British Labour Antisemitism: Stephen & Jonathan Tell (video)

Well look who's talking about antisemitism in Britain's Labour Party, or the, er, lack of it.

Yes, that Stephen.  Stephen the Martyr, persecuted, to hear him tell it, by those dastardly Zionists.  In other words, vicar-turned-Peacemakers Trust CEO Sizer, back in that not unfamiliar setting for him, the London studios of the Iranian regimes's propaganda satellite channel, Press TV. 

But not that Jonathan.  Not the bravely zealous Israel-defender Mr Hoffman but notorious anti-Israel activist Professor Jonathan Rosenhead.

Watch, but have a sick bag close at hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I7MSaEvTqU

And don't please don't overlook my blog's other post of today, by David Singer, the post directly before this one, with another specially-commissioned cartoon by Dry Bones accompanying it.

Bonus: Lord Sugar on the same topic:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeaWfaXszms

David Singer: Trump Unscrambles UN-EU-PLO Misinformation Omelette

Here's the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:
 
Trump’s intention was revealed when the State Department released its annual “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2017” (“Report”)  – renaming its segment previously entitled “Israel and The Occupied Territories” with a new descriptor – “Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza”.


Israel and the Golan Heights are dealt with together in one section of the Report – whilst the West Bank and Gaza are covered in another.


Commas count big time in Middle East diplomacy.


One comma strategically placed in the descriptor – “… West Bank, and Gaza” – identifies them as two separate territorial entities that could involve different solutions.


The Report’s new choice of language signals that resolving the Arab-Jewish conflict extends beyond the West Bank and Gaza to also include the Golan Heights and that any end to the conflict will only eventuate with the allocation of sovereignty in all three of these disputed areas.


This ground-breaking replacement of false statements with factual reality needs to be replicated by Trump in other areas of misinformation maliciously spread by the UN, EU and PLO – including:

* Recognition that the term “West Bank” was first used in 1950 and that for 3000 years prior thereto that territory had been called “Judea and Samaria”

* Acknowledgement that the “Palestinian Authority” created by the 1993 Oslo Accords was disbanded by written decree of PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on 3 January 2013.

* Affirmation of the right of the Jewish People to close settlement on land in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in Palestine under the rights vested in them by article 6 of the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (the 1922 Mandate) – as preserved by article 80 of the United Nations Charter.

* Ending the fiction that the territory of former Palestine stopped at the Jordan River and agreeing that it included the Hashemite Kingdom of TransJordan – 78% of the territory comprised in the 1922 Mandate - which was granted independence by Great Britain in 1946 and subsequently renamed Jordan in 1950.

* Confirming that most of the Golan Heights was included within the 1922 Mandate until Britain ceded the area to France in the Franco-British Agreement of 7 March 1923

* Rebranding the UN and EU designated “Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)” as “The Disputed Territories”

* Agreement that Security Council Resolution 242 does not require Israel’s total withdrawal from Judea and Samaria (West Bank).

Cracking heads by getting all interested parties to adopt an agreed narrative using terms with agreed meanings is crucial in any communications and negotiations between them – if Trump’s long-awaited “ultimate deal” is to not be still born.


Underestimating Trump’s ability to win the Presidential election race against Hillary Clinton in 2016 has seen those who confidently predicted his defeat subsequently engaged in a vitriolic war of attrition in the media trying to convince the electorate that they voted for the wrong candidate.


Yet Trump continues to confound his detractors with impressive gains in both the American economy and foreign affairs.


The State Department Report – in dumping the use of the nomenclature “The Occupied Territories” – has taken one giant step towards ending the decades-long dishonest semantic warfare waged by the PLO, UN and EU.


Trump has set himself a Herculean task confronting this sorry state of affairs.


Trump has once again dumbfounded his malevolent doomsday-pundits – whisking up an omelette that already promises to taste far better than any ever served up by the PLO, UN and EU.



(Author’s note: The cartoon - commissioned exclusively for this article – is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones” –  one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators – whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades.)

Beatrix Shills for Israel (video)

Celebraing Israel's 70th birthday, Beatrix von Storch from the leader-team of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) speaks in the German Bundestag of the special relationship between Germany and Israel and blasts antisemitism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHesZdmPgdY

Read more (from Rita L.) at source.

In Australia, Jewish Pollsters Promote the NIF

There are about 120,000 Jews in Australia, roughly 85,000 of them adults.  The results of a poll, known as the "Gen17" Australian Jewish community survey, taken between February and May last year and attracting 8621  replies, have been released to much fanfare.

Note that I don't say "by 8621 respondents".  And for good reason: there were no safeguards in place to prevent those with a particular axe to grind filling out the questionnaire more than once. (At least one prominent, left-leaning, communal figure has made no secret of participating in the survey several times.)

Never mind that the poll's methodology has been called into question, with pollsters desperately touting for responses among various constituencies, online and in person, including approaching parents of Jewish day school children as they waited to pick up their kids, and offering them coffee while they filled the questionnaires out.

Here, retired professor Bill Rubinstein, who during the 1980s and 1990s was involved in conducting polls on behalf of Isi Leibler's Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs, declares the survey "deeply flawed" and pulls few punches:

'The only proper way to conduct such a survey is to obtain a comprehensive master list of all Jews in the communities being surveyed  ̶  in this case, Melbourne and Sydney  ̶  and then draw up a random sample of names on these lists, a genuinely random list obtained from a table of random numbers or generated by a computer. This is, of course, the method adopted in all surveys of voting intentions, and is the reason why a truly random sample of only 1500-2000 registered voters, drawn from the millions of registered voters, will produce a result normally within a few per cent of the actual outcome....

Using a random sample ... is not, however, what the “Gen17” survey has done. Apparently, it has simply requested that all local Jews answer its online questionnaire, and reported on the responses of those who did.... Simply reporting on the replies of voluntary respondents is exactly what was done in probably the most notoriously inaccurate poll in history, that conducted by the American weekly The Literary Digest during the 1936 presidential election. A popular magazine of the time, it succeeded in obtaining no fewer than 2.4 million responses as to voting intentions at that election, and confidently predicted that Republican candidate Alfred M. Landon would easily defeat President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was running for re-election.  Of course, the very opposite happened: FDR trounced Landon, and was re-elected with a record majority.  At the same election, the newly founded Gallup Poll employed the valid method of surveying voters, and predicted that Roosevelt would win decisively.  Largely because of The Literary Digest fiasco, that journal’s method of conducting surveys was abandoned.

Unfortunately, however, the Gen17 survey has used The Literary Digest technique.  While its 8600 respondents are superficially a very impressive number, its results are reliable only insofar as they represent a truly random sample of the Jewish community, without any biases. “Appropriately weighting” its results will not correct the absence of randomness, and almost nothing can be inferred about background or attitudes of those it has not polled.  Any adjustment by assuming that those it has polled will be similar to those it has not polled will be valid only if these two samples are similar, for which it has no evidence....'

He goes on:

'The major problem with the survey ... is that the background and attitudes of those who did not participate in the survey  ̶  90 per cent of the community  ̶  are unknown, and simply cannot be inferred  from the responses of those who actually did vote. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that those who did participate represent anything like a random sample of the whole community, but is a group hallmarked by clear biases.... 

Several of the findings in the survey strike me as being, frankly, unbelievable. Thirty-two per cent of respondents stated that the Israeli government should negotiate with Hamas, officially regarded as a terrorist body by all Western governments, with which no one in the Israeli mainstream would negotiate until it changes its charter that calls for the destruction of Israel. Similarly, 37 per cent of respondents  stated that non-Jewish people suffer from discrimination in Israel, a position here associated only with the extreme left. The sheer implausibility of both of these “findings” strongly suggest either that their respondents are a deeply unrepresentative sample of the Jewish community, or that the poll has been abused by multiple votes from a minority....'  [Emphasis added]

It's extremely concerning to see the poll's organisers snuggling up with the local supporters of that highly questionable, indeed dangerous, organisation, the New Israel Fund, who seem to be going all out to reap as much political capital out of the survey's ostensible results as they can.

A particularly brazen and egregious instance of this propagandistic drive occurred last Sunday evening in Melbourne, when, under the aegis of the survey's organisers, a panel convened to discuss the results of the survey and its implications.

Alarmingly, the panel included (why, if not solely for partisan purposes?) Professor Emerita Ilana Snyder, representing the NIF Australia and touting that organisation at length. She especially recommended it to Jewish young people keen to participate in communal affairs.

Learn more about this lamentable state of affairs from decidedly non-leftist communal broadcasters Alan Freedman, Michael Burd and their guest Professor Rubinstein on this J-Air "Nothing Left" podcast.  It's the first topic in that podcast, and fear not: although contact is lost during Freedman and Burd's interview with the professor, it's soon restored.

"Oh, Jeremy Corbyn ..."

What a rum lot!  It sounds like a dirge to me, a wail of derision against the execrable Labour leader. But alas, it's a tribute to him, on the part of old and not so old lefties, anti-Americans  and unilateral nuclear disarmament advocates at a "Don't Bomb Syria" demo in London recently:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDxHlaVSDo

(Another MrAlexSeymour video.)

"In a Very Dangerous Neighbourhood ... Israel Stands Out as an Oasis"

 Brevity of Life
"The days of our years are threescore and ten" - Psalms xc, 10

"Three score and ten," the youth replies,
"How far off seems the day."
"Three score and ten," the old man cries,
"How quickly passed away"....

Those are the opening lines of a poem penned in Victorian times by a British Jew, Philip Abraham (Jewish Chronicle, 2 December 1864).

He was, of course, thinking in terms of end of life, but as we all know, and he could not, 70 epitomises a beginning of life, the period in which the State of Israel has been in existence, and miraculously flourished in so many  ways.

On that note, here's Mark Regev, giving a terrific address at Bnei Akiva's Yom Ha'atzmaut 5778 service at London's Kinloss Synagogue.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnC1ofe4k3s

In Jewish tradition "seventy is a symbol of perfection, of completion" explains Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis at the same event, after paying tribute to Regev, Bnei Akiva, and before giving a stirring encomium to Medinat Israel.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-Z_QfEXFks

More videos can be seen on Bnei Akiva's YouTube channel, including a Yom Ha'atzmaut tribute to Israel by Secretary of State for Defence Gavin Williamson MP.  (Read snippets here)

Seems there's always a party pooper, though:

Sheer brilliance

David Singer:Arab Summit Helps Trump Break Jordan-PLO-Israel Impasse

Here's the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:

The 29th Arab Summit – concluded in Dhahran on 15 April – has presented President Trump with a wonderful opportunity to circumvent the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) refusal to consider Trump’s eagerly-awaited proposals to end the Arab-Jewish conflict.

Conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain and Sudan received scant attention – the Summit’s final communique declaring:

“We reaffirm that the Palestine Cause is the entire Arab nation's main priority, stressing the Arab identity of occupied East Al-Quds as the capital of the State of Palestine.”

Using the term “Palestine Cause” rather than “Palestinian cause” indicates the Arab world now intends focusing on recovering territory lost in the 1967 Six Day War without necessarily creating another Palestinian Arab state – in addition to Jordan – in former Palestine.

The communique further reinforced this interpretation when adding:

“The conflict could be ended through a two-state solution that guarantees the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the borders of 4 July 1967 with East Al-Quds as its capital.”

Using the words “could be ended” rather than “can only be ended” is highly significant in the context of this long-running conflict where every word uttered is invariably scrutinised and analysed in great detail.

The Summit’s declared “two-state solution” – pressed for the last 25 years by the PLO and the Arab League and endorsed by the United Nations and the European Union as the only solution to end the Arab-Jewish conflict – is now being seen by the Arab world as just one possible solution.

The Dhahran Communique downgraded the PLO’s sole-spokesman status:

“We consider the Jordanian authorities as the only body in charge of the administration, maintenance and access to Al-Aqsa Mosque”

This unequivocal Arab endorsement of Jordan challenges the PLO having any future control or influence in the most sensitive area of crucial concern to the Islamic world in Jerusalem – the Moslem holy sites.

Jordan has maintained its presence in Jerusalem as Islamic Holy Shrines Custodian for the last 24 years as a result of the 1994 Peace Agreement between Jordan and Israel – article 9 declaring:

“1. Each Party will provide freedom of access to places of religious and historical significance.

2. In this regard, in accordance with the Washington Declaration, Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem. When negotiations on the permanent status will take place, Israel will give high priority to the Jordanian historic role in these shrines.

3. The Parties will act together to promote interfaith relations among the three monotheistic religions, with the aim of working towards religious understanding, moral commitment, freedom of religious worship, and tolerance and peace.”

The Washington Declaration – signed by His Majesty King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the White House on July 25, 1994 in the presence of President Clinton – formally ended the 46-year state of war between Jordan and Israel.

The Washington Declaration is testament to America’s role as the only power possessing the prestige and clout to change Arab and Jewish perceptions on resolving their long-running conflict.
Jordan’s special role in Jerusalem recognised by the Summit closely follows PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s recent assertion that Jordanians and Palestinians are indeed one people.

Resolving the “Palestine Cause” remains more easily achievable in negotiations between Israel and Jordan within the framework of their existing peace treaty – rather than resuming fruitless negotiations pursued over the last 25 years between Israel and the PLO.

Ending the 100-years-old “Palestine Curse” which has so terribly afflicted both Jews and Arabs could well be within Trump’s grasp thanks to the Dhahran Summit.

(Author’s note: The cartoon  –  commissioned exclusively for this article  –  is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones” – one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators – whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades.)