Wednesday, September 27, 2017

IDF in Mexico for Earthquake Aid


“Fear not, for I am with you, Be not frightened, for I am your God; I strengthen you and I help you, I uphold you with My victorious right hand.” Isaiah 41:10 (The Israel Bible™)
Video of the week - Israel helps Mexico after earthquake - http://tinyurl.com/yb67ylv2


The IDF’s aid delegation to Mexico, moments before lifting off on September 20, 2017. (IDF Spokesperson)
           
Tazpit Press Service September 24, 2017                         
By: Mara Vigevani
A 60-strong delegation from the IDF’s Home Front Command, together with two foreign ministry representatives,  left for  Mexico City on Wednesday afternoon shortly before the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah)  to provide emergency aid after an earthquake hit the country, killing at least 200 people.
They were met with applause by Mexican civilians as they walked through Mexico City.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed the IDF to send the delegation after receiving a request for aid from Mexican authorities in the wake of the 7.1 quake that caused several building in Mexico City to collapse on Tuesday night.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered that an aid operation be organized to leave to Mexico as soon as possible,” his office said.
Gali Cohen, a representative of the Strategic Cooperation Division  of the National Emergency Authority and Home Front Command told Tazpit Press Service (TPS) the delegation would be comprised mainly of “engineers and other professionals that can provide assistance.” The delegation will stay in Mexico for a week and will come back on September 29, ahead of Yom Kippur.
Though the IDF soldiers were in Mexico to assist in aid and rescue missions, they made sure to perform the special commandments, or mitzvot, that are incumbent upon Jews during Rosh Hashana, including blowing the shofar.
The delegation is headed by Col. Dudi Mizrahi, the head of the army’s search and rescue unit.
Israeli diplomats in Mexico were in touch with local officials to find out what exactly Mexico needed.
Netanyahu made his first trip as prime minister to Mexico last week meeting with President Pena Nieto and offering reconstruction aid following an earthquake that killed 96 people in southern Mexico earlier this month. Wednesday morning  before taking off to Israel following a 10-day trip to Latin America and New York, Netanyahu said Israel’s “heart” was with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and the rest of the country.


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Wednesday, September 13, 2017

The Accidental Zionist

Video of the week -  Africa: Through the Eyes of an Israeli 8 year old http://tinyurl.com/y7nffp4m

by Gary C. Gambill

The Jerusalem Post http://tinyurl.com/y7jsxw3m
4-9-2017
I was staunchly pro-Palestinian when I arrived at Georgetown University to begin studying for an MA in Arab Studies in the fall of 1995, or at least I thought so.
I had read Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem in college a few years earlier and accepted the basic conclusion that Israel's unwillingness to compromise had become the primary obstacle to Middle East peace.
If any place might have been expected to shepherd this eager young mind into accepting "progressive" orthodoxy on Israel, it would have been Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS).
There I received a solid grounding in post-colonial theory, revisionist historiography of Israel, and so forth.
Radical though their views may have been, I don't recall many CCAS faculty caring much what I thought of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and few were involved in the kind of campus activism that is de rigueur among academics today. The roster of guest lecturers hosted at CCAS's spacious, elegantly appointed boardroom was another story, however, and notices for anti-Israel events throughout the Washington, DC, area were routinely advertised on the center's bulletin board. Going to them was the cool thing to do, and I attended more than I care to admit.
However, while I remained sympathetic to the Palestinian experience, I found interacting with other sympathizers increasingly intolerable. My immersion into the anti-Israeli movement brought me face to face with peer antisemitism for the first time, primarily among European and American students who shared much the same liberal outlook as myself.
Oddly enough, I don't recall any disparaging talk about Jews (albeit plenty about Israel) from Arab students at Georgetown, some of whom went out of their way to befriend Jewish students and faculty. It was Western students who said the darndest things.
The final straw came when I arrived with friends at an Israeli embassy protest during the September 1996 Western Wall Tunnel riots, when organizers led the crowd in chanting "Bibi, Hitler, just the same / Only difference is the name." I left in disgust, then sent an email to CCAS students and faculty inviting anyone who felt Hitler was no worse than then (and current) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join me on a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the other side of town. There were no takers, though several students – including two who had enthusiastically participated in the rally – privately applauded the letter.
Truth be told, though, the biggest problem with the pro-Palestinian movement wasn't so much the antisemitism as it was the varying degrees of willful blindness displayed by its foremost advocates both to the suffering of other ethno-sectarian groups in the region (particularly Kurds and Christians) and to Palestinian suffering at the hands of villains other than Israel, particularly those seen as leading the fight against the Jewish state. There was more than antisemitism at work here.
This blindness owed much to the fact that CCAS and other Middle East studies departments were becoming increasingly inundated with lavish grants from Arab governments.
Having fed their own citizens a steady diet of propaganda blaming all the region's ills on Israel, Mideast autocrats now promoted this narrative abroad very effectively.
This was painfully evident when Lebanese human rights attorney Muhammad Mugraby traveled to the United States in November 1997 for a short lecture tour at the invitation of Human Rights Watch. As it often does when hosting guests from the Middle East, HRW asked if CCAS would be interested in hearing Mugraby speak.
Yes, the answer came back from a CCAS administrator failing to see why a Muslim discussing Lebanon in the wake of Israel's devastating Grapes of Wrath campaign the year before would be a problem, so Mugraby was scheduled to speak at the center.
That was, until the day of the talk, when (I'm guessing) CCAS faculty learned that Mugraby was speaking about the abduction and incommunicado detention of Lebanese and Palestinians by Syrian forces then occupying all but a sliver of Lebanon (with the blessing of most Arab and Western governments). The location was abruptly changed from the CCAS boardroom to on ordinary classroom outside the center. No faculty were in attendance.
At that time, I was doing freelance web development work (a little html knowledge went a long way back then) for, among others, an NGO stridently critical of Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, and got to know its Jewish-American director.
When I mentioned the Mugraby story, he confided in me that a longtime Palestinian friend of his had been imprisoned incommunicado for many years in Hafez Assad's Syria, which then held far more Palestinians in its prisons than Israel, and under far worse conditions.
Then why focus on Israel, I asked. "I can't do anything for him," he explained.
Alongside the antisemitism and the money, this idea of Israel as the low-hanging fruit for do-gooders wanting to improve the Middle East was the third foundation stone in what became a vast conspiracy of silence about how the region works during the 1990s.
The well-intentioned flocked in droves to the belief that Israeli-Palestinian peace was achievable provided Israel made the requisite concessions, and that this would liberate the Arab-Islamic world from a host of other problems allegedly arising from it: bloated military budgets, intolerance of dissent, Islamic extremism, you name it.
Why tackle each of these problems head on when they can be alleviated all at once when Israel is brought to heel? Twenty years later, the Middle East is suffering the consequences of this conspiracy of silence.
I don't have a particularly rose-colored view of Israel's history (or that of any other nation-state, including my own), nor do I put much stock in the religio-cultural attachments that make many Israelis resistant to sweeping concessions.
I just don't buy into the "theory of everything" where Israel is concerned. The particulars of when and how Israelis and Palestinians work out their differences don't matter that much, and insofar as they do Netanyahu is among the least of the complications getting there.
That makes me a hardline Zionist, liberal friends tell me.

All right, I guess.

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

MY EXPERIENCE IN ISRAEL: IT IS NOT WHAT YOU SEE ON TV


Video of the week- BBC anti-Israel bias- http://tinyurl.com/ybreolkq


 From the JPOST, By Diliman Abdulkader, 30-8-2017

For the full article go to - http://tinyurl.com/y7r6tp6b

People do want peace on both sides. We just have to move beyond those who incite terrorism.
I recently traveled to Israel as part of a study abroad program through the American University in Washington, DC. As a master’s student concentrating on peace and conflict resolution and as a Kurd from northern Iraq, I was curious about the intense hostility toward Jews in the Middle East, the negative bias in the mainstream media and the continuous antisemitic lectures and activities on college campuses, including my own university.

My trip to Israel was unique. I was able to travel there through the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Having departed from the Sulaymaniyah International Airport in the KRI, I was sent off with a smile among my fellow Kurds without any shame, despite the fact that a trip to Israel is taboo among Middle Easterners.

Upon arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport, I was briefly held back by security due to concerns about a first-time traveler to Israel coming from an Arab state with no diplomatic relations (Iraq). This was understandable and expected, I too expect heavy screening towards foreigners entering the KRI due to the hostility of the region. I successfully and peacefully passed through airport security with a visa that would allow me to stay beyond my permitted time.

My first interaction with an Israeli was with a taxi driver driving me to my hotel. His conversations were animated, his politics realistic. He said he doesn’t care what religion one believes in, he just wants to live in peace. I tested the waters and told him I was Kurdish and he was very excited.

His eyes lit up and he immediately called for establishing a Kurdistan without my prodding. “That was easy,” I said to myself.

My time in Tel Aviv was brief, a little over a week. But what the city offered was unprecedented to me, especially in the Middle East. It is modern, filled will young Israelis enjoying life at the beaches, nightlife spots, restaurants. It is also historical and diverse. I witnessed Muslims and Jews intermingling, mosques calling for prayer, Arab families enjoying their time together on the beaches after breaking their fast. No one bothered others; everyone minded their own business. I tried hard to discover instances of negative interactions between the two peoples, but they even smoked hookah together at the local café.

I thought that maybe Tel Aviv is in its own little bubble, distant from the reality we witness every day in the media, so together with my class, we took a bus ride to Jerusalem.

I was excited, having heard so much about the ancient city – from the time when the Kurdish sultan Saladin Ayubi conquered the Old City from the Crusaders to the current Arab-Israeli conflict.

After a short ride, we checked into our dorms and got a tour of Hebrew University, where we would be studying for the rest of the trip. Hebrew University has a beautiful campus situated on a hill overlooking the Old City. Without having any knowledge of the school, I assumed there would be only Israelis studying there, but again I was wrong. Young college students included Jews, Muslims, women with and without headscarves all together at this institution. I was still struggling to find the picture that the Arab world and the mainstream media have painted.

Throughout my time in Jerusalem I had the opportunity to speak with locals and elected officials, Arabs and Israelis at cafés, restaurants, bars, in the Muslim quarter, the Knesset, the shuk (outdoor bazaar) and so on. My interactions with Palestinians took place in the Muslim quarter, at the local restaurants and tea houses – all men, as talking with the women was looked down upon.

I entered the Old City through the Damascus Gate, although I was warned to not enter there because the site had been the scene of stabbings and attacks. I thought to myself, “I’ll be fine – I’m from Kirkuk, a far more dangerous city.”

Wanting to experience the real Jerusalem, I stayed away from popular tourist sites such as the shopping centers and famous high-end restaurants and explored the Old City and the surrounding area for the next few weeks. I made a few Palestinian friends over hookah and Arabic coffee. They tried to not discuss politics but were also keen on labeling me Iraqi. I accepted their opinions, but they were more excited about America and the dream of one day moving there.

I also visited the walls built around the Palestinian territories.

My feelings were mixed, but having personally experienced war and refugee camps from Arab governments, Syrian President Bashar Assad and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a Palestinian ally, I thought although it is not the ideal solution for either side – safety and security are better than terrorism.

One conversation that would stick with me was with a uniformed IDF soldier in his early 20s. I approached him while he was sitting alone having lunch, and began to slowly move past small talk. He was proud to serve his nation and was ready to defend it both literally and verbally.

He wasn’t a “tough guy,” he simply loved his nation.

He mentioned although it is mandatory for him to serve in the IDF, he would have done it regardless. He was also curious where I was from. When I replied Kurdistan, he shook his head in sadness, acknowledging that we are without a state and thanked me for our people fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

We had the privilege of visiting the Knesset. Thanks to my professor, who attempted to keep the meetings with guest MKs balanced, we were given views from the far Left, Right and everything in between. The most surprising comments were made by MK Taleb Abu Arar of the United Arab List, who openly declared Israel an undemocratic terrorist country while supporting Hamas and staunchly backing Turkish President Erdogan. He ignored my questions about double standards on Kurds in Turkey. I thought to myself, “You are calling Israel undemocratic? But you have a seat in their Knesset, you’re openly supporting Hamas and calling the government terrorist? Interesting.”

Unfortunately, the night before the end of the program, when I was having coffee inside Damascus Gate, a terrorist attack occurred. An IDF soldier by the name of Hadas Malka, only 23, was stabbed and lost her life after being rushed to the hospital. The gates were shut down, the city was on alert and Palestinians flocked to the streets to protest. Tel Aviv may be in its own bubble, but Jerusalem is fragile. People do want peace on both sides. We just have to move beyond those who incite terrorism. Israel is not the horror movie we witness on TV or by academics – it is a country simply striving to survive in a hostile region.

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