Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, who last year passed a motion denying the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, shocked many last week when she publicly affirmed the Jews’ historic connection to the Holy City. “In the Torah, Jerusalem is the capital of King David, where Solomon built the Temple and placed the Ark of the Covenant,” Bokova reminded the European Parliament in a session last Thursday. “The protection of the heritage of Jerusalem is part of a broader vision for peace and the fight against all forms of denial of Jewish history, delegitimization of Israel, and anti-Semitism,” she continued. No…
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A Palestinian who offered assistance at the scene of a July 1 terrorist attack in Israel, in which a rabbi was killed, has been dismissed from his public service job in the Palestinian Authority. J., whose full name has not been made public, was the first of two Palestinians who provided assistance to Rabbi Michael Mark, who was shot by Palestinian terrorists while driving on Route 60, an intercity road across Israel, Judea and Samaria between Nazareth in the North and Beersheba in the South. Mark’s wife and one of his daughters were wounded in the attack. The Palestinian man…
During a campaign interview this week, presumptive Republican candidate for the US presidency, Donald Trump, used Israel as an example of the kind of racial and religious security profiling he feels is necessary to keep America safe. “I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” the real estate mogul said. “Other countries do it, you look at Israel and you look at others, they do it and they do it successfully. And I hate the concept of profiling, but we have to start using common sense and we have to use…
Monday March 21, 2016 U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) God bless AIPAC. I’m thrilled to be with you here today and let me say at the outset, perhaps to the surprise of a previous speaker, Palestine has not existed since 1948. On Wednesday night of this week, in synagogues across the world, Jewish people will read the Megillah, which tells the story of Purim, the miraculous rescue of the Jewish people from the hands of a wicked Persian king. When the evildoer Haman plots to kill the Jews, he describes them as a nation that is scattered and spread out.…
“Preserving the memory of the Holocaust is more important today than ever for in this period of resurgent and sometimes violent anti-Semitism, it is commemorations like this that remind us all where the oldest and most enduring hatred can lead. Unfortunately, in Europe and elsewhere, Jews are once again being targeted just for being Jews. Around the world, Jewish communities are increasingly living in fear. We see anti-Semitism directed against individual Jews, and we also see this hatred directed against the collective Jew, against the Jewish state. Israel is targeted with the same slurs and the same libels that were…
When US President Barack Obama was elected, he promised to create the most transparent presidential administration in history. Apparently he has forgotten his love of transparency, or simply neglected to let his State Department in on the goal. Regardless, it is highly ironic that the US State Department now finds itself in the ridiculous position of criticizing Israel’s government for being too transparent. The source of this latest “friendly disagreement” is the draft of an Israeli law currently working its way through the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. The law mandates that all Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) operating in Israel which receive more…
Yesterday’s lead headline in the daily Israel Hayom announced a dramatic change by the Israel Medical Association’s Ethics Board regarding “triage” – the sorting and treating battle casualties according to urgency. The 2013 Israel Medical Association (IMA) ethical code regarding multi-casualty terror attack says that in such events the notion of “charity begins at home” is to be applied. This principle demands treatment of wounded victims first, and wounded terrorists later. This Jewish ethical principle contradicts the international concept of sorting patients according to urgency alone. Triage, blind to the identity of the wounded, leads to the possibility of treating…
The speech of Pastor Victor Styrsky, given on Holocaust Remembrance Day last month, is now surfacing on Israeli social media and is touching the hearts of many. Styrsky spoke on behalf of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), founded by John Hagee in 2006. CUFI claims 2.5 million members across the United States is probably the most active and vocal pro-Israel Christian organization in the world today. CUFI’s unambiguous commitment to Israel stands in sharp contrast to the growing number of Christians whose attitude towards Israel is increasingly crossing the line between criticism and anti-Semitism. CUFI affirms, what up until a…
In the wake of the ISIS attack on Paris, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “militant Islamic terrorism attacks our societies because it wants to destroy our civilization,” which is why “all terrorism must be condemned and fought equally with unwavering determination.” Netanyahu is among those who find no excuse for Islamic terror. Some European leaders, on the other hand, are doing what they have done all along – blaming Israel and the West for Islamic violence. Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom was rebuffed by some Israeli officials, like Yair Lapid, who misunderstood her as justifying Palestinian terror while condemning ISIS…
This instructive video shows what news reports would look like if they applied their outrageous Israel-reporting techniques to terrorist attacks in the rest of the world. In the hope of lessening the egregious anti-Israel bias, here are some pointers to members of the media: Your job is to report facts, not reinforce a narrative. Really. The facts matter – they form the basis for judgments. So here are some facts for you, meticulously documented and updated (with details and graphs worthy of a data scientist) in a shared Google spreadsheet by Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho. According to his data, in the fifty days from September 11 through…