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Friday, May 20, 2022

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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


Melanie Phillips: The ‘broken windows’ strategy for combating Israel demonization
Palestinianism has worked because of a strategy, applied over decades and backed by huge funds, to seed an entirely false narrative among gullible Western liberals that has reversed aggressor and victim and demonized Israel and its defenders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The BDS Movement Has Already Lost
Of the nearly 200 countries in the world, over 160 have relations with Israel, including six members of the Arab League. Of the couple dozen that do not, around half are Arab countries—but even among those there are gray areas. In 2021, Qatar and Israel signed an agreement allowing Israeli diamond traders to operate in Doha, and Qatari diplomats are the primary interlocutors with the Israelis on Gaza. Saudi Arabia is a virtual party to the Abraham Accords. If it weren’t, it would be impossible to fly on Israel’s El Al airlines from Dubai to Tel Aviv in three hours, and a representative from the Israel Defense Forces would not likely be posted in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, just about 20 miles from Saudi Arabia by a causeway. And in 2018, then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Oman in a not-so-secret visit.

Those countries that have not come to terms with Israel at all include Iran, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Pakistan, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. This is an important group of countries for a variety of reasons, but Israel has managed to thrive without them. Sure, Israel endures endless criticism at the United Nations, but since when does what happens in the General Assembly, Human Rights Council, or UNESCO have a bearing on the conduct of global affairs? Almost never.

It is not just that Israel has greatly expanded its relations with countries across the globe—investors see a lot of opportunity in Israel, and the world’s biggest firms want to leverage the country’s greatest asset: its well-educated and talented workforce.

In 2021, investors poured $21.5 billion into Israel’s health care and health tech sectors, according to Israeli businesspeople I spoke to. That is more than double the previous record year, which was 2020. The Israeli government reports that 33 percent of all cybersecurity unicorns—private firms worth over $1 billion—are Israeli and 40 percent of global investment in cybersecurity is in Israel. Even if governments tend to pad their statistics to accentuate the positive, there is no denying Israel is a world leader in cybersecurity. (Of course, as the NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware make clear, the Israelis are not always good stewards of this technology, but that’s a separate issue.)

Then there are tech behemoths and other powerful companies—such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, Applied Materials, Alibaba, Berkshire Hathaway, Baidu, Bosch Group, Booking.com, Citi, Dell, eBay, Flex, Ford Motor Co., HP, Mastercard, Perrigo, and Phillips—that have operations and research and development facilities in Israel. The country has no automobile industry, but Israeli engineers are writing the code for General Motors-manufactured vehicles, and the future of self-driving vehicles is located in an office building in Jerusalem, at the headquarters of an Israeli firm called Mobileye that Intel owns (and is set to be spun off in an IPO next month).

BDS activists have clearly failed to force global firms to unwind their operations in Israel. This is where any analogy to South Africa, which the Crimson editorial writers employ, breaks down. Israel and Israeli firms are too well integrated into global business for international companies to walk away from the country. Settlers can do without Ben & Jerry’s, and Israelis will survive not getting to see Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters or any number of other artists who support BDS perform live in the country, but Microsoft, Apple, Google, and the others all benefit from Israel and aren’t likely to leave anytime soon.

Pro-Palestinian activists are taking the wrong cues from whatever victories they have scored on college campuses. Campus BDS resolutions have done little to alter the way the world sees Israel, which is too important a geopolitical and economic player to be isolated. The BDS movement has already lost. The tragedy is that Palestine’s supporters remain wedded to a losing strategy, apparently believing they have time on their side to change hearts and minds.
Rebranding the Israeli Narrative
In order to be able to overcome and outmaneuver the methodology and tactics that are being used against us, it will be necessary to “reverse engineer” the false and manipulative narratives that have been so successfully applied by our enemies. The State of Israel and the Jewish people around the globe are finally coming to this realization, albeit half a century too late. This fact presents the enormity of the challenges facing Israel and the Jewish world, incorporating all facets of the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-Zionist narratives in the converging spheres of; media, social network, academia, progressive politics, social, religious, and cultural.

Anti-Israel propaganda has permeated every single facet of American (and Western) society including: labor (longshoremen’s refusal to unload an Israeli cargo ship and a national teacher’s union putting to vote a harshly anti-Israel resolution); sports (boycotting Israel at international competitions); cultural events (Roger Waters’ campaign to pressure musicians to boycott Israel, and a Swedish art museum glorifying Palestinian mass murderers); higher education (universities outright banning pro-Israel speakers and allowing extremely violent Arab and leftist “protesters” to attack pro-Israel speakers, driving them off campus); science (calls for boycotts of leading Israeli research institutes and termination of cooperation agreements); and numerous other examples.

Israel has consistently forfeited her leverage in the world of technology, medicine, research, and military development against supporters of the Palestinian Arab and other anti-Semitic coalitions, letting them “off the hook,” consequentially further empowering their supporters and resulting in even more aggressive tactics/attacks against Jews and the State of Israel.

Progressive narratives embody fundamental assumptions by which any and all actions by the State of Israel are interpreted and presented negatively by the progressive media and within academic circles. Techniques based on Psychological Warfare and the application of “Info war” can provide an effective response to deafen the dissonance that automatically erupts with Pavlovian consistency when pro-Israel, and pro-Zionist narratives are expressed.

Continuing on the current path of appeasing those at the forefront of Jew hatred demanding the end of Israel as the nation of the Jewish people, will only whet their appetites to question Israel’s legitimacy and continue to threaten and attack Jews wherever they may be.

An endeavor of this magnitude can only be executed by Israel’s governmental agencies or non-governmental NGOs in Israel which have a formidable reservoir of manpower capability with experience in the field of “psychological warfare” and the “info-war”.
CUNY Law Faculty Endorse Israel Boycott Resolution
The faculty of the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law have endorsed a student government resolution that backs the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, a school spokesperson told The Algemeiner on Wednesday.

The December 2021 resolution said the school’s work with Israeli academic institutions made it “complicit” in alleged war crimes committed by Israel, and condemned Hillel and other student organizations at CUNY for their support of the Jewish state.

At the time, the original measure was denounced by Jewish groups and rejected by CUNY Chancellor Matos Rodríguez, who said its call for an academic boycott was “contrary to a university’s core mission to expose students personally and academically to a world that can be vastly different to their own, particularly through international exchange programs.”

The CUNY Law spokesperson said the faculty endorsement took place on May 12, and did not disclose further details of the vote.

Sponsored by CUNY Law Students for Justice in Palestine and CUNY Law Jewish Law Student Association, the resolution was originally endorsed by more than 20 other student organizations. It said that exchange programs between CUNY and Israeli institutions like Haifa University and Tel Aviv University were all “a form of propaganda” that “normalize settler colonial and apartheid rule.”

It also called for the school to “cut all ties with organizations that repress Palestinian organizing,” and criticized student groups including Hillel, Bulldogs for Israel, and Students Supporting Israel at City College of New York.
CTV News Ottawa Broadcasts Extreme Anti-Israel Accusations by High School Students
On the morning of Wednesday, May 18, a group of students in an Ottawa Catholic high school staged a walk-out protest against Israel.

The incident, which took place at St. Francis Xavier High School in Gloucester, a suburb of Ottawa, was covered by CTV News Ottawa in their online and broadcast news report, “Ottawa school students protest discrimination of Palestinian people.”

While CTV News Ottawa is entitled to cover any news item they deem appropriate, in this instance, the broadcaster allowed itself to be a platform for the dissemination of extreme anti-Israel disinformation.

For example, one of the protesters, Lana Alhumsi, a grade 11 student, told the news report: “I’m here to support the protest for Palestine. This is a really big thing for me because I have family affected in the occupation of Palestine.”

This claim of an Israeli “occupation of Palestine,” while frequently made by anti-Israel activists, is simply without merit.

It is unclear what land Alhumsi is referring to specifically in her assertion, but her claim serves to effectively dismiss three thousand years of Jewish history in the land of Israel and write it off as merely an “occupation.”


Mehdi Hasan, Historical Revisionism, and “Nakba Day”
Resolution 194 does not create any “rights.” Even the very language Hasan quotes is not in the language of a “right.” To the contrary, it is worded as a recommendation (“should”) and is explicitly conditional on those refugees also being willing to “live at peace with their neighbors.” Considering the repeated wars and attacks launched against the Jewish state, and the fact that when the Palestinians last held an election, they voted for a terrorist organization that explicitly calls for Israel’s destruction, that condition has not been met.

Moreover, resolution 194 is not even “international law.” The resolution was adopted by the General Assembly, which has no binding powers and is limited to making recommendations.

Hasan’s claim of a legal “right” to “return” is objectively false. If he believes it to be a moral right, that’s his opinion. But to claim it as a legal right is baseless.

Hasan also claimed that 74 years after the “Nakba,” there are still millions of Palestinian refugees. Presumably, the host is relying on the unique UNRWA definition of a refugee applied only to Palestinians, a political definition far broader than that used for all other peoples. For example, if a Syrian refugee was to acquire American citizenship, she would cease to be classified (see article 1(C)(3)) as a refugee. Contrast that with, for example, Rashida Tlaib – the cosponsor for the “Nakba Bill” – who is still considered a “refugee” under the UNRWA definition notwithstanding her American citizenship and considerably powerful position as a member of Congress.

Further exposing the absurdity of such a definition, Hasan claims that those Palestinians residing in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are “refugees.” In other words, individuals who never left their homes are somehow considered “refugees.”

In reality, far from there being “millions” of Palestinian refugees, there are likely fewer than 200,000 actual Palestinian refugees under the standard definition. Failing to acknowledge the unique political definition applied only for Palestinians fundamentally misleads viewers.
A statement by then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo regarding UNRWA refugee numbers.

The MSNBC host has recently displayed a willingness to apply double standards to demonize the Jewish state. As his latest rant demonstrates, his repertoire of dishonesty also includes the use of revisionist history.
The Times legitimises Palestinian 'Jenin massacre' libel
An analysis in The Times by their Diplomatic Editor Roger Boyes (“Accident or assassination, Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing risks trouble in the West Bank”, May 11) provides context concerning the killing of the Al Jazeera journalist in Jenin.

Here’s the first and relevant paragraph:
The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, an Al Jazeera journalist, has sent ripples of concern across the Middle East. In part that was down to the historic echo of trouble in Jenin, the West Bank Palestinian camp and neighbourhood that saw fierce fighting over two decades ago in the Second Intifada. At the time Palestinians put the death toll at 500 and talked of mass graves containing thousands more. Later those figures were revised down but Jenin and its fightback against Israel has established itself in the popular Arab imagination as a centre of hardy resistance. Trouble in Jenin rarely stays in Jenin.

To describe Palestinian ‘claims’ that “500” Palestinians were killed, with “thousands” more dead in “mass graves“, as a result of an IDF military operation in Jenin in 2002 – part of a larger operation in response to deadly suicide bombings, a large number of which eminated from the city – as figures which were merley “revised down” is extraordinarily misleading.

They weren’t Palestinian “claims”, but Palestinian propaganda – fake news, full stop!
BBC’s ECU partly upholds eleven-month-old complaint
Almost a year ago Mr Stephen Franklin made a complaint to the BBC about news bulletins aired on BBC Radio 4 on June 3rd 2021.

Those news bulletins included the inaccurate claim from the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Yolande Knell that the new Israeli government that was being formed at the time “will include for the first time ever in Israeli politics some Arab law makers”.

On July 23rd 2021 BBC Complaints acknowledged that the statement was inaccurate and claimed that it had been amended in subsequent news bulletins. However Mr Franklin pointed out that the error had in fact been repeated in additional bulletins and in November 2021 the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit informed him that it would consider his appeal.

On May 12th 2022 the ECU informed Mr Franklin that his complaint had been partly upheld.
90-year-old Jewish man allegedly pushed to his death in Lyon, France
A dispute between neighbors in France ended with the death of a 90-year-old Jewish man, according to police, who do not suspect an antisemitic motive.

Police arrested a 51-year-old neighbor of the deceased, René Hadjaj, sometime after Hadjaj’s death on Tuesday evening outside his home in Lyon in eastern France, the Tribune Juive Jewish newspaper reported on Friday. The suspect had pushed Hadjaj to his death from an elevated story of their residential building, prosecutors told Le Progrès, a local newspaper.

Le Progrès reported that police had initially investigated a possible antisemitic motive but have now excluded it. They believe the incident was the result of an argument that was unconnected to the fact that Hadjdaj was Jewish. French media have not reported the identity of the suspect or other details about him.

Reports about the incident Friday evoked anger and disbelief among multiple French Jews on social networks and beyond.

Elements of the case are reminiscent of the death of Sarah Halimi in 2017. Her neighbor, Kobili Traore, killed her and threw her body from the window of her third-story apartment while he shouted about Allah.
Israel’s Perilous Moment, Then and Now
In his survey of the pro-Zionist journalism of the time, Herf devotes a lot of attention to Stone’s reports of the voyage he took aboard an “illegal” ship carrying Holocaust survivors to Palestine and the ship’s attempts to dodge the British Naval blockade. Stone’s personal dispatches were a spectacular example of courageous journalism, and the widely praised book he wrote about his experience, Underground to Palestine, had a big impact on the American debate over the Jewish State.

It’s too bad that Herf doesn’t discuss Stone’s next book, This is Israel, published in late 1948 by a major US publishing house. In my view, this second volume was even more important to the pro-Israel cause than his first. In Underground to Palestine, Stone expressed a preference for a bi-national state in Palestine that would satisfy the aspirations of both Jews and Arabs. But by the time Stone returned to Israel in May 1948, just as the Jewish state was about to be invaded by the Arab armies, he realized that no compromise was possible and that Israel had to win the war or die.

This Is Israel opens with a glowing forward written by Bartley Crum, publisher of PM. Crum writes that through Stone’s account of the Jews’ struggle for independence, “we Americans can warm ourselves in the glory of a free people who made a two-thousand-year dream come true in their own free land.” Indeed, Stone’s text reads like a heroic epic intended to generate support for the Israeli war effort. He calls the young state a “tiny bridgehead” of 650,000 faced by 30 million Arabs. “Arab leaders made no secret of their intentions,” Stone writes, and then quotes the head of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam, as follows: “This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.”

Significantly, Stone blames Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Arab Higher Committee for creating the Palestinian refugee crisis. The Palestinian leaders reminded him of the fascists he had fought with his pen since the Spanish Civil War, and he ticks off the names of Nazi collaborators leading Palestinian military units attacking Jewish settlements after passage of the UN partition resolution. “German Nazis, Polish reactionaries, Yugoslav Chetniks, and Bosnian Moslems flocked [into Palestine] for the war against the Jews,” Stone writes.

Though it’s not part of Jeffrey Herf’s book, I found myself thinking about the historical ironies that led the major political players during the struggles over the creation of Israel to eventually switch sides. Perhaps the most consequential example of this turnabout occurred when the Stalin regime reverted to its historical anti-Zionism, even criminalizing Zionist activism. Alarmed by the euphoric reception Golda Meir received from Russian Jews during her ambassadorial visit to the USSR in 1948, Stalin began to obsess about the threat posed to the Soviet Union by Jewish disloyalty. As a result, the Soviets unleashed the big lie that Israel was actually a creation of Western imperialism—propaganda that the Arab world was happy to embrace.

Six years later, the British and French governments collaborated with Israel in a joint military action against Egypt to obtain free passage through the Suez Canal, an operation aborted following pressure from the Soviet Union, the UN, and the US. But from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations onwards, successive American governments began to cast a friendlier eye on Israel as a potential military ally in the Middle East.

The most radical ideological change of direction regarding Israel occurred within the ranks of American journalism. By the late 1960s, the Nation had turned into a hot bed of anti-Israel commentary, as had many other leftist and liberal publications. In an essay for the New York Review of Books after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, I.F. Stone, by now an icon of American journalism, castigated the Zionists for “moral myopia” and their lack of compassion for the Palestinians. Henceforth, most of the liberal media would dwell endlessly and disproportionately on Israel’s imperfections.

None dared recall that, only a few years before, Stone and the editor of the Nation had forensically documented the collaboration between the Palestinian Arab leadership and the Nazis, nor that these left-wing journalists had once argued passionately that the birth of Israel was one of the great moral triumphs of the 20th century. It is to Jeffrey Herf’s credit as an historian and scholar that he has provided this important reminder of who actually defended and opposed international justice for the Jewish people 75 years ago.
Ancient Coins From Jewish Revolt Against Romans Among Trove of 1,800 Stolen Artifacts Recovered in Israel
In one of the biggest recoveries in the country’s history, Israel has seized more than 1,800 ancient artifacts, including stolen coins dating back to the Bar Kochba revolt, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said Thursday.

During a raid in the central Israeli city of Modi’in on Sunday, police and the IAA’s theft prevention unit seized stolen artifacts at the home of an illegal antiquities dealer. Among the items were silver coins from the 1st-century Great Revolt against the Romans, inscribed with the words “Holy Jerusalem;” coins bearing the name “Shimon,” the first name of the Jewish leader of the 2nd-century Bar Kochba revolt; and a bronze figurine, among other rarities.

During a search of the dealer’s home, inspectors found ancient items with traces of fresh dirt, suggesting the objects were recently retrieved from illegal excavations at archeological sites around Israel. The police also found dozens of coins inside addressed postal envelopes, ready for shipment to recipients abroad.

“It’s heartbreaking to think about the many antiquity sites with heritage values that have been destroyed to make money from merchants,” IAA’s antiquities trade inspector Ilan Hadad said. “It’s the history that belongs to all of us, which can no longer be restored.”

Among the seized artifacts are silver coins that date back to the Hellenistic period, others from the Persian and Hasmonean periods, and bronze coins from the Roman era and various Jewish coins.

Hadad said the suspect is believed to have traded antiquities without a license for a long period, and has allegedly smuggled thousands of coins from Israel abroad. The man confessed to illegal trading, smuggling hundreds of coins, and buying pirated coins from thieves and illegal traders in the Palestinian territories, bringing them into Israel illegally.


Jewish pilgrims celebrate Lag B'Omer in Djerba, Tunisia



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