"The Palestinians [Are] One of Many Many Created Bogus Names": Arab Politician

"Needless to say it's very sad what is happening right now in Israel and ... in Gaza.  I bet most Israelis and the Israeli establishment and government did not desire the war on Gaza and did not desire to be bombing Hamas.  But unfortunately Hamas, a terrorist group, has brought misery for my people the Palestinians and for the Israelis....

Unfortunately the media antisemitism ... has reported very badly on Israel at the moment.

As a Palestinian leader it is in my best interests that Israel does well because whenever Israel does well we do very well and we thrive. Whenever Israel is in trouble because of Hamas and the antisemites in the West we suffer.

In fact, Hamas has only survived because of the tolerance and the media support of the West and elsewhere .....

.... All this is happening because the Palestinians need a state. It's true we do deserve a state....That state today is Jordan....

.... There is no question about the right and the entitlement [of the Jews] to The Land ....

It's about time the Israel-lovers in the United States, and there are millions of them, should consider the Jordanian option....

Most so-called Palestinians, my people, live in Jordan ..."

 That's the message of  the brave and personable Mudar Zahran, the Jordanian opposition leader who we have had the pleasure of meeting several times before on this blog.

He makes the point quoted in the header at 19:20, during a theme that begins at 18:48.

Among his other observations is that Israel is fighting the West's war against Islamism and that if Israel falls, other western countries will follow.

He is speaking at length to Brett and Jon Rappaport of Rappaport Media.Com, in a long discussion on paths to peace that also includes Sarah Stern, founder and president of the Endowment for Middle EastTruth


In this superb must-hear discussion she aptly describes Mr Zahran as a"profile in courage".

Bibi On Fighting "The Rocketeers" & On "The Preeminent Terrorist Empire Of Our Time" (video)

On Fox News yesterday, Bibi Netanyahu talks about Operation Protective Edge with his customary eloquence:

On Hamas:

"[H]ere's the difference between us. We are using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they're using their civilians to protect their missiles. That's basically the difference. They're embedding these rockets that they're firing wholesale into our cities, terrorist rocketing, trying to kill as many as they can. 

They're not succeeding because of two reasons. One is because we've developed this incredible missile defense system, which I think is a historic development in the history of defensive warfare ...

But the other reason we're succeeding, you have to understand some of the rockets do pierce through this shield. The reason we're succeeding is also because we're targeting the rocketeers. The rocketeers are firing from homes, these homes are actually command posts of the Hamas and Islamic jihad army. So, that's where they have their secure communications, weapon caches, rockets hidden, map rooms, so on. These are the command posts. 

Obviously, we're not going to give them immunity.... [W]e try to minimize ... civilian casualties. 

But with this kind of enemy, we'll take whatever necessary means that we need to take.... We're not indiscriminate. It's very tough. There will always going to be civilian casualties, which we regret, but we have to defend our people. And that's what we'll do." 

 On Iran:

"....Of course, they're developing nuclear weapons. They invested, not billions, you can start counting it in maybe in hundreds of billions of dollars for what, for creating medical isotopes for Iranian patients circling the Earth? What are they developing ICBMs for if not for nuclear warheads? What are they developing these -- building these enormous underground nuclear facilities if not for nuclear weapons? If they wanted to have just civilian nuclear energy, they could have it without centrifuges for enrichment, without plutonium and the heavy water. These are only use for nuclear weapons.

....I think we have to remember, this is the same Iran that is arming, financing, training Hamas and Islamic jihad. This is the preeminent terrorist empire of our time, not even a terrorist state. It's a terrorist empire...."

David Singer on Mahmoud Abbas's Culpability for War Crimes Committed in Gaza

Titled "Palestine – Abbas Facing Prosecution For Aiding And Abetting War Crimes", here is the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:

Mahmoud Abbas – Head of the Government of National Consensus in Gaza since 2 June – faces prosecution in the international criminal justice system for aiding and abetting war crimes involving the indiscriminate firing of 384 rockets and missiles from Gaza into Israeli population centres reaching as far away as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem over the past four days.

This latest barrage – which sees no signs of ending – comes after more than 10,000 similar rocket attacks on Israeli civilians from Gaza – then governed by Hamas – following Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

Abbas and his Government now however bear primary responsibility for preventing war crimes emanating from Gazan soil.

In a pre-recorded message aired on Palestine TV, Abbas said the new government was transitional.

This lame excuse cannot enable Abbas to abdicate his responsibility to prevent war crimes being committed in Gaza.

Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch stated in December 2012:

“There is simply no legal justification for launching rockets at populated areas.”

Human Rights Watch makes it clear that under international humanitarian law, or the laws of war, civilians and civilian structures may not be subject to deliberate attacks or attacks that do not discriminate between civilians and military targets. Anyone who commits serious laws-of-war violations intentionally or recklessly is responsible for war crimes.

Locating rocket launchers within or near densely populated civilian areas is also a war crime.

There is abundant evidence that this is occurring in Gaza right now.

Belligerents are also prohibited from using civilians to shield military objectives or operations from attack. "Shielding" refers to purposefully using the presence of civilians to render military forces or areas immune from attack.

This too is occurring in Gaza under the watchful gaze of Abbas’s Government.

Abbas as head of the ruling Government in Gaza, is obligated  to uphold the laws of war and should appropriately punish those responsible for these serious violations.

Abbas is making no effort to restrain or end the commission of these war crimes.

There appears to have been no effort by Abbas or the security or police forces that he now controls in Gaza to take action to prevent the further commission of these war crimes.

Abbas has not attempted to travel to Gaza to take control of the rapidly deteriorating position Gaza finds itself in as rockets continue to be fired indiscriminately into Israeli population centres with what appears to be ever increasing intensity – inviting retaliation by Israel to defend its civilian population under article 51 of the United Nations Charter.

Abbas was clearly aware of the danger of provoking such an Israeli response to rockets being launched into Israel – as this report on 6 July made clear:

“Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas spoke to the chairman of the Hamas political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, on Sunday, and asked him to calm the situation in Gaza. Abbas asked Meshaal to avoid escalation of the situation, which would give Israel an excuse to launch an operation in Gaza.

Meshaal reportedly told Abbas that he would not act to stop the rocket fire unless the PA met its financial obligations to Hamas, including paying the overdue salaries of several Hamas officials.

The PA is currently embroiled in a conflict over wages with Hamas; some 40,000 Hamas employees are not being paid backlogged wages by the newly established unity government, even while the PA's 70,000 employees in Gaza continue to be paid.”

Abbas's plea was made after Hamas ignored Israel’s ultimatum – made on 3 July – which called for the rocket fire to stop within 48 hours or face war.

At least fifteen rockets were fired on Israel in a 12-hour period on 5 July including two at Be'er Sheva.

Abbas clearly exercises control over the public servants in Gaza. He must immediately assert control over those presently in Gaza committing these heinous war crimes.

Abbas’s inaction in using his security and police forces to forcibly intervene to

 1. Remove rocket launchers from populated civilian areas

 2. Destroy supplies of rockets

 3. Prevent the manufacture of rockets

 4.  Prevent the importation of rockets

 5.  Confront, arrest and try those found launching rockets into Israel

 6. End the use of “human shields”

could result in Abbas and his Government colleagues having to face charges before the International Criminal Courts including

  1. Committing war crimes by omission

  2. Aiding and abetting the commission of war crimes

  3. Substantial contribution to the commission of war crimes

   4. Tacit approval and encouragement of war crimes

   5.  Aiding and abetting war crimes by omission

   6.  Ending the use of "human shields"

Abbas could well follow in the footsteps of former Liberian President Charles Taylor who was found guilty on 26 April 2012 on 11 counts including aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Taylor’s appeal was dismissed by the Court of The Hague on 26 September 2013.

Taylor’s case was the first concluded by an international court against a head of state since the Nazi trials at Nuremberg in 1946 convicted Admiral Karl Doenitz – who became President of Germany briefly after Adolf Hitler's suicide.

Will the international community end its love affair with Abbas by calling for his prosecution for aiding and abetting the commission of war crimes being perpetrated in Gaza at this very moment?

The silence presently coming from the United Nations condemning Abbas is deafening.

 Justice will hopefully prevail.

Update: Surprisingly, the views expressed above by David Singer are not entirely at odds with the opinions of the Palestinian envoy to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Ibrahim Khreisheh, as this interview (translations by Memri.org) on Palestinian Authority television on 9 July shows:

 

“The Dangerous Notion Is That There’s A Moral Equivalence Between The Actions Of Hamas, & Those Of The State of Israel" (includes videos)

"Kalb Yehud! [Jewish dog!] That, Allahu akbar, and "something about Gaza in Arabic" is what two young  men screamed as they jumped on and punched a former IDF soldier wearing an identifying T-shirt in a Jewish district of Melbourne last Thursday night, leaving him with cuts and a swollen face:

"I noticed them when it was too late.... One of them tried to pull me to the ground, I started fighting and punching back.  I grabbed one of them by the throat and screamed at them, cursing in Arabic as well. This shocked them, they ran off."

(Hat tip: reader Ian) 

"Jewish scumbag hail hitler let's finish what hitler left for us"

"Isreal[sic] the Jewish Terrorist State of the zionist bankers. It keeps forcefully evicting people from their homes and lands and expects there to be no retaliation? Then they accuse the aggressors to be the palestinian people? wake up up humans! This dirty jew rat bastard in new york is feeding you propeganda [sic] that he gets paid huge money to talk about. This is war crimes being excused because they are dirty JEWS. I will meet you in hell jew cocksucker"

Those are two intemperate comments left by obvious antisemites beneath the following video on YouTube in which Senator Charles (Chuck) Schumer (Democrat, New York), in an able and fair speech, talks of 

“The dangerous notion is that there’s a moral equivalence between the actions of Hamas, and those of the State of Israel.  It must be said, there’s no moral equivalence between the actions, and reactions, of Israel, and Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to the violence that has occurred there.”

The current "Operation Protective Edge" waged by Israel against Hamas in Gaza has of course garnered a predictable outbreak of outrage against the Jewish State, forcefully expressed, though of course not invariably in nakedly antisemitic terms, by the usual suspects.

Biased and/or inept reportage, which harps on the "asymmetrical" nature of the conflict and presents it as a "tit-for-tat" exercise, helps, unwittingly or not, to stir prejudice against Israel among the general public (the BBC, to its utter shame, has excelled at this; see here and here): after all, who can remain unmoved by the spectacle of suffering civilians and dead and injured children?

In the shrewd words of one pro-Israel commenter responding to criticism of Israel's current response to Hamas terror:

'Imagine this ...: A group of your neighbors have repeatedly and consistently declared their intent to murder you and your entire family (See the Hamas Charter, especially Article 7, for a sample of what they say).

 They regularly fire home-made rockets at your house. You build a shelter. The continue firing, threatening all the while to drink your blood  and elevating their hatred of you to a religious principle. They teach their kids that killing you is a sacred duty. They build luxury hotels for their leadership but no shelters for their children. Instead, turn their places of worship and schools and hospitals into arms depots and launch rockets from them. When you retreat they use the place you left as another launching pad.

 They encourage their women, elderly and children to be human shields for anyone trying to murder you and boast that they love death more than you love life.  Then they import much more sophisticated rockets from other people who regulalrly boast that they want you murdered and launch hundreds of those rockets at you and your family from within civilian areas (and accuse you of committing "aggression " and "war crimes" when you start to defend yourself) A disproportionate casualty count is completely misleading in a situation when one side wants only death for you - is willing to commit suicide to see you dead - and consistently encourages their children to be killed in the attempt to murder you.

 Now do you see the situation more clearly? ... The Israelis are not bombing indiscriminately. Unlike any other army in this region - and indeed the world - they call the people living in houses where arms tunnel entrances are located to warn them of an impending strike. The IDF also sends SMS's and drops leaflets and fires warning shots - Hamas tells people to ignore these warnings and encourages them to expose themselves to danger.

 If you had neighbors so determined to murder you and your family - exploiting pictures of those killed in the process in order to get others to hate you, too. Now, for the hard question: How do you respond to this scenario? Think carefully, knowing that the the your life and the lives of all you hold dear are at stake. See the problem?'

 The perceptive Daniel Pipes writes:

 'Why ... did Hamas just provoke a war with Israel? Out of nowhere, on June 11 it began launching rockets, shattering a calm in place since November 2012....  The battlefield outcome of Arab-Israeli wars in last 40 years have been predictable; everyone knows Israeli forces will prevail. It's more like cops and robbers than warfare. Ironically, this lopsidedness turns attention from winning and losing to morality and politics. Israel's enemies provoke it to kill civilians, whose deaths bring them multiple benefits.

The four conflicts since 2006 have restored Hamas' tarnished reputation for "resistance," built solidarity on the home front, stirred dissent among both Arabs and Jews in Israel, galvanized Palestinians and other Muslims to become suicide bombers, embarrassed non-Islamist Arab leaders, secured new United Nations resolutions bashing Israel, inspired Europeans to impose harsher sanctions on Israel, opened the international Left's spigot of vitriol against the Jewish state, and won additional aid from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The holy grail of political warfare is to win the sympathy of the global Left by presenting oneself as underdog and victim....

The tactics of this new warfare include presenting a convincingly emotional narrative, citing endorsements of famous personalities, appealing to the conscience, and drawing simple but powerful political cartoons (Israeli supporters tend to excel at this, both in the past and now). Palestinians get even more creative, developing the twin fraudulent techniques of "fauxtography" for still pictures and "Pallywood" for videos. Israelis used to be complacent about the need for what they call hasbara, or getting the message out, but recent years find them more focused on this.'

And those in the media and elsewhere who present Hamas's rocketry as of the homemade, pipsqueak kind are economical with the truth. The Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, pointed out last Wednesday that about three-quarters of the Israeli population are now within striking range of Hamas's rockets, thanks largely to shipments, since 2012, of long-range rockets from Iran.

"You remember that ship that we interdicted a few months ago in the Red Sea was carrying 40 long range rockets. Well, one of those types of rockets was actually fired yesterday into Israel. But in addition to the rockets being smuggled in—and the smuggling route went from Iran to Sudan and up through the Sinai into Gaza—in addition to that, Hamas has developed a domestic manufacturing capability for these long range rockets and part of Israel’s military operation is to not only go after the missile batteries but to go after these factories that are essentially making these weapons."

Moreover, it's reported:

"In addition to Hamas, the Iranian-funded Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) has been firing many rockets into Tel Aviv and southern cities such as Be’er Sheva.

PIJ, which acts at Iran’s behest, is in possession of multiple Iranian-made rockets, including the Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 missiles...."

 and that 

"If the fighting with Israel escalates, the organizations are likely to launch more of these missiles toward the Greater Tel Aviv area and northern cities (Hadera, Haifa), believing that to put an end to Israeli attacks, they will need to ramp up the pressure on Israel with strikes on major cities to create a balance of terror that will force Israel to end its operation."

To quote analyst Jonathan Spyer, author of The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict:

"....There is a tendency to see the Israeli-Palestinian arena as somehow set apart from the rest of the Mid-East neighborhood. But this is an illusion.

Firstly, in the most tangible way, the most potent elements of the Hamas assault on Israeli cities of recent days is made possible only by the movement's link with Iran....

Similarly, the Islamic Jihad movement, which has been rapidly gaining strength at Hamas's expense in Gaza in recent months, is a full proxy of Iran.

But in a deeper sense, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are local manifestations of the particular, pathological Islamist political-religious-paramilitary style and ideology which has challenged order and made life a misery all across the region in recent decades, and with added strength in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011.

Take a look around the neighborhood. In Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, rival, equally implacable versions of political Islam are at each others' throats. In Syria, upwards of 160,000 people have died over the course of the last four years. In Lebanon, a Shia Islamist terror group, Hizballah, enjoys unrivalled dominance. In Iraq, a Sunni Islamist killing machine has conquered the west of the country and is poised to assault Baghdad.

So why then have Israel and its environs nevertheless managed to avoid the general collapse of these other countries? The reason is deterrence.

 There is a single, dominant military element west of the Jordan River. This element is the Israel Defense Forces.

But deterrence, alas, is a perishable substance, which must be periodically replenished. Hamas, facing difficult economic straits, with its tunnels sealed by Sisi's armed forces, with newer and yet more radical Islamist elements inspired by ISIS emerging from within, evidently decided that it was time for another round.

As of now, Israel is engaging in a far reaching operation designed to hit at Hamas' capabilities. But more profoundly, in the simple and brutal logic of the neighborhood, Israel is trying to remind Hamas of the cost of tangling with the Jewish state.

The objective of this is not to re-conquer Gaza, nor to impact on local politics, still less to impose suffering on the Palestinians for its own sake.

When one's neighbors are Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the modest objective of quiet can only be bought at the cost of periodic military actions intended to remind the enemy of the cost of aggression and thus reinforce deterrence.

Because of the strength of Israeli arms, the conflict between Israel and the PA territories don't resemble those roiling Iraq or Syria. The relative balance of forces, however, is a lesson which those who wish to turn the country into something resembling those hell-holes must periodically re-learn - through bitter experience."

Reminders Of The Death Culture (includes videos)

Israeli columnist Dror Eytan was obviously seeking no kudos from the Ha'aretz set or the Obama administration when he wrote inter alia  last week:

 'What has the death culture that surrounds us sought to sell in the past hundred years? Look around: there are no Jews in Iraq and no “territories” in Syria, and nevertheless the angels of death gleefully slaughter each other. No science and no industry and no inventions that will benefit humanity. Just death, and it’s wrapped in a thick layer of damned political correctness that has distorted our thought process....

If we don’t realize that the executioners who pack the condemned into cattle trucks and lay them by the dozens or hundreds in ditches and put them to death amid devilish ululations, and if we don’t get that this bunch is operating on our borders, and that its successes encourage our own local death culture, we will have to pay heavier prices in the future.

We must employ full force against the emissaries of the death culture, those who aid them, their military and civilian infrastructure, their sources of funding, their families, their clans, and anyone who knows something but just nods his head and keeps quiet. We know the argument that keeps us emasculated: “It will only increase tension and give an incentive to terror and strengthen the cycle of bloodshed.” Not at all. The culture of death doesn’t need incentives—it kills and murders and kidnaps, because that's what it is....

.... In the eyes of our neighbors and some parts of the world we are all people who stole a land that wasn’t theirs. This blood libel is spread every day by anti-Semites and haters of Israel, as well as by useful idiots among us....

Various conquerors and nomads from the four ends of the earth have arrived in this country. But since we Jews were exiled, no other sovereign entity has sprung up in this land. What would this country be if it weren't for the Jews? What would Jerusalem be without the Jews? The groups of strangers never wanted to compromise with the Jews who survived extermination and came home after a long exile. Even today they refuse to compromise and seek to oust us from the entire country. From Tel Aviv, too.... The fight for Israel is our fight for life....'

American Jewish leaders have expressed firm support for Operation Protective Edge, Israel's current initiative against that antisemitic genocidal Hamas.  As they observe:

'....Millions of Israelis are spending a sleepless night as sirens go off across the country in response to the constant barrage of missiles fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza, targeting the civilian population. No country would or should tolerate such a horrific onslaught as the one emanating from Gaza, which is controlled by the terrorist Hamas organization. The government of Prime Minister Netanyahu has shown great restraint seeking to avoid an all-out war and the civilian casualties that would entail. They have engaged in limited strikes against missile-launchers, storage facilities and manufacturing locations. Hamas has exploited this to expand the scope and range of its rocket attacks.  This puts the lie to the assertion that Hamas has changed and it remains a bloodthirsty terrorist entity. If there is to be any hope of a peaceful resolution of the conflict, it is imperative that President Abbas end the so-called unity government and disassociate in every respect from Hamas....'

The evil that characterises Hamas is seen in the following Palestine Media Watch video, which appeared on Al-Aqsa TV yesterday (9 July, and begins

'Zionists, wait and see stabbing attacks everywhere.
Wait for suicide attacks on every bus, café and street':

And then there is this footage showing how Hamas rockets are fired from civilian areas in Gaza, deliberately putting Gazan civilians in danger from Israeli fire:

And here's how Hamas targets its own people by encouraging Gazans to make themselves into human shields, knowing that despite the IDF's best intentions some will inevitably become casualties, and that much of the international community will condemn Israel for a "disproportionate response":

But even as the conflict between Israel and Hamas rages, another threat continues to loom.

Analysts Ali Alfoneh and Reuel Marc Gerecht, at the end of a  most useful pen portrait of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, have this to say:

'Those who argue that Rouhani has abandoned the nuclear ambitions that he has so proudly defended and advanced would be well advised to consider more closely the cleric’s words, deeds, associations, and pride. Most probably Rouhani wants the nuke as much as any officer in the Revolutionary Guard or Saeed Jalili, the one-legged, shrine-loving war veteran who so enjoyed ignoring and belittling European and American diplomats as Ahmadinejad’s nuclear negotiator. Rouhani just wants to be cleverer about how the regime becomes a nuclear state. The deal that he has likely cut with the supreme leader is a variation on what Rouhani believes he tried with the West after the clandestine nuclear program was revealed by an opposition group in 2002: temporary concessions on those things that no longer need further research, no concessions at all in areas requiring further work. To get the sanctions lifted—and Rouhani is convinced that once they start coming down, they are unlikely to go back up—the Islamic Republic should slow its nuclear program without diminishing its capacity to produce a bomb and the ballistic missiles to deliver it. 

This time round, this approach may work with the West. It may not work at home. Although Khamenei has solidly backed Rouhani’s diplomatic offensive, referring to the need for “heroic flexibility” when confronting the enemy, his support is undoubtedly conditional. The supreme leader is surely aware that Rouhani’s nuclear memoir is, among other things, a criticism of his preferred confrontational approach during Ahmadinejad’s presidency. And Khamenei today doesn’t give the impression that he considers 2005-2013 wasted time. For cause: The nuclear program’s greatest technical and industrial advances have been made in the last eight years. True, sanctions have mounted; the supreme leader may believe they were unavoidable. And Rouhani has to worry that the Guard Corps’s longstanding distaste for him and small appetite for concessions may derail his diplomatic efforts to test Western resolve and unity. In addition, the Corps has grown enormously powerful under the sanctions regime because its resources are vast and privileged: As private Iranian businesses have withered and foreign firms have fled, the Guard Corps has moved in. Khamenei has approved or acquiesced to the Guard’s economic expansionism because it is, as it proved in smashing the massive pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009, indispensable to his rule. 

Western observers of Iran often see the antagonism between Rouhani and the Revolutionary Guard Corps primarily as a test of wills over the nuclear program; it isn’t. It’s a struggle about the nature of the regime and the revolution. Rouhani’s politics aren’t reformist; they are revanchist. He wants his class—the first-generation, upper-tier revolutionary managers who made the republic under Rafsanjani—to again have the high ground. He wants educated civilians—primarily clerics—to determine the destiny of the Islamic Revolution, not coarse militiamen who, in his eyes, lost the great war against Saddam Hussein. Rouhani has conspicuously dumped guardsmen from his cabinet and provincial governments. He and his men have publicly attacked the Corps for trying to destroy private enterprise and exposed “private” firms that are really Revolutionary Guard front companies feeding on public finances. It’s unclear, however, whether Rouhani will have any better luck this time confronting the Guard than he did earlier. He may if the supreme leader believes that his praetorians have gone too far. But the odds aren’t in Rouhani’s favor. Khamenei knows—because his praetorians keep publicly reminding him—that the Corps is the guarantor of his rule and the revolution. 

President Obama is in a peculiar situation: He has hooked his diplomacy onto a cleric who can claim to have been a founding father of Iran’s theocracy and its nuclear-weapons program. Rouhani has arduously and vengefully worked to see the revolution succeed. He treated with the devil (the Reagan administration) to get what the republic desperately needed during the Iran-Iraq war. He appears willing to do so again to ensure the regime’s continuing dominion. Whether or not Rouhani has any intention of trading away his nuclear legacy for a better economy, he’s clearly shown that he was an attentive student to his mentors. President Obama may not appreciate the fact that his Iranian “moderate” is the same “moderate” Oliver North dealt with. Rouhani surely does. Persian humor is built on irony and a mordant appreciation for an unpleasant Middle Eastern truth: Nice guys finish last—if they even finish at all.'

AIPAC has not forgotten what's at stake, issuing this stark warning:

"In Reality, Israel Is The Only Middle Eastern Entity That Is Not An Apartheid Regime"

In New York on 7 July, a participant in an anti-Israel rally proclaims her reason for supporting BDS.

It is as we know a commonly-expressed justification by BDSers for their hatred of and targeting of the tiny Jewish State, and it's based on a false premise, of course, depending for its origin and its circulation on the construction and consumption of a Big Lie.

The latest well-informed person in a position to be able to show it up for what it is does so in a substantial, scholarly, closely argued, fully footnoted article.

He's Steven Plaut, an academic in the Graduate School of Management at the University of Haifa, and his article is entitled "The Myth of Ethnic Inequality in Israel".

Here's a taste:

'It is commonplace to attribute much of Israel's domestic tensions to supposed Jewish discrimination against the country's Arab citizens. Nearly every Israeli Arab nongovernmental organization insists that such discrimination characterizes the Jewish state in general and its labor markets in particular. The Israeli media routinely interview Israeli Arabs (and non-Ashkenazi Jews) who claim to have been victims of discrimination. These allegations are echoed by Jewish Israeli academics, think tanks, and journalists, especially on the political Left, not to mention the international anti-Israel movement and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign. Indeed, the U.S. Department of State has even joined the growing outcry concerning Israel's alleged racist discrimination against its Arab citizens. 

 Of course, in reality, Israel is the only Middle Eastern entity that is not an apartheid regime, and the apartheid slander holds no water whatsoever save in the minds of the Jewish state's enemies and defamers. Yet discrimination is a scientifically empirical question subject to testing and not a matter of subjective personal opinion. Stripping away the venomous anti-Israel rhetoric, the legitimate question remains whether and how much discrimination really exists in Israel....

 The most surprising conclusion from the econometric analysis of ethnic earnings disparities in Israel is how many of the stereotypical characterizations of Israel turn out to be false. Ethnicity in Israel simply does not play a large role in the labor market, in contrast with gender or schooling.

 While it is widely presumed that the Arab minority underperforms in the labor market of the Jewish state, either because of discrimination or other structural or cultural disadvantages, this turns out not to be so. That accusation is central to the claim that Israel is some sort of apartheid regime....

 The problem is not just in the media. The academic careers of many in Israel, particularly in sociology, have been constructed entirely upon unsubstantiated allegations of Israeli racism. Israeli sociologists in general tend to accept at face value the notion that any documented disparity in earnings or numerical representation between Israeli Jews and Arabs must be due to discrimination. Perhaps the most notorious example is that of Yehouda Shenhav, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University. Shenhav is father of the notion that "Oriental Jews" are in fact "Arabs of the Mosaic faith," and together with Arabs, share a victimhood imposed upon them by racist Ashkenazi Zionists.  Shenhav and those of similar ideological orientation operate the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, dedicated to liberating "Oriental Jews" from Ashkenazi bigotry and capitalism.

In Israel's media, it is considered common knowledge that Arabs, Mizrahim, and Ethiopians are victims of harsh discrimination.The accusations of apartheid may be malicious, disingenuous, and over-the-top—or so most Israeli commentators and sociologists would agree—but the presumption of an underlying widespread pattern of discrimination is, to their minds, undeniable. The extent to which some in Israel go to manufacture evidence of discrimination can be awe-inspiring. For example, the ordinarily prestigious Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), a left-wing think tank, published a study in May 2013 that claimed to have discovered unambiguous proof of widespread discrimination in Israel against Arabs. Composed by IDI legal staffer Tanya Steiner under the supervision of Hebrew University professor Mordechai Kremnitzer, the study's evidence was the number of complaints about discrimination submitted to the Israeli Commission on Equal Opportunities in Employment. Yet while numerous complaints from women reached the commission, only 3 percent of the complaints it received were from Israeli Arabs, who represent about 18 percent of the labor force. Of these, only three of the complaints received in the entire 2011 year by the commission about alleged anti-Arab discrimination were deemed worthy of investigation. So instead of concluding that the evidence points to an absence of discrimination, the IDI's conclusion was that it all proves how badly discriminated Israeli Arabs are in Israel; after all, they are so victimized that they do not even file complaints about discrimination.

There is no evidence that points to ethnic discrimination against Israeli Arabs or Mizrahi Jews in Israeli labor markets. Recent immigrants appear to be the one group in the country at an earnings disadvantage. But it would be difficult to make a case that even their disadvantage is due to discrimination since immigrants in all societies are at a competitive disadvantage compared with natives...

The nearly complete absence of evidence of ethnic discrimination in Israeli labor markets does not, of course, preclude its existence in other markets or aspects of society. As was shown here, Arabs earn a higher return on education than Jews. But this does not rule out possible discrimination against Arabs in admissions to universities and colleges. It should be noted, however, that Israeli universities routinely implement affirmative action preferences in favor of Arabs and sometimes in favor of Mizrahim (and women). The only other documented university discrimination is that which grants some preferences to army veterans, a practice found in most countries.

There have also been allegations that Israel discriminates in its fiscal allocations and revenue sharing where Arab towns and villages are underfunded. But an empirical analysis of the question found just the opposite; if anything, the Arab local authorities were being over-funded.  Evidence regarding other alleged forms of discrimination by Israel tends to be just as skimpy. Some accusations are based upon Israel's granting automatic citizenship to Jews under its "Law of Return." But such citizenship entitlements are not unusual in the world and can be found in many other countries, such as Armenia, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, and are guaranteed under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.  Another indictment of Israel concerns the discriminatory nature of its military conscription. Jews and Druse are conscripted into the Israeli military while Arabs may volunteer for service but are not conscripted. Again, this practice may indeed constitute discrimination but that discrimination is against Jews, not against Arabs.

None of this proves that discrimination never exists in Israel against Arabs, against Mizrahi Jews, or anyone else. But the very fact that empirical evidence of discrimination is so hard to discern or observe must itself serve as an important warning indicator about its magnitude or lack thereof.'

Read the entire article, with its supporting footnotes plus captioned illustrations, here

"Officers, These Guys Are Threatening Us": Anti-Israel Ferals Show Their Ferocity in San Francisco

In San Francisco on 7 July, thirty peaceful pro-Israel demonstrators are taunted and menaced by  300 anti-Israel ferals, screaming abuse, calling for another Intifada, and of course the destruction of the Jewish State: