Saturday, November 11, 2023

11/11 Links: The passionate intensity of the know-nothing protester; Dershowitz calls out Obama's 'deep hatred of Israel'; Has the IDF finally learned to do PR?

From Ian:

The passionate intensity of the know-nothing protester
Of course the events of 7 October did happen. This is the bare minimum one should know before going on protests against Israel in its war with Hamas. But this conflict is a multi-volume history, and very few of us have mastered the complete set. Indeed, the past 75 years of Arab-Israeli conflict is a lifetime’s study and then some.

There are the wars, the personae, the negotiations, the demographic changes. There are the changes in the global power balance, the coming and going of the Cold War. There is the fall of Arab nationalism and the rise of Islamism, especially after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. And there are the changing calculations within the Arab world, such as the rising enmity between Saudi Arabia and Iran. And all that is before one gets into historical Zionism, into Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, and the Balfour Declaration…

Be realistic. No student could be expected to get to grips with all of that before taking a stance on the current conflict. But still the question remains: why have so many young people seemingly forgotten or chosen to doubt the horrors visited on Israeli civilians, only a month ago, and swung so decisively behind their murderous tormentors?

Some have attempted to explain this phenomenon by pointing to the influence of critical race theory and ideas of ‘decolonisation’. After all, various academic currents suggest that the darker skin in any conflict is a reliable proxy for virtue. And that the better-funded military and the smoother-running democracy is always suspect. Wokeness always favours the weak.

But getting properly into CRT and theories of decolonisation also involves some heavy reading, and we have long been a post-literate culture. No, the visual images of suffering in Gaza are vastly more persuasive and immediate.

And these are not the only images that young people are subjected to. They have also been exposed to powerful messaging from Hollywood for decades. They have repeatedly seen tales of brave and noble partisans fighting back against highly militarised, colonising forces, from Star Wars to Avatar to Dune.

But the more powerful, the better resourced, are not always in the wrong, despite what the movies say. And this is an important lesson that I do not think we take the time to teach: to not always believe that strength and resolve is cruelty, that might is necessarily wrong.

The most-quoted poem to describe the world we live in has for some years now been WB Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’. And especially the line, ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ Let us at least teach our children not to mistake one for the other. Especially when, on a rare occasion, the best display some conviction after all.
Snowflakes for Hamas
After the Oct. 7 attacks, over a hundred thousand people approved of a tweet, by a writer who’s not worth naming, which read: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” This way of framing the issue is telling for a number of reasons. First, there is this notion of “decolonization,” with which it’s assumed we’re all familiar. But there’s apparently been some sort of misunderstanding: Some people might get the idea that decolonization is simply something to discuss in “papers” and “essays,” meaning that it’s something we might take seriously in an academic context, but only as far as that context goes. These people are, according to the tweet, wrong: Decolonization is really about (one assumes) killing; such killing is (again, according to the tweet) good, and only losers can’t stomach it. This is the flip side of the injunction to “abolish whiteness,” which is sometimes excused as a matter of technical terminology in the sociology of race. Here a seemingly anodyne, scholarly term turns out to have violent resonances when applied to everything from statues, to private property, to people.

It is therefore no surprise that the same academy that protects scholars who speculate on whether it might be politically acceptable or even necessary to murder white people will have a lot of trouble motivating itself to care about widespread approval of the murder of Jews. My friend Liam Bright, a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics, wrote a paper about the culture wars called “White Psychodrama.” His thesis was that much of the culture wars can be understood as white people’s divergent strategies of processing various feelings of guilt, shame, cognitive dissonance, and so on, regarding the racial situation in the United States and in the West more broadly. I had a few objections to this, one of which was that much culture war discourse takes places among us Jews (or half-Jews, in my case). Of course, we have differences of principle, and sometimes different opinions about the facts on the ground when it comes to political issues. But there is a different kind of dispute that seems to simmer beneath the surface of Jewish political disagreement: Who is most likely to actually try to kill us? Is it “white supremacists,” in whatever guise, or the people who talk about “ending white supremacy”?

The stakes of this debate were clear in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 election. Trump drew some support from the feeling that Islamist terror was on the rise, especially in Europe, and such terror was often antisemitic; for instance, an Islamist terrorist slaughtered four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in 2014. Videos of street attacks against Jewish men began to go viral, and commentators discussed the slow exodus of Jews from countries like France and Germany. On the other hand, Trump himself was associated, rightly or not, with the burgeoning alt-right movement, many of whose enthusiasts believed in antisemitic conspiracy theories (“Jews will not replace us!”). The gunman in the 2018 Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue massacre was an alt-rightist. Antisemitic incidents were often accompanied by a kind of anxiety about which team of extremists would turn out to be ultimately responsible. Fervor about threats against Jewish centers and cemeteries in 2017 took a strange turn: The two people jailed for making such threats turned out to be Juan M. Thompson, a Vassar College dropout and failed progressive journalist who was trying to frame a former lover, and Michael Ron David Kadar, an Israeli American with no clear motive.

I don’t mean to suggest that the debate this undercurrent represents has been resolved one way or another, at the level of who is more likely to walk into a synagogue with an AK-47 and start murdering congregants. But if the letters and statements from Jewish donors to college presidents are any sign, many Jews—however they feel about Israel or the alt-right—have plenty of concerns about the American left, which they might not have had even a month ago. These concerns center on the idea of Jews being made out to be “white,” among—but almost exclusively among—the very people who see whiteness as the proper object of ethnic essentialism, conspiracy theorizing, and collective hatred.

It is therefore hard to avoid the perception that “white people,” when the term is used to express vitriol and racism, typically means Jews.


Alan Dershowitz calls out Obama's 'deep hatred of Israel': 'He should be ashamed'
Expressing outrage over former President Barack Obama’s call for an end to Israeli "occupation," Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz expanded on why he’s never talking to the Democratic president again.

"I think he always had a deep hatred of Israel in his heart. He hid it very well. He called me to the Oval Office and he said to me, 'Alan, you've known me for a long time. You know I have Israel's back.' I didn't realize he meant to paint a target on it," Dershowitz said Friday on "Mornings with Maria."

"He's never been supportive of Israel. And finally, his true feelings have come out now that he's no longer president and doesn't have to be elected," the professor continued. "He has contributed enormously to the problem because he is respected among young people. And if he says the occupation is unbearable and that anything can be done to stop it, he is encouraging people to engage in their antisemitic, anti-Israel and anti-American attitudes. He should be ashamed of himself. He should apologize, but he won't."

Dershowitz’s commentary comes after he claimed Thursday that any relationship with Obama is "over" following the 44th president’s onstage statements about the Israel-Hamas war.

Obama spoke at the Obama Foundation's Democracy Forum last Thursday, where he called for a two-state solution and an end to the "occupation," while not clarifying what occupation he meant.

Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, left, called for former President Barack Obama to apologize for his Israeli occupation comments on "Mornings with Maria." (Fox News)

"All of this is taking place against the backdrop of decades of failure to achieve a durable peace for both Israelis and Palestinians," the former president told the forum audience.

He continued: "One that is based on genuine security for Israel, a recognition of its right to exist, and a peace that is based on an end of the occupation and the creation of a viable state and self-determination for the Palestinian people."


Some Concrete Proposals for Protecting U.S. Jewry
What is to be done about the anti-Semitism that seems to be bursting forth everywhere? Discussions often run aground on the problems of protecting freedom of speech and making fine distinctions between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel. But Yuval Levin explains that these aren’t, in fact, particularly intricate problems and, moreover, that there are clearcut policy solutions:

The students left to cower in their dorms at Cornell or the New Jersey residents vaguely warned by federal officials to “take all security precautions to protect your community” . . . could tell you that the problem is not speech but hateful intimidation. The boundaries between the two are not unexplored in our laws. They can sometimes be vague, and in those instances, some balance must be sought between rights of expression and the imperative of physical security. But they are often not vague at all. The states and the federal government have statutes in place to protect Americans subjected to terror tactics and hate crimes. Yet anti-Semitism can sometimes fall between the cracks of such laws, and of their enforcement.

This is in part because . . . contemporary left-wing anti-Semitism so often treats Israel as its subject but American Jews as its object. Concerns about it are frequently dismissed because its practitioners insist they are criticizing a foreign government, not fellow Americans. Yet their criticism is not a policy argument but a denial of Israel’s right to exist on the basis of its Jewish character, and they themselves plainly behave as though that message should have implications for Jews in America.

In this respect, anti-Zionism is not about geopolitics; it is about Jews. It is generally easy to distinguish from criticism of the particular actions of any Israeli government, and all the more so when it is attached to the intimidation of particular Americans on the basis of their Jewish identity.
Israel’s Gaza Campaign and the Danger of Sloppy Comparisons
When not showing video and photographs taken by journalists embedded with Hamas forces, news outlets are showing an endless stream of images of the devastation in Gaza, which in turn are used as fodder for those arguing that Israel has “done enough” and must work for a ceasefire. One of the more reasonable versions of this argument has been made by the journalist Shadi Hamid, first on the website formerly known as Twitter and then in the Washington Post. Robert Satloff refutes it, beginning with Hamid’s reliance on faulty comparisons with the U.S. campaign against Islamic State:

Comparisons between Gaza and the U.S. experience in Syria and Iraq are false and misleading. Distance and time matter. The U.S. was under no time pressure to complete the mission in a huge, faraway place and did not have CNN embedded with the enemy, so it could operate a certain way.

By contrast, Israel is securing its own border after a horrific next-door attack, with the global clock ticking, under the glare of international media. No one ever threatened the U.S. with demands for a ceasefire; thousands of Islamic State-sympathizers did not march in world capitals. So if Israel uses more bombs per day than U.S., that’s a function of time and space; if you told Israelis the world would let them finish the job without interference, that there was no race to achieve success before global patience ran out, their tactics may be different.

Then you make the straw-man argument that Israel is “likely to further radicalize more Palestinians.” Israel doesn’t say its goal is to eliminate radicalism; it’s to deny Hamas territorial control, political rule, and military capacity. For that, nothing succeeds like success. . . . If you truly care for the future of Palestinians in Gaza and potential for Israel-Palestinian peace, let alone Israeli national-security interests, then the only thing worse than the current fighting is fighting that ends with Hamas still in power.
Joel Pollak: 50 Years of Excuses for Palestinian Terror Are Enough
Up to 2000, it was possible to believe that some Palestinian grievance justified the rejection. But when then-President Bill Clinton offered Arafat nearly all of the West Bank, and shared sovereignty over Jerusalem’s holy sites, and possible compensation for Palestinian refugees, Arafat walked away. He then launched a cynical and destructive campaign of terror that Hamas, the Islamist rival of Arafat’s nationalists, continued.

That shattered the Israeli left, which had long supported compromises with the Palestinians, believing that peace was possible. For the last 23 years, Israelis have been looking for a workable alternative to solve the problem — from building a barrier along the West Bank, to unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, to making peace with the other Arab states in the hope that the Palestinians could eventually be persuaded to set war aside.

Yet the Palestinian leadership had other ideas — boosted by Iran, which continued to fund and arm terror groups.

In 2001, at the UN World Conference Against Racism, which was held in Durban, South Africa, global anti-Israel activists seized on the idea of casting Israel as the new “apartheid” state — which, like South Africa, had to be dismantled. It was an idea without merit, but the symbolism appealed to western leftists.

I happened to be at the World Conference Against Racism, which ironically saw a shocking outbreak of anti-Jewish hatred. Anti-Israel activists literally broke up a meeting to discuss antisemitism, which had nothing to do with Israel.

The same impulse persists in the efforts of anti-Israel activists to tear down posters of Israeli hostages: there can be no acknowledgement of Jewish victimhood, which is part of Israel’s reason for being.

But ask these activists what they have actually done to help “Palestine,” and you will find no answers. They have not invested in economic development; they have not donated to Palestinian schools. A few may have donated to Palestinian relief efforts, but none has given thought to building Palestinian institutions.

The one question that unravels them, every time, is: “What kind of Palestinian state do you want?” They don’t know.

They just want to “free Palestine,” and “from the river to the sea,” which the president of Harvard admitted this week was an antisemitic slogan: it envisions the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its Jews.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh recently urged followers to imagine a post-Israel “Palestine.” He wants an Islamic state. The likely outcome: Gaza. a complete wreck, a constant threat to its neighbors.

The world has heard Palestinian excuses for terrorism for 50 years. The difference now is that those same excuses come from Ismail Haniyeh rather than Edward Said — both from comfortable exile.

The only portion of the Palestinian Arab population that has moved beyond this are the Israeli Arab citizens, who are deciding, in the face of Hamas terror, that they would rather be Israeli than Palestinian. Their “free Palestine” is Israel.

There is talk about what to do with a post-Hamas Gaza. The White House wants it run by the Palestinian Authority, which has never worked. My preference would be to pay Gazans to relocate to the West Bank and annex Gaza to Israel, solving the problem of Palestinian geographic contiguity.

What do the Palestinians themselves want? We don’t know. They don’t either. Again, it is easier to destroy than to create. But “no more Israel” is not an acceptable answer.


Netanyahu: 'Hamas lost control of northern Gaza, PA can't run the Strip'
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday evening at a press conference in Tel Aviv that the Hamas terrorist group has lost all control of the northern Gaza Strip.

"First of all, I would like to hug the families of the martyrs to whom more martyrs were added yesterday - the heroes of Israel. Our hearts are with the families," the prime minister said. "I say here to all the families of our loved ones who fell in the difficult war - we are doing everything to be worthy of their sacrifice and heroism. We will not stop until the mission is completed."

"There is no substitute for victory. We will eliminate Hamas and save our hostages," Netanyahu added. "The IDF has completed the encirclement of Gaza City. They are on the outskirts of Shifa Hospital and have killed a lot of terrorists.

"Hamas has lost control in the north of the Gaza Strip," he continued. "They have no safe place to hide. Until the last of the terrorists, all of Hamas, are dead."

Netanyahu was also joined by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and National Unity Party leader Benny Gantz.

Addressing the war in Israel's north, the prime minister said "We are also prepared on the northern front, we are operating there under fire from the air and ground. I warned Hezbollah, do not make the mistake of entering the war, your entry into the war will undermine the fate of Lebanon. We are also fighting on other fronts, Every day we act against terrorism in the Red Sea, in Syria, and in any area that is required."
IDF has struck 15,000-plus terror targets in first month of war

IDF's Golani Brigade overpowers one of Hamas' strongest battalion: Eliminate 300 terrorists

IDF kills Hamas commander who held Gazans hostage at Al Rantisi Hospita

2020: Modern War Institute: Military Ethics and Urban Warfare
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Dr. Deane Baker, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy, where he is the co-convener of the Future Operations Research Group in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. He specializes in the ethics of armed conflict.

In the conversation, Dr. Baker discusses his research on military ethics and how ethical dilemmas present themselves on the battlefield. In particular, he explains why urban warfare creates a context that generates unique ethical concerns—concerns that remain unresolved and are of interest to both warfighters and ethicists.

You can listen to the full episode below or find it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn, or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to subscribe, and if you’re enjoying the Urban Warfare Project Podcast, please take a minute and leave the podcast a review or give it a rating!

Note: This episode was originally released in 2020.
Hamas’s human shields: ‘Terrorists left the hospital with civilians’

Podcast: Bruce Bechtol on How North Korean Weapons Ended Up in Gaza

Hamas hid weapons, explosives in a kindergarten, IDF troops find

Has the IDF finally learned to do PR?
IN A briefing long before Hamas attacked Israel, Hagari said the IDF’s new policy was to act fast to tell the world its side with simple messaging.

Hagari and Lt.-Col. Richard Hecht, head of the IDF’s international communications department, have been doing that effectively, with regular English briefings, soundbites, interviews, and press releases with maps and videos. In one clip he released, Hagari spoke about nine-month-old Kfir Bibas, the youngest Gaza captive, and compared him to his own child.

IDF spokespeople still need to improve its public relations game
But the spokesmen still have a long way to go. It would have been helpful if they could have given the foreign press quicker proof that Israel did not bomb the Al-Ahli Hospital on October 17. They worked fast to get the IDF commanders to understand the severity of the situation.

IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevy and Air Force Commander Tomer Bar went into the smallest details to prove that the IDF was not responsible and signed off on Spokesman Jonathan Conricus’s telling CNN and then the rest of the world within four hours. By then, nearly every international media outlet falsely accused Israel of killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians.

Yes, Israel suffered tremendous damage to its image from the incorrect reports.

But the high-profile incident also severely harmed trust in the media, who were caught reporting lies they received from a terrorist organization as gospel.

“It could have been done a bit faster, but it’s still night and day from how it used to be,” a former IDF spokesman said. “The international media are more careful now not to rely on Hamas sources after we held them accountable.”

Another decision that has gone well is to maximize the impact of a 40-minute video of Hamas atrocities by showing it in private screenings to journalists, influencers, diplomats, and politicians rather than releasing it to the public. Reporters were immediately brought to kibbutzim in the Gaza periphery to see the massacre site.

The IDF even launched its first podcast, hosted by IDF Spokeswoman Libby Weiss, a Northwestern University graduate.

There have been mixed results from the decision to not let reporters into Gaza unaccompanied. It prevented harm to journalists but also made the world reliant on Gazans with cellphones.

In recent days, the IDF embedded journalists from CNN, Fox News, NBC, BBC, AP, Reuters, The New York Times, Times of London, Newsmax, and Bild.

Fareed Zakaria complained on CNN that he had to “submit all materials and footage to the army for review before publication, but NBC’s Raf Sanchez said more honestly that he needed to show the IDF raw footage, not the final story.

THE DATA and visual information provided by the IDF still fall short. There have been too many black-and-white mushrooms of the IDF blowing stuff up instead of providing quality visuals of terror tunnels and dead terrorists from combat cameras. Hamas and Hezbollah by contrast keep good strong cameras near their terrorists to amplify their achievements. This remains a strategic weakness that must be corrected.

Not enough is being done to stop misinformation; and besides the hospital, the IDF was slow to respond to false charges of bombing the Gaza humanitarian corridor and holding up aid coming via Egypt.

More outreach can be done to anchors reporting from the US, who as media watchdog HonestReporting pointed out, have been more critical of Israel than reporters who parachuted in.

The IDF could also do more to diversify its spokespeople. While Conricus, Hecht, Peter Lerner, Doron Spielman – and Daniel Hagari, whose English isn’t perfect – have been delivering talking points well under fire, they are all straight, Ashkenazi, men, and Weiss is the only woman speaking to English media outlets.

In other languages, the IDF has been blessed to have more diverse spokespersons, such as Persian Arye Sharuz Shalicar in German and Farsi; and deputy Arabic Spokeswoman Major Ella Wawia, a courageous Arab woman from Kalansawa.

The IDF should showcase more Arab, Druze, Bedouin, women, and LGBTQ combat soldiers internationally to humanize Israel’s army.

More can be done to illustrate the high moral standard of the IDF. The Christian Evangelical media, which reaches a key audience, deserves more outreach.

Of course, the army has not been helped by backbench minister Amichai Eliyahu talking about nuking Gaza or MK Galit Distel-Atbrayan suggesting erasing it from the face of the Earth.

During Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s speech on Friday, her words were constantly tickered by Iranian Press-TV as if she mattered.

There are enough hasbara nightmares without them coming from our own politicians.


The NY Times Publishes a Hamas' Tunnels Primer and Readers Get It

Gallant threatens Hezbollah: 'What we can do in Gaza, we can do in Beirut'

Terror suspect arrested in Brazil confesses to meeting Hezbollah leader in Lebanon and being paid $600 after he turned down offer to 'kidnap and kill' Jewish targets back home

Why are the Houthis attacking Israel?
Tim Lenderking, UN Special Envoy on Yemen, told Reuters in May 2023, “The Iranians have continued to smuggle weaponry and narcotics toward this conflict, and we are very concerned that this would continue, despite the benefits that would come from a Saudi-Iran deal. So I think that is a space we have to watch.”

IN RECENT years, Iran has begun to use Ansar Allah as its preferred deniable client for strategic-level strikes on its regional enemies. Until the current war, the most famous instance of this was the September 14, 2019, attack on the Saudi oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khureis.

In this sophisticated, two-wave attack, a swarm of drones and cruise missiles overcame Saudi air defenses and caused serious damage to the two facilities. Ansar Allah claimed responsibility. The sophistication and range of the attacks led to this claim being immediately dismissed by US, Saudi, and Western officials, who concluded that Iran itself was behind the strike.

Ansar Allah is of particular use to Iran for attacks of this kind for several reasons. Firstly, and obviously, Iran doesn’t want to invite retaliation on itself and is indifferent to the lives of those who crew or live under its proxies.

But the Houthi-controlled part of Yemen has additional advantages. Iran controls or maintains a military capacity in several Arab states – it is dominant in Iraq and Lebanon and has freedom of action in parts of Syria. But in all three of these areas, the Iranian proxy must take into account complex local political realities and the interests of other players – the Russians and the Assad regime in Syria, the non-Iran aligned Shi’ites, and non-Shi’ite populations with their own political connections and interests in both Lebanon and Iraq.

In Yemen, this is not the case. There, the country is divided, and in the Houthi-controlled areas, the movement maintains a monopoly of power by openly coercive means, with only the most flimsy pretense of a formal political process. And while a 2014 UN embargo against weapons transfers to the Houthis has been in place since 2014, it remains poorly enforced.

For these reasons, the Houthis have become Tehran’s preferred tool for the carrying out of strategic attacks by proxy. The use by the Houthis/Ansar Allah of ballistic missiles against Israel brings this process to its highest point yet.

The remaining question is whether, and for how long, Israel and the West will continue to indulge the obvious fiction of the Houthis’ independent advanced missile capacity. On the one hand, this is a clear absurdity. On the other hand, pointing that out would mean acknowledging that Iran has launched drone and missile attacks on Israel – i.e., carried out clear acts of war – on four occasions since October 7.


The WAR FRONT in Israel That NO ONE is Talking About | LIVE From the Jordanian Border
Today Joshua goes live from the Jordanian border to discuss the fourth front of the war that nobody is talking about. Also, we have some more exclusive interviews with the cowboys working on Jewish farms.


IDF uses birds of prey to locate remains of massacre victims

Israel revises Oct. 7 death toll to 1,200

Samantha Woll murder: Detroit Police not naming arrested suspect is highly unusual, expert says
Detroit Police announced Wednesday they made an arrest in the stabbing death of Jewish community leader Samantha Woll but have refused to provide any details, including the suspect's name.

Experts told Fox News Digital it's unusual to withhold the name of a suspect after that person has been taken into custody, adding another layer of mystery to an already puzzling case.

"There are a host of possible reasons to withhold the name. I can think of many. Does it happen often? As often as a lunar eclipse," said former senior Manhattan prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon.

Aside from juveniles, she has never tried a case in which a suspect's name was withheld after an arrest in 33 years of prosecuting serious crimes.

Samantha Wall smiles in front of the stained glass windows at the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue.

Woll, the president of the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue and an avid supporter of Israel, was attacked Oct. 21 inside her Lafayette Park home before stumbling outside and collapsing on her front lawn, according to police.

At about 6:30 a.m., a person found her unresponsive and called 911. There were no signs of forced entry, and she had her phone and ID with her.

Many speculate Woll had been the victim of a hate crime amid tensions over the Israel-Hamas war. The Detroit area has the largest Arabic-speaking population in the U.S.

Two days after the slaying, Detroit Police Chief James E. White held a press conference and told reporters very little.

"We believe this incident was not motivated by antisemitism, and this suspect acted alone," he said, declining to comment on a possible motive.

In announcing the arrest on X, White wrote that details of the investigation "will remain confidential."


Caroline Glick joins Neil Cavuto
@carolineglick Netanyahu's fmr. Assist Foreign Policy Advisor and fmr. IDF Captain joins Neil Cavuto, @FoxNews to discuss the latest on the #israelhamaswar. November 11, 2023


Jonathan Schanzer: The War in Israel
Today’s guest is terrorism finance expert Dr. Jonathan Schanzer.

Dr. Schanzer is a Senior Vice President for Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and serves on the FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power leadership team.

Along with hundreds of articles on terrorism and the Middle East, he is the author of books including Gaza Conflict 2021: Hamas, Israel and Eleven Days of War, State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State, Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine, and Al-Qaeda’s Armies: Middle East Affiliate Groups and the Next Generation of Terror.

Previously, Dr. Schanzer was a terrorism finance analyst in the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He also held think tank research positions at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Middle East Forum.




Ben Shapiro: Pro-Hamas Protesters Want To Intimidate You
The Washington Post pulls down a cartoon criticizing Hamas after staffers cry “racism”; the Biden administration ratchets up pressure on Israel; and Joe Manchin announces he won’t run for re-election.




Hamas hate rallies persist in North America. How long until a Jew gets shot?
On last night's episode of the Ezra Levant Show, Ezra discussed the recent wave of pro-Hamas demonstrations in North America, which has escalated to violence and raised significant concerns for the Jewish community.


The faces and names of hostages will NOT be censored by pro-Hamas thugs
Rebel News' David Menzies reports on how one organization is showing its support for Israel and calling for the release of the over 200 hostages still held captive by Hamas.


Maher: Media 'Couldn't Be More Pro-Hamas than It Is Now'
On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher discussed a letter signed by journalists on media coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and stated that media coverage of the Israel-Hamas war “couldn’t be more pro-Hamas than it is now.”

New York Times columnist Pamela Paul said that no one at the Times signed the letter, and they’re not allowed to.

Maher responded, “But I bet you there [are] lots of people who work there who would, who wanted to.”

Paul cautioned, “I want to say about that particular letter…is this is by 750 journalists in the same way that open letters — you probably can tell if there’s an open letter in the TV industry, and you look down the names, you’d be like, that guy hasn’t made a show in years. You can look at this letter, a lot of them are not journalists, first of all. It’s similar to other open letters where they’ll say, contributors from The New York Times and a thousand have signed it, and you look and someone maybe wrote a book review 15 years ago and was never hired to do a book review again. A lot of the names on that list are not actual journalists, I just want to make that clear. … Some of them were. A lot of them didn’t — don’t have any affiliation, so they don’t have to worry about having any repercussions, because this is not the role of journalists.”

She added, “And that letter is couched in something that I do think is important to journalism, which is the opening part, which is to say that, I think it’s now at 37 journalists or people who work in the media generally have been killed in this conflict so far, which is tragic. And, obviously…most people don’t want journalists to die. But then, in the substance of the letter, it then goes on to — and what bothers me is they use the Times’ slogan, ‘without fear of favor’, but they go on to list a bunch of things that they would like the media to do to reframe the conversation, which is essentially in a more pro-Hamas direction.”

Maher responded, “It couldn’t be more pro-Hamas than it is now. They’re saying they want the newsrooms to adopt words such as ‘apartheid,’ I hear it all the time anyway. It’s wrong, and I hear it. ‘Genocide,’ again, wrong, Israel [is] not trying to commit genocide, the other side [is] blatantly saying, we would love to commit genocide on you.”


Peace Is for Suckers
I went to my first Free Palestine protest this month. I’ll start with the good news: at no point did I, a poster child for the Ashkenazim, feel unsafe. Sure, one of the speakers, Frank Cardenas of the Peace and Freedom Party, drew cheers and applause with the line, “Do I condemn Hamas? Hell no!” But he also assured the crowd that the current conflict was not about Jews versus Arabs, but about colonizers versus the colonized. Not having colonized anyone lately, I managed not to take it personally.

A co-production of the Los Angeles Movement for Advancing Socialism, the East L.A. Brown Bears, the L.A. County Peace and Freedom Party, and an organization called Centro CSO, the demonstration on November 4 attracted maybe two or three hundred participants and began with a series of mostly Latino speakers at Boyle Heights’ Mariachi Plaza. It then migrated across the L.A. River to the steps of City Hall, where there was more shouting into megaphones about the need for both a cease-fire and the destruction of Israel.

There was also a call for an alliance between Palestinians and Chicanos, who “face harassment, violence, and murder by the occupying forces of LAPD. . . and other police departments.” Lost in the fervor, of course, was the detail that the “occupying force” in Gaza is not Israel, but a gang of Islamists who would have happily slaughtered every merry Christian at this gathering. (The situation in the West Bank, I maintain, is another story, and it sure would be nice if we could say with a straight face that Israel’s current government has pursued nothing but peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbors.)

Decolonization was the word of the day, and there was much talk of a “one-state solution” that would turn over all of Israel to the Palestinian people. I asked some folks what this would mean for the Jews of Israel, and responses ranged from the evasive (“I don’t think it’s for me to guess”) to the delusional (“Before Israel became a nation, everybody lived peacefully side by side”) to the blithely genocidal (“The Jewish people in Israel [will] always have to look over their shoulders because. . . the hatred that Palestinians have for them is justified.”).

Look, no one said decolonization would be easy, but what’s the alternative, trying to live in peace?

Peace, it would seem, is for suckers. What’s hot right now is “liberation.” What’s really righteous is to promulgate a fundamental loathing of anyone belonging to the “oppressor” class.


We learn hate for Israel on TikTok and Instagram say young protesters

Inside the anti-Israel plot to bring London to standstill

British Police ‘Are Giving in to the Mob’

Egyptian TV presenter who ‘backed Hamas at pro-Palestine rally’ has visa revoked

Inside the Met's Armistice Day operation: Force doubles officers and sets up exclusion zone around Cenotaph as pro-Palestine activists across Britain organise buses to head to London for 'Million March' - and far-right groups vow 'we'll be waiting'

Met prepares for round two: Hooligans are holed up in a PUB as pro-Palestine demo ends - while police chief warns troublemakers WILL pay with at least 92 arrested after missiles and a metal barrier were hurled at officers

More than 300,000 Pro-Palestinian protesters take to the streets as they demand that Israel stop bombing Gaza

'ZERO TOLERANCE' Hamas sympathiser living in Britain has visa REVOKED for supporting banned terror group

'Disgraceful! These people should be prosecuted': London citizens comment on cenotaph vandalism
As awareness grows about the upcoming pro-Gaza demonstration coinciding with Remembrance Day, people in the streets appear somewhat divided. Some mentioned the potential for conflict, while others emphasized the right to protest.


'Paraglider protesters' are bailed after denying displaying images indicating support for Hamas at pro-Palestinian march in central London

'The continuing existence of Israel is a war crime': Pro-Palestinian protesters reveal what they really think as they call Hamas 'freedom fighters' ahead of Armistice Day march

Grand Central Station is forced to shut down as hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters kick in doors and police rush to place barricades during night of chaotic demonstrations against Israel

Dramatic new video emerges from brutal clash between Palestine and Israel supporters in Melbourne - as police intervene in a tense confrontation outside a 7-11 before chaos erupted

Pro-Palestine protesters take to the water on jet-skis to block major port and prevent entry of Israeli cargo ship

Shocking moment MIT student interrupts class to accuse college, Israel and the U.S. of perpetuating genocide before chant of 'free, free Palestine' breaks out - as tycoon Bill Ackman slams 'failure of leadership'

Two Ohio State Students Assaulted by Men Who Asked If They Were Jewish

Pro-Israel students face antisemitic harassment at Concordia University
Within the anti-Israel crowd, social media users claim to have identified Yanise Arab, a teacher from the University of Montreal, yelling offensive remarks at a Jewish student.


Students at $24,000-a-year all-boys Catholic prep school in New York City are suspended for antisemitic graffiti: Principal warns that the boys could face a police investigation

The two open letters that have ripped the arts world apart
Mass resignations, boardroom brawls, angry donors, competing open letters and artist pitted against artist. These are just some of the ways the Israel-Hamas war is filtering down into Australia’s high-powered arts world.

Meanwhile, an open letter titled “Stop the genocide in Gaza” addressed to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Arts Minister Tony Burke has been signed by over 1000 artists, including Miles Franklin winners Tara June Winch, Jennifer Down, Melissa Lucashenko and Michelle de Kretser, comedian Nazeem Hussain, five-time Archibald finalist Abdul Abdullah and actors Meyne Wyatt and Osamah Sami. The letter called for “an immediate ceasefire, an investigation into alleged war crimes on Palestinians in Gaza ... and an end to Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid regime”.

“The armed attacks on October 7 by Palestinian people cannot be de-contextualised from apartheid, extreme oppression, vicious brutality against protests and the open embrace by the Netanyahu government of policies that openly aim to exterminate the Palestinian people and their struggle for freedom,” the letter read. “The appropriate response to these and all attacks, is investigation and accountability, and addressing the root cause, namely, an end to the settler colonial regime once and for all.” Arnold Bloch Leibler has terminated its relationship with the Melbourne arts precinct Collingwood Yards.

A separate open letter, written partly in response to the first, has been signed by over 500 Jewish artists and academics. The letter emphasised the Hamas attack on October 7 and suggested that artists who had signed onto the first letter had attempted to “justify” the massacre of Israelis by refusing to explicitly address and condemn Hamas’ actions.

The original letter was first published by literary journal Overland, then reproduced on the website of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), the peak body for visual arts in Australia. The day after it was published, NAVA received an email from a partner at the law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler (ABL) which provides pro bono support to a number of arts organisations, including NAVA. Mark Leibler, the firm’s sole senior partner, is a well-known Jewish community figure and supporter of Israel. He also serves as the national chairman of the Australia Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.

In the email the law firm said it was “disgusted” with the open letter and described it as being “laced with misinformation, bias, false moral equivalence and contextual justification for the deliberate brutality of Hamas terrorists”.

ABL asked NAVA to immediately withdraw its support for the open letter, and said that if they did not do so, the firm would end its partnership with the arts organisation and no longer make its services available. NAVA ultimately did not withdraw its support for the open letter. In a follow-up email, ABL confirmed it would no longer work with NAVA. NAVA confirmed to this masthead that its relationship with ABL had ended.
WaPo's Shipley Hand-Selected Hamas Cartoon He Pulled Amid Woke Blowback, Cartoonist Ramirez Says

Senators call for UN resolution designating Hamas a terrorist org

Daniel Greenfield: Discover the Networks Continues Exposing Rep. Rashida Tlaib

Believing Israeli accounts of Oct. 7 makes you a 'war criminal,' ex-UK MP says

Meet the Christian Cowboys defending Israel's heartland

Nasrallah: 'Israel making mistake by attacking us; all objectives will fail'

Iranian president calls to eliminate the Jewish state



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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 20 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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