In this mailing:
by Giulio Meotti
• November 30, 2016 at 5:00 am
- "The
newspaper is no longer the same, Charlie is now under artistic
and editorial suffocation." — Zineb el Rhazoui, French-Tunisian
intellectual and journalist, author of Destroying Islamic Fascism.
- "We must continue
to portray Muhammad and Charlie; not to do that means there is no more
Charlie." — Patrick Pelloux, another cartoonist who left the
magazine.
- "If our
colleagues in the public debate do not share part of the risk, then
the barbarians have won." — Elisabeth Badinter, philosopher, who
testified in court for the cartoonists in the documentary, "Je
suis Charlie."
- After the Kouachi
brothers slaughtered Charlie Hebdo's journalists, they ran out
into the street and cried: "We have avenged Muhammad. We killed Charlie
Hebdo." Two years later, it appears that they won. They
succeeded in silencing the last European magazine still ready to
defend freedom of expression from Islamism.
Charlie Hebdo, after Islamist terrorists
murdered much of its staff in 2015, announced it would "no longer draw
Mohammed." Instead, the magazine now focuses on attacking critics of
Islamism, and mocking the Judeo-Christian God.
Over twenty years, fear has already devoured important pieces of
Western culture and journalism. They all disappeared in a ghastly act of
self-censorship: the cartoons of a Danish newspaper, a "South
Park" episode, paintings in London's Tate Gallery, a book published by
the Yale University Press; Mozart's Idomeneo, the Dutch film
"Submission", the name and face of the US cartoonist Molly
Norris, a book cover by Art Spiegelman and Sherry Jones's novel,
"Jewel of Medina", to name just a few. Most of them have become
ghosts living in hiding, hidden in some country house, or retired to
private life, victims of an understandable but tragic self-censorship.
Only the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was missing
from this sad, long list. Until now.
by A.J. Caschetta
• November 30, 2016 at 4:00 am
- For decades, UN
agencies have slandered the Jewish state, most recently with the April
2016 accusation that it has been "planting Jewish fake
graves" in Palestinian territory, and with UNESCO declaring last
year that the ancient Jewish Biblical sites Rachel's Tomb and the Cave
of the Patriarchs are actually Muslim holy sites, and last month that
the Temple Mount, where the Jewish Temples were destroyed in 587 BCE
and 70 CE, is an Islamic site with no connection to Judaism.
- West Bank: This territory
was for millennia called Judea and Samaria. After the 1948 War of
Independence, Transjordan annexed it, renamed it the "West
Bank," and occupied it for nearly two decades. In the Six Day
War, after Jordan attacked Israel, Israel entered the territory and
administered it until the Oslo Accords era, when Israel turned over
much of the area to the Palestinian Authority.
- Occupation: When it comes
to Israel, the UN is obsessed with the word "occupation." A
recent Wall Street Journal article documents 530 General
Assembly references to Israel as an "occupying power" versus
zero for Indonesia (East Timor), Turkey (Cyprus), Russia (Georgia,
Crimea), Morocco (Western Sahara), Vietnam (Cambodia), Armenia
(Azerbaijan), Pakistan (Kashmir), or China (Tibet)....Saying that Jews
are "occupying" Judea is as nonsensical as saying Arabs are
"occupying" Arabia or Gauls are "occupying"
France.
- Settlement: The UN uses the
term to insinuate Israeli theft of "Palestine." The Obama
administration eagerly embraced this terminology. If there is an
occupying force in Gaza, it is Hamas. The West Bank is "disputed
territories" to anyone claiming a modicum of neutrality. As
Elliot Abrams put it, "the term 'settlement' loses meaning when
applied to Jews building homes in their nation's capital city."
UNESCO last year declared ancient Jewish Biblical sites
to actually be Muslim holy sites: the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron
(left) as the "Ibrahimi Mosque," and Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem
(right) as the "Bilal ibn Rabah Mosque." (Images source: Wikimedia
Commons)
US President-elect Donald Trump won the White House promising to
reform our dysfunctional government. But will he also stand up to the even
more dysfunctional United Nations?
As the Trump campaign emphasized in a position paper released November
2, the UN has long displayed "enormous anti-Israel bias." For
decades, UN agencies have slandered the Jewish state, most recently with
the April 2016 accusation that it has been "planting Jewish fake
graves" in Palestinian territory, and with UNESCO declaring last year
that the ancient Jewish Biblical sites Rachel's Tomb and the Cave of the
Patriarchs are actually Muslim holy sites, and last month that the Temple
Mount, where the First and Second Jewish Temples were destroyed in 587 BCE
and 70 CE, is an Islamic site with no connection to Judaism. On the day
America elected a new president, the UN adopted ten new resolutions against
Israel.
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