New York Times - Some more stuff about the never-ending religious wars in the Middle East.

Some of the worst fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in years showed no signs of subsiding.

Israeli airstrikes left neighborhoods in Gaza trembling and rockets fired by Palestinian militants rained on cities in Israel, including Tel Aviv. By Tuesday night 30 Palestinians had been killed, including 10 children, and 203 others were wounded by airstrikes over the past two days, according to health officials in Gaza. At least three people in Israel were killed in strikes by Hamas, and at least 100 wounded.

Shortly after 9 p.m. in Tel Aviv, militants fired another barrage. One rocket hit an empty bus south of the city, wounding at least three people, including a 5-year-old girl. Above, rockets launched from Gaza toward Tel Aviv.

Palestinian militants said the barrage was revenge for an airstrike that hit a tower housing the offices of several Hamas officials, as well as an apartment owned by a Hamas leader.

The conflict escalated rapidly after confrontations at the Aqsa compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, a chronic flash point.

If everyone was a normal person, aka atheist, there would never be these ridiculous religious wars.

               New York Times

BREAKING NEWS

Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza, killing at least 26 over two days. Hamas launched a barrage of rockets at southern Israel, killing two Israelis.

Tuesday, May 11, 2021 9:42 AM EST

At least 26 Palestinians, including nine children, were killed in at least 130 Israeli strikes on Monday and Tuesday, and 122 others were wounded, according to health officials in Gaza. Two people in Israel were killed in strikes on the Israeli seaside city of Ashkelon on Tuesday, and at least 56 Israelis have received hospital treatment, according to medical officials.

Read the latest

Arabic. Why can't these people speak English so humans can understand?

المرحلة النهائية من بطولة العرب الفردية للفئات العمرية للشطرنج

The final stage of the individual Arab championship for chess age groups 

"PMW believes that the key to the future is peace education. Our research, however, shows that Palestinian children have not been given that key. More than two decades since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority is still actively poisoning the minds of its children with hate."

About PMW

Founded in 1996, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) is a non-profit Israeli research institute known internationally for its in-depth research of Palestinian society from a broad range of perspectives. PMW’s findings are sought after by governments, legislators, media outlets, and decision-makers worldwide and have played a central role in correcting inaccurate narratives about the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

PMW's reports on the Palestinian Authority's promotion and glorification of terror -- which include paying salaries to terrorists; naming schools, sporting events, and public spaces after terrorists; promoting terror in children's TV programs and schoolbooks, and so much more -- have fundamentally changed the way the world sees the Palestinian Authority.

PMW's exceptional team of Arabic language researchers spends countless hours monitoring, translating, and analyzing PA-controlled newspapers, TV shows, radio programs, social media sites, and schoolbooks to understand the messages the Palestinian Authority and other Palestinian leaders send to their people.

Translated from the original Arabic source, PMW's findings document a decades-long pattern of the Palestinian Authority's indoctrination of adults and children to seek Shahada (Martyrdom), while denying Israel's right to exist and anticipating a world without Israel.

PMW is the organization that uncovered and notified donor countries that the Palestinian Authority rewards terrorism by paying salaries to terrorist prisoners and money to the families of terrorist “Martyrs” totaling hundreds of millions of dollars every year. PMW’s research led to the US Taylor Force Act and Israel’s “Anti-Pay-for-Slay” law and impacted funding policies in a multitude of countries.

PMW's yearly presentations to the Israeli government, US Congress, and many parliaments have led to numerous parliamentary debates, policy decisions, and legislation concerning the Palestinian Authority. PMW’s work has been instrumental in propelling Australia, Belgium, Britain, France, Holland, Norway, the US, and other countries to publicly condemn the PA for glorifying hate and terror and to cut funding to the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian projects promoting or glorifying terror as a means to pressure the Palestinian Authority to change.

PMW also reaches hundreds of thousands of people worldwide through its bulletins and special reports and millions more through international news outlets and social media sites covering PMW’s work. By demonstrating the direct link between the Palestinian Authority's messaging and Palestinian hate and terrorism, PMW has provided clear evidence that it is Palestinian Authority, not Israel, that is perpetuating the conflict by promoting hate and terror and denying Israel’s right to exist in any borders.

It is PMW’s intention that governments and key-decision makers worldwide will use PMW’s research to address the real obstacles to peace and develop effective solutions that focus on the fundamental changes the Palestinian Authority must make before there can be any chance of peace.

New York Times - Bret Stephens - "A Rare Middle East Triumph And — yes — a triumph for Trump, too."

Bret Stephens is my favorite New York Times columnist. I read this whole thing and I agree with everything he wrote.

New York Times

Opinion

A Rare Middle East Triumph

And — yes — a triumph for Trump, too.

By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist

September 14, 2020

For years, the Trump administration’s peacemaking efforts in the Middle East have been the object of relentless derision in elite foreign-policy circles, some of it justified. Yet with Friday’s announcement that Bahrain would join the United Arab Emirates as the second Arab state in 30 days to normalize ties with Israel, the administration has done more for regional peace than most of its predecessors, including an Obama administration that tried hard and failed badly.

There are lessons in this, at least for anyone prepared to consider just how wrong a half-century’s worth of conventional wisdom has been.

At the heart of that conventional wisdom is the view, succinctly put by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres in February, that “resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains key to sustainable peace in the Middle East.” Untie that Gordian knot, so the thinking goes, and the region’s many problems become easier to solve, whether it’s other regional conflicts or the anti-Americanism that feeds international terrorism.

That thinking was always dubious — what, for instance, did the Iran-Iraq War, in which a million people or more died, have to do with Israelis and Palestinians? — though it had the convenience of giving Arab regimes a good way of deflecting blame for their own bad governance. But since the (misnamed) Arab Spring began nearly a decade ago, the view has become absurd.

The rise and fall of ISIS, civil war in Syria and anarchy in Libya, Turkey’s aggression against Kurds, proxy battles and hunger in Yemen, political turmoil and repression in Egypt and Iran, the bankruptcy of the Lebanese state, the plight of Middle Eastern refugees — if any of these catastrophes have something in common, it’s that they have next to nothing to do with the Jewish state or its policies. One may still hope for a Palestinian state, but it won’t save the region from itself.

What would? The best option is an alliance of moderates and modernizers — anyone in power (or seeking power) who wants to move his country in the direction of greater religious and social tolerance, broader (that is, beyond energy) economic development, less preoccupation with ancient disputes, more interest in future opportunities. Such an alliance is the only hope for a region being sucked into the maw of religious fanaticism, economic stagnation, environmental degradation and perpetual misrule.

Now this alliance may finally be coming into being. Unlike Israel’s peace with Egypt and Jordan — both based on strategic necessity and geographic proximity — the peace with the Emirates and Bahrain has no obvious rationale, even if a shared fear of Iran played a role.

The larger factor is shared aspiration. Israel is the most advanced country in the region because for seven decades it invested in human, not mineral, potential, and because it didn’t let its wounds (whether with respect to Germany in the 1950s or Egypt in the 1970s) get the better of its judgment.

The choice for the Arab world is stark. It can follow a similar path as Israel; be swallowed by Iran, China, Russia, Turkey or some other outsider; or otherwise continue as before until, Libya-like, it implodes.

As consequential as the peace deals themselves is the Arab League’s refusal to condemn them, eliciting a furious Palestinian reaction. That’s not surprising: It means the Palestinian grip over the league’s diplomatic agenda may finally be loosening.

Perhaps it also means that the grievance-driven politics that have dominated the Palestinian issue for decades are finally over, too. If so, it’s bad news for those Palestinian leaders and activists who think that, with unflagging obstinacy, they can somehow restore the status quo ante 1948, when Israel didn’t exist.

What’s bad news for some Palestinian leaders may be good news for ordinary Palestinians. Peace between Israelis and Arabs will not come from the inside out — that is, from a deal between Jerusalem and Ramallah that wins over the rest of the Arab world. Decades of diplomatic failure, culminating in John Kerry’s failed mediation efforts in 2014, should put an end to that fantasy.

Yet it isn’t crazy to think that peace might come from the outside in: from an Arab world that encircles Israel with recognition and partnership rather than enmity, and which thereby shores up Israel’s security while moderating Palestinian behavior. If that’s right — and if states like Oman, Morocco, Kuwait, Sudan and especially Saudi Arabia follow suit — then this summer’s peace deals might finally create the conditions of viable Palestinian statehood.

A final point about these deals: This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not under the leadership of Israel’s supposedly bellicose Benjamin Netanyahu; certainly not through the diplomatic offices of the usually crazy/amateurish/perverse Trump administration. Luck and timing played a part, as they always do.

But it behooves those of us who are so frequently hostile to Netanyahu and Trump to maintain the capacity to be pleasantly surprised — that is, to be honest. What’s happened between Israel and two former enemies is an honest triumph in a region, and a year, that’s known precious few.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 15, 2020, Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: Rare Triumph In the Mideast.

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This is typical. A young woman is murdered by her family. The Muslim assholes call it a honor killing. Muslim scum need to be wiped off this planet.

On This Day...
Aug 30, 2019: Bethlehem, Israel
An aspiring makeup artist is tortured and honor killed
by her family for posting video of herself: 1 Killed

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Toronto Sun

World

Activists call for justice after honour killing of Palestinian woman

Author of the article: Postmedia News

Publishing date: September 01, 2019

The death of a 21-year-old aspiring makeup artist has activists from around the world calling for justice.

Isra’a Ghrayeb, a Palestinian woman from Bethlehem, was reportedly killed this past Thursday after being allegedly tortured and beaten to death by her brother in a family honor killing.

According to The New Arab, Ghraybeb was killed after posting a video on social media depicting her and her fiance.

Her brother, Ihab — a Canadian citizen — was reportedly angered by the video, believing it was a family dishonor to show herself with her betrothed together before a formal wedding ceremony takes place.

Citing social media posts, The New Arab reported Ihab’s father called for his daughter’s beating after other family members saw the video. Local media reported Ghrayeb fell from the second floor of the family home while trying to escape family violence.

The fall caused severe spinal injuries. While in hospital awaiting a spinal cord operation, Ghrayeb stated on an Instagram story she had to cancel all August and September makeup appointments because of her bad state of health.

“I’m strong and I have the will to live — if I didn’t have this willpower, I would have died yesterday,” she reportedly wrote.

While in hospital, Ghraybeb was allegedly attacked a second time. She later died.

It’s unclear how Ghraybeb really died. Social media reports claim the woman died at home days after the alleged hospital attack.

Ghraybeb’s family claim she died of a heart attack.

Police have not officially commented on the alleged killing.

News of Ghraybeb’s death spawned the Arabic hashtag #WeAreAllIsraa which trended online with messages calling for justice for the woman’s death. Others called on the Canadian government to arrest Ihab for the alleged crime.

I just played chess with someone in Jenin, Palestine. I looked it up. They don't seem to like Israel very much.

Mohammad Ghanem

I'm a medical Doctor.

Jenin, Palestine

The Middle East has always been totally fucked up and the problems are getting worse. It's all thanks to religion. Religion is bullshit and it destroys everything. This New York Times article is interesting whether or not you agree with it.

Opinion

One Thing Trump Gets Right

Israel’s settlements are not the principal obstacle to peace with the Palestinians.

By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist

November 21, 2019

In this week’s Mideast news, the Iranian regime has reportedly killed more than 100 of its own people as it attempts to suppress another wave of nationwide demonstrations. The Islamic State is taking advantage of Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria to regroup. Governments in Lebanon and Iraq remain paralyzed by popular discontent. And Israel has struck dozens of targets near Damascus after intercepting Iranian rockets fired from Syria.

Into this thicket of trouble, Mike Pompeo announced on Monday that the State Department would reverse a 41-year-old legal opinion claiming that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were inconsistent with international law. The decision has garnered outsized attention, as if it’s another gratuitous Trumpian obstacle on the road to peace.

It’s not. To paraphrase Ariana Grande, we have one less problem without it.

I rarely have anything positive to say about Donald Trump’s foreign policy, and his overall approach to the Middle East is damaging and potentially disastrous for the United States and Israel alike. America cannot turn its back on the region, as Trump would like to do, and imagine the Middle East will return the favor. And Israel will not be safe in an America First world in which allies like the Kurds are cavalierly betrayed and enemies like Iran are only haphazardly confronted.

But let me give the administration some credit: When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least it isn’t stuck in a time warp, hanging on to hoary shibboleths.

Among those shibboleths: That the conflict can be solved by returning to the status quo ante 1967, or at least an approximation of it. That peace between Israel and the Arab states hinges on delivering a Palestinian state. And that settlement construction is the principal obstacle to peace.

This is all nonsense. The pan-Arab campaign to “liberate” Palestine began two decades before Israel controlled an inch of Gaza or the West Bank. Resolving the territorial dispute arising from the 1967 war does nothing to solve the existential issues arising from Israel’s creation in 1948. Relations with much of the Arab world have flourished in recent years, not on account of any progress on the Palestinian front, but because Arab states see Israel as a capable ally against an imperialist Iran.

As for settlements, Israel withdrew all of its settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip in 2005. The result was more war, not less. What began as a moment of hope rapidly descended into a Palestinian civil war. That was followed by a Hamas victory, three major wars, and innumerable bloody skirmishes. Now we have an endless limbo in which Israelis live under constant threat, Gazans chafe under a remorseless tyranny, and groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad somehow have the means to acquire and fire hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilian targets.

Whatever else one might say about the administration, at least it understands that it would be worse than useless to demand that Israelis repeat the experiment on a much larger scale. Reversing a legally shaky opinion that does little more than drive American policy down a familiar cul-de-sac advances nobody’s interests, including those of the Palestinians.

I say “legally shaky” because it was never clear just whose territory Israel supposedly occupied when it wrested the West Bank from Jordanian control in a defensive war: Jordan’s claims to the area weren’t internationally recognized, either.

The more important point is that no progress can be made by repeatedly exhuming an increasingly distant past. As a matter of principle, Israel needs a two-state solution because it should not indefinitely rule (even indirectly) people who do not wish to be ruled by Israel. As a matter of survival, Israel also requires that a Palestinian state have neither the ambition nor the means to devote itself to Israel’s ultimate destruction.

The core problem with the past half-century of failed peacemaking efforts has been the facile assumption that meeting the need for two states would ultimately fulfill the requirement for security. The lesson of experience has been the opposite. The failure of Palestinians and their international enablers to satisfy that requirement — or even feign concern for it — has only made the need seem like little more than a remote abstraction to most Israelis.

This presents its own dangers. Having a right to build settlements is one thing. Having the right and exercising it wisely are separate things. A wise Israel needs to understand that it will have to compromise with the Palestinians at some point, in conditions that make compromise possible.

Opposition leader Benny Gantz, who on Wednesday failed to assemble a ruling coalition, gets this. Benjamin Netanyahu, who lately has promised to annex parts of the West Bank, does not. We’re a long way from knowing which of them will become prime minister.

In the meantime, the administration’s ruling on settlements cleans out some of the cobwebs under which thinking about the conflict has moldered. Good. Peace, if it comes, will not be the result of a diplomatic solution, much less as part of a legal argument over the Geneva Convention. It will happen as a cultural evolution, in which a new generation of Palestinian leaders dedicate themselves to building up the institutions of a decent state rather than attacking those of their neighbor; and in which Israelis have the wisdom to wait for those leaders, if necessary for decades.

Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook

Muslims are scum.

On This Day...
August 26, 1972: Munich, Germany
Muslim terrorists massacre innocents at the Munich Olympic games: 12 Killed

"First hooded Palestinian terrorists tortured 11 Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich... then they murdered them in an atrocity that shocked the world."

Muslims are scum. This is why we should never let Muslim morons enter America.

Wikipedia - 1997 Empire State Building shooting

On February 23, 1997, Ali Hassan Abu Kamal, a 69-year-old Palestinian teacher, opened fire on the observation deck of the Empire State Building in Manhattan, New York City. The gunman killed one person and wounded six others before taking his own life with a gunshot to the head.[1]

Law enforcement officials ruled it was a premeditated attack after finding notes indicating Abu Kamal's anger over Palestine and Israel. At the time, Abu Kamal's widow stated the shooting spree was not politically motivated, but rooted in his despondency over financial ruin.

Ten years after the shooting, Abu Kamal's daughter revealed that she had lied in hiding that her father's actions had in fact been motivated by Palestinian nationalism. Her mother's 1997 account was a cover story fabricated by the Palestinian Authority as Abu Kamal sought revenge against the Americans, the British, and the French for supporting Israel.

Abu Kamal opened fire shortly after 5 p.m. on February 23, 1997, on the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building, one of New York City's most popular tourist attractions. Before he started shooting, he muttered something about Egypt, apparently shouting, "Are you from Egypt?" The NYPD said they did not know whether it was said in an effort to spare or identify potential victims.[1] Surviving victims however witness that Abu Kamal asked them in a friendly way whether "you are Italian or American?" before the shooting started.[2]

The shooter used a 14-shot .380-caliber Beretta handgun that he apparently bought in Florida at the end of January 1997.[3] Abu Kamal killed one person and wounded another six before shooting himself in the head. He was taken to a hospital where he died five hours later.[1]

The sole murder victim was 27-year-old Christoffer Burmeister, a Danish musician who was living in New York and played in a band. He was visiting the Empire State Building with bandmate Matthew Gross, who was critically wounded in the attack.[4]

The shooter Ali Hassan Abu Kamal was a 69-year-old Palestinian English teacher. He was born in Jaffa in Mandate Palestine on September 19, 1927. He was the son of a refugee family that fled the city during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and resettled in Gaza. He became a well-respected English teacher at a local high school and a university, and he was also a well-paid tutor and accomplished translator. He earned about $3,000 a month and lived in an affluent neighborhood with his wife, and had six children.[5]

In 1996, he decided his family should relocate to the United States for a better life. He obtained a legal nonimmigrant visa and arrived in New York on Christmas Eve, 1996.[5]

According to law enforcement officials, Abu Kamal's attack was premeditated, based on his visit to the observation deck the day before the shooting. A pair of identical letters, one in English and one in Arabic, was also found in a pouch around his neck. The letters were a diatribe against the "Big Three" of the United States, France and England for their mistreatment of Palestinians, as well as against Zionism, which he said oppressed Palestinians.[5]

Despite the letter's reference to Palestine and Zionists, Abu Kamal's widow offered another explanation that the real motive for the shooting spree was not political, but rooted in financial ruin. The letter had also named two business partners, who Abu Kamal claimed swindled him out of money, losing $300,000 in a business venture. At that point, she said he became suicidal. His daughter added that he could not return home after losing the money.[6] Fathiya Abu Kamal told the press:

My husband is not a terrorist, he was just hopeless. He was aged, he had nothing to do with politics, or terrorism, or crime.[7]

In February 2007, 10 years after the shooting, the New York Daily News reported that Abu Kamal's daughter, Linda, was "tired of lying" about her father's motives for the attack. She told the Daily News that her father wanted to punish the U.S. for supporting Israel and revealed that her mother's 1997 account was a cover story fabricated by the Palestinian Authority:[6]

A Palestinian Authority official advised us to say the attack was not for political reasons because that would harm the peace agreement with Israel. We didn't know that he was martyred for patriotic motivations, so we repeated what we were told to do... His goal was patriotic. He wanted to take revenge from the Americans, the British, the French and the Israelis... He wrote that after he raised his children and made sure that his family was all right he decided to avenge in the highest building in America to make sure they get his message.

What I wrote at the New York Times about the Muslim scum in Palestine.

New York Times

The Progressive Assault on Israel

A movement that can detect a racist dog-whistle from miles away is strangely deaf when it comes to some of the barking on its own side of the fence.

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

This is the comment I wrote:

"Israeli prime ministers offered a Palestinian state in 2000 and 2008; they were refused both times."

It seems to me the problem is Palestine. They turned down two chances to fix the problem. Also, they brainwash children to hate Jews. For example they teach children to recite poems that say "Jews are Allah's enemies, the sons of pigs". I'm not making this up. I watched a video of this child abuse.

Child abuse in Palestine

Jews are "Allah's enemies, the sons of pigs" - in poem recited by child on PA TV

The young girl was brainwashed. That's probably typical for Palestine.

The world would be a better place if the Magic Man was thrown in the garbage where it belongs.