Native Activist Fed Up with Anti-Israel BS Exploiting his Cause.

Ryan Bellerose has penned another epic piece of moral clarity. Not one to mince words, Bellerose, a Metis activist from Western Canada, has written a devastating op-ed in the Toronto Sun (and syndicated in 4 other Sun papers) taking the Palestinian propaganda machine to task for dishonestly using the native rights cause.

Money quote:

though Palestinian propagandists love to characterize Zionism (that is, Jewish nationalism) and the re-establishment of Israel in 1948 as colonial enterprises, it is the Jews who are aboriginal to the Holy Land. Alone among other nations, Jews’ language, history, culture and folklore were born and forged in the Holy Land. There is no statute of limitations on being indigenous. Accordingly, to claim the Jews are colonizers in the Holy Land delegitimizes all indigenous peoples because such attempts trivialize the unbreakable, maternal ties to the land that make us, like the Jews, indigenous.

Berllerose goes on to explain why conflating Palestinian issues with Native Issues is plainly dishonest and untenable.

This is not the first time Bellerose has spoken up against the appropriation of his cause and culture by irredentist Arab nationalists. A few months ago, he wrote in the Metropolitain an article entitled “A Native and Zionist” where he first explained the parallels between Jews and Native Canadians, and why he is so offended by Palestinian propaganda’s exploitation of his cause:

The Palestinians are not like us.  Their fight is not our fight.  We natives believe in bringing about change peacefully, and we refuse to be affiliated with anyone who engages in violence targeting civilians.  I cannot remain silent and allow the Palestinians to gain credibility at our expense by claiming commonality with us. I cannot stand by while they trivialize our plight by tying it to theirs, which is largely self-inflicted.  Our population of over 65 million was violently reduced to a mere 10 million, a slaughter unprecedented in human history.  To compare that in whatever way to the Palestinians’ story is deeply offensive to me.

Bellerose should be commended for his courage. As I have repeatedly stated and will continue to state, the Palestinians have an undeniable right to self-determination. That right, however, cannot be realized by rejecting all offers of peace and deliberately robbing the Jewish people of its history instead.

Only the truth will set Palestinians free.

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Source: Israpundit

An associate of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan posted this past weekend a note to a social media account in which he claimed that the protests now raging in Turkey are part of an effort by the American “Jewish lobby” to undermine Turkey’s government.

Ankara Mayor İbrahim Melih Gökçek, a member of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, has been vocal about his distaste for the protestors in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, having both mocked and criticized them through a series of tweets on his own personal twitter account

But the incendiary rhetoric reached a conspiratorial crescendo when he posted a note on twitter, which claims that Turkish intelligence has learned that the protests are a result of a February meeting of the American Enterprise Institute, which the note further asserts is a branch of the The America Israel Public Affairs Committee. The note claims that it was discussed at the meeting to have Turkish youth spill out into the streets to protest.

The note further claims that present at the meeting were several prominent neoconservative figures often associated with a pro-Israel stance, including: Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, and William Kristol.

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Source: The Algemeiner

BBC – Hungarian prosecutors have charged a 98-year-old man, Laszlo Csatary, with participation in Nazi war crimes.

He is under arrest in Hungary, accused of assisting in the murder of 15,700 Jews during World War II. He denies the allegations.

In 1944 he was serving in the Nazi police in Kosice, now in Slovakia.

Read full story.

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Source: The Algemeiner

Breitbart - A report from New Focus International, a North Korean news organization that runs underground to avoid the scrutiny of the tyrannical government, senior government officials got copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf for Kim Jong Un’s birthday in January.

Only a few copies were handed out, since most books are banned in the country; such gifts are called “hundred-copy books” in North Korea. According to the report, the book was not intended to idolize the anti-Semitic aspects of Nazism, but to focus in on Hitler’s plans for economic recovery in the country. “Kim Jong Un gave a lecture to high-ranking officials, stressing that we must pursue the policy of Byungjin in terms of nuclear and economic development,” the government source said. “Mentioning that Hitler managed to rebuild Germany in a short time following its defeat in World War One, Kim Jong Un issued an order for the Third Reich to be studied in depth and asked that practical applications be drawn from it.”

Read full story.

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Source: The Algemeiner

It is a new day in Israel and the country, through still isolated and maligned around the world, is pushing forward and making remarkable progress despite the diversity within and all the external critics who claim to know what is best for her.

Just this week, Bayit HaYehudi leader, Naftali Bennett said that the idea of a Palestinian state was done, finished and over. He observed in an address to a group in Israel that there are almost 400,000 Jews living beyond what the world refers to as the Green Line and another 250,000 residing in East Jerusalem. With those facts on the ground, how does anyone who considers themselves a straight or level headed thinker capable of suggesting that in another sovereign state can be plopped down right on top of these people’s heads or perhaps under their feet.

In response to Bennett who is a Minister in the current government, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Bennett does not speak for the government on this issue and that it is the PM’s position to be supportive of reaching a peace deal with the Palestinians which will by design at some stage result in the establishment of a new Arab state somewhere within the current borders of Israel.

Everyone involved in this issue has been flip flopping on it now for over two decades. There is a divide in the democratic Israeli government as well as an even greater schism between the Israeli and Palestinian positions. And it seems that as time goes by the differences become more pronounced and nearly impossible to bridge. The point is that it is safe and perhaps even smart for Mr. Netanyahu to advocate for the creation of a new Arab state in theory because in practice any realist will realize that the circumstances simply do not exist for it to happen.

Taking that into consideration it becomes additionally clear that there is no downside to at least saying that you are in favor of a two state solution. And that has to be Bibi’s thinking. Support two states because as each day passes it becomes more and more unlikely if not impossible.

Israel’s military may have a world-class reputation, but a new power index surprisingly says the Jewish state, at least this year, falls shy of a top 10 ranking.

The rankings published by GlobalFirepower.com list the top 68 militaries in the world. The list, which the site says makes use of more than 40 factors to determine army strength, places Israel at number 13. Just three spots down the list at number 16 is Iran, a country that Israel has warned may be the target of military action if its current nuclear weapons program continues unabated. Turkey, a country that has showed open hostility to Israel in recent years ranks 11th on the list two spots ahead of the Jewish state, while the Muslim Brotherhood’s Egypt ranks just one spot below Israel.

Israel’s Channel 2 notes that there may be many reasons for the relatively low ranking, which places the country behind the less prominent militaries of countries such as Italy and Brazil. The fact that Israel doesn’t publicly acknowledge is has a nuclear arsenal is one of them, plus its reliance on strategic alliances and the fact that much of its military might is kept secret.

The United States ranks highest on the list followed by Russia in second place, China in third, India fourth and the United Kingdom 5th. Others that rank ahead of Israel include France, Germany, South Korea and Pakistan.

“Ongoing regional threats have powered the Israeli war machine for decades,” write the list’s authors, adding details on Israel’s military makeup. According to the website, Israel has 187,000 active front-line personnel and 565,000 active reserve personnel, as well as 3870 tanks, 656 aircraft, 65 naval vessels and a military budget of $15, 209,000,000.

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Source: The Algemeiner

American Apparel is causing controversy again, after naming one of the colors of a nail polish line “Hassid.” The “nail lacquer,” as the bottle officially says, is black, but keeping with owner and founder Dov Charney’s incendiary vision, it was designated the religious moniker to honor (or mock) the ultra-orthodox community’s taste for all-black clothing.

Charney, who is Jewish, is no stranger to exploiting Chasidic culture to sell clothing. In 2009 Wood Allen successfully sued his company for five million dollars, over an American Apparel billboard featuring Allen’s Annie Hall character in the famous Chasidic garb dream sequence.

Of course, Charney’s choice can also be approached from a different angle: “Hassid” translates to “piety” or “loving-kindness.” So perhaps he just wanted to brighten the image of a gloomy color.

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Source: The Algemeiner

The diary of a young German woman’s experiences during WWII is finally seeing the light of day, and it may offer new insight into the all-too average day-to-day lives of war-era Germans, Der Spiegel reports.

Brigitte Eicke was just a teenager when in 1942 she began keeping a record of her interactions with the Third Reich. For the next three years she wrote in her journal every day. That dedication has paid off now that the entries have been published in German as “Backfisch im Bombenkrieg” — backfisch being an old-fashioned term for a girl on the cusp of womanhood.

The book not only describes Eicke’s own insecurities as a young woman, but it also offers a window into the mundane lives of Germans–and their ability to turn a blind-eye to the crimes of their government.

Eicke sent along her diary to writer and local historian Annet Gröschner, who co-edited and annotated the published version. “The paper was yellowed and had virtually disintegrated,” Gröschner told Der Spiegel. “It was almost unreadable.”

But it has proven highly valuable, especially as Germans have been willing to open themselves up more to public self-scrutiny.

Writes Der Spiegel: “Until relatively recently, accounts of Germans’ own wartime suffering were considered something of a taboo, their own trauma eclipsed by the horror of the Holocaust. But now that the wartime generation is dying, every slice of first-hand social history has inherent value.”

Eicke’s diary is unique in its style, a fact that lends to its appeal.

“She only kept a journal in order to practice her stenography skills, so she was economical about what she said,” remarks Gröschner. “The diary is simply a clear-eyed account of her life at the time. She had nothing to prove and no reader in mind, so she didn’t embellish anything and she didn’t censor herself. And even though she doesn’t go into much detail, she conveys a lot with a few words.”

Eicke’s diary depicts a life of an astonishingly normal teenage existence, albeit one where cinema visits and air raid warnings were treated with equal doses of indifference.

Just as importantly, Eicke’s diary also reveals how easy it was for Germans to remain oblivious to the atrocities being conducted right under their noses.

Now 86, Eicke told Der Spiegel she remains unapologetic about it. “I was young and busy with my own life,” she recalls. A nursing home near where she worked at the time served as a collection center for Jewish transports to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. “My son always said to me: How could you have been so oblivious?” she says. “I never saw a thing!”

She continues: “Berlin was already Judenrein (“cleansed of Jews”) by then, and I was too young to have noticed anything before that. There were some Jewish girls in my first ever class photograph, taken in 1933, but by the time the next was taken, they were all gone. When I …read more
Source: The Algemeiner

Israel recently discovered two tunnels underneath its West Bank security barrier barrier near the Taybeh village in Samaria, Maariv reports.

Soldiers spotted two Arabs trying to enter Israel through the tunnels, but their motive could not be determined as they fled before they were caught.

Tunnels from Egypt into Gaza have been used for some time to smuggle anything from weapons to building materials. Thus far, however, tunnels from the West Bank into Israel have been rare.

According to Maariv, Israeli officials fear that Hamas cells in the West Bank could use tunnels to kidnap Israeli citizens to hold hostage and exchange for Palestinian Arab convicts, much in the same way Hamas in Gaza did with famed captive Gilad Shalit.

…read more
Source: The Algemeiner

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel found itself a friend in major American newspaper USA Today recently, when a press release about its efforts to have Alicia Keys cancel her upcoming show in Israel appeared almost verbatim in an article on the newspaper’s website.

The American Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg first tweeted about the disturbing similarities Thursday, a day after the article appeared. “@USATODAY ran a BDS press release as a story. Here’s the newspaper piece Here’s the release” he wrote.

The article accuses Israel of “large-scale abuses of Palestinian rights” and also takes a quote from the press release from Andrew Kadi of the “U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation,” who accuses Israel of denying Palestinians health care and of torturing children.

A paragraph from the USA Today article reads, “The delegation met with staff at the organization, who explained that they were aware of the ongoing efforts to encourage Keys’ cancellation. Delegates passed along materials that included details of the global boycott campaign and reports from rights organizations documenting Israel’s violation of Palestinian children rights, which they confirmed was received by Peter Twyman, executive officer of Keep a Child Alive.”

And an almost identical paragraph from the BDS press release reads, ”The delegation met with staff at the organization, who explained that they were aware of the ongoing efforts to encourage Keys’ cancellation. Delegates passed along materials that included details of the global boycott campaign and reports from rights organizations documenting Israel’s violation of Palestinian children rights, which they confirmed Keep a Child Alive’s Chief Executive Officer, Peter Twyman, received.”

Another paragraph from USA Today: “In response to Israel’s large-scale abuses of Palestinian rights, Palestinian Civil Society launched a call for a global campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel in 2005, modeled on the call by black South Africans for a boycott of apartheid South Africa that helped bring an end to the racist system. In response, numerous musicians, including Elvis Costello, Santana, The Pixies and others have canceled concerts or refrained from playing in Israel. In May, physicist Stephen Hawking canceled his planned participation in a conference in Israel, responding to Palestinian requests.”

And here is the same paragraph from the BDS press release almost verbatim: “In response to Israel’s large-scale abuses of Palestinian rights, Palestinian civil society launched a call for a global campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel in 2005, modeled on the call by black South Africans for a boycott of apartheid South Africa that helped bring an end to the racist system. In response, numerous musicians, including Elvis Costello, Santana, The Pixies, and others have cancelled …read more
Source: The Algemeiner