David Collier: Antisemitism and terrorism supported by the NUT
The first story to tell is that I had trouble getting in to an event and was eventually evicted. As someone who does nothing but *REPORT* on events, I find this truly disturbing. It is something that needs to be addressed urgently by both the PSC and the National Union of Teachers (NUT). I was a Jew who was simply thrown of the NUT HQ.
As anyone who attends functions on the Israel / Arab conflict knows, security measures are required in only one direction. Any event run by a pro-Israeli group needs to be concerned about safety, and the larger and more publicised the event, the more of a problem this becomes. Just as Jewish schools are patrolled and synagogues have heavy security details, taking pride in your Jewish identity places you at risk.
The same is not true the other way around. I have been to scores of anti-Israeli events and have never seen a single policeman, never been checked at the door and never seen any violence. It is worth remembering this fact when trying to understand the source of the violence in the conflict itself.
I made it until after lunch, when two of the PSC organisers asked me to leave. I did protest, as I couldn’t fathom why my presence was such an issue. I never cause trouble and they know it. I was told it was a private party. I was told I was not welcome. I reminded them it was a publicly advertised event that placed no condition on entry. I told them I had already paid and was accepted into the event. I asked what they want to hide, what is it that I am not allowed to see? It made no difference. My day at the event was done.
The event itself was organised by PSC, but according to the website, it was ‘supported by the NUT’ and the venue was Hamilton House, the Headquarters of the National Union of Teachers, near Euston in London.
The program involved a couple of panels, a few individual speakers and 4 workshops, on BDS, media, education and refugees. The workshop on education was my choice, given a clear PSC / NUT strategy to ‘poison the well’, and infest our curriculum with the antisemitic venom. The poison which remains the central pillar of the false Arab narrative. I was never to get to see that particular workshop, by the time it started I had been evicted.
Phyllis Chesler: “Anti-racists” and feminists demonize only Israel
Interview with Phyllis Chesler about those who demonize Israel. “Most Western thinkers do not know that Islam has a long history of slavery, anti-black racism, religious apartheid, gender apartheid, colonialism, and conversion via the sword. “
“It is important to understand that it is not only feminists who demonize Israel. They are merely part of a global phenomenon in which the world media, academics, government leaders and human rights organizations drive this madness.”
Prof. Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies. She lives in New York City. She is the best-selling author of 16 books including “The New Anti-Semitism” (2003, 2015), “The Death of Feminism” (2005) and “American Bride in Kabul” (2013) which won a National Jewish Book Award. Her latest book is “Living History: On the Front Lines for Israel and the Jews, 2003-2015” (2016).
“In 2003, after a rather successful lecture about a feminist topic to an African-American feminist audience at a free-standing conference at Barnard, I was asked –completely off-topic– where I stood on the issue of the women of ‘Palestine.’ I responded: ‘I think you are asking me where I stand on the issue of apartheid and I oppose it. Islam is the largest practitioner of gender and religious apartheid in the world.’
‘Jews invented the Temple Mount lie’
The Association of Palestinian Scholars and Preachers praised the controversial decision of UNESCO, which recently denied Jewish history at the Temple Mount and referred to the area only as the religious Islamic sites “Al-Haram Al-Sharif” and “Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
The Association declared this decision a victory for the religious and historical legitimacy of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the Mount – the holiest site in Judaism.
The Association further declared that the term Temple Mount is an “historical lie” invented by Jews, and that history is not allowed to be established on “lies,” in an ironic statement given that the First and Second Temples stood at the site, as has been repeatedly proven by archaeology.
Furthermore, according to the Association, the expression “Al-Aqsa” is the religiously, historically and politically correct word which points to the Muslims right from 1,500 years ago, indicating a period a full 1,000 years give or take after the destruction of the First Temple when Islam was created. (h/t Elder of Lobby)
You can’t make this stuff up. From Palestine News Network:
Nakba, in Arabic, simply means, Catastrophe, or Tragedy; for Palestinians, it is the most tragic nightmare to happen to a whole nation in modern history.
The irony is that while Palestinian commemorating the 68th anniversary of their Catastrophe, the Palestinian exodus, Israelis celebrate what they call “independence day”.
The wonder is how people can celebrate what they call independence while they know that this was on the account of others people tragedy, a celebration that reflects the sick and twisted minds of such celebrators.
Yes, people who openly celebrated the murders of thousands of Americans,
People who hand out candy in response to the murder of rabbis who were praying,
People who name their schools and town squares after those whose only claim to fame was to successfully murder Israelis, including children,
– are complaining that a national independence day celebration is sick and twisted.
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It looked for a while like the myth of “linkage” – that Middle East peace and, by extension, world peace is dependent on Israel allowing itself to become nine miles wide – was dead and buried.
The Arab spring, Egyptian coups, Syrian civil war, Yemen conflict, Islamic State and Iranian belligerence all prove to any reasonable human that the Palestinian problem is a relatively small issue in the Middle East, and Arab governments have much bigger – and much more real – problems than spending their time worrying about whether a Palestinian needs to wait for a half hour at a checkpoint.
Yet the idea that somehow Israel is to blame for all the world’s ills keeps coming up.
French FM Ayrault says the peace conference being planned by France is important as it can help stop the advance of the Islamic State terror group in the region.
“France has no vested interest, but is deeply convinced that if we don’t want to let the ideas of the Islamic State group prosper in this region, we must do something,” Ayrault tells reporters.
They can’t just sit there! They must do something! Maybe a raindance, or a strongly worded letter to ISIS leaders? Because those would be just as effective as a Palestinian state in fixing the Arab and Muslim world’s problems.
In fact, history shows that Israeli land concessions empower Islamic radicals to redouble their efforts. We’ve seen it before – Hamas gained power after Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hezbollah gained power after Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Somehow, those Islamic fundamentalists didn’t subscribe to the idea that Israeli concessions would weaken them that the experts are so sure of.
And if withdrawing from the West Bank doesn’t mollify ISIS, then we just may have to reviit the entire idea of a Jewish state altogether. Isn’t that the next logical step?
The French FM isn’t the only foreign minister to resurrect the linkage nonsense. Jordan’s FM said the same thing:
Palestinian statehood is the most important issue now facing the world and that it fuels extremism gripping the Mideast, Jordan’s foreign minister said Tuesday.
Nasser Judeh made the comment at the Arab Media Forum in Dubai.
Palestinian cause represents the essence of the conflicts and crises in the region,” he said.
He added that “every day of delay where the international community does not exert pressure toward reaching a fair and just settlement of the Palestinian cause will lead to another day of darkness where the forces of extremism and terrorism can act. Then humanity as a whole will pay the price.”
Yet as we have seen, Jordan doesn’t want to put any skin in the game to help Palestinians when it costs them more than empty words.
Actually looking clearly at the problem of Islamic fundamentalism, and the hard work necessary to eradicate it, is an enormously difficult problem. Blaming Israel for it is enormously easy – especially for people who really don’t like Jews and the concept of Jewish nationhood that much to begin with.
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PMW: Palestinian girl’s hate speech at Red Crescent event: The Jews kill worshippers
In its report on an event for children arranged by the Palestine Red Crescent, Palestinian Authority TV News chose to include a young Palestinian girl’s hate speech demonizing Jews:
Palestinian girl: “Like all the children of Palestine, I do not like the occupation. I am scared of the Jews when they come to our village. They kill worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. They kill our people and imprison small children. It is my right to live in peace, like all children in the world.” [Official PA TV, April 18, 2016]
The girl’s libelous statement that Jews “kill” Muslim worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque plaza is an extension of the PA libel that Israel seeks to harm and destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque – a libel the PA has been repeating for years. These two libels, presenting Israelis/Jews as murderers who threaten Al-Aqsa have been used by PA and Fatah leaders as the prime motivating forces behind the recent wave of terror attacks against Israelis, which lasted more than 6 months and in which 34 Israelis were murdered and 452 wounded.
Note that the girl spoke of “Jews,” and not “Israelis.” Her statement echoes many other demonizing statements about Jews as “enemies” and posing a danger to Muslims and the world, as exposed by Palestinian Media Watch. She echoed the PA teaching that the conflict is religious and not territorial. Similar teachings are coming from the top of the PA leadership. Abbas’ advisor, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, has described Jews historically as representing “evil” and “Satan’s project” versus Muslims who represent “good” and “Allah’s project.”
Edgar Davidson: The day the Jews of London and their friends fought back
Today, like so many days in London over the last 10 years, a group of antisemites who go under the laughable guise of ‘Palestine supporters’ planned to:
– March through the streets of London shouting despicable lies against Israel without being challenged
– Hand out leaflets spewing more lies, hatred and antisemitic blood libels to unwitting Londoners trying to enjoy a day out in the sunshine; and finally
– Lay siege to a modest Jewish Israeli-owned shop with the explicit intention of forcing it out of business, without a murmur of protest against them.
But NOT today. They met their match because, thanks to outstanding work by Yochy Davis, Joseph Cohen and others, Israel supporters had found out their plans and, at short notice, got together an impressive counter demo. And for over 3 hours Israel supporters were right in the faces of the antisemites ensuring that not a single Londoner or tourist heard their lies unchallenged.
It all started when the antisemites gathered in Soho Square and were about to serenade the visitors there trying to have a peaceful lunch with their classic tune “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free”. They were greeted first by Ishmael Sali, who they assumed would be joining their hatefest.
The look on their faces was quite something to see when Ishmael pulled out a large Israeli flag, followed by others doing the same. Within seconds the terrorist supporting goons were surrounded by more people with Israel flags (more people in fact than the antisemites) and for the 20 minutes they stayed there singing the Israel supporters drowned out their noise with their own, including with some impressive shofar blowing.
UK: Zionists disrupt and harass peaceful Nakba Day event in London
Edgar Davidson: Read the antisemitic abuse following today’s counter demo
I reported earlier on today’s counter-demo against an antisemitic ‘pro-Palestinian’ attempt to spew lies and hatred in London and close down a Jewish-Israeli store. As this video from the anti-Israel agency Russia Today shows, the counter demo was clearly both a surprise and shock to the antisemites who normally have free rein over London’s streets.
But just check our the continual stream of antisemitic abuse in the comments on the video. I have captured a few screen shots below:
The Jewish students who oppose, and work to undermine, Israeli policies all have the usual excuses:
“Within the Jewish community, these sorts of discussions do not happen often enough,” said event organizer Ben Williams, a senior at Brown. “[Ignorance] leads to a certain complicity in continuing systems of oppression.”
Yes, there isn’t enough J-Street and “Jewish Voices for Peace” and SJP chapters and professors who advocate tirelessly against Israel on campus. It is hard to find the Palestinian perspective on campus – so hard that it must be hosted at an ostensibly Zionist venue. There are no libraries or classrooms that could possibly be adequate.
Which brings up a question I have asked before: where is this same open-mindedness on the other side? Where were the Muslim Student Association’s Yom Haatzmaut parties, celebrating the only country in the Middle East where an Arab can successfully sue the state?
Where is the open dialogue in the Palestinian campus community? Where are the peace events held on campus mosques calling for a two state solution?
Why is it so inconceivable to have a pro-Israel Muslim event but practically considered mandatory to have anti-Israel events at Jewish venues?
I once created a webpage to highlight the disparity between how each side talks about “peace.”
The unfortunate fact is that the As-A-Jews are happy to use their ancestry as a reason to bash Israel, instead of supporting their fellow Jews whose lives are literally in danger.
The real problem is that, despite the claims of the antisemites, Jews aren’t united. And the Israel bashers are.
Maybe Jews should label Hillel their “safe space” where they can celebrate the miracle of Israel without fear of disruption. Or does that concept only apply to other minorities?
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Israel-haters like to claim that Israel infringes on academic freedom and this is why scholarly associations must boycott Israel.
Sure, they say, there might be other countries that aren’t so great in that area, but – you have to start somewhere.
Academic Freedom Monitor tracks examples of attacks on higher education worldwide. Here are the number of incidents for all countries reported since January 2015:
| Turkey | 11 |
| Venezuela | 7 |
| Myanmar (Burma) | 6 |
| Thailand | 6 |
| Egypt | 5 |
| Malaysia | 5 |
| Yemen | 5 |
| Bangladesh | 4 |
| Pakistan | 4 |
| India | 3 |
| South Africa | 3 |
| Sudan | 3 |
| Ethiopia | 2 |
| Iraq | 2 |
| Kenya | 2 |
| Korea, South (ROK) | 2 |
| Mozambique | 2 |
| Nigeria | 2 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2 |
| United States | 2 |
| Bahrain | 1 |
| Belarus | 1 |
| Burundi | 1 |
| Côte d’Ivoire | 1 |
| Cuba | 1 |
| Ecuador | 1 |
| Indonesia | 1 |
| Iran | 1 |
| Kuwait | 1 |
| Mexico | 1 |
| Morocco | 1 |
| Palestine (OPT) | 1 |
| Russia | 1 |
| Syria | 1 |
| Zimbabwe | 1 |
Israel isn’t listed. (They did have a couple of entries from 2014 when Israeli forces entered campuses while desperately searching for the kidnapped teens who were later found to have been murdered.)
So why is Israel held up as the prototypical example of violating academic freedom again?
Oh yeah, because it is Israel, and the normal rules don’t apply.
(h/t Bupkes)
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Last week, Egypt opened up the Rafah crossing to allow a trickle of Gazans to leave the sector. Out of some 30,000 people waiting to leave, only 747 were allowed to cross before Egypt closed the border again.
One Palestinian writer unwittingly referred to an old Yiddish story about the man who complains that his house is too cramped, and the wise man told him to put animals from his barn in the house as well, making things worse. Then when he was told to remove the animals he felt much better. He said that when Egypt opens Gaza for a token number of Gazans, the Gazans feel the same way as the homeowner in the story when Egypt opens up Rafah once every few months.
In March, partly as a response to Egyptian refusal to allow any significant number of Gazans to leave, Israel started allowing Gazans to go through Israel and to Jordan – with one catch: they would have to stay abroad for at least a year before they could return via Jordan. This would allow students and businesspeople an option that was simply not available any more from Egypt.
But something has happened since then. At first, without explanation, Jordan started delaying the amount of time to respond to travel applications from Gazans from two weeks to two months.
Now, Jordan has now severely restricted Gazans from entering its territory altogether. The official passes that Gazans need to travel through Jordan (which are different from those of most West Bank Palestinians) are becoming harder and harder to get.
No official reason is being given, but reports say that Jordan is not interested in taking up the slack from Egypt. In addition, there have been some political conflicts between Jordan and the Palestinian political leadership that has aggravated the issue..
Israel allows some humanitarian cases from Gaza to travel to Ben Gurion airport, but it has no plans to allow masses of Gazans to travel abroad via Israel because of both security and logistical concerns.
Now we see that the Arab world, which rises up in protest at every Israeli action that is perceived to be against residents of Gaza, has no interest in helping them.
Talk is cheap but when Arab nations have the actual opportunity to help Palestinians, they largely refuse.
And this endemic discrimination against Palestinians within the Arab world is ignored by the “progressive” community that claims that they care so much about Palestinians. If Israel isn’t involved, then no one cares about them.
(h/t Ibn Boutros, Yoel)
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This graphic has been doing well on Twitter; feel free to retweet.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
There have been some articles lately about charges of antisemitism against Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar. I don’t like to toss around phrases like that lightly, so I was very interested in reading a transcript of Puar’s recent talk at Dartmouth University.
Is she a classic antisemite? No. But her rhetoric shows why the argument that anti-Zionism is a modern form of antisemitism has a lot of merit.
First of all, Puar was participating in a panel discussion of gender and ecological issues – yet she spoke only about Israel and supposed Palestinian oppression. She barely even tried to relate her talk to the topic. Such obsession, and indeed rudeness to the organizers of an event on a completely different topic, betrays a hatred that goes way beyond sober academic reflection.
Secondly, her comments itself were the usual pseudo-academic rhetoric that one often hears from obsessed Israel haters. It starts from the premise that Israel is uniquely evil in the world, and all of her “research” is based on that flawed assumption.
The paper is in three parts, so the first part is about the new project. The second part is a kind of piecing of an article that’s already been published in order to set the stage for the third piece, which is part of the second half of the book. And I apologize to those of you who have probably already heard one part or another in some other context but this is how I wanted to lay it out to you today.
So the first part is called Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters. How Palestine Matters apprehends the science fiction of the everyday, of every day life. It stretches the speculative into the now, to revise the temporal frames of past, present and future. The West Bank is the past of Jim Crow and the future of controlled societies together. While many decry the settler colonial project of Israel as an archaic remnant of the past, bemoaning, how can this still be happening in the 21st century, I would argue that it is only in the 21st century that such a concentration of power, economy, and technology is possible.
In this project I attempt to articulate what I am calling the computational sovereignty of Israeli settler colonialism: occupation and apartheid. This twerking of sovereignties stands as a challenge to the literatures of biopolitics, deploying a notion of population beyond the human, non-human, animal frame. How do objects compose a population? How do toxicities populate and become populations?
In centering in human entities and temporalities how Palestine matters resituates the geopolitical that has been oddly alighted in the resurrection of the ecological and the geographical and emergent fields of new materialisms and Anthropocene studies. Many scholars have rapidly noted that much of the Anthropocene talk has been enabled through a rather bald-faced appropriation of long-standing native and indigenous cosmologies. So the book attempts to offer a counter genealogy to the surge of theories of object-oriented ontology and theories of post-humanism by putting them into direct relation to the fields of post-colonial theory, questions of imperial occupation and settler colonialism and disability studies.
Did you get that? Neither did anyone else. It is nonsense, although this may be the first time I’ve seen the word “twerking” in a so-called academic setting. But it goes beyond nonsense – it is an attempt to build an edifice of quasi-academic lingo on a foundation that is a lie to begin with. Israel’s unrivaled and malicious evil is a given, and it is up to academic frauds like Puar to find new and innovative ways to express their hate in socially acceptable ways, which includes gobbledygook.
Much of her talk is based on the premise that Israel has an intentional policy to maim Palestinians. In other words, when an Israeli soldier shoots a rock-throwing protester – who is endangering his life – in the legs, that is an evil Zionist policy to create as many disabled Palestinians as possible. (The idea that this also saves numerous lives compared to other methods of self-defense is completely besides the point, apparently.)
But Puar goes beyond. She came up with a novel theory that every Palestinian is disabled, because they have a lack of mobility, because of Israeli restrictions on allowing Jews to be murdered.
So I want to close with a short comment on recent fieldwork in the West Bank and occupied east Jerusalem that I completed in January 2016. During this visit I met with rehabilitation and disability service providers. I met also with Palestinians with disabilities and spoke with people with varying bodily capacities at numerous checkpoints. Health is big business in the West Bank, and it is among the most dominant form of NGO, humanitarian work conducted by European and North American agencies. It is not news, again, that these otherwise valiant efforts wind up reproducing the dependency of colonized populations while legitimizing the structure of settler-colonial occupation. There’s a tension between the liberal U.N. rights-based frames that these organizations carry forward, one that foregrounds disability as an individual affliction to be accommodated and empowered and understanding Palestinian populations as debilitated, as enduring forms of collective punishment that restrict mobility for everyone albeit unevenly.
If the occupation is reducing able-bodied capacity across manifold Palestinian populations, by literalizing mobility impairment through both targeting the knees and creating infrastructural impediments to deliberately inhibit and prohibit movement, then this disabling is happening on both individual and structural population levels. Neither the medical nor the social models of disability are able to address the complexities of debilitation in Palestine. The medical model understands disability as a defect to be repaired, this repair is usually not possible in Palestine. The social model understands disability, the environment to be disabling, curbs, stairs, elevators, chemicals, but does not address the disabling infrastructure of the occupation, checkpoints, divided highways, settlements that divide Palestinian landscapes and so on. One could say that the disabled are thus twice disabled and yet disability is not held
up as a specific identity formation, but rather understood as one that is evolving. So we wouldn’t say it’s twice disabled, rather that everyone is debilitated to some degree or another way to put it is no one is actually able-bodied. Disability activists are less interested in nor committed to the distinction between the disabled and the non disabled, no one is constituted as necessarily able-bodied, preferring instead to see the inhabitants of the West Bank suffering and resisting together, the collective punishment of the occupation. Does this disabling structure of collective punishment create more acceptance and solidarity between those disabled and those able bodies made disabled by the infrastructure of the occupation? This is one of my pending research questions.
Puar makes up a bizarre relationship between disabled people and Palestinians, and wants to see if Palestinians feel solidarity with the disabled because they supposedly share the same challenges. They don’t, of course, but when they see Westerners asking leading questions that can end up demonizing Israel, they know quite well how they are supposed to answer.
The idea that fully abled people are “disabled” because they are under “occupation” is almost certainly highly insulting to people with real disabilities. I think most of them would gladly trade places with the people in the West Bank who have both legs and arms and eyes. In Puar’s zeal to foment hatred towards Israelis, she is throwing disabled people under the bus, watering down their very real challenges.
Her last part is the coup de grâce:
Toward the end of our visit with a disabilities support group just north of Hebron, we asked the twenty odd people there what their hopes and dreams were for the future. One after another, the respondents articulated desires for rehabilitation, “I hope to walk again someday,” “I hope to go to Germany so I can get the treatment to fix me.” “I want to be able to know what it’s like to walk.” These statements of desire for mobility are profound in the context of the mobility impairment and in fixing of space that is one of the prime logics of settler-colonial occupation. While the long-standing formulation of disability as deficit drives the right to maim, and the production of widespread debilitation is key to maintaining colonial rule, these desires on the part of Palestinians with disabilities points to something more entrenched, there can be little reclaiming of disability as an empowered identity until and unless the main source of producing debilitation, that is the occupation, is ended. One cannot happen without the other.
She asked a question from rehab patients. They answered the exact same way that rehab patients anywhere in the world would answer the question. But since Puar sees the world through Israel-hating glasses, she sees their answers as damning for Israel for supposedly limiting their ability to heal. (Which is, from everything I can tell, a lie. There are rehab centers in the West Bank.)
The overarching message from Puar, from her choice of topic to her highly selective facts to her outright lies, is that hating Israel is the animating theme of every sociological discipline. Feminism, disability studies, ecology, racism – all of those studies must be anchored in a solid belief of unwavering Israeli evil. Hate is the driver for her entire research discipline.
Since Puar’s pretense of research and writings are just a smokescreen to spread hate against Israel and Zionists, it has far more in common with antisemitism than with academics. It might not be antisemitism in the classic sense, but the underlying motivation is just as ugly – and just as devoid of scientific or fact-based evidence.
This was not as noxious as some of her other appearances. Yet they all have one thing in common – hate.
My guess is that social scientists are far more reluctant to openly attack the work of their fellows, because they don’t want their own work to be subject to the type of scrutiny that is expected from hard sciences. It would be a much better respected field if sociologists and the like would rip apart academic frauds like Jasbir Puar instead of silently allowing her and those like her to be nothing more than vehicles of hate.
It would be nice to see what a truly disabled person has to say about her theories, though.
(h/t Judith)
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Vic Rosenthal: On observing the nakba
Many of you have seen the traffic coming to a stop on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance day and Memorial Day, with drivers getting out of their cars and pedestrians standing stock still, at attention while a siren sounds for two minutes. It never ceases to move me to tears, no matter how many times I’ve experienced it. Ordinary Israelis understand quite well why their independence is important and what it still costs them.
If you’ve seen videos of the event, you may have noticed a few vehicles that don’t stop. These are primarily Arabs. After all, it’s not their grandparents who were murdered by the Nazis (the father of Palestinian nationalism, al-Husseini, was a Nazi himself), and the last people they would want to honor are the soldiers who died to keep the Arabs from finishing al-Husseini and Hitler’s program. Indeed, today the Arabs of Judea and Samaria will sound a siren of their own to commemorate “nakba day,” the day they failed to prevent Jewish sovereignty from returning to the Land of Israel.
The experience of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day, which all come within the space of a week, always affects me profoundly, creating feelings of love for the Jewish people and pride at what we have accomplished. I don’t have the slightest twinge of regret for what my people had to do to get their independence, and what we continue to do to keep it. And I don’t think there is a place in the state of Israel for the observance of the nakba, the catastrophic failure of our enemies to kill or re-disperse us.
French Jews oppose Cannes film defending Munich terrorists
The umbrella group of French Jewish communities objected to the planned marketing at Cannes of a film it said falsely blames German security forces for the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes held hostage by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Roger Cukierman, the president of CRIF, made the objection in a May 3 letter to Pierre Lescure, president of the Cannes Film Festival, and to French Culture Minister Audrey Azoulay, CRIF revealed on its website Thursday.
Cukierman said he was “concerned” about the planned screening of the film, “Munich: A Palestinian Story,” at a promotional event for Arab cinema at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film depicts as freedom fighters Palestinians who during the Summer Olympics in Munich in 1972 are believed to have shot and killed at least two of 11 Israeli athletes they took hostage. It wrongly accuses German police of the killings, Cukierman said in the letter.
Directed by Nasri Hajjaj, “Munich” is part of a partnership between the Cannes Film Festival, which is one of the most important events in cinema, and the Dubai International Film Festival. This year for the first time, the Dubai festival sent a selection of Arab films, including the one about Munich, to Cannes’s Le Marche du Film — a platform for international cinema that takes place alongside Cannes.
Stop giving British aid money to Palestinian terrorists, Jewish community say in new campaign
Jewish groups are launching a campaign to stop British aid being used to fund Palestinian terrorists following shocking revelations in The Mail on Sunday.
They are demanding the Government cut all funding to the Palestinian Authority (PA) until it ends support for payments of ‘salaries’ to suicide bombers and child killers.
The Department for International Development (DFID) will this year give the PA £25.5 million.
The campaign is backed by former Labour MP Michael McCann, who reveals today how the PA finance minister openly admitted to such funding during a visit two years ago by Parliament’s International Development Select Committee, whose members were investigating aid spending in Palestine.
McCann says DFID is ‘guilty of turning a blind eye to UK taxpayers’ money being used to incentivise murder’.
In March, we exposed how ‘rewards for murder’ flowed from British and European funding bodies to terrorists accused of atrocities.
It’s time the world — and Jews themselves — identify the People of the Book as indigenous people. At least, that’s the opinion of indigenous rights activist Ryan Bellerose of Alberta, Canada. He recently returned from his second trip to the Holy Land where he filmed a video supporting the concept for the Israeli advocacy group StandWithUs.
I have visited all the major sacred sites, and many historical sites that reinforce the indigenous nature of the Jewish people to their ancestral land. This has helped me in being a pro-Israel advocate.I write about the commonalities of indigenous struggles, so going to Israel and seeing a place where indigenous people have managed to gain self determination is massive for me. I believe very strongly that in order for me to expect people to listen to me about my peoples’ struggles, I must listen to them and stand with them in theirs.
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Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the “Chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopedia,” which I cannot find any information on. But he appears to have been a PLO member and has represented Mahmoud Abbas in speeches.
Here is the beginning of an article he wrote for Gulf News:
The Zionist state has taken the Holy Torah as a constitution for its “Jewish state”, thereby claiming ‘high morality’ to gain more support in the western world. Israel’s second claim is that it has the only true democracy in the Middle East and is “an extension to western values” in a region that lacks rule of law.
The claim that the Holy Torah stands as its law is contradicted by the actual resort to the Talmud, which has been written by Jewish Rabbis. Adherence to the Talmud rulings and edicts that are inconsistent with the Torah has prompted American Reform Jews to discard it as a racist text from their religious services. Such a description strips Israel of any claim of morality.
Israeli democracy is being contested by all Israeli human rights organisations — especially with regard to the “indefinite incarceration of Palestinians without charging them with any crime”. A true democracy can never be a colonial occupying power, imposing its military rule by force. A true democracy would not strip the occupied population of their political and civil rights, while stealing their lands in the name of a self-concocted religiosity that has no connection — except in name only — to the original spiritual/anti-material message that came to Prophet Moses. Israel has been imposing the immoral laws of the Talmud along with the colonial law of administrative detention to rob Palestinians — not only of their land and rights, but also of their national identity.
It is not even worth the time to fisk this. Virtually every sentence is wrong.
Here is proof positive that a Palestinian “scholar” and PLO representative is happy to publish nonsensical, antisemitic gibberish. It takes a mere three paragraphs of his own writings to establish that Professor Rahman knows nothing about Israel, nothing about Judaism, nothing about history, nothing about democracy and nothing about current events.
That’s quite an achievement.
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