Today’s Top Stories

1. UK taxpayers are funding BDS garbage, with an assist from the UN. The Jerusalem Post reports:

Charles Tannock, a Member of the European Parliament, told The Jerusalem Post: “I totally oppose the promotion, by a UK taxpayer-funded organization such as the British Academy, of events which aim to promote a ‘campaigning boycott, divestment and sanctions’ anti- Israel event which is aimed at sanctioning a close friend of the UK and a democracy such as Israel.”

“It’s equally unacceptable a UN official should be promoting this event through his official email address suggesting possible UN endorsement of this message.”

2. The International Criminal Court’s making “preliminary inquiry” into the Mavi Marmara incident. Reuters was most even-keeled about the whole thing:

The prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, said in a statement that she was obliged to open a preliminary examination following a referral from the Indian Ocean island nation of Comoros, where one of the vessels that were raided was registered.

Few preliminary examinations ever lead to a full investigation, let alone a trial.

3. Israel warned Syria not to retaliate for the recent airstrike on the Hezbollah arms shipment. I’m not exactly a fan of anonymous sources pulling these kinds of stunts, but since it was in the NY Times, you can assume the buzz will reach Bashar Assad:

“If Syrian President Assad reacts by attacking Israel, or tries to strike Israel through his terrorist proxies,” the official said, “he will risk forfeiting his regime, for Israel will retaliate.”

The Israeli official, who has been briefed by high-level officials on the Syria situation in the past two days, declined to be identified, citing the need to protect internal Israeli deliberations. He contacted The New York Times on Wednesday.

The precise motives for Israel’s warning were uncertain: Israel could be trying to restrain Syria’s behavior without undertaking further military action, or alerting other countries to another strike.

Meanwhile, a previously unknown Islamist group, Abdul Qader Husseini Battalions of the Free Palestine movement, claimed responsibility for firing two mortar shells at Mt. Hermon yesterday.

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4. Update: World Press Photo Claims Winning Image Wasn’t Doctored: At what point do enhancements of Gaza mourners make a photo dishonest?

Rest O’ the Roundup

• The PA curbed Israeli journos from covering Naqba Day events in the West Bank, according to the Washington Post.

• Worth reading at the National Post: Haunted by the past: Living an hour away from the terrorist who killed my grandfather

• The Boston Globe supports Stephen Hawking’s boycott.

• Why the Syrian War Could Last 10 Years

• Australia’s foreign ministry appointed Dave Sharma as next ambassador to Israel, according to The Australian.

• Iran’s going all-out to preserve the Assad regime. YNet says they’ll fight to the last Hezbollahnik.

(Image of Wikimedia Commons/Free Gaza movement)

For more, see Tuesday’s Israel Daily News Stream.

Original article can be viewed at International Criminal Court Making “Preliminary Inquiry” Into Mavi Marmara on HonestReporting.

Today’s Top Stories

1. Washington DC’s Newseum reconsiders its plan to add the names of two Hamas terrorists to a journalist memorial, releasing a press statement:

Serious questions have been raised as to whether two of the individuals included on our initial list of journalists who died covering the news this past year were truly journalists or whether they were engaged in terrorist activities.

We take the concerns raised about these two men seriously and have decided to re-evaluate their inclusion as journalists on our memorial wall pending further investigation.

Terrorism has altered the landscape in many areas, including the rules of war and engagement, law, investigative and interrogation techniques, and the detention of enemy combatants. Journalism is no exception.

Full AP coverage in the Washington Post and yesterday’s HonestReporting communique.

2. British Labor Party politician Lord Ahmed has finally resigned from the party following the exposure of an anti-Semitic interview on Pakistani TV where he claimed his imprisonment for dangerous driving was the fault of Jews “who own newspapers and TV channels” and who placed pressure on the courts to punish him for supporting the Palestinians in Gaza. Lord Ahmed remains a member of the House of Lords, however.

3. Israeli government to hand over parts of the West Bank for the construction of a new Palestinian city near Jericho. In order to build the new city Israel’s military authorities plan to transfer large areas of land currently under the jurisdiction of the Jordan Valley settlers’ council.

Considering the amount of media coverage of Israeli demolitions of illegally-built Palestinian structures, why is this piece of news only covered in the Irish Times?

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Israel and the Palestinians

• Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Alan Johnson of BICOM exposes the Jew-hatred of former London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s favorite Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi as he visits Gaza:

In fact, Qaradawi is utterly reactionary. He has sanctioned the murder of pregnant Jewish women to prevent the creation of “Zionist soldiers”, supported female circumcision (“whoever finds it serving the interest of his daughters should do it, and I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world”), urged the throwing of homosexuals from rooftops as a punishment for their sin (“Should both the active and passive participants be put to death? While such punishments may seem cruel, they have been suggested to maintain the purity of the Islamic society and to keep it clean of perverted elements”), advocated wife-beating (“though only lightly”), and, of course, cheered on suicide bombings (“the martyr operation is the greatest of all sorts of jihad in the cause of Allah.”)

The far-away voices of opposition to Qaradawi’s Gaza trip should help us oppose his kind of bigotry here at home.

• Prominent Israel boycott activists Hilary and Stephen Rose crow in The Guardian over Stephen Hawking’s decision not to attend the President’s Conference, arguing that boycotting Israeli science and technology hits Israel where it hurts.

Demonstrating their ignorance and hatred of Israel, they claim “Israeli home-produced chemical weapons minimally match those of Syria” and then state that the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where they believe the President’s Conference is to be held, is “built on illegally annexed Palestinian land.” In fact, both campuses (Mount Scopus and Givat Ram) are located on land that was Israeli before 1967. The conference is actually being held at the ICC Jerusalem International Convention Center.

• Hamas claims success in crackdown on ‘Israeli collaborators’ in Gaza

• The Australian (accessible through Google News) publishes an excellent op-ed destroying the notion that Israel is an “apartheid state”:

Yet Israel is flogged by the BDS campaigners as an “apartheid” state that deserves to be punished and ostracised by the international community in the way South Africa was. Nothing is heard, of course, about the “apartheid” being enforced by Hamas in Gaza, where strict Islamic law is being imposed, with women barred even from running in a local marathon, while schoolchildren are being segregated and forced to wear Islamic dress. There is also silence on the rank discrimination that is enforced in so much of the Arab world. That South Africa, because of its grotesque system of apartheid, was fair game for the sort of campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions that contributed substantially to the ultimate demise of white rule is hard to argue against.

But comparisons between South Africa then, and Israel now, are neither fair nor sustainable. And they certainly do not accord with reality.

Arab Spring Winter

• Turkey eyes retaliation against Syria for bombing.

• Peter Beinart asks why are we debating intervention in Syria but not Afghanistan and Iraq? He says it’s because Americans prefer to clean up the messes of others, rather than their own.

Rest O’ the Roundup

• After 25 years of trying, the Canadian government is deporting Mahmoud Mohammad Issa Mohammad, a former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who, together with another man, stormed an Israeli airliner in 1968, killing one passenger.

“We’re sending the message that we will no longer be treated like suckers by terrorists like Mr. Mohammad,” said Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

• The Israeli cabinet approves a controversial austerity budget.

• A teenage conscientious objector has been jailed by an Israeli military court for the tenth time in six months for refusing to enlist for compulsory military service.

For more, see Monday’s Israel Daily News Stream.

Original article can be viewed at Newseum Reconsiders Honoring Hamas Terrorists on HonestReporting.

Today’s Top Stories

1. Bed-Gate hits the media. News of Netanyahu’s opulent sleeping cabin for flight to London reported widely as the new “austerity” budget nears cabinet vote.

2. Israeli officials concerned that countries will pull peace-keepers out of Lebanon. LA Times spoke to Israeli officials after Syrian rebels kidnapped and released four peacekeepers from the Philippines.

“We want them to stay,’’ said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. “They can’t prevent the war in Syria but they have an important role to play. If they disappear, it will just be Israel facing whatever or whoever is on the other side.”

3. Pew Research poll indicates wide differences in attitudes between Israelis and the Palestinians on peace.

Israelis, on balance, believe a way can be found for an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully with their country. Palestinians, on the other hand, overwhelmingly do not think this is possible, and a plurality believes armed struggle rather than negotiations or nonviolent resistance is the best way to achieve statehood.

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Israel and the Palestinians

• Elder of Ziyon looks at Stephen Hawking’s boycott decision in the context of British attitudes towards Israel.

Hawking is a product of his environment, and his ability to go beyond the conventional wisdom in anything besides physics is severely constrained. Which means that Hawking’s knowledge of Israel is filtered through the conventional wisdom of Britain.

In the most recent Pew Global Attitudes poll, we see that 44% of the British have an unfavorable attitude towards Israel, and only 34% have a favorable attitude.

When asked which side they sympathize with more, 19% were on the Israeli side and 35% sympathized more with the Palestinian Arab side. Even more telling, in 2002, while Israelis were being blown up every couple of days from suicide bombs, the British were only 17% sympathetic towards Israel compared to 28% for Palestinian Arabs.

Rabbi David Wolpe adds his perspective on Hawking in Time magazine:

Perhaps Stephen Hawking just doesn’t believe in talking to people with whom he disagrees. Where then is his condemnatory statement about the treatment of the Maya people in Guatemala, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Kashmiris in India, the Kurds in Turkey, The Bahai of Iran, The Shia of Pakistan, the Chechens in Russia, or perhaps about the Tibetans in China, where Hawking recently paid a celebrated visit? Rather than actually confront the difficulties of the region, he is deploying his considerable prestige to say that one country, among all the nations of the world, is uniquely deserving of obloquy.

An op-ed in The Scotsman argues that Hawking’s boycott will do little to affect Israeli policy. However, it freezes out Israeli academia, which is dominated by left wing critics of the government.

• Khaled Abu Toameh notes the deafening silence among the media and human rights organizations on the plight of Palestinians killed in Syria or displaced by the fighting there.

It is not only the Arabs and the Palestinian governments who are turning a blind eye to the mass displacement of Palestinians. Human rights organizations and the mainstream media in the West are also ignoring the plight of the Palestinians. This is, after all, a story that lacks an anti-Israel angle.

 Rest O’ the Roundup

• AP gives Israel’s critics the lead voice in an article about a bill promoted by Senator Barbara Boxer allowing Israelis the right to visit the US without a visa.

The US allows inhabitants of 37 countries to enter without a visa, as long as they extend the same privilege to US citizens. Senator Barbara Boxer is proposing to add Israel to that list – but without requiring equal treatment for Americans travelling to Israel.

Instead, the legislation the Democratic senator has introduced would exempt Israeli visitors from visa requirements as long as the US government certifies that Israel “has made every reasonable effort, without jeopardising the security of the state of Israel,” to admit Americans without a visa.

What that means, according to critics of the Israeli government, is that Israel can continue to exclude Americans who are either Arab or Muslim, or who belong to groups that oppose Israeli policies. Requiring a visa for visitors allows the government to bar them from entering, or to limit their activities or the length of their stay.

• National Post columnist Robert Fulford really dissected the Toronto Star‘s Haroon Siddiqui. Siddiqui recently used the word “rabid” to describe the Canadian Prime Minister’s pro-Israel views.

Perhaps Siddiqui, in using that strange word, “rabid,” unconsciously projects his own feelings of rage and frustration onto his subject. For the left and the leftish, such as Siddiqui, a furious opposition to Israel has become a sacred duty.

• Michael Totten on the futility of the West engaging the Muslim Brotherhood:

El-Gazzar made it to Washington and checked into his room, but he refused to show up at the conference.

Why? Because Israelis—or “Zionists” as he called them—were also going to be there.

Original article can be viewed at Bibi’s Bed-Gate Hits the Media on HonestReporting.

Today’s Top Stories

1. Palestinians and Syrians forming units to fight for Golan Heights and Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah promises to help. But don’t expect any serious Hezbollah attacks in the near future:

Hezbollah has become increasingly embroiled in the war in Syria in recent months, dispatching hundreds and perhaps thousands of fighters to aid government forces battling the rebels seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad. Analysts say the Syrian entanglement leaves Hezbollah in no position to risk opening up a second front against Israel.

Meanwhile, a Toronto Star op-ed by the former head of al-Jazeera, ignores the fact that Israel’s attack on Syria focused on weapons earmarked for Hezbollah, and draws an unfair moral equivalence.

It is too early to assess how important Israel’s strikes on Syria will prove to be. With Iran still clearly in its sights, Israel’s government was able to show off its military power in the region. And although the attacks were illegal and unprovoked, and would have been widely condemned if they were inflicted upon Israel by Syria or some other party, the Israeli action was immediately supported by the U.S., Britain and Canada.

2.The Newseum to honor Al Aqsa TV terrorists among journalists who died in the line of duty. The two were killed by an Israeli airstrike during Operation Pillar of Defense. Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out Al Aqsa TV has been designated a terrorist organization. Despite the protests, the Newseum is holding firm by it decision.

3. Netanyahu will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to attempt Russia to halt sales of advanced S-300 anti-aircraft defense systems to Syria. The Problem is that it might already be too late.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Israel had provided the United States with intelligence that Syria had already begun making payments on a 2010 contract with Russia to purchase four S-300 batteries, with 144 missiles, and that the first deliveries were expected to be made this summer.

Russian’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, told reporters on Friday that Moscow was fulfilling contracts with Syria, saying, “Russia has sold and signed contracts a long time ago, and is completing supplies of the equipment, which is antiaircraft systems,” according to Agence France-Presse.

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Israel and the Palestinians

• The Economist blames Israel for the stalled peace talks, essentially for not being more excited by the Arab League’s agreement to include land swaps in its decade-old peace plan.

• John Kerry preparing to offer peace plan in early June.

• The Scotsman has op-ed blasting Stephen Hawking for violating the principles of academic freedom by participating in the academic boycott of Israel:

Hawkings’ (inconsistent) stand is dangerous because it violates the cardinal virtues of scientific discourse that emerged with the Enlightenment: that the rational pursuit of knowledge, unencumbered by political or religious prejudice, betters all mankind in the end. That the free pursuit of truth is more likely to undermine ignorance and oppression than strengthen it. And that ending national and religious enmities is better achieved by academics meeting and co-operating, than by keeping them apart.

• Noam Chomsky helped lobby Hawking to join the boycott.

Arab Spring Winter

• Turkey blames pro-Syrian figures for major terrorist attack. Analysts say the attack was a response to Turkey’s overt support for the Syrian rebels, and it could drag Turkey into the war.

• Washington Post looks at what might happen if the US refuses to join the fighting in Syria.

The most likely scenario is that Syria fractures along sectarian lines. An al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, is already consolidating control over a swath of northeastern Syria; remnants of the regime, backed by Shiite fighters from Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, could take over a strip of the western coastline.

Such a splintering would almost certainly spread the sectarian warfare to Iraq and Lebanon, as it has to some extent already. That could cause the collapse of the Iraqi political system that was the legacy of the U.S. mission there. Chemical weapons stocks now controlled by the Assad regime would be up for grabs, probably forcing further interventions by Israel in order to prevent their acquisition by Hezbollah or al-Qaeda. Jordan, the most fragile U.S. ally in the Middle East, could collapse under the weight of Syrian refugees. Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which have been imploring the Obama administration to take steps to end the war, could conclude that the United States is no longer a reliable ally.

Of course, some of these consequences may come about whatever the United States does.

Rest O’ the Roundup

• EU is finally moving towards admitting Hezbollah is a terrorist organization.

The EU plans to endorse the UK’s model of proscribing Hezbollah’s military wing as a terror entity while permitting the Shi’ite Lebanese group’s political arm to operate as a legal organization, sources well-versed in the inner workings of EU discussions on the matter told The Jerusalem Post last week.

• A Foreign Ministry report reveals that Israel has opened a diplomatic mission in an unnamed Gulf state.

• New trade deal with China brings total financial relationship between China and Israel to $2 billion.

For more, see Thursday’s Israel Daily News Stream.

Original article can be viewed at IDNS – Palestinians and Syrians Preparing to Fight for Golan on HonestReporting.

UPDATE:  Newseum is re-evaluating its decision to honor the terrorists.

* * *

The Washington DC-based Newseum, a museum dedicated to the media, will be holding a ceremony to honor those journalists who have been killed in the last year in the course of covering the news.

Included in this list of 84 names are Mahmoud Al-Kumi and Hussam Salama.

Back in November 2012 during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense, the IDF targeted Mahmoud Al-Kumi and Hussam Salama.

The IDF Blog explains that they were:

Hamas operatives and cameramen for Hamas’ Al-Aqsa television network, which regularly features programming that encourages and praises attacks on Israeli civilians. … Palestinian media reported that the two men were indeed Hamas operatives.

Faced with serious accusations of Al-Aqsa TV’s connections to terrorism, the head of the network, Mohammad Thouraya, denied that Al-Aqsa was the voice of Hamas — a hard fact to deny, since the channel is financed and controlled by Hamas — but he did admit that his employees were “all part of the resistance.”

Being “part of the resistance”, in other words, could mean that those carrying a camera during the day could be carrying rockets at night.

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Despite heavy criticism, the Newseum is sticking to its guns and has issued a statement which included the following:

Hussam Salama and Mahmoud Al-Kumi were cameramen in a car clearly marked “TV.” The Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers all consider these men journalists killed in the line duty.

Hamas operatives Mahmoud Al-Kumi (left) and Hussam Salama. Source: http://alresalah.ps

As many commentators have pointed out, both Hamas and Al-Aqsa TV are considered to be terrorist entities by the US government. Why should terrorists be protected by virtue of marking “TV” on a car or carrying a camera? A real journalist reports on a conflict and does not actively take part in it. And can a Hamas propaganda outfit that promotes anti-Semitism and violence towards Jews and Israelis really be considered a legitimate media outfit?

HR CEO Joe Hyams commented:

Honoring these two terrorists is an insult to the real journalists who have tragically lost their lives in the cause of news gathering. It is profoundly disturbing that a respected U.S. institution dedicated to documenting the media cannot tell the difference between a genuine journalist and a terrorist.

The Newseum should be ashamed to refer to Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV as a credible media outlet and has set the bar so low as to render the term “media” almost meaningless.

If you agree, send your complaint to the Newseum and let it know that there is a difference between honoring journalists and terrorists - info@newseum.org

Original article can be viewed at Media Museum to Honor Hamas Terrorists on HonestReporting.