The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has produced a handy catalogue of companies that supporters of Israel can give their business to. Of course, this was not its intention. The roster was compiled at the request of the UN Human Rights Council. This is a body in which countries whose idea of human rights is gender-neutral torture and equal-opportunity ballot-rigging get together and pass reams of vexatious resolutions against Israel.
The BDS movement's economic warfare against the Jewish state has had little success but that's not the point: a UN body is tacitly legitimizing its agenda and even doing the research for it. What OHCHR's list is about is the UN's institutional hostility towards Israel and support for "de-judaizing" Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria.
Jerusalem is Israel's capital; before that it was the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Judah. However hard the UN strives to erase the Jewish character of the city, its historical record isn't going anywhere. When Israel captured Judea and Samaria in 1967, they did so not from any state called Palestine (no such state has ever existed), but from Jordan, whose annexation was almost universally unrecognized - it was an illegal occupation - and prior to this these lands had been part of Mandatory Palestine.
Mandatory Palestine was created by the League of Nations to "secure the establishment of the Jewish national home." The Israelis have many innovations to their name, but perhaps their greatest feat is being the first nation-state in history to "illegally occupy" their own territory.
The people the UN harms when it works to isolate and delegitimize Israel are the Palestinians. It tells them that their long, painful campaign of national self-harm is just and holds out false hope that it will one day triumph. It won't.
The priority of anyone who professes to be pro-Palestinian should be convincing the Palestinians to recognize that Israel is here to stay and, on that basis, finally accept offers of peace and statehood.
The UN Human Rights Council's "blacklist" of 112 international and local companies operating in the territories is a shameful attempt to strike a blow against the Middle East's only functioning democracy and upholder of the rule of law and religious freedom. No wonder Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council executive director Colin Rubenstein described publication of the blacklist as "a witch-hunt that reminds us of Nazi-era boycotts of the Jewish people." There is no precedent for any UN body taking similar action over a disputed territory, and no basis in international law for it to do so.
As Dr. Rubenstein pointed out, it is not in breach of international law for the 112 companies to operate in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. "They are legitimate businesses providing goods and services...they are not breaking any international laws." Australia must waste no opportunity to condemn and counter the council's brazen hypocrisy and the sinister witch-hunt it has embarked on.
Yair Lapid, co-leader of Blue and White, says that if the Democrats beat Trump, Israel, with Bibi at the helm, will be in “deep, deep trouble.” That “Obama time is going to be just a promo for what is going to happen.”
But the truth is, it doesn’t matter who wins the Israeli election. The Dems would screw Israel over no matter who sits in the prime minister’s seat. Which means this is just another fear-mongering lie. It’s Lapid going “OOGA BOOGA!” to scare us into voting for his guy, Gantz.
And the thing is with this third round of elections in March, Israelis are tired. We’re tired of the scare tactics; of listening to the candidates vie for our attention. We are tired of thinking about who will be the least of all evils, of listening to the endless lies. The candidates lie to us in the media and on social media. They spam us on our phones by SMS.
So I began to think about what might make voting different this third time around. How might the average Israeli be induced to feel a bit of enthusiasm for sticking yet another ballot in a box? Sure, it’s nice to have another legally mandated paid day off, but I’d like to feel excited about what we can do to make Israel a better place to live.
What exactly would I like the government of Israel to achieve? What might the candidates, offer me other than fear? To my mind, the ideal prime minister of Israel is someone who will:
·Stop the balloons targeting Israeli children in the South
·Solve the problem of Gaza rocket fire, once and for all
·Make housing more affordable for middle class Israeli citizens
·Allow Jews greater access to Jewish holy sites, and the right to pray wherever they wish
·Reform the Israeli court system that cripples Israeli governments and holds them hostage
·Do what is best for Israel, even under pressure from friendly foreign leaders and
·Assert Israel’s right to rule over itself without interference
Who will do these things and lead my granddaughter out of her safe room in Netivot, dry her tears and wipe away her fears? Who will turn balloons back into objects of delight instead of something to fear? Who will make it possible for Yehudah Glick to linger as long as he likes on the Temple Mount, and pray there, too, without fear of arrest or interrogation?
These what I see as very basic needs have not been met by Bibi in his long run as prime minister. That won’t be different after the next election. Gantz and Mr. Hair, on the other hand, would be an inexperienced disaster. So the only question left is whether enough people will hold their noses and vote for a clear majority, or whether Israelis will get yet a fourth legally mandated holiday, on September 8.
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Rai al Youm has a paranoid article about how Jews want to take over Jordan.
On Sunday, Jordan struck down a bill that would have theoretically allowed foreigners to purchase land in Petra. Jordanians are deathly scared that Jews will buy land there and somehow transfer it to Israel.
The author, Ahmed Abdul Basit Rajoub, mentions the filming of "Jaber" that was shut down last year because Jirdan found out that the movie implied a Jewish history in Petra. It mentions that Jews visit the mountain said to be the burial site of the biblical Aaron, and how terrible that is.
Rajoub argues that there is no evidence that the Children of Israel were ever in Jordan. In fact, the ancient Jews were nobodies:
Most historians in archaeology and anthropology tend to believe that the ancient Jews in the East are Arab tribes that were Judaized. They were pastoral, and practiced usury and the profession of mercenaries due to their particular social situation. They did not know stability, agriculture, city building, or fortresses. ...
We are facing a wicked enemy. We must pay attention to every movement he makes, not only in the political field that relates to the Palestinian issue, but rather in the religious, cultural, touristic, etc. areas from which he crept to consolidate his allegations, his lies, to implement his plans.
One of the less traveled tourist sites there is Machaerus, a fortress originally built by the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus around 90 BCE, destroyed but later rebuilt by Herod the Great in 30 BC as a military base.
This is the sort of thing that Jordan doesn't want the world to know.
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That Abbas brought his map to the highest level of international diplomacy suggests that he believes that the world is ready to entertain this revisionist history of the Middle East. Sadly, in this regard, he may not be mistaken.
Rewriting history has long been a tactic of overtly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic organizations. On college campuses, anti-Israel groups regularly use a version of this map during the notorious Israel Apartheid Week. The anti-Semitic BDS movement features this graphic in its campaign materials. Al Jazeera, the propaganda arm of Qatar that has a growing audience among younger generations in America, has a “Vanishing Palestine” interactive video as part of its “Palestine Remix” channel.
What is most insidious, however, is the growing use of the map in mainstream venues. In October 2015, MSNBC displayed these maps during a live segment discussing a recent spate of Palestinian violence on the Temple Mount (for which it later apologized). In 2017, Columbia University published the maps on advertisements for a workshop on “Citizenship and Nationality in Israel/Palestine.” Last September, a high school matriculation exam in Finland included the maps.
The use of the “Map of Lies” in mainstream media and academic circles in particular will have the effect of normalizing its content and message.
For Israel and the Jewish people, this presents a real danger. Efforts to delegitimize the Jewish State are growing louder, with the United Nations recently releasing a “blacklist” of Israeli companies that operate in Judea and Samaria being only the latest example of revisionist history having tangible consequences.
One’s interpretation and understanding of the past forms their assumptions about the present and determines their vision for the future. Believing Abbas’s “Map of Lies” will do more than dishonor the past; it will irrevocably damage the cause of peace.
Ambassador Friedman heads the three-man American delegation now sitting down with the three-man Israeli delegation on the Mapping Committee.
Gantz has been powerless to stop the formation and work of the Mapping Committee. Indeed Gantz urged Trump to release his peace plan before the elections. Gantz has not even requested that one of his nominees be part of the Israeli delegation on the Mapping Committee.
In ignoring the Mapping Committee – Gantz is signalling the continuation of his policy opposing Israel extending its sovereignty into Judea and Samaria with America’s approval.
Gantz has made his own policy very clear: “After the elections, we will work to apply [Israeli] sovereignty on the Jordan Valley. We will do this in a nationally agreed process and in coordination with the international community.”
Believing the international community would ever agree to Israel extending its sovereignty into any part of Judea and Samaria – without swaps of existing Israeli sovereign territory – is totally unrealistic. The international community has been fixated for decades on seeing another Arab State created in the entirety of Judea and Samaria – or in an area of the same size including land currently part of Israel.
Gantz – in limiting sovereignty to just the Jordan Valley – is dashing the hopes of an estimated Jewish population of 464,353 in 131 settlements seeking unification with Israel.
Israeli voters now have a clear choice to end the political deadlock that has followed two indecisive elections held in the past twelve months: Is it Netanyahu – promising the restoration of sovereignty in parts of the heartland of the Jewish people’s historic and biblical homeland for the first time in 3000 years?
OR
Is it Gantz – promising more of the same in Judea and Samaria that has been going on for the last 53 years?
A third deadlocked election result now seems increasingly unlikely.
The choice is stark and the direction Israel will take for generations to come is at stake.
One of the most egregious examples is the NGO for Palestinian “prisoner rights” Addameer. Addameer leaders regularly meet with EU officials and are very involved internationally. It even participated in the UN Human Rights Council’s discussions on Israel in 2018, and urges the ICC war crimes probe of Israel. They also hold “educational” events on campuses with students in the US. Multiple Addameer employees and leaders have a long and rich track record of terrorist convictions and, in several cases, have been Addameer employees and PFLP operatives simultaneously. It is problematic, to say the least, for the EU or UN to be advised on their decisions by organizations with such extensive ties to an EU-recognized terrorist organization.
From 2013-2019, Addameer received nearly $2.1 million from the EU and European member states, including Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain. The Basque autonomous community alone has given it over $920,000 in grants between 2014 and 2019. From 2014 to 2017, Addameer received $498,700 from the Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Secretariat (according to their website), a joint funding body financed by Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. With such significant EU investment, heightened transparency is an absolute necessity.
If the EU is not prepared to cut funding completely, they must double down and demand not only that Palestinian NGOs commit to not working with terrorist organizations, but also that they demonstrate complete financial transparency as to how their money is being spent. Palestinian NGOs should also be required to prove, in light of the evidence, that their employees and leaders are not active PFLP members, perhaps by a new disclosure requirement of past and present civil society affiliations.
The fact that the ties between Palestinian civil society groups and terrorist organizations have significantly deepened over the years, and that simultaneously their ties to European countries have also deepened, should alarm anyone. The EU, and other European states, have an obligation to ensure their grants are not being used to fund the expansion of terrorist activities. They also have an obligation to ensure that decisions made at the UN and EU regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not unduly influenced by groups with PFLP ties.
The latest Palestinian Central Bureau for Statistics report says that there are now 135.000 Palestinian workers who are employed by Israelis (a drop of 6000 in the last quarter 2019) and 24,000 of them work in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, an increase of 2000 from Q3.
65% of them work in construction, which is the highest paying category of work. This chart shows the comparative daily wages in shekels for Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel/settlements for different types of jobs.
While some 13% of Palestinians work for Israelis, based on the averages in the chart above, it appears that about half of all Palestinian construction workers are actually working in Israeli communities and a much smaller percentage of the other categories.
Last year several thousand Gazans were quietly allowed to work in southern Israel. I do not believe that the PCBS has those people included; Hamas probably has those statistics.
Also, there are many Palestinian workers who depend on business from Israel but who are not employees. I know that some Israeli high-tech firms outsource programming to Palestinian consultants, for example. If Palestinians would succumb to BDS-style pressure, their economy would be devastated.
(h/t Ibn Boutros)
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I enjoyed reading Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism. I want to center this review on Hazony's theory of modern anti-Zionism.
To oversimplify, the book is a defense of nationalism as opposed to imperialism. Nationalism is defined as being loyal to one's nation and letting other nations do their own thing; each nation is free do decide on the best way to govern yet each maintains its own national character. Imperialism is a philosophy where the ideas of one nation are imposed on others that might have different ways of thinking because the ideas are superior to all others, so imposing them is for the greater good.
Modern Europe is in many ways a response to Nazism; the horrors of Hitler were so great that we must do everything possible to avoid anything that resembles it in the slightest. But Europe, specifically the EU, makes two very horrible mistakes.
One is that they look at Nazi Germany as being the outcome of extreme nationalism. Because of that, they regard all nationalisms with suspicion at best and hostility at worst.
Yet Nazi Germany was not nationalist - despite calling itself National Socialism. Nazi Germany was imperialist. The Third Reich was meant to rule over Europe and to impose its racist and antisemitic philosophy worldwide.
The EU's connection between nationalism and Nazism is completely wrong.
The second mistake is that the EU, by trying to impose a single standard of law and regulations across Europe, is imperialist itself! The irony of an imperialist Europe, being largely led by Germany, as an answer to the imperialist Third Reich, is painful.
(The major difference between the two is that Europe has effectively outsourced its defense to the United States, so in that way it is a protectorate. Yet its philosophical underpinnings are imperialist.)
Europe looks at Israel as a nationalist endeavor - which it most certainly is. (Hazony brings much evidence that early philosophers of nationalism got their ideas from the Biblical description of the Jewish kingdoms, where individual tribes banded together for defense, one of the major functions of a nation.) Since Europe is traumatized by World War II and mistakes Nazism as nationalism, it views Israel as a potential nationalist danger.
Hazony makes a stark distinction between what lessons Israel and Europe learn from the Holocaust. Israel looks at the slaughter of Jews and says that a national entity could have defended them; Europe looks at the same slaughter and says that Nazi "nationalism" is the cause and that is what must be stopped to ensure it doesn't happen again.
As Hazony writes (p. 206):
In both paradigms, the fact of Israel takes on an extraordinary significance because of the identity of the Jews as the victims of the Shoah. For Israel's founders, the fact that the survivors of the death camps and their children could be given weapons and permitted to train as soldiers under a Jewish flag seemed a decisive movement of the world toward what was just and right. It could in no sense make up for what had happened. But it was just nonetheless, granting the survivors precisely the empowerment that, had it come a few years earlier, would have saved their loved ones from death and worse. In this sense, Israel is the opposite of Auschwitz.
At the same time, Israel takes on extraordinary significance in the new European paradigm as well. For in Israel, the survivors and their children took up arms and set themselves on a course of determining their own fate. That is, this people, so close to the Kantian ideal of perfect self-renunciation only a few decades ago, have instead chosen what is now seen as the path of Hitler—the path of national self-determination. It is this that lies beneath the nearly boundless disgust so many feel toward Israel, and especially toward anything having to do with Israel's attempts to defend itself, regardless of whether these operations are successful or unsuccessful, irreproachable or morally flawed. In taking up arms in the name of their own national state and their own self-determination, the Jews, as many Europeans and others now see it, have simply taken up the same evil that led Germany to build the camps. The details may differ, but the principle, in their eyes, is the same: Israel is Auschwitz.
Therefore, Hazony stresses, it doesn't matter what Israel does or doesn't do - its very existence as a nation willing to defend its people is proof of its inherent immorality.
Antisemitism is not the driving factor of anti-Zionism, according to Hazony. He says that Europe is also antipathetic towards all (European-origin) nations that embrace nationalism. This is why they are so upset at Britain after Brexit, at Trump's America, at some eastern European countries - because those countries insist on making their own national decisions and not to be bound by the rules and international institutions and protocols and standards pushed by Europe (e.g., the ICC, the Kyoto Protocol.). I am reminded of the Carter-era US arguments when abstaining from the 1980 UNSC Jerusalem resolution that emphasized how the portion that demanded that no country establish embassies there was an unacceptable violation of national sovereignty. To the Left, every nation must give up some independence to be part of the world community, and the US has always resisted that to varying degrees.
I'm not so sure that antisemitism is not a major factor in European anti-Zionism - it seems to me the vitriol against Israel by the European Left is much greater than that against the US or Britain. But Hazony's theory is intriguing.
As far as non-European countries such as Arab nations are concerned, Hazony claims that Europe and the Left subconsciously do not consider them to be full nations but savages. In this, they are recalling Kant, who theorized three stages of mankind's development, from savages to nations to a higher moral order where all nations federate under one rule of law. European anti-nationalists look at themselves as being at the highest level, at the US, Israel and Britain at the second level, and the rest of the world still at the level of savages, from whom nothing can be expected. I'm not so convinced of this argument; it seems to me that the anti-colonialism of the Left is driving them to regard all non-whites as noble people whose immorality is the fault of the West.
It is always a treat to read Hazony. And this is a very important book.
(Naturally, any mistakes in summarizing Hazony's arguments are mine alone.)
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Egyptian authorities have uncovered a human trafficking ring in Giza where young girls were forced to "marry" rich Arabs for as little as 48 hours where they would be sexually abused.
The price of the girls were between 10,000 and 200,000 Egyptian pounds ($640-$13,000) and the timeframe of each "marriage" was from two days to a week. The leaders of the ring, which included a lawyer, would keep the money for themselves.
The girls were between 12 and 15.
The girls were often runaways. The pimps would send photos of the girls via WhatsApp to the rich Arab johns. One of the pimps performed the "marriage" ceremony with a Quran. in a cafe in Agouza.
The girls say that the pimps also sexually assaulted and raped them.
During the police raid, a "large number" of girls were found.
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In a new BBC2 documentary that aired on Monday, British Jewish comedian and presenter David Baddiel sat down with a Holocaust denier and challenged his conspiratorial views.
A clip from “Confronting Holocaust Denial” showed a frustrated Baddiel trying to argue logically with Irish antisemite Dermot Mulqueen, who expressed a range of vicious tropes, among them the medieval accusation that Jews murdered Christian children and that Jews “hate” Europeans.
Baddiel at one point countered, “If the gas chambers never existed, us Jews would have no reason to hate Europeans. Why would we hate Europeans for something that actually never happened?”
Mulqueen paused awkwardly in response, before stammering, “…because it’s profitable.”
After being arrested in 2015 for vandalizing private property in protest of Holocaust Memorial Day, Mulqueen unsuccessfully ran in Ireland’s 2016 general election as an independent MP.
In an interview with BBC HistoryExtra, Baddiel said he struggled with the question of whether exposing Holocaust deniers to the public provided them a platform to gain legitimacy.
“My feeling — and indeed the empirical fact — is that Holocaust denial won’t go away if we ignore it and therefore it’s better to confront it, and at some level try to understand it. That was my mission in this film,” explained Baddiel.
The Holocaust is one of the most documented, witnessed and written about events in history, yet one in six people worldwide either think the Holocaust has been exaggerated or deny that it took place. What has happened in the 75 years since the liberation of the camps to have so skewed the picture? And, if it matters, why does it matter?
In this timely and important film, David Baddiel explores the multi-faceted nature of Holocaust denial - in both historical and contemporary terms, in an attempt to understand what motivates this dangerous phenomenon and why it is on the rise, both in Britain and across the globe.
David begin his journey at Chelmno, the site of a huge extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where 200,000 Jews were murdered. He learns of the extraordinary lengths German forces employed to conceal what they were doing – building huge crematoria to burn bodies, using ‘bone mills’ to grind down skeletons and scattering the resulting human ashes in surrounding woodland. For David, this is the starting point of Holocaust denial – where the Nazis themselves were attempting to deny their actions.
But the Germans were not alone in concealing the truth of the Holocaust. In the national archives in Kew, David uncovers an extraordinary memo issued by the Ministry of Information’s propaganda department, discussing how the atrocities of death camps should be reported to the public. The memo recommends reports focus on the camps' ‘innocent victims’, not criminals, and ‘not Jews’. This idea that the suffering of the Jewish people should somehow be played down was still dominant when the camps were liberated - many newsreels barely mention that the majority of victims had been Jewish. For David, anti-Semitism is fundamentally at the root of all Holocaust denial.
David discovers how, as the true scale of the Holocaust emerges in the postwar years, the numbers of people attempting to deny or to downplay its scale increases. There is a direct correlation between a higher profile of the Holocaust and rates of denial, something reflected in David’s own experience. As soon as this programme is announced by the BBC, David's Twitter feed fills with posts trying to deny the truth of the Holocaust. It begs the question whether David, by making the film, is himself fanning the flames of denial? And if so, should he be doing it?
Watching deeply disturbing and depressing documentary on Holocaust denial by @Baddiel which features a copy of “‘Holocaust’ News” with the headline “Holocaust story an evil hoax”. I’ve seen a copy of that. This one. It was in the private papers of the Labour MP, Andrew Faulds. pic.twitter.com/zbTl4TTEEW
Now more than ever, Germany has its own domestic challenges again rising to the surface: the far-right ideology that has resurfaced throughout Europe in apparent response to the refugee crisis has provoked a resurgence of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia—particularly in Germany. On the one hand, many fear that if Germany fails to address its current situation, the world could relive one of its darkest moments in history. German-Jews have already been told by Jewish leadership to refrain from wearing Kippahs in public and remove mezuzot from their doors—many have begun to conceal their identity. The attempted attack on the Halle Synagogue—though prevented from becoming a full-blown massacre by a locked door—still led to a loss of life and demonstrates the repercussions of not actively addressing this issue. On the other hand, if this issue prioritized, as was publicly called for by Germany’s foreign minister, Germany will have the chance to confirm its position as a ‘land of opportunity,’ where people from around the world can reinvent themselves.
Yet while the German government has vowed to combat anti-Semitism, its threats so far have mainly consisted of unspecified consequences for individuals who attack German Jews. As a Syrian, I know that warnings alone are not enough to counter decades of anti-Semitic messaging. In febrile minds of extreme anti-Semites, attacking Jews can be seen as an honorable and courageous act. In many cases, these individuals have been conditioned since birth to perceive the Jewish people as their enemy, themselves victims of a narrative designed to prevent them from holding their country’s dictators accountable for the widespread misery felt throughout the Arab world.
Syrians must educate themselves on persistent history of Anti-Semitism, which did not start with the Holocaust—nor end with the creation of the state of Israel. Every Syrian who aspires to become a European citizen must refuse to be an anti-Semitic extension of their government. Germany, with its years of retraining its own population, has a lot to offer on this front, but the German government must make this a priority and a commitment with its deeds as well as its words.
A Europe unsafe for Jews will never be safe for other minorities. When Syrian communities throughout Europe come to recognize this reality, there is the remarkable potential for fostering a conducive environment for Jews and Syrians to respect one another, encouraging understanding and cooperation between neighbours and mutual support of minority communities throughout Europe. However, getting to this point will require a lot of effort and determination, both on the side of the German government and among Syrian communities themselves.
The Israeli occupation authorities are trying to subjugate the Palestinian citizen, imposing him, arbitrarily, on the military barriers and iron gates that make it difficult for him to carry out the simplest tasks, and confuse his planning for his life. Will he be able to arrive at the appointed time or not?
The West Bank barriers and gates were divided into 100 cantons, and its goal is to generalize the apartheid regime and prevent the establishment of a connected Palestinian state...
The occupation forces install about 165 iron gates on the entrances of villages and cities, and on the roads connecting them, half of which are closed in normal conditions, while about 600 military barriers, dirt berms or cement blocks control the lives of citizens, which restrict the movement of vehicles and pedestrians alike, and they erect gates at the entrances to the villages which aim to isolate any village within a few minutes when the occupation decides.
Besides the fact that the numbers seem hugely exaggerated, the timing of this and similar articles is curious.
After all, if anything, the checkpoint situation is better today than at any time in the past 20 years.
This seems to me to be a way for Palestinian leaders to misdirect both their own people and the world by starting a campaign against Israeli security measures.
They want to proactively stir up anger because there is a simple solution to the checkpoint problem, as well as the "canton" problem and most of their other complaints: Accept the "Peace to Prosperity" plan!
Every single checkpoint, except those into Israel, would be dismantled under the plan.
Palestinian propagandists realize that they need to change the focus away from the plan and towards their usual posture of playing the innocent victim of Israeli evil. They know they can't have it both ways - complain about how terrible life is and also complain about how terrible a plan that solves all their every day problems is as well. So they will complain about specific aspects of the peace plan they don't like and try as hard as they can to distract people away from the parts that would solve their major everyday issues.
The proper response to all of these types of articles and tweets is - if things are so bad, then a peace plan that solves those issues is a good idea.
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In September 2017, right after Rosh Hashanah, Peter Beinart wrote in The Forward:
Last week, Bernie Sanders gave a much-touted foreign policy speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the same location where Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” address in 1946. The contents of the speech were intriguing. So was its timing.
Sanders delivered it on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.
This has become a pattern for the Vermont Senator. In 2015, Sanders used the Jewish New Year to deliver a major address on, ironically enough, religion and public life, at Liberty University, an institution founded by Jerry Falwell. In 2016, he spent Yom Kippur at the White House meeting Pope Francis and talking about it on CNN.
It’s a pattern he’d do well to reconsider. Although he considers himself Jewish, Sanders is not, in his words, “actively involved with organized religion.” That is, of course, fine. He can observe or not observe Jewish holidays however he’d like. But he’s also a former — and likely future — contender for the presidency in a deeply religious country. And flaunting his disrespect for his own religious tradition isn’t smart.
Beinart's concern was not for Sanders to embrace his spirituality, but to ensure he is electable:
Sanders has not called himself an atheist. His secularism, however, may hurt him with voters who espouse a specific faith. According to a January 2016 Pew Research Center survey, Democrats who identified as Protestant or Catholic were roughly 20 points less likely than religious unaffiliated Democrats to say Sanders would make a good or great president. Among the religious unaffiliated within their party, Sanders led Clinton by eight points. But among Protestants and Catholics, she led him by 23 points.
Sanders' recent videos where he claims to be proud to be Jewish may be a direct, and somewhat cynical, attempt to gain the votes he lost to Hillary.
Bernie's latest outreach video to Jews is more of the same - he talks a lot about Hitler's Nazis and contemporary Nazis and that is pretty much his entire Jewish playlist.
I'm very proud to be Jewish and I look forward to becoming the first Jewish president in the history of this country. pic.twitter.com/UOPvEomHNE
There is a short clip there of Bernie lighting a menorah - but even then, in Des Moines, he couldn't come up with a single word to relate to Chanukah itself, only speaking in platitudes about freedom and diversity. It's a holiday that celebrates religious freedom and he couldn't even bring himself to make the connection, something that non-Jewish presidents have done ever since they started creating greetings for Chanukah.
Maybe he can fool some people of faith in America into thinking that his talking about people who hate Jews gives him some Jewish bona fides. But the entire "proud to be Jewish" shtick, when four years ago he avoided the topic at all costs, is not seeming very authentic.
He has yet to say a single specific thing about Judaism he is proud of.
(h/t EBoZ)
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Question: How long does it take a Palestinian Authority TV reporter to rewrite history and deceive Palestinians into hating Israelis?
Answer: 10 seconds.
This is a classic example of how the Palestinian Authority lies to its own people to demonize Israelis and create hatred of them among Palestinians.
At a Palestinian protest against US President Trump’s Middle East peace plan, an Israeli officer instructed Palestinian journalists to move to the other side of the road to be safe from oncoming cars.
But in the PA TV reporter’s instantaneous rewriting of history – during his live broadcast – this was distorted into a lie, turning the Israeli officer’s attempt at protecting the Palestinians into a racist statement. The PA TV reporter told viewers that the Israeli soldiers ordered them to move because “this is an Israeli road and Palestinians are not allowed on it.” In truth, the Israeli officer stressed that the soldiers were trying to “look out for” the lives of the Palestinians, because they were in danger of being “run over.” It is worth noting that the Israeli officer and the PA TV reporter spoke Hebrew together.
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Stand over there.”
PA TV reporter (in Hebrew): “We are journalists.”
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Journalists over there.”
PA TV reporter (in Hebrew): “Where?
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Across the street. They’ll run you over. It’s your life. Go over here.”
PA TV reporter (in Arabic): “As you can hear –”
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “You’ll get killed. We’re looking out for you.”
PA TV reporter (in Arabic): “One of the occupation soldiers is making us move away on a false claim that this is an Israeli road and Palestinians are not allowed on it.” [Official PA TV, Jan. 29, 2020]
Iranian authorities are threatening to destroy the historic tomb of Esther and Mordechai in the city of Hamedan, 200 miles west of Tehran, in favor of constructing "a consular office for Palestine," ARAM, the Alliance for Rights of All Minorities in Iran, said in a Twitter post on Sunday.
The organization claims that members of Iran's formidable Basij paramilitary force attempted to raid the historic site in what it called "an act of revenge against the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan by President Trump."
"Ester and Mordechai were biblical Jewish heroes who saved their people from a massacre in a story known as #Purim. Their burial site has been a significant Jewish landmark for Jews and history buffs around the world," ARAM said.
In December 2010, Iranian protesters tried to breach the compound citing fears that Israel might damage the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Sir Henry McMahon, acting on behalf of the British government, met with Sherif Hussein of Mecca in 1915 and made what were taken to be a series of promises to the Arab people. These ‘promises’ were later disputed by the British government and, as with many issues concerning recent Middle East history, were open to interpretation.
Hussein interpreted the correspondence given to him by McMahon as a clear indication that Palestine would be given to the Palestinians [sic] once the war had ended. The British government was later to dispute this interpretation. They claimed that any land definitions were only approximate and that a map drawn at the time (but not by McMahon or a member of the British delegation) excluded Palestine from land to be given back to the Arab people.
...
By the time war ended in November 1918, two distinct schools of thought had developed regarding Palestine:
1) That the British had promised Palestine to the Arabs after the war had ended in return for their support to the Allies in the war.
2) That the British had agreed to give their support to the Jews for a homeland in Palestine as laid out in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
It turns out that this same argument came up in 1937, when the Peel Commission issued its partition plan. In that plan, there would be a tiny Jewish state but the Arab state would become united with Trans-Jordan, seemingly under the rule of King Abdullah. ("two sovereign independent States would be established--the one an Arab State consisting of Trans-Jordan united with that part of Palestine which lies to the cast and south of a frontier such as we suggest in Section 3 below; the other a Jewish State consisting of that part of Palestine which lies to the north and west of that frontier.")
At the time, Palestinian Arabs argued that the McMahon correspondence gave them the right to an independent state in Palestine and therefore the Peel Commission plan was invalid.
As a result, Sir Henry McMahon himself wrote a letter to the Times of London and set the record straight. The Palestine Post reported:
Sir,
Many references have been made in the Palestine Royal Commission Report and in the course of the recent debates in both Houses of Parliament to the ‘McMahon Pledge’, especially to that portion of the pledge which concerns Palestine and of which one interpretation has been claimed by the Jews and another by the Arabs.
It has been suggested to me that continued silence on the part of the giver of that pledge may itself be misunderstood.
I feel, therefore, called upon to make some statement on the subject, but I will confine myself in doing so to the point now at issue—i.e., whether that portion of Syria now known as Palestine was or was not intended to be included in the territories in which the independence of the Arabs was guaranteed in my pledge.
I feel it my duty to state, and I do so definitely and emphatically, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge to King Hussein to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised. I also had every reason to believe at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included in my pledge was well understood by King Hussein.
Yours faithfully,
A. Henry McMahon.
July 22.
That should have settled the matter, yet even today Arabs and Arabists are arguing that the McMahon correspondence pledged an independent Palestinian state.
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The hidden government of the world, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Masonic plans to dominate the world, Part 10, by MANSOUR ABDUL HAKIM, Egypt, 2011 Stones on the chessboard .. The practical application of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by Majdi Kamil, Egypt, 2011 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, MOHAMMED IBRAHIM, Jordan, 2011 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ABDEL BADIE KAFAFI, Oman, 2007 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, VICTOR MARSDEN, Egypt, 2004 (Also a 2018 edition) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, MOHAMED IBRAHIM, Egypt, 2012 (Also a 2014 edition published in Jordan) Protocols of the Elders of Zion, OSCAR LEVY, Jordan, 2017 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Part 1 and 2), AJAJ NOUEIHED, Jordan 2014 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, AHMED MUTAWE, Jordan, 2015 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ABBAS EL AKKAD, Egypt The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, BAHA AL-AMIR, Egypt, 2016 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, SALAH ABOUDIA, Kuwait, 2015 Zion Protocols, RASLAN ALADDIN, Syria, 2016
That's about 15 different publications of the Protocols or about them.
I also found a book from Algeria, "Blood from the Pastry of Zion," by Muslim Brotherhood member Najeeb al-Kilani, describing the 1840 Damascus blood libel as if it was true.
The Great Conspiracy to Control the World 3 - Isra and the Children of Israel is one of the many anti-Israel books that are pure antisemitism. Also a number of books predicting Israel's demise.
Anti-Israel books by Shlomo Sand and Israel Shahak are also featured, although Bibi Netanyahu's 1996 book "A Place Among Nations" is also there.
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Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech Sunday where, among other ramblings, he discussed how Hezbollah will deal with the United States. (The translation comes from Hezbollah's Al Manar website.)
Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah stressed Sunday that the United States of America has recently committed two major crimes, the assassination of the head of IRGC’s Al-Quds Force general Qasem Suleimani as well as the deputy chief of Iraq’s Hashd Shaabi Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis and the announcement of Trump’s Mideast plan.
Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that those two crimes had ushered a direct confrontation with the axis of resistance in Lebanon, calling for forming a comprehensive (political, economical, cultural and legal) resistance front, against the United States all over the world.
The military choice will never be abandoned, according to the Resistance Leader who pointed out that the US tyrant has not left [anything] for the regional peoples except holding guns to fight it.
That last paragraph sounds like a terrorism threat, but he left it vague.
Sayyed Nasrallah considered that the confrontation between the United States and the forces which reject to surrender to its will is inevitable, adding that Washington is who has led the region to this conflict, not the resistance.
All the regional peoples must be prepared for the key confrontation, according to Sayyed Nasrallah who added that Trump’s administration is the most arrogant, unjust, Satanic and corrupt in the US history.
The US hit the quadfecta!
But here's the best part:
Hezbollah Chief suggestedboycotting all the US goods or at least the products of some (e.g. Trump’s) firms, adding that the US point of weakness is its economy.
What, exactly, does Hezbollah purchase from Trump's companies today? Do they stay in Trump hotels? Do they buy apartments in Trump buildings?
This is some strategy.
Nasrallah then gave a backhanded compliment to Israel while trying to insult it and the US:
“The Israeli enemy has a major weakness which is the human losses; similarly, the Americans have their economic and financial situation as a point of fragility. Hezbollah hit the Israeli enemy at its weakness, so, likewise, we can concentrate on the US economic interests.”
Those crazy Jews and their concern for human life! We in Hezbollah have no such weakness.
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Featured on the program were Messianic Jews Steve and Jana Ben-Nun of Israeli News Live, who claimed that the transgender rights movement is a Zionist plot to make all of humanity androgynous.
“They want to rule the world,” Jana Ben-Nun said of the Jews. “They want to get Gentile riches, and they want to rule the Gentiles. They don’t consider Gentiles [to be] fully human beings. In fact, as an end game, they have this strange doctrine: the Adam Kadmon doctrine. Adam Kadmon was, originally, according to the Zohar and the Talmud, he was androgynous; Adam, he wasn’t male or female, he was male and female in one body, and this is why you see this transgender agenda today.”
“Is Zionism behind the transgender movement?” Wiles asked.
“Yes,” Ben-Nun replied. “It gets its origin in Zionism, and it gets its origin in the Talmud, Zohar, and Kabbalah. It’s a Kabbalahistic doctrine of Adam Kadmon. They have this doctrine called Tikkun Olam—repairing the world—so how do they want to repair the world? They want to bring it to the original. Who was original? Adam. He was androgynous. So now they’re putting specific things in food, in drink, and basically their end game is to make humans on Earth that will survive—whatever it is they are bringing—androgynous.”
“What they are really trying to do is undo God’s creation,” Wiles said. “They are at odds with the Creator.”
I'm not quite sure I get the logic, but perhaps when the entire world is androgynous, the Jews will have the only men left and they can take over. You'd have to ask Wiles whether I have that right.
Actually, Jews are often at odds with the Creator. We've been arguing with Him for millennia. And now we ask Him, why is this antisemitic jerk still spreading his filth?
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What is it that makes possible a horror like the machete attack on a Jewish gathering in New York in December? The outrage overshadowed increased sightings of anti-Jewish graffiti and incidents of boorishly aggressive behaviour towards Jews in public places, here as well as in the United States. Violence always depends on the normalising of bigotry, in which even the most farcically ignorant prejudice plays its part.
During the election campaign, a Labour candidate was obliged to stand down for having used the name “Shylock” as a term of abuse against a member of the Jewish community. In his defence, he claimed that he did not know that the name had any Jewish associations.
This may be chiefly an indictment of standards in British secondary schools. But it also points to an issue about cultural awareness of Judaism and Jewish history. Schoolchildren, of course, study the Holocaust. But what is disturbing —from our own experience and that of many other teachers—is that they often emerge with only the haziest idea of the specifics. We have heard of students who have studied the diaries of Anne Frank with barely any mention of the fact that she was Jewish. Holocaust education, and even events around Holocaust Memorial Day, can come to be focused on generalities about victimised minorities. We have encountered schoolchildren who have visited Auschwitz and returned with only the vague notion that it is bad to persecute people for their religion. This is a worthy enough principle (as Christians in the Middle East or Pakistan would agree); but it signally fails to bring out what is distinctive about the atrocities of the Third Reich and their accomplices, and what is distinctive about Jewish identity and history.
The Holocaust is not a story about deplorably bigoted attitudes. It was a systematic, indeed “scientific”, effort to exterminate an entire population. It is also about a campaign rooted in two millennia of consistent demonisation of that population by Christian theologians, artists and liturgists—and latterly by political extremists searching for a universal scapegoat. The nightmare of the Third Reich is intelligible only against the background of this long record.
What would effective Holocaust education look like? It would certainly have to involve an attempt to trace these historical roots, to look at, for instance: the history of the “Blood Libel” (the myth that Jews routinely kidnapped, tortured and killed Christian children at Passover), with origins that lie in this country in the Middle Ages; at the expulsion of Jews from England in the 13th century, France in the 14th century and Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th; at the 19th century pogroms in Tsarist Russia, and at the resulting first large waves of Jewish refugees in Britain and elsewhere. It would need to look at how these communities took root and developed, what they had to battle against and still have to combat in the form of lazy prejudices encoded in British literature and popular culture, even when the latter’s Christian rationale has long been forgotten.
Some important liberal journalists have recently started talking about an ugly fact. Running afoul of Sen. Bernie Sanders's online supporters isn't fun. That was the upshot of a recent conversation on MSNBC when Meet the Press host Chuck Todd read aloud a passage from an article by writer Jonathan Last that was published in The Bulwark, where he wrote about the behavior of Sanders' backers, popularly known as the "Bernie Bros."
Last accurately described fans of Sanders as an online mob that bullies the Vermont senator's critics, "hounding opponents, enforcing discipline, quashing any sort of dissent – and trying to preempt anyone else from taking sides against the Dear Leader." The point of the piece was to compare them to supporters of President Donald Trump, but in doing so, Last went a step further by saying that both Sanders and Trump each had a "digital brownshirt brigade."
Predictably, that sent up howls of protest from supporters of Sanders, who said it was offensive to compare a Jewish candidate's backers to Nazis. And, in the manner of online mobs, Todd's sin in merely quoting the article brought down on his head an avalanche of criticism, including a trending #firechucktodd hashtag. By calling attention to the bullying the press gets from the socialist's posse, Todd (who is also Jewish) was "canceled" by the political correctness police of the left.
The context for this kerfuffle is not one of the usual left-right, pro-Trump/con-Trump variety that seems to characterize all of our political arguments these days.
Todd is a liberal journalist notorious for his disgust of the president. And Last is a #NeverTrump conservative writing in an anti-Trump publication. Yet the tsunami of abuse thrown at Todd proved his point about the way the Sanders mob swarms anyone who speaks up against the current Democratic presidential frontrunner.
But there are two separate points to be made here.
One is that Sanders' supporters are right that Last was wrong to call them Brownshirts. Todd was equally wrong for quoting the passage on air without pointing out the huge difference between even the most obnoxious of the Bernie Bros and Adolf Hitler's Storm Troopers, who were known for their brown uniforms.
Those words can't come from someone caught in the throes of war. In its relentless focus on taking down Trump, the Democratic Party has overlooked the power of a unifying message. Yes, the goal is to replace Trump – but how and with what? Bashing Trump is a tactic, not a strategy. And promising radical changes to the country and the economy is a strategy, but the wrong one.
The lesson of the Trump presidency is that character counts at least as much as policy. America doesn't need a policy revolutionary. It needs decency. It needs a mensch in the White House. A mensch with the wisdom to hear all voices and the spine to make difficult decisions.
Bernie Sanders is no mensch. He's a cranky idealist hell-bent on pushing his utopian socialist agenda – and "healing the country" is not on that agenda. He's exploiting the rage at Trump to trigger the kind of class warfare that spreads even more animosity and division.
Sanders is just the most extreme expression of a phenomenon that has plagued the Democrats: They've allowed their fury at Trump to turn them into a crisis party. In their near panic at the prospect of losing another election, they've thrown the kitchen sink at Trump and the American voters hoping something would stick.
But in the process, they've missed the real crisis: We are a deeply divided nation in desperate need of a courageous leader who will embrace the challenge to Make America One Again.
I know: I'm dreaming. Being a dreamer these days is a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.
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The Speaker of the Jordanian Senate, Faisal Al-Fayez, is sponsoring a campaign to be launched by the Palestine Committee in the House of Representatives on Thursday, titled "The Return Campaign ... My Right and My Decision."
The campaign aims to collect a million signatures affirming the right of the return of all Palestinian refugees to their homeland along with compensation.
Al-Fayez confirmed during his meeting with the President and members of the Parliamentary Committee of Palestine Sunday, in the Senate, that the right of return is a sacred right and cannot be relinquished, and that King Abdullah II is clear in asserting that "neither resettlement nor the alternative homeland [Jordan]" is acceptable.
The petition is supposed to be given to the London-based Palestinian Return Center which will in turn deliver it to the United Nations.
There are some two million Palestinian citizens of Jordan. Jordan is the only Arab country that used to allow Palestinians to become citizens. But even now, some 70 years after they gained citizenship, they are still treated as different from "normal" Jordanians.
This petition, sponsored by the Jordanian government itself, tells the Palestinians citizens - in no uncertain terms - that they are not wanted, that they really belong in Israel. But they dress up that desire for ethnic cleansing of their Palestinians as defending a "right" to move to Israel, pretending that they are actually supportive of the millions they want to get rid of.
This is how the entire Arab world has treated Palestinians since 1948 - outward support for their cause and for "return" masking a desire for them to move anywhere else.
Yet no "human rights" organization calls out Arabs for their disgraceful treatment of their "brethren." Human Rights Watch and Amnesty both twist international law to pretend that there is a legal "right to return." Furthermore, while they work against statelessness of all other peoples, they don't pressure Arab nations to make Palestinians citizens even after 71 years; even after most Palestinians were born on their soil.
Same as it ever was.
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One of the less remarked upon, but nevertheless most painful series of reactions to President Donald Trump’s long awaited “Deal of the Century” has been the response of the organized American Jewish Left, which I will refer to here as AJL.
That there has been relatively little focus on this facet of the announcement’s aftermath might be because we have gotten used to the critical-unto-condemning tone adopted by many of these groups toward Israel.
However, the deal and its copious details have provided a unique platform for those attitudes to play out. AJL reactions focus overwhelmingly on the plan’s accentuating and enabling increased Israeli “occupation” (J Street and The New Israel Fund), “annexation” (Israel Policy Forum), and “apartheid” (Jewish Voice for Peace).
There are numerous lamentations about the negative implications for Palestinians and the manifest injustice being paid to them.
Nowhere, though, is there any sense of balance, nuance or understanding.
What comes through overwhelmingly clearly is the profound lack of empathy of these left-wing American Jews for their Israeli brethren. There is no recognition of the conditions that have kept the region in its current limbo state; no understanding of the vulnerability, fragility and tenuousness that even a stronger and more successful Israel lives with daily.
During a briefing last week on the U.S. peace plan at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman expressed his thanks to former diplomat and Jerusalem Center president Dore Gold "for the three years of terrific collaboration and advice. Dore and I have spoken countless times about these issues....He played a very important and significant role in this process and one that I would say was irreplaceable."
Gold would occasionally brief Netanyahu on the content of the talks he was holding with the U.S. administration and got a green light from the prime minister to continue. "Most of the meetings were held in Israel, but quite a few were held at the White House," he said.
"We presented the Americans with what most Israelis believe in," Gold said. "For example, they read the book Jerusalem: Delusions of Division by Israel Hayom columnist Nadav Shragai, which detailed the many dangers that the partition of the city would entail. It's not that they actually wanted to divide the city, but the book gave them the ammunition they needed and the rationale for why it would be problematic."
"I felt like the librarian who had to find the Americans the relevant material so that they could make decisions. But I also felt that I was carrying out an important job and fulfilling my duty to my country and people."
Gold makes it clear that not all of Israel's requests were met. He would have preferred that the plan gave the Palestinians less territory and he is less than thrilled about the prospect of establishing a Palestinian capital in the eastern part of Jerusalem.
"This plan comes with costs, but we look at the cost-benefit analysis. Would anyone have imagined such a plan being rolled out by an American administration several years ago? And a plan that endorses Israeli sovereignty in the Jordan Valley?"
Despite the expected resistance of the Palestinian leadership, January 28, 2020, will be remembered as a historic date in the longstanding conflict. The “Deal of the Century” is the most detailed plan ever presented and it showcases a much-needed strategy shift for the region. The plan redefines the psychological borders of the conflict, which will enable the physical borders to be fixed at a later date.
The continuous Palestinian rejection of any type of resolution since the days of the Oslo Accords has imbued them with a false feeling of strength that has harmed both them and the chances of a realistic settlement. From a historical perspective, their reluctance to reconcile themselves with the concept of a Jewish national home caused them to lose land. Every time they refused to share the land “between the river and the sea,” their proposed state shrunk in size. A look at the maps from the Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947, and the eventual cease fire border lines in the 1948 War of Independence show this graphically.
When the Palestinians reached the conclusion that rejection does not pay, they recognized Israel’s statehood and signed the Oslo Accords. Not long after, though, the Palestinians reversed track with the intuition that their rejection would benefit them and increase the size of their eventual state. This theory was supported by empirical facts. The Israeli offers improved in each round of negotiations – from Camp David, to the Taba summit and later to the offer from Olmert to Abbas. So, rejection was deemed worthwhile and serious compromise was delayed.
The “Deal of the Century” reverses this dynamic. The plan changes the psychology of the conflict and its resolution. Palestinian rejectionism will no longer benefit them. Rather, we have returned to the logic of the “Iron Wall” of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Peace will only be achieved when Israel’s neighbors internalize that the nation-state of the Jewish people is here to stay. This has happened with Egypt and Jordan, and now comes the Palestinians turn to play ball as well.
Meet
Muhammad Shehada – the Forward’s (not so) new columnist and Hamas apologist
When
the Forwardannounced at
the end of last year that they were “adding five contributing columnists” to
write for their op-ed pages, I felt that professor Deborah Lipstadt had gotten
a rather bad deal. As a highly regarded scholar, she was by far the most
prominent among the new columnists, and the Forward rightly noted that
she is also widely known outside academia ever since she “famously vanquished
Holocaust denier David Irving in court after he sued her for libel.” But now
this fierce fighter against antisemitism was listed just above professional
Hamas apologist Muhammad Shehada.
For
Shehada, this is of course a great line-up. Almost exactly five years before he
officially became a Forward columnist alongside Deborah Lipstadt, he had
proudly posted
what he called “a selfi with the ex-Prime Minister Of #Gaza and the leader of
#Hamas: #Ismail_Haniya.” The photo shows Shehada smiling and with his hand on
the shoulder of Ismail Haniyeh, one of the veteran leaders of the Islamist
terror group Hamas.
So
it’s quite pointless to get upset
about Shehada writing articles that whitewash Hamas. The Forward and other media outlets
– notably the Israeli paper Ha’aretz –
that publish him regularly do so precisely because Shehada skillfully poses as
a likeable and eminently reasonable progressive Palestinian who ardently
defends Hamas as a legitimate group that must not ever be
condemned for terrorism, while at the same time pretending to be all for some
kind of vague kumbaya-style coexistence.
As
far as Shehada is concerned, “Hamas incurred the ‘terror’ label for political reasons,” and it would only be fair if everyone
realized that the thousands of
rockets
that have been launched from Gaza since Israel withdrew from the territory
should be dismissed as
“Hamas’s occasional projectile attacks,”
while the violent Hamas-orchestrated border riots incited
with murderous antisemitic slogans should be appreciated as a “non-violent grassroots protest.” And in any case, if there ever is anything for
which Hamas might deserve a slightly raised eyebrow, it’s Israel’s fault. You
can see that idea nicely reflected in the hyperlink for Shehada’s recent Forward
article: https://forward.com/opinion/439846/israel-is-clearing-the-way-for-more-violence-by-demonizing-moderate/ -- it’s of course Israel that “is clearing the
way for more violence.”
But
while Shehada considers Hamas as a legitimate Palestinian group that deserves
to be defended, he has some really harsh words for the Palestinian Authority
and Mahmoud Abbas, which he has denounced as
“tyrannical, careless and unpopular.”
Shehada’s
eagerness to serve as a Hamas apologist while also pretending to be vaguely for
peaceful coexistence (presumably under the benevolent rule of Hamas from the
river to the sea) imbue his usually very well written articles with a marked
disingenuity. Camerahighlighted
some of the omissions and distortions in several of his articles last year. But
the question who Muhammad Shehada really is, or what he really stands for,
seems also worthwhile asking given that, for a young man from Gaza who appears
to be on very friendly and familiar terms with a senior Hamas leader, he has
managed very quickly to establish himself as a regular contributor for a major
American Jewish site like the Forward – for which he has written
regularly since January 2018 –
and Israel’s Ha’aretz – for which he has written regularly since July 2017.
It
seems that Shehada first tried to
make a name for himself as a writer in English in May 2016. Nowadays Shehada
usually presents
himself as “a writer and civil society activist from the Gaza Strip and a
student of development studies at Lund University, Sweden,” as well as a former
“PR officer for the Gaza office of the Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights.”
However, when Shehada started out in mid-2016, he chose a
very different biography: “Born in Egypt, raised in diaspora, Palestinian by
blood, Egyptian by birth. With progressive endeavours towards democratic
reforms and deradicalization, religious tolerance and coexistence, social
equity and feminism, I aspire to construct an intellectual debate that corrects
the misconceptions about the Middle East and offers a clear picture of
Palestinian daily life, which will be my main focus.”
So if
Shehada was “raised in diaspora,” where did he grow up? Perhaps he regards Gaza
as some kind of “diaspora,” because he seems to have spent at least part of his
childhood and his teen years in Gaza. This is at least what he claims in an article
marking the anniversary of the end of Operation Cast Lead, where Shehada offers a harrowing account of
living through this war in 2008/09 as a fourteen-year-old.
There
are several noteworthy points regarding this article from January 2018. First,
it was published by Ali Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada – and Abunimah,
who is an outspoken supporter of Hamas, can be counted on to publish only
articles by authors he considers as reliable allies. Secondly, the article
offers a glimpse of Shehada’s life in Gaza: while he refers to “a family house
in Cairo,” he writes that in Gaza, his family lived in the Tal al-Hawa area, which
– though he doesn’t mention it – is regarded as a fairly affluent neighborhood
not far from the Hamas-dominated Islamic University. Indeed, Shehada’s family
lived in a house that even had underground parking, and they owned a car.
It
seems that Shehada eventually went to study
computer engineering at the Islamic University. At the university, he becamefriends
with a murky figure who makes an appearance in the work of British antisemitism
researcher David Collier. In the course of a project that focused on supposedly independent
“activists” from Gaza with a sizeable social media following, David encountered
Walid Mahmoud/Walid Mahmoud Rouk,
whose “reporting” from Gaza always seemed to echo Hamas propaganda. More
bizarrely, Walid Mahmoud was involved in, and even administering, Facebook
pages followed by tens of thousands of supporters of British Labour leader
Jeremy Corbyn. These Facebook pages included countless posts demonizing Israel,
Zionism and Jews. But it turned out that Walid Mahmoud also used his social
media clout to fundraise for all sorts of ostensibly charitable projects that
he claimed to have started – and he actually managed to take in tens of
thousands of dollars in various campaigns (see e.g. here).
Needless
to say, Walid Mahmoud was not accountable to anyone and free to use the money
as he pleased, but as David Collier rightly points out, it is hard to imagine
that Hamas would be unaware of a social media activist in Gaza “with an audience of 100,000s, access to
sympathetic political players in the UK and the ability to generate hard
foreign currency.”
At
one point, Walid Mahmoud apparently also tried to use his fundraising skills for the benefit
of his friend Muhammad Shehada; nowadays the two continue to collaborate on
journalistic projects (see e.g. Walid Mahmoud’s author page at
Al Jazeera, where all articles are co-authored with Shehada).
But
back to Shehada’s time as a student at Gaza’s Islamic University. In 2015, he
was interviewed by a fringe website, where he was introduced as
a “21 year-old engineering student”
and a “a community translator and researcher for outspoken author and critic of
Israel, Professor Norman Finkelstein.”
Given that Finkelstein’s work has made him “a superstar for antisemitic
websites,” it seems safe to assume that having a soft
spot for Islamist terrorists and obsessively hating Israel is a requirement for
working for him.
Shehada
called Finkelstein “my dear friend” in a Facebook post in March 2017, when Finkelstein apparently gave
a talk at Harvard that Shehada joined via Internet. And in fall 2016, when
Shehada was leaving Gaza for Malaysia – much to the regret of his friend Walid Mahmoud – Finkelstein shared on his website an appeal for donations ‘to help
a Gaza student resettle in Malaysia.’
In
this fundraising appeal, Shehada described himself as “a junior 21-year-old writer and civil society activist from the Gaza
Strip” who was planning to “start a program of Business Administration at the University of Malaya,
for the next three years.”
But
luckily for Shehada, his worries about how things would work out for him in
Malaysia proved unwarranted.
When
the veteran Malaysian politician Mahathir Mohamad – who also happens to be a notorious Jew-hater – won elections in
May 2018, Shehada offered his heartfelt congratulations in a Facebook post, accompanied by a photo that showed him shaking
hands with Mahathir Mohamad. As Shehada explained: “Malaysia was one of the most crucial milestones in my life! There, I was
reunited with my heart and soul. It is where I met some of the most
extraordinary friends who overwhelmed me with unique kindness and selflessness. In my first few days in Kuala Lumpur, I was
introduced to the founder of modern Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, a
sweet dedicated father and lovable grandfather who nonetheless commands
enormous respect. His support of the Palestinian cause is greatly remarkable.”
Well,
it is certainly a fabulous stroke of good luck if you come to a foreign country
as a penniless 21-year-old student and happen to be introduced to one of the
country’s most prominent and powerful politicians right away.
Those
of us who don’t believe all that much in such extremely happy coincidences can
of course only speculate about the connections that got Shehada his lucky
break. The most obvious possibility is that Shehada had contact with the
network of Hamas operatives based in
Malaysia. The country has been described as
“Hamas’ gateway to Asia,” and only a few weeks ago, Mahathir Mohamad was happy to
receive Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh
and to tweet about their get-together extensively (see this thread
and the retweets here
and here).
But
whatever happened to make Malaysia “one of the most crucial
milestones” in Shehada’s life, he apparently didn’t stay
there too long. Instead of studying business administration at the University of Malaya, he seems to have moved on to Sweden some time
in 2017 to pursue development studies at Lund University.
Perhaps
his association with the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med Monitor) had something to do with this move. As
mentioned previously, Shehada claims in some of the biographies for his op-eds
that he was a “PR officer for the Gaza office of the Euro-Med Monitor for Human
Rights.” In his current Twitter biography, he claims to be “Manager at @EuroMedHR”
and links to the organization’s website,
where he is indeed featured as
the first of the “leadership team,” though it seems somewhat odd that his area
of responsibility is given as “Europe Affairs.”
According
to its website,
the Euro-Med Monitor was founded in 2011 “by a group of European youth from diverse origins, MENA [Middle East &North Africa] immigrants and students living in Europe, who were inspired by the
people’s will to rebel against tyranny and oppression that swept through the
Arab region in 2011.” The organization
emphasizes in bold print that it is “youth-led,” though they make up for it with their Board of Trustees: the current chairman is
none other than veteran Israel-hater
Richard Falk, an ardent supporter of Hamas who also managed to gain notoriety
as a “9/11 truther and promoter of anti-Semitism.”
So in a way, Muhammad Shehada had a point when he described Falk as “legendary.”
Another
not-so-youthful board member is John Whitbeck, who clearly shares
Falk’s hatred for Israel and is apparently also fond of 9/11 conspiracy theories.
* * *
While
it is not clear if Shehada’s eagerness to serve as an apologist for Hamas is
due to any actual ties to the Islamist terror group, it is quite obvious that
even though he managed to leave Gaza, he always stayed in a world where hatred
of the world’s only Jewish state is not just normal, but actually useful for
your career.
Shehada knows and admires an awful lot of people
who hate Israel (and Jews) just as much as Hamas does. For a young man of 26,
he has already a rather promising career, and he may well have bright
prospects. Hopefully he will come to realize at one point that a better Middle
East, which is something he supposedly wants, can emerge only once Islamist
terror groups like Hamas are firmly rejected instead of whitewashed. And
perhaps now that he is officially a Forward columnist – which he
currently notes proudly in his Twitter profile – he will try to widen his
horizon by checking out the work of his fellow Forward columnist Deborah
Lipstadt. He could start by reading this Forwardcolumn,
and of course he could read her book on “Antisemitism: Here and Now.”
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 14 years and 30,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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