Showing posts with label Linkdump. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linkdump. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

From Ian:

David Collier: Antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Performing the duck test
Is it antisemitism or anti-Zionism? Everyday, semantics are used to deflect what is obvious. When people argue over this it protects antisemitism. It does not matter whether in theory anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the same thing or not. It is a straw man argument. When you perform the duck test on anti-Zionist activity across the board, it soon becomes clear that antisemitism overflows in every corner of the anti-Israel movement. The duck test highlights just how seamlessly, blatant antisemitism has renamed itself.

I am in the middle of writing a large report that will hopefully meet my self-imposed end-of-February deadline. This particular post is not part of that and was never planned. It came about because in preparation for a talk I gave last night to students at KCL I needed to spend some time gathering examples of the similarity between anti-Zionism and classic antisemitism. This is what I found:
The duck test

What are examples of antisemitism? What are the tropes? I needed to work from a check-list, so turned to Wiki to find one. They have a page titled ‘antisemitic canards‘. It provides a list of different types of canards used to foster and legitimise hate against Jewish people throughout the ages. There are 20 classic types listed. They added the 9/11 conspiracy, which I ignored because I believe it captured in the essence of all the others.

Below are the results from the twenty I worked with. In those cases where the accusation predates Zionism (such as the killing of Christ), I have only used posts by people who ‘coincidentally’ are also anti-Israel activists:
PreOccupiedTerritory: Near-Total Overlap Of Antisemitism And Anti-Zionism Just A Coincidence (satire)
Researchers have determined that the uncanny correlation between hatred for Jews and opposition to Israel constitutes a statistical fluke, a recent study reports, cautioning that observers ought not to draw unwarranted conclusions from the close association that means nothing.

A comparative study of the rhetoric and behavior of people who claim only to oppose the Jewish State and of the rhetoric and behavior of outspoken antisemites revealed a 98% overlap in the composition and content of the two groups, which study authors warned does not indicate any inherent relationship between them, since, as every student of elementary statistics knows, correlation does not imply causation. Instead, the researchers advise the public to note the overlap as a curiosity and then return to the everyday work of explaining how opposing the existence of the world’s only Jewish country, established as a refuge from thousands of years of persecution, does not qualify as antisemitism.

“We can understand why a facile interpretation of these numbers would lead a person to the conclusion that the two phenomena are in some way related,” the authors wrote. “But that fails to take into account all the protestations by self-proclaimed anti-Zionists that they do not in fact harbor ill will toward Jews; they just want them to remain at the mercy of the world’s often-hostile majority, with a soupçon of human rights verbiage thrown in. We therefore urge people not to misinterpret the near-perfect correlation as anything but an interesting quirk.”
Jonathan S. Tobin: Who are the real racists in the Middle East?
But the difference here is that while genuine racism exists in Israel—as it does in any other society of imperfect human beings—to claim that the government promotes hate is a bold-faced lie. To the contrary, classic anti-Semitic tropes and blood libels are a staple of the Palestinian Authority’s official press, broadcast media and education system. The same is true of the Hamas government of Gaza. Moreover, the P.A. continues, despite threats of aid cutoffs from the United States, to pay salaries and pensions to imprisoned terrorists and their families.

This reflects a consensus within Palestinian society that those who commit acts of violence against Jews and Israelis are role models and heroes to be celebrated, rather than to be shunned.

Will it be any different for the murderer of Ori Ansbacher, a teenager from the settlement of Tekoa who was doing national service for her country? The Israeli media has reported that the murderer is affiliated with Hamas and said he wanted to be a “martyr.” Unfortunately, nothing that has happened up until now gives us much hope that most Palestinians will treat the death of a Jewish teenager as anything other than a victory for their cause, no matter how egregious the crime.

Neither Israel nor its citizens are perfect. But friends of Israel can be proud of the efforts of the Israel Defense Forces to spare innocent lives even when it means that sometimes terrorists might escape. Moreover, its political system, however flawed it might be, rests on democratic principles that ensure that Israeli Arabs are equal before the law and have rights to representation unknown elsewhere in the region.

Those who wish to talk about racism should point their barbs at Palestinian leaders who bear personal responsibility for creating an environment in which “nationalist” murders like that of Ansbacher are made possible, not at Israel.
American Support for Israel Is Based on Strategic Interests, Not Just Morality
Unlike other U.S. allies, Israel has never asked for a single American soldier to deploy to Israel and give their life for the Jewish state. Israel has always been committed to defending itself. That is an invaluable strategic asset.

More specifically, the United States benefits from its alliance with Israel in very practical ways. In 2012, Michael Eisenstadt and David Pollock, both fellows at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, produced a great report that details these benefits—from intelligence sharing and counterterrorism cooperation to cyber and water security. Israel's remarkable technological innovation is critical for American businesses, and its expertise in homeland security and military tactics are critical for keeping Americans—both in and out of uniform—safe.

The number of benefits is too long to list here, but it is extensive. Even Richard Nixon, who peddled his share of anti-Semitic canards, recognized Israel's strategic importance and ordered an essential arms airlift during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The former president also recognized the remarkable character of the Israeli people, and became the first commander in chief to visit the Jewish state on the job. Critics may say the alliance is just a relic of the Cold War, but this is a dangerously myopic view. In such an interconnected world, where security is ever more difficult to guarantee and technology is the economy of the future, Israel is a necessary ally.

In sum, Americans support Israel for both moral and strategic reasons. The two cannot be separated. And together, they create a foundation for an alliance that can resist Omar's corrosive, anti-Semitic charges, which are part of an effort to break apart an essential, mutually beneficial relationship. In defending Israel against the likes of Omar, Americans should remember that they not only have the moral high ground, but also the strategic high ground.

From Ian:

PMW: As Israel grieves a brutal murder, PA TV sings: “We have given them a taste of grief”
Two days after the brutal murder of the 19-year-old Israeli woman Ori Ansbacher, official Palestinian Authority TV broadcast a song celebrating that Palestinians cause Israelis grief:
"A bone in the throat of the Zionists... We have given them a taste of grief"
[Official PA TV, Feb. 9, 2019]

The song tacitly promises 10 times more terror than Israel has suffered until now by promising there will be 10 times more Palestinian prisoners:
"We swear in the name of the prisoners In place of one [prisoner], here are ten"

While singing the words promising more prisoners, the singer points to a young child he is holding as if to say: This child is the future terrorist; this child is the future prisoner. The song's message is that today's children are the future terrorists and prisoners - those who will grow up to give "a taste of grief" and be "a bone in the throat of the Zionists."

"We are not afraid of the enemy - a bone in the throat of the Zionists
Palestinians - We are! We are!
The people of Jerusalem - We are! We are!
The people of Jenin - We are! We are! ...
O Al-Aqsa [Mosque], your wounds will heal
Victory is certain, it's inevitable
A rock thrown with expertise...
The people of Jaffa - We are! We are!
The people of Haifa - We are! We are!
The people of Lod - We are! We are!
The people of Ramle
The people of Acre - We are! We are!
The people of Nazareth - We are! We are! ...
We swear in the name of the prisoners
In place of one [prisoner], here are ten
We have given them [the Israelis] a taste of grief
We have given them a taste of grief - a bone in the throat of the Zionists"
[Official PA TV, Feb. 9, 2019; July 30 and Aug. 6, 2016]


The Palestinians incite to rape, too
In response to the horrifying rape and murder of Ori Ansbacher by a Palestinian terrorist, MK Aida Touma-Sliman, chairwoman of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, claimed that "the crime should be called what it is: The rape and murder of Ori Ansbacher is a gender-based crime. The criminal being Palestinian doesn't make the crime less horrifying and it cannot be part of the struggle for [Palestinian] national liberation."

The Palestinians Knesset member and Israeli citizens, like her friends in the various Palestinian terrorist organizations, were prepared for a public relations battle to characterize the rape and murder of Ori as another woman being murdered. In other words, some nameless killer with a knife just raped her for the heck of it on a chilly morning, just because she was a woman – not because she was Jewish. Why did the Palestinian criminal arm himself with a knife, cross the security barrier, rape and fatally stab Ori, rather than some random Palestinian woman?

The reason is simple: Every Palestinian who is exposed to incitement in some mosque, on social media, or in speeches by Palestinian leaders, knows that the enemy's blood can be shed. But if he rapes a Palestinian woman (a gender crime) or even secretly has his way with her in private, he'll be slaughtered and his immediate family members will follow him to hell.

After all, Muslims have honor and they are permitted to commit murder to uphold it. So whom are they allowed to rape and murder on the basis of their gender? Jews and Christians, who are defined as weak and out of bounds of the Arab code of vengeance.
Ori's blood cries out to deaf ears
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the lack of coverage was purposeful…a blanket wall-to-wall blackout.

But I do know better and I still call it a confederacy of silence, beginning at The New York Times.

They are all in it together. I cannot prove it; rather it’s for them to prove that they are not carriers of journalistic malpractice. I know that scoffers’ smell of theirs from my own years in the newsroom and travelling with them to Israel where they went, and came back, like the Spies, to curse the land.

I saw it firsthand, their scandals of playing hide and seek with the truth. It’s in this and this book. They won’t tell it; I did.

Yes, the topic is Ori Ansbacher, a beautiful 19-year-old daughter of Israel who was found in the Ein Yael forest in south Jerusalem, dead from a particularly horrific act of rape and murder.

Did you read about it in the Times, in the Post, or in any other major (even minor) newspaper? Neither did I? Zero.

Did you watch any of it from CNN, the BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS or any other network? Same here. Nada. Zilch.

Ori’s blood cries out to deaf ears. A nation is in distress, the world shrugs, the media yawns.

Tuesday, February 12, 2019

From Ian:

The Democratic Double Standard for Anti-Semitism
The problem for Democrats here is not only moral but political. Calling for Northam’s resignation was a low-cost engagement—at least, it was before it was learned that his potential successors have blackface and sexual assault controversies of their own. No one is calling for Omar’s resignation or even relieving her of her influential committee assignments so the people of Minnesota’s 5th Congressional district can “heal and move forward,” in part, because it wouldn’t end with Omar.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib invoked the noxious “dual loyalty” canard when she expressed her opposition to an anti-BDS bill before Congress by accusing Republicans of forgetting “what country they represent.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has never had to revisit her claim that the organizers of the Women’s March are the “suffragists of our time,” even though its organizers have since embraced the anti-Semitic Minister Louis Farrakhan and were accused of discriminating against its Jewish members. Indeed, when asked if she would condemn these formerly feted Democratic organizers, she declined to comment with any specifics. She did, however, offer a blanket denunciation of anti-Semitism.

The party has been unable to explain why some of its members vehemently denounce Farrakhan while others, including Reps. Andre Carson, Al Green, Danny Davis, and Maxine Waters, seem keen not only to embrace him but defend their association with the Nation of Islam.

To apply the Northam standard to casual acts of anti-Semitism would purge the Democratic caucus of many of its most valuable members. As such, it’s not really a standard at all. It’s more like a talking point.
Jonah Goldberg: Ilhan Omar’s Lazy and Anti-Semitic Tweets
Of course, it’s no surprise that Omar believes this garbage. It’s one of the lazier and most timeless talking points of a rogue’s gallery of cranks, Islamists, and, of course, anti-Semites of the Left and Right, as well as conspiracy theorists generally. Congress is “Israeli Occupied Territory” according to all the worst people.

Now a few points seem worth making. AIPAC isn’t a foreign lobby. It’s an American organization run by Americans. It spends remarkably little on lobbying and Israel spends virtually nothing on lobbying Congress. According to Open Secrets, the biggest political contributor of the “Pro-Israel” lobby in the 2018 cycle was . . . J Street, which spent nearly four times as much ($4,057,820) as the next biggest contributor NORPAC ($1,126,063). Planned Parenthood gave $5,734,048. In 2018, AIPAC did spend the most on lobbying — which is different than contributing. But again, its expenditures were relatively miniscule at 3.5 million. Lawyers spent nearly three times as much on lobbying ($15.4 million) and their contributions totaled over 217 million. The financial, insurance, and real-estate industries contributed nearly $883 million and another half-billion on lobbying.

Now, I’m not naïve. Of course, pro-Israel groups and individuals spend money on politics in other ways, direct and indirect. One need only look at Sheldon Adelson’s political giving to understand that.

But sometimes when people say “It’s not about the money” it’s actually not about the money. The best analogy is to the NRA. For many on the Left and in the media, it’s an article of faith that Republicans don’t cross the NRA because of all of the “blood money” the group lavishes on Congress. They find gun-rights arguments to be so outlandish on their face — in part because they live in gun-free blue bubbles — they immediately assume that bribery is at play. But, as I wrote here, the NRA gives remarkably little in terms of donations. The NRA’s — and the broader gun lobby’s — real power lies in the fact that it can mobilize voters.

Israel is popular with a number of important constituencies including many Jews (imagine that). But its real popularity resides among evangelical Christians and voters generally. And, despite its perfectly debatable flaws, real and alleged, it should be popular. It’s an ally. It’s democratic. It’s Western. And its enemies are largely our enemies. It’s no coincidence it’s listed as the “Little Satan” alongside the “Great Satan” that is America, by some of the most evil and backward regimes in the world.
Ben Shapiro: The Democratic Party Has Become The Party Of Anti-Semitism. Here's Why.
Anti-Semitism now thrives inside the Democratic Party. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) wrote a piece for Louis Farrakhan in 2006; she’s welcome in the party. Linda Sarsour continues to be an ally to the new Democratic Fresh Faces™ as well as more established names like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) (in November, Sarsour slammed “folks who masquerade as progressives but always choose their allegiance to Israel over their commitment to democracy and free speech”). Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) holds conference calls with vicious British anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn, to no serious blowback from the Democratic Party. Keith Ellison, now attorney general of Minnesota, was nearly made the head of the Democratic National Committee after engaging in blatant anti-Semitism for years.

How has the Democratic Party morphed into the party of anti-Semitism? By embracing the philosophy of intersectionality on the one hand, and by embracing the myth that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are completely separable on the other. The former provides the emotional impetus for nodding at Jew-hatred; the latter provides the intellectual framework for doing so.

The philosophy of intersectionality has othered Jews from the intersectional coalition. Because intersectionality is built on the premise that the prevailing Western system of thought has victimized various groups, and that those groups must band together in order to destroy that system, those who have thrived under the West must be excised from the intersectional agglomeration – being, as they are, representatives of the fact that Western thought is not, in fact, rooted in evil. The Jews are simply too financially, educationally, and politically successful to be seen as anything other than members of the power structure. Thus, slurs against them must be countenanced from more victimized groups.

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich (WSJ): For the ACLU, Antipathy to Israel Trumps Antidiscrimination
The ACLU has long argued that although private parties have the right to refuse to do business with people for ideological reasons, the government need not fund such conduct. “Taxpayer dollars must not fund discrimination” carried out by private parties, the ACLU states in its issue brief on government-funded discrimination. It has successfully pushed measures banning the federal government from contracting with companies that engage in certain boycotts. And it “strongly” supported legislation that would bar federal funds from being used by states in contracts with companies that engage in boycotts.

Identity politics is the key to understanding the ACLU’s apparent change of heart. The antiboycott laws the ACLU has defended are meant to protect gays and lesbians, an identity group they favor. The ACLU acknowledges that in many states it is “legal to fire or refuse to hire someone based on their sexual orientation,” but argues that companies that do so “must not be allowed to do so with taxpayer dollars.” It inexplicably ignores that the logic of those antiboycott laws applies equally to Israel.

The ACLU may think that refusing to do business with people because of their sexuality is immoral while refusing to do business with people connected with Israel is a blow for justice. That’s an intelligible political position, but it’s lousy First Amendment jurisprudence. First Amendment protections are the same regardless of what one thinks of the underlying conduct.

I played a role in developing the state anti-BDS laws, submitting testimony to legislatures and advising private groups that supported the measures. To avoid any constitutional doubts, I stuck to the model of antiboycott laws that the ACLU supports, comfortable in the knowledge that their constitutionality was unquestioned. I underestimated how much changes when sexual identity is replaced with Israeli identity.

There is more at stake here than hypocrisy. The ACLU’s enthusiasm for Israel boycotts has led it to take legal positions that threaten to undermine the antidiscrimination norms it has worked for decades to achieve. Now it is prepared to risk legal protections for sexual minorities for the sake of creating a constitutional right to boycott Jews. The ACLU probably hopes to have it both ways, arguing that boycotts of Israelis are “political” and boycotts of gays and lesbians are just mean. But courts won’t maintain one standard for boycotts of progressives’ favored targets and another standard for everyone else.



Minister Gamliel gets a platform in Newsweek
It is rare for mention of Jews of Arab countries to penetrate the mainstream international media, let alone for a voice in the maligned Israeli government to make itself heard. This piece in Newsweek by the minister of social equality, Gila Gamliel, bucks both trends. Gamliel recently launched a new app for uploading the stories of Jews from Arab countries to an oral history website, Seeing the Voices.

Gila Gamliel: story with us for good
Like most things, this history has its good and its bad periods; peaceful neighborly relations were followed by economic discrimination and then deadly violence as thousands of Jews were murdered in violent rioting caused by blood libels and false accusations.

My father Yosef escaped Yemen at the age of 10, and came to Israel as an orphan, where he was adopted by a Polish Jewish family. My mother Aliza came from Libya to Israel at the age of 6, the oldest of 12 brothers and sisters.
Aliza and Yosef were just two people among the 850,000 other Jews from Arab countries who were forced to leave their homes.

For seven decades, the story of the Jews from the Arab countries—both the good and the bad—was left largely untold both in Israel and around the world.
Now as a Minister in the Government of Israel, I am working to preserve the rich cultural history of our parents and grandparents from the Arab world.

We’ve just launched an app allowing Israeli citizens to document the testimony of family members and friends; we’ve promoted research on this history by academics and historians, we have marked an annual commemoration of the Jewish communities from the Arab countries; and we’ve made sure this history is in our classroom schoolbooks.

I can say with satisfaction that this important part of history is now with us for good.

It is a critical part of the story of the Jewish people who over centuries of steadfast determination managed to maintain their identity and religion, along with the dream of one day returning to the Holy Land.
Rivlin marks 70th anniversary of last Jewish camps in Cyprus
President Reuven Rivlin flew to Cyprus Tuesday to mark 70 years since the closure of British detention camps on the island for Jews trying to reach Palestine after World War II.

He was to visit a monument in Nicosia dedicated to the 2,200 children of Holocaust survivors who were born in British colonial camps there between 1946 and 1949.

Rivlin also held talks with Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades.

Cyprus and Israel aim to upgrade relations, “especially on energy, security, economy, tourism, research and innovation,” tweeted Anastasiades.

Rivlin said cooperation between Israel and Cyprus on intelligence, security and terror prevention has made the Mediterranean “much, much safer.”

After the talks Tuesday with Anastasiades, he said Israeli-Cypriot security ties “have never been better” with the two countries’ navies and commando units sharing “space, knowledge and experience.”

He added that the focus of the neighbors’ strategic partnership, which includes Greece, is developing the East Med gas pipeline that “could be one of the greatest underwater projects in the world.”

The envisioned pipeline would carry natural gas from deposits in the eastern Mediterranean to Europe via Greece and Italy.

Monday, February 11, 2019

From Ian:

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar suggests Jewish money behind US support of Israel
Newly elected Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar suggested on Sunday that Jewish money was behind American elected officials’ support for Israel, sparking widespread condemnation and fresh allegations of anti-Semitism.

Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, was responding on Twitter to Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCathy’s vow to “take action” against her and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, both of whom support the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.

“It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” Omar tweeted, reacting to another tweet from the prominent journalist Glenn Greenwald, who said it was “stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans,” referring to McCarthy’s pledge.

Benjamins are a slang term for $100 bills, which feature US founding father Benjamin Franklin.

When one journalist followed up by saying she wondered who Omar thought was paying American politicians to be pro-Israel, Omar responded: “AIPAC!,” referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

While the pro-Israel lobby wields considerable influence in Washington, it does not contribute to campaigns, nor does it make endorsements.

Omar, a Somali-born refugee from Ethiopia, was recently appointed to the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee. In recent weeks, Omar and others have been vociferous critics of two anti-BDS bills that are being pushed in Congress.
Ilhan Omar Promotes Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories, Retweets 'Hook-Nosed' Tweet
Anti-Semitic Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Sunday and retweeted a tweet that said "[Omar] might as well call [Jews] hook-nosed."

Omar's vile remarks came in response to a Haaretz report that stated that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was going to take action against anti-Semitic Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Omar.

"If [Democrats] do not take action I think you’ll see action from myself," McCarthy said. "This cannot sustain itself. It’s unacceptable in this country."

Omar, who has promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that were used by Nazi Germany, said that the GOP's support for Israel was "all about the Benjamins baby."

An hour later, Omar promoted another anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, falsely stating that The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is paying American politicians "to be pro-Israel."

Omar then retweeted the following tweet that stated she "might as well call [American Jews] hook-nosed."

"I’m one of those American Jews who opposes the occupation, laments Israel’s anti-democratic drift, and doesn’t regard the country as especially central to my Jewish identity," Politico magazine editor Joshua Zeitz tweeted. "And I know exactly what the congresswoman meant. She might as well call us hook-nosed."


Ilhan Omar To Speak Alongside Man Who Praised Killing Jews, Report Says
Embattled anti-Semitic Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is scheduled to speak alongside a senior charity official who has praised the killing of Jews on social media.

"Islamic Relief USA is hosting a fundraising dinner for aid to Yemen on February 23," the Middle East Forum reports. "Rep. Ilhan Omar is due to speak alongside senior Islamic Relief USA official Yousef Abdallah, who was widely criticized in 2017 after the Middle East Forum found he had expressed violently anti-Semitic ideas on his social media accounts."

The Middle East Forum's report provides screenshots and descriptions of numerous anti-Semitic social media posts from Abdallah:
  • Abdallah, who serves as Islamic Relief USA's "operations manager," shared a "very beautiful" story about "martyrs" who provide guns to "kill more than 20 jews" and "fire rockets at Tel Aviv."
  • Other posts referred to Jews as "stinking," and claim "the Jews put the outside wall of Al Aqsa [the mosque in Jerusalem] on fire." Abdallah also 'liked' a comment on his Facebook post that calls on God to wreak "revenge on the damned rapists Zionists. O God they are no challenge for you . Shake the Earth beneath their feet and destroy them as you destroyed the peoples of ʿĀd, Thamud and Lot."
  • And in 2014, after Republican politician Chris Christie apologized for referring to the West Bank and Gaza as "occupied," Abdallah wrote: "Christie kneels down on his knees before the jewish lords and says 'I am sorry'. Only money makes stuff like this happen. Mr. Christie.. Muslims should remember this very well."
‘Hateful and Offensive:’ Omar Slammed by Fellow Democrats for Saying Israel Support Is Bought by AIPAC
Another day, another anti-Semitic controversy for freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.).

This time, she found herself being called out by one of her own Democratic colleagues, Jewish organizations and even Chelsea Clinton for tweets claiming Republican support for Israel is bought and paid for by AIPAC.

Omar linked to a tweet by left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was criticizing House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) for threatening punishment against Omar and fellow anti-Israel Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.). She wrote, "It's all about the Benjamins baby" with musical notes, a reference to $100 bills with Benjamin Franklin's face on them.

Forward opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon criticized Omar for tweeting an "anti-Semitic trope" and said she'd love to know who is "paying American politicians to be pro-Israel." Omar responded, "AIPAC!", the name of the pro-Israel lobbying organization.

Omar's tweets were met with sharp criticism even from members of her own party, including Rep. Max Rose (D., N.Y.). Rose, who is Jewish, tweeted out a statement calling her words "hateful and offensive."

Clinton tweeted in agreement with Ungar-Sargon that the congresswoman had again crossed a line.

"We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism," Clinton wrote.
Bipartisan Condemnation Erupts Over Ilhan Omar's Anti-Semitism
On Sunday, after Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) displayed her blatant anti-Semitism by tweeting that GOP support for Israel was "all about the Benjamins," and followed by accusing AIPAC of paying American politicians to support Israel, bipartisan condemnation of her remarks erupted, although no leading Democrats said a word about their colleague’s vile rhetoric.

Omar’s initial anti-Semitic tweet was triggered by famed anti-Semite leftist Glenn Greenwald, who tweeted, "GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy threatens punishment for @IlhanMN and @RashidaTlaib over their criticisms of Israel. It's stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans."

Omar delightedly responded, "It’s all about the Benjamins, baby."

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, an incredibly staunch supporter of Israel who saw Israel get attacked incessantly at the U.N., fired back, "To see this at the UN was a fight every day. This CANNOT be tolerated in our own Congress by anyone of either party. In a time of increased anti semitism, we all must be held to account. No excuses."

McCarthy himself blasted, “Anti-Semitic tropes have no place in the halls of Congress. It is dangerous for Democrat leadership to stay silent on this reckless language.”

Former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who has been virtually the only Democrat willing to call out members of his own party for their anti-Semitism, snapped, "Defending Israel from antisemites is 'all about the Benjamins'? Really? It’s about money? Another antisemitic trope for @Ilhan Omar? She’s like an antisemitic pinball machine that spits out old canards as the ball bounces around her brain. She’s the gift that keeps on giving!"


From Ian:

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair: Don't Make the Mistake of Dismissing Iran's Ideology
Hopes that the 2015 nuclear deal would lead the Tehran regime to moderate its behavior have proved misplaced. The ayatollahs may have kept to the letter of the deal, but they have intensified their malign policies around the region. Where Israel is concerned, they implacably oppose not only government policy but also the country's very existence.

This hatred of Israel is not confined to the clerics. It is also the declared position of figures that the West has misidentified as "moderate." So it is misguided to see Iran as following the principles of realpolitik. It is ultimately defending and where possible extending ideological interests. The ideology is driven by a belief that religion should be converted into a political system of government. Such a worldview necessarily becomes totalitarian.

This politicization of religion is the bane of the Middle East. In a world where economies succeed by being open, and countries prosper by being open-minded, such a view of religion divides people, misdirects political energy and causes extremism.

Where Iran is exercising military interference, it should be strongly pushed back. Where it is seeking influence, it should be countered. Where its proxies operate, it should be held responsible. Where its networks exist, they should be disrupted. Where its leaders are saying what is unacceptable, they should be exposed. Where the Iranian people are protesting for freedom, they should be supported.

Forty years of disappointment should make us clear-eyed. The revolution has made Iran the single biggest destabilizing force in the Middle East. Ultimately the Iranian people will find a way to the future without this outdated theocracy.
Iranian commander threatens to ‘raze Tel Aviv and Haifa’ if US attacks
A senior commander in Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps threatened on Monday to destroy two of Israeli’s largest cities if the country is attacked by the United States.

“The United States does not have the courage to shoot a single bullet at us despite all its defensive and military assets. But if they attack us, we will raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground,” Brig. Gen. Yadollah Javani was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA, according to Reuters.

Top political and military leaders in Iran regularly call for Israel’s annihilation, with a senior general recently claiming it would defeat the Jewish state “within three days” in the case of a war.

Javani, the deputy for the IRGC political bureau, was speaking at a rally marking the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, when the US-backed monarchy was overthrown and replaced in power by Islamic fundamentalists.

Along with the chants “Death to America” and banners bearing slogans calling for “Death to Israel,” Monday’s marches were also a backdrop to the military’s display of Iranian-made missiles, which authorities showcase every year during anniversary celebrations.

UNRWA Is a Total Failure as a Refugee Organization
Uri Akavia, a researcher at Kohelet Policy Forum, recently published a new paper titled “Is UNRWA’s hereditary refugee status for Palestinians unique?” In it, of course, he details the origins of the issue since 1948, the year Israel was established, and its ensuing state of affairs.

“People have finally realized that UNRWA [U.N. Relief and Works Agency], is a very large and important organization that is perpetuating a problem that should not have even existed after 70 years,” he told JNS.

When U.S. President Donald Trump announced last year that he would pull $300 million in funding for UNRWA, which is in charge of resolving the Palestinian refugee problem, Jerusalem’s Mayor Nir Barkat realized that he now had an opportunity to kick UNRWA out of Shuafat, a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem the body considers to be a refugee camp.

“The U.S. decision has created a rare opportunity to replace UNRWA’s services with the services of the Jerusalem Municipality,” he said. “We are putting an end to the lie of the ‘Palestinian refugee problem’ and the attempts at creating a false sovereignty within a sovereignty.”

For Akavia, Barkat and those who have followed the situation closely, UNRWA, tasked with resolving the Palestinian refugee problem, has only perpetuated and not solved the refugee problem. They argue, and many Israelis agree, that it has utterly failed in its mission.

According to Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, “UNRWA has so many problems,” he told JNS. “The fact is that so many of the worst Hamas terrorists were educated in UNRWA schools, and UNRWA was used as a place where Hamas could store its weaponry in violation of all kinds of U.N. resolutions that prohibit conversion of refugee camps to military facilities.”

However, Gold pointed to what he thinks is UNRWA’s worst sin: The “conversion of the Palestinian refugee problem to a challenge locked into perpetuity.”

Sunday, February 10, 2019

From Ian:

Human Rights Watch head claims Israel interfering in UK politics
Human Rights Watch has lost all legitimacy regarding Israel, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said Sunday after a senior HRW official supported a conspiratorial claim that Israeli manufactured the antisemitism crisis within Britain's Labor party.

Sarah Leah Winston, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division, embeded a tweet on her Twitter account on Saturday from Asa Winstanley, a writer for the Electronic Intifada website that said, We're on the cusp of a major new wave of manufactured ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ stories, much like spring/summer 2018. Buckle up”

Above the tweet, Winston wrote, “Why is this #israel interference in domestic UK politics acceptable? Is it only a problem when Russia does this?”

Nahshon tweeted in response that HRW “has lost all legitimacy when it comes to Isarel. Obsessive hatred and conspiracy theories worthy of the worst antisemites.”

Nahshon said that it has been a “long time” since the Foreign Ministry last cooperated with the organization.

Winstanley's article on the anti-Israel Chicago-based Electronic Intifada, headlined "Israel running campaign against Jeremy Corbyn," claimed that the Israeli government operates an application that urges its users to call out Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for antisemitism.

“This is the latest evidence of an Israeli campaign of psychological warfare against the UK’s main opposition party,” he wrote.







Blair on Labour Anti-Semitism


Saturday, February 09, 2019

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: The Progressive Assault on Israel
To say, as progressives sometimes do, that Jews are “colonizers” in Israel is anti-Semitic because it advances the lie that there is no ancestral or historic Jewish tie to the land. To claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, when manifestly it is not, is anti-Semitic because it’s an attempt to Nazify the Jewish state. To insist that the only state in the world that has forfeited the moral right to exist just happens to be the Jewish state is anti-Semitic, too: Are Israel’s purported crimes really worse than those of, say, Zimbabwe or China, whose rights to exist are never called into question?

But the most toxic assumption is that Jews, whether in Israel or the U.S., can never really be thought of as victims or even as a minority because they are white, wealthy, powerful and “privileged.” This relies on a simplistic concept of power that collapses on a moment’s inspection.

Jews in Germany were economically and even politically powerful in the 1920s. And then they were in Buchenwald. Israel appears powerful vis-à-vis the Palestinians, but considerably less so in the context of a broader Middle East saturated with genocidal anti-Semitism. American Jews are comparatively wealthy. But wealth without political power, as Hannah Arendt understood, is a recipe for hatred. The Jews of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh are almost surely “privileged” according to various socio-economic measures. But privilege didn’t save the congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue last year.

Nor can the racial politics of the United States or any other country be projected onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as some have desperately sought to do. Nearly half of all Jewish Israelis have Middle Eastern roots; some, in fact, are black. Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolent resistance; Yasir Arafat practiced terrorism. The civil rights movement was about getting America to live up its founding ideals; anti-Zionism is about destroying Israel’s founding ideals.

As for the oft-cited apartheid analogy, black South Africans did not have a place in the old regime’s Parliament, as Israeli Arabs have in the Knesset; nor were they admitted to white universities, as Israeli Arabs are to Israeli universities. Israel can do more to advance the rights of its Arab citizens (just as the United States, France, Britain and other countries can for their own minorities). And Israel can also do more to ease the lives of Palestinians who are not citizens. But the comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa is unfair to the former and an insult to the victims of the latter. (h/t Elder of Lobby)
Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Palestinians Oppose an Anti-Iran Coalition
Osama Qawassmeh, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's ruling Fatah faction, also lashed out at Iran:

"Iran has not provided anything for the Palestinian people. It is shameful that some think that the economic crisis in Iran is because of its support for the Palestinians. We never heard that Iran helped build a school or hospital or university or any other developmental project."

Iran's support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, he explained, does not mean that it supports the Palestinian people. "This is a huge misconception and mistake," he said.

In addition, Abbas loyalists have accused Iran of supporting Hamas's violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007. One official claimed that the Hamas terrorists who staged a coup against the Palestinian Authority back then had received military training in Iran and "some Arab countries."

Another sign that the Arab countries have turned their backs on the Palestinians was provided by the recent convening of Arab foreign ministers in Jordan to build a consensus among Arab states on regional security issues. The Palestinians were not invited.

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank city of Ramallah should ask itself why is everyone disparaging the Palestinian cause," said Palestinian political analyst Fayez Abu Shamaleh. "Why is the Palestinian cause no longer at the center of the attention of Arabs and Jews? Even the candidates running in the Israeli election have ignored the Palestinian issue."

The Palestinian fears do not seem unjustified. Several Arab countries appear completely fed up with the Palestinians, particularly the continued bickering between Fatah and Hamas. Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab countries have tried in the past decade to help the two rival parties resolve their differences, to no avail. Egyptian intelligence officials have devoted years trying to convince Hamas and Fatah to work together for the benefit of the Palestinians.

Instead of doing so, however, Palestinian leaders are preoccupied with blocking Arab participation in a conference that could see the creation of a coalition against Iran -- the same country that Abbas and his loyalists hold responsible for the ongoing divisions among the Palestinians. Might it be possible that the Arab countries are finally rousing themselves from their long slumber and beginning to seek better lives for themselves and their neighbors?
Michael Lumish: "Palestinians" and BDS
Note the use of "Palestinian" in quotes by the creator of the image below.

The reason for this is because he understands that the Arabs who live in the Land of Israel -- which is to say, the land of the Jewish people -- only came into recognizable existence around the time that Paul McCartney was writing "Yesterday."

The people who we call "Palestinians" come from throughout the entire Arab world and that world is a world of conquest by Arabs against non-Arabs. This is not a matter of debate. It is a matter of fact.

It is a matter of known historical knowledge.

Were Israel to be the twenty-third Arab-Muslim state, rather than the lone, sole Jewish state, it would be hailed as the most enlightened country throughout the Middle East. It is only hated by Arabs and their western-left allies because it is the single Jewish state.

Thus, many of us who favor the ongoing well-being of the Jewish people in an entirely hostile world often put the word "Palestinian" in quotes.

Friday, February 08, 2019

From Ian:

Danny Danon: When anti-Semitism pretends to be just anti-Israel
Instead of viewing anti-Semitism against Israelis as the irrational bigotry that it is, the world often attributes it to rational motives, part of a legitimate national struggle.

Western apologists justify violent rioters shouting “Jews, we’re coming to slaughter you!” at the Gaza border, claiming such hateful outbursts are an understandable reaction to the “occupation.” Ditto for the 17-year-old Palestinian who last year murdered Ari Fuld, an Israeli-American Jew, in cold blood.

People who would rightly condemn violence against Jews for ­being Jews as anti-Semitism lose their moral bearings when it comes to Israel, where political, territorial or economic reasons are offered as alibis for what is, at the core, anti-Semitism.

And when Israel is forced to defend itself, world leaders often draw a false moral equivalence ­between a Jewish democracy and its terrorist enemies. Naturally, they blame Israel for any resulting casualties. The inability or unwillingness to unequivocally condemn the anti-Semitic perpetrator is uniquely applied to Israel — the “Jew” among the nations.

Such biased attitudes allow the boycott, divest and sanctions movement to conceal its true goal of destroying the Jewish state. They also enable the likes of Corbyn to normalize overt hostility against Israel, something that was once considered beyond the pale in the West. Finally, elite tolerance for Israel-focused anti-Semitism has led to Jews being ostracized from supposedly “progressive” rallies in the West. You can claim that you find Zionism “creepy” when really you detest Jews.

This new form of anti-Semitism is especially pernicious, as it will bide its time until an ever-changing political climate allows it to ­reveal its true nature and turn on its ultimate target: the Jewish people everywhere.

It is imperative for the world to recognize that, to paraphrase the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., anti-Semitism anywhere is a threat to Jews everywhere. An ­attack against a Jew for being a Jew must be condemned for what it is — bigotry — regardless of whether it occurs in New York, Paris or ­Jerusalem.
American Jews Thank Trump in Full Page New York Times Ad
American Jewish leaders took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times on Thursday to thank President Donald Trump for his efforts to combat anti-Semitism across the globe and criticize Democrats for their open embrace of causes advocating the destruction of Israel.

The advertisement, signed by more than 50 leading American Jewish voices, comes on the heels of Trump appointing Elan Carr as the new State Department Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism, a post that has become increasingly important in recent years as anti-Semitism and violence against Jews flourishes across the globe, particularly in Europe.

"Thank you, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for the appointment of Mr. Elan Carr as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism," states the ad, which was purchased by the Republican Jewish Coalition.

"Anti-Semitism must be confronted and defeated," the advertisement declares. It also contains a direct quote from Trump in which he declares, "The scourge of anti-Semitism cannot be ignored, cannot be tolerated, and it cannot be allowed to continue."

From Ian:

Ori Ansbacher, 19, named as Jerusalem murder victim
Ori Ansbacher, 19, from the West Bank town of Tekoa, was named Friday as the murder victim whose body was found a day earlier on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

President Reuven Rivlin sent a message of condolence to the victim’s family, saying “the heart breaks at the loss of life.”

On Thursday evening, Ansbacher’s body, with “signs of violence” on it, was found in Ein Yael to the south of Jerusalem, police said.

She had been reported missing since early Thursday.

Ansbacher’s parents, Noa and Gadi, told Hebrew-language media their daughter was “a holy soul seeking meaning, with a sensitivity for every person and creature and an infinite desire to correct the world with goodness.”
Israeli security forces search the scene where a body of a 19 year old woman was found in Ein Yael, in the outskirts of Jerusalem, February 8, 2019 Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

One of her high school teachers told Channel 13 news that Ori was “a smart and honest girl with an original and creative intellectual openness. She cared for the environment and was sensitive to others.”

Ansbacher was carrying out a year of national service at a youth center in Jerusalem at the time of her death.
‘The heart breaks’: Hundreds mourn Ori Ansbacher, 19, murdered in Jerusalem
Hundreds of mourners attended on Friday the funeral of Ori Ansbacher, 19, whose body was found a day earlier in the outskirts of Jerusalem. The funeral was held in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, where Ansbacher lived.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement on the murder, saying Ansbacher was killed “with shocking brutality.”

“At this difficult hour we all embrace the Ansbacher family and the people of Tekoa. The security forces are investigating the murder — we will find those responsible for it, and we will bring the matter to justice,” the prime minister pledged.

President Reuven Rivlin sent a message of condolence to the victim’s family, saying “the heart breaks at the loss of life.”

Ansbacher’s sister, Tama, eulogized Ori to the gathered mourners. “Last Saturday you said that you do not believe that you will be 20 years old at the end of the year, and now you have gone. You taught me so much — to sing, to dance with all your light. All the time you tried to fix things and to grow. I love you so much and I’m sorry I didn’t always tell you that, goodbye Ori,” she said.

Ansbacher’s father, Rabbi Gadi Ansbacher, tearfully told mourners that he was at a loss for words.

“I do not believe it, I do not know what to say. I think about you now – how you saw everything so sharp and clearly. In the last year you did it, Ori, you won. You lived a whole life,” he said.

Netanyahu: we will find those responsible for murdering Ori Ansbacher
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed great sorrow at the murder of Ori Ansbacher of Tekoa, who was murdered Thursday in Jerusalem.

"In this difficult hour, all of us embrace the Ansbacher family and their home town of Tekoa. Security forces are investigating the murder; we will find those responsible and bring them to justice," said Netanyahu on social media.

President Reuven Rivlin also mourned Ansbacher's death, saying "the heart shatters when faced with such a loss of life at the peak of bloom, and the pain is too great to bear, Ori's generous doing to help others and her kindness will shine even after her great light was put out."


Thursday, February 07, 2019

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Amnesty International Uses Airbnb to Push Wider Boycott of Israel
To advance their goal of criminalizing the act of being Jewish while present in Judea, Samaria or Jerusalem, Amnesty refers to Israel as an “apartheid regime.”

In so doing, like its fellow antisemitic political groups that pose as human rights organizations, Amnesty distorts the language of human rights and international law to libel Israel. In the real world, Israel is the only human rights respecting democracy in the Middle East.

Apartheid was the South African regime for forced legal separation between whites and blacks and other racial groups, and the subjugation of the latter to lower legal status. Apartheid South Africa forbade blacks from living in white areas unless in domestic servitude. Blacks were forbidden to use white bathrooms, white parks, white movie theaters and white beaches. And, of course, blacks were denied the right to vote. The laws were inherently discriminatory.

Israel’s legal code in contrast rejects any form of discrimination. Minorities in Israel have the same legal rights as Israel’s Jewish majority. And yet, here is Amnesty finding “inherent discrimination” in Israel’s legal code, which allows persons of all ethnicities – including Jews — to open up their homes to tourists.

By asserting a separate legal system for criminalizing Israeli Jews, by applying legal norms against Israeli Jews that are applied to no other group, Amnesty and its fellow antisemitic activist groups that are seeking to institute a quasi-apartheid regime – against Israel.

This is not simply a gross abuse of the very concepts of law and human rights. It is the negation of the concepts of law and human rights. Those who ascribe to Amnesty’s thinking view the law not as an instrument to serve justice blindly but instead is a means to discriminate against hated groups.

It is appalling that Amnesty has stooped this low. And of course, the pit of antisemitism is bottomless, so there is no reason to believe that it won’t go even lower in a month or two.

But the worst part about Amnesty’s galling report is that it shows that the powers-that-be in fake human rights group, with annual budgets in excess of $300 million, think that it is acceptable to wear their Jew-hatred on their sleeve.
Amnesty International has lost its moral way with regard to Israel
In 2002, following an Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin in response to the Passover massacre in Netanya, in which a Palestinian suicide bomber murdered 30 civilians during a celebratory feast, Amnesty accused Israel of carrying out war crimes and massacres of Palestinian civilians. The allegations, promptly reported by the BBC and other news outlets, placed the Palestinian civilian death toll at more than 500. But 52 Palestinians died, the majority of them combatants, along with 23 Israeli soldiers, in fierce urban combat.

False allegations of a massacre made by Amnesty lubricated the machinery of the political campaign against Israel, leading to street protests, campus hearings, reams of condemnations and anti-Israel resolutions across civil society and government.

In 2015, Amnesty was forced into a humiliating admission that it had lobbied the Australian government to accept murderous Lindt Cafe terrorist Man Haron Monis as a genuine refugee.

Last April, Amnesty’s secretary-general called Israel’s democratically elected government “rogue”. In 2010, the head of its Finnish branch called Israel a “scum state”. Its British campaign manager has likened Israel to Islamic State and been condemned for his attacks on Jewish parliamentarians.

Perhaps as revealing as Amnesty’s fixation on Jews living on the “wrong” side of a long-defunct armistice line has been its relative silence on the disturbing trend of rising anti-Semitism. In April 2015, Amnesty UK rejected an initiative to “campaign against anti-semitism in the UK”, as well as “lobby the UK government to tackle the rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Britain” and “monitor anti-Semitism closely”. It was the only proposed resolution at the annual general meeting that was not adopted.

The skewed morality revealed by Amnesty’s obsession with Israel reflects a broader decline in the non-governmental sector. Whereas groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch once led the struggle against Soviet tyranny and actively defended the rights of political prisoners, today they serve an increasingly narrow political agenda, one aligned with anti-Western, anti-capitalist forces. Amnesty’s apparent contempt for Israel, its ho-hum attitude to anti-Semitism, and its inordinate condemnations of democracies all stem from this malaise.

Of course, the settlements are a point of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Indeed, the parties identified settlements as a final status issue in the historic Oslo Accords signed between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel in 1993. It was agreed that the questions of which settlements will be annexed to Israel and which will be dismantled or transferred to Palestinian sovereignty are to be resolved in direct negotiations in the context of a final peace agreement. But the pursuit of peace is not aided by Amnesty’s political manoeuvres and attempts to isolate Israel, which perpetuate conflict by other means.
Why Won't the British Left Pick on Someone Else?
Why are Labour members not speaking out loud about the need to boycott or overthrow such a regime as Iran, but instead focus all their venom on Israel, a country they demonize on wholly false grounds, especially considering the full IHRA definition of anti-Semitism which Labour has technically adopted -- while reserving the right, however, to criticize Israel as an apartheid or Nazi state?

Whatever its faults, Israel is a utopia for human rights that many self-congratulatory moralists identify as their personal preserve. Israel is the only Middle Eastern country to uphold all the rights the Labour Party claims to hold precious. Yet, Israel is the only country in the world that the Labour party reserves for its censure, while other countries are ignored, mildly rebuked or even cosied up to.

In reality, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have largely governed their own people since 1994, following the signing of the Oslo Accords. The Palestinians, however, continue to go through inconceivable suffering due to the atrocious governance by their own often corrupt and manipulative leaders. They continue to blame Israel and the Jews -- preferable, apparently, to blaming themselves.

"Victimization is the pain-orientated version of privilege. If it suffices to call oneself oppressed in order to be in the right, everyone will fight to occupy that slot." — Pascal Bruckner, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt.

From Ian:

Abe Greenwald: The State of the Union is Pro-Jewish
At Tuesday night’s address to the American people, writes Abe Greenwald, the president made multiple pronouncements of particular relevance to the Jewish people—all of them for the good:

President Trump used his State of the Union address in part to celebrate the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, call out Iran on its genocidal hatred of Jews, confront anti-Semitism generally, and tie his conception of American greatness to the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. . . .

For Trump, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was, as he put it, a matter of “principled realism.” Based on that realism, his administration “proudly opened the American embassy in Jerusalem.” Nothing here about both sides having to bend or about Israel now having to “do its part for peace.” The president of the United States simply noted that he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital because it is. And that’s the most powerful thing he could have said on the matter.

The president [also] called Iran “the world’s leading state sponsor of terror” and emphasized that “it is a radical regime.” He went on: “We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants ‘death to America’ and threatens genocide against the Jewish people.” No garbage about make-believe moderate mullahs, no specious conflation of the Iranian people and the regime, no wishful fantasies about Iran’s tyrannical theocracy showing heartening signs, and, finally, no equivocating about the nature of its obsessive anti-Semitism. In all, a welcome return to moral sanity.

Trump talked about a great many other things [as well], but it’s remarkable the extent to which his speech acknowledged, celebrated, and urged on America’s doing right by the Jews. It would be welcome enough if he emphasized such things in an address to an exclusively Jewish audience, but this was a State of the Union speech, and so his words were meant to shape our very understanding of America.

Jewish takeaways from Donald Trump’s State of the Union address
President Donald Trump linked his actions on Iran to the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, pivoting during his State of the Union address from his decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal to a declaration that anti-Semitism must be confronted “anywhere and everywhere it occurs.”

Trump also bookended his speech with references to D-Day, including salutes to troops, among them Jewish-American veterans, who helped liberate Europe, and Holocaust survivors who were liberated thanks to the American-led action. The salutes earned standing ovations.

Containing Iran is fighting antisemitism

“My administration has acted decisively to confront the world’s leading state sponsor of terror: the radical regime in Iran,” Trump said Tuesday evening, delivering his address in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“They do bad, bad things. To ensure this corrupt dictatorship never acquires nuclear weapons, I withdrew the United States from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal,” he said, referring to the 2015 sanctions-relief-for-nuclear-rollback agreement negotiated under President Barack Obama. “And last fall, we put in place the toughest sanctions ever imposed by us on a country.

“We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants death to America and threatens genocide against the Jewish people,” he continued, to applause, mostly from the Republican side. “We must never ignore the vile poison of antisemitism, or those who spread its venomous creed. With one voice, we must confront this hatred anywhere and everywhere it occurs. Just months ago, 11 Jewish Americans were viciously murdered in an anti-Semitic attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.”

The October 2018 shooting, in which 11 people died, was the worst attack on Jews in American history. It was carried out by a man shouting anti-Semitic epithets, and appears to have been principally motivated by hatred of pro-immigration policies favored by HIAS, a Jewish immigration advocacy group. The alleged attacker bought into the notion that migrants from Mexico pose a national security threat, a theme also favored by Trump, who devoted much of his speech Tuesday night to securing the border. There’s no evidence that the attack was related in any way to the Middle East.
Jewish Model Harassed After Coming Out As Trump Supporter
Jewish model Elizabeth Pipko kept her work for President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign a secret, fearing she would be ostracized by the liberal fashion world. Last month she came out as pro-Trump, and she's already being called a Nazi.

The 23 year old started off as a volunteer for the campaign, but was eventually hired full-time. Late last year she got married to a man she met on the campaign, and who is already working on Trump's reelection campaign.

The wedding was at Trump's Mar-a-Lago. She said the president didn't make it because he was dealing with negotiations over the government shutdown, but she wore a Make America Great Again hat on the dance floor anyway.

She came forward with her story to the New York Post in January, telling the paper she is "hoping to take part in the reelection in some capacity" and has no plans to hide her support for Trump this time around.

"Now that it’s been two years since the election, I don’t want to keep silent any longer," she said. "Even if that means saying goodbye to modeling forever."

Wednesday, February 06, 2019

From Ian:

European Anti-Semitism Goes Well Beyond “Criticism of Israel”
While there is little doubt that hatred of Israel has become the dominant form of anti-Semitism in Europe, its more naked forms persist as well. Manfred Gerstenfeld writes:

Polls by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) show that the evil myth that Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus is alive and well in Europe. It was found that 46 percent of Poles, 38 percent of Hungarians, 21 percent of Danes and Spaniards, and 19 percent of Norwegians and Belgians believe this. So do 18 percent of Austrians and British, 16 percent of the Dutch, 15 percent of Italians, and 14 percent of Germans. Once a belief is so deeply ingrained in a culture, it takes a very long time to flush it out. Rather than disappear, it will change its shape. . . .

From [another] study, it emerged that at least 150 million adult EU citizens agreed with the statement that Israel is conducting “a war of extermination against the Palestinians.” . . . In another new mutation of anti-Semitism, European Jews are now accused of being responsible for Israel’s actions. . . .

The way that ingrained anti-Semitism manifests itself varies not only from subculture to subculture but also from country to country. In January 2014, a mass rally in Paris took place. This “Day of Anger” was not related to any specific Jewish topic, and part of the protest was against French president François Hollande’s economic plans. However, various groups of participants started to shout anti-Semitic slogans. These included, “Jews, France doesn’t belong to you” and [the Holocaust denier] “Faurisson is right,” as well as “the Holocaust was a hoax.”

The same has happened recently in the “Yellow Vest” demonstrations. These are ostensibly a protest against the French president Emmanuel Macron’s decision to raise fuel prices—again, a topic that has nothing to do with Jews. Yet during some of the demonstrations, there have been signs describing Macron as a “whore of the Jews” and as their “puppet.”
Alan Dershowitz: Double Standard for Historical Revisionism
Ford's book, The International Jew, became a bestseller in many parts of the world and was cited at the Nuremberg trials as a work that turned many Germans and Austrians into anti-Semitic Nazi leaders and followers. Ford was the single most influential anti-Semite in the first quarter of the 20th century and beyond.

Yet, according to the New York Times, Ford's "name or likeness graces everything from the performing arts center to the manhole covers." Bill McGraw, a historian of Dearborn, has written that "Ford's attacks on Jews were distributed around the world before and after World War II and, alarmingly, they influence budding neo-Nazis today."

The New York Times continues: "But Mr. McGraw also included in his report an article on how Mr. Ford's descendants have consistently supported Jewish charities and cultural organizations..." These descendants should be praised for those contributions and not condemned for the sins of their ancestor. But the truth about Henry Ford must be told -- to the residents of Dearborn and to the world.

Many buildings are named after Henry Ford, who remains Dearborn's favorite son. It's difficult to go anywhere in Dearborn without encountering the Ford name. Even buildings carrying the generic name Ford are based on his deeply flawed legacy. There is too much honoring of Henry Ford and too little educating about the horrible influence he had on promoting anti-Semitism and Nazism.

I'm not one for destroying or removing statues or other historical works of art, but I strongly believe that these images must be accompanied by contemporary descriptions of the evil deeds committed by those portrayed in the art. Removing the Ford name from Dearborn's Ford Community & Performing Arts Center raises more difficult issues. There is no art, just honoring, in the selection of a name for a center. Henry Ford does not deserve to be honored. The question the good people of Dearborn should ask themselves is: What would you do if the center were named after Jefferson Davis? If the answer is that you would remove Davis's name, then you should remove Ford's. There cannot be differences between how anti-Black, anti-gay, anti-women and anti-Jewish practitioners of bigotry are treated. There must be a single standard for historical revisionism.
Melanie Phillips: Ireland bigotry, EU bares teeth on Brexit
Please join me in the video below for my latest chat about our crazy world with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired. We discuss the bill which is currently going through the Irish parliament to boycott Israeli goods or services produced in the disputed territories or eastern Jerusalem. You can read what I wrote about this piece of poisonous bigotry here.

We also discuss the latest in the Brexit crisis, in which the EU negotiators have decided to double down on their intransigence by refusing to re-open negotiations with the UK in the hope that the supposed chaos caused by leaving the EU with no deal will cause the British to come crawling back on their knees to accept the terms they have so far rejected. What this tells us is that the Eurocrats not only have the mindset of the mafia but really don’t understand democracy, political liberty or the British national character at all.




From Ian:

Marco Rubio (NYTs): The Truth About B.D.S. and the Lies About My Bill
A bipartisan supermajority in the Senate passed the Combating BDS Act on Tuesday. Yet a few of my colleagues recently echoed false claims made by anti-Israel activists and others that the bill violates Americans' First Amendment rights.

That line of argument is not only wrong but also provides cover for supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, who embrace an international campaign of discriminatory economic warfare against Israel, a fellow democracy and America's strongest ally in the Middle East.

In a high-profile case in 2014, the BDS movement drove the Israeli company SodaStream from the West Bank. Five hundred Palestinian employees were left jobless by the move.

The Combating BDS Act does not prohibit Americans' right to engage in boycotts. It focuses on business entities - not individuals - and, consistent with the Supreme Court, it focuses on conduct, not speech. It does not restrict citizens or associations of citizens from engaging in political speech, including against Israel.

Rather, the bill merely clarifies that entities - such as corporations or companies - have no fundamental right to government contracts and government investment.

"Anti-discrimination restrictions on government contractors are commonplace and a normal requirement for government funding," Eugene Kontorovich, a law professor at George Mason University, notes.
Senate Passes Anti-BDS Measure by 77-23
The U.S. Senate approved in a 77-23 vote a bill that codifies $38 billion in defense assistance to Israel and which provides legal cover to states that target the boycott Israel movement.

The bill, sponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., had stirred controversy because a number of Democratic senators said that while they oppose the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, they were also concerned that state laws aimed at BDS impinged on speech freedoms.

Among the Democratic dissenters were declared presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California. Non-declared but likely presidential contenders who voted included Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sherrod Brown of Ohio who voted against; and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota who voted for. The sole Republican voting against was Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Rubio, writing Wednesday in The New York Times, defended the bill against charges that it would violate free speech. Democrats supporting the anti-BDS component included Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

The bill now goes to the U.S. House of Representatives where the Democratic majority will break it up into its components, and its leadership is likely to bury the anti-BDS section while advancing the other components.

In addition to the money for Israel and the proposed anti-BDS laws, the bill intensifies sanctions on Syria’s Assad government and reinforces ties with Jordan.
David Singer: Hamas and PFLP Embroil USA and EU in Plans to Destroy Israel
A look at just one organisation – Al-Haq – headquartered in Ramallah and operating in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), the Netherlands, France, and Northern Europe – indicates the modus operandi that similarly exist in the others.

Al-Haq (established in 1979):
  • Has Governmental Sponsors: European Union, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Ireland
  • Received Grants from Governmental Sources, 2014-2018: Over $3 million
  • Published with a group of French NGOs a report in March 2017 entitled “The Dangerous Liaisons of French Banks with the Israeli Colonization”.
  • Leads the legal effort to delegitimize Israel at the International Criminal Court in The Hague
Shawan Jabarin, General Director of Al-Haq since 2006, served as a senior PFLP official in the past and at least until recently maintained close ties with PFLP operatives in Judea and Samaria. Jabarin was tried and convicted for his military activity in the PFLP and has served multiple prison sentences.
Jabarin was described in a 2007 Israeli Supreme Court case by the presiding judge as:
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Some of his time is spent in conducting a human rights organization, and some as an operative in an organization which has no qualms regarding murder and attempted murder, which have no relation whatsoever to rights. Quite the opposite, they reject the most basic right of all, without which there are no other rights, that is, the right to life.”

Three other PFLP members arrested by Israel are also identified as working or having worked for Al-Haq: Ziyad Hmeidan, Zahi Jaradat and Majed Abbadi.

European and American funding of these organisations should be banned, their offices in the USA and EU closed – and those identified as Hamas and PFLP members deported.

Terrorists in suits denigrating and delegitimising Israel in slick racist and ongoing deceptive public relations campaigns of lies and half-truths – can be just as dangerous as terrorists armed to the teeth.

The EU and America must stop being played for suckers by these Jew-hating organisations.

Tuesday, February 05, 2019

From Ian:

Could Jewish and Zionist Leaders Have Done More to Rescue the Jews of Poland?
In the view of Philip Roth’s narrator in The Plot Against America—a fictional account of how fascism might have come to the United States in 1940—history as schoolchildren study it is the story “turned wrong way around”: a tale told after the fact, with “everything . . . chronicled on the page as inevitable.” By contrast, the narrator asserts, history experienced in real time is a story of the “relentless unforeseen.”

Historians have a term—“hindsight history”—for accounts that ignore the daunting uncertainties and moral dilemmas presented by history as it actually unfolds. That is precisely what Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit set themselves against in their important and provocative book The Road to September 1939: Polish Jews, Zionists, and the Yishuv on the Eve of World War II (2018). Bringing us right up to the edge of the destruction of European and particularly of Polish Jewry, they seek to recover the story of the “relentless unforeseen.” As they put it in the book’s preface:

We do not intend to describe the events by reading history backward. We have tried not to read the story from its endpoint, but rather to tell it as much as possible in the “present.” Before August 1939, as well as during that month, no one really knew what was in store. It is only a retrospective reading that determines that the events moved inexorably toward an unequaled calamity and that it was impossible to halt their course.

The authors are themselves distinguished historians. Reinharz has to his credit a magisterial two-volume biography of the great Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, a major figure in the events narrated here, and Shavit is a longtime scholar of another major figure of the time, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, and of Jabotinsky’s Poland-centered Revisionist Zionist movement. With an important exception to be discussed below, the two authors succeed admirably at their task. Theirs is an extraordinary account of a horrific time, told mostly through the letters, diaries, and recorded thoughts of those who lived through it.

Moreover, in telling this tale of uncertainty, the authors shed light on a key question that has troubled—and still troubles—countless minds: could Jewish and Zionist leaders have done more than they did to rescue the Jews of Poland?
Why has Human Rights Watch become an anti-Israel activist group?
Jabarin denies his PFLP connections while he continues to assail Israel through his NGO, which has called for a European boycott on Jewish goods from the West Bank and a French financial boycott of Israel. Jabarin submitted several reports to the International Criminal Court as part of an anti-Israel lawfare campaign, and he was instrumental in the recent push in Ireland to criminalize business transactions with Jewish businesses in the West Bank.

Jabarin is not al-Haq’s only contribution to HRW. A former legal researcher with al-Haq, Anan AbuShanab, is currently HRW’s West Bank researcher. There is also Charles Shamas, a co-founder of al-Haq, who has been an HRW adviser since at least 2002. Shamas also founded the MATTIN Group, which lobbied Europe to exclude Israeli products from free trade agreements.

HRW has since joined several other controversial BDS campaigns. This includes the malicious 2015 effort to lobby the U.N. to blacklist Israel as an abuser of children in armed conflict. In 2016, the group unsuccessfully petitioned the world soccer federation FIFA to block matches in Israeli settlements.

In January 2016, HRW published “ Occupation, Inc.,” a report claiming Israeli businesses in the West Bank contribute to Palestinian human rights violations. The U.N. Human Rights Council, the group former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley blasted as a “cesspool of political bias,” soon called for a blacklist of companies operating in Israeli settlements, in line with HRW’s vision. HRW brass cheered the move and even recommended three companies to blacklist for good measure.

In October 2016, HRW hired BDS advocate Omar Shakir as its new Israel-Palestine director. In 2017 and 2018, HRW began pressuring banks to cease operations in Israeli settlements. It was also around this time that HRW began lobbying Airbnb and Booking.com to delist Jewish properties in the West Bank. When Airbnb relented in November, Arvind Ganesan, business and human Rights director at HRW, crowed, “Airbnb has taken a stand against discrimination, displacement, and land theft.”

While HRW may do serious work on other issues, it is now an activist group aligned with a vitriolic movement. The connection to al-Haq may explain some of this. But it’s unclear why HRW’s leadership, beginning with Executive Director Kenneth Roth, allowed an otherwise mainstream group to become a ringleader for BDS.
Did WCC Activists Attend A Birthday Party Promoted by Palestinian Extremist Organization?
This is why it is so troubling that WCC and EAPPI officials have not responded to queries posted on Twitter regarding the party. The question is a pretty simple one: Did EAPPI activists attend a propagandistic birthday party promoted by Palestinian Human Rights Defenders, an anti-normalization organization that seeks to drive Jews from their homes in Hebron?

If the answer is no, great!

If the answer is yes, well, then the WCC owes Israel and its citizens an apology for allowing its peace activists to affiliate with people who promote hatred and hostility toward Jews in the Holy Land in clear contradiction of the organization’s stated opposition to antisemitism and violence.

This would not be the first time EAPPI activists have associated with promoters of hatred in the West Bank. They made regular visits to Hasan Breijieh, coordinator for the Committee Against the Wall and spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department in the 1990s.

Watch this video here to see Breijieh being accompanied by two EAPPI activists as he harasses Jews outside their homes — on shabbat no less — in the West Bank. He's also written a poem that looks forward to the murder of Jews living in the West Bank.

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