Palestinians Turn Jerusalem Into a Tool of Terror - Noah Beck ISRAEL TODAY

Palestinians Turn Jerusalem Into a Tool of Terror

Friday, February 10, 2017 |  Noah Beck  ISRAEL TODAY

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Jerusalem

Originally written for the Investigative Project on Terrorism

Palestinian and other Arab leaders threatened violence in response to President Trump's pledge to move the U.S. embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. While Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also promised such a move as candidates, each backed off.

The terrorist who killed four Israelis in Jerusalem Jan. 8 by mowing them over with his truck expressed agitation after hearing a sermon at a local mosque criticizing Trump's embassy relocation promise.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership reportedly instructed the mosques it controls to focus their religious sermons on the embassy relocation. Worse still, the PA promised the terrorist's widow a lifetime, $760-per-month stipend for her husband's "martyrdom for Allah."

Arab reactions to Trump's embassy plans are more heated than they were to those of candidates Bush and Clinton perhaps because of Trump's pledge to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and relocate the embassy there from Tel Aviv, not only as a candidate (including during his address at last year's AIPAC Policy Conference) but also as president-elect, issuing public reassurances on the issue. Trump even planned to visit the Temple Mount as a candidate, although the visit never materialized and – as president – he said last Thursday that it was "too early" to discuss moving the U.S. Embassy.

Nevertheless, Palestinian and Arab leaders have warned that moving the embassy could lead to unrest and violence. Influential Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called the idea "a declaration of war against Islam." PA President Mahmoud Abbas said he could revoke the PLO's recognition of Israel, while his Fatah party warned the move "would open the gates of hell."

Such declarations by political and religious leaders give a green light to Palestinians to react violently, as the Jerusalem terrorist truck attack shows.

Palestinian leaders, including the "more moderate" Palestinian Authority, regularly deny that Jews have any historical or religious connection to the Temple Mount.

PA Jerusalem Affairs Minister Adnan al-Husseini demanded an apology Sunday after United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it was "completely clear that the Temple that the Romans destroyed in Jerusalem was a Jewish temple." The statement "violated all legal, diplomatic and humanitarian customs and overstepped his role as secretary general," al-Husseini said.

This is not the first time that the Palestinians, including the "more moderate" Palestinian Authority, manipulated Jerusalem into an incendiary trigger for terror.

As Palestinian Media Watch reported, Abbas led calls in 2015 for Palestinians to act violently to "defend" Muslim holy sites. He blessed "every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem" and presented violence in "defense" of holy sites and against the Jews' "filthy feet" as a religious imperative.

Indeed, the "stabbing intifidah" was launched in 2015 by false rumors that Israel was trying to change the status quo on the Temple Mount.

"Arabs are convinced that Israel is set on destroying, desecrating or 'Judaizing' Haram al-Sharif, the Jerusalem compound that includes al-Aqsa, Islam's third-holiest site," Benny Avni wrote in the New York Post. Such incitement persists, Avni noted, even though "Israel points out that the arrangements that have existed since 1967, when it seized control of the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site, are intact, and will remain so: A Jordanian trust, the Waqf, maintains the Mount. Jews can visit, but not pray there."

Even worse, President Obama's State Department reinforced the dangerously false incitement about Jerusalem promoted by Palestinians.

Writing about the 2015 "Stabbing Intifida," journalist Jeffrey Goldberg rightly pointed out that it was "prompted in good part by the same set of manipulated emotions that sparked the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s: a deeply felt desire on the part of Palestinians to 'protect' the Temple Mount from Jews."

In the 1929 Arab riots, Arabs killed more than 130 Jews, and nearly as many Arabs died when British police responded. Among the findings of a subsequent investigation by the Shaw Commission was that "the Mufti was influenced by the twofold desire to confront the Jews and to mobilise Moslem opinion on the issue of the Wailing Wall" (in Jerusalem) and that one of the chief causes of the riots was "Propaganda among the less-educated Arab people of a character calculated to incite them."

Arab incitement against Jews happens regularly, often without the explosive element of Jerusalem. In a sermon broadcast on Hamas's Al-Aqsa TV in early January, a Hamas leader name Marwan Abu Ras, accused Jews of sending "AIDS-infected girls to fornicate with Muslim youths." He also claimed that Israel was allowing drugs to be smuggled through tunnels into Gaza, while blocking the entry of essential goods. "Their state is about to disappear," Abu Ras said. "...My brothers, know that people, stones, and trees all hate [the Jews]. Everyone on Earth hates this filthy nation, a nation extrinsic to Mankind. This fact was elucidated by the Quran and the Sunna."

But adding Jerusalem to Arab incitement against Israelis can make the resulting violence even more explosive.

Qanta Ahmed, a pro-Israel Muslim reformer who visited both the Jewish and Muslim holy sites at the Temple Mount, eloquently noted the Islamist thinking that enables the weaponization of Jerusalem: "Forbidding worshippers from entering holy sites in Islam, including non-conforming or pluralist Muslims who reject both the ideology and accouterments of Islamism is an impassioned pastime of fervent Islamists who foolishly believe only they are the keepers of our Maker..."

Unfortunately, Jerusalem has a long and bloody history of being manipulated by Muslim leaders into an explosive tool of incitement. But if Islam truly is a religion of peace, its leading practitioners should stop turning religious holy sites into weapons of war, and instead embrace Doctor Ahmed's tolerance.

Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.

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The Left Lost Its Logic On Israel - Noah Beck ISRAEL TODAY

The Left Lost Its Logic On Israel

Thursday, January 26, 2017 |  Noah Beck  ISRAEL TODAY

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America

Originally written for the Investigative Project on Terrorism

Support for Israel among Democrats has plummeted in recent years, a new Pew poll shows, with about as many – 31 percent – saying they sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israel, which garnered 33 percent support.

By contrast, 74 percent of Republicans surveyed sympathize more with the Jewish state. That is the widest partisan gap since 1978.

A similar poll last year found a deep divide within the party, with conservative and moderate Democrats favoring Israel over the Palestinians by 53-19 percent.

This trend has accelerated during President Barack Obama's tenure. During Israel's 2014 war with Hamas, 61 percent of Democrats sympathized with Hamas and hundreds of left-wing historians openly sided with the terrorist group.

Bernie Sanders, whose liberal support nearly won him the 2016 Democratic primary, sought to empower anti-Israel figures like Cornel West – a supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement – and James Zogby of the Arab American Institute.

President Obama's refusal to veto an anti-Israel U.N. resolution last month was ranked as the most anti-Semitic incident of 2016 by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. When Congress condemned that resolution, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, a leading contender to run the Democratic National Committee, voted against it.

This hostility toward Israel is not limited to the American Left.

In the UK, it often coincides with anti-Semitism. As Jonathan Tobin observed, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has been "openly sympathetic with Hamas and Hezbollah," has "campaigned for the release of terrorists convicted of attacking Jewish targets," and "praised vicious anti-Semites." The co-chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club resigned after the organization voted to endorse Israel Apartheid Week. The club has a growing record of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents. Last May, Britain's Labour Party secretly suspended 50 of its members for anti-Semitic and racist comments.

France's left-wing government just convened a 70-nation "peace conference" that was hostile to Israel

. France has summoned far less international pressure to the exponentially bloodier conflict next door in Syria. Moreover, the French government funds French, Israeli, and Palestinian organizations that support and promote BDS campaigns against Israel, a report by NGO Monitor shows. Such boycotts are illegal under French law.

France also funds several other NGOs with alleged ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group, the report notes.

In the West, the political left considers itself "progressive," yet it increasingly targets the only Mideast country that actually embraces progressive values such as the rule of law, gender and sexual equality, and freedom of religion and speech. "Progressives" attack the only Mideast country making progress for all of humanity in science, technology, and medicine – from a crowdsourced solution to traffic (Waze) to breakthrough research on melanoma and leukemia.

Yet, on university campuses, where the minds of future politicians are formed, hatred of Israel and Jews has become endemic. The AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit organization that tracks BDS and anti-Semitic activity on U.S. campuses, reported more than 600 instances of such activity in 2016.

So why do liberals embrace illiberal players in the Arab-Israeli conflict? Double standards, underdog favoritism, media bias and group think, and prejudice at institutions like the United Nations.

Because Israel is a country of laws and Western values, Western critics often hold Israel to a standard that no democracy could meet. Alan Dershowitz captures the standard that should apply: "Name a single country in the history of the world faced with internal and external threats comparable to those faced by Israel that has ever had a better record in human rights; a better record with compliance of the rule of law; a better record of concern for civilians?"

In addition, media coverage often is skewed by Palestinian intimidation and deception, by reporters who uncritically favor underdogs, and by sloppy journalism and outright bias.

Hamas physically intimidates journalists who dare to defy its propaganda goals, thus distorting both the "facts" and the photos distributed to the world.

"Pallywood" – the practice of staging casualties and defaming Israel – has been deceiving journalists for at least 16 years. A particularly galling Pallywood example from 2015 was the inflammatory lie – by "moderate" Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas – that Israeli forces "executed" a 13-year old after an attempted terrorist attack. The truth: the child was treated in the same Israeli hospital as the boy he tried to murder.

Even Amnesty International acknowledged the unreliability of "eyewitnesses" in the conflict.

By contrast, during the 2014 war, Hamas executed 23 Gazans and tortured dozens of others.

In September 2015, Hamas imprisoned Gazans for protesting over a lack of electricity, causing some Gazans to admit that they prefer Israeli rule to Hamas.

Consistently sloppy journalism also poisons public opinion against Israel. News organizations often fail to identify the terrorist and the victim when reporting on Arabs killed by Israelis trying to defend themselves from a terrorist attack. Such missing context creates the false impression that Israelis wake up every morning asking how they can hurt Arabs.

The BBC's distortions often turn terrorists into victims. Its bias is so egregious that even its former chief complained:

"Regrettably, this is not the first time the standard of reporting and impartiality has been unsatisfactory in recent weeks. On Saturday 3rd October, I was disappointed to see the BBC News website publish a misleading and counter-factual headline: 'Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attacks kills two'. I note reports that this headline underwent four revisions following public criticism." The BBC's horrible headlines continue, describing the terrorist in last month's Jerusalem track-ramming attack as a "Driver of a lorry...allegedly ramming pedestrians."

Worse still, mainstream political figures sometimes promote anti-Israel calumnies. Last April, Sanders claimed that Israelis killed "over 10,000 innocents in Gaza," an estimate nearly seven times higher than Hamas's propaganda estimate of civilian deaths. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes falsely claimed in a recent PBS interview that Israel has built "thousands of new settlements" (rather than about 200). PBS never corrected this falsehood.

Thus, the "free press," which is supposed to act as a check on the government, ends up abetting its misinformation campaign against Israel.

The Obama administration and most of the political left promote a kind of anti-settlement religion that blames the lack of peace with the Palestinians on settlements. This position ignores the last century of Arab Muslim attacks on Israelis, starting decades before any settlements existed. The anti-settlement religion axiomatically affirms that settlements are illegal, even though legal scholars have concluded otherwise. The same religion also ignores Israel's removing the settlement of Yamit for peace with Egypt in 1982, and its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Those actions did nothing to persuade Palestinians to pursue peace, as they responded with more than 10,000 jihadi rocket attacks aimed at Israeli civilians.

Liberal support for illiberal players is illogical and counterproductive. If "progressives" choose only to blame Israel and never ask Palestinians to embrace liberal values, stop their incitement to violence, renounce terror, and accept Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, then such "liberals" have mislabeled themselves while making peace less likely.

Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.

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Islam, Sexual Violence and the West - Noah Beck ISRAEL TODAY

Islam, Sexual Violence and the West

Sunday, July 31, 2016 |  

Noah Beck  ISRAEL TODAY

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Originally written for the Investigative Project on Terrorism

The mass rape of hundreds of German women mostly by Muslim migrants last New Year's was recently revealed to be far worse than originally acknowledged. Authorities now believe that more than 1,200 women were sexually assaulted – over twice the original estimate of 500. While more than 2,000 men were allegedly involved, only 120 suspects — about half of them recently arrived migrants — have been identified.

One explanation for why it took half a year for the full extent of the crime to be revealed is the German police's effort to avoid a public backlash against refugees. But ultimately, Holger Munch, president of the German Federal Crime Police Office, acknowledged to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that there is "a connection between the [sexual assaults] and the rapid migration in 2015."

Denial is not a strategy. Western countries that cherish women's rights must wake up to the fact that many migrants could challenge those values. Most of the mass migration comes from violence-plagued, Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, where women are second-class citizens subject to honor killings and various legal restrictions, and where the local culture often condones rape, encourages wife-beating, and treats women as sexual objects (with 72 virgins promised to Muslim men who reach heaven).

Thus, just as the mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa raises the specter of regular Islamist terror on European soil, it also augurs the kind of sexual abuse that those regions have traditionally tolerated. German officials implicitly seemed to acknowledge as much with their laughably impotent campaign to re-educate migrants using signs that explain acceptable behavior towards women.

Non-Muslim ("infidel") women are especially vulnerable to sexual assault: Christian women are often abused and denigrated in Islamic societies, as extensively exposed by Raymond Ibrahim, author of Crucified Again. The Islamic State (ISIS) regards the Yazidi, another religious minority, as devil worshippers and reportedly enslaved up to 5,000 Yazidi women, subjecting them to rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and other acts of extreme brutality, like burning alive a 20-year-old girl "because she refused to perform an extreme sex act."

Saudi Arabia, arguably the leader of the Sunni Muslim world, has a legal system based on strictsharia law, which prohibits women from dressing as they wish or even driving a car. Saudi rulings are notoriously abysmal when it comes to rape. Last year, a Saudi woman was sentenced to 200 lashes after being gang raped by seven men. In 2013, a Saudi preacher who raped, tortured, and murdered his 5-year old daughter was punished with just eight years of prison, 800 lashes, and a $270,000 fine. With such legal norms, it's not surprising that when members of the country's ruling elite travel to the West, their behavior may not change accordingly (last October three womenaccused a Saudi prince of sexual assault in Beverly Hills). By ironic and tragic contrast, U.S. soldiers stationed in Muslim majority countries are trained to respect local norms to the point that marines stationed in Afghanistan were actually taught to look away if they find Afghanis raping children, a common local practice.

While sharia advocates often claim that the Islamic dress code protects women, the brutally unfair treatment of women by Islamists seems driven more by power-hungry male chauvinism and/or sexual insecurity than by any genuine concern for women's welfare, judging from the staggering hypocrisy of its proudest proponents. The 9/11 jihadists visited strip clubs, and paid for prostitutes in their motel rooms. Anwar Al-Awlaki, the American-born imam whose sermons continue to attract recruits to jihad, frequented prostitutes. Osama bin Laden had an extensive pornography collection, and is among the many examples of jihadis obsessed with porn and prostitution collected by Phyllis Chesler, a CUNY emerita professor of psychology and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Between 1997 and 2013, well before the recent mass migration to Europe began, an estimated 1,400 children had been sexually abused in Rotherham, England, predominantly by gangs of British-Pakistani men.

While that scandal involved mostly "white" victims, an Oxford-educated Pakistani-British woman revealed her own exploitation, noting that "sexual abuse has been systemically under-reported among Asian girls due to deeply entrenched cultural taboos – obscuring the reality that there is a similarly rampant problem of minority girls being abused by members of their own community."

A few weeks ago, Swedish police received 35 complaints from girls aged 12 to 17 who claimed that "foreign young men" sexually assaulted them at a popular music festival.

Soeren Kern, a distinguished senior fellow of the Gatestone Institute, compiled details of dozens of sexual assaults by migrants in Germany during the first two months of 2016, and noted the enabling reaction from "the upside-down worldview of German multiculturalism: Migrants who assault German women and children are simply rebelling against German power structures. Germans who dare to criticize such assaults are racists."

In contrast to the initial cover-up by German police of the mass rape by mostly Muslim migrants, France's top security official recently spoke with candid alarm about the threat that his country faces. Just two days before the truck-ramming, ISIS-inspired massacre in Nice, Patrick Calvar, chief of the Directorate General of Internal Security, warned members of the French parliamentary commission that France is on the verge of a "civil war" that could be sparked by the mass sexual assault of women by migrants.

There are remarkable exceptions within Islam itself, such as the Tuareg, an Islamic tribe in Africa, where women embrace sexual freedoms, dictate who gets what in divorce, and don't wear the veil because men "want to see their beautiful faces." But how long can the Tuareg's enlightened version of Islam survive in southwest Libya when ISIS is expanding there, or in Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria, where Boko Haram is on the march?

There are also brave Muslim reformers trying to improve the way Islam treats women. However, they mostly operate in the West, where they still face death threats; one example is Irshad Manji. Another, Fadela Amara, founded Ni Putes Ni Soumises, a group that defends Muslim French girls against the pressures they face to wear the hijab, drop out of school, and marry early without the right to choose their husband. Amara went on to serve in the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, but she, too, received death threats for her efforts to liberate Muslim women.

Muslim feminists outside of the West assume far greater risks. Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel ‎Baloch, who openly expressed her feminist views online, was recently strangled to deathby her brother in their family's home, in an "honor killing." Her "intolerable behavior" is what drove him to murder her, he said, because her risqué persona was bringing "dishonor" to the family. There are an estimated 1,000 honor killings per year in Pakistan.

Even in the West, few feminists dare to criticize Islam because doing so can invite threats and violence. Absurdly, those brave enough to do so also risk being prosecuted for "hate speech."

Western countries must support courageous Muslim reformers while protecting all women living in their territories from the sexual abuse often encouraged by Islamist culture – whether that abuse is perpetrated by recent immigrants or long-time residents. The survival of the West depends on it.

Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.

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