It is a heck of a family tree

From Wikipedia:

Nathan Mileikowsky (Writer and Zionist activist)

Benzion Netanyahu (Professor of History and Zionist activist)

Elisha Netanyahu (Professor for Mathematics)

Shoshana Shenburg (Justice at the Supreme Court of Israel)

Yonatan Netanyahu (Commander of Sayeret Matkal)

Benjamin Netanyahu (Prime Minister of Israel)

Iddo Netanyahu (A radiologist, author and playwright)

Nathan Netanyahu (Professor of Computer Science)

Baruch Dayan ha-Emet for BenZion Netanyahu.

IOC: Israel and "Palestine" are on different continents

According to Israeli media, last week the official Olympics site said that Jerusalem was the capital of "Palestine" but Israel had no capital:


After inquiries and complaints, the website swapped things:

(Also note that their population of "Palestine" does not include Gaza!)

But if you go now to the site you see that they scrapped the idea of listing "capital" altogether.

Yet there is still one bizarre "fact" about "Palestine" and Israel remaining on the site.

"Palestine" is in Asia:

While Israel is in Europe!

The reason, of course, is that Arab nations never accepted Israel to  become a member of the Asian region, so Israel must compete in European competitions. But it is still a little nutty to say that Israel is physically located in Europe.

Although Helen Thomas and Arab leaders would suggest that Israelis indeed belong in Europe.

I am a little surprised that the Olympics website crack fact checkers didn't claim that Palestine's Olympics Committee was created in 1932.

---

Don't forget, you can still buy official London 2012 Zionist Games apparel and products (based on Iran's complaints about the logo.)

BDS Fail: $50M in trade between Israel and Morocco

Morocco's Hespress reports that trade between Israel and Morocco is now more than $50 million annually.

Quoting a Slate Afrique article from last year, it notes that the trade keeps growing despite the noisy Moroccan groups that are against "normalization" with Israel.

There is a lot of trade in agriculture, the Slate article says that much of it goes through European middlemen. But, surprisingly, much of the trade is in spare parts for Morocco's armed forces - parts for F-16s as well as for armored vehicles, which may be the only instance where Israel provides parts for an Arab army.

Other items being sold by Israel to Morocco include telecommunications equipment.

(The illustration to the article, showing a protest against Moroccan normalization with Israel, indicates that the people opposed to such trade are not exactly "anti-Zionist":)


To put this in perspective, this means that every year, a single, medium sized Arab country buys about 100 times the amount of goods from Israel that the British Co-Operative supermarket chain did from the Israeli companies it decided to boycott. The increase in goods sold to Morocco alone this year alone will be far greater than the amount Israel might lose from any conceivable BDS action.

When Israel is making inroads into Arab(!) markets at rates that are orders of magnitude greater than "progressive" Westerners manage to boycott Israeli goods, it seems that BDS is not just a failure, but a spectacular failure.

UK Foreign Office swallows a "price tag" lie

From Human Rights and Democracy: The 2011 Foreign & Commonwealth Office Report (UK)

We were concerned at violent attacks by extremists among the Israeli settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem against Palestinians and their property in 2011. We saw an increase in the number of so-called 'price tag' attacks ' a reaction by some extremist settlers to Israeli government policies that they see as against their interests ' including vandalism of Muslim and Christian cemeteries in Jaffa, hate graffiti on the homes and offices of Peace Now activists, and arson attacks on mosques. We have condemned these incidents; Mr Burt described the 'intentionally provocative attack' on a mosque in Tuba Zangria, northern Israel as 'appalling'.

Pretty much all of the Jewish leaders in Judea and Samaria have severely condemned "price tag" attacks as well, something that should have been mentioned in the report.

More problematic, though, is the fact that the Tuba Zangaria attack was almost certainly done by Arabs.

An Israeli blogger was the first to discover that the evidence did not add up. Later Israel's Channel Two did its own investigation and interviewed a Muslim resident who stated flatly that it was done by Arabs.

It is interesting that the FCO seems unaware of this months after the fact.


After the Arab's comments on Tuba-Zangaria were published, his house was sprayed with gunfire.

But that breach of human rights was not considered important enough to be covered by the FCO.

In fact, Arab-on-Arab violence is essentially ignored in the report, and human rights abuses by Hamas are similarly downplayed compared to what they consider the major human rights crime of the area - Jews building houses in their ancestral homeland.

(h/t Gidon)