| The pine tree is indigenous to Israel - it is not a Western implant - and has been there for millennianoreply@blogger.com (Unknown), 22 Aug 04:45 AM | | MK Ayman Odeh repeats a popular lie when he writes in Haaretz: The pine tree was the main symbol of the new [Jewish National Fund]; it grows quickly and doesn't need much depth to strike roots. Like the British before it, the JNF chose the pine tree instead of expanding the natural Mediterranean woodland that grew in the Judean Hills. The pine looks nice, but it's a foreign implant in the local environment and endangers it because it's especially flammable in our dry, hot climate.I debunked this claim in 2016, but here is some more proof.
The Survey of Western Palestine, Special Papers on Topography, Archaeology, Manners and Customs, Etc · Volume 4, By Palestine Exploration Fund · 1881, quotes a 7th century observer of large pine forests in the center of the land of Israel: From Underground Jerusalem: An Account of Some of the Principal Difficulties Encountered in Its Exploration and the Results Obtained. With a Narrative of an Expedition Through the Jordan Valley and a Visit to the Samaritans, by Sir Charles Warren, 1876: In The Trees and Plants Mentioned in the Bible by William Howse...Read More |
From Ian: Seth Frantzman: How the US disaster in giving Afghanistan to the Taliban happened What's worse is that the US had already pulled contractors and air support and other key factors that had helped prop up the paper-thin Afghan army. It turned out that despite the trillion dollars spent since 2001 in Afghanistan, almost no infrastructure had been built. The Afghan Air Force was a few propeller planes and helicopters, not a real air force. The US had kept the Afghan army underarmed precisely because of the sense that this way it would be dependent, and if the US left, then US fighter jets would not end up in the hands of US adversaries. Almost nothing was left to show for 20 years of the US role when it was all over. AMERICA SENT in troops to secure part of the airport to get Americans and Westerners out. It wasn't exactly apartheid at the airport in the final hours on August 16, but Afghans were left stranded, and mostly white Westerners got on the planes. Where once the US had helped Kosovars and helped Kurds, in 2021 the days of Americans helping were done. While some compare the US leaving Kabul to the US leaving Saigon, in 1975 the US ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, went to the front to see the debacle himself and struggled to stay to the end to help get Vietnamese out. He and his wife personally helped get Vietnamese out, and he urged the...Read More |
From Ian: Meir Y. Soloveichik: The Real Truth About the Temple Mount Ultimately the problem with statements such as these is not their ignorance but that they give ammunition to enemies of Israel, who seek to lie about Jewish history. The hard truth is that in the past 54 years since the miraculous moment when Jews returned to ancient Jerusalem, the sacred city has itself been rebuilt—but the destruction of the remnants of the Temple has gotten worse. The waqf has destroyed much archeological evidence of the Temple that once was there, and many Palestinian leaders have denied that the Temple stood there in the first place. To say on television that the Western Wall is Judaism's holiest site is to provide propaganda to those who seek to negate the Jewish connection to Jerusalem. The episode is another reminder that the Jewish return to Jerusalem in 1967 marked one of the most miraculous moments in the history of the Jewish people, but it is also the anniversary of Israel's greatest mistake. The victory in the Six-Day War could have been a moment to establish what Prime Minister Bennet rightly called "freedom of worship" on the Mount, a moment to enshrine the right for Jews to pray there as much as Muslims. But that moment was missed by Moshe Dayan, and the situation is very different today. For those who care deeply about the Jewish connection to the Mount, and who desperately...Read More |
This story came out earlier this year, but I missed it and it is too good not to share: Less than two years ago, the official news website of the Palestinian Authority's ruling Fatah faction (the party of President Mahmoud Abbas) contended that what's today known as London's Big Ben was originally a clock tower positioned at Hebron Gate (more commonly known as Jaffa Gate) in Jerusalem's Old City. According to the Fatah website, the Hebron Gate clock tower was completed in 1909, when Jerusalem was still under Ottoman rule. After the British took control of the city and established their mandate, they ordered the clock tower dismantled (which is true) and moved, first to another part of Jerusalem, and later to London (which is not true), where it was eventually placed at the north end of the Palace of Westminster. Big Ben was built in 1859, fifty years before the Jaffa Gate clock tower was built. Daniel Greenfield gave a detailed history of the Ottoman clock in Palestine which is worthwhile reading. The claim is all over Arab media. Here. Shehab News put them side by side as if that proves something: There is a bit of a scale problem. The entire Jaffa Gate clock tower was 42 feet high, while Big Ben is 316 feet high. Big Ben's clock face itself is 23 feet...Read More |
An NGO called the "Association 302 to Defend Refugees Rights" condemned the US conditions on aid to UNRWA, including the condition that UNRWA should adhere to its own mandate of impartiality and UN principles. The organization said that these measures will ultimately lead to restrictions on the UNRWA definition of refugee, presumably to bring it in line with the UN definition. It said that if the US must approve UNRWA Palestinian school curricula, it is "stripping the Palestinian curricula of any contents seen as discriminatory or inciting against the Israeli occupation, such as referring to historical Palestine." Judging from what I've seen in their curricula, that isn't the issue. Another NGO, the Democratic Gathering of UNRWA workers, the trade union of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, terror group, condemned UNRWA supposedly punishing workers who post incitement on their social media, saying that this is a violation of freedom of speech. It is normal for Western corporations to prohibit employees from engaging in controversial topics on social media when they can be identified as being employees of that company. It isn't stopping freedom of speech...Read More |
From Ian: Caroline Glick: Joe Biden's catastrophic judgment US allies are furious and alarmed as they see the collapse of US credibility and strategic rationality. And this brings us to Bennett's meeting with Biden next Thursday. Biden's decision to stick to his guns on Afghanistan shows that once he has made up his mind about something, Biden is unwilling to listen to counterargument. And the only other major position that Biden has held consistently over the years is his position on Iran. Whereas for 15 years Biden was an outspoken critic of the war in Afghanistan and demanded a swift US withdrawal, since the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, Biden has been among the regime's most stalwart supporters in Washington. Biden's policy towards the ayatollahs in Tehran has been appeasement for the past 42 years, even when he stood alone on the issue. For instance, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee in 2001, Biden responded to the Sept. 11 attacks on the US by calling for the Bush administration to give Iran $100 million in foreign aid. This week it was reported that ahead of Bennett's visit with Biden next Thursday, government officials are hoping to convince him that given the failure of the nuclear talks in Vienna, the time has come for the US and Israel to jointly attack Iran's nuclear installations. If Biden weren't impermeable to reason, Israel's argument might have...Read More |
For decades, we have seen people who use their (real or constructed) Jewish identity to attempt to discredit Zionism.
But some of them hate Israel so much, they pretend to be Zionists in order to discredit Zionism!
From Haaretz:
Is it time for liberal Zionists, in the name of Zionism, to embrace the end of a sovereign Jewish state in Israel and instead seek the establishment of a binational one? Omri Boehm, an Israeli philosopher and associate professor at the New School for Social Research, believes so – making the case in his new book "Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel," published this week by the prestigious New York Review Books imprint. The book is an effort to reconcile Zionism with the diminishing prospects of a two-state solution. For decades, the Zionist left in Israel and its supporters in the Jewish Diaspora focused on the two-state solution as the only way to preserve Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Israel's current government, however, has no intention to advance that solution, as Foreign Minister Yair Lapid recently reminded the European Union's foreign ministers. Boehm argues in "Haifa Republic" that the two-state solution is now impossible to achieve, and adjures those looking to prevent an apartheid reality on the ground to think outside its confines. The most significant conclusion he invites...Read More |
The Guardian, August 28, 1924
In the 1920s, the notoriously antisemitic Mufti of Jerusalem - appointed by the British - built his power base by raising money in the Arab world for restoration of the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, which had fallen into disrepair under 400 years of Ottoman Muslim rule.
Part of his sales pitch was that the Jews intended to destroy the mosque to build a third Temple. He would take statements by rabbinic leaders in Palestine about the Messianic era and pretend that Jews were planning to demolish the structures on the Temple Mount.
This was a powerful message that the antisemitic Arab world eagerly accepted. It was the lie that was at the root of the deadly 1929 massacres of Jews.
The 1931 Muslim Congress in Jerusalem, led by the Mufti, neatly tied together his lie about the "Jewish designs" on Al Aqsa and his antisemitism, as he banned any Jewish reporters from covering the conference.
In 1967, the lie resumed, even though Israel could have (and should have) taken over complete control of the Temple Mount.
Arab political cartoons continue to push the lie that Israel plans to demolish Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, even though it has had the ability to do that for 54 years. Every August 21, the lie reaches a fever pitch on the anniversary of the attack on Al Aqsa by mentally ill Australian Christian named...Read More |
| | | |
אין תגובות:
הוסף רשומת תגובה