Today’s Top Stories
1. Anti-Semitism and extremism were on display at a demonstration in London against Israeli PM Netanyahu’s UK visit where he met with British PM David Cameron. Despite its status as a terrorist organization, Hezbollah flags were spotted. Breitbart UK reported from the scene:
Arrieh A. Miller, executive director of The Zionist Federation, told Breitbart London: “The yellow and green flags over there are Hezbollah, there’s also a Hamas flag on the reverse of one of them.
Ostensibly, brandishing the flag of a terrorist organisation is an arrestable offence, but the police seemed as uninterested as they were in taking action against the man who flew the ISIS flag outside Big Ben.
“We’ve complained to the police about it and they have said they will deal with it. They are a proscribed organisation in the UK, a proscribed terrorist organisation, as are Hamas – by the EU,” Miller continued.
“This shows the message of the protest. That demonstration is not against Netanyahu, it is not even against Israel; it is in support of terrorism.
“What we talk about is a red-green alliance, which is the socialists aligned with the pro-Palestinians and anti-Zionists.
“The only thing they agree on is their hatred of Israel. They don’t agree on rights for women; they don’t agree on rights for gays; they don’t agree on rights for education. What brings them together is a hatred of Israel, and that is what is on display at this demonstration today.”
This call for genocide of Israelis is just one piece of footage taken from outside Downing Street by pro-Israel advocates exposing the real agenda behind the protests.
The Times of Israel also reports on one individual, later arrested, who brandished a coin, shouting at the pro-Israel demonstrators: “You only understand money.”
2. Defense Minister Moshe Ya’lon signed a decree on Tuesday banning the Murabitun and Murabatat Islamist activist groups, which gather on the Temple Mount to disturb and intimidate Jewish visitors to the holy site on a daily basis.
3. Amazon agrees to remove products with image of blood spattered Israeli flag.
A standing symbol of anti-Israel sentiment, the bloodied flag is available for purchase in the form of a cell phone cover, a shower curtain, a welcome mat, a mouse pad, an umbrella and a throw pillow. Prices range from $7.99 for the mouse pad, to just $34.99 for the “100% polyester waterproof bathroom shower curtain.”
Israel and the Palestinians
• The Times of Israel reports Arab residents of Jerusalem are significantly more conciliatory to Israel than their counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza, a recent poll has found, leading its author to conclude that interaction with Israeli society has a dramatic moderating effect.
A Washington Institute poll conducted in June this year among 1,500 Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem was widely cited in the media for its findings on the question of citizenship: 52 percent of Jerusalem’s 300,000 Arabs would opt for Israeli citizenship “with equal rights” rather than Palestinian citizenship in a future two-state scenario. In the West Bank, a mere 4 percent said they’d prefer Israeli citizenship to Palestinian, and 12 percent in Gaza.
• As the Jewish New Year approaches, some 29,500 immigrants arrived here over the Hebrew past year, with more than 14,000 hailing from the former Soviet Union, according to statistics for 5775 released by the Immigration and Absorption Ministry and the Jewish Agency. This marks a 13 percent increase over 5774.
While around 3,600 immigrants came from North American, the largest sources of aliya were France (7,350) and Ukraine (6,900), increases of 10 percent and 50%, respectively.
• Israel’s Knesset wants to be the greenest parliament in the world.
• The United Nations is expected on Thursday to allow the Palestinians to raise their flag at its headquarters in New York in a symbolic move highlighting Palestinian aspirations for statehood.
Around the World
• A Turkish civil war? Yes, according to Kurdish source.
The leader of Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish political party warned that the country was on the verge of full-blown civil war between state forces and militant Kurdish separatists. The remarks made by Selahattin Demirtas, co-chairman of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, followed a worrying night of violence and firebombing in Turkey, with hundreds of reported attacks by nationalist mobs on offices belonging to Demirtas’s party, known by the Turkish abbreviation HDP, as well as on ordinary Kurds.
• Has the US administration been misrepresenting intelligence reports on ISIS to give the impression that the group is weaker than it actually is? The Daily Beast has the exclusive:
The accusations suggest that a large number of people tracking the inner workings of the terror groups think that their reports are being manipulated to fit a public narrative. The allegations echoed charges that political appointees and senior officials cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons program in 2002 and 2003.
Commentary/Analysis
• Tempest in a teacup from Robert Mackey at the NY Times over the reaction to Colbert’s ironic ad for Sabra Humus and the BDS, which boycotts it. Next up? Scarlett Johansson. (Note: Video is only available to US readers.)
• Jewish orgs are out of touch with US Jews according to the Washington Post, citing research from Pew and the failed bid to stop the Iran deal as evidence. Here’s the money ‘graph on Israel:
One of the most striking, but not surprising, results of the Pew Research Center survey is the disenchantment that many, perhaps most, American Jews feel toward Israel. No nation can control another people and occupy its land for 48 years, as the Israelis have the Palestinians, without brutalizing and coarsening themselves, eroding many of the high moral hopes that American Jews once invested in Israel. Some older Jews are still attached to the Israel of 1948, to the scrappy but long-vanished Israel of kibbutz egalitarianism — one reason, perhaps, that three Jewish members from Florida, home to so many Jewish retirees, oppose the Iran deal. Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, Israel’s values have become less universal and more dangerously tribal — appealing to the more tribal and self-segregating sensibilities of America’s Orthodox, and less and less to the more liberal and cosmopolitan sensibilities of the American Jewish majority. Most American Jews still feel what Catholics term a preferential option for the poor, for immigrants, for minorities. They don’t see such values in today’s Israel — or in American Jewish orthodoxy, either.
• David Bernstein takes issue at the assertion that Sheldon Adelson is the reason for GOP support for Israel:
Jason Zengerle, writing in New York Magazine, argues:
On issue after issue — from military aid to settlement policy — the GOP now offers Israel unconditional and unquestioning support. … The person most responsible for this development is the multibillionaire casino magnate and Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson.
No, putting aside the question of whether GOP support for Israel is truly “unconditional and unquestioning,” the person most responsible for making support for Israel a core Republican issue is Osama bin Laden, with a supporting role played by Yasser Arafat.
• David Horsey says that dictatorial rulers and fanatical terrorists have played the most direct role in Syria’s disintegration and, as is the case in power struggles throughout the region, the contesting sides have demonstrated an utter uninterest in moving beyond the mafia model of social organization.
Featured image: CC BY-NC Tobia Myrstrand Leander via flickr with additions by HonestReporting
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