Friday, November 10, 2023

11/10 Links Pt2: Israel’s Blueprint for a Revival of the West; The Mindset of Our Anti-Semites; Yale Law Students for Hamas; Columbia Uni suspends SJP, JVP

From Ian:

Saul Singer and Dan Senor: Israel’s Blueprint for a Revival of the West
Israelis are not lonely, and this probably goes far in explaining an extraordinary anomaly: according to the last UN World Happiness Report, Israel is the fourth happiest country in the world.

In perhaps the greatest sign of confidence in the future, Israelis have by far more children than any other wealthy democracy. It is an iron law of demography that as countries become more economically productive, they become less reproductive. There are no exceptions. Every other wealthy democracy is well below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1—the OECD average is 1.6 children per woman.

But Israel has been at about 3.0 for the last 25 years. And it is not just because of the ultra-orthodox. Having three children is about the norm in secular Tel Aviv, and having four is not uncommon. One television report even claimed that “four is the new three.” (Compare this to Japan, the world’s oldest country, where more adult diapers than baby diapers are sold each year.)

Israelis not only have larger families but closer ones. While short distances help—you can drive all of Israel, top to bottom, in seven hours—it is not the only reason that three generations of families get together nearly every week on Shabbat. While the world is plagued with a loneliness epidemic and “deaths of despair”—that is, deaths from suicide, alcohol, and drug abuse—Israel has one of the lowest levels of such deaths in the OECD.

Meaning over Materialism
“The incredible thing is that the tech CEOs—if they were not drafted themselves— not only personally dropped everything to join the war effort, but also encouraged all their employees to do so,” said Adi Soffer Teeni, the head of Facebook’s Israel development center.

Over 24 hours, beginning the morning of October 7, a team of 20 people from different tech companies built a system using AI and facial recognition to identify missing people—many of them kidnapped—from videos posted by Hamas on social media. It would have been impossible for the military or the government to have built such a system so quickly.

Tech volunteers also built an app with a “rescue me” button, following the national trauma of thousands of people trapped in safe rooms or hiding in fields waiting for 18 hours or more to be saved. They created the equivalent of an Airbnb system to keep track of empty hotel rooms around the country that could be used by evacuees in need, and a volunteer-powered personalized delivery service to get people across the country their meals and medicines.

Some of the top tech CEOs in Israel joined the effort full time. Eynat Guez, the founder and CEO of the hot start-up Papaya Global, was put in charge of creating an airlift of military supplies, such as ceramic flak jackets. Michal Beinisch, another founder, headed up procurement, sourcing supplies from various countries. “Our people were ten times overqualified for what they were doing. If you asked me if it were possible to build a start-up this fast, I would have said no way,” Israeli venture capitalist Gigi Levy-Weiss told us. Imagine if America went to war. Would Silicon Valley’s start-up founders offer themselves up in this way?

Israel is a changed country after October 7. But one of the changes is in the way that these values now permeate even parts of society that had seemed immune to them.

As the Israeli public intellectual Micah Goodman put it, “We’re not supporting the government. We’re not waiting for the government. We’re not waiting for Israel. We are Israel.”

The war reporter Sebastian Junger writes that “Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” The exception to this is modern Israel, where Israelis feel necessary. They take ownership of their fate. They feel they have a personal responsibility in building—and now rebuilding—their country.

While Israel may at this moment look like the last place other countries should emulate, look closer. In Israel’s hidden societal strength lie not only the seeds of Israel’s revival, but a possible blueprint for the revival of the West.
Yisrael Medad: Jews supporting the ideology of elimination
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee published a position paper on Aug. 15, 1967 in reaction to the Six-Day War, in which they wrote of the “Zionists … illegal takeover of Palestine” and that “the United Nations partition plan … was not legal under the Charter of the United Nations and was never approved by any African, Asian or Middle-Eastern country.” In fact, already in the June-July 1967 issue of the SNCC newsletter, one can find a semblance of the current theme of intersectionality in the explanation of the editors that African-Americans must know and understand what “our brothers are doing in their homelands” in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Furthermore, the SNCC asserted in August that “Israel is and always has been the tool and foot-hold for American and British exploitation.” In addition to referring to a conspiracy theory about the Rothschilds, the statement ends:

“America has worked with and used powerful organized Zionist movement to take over another people’s home and to replace these people with a partner who has well served America’s purpose … to exploit and control the nations of Africa, the Middle East and Africa.”

By 1973, as a result of Maxime Rodinson’s treatise that originally appeared in French in 1967 (having been written in 1966) titled “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?”, the portrayal of Zionism and Israel as illegitimate and representing the worst example of what the New Left opposed was well entrenched. The foundations for today’s thought framework were being constructed already then.

Thus, in 2018, one could read at the OpenDemocracy website, in total falsification, that: “The first European Jews landed on the shores of Palestine and established early settlements in the 19th century. In 1948, Zionist forces systematically took over land. … The foundations of Israel are rooted in a colonial project that has modernized its face but continues to subject Palestinians … .” And slowly, but surely, this framework of the conflict settled into the minds of academics and then into university teaching staff and then into the minds of the students.

But what was required was a specific Jewish twist to this process, an obversion of the simple truth. This was provided by the neo-Marxist progressive camp that was developing.

Its eventual formulation was provided by journalist Peter Beinart, writing in The New York Times on Oct. 23 that “Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.” An earlier version of this catchphrase was that of sociologist Na’ama Carlin, dual Israeli-Australian citizen, who penned “No liberation until Palestinian liberation” in Eureka Street on April 16, 2018. In July of that year, marchers of IfNotNow carried a banner, seen in New York magazine, which read “The Jewish Future Demands Palestinian Freedom.” The fates of the two peoples were being intertwined, although there was no value equivalency—historical, cultural, literary, religious or legal in any way.
Victor Davis Hanson: The Mindset of Our Anti-Semites
Civilian casualties
Campus activists scream that Israel has slaughtered “civilians” and is careless about “collateral damage.” They equate retaliating against mass murderers who use civilians to shield them from injury, while warning any Gazans in the region of the targeted response to leave, as the moral equivalent of deliberately butchering civilians in a surprise attack.

So did protestors mass in the second term of Barrack Obama when he focused on Predator drone missions inside Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen to go after Islamic terrorists who deliberately target civilians?

At the time, the hard-left New York Times found the ensuing “collateral damage” in civilian deaths merely “troubling.” No matter—Obama persisted, insisting as he put it, “Let’s kill the people who are trying to kill us.” Note Obama did not expressly say the terrorists in Pakistan or Yemen were killing Americans, but “trying” to kill Americans. For him, that was, quite properly, enough reason “to kill” the potential assassins of Americans.

What would the Harvard President today say of Benjamin Netanyahu saying just that about Hamas?

We have no idea how many women, children, and elderly were in the general vicinity of a targeted terrorist in Pakistan or Yemen when an American drone missile struck. Then CIA Director John Brennan later admitted that he had lied under oath (with zero repercussions), when he testified to Congress that there was no collateral damage in drone targeted assassinations.

Obama was proud of his preemptive assassination program. Indeed, in lighthearted fashion he joked at the White House Correspondence Dinner about his preference for lethal drone missions, when he “warned” celebrities not to date his daughters: “But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you, ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming. You think I’m joking.”

Did the campuses erupt and scream “Not in my name” when their president laughed about his assassination program? After all, Obama had also admitted, “There is no doubt that civilians were killed who shouldn’t have been.” Did he then stop the targeted killings due to collateral damage—as critics now demand a cease fire from Israel?

“Genocide”
Genocide is now the most popular charge in the general damnation of Israel, a false smear aimed at calling off the Israeli response to Hamas, burrowed beneath civilians in Gaza City.

But how strange a charge! Pro-Hamas demonstrators the world over chant “From the River to the Sea,” unambiguously calling for the utter destruction of Israel and its 9 million population. Are the Hamas supporters then “genocidal?”

Is genocide the aim of Hamas that launched over 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities without warning? What is the purpose of the purportedly 120,000 rockets in the hands of Hezbollah if not to target Israeli noncombatants? Is all that a genocidal impulse?

Do Hamas and Hezbollah drop leaflets to civilians, as does Israel, to flee the area of a planned missile attack—or is that against their respective charters?

Hamas leaders in Qatar and Beirut continue to give interviews bragging about their October 7 surprise mass murdering of civilians. They even promise more such missions that likewise will be aimed at beheading, torturing, executing, incinerating, and desecrating the bodies of hundreds of Jewish civilians, perhaps again in the early morning during a holiday and a time of peace.

Is that planned continuation of mass killing genocidal? Does the amoral UN recall any other mass murdering spree when the killers beheaded infants, cooked them in ovens, and raped the dead?

Perhaps students at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Stanford will protest the real genocide in Darfur where some half-million black African Sudanese have been slaughtered by mostly Muslim Arab Sudanese. Did the Cornell professor who claimed he was “exhilarated” on news of beheaded Jewish babies protest the slaughter of the Sudanese? Did the current campus protestors ever assemble to scream about the Islamists who slaughtered the indigenous Africans of Sudan?

Are professors at Stanford organizing to refuse all grants and donations that originate from communist China? Remember, the Chinese communist Party has never apologized for the party’s genocidal murder of some 60-80 millions of its own during the Maoist Cultural Revolution, much less its systematic efforts to eliminate the Uyghur Muslim population?

These examples could easily be expanded. But they suffice to remind us that the Middle-East and Western leftist attacks on Israel for responding to the October 7 mass murdering are neither based on any consistent moral logic nor similarly extended to other nations who really do practice apartheid, genocide, and kill without much worry about collateral damage.

So why does the world apply a special standard to Israel?

To the leftist and Islamist, Israel is guilty of being:
1) Jewish;
2) Too prosperous, secure, and free;
3) Sufficiently Western to meet the boilerplate smears of colonialist, imperialist, and blah, blah, blah.
Yale Law Students for Hamas
In its own telling, Yale Law School's Schell Center for International Human Rights seeks to "equip lawyers and other professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to advance the cause of international human rights."

It has educated students and human rights professionals on atrocities large and small, issuing a detailed report last year on ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and proposing a framework in mid-September to moderate "indirect hate speech online"—whatever that means.

But six days after Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre and kidnapping of over 1,600 Israelis, the center was silent.

On Oct. 13, a Jewish law student implored the center to speak out.

"Don't stay silent in the face of this genocide," the student wrote in an email—reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon and the Free Press—to James Silk, a Yale Law School professor and the co-director of the Schell Center. "Be a leader for human rights."

Silk replied that the center was still deciding whether to address the massacre. The situation, he said, was "complex."

"We at the Schell Center are trying very hard and earnestly to do what is … in some calculation, best for our responsibilities and our community," Silk wrote. "That is more complex than people hurt so directly by last week's atrocities in Israel might feel."

The need to appreciate the complexity of human rights atrocities—and the idea that those experiencing them secondhand can't see the larger picture—seems to be a recent development. Last year, the Schell Center sponsored an event on Israeli "apartheid" with Omar Shakir, a pro-Palestinian activist, as its sole speaker. "There is consensus today in the global human rights movement, spanning the major Israeli, Palestinian and international organizations, that Israeli authorities are committing the crime against humanity of apartheid against millions of Palestinians," materials advertising the event read.

In fact, the relationship between Israel and the West Bank is considerably more "complex" than the Oct. 7 massacre, which has been condemned as a war crime by all major human rights groups, including those critical of Israel. The Schell Center's willingness to address one issue but not the other rankled some Jewish students, who slammed the double standard in an open letter to alumni of Yale Law School.

"What kind of 'Center for International Human Rights' would refuse to host an event condemning the largest pogrom since the Holocaust," the students wrote on Oct. 20. "Does the Schell Center not think that Israelis are entitled to human rights, too? Or is it perhaps because they were Jewish?"


Bret Stephens: Lessons Israelis Learn from the Hamas Attack
Not the least of Hamas' aims was to kill Jews for its own sake, to instill a sense of terror so visceral and vivid that it would imprint itself on Israel's psyche for generations. In that, it has succeeded. Israelis are under no illusions that had the Hamas terrorists been able to kill 100 or 1,000 times as many of them as they did on Oct. 7, they would have done so without hesitation.

Hamas' goal is fundamentally homicidal: to end Israel as a state by slaughtering every Jew within it. How can critics of Israeli policy insist on a unilateral ceasefire if they can't offer a credible answer to a reasonable Israeli question: How can we go on like this?

The issue of Israel's internally displaced people gets short shrift in most news accounts. But it's central to the way in which Israelis perceive the war. There are now more than 150,000 Israelis - proportionately the equivalent of 5.3 million Americans - who were forced out of their homes by the attacks of Oct. 7. Small cities like Sderot, near Gaza, and Kiryat Shmona, near Lebanon, are now mostly ghost towns.

Israeli military planners have been war-gaming an invasion of Gaza for decades and have tools and tactics that can flush Hamas fighters out of their maze of tunnels. The Israeli public is not likely to be swayed by civilian casualties into supporting any kind of ceasefire in the military campaign until Hamas is defeated and the hostages are returned. Israelis spent 18 years watching Hamas turn to its military advantage every Israeli concession - including free electricity, cash transfers of Qatari funds, work permits for Gazans, thousands of truckloads of humanitarian goods. Israelis won't get fooled again.

I went to see Amir Tibon, a correspondent for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. Tibon became internationally famous last month after his family's rescue by his 62-year-old father, Noam (a retired general), when his kibbutz was overrun by Hamas terrorists. I asked Amir what needed to change going forward. His first answer: More people would need permits to carry personal sidearms.
Col. Richard Kemp: If anyone can rescue the hostages, it's the IDF

Douglas Murray: Oct. 7 got quickly knocked down the news agenda, the world must know more about it
Prominent British author Douglas K. Murray is in i24NEWS studios to discuss the global spike in antisemitism and its link with the mass immigration from Muslim-majority counties, and the tragedy of the October 7 massacre.


Israeli doctor recounts 'apocalyptic' October 7
On October 7, Dr. Ori Galante was saving lives in a southern Israeli hospital while his family were fighting for theirs. At one point he was sent a video of his elderly aunt on a motorcycle, sandwiched between two gunmen. He speaks to i24NEWS' Guy Azriel.


Editor's Notes: Why they tear down hostage posters

Bereft mother 'stunned' after grinning Londoner tears down posters of kidnapped daughters

Detroit police REFUSE to name suspect arrested for murder of Jewish synagogue leader Samantha Woll - but say they're at 'critical juncture' in the case

JPost Editorial: Journalists embedded with Hamas on Oct. 7 violated all media redlines

Cotton: Investigate news outlets over freelancers ‘embedded with Hamas’

AP Was Warned in 2018 About its Hamas ‘Journalist’

Ben Shaprio: These “Journalists” Work for Hamas
Hamas supporters in the press are now claiming that Israel is intentionally targeting Palestinian journalists. Who in their right mind thinks that Israel would actually do this?


Line between ‘terrorist militant and journalist’ was blurred in Hamas attack
There are revelations about the media’s role in covering the October 7 Hamas terror attack with an investigation lifting the lid on the line between terrorist militant and journalist being blurred.

The investigation by Honest Reporting found photo journalists used by the AP, CNN the New York Times and Reuters positioned themselves in the middle of the terror attack so they could take photos and collect video.

Sky News Digital Editor Jack Houghton said this is like knowing a plane is about to be hijacked but instead of reporting that and saving lives, you let it happen.

“Either to get a good photo or because you agree with the motives,” he said.

Mr Houghton said the findings also raise questions about advanced knowledge.

“For journalists with camera gear to find themselves embedded with a terror cell, they must have had advanced notice of the attack.

“You don't just teleport into a situation like this. It would have taken sources, planning and time.”




Columbia University suspends SJP, JVP chapters

What’s really at the root of anti-Jewish hate on college campuses

California Legislative Jewish Caucus outraged at antisemitism ‘explosion’ at state universities

Jewish billionaire resigns from Board of Columbia Business School over 'blatantly anti-Jewish student groups' on campus

‘Holocaust 2.0’ graffitied on the University of Maryland by pro-Palestinian student activists

LA charter school housed at synagogue tells 1st-graders about ‘genocide of Palestine’

Anti-Semitic Slogans Projected on UPenn Buildings

Anti-Israel Protesters Disrupt Cornell Jewish Student and Others Testifying About Campus Anti-Semitism

Jewish MIT Students Warn Campus ‘Not Safe for Jews,’ Describe Hostile Environment Amid Anti-Israel Protests

BBC executive admits flawed Israel war coverage could endanger British Jews
A senior BBC executive has admitted that errors in its news coverage of the Israel could endanger British Jews - but insisted such mistakes were inevitable because of the “fog of war”.

Rhodri Talfan Davies, the BBC executive in charge of local and regional outlets, made the admission while addressing an audience of around 300 community members at South Hampstead United Synagogue on Wednesday evening.

The event, organised by the Campaign Against Antisemitism and intended to address community fears, saw Davies and David Jordan, the head of the BBC editorial policy department that issues reporting guidelines, respond to questions put to them by the group's CEO, Gideon Falter.

At times, the atmosphere grew heated, with members of the audience claiming that the BBC was “institutionally antisemitic” - a claim that the two executives vehemently denied.

“I can accept the criticisms that have been made about our news coverage,” Jordan said.

“But the idea that the BBC anyway endorses or has antisemitism at its core? I just can’t agree.”

Davies’s acknowledgement that inaccurate reports might have “real world” consequences for British Jews came after Falter asked him about the BBC’s reporting of the blast at the Al-Ahli hospital on 14 October, when correspondent Jon Donnison stated he believed it could not have been caused by anything other than an Israeli airstrike - a claim that has since been undermined by evidence that it was the result of a rocket fired from inside Gaza that fell short.

In the wake of the report, Falter said, the CAA was notified of physical threats to Jews being posted on social media, including one threatening that “no Jew in London” should be left alive.

Davies said he realised that since the October 7 atrocities, “the fear factor for the Jewish community is significant”, citing police figures suggesting that antisemitic incidents have soared.
Outrage as BBC journalist who called Israel ‘terrorists’ returns to cover war

BBC’s Gritten airbrushes Ahed Tamimi’s record of incitement

CNN CONTINUES ERASING PALESTINIAN TERRORISM IN JUDEA & SAMARIA

CAMERA OP-ED: THE WASHINGTON POST WANTS YOU TO TRUST HAMAS

Washington Post is forced to remove 'racist' cartoon depicting 'grossly mischaracterized' Hamas terrorist with women and children tied to his body

Issa Slams Unprecedented Anti-Semitism in Democratic Party

9,500 Rockets Fired on Israel since War Started

IDF has struck 15,000-plus terror targets in first month of war

Poll: Nearly 70% of voters reject calls for ceasefire ‘surrender to Hamas’

MEMRI: Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Al-Safadi: Hamas Is An Idea And Ideas Do Not Die

Hamas ‘is an idea’ Israel can’t destroy, PA prime minister says

PMW: PA: Israel’s “attack” on Gaza is part of greater “satanic plan” against entire Arab world

MEMRI: Senior Hamas Official Sami Abu Zuhri: Israelis Are A Bunch Of Bloodsuckers Who Derive Pleasure From Killing; Their Military Is Mentally Defeated And No Match For People Who Eagerly Pursue Martyrdom

MEMRI: New York Shi'ite Imam Fadhel Al-Sahlani: Hamas Has Made A Big Difference For The Whole World – Maybe It Will Wake Up The Very Sleepy Arab World

MEMRI: Virulent Incitement By Al-Azhar: Praise For Palestinian Jihad Fighters; Israel Is Destined To Perish; U.S. Is The Greatest Satan; Jews Are Descendants Of Apes And Pigs



MEMRI: The Iranian Regime's Doubletalk About The October 7 Hamas Invasion Of Israel: To The Muslims – '"Death To America" Is Not Only A Motto But A Policy'; To The West – Iran Has No Part In The Israel-Hamas War

MEMRI: Head Of Iran-Backed Shi'ite Cultural Center Sayed Esa Hussaini Mazari, Tells Conference In Kabul: 'The Zionist Regime Is Affected By America's Defeat In Afghanistan,' Notes That October 7 Attack Happened On 22nd Anniversary Of U.S. Invasion Of Afghanistan

Melbourne man, 24, is charged after allegedly performing a Nazi salute outside court

85 Years After Infamous Nazi Pogrom, Holocaust Survivors Say They Once Again Feel ‘Terrified’

King Charles meets refugees who fled Nazis as children during the Second World War at London synagogue Commemorating rescue mission's anniversary Support shows no sign of slowing for NY cafe after pro-Hamas walkout



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