| Arabs accuse Israel of taking over a building at a historic vantage point overlooking the Temple Mountnoreply@blogger.com (Unknown), 02 Mar 05:45 AM | | Arab News reports: Dozens of Palestinian parents staged protests in East Jerusalem on Saturday over plans by Israeli authorities to merge two schools in the Old City. Parents joined protests at the Omariya and Mawlawi schools to speak out against what they said was an unjust and dangerous decision that might lead to an emptying of schools in the Old City. Jerusalemite activist Ahmed Al-Safadi said the Israeli move is designed to turn the Al-Qadisiyah school building near Bab Al-Sahira into a school for settlers. Jerusalemites have condemned Israeli education proposals as "racist." Israeli authorities have threatened to withdraw the licenses of some schools and forced principals to sign a petition obliging them not to teach the Palestinian curriculum. Abu Ziyad, a lawyer, writer and former minister of Jerusalem affairs in the Palestinian government, told Arab News: "If the goal of the Israelis is to control the Omariya school, then it is an ancient building and an Islamic Awaqaf, and it forms one of the borders of Al-Aqsa Mosque." It is possible to control the northern squares of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock through this step, he said. The school is administered by Israel's Education Ministry, as a virtual walk using Google Street Maps shows. I cannot...Read More |
From Ian: Israel Is About to Turn 75; We Must Stop the 'Lawfare' Strategy Used to Attack It In May, the State of Israel will celebrate its 75th birthday. Yet attacks on the very idea of a Jewish state continue, predominantly in the form of "lawfare." Below we explain what lawfare is, and how Israel and its supporters must respond to this threat to the Jewish State. Lawfare is conducted through legal machinery, deploying tactics that misuse international laws by applying them in extraordinary ways, in order to isolate, demonize, and persecute the Jewish State. For example, a Hamas lawfare tactic is to deliberately place civilians in harm's way in armed conflict. The Israeli military — when targeted by this lawfare tactic — must either harm the innocent or abort combat. Of course, placing civilians in harm's way undermines the purpose of international humanitarian law, which is intended to limit battlefield suffering of civilians. Hamas places its citizens in danger, and perverts the course of justice. However, the lawfare tactic works, as it diminishes Israel's ability to respond to terror attacks and offensive attacks, and is used to demonize Israel when civilians are accidentally killed, despite Israel's best efforts to prevent this. Lawfare also occurs in trade and human rights law. For example, when the law is leveraged to draw a court into...Read More |
Givat HaTurmosim or Lupine Hill is what everyone calls it. But that's not its proper, biblical name. That would be Tel Socho in the Elah Valley, where David fought Goliath: The Philistines assembled their forces for battle; they massed at Socho of Judah, and encamped at Ephes-dammim, between Socho and Azekah. Saul and the men of Israel massed and encamped in the valley of Elah. They drew up their line of battle against the Philistines, with the Philistines stationed on one hill and Israel stationed on the opposite hill; the ravine was between them. A champion of the Philistine forces stepped forward; his name was Goliath of Gath, and he was six cubits and a span tall. (1 Samuel 17:1-4) The history is reason enough to make a pilgrimage to this scenic spot, located in the Beit Shemesh area. But there's another reason to visit, and that's the lupines, which bloom here in profusion from approximately late February to early March. The lupine, Lupinus pilosus, derives its name from the Latin lupus, or "wolf," an allusion to the ancient (false) belief that the plant destroys the soil in which it grows, rendering the earth henceforth infertile. The second part of the botanical name of this flower, "pilosus," refers to the velvety plant's covering of long, soft hairs. Lupinus pilosus, the blue lupine The purplish-blue flowers are picky. They grow on this hill, and just a few feet away, they won't, except for a...Read More |
This morning, ahead of a planned press conference at the Watan Media Network in Ramallah, Palestinian security services in plainclothes stormed in and shut it down.
According to Watan, the security forces, some of whom were armed, tried to expel a number of journalists who were present to cover the press conference. They also attacked Watan employees when they objected to the intrusion, which they say was done without a written order.
The press conference was going to include criticism of the Palestinian Authority for working with the US in trying to calm down tensions, as well as for not working to hold elections.
Since this is a dog-bites-man story, don't expect to see any op-eds decrying the lack of freedoms under Palestinian rule. * * * * * * Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. Read all about it here! ...Read More |
From Ian: Jonathan Tobin: Judge the Jewish rioters, but don't rationalize Arab murderers On the contrary, the post-Oslo Accords era has made clear that the Palestinians have no more interest today in ending their century-old war on Zionism now than they had in the past, when they rejected repeated Israeli attempts to forge a compromise based on the now-discredited "land for peace" formula that would have created an independent Palestinian state. Yet as much as the left is determined to establish a moral equivalence between the Palestinians and the Netanyahu government and its supporters in the territories, this is a false narrative. Even at the worst of times, support for violence against Arabs is limited to a tiny segment of Israeli opinion. It is not merely condemned by a broad sector of the public and the Knesset; those who engage in it are subject to prosecution. Belief in the "purity of arms" and a policy of restraint that seeks to avoid civilian casualties even when fighting terrorism is baked deep into the political DNA of Israel and its culture. On the other side, terrorism against Jews and Israelis is not only widely supported by Palestinian Arabs but embraced by their political parties. This includes the supposedly moderate Fatah Party that runs the Palestinian Authority, as well as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, whose public support is...Read More |
A death penalty bill for terrorists passed a preliminary hearing in the Knesset today, and we can expect the normal outrage to ensue. I don't think that such a bill would serve as a disincentive to terror - after all, terrorists expect to be killed during their attacks - but there are a couple of subplots to this story that are more important than the story itself.
One is that the chances that the bill actually passes is fairly low - and that is because the religious parties in the coalition are against the death penalty. As JPost writes: Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef has ruled that the death penalty violates Halacha. The Shas Party, which represents the Sephardi haredi (ultra-Orthodox) electorate, said it would support the bill only in its preliminary reading at this point, out of coalition obligations, but that it would follow Yosef's ruling in the future, which is unlikely to change, according to Yishai Cohen, a reporter for the Kikar HaShabbat news site. Supporters of the law, without Shas and UTJ but with Yisrael Beytenu, would likely have 52 votes. Assuming that Shas and UTJ abstain and the opposition parties oppose the bill, there would be 50 votes against it. This means that if either of the haredi parties, or even if any of the two factions that make up UTJ – the Lithuanian Degel Hatorah and the hassidic Agudat...Read More |
Cartoon with article in The New Arab
MSN, like most media outlets, enters into syndication deals so they can publish articles from other news sources legally.
Apparently, republishing and amplifying hate doesn't bother them. Today, MSN published an article by Wael Kandil in The New Arab that calls all Jews in Israel thieves - and worse: The fact that groups of Zionist settlers attacked the town of Hawara and other Palestinian villages south of the city of Nablus brings the conflict over Palestine back to its roots at the beginning of the last century: gangs of foreign looters coming from abroad attack lands and homes to forcibly seize them from their original inhabitants, expel them from them, and make them their home and residence. Burning is a creed of the Zionist colonizers, burning people, trees and stones, as they did recently, on the evening of the Aqaba summit, by attacking the towns and villages of Hawara, Burin, Qaryut and Za'tara south of Nablus, under full...Read More |
| | | |
