Spotlighting the Israeli Police, Downplaying the Intra-Eritrean Riot

Video Of The Week - Israel's Gas Supply to Save Europe https://tinyurl.com/bp8w9rsx

On September 2, 2023, the streets of south Tel Aviv were turned into a warzone as rival groups of Eritrean expats battled amongst themselves and then, later, with the Israeli police, who were attempting to disperse the melee.4:00 pm

On September 2, 2023, the streets of south Tel Aviv were turned into a warzone as rival groups of Eritrean expats battled amongst themselves and then, later, with the Israeli police, who were attempting to disperse the melee.

The riot began when Eritreans opposed to the dictatorial regime in their home country confronted a group of Eritreans celebrating the African country’s independence. The confrontation quickly turned into a full-blown rampage, with members of both the pro-government and opposition camps attacking each other with pieces of lumber, metal, rocks, and at least one axe.

Ultimately, the Israeli police were forced to use a variety of riot dispersal methods, including tear gas, stun grenades, and live ammunition fired in the air, to quell the riot and return calm to the area.

With roughly 150 people injured, the brawl garnered a significant amount of international media attention.

While most of the media accurately portrayed the riot, several news outlets disproportionately focused on the police response, creating the false impression that the tumult was essentially a dispute between Eritrean refugees and the Israeli police.

Several commentators on social media also used the police response as an opportunity to malign the Jewish state.

Spotlighting the Israeli Police, Downplaying the Intra-Eritrean Riot

Several international news outlets played down the violent clash between the two groups of Eritreans and instead focused heavily on the Israeli police’s response.

For example, the BBC’s initial headline reported it as “Police clash with Eritrean asylum seekers.” Even though the headline was later updated, the article continued to dedicate several paragraphs to the police response while only briefly referring to the violent confrontation between the Eritrean groups in two paragraphs.

The BBC report even went so far as to implicitly blame Israel for the rampage, claiming that it “was sparked after activists opposed to the Eritrean government said they asked Israeli authorities to cancel an embassy event on Saturday.”

Similarly, The Guardian’s report, under the headline “Eritrean asylum seekers and police injured in clashes in Israel,” dedicated the majority of its coverage to the skirmish between the police and the Eritrean rioters.

When referencing the initial clashes that pre-empted the police response, The Guardian only mentioned a “demonstration” that “turned violent” as well as “clashes…between supporters and opponents of the Eritrean regime.”

This is a far cry from its coverage of a similar riot in early August in Sweden. In that instance, nearly the entire piece was dedicated to describing the intra-communal fighting and not the police’s response.

This false portrayal of the riot as primarily a clash between the police and Eritrean refugees was also evident in Sky News’ headline, “More than 140 injured in clashes between Eritrean asylum seekers and Israeli police.”

Voice of America’s one-minute video, “Eritrean Asylum-Seekers Clash With Israeli Police,” predominantly featured images of the police response and almost no coverage of the violent skirmishes that precipitated the response.

The story was not newsworthy for The New York Times until, 24 hours later, the Israeli government began discussing a plan to deport those who had engaged in the violence, contributing to a false and misleading media narrative that portrays the Israeli police and government as the aggressors and victimizers of Eritrean refugees.

Misrepresenting the Riot on Social Media

Some anti-Israel social media personalities took their hate to the extreme by erasing any mention of the clash between the two Eritrean groups and portraying the Israeli police as using deadly force without provocation.

The British rapper Lowkey claimed that “Israeli police opened fire with live ammunition on a protest of Eritrean refugees in Tel Aviv” while pro-Palestinian activist Heather Alexandra was more blunt in her revolting message by tweeting that “Israeli police fired live bullets at black people in Tel Aviv today.” 

Israeli police fire with live ammunition on  protest of Eritrean refugees in Tel Aviv.

Over 100 protestors are injured, including 13 in serious condition.

Just another day in a racist state. pic.twitter.com/O0qtX5fZdu

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) September 2, 2023

Independent journalist Rafael Shimunov claimed that “There are images of corpses of Eritrean refugees who were murdered by Israeli police in a playground” (even though there were no reported deaths from the riot at the time of his tweet) and that “Their ‘crime’ was protesting an event by the Eritrean embassy. Rather than deescalate…they used bullets and will now smear the dead.”

Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti tweeted that “Israeli police are brutally cracking down on Eritrean refugees in Tel Aviv,” adding that this signified the “essence and core of Israeli supremacy. A single ethnoreligious state for White Jewish people.”

Barghouti clearly doesn’t account for the fact that the vast majority of Israeli citizens are of non-European descent.

Various skirmishes have occurred around the world between expatriate Eritrean supporters and opponents of its government. However, only the melee that occurred in Israel seems to have resulted in a change of narrative to turn an intra-Eritrean conflict into one between the police and Eritrean expats.

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"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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Stockpiling Rocks and Ammunition in Mosques-the New Religion?

Tension on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount isn’t new. The site of both the First and Second Temples in ancient times and al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock shrine today has the potential for friction built-in.

But what we are increasingly seeing are cynical attempts to exploit the holy site for a different purpose, for propaganda  rather than peaceful religion. The Palestinian rioters who desecrated the site by throwing rocks and firecrackers at police and on the Jewish worshipers gathered at the Western Wall below the Mount, did not go to the area Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) or al-Aqsa compound for a spiritual Ramadan experience.

Video footage of clashes between Israeli police and security forces and Palestinian rioters at the site have gone viral and are often difficult to watch. There certainly seem to be cases of police overreacting and attacking Palestinians who appear to be unconnected to the violence. Nonetheless, what needs to be kept in mind is cause and effect.

The Muslims who stockpiled stones, rocks, logs and firecrackers in al-Aqsa did not do so for religious purposes. They prepared for a riot – to attack police and Jewish worshipers – not for prayers. Police did not storm al-Aqsa Mosque to “conquer” it. They broke in to arrest the rock throwers who had barricaded themselves inside after Friday prayers. Some of the masked Palestinians waved Hamas flags and praised arch-terrorist Muhammed Deif as they tried to bombard the Jewish worshipers who had come to pray at the Western Wall at the start of the Passover holiday.

With their unholy actions, the rioters are disturbing the freedom of prayer of everyone, including other Muslims. The vast majority of the 50,000 or so Muslim worshipers in the al-Aqsa area on Friday came with the peaceful intention of prayer at Islam’s third holiest site. The fact that so many thousands were able to gather there shows that Israel is intent on protecting freedom of worship for the Muslims.

It is Jewish worship that is limited at Judaism’s holiest site. The Muslim extremists object to any Jewish presence on Temple Mount and now refer to the entire area as “al-Aqsa” and yesterday they threw rocks at buses traveling to the Western Wall. Jews who ascend Temple Mount note, however, that part of the area serves as a soccer field, far from serving religious needs.

Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority have all accused Israel of carrying out “provocations” and an “assault” at the site. They are hoping to turn it into a battle cry. It is easy to rally Muslims everywhere around the lie that al-Aqsa is in danger and needs defending. The terrorist organizations are hoping that this becomes as self-fulfilling prophesy.

Stockpiling rocks and weapons in a mosque is a desecration, not a way of elevating its religious status; similarly, launching rockets in the direction of Temple Mount does absolutely nothing to “protect” it. On the contrary.

The Temple Mount is significant to all three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Thousands of Muslim worshipers were able to pray at al-Aqsa Mosque yesterday, during Ramadan, as a few hundred Jews also went up to Temple Mount, on Passover, while Christians could be seen celebrating Easter in Jerusalem.

Israel cannot allow a minority of violent rioters to desecrate the holy site. Anyone who supports freedom of religion and truly cares about the Temple Mount should condemn the Arab rioters, not the police.

 

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SOLVING GAZA CRISIS IS EASY – FOCUS ON LIVING, NOT KILLING

Video Of The Week- Why Israel Uses Lethal Force During Mass Gaza Protests- https://tinyurl.com/yah7hclf

By Mark Humphrys

Sunday Times (London)

27-5-2018

Books of condolence have opened in Ireland for some hideous people, such as Fidel Castro in 2016 and Yasser Arafat in 2004. But the opening in Dublin of a book of condolence on May 16 for the Hamas rioters in Gaza takes the biscuit. More than 100 rioters have been killed attacking the border with Israel over the past two months, and the reaction in Ireland has been hysterical. There were calls to expel the Israeli ambassador and boycott Israeli goods. The Hezbollah flag flew at an Ireland-Palestine Solidarity protest in Derry. One popular Irish Twitter account even called for a terrorist attack on the Israeli embassy.

What happened in Gaza this month was that 50,000 rioters tried to break through the border and storm into Israel to kill Jewish families in houses nearby. They were open about that. Social media in Gaza was full of calls to attack and kill local Jews. One post said: “Kibbutz Kerem Abu Salem is . . . 200 meters from the fence . . . and only 15 families live there. Attack them with knives!”

One video showed a group breaking through the fence. They shout: “Allah Akbar. Remember Khaybar. Oh Jews, we’re coming to slaughter you.” Khaybar was the battle where Muhammad slaughtered the Jews and took their women as war booty.

Now you may say we don’t know that the rioters wanted to lynch Jewish families. But that doesn’t matter. The Israel Defense Forces believed the mobs wanted to lynch Jewish families, so it used force to stop them. And if tear gas and live fire are not enough, it will use helicopters and fighter jets. The military would never let 50,000 jihadis raid a Jewish village to see what happened. The only logical thing for Gazans to do is steer clear of the fence.

Could the Israeli army have stopped them with less bloodshed? Claims were made that soldiers were shooting indiscriminately. This was rather disproved by the emergence of photographs of military funerals for about half of those killed. A Hamas official said most of the dead killed in riots on May 14 were Hamas: “Sixty-two people were martyred; 50 of them are from Hamas and 12 from the people.” If Israel’s forces were shooting at random, then they had the luckiest shooting day of any army in history.

Gazans would clearly be safe if they left Israel alone. On May 14, huge mobs attacked the fence and 60 died. The next day, a few people attacked it and two died. The following day the rioters stayed away. This may indicate a way to keep Gazans safe. All they have to do is stay away from the fence. We heard the claim that they were driven by “despair”. What they were driven by is hatred, anti-semitism, jihad and the excitement of a march on Israel to cleanse the land of the Jews. They were driven by hope, not despair.

The tragedy of Gaza is that, ever since the Jews left, a new life has been there for the taking. All they have to do is ignore Israel, stop terrorism, stop thinking about the Jews, and build a state in Gaza. They should abandon “the struggle” and pursue money and life. If they did so, and if they were serious, Israel would drop the security barriers and partner with them to pump money into Gaza. They could become some of the richest and happiest Arabs in the Middle East.

But Gazans do not want to be rich and happy. They want other things: honour, blood, soil, revenge and jihad. These things will not make them happy, but that is what they want, so their misery will continue. They do not need books of condolence. They need someone to talk sense to them.

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