Caroline Glick: A (much) better year
On Wednesday the US media interrupted its saturation coverage of the presidential primaries to report on President Barack Obama’s visit to a mosque in Maryland. The visit was Obama’s first public one to a mosque in the US since entering the White House seven years ago. The mosque Obama chose to visit demonstrated once again that his views of radical Islam are deeply problematic.PMW: PA cartoon: Israel is snake, its head a rifle targeting Muslim and Christian holy sites
Obama visited the Islamic Society of Baltimore, a mosque with longstanding ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. During Operation Protective Edge, the leaders of the mosque accused Israel of genocide and demanded that the administration end US support for the Jewish state.
According to The Daily Caller, the mosque’s former imam Mohammad Adam el-Sheikh was active in the Islamic American Relief Agency, a charity deemed a terror group in 2004 after the US Treasury Department determined it had transferred funds to Osama bin Laden, Hamas, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.
According to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, before Obama visited the Islamic Society of Baltimore, he asked the FBI for its opinion of the mosque. FBI investigators informed Obama of the mosque’s ties to terrorism. They urged him not to confer it with the legitimacy that comes with a presidential visit.
Obama ignored the FBI’s advice.
The next 11 months will be miserable for Israel.
But we should take heart. By all accounts, next year will be better. And judging by the way the presidential race is shaping up, next year may be a much, much better year.
Depicting Israel as a snake with its head a rifle, this official Palestinian Authority daily cartoon expressed visually the PA libel that Israel is targeting Muslim and Christian holy sites. The cartoon shows a snake with the head of a rifle coiled around a mosque and a church while aiming the rifle at the towers.Netanyahu visits wounded border policewoman
Palestinian Media Watch has documented this libel as well as the PA's portrayal of Israel as a snake, an octopus, wolves and rats threatening Jerusalem and the holy sites.
The libel that Israel is working to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque to build "the alleged Temple" as well as the PA message that Israel seeks to "Judaize" the Old City of Jerusalem are constantly kept alive by PA and Fatah leaders to instill fear, anger, and hatred in the Palestinian population. Whenever the PA leaders want violence and terror attacks, they build on these feelings, intensify the libels and use them to justify calling Palestinians to use violence to "defend" and "protect" the holy sites.
Thus PA Chairman Abbas used these libels as a pretext for encouraging Palestinians to use "everything in our power" to "protect" the Al-Aqsa Mosque in a speech in September 2015, leading to the onset of the current wave of terror attacks:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited a wounded border policewoman at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Mount Scopus hospital on Wednesday, describing her conduct during an attack in the city a day earlier as “heroic and resourceful.”
The policewoman, Ravit Mirilashvili, was hospitalized with serious injuries along with another officer, Hadar Cohen, after three Palestinians shot and stabbed them outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City on Wednesday afternoon.
Cohen, 19, suffered from multiple wounds to her upper body and died hours later. Mirilashvili left the hospital to attend her funeral on Thursday.
“The officers, together with their commander, prevented a much greater disaster,” Netanyahu told Israeli media following the visit, stressing that he admired the injured officer’s “courage and tenacity.”
He praised Cohen as “a genuine hero.”