypocrisy, anti-Semitism and maybe other things."