Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, May 23, 2022

The obvious truth the world doesn't accept: Palestinians are responsible for Palestinian violence.

"Jihad" original AI-produced artwork

We've seen this show before. And it keeps repeating because the world lets it happen.

The Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court ruled that three Jewish teenagers who bowed down and said the "Shema" prayer on the Temple Mount should not have been banned because they didn't violate the law.

The State of Israel is appealing the decision - meaning that the state is against Jewish rights on the Temple Mount.

That's crazy enough. But the court ruling is starting an entirely new round of incitement from Palestinian Arab leaders, saying that this is a holy war.

Hamas official Mushir al-Masri called this "a declaration of religious war" and said "If our messages do not reach the occupation through mediators, they will find their way through missiles."

Similarly, Palestinians are warning that there will be violence if the Flag March on Jerusalem Day goes to the Temple Mount. There is no way that it will, but they are inciting violence for that day - getting hotheaded youth ready for violence whether Israel does anything or not, preparing their firebombs and stones, and with no desire not to use them.

And then, when violence breaks out, the Palestinians say that they were reacting to being "provoked," and the world blames Jews for causing Muslims to become violent.

It seems obvious, but it needs to be emphasized:

Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount isn't incitement.

Marching in Jerusalem with flags isn't incitement - even if it is on the Temple Mount.

Drawing a picture of Mohammed isn't incitement.

Even burning a Koran isn't incitement.

They may be extraordinarily disrespectful, or they may be freedom of speech or freedom of religion, or they may be knowingly provocative. But they do not cause violence.

Muslim reactions to them cause violence. Incitement and stabbings and Molotov cocktails are the responsibility of the people who call for violence and those who act on it - no matter what the provocation.

The Western world has accepted a narrative where Jews are expected to turn the other cheek when they are insulted or provoked, but Muslims are expected to turn violent - meaning that the Jews are at fault no matter what.

This is not only antisemitic. This is disrespect and bigotry against Muslims.

It is a bigotry that is eagerly sought by Muslims who want to be framed as perpetual victims. Those who stab random Jews are given a pass because of "occupation" or, if it is within the Green Line, some other imagined justification. Arabs and Muslims are animals with no free will, according to "progressive" people who always say Jews are at fault, no matter what.

Until the world makes it very clear that Palestinian violence is not a result of Israeli actions, but a decision made by Palestinians themselves and they are wholly responsible for it. When NGOs and the media link Palestinian violence to "occupation" or fictional "apartheid" or whatever the fashionable euphemism for Jewish evil is nowadays, they are accepting that violence. And Palestinians are happy to take on the role of wild animals who cannot control themselves.

The truth is clear cut. Terrorists are responsible for their actions. Not those who the terrorists blame.

We are seeing incitement to terror happening, today - and the world is silent. It is not acceptable and it encourages more attacks on Israelis and Jews.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Truth is stranger than fiction, but stranger still are lies

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but stranger still are lies" is a quote from Philip Roth's Great American Novel.

I think about that quote often when researching anti-Israel propaganda.

A group of actors and other entertainers signed an open letter for "Artists for Palestine UK" that says, in part:

We are deeply disturbed by the Israeli occupation forces’ killing of the highly respected Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, as she arrived, wearing a clearly marked press vest, to report on an Israeli incursion in the occupied city of Jenin last Wednesday. As we grieve her loss, we call for full accountability for the perpetrators of this crime and everyone involved in authorizing it.

The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh is a grave breach of international humanitarian law and an attack on journalism and freedom of expression. UN and international human rights experts have said that it may constitute a war crime and should be subject to an independent, transparent international investigation.

Who needs facts? Hollywood stars - including Susan Sarandon, Tilda Swinton, Mark Ruffalo, Kathryn Hahn and Steve Coogan, along with film directors, authors and musicians - have declared that the Israeli government authorized the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh, and insist that an investigation take place - but only an investigation that will reach the same verdict that they already reached.

Israel's already doing an investigation and has already shown a willingness to accept responsibility if it is at fault? Irrelevant!

Palestinians refusing to cooperate in a transparent investigation? Who cares?

Israeli sniper rifles have a different caliber than the bullet that killed Shireen? Hasbara!

Video with audio of sprays of gunshots at the time she is hit, knowing that the IDF only shoots single rounds at a time? Please, that's just Zionist propaganda!

Not only don't the celebrities care about the facts - they are confident that their fans don't, either, and that they won't be embarrassed by their obvious lies.

Lies are indeed strange. People are conditioned to believe those who speak earnestly and passionately. They are in general not going to bother to fact-check a famous actor or author - what incentive do they have to lie so egregiously, so nakedly?

And yet, they do. I don't know if they lie as easily about global warming or racism, but they sure lie about Israel, and knowing that should cast doubt on everything that comes out of their mouths.

In a world that values truth.

That is no longer the world we live in, if it ever was.

The people who tell the truth are at a disadvantage.The world audience prefers newsmakers to be either wearing black hats or white hats, and they are forced to judge between the truth-tellers speaking in shades of grey who say "we don't have enough information yet" and the liars who confidently say, "GUILTY!"

"The truth will come out" may be correct in some cases but by the time it does, the audience for the truth has already moved on, having decided for themselves who is right based on how earnest and photogenic the debaters are. And they are a bit more antisemitic.

Which is, of course, the goal.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

05/22 Links: Did Abraham use a smartphone?; ‘Ideology of Rage’ Comes to Congress; Israel bans European parliamentarian who worked with terror supporters

From Ian:

Did Abraham use a smartphone?

The question, of course, is anachronistic and the answer is no. The first smartphone was released (by IBM) in 1994, less than 30 years ago. Abraham,,Patriarch of the Jewish nation, lived 4000 years earlier. He could not possibly have used a technology invented thousands of years later.

That is why no-one suggests Abraham Avinu (Hebrew for the Patriarch Abraham), used a smartphone. That revisionist history would be too laughably obvious to try to put over on the public.. However, UNESCO does seriously allege that Abraham and Sarah’s tomb, a world heritage site, is “Palestinian”.

That’s elevating anachronism to sacrosanct status – because the term “Palestinian” is every bit as new an invention as the smartphone is. “Palestinian”, describing members of the Arab Umma who live in Eretz Israel, was coined in the twentieth century – 4000 years after the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron was purchased and consecrated by Abraham Avinu.

Of course, UNESCO has its excuses ready. UNESCO says that the Cave of the Patriarchs is “Palestinian” because Hebron is situated in what they intend to be a “Palestinian” state. But this too is incorrect. First, Hebron belongs to the Jewish people, as recognized by the unanimous and irrevocable internationally legal decision at San Remo. Second, the area allocated to the Palestinian Authority in the Oslo accords does not include the Cave of the Patriarchs. Third, the Palestinian Authority is not a state.

Fibbing has turned into a serious international problem. During COVID, wide-spread fibs caused untold millions to refuse crucial vaccines.

When fibs in the “Palestinian” arena first surfaced, the United States justified its status as the world’s superpower by refusing to take the fibs lying down. In 1989, the PLO first tried to elbow its way into the World Health Organization (WHO). But international organizations like WHO are joined only by states, not by social groups, political parties, or terrorist organizations. The PLO was pretending to be a state, and the international community was expected to acquiesce in the fib.

Jonathan Tobin: Who is really responsible for Palestinian suffering?

Resolutions proposed in the US House of Representatives mean nothing. They give members an opportunity to pay lip service to various causes favored by their constituents but don't commit the government to action. They are almost always not worth noticing. But every once in a while, a resolution is put forward that demands attention. This week that is exactly what happened when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) proposed House Resolution 1123, "Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugee Rights."

The word nakba means "disaster" or "catastrophe," and that is how Palestinian Arabs and their supporters refer to the events of 1948 and the birth of the State of Israel. The text is a thumbnail guide to Palestinian propaganda about their suffering and the events that led to approximately 750,000 Arabs to flee their homes during Israel's War of Independence. What happened to them is a tragedy deserving of sympathy, but the story told in the resolution provides not even half of the truth about the conflict or why nearly 10 times the number of Arabs who fled the war now claim to be Palestinian refugees.

As an attempt at telling this history, the resolution is a despicable farce that deserves little notice. But it's important because it represents the way the left-wing of the Democratic Party led by the so-called "Squad" – of which Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, is a charter member – has fully embraced intersectional ideology. Other "Squad" members are co-sponsors, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Betty McCollum (D-Minn.). This attempt to treat the war on Israel's existence as analogous to the struggle for civil rights in the United States and an integral part of the progressive political agenda represents a sea change in American politics.

So, while the resolution itself is contemptible, it merits a full debate and vote in the House rather than to be tabled and forgotten.

The pro-Israel community has generally ignored the Palestinian narrative about 1948. The story of Israel is one that stands on its own and is widely accepted by the overwhelming majority of Americans. It is the one Jewish state on the planet and represents the 2,000-year-old dream of Jews for a return to their ancient homeland. Israel has not known a single day of peace in the 74 years since its modern-day establishment on May 14, 1948. Few thought it would survive being invaded by five Arab armies immediately after its birth, or the subsequent wars and terrorist campaigns aimed at destroying it. It is the only democracy in the Middle East and one where all people, including its Arab minority, have equal rights under the law. And it has grown from a poor and tiny country into a regional economic and military superpower.

But seen through the funhouse mirror of the nakba rhetoric in Tlaib's resolution, which mimics the rhetoric of the anti-Semitic BDS movement that she and co-sponsor Omar support, Israel is an "apartheid state" whose creation was an injustice. Moreover, the resolution also demands recognition of the Palestinian "right of return" in which the 7 million descendants of the 1948 refugees would have the right to reclaim the homes of those who left and essentially eliminate Israel as a Jewish state.

While Tlaib and the other Progressive Caucus members who co-sponsored the resolution want to frame their gesture as a matter of support for human rights and recognition of the suffering of Palestinians, it is actually nothing of the kind. Its purpose is to place on the record, congressional support for the elimination of Israel.

‘Ideology of Rage’ Comes to Congress

It is the sort of resolution one would expect to be tabled before the UN General Assembly or even Iran’s parliament, the Majlis, but not the US Congress.

Last week, a group of left-wing Democratic legislators led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib and backed by her House colleagues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Cori Bush (D-MO), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Marie Newman (D-IL), presented a resolution on the subject of the nakba — an Arabic word meaning “disaster” or “catastrophe” that Palestinians use as shorthand when talking about the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In keeping with the language and themes that feature in the UN’s ritual denunciations of Israel, the resolution portrays the Jewish state as an incorrigible colonizer. “[T]he Nakba refers not only to a historical event but to an ongoing process of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land and its dispossession of the Palestinian people that continues to this day,” the resolution argues.

We shouldn’t be under any illusions about the core message of this resolution. Without saying so explicitly, the resolution effectively denies Israel’s right to exist by endorsing UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948, which specifies the right of Palestinians who fled from Israel during the War of Independence in that year to either return to their original homes or receive compensation. Especially as the original 750,000 refugees now number more than 5 million — thanks to the transfer of refugee status to subsequent generations of Palestinians — incorporating such an enormous and largely hostile population within the borders of Israel would almost certainly result in appalling acts of terrorism and violence, as well as the demise of a sovereign Jewish state.

While the resolution doesn’t explicitly demonize Zionism as a form of racism, as the United Nations expressly did in 1975, that is the conclusion its authors would like you to reach. This is no appeal for a historic accord between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism based on compromise and a final partition of the land between sovereign states. Rather, the resolution is an orthodox anti-Zionist screed that denies both the indigeneity of the Jewish population and the legitimacy of its national project. It is, in other words, the “original sin” version of history holding that the Jews stole Palestinian land and then justified the theft by invoking an invented past — the exact same discourse that has bedeviled peace efforts for decades through its insistence that the resolving the Palestinian question requires Israel to cease its independent existence, and the Jews to recognize that they are not a nation but a confession.

Of the many distortions of past and present contained within the resolution, one of the most glaring is its claim that the transfer of refugee status across multiple generations of Palestinians is legally and morally justified.“[P]rotracted refugee situations are the result of the failure to find political solutions to their underlying political crises,” it states. UNRWA, the refugee agency dedicated exclusively to the Palestinians, says much the same: “Under international law and the principle of family unity, the children of refugees and their descendants are also considered refugees until a durable solution is found.”

In English, a child victim of Israeli aggression. In Arabic, a heroic fighter and martyr.

Early Saturday morning, there was a firefight in Jenin where Amjad al-Fayed was killed.

The official Wafa news agency said:

A Palestinian teenager was killed and another one injured early this morning by the Israeli occupation forces during an Israeli army raid of Jenin city, north of the occupied West Bank, according to the Ministry of Health.

It said Amjad Fayed, 17, was killed and another one, 18-years-old, was seriously injured during the raid.

An Israeli military force stormed Haifa Street in Jenin sparking confrontations with residents during which Israeli soldiers fired live bullets at the Palestinians killing one and injuring another, who was reported in critical condition at a local hospital.

Photos shows a smiling teen:

It doesn't show the full photo, though, with the gun at his belt:

It turns out that Fayed was an Islamic Jihad terrorist. Which they bragged about:

The resistance fighter, Amjad Walid Al-Fayed, was martyred at dawn today, Saturday, during armed clashes that took place between Palestinian resistance fighters and the Zionist occupation forces that stormed the city of Jenin.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health announced the death of the 17-year-old Al-Fayed shortly after he was transferred to Ibn Sina Hospital, critically wounded as a result of being targeted by the occupation forces on Haifa Street in Jenin.

Other photos of this child victim:

Which means that Islamic Jihad recruits child soldiers.

Where are the NGOs that pretend to care about Palestinian children?

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Buffalo shooter's manifesto shows the cross-pollination between Right and Left antisemitism

Payton Gendron, the 18 year old white supremacist who targeted Black people as he murdered 10 at a Buffalo supermarket last weekend, wrote a 180 page manifesto where laid out his bizarre philosophy.

The document is divided into three major sections. The first describes Gendron's racial theories, the second describes in detail his preparations for the massacre, and the third is his call to action for white people.

For the most part, his racial theories are copy/pastes from far Right websites. He does not have any real original thoughts. (One interesting deviation is that he describes himself a "ethnically White" but admits having partial Italian ancestry, and Italians were not historically considered to be white people for much of American history.)

His chapter on Jews in the first section likewise copies both text and graphics from far Right websites. However, there is a bit of cross-pollination between the far-Left and the far-Right in how they regard Jews. One can see that his sources both take materials from the far-Left antisemites and that Leftist antisemites take materials from the same far-Right materials that he quotes.

His document includes talking points taken directly from the "anti-Zionist" Left as well as from the Arabs that he hates as well:

He also takes talking points from the Nation of Islam:

Some of his neo-Nazi antisemitism is adopted by heroes of the Left, like Alice Walker and Roger Waters, who have said things about Jews and the Talmud that directly come from the same mistranslated Nazi sites that Gendron quotes. In the case of Walker, both say falsely say that Judaism allows rape of three year old girls and that gentiles must be killed; in the case of Roger Waters, that religious Jews believe that non-Jews exist to be their slaves and are not considered human.

Like the antisemitic Left, Gendron argues that he doesn't hate all Jews: "When referring to 'the Jews' I don’t mean all ethnic or religious Jews. Some can be actually decent, and make significant progress to humanity. However many of them are not." Is there any difference between what he says and the antisemitic Left saying that their obsessive hate of Israel has nothing to do with hating Jews, since they think there are "good Jews" as well?

Finally, Gendron reproduces the graphics that far-Right sites use to "prove" Jewish influence in the media, government, porn and pharmaceutical industries:

Which is no different from David Miller's graphs of Jewish ("Zionist") influence over British institutions:

Also, while Gendron's philosophy pretends that his hate of Jews is purely racial, you see things like this in his screed:

There is no "Jewish blood" in her body, but Gendron considers her a Jew. In fact, even non-Jews are Jews to him if they act in "Jewish ways."

I should also mention that not all “Jews” are ethnic or religious Jews. Jeff Bezos for example is not a religious or ethnic Jew, but may be considered a Jew. All elitists and globalists may be considered a “Jew” simply because they act like one.

The hate for Jews is suddenly not a race issue but simply associating Jews with whatever it is he hates most. It suddenly morphed from hating Jews as an ethnicity or people to turning Jews into a symbol of everything the far-Right finds odious. Jews support Blacks, Jews support transgenderism, Jews support socialism.

Is this any different from the crazed hate from the far-Left for Israel and Zionism? Like Gendron and the far-Right, the far-Left will associate Israel with whatever they consider to be the biggest crimes they can think of: they claim that opposing Israel is a social justice issue, from animal rights to feminism to environmentalism and opposing US police brutality.

The fact that right-wing antisemites say they oppose Jews for the exact opposite reasons does not faze them.

The far-Left and the far-Right might say they hate Jews for different reasons, but neither of them have a problem with using the arguments and methods of the other side. Because, in the end, the real goal is to get the majority to hate Jews - that is the only consistent philosophy that both sides have, prompting both sides to paper over the obvious and massive self-contradictions in their pretense of having a cohesive philosophy to justify their hate.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

David Miller, the British professor fired for antisemitism last year, was defended at the time by a large array of well-known intellectuals.

One letter of support said, "We oppose anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and all forms of racism." It was signed by many prominent academics including Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe and Judith Butler. Here' s one page of its signatories.

Another letter of support came from prominent leftist Jews including Norman Finkelstein, Rabbi David Mivasair and Tony Greenstein.

I think it is time to give these people a chance to show their support for Miller again. Because last week he went full antisemite on Twitter, and no sane person could think that he was only attacking "Zionists."

Here are excerpts of his thread:

There seems to be some confusion about who the occupation for Palestine began. Jonathan @Freedland appears to believe it started in 1967. But it didn't.

So did the occupation begin in 1948 - the #Nakba - when thousands were massacred and 750,000 expelled? No, not then either.

Did the occupation begin in 1909? That was when the first ‘Kibbutz’ was created in Umm Juni, by Arthur Ruppin, the head of the Zionist Organization office in Palestine....

No, not 1909: what about 1878? ‘Petah Tikva’, often described as the ‘Mother of settlements’, was created then with financial help from Baron Edmond de Rothschild. but, it did not begin then, either.

What about 1815 when a settlement was created in Hebron by the extremist Chabad-Lubavitch sect (which originated in Russia/Ukraine)? Today it is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York City. Here is what it says about Hebron.

But no, it may have been earlier: Russian Chabadniks had created settlements in Safed from 1777.

Things you should know about Chabad-Lubavitch: It's a supremacist organisation at the extreme end of the settler movement. According to Shin Bet ( Israeli intelligence agency) it’s responsible for about 80% of ‘price-tag’ revenge attacks on Palestinians.
(Here he links to a video from that authoritative source on Judaism, Iran's PressTV.)

So, in conclusion: The settlement and occupation of Palestine has been a long time coming. The descendant's [sic] of the earliest settlers are still there continuing the #Nakba through violence and land theft. Time to end the occupation.

David Miller is saying that the continuous return of Jews to Eretz Yisrael over the centuries is all evil Zionist settlement and occupation.

No one would mistake the Chabadniks from the 18th century for modern Zionists. They moved to the Holy Land for the same reasons Jewish groups have been moving to Palestine since the Second Temple was destroyed - because that is the center of Jewish religious life.

In the 13th century many prominent French rabbis moved to Palestine. Nachmanides moved to Israel in 1267. The Arizal, Rabbi Isaac Luria, moved to Tzfat in 1579. Many Chassidic leaders and their followers moved to Tzfat and Tiberias in the 18th century.

Miller also cannot distinguish Chabad from any other religious Jews. Chabad isn't responsible for 80% of "price tag" attacks - that's completely absurd, and the Shin Bet never said that. To Miller, any Jew wearing a kippah is the same.

Miller is saying that any Jew who moved to Eretz Yisrael in the centuries before modern Zionism is an illegal settler and occupier. His link to PressTV's video about Chabad (which also conflates Chabad with all religious Jews) shows not only his ignorance and lack of critical thinking abilities when it comes to Jews, it proves his own hatred of Jews who are public about their observance.

He is saying that not only the Jews who moved to Israel from elsewhere are stealing Palestinian land, but the Jews who lived there beforehand and their descendants are also illegal thieves of the land. Even the PLO and Iranian leaders say that Jews who lived in Israel before 1917 are "Palestinian" and can stay when the other Jews are ethnically cleansed - but that opinion is too pro-"Zionist" for David Miller.

So it is time to explicitly ask Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler and Norman FInkelstein if they still think that David Miller has no antisemitic tendencies. Do these academics who claim so loudly that they are against antisemitism denounce David Miller's clear hatred for Jews, not Zionists?

Pick names from the hundreds of academics and Jews who defended him from the links above, and tweet asking them what they think of someone who calls Jews who moved to Palestine for religious reasons, centuries before modern Zionism, "thieves."

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

05/21 Links: The world made Israel necessary by refusing to help Jews in WWII; How do Putin and Zelenskyy get the Holocaust so wrong?; Israel is guilty until proven innocent in the UN

From Ian:

The world made Israel necessary by refusing to help Jews in WWII

Headlines in March 2022, stemming from the prime minister of Canada, said that Canada would accept as many refugees fleeing the Russian attack on Ukraine “as we can.” But 84 years ago, from July 6 to July 15, 1938, when representatives of 32 countries met in the French spa town of Evian-les-Bains to search for a solution to a Jewish refugee crisis, the response was very different.

The crisis was precipitated by the intense antisemitism unleashed by the Nazis in Germany in 1933 and in Austria in 1938. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were stateless. The Evian Conference, the initiative of US president Roosevelt, was convened to find a solution. It has been argued that the conference was a cynical ploy designed by Roosevelt for appearances only; there was never any intention to raise US immigration quotas (or even fill existing quotas) to save Jews.

The conference was an abject failure. With the exception of the Dominican Republic (in the end, only a little more than 700 Jewish refugees found sanctuary there), no country agreed to accept Jewish refugees. The countries represented at Evian included a European bloc, another large group representing Latin America, as well as the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Canada, today a federation of ten provinces and three territories, was created in 1867 as a self-governing dominion, although full independence with regard to foreign policy only came about in 1931. Today, the Jewish population of Canada (about 390,000) is the fourth largest in the world, after Israel, the US and France. At the start of World War II, the Jewish population had reached 160,000 in a population of 11 million.

Canada’s record with regard to Jewish refugees before and during World War II is shameful and well documented in None Is Too Many, by Irving Abella and Harold Troper (1983). The title, a reply by an unnamed bureaucrat to a question as to how many Jews should be admitted to Canada after World War II, is not an exaggeration.

Partly due to the Great Depression and a struggling economy, but largely because of antisemitism, only 5,000 Jews were admitted to Canada from 1933 to 1945. The frantic efforts of the leaders of the Canadian Jewish community were useless; even in cases related to family reunification or when affluent applicants offered to transfer substantial assets to Canada.

How do Putin and Zelenskyy get the Holocaust so wrong?

It's a piece of the Holocaust that even scholars misunderstand, or neglect altogether. And it's a story unknown even to the descendants of a quarter-million Holocaust survivors.

The United Nations Holocaust Outreach Program hosted author and academic Mikhal Dekel on May 11 to discuss her book, "In the East: How My Father and a Quarter Million Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust," a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the National Jewish Book Award and the Chautauqua Prize. Dekel's book – part-historical, part-memoir – presents a unique narrative about the Polish refugees fleeing the terror of the Holocaust en route to the Soviet Central Asian Republics and the Middle East.

Investigating her late father's mysterious identity as a "Tehran Child," Dekel delved deep into rare Soviet archives previously unavailable to Western scholars, charting the path of Holocaust refugees to Siberia, Uzbekistan and Tehran, where her father and aunt were among those who survived the war.

Why do the Russians insist that they are de-Nazifying Ukraine? How can Ukraine's president lecture Israel's parliament, the Knesset, that his country aided the Jews during the Holocaust? According to Dekel, it revolves around a Soviet perspective of the Holocaust that has little to nothing to do with Jews.

Jewish News Syndicate chatted with her to understand what has eluded even dedicated students of the Holocaust.

Q: I don't like stretching or trying to make comparisons that don't exist. And so, I'll try to avoid it here. Do you feel at all that the current tensions between Israel and Russia will lead to more research and more questioning of the Soviet era during this time? Do you feel that might evolve in some way?

"I think it will. Somebody asked me that in the UN event – not exactly in these terms – but they asked how this current war affects the way my book is being read, and I said that first of all, it makes reading my book more possible because people are thinking about Soviet crimes. And in fact, my book is very much related, because of a few things. But one of them is this rhetoric that Putin is using when he says, 'I'm fighting Nazis.' To us, it's insane, right? Where is he getting this? This is a cynical use of World War II. But, in fact, when you travel in the areas that I traveled, World War II is not even over. They're still talking in these terms. You started by saying Holocaust teaching is on the decline, but you have to understand that in those regions, they don't know anything about the Holocaust. You think here it's on the decline? They think the war between the Nazis, or the fascists, and the Soviets is that this is Russia vs. the world. The Jews have nothing to do with it or very little to do with it. They don't even know about the concentration camps, half of these people. It's shocking."

Q: It brings up (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskyy's interview recently, where he described his own family members perishing in the Holocaust but never used the word "Jew." Or Holocaust, for that matter. It really speaks to a perspective of the Holocaust that isn't known outside of that region.

"I agree with that completely. Zelenskyy's perspective as someone who grew up in Ukraine is also completely off because, if you'll recall, he spoke to the Knesset and said Jews should save Ukrainians the way the Ukrainians saved the Jews, and people are sitting there saying, 'Oh, my G-d.' But he wasn't being cynical because he grew up on that. It doesn't matter that he's a Jew. He grew up in that education system; they tell a whole other story. They tell the story of Soviet and Nazi aggression against Ukraine. Again, the Jews are not part of this, and in fact, the Ukrainians were the great, poor victims, and so ethnic Ukrainians were just as much victims as the Jews. We know that's not true from every piece of evidence we have. There were, of course, exceptions, but I'm speaking generally. That's the story that's being told in Poland and in Ukraine and Lithuania. Both Putin and Zelenskyy are speaking from a cultural, social, political world that I don't even understand. I mean, I understand it, but the general public in the United States doesn't understand it or in Israel, so I think maybe this will help unearth these things. Before this war, there were few scholars working on this. My book came out, and it's kind of the right moment for it."

Australian PM concedes defeat, ending party’s 9-year rule; was firm backer of Israel

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese will be sworn in as prime minister after his Labor party clinched its first electoral win since 2007. The party was last in power in 2013 when it led a minority government.

Morrison, who heads the Liberal Party, was considered a good friend of Israel, heading one of a handful of governments to somewhat follow former US president Donald Trump’s lead on Jerusalem, recognizing the western side of the city as Israel’s capital.

Also during his tenure, the Australian government listed all of the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Gaza Strip-based Hamas as terror groups. At the time, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said that “Australia is a close friend of Israel in the fight against global terrorism.”

Albanese in the past has described himself as “a strong advocate of justice for Palestinians,” and has said he is “very critical of a lot of Israel’s policies.”

Speaking to The Australian Jewish News earlier this month, Albanese said his party continues to support a two-state solution based on the right of Israel to live in peace within secure borders and reflecting the aspirations of the Palestinians to statehood.

“Labor’s national platform makes clear the desire of the conference to recognize Palestine as a state while acknowledging this will ultimately be a matter for a future Labor government,” Albanese told AJN.

“And Labor governments have always understood that any just and lasting resolution to the Middle East conflict cannot be at the expense of either Palestinians or Israelis. The only way that a two-state solution can be achieved is through a negotiated outcome between the two parties,” he added.

You can watch Albanese’s remarks over the years here:https://t.co/g36DB3lbdF
— Sharri Markson (@SharriMarkson) May 17, 2022

05/20 Links Pt2: Antisemitism isn't a strong enough word; The ‘broken windows’ strategy for combating Israel demonization; The BDS Movement Has Already Lost

From Ian:

Antisemitism isn't a strong enough word

UCLA Professor Judea Pearl has suggested we refer to their malignancy as "Zionophobia." A phobia is an irrational fear. One might argue that their demonization of Jews and the double-standard of treating Jews differently than any other people are irrational, but BDSers don't fear Jews; their hatred is based on an assertive desire to eliminate the Jewish people as punishment for their crimes.

There are some "Judeophobes," but they are mostly conspiracy theorists. While some BDSers may subscribe to some of these fictions, they are not driven by them. BDS is not an extension of QAnon.

An apt term would be "ethnic cleansers," but that's a bit awkward. Run-of-the-mill antisemites are again distinguishable from the BDSers since they don't insist on ethnically cleansing the State of Israel. Ironically, it is also two-state proponents who want to ethnically cleanse a future Palestinian state of Jews. As it is, their attitude towards settlements is essentially antisemitic because they insist that there is one place on earth where Jews should not be allowed to live despite the fact it is part of their homeland. Imagine the reaction if anyone agreed there should be two states and that Palestinians should not be permitted to reside in one of them.

BDSers and other like-minded folks, like Islamists, belong in the same category as reprobates who have sought to exterminate a particular group of people. We could call them "liquidators" but that sounds too conventional, like a store going out of business. "Exterminators" fits but is too associated with pest control. BDSers also generally don't have the Hitlerian view of Jews as vermin, at least not that they would admit. "Terminators" makes you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but while their goals are frightening, the BDSers themselves aren't the least bit scary (Schwarzenegger, incidentally, is an avid supporter of Israel).

Better terms would be either "genocidists" or "genocidaires." Still, we need to distinguish them from Pol Pot, Stalin, Rwandans or other mass murderers who did not specifically target Jews.

Referring to BDSers as "antisemites" is too good for them. They are Judeocidists.

Melanie Phillips: The ‘broken windows’ strategy for combating Israel demonization

Palestinianism has worked because of a strategy, applied over decades and backed by huge funds, to seed an entirely false narrative among gullible Western liberals that has reversed aggressor and victim and demonized Israel and its defenders.

Those defenders need to adopt a similar pro-active and aggressive strategy against Israel’s foes but on the basis of truth rather than lies.

That means creating an infrastructure that seeks to frame public debate rather than just react to it. The principal aim should not be to tell people about Israel and the Jewish people (important though that remains). Its main purpose should be to alert the public to the key fact of which they are almost wholly unaware—that they are being lied to, and that the cause they may be supporting in good faith is an evil and genocidal one.

It is astounding, for example, that Israel’s defenders aren’t regularly publicizing the eye-watering and deranged anti-Semitic cartoons, sermons, and statements that are perpetually pumped out by Palestinian Arab media and carefully translated and displayed on the websites of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and Palestinian Media Watch.

Such material provides a weapon with which to target the Israel-haters’ Achilles heel—their narcissistic self-regard. For what’s of prime importance to such individuals is their self-belief as people of conscience committed to anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and so on.

An effective pro-Israel strategy would name and shame all such offenders—media outlets, specific journalists, academics and other cultural leaders—by rubbing their noses in what is being said by the Palestinians they champion, in order to expose such “progressives” as facilitators of racism, ethnic cleansing and Arab imperialism.

Most people in the West have no idea that the Palestinians they support are spewing out Nazi-style incitement against Israel and the Jewish people. That’s because no one—in the Jewish world or anywhere else—is making use of such material to ask how any civilized person could ever support such people. Instead, an increasing number of liberal Jews are themselves also supporting them.

Media monitors like the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) and Honest Reporting do excellent work in exposing the lies, but who outside the Jewish community hears about their work? A joined-up strategy would ensure that political and other figures whose utterances are news-worthy give these findings a megaphone. It might even give them a TV station.

All this would require an enormous investment of money, people and time. Most importantly, though, it would need the pro-Israel world to adopt a totally different mindset—creating a strategy to break the enemy’s windows before they break any more of your own.

Was honoured to be given a 'Portrait of Courage' award by @CAMERAorg this week.

I do what I do because I must. I do not see self-preservation or truth-telling as 'courage'.

Greatest motivation? Knowing that if I do not fight now, my children will have to fight a greater battle pic.twitter.com/MuH9WgdOM3
— David Collier (@mishtal) May 20, 2022

Roths pressure monarch

ARNOLD and Frimet Roth have thrown their support behind draft legislation in the US Congress to compel Jordan to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, a terrorist involved in the bombing of a Jerusalem pizzeria that claimed the life of their Australian-born daughter Malki 21 years ago.

The Roths have publicly endorsed a bill by Congressman Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, which would commit Congress to recognising Jordan has an extradition treaty with the US. Malki, 15, was a US citizen through her American-born mother.

The couple’s endorsement coincided with a visit to Washington by Jordan’s King Abdullah II last Friday to meet with US President Joe Biden over a Jordanian bid to increase the Waqf presence on the Temple Mount after recent unrest, a move rejected by Israel, which has sovereign jurisdiction there.

Tamimi was charged with terrorist crimes by the US in 2013 and is on a list of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists. The bill proposes penalising Jordan if it does not extradite Tamimi. Said Steube, “Our US tax dollars will not continue to flow to a country harbouring a Hamas terrorist with American blood on her hands.”

Jordan maintains its extradition treaty with the US was never ratified, but the Roths cite documentation contradicting this.

Tamimi, one of the bombers of the Sbarro pizzeria in 2001 which killed 15 and injured 140, served part of a sentence in Israel but was extradited in a prisoner swap to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas. She is now a Jordanian media personality and remains unrepentant about her role in the attack.

“Ahlam Tamimi’s obscene, ongoing freedom in Jordan has to be on the agenda of every meeting the Jordanian monarch is granted,” Arnold Roth said of King Abdullah II’s US visit.

A simple solution to determine if an Israeli weapon shot Shireen Abu Akleh - WITHOUT the PA handing over the bullet

OK, so the Palestinians don't want to share the bullet that (they say) killed Shireen Abu Akleh to Israel, because they don't trust Israel (even if US and Palestinian investigators are there) not to tamper with it.

Fine.

Then let's do the next best thing.

The US - or any Arab nation - should buy sophisticated equipment for forensics analysis of bullets and donate it to the cash-strapped PA.

Such as this:

Forensic Technology offers the world’s most advanced ballistic identification solution, IBIS® (Integrated Ballistic Identification System), which enables the sharing and comparison of significant quantities of exhibit information and images across a network of imaging sites, as well as the automated identification of likely matching bullets or cartridge cases. The latest generation of IBIS technology includes exceptional 3D imaging, advanced comparison algorithms, and a robust infrastructure. It has been designed to meet the needs of police and military organizations that gain actionable information from firearms and their fired ammunition components.

The Palestinian Authority can simply use this or another similar piece of equipment to create a high resolution 3D image of the bullet (or bullets, since there were more than one.)

At the same time, Israel can shoot test bullets from all the firearms they used in Jenin that day and take high resolution, 3D models of those.

Then anyone can see if they match and no one can easily lie.

Tampering would be impossible. Cheating would be difficult.

Yes, Israel could theoretically cheat - by not making available the weapon they said was the only possible one on their side. However, Israeli forensics is no doubt professional - meaning there is a documented, incorruptible chain of custody that can be examined by outsiders to ensure that everything is honest.

(And if you want an even playing field, then the Palestinian Authority security services should confiscate all the weapons in Jenin - which they should anyway! - and have them tested. Then things can be perfectly transparent!)

When it comes down to it, we know that the PA would not agree to this, even though it ostensibly addresses their concerns. Because everyone knows that the PA doesn't want anything that could possibly exonerate Israel. They are already getting the propaganda bonanza from their lies - why would they want to jeopardize that with a doze of transparent, provable truth?

But Israel should make the offer (the UAE or Bahrain could buy the equipment.) The PA's reasons for refusal will be absurd - and that is what the world needs to see.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Israel Moves From COVID Tests To IQ Tests At Entry; Weeds Out 99% Of Anti-Zionists (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Ben-Gurion Airport, May 19 - The Ministry of Health eliminated the requirement this week for all incoming passengers to undergo swabbing for the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen, instead leaving the Ministry of Transportation to administer arrival policy without such considerations. The latter ministry has instead implemented an intelligence assessment test for all foreign visitors, an unintended consequence of which has been the reduction of "pro-Palestinian" activists to near zero among those permitted to stay, ministry sources indicate.

More than two years of COVID-mitigation policies have included on-again, off-again restrictions on air travel to and from Israel, with the most long-lasting policy in that respect involving a test upon landing to check for the presence of the specific coronavirus that causes the illness, with quarantine until negative results emerge. That policy ended as of this past Sunday, in acknowledgement of the diminished public health risk the disease now poses in a world where vaccines and post-infection immunity have rendered the continuation of various mitigation measures not worth the expense or effort. However, the Ministry of Transportation decided to impose a different test that incoming visitors must undergo, to measure each person's Intelligence Quotient, and have barred non-citizens who score noticeably lower than the global average. Ministry officials disclosed that while at first the policy aimed to filter out less-desirable tourists and visitors - lower intelligence correlates with lower economic power, for example - its most apparent unintended benefit has been the prevention of 99% of anti-Israel activists from entering the country and spreading their venom.

"We didn't actually expect this" admitted Minister of Transportation Merav Michaeli. "It was chiefly an economic and cultural move. We intended to leverage it in combination with other measures, and in conjunction with the Ministry of Tourism, the Ministry of Culture and Sport, the Ministry of Economic Development, and several governmental agencies and academic groups, toward attracting intelligent people and facilitating higher concentrations of those intelligent people from all over the world, in part by filtering out unintelligent people. Our own citizens we can't do anything about; heck, that's our voter base. But foreign passport holders are an easier group to handle that way. We just didn't expect it to be this easy to flag and neutralize those who act against our interests."

Tourism officials have voiced a more equivocal reaction, observing that certain sectors of the tourist economy that depend on predatory sales practices toward gullible foreigners will suffer under the new policy.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

05/20 Links Pt1: Israel is losing sovereignty over east Jerusalem; Jordan fully determined to end Jewish prayer on Temple Mount; Now is a bad time for Biden to visit Israel

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Israel is losing sovereignty over east Jerusalem

The reality of Israel today is that there are large swaths of its capital city that are too dangerous to step foot in if you’re Jewish. Even the police and municipal civil servants avoid going near them.

One might argue that there are plenty of high-profile cities around the world – from Chicago to Paris – that have neighborhoods and areas with huge crime and murder rates that many people would go out of their way to avoid.

But Israel prides itself on its “unified” capital, with every government and prime minister over the 55 years since the Six Day War vowing that Jerusalem will never be divided.

That unblinking belief that the eastern part of Jerusalem will never be up for negotiation might have something to do with Wednesday’s decision by the police to allow this year’s Jerusalem Day Flag March to enter the Old City through the Damascus Gate, after the route was blocked last year due to threats from Hamas that turned into Operation Guardian of the Walls.

The march, which should be a national, non-political event celebrating Israel’s victory in 1967 and the reunification of Jerusalem, has long since turned into a right-wing-fueled show of strength, aimed at boasting ownership over the city, even the Arab sections inside and outside the Old City.

Although the final decision on the march’s route will be made by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in consultation with the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), organizers of the march welcomed the police decision, saying, “There is nothing more suitable than a happy and unifying march, from the west of the city to the east, through the places that the IDF liberated 55 years ago, on the holiday of the capital of Israel.”

Statements like that don’t jibe with the images of riots, clashes and violence that have been plaguing that capital almost every day in recent weeks. Marches like those the organizers want to hold are nice ideas but they can’t exist in a vacuum. Israel has long ago forfeited sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem. A march through Damascus Gate won’t restore it.

Jordan fully determined to end Jewish prayer on Temple Mount

Jordan and the Palestinian Authority have reached a new understanding with regard to the Temple Mount status quo. At the White House on Saturday, King Abdullah presented the conditions of this new understanding. The king accused Israel of gradually encroaching on the status quo, outlined several demands, and asked President Joe Biden for support.

Amman, which holds custodianship over Muslim and Christian sites around the Temple Mount, demands that Jerusalem cease Jewish prayer at the site, which began about five years ago. This is also the demand of the Ra'am Islamist party, or as its leader, Mansour Abbas put it: what is acceptable to Jordan is acceptable to us.

Abdullah had previously made the same demand from Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who rejected it. The Prime Minister's Office adamantly denied this even happened, but sources involved in the matter confirm so.

Israel makes a point of not addressing these silent prayers formally, although the matter is a well-known secret that takes place on the eastern side of the Temple Mount, albeit without traditional Jewish prayer items such as tallit, tefillin, or siddur.

And yet, Israel is determined to safeguard this achievement – a sole one – in the face of a series of fundamental changes the Muslims have made to the status quo on the mountain over the years – having built several new mosques, limited the times and areas Jews are allowed to visit, at times denied Jews access to the site altogether, damaged archeological sites located there, and last but not least, held protests and fired rockets at Israel under the false pretext of "Al-Aqsa being under attack."

Bennett has a short, but tumultuous history when it comes to Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount. The silent prayers began with the quiet consent of then-Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also approved it, although he would never admit it. He too was asked by Abdullah to stop Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount and rejected the Jordanian monarch.

When Bennet became prime minister, he had to face this reality, which he was unfamiliar with before, so he decided to go with the flow. He also studied the Temple Mount clause in Trump's "deal of the century," which was designed to ensure future freedom of prayer at the site, for both Jews and Muslims.

Unlike his predecessor, who kept quiet on the matter of Jewish prayer at the flashpoint site, Bennett announced shortly after taking office that freedom of worship would be maintained on the Temple Mount for all religions, including Jews. Jordan – unsurprisingly – was furious, and the US sided with the Hashemite Kingdom.

Ruthie Blum: Now is a bad time for Biden to visit Israel

AS OF YET, Biden hasn’t commented on this travesty. Perhaps the press is too fearful of a gaffe on his part to request a reaction. In any case, Biden has been nervous from the get-go about the disproportionate power of and pressure from the loud-mouthed “progressives” in his party.

This is why he sucked up to Tlaib exactly a year ago, in the midst of Operation Guardian of the Walls, Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Intercepting him as he landed in Michigan to deliver a speech at the Ford Motor Co. truck plant in Dearborn, she dressed him down for expressing to then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “his firm support for Israel’s right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attacks, [and] welcomed efforts to address intercommunal violence and to bring calm to Jerusalem.”

He could have reminded her, however sheepishly, that his conversation with Netanyahu included a call for a ceasefire. Instead, he paid tribute to her during his talk at the Ford plant.

Flubbing her first name by referring to her three times has “Rashid,” he announced: “I want to say to you that I admire your intellect; I admire your passion; and I admire your concern for so many other people. And from my heart, I pray that your grandmom and family [in the Palestinian Authority] are well, and I promise I’m going to do everything to see that they are on the West Bank. You’re a fighter, and God thank you for being a fighter.”

THE IRONY is inescapable. Despite Biden’s many moves to reverse his predecessor’s policy of holding the Palestinian Authority accountable for its intransigence and “pay for slay” mechanism, as long as he so much as mentions that Israel is a US ally, he cannot appease the likes of Tlaib.

Nor will he be able to satisfy her quest for the “liberation of Palestine, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea” – the wiping of the Jewish state off the map – by admonishing the Israeli government for plans to build some 4,000 housing units in the communities of Judea and Samaria.

If Biden thinks, for example, that she was happy with his State Department’s warning against settlement expansion, on the grounds that it “exacerbates tensions, undermines trust between the parties and deeply damages the prospects for a two-state solution,” he’s kidding himself.

Ditto for Bennett and Lapid. If they imagine that their approval of the construction of at least 1,000 additional Palestinian homes will be sufficient to allay White House concerns, they’re living in la-la land.

The rest of us grasp that it would be preferable for Israel if Biden canceled his trip.

Israel haters really are master propagandists

Lately, I have been considering writing a book about anti-Israel propaganda techniques. Earlier this week I mentioned a variant of "thinking past the sale." There are lists of such techniques but sometimes I find that the haters come up with things that don't even have a name yet.

Fpr now I want to talk about this multi-month, multi-layer effort that appears at first blush to be an attack on Google and Amazon's "Project Nimbus," a billion dollar deal they struck to provide cloud services for the Israeli government.

Like BDS, the effort has no chance of succeeding. However, that is not the goal of the propagandists.

Last year, the haters managed to get some publicity when a tiny percentage of Google and Amazon workers wrote an "open letter" to their employers saying they opposed Project Nimbus, even though no one knows the details of what exactly it would be used for. The fact that Israel is paying for it is enough to make them oppose it.

They now have a thousand signatures, which is minuscule compared to the 1.8 million employees at those two companies. There is exactly a zero percent chance that Google and Amazon will cancel a billion dollar contract over some vague objections of some anti-Israel employees.

Yet The Guardian published this open letter! Getting anti-Israel media to magnify a non-story is a hugely effective means of making it appear significant.

An "open letter" is one of the easiest methods of gaining publicity, with the most bang for the buck. It costs almost nothing; all you need is a a small number of signatures and media attention. People who read about it get the impression that it represents far more people than it does.

Earlier this month, the haters tried to get more traction by starting a petition where college students were urged to "pledge" that they would not accept internships with those companies. Only 750 college students - out of 20 million - signed this "pledge," and probably none of them are in fields that Google or Amazon are even interested in hiring.

"Hundreds" of people signing something is meaningless when the total population is in the millions. You could get hundreds of people to support chocolate hummus on pineapple pizza. But casual readers only see "hundreds" and think, wow, that seems like a lot.

On the face of it, this attempt was a massive failure. But a pledge is an effective brainwashing technique for the students - once they sign a pledge, they are unlikely to backslide. No one wants to be a person who breaks their solemn promise. Even if the students learn facts that contradict the lies they have been told, they are unlikely to even listen to them - let alone act on them - so as not to break the pledge. So the effort to get tens of thousands of students to sign such a pledge might have failed - but they gained 750 people who are unlikely to allow facts to cloud their thinking about Israel for the rest of their lives.

That is a victory.

Now the haters are trying another angle. They are bringing a proposal to an upcoming Amazon shareholder meeting that includes demanding that it review whether its customers are violating human rights with their products and services.

Sensing that the Israel issue alone will not get any traction, they are bundling it with opposition to Amazon partnering with police, ICE, prisons, and the IDF. As always, they throw Israel together with hot button issues to widen their base, because the number of Americans who care about what happens in Israel is pretty small.

Their petition towards Amazon stockholders extends beyond those topics to also include worker safety. In this way they are attempting to link the Palestinian issue in people's minds with workplace safety issues, saying that if you support one, you must also support the other.

It is another brainwashing technique - associating Israel with whatever is considered "bad" nowadays. And, like "Israel=Apartheid," over time it works.

As with The Guardian last year, they recruited The Intercept to trumpet and exaggerate this campaign as if there is a "shareholder revolt."

The article uses yet another propaganda technique, one that was used with the "open letter" and the "pledge" as well: the knowledge that most people are innumerate, meaning mathematically illiterate.

In the case of the shareholders, here is what The Intercept says:

Nimbus will now face a referendum of sorts among Google and Amazon shareholders, who next month will vote on a pair of resolutions that call for company-funded reviews of their participation in that project and others that might harm human rights. The filers of the Google resolution collectively own roughly $1.8 million in shares, according to Ed Feigen, a Google shareholder since 2014 and lead filer of the resolution.

$1.8 million sounds as impressive as "hundreds of signers." It is equally meaningless. Alphabet, Google's parent company, has a market capitalization of nearly $1.5 trillion. They represent 0.00013% of Alphabet shares. That is the equivalent ownership percentage as $10,000 of Gamestop stock.

That is not a "shareholder revolt."

The article describes exactly its own propaganda goals: "The proponents of the proposal are] also tapping into the specific anxieties of the Wall Street investor: What if bad press from Project Nimbus loses us money?" The entire article is meant to be that very bad press - a self-fulfilling prophecy, if anyone takes The Intercept seriously.

It's funny that even the anonymous Google workers they quote who signed the open letter say that there is next to no interest within Google on this initiative:

This engineer added that while they have found like-minded colleagues who are similarly disturbed by the prospect of their cloud technologies being used to fortify the Israeli occupation, employee activism against Nimbus is much diminished since the waves of worker-led protests against prior Google contracts like Project Maven and Dragonfly, the company’s planned custom-built Chinese search engine. “Right now we’re kind of in a slump,” they said. While past employee movements spurred heated discussions on internal chat forums, they said, “We haven’t had anything like that from Nimbus, which is really unfortunate.”

The anti-Israel propagandists are masters of exaggerating their most ineffective actions into sounding like major victories. We see this often with their trumpeting rallies that attract only a handful of people - but they manage to get some coverage.

They are very good at making their side appear much more powerful than it is. The propagandists are true experts at punching above their weight. But it wouldn't work if they didn't have media eager to help them along.

There is another layer that these propaganda experts use: the petitions themselves. I have never seen them actually present any of their petitions to any of their targets. The existence of the petitions are more important than the number of signatures, for two reasons: the petition itself is "news" to some extent, and the people who do sign up also get added to the mailing lists of the anti-Israel organizations and will then become recipients of more brainwashing materials.

They talk about "hasbara." Yet nobody on the pro-Israel side is doing anything close to this level of effort, sophistication and multi-layer advocacy, where even an initiative that is a complete failure can end up paying off in the future.

The problem is, the pro-Israel side doesn't like to manipulate people, to lie to people, to brainwash people. We still naively think that the truth will win out. And in this era where marketing is a science, that is not even close to true anymore.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The main witness to Shireen Abu Akleh's death appears to be a known Pallywood liar

Ali al-Samoudi is the Jenin journalist who was next to Shireen abu Akleh in Jenin when she was shot. He was shot himself. As such, he has been the main source of information as to the circumstances of her death - insisting that IDF soldiers shot them, that the IDF knew they were there and that there were no Palestinian gunmen in the area, and how "We were in a place far from armed clashes with Palestinians, from where we couldn't reach that area as the Israeli forces sealed it off." (So why were they hanging in a place where they couldn't report on anything?)

Nearly 20 years ago, Pierre Rehov made a documentary, "The Road to Jenin," where he documented case after case of how Palestinian journalists create the news they want.

CAMERA describes one section of the movie:

Underscoring the Palestinian penchant for inventing “news,” Rehov even manages to capture on film the manufacturing of a fictitious news story. On Jan. 25, 2003, he accompanies Palestinian journalist Ali Smoddi of the PA-controlled Jenin television station as he and his crew set out to interview a Palestinian man and his wife whose baby was just delivered by a doctor. In the car on the way there, Smoddi constructs a fictitious story in which the husband was forced to deliver the baby: “I want to emphasize certain elements. The husband has no experience in delivering and in spite of that he’s the one who delivers his wife. It’s the climax of all tragedy.” Smoddi then takes a call from the couple’s doctor, and asks: “You’re the one who delivered her? . . . No, don’t let them go.”

At the hospital, Smoddi’s crew does several “takes” of the father’s account of the birth, each with a different spin. In one version, the father claims that the ambulance they intended to meet was held up at a checkpoint for 15 minutes, and he was forced to deliver his infant son in the car, as the ambulance had not arrived. In another telling, the father says: “The soldiers took me down to the ambulance to check my identification and my wife gave birth in the ambulance and went to the hospital.” In each account, Smoddi prompts the father and makes suggestions about the events. Smoddi then prompts the new mother: “The tank stops you while giving birth. You’re alone in the car, talk about your feelings.”

Here is part of that section, captured in Richard Landes' "Pallywood I: 'According to Palestinian sources...'"

It appears that Ali Smoddi is Ali al-Samoudi:

They both have a prominent widow's peak in their hairline, the same thick eyebrows, the same nose, both Palestinian journalists in Jenin with similar voices. (Arabic does not have vowels so both names are spelled identically in Arabic.)

Assuming they are the same person, the main witness being quoted in every article is known to have zero credibility and to deliberately make up whatever he wants people to hear that he thinks are best for the Palestinian cause.

This isn't proof that he is lying now. But it is a strong indication that Ali al-Samoudi is, quite literally, a professional liar, and any real journalist - no matter how sympathetic they are to the death of a colleague - should treat him as one.

(Notice also in the 2003 video clip that the doctor is an enthusiastic participant in the Pallywood creation, directing the new mother to say what Samoudi wants her to say. Pallywood isn't only from journalists: it is part of Palestinian honor/shame culture to present to the West what makes them look as righteous ss possible. It isn't a conspiracy guided by a small group of people; it is a group of actors who know what their roles are when speaking to any Westerner.)

(h/t Irene)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!