Category Archives: Israel

Tel Aviv bus driver verbally assaults Arab women wearing hijabs

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Two female Arab students were insulted and verbally abused Wednesday afternoon by a Dan bus driver for wearing their traditional hijabs. When they got on the bus near Tel Aviv University, the driver reportedly said to them: “What is this disgusting Islamist look? You look like IS.”

Another passenger who was on the bus with them turned to the driver and expressed her shock and dismay. “I told him he should be ashamed of himself”, she told Channel 2 News, “and that his job is to drive people and not to make hurtful comments about how they dress.”

The students themselves did not respond and went to take their seats. When they got off they phoned Dan’s service center to complain, and also reported the incident to the bus conductor at the station by the university.

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Israel indicts US fugitive who allegedly planned to bomb Muslim holy sites

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Adam Everett LivvixAn American fugitive who took up residence in Palestinian-controlled cities on the West Bank and who allegedly came into possession of arms in order to carry out terrorist attacks against Islamic holy sites in Israel was indicted last month by Israeli prosecutors, officials said on Tuesday.

Adam Everett Livvix, who is wanted in the United States for questioning on drug-related charges, was apprehended by Israeli police on November 19.

According to the indictment, Livvix had recently “told his acquaintances in Israel about his negative opinions towards the Arab population in Israel and his desire to cause harm to Islamic holy sites in Israel.”

In October 2014, he conspired with his roommate, an IDF soldier who also holds American citizenship, to acquire weapons. The indictment says this included 1.4 kg of explosive bricks, for which he paid his roommate an unstated sum.

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‘Shame on you for hosting racist speaker!’ PSC protest against Sussex Friends of Israel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Brighton PSC protest against Mordechai Kedar (2)30 anti-racist and feminist demonstrators braved freezing temperatures last night to express their anger and indignation after local Zionists failed to cancel a talk by Mordechai Kedar. Kedar is an Israeli lecturer with an appalling record of racist and misogynist views.

Despite cancellations of many of his other UK speaking engagements at synagogues and Jewish schools, following publicity about his outrageous statements, Sussex Friends of Israel provided him a platform at Ralli Hall in Hove.

This is perhaps not surprising, in view of SFI’s consistent record of unquestioning support for Israeli apartheid. What is puzzling is the failure of the Home Secretary, Theresa May, to deny Kedar entry to the UK. She has frequently exercised her power to exclude Palestinian visitors who posed far less of a threat to community relations.

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PSC calls for protest against Mordechai Kedar

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mordechai Kedar with Geller and Spencer at SION conference

Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign will be holding a demonstration this evening against Mordechai Kedar, the Israeli right-wing extremist currently on a lecture tour of Britain organised by the Zionist Federation.

Kedar is a close ally and co-thinker of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, the US Islamophobes banned from the UK because of their record of inciting anti-Muslim hatred. Earlier this year he provoked outrage by arguing that the only way to deter attacks on Israel would be to rape the female relatives of the perpetrators.

MORDECHAI KEDAR NOT WELCOME IN OUR CITY

Opposite Ralli Hall, Denmark Villas, Hove – very close to Hove Station

Kedar is an Israeli “academic” with an appalling record of racist and misogynist views. He is speaking tonight at the Ralli Hall in Hove at the invitation of Sussex Friends of Israel and the UK Zionist Federation. Please join us at 6pm to demonstrate our anger and opposition.

Kedar lectures at Bar-Ilan University – itself deeply complicit in the occupation of Palestine and the broader apartheid project. He stated in an interview earlier this year, when asked his view about deterring so-called Hamas terrorism: “the only thing that can deter terrorists… is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.”

Several of Kedar’s UK appearances have been cancelled – not because of the threat of disruption, but because the venues themselves (a synagogue and a Jewish college) wished to distance themselves from Kedar’s racist and misogynist views.

His Hove gig, sponsored by SFI, is going ahead.

Join us at 6pm opposite Ralli Hall. And please circulate this call-out to anti-racist and feminist networks.

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Zionist Federation cancels Mordechai Kedar lectures … but only at schools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mordechai Kedar with Geller and Spencer at SION conference
Mordechai Kedar with Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer at a Stop Islamization of Nations conference in 2012

The Zionist Federation this week cancelled appearances at three Jewish schools by an outspoken Israeli academic following concerns about his links to an anti-Islamist activist banned from Britain.

Dr Mordechai Kedar, an expert on Israeli Arabs who regularly appears to defend Israel on Arabic stations such as Al Jazeera, was due to begin a speaking tour on Wednesday night. But ZF chairman Paul Charney said that he had removed the schools from the tour after the intervention of the Board of Deputies.

Dr Kedar, who lectures at Bar-Ilan University, has spoken at events organised by Stop the Islamisation of Nations, founded by the Jewish American Pamela Geller, who was banned from Britain last year in a move supported by the Board of Deputies.

At a 2012 Sion conference, where speakers also included Tommy Robinson, then of the English Defence League, Dr Kedar urged Europeans to have more babies. Muslims, he declared, were “multiplying – somebody said [like] rats”.

The Board had said “their biggest concern would be about him visiting schools”, Mr Charney explained. “To which I replied that I would pull him from the schools so as not to have an argument, to which they replied they were glad to reach accommodation on this.”

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Israeli settlers burn mosque in West Bank

Posted on by Bob Pitt

al-Mughayir mosque arsonIsraeli settlers have torched a mosque in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian officials said, amid growing tensions and violence in the territory and occupied East Jerusalem.

The attack on the mosque just before dawn on Wednesday, near the Jewish settlement of Shilo, came after separate Palestinian knife attacks on Monday killed a settler in the southern West Bank, and an Israeli soldier in Tel Aviv.

“The settlers set fire to the whole of the first floor of the mosque” in al-Mughayir village near the West Bank city of Ramallah, a security official said. Police confirmed the incident and opened an investigation.

Al Jazeera’s Imtiaz Tyab, reporting from inside the destroyed mosque in Mughayir in Ramallah, described seeing religious books turned into ashes and windows being blown out. “There an awful lot of anger in the community,” he said.

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Israeli MP proposes banning Islamic prayer call

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert IlatovIsraeli Right-wingers have revived highly contentious plans that could effectively silence the Muslim call to prayer, known as the muezzin.

In a move that risks stoking already simmering tensions in Jerusalem between Jews and Arabs, a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is tabling legislation that could put strict limits on Islamic prayer calls from mosques in the city and across Israel.

Robert Ilatov [pictured], a parliamentarian with the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, is sponsoring the bill with the support of Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister who is also the party’s leader.

While the legislation is being justified on the grounds that prayer calls often produce “intolerable noise” that disturbs many citizens’ sleep, it is bound to prompt accusations of religious intolerance and prejudice against Israel’s Muslim minority.

A similar proposal – also put forward by Yisrael Beiteinu – was shelved in 2011 despite having the explicit support of Mr Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, after several cabinet members criticised it as likely to cause division.

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Harrods shoppers ‘are buying into terror’ (it says here)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Exterior of the Harrods department store in the Knightsbridge area of London.. Image shot 2007. Exact date unknown.Customers of Harrods are being urged to boycott the department store in a symbolic protest against its Qatari owners.

Qatar, which bought Harrods in 2010, has been accused of either directly funding terrorist groups or turning a blind eye to financiers operating out of the Gulf state.

It is now facing a backlash from protesters sickened by the executions of Western hostages in Syria and the violence wreaked on the region by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil), al-Qaeda and other offshoot terror groups.

Harrods was sold by Mohamed Al Fayed, its previous owner, to Qatar Holdings, part of the Qatar Investment Authority, the state’s sovereign wealth fund, in May 2010 for a reported £1.5 billion. The sale was concluded by Qatar’s then prime minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al Thani, who was also chief executive of the wealth fund.

Under his rule, Qatar also owns or co-owns a number of other landmarks including the Shard, Europe’s tallest skyscraper, as well as large stakes in some major UK businesses.

Now Harrods is facing a boycott as a consequence of criticism of Qatar’s links to Islamist terrorists.

Mark Lewis, the solicitor who represented the family of Milly Dowler among others in the News of the World phone hacking scandal, is leading calls for a boycott. Mr Lewis said: “We can stand back and do nothing, but when we do, we are paying for that terror … People need to know where their money is going.”

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Hundreds protest Israeli wedding of ‘Jew with Muslim’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Lehava anti-wedding protest

A bride who converted from Judaism to the Muslim faith and a Muslim groom were married on Sunday to cries of “Death to Arabs” as Israeli police held back about 200 angry protesters.

The protesters, many of them young men wearing black shirts, denounced the bride, who was raised Jewish and converted to Islam before the wedding, as a “traitor against the Jewish state”. They sang a song that urges, “May your village burn down.”

A few dozen left-wing Israelis held a counter-protest nearby holding flowers, balloons and a sign that read, “Love conquers all.”

The groom told Israel’s Channel 2 TV the protesters failed to derail the wedding or dampen its spirit. “We will dance and be merry until the sun comes up. We favour coexistence,” he bravely said.

Several dozen police, including members of the force’s most elite units, formed human chains to keep the protesters from the wedding hall’s gates and chased after many who defied them. Four protesters were arrested, and there were no injuries.

A lawyer for the couple, Maral Malka, 23, and Mahmoud Mansour, 26, both from the Jaffa section of Tel Aviv, had unsuccessfully sought a court order to bar the protest. He obtained backing for police to keep protesters 200 metres from the wedding hall in Tel Aviv.

The far-right group Lehava has harassed Jewish-Arab couples in the past but has rarely protested at the site of a wedding. Sunday’s demonstration was a sign of how tensions have risen during the war in Gaza.

A protester against the wedding, Ofer Golan, told France 24, “It’s time that the Muslim will leave Israel. That’s it. This is a Jewish country, they don’t belong here, they don’t have to be here. They have 22 countries; they can go anywhere they like.”

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Mordechai Kedar joins Geller at pro-Israel, anti-Islam rally

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mordechai Kedar at AFDI rally August 2014Yesterday Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative held a rally in Union Square, New York, under the slogan “We the living support Israel”.

In an apparent attempt to boost turnout – even Geller must be aware that the vast majority of New York’s Jewish community, including committed supporters of the state of Israel, will have nothing to do with her – the event was subtitled “And minorities persecuted under Islamic rule”.

According to Geller, an individual who enjoys at best a tenuous relationship with reality, the event attracted “thousands” of AFDI supporters, though it’s odd that her website contains no pictures of this vast throng. From photographic evidence, it looks as though the attendance was at most a couple of hundred. A report at the Huffington Post puts it at “around 150”.

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