| Palestinians upset that their firefighters helped Israelnoreply@blogger.com (Unknown), 19 Aug 04:45 AM This week, Israel suffered major wildfires we | | This week, Israel suffered major wildfires west of Jerusalem. It asked other countries for aid in fighting the fires, but not the Palestinian Authority.
The PA volunteered to help, and Israel accepted. They sent four firetrucks and 20 firefighters to help control the blaze.
Now, Palestinians are complaining about their leaders approving doing something humanitarian for Jews.
Social media in Arabic had many posts against the Palestinians helping Israel.
Many of them pointed out that this happened on the same day that Israeli forces killed four armed terrorists in Jenin.Journalist Ibrahim Moqbel said on his Facebook page, "The occupation killed 4 and we sent them 4 fire engines. This is the national project in the religion of Abbas...Read More |
From Reuters: Algeria on Wednesday blamed devastating wildfires this month on two groups it recently designated as terrorist organisations, adding that one of them was backed by Morocco and Israel. The president's office said police had arrested 22 people for starting the deadly fires, but said ultimate responsibility lay with the Islamist Rashad group and MAK, an autonomy movement for the mostly Amazigh-speaking Kabylie region. Algeria designated both groups as terrorist organisations this year. The presidency said on Wednesday that MAK "gets support and help from foreign parties, particularly Morocco and the Zionist entity", referring to Israel. The wildfires have killed some 90 people in Algeria. * * * * * *
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From Ian: New York City's Kristallnacht Ed Koch called it "a pogrom." So did Rudy Giuliani. The Reverend Al Sharpton—the chubby, agitating, last-century version—led a march along the streets as rioting young blacks rampaged through the neighborhood looking for Jews and Jewish businesses to attack. Hasidim cowered behind their mezuzah-trimmed doors while the sluggish police ducked rocks and bottles. New York's first African-American mayor, the courtly David Dinkins, showed up, hoisted a bullhorn, and tried to pacify the mob. "Will you listen to me for just a minute?" he pleaded. "No!" they responded, trying to stone him. "I care about you. I care about you desperately," he shouted. "Arrest the Jews!" they demanded. That was the raw scene 30 years ago, in August 1991, when the worst race rioting in modern New York memory engulfed Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Caribbean immigrants, American blacks, and Hispanics shared the neighborhood with a heavily outnumbered community of Jews, most of them Lubavitcher Hasidim. The convulsive episode drove Dinkins's handpicked black police commissioner back to Houston and helped doom his mayoralty, but not before that commissioner's successor, Ray Kelly, began to reenergize the police force. This, in turn, gave momentum to Rudy Guiliani's more muscular regime once he had defeated Dinkins in the mayoral election two years later. Even today...Read More |
With both Afghanistan and the Abraham Accords in the news this week, it is interesting to note that the Abraham Accords could potentially have started off with Afghanistan. According to Radio Free Europe, in 2005 -- following Israel's disengagement from Gaza -- Afghanistan suggested establishing formal ties with Israel: In an unprecedented interview in Kabul with a reporter from Tel Aviv daily "Yedi'ot Aharonot," Afghan President Hamid Karzai hinted at a desire to establish formal relations with Israel. While the euphoria that accompanied presumptions of imminent full diplomatic relations was quickly tempered by preconditions, the warming of ties between Afghanistan and Israel sets Kabul's policies in sharp contrast to those of neighboring Iran, where President Mahmud Ahmadinezhad has called for the destruction of the Jewish state. According to the article, Karzai had met Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres and called him "a dear man, a real warrior for peace." Israel's response to this news was "muted," but Ha'aretz reported that unnamed Israeli political sources believed that such a move by Afghanistan would represent "another important step on the road to recognition of Israel by the Muslim world." That recognition of Israel never happened, in part of because of pressure from Iran, but even so -- the current debacle in that country is also likely to have an effect on relations between the...Read More |
The director of the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Sheikh Hefzy Abu Sneina, now claims that his mosque is the fourth holiest mosque in Islam after the Al-Haram in Mecca, the Al-Nabawi mosque in Medina and the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. He says that it contains Islamic sanctities and the tombs of their prophets, "which proves the right of Palestinians and Muslims to it and denies any Israeli claims of their rights in it. "
Even though the prophets buried there have nothing to do with Islam, with the exception of Abraham, but everything to do with Judaism.
The Jewish ties to Hebron have given the Ibrahimi Mosque some holiness inflation, it seems.
I have not seen the Hebron mosque listed as the fourth holiest in any other source.This article in The Guardian says that #4 is Imam Ali in Iraq, #5 is the Dome of the Rock, #6 is Great Mosque of Djenne in Mali and #7 is the Quba Mosque in Medina. Hebron isn't mentioned...Read More |
From Ian: After American withdrawal from Afghanistan, implications for Israel look grimmer As Israel observes the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, it's difficult to forget the capitulation of the Iraqi army to ISIS in 2014 or the EUBAM observers who fled as Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007, not to mention visions of the United States fleeing Saigon in the spring of 1975 as part of the collapse of the Vietnam War. Noting the coincidental, yet equal number of years separating each of the Middle Eastern incidents in which Islamic fundamentalists defeated their adversaries, Eran Lerman, vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, half-jokingly called it the "seven-year-itch." "What worries me," he says, "is a much broader symbolic message that Islamist radicalism is once again on the march, the Americans have no staying power, and the West is in decline." Lerman suggests that Israel learn lessons from the past, saying it should "band together with other countries to hold against the tide." Referring to Israel's own concerns of Islamic fundamentalists taking over Palestinian areas besides Gaza, which Hamas already controls, Lerman says "I hope we never again hear lectures from the Americans on how you can trust Palestinian security forces to run their country and keep us safe once we leave." Israel has long argued that a future...Read More |
Remember the articles from the 1990s and early 2000s that predicted a demographic bomb that would destroy Israel? This front page article in the St. Petersburg (FL) Times from September 21, 2003 was typical: Note the pull quote - the entire reason this woman wants lots of children is because she wants to ethnically cleanse Jews. In that article, Israeli demographer Arnon soffer confidently predicted that by 2020, there were be 8.5 million Arabs in territories Israel controls, compared to 6.5 million Jews. His predictions of the Arab population was only off by 1.5 million. The Arab population growth has been steadily slowing over the years, and their birthrate has plummeted. While the Palestinian Arab and Israeli Arab birthrates per thousand used to be more than double that of Jews in Israel in 2001, they are now much closer to parity. Also, in 2018, the fertility rate of Jewish women in Israel surpassed that of Arab Israeli women. Not to say there isn't still an issue, but that argument that Israel must panic and give Palestinians a state because of the demographic threat has lost much of its urgency - especially since Israel washed its hands of Gaza and has no interest in controlling that sector with its 2.1 million Arabs. Interestingly, most feminists don't seem to have a problem with the reasons for a higher Arab birthrate - a patriarchal...Read More |
In the Times of Israel, diplomatic reporter Lazer Berman offers an analysis of how the Afghanistan fiasco could affect Israel: Though the tragedy is unfolding almost 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) from Israel, it will have important ramifications for Jerusalem and the choices its partners and enemies will make in the coming months. For Israel, which has tied itself snuggly to Washington for decades, the downsides are clear. "When the US is seen as weak, in the simplest terms, it's bad for Israel," said Micky Aharonson, a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and former foreign policy director at Israel's National Security Council. The idea that the most capable intelligence apparatus in the world so badly misread a country it has been intimately involved with for two decades does not inspire confidence in America's abilities to read and shape the region — especially after a string of high-profile intelligence failures in Iraq, Iran, Libya and more. "Whenever the world's most powerful nation suffers a humiliating foreign policy failure, it's going to have far-reaching international effects, including for countries, like Israel, who have based so much of their own deterrence and national security on the credibility of their strategic partnership with the United States," said John Hannah, senior fellow at the Jewish Institute...Read More |
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