ARTICLES

TERRORIST ACCUSED OF KILLING BRITISH STUDENT WILL BE REWARDED

Terrorist accused of killing a British student will be paid £800 a month by the Palestinian government which receives £25m-a-year UK foreign aid
By Nick Craven
The Mail on Sunday
April 23, 2017

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4436526/Terrorist-accused-killing-student-paid-80.html

A terrorist accused of murdering a British student in Jerusalem will be paid a salary of more than £800 a month by the Palestinian government – which receives more than £25 million a year from the UK in foreign aid.

Jamil Tamimi, who has a history of mental health issues, killed theology student Hannah Bladon in a frenzied knife attack on Good Friday after the 21-year-old gave up her seat on a tram to a woman with a baby.

The 57-year-old Palestinian told police that he attacked Hannah, a Birmingham University exchange student attached to Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, in the hope that a soldier in the carriage would kill him.

Instead Tamimi was arrested and is almost certain to be lauded as a resistance ‘hero’ by the Palestinian Authority (PA), like hundreds of others before him.

An Israeli court has already ruled, following a psychiatric evaluation, that he is fit to stand trial and should be treated as a terrorist by the justice system.

It means Tamimi or his family qualify for a ‘salary’ from the PA, according to Itamar Marcus, spokesman for the Israeli monitoring group Palestinian Media Watch.

‘According to PA law, everyone who is imprisoned for ‘resisting the occupation’ receives a PA salary,’ he said. ‘In PA practice, 100 per cent of the suicide bombers, stabbers, shooters and car rammers have been included in this category and do receive PA salaries.’

Terrorists who have ‘resisted the occupation’ are paid a monthly amount by the PA and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) on a sliding scale related to their sentence.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, tweeted his outrage, saying: ‘Not only didn’t PA president Abbas condemn Hannah Bladon’s murder, but he’ll reward the Palestinian attacker who did it with a monthly salary.’

Influential commentator Avi Mayer, a former spokesman for the Israel Defence Forces, added: ‘If you’re British and you pay taxes, know that your money is going to fund a body that rewards convicted murderers.’

British taxpayers give the PA £25 million a year from foreign aid for health and education.

The Mail on Sunday has repeatedly highlighted the way in which such funding has been abused, and the news comes as our poll shows a pledge to continue spending 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid will be a voter loser for the Tories. Last month, we exposed how terrorism was openly promoted to pupils at West Bank schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants.

Last December, the Department for International Development announced that it would restrict its payments to the PA to health and education with a ‘vetted list’ of public servants. But critics point out that when British taxpayers’ cash goes to education and health, it frees up money in other budgets controlled by the PA.

DFID said: ‘UK financial support is only used to provide essential health and education services to Palestinians, as part of our efforts to help deliver peace and the two-state solution. We have extensive precautions in place to ensure that UK money does not support terror groups or organisations.’

***

See also from today’s Mail on Sunday: “Why a UK woman's murder in Israel should boil your blood and make you rethink foreign aid, Mrs May”

 

FRENCH JEWS ARE WORRIED ABOUT LE PEN. NOW ANOTHER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE SCARES THEM, TOO

French Jews are worried about Le Pen. Now another presidential candidate scares them, too.
By Cnaan Liphshiz
JTA
April 20, 2017

http://www.jta.org/2017/04/20/ news-opinion/world/french- jews-are-worried-about-le-pen- now-another-presidential- candidate-scares-them-too

Even before the communist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon emerged as a serious contender for the presidency in France, the elections were shaping up to be a fateful moment for the country’s 500,000 Jews.

Many of them are deeply worried about the rise in the polls of Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front party, with its xenophobic policies and anti-Semitic roots. Some French Jews vowed to leave France should Le Pen win – she was leading the polls for weeks ahead of the first round of the elections on April 23 and the final one on May 7.

With the meteoric rise of Melenchon, an anti-Israel lawmaker with a record of statements deemed anti-Semitic, French Jews now feel caught in a vice between two extremes. Melenchon climbed to third place in the polls, with approximately 20 percent of the vote this month, from fifth with 9 percent in February.

“I don’t see any significant difference between Melenchon and the National Front on many issues,” Joann Sfar, a well-known French-Jewish novelist and filmmaker who used to support communist causes, wrote last week on Facebook. Both are “surrounded by Germanophobes, nationalists and France firsters.”

Sfar’s post triggered a torrent of anti-Semitic statements about him on social networks.

Le Pen, whose father, Jean-Marie – a Holocaust denier and inciter of racial hate against Jews who founded the party his daughter now leads – recently said France “was not responsible” for the murder of Jews whom French police helped round up for the Nazis. She has also vowed to ban kippahs and the right of French citizens to have an Israeli passport – prohibitions she said were necessary to enforce similar limitations on Muslims.

CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish communities, has also equated Melenchon with Le Pen.

“They both traffic in hatred, and they are both a danger to democracy,” CRIF President Francis Kalifat told JTA last month, adding that his group shuns all contact with both politicians.

Melenchon, 65, a former Socialist deputy minister, was born to Spanish parents in what today is Morocco. He supports a blanket boycott of Israel. True to his populist oratory style, has said that allowing Israel to keep even some West Bank settlements “is like letting bank robbers keep the money.”

His fiery rhetoric in speeches and quick comebacks in recent television debates have helped the surge in Melenchon’s numbers following the establishment of his Unsubmissive France movement in February. So has his opposition to the increasingly unpopular European Union and to budget cuts designed to jump-start France’s stagnant economy. He is appealing to the poor with promises to increase welfare, promising the money will come from new markets that he seeks to open by improving relations with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and oil-rich socialist countries in South America.

These policies and his remarks have alienated many Jews, as did Melenchon’s assertion in 2013 that a Jewish Socialist politician, Pierre Moscovici, “thinks in international finances, not in French” – a statement critics said was anti-Semitic. (Melenchon denied the charge.) But it was only after a speech that Melenchon delivered in August 2014 that leaders of French Jewry flagged him as a public enemy.

Speaking in Grenoble less than a month after nine synagogues were attacked amid a wave of violent and unauthorized protests against Israel over its war with Hamas in Gaza that summer, Melenchon praised the protesters. He also condemned French Jews for expressing solidarity with Israel in a support rally in front of its embassy.

“I want to congratulate the youth of my country who mobilized in defense of the miserable victims of war crimes in Gaza,” Melenchon said in the speech at a general assembly of his Left Party. “They did so with model discipline when they were pushed to extremes on all sides. They knew how to remain dignified and embodied better than anyone the founding values of the French republic.”

Melenchon did not mention the synagogue attacks and the wave of anti-Semitic assaults that followed the protests. But he did go on to criticize thousands of French Jews over their support for Israel.

“If we have anything to condemn, then it is the actions of citizens who decided to rally in front of the embassy of a foreign country or serve its flag, weapon in hand,” he said.

Melenchon also said: “We do not believe that any people is superior to another” – a statement some of his critics took as an allusion to the Torah’s designation of Jews as the “chosen people.”

He also accused CRIF of attempting to label him an anti-Semite in order to discredit his criticism of Israel.

“We’ve had enough of CRIF,” Melenchon said, shouting. “France is the opposite of aggressive communities that lecture to the rest of country.”

Recalling these and other remarks, François Heilbronn, a well-known scholar of political science, recently wrote in an op-ed that he will vote neither for Le Pen, whom he called a successor of those who collaborated with the Nazis, “nor for those who encouraged the pogromists and anti-Semites” in 2014, referring to Melenchon. “Vote to keep out of power those two candidates of hatred for democrats, modernity and liberty.”

Bernard-Henri Levy, a left-leaning French Jewish intellectual, also drew parallels between Le Pen and Melenchon, whom Levy said “unfortunately often [has the same] anti-democratic radicalism, anti-Zionist, pro-Assad and pro-Putin attitudes” as Le Pen, he wrote Sunday on Twitter.

Levy has endorsed Emmanuel Macron, a centrist candidate and former banker at the prestigious Rothschild investment house. Macron is leading in the polls ahead of the first round with approximately 23 percent of the vote, slightly ahead of Le Pen. The Republican candidate Francois Fillon, whose campaign has suffered because of his recent indictment on corruption charges, and Melenchon are each drawing 18-20 percent in the polls.

Whoever wins the first round Sunday will run against the second-place candidate in the final round.

Surprisingly, it’s not just the Jews who are finding equivalence between Melenchon and Le Pen. The comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, who has multiple convictions for Holocaust denial and incitement against Jews, thinks the far-right and far-left politicians are both standing up against Jewish and outside influence.

“Some say it’s a faceoff between the real right and the real left,” Dieudonne said about Le Pen and Melenchon in a video he posted Tuesday and which has been viewed more than 160,000 times. “I say it’s the real France that will fight the France of Rothschild and of Qatar that finances terrorism and war in the world.”

Le Pen and Melenchon, he said, “are the candidates of peace.”

 

IT IS ARGUABLY THE LARGEST ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION IN RECORDED HISTORY. CAN OUR POLITICS ADAPT?

The Challenge of Our Disruptive Era
It is arguably the largest economic transformation in recorded history. Can our politics adapt?
By Ben Sasse
Wall Street Journal
April 22, 2017

I am a historian, and that usually means I’m a killjoy. When people say we’re at a unique moment in history, the historian’s job is to put things in perspective by pointing out that there is more continuity than discontinuity, that we are not special, that we think our moment is unique because we are narcissists and we’re at this moment. But what we are going through now – the past 20 or 30 years, and the next 20 or 30 years – really is historically unique. It is arguably the largest economic disruption in recorded human history. And our politics are not yet up to the challenge.

There have been four kinds of economies: hunter-gatherers, agriculture (settled agrarian farmers in their villages), industry (mass urbanization and immigration), and whatever we’re entering now. Sometimes we call it the information-technology economy, the knowledge economy, the service economy, the digital economy. Sociologists call it the “postindustrial” economy, which is another way of saying “we don’t have anything to call it.”

What it really means is that jobs are no longer permanent. It used to be that you did whatever your parents and grandparents had done. Hunter-gatherers and farmers never even thought about it. There was no such thing as job choice, only becoming 7 and 10 and 12 years old and taking on more responsibilities to earn your keep.

Industrialization brought a massive disruption. At the end of the Civil War, 86% of Americans still worked on the farm. By the end of World War II, 80 years later, 60% of Americans lived in cities. One of the most disruptive times in American history was the Progressive Era. And what was Progressivism? Not much more than the response of trying to remake society in an era of mass immigration, industrialization and rising cities. But it turned out not to be as disruptive as people feared, because once you got to the city, you got a new job, which you’d probably have until death or retirement. And the social capital that used to be in the village tended to be replicated in urban ethnic neighborhoods.

What’s happening now is wholly different. The rise of suburbia and exurbia, and the hollowing out of mediating institutions, is an echo of the changing nature of work. In the 1970s, it was common for a primary breadwinner to spend his career at one company, but now workers switch jobs and industries at a more rapid pace. We are entering an era in which we’re going to have to create a society of lifelong learners. We’re going to have to create a culture in which people in their 40s and 50s, who see their industry disintermediated and their jobs evaporate, get retrained and have the will and the chutzpah and the tools and the social network to get another job. Right now that doesn’t happen enough.

Think about qualitative survey data – polls that ask, “What are the top three or four things you’re worried about?” Ten years ago, nowhere on the top 10 of that list was anything about prescription drugs. Today opioids are a major concern. People are scared about drug abuse in largely middle-aged populations. That’s a symptom of the economic disruption.

I don’t mean to be exceedingly pessimistic. There are plenty of wonderful opportunities for American families and innovators in this new economy. For one thing, there are fewer middlemen complicating transactions instead of adding value. So we’re going to get a lot more visibility and transparency into product offerings, and consumers are going to get higher-quality and lower-cost stuff.

In other industries, we don’t know how to price for things that turn out to matter quite a lot. Think of the news media. We are going from a world in which we had too much central control by a few large organizations, to one in which everybody, everywhere can deluge us with information. What is likely to happen next is not a lot more higher-quality journalism. We’re going to have higher-volume journalism, and some of it will be good. A free, thriving, and independent press is critical to self-government, so this is a big challenge.

But people are also able to silo themselves into an echo chamber, where they hear only things that they already agree with. More conspiracy theories come to flower than ever before. You can see it on our college campuses, where students don’t want to encounter any new idea without a trigger warning. If you’re never going to encounter ideas that you didn’t already know and affirm, I don’t know why your parents are paying tuition, because education is all about wrestling with new ideas.

The political result is not just polarization, which is a big problem, but political disengagement. If you think that the biggest problem in America is the other political party and that your party has all the answers, if only you could vanquish the other team from the field, I’ve got a lot of people I’d like to introduce you to – because Washington doesn’t have very good answers right now.

With the magnitude of the challenges we face in this moment of disruption, it isn’t the case that one side is right and the other side is standing in the way, or that one side is enlightened and the other side is retrograde. It’s that we don’t have any of the right policy conversations. Most of the really big challenges of this moment are not easily reducible to core Republican or Democratic platform positions.

For one thing, we don’t have a national-security strategy for the age of cyberwarfare and jihad. Since the 1640s and the Treaty of Westphalia, we’ve had a view of geopolitics and national security that is about state actors. There are lots of state-actor problems out there, including Russia and China. But of the 200 or so countries in the world, only about two-thirds really control all their territory.

The rest are more like Afghanistan, Syria or Libya. There may be some entity that has more power than anyone else – think of the Taliban on the eve of 9/11. But we weren’t attacked by the Taliban; we were attacked by al Qaeda, which exploited the vacuums of ungoverned spaces in the territorial borders of Afghanistan. A lot of the dangers and the threats we face are from jihadi-motivated people who are going to self-radicalize in place and create their own terror networks.

We also lack seriousness about tackling the entitlement crisis. The Republican Party appears almost as indifferent as the Democrats to telling the truth about entitlements. People talk about the national debt, which is approaching $20 trillion. But that’s just the total of intergovernmental transfers and publicly held bond debt. The number that matters is the unfunded obligations of the U.S. government, including future Social Security and Medicare payments. It’s more like $65 trillion to $75 trillion.

And what about the policy implications of the economic disruption? The cultural, societal, familial and social-network responses to a world of lifelong learning and job disruption are far more important. But there are many potential policy responses in education and job retraining. Are any of these conversations on our national agenda right now?

What will the American idea look like when we get to this new, disrupted world of the digital economy? What will entrepreneurship look like? What will cultural pluralism and a robust defense of the First Amendment look like? What will it mean to be able to say that the meaning of America is still centered in institutions that look like the Rotary Club – where people actually live, where they know and love their neighbors, and where they actually want to do good, not just wear tribal labels about some distant fight in Washington that isn’t anywhere near up to the task of the moment we face?

That’s the challenge before us, and here’s the good news: Throughout our history Americans have been optimists, ready to seize the day. Let’s get to work.

(Mr. Sasse, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Nebraska. This is adapted form a speech he delivered to Colorado’s Steamboat Institute.)