Israel’s Advocacy: Toward a Better Future.

Transcript of Barry Shaw’s address to the Haifa University Conference on “Rethinking the Challenges of Israel’s PR.”

A warning! I don’t come from an academic, media or political background. My grounding is in business. I tend to see things in stark black and white reality. I also originate from Lancashire in the north of England where we employ straight talking. It’s where we call a spade a “bloody shovel.”

I’ve been asked to talk about rethinking Israel’s PR and the establishment of an independent advocacy body and they’ve only given me fifteen minutes. That’s like mission impossible, but I’ll give it a shot.

This conference would have a missing heart if we didn’t talk about you and your valuable contribution to Israel’s hasbara.

It is because of you we had to move this event into a larger hall.

You came because you live and breathe defending Israel on a daily basis.

You do it because you expect the government to protect and defend us. This includes protecting and defending us from the accusations, the slanders, the demonization and the intimidation that threaten us. 

They have failed to do that.

This has led us to pick up the weapons at our disposal and lead the fight back against the Israel bashers.  We do that on various battlefronts – law, diplomacy, academia, media are just some of them.

They have failed us, and they have failed our friends abroad, the ones who have been on the frontline of this battle for decades.

We have to ask ourselves why?

In fairness, I think it’s because government is there to deal with diplomacy.

Diplomacy means government to government, government to governmental institutions, UN and EU, inter-parliamentary bodies.

They’ll be the first to tell you, if truth be told, that they are not there to dabble in other countries internal affairs.  

That would be undiplomatic.

As such, they abandon our supporters who are left alone, relying only on us to help them.

The government is nowhere to be seen when the editorial line of much of the western media is perpetually pumping out anti-Israel imagery and lies that favor Hamas over IDF, or Palestinian lies over Israeli truth.

The government is not there when demonstrators take to the streets and we see our supporters rally to counter the hate, or to counter the BDS activists demonstrating outside stores selling Israeli products in Europe and in South Africa.

The government was nowhere to be seen when we warned them about the coming EU labeling of Jewish products and how it was possible then to prevent it.

I brought a team from UK Lawyers for Israel to sit with government officials a year ago. Each presented ways to tackle boycotts, sanctions and even labeling. The officials did nothing and look where we are today with the EU labeling sanctions.

They weren’t there to deal with the rise of BDS, or the anti-Israel hate machine being generated on campuses.

We have a government that does little to protect our students and campus supporters who are struggling against well-funded, well organized intimidators and slanderers who feel they own the campus.

They are not there to prevent or challenge annual Israel Apartheid Week rituals or boycott resolutions, or when our students or our diplomats are intimidated and prevented from speaking.

And when they do step out of their formal environment of governmental diplomacy, they do it badly.

A couple of weeks ago we saw Yair Lapid handing out leaflets at Ben Gurion airport to Israelis flying abroad. 

What on earth was that about!  It’s was a gimmick, a publicity stunt. 

Here’s what he said to the press;

“We can no longer abandon this battle to the haters of Israel. The time has come to answer them.”

By his saying that “we can no longer abandon this battle” indicates that they had abandoned the battle.

In truth, the world has changed. In our advocacy work we see what I call called ‘the uberization of public diplomacy.’

What is the uberization of public diplomacy?

Today, the public is attracted to the Uber initiative of choosing private transportation over conventional taxi and bus services. They are also prefer the advocacy of independent groups to government or more convention leadership. We are seeing have linked up to anti-Israel messaging transmitted on the campus, in the media, and elsewhere, by less formal groups.

So it’s private diplomacy, not government diplomacy, which sways the hearts and minds of public opinion. It is the hyper-active group initiatives that are driving the messaging against us - of which BDS is the one that most readily grabs our attention.

Professor Irwin Cotler spoke eloquently about incitement to genocide being an international crime. BDS is conducting a benign genocide when it calls for the elimination of Israel.

It takes a network to defeat a network - and we don’t have a network.

To prove my point, in the UK, the National Union of Students just produced a 92 page BDS campaign booklet. The foreword includes the following;

“The campaign for BDS will not be won in NUC meetings. It will not even be won at national conferences, despite the importance of these bodies. The BDS campaign will be won when across the UK when institutions refuse to collaborate with Israeli institutions.”

In stark terms this is the battle we must fight and win!

We must abandon conventional methods that have failed to dent the attacks against us. We need to be creative. We need to think out of the box.

So this is where you have your say.  My vision is derived from what you have told me and from what I see from my own experience.

We must create a new central advocacy body, outside of government, to vastly improve and coordinate our advocacy efforts to better effect.

This center must empower the many NGOs and groups with proven track records already doing excellent work. They need our help and can do even better with the right resources and with a central coordination to integrate and accelerate their work.

Yair Lapid called for an organization to fight the Israel haters. He’s right. We should take him up on that demand.

We have people like you fighting our cause, fighting for us on various battlefields on a daily basis.

Lapid spoke about a battle. He was right. We are in a war for the future of Israel. We are individuals doing amazing work on various battlefronts such as those selected here – media, academia, law, diplomacy.

We are under-staffed, under-resourced, but we are ideally positioned to win important battles, battles than the government shouldn’t get involved in. They are the daily public opinion, person-to-person, group-to-group battles that sometimes must be fought undiplomatically. 

We need to go on the offensive, to take the fight to our enemies - and those who misguidedly support our enemies – in a more coordinated way.

To fight against those who are harming us in the media, academia, and even foreign governments that finances much of the campaigns against us.

We have to censure a media that presents us in a way that we hardly recognize ourselves.

We need an organization that can build a network that can win the battles in the hubs of delegitimization.

It takes a network to defeat a network and this cannot be done at government level.

 

In military terms, our problem is that we are fighting as individual warriors or small specialist teams, each fighting our own battles independently against a well-funded, well-coordinated enemy with an integrated message.

We are alone on the battlefield while they have captured valuable territory – campus, media, even influencing their governments.

The weapons of our arguments are the right ones but we, as separate units, are simply overwhelmed, out-gunned by the growing fire power ranged against us.

Our individual efforts can be far more effective if we are united and coordinated into one control center – an advocacy command and control center, if you will.

The IDF is made up of an army, an air force, a navy. People are recruited to serve in different units but all come together under a central command that deploys the various units, whose job it is to improve the effectiveness of these elite fighting units, to coordinate their use according to battle conditions to achieve victories that will defeat, deplete or demoralize the enemy.

Let me give you a few examples of where a coordinated response wins battles.

I have seen the effective application of law help students who felt isolated and defeated win counterclaims on campuses in the UK and in South Africa.

I have seen where lawyers have forced the media to back down and publicly apologize for false reporting.

I have experienced where information brought in by students at IDC Herzlia as part of their work in the advocacy room fighting against the 2011 Gaza flotilla prevent a BDS plan to fly hundreds of anti-Israel activists into Israel to cause disruptions at Ben Gurion airport with demonstrations. 

They called it the “flightilla”. The BDS plan utterly failed.

Why did the ships in the 2011 flotilla fail to leave port and sail to Gaza?

Time doesn’t permit me to give you the details. The short answer is that UK Lawyers for Israel and Shurat Hadin prevented the Gaza flotilla ships from leaving the Greek port of Pireaus. Compare that to the Mavi Marmara PR disaster of the previous year.

These are just a few instances where effective coordinated actions have won major battles for us. 

I know that many of you have similar stories to share.

Think how much more effective we could be if we had a fully functioning advocacy body manned by proven leaders with successful track records, organizational and communication skills, motivational and logistical support abilities, and with influential global connections.

This surely has to be the way forward.

Can this model succeed? Yes. This is the model we must aspire to, led by talented men and women of action dedicated to Israel and not to personal vanities.

It should be headed by an elite honorary board made up of global figures who share a strong affirmative love of Israel.

It should be manned by an executive branch that will coordinate a plan of action to create an integrated support system in the fields we are discussing today.

This executive will lay the foundation and appoint directors and managers both in Israel and abroad who will work with existing NGOs and set up new ones where there is a need.

Basically, we should copy the best examples of global corporate structures. That’s why, with respect, business executives are better placed to succeed than politicians and academics. They know how to raise capital & operate corporate structures efficiently.

We must be everywhere, every day – a constant multi-headed presence.

It takes a network to defeat a network.

Haifa must be the first step on the road to achieving the goal of establishing a much needed independent advocacy central organization.

Today’s conference cannot be a stand-alone event. It’s too important an issue.  This has to be the beginning and we need your help.

We need more of you to have your say on how the future of our public diplomacy & advocacy should look going forward.

You put your heart and soul into our efforts and i for one value your contribution.           

So there you have it, how to face the challenges and create a better advocacy future in fifteen minutes.   

Thank you.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.  He is also the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism’ and ‘Israel Reclaiming the Narrative.’ www.barrysbooks.info

Israel shows the way to a better place.

They are queuing round the block to get into the new Star Wars movie.

A line from the 1999 Star Wars movie goes, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

Where does your country stand in the wise Yoda’s warning to Anakin Skywalker?

Israel is going through a period in which many of our people fear the current wave of knife-stabbing, rock-throwing, car-smashing terror attacks inspired by Palestinian incitement couched in anti-Semitic terms. But is this fear leading us to through Yoda’s stages of anger, hate and suffering to the dark side?

Not according to the recent UN Human Development Index findings.

Israel is the most resilient of nations. We have experienced what no other liberal democracy has gone through. Western countries have suffered the sudden shock of terror that makes its people fearful and a feeling of insecurity, but these attacks are not constant.

Israel, since its inception has known nothing but wars and terror, inflicted on it as a constant companion from our neighbors who, quite frankly, want to see us dead. Yet, the latest UN Index shows us to be one of the leading people when it comes to satisfaction with our lives. With an Index mark of 7.4, we tied with Norway and Finland, and were only pipped by Switzerland, Denmark and Iceland who received a figure of 7.5. 

Israelis, apparently, are a more satisfied lot than Americans, Canadians, Brits or the French, despite the terror and threats.

When it came to assessing income, life expectancy and education Israel ranked 18^th out of the 188 countries in human development. I promise you, we will rank even higher going into the future.

Israel scored miles higher than any other Middle Eastern country. Next best was the terrorist-sponsoring Qatar in 32^nd place.

Israel’s overall position is impressive given that we only began life less than 70 years ago. Other nations have had centuries to develop their cultures and life-styles. In that short time, we have absorbed millions of immigrants and refugees into our society to become productive and positive citizens. This is a subject I will be discussing at an upcoming conference on the Middle East and the migrant problem.

One must bear in mind that the majority of Israel’s immigrant population came from underdeveloped Muslim countries and from the poverty and strife of Ethiopia, while others came from the undemocratic Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

In short, Israel had to hit the group running, being attacked by vengeful neighbors from day one of our existence.

And yet, the Zionist state appears regularly among the top nations in UN human factor and nation surveys as an example to others on how to develop a successful and happy society.

There is room for improvement, and we will improve despite the challenges that less developed countries and entities will attempt to inflict on us.

There is no shortage of negativity thrown at Israel. In the main, it bounces off us like blunt arrows. We know who we are, and we love ourselves for it.

Yoda’s words may apply to others. We can show this Star Wars hero that Israel has found another path to overcome fear, a path that takes us to a better place.

May Israel's force be with you!

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.  He is the author of the best-selling book  ‘Israel Reclaiming the Narrative.’ www.barrysbooks.info

BDS LIES when it calls our brave IDF soldiers “war criminals.”

BDS LIES when they call our brave soldiers “war criminals” and accuse the IDF of “war crimes.” So let me introduce non-Israel, non-Jewish neutral experts to give their opinion.

14 international former chiefs of staff and senior military officers reviewed the 2014 Gaza conflict from both the IDF and Hamas operations.

They visited Israel both during and after the conflict. They interviewed soldiers from the regular foot-soldiers to unit commanders all the way up to the highest ranks of the IDF. In their fact finding missions they also spoke with military intelligence personnel.

While conducting in-depth analysis into Operation Protective Edge they received unprecedented access to the IDF and to government officials up to the Prime Minister that, together with their impeccable military expertise, enabled them to produce a fair and factual report which they released in early December 2015.

They began by admitting that Israel’s military efforts were entirely necessary and justified in the defense of Israel’s national security as a result of the aggressive and offensive operations conducted against Israeli civilian centers by Hamas and their other terror affiliates in support of Palestinian Hamas actions initiated against Israel.

Their conclusions solidly stated that “Israel’s conduct in the 2014 Gaza Conflict met and in some respects exceeded the highest standards we set for our own nation’s military.”

They went on, “It is our view that Israel fought an exemplary campaign, adequately conceived with appropriately limited objectives, displaying both a very high level of operational capability as well as a total commitment to the Laws of Armed Conflict.”

To emphasize the point, the report states, “The IDF not only met its obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict, but often exceeded these on the battlefield at significant tactical costs, as well as in the humanitarian relief efforts that accompanied its operation.”

Additionally highlighting the conduct of the IDF and the Israeli soldier the report recorded that, “Where the high standards of conduct the IDF sets for its personnel have not been met incidents are investigated, including criminal investigations, through an independent mechanism under the oversight of the democratic institutions of the State of Israel. This mechanism clearly meets the requirements of legal recourse, judicial independence and democratic oversight that our own nations set for ourselves.”

The team of overseas military experts reported on Hamas thus,

“Hamas not only flagrantly disregarded the Law of Armed Conflict as a matter of course as part of its terrorist-army hybrid strategic concept, but rather it abused the very protections afforded by the law for military advantage. It embedded its entire military machinery in civilian locations and sensitive sites, including those of the United Nations.

Hamas indiscriminately targeted Israeli civilians throughout the conflict with extensive rocket fire and willfully sought to draw the IDF into battle in a prepared urban stronghold amid the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, for which it located its operational headquarters in Gaza’s main hospital.”

All these are war crimes.

The notable military staffers who researched and investigated the conflict included;

Colonel Richard Kemp; Former Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan. He also served in Iraq, the Balkans, South Asia and Northern Ireland. He led the international terrorism team at the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee and served as Chairman of the strategic intelligence group for COBRA, UK’s national crisis management committee.

General Klaus Dieter Naumann; Former Chief of Staff of the German Armed Forces and served as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1996 to 1999.

General Vincenzo Camporini; Former Italian Chief of Defense. He later served as Chief of Staff of the Italian Air Force as well as Chief of Defense General Staff.

Lt. General David A. Deptula; Former three-star general in the US Air Force. He was the principal attack planner for the Desert Storm coalition air campaign in 1991 and served as Director of the Combined Air Operations Center in Afghanistan and as first Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance at Air Force Headquarters.

Admiral Jose Maria Teran; Serves in the Office of Strategic Assessment of the Spanish Defense Minister and Former Chief of Joint Staff and Chief of the Strategic Analysis Group.

Major-General Andrew James Molan served as the Chief of Operations for the HQ Multinational Force in Iraq. Former Commander of the Australian Defense College.

Other top military leaders in the High Level International Military Group came from India, France and Columbia.

Lost in the malediction of cynical media misreporting and malevolent anti-Israel propaganda disguised as Palestinian human rights concerns is the fact that, during fifty days of war, Palestinian fired 4,564 rockets at Israeli civilian targets. Despite the UN statistics, which were adopted lies provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, a de factor Hamas Gaza, the real Gazan casualty figures show that 60% were men of fighting age, that many of the “children” quoted in the false figures were actually men in their 20s, that many Gazans were killed by Palestinian rockets aimed at Israel short-falling within Gaza and there is video evidence of Hamas conducting public executions of non-compliant Palestinians.

My investigations into Gaza casualty figures, conducted while the conflict was taking place and in the months after, confirmed the findings of these fourteen military experts that the Gaza casualty figures were remarkably low when taking into consideration the intensity of the fighting in such a densely populated area.

Consider this scenario. The Israeli Air Force conducted over 5000 sorties over Gaza, IDF artillery mapped out and targeted large concentrations of terrorist activity throughout the Gaza Strip, tanks softened up intense areas of terrorist strongholds in urban areas in preparation for the entry of thousands of infantry soldiers who were forced to destroy booby-trapped buildings alleyways and uncover and destroy miles of terror tunnels, rocket sites, and weapon storage facilities as well as fighting civilian-attired terrorists coming out of houses and public buildings to attack them. And yet there were only a few hundred non-combatants killed in such a ferocious and prolonged firefight.

As the international experts reported, this feat was achieved by both the accuracy of the surgical strikes of all elements of Israel’s fighting force combined with the IDF humanitarian concern to avoid, as much as militarily possible, harming innocent civilians, even those in support of the Palestinian Hamas offensive against Israel.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.  He is also the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism.’ www.barrysbooks.info

ACADEMIA – THE FACTORY PRODUCING TODAY’S POLITICAL NITWITS.

Countries are coming together in a common cause to strike ISIS in their rage, and in their fear.

The anger that wasn’t there in the past is palpable today.

It wasn’t there in sufficient force when ISIS slit the throats of Americans and Brits in the sand of Syria, and wholesale beheadings that gruesomely played on the social media.  It was just a piece of awful voyeurism. Terrorist pornography.

Sure, Obama said he had forged a coalition of sixty five countries, but nobody demanded that he publicly count out for us who these nations were, or what they were doing to counter, let alone defeat, ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State, Daesh, or whatever name they call themselves.

The name, with their identity, is left in the fog of confused language.

At its heart it’s not ISIS that is driving Muslims to behead people, to shoot them in Paris or San Bernardino, or to cause teenagers to knife people in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, or the launch of rockets at Israeli civilians, or explode themselves on buses, or fly planes into buildings, or to slaughter tourists on a Tunisian beach or in a luxury Mali hotel.

ISIS is only the target for Western and Russian rage because they can’t quite put their finger on any other target for their anger when the terror hits home rather than in some distant desolate location.

ISIS is not the root cause. It is merely a horrible symptom of an age-old sickness.

It is a sickness that politicians, diplomats, media and think tank pundits cannot, or will not, identify.

They cannot bring themselves to identify the root cause dispassionately because it passionately conflicts with everything they have been taught in the misguided halls of higher learning by radically leftist professors and lecturers.

Whatever false but appealing narrative they concocted for gullible students in search of some revolutionary cause, they were dangerously dead wrong.

The result has been the sheer nonsense of American political leaders blaming Islamic terror on global warming or the lack of gun control, the Paris outrages on Palestinian discontent against Israeli policies , according to a grossly misinformed Swedish Foreign Minister, and, basically, pointing the finger at anyone or anything, except what it is.

The fault lies with the deformed political thinking of a dishonest campus upbringing in faculties teaching a fictional form of anti-Western history designed to leave students with a guilt complex that blames the West, particularly America, Europe and Israel, for perceived crimes including “colonialism,” “imperialism,” “oppression,” “occupation” and “apartheid” that are not applied to any of the Middle Eastern regimes they support, yet are guilty of all of these epithets.

They find it impossible to address the sickness that, through the ages, has erupted with global violence, namely an inbred Islamic thirst for a God-driven drive to world domination, intimidation and death.

The corruption of campus degree courses in the humanities and political science have so screwed up the minds of emerging opinion and influence makers that we now have a polarization in most Western societies in which the political and intellectual elite simply don’t understand  what’s happening, but the simple man in the street knows exactly what’s going on.

I was in Europe this summer. I can tell you that the people I spoke with are very fearful of the tide of Middle Eastern migrants and what they will do to their country. They already feel the effects of those who have already arrived and failed to integrate. And yet their leaders announce they have multicultural countries, that this is their value and are keeping their gates open to receive many thousand more. The people get it. Their leaders don’t.

In America, the people knew there was a danger to their vast country both from without and within from radical Islamic terror, but their elected Administration was for allowing in thousands of unverified migrants. Then San Bernardino happened and their president talks about gun control not Islamic State inspired murderous terrorists. The people get it in America. Their leaders don’t.

The fault lies with the educators that produced their current and future leaders. It has infected political thought, as evidenced by President Barack Obama.

Can anyone tell me, in all honesty, if this man has a clue about what is going on in the world?

Or his ex-Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who infamously called Syria’s Assad “a reformer” before he went on his rampage reforming and killing his own people. Clinton, who told us she had pressed the “reset button” with Putin, and who would have us believe that the terror attack in Benghazi that killed a US Ambassador and three other Americans was caused by an “amateur video.” 

Does she really think that we simple-folk believe a word of what she says? Does she think us that dumb? Does she care?

Where did their ideas come from if not from their political upbringing?

Is this the quality of political thought that they produce in American universities? If so, God help us!

Today, the sight of thin-skinned and intolerant students demanding the comfort of “safe-space zones” to escape conflicting thought they find offensive because it doesn’t tally with their brain-washed numb-skulls, to avoid any full and open debate in case it damages their dogma, makes us non-academics fearful of what these campuses are producing.

It is we, the general public that will require safe-spaces when these academic idiots graduate, join us in society, and start imposing their nonsensical thought control on the rest of us.

If these educators of world leaders of today and tomorrow, who have led them to such an abyss of judgment and reality, had been medical teachers we would have surgeons amputating limbs in their search for cancer in the body of our society, instead of applying clear-headed and surgical methodology against the cancer cells themselves.  This is how far off the mark they have become.

The root cause of the cancer of modern-day terrorism is so obvious that simple people recognize it, but ‘progressive’ leaders don’t.

It’s time to reform the universities that have become riddled with radically specious teaching that has resulted in the vacuous thinking of too many of our political leadership.

It’s time to get back to common sense and plainly diagnosis of what is troubling the world.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. 

ACADEMIA – THE FACTORY THAT PRODUCES TODAY’S POLITICAL NITWITS.

Countries are coming together in a common cause to strike ISIS in their rage, and in their fear.

The anger that wasn’t there in the past is palpable today.

It wasn’t there in sufficient force when ISIS slit the throats of Americans and Brits in the sand of Syria, and wholesale beheadings that gruesomely played on the social media.  It was just a piece of awful voyeurism. Terrorist pornography.

Sure, Obama said he had forged a coalition of sixty five countries, but nobody demanded that he publicly count out for us who these nations were, or what they were doing to counter, let alone defeat, ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State, Daesh, or whatever name they call themselves.

The name, with their identity, is left in the fog of confused language.

At its heart it’s not ISIS that is driving Muslims to behead people, to shoot them in Paris or San Bernardino, or to cause teenagers to knife people in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, or the launch of rockets at Israeli civilians, or explode themselves on buses, or fly planes into buildings, or to slaughter tourists on a Tunisian beach or in a luxury Mali hotel.

ISIS is only the target for Western and Russian rage because they can’t quite put their finger on any other target for their anger when the terror hits home rather than in some distant desolate location.

ISIS is not the root cause. It is merely a horrible symptom of an age-old sickness.

It is a sickness that politicians, diplomats, media and think tank pundits cannot, or will not, identify.

They cannot bring themselves to identify the root cause dispassionately because it passionately conflicts with everything they have been taught in the misguided halls of higher learning by radically leftist professors and lecturers.

Whatever false but appealing narrative they concocted for gullible students in search of some revolutionary cause, they were dangerously dead wrong.

The result has been the sheer nonsense of American political leaders blaming Islamic terror on global warming or the lack of gun control, the Paris outrages on Palestinian discontent against Israeli policies , according to a grossly misinformed Swedish Foreign Minister, and, basically, pointing the finger at anyone or anything, except what it is.

The fault lies with the deformed political thinking of a dishonest campus upbringing in faculties teaching a fictional form of anti-Western history designed to leave students with a guilt complex that blames the West, particularly America, Europe and Israel, for perceived crimes including “colonialism,” “imperialism,” “oppression,” “occupation” and “apartheid” that are not applied to any of the Middle Eastern regimes they support, yet are guilty of all of these epithets.

They find it impossible to address the sickness that, through the ages, has erupted with global violence, namely an inbred Islamic thirst for a God-driven drive to world domination, intimidation and death.

The corruption of campus degree courses in the humanities and political science have so screwed up the minds of emerging opinion and influence makers that we now have a polarization in most Western societies in which the political and intellectual elite simply don’t understand  what’s happening, but the simple man in the street knows exactly what’s going on.

I was in Europe this summer. I can tell you that the people I spoke with are very fearful of the tide of Middle Eastern migrants and what they will do to their country. They already feel the effects of those who have already arrived and failed to integrate. And yet their leaders announce they have multicultural countries, that this is their value and are keeping their gates open to receive many thousand more. The people get it. Their leaders don’t.

In America, the people knew there was a danger to their vast country both from without and within from radical Islamic terror, but their elected Administration was for allowing in thousands of unverified migrants. Then San Bernardino happened and their president talks about gun control not Islamic State inspired murderous terrorists. The people get it in America. Their leaders don’t.

The fault lies with the educators. It has infected political thought, as evidenced by President Barack Obama.

Can anyone tell me, in all honesty, if this man has a clue about what is going on in the world?

Or his ex-Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who infamously called Syria’s Assad “a reformer” before he went on his rampage reforming and killing his own people. Clinton, who told us she had pressed the “reset button” with Putin, and who would have us believe that the terror attack in Benghazi that killed a US Ambassador and three other Americans was caused by an “amateur video.” 

Does she really think that we simple-folk believe a word of what she says? Does she think us that dumb? Does she care?

Where did their ideas come from if not from their political upbringing?

Is this the quality of political thought that they produce in American universities? If so, God help us!

Today, the sight of thin-skinned and intolerant students demanding the comfort of “safe-space zones” to escape conflicting thought they find offensive because it doesn’t tally with their brain-washed numb-skulls, to avoid any full and open debate in case it damages their dogma, makes us non-academics fearful of what these campuses are producing.

It is we, the general public that will require safe-spaces when these academic idiots graduate, join us in society, and start imposing their nonsensical thought control on the rest of us.

If these educators of world leaders of today and tomorrow, who have led them to such an abyss of judgment and reality, had been medical teachers we would have surgeons amputating limbs in their search for cancer in the body of our society, instead of applying clear-headed and surgical methodology against the cancer cells themselves.  This is how far off the mark they have become.

The root cause of the cancer of modern-day terrorism is so obvious that simple people recognize it, but ‘progressive’ leaders don’t.

It’s time to reform the universities that have become riddled with radically specious teaching that has resulted in the vacuous thinking of too many of our political leadership.

It’s time to get back to common sense and plainly diagnosis of what is troubling the world.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.

Israeli Jews- the invisible victims of terror.

Facts;

The invisible victims of terror – Israeli Jews.

The perpetrators of a Jewish genocide – Palestinian Arabs.

The cause of their terror – to destroy Israel and kill Jews in the name of Palestinian liberation and Jihad.

How do we prove these facts? As follows;

Mahmoud Abbas, on official Palestinian TV on September 16, infamously incited Palestinian Arabs with a call to spill blood.

“We won’t allow Jews with their ‘filthy feet’ to ‘defile our holy Al-Aqsa Mosque.’ We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean pure blood for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah.”

This then is the Palestinian Authority president that hides behind a secular exterior.

His call was taken up by one of the main preachers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Khaled al-Mugrabi who, in a sermon, declared, “The Children of Israel will all be exterminated. The Anti-Christ will be killed, and the Muslims will live in comfort for a long time.”

Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, appointed by Abbas as the mufti of Jerusalem and the Muslim cleric supervising the Temple Mount, repeatedly claims that there was never a Jewish temple atop the Temple Mount, and Mahmoud al-Habbash, Abbas’s advisor on all things Islamic called Jews “evil” and Israel “a Satanic project.”  He also called Jesus a “Palestinian,” yet another attempt to remove any Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the land.

Meanwhile, Article 7 of the Hamas Charter charges Muslims to kill Jews.

“Oh Muslim! There’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come out and kill him!”

The Palestinian National Charter states in Article 9 that, “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. Thus it is the overall strategy not merely a tactical phase,” while Article 19 clearly states that “The partition of Palestine and the founding of Israel are entirely illegal.”

How does the Jewish state make peace with an entity that is so completely drenched in Jew hatred to the point of calling for genocide?

Yet this is ignored by a disinterested world, disinterested that it when it comes to protecting the only liberal democracy in a region, a region whose hate spills over onto European shores.

While the world painted the colors of the French tricolor on their Facebook pages, Israelis were being killed on an almost daily basis at the hands of Palestinian Arabs.  No blue and white face-overs on Facebook profiles in memory of our dead.

It was startling to see how many Facebook Jews identified with the Parisian outrages but failed to stand publicly with the murdered Jews of Israel.

It seems the overpowering phony Palestinian narrative has cowed even Jews into silence.

This narrative not only emanates from Palestinian and BDS propaganda sources. It resounds in media headlines that scrub Jewish dead while refusing to name Palestinian Arabs as the murdering terrorists. Headlines, such as this of the BBC, seem to deliberately alter facts to hide the truth.

“Palestinian shot dead as Jerusalem attack kills two.”

This BBC World News headline is callously typical of a media cover-up of Palestinian crimes.

No one would know from reading this news report that the Palestinian shot dead was an Arab attacker that targeted Jews. Nor would they know that the two killed were his Jewish victims. Why the transliteration?

Or Sky News coverage that “Palestinians shot dead in alleged knife attacks” makes it read that Palestinians were victims of a shooting when, in fact, they were the attacking terrorists hunting for Jews to kill and that the knife attacks carried out by Palestinian Arabs were far from “alleged” but very real, leaving Israeli Jews bleeding and hospitalized.

In every case, editors twist themselves into pretzels to avoid telling the truth.

They have an undeniable agenda to present Palestinian Arabs as victims, a right that cannot be granted to Israeli Jews even as they are being attacked, wounded and killed by murderous Palestinian Arabs. It spoils these editors permanent story line. Every story must be portrayed to represent the best interests of the Palestinians, and present the worst of those pesky Israelis.

The deliberate protection of the ugly face of violent Palestine ends up neutralizing the story, leaving no room for sympathy for Israeli victims.

When it happens regularly you know there is an editorial issue at work here.

To prove this point let’s reverse roles.

Can you imagine the global reaction if Arabs had been stabbed, mowed down in vehicular attacks, shot, or injured and killed by rock-throwing Jewish Israelis?

Can there be any doubt it would not have made headline news around the world, especially if it were occurring daily, as it is to Jews in Israel?

Does anyone think that the noise level of reaction against Israel would not have been deafening?

Is there any denial that international bodies would have been calling for criminal investigations and punishing condemnations of Israel, rather than the individual perpetrators?

Would anyone attempt to justify the resultant Arab deaths and injuries as an excusable reaction to ongoing violence against a fearful population?

Of course not!  But when it happens the other way round, it’s nothing more than a yawn. Not worth spilling editorial ink.

So why the double standard? Why hasn’t the media, the international diplomatic community, taken the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas to task for the clear and public incitement to violence that is anchored in blatant anti-Semitism?  

Incitement to genocide is an international crime. Why is this not being called out?

Tolerating a Palestinian Authority that calls for a world without Israel as they murder Jews is intolerable, particularly when it is practiced by liberal democratic countries.

The statements made by Western leaders have been heinous.  I use that word deliberately.

American Vice President, Joe Biden, described as “heinous” terrorist attacks, naming Paris, Beirut, Iraq and Nigeria. He forgot to mention Israeli terror victims. No doubt he will call it a slip of the tongue.  He was not alone.

It is particularly galling when Western policy-makers attempt to twist an emboldened Palestinian terror campaign that leaves too many Israeli Jews dead and injured into a false narrative of Palestinian “despair” and, further, link it to Islamic attacks in Paris as did the inexcusable Swedish Foreign Minister and the leader of the Dutch Socialist Party. Or US Secretary of State, John Kerry, who blamed settlements for rampant Palestinian killers, responding to the incitement of their Palestinian and Islamic leaders to kill Jews.

This dangerous Western thinking and rhetoric is wrong. It has to end!

It is time for misguided influence and opinion makers to own up to the truth. 

The truth is that Israeli Jews are being targeted and killed for being Israeli Jews.

The truth is a Palestinian ambition not to live in peace alongside Israel but to destroy Israel and kill Jews. 

The truth is that the false language expressed by diplomats and the Western media makes them complicit in encouraging further Palestinian violence against Israeli Jews and a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.

The truth is they are sanitizing anti-Semitic incitement and attacks.

The truth is they are emboldening a Palestinian leadership who sees Western intellectuals mouthing their narrative and closing their eyes to their crimes.

As long as Israeli Jews remain the invisible victims of terror, victims of an invisible malevolent Palestinian agenda, do not expect Israelis to offer gestures or concessions for peace.

We, the invisible victims and targets of Palestinian terror, are too busy trying to stay alive.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies. He is also the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism.’

Barry Shaw was the founder of the Netanya Terror Victims Organization when Palestinians targeted his hometown for suicide attacks, car-bombing and shootings that killed over 50 and injured hundreds.