“So, before Israel gets further lectures on what needs to be done, perhaps we should take stock of what’s transpired — and why”

Posted on February 14, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
The ‘If only Israel syndrome’
by David Harris
Febrary 9, 2021

“If Only Israel (IOI) syndrome,” a term I began using several years ago, is the misguided notion, peddled in the name of Israel’s “best interests” by some in the diplomatic, academic, and media worlds, that if only Israel did this or that, peace with the Palestinians would be at hand. Poor Israel. If only it had the visual acuity of these “enlightened” souls, everything would be hunky-dory. After all, according to them, Israel holds all the cards, yet refuses to play them. The thinking goes: Why can’t those shortsighted Israelis figure out what needs to be done — it’s so obvious to us in Brussels, Paris, Dublin, and Stockholm, in our ivory towers from Cambridge to Berkeley, and as commentators on BBC and CNN — so the conflict can at long last be brought to a screeching halt? READ MORE

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“The prosecution of researchers and journalists who deal with Polish involvement in the Holocaust constitutes a “real threat to academic and press freedom,” says the museum”

Posted on February 14, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Yad Vashem ‘deeply disturbed’ by Polish court verdict in Holocaust libel case
February 14, 2021

Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center said on Thursday that it was “deeply disturbed” by the implications of a Polish court’s recent ruling in a libel case involving the alleged wartime actions of Edward Malinowski, the former mayor of Malinowo, Poland. On Tuesday, the court ordered professors Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, the editors of “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland,” to issue a retraction of their work and apologize to Malinowski’s niece, who initiated the libel suit. The two-volume study cites a Polish survivor as saying that Malinowski gave up Jews to the Nazis. READ MORE

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“The result of the 2006 election showed that majority of Palestinians fully supported Hamas’s call for ending corruption in the Palestinian Authority, imposing Islamic law and, most importantly, continuing the armed struggle against Israel”

Posted on February 14, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

GATESTONE
Palestinians: What Real Education Means
by Khaled Abu Toameh
February 16, 2021

The last Palestinian parliamentary election, held on January 25, 2006, resulted in a victory for Hamas, the Islamist movement controlling the Gaza Strip. The next parliamentary election is scheduled to take place on May 15, 2021, although the parliament, known as the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) was elected for a four-year term. The Hamas victory in 2006 triggered a bitter dispute with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, effectively paralyzing the PLC and creating two separate mini-states for the Palestinians — one in the West Bank and another in the Gaza Strip. Hamas won the 2006 vote mainly because its candidates ran as part of a list named Change and Reform Bloc. READ MORE

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Chicago’s teachers’ union’s outsize power “comes at the expense of students, parents, and taxpayers”

Posted on February 14, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

CITY JOURNAL
Chicago’s Big Education, Inc.
by Adam Andrzejewski
February 17, 2021

On Super Bowl Sunday, the Chicago Teachers Union announced its intention to return to the classroom. Finally, Chicago’s 347,476 public school students can receive the same in-person instruction that many private and parochial students have already been receiving throughout the pandemic. Why does this seem like such a big achievement? Other “essential” workers such as grocery clerks, doctors and nurses, and package-delivery workers haven’t enjoyed the same luxury of working remotely—and they’ve kept doing their jobs without the generous pay and benefits earned by Chicago’s public-school teachers. READ MORE

H/T Professor Charles Lipson

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“Last week, the US Department of Transportation officially complained to its Israeli counterpart after only El Al was granted an exception to continue flying into Israel despite the border closure, Israeli government sources confirmed”

Posted on February 11, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

JERUSALEM POST
US threatens to ban Israeli planes landing in America – report
by Lahav Harkov, Eve Young
February 14, 2021

If American planes are not allowed to operate emergency flights to Israel, Israeli planes will not be allowed to land in the US, N12 reported Saturday. The Biden administration accused Israel of violating the freedoms of the air and creating a crisis with the new administration following the Israeli border closure due to the coronavirus pandemic, N12 reported. The administration then demanded that planes from the US be allowed to land in Israel. A source in the Foreign Ministry denied the report and told The Jerusalem Post that they were not aware of any threats. READ MORE

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“President Joe Biden has made a flurry of phone calls to American allies around the world. There has been one notable omission”

Posted on February 11, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

NBC NEWS
Biden hasn’t called Israel’s Netanyahu yet, raising fears of a frosty four years to come
by Raf Sanchez
February 11, 2021

In his first three weeks in office, President Joe Biden has made a flurry of phone calls to American allies around the world, including the leaders of Canada, Britain, France and Japan. But one close American ally’s leader has so far been left conspicuously off the new president’s call list: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While it is clear that Biden has his hands full with a myriad domestic challenges, every day the phone doesn’t ring adds to concerns in Israel that Netanyahu is being frozen out by the new Democratic administration because of his close ties with Donald Trump and his public antagonism of Barack Obama. The contrast between Biden and Trump is stark: Trump called Netanyahu within two days of taking office in 2017. READ MORE

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UAE—now at peace with Israel—won’t resume UNRWA funding

Posted on February 11, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

REUTERS
UAE halts funding to UN Palestinian agency in ‘reset’ of aid programme
February 8, 2021

The United Arab Emirates does not plan to resume funding to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, which was halted last year, until steps are taken to manage funds more efficiently, a UAE government official said. The Gulf state, current chair of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) advisory committee, provided the agency with $50 million in 2019 and $20 million in 2018, but made no contributions last year, although the official said UAE charitable groups donated $1 million. READ MORE

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What a difference a month makes: Biden Press Sec Jen Psaki Refuses to Say Israel Is An Ally

Posted on February 11, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

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#Antisemitic violence and threats originate across political spectrum: “white supremacists, extreme anti-Zionists and marginal black nationalist groups alike”

Posted on February 11, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

ALGEMEINER
Jews ‘Taking Ownership of Their Own Security’ Is Key to Countering Antisemitic Threat in US, Top Community Official Argues
by Ben Cohen
February 11, 2021

Over the space of less than three years, the challenge of securing Jewish communities from outside attack leapt to the top of the communal agenda with an urgency that surprised even the most seasoned observers of American Jewish life. The shift in communal priorities reflected the harsh reality that even in the US, violence against Jews has increasingly become, in the carefully-chosen word of one of the community’s leading security practitioners, “normalized.” “What we accept as normal behavior in our society has dramatically changed,” observed Evan Bernstein — the chief executive of the Community Security Service (CSS), a volunteer-based security agency — during an extensive conversation with The Algemeiner this week. READ MORE

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#BretStephens on the corruption of journalism, woke politics and virtue signaling at the #NewYorkTimes (the very same publication that ignored the Holocaust and lies about Israel)

Posted on February 11, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

NEW YORK POST
Read the column the New York Times didn’t want you to read
By Bret Stephens
February 11, 2021

Last weekend, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece criticizing the rationale behind the forced ouster of Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr., but it was never published. Stephens told colleagues the column was killed by publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Since then, the piece has circulated among Times staffers and others — and it was from one of them, not Stephens himself, that The Post obtained it. We publish his spiked column here in full.

…Late last week, Donald G. McNeil Jr., a veteran science reporter for The Times, abruptly departed from his job following the revelation that he had uttered a racial slur while on a New York Times trip to Peru for high school students. In the course of a dinner discussion, he was asked by a student whether a 12-year old should have been suspended by her school for making a video in which she had used a racial slur. In a written apology to staff, McNeil explained what happened next: “To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.” READ MORE

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