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Israel Tag

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.

As I noted in Morning Insurrection last week, I will be spending 18 days touring Central Europe and the Balkans. During our stop in Budapest, Hungary, motorcades are rolling down our street continuously and Israeli flags are flying high. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in town, and he is now making news with a rather stark assessment about his country's relationship with the European Union.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a blistering attack against the European Union during a closed-session meeting Wednesday morning in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, telling the premiers of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia that the EU's behavior toward Israel is crazy.

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.

In a stunning display, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel received favourable coverage from across the Indian media landscape. The Indian Prime Minister was in Israel on a 3-day visit, first ever by an Indian premier. Prime Minister Modi’s visit lays “the foundation of a new chapter in relations with Israel," commented the country's leading business daily Economic Times. Both countries took "historic steps towards a new engagement," wrote newspaper Hindustan Times. Like many Indian newspapers, The Hindu described the visit as "ground-breaking" and noted the "extraordinary welcome" Indian leader received in "the Jewish nation."

In late November 2008, 10 Pakistani terrorists launched one of the most brazen terrorist attacks ever, in the Indian city of Mumbai. By the time it was over, 164 people were killed in multiple locations, including Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, Leopold Café, Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, Oberoi Trident Hotel, Metro Cinema, Cama and Albless Hospital and Nariman House. Sending teams of terrorists to multiple locations to effectively paralyze a city was a model that would be repeated, including in Paris 2015:

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Israel yesterday for a 3-day tour of the Jewish State, the first ever by an Indian Premier. Following his red carpet welcome at the Ben Gurion Airport, Modi engaged in some serious bilateral diplomacy with the Israeli government. Both countries signed a series of agreements in the fields of agriculture, water, and space exploration. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accompanied Modi to the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, located on the slopes of the Mount of Remembrance near Jerusale, where the Indian leader laid a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance in memory of over six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Both leaders made an impromptu stop at the grave of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of modern Zionism. The visit has attracted enormous media and public interest in both the countries, with #ModiInIsrael became the leading hashtag on Twitter in both Israel and India.

With economic and diplomatic ties at all-time high, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi will embark on a 3-day visit to Israel starting tomorrow, making it the first ever visit by an Indian premier to the Jewish State. The historic visit comes as both countries mark the 25th anniversary of the establishment of full diplomatic relations. India-Israel "relations are upbeat holding huge potential," said Dr. Anju Kumar, Deputy Chief of Mission at the Indian Embassy in Israel. "India and Israel are complementary economies. India, given its huge population has lot of demand for technology in order to increase agricultural productivity, water efficiency and recycling, post-harvest treatment, digitisation and making its cities smart. Israel has many such innovative technologies which can be adapted to Indian requirements."

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.

Just days ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s historic visit to Israel, an Israeli-Indian partnership has announced the creation of a funding platform to help start-ups find investors in each other’s country. Israel’s equity crowdfunding firm OurCrowd and India's leading start-up platform LetsVenture have joined hands to create an 'India Fund' for Israeli and Indian start-ups, seeking to rope in big investors, family funds and OurCrowd’s own global network of investors. “India is a critical growth market for our business with a huge number of very exciting startup investment opportunities in a range of sectors,” OurCrowd CEO Jon Medved said.

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).

Germany’s Jewish community has criticised the government and lawmakers for failing to act against the rising antisemitism in the country. The Head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, slammed the German politicians over 'lack of interest' when it comes to combatting the rising antisemitism within the country. The Central Council of Jews in Germany is the umbrella organization of Jewish communities in the country. The statements coincides with the recent parliamentary debate centred on a detailed report on antisemitism by a group of independent experts tabled in the German Bundestag. The 311-page report by the 'Independent Expert Group on Anti-Semitism' deals with -- to quote a German news network -- the "current anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany." The German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported the recent parliamentary debate saying, “One by one, politicians from all of Germany's major parties took to the podium to condemn anti-Semitism and stress how seriously they took the problem”. Deutsche Welle revealingly called the parliamentary debate on Antisemitism a “ritualized speech-making.” The Bundestag debate ended with Merkel's government deciding to put the report on the back burner.

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.

Public outrage has forced the leading German broadcaster ARD to air the Antisemitism documentary that had previously been censored. The 90-minute documentary, commissioned by the French-German TV network ARTE and Germany’s WDR -- both funded by the German government, had previously been shelved. The film highlights the prevailing Antisemitism in Europe’s growing Muslim population and exposes European and Germany government's financing of antisemitic and anti-Israel groups posing as charities and NGOs.

You may recall the horrifying murder of Israeli mother Dafna Meir in front of her children. We first reported on January 17, 2016, Reports: Palestinian stabs Israeli woman to death at home in front of children:
This has eerie resemblance to the stabbing to death of the Fogel family in 2011, including 6 month old Hadas as she slept in her crib. Reports indicated that a Palestinian man entered a home in a settlement near Hebron, and stabbed to death a mother in front of her three children. One of the children, 15 years old, gave a description of the man to the police, and he was caught on security cameras leaving the the settlement heading towards an Arab village.