"Apartheid" State, Who is Kidding Who?

Video Of The Week - CNN lies corrected by Bennett- https://tinyurl.com/yc6735tf

For the full Article go to the Spectator - https://tinyurl.com/2p96jkjk

If you’re after evidence of apartheid in Israel, you don’t have to look very far. Amid rioting by Palestinians and Arabs, the Israel Police has declared the Temple Mount in Jerusalem off-limits. For ten days, only practitioners of one religion will be allowed to visit.

For context, Temple Mount is home to the Holy of Holies, the most sacred site in Judaism, and is where the First and Second Temples stood until their destruction by the Babylonians and Romans, respectively. Following Jerusalem’s conquest by Islamic imperialists in the 7th century, a succession of caliphs worked to Islamise the Temple Mount by erecting Muslim worship sites including the Dome of the Rock, built on top of the old Jewish temple, and Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

In recent days, Arab and Muslim rioters have run amok on the Temple Mount and throughout the Old City. They have fired off Molotov cocktails and rocks at law enforcement from inside Al-Aqsa. They have beaten religious Jews on their way to pray at the Western Wall. They have stoned at least ten buses, injuring passengers including a 13-year-old girl. Hence why the Israel Police has said adherents of one religion and one religion alone will be permitted on the Temple Mount for the next ten days. That one religion is, naturally, Islam.

For centuries, Jews were forbidden from ascending Temple Mount by the occupying empire of the day

Welcome to Israel, apartheid state. This interdict is not unusual and nor is the tumult that has occasioned it; both have played out semi-regularly in recent years. Religious discrimination against non-Muslims is in fact routine on Temple Mount, which is governed by the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, a Jordanian religious trust, in cooperation with the Israel Police.

For centuries, Jews were forbidden from ascending Temple Mount by the occupying empire of the day, and even after they liberated their capital city in 1967, almost all senior rabbis have forbidden Jews to set foot on the hill. Nevertheless, some have persisted and Israel permits a limited number of its Jewish citizens to visit their holiest site, provided they do not pray while there. Those Jews who do pray are arrested. Jews may only enter the complex through a separate gate designated for use by non-Muslims.

The virtues of these arrangements are open to question. For one, they concede Islamic and Palestinian supremacist views about the Temple Mount and the freedom of Jews to worship there. Limiting Jewish access to the hill does not stop Palestinian terror groups, preachers and media routinely prompting riots with false claims that the Zionists are ‘storming Al-Aqsa’. Israeli police operations to curtail said rioting are then packaged by the international media and NGOs as a wanton Israeli attack on Muslim holy sites and worshipers, a framing amplified by gullible western progressives.

Ariel Sharon’s decision to visit Temple Mount in 2000 is generally agreed to be the cause of the Second Intifada, in which Palestinian suicide bombers murdered more than a thousand Israelis. (If you’re wondering why the lesson from this incident was ‘Israeli Prime Ministers must not be so provocative as to visit Jewish holy sites in their own capital city’ and not ‘blowing up buses and pizza parlours for four years because someone walked up a hill seems a bit extreme’, you just failed your Foreign Office civil service exam.) Nor do the current arrangements do much for the sacrosanctity of Al-Aqsa, the mosque that is ‘desecrated’ by Israeli police entering to stop rioting but not by the rioting itself.

Rather than acknowledge Israel’s self-denying efforts to keep the peace on Temple Mount, the international community simply breezes past them and onto their condemnations. It is taken as given that Israel ought to cede sovereignty in its capital city and task its police with arresting Jewish citizens for praying on a hill. This goes to the hypocrisy that runs through elite western (and, it must be said, Israeli) discourses on Israel and the Palestinians. Western legal norms and the assumptions of rights-based liberalism are applied – often, though not always, dishonestly – to characterise Israeli laws, military decisions and security measures as arbitrary and discriminatory, motivated by racial and religious malice and a nationalist desire to dominate the Palestinians. Because Israel is not Sweden, it is damned as South Africa.

Yet this commitment to universalising western values only goes one way. It is not applied to Palestinian demands for a Jew-free state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, nor to Palestinian prohibitions – backed up by the death penalty – against selling property to Jews. Most noticeably, it does not apply when Israel discriminates against its Jewish citizens and restricts their liberty of movement and freedom to manifest their religious faith. Israelis often complain about double standards but there is only one standard and it is always against Israel.

The Temple Mount compromise is messy, unjust, inequitable and probably doesn't bring a fraction of the benefits the Israeli security establishment tells itself, but it is an accommodation made in the interests of public order, stability, and coexistence. It is plainly discriminatory against Jews but Israel figures, rightly or wrongly, that this is the price of keeping an uneasy peace. There's your apartheid state.

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Violence At The Security Fence

Video Of The Week - 'Israel is simply defending itself'- https://tinyurl.com/y9uhswwf

The Israeli military on Saturday night identified 10 of the 15 people 

reported killed during violent protests along the Gaza security fence 

as members of Palestinian terrorist groups, and published a list 

of their names and positions in the organizations.

On Friday, some 30,000 Palestinians took part in demonstrations along the Gaza border, during which rioters threw rocks and firebombs at Israeli troops on the other side of the fence, burned tires and scrap wood, sought to breach and damage the security fence, and in one case opened fire at Israeli soldiers.

The army said that its sharpshooters targeted only those taking explicit violent action against Israeli troops or trying to break through or damage the security fence. Video footage showed that in one case a rioter, whom the army included in its list of Hamas members, appeared to be shot while running away from the border. The army in response accused Hamas of editing and/or fabricating its videos.

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According to the Israel Defense Forces (Arabic link), eight of the men killed were members of Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip. One served in the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and another was affiliated with “global jihad,” it said, apparently referring to one of the Salafist groups in Gaza.

Earlier on Saturday, Hamas publicly acknowledged that five members of its military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, were among the fatalities.

The army did not provide evidence for its identifications. Most could be independently verified with photographic evidence of the operatives wearing uniforms or receiving a military-style funeral from the terror group in question. Others could not be immediately substantiated. At least one appears to be partially incorrect.

The IDF identified Hamdan Abu Amsha as belonging to Hamas, yet in his funeral he was wrapped in a flag belonging to a different terrorist group, Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and a Fatah-affiliated Twitter account claimed him as “our martyr.”

Palestinians carry the body of Hamdan Abu Amsha, said killed a day earlier by Israeli fire during a mass border protest along the security fence, in Beit Hanoun in the northern of Gaza Strip, on March 31, 2018. (AFP/ MAHMUD HAMS)

The army said that at least one of the Hamas members, Sari Abu Odeh, was part of the group’s elite Nukhba force and that another, Muhammad Abu Amro, served in its tunnel operations. (The IDF’s Arabic spokesman provided more details in Arabic via Twitter.)

The IDF identified one of the two Hamas members who shot at Israeli soldiers on Friday evening and attempted to breach the security fence, before they were shot dead, as 23-year-old Mussa’b al-Saloul.

Gaza’s Hamas terrorist rulers released these images of members of its military wing who it acknowledged were among 15 Gazans it said were killed by Israeli fire during clashes along the security fence on Friday, March 30, 2018.

Palestinian media reported that the bodies of the two gunmen were captured by Israeli soldiers. The IDF would not officially comment on this claim.

The oldest operative identified was Jihad Farina, 35, a company commander in Hamas’s military wing; the youngest was 19-year-old Ahmad Odeh, who served in the terror group’s Shati Battalion, the army said.

Palestinians hurl stones toward Israeli soldiers during a protest near the Gaza Strip border with Israel, in eastern Gaza City, Saturday, March 31, 2018. (AP/ Khalil Hamra)

Hamas claimed those killed were taking part “in popular events side-by-side with their people.”

Thousands attended funerals in Gaza Saturday for 14 of those killed — two were buried on Friday — with mourners holding Palestinian flags and some chanting “revenge” and firing into the air.

“Where are you, Arabs? Where are you, Muslims?” mourners chanted at one funeral, calling on the Arab and Muslim world to intervene. A general strike was held in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

IDF Spokesman Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis said on Saturday that all those killed were engaged in violence, adding that Gaza health officials exaggerated the number of those wounded and that several dozen at most were injured by live fire while the rest were merely shaken up by tear gas and other riot dispersal means.

Manelis said on Friday evening that the army had faced “a violent, terrorist demonstration at six points” along the fence. He said the IDF used “pinpoint fire” wherever there were attempts to breach or damage the security fence. “All the fatalities were aged 18-30, several of the fatalities were known to us, and at least two of them were members of Hamas commando forces,” he said.

The Palestinians’ march to Gaza’s border with Israel on Friday was the largest such demonstration in recent memory, calling for Palestinians to be allowed to return to land that their ancestors fled from in the 1948 War of Independence. It was dubbed the “March of Return.”

A picture taken on March 30, 2018 shows Palestinians taking part in a demonstration commemorating Land Day near the border with Israel east of Gaza City. (AFP/Mahmud Hams)

The death toll from Friday’s protest was provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which also added that some 1,400 Palestinians were injured during the protests, over half by live rounds. Israeli authorities have no way to independently confirm the casualty reports.

Manelis warned Saturday that if violence drags on along the Gaza border, Israel will expand its reaction to strike the terrorists behind it. The military has thus far restricted its response to those trying to breach its border, but if attacks continue it will go after terrorists “in other places, too,” he said.

Manelis reiterated that Israel “will not allow a massive breach of the fence into Israeli territory.”

He said that Hamas and other Gaza terror groups were using protests as a cover for staging attacks. If violence continues, “we will not be able to continue limiting our activity to the fence area and will act against these terror organizations in other places too,” he said.

Hamas is an Islamist terror group that seeks to destroy Israel. It seized control of Gaza from Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah in a violent coup in 2007.

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar (C) shouts slogans and flashes the victory gesture as he takes part in a tent city protest near the Gaza border on March 30, 2018 to commemorate Land Day. (AFP PHOTO / Mohammed ABED)

The army has remained on high alert even as the violence appeared to abate Friday evening, amid fears of persisting attacks, including infiltration attempts and rocket fire.

Protest organizers have said mass marches would continue until May 15, the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel. Palestinians mark that date as their “nakba,” or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands left or were forced to leave during the 1948 War of Independence. The vast majority of Gaza’s two million people are their descendants.

At previous peace talks, the Palestinians have always demanded, along with sovereignty in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Old City, a “right of return” to Israel for Palestinian refugees who left or were forced out of Israel when it was established. The Palestinians demand this right not only for those of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who are still alive — a figure estimated in the low tens of thousands — but also for their descendants, who number in the millions.

No Israeli government would ever be likely to accept this demand, since it would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority state. Israel’s position is that Palestinian refugees and their descendants would become citizens of a Palestinian state at the culmination of the peace process, just as Jews who fled or were forced out of Middle Eastern countries by hostile governments became citizens of Israel.

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As soon as the cameramen left, so did the rioters

Video of the week - The Arabs Are Aliens In The Land Of Israel - https://tinyurl.com/y8j7snnb

From “Tablet” by Amit Deri

My name is Amit. I have two small children, and another one on the way. And even though balancing a young family and a full time job is difficult enough, once a year I leave everything behind and report for one month of reserve duty in the Israel Defense Forces.

It’s hard to explain, to those who haven’t experienced it, just how powerful the experience of miluim, as we call it in Hebrew, really is. There are few things more moving than seeing a collection of guys put their careers on hold and happily do their part to keep their nation safe. My own company is made up of a successful engineer, the manager of one of Israel’s trendiest restaurants, a biologist, an educator, and others from all walks of life who, for one month a year, put aside political differences, financial worries, and anything else to spend 18-hour days patrolling the vicinity of Hebron and keeping the peace.

We’re not unique in any way, but, sadly, you’re not likely to read about us in the papers. The headlines, I learned the hard way this week, are reserved for violent provocateurs. Last Wednesday, a Palestinian terrorist stabbed an Israeli citizen, wounding him lightly before being shot and killed by a nearby security guard. On Friday, Israel returned the terrorist’s body to his family, a basic humanitarian act that Hamas, for example, denies the families of the Israeli soldiers it had kidnapped and killed. We were told to expect trouble.

The next day, Saturday, my men and I, about 100 of us in total, arrived to find about 400 Palestinian rioters throwing Molotov cocktails, hurling large rocks, attacking us with slingshots, and burning tires. They were documented by something like 40 cameras representing every foreign press outlet you can think of. They were shouting slogans about Muhammad’s army coming to avenge itself on the Jews, and pranced bravely in front of the photographers, knowing full well that the IDF’s strict regulations prevent us from doing much more than trying to disperse the violent mob by shooting canisters of tear gas.

We did the best we could to keep anyone, Israeli and Palestinian, from getting seriously injured. And then, magic: A short while into the demonstration, the media, getting what it came for, decided to leave. As soon as the last cameraman was gone, the very same Palestinian rioters who were, just a moment earlier, so passionate and furious and violent tossed aside their gasoline-soaked rags and their boulders and cheerfully walked away. They weren’t interested in a real confrontation. They weren’t truly mad. They were putting on a show for the press. An hour later, a friend sent me a photograph of myself, just published by the Arab media, holding a tear gas gun and looking menacing.

To be honest, I’m amused by the incident, but also incensed by it. I know this is hardly a new story, but when your own well-being and that of your friends is on the line, it feels just a touch more urgent than usual. I’m very proud to do my duty and serve my country, but I wish members of the media were as serious about doing theirs, taking the time to accurately reflect what’s happening on the ground rather than buy into fake news narratives set up by cynical propagandists.

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