In 1877, a sensational story played out in the pages of the New York Times.
A Jew named Joseph Seligman and his family were refused lodging at the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, upstate New York because they were Jewish, even though they had stayed there previous years. The owner of the hotel, Judge Henry Hilton (not related to the Hilton hotel chain of today), justified this because, he said, his gentile guests objected to being with Jews.
On June 20th, the Times published a number of articles and letters about it. Here is the summary:
Other vacation hotel managers in Long Branch, NJ, agreed with Judge Hilton and said they did not welcome Jews.
New York City hotel owners were generally fine with Jewish customers, many of them complimenting them as guests. A few hotels, however, some flatly refused Jews, giving interesting reasons about how Jews acted. Others bragged that they didn't discriminate against anyone, even Blacks.
The letters section the next day had three letters agreeing that Jews were nasty and no one wants to share a hotel with them. Here are two of them.
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The end of the historic “Arab-Israeli conflict” may be on the horizon, depending on the outcome of the US presidential election.
Oh, It wouldn’t mean that the Palestinian Arabs will soon give up on the idea that they can flood Israel with the descendants of 1948 refugees and reverse the result of the War of Independence. It wouldn’t mean that the antisemitism and misoziony that are rife in our neighbors Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, are likely to end in our lifetimes. It wouldn’t mean that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will stop trying to re-establish the Ottoman Empire, including Jerusalem, or that the revolutionary regime in Iran will stop planning to wipe Israel off the map and establish a Shiite caliphate in the region. ISIS, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood will not be normalizing relations with the Jewish state no matter what. There will be plenty of conflict and terrorism in our region for the foreseeable future.
But the classical Arab-Israeli conflict, as expressed by the Three No’s of 1967 may soon be history. The idea that no Arab nation can accept the existence of the Jewish state – or even mention it by name – until all of the extreme demands of the Palestinian Arabs have been met has already fallen by the wayside. It is becoming obvious to any honest observer that the reason the Palestinian issue has festered for so many years is that the Palestinians, encouraged by the Arab nations and European antisemites, have never entertained any possibility short of total victory. Now Arab support for their intransigence and rejectionism is falling away.
The UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan have already made normalization agreements with Israel. Others are expected to follow. The most important of those would be Saudi Arabia, the leader of the Sunni Muslim world, the custodian of the Holy Mosques, and the source of funds for countless Islamic institutions around the world. There are reliable reports that the Saudi regime, which is increasingly under the control of Crown Prince, Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Defense, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), will normalize relations after the US election – if Donald Trump wins.
It’s hard to imagine that any of this would have happened if not for the change in US policy initiated by the Trump Administration. The recognition of Israeli rights in Jerusalem and sovereignty over the Golan, and the downgrading of relations with the PLO, sent an unmistakable message that America did not support the Palestinian program to replace Israel with an Arab state. Trump’s peace plan, unlike those proposed during the previous administration, is not based on the transformation of the 1949 cease-fire lines into borders, but respects the concept of “secure and recognized boundaries” as expressed in UNSC resolution 242.
In order to truly appreciate the change in policy, compare it to that of the previous administration. Even before his inauguration in January 2009, Barack Obama forced Israel to abandon its campaign to oust Hamas from Gaza, probably the last practical opportunity to do so. In June of that year he visited Cairo and made a speech in which he directly compared the Holocaust to Palestinian “suffer[ing] in pursuit of a homeland” (he didn’t visit Israel until 2013, and then chose not to speak to the Knesset in Jerusalem but rather informally to students). Obama deliberately refrained from helping Iranian dissidents in Iran’s failed Green Revolution. He supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Arab Spring conflicts in Egypt, endangering Israeli-Egyptian relations. He demanded a freeze on all “settlement activity” which was used by the Palestinians as an excuse to refuse to talk. He deliberately humiliated PM Netanyahu when he visited the White House in 2011. He stopped a shipment of missiles to Israel during the 2014 conflict with Hamas in Gaza. At the same time the FAA ordered flights to Israel canceled, in an action that many thought was ordered by the administration.
Obama rammed through the Iran deal over the objections of a majority in Congress, including huge cash payments that the regime used to finance terrorism and Hezbollah’s military buildup. In 2013, his administration leaked information to the press about Israeli attacks against Iranian weapons shipments in Syria, making a wider conflict more likely. Finally, as a lame-duck parting shot at Israel in 2016, he encouraged the introduction of an anti-Israel Security Council resolution, and instructed his ambassador to abstain, ensuring its passage. And there is much more.
One can understand why Arab leaders might have thought that there was no percentage in improving relations with Israel while the US was kicking her to the curb.
Joe Biden was deeply involved in the Obama Administration’s relationship with Israel. You may recall that Biden was “furious” after an Israeli official announced the completion of a step in the process of approval for the construction of apartments in eastern Jerusalem while he was visiting Israel, precipitating a 45-minute angry phone call full of demands from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to PM Netanyahu.
Biden has said that he would “rejoin the [nuclear deal with Iran] … as a starting point for follow-on negotiations.” He opposes Trump’s “maximum pressure” approach and even blames it for Iranian progress toward nuclear weapons. He is likely to reopen the American consulate in eastern Jerusalem that was the unofficial “US Embassy in Palestine,” and the PLO office in Washington that were closed by Trump. He will restore financial aid to the Palestinian Authority that was cut off by Trump because the PA would not agree to stop payments to convicted terrorists (“pay to slay”). He will probably restore payments to UNRWA, which supports the descendants of 1948 refugees and is closely aligned with Hamas in Gaza. And he will bring back the tired rhetoric of the impossible “two-state solution” based on 1949 lines. It’s doubtful that he would be as hostile to Israel as Barack Obama, but he would undo much of the progress made by Trump.
This explains the statement by MBS that he would not normalize relations with Israel immediately if Biden becomes president. There is plenty of opposition in Saudi Arabia to such a bold step, which could even express itself violently. MBS is willing to take the risk if it will lead to the development of a powerful, US-supported Sunni-Israel bloc which could challenge Iran for regional leadership. Why should he do so if the US returns to the Obama-era policy of appeasement of Iran? And the same applies to other Arab countries that are waiting in the wings.
The development of a Sunni-Israel bloc in the region would be a breakthrough that would fundamentally alter the balance of power, and reduce the need for the US to physically intervene to keep the peace. It might set the stage for greater regional independence, so that outside players like Russia, the US, and Turkey would be less able to use its nations as pawns in their power struggles. It might lead to the Iranian people finally throwing off the corrupt and oppressive regime of the Mullahs. It might even bring a solution to the Palestinian problem somewhat closer. It would not fix all of the region’s problems, but it would be a good start.
But all of this depends on continuing Trump’s sharp turn towards rationality in Middle East policy. And Joe Biden is not the guy to do it, especially since he has already adopted some of the same advisers and former officials of the Obama Administration that were responsible for its destructive policies, including several architects of the Iran deal. Biden’s mental condition is a matter of dispute, but the specter of the enormous power of the US president in the hands of unelected and unaccountable operatives who have demonstrated their hostility to Israel and their approval of Iranian regional hegemony is truly frightening.
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Twitter boss Jack Dorsey sowed further confusion over the social media platform’s Holocaust denial policy during an angry grilling at the hands of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on Wednesday.
Facing questioning from Republican senators who alleged that Twitter was censoring information from conservative outlets while permitting posts that deny the fact of the Holocaust, Dorsey appeared to backtrack on a statement issued by his company on Oct. 15, when a spokesperson for Twitter had condemned “antisemitism and hateful conduct,” emphasizing, “We also have a robust ‘glorification of violence’ policy in place and take action against content that glorifies or praises historical acts of violence and genocide, including the Holocaust.”
But at Wednesday’s hearing, Dorsey said that Twitter did not “have a policy against misinformation.”
He explained: “We have a policy against misinformation in three categories. That is all we have policy on for misleading information.”
He then added that tweets denying the Holocaust could be removed if they were considered to incite violence.
Dorsey’s answer infuriated Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO), who countered by invoking Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s constant use of Twitter to engage in Holocaust denial.
“It’s strange to me that you’ve flagged tweets from the president [of the United States] but haven’t hidden the ayatollah’s tweets on Holocaust denial or calls to wipe Israel off the map,” Gardner said. “Millions of people died and that’s not a violation of Twitter?”
Responded Dorsey: “It’s misleading information, but we don’t have a policy against that type of misleading information.”
This is astonishing: Jack Dorsey says that Holocaust denial is not “misinformation” according to Twitter policy. pic.twitter.com/GhVn3u9ow8
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday said his platform allows Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to fulminate against “cancerous” Jews because he wanted to “respect” his “right to speak.”
“We believe it’s important for everyone to hear from global leaders, and we have policies around world leaders,” Dorsey said in testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, responding to a question from Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS) about the messages. “We want to make sure we are respecting their right to speak and to publish what they need. But if there is a violation of our terms of service, we want to label it.”
Wicker interjected to note the messages still appear on Twitter without a label. Dorsey said he found them permissible because Khamenei was threatening citizens of other countries rather than citizens of Iran.
“We did not find those to violate our terms of service, because we considered them saber-rattling, which is part of the speech of world leaders in concert with other countries,” Dorsey said. “Speech against our own people, or our country’s own citizens, we believe is different and can cause more immediate harm.”
Khamenei has used Twitter to write numerous messages that have drawn attention this year. He used the platform in July to promise a “reciprocal blow” to the United States for the January killing of Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and previously referred to Israel’s “Zionist regime” as a “cancerous tumor” that needed to be “eliminated.”
I meant the fact this enormous tool is still tweeting, I'm guessing if I were to post an illustration of the prophet, my account would probably be reported and banned. Should tell you something. pic.twitter.com/c8GT3Co5xA
That Beinart has made a career of blaming Israel for everything from Palestinian Authority (PA) intransigence to Hamas terrorism is not news. Nor is it surprising that many of his admirers in Israel and abroad are miffed that the Abraham Accords exposed the conventional wisdom about Mideast peace-making as folly.
But it takes a special kind of vicious creativity to concoct a universe in which peace, if forged by or with Israel, is evil. Beinart’s main method is to twist facts to fit his false version of reality. One such revision of history includes the idea of widespread Muslim-Arab support for the Palestinians. The latter would be the first to scoff at the notion that they have received much more than lip service from their Arab League “brethren,” particularly of late.
Nevertheless, Beinart concludes his piece by warning against the danger of additional peace deals with the Jewish state.
“In the coming months, Israel may succeed in normalizing relations with additional Arab states,” he writes. “Over the long run, however, its warming relations with oppressive regimes will likely provoke even greater hostility from the broader Arab public. In the past, Arab citizens mostly resented Israel for oppressing Palestinians. In the future, they may also resent it for helping their own governments to oppress them.”
For someone so concerned about oppressive regimes, Beinart is curiously silent about the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of their own corrupt and despotic leaders in Ramallah and Gaza. Indeed, he has nothing to say about the blatant human-rights abuses committed by Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas and his henchmen against critical journalists, academics, novelists, and even average social-media users.
Nor does he bother wasting ink on the absence of free speech or the persecution of gays that are the norm in the PA. No, if Israel can’t be called out as the culprit, Beinart’s not interested.
He can’t even pause to acknowledge the flurry of preparations being made in the Gulf for Israeli tourists, from kosher-catered airplane food to Jewish-holiday hotel packages. But then, doing so might cast a shadow on The New York Times-approved convictions that pay his bills.
Khaled Abu Toameh won a victory in a small Jerusalem courtroom
this week when Ted Belman at last agreed that his defamatory articles, social
media posts, and newsletters were factually baseless. Belman is now required to
make public apology to Abu Toameh within 14 days. If Belman again defames the award-winning Israeli Arab journalist and distinguished senior Gatestone fellow, he will have
to pay 5000 shekels per defamatory item published, in compensation to Khaled.
By way of disclaimer, there was a personal victory here as
well, as Belman’s countersuit against Abu Toameh, this author and Bat-Zion
Susskind-Sacks was rejected out of hand by the court. The interesting thing about
this is that I was approached by the 86-year-old Belman in court on Monday. “Who
are you?” Ted asked me. “Are you the enemy?”
He was suing me, but didn’t even know me.
Here we must go back and explain why Ted was suing me. Ted
Belman, you see, asserted that Khaled was running a spy ring in Israel for the
Jordanian king, and that I was one of his operatives, the other being Bat-Zion
Susskind Sacks. Well goodness I’m relieved. An Israeli court has rejected a
lawsuit accusing me of working on behalf of His Majesty, King Abdullah of
Jordan. Not guilty! Acquitted.
But I digress. The main thing is that all three of us—me,
Batzi, and of course, Khaled—are victorious.
So ends this courtroom saga that began in late 2017, when
Abu Toameh had finally had enough of the defamatory campaign of words and memes
waged against him since at least 2013. Readers of this column will recall my
exposé
of self-proclaimed “putative prime minister of Jordan” Mudar Zahran (see for
instance, HERE,
HERE,
and HERE).
Zahran, banned
from entering Israel as a security risk, tried to enlist me in his smear
campaign against Khaled Abu Toameh. I refused, but Ted Belman apparently did
not.
What followed was an endless campaign of baseless defamation, an ongoing attack that lasted seven full years. Articles were published in numerous publications, all smearing Khaled. The defamation of Khaled was an ongoing theme in newsletters, Belman's personal website, and on Facebook, too. The
worst part of this defamation, of course, is that Khaled Abu Toameh is a fine
person: the only Israeli Arab journalist I know of who writes the honest truth
about Israel and the Middle East.
Khaled is one of the good guys. And everyone on our side
knows this. Which is why Khaled Abu Toameh has won plaudits and numerous awards
by distinguished bodies. From Wikipedia:
Recognition and awards
·Abu Toameh received the 2014 Daniel Pearl Award. Abu
Toameh shared Israel Media Watch's 2010 award for media criticism with the
satirical Israeli website Latma.
·On 10 May 2011, Khaled Abu Toameh won the Hudson
Institute Award for Courage in Journalism.
·Canada's Toronto
Sun columnist Salim Mansur praised Abu Toameh for his courage and
knowledge of the politics of the Arab world.
·He was chosen on the Algemeiner Journal's 2013 list of The Top
100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life.
All during this trying time, while Khaled was being smeared,
important people came to the fore to defend the embattled journalist. People
like Caroline Glick, Lori Lowenthal Marcus, Ruthie Blum, and Harold Rhode, couldn’t
offer enough praise for Khaled. And still, this creep Zahran spread horrible
lies about Khaled to all and sundry through anyone he could rope into his web.
Well, all’s well that ends well, and in that small Jerusalem
courtroom on October 26, 2020, justice won out with victory on many counts:
1. Ted Belman finally admitted that
he has no evidence to support the libelous publications.
2. Ted Belman agreed to publish an
apology and retraction, admitting that what he published was factually
baseless.
3. Ted's main witness, the
Jordanian fraudster Mudar Zahran, who is banned from Israel for security
reasons, never got a chance to testify before the court, not even by video.
4. Ted's counterclaim against
Khaled Abu Toameh, Varda Meyers Epstein, and Bat-Zion Susskind-Sacks, was
rejected.
5. The court ruled that if Ted
republishes the same material against Khaled Abu Toameh, he will pay 5000
shekels in compensation per piece.
After three years of refusing to do so, Ted will finally apologize
and admit that what he published about Khaled Abu Toameh was factually
baseless. Assuming Ted fulfills his promise to the court, he now has 14 days to
issue the apology and retraction. This is good because Ted’s own lawyer admitted in court that Belman
had no proof to back up any of the nasty things he published about Khaled. It’s
icing on the cake that Belman’s counterclaim was rejected. And if he tries to republish
the defamatory items, he’s going to get slapped with a fine of 5000 shekels per
article. Pretty nifty.
Judge Moriah Cherka, addressing Belman, said that what
he did was unethical and against journalistic standards, because Ted never
sought Khaled's response before publication. Judge Cherka also noted that
Khaled Abu Toameh is a renowned and respected journalist, therefore it is inconceivable that his credibility should be questioned or harmed.
Nadav Haetzni, representative for the plaintiff, Khaled, said, "At long last, this grievous smear campaign against one of Israel's leading journalists is over. This was a campaign aimed at destroying this man's reputation; it caused him great damage and suffering, but in the end, this was a victory and we hope others will learn from it."
“For me,” said Khaled Abu Toameh, “The lawsuit was never
about money, but about getting Belman to publicly admit that every bit of what
he published about me was factually baseless. I initiated the lawsuit as a
matter of principle, to defend ethical standards in journalism, and to serve as a deterrent to others,”
said Khaled.
The judge made a point of rebuking Ted Belman in court, for
behaving in an unethical manner. Which is as it should be. Journalists, and bloggers like Ted Belman, need to check the facts before they publish, to
ascertain the truth, and to seek a response from the person in question, when preparing
to publish something that might be defamatory.
Let us hope that this lawsuit will underscore this point for
anyone who takes to the blogosphere to randomly and without proof, trash-talk and
damage others. This is wrong and should not be countenanced in a country ruled
by law. And on Monday, in that small Jerusalem courtroom, a judge did in fact, determine
that such baseless defamation would not be countenanced in Israel.
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San Francisco State University Professor Rabab Abdulhadi said in an interview that students who expressed concern and outrage over her decision to host known terrorist hijacker Leila Khaled were part of a “Jewish caucus” and “a Zionist agenda."
“The Zionist movement is quite strong, it has resources, it has networking,” Abdulhadi remarked in a YouTube interview with Steve Zeltzer, “so they pressure- and actually, some of the legislation, not all of them, but some of them, went along with them, led by the Jewish caucus, which is all Zionist agenda, it has a Zionist agenda.”
Abdulhadi claimed the outrage over her invitation to Khaled was manufactured by the “Israel Lobby Industry," and said opposition to her was “catering to donors, catering to the right-wing agenda and catering to Islamophobia.” Abdulhadi doubled down on her comments later on in the video, stating that the university president “only talked to Zionists, only talked to one brand.”
“The university is participating in a very discriminatory, racist, defamatory, smearing campaign by the Zionist bullies and their right-wing, neoliberal and wealthy allies,” Abdulhadi said. She also claimed the talk with Khaled was only canceled because of the university’s desire to retain wealthy Jewish donors, alleging the school's president told donors she would “crush the Palestinians” and “crush AMED studies.”
That last sentence is only the most obvious lie.
The interview, which was posted on September 22 before the Leila Khaled event was dropped by Zoom, shows that Abdulhadi has no concept of truth. She [13:07] accuses SFSU president Lynn Mahoney of publishing a piece in J Weekly that is "Islamophobic" - you can read it yourself and see that all she condemned was terrorism and didn't use the words Islam or Muslim once.
The interviewer Steve Zeltzer directly accused Israel of funding universities through American Jews to further its agenda, comparing it to China and Russia influence campaigns:
When we talk about influence - there's a big campaign, both Democrats and Republicans talking about the influence of China, the influence of Russia, yet it seems when it comes to Israel and Israeli funding of institutions in the United States and campaigns to target professors such as yourself and others who are critical of Israel, there doesn't seem to be a problem with that role of Israel in the United States and operating through Jewish community councils and others it seems like a double standard.
Abdulhadi enthusiastically agrees with this accusation, which goes beyond the dual-loyalty trope of American Jews - the accusation is that Israel is paying American Jews to be loyal to it above the US.
This is today's antisemitism, and the only defense they use (as Abdulhadi does in this video) is the one that Jew-haters have used throughout the centuries: "Some of my best friends are Jewish."
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Arab48 reports that the body of a young man was found near Qusra, south of Nablus - with his hands missing.
Local sources said that he was killed in an explosion of a homemade bomb.
Usually such work accidents happen in Gaza as terror groups work on explosives and rockets. It is unusual for such things to happen in the West Bank.
It could be that he decided to become a lone wolf terrorist, but one has to worry that this was part of a larger terror plot.
(h/t Tomer Ilan)
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The United States and Israel will eliminate territorial restrictions for bilateral agreements in a ceremony on Wednesday.
The move will build upon a policy shift made by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this past November, in which America no longer recognizes Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria as illegal under international law.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman are slated to participate in a signing ceremony at Ariel University in Samaria.
The agreement will immediately expand scientific and academic cooperation to include projects within Judea and Samaria, and the Golan Heights—disputed territories under Israeli control. The United States recognized Israel’s full sovereignty over the Golan Heights in March 2019.
Israel captured Judea and Samaria, in addition to the Golan, from Jordan and Syria, respectively, during the defensive Six-Day War in 1967.
Israel formally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981. Judea and Samaria remain disputed territories and were divided into non-contiguous zones (“Area A,” “Area B” and “Area C”) of varying Israeli or Palestinian administrative and security control under the 1993 Oslo Accords
'In the spirit of the #AbrahamAccords, we place great value on academic, cultural, commercial and diplomatic engagement as the best path to peace,' David Friedman, @USAmbIsrael, at signing ceremony of Israel-US scientific research cooperation pic.twitter.com/mE0pmkNjU2
And to those malevolent boycotters, I have a simple message today: You are wrong and you will fail. You are wrong because you deny what cannot be denied, the millennial connection between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel—it's over three-thousand years old.
Extending agreements between the US and Israel to the West Bank, Golan and east Jerusalem bolsters the ties between the countries, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said in a ceremony removing the only territorial limitations in agreements between Washington and Jerusalem on Wednesday.
“We are righting an old wrong and strengthening yet again the unbreakable bond between our two countries,” Friedman said at a signing ceremony with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Ariel University in Samaria.
Netanyahu and Friedman signed new versions of three agreements on research cooperation, which erase a line that says "cooperative projects sponsored by the Foundation may not be conducted in geographic areas which came under the administration of the Government of Israel after June 5, 1967, and may not relate to subjects primarily pertinent to such areas.”
The first agreement, signed in 1972, was the Binational Science Foundation, followed in 1976 the Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation (BIRD), and then the Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (BARD) in 1977. All three had large endowments that provided grants to American and Israeli academics and companies for research and technology.
They also signed a new Science and Technology agreement, meant to increase government-to-government cooperation at the highest levels, which also does not have geographic restrictions.
Friedman said that BIRD, BARD and BSF, as originally written, “were subject to political limitations that did not serve the goals sought to be achieved.”
US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that there are up to 10 countries that he expects to soon normalize relations with Israel, but that the developments would largely happen after next week’s presidential elections.
Asked if there were more countries in the Middle East that would follow the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan who all recently opened diplomatic relations with Israel, Trump said there were more on the way, without specifying exactly how many or which countries they were.
“We have five, but really have probably nine or ten that are right in the mix, we’re going to have a lot, I think we’ll have all of them eventually,” he told reporters at Andrews Air Force Base before hitting the campaign trail.
“The beauty is there’s peace in the Middle East with no money and no blood,” he continued. “There’s no blood all over the sand. We have five definites and I think we’ll have another five pretty much definites. And all of them, the big ones, the smaller ones.”
Asked if agreements would come before or after the November 3 election, Trump said “largely after.”
Donald Trump came along and managed to “do the unthinkable” by brokering peace between the Israelis and the Arabs by simply bypassing the Palestinians, according to Sky News host Rowan Dean. President Donald Trump has recently brokered a third historic peace deal this time between Israel and Sudan, after previously negotiating deals between Israel and the UAE, and Bahrain. Mr Dean said bypassing Palestine to broker these deals is the “genius of Donald Trump”. "The Democrats have no solutions for the problems in the world,” he said. “You need people like Donald Trump who just cut through all the sort of red tape and get to the bottom of the nut of the problem and solve it.”
Black youths in the middle of the Philadelphia riots see a fewJews wearing kippot. One refers to them as "Amalek," which they do not notice.
The harasser goes on. "Amalek, whatcha all doing down here? Do you live here? You know you aren't all real Jews, right? This ain't your fight!"
One of the Jews responds, "We are showing solidarity."
"We don't need your solidarity!"
Others join in, shouting at the Jews, "Get the fuck out! Get the fuck out of here!" A Jew is shoved as the crowd forces them out. As they leave, one shouts, "Revelation 2:9, Synagogue of Satan!"
Must be white supremacists.
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Two giant stories occurred this week regarding the legal status of the disputed territories.
Israel announced on Tuesday the United States is lifting a ban on funding Israeli scientific research conducted in the West Bank and Golan Heights. This follows the announcement a year ago by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the US does not consider "settlements" to be a violation of international law.
Up until now, the US was careful not to spend any funds on Israeli projects across the Green Line armistice lines of 1949.
This position is consistent with Donald Trump's "Peace to Prosperity" plan as well as common sense that in any potential two-state solution, Israel would hold on to most of the areas where Israeli citizens (Arabs and Jews) have lived for decades.
As important as that announcement is, perhaps the UAE has gone further.
They will be imported by the UAE-based African+Eastern, which made the announcement. They sell wines and spirits to the many non-Muslim consumers in the UAE.
The Golan Heights wines are not yet on their webpage.
The people that consider Judea and Samaria to be "occupied" say the same about the Golan Heights, conquered by Israel in 1967.
By allowing imports from the Syrian-claimed region, the UAE is saying that it is considering at least some of the "occupied territories" to be part of Israel - or at least it doesn't object to labeling goods from the Golan Heights as Israeli, which makes the UAE more pro-Israel than some European countries.
None of these announcements should be earth-shattering. The world never made the demands on other disputed or "occupied" territories that is has of Israel. Earlier this month, Turkey announced it will open a tourist site on the ruins of an abandoned Cypriot beach town without a word from Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International about "illegal settlement activities in occupied territories."
But treating Israel like any other nation is, indeed, big news. Hopefully that will not be the case for long.
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As soon as the Jews set foot on the ground [in Algeria], they tried to desecrate and distort its heritage, and on a journey that wandered around the globe, they immigrated to Algeria, dissolving into society, learning its language, and wreaking havoc in it ... We open the archive of history, in search of Jewish profane linguists during their presence in guarded Algeria.
A number of examples are given of phrases that apparently are common in Algerian dialects of Arabic that they say are actually from Jews trying to destroy Algerian culture through language.
One is the word "makalah" which apparently means in colloquial Algerian "something that is not necessary." This article, and apparently many others, claim that the origin of the word is that Jewish traders in the market used to tell the Muslim traders with whom they traded that "ma kan ilah" which means "there is no Allah (in the market)." In other words, the Jews told the Muslim traders that they do not need to swear by Allah's name.
Another example - which may actually be true - is the Algerian word "haylula" which means tumult. They claim that it came from the Hebrew word "hilula," the celebration on the anniversary of the death of a major Jewish rabbinic figure.
They give a couple of examples where Jews apparently referred to Aisha, Mohammed's very young wife, in a derogatory manner - although they are not sure if that is of Shiite origin rather than Jewish.
Another example of "bakbuk," which means "bottle" in Hebrew as well as some Algerian dialects.
Why this is considered a desecration of language is anyone's guess.
(h/t Ibn Boutros)
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WE ALL AGREE that a crucial part of Zionism is maintaining a clear majority of Jews in the Jewish state; yet CIS [Commanders for Israel’s Security] insists on claiming that any act of applying sovereignty over areas that are inhabited by Jews and don’t include the Palestinian Authority necessarily mean that we must “annex” the Palestinians and endanger our Jewish majority. This is simply not true.
CIS completely ignores that the “Deal of the Century” suggests Israel can apply sovereignty over Jewish communities, have full security responsibility over the whole of the Land of Israel, and that there will still be an option for a Palestinian state to be formed, in a format similar to San Marino, Lesotho or Luxembourg. A demilitarized Palestinian state was also Yitzhak Rabin’s vision when he initiated the Oslo Accords. The original two-state solution was far from what it became later on.
We all aspire to have a Jewish state that will be secured for generations to come. Knowing that we can’t afford a third exile from the land of our forefathers, we understand we can’t afford to lose even one war. However, the plan CIS is aggressively promoting, while falsely claiming that the Jewish majority is in danger, is devastating for Israel’s security.
CIS’s suggestion means that in the long-term, our security should be placed in the hands of the Arabs and international forces. This suggestion is coherent with former president Barack Obama’s plan, which CIS has endorsed since its very foundation. While they talk about “security arrangements,” we know there is no sustainable option other than all aspects of security being solely in the hands of the IDF, along with defensible borders and a strong civil infrastructure. Without Judea and Samaria, Israel simply cannot defend itself from the narrow nine mile-wide coastal plain. This isn’t an ideological opinion; it’s a military fact.
When Zionists came to the Land of Israel in the 19th century, they realized they must acquire three abilities: to establish a Jewish entity in the largest territory possible; to become farmers and grow their livelihood from the land; and to be able to defend themselves without dependence on the good will of the Arabs or the international community. A core value of Zionism is that Israel will never place its citizens’ lives and in someone else’s hands. The Jewish people must be able to defend itself in our homeland and defend every Jewish community around the world when called upon.
In summary, the Zionist movement and the State of Israel have fought from the very beginning against all the odds, and won. Trying to find practical solutions to our complex situation with the Palestinians cannot be done by rejecting our core values and spirit.
Leading French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy has called for a renewal of the Zionist vision, arguing that the notion that the Jewish national liberation movement had already fulfilled its mission was sorely mistaken.
“Zionism is only at the beginning of its history,” Lévy declared in a virtual address to the 38th World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem last week.
“Israel is such a young nation,” he noted. “And in another way, it is ancient, as old as the history of the world. What we call Zionism today must continue to maintain its spirit as long as we are alive. Let us not say today that Zionism has exhausted its message, that’s completely untrue.”
Lévy also argued that Diaspora Jewish communities had to remain at the core of the Zionist movement’s vision.
“The Diaspora is not some kind of remainder or remnant, cast away by history,” the philosopher said. “On the contrary, it is something that should be integrated quickly into the mainstream of Zionism.”
Lévy continued: “In Diaspora life, Jewish existence, let’s say someone who’s Romanian, Italian, American or French, there is something very noble in the existence of these Jews, something that cannot be reduced to the expectation of going to Jerusalem. I don’t think that existence in the Diaspora, in exile, is somehow less-than.”
Nearly half of Americans don’t know what the phrase “antisemitism” means.
That’s one takeaway from two surveys published Monday by the American Jewish Committee. The surveys asked Jews and the general American public about antisemitism in the United States.
The Jewish survey found that a large majority of Jews consider antisemitism a problem, and that most see it as a problem on the right and in the Republican Party. Those findings were in line with what the AJC, a nonpartisan advocacy organization, found when it surveyed American Jews last year.
The new surveys found that, in a year when 88% of American Jews say antisemitism remains a problem in the United States, 21% of Americans overall — more than one in five — say they’ve never even heard of the term. An additional 25% of Americans overall have heard the term but are unsure of what it means.
But nearly half of Americans overall say they have seen antagonism against Jews either online or in person during the past five years, suggesting that respondents may be familiar with the reality of anti-Jewish bigotry but unfamiliar with the term “antisemitism.”
A new survey shows that more than 8 in 10 American Jews believe antisemitism has risen in the US over the past five years.
The State of Antisemitism in America 2020 survey — conducted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) — also found that 85% of American Jews viewed the statement, “Israel has no right to exist,” as antisemitic, with 84% feeling the same about the statement, “The US government only supports Israel because of Jewish money.”
Another 76% considered the idea, “American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America,” as antisemitic.
Furthermore, a combined 80% said the BDS movement was “mostly antisemitic” or had “some antisemitic supporters,” with only 15% saying it was “not antisemitic.”
Asked how much of a problem antisemitism was in the US today, 88% said it was a “very serious problem” or “somewhat of a problem.”
However, 97% said they had not suffered a physical antisemitic attack, 75% said they had not been the target of an antisemitic remark and 77% had not been targeted over their religion on social media.
Of those who were targets of such abuse, however, 76% said they had not reported the incidents.
Occurrences of antisemitism on social media were overwhelmingly clustered on Facebook, at 62%; with Twitter at 33%.
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Weekend long read
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1) At the Fathom Journal, Calev Ben-Dor discusses some assessments of the
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1) At the Fathom Journal, Calev Ben-Dor discusses some assessments of the
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understand.....
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Thursday, October 29, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
