Ils Ne Sont Pas Charlie Hebdo: Angry Muslims demonstrate on the Temple Mount (video)

Here's footage of the large and vehement demonstration against France that's taken place in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount:

 
 Read and see more here

Post-Paris, Pat In Full Flood (video)

Whatever you think of him, you can't justly label him a coward ...

(Hat tip: Ian)

#Je Suis Le Deuxième Sexe

Now you see 'em ... Now you don't ...

In the front line of the march of world leaders and important personages in Paris a few days ago:

In HaMevaser,  a Charedi newspaper in Israel, members of Le Deuxième Sexe (to quote the title of Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book) have been airbrushed out.

This is not the first time a minority of ultra-Orthodox elements in Israel have gone to such absurd lengths to, presumably, prevent the male gaze from leading to lustful thoughts towards the female; Tzipi Livni and Hillary Clinton's images have also been airbrushed out in the past, and I seem to recall that, even though she was in or approaching her nineties, the distinguished Israeli biblical scholar Nechama Leibowitz was permitted to give a lecture to Charedi men only when seated behind a screen.

Time to concede a little bit to the twenty-first century, boys!

From the Left, prejudice against Israel needs no excuse, and absurdities like those only serve to stoke it.  No wonder the Independent and the Guardian have been swift to report this latest airbrushing! As also (the gleeful sense of triumph is palpable) the biased BBC.

Still, boys, you have served the cause of women in one respect: as remarked here you've shown how few of Le Deuxième Sexe in Haim Zach's photo (above) remain if Le Premier Sexe (the title, incidentally, of a 2006 pamphlet by Éric Zemmour) is airbrushed out.  From left to right: EU Foreign Affairs chief Federica Mogherini, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel:

Credit: Colm Williamson/Waterford Whispers

Shame On You, Stephen Sizer! Shame On You!

Soon they will rest in the soil of Eretz Israel, in the same cemetery as four of the victims of the Islamist monster who targeted a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, the four victims of the Islamist monster who deliberately made Jews his target, and blasted them to death in a kosher supermarket in Paris while other terrified hostages cowered.  They were (from right to left in the picture) a retired gentleman, a teacher, and two young men who had their entire adult lives ahead of them, one of whom, Yoav, was the son of the chief rabbi of Tunis.  The other, Yohan, was killed when he made a heroic attempt to disarm the Islamist monster.

Murdered because they were Jews

Indeed, it appears that Elsa Cayat, the only woman slaughtered at the Charlie Hebdo offices, was killed owing to her Jewishness (video interview with her cousin, who also tells how Elsa had been receiving antisemitic death threats over her association with the magazine).  No other woman at Charlie Hebdo was murdered by the killers, who reportedly had a self-declared policy of sparing women.

In addition, it's widely assumed, certainly by the school administration itself,  that the supermarket monster who killed a young policewoman and blasted a council worker in the face.had been on his way to cause mayhem and carnage at a Jewish primary school around the corner.

I've a little more to say on the topic of France in the wake of the recent atrocities, but right now I'd like to bring readers' attention to the shameful behaviour of the Anglican vicar of Virginia Water, the Reverend Stephen Sizer, who's been posting his usual propaganda against Israel with breakneck speed. 

Among all of these par-for-the-course items he has also posted items that have more than a whiff of the sewer about them, and are surely unworthy of a professed Christian, let alone a man of the cloth.  Shame on him.  And that goes double for some of his followers.

 The bodies of the Jewish victims of the  Parisian supermarket atrocity were hardly cold when Sizer,  a firm foe of "Islamophobia", shared a link to a Jerusalem Post report regarding a slimy little item from Wikileaks

And instead of lamenting the antisemitism and expressing sympathy for the genuine fear that in the wake of the Paris tragedy has forced the Jews of north London to beef up security – as described here by the Daily Mail – the vicar posted this mockery of the steps Jews feel they have to go to in order to try to keep their community safe from harm (Shomrim, in case some non-Jewish readers don't know, is Hebrew for watchers or guardians):

 

The commenters above include Jewish-born convert to Christianity Miranda Pinch, herself an anti-Israel activist, and Mike Allan, whose persistent antisemitic postings should long since have persuaded the vicar to de-friend him. Here's a current example:

Note the snotty introduction (rather than a condemnation of antisemitism) to this item offered by the vicar to his follows for their delectation:

This, incidentally, is what the above antisemite wrote:

A snide comment regarding this report, which concerns David Ward MP, who was once suspended from the LibDem Party for antisemitic comments:

The following relates to BBC reporter and newsreader Tim Willcox's crass question to a Jewish lady in Paris, which incidentally, as the linked report shows, has been condemned by, among others, historian Simon Schama (good on yah, sir!) 

Included among these comments is a taste of the despicable antisemitism that Sizer lets his followers get away with.

Mick Fletcher's post in full:

For shame, Stephen Sizer.  For shame.

Update; breaking news: Sizer's latest:

 Will someone please bring the disgraceful posts to his bishop's attention?

Update: he's at it again ...

David Singer: Palestine – Mapping The Truth Erases A Long-running Fiction

Here is the latest post by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:

As the accompanying map makes clear:

1. There was a 1950 armistice line that separated Israel from the Gaza Strip

2. There was a 1949 armistice line that separated Israel from the West Bank.

The use of dishonest and untruthful verbiage such as “boundaries” and “borders” has been a major factor in causing what now appears to have led to an irretrievable breakdown in negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) designed to create a second Arab State in former Palestine – in addition to Jordan.

Absent from this State Department map is there any mention of these aberrant terms.

Instead the map seeks to present an honest and accurate position of the current territorial relationship that exists between Israel, the West Bank (“Judea and Samaria”) and Gaza.

PLO propaganda – aided by sloppy media journalism – have been the drivers in introducing these false and misleading terms into the political diplomatic lexicon.

This campaign of deception and media indolence can at least be traced back to October 2007 – when USA Today under the headline  “Abbas wants return to pre 1967-borders” –  reported PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas telling Palestine TV: 

"We have 6,205 square kilometers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. We want it as it is.”

There were four “small” problems confronting Abbas – that he was not prepared to recognise and USA Today to question or challenge:

1. There had never been any pre-1967 borders – only the 1949 and 1950 armistice lines.

2. Those armistice lines had been agreed between Jordan, Israel and Egypt – long before the PLO came into existence in 1964.

3. The PLO in 2007 at best still only “had” about 40 per cent of the West Bank it had obtained under the 1993 Oslo Accords. Israel “had” the other 60 per cent – also granted under the Oslo Accords.

4. The Jews had a better legal claim to “have” at least that part of the West Bank they had lived in prior to 1949 – before being driven out by six invading armies – as well as those areas defined as State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes as stipulated by article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the United Nations Charter.

Undeterred by these roadblocks – Abbas continued making these misleading demands – with Islam On Line reporting the following statement by Abbas on 9 December 2009 under the headline “Abbas Names 1967 Borders as Precondition for Talks”:  

“We will renew negotiations if the settlements are completely halted and the 1967 borders recognized as the borders of the Palestinian state"

 The New York Times obligingly gave credence to Abbas’s claims on 19 May 2011 with a story under a banner headline 

“Obama sees ’67 borders as starting point for peace talks” 

followed by this misleading report accompanied by a supposedly accurate map showing the “Green Line Pre-1967 border”: 

“A day before the arrival in Washington of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Mr. Obama declared that the prevailing borders before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war – adjusted to some degree to account for Israeli settlements in the West Bank  – should be the basis of a deal. While the 1967 borders have long been viewed as the foundation for a peace agreement, Mr. Obama’s formula of land swaps to compensate for disputed territory created a new benchmark for a diplomatic solution.”

Suitably emboldened with the New York Times unquestionably uttering the same nonsense as he was, Abbas sent a letter to the UN Secretary General dated 23 September 2011 applying for membership of the the UN.

Abbas – signing as “President of the State of Palestine [a non-existent legal entity – ed.], Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization”- brazenly repeated his earlier claims – this time seeking to implicate most of the international community in his fantasy. 

“Furthermore, the vast majority of the international community has stood in support of our inalienable rights as a people, including to statehood, by according bilateral recognition to the State of Palestine on the basis of the 4 June 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and the number of such recognitions continues to rise with each passing day.” 

 Abbas was at it again in 2012 – as BBC News reported him saying: 

"Palestine for me is the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital. This is Palestine"

With Abbas last week choosing the path of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court in preference to resuming negotiations with Israel – he surely has succumbed to his own propaganda and sown the seeds for his own fall from grace.

He has shown himself unwilling to be bound by the procedures laid out in the Oslo Accords, the Bush Roadmap and Security Council Resolution 242 – the internationally laid down parameters under which an end to the Jewish-Arab conflict was to be negotiated and resolved.

An opportunity could now be opening for negotiations between Israel, Egypt and Jordan - the parties to those 1949 and 1950 armistice lines – to try and transform them into lasting and permanent borders.

A little bit of intellectual honesty can go a long way.

Ambushed in Australia at Sunrise: A Muslim friend of Israel

America-based British-born physician Qanta Ahmed is a practising Muslim of Pakistani parentage who is known for her support for Israel and her opposition to, in her own words, "virulently anti-Semitic Islamism".

At the end of last year, during her visit to Australia as an ambassador for Project Rozana, an Israeli-Palestinian initiative to train West Bank physicians (mainly Palestinian Muslims) at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, she accepted an invitation by Channel Seven's Weekend Sunrise program to talk about the Project.

But the program-makers had an agenda, it seems, that did not fit with what she said, and which has, not unnaturally, left this beautiful, courageous, and highly respected lady seething.

As she explains in The Spectator:

"[M]y suspicions should have been raised when the producers didn’t indicate the nature of my interview, nor even confirm that I would be discussing Project Rozana. Minutes before live broadcast, the young segment producer Maddy still ‘didn’t know’ what the anchors would be asking.

The cameras began rolling and I described my experiences at The Technion, The RamBam Medical Center and at Hadassah Hospital, responding to the anchors’ evident curiosity. The close knit and fully integrated coexistence with which Israeli and Arab Palestinian scientists and physicians interact with their equally diverse Israeli and Arab Palestinian patients surprised my interviewers.

Later we discussed Islamism, a movement which as a Muslim I recognise masquerades as the great monotheism of Islam but is starkly totalitarian in ideology with a foundational tenet of subjugating democracy. More significantly, Islamism harbors cosmic enmity to all Jewish and by extension Israeli entities and institutions. It is because I am an observing Muslim that I can emphatically reject Islamism – neither anti-Semitism nor anti-Zionism have basis in Islam.

Ending the segment, the anchors were broadly smiling and engaged. This had been the last of 27 scheduled commitments for my eight-day visit. Satisfied I had been informative and shared a novel perspective, I moved to exit the studio....

Hours later, I received the link of the broadcast ... The shock was physical as I witnessed my exploitation. At each description of the pluralism and egalitarianism I had witnessed in Israeli medicine, the screen split to show the rubble of decimated North Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war, or the launching of an Iron Dome interception missile.Then the screen split to the Security Wall, shown from the Palestinian, not Israeli side.

 Mortally wounded Palestinian children, injured in conflict were broadcast liberally.

The war footage had clearly been assembled in advance of my live interview without prior knowledge of what I would say. In an unseen control room, to the producers’ signal, as I responded with words like ‘coexistence’, ‘integration’ or ‘pluralism’, a technician pulled the trigger and rolled the stock ‘Israel as a terrorist state’ footage; detonating my truthful and universal message....

In my ignorance, I had unwittingly collaborated in my own exploitation by the Australian broadcaster who chose to cast me not as an anti-Islamist Muslim physician volunteering in pursuit of coexistence but as a vapid tool serving the malignant media construct of a two-dimensional anti-Semitic caricature of Zionism. This was a deliberate and opportunistic objectification of my identity as a Muslim and a physician, of the Jewish state reduced to an anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist mannequin, and of my political position as an opponent of Islamism; a position which entails significant personal and professional risk. This is neither journalism nor broadcasting; it’s pure pro-Hamas propaganda .

The producers hadn’t bothered to insert Hamas foot-soldiers which include recruited Palestinian children and youth who wage war on Israelis, nor reveal the damage wrought by its hundreds of rockets on Israeli civilians (of whom 23% are non Jewish – mostly Sunni Muslim), nor did Australians see the industrially rendered labyrinth of Hamas tunnels so central to the recent conflict. Weekend Sunrise prostituted my goodwill in the service of personal or official anti-Israeli and pro-Hamas propaganda.

 This is what Israel faces, that which no other nation embattled with the lethal threat of Islamism wrestles: the battle over narrative. While Pakistan wages a far more indiscriminate campaign against Islamists in tribal areas, while Afghanistan has been under siege by the Taliban for a decade and a half, while Britain, Canada and America target, prosecute and eliminate Islamists, while Egypt wages war on Islamists and criminalizes their ideology, while Saudi Arabia incarcerates Islamists, while France defends Mali from Islamists, while Kenya and Nigeria flail against Islamists, only Israelis are to be dehumanized, judged apart from humanity as they face Islamist threats on every border. Only Israel must be denigrated, reviled and excoriated in her efforts to secure citizens and territories from the ambitions of genocidal anti-Semitic Islamism.

 I felt intensely angry. To be whored out as I strive as an ambassador for a philanthropic mission with universal reach, to be debased as an instrument despite my decades long authority as a physician and Muslim humanist is nothing but obscene.

An on-air apology wouldn’t come amiss."  [Emphasis added]

(Hat tip: Michelle H.)

Ashraf Ramelah: Jews Cope With Egypt’s Hysteria & Revision of Jewish-Egyptian History

Dr Ashraf Ramelah, is the founder and president of Voice of the Copts, a non-profit human rights organisation, whose mission statement is here.

 An able and doughty advocate for the rights of his own community, who as Christians have often been subject to horrendous persecution by Muslim rulers, Dr Ramelah is a friend of Jews and Israel.

 In his latest article he focuses on a subject that will be of interest to all concerned with the history and status of the Jews of Egypt, and I take the liberty of reproducing it here in full:

At the end of last month, the Egyptian courts of Alexandria delivered a verdict to ban annual visits to the historic mausoleum of Moroccan Rabbi Yacoub Abu Hasira in the nearby village of Demto. After thirteen years in the court system, the Administrative Court of Alexandria issued a definitive verdict to abolish the annual celebrations of the Rabbi’s birth on the merit of evidence that Jewish visitors “violate public order and morality and use the opportunity to desecrate the land of Egypt.” In response to the verdict, Israelis requested to have the tomb of Abu Hasira transferred to East Jerusalem. Egyptian authorities denied their request.

The Jewish tradition to journey to the Demto Abu Hasira tomb began in 1907. Jews from around the world – in particular, France, Morocco and Tunisia – made the week-long pilgrimage each year to the Demto tomb to celebrate the Rabbi’s birth (December 26 through January 2). The new ruling now forbids this. Until now, Egypt has always allowed foreign Jews (except for Israeli Jews) to visit the Jewish historical landmark despite the fact that virtually all Jewish-Egyptian citizens have been expelled from Egypt since the Nasser regime – only twenty Jews reside in Egypt today.

Israeli Jews were only allowed visits into Egypt after the signing of the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Special permission was sought from the Sadat government to allow organizing celebration tours (pilgrimages) to the Abu Hasira mausoleum and shrine. This current ruling has put an end to these tours.

Who was Yacoub Abu Hasira, and why is his birthday celebrated? His original name was Jacob Ben Massoud, and he was born in 1805 in southern Morocco. Jewish narrative depicts him as an aged rabbi leaving Morocco by ship on a journey to the Holy Land. During his trip the ship sank, and he clung to a mat (hasira) until he safely reached the shores of Syria. Upon his return from the Holy Land he chose to travel by land. While transiting through Egypt he died, but the miracle of his journey to the Holy Land has been kept alive.

Critically, last month’s court ruling also includes an order for Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities to remove the Rabbi Yacoub Abu Hasira mausoleum from the records of Egyptian Antiquities where it is officially designated a historic monument. The tomb's physical conversion into a mausoleum and simultaneous entry into the records of Egyptian Antiquities can only be considered a second miracle in the Abu Hasira story. Egypt, with its climate of relentless racial bias and paranoia against Jews, is more likely to disavow Jewish-Egyptian history than to embrace it. 

But the reason for the tomb’s designation has more to do with a political decision made by the ambitious former Egyptian Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosni, in preparing for his bid for the head of UNESCO and the favor he sought for that upcoming election. This occurred shortly before Egyptians and their courts began to stir up the issue of prohibiting visitors to the Abu Hasira tomb. Today, Hosni denies that the tomb conversion and upgrade in 2001 was his doing, citing a committee’s responsibility for it.
 
However, as Culture Minister, committee decisions came through him, and now his response to distance himself from his efforts to seal Egypt’s Jewish heritage only serves to highlight his bigotry. At the time, advocating for the rabbi’s tomb had been politically useful for Hosni in mitigating the impact of one of his previous ideas, publicly declared, to burn all Hebrew books found on the shelves of Egyptian libraries. He was widely known for this anti-Semitic initiative (never materialized) both inside and outside of Egypt which ultimately deprived him of the UNESCO position.

Grievances from Egyptians concerning the Abu Hasira mausoleum and Jewish celebrants began as early as Sadat’s 1977 visit to Israel as a form of indirect opposition to Sadat’s show of friendliness toward the Jewish state. Years later, during Mubarak’s presidency, a heated debate began in 2001. Poor villagers expressed gratitude for the increase in local business during the week-long visits. Although they claimed the Jews were harmless, and no harm would come to them by allowing the festivities, the opposition expressed the standard complaint that Jews in Egypt were a national security problem.

Brainwashed by mosque indoctrination and the public school system, Egyptians tend to believe that Jews coming to Egypt from Israel are spies for the Israeli government. Town’s people backed by Muslim Brotherhood members in the Egyptian Parliament began a case in the Alexandria courts and won an injunction against the Jewish celebrants. A ruling was issued prohibiting the pilgrimage. But this verdict was appealed and reversed within the same year.

The warfare against Abu Hasira continued. In 2010, Jews around the world were warned by Israeli authorities and the Egyptian embassies that attending the pilgrimage might be dangerous in view of the Muslim Brotherhood rise to power and anti-Jewish graffiti smeared on the mausoleum walls. A national television talk show videotaped the Jewish Abu Hasira festivities and saw nothing wrong, but bystanders claimed they saw vicious acts. One witness recalled seeing “slaughtering of pigs in the streets.” A reporter from the Egyptian press described “hysteria and half-naked dancers, unethical behavior.” Chancellor Jaber Qasim, Deputy General of Sufis, ranted that, “the pilgrims are a plot and plan of Zionism to rape the nation by claiming that Jews have roots in Egypt …”  

This frenzy – fabrications and hysteria  – was the “evidence” used by the courts to decide last month’s verdict -- ignorance and prejudice once again leading to the discrimination of minorities. This court ruling now sets a precedent whereby every non-Muslim religious monument, artifact and sacred place in the historic registry becomes vulnerable to the whims of Egypt’s biased courts. In the first place, Egypt’s courts do not have jurisdiction over the status of antiquities or the registry of monuments in the Ministry of Culture where its protection act has the absolute authority. It is not the job of the courts but rather for panels of experts to decide. Moreover, this case sets a precedent which directly contradicts Egypt’s constitution – Part 1, Article 4 and Chapter 3, Article 47-50, 64 – which declares freedom of religion and respect for all religions. Israeli authorities have now launched a complaint with UNESCO where the Abu Hasira mausoleum is recorded as a historic Egyptian monument.