Newseum cancels honor for Hamas
(JNS.org) The Newseum, a non-profit museum of news and journalism in Washington, DC, has reversed its controversial decision to commemorate Hussam Salama and Mahmoud al-Kumi, two cameramen who worked for the Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV in Gaza, after considerable outrage from leading Jewish organizations.
“Serious questions have been raised as to whether two of the individuals included on our initial list of journalists who died covering the news this past year were truly journalists or whether they were engaged in terrorist activities,” according to a statement on the Newseum website.
The cameramen were to be commemorated as part of a memorial service on Monday for reporters who died or were killed in the pursuit of news over the past year.
Salama and al-Kumi were both killed in an Israeli airstrike during Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012. Both were reported to be Hamas operatives by the Palestinian news site Palestinian Information Center at the time of their deaths.
Al-Aqsa TV, which is financed and run by the Hamas terrorist group, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is banned in many Western countries, including the U.S.
Leading Jewish organizations slammed the Newseum’s original decision to honor the Hamas cameramen.
“The Newseum board of directors should be ashamed of themselves for saluting two individuals who were integral to the propaganda machine of the Hamas terrorist organization,” said American Jewish Committee Executive Director David Harris in a statement. “We are astonished that the Newseum did not reconsider its stance after initial concerns were raised. What are they thinking, seeking to conflate authentic journalists and operatives for a murderous group banned by the U.S. and European Union?”
“It is a dark day when members of a terrorist organization advancing their agenda through murderous violence are honored as part of a tribute to journalists killed in the line of duty,” Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman in a statement.
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Netanyahu reduces proposed cut to Israeli defense budget
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ruled Monday that the Israeli defense budget will be cut by 3 billion shekels ($840 million), in lieu of the original 4-billion shekel ($1.1 billion) cut originally proposed by the Israeli Finance Ministry.
“I have decided to present the cabinet, and later on the Knesset, with a smaller cut to the defense budget to the tune of 1 billion shekels,” Netanyahu said. “This will not be made at the public’s expense. I would like to stress that the Israel Defense Forces, its soldiers, officers and weapons are vital to public security.”
Israel’s defensive front “keeps expanding and now includes the entire homefront—all of Israel,” Netanyahu said. “That is why we need the IDF to continue with its streamlining plans, but we also need more Iron Domes,” he said.
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IRS flagging controversy may extend to pro-Israel groups
(JNS.org) The admission of a policy violation by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), in which it flagged conservative political groups who used the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status for extra reviews during the 2012 election, has brought to light a similar episode involving a pro-Israel group.
Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division overseeing tax-exempt groups, made the revelation last Friday at an American Bar Association conference. She said the IRS asked conservative groups to list their donors, also a violation of IRS policy.
“That was wrong,” Lerner said, the Associated Press reported. “That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review.”
Lori Lowenthal Marcus, president and founder of the pro-Israel group Z Street, wrote for The Jewish Press that the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, which will be investigating bias at the IRS in light of the agency’s admission, “might want to ask the IRS whether their list of targets extended beyond political party discrimination.”
Z Street in 2010 filed a lawsuit against the IRS alleging that the group was told by an IRS agent that its tax-exempt application would receive “additional scrutiny” because Z Street is “connected to Israel.” The agent also told Z Street that the applications of other “Israel-related organizations” were assigned to a “special unit” in the Washington, DC office of the IRS to determine “whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies,” Marcus wrote.
The first hearing in this case, IRS v. Z Street is scheduled for July 2 in Federal District Court in Washington.
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Noam Chomsky lobbied Hawking to boycott Israel’s Presidential Conference
(JNS.org) Frequent Israel critic and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky urged famed British physicist Stephen Hawking to boycott the fifth annual Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, The Guardian reported.
Chomsky, a leader of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, joined several leading British academics to urge Hawking to boycott the conference after hearing that Hawking initially accepted an invitation to attend.
According to The Guardian, in a letter to Hawking, Chomsky harshly criticized Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, calling them “collective punishment” and said that Israel “has a name for the promotion of its cultural and scientific standing: ‘Brand Israel.’ This is a deliberate policy of camouflaging its oppressive acts behind a cultured veneer.”
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Pope Francis canonizes several hundred Christian martyrs who refused to convert to Islam
(JNS.org) Pope Francis on Sunday announced the canonization of new saints to the Catholic Church, including several hundred 15th-century Christian martyrs who were killed for refusing to convert to Islam.
The “Martyrs of Otranto” were 813 inhabitants of the southern Italian city of Otranto who were beheaded in 1480 by Ottoman Turkish invaders after they refused to convert to Islam.
“While we venerate the Otranto Martyrs, we ask God to sustain the many Christians who, today, in many parts of the world, right now, still suffer violence and give them the courage to be faithful and to respond to evil with good,” Pope Francis said before more than 70,000 people in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, Reuters reported.
Since assuming the papacy in March, Pope Francis has frequently expressed concern for the Middle East’s beleaguered Christian populations under increasingly hostile Islamic rule, but he has also called for dialogue with Muslims.
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Polls says nearly half of Israelis support ‘Women of the Wall’
(JNS.org) Nearly half of Israelis, 48 percent, support the right of the group known as Women of the Wall to hold traditional Jewish prayer services at the Western Wall, according to a recent poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University, Israel Hayom reported.
The results of the poll come amid increasing tensions between ultra-orthodox Jews who oversee the Western Wall plaza, Judaism’s holiest site, and a group of reform-minded women who hold monthly prayer services. The group’s women often wear traditional Jewish prayer shawls – tallitot – that are typically reserved only for men under Orthodox Judaism. On Friday, ultra-Orthodox protestors clashed with Israeli police after the Women of the Wall held their monthly prayer session.
The poll also found that 64 percent of the secular public, 53 percent of the “traditional non-religious public,” and 26 percent of the traditional-religious public support the group. But the group was unanimously rejected by the poll’s ultra-Orthodox respondents.
A proposed plan by Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky calls for the creation of an egalitarian prayer section at the Western Wall in a bid to quell tensions over non-Orthodox prayer at the site.
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Church of Scotland agrees to amend controversial report on Israel
(JNS.org) The Church of Scotland has agreed to amend a recent controversial report on Israel, The Guardian reported. After provoking an unexpected storm of protest, the report was removed from the Church of Scotland’s website.
Senior church leaders have agreed to amend the official report entitled “The inheritance of Abraham,” after outrage over the report’s questioning of Israel’s legitimacy and the biblical Jewish connection to the land of Israel.
The original report also drew fire over its recommendations of sanctions against Israel. The original report urged the U.K. government to use “pressure to stop further expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank.”
But after a discussion between the Church of Scotland and the representatives of the Jewish community in the U.K., there was an agreement that the original report “has given cause for concern and misunderstanding of its position,” and that it “requires a new introduction,” according to the Church of Scotland’s website.
In particular, the Church of Scotland clarified its positions regarding Israel, stating, “There is no change in the Church of Scotland’s long held position of the right of Israel to exist.”
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Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood holds massive anti-Israel rally
(JNS.org) Egypt’s ruling party, the Muslim Brotherhood, staged a massive anti-Israel rally outside of Cairo’s Al-Azhar mosque following Friday prayers, the Associated Press reported.
The anti-Israel rally, the first of its kind by the Muslim Brotherhood since the Islamist party took power from Egypt’s military nearly a year ago, protested Israel’s recent brief detention of the Mufti of Jerusalem and its purported airstrikes in Syria.
During the rally, demonstrators chanted, “The people want the destruction of Israel,” and a leading Muslim Brotherhood member got up and shouted over the microphone, “We will repeat it over and over, Israel is our enemy,” according to the Associated Press. Additional chants from the crowd urged the Egyptian army to launch a war against Israel to “liberate Palestine.”
While Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has repeatedly told Western officials that he will uphold his country’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, earlier this year a video of Morsi emerged where he described Zionists as “bloodsuckers” and “descendants of apes and pigs” in 2010.
Meanwhile, Egypt’s ultraconservative Salafi party, al-Nour, boycotted the anti-Israel rally. Instead, the Salafis urged Morsi to wage jihad.
“The fighters in Jerusalem, Afghanistan, Gaza, Palestine, Mali and Damascus need the sacrifices of money and souls rather than demonstrations and stances,” Egyptian Salafist leader Sheikh Murjan Salem al-Jawhari said, Al-Arabiya reported.
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