What is the Palestinian Authority (PA)'s official stance when it comes to the global pandemic?

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Earlier this month, some experts claimed that Israel and the PA were cooperating effectively to combat a mutual concern. It appears that the Palestinian government was playing a double game, however, and integrated COVID-19 into its long-standing practice of inciting against Israel on a systematic level. The PA accuses Israel of purposefully spreading the virus to the West Bank in an effort to "annihilate" the Palestinian people, according to extensive reporting from Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).

But the numbers tell a different story.

As of Monday, 259 people in the West Bank are reported to have coronavirus and two people have died from the virus – a relatively low figure suggesting mitigation efforts are working well so far.

On Sunday, Israeli military officials warned the PA to cease its COVID-19 incitement campaign, according to Israel's Channel 12 News and reported by the Times of Israel. The Channel 12 report states that most COVID-19 cases in the West Bank have been traced to Palestinians who work in Israel. The PA sought to spin this information to accuse Israel of deliberately targeting Palestinian areas with the virus.

For example, on April 5, the official PA daily al-Hayat al-Jadida published an article claiming that "Palestinian prisoners are being burned between the fangs of Israel and the coronavirus."

The article, translated by PMW, featured a Fatah spokesman warning of Israel's "exploitation of the coronavirus in order to annihilate the Palestinian prisoners."

Another PA conspiracy claims that Israel is deliberately infecting Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails with the virus.

One video, posted to a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Facebook page, depicts a tank taking aim at a Palestinian child while coronavirus particles threaten children imprisoned in Israeli jails.

PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh's voice is superimposed on another PLO-produced clip depicting this modern-day blood libel, calling for the release of all Palestinian prisoners.

Despite US and international pressure, the PA continues to transfer payments to convicted terrorists and their families. The amount of money paid to imprisoned or released terrorists depends on the length of sentence, which is a function of an action's severity. The more brutal the attack or murder, the more money a Palestinian prisoner receives.

On March 30, after airing footage of an Israeli soldier simply spitting on the ground, the PA's official daily claimed that "dozens of occupation soldiers spit on cars of (Palestinian) residents and the door handles of the homes" to spread COVID-19. A day earlier, Fatah's official Facebook page stated that Israel is waging "a biological war against Palestine."

Another article in the PA's official daily last month claimed that Israel is attempting to "thwart" Palestinian efforts to combat the virus.

In reality, however, Israel continues to train Palestinian doctors and supply medical assistance to the West Bank to mitigate against a COVID-19 outbreak in areas controlled by the PA. Instead of encouraging Israeli-Palestinian cooperation, the PA would rather incite against the Jewish state amid a pandemic that does not discriminate against its victims.

West Bank-based leaders are not the only Palestinians engaging in coronavirus-related incitement.

In a sermon last month, a Gaza-based imam, Jamil Al-Mutawa, preached that God started COVID-19 to kill infidels and Israelis, claiming that Muslims were least impacted by the virus.

"Look how anyone who schemes against the Al-Aqsa Mosque is being shattered to smithereens by the soldiers of Allah," Al-Mutawa claimed, adding "look how empty the [Israeli] cities are. Look how empty their streets are and look how crowded this mosque is. Who is it that has given us security and terrified them? Who is it that has protected us and harmed them? It is Allah!"

The imam noted that "there is not a single case (of COVID-19) in Gaza." The next day, Palestinian health officials confirmed two cases of the virus in the Strip.

Last week, Hamas arrested several peace activists in Gaza for participating in a video conference call with Israeli activists seeking to find common ground on several issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Hamas views any engagement with Israelis as a treasonous offense.

Several Palestinians, including a journalist and former research consultant at Amnesty International's Israel office, condemned the video conference as an attempt to normalize ties "with the Israeli enemy." Palestinian journalist Hind Khoudary tagged three senior Hamas officials on her Facebook post last week to alert the terrorist organization about the peace activists' call. Amnesty International's Israel office has since condemned Khoudary's post and clarified that she worked for the organization as a free-lance researcher in March 2019.

Like Palestinian leaders, Islamist outlets from Algeria's Al Masdar to Hizballah's Al Manar TV blame others, including Israel and the United States, for the virus's spread.

Last month, Iran's supreme leader refused US assistance to fight the deadly virus spread, suggesting that "possibly your [American] medicine is a way to spread the virus more." The coronavirus has severely plagued Iran, with 4,585 recorded deaths. The commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) called the virus an "American biological invasion," while Iran's propaganda machine spread rumors that the virus was a "Zionist biological terrorist attack," according to an article in Foreign Policy. Even so-called biology experts in Iran claim that the "Americans and Zionist regime" created the "biological ethnic weapon" to target Iranians specifically.

If the latest Palestinian campaign of incitement does not stop, Israeli officials recently threatened to reduce security cooperation with the PA – which depends on Israeli intelligence to thwart terrorist attacks and Hamas-led plots to overthrow the Palestinian government.

By spreading these dangerous lies, the PA joins the likes of the Islamic State, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime in their efforts to exploit the coronavirus pandemic for their own terrorist and political objectives.

Reprinted with permission from IPT News.

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Marc Lamont Hill can make the outrageous claim that Israel poisons Palestinian water and still be invited to speak at fundraisers and other events. Linda Sarsour can repeat the blood libel that Jews and Zionists justify police killings of unarmed black people in America – and worse, are responsible for them – and still get a lucrative Simon & Schuster book deal and serve as an official surrogate for Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign.

Her chronic displays of anti-Semitism largely are overlooked by national news outlets.

Fellow Sanders surrogate Amer Zahr can equate Israel with ISIS, a sentiment repeatedly uttered by Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) chapter directors Zahra Billoo and Hussam Ayloush, without consequence. Billoo comes right out and says she does not "believe [Israel] has a right to exist."

She's still CAIR's top official in the San Francisco Bay area.

Their obsessive focus on Israel is telling. Syria has spent years engaging in mass murder of hundreds of thousands of its own people and displacing millions more, numbers exponentially greater than Palestinian casualties in all the wars and conflicts with Israel. But thus far, none of these activists have advocated ending these, or any other states. Just the world's lone Jewish state.

And that brings us to a protest held Sunday in front of the White House. A small group met for the anti-Israel group Al-Awda: The Right of Return of Palestinian Refugees' "national rally to support Palestine and protest AIPAC." The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was holding its annual convention a short distance away.

"AIPAC is a terrorist organization," Eric Resnick, who was part of the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace from Cleveland, told the protest. "AIPAC commits war crimes."

Advocacy, when done in support of Israel, is a war crime. He didn't offer any examples.

Another protester held a sign reading, "Stop the genocide, End Israel, Free Palestine."

"Can I get an amen for that?" asked speaker Richard Siegel, identifying the sign-holder as his friend.

The data makes clear there is no genocide targeting Palestinians, whose population has grown by 400 percent in the past 50 years. But the solution Siegel and his friend offer actually would be a genocide. If you "End Israel," you destroy a people and their culture. There is no historical example of that being done without massive death and devastation.

This virtue-signaling ignorance, unfortunately, is not an aberration at anti-Israel protests.

Rare is the anti-Israel gathering that does not feature the chant, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." It was repeated dozens of times during Sunday's Al-Awda protest. It's a not-so-subtle dream of a Palestinian state that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, swallowing all of Israel.

That vision is codified in an updated, supposedly more moderate Hamas charter, a document that unambiguously calls for Israel's annihilation: "Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea."

The protest featured a number of D-list speakers, many of whom were introduced by first name only. One, identified as Andre from Baltimore, let his guard slip for a moment, drawing knowing laughs from the crowd.

"We say, 'Down with Israel.' I really want to say 'Death to Israel.' Israel out of occupied Palestine, Palestine for the Palestinian people. Long live Palestine, sisters and brothers."

Another Baltimore resident, Miranda, represented something called Youth Against War and Racism. Yet she offered some bigoted scapegoating of her own, blaming Israel for global woes that are felt here at home. She claimed Israel exists solely for "driving up profits, they're driving up prices." Through its "active genocide against the Palestinian people ... it's actively destroying the lives of people, working people here in the United States."

Don Bryant, from Al-Awda's Cleveland chapter, argued it is not anti-Semitic to deny Jews a country in their ancestral homeland. If anything, "Israel is the anti-Semite here," because Palestinians are a Semitic people and Israel is "bombing the crap outta Palestine."

Israel's bombings in Gaza have followed terrorist attacks, including rockets fired at Israeli communities. The attacks are focused on terrorist infrastructure and often include advanced warnings for civilians to leave the area in an attempt to minimize casualties. No speaker urged Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad to cease firing those rockets at civilians.

Siegel boasted of his past anti-Israel protests outside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "because Holocaust education basically serves Zionism ... the way Holocaust education is presented, it's presented in such a way that presents the Jews as the ultimate victims and presents Israel as the solution."

Future protests should be held at the museum instead of in front of the White House, said Eric Resnick, representing the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace.

"We need to move this rally to the Holocaust museum and use it to tell the story of the Nakba," meaning catastrophe – how Palestinians refer to Israel's creation. "Because when those people say 'Never Again,' they don't mean 'Never Again' to anyone, anywhere else. They just mean 'Never Again' to Jews. And they also mean the Jews can be as mean and as nasty and commit as many crimes as they want to because they were victims once."

The museum's website offers direct evidence proving he is wrong.

Siegel, meanwhile, likened secular Zionism to a cult.

"It's almost like we're inventing a new Jewish religion based on Christianity that poses the Jews as Jesus, Auschwitz as the cross and Israel as the resurrection."

Later, protesters marched toward the convention center to protest the AIPAC convention. There, a man was videotaped shouting that "the Holocaust will come back to you ... you gonna get burned if you don't give us the land."

Reprinted with permission from IPT News.

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Despite a long record of anti-Semitic speech and alleged radical connections, Linda Sarsour manages to enjoy a reputation as a "civil rights activist" and "community organizer."

Simon & Schuster thought well enough of her to publish her memoir this week.

Video: IPT News

In this video, the Investigative Project on Terrorism examines the gap between the flowery hype aimed at driving Sarsour's book sales and the uglier reality about her message.

Reprinted with permission from IPT News.

The post Is Linda Sarsour anti-Israel? Her book says something else appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

The terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip conducts nonstop efforts to carry out mass-casualty attacks against Israelis, and the Israeli defense establishment is constantly thwarting such plots in time, mostly behind the scenes. thus fostering a sense of calm on the ground.

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In actuality, the Izzadin al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas military wing, is interested in turning Israel's streets into scenes of bloodshed and chaos – a dark vision that Israel's intelligence and security communities work around the clock to prevent.

Hamas's efforts include bombings, shootings, kidnappings, and the Shin Bet disrupts hundreds of such plots every year.

One of the primary tactics chosen by Hamas to implement its policy is to take advantage of humanitarian channels, such as Israel's policy of allowing Gazans into its territory for medical treatment.

These patients are often used to relay instructions, funding, and sometimes even weapons to terrorist cells the Islamist terrorist group is cultivating in the West Bank. The spy ring most recently broken up had relied on the Family Reunification Law – humanitarian legislation designed to bring families together is part of this larger pattern – for its operations.

In the latest case to be revealed by the Shin Bet, Hamas' military wing sought out Gazans with Israeli citizenship to exploit their ability to move freely between Israel and the coastal enclave.

In this context, the Shin Bet arrested two suspects on Jan. 2: Rami Amoudi, 30, a Khan Younis resident who has been living in Tel Aviv since November 2019, and Rajab Dakah, 34, originally from Gaza who moved to Israel in 2017.

Amoudi's mother is a Jewish Israeli, while Dakah's mother is an Arab Israeli living in Lod, in central Israel. This made both men eligible for Israeli citizenship through the Family Reunification Law. Dakah left his wife and five children in Gaza to move to Israel, and traveled back to visit them every few months.

The Shin Bet investigation found that the two were recruited by Hamas while they were still living in Gaza, and then dispatched to Israel to conduct hostile espionage missions.

They were told to purchase cellular phones and SIM cards to maintain secret communications with their Hamas handlers.

Their missions allegedly included photographing a variety of defense installations in central Israel, such as military bases, police facilities, and the locations of Iron Dome air defense batteries, the Shin Bet stated.

Apart from exploiting Palestinians in need of medical care and those who hold Israeli citizenship, Hamas is also in the habit of siphoning off infrastructure materials that Israel transfers into Gaza for civilian use to build up its defenses and notorious grid of cross-border terrorist tunnels.

Pipes meant for waste plants end up as fodder for rocket mills, generators intended for civilians are deferred to the tunnels project, powering lights and other electric needs, and medical equipment earmarked for hospitals, especially oxygen tanks, go to tunnel diggers.

Hamas also regularly exploits Gaza's civilian mail system to try to import dual use equipment that has both civilian and military purposes to build up its attack capabilities. Those shipments include chemicals that fuel rockets, generators for tunnel digging, drones, digital microscopes, biometric equipment, cell phones designed for rugged field conditions, and fiberoptic cables.

There is little reason to believe that Hamas's well-established pattern of taking advantage of humanitarian openings to promote terrorism will change any time soon. Israel's security forces will continue to be on high alert for such dangerous activities, while remaining committed to the goal of assisting Gaza's civilians where possible, despite Hamas's activities.

Reprinted with permission from IPT News

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Now, a museum dedicated to Van Gogh's oeuvre is asking whether it is "appropriate," in anno 2020, to exhibit a drawing by Degas.

To be sure, it's not just any drawing. The sketch in question depicts a bathing woman from behind, her derriere revealed in all its flesh and glory. It is also a drawing the Amsterdam-based Van Gogh Museum purchased last year at auction for the eye-widening price of $6 million.

Yet apparently even before acquiring the "Bather," part of a series Van Gogh is known to have especially admired, museum staff discussed the issue of whether it could or should be placed on view. Earlier this month, the Van Gogh Museum's new director, Emilie Gordenker, observed on Dutch national TV that while she is pleased the work is now hanging in the museum, she considers it important to address the question of "whether female nudes are appropriate for people of all cultures."

This, as everyone immediately understood, was code, a subtle way of asking, really, whether nudes should be exhibited at all in a museum located in a city where Muslims happen to live.

It's not the first time a question like this has been asked. In 2006, a Berlin opera house canceled its performance of Mozart's "Idomeneo" out of concern for the "incalculable safety risk" posed by a scene depicting the severed heads of Mohammed, Jesus, Buddha, and Neptune. A year later, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague bowed to pressure from Muslim radicals who threatened the museum if it exhibited photographs by Iranian art student Soorah Hera that depicted gay men disguised as Mohammed and his son-in-law Ali. The works were removed from the exhibition, and Hera was forced into hiding. And following the death threats and assassination attempts against several European cartoonists who had depicted the prophet Mohammed, a sin in Islam, gunmen stormed the editorial office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. Twelve people were killed and11 injured in the attack.

But since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Western cultural leaders have tended to be less willing to compromise on these issues. More important, there is nothing blasphemous about the Degas drawing, nothing about it to send radicalized Muslims into a violent rage. It poses no "security risk" to the museum. What's more, no Muslim or Muslim group has threatened to take action, or even mentioned any discomfort with the drawing, at least publicly, nor has the museum indicated otherwise. And no one appears to have requested it not be placed on exhibition.

So why, then, the debate?

"The role of museums is changing," Gordenker told TV program "Buitenhof" on Feb. 9. "They are increasingly seen as part of the culture and society around them."

But is that really new? Many in the art world can recall the uproar when, in 1999, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to cut off all subsidies to the Brooklyn Museum over its plans to include a painting by the artist Christopher Ofili of the Virgin Mary, created with oil paint, glitter, and elephant dung. (The work is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.) The museum refused to bow to his pressure, and the public by and large stood with it. You do not censor art, the public declared. You especially do not censor art without first understanding it. And the censorship of public institutions is not an American value.

Even in the Netherlands, the public has long been involved in museum decisions. In the early 1990s, the Dutch government paid an American restorer $800,000 to repair a painting by Barnett Newman in the collection of the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum after it had been slashed by a vandal. The restoration was a failure. The government sued the restorer, Daniel Goldreyer, but not before both the media and the public had expressed their outrage at the cost, and that it had been paid to a restorer outside the Netherlands.

But more importantly, who declared museums the center for such critical sociological debates, and when? Moreover, while America removes Confederate statues from its plazas and the Netherlands' own national museum, citing the Dutch history of slavery, no longer uses the term "Golden Age" to describe 17th-century Dutch culture, shouldn't the real reason not to exhibit a $6 million Degas drawing – if it is to be censored at all – be the artist's rabid anti-Semitism?

Rather, we could talk about what there is to see in Degas' work: about his passion for depicting movement in a static image, about the line and color that so bewitched Van Gogh. Or we could talk about curator Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho's observation that "all the colors of the rainbow can be found in [the bather's] skin." We – or the museums – could teach people how to see.

In fact it was just this that, in 2005, inspired Holland's most celebrated curator, Rudi Fuchs, to bring a group of Moroccan-Dutch youth to the Rijksmuseum in an effort to teach them about art. The painting he selected: Rembrandt's "Jewish Bride" – a work, coincidentally, that Van Gogh himself once wrote brought him to tears. Not one student had a word to say about the fact that the bride was Jewish. Not one student had anything to say about the man's hand on the woman's breast. They talked about the painting while a reporter for Dutch national daily Volkskrant took notes. And when one student admired the gold jewelry the bride wore, Fuchs pushed her forward to the painting. "You don't see gold," he told her. "You see paint. Only paint." To another, he said, "Art is fantasy. You can see things in a painting that only you see. What do you see?"

But this is not the discussion Gordenker seems to have had in mind when she suggested that museums should stimulate conversation. Rather, it appears, she meant that a museum should create buzz so people will come – and this, she has certainly accomplished. The Degas drawing has now become the star attraction at a museum dedicated to the work of a different artist entirely, whose masterpiece sunflowers and sketches of peasants in the field will go unregarded as visitors seek out the fleshy buttocks of a comparatively unimportant "bather."

Yet meantime, museums as well as churches across the world still quietly spotlight their portraits of the Madonna nursing a naked baby Jesus. In the name of cultural sensitivity, should these now come down as well? Should the question even be debated? Rather than insisting on the normalcy of nudity, rather than teaching the importance of form and history and the painting of light along the curves of thighs and shoulders, rather than asking 'what do you see?,' opening the minds and eyes of those still stumbling in the dark, shall we just turn out the lights? Shall we stumble, too, in solidarity? Is that how it works?

Yes, it is important for a museum to inspire conversation. But not this conversation.

Because, as with the rampant "trigger warnings" on American campuses, such indulgences of small-mindedness and ignorance produce nothing, leaving only the slow death of the Enlightenment, of knowledge, the tragic, dark destruction of all we are, and all we could have been.

Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands Her next book, on domestic abuse and terrorism, will be published by Potomac Books. Follow her at @radicalstates.

Reprinted with permission from IPT News.

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US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), has publicly doubted Jewish Americans' patriotism and more recently, perpetuated a blood libel against Israeli Jews, without apology.

None of that is enough to keep US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) from relying on her in his 2020 presidential bid, including an appearance this week in Iowa.

Bernie Sanders – Magnet for Anti-Semites is a fast-paced 9.5-minute video spotlighting the abjectly anti-Semitic views publicly espoused by several of the top campaign advisers and surrogates with whom presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has chosen to officially associate.

There is a definite and ironic anti-Semitic streak to those who speak for, support, advise and officially endorse the country's potential first Jewish presidential nominee.

This video includes insights on Sanders' official stance on anti-Semitism and the meaning of anti-Semitism, along with provocative and disturbing comments made by some of his surrogates, supporters and campaign staff.

In his November 19, 2019 op-ed in Jewish Currents, "How to Fight Antisemitism," Bernie Sanders wrote: "I will always call out antisemitism when I see it."

Not always, it seems. Not with those closest to him.

As just one example, Sanders campaign surrogate Linda Sarsour, who has a long record of anti-Israel rhetoric which crosses into anti-Semitism, said this at a November American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) conference: "Ask them this: How can you be against white supremacy in the United States and the idea of living in a supremacist state based on race and class, but then you support a state like Israel, that is built on supremacy, that is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else..."

"We were quite shocked in discovering the number of brazenly and openly anti-Semitic advisers and surrogates who have embraced Senator Bernie Sanders or whom he has embraced," said Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, "especially since Mr. Sanders so adamantly claims to condemn anti-Semitism."

Reprinted with permission from The Investigative Project.

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