Today’s Top Stories
1. A Mail on Sunday investigation into UK foreign aid uncovered how tax money is being squandered on salaries for Palestinian terrorists and a boondoggle West Bank palace for Mahmoud Abbas.
Britain gives £72 million a year to Palestine, more than one-third of which goes straight to the PA. It openly admits supporting terrorists whom it hails as heroes for fighting illegal occupation, awarding lifetime payments that rise depending on time spent in jail and the seriousness of crimes.
One Hamas master bomber has reportedly been given more than £100,000. Other ‘salaries’ go to the families of suicide bombers and even teenagers involved in the latest upsurge of deadly attacks on Israel.
2. Microsoft’s experiment with an artificial intelligence chat robot on Twitter ran amok. The robot, a simulated teenage girl named Tay began generating anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, misogynistic tweets. Within 24 hours, Microsoft shut down the experiment and deleted every tweet (save three) from Tay’s Twitter account.
The flaw? Microsoft programmed Tay to learn from her conversations. Microsoft’s apology acknowledged that “a subset of Twitter users” figured out how to game Tay to their advantage. Intelligence never felt so artificial.
3. The IDF arrested a soldier who was filmed shooting an unarmed, prone Palestinian in Hebron on Thursday. The Palestinian had stabbed a soldier. More at YNet and the Times of Israel.
A second video was said to corroborate the soldier’s claim that he believed the Palestinian had a bomb, but I couldn’t tell anything. Army investigators say that a soldier had already checked and confirmed that the terrorist didn’t have an explosive.
The soldier in question reportedly told another soldier that “a terrorist who stabs our friend must die.”
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
Israel and the Palestinians
• On Friday afternoon, police in a Jerusalem thwarted a stabbing attack by a 15-year-old Palestinian girl.
• The UN Human Rights Council nominated an anti-Israel Canadian legal expert, Michael Lynk, as the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories. More on the story and Lynk’s background at the Jerusalem Post and UN Watch.
No “favorite son” support from Ottawa: The Canadian Press picked up on Canadian Foreign Minister Stephane Dion questioning the Lynk nomination on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/MinCanadaFA/status/713411853599289344?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
• Israel slammed a UN blacklist” of Israeli firms operating in the West Bank. So did the US.
• Hamas sentenced two PA security officers to 12-15 years in prison. The Jerusalem Post writes:
The two officers were part of what Hamas described as a PA-engineered conspiracy to instigate unrest and instability in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas claims that the alleged plot was sponsored by PA security officers who fled the Gaza Strip to the West Bank.
• Happy birthday, Mahmoud Abbas.
President Mahmoud Abbas's birthday is today; he's now 81 and in the 11th year of his 4 year term in office. pic.twitter.com/JnJrFD1o9n
— Khaled Abu Toameh (@KhaledAbuToameh) March 26, 2016
• Four east Jerusalem residents indicted for Islamic State-related terror activities.
• USA Today reports “Palestinian groups find non-violence calls are drowned out by militants.”
• Palestinian schools and media glorify martyrdom, but have a problem teaching “Romeo and Juliet” because “it encourages suicide and disobeying parents.” What would Shakespeare say?
Mideast Matters
• A noteworthy statement on an Islamic State mouthpiece web site explains why jihad in Palestine does not take precedence over jihad elsewhere. MEMRI translated excerpts from the statement, explaining:
Since the entire world except for the ISIS-controlled areas is ruled by infidels, the article asks why war against the Jews is being prioritized over the war against other infidels. It also states that restricting jihad’s target to war solely against the Jews is a forbidden alteration in the laws of Allah. In ISIS’s view, if there is to be any prioritization of jihad in any one place, then it should be to liberate the Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina from the clutches of the Saudi royal family.
• Turkey warns of possible Islamic State attack on synagogues, churches, and embassies.
• Israeli, Jordanian jets teamed up to warn off Russians, says King Abdullah.
• According to Hurriyet, Israel and Turkey have been saying all the right things since last week’s Istanbul attack, raising confidence in both Ankara and Jerusalem.
• Sleep better: International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano told AFP he worries about nuclear terrorism nowadays:
A grapefruit-sized amount of plutonium can be fashioned into a nuclear weapon, and according to Amano it is “not impossible” that extremists could manage to make a “primitive” device — if they got hold of the material.
“It is now an old technology and nowadays terrorists have the means, the knowledge and the information,” he said.
But he said that a far likelier risk was a “dirty bomb”.
This is a device using conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material other than uranium or plutonium.
Such material can be found in small quantities in universities, hospitals and other facilities the world over, often with little security.
Around the World
• Belgian Jews have little confidence that the government can defend them. Most of the buzz surrounds one Belgian rabbi’s comments to Israeli radio. The JTA writes:
On Thursday, Menachem Hadad, a Brussels rabbi, told Israel’s Army Radio, “Belgian authorities have no understanding of security issues — zero.” He said soldiers posted outside a synagogue and the city’s Chabad House told him that for months, they used to guard the area with no bullets in their rifles. “It was just a show. It’s not normal,” he said.
• Tweet of the day from Father Gabriel Naddaf:
https://twitter.com/FrGabNaddaf/status/713248298317049856
• The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spoke out against campus anti-Semitism in an interview with London’s Sunday Times.
• Over at the University of California . . .
The University of California’s regents declared on Wednesday they would not tolerate anti-Semitism on campus but rejected a proposal to equate anti-Zionism with religious bigotry, as they tried to defuse tensions between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students.
• Colorado‘s governor signed a bill divesting state retirement funds from anti-Israel companies, while the Georgia General Assembly advanced similar legislation.
• A professor in New Zealand professor compared SodaStream to IG Farben, a German company that exploited Jewish slave labor during World War II.
Commentary/Analysis
• France’s role in selecting anti-Israel activist Michael Lynk for a key UN human rights post undermines Paris’s credibility in peace efforts, argues Hillel Neuer.
• One of my favorite British writers, Howard Jacobson, wrote his final column in The Independent. Not surprisingly, the paper’s distaste with Israel came up.
But no one entertains all of the people all of the time. Kelner stopped being entertained when I began savaging other writers on the paper. And those other writers weren’t much entertained either. But readers who didn’t share the indurated anti-Zionism I was attacking declared themselves grateful.
In other circumstances, I might have written fewer articles on the subject. I didn’t come on to the paper a polemical Zionist. If I have sometimes sounded like one, that’s the paper’s fault. I’m not saying I cared nothing for Israel beforehand, but there was a new orthodoxy of anti-Zionism in the air and this paper inhaled its poisons freely. Had there been fewer anti-Zionists writing, and had their hostility to Israel been less a thing of myth and rhetoric, I might not have felt the call to buckle up as often as I did. But when I did buckle up, it was as a critic of their psychology, not their politics. The deep, self-deluding irrationality of hatred will always give itself away in language first.
• Here’s what else I’m reading this weekend . . .
– Ruth Wisse: March madness, the anti-Semite bracket (via Google News)
– Jared Samilow: Watch out, Jewish students: The anti-Israel movement will boycott you next
– Barbara Kay: The link between BDS and Jew hatred on campus
– Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinian campuses “more Hamas than Hamas”
– Abi Wilkinson: What is it about the Left which makes anti-Semitism so common?
– Tal Keinan: BDS is an existential threat
– Yossi Kuperwasser: Dying for Allah
– Shadi Khalloul: Israel’s Christian minority
– Vijeta Uniyal: What India could learn from Israel
– Eran Lerman: The Russians are leaving Syria: Why the surprise?
Featured image: CC BY Jon S with additions by HonestReporting; Amano CC BY-SA IAEA Imagebank; Jacobson via YouTube/The Royal Society for Literature;
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