Barry Shaw: Jew hating and Jew denial: Israel fighting Palestinian terror and the Western media/Cinnamon Stillwell: Who’s Oppressing Palestinian Christians? Georgetown Lecture Blames Israel

Jew hating and Jew denial: Israel fighting Palestinian terror and the Western media
Barry Shaw/Canada Free Press/October 24/15

The old argument used to be that Palestinians were fighting and demonstrating to achieve a state of their own, and that it was Israeli obstinacy that was fermenting Arab violence against Jews. On top of that, a misinterpreted by much of the media positioned Palestinian rage being caused by excessive Israeli military attacks against defenseless Palestinians. This was also known as “disproportionate force.”Why wouldn’t a put-upon population rise up in anger when they are so “oppressed” and “occupied,” so they say. When I put pen to paper to expose the Jew hatred at the core of the Palestinian cause in my book “Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism” I did so to expose the facts and anecdotal evidence that this perception was dangerously flawed and the real burning rage behind a violence that has been going on for a hundred years was primeval anti-Semitism. Though many were in denial, preferring to reference Israeli policies not in line with conventional left-wing Western thinking, the overwhelming weight of in excess of three hundred pages of undeniable incidents, together with the eruption of anti-Jewish tirades during the numerous pro-Palestinian demonstrations and such expressions by some European politicians during and after the 2014 Gaza conflict, made the thrust of my book resoundingly relevant.

If further evidence of what lies at the heart of Palestinian thinking and planning was needed the outpouring if Palestinian anti-Jewish rhetoric, incitement, and the deliberate hunting and targeting of Jews for knife, gun and rock wielding Palestinian attacks should leave nobody in any further doubt about what is at play here. Despite the stark reality that the Palestinian cause was never about creating a new and peaceful state that would instantly solve all the problems of the Middle East but rather about killing Jews and destroying the “abomination” of a Jewish state,” a tiny island of progress in the midst of a radical and bloodthirsty Islamic region, many leading politicians and a media in denial still hold to the mistaken notion that only by granting a volatile Palestine statehood will the area calm down. If there has been any recent abomination it has been with the government of South Africa officially welcome Hamas leader, Khaled Maashal, on the same day that this internationally designated terrorist organization announced it would initiate renewed suicide bombings against Israelis.

Following the declaration from Palestinian Authority head, Mahmoud Abbas, that “every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah” and that this blood must be spilled because the Jews were desecrating the Islamic holy places “with their filthy feet,” a lie so preposterously dangerous, hordes of knife and rock wielding Arabs went in search of Jewish victims. All the attacks were executed by Palestinian Arabs and all of the victims were Israeli Jews Israelis, tense with the expectations of knifing attacks on the streets of their towns, were subjected to world headlines defining them as the perpetrators and Palestinians as the innocent victims. The Reuters bureau chief, Luke Baker, falsely tweeted that undercover Israeli police threw stones at Israeli security forces and incited Palestinian youth to do the same. This was repeated by AFP and EuroNews.

You will find most media headlines leave the identity of the assailant anonymous as in “Jerusalem bus and car attacks leaves dead and wounded,” or “Jerusalem attack kills three,” or The Independent’s headline that reads as if Israelis were doing the attacking when, in fact, they were the victims of Palestinian Arabs attacks, “Israel attacks” Guns, cars and knives are the new weapon of war in Jerusalem.”You would never know that all the attacks were executed by Palestinian Arabs and all of the victims were Israeli Jews. So incensed was Lord Michael Grade, former chairman of the BBC Trust, that he wrote a letter of complaint slamming the BBC correspondent, Orla Guerin, for her misreporting of the ongoing violence carried out by Palestinians against Israelis. He was upset by her “equivalence between Israeli victims of terrorism and Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli security forces in the act of carrying out terror attacks.” His letter follows an appalling BBC headline which described a Palestinian youth who carried out an assault that killed two Jewish men, seriously injured a woman and wounded her two year old son thus, “Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attack claims two.”

The twist of this headline leads the BBC audience in to falsely believing that the Palestinian was the innocent victim of a Jerusalem attack by known assailants. Nowhere in this headline would an audience know that Jews had been murdered in a vicious attack. Much of the Western media choke on identifying the victims of Palestinian violence as Israeli Jews. So egregiously frequent have these incident of untruthful reporting been that a frustrated Prime Minister Netanyahu asked BBC’s Lyse Doucet at a Jerusalem press conference, “Are we living on the same planet?”When much of the Western media choke on identifying the victims of Palestinian violence as Israeli Jews you know there is a serious breach of trust at play that must be addressed. Sadly, these headlines are commonplace as editorial discretion repeatedly tilts a bias that fails to allow the truth and honest reporting to shine through.One of the truths is that there is a deliberate Palestinian policy to incite their followers to attack Israeli Jews and deny them any rights, not to sovereignty, not to heritage in Jerusalem, not even to life.es Israel today will surely visit you tomorrow.

**Barry Shaw is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism.’
**Barry is the author of ISRAEL – RECLAIMING THE NARRATIVE which is available at Israelnarrative.com or at Amazon Kindle.
Barry can be reached at: theviewfromisrael@gmail.com

Who’s Oppressing Palestinian Christians? Georgetown Lecture Blames Israel
Cinnamon Stillwell/Jihad Watch/ Middle East Forum/October 24/15

Naim Ateek, trying to rally Palestinians at an Israeli security checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
Amid widespread and ongoing Islamist attacks against Christians in the Middle East, Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek, co-founder of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, informed an audience at Georgetown University that “the government of Israel” and Israeli “settlers” pose the greatest threat to Palestinian Christians. A Palestinian Anglican priest now living in the U.S, Ateek’s claims are typical of Sabeel, an organization that advocates “resistance to the Israeli occupation” by blaming the plight of Palestinian Christians on Jews rather than Islamic supremacism in Palestinian society. The recent lecture sponsored by Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) was titled “Christians in the Holy Land” and included Jonathan Kuttab, co-founder of the Mandela Institute for Palestinian Prisoners.
Ateek claims that the American media is hiding “what’s really happening” from the public.

About fifteen students, faculty members, and activists, including School of Foreign Service Professor Yvonne Haddad and Kathy Aquilina, program director of the non-profit organization Initiatives of Change, attended the discussion. In keeping with ACMCU events, Ateek and Kuttab were in agreement on almost all of the issues and no alternate point of view was represented. Despite strong evidence of media bias against Israel, particularly in coverage of the current crisis, Ateek claimed that the American media is hiding “what’s really happening” from the public. The news is terrible when you’re looking at what the settlers are doing, what the government of Israel is doing. . . . It’s very extreme. I think people need to know and the news does not reflect the reality of the situation back at home. . . . If they [Americans] would see what’s happening there, I think they would begin to change but they are not able to see.

Pointing to Israel’s demographics, Kuttab, a human rights attorney, argued that the government is not pluralistic: Israel thinks if they become less than 51 percent they would be totally squashed, and as long as they have the 51 percent majority, they can squash the non-Jews. The problem is with the basic premise that Israel is and was intended to be a Jewish state for Jews rather than a state for Jews and Arabs who happen to be indigenous. To the contrary, Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, currently has thirteen Arab members, while the country is one of the few in the region where Arabs, including women, have the right to vote. Moreover, according to the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2014, Israel’s Supreme Court has “repeatedly held that the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty protects freedom to practice religious beliefs.”

Yet, to hear Ateek tell it:
Almost at every level of life, almost every level of life, the situation is getting bad. If we’re looking at Israel, not the occupied Palestine, Israel itself, the question of the Christian schools – they are having a hard time now. Israel is cutting off the funding which the government gives to the private schools.

In fact, Israel recently began funding private Christian schools following a month-long strike. Public schools, regardless of religious affiliation, have always received full government funding.

Ateek then used one incident to paint a picture of widespread anti-Christian persecution:
They see some of these right-wing settlers or extremist Jews targeting Christians. For example, the church in Tiberias near the Sea of Galilee is burned because it is a Christian Church and Israel has not done much about it. They’re now trying to pay for it, but in the beginning they said they were not going to pay for it, so things are worse than what people think. Israeli authorities indicted two Jewish suspects in connection with the June, 2015 arson attack on the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes in Tabgha, while Israel’s Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein overruled the tax authority’s denial of payment of damages. In addition to the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee donating funds to help rebuild the church, thousands of people attended a June 21 solidarity rally and church officials have reported an upsurge in support from Israelis of all faiths.

Undeterred by the facts, Ateek continued:
You’re really dealing with people who are very extremist Jews who do not want to see Christians – that’s it’s a Jewish country and it’s only for Jews. It’s against democracy, which means everyone has a place, and I think that’s becoming less and less back home.

From such statements, one would never know that “extremist Jews” make up a tiny portion of the population and that their acts have been condemned by both Israeli authorities and American Jewish groups. This is in marked contrast to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, both of whom employ genocidal language, incite violence against Jews as a matter of course, and have never apologized for doing so.

Attempting to portray Christians and Muslims as victims of Jewish aggression, Ateek concluded, “They don’t differentiate between a Christian and a Muslim. We are in the same boat together in this.”Kuttab told the audience too much time and energy has been wasted trying to figure out if a one- or two-state solution would end the Arab-Israeli conflict: I personally have decided several years ago not to even engage in that debate. What we can address are specific issues. We can talk about human rights, we can talk about equality, we can talk about violence and non-violence, we can talk about sending less rather than more weapons to either party. Yet a one-state solution would guarantee the end of Israel as a Jewish state—a draconian outcome unacceptable to most Israelis and unaddressed by the panel. Jonathan Kuttab has given up on the two-state solution.

Ateek argued that Israel does not want peace, claiming it is comfortable controlling the Palestinian people. He maintained that the U.S. has “never” been able to take a “neutral or objective” position toward the situation and therefore the conflict remains unresolved.

The panel’s lack of balance allowed such statements to go unchallenged, as for example by pointing out that the Arab states have repeatedly waged war in the hopes of destroying Israel, that the Oslo Accords—turned down by then-PLO chairman Yasser Arafat—would have given the Palestinians virtually everything they requested, and that Hamas, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization, launches frequent attacks against Israeli civilians. In presenting only one side of the conflict, ACMCU failed in its obligation to offer scholarly, rigorous, and balanced commentary on a complex and ongoing problem. Its bias reflects that of Middle East studies on the whole: a discipline in dire need of reform with less concern for genuine debate than with ensuring the domination of anti-Israel, anti-American views. Prince Alwaleed is getting precisely what he paid for.

**Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.