Wednesday, November 15, 2023

11/15 Links Pt2: The Hate That Doesn’t Know Its Own Name; The American Multimillionaire Marxists Funding Pro-Palestinian Rage; #MrFAFO is Real

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: The Hate That Doesn’t Know Its Own Name
Why is so much of today’s antisemitism coming from well-educated people, the sort who would never be caught dead uttering other racist remarks? Lipstadt recalled that of the four Einsatzgruppen — the German death squads entrusted with the mass murder of Jews in World War II — three were led by officers with doctoral degrees. “You can be a Ph.D. and an S.O.B. at the same time,” she said.

She also pointed to academic fads of the past two decades, “narratives or ideologies that may not start out as antisemitic but end up painting the Jew as other, as a source of oppression instead of having been oppressed.” One of those narratives is that Jews are “more powerful, richer, smarter, maliciously so,” than others and must therefore be stopped by any means necessary.

The idea that opposing Jewish power can be a matter of punching up, rather than down, fits neatly into the narrative that justifies any form of opposition to those with power and privilege, both of them dirty words on today’s campuses. It’s how Hamas’s “resistance” — the mass murder and kidnapping of defenseless civilians — has become the new radical chic.

The challenge that Lipstadt confronts isn’t confined to campuses. It’s worldwide: the streets of London (which saw a 1,350 percent increase in antisemitic hate crimes in the early weeks of October from the previous year) and on Chinese state media (which hosts discussion pages about Jewish control of American wealth) and in Muslim immigrant communities throughout Europe (with Muslims handing out candy in one Berlin neighborhood to celebrate the Oct. 7 attacks).

Lipstadt was clear about where this leads: “Never has a society tolerated overt expressions of antisemitism and remained a democratic society.” What to do? Governments alone, she said, can’t solve the problem.

“I know it sounds ludicrous, but a lot comes down to what happens at the dinner table.” She told me of a friend whose fifth-grade daughter was taunted by antisemitic remarks by her classmates at a “fancy Washington school.”

“Where did they get that? Where did it come from? How did they learn it was OK?”
Elisha Wiesel: The Hatred that Begins with Antisemitism Threatens the Whole World
After bearing witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, my father demanded that the world fight evil. He warned that hatred which begins with antisemitism inevitably threatens the whole world. But my father's protests were ignored. The UN did nothing in 1948 when the Arab Middle East violently rejected Israel's existence. 17 years later, it equated Zionism with racism.

"This is not the first time the enemy has accused us of his own crimes," my father wrote of Israel's trial in the court of world opinion. "Our possessions were taken from us, and we were called misers; our children were massacred, and we were accused of ritual murder."

Last week, the UN adopted eight resolutions which condemned Israel. One of the resolutions was drafted and co-sponsored by Syria, whose dictator, Bashar al-Assad, has murdered 300,000 of his own citizens.

So many of us have woken up since Oct. 7 to a nightmare where we are told that we must accept terror attacks as the price for living in our ancient homeland. We are told that we may not destroy enemies that are trying to destroy us.

We will likely not convince the skeptics that we deserve the same rights as every other people: to secure our borders and defend our citizens. Neither Israel nor Gazan civilians can afford this to be anything other than the last battle. This war can only end with the complete destruction of Hamas.
Jonathan Spyer: Israel's Gaza Offensive Progresses, but Obstacles, Competing Timetables Remain
The stated goal of Israel's operation is the destruction of the Hamas governing authority in Gaza. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on 23 October that the achievement of this goal may take 'a month, two months, three.'

This is a plausible and achievable goal. De facto governing structures are amenable to destruction at the hands of an invading military force. The Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers and the Iraqi Islamic State movement are two terror groups who have found their areas of control taken by superior conventional military force in recent years.

But alongside the military clock, the diplomatic clock is also ticking. Most of Israel's wars end not with a clear decision, but with an imposition of a ceasefire from without. The Lebanon War of 2006, for example, ended with the unsatisfactory UNSC resolution 1701, which entirely failed to address or settle the war's causes. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, too, was brought to an end in Sinai by international pressure before Israeli forces could seal their military victory.

Diplomatic pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire is growing. Israel has agreed to daily four-hour pauses in fighting to allow civilians to depart areas where clashes are taking place.

The US, now as ever Israel's sole barrier against international pressure for an immediate, open-ended ceasefire, supports a pause of at least three days. Rishi Sunak has jumped in, too: on Monday night he said that 'too many civilians are losing their lives'. Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen this week estimated that Israel has two to three weeks until international pressure for a ceasefire becomes serious.

The third ticking clock to be considered is that of the 239 Israeli hostages held in Gaza since 7 October. Israeli officials have suggested that military pressure on Hamas and Qatar-mediated negotiations for the hostages work in tandem, with the pressure inducing Hamas to adopt a more flexible position.

This suggestion may well be to once again misunderstand the nature of Hamas. The movement is likely to seek to hold on to an appreciable number of hostages in order to use them as human shields against Israel's continued advance. The US administration is seeking to couch its support for longer periods of ceasefire in terms of the need to allow hostage negotiations to continue and bear fruit. But days long ceasefires will serve to slow the Israeli advance at a time when every moment is vital.

So, the diplomatic and hostage clocks are currently running in contradiction to that of Israel's military campaign. The result is that the IDF is set to soon find itself in a race against time to effectively collapse and obliterate the authority that perpetrated the 7 October massacre.

Even as the Gaza fighting continues, a sharp escalation is taking place on Israel's Lebanon border. Attacks on civilian targets by Hezbollah anti-tank missile fire are now a daily occurrence. In the largest single attack yet, 14 civilians were wounded on Sunday by an anti-tank missile which hit near the border community of Dovev. One of the injured later died of his wounds.


EXPOSED: Weapons in Gaza's Shifa Hospital's MRI Building
Watch as LTC (res.) Jonathan Conricus exposes the countless Hamas weapons IDF troops have uncovered in the Shifa Hospital's MRI building


Hostage gave birth in Gaza captivity, Netanyahu’s office confirms
A woman abducted into Gaza by Hamas terrorists on October 7 has given birth in captivity, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wife Sara said in a letter released by the premier’s office Wednesday.

“One of the kidnapped women was pregnant. She gave birth to her baby in Hamas captivity,” Sara Netanyahu said in a letter addressed to US First Lady Jill Biden.

“You can only imagine, as I do, what must be going through that young mother’s mind as she is being held with her newborn by these murderers,” she wrote. “We must call for the immediate release of them and all those being held… The nightmare that began over a month ago must end.”

Reports Wednesday said that the woman who gave birth in Gaza was a foreign worker in one of the Israeli towns bordering the enclave until she was kidnapped on October 7.

Hamas-led terrorists launched a devastating onslaught on October 7, rampaging through southern communities, killing over 1,200 people, mostly civilians butchered in their homes and at a music festival, and kidnapping some 240 people. Israel then declared war with the aim of toppling the terror group’s regime in Gaza, which it has ruled since 2007.
Incompetent cops SET FREE suspected knifeman who stabbed female Jewish leader: Wayne county killer on loose after paperwork failure
A suspect arrested in connection with the stabbing death of a prominent Jewish community leader was released after cops did not file the necessary paperwork, prosecutors have confirmed.

The revelation, offered this week by the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office, comes almost a month after 40-year-old Samantha Woll was found stabbed to death outside her Detroit home, spurring an investigation that led to the suspect's arrest.

On Friday, after being held for 72 hours, the suspect was released - days after the city's police chief announced to reporters they had taken in a person of interest, without specifying what led to their arrest.

A dayslong interrogation ensued, culminating with the suspect being cut loose. The decision was reportedly made after the suspect made an 'ambiguous' statement to cops - one that sources told The Detroit News was not enough to warrant charges.

A warrant was never filed, and the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office's hands were tied. A spokesperson for the office confirmed the situation in a brief statement.

'There is nothing before us,' Maria Miller told Fox News of the absence of a warrant request - something already claimed last week by the suspect's attorneys.

'This must happen before we can review the case for a charging decision,' Miller further explained, citing longstanding legal practices in place in every state.

'Until then, it is entirely a police open investigation that they are continuing to work on,' she added.

Meanwhile, not a single charge has been filed, meaning the suspect - in addition to being back on the street - can go unnamed.
The American Multimillionaire Marxists Funding Pro-Palestinian Rage
The pro-Palestinian protests over the last month, where tens of thousands in the U.S. have chanted for the end of Israel, are not merely a story of organic rage.

They are also funded in large part by an uber-wealthy American-born tech entrepreneur: Neville Roy Singham, and his wife Jodie Evans.

Since 2017, Singham has been the main funder of The People’s Forum, which has co-organized at least four protests after 1,400 innocent Israelis were slaughtered by Hamas on October 7. One rally, in Times Square, happened on October 8 before Israel had even counted its dead.

Based in Midtown Manhattan, The People’s Forum calls itself a “movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad.” But a review of public disclosure forms show that multimillionaire Singham and his wife Evans have donated over $20.4 million to The People’s Forum from 2017 to 2022 through a series of shell organizations and donor advisory groups—accounting for nearly all of the group’s funding.

Singham’s wealth stems from Thoughtworks, a software consulting company that he launched in 1993 in Chicago and sold in August 2017 to private equity firm Apax Partners for $785 million. That same year, The People’s Forum was founded and set up on the ground floor of a multistory building on 37th Street just blocks from Times Square; Evans was also installed as one of its three board members. As of 2021, the organization employed 13 staff members and held more than $13.6 million in total assets.

“I decided that at my age and extreme privilege, the best thing I could do was to give away most of my money in my lifetime,” said Singham, now 69, in a statement after selling his company, according to a New York Times investigation in August.

But Singham is more than just a Marxist with deep pockets. He is also a China sympathizer who lives in Shanghai and has close ties to at least four propaganda news sites that boost the Chinese Communist Party’s image abroad, the Times reported.
Gad Saad: Concordia University is unsafe for Jewish students and professors like me
This anti-Jewish venom was perfectly captured a few days ago when a group of Jewish students who had set up a table to commemorate the hostages kidnapped during the Oct. 7 massacre, were aggressively accosted yielding a clip wherein a woman was heard uttering a deeply offensive antisemitic slur, though she claims she called the Jewish student a different offensive word. Another individual shouted for the Jewish students to “go back to Poland.” This eventually led to the Montreal police having to intervene to restore a semblance of order on campus.

I have had to implement several security protocols in order to merely pursue my professorial responsibilities. It is difficult to feel safe when one hears deeply antisemitic cries such as the “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” chanted by a large gathering of overzealous individuals who greatly outnumber Jewish students and faculty members. I should add that two Jewish schools were recently shot at in Montreal (one of which on two separate occasions), and a synagogue was firebombed.

The response of our leaders has been to always lump the astounding increase of Jew-hatred with Islamophobia. Apparently, the optimal way to combat Jew-hatred is to remind the populace that we must all redouble our collective efforts to eradicate Islamophobia. As I explain in The Parasitic Mind, the West has replaced the meritocratic ethos by one rooted in Victimology Poker. I am a victim therefore I am is the means by which one garners sympathy, empathy, and hence power in the arena of public opinion. Viewed from this perspective, Jewish students, Jewish professors, and the Jewish nation can never be the victims. In the false binary world of oppressor-oppressed dynamics taught in Near East departments on university campuses, the Jews do not have the right to ever be aggrieved. They are always the oppressors even when threatened, harassed, attacked, and massacred.

For several decades, I thought that I was long removed from the endemic hatreds of the Middle East but now to my deep chagrin I realize that most university campuses including that of my own university are replicating the dynamics of fear that defined the Jewish life of my childhood.
Giving Notice
A few days after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, Asaf Eyal, a field education instructor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, was participating in a quiet vigil on campus, mourning the dead and remembering the kidnapped Israelis. A large group of pro-Palestinian protesters soon appeared, singing and, according to Eyal, chanting hateful slogans. When Eyal, who also has a master’s from the university and had worked there for over three years, approached the campus security representatives and asked whether the protest was allowed, he was told that in the name of freedom of speech, nothing could be done. “At that moment, I, as an Israeli and a Jew, felt abandoned by the university,” he told me. The next day, Eyal sent in a resignation letter, leaving his position effective immediately.

The public discourse about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, which erupted with an unprecedented attack on several kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope, has now permeated the workplace. While stories about people getting fired for expressing their opinions—on either side, even on their personal social media accounts—have been dominating the headlines, another phenomenon is quietly persisting: Around the United States, Jewish workers like Eyal have been quitting their jobs in protest of their organizations’ stance.

Although some must have heard about screenwriter Dan Gordon’s resignation from the Writers Guild of America due to its ongoing silence on the matter, or about the British journalist Noah Abrahams, who threw away a desirable freelance gig on BBC Radio by condemning the media outlet’s description of Hamas as militants, most resignations are small and relatively private acts of bravery, fueled by a deep sense of disappointment and betrayal. Though Eyal has another source of income—a social worker, he manages a homeless family shelter in Brooklyn—he said, “If Columbia was my only job, I would have done the exact same thing. I had a lucrative position and gave it up because morally, I just couldn’t do it.”

Though a feeling of betrayal laces Eyal’s decision, he didn’t exactly expect greatness from his alma mater, given the much-covered anti-Jewish tendencies of leading U.S. universities. Slightly more surprised was mental health clinician Bari Goldojarb, who, until recently, was employed at the Bay Area chapter of an international nonprofit, the mission of which is to eliminate racism and empower women. When the organization remained silent about the Oct. 7 massacre for several days, including internal communication, Goldojarb, who was “reeling,” messaged her boss and the chapter CEO, concerned. She was told that the chapter echoes the national headquarters’ messaging, and that for international affairs, the world headquarters weighs in.

I can’t be shy or timid right now. Antisemitism thrives in the silence.

After a quick Google search, Goldojarb found that the world headquarters’ official statement didn’t mention the massacre or the hostages, instead calling on the international community to recognize the root cause of the unending situation and suffering: the Israeli occupation. The U.S. statement, while acknowledging the Hamas attack, used general language at best. “This was enough for me,” Goldojarb said. “I thought, your antisemitism can’t be stronger than the need to condemn this massacre. It was just a point that I couldn’t continue working here.”

Goldojarb went out with a bang, sending an agencywide email to more than 100 employees, expressing the painful realization that in the nonprofit’s mission to eliminate racism, Jews weren’t included—after which, her email was promptly shut off. She also published a post on LinkedIn, sharing the decision. “I felt fearful,” Goldojarb said of the sentiment surrounding the rather risky move. “I’ve spent an incredible amount of time understanding racism, and then just realizing that an agency with a mission to eliminate racism is too timid in calling it out.” Though posting on LinkedIn may hurt her chances of finding a job in the future, Goldojarb had felt the urge to share her decision publicly.
I'm Arab and I Don't Understand Why the World Can't Acknowledge Jewish Pain
Many years ago, I learned Hebrew in a bid to penetrate into a world that I once thought was evil and conspiring against the Arabs and Muslims. Once in, I was surprised how wrong I was, how wrong almost every Arab and Muslim around me was. Israel was not on a mission to kill us all. Israel wanted to live and let live. In the Middle East, it's we, the Arabs, who never seem to let live.

These days, Israelis are suffering immense pain over the 1,200 people who Hamas killed in cold blood on Oct. 7. Survivors are struggling with PTSD. All of Israel is living in anxiety over the fate of the 240 hostages Hamas took. Tears for the victims of Oct. 7 are now mixed with tears over fallen soldiers fighting in Gaza.

The world does not feel Israeli pain. It only sees and hears Palestinian pain. The world likes to take the side of the underdog, even when the underdog is guilty. One billion Muslims have a much louder voice than 16 million Jews. So the world blames Israel, even when Palestinians started the carnage.

The Jews understood a long time ago that the world is not a fair place. This is exactly why the Jews went out of their way to create Jewish sovereignty, to establish a state that can protect Jews. Many Jews died to earn that Israeli sovereignty, and they continue to die for it even now.
Michael Oren: The Iran Delusion
The absence of American responses to Iranian assaults guarantees that Tehran will keep pulling the trigger. In dealing with the ayatollahs, the U.S. made the same mistake that Israel made regarding Hamas, hoping that jihadis could be paid to abandon their vision of first regional and then global conquest. Nor can the mere threat of massive retaliation, not backed by actual force, deter them. As my old professor, the late Bernard Lewis, used to assure me: “Mutually assured deterrence for the Iranian regime is not deterrence, but an incentive.” Iran will continue to ramp up its attacks against American assets in the Middle East and to sic its proxies on Israel.

Its support for terror worldwide will escalate.

Israel admitted the error of its misconception about Hamas and it’s time for America to follow suit about Iran. It was wrong to keep allies at arm’s length and supremely wrong to bolster Iran’s influence both in the Middle East and beyond. It was foolhardy to think that an appeased Iran would allow the U.S. to detach itself from the region; on the contrary, a coddled Iran only dragged it back in. The belief that America, Israel, and other friendly states could grapple with Iran’s terrorist tentacles while leaving the leviathan unscathed was misguided. Admit, finally, that as long as Iran remains unvanquished, the next war and the next are inevitable, culminating in a nuclear showdown.

Fessing up errors is never easy, especially for leaders. Especially in the United States, where no one resigned after the Pearl Harbor attack or after 9/11. But Joe Biden has proven himself no ordinary leader. His courage in the face of domestic criticism, his willingness in an election year to defy parts of his own party, is immense. Israel and the Jewish people will always cherish him. Greater bravery yet, though, will be required to say, “We got it wrong and from now on we’re going to get it right.” America and the world cannot afford to live with an Iran at nuclear threshold capacity, an Iran that augments Russia’s killing machine and trades oil for Chinese arms. America, Biden must say, will no longer countenance a country that funds, trains, and encourages terrorist bands to commit mass murder and ignite an entire region—and quite possibly the world—afire.

Back in 2010, after our dinner, Ehud Barak couldn’t stop laughing. “Pull the trigger, make my day!” he kept chuckling. What exactly about Clint Eastwood’s line so tickled the defense minister was a mystery to me, though I politely chuckled along. Inside, though, I was saddened by the fact that, no matter how unambiguous the pretext, the United States would never attack Iran. Iran could pull trigger after trigger and never once make America’s day.

President Biden can change all that. He can remove Iran’s sword of Damocles from above the free world’s head and send a message of American resilience to Tehran, Beijing, and the Kremlin. The next time Iranian stand-ins fire rockets at American bases or steer a suicide speedboat at a U.S. Navy ship, the president must be ready. He must seize the Dirty Harry moment.
MEMRI: Saudi Journalists: Hamas' October 7 Attack Was Meant To Torpedo The Peace Efforts; Iran Knew About It In Advance
Recent articles in the Saudi press accuse Iran of involvement in Hamas' October 7 attack in southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were murdered and about 240 were kidnapped.[1] The articles claim that Iran is not to be believed when it says it was not involved in the attack, because evidence actually suggests that high-ranking figures in the resistance axis coordinated the launch of this attack. Stating that Iran is using the Palestinian cause to its own ends, they add that the October 7 attack was meant to thwart the Saudi-led efforts towards peace and normalization in the region. Unlike Iran, they say, Saudi Arabia and its camp in the Arab world are the ones who are actually promoting the Palestinian cause, and it is time to adopt a realistic and rational solution to the Palestinian issue, far from the illusions marketed by Iran.

The following are translated excerpts from these articles:
Saudi Journalist: The October 7 Attack Was Meant to Undermine Regional Peace
In a November 3, 2023 article on the news site Elaph, Saudi writer and journalist Dr. Muhammad Nahed Al-Quaiz stated that all evidence indicates that the entire resistance axis, headed by Iran, was involved in planning the October 7 attack, with the aim of torpedoing the peace efforts, but later left Hamas alone in the fray. He wrote: "Hamas and its followers chose to join the camp that has destroyed four Arab countries in the name of liberating Jerusalem, namely the axis of Iran, Hizbullah, Syria and Al-Hashd [Al-Sha'bi, i.e., the Popular Mobilization Units in Iraq].

"…This resistance axis and its mercenaries in the media started hurling accusations at Saudi Arabia and maligning it for pursuing the just path of peace, calling the peace talks 'normalization.' [Then] the so-called resistance axis – [the axis of] false resistance – agreed to arm and support Hamas in order to destroy this peace track. All evidence indicates that [figures] at the highest level [of the resistance axis] coordinated the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood [Hamas' name for the October 7 attack], whose goal was one: to torpedo the peace process without offering any alternative or considering the consequences, namely the death and devastation brought upon the people of Gaza…

"Upon the outbreak of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi issued a statement that exposed the [hidden] truth, saying: 'The entire normalization policy has suffered an enormous defeat, and in practice no longer exists.' But then something happened that Hamas did not plan for: Iran, Hizbullah and Al-Hashd Al-Sha'bi left it [alone in the fray]…

"Gaza wrote the most powerful message in the blood of its children, women and unarmed [civilians], namely that there can be no sympathy for those who falsely purport to wage resistance, those who traded in the cause of [liberating] Jerusalem, or the media mercenaries who attacked Saudi Arabia."[2]
Palestinians don’t want to govern Gaza — here’s why
Israel battles Hamas near Gaza’s largest hospital as hostage deal looms, Netanyahu says

Qatar, Hamas’ main sponsor, is trying to turn the clock back to Oct. 6.

Qatar realized Oct. 7 the gravity of the Hamas massacre of 1,400 Israeli noncombatants.

Doha thus went into damage control, impressing on Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh the need to pretend his organization had accepted the two-state solution.

Haniyeh then said in a speech Hamas agreed to recognize a Palestinian state on 1967 territory.

But that would be only half of the Arab Peace Initiative. The other half is for Arabs to recognize Israel and live in peace with it.

Haniyeh could not get himself to utter the words “Israel” or “peace.”

Second, Qatar took the offer of the other Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, that his organization was willing to release all nonmilitary hostages but needs Israel to stop the war long enough for Hamas to gather the hostages and set them free.

Meshaal said the remaining 200 Israeli “military hostages” would only be released in return for Israel freeing all Palestinians in its prisons.

Qatar knows that once Israel engages Hamas in the release of any number of hostages, the Jewish state might find itself forced to continue talking to free the rest.

And as long as Israel needs to talk to Hamas, indirectly through Qatar, Hamas will remain valuable. Destroying it will have to wait.

Palestinians and the Gaza Strip stand at a crossroads.

Either Israel succeeds in obliterating Hamas, giving the UAE and Palestinians an opportunity for a new start — rebuilding Gaza and with it a new and competent government — or Qatar manages to delay, obstruct and keep Hamas relevant until the Israeli momentum weakens and the world forces Israel to stop.

Hamas would thus survive, and plans for a better post-war Gaza will be shelved, probably forever.
Is it racist to make fun of Hamas?
It’s glaringly obvious now that Hamas Lives Matter is the hottest new trend on the Western left. Never mind the centuries of persecution, in the eyes of the woke Jews are now thoroughly equated with ‘white privilege’. And so, no horror they suffer through will ever be recognised as such.

It’s time for any remaining old-school lefties and liberals still associated with the left to regroup. The moral rot, especially in the media and the intelligentsia, has been all too visible after the 7 October attacks.

The kerfuffle over the Washington Post’s Hamas cartoon is just a small example of a broader problem. The left’s well-worn playbook is this: take a kernel of truth about the suffering of a group of people and from that extrapolate so that everyone who is not a member of that group is a genocidal colonialist, unless they grovel to be forgiven for some historical sin.

A few years ago, the left took the reality of the mass incarceration of blacks and policing malfeasance and distorted it beyond all recognition. Black Lives Matter activists exploited the public’s concerns about this to turbocharge a thoroughly toxic and racist ideology, which portrayed every white person as personally responsible for the suffering of every black person. Today it is Israel’s turn to be demonised. The suffering of the women and children in Gaza, as a result of the war Hamas started, is taken as bulletproof evidence that all Jews are evil colonisers and all Palestinians are innocent saints – even, it seems, the leadership of Hamas.

Sadly, we live in a culture where pointing out the facts will do little to move the needle. It doesn’t matter to the left that the top three Hamas leaders are billionaires living in the safety of Qatar. It doesn’t matter that some mainstream-media stringers may have been in cahoots with the perpetrators of the 7 October massacre, or that they have praised Hitler. Nothing penetrates the ideology.

It’s very difficult to discern how the non-Jew-hating liberals and progressives (for there are a few of them left) will move forward and away from the terror apologists in their midst. But they need to figure out how to do so as soon as humanly possible. Right now, it is hard to see how the left can sink much lower.
#MrFAFO is Real
Why do we love him so? Why has he become the subject of so much attention, on social media and in the press? Because he is the pure embodiment of a greater truth: We live in an age that has progressed beyond rational argument. It should be obvious by now that so many of the creeps who purport to weep for Palestine don’t really care about Palestinians, dead or alive, or about Israelis, or about the historical and moral intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What they want is an excuse to indulge in something deeper, more libidinal, ancient, and indeed erotic—hating Jews. They cheer for #MrFAFO not despite the fact that he’s so obviously faking it but precisely because of it. His performances promise liberation from the annoyances of a fact-based reality whose contradictions are inherently troubling, and instead affirm that old motto coined by Hasan-i Sabbah, the 12th-century founder of the Hashashin, or the Order of the Assassins—nothing is true, everything is permitted.

If that statement strikes you as just a bit too breathless, take a moment to observe #MrFAFO’s art qua art. Suppose for a moment that you are a Palestinian propagandist, and that you wish to create videos for the sole, wholly understandable, and entirely rational reason of embarrassing your enemies and generating sympathy for your cause, which you believe to be totally just. What sort of video would you make? Maybe something like the Beit Lahia Witch Project, drawing on the generic conventions of found footage to deliver snippets of soul-searing suffering that gives viewers the feeling that they’re looking at real people bleeding and crying and dying in real time. Or maybe you’d borrow the emotional valence of TikTok, where the young and the unripe mimic earnestness by flailing their arms because they care so much. Or you’d create a scene like the heart-rending footage of a 12-year-old boy, Mohammed al-Durrah, being sheltered by his father before being shot to death by Israeli snipers, an event that has been conclusively shown by several generations of investigators, beginning with James Fallows of The Atlantic, to have been deliberately staged and weaponized.

FAFO, he’s made of different stuff. His eyebrows are always slightly raised, as if he’s just seen something that amazes him. His arms are always outstretched, reaching for something that lies just outside the frame. And then there are the props: a blue helmet that reads PRESS; an oxygen mask; a physician’s vest; a fanny pack. FAFO wears each new item as if it was the expression of his innermost being, as if his survival depended on them, like Buster Keaton driving that jalopy on a bumpy road and holding on to the steering wheel even as the entire vehicle disintegrates beneath him. As the critic David Thomson wrote, the silent comedy giant “plainly is a man inclined towards a belief in nothing but mathematics and absurdity, like a number that has always been searching for the right equation.” The same goes for FAFO, which is why it doesn’t matter if he’s dying or dancing. The only constant is him and that great face of his, obeying Ovid’s dictum: Omnia mutantur, nihil interit—everything changes, nothing perishes. Only mirthless sticklers believe in ideas that are always present and always true.

FAFO’s fans ain’t sticklers, and they’ve no use for facts. Don’t trouble them with the truth that Hamas beheads babies and rapes women or show them footage of Gazan men being offed because someone suspected them of being gay. Don’t tell them that Hamas has located its main command bunker underneath the al-Shifa Hospital, a fact that has been repeatedly documented. The business of separating argumentation and propaganda from reality is a tedious and bothersome constraint. The over-the-top comic-hysterical ludicrousness of FAFO’s performances represents freedom from the stifling business of interpreting reality on progressive terms, of believing women and respecting minorities and checking your facts and your privilege—and all the other silly code words that allow you to gain entrance to the clubhouse.

Like his French counterpart, the racist and antisemitic comedian and filmmaker Dieudonné, whose knowing insanity helped inspire the killing of four workers at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in 2014, FAFO promises his followers a liberation from the basic laws of moral gravity. His work represents a quantum moral and aesthetic leap beyond the pseudo-realist footage produced by Pallywood media fakers during the Second Intifada, which turned the invented story of the death of a Palestinian boy at the hands of cruel Israeli soldiers into the 21st century’s first global blood-libel, or Mohammed Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin, the award-winning documentary-length compendium of lies, faked footage, and manipulative framing of a brutal Israeli massacre that never happened. In their fakery, the al-Durrah footage aired on French television and Bakri’s “documentary” acknowledge at least the concept of reality and its accompanying apparatus of rational investigation and proof: They are knowing lies that use the forms of evidence-based reasoning to fool the viewer.

Mr. FAFO isn’t trying to fool anyone. Rather, he invites them to join in his sickening delirium, in which the viewer can achieve a higher form of freedom by hating and libeling the Jews, without constraint or consequence.
Anti-Semitism Is a Sign of Social and Cultural Rot
There are, thankfully, those who refuse to surrender to such moral confusion. Considering both the global political situation and the current outbreak of anti-Semitism, the Catholic philosopher George Weigel writes:

Jew-hatred that leads to cries of “Kill the Jews!” and “Gas the Jews!” is as clear an example of a deliberate choice that “destroys in us the charity without which eternal beatitude is impossible” as one can imagine. It is loathsome. It is a gangrenous wound eating away at everything from higher education to politics. It cannot be tolerated, and those who advocate such barbarities should not be tolerated either.

There is no excuse—none—for the wave of Jew-hatred that has washed across the Western world like an acid bath. Anti-Semitism is usually a sign of social and cultural rot, and this latest outbreak of an ancient social disease is no exception. Western culture and society are being rotted out from within; is it any wonder that some of the worst of the recent Jew-baiting has taken place on elite campuses, where nihilism, cynicism, and soul-withering secularism reign supreme? (Any parent planning to spend a half-million dollars to send a son or daughter to an Ivy League university or some other intellectual cesspool really should think again.)

The hour is late. The threats are growing. Wake up. And take a first step toward sanity by standing in solidarity with those whom John Paul II called our “elder brothers” in faith.
Israel's Labor Party Leader Calls Out Fellow Progressives for Being "Complicit" in Hamas' Crimes
The leader of Israel's Labor Party, Merav Michaeli, said that after Hamas attacked Israel, "It became very, very clear in this attack that people who consider themselves to be democratic, progressive, are supporting a totalitarian terror regime that oppresses women [and] the LGBTQ+ community."

Speaking on the fringes of an international meeting in Spain of Socialist and social democrat parties, she said, "I fail to see how shouting jihad and calling for a mass murder of Jews is pro-Palestinian. It's important for me to emphasize to them that when you do not very strongly go against Hamas and what it does in Gaza, including to its own people, you are complicit."

Calling for a "cease-fire now is giving permission to Hamas to continue rearming itself, continue stealing food, water, medicine and fuel from its own people and yes, rebasing itself." She put the blame for thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza on Hamas, rather than on the Israeli army, whose actions she defended. "They are dying because Hamas is using them as human shields, because they have based everything from equipment to missiles to their headquarters in the midst of the most civilian functions there are."

She criticized a lack of support among EU politicians, in general, to push for the release of 240 hostages kidnapped by Hamas. "I would have loved to hear more about that than just a mention, at least as much as they're talking about the humanitarian needs in Gaza."
It’s the Anti-Semites Who Conflate Criticism of Israel with Anti-Semitism

Biden judicial nominees include union lawyer who sued Israeli consulate at Supreme Court

'Rabbis For Ceasefire' revealed as anti-Israel, anti-American extremist group

Antisemitic Black Celeb ‘Boots Riley’ Discovers He’s ‘Jewish’ in Time to Support Hamas

Hamas-tied charities under congressional investigation following terror attacks in Israel

Progressive Rashida Tlaib is a 'long-time member of a closed Facebook group' where members glamorize Hamas terrorists and brand October 7 slaughter 'the achievements of the resistance'

Pro-Palestinian Labour frontbenchers are warned they face the sack if they defy Keir Starmer to vote for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza today

Fury as conspiracy theorist Piers Corbyn claims October 7 massacre was an Israeli 'false flag' operation - after his ex-Labour leader brother Jeremy repeatedly refused to call Hamas terrorists in TV interview

Revealed: Pro-Palestine marcher who joined crowd that mobbed Michael Gove through London's Victoria station is unmasked as hard-Left journalist, Jeremy Corbyn follower and son of top literary critic

Salman Rushdie makes surprise appearance at awards ceremony telling audience he kept his attendance under wraps until the last minute ‘to make life a little simpler’ after he was stabbed by suspected Hezbollah extremist in horror attack Belgian parliament refusing to screen video of Hamas atrocities

Why Erdoğan Wants a UN Seat for Muslims
In [Erdoğan's] speech [at the UN General Assembly], greeted as a brave international challenge by the Turkish media (90% of which he controls), he called on the international community to collectively fight what he thinks is the greatest malady of mankind: Islamophobia. He wants, he said, to revolutionize the post-World War II international political order by giving Muslim nations a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

That is not all. Erdoğan wants the world to recognize the breakaway Turkish statelet of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized only by Turkey. That statelet emerged after Turkey's illegal invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

Still not all. Erdoğan admitted he was holding NATO hostage. On September 26, he said that the Turkish parliament would abide by his pledge to ratify Sweden's accession to NATO if the US sticks to its commitments to deliver F-16 fighter jets to Ankara.

Meanwhile, at home, a brave Turkish journalist broadcast a video showing Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists being detained in Turkey, then released and sent to government-run camps for military training.

In Erdoğan's worldview, Islamophobia is the greatest threat to humanity. Radical Islamist suicide bombers and torturers are not.
Turkey's president Erdogan declares Israel a terrorist state committing war crimes but says Hamas are NOT terrorists but 'a political party elected by Palestinians'

Volunteers give first aid to Israeli agriculture

How the Palestinian Authority Failed Its People
Since its establishment in 1993, the Palestinian Authority has been losing credibility among the Palestinian people. It governed on a model of corrupt authoritarianism. Government jobs were political favors to be doled out to supporters; public funds, many of them from international aid, were mere means toward the enrichment of officials. Efficiency, responsiveness to the public, and the provision of services were all an afterthought.

When in 2006, the newly elected PA President Mahmoud Abbas called elections, Hamas ran an effective campaign focusing on the PA's corruption and promising clean governance - and won. A year later, Hamas clashed with the PA old guard in Gaza and expelled the PA.

Today, a staggering 87% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that the PA is corrupt, 78% want Abbas to resign, and 62% believe the PA is a liability. This loss of popular legitimacy means that even before the current war in Gaza, areas of the West Bank were practically ungoverned.

In Gaza, meanwhile, Hamas' initial popularity has evaporated. Today, 72% of Palestinians believe that Hamas is corrupt - but the group maintains its power through fear and brutality, not the consent of the governed.

If the PA were a more effective, clean government, better trusted by its people, one might imagine it returning to Gaza when this war ends and leading the process of reconstruction and recovery. But Palestinians have no confidence that the PA has their interests at heart, and the international community does not trust it to administer funds on the scale of those that will be needed for reconstruction.


The Perils of Allowing Elon Musk’s Starlink Into Gaza

Jordanian newspaper features front-page Hebrew article predicting Israel’s collapse

France Issues Arrest Warrant for Syrian President Assad

Khamenei reportedly told Hamas chief Iran will not directly enter war

Iran's nuclear enrichment advances as it stonewalls UN, IAEA says

FDD: 10 Things to Know About Iran’s Nuclear Program

Yemen’s Houthis threaten Israeli ships in Red Sea - analysis

Biden Unlocks Fresh Funds to Iran Totaling Billions

This Harvard Student Group Wants To Combat 'Misinformation'—By Promoting News Sources That Peddle Hamas Propaganda

NGO Monitor: Canadian Government Matching Humanitarian Funds: NGO Partners with Terror Links

CBC Airs Report On Ontario Student Walkouts, Failing To Mention Signs Called For Israel’s Destruction & Featured Holocaust Distortion / Antisemitism

“Racial doctrines such as ‘critical race theory’ and ‘intersectionality’ are the mother’s milk of antisemitism on campuses”

Jewish sponsor withdraws from National Book Awards after learning of authors’ plans for Israel ceasefire statement

Jewish students sue NYU claiming university allows students to chant 'gas the Jews'

George Washington University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine Chapter

Cornell graduate student workers vote to join anti-Israel national union

COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS PROTECTS HAMAS MURDERERS OF ISRAELI JOURNALISTS

BBC forced to apologize for more fake news; & both French, Israeli presidents: BBC twisted our words
This clip is of an extremely rare on-air apology that the BBC was forced to make this morning, after it ran yet more fake news in which it falsely claimed that Israel had shot at civilians in a Gaza hospital. After that, there is an interview I gave this afternoon about the BBC.


PreOccupiedTerritory: BBC Frames Arab Threat To Drive Jews Into Sea As Offer Of Ride to Beach (satire)

How The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah Defames Israel Online & in Print

CTV Amends Headline After Failing To Mention Canadian-Israeli Victim Had Been Murdered By Hamas Terrorists

Hill Times Columnists Demand Ceasefire – But No Return of Hostages

Le Devoir Article Quotes Six Anti-Israel Commentators In Article On Gaza – And Not A Single Dissenting Voice

Rocker Tom Morello Accuses ‘Murderous Right-Wing Israeli Administration’ of ‘Horrific War Crimes’

Leading German Philosopher Jürgen Habermas Declares Support for Israel, Opposition to Resurgent Antisemitism

France Hits New Record for Antisemitic Acts, With Over 1,500 Recorded Since Hamas Pogrom in Israel

Unpacked: Did Napoleon Create Modern Jewish Identity?
French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte played a pivotal role in the emancipation of Europe’s Jews. He also set the stage for how Jews understand their own identity today by convening the Grand Sanhedrin and directing it to divide Jewish identity into two components - the religious and the national - and to discard the national in favor of loyalty to the French nation.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:31 The French Revolution
01:13 Jewish emancipation
01:52 Christian antisemitism
02:51 Napoleon Bonaparte and plan for Jewish assimilation
03:58 The Assembly of Jewish Notables
05:39 Do Jews see themselves as French?
06:25 Who's in charge of the Jews?
07:14 Are Jews going to destroy our economy?
08:05 The Grand Sanhedrin of Napoleon
10:03 Holding multiple identities
10:46 Defining our own identity




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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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