Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Preoccupied

Showing posts with label Preoccupied. Show all posts

Thursday, April 02, 2020

Unaware Imams Promised Them Immunity, Coronavirus Kills Muslims Too (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

: PJL Laurens, via Wikimedia Commons

Gaza City, April 2 - A pathogen responsible for tens of thousands of deaths worldwide and hundreds of thousands more with life-threatening respiratory symptoms has either ignored or remains unconscious of the guarantees of various Islamic preachers that the faithful will remain unscathed, and has ravaged those believers along with everyone else.

SARS-CoV-2, known by various other appellations such as COVID-19, The Wuhan virus, or the more general term coronavirus, has killed thousands of Muslims in Iran and other predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, in addition to Muslims residing outside the region, such as in the US or UK. The virus has infected millions of people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, indicating that it either does not know or does not care that Imams from Malaysia and the Philippines to Nigeria and Gaza have pronounced COVID-19 a divine weapon against the infidel that will cause no harm to loyal followers of Muhammad.

"No one seems to have told the virus to avoid Muslims," lamented an epidemiologist in Mashad, Iran. "All this trouble with the disease spreading outwards from the holy city of Qom, and the shrines there that people licked for protection, all because of that oversight. Like, even putting a Quran up on the telephone wires hasn't kept COVID-19 out of people's neighborhoods, even though many of our spiritual leaders issued guarantees that such measures would shield us. We need an inquiry into whose job it was to inform the coronavirus only to attack infidels."

After the pandemic claimed the lives of three Muslim healthcare workers in London last weekend, Imams began to suspect a more fundamental problem. "This looks a lot more systemic than simple negligence," worried a preacher at a mosque outside Paris. "I think we need to consider that the entire mechanism for sparing faithful Muslims from the ravages of misfortune and evil - be they war, disease, famine, oppression, enslavement, or indignities of all kinds - requires attention. Far too many examples just in recent memory provide evidence that divine protection for Muslims has not been implemented as we have been led to expect: conflicts in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq; the current pandemic; droughts that hit Africa every few years; Uighurs in Chinese concentration and forced-labor camps; and ongoing subjugation to non-Islamic regimes in India and Israel as well, just to name a few."

Specimens of the COVID-19 pathogen declined to be interviewed for this article, citing social distancing precautions.

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Before I Judge An Act I Ask If Israel Did It, And Then I Judge by Issa Amro (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Before I Judge An Act I Ask If Israel Did It, And Then I Judge

by Issa Amro, Palestinian activist

Hebron, March 26 - Philosophers and thinkers have long grappled with the nature of a given act: its context, its purpose, and of course its effects, to determine whether that act complies with or violates human morality. They have failed, however, to reach a convincing conclusion - and I maintain they have failed because they do not apply the litmus test I and my allies have devised. The test asks one simple question: did Israel do the act? If not, the act can be moral; if yes, perforce the act is evil.

This illustrates and explains a phenomenon we saw most recently with divergent official Palestinian reactions to the same act performed by two different agents: Israel and Hamas. The Palestinian Authority, led by Fatah, condemned Hamas's closure of mosques throughout the Gaza Strip; at the same time it lambasted Israel for not closing mosques in areas under its control, because of course Israel neglects the health of its Arab minority.

To many people such contrasting responses to the same question smacks of hypocrisy, but those people ignore the salient point: anything Israel does is evil, even if others engage in the same behavior yet escape that characterization. The answer hinges on Jewish- I mean Israeli or Zionist action, not the act itself. Thus, self-defense by the vast majority of humanity qualifies as a positive moral value, a defensible, if unfortunate act when necessary, and, indeed, a moral imperative; whereas when Zionists engage in so-called self-defense they automatically violate the human rights of Palestinians. I am a human rights activist; I know these things.

Note also that a Zionist failing to uphold the principle of self-defense would not thus perform a good act - just the opposite. That Zionist would be committing evil by choosing not to exercise self-defense, since his refusal to defend himself violates the sanctity of the life God gave him, and is it not just like a Jew to show no appreciation for all the kindness done to him by his non-Jewish hosts through the generations?

The question can still remain regarding acts by non-Zionists; I do not pretend to greater intelligence than all the thinkers who preceded me in this line of inquiry, and acknowledge the larger question remains unresolved. But I do confess no small amount of pride in bringing this iota of moral clarity into the world, and look forward to its application much more widely than has, to our collective chagrin, been the case.

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Parents Keeping Warring Children At Bay In Lockdown Ready To Tackle Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Giv'at Shmuel, March 19 - Heads of a family who have so far succeeded in preventing their offspring from killing one another amid restrictions that keep everyone housebound in the face of a deadly pandemic believe that after handling that fraught situation, they feel prepared to broker a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Udi and Linor Harel, father and mother of Pazit, Malachi, Itamar, and Hadas, announced yesterday that their experience over the last several days with the conflict-plagued children confined to the family's three-bedroom apartment has provided them with the skills and wisdom necessary to resolve even the most intractable violent disagreements, including those that have stymied or thwarted diplomats and brokers for generations, such as the century-old Arab-Jewish territorial dispute over the Holy Land.

"We can probably get the two sides to reach an agreement inside of six hours, seven tops," predicted Udi, who until Sunday worked as a driving instructor. "If we can get our children to keep their fighting to a minimum, and on occasion even cooperate, we can get ANYONE else to do the same. Intifadas, counter-terrorism operations, military incursions, blockades, and rocket attacks are peanuts compared to the hostilities we've defused here."

"The parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have another think coming if they believe they can just keep fighting," added Linor, who develops educational materials for a non-profit. "Everyone in this family knows by now that's unacceptable. Give me some time with the leaders of the parties to the conflict and I'll get them to see the correct decision, if they know what's good for them. For starters, if I hear or see evidence of a single Molotov cocktail, that's no allowance for two weeks. Uh, not that there's any way to leave home to spend such money in the near future, but still."

The Harel children offered cautious agreement. "If Mom can get Malachi to stop invading my personal space, maybe she can do better than those idiots who ran the Oslo process," assessed Pazit, 14. "He's so annoying! I swear, if I hear [the children's Passover song] 'Simcha Rabbah' ['Great Joy'] as 'sim chara bah' ['put feces in it'] one more time I'm going to shove his smartphone up his... disease vector."

"Oh my God, this nightmare has to end, and then maybe Dad can tackle smaller problems like the political conflict," concurred Itamar, 8. "That is, if Pazit sticks to her side of the bargain and shuts up about her stupid social life and how this situation is killing it. Hello? It won't be your social life that I end if I hear one more gripe about missing a friend's birthday party."

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Pandemic Prompts Divine Thoughts Of Postponing Passover Till After Sukkot (PreOccupied Territory)

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Jerusalem, March 12 - Ministering angels disclosed today that the Almighty has begun consultation with His advisory board regarding the possibility of delaying this year's observance of the Feast of Unleavened Bread for more than six months until the danger of a burgeoning plague has passed.

Archangel Gabriel told reporters Thursday that the LORD has voiced concern for several weeks already that the observance of a pilgrimage festival under current circumstances will prove catastrophic, as it is expected to bring together hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps even millions, in a single location for days at a time. Such prolonged proximity to an unknown number of plague carriers, whether they display or do not display symptoms of the affliction, carries frightening epidemiological implications.

"God is close to a decision as to whether Passover will happen on schedule this year," the angel stated. "We should have an announcement by the end of the workweek tomorrow. The most likely scenarios under discussion at the moment include canceling Passover entirely for this year, but perhaps more likely, postponing it until after the onset of the autumn holidays, perhaps as an extension of Sukkot when so many people come to Jerusalem anyway. We all want to know what to expect so we can make adequate preparations and take the necessary precautions, but the economic, social, spiritual, and other effects of moving the festival deserve due consideration and discussion. I urge the public to maintain its admirable discipline and cooperation to date with the hygienic and other measures to help contain the disease, and ask a little more patience so that this important issue can undergo proper evaluation."

Hospitality industry figures voiced consternation. "We need to know already," declared a Judah Hotel owner. "In a typical year I'm full to capacity with pilgrims who've come to bring the paschal and festival offerings, and that means ordering food, arranging adequate laundering of guest linens, and providing extra services such as guides if that's what they want. I understand attendance might be sparser this year, but I'm still going to be out a pretty perutah if I order things that no one is here to eat."

Spiritual community figures also expressed concern. "I think it might be better to cancel Passover outright rather than delay it till after the Feast of Booths," argued a tribal elder of Ephraim named Jeroboam. "It's entirely the wrong season to be celebrating Passover, the spring festival, in the fall. I say just call off pilgrimage festivals to Jerusalem entirely, while we're at it. No need to take these epidemiological risks all the time. It courts disaster even in less troubling conditions."

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Of COURSE We Will Allow Jews To Live In Palestine. Then We Will Kill Them. by Saeb Erekat, Chief Palestinian Negotiator (PreOccupied Territory)

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Of COURSE We Will Allow Jews To Live In Palestine. Then We Will Kill Them.
by Saeb Erekat, Chief Palestinian Negotiator

Ramallah, March 5 - We Palestinians have grown tired of the contention that we demand a state with no Jews in it. Not only does it distract from the core issue of our statelessness and displacement, it presumes something false. In fact we make no such demand - any Jews whom we can exterminate will receive a warm welcome to remain within our borders, until we unleash our just wrath against them for the suffering we have endured for more than seventy years.

Accusations such as "Apartheid," "ethnic cleansing," and the like only serve to divert attention from the real injustice: Palestinians living under foreign occupation since 1948, who want nothing but the sovereignty and liberty to slaughter as many Jews as they can. Calling unwarranted attention to some spurious would-be policy that the State of Palestine would establish itself a priori as Judenrein only distorts the reality that the people of Palestine would have no problem accepting Jews living within its borders, no matter how many. You read that correctly - contrary to the slanders of the warmongering Zionists, all the Jews who wish to remain withing this state once Palestine asserts its rightful borders may continue to do so, until we kill them.

We fully understand that some Jews might choose to move elsewhere before the State of Palestine reclaims it rightful boundaries and sovereignty, and they may do so. We in fact recommend they do so right now. We have been recommending it for many decades. Palestinian activists have expended enormous effort to persuade the Jews in this land to make some other place their home, for more than a hundred years. We have made clear, again and again, as painfully as possible, the wise choice to make. For a group reputed to have higher-than-average intelligence, well, let us simply say one might have expected a quicker grasp of our intent.

It must therefore be made clear: Jews may stay in Palestine. Permanently. This time we might not even bother desecrating your graves, because in the circumstances I foresee, you will not have to go through the trouble of preparing for maintaining any such thing. Our policies toward the Jews who do stay will spare you the effort necessary to dig an individual grave.

Stop the slander. Palestine need not be Jew-free; disbelieve the lies the Zionists tell you about our supposed ethnic policies. The Jews may stay, as long as we allow them.

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Waqf Warns Against Making Tower Of Babel Taller Than Mosque (PreOccupied Territory)

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Babylon, Land of Shin'ar, February 20 - Islamic authorities cautioned today against the completion of a planned project to construct a tower that reaches the heavens, reminding officials in charge of the initiative that Sharia law prohibits any non-Islamic building from exceeding the height of any nearby Islamic house of worship.

Mufti 'Ana Akil Alqarf of Mesopotamia issued a warning today regarding the ongoing public works project in a central valley of the kingdom, admonishing the government and construction functionaries not to build the Tower of Babel to a height that even appears equal to or greater than any mosque in the area, and that violating the principle will lead to violence.

"To defend the honor of Allah and his greatest and last prophet," declared the mufti, "no structures may rise higher than our mosques. "This demand must be followed on pain of violent death. We therefore urge the authorities to alter the existing plan for the Tower of Babel to accommodate Muslim sensibilities." Municipal officials have yet to comment on the demand.

Babylonian leaders embarked on the public works project several months ago amid concerns that society's sprawl might create unwelcome divisions among those who live in disparate locations and thus develop clashing sensibilities. King Nimrod and his advisers therefore developed the Tower of Babel program to create a unifying focus for the civilization and to minimize or eliminate differences of opinion, ideology, or culture. To cement the idea of conformity, the engineers mass-produced identical oven-fired bricks instead of relying on the traditional method of fitting together stones, which most often occur in irregular, unique shapes.

Muslim leaders voiced support for the conformity initiative. "We fully endorse any effort that will bring all of humanity under the dominance of Islam," declared Imam Mustafa Massiqr.

"Alternatively, making the tower itself a mosque will solve the comparative height problem. The main complication I foresee is informing our brethren in other places that the structure in fact serves as a mosque and not, as they might otherwise assume, an office tower so big and imposing that it comes to symbolize a culture in which Islam sees a mortal enemy, an assumption that could lead some enterprising martyrs-in-waiting to crash something large and flammable into it with the goal of bringing it down in dramatic, fiery fashion."

A small faction of Imam Massiqr's followers also contend that the tower, if built high enough, could serve as a base from which to attack God, who opened Zionist dams several generations before and deluged all of civilization.

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Jewish Candidate Hopes To Dispel Stereotype Of Rich Jews By Impoverishing Everyone (PreOccupied Territory)

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Montpelier, VT, February 13 - A lifelong politician and committed socialist vowed again today to combat the pernicious, widespread assumption that Jews enrich themselves at the expense of others, through the imposition of an economic system to guarantee no one, including Jews, ever has enough, let alone gets or stays wealthy.

Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) aims to secure his party's nomination for the presidency, and promises to combat income inequality by redistributing the nation's wealth to help the have-nots. Such policies implemented elsewhere in the world have in fact had significant impact on inequality, with many more people in countries such as Venezuela no longer any better-off than the neighbors next to whom they must scavenge for food. Sanders hopes to engineer the mechanisms of that transformation to undo persistent negative assumptions about Jews, aiming to achieve a total equality in which Jews starve just as much as everyone around them. The Jewish candidate himself, however, will retain his multiple residences and private luxury amenities.

"There's no way this goes sideways," Sanders assured listeners at a town hall meeting Wednesday evening, following a narrow victory in the New Hampshire primary. "Jews are always safe in periods of rapid economic change and uncertainty. Just look at the difference between the eastern part of Germany under the Weimar Republic and the same part of the country after Soviet administration in 1945. During Weimar, with its capitalism, and in the several years that followed, Jews came under constant attack and abuse, but how many such incidents do we have once the socialists of the Soviet Union took the reins? Close to zero."

Sanders also cited the precedents of China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and North Korea, noting that they have no Jews in a higher economic bracket than the rest of the population, and all have embraced policies similar to his proposals.

"In general the Soviet Union did a remarkable job of combating that stereotype," observed Sanders. "That could serve as our model. If you look, you'll find almost no Jews in positions of economic influence in the USSR, or of political influence. The leaders of that great nation understood how to handle the issue. We can do it, too, with enough political will. Naturally, seeing it through in any practical sense will require some adaptations and compromises, which is why my own estates and lifestyle will remain unchanged. I find it absurd anyone might suggest that such a decision might contradict the goal I have in mind. In fact that line of thinking exposes you as an antisemite."

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Rachel Corrie's spirit continuing to be punished (PreOccupied Territory)

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Rafah, February 6 - The departed spirit of an American activist who sought to shield a terrorist armaments cache with her body but ended up crushed by a bulldozer must spend the rest of eternity looking on as Israeli soldiers and machines continue to dispose of war materiel intended for use by the terrorist groups she tried to defend, sources in the transcendental realm disclosed today.

Reporters in the World of the Souls confirmed to PreOccupied Territory Thursday morning that Rachel Corrie's spirit suffers everlasting torment in the form of being forced to watch every instance of the IDF interdicting, destroying, or otherwise rendering inaccessible any weapons, explosives, ammunition, or other instruments of war in the possession of Hamas or allied Palestinian terrorist groups, or such materials on their way to said groups.

"Ms. Corrie inhabits the eternity she created for herself," a spectral representative stated. "Her choice in 2003 to enter a closed military area - effectively a war zone - to serve as cover for terrorists and to prevent soldiers from stemming the flow of arms to those terrorists, all while claiming the mantle of 'human rights' among other dubious goals, led her to stand in front of an armored bulldozer whose driver had limited visibility, and who was trying to destroy a weapons-smuggling tunnel. Her decision to side with murderous thugs who target children and other innocents as a core part of their ideology, and who would otherwise target Corrie herself for her non-Islamic allegiances and lifestyle, brought her to this place."

Corrie took part in an operation by the pro-Palestinian group the International Solidarity Movement to disrupt IDF activities in this town bordering Egypt, where an unknown number of smuggling tunnels and weapons caches ran under the frontier. Most of the passages led into homes or other civilian structures near the Philadelphi Road running parallel to the boundary, structures that also often served as cover for Palestinian snipers firing on IDF troops patrolling the area or engaged in operations to find and destroy the tunnels and weapons. Israel withdrew its soldiers and uprooted thousands of residents from the Gaza Strip in a unilateral disengagement two years later; the smuggling and armed attacks on Israelis have continued.

Corrie's ghost remained unavailable for comment; a spokespecter told journalists that until other materials come to light, her eternal consciousness will be forced to view video of the capture of a Hamas armaments-smuggling boat in an operation that took place this past November.

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Bibi Vows Not To Let Fateful Opportunity Get In Way Of Politics As Usual (PreOccupied Territory)

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Jerusalem, January 30 - Israel's embattled prime minister promised his citizens today that he will not allow the historic moment facing the country to disrupt his administration's horse-trading, bickering, and cynical manipulation of the public and its institutions.

Binyamin Netanyahu returned from a dramatic overseas trip to the US and Russia with a triumph in hand: de facto official American endorsement of Israeli sovereignty over much of the territory the country took in the 1967 Six-Day War, with an ultimatum to the Palestinian leadership that further intransigence and avoidance of negotiations will result in loss of potential statehood. The premier stood at President Donald Trump's side as the latter made his historic announcement and urged the international community to back the plan which, he and his staff contended, dispenses with the failed formulae of the past and focuses on what works, effectively siding with Israel and Netanyahu on every major issue. Several Persian Gulf Arab states sent representatives, as well, indicating the historic shifts taking place. The prime minister assured his constituents Sunday that this once-in-two-millenniums opportunity, as important as it may seem, will not impede his ongoing effort to make everything about petty politics.

"I stand before you with the most important proposal Israel has accepted in two generations," he declared at a rare press conference upon disembarking. "The State of Israel faces an opportunity of epic, perhaps even Messianic, proportions: US recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and other strategic locales in our heartland, the cradle of our culture and history. Already I have instructed my cabinet to prepare for such a move, but in the meantime, I say to you, my fellow citizens, that I will continue to work as hard as I can to make sure this episode causes no interruption in my use of power for personal gain; my machinations to assert and retain control of my Likud political apparatus; and my famed refusal to do anything remotely right-wing of lasting significance despite my campaign promises, lest the unelected officials of the Attorney General and the High Court veto them."

"It's nice to always have them to blame for my lack of political will, so you can rest assured I will not lift a finger to reform anything," he added.

In addition to the question of annexing disputed territory, Netanyahu has been indicted for bribery, and must conduct yet another election campaign for a contest scheduled at the beginning of March, which experts believe will help, rather than hinder, his efforts to make every move with maximum cynicism.

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If Not Now To Offer 'Ultra-ULTRA-Orthodox' Rabbinic Ordination (PreOccupied Territory)

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New York, January 23 - Two progressive, pro-Palestinian organizations that play up Jewish connections and names to bolster their otherwise negligible Hebraic legitimacy have launched a joint initiative to underscore the traditional bona fides they often get accused of lacking, the groups announced today, with a program that aims to train members for the title "rabbi," the main qualification for which will be anti-Zionism. Based on the group members' understanding that "true" Jews oppose Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish ancestral homeland, the two organizations intend to identify their rabbis as "ultra-ULTRA-Orthodox," reflecting a level of anti-Zionism that goes even beyond that of such groups as Neturei Karta.

If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace unveiled a new syllabus today for members who wish to carry the religious title Rabbi, so they can wield it to fend off criticism of their manifestly anti-Jewish activities, rhetoric, and ideologies, representatives of the organizations disclosed Thursday.

According to materials distributed at a press event, the curriculum will include homiletic pointers on how to extract anti-Israel messages from facile readings of canonical texts; how to distort the plain meaning and intent of a passage to make Zionism appear evil; and how to remove context and neighboring material to prevent discovery that the source in question actually means the opposite of what the activist contends.

"We've struggled with Jewish authenticity issues for some time," admitted If Not Now founder and director Seth Woody, an evangelical Christian. "At first we simply dismissed challenges to our Jewishness as pretexts for fascist Jewish supremacism, which is basically what Zionism is - just ask Linda Sarsour, for example, if you want an authentic Jewish perspective. But gradually we realized what an opportunity we had on our hands."

"We're used to taking terms and redefining them to suit our purposes," he continued. "Well, we figured, why not do that to the entire institution of rabbinics? Before long, we and our Jewish allies at Jewish Voice for Peace - have I mentioned they're Jewish? - will be ordaining rabbis of our own who can challenge the mainstream idea of who gets to interpret Jewish tradition, without the distraction of who actually has the background to do so. And we're going to be unassailable in that, because it'll be even more anti-Zionist than our Neturei Karta friends who visit Tehran for Holocaust denial conferences. It'll make us more Jewish than all the Jews. Kind of like followers of Jesus."

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Climate Change Proving Difficult Cause For Palestinians To Hijack (PreOccupied Territory)

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Melbourne, January 16 - Progressive activists seeking to link every cause to the struggle for Palestinian independence confessed today they have yet to arrive at a successful formula for making the fight against long-term, human-induced atmospheric shifts dependent on, or at least subordinate to, the campaign against Israel.

Speaking against the backdrop of fires that have devastated Australia's wilderness, activists described the challenges they have faced drawing a convincing causal relationship between climate change and those disasters, let alone between those two phenomena and Israeli policies or existence.

"Gaining traction with this one has proved harder than we anticipated," conceded Ali Latdam, who helped pioneer the progressive assertion that the Black Lives Matter movement formed but a part of a larger struggle against Israeli treatment of Palestinians. "I think part of the difficulty stems from the lack of resonance climate change already suffers outside a limited cadre of activists. We can't take the fight against global warming to the Zionists unless and until we can generate enough popular support for the fight against global warming in the the first place, and the fight against climate change, despite its prominence in the media, simply doesn't register as a priority among enough people outside the Soros-funded matrix of NGOs."

Activists acknowledge that efforts to draw a direct connection between Israeli policies and climate have enjoyed limited success at best. "We of course have the more-or-less annual accusation of Israel opening dams and flooding Gaza when serious rain hits," noted Rania Khalek. "That always generates some buzz. But it gets less and less effective each year as Zionist Hasbara people counter faster and faster with the irrelevant fact that Israel has no such dams. We're left with deploring the environmental conditions in Gaza, but as in Australia, basically nobody cares."

Contributing to the awkwardness in progressive anti-Israel spaces and groups, those who claim to advocate for democracy and who therefore decry what they call Israel's denial of Palestinian democratic rights - even though Palestinians under the Palestinian Authority have political autonomy and may hold their own elections, which they have neglected to do since 2006 - have remained silent in the face of pro-democracy and anti-regime demonstrations in Iran, a chief financier of Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese terrorist groups that target Israel. "We're just going to wait till this blows over and then get back to business as usual," predicted Latdam. "Did you know it's all a Zionist plot to distract from Israeli crimes?"

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