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Author: Miriam Elman

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Miriam Elman

Miriam F. Elman is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, where she is a research director in the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration.

Frimet and Arnold Roth’s 15-year-old daughter Malki was murdered in the August 9, 2001 Hamas terror attack at a busy Sbarro's Pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem. Now they’re requesting the public’s help in their effort to bring Ahlam Ahmad Al-Tamimi, the mastermind of the heinous crime, to justice in a U.S. court of law. (Sign up form here.) As we noted in a recent post, the Jordanian government has refused to extradite Tamimi.

Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Israel organization which is a leading player in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, has released an “updated” video for its “Deadly Exchange” campaign. We wrote about JVP’s “Deadly Exchange” initiative in a prior post, With “Deadly Exchange” Campaign, Jewish Voice for Peace moves from enabling to promoting antisemitism. As we highlighted, the campaign blames Israel and major Jewish American organizations for policing problems in minority communities, including police shootings. JVP thus sets up Jews as part of and the driving force behind a white police power structure oppressing non-whites. As demonstrated in the prior post, those accusations are false, but pernicious. JVP holds Jews out as the cause of unrelated problems, and does so in terms meant to exploit and incite antisemitism and racial hatred and resentment.

We’ve written before about convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh, a military member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who murdered two university students, Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner, in 1969 when she put a bomb in a Jerusalem supermarket. She also unsuccessfully tried to bomb the British Consulate. Odeh's complicity in the bombings has been documented thoroughly, including in recent video interviews with her two Palestinian co-conspirators, who now live in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Odeh was sentenced to life in prison, but spent 10 years in prison. She was released in a prisoner exchange in 1979 for an Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon, eventually making her way to the U.S. where she became a citizen.

Anti-Israel propaganda is common on America’s college and university campuses. But as we’ve highlighted in a number of recent posts, this biased messaging appears to be filtering down into the U.S. public school system. In 2015, we documented an effort to indoctrinate children in an Ithaca, NY 3rd grade classroom into becoming “freedom fighters for Palestine”. Then last February we reported how the NY State Education Department and the Board of Regents became embroiled in a controversy over the insertion of an offensive anti-Israel cartoon into a global studies Regents exam administered to 10th graders. These cases are important to document and record because they provide accumulating evidence of the expansion of the anti-Israel and BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement’s propaganda campaign. Now a new study by CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) offers another sobering example of biased anti-Israel curricular materials working their way out of higher education and down the chain into several U.S. public schools.

Shortly after 7:00 a.m. Friday, Israeli time, three Israeli Arab terrorists opened fire near the Temple Mount, killing two Israeli policemen, and then fled onto the Temple Mount where the attackers were killed by Israeli police.  The two policemen killed were Israeli Druze. In dramatic video, one of the attackers "played dead" only to rise to try to stab the police. He was shot dead in the act. The attack at this location was a clear attempt not just at terror, but to stoke wider conflict.

In dozens of posts we’ve highlighted how the anti-Zionist, non-Jewish group "Jewish Voice for Peace" (JVP) enables, legitimizes and mainstreams antisemitism by providing a seemingly Jewish cover for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and similar movements. But JVP isn't merely an enabler of antisemitism. JVP also itself is a producer of anti-Jewish animus.

For a century Palestinians have been denying and denigrating the Jewish people’s attachment to the Land of Israel even as they’ve been doubling-down on their own fictitious claims to ‘Palestine’ in antiquity and to family lineages in the Holy Land that predate that of the ancient Hebrews. A former adjunct lecturer of Jewish history at Haifa University, now the creative director at a Tel Aviv advertising agency, decided to poke fun at this absurd situation in which Palestinians reject the historical accuracy of a Hebrew/Jewish presence in the land while simultaneously concocting an essentially fraudulent narrative of their own history. The literary product is History of the Palestinian People: From Ancient Times to the Modern Era.

What happens when an Israeli leftist activist confesses publicly to beating a Palestinian in order to prove how bad Israel is? In this case, described below, the activist finds himself the subject of an investigation because he either is lying to damage Israel, or telling the truth, in which case he's a criminal. Israeli authorities are not allowing the activist to have it both ways, claiming he's a criminal for political purposes, but evading criminal responsibility. We’ve written before about the Israeli radical leftist NGO Breaking the Silence (BtS).

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is asking the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Committee to register the Old City of Hebron, including the Cave of the Patriarchs located there, as a Palestinian World Heritage Site. It’s a fresh bid by the PA to reject ancient Jewish ties to the Land of Israel and to pressure the UN body to deny the Jewish people’s attachments to sacred sites in their biblical heartland.

Note: This is the final in our daily re-created coverage of the Six-Day War, which ran from June 4. Prior posts: 50th Anniversary of Six-Day War: The Eve of WarSix-Day War Day 1 — War BeginsSix-Day War Day 2 — At the Gates of Jerusalem’s Old CitySix-Day War Day 3 — “The Temple Mount is in Our Hands”; Six-Day War Day 4 — Egypt and Jordan Defeated; Six-Day War Day 5 — Golan Heights are Captured. Today, after 132 hours of fighting between Israel and her Arab neighbors, a cease-fire went into effect with Syria.

Note: This is the fifth in our daily re-created coverage of the Six-Day War, which will run through tomorrow (Saturday, June 10). Prior posts: 50th Anniversary of Six-Day War: The Eve of WarSix-Day War Day 1 — War Begins; Six-Day War Day 2 — At the Gates of Jerusalem’s Old City; Six-Day War Day 3 — “The Temple Mount is in Our Hands”; Six-Day War Day 4 — Egypt and Jordan Defeated. As we reported in prior posts, for the past four days Egypt’s media has been incessantly reporting about false military victories. But by this morning, President Gamal Abdel Nasser could no longer hide the truth. Appearing on national television, he admitted the defeat of the Egyptian armed forces and told the nation that he was resigning from office. With Egypt and Jordan maintaining cease-fires, the southern and eastern fronts are now quiet. But that’s not the case for the beleaguered Israeli communities in the north of country. They’ve been coping with a barrage of rocket fire over the last four days.

Note: This is the third in our daily re-created coverage of the Six-Day War, which will run through Saturday, June 10. Prior posts: 50th Anniversary of Six-Day War: The Eve of WarSix-Day War Day 1 — War Begins; Six-Day War Day 2 — At the Gates of Jerusalem’s Old City; Six-Day War Day 3—“The Temple Mount is in Our Hands”. On this fourth day of the war pitting Israel against a coalition of Arab armies, the Jewish state has managed to avert near certain annihilation. Israel’s defense forces are now fully in control of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank)—important territory from both a historical and strategical standpoint. Along with the eastern front, the IDF has also neutralized the threat from Egypt in the South. Israel’s advance to the Suez Canal has tonight finally convinced President Gamal Abdel Nasser to accept a cease-fire.

Note: This is the third in our daily re-created coverage of the Six-Day War, which will run through Saturday, June 10. Prior posts: 50th Anniversary of Six-Day War: The Eve of WarSix-Day War Day 1 — War Begins; Six-Day War Day 2: At the Gates of Jerusalem’s Old City. Israel’s armed forces are emerging triumphant in a lightning war which today saw the Egyptians defeated and forced back to the banks of the Suez Canal. The blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba has also been broken with the Israel’s Navy now holding Sharm el-Sheikh and reopening the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. This afternoon, Egypt’s President Nasser also surrendered Gaza.

Note: This is the second in our daily re-created coverage of the Six-Day War, which will run through Saturday, June 10. Prior posts: 50th Anniversary of Six-Day War: The Eve of WarSix-Day War Day 1 — War Begins. Yesterday, a surprise aerial attack on the Egyptian Air Force set the stage for some impressive military gains by Israel against her enemies in this second day of fighting. The Egyptian armed forces are now in retreat as the IDF continues to “smash deeply into the Sinai.” Gaza has also been captured by the 7th Armored Brigade led by Major General Yisrael Tal, and shells from there have now stopped falling on the beleaguered Jewish settlements lining that border. Over the last 24 hours the IDF has fought its way to the gates of the Jordanian-held Old City in Jerusalem.

Note: This post is the first in our daily re-created coverage of the Six-Day War. Starting Monday June 5 and concluding on Saturday June 10, we will cover each night the war as the events happened in 1967.  For a prelude, see 50th Anniversary of Six-Day War: The Eve of War. In the early morning hours of June 5, Israel launched an aerial strike on Egyptian air force bases. The attack was in response to the huge dangers that the country has faced in recent weeks—at least 200,000 Arab troops and some 1,000 tanks massed at its border—and the Soviet-backed Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s ongoing provocations. Israel has finally come to terms with Egypt’s threat to destroy it.

Note: This post is a prelude to our daily re-created coverage of the Six Day War. Starting Monday, June 5, we will cover each night the war as the events happened in 1967. The Six-Day War, the fiftieth anniversary of which takes places tomorrow on June 5, 2017, is “one of history’s most brilliant—and controversial campaigns.” In a mere six days, from June 5 through June 10, 1967, the state of Israel routed a numerically and materially superior Arab war coalition, decisively defeating the surrounding Arab armies in a pre-emptive act of self-defense. As the editors of a special Summer 2017 issue of Middle East Quarterly put it:
On June 4, 1967, the ecstatic Arab leaders were prophesying Israel’s imminent destruction and promising their subjects the spoils of victory; a week later, they were reconciling themselves to a staggering military defeat, the loss of vast territories, and sharp international humiliation.”

We’ve written before about Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada in connection to BDS and virulently anti-Israel activism crossing over into flagrant antisemitism and creating a toxic environment for Jews, Anti-Israel protest disrupts vote to support Holocaust Education Week at Ryerson U. In that earlier post we highlighted how several groups of Ryerson students, members of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association, reportedly staged an “unofficial” walk-out so that a student government vote on a resolution to commemorate Holocaust Education Week would be deprived of a quorum. Now, a new disturbing story has surfaced at Ryerson. But this time it involves anti-Israel, pro-BDS faculty there allegedly behaving badly toward a Jewish undergraduate student.

Today (May 24th) is Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day). The newest addition to the Jewish calendar and an Israeli national holiday, Jerusalem Day is held on the 28th day of the Hebrew month of Iyar—six weeks after the Passover seder and one week before the eve of the holiday of Shavuot. In June 1967, 28 Iyar was the third day of the Six-Day War, when Jerusalem’s Old City fell to Israeli forces. As we discussed in prior posts, Jerusalem Day celebrates this reunification of Israel’s capital city, when the IDF essentially brought the holy city back to Jewish sovereignty. It also commemorates the two-day (June 6-7, 1967) hard-fought battle for Jerusalem, when the elite 55th Paratroopers Brigade, led by its legendary commander General Motta Gur, liberated Jewish holy places from an illegal and immoral Jordanian occupation.