RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/29/human-rights-bodies-corrupt-human-rights-to-vilify-israel/

The United States has a special interest in safeguarding the integrity of human rights because America is founded on the rights inherent in all persons, and the nation’s political traditions revolve around them. Ordinary Americans as well as Washington policymakers, therefore, should condemn prominent human-rights organizations’ abuse of human rights to defame Israel and to legitimate jihadists’ efforts to destroy the Jewish state. Correcting the record about the Middle East’s only rights-protecting democracy and the Islamist forces sworn to its elimination is crucial to restoring the good name of human rights.

The Declaration of Independence holds that it is self-evidently true that human beings are endowed with “unalienable rights” – the 18th-century term for human rights. The Constitution aims to secure them. Much of the nation’s history revolves around the struggle to ensure that all Americans enjoy the rights that are theirs in virtue of their humanity. While the Constitution does not grant government a roving mandate to protect human rights around the world, it does invigorate the nation’s interest in serving as a beacon of freedom for those who suffer under authoritarian regimes and in cooperating with countries that share America’s understanding of the dignity of the person.

Dictatorships reject human rights, which place individual freedom ahead of dictators’ ambitions and decrees. Dictatorships’ aversion to human rights is as characteristic of the Iranian Ayatollahs’ Islamist theocracy as it is of Putin’s imperial Russia and of the Chinese Communist Party’s synthesis of Marxism-Leninism and traditional Chinese nationalism.

In the 21st century, powerful human-rights organizations have played into dictators’ hands by politicizing human rights. While persisting in affirming human-rights’ universality, these organizations equate them with a tendentious version of the progressive agenda. They wield human rights as a propaganda tool, inflating the claims of favored groups and disparaging the claims of the disfavored. The politicization of human rights sends the pernicious message to those who differ with the progressive left’s political priorities that human rights are a sham and should be expelled from respectable political discourse.

Nowhere do human-rights organizations more crudely politicize human rights than in the case of Israel.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21577/palestinians-hussein-al-sheikh-musical-chairs

The appointment of al-Sheikh needs to be seen in the context of Abbas’s effort to dupe the international community into believing that he is serious about reforming the PA and sharing power. Abbas’s main goal is to rid himself of the image of an autocrat and present himself as a reformist and democrat, so that Western donors will continue to pour money on him – foolishly with no conditions.

[T]hose who think that al-Sheikh would be different from Abbas are clueless. Al-Sheikh, a veteran member of Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction, is an exact replica of his boss. Abbas and he share the same positions on almost every issue related to Israel. Both have always used harsh rhetoric to condemn and vilify Israel, especially in the international arena.

Al-Sheikh may not represent the old guard in the Palestinian leadership, but his statements and positions reflect those of Abbas and the old guard. The Palestinians need real reforms that will end the corruption in PA institutions and remove corrupt and incompetent officials. The last thing they need is a new game of musical chairs designed to deceive both the Palestinians and the international community.

On April 26, a group of unelected Palestinian Authority (PA) officials approved the appointment of Hussein al-Sheikh as “Deputy Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Vice President of the [non-existent] State of Palestine.”

PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who also serves as chairman of the PLO Executive Committee, had nominated the 64-year-old al-Sheikh for this position in accordance with a decision by the Palestinian Central Council, a body dominated by Abbas loyalists, to create the position of “Deputy Chairman of the PLO Executive Committee and Vice President of the State of Palestine.”

The 16-member PLO Executive Committee, which approved the nomination, is also dominated by Abbas loyalists, including al-Sheikh, who was appointed a few years ago by the now 89-year-old Abbas as its secretary general.

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

Following World War II, the global Jewish population was estimated to be around 11 million with approximately two-thirds of European Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Today, in a modern miracle of rebirth the Jewish population of the world has climbed to 15.8 million out of a total world population of 8 billion. This represents .02% of the global population.

Approximately 7.2 million Jews live in Israel and enjoy freedom, democracy, arts and theater and cafes and restaurants.

This tiny nation contributes more to  the science, medicine, agricultural and water conservation technologies, per capita, than any other nation in the world.

Michael Ordman details and proves this in every posting of positive news from Israel. Read it all.

rsk

https://israfan.com/p/archaeologists-boycotted-judea-samaria

Political boycotts by global academia silence findings from Israel’s historic heartland, leaving ancient Jewish heritage at risk.

In the hills of Judea and Samaria, where the stories of the Bible come to life in stone and soil, Israeli archaeologists are facing academic exile. Despite groundbreaking discoveries that illuminate ancient Jewish history, researchers are being shunned by international journals their work deemed untouchable, not for lack of scientific merit, but for its location.

Archaeologists like Dvir Raviv of Bar-Ilan University, who recently completed a season of excavations at Sartaba, a Hasmonean fortress from around 100 BCE, are unable to publish their findings in any major academic outlet. “I know I won’t be able to publish the results of my study in any of the leading publications,” Raviv says, pointing to a “clever boycott” enforced by a politically motivated academic elite.

The chilling effect is widespread. Even non-Israeli scholars face retribution for working in these areas. Dr. Scott Stripling, an American archaeologist leading excavations at biblical Shiloh, says his team’s findings are consistently rejected on political grounds. “If I wait for Middle East peace, my work will never be completed,” he says.

Following the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israeli archaeologists largely retreated from Areas A and B, where the Palestinian Authority assumed administrative control. But even in Area C, under full Israeli jurisdiction, research is obstructed not by local laws, but by international academic censorship.

“The biblical heartland remains critically understudied,” says Raviv. “To me, it’s an opportunity. But to humanity, it’s a loss.”

Judea and Samaria are rich with unparalleled archaeological value.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21572/hamas-weapons

Hamas wants to keep its weapons so that it could kill even those Jews who “hide behind stones and trees.” Hamas also wants to hold on to its weapons so that it can continue to oppress Palestinians who dare to speak out against the terrorist group. This old but reliable method of control is how Hamas has managed to remain in power for the past two decades.

Any deal that allows Hamas to keep its arsenal of weapons is simply a green light to the Islamists to pursue their jihad against Israel. It is a waste of time to demand that Hamas just be removed from power in the Gaza Strip.

The Trump administration actually needs to place the issue of disarming Hamas and all the Palestinian terrorist groups not among its demands, but at the top.

As the war in the Gaza Strip is about to enter its 20th month, the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group has once again repeated its refusal to disarm. It says the weapons are needed to continue its fight against Israel. Those who believe that Hamas would ever agree to lay down its weapons are living in a dream world. There is, unfortunately, only one way to convince Hamas to disarm: military force.

Recently, two senior Hamas officials, Mahmoud Mardawi and Bassam Naim, announced their group’s absolute rejection of any proposal related to laying down its weapons. They said that other Palestinian terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip also reject any plan to disarm.

“The [Palestinian] resistance’s weapons represent the life of the Palestinian people and cannot be relinquished under any circumstances,” Mardawi said in a statement to Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV station. Hamas, he added, “will not negotiate over its weapons, or those who carry them, at any stage. The mere entry into a discussion about this issue is completely unacceptable.”

Naim also told the TV station that Hamas would not lay down its weapons and that the “resistance will continue as long as there is an [Israeli] occupation.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21567/iran-hamas-terrorism-plan

In the West Bank and Jerusalem, most Palestinians have ignored Hamas’s repeated calls for violence against Israel.

“As the dimensions of these unimaginable sadistic horrors are uncovered, I ask you to believe me when I say that I want it to be clear to you, and the whole world, that we stand as your brothers, as human beings, and as citizens of the country, by your side. It is our simple and required moral and human duty to express abhorrence, to cry out loudly against unimaginable crimes. Our voice with be sharp and clear, unapologetic, unhesitant, unfaltering, without proportionality, with no ifs, ands, or buts. There are no dilemmas in the face of atrocities!” — Louis Haj, an Arab resident of the city of Acre, and former tech executive, Globes, October 22, 2023.

Now that the Trump administration is holding direct negotiations with Iran, it must demand that the ruling mullahs immediately stop supporting Hamas’s attempts to unleash a new wave of terrorist attacks against Israel from within Israel itself and from the West Bank.

After bringing death and destruction on the residents of the Gaza Strip, the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group is now trying to drag Arab Israelis and Palestinians in east Jerusalem and the West Bank into a violent confrontation with Israel.

Hamas and Iran’s mullahs will not be content until they see bloodshed and violence spread to areas outside the Gaza Strip. For them, this is a way of distracting attention from the catastrophe they brought on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for the past 18 months. They want the world’s attention to shift from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the two-million-strong community of Arab citizens inside Israel.

https://mailchi.mp/dd9d88d97a17/israel-current-events

EXCERPTS

Gaza/Hostage Situation Update
While we were burning our chometz last week, the IDF was busy scorching parts of Gaza, both above and below ground. Most of the ground activity is happening in the southern strip in the area now referred to as the Morag Corridor and also in the northern strip. Both sides seem to be avoiding confrontation for the most part. In instances where terrorists did appear, Israeli Air Force planes eliminated them before they could pose a significant threat to the nearby IDF soldiers. Meanwhile, the planes also spent their time eliminating terrorist leaders in the central areas of Gaza that the ground troops are currently avoiding. 

Negotiations are continuing toward renewing a ceasefire that would see about 10 Israeli hostages freed in exchange for the release of hundreds of terrorists and the resumption of aid. As of now, Hamas is still insisting on guarantees that the war will be ended before any more hostages are freed. The Israeli Government continues to insist that increased military pressure is what has led to previous hostage deals and is the only thing that will lead to future ones as well. Former hostages and family members of current hostages continue to compete to see who can say the most retarded, non-sensible thing about how the remaining hostages should be freed. It’s getting quite annoying. For some reason folks seem to think that these people are beyond criticism, but their incredible lack of sensitivity to the families of the hundreds of soldiers killed and to those wounded and still fighting certainly qualify them for a nice helping of vitriol. Everyone wants the hostages freed, but performing national suicide shouldn’t really be on the negotiating table. 

A new trend started this week where folks who think they are important are signing petitions that say that the war should be ended in order for all the hostages to be freed – basically what Hamas has demanded from the very beginning of the current conflict. They threaten that they will no longer appear for reserve duty and/or work. So far, the Chief of Staff has removed some of them from reserve duty altogether. This is definitely the correct way going forward. US President Ronald Reagan and the air traffic controllers all over again. Some British people also joined in as well. Lol. That imperial ship sank a long time ago. There is nothing like British self-righteous arrogance. So much better done than their food.

http://bit.ly/4jmZ6cP

“Israel’s Jewish women are unusual among industrialized nations for their high birth rate, while modernizing Arab women have fewer babies than in the past.

Israelis have wondered at times whether they would be outnumbered by Palestinians and become a minority in the world’s only Jewish homeland.

The fear of a “demographic time bomb” has often been cited by those who support the two-state solution, in which Palestinians would get an independent state alongside the Jewish state. An independent Palestinian state, they say, is the only way for Israel to remain majority Jewish.

The fear may be unwarranted. A 2025 demographic study by an Israeli-American group shows the Jewish population growing more rapidly than the Arab Muslim population, particularly in Judea and Samaria—Israel’s historical names for what other nations refer to as the West Bank.

The study, which has traced the population question for two decades, found that the number of annual Jewish births increased by 73 percent from 1995 to 2024, while those among Arabs in Israel increased by only 18 percent.

Jewish births in 2024, about 139,000, were 76 percent of about 182,000 total births, compared with 69 percent of total births in 1995, according to the study, titled “2025 Israel’s Demographic Update Defies Conventional Wisdom.”

Study co-leader Yoram Ettinger, a retired ambassador who published the study in his online “The Ettinger Report,” told The Epoch Times that his group does not accept the statements of either the Israeli government or the Palestinian Authority at face value. It takes hard looks at as many figures as possible to audit the official numbers, he said.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21549/palestinians-slaughtering-jews-al-aqsa-pretext

Peaceful and permitted outdoor tours to the grounds around the Al-Aqsa Mosque are regularly described by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas as violent incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

It is time for the US and other Western countries to impose consequences on Palestinian leaders, especially Mahmoud Abbas and his senior representatives, for spreading falsehoods and libels against Israel and Jews. It is precisely this type of rhetoric that incentivizes Palestinians to carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews. The message to Palestinian leaders should read: “Stop using the Al-Aqsa Mosque as an excuse to slaughter Jews. The mosque remains intact, and is not facing any threat, despite Palestinian libels and lies.” Failure to comply would result in international donors imposing financial sanctions on the Palestinian leadership.

If anyone is desecrating the mosque, it is those who exploit it to encourage their people to carry out terrorist attacks.

As the Hamas-Israel war continues in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has resumed its false claim – first propagated in 1929 by Adolf Hitler’s subsequent ally, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, and again and again after that — that that Jews are violently “storming” the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and planning to divide it in time and space between Jewish and Muslim worshipers.

Such claims were also used by the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group to justify the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in which Gazan terrorists murdered 1,200 Israelis and wounded of thousands. On that day, another 251 Israelis were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, where 59 -alive and dead – remain in captivity. It is worth noting that Hamas called its invasion of Israel “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”

Shortly after the October 7 massacre, Hamas published a report highlighting the motives behind the cross-border attack on Israel. According to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency, the report, titled “Our Narrative, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” said that:

“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was a necessary step and a natural reaction against Israel’s plans to eliminate the Palestinian cause, seize lands, Judaize the Palestinian lands, and establish complete control over Al-Aqsa Mosque and holy sites.”