Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, December 21, 2024

12/21 Links: Israel is winning the war, while the West retreats; 16 hurt as Houthi missile from Yemen hits Tel Aviv; Violent Anti-Semitism As a Campus Recruiting Tool

From Ian:

Israel is winning the war, while the West retreats

Every act of betrayal of Israel has been accompanied by the constant barrage of international media coverage that works on the principle of blame Israel first, and ask questions later. In this Gaza-through-the-looking-glass version of events, Israel’s just war against the genocidal death cult responsible for the 7 October pogrom is somehow twisted into an act of genocide.

In reality, the IDF has gone to greater lengths than any army in history to reduce civilian casualties, while making clear that Hamas is responsible for every death. Yet many in the West are too blinded by anti-Israeli hatred to see the truth. As a top US military strategist asked in Newsweek in March: ‘Israel has created a new standard for urban warfare. Why will no one admit it?’ The only answer appears to be – because it’s Israel that has set that remarkably humane standard of warfare.

The double standards by which the world judges Israel were starkly displayed after the fall of the Assad regime. Faced with dangerous uncertainty, Israel sent troops into a previously demilitarised zone to secure its border with Syria, and launched air strikes to prevent chemical weapons falling into the hands of Islamists. The United Nations and states including France immediately condemned these reasonable defensive actions for allegedly breaking international law. Yet when the Turkish government launched a fresh offensive against the Kurdish minority within Syria, there was not a word of condemnation from the ‘international community’.

The desertion of Israel is a travesty not only for Israelis and Jews worldwide forced to face a wave of anti-Semitism alone, but for the West itself, too. The Israelis are fighting for the principles on which our civilised societies were built: democracy, national sovereignty and freedom. We should be supporting them as the front line in the global war against barbarism and slavery.

Yet the globalist elites of Western society have abandoned those foundational principles, and they now fear and loathe the Israelis who dare to stand up for them. That is why since 7 October, we have seen the consolidation of an unholy anti-Israeli alliance in the West, between Jew-hating Islamists and self-loathing left-liberals. Through 2024, everything that is rotten in our societies has continued to congeal around the banners of the anti-Israel crusade.

To its eternal credit, Israel continues to ignore the Western naysayers and fight its corner. Yet as the old order in the Middle East falls apart, with the Western powers losing their grip on events, the future remains uncertain.

It is time, as Israeli prime minister Netanyahu told the hostile UN a few months ago, to make a choice: will we bequeath future generations the ‘blessing’ of a Middle East shaped by Israel and its pro-democracy allies, or the ‘curse’ of a region dominated by Islamists, with all the implications of that worldwide?

In 2024, the West made the wrong choices. In 2025, there is still time to put that right and get behind the Israelis who are fighting for us all.

Thank You, Israel, for Saving the World, Defending Freedom and Reshaping the Middle East

When it comes to national security, appeasement is not an option. Bribing aggressors only finances their militaries for attacks on the West in the future. Israel's approach to combating terrorism has always been characterized by thoroughness and determination -- for which is usually put through the tortures of hell by the very countries it is working to save.

With a vision of ultimately fostering peace, harmony, security and prosperity throughout the region, as in the Abraham Accords, Israel expanded its military operations beyond Hamas... reshaping the Middle East into a region free of the grip of terror... Make Persia Great Again!

So long as Iran's regime remains in power, brutalizing its people and making plans for global expansion, there can be no chance for peace in the region.

Removing the regime... would bring lasting security and prosperity to the Middle East and beyond.... One could then set about subduing Turkey and its terrorist proxies in Syria.

Gestures won't remedy antisemitism, actions will

Respecting an office of state when its holder is controversial or perceived as undeserving presents a profound moral and practical dilemma, particularly in moments of crisis.

This issue came sharply into focus last Shabbat, when Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made an unannounced visit to the Perth Hebrew Congregation, offering solidarity after the suspected arson attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne.

The visit, arranged with only half an hour’s notice, sparked a storm of debate within the Jewish community and raised broader questions about the interplay between respect for institutions, personal convictions, and the challenges posed by social media discourse.

The backdrop to Albanese’s visit was a tragedy: The Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne had been targeted in what police have described as a likely terror attack. This occurred amidst a surge in antisemitism across Australia, exacerbated by the Israel-Hamas War following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

Albanese, who was in Perth at the time, likely saw the synagogue visit as an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with Jewish Australians during a deeply unsettling moment for the community.

However, the prime minister’s relationship with the Jewish community is fraught. Many Australian Jews view him as, at best, unsympathetic to Israel and, at worst, indifferent to the rise of antisemitism. His recent appearance at a protest against antisemitism in Sydney was marred by boos, reflecting widespread frustration and distrust. These sentiments complicated his reception at the Perth synagogue and placed the synagogue’s rabbi in an unenviable position.

Respect for the office vs distrust of the individual
The core of the dilemma lay in balancing respect for the office of prime minister with the community’s grievances against the individual holding that office.

In Jewish tradition, the Shabbat service includes a prayer for the welfare of the government, underscoring a recognition of the importance of civic authority and communal responsibility.

Rejecting a sitting prime minister from attending such a service, particularly in the context of a solidarity visit, would have been a profound statement – arguably one of disrespect not just to Albanese as a person but to the institution he represents. Yet, for many congregants, Albanese’s presence felt incongruous, even offensive.

This tension highlights a broader issue faced by faith communities and civic groups worldwide: how to engage with political leaders whose actions or policies are viewed as antithetical to their values. Can one separate the office from its holder? And should respect for the office override personal or communal grievances?

The rabbi of the Perth Hebrew Congregation ultimately chose to welcome Albanese, inviting him to address the congregation briefly and say the prayer for the government.

This decision demonstrated an adherence to the principle of respecting the office while providing the Jewish community an opportunity to receive a gesture of solidarity in a moment of fear and vulnerability. It was a difficult, nuanced decision that placed communal unity and decorum above personal grievances – a stance rooted in the Jewish value of being a mensch (a person of integrity and honor).

Early this morning, a ballistic missile from Houthi forces in Yemen slammed into a park in Jaffa. Debris and the shockwave shattered numerous windows, causing over 20 relatively minor injuries.

Israel's missile defenses failed to intercept the missile.

That's the bad news.

Here's the good news:

1. It is a miracle that the missile did not hit a building, which would have caused numerous injuries and deaths. Only the area of Tel Aviv/Jaffa are open space, which means that a missile avoiding hitting any building directly is significantly less likely than hitting a building.

2. The Houthis are presumably using Iran's most sophisticated missiles. While they claim that they aimed at a military target, clearly the missiles they have do not have good accuracy - it can be presumed that any military facilities are nowhere near the impact site, probably hundreds of meters away t the least, judging from the photos of the obviously residential buildings surrounding the park.

This means that any claims that the Houthis have that they are only aiming at military targets is absurd - they are aiming at populated areas and the attacks are indiscriminate. This means that by any definition, the Houthi attacks are war crimes.

3. While the Arrow missiles missing their targets are quite concerning, the Israelis learn quickly how to correct mistakes. At least this mistake wasn't fatal.

Another important point is the lack of any condemnation of the hundreds of Houthi attacks on Israel by :"human rights" groups. It further proves that "human rights" groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch don't care about Jewish lives. The only time I found either group say that Houthi attacks may be a war crime is when HRW was condemning Israel for retaliating; they have plenty of articles condemning the Houthis for other crimes but not one against Houthi attacks on Israel. They simply cannot credibly claim that they are evenhanded - their bias is obvious to anyone who isn't themselves biased.

The question is, can Israel do anything to deter the Houthis?

I believe they can. Not by threatening the Houthis.- but by threatening Iran.

Iran still has not responded to Israel's last raid, because it knows that any Israeli response will be much more damaging. Israel's airstrikes sent a clear message that Israel can hit any area in Iran and that it was pulling its punches. Iran cannot thread the needle between showing that they are not cowards and dooming their oil exports, for example.

Israel needs to announce clearly that it considers the Houthis to be a proxy of Iran, doing Iran's bidding, and the next missile or drone from Yemen will prompt a response to Tehran. And follow through.

Nothing Israel or the US can do will stop the Houthis (except a Hezbollah-type campaign to kill all their leaders, a very difficult task from that distance.) But the Iranians are more practical and care more about self-reservation than the Houthis. Only Iran can tell them to stop, so let's make the "proxy" issue explicit: proxies do the bidding of a master, and Israel will go after the master.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

12/20 Links Pt2: The cult of the keffiyeh; Welcome to ‘Paddystine’; Tucker Carlson, Superspreader; Toronto Jewish girls' school shot at for third time

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: The cult of the keffiyeh

The keffiyeh classes, in contrast, are attracted to the Palestinian people not for their dynamism, but for their wretchedness. Not for their vim but for their victimisation. Where the elite posturing that Wolfe so mercilessly ribbed was ‘vicarious radicalism’, the cult of the keffiyeh is something far more unpleasant: vicarious victimhood. The keffiyeh classes seem keen to ‘appropriate’ not only the clothing of the Palestinians, but their suffering, too. Witness the organisers of the Gaza encampment at Columbia University in New York City mimicking both Palestinian style and Palestinian privation. One student leader said she and her comrades were going hungry and required ‘humanitarian aid’. Do you want us to die of dehydration and starvation?, she asked university bosses. In a viral clip, a group of keffiyeh-wearing students was seen receiving ‘humanitarian aid’ through the college gates. I say humanitarian aid – it was probably a Starbucks order and blueberry muffins from a nearby bodega. Here we had privileged youths on an Ivy League campus cosplaying as victims of a humanitarian crisis; comfortably off Ivy Leaguers masquerading as the wretched of the Earth.

It provided a grim insight into the true nature of ‘Palestine solidarity’. It shone a light on why so many of our young chant, ‘In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians’. This is a new and unsettling form of activism. It is not 1960s-style solidarity with foreign struggles or even radical chic, that old politics as fashion. No, it is a coveting of suffering. The keffiyeh classes, it seems to me, crave the moral rush of oppression, the thrill of persecution. They pull on the garb of a beleaguered people in order to escape, however fleetingly, the pampered reality of their own lives. In order to taste that most prized of social assets in the woke era: victimhood. In draping the keffiyeh around their shoulders, they get to be someone else for a while. Someone less bourgeois, less white. Someone a little more exotic, a little more interesting. It’s less politics than therapy. They seek to wash away the ‘sin’ of their privilege through mimicking what they consider to be the least privileged people on Earth. That’s what the keffiyeh has become: the cloth with which the rich seek to scrub away their white guilt.

If the keffiyeh is the uniform of this Palestine politics of victimhood, then its currency is images of Palestinian suffering. Where yesteryear’s purveyors of radical chic revelled in images of revolting minorities, today’s followers of the cult of the keffiyeh savour images of Palestinian destitution. They trade in photos of Palestinian pain, meaning that social media has become ‘oversaturated with traumatic imagery’, as one writer describes it. Log on and you’ll be instantly exposed to a ‘kaleidoscopic view of human suffering without respite’. Not content with commodifying Palestinian attire, they commodify Palestinian trauma, too. They make a spectacle of Palestinian agony. Not to assist Palestinians in any meaningful way – how could it? – but rather to inflame their own satisfying feelings of collective moral revulsion.

Even requests from Palestinians to stop sharing horrific images from their wars have not been enough to slow this grim trade. A few years ago, Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr counselled Westerners against sharing ‘shocking content’ showing ‘shattered people’ in the Palestinian territories, on the basis that such ‘pictures of pain’ violate ‘the privacy and dignity of the subjects’ and can ‘create terror’ among Palestinians who might fear suffering the same fate. These images might ‘provide thrills’ to outside observers, and nurture ‘more “likes” and “shares”’ online, but they can be devastating to ‘public morale’ in the Palestinian territories, Jabr wrote. It was a fruitless plea. Imagery of Palestinian suffering is too valuable to the keffiyeh classes to be sacrificed to trifling concerns about Palestinian dignity. Your pain is ours now, just like your headwear.

The elites’ vicarious victimhood through the Palestine drama is a dangerous game. It seems undeniable now that the more the cultural powers of the West crave and collect depictions of Palestinian distress, the more the ideologues of Hamas will be willing to supply such depictions. Witness Yahya Sinwar’s insistence, in the summarising words of CNN, that the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ will likely ‘work in [Hamas’s] favour’. Sinwar, the then military leader of Hamas in Gaza, callously described the deaths of Palestinians as ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get the Israelis ‘right where we want them’.

Hamas clearly recognises that when the cultural establishments of global capitalism treat every image of Palestinian death as an indictment of Israeli evil, when the West’s activist class, media elites and online influencers hold up every picture of a broken Palestinian as proof of the Jewish State’s ‘uniquely murderous nature’, then it is in Hamas’s interests to prolong the war and allow more such suffering to occur. Having made Palestinian agony the currency of their activism, the activist class cannot now feign surprise at Hamas’s willingness to let this disastrous war continue. Hamas’s intransigence in the face of its far more powerful foe is a direct consequence of the keffiyeh classes’ commodification of Palestinian pain as a testament to both Israeli malfeasance and Western indifference.

The cult of victimhood’s greatest offence is to reduce everything to a simplistic clash between the oppressed and the oppressor, good and evil, light and dark. This movement requires not only victims it might ostentatiously empathise with, but also the opposite: victimisers, the monsters of persecution, who must be noisily raged at. As Professor Joshua Berman writes, the ‘Palestinian ideology of victimhood… constructs a struggle between a victim-hero in opposition to a scapegoat’. And this can lead to a ‘revelling in caricatured depictions of the oppressor’, he says. So where Palestinian radicals ‘traffic in classic hook-nose anti-Semitic tropes’, their Western supporters traffic in the insistence that the Jewish State is uniquely murderous, given to bloodletting, obsessed with murdering children, and so on. This is the thin line between pity and hate. Pity for Palestinians morphs with frightening ease into hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation, courtesy of the morally infantile narrative the cultural establishment has weaved around this most fraught of conflicts.

The end result? Protesters in keffiyehs telling Jews in New York City to ‘go back to Poland’. Activists in keffiyehs shouting on the New York subway: ‘Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.’ Britons in keffiyehs marching alongside radical Islamists who long for further pogroms against the Jewish State. The aftermath of 7 October is a painful reminder that the facile moral binaries of identity politics are far more likely to resuscitate racism than tackle it.

Seth Mandel: Tucker Carlson, Superspreader

Carlson begins his interview of Sachs by asking about the big news of the day: the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s monstrous dictator. The crimes of Assad and his father, who ruled Syria before Bashar, pockmark the earth: mass graves and torture prisons dot the face of the Levant. A rebellion against Assad that began during the Arab Spring finally succeeded. The story is gruesome but simple: A butcher was overthrown by his subjects.

In the clip that opens the show, Sachs has another explanation: the Jews. “It’s part of a 30-year effort. This is [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s war to remake the Middle East.”

Just after Sept. 11, 2001, Sachs preaches, Gen. Wesley Clark was brought in to the Pentagon and “told that the neocons and the Israelis are going to remake the Middle East.” It would require war with seven countries, and “we’ve been at war in six of them now. And I mean we, the United States on behalf of Israel… So what happened in Syria last week was the culmination of a long-term effort by Israel to reshape the Middle East in its image.”

Sachs refers to the “Israel lobby” as the agents of nefarious foreign interests in America, and he describes Jewish control as so airtight that it “doesn’t really matter who’s president. This is long-term deep-state policy.” Indeed, says Sachs, “Obama ordered the CIA to overthrow Assad.”

Why would Obama do that, asks Carlson. “Because Israel has run American foreign policy in the Middle East for 30 years,” Sachs responds. “That’s how it works.”

Sachs gives us a ballpark figure of the human cost of this supposed Jewish control: 1 million people are dead today who would otherwise have been alive if not for Israel’s supposed bloodlust. That places a lot of blood on Jewish hands. But as noted earlier, that’s a story that never gets old.

The second characteristic of anti-Semitism that keeps it so potent is the way information moves. It travels on a populist current because “the powers that be” are compromised and cannot be trusted. Tucker Carlson has an audience primed to imbibe all the information “They” supposedly don’t want you to know. Carlson can’t just repeat it all himself every single night because that would get boring, so he brings on guests to help out.

People like Carlson and Sachs rely on the network-contagion effect, in which information moves through social networks after being introduced by a trusted source, to spread their poison. Typical followers of Jeffrey Sachs aren’t relying on Tucker Carlson for their information. So Carlson hands it off to Sachs, who is essentially playing the role of ideological drug mule.

Elon Musk, the owner of X/Twitter and an adviser to president-elect Trump, reposted the interview himself online. Musk didn’t say anything specifically about the Israel portion, but a Musk post gives a superboost to anything looking for more networks to spread to.

So, yes, Carlson matters here. He is a superspreader of the brain mold that makes our politics and culture sicker, gloomier, angrier, and more extreme at a time when there is an eager market for it.

Antisemitism backfires on the perpetrators: Will the church ever learn?

Will the church ever learn? When it comes to Israel, it is debatable. First, the soon to stand-down-Archbishop of Canterbury effectively urged member states of the United Nations to back the call of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for Israel to withdraw from Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem, the heart of their territory.

Now the Pope is calling for a genocide investigation about Israel’s military actions in Gaza. But is the investigation justified? Leading American and British military men think otherwise. (Ret.) Col Richard Kemp (UK) and Prof Geoffrey Corn (USA) are just some who after fact-finding missions to Gaza have publicly exonerated Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor.

Why this fixation on Israel? Not for the first time Jewish people have asked why the church is largely silent regarding the murder of Africa’s Christians, for instance. At the heart of the problem is the chosenness of Israel.

“The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession. The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors…” (Deuteronomy 7:6-9 NIV) The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob chose the Jewish people, and the rest of the nations apparently have difficulty accepting this.

“If there were no chosen people, there would be no war in the Middle East,” claimed a Canadian lecturer. Hitler has been credited with saying there was no room for two chosen peoples.

Chosenness, though, comes with a price. So does antisemitism. It backfires on the perpetrators. A case in point is the recent resignation of former Archbishop of Canterbury, albeit for a completely unrelated issue – the cover-up of the abuse scandal. Could this be in part the outworking of Scripture? “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse…” (Genesis 12:3 NIV)

12/20 Links Pt1: Poland Says It Will Arrest Bibi If PM Attends Auschwitz Liberation Anniversary; Car ramming kills 11 German Christmas market; Sweden Stops Funding UNRWA

From Ian:

Poland Says It Will Arrest Bibi If Israeli PM Attends Auschwitz Liberation Anniversary

Polish officials said they will arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in compliance with a warrant from the International Criminal Court if he attends the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

"We are obliged to respect the provisions of the International Criminal Court," Władysław Bartoszewski, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, told Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita on Friday.

Dozens of world leaders are expected to attend the anniversary event on January 27, which will honor the estimated 1 million Jews who died in the Nazi genocide. Netanyahu is not due to attend the ceremony, according to Rzeczpospolita.

The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in November, which Israel appealed last week. Israel argued that the ICC does not have power over Israelis since the country is not bound to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the international court in 1998. Neither Israel nor the United States are parties to the treaty.

"The State of Israel denies the authority of the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the legitimacy of the arrest warrants," Netanyahu said in response to his arrest warrant.

U.S. Republican lawmakers also vowed to sanction the ICC and erode its legitimacy on the world stage following Netanyahu’s arrest warrant.

"The ICC has no credibility and these allegations have been refuted by the U.S. government," said Rep. Michael Waltz (R., Fla.), President-elect Donald Trump's incoming national security adviser. "Israel has lawfully defended its people & borders from genocidal terrorists. You can expect a strong response to the antisemitic bias of the ICC & UN come January."

Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment

Then there was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave the story a further epic dimension by returning to the original field of battle. Bibi, as you may recall, played the role of Obama’s piñata during the fight over the Iran deal, fated to go down to defeat by opposing the will of a sitting U.S. president on a foreign policy question that most Americans cared very little about. But this past summer, Netanyahu turned himself into the active party, with the means to reverse Obama’s achievement and unveil the origins of his power grab, by showing that the “peace deal” that he had sold to the American people—founded on the idea that Iran was itself a formidable adversary—was a mess of lies. Iran was not and never was a regional power, capable of “balancing” traditional American allies. It was a totalitarian shit hole regime that is deeply hated by its own people and throughout the region, entirely dependent on American backing in its efforts to gain a nuclear bomb.

Netanyahu’s decision to invade Rafah on May 6, 2024, was the culmination of two long and otherwise separate chains of events whose consequences will continue to reverberate throughout the Middle East, and also at home. Netanyahu had been promising to invade Rafah since February. The fact that he had not done so by May had become both a symbol of Israeli weakness and indecision in the face of a global onslaught of Jew-hatred, as well as the continuing solidity of the regional power structure established by Obama’s Iran deal. Within that structure, Israeli interests were held to be subordinate to those of Iran, which was allowed to finance, arm, and train large terrorist armies on Israel’s borders. Even when one of those armies decided to attack Israel in an orgy of murder and rape directed against civilians and recorded and broadcast live by the terrorists, Israel’s response was to be limited by its subordinate place in the regional hierarchy, underlining a reality in which Israel was fated to grovel before the whims of its American master—and would sooner or later most likely be ground into dust.

Israel could not strike Iran. Nor could it directly strike Hezbollah, the largest and most threatening of the Iranian-sponsored armies on its border, except to retaliate tit-for-tat for Hezbollah’s missile attacks on its civilian population. While it could invade Gaza, it could do so only while being publicly chided by U.S. officials from the president and the secretary of state for violating rules of wars that often appeared to be made up on the spot and were entirely divorced from common military practice and necessity. In particular, Israel was not to invade Rafah, a prohibition that ensured that Hamas could regularly bring in supplies and cash through the tunnels beneath its border with Egypt while ensuring the survival of its command-and-control structure, allowing it to reassume control of Gaza once the war was over, thereby assuring the success of U.S. policy, which was that Israel’s military invasion of Gaza must serve as the prelude to establishing a Palestinian state—an effort in which Hamas was a necessary partner, representing the Iranian interest, and must therefore be preserved in some part, even after being cut down to size.

Netanyahu’s decision to override the U.S. and take Rafah would turn out to be the prelude to a further series of stunning strategic moves which would enable Israel to smash the Iranian regional position and take full control of her own destiny. After conquering Rafah, in a campaign that the U.S. had said would be impossible without large-scale civilian casualties, Netanyahu proceeded to run the table in a series of rapid-fire blows whose only real point of comparison is Israel’s historic victory in the Six-Day War. In fact, given the odds he faced, and the magnitude of the victories he has won, that comparison may be unfair to Netanyahu, who has provided history with one of the very few examples of an isolated local client redrawing the strategic map of the region against the will of a dominant global power. Netanyahu killed terror chiefs Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah; spectacularly eliminated nearly the entire upper military and political echelons of both terror armies on his border, Hamas and Hezbollah; turned both Gaza and Hezbollah’s strongholds in southern Lebanon and Beirut into rubble; and finally, last week, took out the entire stock of modern tanks, aircraft, naval vessels and chemical weapons and missile factories accumulated over the past six decades by the Syrian military.

While the questions of how and when the Iranian regime might fall are for the moment unanswered, it seems clear that Obama’s imagined new regional order in the Middle East, centered on the imagined power of the ayatollahs, is now gone—having disintegrated on contact with Netanyahu’s unanticipated willingness and ability to aggressively defend his castle. What role Biden’s resentment of Obama, especially after the humiliation of his removal from the Democratic ticket, contributed to his continued public backing of Israel, and his repeated declarations of his own Zionism, can be left up to the individual imagination, and to the diligence of future historians. I doubt it was zero, though. Again, the fault in the Obama party’s scheme to use Biden as an empty figurehead was the same fault in his handling of Musk: hubris.

Khaled Abu Toameh: How the International Community Can Best Help the Palestinians

Had the international community held the Palestinian Authority (PA) accountable for financial and administrative corruption after the signing of the Oslo Accords 30 years ago, the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group would not have gained popularity among Palestinians.

Although many Palestinians support Hamas's policy of rejecting Israel's right to exist, the Islamist group's victory greatly reflected the desire of the Palestinian public to end corruption in the PA government and institutions.

The most common forms of corruption seem to be the offenses of favoritism, nepotism, embezzlement of public funds, breach of trust, abuse of power, bribery and money laundering.

The best way to undermine Hamas and help the Palestinians is by offering the people a better alternative to the Islamist movement. The current Palestinian Authority leadership is just not seen by many Palestinians as a better alternative to Hamas. That is because the United States, European Union and other donors are not banging on the table and demanding an end to the PA's authoritarian and corrupt conduct.

Australia has its own "Jewish Voice for Peace" type group named the "Jewish Council of Australia."

We are proud Jewish people in Australia with diverse histories, traditions and politics. We are committed to the values of tikkun olam (repairing the world), calling out injustice, challenging assumptions and promoting debate.

Pro-Israel Jewish organisations, that do not recognise the diversity of views among Australian Jews, do not speak for us.

While we have diverse views on many issues, we are united in our opposition to Israel’s continued policies aimed at the destruction of Palestinian life. We are opposed to the Israeli occupation and the prioritisation of the rights of Jewish people over the rights of Palestinians.

They don't spell out the details, but it appears they support replacing Israel with what Moammar Qaddafi used to call "Isratine" where Palestinians would be allowed to immigrate from all over the world to outvote Jews, and then vote to take away all Jewish rights.

The irony is that while they say they exist because mainstream Jewish organizations don't speak for them, these fringe Jews are calling themselves the Jewish Council of Australia. They are trying to represent themselves as being the voice of Australian Jewry - as if they represent the vast majority of Australian Jews who are Zionist!

According to a 2023 survey, 77% of Australian Jews - and 86% of those who answered - consider themselves Zionists, while only 13% said they were not. The number who identify as Zionist actually increased since the previous survey in 2017.

The "Jewish Council of Australia" is not only representing a fringe minority as mainstream Australian Jewry, but a shrinking minority!

The JCA is especially clueless by claiming that they oppose burning down synagogues when their partners in "peace" are the ones doing the burning. JCA says it wants "to work in solidarity with other groups facing bigotry and discrimination to fight all forms of racism." They are the antisemites, idiots!

If anything, Jews in Australia are more committed to Israel than Jews in most countries. Over 70% of Australian Jews have visited Israel three times or more, over 70% have relatives in Israel, over 70% have close friends in Israel.

Like other anti-Zionist fringe groups worldwide, the JCA is trying to deceive the larger public into thinking that Jews are divided about Israel. Their very name shows that they are the ones who are misrepresenting themselves, not the major Zionist Jewish organizations.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Axios has an article that seems almost panicky, titled "Media vs. Reporting," about how Elon Musk helped stop the government spending bill.

This week's epic fight over funding the government captures the power — and flaws — of the new information ecosystem.

Why it matters: Elon Musk and his followers on X proved they dominate the Republican media industrial complex — using a digital revolt to kill a spending bill, and open the door to a government shutdown. That revolt was powered by some false information, tweeted with total self-certainty.

"We aren't just the media here now. We are also the government," Donald Trump Jr. tweeted yesterday to his 13 million followers....

So when Musk tells X followers "You are the media," it's true they're part of his media. But that's different than declaring they're all reporters, trying to validate information before sharing it.

I've been doing what I do for a long enough time to know that reporters are not necessarily any better at reporting the truth than anyone else.

There are several advantages of listening to reporters over non-reporters:

1. They at least go through the motions of validating information before publishing. We do not know what exactly they do and how they do it, though.

2. They have at least one layer of oversight, namely, editors and maybe fact-checkers.

3. At least in theory, they don't want to pub publicly shamed for getting their facts wrong.

But the overriding problem with "reporting" is that it is still as subject to bias as anything else. That bias, when entrenched, means that the editing sand fact-checking themselves are also biased. If the entire ecosystem is bad, then you cannot trust anything that comes out of it.

The news media aren't the ecosystem, however. it is much bigger than that.

This week, Tablet published a long piece by David Samuels about how the Obama administration subverted the media to push its worldview and quash any other viewpoints. In this story, reporters are not the righteous, objective upholders of truth and democracy - they are part of the problem, and only cogs in the machine.

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.

This description reflects reality much more than Axios' simplistic "trustworthy reporters vs. untethered right-wing social media activists" dichotomy. Before Musk bought X, reporters and the companies that ran social media were on the same side, and opinions that disagreed with the prevailing conventional wisdom were actively silenced, like questioning COVID lockdowns or bringing up Hunter Biden's laptop.

Even the most careful, professional, ethical reporting cannot eliminate bias. Newspapers are beholden to advertisers, they must ensure they have access to newsmakers, they don't want to risk losing readership, they want to please their corporate owners as well as the activist members of their own newsrooms. The choice of stories to cover and what not to cover, and how prominent those stories are, reflect bias.

Why don't we see more stories about starvation or sexual abuse by aid workers in parts of Africa? Do black lives not matter? Not as much as ratings and circulation.

And it is not only journalism. Even science, which should be the field with the least amount of bias because the scientific method is meant to eliminate it, is still subject to bias. The choices of what topics to research, what kinds of research get funding, concerns over publishing papers that go against conventional wisdom and might lead to "cancellation" or other professional harm, have all been shown to affect the quality and objectivity of scientific research.

Of course, this is personal to me. I am my own reporter, editor, editorialist, designer, headline writer, publisher, illustrator, legal advisor, social media expert, and marketing department. To complicate things, I am anonymous. How can I get people to trust me? What is the best model for someone with no known experience, no resume, no history, to become a news media professional?

The answer is transparency.

I will show my sources. I will describe how I got from point A to point B. I try to give enough information in every article I write to allow anyone to check my work.

Moreover, I am upfront about my own biases. This is a pro-Israel blog, and I choose to cover stories from that direction. My choice of what to write comes from my biases and my mood at the moment. If I feel like I am burning out on one topic, I will switch to something else or to another medium like cartoons or memes or videos.

So EoZ is not a place for comprehensive news. But neither is any newspaper or TV show or website on Earth. At least I can tell you why I choose to cover a story and (for those who ask me) why I don't cover others - often the reason is simply that I don't have the time to do it properly, or that I'm not so interested at that moment, or that I feel others are covering it adequately and I have nothing to add.

Unlike other media, I don't have to please my boss, my advertisers, my peers (although there is some peer pressure as with anywhere else.) I am very appreciative of donations but I do not cover or avoid covering any topics because of them or the threat to withhold them.

So even though most of you don't know my name, I believe I am more transparent about these things than any major media outlet is, where they pretend that they have no biases and no external pressure to cover or not to cover a story.

Transparency is the key to being able to trust any source, whether it is a newspaper or a Facebook post or a scientific paper or a Wikipedia entry or AI.

The Axios story does get this right:

That puts even more pressure on you as a news consumer to discern what and who you can trust for reliable, actionable information. It demands skepticism and patience when hot news hits fast.
You need to be skeptical of people or sources unless you feel confident they routinely get it right. You need to be patient in not overreacting to — or oversharing — stories that hit your dopamine button.

We should be teaching students how to check their own facts, how to put things in context, how to understand the motivations of the source - and there are always motivations - how to relate the story with history, and how to be skeptical especially when the story fits in with your own biases. In short, how to think.

When a story like the drones over New Jersey comes out, it helps to compare them to UFO sightings in the past - and how most of those have more mundane explanations. Occam's razor is very useful for taking a first pass at understanding an event.

So is life experience. If you are too young to know about the waves of UFO sightings in the past, then you don't have the proper context to examine another story of unknown lights mysteriously appearing in the sky.

And, perhaps most of all, is humility. Everyone has a field they are experts in, and have seen how others misjudge it based on their own ignorance. But those same people believe the are experts on military matters or psychology or history based on little more than TikTok videos.

Misinformation is not something to be trivialized. It is a major problem. But it is a potential problem with every news source, present company included. Only educated consumers of news can pressure the news sources to do the right thing.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

House antisemitism report mentions that the Department of Homeland Security isn't doing its job to deport members of terror groups

On Thursday, House Republicans issued the House Antisemitism Staff Report which concentrated on how colleges and universities didn't protect Jewish students since October 7.

Beyond the focus on universities, though, it also has a section on how the Department of Homeland Security is not doing its job to deport foreigners, mostly students, who violate the law by their associations with terror organizations.

The report says:

The Committee on the Judiciary has jurisdiction over the Biden-Harris Administration’s enforcement of federal immigration law. This jurisdiction includes the adjudication, issuance, and revocation of nonimmigrant visas, such as student visas.

Certain conduct during the antisemitic protests may render aliens removable from the United States. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”), an alien is inadmissible to and removable from the United States if the alien “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” Despite the clear statutory language, in October 2023, only three weeks after Hamas’s attacks on Israel, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas declined to state whether foreign students should “have their visas revoked” if they “advocate for the elimination of Israel and attacks on Jewish individuals.” Instead, Secretary Mayorkas claimed that “it is a matter of law and it requires a legal interpretation,” noting that DHS was “assessing [the] legal assertion” that those aliens could have their visas revoked.

The Committee request that the Department of Homeland Security list all of the people who violated the law and are being deported because of their association with terror groups. After some stonewalling, the DHS answered the question: Zero.

Keep in mind that in October, the US declared Samidoun - which has been instrumental in many antisemitic protests - to be a terrorist organization, a fundraising front for the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Yet even before the designation, there were other reasons to investigate foreign student protesters. Not only does the law say that aliens associated with terrorism are inadmissible to the US, but also "Any immigrant who is or has been a member of or affiliated with the Communist or any other totalitarian party (or subdivision or affiliate thereof), domestic or foreign, is inadmissible."

Most of the major protests have been organized by communist groups like ANSWER (it is linked to the Party for Socialism and Liberation which describes itself as communist), and Samidoun is also linked to many communist groups itself.

In short, if the DHS wanted to protect Jews on campus, it has plenty of ammunition to not only get rid of foreign participants and supporters of antisemitic protests but also to send a message of intolerance for intolerance.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi pretended to reveal Israel's secret plans for the region.

According to him, Israel plans to invade some 50 miles into Syria to reach Suwaida, where they will meet with the American "occupiers" who supposedly hold vast swaths of land there. From there they will establish what he says they call "David's Corridor" to reach the Kurdish sections on the Euphrates.

The ultimate Zionist goal (with the Americans) is to take over Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, according to al-Houthi.

This is a pattern. Arabs accuse Israel of planning something that no sane Israeli is interested in doing, and then they take credit for dissuading Israel with their might and perseverance when Israel doesn't do what it never planned on doing in the first place.

It started with the rumor of the Mufti of Jerusalem that has never ended - that Jews were planning to demolish the Al Aqsa Mosque and build a new Temple there. This rumor is over a hundred years old, and the Arab masses still believe it, even though Israel could have destroyed Al Aqsa and the rest of the Muslim sites a thousand times over by now. But the reason, we are told, is because clerics tell believers to go there and "defend Al Aqsa."

The Greater Israel rumor is fueled by the crazed claim that the two blue stripes on the Israeli flag symbolize the Nile and the Euphrates - says that Israel plans to expand to encompass most of the Middle East. Israel having given back land it controlled for peace is not proof the accusation is wrong - it is merely proof that Israel makes tactical moves to make it look like it wants peace when its real goals of domination are obvious.

Or the perennial favorite that Israel is "Judaizing" Jerusalem. In fact, Israel protects Muslim archaeological treasures and has discovered and preserved some important ones in Jerusalem.

No rumor is too bizarre for the Arab antisemitic world not to believe. Israel controls the weather! Israel has weaponized viruses to sicken Muslims! Israel sends Palestinians chewing gum that will make them sex-crazed! Israel steals organs from dead Palestinians! Israel has a weapon that vaporizes Gaza civilians!

When the rumors don't pan out, that proves not only that the strong Arab world can stop these plans, but also that the Jews are too weak and frightened to implement them fully.

After all, the thinking goes, if the Arabs had this power they wouldn't hesitate to commit genocide on the Jews; when the Jews don't do the same to Arabs there must be a logical reason that fits in with their projection.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

My cartoon book "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" gets a great review by @BenRothke in The Jewish Link

My new book or cartoons, "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!," just received a glowing review by Ben Rothke in The Jewish Link, a weekly newspaper with a readership of 100,000.

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The Elder of Ziyon is one of the most important pro-Israel bloggers. You can read my Jewish Link interview with him at https://bit.ly/4gVMUyT and my review of his amazing book at https://bit.ly/3ZVBvsT.

The thousands of posts on his blog detail the bias and lies spread about Israel. For example, he made it eminently clear how Hamas had infiltrated UNRWA a decade before mass media started to report on it. His many posts about that malevolent U.N. agency led me to write my post about them on Medium: https://bit.ly/41BIXef.

EoZ is back with a great new book, “He’s An Anti-Zionist Too! Cartoons by Elder of Ziyon.” In 2018, he started adding his own captions to New Yorker-style cartoons. This was meant to satirize people who think they are sophisticated, yet are clueless about Israel and the Middle East.

EoZ writes that a problem with satire, especially when discussing “anti-Zionists,” is that often their reality overtakes the satirical versions. Cartoons are one way to expose the insanity, hypocrisy and hate that animate these people. And that is something he does exceptionally well in the nearly 150 cartoons in this amazing book.

This book brilliantly details the utter hypocrisy and absurdities of those who mindlessly criticize Israel—from Amnesty International to CNN and more. EoZ’s sharp wit and insight make this a most entertaining and enlightening read.

The Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary is given annually for “a distinguished portfolio of editorial cartoons or other illustrated work characterized by political insight, editorial effectiveness or public service value.” These cartoons by EoZ are certainly worthy of that prize.

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Buy your copy today, and get more as gifts for the Zionists in your life!

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

12/19 Links Pt2: Phillips: The diplomatic crisis between Israel and Ireland; Antisemitism is a public health crisis; Jesus Wasn’t Palestinian

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The diplomatic crisis between Israel and Ireland

Why are the Irish so bigoted against Israel and the Jewish people?

Ireland has a deplorable history. As Sa’ar said, it was at best neutral during World War II. In 1945, the Irish leader Éamon de Valera sent his condolences to the German people over Hitler’s death.

One reason often given is the country’s Catholicism with its ancient history of theological antisemitism. But this can’t be the whole reason since other Catholic countries aren’t suffused with this degree of venom towards Israel and the Jews.

An important further reason is that the Irish identify with the Palestinian Arabs as perceived victims of Israeli “colonial” oppression just as they identify the Irish as victims of British “colonial” oppression.

Some point to the critical influence in Ireland of Sinn Féin, the party that served as the political fig leaf for the Irish Republican Army. The IRA waged a terrorist war against Britain and the Protestants of U.K.-run Northern Ireland on and off from early in the last century and was responsible for a campaign of bomb attacks in disturbances known as the “Troubles” from the late 1960s to 1998.

The IRA received massive arms shipments from Libya in the 1980s, and was funded and trained by the Palestine Liberation Organization. After the IRA disarmed in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams met Hamas leaders in 2006 and 2009.

According to Irish journalist and anti-extremism researcher, Dr. Eoin Lenihan, the links in the Irish mind between Israeli and British “colonialists” and between the Palestinian and Irish “resistance” resulted from Adams yoking together Arab and Irish nationalism under the banner of revolutionary socialism.

This permeated more widely, he says, because, unlike other countries, Ireland doesn’t have a tradition of centrist politics. Its two big parties, Fiánna Fail and Fine Gael, have no core values; so they veer towards wherever the wind is blowing—in this case, Sinn Féin’s revolutionary leftism and the Israel-bashing NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty.

Through Sinn Fein’s influence, Ireland has become enmeshed with the international radical left and its promotion of intersectionality and victim culture. Under this dogma, the Jews can never be victims because they are seen as all-powerful, controlling the Western world in their own interests to the disadvantage of everyone else.

Victim culture is therefore itself innately anti-Jew. So there’s a double source of Jew-hatred in Ireland—both from its Catholic heritage and from the secular religion of universalism and victim culture.

Ireland is simply a danger to Israel and the Jewish people. It should be treated as a pariah until and unless it decides to support civilization rather than its nemesis.

Biden admin, universities failed to crack down on antisemitism in ‘disturbing pattern’ after Oct. 7, scathing House GOP report finds

The Biden administration, top universities and medical institutions utterly failed to crack down on antisemitism that exploded in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, according to a scathing House Republican report released Thursday, which laid bare “systemic” and “astounding” shortcomings.

Six GOP-led House committees declared in a joint report that “antisemitism has been allowed to fester unchecked” due to “a disturbing pattern of defensiveness and denial,” according to a copy exclusively obtained by The Post.

“Across the nation, Jewish Americans have been harassed, assaulted, intimidated, and subjected to hostile environments — violations that stand in stark contrast to America’s fundamental values, including a foundational commitment to religious freedom for all,” the 42-page report says.

“The failure of our federal government departments and agencies is astounding.”

The outpouring of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish remarks and actions tested America’s free speech precepts and the fact that hate speech is generally lawful in the United States, unless it amounts to harassment or is an aggravating factor in a criminal act such as assault.

The Republican-led report points out, however, that federal law generally prevents recipients of taxpayer funds from tolerating discrimination — allowing a foothold to leverage recipients to stiffen policies on campuses and at medical settings should federal officials so choose.

In almost every case, institutions allegedly took almost no disciplinary action against alleged antisemites and made no changes to codes of conduct, and faced no loss of grants to stop the rapidly spreading Jew hatred.

The report focuses heavily on Columbia University and its recommendations urge federal agencies to use money to incentivize more stringent anti-discrimination policies — and also proposes potential legislation to that effect.

“The executive branch should aggressively enforce Title VI [anti-discrimination rules] and hold schools accountable for their failures to protect students. Universities that fail to fulfill the obligations upon which their federal funding is predicated or whose actions make clear they are unfit stewards of taxpayer dollars should be treated accordingly,” the Republican panels said.

Commuting federal death sentences would include Tree of Life shooter, McConnell says

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) urged U.S. President Joe Biden not to heed the call in a letter from 21 retired, liberal judges to commute the sentences of all of those on federal death row.

“President Biden’s decision earlier this month to pardon his son may well have set a unique and unfortunate precedent. But abuse of the presidential pardon doesn’t stop there,” the Kentucky senator said on the Senate floor on Dec. 18. “Last week, the president went on to commute 1,500 sentences, and the way liberal activists see it, he should have done even more.”

“More than 20 liberal retired judges—including the Boston radical, who recommended the disgraced pro-crime U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins—have now urged the president to turn his eye to federal death sentences,” McConnell said.

“If the president heeded these former judges’ call, it would mean commuting the death sentences of the perpetrator of the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh,” the senator added.

Robert Bowers was convicted of murdering 11 people at the Tree of Life*Or Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh on the morning of Oct. 27, 2018.

12/19 Links Pt1: The ‘Machinery of Death’ and Its Apologists; Israel calls HRW ‘genocide’ report a ‘blood libel’; IDF hits Houthi targets in Yemen after missile fired at central Israel

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The ‘Machinery of Death’ and Its Apologists

The sheer scale of the horror in Syria is going to be almost incomprehensible. And the names of many of the missing will never be known.

Organized mass atrocities require enormous bureaucratic systems. “The graves were prepared in an organized manner — the truck would come, unload the cargo it had, and leave,” one farmer told Reuters. He lived near a former Syrian military base and would often see refrigerated trucks full of bodies driving to a nearby cemetery with a full military escort.

Digging and then expanding such graves can be decade-long projects, as satellite images showed. And that means the UN is only part of the problem, because the world cannot plausibly feign ignorance. The anti-Western propaganda on campuses and in textbooks and flooding through the discourse of the activist class is being disseminated precisely for the benefit of the regimes digging those mass graves.

It may get tiresome to keep hearing questions like “Where were the tentifada protests and the flotillas to Syria?” But the answer is important. The students and activists marching for Gaza are not overlooking the Syrian victims; they are actively on the side of those committing the atrocities. Waving a Hezbollah flag is an act of anti-Israel incitement, yes. But it is not only that. It is also a show of support for the “machinery of death” putting Syrian civilians in the ground.

At moments like this we see the activists and protesters who have enabled these crimes for who they are. They aren’t just now finding out what goes on in Sednaya prison and others like it. They did not back a regime that turned out to be evil. They chose to back an evil regime, eyes wide open. The Syrian civil war has been going on for nearly a decade and a half. Eleven years ago, the Obama administration announced to the world that, yes, Assad had used poison gas on families trying to hide in their basement:

“The situation profoundly changed… on August 21, when Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people, including hundreds of children. The images from this massacre are sickening: Men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas. Others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath. A father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk. On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons, and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off-limits — a crime against humanity, and a violation of the laws of war.”

The Iranian empire responsible for the barbaric crimes in Syria, in Gaza, in Lebanon may be receding, but now is not the time to look away. Now is the time to sear into our memories just how low Tehran’s apologists are capable of sinking.

Middle East Scholar: "The Sunnis Can Smell Blood"

Dr. Mordechai Kedar interviewed by Nadav Shragai (Israel Hayom) Lt.-Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar, 72, a frequent guest on Al-Jazeera, served for 25 years in IDF Military Intelligence. Now closely monitoring developments in Syria, he said, "Iran has abandoned its proxies - Hamas, Hizbullah, and Assad. The glue that has held the Shi'ite alliance together is now disintegrating, and the Sunnis can smell blood."

"I sense that Iraq, too, might disavow the Iranian presence there in the not-too-distant future, and we could even witness the fall of the Houthis in Yemen. The events in Syria have provided a real boost to the Sunnis everywhere, encouraging them to get organized against the Iranian presence."

"We need to encourage the minorities in Iran to rise up against the Persian hegemony....There is no Iranian people. There are Persians and other large groups, such as Baluchis, Arabs, Kurds, Azeris, and Turkmen, alongside an additional 40 or so smaller groups....In Iran today, at least 80 out of the 90 million people there are over the moon about what has been happening in Syria, as this is a blow to the Iranian government and its plans to spread out over the entire Middle East."

In Syria, "we have exchanged radical Alawites for Sunni jihadis, who are backed by a megalomaniac in the form of [Turkish President] Erdogan, who provides refuge for Hamas, who talks in favor of Hamas, from his land Hamas mastermind terrorist attacks carried out in Israel, who has sworn to revive the days of the Ottoman Empire....Only last July, he made a clear threat to invade Israel." Regarding the hostage talks, he said, "Hamas will not release all of them. The hostages are their life insurance policy. That is the reason why, to date, they have yet to provide Israel with a complete list of names of all of them. In any deal, they will seek to keep hold of a certain number of hostages."

"Even after a deal, they will definitely suddenly discover some additional hostages, holed up somewhere or other, with some other organization or local clan, hostages of whom they really 'had no idea.' They have absolutely no intention of returning them all."

Reasons to Be Hopeful

In a crisis, you are going to want an Israeli on your side. In times of difficulty, Israelis have a way of stepping up to help that goes way beyond the norm.

Whether you were a farmer who couldn't get the crop in on time, the partner of a reservist struggling to support the family, or a business from the north or south in trouble, Israelis rushed in their hundreds of thousands to help.

During the first two weeks of the Oct. 7 war, more than 1,000 civil initiatives emerged across Israel and 48.6% of the Israeli population engaged in volunteering, according to a report from Hebrew University.

In addition, locally-based international humanitarian aid organizations continued to send out dedicated and trained staff to help in all sorts of crisis situations.

In January, SmartAID sent help to earthquake-hit Japan, then to Taiwan after another earthquake in April.

In October, SmartAID provided solar power units and communication systems to communities in Florida and North Carolina in the wake of two devastating hurricanes.

In June, IsraAID sent help to Papua New Guinea after a deadly landslide. It also expanded access to safe water in Ukraine and drilled new bore holes in Kenya after the country suffered its worst drought in 40 years.

Israeli villages and towns near Gaza are finally rebuilding. Destroyed buildings are being bulldozed and rebuilt, volunteers are cleaning and clearing, residents are returning, businesses reopening.

Since the ceasefire with Hizbullah on Nov. 27, the north has also seen signs of recovery.

Citizens are beginning to return home, communities are regrouping, farms are getting back to normal, businesses are reopening, and rebuilding is beginning.

Israel's air defense systems more than proved themselves in the last 15 months. According to Rafael CEO Yoav Turgeman, the Iron Dome and David's Sling systems intercepted more targets than all other air defense systems combined in the past 50 years.

In one year since Oct. 7, there had been 26,000 rockets, missiles and drones launched at Israel - 13,200 from Gaza, 12,400 from Lebanon, 400 from Iran, 180 from Yemen, and 60 from Syria.

Democrats Fear Trump Will Weaponize Defense Dept Against America's External Foes (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

Washington, December 19 - Senior Biden administration officials expressed their concerns today that as part of an anticipated revamping of government institutions that the president-elect and his associates have promised, the federal agencies that oversee US military operations might be repurposed for missions and policies aimed at undermining or curtailing opponents of the US and aiding her allies.

Outgoing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has cautioned media and government figures ever since Election Day that Donald Trump will weaponize the US Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, Space Force, and other forces under Department aegis against America's enemies, in a sharp break with policy under outgoing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the latter of whom Trump defeated in the election.

"That's not what government institutions are for," insisted Austin. "Government institutions, as Presidents Obama and Biden have repeatedly modeled for us, serve the primary purpose of containing, weakening, and ultimately eliminating domestic political opposition. That can be through the Department of Justice, obviously, but the Internal Revenue Service of the Department of the Treasury also has an important role to play in targeting both individuals and organizations hostile to the Obama-Biden vision for America."

"It's dangerous to weaponize this department in particular against our rivals and foes," he continued. "I dread the thought of sanctions enforcement actually taking place against Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, for example, or their facing American-led consequences for their decades-long destabilization of Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Iran, and the Palestinian Territories. Perish the thought of US military action to block the export of Iranian oil to China, or Iranian drones to Russia!"

Other defense officials fear that Trump might remove any restrictions Biden had placed on Israel or Ukraine in confronting enemies of the US. "If, as threatened, Trump insists on full supply of Israel to achieve victory, or Ukraine to strike anywhere in Russia," acknowledged one senior Pentagon official, "then our enemies might be effectively deterred. Our defense contractors would never stand for such a thing. Also, the grievance narratives that drive both Right and Left politics will have to find new conflicts to carry the valence necessary for grifting and generating clout. We can't have that."

Administrators at the Department of Defense and in the various Commands of the military have already ordered plans drawn up to defend against an anticipated "weaponization" of the Department that they expect will take the form of eliminating DEI programs.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)