Palestinian lies about death of child

Don’t Let Facts Hinder Israel-Bashing

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary03.12.2013 - 6:00 PM

The human costs of last fall’s outbreak of fighting between Hamas and Israel was all too real on both sides of the border. Civilian casualties in war are inevitable, but should never be seen as anything but a tragedy that should be avoided if at all possible. But the willingness of the Jewish state’s critics in the media to embrace a Palestinian narrative of Israeli beastliness has led to a double standard that has distorted accounts of the conflict. Palestinian terror attacks that lead to Israeli counter-measures tend to be ignored unless they succeed in achieving their goal of mass slaughter. Israeli attacks on terrorists are depicted as disproportionate with little context to put them in perspective. And when Palestinian children are killed in a conflict in which Hamas uses civilians as human shields, the result is often an emotional account in which images of supposed Israeli atrocities substitute for a reasoned explanation of what has occurred.

But occasionally, facts have a way of outstripping even the formidable Palestinian propaganda machine. An example of this came this month when, as the New York Timesexplains, a report from–of all sources–the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, had the audacity to point out that a highly publicized case in which the death of an Arab infant in Gaza was blamed on Israel was actually the fault of the Palestinians.

One may say that when a death such as this happens the identity of the person or force that pulled the trigger is almost beside the point. The child is just as dead no matter who did it. But in this case, the revelation that 11-month-old Omar al-Masharawi’s death was the result of a Palestinian rocket aimed at Israel that fell short of its target rather than of an Israeli army missile deliberately fired at his home goes straight to the heart of the slanted accounts of the conflict that are commonplace.

This particular child’s death was made a cause célèbre because his father, Jihad al-Masharawi is an employee of the BBC. In a graphic account broadcast on the network, al-Masharawi, who is a picture editor, claimed “shrapnel” from Israeli artillery hit his son and another relative. In the video, al-Masharawi tearfully demanded to know “what did my son do to die like this?” The response from many who viewed it was to damn the Israelis as heartless murderers. Those who cited the child as proof of the injustice of Israeli actions in the Gaza fighting now ring hollow.

The point here is not just to illustrate that many of those Palestinians who have died in the fighting with Israel were the victims of “friendly fire” from their own side. In a very real sense, Omar al-Masharawi’s death was not a mistake. It was just one more example of a deliberate policy of sacrificing Palestinian children on the altar of unending war against Israel. When terrorists launch missiles from Gaza at Israeli civilian targets, the creation of a fresh batch of Palestinian martyrs is more important to them than even the shedding of Jewish blood.

This is a terrible tragedy that has all too often been aided and abetted by an international media eager to use shocking pictures and videos meant to depict Israeli atrocities to put forward a skewed version of what has happened in Gaza.

In this case, just as with the celebrated case of Mohammed al-Durrah–the picture of whose death in his father’s arms after supposedly being shot by Israelis at the beginning of the second intifada became a rallying point for Palestinians–the fictional narrative of Palestinian victimhood trumped the facts. Even after the story was conclusively debunked, the image of the dying child remains an icon of the campaign to defame Israel.

Some of those who were killed last fall did die from Israeli fire (though the overwhelming majority of casualties were Hamas fighters not civilians) as its army sought to take out the terrorists who rained missiles down on targets in southern and central Israel. But the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of all civilians in Gaza falls on the shoulders of Hamas leaders who continue to pursue Israel’s destruction and don’t care how many of their own people must die to keep that vile dream alive. Most of those who wish to delegitimize both Israel and its right to self-defense will ignore the UN report. But the al-Masharawi case, in which a terrorist missile landed in Gaza rather than Israel, should make this truth a bit more understandable even to those accustomed to accepting whatever lies emanate from Hamas and its enablers. 

kosher for Passover

Parashat Vayikra

Michele and Hillary to award anti Semite

In a deeply disturbing development, the Weekly Standard reported on Thursday that the U.S. State Department will be giving a prestigious award to an outspoken antisemite.

On Friday, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton will present Samira Ibrahim with the International Women of Courage Award. Ibrahim is a victim of sexual violence and an activist for women's rights in Egypt, her native country.

She is also, apparently, a ferocious antisemite. The Standard has several examples of Twitter posts that display the crudest and most offensive forms of Jew hatred. In one, she appears to approvingly quote Adolf Hitler saying "I have discovered with the passage of days, that no act contrary to morality, no crime against society, takes place, except with the Jews having a hand in it."

In another, she rejoices over the murder of Israelis in the Burgas terror attack. "Today is a very sweet day," she wrote of the atrocity, "with a lot of very sweet news." She also attacks the Saudi royal family by calling them "dirtier than the Jews."

According to the Standard,

Just today, apparently after having been warned that her vicious tweets might cause her trouble during her visit to the U.S., she has written on twitter: “My account has been previously stolen and any tweet on racism and hatred is not me.” However, in the past she never made any mention of her account being “stolen.” The record of her anti-Semitic tweets is still available online.

One doubts that, only a day away from the ceremony, the State Department will rescind the award, but one hopes they will be more careful, much more careful, in the future.

The Jewish Organizational Failure

Hagel Without Tears

Editorial of The New York Sun | February 27, 2013

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/hagel-without-tears/88207/

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By confirming Charles Hagel as secretary of war, Senator Schumer and the Democratic leadership send a pointed message to the Jewish community in America. It is that if the Jewish defense agencies are not going to stick up publicly for Israel, it is hard to expect others to do so. There is no sugar-coating the point. The Senate has just confirmed the most truculent cabinet officer in respect of Israel in more than a generation because important institutions and leaders shrank from making an issue of it.

This is a story that is painful for many people to talk about. It would be inaccurate to suggest that the only objection to putting Mr. Hagel in at the war department had to do with Israel. He would be inadequate, even were Israel not an issue. There is a broad sense within the Jewish community — as there is among a number of non-Jewish senators who permitted his nomination to go to the floor — that Mr. Hagel has proven himself incompetent and disingenuous.
Yet there’s no gainsaying the special concern that his hostility to Israel has raised among the Jewish leadership. And one of the stories that is being spoken of in private is how humiliated the leaders of the Jewish community feel. Nearly all of them — not all, but nearly all — were opposed to the elevation of Mr. Hagel to the Pentagon. But only one of the Jewish defense agencies spoke out forcefully against him.
That was the Zionist Organization of America, which is the oldest pro-Israel organization in America, having been founded in 1897, the same year in which Theodor Herzl convened at Basel, Switzerland, the First Zionist Congress. It opposed the Hagel nomination early, forthrightly, and unapologetically. The result, according to the ZOA’s president, Morton Klein, is that it received objections from several leaders worried about the consequences for the Jewish community of such a public position.
Mr. Klein believes the Hagel nomination would not have been confirmed had the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee taken a formal public position against Mr. Hagel. All three agencies have had many heroic moments. But they stood down on Mr. Hagel. Said Mr. Klein: “Several senators — and important ones — said to me: ‘If Aipac, ADL and AJCommittee — especially Aipac — had come out and lobbied against Hagel, he would have been stopped.”
What such public opposition would have done, Mr. Klein argues, is that it “would have given a number of Democrats, who thought Hagel was awful, cover to vote against him.” Instead, the response leaders of the Jewish community received was, “If he’s so awful how come we’re not hearing anything against him from other Jewish groups.” Mr. Klein says he heard such a message from both sides of the aisle in the Senate.
So the opposition had to be carried by newspapermen. A number of them wrote important pieces, including Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard and the Emergency Committee for Israel, Jonathan Tobin of Commentary magazine, Alana Goodman and Adam Kredo of the Free Beacon online, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, and the online Jewish newspaper the Algemeiner Journal. The last carried a memorable dispatch on the bitterness in the Jewish community in Nebraska in respect of Mr. Hagel going back to when he was a sitting senator.
There were also a number of senators who seemed to understand the issue but flinched, refusing to block a vote. They include Senators Graham of South Carolina and McCain of Arizona, which is all the more disappointing for how strong they were during the hearing. Senators Inhofe of Oklahoma, Rubio of Florida, and Cruz of Texas took a hard line all the way through. Senator Paul voted against cloture, but once the confirmation was assured voted aye. It’s a mystery to us why Messrs. McCain and Graham, in particular, voted for cloture, because they represent so strongly that they believe Mr. Hagel to be unqualified to be war secretary.
The most disappointing figure to the Jewish community, aside from the President, has been Senator Schumer, who endorsed the candidate to whom he had once been objecting. He did so on the basis of a 90-minute meeting in which, he was quoted as saying, Mr. Hagel “almost had tears in his eyes.” No doubt Mr. Obama now expects Senator Schumer to run interference for the administration as the president and his new war secretary seek to appease the Iranian mullahs. The estimation is that they want to extricate Mr. Obama from his declarations that a nuclear armed Tehran is unacceptable. In other words, it turns out that failing to speak up when one had the chance has its consequences.

Why did Aipac keep its mouth shut?

This is what i wrote about here a few days. Aipac lost big . Im going Sunday to the conference but sure wondering

How AIPAC Is Losing
Chuck Hagel will be secretary of Defense, and Iran will go nuclear. So much for an all-powerful Israel Lobby.
By Lee Smith|February 27, 2013 12:00 AM


This weekend, more than 10,000 pro-Israel activists, Jews and non-Jews alike, will gather at the Washington convention center for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference [1]. These friends and supporters of the U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship will hear from members of Congress and the executive branch who will all testify to the singular influence that AIPAC, as the pillar of the pro-Israel community, wields in the capital of the free world.
But just how powerful is AIPAC if a man who refers to it as the “Jewish lobby” and has defiantly claimed that he is not an “Israeli senator” is slated to be our next secretary of Defense? And, most significantly, how much influence does the lobbying organization actually exercise if it can’t carry the day on the single issue that’s been at the very top of its agenda for over a decade: stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
Despite an operating budget [2] of more than $60 million, on the most crucial issue facing Israel’s security, AIPAC has lost the policy debate. The winners include those who believe you can’t stop a nation from getting the bomb if it’s determined to do so, those who think the Iranians have a right to nuclear weapons, and those who argue the Iranians can be contained—among them, our new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.
***
For the past two months, those invested in the Israel-U.S. relationship have been fixated on whether or not Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel would fundamentally alter U.S. policy toward Israel. In addition to his revealing statements about Jews, the former senator from Nebraska voted against sanctioning Iran and against designating the Revolutionary Guards Corps a terrorist organization.
Yet AIPAC has remained totally mum. The group says [3] it focuses its energies on matters of policy rather than personnel. If it campaigned against Hagel, where would it stop? The organization would potentially have to take a position on every Cabinet nominee. Meantime, in the absence of AIPAC, other pro-Israel organizations have come out publicly against Hagel, like the Emergency Committee for Israel. For taking the lead on this issue [4], they have been labeled partisans, while AIPAC has preserved its bipartisan status.
But it’s not clear how much that label matters when a very influential segment of the Democratic party has made it plain that supporting Israel isn’t a top priority. I’m not just referring to the delegates who booed pro-Israel changes to the party platform on the floor of the convention in San Antonio last summer. I’m talking about the White House.
Pro-Israel Obama supporters on the Hill and in the press keep trying to make the case that in spite of how it might look on the surface, the administration cares deeply about the U.S.-Israel relationship. They point to the success [5] of Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense batteries as evidence that the security and military cooperation between the United States and Israel has reached unprecedented highs under Obama’s stewardship. But politics is mostly about how things look. And if the administration really cared that much about Israel, it wouldn’t nominate a secretary of defense who referred to defenders of the U.S.-Israel relationship as “the Jewish lobby.”
***
The paradox is that by giving personnel a pass, AIPAC has lost the policy debate. Policy is made by people who believe in certain ideas, principles, and even fantasies. What Hagel seems to have learned from his tours of combat in Vietnam is that it is a fantasy to imagine that you can bomb a country into submitting to the will of the United States. Presumably, this is why he also opposed the war in Iraq. The problem is that deconstructing such a fantasy does not necessarily leave you with reality. In Hagel’s case it has left him only with an equally dangerous fantasy: that instead of waging war, it is possible to reach an accommodation, if not an amicable understanding, with nations that have clearly identified themselves as adversaries.
This fantasy is shared by much of the U.S. policymaking elite, including Obama. Indeed, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution every White House has sought comity with the Iranians. The fact that all, including Obama, have failed, is proof that the endeavor is not possible. From this perspective, it is also clear that Western sanctions against Iran and the secret war conducted against Iranian scientists and installations are intended less to destroy the nuclear program than to prolong the fantasy that at some point the Iranians will come to their senses and abandon their search for a bomb. It is noteworthy that the majority of the American electorate does not share this fantasy, with a Pew poll last year showing that 58 percent support [6] U.S. military action against the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
But AIPAC—and this 58 percent majority—lost the debate to a host of adversaries. Some on the winning side argued for engagement. Among these were the stars of the policy pantheon, like former Secretary of State Jim Baker [7], and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who argued [7] that a combination of incentives and pressures might get the Iranians to the table.
And if Iran didn’t want to negotiate, some claimed that wasn’t such a big deal anyway. As Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has said [8], it’s no problem containing Iran. Journalists like Fareed Zakaria agreed [9]. Some went even further, arguing [10] that Iran was in fact a natural American ally. More extreme yet in their efforts were the single-minded obsessives, the creeps, like Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, and Trita Parsi, who argued [11] that in fact the problem was not with Iran but with the United States.
If, as Hagel has said, the Jewish lobby truly intimidated “a lot of people up here,” you’d expect to see Washington all humming the same tune on Iran. Instead, it’s the Iranians calling the shots. “You must raise the level of your tolerance,” the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization recently told the West. “Try to find ways for cooperation with a country that is moving towards technological progress.”
The Iranian negotiating team meeting [12] with its Western counterparts in Kazakhstan this week has earned the right to its smugness. The Iranians are installing equipment that will allow it to accelerate the production of nuclear fuel. And then there was North Korea’s nuclear test two weeks ago. At the very least, it signaled to the Iranians that in the end, despite all of the tough talk coming from the White House, the Americans are not going to stop the Iranians from acquiring the bomb.
Tehran has the upper hand in negotiations because it recognizes that all the White House wants is some sort of deal it can sell as a victory. And the all-powerful pro-Israel lobby has no choice but to swallow it and smile.

UN vs Israel

U.N. Bias against Israel

U.N. institutional structures consistently are used to isolate and vilify Israel.

• Israel is the only country in the world that is not eligible to sit on the Security Council, the principal policymaking body of the U.N. This situation violates the principle of the "sovereign equality of all member states" of the U.N. under Article 2 of the U.N. Charter. 
• Seven of the 140 items submitted for a vote in the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) in 2002 were anti-Israel. Last year, the UNGA adopted 19 anti-Israel resolutions. 
• Israel is the object of more investigative committees, special representatives and rapporteurs than any other state in the U.N. system. For example, a special representative of the Director-General of UNESCO visited Israel 51 times during 27 years of activity. The Director-General of the International Labour Organization has sent a "Special Mission" to Israel and the territories every year for the past 17 years. 
• The "Special Committees" and "Palestinian Units" of the U.N. spend more than $3 million a year, essentially to spread anti-Israel propaganda. These bodies—the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the Division on Palestinian Rights and the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs—are the focus of the worst anti-Israel activity under the aegis of the U.N. They organize, inter alia, the annual "Palestine Day" events at the U.N., as well as symposia and other events. 
• The U.N. has repeatedly held "Emergency Special Sessions" focusing solely on Israel. Originally conceived in 1950 for emergencies like the Korean War, Emergency Special Sessions over the past 15 years have only focused on Israel. No Emergency Special Sessions were convened to examine the genocide in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia or other major world conflicts. 
• The U.N. routinely attempts to circumvent the founding principle of direct negotiations. The UNGA passes annual resolutions that undermine the principles of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, based on direct negotiations between the two parties. By proposing specific solutions to issues such as Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and settlements, the U.N. pre-judges the outcome of negotiations. Ironically, it was the U.N. Security Council that proposed bilateral negotiations through Resolution 242 (1967) and 338 (1973).

The U.N. has failed to investigate Palestinian actions supporting terrorism.

• The U.N. has never initiated any inquiry into Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority's role in aiding and abetting terrorists, or passed one resolution condemning any terrorist organization operating against Israel. 
• One glaring example of the U.N.'s biased policy against Israel is the concealment and vehement denial of the existence of a videotape of Hezbollah's abduction of three Israeli soldiers made by U.N. peacekeeping forces in Lebanon. For 11 months, the U.N. lied to the world and denied the existence of any evidence related to the abduction. When the cover-up was exposed, revealing the existence of the videotape, the U.N. eventually showed Israel a heavily edited videotape with the faces of the terrorists blurred. When asked the reason behind this, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan stated it was due to the U.N.'s standing as a neutral organization.

The U.N. has tolerated and fostered anti-Semitism and anti-Israel propaganda.

• The U.N. has condemned virtually every conceivable form of racism. It has established programs to combat racism and its multiple facets — including xenophobia — but has consistently refused to condemn anti-Semitism. It only was on November 24, 1998, more than 50 years after the U.N.'s founding, that the word anti-Semitism was first mentioned in a U.N. resolution (GA Res. A/53/623).
• "The Talmud says that if a Jew does not drink every year the blood of a non-Jewish man, he will be damned for eternity." —Saudi Arabian delegate Marouf al-Dawalibi before the 1984 U.N. Human Rights Commission conference on religious tolerance. A similar remark was made by Farouk al?Chareh, the Syrian Ambassador to the U.N., at a 1991 meeting, who insisted Jews killed Christian children to use their blood to make matzos, a charge recently recycled in a Saudi government sponsored newspaper. 
• On March 11, 1997, the Palestinian representative to the U.N. Human Rights Commission falsely charged Israel with injecting 300 Palestinian children with the HIV virus.

The U.N. Human Rights Commission promotes anti-Israel, anti-Semitic resolutions.

• The Commission on Human Rights routinely adopts totally disproportionate resolutions concerning Israel. Of all condemnations of this agency, 26 percent refer to Israel alone, while rogue states such as Syria and Libya are never criticized.
• Last summer's conference on Human Rights in Durban, South Africa, was devoted almost entirely to condemning Israel. The conference was boycotted by the United States and Britain. 
• The United States was kicked off the U.N. Commission for Human Rights in May 2001, despite being one of the most outspoken advocates for human rights and a founding member of the Commission. It was replaced by Sierra Leone and the Sudan, both of which have records of abuses of human rights, including slavery and the forced use of children as soldiers. The United States recently regained its seat after a yearlong absence.

Source: AIPAC