White House press secretary Jim Carney refused to publicly name the capital of Israel yesterday. All he was willing to say when asked repeatedly is that the White House position on Israel’s capital hasn’t changed...
It’s a fact—not an opinion—that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. Anyone
who insists otherwise is in denial. You may wish Tel Aviv was its
capital. You may even wish a united Al Quds was the capital of the Arab
state of Palestine. But those things can only be true in an alternate
universe or in the future. In this universe, in 2012, Israel exists and
Jerusalem is its capital.
Only one of Israel’s national government buildings—the ministry of
defense—is in Tel Aviv. All the others are in Jerusalem. And all of them
are on the western side of the city inside the internationally
recognized borders. The only people who dispute Israel’s right to exist
in west Jerusalem are those who dispute Israel’s right to exist
anywhere.
Apparently the only people who don't know that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel are those in the Obama administration.
He may yet implode as a presidential candidate, but "good on you" (as they say in Australia, at least according to one movie we just watched) Newt Gingrich for some candor about the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
Jerusalem Post columnist and Middle East expert Caroline Glick supports Gingrich's "invention" thesis:
His statement about the Palestinians was entirely accurate. At the end of 1920, the "Palestinian people" was artificially carved out of the Arab population of "Greater Syria." "Greater Syria" included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. That is, the Palestinian people were invented 91 years ago. Moreover, as Gingrich noted, the term "Palestinian people" only became widely accepted after 1977.
Ron Prosor, Israel's U.N. ambassador, recently stated the following:
“From 1948 until 1967, the West Bank was part of Jordan, and Gaza was part of Egypt.” Prosor stated. “The Arab world did not lift a finger to create a Palestinian state. And it sought Israel's annihilation when not a single settlement stood anywhere in the West Bank or Gaza.”
Despite recent anti-Israel remarks by Obama administration officials Howard Gutman and Leon Panetta, Obama vaingloriously praised himself (during yet another fundraiser) for protecting Israel's security. Given the actual track record, Charles Krauthammer says the president is delusional:
Prominent YouTube commentator and gadfly Pat Condell, apparently a former Israel basher (and an atheist) who has reversed course, discusses among other things in this video the "Palestinian public relations industry" otherwise known as the Western media:
Putting differing historical interpretations aside, lets say the two-state solution was implemented tomorrow. Does any reasonable person really believe that this would actually solve widespread Middle East turmoil?
Israel's prime minister, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, shines the light of truth in the U.N. General Assembly yesterday:
With regard to this speech, Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon writes the following:
And yet his talk was extremely eloquent and well-delivered. In an atmosphere former NY Mayor Koch describes as a “cesspool,” Netanyahu was the only man, the only statesman, genuinely to stand up for the principles of guilt-ridden Western civilization.
Noteworthy too is that the Israeli PM speaks (and no doubt writes) the English language far better than any of our presidential candidates, not to mention our cliche-ridden liberalist incumbent who is even loath to appear before children without a teleprompter.
Bibi Netanyahu has grown up and grown into the kind of statesman the world and, alas, this country needs.
Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Danny Ayalon explains the history of the conflict in the region in these videos:
It is trendy to blame Israeli intransigence for all these bleak developments. But to do so is simply to forget history. There were three Arab efforts to destroy Israel before it occupied any borderlands after its victory in 1967. Later, it gave back all of Sinai and yet now faces a hostile Egypt. It got out of Lebanon — and Hezbollah crowed that Israel was weakening, as that terrorist organization moved in and stockpiled thousands of missiles pointed at Tel Aviv. Israel got out of Gaza and earned as thanks both rocket showers and a terrorist Hamas government sworn to destroy the Jewish state.
The Arab Middle East damns Israel for not granting a “right of return” to Palestinians who have not lived there in nearly 70 years. But it keeps embarrassed silence about the more than half-million Jews whom Arab dictatorships much later ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo, and sent back into Israel. On cue, the Palestinian ambassador to the United States again brags that there will be no Jews allowed in his newly envisioned and American-subsidized Palestinian state — a boast with eerie historical parallels.
You have to wonder how delusional anti-Israel "activists" function in day-to-day life given their unreal claims that apartheid is in effect in that country.
According to this report in USA Today, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s representative in Washington has declared there will be no place in any future Palestinian state for Jews. There are several ironies.
Turkey and perhaps European countries as well are maybe on the verge of recognizing the first state since Nazi Germany to propose a judenrein policy. There are several ironies: First, Israel, whose Arab Christian and Muslim minorities—perhaps 20 percent of the population—have full rights, but is lambasted by the cocktail set as racist. Second, when the Netanyahu government proposed recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, many diplomats—including those in the State Department—balked. But to propose a Jew-free state? That’s okay.
Back on August 30, Dennis Prager (at National Review Online) rejected the apartheid comparisons:
One and a half million Arabs live in Israel, constituting about 20 percent of the country’s population. They have the same rights as all other Israeli citizens. They can vote, and they do. They can serve in the Israeli parliament, and they do. They can own property, businesses, and work in professions alongside other Israelis, and they do. They can be judges, and they are. Here’s one telling example: It was an Arab judge on Israel’s supreme court who sentenced the former president of Israel, a Jew, to jail on a rape charge...
Arabs in Israel live freer lives than Arabs living anywhere in the Arab world. No Arab in any Arab country has the civil rights and personal liberty that Arabs in Israel have...
So, then, why is Israel called an apartheid state?Because by comparing the freest, most equitable country in the Middle East to the former South Africa, those who seek Israel’s demise hope they can persuade uninformed people that Israel doesn’t deserve to exist just as apartheid South Africa didn’t deserve to exist.
As we have noted previously, the gullible media and the international community seems to be oblivious to the treatment of Palestinians in countries other than Israel. We know also that the premise that global terrorism will magically go away upon the implementation of a "two-state solution" is absurd. Yet, the shrill, irrational demands on Israel to make unilateral territorial and other concessions in the so-called "peace process" never ends. The dictatorships and thugocracies in the U.N. seem only concerned with make-believe human rights violations by the Jewish state, the only functioning Middle East democracy. The idea that global terrorism will magically go away upon the implementation of a "two-state solution"
In last August, the Wall Street Journal shed further light on this issue in connection with a recently enacted law in Lebanon granting limited rights to Palestinian refugees:
Last week, Lebanon's parliament amended a clause in a 1946 law that had been used to bar the 400,000 Palestinians living in the country from taking any but the most menial jobs. "I was born in Lebanon and I have never known Palestine," the AP quoted one 45-year-old Palestinian who works as a cab driver. "We want to live like Lebanese. We are human beings and we need civil rights."
The dirty little secret of the Arab world is that it has consistently treated Palestinians living in its midst with contempt and often violence. In 1970, Jordan expelled thousands of Palestinian militants after Yasser Arafat attempted a coup against King Hussein. In 1991, Kuwait expelled some 400,000 Palestinians working in the country as punishment for Arafat's support for Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War.
For six decades, Palestinians have been forced by Arab governments to live in often squalid conditions so that they could serve as propaganda tools against Israel, even as millions of refugees elsewhere have been repatriated and absorbed by their host countries. This month's vote still falls short of giving Palestinian Lebanese the rights they deserve, including citizenship. But it's a reminder of the cynicism of so much Arab pro-Palestinian propaganda, and the credulity of those who fall for it.
One of the most under-reported stories is that the nations in the Middle East don't want Iran to get nukes either. For various reasons, these countries view Iran as a regional menace. Since this doesn't fit the media's simplistic narrative, it gets ignored, however. If Israel winds up taking unilateral military action--something which would ignite a huge international crisis--many countries would bitterly denounce Israel publicly while applauding privately. And if this story from the Times of London is accurate, Saudi Arabia is on board:
Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.
In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran
To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defences will return to full alert.
We're hoping somehow, some way, that this situation can be resolved peacefully, but given the international community's fecklessness when it comes imposing real sanctions on Iran, sadly it seems unlikely.
Thanks to videos widely disseminated over the Internet, every fair-minded person now knows what really went on between Israeli soldiers and the so-called peace activists aboard the Gaza freedom flotilla. But for anyone who tuned in late, Mona Charen on NationalReviewOnline provides some essential background information:
The effort to destroy the Jewish state has many fronts. One front is in Iran, where the maniacal regime that has repeatedly promised to “wipe Israel off the map” marches inexorably toward a nuclear bomb. Another is in Gaza, from which Hamas has lobbed 10,000 missiles into Israeli cities. Yet another front, the most insidious, is comprised of the propaganda arm of the Palestinian movement. And this front thrives for only one reason — the complicity of the world press and the so-called “international community.”
Fact: Israel imposed a blockade of Gaza to prevent weapons from reaching the radical Islamic regime there that continues to make war on Israeli civilians. Egypt too has blockaded the strip, hoping to choke off weapons to Hamas, which it views as a threat.
Fact: Humanitarian relief is delivered to Gaza from Israel on a daily basis. During the first three months of this year, 94,500 tons of supplies were transferred to Gaza from Israel, including 48,000 tons of food products; 40,000 tons of wheat; 2,760 tons of rice; 1,987 tons of clothes and footwear; and 553 tons of milk powder and baby food for the strip’s 1.5 million inhabitants. Representatives of international aid groups and the United Nations move freely to and from the Gaza Strip.
Fact: Upon learning of the intentions of the Gaza flotilla, the Israeli government asked the organizers to deliver their humanitarian aid first to an Israeli port where it would be inspected (for weapons) before being forwarded to Gaza. The organizers refused. “There are two possible happy endings,” a Muslim activist on board explained, “either we will reach Gaza or we will achieve martyrdom.”
Fact: The flotilla ignored multiple instructions from Israeli navy ships to change course and follow them to the Israeli port of Ashdod...
Fact: The flotilla’s participants included the IHH, a “humanitarian relief fund” based in Turkey that has close ties to Hamas and to global jihadi groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere, and which has also organized relief to anti-U.S. Islamic radicals in Fallujah, Iraq. A French intelligence report suggests that IHH has provided documents to terrorists, permitting them to pose as relief workers...
Fact: When Israeli commandos rappelled down ropes to the deck of the Mavi Marmara, they were assaulted and beaten with metal poles and baseball bats by the Palestinians on board.
On PajamasMedia, Phyllis Chesler writes the following:
...Yes, I am talking about how our world well has been poisoned by brazen, crazy lies about Israel and about the Israeli Defense Forces. These lies come at us day after day, week after week, year after year, and they do not stop coming. The world is saying, as if in one voice: Jews, Israelis: Stop. Do not defend yourselves. You are defending a state that is not supposed to exist; its extermination or dissolution will alone bring peace to the Middle East, peace between America and the Muslim world, prosperity and the end of civil, tribal, and ethnic wars everywhere....
What an irony. Jews were ceaselessly persecuted when we did not have a state of our own. Today, the continued persecution of Jews everywhere is being justified on the basis of how much “trouble” Israel causes the world...
We now do understand that the passengers on board one ship, the Mavi Marmara, came to fight, to kill, and to die. Some were definitely Turkish mercenaries, hired to do the Turkish prime minister’s bidding—or perhaps Iran’s bidding. Many had ties to known terrorist organizations. We also know that there were important tactical, practical, and life-saving reasons that the IDF stopped the boat while it was still in international waters. And we know that IDF soldiers rappelled onto the boat with paintball guns on their backs, expecting as little resistance as was met on all the other boats. Yes, perhaps Israeli Naval Intelligence failed to factor in the possibility that this boatload was “loaded for bear,” that the IDF soldiers would be met with a fierce battle at sea. Why, and whether this is really so, remains an open question, an open wound, really. But we also know that no Israeli soldier died, or was successfully kidnapped. And we know that only nine of the six hundred or more flotilla passengers were killed.
Chelser's piece also contains what is supposedly a grisly first-hand account from an Israeli commando.
High-profile lawyer (and super liberal) Alan Dershowitz calls out the United Nations for its strange obsession with Israel while turning a blind eye to real atrocities committed around the world:
There is only one answer - because Israel has long been singled out for public scrutiny and opprobrium by the United Nations in particular and the international community in general.
This is not to say that Israel has always been blameless. It foolishly took the bait and allowed itself to be provoked into overreacting to a well planned provocation by so-called "humanitarians," who love only those who hate the Jewish state. The best proof that the flotilla had little to do with providing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza and everything to do with breaking Israel's entirely lawful military blockade of a terrorist enclave, is Hamas' refusal to accept the food and medicine that Israel removed from the captured boats. The leaders of the flotilla admitted that their object was the same as Hamas' - not to provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza but rather to break the military blockade that is designed to keep rockets and other anti-personnel weapons from the hands of Hamas terrorists.
Israel should have been smarter in its efforts to enforce its blockade, but it did nothing illegal - and what it did do certainly doesn't warrant being singled out for the stigma of an international investigation.
If the United Nations is to get into the business of ordering and conducting international investigations, it must establish neutral and objective criteria for when such an investigation is warranted. These criteria must be equally applicable to all nations, and not merely to the Jewish nation.
Primary among the criteria must be "the worst first." Under that rule, investigations must be conducted in the order of the seriousness of the offense, not the unpopularity of the offender...
The second neutral criteria should be the capacity of the accused nation to investigate itself and to be subjected to domestic scrutiny and criticism. Here too Israel fares must better than most. It has an activist Supreme Court, a free and aggressive press and a responsive political system. It doesn't need dictatorial tyrannies telling it how to defend its citizens.
For international law to have any credibility, it must be applied neutrally, objectively and fairly to all nations. Singling out Israel for special scrutiny and investigation, while far more serious offenders and offenses are ignored, is incompatible with the rule of law.
If Helen Thomas and her friends get their way, and Israel (the only functioning democracy in the Middle East where every citizen regardless of ethnicity or religion/non-religion enjoys individual rights) becomes ethnically cleansed, would all the turmoil and instability in the region instantly get resolved? Our gullible and lazy news media seems to think so.
Over his long career (which is still going strong), talk show host Bob Grant used to say that liberals are the ultimate hypocrites. Liberals (esp. liberal journalists, although that may be redundant) are the ones always labeling others racists, when it's obvious what they're all about. One of them, Helen Thomas, resigned her position with the Hearst News Service after her "controversial comments" about Israel went viral (and viral is a good word for it) on the Internet. Her retirement came with a lame apology.
Many thoughtful bloggers have weighed in on this so-called journalist's loathesome comments. William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection had this to say:
The Islamist-Leftist Coalition repeatedly seeks to delegitimize Israel by claiming that Israelis are Europeans who should go back home. This racial component is key to portraying Israelis as European racists and denying the legitimacy of Israel through coalitions with "people of color."
But the portrayal of Israel as a European implant is false.
In the immediate aftermath of Israel's War of Independence (after the Arabs rejected the U.N. partition plan which would have created the first Palestinian state ever), approximately 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries, with the majority going to Israel.
What happened in 1947-1949 was an exchange of populations, with roughly equal numbers of non-Jewish Arabs leaving what now is Israel and the West Bank, and Jews leaving Arab and Muslim countries to go to Israel.
Those Jewish refugees from Muslim countries, and their descendants, now account for roughly half of Israel's population. Israel also went to great lengths to rescue the Ethiopian and Yemeni Jewish communities, among others.
William Katz, the editor of Urgent Agenda wrote, in part, the following:
Helen Thomas's disgusting call for Israeli Jews to "go home" to Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust took place, is even more sinister than it seems. Remarks like that are part of an international campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel by denying that Jews have a history there. But many of the same forces behind this campaign are also militantly anti-Christian. After all, if Jews have no history in Israel then, by definition, Christianity was never invented, since there could not have been a Jew named Jesus.
Thomas’s reference to Germany and Poland as the original “home” of the Jews of Israel also expresses, among other things, her adherence to the false and misleading anti-Israel party line that Israel is composed of European Jews, which ignores the vast numbers of Jews from Arab countries who have settled there since its founding. And her particular mention of Poland as the Jewish “home” made me think of the complex yet ultimately sorrowful history of the Jews in that country...Where did that small number of surviving Polish Jews go? The answer, for quite a few, was “Israel”—the only country on earth that was/is bound to take them. But for the Helen Thomases of the world, the Jews must leave there as well—that is, if they are allowed to live at all.
Of course, Thomas doesn’t care that nearly half the Israelis are of Middle Eastern heritage, that many Israelis can claim a family residence in “Palestine” longer than her own in the United States, that a Jewish presence in Israel dates to the dawn of recorded history, that many of Israel’s older generation were ethnically cleansed from cities like Baghdad and Cairo after the 1967 war, or that her views are in sync with the Hamas charter and Iranian promises. Note also that Thomas is not concerned with occupation in such places as Tibet, Cyprus, or Ossetia; such human-rights violations as Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds; such violence on the high seas as the North Korean attack, Iran’s hijacking of a British ship, or the pirates off Somalia. All these are mere abstractions — unless they involve the Jews.
Addendum: On the American Spectator website, Aaron Goldstein points out that "Never mind that Gaza and the West Bank were under Egyptian and Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967, respectively. Isn't it curious that no one was advocating Palestinian statehood while Egypt and Jordan were occupying those territories?"
Despite the ever-present propaganda, let's not forget that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where people are free to practice any religion or no religion:
The pilgrims will be there as midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity is again broadcast live around the world this Christmas Eve -- but the town of Bethlehem is fast losing its last few year-round Christian residents.
Christians are fleeing the town of Christ's birth, and the much-reported hardship that Israel inflicts on residents of the West Bank town has little to do with it. It's the same reality across the Arab world: rising Islamism pushes non-Muslims away.
Islamists frown on real-estate ownership by non-Muslims -- Christian, Jew or anything else. And though the secular Palestinian Authority still controls the West Bank, the clout of groups like Hamas is growing: Even in Bethlehem, where followers of history's most famous baby once thrived, Christians are ceding the land.
Yes, ever since the PA took control of the West Bank in the early '90s, its leaders have taken care to show the world an idealized picture of Muslim-Christian solidarity. But it's a facade -- a way to score anti-Israeli political points.
...Practically the only place in the region where the Christian population is growing is in Israel.
There was a huge international outcry when Israel built a security fence in the West Bank area to protect itself from Palestinian suicide bombers. Has anyone said a word about Egypt's plans?
Egypt has begun the construction of a massive iron wall along its border with the Gaza Strip, in a bid to shut down smuggling tunnels into the territory. The wall will be nine to 10 kilometers long, and will go 20 to 30 meters into the ground, Egyptian sources said. It will be impossible to cut or melt.
The new plan is the latest move by Egypt to step up its counter-smuggling efforts. Although some progress had been made, the smuggling market in Gaza still flourishes.
Egyptian forces demolish tunnels or fill them with gas almost every week, often with people still inside them, and Palestinian casualties in the tunnels have been steadily rising.
Congratulations to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for at long last forcefully bringing reality into the upside-down, propaganda drenched world that exists only inside the U.N. General Assembly:
Brandishing blueprints of the Auschwitz death camp, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday blasted the United Nations for turning a blind eye to terrorism and urged the world leaders to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Calling out those heads of state who remained in their seats for Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "anti-Semitic rants" earlier this week, Netanyahu also pulled out chilling evidence of the Final Solution.
It was a copy of the minutes of the infamous 1942 Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leaders fine-tuned their methodical plans for genocide.
Meantime, the situation with Iran's nukes is even worse than originally thought:
The United States, France and Britain have presented "detailed evidence" to the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog that "Iran has been building a covert uranium enrichment facility," President Obama said Friday.
Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- all in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for a G-20 economic summit -- accused Iran of intentionally hiding its nuclear facilities from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
They threatened a stiff response if Iran fails to conform to international obligations regarding nuclear development.
Let's face it; President Sarkozy appears to be the only member of this trio that has any credibility in addressing this threat. And isn't it about time that the American (and international) media starts reporting that all the regimes in the Middle East, not just Israel, have grave concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions?
Update: BigGovernment.com has the story of Sarkozy schooling Obama about the Iran nuclear threat. RealClearPolitics.com has more on Sarkozy's contempt for Obama, as reaffirmed by this FNC clip:
Is it too simplistic to suggest that when countries (neighboring or otherwise) start making money and develop a prosperous mercantile infrastructure, they are generally far less likely to want to fight with each other? This comes to mind in connection with economist George Gilder's piece in City Journal about the Israeli high-tech economy:
Israel has very recently become a center of innovation, second in absolute achievement only to the United States, and on a per-capita basis dwarfing the contributions of all other nations, America included. How Israel is treated by the rest of the world thus represents a crucial test for civilization. Will we pass it?
...This tiny embattled country, smaller than most American states, is outperforming European and Asian Goliaths ten to 100 times larger. In a watershed moment for the country, Israel in 2007 passed Canada as the home of the most foreign companies on the technology-heavy NASDAQ index; it is now launching far more high-tech companies per year than any country in Europe...
Just as Hong Kong ultimately reshaped the Chinese economy in its own image when Deng Xiaoping mimicked its free economy, Israel could become a force for economic liberation in the Middle East, reaching out to Palestinians and other Arabs with the blandishments of commercial opportunity.
So wouldn't it be better for Israel's impoverished neighbors to move away from a self destructive, self defeating war footing and instead try to join it on the economic bandwagon?
We have long maintained that politics of any kind should be kept separate from entertainment and science. We happen to be renting the DVD of Jonathan Demme's excellent 1980s concert film "Stop Making Sense," featuring the Talking Heads led by David Byrne. By coincidence, this stomach-turning development just emerged in the news:
Some 50 celebrities, artists and filmmakers, including actors Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, musician David Byrne and filmmaker Ken Loach, have accused the Toronto International Film Festival of "complicity with the Israeli propaganda machine" over its spotlight this year on Tel Aviv.
The 2009 festival will present 10 films by local filmmakers on the Israeli metropolis, for its City to City program, which each year focuses its lens on a different city.
The choice led to protests that the film festival was "staging a propaganda campaign" on Israel's behalf, given "the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program," said an open letter to festival organizers, AFP reported.
The program "ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories" after a "mass exiling of the Palestinian population" in 1948, according to the letter.
"Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city's past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto," AFP reported the letter as saying.
The controversy started on August 28, when Canadian filmmaker John Greyson withdrew his film from the festival in protest.
We don't expect much from Hollywood airheads such as the artist formerly known as "Hanoi Jane," but David Byrne is a brilliant musician who clearly has the capacity to do his own research.
Unlike the surrounding dictatorships with non-existent human rights records, Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East and where its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion (or non-religion) have the right to vote and to exercise freedom of speech. [If you've seen any movies from Israeli film industry, you'll note that they generally tend to be highly critical of the policies of the government and military, and hardly constitute propaganda.] And if David Byrne is concerned about "apartheid," he should ask why the United Nations and the Arab regimes force people to live in refugee camps rather than granting them legal status and resettling them into their countries.
Adds the Washington Times, "Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici complained that Mr. Greyson is now trying to shut down the voices of filmmakers in the only country in the Middle East that allows free expression."
By the way, is there any sovereign nation on earth other than Israel that the U.S. and the international community can try to tell its citizens where to live?
Leaving politics aside, here is a very cool video of David Byrne's 21st-Century bike rack designs:
