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Amidst some questionable journalism about the American move to acknowledge the location of Israel’s capital, a passage in yesterday’s New York Times editorial stands out as particularly stunning and perverse.
The editorial, titled “Does Trump Want Peace in the Middle East,” effectively ratifies the cleansing of Jews from Jerusalem’s Old City and other formerly Jewish areas of Jerusalem during the 1948 Independence War.
In a paragraph criticizing the return of Jews to what the newspaper describes as “settlements” in those parts of Jerusalem, the editorial bases its disapproval on the fact that “East Jerusalem was exclusively Arab in 1967.”
It is true that this section of Jerusalem was exclusively Arab in 1967. This is because Jews, long a majority and plurality in these parts of the city, were forced out in 1948, when the area was seized by Jordanian troops. Jerusalem neighborhoods like the Jewish Quarter, Shimon Hatzadik, and Silan indeed became Jew-free, their synagogues razed and their cemeteries desecrated.
To consider the 19-year period during which Jews were exiled from the Old City and surrounding areas as the starting point of history, and to use it as a bludgeon to attack Israel and delegitimize the presence of Jews in eastern Jerusalem, effectively communicates the newspaper’s acceptance of the expulsion of the Jews and seeming endorsement of an ethically cleansed eastern Jerusalem.
Read more @ Camera
President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is a perfect response to President Obama’s benighted decision to change American policy by engineering the United Nations Security Council Resolution declaring Judaism’s holiest places in Jerusalem to be occupied territory and a “flagrant violation under international law.” It was President Obama who changed the status quo and made peace more difficult, by handing the Palestinians enormous leverage in future negotiations and disincentivizing them from making a compromised peace.
It had long been American foreign policy to veto any one-sided Security Council resolutions that declared Judaism’s holiest places to be illegally occupied. Obama’s decision to change that policy was not based on American interests or in the interests of peace. It was done out of personal revenge against Prime Minister Netanyahu and an act of pique by the outgoing president.
It was also designed improperly to tie the hands of President-elect Trump. President Trump is doing the right thing by telling the United Nations that the United States now rejects the one-sided U.N. Security Council Resolution.
Read more @ Gatestone Institute
In correspondence to a friend, the heir to the throne also laments the unwillingness of US presidents to take on the ‘Jewish lobby.
In a newly revealed letter from 1986 , the UK’s Prince Charles implied that the “influx of foreign, European Jews” to Israel was to blame for fueling the Israeli-Arab conflict, and lamented that US presidents were unwilling to take on the American “Jewish lobby.”
Read more @ Times of Israel
“Hamas, which I know well, is an ideological political organization that views extreme violence as a means to achieve its political ends. In the 21st century an individual or group that tries to achieve its goals by violent means should not be legitimized by anybody. In my definition, Hamas is a terror organization.
“I have seen how radically different the behavior of democratic Israel is from that of Hamas and Fatah. Hamas is still living in the 7th century, something Europe cannot even understand. Over the years I have realized that due to their religious views, Hamas cannot make peace with Israel. Their interpretation of Islam requires that cease fires alone are possible with infidels, not peace. Such a cease fire can last no more than 15 years. No political solution will ever satisfy Hamas in the long term. It is not about borders but who believes in their God and who does not. Hamas’ target is not just Israel, but for Islam to gain control over all non-believers.”
Read more @ Arutz Sheva
The newest Barbie doll made her appearance this week in a look that would be unrecognizable to the original. Jenna, created by a French Muslim mother, is a hijabi Barbie.
In tradition with Muslim customs, Jenna wears an abaya, a modest dress that covers her collarbone and that stretches to her wrists and ankles. She comes with a matching scarf meant to be wrapped around her hair as a hijab. In addition to looking the part of a Muslim, Jenna will play it as well: she has the ability o recite 4 Quran verses.
Read more @ The Jerusalem Post
The United States will return to Iraq next year a trove of Iraqi Jewish artifacts that lawmakers and Jewish groups have lobbied to keep in this country, a State Department official said.
A four-year extension to keep the Iraqi Jewish Archive in the US is set to expire in September 2018, as is funding for maintaining and transporting the items. The materials will then be sent back to Iraq, spokesman Pablo Rodriguez said in a statement sent to JTA on Thursday.
Read more @ Times of Israel
Six years ago, a teenager in Newton, Massachusetts — Shiri Pagliuso — asked her father if it was true that Israel tortures and murders women activists in the Palestinian resistance movement.
Then a high school freshman, Shiri had learned the information from her textbook — the Arab World Studies Notebook, a 540-page volume so riddled with unabashed bias that it had garnered a scathing 30-page report from the American Jewish Committee (AJC).
Back in 2011, Shiri’s father — Tony Pagliuso — wasn’t yet aware of the AJC’s report. But he knew outright propaganda when he saw it.
He contacted his daughter’s teacher, the head of the high school’s history department, the principal, and eventually the superintendents — who all defended the Arab World Studies Notebook as essential for sharpening critical thinking skills. They also praised the book for providing a “balanced perspective” and an “Arab point of view.
Pagliuso realized that he was being stonewalled, which got him thinking: If he looked at Shiri’s other course materials, what other dreadful stuff would he find?
Determined to expose the extent of the problem, a bitter multi-year battle ensued that pitted Pagliuso — who was soon joined by a group of other parents and Newton residents — against a shockingly hostile school district.
Together, the parents and residents fought to get school officials to acknowledge their legitimate concerns, provide access to all the curriculum materials as required by law, and to pull the Arab World Studies Notebook and other academically unsuitable materials.
Now, in a new study by CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), researcher Steven Stotsky carefully traces how these partisan materials — many with scant scholarly value — seeped into a nationally prominent public school system.
The 108 page monograph, Indoctrinating Our Youth: How a U.S. Public School Curriculum Skews the Arab-Israeli Conflict and Islam, is the most comprehensive analysis to date of the Newton curriculum controversy.
Read more @ The Algemeiner
After Lebanon decided to ban the new superhero film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot, a cinema in Ramallah has now chosen not to screen the film, which has become a global hit.
The IDF’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Major General Yoav (Poli) Mordechai, posted on his Facebook page in Arabic that the movie theater Berg Palestine in the city of Ramallah decided to refrain from screening the film for what appear to be political reasons.
Read more @ Jerusalem Online
The liberation of most of Mosul from the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) made global headlines in April. Largely lost in the coverage of the conflict was the recapture of another significant site at the end of the month: the Roman-period city of Hatra. On 26 April Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces announced they had recaptured the site from ISIS after fierce fighting.
Hatra rises out of the desert some 90 kilometers south of Mosul in the midst of a network of usually dry wadis. Its forlorn location belies its once fabulous wealth. Caught between the twin superpowers of the Roman and Parthian Empires, Hatra was well positioned to make a fortune by taxing trade caravans looking to take a shortcut across the desert.
Read more @ Apollo Magazine
Expelled from their homes during Arab riots in 1938, the Jews of Shiloah were promised they would return home. Now, it’s finally happening.
In preparation for the 50th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem, Arutz Sheva, together with Ateret Cohanim, are presenting a special project that will focus on the renewal of Jewish presence in eastern Jerusalem, the Old City and the village of Shiloah (bordering the Kidron Valley outside the Old City walls).
In this, our third episode in the series, we focus on the restoration of the old Jewish community of Shiloah, in the neighborhood today better known by its Arabic name, Silwan.
Shiloah, adjacent to the ancient City of David and the Old City of Jerusalem, was, prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, a thriving community of Yemenite Jews.
Established in 1882, Shiloah was built on a barren hillside; the area today referred to as Silwan, at the time utterly bereft of inhabitants.
Like other Jewish communities, the heart of the Yemenite village of Shiloah was the synagogue. Named Ohel Shlomo, the synagogue was completed in 1885, three years after Shiloah was established.
For more than half a century, Shiloah was a center of Yemenite Jewish life in the Land of Israel, and Ohel Shlomo the center of life in the village.
But in 1938, in the midst of the Arab Revolt against the British Mandate and the wave of massacres against Jews, the British administrators evacuated the residents of Shiloah – with promises that they would one day return.
It seemed, however, that the Jewish return to Shiloah was not to be. That promise went unfulfilled for decades, with the Jordanian army occupying the area in 1948.
Read more @ Arutz Sheva
For the first time in over a decade, archaeologists are commencing new excavations atop Masada, studying previously untouched areas of the legendary desert mountain fortress, including the residences of Jewish rebels who met their doom in 74 CE.
A Tel Aviv University team, headed by Roman-period archaeologist Guy Stiebel, will conduct a month-long excavation at the UNESCO World Heritage Site starting on February 5. It will be the university’s first expedition at the site, and the first expedition overall there since 2006.
Masada is a rugged crag in the Judean Desert overlooking the Dead Sea. Herod, the first-century BCE king of Judea — perhaps best known for building Jerusalem’s Temple Mount complex — constructed a fortress and palace on the mountain. The elaborate waterworks channeling seasonal rainfall allowed the royal redoubt to have a more plentiful supply than Jerusalem, according to ancient accounts.
Read more @ Times of Israel
No word how business is doing since the U.S. launched more than 50 tomahawk missiles on Syria earlier this week.
At Trump Grill, one of the Trump-branded restaurants inside Trump Tower, the entrees include a $34 filet mignon, a $22 Platinum Label burger and a $21 Mar-A-Lago club sandwich. At Trump restaurant in Kobani, Syria, the menu includes falafel sandwiches and…falafel sandwiches.
Yes, Waleed Shekhi, a well-meaning (or possibly misguided) Syrian Kurdish man, named his restaurant after the 45th President, in the hopes that the Trump name will help his business. He told a Kurdish news outlet that he wanted to express his gratitude to the United States for helping the Kurds in their ongoing fight against ISIS.
Read more @ Vice.com
