Daphne Anson: "The Israeli Army Killed Palestinian Children For Sport": Vivid imaginations run rampant

Eretz Israel is our unforgettable historic homeland...The Jews who will it shall achieve their State...And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind. (Theodor Herzl, DerJudenstaat, 1896)

We offer peace and amity to all the neighbouring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The State of Israel is ready to contribute its full share to the peaceful progress and development of the Middle East. (From Proclamation of the State of Israel, 5 Iyar 5708; 14 May 1948)

With a liberal democratic political system operating under the rule of law, a flourishing market economy producing technological innovation to the benefit of the wider world, and a population as educated and cultured as anywhere in Europe or North America, Israel is a normal Western country with a right to be treated as such in the community of nations.... For the global jihad, Israel may be the first objective. But it will not be the last. (Friends of Israel Initiative)

Friday, 4 July 2014

"The Israeli Army Killed Palestinian Children For Sport": Vivid imaginations run rampant

It's instructive to note how elements within the Western BDS movement reacted to the kidnapping crisis that began on 12 June and had its tragic denouement this week.

From the start, conspiracy theories abounded. The earliest consisted of allegations that Israel had faked the kidnapping of the three tragic teenagers as a pretext to mount an offensive against the Palestinian Arabs, and an article in Ha'aretz (see below), the despicable rag that's the Israeli newspaper of choice for foes of Israel everywhere, played its inevitable part in the dissemination of the theory.

There were suggestions that Israel had made sure to include among the abductees a youngster with American as well as Israeli nationality in order to whip up outrage on the part of American Jews and ensure their support for Operation Brother's Keeper.

There was indignation on the part of some Israel-haters that the media had given publicity to the three boys' disappearance and subsequent fate, alleging that the media values Jewish lives above Palestinian ones: amazingly (as the above photo indicates), there was a demonstration outside the BBC's headquarters over this point. But look at BBC Watch's posts (latest one here) to be persuaded of the unsubstantiated nature of the allegation! (Presumably the Israel-haters want the BBC to be biased at all times against Israel, whereas what the BBC should at all times be is impartial and objective, favouring neither side over the other. But as I've observed before, such demonstrations enable the smug, self-satisfied BBC to claim that, since Israel's supporters also perceive it as biased against their side, the Corporation's reportage is balanced: "just about right".)

There was a desperate recourse to the "Israel has killed 1518 Palestinian children since 2000" mantra, citing "official figures from Ramallah". Needless to say, these "official figures" are highly suspect, manipulated and politicised, and the definition of "children" is deeply flawed. "Children" implies non-combatants, and persons below, say, 16 years of age.

Elder of Ziyon, in a post of 1 July titled "How NGO's make up lies about Israel", happens to discuss highlights one of the very graphic summaries that the Israel-haters have been citing. (Hat tip: reader Yosef)

Some of the reaction to the kidnapping and the ensuing Operation Brother's Keeper in representative images:

Is that the gospel truth, vicar?

This report seized many an anti-Zionist imagination

By an American heavy-duty antisemite whose posts infest Facebook

Widely shared on Facebook by the usual suspects

A well-peddled poster with the anti-Israel set

Numerous Israel-haters took up this theme, with various images

No "Christian charity" here for the mourning Israeli families

From the Scottish PSC chief

From a pin-up of the Israel-haters in Britain and abroad

Veteran anti-Israel MP Jeremy Corbyn in the Morning Star

Moral relativism and conspiracy

See here for Tony Gratrex


Australia's Israel-demonising Left gets into the act

A link to a conspiracy-theory video


Another conspiracy theory; Note that the boys are termed "soldiers" here!

Protesting Al Beeb's "pro-Israel" bias! (Should have gone to SpecSavers!)

Steve Bell's cartoon in today's Guardian

A vile crime, but the perpetrators aren't yet known for sure

Al Beeb's Jon Donnison tweets his ten cents' worth here and below

Now that he's been told as much by another Twitter member, Eugene Kontorovich, Donnison will in future perhaps bear in mind that the policy of home demolitions was adopted as a punitive necessity against families rewarded by the Palestinian Authority with both money and adulation for producing terrorist shahids; unlike the PA, Israel is not disposed to reward those of its people who are found to have carried out heinous acts.

For their part, the Palestinian media shamelessly manipulated the facts. As reported inter alia here,

'the Palestinian media routinely referred to the three murdered boys as “settlers” and in some cases, also as “soldiers.” The Palestinian news agency Wafa condemned Israel for collectively punishing Palestinians, but did not denounce the murder of the three Jewish youngsters. They merely referred to them as “the three settlers” that disappeared.

Fatah’s official Facebook page, however, referred to them as “the three killed soldiers, whose bodies according to Israeli claims, were found in Hebron.” Two weeks ago, Fatah had celebrated the kidnapping of the three boys with a caricature posted to their Facebook page showing three mice with Stars of David attached to a fishing hook. According to an article [Dr Mudar] Zahran [the exiled leader of the Palestinians in Jordan, who is of course a friend of Israel; see for example his recent video here] wrote in the Gatestone Institute, the official PA daily had written that “Israel was behind the kidnapping,” alleging that the three were soldiers. He noted that the kidnappings were celebrated by average Palestinians with glorifications of the kidnappers and the passing out of sweets....

[R]eferences to the three boys as soldiers tend to be retweeted more than any other mention of them within the Palestinian Authority [as in Adnan Abdulal's post reproduced above]....

As Zahran wrote in the Gatestone Institute, “Keep in mind that the PA exerts extreme monitoring and control over social media used by Palestinians in the West Bank. A Palestinian man was jailed for six months for liking an anti-PA post on Facebook. The PA, therefore, is fully responsible for encouraging the celebrations of the kidnappings over Palestinian social media.”

.... Zahran stressed, “My comment as the leader of the Palestinians in Jordan, which numbers 6.2 million people is it is with our sincere sense of sadness and disgust that we extend our condolences to the families of the killed children and to Prime Minister Netanyahu, as well as to the Israeli people. We are forced to remind everyone that the death of these young men is yet another result of the Oslo Agreement and its time to consider different options.”

Zahran called on the Israeli leadership to hold the Palestinian leadership within the Palestinian Authority responsible for what happened: “As much as it is a tragedy, it’s a chance for all of us, Israelis and Palestinians, to have Oslo ended forever. Everyone in Judea and Samaria is better off under Israeli sovereignty and now in Jordan, while we have the Israeli Army protecting us from ISIS, we have another reason to see that Israel’s power is the only guarantee of safety and security for Palestinians in Jordan and inside Israel.”'

3 comments:

Ian5 July 2014 at 02:34
WTF is going on in Sydney??
Australian man acquitted of anti-Semitic attack
Robert Clifford, 26, was charged last October with affray, assault and possessing a knife. Police said he attacked five Orthodox Jews as they walked home from a Shabbat dinner near Bondi Beach. One of the victims, Eli Behar, suffered minor cerebral hemorrhaging and was hospitalized for two days.
But the case against Clifford, who pleaded not guilty to the charges, was dismissed earlier this week because the magistrate said he could not be satisfied Clifford had committed the alleged offenses.
The acquittal comes just weeks after the case against another man accused in the attack, Spartaco Marciano Di Bella, 24, was also withdrawn because the director of public prosecutions deemed there to be insufficient evidence that would lead to a conviction.
ReplyDelete
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Anonymous5 July 2014 at 16:20
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4446/isis-threatens-holocaust-against-jews
ReplyDelete
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Unknown7 July 2014 at 01:41
re Sizer – perhaps we should be sorry for him but the worrying thing is that his parish & the Church of England establishment allow him to continue

re-Guardian cartoon – in very bad taste while there is an element of truth in it BUT they could & should make a much better point by using green yellow & black flags of Islamistic movements engaged in wholesale carnage of a colossal scale while the West knit picks over Israel's right to this or that
ReplyDelete
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'For as long as these antisemites wrap themselves up in the Palestinian flag, too many people are willing to turn a blind eye. Only against Jews is this type of racism openly tolerated. It is flourishing in schools, colleges, universities, unions and in city councils. In fact, so rampant is the disease now, in some settings you can be ostracised if you do not partake in the frenzy yourself. Bashing Jews has becomes a trendy position for the ignorant social justice warrior. "Palestinianism" is a viral "ponzi scheme" and as it spreads, it carries antisemitism in the undergrowth.' David Collier (2017)

'This new rise in antisemitism, which I had thought long dead, was not shaven-headed white imbeciles from the far right. It was Muslims, a large chunk of it.... Suddenly I grasped that the British far left didn’t want people to know about antisemitism because it pointed the finger at people they really, really liked. From that moment on, it all fell into place.... Time and again the same tropes emerged, the same sort of stuff that Streicher and Goebbels would have commended – and uttered.... And from that a whole bunch of other stuff emerged: the old blood libel business (a favourite of the repulsive Jenny Tonge).... Nice, avuncular, Jeremy Corbyn, with his peace badges, happily laying a wreath at the graveside of Palestinian terrorists who murdered innocent Jewish athletes, oh, and much much more.... It is the same antisemitism, exactly the same: the obsession with Israel to the exclusion of everything else, the conspiracy theory paranoias, the derangement.... Here’s the test – if you cannot see the flagrant racism in the BDS movement, and if you are obsessed with the perfidy of the Middle East’s only democracy to the exclusion of all else, you are an antisemite. That means a good proportion of the Labour Party, including the leader, and almost all of Momentum: no brown shirts, no marching bands, but the same old filth, dressed in the clothes of a polytechnic geography lecturer.'
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'Before the June 1967 Six Day War, there were no such things as "settlements". Palestinians were trying to destroy and displace Israel anyhow. The core problem is not, and never was, "settlements," but the right of Israel (or any non-Muslim nation) to exist inside any borders in that part of the world.
If you take a stand that is based on a lie, then that stand cannot succeed. If you try to oppose antisemitism but pretend it is the same thing as "Islamophobia," then the structure on which you have made your stand will totter and all your aspirations will fail. If you try to make a stand based on the idea that settlement construction rather than the intransigence of the Palestinians to the existence of a Jewish state is what is holding up a peace deal, then facts will keep on intruding.' Douglas Murray (31 December 2016)
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9685/britain-little-lies

'Islamophobia does NOT come from the same wellspring of hatred as antisemitism. Antisemitism is a true prejudice because the hatred and demonisation it promotes derive entirely from lies and a repudiation of rationality itself.
Islamophobia is a false allegation of prejudice which is deployed to silence rational criticism based on actual facts about attitudes and practices within the Islamic world.
[L]ethally compromised even-handedness is to misunderstand, and thus minimise, antisemitic attitudes and behaviour while shutting down legitimate and necessary discussion of the threat from the Islamic world – even to demonise as “Islamophobic” anyone who draws attention to the extent and consequences of Muslim antisemitism.' Melanie Phillips (14 December 2016)

Jews have re-assumed the role of the canary in the mine and are the first to be targeted, but the world would face the same threat if Jews did not exist. Israel has been at the front lines confronting Islamic extremism but has received scant support... For Jews, the writing has been on the wall for a long time. The virulence of the antisemitic hatred closing in on Jews in Europe (and elsewhere) is horrifying...
Europe is today facing a crisis as serious as the confrontation with Nazism. If Western leaders continue behaving like Chamberlain and fail to stand up to this global threat, it could usher in a new Dark Age in which the Judeo-Christian culture is subsumed by primitive barbarism. The writing is on the wall Isi Leibler (12 January 2015)

Expose The Lies!

There is a war of lies and deceit on the internet generating unbelievable hate by denigrating and delegitimising the legal rights conferred on the Jewish people by the League of Nations in 1922 and the United Nations in 1945. The idea that there are two narratives on the Arab-Jewish conflict is rubbish. There is only one – the factual truth that details the return of the Jewish people to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in its ancient biblical, ancestral and historic homeland after 3500 years of dispersion with the unanimous endorsement of the nation states then comprising the League of Nations.... Generals can’t fight a war without soldiers. Jews around the world need to join the fight or vacate the internet to the Jew-haters and their lies that repeated often enough eventually become accepted as truth. David Singer (2016)

The "Apartheid" Slur

The division of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) into three separate areas “A”, “B” and “C” was agreed on by Israel and the PLO pursuant to the Oslo Accords.
95% of the West Bank Arabs live in Areas A and B and their daily lives are under the total administration and control of the PLO since the Palestinian Authority was disbanded by Abbas in January 2013. The PLO has total security control in A and shares security control in B with Israel. Israel has total administrative and security control in C.
Israel is entitled to and will continue to take responsibility for the security of Jews living in the West Bank.
Jews were given the legal right to settle in the West Bank under article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the UN Charter. They did so for decades until they were driven out in 1947 and not able to return there until 1967.
There are Arab roads only in the West Bank that Jews are not allowed to use. Jews are also forbidden from entering Area “A”. Selling land to Jews is forbidden by the PLO under pain of death. The PLO runs the daily lives of 95% of the West Bank Arabs and Hamas runs the daily lives of 100% of the Gazan Arabs. They have been under occupation – and subjugation – by these two evil groups for the last ten years and given no say in their future or any opportunity to elect others to lead them following the disastrous political decisions of their leaders over the past ten years. Hamas and the PLO do not accept the continued existence of a Jewish State and call for its disappearance.
The narratives did not begin in 1948 – they began in about 1917. How do you make peace with an enemy that has been obsessed with not recognising any Jewish national rights in former Palestine for the last 100 years? David Singer (2016)

The Jews of the Holy Land ... are surrounded by hostile states 650 times their territory and sixty times their population. Yet their last, best hope of ending two millennia of international persecution - the State of Israel - has somehow survived. When, during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Cross for bravery. Today, Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long. Andrew Roberts (historian)

Israel is understandably obsessed with security, but its greatest security lies ultimately not in the Israeli Defence Forces, but in political warfare.... Most of the world is not deeply interested in what happens in Israel, and probably does not want to be deluged with legalistic defences of particular actions. What it wants is a clear, calm, repeated case. It is a case – aimed more at public opinion than at foreign ministries – about freedom, democracy, a Western way of life and the need for the whole of the free world to fight terrorism. Sometimes you hear Israelis say: “It doesn’t matter what we say. The whole world is against us.” You can see why they say it, for they are indeed unfairly treated. But when they say it, they are uttering a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they won’t say what needs saying, no one else will say it for them. Charles Moore (2010)

Once again the armies of the Arab nations are coordinating their military efforts to destroy Israel - whatever they say about wishing merely to regain the lost territories.... [I]f the present Arab offensive had been launched at the pre-1967 frontiers, then the Israelis would indeed have been fighting to avoid annihilation. It seems now that the Israelis were right to maintain the ceasefire lines gained in 1967, and that to do so is the only guarantee of their continued safety.
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Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam... In this deadly game of thrones, there’s no place for America or for Israel, no place for Christians, Jews or Muslims who don’t share the Islamist medieval creed, no rights for women, no freedom for anyone... [T]he greatest danger facing our world is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons. To defeat ISIS and let Iran get nuclear weapons would be to win the battle, but lose the war. We can’t let that happen...[T]he days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over. We are no longer scattered among the nations, powerless to defend ourselves. We restored our sovereignty in our ancient home. And the soldiers who defend our home have boundless courage. For the first time in 100 generations, we, the Jewish people, can defend ourselves....Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand. But ... I know that America stands with Israel... You stand with Israel, because you know that the story of Israel is not only the story of the Jewish people but of the human spirit that refuses again and again to succumb to history’s horrors. Bibi Netanyahu (12 Adar 5775; 3 March 2015)

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions, of people, and there is no refugee problem.... [N]o one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees.... Other nations - when they are defeated - survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed.... [A]s it goes with Israel, so it will go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us. Eric Hoffer (1968)

Most of the present Arab countries were given their freedom after the 1914-18 War, or after the 1939-45 War.... Yet to listen to Arab spokesmen one might think that they had been cheated ... because they have not also got Israel. Israel is only .2 per cent of the land where Arab States have been established. Surely no fair-minded man can begrudge the Jews their own promised land when it is remembered that for every 2 acres that went to make up Israel, 1,000 acres became Arab.... Why is there an Arab refugee problem? The oil-rich countries have the money. There is no shortage of land, and the Israelis have the technical knowledge to show how it could be developed and made fertile. Bring those things together and the problem could be solved. 3rd Earl of Balfour (1968)

January 7, 2015 has already its place in the history of infamy, but also will be the date when the defenders of freedom and democracy will rise and pay tribute to those who died for their freedom and ours. Therefore, we must not forget on which side we are and who are our allies in the defense of the West and its values. Whether we admit it or not, the West is at war with an enemy who will not stop to destroy us...
The State of Israel boasts a commandment that, in one of the darkest hours in the fight for liberty Winston Churchill taught: "Never give up". Israel has proven to be a key ally in the fight against Islamism and also an example of how a liberal democracy can resist the jihadist stake and thrive as a Western nation ... Not only France but also all the West should look to Israel to defeat Islamism...
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For Western countries to side with those who question Israel's legitimacy, for them to play games in international bodies with Israel's vital security issues, for them to appease those who oppose Western values, rather than robustly to stand up in defence of those values, is not only a grave moral mistake, but a strategic error of the first magnitude. Israel is a fundamental part of the West. The West is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is lost and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Jose Maria Aznar

Israel is, for us, a normal and a special country. A normal country, because it is just like any other democracy. A special country, because the Jewish culture, which eventually became the Judeo-Christian culture of the dignity of man, is the conceptual foundation of liberalism and democracy. This is why attacking Israel is tantamount to attacking Europe and the West. This is also why disputing Israel's legitimacy and its right to existence means questioning democracy. And this is why we are Friends of Israel. By defending Israel, we are defending ourselves. Marcello Pera

Israel ... is beset today by a unique combination of threats. It must defend its people from attack while defending its very right to exist. No other nation in the world faces this dual challenge. To deny Israel's right to confront some of the world's most vicious terrorist groups in order to ensure the safety of its citizens is to corrode international norms from within ... The assault on Israel is one part of a more general assault on the West, on democracy, and on the moral and cultural heritage that grew from the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome ... Should these efforts succeed, similar efforts will certainly be turned against other western democracies. George Weigel

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