Israel working to create safe area in Syria for Druze
Fearful of a genocide of Syrian Druze, Israel is working with other countries, the International Red Cross and the United Nations to bring about the creation of a safe zone for Druze and other religious minorities in southern Syria according to a report at the website Walla! (link in Hebrew) that has been confirmed by Israeli diplomatic sources. The Red Cross refuses to confirm the report.
According to the report, Israel says it cannot take in hundreds of thousands of Druze, but it is working toward a safe zone in the area of Idlib, near where the borders of Israel, Syria and Jordan come together. The Druze, like other religious minorities in Syria, support President Bashar al-Assad and fear a massacre by Islamist forces as the Assad regime apparently collapses.
Israel says that it will not stand by and watch a genocide on its borders.
Rabbi Shmuely Boteach held a panel in a Senate office building on Monday, which featured Ted Cruz and Elie Wiesel. The panel addressed Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and was intended to be bipartisan. Unfortunately, the Democrat who was supposed to be on the panel didn't show up.
The Cruz-Wiesel event was intended as a bipartisan dialogue. But Rep.
Brad Sherman, D-Calif., pulled out after the host, Rabbi Shmuley
Boteach, ran a full-page ad in The New York Times accusing White House
national security adviser Susan Rice of turning a blind eye to genocide.
The ad featured a photo of Rice looking away from a stack of human
skulls. Sherman called it vulgar, and Boteach opened the event by
apologizing, insisting his disagreements with Rice are strictly over
policy.
Because after all, what's more important: Stopping an Iranian nuclear weapon or defending what's left of Susan Rice's honor?
Where's Hillary? Netanyahu doesn't want you to ask
After the Sabbath started on Friday, the Emergency Committee for Israel, which is based in the United States, circulated this advertisement asking where Hillary Clinton is in the current controversy over a deal with Iran. If you watch the political talk shows on Sunday morning in the US, you are likely to see it.
Let's go to the videotape.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu's office condemned the ad, along with a full-page ad against Susan Rice that was placed in Saturday's New York Times by Rabbi Shmuely Boteach (ad below followed by story).
"We condemn these ads and oppose personal attacks of every kind,"
Netanyahu's office said, shortly before the prime minister's scheduled
flight to Washington where he was to address Congress this week. "We
have no connection to these ads and we believe that the discourse on the
Iranian issue must remain to the point."
Netanyahu is really trying to walk a tightrope here....
Here it comes.'Moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud AbbasAbu Mazen has accused Israel of genocide in Gaza.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday accused Israel
of committing “genocide” against the Palestinians in its operation in Gaza and said the coming days will be “difficult.”
Abbas, who was speaking after an emergency meeting of the Palestinian
leadership in Ramallah to discuss the current IDF operations in the Gaza
Strip, said that the Israeli “war” on the Palestinians began in Hebron
before moving to Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
“This war is not against Hamas or any faction, but against the
Palestinian people,” Abbas said. “We must have a say about what’s
happening and what could happen in the coming days, which will be
difficult.”
Abbas said that Israel was not only defending itself, but also settlements, “which are its basic project.”
This guy has all the credibility of Baghdad Bob, and yet, people believe him anyway. There have been 42 people killed and about 300 wounded on the 'Palestinian' side. If we were really looking to commit genocide, we would have killed a lot more people than that.
Ben Dror Yemini on Richard Falk's lie about 'Palestinian' civilian casualties.
Let us gauge the genocide claim. In 2013, 36 Palestinians were
killed, according to the human rights organization B'Tselem. At least 30
of those were either involved in clashes with IDF soldiers or were
members of terrorist organizations. Only a few innocents were killed.
The death of each one of them is to be deeply regretted. Yet one should
add that there isn't another conflict in the world where the fatality
rate among civilians is as low as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In other conflicts it is estimated that between 60 and 90 percent of
fatalities are innocents. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they are a
minority.
In fact, the annual fatality count in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is lower than a daily terror casualty toll in Iraq, Somalia,
Syria, Yemen, and other countries, where 1,153 people died as a result
of terror attacks. This does not include the daily toll from the
massacre perpetrated by the Syrian regime.
Most of the victims are Muslims killed by radical Islamists. In
Pakistan in the course of last year alone, 5,366 people were killed in
acts of terrorism. Almost 3,000 of them were civilians. In Iraq in 2013
alone, 8,868 were killed in terror acts, including 7,818 civilians. The
war on terrorism waged by coalition forces claimed between 227 and 300
thousand lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them innocents.
Even if the number of casualties of Israeli operations was 10 or 20
times higher, this would still not constitute genocide. A broad
historical examination supports this view. Since 1967, less than 10,000
Palestinians have been killed. Most of them were terrorists. You can
call it many things, but genocide it ain't.
But in all the other conflicts, there is no Professor Falk hovering
in the background and spreading blood libel, no UN Human Rights Council
to pass countless resolutions, no rights organizations cranking out an
increasing number of hostile and biased publications, and no million
dollar subsidies from Europe to bankroll NGOs whose aim is to spin yarns
of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The only one being singled out is Israel, which kills less people
than any other party involved in a conflict, both in absolute and
relative terms. And it has to deal with organizations such as Islamic
Jihad and Hamas, which blatantly declares that its goal is the
destruction of Israel and the extermination of Jews and the killing of
Christians and communists "until the last remaining one."
Read the whole thing. It's even more amazing when you consider that in most other cases, civilians are not systematically placed in the line of fire by their leadership as the 'Palestinians' are.
In a Russian Television segment that was played repeatedly on television and on the internet, UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk has once again accused Israel of being 'genocidal.'
Let's go to the videotape.
That video is an incredible collection of anti-Semites and nut cases. UN Watch's Hillel Neuer adds:
Falk uses his imprimatur as a UN official to
make the grievously false accusation that Israel is acting with
“genocidal intent” and perpetrating a “Holocaust.”
If Israel really is “genocidal,” it only follows logically that Falk will justify violence against Israelis, as he did in a recent blog post,
berating “demands by Israel that Palestinians renounce violence” while
Israel “sustains a structure of occupation and oppression.”
It’s time for
the the U.S. to at least attempt to remove the 9/11 conspiracy theorist
and Hamas supporter from his post—and to eliminate his prejudicial and
outdated Human Rights Council mandate.
UN Watch today sent a letter to
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urging him to condemn Falk. When the
name of the world body is misused to promote specious canards—and as an
odious warrant for terrorism—the UN chief has a moral duty to speak out.
But the truth
is that Falk, like other Human Rights Council appointees, answers only
to the U.S. and the 46 other member states of the UNHRC. In this case, the buck does not stop with Ban Ki-moon; it stops with Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the UN. That is why I have urged her, in a UN Watch letter sent today, to take action.
(You can do it too, by clicking here to send Ambassador Power a message.)
And to think that Russia Today interviewed me nearly four years ago. I haven't seen anything this anti-Semitic on the web from a non-Nazi website in a long time.
US envoy storms out of IAEA talks over Iran remarks
The United States Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) stormed out of a meeting on Wednesday after the Iranian ambassador to the organization accused Israel of genocide.
Officials from
Canada and Australia also left the closed-door meeting of the
International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) 35-nation governing board
when Iran's Ali Asghar Soltanieh made his statement during a debate on
Syria, they said.
Soltanieh was not immediately available for
comment. Iran has often criticized Israeli policies towards the
Palestinians. It has also said Israel would be wiped "off the face of
the earth" if the Jewish state attacked it.
I don't understand how anyone can possibly believe that Iran can be stopped without the use of military force.
Human Rights Watch can't decide whether Ahmadinejad's calls to wipe Israel off the map are a human rights violation
This is beyond amazing.
'Human Rights Watch' is such a bunch of Jew haters that they can't decide whether genocide is still genocide when it's directed at Jews....
Some at the nonprofit want to denounce Iran's regime for inciting
genocide. "Sitting still while Iran claims a 'justification to kill all
Jews and annihilate Israel' . . . is a position unworthy of our great
organization," Sid Sheinberg, the group's vice chairman, wrote to
colleagues in a recent email.
But Executive Director Kenneth Roth, who runs the nonprofit, strenuously disagrees.
Asked in 2010 about Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statement that Israel "must be wiped off the map,"
Mr. Roth suggested that the Iranian president has been misunderstood.
"There was a real question as to whether he actually said that," Mr.
Roth told The New Republic, because the Persian language lacks an idiom
for wiping off the map. Then again, Mr. Ahmadinejad's own
English-language website translated his words that way, and the main
alternative translation—"eliminated from the pages of history"—is no
more benign. Nor is Mr. Ahmadinejad an outlier in the regime. Iran's top
military officer declared earlier this year that "the Iranian nation is
standing for its cause that is the full annihilation of Israel."
Mr. Roth's main claim is legalistic: Iran's rhetoric doesn't qualify
as "incitement"—which is illegal under the United Nations Genocide
Convention of 1948—but amounts merely to "advocacy," which is legal.
"The theory" to which Human Rights Watch subscribes, he has written
in internal emails, "is that in the case of advocacy, however hateful,
there is time to dissuade—to rebut speech with speech—whereas in the
case of incitement, the action being urged is so imminently connected to
the speech in question that there is no time to dissuade. Incitement
must be suppressed because it is tantamount to action."
Mr. Roth added in another email: "Many
of [Iran's] statements are certainly reprehensible, but they are not
incitement to genocide. No one has acted on them."
...
So if genocidal talk isn't causing genocidal action in "real time,"
Human Rights Watch must sit on its hands. That approach seems to miss
the purpose of both the Genocide Convention—to stop genocide before it
happens, not simply litigate it afterward—and of human-rights activism
generally. Human Rights Watch says its mission is "strategic, targeted
advocacy," but apparently the organization needs to see a genocide in
progress before condemning the rhetoric of its perpetrators.
For decades Human Rights Watch has done brave reporting behind the
Iron Curtain, in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, communist China and other dark
corners. Yet its silence on Iran's genocidal rhetoric fits a pattern
toward Israel.
But Leftist Jews will go on supporting 'Human Rights Watch.' At least until the Muslims come after them.
UN Watch, the Geneva-based non-governmental human rights group, urged UN chief Ban Ki-moon, rights commissioner Navi Pillay, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice and the EU’s Catherine Ashton to condemn today’s U.N. election of “genocidal, misogynistic and tyrannical” Sudan to its 54-member Economic and Social Council, a top U.N. body that regulates human rights groups, oversees U.N. committees on women's rights, and crafts resolutions from Internet freedom to female genital mutilation.
The United States doesn't seem to be overly concerned.
Although the U.S. took important action in September to pressure Sudan into withdrawing from this Monday's elections to the 47-nation Human Rights Council -- boosted by a massive campaign led my film star Mia Farrow and UN Watch -- the Obama Administration has been surprsingly silent on today's vote.
By contrast, in 2004, the U.S. ambassador famously walked out of ECOSOC after Sudan was elected.
According to insiders, Washington's silence on Sudan may stem from fear of upsetting African and Arab states in advance of America's own fragile bid for a UNHRC seat in the Nov. 12 vote.
Priorities man, priorities. But wouldn't it be great if Obama loses that 'human rights council' seat?
Al Bashir's regime will now help select the members of the Commission on the Status of Women, the executive board of UN Women, and UNICEF, which protects children’s rights.
Under the U.N. Charter, ECOSOC is the principal organ legislating on matters related to “promoting respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all.”
Importantly, ECOSOC is also the body that accredits and oversees human rights groups at the U.N., deciding who can participate at the UN Human Rights Council.
The dominant influence of tyrannies in ECOSOC's notorious 19-member "Committee on NGOs" has often led to the rejection or expulsion of human rights groups that dare to criticize China, Cuba or other repressive U.N. member states, or which speak for minority ethnic groups or for gay rights.
But don't you just feel what a great effect Obama has had on the UN? What could go wrong?
Behind a paywall at Boston's Jewish Advocate, Elihu Richter calls on new 'atrocities board' chief Samantha Power to speak out against verbal genocide. The call is likely in vain (Hat Tip: Ricky G).
Rwanda served as a reminder that words kill. It was a lesson we previously learned at the Nuremberg Trials, where Julius Streicher, the editor of the viciously anti-Semitic newspaper Der Sturmer, was executed for incitement. In February 2006, the International Association of Genocide Scholars endorsed a resolution calling on the world to indict Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide, Holocaust denial, human rights abuses and pursuit of nuclear weapons. The US House of Representatives passed its own resolution backing that of the association.
In July 2007, I wrote Power – then a professor at Harvard – asking her to lobby the US government to take executive action. I followed up by calling her research assistant.
Power never answered.
At the time, then-Senator Joseph Biden – chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee – personally blocked introduction of the House resolution in the Senate, according to the Jerusalem Post. As Barack Obama marched to the White House, the soon-to-be victorious Democrats embraced “engagement with Iran” – which in retrospect bore disturbing parallels to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler.
To date, despite economic sanctions, Iran continues to incite genocide with its propaganda, invite Armageddon with its nuclear program, and promote terror with its support of Hezbollah and Syria’s suppression of rebels.
I call upon Power to push for a doctrine of Zero Tolerance for Incitement. That means:
• Applying existing international laws to deter and punish hate language and incitement by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and all other powers in the region;
• Using the lever of US aid to set tough ground rules against incitement for the Islamist regimes who have taken over in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as in Pakistan;
• Using the lever of US aid to stop Palestinian incitement, such as President Mahmoud Abbas’ glorification of terrorists who intentionally kill civilians; and
• Mobilizing international pressure to protect and guarantee the human rights of all threatened minorities, including
Copts in post-revolution Egypt; Armenians, Christians and Assyrians in Turkey and Iraq; Baha’i and Kurds in Iran; and Christians and Jews in territory under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
If Power’s Prevention Board is to live up to its name, it must respond to the warning signs of atrocities, not sit back until the slaughter begins.
Abu Mazen's partners discuss their plans for the Jews
Here's 'Palestinian parliament' MP Yunis al Astal (Hamas) telling Hamas' al-Aqsa television why the 'divine plan' has gathered the Jews in Israel. This is not the first time we've seen this claim from the 'Palestinians' and their allies, but this is the first time we have seen it from a 'Palestinian' public figure since Abu Bluff and Khaled Meshaal kissed and made up in Egypt a couple of weeks ago.
Let's go to the videotape.
Just think: With the 'Palestinian' unity government in place, if you're an Israeli, American or European taxpayer, your taxes are making this happen - by paying for Hamas' television statement to broadcast statements by people like al-Astal.
To advocate for a 'Palestinian state' is to advocate for genocide
Daniel Greenfield comes right out and says it. And I agree with him completely. Advocating for a 'Palestinian state' is advocating for genocide. There won't be a 'two-state solution.' There will either be a Jewish state or (God forbid) the genocide of the Jewish people living in Israel. It's time we woke up to that reality and stopped tiptoeing around it (Hat Tip: Jeff Jacoby via Twitter).
Deliberately targeting children has only one tactical purpose. The extermination of an entire people. Had the Muslim world really wanted a Palestinian state, they could have created one by accepting the UN partition plan, or at any time between 1948 and 1967 when Gaza and the West Bank were in their hands. Had the Israeli Arabs who dub themselves 'Palestinians' wanted a state of their own, they could have had one between 1992 and 2011. They don't want a state. What they want is a state of war.
Genocide cannot be resolved by territorial compromise. People who approve of slitting a baby's throat and stabbing a 4 year old in the heart are not out for an extra kilometer here or there. The Nazis were not going to be appeased with the Anschluss or the Sudetenland-- and Muslims are not going to be pacified with partial control over East Jerusalem. It isn't East Jerusalem that they want. Or even all of Jerusalem. Or even all of Israel. What they really want is a reason to keep killing.
A man who murders a child might be insane, but millions of people who act and think that way are not insane. They have developed a moral code that says their victims are subhuman, while they are the 'True People'. That code allows them to act out their worst impulses in the name of an ideal. Whether that ideal is the Third Reich or the Caliphate doesn't matter at all. The ideal is there to justify the atrocity.
Men make laws to rise above the beast inside them. But sometimes it is the beast who begins making the laws. The Koran is the law of the beast. The law that says you may kill a man who is different than you and take his wife for your own. That he is less than you because he is different than you. The law of the beast does not seek the peace of equals, but the peace of predators and prey. The right of the beast to prey on you because you are not of his kind.
Liberals may plant Coexist stickers on their bumpers decorated with a string of religious symbols beginning with the Islamic star and crescent, that renders it first among equals-- but it is all in vain. On his deathbed, Mohammed proclaimed that, "two religions cannot coexist in the Arabian Peninsula". You may cry peace, peace-- but there will be no peace. For the Prophet of Islam has commanded it. There can be no peace or coexistence. Only servitude, genocide or resistance. If you refuse to serve, then you will be massacred or driven out. That sentence is all you need to know to understand the Islamic war of extermination against Israel.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
