Israel's Farming Communities Bear Brunt of Gaza Rockets and Snipers

Anav Silverman

Tazpit News Agency Israel

Fri Jun 22 2012

Building damaged by rocket shrapnel in the Eshkol Regional Council near Kibbutz Kissufim this past week.
Photo: Daniel Hagbi, Sderot Media Center.

 

Over 100 rockets fired from Gaza struck southern Israel this past week, with 65 of those rockets clobbering Israeli communities in the northwestern Negev in a single day, on Wednesday.

In the worst of the rocket escalations, a home in the Sdot Negev Regional Council was directly hit by a rocket on Wednesday, with the mother and her child home at the time. Miraculously, they were able to make it to the bomb shelter within seconds of the rocket striking their home and were not injured. “My wife and son were saved by a miracle,” said the father of the family to Ma’ariv, who was at work during the attack.


Children on their way to their last day of school were also miraculously saved when they mounted a school bus, just minutes before a rocket struck across their bus stop on a kibbutz in the Eshkol Regional Council.


“This has been a very stressful time for us,” said Ronit Minaker to Tazpit News Agency, a spokeswoman for the Eshkol Regional Council, which is comprised of 31 communities located along the border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. “You hear the sounds of war everywhere and there is this feeling of constant pressure on your mind and in your body. You’re always watching yourself, thinking where you will take cover the next time the siren goes off,” Minaker explained.

“Not everyone here has a bomb shelter. The worst is for the families. There are parents who lay over their children to protect them when the siren sounds.”

Minaker points out that there are times when there is no Color Red siren-the warning sound system which allows people approximately 15 seconds to find cover--which means that Gaza rockets will strike without warning. “In one of the Eshkol communities this week, there fell a barrage of six rockets with no siren. It was mazal [luck] that none of those rockets directly hit a home. But countless people were left in shock, including several women,” said Minaker.

Suppressing Ugly Truth for Beautiful Art

Alan M. Dershowitz

The Metropolitan Museum in New York, in its current exhibit on the collection of Gertrude Stein and her family, has made a decision to suppress the ugly truth about her collaboration with Nazism during the German occupation of France. Anyone walking through this beautiful exhibit of the Stein family's exquisite tastes in art would learn nothing about Gertrude's horrendous taste in politics and friends. Stein, a "racial" Jew according to Nazi ideology, managed to survive the Holocaust, while the vast majority of her co-religionists were deported and slaughtered. The exhibit says "remarkably, the two women [Stein and her companion Alice Toklas] survived the war with their possessions intact." It adds that "Bernard Fay, a close friend…and influential Vichy collaborator is thought to have protected them." That is an incomplete and distorted account of what actually happened. Stein and Toklas survived the Holocaust for one simple reason: Gertrude Stein was herself a major collaborator with the Vichy regime and a supporter of its pro-Nazi leadership.

"Beyond Stupid"

Arlene Kushner

I don't know exactly how I should refer to the behavior of the six nations that are "negotiating" with Iran. But "stupid" doesn't quite cut it for me. 

 

The two-day talks in Moscow, just completed, were an abysmal failure that went no where.  French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius referred to "the large gap between the two sides."

 

According to a report in Haaretz, "A Western diplomat who asked to remain anonymous said that one major obstacle revealed by the Moscow talks relates to the underground facility for uranium enrichment in Fordo, near the city of Qum. According to the diplomat, the Iranians refused to discuss the Fordo plant at all." 

MK: End Muslim Occupation on Temple Mount‏

by Maayana Miskin

MK Aryeh Eldad (Ichud Leumi) called Thursday to end Muslim control over visits to the Temple Mount.



“The time has come to end the occupation,” he declared in a letter to Minister of the Interior Yitzchak Aharonovitch. “The Muslim occupation that occurred 1,300 years ago, and is still in effect on the Temple Mount, of course.”



Eldad was angered by the arrest of a Jewish visitor to the Temple Mount on Thursday morning, and the police’s decision to ban Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, who heads the Temple Mount institute, from visiting the holy site.



“This is an unacceptable escalation of the affront to freedom of worship in Israel, and another step toward abandoning the Jewish people’s holiest place to the Arab enemy and the Waqf,” he charged.

How many refugees?

Elliott Abrams

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics recently commemorated World Refugee Day by releasing new statistics on Palestinian refugees. Therein lies a tale.

The bureau reported that there are now 5.1 million Palestinian refugees, saying of their ages: “The Palestinian refugees are characterized as a young population where 41.7% are under the age of 15 in Palestinian territory, 35.9% of Palestinian refugees in Jordan were under 15 in 2007, 33.1% of Palestinian refugees in Syria were under 15 in 2009, and 30.4% of the refugees in Lebanon were under 15 in 2010.”

This means, for example, that more than a third of Palestinian “refugees” in Jordan were born after 1997. That is either 30 years (from the 1967 war) or almost 50 years (if they fled when Israel was established in 1948) after their parents or more likely grandparents arrived in Jordan. Those in Jordan have full Jordanian citizenships and vote in Jordan, which means this: A young Jordanian of Palestinian origin, whose family has lived in Jordan for 30 years and who himself or herself has always lived in Jordan, is still considered a "refugee." 

Khaled Abu Toameh

Gatestoneinstitute.org

Wed Jun 20 2012

The security crackdown in the West Bank has nothing to do with combating terrorism. The arrests and confiscations of weapons are part of an effort by the Palestinian Authority to fight crime and dissension within its own ranks.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3116/palestinian-authority-losing-control In recent weeks, the Palestinian Authority security forces have been launching a massive crackdown on anarchy and lawlessness in various parts of the West Bank.  The crackdown was ordered by Abbas after he discovered what many Palestinians have known for a long time: that his security forces and Fatah loyalists are responsible for the chaos and anarchy.  Palestinians say this is the biggest operation to be carried out by the Western-funded security forces since Mahmoud Abbas was elected to succeed Yasser Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority in 2005,  Dozens of Palestinian security officers, some of them holding very high ranks, have thus far been rounded up and transferred to a Palestinian prison in Jericho.  The officers, who were trained and armed by US and EU security experts over the past years, are suspected of involvement in various types of crime, including extortion, armed robbery, kidnappings, physical assaults and fraud. Some of them, according to Palestinian sources in the West Bank, are also suspected of involvement in trafficking weapons and drugs, The clampdown was ordered by Abbas following a series of incidents in Jenin, which reached their peak when unidentified gunmen opened tried to assassinate the Palestinian governor of the city, Kadoura Musa, who was not hurt in the assassination bid, but died a few hours later of a massive heart attack.

"Face of Things to Come?"

Arlene Kushner

 

When last I wrote, a member of an Israeli crew working on the fence being constructed on our border with Sinai -- precisely to prevent infiltration into Israel -- had just been killed by terrorists who had crossed over from Sinai.  (According to one report, one terrorist shot by the IDF was wearing a suicide belt, and planning considerably greater damage.)

 

This followed by two days the launching of two Grad Katyusha rockets from the Sinai into the Negev.

 

Then, very shortly after the attack at the fence, rocket attacks from Gaza began.

 

The army statement at that time was that there was no connection between the Gaza rocket launchings and the terrorist attack out of the Sinai.  Such coincidental timing left me a bit dubious.

 

~~~~~~~~~~

J-Street endorsed congressman sponsored anti-Israel resolution

Elder of Ziyon

Yesterday, I reported on a one-sided anti-Israel resolution that was considered (and tabled for further consideration) by the North Carolina Democratic Party st their state convention this past weekend.

The resolution, which blames only Israel for all problems of the area and calls to recognize Hamas as a peace partner, was sponsored by the 4th Congressional District of North Carolina, which includes Chapel Hill.

(See Page 12, name of resolution:
26. BRINGING A JUST PEACE TO THE MIDDLE 
EAST:  ISRAEL AND PALESTINE (4TH CD) )

The member of Congress representing that district is David Price, an eleven term congressman.

J-Street, the purportedly pro-Israel organization, enthusiastically endorses Price:

Apparently, J-Street agrees that US military aid to Israel must be eliminated, that Hamas must be recognized, and that the PLO bears no responsibility for anything.

Why Is the Peace Process Dead?

Hisham Jarallah
June 20, 2012 a

The peace process is dead because a majority in the Arab and Muslim world still has not come to terms with Israel's right to exist.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced this week that the Middle East peace process was "clinically dead" because Israel was refusing to accept his conditions for returning to the negotiating table.

Abbas has been demanding that Israel freeze all settlement construction and recognize the pre-1967 lines as the future borders of a Palestinian state.

Recently, Abbas added two more conditions for resuming the stalled peace talks: first, that Israel allow him to import more weapons for his police forces in the West Bank, and second, the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

Abbas is in fact searching for any excuse not to return to the negotiating table with Israel.
His demand that Israel stop building in the settlements sounds more like a joke: has he just discovered that there are settlements in the West Bank?

The Progressive-Traditionalist War

Sultan Knish

The main weapon that progressives wield against traditionalists is their ability to break down the values that make up their worldview by challenging norms of behavior and thought, with the goal of using cultural friction to slowly replace traditional values and mores with their own.

This is a weapon that progressives have explicitly disavowed using against Islam. In Europe there are some hesitant attempts at promoting integration, but it's a fitful self-doubting effort that consists of the authorities telling everyone who listens that integration is moving along smoothly, while the No-Go Zones grow, black ghosts haunt the alleyways of major cities and the mosques go on crying Jihad from minaret loudspeakers rising above European capitals.

Mitt Romney speaking to the Faith and Freedom Coalition from a bus tour stop in Pennsylvania

By Lauren Appelbaum, Political Director

Washington, June 16 – Israel is both an ally and a friend of America because the two countries share the same values, Mitt Romney said Saturday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference.
“America is stronger if we are locked in with our friends and Israel is one of our friends, not just because of economic interest but because we share the same values,” Romney said while answering a prescreened question on U.S.-Israel relations.

The presumptive Republican nominee pledged as president he would “forge a strong working relationship with the leadership in Israel” and he would not “show a dime’s worth of distance between ourselves and our allies such as Israel.”

He said if he and the Israeli leadership have disagreements, they would discuss them behind closed doors. “But to the world, you know that we’re locked arm-in-arm. I would make sure Israel’s safety is important to the people of the world.”

"Let every person know that I do not compromise"

http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=6999

by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

On May 14, the day before Israel's Independence Day, PA TV broadcast the following political statements as printed text on the TV screen:

"Let all of humanity know that I'm not an immigrant"

"Let all religions know that I do not make truces"

"Let every person know that I do not compromise"

"Let all of humanity know that we are proud of [our] patriotism"

"Let all the nations know that we are proud of [our] aspirations"

"Let Palestine know that I am madly in love with it"

"Let Jaffa (Israeli city) know that I will return to it"

 [PA TV (Fatah), May 14, 2012]

Click to view

Each text appeared on the screen with pictures of mostly unidentified old buildings, implying that they, like Jaffa mentioned in the last statement, are inside "Palestine" and that the PA is claiming them.

Also significant are the political messages that the PA will neither agree to a truce nor compromise.

"Jerusalem and Jewish Rights"

Arlene Kushner

 

Last week, Jacques Gauthier came to town for a conference on who has the rights to Jerusalem.  Gauthier, who is a lawyer specializing in international law, says, hands down, the Jews do.  What is significant here is that he is not Jewish, and arrived at his opinion not from the basis of religious conviction, but rather from an examination of the legal and historical facts.

 

His interest in Jerusalem began in 1982, when he traveled here; he subsequently devoted 25 years of study to the subject, culminating in a Ph.D. dissertation on the issue that runs for 1,300 pages and has 3,250 footnotes.

Swiss ignore new Iran oil and bank sanctions

BENJAMIN WEINTHAL JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT

06/17/2012 0

US increasingly frustrated over Switzerland's failure to join Western coalition trying to stymie Iran's nuclear program.

Photo: REUTERS/Morteza Nikoubazl

BERLIN – The Swiss government’s policy to reject sanctions targeting Iran’s Central Bank and European oil trade has prompted criticism from the US government.

With a new round of EU and US Iran sanctions to be implemented on July 1, there is growing frustration from the American side that the Swiss have failed to join the Western coalition trying to stymie Iran’s nuclear work.

“We expressed our disappointment. We would like them to do it [follow the EU on Iran sanctions],” US Ambassador Donald Beyer told a news conference in Geneva in earlier this month.

In an email to The Jerusalem Post on Saturday, Josh Block, a senior fellow at the Washington- based Progressive Policy Institute and a former spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, wrote, “It is incomprehensible that the Swiss government would seek to undermine global pressure on Iran that is designed to blunt Tehran’s dangerous nuclear ambitions. A respectable member of the international community would not allow its banking system to help Iran evade sanctions, yet it appears the Swiss government is shamefully doing exactly that.

PA children taught to hate Jews and Christians

PA TV rebroadcasts:

Christians and Jews are "inferior" and "despised"

"Our enemy, Zion, is Satan with a tail"

http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=6983

by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

Palestinian Authority TV chose to rebroadcast a program featuring a little girl reciting a hate poem targeting Jews and Christians as "inferior and smaller, more cowardly and despised." It was broadcast in May and again this month.

Click to view

In addition, Palestinian Media Watch  reported last month that in April, PA TV broadcast a young girl reciting a poem that included the words: "Our enemy, Zion, is Satan with a tail." One month later, PA TV broadcast an even younger girl reciting the poem with the same hate speech, adding that the child had already recited it at the opening of a Palestinian exhibition of educational tools.

Click to view latest broadcast of "Satan with a tail"-poem
Click to view first broadcast of "Satan with a tail"-poem