Ongoing Arson Terror

Today over 20 fires were started by terror 

bombs and molotov cocktails, mostly f

rom arson terror from terrorists in Gaza, 

but a number in the Judean Hills as well. 

This is over a year and a half of arson 

terror attacks that have included balloon 

bombs, molotov cocktails and many other homemade incendiary devices.

Lebanese Man Escapes Hezbollah to become Rabbi

After spying on the Hezbollah terror group for Israel, this 

courageous Lebanese man endured torture at the hands 

of his captors, before escaping to Israel and becoming 

a devout Jew.

Take the Palestinians’ ‘No’ for an Answer

Eugene Kontorovich – June 24^th 2019

This isn't the first time the Palestinians have said no. At a summit brokered by President Clinton in 2000, Israel offered them full statehood on territory that included roughly 92% of the West Bank and all of Gaza, along with a capital in Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority rejected that offer, leading Israel to up it to 97% of the West Bank in 2001. Again, the answer was no. An even further-reaching offer in 2008 was rejected out of hand. And when President Obama pressured Israel into a 10-month settlements freeze in 2009 to renew ne­go­ti­a­tions, the Palestinians refused to come to the table.

This week’s U.S.-led Peace to Prosperity conference in Bahrain on the Palestinian economy will likely be attended by seven Arab states—a clear rebuke to foreign-policy experts who said that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the Golan Heights as Israeli territory would alienate the Arab world. Sunni Arab states are lending legitimacy to the Trump administration’s plan, making it all the more notable that the Palestinian Authority itself refuses to participate.

The conference’s only agenda is improving the Palestinian economy. It isn’t tied to any diplomatic package, and the plan’s 40-page overview contains nothing at odds with the Palestinian’s purported diplomatic goals. Some aspects are even politically uncomfortable for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Given all that, the Palestinian Authority’s unwillingness to discuss economic opportunities for its own people, even with the Arab states, shows how far it is from discussing the concessions necessary for a diplomatic settlement. Instead it seeks to deepen Palestinian misfortune and use it as a cudgel against Israel in the theater of international opinion.

This isn’t the first time the Palestinians have said no. At a summit brokered by President Clinton in 2000, Israel offered them full statehood on territory that included roughly 92% of the West Bank and all of Gaza, along with a capital in Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority rejected that offer, leading Israel to up it to 97% of the West Bank in 2001. Again, the answer was no. An even further-reaching offer in 2008 was rejected out of hand. And when President Obama pressured Israel into a 10-month settlement freeze in 2009 to renew negotiations, the Palestinians refused to come to the table.

After so many rejections, one might conclude that the Palestinian Authority’s leaders simply aren’t interested in peace. Had they accepted any of the peace offers, they would have immediately received the rarest of all geopolitical prizes: a new country, with full international recognition. To be sure, in each proposal they found something not quite to their liking. But the Palestinians are perhaps the only national independence movement in the modern era that has ever rejected a genuine offer of internationally recognized statehood, even if it falls short of all the territory the movement had sought.

The best example is Israel itself, which jumped at a 1947 United Nations proposal for a Jewish state, even though it was non-contiguous and excluded Jerusalem and much of its present territory. The Arab states rejected the proposal, which would have also created a parallel Arab country.

India and Pakistan didn’t reject independence because major territorial claims were left unaddressed. Ireland accepted independence without the island’s six northern counties. Morocco didn’t refuse statehood because Spain retained land on its northern coast.

While there have been hundreds of national independence movements in modern times, few are fortunate enough to receive an offer of fully recognized sovereign statehood. Including 1947, the Palestinians have received four. From Tibet to Kurdistan, such opportunities remain a dream. 

Several lessons must be drawn from the Palestinians’ serial rejection of statehood—and this week, even of economic development. First, the status quo is not Israeli “rule” or “domination.” The Palestinians can comfortably turn down once-in-a-lifetime opportunities because almost all Palestinians already live under Palestinian government. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, they’ve enjoyed many of statehood’s trappings, particularly in foreign relations. Israel undertakes regular anti terror operations, but that’s different from overall power. For instance, the U.S. doesn’t “rule” over Afghanistan.

Second, statehood and a resolution to the conflict is not what the Palestinians truly seek. This is what economists call a “revealed preference”: To know what consumers truly want, look at what they choose. The Palestinians have repeatedly chosen the status quo over sovereignty. 

Finally, throw out the assumption that when Palestinians reject an offer, it stays on the table and accrues interest. If offers will only improve with time, the Palestinians have an incentive to keep saying no.

The Palestinian Authority cannot be forced to accept a peaceful settlement, and Israel doesn’t wish to return to its pre-Oslo control over the Palestinian population. But rejection-ism, culminating this week in Bahrain, must have consequences. 

For more than 50 years, the future of Jewish communities in the West Bank—and the nearly half a million Jews who now live there—has been held in limbo pending a diplomatic settlement. While the authority rejects improved hospitals, port arrangements and employment centers, many of the benefits for Palestinians could still be achieved by locating them in parts of the West Bank under Israeli jurisdiction. But to do that, the question mark over these places, which include all of the Jews living in the West Bank and a much smaller number of Palestinians, must be lifted. Washington should support Israeli initiatives to replace military rule with civil law in these areas, normalizing their status. The Palestinians’ no-show in Bahrain should end their ability to hold development and growth hostage.

US Universities Took $600 Million Tied To Muslim Nations

Luke Rosiak | Investigative Reporter,  Daily Caller

• A Department of Education program funds colleges to teach about the Arab world, but upcoming payments are going to colleges that have received millions of dollars from Arab countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, data shows.
• One critic said that coupling the program with the foreign funding is “a back-door route to Saudi influence.”
• Some of the universities employ faculty or have hosted guests who made anti-semitic remarks.

The Cold War-era Higher Education Act of 1965 created a program called “Title VI” that pays colleges to help students better understand international relations and includes funds earmarked for studying the Middle East. It was intended to help prepare a cadre of intelligence agents and diplomats.

Instead, the money has funded anti-Americanism and anti-semitism in U.S. higher education, according to a November 2014 report by the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. There have been instances where some of the universities hosted or employed anti-semites, with some facing accusations of having ties to terror groups.

For 2019 through 2021, the Education Department has allocated nearly $7.5 million to 16 universities for Middle East studies and outreach, according to Title IV records. Twelve of those have recently received money affiliated with Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East, and in each case, that money dwarfed the U.S. funding, a DCNF (Daily Caller News Foundation) data analysis found.

The Education Department says that “In addition to supporting foreign language and area studies instruction and research, Title VI” recipients will “conduct outreach and develop programs that expand global opportunities for K-16 educators.”

A senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Stanley Kurtz, has been warning about the issue for years.

The system “has opened up a back-door route to Saudi influence over America’s K-12 curriculum,” he wrote in the National Review in 2007. “Believe it or not, the Saudis have figured out how to make an end-run around America’s K-12 curriculum safeguards, thereby gaining control over much of what children in the United States learn about the Middle East.”

The Muslim nations awarded $603 million to the 12 universities from 2011 to 2016 — 80 times more than the allocated Title VI funding, The DCNF found. Israeli interests donated a total of $13 million to eight of the schools, but in every case, their funding was only a fraction of the Muslim nations’.

College	Taxpayer Money for Middle East Studies	Funds From Muslim Middle East Countries	Funds from Israel
Total	$7,452,916	$603,252,491	$13,026,242
University of Chicago	$611,000	$5,718,930	$313,800
University of California, Berkeley	$597,500	$18,569,018	$507,882
Indiana University	$594,000	$3,041,719	$306,990
Columbia University	$589,300	$13,636,790
University of California, Los Angeles	$586,500	$12,485,991	$6,025,700
University of Michigan	$581,000	$15,837,433	$1,815,288
University of Washington – Seattle	$539,000	$10,729,004	$2,995,676
New York University	$537,500	$81,140,930	$891,893
Georgetown University	$484,558	$343,751,617
George Washington University	$258,000	$96,122,285
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill*	$235,000	$251,998
Yale University	$220,000	$1,966,776	$169,013

Sources: Department of Education Title VI grants 2019-2021, Department of Education foreign gifts and contracts data 2011-2016. *This award was split with Duke University, which did not receive funding from Muslim Middle East nations or from Israel.

 The program helps teachers convey a nuanced and realistic view of Arabs and Islam to overcome stereotypes and shallow media presentations, supplementing the often inadequate treatment in curriculum and textbooks,” it continues. However, one critic commented, “Outreach coordinators or teacher-trainers at a number of university Middle East Studies centers have themselves been trained by the very same Saudi-funded foundations that design K-12 course materials.”

Below are examples of anti-semitism from colleges or their faculty that received funding from the Muslim nations.

• The University of California, Berkeley, which is the second-highest recipient  of Title IV funding and has received $19 million in funding from Middle Eastern countries, hosted a 2011 event where a lecturer said that “Holocaust denial is a form of protest.” In its report, the Brandeis Center wrote that he “downplayed the atrocities of the Holocaust.”

• At Columbia University, which received $14 million from the Muslim countries, $600,000 from Title VI, and none from Israel, Iranian Studies professor Hamid Dabashi said in May that the Jewish state is behind “[e]very dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.”

• The University of California, Los Angeles, held a 2009 panel comprised of four critics of Israel’s existence, according to the Brandeis Center. One described Israeli soldiers as war criminals, and another said they target civilians. The panel “riled up the largely non-student audience into chants such as ‘Zionism is racism,’ ‘Zionism is Nazism,’ and ‘F- Israel,'” according to the Brandeis Center. UCLA received $12 million from the Muslim nations. It also received $6 million from Israel, far more than any other school, but most of that money came from Israeli biotech firms, while only $980 came from a group dedicated to boosting ties with Israel, the Yahel Foundation.

• In October 2015, “Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies hosted a teach-in for K-14 teachers and the public on Gaza featuring speakers who have defended Hamas and support the BDS movement,” according to the Endowment for Middle East Truth. “The event was co-sponsored by the World Affairs Council and the Jerusalem Fund.” Also at Georgetown, a Saudi-funded entity uses social justice rhetoric popular among liberal college students to advance a Saudi agenda, likening Muslims to Hispanic “Dreamers,” invoking “white supremacy” and using hip-hop.

• At the University of Michigan, which has received $16 million from the Muslim countries and $1.8 million from the Muslim countries and $1.8 million from Israel, two instructors refused to help students study abroad in Israel in 2018.

The countries whose governments and foundations — and, to a lesser extent, companies and citizens — have donated to the latest Title VI recipients are Qatar ($343 million), Saudi Arabia ($131 million), United Arab Emirates ($87 million), Kuwait ($16 million), Turkey ($9 million), as well as Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Bahrain and Iraq.

In 2006, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found “substantial evidence” that “many university departments of Middle East studies provide one-sided, highly polemical academic presentations and some may repress legitimate debate concerning Israel.”

The Whitewashing Of Anti-Jewish Bigotry

 I attended a conference this week on the subject of anti-Semitism and met up with Sharon Alshul who authored the report below. so why try to reinvent the wheel. Thanks Sharon. The full report with photos can be seen here.

By: BJLIfe/Sharon Altshul

The antisemitic BDS campaign is growing in mainstream media and also on American campuses

At a June 11th event hosted by CAMERA at the Kahn Theatre in Jerusalem, Israel, a panel of experts examined how expressions of anti-Jewish bigotry have gained ground and acceptance in the media and on college campuses.

Co-sponsored by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and The Israel Innovation Fund, IIF, the event’s title initially emphasized that antisemitism is often hidden under the veil of human rights.

“Why now?” asked David Hazony cofounder of IIF in his opening remarks, “Is it possible that antisemitism and assimilation are two sides of a coin?”

“The New York Times’ publication of a cartoon straight out of Nazi propaganda ripped away the veil,” said Tamar Sternthal, Director of CAMERA’s Israel office.

The New York Times cartoon, which was published in April, exposed the increasing prevalence of antisemitism in the mainstream media.

The cartoon depicted a blind, kippah-wearingPresident Donald Trump being led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as his guide dog, tagged with a Magen David. The cartoon caused a social media uproar after the image was shown to mirror caricatures in Nazi publications of the 1930s and 40s.

“After the cartoon was published, it was clear that even in The New York Times explicit, blatant antisemitism can sneak its way into the mainstream news. This compelled us to focus our event on mainstreaming of antisemitism,” added Sternthal, it’s dressed up as mere criticism of Israeli policy.

Dan Diker, Director of the Project on Political Warfare and BDS at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, acknowledged former MK Anat Berko,an expert in counterterrorism and her husband Reuven, an expert in Arab affairs, who along with historian Joel Fishman, were helpful in his career development, and in the audience.

Diker spoke of the German parliament’s recent resolution condemning BDS, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel, as antisemitic. Diker noted that the only two groups condemning the German parliament’s censure of BDS as antisemitic were Hamas and 240 Israeli and Jewish academics.

“It’s been said that you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. When it comes to BDS, when Jews put lipstick on a pig, it convinces the world that the pig is kosher,” Diker stated.

Ricki Hollander, CAMERA senior media analyst, said that journalists all too often use double standards or distort, conceal and revise the facts in order to maintain a narrative of Israeli guilt.  

“They’re not relaying legitimate criticism of Israel. They are engaging in "Israelophobia" that masquerades as criticism of Israel."

Hollander said that there are other cultural factors that inform the media’s mainstreaming of antisemitism. “Many journalists are now rooted in an educational culture ruled by identity politics and partisan activism. And in the hierarchy of perceived victimhood within this culture, Jews are not even ranked. They're erroneously seen as white, privileged and powerful, on the other side of the divide.”

The antisemitic BDS campaign is also growing on American campuses.

“Over the years, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters across the US have shared antisemitic literature, trying to hide it under the guise of anti-Zionism. But their mistakes have, at times, revealed their true colors,” said Aviva Rosenschein, International Campus Director for CAMERA.

While The New York Times’ April cartoon used Nazi-like imagery, Rosenschein gave examples of SJP chapters on American campuses that use actual Nazi imagery in materials that are supposed to be mere criticism of Israel.

According to Rosenschein, a collaboration between SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), another radical anti-Israel organization, is also fueling antisemitism on campuses.

“Neither SJP nor JVP represents mainstream Jews and yet both groups somehow think that they are in a position to decide what constitutes discrimination and bigotry against Jews,” Rosenschein remarked.

Unfortunately, the antisemitic agenda of groups like SJP and JVP are often glossed over and misunderstood by university administrations.

“The more chancellors, administrators, university donors, faculty and students understand the real goals of these extremist organizations, the more allies we will have to stand up against their hate. We cannot expect the average American to know about these difficult issues; we must be willing to educate others,” Rosenschein concluded.

The audience was given an opportunity to pose questions to the panel at the conclusion of the prepared presentations.

Israel’s legal rights to expanded borders under international law

For the full text of the article see here by Peter Baum

No modern day conflict receives so much detailed and disproportionate attention than the Israel – Palestine Conflict. Unfortunately for reasons varying from extreme ignorance to extreme antisemitism much of the output for, decades has been disproportionately negative against Israel and biased and sympathetic towards the so-called Palestinian cause.

Many commentators spew utter garbage when attempting to justify their anti-Israel views by regularly referring to Israel’s continuous breaching of International Laws. Irrespective of whether or not UN Resolutions are binding under International Law (and they are not) the binding principles of Acquired Rights and Estoppel enshrine Israel’s legal rights under International Law for time immemorial.

Israel’s supporters are often not fully briefed thus fiction and revisionist history have morphed into fact.

a)  Balfour Declaration…..a statement of intent of British Foreign Policy, Nov 2, 1917

b)  Smuts Resolution, January 1919

c)   Officially endorsed by the Council of 10 on January 30, 1919 – Palestine as envisaged by the Balfour Declaration named as a Mandated State.

d)  The Smuts Resolution became Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant

e)  Paris Peace Conference, February 27, 1919

f)    Treaty of Versailles, June 28, 1919

g)  San Remo Resolution – the Magna Carta of the Jewish People, April 25, 1920

This latter resolution became Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres and retained its validity as an act of International Law when inserted into the Preamble of the Mandate for Palestine confirmed by 52 States of the League of Nations. Article 22 also implemented the Balfour Declaration and the San Remo Resolution. The Mandate has 28 Articles.

It is the Legal official creation of Israel / Palestine adopted by the 52 States and by the Supreme  Council of the Principal Allied Powers Under this Resolution the Principal Allied Powers charged the British Government (who accepted ) with the responsibility and legal obligation of putting into effect the Balfour Declaration and the borders of Israel / Palestine including Cis and Trans Jordan. It combined Article 22 of the League of Nations with the Balfour Declaration

Agreed by David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau defined Palestine as from Dan to Beersheba and also included TransJordan and other Nations, Saudi, Mesopotamia, Syria

League of Nations Covenant  Article 22, July 24, 1922

Article 5 – Great Britain shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to or in any way placed under the control of the  Government of any Foreign power

N.B. Great Britain illegally by unilaterally divided the land between West ( Cis ) and Trans (West ) Jordan and illegally gave the Golan Heights to France for Syria. The excision of Transjordan based on Article 26 is almost certainly illegal as it directly contravened Article 5 but too late to be rescinded

Article 6 shall facilitate Jewish immigration and shall encourage settlement by Jews on State Lands and Wastelands.

This principle of Acquired Rights once granted is recognized under a Treaty or other instruments do not expire with the expiration of the Treaty

UN General Assembly Partition Resolution

Not legally binding as General Assembly can only make recommendations, November 1947 and May 1948

The rights of the Jewish People deriving from the Mandate for Palestine remain in full force. This principle of International Law would still apply even if one of the parties to the Treaty failed to perform the obligations imposed on it e.g. the British Government in regard to the 1922 Mandate for Palestine.

The cowardly baying mob has had more than their share of rewarded publicity and it is time they are intellectually challenged.  This is just the start.