Palestinian Media Watch has posted this clip on YouTube showing a segment from Hamas-run television asserting that the Holocaust was a plot cooked up by Israeli leaders to win international sympathy for their cause:

Quick, convene a conference, someone is falling down on the job: “Israeli Teens Don’t Fear Another Holocaust.”

Oh, false alarm. According to the new ADL survey in question, a majority of Israeli teens do think their country is under “serious threat” of destruction.

Here’s the full press release: (more…)

Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Larry Derfner makes the case for an Israeli-Hamas ceasefire:

There are reasons for Israel not to want a cease-fire with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. For one, the terrorist groups will take it as a victory; it will be a great morale booster for them. For another, it will undercut Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian moderates; the message they’ll take from it is that their way, the way of negotiation, didn’t work, while the Hamas/Islamic Jihad way, the way of terror, worked. And this conclusion will be drawn not only by Palestinians, but by much of the Muslim world, including Iran.

Not good.

Nevertheless, I am in favor of Israel accepting a cease-fire with Hamas. How the Palestinians and other Muslims interpret such a cease-fire would be one thing; the true import of it would be something very different - which the Palestinians and other Muslims would see soon enough.

If a cease-fire worked, it would bring peace and quiet on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border, while the downside for Israel wouldn’t be any steeper than it’s already been for several years. By agreeing to a cease-fire we don’t have anything to lose, and a lot to gain. If Hamas offers, we should accept.

I KNOW some of you have questions. Such as: What if it doesn’t work? What if Hamas keeps firing Kassams? Or what if Hamas upholds the cease-fire but Islamic Jihad doesn’t?

The answer is: Then the cease-fire is over and Israel goes back to war in Gaza like we’ve been doing for the last seven years. Nothing gained, but nothing lost, either. …

With all the hubbub in the Jewish world these days surrounding Israel’s 60th anniversary, it was perhaps inevitable that Israel’s critics would want their own commemoration. As JTA reported yesterday, this week has been branded “Nakba Week” at Columbia University, with a whole host of events planned around what Palestinians see as the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation.

Several campus groups are participating. Two that are not – surprise! – are Hillel and the Progressive Jewish Alliance, a Hillel subgroup. Apparently, Hillel and PJA declined to co-sponsor an April 14 event that had the word “Nakba” in its description. According to Columbia senior David Judd, who assailed both groups in a piece in the Columbia student newspaper, the Spectator, Hillel cannot acknowledge the Nakba because of its stated commitment to a Jewish democratic Israel.

He writes:

In the case of the April 14 event, I’m told this policy was cited against any Hillel association with the claim that Palestinians suffered a historical wrong in 1948. Whatever happened that year, it cannot be labeled a “catastrophe.” Harm done to Palestinians cannot, apparently, be acknowledged in this framework as an ethical offense. Where it cannot plausibly be denied nor justified, absolute silence on the subject must suffice.

This implication may seem a stretch from the formal wording of Hillel policy—and indeed, it is unlikely that, should Hillel or PJA have cosponsored, either would have suffered any direct sanction. But deriving an imperative from the Hillel formula for the exclusion of Palestinians from ethical consideration does not require too strained a reading.

A stretch indeed.

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Another day, another tongue lashing from Anne Bayefsky. Bayefsky, the director of the Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust at Touro College, has become a Jewish gadfly here in Geneva, as speechifying diplomats wrapped the first week of a two-week “preparatory” session for the 2009 World Conference Against Racism. A common theme here is for Arab, Islamic and African nations to they’re racist, then point their fingers at Israel for racism. So for a fourth straight day, Bayfesky weighed in. “I wasn’t planning to say anything,” she said, after singling out Iran, Syria, Senegal and Algeria for hypocrisy. “But their words strained credulity, so I couldn’t let it go unanswered.” She’s become such an irritant for Arab anti-Israel sentiment that the Egyptian ambassador couldn’t help but express his frustration with her on Thursday. “This has become a daily show,” he said, “and we are sick and tired of it.”

While Israel boycotts the forum because of its distinctly anti-Israel vibe, one quasi-Israeli mills about — “kind of undercover,” as he puts it. Khazriel Ben Yehuda isn’t actually a citizen, but a permanent resident of Israel for 30 years. You wouldn’t guess it from his dapper African-looking garb. Ben Yehuda hails from Israel’s small Black Israelite community. “I don’t really announce I’m from Israel, like a Malian wouldn’t announce ‘I’m from Mali!,’” says Ben Yehuda, who spoke on behalf of the African Hebrew Israelite Development Agency, based in Ghana and in his Israeli hometown of Dimona. Still, he sees the forum like an Israeli would: “When you get down to it, the Arab and Islamic countries tend to dominate.”

Noel Hidalgo/Creative Commons

JTA correspondent Michael J. Jordan visits with the diplomats in Geneva preparing for the 2009 World Conference Against Racism as they seek to widen the definition of anti-Semitism to include Islamophobia – Arabs are Semites, after all – and talk of the importance of focusing on “state racism.” Guess which state?

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The day after reporters flocked to a courtroom in downtown Manhattan to catch a glimpse of the 84-year-old New Jersey retiree arrested this week for spying for Israel, reporters converged on the man’s hometown of Monroe, N.J. to talk to friends, neighbors and anyone else willing to spill what they knew of the alleged spy, Ben-Ami Kadish.

“You can know people for years and just not know them,” a woman named Anita told The New York Times. “Nobody ever said anything bad about them,” a “shocked” neighbor told the New York Jewish Week. The spy story has been a boon to the New Jersey Jewish News, which scooped them all with a 2006 profile of Kadish and his wife, Doris. That story showed the couple hosting a charity event in their sukkah, portraying them as pillars of their Jewish community. Who knew?

Barbara Streisand denies to Page Six that her decision to bow out of the Israel 60 celebration next month in Jerusalem had anything to do with her antipathy toward another high-profile participant: President Bush…

Streisand’s publicist, Dick Gutman, denied Bush had anything to do with her cancellation: “However she feels about our current president, that would not have precluded her attendance,” he told us. “And, besides, it’s a three-day event, so simultaneous participation would have been easily avoided.” Streisand has long been a strident critic of Bush, often bashing him on her Web site.

Don’t expect him to get honored at an ADL dinner, but Al-Qaida’s second-in-command wants the world to know — Israel is not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Check out the report from the Associated Press:

Ayman al-Zawahri accused Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television of starting the rumor [about Israel]. “The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it,” he said.

In an audiotape last week, according to the AP report, the Al-Qaida leader had plenty of negative to say about the regime in Tehran:

Al-Zawahri denounced what he called Iran’s expansionist plans, saying Tehran aims to annex southern Iraq and Shiite areas of the eastern Arabian Peninsula as well as stre ngthen ties to its followers in southern Lebanon. He warned that if Iran achieves its goals, it will “explode the situation in an already exploding region.

The rhetoric is a stark change for al-Zawahri, who in the past did not seek to exploit Shiite-Sunni tensions. When the former head of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was waging a campaign of suicide bombings against Shiites in Iraq, al-Zawahri sent messages telling him to stop, fearing it would hurt al-Qaida’s image.

Gunaratna said the change in tone could be because of al-Qaida’s failure to win the release of al-Qaida figures detained by Iran since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, including al-Qaida security chief Saif al-Adel and two of bin Laden’s sons.

Gunaratna said that up to 200 al-Qaida figures and their families are under house arrest in Iran and that Tehran has rejected al-Qaida attempts to negotiate their release.

Al-Qaida doesn’t have the strength to launch attacks in Iran, but it intends to do so “in the future,” he said. “If al-Qaida becomes strong in Iraq … Iran believes al-Qaida in Iraq could become a major threat.”