From Ian:
Congressional Testimony: Anti-Boycott Laws Needed to Protect US, Allies from Economic Attack
The ultimate goal of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and its leaders is to delegitimize the state of Israel, legislators, legal experts and business leaders agreed in a congressional hearing Tuesday. The hearing was held by the Subcommittee on National Security of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform.
“[BDS] is a familiar playback for people who have worked in various sanctions,” Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation of Defense of Democracies, told the hearing. “It’s a very a familiar playback about delegitimization for political ends, about establishing a country as an international pariah, and about using a combination of state action and private action in an economic and financial warfare campaign against that country.”
Dubowitz suggested that boycotts of U.S. allies set a dangerous precedent for the future, saying, “America and its allies must prepare for an increasingly dangerous era of political, economic, and financial warfare targeting the United States. As always, Israel is a canary in the coal mine.”
Tuesday’s hearing came in the wake of increased calls in European capitals and on American college campuses for boycott and divestment campaigns targeting Israel, which have sparked a contentious debate within the US government over how to best deal with the issue. Dubowitz’s comments echoed the tenor of the hearing, as members of Congress and witnesses identified BDS as a tactic that seeks to demonize Israel and stunt the peace process, and which harms both Palestinians and Israeli Arabs.
Fighting The Coming EU Economic War Against Israel
In this post, we focus on the testimony of Northwestern Univ. Law Professor Eugene Kontorovich
Prof. Kontorovich’s full written presentation contains important background as to the role Congress can play in opposing BDS consistent with U.S. law, policy and history of involvement in the issue. The subjects covered include:
- Background on Economic Warfare Against Israel
- U.S. Policy on Boycotts of Israeli Entities
- The Scope of Anti-boycott laws
- The Argument that Boycotts of Israel are Justified or Required by International law
- Potential European Measures and their Implications for International Trade Law
Here is Prof. Kontorovich’s appearance before Congress:
Fighting The Economic War on Israel
Prof. Eugene Kontorovich, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Committee, July 28, 2015
Epic House Testimony – BDS in business of “Manipulation, Violence and Destruction”
Today we focus on the testimony of Daniel Birnbaum, CEO of SodaStream International.
We previously have featured the success story of SodaStream in hiring Palestinians and bringing Israeli Jews, Arabs and Palestinians together:
Because it represents peace and coexistence, SodaStream has been a prime target of BDS, including failed attempts to get SodaStream commercials banned at the SuperBowl:
There were attempts to force SodaStream to close its West Bank factory.
When it decided to move the production to an Israeli factory for business reasons unrelated to BDS, the BDS movement nonetheless continued to boycott SodaStream — proof positive that the complaints about a factory in the West Bank were just pretext.
In France the lies spread by BDS about SodaStream were so extreme that SodaStream won in French court case against a boycott group.
In his congressional testimony, Birnbaum revealed the full depth and breadth of the attacks on SodaStream — threats, sabotage, and disruption around the world.
Birnbaum’s written testimony is embedded below, and contains extensive documentation of the BDS war against SodaStream.
BDS = "Manipulation, Violence and Destruction"
Impact of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement (The full hour)
U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, 28 July 2015,
PMW: Vote ‘no’ on anti-Israel resolution: Send a message for peace education
The following is a statement [Itamar] Marcus printed and handed out to the participants on the third day of the conference, criticizing the anti-Israel resolution and calling to vote against it as a vote for peace.
Before the 7th World Congress of Education International is a resolution blaming Israel for various things that are claimed to obstruct Palestinian education.
There are many things that definitely do obstruct a decent Palestinian education that were left out of this resolution and I want to mention a few of them.
On a Saturday afternoon in 1978, a young Israeli couple named Rebecca and Yossi took their two children, Ilan and Roi, aged three and six, on a bus outing with other families. Near Haifa, terrorists attacked and hijacked their bus and eventually murdered 37, including 12 children.
One of the terrorists, named Dalal Mughrabi, threw the hand grenade that killed Rebecca, her two children, and blew off Yossi’s legs.
The Palestinian Authority has named three schools after Mughrabi. It has named dozens of sporting events, summer camps, educational courses, even a city square, all in honor of this murderer of children.
What do children who study in schools named after Mughrabi learn from this? Official PA TV interviewed children in a Mughrabi school.
One teenager said: “My life’s ambition is to reach the level that the martyr fighter Dalal Mughrabi reached.”
Thanks to PA education, that girl’s life ambition is to reach the level of the murderer of 12 children and 25 adults.
The Supreme Court’s gift to the Boycott movement
A new study published by Legal Grounds, a campaign advocating on behalf of the legal basis for Israel’s legitimate control of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, points the finger at none other than the Supreme Court.
The argument set forth by Legal Grounds is convincing: While the government has had an official policy since 1967 of rejecting the claim of occupation in Judea and Samaria, the Supreme Court considers these territories under occupation. This gives ammunition to those who want to censure Israel for illegal activities, by allowing them to cite Israel’s own Supreme Court as a legal source claiming these lands are under occupation.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must point out that Legal Grounds is a campaign which I fully support and which I have helped out in the past. Its agenda, attempting to change the discourse with respect to the legality of Judea and Samaria and to stand up for Israel’s legal rights to these areas, is of great importance to me both as a lawyer and as an Israeli.
INTERNATIONAL LAW is unclear as to the legal status of Judea and Samaria, and Israel has good reasons to claim that these lands are not under occupation.
In fact, the Mandate for Palestine clearly defined these lands as being meant for a future Jewish state. The mandate recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” This is the last binding legal document addressing this area which is available to this day.
Israel’s Best Diplomat Offers Hope to the Entire Middle East
When George Deek uses the word “we” in a conversation, it is not entirely clear whether he means “we Palestinians,” or rather “we Israelis,” or perhaps “we Westerners,” or even “we Arabs.” At the age of 30, with a constant five-o’clock shadow compensating for his baby-face and thin silhouette, he is both an Israeli diplomat, representing the Jewish state, and a descendant of a Palestinian family who fled its home during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. His cousins live today in Canada, Dubai, Damascus, and Ramallah, and some of them are considered by the United Nations to be refugees of that same war.
This personal tension came fully into being last summer, during the war between Israel and Hamas, when Deek was Israel’s chargé d’affaires in Oslo. He presented Israel’s positions and defended its actions, while Norwegian TV networks were screening endless footage of destruction coming out of the Gaza Strip. He explained how the Israeli army works, without ever serving in it. He spoke on behalf of Israel, when none of his viewers and listeners knew that he was actually (also) a Palestinian.
A few weeks later, at the end of September, he decided to unveil his personal story for the first time. In a lecture in the House of Literature in Oslo, during the launching of the Norwegian translation of Benny Morris’ history book dedicated to the 1948 war, Deek recounted how his grandfather fled Jaffa and reached Lebanon, how he insisted on getting back into Israel when the war ended, and how he raised his family in the nascent Jewish state. He talked about the personal suffering of his own family, now scattered all around the world, but also about the fact that “the Palestinians have become slaves to the past, held captive by the chains of resentment, prisoners in the world of frustration and hate.”
But he talked mainly about the way forward, and mainly about hope. He spoke about his neighbor Avraham, a Holocaust survivor, who taught him always to look to the future and not to the past. He gave his listeners a sense of why a young Arab-Palestinian has decided to dedicate his career to the Israeli Foreign Service. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the speech quickly went viral under the somewhat ironic title “the best speech an Israeli diplomat ever held.”
Is It Good for the Jews?: Anti-Semitism and the New Europe
The problems are real enough. Jihadists pose a grave threat to Jewish life, and the jihad in Syria and Iraq, so easily accessible for European jihadists who wish to travel back and forth between their homes and the battlefield, means that this threat will endure for years to come. Neo-Nazis have seats in the European Parliament for the first time in its history, and the economic and immigration crises of the eurozone mean that populist (and in some cases, anti-Semitic) parties of the far right and far left will continue to attract support in future elections.
Whenever Israel fights its periodic conflicts with Hamas or Hezbollah, Jews in Europe will feel the backlash. In July and August 2014, as the bombs and rockets began to fly between Gaza and southern Israel, anti-Semitism started its predictable rise in European cities. In France, riot police were needed to protect synagogues and Jewish shops were burnt out. In Britain, the highest-ever number of anti-Semitic incidents was recorded. In Germany, chants of “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” were heard coming from anti-Israel demonstrators.
These outbreaks of anti-Semitism are most acute during times of conflict, but their background hum has a more permanent feel for many Jews. In 2013, before the most recent Gaza war and before the Paris and Copenhagen and Brussels attacks, 60 percent of Swedish Jews told opinion pollsters that they always or frequently avoided wearing or carrying anything in public that might identify them as Jewish. Forty-nine percent of French Jews and 45 percent of Belgian Jews said the same. These figures were lower in other parts of Europe, but Jews in those places look to France and Belgium and wonder if that is where their own societies are heading. Such fears are not compatible with what European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor calls a “normative Jewish life.”
It would be easy to imagine that this anti-Semitism is uniform and ubiquitous, but what is striking about anti-Semitism in Europe is how much it varies from place to place. A snapshot of this asymmetry can be seen in a series of experiments conducted during the past six months, in which various journalists donned Jewish garb and walked the streets of European cities, accompanied by people wearing hidden cameras to record any anti-Semitic comments (or worse) from passersby. This was done in London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Rome, Copenhagen, Manchester, and Bradford, and the results show the danger in trying to squeeze the story of European anti-Semitism into a single narrative.
New Report Finds 53% Rise in Recorded UK Antisemitic Incidents in First Half of 2015
Reported antisemitic incidents in the U.K. were up 53 percent in the first half of 2015 as compared to the corresponding period the year before, the British Community Security Trust (CST) revealed in a new study.
The upward trend of recorded antisemitic incidents in 2015 was consistent with the past three years, with 473 events reported between January and June 2015, compared to 309 in 2014 and 223 incidents in 2013.
CST, a charity that oversees security efforts in Britain’s Jewish communities, said 44 of this year’s attacks were considered violent, with two of them constituting “extreme violence” or threat to life. But the overwhelming majority of incidents were the 353 cases of what the CST called “abusive behavior,” including hateful graffiti, antisemitic vituperation and abuse through social media or hate-mail. Thirty-five incidents included damage and desecration to Jewish property and 36 included direct antisemitic threats.
Notably, CST backed down however from expressing explicit concern at an actual rise in antisemitism, indicating that the uptick in recorded incidents seems to reflect more consternation among the Jewish community following deadly terrorist attacks in Paris at a kosher supermarket and Copenhagen at a synagogue in January.
MK Oren: Bring Pollard Home Now, Not in Five Years
Kulanu MK and former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren on Thursday told Arutz Sheva that the government should make every effort to bring released spy Jonathan Pollard to Israel as soon as possible.
Pollard, who is to be released from prison in November after serving a 30-year term, will not be allowed to leave the U.S. under the terms of his parole for at least five years. Oren said that the government should make every effort to convince the U.S. to waive this condition of his release.
“It would have of course been better had Jonathan been released many years ago, but better now than never,” said Oren. “He needs to begin rehabilitating himself physically and spiritually, in order to prepare himself to come home to Israel.”
Oren said that as Israeli ambassador to the U.S., he had visited Pollard several times in prison. “It was shocking to see a man who had been stuck in jail for 26 years at the time,” said Oren. “As a nation, we took responsibility for Jonathan's actions. We apologized to the U.S., and I personally handed President Obama asking for mercy, not a pardon. I am very happy that the parole committee decided to release him.”
Lawyer: Jonathan Pollard ‘Shocked and Speechless’ Over His Upcoming Release
Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard reacted with shock and disbelief when his lawyer, Eliot Lauer, delivered the news to him that he would be released this upcoming November, Israel’s Channel 2 reported on Tuesday.
“I immediately called Pollard after the announcement,” said Lauer. “He was shocked and speechless.”
“He had very little to say besides thanking God and everyone who supported him,” Lauer added. “He’s very happy for Esther (Pollard’s wife) who fought for his freedom for all of these years.”
“I am looking forward to being reunited with my beloved wife Esther,” Pollard said through his attorneys. “I would like to thank the many thousands of well-wishers in the United States, in Israel, and throughout the world, who provided grass roots support by attending rallies, sending letters, making phone calls to elected officials, and saying prayers for my welfare. I am deeply appreciative of every gesture, large or small.”
Lauer also said that he was personally thrilled by the news. “We really waited for this day to come. We are happy that finally he will be able to unite with Esther after 30 years in prison.”
The secret plan to turn the Gaza pullout into a peace effort
Over 10 years ago, many months before the target date set for Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip, a dozen Israeli and Palestinian experts convened secretly in a European resort. They were there in an effort to work out a joint plan to transform what was devised by late prime minister Ariel Sharon as a purely unilateral move — evacuating the settlements there and pulling out the IDF — into a well-coordinated initiative which would allow the parties to re-engage in the stalled peace process.
Unfortunately, I am still not allowed to disclose the names of the participants — except those of my late colleague Ze’ev Schiff and myself — or the identity of the European prime minister who hosted the meetings. But among those attending were some of Yasser Arafat’s top advisers, including from Gaza, as well as several Israelis who previously held high-ranking positions in different branches of the government.
The sessions were focused on drafting a document offering a new approach to the withdrawal from Gaza. Three days of lively — sometimes heated — discussions ended with an agreed 10-page paper titled: “Disengagement towards Re-engagement: A policy of unilateral disengagement and mutual responsibilities.”
The Palestinian participants were in frequent contact with their leadership in Ramallah. The Israelis — none of them close to the government — planned to present the proposals to Sharon once back home.
Herzog: Gaza disengagement was ‘a mistake’ for security
Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog on Tuesday said the Gaza disengagement was “a mistake” from a security perspective, but an “essential” step in preventing Israel from becoming a binational state.
Speaking at a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Gaza pullout, Herzog said he opposes unilateral overtures and that any future territorial compromises to the Palestinians must be the result of a peace accord.
“Without a doubt, from a security perspective, the disengagement was a mistake,” Herzog said, adding that he had made similar comments in 2006 and 2007.
“I don’t believe in unilateral moves, from a policy perspective — only a [peace] agreement,” the opposition leader, who in 2005 served as housing minister, said.
Israel Reaches Consensus on Gaza, Diaspora Jews Reject It
It’s not just the obvious fact that the Palestinians turned Gaza into a giant launch pad from which some 16,500 rockets and mortars have been fired at Israel over the past decade, whereas exactly zero have been fired from the Israeli-controlled West Bank over the same period. It’s not just that quitting Gaza has resulted in more Israeli soldiers being killed, and also more Palestinians, than occupying Gaza ever did. It’s not just that after Israel withdrew every last settler and soldier from Gaza, the world has sought to deny it the right to defend itself against the ensuing rocket attacks by greeting every military operation with escalating condemnation, accusations of war crimes, and attempts to prosecute it in the International Criminal Court. It’s not just that the withdrawal ended up worsening global anti-Semitism, since every military operation in Gaza has served as an excuse for a massive upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks worldwide. It’s not just that Israel received zero diplomatic credit for the pullout, with most of the world not only still insisting that Gaza is “Israeli-occupied territory,” but excoriating Israel with escalating ferocity, and even threatening sanctions, for its reluctance to repeat this disastrous experiment in the West Bank, while assigning Palestinians zero responsibility for the impasse.
All these are certainly reasons enough to consider the pullout a disaster. But there’s one final negative outcome, as reflected in another poll released last week: Due to this Israeli reluctance, born of hard experience, a majority of overseas Jews now deems Israel insufficiently committed to peace. And that, in some ways, is the worst betrayal of all. Most Israelis don’t expect much from the Palestinians or the UN or Europe. But they do expect their fellow Jews to sympathize with their fear that withdrawing from the West Bank would simply replicate the Gaza disaster on a much larger scale.
After all, none of the negative consequences that ensued in Gaza can be blamed on the popular distinction between the “moderate” Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas, and the “hardline” Hamas. For Gaza wasn’t handed over to Hamas, but to Abbas. He’s the one who first enabled the escalation by refusing to use his forces to stop it; consequently, there were more than four times as many rocket attacks in 2006, the first year after the disengagement, as in either of the previous two years. And he’s the one who lost Gaza to Hamas in a bloody coup in mid-2007 when the latter decided it no longer needed a fig leaf.
Justice Minister Shaked playing into BDS hands, will bring Israel to ICC
Zionist Union co-leader Tzipi Livni blasted Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked Thursday, asserting that her plan for establishing a legal body separate from the High Court of Justice to deal in land disputes in the West Bank, would play into the hands of and "aid the BDS movement."
"Shaked's offer is not new," said Livni in a statement.
"If you want Judea and Samaria to be like Ra'anana, you must annex it," Livni said.
The former justice minister warned her successor that there is a reason why the Netanyahu government and various other governments did not adopt such a policy, namely that such moves would extend the same voting rights to all of the area's inhabitants and that the result would be "the transformation of Israel into a country with an Arab majority."
Livni further accused Shaked and those who would support her vision of "not having the courage to admit that in the short term Israel would be cutting her oxygen supply to the United States."
Gidon Levy Throws in the Towel; 'The Settlers Have Won'
“The settlers have won and they deserve the victory,” wrote ultra-leftist journalist Gideon Levy wrote in his home newspaper Haaretz Thursday.
Levy explained that the settlers – as Jews living in Judea and Samaria are often called, in short – “simply wanted it more, and that is also why they won. The settlers tried harder, they sacrificed more, they invested more, they persevered more.”
Meanwhile, “the state of Tel Aviv could not be awakened from its smugness, its imperviousness, its blindness and its ignorance.”
Levy repeated his accusations against fellow left-wingers in a radio interview. “The settlers won because of the limpness of the Left and the 'state of Tel Aviv',” he explained. “They won because they care more and are willing to sacrifice more. The other side opts for cottage protests and sardine protests, and even that is only for two or three days, and it is never enough.”
There are more than half a million “settlers” today, he complained, and this is an irreversible situation. “They succeeded in their main goal, which was, from the get-go, to sabotage any chance of a partition and an arrangement of two states. There are very few people today who really think that two states can still be brought about. The people mumbling this know full well that we missed this train a long time ago; they keep mumbling it to play for time and they don't suggest anything else.”
US, EU: Israel's authorization of 300 new settler homes harmful to peace
American and European officials warned Israel on Wednesday that its authorization of 300 new settler homes in the Beit El settlement was harmful to ongoing efforts to jump start the frozen peace process.
Nabil Abu Rudaineh, spokesman for the PA presidency, said the decision would sabotage US and EU efforts to resume the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.
“This requires a quick intervention by the international community to stop dangerous Israeli policies that could lead to further deterioration,” he said. “The decision also represents a message that Israel is not interested in peace or any efforts to create a climate that paves the way for peace.”
The US State Department deputy spokesman said, "Settlement expansion threatens the two-state solution and calls into question Israel’s commitment to a negotiated resolution to the conflict. We continue to urge the Israeli government to refrain from unhelpful actions that undercut the possibility of a two-state solution."
The EU slammed the government’s decision, saying it calls into question Israel’s commitment to a two-state solution.
UN: Beit El Housing 'An Impediment to Peace'
Ban reiterated that "settlements are illegal under international law, an impediment to peace and cannot be reconciled" with Israel's "stated intention to pursue a two-state solution," his spokesman said in a statement released in New York.
Ban urged Israel "to halt and reverse such decisions in the interest of peace" his spokesman said.
The UN secretary general also expressed concern about the threat of demolitions in the village of Susiya ahead of an August court hearing.
"The destruction of private property in occupied territory is prohibited under international humanitarian law, and for which actions there must be accountability," his spokesman said.
The statements follow a media and political storm over the destruction of the Draynoff housing units in Beit El, which involved an unprecedented number of police officers descending on the Samaria town and clashing with its residents. Several reports of police brutality at the scene surfaced before, and during, the demolition.
PLO Official Denounces Israeli Construction as 'War Crimes'
A senior official from the Palestine Liberation Organization on Wednesday denounced Israel’s plans to build new homes in Beit El and Jerusalem as "war crimes".
"These settlement measures and war crimes are part of a plan by Israeli leaders to impose a 'Greater Israel' on historic Palestine and destroy the two-state solution and the chance for peace," the official, Hanan Ashrawi, said, according to the AFP news agency.
The statement came after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had earlier approved the "immediate" construction of the 300 homes in Beit El and planning for another 504 homes in Jerusalem.
BBC’s Knell flouts impartiality guidelines with failure to inform on Susiya interviewee’s day job
Both Knell’s reports include considerable input from one Nasser Nawaja – described by her in the audio report as “one of about 350 villagers” and in the written report as a “Susiya resident”.
Whilst those descriptions may indeed be accurate, Mr Nawaja’s position as a community organizer and a field researcher for the political NGO B’Tselem is highly relevant to this story. But – in breach of the BBC editorial guidelines on impartiality which state “[w]e should not automatically assume that contributors from other organisations (such as academics, journalists, researchers and representatives of charities) are unbiased and we may need to make it clear to the audience when contributors are associated with a particular viewpoint, if it is not apparent from their contribution or from the context in which their contribution is made” – Knell refrains from telling audiences about her main interviewee’s day job or his worldwide promotion of a libel which has darkly medieval overtones.
“My name is Nasser Nawajah, I’m 30 years old and a resident of a Palestinian village called Susiya in the occupied West Bank. My home is here in the Hebron hills that Israel calls an “illegal outpost” and they have demolished our town five times since 1985, even poisoning our wells.”
As NGO Monitor reports, B’Tselem is one of a number of foreign funded political organisations involved in promoting the Susiya campaign.
Expert Witness Uses Animation to Prove Argentine Prosecutor Nisman Was Murdered
The family of Alberto Nisman, a top Argentine prosecutor who was found dead of a bullet wound in his home the day before he was to testify against the President of Argentina before the nation’s legislature, claims there is evidence in the home that the shooter washed his hands in Nisman’s bathroom before leaving.
An expert witness brought to trial by the family, Daniel Salcedo, presented evidence this week proving that Nisman could not have killed himself and made the blood stains found in his bathroom. Nisman was found dead on January 18 in his home with a bullet wound in his head. He was to present a report before the Argentine legislature the next day accusing President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and other high-ranking officials of helping Iran-linked terrorists escape justice after organizing the deadliest terror attack in Argentina’s history.
Salcedo told the chief prosecutor in the Nisman case, Viviana Fein, that bloodstains in the bathroom could not have been made by Nisman because of the angle at which he fell. The stains, he argued, were “almost half a meter above where the victim’s head was found.” In addition, he noted that no bloodstains were found under the sink, only above it. Had Nisman shot himself and fell to the floor under the sink, it is to be expected that some blood would splatter there.
Salcedo used a digital animation to make his point. His evidence will be taken into consideration, though the federal police have ruled out homicide.
BDS DEFEAT: StandWithUs Canada Congratulates U of T Student Leaders
StandWithUs Canada congratulates the student representatives of the U of T (University of Toronto) Board of Directors (UTSU) who resoundingly defeated the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions movement to demonize Israel) in a motion at their campus. The meeting, held to vote on the funding of a BDS ad hoc committee at U of T, was defeated as the result of a secret ballot with 17 votes against, 7 in favour, and 2 abstentions.
One of the board members of UTSU (who wishes to remain anonymous) issued this statement to StandWithUs Canada, "I thought the motion was designed to divide students and marginalized Jewish students specifically. There was no reason why the UTSU should organizationally take a stance when it clearly discriminates against portions of our membership. I'd also add that BDS has no place on our campus”
Aidan Fishman, former U of T StandWithUs Canada Emerson Fellow, "With 17 votes against, seven in favour, and two abstentions, the vote has failed." The UTSU Board of Directors stands on the right side of history, and has voted decisively not to establish a BDS Committee!"
The Judean People's Front: Calling BS on BDS - Apartheid Law vs. Israeli Law
The core argument of the BDS movement rests on the idea that Israel is an "apartheid State." But more than simply being a derogatory term, "apartheid" has a specific meaning. The Apartheid System of the Republic of South Africa was based a series of laws mandating segregation of the races and unequal treatment in order to maintain minority white-rule. If Israel is truly an apartheid state, it would have to have similar laws with the same intent.
The way BDS makes its case is by highlighting Apartheid Laws that have superficial similarities to Israeli law and then saying this means Israel practices apartheid. In doing so they not only distort the meaning of those apartheid laws and how they functioned but they completely ignore the many other apartheid laws that not only aren't in place in Israel, but that are actually illegal.
As we examine both sets of laws, it is clear that not only is Israel not an apartheid state, but if apartheid was judged by the standards of BDS, most states would be considered to be apartheid.
What's more, if there is are entities that support any of these laws, it is the Palestinian Authority and the Islamic Resistance Movement's Gaza Strip!
College Democrats of America President Threatened with Impeachment, Attacked for Israel Support
The College Democrats of America (CDA) is in turmoil this week, with its president facing impeachment after being accused of pro-Israel allegiances and charged with improper conduct.
The College Democrats of America is the official college-outreach arm of the Democratic Party. With the publication of two articles today, the organization’s chaos and infighting has spilled into the public sphere. The last 24 hours have made it clear that Democratic support for Israel ought be viewed with suspicion and that opposition to Obama’s farce of a nuclear deal with Iran has no place in the Party. It turns out not even CDA’s president is immune from such attacks.
On Tuesday, the organization began impeachment proceedings against its sitting President, Natasha McKenzie, reelected to a second term only last week.
In an article published on Daily Kos, an anonymous member of CDA’s Executive Board wrote that the reasons for impeachment included “a series of well-publicized allegations of intimidation, corruption, chaos, and other concerns raised followed the 2015 National Convention.”
The author’s claim of “corruption” hyperlinks to another story about McKenzie, written by the same author hours earlier. This article highlights an award given last week by CDA to The American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and an award given by AIPAC to CDA President Natasha McKenzie in March. In this earlier post, also on the Daily Kos, the author lambasts CDA for allowing Jonathan Kessler, AIPAC’s Leadership Development Director and a lifelong Democrat, to speak at the CDA national convention, accusing AIPAC of being incompatible with the Democratic Party. It also questions McKenzie’s dual allegiances to the groups. McKenzie has been a decorated and vocal supporter of the US-Israel relationship, and apparently that has no place in today’s Democratic party.
HuffPost Arabic’s Muslim Brotherhood connections
Editorial line of the Huffington Post’s new Arabic-language site is in the hands of two prominent Islamists
“Don't be shocked if you expect one thing and find something entirely different,” writes Anas Fouda, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post’s brand new Arabic-language edition, HuffPost Arabi, in his inaugural editorial.
The warning is apt, for presumably few readers indeed will have expected the liberal American media juggernaut to launch a venture headed by two prominent figures of the Middle East’s religious right.
Fouda, previously an executive producer at Al Jazeera Arabic (AJA), is managing the website in partnership with his old boss, former AJA director general Wadah Khanfar. Their profiles may make for interesting perusal for existing Huffington Post readers unfamiliar with the Arabic-language media landscape.
An Egyptian national now living in Turkey, Fouda was arrested in the United Arab Emirates in 2013 on suspicion of affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) – an affiliation which he freely admitted had existed since 1988, though he claimed to have held no formal party role since 1995. A browse of his Twitter timeline shows his politics to be fairly bread-and-butter MB; recommending, for instance, articles praising “His Eminence” Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Holocaust-revisionist cleric who routinely denounces Shiite and Alawite Muslims, to say nothing of Jews. Indeed, Fouda has himself on occasion found less-than-obliging things to say about his Semitic cousins, e.g., tweeting last July that, “Only after the latest Israeli aggression on Gaza did I realize the number of Egyptian Jews has increased greatly since the coup.”
Financial Times perpetuates the myth of “sealed off” Gaza
Reed uses this example of a Gazan employed by a client based in another country – and the broader problem of high unemployment in the Palestinian-controlled territory – to highlight Gaza’s ‘isolation’ from the rest of the world.
This is no ordinary workplace: Mr Othman translates weird news in a high-rise in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian enclave ruled by the militant Islamist group Hamas. Gaza is sealed off from the world by an Israeli naval and aerial blockade, and its land borders with Egypt and Israel that only let a few travelers through.
…
Israel sealed off Gaza’s land, sea and air borders after Hamas took over in 2007, and now only admits a trickle of special cases: senior businesspeople, medical patients, religious pilgrims, and family reunification.
First, Israel’s legal naval blockade of Gaza wasn’t initiated until 2009 (after the 2008-09 Gaza War), not 2007 as Reed claims.
Moreover, it’s less than clear how precisely Reed defines the word “trickle” or the term “sealed off”.
- 115,000 Gazans crossed the Erez Crossing for medical treatment in Israel and abroad in 2014.
- On any given day in 2015, over 1,000 Gazans cross into Israel, including hundreds of merchants.
- Hundreds of trucks carrying thousands of tons of humanitarian, construction and consumer goods enter Gaza every month.
The Israeli Emigre Who Opened Sweden's Eyes to Anti Semitism
Shirley Tsubarah left her life in Malmo, a Swedish city that has 75,000 Muslims and is known as one of the most anti-Semitic cities in Europe, to move to Israel; life is easier there in some ways, she says, but she'll never go back.
For some Swedes, it was a rude awakening: the newspaper Sydsvenskan’s interview with Swedish Israeli Shirley Tsubarah. “I’m hated in Malmo,” the 25-year-old said.
Tsubarah, who has an Israeli father, says that after she and her family fell victim to hate crimes, she left Sweden a few years ago and moved to Israel.
In the interview, she said the Swedish authorities consciously ignored the situation — 134 complaints last year to the Malmo police, including claims of violence and property damage. But all those files were closed without investigations, she says.
“In Israel you live under security threats with a lot of tension and uncertainty, but you can be whoever you want to be,” she says. “In Malmo, Jews hide their identity or they suffer.”
The southern Swedish city with its 75,000 Muslims is known as one of the most anti-Semitic cities in Europe. In 2012, the European Jewish Congress warned that the city’s Jewish community was at grave risk and that hate crimes were designed to make the lives of Swedish Jews unbearable.
Holocaust-Denying Professor Suggests That Cosby’s Accusers May Have Just Been ‘Sluts’
Kaukab Siddique also expressed doubts that ISIS is actually raping women.
A tenured, Holocaust-denying professor at taxpayer-funded Lincoln University in Pennsylvania suggested that Bill Cosby’s accusers may have waited so long to report their attacks because “many women are sluts.”
Siddique is no stranger to controversy. In May, he called on Muslims to “prepare themselves” because “if Zionist Pamela Geller has her way, the racists might try to enter mosques.”
“Don’t be scared of these dirty Jewish Zionist White Supremacist thugs,” he added.
Yes — he said “dirty Jewish Zionist White Supremacist thugs.” But that shouldn’t be too surprising, considering that he has also called on people “to defeat, to destroy, to dismantle Israel” and stated that the Holocaust never happened.
Neo-Nazis attack Jewish man in Zurich
A group of some 20 men making the Hitler salute and shouting anti-Semitic slogans assaulted an Orthodox Jewish man in Zurich.
The July 4 incident on a main street in the Swiss capital’s Wiedikon district was only reported recently in the national media in Switzerland following the completion of an initial investigation into the case, the Tele Zurich reported Sunday.
Two leaders of the group spat in the victim’s face and pushed him before police, alerted by passersby, intervened, according to the Sonntags Zeitung daily. The officers asked the men to leave the victim alone, according to the Zeitung.
The unnamed victim, who is in his 40s, was on his way home from a local synagogue when the attack happened, the daily reported. Police would offer no further information, citing an ongoing investigation.
Switzerland’s Federation of Jewish Communities said in a statement that the incident was “highly unusual and frightening.”
Chip giant ARM buys Israeli Internet of Things security firm for approx $85m
UK-based chip and systems maker ARM announced Thursday that it was acquiring Israel’s Sansa Security, which specializes in protective cyber-security systems for embedded chips.
Embedded chips power the Internet of Things (IoT), the networked infrastructure that connects billions of standalone devices, appliances, and objects to servers, where data is sent back and forth in order to enhance user experience and value.
The value of the deal was not disclosed, although previous reports had pegged its value at between $85 million and $100 million. With the acquisition, ARM will be establishing its first Israeli research and development center. ARM had been one of the few multinational tech giants not to have had an Israeli presence.
By the end of the decade, industry experts say, there could be as many as 50 billion wired and connected “things” in the world – with refrigerators, washing machines, fitness devices, and even lightbulbs and home lighting systems connected to the Internet.
Drug for rare muscular dystrophy fast-tracked
Treatments for extremely rare medical conditions are few and far between. The number of cases of “orphan diseases” doesn’t justify the amount of cash needed to get a pharmaceutical developed, tested and approved.
This is exactly the niche that Tel Aviv-based BioBlast Pharma was created to fill in 2012. Now its three experimental platforms are moving closer to market.
Cabaletta, BioBlast’s lead product for treating two rare and currently untreatable conditions — oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD) and spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (SCA3) — received Fast Track approval in June from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to expedite the drug’s development, review and potential approval specifically for treating OPMD.
Cabaletta is a protein stabilizer that binds to proteins to prevent harmful aggregation. It is undergoing phase 2 trials in Israel and Canada for treating OPMD, and in Israel for treating SCA3. By year’s end, phase 3 trials are anticipated to start for OPMD in North America and for SCA3 in the US and Europe.
“We believe that the Fast Track designation represents an important recognition by the FDA of Cabaletta’s potential to address a significant unmet need,” says BioBlast President and CEO Colin Foster.
Canada to purchase Iron Dome-like radar systems
The defense ministry put the cost of the 10 medium range radar systems at Cad$243.3 million ($187.2 million).
Canada’s National Defense Minister Jason Kenney hailed the deal, saying the technology had proved useful for Israel.
“Much like Israel’s successful Iron Dome radar technology, the Medium Range Radar system will be able to instantly track enemy fire aimed at Canadian armed forces personnel and help keep them safe during operations,” Kenney said.
The ministry said the radar systems are “capable of detecting hostile indirect fire, locating the position of the enemy weapon and calculating the point of impact of a projectile, as well as simultaneously tracking multiple airborne threats.”
They will be manufactured by Rheinmetall’s Canadian branch, which will work alongside ELTA Systems, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries.
Immoral World Cares More about a Lion than Jewish Victims of Arab Terror
There were no outraged headlines and newscasts when Arab terrorists murdered Malachi Rosenfeld, Rachella Druk, Harel Bin-Nun, Gila Kessler, Yehuda Shoham, Shmuel Yerushalmi, Avi Siton, HaYa"D for them all, and all the other dozens or hundreds of Jewish victims of Arab terrorism.
This Cecil the Lion business is a very clear example of the moral bankruptcy of the world. There is neither justice nor mercy for Jews. The world is more concerned about a lion than an innocent Jew. They can understand, justify, excuse and identify with Arab terrorism against Jews, but they get all outraged when a lion is killed.
This is proof that we, the State of Israel, must leave the United Nations and the official bastions of hypocrisy. We must tell all of the international leaders that we will do what's best for us and expect them to recognize Arab terrorism and the so-called Palestinians sic for what they really are, immoral terrorist murderers.
Israeli vets save Samuni the Lion
With the story of Cecil the Lion roaring from news media the world over, the almost anonymous Samuni the Lion got a new lease on life thanks to the quick response of Israeli veterinarians.
Samuni is an eight-year-old Big Cat living at the Zoological Center of Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan (Safari). During a routine checkup on their charges, the zookeepers at the Safari noticed a large growth on Samuni’s stomach.
The beautiful lion was anesthetized so the vets could take a sample of tissue for a biopsy. However, the lab results were inconclusive and the veterinarians decided not to take a chance but instead remove the tumor in its entirety.
“Every lion is extremely important for us here at the Safari and we will do everything we can to care for them and give them a quality life,” Sagit Horowitz, Ramat Gan Safari spokesperson, told ISRAEL21c. “There was no doubt that we’d take care of Samuni even though it is extremely difficult to anesthetize a lion. We knew that we would do everything to save his life.”