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Israel Tag

FIFA has decided to reject a request from the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) to sanction Israel due to athletic activities that take place in the West Bank. From The Jerusalem Post:
"The FIFA Council takes note of the documents adopted by international governmental bodies concerning the relationship between Israel and Palestine – such as United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which comprises recommendations without sanctions – but has decided that it should not take any position on their contents," the statement read. "The FIFA Council acknowledges that the current situation is, for reasons that have nothing to do with football, characterized by an exceptional complexity and sensitivity and by certain de facto circumstances that can neither be ignored nor changed unilaterally by non-governmental organizations such as FIFA."

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced his plans to visiting India in January. The announcement comes less than four months after India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi's historic visit to Israel -- the first ever such visit by a sitting Indian head of the government. The visit will take place at a time when the bilateral relations between both countries are at an all-time high. The last Israeli Prime Minister to visit India was Ariel Sharon almost 14 years ago.

For a number of years we’ve been documenting anti-Israel activism on U.S. college campuses, carried out by student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. In these prior posts we’ve described many instances when this virulent anti-Israelism has crossed over the line into blatant anti-Jewish animus, including at schools like Vassar, Oberlin, University of Illinois and at various California colleges and universities.

In a deliberate show of anti-Israel sentiment, a Palestinian city has erected a statue of Saddam Hussein bearing the words:  "Arab Palestine From River To Sea."  This was Hussein's rallying call for the destruction of Israel. The Times of Israel reports:
The Palestinian city of Qalqilya has named a street after Saddam Hussein and erected a memorial with his likeness, an NGO monitoring Arabic media reported.

Last week, Austria's National Union of Students (ÖH), the country’s leading student body, passed a sternly worded resolution condemning the anti-Israel boycott campaign -- or the "Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” Movement -- trying to get a foothold in the country. The student body raised concerns about the "growing presence of the antisemitic BDS campaign" on Austrian college campuses and vowed to combat the antisemitic agitators trying to infiltrate student politics.

UNESCO has become a poster child for how UN agencies have had their missions perverted by the anti-Israel agenda. Other than the absurd UN Human Rights Council, which is run by some of the worst human rights offenders in the world, UNESCO stands out for its anti-Jewish agenda, which seeks to deny the history of the Jewish presence in what now is Israel and Judea/Samaria (the "West Bank") putting in its place a false Islamic supremacist version of history. Among our recent posts documenting this bias:

In a strongly worded resolution passed by the Green Party in the southern German state of Bavaria, the state unit of the party has rejected the anti-Israel boycott campaign, or the BDS Movement as antisemitic. The resolution titled "No to Antisemitism, no to BDS" (embedded and translated below) declared the Bavarian Green Party's intention to actively challenge the BDS activism in the state.

Now in its second consecutive year, the Nakba Tour is a speaking event that brings several Palestinian women registered as refugees in Lebanon to university, church, and other community venues across North America. The talks rightly highlight the many overwhelming challenges that Palestinians face in Lebanon, including the denial of basic civil rights and endemic discrimination.

We blogged about the Kurdish Independence vote held last week and about the resulting international threats and tensions, including the closing of Kurdish airports. Pro-western Iraqi Kurds are disappointed by the lukewarm European response to their overwhelming victory, and can't be too happy with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's statement that the U. S. does not recognize their independence referendum. Turkey, Iran, and Iraq are stepping up their disapproval of the referendum and moving to isolate the Kurdish region of Iraq.

An initiative sponsored by the Embassy of Israel in India seeks to connect Jerusalem's startup ecosystem with India's technology scene. Contrary to the popular perception, Jerusalem is fast catching up with Tel Aviv as a leading technology center in the world. In 2015, TIME magazine named Jerusalem as one of the world’s fastest growing hi-tech hubs. The annual startup competition "Start JLM", supported by Indian government and local private sector players, is being held in the country for the first time. This year's winner, Bangalore-based Mimyk startup will be taking part in an technology boost camp in Jerusalem. Four other finalists will be getting access to startup incubators.

The Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), a national organization that supports pro-Israel and Zionist students on university campuses, has released a new report that summarizes the findings from nearly 1200 anti-Israel activities that took place on U.S. colleges during the 2016-2017 academic year. The report highlights a “growing intensity” of anti-Israel campaigns on certain campuses, but also notes a 40% decrease in BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaigns—from 33 in 2015-2016 down to 20 over the last year—and a 20% decline in overall anti-Israel activity during the same period.

At a time when smear campaigns against Israel often go unchallenged on college campuses and anti-Israel activists hijack protest movements across the U.S. to attack of the Jewish State, a newly published book tells the story of Israel's 69-year silent journey to impact the world and serve those in most need. "United Nation: The Humanitarian Spirit of Israel" written by the Israeli entrepreneur David Kramer, is a collection of 40 stories, each illustrating the benevolent and altruistic side of Israel that the mainstream media and the 24-hour news cycle don't care to show.

Mitchell Flint, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot during World War II who later became a founding member of Israel’s legendary first fighter squadron and flew dozens of missions on behalf of the fledgling Jewish state during its 1948 War of Independence, died of natural causes on Saturday (September 16) at his home in Los Angeles. In several prior posts, we described how Flint and other non-Israeli volunteers played a key role during the second phase of the 1948 war, when the combined armies of five Arab states threatened to overrun and cripple Israel and “throw the Jews into the sea”:

Newsela is a relatively recently-established educational resource that purportedly specializes in non-fiction content for the nation's K-12 schools, teachers, and students.  It sprung up as a private partner of Common Core, and the service reaches at least 75% of America's K-12 classrooms. Newsela recently came under fire for its 9/11 instructional material. Newsela's 9/11 "Fact Sheet" included reference to Israel's "long and shady history" and to Israel as belonging, originally, to Muslims. A historical impossibility. Nonetheless, this drivel was published far and wide, and America's 5th and 6th grade students across the nation were spoon-fed it. Newsela has, under pressure from parents and alarmed educators, retracted and corrected the materials, but not before the damage was done.

A joint report released last week by the Institute of Jewish Policy Research (JPR), a London-based think tank, and the Community Security Trust (CST), the communal Jewish defense body in the UK, found an “unambiguous association” between antisemitic and anti-Israel attitudes in Britain. The report—an in-depth investigation and analysis of animus toward Jews, the role of hatred directed toward Israel, and the prevalence of bigotry across the political spectrum in Britain today—makes for a sobering read.