SPECIAL NOTICE: Your humble servant knew he was back in Israel early this morning when the usual night-time background noise of the nearby freeways in California had been replaced by that of Israeli Air Force drones overhead. Please note that israelstreet blogs will now be appearing in the morning Israeli time instead of the evening.
UPDATES
7 am Israel time, Thursday, June 11 2015
**A 60 year old female tourist from the Philippines was moderately wounded last night when the bus she was riding in was attacked by Arabs in the Old City of Jerusalem. As of this morning, the tourist is in the hospital and the terrorist is on the loose.
According to reports on 0404, an astonishing 27 other terrorist attacks occurred yesterday across eastern Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. Particularly hard hit in “rock” and Molotov cocktail assaults were Israelis in Issawiya, A-Tur, Kiryat Arba, and all along Road 443.
**Another example of the Israeli police not wanting to call a terrorist attack a terrorist attack: on Sunday afternoon in Ramle an Arab man stabbled a 26-year-old Israeli woman repeatedly in the back with a screwdriver. When police rushed in to save her, he attempted to stab them as well and was shot in the legs.
Ramle police have a concocted a series of rationales to explain his terrorist–the Arab was a racist, the Arab was “disaffected”, etc. etc. This all follows the pattern here first begun by the IDF of looking for any rationale possible to explain Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel. Police forces all over the country are loathe to call any terrorist attack what it is.
The woman who was stabbed remains in a hospital today in “moderate” condition.
**The newest ethnic target of IS and Al-Qaeda along the Israeli-Syrian border (on the Syrian side) are the Druze. Yesterday 40 Druze young men and elders were massacred in the Idlib province.
**Where the Israeli Embassy in Switzerland failed last week to stop an exhibition of the abominable “Breaking the Silence” organization, the Israeli Embassy in Germany yesterday succeeded in blocking a “Breaking the Silence” presentation in Cologne.
Kudos to Deputy Israel Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely for leading the charge against Breaking the Silence!
**Another boat, the Marian, has left Sweden on the way to “break the siege” of Gaza. A glorified yacht, the Marian has been languishing at the dock for three years as its owners sought to raise funds for the trip.
Let’s hope the boat sinks before it gets here.
**Do you remember President Obama’s odious interview on Israeli television last week in which he accused PM Netanyahu of seeking to add numerous conditions to “negotiations”–and in which Obama did not utter a syllable about Palestinian responsibility for anything.
Yesterday, PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was busy in Bulgaria telling a press conference that Israel must stop building “settlements”, must stop the Judaization of Jerusalem because it is burying Christian and Islamic identity, and must release Palestinian terrorists held in Israeli prisons.
To put the icing on the cake, Abbas added that the PLO would not agree to a Palestinian state with provisional borders in future negotiations with Israel–and the PLO was reexamining security and economic ties with Israel.
Of course, the idea that Abbas will in any way tamper with security ties with Israel is ludicrous. Those security ties are what keeps Abbas alive.
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However the entire Bulgarian episode shows yet again to whomever is paying attention, just how biased President Obama is against Israel as he continues to single out Israel for castigation at every opportunity.
TODAY’S BLOG:
Your humble servant continues to be impressed by the way that the new government and its ministers are fighting for Israel at every turn.
Whether its Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely putting Israeli embassies worldwide on the attack against BDS, or Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked accelerating efforts to legally challenge Israel delegitimizers here in the country, or Minister of Sports and Culture Miri Regev moving the Ministry of Sports and Culture to Jerusalem, one has to be impressed by the surge of energy that these and others have brought to the scene in less than a month on the job.
Whether they can keep up this energy and momentum is anyone’s guess because everyone on the Israeli “left” from President Reuvin Rivlin, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, opposition leaders Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni, and of course all the self-professed “humanitarian” NGOs are doing everything they can to thwart them.
The last few days has seen another refreshing sign of the new wind blowing in Jerusalem–this time in the actions of new Education Minister Naftali Bennett. Bennett took the extraordinary action on Tuesday of pulling all government funding for a play that was to be produced in an Israeli-Arab theater in Haifa.
That the Israeli government was ever involved in funding the play in the first place is indicative of just how far to the “left” things have swerved in Israel.
The play, entitled “A Parallel Time”, glorifies the actions of Walid Daka, an Israeli-Arab terrorist who abducted and brutally murdered Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984.
As you can imagine, the Tamam family was outraged over the decision of a previous ministerial committee to fund the play and welcomed Bennett’s decision on Tuesday.
Here’s what Bennett said in making his decision:
“Israeli citizens won’t fund plays tolerant of the murder of soldiers. I’m education minister, and a play that portrays tolerance to the murder of soldiers guarding over me is not education . . . [Israeli schoolchildren] will never see a play that tolerates the murder of Jews — not in my schools.”
Bravo to Minister Bennett for making this decision, and bravo to the Ministers of the Netanyahu government for beginning to act.
By the way, don’t expect Bennett’s decision to go unchallenged. Already the Arab Unified List party has said that it will challenge the decision based on “free speech”–and expect Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to fight tooth and nail for the play’s funding. And don’t be surprised if Herzog and Livni decide that they will fund the play privately.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.