Dear Family & Friends,

Here’s a brilliant & heart-warming photo-story about our Medical Mission

on Earthquake Rescue Duty in Kathmandu. This is who we are & why we fly to

help at the ends or heights of the world. It is a matched set with yesterday’s

JINSA Gaza War Assessment Attorneys at War: Inside an elite Israeli military

law unit. Read them & be proud.

Have a swell day, a sweet night & a great tomorrow.

All the very best, Gail/Geula/Savta/Savta Rabax2/Mom

1.When the IDF Invaded Kathmandu by Yardena Schwartz

2.The new government’s war on BDS By Caroline B. Glick

3.Watch “JPost Annual Conference: Caroline Glick attacks Dagan & Ashkenazi” on YouTube June 7, 2015

4.The Kurds Are Starting to Panic in the War Against ISIS

5.“Dictatorship in Turkey Is Now Over” by Burak Bekdil

6.Petition PM Netanyahu to increase budget for Public Diplomacy By Ted Belman

7.Obama secretly backed Muslim Brotherhood terror group by Pamela Geller

8.The War of a Million Cuts: The Struggle against the Delegitimization of Israel & the Jews, & the Growth of New Anti-Semitism by Manfred Gerstenfeld

9.Raif Badawi and Saudi “Justice” by Denis MacEoin

1.When the IDF Invaded Kathmandu by Yardena Schwartz from The TOWER

IDF FIELD HOSPITAL – Kathmandu April/May 2015

Yardena Schwartz Freelance journalist and Emmy-nominated producer

More than 120 Israeli doctors and medical workers flew to Nepal to assist in relief efforts, the largest contingent from any single country. A look inside their operation.

When a 7.3 magnitude aftershock shook Nepal on May 12, less than three weeks after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake reduced much of the Himalayan country to rubble, the first thing Martine Bar-Om thought of was Trumpeldor. This was the nickname she and her fellow nurses at the Israeli field hospital in Kathmandu had given to their first patient, 19-year-old Sagar Majhi. It was a reference to the legendary Zionist pioneer Joseph Trumpeldor, who, like Majhi, lost his arm.

When the second earthquake struck, Bar-Om had just returned to Israel, and was in the middle of a welcoming ceremony at Ben-Gurion Airport. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was thanking the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) delegation for treating more than 1,600 patients over the course of their two weeks in Nepal. It was during this ceremony that Bar-Om heard the news that Mother Nature had dealt yet another unforgiving blow to an already devastated country.

All she could think of was poor Trumpeldor.

On Saturday morning, April 25, Sagar Majhi had been lying in bed, scrolling through Facebook on his cellphone. Suddenly the walls around him began to shake. The shaking grew stronger and stronger with each passing second. Not knowing exactly what was happening, Majhi instinctively jumped out of bed and headed for the door, hoping to get out of the house as quickly as he could. He only made it out of his bedroom before the entire house caved in on him. One wall came crashing down onto his arm, chopping it off at the shoulder, and the ceiling collapsed on his head.

Thankfully, Majhi says he doesn’t remember any of it. His first memory after blacking out is of members of the Nepali army digging him out of his home in Kathmandu Valley. “I couldn’t see my arm and my head hurt,” Majhi recalls from his hospital bed inside the post-op tent at the Israeli field hospital, five days after he was first admitted.

Although it is composed of tents flown in by military aircraft and sits in an open field, the IDF field hospital has departments like any other. Next to Majhi’s post-op tent (also referred to as the internal medicine department) is the orthopedic tent, and across from that is the operating room. There is also a pediatric wing, an OB/GYN department, an emergency room and triage center, an intensive care unit, an imaging tent, a lab, a dining hall; dozens of small tents where the doctors, nurses, and other IDF personnel sleep; and of course, a synagogue, which is essentially a Torah in a tent. The hospital is also equipped with the sophisticated machines and devices Israeli doctors are accustomed to, many of which are rarely found in Nepali hospitals.

For many of the doctors and nurses here, this is not their first humanitarian mission. Some were part of Israeli relief efforts in Haiti, the Philippines, and Thailand. And while they are in Nepal on behalf of the IDF—either called up for reserve duty or volunteers—many of them are heads of their departments at the biggest hospitals in Israel. Dr. Jonathan Halevy, for example, is head of the internal medicine department at the field hospital, but back home he is Director General of Shaare Zedek in Jerusalem, one of Israel’s best hospitals. Alex Rechin is a neonatal nurse at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva. Here, one of his patients is a premature baby born one month early. Weighing just three pounds, the little girl has spent her entire young life in an incubator, being fed by Rechin through tiny tubes inserted into her throat. Her mother, still in shock, hasn’t named her yet.

When the Nepali army found Sagar Majhi two hours after the earthquake struck, they first brought him to the Nepali military hospital in Kathmandu. The hospital had sustained so much damage that it too was operating as a field hospital of sorts, with nearly all of its patients being cared for in outdoor tents. This was also done to avoid any further devastation caused by the aftershocks that have shaken Nepal several times a day.

Overwhelmed by the destruction at their hospital and the daunting number of severely injured patients, the Nepali doctors performed an emergency neurosurgical operation on Majhi’s head, but did nothing more than bandage what was left of his arm, and didn’t even notice his broken hip.

19-year-old Sagar Majhi was one of the first patients at the Israeli field hospital in Nepal. Photo: Yardena Schwartz / The Tower

When Israel decided hours after the quake that it would send a massive medical delegation to Nepal—according to UN figures, the largest sent by any country—it chose to set up its field hospital next door to the military hospital, precisely in order to treat patients who had not received proper and comprehensive care. When it opened its doors on April 28, Majhi was one of the first patients to arrive.

“He came here with a huge swollen head and a raw, improvised amputation,” says nurse Martine Bar-Om. The Israeli doctors performed emergency surgery, including a thorough amputation and, later, a skin graft from his thigh in order to cover the large gaping wound. They also operated on his eyes, which were infected, and his head, which needed more than 50 stitches. Over all, Bar-Om says Majhi underwent five surgeries over the course of his two-week stay.

“When he first arrived, we called him Rakdan,” says Bar-Om, using the Hebrew word for dancer, because, two years ago, Majhi moved from his village in Udayapur district to Kathmandu—a seven-hour drive away—to attend a professional dancing school. He loved all kinds of dance: Hip-hop, contemporary, traditional Nepali, everything. Now, with just one arm, a broken hip, and a long line of stitches across his entire forehead, Majhi has resigned himself to the reality that he will have to leave his dancing career in the past, along with the other precious pieces of his life that were taken by the earthquake.

“I need to forget the world of dance,” says Majhi, with no self-pity in his voice or expression. He says he is just thankful to be alive.

“It’s hard for us to call him Rakdan now, because we don’t think he’ll ever be a dancer again,” Bar-Om says. So she and the other nurses renamed him Trumpeldor, after the aforementioned Zionist war hero who, before fighting for the not-yet-created State of Israel during the British Mandate of Palestine, lost his left arm in the Russo-Japanese War.

A clown entertains children at the Israeli field hospital in Nepal. Photo: Yardena Schwartz / The Tower

Bar-Om does not hide the fact that Trumpeldor is her favorite patient. She constantly dotes on him and calls him “Babu,” a Nepali word akin to “honey” or “sweetie.” “He’s our hero,” she says, just as one of the hospital’s volunteer clowns—brought in to lift the patients’ spirits—pops his head into the tent and sneaks up to Majhi’s bed. The clown, who looks like a mix between The Simpsons’ Krusty the Clown and Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, stares at Majhi with a huge goofy smile and starts talking gibberish. Majhi’s entire face lights up and he flashes a wide smile that scrunches up the stitches on his forehead.

To be in this situation and to be able to smile and laugh, and have the desire to live, that’s called a hero. His first few days here he couldn’t even open his eyes,” says Bar-Om. “He’s been here since the first day we opened, and he’ll be the last one we release when we go back to Israel.”

Unlike other Western countries like the U.S. and UK, which have poured millions of dollars into Nepal’s recovery, Israel has not sent money to the government of Nepal. Instead, it sent 267 people, including 124 IDF medical personnel to staff the field hospital, as well as engineers to assess damaged structures and determine whether or not they can be lived in, or if they are too dangerous and need to be razed. The delegation came with 95 tons of aid materials, including advanced medical equipment that is either nonexistent or hard to find in Nepal. According to the UN, Israel also sent the third-largest search and rescue team in the immediate aftermath of the quake, exceeded only by Russia and India—countries with more than 18 times the population of Israel.

“Usually, we are not sending money during disasters,” says Alon Melchior, the Deputy Spokesperson for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “We have better ways of helping without sending money.” With money, you don’t always know where it goes, says Melchior, whereas when you send people and equipment to aid the population, you can actually see the impact you’re making on the ground. “We have quite a lot of expertise in emergency situations, and this is what we do best,” he says. “There are countries that are quite richer and can send a lot of money. We have other advantages, and they don’t need our money. They need our methods, expertise, and way of working quickly.”

When they arrived, the field hospital staff had no idea when they would be packing up their tents and heading home. Each day they saw nearly 200 patients; over the course of their two-week stay, they performed 85 life-saving surgeries and delivered eight babies.

One major challenge the medical staff faced, aside from the obvious distress of caring for victims of a brutal natural disaster, was the language barrier. Many of the patients spoke not a word of English and, of course, no Hebrew. An unexpected solution to that problem was the influx of Nepali volunteers who started showing up at the hospital in its first days of operation. In addition to about a dozen staff from the Nepali military hospital, there were also around 20 Nepali translators who came each day. Some of them, like 37-year-old Mira Poudel, have lived in Israel as caretakers for the elderly, and thus speak fluent Hebrew.

A baby born at the Israeli field hospital in Nepal. Photo: IDF / Flash90

Poudel spent nine years living in Bat Yam, a coastal community just south of Tel Aviv, and had returned to her home in Kathmandu just one month before the earthquake struck. She loved living in Israel and says she misses it every day, but she has a 13-year-old son and wanted to take care of him. Thankfully, she says, her home wasn’t destroyed by the earthquake because it is newer and stronger than others in Kathmandu. The money she earned in Israel, she says, was the primary reason she was able to live in such a building. Her parents and sisters, however, weren’t so lucky. Their houses were all destroyed, because they live outside of Kathmandu, where homes are much less sturdy, often constructed of mud and stones.

Poudel’s son is also serving as a translator at the field hospital, because he speaks decent English. Both of them have been suffering from post-traumatic symptoms like headaches, chest pains, and difficulty sleeping. “I thought, I can get help from really good doctors and help them too,” Poudel says before being called upon by a doctor to help translate for a young woman who has just arrived at the triage tent.

One of the doctors who came to Kathmandu with the IDF is Nepali himself. Thirty-year-old Krishna Kashichawa has been living in Jerusalem for the past two years, doing his residency in the orthopedic department at Hadassah Medical Center. When he arrived in Kathmandu, it was his first time in Nepal since moving to Israel. His entire family, including his five siblings, survived the quake, but their home didn’t.

“Everyone is okay, baruch HaShem,” says Kashichawa, using the Hebrew expression for “thank God,” “but our house is destroyed.” Nonetheless, the earthquake had at least one silver lining: After not seeing his family for two years, Kashichawa was finally able to hug his parents, sisters, and brothers. The first time he visited them at their village in Bhaktapur district, he brought them blankets, tents, and money. “You know, they may need it,” he says sardonically.

Nepali doctor Krishna Kashichawa, who is doing his residency at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, returned to Nepal for the first time in two years as part of the IDF’s medical aid mission. Photo: Yardena Schwartz / The Tower

Since the earthquake, nearly everyone in hard-hit Bhaktapur, as in most districts affected by the quake, has been living in makeshift tents donated by governments and NGOs from around the world. This represents one of the biggest challenges of working in the field hospital, says Kashichawa. Releasing patients and sending them back to live in tents “is the hardest part,” he says. “They don’t have a home to go back to and recover, and many of them have very serious injuries.”

Yet the most difficult thing for Kashichawa was when he couldn’t save one of his patients. “When we received him from the Nepali hospital, he was in septic shock. We did surgery and had to remove his leg, and as we transferred him to the ICU, he looked at me and said in Nepali, ‘Brother, save me somehow.’ I said we will try our best. We are the best doctors in Israel, maybe even the world.”

The patient died four days later, after his kidneys failed and his heart gave out. He was just 23.

“I will never forget his face,” says Kashichawa.

Although he is wearing an Israeli army uniform, he is not actually an Israeli citizen and never served in the IDF before this mission. Still, he says he feels every bit an equal member of the Israeli delegation, and even participated in Shabbat services at the field hospital.

Like many of the Israelis here, Kashichawa volunteered for this mission. He was just finishing up a shift at Hadassah on the morning of Saturday, April 25 when he heard about the earthquake and knew that there were bound to be thousands of dead and injured. He immediately told the head of his department that he wanted to help somehow. His boss had heard that the IDF was considering sending over a medical relief team and possibly a field hospital, and recommended Kashichawa to the organizers.

The very next morning, he got a call from Dr. Tarif Bader, commander of the Israeli field hospital and Deputy Chief Medical Officer of the IDF. Bader told him that the Israeli government had approved plans to send a medical response team to Nepal and he would be a part of it. By the following day, they were both on a plane.

The IDF aid delegation prepares to board a plane to Nepal. Photo: IDF / Flash90

Bader can relate to Kashichawa’s bilingual and bicultural advantage. He himself is an Israeli Druze, and thus speaks fluent, native Arabic. For the last three years, he has commanded the medical officers of Israel’s northern command. For two of those years, he was the head of Israel’s field hospital in the Golan Heights, where military doctors have treated more than 1,500 wounded Syrian civilians who crossed the border to seek help outside their war-torn country.

Bader, a pediatrician by trade, was just beginning a short vacation when he heard the news of the earthquake. For Israeli Druze, April 25 is the holiday of Nabi Shu’ayb, where believers visit the tomb of the prophet Shu’ayb near Tiberias. Bader was supposed to be in a hotel in northern Israel with his family for four days, but when he heard about the earthquake, he knew his vacation had ended.

“Our experience is that whenever there is an earthquake or natural disaster anywhere in the world, we send assistance and dispatch a field hospital when it’s needed,” says Bader, who also took part in Israel’s relief efforts in Thailand in 2004, Haiti in 2010, and the Philippines in 2013.

Lingering in the air, unaddressed throughout this humanitarian mission in Nepal, is the international criticism of Israel’s aid work. Asked about his response to critics who accuse Israel of helping a faraway nation in need while ignoring the plight of the Palestinians, Bader appears annoyed.

“We took care of people in Gaza also,” he replies, pointing to the fact that Israel set up a field hospital at the Erez border crossing for Palestinian civilians during Operation Protective Edge last summer. “The fact that the Palestinian people decided not to come to our field hospital in Gaza doesn’t say we didn’t have a field hospital in Gaza. Everywhere we feel there’s a need for our help, we are there. We were helping in Gaza, we’re helping in the Golan Heights, we were in the Philippines, and now Nepal. We are everywhere.”

Unlike other Israeli officials, who argue that it’s an unjust comparison given that Israel is not at war with Nepal and Nepali citizens have not attacked Israeli civilians, Bader seems to feel that there is no way to avoid the international vilification. “This criticism will continue to be here all the time,” he shrugs.

Then he jokes that even in Israel there has been criticism, because in Israeli hospitals, patients can wait three months for orthopedic surgery; while here at the field hospital, the wait is less than one day.

That these patients could wait any longer than a day is unimaginable. On one busy day in the orthopedic tent, among the six patients being treated was a man whose leg had been completely crushed. To fix his fractured bones, Israeli doctors performed an external fixation procedure in which a metal device that looks like a tiny bridge is installed and protrudes from the patient’s skin.

As impressive as the medical work being done under these circumstances is, what’s more incredible are the patients’ stories of survival. Many here came face to face with death, and lost all hope that they would ever emerge from the rubble alive.

Twelve-year-old Nangsal Tamang was trapped under a pile of rocks for five days before her brother, Sonamtasi, finally found her. At the time of the quake, Sonamtasi was inside their house in Palep, eight hours from Kathmandu. He ran outside just in time. Nangsal was playing outside when she felt the earth shake beneath her. Scared and confused, she ran into the forest, and was hit by a massive landslide. Sonamtasi had thought his little sister was dead until he found her in the rubble, her head smashed by the falling stones that had pinned her to the ground. Sonamtasi also found their aunt, who had been killed by the same landslide.

After pulling his sister from the jaws of death, Sonamtasi brought her to another village for help. There he coincidentally ran into an Israeli rescue team, which sent them to the field hospital in an ambulance. Doctors treated her for a fractured skull and internal bleeding, and she spent the next 10 days recovering in a field hospital bed. Yet despite having her brother by her side every day, Nangsal was utterly depressed. Her nurse, Revital Elias, says that for nearly a week, Nangsal wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t smile, and cried almost all the time.

israeli soldiers attempt to rescue injured and trapped people from the ruins of buildings in Nepal. Photo: IDF / Flash90

When she first arrived on April 29, Nangsal had beautiful long black hair that framed her big brown eyes. But in order to operate on her head, doctors had to shave her hair off. Now, her head is covered with a thick, bloody bandage. Losing her hair was traumatic for Nangsal, but she’s also been crying for her parents, who couldn’t come to Kathmandu because there was no room in the ambulance. On top of that, Nangsal is virtually immobile due to the injuries she suffered. For a child who loved playing outdoors, the feeling of paralysis is terrifying, says Elias. Yet after six days at the hospital, she finally started to regain movement on the left side of her body. When Elias saw Nangsal smile for the first time, she cried. Now, when the volunteer clowns come to her tent every few hours, Nangsal laughs, rather than turning her body toward the wall.

Other volunteers include aid workers from international NGOs, along with Israeli trekkers. The Israeli Foreign Ministry says that there is no official estimate of how many Israelis were on the ground in Nepal at the time of the earthquake, but as of May 5, Israel had evacuated more than 300. Yet there were many who chose to say, like Keren Futeran, a 23-year-old who moved to Israel from South Africa in 2011, and was on a long post-army vacation when the earthquake struck.

Lacking any medical skills but having picked up some Nepali during her travels, Futeran spent most of her time in the pediatric wing, trying to cheer up the young patients who often underwent painful operations.

Seeing Nangsal interact with the volunteers, it’s clear that the young girl’s vitality has returned. Blowing bubbles with Futeran one day, she asks Futeran a question in Nepali. Futeran doesn’t understand it, so she asks a Nepali volunteer to translate. “She wants more bubbles,” says the young Nepali woman. Nangsal looks mischievously at Futeran, clearly aware that there are still plenty of bubbles in the bottle she’s holding. Yet perhaps after what she’s been through and all she’s lost, she’s not sure what could be taken away from her next.

A clown entertains children at the Israeli field hospital in Nepal. Photo: Yardena Schwartz / The Tower

Another volunteer at the field hospital is Jon Brack, who flew in from Washington, DC with the international health care organization Project Hope. One day, while Brack is photographing Nangsal, she smiles for the camera, and then asks to see the pictures. After looking at the images for a few seconds, she says something in Nepali, which a local volunteer translates as, “Try from a different angle.”

Another young patient who’s been at the hospital since its first days in operation is seven-year-old Anishka Manandhar. She and her parents were inside their house when it began to crumble, and both she and her mother were trapped inside. She underwent four surgeries at the field hospital and started a physical therapy program, but her father, who has been with her every day, says that the emotional support she’s gotten has been just as important.

One afternoon, she’s lying in her bed, laughing and smiling while playing with a clown who’s brought her some tiny finger puppets. After an hour or so, two Nepali military doctors from the neighboring hospital come by to check up on her. They are dressed in military uniforms and have stern looks on their faces. Without the niceties or gentle touch that the Israeli nurses and doctors use, the Nepali doctors insert tubes into her leg and start moving her foot around. The tent is suddenly filled with Anishka’s cries and pleas to stop. Her father, Sohan, looks helpless, close to tears at the sight of his daughter in so much pain.

That night, he says that this scene is just one example of why he’s grateful his daughter ended up in the hands of Israeli doctors. “The treatment is totally different here, with the clowns, the smiles, and the balloons,” he says, referring to the balloons that line the walls and ceiling of the pediatric tent. “It’s very different from the Nepali hospital. Before those men came in, she told me she didn’t feel any more pain, because a lot of it is mental. With the treatment here, they help her forget her pain.”

A man is treated for injuries at the Israeli field hospital in Nepal. Photo: IDF / Flash90

Another patient’s brother echoes this sentiment. Sukuram Tamang, an 11-year-old boy from Rasuwa district, one of the popular trekking areas, was brought to the Nepali military hospital by helicopter with his 20-year-old brother Kagi. The doctors there transferred the young boy to the Israeli field hospital. A giant rock had fallen on Sukuram’s left foot during the earthquake and it had to be amputated. Watching his little brother rest in his hospital bed with a beehive-sized bandage around his foot, Kagi says Sukuram feels much more comfortable in the Israeli field hospital.

“It’s very much like family here. It’s a more friendly, caring environment,” says Kagi, adding that before this, he had never met an Israeli or knew much about them. “For us, they are like gods.”

Even outside the field hospital, people in Nepal are talking about the work the doctors are doing here. One local taxi driver, who knows about the field hospital through the news and word of mouth, hears that I am going there, and perhaps thinking that I’m seeking medical help, says, “Ah, good, the Israelis are the best doctors in the world.”

After two weeks in Nepal, it was decided that the time had come to close the field hospital and transfer the patients and equipment to the military hospital next door. Tarif Bader notes that the field hospital had reached the point at which the majority of new patients were coming in for non-earthquake related problems like asthma, cancer, and other chronic issues.

“We came here to help the Nepali people after the earthquake,” he says. “So shall we stay here for a year helping them treat recurring diseases, or should we go back to Israel and continue our jobs? There’s no right answer to that question.”

Ultimately, the IDF’s answer was to return to Israel, but to donate all their medical equipment and medicine to the military hospital. “We can’t let their treatment go down once we leave,” says Bader. “We can’t leave our doctors here, but at least we can leave our equipment,” which includes new machines and wheelchairs that cost thousands of dollars apiece.

While Bader and others assert that the patients they are transferring to the Nepali hospital will be in good hands, there is palpable concern among others. Martine Bar-Om is clearly very distraught by the thought of leaving Majhi behind. On the final day of the field hospital’s operations, as doctors prepared patients to be released to their homes or transferred to the military hospital, Bar-Om darts around the tent, giving Majhi’s sister detailed instructions for his care, in addition to what she’s already told the Nepali doctors. She tells them several times that Majhi needs his own ambulance “because he’s special,” and mentions at least five times that he needs to be placed in an area with electricity in order to power the various medical devices that will enable his recovery.

She wishes she could take him home with her, she says, but knows that he needs to remain hospitalized for at least another 10 days. She tries to be as hopeful and optimistic as she can be, but admits that she is worried that Majhi won’t receive the close attention and care he needs. “How can we know?” she asks, with a look on her face that says she doesn’t expect to.

Israeli soldiers participate in rescue attempts of injured and trapped people from the ruins of a village in Nepal. Photo: IDF / Flash90

“The reason they want these patients is because of the machines and equipment that come with them. They don’t have them there,” she says, adding that normally the military hospital is only for members of the military and their families. Because of the earthquake, the hospital has loosened this rule, but Bar-Om worries about how quickly her former patients may be released. To ensure that they are taken care of, Bar-Om says, the Israeli team spoke with the UN and the Israeli ambassador to Nepal, who agreed to check up on the team’s patients after they returned to Israel.

On May 9, after all of the patients have been released from the hospital—some transferred to the military hospital, others to homes that are no longer standing—it is finally time for Bar-Om to say goodbye to Majhi. In the end, the Nepali military wasn’t able to honor her wish to have him transported in his own ambulance. Instead, he is packed into an SUV-sized vehicle with another patient and several Nepali military staff.

With no room for Bar-Om inside the car, she and a few other nurses walk across the field to the military hospital to make sure Majhi is placed in a room with electricity. Once they get there, they see that he isn’t. Instead he’s in a giant outdoor tent. Bar-Om refuses to leave until the Nepali doctors promise her multiple times that Majhi will be moved out of the tent and into another department with access to electricity. She hugs and kisses him goodbye, telling him how proud she is of him, and that all he needs to do is stay strong and he’ll be alright. As she leaves, Majhi looks around the giant tent filled with patients but barely any doctors and certainly no clowns. With his head still bandaged, and his nub of an arm attached to a disconnected draining machine, Majhi looks like he’s in shock.

Yet even before she returned to Israel the following day, Bar-Om was already checking up on Majhi. The doctors did in fact keep their promise, and his machines were now hooked up. Bar-Om could go home feeling relieved that Majhi is going to continue the recovery process he started with her.

Sagar Majhi grew to be a favorite of Israeli doctors during his stay at the field hospital. Photo: Yardena Schwartz / The Tower

48 hours later, the unthinkable happened. While aftershocks had occurred every day the Israeli team was in Nepal, they were relatively minor. Experts said that a bigger aftershock would strike eventually, but few expected a magnitude of 7.3. The death toll from both the first and second earthquakes now stands at 8,635, making it the deadliest earthquake Nepal has ever seen. More than 21,000 people have been injured so far.

Back home in Rosh Ayin the day the second earthquake struck, Bar-Om said she felt lucky to be home, but couldn’t stop thinking about what she left behind. After hearing the news that morning, she made some calls and found out that Majhi and the rest of the patients were doing fine. “It’s a miracle,” she says, that the military hospital wasn’t affected by the second quake.

Still, she knows that anything can happen. There have been more than 200 aftershocks since the first quake, monsoon season is beginning, and many in Nepal, including Majhi, have been rendered homeless. They will be spending monsoon season in tents. For now, the best Bar-Om can do is hope and pray.

“I hope they’ll be okay,” says Bar-Om. “I hope they will get the treatment they need.”

2.The new government’s war on BDS By CAROLINE B. GLICK The Jerusalem Post June 5, 2015

The flagship of the diplomatic war against Israel is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government is less than a month old, but it’s already apparent that it is different from its predecessors. And if it continues on its current diplomatic trajectory, it may do something that its six predecessors failed to accomplish. Netanyahu’s new government may improve Israel’s position internationally.

The stakes are high. Over the years, Israel has largely concentrated its efforts on developing the tools to contend with its military challenges. But as we have seen over the past decade and a half, Israel’s capacity to fight and defeat its enemies is not limited principally by the IDF’s war-fighting capabilities.

Israel’s ability to defend itself and its citizens is constrained first and foremost by its shrinking capacity to defend itself diplomatically. Its enemies in the diplomatic arena have met with great success in their use of diplomatic condemnation and intimidation to force Israel to limit its military operations to the point where it is incapable of defeating its enemies outright.

The flagship of the diplomatic war against Israel is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

Participants in the movement propagate and disseminate the libelous claim that Israel’s use of force in self-defense is inherently immoral and illegal. Over the years BDS activists’ assaults on Israel’s right to exist have become ever more shrill and radical. So, too, whereas just a few years ago their operations tended to be concentrated around military confrontations, today they are everyday occurrences. And their demands become greater and more openly anti-Semitic from week to week and day to day.

Consider the events of the past seven days alone.

Late last week Israel fended off a major international effort led by Palestinian Authority Soccer Federation chairman and former terrorist chief Jibril Rajoub to expel it from the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. Not only is Rajoub a man with blood on his hands. The Fatah luminary is admired by the Israeli far-Left while also being a favorite of Qatar, the chief state sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

Rajoub is sympathetically inclined toward enabling Hamas in Gaza to expand its presence in Judea and Samaria.

Before the government had a chance to sigh in relief that FIFA was settled, Britain’s National Union of Students voted to join the BDS movement. This means that the anti-Israel demonstrations and assaults that take place several times a week at Britain’s universities will now take place under the NUS banner.

Also Wednesday, the French telecom giant Orange’s CEO Stéphane Richard told reporters in Cairo that he wishes to cut off his contract with Israel’s Partner telecommunications company, one of Israel’s largest cellular telephone services providers.

Richard was apparently coerced into making his statement by the Egyptian BDS movement which has threatened to boycott Orange’s subsidiary in Egypt due to its contract with Partner.

Tuesday it was reported that last month the Dutch government issued a travel advisory to its citizens traveling in Israel. In an act of anti-Jewish inversion now common in the Western discourse about Israel and its enemies, the Dutch government warned that Jews in Judea and Samaria constitute a threat to Dutch travelers because they throw stones “toward Palestinian and foreign vehicles.”

In the US, the Anti-Defamation League reported that this past academic year there was a 38 percent rise in anti-Israel events on college campuses over the previous year. The number of BDS campaigns doubled over the previous academic year.

By ADL’s count, there were 520 anti-Israel events on campuses. BDS campaigns were initiated on 29 campuses.

At the UN, Tuesday “The Palestinian Return Center,” Hamas’s European chapter, was granted official status as a recognized nongovernmental organization by the UN’s Commission on NGOs. Now, thanks to the commission, Hamas terrorists can participate in UN meetings, have full access to UN facilities and wear their new, official UN badges.

Incidentally, the same commission rejected a request by ZAKA to receive the same status. ZAKA is an Israeli NGO that provides first aid and handles the remains of terrorism victims and victims of major disasters in Israel and worldwide.

Also at the UN, Leila Zerrougui, the envoy for children in armed conflicts, is pushing to get the IDF added to the blacklist of groups that harm children.

Boko Haram, Islamic State, al-Qaida and the Taliban are among the current names of the list.

Wednesday Republican Sen. Ted Cruz sent a pointed letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemning Zerrougui’s actions. Cruz threatened, “Congress will have no choice but to reassess the United States’ relationship with the United Nations and consider serious consequences if you choose to take this action.”

In contrast to Cruz’s position, in his interview with Channel 2 broadcast Tuesday, US President Barack Obama indicated that due to the rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment and campaigns, if Israel doesn’t make unreciprocated concessions to the PA then the administration will have no choice but to join the anti-Israel UN bandwagon.

The time has come, then, for Israel to take the wheels off the wagon.

For the past dozen years or so, pro-Israel activists in the US in particular have been fighting an uphill, lonely battle against the organizations promoting the BDS movement. Among their top complaints has been the constant refrain that the Israeli government has undermined their actions by standing silent or denying what was happening or treating Israel’s defenders as the moral equivalents of its adversaries.

To some degree, the reticence of the Foreign Ministry was understandable. The BDS Israel haters often claim that they wage political and economic warfare against Israel and isolate and humiliate Israel supporters in the West to promote peace.

This claim has always been ridiculous. You can’t support peace and boycott Jewish-owned businesses in all or parts of Israel. You can’t support peace and boycott Israeli students and professors and dance troupes.

But so long as the word “peace” has been involved, or the boycotters have pretended that they are only referring to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, the Foreign Ministry has by and large taken them at face value and pretended that their smear operation is nothing to worry about.

To the extent they have tried to deal with the growing hate Israel phenomenon, they have run away from its essence. Instead, our senior diplomats have said that the best way to combat BDS is by rebranding Israel as the start-up, gay, friendly state with great beaches.

And largely as a result of this self-induced paralysis and blindness, pro-Israel activists have been isolated.

Jewish anti-Israel organizations such as J Street, Open Hillel and the New Israel Fund in the US, and European governments and government- funded organizations in Europe have operated largely free from criticism by official Israeli voices unwilling to take sides in the debate about the country’s right to exist and defend itself.

All the while, Israel’s diplomatic standing has gone from weak to incapacitated.

Against this backdrop, statements and actions by the new Netanyahu government are encouraging because, unlike its predecessors, it seems to have stopped playing the fool.

At the outset of this week’s cabinet meeting, Netanyahu spoke out angrily and specifically against the BDS movement and warned that Israel must not blame itself for the BDS haters’ assaults against it.

As he put it, “The last thing we need to do is to bow our heads and ask where we went wrong, where we erred. We have done nothing wrong and we have not erred. We are not a perfect country; we do not pretend to be such, but they are setting standards for us that are both twisted and higher than those for any other country, any other democracy.”

Wednesday Netanyahu assailed the British student union’s decision to join the BDS movement.

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked excoriated the BDS movement at the Knesset, stating openly that it is the new Jew hatred.

Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely has translated this new position into action. Among other things, this week she instructed Israel’s ambassador to Switzerland to formally demand that the Swiss government and the Zurich municipality rescind their financial support for the planned Breaking the Silence conference this month in Zurich.

The purpose of the conference, like the purpose of the foreign-funded group more generally, is to demonize and libel the IDF.

So it appears that the government has decided to finally go on offense. But if this is true, then much more can and must be done immediately.

Take the Dutch travel advisory for instance. Israel wasted no time in condemning Holland’s move. But the Dutch statement was just the tip of the iceberg.

Holland spends millions every year to directly and indirectly finance organizations whose sole purpose is to demonize Israel and Israelis.

The Dutch government paid a lot of money to invent lies about Israel and its Jews that then formed the basis of its malicious, bigoted travel advisory.

The Israeli embassy at The Hague as well as the Foreign Ministry must demand not only a retraction of the travel warning. They must demand an immediate cessation of this subversive, adversarial campaign.

So, too, while the British government responded with embarrassment to the BDS vote of the NUS, the fact is that the British government holds responsibility for the strength and radicalism of the BDS movement in Britain. Like Holland, the UK spends millions every year financing NGOs whose purpose is to undermine Israeli sovereignty, demonize the IDF, attack Israel’s right to exist and fund Palestinian terrorists.

Every year, the British government funds dozens of Israeli and Palestinian-registered NGOs whose purpose is to make Israel into an international pariah unable to wage wars of self-defense without risking war crimes tribunals, economic boycotts and international humiliation.

Rather than sufficing with expressions of thanks to the Cameron government for distancing itself from the student union’s boycott of Israel, the government must demand the cessation of direct and indirect British governmental funding of these groups and their campaigns.

The BDS movement is a proxy war. It is being waged against Israel not only by deep-pocketed Arab governments which fund the NGOs that carry the battle to the streets. It is also being waged by hypocritical leftist donors in the US and by supposedly friendly European governments.

The government has taken the first steps in beating back this onslaught. But the hour is late and the stakes are high. The BDS movement is a strategic threat because as it gets stronger, Israel’s ability to wage war on the military battlefield becomes further constrained and the threats to Israel’s economy and social fabric grow. BDS must be defeated piece by piece in an unrelenting offensive that attacks its sources and puts it out of business. It won’t be easy. It won’t be genteel.

But if the government doesn’t submit to the diplomatic urge to be polite, it stands a chance of making matters better, for a change.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-new-governments-war-on-BDS-405090

Women For Israel’s Tomorrow (Women in Green) POB 7352, Jerusalem 91072, Israel mailto:wfit2@womeningreen.org http://www.womeningreen.org For online donations to Women in Green:http://www.razoo.com/story/Women-In-Green To subscribe to the Women in Green list, please send a blank email message to: womeningreen-subscribe@womeningreen.org

3.Watch “JPost Annual Conference: Caroline Glick attacks Dagan and Ashkenazi” on YouTube June 7, 2015

https://youtu.be/WtY-vo6c7H4

+ 30 minutes of Caroline at JPost’s 2013 Conference! She’s always superb!!

4.The Kurds Are Starting to Panic in the War Against ISIS

The Kurds desperately need an influx of arms and supplies in order to be able to continue to hold their 600-mile long border against ISIS attacks. The need for weapons has only increased over the past months as the militant group has effectively plundered Iraqi military bases after overrunning cities, Yaroslav Trofimov reports from Kurdish-controlled areas for The Wall Street Journal.
“Peshmerga ammunition stocks are running low and whatever heavy weapons they have are mostly of Saddam Hussein-era vintage,” Trofimov reports, citing Peshmerga commanders.

Currently, Kurdish lines throughout Iraq consist of defenses manned by Peshmerga troops armed with outdated weapons with dwindling supplies of ammunition.

And although the Peshmerga have put up an effective defense since being driven back by an ISIS offensive last summer, their positions could be easily overrun should ISIS launch a concentrated assault.

“If ISIS combines its forces and pushes into one area with multiple vehicles, they will break through — and then the whole line breaks,” Jamestown Foundation analyst Wladimir van Wilgenburg told The Journal.

This concern is especially true should ISIS launch a suicide blitz like it has done previously in Ramadi and Mosul. On those occasions, the militants overwhelmed well-defended static Iraqi defensive positions through waves of suicide car bombings that demoralized and ultimately drove back the Iraqi forces.

“There is little defense against a multi-ton car bomb; there is none against multiple such car bombs. … the Islamic State is able to overwhelm once-thought formidable static defenses through a calculated and concentrated use of suicide bombers,” The Soufan Group notes. “The Islamic State has neither a shortage of such explosives nor a shortage of volunteers eager to partake in suicide attacks.”

The risk of the Peshmerga being overwhelmed by a similar scenario is likely given that the Kurds lack proper supplies. The US does not directly arm the Kurds: All supplies are routed through the central government in Baghdad, which has been reticent to provide the Peshmerga with all the arms the group may need over fears that Kurdistan may eventually push for independence.

By Jeremy Bender, http://www.businessinsider.com

This lack of direct aid has forced the Kurds to lobby the EU directly for medical aid, funding, and military support.

“Today Kurdistan is fighting terrorism with Peshmerga boots on the ground in a war front of more than 100 kilometers, with more than 1,300 Peshmerga murdered and more than 6,000 wounded since the beginning of the conflict,” Kurdistan Planning Minister Ali Sindi told the European Parliament, according to Rudaw.

On the ground, Kurdish commanders complained to The Journal that each loss the Iraqi military suffers directly aids ISIS and further empowers them against the Peshmerga.

“[ISIS] target us with weapons that were abandoned in Ramadi,” Mustafa Sayid Qadir, the minister of Peshmerga affairs, told The Journal. “Wouldn’t it have been better if the Iraqi army had given them to us instead of giving them to ISIS?”

The Kurds Are Starting to Panic in the War Against ISIS

5.”Dictatorship in Turkey Is Now Over” by Burak Bekdil http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5915/turkey-election June 8, 2015 at 4:00 am

For the first time since his Islamist party won its first election victory in 2002, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was nowhere to be seen on the night of June 7. He did not make a victory speech. He did not, in fact, make any speech.

Not only failing to win the two-thirds majority they desired to change the constitution, the AKP lost its parliamentary majority and the ability to form a single-party government. It won 40.8% of the national vote and 258 seats, 19 short of the simple majority requirement of 276. Erdogan is now the lonely sultan at his $615 million, 1150-room presidential palace. For the first time since 2002, the opposition has more seats in parliament than the AKP: 292 seats to 258.

“The debate over presidency, over dictatorship in Turkey is now over,” said a cheerful Selahattin Demirtas after the preliminary poll results. Demirtas, a Kurdish politician whose Peoples’ Democracy Party [HDP] entered parliament as a party for the first time, apparently with support from secular, leftist and marginal Turks, is the charismatic man who destroyed Erdogan’s dreams of an elected sultanate. Echoing a similar view, the social democrat, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party [CHP], commented on the early results in plain language: “We, through democratic means, have brought an end to an era of oppression.”

What lies ahead is less clear. Theoretically, the AKP can sign a coalition deal with the third biggest party, the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party [MHP], although during the campaign, MHP leader Devlet Bahceli slammed Erdogan harshly for the embarrassing corruption allegations against the president. At the same time, a CHP-MHP-HDP coalition is unlikely, as it must bring together the otherwise arch-enemies MHP and HDP.

The AKP management may be planning for snap, or early, polls but there are hardly any rational reasons for it except to risk another ballot box defeat. Parliament may try a minority government, supported by one of the parties from outside government benches, but this can only create a temporary government.

Two outcomes, however, look almost certain: 1) The AKP is in an undeniable decline; the voters have forced it into compromise politics rather than permitting it to run a one-man show, with in-house bickering even more likely than peace, and new conservative Muslims challenging the incumbent leadership. 2) Erdogan’s ambitions for a too-powerful, too-authoritarian, Islamist executive presidency, “a la sultan,” will have to go into the political wasteland at least in the years ahead.

The AKP appeared polled in first place on June 7. But that day may mark the beginning of the end for it. How ironic; the AKP came to power with 34.4% of the national vote in 2002, winning 66% of the seats in parliament. Nearly 13 years later, thanks to the undemocratic features of an electoral law it has fiercely defended, it won 40.8% of the vote and only 47% of the seats in parliament, blocking it from even forming a simple majority.

Turkey’s Nationalist Movement Party leader Devlet Bahceli addresses supporters after the release of preliminary election results, June 7, 2015. (Image source: MHP video screenshot)

6.Petition PM Netanyahu to vastly increase the budget for Public Diplomacy By Ted Belman

SIGN THE PETITION

PM Netanyahu recently appointed Gilad Erdan, Hasbara Minister with a budget of $25 million in the first year exclusively for coordinating international events to counter the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

And now PM Netanyahu warned:

“We are in the midst of a great struggle being waged against the State of Israel, an international campaign to blacken its name. It is not connected to our actions; it is connected to our very existence,”

“It does not matter what we do; it matters what we symbolize and what we are. I think it is important to understand that these things do not stem from the fact that if only we were nicer or a little more generous — we are very generous, we have made many offers, we have made many concessions — that anything would change because this campaign to delegitimize Israel entails something much deeper that is being directed at us and seeks to deny our very right to live here.”

“Now, this is a phenomenon that we have known in the history of our people. What hasn’t been said about the Jewish people? They said that we are the source of all evil in the world. All of these things are being said about us today as well. It was not true then and it is not true today. There is not a shred of truth to it,”

For years many concerned Zionists have been imploring the Government to take this problem seriously, but to no avail.

All this has happened during your watch but you have refused to allocate the necessary resources to reverse the tide.

On June 5/15, Itamar Eichner, YNET, wrote
Foreign Ministry finds itself battling Israel boycott alone without resources

This is a massive problem. It requires a massive budget.

We demand that the budget be increased to $500 million and that the Ministry be tasked with winning the propaganda war rather than just “coordinating international events”.

Martin Sherman has been at the forefront of demanding a billion shekel budget.

Comprehending the incomprehensible – Part l

Comprehending the Incomprehensible – Part ll

Later in My Billion Dollar Budget he recapped his position.

Readers will recall that I have criticized the abysmal performance of Israeli public diplomacy (PD) and its failure to present its case assertively and articulately to the world.

To recap briefly

I likened the effects of this failure to those of the HIV virus that destroys the nation’s immune system, leaving it unable to resist any outside pressures no matter how outlandish or outrageous. Given the gravity of the threat, I prescribed that, as prime minister, my first order of business would be to assign adequate resources to address the dangers precipitated by this failure.

To this end I stipulated that up to $1 billion should be allotted for the war on the PD front, and demonstrated that this sum was eminently within Israel’s ability to raise, comprising less than 0.5 percent of GDP and under 1 percent of the state budget.

Petition PM Netanyahu to vastly increase the budget for Public Diplomacy By Ted Belman

7.Obama still secretly backed Muslim Brotherhood terror group BY PAMELA GELLER: ISIS is here. The Muslim Brotherhood is here. There’s war in the streets. And Obama is aiding and abetting terrorist groups — the very groups that actively work towards the destruction on America. –

Bill Gertz, top Pentagon reporter for the Washington Times has just reported that “Obama secretly backed Muslim Brotherhood.” The Brotherhood is literally a fascist Muslim radical group from the Nazi period.

Writes Gertz:

President Obama and his administration continue to support the global Islamist militant group known the Muslim Brotherhood. A White House strategy document regards the group as a moderate alternative to more violent Islamist groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State.” (Aka ISIS).
The policy of backing the Muslim Brotherhood is outlined in a secret directive called Presidential Study Directive-11[.] … The directive was produced in 2011[.] …

Efforts to force the administration to release the directive or portions of it under the Freedom of Information Act have been unsuccessful. …

The directive outlines why the administration has chosen the Muslim Brotherhood, which last year was labeled a terrorist organization by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates as a key vehicle of U.S. backing for so-called political reform in the Middle East. …

The UAE government also has labeled two U.S. affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society, as terrorist support groups. Both groups denied the UAE claims. Egypt is considering imposing a death sentence on Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood-backed former president who was ousted in military coup in July 2013.

Critics of the administration’s strategy say the Brotherhood masks its goals and objectives despite advocating an extremist ideology similar to those espoused by al Qaeda and the Islamic State, but with less violence. The group’s motto includes the phrase “jihad is our way.” Jihad means holy war and is the Islamist battle cry.

Counterterrorism analyst Patrick Poole said the Brotherhood in recent weeks has stepped up its use of violent attacks in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood is called the “Ikhwan” in Arabic, meaning “brotherhood.” (Like German “ich” and “won.”) It took that name in 1928, when fascist and Nazi “brotherhoods” were spreading all over Europe.

From the start, the Ikhwan actively collaborated with Hitler through the mufti of Jerusalem. One of their slogans is “All we want is to die in the way of Allah” – which means killing as many infidels as you can when you die. This is the theological basis for suicide-bombing. Today, there is no daylight between the Ikhwan and ISIS.

In 1981, an Ikhwan front group assassinated Pres. Anwar Sadat, the most important Arab peacemaker with Israel.

The Ikhwan employs Malik Obama, the president’s half-brother, as a big money man.

The Ikhwan created Hamas – the terrorist group that uses children as human shields to protect rocket launchers in Gaza.

The Ikhwan helped neo-Ottoman fascist Erdo?an to take over Turkey.

The Ikhwan is almost certainly behind ISIS, together with Turkey and Qatar.

In 2011, the Ikhwan overthrew Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak – who upheld the Egypt-Israel peace treaty for four decades – in close collusion with Obama, Code Pink, and Bill Ayers. The Western media actually reported that Code Pink and Bill Ayers were protesting Hosni Mubarak in the weeks before Mubarak was overthrown. Today, millions of Egyptians believe that Obama supports their mortal enemy, the Ikhwan.

The Ikhwan is now engaged in a monumental civil war against President El Sisi, whose court just condemned its leader to death. Their leaders who are not in jail have fled to Qatar, Turkey, and Gaza, all part of the Ikhwan network.

The Ikhwan controls American front groups like CAIR, which buys up American politicians by the truckload, especially on the left.

Four-star admiral James Lyons (USN, Ret.) has gone public with the charge that the Ikhwan has deeply penetrated U.S. intelligence. That is why Obama can’t even say the words “Muslim war on America.” That is why our defense has been so feeble and cringing.

Hillary Clinton’s closest personal aide as SecState was Huma Abedin – an Ikhwan insider. Abedin was one of the few people who had access to Hillary’s illegal personal e-mail account on the night of Benghazi. Nothing has changed – Abedin is still at the top of the Hillary campaign. Probably for the first time in U.S. history, presidential candidate Hillary has stonewalled any media questions, period.

Major Ikhwan money flows have been reported going to the Clintons, the Carters, and Obama. Ikhwan penetration of American society and the U.S. government gives all the appearance of a political quid pro quo – with our survival at stake.

Bill Gertz’s Pentagon documents now prove the Ikhwan connection directly. The liberal media will try to stifle the facts, as always.

Maybe this time they will fail.

Obama still secretly backed Muslim Brotherhood terror group

8.The War of a Million Cuts: The Struggle against the Deligitimization of Israel & the Jews, & the Growth of New Anti-Semitism by Manfred Gerstenfeld. A review by Jerry Gordon, NER

In early June 2015 the new government of Israeli PM Netanyahu took on the international Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) action by French cell phone giant Orange. Orange was seeking to withdraw its name from an Israeli company, Partner Communications, Ltd. The Los Angeles Times reported this latest BDS kerfuffle involving Israel:

Orange said Thursday that it “ultimately” planned to pull its brand name from Israel, giving a boost to an international boycott movement while enraging the Israeli government and the local franchisee.

In a news release from Paris, the company said it wished to “ultimately end this brand license agreement.” It insisted it was making a business decision, saying it did not want to maintain the brand’s presence in countries where the French company does not actually operate, as is the case in Israel.
The statement capped a tense 24 hours after Orange Chief Executive Stephane Richard at a Cairo news conference Wednesday said that the company would love to terminate “tomorrow” the contract granting the Israeli cellular company Partner Communications Ltd. use of the Orange brand. He added, however, that the legalities would have to be sorted out or the French company would incur staggering expenses.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius responded swiftly saying: Although it is for the president of the Orange group to determine the commercial strategy of the company, France is firmly opposed to a boycott of Israel.

Also, France and the European Union have a consistent policy on settlement-building that is known to all.

This occurred in less than 48 hours after Orange CEO Stephane Richard’s meeting in Egypt with BDS campaign representatives. He said he “would to ultimately cut ties with Israeli Partner Communications, Ltd. (Partner) because of cell phone use in the disputed territories where Palestinians allege human rights abuses occur. Richard admitted he couldn’t do that as the French government owns 25% of the cell phone company which has a 10 year contract with Partner, allowing it to use the name “Orange.” Richard was pummeled for his statement in comments by Prime Minister Netanyahu and from Israeli American Hollywood mogul, Haim Saban, who holds a significant stake in Partner. Netanyahu called on France to repudiate BDS and what he deemed the “miserable actions” of Orange. Saban said on Israel’s Channel 2that Richard “succumbs” to antisemitic pressure groups and ought to be fired.

L’affaire Orange ended just as abruptly as it began with a phone conversation between Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom and cell phone CEO Richard. The Jerusalem Post reported this exchange posted by Shalom on his Facebook page:

“I spoke with the CEO of Orange, Stephane Richard, and I told him that the people of Israel are angered and hurt by his statements. I told him how it saddened me that he had turned into a tool in the struggle against Israel and that he had lent a hand to the assault by Israel-haters who are trying to harm Israel not just militarily but economically. Richard apologized for his remarks that he made during a conference in Egypt and told me that he is a friend of Israel. He claimed that his comments were not properly understood and that he spoke only about the economic aspect [of his decision]. He apologized on behalf of himself and the company for the remarks, and he said that they condemn all forms of boycotts.”

As the L.A. Times reported the original statement by Orange CEO Richard caught Israeli officials flat footed. That prompted Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely to hold an emergency meeting which resulted in a letter sent to Richard saying: “I appeal to you to refrain from being a party to the industry of lies which unfairly targets Israel.”

Still concerning the Israeli Foreign Ministry was the recent adoption of a BDS resolution voted by the UK Student Union and the recognition of a Hamas–related ‘Palestinian Return’ NGO in a vote by Turkey and Iran at the UN. There was also the spike reported by the ADL in BDS resolution votes at US universities seeking divestment of endowment holdings of securities of Israeli companies and securities of US companies doing business with Israel. The UK Student Union vote prompted Israeli PM Netanyahu during welcoming remarks for visiting Canadian Foreign Minister Robert Nicholson to say:

“They boycott Israel but they refuse to boycott ISIS. [ISIS] burns people alive in cages and the national student groups in Britain refuse to boycott ISIS and have boycotted Israel. That tells you everything you want to know about the BDS movement. They condemn Israel and do not condemn ISIS; they condemn themselves.”

The Anti-Israel BDS campaign formally began in 2005 with formation of thePalestinian BDS National Committee. The international Palestinian BDS project is modeled on the South African Anti-Apartheid sanctions campaign of the 1980’s and early 1990’s. It was an outgrowth of the UN Human Rights Commission Durban I Conference Against Racism in 2000 prompted by Palestinian and so-called ant-racist anti-Israel NGOs. The International Palestinian BDS initiative endeavored to depict Israel as allegedly violating Palestinian human rights as an occupying power in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Israel’s kerfuffle with French cell phone giant Orange is an example of a long overdue strategy articulated in a new book by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, The War of a Million Cuts: The Struggle against the Deligitimization of Israel and the Jews, and the Growth of New Anti-Semitism. Dr. Gerstenfeld is the former chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a recognized expert on European and Global Antisemitism. His latest work on the rise of the “new Antisemitism” is a masterful compendium of the origins and contemporary sources of Jew hatred, delegitimizing and demonizing Israel and world Jewry, as well as a strategy for Israel to combat this political war against the Jewish State. In our 2013 interview with Dr. Gerstenfeld, “Anti-Israelism is Anti-Semitism,” in response to a question on what Israel and world Jewry could do to combat this, he replied:

In post-modern times, there is no single remedy against widespread hate-mongering. The government of Israel has to set up a much more comprehensive infrastructure to fight this war and it must properly fund it. One must develop a detailed concept of how this is going to be done.

In The War of a Million Cuts, Gerstenfeld proposes, the equivalent of the US WWII Office of War Information, funded at upwards of $250 million by Israel. He notes the compelling rationale:

There is no Israeli organizational structure that is capable of overseeing the battlefield, let alone one that combats incitement abroad as well as anti-Semitism in a systematic way. This is despite the fact that the war of a million cuts has been raging for so long.

Such an overview of the battlefield would involve understanding who Israel’s most dangerous hate-mongering enemies are, what their various modes of activity are, how their operations interrelate, what impact they have, and so on. Such an agency would also assess and develop the best ways of combating the aggressors and guiding Israel’s allies on how they can help fight the enemy. No other country is confronted with a propaganda onslaught of such magnitude.

With Israel’s premier expertise in cybersecurity, that might entail development of a’ big data’ approach to target and fine tune messaging to combat Anti-Israel propaganda. Illustrative of that was the development by both the IDF and ad hoc social media groups at Israeli universities to rebut pro-Hamas and Palestinian disinformation through adroit use of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube videos in the midst of Operation Defensive Edge. In the US colleagues involved with the National Security Task Force of the Lisa Benson show held a combined Facebook Twitter Rally in the midst of last summer’s Hamas rocket and tunnel war that at its peak was sending more than 600 messages per hour. That effort caught the attention of several US Congressional Representatives and even a reporter from Al Jazeera America using the hashtag “#defundsHamas.”

Carolyn Glick in a Jerusalem Post oped on the Orange and more recent BDS attacks against Israel noted the daunting task ahead in the expanding war against BDS:

“Israel’s ability to defend itself and its citizens is constrained first and foremost by its shrinking capacity to defend itself diplomatically. Its enemies in the diplomatic arena have met with great success in their use of diplomatic condemnation and intimidation to force Israel to limit its military operations to the point where it is incapable of defeating its enemies outright.”

The flagship of the diplomatic war against Israel is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

Participants in the movement propagate and disseminate the libelous claim that Israel’s use of force in self-defense is inherently immoral and illegal. Over the years BDS activists’ assaults on Israel’s right to exist have become ever more shrill and radical. So, too, whereas just a few years ago their operations tended to be concentrated around military confrontations, today they are everyday occurrences. And their demands become greater and more openly anti-Semitic from week to week and day to day.

These latest BDS attacks against Israel aroused casino mogul and GOP campaign financier Sheldon Adelson. Following this episode, he called for an emergency meeting of likeminded anti-BDS colleagues at his flagship Casino in Las Vegas

On June 4, 2015, Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina signed into law a model anti-BDS law for adoption by other states and possibly at the federal level through amendment of the existing 1977 Anti-Boycott legislation that bars participation of US persons in boycotts, not sanctioned by the government. The blog Legal Insurrection reported:

The new law prohibits[s] the state from doing business with firms or individuals who engage in a “boycott of a person or an entity based in or doing business with a jurisdiction with whom South Carolina can enjoy open trade.”

The South Carolina bill was signed into law a few weeks after Illinois passed legislation prohibiting the state from investing its pension funds in businesses that boycott Israel. Shortly afterwards Prof. Jacobson [of Cornell Law School] reported that New York had started working on a bill similar to the Illinois bill.

According to a spokesman for the Israel Allies Foundation, “a bloc of sponsors across 18 states has already committed to introducing similar legislation in their next legislative cycle.” The Israel Allies Foundation is working on fighting BDS at the state level.

If adopted in other jurisdictions in the US the South Carolina model might bring a halt to state university student associations passing anti-Israel divestment resolutions. It also might bring up short groups like J Street, the New Israel Fund and some Federations that have supported BDS proponents.

It may augur well that a colleague of Dr. Gerstenfield’s at the JCPA, former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Dr. Dore Gold, was appointed Director General at the Israeli Foreign Ministry along with Deputy Foreign Minister Ms. Hotovely. What could emerge from these events and Netanyahu government appointments just might be the political warfare agency suggested by Gerstenfeld to ultimately rein in the rampant Jew hatred in the world directed in an unceasing BDS campaign demonizing Israel.

In The War of a Million Cuts, Gerstenfeld examines in definitive detail the classical forms of Antisemitism from early Church, nativist European blood libel accusations to the sanguinary racist forms that originated in the Spanish inquisition. These later emerged in 19^th Century France and Austria with Antisemitic motifs of dual loyalty accusations and motifs of global media and financial controls depicted in editorial cartoons by the figurative Jewish octopus often conveyed in Arab and Iranian propaganda in the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. Those motifs include those drawn from Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and pictorial dehumanization of Jews which ultimately led to Hitler’s final solution – murdering six million European Jewish men, women and children. As a child, Gerstenfeld was hidden with a Dutch Christian family during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands during WWII.

His latest book covers the re-emergence of Antisemitism in post-war Europe against the background of the creation of the third Jewish commonwealth, Israel and the Palestinian conflicts that triggered a new international Anti-Israel campaign. A campaign fostered in part by the growth of non-selective mass Muslim immigration into Europe and the West which brought with it Islamic Jew hatred drawn from foundational Qur’anic documents.

Gerstenfeld portrays these common motifs and themes drawn from these ancient and contemporary sources and the means by which they are disseminated in print and electronic social media. Against this background, he highlights evidence from contemporary surveys exposing the depths of virulent Antisemitism in France, Holland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Sweden and the UK which threaten both domestic Jewish populations and Israelis.

In addition to Palestinian and Islamic organizations and media, the new Antisemitism derives from anti-Israel positions of international mainstream Christian NGOs and churches, European extremist left and neo-fascist political parties, nominally friendly state leaders, biased Western media, academia and even self-hating Jews.

Then there is Lawfare by the Palestinian Authority in international and even US courts directed at criminalizing Israel’s self defense and civil actions against accusations from corrupt Palestinian leaders. Despite the absence of an official Israeli political warfare agency Gerstenfeld commends NGOs, social media and academic groups in the US, EU and Israel that combat Anti-Israelism. Groups like Palestine Media Watch, NGO Monitor, CAMERA, StandWithUs and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East that monitor, disclose abuses and drawn attention to these developments arousing activism.

In his 2013 book, Demonizing Israel and the Jews Gerstenfeld developed the stunning estimate of 150 million Europeans who dislike Israel and Jews. This figure is based on survey responses to questions about Israel’s alleged “genocidal” behavior towards Palestinian Arabs conducted in major EU member countries.

How bad the level of global Antisemitism is reflected in a statistic that Dr. Gerstenfeld drew from the 2014 ADL Global 100 survey results. For every Jewish person in the world there are 700 Antisemites. That would make Antisemites the equivalent of the third largest country in the world with an estimated 1 billion people.

9.Raif Badawi and Saudi “Justice” by Denis MacEoin http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5916/raif-badawi-saudi-justice June 8, 2015 at 5:00 am

You may have seen the face of Raif Badawi, a young Saudi man, or a short article about him, or impressive efforts by The Independent, to bring attention to the cruel punishments inflicted on him by a series of deeply illiberal Saudi courts: 1000 lashes — “very harshly,” the flogging order read — to be administered 50 at time for 20 weeks, or five months.

Raif Badawi is a 31-year old author, blogger and social activist, who gently tried to introduce just the smallest traces of enlightened thinking to the government and the religious elite of Saudi Arabia from his home in Jeddah.

He did this mainly through a website and public forum entitled, “Free Saudi Liberals.” An example of what he is now to be flogged to death for goes: “My commitment is… to reject any repression in the name of religion… a goal that we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.”

It is for unspeakable thoughts such as this that the Saudi authorities have come down on him with such cruelty as to make themselves look globally like a pack group of insatiable, perverted, sadistic, sexual deviants.

Badawi’s life is in serious danger. He was detained briefly in 2008, on a charge of apostasy — a crime that carries the death sentence in the Saudi kingdom. In the following year, his bank accounts were frozen and he was banned from travelling outside the country.

He was arrested again on June 17, 2012, in Jeddah, after organizing a conference to mark a “day of liberalism.” The conference, which was to have taken place in Jeddah on May 7, was banned by the authorities. Several months later, on December 17, 2013, he first appeared before a General Court in Jeddah. This was not a court in the Western sense of the word, with jury selection, evidence, discovery, and so on. The vast majority of courts in Saudi Arabia are Shari’a courts, operating according to the rules of Islamic law and presided over by state-appointed clerics (‘ulama). On this occasion, the charges against Badawi were outside the norms of international law: “setting up a website that undermines general security,” “ridiculing Islamic religious figures,” and “going beyond the realm of obedience.” Some days later, the court decided to proceed with the charge of apostasy. More months passed, and on July 13, 2013 it was reported that Badawi had been sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment and 600 lashes for violating Islamic values and propagating liberal thought. His website was shut down.

But the Saudi judges were not done with him yet. On December 26, 2013 a judge recommended that he be brought before a higher court on the apostasy charge, then on May 7, 2014 his sentence was increased, now totaling 1000 lashes followed by ten years in prison and a large fine of around $260,000.

To make matters worse, in another example of Saudi “justice,” Badawi’s lawyer, Walid Abu’l-Khayr (Waleed Abulkhair), was jailed.

Abu’l-Khayr, from a prominent family of religious judges and clerics, had been listed in Forbes magazine as one of the top 100 Arab writers on Twitter. His wife, Samar, is Raif Badawi’s sister. Abu’l-Khayr had set up an organization named “Monitor of Human Rights in Saudi Arabia.” He was sentenced to 15 years in jail, to be followed by a 15-year travel ban.

On January 9, 2015, Raif Badawi received the first of his planned twenty flogging sessions: 50 lashes each time, to be delivered after Friday noon prayers outside Jeddah’s al-Jafali Mosque, across the road from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Badly hurt — he is a diabetic and physically frail — he faced almost certain death long before his punishment could be brought to an end. Doctors advised delay, and for many weeks, he was not subjected to further floggings.

In the meantime, an international campaign for his release started in earnest. Newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations across the West featured his story prominently. Everyone agreed that the prescribed punishments were cruel, inhuman, and degrading, and that the floggings amounted to torture, illegal under international law.

Criticism of Saudi inhumanity went to very high levels in Europe and North America. The U.S. State Department issued a strong statement on the affair. The National Assembly of Quebec passed a unanimous motion in condemnation. Britain’s Prince Charles, long familiar with the Saudi kingdom, raised the issue with the new King Salman.

On March 3, 2015, sixty-seven members of the U.S. Congress sent a bipartisan letter to King Salman, calling for the release of all prisoners of conscience, including Badawi and Abu’l-Khayr.

The Swedish government, in protest at the conviction, went so far as to cancel an arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Seldom have the Saudis come under such a volume of international criticism as they have done over this one affair. A discreet retreat and the freeing of Badawi and Abu’l-Khayr might have paid off well for a country with a new monarch, facing terrorism on all sides, and negotiating help in its counter-terrorism efforts even from Israel.

But to renewed outrage around the world, it was reported on June 7 that the Saudi Supreme Court — originally thought to herald reform in the judicial system — has confirmed Badawi’s sentence finally in all respects. The only possible reprieve now would be a royal pardon. The judgement is, in effect, a slow, bloodthirsty, agonizing, death sentence handed to a man whose only concern was to speak gently but honestly in a country so backward that it prefers the outrages and injustices of seventh-century Arabia to anything, such as mercy, in the twenty-first century — the technology of which the Saudis are all too happy to avail themselves.

The Saudis cannot have it both ways. On one level, they are only too happy to join the modern world, building skyscrapers, funding universities, training scientists, and benefiting from the many luxuries and conveniences the Western world offers them. On another level, they reject everything that makes the West strong — freedom of conscience, thought and speech, an equal role for women in society, tolerance of other religions and philosophies, and the acceptance of either international law or the most elemental human rights.

Tomorrow, governments and rights organizations, along with ordinary citizens, will meet to plan their response to this abuse of decency.

If Raif Badawi is flogged again, and if he should die, his wife be widowed and his children orphaned, and the reputation of Saudi Arabia, already mired in the mud, will sink to a point beyond which it may never regain the trust or support of anyone. There is already unrest in the kingdom. The Saudi kingdom and its extremist cult of Wahhabism, its clerical elite, and its pompous princes know that they face attack from the Islamic State, and from Iran in Yemen and across the Gulf. Young Saudis, bribed and brainwashed though so many are, they are not fools.

The Saudi Supreme Court’s judgement is worse than burying one’s head in the sands of the Empty Quarter [al-rub’ al khali], a large, almost uncrossable desert in Saudi Arabia. It is an admission of a complete inability to change, even while the world around it is shifting out of control.

What is happening to Badawi is also a perfect reminder to anyone who claims to be “offended” by “Islamophobia,” why it might exist, who is to blame for it, and that it is precisely behavior such as this that justifies it.

Everyone who thinks and feels will continue to work and pray for Raif Badawi’s release and his return to his wife and children at their home in Canada, where they obtained political asylum in 2013.

Denis MacEoin is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and a former lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies.