THE LIES THE MEDIA AND NGOS TELL ABOUT GAZA

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

In recent days, the international media, particularly in Europe and the Mideast, has been full of stories about “activist boats sailing to Gaza carrying desperately-needed humanitarian aid and building materials.”

The BBC World Service even led its world news broadcasts with this story at one point over the weekend. (The BBC yesterday boasted that its global news audience has now risen to 220 million persons a week, making it by far the biggest news broadcaster in the world.)

Yet the BBC and other media fail to report on the fancy new restaurants and swimming pools of Gaza, or about the wind surfing competitions on Gaza beaches, or the Strip’s crowded shops and markets.

No, this would spoil their agenda. Playing the manipulative game of the BBC is easy. If we had their vast taxpayer funded resources, we too could produce reports about parts of London, Manchester and Glasgow and make it look as though there is a humanitarian catastrophe throughout the UK. We could produce the same effect by selectively filming seedy parts of Paris and Rome and New York and Los Angeles too.

Of course there is poverty in Gaza. There is poverty in parts of Israel too. (When was the last time a foreign journalist based in Israel left the pampered lounge bars and restaurants of the King David and American Colony hotels in Jerusalem and went to check out the slum-like areas of southern Tel Aviv? Or the hard-hit Negev towns of Netivot or Rahat?)

But the way the BBC and other prominent Western news media are deliberately misleading global audiences and systematically creating the false impression that people are somehow starving in Gaza, and that it is all Israel’s fault, can only serve to increase hatred for the Jewish state – which one suspects was the goal of many of the editors and reporters involved in the first place.

STEAK AU POIVRE AND CHICKEN CORDON BLEU

If you drop by the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook for Gaza and the West Bank, you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”.

The restaurant’s website in Arabic gives a window into middle class dining and the lifestyle of Hamas officials in Gaza.

And here it is in English, for all the journalists, UN types and NGO staff who regularly frequent this and other nice Gaza restaurants (but don’t tell their readers about them).

Please take a look at the pictures on the above website. They are not the kind of things you see in The New York Times or CNN or in Newsweek, whose international edition last week had one of the most disgracefully misleading stories about Gaza I have ever seen, portraying it in terms which were virtually reminiscent of Hiroshima after a nuclear blast.

And here is a promotional video of the club restaurant:

In case anyone doubts the authenticity of this video (which is up on the club’s own website), I just called the club in Gaza City and had a nice chat with the manager who proudly confirmed business is booming and many Palestinians and international guests are dining there.

In a piece for The Wall Street Journal last year, I documented the “after effects” of a previous “emergency Gaza boat flotilla,” when the arrivals were seen afterwards purchasing souvenirs in well-stocked shops.

And please see here for more pictures of Gaza’s “impoverished” shops.

***

The front of the Roots Club flyer reads:
Ambiance galore.
Beautifully designed buffets.
Every detail handled for you.

STARVED OF WATER AND BUILDING MATERIALS?

While Western media, misled by corrupt and biased NGOs, continue to report on a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports on the Olympic-size swimming pool that opened in Gaza last week. (Article below).

As reader Joy Wolfe of Manchester, England, a subscriber to this list, points out to me in an email: “How does an area that claims to be starved of water and building materials and depends on humanitarian aid build an Olympic size swimming pool and create a luxury lifestyle for some while others are forced to live in abject poverty as political pawn refugees?”

Another reader, Barry Shaw, writes from the Israeli town of Netanya:

“Gaza City recently opened an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Netanya does not have a municipal Olympic pool. Neither does Ashkelon, or Sderot. Gaza City is part of the Palestinian territory operated by the Islamic terror regime, Hamas. Netanya has been hit by repeated Palestinian suicide attacks, car bombings, and terrorist gunmen that have left over fifty of its citizens dead and more than three hundred injured. The Palestinians receive record amounts of international funding. The victims of Palestinian terror get nothing.”

Another subscriber, Michael Horesh, points out, “The Financial Times of London, a leading media beacon in international money matters and no friend of Israel, observes that ‘Branded products such as Coca-Cola, Nescafé, Snickers and Heinz ketchup are both cheap and widely available in Gaza… [as are] Korean refrigerators, German food mixers and Chinese air conditioning units.’”

AN INDUSTRY OF LIES

While middle class Palestinians plead poverty and receive excessive amounts of international funding, elsewhere in the world (in places like Congo and Zimbabwe and Bangladesh) millions of children really are dying of starvation and disease, all but ignored by those very same governments and aid agencies that pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the Palestinian coffers.

Of course, there is a whole industry of people (UN and EU staff, NGO workers, journalists) who make their living and have a vested interest in continuing to propagate lies about Gaza and West Bank.

As the boats of “humanitarian aid activists” (including a number of European politicians and journalists) left Turkey on Saturday I wonder if they understood what the crowd was chanting.

Video below form Turkish TV:

The crowd shout:

“Intifada, intifada, intifada!

“Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews! The army of Mohammed will return!”

GAZA’S OLYMPIC-SIZED SWIMMING POOL

The Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports (May 18, 2010):

www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=285242

“Gaza – Ma’an – Gaza’s first Olympic-standard swimming pool was inaugurated at the As-Sadaka club during a ceremony on Tuesday held by the Islamic Society.

“Gaza government ministers, members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, leaders of Islamic and national governing bodies, as well as club members and athletes were among those at the opening ceremony, where Secretary-General of the Islamic Society Nasim Yaseen thanked the donors who helped realize the project.

“Yaseen praised the As-Sadaka club for a number of wins in international and regional football, volleyball and table tennis matches.

“As-Sadaka athletes performed a number of swimming exercises in the new pool to mark its opening.”

WHO BURNED DOWN THE SUMMER CAMP?

(No, it wasn’t a rampaging mob of American supporters of Israel on an AIPAC lobbying trip.)

A UN-run summer camp for Palestinian children was burned to the ground on Sunday and the UN staff threatened with murder. Tens of thousands of Gazan children were due to attend the camp this summer, as they have every summer in recent years.

This is a rare occasion when the international media did report on Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence, although most downplayed any criticism of Hamas or other Islamists in their reports.

“A SUMMER PROGRAM OF ARTS AND SPORT”

The BBC reported online:

Masked gunmen have attacked a UN summer camp being set up for children in the Gaza Strip, UN officials say.

The attackers burned tents and destroyed other equipment after tying up a guard.

They also left a letter threatening the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), John Ging…

“The armed men torched the camp, which contained recreational equipment and swimming pools, and completely destroyed it,” UNRWA spokesman Abu Hasna told journalists.

The camp is one of dozens of beach facilities set up by the UN offering a summer programme of arts, sport and other activities for some quarter of a million children in the Gaza Strip…

“TEACHING SCHOOLGIRLS DANCING AND IMMORALITY”

CNN explained that the Islamists of Gaza object to the fact that boys and girls were due to participate in activities together at the camp:

CNN began its online report: “A U.N.-sponsored summer camp in Gaza was burned Sunday hours before it was due to open, witnesses said, blaming Muslim extremists who apparently object to boys and girls going to camp together.”

Reuters also reported:

“About 20 men, some carrying assault rifles, tore up large plastic tents and burned storage facilities at the site, where tens of thousands of children are due to attend camp sessions…

“Two days earlier, a previously unknown militant group, The Free of the Homeland, issued a statement criticizing the camp’s organizer, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), for, ‘teaching schoolgirls fitness, dancing and immorality.’”

The Al-Jazeera report online adds:

“Dozens of armed attackers also vandalized bathrooms… and assaulted a guard and tied him up… the men also left a letter with four bullets, threatening the agency’s Gaza director and sending a chilling message to the camp’s organizers.”

FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS AND NGOS IGNORE HAMAS’S WORSENING HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD

In an editorial, The Jerusalem Post reflects on the atrocious human rights situation in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and notes that “an iron curtain of a strict theocracy is slowly descending on Gaza, but many human rights proponents still prefer to depict it as the embattled bastion of freedom fighters…

“Both foreign governments and NGOs, in their inaction, are signaling to Hamas that domestic oppression by its tyrannical regime is tolerable so far as the international community is concerned,” said the paper.

DOZENS MORE WEST BANK ROADBLOCKS TO BE DISMANTLED

Following a meeting between IDF OC Central Command and Palestinian security officials yesterday, Israel has announced the further dismantling of 60 roadblocks and the easing of travel throughout the West Bank. Most West Bank roadblocks have been dismantled since the government of Benjamin Netanyahu assumed power in Israel last year.

The Israelis explained that the success of the Palestinian security forces in fighting terror led to the decision to ease restrictions.

The IDF pointed out, however, that it will “continue to operate firmly against terrorism while sustaining liaison and coordination with Palestinian officials, in order to maintain the life routine and security of all residents” of the West Bank and Israel.

SHIMON PERES ATTACKS THE GUARDIAN’S BLATANT LIES

Israeli President Shimon Peres yesterday accused the British paper The Guardian of telling blatant lies about Israel in a front page story that slandered Israel in general, and Peres in particular.

It is quite something when the president of a country sees the need to criticize a foreign newspaper for failing to maintain elementary journalistic standards – failing to ask for his response before publishing a massive defamation of him, for example. But such are the depths to which The Guardian sunk yesterday. (As I noted on this email list, The Guardian recently had to apologize for running a notorious organ trafficking libel about Israel.)

Additional Israeli government sources added that “documents that Guardian journalist Chris McGreal – who has a long track record of writing anti-Israel pieces – used to run his story are completely fabricated.” (The alleged documents come from a new book by a publicity-seeking anti-Zionist American researcher.)

The story concerned an alleged offer to sell arms, including nuclear warheads, by Israel to South Africa in 1975. Quite why The Guardian decided this is now lead front-page breaking news 35 years later, is beyond me, given how much real current news there is in the world.

Of course, The Guardian has nothing to say about the arms sales by Britain and many other Western countries to Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. Could its continuous singling out of Israel perhaps be because Israel is a Jewish state?

UPDATE:

Yossi Beilin, a former leftist minister, has also dismissed The Guardian’s article and the book on which it was based, as complete nonsense, as has Avner Cohen, the world’s leading expert on Israel’s alleged nuclear arms.

In an interview with the South African Press Association, Pik Botha, who served as South Africa’s foreign minister in the waning years of apartheid, also dismissed the article’s claims as untrue.

Nevertheless, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and other prominent media today picked up and reported on The Guardian’s article, and The Guardian’s demonization of Israel continues to spread.

The Guardian has a whole news page and a lead editorial on the subject again today. To say that they are obsessed with Israel would be an understatement. More background here. (Note the Al Jazeera interview in that post.)

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

GUESS WHAT THE FIRST DEMONSTRATION AGAINST CAMERON WAS ABOUT?

Here is a video of the very first organized rally on any issue in London outside the Prime Minister’s residence in Downing Street since David Cameron became British Prime Minister a week ago. Yes, while the economy may be in shambles, telling lies about Israel is the first priority for British activists.

Have they perhaps heard about Britain’s operation in (some would call it an occupation of) Afghanistan, where far more civilians were killed by the 44 countries who have soldiers there – Britain has the second highest contingent – than Israel has killed in the West Bank? And unlike what Palestinians have been trying to do in Israel, Afghans aren’t trying to blow up British shopping malls and school buses on a daily basis.

Among those in attendance at the rally were representatives of the Green Party, UNITE, UNISON, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition and CND.

SELF-RIGHTEOUS “LUVVIES” APPEAR TO HAVE VERY LITTLE INTEREST IN BLACK AFRICANS

After the demonstration, a petition against Israel was delivered to the door of Downing Street signed by, among others, film director Ken Loach, Lib Dem peer Jenny Tonge, “comedian” Jeremy Hardy, notorious Jewish anti-Zionist Sir Gerald Kaufman MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP, actress Miriam Margolyes, Guardian journalist and editor Victoria Brittain, New Statesman columnist John Pilger and playwright Caryl Churchill (author of “Seven Jewish children,” a play denounced by many as anti-Semitic -- See the note “anti-Semitism in London’s theatreland” here).

The petition called, among other things, for Cameron to back down on his commitment to change British universal jurisdiction law so that Israeli politicians, such as the leader of the center-left opposition party Kadima, Tzipi Livni, can visit Britain without being arrested for “war crimes”.

One wonders how much these self-important theatrical and media types know about the hundreds of other conflicts raging around the world. For example, do they know or care about the latest bomb attacks on Monday in Rwanda at a crowded market and at the capital’s busiest bus station that killed and injured civilians, or the heavy clashes in Sudan last weekend that left over 160 dead. (An estimated 300,000 people have died in the conflict in Darfur since 2003.)

They also apparently couldn’t care less about conflicts inside Europe itself, such as the shootout by Albanian separatists in Macedonia that left four dead last week. (Albanians, who are discriminated against, make up about one quarter of Macedonia’s population). Or the continued flare-ups resulting from the Russian military occupation of the Transdniester region of Moldova.

ACTIVISTS STORM SAINSBURY’S IN CENTRAL LONDON ON SATURDAY

Here pro-Palestine activists descended on the Holborn branch of Sainsbury’s, one of Britain’s largest supermarket chains, in central London last Saturday to protest the on-going sale of Israeli fruit and vegetables.

Among those who can be seen in the video is Deborah Fink, a professional singer and a tireless Jewish campaigner against Israel, who for the last seven years has been leading a group of anti-Zionist activists who sing Christmas carols inside and outside London churches with the words changed to reflect “Israeli war crimes”.

For more on Fink, please see the dispatch: ‘Tis the season for anti-Israel tunes (& “Jews for Christmas”) (Dec. 24, 2008).

See also the dispatch of Dec. 20, 2003, titled “On the twelfth day of Christmas, Arik Sharon sent me...”.

After these carols were sung in St James’s, Piccadilly, one of London’s most prestigious churches (thereby insulting both Christians and Jews), Michael Gove (who is a founding subscriber to this email list, and as of last week serves as the British government’s Minister for Education) writing in The Times of London, called it a “festival of anti-Semitism.”

(Among those attending the sham “carol” service was Liberal Democrat peer and former party spokesperson, Baroness Jenny Tonge, who alleged Israeli medics went to Haiti after January’s earthquake not to save lives but to harvest organs, a lie reminiscent of the kind told in Nazi Germany.)

***

For more dramatic scenes of anti-Israel activists storming into shops in Paris and London (H & M, Carrefour, Tesco), please watch these videos here.

MORE ZIONIST CRIMES!

Since the mass demolitions described below were carried out by Hamas, very few Western media reported prominently on this, even though it was carried on the main Associated Press news wire, to which most media outlets in the world subscribe:

AP reports:

Hamas destroys dozens of homes in southern Gaza

By RIZEK ABDEL JAWAD | AP

Published: May 17, 2010 02:54

RAFAH, Gaza Strip: Hamas police wielding clubs beat and pushed residents out of dozens of homes in the southern Gaza town of Rafah on Sunday before knocking the buildings down with bulldozers, residents said.

Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers said the homes were built illegally on government land. Newly homeless residents were furious over Palestinians on bulldozers razing Palestinian homes.

For years, Palestinians have criticized Israel for destroying houses, mostly because they were built without permits issued by the military. Now, Rafah residents complained, their own government, run by the Islamic militant Hamas that seized power in Gaza in July 2007, has done the same.

“They promised reform and change – instead they’ve destroyed our homes,” shouted Miasar Gan, a 54-year-old woman. Gan said she and her husband had nowhere else to go.

“I found my mattress, and that’s where I’ll be sitting,” she said, standing next to the concrete chunks – all that was left of her house.

Her neighbor, Nazira Abu Jara, 56, said policewomen wearing face veils typical of conservative Muslim women beat her with clubs until she fled her house with her husband and two children. “Neighbors help us get by with charity. We can’t afford to build again,” Abu Jara said.

Others picked through rubble to retrieve dusty clothing and mangled furniture.

Residents said between 30 and 40 homes were torn down, ranging from concrete structures to tin shacks. They did not know how many people were affected. Hamas officials did not allow reporters into the area until the demolition was over.

Residents said more demolitions in the area were expected Monday.

(Full article here from the independent Arab daily, Arab News.)

***

One of the few media outlets to cover this story, having come under pressure from critics (including myself) to stop covering up for the crimes of Fatah and Hamas, is the BBC, albeit online (here) rather than on air, and with a much lower profile than they grant anti-Israeli stories.

Western human rights groups are suddenly strangely silent. As are all those demonstrators in London, Paris and elsewhere.

FIRST GREENHOUSES, NOW PEOPLE’S HOUSES

Perhaps even more perversely, Hamas bulldozed the impressive greenhouses – the most economically-productive in the Middle East – which Israeli settlers in Gaza had built and the Israeli government had left for the people of Gaza so that they would help the Palestinian economy, when Israel withdrew in 2005.

This has never been properly reported in the Western media. Please scroll down to the foot of the page here and look at these photos.

These high-tech greenhouses had provided employment for thousands of Palestinians and produced an array of fruits and vegetables in the midst of a barren desert.

IMPENDING SEVERE FOOD SHORTAGE IN ARAB WORLD

Meanwhile, a severe food shortage may soon affect the Arab world, according to Tareq A-Zadjali, director general of the Arab Organization for Agriculture Development. He said Arab states need to invest a staggering $144 billion in agriculture over the next twenty years to meet the food demands of the growing population.

The Arab population in the Middle East, currently numbering around 335 million, is projected to grow to 545 million by 2030. In spite of the enormous wealth of many Middle Eastern countries, tens (if not hundreds) of millions already live in dire poverty there, heavily dependent on basic foods.

EGYPT REPORTEDLY SEVERS LINKS WITH HAMAS

There are reports in the Arab media that Egypt has decided to cut all ties with the leaders of Hamas, which would in effect make it hard for them to leave Gaza. This move follows Cairo’s anger at Hamas’ refusal to accept an Egyptian-brokered plan for Palestinian reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah and displeasure with what they say is a campaign of incitement against Egypt led by Hamas leaders.

As reported in one of last week’s dispatches on this list, Hamas recently accused Egypt of using poison gas inside smuggling tunnels that killed at least four Palestinians.

ISRAEL’S MISTAKE AS NOAM CHOMSKY BARRED FROM ENTERING

What has been described as an “overzealous clerk” at Israel’s border crossing with Jordan refused to allow Noam Chomsky, the anti-Israel American-Jewish academic, and darling of the international Far Left, to enter the country. Chomsky had been invited by Palestinians to lecture at Bir Zeit, one of the West Bank’s most radical universities, where incitement is rife against Israel and against Jews in general.

Israel has barred two other prominent American Jews from entering in recent months – Professor Richard Falk and Norman Finkelstein. In Falk’s and Finkelstein’s cases both had agitated in a way that could help terrorist groups and adversely affect Israel’s national security (in Finkelstein’s case arising in part from his liaisons with Hizbullah on a visit to Lebanon).

Their language is also notorious. Last year, as I pointed out on this list at the time, Norman Finkelstein told The Tehran Times that Israel is a “vandal state,” an “insane state,” a “lunatic state,” a “terrorist state,” a “satanic state” from “the boils of hell” which “is committing a holocaust in Gaza”.

Although Chomsky has made many odious political pronouncements, and his seeming justification for various massacres during the twentieth century, notably those carried out by Communists, is repugnant, his agitation against Israel is not in the same league as Falk’s and Finkelstein’s. It was clearly a mistake of Israel to refuse him entry, as indeed the Israeli government acknowledged yesterday, saying Chomsky would be welcome if he returned.

TOP WORLD NEWS?

Nevertheless, given how much else is happening in the world, it is still an amazing judgment by news editors to lead their world news pages with Chomsky’s non-entry into Israel as The Times of London, The New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune, and other papers did yesterday. (The International Herald Tribune printed a further editorial on it today, calling the treatment of Chomsky “outrageous” and saying “Israel has lost its last remnants of tolerance” – I don’t recall them ever calling America’s killing of civilians in Afghanistan and elsewhere “outrageous”.)

Israel’s interior ministry said the official at the border crossing who had refused Chomsky entry was being reprimanded – not that most international papers mentioned this in their often hysterical stories yesterday about Israel’s behavior.

“There is no change in our policy,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The idea that Israel is preventing people from entering whose opinions are critical of the state is ludicrous; it is not happening. This was a mishap. A guy at the border overstepped his authority.”

After being barred from entering, Chomsky was quoted as comparing Israel with “Stalin’s regime.”

As everyone knows (perhaps even Chomsky) Stalin murdered tens of millions of innocent people.

ELTON JOHN BANNED FROM EGYPT FOR BEING GAY

In contrast to the breaking news surrounding Chomsky, very few Western news outlets reported on the banning two weeks ago of British pop star Elton John from performing at a private concert in Egypt for being gay. The news was widely reported in the Middle East and by international agencies like the DPA. Elton John has been forced to call off his concert there by the government-controlled Egyptian Musician Union, but will still perform in Israel, where gays are welcome.

There has barely been a peep of protest about the Egyptian decision from his fellow pop stars, including fellow British pop star, Elvis Costello, who did however this week call off his concerts in Israel on June 30 and July 1 following pressure from anti-Israeli activists in Britain.

The Facebook page for Elvis Costello already includes remarks from people criticizing him for the decision: www.facebook.com/ElvisCostello

In a statement, Costello made criticism of Israel (about which he seems to know nothing other than from the highly distorted coverage in the British media) but added, presumably by way of saying sorry to Israelis:

“My thanks also go to the members of the Israeli media with whom I had most rewarding and illuminating conversations. They may regard these exchanges as a waste of their time but they were of great value and help to me in gaining an appreciation of the cultural scene.

“I hope it is possible to understand that I am not taking this decision lightly or so I may stand beneath any banner, nor is it one in which I imagine myself to possess any unique or eternal truth. It is a matter of instinct and conscience.”

Costello issued a further statement saying he couldn’t imagine ever being invited again to perform in Israel. From the angry reaction in Israel’s media it seems there’s little chance of that ever happening.

OLD-FASHIONED ANTI-SEMITISM ISN’T PC; DEMONIZING ISRAEL IN ITS PLACE IS

Below I attach an article by Ralph Peters from The New York Post.

Peters served for over two decades in the U.S. Army, as an enlisted man and officer. He writes for The New York Post and Armed Forces Journal, and is a subscriber to this email list.

He writes: “It’s no longer socially acceptable to accuse Jews of sacrificing Christian infants. But it’s quite fashionable to blame Israelis for the suffering of Palestinian children. One doesn’t mention ‘Jews.’ But calumnies against ‘Israelis’ are the new, politically correct blood libel.”

Peters (who is not Jewish) says he takes “personally” the fact that some in the U.S. military appear to falsely blame Israel for a “negative effect on our regional policy”.

“I ask the gripers for any evidence that our betrayal of Israel would have the slightest positive effect. The Saudis wouldn’t even drop the price of oil for 24 hours.”

He also says (correctly of course) that “Israel needs to rediscover public relations. With the global media rabidly pro-Palestinian, Israel had better get back in the information fight.”

(His full piece is below.)

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

[The first part of this dispatch is a follow-up to notes 5 and 6 in this dispatch last week.]

UN HUMAN RIGHTS POLICYMAKERS NOW INCLUDE LIBYA

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

In a secret ballot at the UN General Assembly on Thursday, no less than 155 countries, representing 80 percent of UN members, decided Libya would be a superb choice and voted it on to the UN Human Rights Council.

Libya – one of the world’s worst human rights abusers – will join other countries that the UN apparently regards as bastions of human rights who already sit on the Council, among them Saudi Arabia, China and Cuba.

The Council, one of the most appallingly misnamed bodies in history, is supposed to be the UN’s leading human rights body. According to its own charter, it is meant to “promote and protect” human rights.

If the Council in its present form is the best the UN can do, God help all those dissidents and human rights campaigners rotting away in jails and torture centers around the world.

WHERE’S OBAMA? WHERE’S SUSAN RICE?

Just as the Obama administration declined to oppose Iran’s joining “The UN Commission on the Status of Women” last month (as reported here) so too Obama’s UN ambassador and close personal friend Susan Rice made no serious attempt to object to Libya’s inclusion on the Human Rights Council last week.

Writing on National Review Online, Anne Bayefsky reports that: “Susan Rice refused to divulge those states which the U.S. supported. When pressed, she said only that the Obama administration regretted some states on the ballot, but ‘I am not going to name names. I don’t think that it’s particularly constructive at this point.’

“Not constructive because, Rice suggested, it was no big deal. She described the countries on the Council as just ‘countries whose orientation and perspectives we don’t agree with.’ And she described the election as one which ‘yielded an outcome that we think is a good reflection on the potential of the Human Rights Council.’”

WHY ARE U.S. TAXPAYERS PICKING UP THE TAB?

Tom Gross adds: Susan Rice may blandly refer to Libya’s “orientation and perspectives” but here is what the 2009 U.S. State Department Human Rights Report revealed about Libya:

* Security personnel engage in routine torture and abuse of detainees
* They have the authority to sentence political opposition without trial
* The law sanctions amputation and flogging
* Women and girls may be detained indefinitely after having been raped

The Bush administration had boycotted The UN Human Rights Council, which was established in 2006, not wanting to lend legitimacy to this sham of an organization.

I still don’t quite understand why last year Obama decided to join the Council and then have U.S. taxpayers pick up 22 percent of the tab.

80 percent of all resolutions by the council concentrate on demonizing one state alone: Israel.

(For more background, please see: Does Obama believe in human rights? (and what that might mean for Israel))

DOES HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH CARE ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS IN IRAN?

Where were the world’s leading human rights groups while Libya was being welcomed, one might ask. Well, last week New York-based Human Rights Watch was busy releasing its 7th – yes 7th report (this one comprising a whopping 134 pages and titled “I Lost Everything”) on Israel’s short defensive mini-war against Hamas in January 2009.

No doubt that will please Human Rights Watch’s donor base.

We’re still waiting, of course, for the sequel to HRW’s pitiful 19-page report on the Iranian post-election crackdown, which includes one of my favorite HRW gems of all time:

“Recommendations to the Government of Iran: Establish an independent and impartial fact-finding commission to identify those who ordered the crackdown on post-election protesters and those responsible for serious human rights violations...”

Hilarity aside, notice that there is no demand – as there almost always is in HRW’s Israel reports – for an international (read: UN Human Rights Council) investigation.

HRW AND THE GLORIFICATION OF PALESTINIAN SUICIDE BOMBERS

In an important new piece on HRW for The New Republic, Benjamin Birnbaum points out, among other things, that when he visited the office of Sarah Leah Whitson, the anti-Israeli activist who runs the HRW section charged with assessing the human rights records of countries in the Middle East and North Africa, “I noticed that a poster for Paradise Now, a movie that attempts to humanize Palestinian suicide bombers, hangs on her door.”

Below in the “Full Articles” section I attach a piece titled “Human Rights Watch: Their master’s voice” by Benjamin Kerstein from last week’s New Ledger, referencing Birnbaum’s New Republic piece.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL JUST CAN’T HELP THEMSELVES

Meanwhile, Amnesty International’s UK branch is launching yet another exhibition in London in a few weeks directed against Israel’s security barrier.

The decision to hold the exhibition follows an event by Amnesty International last week on Israeli policy in East Jerusalem. That event was provocatively titled “Capital Murder” and made false claims that Israel has “ethnically cleansed Jerusalem of Arabs.” (In fact the population of Arabs living in Jerusalem has gone up considerably more quickly than the Jewish population since 1967 in part because West Bank Palestinians have moved to Jerusalem to take up the greatly increased personal freedom and economic opportunities afforded there by Israeli rule.)

Yet at the event Ben White, the journalist, Amnesty International activist and author of the book “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginners Guide,” described what was happening in the city as “a microcosm of Israeli apartheid”. White cited dubious United Nations statistics to justify his claim.

Krystian Benedict of Amnesty also announced last week that in October they will publish a paper on “discrimination against Israeli Arabs” and will launch a campaign on this (because there is nothing else happening in the world, according to Amnesty…)

Eric Lee, one of those within Amnesty International who is fighting to stop the organization being taken over and used as a political front by hard-left political activists, condemned the information presented by Amnesty International’s UK branch at their “Capital Murder” event as “contemptible lies.”

Lee also spoke out on behalf of Gita Sahgal, who resigned last month as head of Amnesty International’s gender unit over Amnesty’s links to supporters of the Afghan Taliban. “Gita represented all that was positive and progressive in the organization. With her departure Amnesty can more easily complete its transformation into a political front for anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism rather than an organization committed to human rights,” he said.

(Please use the search mechanism on this website to see past dispatches on Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.)

***

Some students were outraged when in a speech last week the president of Israel’s prestigious Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya called B’tselem, the Israeli left-activist group (from which HRW and Amnesty International copy much of their information before further exaggerating it) “a fifth column” in Israeli society.

WHY ISN’T THIS THE LEAD STORY IN WESTERN NEWSPAPERS?

Major American papers, which supposedly care about liberal values, are (once again) strangely quiet about America’s failure to oppose Libya’s joining the Human Rights Council, presumably not wanting to criticize their hero Barack Obama.

But commentator Claudia Rosett, who like Anne Bayefsky is a long-time subscriber to this email list, writing in her online column for Forbes magazine, asks:

“Where in the makings of this travesty last week was oddly quiet U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice?

“For that matter, where was Rice when the misogynist rulers of Iran, murderers last year of peaceful protester Neda Soltan, won a seat last month – by acclamation, no less – on the UN’s commission for women’s rights? Where was Rice when Libya’s candidate won the presidency last year of the current General Assembly? At a UN so lacking in moral compass that all this counts for business as usual, the U.S. made no fuss. Washington went with the flow.

“… For America to swim along with this is not smart diplomacy. It is at best naive. It emboldens the worst violators of civilized norms, and further compounds the already alarming failings of the UN, a sprawling and opaque collective which lends itself to exploitation by the most ruthless and corrupt of its 192 member states.

“… But cozying up to the UN comes with responsibilities for standing up to the liars, crooks and tyrants who seize every chance to exploit the institution. These days Washington shows limp interest in oversight, despite U.S. taxpayers providing roughly one-quarter of a UN system-wide budget now well upward of $25 billion per year.

“The Obama administration may not look kindly on Fox News, but Rice would be doing herself a service to read a series of recent articles on the UN by Fox News Executive Editor George Russell. Russell’s recent dispatches have included the April 20 story, ‘UN’s Ballooning $732 Million Haiti Peacekeeping Budget Goes Mostly to Its Own Personnel’ (not to earthquake stricken Haitians).”

RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT FANTASIES ABOUT ISRAEL

Tom Gross adds: One reason this isn’t the lead story in Western newspapers is that Western liberal newspapers generally don’t care about crimes by “third world,” Islamist or far-left dictatorships. Below I attach a new article by the Istanbul-based, American journalist Claire Berlinski, from City Journal. She asks why the mainstream right has been willing to learn, absorb and record the horrible lessons of Fascism, but the mainstream left is still reluctant to do so regarding the crimes of communism.

The article is not directly related to the Middle East, but does have one or two illuminating anecdotes suggesting interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy.

Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place between then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and then Syrian President Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:

ASSAD: To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .

GORBACHEV: I think so, too. . . .

ASSAD: Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.

GORBACHEV: But this is racism, combined with Messianism!

ASSAD: This is the most dangerous form of racism.

Berlinski notes: “One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.”

A LESS FAVORABLE VIEW OF MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

In other ways too, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the largely sympathetic one in which he is generally regarded in the West.

In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983. And these minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:

“Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.”

Gorbachev: “We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?”

And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending the April 9, 1989 massacre of peaceful protesters in the Georgian capital Tbilisi by Soviet troops.

WHAT THE SOVIET ARCHIVES SAY ABOUT JOE BIDEN

And what of the descriptions by Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the Central Committee’s International Department until 1987 and then Gorbachev’s advisor until 1991, of his dealings with the U.S.’s own current vice president in 1979?

Zagladin wrote at the time: “Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for ‘human rights.’ . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.”

***

(I am told by various reliable historians that Berlinski is unfair in her article in suggesting that Soviet scholars have been reluctant to explore the revelations in Bukovsky’s and other archives, and that her comments about Jonathan Brent, editor of the Annals of Communism series for Yale University Press are also unfair, and the “the notion that the Stroilov and Bukovsky collections are being willfully disregarded for some nefarious reasons is absurd.”)

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

GOLDSTONE: JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS

Judge Richard Goldstone was responsible for sending at least 28 black South Africans to death when they appeared before him during the apartheid regime, Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Ahronot has revealed after a thorough investigation.

Goldstone, who last year headed the UN committee which charged Israel with “war crimes and possible crimes against humanity,” handed down the sentences while serving as a judge in the South African Court of Appeals.

Goldstone wrote in one of his rulings that the gallows are the only deterrent for killers.

Goldstone responded to the Yediot Ahronot report by saying that he was a part of the system and had to respect the laws of the state, occasionally having to enforce laws he was opposed to, including the death penalty.

WHIPPING BLACK MEN

Even when it came to far less serious offenses, Goldstone sided with the racist policies of the Apartheid regime, Yediot Ahronot also reported. Among other things, he approved the whipping of four blacks found guilty of violence, while he acquitted four police officers who had broken into a white woman’s house on suspicions that she was conducting sexual relations with a black man – something which was then considered to be a serious crime in South Africa.

In another incident, Goldstone sentenced two young black men merely for being in possession of a video tape showing a speech given by one of the senior officials in Nelson Mandela’s party.

Some of Goldstone’s allies among the South African judiciary claimed in his defense that Goldstone had also done much to try and oppose apartheid.

But Yediot Ahronot journalist Tzadok Yehezkeli, who co-wrote the story, said “it was Goldstone’s choice to be a judge under apartheid, and because of this decision, he ended up doing things that served the apartheid laws.”

YES, IT WAS

Goldstone also said in response to Yediot’s article this weekend:

“I would say that these events took place 25 - 30 years ago. At that time a number of democracies had not abolished the death sentence. I do not understand why my actions as a judge in those years preclude me from judging war crimes now.”

Goldstone also insisted he opposed apartheid even though he chose to serve as one of the judges enforcing it.

Haviv Rettig Gur of The Jerusalem Post, who has covered this story, says that “Goldstone has a habit of agreeing to serve corrupt and immoral systems [apartheid and the UN Human Rights Council] in the utterly naive hope of reforming them from within.”

As I pointed out in dispatches last year, Goldstone acknowledged that his own report on Israel would not hold up in a court of law, yet insisted that Israel had to refute those claims or be judged guilty.

Goldstone told The Jewish Chronicle online yesterday: “It was a difficult moral decision taking an appointment during the Apartheid era.”

Yes, it was.

At any rate, Goldstone seems to be a man without a moral compass.

Only in 1995 when Nelson Mandela took power was the South African constitution amended and the death penalty abolished. Hundreds of people sitting on death row were spared, including some that Goldstone himself sent there.

“HIS ROBE AND GAVEL LENT AN AIR OF LEGITIMACY TO A BARBARIC REGIME”

Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who is a longtime subscriber to this email list, adds:

“Richard Goldstone, author of the notorious Goldstone report, did not become a South African judge in the post-Apartheid Mandela Era, as The New York Times and other media have erroneously reported. He accepted a judgeship during the worst days of Apartheid and helped legitimate one of the most racist regimes in the world by granting the imprimatur of the rule of law to some of the most undemocratic and discriminatory decrees.

“Goldstone was – quite literally – a hanging judge. He imposed and affirmed death sentences for more than two dozen blacks under circumstances where whites would almost certainly have escaped the noose. And he affirmed sentences of physical torture – euphemistically called ‘flogging’ – for other blacks. He also enforced miscegenation and other racist laws with nary a word of criticism or dissent. He was an important part of the machinery of death, torture and racial subjugation that characterized Apartheid South Africa. His robe and gavel lent an air of legitimacy to an entirely illegitimate and barbaric regime.

“It is no surprise that Goldstone kept this part of his life secret from academic colleagues, friends and the general public. I recall him at the lunch and dinner tables in Cambridge [Harvard] describing himself as a heroic part of the struggle against Apartheid. Now it turns out he was the ugly face of Apartheid, covering its sins and crimes with a judicial robe. How differently we would have looked at him if we knew that he had climbed the judicial ladder on whipped backs and hanged bodies.”

***

Separately, Goldstone has said in his latest piece (published in Britain’s Guardian last week): “I am not aware that the UN Gaza Report has or is being used to delegitimize Israel by questioning her right to exist as a member of the International Community. I would object to any such use being made of it.”

What planet is he on?

***

Among past dispatches on this concerning the Goldstone Report, please see:

* “Goldstone’s crime against human rights” (& a mental patient at the UN) (Sept. 28, 2009)
* Dachau survivor asks Goldstone: How dare you? (& Peres: Goldstone “legitimized terrorism”) (Sept. 21, 2009)
*As the UN endorses Goldstone report, even Goldstone now criticizes the UN (Oct. 17, 2009)… Are the British and French proud of their governments for putting them in the same voting camp as Angola, Kyrgyzstan and Madagascar, three of the worst dictatorships in the world?

IRAN’S ENTRY TO UN WOMEN’S RIGHTS COMMISSION FINALLY GETS SOME MEDIA COVERAGE

Since I criticized the mainstream media for not mentioning that Iran had been appointed by the good-for-nothing, African-child-raping UN to its UN Women’s Rights Commission, I am glad to see that several newspaper columnists who subscribe to this list have now mentioned this appointment – and criticized it – including columnists for The Washington Post and The (London) Sunday Times.

Still, it has not garnered nearly the attention it ought, and the failure by the Obama administration’s representative at the Women’s Rights Commission to attempt to block Iran’s appointment, ought to be a scandal of the first order. (Hillary Clinton, where are you?)

(For background, please see the dispatch: No joke: UN adds Iran to Women’s Rights Commission (& Hamas extends ban on fun) May 1, 2010.)

NOW UN SET TO LET LIBYA SIT IN JUDGMENT ON HUMAN RIGHTS

Following success at the UN by Iran, UN member states (the majority of which are dictatorships) may this week reward another of the world’s worst human rights offenders, Libya, by voting it onto the appallingly misnamed UN Human Rights Council.

There are 13 other countries standing besides Libya, but many UN members love to vote for a good old dictatorship. That way the UN Human Rights Council can continue to concentrate on criticizing Israel and ignore the entire rest of the world, as they have habitually done in the past.

To demonize Israel most recently they have relied on Judge Richard Goldstone (see above), to produce slanderous reports, while turning a blind eye to well-documented killings and other mass abuses in recent months in Iran, China, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere.

A BODY BAG FOR A DEMOCRAT, A VILLA FOR A CONVICTED KILLER

Hundreds of Libyans are jailed and tortured each year and Libya has banned the free press and open use of the internet.

For example, last year 58-year-old political dissident Fathi Eljahmi was returned home in a body bag, having been tortured to death by the regime of Muammar Gaddafi for the crime of advocating democracy. Meanwhile, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer imprisoned for his role in the 1988 Pan Am bombing over the Scottish town of Lockerbie which killed 270 people, who was released last summer on “compassionate grounds” by the Scottish government after it was claimed he was “close to death,” is now living in a luxurious villa, provided to him by the Libyan regime.

According to the 2006 resolution founding the Human Rights Council, member states must “take into account the candidates’ contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights and their voluntary pledges and commitments made hereto.”

I’ll leave readers to judge whether the UN is worthy of integrity and respect.

EXPATS IN U.S. VOTE IN MOCK EGYPTIAN ELECTION

On May Day, Egyptians in America voted for the first time ever in a free and fair electoral process that included Hamdeen Sabahi, Mohamed ElBaradei, Ayman Nour, Amr Moussa and Gamal Mubarak as candidates.

The voting, which took place in front of the Egyptian embassy in Washington, was part of a mock presidential election staged by the Egyptian Association for Change.

Protesters held Egyptian flags and lined up to cast their mock votes to demonstrate their demand for open elections in Egypt. They also demanded an end to the state of emergency in Egypt that has been in force for almost thirty years.

ISRAEL EXPECTED TO WIN ACCEPTANCE INTO OECD TODAY

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is expected to invite Israel to join later today as the organization’s 32nd member state. The decision by the OECD must be unanimous. The strong performance of the Israeli economy in recent years, which continues even as much of the rest of the world grapples with severe economic problems, means Israel has been fast-tracked for accession to the OECD. No country is expected to oppose Israel’s membership.

Israel is the only country in the West that has managed not to increase its deficit during the global economic slowdown. Its medical and high-tech companies are world leaders. On May 26, Israel will officially be classified as a developed rather a developing economy.

***

UPDATE: The OECD has unanimously voted to invite Israel to join, together with two other small and successful democracies, Slovenia and Estonia. Here is the official announcement.

NY TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES COLUMNISTS ADMIT WEST BANK PROSPERITY

For over two years, these dispatches have been recounting how the West Bank – far from being a humanitarian catastrophe as regularly claimed on the BBC and by UN officials and NGO spokespersons – is in fact undergoing a mini-economic boom. I based this on repeated trips I have made to the West Bank and have outlined the situation in a series of articles I wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The National Post in Canada, The Australian and other papers.

Finally, some mainstream liberal newspaper columnists known for their hostility to Israel are beginning to acknowledge this too.

Last week, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen who is usually so nasty about Israel, acknowledged that not only the Israeli economy is improving fast, but so is the Palestinian one.

Cohen writes, for example: “The yellow pages, yes, the yellow pages from the West Bank town of Kalkilya were in his hand, and he found them interesting because, in recent years, they had tripled in thickness, an indication of the expansion of business and decline in violence.”

Cohen also acknowledges far from being a dangerous place, at present Tel Aviv feels like “New York’s West Village of a balmy Sunday.”

(His full article is below.)

***

Meanwhile, chief Financial Times foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman, who is a subscriber to this email list, and has long been a critic of Israel, begrudgingly admits that life on the West Bank isn’t as bad as he previously suggested it was, having been convinced of this by none other than Yasser Arafat’s nephew.

“The place does seem noticeably more prosperous,” Rachman says, although he still can’t bring himself to acknowledge that the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, have done much to aid this development.

(Full article below.)

ENORMOUS AIRPORT TO OPEN IN MECCA

The Saudi parliament, the Shura Council (members of which are appointed by the king) has unanimously approved plans to build an international airport outside Islam’s holiest city, Mecca, in an effort to cater to more than two million pilgrims who visit the city each year.

Since only Muslims are permitted to enter Mecca, the council said that the new airport must be located outside the city center, so as to allow non-Muslims to serve as pilots and cabin crew flying pilgrims there.

TURKEY OPENS FIRST NUDIST HOTEL

While there has been a trend towards Islamization in Turkey in recent years, not everything there is going that way.

One wonders what the Turks’ new friends in Hamas will make of the fact that the Turkish government last week allowed the country’s first nudist hotel to open.

Hotel Adaburnu-Gelmar, in Datca, on the southwest coast of Turkey, has its own beach. It is being operated by a British-based provider of naturist holidays.

But in the evening guests must dress for dinner: nudity is only allowed on hotel grounds from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

[I previous published this item on NRO and The National Post and sent it to some people then.]

CHINA LAUNCHES 24-HOUR ENGLISH NEWS CHANNEL

Following in the footsteps of other less-than-democratic governments such as those of Iran (“Press TV”), Qatar (“Al Jazeera English”) and Russia (“Russia Today”), China has launched a global, English-language television news network, part of efforts to extend the communist government’s media influence abroad.

The government-controlled China Xinhua News Network Corp. has begun trial broadcasts of its English TV service 24/7, including news segments, feature stories, weather updates and special bulletins.

The channel is officially set to launch on July 1. It has not yet been announced what countries would receive the channel, but the Chinese are likely to follow Russia Today and Press TV both of which are fast spreading their broadcasts globally, using cable and satellite providers in Europe and elsewhere.

Chinese authorities have expressed disapproval of much of the international coverage of sensitive events in China, such as human rights.

China already broadcasts a 24-hour Arabic language channel airing in 22 Arabic-speaking countries, reaching a total population of nearly 300 million people.

Last year, China launched an English-language daily newspaper, as I reported in these dispatches at the time.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

SOME NOTES FROM THE BRITISH ELECTION

Below are some notes concerning the British election results.

For background, please the dispatch: “If Clegg were British foreign minister...”

ANOTHER DEFEAT FOR THE BAATH PARTY

George Galloway, who I have criticized on many occasions in these dispatches over the years, lost the Poplar & Limehouse constituency in east London.

Galloway was leader of the extreme left-wing Respect Party, which some observers said bore similarities in its worldview to the Baath party, which formerly ruled Iraq and still rules Syria.

As a non-MP, it will be harder for Galloway to hide behind the protection of parliamentary immunity – or to charge expenses while rarely showing up to vote.

Galloway’s right-hand woman Salma Yaqoob lost her bid for the Birmingham Hall Green seat, in part because some among her natural constituency of Islamists accused her of apostasy for even standing for elected office.

GEORGE GALLOWAY MEETS SADDAM AND OFFERS “HEARTFELT GREETINGS”

Here Galloway praises the former Iraqi regime:

GALLOWAY ON IRANIAN TV: A COMATOSE ARIEL SHARON SHOULD BE TRIED FOR WAR CRIMES

Here, Galloway tells Iranian TV that Ariel Sharon should “burn in hell for eternity.” He was speaking live on Iran’s English-language propaganda arm, Press TV, which is now broadcast throughout Europe and beyond.

REJECTION OF RIGHT-WING FASCISTS TOO

It is not only neo-Fascists of the Left, like Galloway, that were rejected by British voters, but right-wing ones too.

The British National Party not only failed to win their prize seat of Barking in the House of Commons, but they lost all 12 of their seats on Barking and Dagenham council. (Municipal elections were held at the same time as the general election last Thursday.)

A GREEN’S MUDDLED VIEW OF THE WORLD

The election of Caroline Lucas as Britain’s first-ever Green MP is bad news for Israel.

She has said some very hostile things in the past. For example, as I noted at the time, during the Mumbai massacres in India of 2008, interviewed on BBC Radio’s Any Questions, Caroline Lucas blamed this “terrible act of terror in Mumbai” on “the ongoing Israeli absolute strangulation of Gaza with this siege on Gaza feeding so much anger right across the world.”

Not even the terrorist who last week was convicted of the Mumbai attacks put the blame on Israel, as Lucas did.

AN INCREASED NUMBER OF SUBSCRIBERS TO THIS LIST ENTER PARLIAMENT

Many MPs that subscribe to this list were returned to the House of Commons, including Labour MPs such as Denis MacShane, John Mann and Louise Ellman (Labour), and likely Cabinet ministers if the Conservatives form the next government, such as Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey.

A host of other long-standing subscribers to this email list, such as Luciana Berger (Labour) and Robert Halfon (Conservative) won seats in parliament for the first time. (Many members of Britain’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, also subscribe to this list. These include David Cameron’s national security advisor, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones.)

ISRAELI FORCES CONTINUE TO DEMOLISH SETTLERS’ HOMES

Several more Jewish families were evacuated from their West Bank homes by force last week before their houses were demolished.

In Hashmonaim, about 100 protesters surrounded one house after two other homes had been razed there a short time earlier. The homes were believed to be violating the 10-month West Bank construction freeze.

The owners claimed that their houses had been built legally, Ha’aretz reported. Family members barricaded themselves inside in an attempt to prevent the demolition.

Earlier in the week, several buildings were demolished in the northern West Bank settlement of Shavei Shomron.

The foreign media never seems to report on these ongoing destructions of Jewish-owned homes in the West Bank by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

ABBAS SPOKESMAN DENIES PALESTINIAN LEADER IS SUFFERING FROM SEVERE HEART PROBLEMS

A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has denied media reports that Abbas is suffering from severe heart problems. “Reports about the president being ill are not true. The president is in good health,” his spokesman told Reuters.

Abbas, 75, has reportedly made several “secret” trips to Jordan so far this year to receive medical treatment.

Abbas became President of the Palestinian Authority and leader of the dominant Fatah movement within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) after the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004. His presidential term should have expired, triggering new elections, but the split between the PLO and the Islamist Hamas movement, which seized Gaza from Abbas’s forces in 2007, has left the constitutional processes in limbo.

ISRAEL SAVES LIFE OF TOP HAMAS OFFICIAL’S DAUGHTER

Israeli doctors have saved the life of the three-year-old daughter of a top Hamas leader in Gaza, but instead he told Arab media that Jordan had saved her.

After the daughter of Hamas Interior Minister Elham Fathi Hammad was the victim of an unsuccessful heart operation in Gaza, the Israeli army rushed her for treatment to Barzilai Hospital in the nearby Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, which has been bombed many times by Hamas. There, Israeli doctors worked round the night to repair the damage from her earlier surgery and to stabilize her.

A Jordanian helicopter then picked her up and escorted her for recuperation in Amman. Hammad later issued a public statement thanking Jordan. He did not mention Israel at all.

HAMAS SAYS EGYPT GASSED FOUR PALESTINIANS TO DEATH

Hamas officials have charged Egypt with using poison gas to clear out workers from a smuggling tunnel dug between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, killing four and wounding six.

Egypt has previously used gases designed to disperse crowds, but if the Hamas allegations are true, this would mark the first time a toxic substance might have been used.

A statement issued by Hamas said, “The Interior Ministry confirms that the citizens’ cause of death was the Egyptian security forces spraying poison gasses into one of the tunnels.” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum told the Associated Press: “It was a killing in cold blood.”

Naturally (since Israel wasn’t involved) there is near universal silence on this matter by international media commentators and human rights groups.

IRAN CALLS UAE MINISTER “ZIONIST”

Apparently, Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahayan, who has a track record of anti-Israeli activity, is now an Israeli collaborator, according to the Iranian regime.

An Iranian government spokesperson made the allegation in the context of Emirati claims to the ownership of three Persian Gulf islands occupied by Iran.

The Emirati Foreign Minister had angered Iranian officials when he called on Iran to end the “occupation” of the three islands of Greater Tunb, Lesser Tunb and Abu Musa.

ISRAEL STOLE OUR GOATS, LEBANON TELLS UN

A diplomatic quarrel developed over the weekend after Lebanon claimed Israeli soldiers confiscated 185 goats that wandered across the border into Israel.

Beirut filed a complaint with the UN Security Council and UN truce observers on the border reportedly appealed to the Israelis to return the goats, which have been duly handed back.

Last year, UN peacekeeping troops shot dead a cow that had crossed over from Israel to drink in a watering pool.

LEBANON BACK IN FRONT IN HUMMUS WAR WITH ISRAEL

Beirut has won the latest battle in its ongoing culinary war with Israel, after Lebanese chefs prepared the largest ever dish of hummus, retaking the official Guinness world record title won by an Israeli restaurant earlier this year.

The 10-ton dish made up of chickpeas, sesame paste, lemon juice and olive oil, was more than double the Israeli 4-ton dish which an Israeli chef had prepared inside a huge satellite dish.

Ten tons of hummus! It sounds like a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

BRITAIN, STILL A COUNTRY OF GLOBAL IMPORTANCE

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

Britain’s general election, to be held tomorrow, is expected to be the tightest in decades. There is a real possibility that British voters will usher in the most divided parliament in generations, potentially ending the two-party dominance that has defined modern Britain.

Despite its decline, Britain remains a significant world power, with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a nuclear arsenal and a still relatively robust economy. London is one of the world’s leading cities, with a large number of senior financiers working there, and bright foreign students from around the world (the leaders of tomorrow) studying there.

The Britain media – including the BBC, The Economist and Financial Times – retains global influence, despite the regular litany of mistakes and prejudices contained within it.

IF CLEGG WERE FOREIGN MINISTER

Many British people subscribe to this email list (and according to my site monitor, thousands more Britons regularly read this website) and quite a number have asked me about the British party leaders’ views on Israel.

Both the ruling Labour Party, under incumbent Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and the main opposition Conservative Party under the leadership of David Cameron, have, according to many observers, been among the most hostile to Israel in recent years among major political parties in the Western world.

This is certainly the case when you compare their leaders’ pronouncements on, for example, the Goldstone report, or the 2006 Hizbullah conflict, or 2009 Hamas conflict, to those of leading politicians in other democratic countries, such as Canada or Italy or Germany or the Netherlands or Poland or the Czech Republic, who were far more sympathetic to Israel’s situation. (Cameron has even gone out of his way to criticize Israel during this election campaign. For example, in his election interview with The Financial Times, when asked about the most pressing matter in world affairs, he made a point of criticizing Israeli housing in Jerusalem. Nevertheless most ordinary Conservative MPs are considerably more understanding of the threats facing Israel than Labour ones.)

However, both Brown and Cameron look like virtual Zionists compared to Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who has made a strong showing in the campaign and according to the polls, could emerge as a key player in a coalition government after the election, and could quite possibly be appointed foreign secretary (foreign minister) given the electoral math.

“WE MUST STOP ARMING ISRAEL”

Nick Clegg has not only failed to withdraw the party whip from his former party spokeswoman Baroness Tonge, whose most recent outrageous accusation against Jews (as outlined on this email list in January) was to say that Israeli doctors had gone to Haiti in January following the devastating earthquake not to save lives, but to steal Haitians’ organs, a classic anti-Semitic blood libel of the kind that gave rise to centuries of pogroms and the Holocaust. But Clegg himself has on many occasions shown a willingness to vilify Israel.

For example he wrote a piece for The Guardian in January 2009 entitled “We Must Stop Arming Israel,” in effect calling for the EU to isolate and even sanction Israel. (Britain barely arms Israel in any case.)

CLEGG’S IMAGINARY MALNUTRITION

In December 2009, Clegg was the lead signatory of a group of British MPs in a letter to The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper The Observer, in which they made sensational claims about Israel “imprisoning” millions of Palestinians.

Also in December 2009, Nick Clegg penned another piece for The Guardian entitled “Lift the Gaza Blockade: The Suffering is Shocking,” which in parts reads like an anti-Israeli propaganda tirade of the kind a Hamas spokesperson might be invited to make on the BBC World Service.

Clegg wrote in The Guardian of “a living nightmare for one and a half million Palestinians squeezed into one of the most overcrowded and wretched stretches of land on the planet” and of “sickness, mortality rates, and malnutrition increasing in Gaza.”

This is of course, complete nonsense. To see photos of life in Gaza from the week before Clegg wrote his article, please scroll down to the second half of the page here.

Given Clegg’s penchant for writing such pieces in The Guardian and The Observer, it is not surprising that both papers last weekend publically endorsed Clegg for prime minister and urged their readers to vote for his party tomorrow.

Clegg has also called for the UK to be weaned off what he termed its “slavish” special relationship with the United States.

MEANWHILE, SILENCE ABOUT IRAN

While Clegg has continued to subject Israel to what amounts to a public whipping, he has (as British commentator Nile Gardiner pointed out in a Daily Telegraph piece titled “Nick Clegg’s Israel-bashing is sickening”) “remained remarkably silent in the media about Iranian backing for terrorist groups, Tehran’s calls to wipe Israel off the map, and the massive levels of hatred directed at Israel from within the United Nations, not least the UN’s Human Rights Council.”

“I don’t recall any op-eds by Clegg warning against Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or calling for an end to the persecution of Israel by Islamist states. Nor has he written pieces in support of the democracy protestors in Iran, many of whom have been brutally beaten, raped, and in some cases murdered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime,” wrote Gardiner.

“As a former EU bureaucrat, Clegg brings with him to Westminster the sneering condescension towards Israel which is so pervasive in Brussels and Strasbourg. It is a destructive approach that undermines a close British ally while encouraging Israel’s enemies,” continued Gardiner in The Daily Telegraph.

LIB DEMS SUPPORTING TZIPI LIVNI’S ARREST

Writing in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, Dan Kosky, says:

“Although Clegg’s popularity and public recognition have soared over the past few weeks, he is not the only barometer of his party’s position. In December 2009, an overwhelming 51 of the 63 Liberal Democrat MPs, including Foreign Affairs spokesman Ed Davey, sponsored a motion in the House of Commons that pledged to ‘oppose any legislation to restrict the power of UK courts’ over universal jurisdiction.

“This came in direct opposition to Labor and Conservative support to amend the absurd loophole in the law that had allowed pro-Palestinian plaintiffs to successfully apply to a British court last year for a warrant for Tzipi Livni’s arrest. One can only assume that the prospect of Livni being taken into custody is perfectly palatable to the majority of Liberal Democrat MPs.”

KHALED MESHAAL IS “VERY LIKEABLE”

As outlined from 2002 on this email list, Liberal Democrat spokeswoman Jenny Tonge made a succession of anti-Semitic remarks before Clegg became leader of the party in 2007.

British commentator Chas Newkey-Burden writes:

“Since then Mr. Clegg has promised that he would discipline Tonge if she repeated such behavior ‘on my watch’. In 2008 Tonge ranted at the IslamExpo about ‘the Jewish lobby’ and asked: ‘How can we stop anti-Semitism if they [Israel] keep treating the Palestinians like this?’ Last year she met Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and described him as ‘shrewd, plausible and actually very likeable’. She also had a meeting with Ramadan Shalah, head of Islamic Jihad.

“So has Mr. Clegg kept true to his ‘not on my watch’ promise? No. He refuses to deal with Tonge and erupted when questioned about this by The Jewish Chronicle’s Martin Bright. Clegg’s angry, defensive tone in that interview is familiar. Last year I saw him speak at an event organised by Jewish News. It was mostly a gentle, friendly evening but in the rare moments when Mr. Clegg was properly grilled on his and his party’s shameful record on Israel, he was visibly uncomfortable and furious. Like many Liberal Democrats he wants to have it both ways: he wants to victimise and demonise Israel, but then pretend that he’s a friend of Israel too.

“… If Nick Clegg doesn’t even have the balls or the will to deal with anti-Semitism and support for terrorism within his own party, why on earth should we believe he is in any way ready to be a leader of the country?”

“CONVICTED ARAB BILLIONAIRE FRAUDSTER THREW FUNDRAISER FOR CLEGG”

A controversial Iraqi-British billionaire who funds one of the UK’s most strongly anti-Zionist websites organized a banquet in honor of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, and a fundraiser for Susan Kramer, the party’s candidate in the high-profile seat of Richmond Park, reports The Jewish Chronicle.

Nadhmi Auchi was convicted of fraud in the giant French Elf-Aquitaine oil company trial in 2003 and given a suspended sentence.

Auchi’s Middle East Online site promotes material by well-known anti-Zionistic extremists such as musician Gilad Atzmon and Jeff Gates, who runs the anti-Israel “Criminal State” blog.

Auchi also helped fund the first of George Galloway’s “Viva Palestina” convoys to Gaza.

The former Lib Dem leader Lord Steel is a longstanding director of Auchi’s Luxembourg-registered company General Mediterranean Holdings.

A FEW FRIENDS

It should also be noted that an active, albeit small, Friends of Israel faction exists within the party and that the Liberal Democrats are fielding a small number of Israel-friendly candidates in tomorrow’s election, but collectively the Liberal Democrats remain one of the most hostile mainstream parties to Israel in Europe.

As Winston Pickett, another British writer who (like Dan Kosky and Chas Newkey-Burden) subscribes to this email list, points out, “It didn’t help the party’s reputation in pro-Israel circles when William Wallace, a deputy Liberal Democratic leader in the House of Lords, offered a politically tone-deaf address when he met with the Board of Deputies of British Jews on April 18 [2010]. Wallace defended Tonge’s ‘over-emotional approach,’ called Israel’s Likud government ‘very intolerant of all criticism’ and said Israel’s blockade of Gaza constituted ‘collective punishment.’ Several members of the Board of Deputies walked out of the meeting in protest.”

***

A reader writes: “I think a party’s attitude to Israel is also a measure of its honesty and ability to reason.”

LIST OF CANDIDATES RECOMMENDED BY THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

Here is the list of British Muslim Initiative recommended candidates tomorrow.

www.bminitiative.net/bmi/en/details_home.aspx?ID=291&table=sub

Among other activities, according to their website, the British Muslim Initiative co-organizes “The Annual Al-Quds Day March to reflect on the oppression of millions world-wide through the symbolism of Palestine.”

Speakers include anti-Zionist and pro-Hamas extremists such as Dr. Azzam Tamimi, Dr. Daud Abdullah, George Galloway, Majid Nawaz, Massoud Shadjareh and Yvonne Ridley.

According to press reports, the BMI’s president is Mohammed Sawalha, a former military commander of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

Those who care about true liberal values may wish to vote against these candidates. (The exception from the BMI list is Margaret Hodge, whose chief opponent in her constituency of Barking is Nick Griffin, the leader of the extreme right-wing British National Party. In this case I recommend voting for Hodge, the Labour Party candidate.)

PROTESTORS AT MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY TRY TO BEAT UP ISRAEL’S DEPUTY AMBASSADOR

Israel’s deputy ambassador to Britain was last week forced to seek refuge in a security office after protesters attempted to attack her following a lecture at Manchester University’s politics society.

Talya Lador-Fresher said she feared she would be physically assaulted when a mob of demonstrators climbed onto her car and attempted to smash the windscreen.

“I don’t think they wanted to kill me but I genuinely believed they wanted to physically hurt me. If I had not had the police and security team I would have been beaten up,” she said.

Security guards then locked her in their nearby office for her own safety. She was later picked up by embassy security staff. She added: “No foreign diplomat in Britain should have to go through what I went through.”

“WHAT IS GOING ON AT BRITISH TAXPAYER-FUNDED UNIVERSITIES IS SHOCKING”

Israel’s ambassador to Britain Ron Prosor said: “What is going on at British taxpayer-funded universities is shocking. Extremism is not just running through these places of education, it is galloping. My ears are ready and waiting to hear the strongest condemnation of this behavior both from the heads of campus and the local authorities.”

“This is a lawlessness whose damaging effects are already being felt in the short term, and whose effects in the long term may be irreversible,” Prosor (who like Lador-Fresher is a subscriber to this email list) said.

Israeli diplomats have been verbally attacked by student protestors in other countries, including Michael Oren in the United States. But there are few instances in the West when students have used violence and yet so few denunciations have then been forthcoming in the British media. Such is the atmosphere in the UK.

If a diplomat from any other country had been assaulted this way by students at a leading British university I think it would have received more press coverage in the UK.

Can you imagine the reaction in the UK media if Israeli students had ever attacked the British or any other ambassador who was invited as a guest at their university?

Several terrorists have already admitted to becoming indoctrinated while studying at British universities, the most recent prominent example being the Christmas day Detroit airplane underwear bomber.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

YOU COULDN’T MAKE IT UP!

No Joke: U.N. appoints Iran to Women’s Rights Commission
By Tom Gross
National Review Online / National Post (Canada)
April 30, 2010

No, this is not a parody.

The United Nations has elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on what is supposed to be an influential human-rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning of women and girls for alleged sexual misdemeanors is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women deemed to be “immodest.”

Here is the story, buried in this UN press release.

So far, among major media, only Joseph Abrams of Fox News seems to have picked up on this latest startling example of UN hypocrisy. (Where’s The New York Times? Oh wait, this story doesn’t concern the Palestinians or George W. Bush.)

According to its website, The UN Commission on the Status of Women is “dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women”.

Clearly.

***

ADDITIONAL NOTES

It is quite amazing how little attention this has gotten in the mainstream media, especially given the feminism angle.

Equally scandalous is the fact that the U.S, which has a seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women, apparently didn’t object to Iran’s appointment.

Fox News.com learned of the UN press release after being alerted to it by Anne Bayefsky, director of “EYE on the UN.”

(Both Anne Bayefsky and Joseph Abrams are subscribers to this list.)

There are various readers’ comments here.

***

Some Jewish and Iranian dissident groups are calling on U.N. member representatives to walk out in protest when Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks on Monday (May 3) at the United Nations in New York.

Malcolm Hoenlein, a leading American political campaigner (and a subscriber to this email list), said “Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability poses a threat to the region and the entire Western world. To have President Ahmadinejad address this nuclear review conference makes a mockery of the efforts of many countries to prevent nuclear weapons and nuclear terrorism from becoming the gravest global threats of this century.”

PENTAGON: IRANIAN MISSILE MAY BE ABLE TO HIT U.S. BY 2015

Iranian missile may be able to hit U.S. by 2015
By Tom Gross
National Review Online
April 20, 2010

The latest from Reuters:

Iran may be able to build a missile capable of striking the United States by 2015, according to an unclassified Defense Department report on Iran’s military sent to Congress.

“With sufficient foreign assistance, Iran could probably develop and test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the United States by 2015,” said the report, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters. A classified version was also submitted to Congress.

… The U.S. military tried and failed to shoot down a simulated Iranian missile strike on the United States in January, in a botched $150 million exercise over the Pacific Ocean. That attempt failed because of a malfunction in a radar built by Raytheon Co.

… The report also included an assessment of Iran’s broader military capabilities and support for insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as groups like Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

With Iranian support, Hezbollah has replenished its arsenal beyond levels it had in the 2006 war with Israel, the report said, without offering specifics.

… The report cited recently uncovered caches of weapons that Iran’s Qods Force gave to Afghan militants. They contained “large amounts of Iranian-manufactured weapons,” including 107 mm rockets.

It estimated the size of Iran’s “Ground Force” at 220,000 personnel and the Revolutionary Guard Corps’s “Ground Resistance Forces” at 130,000 personnel. It said Iran had between 1,800 and 1,900 tanks.

***

[Tom Gross adds:] Meanwhile, as Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad runs rings round President Obama, the two pictures below sum up the first 15 months of Obama’s Middle East policies:

JEWS THINK OF JERUSALEM, MUSLIMS OF MECCA

Obama’s Jerusalem stonewall
Demanding a construction freeze in the capital reverses decades of U.S. policy
By Mortimer Zuckerman
The Wall Street Journal
April 28, 2010

Thanks to a deadlock engineered by the U.S. government, the Middle East peace process is stalled. President Obama began this stalemate last year when he called for a settlement freeze, and he escalates it now with a major change of American policy regarding Jerusalem.

The president seeks to prohibit Israel from any construction in its capital, in particular in a Jewish suburb of East Jerusalem called Ramat Shlomo. This, despite the fact that all former administrations have unequivocally understood that the area in question would remain part of Israel under any final peace agreement. Objecting to any building in this East Jerusalem neighborhood is tantamount to getting the Israelis to agree to the division of Jerusalem before final status talks with the Palestinians even begin.

From the start of his presidency, Mr. Obama has undermined Israel’s confidence in U.S. support. He uses the same term – “settlements” – to describe massive neighborhoods that are home to tens of thousands of Jews and illegal outposts of a few families. His ambiguous use of this loaded word raises the question for Israelis about whether this administration really understands the issue.

It certainly sends signals to the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority followed the president’s lead and refused to proceed with planned talks until Israel stops all so-called settlement activities, including in East Jerusalem.

President Obama’s attitude toward Jerusalem betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of the city. After Israel was recognized as a new state in 1948, it was immediately attacked by the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The attacks were repelled, but the Jordanians, who were asked not to join the Egyptian war effort, conquered East Jerusalem and separated it from its western half. In 1967, the Arab armies again sought to destroy Israel, but it prevailed in the famous Six Day War and reconquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.

Under Jordanian rule, from 1948 to 1967, dozens of synagogues were destroyed or vandalized. The ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives was desecrated, its tombstones used for the construction of roads and Jordanian army latrines. The rights of Christians as well as Jews were abused, with some churches converted into mosques.

When Israel captured the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1967 it built, and has since continued to build, neighborhoods for its Jewish residents. Palestinian Arabs have also built in Jerusalem throughout this period. Incidentally, today there is more new Arab housing (legal and illegal) being built than Jewish housing according to a report by Middle East expert Tom Gross – without any criticism from the Obama administration.

But this is all recent history: Israel’s claim over Jerusalem does not spring from 1948 or 1967. Rather, it signifies the revival of historic rights stemming from biblical times.

Jerusalem is not just another piece of territory on a political chessboard: It is integral to the identity and faith of the Jewish people. Since the city was founded by King David some 3,500 years ago, Jews have lived there, worked there, and prayed there. During the First and Second Temple periods, Jews from across the kingdom would travel to Jerusalem three times a year for the Jewish holy days, until the Roman Empire destroyed the Second Temple in 70 A.D. That ended Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem for the next 2,000 years, but the Jews never relinquished their bond.

Jerusalem is much less embedded in Muslim culture. When Muslims pray, they face Mecca, not Jerusalem. The Old Testament mentions Jerusalem, or its alternative name Zion, a total of 457 times. The Koran does not mention Jerusalem once.

Muhammad, who founded Islam in 622 A.D., was born and raised in what is now Saudi Arabia; he never set foot in Jerusalem. And in the 1,300 years that various Islamic dynasties ruled Jerusalem, not one Islamic dynasty ever made the city its capital. Indeed, even the National Covenant of the PLO, written in 1964, never mentions Jerusalem. It was only added after Israel regained control of the city in 1967.

The reality today is that in the area referred to as East Jerusalem – that is, an area north, south and east of the city’s 1967 borders – there are roughly a half a million Jews and Arabs living in intertwined neighborhoods. The idea of a purely Jewish West Jerusalem or a purely Palestinian East Jerusalem is a myth: Building in particular neighborhoods in no way precludes the possibility of a two-state solution.

Ramat Shlomo, the center of the most recent row, is a thriving community of tens of thousands of Jews located between two larger Jewish communities called Ramot and French Hill. Its growth would in no way interfere with the contiguity of new Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. And in every peace agreement that has ever been discussed, these areas would remain a part of Israel.

No wonder the Israelis reacted so strongly when Mr. Obama called this neighborhood “a settlement.” For over 43 years, there has been a tacit agreement that construction here did not constitute an obstacle to negotiations. Thus, the new policy was seen as an Obama administration effort to force Israel to accept the division of Jerusalem, taking yet another negotiating card off the table for the Israelis.

But what the world never remembers is what the Israelis can never forget. When Jordan controlled the eastern part of the city, including the Old City and the Western Wall (a retaining wall of the ancient Temple), it permitted reasonably free access to Christian holy places. But the Jews were denied any access to the Jewish holy places. This was a fundamental departure from the tradition of freedom of religious worship in the holy land, which had evolved over centuries, not to speak of a violation of the undertaking given by Jordan in the Armistice Agreement concluded with Israel in 1949. Nobody should expect the Jews to risk that again.

Since Israel reunited Jerusalem in 1967, it has faithfully protected the rights and security of Christians, Muslims and Jews. Christians now control the Ten Stations of the Cross; Muslims control the Dome of the Rock. Yet the Palestinians often stone Jewish civilians praying at the Western Wall below. Their leaders and imams repeatedly deny the Jewish connection to Jewish holy sites. Freedom of religion in Jerusalem should not be compromised by American policy.

That’s not all. Dividing Jerusalem would put Palestinian forces and rockets a few miles from Israel’s Parliament. And Jewish neighborhoods would be within range of light weapon and machine-gun fire. This is exactly what happened after the Oslo Accords, when the Palestinians fired from Beit Jalla toward Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood, wounding scores of residents.

The vast majority of Israelis believe Jerusalem must be shared – not divided. Even the great Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords, said in 1995: “There are not two Jerusalems; there is only one Jerusalem.”

The final status of Jerusalem will be on the table if and when Palestinians and Israelis talk. But Mr. Obama’s policy reversal has, yet again, given the Palestinians every reason not to negotiate.

(Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.)

HAMAS EXTENDS CRACKDOWN ON FUN

Hamas forces break up of Gaza’s first hip-hop concert
By Tom Gross
National Review Online
April 25, 2010

The Islamist group Hamas, which has already shut down Internet cafes and forced women to stop wearing jeans, continues to clamp down on anything fun as its security forces broke up the Gaza Strip’s first major hip-hop concert late last night.

The B Boy Gaza group had just started a lively dance set in a crowded auditorium when Hamas thugs broke it up, deeming it “immoral,” reports Reuters.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said police confiscated cameras and tapes at the venue and arrested six of the performers.

Last year, Hamas’s “morality police” in Gaza banned Palestinian women from swimming unless they are covered from top to bottom, and forbade women from entering coffee shops, restaurants, and other public places unless they are escorted by male relatives.

EUROPEAN UNION DECREES THAT VACATIONS ARE A “HUMAN RIGHT”

With such a wide definition of human rights, it is no wonder that the EU is always accusing Israel of human rights abuses...

European Union decrees that vacations are a “Human Right”
By Tom Gross
National Review Online
April 21, 2010

Ever wondered why Europe is heading downhill?

From The Times of London:

AN overseas holiday used to be thought of as a reward for a year’s hard work. Now Brussels has declared that tourism is a human right and pensioners, youths and those too poor to afford it should have their travel subsidised by the taxpayer.

Under the scheme, British pensioners could be given cut-price trips to Spain, while Greek teenagers could be taken around disused mills in Manchester to experience the cultural diversity of Europe.

The idea for the subsidised tours is the brainchild of Antonio Tajani, the European Union commissioner for enterprise and industry, who was appointed by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.

… The scheme could cost hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

… Tajani, who unveiled his plan last week at a ministerial conference in Madrid, believes the days when holidays were a luxury have gone. “Travelling for tourism today is a right. The way we spend our holidays is a formidable indicator of our quality of life,” he said.

Tajani, who used to be transport commissioner, said he had been able to “affirm the rights of passengers” in his previous office and the next step was to ensure people’s “right to be tourists”.

The European Union has experience of subsidised holidays. In February the European parliament paid contributions of up to 52% towards an eight-day skiing trip in the Italian Alps for 80 children of Eurocrats.

Tajani’s programme will be piloted until 2013 and then put into full operation. It will be open to pensioners and anyone over 65, young people between 18 and 25, families facing “difficult social, financial or personal” circumstances and disabled people.

***

Now all Europe has to do is to get its volcano-hit airlines industry in order (oh, and find the money to pay for all these free vacations).

MORE FREELANCERS ARE FIGHTING TO BE PAID

More freelancers are fighting to be paid
By Tom Gross
Thursday, April 29, 2010
National Review Online

As more people turn to freelance work – including working as journalists – they are taking on an unexpected role: bill collector, reports The Wall Street Journal.

About 40 percent of freelancers had trouble getting paid in 2009, according to a survey by the Freelancers Union, a 135,000-member organization for independent contractors in fields such as media, technology, and advertising. Some freelancers are owed tens of thousands of dollars.

How can a freelancer avoid problems? Before accepting a job, freelancers can search consumer complaint websites such as RipoffReport.com and industry discussion boards to make sure the company they’re contracting with doesn’t have a history of late payments, says the paper.

Filing a complaint in a small-claims court should be a last resort, the paper advises.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve been told ‘The check is in the mail’ or ‘Your invoice went to my junk email inbox,’” bemoans one exasperated freelancer.

BRITISH NEWSPAPER WILL PUBLISH IN 3D

British newspaper will publish in 3D
By Tom Gross
Saturday May 1, 2010
National Review Online

With newspaper circulation continuing to fall dramatically throughout the world, Britain’s best-selling daily, The Sun, has come up with a novel way to try and attract readers: It is to experiment with a 3D edition.

The initially one-off title will be published on June 5 with the expectation that advertisers will have to pay a significant premium if they want color ads in 3D.

The edition is to appear shortly before the start of the eagerly-awaited soccer World Cup, the world’s most popular event, which takes place once every four years. (One of this year’s opening matches pits the U.S. against England.)

The special edition of The Sun, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, will include a World Cup Fixtures Wall Chart in 3D, as well as the paper’s famous topless Page 3 girls.

The paper said it will increase its print run by hundreds of thousands of copies on June 5, and Sun readers will receive a pair of 3D glasses with the paper that day.

Matches at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa will be filmed in 3D for the first time, using special 3D cameras.