Unity between Israel and the Iranian People

Video Of The Week - Present Day Israel 2023 - https://tinyurl.com/yc8mz8zz

For the full Article from the JPost go to - https://tinyurl.com/mpen7ssd

Reza Pahlavi's trip underscores Israel’s message of unity with the Iranian people.

I am traveling to Israel to deliver a message of friendship from the Iranian people, engage Israeli water experts on ways to address the regime’s abuse of Iran’s natural resources and pay respects to the victims of the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah.

 

I want the people of Israel to know that the Islamic Republic does not represent the Iranian people. The ancient bond between our people can be rekindled for the benefit of both nations. I’m going to Israel to play my role in building toward that brighter future.

Israel and Iran can have a prosperous future said Reza Pahlavi — the son of the deposed Iranian Shah —as he and his wife Yakima made their first-ever visit to Israel on Monday night.

“We are very happy to be here and are dedicated to working toward the peaceful [and] prosperous future that the people of our region deserve,” he tweeted on landing in Ben-Gurion Airport where he was greeted by Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel who had arranged his visit.

“From the children of Cyrus, to the children of Israel, we will build this future together, in friendship,” Pahlavi tweeted.

His trip underscores Israel’s message of unity with the Iranian people given that the two nations have a historic relationship that continued with the modern state and was destroyed only in 1979 during the Islamic revolution that thrust Pahlavi’s father Mohammed out of power.

The Islamic Republic has since treated Israel as an enemy nation and has threatened to annihilate it, a goal which has caused Israeli leaders to view it as an existential threat akin to that which the Jews faced from Nazi Germany. Iranian leaders are also among those who have denied that the Holocaust occurred.

To counter that image, Pahlavi went directly from Ben-Gurion Airport to the national Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem.

“It is especially meaningful for me to be here on #YomHaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today, I join Holocaust survivors and their families at @yadvashem to help keep the memory of Holocaust victims alive. As author Elie Wiesel said, without memory there is no hope.”

At the end of the ceremony Pahlavi stood for Israel's national anthem and then met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sarah.

Gamliel said that Pahlavi was “the most senior Iranian personality to ever come to a public visit to Israel. We appreciate the Crown Prince's expression of solidarity with the citizens of Israel in the face of the severe terrorist attacks perpetrated by Iran.” 

She added that was also grateful for his visit to Yad Vashem “in order to sympathize with the Jewish people, in contrast to Iran's rulers who deny the Holocaust and encourage antisemitism. Together, through a common vision, we will take the first step in building bridges and collaborations between the two peoples.”

Prior to his arrival Pahlavi wrote of his visit, “I want the people of Israel to know that the Islamic Republic does not represent the Iranian people. The ancient bond between our people can be rekindled for the benefit of both nations.”

As part of his itinerary, he will meet with Israeli officials and visit the Western Wall and the Bahaii Gardens in Haifa.

Iran's foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani was dismissive when asked about the trip at his weekly press conference.

"Neither the person you've mentioned (Reza Pahlavi), the purpose of this trip, nor the place he wants to travel to are worthy of discussion," he said.

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Shameful Silence on West Bank Massacre

Video Of The Week -Manipulated Media Attacks on Israel- https://tinyurl.com/mr2dtd4f         

For the full article by Brendan O'neill go to - https://tinyurl.com/mnrknere

So that’s it, is it? A British mother and her two young daughters are murdered by a terrorist in the most awful fashion imaginable, and we’re just going to move on? Three British citizens are shot to death at point-blank range on account of their identity, their beliefs, and it’s fading from our collective memory already? The Foreign Office did express ‘sadness’ over this massacre of half a family, which is something, I suppose. Though if you and your mother were murdered overseas for being the ‘wrong’ kind of people, wouldn’t you hope for something more than sadness from the government? Anger, perhaps?

This is the grim story of the murder of Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia and Rina in the West Bank. The Dees are originally from the UK. The father of the family – Leo Dee – was a rabbi in Hendon in north London and later Radlett in Hertfordshire, parts of Britain with large Jewish populations. The family made aliyah to Israel in 2014 and were living in Efrat, a settlement in the West Bank. On Friday, as they drove to Tiberias in northern Israel for Passover, mum Lucy’s car was ambushed by a Palestinian gunman. He shot at the vehicle, causing it to crash. Then he walked to the wreckage with his Kalashnikov and sprayed bullets inside. Maia and Rina were hit by 20 bullets. They were 20 and 15 years old. Lucy survived, in a comatose state. ‘How will I explain to Lucy what has happened to our two precious gifts?’, Rabbi Dee wept at the funeral of his daughters. The next day, Lucy died.

Where is Britain’s anger over this slaughter of three women who were British citizens? Actually, two women and a minor. A British-born child – 15-year-old Rina – was shot, executioner-style, for the crime of being a Jewish person in the West Bank and there is only deathly silence from Britain’s moral clerisy. Our opinion-forming elites expressed more sympathy for Shamima Begum, 15 when she fled Britain to join the Islamist death cult of ISIS, than they have for Rina Dee, 15, when she was cut down for her family’s offence of migrating from the UK to a peaceful Jewish community in the West Bank.

Officialdom’s initial comments on the murders were extraordinarily passive. ‘We are saddened to hear about the deaths of two British-Israeli citizens and the serious injuries sustained by a third individual’, said the Foreign Office. Deaths? The women did not just expire, of natural causes or something. These weren’t deaths, they were killings. Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the US, said the lack of ‘outrage’ in the FO’s statement was strange and disturbing. According to the UK government, ‘The sisters merely “died” and a third person was somehow injured’, he said. The murders were decontextualised, de-moralised in fact – turned from wickedness consciously inflicted on three civilians into a mere regretful demise.

The passive voice could be heard in the media, too. ‘Daughters of British rabbi die in West Bank drive-by shooting’, was The Sunday Times headline. This elevation of the act of dying over the act of killing, of the passing away of the victims over the murderous intent of the killer, speaks to an urge to drain the incident of its true horror. To render it sorrowful rather than political; a tragedy rather than terrorism. The BBC’s first report on the attack swiftly stated that ‘the shooting took place hours after Israeli warplanes carried out airstrikes in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip’. As if these things are morally linked. As if the fact that Israel and Palestinian elements remain in a state of low-level war explains the massacre of three unarmed women. I trust the BBC still believes in the Geneva Conventions? They stipulate that in times of war no violence may be visited on individuals who are ‘taking no active part in the hostilities’.

Such moral depravity has been widespread. Under the BBC’s tweet about Maia and Rina’s funeral, one respondent said they ‘shouldn’t be there in the first place’. ‘Not a smart idea to go settle [in] occupied land’, laughed another. ‘Occupiers dead’, said one. The cruelty of it all is unsettling. Then we had the response of Cage, the advocacy group that works with communities affected by the ‘war on terror’. Its Twitter thread branded Rabbi Dee a ‘coloniser’ and said he and his family enjoyed ‘an apartheid lifestyle’. “

The British silence on the massacre of these three British citizens is a new nadir in moral cowardice. The problem is that the faces of the murdered mother and her young, aspirational daughters pose too much of a threat to the self-aggrandising moral narrative of the anti-Israel set. These women dangerously call into question the hyper-racial depiction of Zionists as a wicked, abnormal people, and reveal that, in truth, some of them look and sound a lot like us. This must not stand. Too much moral capital has been invested in othering these people. And so Britain’s chattering class looks the other way – anywhere but into the eyes of the three women murdered for being Jews.

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An Unspeakable Atrocity

Video Of The Week -  Rabbi Dee speaks from the heart -  https://tinyurl.com/yycmkx7u

For the full article by Melanie Philips go to - https://tinyurl.com/yxnphkwp

On Friday, as the rabbi drove towards Tiberias in northern Israel for a Passover break with his family, the car following him carrying his wife Lucy (Leah) and two of his daughters, Maia and Rina, was ambushed by Palestinian Arab gunmen and crashed into the barrier. The gunmen then approached the car and shot Lucy and her daughters at point blank range with 20 bullets from a Kalashnikov rifle.

This unspeakable atrocity has united Israel in horror. Once again, Israeli Jews have been murdered for nothing other than the fact that they are Jews living in their ancestral homeland.

Since September 2000, Palestinian Arabs have murdered at least 1420 Israelis. Over the past year, at least 30 Israelis have been murdered in such attacks. For months, there have been multiple attempted attacks against Israeli citizens almost every day.

For Anglo-Jews, however, the attack on the Dee family isn’t just close to home. It is home. Rabbi Dee was a community rabbi in Radlett, just outside London, from 2011-2014 when the family moved to Israel.

The atrocity was unspeakable. What makes it all the more unbearable is the reaction from so much of the west to such horror. The Dee family lives in Efrat and the attack happened in the Jordan valley, all part of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. Israeli Jews who are attacked in these territories tend to be dehumanised by western commentators as “settlers'“ in the “occupied territories” who were “asking for it”; or they are airbrushed out of media coverage altogether. 

This is even though the Palestinian Arabs have been murdering Jews in Israel and these territories for more than a century, decades before the so-called “occupation of the West Bank” after the 1967 six day war, and decades before the State of Israel even came into existence in 1948. The initial response of the UK government was shocking. As Israel’s former ambassador to the US Michael Oren tweeted in disgust: 

“The British government was “saddened to hear about the deaths of British-Israeli citizens and the serious injuries sustained by a third individual” and called on “all parties to de-escalate tensions”. No mention of Palestinians or terror, no outrage. The sisters merely “died” and a third person was somehow injured. The citizens are not really British but a  qualified “British-Israelis”. And “all” parties, including the Israeli victims, are urged to de-escalate”.

Shame on Britain. The dead were from a British family. You might have thought the British government would be outraged at the murder of three of its citizens. You might have thought that it would seek to hold the Palestinian Arabs to account for their incitement and complicity.

But of course, the British government is itself complicit in this and in all the other attacks on Israelis. That’s because it connives at the incitement to murder Israeli Jews by continuing to insist falsely that Israel is in “illegal occupation”; it continues to sanitise or ignore fanatical Palestinian Arab Islamic incitement to murder Israeli Jews and steal their land; it continues to refuse to exert any pressure on the Palestinian Arabs to cease its war of extermination against the State of Israel. Instead, it calls on both sides to “de-escalate” — an obscene moral equivalence between terrorists and terrorised, which means in practice telling Israel not to take the action that’s necessary to protect its people.

After the death of Lucy Dee, and doubtless aware of the gathering outrage over the British government’s initial response, the Foreign Secretary James Cleverly tweeted:

Tragic news that Leah Dee has also died following the abhorrent attacks in the West Bank. There can be no justification for the murder of Leah and her two daughters, Maia and Rina. We will continue to work with the Israeli authorities to end this senseless violence.

And to all of this sickening reaction by the British establishment, there has been (at time of writing) not a peep of protest from Britain’s Jewish leadership. But wait — a headline in Ha’aretz says:

British Jews Are Finally Speaking Out”… 

Oh dear, not against the appeasement of the terrorist Palestinian Arabs but against Netanyahu and the Israeli Far-Right. These cowardly people have been put to shame by a decent Muslim, Noor Dahri. He tweeted:

“I feel so sorry and have no words to express my grief. Two innocent British teen sisters were murdered by my co-religious people (Palestinians) in the name of my faith. My religion hasn’t permitted them to kill innocent people in its name at all. They don’t belong to my religious principles but unfortunately most of my Muslim followers (whom I know) are supporting them in killing Jews and call these acts resistance and reaction which I feel ashamed of them. I am so sorry but my unconditional support will always remain with you. Jews have absolute right in the holy land to celebrate and enjoy Passover with peace. Never feel weak because you aren’t born helpless. Never Again. May Allah rest victims in peace. Amen. “

Palestinian Arabs committed this vile deed. But they are consistently backed, encouraged, sanitised, excused and incentivised by many others who have accordingly kept this war of extermination going for the past century. Lucy Dee and her two daughters, along with Alessandro Parini, are the latest victims of it and they won’t be the last.

Remarkably, there have been no words of hatred from Rabbi Dee. No words of bitterness, no calls for revenge. Only an expression of trust that justice will be done; a reiteration of the balance within Judaism between justice and love; and the beyond-moving hope  — after his wife finally succumbed to her injuries — that by choosing good over evil we can all make the world a better place.

May the memory of Lucy, Maia and Rina Dee be a blessing.

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