Pro-Palestinian Mob Beats Up Jewish Men in Los Angeles
A pro-Palestinian mob brutally beat up a group of Jewish men Wednesday at a restaurant in Los Angeles, the day after a Palestinian Youth Movement-led protest was held in the city.
According to video accounts of the incident posted on Twitter, the pro-Palestinian mob approached a group of men dining at a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood and asked if they were Jewish. When the men replied, "Yes," they attacked them. The mob hurled bottles and yelled anti-Semitic slurs. One bystander said they repeatedly struck one of the Jewish men "with a pole." Police are investigating whether the incident was a hate crime.
The anti-Semitic attack took place in the early hours of the morning after a "Day of Action" Palestinian solidarity march outside the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles. The march coincided with a "Day of Rage" in the West Bank, for which the Palestinian Authority urged residents "to attack Israelis with rocks, molotov cocktails, and car rammings."
In one of the videos of the attack, a man can also be heard yelling into a bullhorn, "Leave him! It's not worth it…. Don't look like this."
Anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise in the United States. The Anti-Defamation League reported a four-decade high for anti-Semitic incidents in 2019, with only a slight decrease from that level in 2020.
Police are also investigating an incident involving an Orthodox Jewish man, who was chased Monday night in Los Angeles by a car full of people waving Palestinian flags.
The attack comes as conflict between Israel and Hamas terrorists reached its 10th day Wednesday.
The Battle of Nicaea, the first (telling) encounter between Crusaders and Turks.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Today in history, May 20, 1097, witnessed the first battle between Western Crusaders and Muslim Turks: the siege of Nicaea.
Context: In the years following the decisive Battle of Manzikert (1071), which saw the Seljuk Turks defeat the Eastern Roman Empire and conquer that ancient bastion of Christianity, Anatolia (modern day Turkey), mindboggling atrocities were committed. Whether an anonymous Georgian chronicler tells of how “holy churches served as stables for their horses,” the “priests were immolated during the Holy Communion itself,” the “virgins defiled, the youths circumcised, and the infants taken away,” or whether Anna Comnena, the princess at Constantinople, tells of how “cities were obliterated, lands were plundered, and the whole of Anatolia was stained with Christian blood”—the same scandalous tale of woe reached the West.
As a result, what came to be known as history’s First Crusade was launched. Paraphrasing Pope Urban II’s famous call at Clermont in 1095, Crusades historian Thomas Madden writes, “The message was clear: Christ was crucified again in the persecution of his faithful and the defilement of his sanctuaries.” Both needed rescuing; both offered an opportunity to fulfill one of Christ’s two greatest commandments: “Love God with all your heart,” and “love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27).
Christians from all around Europe hearkened to the call and took the cross. By 1097, the major lords and knights had reached Constantinople, whence they were ferried into the lion’s den, Turkic-controlled Asia Minor. By May they reached Nicaea, site of Christendom’s first ecumenical council (325), where the Nicaean Creed, which is still professed by all major Christian denominations, was articulated. Now the capital of the Seljuk sultanate and occupied by the “enemies of the cross,” the Crusaders quickly laid siege to Nicaea on May 14.
It was long and brutal, but the Turks held their own; from their high walls, the Muslims “shouted their war-like battle-cry in the horrible tones of their language”—the contemporary chronicler, Albert of Aachen, could not decipher the shrill cries of “Allahu Akbar!”—and “fired poisoned arrows so that even those lightly wounded met a horrible death.” Moreover, in order to defend their walls from being “struck and shaken repeatedly by the battering ram, the Turks created a combustible mixture and poured it over the walls, which torched the battering ram.” Smoke and fire rose as the siege went on.
Finally, on today’s date, May 20, Kilij Arslan, the Seljuk sultan and supreme head of the Turks, appeared with a massive Muslim army to deliver Nicaea, his capital. A wild battle ensued. Albert continues:
Duke Godfrey and Bohemond did not curb their horses but let them have their heads and flew in the midst of the enemy, piercing some with lances, unsaddling others, and all the while urging on their allies, encouraging them with manly exhortations to slaughter the enemy. There was no small clash of spears there, no small rings of swords and helmets heard in this conflict of the war, no small destruction of Turks.
But it was the greater force of the crusader army under the command of Raymond of Toulouse with aid from Robert of Flanders that gave the Muslim army its death stroke, routing them.
In this, the inaugural battle of the First Crusade, which occurred 924 years ago today,
The Arabs, Persians, and ferocious Turks soon fled; the savage people showed their backs to the Christians. It was a rout... Prodigious was the slaughter of the fleeing army…. From the third until the ninth hour the destruction, or rather Arabian slaughter, of this battle raged.
This triumphant description is not so much invention and bias on the part of Guibert of Nogent as it is a reflection of the fact that this vast Muslim army was not made of professional soldiers but largely consisted of “peasants, scum herded together from everywhere.” Later Turkish armies would be more formidable.
Having slaughtered countless Muslims, the bloodstained Westerners resumed the siege of Nicaea. As a stark and material reminder to its inhabitants not to hope for deliverance from their coreligionists, the Crusaders “lobbed the severed heads of the slaughtered Turks from their throwing-machines and catapults into the city,” writes Robert the Monk.
There was, of course, a reason that the Crusaders behaved so ruthlessly. Earlier, on first landing in Anatolia, they encountered a horrific sight: “Oh, how many severed heads and bones of the dead lying on the plains did we then find beyond Nicomedia near the sea!” wrote Fulcher of Chartres. “Moved to compassion by this, we shed many tears there.” They had come upon the remains of all those European peasants—men, women, and children—that were too impatient to wait for the professional knights at Constantinople and crossed into Asia alone. Soon after landing in the Nicaean inland in 1096, they “fell into the Turkish ambuscade and were miserably slaughtered,” recollected Princess Anna Comnena:
So great a multitude of Kelts and Normans died by the Ishmaelite sword that when they gathered the remains of the fallen, lying on every side, they heaped up, I will not say a mighty ridge or hill or peak, but a mountain of considerable height and depth and width, so huge was the mass of bones.
Those captured underwent another trial: “Some of the prisoners were challenged about their faith, and ordered to renounce Christ, but they proclaimed Christ with steady heart and voice, and were decapitated,” writes Guibert. The fate of those kept alive—as usual, the young and comely—was often worse:
The Turks divided up among themselves some of the captives, whose lives they had spared—or rather reserved for a more painful death— and submitted them to dismal servitude at the hands of cruel masters. Some were exposed in public, like targets, and were pierced by arrows; others were given away as gifts, while others were sold outright . . . [and taken to Khorasan and Antioch where] they would endure wretched slavery under the worst masters imaginable. They underwent a torture much longer than that endured by those whose heads were severed swiftly by the sword.
How the Islamic lords of Asia Minor must have laughed then! Having annihilated the indigenous Christian population of Anatolia, now European Christians were marching in for the same exact treatment.
But they were not laughing now, as the heads of their coreligionists rained down on them. Along with all the ones the Crusaders had lobbed into Nicaea, another “one thousand of these heads were sent to Eastern Roman Emperor Alexios, a present which won his hearty favor”—unsurprisingly so, as these were the same men who had sacked and taken Nicaea from Alexios in 1092. He responded by sending more supplies, including much needed boats for the Crusaders to cut off Nicaea’s only supply route. These the Crusaders, “during the course of one night, by ropes placed on the shoulders and necks of men and horses,” dragged to Nicaea, “a distance of seven miles or more,” says William of Tyre.
Soon thereafter, on June 19, 1097, the now overly traumatized Turks—these longtime scourges of Eastern Christendom—surrendered Nicaea, on condition that they capitulate, not to the heavily armored newcomers from the West who had so terrorized them, but to Alexios, who had followed the Crusaders with his own army.
And so, the First Crusade began with a victory over the Muslims, just as it would conclude. But that is another story.
In Israeli Cities, Muslim Arab Mobs Continue to Cause Mayhem
Israeli Jews must face what they are up against.
Israeli Arabs continue to cause mayhem in Arab-Jewish towns, though in Lod itself the Border Police have helped to bring some semblance, not of calm, for there can no longer be calm after what the marauding Arab mobs did to the homes, shops, synagogues of their Jewish neighbors — but order. A report on the latest developments in this struggle by Israeli authorities to suppress the mob violence in mixed cities is here: “Riots Intensify in Lod, Acre and Other Jewish-Arab Cities, as Rivlin Condemns ‘Brutal Assault on Shared Existence in Israel,’” by Sharon Wrobel, Algemeiner, May 12, 2021:
Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz asked 30 local authority heads from Arab society to help calm the tension and escalation of violence in Arab-Jewish towns which has erupted since Palestinian militants fired rockets into Israel and air strikes were launched in Gaza by Israel.
The move came after Israel declared Lod, a city of both Arab and Jewish residents, a special state of emergency, following severe rioting in recent days by Arabs. The assailants were taking the streets of Lod, Acre, Ramle and other towns of mixed communities, setting fire to synagogues, shops and cars.
Despite the efforts to restore calm on the street and an overnight curfew imposed by police, violent riots continued on Wednesday night in Acre and Lod.
The sight of the pogrom in Lod and the disturbances across the country by an incited and bloodthirsty Arab mob, injuring people, damaging property and even attacking sacred Jewish spaces is unforgivable,” said Israel President Reuven Rivlin. “Tearing down the Israeli flag by Arab rioters and replacing it with the Palestinian flag is a brutal assault on shared existence in the State of Israel.”
“The silence of the Arab leadership about these disturbances is shameful, giving support to terrorism and rioting and encouraging the rupture of the society in which we live and in which we will continue to live once all this has passed. The Israeli government must pursue the rioters with a firm hand restore security and order while fighting terrorism from Gaza without compromise,” Rivlin added.
Only a single Arab MK, Esawi Frej, asked his fellow Arab leaders to speak out:
“I call on [the Joint List’s] Ahmad Tibi, Ayman Odeh along with Arab mayors: This is the test of your leadership. Don’t hide..”
But they did hide. Neither Ahmad Tibi, nor Ayman Odeh, nor any of the other Arab MKs or mayors, spoke out; Frej was alone. There were lower-level Arabs, some city councilmen in Lod, Acre, Haifa, Ramle, and Tel Aviv-Yafo, who, with their Jewish colleagues, signed a declaration calling for calm. And so far, that’s been the only response of leaders in the Israeli Arab community.
Even after President Rivlin made his appeal, the leaders of the Israeli Arabs have remained silent. It’s been quite a shock to many Israeli Jews, but it is surely better that they realize now what they are up against, rather than continue to assume the loyalty and good will of their Arab population.
Magen David paramedics were called to Acre central station to provide medical treatment to a 30-year-old man in critical condition with a head injury, who was hurt during the riots.
The Jewish man in critical condition is one of nearly a half-dozen Jews who so far have been seriously hurt by Arab rioters in Lod and Acre. One Arab man was also killed in Lod, shot in self-defense by a Jewish man whom he had been attacking. There are no other reports of Arabs being killed despite their continuing mob violence.
Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu called the riots in Jewish-Arab integrated cities “intolerable.” Netanyahu on Wednesday [May 11] visited Acre to meet with the mayor, police and security officials, for a discussion and assessment of the situation, following the events in the city.
“We are in a fight on several fronts. Last night I went to Lod, another front of anarchy that was opened there. We also made decisions there and brought in forces and this afternoon here in Acre. We will continue the effort to stop the anarchy, restore governance to Israel’s cities with an iron fist if necessary, with all necessary force and with all necessary authority,” Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu said that he instructed border police forces from the West Bank to be transferred to assist the police in Lod, Acre and other places to help stop the wave of riots.
According to Walla, more than a dozen Arab and Jewish council members from the mixed cities of Lod, Acre, Haifa, Tel Aviv-Yafo, and Ramle have signed a declaration to help restore calm on the streets.
Commenting on the violent clashes between Jews and Arabs, Brig. Gen. (ret.) Dr. Meir Elran at the INSS said: “If the explosive situation continues or, God forbid, worsens, there will be very negative consequences for the fabric of life in Israel. Hence Israel’s national interest in achieving calm in rapid fashion, on this internal front as well, which likewise has an impact on the confrontation with the Palestinians and with Hamas.”
The marauding Arab mobs in Lod and the smaller groups of Arab attackers in Acre, Ramle, Haifa, Tel Aviiv-Yafo have forced the Israelis to carefully consider the problem of the enemy within. Once the current fighting is all over, Israel having delivered enough punishing blows so that Hamas will sue for a ceasefire, with calm restored to the Temple Mount, and Arab mobs inside Israel put down, the leaders of the IDF, the Shin Bet, the regular police, and the Border Police will have to study how to deal with this dangerous new front, of the Enemy Within. How many Arabs actually took part? How should those who were part of the mobs be handled — prison sentences, or is expulsion a possibility? Why was Lod the city most vulnerable to such mob violence? How should Israeli Arab leaders who refused even to call for calm, much less to condemn the rioters, be treated? Is there any way to repair the inter-communal damage, or will Israelis now have to permanently adjust to living among those who clearly wish them harm, and are just waiting for another opportunity to do so? In such circumstances, what can Israel now do to protect its Jewish citizens from their Arab neighbors? If the Bidenites thought that Israel could be persuaded to return to the “pre-1967 lines” (1949 armistice lines) as a basis for negotiations, that possibility has now gone up in smoke, like the shops and homes and synagogues in Lod.
AP and Al Jazeera Feign Ignorance of Hamas in Their Building
The myths that enablers of terror try to sell.
Journalists are condemning an Israeli air strike last Saturday that destroyed a building in Gaza housing the local offices of media outlets such as the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. Israeli officials claimed they have "smoking gun" evidence that the building also “contained military assets belonging to the intelligence offices of the Hamas terror organization.” The Israeli military provided advance warning of the air strike, which allowed the occupants to evacuate safely. There were no reported deaths or injuries. Nevertheless, the biased anti-Israel mainstream media expressed dismay at what Israel had done. They are exploiting the incident to put Israel in the worst possible light and influence public opinion against Israel. This is just the latest example of many in the mainstream media serving as the useful idiots for Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Secretary-General Christophe Deloire called upon “the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor to determine whether these airstrikes constitute war crimes.” He said nothing about the dual war crimes committed by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in firing rockets from Gaza aimed at Israeli civilian population centers, and using civilians including journalists as human shields.
Associated Press President and CEO Gary Pruitt said that his news agency was “shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza.” Pruitt claimed that “We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building. This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.”
Pruitt’s claim that the AP had no reason to suspect it was sharing building space with Hamas lacks even a single shred of credibility. It is reminiscent of the scene from the movie Casablanca when Captain Renault, a regular patron and gambler at Rick's Café, said "I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here" before closing the café on the orders of his Nazi superior.
The local Associated Press bureau has turned a blind eye to Hamas’s war crimes, including Hamas’s activities in the immediate proximity of the building the AP bureau was occupying for 15 years. The AP at its highest levels has taken the Palestinians’ victimhood narrative at face value and condemned Israel as the aggressor. They have done so partly for ideological reasons and partly because they fear retaliation from Hamas if they report what they really know about the terrorists’ operations happening right under their noses.
Matti Friedman, a former AP reporter, wrote back in 2014, following that year’s Gaza War, that “I was informed by the bureau’s senior editors that our Palestinian reporter in Gaza couldn’t possibly provide critical coverage of Hamas because doing so would put him in danger.” Friedman added that “The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.)”
Friedman went on to charge that members of the media on-site in Gaza were “co-opted by Hamas.” He added that they “ceased to be reliable observers and became instead an amplifier for the propaganda of one of the most intolerant and aggressive forces on earth.”
In condemning Israel for taking out a target it reasonably believed was being used in part by Hamas for military purposes against Israeli civilians, the Associated Press and its brethren in the media are playing right into Hamas’s propaganda strategy. Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields and then appeals for sympathy on their behalf when Israel responds to the rocket attacks on Israel's civilian population. Hamas is using journalists reporting in Gaza as human shields too, counting on the fact that the media will blame any deaths, injuries, or property damage on Israel.
Like the Associated Press, Al Jazeera condemned Israel’s destruction of its Gaza offices by the Israeli military. Commenting on the bombing of the building Al Jazeera had occupied, Mostefa Souag, acting director general of Al Jazeera Media Network, said: “We call on the international community to condemn such barbaric actions and targeting of journalists and we demand an immediate international action to hold Israel accountable for its deliberate targeting of journalists and the media institutions.” Souag added: “The aim of this heinous crime is to silence the media and to hide the untold carnage and suffering of the people of Gaza.”
This is pure pro-Hamas propaganda. Anyone who thinks that the local Al Jazeera media outlet in Gaza was not fully aware of Hamas’s presence in its building is burying his or her head in the sand.
Al Jazeera is funded and controlled by the government of Qatar, which has maintained strong relations with Hamas since at least 2007 when the terrorist organization took control of the Gaza Strip.
Ismail Haniyeh, chief of Hamas’s political bureau, is living in exile in Qatar, where he remains very active in Hamas’s affairs and helps ensure the flow of money from Qatar to Hamas in Gaza. On May 15th, Haniyeh spoke to a huge crowd in Doha, Qatar. Haniyeh charged that “the Zionist enemy" had "carried out massacres.” He said that "The title of this battle today, the title of the war, and the title of the intifada, is Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem."
Qatar's foreign minister met with Haniyeh that same day and assured him of Qatar's support for its "Palestinian brothers."
At the rally in Doha, Haniyeh left no doubt that Hamas rejected any two-state solution where the Jewish state of Israel would remain intact. “The geographical barriers within historic Palestine have been removed,” he declared. “Today, Palestine is waging an Intifada from Rosh HaNikra to Umm Al-Rashrash [Eilat], and from Rafah to the farthest points to the North, East, and West of Palestine.” Referring to Safed, a city in the Northern District of Israel that is considered one of the Four Holy Cities of Judaism, Haniyeh proclaimed, “Safed is ours! Safed is ours! Safed belongs to us and to nobody else!" (as translated by MEMRI TV)
Haniyeh’s inflammatory remarks were broadcast by Qatar’s mouthpiece and Hamas’s propaganda arm, Al Jazeera Network.
Al Jazeera has been carrying Hamas’s water for years in alignment with its Qatari government masters’ support for the terrorist group. Its articles praising Hamas and vilifying Israel might just as well have been written by one of Hamas’s operatives working out of the same building in Gaza as Al Jazeera.
Hamas has threatened the few reporters and photographers who have tried to reveal the war crimes they actually witnessed committed by Hamas. Most so-called journalists are either too afraid or too ideologically biased against Israel to report the truth. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis has compiled examples of such biased reporting, including by the Associated Press.
Buildings containing military personnel, equipment or supplies constitute legitimate military targets under international law. Buildings used both for civilian and for military purposes also constitute legitimate targets, so long as effective advance warning is provided. This includes buildings that house media personnel and facilities, but which are also used for military purposes.
Nobody was hurt as a result of Israel’s air strike on the building housing the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. This building also housed Hamas assets, according to Israel's best actionable intelligence that it shared in confidence with United States officials. Israel provided a warning to the building’s owner an hour in advance, allowing the occupants to evacuate safely.
It’s long past the time that the media came to terms with the fact that Hamas is manipulating the media for propaganda purposes and using the media in Gaza as human shields. Media outlets in Gaza should check out the next building they consider occupying to make sure they are not sharing space in the building with Palestinian terrorists.
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