Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Electronic Intifada

Showing posts with label Electronic Intifada. Show all posts

Monday, October 16, 2017

Guess who is to blame for ISIS terrorists in Gaza? (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

A few days ago, Ali Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada published a story about the situation in Gaza that started out with the untimely demise of Nidal al-Jaafari, a recently married 29-year-old, who “was killed on 17 August in a suicide bombing near Gaza’s boundary with Egypt.”

Since Nidal al-Jaafari was a member of the Qassam Brigades, he would have certainly been among those who would celebrate any suicide bombing targeting Israelis. But other Islamist terror groups love suicide bombings just as much as Hamas, and Jaafari was killed in a “bombing [that] was attributed to the Islamic State group.”

Unsurprisingly, Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada doesn’t mention terrorism in this story that is really about one terrorist group – namely Hamas – being forced to fight another terrorist group – ISIS – in order to appease the Egyptians.

The reader learns that already in June, “Hamas also began clearing a buffer zone along its boundary with Egypt” – and the link leads to an article in Ha’aretz that notes that this “will force a lot of families out of their homes.” Well, if even one Palestinian faced the prospect of being forced to move just a few yards because of Israel, Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada would have had plenty to say about this terrible hardship…

But now that Egypt is forcing Hamas to confront ISIS supporters in Gaza, it’s of course time to trot out the usual variations of the Nazi slogan “The Jews are our misfortune” – so here goes:

“Some also see an Israeli hand in the area.

Akram Attalla, a political analyst and columnist for al-Ayyam newspaper, speculated that Islamic State in Gaza and the Sinai is funded by Israel in order to undermine Hamas.

‘Israel is aware that the Palestinians have adapted to the division among them and the siege,’ he told The Electronic Intifada. ‘Hence, Israel is trying to create groups that can wear Hamas down.’

Omar Jaara, an Israel affairs expert and lecturer at An-Najah National University in the West Bank, echoed this theory. Islamic State, he said, is a ‘tool controlled by Israel to maintain instability’ at the boundary with Egypt. As the group’s threat to Egypt grows, he added, it becomes a ‘wild card’ that Israel can wield against Hamas.”

Well, if even an “Israel affairs expert and lecturer at An-Najah National University” thinks Israel is behind ISIS, there must be something to it, right? And indeed, I think no one can deny that this view reflects as much “expertise” as Dr. Omar Ja’ara’s amazing performance on Palestinian TV a few years ago, when he explained that “Moses the Muslim” led “the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine from the nation of giants led by Goliath.” As he said: “This is our logic and this is our culture.”

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Latest "human shield" lie debunked (update)

Al Ahram (Egypt) reports:

Israeli forces used a 17-year-old Palestinian as a human shield while trying to disperse a protest in Abu Dis in the West Bank this Friday, the Electronic Intifada website reported.

Independent journalist Huthifa Jamous took pictures of the incident and shared a video shot by another observer, Kate A, a journalist, on his Facebook page.

The boy, called Muhammad R. by Electronic Intifada, is marched out of an armoured vehicle by Israeli forces. With his hands tied with a single plastic cord and raised above his head, and his shirt pulled up, he is led out to face out-of-frame protestors.

Three soldiers then raise their weapons, and shoot twice in the direction of the protesters. The youth is then forced back to the vehicle. One of the soldiers then flashes the V-for-victory sign.

According to the Jerusalem Media Center and Ma'an news agency, the incident occurred when at least 500 Palestinians in Abu Dis held a protest expressing solidarity with Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike. Israeli forces fired teargas and rubber bullets at them. The protestors responded by hurling stones and empty bottles.

They show this video as proof:

We have seen many times that an event might be photographed accurately, but the caption lies. This is the video equivalent.

Here is a classic case of an ambiguous event occurring where the framework is given by an anti-Israel source - and gullible journalists believe that the video supports the report, when in fact it is the opposite.

Think for a second. How effective is a "human shield" if it is used for only a couple of seconds and then put back in the police van?

Just a quick unbiased view of the video indicates that the soldiers are showing the rioter to his comrades. Before I researched this my guess was that the rioters started a rumor that the teenager (assuming he is a teen) had died and the soldiers were proving that he was not injured.

Which was what indeed happened, as the Jerusalem Post reported after the incident:

Border Police spokesman Idan Iluz said Saturday that the officers were not using the teen as a human shield, and instead had pulled him out of the jeep in order to show the protesters that the boy had not been harmed.

Iluz said that a rumor had made its way among the demonstrators that the boy had been injured, and as a result they began to react violently, throwing rocks at officers.

He said that not long after the boy was taken out of the car and shown to the protesters, the situation calmed down considerably.

A look at the fuller version of the video shows also that the "Jerusalem Media Center" - which is QudsMedia.com, a site that lies continuously, often about "Jews storming the Temple Mount" - is lying here as well as to the order of events. It is clear that the stone-throwing and rioting came first, and the tear gas later.

You can see that the IDF even temporarily withdrew from the dangerous stone rioting, as the rioters yelled "Allah Akbar". This supports the idea that the IDF only returned to show that the youth had been unharmed.

This incident also illustrates how Al Ahram believes the lies of Israel haters without the slightest critical thinking, or even a five second search through the Internet to see the Israeli statement about the incident, even though it published this two days later. Which means that this respected Egyptian paper acts exactly like Hamas in its reporting.

(h/t Israel Muse)

UPDATE: Now Electronic Intifada is walking back the "human shield" claim (even though they keep it in the headline) and restating the "crime" by saying that the IDF exposed the youth to danger by bringing him to a dangerous place. Which is funny, because I thought rock throwing was "non-violent resistance."

They also say, implausibly, that the beginning of the video happened after the part where the teen is shown. Sure, everyone edits things backwards.

I cannot answer why the IDF shot a couple of rounds in the latter part of the video, but clearly this is not a "human shield" situation and the initial lies by EI were picked up by media worldwide. Which is, of course, what they intended, truth be damned.

Ilan Pappe's dishonesty shines through

In Electronic Intifada, anti-Israel historian Ilan Pappe - who has been proven a liar and a fraud more than once - gets hot and bothered by a quote by Shimon Peres:

In a regal interview he gave the Israeli press on the eve of the state’s ” Independence Day,” Shimon Peres, the current president of Israel, said the following:

“I remember how it all began. The whole state of Israel is a millimeter of the whole Middle East. A statistical error, barren and disappointing land, swamps in the north, desert in the south, two lakes, one dead and an overrated river. No natural resource apart from malaria. There was nothing here. And we now have the best agriculture in the world? This is a miracle: a land built by people” (Maariv, 14 April 2013).

This fabricated narrative, voiced by Israel’s number one citizen and spokesman, highlights how much the historical narrative is part of the present reality. ...Peres’ denial of the native Palestinians and his reselling in 2013 of the landless people mythology exposes the cognitive dissonance in which he lives: he denies the existence of approximately twelve million people living in and near to the country to which they belong.

The entire rest of the article rails against Peres' supposed denial of the existence of Arabs in British Mandate Palestine.

Is Peres denying the existence of Arabs in Palestine before 1948?

Of course not. He was talking about natural resources, nothing else. After all, would anyone interpret Peres' statement "There was nothing" to mean that Jerusalem or Jaffa didn't exist? Isn't that what "nothing here" means - if you are a narrow-minded idiot who chooses to interpret the words without context?

This is the state of the art in Israel criticism today. A celebrated author and historian, writing in the premiere showcase for anti-Israel literature, makes stuff up - and no one in the anti-Israel community has a trace of integrity to call him on it, or to demand that EI pull the article based on a lie. There is no pushback in the "progressive" community against this transparent falsehood.

Nothing.

Because hating Israel is a religion to these fanatics, and far more important than mere honesty.

Poor Ali Abunimah, upset at Anonymous

Ali Abunimah, of Electronic Intifada, is upset with "Anonymous":

M. arrived at work last Friday morning in a city in the north of present-day Israel. As she walked in, one of her colleagues approached her with a look of concern and asked her to step outside. “Your name is on a list of Mossad agents,” M. recalls the colleague saying.

“ ‘Then congratulate me,’ I said, thinking this was all a strange joke,” M. recalls responding.

But then M. found that many other people at her workplace were talking about a list, a file obtained by hackers and circulated on social media purporting to contain the names of agents of Israel’s notorious spy and assassination agency Mossad.

The vast majority of names of the list are Hebrew names of Israelis.

“I looked at the list, it had my name on it, my ID number and other details. By the end of the day everyone knew about it and was talking about it.”

M., however, is a Palestinian, a citizen of Israel, with an Arabic name – although like all the other names on the list her name was written in the Hebrew alphabet. She was stunned.

The false accusation or suspicion of being an Israeli agent can be absolutely devastating for any Palestinian.

...It is clear that circulating this list was not harmless. It does real damage to real people like M. and the people she knows, Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are guilty of no greater crime than doing what many of us do with little thought every day: buying something online, or perhaps, filling in a form to get a coupon.

Now, you can look at the last paragraph and think that Abunimah is saying that hacking the personal information of Israeli Jews - credit cards, email and home addresses - is admirable, and only hacking the Israeli Arab information is reprehensible.

Which would be textbook anti-semitic.

But it is possible that the reason that he is upset over only the Arab names revealed by the low-level Anonymous hack is because only the Arabs on the list are in real danger.

From certain people who would consider anyone who "collaborates" with Israel to be deserving of death.

Who might those potential murderers be?

Hmmmm.

Abunimah apparently doesn't have a problem with the Arabs who target other Arabs for being "collaborators." He seems to fully support that.

He is only upset at people who leak information that could lead Arabs to mistakenly target other Arabs for being "collaborators." That would be awful!

It would really be a shame if Abunimah, one of Mossad's best agents, were to be exposed....Oops!

(h/t WarpedMirrorPMB)

The most expensive, expansive anti-Israel initiative just ended - and no one noticed (update)

This weekend was the final session of the "Russell Tribunal on Palestine."

"Jury"

Founded four years ago, the "tribunal" was from the start meant to be a kangaroo court to damn Israel. Using rabid Israel-haters like Roger Waters, Cynthia McKinney, Ronnie Kasrils and a host of others to lend it legitimacy, it would hold sessions in different cities and pretend to call "witnesses" to be evaluated by "jurors" who were all in on the scam from the start.

It held its first session in Barcelona in 2010 and from there went to London, Cape Town and New York, each time receiving less and less coverage.

This weekend, the "tribunal" wrapped up its pre-determined findings in Brussels. What was supposed to be its crowning achievement ended with barely a whisper, as there has been literally no news coverage of its final weekend.

I tuned into their webcast this morning to see that the final session had less than three dozen viewers - worldwide.

Keep in mind that this effort at delegitimizing Israel has cost hundreds of thousands of euros. Their budget for the Cape Town session alone was €190,000, so almost certainly the entire sorry exercise cost close to a million euros, paid by far-left anti-Israel extremists.

For all that money, effort and attempts to recruit D-list celebrities, the only articles about the sessions themselves can be found in the echo chamber of the anti-Israel sites like Mondoweiss. Even 972mag and Electronic Intifada criticized the sessions, for differing reasons.

This weekend, the final session wan't even mentioned by Mondoweiss either!

The Zionist community gets upset, and rightly so, at these constant attempts to delegitimize Israel. We are so often on the defensive that we don't always notice that the haters generally have very little support outside their own circles.

In this case, however, the "Russell Tribunal on Palestine" was by any yardstick an expensive, time consuming, epic failure.

UPDATE: AFP did decide to do a generic story. Its best quote comes at the end:

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AFP: "They can write what they like, they only represent themselves. It's a private body with no legal or political weight and has moral weight only among its members."

"It has no political or legal significance, it is an ideological and propaganda document that people write for their like-minded friends."

Israelis eating hummus is now a war crime, according to Electronic Intifada

Ha'aretz has a food column called Modern Manna. This week it scored an interview withe the White House chef, asking him if he makes any foods that could be considered Jewish or Israeli, presumably because that critical information would help President Obama get more Jewish votes.

The entire column is written from Ha'aretz' viewpoint, even saying in a tongue-in-cheek fashion:

So, if Obama loves hummus it must mean he loves us Israelis too! Israelis, self-acclaimed hummus connoisseurs, prefer their hummus with fresh pita bread, but even they have learned to accept the American usage of hummus as a dip for veggies.

Enter Ali Abumineh, famous Israel-hater and blogger at Electronic Intifada. Apparently, the very mention of Obama together with hummus in an utterly vacuous Haaretz article is enough to make him foam at the mouth:

Notice how Israelis are positioned as the “connoisseurs” and arbiters of how hummus should and should not be correctly consumed.

There is absolutely no mention of the Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian or other indigenous Arab origins of these foods in the interview, where hummus, its key ingredient tahini, and the flat bread Palestinians typically eat with them are easily subsumed into “Jewish foods” used to celebrate Zionist occasions...

Is this 2000 year old olive press "Palestinian"?

He then rails against how he thinks Israelis have stolen "Palestinian" foods and culture, and how the Obama White House is complicit in that awful activity of Israelis stealing foods that are all generically Middle Eastern.

Keep in mind that the chef didn't say a word about how these foods were Israeli. Only the Ha'aretz writer did.

Abuminah links back to this equally ridiculous posting where he claims that these foods are "Palestinian" - they aren't - and that Israelis are stealing olive oil cultivation from Palestinian Arabs as well, even though Jews were cultivating olive oil in that exact spot way thousands of years before any "Palestinians" existed.

To wrap it all up, Abuninah tweeted his magnum opus about a stupid Haaretz columnist saying that White House hummus is somehow Israeli this way:

Yes - Israeli pride in their Middle Eastern food is a war crime!

The mystery isn't that Israel-haters are this stupendously idiotic. The mystery is why so many people in the real world seem to regard them as anything less than stupendously idiotic.

Another fake BDS "victory"

Electronic Intifada is claiming that a website called Creative Time Summit has removed its "Sponsors" page - because one of the sponsors is Israeli and the Summit isbeing boycotted by some anti-Israel groups for doing something so horrible:

Update: Creative Time Summit “partner” page showing Israeli group removed

In light of the boycott actions mentioned above, by Mosireen and Rebel Diaz, it would appear that the Creative Time Summit has attempted to scrub its website of the evidence of its partnership with Israeli government funded Israeli Center for Digital Art.

Luckily, we kept screenshots. You can see the page as it appeared before, whereas now a click on the link brings up “page not found.”

So, the Israel-haters actually think that Creative Time Summit would delete all of their partners just to avoid mentioning Israel?

Now, look at the two screenshots above and the menu under the title. Notice how the first says "Partners" and the second, in the same position, says "Sites."

Clicking on "Sites" shows that website simply renamed "Summit Partnerships" to "Summit Sites", and the page prominently mentioning the Israeli Center for Digital Art is prominently displayed exactly as it was before:

So there is no demotion or boycott of the Israeli sponsor, just a renaming of every sponsor to a featured site.

But don't tell the idiots at Electronic Intifada. They seemed so happy.

Rachel Corrie DID get college credit for joining ISM

Yesterday, I asked whether Rachel Corrie received college credit for joining the ISM in Gaza. I based this on a 2003 article that said that all Evergreen students in Rafah were getting independent study credit.

It looks like Corrie had set up her trip to Gaza as an independent study course at Evergreen. A lengthy 2003 article in Mother Jones tracing Corrie's journey says:

In the fall of her senior year a friend returned from ﬁve months in Gaza and talked enthusiastically to Corrie about the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian activist group founded just the year before. A motley collection of anti-globalization and animal-rights activists, self-described anarchists and seekers, most in their 20s, the ISM upholds the right of Palestinians to carry out "armed struggle" and seeks "to establish divestment campaigns in the U.S. and Europe to put economic pressure on Israel the same way the international com- munity put pressure [on] South Africa during the apartheid regimes."

...Corrie proposed an independent-study program in which she would travel to Gaza, join the ISM team, and initiate a "sister city" project between Olympia and Rafah.

So indeed, Corrie went to Gaza with the expectation of receiving college credit for her work.

I still don't know which of her teachers sponsored her study program. Footnotes in the book based on her journals list three radical anti-Israel teachers who encouraged her to go: Simona Sharoni (who I mentioned in yesterday's post,) Steve Niva and Jean Eberhardt.

Steve Niva is a piece of work. In an article he wrote for Electronic Intifada on the first anniversary of Corrie's death, he defended her for burning the American flag - and made it sound like it was her patriotic duty!

Israeli apologists frequently circulate a picture of Rachel burning an American flag at a Palestinian demonstration, as if to prove that she was an irresponsible promoter of anti-American hatred.

Yet the most important point that her critics miss is that the symbol of an American questioning her government’s policy in the Middle East is extremely important and highly beneficial to Americans in general. It is very important for Americans to show people in this region that America is not monolithic and that some American civilians strongly disagree with their government’s policies. Lack of exposure to these voices is a major factor that increases the likelihood of terrorism and animosity towards American citizens.

Compared to the immensely dangerous impact on regional public opinion of the widely disseminated images of U.S. Marines placing flags on Iraqi government symbols during the recent war, Rachel’s act appears altruistic. Americans should be thankful for people like Rachel who uphold deeply rooted American values about freedom from illegitimate domination and for presenting a progressive image to the world.

Get that? Burning the symbol of America represents American values!

The Mother Jones article disputes the Corrie's parents contention that the area was not a war zone (they repeated this last night in a videoconference call): It also confirms the Haifa judge's contention that there were hidden explosives in the area that had to be cleared .

Masked militants from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades prowl the city's sandy alleyways at night, past gray cinder-block homes and shops whose walls are covered with "martyr" posters and brightly painted images of assault riﬂes and exploding Israeli tanks. Nightly gun battles pit Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers (apcs) patrolling the border strip -- known by the Israelis as "Philadelphi Road" or the "Pink Line" -- against guerrillas ﬁring anti-tank missiles, grenades, and Kalashnikovs. Roadside bombs lie buried in the sand, and a local Bedouin family controls a lucrative business smuggling weapons from Egypt via tunnels dug as deep as 100 feet and often concealed inside Palestinian homes.

And it appears that Corrie naively thought that her status as an international would be a kind of force field that would protect her, no matter what. As the article goes on to say:

Corrie had come to Rafah a paper radical, primed for outrage, but with little real-world experience. That changed immediately. On her ﬁrst night in Rafah, she and two other human shields, a fellow Olympian and an Italian, set up camp in a heap of rubble inside Block J, a densely populated neighborhood along the Pink Line and frequent target of gunﬁre from an Israeli watchtower. By placing themselves between the Palestinian residents and the troops, and hanging up banners announcing the presence of "internationals," the activists hoped to discourage the shooting. But the plan backﬁred. Huddling in terror as Israeli troops ﬁred bullets over their tent and at the ground a few feet away, the three activists decided that their presence at the site was provoking the soldiers, not deterring them, and abandoned the tent.

But even after this incident, Corrie still believed that she was invincible because she was an "international." She wrote on February 22, nearly a month after arriving in the Middle East:

People can’t get to their jobs and those who are trapped on the other side can’t get home; and internationals, who have a meeting tomorrow in the West Bank, won’t make it. We could probably make it through if we made serious use of our international white person privilege, but that would also mean some risk of arrest and deportation.

Joe Smith, another ISM member, admitted that they felt invincible:

It's definitely easy to get cocky in this war zone when a tank is shooting at people and you walk up to them and shout at them, 'Hey, I'm here!' and they pack up and leave. You get so used to this idea, 'Hey, they won't hurt us.' It [Corrie's death] has really made me realize how naive and cocky I was.

Corrie's professors and her ISM comrades told her that her "whiteness" would protect her, because Israeli kill Palestinian Arabs purely for racist reasons. She even wrote that in a February 27 email:

When I come back from Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of the better things I’ve ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible.

This is what Rachel Corrie was taught, and this is what she believed.

Her mentors encouraged her to risk her life for their anti-Israel cause, falsely telling her that she was protected because she was white and from America and had a magic fluorescent vest and a magic bullhorn and magic signs that can stop tanks and bulldozers.

No wonder that after her death, her martyrdom is celebrated. By dying, Rachel Corrie managed to make the difference she was indoctrinated to make. And, according to the same Joe Smith, it was all worth it:

The spirit that she died for is worth a life. This idea of resistance, this spirit of resisting this brutal occupying force, is worth anything. So the life of one international, I feel, is more than worth the spirit of resisting oppression.

(h/t Ian, Nevet)

Ben White proves the hypocrisy of the anti-Israel crowd

Ben White, who is apparently a writer specializing in hating Israel, wrote an article in Electronic Intifada criticizing my post pointing out the hypocrisy of the British Co-op boycott of Agrexco, which I noted also effectively hurts the livelihood of most Palestinian Arab farmers. In his critique, White unwittingly shows exactly the hypocrisy that I am talking about.

Following the decision of major UK supermaket chain the Co-op to boycott four Israeli suppliers, Israel’s apologists have responded with an ‘argument’ of unintentional hilarity: that BDS harms the Palestinians it claims to help.

One would be forgiven for viewing this newly discovered concern for Palestinian farmers living under Israel’s colonial occupation with scepticism, given that the same folks downplay, deny, or whitewash the routine apartheid policies enforced by Israel’s military.

I have noted numerous times, including in the linked post, that people who claim to be pro-Palestinian are almost always really anti-Israel and show no real concern for Palestinians. I have also pointed out that while Zionists have the tendency of trying to find win-win solutions, Arabs and the anti-Israel crowd tend to think in terms of the conflict being a zero-sum game. And I have also shown that what the anti-Israel crowd accuses Israel of is almost always something that they are far more guilty of - and they are projecting their own hate onto Israel.

Until this little screed by White, I never connected these three themes.

White assumes that I hate Palestinian Arabs. He says that I have a "newly found concern" for them, implying that I am only defending Israel and conveniently using this issue as an excuse, when in fact I would be happy seeing Palestinian Arab farmers drop dead.

This is of course nonsense. I challenge White or anyone to go through my 14,000+ posts over the years and find anything where I show hatred for ordinary Palestinians. Because yet another theme I have used throughout the years is that the highest priority for most ordinary Palestinian Arabs is to raise their families and live in dignity. Politics, for the majority of Palestinians, are secondary to living a normal, dignified life. They don't care if they work for Israelis or Arabs or British or Turks. Tens of thousands don't even care if they work for Jewish settlers! They just want to live without having to worry about artificial obstacles caused by political or other factors. And if Jews happen to pay a higher salary than Arabs do, they will invariably make the best decision for their families.

I have nothing whatsoever against that desire. As a committed Zionist, I want to give Arabs as many rights as possible - as long as they do not violate the rights of Jews to live in security within their ancestral homeland. It is sometimes a hard line to draw between the two competing sets of rights, but that is my view and that has been the mainstream Zionist viewpoint as well since the 1910s (for those who actually read real Zionist literature and not the cherry-picked, out of context quotes that are shown so prominently on sites such as the ones White writes for.)

When White assumes that I hate Palestinian Arabs, it is because he is projecting his own hate - that towards Zionist Jews.

At this point in time, there is no question that the best thing for Palestinian Arab farmers is to continue to export their goods to the West, and the only way for them to do that in any real quantities is through Agrexco. At this point in time, it is a win-win for Israel and for the Palestinian Arabs, where both work together to achieve the common goal of growing and marketing produce.

Now, White could have argued that this is not good in the long run for the farmers. He could be advocating for an alternative distribution channel that would bypass Agrexco and presumably leave more money in their pockets. He could be proposing a five year plan to keep the farmers at the status quo and migrate them to a better solution, without losing anything in the meanwhile, and in the end cutting out Agrexco. He could be pushing the expansion of existing small but growing alternate, non-Israeli channels for export to other markets (something that the Israeli government is actually supporting!)

That is what a real pro-Palestinian activist would say.

But White doesn't say that.

No, he wants the boycott to happen now, today - and consequences to his pet Palestinians be damned. (Yes, his attitude towards them is more akin to performing animals than real people.) It is obviously not possible to create a marketing and distribution channel to various European markets overnight, and someone who loves Palestinians would never, ever propose that they lose their livelihoods in the hope that somehow such a channel might be built without Israeli cooperation. But someone who hates Zionists - and doesn't give a damn about Palestinians - would definitely say exactly what White is saying.

White thinks he can buttress his argument, however - by quoting a spokesman for the Palestinian Union of Agricultural Work Committees in favor of the boycott. Since this union supports BDS, then the farmers must support it too, according to White.

In the real world, however, this is also nonsense. Palestinian unions are notoriously political and out of touch with what ordinary people want. They spout the largest amount of anti-Israel invective but they cannot stop normal Palestinians from buying Israeli goods, or working for the hated Zionists, of their own free will. There is a huge disconnect between the politicians and the people, and the union heads represent, literally, no one but themselves. BDSers love to quote "Palestinian civil society" as supporting BDS but for the most part these are a bunch of tiny organizations with no real constituency.

To see what real Palestinian Arabs want, look at their companies who attend Israeli trade shows and fairs to increase their market. Look at those who visit the ports at Ashdod and Haifa to better understand import/export procedures. Does White expect people to believe that the "Palestinian Union of Agricultural Work Committees" represent farmers more than the actual dozens of West Bank farmers who attended an Israeli-sponsored R&D seminar? It is a joke. Real Palestinians, like people everywhere, act out of self-interest - and if that self-interest coincides with Zionist interests, that is not a problem to them.

People blinded by hate, however - like Ben White - will reflexively push any policy that they believe hurts Israel in the naive hope that eventually they can destroy the state. They have no conception - none - of trying to find solutions that can benefit everyone. For all the thousands of words they churn out, their message always comes down to nothing more nuanced than "Israel bad."

And that is the difference between Zionists and anti-Zionists. Zionists want to find solutions that can benefit even their supposed enemies; anti-Zionists just blindly push whatever they think will hurt Zionists. And anti-Zionists pretend that their hate is meant to help Palestinians - which is the biggest lie of all.

Ben White proves this, unwittingly but brilliantly.

How many missiles did Israel shoot? I'll tell you!

Ali Abuminah of Electronic Intifada asks what he thinks is a damning question:

Whenever you hear Israel’s tired hasbara refrain about rockets, rockets, rockets, remember to ask the question Yousef Munayyer recently asked: Why don’t Israel’s spokespeople ever tell us how many rockets, missiles and bullets Israel has fired on Gaza?

Of course the answer is because it is by orders of magnitude greater in both number and explosive power than anything Palestinian armed groups have or ever could muster against Israel.

Well, luckily for Abuninah, we can know how many missiles Israel shot into Gaza over the past few days - because PCHR counts every report of a missile, even those that cause no injuries or damage, and even some that never happened.

So using the numbers provided by a biased, lying anti-Israel organization that cannot even call the IDF by its name, we can count:

11 missiles fired on Friday and Saturday,
10 missiles fired on Sunday, and
8 missiles fired on Monday.

That's a whopping maximum of 29 missiles the PCHR claims (including at least one that was fictional) that Israel's dreaded war machine shot at Gaza over four days.

Not exactly carpet bombing, is it?

In comparison, Gaza terror groups shot about 250-300 rockets at Israel in the same time period. Meaning they shot ten times as many projectiles at Israeli towns as Israel shot at specific terrorist targets.

And most of the rockets fired by the Gaza terrorists were not the small "homemade" Qassams, but professional 122 mm Grad rockets, probably of Chinese or Russian manufacture, often with a payload of about 20 kg of explosives. They are not firecrackers.

Needless to say, when Israel shoots a missile, it generally hits the exact target intended. When Islamic Jihad fired a rocket, it aims at the general direction of where ever it thinks it can kill the most civilians. For moral midgets like Abuminah to pretend that somehow Israel's actions are worse than those of terror groups in Gaza is simply an attempt to justify terrorism.

Yes, Israel has far more firepower, but in no possible universe can you say that Israeli fire was disproportionate to the rockets that came out of Gaza.

You're welcome, Ali.

Rabid Israel-haters say Gilad Atzmon is too Zionist for them

A group of people whose single-minded aim is to take away the Jewish right of self-determination has decided that Gilad Atzmon's nutty anti-semitic rantings is too crazy - even for them.

From the "US Palestinian Community Network," quoted in Electronic Intifada:

For many years now, Gilad Atzmon, a musician born in Israel and currently living in the United Kingdom, has taken on the self-appointed task of defining for the Palestinian movement the nature of our struggle, and the philosophy underpinning it. He has done so through his various blogs and Internet outlets, in speeches, and in articles. He is currently on tour in the United States promoting his most recent book, entitled, The Wandering Who.

With this letter, we call for the disavowal of Atzmon by fellow Palestinian organizers, as well as Palestine solidarity activists, and allies of the Palestinian people, and note the dangers of supporting Atzmon’s political work and writings and providing any platforms for their dissemination. We do so as Palestinian organizers and activists, working across continents, campaigns, and ideological positions.

Atzmon’s politics rest on one main overriding assertion that serves as springboard for vicious attacks on anyone who disagrees with his obsession with “Jewishness”. He claims that all Jewish politics is “tribal,” and essentially, Zionist. Zionism, to Atzmon, is not a settler-colonial project, but a trans-historical “Jewish” one, part and parcel of defining one’s self as a Jew. Therefore, he claims, one cannot self-describe as a Jew and also do work in solidarity with Palestine, because to identify as a Jew is to be a Zionist. We could not disagree more. Indeed, we believe Atzmon’s argument is itself Zionist because it agrees with the ideology of Zionism and Israel that the only way to be a Jew is to be a Zionist.

Palestinians have faced two centuries of orientalist, colonialist and imperialist domination of our native lands. And so as Palestinians, we see such language as immoral and completely outside the core foundations of humanism, equality and justice, on which the struggle for Palestine and its national movement rests. As countless Palestinian activists and organizers, their parties, associations and campaigns, have attested throughout the last century, our struggle was never, and will never be, with Jews, or Judaism, no matter how much Zionism insists that our enemies are the Jews. Rather, our struggle is with Zionism, a modern European settler colonial movement, similar to movements in many other parts of the world that aim to displace indigenous people and build new European societies on their lands.

...Indeed, we regard any attempt to link and adopt antisemitic or racist language, even if it is within a self-described anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist politics, as reaffirming and legitimizing Zionism.

...As Palestinians, it is our collective responsibility, whether we are in Palestine or in exile, to assert our guidance of our grassroots liberation struggle. We must protect the integrity of our movement, and to do so we must continue to remain vigilant that those for whom we provide platforms actually speak to its principles.

When the Palestinian people call for self-determination and decolonization of our homeland, we do so in the promise and hope of a community founded on justice, where all are free, all are equal and all are welcome.

Until liberation and return.

I don't know if it is worth fisking the absolute stupidity and purposeful lies seen here - for example, the ridiculous idea that Zionism is colonialism, or the myth that Palestinian Arab nationalism would accept Jews as equals, or even the sheer hypocrisy of stating that "Palestinians," who have enjoyed peoplehood for a few decades at most, have a greater claim for self-determination than the 3000 year old Jewish nation (which these signatories deny even exists.)

The people who signed this are attempting to put on a "moderate" facade on their sheer hate by distancing themselves from a Holocaust denier and anti-semite, but their excuses are hardly more moral than Atzmon's sickening rhetoric. It is equally anti-semitic to deny Jewish peoplehood and Jewish self-determination.

And who signed it? A score of Arab academics and thinkers, whose signatures to this letter show that there is no relationship between being an intellectual and being a moral human being. They include Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, Omar Barghouti and a host of prominent Palestinian Arab professors and activists who cloak their hate in big words and lofty-sounding concepts - that only apply to their own people.

The Forward's jihad against Touro College and JOU

Naomi Zeveloff at The Jewish Daily Forward wrote an article entitled "Is Jerusalem Online U. a Real College"?

The article is trying to create a controversy about how an Israel education and advocacy website has had some of its materials used by Touro College for a small number of students to gain credit.

The headline itself is proof of how little interest the Forward has in telling the truth, because buried in the eighth paragraph the founder of JOU says quite clearly that the website is an education portal, not a university.

Zeveloff's ire seems to be that JOU "boasts an explicitly pro-Israel mission that seems distinctly at odds with academic principles."

Only two classes from JOU can gain credits at Touro, and only one of them, "Israel Inside/Out", is what is making Zeveloff so upset - so much so that she has a follow-up article where she attempts to marshal academic experts to agree with her that such a class should be considered problematic.

I have not taken the course myself, but the list of people giving lectures - while they may be biased - hardly exhibits the fluff that Zeveloff implies. They include Sir Martin Gilbert, Professor Bernard Lewis and Dr. Daniel Pipes, Professor Alan Dershowitz, and Bassem Eid, the executive director for The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group along with others who are without a doubt staunchly pro-Israel like Caroline Glick.

It seems that being angry at a single course in a college that offers hundreds of courses - and the implication that somehow because of that course one should question the academic strength of the entire college - shows far more about the reporter than it does about Touro.

For example, one person that Zeveloff quotes in each of the two articles is Zachary Lockman, NYU professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, who said that the syllabus for this course strikes him as "tendentious."

Perhaps. But a quick look at NYU's Middle East courses* reveals one called The Emergence of the Modern Middle East, taught this term by Nahid Mozaffari. In that course, only one book is recommended that discusses Israel specifically - and that book is "A History of Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples" by Ilan Pappe. In the introduction to that very book Pappe writes:

My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the "truth" when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers.

Which means that according to NYU, the only book worth reading in this course that talks about Israel is written by a pseudo-historian who freely admits that he is not interested in even the pretense of bias and who is against the very idea of Israel.

To me, the idea that a course on Israel in a Jewish school is biased towards Israel, where the contents and goals of the course are open for everyone to see, is far less offensive than the idea that students at a multi-cultural school are force-fed a biased version of history in their courses under the guise of being fair and balanced.

And this is only a tiny example. Who can expect that Joseph Massad's classes at Columbia have anything good to say about Israel, when he states ad nauseum that Israel is racist and colonialist? Indeed, Columbia's new Center for Palestine Studies is apparently a way to bash Israel under the guise of academia.

JOU, on the other hand, does not try to hide its agenda. Zeveloff spends quite a bit of time finding nefarious-sounding connections between JOU and Aish HaTorah and other pro-Israel organizations and funders, all in an attempt to give the reader the impression that something is really rotten there, without quite finding anything substantial.

I am not saying that "Israel: Inside/Out" is a fantastic college course, or that it represents the pinnacle of academic standards. But in a world when students at even Ivy League schools can find dozens of classes that teach nothing and hand out A's as if they were candy, it hardly seems controversial that a Jewish college gives credit for a pro-Israel course.

I would argue that Zeveloff is far guiltier posing as an objective journalist while writing these two hit pieces than Touro or JOU are in openly offering a single for-credit course that is biased towards Israel.

(Disclaimer: I have done some graphics work for JOU, including this poster for an educational initiative they have for Jewish high school students. And one more disclaimer: A long, long time ago, under a different name, I wrote a funny article that ended up being used as source material in at least one college course.)

*UPDATE: A reader who has taken the NYU class I mentioned says that Dr. Mozaffari's class at NYU also uses Efraim Karsh's Palestine Betrayed as required reading, even though it is not mentioned in the syllabus. He also says that she was very welcoming of student input into potential bias and works hard to give as fair a portrayal as possible. I am very glad to hear it.

Darling "historian" of anti-Zionists falsified a Ben Gurion quote

From CAMERA:

Filmmaker Porter Speakman, Jr., producer and director of the 2010 movie With God on Our Side, has issued a press release acknowledging that a quote attributed to David Ben-Gurion by historian Ilan Pappé is not reliable.

In his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications), Pappé reported that in a 1937 letter to his son, David Ben-Gurion wrote the following: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”

It's a damning quote and is featured prominently in With God on Our Side. But it does not appear in any of the sources Pappé cites.

In his book, Pappé provided two references for this quote. The first reference is the July 12, 1937 entry of Ben-Gurion's diary. The second is page 220 of the August-September 1937 issue of New Judea, a newsletter published by the World Zionist Organization.

CAMERA provided electronic copies of both of these sources – neither of which include the quote attributed to Ben-Gurion – to Speakman earlier this week.

In response Speakman issued a press release that states in part:

… this quote cannot be found in the original sources of Ben Gurion's diary and therefore cannot be verified as authentic. While references to this quote exist, we could not find it in its original form. In an effort to be transparent and accurate, the producers have decided to take the extra step of removing it from future printings of "With God On Our Side." We apologize for this change.

The quote attributed to Ben-Gurion also appears in a 2006 article published in The Journal of Palestine Studies. In this article, Pappé provides another source for the quote. He states it appears on pages 167-168 of Charles D. Smith's Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Boston and New York: Beford/St. Martin's Press, 2004.

The quote does not appear here, either.

The editors at the Journal of Palestine Studies are currently investigating the issue.

CAMERA has made numerous attempts to contact Dr. Pappé at the University of Exeter, but the historian has not responded.

The fake Ben Gurion quote is all over the Internet and has been quoted in The Independent, after which Benny Morris wrote in and said that the quote was a falsification.

We've seen before that Pappe makes stuff up whenever he feels like it. We also have seen him admit:

There is no historian in the world who is objective. I am not as interested in what happened as in how people see what's happened....I admit that my ideology influences my historical writings...Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers.

He has also said

My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the "truth" when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers.

But this is the first time that every single source Pappe supposedly had for a specific quote has been shown to be definitively falsified. He didn't make a mistake - he made up three separate sources for a quote that was nonexistent.

This is not sloppiness. This is historian malpractice. The University of Exeter should take a long, hard look at whether they want their own name sullied by supporting a pseudo-historian who decides what the history would be before he tried to make up facts supporting his pre-existing ideas.

And all who approvingly quotes Pappe, like Richard Falk and John Pilger, are suspect as to their own interest in truth as well.

The frustration of the anti-Zionist left (updated)

Joseph Dana writes in the UAE's The National:

Last weekend, more than 300,000 Israelis protested for economic reform throughout the country. In Tel Aviv, the epicentre of the housing protests, 250,000 Israelis marched to the defence ministry chanting the slogan "the people want social justice". The demonstrations were some of the largest in Israel's history and have pumped new life into the corpse of Israel's leftist political movement.

But the one issue glaringly missing from these demonstrations demanding "social justice" is the most urgent social justice issue in the region: the equality of everyone under Israeli rule, including Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Despite the connection between economic hardship and the settlements, Israeli protesters have been careful not to connect their struggle with Palestinian solidarity or an end to occupation.

This is partly tactical. In the climate of radical politics, Israeli public opinion meets any discussion of the occupation with a negative reaction. Protest organisers say economic reform would not receive the 87 per cent public approval rating that it enjoys if the early demonstrations had been overtly anti-occupation. However, after a month of increasing protests, questions about "social justice" can hardly ignore the occupation or unequal conditions for non-Jews.

Organisers are desperate to show that the demonstrations include all Israelis. As the protests have gained momentum, Arab-Israelis, among the most disenfranchised people in the country, have slowly joined. But displays of Zionist politics have been overwhelming.

How can a protest in Israel, borrowing the revolutionary energy of the Arab Spring, ignore Israel's military control of the Palestinians?

Dana and his anti-Israel fellow travelers have been tweeting their frustration about this issue for weeks now. They see the tent protests as an opportunity wasted, as a tragically Zionist phenomenon when it should have been, they believe, an anti-Zionist movement.

Of course, their complaints have been based more on their hatred of Zionism than on any logic.

The protests touch upon a romantic memory of Israel's socialist past, when the entire country felt that it was like one big kibbutz and everyone was in it together. Whether this is true or not, and whether a massive social program would help more than it would ultimately hurt, is not the issue for now - the point is that the tent movement is a quintessentially Zionist response to perceived economic and economic inequity.

In other words, it's the economy, stupid.

Dana and his pals love to say that the "settlements" are the cause of the economy's woes, as they paint a picture of massive Israeli investment in helping crazed rightists on hilltops oppress their Palestinian Arab neighbors. This is false to begin with.

Beyond that, if the anti-Zionist left would get their way and a half million Jews were ethnically cleansed from their homes, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars - money that every Israeli taxpayer would have to pay! It cost about $2 billion to remove a few thousand Jews from Gaza; the cost of Dana's idea of "social justice" would be a huge burden on the Israeli economy, making the chances of affordable housing in Israel much more remote. As much as Dana loves to pretend that the settlements are expensive, he never addresses the flip side.

If you want a back of the envelope calculation, Ha'aretz reported that the total cost of building the Jewish communities across the Green Line was $17 billion - of which $13.5 billion were for the homes that the Jewish residents paid for themselves, Many of the other public buildings like synagogues were paid for by the residents as well, not the state. It would cost an order of magnitude more to evict them, and such a move would hugely exacerbate the housing crisis that prompted the tent protests to begin with.

So Dana's agenda is exactly the opposite of that of the tent-protesters. He wants them to pay a massive personal price for a program of ethnic cleansing that they do not support.

There is, of course, another angle that Dana and his fellow anti-Zionists always ignore as they push their half-baked arguments. Israelis - real Israelis of all types, right and left, not the coffee-shop Tel Avivians of Dana's world - have become extraordinarily cynical about Palestinian Arabs.

The Israeli Left enthusiastically supported Oslo. Even though there were plenty of terror attacks during the process in the 1990s, before the intifada, they were downplayed by the government and the media because of the desire for peace which seemed at hand.

Arafat's intransigence at Camp David, followed immediately with the pre-planned terror war that cost thousands of lives, left the Left with no one who really believed in the peace process. Sure, the Ha'aretz crowd would still push the concept, but real Israelis, including the Left, saw that the PLO's goals were far from peaceful. They felt let down and their idealism crumbled.

From an economic perspective, the PLO-engineered intifada was hugely expensive. The additional security measures cost Israeli taxpayers - a cost that continues to this day.

Dana and his friends will never mention the intifada except in how they believe it was justified by Israeli policies. To them, the intifada is another "social justice" movement, and they cannot figure out the difference between Arab suicide bombers and tent-dwellers on Rothschild Boulevard.

Dana's world does not include the Zionist Left, the mainstream Left that built the state (and, incidentally, is part of the government.) His viewpoints are fringe within Israeli society. His stated objective would result in the exact opposite to what the protesters want.

And his knowledge that his opinions are so far out of whack with those of the mainstream is frustrating him to no end.

UPDATE: The paragraph I struck out was overly harsh towards Dana, and I apologize for that. I didn't know that he had lost family members in terror attacks. I don't want it to detract from my main points, though.

Dana did not accept my apology. Instead, in reply he insulted me on Twitter, saying that I "care nothing for human life whether israeli, palestinian or otherwise" and that I am "disgusting" and I am a "pusher of vile hate."

Of course, he refused to apologize for these far worse insults to me. And (as I pointed out to him) I never saw him use such words against the ISM, which explicitly supports the murderers under the name "resistance." He quotes Electronic Intifada liberally without any note of irony about the name of the site. But those purveyors of hate are not nearly as bad as I am, apparently.

Israeli left: "We want two states!" Arab response: "Screw you!"

The Israeli left tries so hard to be loved by the Palestinian Arabs, but, gosh darn it, they always fall short.

From Budour Youssef Hassan at Electronic Intifada:

Can every instance of Israelis flocking to the streets chanting “End the occupation” be blithely described as solidarity? Should every occasion of Israelis carrying Palestinian flags be ecstatically celebrated as a major boost for the Palestinian cause? Should Palestinians be simply grateful that, amid the increasing construction of settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the overwhelming surge of racism in Israeli society, there are still some Israeli voices willing to “recognize” a Palestinian state?

When persons in a position of privilege formulate and design a solution and impose it on a colonized and occupied people as the only viable solution and the “sole remaining constructive step,” as the 15 July call to action put it, this is not solidarity but rather another form of occupation. Solidarity means not telling people what you think their problem is, let alone telling them what you think the solution should be. Solidarity means not agreeing on everything or even agreeing on a fixed solution but fighting for a shared cause irrespective of the differences.

A quasi-state built on 22 percent of the land of historic Palestine is not what Palestinians have been fighting for over the last 63 years and presenting it as such strips Palestinians of their voices and of their right to decide their own destiny.

... The whole idea of two states for two peoples as the only solution to the Palestinian-Israeli impasse — extremely popular among liberal Zionists — is predicated upon isolationism, exceptionalism and Zionists’ sense of moral righteousness and superiority to Palestinians which grants them the legitimacy to determine the problem, the solution and the means by which this solution shall be achieved.

When the Palestinian Arab leadership decided to launch the terror spree known as the second intifada, it caused many former Israeli leftists to wake up and realize that the Palestinian Arabs were not interested in living in an independent state side by side with Israel. There were some hard-core leftists who kept the faith, continuing to demonstrate and push for a two-state solution and pointing to flawed public opinion polls that seemed to imply that Palestinian Arabs were interested in peace with Israel.

Certainly the minority who march with Palestinian Arab flags feel that they are in the vanguard of solidarity, that they are the "good Jews" and that they are appreciated by the Palestinian Arabs who are happy thattheir cause is being publicized by the enemy.

But this essay shows that the Palestinian Arabs aren't really that appreciative. In fact, they resent it. The activists among them are not demonstrating for peace or equality - but for Arab subjugation of Jews in the Middle East. They are dead-set against the Jewish right of self-determination.

They want Israel destroyed, and they will not be happy until they reach that goal. They make their positions crystal clear.

Yet the sympathetic media and their Israeli leftist buddies continue to act as if these people are liberal, tolerant Arabs. They simply cannot accept that their Arab counterparts are bigoted, hateful warmongers whose entire purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state. It doesn't fit into their worldview, so they willfully ignore it and pretend that they are as interested in peace as they are.

And, as Israellycool points out, this writer who rails against Zionism and the Zionist left is a third-year law student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The media will reluctantly portray crazed Islamists as being against Israel's very existence, but they will never interview a well-dressed secular Arab whose views are equally intransigent and repulsive. They prefer to ignore the evidence that is staring them in the face that the Palestinian Arab "left" is not motivated by the desire of peace but of revenge, not of compromise but of conquest. The website that carries this pure, unbridled hate is treated with respect by the New York Times and is funded by the Dutch government.

When will the media call out and start to highlight the pure hate and intransigence that has become mainstream in Palestinian Arab thought?

(h/t Rafael)