Jerusalem News (27 March 2017, 29 Adar, 5777)
Contents:
1. The Treachery of Dan and Simeon! The Irish left - The Irish left and Israel by Mark Humphrys
2. Father of Jerusalem bombing victim vows to keep pushing for terrorist's extradition
By Dov Lieber
3. US 'Outraged' by UN Report That Accuses Israel of Establishing 'Apartheid Regime' That 'Dominates the Palestinian People'
 by Barney Breen-Portnoy
4. The real face of Jordan By Caroline B. Glick
5. NETANYAHU THANKS BRITAIN FOR CHANGING POSITION
by Mordechai Sones
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1. The Treachery of Dan and Simeon! The Irish left - The Irish left and Israel
MarkHumphrys.com
http://markhumphrys.com/irish.left.israel.html
Extracts:
The book "Ireland and the Palestine Question" (2005) by Rory Miller has much interesting information. For example, it shows that:
Ireland strongly condemned the Israeli bombing of Iraq's nuclear weapons program in 1981.
Ireland strongly opposed the building of the life-saving Israeli wall in 2003.
FF governments were consistently pro-Palestinian throughout the 1980s (and since). FG was little better. Labour was even worse.
The Irish taxpayer has been forced to send money to the Palestinians through the UN since 1959, and directly since the 1980s (and still today). It seems that some of our money has been used to pay for hate-filled schoolbooks that promote jihad and Islamic terror.
Ireland was the last EU country to grant permission (in 1993) for an Israeli embassy.
PLO terrorist dictator Arafat made an official visit to Ireland (1993) before any democratically-elected Israeli prime minister ever did (1996). The PLO terrorist even spoke before the Oireachtas foreign affairs committee.
Christian Aid and Trocaire have been pro-Palestinian since at least 1990.
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2. Father of Jerusalem bombing victim vows to keep pushing for terrorist's extradition
After Jordan's top court denies American request to arrest Ahlam al-Tamimi, who helped carry out 2001 Sbarro attack,
Arnold Roth says he'll take fight to court of public opinion
By Dov Lieber March 22, 2017, 1:27 pm 4
http://www.timesofisrael.com/father-of-jerusalem-bombing-victim-vows-to-keep-pushing-for-terrorists-extradition/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=c5d779cd5f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-c5d779cd5f-55237018
Extracts:
Nearly 16 years ago, Arnold Roth lost his daughter Malki in a suicide bombing at a Sbarro pizza shop in central Jerusalem. Now he's saying he won't give up his fight to make sure a female terrorist who helped plan and carry out the attack sees justice.
Roth's daughter was among 15 people killed in the August 9, 2001, bombing, and one of two American fatalities. On Monday, Jordan's top court upheld an order refusing an American extradition order for Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi, who was convicted over the bombing in an Israeli court but has been living free in Jordan the last several years.Â
Roth is vowing to continue to push for Tamimi to be shipped off to the US to be punished over the bombing, which also injured 122 people, including several Americans, when it ripped through the shop in the midst of the Second Intifada.
According to the US Justice Department, which recently unsealed the extradition order, Tamimi helped plan the bombing, including choosing the location for maximum casualties, and brought the suicide bomber to the restaurant.
Roth expressed great doubt over whether the Jordanian ruling was legitimate, rather than just a political cover-up.
'I'm skeptical based on years of seeing the way formal decisions are taken and announced in the Arab world,' Roth said.
Jordan's top court ruled Tamimi couldn't be handed over to the US because a 1995 extradition agreement between the two countries was never ratified by the Jordanian parliament.
'Perhaps there is a constitutional prohibition against extradition. But they have had more than two decades to figure that out,' said Roth, who is a practicing lawyer.
He added, however, that 'looking back at news reports of 1995, when the extradition agreement was made, no one raised the issue of any constitutional barrier.'
'I want clearer heads than mine to look at this. For instance, the American authorities in Jordan,' he said.
US authorities did not react to the Jordanian ruling, and a Justice Department official declined to comment. However Roth, who says he has begun talking to US lawmakers about continuing to push for the extradition, said he understood the Americans had been caught off guard by Amman's refusal.
'People are outraged and a lot of them are Americans. We've had a real outpouring of support and anger from people who have observed that Jordan gets a terrific media image in the US,' he said.
Because Tamimi is considered a hero in Jordan, Roth asserted, 'no politician will take the risk of handing her off to the Americans. They will come up with any excuses they need.'
'In a country where the king changes the government as often I as change shirts, it's hard to take seriously the claim that the constitution prevents this or that,' he added.
There was no immediate comment from Jordanian officials.
In 2003, Tamimi pleaded guilty in an Israeli court to multiple counts of murder and was sentenced to 16 terms of life in prison, but was released and returned to Jordan in 2011 as part of the deal to free IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, for whom Israel exchanged 1,027 prisoners.
In March, Tamimi was charged by the US with 'conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against US nationals outside the US, resulting in death.' She was placed on the FBI's Most Wanted list.
Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary McCord called Tamimi 'an unrepentant terrorist who admitted to her role in a deadly terrorist bombing that injured and killed numerous innocent victims.'
Roth, originally from Australia, and his wife Frimet Roth, who is from New York (and has blogged for The Times of Israel), have lived in Israel since 1988. After their daughter's murder, they became active in seeking justice over the bombing and founded Keren Malki, or Malki Foundation, named for their daughter, which raises money for special-needs children.
Tamimi had hosted a weekly television show broadcasted on Hamas's satellite station, in which she continued to support terrorist attacks.
In September 2016, Tamimi suddenly stopped hosting the show.
Roth speculated that Tamimi was tipped off about the US indictment by someone in the Jordanian government, and so she quit her show to make herself 'less high-profile.'
'For the first time since our daughter was murdered, we are surrounded by people want to help,' said Roth.
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3. US 'Outraged' by UN Report That Accuses Israel of Establishing 'Apartheid Regime' That 'Dominates the Palestinian People'
 by Barney Breen-Portnoy
https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/03/15/us-outraged-by-un-report-that-accuses-israel-of-establishing-apartheid-regime-that-dominates-the-palestinian-people/
The United States expressed outrage on Wednesday over a report published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) that accused Israel of establishing an 'apartheid regime' that 'dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.'
'That such anti-Israel propaganda would come from a body whose membership nearly universally does not recognize Israel is unsurprising,' American UN Envoy Nikki Haley said in a statement....
'The United Nations Secretariat was right to distance itself from this report, but it must go further and withdraw the report altogether,' Haley went on to say. 'The United States stands with our ally Israel and will continue to oppose biased and anti-Israel actions across the UN system and around the world.'
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4. The real face of Jordan
By Caroline B. Glick
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-real-face-of-Jordan-484720
March 20, 2017 21:42
Extracts:
Every once in a while, the Jordanian people are given a chance to express how they really feel about Israel. It's ugly.
Â
Jordan is the country to Israel's east with which Israel has had a formal peace for 23 years.
And its people hate Israel, and Jews, even more than the Iranians do.
Twenty years ago, on March 13, 1997, 7th and 8th grade girls from the AMIT Fuerst junior high school for girls in Beit Shemesh packed box lunches and boarded a school bus that was to take them to the Jordan Valley for a class trip. The high point of the day was the scheduled visit to the so-called 'Island of Peace.'
The area, adjacent to the Naharayim electricity station, encompasses lands Israel ceded to Jordan in the 1994 peace treaty and Jordan leased back to Israel for continued cultivation by the Jewish farmers from Ashdot Yaakov who had bought the lands and farmed them for decades.
Israel's formal transfer of sovereignty and Jordan's recognition of Jewish land rights to the area were emblematic of the notion that the peace treaty was more than a piece of paper. Here, officials boasted, at the Island of Peace, we saw on-theground proof that Jordan and Israel were now peaceful neighbors.
Just as Americans in California can spend a night at the bars in Tijuana and then sleep it off in their beds in San Diego, so, the thinking went, after three years of formal peace, Israeli schoolgirls could eat their box lunches in Jordan, at the Island of Peace, and be home in time for dinner in Beit Shemesh.
Shortly after they alighted their buses, that illusion came to a brutal end.
The children were massacred.
A Jordanian policeman named of Ahmad Daqamseh, who was supposed to be protecting them, instead opened fire with his automatic rifle.
He murdered seven girls and wounded six more.
On Jordanian territory, the guests of the kingdom, the girls had no one to protect them. Daqamseh would have kept on killing and wounding, but his weapon jammed.
In the days that followed, Israel saw two faces of Jordan and with them, the true nature of the peace it had achieved.
On the one hand, in an extraordinary act of kindness and humility, King Hussein came to Israel and paid condolence calls at the homes of all seven girls. He bowed before their parents and asked for forgiveness.
On the other hand, Hussein's subjects celebrated Daqamseh as a hero.
The Jordanian court system went out of its way not to treat him like a murderer. Instead of receiving the death penalty for his crime, as he would have received if his victims hadn't been Jewish girls, the judges insisted he was crazy and sentenced him instead to life in prison. Under Jordanian law his sentence translated into 20 years in jail. In other words, Daqamseh received less than three years in jail for every little girl he murdered and no time for the six he wounded.
Not satisfied with his sentence, the Jordanian public repeatedly demanded his early release. The public's adulation of Daqamseh was so widespread and deep-seated that in 2014, the majority of Jordan's parliament members voted for his immediate release.
Three years earlier, in 2011, Jordan's then-justice minister Hussein Majali extolled Daqamseh as a hero and called for his release.
Last week, sentence completed, Daqamseh was released. And within moments of his return, in the dead of night to his village, crowds of supporters emerged from their homes and celebrated their hero.
Daqamseh, the supposed madman, never expressed regret for his crime.
And now a free man, he was only too happy last week to use his release as a means of justifying, yet again, his crime.
'Normalization with Zionists is a lie!' he declared in an interview with Al Jazeera. He went on to call for the conquest of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish state.
Jordan owes its existence not to its population nor even to its silver- tongued monarch, Hussein's son Abdullah. It owes its existence to its location. For Israel and the West the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a critical piece of real estate.
For Israel, the kingdom is a buffer against Iraq and Syria.
For the Americans it is a safe port in the storm in the midst of the Arab world now suffering from convulsions of jihadist revolutions, counterrevolutions, insurgencies and counterinsurgencies.
Jordan, which since 2003 has absorbed a million refugees from Iraq and another million from Syria, is viewed by Europeans as a great big refugee camp. It must be kept stable lest the Iraqis and Syrians move on to Europe.
If it weren't for Israel and the Western powers, the Hashemite Kingdom would have been overthrown long ago.
Today, Jordan is an economic and social tinderbox. Its debt to GDP ratio skyrocketed from 57% to 90% between 2011 and 2016. Youth unemployment, while officially reported at 14%, actually stands at 38%.
Jordan, which is the second-poorest state in terms of its available water sources, relies on Israeli exports of water to survive. Its government is its largest employer. Its largest export is its people, whose remittances to their relatives back home keep 350,000 families afloat. And those remittances have fallen off dramatically in recent years due to the drop in oil prices on the world market.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the second largest political force in the country. Although Jordanians were revolted in 2015 when Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria burned alive a downed Jordanian pilot, ISIS has no shortage of sympathizers in wide swaths of Jordanian society. More than 2,000 Jordanians joined ISIS in Syria and several thousand more ISIS members and sympathizers are at large throughout the kingdom.
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5. NETANYAHU THANKS BRITAIN FOR CHANGING POSITION
by Mordechai Sones
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/384152
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu opened the weekly cabinet meeting this morning (Sunday), referring to his meeting this weekend with British Prime Minister Theresa May.
Extracts:
"On Friday, I spoke with British Prime Minister Theresa May. I sent her condolences on behalf of all the citizens of Israel and the government of Israel to the families of those murdered and of course, my best wishes for the wounded's recovery," Netanyahu said.
"I told her that we in Israel have faced terrorist ramming attacks and stabbings, and we understand that the terror that strikes us is the terror that strikes in London and strikes in Brussels and strikes in Nice and elsewhere in the world ... It is the terror of radical Islam that we have to work together against it everywhere, in order to defeat it. We will defeat it much faster if we work together," said the Prime Minister.
Netanyahu also said that he took advantage of the conversation to thank May for changing Britain's position on the UN Human Rights Council. "I also thanked her for the intention that was actually implemented a few hours later at the Human Rights Council, as this strange UN body is called, about the change in their vote and, more importantly, about the important speech that was delivered there by the British representatives, and what was said there that if the bias against Israel continues in this body, then Britain will consistently oppose all decisions ... I think this is an important sign in the direction we want to encourage the international community to follow. We think it is time to start changing the distorted attitude against Israel in international bodies."...
The Prime Minister denied reports about an upcoming agreement with the United States regarding Judea and Samaria construction: "In recent days there have been reports in the media about alleged summaries of our discussions with the White House regarding settlement construction. I want to clarify that there are many inaccuracies in these reports. I will not go into details, our talks with the White House continue - I hope they will end soon."