Rattling Israel's BBC Tormentors

 Video Of The Week - BBC'S "Blood Libel" https://tinyurl.com/9urahnes   

 Melanie Phillips April 21st 2021

 For the full Article go to - https://tinyurl.com/ed9vrvfw

 A reliable sign that someone has managed to puncture one of the BBC’s doctrinal falsehoods is when an interviewer is sufficiently rattled to keep interrupting.

 These theatrics occurred last evening on BBC TV’s Newsnight, when anchor Emily Maitlis grilled Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s new ambassador to the UK.Hotovely,  is highly controversial because of her profile as an Israeli religious nationalist.

 The Newsnight item was ostensibly about what Britain might learn from Israel’s “green” vaccination passport.Maitlis noted concerns that the introduction of a British vaccination passport might widen social divisions. Then she said : But in Israel, where the Palestinian population has not been inoculated at anywhere near the rate of the Israeli population, there’s plenty of concern about the passport’s ability to widen the gulf.

 Subsequently noting Israel’s impressive achievement in getting nearly 60 per cent of its population fully vaccinated, she nevertheless added:

…but the roll-out to Palestinian citizens has been much slower at 0.5 per cent.

 Woa! Stop right there! She appeared to be suggesting that Israel was discriminating against its own Arab citizens by vaccinating them at a slower rate. This is totally untrue. Israeli Arabs have been offered the vaccination in exactly the same way as every other Israeli citizen.   Maitlis seemed to be conflating Israeli Arabs, who are Israeli citizens, with Palestinian Arabs who are not Israeli citizens but inhabit those disputed territories beyond Israel. Under the Oslo Accords, their health needs are delivered by the Palestinian Authority.

 Hotovely proceeded to hole other falsehoods below the waterline. She pointed out that the Palestinian Authority hadn’t wanted Israel to provide the Palestinian Arabs with a vaccination programme. The PA had instead wanted to provide it for them itself, and had done just that by purchasing doses of the Russian Sputnik vaccine.

 This unanswerable fact so wrong-footed Maitlis that she pulled out what she presumably believed was her killer point — that six Israeli ultra-leftist NGOs had said Israel had a “legal, moral and ethical” obligation to deliver Covid vaccinations to the Palestinians.

Hotovely kept her cool and responded with the first of her two zingers of the evening. “Let me ask you, Emily,” she said, “would you actually impose getting vaccines [on] the leaders of the Palestinians? Would you actually say [they had to] accept Israeli access and Israeli help? When they’re not interested?”

 Maitlis started to talk over her by robotically intoning “legal, moral and ethical obligation”. Hotoveley,proceeded to drive her point home:

But you’re not answering my question. My question is very simple. Can you impose receiving the vaccine on populations [whose] leadership wants to be in charge of the programme? You’re patronising the Palestinians.

 Maitlis asked:

You’re telling me that the Palestinians didn’t want to take up the vaccinations? Replied Hotovely:

No no, they had their own programme, they bought the Russian vaccine, they had a agreement with the WHO and they wanted to run their own programme and I think we need to respect that. And when they asked for Israel’s help, we were there to help.

With the collapse of that line of attack, Maitlis switched to the presumed awfulness of both Hotovely herself and the State of Israel that she represents.

 So it was that an item on the issue of vaccination passports found it necessary to accuse Israel of having proposed last year to annex up to one-third of the “West Bank”; and to accuse Hotovely, a former “settlements minister”, of being such a right-wing religious extremist that her appointment as ambassador had provoked 2000 liberal British Jews to petition against it. Did she or did she not, demanded Maitlis, support the “two-state solution”? To which Hotovely said how gratified she had been by the warm response to her arrival from the Jewish community, and calmly delivered her second zinger of the evening.

 You cannot speak about a formula when the Palestinians aren’t willing to sit and negotiate with Israel. They’re not interested in any two-state solution.

 From all of which we might make two observations. The first is that this was an impressive debut appearance by Tzipi Hotovely. She remained calm, factual and pleasant while delivering facts that punctured the lies (and which many Brits will not have heard before).The second is that,  the BBC seems to be taking its talking points not just from the Guardian, but also now from extreme-leftist NGOs.

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Israel stands alone on Iran

 Video Of The Week - Who Are Israelis, Really? - https://tinyurl.com/2tpzzt7d

 From al-monitor by Ben Caspit. For the full article go to https://tinyurl.com/5xzp8fzd

Lt. Gen. Gregory Guillot, head of the US Central Command’s Air Force, visited Israel at the end of February. His host, Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin, took him up personally on an F-15 Eagle for a bird’s eye view of Israel’s borders.

Guillot’s late February visit reflects the extent of cooperation between the various Israeli and American defense and intelligence agencies, which has been experiencing a golden age in recent years. Israel is the only country in the world other than the United States in which a prototype of the F-35 Stealth fighter is being upgraded with additional armaments and fuel tanks. Israel is the only country permitted to install its own domestically developed technology on the advanced aircraft, which will allow it to share the F-35’s sophisticated command and control system with older fighter planes in the Israeli fleet, such as the F-15 and F-16.

These capabilities, as well as being the only country in the world to dispatch the Stealth on real time operational missions on a daily basis, have drawn the attention of many other air forces. The extensive cooperation with the British, Italian, Greek, German, Emirati and other air forces is breaking all records. Israel’s two main defense assets — the absolute control of the skies over the Middle East and the seemingly inexhaustible information collected by its intelligence community — have turned Israel into a magnet for international cooperation, ardent courting and joint drills.

However, the picture is bleak for Israel’s diplomatic posture on the world stage. Israel is experiencing “withdrawal symptoms” from the high it enjoyed for four years of the Donald Trump presidency. Unlike the welcome presence in many countries of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, Mossad director Yossi Cohen, Norkin and other top brass, Israel’s foreign affairs arena is under threat of international boycott from Washington and elsewhere.

The businesslike but chilly tone adopted by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on his visit to Israel on April 11-12 is just the tip of the iceberg with which Israel risks colliding in the coming months. Although this has not been completely verified, Israel apparently did not convey to the Americans in full a detailed warning of the operations and attacks it allegedly planned to mount on Iranian targets over the past two weeks — with suspicious timing proximity to the renewal of talks with Iran on its nuclear program and Austin’s visit to Israel.

Israel has adopted a policy of deliberate ambiguity regarding its low-intensity warfare with Iran, the so-called war between the wars. A long string of attacks on vessels smuggling Iranian oil and/or weapons has been attributed to Israel over the last three years. In recent weeks, however, Israel appears to have abandoned this clandestine posture and displayed a seeming interest in being blamed for certain actions against Iran.

Three such operations have occurred in recent weeks: An airstrike on weapons depots near Damascus, the sabotage at Iran’s uranium enrichment facility in Natanz and the Red Sea attack on an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps vessel used to stage operations and gather intelligence. Iran, which usually ignores such attacks and focuses instead on what it perceives as its primary mission — the lifting of the international sanctions crippling its economy — seems to have had a change of heart. On April 13, an Israeli-owned merchant ship — MV Hyperion Ray — was attacked near the Gulf of Oman in the third operation of its kind in two months. Shortly after, The New York Times reported that senior Israeli officials have conveyed messages to the effect that Israel would not respond to this latest attack, which caused minor damage, and is seeking instead to restore a measure of calm in the arena.

One thing is certain: Israel has been left more or less on its own to face the US alignment with its allies in striving for a diplomatic resolution of the conflict with Iran rather than escalating sanctions and clashes. Israel’s new allies in the Gulf are backing it up, in silence, but on the real front vis-a-vis the world, Israel stands glaringly alone.

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Mohammed Dajani and his Reflections of the Holocaust

Video Of The Week - Medical Volunteers to Care for Holocaust Survivors - https://tinyurl.com/2mh8pbah

By Craig Brandhorst, 10-2-2021. For the full article go to https://tinyurl.com/2hu4fj6

In 2014, Mohammed Dajani, longtime professor at Jerusalem’s al-Quds University, took 27 Palestinian college students to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp near Krakow, Poland. He wanted them to confront the Holocaust, which he believes is downplayed in Palestinian schools, and to consider the complicated history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from multiple perspectives. The backlash, however, would cost him his job and endanger his life. It would also embolden his commitment to reconciliation.

Mohammed Dajani is a man without a country. Born in Jerusalem in 1946 but driven to Egypt in the Nakba, or Palestinian exodus, during the Palestinian-Israeli War of 1948. Educated in Quaker schools in Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem and at the American University of Beirut. Banished from Lebanon for radical activity but welcomed by the United States. Graduate of not one but two Ph.D. programs, the first at the University of South Carolina. 

Dajani is also a complicated man. Secular Muslim well-versed in the Quran. Founder of the political science program at Jordan’s Applied Science Private University and of the Institute for American Studies at al-Quds University. Adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Co-director of the Wasatia Graduate School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Flensburg in Germany. Scholar. Philosopher. Activist. 

At heart, though, Dajani is a teacher. That’s evident from the start of our conversation, which occurs over two days in September via video chat — him at his Jerusalem apartment, me at home in Columbia, quarantining during the pandemic. I’m intrigued by the Auschwitz trip, which prompted a backlash in the Palestinian press and threats to his safety, but three minutes into the call he is delivering an erudite minilecture on the need for cultural education in a civil society.

“If we look at history, when Plato was disappointed with Greek democracy, he did not reject it but started the Academy,” he says. “When John Dewey felt that democracy in America was faltering, he wrote Democracy and Education. I believe that is what we need here for reconciliation between Israel and Palestine.” 

Dajani is emphatic but polite, soft-spoken, professorial. He tents his fingers, smiles ever-so-slightly at the webcam. He’s not guarded but chooses his words carefully. “Part of our conflict is ignorance,” he explains. “Ignorance of ‘the other,’ lack of empathy for ‘the other,’ lack of knowledge of ‘the other’ — their culture, their history, their literature. I feel that education can play a significant role here.”

But first, he says, Palestinian and Israeli schools need reform. He describes the current education model as “conflict education disguised as national education” and suggests, instead, a curriculum based on conflict resolution, negotiation, tolerance, dialogue — the basic tenets of Wasatia, an initiative he and his brother, Munther Dajani, started in 2007 to promote reconciliation. The word comes from the Quran, he explains, and means “middle path.”

“ ‘Wasatia’ is moderation,” he says. “We would like to raise children within a moderate culture, within a democratic culture, for them to understand the elements of conflict, to understand ‘who is the other,’ ‘why is the other,’ and to appreciate the legitimacy of ‘the other.’ We want to change the mentality from ‘us or them,’ to ‘us and them.’ This is crucial to the existence and welfare of both peoples.”

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Coexistence For Special Needs Soldiers

 Video Of The Week - SPECIAL NEEDS IN UNIFORM - https://tinyurl.com/nrypj3ts

Arutz Sheva Staff , Mar 26 , 2021 

For the full article go to; https://tinyurl.com/cbe98x88

Jews, Druze, Christians, and Muslims are joining together for a worthy cause Special in Uniform marks formation of new IDF unit made up of volunteer soldiers from mixed Druze, Muslim, and Christian town.

Just before Passover, the holy day of freedom and togetherness, Special in Uniform and JNF-USA hosted a heartwarming ceremony celebrate the founding of a new unit in the Ami’ad army base. The base is in the Upper Galilee region of northern Israel. The special story about this unit is that the volunteers are from the El-Basma High School in the Kisra-Sumei village, which is home to a mixed Druze, Muslim, and Christian population 

Military service is a rite of passage of sorts for Israeli high school graduates. It is also a gateway to a successful career and future. According to Ministry of Labor, Welfare and Social Services statistics, there are approximately 1,570 children and youth with disabilities in the Israeli Druze, Christian, and Muslim population. Many of their siblings serve in the IDF, yet these youths receive automatic military exemptions due to their disabilities despite their fierce desire to serve their country. Now Special in Uniform is offering these young people a chance to realize their dreams.

A revolutionary project of the Israel Defense Forces in conjunction with JNF-USA, Special in Uniform incorporates young people with mild physical and mental disabilities into Israel’s military. This offers them training and skills that empower them to integrate long-term into Israeli society and the workforce. The program accentuates the unique talents of each participant and places him or her into an appropriate setting within the IDF. Breaking down societal barriers and fostering widespread acceptance of social diversity, Special in Uniform focuses on the ability, not disability, of everyone. It encourages independence, inclusion, and full societal integration. Currently, the program integrates some 500 volunteers with special needs into 40 IDF aerial, marine and land units stretching from the northern Lebanese border south to Eilat.

JNF’s Special in Uniform is a two-year volunteer training program culminating in the graduating youths receiving their soldier’s IDs and being placed in military bases across Israel. There, they utilize the knowledge and skills acquired to perform important jobs on base. They can forget their disabilities and focus instead on their varied abilities and talents. At Special in Uniform, youngsters with low self-worth mature into independent, confident young men and women who believe in themselves and their abilities. Throughout their years of military service, they acquire important social and life skills that empower them to meld seamlessly into society and workforce. 

Basic training in the IDF culminates with a ‘Masa Kumta’, which translates as ‘beret journey.’ At the end of this march, fresh inductees mark their passage into becoming full-fledged soldiers and earn their corps beret. In the ceremony marking the founding of the new unit, commanders and soldiers from the unit hiked alongside their SIU comrades in an unforgettable Masa Kumta celebrating these young heroes and their personal and collective triumphs. At the end of the journey, the young volunteers were met by their proud families. Many had watched with tears in their eyes as their children were awarded their berets, dotages, and volunteer certificates.

Accompanied by the Special in Uniform team, the volunteers travel every week to the base. The day begins 8:30am sharp with lineup and a flag ceremony alongside the brigade soldiers. After this the volunteers join crews on base in the Teleprocessing, Logistics and Technology departments. Not only does the presence of soldiers with special needs on military bases increase their own quality of life, but it also benefits the entire army—and by extension, the nation. The genial natures of these volunteers, their capacity and desire to work hard and, above all, their perseverance contribute to a positive atmosphere on base that motivates their fellow soldiers.

At the ceremony, Munir Sayyad, father of volunteer soldier Hiadd, addressed the assembly. He expressed his heartfelt gratitude to Special in Uniform and the remarkable individuals who made it possible for his son and his friends to live their dream.

“At a very young age, my son suffered a trauma that left him with a severe speech impediment. He began in the special education school system, and we’ve continued there since. Since our extended family all serves our country in various capacities be it security, police, border patrol or the army, Hiadd always looked longingly upon his cousins and relatives, all who proudly wore their uniforms and served their country, and asked, ‘Why can’t I?’ Now, with this incredible opportunity, he finally feels like an equal, like everyone else,” the proud dad emotionally shared.

“We’re so impressed with this new unit from the Druze community, and especially the El-Basma volunteers who so deeply yearn to serve and contribute to our country,” said Kobi Malka, North coordinator of Special in Uniform. We launched the program here with an uplifting, emotional beret journey that left us all inspired. Throughout the journey, there was a unifying sentiment of being a soldier, of being an equal, of being part of a community. These kids are here for the community, here to give, here to contribute, here to accomplish. And today, they received their turquoise beret, testimony to their desire to do their utmost to benefit our country and people.”

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