How Western dupes help propagate murderous Palestinian lies and Israel Police: Rioters took journalist's casket against her family's wishes and The Neturei Karta: ‘Guardians’ Or Fiends?
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
The Three are Rabbi Yehuda Glick, famous temple mount activist, and former Israel Mk, and then Robert Weinger, the world's greatest shofar blower and seller of Shofars, and myself after we had gone to the 12 gates of the Temple Mount in 2020 to blow the shofar to ask G-d to heal the world from the Pandemic. It was a highlight to my experience in living in Israel and I put it on my blog each day to remember.
The articles that I include each day are those that I find interesting, so I feel you will find them interesting as well. I don't always agree with all the points of each article but found them interesting or important to share with you, my readers, and friends. It is cathartic for me to share my thoughts and frustrations with you about life in general and in Israel. As a Rabbi, I try to teach and share the Torah of the G-d of Israel as a modern Orthodox Rabbi. I never intend to offend anyone but sometimes people are offended and I apologize in advance for any mistakes. The most important psychological principle I have learned is that once someone's mind is made up, they don't want to be bothered with the facts, so, like Rabbi Akiva, I drip water (Torah is compared to water) on their made-up minds and hope that some of what I have share sinks in. Love Rabbi Yehuda Lave.
Israel Police: Rioters took journalist's casket against her family's wishes
Israel Police explains what led to violent clashes at funeral of Shireen Abu Aqleh: Mob seized her coffin, then refused to return it.
The Israel Police said on Friday that Arab rioters took the casket of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh against the wishes of her family during Friday's funeral, forcing the officers to intervene.
"Plans for the funeral procession of Shireen Abu-Akleh were coordinated in advance by the Israel Police together with the Abu-Akleh family," the Israel Police Spokesperson said in an English-language statement.
"On Friday, about 300 rioters arrived at Saint Joseph hospital in Jerusalem and prevented the family members from loading the coffin onto the hearse to travel to the cemetery – as had been planned and coordinated with the family in advance. Instead, the mob threatened the driver of the hearse and then proceeded to carry the coffin on an unplanned procession to the cemetery by foot."
"This went against the wishes of the Abu-Akleh family and the security coordinations that had been planned to safeguard the large number of mourners. The Israel Police instructed that the coffin be returned to the hearse, as did the EU ambassador and Shireen Abu-Akleh's own family, but the mob refused."
"Israeli Police intervened to disperse the mob and prevent them from taking the coffin, so that the funeral could proceed as planned in accordance with the wishes of the family."
"During the riot that was instigated by the mob, glass bottles and other objects were thrown, resulting in the injury of both mourners and Police officers," the statement concluded.
Israel came under fire over the violence that broke out during the funeral. US President Joe Biden was asked whether he condemned Israeli security forces for the violence and replied, "I do not know all the details about what happened at the funeral of Shireen Abu Aqleh, but I know that an investigation must be opened."
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki earlier in the day described the footage from the funeral as "deeply disturbing".
"We have all seen those images, they're obviously deeply disturbing. We regret the intrusion of what should have been a peaceful procession," she told reporters.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the UN, tweeted, "Deeply distressed by the images from Shireen Abu Akleh's funeral procession. The tragedy of her killing should be handled with the utmost respect, sobriety, and care."
How Western dupes help propagate murderous Palestinian lies
The mainstream media generally choose to believe the Palestinians, even though they routinely lie about Israel. These lies are weapons of war, deployed to incite violence and mass murder.
Melanie Phillips
JNS) A Palestinian Arab journalist with Al Jazeera, Shireen Abu Akleh, was shot dead this week in a firefight between Hamas and the Israelis in the West Bank city of Jenin.
Western news outlets initially reported uncritically the Hamas claim that the Israelis had shot her, eagerly regurgitating Al Jazeera's assertion that the Israelis had "assassinated" her "in cold blood."
When the Israelis said Abu Akleh might have been killed instead by Palestinian gunfire, journalists grudgingly incorporated this into their reporting while continuing to repeat extensively the incendiary but unsupported Palestinian accusation.
At this point, we still don't know who killed Abu Akleh. But any fair-minded person would say the Israelis are more likely to be telling the truth.
They said that, having gone into Jenin to root out terrorists responsible for a recent wave of murderous attacks, their forces had come under "substantial fire." After studying what evidence they had, it looked as if Abu Akleh had been felled by a Palestinian bullet.
This was because, in a video from the scene, Arabs are heard shouting: "We hit a soldier; he is lying on the ground." Since no Israeli soldier had been hurt, however, the suspicion was that this was Abu Akleh.
Moreover, Honest Reporting's translated commentary on this video contains another crucial line. After the shouts about a soldier on the ground, there's a further shout: "It's a woman."
Hamas, which immediately removed her body, rejected Israel's suggestion of a joint investigation to establish who did kill her and are refusing to hand over the bullet they removed from her body while insisting that the Israelis fired the fatal shot.
By contrast, the Israelis have made no assertions they can't back up. They have pointed out the obvious fact that the truth can't be established unless Hamas operatives bring forward relevant evidence. The fact that they are refusing to co-operate suggests that they have something to hide.
One reason that the genocidal Palestinian Arab agenda has so effectively captured the Western heart is that it weaponizes casualties for which the Palestinian Arabs themselves are actively or intrinsically responsible but for which they blame Israel.
The mainstream media generally choose to believe the Palestinians, even though they routinely lie about Israel. These lies are weapons of war, deployed to incite violence and mass murder. And the Western media duly oblige.
In 2000, French TV footage purported to show 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura dying under a hail of Israeli bullets in the "West Bank." In fact, the TV station had edited out of the footage a section in which the boy—who had been declared dead a few moments earlier—could be clearly seen alive and moving.
Yet the image of that child clinging to his father moments before he "died" was used as the iconic recruiting sergeant for countless acts of murder perpetrated against Israelis, Diaspora Jews and Westerners.
Meanwhile, Jenin itself was the scene of the infamous blood libel in 2002 when the western media recycled wild Palestinian claims that the Israelis had committed a cold-blooded massacre of thousands of Palestinian Arabs.
This claim was used to incite the Arab and Muslim world to further hysteria; but it was false. What had taken place in Jenin was actually a bloody battle, in which Israeli troops were trying (as ever) to root out those responsible for bombings and other terror attacks that had killed more than 100 Israelis.
In that battle, no more than 52 Arabs—most of them gunmen—had died. But the Western media never acknowledged their error or its lethal consequences.
Through such gullibility, ignorance or malevolence, the Western media have turned themselves into accomplices of a diabolical agenda.
This is again on display in Eleven Days in May, a new movie about last year's "Operation Guardian of the Walls" in the Gaza Strip when Israel bombed the Hamas terrorist infrastructure to stop the rocket attacks aimed at killing Israeli civilians.
At the time, the media claimed that the Israel Defense Forces had killed a huge number of civilians, a high proportion of whom were children. This was the reverse of the truth.
The fact was that the 11-day Israeli bombardment of Gaza, deploying a volume of munitions so large that in the hands of any other army it would have left an enormous toll of dead civilians, killed hardly any at all. The barrage produced a vastly smaller proportion of dead civilians to combatants than has ever been achieved by American, British or any other armed forces.
According to Israel's Meir Amit Terrorism and Information Centre, 234 Gazans had been killed—nearly half of whom were Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad combatants. Of the 95 killed who had no terrorist affiliation, 52 were children—nine of whom were killed by Hamas's own rockets falling short.
Yet Eleven Days in May, narrated by Kate Winslet and directed by Gaza-based filmmaker Mohammed Sawwaf and the British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, features heart-wrenching interviews with the families of the dead children. These interviews are grossly decontextualized to constitute a manipulative Hamas propaganda film aimed at demonizing Israel.
It's not just that the Israelis are grotesquely misrepresented as brutal and callous child-killers. The film fails to acknowledge that some of these child casualties were teenagers who belonged to Palestinian terror groups; some were the children of Hamas terrorists who were targeted and who had put their children in harm's way; and some were killed by Hamas's own rockets falling short of their target.
Britain's Jewish Chronicle has now revealed that Sawwaf is a hard-core Hamas supporter. In 2014, reports David Rose, the Hamas media department honored him with a special award for "countering the Zionist narrative" and being able to "penetrate European public opinion" through his work.
On social media, Sawwaf has celebrated the launching of rockets against civilian targets and effectively called for Israel's destruction. Talking about this film, he said: "Israel is never punished or deterred by the international community, and so continues to launch war after war on this poor and besieged strip."
Such remarks should be a giveaway. Yet Western journalists behave as if such people are reliable and honest interlocutors. The film has been hailed as a masterpiece.
Western journalists routinely believe this propaganda not least because Palestinian terrorists control the narrative. News agencies supplying media reports from Gaza use Arab stringers whose lives depend on toeing the Hamas line.
Blogger David Collier, who heroically wades through the sewers of anti-Semitism in order to expose it, notes that the Islamic University in Gaza (where Sawwaf was a student) has units dedicated to turning students into Hamas propaganda stars. Gaza is churning out Hamas activists masked as journalists, charity workers, NGO staff, medical experts and endless "human-rights activists" with their image carefully laundered to dupe a Western audience.
This sealed infrastructure of lies enables Western useful idiots to claim they are incontestably driven by conscience and compassion. That's why Winslet could state so idiotically about Eleven Days in May: "That my participation in this film could be interpreted as taking a public stand on the rights and wrongs of one of the world's most tragic and intractable conflicts never entered my thinking."
Of course, it didn't. Minds like hers are closed against reality. The lies and distortions about Israel in their heads also exist in the heads of all in their social and cultural circle. Not one person in that circle will question those lies because as soon as they did so, they would find themselves outside it.
Even if the lies are exposed as such, this makes no difference. The images work. The narrative sticks. Israel loses—and will continue to do so unless and until it stops playing defense and catch-up, and seizes control of the narrative instead.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for "The Times of London," her personal and political memoir, "Guardian Angel," has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, "The Legacy." Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work
The Neturei Karta, a fringe group of charedi Jews bitterly opposed to Zionist ideology in general and to Jewish sovereignty in Eretz Yisrael in particular, was founded in British Mandatory Palestine in 1938 after the sect split off from Agudat Israel because of the latter's adoption of a more conciliatory and cooperative approach to the Zionist movement.
Its guiding ideology is a belief that Jews are forbidden to have their own state until the arrival of the Jewish Messiah, who will establish a complete theocracy; that any human attempt to recapture land in Eretz Yisrael is a violation of divine will; that any advocacy for Jewish sovereignty constitutes rank heresy because it usurps the messianic prerogative and is a radical rebellion against G-d and his Torah; and that Zionism invokes the duty of yehoreg v'al yaavor (one must die a martyr's death rather than transgress by supporting Zionism or Israel).
Moreover, it believes that the very existence of Israel as a nation-state is actually an obstacle to the Messianic era because it brings more non-observant, Torah-denying Jews and their associated perversions and depravities into the Holy Land. Its problem with Israel isn't merely that it fails to conduct itself in accordance with Torah law; even were the entire government composed of saints and sages, the problem is that Israel exists at all.
The group is known not only for its anti-Israel activism, but also for its alignment with antisemites and Islamic extremists and for its warm and public embrace of Israel's greatest enemies, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Yasser Arafat, and Louis Farrakhan. It is known to the public through its polemical pamphlets, shrill posters, strident public protests, and conspicuous attendance at pro-Palestinian demonstrations and "Israeli Apartheid Week" rallies, where its followers proudly wave Palestinian flags.
Perhaps most horrendously, it preaches that the Holocaust was not due to Naziism and antisemitism but, rather, because it was G-d's divine collective punishment of the Jewish people for the sin of Zionism. Worse, they publicly proclaimed – and continue to do so – that rather than permitting European Jews to escape the crematoria by emigrating for destinations other than Eretz Yisrael, the Zionists cooperated with the Nazis in the murder of Jews to further their claim that a Zionist state is necessary for Jewish survival. The group compares the Zionist response to the Holocaust to criminal arsonists who light the fire and burn the building to the ground, killing most of its occupants, and then expect to be hailed as heroes for saving the few survivors. They also lend support to Holocaust deniers, provided that they join in seeking Israel's destruction, including attending a Holocaust-denying conference in Iran in 2006 as honored guests. Its vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric frequently includes characterizing Israelis as Nazis.
The name Neturei Karta, which literally means "Guardians of the City" in Aramaic, has its source in Tractate Chagigah, where the Jerusalem Talmud explains that the true guardians of a city are not its military or police forces, who are actually destroyers of the city, but, rather, its scribes and scholars. Best current estimates put the number of devotees of the extremist group at about 5,000 members.
Founded by Rabbis Amram Blau and Aharon Katzenelbogen, the group's origins are from within the Lithuanian charedi branch, not the Chassidic branch as many people erroneously believe. In fact, there is considerable religious diversity within the charedi camp and, because Neturei Karta followers dress in similar distinctive garb, the two groups are often mistakenly intertwined in the public consciousness.
Before the birth of Israel, Agudat Israel was firmly against a Jewish state to the point that it asked the United Nations General Assembly to vote against partition. However, seeing the writing on the wall immediately before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Agudat Israel reconsidered its position, narrowly supported the Partition Plan, and decided that it could best promote its interests through having its representatives elected to the Knesset. In marked contrast, the Neturei Karta was and remains anti-Zionist purists; even to this day, it refuses to have any relationship, formal or otherwise, with Zionist institutions and the Zionist State, even to the point of refusing to accept any government support for its yeshivot and for the needs of its community.
Agudat Israel's "betrayal" enraged the Neturei Karta, which responded by increasing its insularity from other Orthodox groups and escalating its confrontation with Zionism which, if possible, became even more extreme. Even today, it reserves its greatest venom for the Agudists and other charedi organizations, whom it regards as traitors for any cooperation with Israel. Mere philosophical and religious anti-Israel discourse was no longer sufficient; concrete action, including broad public demonstrations and collaboration with Israel's arch enemies, became essential to the utter destruction of the very existence of this allegedly "Jewish" state.
The Neturei Karta's hatred for Zionism and its determination to prevent the birth of Israel at all costs reached its zenith immediately after the November 29, 1947, United Nations partition plan resolution, when the British determined to end their Mandate and to extract themselves from the mess that they had helped to create in Eretz Yisrael. With the British now focused on effecting an orderly evacuation and having lost interest in the fate of the Jewish residents still under their rule – to whatever extent they may have arguably ever had any interest at all – a dangerous power vacuum developed. With the implicit, if not explicit, support of the supposedly neutral British, the Arabs commenced attacks on Jewish areas and began murdering Jews.
In particular, the Arabs took control of the arteries leading to Jerusalem, thereby cutting off supplies of electricity and preventing the supply of food, water, and medicine to the city's Jews, and in February 1948, they planted three bombs that killed 70 Jews and terrified the city. Following the heavy bloodshed, the Israel's defense forces – including the Hagganah, Etzel, and LEHI – launched a series of revenge operations, which only hastened the British sense of urgency to get out of Eretz Yisrael. The Neturei Karta, who urged an immediate and complete Jewish surrender to the Arabs, blamed the bloodshed on the "Tzionistas" (Zionists) and the nationalist institutions of the Yishuv and accused them not only of bloodshed but also of forcibly taking over the country and holding them as hostages under the Zionist conquest. Alarmed about their fate at the hands of the Zionists, they sought protection from the British authorities that, at least on paper, were still responsible for safeguarding them.
Historic original letter from Neturei Karta seeking British protection from the Zionists at the end of the British Mandate.
In the unique March 8, 1948, original correspondence exhibited here – arguably the single most important letter relating to the Neturei Karta movement and the State of Israel – the sect, led by Rabbi Amram Blau, assures the British Mandate that charedi Jews played no role in the violent uprising. It protests against the Zionist takeover of nationalist institutions and requests that the Mandate Government save them from the Zionists:
Today, the protesting charedi Jews address the following remarks to the Honor of our Government [i.e., the British Mandate in Eretz Yisrael].
When our Government accepted the appointment to supervise our Holy Land, contained within the scope of its authority was a large Yishuv of Jewish charedim, keepers of the Torah and the commandments, peaceful citizens who had no intentions or policy interest in their political situation in the Holy Land, other than to live and to keep the mitzvot of the Creator and to derive pleasure from its holiness, and for there to be life and peace amongst all the dwellers of the land, and to remain loyal to the Government and who know nothing about acts of violence.
And now, our Government is about to remove its leadership from our Holy Land, which will leave these peaceful citizens abandoned, with their faith, their souls, and their bodies, to fall before those who clutch control of the Yishuv through the power of the fist and the rifle to lead them astray to follow their ideas that are in opposition to our Holy Torah, and which strives for the cause of a State and ruling power.
We plead and beseech before our Government to have mercy upon us and do not cause the peaceful and loyal Jewish charedim to be devoured, G-d forbid, at the hands of those who are taking control over us and who are sweeping away by force our future, which we fear will be terrible and frightful.
If our Government does not find a way to calm the spirits and extinguish the fire immediately, and to bring peace to the land within which to protect also the existence of the Jewish charedim, in its faith, soul, and body, we supplicate and beseech before Your Majesty, that he will have mercy on the souls of its grieving citizens, these Jewish charedim, to rescue them in any possible way, whether by way of the security establishment or through any other means fitting in your eyes.
We are certain on your merciful soul that you will have compassion for our souls and the souls of our infants and children and that you will find the proper path to save us in due time.
With hope for the fulfillment of our request in the greatest possible haste, we hereby sign with thanks and blessings.
Your loyal citizens, in the name of the protestors
Amram Blau
Avraham Roth
Portrait of Rabbi Amram Blau, founder of the Neturei Karta.
Rabbi Blau (1894-1974) was an active member of the Agudat Israel movement in Eretz Yisrael during the British Mandate, including editing its newspaper, Kol Israel, but, as discussed above, he led the break away from Agudat Israel because of what he perceived to be its sell-out to the Zionists. Even amongst the Neturei Karta, he was an extremist who was imprisoned many times for demonstrating against public violations of Shabbat, the conscription of religious women, the opening of a mixed-gender swimming pool, and other government policies.
His decades-long campaign for the modesty of Jewish woman evokes comparisons to the Taliban and the Mullahs in Iran, as he established dress codes and "modesty patrols" to brutally enforce them, beginning in charedi communities and later expanding into other neighborhoods. His campaigns against mixed-gender sporting and cultural activities in non-observant areas in Jerusalem led to mass arrests of his followers, and he rejected every reasonable solution proposed by the municipal government, including erecting a wall between Meah Shearim, the oldest and perhaps largest charedi community in Jerusalem, and the mixed-gender sports clubs.
Good friends of the Neturei Karta: with Yasser Arafat.
Neturei Karata's anti-Israel advocacy and action continue unabated today and, if anything, has grown even more extreme. Its leaders have met with high-ranking Hezbollah officials on several occasions; they participated in a Global March to Jerusalem, at the conclusion of which they laid a wreath at the tomb of Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mugniyeh; and they met with Hezbollah leader Sheikh Nabil al-Kauk during a conference in Lebanon about the Israeli "mistreatment" of Palestinians.
In October 2005, Neturei Karta leader Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss issued a formal statement criticizing Jewish attacks on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who, after all, was merely "yearning for a better, more peaceful world" as he echoed the peaceful beliefs of the Ayatollah Khomeini "who always emphasized and practiced the respect and protection of Jews and Judaism." The following year, several members participated in the Teheran Holocaust Conference, where they praised Ahmadinejad to the assembled Holocaust-deniers for his call to wipe the Zionist regime off the face of the earth and told Iranian television reporters that the Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis, thwarted efforts to save Jews, and used the Jews murdered in the Holocaust to promote their own nefarious political scheme. The group embraced – indeed, kissed (see exhibit) – Ahmadinejad during his UN visit in 2012.
Moshe Hirsch, leader of an activist branch of Neturei Karta, served in Yasser Arafat's cabinet as "Minister for Jewish Affairs." In 2004, members of the sect participated in a prayer vigil in Paris for a mortally ill Arafat and a sizable group of its followers attended his funeral in Ramallah. Leaders publicly urge support for Hamas and, as part of a "Gaza Freedom March," they celebrated a Shabbat in Gaza to demonstrate their strong support for the terrorist group.
The Neturei Karta, strong supporters of the Nation of Islam, met with Minister Louis Farrakhan while participating in the International Islamic Conference in Chicago (2000). During a press conference, the group defended Farrakhan, arguing that his characterization of Judaism as "a gutter religion" and calling Hitler "a great man" were purposely misconstrued by the Zionists and their supporters. A contingent of the sect participated in the Madrid Peace Conference (1991) – as Palestinian delegates.
The Neturei Karta uses these notorious enemies of Israel for propaganda purposes every bit as much as they are used by them for the same reason. Dressed in traditional Chassidic garb and referring to themselves as "Jewish Rabbis," they always make certain that these meetings are photographed for dissemination in the mass media. Their leaders frequently appear for interviews on Al-Jazeera and Press TV (Iran's government-run English language satellite news network), during which they explain that even the Jews do not support Israel in general and its usurpation of Arab and Palestinian land in particular.
In the wake of the horrific attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai in 2008, the Neturei Karta issued a leaflet suggested that the attack was divine retribution for Chabad's maintaining relations with Zionists and the Zionist State, and it criticized Israeli officials for attending the funerals of the victims.
Today, the Neturei Karta is a transnational organization with branch offices in New York, London, and Vienna, although their numbers are still very low. It continues its strong advocacy of a "one-state solution" – a Palestinian state – and it refuses all indicia of Israeli citizenship, including boycotting Israeli products and refusing to use Israeli coins and stamps; some even go so far as to carry pseudo-passports to prove their identities without suggesting any possible association with the "Zionist Entity." They hold annual ceremonies on Israel's Independence Day, which they consider a greater tragedy than the Holocaust, and they regularly participate in Palestinian Nakba Day processions. On Purim, group members conduct celebratory public burnings of Israeli flags in cities throughout Europe and Israel, and they attend the annual Salute to Israel parade in New York only for the purpose of setting Israeli flags afire and holding up signs such as "Israel is a cancer for the Jews" and "Free Gaza."
Some argue that the Neturei Karta acts in what it perceives to be the Jews' best interests and that, even if its followers are mistaken, they should be respected for their uncompromising ideological integrity in the face of almost monolithic Jewish opposition. However, as Norman Lamm cogently argued, that "integrity" is not matched by intellectual honesty, as the sect, which refuses to recognize that Jewish tradition embraces divergent views, supports its positions by misapplying halachic methodology to non-legal aggadic texts.
Jews should always handle disputes amongst themselves internally and not air their dirty laundry in public and, indeed, while other anti-Zionist charedi sects generally limit their fundamental disagreements with Zionism and Israel to their own communities, the Neturei Karta is conspicuous with its "in your face" approach, as it takes every step to publicly draw attention to their belief in the illegitimacy of Israel to the world. At the end of the day, although it is still a fringe group small in number, its anti-Israel advocacy and its prominent public embrace of the Jews' greatest enemies does great harm to the Jews that they profess to love.
