BDS:
A Threat To The Entire Middle East
By Abed
Almaala, a Jordanian Muslim
ISRAELHAYOM.COM, September 6, 2016
As
a Jordanian politician, I feel obligated to speak out against the anti-Israel
boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and its effect on the Middle
East and the world. I represent the point of view and interests of the Jordanian
people. By doing so, I have freedom that many others may not. My views
on BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) are unbiased and balanced
because I am not an Israeli and nobody could accuse me of being
anti-Arab.
Let me be clear: BDS against Israel is a
reckless act of hatred that threatens the security and stability of not
only Israel, but also my country, Jordan, and the entire Middle
East. BDS seeks to attack and isolate Israel. But what is Israel's importance
to Jordan, and to the world? Why should anyone care if Israel is hurt?
This is what the president of the Jordanian
opposition, Mudar Zahran, wrote last year in Israel Hayom: "If the
day were to come when Israel falls, Jordan, Egypt and many others would fall,
too, and Westerners would be begging Iran for oil.
"We can hate Israel as much as we
like, but we must realize that without it, we too would be
gone. Israel is at the front of the war against
terror in our region, and if Israel is hurt, we all will suffer, and
Jordan will suffer the most. Therefore, BDS is a threat to us all -- a threat
to America as much as it is a threat to Israel, Jordan, and our Palestinian
brothers.
"BDS claims to target Israel because
Israel oppresses the Palestinians. If so, why does BDS never target Jordan's
government, which oppresses and destroys the lives of the majority of
Jordanians of Palestinian origins, and where many of my own people, the Bedouin
Jordanians, go hungry?..." www.uc4i.org
Israel:
Rise Of Social Media Linked
To
Rising Anti-Semitism
Edith M.
Lederer
UK.NEWS.YAHOO.CO, September 7, 2016
Israel's
U.N. ambassador demanded Wednesday that media companies "stop providing a
platform for hate sites," saying there is a clear link between the rise of
social media and the rise of anti-Semitism.
Danny Danon told a High-Level Forum
on anti-Semitism that on Twitter, 63 percent of all anti-Semitic tweets are
calls for violence against Jews. But only 1 in 10 are ever removed, he said.
"We are living in a new era and we face a new kind of anti-Semitism,"
Danon said. "Online com-munities of hate spread lies about Israel and
conspiracy theories about the Jews to millions around the world. All they need
is a wireless connection, a Facebook account, and a deep hatred for the Jewish
people."
In France, which has Europe's largest Jewish
population, anti-Semitic incidents today are seven times higher than in the
1990s, Danon said. And in Britain, 2014 saw the highest-ever number of attacks
against Jews.
Soccer fans in Poland held a rally on Aug.
30, he said, but instead of cheering their team they chanted anti-Semitic slogans,
burned a life-size puppet of a religious Jew wearing a hat and beard hanging
from a rope, and held up a banner saying: "Let the Jews burn."
Danon said Google recently took down an
interactive program used to identify and target Jews on the Internet. It let
users around the world "tag people who they thought had a Jewish-sounding
name or who openly supported Israel," Danon said. "By the time it was
shut down it had a vast database of names."
U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power called for
"more effective tools to monitor and confront anti-Semitism online and in
social media." But she stressed that freedom of speech must be protected
"even in some of its most hateful forms."... www.uc4i.org
New Rail Line To Connect High-Tech Tel Aviv
With Holy Jerusalem: Tel
Aviv and Jerusalem are only 40 miles apart but they often feel like different
planets, not just in terms of mentality but because the commute from the Mediterranean
to the Judean hills can sometimes take two hours. That is set to change in the
next 18 months with the completion of a $2 billion, high-speed rail line that
will slash the time between the high-tech, business center and Jerusalem's Old
City to just 30 minutes. After more than a decade in planning, the project,
which involved boring tunnels through mountains and spanning bridges over deep
valleys, promises to transform Israel's two largest cities - or at least bring
them a little closer. Double-decker trains holding around 1,700 passengers will
travel at 160 km/h (100 mph). The plan is for four departures an hour, serving
50,000 commuters a
day,
or 10 million a year, said Boaz Zafrir, the chief executive of Israel Railways.
Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz believes the train will give a jolt to
Jerusalem's economy, encouraging more people from the coast to open businesses
in the city, which is more religious and conservative than Tel Aviv. (Ynet) Vision for Israel, PO Box 7265,
Jerusalem, 9107301, Israel
Corrupt Academics and the Media by Walter E. Williams
Some are puzzled by the dishonesty, lack of character and sheer stupidity of many people in the media. But seeing as most of them are college graduates, they don't bear the full blame. They are taught by dis-honest and irresponsible academics. Let's look at it.
|
Walter E. Williams |
"A Clash of Police Policies," a column written by Dr. Thomas Sowell, presents some readily available sta-tistics: "Homicide rates among black males went down by 18% in the 1940s and by 22% in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice (Earl) Warren and others triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males reversed and skyrocketed by 89%, wiping out all the progress of the previous 20 years."
Academics and the media blame poverty and discrimination for today's crime. No one bothers to ask why crime was falling in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, when blacks faced far greater poverty and discrimination.
The 1960s riots were blamed on poverty and discrimination. Poverty and discrimination were worse in the South than in the rest of the country, but riots were not nearly so common there. Detroit's deadliest riot occurred at a time when the median income of black families in Detroit was 95% of their white counterparts, plus the black unemployment rate was 3.4% and black homeownership was higher than in other major cities.
Academics teach that the breakdown of the black family is the legacy of slavery and discrimination. They ignore the following facts: In 1950, 72% of black men and 81% of black women had been married. Also, only 17% of black children lived in single-parent households; today it's close to 70%. Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates exceeded those of whites. During the late 1940s, the unemployment rate for black 16- and 17-year-olds was less than that for white teens.
According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11% of black children and 3% of white children were born to unwed mothers. Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining; and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income. As late as 1965, 75% of black children were born to married women. Today over 73% of black babies are born to unwed mothers. So much for the "legacy of slavery" argument.
Academics teach that school integration is a neces-sary condition for black aca-demic excellence. Blacks, their logic implies, cannot achieve academic excellence unless they go out and capture a white kid to sit next to their kids. Public charter schools such as those in the Know-ledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, and Success Academy Charter Schools are having some successes without race mixing. Sowell points out that only 39% of students in New York state schools who were tested recently scored at the "proficient" level in math, but 100% of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy scored at that level in math. Blacks and Hispanics are 90% of the students in the Crown Heights Success Academy.
More than 43,000 families are on waiting lists to get their children into charter schools. Teachers unions are opposed to any alternative to public education and contribute to politicians who place obstacles and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools. The NAACP, at its 2016 national convention in Cincinnati, voted to support "a moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools."
It's easy to understand why the NAACP is against any alternative to public schools. Many work in public education, but also want alternatives for themselves. In Washington DC and Baltimore, 25% of public school teachers send their children to private schools. In Philadelphia, 44%; Cincinnati, 41%; Chicago, 39%; and Rochester, NY, 38%.
Viewed
from a 23-year vantage point, the Oslo "peace process" between Israel
and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) stands as one of the worst-ever
calamities to have hit Israelis and Palestinians.
For Israel, it has been the starkest
strategic blunder in the country's history – establishing an ineradicable
terror entity on Israel's doorstep, deepening its internal cleavages, destabilizing
its political system, and weakening its international standing.
For West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, it has
brought about subjugation to corrupt and repressive PLO and Hamas regimes –
regimes that have reversed the hesitant advent of civil society in these
territories, shattered their socioeconomic well-being, and made the prospects
for peace and reconciliation with Israel ever more remote.
This abject failure is a direct result of
the Palestinian leadership's perception of the process not as a pathway to a
two-state solution — meaning Israel alongside a Palestinian state in the West
Bank and Gaza — but to the subversion of the State of Israel; not to
nation-building and state creation, but to the formation of a repressive terror
entity that would perpetuate conflict with Israel while keeping its hapless
constituents in constant and bewildered awe as its leaders line their pockets
from the proceeds of this misery.
|
Palestinian leaders see the peace
process, not as a pathway to a two-state
solution, but to the subversion of Israel. |
So long as things on the Palestinian side
are permitted, or even encouraged, to remain as they are, there will be no
progress whatsoever toward peace. There will be no advancement towards peace in
the framework of a French-initiated international conference, nor even in
bilateral talks (were the Palestinians to be somehow coerced to return to the
negotiating table).
Just as the creation of free and democratic
societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive
sociopolitical and educational transformation, so it will only be when
Palestinian society undergoes a real "spring" that the century-long
conflict between Arabs and
Jews can at long last be resolved and a semi-functioning Palestinian state come
into being. This requires sweeping the corrupt and oppressive PLO and Hamas
rulers from power, eliminating endemic violence from political and social life,
and teaching the virtues of coexistence with Israeli neighbors.
Sadly,
the possibility of a Palestinian spring, which seemed to be in the offing in
1993 when the PLO hovered on the verge of extinction and West Bank and Gaza
leadership appeared eager to strike a historic deal within the framework of the
Washington peace negotiations, has been destroyed for the foreseeable future by
the Oslo "peace process."
Read the full report: The Oslo Disaster, Begin-Sadat Center for
Strategic Studies, September 2016. See also Efraim Karsh's article in the Fall
2006 issue of Middle East Quarterly, "Why the Oslo Process Doomed Peace."
Efraim
Karsh is emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at Kings
College London, a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for
Strategic Studies, and principal research fellow at the Middle East Forum.
COLOMBIANS ARRIVE IN ISRAEL TO LEARN HOW TO
CLEAR LAND MINES:
Just
a week after the Colombian government signed a historic peace agreement with
the FARC terrorist organization, a Colombian delegation arrived in Israel to
receive training on one of the major post-conflict challenges facing Bogotá:
how to clear land mines. After Afghanistan, Colombia has had more people killed
by land mines recently than any country in the world, with the mines that are
spread across the countryside estimated to have killed over 11,000 people in
the last 25 years. The eight-member delegation is receiving instruction from
the Defense Ministry’s National Mine Action Authority. “Israel and Colombia are
old friends,” one official replied, when asked whether Jerusalem would consider
sending experts to Colombia to assist on the ground. “If we can continue to
help, we would certainly consider that.” The official characterized Israeli
efforts in helping the mine-clearing efforts in Colombia as a “humanitarian
civilian” action, adding that Israel is happy to contribute to the efforts to improve
the lives of Colombian citizens. (J.Post)
Vision
for Israel, PO Box 7265,
Jerusalem,
9107301, Israel
WORLD’S OLDEST MAN, A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR, CELEBRATES HIS BAR
MITZVAH: You’re never too old for a
bar mitzvah, even when you’re the oldest person on earth. Yisrael Kristal, at
the age of 113, finally got the chance to celebrate his coming of age. Kristal
was born in 1903 in Poland, but his original bar mitzvah failed to take place
because his mother had recently died and his father was in the Russian army
fighting in World War I. During World War II, he spent time in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and survived
the Holocaust.
But in
2016, Kristal got his chance to celebrate his coming of age the right way (at
his home in Haifa, Israel). The celebration was held in late September.
"They blessed him and sang with him and danced with him and gave out candies,"
said his sister. "We were excited, we're happy, it was a great honor to
celebrate his bar mitzvah. He has children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren
and cousins and everyone was coming." A bar mitzvah is held to mark when a
Jew reaches the age of being responsible for their actions. That's usually at
age 13 for boys and 12 for girls. (Arutz-7/VOA)
Editor's Note: Yisrael Kristal was born into a religious
Jewish family in Poland. The Nazis conquered Poland in 1939. He and his family
were forced into the Lodz ghetto, where his two children perished. His wife
died at the Auschwitz concentration camp. After World War II, he moved back to
Lodz, and rebuilt the candy shop that he had before the Nazi occupation. He met
his second wife, Batsheva. They married in 1947. One child, a son, was born in
Poland. They moved to Israel in 1950, where a daughter was born to them. He has
lived in Israel ever since. He has nine grandchildren. (Source: Wikipedia.)
Vision for Israel, PO Box 7265
Jerusalem, 9107301, ISRAEL
The
'Virtuous' New Nazis
Giulio Meotti
GATESTONEINSTITUTE.ORG 9/17/2016
u Instead of worrying about Islamist terrorism and
Molenbeek, Brussels' nest of jihadists, there are racists in Europe who want to
crush Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.
u They all falsely claim to be a
"peaceful", using "economic means" to correct
"wrongs" in the Palestinian territories. However, they never seem to
try to correct any of the wrongs of the corrupt, repressive governments of the
Palestinian Authority and Hamas in Gaza, or even to advocate there for a free
press, for the rule of law or for building a stable economy. Their true, racist
motives are unmasked.
u The pre- or post-1967 lines are only an alibi for
these new Nazis. Many consider Israel in its entirety illegal, immoral, or both
-- even though Jews have lived on that land for 3,000 years -- part of it is
even called Judea. Their appetite for accusing Jews of having the audacity to
"occupy" their own historical, Biblical land only reveals their
collusion. Should the French be accused of "occupying" Gaul? Just
look at any map of "Palestine," which blankets the entire state of
Israel: to many Palestinians, all of Israel is a single giant settlement that
has to be dismantled.
Meet the packs of new Nazis, posing as righteousness
and virtue, pursuing new exterminationist policies against Israel and, right
after that, the Jews. "In Nazi Germany," noted Brendan O'Neill in the
Wall Street Journal, "it was all the rage to make one's town
Judenfrei."
"Now a new fashion is sweeping Europe:
to make one's town or city what we might call 'Zionistfrei' -- free of the products
and culture of the Jewish state. Across the Continent, cities and towns are
declaring themselves 'Israel-free zones,' insulating their citizens from
Israeli produce and culture. It has ugly echoes of what happened 70 years
ago."
The Nazis said "kauft nicht bei
Juden": do not buy from Jews. The slogan of these new racists is
"kauft nicht beim Judenstaat": do not buy from the Jewish State. The
Nazis repeated "Geh nach Palästina, du Jud": Go to Palestine, you
Jew. Racists in Europe shout "Jews out of Palestine!"
Let us take a look at who they are. The
city council of Leicester, for one, recently approved banning products
"made in Israel." Think of that: a city without Israeli products.
This is not Nazi Germany in 1933; this is a British city under Labour
leadership in 2016. Two Welsh councils, Swansea and Gwynedd, blocked commercial
partnerships with Israeli companies. In Dublin, a well-known restaurant, Exchequer,
decided not to use the Israeli products. The Irish town of Kinvara became
"Israel-free."
Unity
Coalition For Israel - uc4i.org
New US-Israel Agreement Comes with
Tough Conditions
The
US and Israel have agreed to a new 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
which will provide Israel with $38 billion in foreign aid for Israel for
defense spending. (Non-military aid to Israel ended in 2007.) There are 2 big
changes in this MOU, one having to do with Israel’s defense sector and one
having to do with missile defense.
In the previous MOU, Israel could
spend just over a quarter of American defense aid at home. That is being phased
out in the new agreement and Israel will eventually have to spend all of the US
aid in the US. This will cost Israeli defense companies up to $10 billion
in sales of drones, missiles, tanks, and other equipment, according to Reuters.
The
agreement also limits Israel’s ability to lobby Congress for more aid, unless
Israel is “at war,” and Israel cannot ask Congress for more aid to develop
missile systems, the Washington
Post reports. In the past, Congress has appropriated more money for
Israel each year than President Barack Obama requested, often to fund joint
missile defense programs at a higher level. Iron Dome funding is one example.
This year Congress added $42.7 million for technology to detect and destroy Hamas
tunnels.
The new agreement’s restriction on Israel’s
relationship with Congress is unprecedented. It requires Israel to refuse any
additional funds that Congress might appropriate above the $3.8 billion per
year. The editors of the Wall
Street Journal write:
"The Obama
Administration has used various means to usurp Congress’s power of the purse,
but twisting the arm of an ally is a new low. That’s what the President in
effect did this week by requiring Israel to accept his spending limits in
return for a modest boost in military aid… [T]he Administration impelled Israel
to agree not to lobby for more aid and to return any funds Congress appropriates
in the future that exceed the agreement’s terms… So with one maneuver the
Administration has managed to slap Congress and Israel, vindictive to the
end." Source:
Republican
Jewish Coalition, 50 F St NW #100, Washington DC 20001
Editor's
Note: Poison pill military aid is being forced upon
Israel by President Obama. Perhaps the best antidote to this poison is for
Israel to refuse the aid. This will encourage Israel to more fully develop her
own defense industries, which are already highly developed, and will lead to
greater Israeli defense exports. Also, according to the US Constitution, it is
Congress that holds the purse strings, not the President. Obama should be taken
to task for usurping powers not granted to him by the Constitution. RAC
Netanyahu Convenes Special Meeting With African Leaders
Sept
23, 2016, www.IsraelToday.co.il Staff
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at
the United Nations in New York, held a special meeting with over 15 heads of
state and representatives from African countries. Netanyahu told his
interlocutors that he believes that Israel could be an amazing partner for
their countries. He said that technology changes everything, including in
communications, medicine, agriculture and education. He noted that Israel wants
to share its technology with African countries.
The
African leaders told Prime Minister Netanyahu that they thanked him and Israel
for its cooperation in so many fields. They added that this cooperation was
very important and would benefit the citizens of Africa and improve their
standard of living.
Afterwards, Prime Minister Netanyahu and
his wife, along with Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon, attended a
unique event at UN headquarters with dozens of African leaders under the
heading "Israeli Technology and Innovation for Africa." They were
welcomed with applause. The event, led by the Prime Minister, is an
Israeli-African summit that presents the start-up nation to the entire world.
Israeli technological firms and start-ups
presented their innovative solutions to over 15 presidents, prime ministers and
ministers from Africa and developing countries, and to dozens of ambassadors,
senior UN officials and private sector representatives from around the world.
Muslim Migrant Boat Captain Faces Murder Charges For
Pushing Christians Overboard, James
Badcock
TELEGRAPH.CO.UK, 9/16/2016
The prosecutor has asked for six separate terms of 15 years for murder with the aggravating factor of “religious motivation”, amounting to a 90-year sentence. A Cameroonian immigrant has been put on trial in Spain for the murder of six fellow occupants of a flimsy migrant boat because of their Christian religious beliefs.
Survivors of the hellish 2014 crossing from Morocco to the southern shore of Spain described how the accused, the Muslim captain of the inflatable craft identified as Alain N. B., blamed Christian passengers for the onset of a storm and forced six men off the boat to a certain death.
Unity Coalition for Israel WWW.UC4I.ORG
Rosh
Hashanah: Data Finds 186,923 Babies Born Over The Last Jewish Year: Just
before Rosh Hashanah, 2 October 2016, the Population Immigration and Border
Authority put out new data collected from the last Jewish New Year until 26
Sept. 2016. Among the data, it was published that 186,923 babies were born over
the past year, while roughly 42,000 people died, 82,315 Israelis were married,
23,855 got divorced, 26,990 new Israelis made Aliyah and 732,812 new ID cards
were issued. Last year, the Israeli population stood at 8,412,000, with 6,300,000
million being Jews, 1,746,000 (20.7%) Arabs and 366,000 (4.4%) non-Arab
Christian residents. (Ynet)
Presidential Error at the UN: During Barak Obama's
speech at the UN in September, the USA president remarked parenthetically that
Judea and Samaria are "Palestinian lands." The Zionist Organization
of America (ZOA) responded and protested the inaccuracy in Obama's words. Obama
said that "Surely, Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if
Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel, but
Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian
land.” The ZOA remarked that the use of the term Palestinian land
"prejudges the issue of sovereignty and borders and is not accordance with
international law, which designates Judea/Samaria as unallocated territory,
without a recognized sovereign." Moreover, "the President’s use of
this term is political in nature, as it automatically and unjustly designates
the biblical, religious, and historical heartland of the Jewish people for
millennia, before the Arab conquest of the region in the seventh century, as
belonging to Palestinian Arabs.
“It is well-known that
there are conflicting claims to the land, but it is also important to note that
Israel has a better claim in law than any other party. The territory of Judea
& Samaria was earmarked for Jewish settlement in 1920 at the San Remo
Conference. This decision, enshrined in the League of Nations Mandate for
Palestine entrusted to Britain that shortly followed, has never been superseded
by an internationally binding agreement. To the contrary, it was reaffirmed by
Article 80 of the UN Charter.
The Arab states
rejected the 1947 UN General Assembly partition resolution that called for an
Arab and a Jewish state to be established in the territory of the British
Mandate. As a result, no agreement on statehood and borders was ever reached.
Jordan, which illegally invaded and annexed the territory from 1948 to 1967,
formally relinquished its claim to the territory in 1988. In the absence of a
peace settlement, Judea/ Samaria is unallocated territory under international
law, not the sovereign territory of another state that Israel ‘occupies.’”
(Arutz-7)
“Christian
Girls are Meant for One Thing: The Pleasure of Muslim Men”:
Recently in Iraq, 19 Yazidi girls were placed
in iron cages and burned alive in front of a crowd of hundreds, for refusing to
copulate with jihadis. "Religious minority women under ISIS control are
often repeatedly sold from jihadi to jihadi. Once terrorists get tired of
raping and abusing one particular girl, they usually sell them off to one of
their ISIS buddies so they can, in turn, rape and abuse them at their own pleasure."
- Samuel Smith, The Christian Post. After their children were abducted by the ISIS,
a couple answered their door to find the body parts of their daughters and a
video of them being tortured and raped. "Christian girls are considered
goods to be damaged at leisure. Abusing them is a right. According to the
community's mentality it is not even a crime. Muslims regard them as spoils of
war." - Local residents, Pakistan.
Islamic law, always harsh, is still harsher
for women. According to the Koran, men have "authority" over women
and may beat them if they are "disobedient". According to Mohammad,
the prophet of Islam, women are less intelligent than men - two women are
needed to equal one man's testimony - and the majority of hell's population is
made up of women, who are likened to donkeys and dogs in their ability to distract
a man from his prayer and thereby annul it. What, then, is Islam's view of
women who are "infidels"? They are at best "meant for one thing,
the pleasure of the Muslim man," as one Muslim told a group of young
Christian girls in Pakistan before terrorizing and murdering one. In the Koran,
non-Muslim women seized in a jihad can be bought and sold as sex slaves for
Muslim men, as ISIS has been doing. (Gatestone) Intercede for the
captive girls and women taken by ISIS. May they be comforted in the darkest valley,
and find Him by their side in every unspeakable circumstance. May He reap swift
judgment on this most brutal of terrorist groups that would enslave, rape,
torture and kill the innocent with impunity.
Prominent
Jordanian Writer Shot And Killed:
A gunman has killed a prominent Jordanian writer in front of the courthouse
where the writer was facing charges that a cartoon posted on his Facebook page
was offensive to Islam. Nahed Hattar was shot and killed Sunday 25 Sept. 2016,
in front of Amman's Palace of Justice. The shooter was arrested. Hattar, who
was a Christian, said the cartoon was intended as a mockery of jihadists. The
cartoon showed an Arab man with two women, asking God to bring him a drink.
(VOA)
Source
for news items on this page:
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for Israel, PO Box 7265
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Matt Hanna https://kehilanews.com
Former
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once said, “Peace will come when the Arabs
start to love their children more than they hate us.” As a Palestinian who
truly loves his people, when I look around me and listen to what our media says
about the situation of Palestinian children in Gaza Strip or the West Bank, I
ask myself the same thing: Do we really love our children more than we hate Israel
and the Jews?
In my opinion, we still do not love our children
more that we hate Israel. Why? Because of the silent violence perpetuated
against our children by our Palestinian leaders and our media. Yet, if Israel
inflicted violence upon us, we would shout to the world that we do care about our
children. Violence against the Palestinian children is evident in each facet of
Palestinian society. I have highlighted a few examples:
Children’s
shows on Palestinian TV:
Growing up in Palestinian society, I was taught to hate
Israel and the Jews. As I mentioned in "Palestinian Obstacles to
Peace," that animosity permeates our textbooks, schools, mosques and
media. Hatred against the Israelis and Jews is embedded everywhere in
Palestinian Arabic media – even in children’s TV programs.
When the news outlets tell the world about Israeli violence against Palestinian
children, do they really care about Palestinian children
–
or
do they care about attacking Israel? They will use any weapon or argument
necessary to get to this end. When I listen to Palestinians speaking about
“Israeli violence” against Palestinian children, I ask myself why these people
do not care about the violence that Hamas and other Palestinian groups commit
against our children. What is it –
if
not violence against childhood – to teach little ones to kill others
because of their ethnicity or religion?
Parents
sacrifice their children for the sake of hating Israel:
A
video
recently emerged of a Palestinian father’s guiding his 3-year-old son toward
Israeli soldiers, telling him to stone them and telling the Israeli soldiers to
shoot him. Many asked how the father could have sent his child to his death. Of
course the soldiers did not shoot at the child, but instead played with the innocent
boy. But he mentality shown in this video is symptomatic of the deep culture of
hatred.
Palestinians’ anti-Semitism is so deep that
if we want to call somebody the worst name we can think of, we will call him or
her a Jew. What can be done in the face of all of this hatred against the Jews
– combined with the idea of the seeking liberation and becoming martyrs for Allah?
Like many Palestinian parents, this father cared not about the life of his boy,
but rather about giving Israel a bad image. Sadly, the idea of sacrificing our
children to achieve our goals is not a new idea in the Palestinian society.
Since becoming an adult, I often hear people in mosques and schools and at protests
saying that we would offer all of our children to liberate Palestine, which –
in the dictionary of the Palestinian people – means to destroy Israel.
Hamas summer camp:
I
recently watched a video of a Hamas kids’ summer camp in Gaza, and my heart bled
as I saw the Palestinian children learning how to use guns, how to fight and
how to stab. They actually received almost the same training that the special
forces themselves undergo.
Perhaps the Western media has started to
recognize this issue during this past year, but the truth is, I remember being
a 14-year-old in Gaza about eight years ago. And I too was willing to join a
Fatah youth camp. This subject is by no means new in Palestinian society.
Despite all of the violence perpetrated
against our children by terrorist organizations, the Palestinian activists have
neither highlighted nor condemned those atrocities for the evil they truly are.
Not one speaks out against the practice of teaching hatred to children.
In the end, all I can say is that Meir was
correct. We do not love
our children more than we hate Israelis, and we are such hypocrites that we
will watch our children being sent to their deaths by Hamas’ incitement and
stay silent – yet we will shout loudly when an Israeli soldier checks a bag owned
by one of our children.
“Peace will come when the Arabs start to love
their children more than they hate us.”
This article originally appeared on Philos Project, and
reposted with permission.