In March this year, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas posed for pictures in his office with the Antisemitic PA TV host Imad Hamato, who Abbas appointed dean of Gaza's Al-Azhar institutes in October 2016. This month, official PA TV rebroadcast one of Hamato's many antisemitic hate lessons from 2015.
"Our conflict today between us and Israel is the conflict between spirit and body. Israel's global media has expanded, and its war against the Arabs and Muslims is through sex mania which it distributes globally. Israel had to use this sex mania, as we mentioned in a previous lesson, in order to destroy the spirit of Arabs and Muslims. Everything among the Muslims has died, except for their lust. Therefore we see filth and immodesty on many satellite channels, pictures and ads for penis enlargement and for all sorts of things. All of these are contrary to modesty. Why? Because the Jews, as it is said in the Quran, believe only in the body, not in the spirit. The Jews, according to our religion, believe only in the body.
"What has Israel given to the world in our times, aside from moral corruption and degeneration of values, aside from the use of drugs and pills? I said in a previous lesson that the CIA has a unit called the Unit for Creating the Global Mood. They look at a map: 'What is appropriate for Gaza, or Jordan, or Syria? Tramadol pills (i.e., pain killers)? Mood enhancers? Hallucinatory substances?' They are produced in India, shipped to Israel and distributed in Sinai. Afterwards they are spread in the region, in order to destroy what remains of our children's values."
[Official PA TV, June 12, 2015 and April 14, 2017]
Remember, half of Israel's R&D budget is dedicated to increasing Arab sex drive, and the other half to making them impotent.
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In the world of the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership, a journalist's loyalty to his leaders and their cause supersedes his loyalty to the truth. In a word, it is the truth vs. Abbas's security forces.
As the international media relies heavily on Palestinian journalists and "media assistants" in covering Palestinian affairs, this intimidation of Palestinian journalists heavily colors the reporting of Western journalists. The stories Palestinian journalists tell their Western colleagues are limited to ones that will not endanger their own lives. This censorship, whether by the Abbas's security forces or self-imposed, explains why one rarely reads or sees a story in Western mainstream media about negative things happening in the PA-controlled territories.
Even when their Palestinian colleagues are beaten and arrested by Abbas's security forces, these "journalists" fail to report such incidents. This makes some sense: should they open their mouths with the truth, Abbas and his cohorts might indeed stop inviting them to press conferences and banquets in the fancy restaurants of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jericho.
Israel’s borders and territorial scope are a source of seemingly endless debate. Remarkably, despite the intensity of the debates, little attention has been paid to the relevance of the doctrine of uti possidetis juris to resolving legal aspects of the border dispute. Uti possidetis juris is widely acknowledged as the doctrine of customary international law that is central to determining territorial sovereignty in the era of decolonization. The doctrine provides that emerging states presumptively inherit their pre-independence administrative boundaries.
Applied to the case of Israel, uti possidetis juris would dictate that Israel inherit the boundaries of the Mandate of Palestine as they existed in May, 1948. The doctrine would thus support Israeli claims to any or all of the currently hotly disputed areas of Jerusalem (including East Jerusalem), the West Bank, and even potentially the Gaza Strip (though not the Golan Heights).VIEW PDF
Regardless of whether you support or oppose a new law allowing Israel to bar entry to prominent supporters of anti-Israeli boycotts, one outcome was eminently predictable: Israel would lack the guts to enforce it even when doing so was most justified. That was amply proven by Wednesday’s decision to grant a one-year work visa to Human Rights Watch researcher Omar Shakir. By this decision, Israel eviscerated the one crucial point the law got right, despite the many it got wrong: You cannot wage an effective war on the BDS movement while giving the people behind it a pass. As the old truism goes, people are policy. Shakir is the epitome of someone who should have been denied entry, and his case exemplifies why the law’s basic assumption–that boycotters must be targeted personally–is 100 percent correct. He has given lectures on college campuses in which he accused Israel of being an apartheid state, advocated anti-Israel boycotts, compared Zionism to “Afrikaner nationalism,” rejected a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the grounds that it would “institutionalize injustice,” and called for ending Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. His resume also includes a stint as a legal fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, an organization that provides legal assistance and training to BDS activists and files war crimes suits against Israeli defense officials. Nor would discovering all this require any great research skills on the part of government officials; it’s all in a handy memo, complete with links, that NGO Monitor published in December. Yet in his new role as HRW’s “Israel and Palestine director,” Shakir is supposed to oversee the production of unbiased, objective reports about human rights violations in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Needless to say, the very idea is fatuous; when someone has already made up his mind that Zionism is racism, Israel practices apartheid and a Jewish state has no right to exist, expecting him to produce unbiased research on this subject is like expecting the head of the Ku Klux Klan to preside fairly over the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Instead, Shakir will spend his year here producing reports full of vicious anti-Israel slurs. Thanks to the “halo effect” enjoyed by all human rights organizations, those findings will be treated as credible by numerous well-meaning people overseas and will further undermine Israel in the international arena.
A Palestinian security officer destroys confiscated pills in the West Bank city of Hebron, Wesnesday, April, 28, 2010. Palestinian authorities destroyed 2.7 Million dollars worth of Viagra pills and other sexual enhancers in Hebron Wednesday, after arresting a local businessman on suspicion he tried to smuggle the pills and other sex aids hidden in tennis balls, part of an alleged Hamas scheme to launder money in the West Bank.
I guess that sexual enhancement products are terrible crimes when Zionists allegedly distribute them to Arabs, but sacred moneymakers when Hamas uses them to make money for terrorists.
It's hard to keep Hamas' concepts of morality straight, but someone's got to do it.
It was every little girl’s dream - she was to get a new dress, jewellery, sweets and a party for all her friends.
What 10-year-old Aisha* did not know was that after the wedding party she would have to leave school, move to a village far from her parents’ home, cook and clean all day, and have sex with her older husband.
“He took out a special sheet and laid me down on it,” Aisha told IRIN, wringing her small plump hands. “After it, I started bleeding. It was so painful that I was crying and shouting, and since then I have seen him as death.”
After a week of fighting off her husband every night, Aisha’s father was called. He had received 200,000 Yemeni Rial (US$1,000) for his daughter in `shart’, a Yemeni dowry, which he could not pay back.
“My Dad made a cup of tea and put some pills in it, which he gave me. The pills made me feel dizzy,” said Aisha. “My Dad told me to sleep with my husband, or he would kill me, but I refused.”
Instead Aisha broke a glass bottle over her head in a desperate attempt to stay awake. “My Dad hit me badly. I was bleeding from my mouth and nose,” she said.
After spending a few months in her husband’s home, where she said he would regularly drug her and beat her, Aisha managed to escape. Now, two years later, aged 12, she is unable to divorce him.
A bill passed in parliament in February 2009 setting the minimum age for marriage at 17 was rejected by the Islamic Sharia Codification Committee which said it was un-Islamic, according to local women’s rights organizations.
So, for now, there is no law protecting children against early marriages in Yemen.
”I don’t call it marriage, but rape,” said Shada Mohammed Nasser, a lawyer at the High Court in Sanaa. She has represented several child bride divorce cases in court, but admits she has lost most of them. Only a handful of child brides have successfully managed to divorce their husbands.
“The law on marriage stipulates that a girl should not sleep with her husband until she is mature,” said Nasser, which according to the law is the age of 15. “But the law is not enforced.”
A girl can be married at just nine, but cannot legally seek a divorce until she is 15 or older. The money paid by the husband for his “wife” is a further obstacle to divorce, while the case can only be heard in a court in the governorate where the marriage took place.
Just under half of Yemeni girls, 48 percent, are married before they turn 18, according to the Washington DC-based International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW). This is classified as underage, according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In some governorates as many as half of all girls under the age of 15 are married, according to an unpublished study from 2007 on early marriage by Sanaa University’s Gender Development Research and Study Centre.
”These are our traditions,” said Aisha’s father. However, he admits that Aisha might have been too young for marriage. Though she now has a lawyer, Aisha cannot divorce until the two men who control her (her father and husband) agree on how much money each will receive.
What Aisha wants is clear: “I’d rather die than go back to him,” she said, wiping a tear from behind her veil.
This is one of the funniest things I've ever read, from Them, an LGBTQ online magazine, by Ita Segev, a "transfeminine anti-Zionist Israeli interdisciplinary performance artist."
I am an Israeli trans woman who desperately needs Palestine to be free. ....I need this because I understand that trans liberation and Palestinian liberation are linked.
About 10 months ago, I figured out that I wanted to start hormone replacement therapy and in that way medically transition. There were many reasons for this decision, but one of them was the realization that growing up Israeli and trans in Jerusalem while being expected to become a Zionist man left an aftermath in my body. I needed help to heal, and sensed that growing a rounder, more tender body would help me connect with the justice-loving feminine child inside of me, and that having such a body would help me grow from that soft place.
I was already grounded in my anti-Zionist Israeli identity. After I moved to New York, I was thrilled to find how the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement allowed me to work in a non-violent and tangible way under Palestinian leadership to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Yet I still secretly wished for a moment that would alleviate me from the difficulties of my past. And I decided the moment of starting hormones would be it.
And so I waited until the Jewish new year to go to my pharmacy, and start that phase in my transition. I imagined the little ritual I would do while taking that first teal colored pill — new year, new Jew, new me. But when the pharmacy handed me the bottles with my medication, I looked at the label that read “produced by Teva Pharmaceuticals” and my heart stopped.
Teva, a word meaning “nature” in Hebrew, is an Israeli-owned pharmaceutical company that I have vaguely heard about as a participant in the economy of the occupation. This must be a mistake, I thought.
“Excuse me,” I said when I went back to my pharmacist. “This estrogen is produced by an Israeli company, and I am a supporter of BDS. Could I please have a prescription from a different manufacturer?”
“This is the only manufacturer we carry,” the pharmacist quickly replied.
I was in shock. How could this be? I texted all my medicalized trans sisters on my way home and asked a simple question: “Who makes your hormones?” Many of them didn’t know offhand. It takes a great deal of struggle and an intense amount of questioning for many trans folks to get their hands on this life-saving medication, and once we do, we want to start immediately and experience an end to questions regarding the validity of our identity and our choices. But my sisters heard the urgency in my call and checked in. As the responses came, every single one was either Teva, or a company that a quick Google search listed as linked to Teva.
How did this one Israeli company play such a large role in the cross-gender hormone market? How did my body once again find itself as a battleground, a settlement, an ongoing pawn in this Zionist game?
I later got in touch with a Jewish, anti-Zionist trans student at Mills College, Daryn Copland, who reached out to me online. He told me that he had been dedicating the past year of his research to understanding the connections between cross-gender hormone production in the U.S. and in Israel. He told me that he too found out his testosterone was made by Teva and wanted to understand what we should do about it as trans folks who support the BDS movement.
This was no longer just about me feeling free in my body. A large part of the trans community in the U.S. is being forced to choose between our life-affirming transitions and our Palestinian siblings’ demand for freedom.
... I hope that all the trans, GNC, and queer folks reading this will help us make the message loud and clear — Zionism has tried to tie trans liberation to Palestinian oppression, but we refuse to accept this as our reality.
Oh no!!! Her body has become an illegal settlement! Zionism itself has oppressed Palestinians by cornering the market on sex hormones, somehow!
Should she take the hated drugs to become a woman, or stick to her principles and remain a man?
Apparently Ita is swallowing her pride - and the Israeli pills. But she justifies it by creating "performance art" where she embellishes a story she says she heard second hand, almost certainly not true, about an IDF soldier with no experience shooting a missile at and blowing up the wrong building in Gaza during a battle.
Her Facebook page shows that she is not making much money as a performance artist because she also is asking to find a job in "babysitting, hosting, ticket selling, teaching, workshop facilitating, assistenting [sic], coat checking, sales representetiving [sic] or other type of work" that pays $25-$30 an hour.
(h/t Aryeh Meir)
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To those outside the Kerry bubble, Egypt is ruled by a regime more repressive than any in decades, with a muzzled media and thousands of political prisoners. Syria is mired in an anarchic struggle whose most likely winners appear to be Assad and al-Qaeda , with neither inclined to negotiation. Israelis and Palestinians are further apart on the terms for a settlement than they were at the turn of the century. And the emerging conditions for a deal with Iran threaten to drive a wedge between the United States and some of its closest allies.
This raises the question: Does Kerry really believe his rhetoric? In fact, it appears he does, particularly on the Israeli-Palestinian account. Desperate for a legacy at the end of his long career, the former senator has convinced himself that a) the terms for a settlement are readily apparent and b) he has the political skills to convince Netanyahu and Abbas to accept them. Kerry, like President Obama, also is convinced that detente, if not a “grand bargain,” has all along been possible between the United States and Iran, if only the right people (like him) are at the table.
Here, in a nutshell, are the principles driving the Obama Administration’s Middle East policy. Screw the Syrians. Don’t upset the Iranians. And stop those damn Israelis from wrecking Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations.
We are coming to the end of year marked by shameful climb-downs in the face of our enemies and utterly unreasonable demands made of our allies. In Syria, Obama temporarily toyed with the idea of launching air strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, before being seduced by a Russian proposal to have that same regime dismantle its own weapons of mass destruction. There were lots of good reasons to attack Assad, for example his military reliance on the Iranian regime and the terrorists of Hezbollah, as well as the moral imperative of combating the sheer evil of chemical weapons, but Obama, buoyed by isolationists on right and left, placed his faith in Vladimir Putin instead.
There's a new video making its way around "debunking" Danny Ayalon's video that came out (wait for it) two years ago. As is usually the case with Palsbara, insults, ridicule, whining, the race card, and strawman arguments take the place of actual arguments. So Matt and I thought we would create a video debunking their debunking. Check it out below:
My point here is not to criticize the women’s choice of profession (although their politics leaves a lot to be desired). It is to show that the organization that put together the video hired a couple of attractive actresses – neither of whom are actually “Palestinian” according to the definition of someone born here – in order to increase the appeal of the video. They even had one of them put on a fake accent, presumably to make her more appealing (in my opinion, it worked!) None of this surprises me, given the level of authenticity of the arguments they put forward in the video.
A Russian nuclear power plant was reportedly “badly infected” by the rogue Stuxnet virus, the same malware that reportedly disrupted Iran’s nuclear program several years ago. The virus then spread to the International Space Station via a Stuxnet-infected USB stick transported by Russian cosmonauts.
Speaking to journalists in Canberra, Australia, last week, Eugene Kaspersky, head of the anti-virus and cyber protection firm that bears his name, said he had been tipped off about the damage by a friend who works at the Russian plant.
The riot broke out after police attempted to close down a social club operated by the Fatah terror group. Institutions and offices operated by the Palestinian Authority or PA terror groups – of which Fatah is one – are not allowed to operate in Jerusalem, and police close down offices operated by Fatah and Hamas on a regular basis. Police were alerted to the gathering a large group at the site, which turned out to be a memorial service for Yasser Arafat. As police entered the premises, Arabs began to riot, but police used anti-riot tactics to quell the riot.
While Hamas claims to have renounced suicide bombings, it is still committed to rabid anti-Zionism and to violently attacking the Jewish state and its people. Although the past months have been quiet on the Israel-Gaza border, that does not negate the recent Hamas plan to launch explosive laden drone attacks at Israeli towns and settlements (which was ironically foiled by local Palestinian Authority police officers in Hebron).
Yes, Hamas is changing. But this has more to do with realpolitik and less a reflection of any change in the desires and choices of its leadership. When we see its new “softer” face, turned towards Western media, in be an attempt to suggest more substantial policy changes, this is just a veneer. At its heart, Hamas remains as it always has been, the same violent Islamist group, committed to terror and violence. We would all do well to remember that, and not be taken in when we see the new “moderate” face of Hamas. There is no “Hamas 2.0”.
The closures are also affecting the general population, as the loss of fuel supplies through the tunnel has forced Gaza’s only power plant to shut down, causing power outages that last as long as 12 hours. Egypt also has halted transfers of Qatari-funded fuel and frequently closed the Rafah border crossing because of militant attacks on Egyptian security forces in the lawless Sinai Peninsula.
Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei controls a business empire worth around $95 billion - a sum exceeding the value of his oil-rich nation's current annual petroleum exports - a six-month Reuters investigation shows.
The little-known organization, called Setad, is one of the keys to the Iranian leader's enduring power and now holds stakes in nearly every sector of Iranian industry, including finance, oil, telecommunications, the production of birth-control pills and even ostrich farming.
Setad has built its empire on the systematic seizure of thousands of properties belonging to ordinary Iranians - members of religious minorities, Shi'ite Muslims, business people and Iranians living abroad.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Monday took to Twitter to strike back at his American counterpart, Secretary of State John Kerry, placing the blame on the world powers for the failure of nuclear talks to yield an agreement over the weekend.
“Mr. Secretary, was it Iran that gutted over half of US draft Thursday night? and publicly commented against it Friday morning?” he inquired via Twitter.
The statement also described “torture during pre-trial detention and harsh sentences after extremely unfair trials” and stated that “the Iranian authorities are silently preparing the death of prisoners of conscience.”
It came on the same day as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that another 12 Iranian prisoners had been executed amid what the outlet described as “a surge in the use of the death penalty there.”
Britain said on Monday it had revived diplomatic relations with Iran and appointed a non-resident charge d'affaires, two years after an angry mob ransacked the British embassy in Tehran.
It appears el-Sissi's announcement was meant to lay the groundwork for the high-ranking Russian delegation set to arrive in Cairo this weekend. Russia and Egypt have been holding secret talks in recent months, with the goal of establishing a new strategic alliance in the area. Such an alliance would further weaken the U.S.'s sway in the area and give Russia a foothold in Egypt for the first time in 40 years.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy visited Moscow last month, and now the Russian foreign and defense minister will be arriving in Cairo. The Russian visit is historically significant; it is the first time high-ranking Russian officials will visit Cairo in official capacity since Former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat kicked out his Soviet advisers in the early 1970s.
Saudi Prince Faisal al-Turki, in an interview in the Washington Post, decried the ineffectual nature of the American administration, but asked whether Russia could fill the gap, replied, “I don’t think Russia will ever fill the gap. [Russia's support of Syria] is costing the Russians the rest of the Muslim world. They are fighting on the wrong side.”
It is better to be the “ineffectual” United States than to be Russia “fighting on the wrong side.” The U.S. has more room to maneuver. This may be what prompted Secretary Kerry’s hasty and flowery addition of Cairo to his itinerary, but Arab skepticism about American intentions will not be overcome with mere words.
Iraq ranked second-worst after Egypt, followed by Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen.
The Comoros, where women hold 20% of ministerial positions, is followed at the top of the rankings by Oman, Kuwait, Jordan and Qatar.
The poll asked experts to assess factors such as violence against women, reproductive rights, treatment of women within the family and women's role in politics and the economy. (h/t NormanF)
The latest deaths follow the killing of an Ethiopian immigrant on Wednesday. According to reports the man was shot dead by Saudi police as they moved in to clear illegal encampments set up by immigrants. According to the BBC nearly one million foreigners are believed to have left the Gulf state in the last three months, from countries including Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, Nepal, Pakistan and Yemen.
While the Zionists sneer about all the Nobel Prizes won by Jews, Muslim science founded on the unerring Koran and Hadiths transmitted by the Angel Gabriel and occasionally Satan, to an illiterate desert bandit, is about to yield the greatest prize of them all. A cure for the most dreaded of diseases where you might least expect it, but exactly where a Koran-literate Muslim would expect to find it. (h/t Elder of Lobby) Covered by EoZ in 2009
The Saudi government said Monday that a camel has tested positive for MERS, in the first case of an animal infected with the coronavirus that has killed 64 people worldwide. A camel owned by a person diagnosed with the disease had "tested positive in preliminary laboratory checks," the health ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.
Times have changed over the past half-century since the story of Merry’s destruction of her father’s sense of himself and the country that had granted him such riches. And radically so. Young protesters no longer march against the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam or, at the extremes of the movement, in support of North Vietnam and the Vietcong; today, they march in support of Palestinian liberation and, at the extremes, in support of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and a “globalized intifada.”
“I remember when Jewish kids were doing their homework,” Swede’s father laments. “What happened? What the hell happened to our smart Jewish kids? If, God forbid, their parents are no longer oppressed for a while, they run where they think they can find oppression. Can’t live without it. Once Jews ran away from oppression; now they run away from no-oppression.…They have parents they can’t hate anymore because their parents are good to them, so they hate America instead.”
If American Pastoral were set in 2024 instead of in the 1960s and ’70s, Merry would almost certainly be participating in the Free Palestine movement and mindlessly chanting “Palestine must be free from the river to the sea”—and she, her father, and her grandfather would be gazing at each other across a wide gulf of mutual incomprehension. I can’t presume to know how Roth would portray the 2024 version of Merry Levov, but the odds are very high that he (or more specifically his fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman) would have imagined her as a convert not to Jainism, and not to Islam itself—that would be too glib for the Rothian sensibility—but to the pasteurized Islamist radicalism that has infiltrated America’s places of privilege, principally academia, journalism, and the arts.
This is not to say that a 2024 Merry Levov would be an active supporter of Hamas; more likely, she would be chanting slogans inspired by or invented by the Muslim Brotherhood or designed by the KGB to advance the cause of Islamist radicalism in the West without the chanters quite knowing that this was their purpose. What Roth describes in American Pastoral as “the monotonous chant of the indoctrinated, ideologically armored from head to foot” has been an inescapable feature of the current conflict.
What if the Swede back then, or his hypothetical 2024 version, had married a religious fellow Jew and both had raised Merry to be a devout Jew herself, rather than, as she was, a “half Jew”? Would that have changed anything? Would it have made Merry happier, more content, more attached to the eternal and the spiritual and less fixated on temporal conflicts and controversies? Or would it have given her just one more thing to rebel against? There is no way of knowing, in particular because Philip Roth himself was a secular Jew almost devout in his Godlessness and without the ability to provide his characters with satisfactory religious answers.
Even with the distance of many years, the accommodating and ineffectually liberal Swede Levov and his ideologically dogmatic daughter remain paradigmatic figures in the existential journey of American Jewry. The Swede assimilated as well as he knew how, and he became that figure of admiration (and sometimes envy and disdain): the successful Jew who created something useful out of nothing. But “look where it’s got you,” his brother says, during a bitter argument about whether Swede should turn Merry in for her crimes.
Funds that serve terrorism
The rest cooperate with Hamas terrorists. Funds supposed to serve the residents have been used for weapons and ammunition and to establish an anti-Israeli propaganda machine.
The main points of the Hamas charter are as follows.
• The conflict with Israel is a religious conflict between Islam and the “infidel” Jews.
• The entire Land of Israel is waqf land, meaning “Islamic holy land,” which no one has the authority to give up.
• Every Muslim has a personal duty to wage an uncompromising war, jihad, as a central means of destroying the State of Israel.
Numbers of refugees have been artificially increased by the non-reporting of deaths and the false registration of additional people as refugees, aimed at increasing support for the agency over the years.
Bedouins who were wanderers in the area and had no permanent home in Israel were also included in the numbers, but UNRWA has neither improved the lives of the refugees nor rehabilitated them.
Internal UNRWA reports from 1951 and 1960 note that UNRWA was “very flexible” in defining people as “refugees,” to be able to include those who had not even had a home in Israel but only worked for within the territory before the 1948 war was declared by Arab countries on the nascent state.
ISRAELI HOUSING and Construction Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf, also chair of the Israel Land Authority (ILA), has found a way to dislocate UNRWA from property owned by the Jewish state in response to the organization’s deviation from its contractual obligations, The ILA has demanded that UNRWA immediately vacate buildings and land in Jerusalem and pay tens of millions of shekels owed.
Shockingly, despite evidence of the UNRWA-Hamas-and-Islamic-Jihad terror alliance, countries such as Germany, Japan, France, Australia, Canada, Sweden, and Spain have hastened to renew their funding of UNRWA in Gaza.
Germany was, surprisingly, the first, on the heels of the publication of a UN report stating that Israel had not provided evidence that many UNRWA employees belonged to the terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip and that at least 12 UNRWA employees were involved in the October 7 massacre.
Yoav Zeitoun wrote this week on Ynet: “The IDF recognizes how Hamas has recovered in Gaza City in recent months in terms of governance, which has not only manifested itself militarily. The terrorist organization has even managed to pay the salaries of its operatives and recruit hundreds of new militants, some of whom are now confronting IDF forces...”
Hypocrisy reaches new heights
In February, hypocrisy reached new heights when a senior MP in Norway’s ruling Labor party, and a Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee member, Edmund Okrost, announced Norway’s submission of UNRWA for the Nobel Peace Prize for its long-term work in providing essential support to Palestine and the region in general over the past over 70 and particularly in the last three months – even as UNRWA was being investigated for ties to Hamas.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed an Independent Review to investigate UNRWA.
The review reported “a more developed approach to neutrality” than found in other similar UN or NGO entities. France’s former foreign minister Catherine Colonna chaired the inspection committee, submitting its report to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who moved to adopt its recommendations and immediately set a plan in action, called on all stakeholders to actively support UNRWA as a “lifeline” for Palestinian refugees.
Beneath UNRWA headquarters the IDF dug up an 18-m. deep by 700-m. long tunnel, containing an electrical infrastructure shared with Hamas. The tunnel would have enabled raids on additional Israeli targets.
UNRWA Director-General Philip Lazzarini’s comment on this issue was that the organization does not have the “military expertise” to check what is underground.
As proof of UNRWA terrorism, IDF Spokesperson Rr.-Adm. Daniel Hagari published two recordings of UNRWA teachers who infiltrated Israeli territory during the October 7 massacre. In one, an Arabic teacher brags that he has “captured Judaism.”
According to the IDF, more than 450 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists in the Gaza Strip are also UNRWA employees.
It is time to act to close down UNRWA so that the funds contributed by many countries not become the wages of terror, attracting hundreds of new armed terrorists.
Senator Lindsey Graham, while addressing the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that took place on America’s Independence Day, claimed on X, formerly Twitter, that Palestinians born in Gaza are “the most radicalized population on the planet.”
Graham added that in addition to being the “most radicalized,” Gazans are “taught to hate Jews from birth,” and this “will take years to fix.”
Graham further noted that he saw widespread antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian movement, comparing the popular protest chant “from the river to the sea” to the Nazis’ final solution - which planned to see the complete extermination of the Jewish people.
“From the river to the sea” is in reference to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, an area that encompasses the entire state of Israel.
Many critique this chant as advocating for the creation of a Palestinian state at the expense of Israel's existence.
“The Hamas terrorists are the SS on steroids,” Graham said, while asserting, “I will always support giving Israel the weapons and the space they need to destroy Hamas so there is never another October 7. “
On pro-Palestinian protests, Graham wrote that he supported the right to “peacefully protest” but expressed his apologies to nearby households disrupted from their celebrations by the demonstrations.
The protesters were recorded shouting “Lindsey Graham we’re not done, intifada has just begun.” The chants were met with accompanying drum beats.
“Intifada” is an Arabic word for “uprising” and references the waves of terrorism that targeted Israeli civilians and soldiers from 1987-1993 in the first intifada and in 2000 in the second intifada.
Over 1000 Israelis were killed in the second intifada, and thousands more were wounded, according to Israel’s foreign ministry. Thousands of Palestinians were also killed during the intifadas.
Following the summer’s conflict between Israel and Hamas, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared, in a wide-ranging interview with The Algemeiner, that his long held position that the Jewish state will not transfer any territory to the Palestinian Authority in the absence of extensive security arrangements has “only become firmer.”
He also asserted that the possibility that any peace agreement with the PA might unravel is justification for his strong stance on security.
I met Netanyahu last Wednesday evening at an upscale New York City hotel shortly after he reiterated support for “two states for two peoples” in a meeting with President Obama at the White House.
Two IDF soldiers were lightly injured when a Hezbollah bomb went off in their vicinity in the Har Dov region on Tuesday, the IDF Spokesman's Unit said.
The IDF said it shelled two Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon in response to the border bombing. Some 30 minutes after the incident a second explosion occurred on the border. There were no injuries or damage in the second blast.
The soldiers received initial emergency medical treatment on the spot, before being evacuated away from the Lebanese border to hospital for further treatment. "The IDF sees this incident as a gross and violent violation of Israeli sovereignty, and sees the Lebanese government and Hezbollah as responsible for any attempt to harm Israeli soldiers or civilians," the military said in a statement. "The IDF reserves the right to act in any way, and at any time, to defend the citizens of the state of Israel."
Hezbollah later claimed responsibility for the blast.
The Jerusalem Post has reported that people who have arrived from the "affected areas" are being searched for to make sure none are carrying the dreaded Ebola virus. Considering the amount of tourism to Israel and the number of illegal workers from Africa, this is a danger. Yes, it's a medical danger.
But there's a different sort of danger encroaching on Israel, and that's the growing de facto if not de jure recognition of "Palestine" as a nation by foreign countries and international bodies/organizations/NGOs.
There are two equally dangerous reasons for this, and by looking at the above map, you can see that although most Israelis try not to pay too much attention, this is no minor phenomena. Most of the world would be perfectly happy for "Palestine" to replace Israel, because the basis for their recognition is that they, and many world leaders, academics and ordinary people even in countries that haven't yet recognized this new Arab country firmly and sincerely believe that Israel/Jews invaded an ancient country called "Palestine" and imposed a "new" Jewish one now called Israel. This very popular and accepted fallacy is the most dangerous "disease" which we in Israel must fight. It's more dangerous than Ebola for sure. Among the foreign leaders who firmly, religiously believe in the myth of Palestine is United States President Barack Hussein Obama. And unfortunately, Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who support the "two state solution," enabling the establishment of a state called "Palestine" are actually undermining the security and continued existance of the State of Israel. (h/t Bob Knot)
The growing divide between Israeli and American Jews was a major topic of conversation at this week’s annual meeting of the Jewish Federations of North America. It was also the topic of a lengthy feature in Haaretz, which largely blamed the Israeli government. Inter alia, it quoted former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro as saying, in reference to that majority of American Jews who identify as non-Orthodox and politically liberal, “There is an idea that has some currency in certain circles around the Israeli government that says, ‘You know what, we can write off that segment of American Jewry because in a couple of generations their children or grandchildren will assimilate.’”
I agree that the idea of writing off this segment of American Jewry has some currency in Israel. But in most cases, it’s due less to fantasies about liberal Jews disappearing than to a belief that Israel will have to do without them whether it wants to or not, because liberal Jews can no longer be depended on for even the most minimal level of support. And by that, I don’t mean support for any specific Israeli policy, but for something far more basic: Israel’s right to be heard, by both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.
Nothing better illustrates this than recent decisions by two campus Hillels to bar mainstream Israeli speakers from addressing Jewish students. At Princeton, it was Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely, and at Stanford, it was a group of Israeli Arab veterans of the Israel Defense Forces. I can understand Hillel refusing to host speakers from the radical fringes. But how are Jewish students supposed to learn anything about Israel if campus Hillels won’t even let them hear from representatives of two of the country’s most mainstream institutions – its elected government and its army?
Both Hillels later termed their decisions a “mistake” – most likely under pressure from Hillel International, whose CEO, Eric Fingerhut, was the lead author on Princeton Hillel’s apology. But that doesn’t change the fact that at two leading universities on opposite sides of the country, the Hillel directors, both non-Orthodox rabbis, initially thought canceling the speeches in response to progressive students’ objections was a reasonable decision. Princeton’s Julie Roth thought it completely reasonable to deny her students the chance to hear an official Israeli government representative try to explain the government’s policies. And Stanford’s Jessica Kirschner – backed, incredibly, by the university’s “pro-Israel” association – thought it completely reasonable to deny her students the chance to hear from non-Jewish Israelis who don’t agree that Israel is an apartheid state.
There was no pushback from Carlson, usually known for his spunky, combative style. Nor did he bother to present a charitable version of the opposing argument. In the Washington Post, Brookings fellow and COMMENTARY contributor James Kirchick has written a strong brief for why the U.S. should make it harder for RT to access American airwaves. Yet I’m not quite persuaded of the wisdom of such restrictions. I worry about opening the door, even an inch, to government regulation of broadcast speech, even if that speech comes from an adversarial, autocratic regime. Perhaps such moves make sense in small, fragile, Kremlin-endangered states that lack a robust indigenous media. But in the U.S., with its large and diverse media market, the best antidote to Moscow’s lies is truthful reporting.
But never mind all that. What Blumenthal wanted to talk about were the real sources of malign foreign influence in Washington: the Jews. Or as Blumenthal put it to Carlson, “the Israel lobby and organizations like [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee], which have been promoting a humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, war on Lebanon, war on Iran, which is [sic] not required for some reason to register as a foreign agent, and I don’t why that is.”
Carlson didn’t offer a single critical note in response to any of this. Instead, he went on to underscore Blumenthal’s points, raising a knowing eyebrow here and there as his guest cast the pro-Israel lobby–a domestic, small-“d” democratic movement reflecting a broad opinion consensus among U.S. voters–as equally if not more malign than Putin’s infowar operations. And Blumenthal said all this, unchallenged, not on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now–but on Fox News.
The Blumenthal interview followed an earlier segment, in which Carlson approvingly quoted Noam Chomsky to the effect that American democracy represents a form of “manufactured consent”–i.e., that it is merely a more subtle form of dictatorship than those found in obviously unfree societies. I wonder: Which icon of leftist crankery will Carlson elevate next? Naomi Klein? Slavoj Zizek? The ghost of Howard Zinn? Tune in to Fox to find out.
First off let me explain something. I am Metis [indigenous Canadian]. My family has experienced firsthand, the abuses you read about when you study residential schools and generational abuses. I understand very well what racism and bigotry mean. Again, I personally have experienced it first hand. But it was the reaction of people to the attack on some of my Jewish friends at a political demonstration that really sent it home to me. I already explained, I’m not converting, I even explained why, albeit in a humorous (yet truthful) way. I decided that in order to really understand what Jewish people go through, I was going to “become a Jew”. Unlike that dude who tanned and took some pills to become black in that movie, I didn’t really have to do anything difficult. All I had to do to incur the hatred and enmity that comes along with being Jewish, was put on a hat.
For years we have been documenting the rise of anti-Semitic violence in Europe masquerading as anti-Zionism, in a coalition of Islamists and Leftists in places like Malmö, Sweden.
Copenhagen, Denmark also has this history, so much so that the small (6,000-8,000) Jewish community all but stopped showing Jewish symbols in public. In 2012, the Israeli Embassy advised Israelis visiting Denmark not to wear a Yarmulke (aka Kippah or skull-cap) or other similar religious symbols in public.
The threat on the streets continues, with a Jewish school in Copenhagen just this month forbidding its students from wearing yarmulkes in public: In Copenhagen it was more of the same, including a Palestinian woman who shouted “Heil Hitler”: "In Copenhagen it was more of the same — only it wasn’t solely Muslims who confronted us. Danes wanted to know where we stood on the Israeli-Gaza conflict, and they weren’t shy to ask. I don’t mind a healthy debate, but this was loaded. Our answers were irrelevant. They wanted an excuse to rage, and in a country with very few Jews — especially ones so easily identifiable — we became the perfect victims…."
CNN had hired Oren as “a Middle East contributor” in January. According to his contract, he was not allowed to appear on other channels. Mondoweiss, a pro-Palestinian website, quoted sources “knowledgable [sic] of the situation” saying that Oren was stripped of his job “after internal dissent within CNN that Oren’s classification as an ‘analyst’ was not suitable.”
But a spokesperson for CNN confirmed Oren’s version of the events. “Michael Oren requested that CNN suspend his agreement with the network so that he would be free to support and defend Israel before the international community during the current Gaza upheaval,” the spokesperson told The Times of Israel.
“CNN agreed to Ambassador Oren’s request to suspend the contract and he has continued to appear on our air as a guest.”
Oren said he would consider reinstating his contract with the network after Operation Protective Edge ends.
They didn’t realize that the West had a visceral aversion to hearing about the Holocaust. Since this had taken place at the very epicenter of high Western civilization, even nations not directly involved felt an inescapable and unbearable guilt by association.
The way the guilty West dealt with this was effectively to sanitize Nazism. If it could say everyone could be a Nazi, including the Jews themselves, this would let the West off the guilty hook.
Darker still, the genocide of the Jews challenged the narrative of Jew-hatred that was embedded in Western culture. Although the Holocaust drove this underground, people still widely believed the paranoid, antisemitic tropes of covert Jewish power and malign intent.
They resented the fact that the Holocaust prevented them from expressing these views. Calling Israelis “Nazis”—the demonization lie perpetrated by those who wanted Israel destroyed—enabled antisemites to resume hating Jews once again, sanitized and camouflaged as anti-Zionism so that they couldn’t be accused of the very thing that had produced the Nazi Holocaust.
In her article, Wisse noted the perversity of teaching about hate to prevent hate. Societies that concentrate on their self-improvement, she observed, generally rely on positive instruction and reinforcement. “A pedagogical fixation on hate, by contrast, has been associated with societies like fascist Germany and Soviet Russia that wish to direct blame and hate against designated alien or undesirable groups,” she wrote.
The focus of post-Holocaust education should be not on hatred but on admiration. Most people have never met a Jew, whose numbers make them statistically insignificant.
Rather than confront the wider community with the almost inconceivable horror of the attempt to destroy a people about which they know nothing and care less, the focus should be on educating them about Judaism, the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
People should be taught about the key precepts of Judaism that have been absolutely essential to the development of civilized values in the West, including political freedom, the rule of law and respect for human life.
They should be taught that the Jews are an ancient people whose religion is centered upon the land of Israel; that they are the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom; and that this is why the U.N.’s forerunner gave them alone the right to settle what is now Israel, the disputed territories of the “West Bank” and Gaza.
So many in the West think wrongly that Judaism is only a religious faith, which therefore shouldn’t have a land. So many think wrongly that the Jews are latter-day interlopers into that land from where they displaced its indigenous inhabitants. So many think wrongly that Israel is in illegal occupation of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.
They think this because they only hear Palestinian propaganda to this effect and are never told that these are wall-to-wall lies. As a result, they think that Israel is on the wrong side of fairness, justice and the rule of law, while the truth is the very opposite.
Antisemitism will always be with us. The best that can be hoped for is that it’s shoved firmly back beneath its stone. If there’s any chance of doing so, memorializing dead Jews should give way to celebrating the culture of the living ones.
Normally this newsletter wouldn’t link to two separate articles reviewing the same movie, but a writer like Edward Rothstein reviewing a much-praised film like The Brutalist is something that demands attention. Rothstein praises the acting and the score of this film about the career of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, Laszlo Toth, as an architect in America, and praises the director for the film’s ambition and scope. Yet he finds the film marred by its muddled understanding of its subject—modern architecture—as well as its ideological agenda, which “reinforces so many contemporary mythologies that caricature the American dream as a nightmare.”
One of the surprises of The Brutalist is that Tóth is depicted as a committed Jew, and the film takes his religious commitment seriously, though it is under siege by nearly every American he encounters. . . . When Tóth takes refuge in a Catholic homeless shelter, he is pressed to attend church. Later on, at a public meeting, his design of a chapel . . . is challenged partly because he’s a Jew. A mediocre Protestant architect is brought in to modify his designs. As Tóth says to his wife, “They don’t want us here!”
But this assertion seems more influenced by contemporary political talking points than by the Jewish experience in mid-century America; the opportunities that émigré Jewish professionals had from the 1930s through the 1950s transformed nearly every aspect of American culture. And the intense demand for immigration to the United States by all peoples, despite real prejudice and discrimination that often greeted their arrival, has persisted through the decades because more important liberties were being realized.
Despite all of this heavy-handed polemicizing, [the film] treats the Jewish aspects of Tóth’s life soberly, without condescension or irony or sentimentality. In fact, they are insisted upon. We see Tóth in a traditional synagogue on Yom Kippur, chanting the ancient litany of communal sins and beating his breast with each one mentioned—“We have trespassed, we have betrayed; we have stolen; we have slandered”—and we feel that we are in the presence of genuine and ardent religious feeling. In a development that has inspired palpable discomfort among some progressive critics, even Zionism is taken seriously.
Too bad a film willing to convey such a message insists on drawing incoherent parallels between capitalist America and Nazi-ruled Europe, and ignores the circumstances that drew real European Jews, like the fictional Toth, to America’s shores.
The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act—a measure before the Senate that, inter alia, would grant legal status to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism—has for some time been caught in the legislative switches. Now, as its supporters try to move it forward, four amendments have been introduced that will serve as poison pills. Leading the charge to undermine the bill are Senators Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul, who have both claimed, falsely, that the bill criminalizes speech. It does no such thing. Seth Mandel explains:
Sanders . . . has taken criticism of the bill to new levels by doing more than just lying about what the bill actually does. The text of his amendment . . . includes literal Hamas propaganda in demanding the right (already protected under the bill) to “oppose the Netanyahu-led war effort, which has killed more than 50,000 and wounded more than 113,000, 60 percent of whom are women and children.”
These numbers have been repeatedly debunked, most recently by Hamas itself. . . . Obviously Congress cannot and will not enshrine in its legislation proven falsehoods designed to aid the enemy force currently keeping Americans hostage after massacring U.S. citizens. Sanders knows this. He just wants to demand anti-Israel propaganda be put on the congressional record.
Rand Paul’s attempt at scaremongering this legislation out of contention took a different form: . . . “This bill would subject to punishment speech claiming that Jews killed Jesus,” Paul said, repeating a popular white-nationalist talking point. He explained that the Gospels blame Jews for killing Jesus and therefore—and here he offered a solid candidate for the craziest thing ever said in Congress—“you’re no longer allowed to read John 18 and 19.”
He then . . . “entered into the record a list of the names of 400 Jewish American comedians who he said have referred to Jews in stereotypical language, and who he says may be targeted by the bill.”
Most informed readers would consider Paul’s interpretation of the Gospel of John misleading if not tendentious, and even if it were not, the bill proposes no punishment for speech of any kind. The Orthodox Union’s policy director, Nathan Diament, put it thus to Jewish Insider:
Let’s be clear: these amendments are a disgrace. They don’t just weaken the Antisemitism Awareness Act—they mock it. . . . Some lawmakers in Washington are abdicating their responsibility to ensure that this country’s civil-rights laws are used to protect American Jews as much as they protect any other community targeted with discrimination and harassment.
Judge Davis suggests that the I.D.F.’s use of air, tank and artillery fire in populated areas may constitute a war crime and recommends further international legal restrictions on their use. Yet these same systems were used extensively by American and British forces in similar circumstances in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are often vital in saving the lives of our own soldiers, and their curtailment would jeopardize military effectiveness while handing an advantage to our enemies.
The I.D.F. is not perfect. In the heat of battle and under stress its commanders and soldiers undoubtedly made mistakes. Weapons malfunctioned, intelligence was sometimes wrong and, as with all armies, it has some bad soldiers. Unnecessary deaths resulted, and these should be investigated and the individuals brought to trial if criminal culpability is suspected. The reason so many civilians died in Gaza last summer was not Israeli tactics or policy. It was Hamas’s strategy. Hamas deliberately positioned its fighters and munitions in civilian areas, knowing that Israel would have no choice but to attack them and that civilian casualties would result. Unable to inflict existential harm on Israel by military means, Hamas sought to cause large numbers of casualties among its own people in order to bring international condemnation and unbearable diplomatic pressure against Israel.
Judge Davis’s report is rife with contradictions. She acknowledges that Israeli military precautions saved lives, yet without foundation accuses “decision makers at the highest levels of the government of Israel” of a policy of deliberately killing civilians. Incredibly, she “regrets” that her commission was unable to verify the use of civilian buildings by “Palestinian armed groups,” yet elsewhere acknowledges Hamas’s widespread use of protected locations, including United Nations schools.
Most worrying, Judge Davis claims to be “fully aware of the need for Israel to address its security concerns” while demanding that it “lift, immediately and unconditionally, the blockade on Gaza.” Along with the report’s endorsement of Hamas’s anti-Israel narrative, this dangerous recommendation would undoubtedly lead to further bloodshed in both Israel and Gaza.
In fact, the IDF’s efforts to mitigate civilian casualties went beyond the legal requirements, as attested to by two separate reports of high ranking military experts from democratic countries around the globe, who came to Israel to investigate the last operation. For example, Israel surpassed the practices of militaries of democratic states, in warning Gaza citizens in the vicinity of military targets, and encouraging them to vacate the area prior to its attack. During the conflict, Israel also made extensive humanitarian efforts to alleviate hardship in Gaza, such as delivering humanitarian supplies (food and medical supplies, blankets, fuel and more) and providing medical treatment to wounded Gaza civilians.
The fact that military conflicts involve errors, as well as collateral damage (unintentional harm to civilians who were in the vicinity of legitimate military targets) is sad and regrettable, but nonetheless recognized and accepted in international law.
Israel has established an investigative mechanism in order to scrutinize its activities during the recent operation. As an open democracy, Israel is capable of investigating incidents of concern to determine whether they involved errors, collateral damage, or war crimes. Currently, Israel is examining over 100 incidents and the MAG has opened 19 criminal investigations.
It is important to illuminate the disparity between the reality, and what is often reported. The constant, biased treatment of Israel at the UN does not contribute toward a peaceful settlement of the conflict. It serves only to embolden Hamas and other terrorist groups to intensify their unlawful methods.
Does the New York Times editorial board want Israel to take it seriously? Is the board’s distaste for the country so strong that it has no interest in using the newspaper’s well-earned power and influence to make a real impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Take Tuesday’s editorial, which is among the kinds of low-hanging fruit that Gary Weiss and I will be picking and exposing once the funds are in place for our Mideast Reporter—a multimedia, multilingual investigative reporting enterprise. For now, some batting practice…
The Times editorial concludes: “…Israel has a duty, and should have the desire, to adjust its military policies to avoid civilian casualties and hold those who failed to do so accountable.” “Should have the desire… to adjust…” Think about that for a moment. What they are saying is that Israel does not have such a desire, and that Israel has not, and does not, adjust its policies.
The editorial was written in support of the recent UN Human Rights Council report that concluded that Israel and Hamas may have committed war crimes during their war last summer. But here is what the editors decided to omit from the editorial:
What people of conscience must begin doing when such events happen is for the entire community to identify as Zionists or Jews, as the case may be.
Communities need to realize that these attacks, while seemingly catalyzed by Israel’s war against Hamas, have relatively little to do with Jews or Israel. Rather, the people who are probably well remunerated to organize these scenarios are actually attacking Western values using antisemitism as a convenient excuse to do so. After all, as was noted at so many of the recent university encampments, the shouting often turned from antisemitic vitriol to chants of “Down with America” and its values, which seems to be the real driving force behind this latest manifestation of the world’s oldest hatred.
In 1994, the citizens of Billings, Montana, then a town of 80,000 with less than 50 Jewish families, rose up in unison against spreading antisemitism. After a spate of incidents leading up to Hanukkah, when several Jewish homes bearing visible holiday markings had their windows broken by Jew haters, the local paper printed a picture of a Hanukkiah so that the entire community could place the picture in a window of their respective homes, in effect saying to the antisemites, as did Master Sgt. Edmonds in 1945: “We are all Jews.”
Jewish communities under threat need to engage urgently with non-Jewish community leaders and mount a well-organized campaign to educate the greater community about the danger to everyone if antisemitism goes unchecked.
Community organizations, religious communities, the press, and the entertainment industry need to get on board to project the message that hatred of a single group will not be tolerated. History is replete with sorry examples of communities where the non-Jewish population looked the other way and eventually found themselves, too, locked in the vise of hatred and prejudice. That cannot be allowed to happen again.
It is still not too late to respond. Those people in the subway car who remained silent last week should be ashamed for letting themselves be cowed by a gang of masked people who represent the worst of America. Hopefully, they will not one day also have to pay a price for their silence. But continuing the silence makes them complicit in the crime.
Elie Wiesel, humanity’s conscience for the last 80 years, said: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
It would seem that the world has not yet learned this lesson.
The woke take America’s foundational “city on the hill” mythos and reverse it—creating a photo-negative version of our national fable grounded in the same exceptionalist and Zionist mythos. In the new woke myth, America is no longer the global savior or promised land. Instead, America is responsible for everything bad in the world. There would be no human tragedies if not for Judeo-Christian “settler colonialists.” If it wanted to, the U.S. government could fix all contemporary injustice and even historical wrongs—the legacy of slavery, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, you name it. All it must do is wave its imperial magic wand and bring global misfortune to an end—starting in Gaza.
Wokeness, or whatever you choose to call it, is a photo-negative ideology that merely inverts the country’s old Ku Klux Klan-style ethnopolitical mythos and updates it for today’s secularized—pseudo-multicultural and self-hating—era of Anglo American liberal culture. In wokeness’s new mythic ideal, no longer should the dreaded “white working class” MAGA Trump supporters be on top; rather, they should be on the bottom (double entendre intended), while their opposite-world enemies—Black, trans, handi-capable, antifa sex workers—should instead receive institutional preferences via DEI and whatever more aggressive social engineering project is planned next.
Wokeness represents modern American culture’s inability to come to grips with the failure of the country’s greatest LASP myth—the “American dream.” A mythos that denies the importance of socioeconomic class and tells us everyone can live in their own liberal-individual “success” bubble; occupy a home bubble with an individual fenced in yard; arrive at work in a protected individual metal automobile bubble. Watch personalized entertainment and, at all times, have a fully liberal-individual experience—judged entirely on its own personal merits. In the end, wokeness represents the post-liberalism of the fools. For, it recognizes the indelibly unfair outcomes of liberal capitalism but—as with the “socialism of the fools” that antisemitism so often represents—wokeness scapegoats its way toward a new system of racial stigmatizing as the solution. Instead of all non-Anglos and non-Protestants being the source of inferiority, a photo-negative KKK mythos has erected from the frustrated minds of academics disgusted with their own society. A wannabe multicultural nativism where “deplorable” “straight white men” are the source of all cultural backward inferiority and, therefore, everything wrong with the world. In the end, wokeness is not a true rebellion but merely a bizarro redrawing of old American ethnopolitical prejudices.
Yet bizarro Superman is still Superman. All the distinguishing aspects of the character remain recognizable even when artists draw his color scheme differently and reverse the giant “S” on his chest. The same principle applies with wokeness’s photo-negative, white supremacy mythology, which consists of the LASP-exclusivist bigotries of the Klan now inverted to target “white people.” Key to photo-negative thinking is its attempted reversal of the postwar Judeo-Christian alliance, which features radical Islamists—not as backward terrorists—but as the progress parade’s lead baton twirlers. At the core of the Marxist paradigm lies something scholars call the “labor metaphysic.” The phrase connotes the idea that only the working class can bring about true revolutionary change—not the peasants, nor the farmers, nor the bourgeoisie. In wokeness’s new revolutionary metaphysic, Marx’s beloved proletariat has been replaced with a progress-flag collage of morally superior, third world “people of color” and they/them nonbinary heroines. The discordance of queer activism with Palestinian activism is ignored by the woke because to acknowledge that Islamist political culture is violently anti-queer destroys their QTPOC revolutionary metaphysic, which the woke must believe is actionable for the rest of their photo-negative fantasy to hold. As with Marx’s folklore of all the workers of the world uniting to overthrow capitalism, global “decolonialization” can arrive only when all non-European “persons of color”—and “LGBTQ2SIAA” non-heterosexuals—unite and lead humanity to the intersectional Shangri-la.
Here the Palestinians play a central role. Palestinians—as reigning intersectional grand champions—represent the “true Jews” of the bizarro America that the woke wish to manifest into existence. And if, as prophesied in Deuteronomy, Jews must return to their homeland for Christ’s second coming then, through photo-negative logic, the Palestinians—as bizarro Jews—must have a state, which will be the true Israel. Then, and only then, can the day of true global liberation finally arrive.
While wokeness daguerreotypes old-fashioned white supremacism, there’s no “reverse racism” here. To label wokeness’s photo-negative thinking this way is to concede the argument—seeing ethnic prejudice as something that’s only existed historically in the pro-European and pro-Christian sense, as if each continent and country has not witnessed a kaleidoscope of racial and religious bigotries over time. Along with the new mythology of “only Europeans have ever been racist historically,” the woke must also insist on a new matching, present-focused mythology. It looks something like this: Today’s people of non-European “color” can never be racist, for racism entails “institutional power.”
Correct ICC legal procedure, according to Zimeray, takes into account the concept of complementarity. When a nation has a functioning judiciary, the ICC no longer has jurisdiction, so the nation itself is responsible for the investigation, prosecution and sentencing of any war crimes, crimes against humanity, or other violations of international human rights.
Where such organizations are lacking, the ICC lawfully steps in.
ICC Chief Prosecutor Khan and his team were due to arrive in Israel to assess Israel’s judicial capacity concerning exactly such complementarity when the ICC team abruptly changed course and delivered their decision regarding Israel.
True, no one is above the law, including Israeli leaders, but this latest move bears a political dimension. By deliberately choosing to establish a symmetry between Israel and Hamas in the announcement, the prosecutor creates an equivalence between the two camps. Now we know how this also plays into Hamas’s overall strategy. The more Israel is delegitimized the more Hamas is legitimized.
Add to this that Jews historically have been subjected to false accusations which served as excuses to attack them with diabolical consequences, the projected symmetry becomes incendiary.
Many vilify Israel, and many more remain silent on the Hamas atrocities. This silence is perhaps the most powerful weapon in Hamas’s arsenal. In the 1992 treatise, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,’ psychoanalyst Dori Laub observes the fundamental betrayals of trust in humanity. One example was when the world witnessed the Holocaust for years in plain view, yet allowed it to continue unwitnessed.
It is this aspect of denial that is devastating to so many in Israel. It has fundamentally ruptured the sense that the lives of Jews and all Israelis, including Druze, Muslims and Christians, matter.
While a conclusion of this war in Gaza is necessary and a new war may be unfolding in the North, just as vital, perhaps more so, is a more just framing of the injustices to the Jewish people.
For the last 20 years, two primary fears have held Israel back from launching a preemptive military strike to eliminate Iran's nuclear program. The first was a concern that a military strike would not succeed. Senior defense officials in Israel and the West warned that the Israeli Air Force could not reach Iran, could not overcome the advanced Russian air defense systems that surrounded its strategic facilities, and could not penetrate some of the nuclear installations, which are buried deep underground beneath layers of thick concrete and steel.
The second fear was the practical price Israel would pay if it attacked. Iran is believed to have about 2,500 long-range ballistic missiles capable of striking Israel; Hizbullah, until recently, had an arsenal of 150,000 missiles; Hamas had around 40,000 and the Houthis in Yemen have hundreds. Lastly, the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, until recently, was in possession of hundreds of Scud missiles and several tons of chemical weapons.
These fears are no longer relevant. In October, more than 100 Israeli Air Force aircraft flew more than 2,000 km. and struck more than 20 targets throughout Iran, including Iran's S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, knocking out Iran's ability to defend itself and repel a future attack. All this means Iran is today vulnerable.
Israel, whether on its own or in coordination with the U.S., has a unique opportunity to remove the primary threat that it has warned about for more than 20 years - Iran's nuclear program. This window of opportunity is not unlimited. If Israel or the U.S. fail to act, Iran will take the final steps and build a nuclear bomb.
Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon addressed the Iranian regime directly in Farsi during Wednesday's session of the United Nations Security Council, saying to not miss this rare, historic opportunity and "take action now."
"I am telling the Iranian people, we know the cost of freedom and the courage it demands," Danon said before the Security Council. "Your fight is not just for yourselves but for the millions of lives the regime has destabilized and destroyed. In your hands lie the power to restore the beautiful Iranian nation, to rebuild a land rich in history, culture and resilience."
Danon was the last diplomat to speak in Wednesday's session centered on the Palestinian question and Israel's ongoing war with Hamas. Earlier in the session, Michael Levy, brother of Israeli hostage Or Levy, testified before the council about his family's experience as a hostage family.
The chance before us is clear, Danon said, to finally end the Islamic regime of Iran's aspirations for a Shiite supremacist Empire, the chance to "liberate the world from the most corrupt, most violent, most destabilizing regime."
"Israel has acted decisively," he said, by striking terror networks that once "cast a shadow over our region."
In the eighteen-year interwar interregnum, Israel shifted to a strategy of preventing the outbreak of a major war. Employing its intelligence-gathering skills to maximum effect, the Israelis struck repeatedly at Iranian weapons transfers to Hezbollah, primarily in war-torn Syria. This became known in Israel as the “campaign between the wars.” But the pinprick Israeli strikes, meant to slow Hezbollah’s arms buildup—specifically precision guided munitions—never challenged Hezbollah’s overall strength.
But in preparation for this war, the Israelis seem to have spent at least the past decade penetrating every level of Hezbollah’s organizational apparatus. Indeed, when the time came to fight, no Hezbollah official and no Hezbollah asset was safe. Israel seized the initiative and crippled the group’s military apparatus before it could even mobilize. The Israelis located and liquidated one Hezbollah “ghost” commander after the next, including the elusive mid-level Radwan force commanders who had invested heavily in anonymity. Israel’s campaign this go-round even demonstrated a better understanding of the pressure points on Hezbollah’s support base and the group’s broader Lebanese environment. Hezbollah’s path to regeneration, while not impossible, is more complicated than ever before.
On the Israeli home front, the Israeli public was steeled for this fight. The October 7 horrors and Hezbollah’s ability to conduct its own identical attack created an unprecedented recognition among Israelis that Hezbollah would need to be defeated, no matter the price. Compounding this, Hezbollah’s strikes drove an estimated 160,000 Israelis from their homes since October 8. According to one Israeli official who spoke on background to us, Hezbollah has destroyed $10 to $15 billion in Israeli insfrastructure in the countries north.
The war may not be over yet. And more damage could still be sustained. But after nearly a year of indecision, the IDF gained the conventional upper hand, and this time employed it to maximum effect. Israel deployed its forces according to a combined-arms doctrine that was specifically developed over the past eighteen years to confront Hezbollah. This included internal restructuring of the IDF to create forces like the Oz Brigade, which brought all the IDF’s special forces units under one umbrella, to confront an irregular actor like Hezbollah. When Israel entered Lebanon this time, it favored powerful and agile ground maneuvers over armor or standoff firepower.
Israel had also invested in building a multitiered missile defense array, including the short-range Iron Dome and and mid-range David’s Sling systems. These systems are defensive and not hermetic. They could not always neutralize Hezbollah drones and or “sniping” attacks on northern communities. There simply is no substitute for offensive action. Nevertheless, these systems blunted Hezbollah’s attacks just enough to minimize the group’s impact on the Israeli Home Front and to keep up public moralem a vital component of any democracy’s war effort.
Predictably, Hezbollah is now attempting to claim victory. Merely surviving is the group’s key metric in this regard. Admittedly, the group has scored several hits against Israel, killing 56 Israeli soldiers and wounding hundreds of others, and confounding Israeli defenses with anti-tank guided missile attacks and swarms of loitering munitions. But as the dust settles, a stark picture of the group’s defeat emerges: at least 2,500 members killed, many of them elite and irreplicable leaders, a decimated arsenal, and flattened military infrastructure. All of this will take years to rebuild.
Israelis aren’t blind to the mental-health challenge posed not just by the war but by what started it: scenes of inhumanity reminiscent of the Nazis. In September, Israel’s health minister, Uriel Buso, warned that Israel was facing “the largest mental health event the state has known since its establishment. A crisis that requires us, as a state and a society, to change perceptions and upgrade the public mental health system.”
The following month, Buso introduced legislation designed to decentralize mental-health treatment. Though it went mostly unnoticed at the time (even in the Israeli press), Buso had hit on something important: Just as is the case with physical ailments, you don’t want the last resort to be the first intervention. The goal of primary-care medicine is to keep you out of hospitals and emergency rooms. That prevention can be even more difficult in the chaos of wartime and regarding mental health, the deterioration of which is not always noticeable to others.
Buso also sought to take advantage of Israel’s close-knit society. He got a boost to his department’s budget, and instead of keeping it all under his nose at the national level, he disbursed it throughout local community healthcare providers. Psychiatric institutions would merge with major hospitals to make treatment easier and, the Health Ministry’s director general seemed to suggest, reduce the stigma of seeking help.
All of which is yet another reminder that Oct. 7, 2023, caused a seismic change in Israel and the Jewish world. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks, Israel’s HMOs “reported record levels of requests by patients for sleeping pills, painkillers, and tranquilizers,” Tablet’s Hillel Kuttler reported. According to the IDF, of the 17 soldier suicides in 2023, seven of them—40 percent—happened in just the final three months of the year after the attacks.
Meanwhile Hamas continues to torment the country over the remaining hostages by refusing to let the parents of these captives even know whether their children are still alive. Missiles from as far away as Yemen continue to fall on Tel Aviv. Homes in the north have spent a year empty, as have communities in the Gaza envelope.
Israel continues to be the only Western country that truly acts like it has a stake in how this now-global conflict ends. A country of barely 10 million has been putting the rest on its shoulders. Yet still, Israelis somehow seem immune to the paralysis that most would inevitably succumb to. The CEO of Israel’s largest mental-health organization told the Times of Israel that she doesn’t want people to merely say “the country is in trauma. That doesn’t help us. It’s vital that we look at what we can do, how we can be proactive.”
Here’s hoping Israelis have less of a burden to carry in 2025, or, at the very least, that they get some help carrying it.
Jordan and Egypt are both important states in the Middle East, and they have been Israel’s historic peace partners from the 1980s to 1990s.
This means that these two countries share certain qualities that are of great importance to Israel and the wider region.
Egypt, the most populous country in the area, is a historic center of military power and culture.
Jordan, by contrast, is less populated and is a relatively modern country straddling an expanse of desert between Israel, the Gulf, and Syria.
The Kingdom of Jordan enters 2025 with concerns about the outcome of the changes in Syria. Jordan had worked to reconcile with now-toppled president Bashar al-Assad’s regime over the last several years.
The kingdom has hosted hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. Many Syrians who fled southern Syria have clan or tribal ties in northern Jordan, so their appearance in Jordan did not change Jordan’s demographics.
However, this is a burden for Jordan, which is a relatively poor country compared to others in the Gulf. Jordan is a historic monarchy that grew out of the British Mandate era.
The monarchy has to balance the interests of former Bedouin tribes with the townspeople of northern Jordan and the Palestinians who fled to Jordan in 1948.
Amman views itself as having unique rights in Jerusalem, and even though it gave up its claims to the West Bank, it has a keen interest in the Palestinians. It has been concerned about the outcome of the October 7 massacre and how that might propel Hamas to power in the West Bank.
Jordan is also concerned about being used as a conduit for Iranian weapons smuggling via Iraq. The Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah group in Iraq attacked US forces in Jordan in January 2024, killing three Americans. The kingdom is aware that it is sandwiched between Iran’s interests in Iraq, Israel, the Palestinians, the Gulf, and Syria.
Thus, it knows it must balance all these nations that surround it. Jordan is likely concerned that the Syrian shift in power to a new government could lead to troubles at home.
What if Jordanians get the idea that they could have similar changes in Amman?
The new Syrian administration run by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leaders of the successful rebellion and overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, is at least making a pretense of constructing a functioning government. What that government does, of course, is a separate conversation entirely. But simply as a case study of Islamist institution-building, one gets the impression that, unlike Hamas, HTS wants to be seen as giving a whit about the people who depend on them.
To take one example, from Aaron Zelin’s daily diary of the Syrian transition yesterday: “Syrian Minister of Electricity Omar al-Shuqruq: Six months of maintenance are required to fully restore the electricity network. Re-establishing electrical linkage with Jordan is one of the key solutions to securing power supply for Syria.”
Electricity has been one of the main challenges in Gaza, because Hamas refuses to do the one thing that would solve the problem almost overnight: stop its forever war against Israel. Now, it’s possible that HTS is planning to launch semiannual wars against Jordan and sabotage its own power supply, but I consider the possibility unlikely. That is, however, what Hamas does daily.
Here’s how the electricity in Gaza works. Israel provides 50 percent of the enclave’s power—and I do mean “provides.” Technically, Israel is selling electricity to Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority is supposed to pick up the tab. But they very often don’t, and certainly Hamas doesn’t pay, and every so often Israel threatens to cut off electricity for lack of payment—the debt is usually somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. But Israel always backs down or accepts low partial payments.
How much does Hamas value that electricity? Well, it is not uncommon for their own rockets to hit the power lines and cut off parts of the grid. Usually, Israel just fixes the lines when Hamas destroys them. (Israel is terrible at doing genocide.) But on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas knocked down more than half of their own power lines and Israel did not fix them; it had, if you remember, a few other priorities.
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