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Monday, January 10, 2022

01/10 Links Pt2: ‘Murdered Because They Were Jews’: Victims Remembered on 7th Anniversary of French Kosher Market Killings; Aura Herzog, wife to one Israeli president and mother to a second, dies at 97

From Ian:

‘Murdered Because They Were Jews’: Victims Remembered on 7th Anniversary of French Kosher Market Killings
Jewish community leaders and French officials gathered on Sunday to mark the seventh anniversary of a terrorist attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris, paying tribute and expressing solidarity against antisemitic violence.

Organized by the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), the main communal body of French Jewry, the ceremony took place in front of the Hyper Cacher where an Islamist gunman shot dead four Jewish hostages on Jan. 9, 2015 — Yohan Cohen, 20; Yoav Hattab, 21; Philippe Braham, 45; and François-Michel Saada, 63. A couple of days before the attack, two Islamist gunmen killed a dozen people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Multiple French politicians were present at the commemoration, among them former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who described it on social media as a “necessary tribute” to the “victims of Islamist terrorism.” Also in attendance were Marlène Schiappa, minister for citizenship; Sophie Cluzel, secretary of state for people with disabilities; Jean-Michel Blanquer, minister of education, youth, and sports; and Aurore Bergé, a lawmaker from French President Emmanuel Macron’s party.

“Murdered because they were Jews,” wrote Equality Minister Élisabeth Moreno. “Remember, always.”

Remembrance candles were also lit during the ceremony for other French Jews killed in antisemitic violence, including Sarah Halimi, a retired doctor who was beaten and thrown from her third-story Paris apartment in 2017, and Mireille Knoll, an elderly Holocaust survivor who was stabbed and set ablaze in her Paris apartment in 2018.


Don’t Turn Away Supporters of Israel
Some American Jews have given this kind of support a mixed reception. On the positive side, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) has welcomed and encouraged the support of Hispanic evangelicals. In 2019, the AJC accepted an invitation to address the General Assembly of the Alianza Evangelica Latina (AEL, Latin Evangelical Alliance). It was the first Jewish organization to do so. At the Assembly’s opening service, Rabbi Noam Marans, the AJC Director of Interreligious and Intergroup Relations, said, “At a time of rising racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism, Jews and Latino Evangelicals must be brothers and sisters who will together battle the hate that demonizes both our communities.”

Similarly, the American Jewish International Relations Institute (AJIRI) allies itself with faith-based leaders, including Hispanic evangelicals, to help further its mission of reversing discrimination against Israel at the UN. Indeed, the AJIRI recently appointed Pastor Ortiz to its board of directors (I serve with him on that board.) There, he works internationally to combat UN efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state.

But unfortunately, many moderate and left-leaning American Jews tend to discount the support of evangelicals because they don’t like the brand of Christian theology it’s based on. New Israel Fund CEO Daniel Sokatch provides a good example of this in his recent book, “Can We Talk About Israel?” There, he devotes a whole chapter to a dismissive take on evangelical support for the Jewish state.

This attitude is all too common among some American Jews. Writing in the Winter 2008 issue of City Journal, James Q. Wilson noted that, “in one Pew survey, 42 percent of Jewish respondents expressed hostility to evangelicals and fundamentalists.”

Jews with this mindset ignore an important rule of coalition building: Coalition partners don’t have to agree on everything. They just need to agree on one thing: in this case, the legitimacy of Israel as the sovereign nation state of the Jewish people. Jewish rejection of evangelical support is shortsighted and self-defeating. And that is especially true of support from Hispanic evangelical leaders, whose political influence and work on behalf of Israel are international in scope.

As Wilson said, “Whatever the reason for Jewish distrust of evangelicals, it may be a high price to pay when Israel’s future, its very existence, is in question.” Thus, he concluded: “When it comes to helping secure Israel’s survival, the tiny Jewish minority in America should not reject the help offered by a group that is ten times larger and whose views on the central propositions of a democratic society are much like everybody else’s.”

Jewish leaders would do well to keep that in mind.
Matti Friedman: Chinese Itzik Comes to Haifa
Last week I drove up to Haifa to see with my own eyes a sight that, for most Israelis, has yet to sink in: the country’s brand new port, our third, which is beautiful, automated, efficient, and operated by the same Chinese company that runs the megaport at Shanghai. The first full container ship dropped anchor the day after my visit. Chinese characters adorn the soaring ship-to-shore cranes, freshly painted red and white; Israeli workers man joysticks opposite computer arrays running Chinese software; and in the managerial offices sit Chinese executives. To get to the port, I paid a toll and drove through the Carmel Tunnels, which were dug a few years ago by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation. At a gas station on the way I bought a pineapple yogurt made by the iconic dairy-products giant Tnuva, founded as a cooperative by Labor Zionists and now controlled by Bright Food—263 Huashan Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai. China was far, far away, until suddenly it was right here.

The most prominent face of China in Israel belongs to a guy named Itzik. His real name is Xi Xiaoqi, and he’s a 35-year-old resident of Beijing, but here he’s known as Itzik ha-Sini, or “Chinese Itzik.” He gets recognized on the street. He stars in hundreds of internet videos about life in Israel from a Chinese perspective, and about life in China made accessible for Israelis. Some of these appear on his own YouTube channel, but sometimes he appears on Israeli outlets like Channel 12 or KAN 11, the public broadcaster, where journalists are delighted to have a Chinese figure—the first—who speaks perfect, slangy Hebrew and has an acute grasp of the Israeli audience. He’s impossible not to like.

A good introduction to the Itzik genre is the video where he lists his top 10 reasons for loving Israel, including malawah, Jewish holidays, and the Pride Parade in Tel Aviv. Or the one where he introduces his grandfather Xi Rennan, 87, an energetic veteran of the Korean War (on the side of the communist North, of course), gives him a Hebrew name (Ronen), and teaches him to sum up his philosophy with the Hebrew workaholic expression nanuach bakever, “We’ll rest in the grave.” In Itzik’s world, China is a great place, but one that can learn from us Israelis about openness, creativity, and fun. He has much respect for who we are and what we’ve accomplished. The “top 10” video actually includes only nine things, but he ends by saying, “It’s OK, these are Israelis, they’re good people, not small-minded—they won’t make a big deal about it.” He snaps his fingers. “That’s the 10th thing.”

I caught Itzik on Zoom from Beijing. He was born in the city of Jiangyin, he said, son of a traffic cop and a real estate agent. He’d never met a Jew or heard a word of Hebrew before arriving at university at age 18. The school offered Japanese, Nepali, Dutch, and a few other languages, but his grandfather told him that Jews were smart—people of the book. Everyone thinks this in China, he said. If his years communicating with real Jews in Israel has disabused him of this notion, he was too polite to say so. During his Hebrew studies, first in Beijing with an Israeli teacher and then at Tel Aviv University, he adopted his Hebrew name, a diminutive of Yitzhak, or Isaac.

In 2009, with China taking a greater interest in Israel, he was selected to run the Hebrew desk at China Radio International, a state outfit that might uncharitably be called a propaganda arm or, more generously, a showcase for China’s best self. (The Hebrew desk doesn’t actually broadcast radio, only videos.) The CRI website has a lot of upbeat content about, for example, the many plusses of life in Xinjiang. In Itzik’s rise from an obscure city to an elite college, then to studies abroad, and then to an official media job, it’s possible to sense the hand of the state identifying and promoting a gifted young person.


Stephen Pollard: JK Rowling is no antisemite
I am not going to get into a discussion about the iconography of goblins, save to say that sometimes a goblin is just…a goblin. Besides, whatever visual impression Mr Stewart may have had from the film, JK Rowling neither directed nor designed it; and there is nothing in any of the books that is even glancingly antisemitic.

The reality is that none of this is actually about goblins or even about Harry Potter. It’s about feminism and the ideological obsession of those who consider sex to be a construct rather than a biological fact.

In truth, the only interesting part of this mini-saga is what it tells us about those jumping on the bandwagon. First, some context: during the years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, the British Jewish community felt under threat in a way that it hadn’t for generations. On every metric, antisemitism was rising faster than ever recorded — in official police statistics, in Community Security Trust recorded incidents and anecdotally.

Above all else, we pleaded for non-Jewish allies to speak out. The brutal reality was that relatively few figures in public life considered it worth the hassle. One who did, repeatedly, was JK Rowling. She spoke out on Twitter, and most notably when she wrote a parody of Labour under Corbyn referring to his issues with the British Jewish community. For most British Jews she is a heroine.

Strikingly, if you look at the identities of those who are now using her supposed antisemitism to attack Ms Rowling, you will struggle to find a single one who said or did anything in support of British Jews when we most needed it. Worse, many are the very people who cultishly supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Far from being allies against anti-Jewish racism, many of them are the issue.

This latest assault on JK Rowling has nothing to do with any concerns about antisemitism. The only enemies of the Jewish people in this story are those who concoct fake allegations of Jew hate in order to smear a warrior against racism.
GBN talks to Natasha Hausdorff of UKLFI
GBN spoke to Natasha Hausdorff of UKLFI regarding BBC reporting of the antisemitic attack on Jews in Oxford Street on 29 November 2021


Antisemitic incidents on US campus spur special collaboration with Israeli college
The University of Maryland and the Ashkelon Academic College will collaborate by jointly offering a course whose subject matter will focus on residents of southern Israel sharing their experience of living under constant rocket fire, the two institutions announced in early January.

The decision to launch the course was aimed at countering the antisemitic incidents that took place on the US campus as of late. As part of the course syllabus, students from both Israel and the US will participate in sessions that would inform both sides on the cultural aspects of the two countries and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Dr. Eli Friedman and Dr. Michal Neubauer from the Ashkelon college will partner with Professor Paul Scham, who is the executive director of the Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland, to publish a book that would deal with the polarization of Israeli society.

"This course will provide the students with experience on a significant level when it comes working in a global environment," Joseph B. Scholten, an associate director of the University of Maryland's Office of International Affairs, said. According to Scholten, the course will "bring students together and have them work on a variety of global topics from the real world as part of the classes."

According to Friedman, "the course will provide an important environment to understanding the cultural dimension of the local conflict and global media
Brown University Professor Can’t Control Birzeit’s Terrorists
The Birzeit parades had their own versions of marching bands, though MEMRI’s video shows they were really limited to a dozen or so students drumming frantically to be heard over the chants of, “Jihad! Jihad for the sake of Allah, Death for the sake of Allah.” It was the mock suicide vest-wearing future graduates of Birzeit’s department of self-immolation who ghoulishly screamed about the “body parts scattered” throughout Israel by those who went before them and how they too would “shed … their blood.”

The grand marshal of Hamas’s parade, at least in spirit, was “the Engineer” — Birzeit graduate Yahya Ayash, the chief bomb maker of Hamas and the leader of its Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Following the parade, masked Hamas fighters beat up campus security guards and broke into a campus auditorium to hold an impromptu rally at which a Hamas spokesman hailed Ayash as “the greatest among the men of Birzeit.”

What to make of these outrageous displays of barbarism? Since they happened on Doumani’s watch, he owns it. However, it occurred to me that perhaps Doumani is not only an ineffective administrator unable to take charge and control the university he purportedly leads; maybe he’s actually in trouble there. After all, it’s not unlike Hamas to hold hostages against their will. Furthermore, MEMRI reported that “university staff tried to seize the mock rockets, but without success.”

But then I saw in a report translated from Al-Quds al-Arabi describing Doumani’s acts after Israeli police forces put an end to the parades and the Hamas rally in the auditorium. It described “a sit-down … in front of the Faculty of Science” at which Doumani boldly raised the Palestinian flag, and condemned “the barbarism of the occupation.”

The Birzeit administration sought to de-escalate the violence among student groups, “due to its devastating effects on the university’s progress and its ability to achieve its goals.” Those goals, of course, are to train future generations of Palestinians to fight Israel, not each other.

So apparently Beshara Doumani will simply preside for two years as a convenient American figurehead from the great Brown University, making excuses for the terrorists and their student protégés who run Terrorist University while he burnishes his reputation as part of the academic resistance. His first semester at Birzeit is an oozing canker sore on the reputation of the Ivy League school.


BBC News amends report that airbrushed antisemitism
On January 7th the BBC News website published a report on its ‘Lancashire’ page about the suspension of a Labour party member of the West Lancashire Borough Council by the West Lancashire Labour Group.

The BBC’s reporting of that story prompted considerable comment on social media.

Those accessing the current version of the BBC report titled “West Lancashire Labour councillor suspended over Sir Keir Starmer tweet” may have difficulty understanding those objections because it does now tell the whole story.

“A Labour councillor who alleged Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer “follows commands from Israel” has been suspended from the party.

Ron Cooper, who represents the Tanhouse ward on West Lancashire Borough Council, was criticised on social media after the remark was published on his Twitter account on Wednesday.”

However the original report that was published on the BBC News website did not provide readers with the full picture:
Associated Press Injects ‘Occupation’ Into Story About Palestinian Workers Killed in Car Crash
The Associated Press (AP) has managed to turn the death of eight Palestinians in a West Bank car crash into a broad indictment of Israel. In fact, most of the January 6 piece, titled Road crash in West Bank kills 8 Palestinians, injures 2, isn’t even dedicated to the events and details of the accident.

Instead, the article veers towards biased territory:
Tens of thousands of Palestinians work in Israel and Israeli settlements, where wages are much higher than in the parts of the West Bank administered by [Mahmoud] Abbas’ Palestinian Authority. The economic disparity largely stems from Israel’s 54-year occupation of the territory and the restrictions it imposes on the more than 2.5 million Palestinians living there.”

In a story ostensibly about tragedy, the AP, a global news service with 1,300 clients such as The Washington Post, ABC News and Fox News, depicts Palestinians with the opportunity to earn a living outside of Palestinian Authority-administered territories as being subjected to alleged repressive Israeli policies.

Why Are “Martyrs Making a Living” Outside the Palestinian Authority?
The AP notes that “Palestinian [Authority] President Mahmoud Abbas declared a day of mourning for the victims, who he described as ‘martyrs of trying to make a living.’” Indeed, the Associated Press included Abbas’ quote prominently, in the second paragraph of the piece.

But two obvious questions, which for the reader remain unanswered, are: 1) Why are Palestinians in the first place compelled to find work in places under Israeli civilian and military control? 2) Why are connections between West Bank Palestinians and territories under Israeli authority depicted as a bad thing given the decades-long effort by the international community to forge peaceful co-existence?


NY Times Corrects Jerusalem, Not Tel Aviv, Is Israel’s Capital
After twice publishing a book review which erroneously referred to Israel’s government as “the government in Tel Aviv,” The New York Times has corrected, first online and finally, yesterday, in print as well. Yesterday’s print correction stated:
A review on Dec. 19 about “Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy,” by Martin Indyk, referred imprecisely to Tel Aviv, implying that it was the seat of Israel’s government. Israel’s government is in Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv.

The unnecessarily drawn-out saga began not on Dec. 19, but nearly two months earlier, on Oct. 26, when The Times first published Jeremi Suri’s review of Martin Indyk’s book.

At the time, CAMERA contacted The Times to point out that Suri wrongly referred to Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel with use of the common journalistic practice of referring to a nation’s capital as shorthand for the country’s government. Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, erred:
As Washington sent billions of dollars to Israel and Egypt, many groups in the region turned their anger against the United States. When the dictator in Cairo suppressed dissidents and the government in Tel Aviv sponsored new Jewish settlements, Washington became a target for the discontented.

Of course, Israel’s capital and seat of government is in Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv.

Such an error has previously been corrected by, inter alia, the Washington Post, which noted in its correction: “An earlier of the article incorrectly implied that Tel Aviv is the seat of the Israeli government. The Israeli government is based in Jerusalem. This version has been corrected.”
Antisemitic Pamphlet Stoked American Revolutionary Cause, a British Historian Contends
The American Revolution was stoked in part by an antisemitic pamphlet, a British historian contends in a new book defending King George III.

Common Sense, the 1776 broadside by Thomas Paine, was a runaway bestseller, described by Benjamin Franklin as having had “great effect on the minds of the people at the beginning of the revolution.” The historian of the American Revolution Bernard Bailyn has written that it had “unique power.”

In his new book, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, Andrew Roberts derides Common Sense for what he says is “all its antisemitism, absurd exaggeration, anti-Catholic bigotry, and bogus claims of objectivity.”

Paine, Roberts writes, “squarely blamed the Jews for the institution of monarchy.” Roberts writes that in so doing, Paine was “blaming history’s oldest scapegoats.”

In a footnote, Roberts writes, “The mention of George as Pharaoh ought to have reminded readers that the Jews could not be blamed for the concept of monarchy, given that the Egyptian monarchy preceded theirs by centuries.”

It’s become newly fashionable to fault the American founders for bigotry. The New York Times’ 1619 Project originally claimed that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” That claim has been fiercely contested.

I’m the author of a biography of Samuel Adams and was an American history major in college (where I took Bailyn’s class on the American Revolution) but until Roberts’ book I’d yet to encounter the claim that antisemitism played any role in independence. If anything, to the contrary: the philosemitism of the Puritan settlers in New England has been stressed by writers such as Michael Oren, David Gelernter, and Meir Soloveichik.


Tel Aviv antique market sells Nazi memorabilia from the Holocaust
Nazi memorabilia was discovered on sale at a Tel Aviv vintage market, Haaretz reported on Sunday. Items ranging from World War II-era Schutzstaffel (SS) memberships cards to swastika pins were found in one of the stands at Tel Aviv's Vintage Market in Givon Square.

An Israeli couple in their 60s stumbled upon the Nazi memorabilia while strolling at the market. When they asked about the items and their authenticity, the stand owner replied "Ask Yad Vashem," the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority.

A week earlier, a young Israeli law student also saw the Nazi items and after posting images of the memorabilia in a Facebook group, the stand owner also showed her items he owned that were not on display on the stand, such as authentic yellow Star of David patches, which Jews were forced to wear during WWII by Nazi Germany.

The Tel Aviv Municipality responded to Haaretz's report, stating that the municipality does not know which items are displayed at the market at any given time.

"Stalls at the Vintage Market rotate on a weekly basis and anyone is welcome to display their products. If it is found that the sale of these items is inappropriate, we will act accordingly," the municipality stated.


Japan-Israel ties strengthen, as 2021 investments nearly triple to record $2.9b
Economic relations between Japan and Israel reached new heights in 2021, with Japanese firms investing some $2.9 billion across 85 deals in Israeli companies last year, almost triple the amount in 2020, according to a new study released Sunday by consulting firm Harel-Hertz Investment House.

In 2020, Japanese firms invested $1.1 billion in 63 investment deals, up from $914 million in 2019; in 2015 this figure totaled just $87 million.

Japan now accounts for 15.8% of all foreign investments in the Israeli high-tech industry, compared to just 1.8% in 2016, and 12% of the total investment (foreign and Israeli), indicated Elhanan Harel, the founder and president of Harel-Hertz and the author of the report.

In absolute numbers, however, Japanese investments in Israel are still small, compared to those of US (and Israeli) investors. Japanese VCs and corporate VCs still do not take lead investors positions, preferring to join Israeli or global VCs in funding rounds, the report said.

Total Japanese investments in Israel since 2000 amounted to $13 billion in some 400 deals, the Harel-Hertz report showed.

Since 2015, the areas of interest for Japanese investors have diversified. The vast majority of investments that year (61%) focused on communication and IT companies, falling to 13% by 2021 as more investments flowed into life science, food tech, cybersecurity, automotive, fintech, and cleantech companies.
Like a fish out of water? Israeli team trains goldfish to drive
Goldfish are capable of navigating on land, Israeli researchers have found, after training fish to drive.

The team at Ben-Gurion University developed an FOV - a fish-operated vehicle. The robotic car is fitted with lidar, a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed laser light to collect data on the vehicle's ground location and the fish's whereabouts inside a mounted water tank.

A computer, camera, electric motors and omni-wheels give the fish control of the vehicle.

"Surprisingly, it doesn't take the fish a long time to learn how to drive the vehicle. They're confused at first. They don't know what's going on but they're very quick to realise that there is a correlation between their movement and the movement of the machine that they're in," said researcher Shachar Givon.

Six goldfish, each receiving around 10 driving lessons, took part in the study. Each time one of them reached a target set by the researchers, it was rewarded with food.

And some goldfish are better drivers than others. (h/t Zvi)


Israel’s national library sees Arabic site traffic boom
Israel’s national library says the number of visitors to its Arabic website more than doubled last year, driven by a growing collection of digitized materials and an aggressive outreach campaign to the Arab world.

Around 650,000 users, predominantly from the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Algeria, visited the National Library of Israel’s English and Arabic sites in 2021, said library spokesman Zack Rothbart.

One of the most heavily trafficked resources on the Arabic website is a newspaper archive with more than 200,000 pages of Arabic publications from Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine, said Raquel Ukeles, head of the library’s collections.

“We have been working on outreach to the Arab world, into the Arabic speaking public here in Israel for over a decade, and we have slowly built up a rich set of resources on our websites,” she said. They include the digital newspaper archives, manuscripts, posters, electronic books and music, she said. They are open access, allowing scholars and curious web browsers to visit.

The Jerusalem library is home to an extensive collection of Islamic and Arabic texts, including thousands of rare books and manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Turkish ranging from the 9th to the 20th centuries.
Aura Herzog, wife to one Israeli president and mother to a second, dies at 97
Aura Herzog, the mother of President Isaac Herzog and widow of Israel’s sixth president, Chaim Herzog, died Sunday night at the age of 97.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett eulogized Herzog as “a public figure and social activist who loved her people and country. She lived humbly and raised a family to be proud of, while constantly working for the public and Israeli society.”

He sent his “deepest condolences” to her family.

Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu said Herzog “devoted her life to public and social activity for the people of Israel… May her memory be a blessing.”

Defense Minister Benny Gantz called her “a pioneering woman…who worked for Israeli society and was a part of the generation that built the nation and to whom we are all grateful.”

Herzog (née Ambash) was born in Egypt after her parents were expelled from Jaffa by the Turks during World War I. She completed a degree in math and physics in South Africa before immigrating to Israel in 1946 and joining the Hagana, the defense organization that was the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces.







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