Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, October 04, 2023

Memo to Abbas: Jews are Not Descended from Khazars; Here’s Proof (Judean Rose)

Jews aren’t really Jews, according to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, but Khazars, a nomadic Turkic people. These “Khazar Jews” Abbas claims, have no connection to the Land of Israel, just an invented history and a false narrative of religious rights to the Land of Israel. This, of course, is an inversion of the truth. In reality, it is the “Palestinians” who are an invented people with an invented history, and an invented religious right to Jewish territory. By now there is a large body of definitive proof that the Jews are not descended from the Khazars, but those who hate Israel are not interested in either proof or truth.

The purpose of the Khazar myth is to delegitimize all Jewish claims to Israeli territory while spreading the lie that the land in question belongs to others. It’s an if/then proposition. If Jews are Khazars, they have no legitimate claims to Jewish land, which makes them thieves. Except that the Jews are not Khazars. They are Jews. And for thousands of years, Jews have been overwhelmingly endogamous—they marry each other. Abbas says otherwise, because it serves his interests, the main interest being taking land away from the Jews.

Abbas stands truth on its head. The land, he asserts, doesn’t belong to those Khazar Jews, but to his constituents—if you can call them that, when there hasn’t been an election since Abbas assumed office in 2005. Muwaffaq Matar, Fatah Revolutionary Council member and regular columnist for official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, reported on remarks made by Abbas to “various Palestinian intellectuals,” in a 2021 meeting (emphasis added):

[At the meeting he held, PA] President [Mahmoud Abbas] debunked the Zionist fairy tale, which some call the Jewish Israeli narrative…

The president spoke about the 9th century pagan Tatar-Khazar kingdom, which was established in the Caspian Sea area. It underwent attacks and suffered from wars, and therefore its king sought advice to be saved from this situation. His friend, a Jewish man, advised him to convert. The kingdom followed in his footsteps, and it also converted. It remained like this until the 11th century when the kingdom finally collapsed, and [its residents] scattered in neighboring states. These are the Ashkenazis, who were not originally Jews but rather converted.

But this is a lie, as borne out by science. Jews are endogamous: they marry each other (or did until modern times). A study on Ashkenazi hereditary diseases published in 2022, speaks of historically endogamous marriage practices in Judaism in general, and how marrying within the tribe impacted Ashkenazi Jewry in particular:

Judaism is a shared religious and cultural identity, with endogamous marriage practices and distinctive diasporic histories of communities worldwide, particularly a Levantine origin and complex history of migrations over the last ∼2.5 millennia. Present-day Ashkenazim are descendants of medieval Jewish populations with histories primarily in northern and eastern Europe. As a result, they carry distinctive ancestries, and Jewish and non-Jewish medieval individuals living in the same regions would likely show characteristic patterns of genetic variation.

Hereditary disorders in Ashkenazi Jewish populations have been the focus of considerable medical research, with genetic screening now commonplace to mitigate risks. Their prevalence is generally attributed to strong genetic drift during Ashkenazi population bottlenecks, coupled with high endogamy, although other processes such as heterozygote advantage have been proposed.

Candidate population bottlenecks include the phase of dispersion following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the formation of Ashkenazi communities in northern Europe during the medieval period, antisemitic persecution arising from the Crusades, unfounded reprisals for the Black Death, and the movement from western and central Europe to eastern Europe that preceded rapid population growth from the 15th to 18th centuries.

As we see, the Jews are no Khazars, they married within; but no matter, because Abbas has a useful idiot Jew to lend him credibility. More from the Muwaffaq Matar report:

As proof, the president brought the book ‘The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire [and its Heritage]’ by Jewish-Hungarian author and historian Arthur Koestler.

The Jews never were a people and they never will be. The Zionist organization will continue to invent its own history and transpose it into the books of human knowledge, and even into the holy books, in all languages. This is in order to achieve the goal of mobilizing and gathering enough human ammunition [i.e., immigrants] to carry out missions of occupation and settlement, which the colonialist world powers and empires imposed on it.

What of this so-called proof Abbas brings from “Jewish-Hungarian” author and historian Arthur Koestler? According to Yiddish scholar and expert on Ashkenazi surnames Alexander Beider, there is none. Beider describes the evolution of the unfounded Khazar theory in Ashkenazi Jews Are Not Khazars. Here’s The Proof (emphasis added):

Since the late 19th century, the so-called “Khazarian theory” has promoted the idea that a bulk of Ashkenazic Jews living in Eastern Europe descended from medieval Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic people who founded a powerful polyethnic state in the Caucasus and north to the Caspian, Azov and Black seas. The theory received a recent boost with the 1976 publication of “The Thirteenth Tribe,” a book by Arthur Koestler. Most recently, the Khazarian hypothesis has been promoted by authors like the Tel Aviv University professor of history Shlomo Sand and Tel Aviv University professor of linguistics Paul Wexler, as well the geneticist Eran Elhaik.

Despite this institutional backing, the theory is absolutely without evidence. As any historian will tell you, generations of Jews, like generations of any people, leave historical traces behind them. These traces come in multiple forms. For starters, people leave behind them historical documents and archaeological data. Predictably, archaeologic evidence about the widespread existence of Jews in Khazaria is almost nonexistent. While a series of independent sources does testify to the existence in the 10th century of Jews in the Kingdom of Khazaria, and while some of these sources also indicate that the ruling elite of Khazaria embraced Judaism, the Khazarian state was destroyed by Russians during the 960s. In other words, we can be confident that Judaism was not particularly widespread in that kingdom.

A later report by Matar on the meeting between Abbas and the so-called “Palestinian intellectuals” details the PA president’s sickening assertions of a connection between Nazism and Zionism. Hitler’s “Jewish question,” according to Abbas, arose from the failure of the “Khazar Jews” to properly integrate into European society:

We must focus on what the president said regarding the [Jewish] question or ‘the Jewish problem,’ because its cause is that the Jews of the Khazar kingdom did not integrate in the European societies.

A separate report on the same meeting, this time written by Muhammad Al-Masri, appeared in Ma’an, an independent Palestinian news agency, on Dec. 25, 2021:

[PA] President Mahmoud Abbas presented those present with a concise historical survey, such that dealt intensively with the injustice caused to the Palestinians when the world powers – and foremost among them the US and Britain – agreed to the theft of the homeland and land and to granting them as a gift to the Zionist movement, which is an inseparable part of the international colonialist movement.
President Mahmoud Abbas was clear when he said that inflaming the dreams of the Jews and realizing these dreams within a political entity was not the fruit of the efforts of the Jews themselves, but rather colonialist-theological plans and visions of colonialist world powers, as the modern-day Jews are mostly of Tatar origin. They are descendants of dynasties that established a kingdom in the 9th century called ‘the Khazar kingdom.’ In this statement, it appears that President Mahmoud Abbas sought to say that the colonialist world powers used the Jews in order to execute the great colonialist plan – dismantling the Ottoman Empire and afterwards dismantling the Arab nation.

According to Ehud Yaari, this too is a lot of hooey (emphasis added):

It should be noted that Abbas has his facts about the Khazar empire wrong: the Khazars were not Tatars—rather they were a Turkic people—and [the conversion of the royal dynasty and aristocracy as reported by medieval sources] took place, according to most historians, sometime between 740 and 865 CE. His Prime Minister, Muhammad Shtayeh, also had his dates wrong when declaring on June 26, 2021: “Present day Jews are Khazar Jews, who converted to Judaism in the 6th century.” Regardless of the historical inaccuracies about the Khazar dynasty itself, both statements are instead the product of a more recent and dangerous historical trend, reviving the case offered by the late Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, against the justification of a Jewish homeland. These assertions follow in the vein of numerous Arab writers who have produced a number of volumes over the past five decades identifying the Ashkenazi communities as refugees from the destruction of the Khazar Qaganate by Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev c.965 CE.

Promoting this narrative has not just been the effort of Palestinian and Syrian politicians; many Egyptian, Saudi, and Lebanese intellectuals have also been drawn to a narrative that deprives contemporary Jews of pre-medieval Jewish lineage and history connecting them back to the land. Books dealing with the subject are still on sale all over the region and these theories are widely available across the internet.

This approach is deeply rooted in a widely popular theme of Soviet anti-Semitism, prevalent in many of the institutions where a number of Arab intellectuals studied. In a state where history became subservient to the reigning ideology, Soviet historians depicted the conversion of the Khazars as a humiliation of the Russians, poisoning their values and beliefs and sowing corruption in society. In a famous article published in Pravda (1951) under the pseudonym “Ivanov”—posited to be Stalin himself—an argument was put forth that it would be “shameful” to accept that a Jewish empire governed the vast area between the Caspian and the Black Seas before the appearance of the early Russian princes. This became the official interpretation of the Khazars, mixing dangerously with contemporary accusations of a “Jewish nationalistic plot.” Abbas would have acquainted himself with these concepts while writing his Holocaust-denying Ph.D in Moscow twenty years later.

Abbas was indeed well acquainted with these concepts. In May 2018, Abbas gave a speech to the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the PA, in which he claimed that the nonsensical Khazar theory is backed by Jewish sources:

The sons of Jacob were 12. Where did you bring 13 from? They invented it. Where? In the Khazar Kingdom. When? In the 9th century. It was an irreligious kingdom. Afterwards it became a Jewish kingdom. The emperor converted to Judaism and therefore [the kingdom] converted to Judaism. Afterwards it broke apart, and all its residents migrated to Europe, and these are the Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites, and they have no connection to Semitism or Abraham, Jacob, or others. It was a Tatar-Turkic state...

...Now we are talking about the Jewish homeland. They are talking about longing for Zion and that's why they are going [there] and so forth. I say - not me, rather history says that these words are baseless.

But in fact, science says the baseless idea is the one in which Jews have a Khazar origin story. A 2014 Wayne State University study, No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews, concludes:

Employing a variety of standard techniques for the analysis of population-genetic structure, we found that Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations and, among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East. No particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews to populations from the Caucasus is evident, particularly populations that most closely represent the Khazar region. Thus, analysis of Ashkenazi Jews together with a large sample from the region of the Khazar Khaganate corroborates the earlier results that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe, that they possess considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations, and that there is no indication of a significant genetic contribution either from within or from north of the Caucasus region.

And still, as late as August 24, 2023, Abbas was still spouting his wildly embroidered Khazar lies. MEMRI shared these excerpts:

The truth that we should clarify to the world is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with Semitism. . .The story began in 900 CE, in the Khazar Kingdom on the Caspian Sea. It was a Tatar kingdom that converted to Judaism. . . [In the 11th century], this empire collapsed, and all its population left to the north and to the west. They left for Russia and Western and Eastern Europe. They spread there, and they are the forefathers of Ashkenazi Jews. So when we hear them talk about Semitism and antisemitism – the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites.
Everybody knows that during World War I, Hitler was a sergeant. He said he fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money. In his view, they were engaged in sabotage, and this is why he hated them. We just want to make this point clear. This was not about Semitism and antisemitism.

As for the eastern Jews, they are Semites, because all of them originated in the Arabian Peninsula and they traveled to Al-Andalus, and then came back. We are familiar with this history.

Actually, they are familiar not with history but with lies. Since 2006, the world has known that two fifths of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from four women. Judy Siegel-Itzkovich reported on the discovery by a team of Israeli geneticists:

The team, which studied mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) passed on solely by mothers to their children, found evidence of shared maternal ancestry of Ashkenazi and non–Ashkenazi Jews, a finding showing a shared ancestral pool that is consistent with previous studies that were based on the Y chromosome. This evidence pointed to a similar pattern of shared paternal ancestry of Jewish populations around the world originating in the Middle East. They concluded that the four founding types of mtDNA—likely to be of Middle Eastern origin—underwent a major overall expansion in Europe over the last thousand years.

The “four founding mothers,” [Professor Skorecki] added, “are from lineages that originate long before the launching of the Jewish people some 3400 years ago. They probably came from a large Middle Eastern gene pool.

“As consistent with the Bible, in which the founding Jews were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and his sons, and the matriarchs were ‘imported’ from non–Jewish peoples and then converted, the haplotypes of contemporary Jewish men are much less varied.”

Is there any truth to the idea that the Khazars converted to Judaism? According to Prof. Shaul Stampfer, no. The research simply does not support this idea:

Did the Khazars convert to Judaism? The view that some or all Khazars, a central Asian people, became Jews during the ninth or tenth century is widely accepted. But following an exhaustive analysis of the evidence, Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher Prof. Shaul Stampfer has concluded that such a conversion, “while a splendid story,” never took place. . .
From roughly the seventh to tenth centuries, the Khazars ruled an empire spanning the steppes between the Caspian and Black Seas. Not much is known about Khazar culture and society: they did not leave a literary heritage and the archaeological finds have been meager. The Khazar Empire was overrun by Svyatoslav of Kiev around the year 969, and little was heard from the Khazars after. Yet a widely held belief that the Khazars or their leaders at some point converted to Judaism persists.
Reports about the Jewishness of the Khazars first appeared in Muslim works in the late ninth century and in two Hebrew accounts in the tenth century. The story reached a wider audience when the Jewish thinker and poet Yehudah Halevi used it as a frame for his book The Kuzari. Little attention was given to the issue in subsequent centuries, but a key collection of Hebrew sources on the Khazars appeared in 1932 followed by a little-known six-volume history of the Khazars written by the Ukrainian scholar Ahatanhel Krymskyi. Henri Gregoire published skeptical critiques of the sources, but in 1954 Douglas Morton Dunlop brought the topic into the mainstream of accepted historical scholarship with The History of the Jewish Khazars. Arthur Koestler’s best-selling The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) brought the tale to the attention of wider Western audiences, arguing that East European Ashkenazi Jewry was largely of Khazar origin. Many studies have followed, and the story has also garnered considerable non-academic attention; for example, Shlomo Sand’s 2009 bestseller, The Invention of the Jewish People, advanced the thesis that the Khazars became Jews and much of East European Jewry was descended from the Khazars. But despite all the interest, there was no systematic critique of the evidence for the conversion claim other than a stimulating but very brief and limited paper by Moshe Gil of Tel Aviv University.

Professor Shaul Stampfer

Stampfer notes that scholars who have contributed to the subject based their arguments on a limited corpus of textual and numismatic evidence. Physical evidence is lacking: archaeologists excavating in Khazar lands have found almost no artifacts or grave stones displaying distinctly Jewish symbols. He also reviews various key pieces of evidence that have been cited in relation to the conversion story, including historical and geographical accounts, as well as documentary evidence. Among the key artifacts are an apparent exchange of letters between the Spanish Jewish leader Hasdai ibn Shaprut and Joseph, king of the Khazars; an apparent historical account of the Khazars, often called the Cambridge Document or the Schechter Document; various descriptions by historians writing in Arabic; and many others.
Taken together, Stampfer says, these sources offer a cacophony of distortions, contradictions, vested interests, and anomalies in some areas, and nothing but silence in others. A careful examination of the sources shows that some are falsely attributed to their alleged authors, and others are of questionable reliability and not convincing. Many of the most reliable contemporary texts, such as the detailed report of Sallam the Interpreter, who was sent by Caliph al-Wathiq in 842 to search for the mythical Alexander’s wall; and a letter of the patriarch of Constantinople, Nicholas, written around 914 that mentions the Khazars, say nothing about their conversion.
Citing the lack of any reliable source for the conversion story, and the lack of credible explanations for sources that suggest otherwise or are inexplicably silent, Stampfer concludes that the simplest and most convincing answer is that the Khazar conversion is a legend with no factual basis. There never was a conversion of a Khazar king or of the Khazar elite, he says.
Years of research went into this paper, and Stampfer ruefully noted that "Most of my research until now has been to discover and clarify what happened in the past. I had no idea how difficult and challenging it would be to prove that something did not happen."
In terms of its historical implications, Stampfer says the lack of a credible basis for the conversion story means that many pages of Jewish, Russian and Khazar history have to be rewritten. If there never was a conversion, issues such as Jewish influence on early Russia and ethnic contact must be reconsidered.
Stampfer describes the persistence of the Khazar conversion legend as a fascinating application of Thomas Kuhn’s thesis on scientific revolution to historical research. Kuhn points out the reluctance of researchers to abandon familiar paradigms even in the face of anomalies, instead coming up with explanations that, though contrived, do not require abandoning familiar thought structures. It is only when “too many” anomalies accumulate that it is possible to develop a totally different paradigm—such as a claim that the Khazar conversion never took place.
Stampfer concludes, "We must admit that sober studies by historians do not always make for great reading, and that the story of a Khazar king who became a pious and believing Jew was a splendid story.” However, in his opinion, "There are many reasons why it is useful and necessary to distinguish between fact and fiction – and this is one more such case."

Mahmoud Abbas lies like a rug and he repeats the same lies over and over again as if they were fact. His constituents and Jew-haters at large already know the drill. Abbas says it, and the Jew-hating echo chamber will happily repeat the false narrative until it takes on a life of its own. Mark Twain said that “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

Lies spread like wildfire; they have power. We see it with Mahmoud Abbas and the Khazar origin story. The more Abbas repeats his lies about Jewish lineage, the less anyone cares to hear the truth. The truth simply no longer matters; it has been rendered irrelevant.

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!

Islamic Jihad's "largest parade ever" apparently had no audience

Islamic Jihad celebrated its 36th anniversary with what it billed as its largest military march ever in Gaza.

It may have had more marchers than ever, but there weren't too many spectators.

The only crowd I saw was in the stands, which all seemed to be filled with Islamic Jihad members themselves, wearing military colors.

And they made a big deal about a dozen or so female members of Islamic Jihad throwing flower petals on them.

But based on the many photos I saw, there were far, far more marchers than there were spectators.

By any measure, that is pretty pathetic.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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10/04 Links Pt1: American Involvement Has Not Made the United Nations Any Better; Israel-Saudi normalization has nothing to do with Biden

From Ian:

American Involvement Has Not Made the United Nations Any Better

Last week, Russia’s announcement that it is seeking a seat on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) stirred some outrage in the West. To anyone familiar with that organization—where such countries as China, Cuba, and Qatar join in libeling and condemning Israel while diverting attention from their own human-rights abuses—it will be no surprise if Moscow’s bid succeeds. And this sort of corruption is endemic to the United Nations as whole. The UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for instance, recently made the ancient city of Jericho a “world heritage site” with a statement that ignored any ties to Jewish history.

As Richard Goldberg and Enia Krivine point out, the U.S. had left both the UNHRC and UNESCO because of such behavior. The Biden administration has rejoined, on the grounds that “engagement” is the only way to obtain reform—with little success:
The U.S. rejoined [UNESCO] and began paying down more than $600 million in arrears in July, only to be sucker-punched with another anti-Semitic act as the president arrived in New York last week. The administration had demanded the legal ability to rejoin UNESCO, claiming it necessary to counter China within the UN system. But . . . the Biden administration’s track record of countering China at the UN is abysmal.

The administration didn’t even try to challenge the WHO’s Beijing-influenced director-general despite China’s continued cover-up of COVID-19’s origins. A U.S. attempt to hold China accountable inside the Human Rights Council for its genocide in Xinjiang failed. And China still works with Russia to stymie Washington in the Security Council. The goal of countering China within the UN system is noble. Believing that it can be achieved by abandoning U.S. leverage is woefully misguided.

Countering China, however, is not the real reason the U.S. has rejoined a UN organization that continues to spew anti-Semitism. The real reason is the Biden administration’s unshakable ideological belief in the utility of UN engagement for engagement’s sake—the notion that swimming against anti-American currents in a sea of dictators will produce positive results for U.S. national security. The overwhelming evidence suggests the opposite is true.

Israel ambassador warns UN 'contaminated' by antisemitism, says peace with Saudis can 'transform' region

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan had pointed remarks for the world body after being detained by its security personnel, telling Fox News Digital that antisemitism is "very prevalent" within the halls of the U.N.

"The U.N. is a building, and it's fair to say that in this building, antisemitism sadly is very prevalent," Erdan said during an interview with Fox News Digital. "There are many antisemitic countries like Iran who want to annihilate the one and only Jewish state, and we don't hear any condemnation against Iran for saying it."

Erdan's comments come after U.N. security personnel detained the Israeli ambassador after he left the General Assembly Hall to protest a speech by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.

During his protest of the speech, Erdan held up a picture of Mahsa Amini, the Iranian woman who sparked protests across the country last year after she was killed while in the custody of police for not wearing the proper head covering in public, with a caption of Erdan's photo reading, "Iranian women deserve freedom now!"

Erdan expressed disgust with the U.N.'s "red carpet treatment" of the Iranian president to Fox News Digital, noting that Raisi is "responsible for the murder of thousands of his own people."

"I felt that I had to do something," Erdan said. "So I protested peacefully, and I held up the picture of Mahsa Amini and suddenly… I was roughly manhandled by the U.N. security."

Erdan said that his detention "was a small price" to pay for the protest, arguing that he wanted to convey an important message that "the people of Israel stand in solidarity with the people of Iran" against "this ruthless regime."

Seth Frantzman: Iran facing a battle to stop Middle East normalization with Israel

Nasrallah and the ayatollah are on the same page because Iran is quite good at controlling the narrative it puts out, using both its media and its proxies to conduct a full-court press. It could even operationalize other proxies, such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or the Houthis in Yemen.

The concern now in Tehran is that it has not been able to push its agenda as much as it would like. Earlier this year, it was able to obtain reconciliation with Riyadh via a China-brokered deal, and it later got the Assad regime to come in from the cold via reintegration with the Arab League.

This all looked like positive news to Tehran, possibly opening the door to concessions from Washington. But since then, it has seen many of these pawn-like movements on the chessboard of the region face hurdles.

Saudi Arabia has its own interests in reconciliation with Iran. But Riyadh also has its own independent foreign policy, and Saudi Arabia pursues its own interests on its own time; they run both together and independently.

This means Tehran may have miscalculated what it could get out of the moves it made over the past year. Reports about its strategy in Syria, trying to use Hezbollah to help arm Arab tribes to challenge the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in exchange for also getting something from Russia, show Iran flailing about for a new policy.

Tehran fully knows it now faces an uphill struggle against the momentum toward normalization. It will attempt to destabilize various arenas in an effort to get the ball back in its court.

Israel's alleged airstrike: A message to 3 regional actors

Israel reportedly carried out 32 attacks in Syria in 2022, and since early 2023 it has already struck 25 times in the country—at the very least. . . . The Iranian-Israeli clash stands out in the wake of the dramatic events in the region, chiefly among them is the effort to strike a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and later on with various other Muslim-Sunni states. Iran is trying to torpedo this process and has even publicly warned Saudi Arabia not to “gamble on a losing horse” because Israel’s demise is near. Riyadh is unlikely to heed that demand, for its own reasons.

Despite the thaw in relations between the kingdom and the Islamic Republic—including the exchange of ambassadors—the Saudis remain very suspicious of the Iranians. A strategic manifestation of that is that Riyadh is trying to forge a defense pact with the U.S.; a tactical manifestation took place this week when Saudi soccer players refused to play a match in Iran because of a bust of the former Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Suleimani, [a master terrorist whose militias have wreaked havoc throughout the Middle East, including within Saudi borders].

Of course, Israel is trying to bring Saudi Arabia into its orbit and to create a strong common front against Iran. The attack in Syria is ostensibly unrelated to the normalization process and is meant to prevent the terrorists on Israel’s northern border from laying their hands on sophisticated arms, but it nevertheless serves as a clear reminder for Riyadh that it must not scale back its fight against the constant danger posed by Iran.

Arabic language media often uses the phrase "Talmudic rituals" as an epithet for anything religious that Jews do. But for a while, the BBC did, too.

In an article published yesterday, as seen in Google cache, BBC Arabic wrote, "Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karai performs Talmudic rituals and prayers for the so-called “Sukkot Festival” in Riyadh."

This mirrors the language in countless anti-Israel and antisemitic sites, including calling Sukkot "so-called."

Apparently a BBC editor noticed this and changed the story several hours later to say, "The Israeli Broadcasting Corporation 'Kan' reported that Communications Minister Shlomo Karai performed a Jewish prayer called 'Sukkot' in Riyadh." (The prayer isn't called "Sukkot' so the editor didn't quite fix everything.)

But the BBC's original captioning of the video of Karai saying "Hoshanot" as "performing Talmudic prayers" remains at this Arabic news aggregation site, screenshot above.

This points to a long-standing problem at not just the BBC but other Western media sites who rely on anti-Israel Arab reporters to write their stories. The Arabic sections get less editorial oversight than the Western-language sites do, and antisemitic language makes it into the supposedly professional Western media.

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!

Haaretz writes:

Thousands of Israelis visited an archaeological site on Monday that to the untrained eye looks like nothing more than a mound of stones. It’s hard to put a finger on any one thing that distinguishes it from the many other sites spreading across the West Bank that feature rocks of various sizes and lack any identifying sign or explanation.

But anyone taking the trouble to listen to one of the guides there will learn that it is nothing less than “Joshua’s altar on Mount Ebal.”

That claim is subject to dispute: Many archaeologists do not believe it is an altar of any kind, certainly not Joshua’s. But that hasn’t stopped the settlers from claiming that Palestinians are doing everything to destroy an important piece of Jewish heritage.

This belittlement of the site reflects the anti-Judaism bias of the author, Hagar Shezaf, far more than reality.

It is true that some scholars dispute whether the structures on the site are altars (a larger rectangular one enclosing a smaller, earlier one built a couple of decades earlier) , and there is no way to prove that the earlier one is the actual altar described in Hebrew scripture. But even the experts most hostile to finding Biblical ties to archaeological findings agree that this was an early Hebrew religious site.

Nearly all of the charred animal bones found at the site are of kosher animals, which strongly indicates some sort of sacrificial altar. Mount Ebal was clearly an important Jewish site.

The inner altar was dated to about 1250 BCE. According to standard Jewish chronology, Joshua crossed the Jordan in 1273 BCE. That is remarkably close.

And then there is the discovery publicized last year of the "Mount Ebal curse tablet," found at the site, which researchers claim has an inscribed curse written in a palindromic way, "You are cursed by the god yhw, cursed. You will die, cursed – cursed, you will surely die. Cursed you are by yhw – cursed." It is apparently the earliest known use of the Hebrew word for God.

The writing is done in a haphazard way - right to left, left to right, and "as the ox plows." The interpretation of the text is contested by some.

But as this article by Christopher Eames at the Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology summarizes:

Any significance of this discovery is not just contingent upon the nature of the text within. Interpretation of the text to one side, what we have here is clearly a defixio—an example of a typical sealed/folded thin lead tablet well known in association with curses. It was found, not coincidentally, on the biblical “mount of cursing” associated with Joshua and the early Israelites—Mount Ebal. Further, it was found at the very site identified as Joshua’s altar (among a significant quantity of animal bones—96% of which were from kosher animals, and the remaining being from “snake, tortoise, etc”).

Yes, the tablet was not found in situ, in a sealed layer during excavation—it was sifted by Stripling’s team out of the excavation dumps from the structure, left behind by the late Prof. Adam Zertal (who, together with his associate Zvi Koenigsberg, were the first to identify the altar structure, in 1983). Nevertheless, as highlighted in the article, given that 99.75% of the diagnostic pottery sherds from the dumps dated to the Late Bronze ii–Iron i periods (circa 1400–1000 b.c.e.)—and given that the Lavrion mine, from which the tablet’s lead was sourced, was also in operation during the Late Bronze Age—it follows that the tablet most logically dates to within this early, pre-monarchical period: the very time frame associated with Joshua, the conquest of the Promised Land, and the “curse” ritual upon Mount Ebal. (There’s also an additional fascinating link to Job 19:28, a passage which describes the practice of writing “with an iron pen and lead”; note that chronologically, Job is among the earliest books in the Bible.)

Particulars regarding the inscription aside (and it is, at the very least, objectively clear that there is something written on/in it), it is surely not an overstatement to say that the above facts stand alone as remarkable parallels, and from such an early period—one comparatively less highlighted in biblical archaeological research and reporting.

Any way you look at it, Jews at the time of Joshua considered Mount Ebal an important religious site and connected with curses.

The Jews who visit Mount Ebal are trying to ensure that the Palestinian Authority doesn't destroy such an important biblical site, which is in Area B and therefore officially under PA control. Given that the archaeological connection of that site to the biblical description of Mount Ebal is far more compelling than those of other pilgrimage sites (like Joseph's Tomb in Shechem) there is very good reason to work to protect and publicize Mount Ebal.

Despite what Haaretz thinks.

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

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I mentioned yesterday that Iran's Supreme Leader went back to 2012 in his speech Tuesday where he called Israel a "cancerous tumor."

But it is worth looking at the rest of his speech - because it shows the fear that the Abraham Accords has struck into Iran's leaders.

Iran has a tried and true decades-old playbook aimed at the Arab world that simply doesn't convince anyone anymore except wishful thinking Palestinians.

Some highlights:

Normalizing relations with the Zionist regime is a gamble. Betting on a losing horse is doomed to lose because the Palestinian movement is more alive and ready today than ever, and the usurping regime is dying.

This shows how much the Abraham Accords, and the prospect of Saudi-Israeli peace, frightens the Iranians. And it is meaningless - the Saudis don't need advice from Khamenei to make their own foreign policy decisions.

Those insulting the Qur'an use repeated, false claims such as freedom of speech. In countries that allow insulting the Qur'an under the pretext of freedom of speech, do they also allow attacks on Zionist symbols? How much more clearly can we prove that they are under the rule of the cruel, criminal and looting Zionists of the world?

Classic antisemitism has until recently been a sure crowd-pleaser in the Muslim world. But does anyone really believe that Jews are behind the Qur'an burnings in Sweden and Denmark? Or that those countries are controlled by "Zionists"? Or even that when Khamenei says "Zionists' he means anything other than "Jews"?

Today, this regime [Israel] is not only full of hate for the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also all the countries around it, such as Egypt and Syria and Iraq is also full of hatred and anger. The reason for this hatred and anger is the prevention of [Israel] from realizing their goal, which is to usurp the Nile to the Euphrates. They are full of hatred and anger, of course, according to the interpretation of the Qur'an, which says, "Be angry and die of this anger." They are dying, and with the help of the Lord, this verse about the usurping regime is being fulfilled.

The "Greater Israel" myth is another golden oldie. But once the Abraham Accords punctured the united Arab self-deception, the rest of the Arab world understands that a nation that wants to expand wouldn't give up land for peace.

The only person filled with anger is Khamenei, and we see what the Qur'an says about that.

The issue of Palestine and the usurpation and expulsion of a nation from their homes and torturing and killing them as the first issue of the Islamic world in the last few decades.

And again, the Arab world has realized that they must do what's best for them, not sacrifice their own interests on the altar of Palestinians.

Iran's goal has been to be the undisputed leader of the Muslim world and a superpower. That dream has mostly fallen apart - they might become a nuclear power but no independent nation wants to be led by them. And at the same time, the hated Jews are gaining allies and friends that Iran had counted on as being on their side.

This is a speech of desperation and frustration at Iran's strategy for the 21st century being destroyed - and not by a fellow Muslim nation like Turkey or Egypt, but by the Jews.

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10/03 Links Pt2: Journalist Laments “Cruel” Spotlight Shone on Yaroslav Hunka, WW2 Nazi-Unit Veteran; Netflix Doc Examines How German Police Could So Easily Murder Jews

From Ian:

‘Hunka belonged to a unit that did not commit crime’: American news organisation Politico defends Canada for honouring a Nazi in its Parliament

On 2nd October, Politico published an op-ed by author Keir Giles defending Canada in the Yaroslav Hunka Controversy. Giles is the author of several books on Russia, including his latest one titled “Russia’s War on Everybody”. According to him, the Hunka controversy is an outcome of massive Russian propaganda. Giles called the whole controversy a lie; he argued that fighting against the USSR during World War II did not necessarily means that the unit was Nazi.

Giles noted that the outrage stemmed from Hunka’s association with one of the Waffen-SS units. Waffen-SS, where SS stands for Schutzstaffel (Protective Echelon), were the black-uniformed elite troops who self-described themselves as the “political soldiers” of the Nazi Party. Hunka was part of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS that, comprised Ukrainian volunteers.

Giles argued that the history of that time is complicated. As Hunka was in a unit comprised of foreign volunteers, they were, according to him, on administrative rather than ideological grounds. However, Giles said the contention is hard to sell to the audience who “believe” the main objective of the SS was genocide.

Citing several investigations, including the Nuremberg trials, Giles said the unit Hunka belonged to did not commit war crimes or atrocities. Targeting Russia, Giles claimed that Moscow “shouts” Nazis whenever they want despite their own history of aggression and atrocities during WWII. He further argued that Russians were never tried for the alleged “war crimes” they committed during WWII, unlike Nazis.

Giles further claimed that Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center’s statement that the atrocities committed by Hunka’s unit are well-documented was false and “doesn’t seem to have any more substance than the accusation by Russia”.

Citing the 1986 Commission report on War Crimes by the Canadian government, Giles argued that famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal himself was found to have made broad accusations against the unit in question, and the commission found them “nearly totally useless” and “put the Canadian government to a considerable amount of purposeless work.”

CBC Journalist Laments “Cruel” Spotlight Shone on Yaroslav Hunka, WW2 Nazi-Unit Veteran

The fallout from the Yaroslav Hunka affair continues. Following the September 22 standing ovation on Parliament Hill given to the 98-year-old veteran of the First Ukrainian Division, a unit affiliated with the Nazi Waffen-SS during World War Two, condemnations from politicians, human rights organizations and the news media have been swift and widespread, and calls have grown for more concrete action against Ukrainian Nazis and memorials in their honour.

But in one recent incident, a journalist with CBC News seemingly expressed sympathy for a surprising character in the scandal: Yaroslav Hunka, a volunteer collaborator of the SS.

In the September 27 broadcast on CBC News, producer and host Natasha Fatah was asking an interviewee about the fallout from the controversy on Parliament Hill, and made the eyebrow-raising comment that Yaroslav Hunka and his family must be feeling embarrassment as a result of his appearance.

“And now this horrible series of events have happened. (Speaker of the House Anthony) Rota has lost his job, the government is again fractured on an issue, and in the meantime, the Hunka family, this man in question, is now in international spotlight. What was his role? And this is a 98-year-old man who would likely not have wanted this type of attention, so what consideration needs to be given? Because the spotlight can be so cruel. How do we manage to make sure that guests that are invited are also protected,” Fatah asked.Fatah’s question, appearing to seek sympathy for a 98-year-old who voluntarily joined a Nazi unit which was responsible for crimes against humanity during the war, displays a shocking lack of self-awareness. The victims of the scandal in Ottawa were not House Speaker Anthony Rota, and certainly not Yaroslav Hunka, but the innocent victims who perished in the Nazi genocide, including 6 million Jews, Poles, and others.

As former Member of Parliament and current CEO of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, Michael Levitt, told CTV News: “The Nazi units, like the one he was involved with, did not give the victims of the Holocaust, the millions of them, Jews and others, an opportunity to live their lives, have children and grandchildren and live to be 98 years old.

”In a twist of sick irony, Fatah’s comments came only two days before September 29, the beginning of the Babi Yar massacre in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.

Over a two day period in 1941 beginning on that date, the Nazis and their Ukrainian allies brought 34,000 Jews to the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, where they machine gunned them to death.

Almost unbelievably, Fatah’s thoughtless comments were not the only ones made by journalists in recent days, expressing sympathy for Yaroslav Hunka.

Anti-Israel media is up in arms. From Quds News:

Zaid Abdulnasser, a #Palestinian refugee from Syria who has been living in Berlin since 2017, has been notified by Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) that his refugee status is to be rescinded.

The decision to remove Abdulnasser’s refugee status was due to what the BAMF called "extremist activities", namely his activism with the Palestinian advocacy group Samidoun, an international network of activists working to build solidarity with the Palestinian prisoners languishing in Israeli jails.

Sites like +972 have been writing about Abdulnasser for several months.

Of course, Samidoun is indeed a subsidiary of the PFLP terror group; founded by PFLP members and with comrades who continue to organize terror cells.

Which is enough reason to strip his citizenship.

But even beyond that, in an interview with Left Voice about his situation, he discusses exactly what he is trying to accomplish in Germany:

In the EU, Germany is the Zionist occupation’s largest economic partner, routinely takes part in military maneuvers with the terrorist occupying army, signed billions of dollars in arms deals that also included missile systems and nuclear submarines, and is fully involved in the Nakba of the Palestinian people by supporting the occupation at international and national levels in Germany.
This unconditional support for the occupation of Palestine is clearly based on common imperialist interests and the understanding that this European colony in Palestine is the West’s military base in the Middle East. Of course, this is being promoted as Germany’s attempt to atone for the massacre of Jews in World War II. If anything, using the sins of its Nazi history to justify supporting yet another ethnostate project shows that it has never truly learned from its history.
An organized mass Palestinian, Arab and internationalist movement will not allow these lies to continue to dominate public discourse, and the Palestinian refugees have the inner strength to pose a real challenge to the Zionist movement in Germany and shared German and Israeli interests. Since Germany is the stronghold of the Zionist movement in Europe, any success of the Palestinian struggle here will have a major impact on the entire movement. This is the true meaning of organizing the Palestinian masses in Germany, namely that they can shake the foundations of the state’s imperialist interests to their very foundations.

So he is accusing Germany of terrorism and of perpetuating the Holocaust by supporting the Jewish state. And then he says his plan is to "shake the foundations" of Germany itself.

Does this sound like a loyal citizen of Germany or someone who wants to subvert and ultimately destroy Germany?

Beyond that, Abdulzaid explicitly supports terror, as this other recent interview with his other organization, "Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement," makes clear:

We believe that true legitimacy is embodied in the positions of our people and their sacrifices, which are naturally expressed daily, and through embracing the line of resistance everywhere. It’s important to emphasize that the legitimacy of the resistance factions is derived from their acts of liberation and resistance themselves....We believe that true national unity is the unity of our entire people, the resistance factions, and the popular organizations around the project of liberation and return. From its inception, the Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement has called upon all resistance forces to build a broad national front that represents the hopes and aspirations of the Palestinian people and derives its legitimacy directly from them, just as the early Fedayeen (Palestinian resistance fighters) derived their legitimacy through their struggles, sacrifices, and defense of their people.

No Palestinian would read this as "popular resistance." The resistance factions are Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and others.

Looks like the German government made the right call. An avowed supporter of terror should not be a citizen of Germany.

Abdulnasser will not be deported to Syria, but he will lose the benefits of being a citizen.

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

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In 2012, Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei said, “The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and… installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world...Many of the problems facing the Muslim world are due to the existence of the Zionist regime.”

This was two days after Iran's president Ahmadinejad said that Israel was an “insult to humanity” and “a cancerous tumor” and called for “a new Middle East with no trace of Americans or Zionists.”

At the time, the US condemned those insults, and the UN Secretary General issued a statement: "The Secretary-General is dismayed by the remarks threatening Israel’s existence attributed over the last two days to the Supreme Leader and the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Secretary-General condemns these offensive and inflammatory statements."

Today, Khamenei parroted what he said in 2012. According to Al Manar, he "described the Zionist entity as a cancerous tumor and said the axis of resistance and the Palestinian resistance will eradicate it."

I am wondering if Khamanei is testing the UN and the international community. He is not stupid; he knows that throwing insults like this doesn't intimidate Israel. But it could be that he is checking to see if the world is by now so inured to his threats that he can up the ante without fear of blowback.

After all, a key goal of the anti-Israel world is to make Israel into a pariah, to dehumanize the Jewish state and to eventually make any attacks on Israel appear to be moral. By pressing these buttons, it is possible that Khamenei is looking for the UN and EU to remain silent, which would be a green light for him to try something further.

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10/03 Links Pt1: What have the Palestinian Arabs ever done to deserve concessions?; A ‘Samuel Accord’ for Saudi Arabia and Israel; Saudi team cancels match in Iran over Soleimani bust

From Ian:

What have the Palestinian Arabs ever done to deserve concessions?

If any concessions are made to the Palestinian Arabs, and this must be a BIG IF, there must this time be a demand for reciprocal concessions and some substantial give from the them, which must be monitored and policed and, if broken in the slightest, will immediately be cancelled and withdrawn without any further negotiations. This will be and must be entirely at Israel’s discretion and applied. It is more than time to treat the Palestinians like adults and demand they act accordingly.

In short, a significant sword must be held over the Palestinian Arabs' heads with the Palestinian Arabs clearly understanding they have to comply and running in their usual cry baby routine to the United Nations, the International Criminal Court or any other world body will not help. If they break their commitments, they and the world will know about it.

It is time for the Palestinian Arabs to grow up. In all the years of fighting, terrorising, random murders and sabotaging Israel plus their “great” contribution of airline hijackings, what have they achieved? What have they built? Have they built a country in Gaza or in Area A? In reality they have built nothing. They have been spongers, parasites on the world and for various reasons, which includes anti-Semitism, Europe has endlessly financed them as has America.

As American administrations change and the Democrats take over, so laws are broken and ignored and huge funds are sent to the Palestinian Arabs, all of which have contributed enormously to Arafat dying a billionaire, Mahmoud Abbas becoming a multi-millionaire if not a billionaire with a palace in Ramallah. All the heads of Hamas et al are billionaires…. and their people continue to suffer and live in squalor and in poverty.

What is there for their male youth to do? They grow up with no other ambition than to become a terrorist. Their hormones and testosterone raging in a restrictive and backward tribal, religious and medieval culture. To the Western world the idea of being rewarded as a “martyr” with seventy two black eyed virgins is ridiculous and shows just how restricted, controlled and deprived their lives amongst their own are. Is Islamic paradise one continuous orgy? How pornographic and limited can they get?

Financing the Palestinian Arabs ad nauseum only achieves more terrorism. This has been going on far too long without any demands for civilised sensible results. What has happened to the concept of teaching a man to fish? The solution is to force the Palestinian Arabs into modernity. Force them to create and build a normal society on their own with a functioning economy and opportunity for all to make a decent living. It is beyond time they acquired themselves decent leadership and joined the civilised world.

Western youth are imbued with ambition to establish themselves, build businesses, careers, families etc. What have the Palestinian Arab youth to look forward to in their cultures, in their living areas, in Gaza? Nothing!..... Except the machoness, aggression and the madness of terrorism, joining Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PFLP, Lion’s Den and a myriad of sub-groups all increasingly armed, sponsored, used and abused by Iran. There is nothing except death in becoming a “martyr”, no matter how much brainwashing comes from the mullahs.

So we come back to our original question, what have the Palestinian Arabs ever done to deserve concessions? Have they shown the slightest reliable promise to do anything or create anything when their sole misguided ambition is to destroy Israel, chase the Jews into the sea and then what? Go on sponging off the Europeans and Americans whilst threatening them and hating them? And when they have through their stealth invasion of Europe destroyed and turned that continent into the hell holes they come from, what then?

Jonathan Tobin: Who lost the battle to stop Iran’s nuclear quest?

Kerry’s Iran collusion and Trump’s failure
Another possible scapegoat is former President Donald Trump.

Obama apologists do blame Trump for withdrawing from the JCPOA and attempting to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear quest with sanctions and threats. They say his decision torpedoed an imperfect but still working plan to stop Iran without a viable alternative in place. That’s mistaken because the Obama deal was a failure from the start and was going to have to be replaced sooner or later.

In the end, Trump failed during his four years in office to achieve a better Iran nuclear deal or to stop their efforts altogether. But the primary blame for that failure was not his. Had Iran believed that it had no alternative but to return to the negotiating table or to face complete isolation and economic ruin, Trump’s plan would, at the very least, have had a chance to succeed.

They didn’t believe that. The reason was that they were betting on Trump being defeated in 2020 and being replaced with a Democrat who would return to Obama’s strategy of appeasement/containment. Had Biden acknowledged while running for president that the JCPOA was a sham and made clear that he would stick with pressure to get a better deal that would end the threat rather than merely kick the can down the road, Iran might conceivably have been left with no choice but to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Instead, he promised more appeasement.

Even worse than that, former Secretary of State John Kerry met repeatedly with the Iranians in 2018 and advised them to ignore Trump’s moves and “maximum pressure” campaign. He assured them that if they merely sat tight and waited for 2021, they could have everything they wanted. They took his advice and that, as much as anything, is why Iran is now only 12 days away from a bomb.

Kerry’s collusion with Iran wasn’t merely ill-advised; his actions advising an enemy of the United States to thwart government policy was arguably one of the most disgraceful actions undertaken by an American in the history of the republic. That he got away with those actions, which are close to treasonous, and subsequently received the reward of another high office as Biden’s climate czar only makes it worse. While Americans spent three years being lied to by the media and the Democrats about Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia, it was Kerry’s open collusion with Iran that should have generated outrage rather than shrugs and yawns. The “echo chamber” that Obama staffers like Ben Rhodes created in the media ensured that Iranian appeasement stayed on track even after Trump won in 2016.

Obama’s bad deal
Kerry doesn’t stand alone as the man who is most responsible for ensuring that Iran became a threshold nuclear power. Former President Barack Obama came into office determined to realign American foreign policy away from traditional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and his Iran appeasement did just that. It did have the unintended consequence of bringing Israel together with the Arab states in a way that made the Abraham Accords possible. But in 2013, when Obama and Kerry began their initial secret negotiations with Iran, the international community had—thanks in part to Netanyahu’s warnings—endorsed tough sanctions. With American leadership, that could have brought Iran to its knees. Instead, the United States wound up being the ones begging Iran for a deal and abandoning sanctions.

It took 20 years of bad decisions to bring the world to the point where everyone must acknowledge that Iran has succeeded, and Israel and the West failed.

But Obama, Kerry and their foreign-policy team that embraced Iranian appeasement must bear the primary guilt for this appalling and dangerous situation. Honest histories of this debacle—assuming a future in which anti-Trump and anti-Netanyahu partisanship is no longer assumed from the academy and supposedly reputable historians—will judge them harshly. The consequences that will ensue from an Iran terrorist state that is only 12 days from a nuclear weapon are terrible, even unimaginable. In the years to follow, we will learn just how much their feckless policies, lies and collusion with Islamist murderers will cost the peoples of the Middle East and the rest of the world in blood and agony.

Caroline Glick: ‘We the People’ begin to speak

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family packed their bags Monday night for their vacation on the Golan Heights.

The police also made their routine preparations. They set up a water cannon outside the hotel where the Netanyahus are staying to prevent leftist rioters from getting near the premier and his family.

On the face of things, the left’s insurrectionists are as strong as ever. They have unlimited funds to spend on their activities. They are guided by Israel’s most talented PR executives. They receive wall-to-wall support from 95% of Israeli media outlets. And, acting on orders from Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, the police are prohibited from enforcing the law against them.

The insurgents’ current target is religious Judaism and religious Jews.

On Sunday night, a group of leftist male bullies stormed a movie screening for ultra-Orthodox girls and women in Jerusalem to block them from watching a film without males in the room.

Haaretz reporter Yael Freidson cheered them on, writing on X/Twitter, “Neighborhood men appeared at a [film] screening that was organized for women and girls, and prevented the same-sex event from taking place. For those who didn’t understand from the events of recent weeks, the contract has been reopened.”

Freidson’s allusion to “the contract” relates to Israel’s social contract, which permits autonomy and use of public spaces for various religious and social sectors in Israel’s multicultural society. The leftist insurrection now demands that freedom of access be blocked for people who aren’t like them.

Freidson’s mention of “the contract” was also an allusion to a new political party. In August, the heads of Brothers in Arms, the insurgency’s habitually violent paramilitary force, formed a political party called “New Contract.” It will run candidates in the municipal elections scheduled for Oct. 31. The goal is to win enough seats on municipal councils to prevent mayors from forming governing coalitions or otherwise cooperating with religious parties and Likud.

At the State Department briefing yesterday, a reporter I don't recognize asked a question:

In light of UNRWA donors’ – that’s a UN agency – recent meetings at the UN, will the U.S. ask the UN to inspect and disarm UNRWA refugee camps that have become well-equipped arsenals? And I have a follow-up question.

The question and answer were a bit muddled, but it brings up a point that is rarely mentioned in the media.

All of the major Palestinian militias that have emerged over the past two years came from UNRWA "refugee" camps.

The IDF has not had to invade Jenin -but the Jenin camp. Not Nablus - but the Balata camp. Not Tulkarem - but the Nur Shams camp.

And in Lebanon, many have been killed from infighting in the Ein al-Hilweh camp.

UNRWA is not responsible for security in the camps. But the bigger question is, why do these camps exist to begin with?

There are no longer refugee camps in India and Pakistan from 14 million refugees in the 1940s. The displaced persons camps in Europe for the tens of millions of World War II refugees were closed in the 1950s.

Why do the 600,000 Palestinian refugees from 1948 still have camps?

And especially in areas under Palestinian control, why are there camps at all? It's been nearly 30 years since Oslo and Palestinian self-rule - why do they keep the camps instead of treating their own citizens equally?

Palestinians claim that they want to live in dignity. Where is the dignity of living in a cramped, crowded area ruled by masked terrorists who plant IEDs on every street corner?

Why aren't the Palestinians in the Jenin camp all moved to live in dignity in the rest of Jenin?

These camps, ostensibly to help Palestinians, end up prolonging Palestinian suffering. And what the media refuses to report is that this is a feature, not a bug. The camps provide the media with photo-ops to show Palestinian suffering - and blaming Israel for it, without the cameras widening their views beyond the two square miles of these real open-air prisons.

Here is what Jenin looks like outside the camp. It sure doesn't look like the Jenin we see in the media.

If you care about Palestinians, you should want to see these camps dismantled. If you care more about destroying Israel than helping Palestinians, then you want the camps to stay exactly where they are, forever, to provide a never-ending supply of angry young men to be the next generation of terrorists.

And not one nation on Earth is publicly demanding the first option.

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

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