Friday, May 18, 2018

  • Friday, May 18, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon


(This is an expansion of a Twitter thread I wrote yesterday.)

The revelation that seemingly 53 of the dead on the Gaza border on Monday were Hamas and Islamic Jihad members doesn't only exonerate the IDF - it shows that the IDF acted in a remarkably professional way, exactly the opposite of how they are being painted.

It's simple math. We can assume that there were at least 48,000 non-Hamas members out of 50,000 people there. Many women and children were at the fence itself, in the front of the Hamas members who were often behind and giving instructions. As the ITIC writes:
Confirmation of Hamas involvement was ascertained by information gained by interrogating Palestinians who crossed the fence into Israeli territory. According to the interrogations, Hamas encourages and dispatches demonstrators (including children and adolescents) to the border to carry out violent acts, vandalize security installations, and even cross the fence. On the other hand, Hamas forbade its operatives to approach the fence, lest they be killed or captured by IDF forces, and therefore when they are present in the field (i.e., among the rioters) they wear civilian clothing.
Confirmation that Hamas members were told to take off their uniforms, to appear to be civilians, came from Hamas head Yahya Sinwar's statement in an interview:.

Picture the scene: real Gaza civilians, including women and children, are dispatched to the fence. Some of them, in their enthusiasm, try to cut the fence itself - including a 14 year old girl who was given the wire cutters from some unknown person.

Yet nearly 90% of those killed happened to be members of the (say) 4% from terror groups, members disguised as civilians, and possibly not at the fence itself but behind the scenes, directing the action.

Behind huge walls of smoke from burning tires that were specifically set to protect the ringleaders from IDF snipers.

It is astonishing accuracy.

It shows that the Israeli snipers are incredible at identifying potentially deadly behaviors and neutralizing them, while avoiding the tens of thousands of people deployed as chaff to hide the Hamas activities.

There really were human shields in Gaza. A captured Gazan said explicitly that  Hamas "tell women to go forward. They say to a woman: Go ahead, you’re a woman and the army doesn’t shoot women. They tell small children: Go ahead, the army doesn’t shoot small children.”

And somehow the IDF managed, for the most part, to avoid killing the human shields and to target the terrorists who were orchestrating what can only be considered a military operation using civilians as shields.

Israel's critics, if they really cared about saving innocent lives, should be using the IDF as a model for all armies and police in violent riots. Given a completely unprecedented and complicated situation, the IDF was exemplary in avoiding killing innocent people.

But Israel's critics have an agenda that rarely has anything to do with the humanitarian principles they pretend to espouse.





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  • Friday, May 18, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon
Matti Friedman in his New York Times op-ed talks about Hamas' ability to use the media to tell an anti-Israel story:

Most Western viewers experienced these events through a visual storytelling tool: a split screen. On one side was the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem in the presence of Ivanka Trump, evangelical Christian allies of the White House and Israel’s current political leadership — an event many here found curious and distant from our national life. On the other side was the terrible violence in the desperately poor and isolated territory. The juxtaposition was disturbing.

The attempts to breach the Gaza fence, which Palestinians call the March of Return, began in March and have the stated goal of erasing the border as a step toward erasing Israel. A central organizer, the Hamas leader Yehya Sinwar, exhorted participants on camera in Arabic to “tear out the hearts” of Israelis. But on Monday the enterprise was rebranded as a protest against the embassy opening, with which it was meticulously timed to coincide. The split screen, and the idea that people were dying in Gaza because of Donald Trump, was what Hamas was looking for.
In The Forward,  Lisa Goldman pretends to destroy Friedman's argument this way:
In fact, the May 14 demonstration was planned and announced many weeks ago. The date was chosen to coincide with the eve of Nakba Day, the day on which Palestinians mark their exile 70 years ago from the land now called Israel. It was not, as Friedman writes, chosen to coincide with the inauguration of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.
Why would the Great Return March organizers have chosen the eve of Nakba Day, and not Nakba Day itself?

A little research shows that the original date of the climax of the riots was indeed May 15, not May 14:

Al-Monitor, April 18:
Despite the protest organizers noting specific dates for the "Great Return March" — from Land Day, on March 30, to Nakba Day, on May 15 ....
+972, March 30:
Thousands of Palestinians are protesting in Gaza near the border fence with Israel on Friday. The protest marks the beginning of the “Great Return March,” a 45-day series of events planned to culminate on May 15, Nakba Day.
Middle East Eye, April 4:
In the Gaza Strip, where 1.3 million of the territory’s two million inhabitants are refugees, protest organisers have called for six weeks of demonstrations called the "Great March of Return" along the border of the besieged Palestinian enclave and Israel, starting on Land Day and culminating on 15 May for Nakba Day, marking the displacement of Palestinians by Israel in 1948.

The organizers did originally plan to protest on Tuesday as well, and Friedman is correct that the Monday protest was timed to coincide with the US Embassy opening. I couldn't find any announcement of May 14 protests until after the US Embassy opening schedule was publicized.

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said this pretty explicitly:
I must emphasize a great strategic goal accomplished on May 14. Our people in Gaza recorded, for the whole world to see, their testimony over the transfer of the United States embassy to Jerusalem and the declaration that Jerusalem is the capital of the occupation entity.
The Monday protest did its propaganda job so well that they canceled the protest that was meant to be the culmination of the entire Great Return March! When have Palestinians ever canceled a demonstration before?

This is hardly the mot objectionable part of Goldman's article in The Forward. She claims that every single Gaza death was civilian even after knowing that 88% of them were Hamas members in civilian clothing when she says "Israel’s population is four times that of Gaza. Imagine the reaction if 240 Israeli civilians were killed and 10,000 wounded in a single day in a military attack. Just the thought is unbearable." Her entire premise, that blaming Hamas for Palestinian deaths is "racist," is undone by the knowledge that IDF snipers somehow managed to shoot around the masses of civilians and hit the small  minority of disguised terrorists.

But this just shows how easily and willingly the anti-Israel "journalists" are willing to lie for their cause.





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Thursday, May 17, 2018

From Ian:

New video purportedly shows UN influence in Gaza clashes
A video taken by the Center for Near East Policy Research at an UNRWA school and refugee camp in the Gaza Strip allegedly shows that UNRWA encourages anti-Semitism and the realization of the 'right of return' through violent means.

In the video, which was presented to Fox News by journalist David Bedein, children at an UNRWA-run school are seen gathered at a school assembly while repeatedly chanting 'Jerusalem is ours' before Monday's violent riots at the Gaza border.

Students can also be seen burning Israeli flags.

One student said that the school teaches students "how to defend the land, how to recapture the land."

Another student said that "what was taken by force will be returned by force, with jihad and all its means."

A third student was explicit in the means by which the 'right of return' would be achieved: "with weapons, stabbings, and car ramming."

UNRWA reportedly closed its schools in Gaza on Monday and Tuesday, allowing students to participate in the riots at the Gaza border. At least 40,000 people participated in the riots, in which at least 60 people were killed. The majority of those killed were confirmed to be members of Hamas by the terrorist organization itself.


UN Palestinian refugee agency ‘part of the problem’ — Swiss minister
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees is fueling “unrealistic” hopes of return after 70 years and is therefore helping keep the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alive, Switzerland’s foreign minister said Thursday.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was established after Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, when around 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.

But Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis pointed out that the number of Palestinians characterized as refugees — the vast majority of whom are descendants of refugees — living in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza has swelled to more than five million.

“It is unrealistic that this dream [of return] will be fulfilled for all,” he said in an interview given to several German-language papers owned by the Swiss NZZ group.

“But UNRWA maintains this hope. For me, the question is whether UNRWA is part of the solution or part of the problem,” he said, concluding that “it is both.”

The UN agency, he said, “worked as a solution for a long time, but today it has become part of the problem.”

  • Thursday, May 17, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon
The New York Times has a backgrounder on the Gaza protests and the fence, which it claims is the source of the unrest.


The article briefly touches on the word "return" but downplays that as well:

Why is the conflict flaring up now?
The “March of Return,” as Palestinians are calling the protest campaign that began in March, was intended by its creators to publicize global awareness that about two-thirds of Gaza residents are considered Palestinian refugees.

I've covered the planned march since February. It is always exactly what it claimed: to overrun the border with Israel and force it to deal with thousands of people at once, aimed at forcing Israel to allow them to "return" - and destroy the Jewish state.

To call that "publicizing the refugees" is not close to the truth.





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 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column



I attended a lecture on Monday by Moti Toledo, who participated in Operation Solomon, the 36-hour airlift of about 15,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel while Ethiopia was in the throes of revolution.

Religious people can be excused for believing that miracles occurred during the operation. An El Al 747 with all its seats removed set the world record for number of people on a commercial aircraft, carrying 1088 passengers (two or three of them were babies born on the flight to Israel). According to the secular Toledo, the runway at that time was not considered long enough for even a normally-loaded 747, and the plane struggled to get airborne before it ran out of runway. An unexpected gust of wind came along from precisely the right direction, just in time. Make of this what you will.

This was after several covert operations had brought thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, including the fascinating “Operation Brothers,” a Mossad-operated diving resort in Sudan (a country as hostile to Israel as any you can think of) which operated during 1981-5, and succeeded in rescuing some 12,000Jews.

The efforts to get the Ethiopian Jews to Israel began after then Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef wrote a letter to Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Supposedly, Begin then called the head of the Mossad, and told him “Bring me my brothers, the Jews of Ethiopia.”

Toledo said that the story of the Ethiopian Jews illustrates the connection between the State of Israel and the Jewish people. Israel is and will always be a place of refuge and a protector of Jews everywhere. I can’t think of another country that has this kind of relationship with its people (and I am using “people” in its tribal sense). Perhaps if there will be an independent Kurdistan, there could be one more.

He also mentioned that when he gave a presentation in Europe, a non-Jewish person said to him that they too wished they had a place of refuge, the way Jews did. It reminded me of what an African-American Muslim said to my wife and I when we were about to make aliyah in 1979: “I wish we knew where our home was.”

Israel today is experiencing what Ofir Haivry called a “demographic miracle.” Everyone knows that when economic well-being and educational level increase, fertility goes down. This is true in Europe, North America, East and Southwest Asia, and the Middle East, including Palestinian and Israeli Arabs. But not among Jewish Israelis, where each woman has an average of 3.1 children (and this number is rising, despite Israel’s economic success). Haivry notes that this is not mostly because of a high birthrate among Haredim, but because the majority of secular and non-Haredi observant Jews are having more children. I can attest to this anecdotally – the streets and parks here are full of Jewish children and pregnant women.

Haivry attributes this to the strong family orientation of Jewish Israelis. He writes,

Throughout Israeli society, the educational and moral welfare of children as well as the continuity of the family remains at the center of parents’ (and grandparents’) lives, not only emotionally but as a matter of almost day-to-day practice.

But this is only part of it – and I think it is a small part, because close family ties characterize many countries in which there is nevertheless an inverse correlation between development and birthrate. He continues – and here I think he hits the nail on its head:

This peculiarly strong culture draws sustenance from and in turn informs the equally strong sense of national solidarity. Thanks to that strongly shared national identity, Israeli Jews are unusually willing to make personal sacrifices when it comes to welcoming new Jewish immigrants into the state and into their homes—and also when it comes to stoically enduring protracted periods of violence and bloodshed perpetrated by intractable enemies. As traditional communities of origin have receded in importance elsewhere in the world, the shared sense of an Israeli nation-family underlies the habitual instinct of most Israeli Jews to regard other Jews, and especially those in Israel itself, primarily as family members rather than merely as fellow citizens.

In a word, the secret is Zionism.

This is precisely why Menachem Begin asked the Mossad to bring him his Ethiopian brothers. This is why, when my own son told me that his wife was going to have a fourth child, he said – only half-jokingly – “I did it for the demographic struggle of the Jewish people.”

Having children is a joy, especially when one gets older. But in the beginning it means that parents have to sacrifice some of their own well-being for the sake of the children. There are adventures that they will not have, and pleasures that they will have to forgo. In highly self-centered societies, people often prefer not to make such sacrifices. They choose travel, extended education or careers over children. If they do have children, they have them later in life, so they have fewer of them. 

This is why the highly developed native cultures of Europe, for example, are phasing themselves out of history with fertility rates far below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. And worries about their shrinking work force which must support an increasingly aged population have led them to welcome the immigration that will ultimately put an end to those cultures.

And this is why liberal Jews will soon be disappearing as a distinct group in American society: their affluence together with a lack of national feeling – which is also the reason they are attracted to anti-Israel politics – leads them to put their personal gratification before any Jewish consciousness that they may have. They have fewer children, and don’t see a downside to intermarriage.

This also applies to the bitter anti-Zionist Left in Israel, the ones that advise their (few) children to refuse to be serve in the IDF. But for this very reason – they too will be gone soon – I don’t see them as a major threat to Israel’s national consciousness.

Someone said to me at Toledo’s lecture that while the immigration of the Ethiopians was a big success, their absorption has been less so. I disagree. We are just beginning to see the first generation of Ethiopian Jews born in Israel, and they are Israeli in every way. The usual problems of immigrants – prejudice, crime, poverty – are fading away, and in another generation or two will be gone. Jews from Ethiopia are finding their places in our society, including having plenty of children of their own.

Today Israel is militarily the most powerful nation in the region – we’ve just demonstrated that to the Iranian regime – and an economic powerhouse, but we are also vulnerable due to our small size. Begin realized that we need more than military strength to survive – we need to care about each other and our nation.

And despite the sometimes deafening disagreements, we do.





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From Ian:

Matti Friedman (NYTs): Falling for Hamas’s Split-Screen Fallacy
The press coverage on Monday was a major Hamas success in a war whose battlefield isn’t really Gaza, but the brains of foreign audiences.

Israeli soldiers facing Gaza have no good choices. They can warn people off with tear gas or rubber bullets, which are often inaccurate and ineffective, and if that doesn’t work, they can use live fire. Or they can hold their fire to spare lives and allow a breach, in which case thousands of people will surge into Israel, some of whom — the soldiers won’t know which — will be armed fighters. (On Wednesday a Hamas leader, Salah Bardawil, told a Hamas TV station that 50 of the dead were Hamas members. The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed three others.) If such a breach occurs, the death toll will be higher. And Hamas’s tactic, having proved itself, would likely be repeated by Israel’s enemies on its borders with Syria and Lebanon.

Knowledgeable people can debate the best way to deal with this threat. Could a different response have reduced the death toll? Or would a more aggressive response deter further actions of this kind and save lives in the long run? What are the open-fire orders on the India-Pakistan border, for example? Is there something Israel could have done to defuse things beforehand?

These are good questions. But anyone following the response abroad saw that this wasn’t what was being discussed. As is often the case where Israel is concerned, things quickly became hysterical and divorced from the events themselves. Turkey’s president called it “genocide.” A writer for The New Yorker took the opportunity to tweet some of her thoughts about “whiteness and Zionism,” part of an odd trend that reads America’s racial and social problems into a Middle Eastern society 6,000 miles away. The sicknesses of the social media age — the disdain for expertise and the idea that other people are not just wrong but villainous — have crept into the worldview of people who should know better.

For someone looking out from here, that’s the real split-screen effect: On one side, a complicated human tragedy in a corner of a region spinning out of control. On the other, a venomous and simplistic story, a symptom of these venomous and simplistic times.
Bret Stephens (NYTs): Gaza’s Miseries Have Palestinian Authors
Notice, also, the old pattern at work: Avow and pursue Israel’s destruction, then plead for pity and aid when your plans lead to ruin.

The world now demands that Jerusalem account for every bullet fired at the demonstrators, without offering a single practical alternative for dealing with the crisis.

But where is the outrage that Hamas kept urging Palestinians to move toward the fence, having been amply forewarned by Israel of the mortal risk? Or that protest organizers encouraged women to lead the charges on the fence because, as The Times’s Declan Walsh reported, “Israeli soldiers might be less likely to fire on women”? Or that Palestinian children as young as 7 were dispatched to try to breach the fence? Or that the protests ended after Israel warned Hamas’s leaders, whose preferred hide-outs include Gaza’s hospital, that their own lives were at risk?

Elsewhere in the world, this sort of behavior would be called reckless endangerment. It would be condemned as self-destructive, cowardly and almost bottomlessly cynical.

The mystery of Middle East politics is why Palestinians have so long been exempted from these ordinary moral judgments. How do so many so-called progressives now find themselves in objective sympathy with the murderers, misogynists and homophobes of Hamas? Why don’t they note that, by Hamas’s own admission, some 50 of the 62 protesters killed on Monday were members of Hamas? Why do they begrudge Israel the right to defend itself behind the very borders they’ve been clamoring for years for Israelis to get behind?

Why is nothing expected of Palestinians, and everything forgiven, while everything is expected of Israelis, and nothing forgiven?

That’s a question to which one can easily guess the answer. In the meantime, it’s worth considering the harm Western indulgence has done to Palestinian aspirations.

No decent Palestinian society can emerge from the culture of victimhood, violence and fatalism symbolized by these protests. No worthy Palestinian government can emerge if the international community continues to indulge the corrupt, anti-Semitic autocrats of the Palestinian Authority or fails to condemn and sanction the despotic killers of Hamas. And no Palestinian economy will ever flourish through repeated acts of self-harm and destructive provocation.

If Palestinians want to build a worthy, proud and prosperous nation, they could do worse than try to learn from the one next door. That begins by forswearing forever their attempts to destroy it.
Col Kemp: Hamas are using their own people as expendable tools. Don’t fall for their games
Many have condemned Israel for using excessive and disproportionate force. I cannot assess every incident, but I can say for sure that this is not the case. The IDF has strict rules of engagement, similar to our own, which conform to the laws of war and, when appropriate, to human rights law. IDF commanders exercise tight control over use of force, and I stood beside a battalion commander on the border as he directed operations in his sector.

Those who say it would be no big deal if the crowds reached the border fail to understand the potentially catastrophic implications. If they succeeded in breaking down the fence, thousands would pour through, intent on violence against Israeli civilians. Among them would be armed terrorists with orders to reach border communities and carry out mass murder. Some villages are just a few minutes’ dash from the border. Hamas social media provided Google maps marked with routes from the border to the communities they intended to attack. Had that horrendous scenario occurred, the IDF would have defended these communities with lethal force and many more people would have died.

All of this is no doubt hard to fully understand, especially if you are conditioned to see Israel in a bad light. But those who wrongly accuse Israel of using too much force play into the hands of Hamas.

I am in no doubt that the international reaction to conflict in Gaza has validated Hamas’s human shield tactics and encouraged them to step up their violence. This has contributed to the death toll. Anyone who is genuinely interested in human rights and concerned to improve the wretched lives of the people of Gaza should support Israel’s lawful efforts to defend its sovereign territory and condemn Hamas, which so malevolently oppresses its people and throws away the lives of innocent men, women and children.

  • Thursday, May 17, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon


On Tuesday, COGAT reported:

Earlier today, Kerem Shalom Crossing was opened and COGAT coordinated the entry of humanitarian aid, despite the recent riots by the security fence.

The aid included:
4 trucks carrying medical supplies from the PA
2 trucks carrying medical supplies donated by the IDF
2 trucks carrying medical supplies donated by UNICEF
119 tons of medical supplies

COGAT will continue to work with the international community to ensure the fast and efficient coordination of humanitarian goods to the Gaza Strip.
Yes, the IDF itself donated 25% of the medical supplies.

Hamas responded this way:

In middle of the night, trucks loaded with Israeli medical supplies were returned from the Gaza Strip to Israel.

Why? Because the humanitarian aid came from Israel. The Hamas terrorist organization prefers that Gazans die from lack of proper medical care, rather than to receive equipment from Israel.

Israel, despite the riots and terrorist activities on the security fence, had sent medical aid, which is now being returned in its entirety, because Hamas does not care for the lives of Gazans.
The aid included IV fluids, bandages, pediatric equipment and disinfectants, as well as fuel for hospital generators.

The Hamas-led organizers of the Palestinian protests along the Gaza border confirmed that they would not accept medicine “from the murderers of our people,” despite the widespread shortages of medical supplies in the coastal enclave.

The terrorist group accused Israel of “trying to improve its black image” by sending the humanitarian aid.

This is again a manifestation of the Arab honor/shame mentality, where appearances are more important than reality, and "honor" is more important than life itself.

On the flip side, Arabs will make a big deal about how much they are helping their brethren in Gaza - and do little.

The most glaring example is Egypt, whose president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi publicly instructed his country to accept injured people from Gaza for treatment.

Even though the Gaza Health Ministry claims 2700 people were injured, 1360 by gunfire, so far Egypt has accepted only three people for medical treatment.

Appearance are everything. People are worth more dead than alive, as long as their deaths can be blamed on Israel. This is the mentality of the Gaza and Arab leadership. It is reprehensible - and it works.





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  • Thursday, May 17, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon


The story of the eight month old girl who was supposedly killed by Israeli teargas was quickly questioned when reporters, looking for more details on the story, found that there was more to it than Hamas propaganda indicated:

 On Tuesday, a Gaza doctor told the Associated Press health official that the Hamas claim that an 8-month-old baby died from Israeli tear gas was inaccurate. He attested that the baby, Layla Ghandour, had a preexisting medical condition which caused her death.
The baby was literally at the border fence at the time, taken by her 12-year old nephew towards his grandmother who was there.

Reliefweb is a UN-run website that says, "We provide reliable and timely information, enabling humanitarian workers to make informed decisions and to plan effective response. We collect and deliver key information, including the latest reports, maps and infographics from trusted sources."

One of their "trusted sources" is Islamic Relief, a UK-based NGO, which issued this statement reproduced on the UN site:

Over 50 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli gunfire over the past few days, including an eight-month-old baby, and more than 2,700 people have been injured. The victims have been involved in largely peaceful protests near the Israeli border which have come under fire.
No one on the planet claims that the girl was shot - except a UK-based NGO with links to Hamas.

This is what the UN considers to be "reliable and timely information."

The idea that an NGO might also be an anti-Israel propaganda outlet is, apparently, a bonus for the UN.




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  • Thursday, May 17, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon

TOI reports:
Several homes in the Israeli city of Sderot were hit by machine gun fire, apparently fired by terrorists in the Gaza Strip, causing damage but no injuries, in one of three cross-border exchanges on Wednesday, the army said.
According to the city of Sderot, the shots were aimed at an army aircraft that had been flying overhead, and the bullets struck the homes as they fell back down to earth.
 The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the "military wing" of Fatah which is headed by Palestinian dictator Mahmoud Abbas, takes credit for this - and doesn't mention anything about targeting aircraft. They claim that they shot at an Israeli patrol as well as the town of Sderot directly, calling it "an initial response to the massacre committed by the occupation against peaceful demonstrators in the eastern Gaza Strip."

They claim that they inflicted injuries on "soldiers" and that they will release a video of their operation.

Fatah is of course jealous of Hamas for taking the initiative for the "Great Return March" and wants to be perceived as being just as active as its rival.




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Wednesday, May 16, 2018

  • Wednesday, May 16, 2018
  • Elder of Ziyon


On Sunday, 114 Arabs were killed.

On Monday, 30 more.

On Tuesday, 26 more.

But the media didn't think that Arabs dying is an interesting story. Those people had the misfortune of being killed by other Arabs. If they had been killed by Jews, then suddenly there would be interest.

Instead, the news agencies sent hundreds of reporters to "report" on something that they already decided would be a massacre of innocent, unarmed civilians before a single shot was fired.

The reporters were busy falsely accusing Israel of shooting randomly into crowds of innocent unarmed civilians who were simply protesting the "blockade." Or the US embassy.  Or their frustration. (Most reporters pretended that the protests, named the Great return March, had anything to do with "return" to overrun Israel based on its having the audacity to exist since 1948.)

If it was, say, Egypt killing Hamas members at the border, the media would have cheered them. But when Jews act in self-defense, they are the ones who are vilified.






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From Ian:

Noah Pollak: Making Up International Law For Fun and Sport
Media coverage of Hamas's attacks on the Israeli border have been, as usual, a dumpster fire of idiocy and ignorance. Hamas itself now admits that "50 of the 62 martyrs" were card-carrying terrorists. One of the heads of Hamas just boasted to an interviewer: "This is not peaceful resistance." No facts or admissions will intrude on the media narrative, which is that Israel is diabolically slaughtering civilians because Israelis enjoy killing people.

One of the tropes that is being repeated everywhere is this one, promoted here with complete credulity by the New York Times:
International law allowed for the use of lethal force only as a last resort in the face of an immediate threat to life or serious injury, Mr. Colville noted. Those laws "appear to have been ignored again and again," he added.

"An attempt to approach, or crossing or damaging the green line fence do not amount to a threat to life or serious injury and are not sufficient grounds for the use of live ammunition," he said.


This farcical claim originates with "human rights" groups such as Human Rights Watch (whose Israel director, Omar Shakir, is a BDS activist) and Amnesty International (which calls for an arms embargo on Israel).

The problem is this alleged requirement of "international law" doesn't exist. It is made-up, an example of the new trend of human rights groups claiming "international law" that doesn't actually exist in, say, the Geneva Conventions, but is merely what these groups wish was enshrined in international law because it gives their hatred of Israel a sheen of moral high-mindedness and impartiality.
‘The Ugly American’: Official Palestinian Authority Daily Demonizes US History and Politics in Attack on Jerusalem Embassy Move
The Palestinian Authority’s main daily newspaper launched a vitriolic attack on the United States this week, following the opening on Monday of the new American Embassy in the Israeli capital, Jerusalem.

In language reminiscent of Palestinian propaganda targeting the legitimacy of Zionism and Israel, an official editorial in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on May 15 portrayed the US as a nation bereft of moral principles, and a creature of colonialism.

“None of the American administrations were noted for nobility of spirit or for human traits such as compassion, tolerance and understanding of the other,” the editorial — translated by analysts at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) — stated. “America has always employed brutal policies towards small and poor nations. That is how it behaved toward the Native Americans, whom it called ‘Indians,’ during the violent and blood-soaked period of its birth.”

The editorial went on to strongly recommend the writings of Munir Akash — a Syrian-born American academic who has previously accused the US of promoting the mass sterilization of women in the developing world.

The editorial brandished “The Ugly American” — a factually-based political novel about US diplomacy in Southeast Asia that caused a sensation in the late 1950s when it was first published, but is a less-familiar cultural reference today — as the main evidence of US malign intent throughout its 242-year history.

“It would be difficult to continue relating all the stories that appear in The Ugly American, which are full of bloodshed, systematic violence, a culture of brutality and attacks on small nations,” the editorial asserted — listing alleged traits of the US that are routinely associated with Israel and Jews in the Palestinian media

Douglas Murray: The Suicide Of Europe
"The civilization born of Judeo-Christian values, ancient Greek philosophy and the discoveries of the Enlightenment is staring at the abyss, brought there by its own hand," says Douglas Murray, author of "The Strange Death of Europe," in a new PragerU video. "To put it starkly: Europe is committing suicide."

"How did this happen?" asks Murray. "It’s a complicated story, but there are two major causes. The first is the mass movement of peoples into Europe. This has been going on steadily since the end of World War II but sped up massively in the migration crisis of 2015, when more than a million migrants poured into Europe from the Middle East, North Africa and East Asia."

The second cause, argues Murray, is that "Europe lost faith in itself — its beliefs, its traditions and even its very legitimacy."


Kialo advertises itself as, “The only platform designed specifically for rational debates,” but based on its recent, sponsored tweet, it is anything but. Instead, Kialo is just one more vehicle for far-left Big Brothering ala Facebook. The tweet in question reads:

“Is it ok to physically modify yourself as a symbol of a religious bond? What if your parents do it while you're still an infant? Join the Kialo debate on banning infant male circumcision!”

Kialo pretends that it offers a way to have balanced debate “with clear, concise arguments from both sides. That makes it easy to weigh the pros and cons without all that editorial noise.”
But here we have a very leading few sentences in a sponsored tweet. Kialo is telling the Twitterverse what to think about circumcision. They are putting doubt in your minds just by asking the question of whether people have any right to “modify” themselves as a symbol of a religious bond.
And in fact, the question itself is antisemitic. The only people who “modify” themselves as a symbol of a religious bond are the Jews. Muslims circumcise for other reasons.
Notice, as well, that you don’t see anyone complaining about the lip-stretching or scarification practices of some African tribes, or the tooth-sharpening practice of the Mayans and Balinese. How about the neck-accentuation practices of some Thai women in which they wear up to 25 coils, each weighing four and a half pounds, beginning at age 5, to elongate their necks?


No. You don’t hear anyone complaining about any of that. But if you did, it would not be framed as "mutilation" but as diversity. Woe to anyone who dares to cringe or shudder at the nature of these practices, lest he be accused of closed-mindedness and prejudice.
Of course, if you really wanted to address religious mutilation, it would not be circumcision, with its proven health benefits, but female genital mutilation (FGM). Female genital mutilation is known to cause "recurrent infections, difficulty urinating and passing menstrual flow, chronic pain, the development of cysts, an inability to get pregnant, complications during childbirth, and fatal bleeding. There are no known health benefits."
Only when it comes to the Jews, it seems, do people think they are justified in saying we have no right to practice our religion. That our beliefs are wrong, our Torah is wrong, our God wrong. That our age old rite is "mutilation."
But here’s the thing: Jews are obligated to circumcise sons. Banning circumcision effectively bans Judaism. Think how it was in Soviet Russia, how Jews risked death to have their sons circumcised in secret, in the middle of the night. Think how the Romans outlawed Jewish rites like circumcision and how, when Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai criticized them, he and his son were forced into hiding for 13 years in order to evade certain execution. We did not risk death to arrive at the point where our religion and fate can still be debated by outsiders.
And yet, Kialo dares to ask, “What if your parents do it while you’re still an infant?”
With this question, Kialo is making a statement, telling the world to doubt the morality of something that Jews have done for thousands of years. And judging by the responses, Kialo’s implied message has been received, loud and clear.

How, by the way, is it even a debate if Kialo has prejudiced you from the get go? Take a look at the way the “debate” is framed. The question is: “should circumcision be banned” and it’s offered as a choice, pro or con.

But it’s natural for people to choose arguments in favor of things. People like to be positive. They like to be for, and not against things. This is why, for instance, the pro-abortion crowd frames its position as “pro-choice” while telling the world that anyone who disagrees with them is “anti-choice.” And so, given the choice of being pro or anti a ban on circumcision, people are going to take the bait, and choose pro.
Was there a choice about the wording? Of course. Instead framing the question in terms of a ban, Kialo might have written, for instance: “should circumcision be permitted?” and made that as a pro/con choice. It’s clear that the chosen phrasing employing the word "ban"was meant to prejudice participants against Jewish ritual. And at that point, we have to wonder: why should a basic Jewish practice be the subject of “debate?” Why should it even be discussed by people not Jewish?
Can anyone really tell us that we have no right to observe our religion, as mandated by God since Father Abraham was himself circumcised?
Kialo claims it makes it easy to weigh the pros and cons of an argument by giving you “clear, concise arguments from both sides. That makes it easy to weigh the pros and cons without all that editorial noise.”


But here we have a sponsored tweet, issued just as the right to circumcision for non-medical reasons is being debated in Iceland. And the sponsored tweet suggests that the practice of an ancient Jewish rite abrogates an infant’s human rights. How is that NOT editorial noise?
And of course, people responding to the tweet take the bait and run with it. Read the responses. The word “mutilation” crops up numerous times.
Editorial silence, or bias by selective omission, by the way, also provides a kind of “editorial noise” by filtering what it is readers are allowed to see and hear. if you click the link in the tweet, and read the backgrounder for the debate, one paragraph out of five is given over to a detailed explanation of why Muslims perform circumcision. There is, on the other hand, not one word, let alone a paragraph on the reasons Jews perform circumcision. This, though clearly the Muslim rite is based on the Jewish rite, the Jewish rite of circumcision having begun thousands of years before Mohammed was born, the Jewish people having been the first to practice this ritual.
So effectively, Kialo’s tweet tells you to question the Jewish practice of Brit Milah, the Jewish circumcision rite, but tells you absolutely nothing about why Jews perform this ritual. No one should be surprised. Bias by selective omission is a classic tactic of the left. What they keep you from hearing is just as important as what they whisper into your adorable little subconscious.
Which is why this, is utter garbage:
“With Kialo, you can easily visualize every aspect of a complex debate, so you can be more thoughtful about the issues that matter to you and the world.
“Empowering reason.
“Kialo.”
No wait: 

via GIPHY




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