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Tuesday, November 02, 2021

11/02 Links Pt2: David Colier: How the Palestinians stole the suffering, of well – just about everyone; Holocaust survivor publishes PhD dissertation on ‘serendipity’ of Balfour; Russian Lessons for American Jews

From Ian:

David Colier: How the Palestinians stole the suffering, of well – just about everyone
It might seem absurd to those that do not see what is going on, but the pro-Palestinian movement probably cannot believe its good fortune. They can steal any idea, make any accusation, and global antisemitism will do the rest of the work for them. Because their fight is against the Jews, their empty smears all go viral. What we see in the anti-Israel movement today is the result of decades of co-opting causes, historical revisionism and piggybacking on the very real suffering of others. Basically – if there is a bad thing happening in the world – the pro-Palestinian movement stole the idea to use it against the Jews.

Here are some of the key examples:
The theft of Apartheid
Apartheid was a system of legislation that upheld segregationist policies against non-white citizens of South Africa. White South Africans inflicted a brutal racist system upon over 80% of the population – tens of millions of people – just because of the colour of their skin:

The international boycott against the Apartheid policies was seen as successful and so for this reason, the pro-Palestinian camp simply co-opted it as their strategy. They reasoned that if people can be conned into believing that Israel is an Apartheid state – then the international community will realise that it must go the same way as Apartheid South Africa did.

Except of course there is no Apartheid in Israel. Arabs form 20% of the population of Israel and they are the only free voting Arabs in the MENA region. The entire Palestinian argument is flawed. South Africans lived under Apartheid rule – Israeli Arabs are free – Palestinian Arabs can negotiate a peace deal, to finally end a conflict their leaders chose – started – and lost. There is a lot of Apartheid in the MENA region – in places such as Lebanon, but none in democratic Israel.

When the pro-Palestinian camp smears Israel with the vile lie about Apartheid, they degrade and insult the suffering of non-white South Africans and ridicule the long battle which those trapped in that system had to endure. They have stolen the pain of others.

The theft of the Holocaust
This is one of the most insidious appropriations of suffering that has ever been undertaken. The pro-Palestinian movement has stolen the systematic destruction of the Jewish people. There are two strands to the way this was done.

The first was the rewriting of history. The ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe’ that Arabs in the British mandate experienced was the result of the failure of their violent attempt to destroy Israel. The Arabs started a civil conflict against the Jews and then followed that with a regional war. They lost. People do not sympathise much with this type of aggression – so the pro-Palestinian movement simply rewrote history. They airbrushed out the civil conflict – removed the Arab irregular army from history – and turned a tiny Jewish enclave fighting for survival, into a powerful and brutal force intent on carrying out an evil plan. Because the Jews were so strong and mean – local Arab armies came in to try to stop them. The Jews had their Holocaust – but it could now be menitioned alongside the Palestinian ‘Nakba’:

The second strand is the ‘Zionists are the new Nazis’ trope. The poor Palestinians – in this new history – became Europe’s Jews – and Israel became the new Nazi empire. In this fairytale – the invading Arab Armies of Syria, Jordan and Egypt are transformed into Churchill’s Britain – bravely standing up against the evil force. It is why the perverse lie about a historical Zionist / Nazi ideological alliance runs so strongly in their camp, they want people to actually believe that Jews fighting to survive and Nazis intent on global domination are morally equivalent. So, anything that occurs today – is used to reinforce an image of Jews as the new Nazis and Palestinians as the new Jews.
Russian Lessons for American Jews
If any Jewish group has a right to apply the “my existence is resistance” motto to itself today, it is RSJs. Soviet Jews outlasted Lenin’s, Hitler’s, and Stalin’s “solutions” to “the Jewish problem.” They survived mass slaughter (over 100,000 in the postrevolutionary violence; 2.7 million in the Holocaust), a decimation of their religious and cultural institutions, the murder of their intelligentsia, and an erasure of their collective memory. They came out of those experiences with a Jewish identity that was deeply paradoxical: secular, devoid of any ethnic content — and yet, unshakable.

Some of the “credit” for the construction of this identity goes to the Soviet state, which separated Jewishness from Judaism and defined it as nationality or ethnicity. In theory, this meant that Jews were ethnically Jewish in the same way that, say, Ukrainians were Ukrainian: an ethnic group defining itself by language, history, dress, customs and cuisine. This worked in the first decade of Soviet power, but, as historian Zvi Gitelman describes in detail, by the time the anti-cosmopolitan campaign concluded in the 1950s, Soviet Jews had lost their Jewish particularity. Growing up in the 1970s Soviet Union, I learned songs, dances, national costumes, and traditions of Moldovans, Georgians, Armenians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Roma, and, of course, Russians. But the idea that Jews might have equivalent ethnic attributes likely never even occurred to me. By then, nothing remained of Jewish culture in public consciousness but ugly stereotypes.

Soviet Jews themselves struggled with the many paradoxes of their identity. A highly-regarded samizdatjournal had a rubric titled “Who Am I?,” in which Jews mulled the question. Fully acculturated, raised on Pushkin and Tolstoy, they felt as Russian as their ethnically Russian friends and colleagues. And yet, the scarlet letter of the Jewish “nationality” line in their identity papers, as well as their recognizably “Jewish faces,” permanently marked them for hate and discrimination, preventing them from assimilating. Many Soviet Jews’ experience suggested that Jewishness was akin to race: a vague yet inescapable reality whose primary marker was one’s external physical characteristics.

Even so, Soviet Jews did develop a distinct culture. For one thing, they came to view themselves as part of the intelligentsia. They understood themselves as people who collected books, read voraciously, and strove for educational and professional excellence. They were people whose children played musical instruments and spent Sundays in theater matinees. They might not have had much knowledge of Jewish culture or tradition, as historian Yaakov Ro’i has noted, but they felt themselves to be Jewish. They had “an existential feeling of Jewish solidarity” and “common fate,” and Jewish pride emanating from their own and other Jews’ professional and cultural achievements. Being Jewish to them was more of a mentality and a shared interpretation of reality than a set of specific Jewish expressions.

The Jewish identity that this complicated mix of circumstances, policies, and adaptations created did not require any specifically Jewish actions to reinforce itself. It is no wonder, then, that it remained invisible to the American Jewish eye. Writing in 2016, sociologist Steven J. Gold observed that it had been only recently that Jewish scholars and community activists recognized that “while Russian-speaking Jews frequently express their Jewishness in ways at variance from the local Jewish population, they often have a stronger Jewish identity and more extensive Jewish social ties than do American Jews.”


Holocaust survivor publishes PhD dissertation on ‘serendipity’ of Balfour
Paul Goldstein is not the oldest person to receive a PhD, but he comes pretty close. In September 2020, Goldstein earned a doctorate in political science from Israel’s Ariel University at age 87.

In September 2021, Goldstein’s dissertation on the Balfour Declaration was published as a book by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, another achievement he could not have foreseen earlier in his life.

That Goldstein would have the opportunity to pursue higher education, let alone a doctoral degree, was far from a given. As a child, his schooling was abruptly halted as he hid to survive during the Holocaust. As a young man, he had to make up for those lost years, and also find a way to support himself — first in his native Belgium, and then as an immigrant to Canada.

After learning English and earning a bachelor’s degree in political theory at Montreal’s Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in 1958, Goldstein worked for a packaging company. In a bid to be more financially independent and better able to support his Israeli-born wife and their three children, Goldstein moved into the financial services industry in 1966. He found success in the field, and still maintains some of his longtime clients.

“It was only at an older age that I had the maturity and perspective to write this book,” Goldstein said of “The Serendipitous Evolution of the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917.”

The 315-page scholarly, yet accessible, work unpacks the different twists and turns of Jewish and world history in the 18th and 19th centuries as they led — individually and jointly — to the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, in which a major world power recognized for the first time the right of the Jewish people to a homeland in Palestine.
Balfour Day: Dynamics that accompanied famous declaration still at play - analysis
Why is this relevant today? Because of arguments often voiced that Israel should distance itself from evangelical support, especially in the US, since it is pushing away liberal Democrats, including liberal Jewish Democrats, and that making common cause with evangelicals places Israel firmly on the Republican side of the partisan divide.

Had Chaim Weizmann, Nahum Sokolow and other Zionist leaders pressing the matter at the time adopted A SIMILAR line of thinking, it is likely THE Balfour Declaration would never have emerged. The Balfour Declaration shows just how instrumental evangelical support has been for the Zionist cause.

And, secondly, Jewish voices against Zionism and Israel are not something new or invented by Jewish Voices for Peace, IfNotNow or the two Jewish Google employees behind a recent effort to get Google and Amazon to back out of a $1.2 billion contract with Israel.

The loudest voice raised against The Balfour Declaration when it circulated among Lloyd George’s cabinet in July 1917 came from a Jew, Edwin Montagu, an ardent anti-Zionist who was the Secretary of State for India.

Montagu’s vehement opposition led the draft to be changed from His Majesty’s government viewing with favor the establishment of Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people and calling for free Jewish immigration there, to the final text where the government viewed favorably the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, with no mention of immigration.

Thanks to the intervention of Montagu, a Jew, the declaration was toned down and rendered much more equivocal.

The Balfour Declaration may have been issued 104 years ago, but – in light of the debate that swirls around Israel today – the dynamics that accompanied its publication prove the axiom that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Rage Against The Balfour Declaration: Palestinian Leadership’s Rejection of Israel’s Existence
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem unleashes violence against Jews, allies himself with Adolf Hitler

During his 15-year tenure as Mufti of Jerusalem al-Husseini instigated Muslim riots against Jews that resulted in hundreds of deaths. Most notably, he incited the 1929 pogroms that included the Hebron massacre. He was tried and convicted by British Mandatory authorities for inciting decades of violence against the local Jewish population.

Even so, when the British announced that they would be withdrawing from the territory, the United Nations presented the 1947 “Partition Plan,” which envisioned the creation of both a Jewish and Arab state, the latter including all of the strategically imperative high ground, one-third of the coastline and control over the main aquifers. The Jewish state was to be comprised primarily of the barren Negev desert.

The Zionist leadership accepted the proposal. The Arabs, however, rejected it, stating bluntly that they would attack if the Jews attempted to establish a state – with the goal of destroying it.

The Grand Mufti – praised by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as a “hero” and a “pioneer” – gained most of his notoriety as a Nazi collaborator. During World War II, the cleric served as an Arab ally and propagandist for the Third Reich, which manifested in ongoing campaigns of antisemitic warfare in Palestine.

Shortly after Adolph Hitler seized power, Amin al-Husseini met with the German consul in Jerusalem, during which he spoke approvingly of the Nazi’s anti-Jewish policies and conveyed his concerns about the increase of Jewish immigration from Germany to Palestine. In 1941, al-Hussein explained to Hitler that the Arabs were Germany’s “natural friends” because they had the same enemies: namely, “the English, the Jews, and the Communists.”

The official record of the meeting notes that Hitler assured the Mufti that he would carry on “the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.”

Some eight decades later, Abbas’ ruling Fatah faction posted to its official Facebook page the cover of a Nazi children’s book from 1936:
The Letter that Changed the Face of the Middle East

Columnist in official PA daily calls for ‘ending colonial Zionist project’
A columnist in the official Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida called for an end to the Israeli state in advance of the 104th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration on Tuesday.

“Today, after 104 years, the world is still unable to correct this historical error and this gross injustice by putting an end to this colonial Zionist project, which constitutes the largest fraud and theft operation in history,” journalist Basim Barhoum, who writes a regular column for Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, wrote in a column last week.

The article was spotlighted by the nonprofit Palestinian Media Watch, which tracks incitement in official Palestinian Authority media.

On November 2, 1917, the United Kingdom issued the Balfour Declaration — named for presiding foreign minister Arthur Balfour — supporting Jewish self-determination in Mandatory Palestine.

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object,” Balfour wrote on behalf of the British government.

Palestinians continue to view the move as a betrayal by the British government and regularly demand formal apologies. The UK has not supplied one.


Joint List MK decries ‘cursed’ Balfour Declaration on anniversary
Joint List MK Osama Saadi on Tuesday decried the “cursed” Balfour Declaration, a document seen as a key milestone in the State of Israel’s establishment.

“Today, November 2, 104 days ago, was the cursed Balfour Declaration, which announced the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine,” Saadi said in comments made to the Knesset plenum.

On November 2, 1917, Lord Arthur Balfour, the United Kingdom foreign secretary at the time, sent a letter to the leader of the British Jewish community, Lord Walter Rothschild, in which he declared his government’s support for a Jewish state in the area then known as Palestine.

The short document stated that “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

In comments to Army Radio later about his speech, Saadi said that “we recognize the Holocaust, the greatest tragedy in the world, but the Jewish people has its own home and the Palestinian people do not.”
PMW: No peace until Israel destroyed! - The PA on the 104th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration
Fatah: “The Balfour Promise – a promise from one who has no ownership to one who has no right. Lest we forget!!”

In anticipation of today's 104th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian Authority is again confirming its most basic stance: There will be no peace until Israel is destroyed.

Describing the Balfour Declaration as “the most despicable global colonialist plan in history,” a regular columnist in the PA official daily added:
“Today, after 104 years, the world is still incapable of correcting this historical mistake and this severe injustice by putting an end to the colonialist Zionist project… After 104 years the conflict is still continuing, and it will not stop until this promise and its consequences are canceled.”

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 28, 2021]

In other words, until the “Zionist project” (i.e., Israel) is “cancelled,” the Palestinian conflict against Israel will continue.

Fatah echoed, this calling for the end of Israel:
Posted text: “104 years since #The_wretched_Balfour_Promise (i.e., Declaration)

The Balfour Promise will remain a living headline for our tragedy that will not end, except with the end of the occupation state – the racist apartheid state”

[Facebook page of the Fatah Movement – Nablus Branch, Nov. 1, 2021]
Focus needs to be maintained on US antisemitism - opinion
Three years after the deadliest attack on Jews in American history, the wake-up call that emanated from Pittsburgh is not ringing as loudly now.

New American Jewish Committee (AJC) surveys found 46% of American Jews and 37% of the general US population think antisemitism is taken less seriously than other forms of hate and bigotry.

Only 15% of the general and 16% of the Jewish population say hatred of Jews is regarded more seriously.

Younger Jews are more cynical than older ones. More than half, 53%, of 18-35-year-olds think antisemitism is considered less seriously, compared to 41% of Jews ages 36-49, 47% of ages 50-64, and 39% of those 65 and over.

The outpouring of empathy from Americans of all faiths, ethnicities and ages following the murder of 11 Jewish worshipers at Tree of Life Congregation Shabbat services on October 27, 2018, was heartening. Many came the following Saturday morning to synagogues across the nation, to participate in solidarity, clearly stating by their presence that American Jews are not alone. At the time there was a discernible recognition by non-Jews that threats and attacks against Jews is a societal problem that requires mobilizing all sectors of American society to effectively fight it.
Yale Law Diversity Director at Center of ‘Traphouse’ Controversy Got an Anti-Semite Invited to the Yale Law Journal
The Yale Law School administrator caught on tape pressuring a student to apologize for an allegedly racist party invitation pushed the Yale Law Journal to host a diversity trainer who told students that anti-Semitism is merely a form of anti-blackness and suggested that the FBI artificially inflates the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes.

The comments from diversity trainer Ericka Hart—a self-described "kinky" sex-ed teacher who works with children as young as nine—shocked members of the predominantly liberal law review, many of whom characterized the presentation as anti-Semitic, according to a memo from Yale Law Journal editors obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

"I consider myself very liberal," a student quoted in the memo said. But Hart's presentation, delivered Sept. 17 to members of the prestigious law review, was "almost like a conservative parody of what antiracism trainings are like."

The controversy began when a law journal editor asked Hart why her presentation had addressed inequities like "pretty privilege" and "fatphobia" but not anti-Semitism. According to the memo, which collected feedback on the training from 33 law journal editors, Hart responded that she'd already covered anti-Semitism by discussing anti-blackness, because some Jews are black. She also raised questions about FBI data showing that Jews are the most frequent targets of hate crimes—implying, in the words of one journal editor, that the people compiling those statistics had an "agenda."

"She basically said anti-Semitism is a subset of anti-blackness," the editor told the Free Beacon. "She didn't recognize there could be anti-Semitism against white people." That characterization is corroborated by two students quoted in the memo, and by a third who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Reactions to the training were almost uniformly negative, with 82 percent of editors saying they would not invite Hart back even if she incorporated their feedback. Over a third expressed distress at her treatment of anti-Semitism—"shocking," "offensive," and "upsetting" is how three separate editors described it—while several more mocked her account of "white supremacy culture," which one editor called "goalpost-moving, unfalsifiable nonsense."

On a scale of 1-10, the most common score for the training was a "1."
Are Only “Jews of Color” Oppressed? The Lens Of A California Ethnic Studies Leader
Jews aren’t oppressed, according to critical theorist and ethnic studies movement leader Artnelson Concordia (whose ethnic studies gold rush I’ve covered in the Wall Street Journal). Or at least, even when repeatedly asked, he did not deny it at B’nai B’rith synagogue during a Jewish outreach event this month, saying “Jews of color” but not white Jews could be considered marginalized populations to be studied in California’s soon-to-be-mandated Ethnic Studies’ curriculum for K-12 schools.

Concordia is an ethnic studies activist currently employed by the Santa Barbara Unified School District, where he is helping them implement a new ethnic studies course to study “historically underrepresented groups” that will be required for high school graduation. Before he became a consultant, Concordia worked on a version of the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum that Governor Gavin Newsom initially rejected for being anti-Semitic, before passing a revised version this month. Ethnic studies has a long, controversial history in the state. And as of last week, ethnic studies will soon be a course requirement for every high schooler in California. But isn’t the first time that ethnic studies activists have gotten into hot water with the California Jewish community.

In 2016, the California state legislature passed a bill requiring the State Board of Education (SBE) to create an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) to help guide districts interested in creating an ethnic studies course. The original draft of the ESMC was widely derided for being antisemitic, such as the inflammatory political statement: “the state of Israel was founded on Palestinian land.” It repeated common tropes about Jews controlling the media and expressed support for BDS, a Palestinian activist group with ties to Hamas. The outcry was swift and overwhelming: tens of thousands of Californians publicly expressed their opposition. Governor Newsom rejected the curriculum, saying it was “offensive in so many ways” and “would never see the light of day.”

In response, the SBE went back to the drawing board and created a revised curriculum sans the anti-semitism. It passed this year without issue.

When the SBE revised the curriculum, they also started fresh with a new team of authors. But the ethnic studies activists who authored the original curriculum didn’t simply disappear. Instead, they created a private ethnic studies consultancy called the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Institute. Members of this group are the primary advocates of ethnic studies within the state, and many of them have been hired as consultants by California school districts (particularly Santa Barbara Unified and Salinas). Tolteka Cuauhtin is the most infamous of the bunch. Earlier this year he was one of the subjects of a Chris Rufo piece exposing how ethnic studies activists are making children chant to Aztec gods of human sacrifice. (h/t MtTB)
From the ADL and Hillel: We All Must Play a Role in Addressing Campus Antisemitism
A mezuzah ripped from a doorpost of the Hillel at Northeastern University. An advertisement for a Jewish event at Emerson College defaced with antisemitic graffiti. A swastika, a Star of David, and the words “Is Illegal” drawn on a car belonging to a Chabad rabbi at Santa Monica College. And just this past weekend, a Jewish fraternity house at George Washington University vandalized, its Torah scroll doused in laundry detergent.

These are just a few of the antisemitic incidents reported at campuses across the country in recent weeks, as students returned to campus for the Fall semester. They are reminders that antisemitism — that ugly, irrational hatred that has plagued Jews for millennia — is accelerating on American college and university campuses nationwide.

During the 2020-2021 academic year, Hillel International counted at least 244 antisemitic incidents on North American college and university campuses, a significant increase from the 181 antisemitic incidents reported during the previous academic year — when most classes were still taking place in person.

And last week, a new survey released by the ADL and Hillel International offered further confirmation that antisemitism remains a serious problem on campus, as reported by Jewish students themselves.

Our survey found that one-third of Jewish college students personally experienced antisemitism in the last year, either on campus or directed at them from someone in their campus community. The most common forms of antisemitism experienced included slurs and offensive comments. For students who were targeted in person, 79 percent reported that it happened more than once.
GWU Jewish students to rally against antisemitism after replica Torah desecrated
A rally was set to take place at George Washington University on Monday, after a fraternity on campus said a small replica Torah used in its initiation process was damaged during a vandalism spree.

The president of Tau Kappa Epsilon, a fraternity on George Washington’s campus, said the vandalism took place early Sunday morning, according to a report in the university’s student newspaper. He said hot sauce was poured throughout the house and many objects were thrown around, the newspaper reported.

The damage that most caught the public eye was to a replica Torah that the fraternity president said was kept in the basement and used to swear in new members. Replica Torahs, available in gift shops, are printed and not prepared by a scribe. Tau Kappa Epsilon is not a Jewish fraternity, but about a quarter of its members are Jewish, the fraternity president told the student newspaper.

“Our entire chapter is outraged and saddened by this blatant act of antisemitism and violence against our brothers,” the fraternity said in a statement Sunday afternoon.

A picture showing the damaged Torah circulated widely on social media Sunday, drawing condemnation from a wide array of Jewish advocates and influencers, some of whom connected the incident to what they said was a pattern of antisemitism on college campuses.


Honest Reporting: HonestReporting Clarification: Twitter’s New Middle East & North Africa ‘Editorial Curation Lead’ Apologizes for Antisemitic Posts
Nevertheless, the GnasherJew account revealed that Twitter’s newest hire had previously shared antisemitic content.

Indeed, Jassem in 2010 seemingly cited Louis Farrakhan as saying that “we give you our tax dollar to support Israel every year.”

The Nation of Islam leader’s Jew-hatred, as documented by the Anti-Defamation League, is well-known. For instance, in 2009, Farrakhan claimed that “the Israeli lobby” controls the US government and questioned the “veracity of the [fatality] figures of the Holocaust.”

In 2010, Farrakhan waged a public relations campaign against what he called “the synagogue of Satan” and “Satanic Jews.”

Yet, that same year, Jassem called Farrakhan a “great example of faith transcending boundaries” and quoted him at least four times.

The items related to Farrakhan were posted when Jassem was in her mid-twenties, shortly before she was employed as a freelance producer by NBC News’ London desk.

Additionally, Jassem retweeted a post declaring that Israel was “not born” but, rather, “dropped like a bomb in the middle of Palestine.” She also amplified false claims that “Jesus was a Palestinian.”

Following an overture by HonestReporting, Jassem expressed regret.

“I can see that I have been ill-informed with some tweets when [I was] younger. I apologise [British spelling] for any offence caused by these particular tweets,” she wrote to HonestReporting’s Emanuel Miller.

Thereafter, Jassem shut off public access to her Twitter account.

But HonestReporting flagged a post late on Monday that complained about “trolling.”

Twitter’s curation team claims to “quickly, accurately and impartially” summarize “complex conversations” in consonance with the social media giant’s guidelines. According to her job description, Jassem will be responsible for highlighting the “best, most relevant, and timely content that reaches, engages and delights one of the largest daily audiences in the world.”


The Nazis Made Jewish Boxers Fight for Their Lives
During the Holocaust, some Jews had to fight for their right to live by boxing fellow Jews for Nazi amusement, where the loser would die, through starvation or being gassed. A riveting and harrowing new book, “Holocaust Fighters: Boxers, Resister and Avengers,” by Jeffrey Sussman is both inspiring and brutal.

Polish Jew Harry Haft once fought six times in one night. His wild story included a deal with an SS officer, who hoped that should Germany lose the war, Haft might testify that he was not a war criminal.

Haft, whose story was made into the movie “The Survivor,” with actor Ben Foster as Haft, not only survived, but came to America and as a pro boxer, got the chance to fight legend Rocky Marciano. One of the hardest things to stomach from the book is the chapter about Haft that relates the story of him waking up to see other prisoners kill someone and then eat that person’s flesh, then fall asleep with the victim’s blood still on their faces.

Another person that Sussman writes about is Jewish and Arab boxer Victor “Young” Perez, a Tunisian who became the world flyweight champion in 1931 and dated beautiful actresses, including one who dumped him when it was not good for her career to be with a Jew.

Perez was arrested in Paris and sent to Auschwitz. Part of “Transport 60,” he was one of 31 to survive out of the original group of 1,000. He ironically survived a death march of 37 miles with no food or water, only to be shot while giving out bread to hungry people.

Sussman writes that while the Jewish boxers felt guilt, knowing that they ate better than others and that every fighter they beat would be dead soon, they had a survival instinct and knew they’d be killed if they didn’t agree to fight. (A draw would not result in death for either fighter).
Jewish leaders livid over sale of Nazi prisoner stamps
Jewish leaders and Holocaust survivors expressed outrage Monday after an auction house in Jerusalem offered for sale a set of needle systems that were used by Nazis during World War II to tattoo numbers on the arms of Jewish prisoners at the Auschwitz death camp.

How can it be that the world is about to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht – Night of Broken Glass – yet Tzolman's Auction is looking to profit from the sale of stamps used by Nazis? said Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the European Jewish Association.

Margolin wrote a letter to Justice Minister Gideon Sa'ar, calling on the lawmaker to put an end to the "despicable sale."

"I appeal to you personally to do everything in your power to prevent the humiliation of the victims and the sale of stamps that were used to burn the arms of millions of European Jews," he wrote. "The trade of such sensitive items cannot be allowed."

Eighty-nine-year-old old Naftali First, who survived Auschwitz, also condemned the move. "The stamps belong at Yad Vashem [Holocaust museum], not in private hands," he said.

Chairman of Yad Vashem Dani Dayan concurred, saying that contrary to private owners, at the museum "historical items are preserved, researched and serve as historical evidence for researchers and the general public."

Dayan also stressed that Yad Vashem opposed the trade of such items both because it was "morally wrong" and because it encouraged further sale and even counterfeit of Nazi memorabilia.
Employee of German Prosecutor’s Office Leaked Confidential Information to Attila Hildmann, Former Celebrity Chef Turned Antisemitic Agitator
A Berlin woman is being investigated by German authorities for allegedly passing confidential information to Attila Hildmann, a celebrity-chef-turned-antisemitic-agitator who is now living in Turkey.

The 32-year-old woman, named only as M., was an employee in the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office. She is reported to have visited Hildmann in Turkey earlier this year and to have shared with him a number of documents relating to the criminal proceedings he is facing in Germany for hate speech. Hildmann fled to Turkey after police issued a warrant for his arrest last February.

A self-described “ultra right-winger” of Turkish origin who was brought up by German adoptive parents, Hildmann was widely-known in Germany for his vegan recipe books and frequent appearances on TV food programs over the previous decade. But with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Hildmann became one of the leaders of the protest movement opposed to social distancing and other public health measures that has won huge support on the German far right.

Throughout the crisis, Hildmann used his channel on the social media platform Telegram to spread antisemitic claims about the global extent of “Jewish” and “Zionist” power among more than 120,000 followers. He has regularly deployed Nazi terms like “parasites” and “subhumans” to underline his accusation that the pandemic is a symptom of wider global conspiracy run by prominent Jews such as financier George Soros and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
‘These Traditions Are Linked to Judaism’: French Far-Left Leader Mélenchon Offers Bizarre Defense of Far-Right Pundit Over Charge of Antisemitism
The leader of France’s main far-left political party was embroiled in a new controversy involving antisemitism over the weekend, following a television interview in which he depicted Judaism as a xenophobic culture impervious to change while answering a question about the far-right.

The context for the widely panned remarks of Jean-Luc Mélenchon — head of the La France Insoumise (“France Rising,” or LFI) party — was a segment of his Thursday morning interview on BFMTV dealing with the potential presidential candidacy of Eric Zemmour, a far-right television pundit and columnist who has himself been accused of antisemitism.

Asked whether he personally considered Zemmour, who is Jewish, to be antisemitic, Mélenchon demurred by holding up Judaism as the intellectual basis for Zemmour’s anti-immigrant, homophobic and ultranationalist platform.

“Mr. Zemmour cannot be antisemitic because he reproduces many cultural themes: ‘We do not change tradition, we do not evolve, creolization, my god, what a horror,'” Mélenchon argued.

“All these tradition are very much linked to Judaism,” he continued.

He then added: “It has its merits, it enabled [Judaism] to survive throughout history.”

Mélenchon’s comments drew outrage from several French politicians and commentators on social media.

“With these words, with the most abject references, [Mélenchon] finally crossed the line,” said Christophe Castaner, the leader of the ruling LREM Party’s grouping in the French parliament. “Nothing ever justifies sinking into antisemitism.”

“No, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, racism, Holocaust denial, sexism and Pétainism — this hatred of the other that Zemmour professes obsessively — are in no way Jewish traditions,” declared Edwy Plenel, a prominent political journalist.


Israeli Trophy Defense System Successfully Tested on German Tanks
The Israeli-developed TROPHY Active Protective System (APS) that was fitted on German Leopard 2 tanks earlier this year tested successfully, the Israeli and German Defense Ministries announced Tuesday.

The trials on the defense system were carried out by the German Ministry of Defense, in close cooperation with the Israeli Ministry of Defense and with the support of Rafael and the German company KMW, and included challenging scenarios for the platform.

In the series of experiments, the system displayed a 90% interception rate, as well as accurate detection of the source of the fire, thus proving the success of integrating the system on the German tanks.

In February, the two Ministries of Defense signed a deal that included the integration and supply of the active TROPHY defense system for the Leopard 2 tank. The deal includes tank packaging, interceptors, spare parts, and operational and technical training. Under the agreement, the Ministry of Defense will supply the systems to the German Ministry of Defense in the coming years.

The Rafael-developed TROPHY, known as the “windbreaker” in Hebrew, creates a neutralization bubble around the combat vehicle by rapidly detecting and actively engaging all known chemical energy threats, including recoilless rifles, anti-tank guided missiles, anti-tank rockets, HEAT tank rounds, and RPGs.
Israeli drug that slowed Alzheimer’s, ALS in mice gets funding to start trials
Israeli-designed molecules that slowed Alzheimer’s and another degenerative disease in mice are to begin the approval process to become a drug for humans, scientists have announced.

The molecules have shown “amazing” effect in delaying the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, in mice. ALS, which famously afflicted Stephen Hawking and was the subject of the Ice Bucket Challenge, has no approved drug treatment.

Prof. Esther Priel and her colleagues at Ben Gurion University of the Negev have been working for years on the molecules and have published peer-reviewed research on their effectiveness in mice.

They formed a company, Neuromagen Pharma, but did not have the funds to start the pre-clinical trials needed to prepare for human trials.

Now, an Israeli funder has come up with the multi-million-dollar investment needed to move the process forward, Priel told The Times of Israel. “This investment will allow us to push this to clinical trials, which was something we couldn’t do until now as pre-clinical trials for FDA approval cost a lot of money,” she said.

“It’s very positive, and if we’re able to see in humans just 10% of the effect we saw in mice, we will have a very good drug.”







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