05/13 Links Pt2: NGOs and the return of antisemitism; The Hijacking of the ICC

From Ian:

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NGO Monitor: NGOs and the return of antisemitism

This week in Jerusalem, politicians, journalists, diplomats, educators, and civil society will gather at the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism (GFCA), a biannual meeting to assess the state of antisemitism globally. For the hundreds of participants, including many non-Jews, it is essential to expose those responsible for fueling antisemitism and those that enable it in order to formulate effective responses.
In this form of racism, powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that claim to promote human rights and humanitarian agendas, as well as the European governments that fund them, play a central role. The NGOs lead the demonization campaigns that target Israel, and despite the extensive evidence of the moral damage caused by these NGOs, European governments irresponsibly continue to fund them with hundreds of millions of pounds, euros, and kroner.
In advance of the Global Forum, NGO Monitor published a detailed report addressing these issues. The report addresses different types of antisemitism that are manifest in some medical aid organizations, church groups, and major human rights organizations.

Father Gabriel Naddaf: Supporting Middle Eastern Christians is Zionism

This clearly Zionist value is expressed today in Nepal, but not only there. For example, the non-governmental organization Rescuers without Borders, headed by Rabbi Aryeh Levi from Beitar Illit (a hareid rabbi living in a settlement), is operating in Kathmandu right now. At the same time, he is working with me (an Aramaic Greek-Orthodox priest and the head of the Christian Empowerment Council) to collect basic supplies for Christian refugees who escaped the clutches of the murderous terrorist organization ISIL, eventually escaping to refugee camps in Jordan and northern Iraq. Surprisingly (or not), the main source of our manpower for this blessed activity is volunteers from the Zionist non-governmental organization Im Tirtzu,
The combination of a hareidi rabbi, a priest who encourages Christian Israelis to enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces, and a secular pro-Israeli organization all working together is the aim of the Zionist story. Members of all ethnicities and sectors joining together to help those being unjustly persecuted.
This is true, honest, and real mutual responsibility. Israeli mutual responsibility, capable of bringing light even to those populations who are not Israel’s first priority every day.
It upsets me that even on these topics the vast majority of organizations who claim the title of “human rights” organizations, who in reality focus only on the vilification of the State of Israel and Israeli soldiers, are not heard.
Not Adalah, not Physicians for Human Rights, not Rabbis for Human Rights, not B’Tselem, not Breaking the Silence nor any of the other organizations supported by the New Israel Fund (NIF) have found in themselves at least the honesty to praise the amazing and inspiring Zionist activity being done here. Because why should they praise Israel or its Zionist organizations working for Nepalese refugees or downtrodden Christian refugees living in Jordan and in Syria?
After all, this doesn’t serve the international propaganda against Israel that they are primarily and completely committed to.

The Hijacking of the International Criminal Court

The International Criminal Court’s acceptance of Palestine as a state party is the latest example of a noble institution hijacked into serving political ends.
Headlines published on April Fools’ Day are often reserved for pranks, hoaxes, and fake news stories. Yet the many headlines that stated something like, “The State of Palestine formally joins the International Criminal Court, launching investigations into Israel’s War Crimes,” were no laughing matter. The State of Palestine is now officially listed as a state party to the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court. So hold the laughter, this is no joke.
Beyond being an accomplished reality, Palestine’s accession to the ICC is being hailed by some as a triumphal step on the path to the universalization of human rights norms and the Rome Statute, which established the court itself. Yet this latest bid by the Palestinian Authority to circumvent negotiations with Israel should give champions of human rights no cause for celebration, for it places more than the Jewish state’s international standing in jeopardy. As all of the Palestinians’ political bids have done in the past, this move only serves to weaken the legitimacy of the ICC and the international legal system.

ICC urges Israel to cooperate with preliminary Gaza probe

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court warned Israel Tuesday that if it doesn’t provide reliable information for her preliminary probe into possible war crimes in Palestinian territories she may be forced to decide whether to launch a full-scale investigation based on Palestinian allegations.
Fatou Bensouda said in an interview with The Associated Press that she hasn’t received any information yet from either side regarding last summer’s Gaza war and urged Israel and the Palestinians to provide information to her.
The Palestinians accepted the court’s jurisdiction in mid-January and officially joined the ICC on April 1 in hopes of prosecuting Israel for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Gaza conflict so they are certain to provide Bensouda with information. Israel, however, has denounced the Palestinian action as “scandalous,” with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning that it turns the ICC “into part of the problem and not part of the solution.”
At the time, Washington said it was a “tragic irony” that the Jewish state, which had been hit by “thousands of terrorist rockets… is now being scrutinized by the ICC.”
Bensouda said her office is “making attempts” to contact the Israelis and to reach out to the Palestinians.

As experts debate IDF targeting of Hamas, where will ICC come out?

Which side of the latest debate between US-Israeli law of armed conflict experts will the International Criminal Court fall out on when it looks at war crimes allegations against the IDF? (It should be clear that none of the debaters have accused the IDF of war crimes, but their differing positions could highly impact an ICC analysis of the legality of the IDF’s targeting methodology. In contrast, there are many human rights groups who disagree with IDF tactics far more and are more clearly pushing for ICC intervention.)
At the end of April, top US law of armed conflict experts Michael Schmitt (former US Air Force lawyer and current professor at the Naval War College) and army lawyer and an instructor at the Naval War College Maj. John Merriam put out two major reports on IDF targeting methodology after the IDF gave them special insider access.
From their joint work, they concluded that the IDF had at least two very special contextual elements to compete with when fighting Hamas and Hezbollah which were even more challenging than those which Western armies confronted in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One was that when the IDF was deciding whether to target Hamas forces or rockets, that a choice not to attack could mean an immediate Hamas strike on the Israeli civilian population.

'International community should criminalize double standards against Israel as anti-Semitism'

The international community should criminalize anti-Semitism and establish a multilateral body to monitor it, former Ministry of Foreign Affairs legal adviser Amb. Alan Baker asserted on Monday in the text of a draft international convention being promoted by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
In 2013 Baker, who heads the think tank’s Institute for Contemporary Affairs, drafted a similar document banning inciting terrorism, which was promoted at the United Nations by former Israeli UN envoy Dore Gold but which does not seem to have gained much traction.
“The international community has never considered criminalizing anti-Semitism as an international crime, in a manner similar to the criminalization of genocide, racism, piracy, hostage-taking, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and terror,” Baker wrote in the introduction to the document, adding that one might have expected it do so in light of the recent wave of anti-Semitism that has swept Europe.
The lack of coordinated action on this matter is “clearly a vast international injustice,” he wrote, stating that his draft accord is intended to “universally criminalize anti-Semitism within the world community.”
According to Baker, any manifestation of anti-Semitism that results in violence or is meant to incite violence should be considered a crime under international law. He defined anti-Semitism as consisting of several phenomena, including Holocaust denial; expressions of hostility or demonstrations of violence toward Jews individually or as a religious, ethnic or racial collective; the use of “sinister stereotypes” and conspiracy theories “charging Jews with conspiring to harm humanity” and justifying the killing or harming of Jews.

Study: Muslims Responsible for 'Disproportionate' Number of Europe's Anti-Semitic Attacks

The report, authored by Gunther Jikeli, the director of ISGAP France and a research fellow at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at Potsdam University, examines several surveys conducted since 2006, comparing results country by country. (France and the UK receive particular emphasis.) Most of those surveys were based on subjects’ responses to stereotypes about Jews, asking them to agree or disagree with such statements as “the Jews have too much power in politics” and “the Jews have too much power in the media.” Country for country, the number of Muslims agreeing with those anti-Semitic statements far surpassed that of non-Muslims.
In a 2014 study in France, for instance, 25 percent of the general public agreed with the statement “Jews have too much power in the economy and the financial world,” but 50 percent of Front National (right wing nationalist) sympathizers agreed; 67 percent of the Muslim population surveyed agreed.
Similar criteria used by Ruud Koopmans in 2008 showed a like trend among 900 participants in six European countries, reports Jikeli. Subjects in Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Germany, France and the Netherlands were asked to respond to the statement “Jews cannot be trusted.” Consistently, far more self-identifying Muslims agreed with this statement than did self-identifying Christians. In Austria, for instance, 10.7 percent of Christians agreed with this statement; six times as many Muslims agreed—some 64.1 percent; in Belgium, 7.6 percent of Christians agreed while an overwhelming 56.7 percent of Muslim respondents agreed.
Other studies have examined different and possibly more worrying criteria. In France, a Fondapol survey, the IGAP report says, found that “twenty-four percent of the Muslim sample and 12 percent of the general population disagreed that the Holocaust should be taught to younger generations to avoid its repetition.”

Rabbis gather in Toulouse to denounce Islamist terror

The event, the biennial convention of the European Conference of Rabbis, on Tuesday brought together 250 participants including the chief rabbi of France, Haim Korsia, and his British counterpart, Ephraim Mirvis.
Pinchas Goldschmidt, the chief rabbi of Moscow and the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, told JTA Toulouse was chosen as the venue for the event to demonstrate European Jewry’s “determination to stand firm against the new wave of terrorism designed to intimidate Europe and its Jews.”
In 2012, Mohammed Merah, a Muslim fanatic, murdered three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse.
“Toulouse is the point in which we saw the emergence of a new wave of terrorism, different from the terrorist attacks by Palestinians that we have seen in the past,” Goldschmidt said. The 2014 slaying of four at Brussels’ Jewish museum, the murder of four Jews near Paris in January and the gunning down of a Jewish guard in Copenhagen in February, Goldschmidt said, “are the latest casualties of the wave that we saw emerging in Toulouse.”

European rabbis honor French PM Valls for combating anti-Semitism

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls was honored by a gathering of European rabbis on Tuesday for his “exemplary determination in the fight against anti-Semitism,” less than a month after he announced the beginning of a massive national effort to combat the rising levels of anti-Jewish incidents in his country.
The €100 million plan includes regular monitoring of racism and anti-Semitism in order to generate data; protect Jewish and Muslim houses of worship and communal institutions; and push back against discrimination.
“We made the decision to award Prime Minister Valls the Lord Jakobovits Prize after the decisive action Prime Minister Valls took to protect the people the Jews of France from the mobs who were about to make a pogrom against our people and our synagogues,” said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, which is currently holding its annual convocation in Toulouse.
“There are some voices asking if there is a future for the Jewish people in Europe. I say this question can only be answered by European governments themselves. And, if that answer is to be a positive, then they must follow the example of Prime Minister Valls,” Goldschmidt said.
Incidents of violent anti-Semitism jumped 40 percent worldwide over the past 18 months.

European Antisemitism Driving Jews Away From Jewish Life, Says Leading Rabbi (INTERVIEW)

The recent string of attacks against Jews in Europe has driven many Jews away from an active Jewish life, said the president of one of Europe’s leading Orthodox Jewish networks on Tuesday.
“We’re dealing with a large number of Jews who because of the risk involved, and terrorist attacks, have stopped coming to Jewish events,” Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt told the Algemeiner. “It’s more important [for these Jews] to stay alive than to stay Jewish.”
The 51-year-old Swiss-born Conference of European Rabbis (CER) president, who is also Chief Rabbi of Moscow, said apathy was a greater risk to the Jews in Europe because as an issue it is more elusive than both antisemitism and assimilation.
“While assimilation and antisemitism can be addressed directly, apathy is a much harder issue to address … There is a certain percentage of Jews saying I’d be better hiding,” he said. “Our message to our community is that this is not the answer.”
On Monday, the CER awarded French Prime Minister Manuel Valls with its Lord Jakobovits Prize for European Jewry, for his “exemplary determination in the fight against antisemitism.”
Valls said he “can’t imagine a France without Jews,” Goldschmidt related.

Paris Mayor Condemns 'Anti-Semitism Disguised in Anti-Zionism'

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo spoke at the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem tonight (Tuesday).
During her talk, she emphasized her understanding for French Jews' concerns. "I strongly condemn anti-Semitism disguised in anti-Zionism," she told the audience on the Forum's opening evening.
It remains to be seen whether Hidalgo will follow her words with equally strong actions. Less than two weeks ago, a memorial plaque dedicated to Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish man who was tortured and killed by Muslims, was vandalized in a Parisian suburb. The local mayor condemned the act, but local Jews continued to be singled out for harassment.
The French Jews' sense of abandonment by authorities is not limited to French leaders. US President Barack Obama famously dismissed an attack on a kosher deli in Paris this past January as "randomly [shooting] a bunch of guys in a deli."
Surveys have found that 70 percent of Jews in France are worried about anti-Semitic harassment and 60 percent with being physically attacked. Since 2000, over 7,650 anti-Semitic incidents have been reported to the French Ministry of the Interior. As a result, many are moving to Israel. Last year, more people made aliyah from France than from any other country.

European Parliament VP: We Need Jews in Europe

Going into more details about the global threat of terrorism, Tajani argued that with their technical savvy and political ambitions, Islamic State presented much more danger to the world than other terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda.
When asked about his thoughts on world media telling Jews to get out Europe, Tajani was emphatic in his response.
"Jewish people are European people. We need them - the Jewish people in Europe," Tajani proclaimed. "As I said, Jewish and Chrisitian heritage is our heritage. Without Jewish people, we will have less Europe. We need more Europe."
Tajani made clear his message to European Jews: "Stay in Europe. Europe is your country. Europe is also your building."
"Thanks to the Jewish people today, we are living in peace. After the Shoah [Holocaust], Europe is living in peace," he added. "We need Jewish people in Europe."

Life Gets Tough for Jews, Swedish Edition

In the past two years, Europe has exploded, from gruesome murders in Belgium and France to riots, torched synagogues and defaced Holocaust memorial sites, along with a dramatic spike in hate crimes all over the continent. Jews are being singled out and persecuted, once again, and most recently Paris and Copenhagen were added to the list of cities synonymous with terror, as more Jewish blood was spilled before the eyes of the world.
Some would say this summer changed everything, but the situation for European Jewry was dire well before Operation Protective Edge created open season on us and the link to Israel came into question for Jews across the continent. There is nothing new about the anti-Semitism we see now, but the dormant hatred seems to have reached critical mass, using anti-Zionism as a handy and creative outlet. I experienced this shift firsthand this past summer as I traveled from Sweden to Israel during the war. I had had the audacity to display the Israeli flag on my luggage, and that gave someone handling my bag enough reason to rip off the flag, stab the bag and its contents several times, and then pour soda onto the precious siddur that goes with me everywhere. No matter what the airline officials tried to tell me, this was no accident, nor was it political commentary. It was terrorism, having been given the excuse to move above ground, into broad daylight, without any pushback or consequence.

Melbourne Jewish Center Receives Half-Million Dollar Government Grant to Bomb-Proof Building With Security Wall

A Jewish center in Melbourne, Australia received a $500,000 government grant to build a security wall that will make the building bomb-resistant following heightened concerns of terror attacks, local publication The Age reported on Monday.
The funding from the Victoria state government will go toward the $1.3 million wall for the Beth Weizmann Community Center in Caulfield, which is home to 25 Jewish organizations and the Lamm Jewish Library of Australia.
Chairman of the center, Sam Tatarka, said the building has received hate mail and hoax packages, and dealt with antisemitic vandalism and trespassers. Some of the Jewish groups based at the center have faced threats and authorities have now recognized the building as a high-profile target, he said.
The Weizmann Center was also the target of a potential terrorist attack, The Age reported. The incident prompted the local community to strengthen security at schools, offices and religious sites.
Tatarka said the public has a responsibility to take action against violence by extremists.

Congress Must Draw the Line at BDS

Seen in that light, Congressional efforts to both oppose and penalize those who engage in BDS efforts is in keeping with American values and our foreign policy interests that rest in part on preservation of the nation’s sole democratic ally in the Middle East.
In reply, so-called pro-peace groups on the left like J Street as well as open supporters of BDS like Jewish Voices for Peace, say that by including “Israeli-controlled territories” as an area that should not be boycotted, Congress will be legitimizing settlements and harming the cause of peace. But this is another false argument.
The first problem with this argument is that while it is possible for some on the Jewish left to draw a line between the Israeli Jews they want to boycott and others they wish to leave alone, that is a distinction that is lost on Israel’s numerous enemies and anti-Semites either in the Middle East or in Europe. While there is a vigorous debate in Israel and elsewhere about whether the settlements can or should retained by Israel, treating Israeli citizens who are in their homes and businesses with the permission of their country’s government as lawbreaking pariahs is both inappropriate as well as an invitation to boycott all Israelis wherever they live. When one takes into account that the overwhelming majority of “settlers” live in communities near the 1967 lines or in Jerusalem — places that would be retained in any peace deal with the Palestinians — that makes the discrimination even more prejudicial. When one considers that Israel has offered the Palestinians peace and independence (including possession of most of the West Bank and a share of Jerusalem) only to be turned down each time, the insistence that the settlements is the obstacle to peace must be seen as nothing more than a canard.
Boycotting settlements won’t bring peace closer by one day nor will it facilitate a two-state solution that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected. In fact the boycotts make peace less likely because they encourage the Palestinians not to negotiate and prejudges the outcome of talks that should be resolved by the parties, not foreign governments, institutions or businesses. The focus on settlements (that Israel has already proved that it is willing to give up for peace as they did in Gaza in 2005) is nothing more than an attempt to divert attention from the real obstacle that is Palestinian intransigence and unwillingness to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin: University of California must fight back against anti-Semitic acts

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz is the founder of AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit organization that combats anti-Semitism on college campuses. Nominated as a Jewish Community hero, Ms. Rossman has a well earned reputation are a fierce and tireless protector of civil rights of Jewish students, on California campuses and throughout the country
Documenting anti-Semitic incidents in the UC System, she writes in the San Jose Mercury News:
It's not hard to connect the dots. On campuses where anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaigns have been promoted, anti-Semitism has increased and Jewish students report feeling emotionally and physically harassed, threatened, unsafe, and targeted for anti-Jewish bigotry.
The University of California is no exception. Just in the past few months:
At UC Berkeley, in the wake of a contentious BDS campaign, the message "Zionists should be sent to the gas chamber" was found scrawled on a bathroom wall. This past month, a Jewish student leader reported, "We still find anti-Semitic slogans written on bathrooms. A lot of students find swastikas and come to me," and he added that many Jewish students are frightened.

UC Riverside Lets Undergrad SJP Leader Teach Israel-Bashing Course

AMCHA Initiative is an organization dedicated to investigating, documenting and combating anti-Semitic behavior on college and university campuses. CAMERA is supporting a campaign the group is spearheading to fight a travesty taking place at the University of California, Riverside. An undergraduate student and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) leader is teaching a one-credit course clearly intended to indoctrinate students to hate and act against Israel.
According to the syllabus, the class includes:
- Several weeks on “Settler-Colonialism and Apartheid”
- Discussion “on checkpoints, the wall, and occupation”
- Discourse on Palestinian “Refugeehood and Exile” and the “Palestinian Diaspora”
- A guest speaker on the topic of “the history of the Palestinian struggle and exile”
- Exploring “possibilities for the future of the struggle and Palestinian people”
There is not a single session of the ten-week class that focuses on the Israeli and Jewish perspective. The readings are authored by well known Israel-haters such as Edward Said, Ilan Pappé, Rashid Khalidi, Steven Salaita and Ali Abunimah. The class will watch anti-Israel videos and films such as “5 Broken Cameras”.
In addition, the class ignores important elements. The syllabus does not indicate there will be any examination of fundamental realities, including:
- Palestinian Arab cooperation with Nazi Germany
- Arab rejection of U.N. partition plans and later diplomatic "two-state" proposals
- Genocidal pledges to "drive the Jews into the sea"
- Historic and modern day glorification of anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish terrorism and incitement to violence against Israelis and Jews by Palestinian leaders, schoolbooks and official media
- Denial of the Jewish people's ancient and modern ties to the land of Israel
- Arab responsibility for both the Arab and larger Jewish refugee problems

Pitt shouldn't reward students for attending anti-Israel events

Last month at the University of Pittsburgh, two anti-Israel groups — Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) — co-sponsored Holocaust Remembrance Day: Edith Bell on Palestine.
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and many others were offended by the misappropriation of Yom HaShoah to attack Israel. Even more concerning was Pitt's decision to incentivize students to attend the event.
Pitt qualified the event for OCC — Outside the Classroom Curriculum — credit. Students who earn OCC credit get “an edge,” according to Pitt's website, including such “tangible perks” as the enhancement of their academic records, entry to an “Honorary Society” and eligibility for substantial monetary grants.
How Pitt would permit this event to qualify for OCC credit is truly astonishing. The SJP has a long and well-documented history of demonizing Israel and calling for the destruction of the Jewish state — actions that our own government recognizes as anti-Semitic.
Had the administration done even a perfunctory inquiry into the SJP and its partner JVP, it would have been crystal clear that this event would be promoting anti-Semitic falsehoods and that the university should not be encouraging students to attend it.

Huge BDS loss – GreenStar Food Coop rejects Israel boycott

Activists from Ithaca Jewish Voice for Peace brought a referendum to the GreenStar Food Coop in Ithaca calling for a boycott of Israeli products. The effort was national, with big names such as Angela Davis (radical anti-Israel prof.) and Medea Benjamin (Code Pink) lending their support.
The effort was rejected tonight unanimously by the GreenStar Council based on the NY State Human Rights law prohibition of boycotts based on national origin. (Full decision at bottom of post.)
Similar to the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, NY, the referenda caused enormous tension among the GreenStar membership and within the community.
We will post those legal opinions if they become available. The Council’s resolution rejecting the boycott referenda passed unanimously (with one recusal) and is at the bottom of this post.
This is a very important victory, and one in which the NY Human Rights Law played a central role. As such, it has serious implications for other boycott attempts singling out Israeli products based on national origin.
We will have more on this boycott attempt in future posts.

New OED Entry For ‘Racist’ Includes ‘Criticizing Palestinian Violence’ (satire)

As with all OED [Oxford English Dictionary] entries, said Cowardiss, the new ‘racist’ definition would be supported with documented examples of usage in that sense. “The information currently available shows that as used, the term refers not only to mere criticism of Palestinian violence, but to expression of the very notion that anyone should be protected from such violence,” he added.
Cowardiss said OED researchers and volunteers had found scattered usage of ‘racist’ in reference to the notion that Jewish rights, either individually or nationally, can in any way serve to limit maximalist Palestinian demands, but that further research was needed before determining whether that usage has enough currency to be considered.
“For example, we are monitoring the rhetoric surrounding the issue of Jewish access to holy sites such as the Temple Mount,” he explained. “But while we do occasionally encounter the contention that Jews visiting their holiest site is a racist act, it needs to be a more widespread phenomenon before the OED can formally include that new sense of the word.”
Cowardiss said a similar situation exists with reference to an apparent shift in the meaning of the word ‘progressive.’

The racism of the Guardian and its readers revealed in two migrant articles.

Yesterday we had a new article about migrants in the Guardian – Malaysia says it will turn away migrants stranded at sea unless boats are sinking. One might imagine that those so horrified by Israel actually flying a migrant back to Africa, and providing him with the not insubstantial sum of $3,500 to make a start there would be at least equally as horrified by the new article.
The Guardian this time did not plaster an image from another set of migrants heading to Europe at the head of the article. Instead we see a hall full of weary, hopeless people crowded into a hall on a small island off the coast of Malaysia. According to the article:
As I write this after the article has been open there is a grand total of 8 comments.
Where are the dozens of CiFalists who troll the murky waters of the Israel-bashing articles that the Guardian continues posting, leaving them open for comments as if trailing red meat in front of vultures and hyenas? If the fate of Eritreans is so dear to those who find the idea that Israel cannot and will not accept 60,000 unwanted and mainly Muslim migrants so appalling, can they not spare a comment or two for this remarkable story of Muslim Malaysia, population 30 million, refusing to accept a relative handful of Muslim migrants from other countries?
If the Guardian and its Israel-hating readers think Israel, population 8 million, should welcome 60,000 Africans, surely they should apply the same proportionate yardstick to Malaysia, and decry their refusal to accept 250,000 Asians? Where are the frankly racist, snide, and hate filled comments about Malaysia that populate the Israel threads dealing with migrants?

Democratic Operative Caught on Tape in Anti-Semitic Rant

A Democratic operative who was at the center of the 2013 “Progress Kentucky” scandal went on an anti-Jewish tirade against a political client he claimed owed him money, according to an audiotape published on Monday.
Jacob Conway, the former Jefferson County Democratic Party official who made national news after he outed two Progress Kentucky activists for secretly recording a Mitch McConnell campaign meeting in 2013, was caught on tape lashing out at one of his clients, Daniel Grossberg, a Democratic candidate for state treasurer.
The tape was first reported by Insider Louisville on Monday, and audio was published by PageOne Kentucky.
In the April 23 conversation, recorded by Grossberg, Conway claimed the candidate owed him $5,500 for consulting work and threatened to sabotage his campaign if he did not pay up.
“You are why people don’t like Jews,” said Conway to Grossberg, who is Jewish. “You are exactly where the term ‘Jew you out of something’ came from. You’re exactly why my grandfather and everybody else I know has had a hard time doing business in this city, because you’re trying to stiff me out of f#cking money that you contractually owe me.”

Swastikas Carved into Sidewalk in Front of Brooklyn Kosher Store

An employee at Moisha's Discount Supermarket in Brooklyn discovered two swastikas carved into the sidewalk in front of the Brooklyn store yesterday (Monday). Authorities are unsure who carried out the vandalism, but say that it occurred between 10:00 pm Sunday evening and 2:30 pm Monday afternoon, while the new concrete was still wet.
Police say they are investigating the act as a hate crime.

Montreal man scrubs away anti-Semitism

Standing at a burly 6’2″ and sporting a shaved head, cool shades and a black vest, Corey Fleischer looks like an action film hero as he moves around Montreal. His fight is against the bad guys who paint hateful graffiti on public and private property, and his weapon is a power washing wand.
Fleischer simply cannot turn a blind eye to the anti-Semitic, anti-gay and racial slurs and symbols he sees all over. The owner of a power washing company he opened after graduating from university with a women’s studies degree, he dedicates many hours of his personal time to removing the markings.
For the past five years, Fleischer has been on a one-man mission to rid Canada’s second-largest city of visual hate speech. But with word having gotten out in the media about what he’s been doing, demand for his services has risen dramatically in recent months. What started as a sort of hobby for Fleischer has turned into an extensive undertaking that will require more manpower, not to mention water pressure.

An American Trapped in the 1948 Siege of Jerusalem

“We are so used to bombs and the sound of firing guns that we don’t get upset anymore.”
In choosing those words, Florence Bar Ilan probably hoped to convey that there was a certain stability to her daily life, but one can imagine her parents, Rachel and Samuel Ribakove, back in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, trembling as they read the letter their daughter sent from besieged Jerusalem during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
“Dear Florence, Dear Mother and Dad,” a collection of letters between Florence and her American relatives from the 1930s through the 1960s, has been published by family members ahead of Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) 2015, which falls on May 17. The collection is not only a way to document the family’s legacy, but also provides scholars, students, and the general public with a remarkable eyewitness account of an American immigrant’s life in Israel, including a riveting description of daily life during the 1948 siege of Jerusalem.
Florence’s journey began as a counselor in the Cejwin Jewish summer camp in upstate New York in 1934, where she met Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute Toby (Tuvia) Berlin, son of Rabbi Meir Berlin (later Bar Ilan), leader of the religious Zionist movement. Three years later, they were married and living in British Mandatory Palestine

Helen Mirren to be honored for playing Austrian Jew

British actress Helen Mirren will receive the World Jewish Congress recognition award, the group said in a statement on Wednesday. Mirren will receive the award for her role in the film “Woman in Gold” and for helping to educate the public about the issues of Nazi-looted art. WJC President Ronald S. Lauder will present Mirren with the award at a special event in New York later this year at a date to be determined.
In the film, Mirren portrays Maria Altmann, an Austrian-American woman who made headlines in 2006 by winning her legal battle against the Austrian government to reclaim five Gustav Klimt paintings, among them the famous “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” nicknamed “Woman in Gold.” The woman portrayed by Klimt was Altmann’s aunt.
In 1938, the painting was among the works confiscated from their rightful owner, Adele’s widower Ferdinand, because he was Jewish. Following its restitution to Maria Altmann in 2006, it was acquired by Ronald Lauder and is now on display at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan.
“Being a part of this film and preserving Maria Altmann’s legacy has been a truly exceptional experience from the start,” said Mirren. “I am utterly moved to be receiving an award from the World Jewish Congress, an organization that does such important work all over the globe in advocating for Jewish rights.”

Keeping their word, Backstreet’s back in Israel

It could have easily have been a polite brush-off.
After Operation Protective Edge was launched by the IDF last summer, many of the season’s visiting musical artists had to decide whether to cancel their shows or head to what appeared to be a war zone, with Hamas-fired rockets falling on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
American teen sensations from the 1990s, the Backstreet Boys did what any reasonable act would do – they backed out of three sold-out shows slated for the end of July at the Ra’anana Amphitheater. In a statement, the group wrote, “This is a major disappointment for the band and fans, as this was to be our first visit to Israel, and we looked forward to meeting our fans. We’re already working with the producers on new dates during spring 2015 and will notify everyone about this as soon as possible. Sending lots of love to everyone.”
Yeah, sure. That was never going to happen.
But true to their word, less than a year later, Backstreet’s back! The dapper vocal quintet have honored their pledge and will be appearing at the same venue in Ra’anana on May 19, 20 and 21 as part of their In a World Like This global 2015 tour.

Israeli start-up may revolutionize colon cancer detection

A new technology developed in Israel that uses an algorithm to screen blood samples from existing medical records may revolutionize the diagnosis of colon cancer and potentially save millions of lives.
Maccabi Health Services, together with researchers from Israeli start-up Medial Research, recently unveiled the new technology that uses a formula to analyze the results of standard blood tests to predict the likelihood of colon cancer years before the disease is detected.
The algorithm requires lab results that are a part of standard medical records and its prediction relies on math rather than advanced testing technology.
The screening method is inexpensive and its creators say it can easily be introduced and implemented in hospitals worldwide.

Google Street View to map Israel Trail

Google Street View will photograph the length of the Israel Trail, a hiking route that runs from the nation’s northern to southern ends.
A feature of Google Maps that merges photographs to provide a street-level view of locations worldwide, Google Street View will enlist hikers from the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, or SPNI, to map the 660-mile trail, the Israeli business publication Globes reported.
Inaugurated 20 years ago by SPNI, the trail runs from Kibbutz Dan, near the uppermost reaches of Israel’s border with Lebanon, to Eilat on its southern tip.
The trail will be the longest one photographed for Google Maps and the first that spans a whole country. Google is sending two cameras to Israel for the mission.

Magen David Adom to fly home four premature babies caught in second Nepal quake

Magen David Adom is working to fly home four premature Israeli babies and their parents, who were caught in a 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Nepal on Tuesday.
When the earth shook, Israelis Yoav Aliani and his partner, Moran Ben- Dror, were in a hospital in Kathmandu with their tiny twins, who were hooked up to machines.
“I tore the wires with my teeth,” Aliani told Channel 2. The television station showed footage of him standing outside with his daughter, still wearing a blue hospital smock.
“Get us out of here!” he said to the television cameras.
Magen David Adom is working to fly home four premature Israeli babies and their parents, who were caught in a 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Nepal on Tuesday.

Dr. Reuven Keidar in the IDF Field Hospital in Nepal

Vittorio was not the first ISM activist murdered by Palestinian Arabs

Vittorio Arrigoni, who is being beatified as a new Palestinian Arab saint as I write this, was not the first ISM activist to be murdered by his fellow Palestinian Arabs.

In September 2007, ISM member Akram Ibrahim Abu Sba’ was killed by members of Islamic Jihad. He was shot twice in the chest in Jenin.

His killing was never condemned by the ISM. They know better than to say anything bad about Islamic Jihad, their erstwhile partners in "resistance" against Israel.

Moroccan journalist arrested

A respected Moroccan journalist named Rachid Nini, who also runs the AlMassae newspaper, has been arrested by Moroccan authorities who were evidently unhappy with how he was exposing corruption.

The charge was "compromising the safety and security of the homeland and citizens."

Ira Chernus' agenda

In Salon and the Huffington Post, Ira Chernus pooh-poohs Israel's security concerns.

Chernus lists three "myths" about Israel's security. I will only discuss the first one. It should be enough to show that Chernus is not being intellectually honest, to say the least.

Myth Number 1: Israel’s existence is threatened by the ever-present possibility of military attack.

This is a straw man argument. I'm not aware of anyone who says that Israel's existence is threatened by any conventional military attack.

Israel's security posture is not aimed primarily at defending the existence of Israel. Rather, Israel's army is an almost unique position where it must defend its citizens from the threat of being wantonly attacked.

The US Army has no such worries. NATO members have no such worries. For them, all wars are far away and only soldiers are at risk. Israel is perhaps the only Western country in the world where every single citizen is under the credible threat of an attack in any given week.  


This simple fact, which Chernus ignores altogether, is the security issue that Israel faces. Chernus, for all his supposed analytical ability, does not even mention Hezbollah once in his article. It is as if the 2006 Lebanon war - where the hundreds of thousands of citizens in the northern part of the country were forced to become temporary refugees - never happened. Chernus downplays Hamas rockets and ignores the 40,000 more deadly and accurate rockets that are aimed, today, at Israel's population centers. And, as in 2006, it takes only one border incident to escalate into a full scale war.

Would such a war threaten Israel's existence? No. But such a war is still not acceptable. Concern about such a war is still a primary security issue. And those who cannot even acknowledge that this type of war is a possibility less than five years after the last one is either willfully blind or adhering to an agenda.

Chernus also downplays the possibility of a nuclear threat against Israel, with this almost unbelievable sentence:

While the Israeli government constantly sounds alarms about imagined Iranian nuclear weapons -- though its intelligence services now suggest Iran won’t have even one before 2015 at the earliest -- Israel remains the region’s only nuclear power for the foreseeable future.

Is Chernus really suggesting that a nuclear threat that is perhaps four years away is not a significant security concern? How can one take anyone who writes such a sentence seriously?

Moreover, only in 2007 did the world discover that Syria has a secret nuclear weapons program as well. Is Chernus so naive as to think that this is not a threat to Israel either? (Or does he believe that Syria just gave up, and is now a peaceful neighbor that can be trusted?)

In short, Chernus uses multiple false arguments to imply that Israel has no real security concerns.

So why is he purposefully mis-characterizing Israel's security posture?

The answer can be seen in how he sums up his article:

But what if the American public knew the facts...? What if every solemn reference to Israel’s “security needs” were greeted not with nodding heads, but with the eye-rolling skepticism it deserves? What if Israel’s endless excesses and excuses -- its claims that the occupation of the West Bank and the economic strangulation of Gaza are necessary “for the sake of security” -- were regularly scoffed at by most Americans?

It’s hard to imagine the Obama administration, or any American administration, keeping up a pro-Israel tilt in the face of such public scorn.

Chernus has an agenda - to turn the US against Israel.

That agenda is what drives his knowingly deceptive analysis. That agenda is what makes him downplay Iran's nuclear program and political program to surround Israel with Iranian satellites. That agenda is what makes him ignore Hezbollah's rockets and Syria's nuclear ambitions altogether.

And any analysis of Israel's security needs that is based on such an agenda is not worth the disk space it takes up.

---

Israel Matzav and Yisrael Medad have also written some criticisms of the piece, as did HuffPoMonitor in three parts:
http://hpmonitor.blogspot.com/2011/04/ira-chernus-and-more-myths-part-3.html
http://hpmonitor.blogspot.com/2011/04/ira-chernus-and-more-myths-part-2.html
http://hpmonitor.blogspot.com/2011/04/ira-chernus-and-more-myths-part-1.html

Spring cleaning open thread

Lots of last minute Passover stuff to do, so I have to delay the many posts I want to write. Alas.

Meanwhile, here's a sign that spring is actually here.

Weekend links

Ephraim Karsh looks at how many Arab refugees there were in 1948. His conclusion: 583,000-609,000.

Alan Dershowitz on Norman Finkelstein's support for Hezbollah rockets at Israeli civilians.

NYT says that some US groups helped the Arab uprisings.

Investor's Business Daily on why Israel prospers while Arab regimes suffer.

Krauthammer video interview at JPost.

An Indian region strengthening ties with Israel on fruit crops.

Guess who's building a wall?

The delusion of peace initiatives, at the Begin-Sadat Center.

(h/t Mike, YM, Zvi, oao, Folderol, Benjamin)

Let's play some Persian Golf

There has been a long battle between Iran and Arab oil states countries over the name of the gulf that they surround. Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies call it the Arabian Gulf, while Iran and most of the rest of the world call  it the Persian Gulf.

This conflict gets personal.

Iran is hosting some sporting events in coming weeks where Arab states will compete, and people who want to popularize the name "Persian Gulf" are going to hang banners to bug the Arab sports teams and players. Arab delegations have also been harassed with these taunts.

Here's one of the banners, shown by Al Arabiya:

I didn't even know Iran had any golf courses!

This is not a unique case of "Persian Golf" sightings. See this webpage and this Facebook page made by overzealous but spelling-impaired Iranians with the same slogan.

The extreme touchiness over this issue has been noted here before.

PLO terrorist Jibril Rajoub keeps lobbying to kick Israel out of FIFA (poster)

Jibril Rajoub, the Fatah terrorist who now heads the Palestine Football Association and Palestine Olympic Committee, continues to do everything he can to expel Israel from FIFA.

This week, he took South African minister Tokyo Sexwale on a tour of Hebron, trying to go into the Jewish-designated section of the Cave of the Patriarchs and confronting Israeli soldiers with Sexwale for photo-ops.

Mahmoud Abbas joined the fun, telling Sexwale that it was time to "show the red card" to Israel.

The peaceful and spot-loving Rajoub last year said that a friendly soccer match between Jewish and Arab children a "crime against humanity."

This moderate Fatah official also once called for a nuclear bomb to be dropped on Israel, and he called the idea of a minute of silence in memory of Israeli Olympic athletes slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists to be "racist."

Here is a poster I made of a recent photo of Jibril Rajoub: Perhaps FIFA should see exactly who is behind the campaign to suspend Israel.

(h/t Bob Knot)

05/07 Links Pt2: Dodging swastikas and Israel hate, Jordan’s secret Jews; Rivlin salutes aid workers

From Ian:

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Israel’s Haters and Racism in Israel

Suggesting that racism is unique to one group of people is itself racist. Racism is the portrayal of one group of people as inferior or superior to other groups. Saying one group is uniquely racist is to portray them as inferior to other groups of people, which fits the definition of racism.
The Israel hating crew is attempting to hijack an internal Israeli matter in order to boost up their racist agenda. Their agenda doesn’t line up with the Ethiopian-Israeli struggle. Ethiopian-Israelis are proud Israelis. The man who was attacked was wearing an IDF uniform at the time he was attacked. At the demonstration, HaTikvah was sung and Israeli flags were common.
The protesters are not on the side of the Israel hate crew. Israel’s haters support a cause that seeks to destroy the state that Ethiopian-Israelis are (judging by them waving Israeli flags at the protests) are proudly a part of. Israel’s haters support a people which 93% of the population is anti-semitic. Israel’s haters support a group whose own charter calls for the death of all Jews worldwide, including the Ethiopian-Israeli community and Jews of all colors around the world. My message to these people: This is not your fight. Stop trying to sugarcoat your intentions and pretend to sympathize with these people when you support a group that openly advocates a genocide of them all.

Ryan Bellerose: Pro-Israel Advocacy: Out With The Old, In With The New

Effective,modern Israel advocacy is the opposite of what many existing organisations want. It is vibrant, unapologetic, boisterous and in-your-face. It is positive and yet unafraid to attack the other side’s hypocrisy. It is not defensive but rather, proactive. Its music festivals, ethnic food, and aggressive messaging target the emotional switches. Its events aren’t at the JCC but at the centre of campus and downtown in the city, not hidden away and preaching to the 15 Jews and 3 evangelicals in the choir. It is inclusive and builds bridges with other minorities, bridges that for too long were ignored because those communities offered no obvious benefit. Now, university students themselves are building these bridges – often with little or no help from existing organisations. They are, in fact, reanimating and redefining advocacy.
Effective speakers are no longer the slick suit-wearing pyramid scheme prophets, but genuine people who have captivating stories. They might not all sound like they attended Oxford like my friend Kaseem Hafiz,a man who at one point hated Jews so much he was considering how to become a terrorist. His awakening led him to become one of the most outspoken of young pro-Israel advocates. This new breed of pro-Israel advocates have something common with him: they all have engaging stories and are compelling speakers. There are people like Dumisani Washington, a tall African American Christian pastor, an incredible Zionist, who also happens to be an awesome dreadlock-wearing musician. I cannot make up these stories! You have guys like Izzy Ezagui, a good-looking American kid from Miami, who is very well-spoken – and who not so incidentally happens to be an incredible warrior who lost an arm in a mortar attack, rehabbed, and rejoined the army. Izzy, though, didn’t simply rejoin the regular army, but the ISRAELI SPECIAL FORCES, in less than a year (yes, with one arm). The average university student can relate to these guys because of their story alone, even if they may not agree with their politics. There’s Chloe Valdary, a young Black woman whose unapologetic advocacy should be the bellwether for any advocate. Chloe, who attended university in New Orleans, just decided one day she didn’t like seeing so much Jew hate and became a force for change. She started a pro-Israel music festival, and she speaks out against the coopting of the social justice movement by people who do not give a damn about social justice but simply stole the language.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali addresses Anti-Semitism on campus at the Boston premiere of Crossing the Line 2




 Dodging swastikas and Israel hate, Jordan’s secret Jews slip beneath the radar

Jordanian society has a peculiar attitude when it comes to Jews. Walking through Amman, one can find copies of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” translated into Arabic and proudly adorning the windows of bookstores and street newspaper vendors.
For me, looking back at Hitler’s image juxtaposed with a Star of David had a somewhat cathartic effect — it was so open, so public; but meeting and talking to local Jordanians gave me the impression that this was almost a cultural, non-malicious anti-Semitism. A society where the pernicious “al-Yahud,” or Jew, hangs like a dark cloud over the city, but where meeting an individual Jew on the street – a rarity given their paltry number, the transitory nature of their sojourn, and their unwillingness to self-identify — will elicit a curiously friendly, if uneasy reaction.
Unlike in Iraqi, Egyptian or Syrian circles where an aging World War II generation still fondly recalls the Jewish neighbors who were “lost” to Israel in the 50s and 60s following a spate of pogroms, Jordanians have no such reference point. There simply were no Jews historically in the area.
Unlike their cousins over the border, they meet and live “the Jew” vicariously through their local Palestinians – and the image is overwhelmingly negative. A Jew who is an occupier. A Jew who is a baby killer. A Jew who is an obstacle to peace in the region.
I picked up a copy of “Mein Kampf” in Arabic lying beside how-to yoga guides and “50 Shades of Grey” in a trendy Barnes and Noble-style bookstore downtown and approached the affable young man behind the counter. I was on swanky al-Rainbow Street, Amman’s version of Rodeo Drive, bustling with flashy sports cars, overpriced restaurants and high-pitched Arabic sprinkled with American slang. “Does anyone buy this?” I asked, indicating the portrait of Hitler indignantly staring from the front cover beside a large swastika. “Sure,” the storekeeper said, “’Mein Kampf’ is very popular in Jordan. For some people [Hitler] is a role model. Other people are just curious to know about him.” My question seemed to elicit as much of a reaction as a query about a comic book.

Michael Lumish: David Mamet Tells the Left to Go Screw

David Mamet is right to reject the western-left, because the western-left is no friend to the Jewish people and has betrayed its core values.
If the western-left ever actually stood for social justice and human rights, it does so no longer.
Until we wrap our brains around this particular fact, we will have nothing to say, just as most progressive-left Jews who favor Israel basically have nothing to say.
They are mutes who shrug their shoulders, hold up their palms, and wish for the best – that is, when they are not attacking “right-wing” Jews, also known as those of us willing to stand the hell up.

Anti-Semitic, Racist Flier Condemned

An apparent anti-Semitic and racist flier that featured manipulated images of two African-American county executives was distributed Monday evening at a Prince George’s County budget hearing.
The flier, titled “From Baltimore to Jerusalem It’s the Same Game,” invokes several anti-Semitic tropes denigrating U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-District 8), who is not Jewish, and U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who is. In bold typeface, the opening statement reads: “In 10 years, Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin sent $1.2 billion of Maryland federal taxpayer money to the apartheid state of Israel to build schools, roads and other infrastructure while saying Maryland doesn’t have the money to help develop our communities.”
On the left side of the page, Cardin, U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-District 5) and Van Hollen are depicted standing over Prince George’s County Executive Rushern L. Baker III and Montgomery County Executive Isiah “Ike” Leggett, both African-Americans, whose heads were digitally placed on the bodies of dogs.
A speech bubble emerges from Van Hollen’s image, saying, “I thought they’d want millions in school funding for their loyalty, but they sold out their community and Donna Edwards for a few doggy treats.” The accompanying text accuses Baker and Leggett of selling out fellow African-Americans in order “to further their interests.” (h/t Bob Knot)

After Protests, Charlie Hebdo Members Receive Standing Ovation at PEN Gala

Two members of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, took the stage to a thundering standing ovation at PEN American Center’s literary gala on Tuesday night, capping a 10-day debate over free speech, blasphemy and Islamophobia that started in the cozy heart of the New York literary world and spread to social media and op-ed pages worldwide.
Accepting PEN’s award for “freedom of expression courage,” the magazine’s top editor, Gérard Biard, summed up the publication’s belief in the unfettered right to mock all religions, ideas and belief systems, and leveled a riposte at the Muslim extremists whose attack on Charlie Hebdo in January left 12 people dead.
“Being shocked is part of democratic debate,” said Mr. Biard, who accepted the award with the magazine’s film critic, Jean-Baptiste Thoret. “Being shot is not.”

Keith Gessen Leftsplains Charlie Hebdo

Keith Gessen, co-editor of the left-wing journal n+1 has written an explanation of why he joined more than 200 other writers in protesting the PEN American Center’s decision to honor the courage of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. His misgivings date back to the immediate aftermath of the January shootings in Paris. Amid the general sorrow and anger Gessen had picked up on “an attempt to assimilate the shootings to the ongoing American ‘War on Terror.’” And, after all, “people are endlessly being killed, jailed, and harassed in the name of this war.”
I wonder what tipped Gessen off. It must have been the American president’s bold presence alongside world leaders on the streets of Paris. Or maybe the Obama administration’s swift and outspoken recognition of the shooting as an act of Islamic terrorism? Or its blunt declaration that the terrorists targeted Jewish food shoppers because they were Jewish?
Of course American leaders conspicuously declined to do any of those things. What got to Gessen obviously was that the attack on Charlie Hebdo demonstrated that radical Muslims are at war with the West and the West is, unavoidably, at war with them. Reality came too close to George W. Bush’s characterization of it, and that’s unpleasant. It’s better, no doubt, when one can call one’s president a liar.

Danish intel chief steps down over failure to avert anti-Semitic attack

The head of Denmark’s intelligence agency on Wednesday stepped down as an investigation criticized parts of the police response to February’s deadly twin attacks in Copenhagen.
“After careful consideration, I have agreed with the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice and the National Commissioner of Police that I will now undertake new tasks to develop Danish police,” Jens Madsen of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) said in a statement.
His resignation came hours before the publication of a police report that revealed it took almost four hours from the moment gunman Omar El-Hussein shot dead a filmmaker outside a cultural center, until police were deployed outside Copenhagen’s main synagogue, where a Jewish man, Dan Uzan, who was securing a bat mitzvah celebration, was later killed.
“That is too long, it’s obviously not satisfactory. It can’t be explained,” Justice Minister Mette Frederiksen said at a press conference.
She declined to comment on whether Madsen was stepping down as a result of the delayed police response, saying only that she “noted” his resignation. He was appointed to the position in January last year.

The Troubling Historical Context of European funded Breaking the Silence

The release of a United Nations [UN] report on the deaths of Gazan civilians in UN shelters during the summer 2014 war between Israel and Hamas has served as the launching pad for another campaign to smear Israel. Breaking the Silence, a group that travels the world undermining Israel's moral standing by presenting alleged testimonies of Israeli soldiers committing unconscionable acts against Palestinian civilians, is saturating news outlets with articles promoting its 240-page report consisting of testimonials alleging Israeli cruelty and reckless disregard for the safety of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Breaking the Silence is funded by a roster of organizations that seek to undermine Israel's moral standing and force it into making concessions that would leave it vulnerable. Among the major donors are the Royal Norwegian Embassy, the European Union, several European Catholic organizations, including the German-based Miseroer and Flemish-based Broederlijk Delen, George Soros's Open Society, and a number of organizations funded by the far-left New Israel Fund. These organizations fund a bevy of groups dedicated to defaming and undermining the Jewish state. A Swiss organization, Pro Victimis claims that its special emphasis is addressing violence against women. But somehow it found 273,000 NIS to donate to Breaking the Silence.
The Norwegian, Flemish and German representations to groups that smear the only sovereign Jewish state is troubling when one recalls the historical context; This is especially so concerning the involvement of Catholic Church affiliated groups. There is a seamy underside to the history of Church dealings with Europe's Jews, involving the enlistment of disaffected Jews who were willing to villify and bear false witness against the Jewish community for self-serving reasons.

BDS Suffers Dual Defeats as Anti-Israel Resolutions Fail at CA Community College, Bowdoin College

The anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement suffered two resounding blows this week, in college campuses across the U.S.
Bowdoin College in Maine defeated on Wednesday a student-wide referendum, sponsored by the institution’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which called for a complete academic and cultural boycott of Israel.
The referendum, in which 1,619 students (85% of Bowdoin’s student body) voted on the issue, ran from May 2 until May 6, and was defeated with a vote of 228 in favor (14% of the student body), 1,444 opposed (71% ) and 247 abstaining (15%).
The referendum was held after the anti-Israel group managed to get 20% of the student body to sign a petition calling for a boycott of Israel.
Law blog Legal Insurrection said the failure of the referendum was a “a particularly crushing blow to the boycott movement, with 150 fewer students voting in favor than signed the petition.”
The blog argued that results reflect the fact “that many students were pressured into signing the Petition and also were misled as to the nature of the boycott.”

Bowdoin College students overwhelmingly reject Israel boycott

All in all, this was a best case scenario for the anti-Israel, anti-Academic Freedom movement on campus. And it failed miserably.
I understand from people involved that once students really found out how damaging the academic boycott would be to academic freedom, the reaction was overwhelmingly negative.
This demonstrates what I have said for years — it is through false and misleading propaganda, often by faculty, that BDS has gained a foothold in academia. At Bowdoin, even a years-long campaign to demonize and dehumanize Israel could not overcome the good sense of the student body who understood that destroying academic freedom for everyone is not the answer to any problem.
Additionally, those opposed to the BDS movement need to do a better job getting out the vote. At Bowdoin, almost everyone participated in the vote. At other places, including at faculty groups, anti-Israel groups are able to take advantage of low turnout to pass resolutions with a small percentage of the overall membership.
In the United States, at least, there is little overall appetite for the boycotters’ agenda — so expose it, refute it, and Get Out The Vote.

IRS Pummeled by Court for Suggesting OK to Discriminate Against Pro-Israel Group

In a highly unusual public thrashing of a government lawyer for the Internal Revenue Service by the second highest U.S. court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, asked: “You don’t really mean that the IRS is free to discriminate against its citizens, do you?”
The judges asked this question several times in several different ways of the Department of Justice lawyer Patricia McLauglin who had the misfortune of representing the IRS in a case filed against it by Z STREET*, a staunchly pro-Israel non-profit organization in a hearing on Monday morning, May 4.
Since August of 2010, the Z STREET case has been languishing in the U.S. court system. Z STREET sued the IRS because it learned from the IRS agent to whom its tax exempt application had been assigned, that its application would take some time to process because “the IRS had to give “special scrutiny to organizations connected to Israel,” and that the applications of such organizations “were sent to a special unit in Washington, D.C. to determine whether its activities contradicted the policies of this Administration,” according to its Complaint.
Z STREET sued the IRS for “viewpoint discrimination,” a violation of the U.S. Constitution. The claim is that the IRS did not provide Z STREET with a fair process, which is what it is now seeking, through this lawsuit.

Sorry, we got it wrong over UKJFF

By Jonathan Levy, chair of the Tricyle Theatre
The Tricycle Theatre made headlines in 2014, at the height of the crisis in Gaza, when it requested that the UK Jewish Film Festival return the £1,400 of funding it received from the Israeli embassy, to be replaced with the same amount from the Tricycle in lieu.
It was the wrong decision to have taken but the intention was for the Tricycle to maintain its political neutrality at a time of great national and international political tension.
When the UKJFF withdrew from the Tricycle in response, many in the Jewish community felt let down by the decision the theatre had taken, believing it to be conducting a cultural boycott and taking an antisemitic stance. Neither were ever intended.
Many saw the Tricycle’s actions as being directly critical of Israel. Very sadly, this alienated part of the Jewish community, with whom the Tricycle has always held a close, long-standing and much-valued relationship. They felt that the decision was out of keeping with what they had come to expect from the Tricycle — both with respect to its core values and its long history of engagement with the community.

Al Jazeera America Ousts CEO as Ex-Employees Reveal Scandals

The troubled Al Jazeera America network ousted its chief executive on Wednesday following a week of management defections and a lawsuit charging an employee with anti-Semitism.
The little-watched news network is replacing its CEO, Ehab Al Shihabi, with veteran news executive Al Anstey. Al Shihabi has run Al Jazeera America since it started two years ago, and Anstey has been the managing director of Al Jazeera English.
Both networks are offshoots of the Al Jazeera cable news network, run out of Qatar.
Al Shihabi sent an email to the staff welcoming Anstey and saying he would remain as chief operating officer.
Al Jazeera’s former senior vice president of newsgathering, Marcy McGinnis, quit this week and told The New York Times that Al Shihabi managed with a culture of fear. The network’s head of human resources and its communications chief resigned last week, and a former employee sued Al Jazeera America, charging that he was fired when he complained about a former colleague’s anti-Semitic and sexist behavior.

Anti-Israel Bias Oozes into USA Today Column, Again

When it comes to Israel, veteran USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham apparently cannot help himself—if he sees an opportunity to disparage the Jewish state, or imagines he does, he takes it.
In “Israel Seems to Irritate USA Today Columnist, Repeatedly” (March 5, 2015) CAMERA spotlighted Wickham’s compulsion—unsupported by evidence—to force the disagreement between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama over Iran’s nuclear program through the irrelevant prism of American race relations.
Five years earlier, Wickham seized on an erroneous post by an anti-Israel blogger (“Anatomy of a False Allegation: The Petraeus Controversy,” April 26, 2010, CAMERA) to insinuate that Israel might be ungrateful for U.S. support.
Now, criticizing U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for opposing the Obama administration’s delisting Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, Wickham manages a whopper of a gratuitous anti-Israel dig. According to the columnist, “it is doublespeak for Rubio to say Cuba’s designation should be maintained when, in 2010, he argued against the U.S. allowing the U.N. to discredit Israel. At the time, the U.N. was conducting an investigation of Israel’s deadly effort to stop Turkish ships from breaking its embargo of the Gaza Strip.”
Hard to pack more non-sequiturs, irrelevancies and innuendo into two sentences. Does Wickham mean to imply:
That Israel was, like Cuba, a sponsor of terrorism?

BBC News again amplifies unchallenged Hizballah spin

Significantly, neither in that statement nor anywhere in the rest of the report is any mention made of the highly relevant fact that Hizballah functions as one of Iran’s proxies in Syria – as outlined in this report.
“As the fighting in Syria enters the fifth year, it is evident to all that what is happening is not a local civil rebellion against a tyrannical regime, but a war in which both the Syrian regime and the Syrian opposition are being actively supported by numerous regional and international forces. The most prominent foreign element involved in this war is Iran, which is throwing its entire weight into ensuring the survival of the regime. In addition to providing economic aid, arms, and advice, its support for Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad includes combat forces – from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), from Hizbullah in Lebanon, and from the Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani Shi’ite militias that are loyal to Iran.”
The BBC report states:
“In a televised address on Tuesday, Mr Nasrallah said cross-border attacks by militants from the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra Front posed an unacceptable threat to Lebanon’s security and required “radical treatment”.
“The (Lebanese) state is not able to address this issue… so we will proceed with the necessary treatment and assume the responsibility and consequences,” he added.”

Evening Standard Columnist Tweets Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory About London Jewish Editor

A columnist for Britain’s Evening Standard on Wednesday promoted an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory wherein Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard controls British Prime Minister David Cameron.
On Twitter, Israeli-born Mira Bar-Hillel described Pollard as “Cameron’s puppetmaster [sic],” adding that she expected “3 in 4 British Jews” to shun Labour Party leader Ed Miliband in the country’s upcoming general elections.
Bar-Hillel made the comments after Jewish Chronicle staff writer Marcus Dysch interviewed Cameron on Tuesday.
Dysch reported that Cameron had relayed concerns about the Labour Party drawing equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
Pollard, who is Jewish, responded to Bar-Hillel’s comments on Wednesday by calling her an “unapologetic antisemite [who] trots out the Jewish puppet master line.” He also wrote on Twitter, “If you ever wondered just how deranged modern antisemitism can be, try this,” sarcastically adding, “Apparently I control the PM!”

Anti-Semitism in Argentina

Now, in what appears to be an attempt by the Fernández government to discredit Nisman, who was Jewish, and to shift media attention away from her government’s corruption, she and Timerman have lashed out against Argentina’s Jews, US financiers and right-wing American politicians “owned” by Jewish interests, as well as the CIA and the Mossad.
In tweets and a long blog post, Fernández summed up an article penned by Jorge Elbaum, a former executive-director of the Delegation of Argentinean Israelite Associations (DAIA) and a present Fernández ally, that the pro-government daily Página/12 published around the time of De Luca’s decision.
Titled “Vultures, Nisman, DAIA, the Money Route,” the article claimed right-wing Jewish “vulture” fund managers who made their fortunes by charging “usurious” interest and to whom Argentina owes millions of dollars, have bought US Republican congressmen to put pressure on Buenos Aires to end all ties with Tehran.
Nisman, who Fernández claimed was an agent of Israeli and right-wing Jewish American interests, was said to have offered hedge fund money to DAIA so that it would be immune to the government budget cuts expected to be imposed by the Fernández government as punishment for defying it on Iran.
In the latest chapter in this saga, Timerman, who is Jewish and is the son of Jacobo Timerman, a newspaper editor who was kidnapped during the “Dirty War” and later escaped to Israel, publicly resigned as a member of AMIA.

Flemish nationalist leader disowns WWII Nazi collaboration

Right-wing Flanders leader Bart De Wever has disowned Flemish nationalist collaboration with the Nazis in World War II, still a hugely sensitive issue in a sharply divided Belgium.
Allegations of collaboration by Flemish nationalist parties, forerunners of De Wever’s own New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), regularly stoke tensions with Belgium’s French-speaking community in the south which takes pride in its WWII resistance to the Nazis.
“My own grandfather was a member of the VNV (Flemish National League), the nationalist party which collaborated massively,” De Wever told a Holocaust commemoration attended by members of the Jewish community in Antwerp, where he is mayor.
“I want to look at this straight in the eye. This collaboration was a terrible mistake, on all levels,” he said late Wednesday on VRT Flemish public TV.
“This is a dark page in history which Flemish nationalism has to look at squarely and never forget.”
“Nazism and the Shoah were criminal mistakes. Nobody can deny and there is nothing to soften it,” he added.

New film to pay tribute to Munich Olympic massacre

Production has begun on The Foundation for Global Sports Development’s (GSD) first documentary film. The documentary short, tentatively titled “Munich 1972 & Beyond,” is scheduled for release later this fall and will explore the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.
Unlike existing accounts of the attack, the new documentary will capture the contemporary story of a unique memorial under construction in Munich — conceived to recognize the courage of the fallen athletes and their families and convey the possibility of reconciliation for all involved.
Producers from GSD, recognized sports psychologist Dr. Steven Ungerleider and GSD President David Ulich, will travel to Israel this week where early production is taking place. Family members of the victims, former Olympians, and Israeli and German statesmen will be interviewed.
Ungerleider and Ulich shaped the idea for the film while participating in the memorial’s architectural competitions in Munich, Germany last fall.

Tunisia beefs up security at Djerba for annual Jewish pilgrimage

Africa's oldest synagogue played host on Wednesday to a religious gathering of hundreds of Jews.
The pilgrimage took place two months after attacks on the Bardo Museum in Tunisia's capital Tunis which left 22 people dead.
There were 500 visitors for the pilgrimage this year, according to Rene Trabelsi, who runs a travel agency in Paris and organises the pilgrimage.
Most of them are French and around a dozen are Tunisians living in Israel.
"Holding the Ghriba pilgrimage is a challenge, a challenge because it's a celebration and people come here to light a candle, make a wish and our wish is clear. We hope we will never have terrorism again, as we saw in Bardo. People have to live as they want," Trabelsi said.
Guarded by armed Tunisian police, Jewish revelers chanted and danced as the three-day pilgrimage began at the El Ghriba synagogue at an island 500km south of Tunis.

While Battling Mylan, Teva Acquires Auspex Pharmaceuticals for $3.2 Billion

Here’s some news from the battle front between two giant generic drugmakers, Israel-based Teva Pharmaceuticals and Netherlands-based Mylan N.V.:
Teva announced Tuesday the completion of the acquisition of Auspex Pharmaceuticals, through the successful tender offer of $101.00 per share in cash for all of the outstanding shares of Auspex, representing approximately $3.2 billion in enterprise value and approximately $3.5 billion in equity value.
Teva said in a statement the acquisition is expected to enhance its revenue and earnings growth profile and strengthen its “core central nervous system franchise.”
Meanwhile, across the trench lines, being so busy trying to buy Ireland-based drugmaker Perrigo, and fending off Teva’s clumsy attempts at a takeover, Mylan on Tuesday reported disturbingly low profits for the first quarter—a whopping 51 percent drop to $56.6 million, down from $115.9 million a year earlier.

Drake names club for Jewish grandparents

Drake fans know him as the teen heartthrob from “Degrassi: The Next Generation” and the wildly successful rapper credited with introducing the term “YOLO” into youth culture. However, not all are aware that he is also a devoted grandson to his Jewish maternal grandparents, Evelyn and Rueben Sher.
Now the writing is literally on the wall when it comes to Drake’s love for his bubbe and and zaide. The singer has just opened a members-only club named for his grandparents at the Air Canada Center, home of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Toronto Raptors.
The Sher Club, a 370-square-meter space, will be open during all games played at the arena. According to the club’s designer, Ferris Rafauli, it was designed for the “ultimate sports fanatics” like Drake, and is the “ultimate pre- and post-game destination.”
Drake (whose full name is Aubrey Drake Graham) was especially close with his bubbe. He “shared a deep bond with his mother’s mom,” according to a piece published by MTV when Sher died in 2012. In fact, Drake has honored his grandmother by including lyrics either about her or addressing her in a number of his songs.

Rivlin ‘salutes’ Israeli aid workers

In a scene straight out of “Good Morning, Vietnam!” President Rivlin went live at the Israel Defense Forces Field Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Thursday afternoon to congratulate the medical staff on work well done.
The commander of the field hospital, Col. Tarif Bader, and Israeli delegation head Col. Yoram Laredo, received the call from the president and decided to broadcast it to the entire Israeli team using the field hospital’s PA system.
“Dear delegation, dear commanders, rescuers – you are the pride of the country, all of you,” Rivlin said. “I follow your impressive work from the moment you landed on Nepal’s shaky ground and I have you in my thoughts with both concern and pride. Your delegation embodies all the state’s universal values – giving, morality, loving every person for their sheer humanity.”
“I hope soon we will see you back home and we can hug each and every one of you warmly. Your work there is our pride as a nation and your actions with those who now need you so dearly is our face as a nation and a state. I salute you, my dear ones,” the president said.
Commander Bader thanked Rivlin for the call.

Clinic in a backpack brings Israeli relief to remote Nepal areas

The entire field clinic for a team of Israeli and Nepali doctors setting up temporary facilities in remote mountain villages across Nepal fits into 10 large orange backpacks and three duffel bags. After porters carry these bags to the top of a mountain, it takes less than half an hour to arrange the bags on the floor of a school and start treating patients.
The medical team from IsraAID, Israel’s humanitarian response nonprofit organization, works in 29 countries and has responded to disasters in Haiti, Japan, and the Philippines, and to the Sierra Leone’s Ebola crisis, among others.
After the devastating earthquake on April 25 in Nepal that killed at least 7,000 people, 10 doctors, nurses, and midwives left their jobs in Israel for two weeks to volunteer in Nepal. Their first mission was to a group of mountain villages known as Thangpaldkap, in the district of Sidhulpalchowk, one of the hardest-hit regions of Nepal.
In those orange backpacks is a wide range of medical items useful for whatever the doctors encounter: painkillers, anesthesia, IV drips, syringes, eye drops, blood pressure cuffs, bandages, stitches, plaster for casts. Even in the crumbling structure of a primary school, they can do small operations with local or full anesthesia.

IsraAID sets up new ER clinic in Nepal

Israel-based humanitarian relief agency IsraAID announced on May 6 that its emergency medical team has opened a temporary field clinic in northeast Nepal, an area that suffered the worst damage from the April 25 earthquake.
The clinic is in the village of Tar, where more than 120 residents lost their lives and 95 percent of the houses collapsed as a result of the strong quake.
The IsraAID team — the first medical delegation to arrive in the area — has so far treated 122 people, including six severe orthopedic cases.
The clinic was established in partnership with Siddi Vinayak Hospital in Kathmandu and Nepal’s Ministry of Health and Population.

Israel Steps Up For Nepal

Another liar about the "nakba" - in Slate

Saleem Haddad writes in Slate:

My grandmother remembers clearly the night her family left. They were woken up in the middle of the night by loud banging on the front door. My grandmother’s cousins, who lived in an Arab neighborhood of Haifa, had arrived to tell them that Haifa was falling. The British had announced they were withdrawing, and there were rumors that the country was being handed to the Zionists. At the time, the German Colony had been relatively insulated from the incidents of violence in the rest of the country, which included raids and massacres of Palestinian villages by Zionist paramilitary groups. Yet the Haganah, a paramilitary organization that later formed the core of the Israel Defense Forces, saw the British withdrawal from Haifa as an opportunity and carried out a series of attacks on key Arab neighborhoods where my grandmother’s aunts and cousins were living.

“That night our Jewish neighbors told us not to leave,” my grandmother remembers. “And my father wanted to stay, to wait it out. But my mother … well she had 11 children, and of course she wanted us to be safe. And her sisters were leaving because of the attacks in their neighborhoods.”

The family debated all night. In the morning, they reached a decision. They each quickly packed a small suitcase and left the rest of their belongings. “We hid the most valuable things we couldn’t take in a locked room in our house, thinking it would be safe until we came back,” she tells me, chuckling.

As the women of the family packed, my grandmother’s older brother, who had once been employed by the British forces, struck a deal, allowing them to leave on one of the last British vehicles withdrawing from Haifa. With what little they could carry, my grandmother’s family travelled to the Lebanese border, hiding in a British army vehicle.

Does this sound like they were "expelled," or that they fled?

But only a few paragraphs later:

My grandmother’s story is not a unique one. ... An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, and many who were unable to flee were massacred.

Two lies in one sentence. Relatively few were expelled, just like Saleem's family. And the idea that those that chose to remain behind were massacred is an outright lie.

Haddad notices the contradiction, and tries to reconcile it:

But as her memories made their way onto the page, I had a moment of self-doubt: In my grandmother’s recollection, she was clear that her family had made a decision to leave. Might this play into one of the myths used to justify the establishment of modern-day Israel on Palestinian land—the myth that, despite overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary, Palestinians left on their own free will?

“Are you sure you left voluntarily?” I ask my grandmother. “There was a war,” she replies.

“But no one kicked you out, yes? No one was directly attacking you?” I continue.

“Not us personally, but my mother was worried by the reports. We thought we would be gone for a few weeks at most.”

Could my grandmother’s memory of the Nakba bolster the false narrative that Palestinians voluntarily left, given that her family had not been physically removed form their home? As I considered this, my thoughts began to coalesce ... What constitutes voluntary displacement? On May 15, 1948, in the face of growing hostilities and the threat of a regional war, my great-grandmother did the only thing she knew to protect her children: She left. Does running away from an imminent war, with a small suitcase and plans to return, constitute a voluntary departure? And if so, is the departed then unentitled to the land and belongings they left behind, and forbidden from ever returning?

Well, yes, it is voluntary. Because you can contrast it with the Jews - who fought because they had no place to go. The Jews' choice was to fight or die. The Arabs had the choice to fight or flee - or stay. No one was on the radio calling for Arabs to be thrown into the sea. Rewriting the definition of "expulsion" is not an intellectually honest way to approach the question.

As far as his second question, yes, if you leave a country that you are not yet a citizen of in support of those who are trying to destroy it, you cannot expect that its immigration rules will allow you to pretend as if nothing had happened when you want to go back. Israel was happy to let a significant number of the Arabs who fled in support of Israels' enemies to return, in the context of a peace agreement. That didn't happen. Israel remained in a state of war for decades, and the Arabs who fled supported Israel's enemies.

Haddad is giving a very accurate description of what happened to the Jews who lived in the Old City of Jerusalem and in Gush Etzion, however. Every single one of them were either expelled or massacred, and the illegally annexed West Bank became completely Judenfrei.

Here is what the Jewish Quarter looked like in 1948:

That is what ethnic cleansing looks like. And that was emphatically not the case where the 160,000 Arabs who decided not to flee became citizens of the Jewish state.

The real nakba was that the Arab world has treated these refugees like dirt for 67 years. 

Today, Lebanon and Iraq and Jordan are behaving admirably in accepting hundred of thousands of Syrian refugees, just as Arab nations accepted so many Iraqi refugees in the past couple of decades. But the exception to Arab hospitality has been the Palestinians - even today, they are putting refugees of Palestinian ancestry into separate camps and giving them fewer rights.

But you will be hard pressed to find any Palestinian Arab descendant mentioning how they were treated by their Arab brethren. Slate's bravery in publishing these stories doesn't extend to criticizing the so-called moderate nations of Lebanon and Egypt and Jordan concerning how they hate their Palestinian "guests." It won't even mention the small fact that there are "refugee camps" where tens of thousands live under Palestinian Arab rule. Because the commemorations of the "nakba" are not meant to improve the lives of Palestinians, but to be another weapon aimed at Israel.

And the actual stateless Arabs are treated by Arab nations as nothing more than cannon fodder.

(h/t @JedGalilee)