Missile alert in southern Israel - Arutz Sheva Staff

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by Arutz Sheva Staff

Sirens sound in four Gaza-area communities, activating missile defense system.

Sirens sounded Saturday night in the city of Sderot, the community of Ibim, the kibbutzim of Gevim and Nir Am, the Havat Shikmim sheep ranch, and in the Sapir College.

Residents reported hearing explosions, but there have been no reports of injuries or damage. The Iron Dome missile defense system was activated.

"A siren was set off in city of Sderot and in the kibbutzes of Gevim and Nir Am, in the Sapir College, in the town of Ibim, and in the Havat Shikmim ranch," the IDF confirmed. "Details are being investigated."

A later IDF statement read: "Following the reports regarding sirens that sounded a few minutes ago, three projectiles were recognized to have been launched from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory. Two projectiles were intercepted by the Iron Dome aerial defense system."



A Magen David Adom (MDA) spokesperson said: "At 9:10p.m. a report was received at MDA's Lachish Regional Dispatch for a rocket which landed in the Sderot area."

"NO bodily injuries were sustained in the incident. MDA EMTs and Paramedics are treating a 30 year old female for a panic attack.

"MDA EMTs and Paramedics are treating six people, two of whom sustained minor injuries while running to the shelter: A 40-year-old man who fell from his electric bicycle and a woman who fell in her home. In addition, MDA teams are treating four people with panic attacks, of which one, a 76 year old woman, is being evacuated to Barzilai Hospital. Two others include a 30-year-old women and a man did not require evacuation."

On Friday evening, the Israel Air Force attacked two Hamas underground terrorist infrastructures in northern and central Gaza on Friday night, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit confirmed.

According to the statement, the air strikes were carried out in retaliation for the rocket fire from Gaza on Friday evening.


Arutz Sheva Staff

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/267534

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The Longest-Lasting Conspiracy Theory - Denis MacEoin

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by Denis MacEoin

The lies about the State of Israel are amplified in the West through the "mainstream media", such as: The New York Times, The New Yorker, the BBC, The Guardian, MSNBC, and CNN.

• "To try to defeat an irrational supposition – especially when it is firmly held by its proponents – with a rational explanation is virtually impossible. Any information that does not correspond with the conspiracy theorists' preferred social, political, or ethnic narrative is ipso facto false. Social scientists have described such theories as having a "self-sealing quality" that makes them "particularly immune to challenge." — Deborah Lipstadt, Antisemitism Here and Now, 2019 pp 7-8.
• The lies about the State of Israel are amplified in the West through the "mainstream media", such as: The New York Times, The New Yorker, the BBC, The Guardian, MSNBC, and CNN. Churches join in, and of course the United Nations, as well as so-called human rights organizations where pretty well anything goes: The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.
• This bias is well monitored by a number of websites that work to identify their inaccuracies and deliberate distortions about Israel, the IDF, or Palestinian terrorism. CAMERA, Honest Reporting, UK Media Watch, and BBC Watch all dissect bad reportage, and contact editors to request corrections.

How often have we seen commentaries concerning the situation in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, made with intensity, even passion, which purport to tell readers the "facts" about Israel? They often narrate falsehoods that might put to shame a string of fraudsters, conmen and conspiracy theorists.

It seems, at times, that there is no limit to anti-Semitic modern fantasies about the Jewish state of Israel that overwhelm the even older libels about Jews controlling world affairs, as in the totally fraudulent forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Today, we are given to believe that it is Muslim Palestinian children who are slain by sneering Zionists and that the government of Israel works hand in hand with a global network of Christians and Jewish bankers, politicians, and media bosses.

It is not surprising to see ordinary folk taken in by anti-Semitic meanderings and anti-Israel fiction. A 2015 study by Chicago political scientists, J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, provided evidence that belief in conspiracies and other falsehoods is widespread even in the United States:

Using four nationally representative surveys, sampled between 2006 and 2011, we find that half of the American public consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory and that many popular conspiracy theories are differentiated along ideological and anomic dimensions. In contrast with many theoretical speculations, we do not find conspiracism to be a product of greater authoritarianism, ignorance, or political conservatism. Rather, the likelihood of supporting conspiracy theories is strongly predicted by a willingness to believe in other unseen, intentional forces and an attraction to Manichean narratives. These findings both demonstrate the widespread allure of conspiracy theories as political explanations and offer new perspectives on the forces that shape mass opinion and American political culture.

As shown frequently (for instance, here, here and here), human beings are by nature gullible and willing to take on board all manner of bunkum before breakfast. How else to explain the popularity of arch-conspiracists such as Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin? Of course, dictators like Hitler and Stalin can enforce their twisted notions by threats and force. In democracies, however, regardless of the open availability of verifiable information from libraries, universities, colleges, and government agencies, large numbers of people fall for any number of fantasies promulgated by internet trolls, the tabloid press, and, not infrequently, politicians with axes to grind.

The multiple-award winning British journalist, Will Storr, has written one of the most thorough investigations of people with controversial or outright bizarre ideas -- believers in past lives, anti-evolution fundamentalists, and all forms of self-delusion. The Heretics (published in the US as The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science) describes a wide range of believers who cannot be convinced by any contrary evidence that their convictions have no foundation in observable fact.

It would be a mistake to assume that everyone who takes unconventional ideas on board must be uneducated or unintelligent. Many highly educated people, including physicians and scientists, take seriously leading forms of alternative medicine and carry out extensive research into them. The US National Institutes for Health has a branch known as the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, which funds and engages in such research. These are all controversial forms of healthcare, but at least are capable of being scientifically tested.

This willingness to listen to alternative viewpoints while retaining a critical stance serves well in such contexts and is a fundamental part of original scientific and general rational method. All great scientific breakthroughs have been achieved by thinkers willing to challenge the received wisdom of their day -- giants such as Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Darwin, and Freud, to name but a few.

One of the worst examples of a presumably intelligent individual persisting in a much-discredited conviction is the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving, whose reputation underwent severe humiliation during a high-profile libel trial in 2000. Cambridge historian Richard Evans, as the chief expert witness in the trial, tore apart Irving's claims to be a credible historian at all.[1] It is possibly worth adding that Irving had no formal training in history; his two failed attempts to gain a university degree were in physics and political economy.

After such a public disparagement, most people would shrink into embarrassed oblivion. Yet Irving, now 80, continues his Holocaust denial, his anti-Semitism, and his general defiance of official historiography. He writes books, manages a constantly updated website in which he supports the Maduro regime in Venezuela, and links to a series of private meetings he holds. He has many followers in Europe and the United States. His impact may not be great, but in an era of rising anti-Semitism, his persistence in whitewashing Nazism sits well.

It is not surprising that Professor Deborah Lipstadt, the author whom Irving tried unsuccessfully to ruin in that trial, writes in her latest book, Antisemitism Here and Now (London, 2019), about the power of conspiracy theories:

Conspiracy theories give events that may seem inexplicable to some people an intentional explanation. If we were to provide these conspiracy theorists with evidence that the landing was indeed on the moon, they will a priori dismiss what we say and assume we are part of the conspiracy. To try to defeat an irrational supposition – especially when it is firmly held by its proponents – with a rational explanation is virtually impossible. Any information that does not correspond with the conspiracy theorists' preferred social, political, or ethnic narrative is ipso facto false. Social scientists have described such theories as having a "self-sealing quality" that makes them "particularly immune to challenge." (pp. 7-8)

Holocaust denial is, thankfully, an obsession for only a tiny number of bitter die-hards. Lipstadt, however, is writing about something beyond that. Anti-Semitism, in its various forms, is the longest-lasting conspiracy theory across much of the globe. It consists of an assumption of innate Jewish wickedness and has led to millions of deaths, expulsions, and wars, not least in the progressive 20^th and 21^st centuries when we were all supposed to have become rationalists.

Within the broad range of anti-Semitism, there is one controversial subject in which innumerable educated and intelligent people abandon any willingness to listen to the other side, to investigate the full facts, or to reach conclusions wherever those facts lead them: the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians.

The link between traditional anti-Semitism, irrational thinking, and hatred of Israel has been summed up in an article by Dr. Asaf Romirowsky, the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

"Anti-Israelism is the modern face of anti-Semitism and just as toxic. Anti-Israelism is a modern-day religion in that it demands unquestioning adherence to a dogmatic doctrine and rejects non-believers as morally inferior."

The anti-Israel dogmatists of whom I speak are not the denizens of the Arab, Iranian, and wider Muslim world, where hatred of Israel and support of the Palestinians is enforced by governments and clerics. They may possibly be excused because they lack the freedom to learn or speak freely about the issue or even board a plane for Israel to see reality on the ground.

The lies about the State of Israel are increasingly amplified in the West through the "mainstream media", such as:

• The New York Times: In April, the New York Times published what Amb. Dani Dayan called "the correction of the year" after the Gray Lady wrote that Palestinian Authority payments to terrorists and their families are a "far-right conspiracy theory." – CAMERA.org, January 2, 2019.
• The New Yorker: "Raja Shehadeh's 'Letter from Ramallah' is filled with misrepresentations that don't belong in a respected publication like The New Yorker – even in an opinion piece." – CAMERA.org. January 7, 2018.
• The New York Times: "NYT Issues Correction after Labeling Palestinian Support for Terrorists Fake News" – National Review, Jack Crowe, April 24, 2018.
• The Guardian: "The Guardian Delegitimizes Israel in Lying Editorial: The Guardian crosses the line with an editorial replete with lies, distortions and delegitimization of Israel." – Honest Reporting January 23, 2019.
• BBC: "Another Gaza maritime smuggling story ignored by the BBC" – BBC Watch, June 11, 2019.
• CNN: "CNN Sanitizes Mahmoud Abbas' Speech, Expunges Antisemitic Statements" – CAMERA.org. January 17, 2018.
• MSNBC: "MSNBC's Chris Hayes Presents Hamas Propaganda as Fact" – CAMERA.org. April 8, 2018.

Social media trends follow suit, and in general.

Churches join in:

• "Uncovered: United Church of Christ charged with faking anti-Israel boycott" – JNS, January 6, 2019.
• "Episcopal bishop sorry for making up Israeli atrocities" – The Times of Israel, August 22, 2018.
• "EAPPI: The World Council of Churches' Training Camp for Anti-Israel Advocacy" - NGO Monitor, January 14, 2019.

And, of course, the United Nations, as well as so-called human rights organizations where pretty well anything goes:
Amnesty International:

• "Although AI claims that it does not "accept any funds for human rights research from governments or political parties," it has received governmental funding, including from the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the European Commission, the Netherlands, the United States, and Norway....
  
• Disproportionately singles out Israel for condemnation, focusing solely on the conflict with the Palestinians, misrepresenting the complexity of the conflict, and ignoring more severe human rights violations in the region" --
  

Human Rights Watch (HRW):

• Systematic NGO Monitor analyses demonstrate that HRW disproportionately focuses on condemnations of Israel and that publications related to Israel often lack credibility. HRW also promotes an agenda based solely on the Palestinian narrative of victimization and Israeli aggression.
• "Uses distorted legal rhetoric to repeatedly accuses Israel of 'war crimes,' '[s]erious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law,' 'collective punishment,' and fostering a 'culture of impunity.' Applies unique standards to Israel as part of its broader delegitimization campaign.
• "Promotes a Palestinian 'right of return,' which, if implemented, would effectually mean the elimination of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people."

Ironically, many of the media involved, notably sections of the print and online press, are among the most articulate of our sources and are read by the best-educated sections of society. If one can leave aside for a moment their political bias in general, there is no doubt that newspapers such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Independent, The Guardian and others stand apart from the tabloid press in how they report on and debate about a range of serious topics. That they are all left-wing does not usually detract from the quality of what they write. But they are by far the most inaccurate and bigoted when it comes to reporting and debate about Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority.

To read most of their reports and articles on these topics, one might well believe that Israel is the most hideous and cruel state on earth -- a position held widely in the United Nations and its agencies, which are not left-wing or socialist, but which contain a majority of Arab-bloc members and their supporters.

This bias is well monitored by a number of websites that work to identify their inaccuracies and deliberate distortions about Israel, the IDF, or Palestinian terrorism. CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), Honest Reporting, Honest Reporting Canada, UK Media Watch, and BBC Watch all dissect bad reportage, and contact editors to request corrections.[2]

One form of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic speech that is often overlooked can be found in the comments sections that follow many articles, regardless of whether or not the piece itself has those qualities. Even a mild pro-Israel comment can unleash a storm of untruths, distortions of fact and rawness of language.

Two comments were recently in The Independent. On February 1, 2019, Independent staff and agencies published a reasonably accurate report entitled, "US cuts all aid to Palestinians in occupied West Bank and Gaza". The report begins: "The US has ended all financial aid for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, government officials have said."

This might well be interpreted by readers to mean that both the West Bank and Gaza are currently occupied by Israel; so this author posted the following comment:

"When will it sink in that Gaza has not been occupied since 2005, when all Israeli military and civilians finally pulled out? And when will people on the left wake up to the fact that millions from aid money to the PA are given to support terrorist murderers in Israeli jails and the families of 'martyrs' who have died while attacking innocent civilians, with payments increasing in proportion to however many an individual terrorist has killed. You don't have to be a Tory (I am not) to see how support for terrorism undermines genuine left-wing values."

It was not long before Deanna 12 left the following response:

"Quite a disgraceful, uneducated and foolish comment. Has not been occupied since 2005? What nonsense. Do you live on this Planet? The PA is democratically elected organization. As far as murdering innocent civilans (sic) go, your comments are laughable. It isn't (sic) the PA shooting inncocent (sic) medics and diabled (sic) protestors on border fences - with explosive dumdum bullets. It isn't (sic) the PA running an apartheid (sic) system. And it isn't (sic) the PA shooting inncocent (sic) children for fun. Its (sic) well documented. "Children have been shot in other countries I have covered - death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria - but I have never before watched Israeli soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport like in Gaza". Chris Hedges - 2002 Pultizer (sic) Prize Winner."

There is much one could reply to this claim; however Deanna 12's infatuation with a series of fantasies regarding Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas clearly seem so deeply ingrained that no amount of substantiation is likely to induce her to find any facts -- including about Chris Hedges -- for herself.

Dr. Denis MacEoin taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at a British university and for a time Arabic to English translation at a university in Fez, Morocco. Resident in the UK, he is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

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[1] For a shorter account, see Richard Evans, Telling Lies about Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial, here.
[2] On these see Manfred Gerstenfeld and Ben Green, "Watching the Pro-Israeli Media Watchers", Jewish Political Studies Review, 16:3/4, Fall 2004, pp. 33-58; available on subscription online here.

Dr. Denis MacEoin taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at a British university and for a time Arabic to English translation at a university in Fez, Morocco. Resident in the UK, he is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14412/conspiracy-theory
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When Britain Died - John Glynn

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by John Glynn

Welcome to Sharia.

In April of this year, in an article titled "4 Reasons Why London is The Worst," Maria Ebele had this to say: "London has the reputation of one of the greatest cities in the world. But I’ll let you in on a secret: if you ever want to make friends with a Brit who is not from London, casually drop in conversation that London isn’t your most favourite place in the world. Then sit back and watch. Most likely, you’ll see his or her eyes light up with glee at the opportunity to rip into the nation’s capital."

The author has a point. Over the past couple of years, more than 340,000 people have moved away from London amid rising levels of knife crime, according to reports. Extortionate property prices and poor air quality are also cited as reasons for people choosing to leave the capital and set up a new life elsewhere in the UK. Obviously, people want a better quality of life; also, people would prefer not to get stabbed.

However, could there be another reason for the mass exodus?

I ask this because London is acquiring an increasingly Islamic face.

In the words of Maulana Syed Raza Rizvi, an eminent preacher in the city, “London is more Islamic than many Muslim countries put together.” Yes, that London, as in the home of red buses and posh accents. The "traditional" picture of London has been replaced with a more worrying one. According to Giulio Meotti, a researcher at the Gatestone Institute, by 2020, “estimates are that the number of Muslims attending prayers will reach at least 683,000, while the number of Christians attending weekly Mass will drop to 679,000.” Next year, Islam looks likely to be the dominant religion in the capital.
As Meotti notes, since 2001, more than 500 London churches of all denominations have been turned into private homes. During the same period, British mosques have been proliferating. The proportion of Britons who identify themselves as Anglicans continues to fall, while, according to a NatCen Social Research Institute report, the number of Muslims continues to grow by the thousands. As Jean Patrick Gunberg laments, “Churchgoers are declining at a rate that within a generation, their number will be three times lower than that of Muslims who go regularly to mosque on Friday.”

Of course, Islamification doesn’t occur in a vacuum. In Birmingham, the second largest city in the UK, an Islamic minaret dominates the skyline. The "City of a Thousand Trades" has a huge Muslim population (22%). There have been petitions to allow mosques to place loudspeakers throughout the city. Why? To call people to prayer three times a day.

Imagine this occurring in Los Angeles, the second largest city in the U.S.

Demographically, the Britain of today is very different from the Britain of the '90s and early '00s; the most common name in England and Wales is now Mohammed, including spelling variations such as Muhammad and Mohammad.

Outside of London and Birmingham, other major cities have huge Muslim populations: Manchester (15.8%) and Bradford (24.7%). In the latter city, half the children are Muslim. The cultural, demographic and religious revolution in which Christianity declines and Islam advances is almost complete. The future of the UK is one rooted in burqas and strict interpretations of Islam.

An exaggeration? I think not.

As Innes Bowen noted in a piece for The Spectator, of the some 1,700 mosques in Britain, only two - yes, two - now follow the modernist interpretation of Islam. The Wahhabis control many mosques throughout the land. Call it what you will, "ultraconservative," "austere," "fundamentalist," or "puritan," but Wahhabism is premised on an abhorrent doctrine.

Worryingly, major British cities are full of sharia courts. London, for example, has over 100. How did this happen?

According to the aforementioned Giotti, “The advent of this parallel judicial system has been made possible thanks to the British Arbitration Act and the system of Alternative Dispute Resolution. These new courts are based on the rejection of the inviolability of human rights: the values of freedom and equality that are the basis of English Common Law.”

Acquiescence bordering on capitulation has also played a role. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Chief Justice Lord Phillips have previously suggested that British law should "incorporate" elements of sharia law – you know, the law based on the religious precepts of Islam, not the actual law that civilized societies in the west recognize.

British universities have also acquiesced. Take a quick look at the report titled "external speakers in higher education institutions," published by Universities in the UK. There you will read that "orthodox religious groups" may separate men and women during events. As The Daily Mail reported, females at Queen Mary University of London had to use a separate entrance and were told to sit in a room without being able to ask questions or even raise their hands. Remember, this took place in London, not Lahore.

According to reporters at The Telegraph, the Islamic Society at the London School of Economics held a particularly notable gala. Here, like livestock in a shed, women and men were separated by a seven-meter panel.

This should worry us all, especially those of us who care about the UK as a bastion of civilized values.

John Glynn is a professor of psychology at American University of Bahrain. Follow him on Twitter: @John_A_Glynn.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274592/when-britain-died-john-glynn

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Israel Bars Omar And Tlaib - Ari Lieberman

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by Ari Lieberman

The Jewish State shows how it’s done.

Lawmakers Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) will not be traveling to Israel. The excursion, slated for Friday, was nixed by Israel’s interior ministry headed by Aryeh Deri. Decisions to grant or deny visas to Israel are the domain of the Ministry of Interior but given the high-profile nature of the visit, it is a virtual certainty that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was consulted and had the final say.

The decision to bar entry for the duo – known for their frequent anti-Semitic outbursts – was not without controversy but demonstrated significant political fortitude. In 2017, Israel passed a law permitting the interior ministry to deny entry to those advocating for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Omar and Tlaib are among the most notorious advocates of this malign ideology. In fact, both sponsored a congressional bill in support of BDS and obscenely compared boycotts of Israel with boycotts of Nazi Germany.

Following the asinine comparison, the United States State Department updated its definition of antisemitism to include as an example, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” The malign positions held by both Omar and Tlaib place the two squarely within the State Department’s definition of antisemitism.

Last month, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, indicated that the Omar-Tlaib visit would be allowed to proceed unhindered “out of respect for the US Congress and the great alliance between Israel and America.” But circumstances changed measurably once Israel became aware of their malevolent itinerary.

The itinerary was titled, “U.S Congressional Delegation to Palestine.” The United States does not recognize a legal entity known as “Palestine.” Moreover, there was ominously no mention of Israel. The itinerary highlighted plans to meet with various heads of Arab governmental and non-governmental organizations with long records of hostility toward the Jewish State. No meetings were planned with any members of mainstream Israeli political parties. Finally, their trip was planned by MIFTAH, a Palestinian NGO headed Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian Authority lawmaker and PLO central committee member.

In 2013, MIFTAH (which publishes in both English and Arabic) featured an article in Arabic invoking an ancient antisemitic blood libel which claimed that Jews used the blood of Christian children as an ingredient in Passover matzah. Rather than apologizing, Ashrawi initially accused those exposing the hate-filled article of running a “smear campaign.” She ultimately issued a belated apology but only after being threatened with loss of Western funding for her antisemitic NGO.

Clearly, Omar and Tlaib, sponsored by an NGO that propagates blood libels and antisemitic conspiracy theories, had no intention of learning and educating. Their intention was to spread their venomous antisemitic and anti-American poison, and advocate on behalf of BDS and its pernicious ideological underpinnings.

The 2017 anti-BDS law was passed in Israel after robust parliamentary debate and several readings. That is how laws are passed in democracies and these laws should be respected. Israel is under no obligation to commit national suicide by allowing nefarious elements wishing to inflict harm on the Jewish people into the country. Every nation has the right to safeguard its borders and Israel is no exception. The law has been invoked on several occasions and validated by Israel’s supreme court, a highly regarded judicial institution known for its judicial independence.

In July, Israel expelled Fouad Ahmad Assadi, an anti-Israel Spanish lawmaker of Palestinian descent who landed at Ben Gurion airport to attend a socialist conference in the Palestinian-occupied settlement of Ramallah. Israel promptly handed him a one-way ticket back to Spain. Spanish BDS advocate Ana Sanchez Mera was refused entry into Israel in 2018 as was Jewish Voice for Peace (which is neither Jewish nor peaceful) activist Ariel Gold.

These individuals from disparate backgrounds maintained one recurring common denominator. They each shared a passionate hatred of the Jewish State and fanatically advocated for BDS.

Omar and Tlaib are deeply antisemitic. Both have repeatedly expressed anti-Semitic canards and conspiracy theories. Both have publicly argued that U.S. Jews maintain dual loyalties and their dollars (or “Benjamins”) are used to purchase political influence and votes. Both have compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and both have minimized the significance of the Holocaust by comparing the plight of illegal aliens housed in detention centers to those of Jews in Nazi death camps. Omar once alleged that Israel maintains hypnotic powers over the world while Tlaib asserted that the Holocaust gives her a “calming feeling” because it reminds her of how her Palestinian ancestors provided Jews with “safe haven.” Tlaib is apparently unfamiliar with personalities like Haj Amin al-Husseini, Fawzi Kaoukji and Hassan Samaleh nor is she familiar with events like 1929 Hebron massacre or the 1948 Hadassah medical convoy massacre. Perhaps a refresher course is in order.

These and other outrageous canards spewed by these foul-mouthed anti-Semites should have been reason enough to deny them entry into Israel. But it was their itinerary that sealed the deal for the interior ministry for it proved that these malign individuals wanted to spread their hate rather than learn and engage in productive dialogue. Bravo Israel for taking a principled stand and sticking by it despite intense political pressure. 


Ari Lieberman is an attorney and former prosecutor who has authored numerous articles and publications on matters concerning the Middle East and is considered an authority on geo-political and military developments affecting the region.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274645/israel-bars-omar-and-tlaib-ari-lieberman

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Enlisting Arabs for the Nazi Cause - Dr. Alex Grobman

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by Dr. Alex Grobman

Nine part must-read series that details the influence of the propaganda arena in the war between the Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews

Part III (for previous parts, click here)

From 1941-1945, historian Antonio J. Muñoz estimated that about 5,000 Arab and Indian Muslims volunteered to serve in the German armed forces, hardly sufficient to constitute an army of liberation. Their worth as a military force was negligible compared with units created with Muslims in the Balkans and the USSR. Though the Germans failed to conquer the region, the units did have propaganda value which the Nazis exploited.

Joseph Schechtman credited the mufti in helping establish espionage networks to provide information about British troop movements. His news transmissions to the Middle East reported acts of sabotage that would normally have been censored. His agents, who infiltrated the Middle East by land or by air, cut pipe and telephone lines in Palestine and Transjordan and destroyed bridges and railways in Iraq.

He also organized an Axis-Arab Legion known as the Arabisches Freiheitskorps that wore German uniforms with “Free Arabia” patches Schechtman said. As part of the German Army, the unit guarded communications facilities in Macedonia and hunted down American and British paratroopers who jumped into Yugoslavia and were hiding among the local population. The legion also fought on the Russian front. Another major success was el-Husseini’s recruitment of tens of thousands of Balkan Muslims into the Wehrmacht.  Moshe Shertok (Sharett), chief of the political department of the Jewish Agency, reported that on a visit to Bosnia in 1943, the mufti appealed to local Muslims to join the Moslem Waffen-SS Units and met with the units that were already operational.

In addition, Middle East expert Robert Satloff said Haj Amin used his contacts with Muslim leaders in North Africa to urge them to obstruct the Allied advance in every way possible. After Allied troops invaded North Africa in November 1942, Vichy officers in Tunisia established the Phalange Africaine, also called the Légion des Volontaires Française de Tunisie. There were 400 men in the unit, approximately one-third Arab and the rest a mélange of European pro-Fascists. The German Army assumed command of the Phalange in February 1943, fighting the British and the Free French for most of 1944. In 1944, a French military court convicted the unit’s commander, Pierre Simon Cristofini, of treason and executed him.

A second all-Arab unit under German command, known as the Brigade Nord Africaine, Satloff noted was established by Mohamed el-Maadi, a former French officer and antisemite whose nickname was “SS Mohamed.” They fought the partisans, a group of resistance fighters, in the Dordogne region in South-West France.

In March 1944, Schechtman said the mufti urged the Arabs to “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.” In keeping with this religious imperative, historian Raul Hilberg said the mufti asked the German Foreign Minister on May 13, 1943 “to do his utmost” to prohibit further departures of Jews from Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary to Palestine. Four thousand Jewish children, accompanied by 500 adults, had recently arrived in Palestine, prompting the mufti to urge that the escape routes be terminated. When the International Red Cross asked Romanian Prime Minister Marshal Antonescu, two weeks later, to allow Jewish emigration to Palestine on Red Cross ships, the German Foreign Office refused, asserting that Palestine was an Arab country.

Historian Yehuda Bauer stated that in 1943, when Himmler suggested that 20,000 German prisoners in Allied hands be released in return for allowing Jewish 5,000 children to leave the Third Reich, the mufti allegedly said he would rather have all the Jews be killed. When the plan failed to materialize, the mufti got his wish.

On July 27, 1944, Jeffry Herf noted that the Mufti wrote to Himmler to ask that Jews be prevented from entering Palestine. In acceding to the mufti’s request, Himmler would thus demonstrate Germany’s “friendly attitude” to Arabs and Muslims.

Had Rommel had been victorious at the Second Battle of El-Alamein, (October 23, – November 1, 1942), the Germans would have reached Palestine enabling Hitler to exterminate the Jewish populace. German historians Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers found that Nazi intelligence informed their superiors in Berlin that once Rommel entered Cairo and Palestine, he could rely on some Egyptian officers and the Muslim Brotherhood for their help. An SS division had been activated to fly to Egypt to oversee the destruction of the Jewish population.

Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler

Gideon Hausner, who as Israel’s Attorney General, headed a team of prosecutors at the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, described the mufti’s “long standing” relationship with Adolph Eichmann, who played a critical role in the destruction of European Jewry. In early 1942, the mufti and his entourage met with Eichmann’s office in Berlin, to outline the nature of the Final Solution.

The mufti was “so strongly impressed,” with what he heard, he asked Heinrich Himmler, the “Architect of Genocide,” to assign someone on Eichmann’s staff to be his ”personal adviser” on “finally solving” the Jewish problem also in Palestine, as soon as the Mufti was reinstated in his position by the triumphant Nazis.  Eichmann appreciated the offer. “A priceless jewel…The biggest friend of the Arabs,” is how the mufti described Eichmann in his diary.

German Islamic scholar Gerhard Höpp, noted that the mufti had a cordial relationship with Himmler, whom he often met for tea. In his memoirs, the mufti records that in the summer of 1943 Himmler informed him that “up to now we have exterminated [abadna] around three million of them.

The mufti labored diligently to ensure the destruction of the Jews of Europe. Jeffry Herf found that he even urged the Germans to bomb Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. Historian David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann, lecturer and political and foreign policy consultant, add that in 1943 the mufti began asking the German Air Force Command to bomb the headquarters of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem and to launch an air assault on Tel Aviv on November 2, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The appeal was refused as was the one he made on April 1, 1944.

At the post-war Nuremberg Trials, Dieter Wisliceny, an aide to Adolf Eichmann, claimed that the mufti was an “initiator” of the policy to exterminate the Jews. Eichmann and the mufti denied the accusations at the Eichmann trial in 1961. Historian Bernard Lewis found no corroborating testimony about either statement, but the Germans hardly required any encouragement from anyone to annihilate the Jewish people. 


Dr. Alex Grobman is a historian and author of The Palestinian Right To Israel (Balfour Books, 2010). He co-authored "Denying History: Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened And Why Do They Say It?" (University of California Press, 2000). His newest book is License to Murder: The Enduring Threat of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24309

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America Can Stop China from Dominating Artificial Intelligence--And Should - Gordon G. Chang

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by Gordon G. Chang

The West should be seriously concerned: whoever wins at AI will both dominate the global economy and field the most destructive conventional military force.

• The People's Republic of China, nonetheless, is already an AI powerhouse, and for America to maintain its edge—and to prevent U.S. tech from being used for exceedingly disturbing purposes —Washington should force U.S. companies to end cooperative AI projects in China.
• The West should be seriously concerned: whoever wins at AI will both dominate the global economy and field the most destructive conventional military force.
• Unfortunately, American companies are helping China's leaders in what many call—correctly—crimes against humanity. For instance, AI researchers from Microsoft, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Michigan State University gave keynote speeches at the Chinese Conference on Biometric Recognition in Xinjiang in August of last year on facial recognition, a social-control technology.
• Some of Google's research is in China. The company has three AI operations there: the Google AI China Center in Beijing, established in 2017, and partnerships with China's two premier educational institutions, Peking University and Tsinghua University....If the labs remain open, the net flow of AI learning will be out of the U.S. into China.
• Moreover, Chinese researchers, if they could not work for American companies in China, would not, as Vox suggests, necessarily find employment in their homeland. Some of those seeking research slots would follow other Chinese to the United States, and that would exacerbate one of Beijing's big AI vulnerabilities. "China's Path to AI Domination Has a Problem: Brain Drain," is the title of an August 7 article posted by the MIT Technology Review. The U.S. can make that crucial problem even more severe.

China, writes Amy Webb in Inc., has been "building a global artificial intelligence empire, and seeding the tech ecosystem of the future." It has been particularly successful, Webb, the founder of the Future Today Institute, believes. "China is poised to become its undisputed global leader, and that will affect every business," she notes.

Not everyone shares Webb's assessment that Chinese researchers are in the lead. America, after all, is home to most leading AI tech. The People's Republic of China, nonetheless, is already an AI powerhouse, and for America to maintain its edge—and to prevent U.S. tech from being used for exceedingly disturbing purposes, Washington should force U.S. companies to end cooperative AI projects in China.

Chinese artificial intelligence. We need to ask what would happen if the world's most dangerous regime were to dominate the world's most powerful technology. Photo: Getty Images.

Artificial intelligence permits machines to mimic human functions such as driving vehicles, recognizing spoken words, and playing games of skill like chess and Go.

Especially Go, the Chinese game of strategy. If China had an "AI Sputnik moment," it occurred in March 2016 when AlphaGo, developed by Alphabet Inc.'s DeepMind, took four out of five games from an 18-time champion in a challenge match in Seoul.

By the following year, Beijing was pouring even more money into AI research. Beijing in 2017 supplemented the AI component of its Made in China 2025 initiative with its "Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, a three-part effort to lead global AI by 2030. Furthermore, Beijing made sure its determination to dominate the field was shared across society. Business chieftains and policy analysts in China are much more focused on AI than those in the West, surveys show.

The nationwide effort, Webb tells us, paid off. China, for instance, now publishes more AI machine learning papers than the United States.

The West should be seriously concerned: whoever wins at AI will both dominate the global economy and field the most destructive conventional military force. To borrow a phrase, we are witnessing the "Rise of the Machines."

What if those "machines" are Chinese? We need to ask what would happen if the world's most dangerous regime were to dominate the world's most powerful technology.

We are getting a hint what will occur in what Beijing calls the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. There, facial recognition systems, powered by AI, are helping China's leaders to continually track inhabitants.

In Xinjiang, Beijing is relentlessly eliminating cultural and religious identity and implementing race-based policies reminiscent of those of the Third Reich. For example, more than a million inhabitants are being held in concentration-camp-like facilities for no reason other than their Uighur or Kazak ethnicity or their adherence to Islam.

Unfortunately, American companies are helping China's leaders in what many call—correctly—crimes against humanity. For instance, AI researchers from Microsoft, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Michigan State University gave keynote speeches at the Chinese Conference on Biometric Recognition in Xinjiang in August of last year on facial recognition, a social-control technology.

China is on the AI map in part because Beijing has been given a boost by U.S. companies sharing technology. Leaders in the field are both Alphabet and its Google unit. Alphabet is a major player in part due to its acquisition of DeepMind. Google also conducts extensive AI research.

Some of Google's research is in China. The company has three AI operations there: the Google AI China Center in Beijing, established in 2017, and partnerships with China's two premier educational institutions, Peking University and Tsinghua University.

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor, has in recent weeks severely criticized the search giant. "I think it is unprecedented in the last 100 years, or ever, that a major U.S. company refused to work with the U.S. military and has worked with our geopolitical rival," he said on Fox News Channel's "Sunday Morning Futures" on August 11^th.

Google has in various statements denied charges like the ones Thiel has been making, but its contentions, although technically true, appear disingenuous. First, the company has said it works with the Pentagon, but it is nonetheless not renewing its Project Maven contract, an AI project analyzing drone footage.

Second, Google denies working with the Chinese military, but as Thiel, a PayPal cofounder, points out, its "civilian" projects are actually military in disguise. "It's not like the U.S., where you have different companies and different people and you have a government sector and a private sector and these things don't always coordinate or work together," Thiel said on Fox. "In China, these things are still tightly coordinated across the board."

In the China of Xi Jinping, the aggressive ruler, "civil-military fusion" means nominally civilian research is pipelined into the Chinese military.

Thiel is right about the essential nature of China's one-party state. The Communist Party, to which the People's Liberation Army reports, has, in reality, near-absolute power over society, especially over something as important as scientific and technical research. Companies such as Google have to know about the military's access to its AI research in China.

Not everyone is concerned about China's militarization of research. "You're not going to be able to stop or slow down Chinese AI progress by stopping these labs," Jeffrey Ding of Oxford's Center for the Governance of AI, told Vox, the popular American-based news site, while referring to foreign AI research facilities. "Either we try to get the best and brightest, or they have other options," he said.

"If we rather someone work for Microsoft than the Chinese military," Vox, asked, "why take away the option of working for Microsoft?"

Ding and Vox highlight an important aspect of the AI race. The competition, as a practical matter, is one for brainpower: people. As futurist George Gilder has noted, "The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius." Axios reports that most of America's best AI researchers have come from other countries.

"What has given the US its AI advantage has been, in significant part, the fact that the US attracts AI talent from all over the world," Vox writes. "While America is a much smaller country than China, it's drawing on what is effectively a much larger talent pool, including attracting many top Chinese researchers."

Chinese researchers, if they could not work for American companies in China, would not, as Vox suggests, necessarily find employment in their homeland. Some of those seeking research slots would follow other Chinese to the United States, and that would exacerbate one of Beijing's big AI vulnerabilities. "China's Path to AI Domination Has a Problem: Brain Drain," is the title of an August 7 article posted by the MIT Technology Review. The U.S. can make that crucial problem even more severe.

Despite benefits of conducting AI research in China, the weight of evidence argues for closing American AI operations in that country. These labs leak out U.S. learning, and despite what Webb writes, it appears the United States is still ahead in cutting-edge AI. If the labs remain open, the net flow of AI learning will be out of the U.S. into China.

Although much AI research today is open-source—meaning it does not matter where researchers are based—it is becoming clear that in coming years AI work will not be published in open forums. That should put a premium on attracting the best talent to one's own country.

Of course, there is no question that closing American facilities in China will inhibit, in some fashion, American AI work, but that loss is not nearly as great as the benefits of walling off China. Moreover, we cannot ignore the moral considerations of helping a militant, racist state.

It is the race of the century, and the U.S. urgently needs to improve the odds. It is time, therefore, for President Trump, by emergency order, to close the AI projects of American companies in the People's Republic of China.

• Follow Gordon G. Chang on Twitter

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and a Gatestone Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14731/america-can-stop-china-from-dominating-artificial

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Stalin-Hitler Pact Turns 80 - Lloyd Billingsley

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by Lloyd Billingsley

And ignorance still prevails in the Democrat-media alliance.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was born on March 15, 1933, and Senator Dianne Feinstein on June 20 of the same year. An event that occurred six years later is far more significant than both those active public figures but much less understood, if known at all.

On August 23, 1939, Joseph Stalin of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics signed a pact with Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist regime in Germany. “Fascism is a matter of taste,” quipped Soviet foreign policy boss Vyacheslav Molotov, confirming that the two totalitarian regimes were essentially the same. Though often described as a “non-aggression pact,” the reverse was true.

The month after the Pact, Stalin and Hitler both invaded Poland, starting World War II. As Ben Peck noted in 2009 at Marxist.com, the Pact provided the Nazis with raw materials which “funded the Nazi war machine in Europe.”  By 1940, Stalin supplied Hitler’s Germany with 900,000 tons of mineral oil, 100 tons of scrap iron, 500,000 tons of iron ore” and other important minerals.  Soviet diplomats “groveled before the Führer in order to ingratiate themselves. In his cynical fashion, Stalin expelled each ambassador from the territories of the USSR as their countries were occupied by the Nazi armies.”

During the Pact, the Nazi and Soviet intelligence services teamed up against the Western democracies, and as the leftist Guardian recalls, the Stalin-Hitler collaboration did not end there. “Stalin also handed back a substantial number of German communists who had taken refuge in the Soviet Union after the Nazi seizure of power.” These Jewish communists, “were taken directly from the Soviet Gulag to a German concentration camp.”  As Christopher Wolf notes, “not many people know that many Jews fled Stalin’s control as well.”

The Stalin-Hitler Pact prompted many Americans, Jewish and otherwise, to leave the Communist Party, never to return. Prolific screenwriter Dalton Trumbo joined the Communist Party during the Pact and worked like Stakhanov for the cause. In 1940, when Britain stood alone against Nazi attack, Trumbo wrote The Remarkable Andrew in which the ghost of General Andrew Jackson argues against American military aid to Britain because “there’s no point in cooking up an alliance with a country that’s already licked.”

In June, 1941, Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the USSR. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December, the USA joined the fight. The film Mission to Moscow, which some dubbed “Submission to Moscow,” appeared in 1943. That year the first Soviet Jewish delegation to the United States assured Americans that tales of anti-Semitism in the USSR were no more than malicious rumors. Samuel Ornitz, who would later join Trumbo in the Hollywood Ten, organized a reception for Soviet actor-director Solomon Mikoels and writer Itzak Feffer.

After the war the USSR occupied half of Europe and proclaimed the USA the main enemy. Stalin swung the USSR back to its traditional anti-Semitism, deriding Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.” In 1948, Stalin had Mikoels murdered, his mutilated body signaling the dictator’s personal touch. Three years later an executioner’s bullet claimed Itzak Feffer. Many more Jews would have been killed had not Stalin died in 1953.

That year screenwriter and director Robert Rossen (All the King’s Men), previously an uncooperative witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, had second thoughts. Rossen willingly testified about the Communists during the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the murders of Mikoels and Feffer. The victims of the recent show trials in Czechoslovakia, Rossen told the Committee, were “all hung, in my opinion, for being Jews, and nothing else.”

In 1956, Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev revealed the crimes of Josef Stalin, a strong contender for the worst mass murderer of all time. One would never know that from Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznik’s Untold History of the United States, which lists only two atrocities for Stalin, the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest and “having the Red Army stop on the banks of the Vistula while the Germans put down the Warsaw uprising.”

In Stone’s account, the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939 is an “unsavory deal,” and after World War II Stalin’s peaceful USSR “had no blueprint for postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe.” It might have been the clueless Gerald Ford claiming “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” in his debate with Jimmy Carter.

In similar style, those who know little or nothing of Communist realities or the Stalin-Hitler pact also ignore the current alliance of leftists and Islamists, the cutting edge of anti-Semitic hatred in our time. The Democrat-media axis, ignorant of the Pact and a lot more, smears as Nazis and racists those Americans who declined to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton.

As it happens, one of Clinton’s mentors is Robert Treuhaft, a Stalinist lawyer who joined the Communist Party USA after the Stalin-Hitler Pact and served faithfully in the USSR’s alibi armory. POTUS 44’s beloved Frank Marshall Davis, a Stalinist of exceptional ferocity, also joined the Communist Party USA after the Pact. The Democrat-media axis seems unaware of those realities, and a lot more.

And now abide junkthought, slander and ignorance, but the greatest of these is ignorance.

Lloyd Billingsley is the author of  Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation and, most recently, Sexual Terrorist, about the Golden State Killer.  Lloyd’s work has appeared in City Journal, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, California Globe, and many other publications. Bill of Writes: Dispatches from the Political Correctness Battlefield is a collection of his journalism. His crime books include A Shut and Open Case, about a double murder in Davis, California.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274643/stalin-hitler-pact-turns-80-lloyd-billingsley

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