The Best Short Explanation for Why the USS Liberty Conspiracy Theory is Off-Base

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The USS Liberty after being attacked by Israeli warplanes

The blogger behind A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics has written a neat little summary of the issues surrounding the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. It is contained within a larger piece discussing the anti-Israeli views of some traditionalist Catholics and other members of the anti-establishment right.

I first encountered USS Liberty conspiracy people on the left. Since anti-Israel and outright anti-semitic views now largely emanate from the left, this was not surprising. But it's also not surprising to learn that some of them can be now be found among nationalists, America Firsters, hard-core Trumpers, "groypers" and the like.

I suppose I'm in some ways a nationalist and America Firster, but I also believe that there's no better way to put America First than to often put Israel first, at least among our allies. It's prudential as well as just.

That's right, justice isn't only for Catholics.

No, Israel didn't deliberately or intentionally attack the USS Liberty. It's a silly and more and more often malicious conspiracy theory. What follows is one of the best short explanations as to why the theory is off-base.

The attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, is one of those incidents in history that has attracted far more attention and controversy than it has any right to. A US surveillance ship in international waters was attacked by Isreali fighter aircraft on the 4th day of the Six Day War. Israeli aircraft were constantly traversing this region of the Mediterranean going to and from targets in Egypt, whose military they obliterated in the course of a few days. The USS Liberty was in the area under NSA orders to gather intelligence on both sides, but particularly the Egyptians, who used mostly Soviet hardware. The ship was strafed and torpedoed repeatedly, with 34 men killed, 171 wounded, and the ship almost sunk. 

Israel quickly apologized for the attack and paid some degree of compensation, but ever since, many people, including a number of the Liberty’s survivors, have claimed that the vessel was deliberately attacked by Israel, for what reason is never quite made clear, or makes much sense. The US was at that time Israel’s largest and just about only ally. How Israel would benefit from this attack is also far from clear. 

But, some survivors and those who feel the attack was deliberately made claim, Israel had to know it was a US ship! It was flying an American flag! Israel had been notified of the ship’s presence! Unfortunately, the notification of the ship’s presence never made it to the Israeli Air Force and the squadron involved in the attack. False reports of Egyptian ships shelling Israeli units in Sinai caused alarm in Israel’s chain of command. Aircraft were dispatched to investigate. They found the Liberty, and attacked. 

But still, the flag! They should have known it was a US ship! Also, the Liberty was a converted freighter, which looks nothing like a warship. They should have, they must have known. 

This is where a little knowledge of military history enters in. In fact, misidentification of ships by aircraft is a constant, severe, and ongoing problem. Air force pilots are rarely well trained in ship identification. Even naval aviation pilots often make severe mistakes. How severe? A few examples: 

1. British pilots attacked US ships in several of the Malta convoys during WWII in the same region – the Mediterranean. 
2. US pilots at Coral Sea, the Eastern Solomons, Santa Cruz, and the Philippine Sea constantly misreported attacks. The Japanese did the same in all these battles, and more. The Japs sank USS Neosho, an 8000 ton oiler, at the Coral Sea, and thought they had sunk the USS Lexington, a 40,000 ton, 900 foot long aircraft carrier (they did, later). US pilots reported sinking battleships and aircraft carriers when they had actually slightly damaged a freighter or a destroyer. US pilots attacked US ships. German pilots attacked Italian ships. This kind of thing happened all the time. There were literally dozens of such incidents. 
3. At the invasion of Sicily, Allied warplanes attacked allied ships of the invasion fleet right off the coast, in spite being briefed that is exactly where they would be! 

And these were largely aircraft piloted by very experienced men who were experts in identifying ships! It goes to show how incredibly difficult it is to ID a ship from a fast moving aircraft. And fast moving is very relative. Those mistakes in WWII were made by men flying aircraft at perhaps 250 kts. A jet fighter will be going twice that speed, making identification all the more difficult. During the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident, Vice Admiral and later Vice Presidential candidate James Stockdale came within an ace of unloading his ordinance on a US destroyer, mistaking it for a North Vietnamese PT boat, which is about 1/6th the size of a destroyer. 

The same applies to the torpedo boats which attacked the Liberty. While not as common as aircraft friendly fire attacks on ships, in the fog of war instances of “blue on blue” or accidental attacks by surface ships are still quite frequent. During WWII, the motor torpedo boats – PT boats in US parlance – were a frequent source of accidental, US-on-US attacks. One particularly famous incident was during the 2nd Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, when the US’ best battleship admiral in history, Willis Augustus Lee, had to make an emergency, plain-language, unencrypted call to the nearby PT boat squadron base to keep them from attacking his ships. And that, too, was a close run thing. Now, most of these same side surface ship attacks occurred at night, when visibility is of course much worse, but they have been known to happen at day. So, what happened with the Liberty is not all that surprising. 

And I think that’s one of the reasons this has become such a persistent conspiracy theory, one maintained, to a large degree, by some of the Liberty’s survivors. If I’m right, their suffering and the deaths of their friends were the result of an accident, and thus devoid of meaning. That’s a hard thing to take. It’s too much for some people. So, instead of accepting this likelihood, they have created a mythos that the attack was deliberate.

Read the rest of the piece, where the blogger more generally discusses the phenomenon of anti-Israeli sentiment among some on the right, here.

Uncharitable Thursday: Chicago Archbishop Cupich Asks Forgiveness From Jews for Being Proselytized by Catholics

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Cupich at North Shore Congregation Israel

This happened five weeks ago, and even though I am a Chicagoan, I missed it at the time. Perhaps you saw it.

A link from NovusOrdoWatch alerted me.

(Don't get excited, I've always occasionally checked the NovusOrdoWatch site, often finding it interesting and useful. For the record, I don't think I have a sede bone in my body, despite my most recent Bergoglio post. However, a few people are now throwing around that snark on Facebook. Apparently, I'm now a "Johnny come lately sede," which according to the commenter is even worse than being an original sede. Who knew?)

The Glencoe News/Chicago Tribune reports on a January 29 presentation Cupich made at a Glencoe Synagogue: 

He (Cupich) asked for forgiveness from those in the audience who had been proselytized by Catholics. Cupich assessed modern Catholic-Jewish relations in mostly positive terms, but said there is always room for improvement.

Read the rest here.

The irony, of course, is that if there's anyone who doesn't have to apologize to Jews for proselytizing them (assuming for the moment that such an apology would ever be necessary) it's Cupich. He thus places himself firmly in the Obama camp of apologizers - apologizing for what OTHER people have done in order to attack those people and virtue signal that HE, of course, is above such mean behavior.

Then again, in a just world, Cupich should be apologizing to Jews. And Baptists, Hindus, agnostics, Raelians, Latter-day Philatelists  and every other non-Catholic within squeaking range for not giving a fig about their salvation. He's just so insular about his Catholic faith. If you're not already one of us, we don't want you! Keep out! How medieval of him. 

Cupich should also apologize to Jews for inviting extremist Muslims who post-anti semitic rants on their Facebook pages to speak at Holy Name Cathedral.

And, of course, apologizing to Catholics for being such a poor shepherd might be nice. He could even do it privately in the confessional, perhaps while he's texting.

Ahmed Zewail Dies - One of Only 3 Muslims to Ever Win a Nobel Prize in the Sciences (Jews have won 160+)

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Ahmed Hassan Zewail died last August at the age of 70. Zewail was an Egyptian born Muslim who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1999. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1982 but moved back to Egypt in 2011.

In 2015, Aziz Sancar, a Turkish Muslim, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He also is a naturalized American citizen and currently lives in North Carolina.

The first Muslim (perhaps) ever to win the Nobel Prize in the sciences was Pakistani-born Mohammad Abdus Salam, who shared the 1979 Physics prize with two other winners. I say "perhaps" because Salam was a member of the Ahmadiyya sect, which ironically had been declared an heretical non-Muslim religion by his home country, five years earlier. Salam was educated and lived much of his working life (though not all) in Europe and the United States.

If we go by Pakistan's definition, only two Muslims have ever won a Nobel prize in the sciences. But it would be ungenerous to go by Pakistan's definition. By all accounts, Salam believed himself to be a Muslim and even cited the Koran in his acceptance speech.

So, I think it's fair to say that three Muslims have won prizes. It's also fair to say that none of the three would have won prizes without being partially educated and having done work in non-Muslim countries.

It also should be noted that all three men were fairly "Westernized" in their personal lives. Dr. Sancar married an American biochemist. Dr. Salam married a renowned British molecular biologist (although, notoriously, he never broke off an earlier arranged marriage with a cousin in Pakistan). And Dr. Zewail married a secularized Syrian woman. Here is the Zewail family at the Nobel prize ceremonies:

Here is Dr. Sancar and his wife:

And here is Dame Louise Johnson, second wife of Dr. Salam:

But going back to the Nobel awards themselves, since 1901 when the Prize was set up, there have been 659 winners in the sciences - physics, chemistry, medicine and economics.

3 have been Muslims.

160+ of the winners have been Jews.

Here is another way to look at those numbers.

Non-Muslims have won the prize at a per-capita rate 65 times that of Muslims.

Jews have won the prize at a per-capita rate 110 times that of non-Jews.

Jews have won the prize at a per-capita rate 4,400 times that of Muslims.

Islamophiles will of course have answers to these rather sad (for Muslims) statistics:

The Islamic world used to be more scientifically advanced than the West. I believe the current accepted scholarship shows that assertion to be a myth. But even accepting it, it forces the question, what happened for the last 500 years?

Most of the Muslim world was under Western colonial dominance (or the lingering effects of that dominance) during the period of the Nobel Prize. That of course forces the question of why it was under such dominance. And then of course there were the Jews, who, throughout much of the period had to contend with much more than mere dominance (for much of it they didn't even have a country to dominate) - discrimination, pograms, expulsions and the murder, within the space of only a few years, of one-third of their number.

It's all a Zionist plot. It's difficult to argue with that.

Of course, if non-science prizes are counted, Muslims have won 13 total prizes, including 2 in Literature and a whopping 8 in Peace.

As Dr. Evil might say, making scare quotes with his fingers:

"Irony."

Indeed, in recent times, Muslims have dominated the Peace prize, at least on a per-capita basis. One of the winners was Yasser Arafat.

See (the Islamophiles might say), most Muslims are moderates. Only 8% of all Muslim Nobel Prize winners have been terrorists.

To be serious, there's a short clip on YouTube of the late Dr. Zewail claiming that one of the distinguishing features of Islam is that it lays a strong emphasis on knowledge. I have no doubt that Zewail was an extremely intelligent man who deserved his Prize, but that particular claim is preposterous.

Theologically and philosophically, Islam has a huge bias against the acquisition of knowledge - or at least against the acquisition of empirical knowledge. An utterly unknowable, arational and often explicitly arbitrary God completely and directly controls every atom of the universe at all times. Thus, the universe itself becomes largely unknowable, arational and arbitrary.

Islam has been intellectually sterile since its inception. This claim is of course counter to the silly multicultural meme that Muslims invented virtually everything ever, including the fountain pen. But look for an historically prominent Muslim scientist and you will find, precisely, none. And the most well-known philosophers from the Muslim "Golden-Age" were either Jews or decidedly unorthodox Islamic "free-thinkers" who were branded heretics or apostates by many.

Today, a determined and talented Muslim individual may occasionally burst through those social and intellectual obstacles, often with much help from Western individuals and institutions, and in the process moving fairly far away from Muslim practice and tradition. But it's obviously rare.

In the modern sciences, three men did it.

And their wives didn't wear the hijab.

Elie Wiesel and Francois Mauriac

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Elie Wiesel died today at the age of 87.

Some may be aware that the Jewish Wiesel published his most famous work, Night, with the help of the Catholic writer Francois Mauriac.

In May of 1955, the young unknown journalist Wiesel lined up an interview with the eminent Nobel Prize winner Mauriac in Paris.

Wiesel was twenty-six. Mauriac was sixty-nine.

The interview appeared to end very badly after Mauriac somehow offended Wiesel by uttering the name of Jesus one too many times. Jennifer Pierce relates Wiesel's response - pieced together from some of Wiesel's later writings and comments:

“Sir,” I said, “you speak of Christ. Christians love to speak of him. The passion of Christ, the agony of Christ, the death of Christ. In your religion, that is all you speak of. Well, I want you to know that ten years ago, not very far from here, I knew Jewish children every one of whom suffered a thousand times more, six million times more, than Christ on the cross. And we don’t speak about them. Can you understand that, sir? We don’t speak of them.” 

Wiesel fled Mauriac’s apartment for the elevator, wanting only escape, but instead he felt Mauriac’s arm drawing him back to where they had sat. At first, all the old man did was all one can do when words fail and grief overcomes: Mauriac wept. 

Wiesel said recently in an interview that, at first, it made him feel like a monster to have made this decent and wise old man, this loving man, weep so, and he felt an almost unbearable urge to flee again. This was the first whisper of love in the room — what is this love and where does it come from that it makes a man feel shame at his own torment because it injures others? But Mauriac pressed Wiesel: Tell me more. We must speak of it. And so, for a few hours at least, Wiesel spoke the things he swore never to speak, allowing his new friend to shoulder his burden with him. When they parted, the two men embraced near the elevator to which Wiesel had fled earlier; and Mauriac, who had been a member of the Resistance, said to his friend: “One must speak out — one must also speak out.”1

Not only did Mauriac encourage Wiesel to write what would eventually become Night but he added his expertise and considerable weight as of one of France's pre-eminent writers to getting it published - in France in 1958 and the United States in 1960.

Mauriac also wrote the Foreword to Night, which can still be found in current editions. Mauriac's Catholic attempt to find meaning in the Jewish Holocaust no doubt has enough to offend some in both groups:

And I, who believe that God is love, what answer was there to give my young interlocutor whose dark eyes still held the reflection of the angelic sadness that had appeared one day on the face of a hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak to him of that other Jew, this crucified brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world? Did I explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become a cornerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfathomable mystery in which the faith of his childhood was lost? And yet, Zion has risen up again out of the crematoria and the slaughterhouses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. It is they who have given it new life. We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to Him. That is what I should have said to the Jewish child. But all I could do was embrace him and weep.2

Wiesel would later write of his friend:

When I am thinking of my personal experience, there comes to mind, as a luminous example, Francois Mauriac. I, a Jew, owe to the fervent Catholic Mauriac, who declared himself in love with Christ, the fact of having become a writer . . . . Once Mauriac dedicated a book to me and he wrote: “To Elie Wiesel, a Jewish child who was crucified.” At first I took it badly, but then I understood that it was his way of letting me feel his love.3

As Pierce implies, Wiesel may have slightly misunderstood the dedication. It was perhaps intended to show not only Mauriac's own feelings but to remind his younger friend that there was another who loved him even more.

Notes:

1. Jennifer Pierce, "Bearing Witness, Francois Mauriac and Elie Wiesel," in Crisis Magazine. See also, "An Interview Unlike Any Other" in Wiesel, A Jew Today.
2. Wiesel, Night.
3. From Antonio Monda, ed., Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion.

Probable Oldest Man in the World is Holocaust Survivor, Israeli Citizen

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Born in Poland in 1903, Yisrael Kristal survived World War One, World War Two, the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and the deprivations of post-war Central Europe, immigrating to Israel in 1950. How's that for beating the odds?

On a tragic note, his first children died in the Ghetto and his wife was murdered at Auschwitz. He would remarry after the war.

There is some question as to whether Kristal's age can be officially verified, as he doesn't possess any documentation from the first 20 years of his life.

He remembers throwing candy at the Austrian Emperor. Perhaps it was Blessed Karl.

Before reprinting a recent article on Kristal, I want to review some interesting facts: 

• There are believed to be 300,000 to 400,000 centenarians currently alive, though that number has been increasing at a steep rate every year. It is estimated that by the year 2050 Japan alone will have almost that many.
• In both the United States and Japan, an average of 100-150 people turn one-hundred every day--too many for the President or the Japanese Prime Minister to call. In the United States, they do get a letter "signed" by the President.
• The Japanese have the highest per-capita incidence at 40 per 100,000--10 times greater than the world average.
• The top six countries (with a per-capita incidence of 30 or higher) are Japan, Thailand, Spain, France, Italy and South Africa.
• Spain's rate is 10 times higher than Portugal's.
• There are only 300 to 400 supercentenarians (people who have lived to be at least 110) and only 39 people in modern recorded history who have lived to be 115. Only four are alive today.
• The oldest person ever (whose age was officially verified) was Jeanne Calment of France who died in 1997 at the age of 122.
• The oldest person currently alive is Susannah Mushatt Jones, born in Alabama and currently living in Brooklyn.
• There are only two people currently alive who were born in the 19th century.
• There are probably no more than 200,000 Holocaust survivors alive today, with "survivor" defined broadly as anyone--Jewish or non-Jewish--who suffered persecution under the Nazis in camps, prisons, ghettos or were refugees or in hiding. The number of Jewish concentration camp survivors is undoubtedly much smaller.
• This number is shrinking at a rapid rate for obvious reasons. Museums, universities and other institutions are currently racing to document and interview as many survivors as possible.

From The Times of Israel:

A Holocaust survivor in Haifa is believed to be the oldest man in the world. 

Yisrael Kristal, 112, achieved that status this week after Yasutaro Koide of Japan, also 112, died, Haaretz reported Thursday. 

Kristal’s grandson, Oren, received an email this week from the Gerontology Research Group, an international organization that tracks the world’s over-110 set, alerting him that the Polish-born Auschwitz survivor was up for the honor. 

Upon hearing the news, Kristal said in Yiddish: “The joy of my old age.” 

To be officially certified as the oldest living man, Kristal must present documentation from the first 20 years of his life. However, Haaretz reported, the earliest official document Kristal possesses is from when he was 25. 

Born on September 15, 1903, in the town of Zarnow, Kristal moved to Lodz in 1920 to work in his family’s candy business. He continued operating the business after the Nazis forced the city’s Jews into a ghetto, where Kristal’s two children died. In 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz, where his wife, whom he had married at age 25, was killed. 

In 1950, he moved to Haifa with his second wife and their son, working again as a confectioner. 

Kristal’s daughter Shula Kuperstoch told The Jerusalem Post that he has been religiously observant his whole life and continues to lay tefillin each morning. 

“The Holocaust did not affect his beliefs,” Kuperstoch said. “He believes he was saved because that’s what God wanted. He is not an angry person, he is not someone who seeks to an accounting, he believes everything has a reason in the world.” 

“His attitude to life is everything in moderation,” she added. “He eats and sleeps moderately, and says that a person should always be in control of their own life and not have their life control them, as far as this is possible.” 

Interviewed by Haaretz in 2012, at the comparatively youthful age of 109, Kristal declined to offer a theory for his longevity, instead saying, “It’s no great bargain. Everyone has their own good fortune. It’s from heaven. There are no secrets.” 

Asked if his diet was responsible for his long life, he said, “In the camps there wasn’t always anything to eat. What they gave me, I ate. I eat to live; I don’t live to eat. I don’t need too much. Anything that’s too much is no good.”

An Open Letter to Pope Francis from a Jewish Convert: I Want my Money Back!

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The following is a full online reprint of a recent blog post by the writer and historian Michael Hoffman. It's not a real letter, of course, but a dramatization or parody. I'm running it below because I think it's quite good--perhaps the sharpest piece that I've yet read on the subject. In a sense, all it does is declare the obvious. But too often these days that is the least obvious thing to do.

Hoffman has unpopular views on a number of subjects. Some of his views are strange. A few are diametrically opposed to the views that I have put forward on this blog. For example, Hoffman doesn't seem to like Israel very much.

For the purposes of this post, I don't care. Sue me, Chris Ross. 

If you are a faithful Catholic or traditional Christian, read the following and tell me where or how Hoffman gets it wrong. How can his argument (in parody/dream form) be answered? Why should, given the most recent Vatican pronouncements on the subject, Jews convert to Catholicism or Christianity? Or worse, from the point of view of Catholic teachings, why shouldn't Catholics convert to Judaism? After all, according to Church teachings, my Christian baptism and Catholic conformation do not guarantee that I will be saved. So, wouldn't I have a better chance by, as it were, just pulling a Sammy Davis?

Or is the Covenant a purely racial thing (as Hoffman suggests)? I'm sure I have a Jewish ancestor somewhere.

More to the point, why did God come to Earth (in Israel), preach (primarily to Jews) and suffer and die at all?

(Shut up. Because mercy.)

(Shut up yourself. Go to hell.)

See, dialogue is a beautiful thing.

An Open Letter to Pope Francis by Michael Hoffman:

His Holiness, Pope Francis
Vatican City
January, 2016

Dear Holy Father

I am a Jew. I have the assurance, as did Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, of direct descent from King David on my father’s side (my mother, I was assured was descended of Hillel).

I am 74-years-old. I converted to the Roman Catholic Church at the age of 17 in the last year of the pontificate of Pope Pius XII. I did so because I was under the conviction that I had to accept and have faith that Jesus Christ was my savior, and I believed it. And I believed that I had to be a baptized member of his Church to have a chance of salvation. So I converted and was baptized in the Catholic Church, and then I was confirmed.

Over the years I have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to both Peters’ Pence (the pope’s own treasury about which you of course must be very familiar), and my local parish and diocese.

During that time I attended thousands of Masses, hundreds of holy hours and novenas, said thousands of rosaries, and made hundreds of trips to the Confessional.

Now in 2015 and 2016 I have read your words and those of your “Pontifical Commission.” You now teach that because I am a racial Jew, God’s covenant with me was never broken, and cannot be broken. You don’t qualify that teaching by specifying anything I might do that would threaten the Covenant, which you say God has with me because I am a Jew. You teach that it’s an unbreakable Covenant. You don’t even say that it depends on me being a good person. Logically speaking, if God’s Covenant with me is unbreakable, then a racial Jew such as I am can do anything he wants and God will still maintain a Covenant with me and I will go to heaven.

Your Pontifical Commission wrote last December, “The Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews…it does not in any way follow that the Jews are excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God.”

You are the Pontiff. I believe what your Commission teaches under your banner and in your name, and what you declared during your visit to the synagogue in January. As a result, I no longer see any point in getting up every Sunday morning to go to Mass, say rosaries, or attend the Rite of Reconciliation on Saturday afternoon. All of those acts are superfluous for me. Predicated on your teaching, I now know that due to my special racial superiority in God’s eyes, I don’t need any of it.

I don’t see any reason now as to why I was baptized in 1958. There was no need for me to be baptized. I no longer see why there was a need for Jesus to come to earth either, or preach to the Jewish children of Abraham of his day. As you state, they were already saved as a result of their racial descent from the Biblical patriarchs. What would they need him for?

In light of what you and your Pontifical Commission have taught me, it appears that the New Testament is a fraud, at least as it applies to Jews. All of those preachings and disputations to the Jews were for no purpose. Jesus had to know this, yet he persisted in causing a lot of trouble for the Jews by insisting they had to be born again, they had to believe he was their Messiah, they had to stop following their traditions of men, and that they couldn’t get to heaven unless they believed that he was the Son of God.

Your holiness, you and your Commission have instructed me in the true path to my salvation: my race. It’s all I need and all I have ever needed. God has a covenant with my genes. It’s my genes that save me. My eyes are open now.

Consequently, you will be hearing from my lawyer. I am filing suit against the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church. I want my money back, with interest, and I am seeking compensatory and punitive damages for the psychological harm your Church caused me, by making me think I needed something besides my own exalted racial identity, in order to go to heaven after I die.

I am litigating as well over the time that I wasted that I could have spent working in my business, instead of squandering it worshipping a Jesus that your Church now says I don’t need to believe in for my salvation. Your prelates and clerics told me something very different in 1958. I’ve been robbed!

Sincerely,
Pinchus Feinstein
2617646 Ocean View Ave.
Miami Beach, Florida 33239

P.S. I'm transmitting this letter to Hoffman, an ex-AP reporter from New York, in the expectation that he will bring it to the attention of those who should know about it. I am transmitting it to him in the form of a dream, but nevertheless, it represents the feelings of many victims of your robber Church.—Pinch

West Bank Municipality Dedicates Public Park to Terrorist Who Stabbed Jewish Couple AND their Toddler (Flashback to the Attack in the Muslim Quarter: "I yelled for help and they spat at me")

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The Munsters: Parents and siblings of the stabber smile for the camera 

That the entire Muslim population of the West Bank hasn't yet been deported to the An Nafud is a testament to the tolerance of the Israeli government—a tolerance bordering on the saintly. The following is from The Jerusalem Post. A description of the original attack follows:

Park to be dedicated in name of terrorist on site of his destroyed home 

The Municipality of Surda/Abu Kash in the Ramallah area decided on Sunday to name a public park after Muhannad Halabi, who killed two Israelis in Jerusalem’s Old City last October. 

The new park will be built on the site where Halabi’s house existed before it was demolished by the IDF earlier this month. 

Halabi, a 19-year-old Palestinian law student at Al-Quds University from a village near Ramallah, went on a shooting and stabbing spree in October killing two before he was shot dead by police. 

The attack took place at the Lion's Gate on Succot as the victims were en route to the Western Wall. Halabi stabbed a couple and their toddler son and then grabbed a pistol from one of his victims and began firing wildly into the crowd until a border police officer shot him from 50 meters away, killing him. 

The victims of the attack, one of the first in the current wave of terror attacks that have plagued Israel over the last four months, were Rabbi Nehemia Lavie, 41, an Old City resident who worked at the Ateret Cohanim Yeshiva, near the place he was killed, and Aharon Benita from Beitar Illit, the father of the toddler also wounded in the attack.

Nehemia Lavi and Aharon Banita

Meanwhile, Palestinian activists announced on Sunday that they have collected a total of 650,000 Shekels in donations to build a new house for the Halabi family following the launch of a crowdfunding campaign. 

The campaign, used by Palestinians to protest against Israel's house demolition policy, may become a tremendous success since many Palestinians view Halabi as the “hero who ignited the Third Intifada's fire.” 

Many Palestinians were outraged that the Palestinian Authority did not act to stop the house's demolition by closing the roads leading to the structure and preventing the approach of the Israeli forces. 

Following the destruction of their house on January 9, the entire Halabi family gathered around the ruins and took a selfie picture in which all family members are seen smiling and flashing the victory sign. 

The family members’ smiles just after losing their house are consistent with the behavior of many young Palestinians during the current terror wave which has seen Palestinian terrorists tend to smile to the camera, even when they are already arrested or physically injured by Israeli security forces. The phenomenon, known in Arabic as Ibtisamat (smiles) has even become a popular hashtag on Palestinian social media.

From The Times of Israel (October 4, 2015):

‘I yelled for help and they spat at me,’ says victim of Jerusalem attack 

Adele Banita gives harrowing account of terror assault in which her husband Aharon and Old City resident Nehemia Lavi were murdered, and she was badly wounded  

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Adele Banita and her son Matan  

Adele Banita, one of the victims of Saturday night’s terror attack in Jerusalem Old City, gave a harrowing account of how the deadly stabbing assault unfolded and how her cries for help were ignored as her husband lay fatally wounded on the floor and she herself was stabbed. 

“I yelled ‘please help me!’ and they just spat at me,” said Banita of the surrounding Palestinian shopkeepers whom she said looked on and did nothing as Palestinian terrorist Muhannad Halabi attacked her and her family in an alleyway near Lion’s Gate in the Old City. 

The Banitas’ two-year-old son was also lightly injured in the attack. Their infant girl was unharmed. 

Banita was taken in serious condition to Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem where she underwent emergency surgery overnight Saturday-Sunday. She regained consciousness on Sunday. Her husband died of his wounds at Shaare Zedek Hospital shortly after the attack. 

“When we got back from the Western Wall, we felt that something wasn’t right,” she told Ynet from her hospital bed Sunday. 

“We started walking fast but the terrorist emerged from one of the stores and lunged at us and started stabbing my husband. My husband is a strong man and started fighting him, he punched him in the face. At that point, the terrorist started stabbing me. Then he went back to my husband and stabbed him again and again. I also fought him, I tried to take away the knife, but I failed,” she recounted.

Law student and murderer

Banita said Palestinian youths who saw the attack laughed and cursed at her as she yelled for help. 

She said that one of them slapped her and another laughed in her face and told her to “drop dead” when she told him she’d give him a million shekels if he helped her get away with her two babies. 

“They saw that we were with two baby carriages,” she said. 

Banita — stabbed, bleeding and losing consciousness fast — said she used her last ounces of energy to run toward security forces for help. 

“I said ‘I’m hurt, my husband is stabbed and my two babies are there alone,’ then I lost consciousness,” she said. 

Nehemia Lavi, 41, an Old City resident who heard the screams, came to help and he too was stabbed and killed by the terrorist. 

Lavi and Banita were laid to rest Sunday at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem. 

In video footage that emerged from the attack, Halabi, a 19-year-old resident of al-Bireh near Ramallah, can briefly be seen lunging at one of his victims — it’s not clear who — and wrestling him to the ground. Adele’s screams can be heard as well as a baby’s wails. The video ends with the sound of gunshots. Throughout, shopkeepers and people can be seen either looking on or running away. 

At the end of the video, one man nonchalantly takes a sip of his soft drink as he looks on. 

The terrorist was shot dead by security forces at the scene.

What Damascus Looks Like, Four Years After the Arab Spring

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Not all of Damascus looks like this but much of it does.

This is the Jobar neighborhood, close to the center of the city. Before the Syrian Civil War it was home to 300,000 residents, though the area looks larger than that figure would imply, with utter devastation seemingly stretching as far as the eye can see.

The photographs were recently taken by a Russian drone and re-posted in a number of news sites including the Daily Mail. There is also a haunting aerial video on RT News.

Note the dishes. I assume that means there are people (fighters?) still living there.

At one point Jobar also had a thriving Jewish community centered around the ancient Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue (not to be confused with the Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria, which has apparently been partially closed down). During the war, the synagogue was allegedly first looted and burned by Al-Qaeda and the Free Syrian Army. It was then mostly destroyed--by the government (according to the rebels) or the rebels (according to the government).

The Jobar area is still contested, with Islamist forces dug into a network of tunnels, though the government may now have the upper hand.

For what it's worth.

Whatever one thinks of the refugee crisis, this at least provides some perspective on it. Some of the residents were killed. Some joined one of the warring factions. But presumably, most of them simply fled.

Happy Chanukah! After Lighting White House Menorah, Bizarre ObamaRabbi Invokes Allah, Demands Justice For Palestinians

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Radical Chick

Well, personally I think this is one Rabbi who's angling for a FrancisChurch Archbishopric.

From Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage:

Obama's Chanukah parties have had issues in the past. But this time it teetered over into full-blown violently offensive territory. Obama's own remarks were boilerplate inoffensive stuff. Israel's President Rivlin, a political hack who desperately sucks up to the media, was equally insipid. 

But the White House chose Susan Talve to light the Menorah. Talve is a member of the anti-Israel group T'ruah which is currently promoting assorted "soft BDS" programs. She's also a Ferguson activist. Her behavior was deeply insulting to the religious Jewish community and made it clear that the White House was determined to hijack even a Chanukah party to promote an anti-Jewish agenda. 

So the general conviviality of the Chanukah party was disrupted by a crazed rant from Susan Talve in which she seemed determined to jam as many leftist talking points as possible in her limited time. Instead of talking about Chanukah, Talve blathered on about getting, "guns off our streets" and to "clean up the fires of toxic nuclear waste". 

Talve screeched, "I stand here with my fierce family of clergy and black lives matter activists who took to the streets of Ferguson".

Having celebrated the race riots which destroyed a community, she pivoted to Syrian Muslim migrants. Chanukah is a celebration of the Maccabees defeating a Syrian occupation, but Talve may not even know that. Radical clergy tend to be light on the religion and heavy on the social justice. 

Instead she rambled on about how the "gates of this nation would stay open for all immigrants and all refugees". 

Then, not satisfied with having made a disgrace of the Chanukah ceremony, Susan Talve declared, "I stand here to light these lights to say no the darkness of Islamophobia and Homophobia and Transphobia." 

Talve babbled about insuring "justice for Palestinians" and began gleefully chanting, "Ins'Allah, Ins'Allah". Or "Allah Willing". 

I don't recall Susan Talve mentioning G-d or a word of Jewish scripture. Indeed she spent more time talking about Muslims than about anything in Judaism. And yet that's typical for Social justice clergy who have no organic ties to Judaism. 

It's bad enough that Obama insists on pursuing anti-Israel policies, but the Susan Talve appearance was just gratuitously insulting to the Jewish community.