Tuesday, September 05, 2023

09/05 Links Pt2: For the OIC, “Human Rights” Is a Tool to Manipulate the West; Musk Fuels White Supremacist ‘Ban the ADL’ Campaign on Social Media

From Ian:

For the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, “Human Rights” Is a Tool to Manipulate the West
Currently consisting of 56 states in addition to the Palestinian Authority, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) began with an effort in 1969 to blame Israel and “Zionists”—falsely—for setting fire to al-Aqsa Mosque. The group, which touts itself as “the collective voice of the Muslim world,” has made a consistent habit of condemning the Jewish state, and to a lesser extent India, for supposed abuses. It also supports boycotts of Israel and sharply condemned Danish caricatures in 2005. One country it has not condemned is China, which is currently seeking to extirpate Islam from its northwestern territory by the most brutal of means. Georgia Gilholy writes:

This week an Organization of Islamic Cooperation delegation visited China. It offered slavish praise and deference to the state responsible for atrocities against millions of mostly Muslim Uighurs, which a British tribunal designated as genocide. . . . In a July 2019 statement, over a dozen OIC member states went so far as to cosign a letter that “commended China’s achievements in the field of human rights.”

The key factor behind the OIC’s double standards is obvious: money. The attempt to decimate and subjugate the Uighurs is an informal component of the “Belt and Road” Initiative. This program is scheduled to pour over $8 billion into a transcontinental “belt” of overland economic corridors. This “belt” and its corresponding maritime “road” will encompass a major chunk of the world’s Muslim-majority nations from Sudan to Indonesia.

Easy cash, however, is just one part of the story. Just as the dictators of Russia, Cuba, and North Korea collaborate with China on the international stage in a bid to normalize authoritarianism at large, administrations across the Muslim world likewise seek to reap the same nefarious rewards.

Cunning employment of moral relativism is at the heart of this arrangement. When engaging with democracies, OIC representatives gleefully employ the language of liberal human rights. When brown-nosing other autocracies and dispensing domestic law, however, these principles are mysteriously absent.
Did the Mufti-Hitler photo row influence Netanyahu’s plan to fire Yad Vashem head?
It is now believed that the Netanyahu government has backed down from its plan to fire Dani Dayan, a political appointee head of Israel’s flagship Holocaust memorial museum at Yad Vashem, after an international outcry. Dani Dayan was the target of criticism from veteran guides when he refused to re-instate a floor-to-ceiling photo of the famous meeting between the Palestinian wartime Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Adolph Hitler in 1941, because’ it seeks to harm the Palestinians’ image today’. We do not know if the Mufti-Hitler photo affair was a factor in the government’s intention to dismiss Dayan, but we reproduce a JNS News article by Lyn Julius explaining why the Yad Vashem head’s views on this matter are wrongheaded:

What impact did the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, have on the Nazi enterprise? According to Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, the Mufti’s role was limited – so marginal in fact that Dayan refused to re-instate a large photo of the Mufti meeting Hitler in November 1941. The floor-to-ceiling photo used to feature at the Museum before it was re-designed in the 1990s. Denying at first that the photo was ever at Yad Vashem, Dayan even told Haaretz: Those who want me to put it up aren’t really interested in the Mufti’s part in the Holocaust, which was limited anyway, but seek to harm the image of the Palestinians today,” he says. “The Mufti was an antisemite. But even if I abhor him, I won’t turn Yad Vashem into a tool serving ends not directly related to the study and memorialization of the Holocaust. Hasbara, to use a term, is an utterly irrelevant consideration that shall not enter our gates.”

It is certainly true that the Mufti was marginal to the ‘final solution’: Benjamin Netanyahu was wrong to remark in 2018 that the Mufti ‘convinced’ Hitler to annihilate the Jews. However, there were instances when the Mufti, who was known to have visited Nazi camps and hobnobbed with Himmler and von Ribbentrop, proved even more extreme than the Nazis. In 1942, a plan to bring ten thousand Jewish children from Poland to Theresienstadt and exchange them for German civilian prisoners was dropped after fierce protests by the Mufti. The children were sent to their deaths. The Mufti’s Muslim SS units in the former Yugoslavia murdered tens of thousands. According to his memoirs, Hitler had given an explicit undertaking to the Mufti at their famous meeting in November 1941 that he would be allowed to solve the Jewish problem. ‘ The Jews are yours,’ Hitler said. The Mufti did had the satisfaction of exterminating the Jews in his sphere of influence – but his alliance with the Nazis was far more ideological than pragmatic.

But it is not the Mufti’s effect on the Nazis which Dayan ignores, but his impact on the Arabs. And here he had a massive effect – and many would argue, still has. Wherever he went in the Arab world, he stirred up trouble against the local Jews. He was a driving force behind the pro-Nazi coup in Iraq leading to the Farhud massacre of hundreds of Jews in Iraq in June 1941 – proof positive that anti-Zionism had spilled over into outright antisemitism. Escaping to Berlin when he was Hitler’s lavishly-funded wartime guest the Mufti and a group of Arab exiles pumped out poisonous propaganda from the short-wave transmitter at Zeesen, fusing anti-Jewish verses from the Qu’ran with modern anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.
Putin: West put ethnic Jew to rule in Ukraine to 'cover glorification of Nazism'
Russian President Vladimir Putin alleged in a television interview on Tuesday, without citing evidence, that Western powers had installed Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, as president of Ukraine to cover up the glorification of Nazism.

In seeking to justify its invasion of Ukraine, which it calls a "special military operation," Moscow accuses Kyiv's leaders of pursuing a neo-Nazi "genocide" of Ukraine's millions of native Russian-speakers - something Kyiv and its Western allies call a baseless pretext for a war of acquisition.

It was not the first time Putin had tried to associate modern Ukraine's democratically elected government with the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews in World War Two by Nazi German occupiers of Soviet Ukraine and their local collaborators.

Zelensky's Jewish identity
Zelensky, himself a native Russian-speaker who was democratically elected in 2019, has said some of his grandfather’s brothers were killed in the Nazi Holocaust, and has repeatedly rejected Russian accusations that he has supported neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

Putin told Russian television reporter Pavel Zarubin:
“Western curators have put a person at the head of modern Ukraine - an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins. And thus, in my opinion, they seem to be covering up an anti-human essence that is the foundation ... of the modern Ukrainian state," Putin said.

"And this makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, in that an ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and covering up those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine at one time - and this is the extermination of one and a half million people."

In answer to a request for comment, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Putin himself was disgusting "when he tries to justify mass crimes against citizens of another country with a monstrous lie."


Musk Fuels White Supremacist ‘Ban the ADL’ Campaign on Social Media
A group that includes some of the most vocal antisemites on social media has received an important boost from Elon Musk — the billionaire owner of the X platform, formerly known as Twitter — in their campaign to shutter the account of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), one of the best-known Jewish civil rights organizations in the US.

Last Thursday, several accounts began tweeting the hash tag #BantheADL apparently in response to a tweet by the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt.

Greenblatt’s posting noted his “frank and productive” conversation with newly-appointed Twitter chief Linda Yaccarino over the profusion of hate speech on the platform since Musk acquired it in October last year for $44 billion. Several organizations monitoring the platform have charged that antisemitism has surged in the year since Musk’s takeover, with a daily average of more than 12,000 “plausibly antisemitic” tweets, according to research carried out by CASM Technology, a tech firm, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think-tank.

In the hours after Greenblatt’s tweet, several white supremacist and far right activists began calling on X to close the ADL’s account — among them Andrew Torba, the CEO of the social media platform Gab that was used by neo-Nazi gunman Robert Bowers in the run-up to his massacre of 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue on Oct, 27, 2018, and Matthew Parrott, the founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party. The posts were among the top trending subjects on X for at least 72 hours.

Musk entered the fray by liking and then replying to a tweet by Keith Woods, an Irish neo-Nazi whose YouTube channel is followed by 50,000 subscribers. After Woods falsely accused the ADL of “financially blackmailing social media companies into removing free speech on their platform,” Musk responded that “the ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter” without offering any evidence. Woods answered by triumphantly tweeting, “Elon Musk likes my call to #BantheADL.”


X: A platform for free speech fragility
Elon Musk the CEO of X (formerly twitter) to sue the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) over accusations of Antisemtism. Claiming his platform rejects all forms of hate and citing defamation for his lawsuit. Legal expert and political analyst Daniel Pomerantz joins i24NEWS to break this situation down


Elon Musk claims ADL is 'biggest generator' of antisemitism on Twitter
Elon Musk has sparked a backlash after claiming the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) were “the biggest generators of antisemitism” on Twitter.

The owner of Twitter, which Musk has tried to rebrand as X.com, also asked his followers whether he should start a poll about banning the group.

In response to a video clip of conspiracy theorist presenter Alex Jones branding ADL as "pro-hitler", Musk added: "The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of antisemitism on this platform!”

The #BanTheADL hashtag has been embraced in recent days by white nationalists and others on the far right. Musk had “liked” a tweet launching the hashtag by Keith Woods, an Irish white nationalist and self-described “raging antisemite.”

Posting on August 31, Woods said: “The ADL’s favourite tactic is financially blackmailing social media companies into removing free speech on their platforms.

“Why should they have a platform on X to hold @elonmusk to ransom? It’s time to #BanTheADL.”

Andrew Torba, a Christian nationalist who founded Gab, a right-wing Twitter competitor has also endorsed the hashtag.

Woods’ tweet came a day after Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO, spoke with Linda Yaccarino, the boss of Twitter, about users trafficking in hate on the platform.

The ADL said they recorded large spikes in racist, antisemitic and homophobic content and harassment since Musk bought the platform last year.
Elon Musk Blames Jews for a Boycott Funded by a Non-Jewish Tech Billionaire
The ADL is a garbage leftist organization. It was never good for anything but under its current head, Jonathan Greenblatt, it’s become a generic woke group dedicated to intersectionality. I have spent over a decade exposing the ADL for what it is including, last week, for its decision to spend the anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom together with Al Sharpton in Washington D.C.

Last year, Musk met with a coalition of leftist groups, Color of Change (formerly founded by Van Jones) , the NAACP and the ADL and a number of others that were organizing boycotts of Twitter over ‘hate speech’.

A total of 40 organizations including the ADL, GLAAD, the NAAC,P Muslim Advocates, National Hispanic Media Coalition, United Church of Christ and many others urged advertisers to boycott Twitter.

Musk blamed these groups for “a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.”

Recently Musk rebooted these claims, but instead of addressing all of these groups which are still pressuring Twitter advertisers to drop their ads, he decided to blame only the ADL.

And while the ADL is a reprehensible group, there are currently 60 organizations in the #StopToxicTwitter coalition representing a range of leftist groups. Musk apparently decided it was easier to target the ADL.

And he didn’t just target the ADL, he began promoting a campaign by Keith Woods: an antisemitic Irish vlogger with a long ugly history of attacking Jews. Not the ADL, Jews.


Israeli minister’s scheduled visit to JW3 is cancelled after ‘internal pressure’
A planned visit by Israeli diaspora affairs minister Amichai Chikli to the JW3 community centre in north London was cancelled following “internal pressure” only hours before it was due to take place on Tuesday afternoon.

Jewish News understands that the scheduled engagement, during the controversial minister’s two-day visit to the UK, was eventually called off following “internal pressure” and “long-running concerns” about Chikli’s record of making inflammatory statements promoting “vitriol” against protesters opposing Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, his record of speaking out against LGBT equality, and his spreading of conspiracy theories and anti-Palestinian rhetoric.

Protesters from the Defend Israeli Democracy UK group had also been scheduled to gather outside JW3 to show their disapproval of the Likud government minister, ahead of his scheduled 5.30pm visit.

Sources confirmed to Jewish News that bosses at JW3 had faced growing questions and “internal pressure” over the decision to allow such a divisive political figure to go ahead with a visit to the community centre.

“Internal pressure eventually led to the Chikli visit being cancelled,” confirmed one insider.

In Westminister, a parliamentary committee scrutinising the government’s anti-Israel boycott bill was informed that Chikli had been “uninvited” to JW3, a sign of the “huge concern within the Jewish community here about the ascendency of the Netanyahu government and the rise of the far-right.”

Giving evidence to the committee Yachad’s Hannah Weisfeld informed MPs:”Today, we had a (Israeli) government minister here today, and he has just been uninvited to JW3, which is the main Jewish community centre in London because of his opinions, and because of his far-right positions.

“He was due to have a tour this afternoon, but he’s been uninvited in the last five minutes.”
California Professor Leading Push for Mandatory Ethnic Studies Classes a Staunch Anti-Zionist, Activists Warn
Over 70 religious, civil rights, and educational organizations led by the AMCHA Initiative, an antisemitism watchdog group, have sent a letter to the California Legislative Jewish Caucus — a voting bloc in the Golden State’s legislature — warning that a University of California (UC) professor leading the effort to require high school students to pass an ethnic studies class in order to graduate is also a prominent anti-Zionist activist.

Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz, recently co-founded the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), which declares on its website that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.”

Last month, Hong argued during a podcast interview that ethnic studies should teach “the extraordinary violence of Zionism, the settler colonial violence, [and] the militarism that is inflicted on Palestine and Palestinian people.” She added that “a critique of Zionism is part and parcel of the field of [ethnic studies].”

In the same interview, ICSZ’s co-founder Emmaia Gelman said academics should “tie [Zionism] to this much larger Western supremacy and white supremacy” and “de-link the study of Zionism from Jewish studies.”

The letter notes that Hong co-chairs a working group in the UC Academic Senate tasked with developing a proposal that would require applicants to schools in the UC system to take an ethnic studies course. The idea — inspired by AB 101, legislation approved in 2021 to make passing ethnic studies a requirement for high school graduation in California — outlines what UC would consider an acceptable ethnic studies course for admission.
Upcoming Muslim Association Of Canada Conference Features More Speakers With History Of Anti-Israel And Antisemitic Comments
On August 24, HonestReporting Canada published an important alert informing the news media and the general public, about statements seen as antisemitic by one featured speaker, Sheikh Nashaat Ahmed, at the upcoming Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) annual conference, scheduled for early September in downtown Toronto.

Subsequent to our alert and complaint sent to MAC, Sheikh Ahmed is no longer listed as a scheduled speaker on the MAC conference website, nor is he listed on the program itinerary. For its part, MAC published this release on August 30 committing to conduct a thorough review of this matter.

Regrettably, other speakers are scheduled to speak at the MAC conference who have problematic histories.

Another speaker, Fadel Soliman, an Egyptian-born lecturer who has described Islam as a “religion of resistance,” has reportedly spoken in support of men using physical punishment against their wives, saying that abuse is justified if a husband is displeased with his wife’s actions.

In a lecture given in the United Kingdom, it was reported that he told students that after two “non-physical” attempts to change a wife’s behaviour, “the next stage must involve something physical, in order to escalate the intensity of the warning”.

Another speaker, Osama Abuirshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine, has a long history of making offensive statements.

In a 2017 webinar entitled “Why BDS matters,” Abuirshaid, in our view, attempted to rewrite history and omit thousands of years of Jewish presence in Israel, telling listeners that “there is no, not even a single evidence that a (Jewish) Temple existed there,” in Jerusalem.

While anti-Israel detractors frequently attempt to diminish Jewish history for ideological reasons, there is extensive archaeological evidence of a Jewish Temple in the First Century CE.

Abuirshaid has accused “Israel firsters” of “double loyalty,” a common antisemitic trope which calls into question the loyalty of Jews living outside of Israel.
BDS Supporters Attack Academia, Pro-Israel Democrats, and More
The Princeton situation highlights the manner in which Israel-obsessed academics have come to dominate and shape discourse at universities, including the move of noted BDS supporter Marc Lamont-Hill from Temple University to the City University of New York.

Similarly, the appointment of anti-Israel activists as faculty and staff have been revealed in Britain. Reports there indicate that Islamic Student Association chapters have hosted viciously antisemitic talks from both Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and global jihadist Hizb ut-Tahrir speakers.

More positively, fallout from the American Anthropological Association (AAA)’s formal adoption of BDS has begun to expand. The organization’s decision was condemned by New York University President Linda G. Mills and Interim Provost Georgina Dopico, who noted that “academic boycotts contravene the concept of the free exchange of ideas, a key tenet of academic freedom.” There are reports of individuals resigning from the organization, but it is too soon to determine how widespread these might be.

As many commentators have noted, the AAA decision transforms it from an academic to a political organization, with a simplistic worldview of oppressor and oppressed, in which Jews are particular villains. The AAA resolution was endorsed, however, by a Latin American association of anthropologists.

In the cultural sphere, the manner in which the BDS movement associates Israel with all contemporary horrors, was demonstrated by a social media posting from Jewish Voice for Peace, linking “the climate disaster and exploitation Native Hawaiians are experiencing right now” with the fictitious “Tantura massacre,” where the Israeli government “built a parking lot over a mass grave of Palestinians murdered by Jewish militias in 1948.”

In the political sphere, with the election season heating up, charges and counter-charges related to Israel and anti-Zionism have been fully integrated into campaigns. A recent AIPAC-sponsored junket to Israel for House Democrats brought a slew of condemnations from the “Squad” and pro-BDS groups.

The Squad’s feud with AIPAC also included attacks on AIPAC’s support for pro-Israel candidates, including thus far unnamed challengers to individuals such as Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). This has included accusations by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that the organization was “funneling dark money” targeting “progressive, working-class candidates of color,” and that “We just got word: AIPAC is at it again. They’re trying to recruit an establishment executive to run against my brother in The Bronx, Jamaal Bowman.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) used the same “dark money” rhetoric in a series of social media ads, while Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) also described AIPAC as “a right-wing bully group that supports actual insurrection, white supremacists.”

At the same time, leading BDS group IfNotNow has targeted pro-Israel Democrats including Rep. Jerry Nadler (NY) and Rep. Dan Goldman (NY) specifically for accepting support from AIPAC.


Dozens of UK Universities Refusing to Adopt Leading Definition of Antisemitism, Watchdog Reveals
The definition of antisemitism adopted by dozens of governments and hundreds of civic institutions around the world has yet to be endorsed by 43 of Britain’s leading universities, a UK-based group campaigning against antisemitism revealed last week.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organization comprised of dozens of countries including the US and Israel, adopted a non-legally binding “working definition” of antisemitism in 2016. Since then, the definition has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and well over 1,000 global entities, from countries to companies. The US State Department, the European Union, and the United Nations all use it.

Despite the IHRA definition’s wide acceptance, however, dozens of universities in Britain have chosen not to adopt it, according to the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA).

“The arguments that these universities have deployed to justify their failure to adopt the definition do not hold water,” CAA said in a statement on its website, citing the University of Brighton and the University of Wales Trinity St. David as two schools that have not embraced the definition during a time of rising antisemitism around the world.

“Those that claim that their existing policies render the definition unnecessary misunderstand its purpose: the definition is not a policy on antisemitism but a definition of antisemitism,” CAA continued. “The claim, meanwhile, that the definition can have a ‘chilling effect’ on freedom of expression or inhibits criticism of Israel are also baseless canards.”

According to the definition, antisemitism “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
Israel in Hollywood: How The Jewish State Never Makes The Cut in Film Reviews
The reception to Israeli director Guy Nattiv’s biopic on the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s role during the 1973 Yom Kippur War has been lukewarm at best.

The general consensus among professional critics is that it is a movie that “fails to deliver” with its “languid pacing,” and whose leading actress Helen Mirren “gets lost beneath layers of heavy prosthetics.”

And while the film appears to have gone down better with audiences — scoring 6.3 out of 10 on the ranking website IMDb — current box receipts of around $3.5 million suggest it may fall short of recouping its $30 million budget.

Yet, the generally negative reviews of ‘Golda’ appear to be part of a fairly recent trend in which films that pertain to Israel are not received well, including by some movie critics who use their write-ups as an excuse to fire subtle barbs at the Jewish state.
'Wake up, mate': Fighting antisemitism in Australian education
Australian students don't feel support of non-Jewish allies
As one student aptly stated, “A person in my class heiled Hitler to me and not a single professor/tutor or student did anything. The uni needs to step up.” Voices like this, along with the survey’s stark revelations, highlight a disconcerting reality that cannot be ignored, including the statistics that:

One in five Jewish students has chosen to stay away from campus to avoid antisemitism; 57% of students have concealed their Jewish identity to evade antisemitism; 84% would gain confidence in making a complaint if their university adopted an antisemitism definition.

These statistics are not just numbers, they represent the experiences of individuals who have felt the sting of prejudice.

Another student shared, “The anti-Israel narrative is so overwhelmingly strong on my university campus that I always hide this part of my Jewish identity… I would be nervous about being present at a Jewish society event if an Israeli flag was displayed.”

There is a lack of security in the knowledge that, without a definition of antisemitism, the local authorities and institutions don’t act or even have the right framework to do so. Despite the challenges, there is room for optimism and hope. The survey acts as a wake-up call, providing an opportunity for universities to acknowledge the issue and take proactive steps toward creating more welcoming and respectful environments.

The multicultural fabric of Australia is a strength that can be used to combat antisemitism as well. In the face of adversity, the Jewish community and its allies must stand united by utilizing education, open dialogue, and cultural exchange among other powerful tools.

By collectively working towards a brighter future, we not only honor the Australian anthem’s promise of being “one and free,” but also forge a real path towards a society where every individual is valued, respected, and free from discrimination.
Sky News Australia: 'My role is to wake people up': Anti-Semitism comes in 'various ways'
Actress and activist Noa Tishby says her role is to “wake people up” and understand that anti-Semitism comes in various ways.

“It comes from the far right, it comes from the far left, and comes from radical Islam, and we have to be able to call all of them out absolutely equally,” she told Sky News host Sharri Markson.

“The one on the left is slightly more hidden.”




Pharmacist's comment blaming 'Tory Zionists' for Grenfell fire was antisemitic, regulator rules
A pharmacist who linked the Grenfell Tower tragedy to “Zionists” will not lose his job despite the comment being branded antisemitic, the pharmaceutical regulator has ruled.

Nazim Ali, who is also a former director of the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), also attacked the Board of Deputies.

The managing partner of Chelsea Pharmacy Medical Clinic was filmed making the two controversial statements at a 2017 Al Quds Day demonstration, held annually on the last Friday of Ramadan.

Speaking just days after the Grenfell Tower fire, he said: “They are responsible for the murder of the people in Grenfell. The Zionist supporters of the Tory Party.”

Ali also said: “Any Zionist, any Jew coming into your centre supporting Israel, any Jew coming into your centre who is a Zionist, any Jew coming into your centre who is a member for the Board of Deputies, is not a Rabbi, he’s an imposter.”

His comments were reported to the Metropolitan Police who launched an investigation. The case was then passed to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), but they declined to prosecute.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) then attempted to launch a private prosecution in the High Court. But the CPS intervened just a week before the case was due to go to trial, saying it did not believe a prosecution would succeed and shut it down.
Louise Ellman who left Labour over antisemitism rejoins largest ever LFI delegation to Israel
Dame Louise Ellman, the former Labour MP who left the party over its failure to tackle antisemitism when it was led by Jeremy Corbyn and rejoined in 2021, has this week joined a delegation of prospective parliamentary candidates to Israel.

The delegation, which includes candidates standing in constituencies with thousands of Jewish voters, is being organised by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI).

Dame Louise told the JC she was “delighted” to be present, and was “heartened by the continued progress Labour has made back to re-building ties with the Jewish community and returning to its historic position as a friend of Israel and honest broker on the Middle East”.

None of the delegates had visited the region before. “They will have benefitted hugely from this experience, coming away with a much deeper understanding of the complexities of Israel and the wider region that will prepare them well for Parliament,” Dame Louise said.

Among the delegates are Dan Tomlinson, who is standing for the party in Chipping Barnet, Primesh Patel (Harrow West) and Graham Downie (Dunfermline and West Fife). During the week they are set to visit sites including Yad Vashem, the Old City of Jerusalem, the Gaza border region and a Palestinian refugee camp.

They are meeting senior Israeli and Palestinian politicians and officials.

Leading the group is Washington and Sunderland West MP Sharon Hodgson. She told the JC: “I’m delighted to be leading LFI’s largest ever delegation of parliamentary candidates to Israel this week. It is also fantastic to be joined by Louise.
When a Jew-Hating Islamist Organizes Events for Broward Public Schools
A radical activist who was forced off two Broward County, Florida School Board committees for her extremism has successfully worked her way back into public schools in the county, through activism on behalf of Islamist organizations with ties to terror. The activist is Naima Khan-Ghany, and her exploits, which include anti-Semitic posts on social media, have been well-documented. The activism is in the form of ‘Back to School Backpack Giveaways,’ which to unsuspecting schools most probably sounds innocuous and even admirable.

As of July 1st, Khan-Ghany was no longer affiliated with the School Board. In June, she was suspended from the two School Board committees she had served on, the Diversity Committee and the Human Relations Committee, the latter of which she chaired. Her suspension took place, after an article this author had written was published concerning Khan-Ghany’s affiliations with extreme Muslim groups and her own promotion of anti-Jewish bigotry.

Khan-Ghany has worked with a number of Islamist organizations, including the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the South Asian terror-linked Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). She has hosted shows for Al-Hikmat TV, the media arm of the Darul Uloom Institute (DUI), a past haven for high-profile al-Qaeda militants and whose imam/founder has been thrown off several Broward community boards for his hate-filled talks against homosexuals.

Khan-Ghany is an advisor to local chapters of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), an entity originally started by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Broward County MSA Council. She has used the group to promote extremists, including an imam who has called for violence against Jews and urged his followers to provide funding to Hamas.

Khan-Ghany has targeted Jews and Israel, herself. In May 2021, she made a series of posts on social media questioning Israel’s right to exist and calling for Israel’s outright destruction. She wrote that Israel’s claim of “self-defense” was a “usual excuse.” She posted a call for prayers for the “liberation of Palestine… from the river to the sea.” She called for a boycott of Israeli products. And she promoted videos equating Jews with Communists and Satanists and spewing age-old Jewish libels.


BBC admits 'Israeli forces are happy to kill children' comment fell below impartiality standards
Jewish community groups accused the BBC of being impartial and of demonstrating anti-Israel bias, and the broadcaster apologised the following day.

This apology described Gadgil’s language as “inappropriate” but also stressed the BBC had covered the operation “in an impartial and robust way”.

However, a further complaint was lodged by a viewer who claimed that “insufficient action had been taken to remedy the bias apparent in [Gadgil’s] statement.”

The BBC Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) has now acknowledged that Gadgil’s statement “fell below BBC’s standards of impartiality”.

In a statement it said: “The ECU accepted that, as phrased, the statement might have given viewers the impression that they were hearing the presenter’s personal view on a controversial matter, and that it therefore fell below the BBC’s standards of impartiality.”

It added that, as BBC News had “already acknowledged a problem with the interview” on its online “corrections and clarifications page”, it considered the complaint resolved. sufficient to resolve the issue of complaint.

The Israeli military launched the raid on the West Bank city of Jenin on July 3 under the orders of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. It was the largest-scale military operation the West Bank in 20 years.

During the 48-hour raid, Israeli forces killed 12 Palestinians and arrested around 100 terror suspects.
MSNBC Reaches a New Low With Shameless Anti-Israel Rants
MSNBC has done it again. The network’s talking heads, Mehdi Hasan and Ali Velshi, seem to be competing against each other in a despicable contest to trash Israel.

Throwing loaded words like “apartheid” or “racist” state, the two charlatans have clearly decided that the world’s most burning issue is the evil Zionist regime.

Unfortunately for them, their entire argument is flawed, contradictory and biased.

In a monologue this past weekend, Hasan shamelessly laments the fact that one cannot criticize Israel as an “apartheid state” without being labeled an antisemite. He then tries to prove his point by quoting “racist” remarks made by Israeli ministers.

But there are several problems with this twisted line of argument:

Firstly, Hasan may have forgotten that in a democracy, the opinions of government ministers do not reflect upon an entire nation. His claim may actually reflect back upon himself as someone who makes baseless collective racist accusations against the Jewish state.

Secondly, Hasan is simply sawing off the branch he is sitting on: He shows that there is freedom of speech in Israel, as well as the freedom to criticize – even when it comes to ministers whose remarks are scrutinized daily by local media. Why? Because Israel is a democracy.
BBC’s Knell dons her political campaigning hat once again
It is not difficult to determine when a report from the BBC’s Jerusalem bureau is part of a wider campaign on a particular topic rather than straightforward coverage of news. Such reports usually get more cross-platform exposure than regular news items and quite often, perusal of other media outlets will turn up similar reports from around the same time based on the same sources, which are often political NGOs.

On the afternoon of August 28th, the BBC News website published a report by Yolande Knell on both its ‘World’ and ‘Middle East’ pages under the headline “Palestinian fears grow amid rising Israeli settler attacks”. A filmed version of that report was aired on the BBC World News channel on the same day and an audio version was broadcast on the BBC World Service radio programme ‘Newsday’ (from 05:36 here) and on both editions of the same station’s ‘Newshour’ (from 07:10 here and from 37:37 here) as well as on the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘PM’ (from 18:11 here).

Earlier in the month both UN OCHA-oPt and the political NGO B’tselem had put out related press releases and several days before the appearance of Knell’s reports, other media outlets published a similar report by AP.

The theme of all Knell’s multi-platform reports is captured in this passage from her written item:
“Anti-occupation groups argue that as settlers have become emboldened by the current Israeli coalition government, settler attacks on Palestinians and their property have risen to a record high.”

Like the AP item, all Knell’s reports quote “the UN” – although the contributor concerned is actually a representative of the ‘UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory’ (UN OCHA-oPt) – without providing audiences with any information concerning that organisation’s record of anti-Israel activity and campaigning as required by BBC editorial guidelines on impartiality.
London-based Arabic outlet peddles antisemitism and support for terror
Last Thursday, a new antisemitic cartoon was published in London-based, Qatari–owned and Palestinian–run newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi.

Drawn by Syrian cartoonist Fahd al-Bahady, it depicts a mosquito-shaped Israeli soldier feeding off a puddle of blood from a (presumably dying or dead) Palestinian. The title reads “Israeli occupation delves into the Palestinian blood”:


A common counter-argument challenging the antisemitic nature of this cartoon and its likes would often focus on the fact that the evil insects, octopuses, viruses, beasts, reptiles and puppet-masters they show do not bear the ‘ordinary’ Jewish or Israeli image.

Rather, they have the specific characteristics of an Israeli soldier – green uniforms, helmets, bulletproof vests and M-16s. Supposedly, this would absolve the cartoonists of the antisemitism accusation, since they ostensibly attacked only the military occupation Palestinians are subjected to, or at worst the Israeli state – not Jews or Israeli civilians collectively.


US Open fan ejected after singing Nazi anthem at German player
A fan has been ejected from the US Open after German tennis star Alexander Zverev complained they were singing a Nazi-era version of the German national anthem.

Zverev was serving in the fourth set of his last 16 victory over Italy's Jannik Sinner at the Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York when the incident unfolded on Monday.

Zverev said he had heard the fan singing the opening words of Germany's Nazi-era anthem - "Deutschland Uber Alles".

The 12th-seeded Zverev approached umpire James Keothavong to complain about the alleged catcall during the incident.

Zverev told the umpire: "He just said the most famous Hitler phrase there is in this world. This is unbelievable."

A man wearing a blue baseball cap was singled out as the alleged culprit and then ordered to leave the arena.

Speaking after the match, he said: “He started singing the anthem of Hitler that was back in the day - Deutschland Uber Alles - it was a bit too much.
Memoirs of a Closet Conservative
Like a lot of professors, Peretz's true interest was politics. He became an activist early on. His prominence and effectiveness were guaranteed by his marriage to an heiress named Anne Labouisse, whose family was "astoundingly, alienatingly rich." Their money, however, was not so alienating that he refused to spend it. Candidates and causes flocked to him as if he were a milch cow with a thousand teats. (Perhaps this explains the unbuttoned shirts.) Starting as a radical in the 1950s, he gradually worked his way rightward, almost to the center, and eventually, on most subjects, well beyond.

A watershed moment came in 1967 when he organized a left-wing lollapalooza called the National Conference for New Politics that could have been scripted by Tom Wolfe. The leaders met at Peretz's seaside mansion on Cape Cod (natch) and were instantly at each other's throats (also natch). Later, the conference keynoter, Martin Luther King, was heckled by the black caucus, whose leader took the stage and proclaimed himself "dictator." A rabbi announced that all white men should be "castrated" because of slavery. The conference dissolved in an acid bath of anti-Semitism, but not before Peretz had an instructive peek into the future of the left.

The most enduring expression of his political interest was his editorship of the New Republic, a worthy, boring Democratic weekly that he decided to buy in 1974—"Anne, sweetie, where's the checkbook?"—and he built it rather quickly into an indispensable element of the country's political and intellectual life. The magazine's success over the decades was owing to his gift for recruiting clever, word-savvy liberals who, under his loose-reined oversight, became very good journalists, as editors and writers. Michael Kinsley, Leon Wieseltier, Charles Krauthammer, Emily Yoffe, Andrew Sullivan, Hendrik Hertzberg, Charles Lane, Ann Hulbert, Adam Kirsch… it's a long list. On every issue but one—the defense and survival of Israel is his consuming passion—he was happy to let everyone disagree. He describes his guiding editorial principle like so: "My bullshit goes in, so does yours." The magazine was often ferociously contentious and soon became beloved of a journalistic class that pretends to value contentiousness. (h/t MtTB)
FC Barcelona legends land in Israel to play against Maccabi Tel Aviv, Haifa veterans
A lineup of Barca Legends, former FC Barcelona greats, arrived in Israel on Monday, ahead of two matches this week against veteran Israeli players from Maccabi Tel Aviv and Maccabi Haifa.

Tuesday evening, at Bloomfield Stadium, the now middle-aged stars will go up against a team of former players for Maccabi Tel Aviv, including ex-captains Avi Nimni and Tal Ben Haim.

The Barca Legends include Brazilian ace Rivaldo Ferreira, one of the top goal-scorers in Barcelona history, and former forward for the team Javier Saviola.

“My expectations are high, but I have to lower them because what everyone wants and expects from us is not what will happen,” Nimni said during the team’s press conference at Tel Aviv’s Carlton Hotel, where the athletes are staying ahead of the first game.

“We’ve trained two times and although my body is betraying me, not letting me do the things I was once able to, it’s still very exciting,” he added.

When asked whether he’s the “Israeli Rivaldo,” Nimni quipped that such a statement is “flattering for me, but sad for him.”

“I’m very excited to return to Israel,” said Rivaldo, who visited two years ago to compete for Barcelona Legends against its longtime rival Real Madrid in front of an Israeli audience.

“All of us retired years ago, but we don’t like to lose any game, just like Maccabi Tel Aviv doesn’t like to lose. We’ll go on the field to win,” said Rivaldo.


Israeli TV hit Fauda returns for unexpected Season 5
Israeli hit television show Fauda is set to return to the screen for an unexpected Season 5, to the joy of fans all over the world.

The TV shows follows the action-packed antics of Doron Kabilio and his badass pals as they save Israel from yet another terrible terror attack. It is based on its creators’ personal experience from their service in Israeli military, and has raised the profile of the unique work carried out by undercover, Arabic-speaking security forces.

Since being picked up by streaming giant Netflix, Fauda has been delighting viewers in multiple locations, including countries with which Israel has no diplomatic relations, such as Lebanon and Qatar, where it reached top viewing spots.

In fact, the show is so successful that it prompted Hamas to issue a counterweight viewing option which, alas, has not been so universally welcomed.

According to Israeli media reports, while Season 4 was meant to be the series’ grand finale (and most certainly looked like it, if you viewed that season’s final moments), lengthy negotiations between the show’s producers and cable provider YES ended with an agreement to continue for another season.

The show has been applauded for providing viewers with a more-complex-than-usual look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and for giving substantial airtime to Arabic dialogue – a rare phenomenon in Israeli media.

The show’s cast includes some of Israel’s best loved actors and entertainers, such as Itzik Cohen, Neta Garti and Idan Amedi.

Fauda’s great success has resulted in creators Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff selling their production company, Faraway Road Productions, to Candle Media, which is headed by former Disney execs, for a cool $50 million.
Pompeo, Friedman guide viewers through ‘ancient mysteries’ of Israel’s ‘Route 60’
The political achievements in the Middle East of two of America’s most impactful diplomats, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, were rooted in their strong faith in God and the values imbued by the mystical stories of the Bible.

Now both out of politics, the diplomatic duo has teamed up once again to document some of their key geopolitical triumphs and the motivational religious underpinnings that guided them, while filming an all-access tour of Israel’s most sacred sites.

“Route 60: Israel’s Biblical Highway” is a trek down the road that runs down the center of modern Israel. The 146-mile highway connects several cities fundamental to both Judaism and Christianity, including Jerusalem, Hebron, Beit El, Shiloh, Beersheva, Bethlehem and Nazareth.

The unscripted tour was filmed over a four-day period by Friedman, a devout Jew, and Pompeo, a devout Christian. As Friedman says in the film’s opening: “Route 60 connects many holy sites and biblical events in what could be called the original Bible Belt. It has mile markers, human and divine, to memorialize the acts of celebration, suffering and salvation that are woven into Israel’s history.”

Most of the sites toured are located in the biblical provinces of Judea and Samaria, commonly referred to by many around the world as the West Bank. While many recognize the province for its millennia-old biblical importance, today many view the contested parcel only through the prism of a decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“I want people to care about Judea and Samaria,” Friedman told JNS. “I want them to stop thinking about it as some part of the world that is distant and removed from them, that doesn’t matter, that’s just a piece of territory that’s subject to violence or subject to disputes or subject to claims of legality or illegality.”

“There is a lot of apathy and a lot of ignorance about many of these places,” he added.
The Munich massacre reminds us we can rely only on ourselves
THE BLACK September terror group was an affiliate of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), whose goal was to destroy Israel through armed struggle. The mastermind of the Munich Massacre, Abu Daoud, had openly stated that Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman, approved the terror plot. The group demanded the release of over 236 Palestinian prisoners, most of which were held in Israeli prisons. If the prisoners were not released, they would kill the Israeli hostages.

What disturbs me about the following sequence of events is that while all this was happening, and the German authorities were at a loss for what to do, the Olympics continued as usual. While knowing about the hostage situation, Avery Brundage, the president of the Olympic Committee, declared that the games must go on.

The idea that Olympic athletes were celebrating and competing in the games while two Israelis lay dead and terrorists held nine others captive just yards away is an unimaginable reality. At the Olympic press center, monitors simultaneously streamed the athletic competitions and the building where the terrorists held the Israelis hostage. Journalist Dave Marash of the CBS network in the US stated, “Those simultaneous images flickering on those monitors struck me as the most incongruous, most inappropriate, most flat surreal visual memory of my life.”

It was about 10 hours into the hostage situation before the Olympic Committee halted the games. By then, every news crew pitched cameras outside the hostage building, and thousands of athletes walked to the building to watch and wait for the news.

German authorities turned down help from the Mossad, who, unlike them, had a counterterrorism unit. Instead, they began feeble negotiations with the terrorists while German police attempted to attack the terrorists with no real plan. In a tremendous oversight, the Germans realized that the world, including the terrorists, was watching their actions on live broadcasts. There was no way to surprise the terrorists and they had no information on what they were walking into. With cameras capturing their every move, the Germans could not confront the terrorists and resorted to an unorganized Plan B. A botched rescue attempt by the Germans resulted in the tragic cold-blooded murder of all nine hostages.

The Munich Massacre was the day that terrorism won and the world showed how, only 27 years after the Holocaust, they could once again sit aside and watch Jewish people murdered on German soil. It reminds me that as an Israeli, I do not have the luxury to take the security of my country or my fellow citizens lightly.

On September 5, we painfully honor the victims of the Munich Massacre: Yossef Gutfreund, Moshe Weinberg, Yossef Romano, Kehat Shorr, Amitzur Shapira, Andre Spitzer, Yakov Springer, Eliezer Halfin, Mark Slavin, David Berger, and Ze’ev Friedman.

May their memories be a blessing.


Israeli Air Force marks 20 years since symbolic flyover of Auschwitz
The Israeli Air Force on Monday marked the 20th anniversary of its historic flyover of Auschwitz.

On Sept. 4, 2003, three IAF “Eagle” (F-15) fighter jets flew over the former Nazi-run extermination camp in Poland, where more than one million Jews were murdered during World War II.

“We rose from the ashes of millions of victims, carrying their silent cry, saluting their heroism and promising to be a protector of the Jewish people and their country, Israel,” said the IAF pilots who made the flight at a ceremony on Monday.

In August 2020, a joint drill by the Israeli and German air forces included a historic flyover above the Dachau concentration camp, in memory of the victims of the Holocaust and of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.

Eleven Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered during the 1972 Summer Olympics in an attack carried out by the Black September Palestinian terrorist group.

The ongoing debate over the failure of the Allies to bomb Auschwitz continues to inspire anger and controversy to this day.




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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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