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Thursday, November 30, 2023

11/30 Links Pt2: Rejection of the UN Partition Plan in 1947 Was a Prequel to the October 7 Massacre; The depravity of the Islamo-left

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Even now, the threat to British Jews is not being taken seriously
Classical antisemitism isn’t just prejudice or hatred. It’s based upon defaming Jewish people with the murderous lie that they are the source of all evil in the world.

If Israel (as implied by Cameron and Blinken) recklessly and needlessly kills huge numbers of Palestinian innocents, its behaviour is so abhorrent it doesn’t deserve to exist. If the Jewish state doesn’t deserve to exist, then Jews don’t deserve to exist. So there’s a direct line between defamation of Israel and attacks on Jews.

Moreover, this war against the Jews has been facilitated by the fantasies of western governments. The US and Britain deny the truth of the Palestinians’ war of extermination against Israel, because such a war requires not a “two-state solution” but the defeat of the Palestinians whom they refuse to acknowledge as aggressors. Similarly, the US and Britain have catastrophically appeased Iran in the inane belief that it could be tamed by extending the hand of friendship. Denying that Islamic extremism is rooted in an interpretation of Islam currently dominant in the Muslim world, the British government still refuses to outlaw Hizb ut-Tahrir, seen on the streets of London these past few weeks screaming for jihad, or ban the seditious and insurrectionary Muslim Brotherhood.

The more the Palestinians and the Iranian regime have waged war and terrorism again Israel, the more America and Britain have pressured Israel to compromise its security. The more extreme the violence perpetrated by Islamists against the west, the more the west fell over backwards to avoid any challenge to the Muslim world.

The result has been 100 years of Arab war against Israel, the empowerment of genocidal Iran, the progressive Islamisation of the west, the re-emergence of violent antisemitism and, exacerbated by Israel’s own catastrophic errors of judgment, the Hamas pogrom of October 7.

Those (of whom I am one) who have warned for years about these trends have been ignored, demonised and vilified as “right-wing,” “extremist” and “Islamophobic”, by Britain’s Jewish leadership no less than the wider establishment. And they still don’t get it.

The result is what we are now seeing playing out in front of our horrified eyes.
Howard Jacobson: Jews don’t need the cult of woke – it doesn’t care for us
Students of my work – supposing there to be any – will not, until today, have found a single reference to the phenomenon of “woke”. It’s not a word I care to use and the arguments it has incited are not such as I have wanted to join. Woke is the Softer Side of Radical Left Politics for Dummies and so all too easy to mock. Of course Gender Neutral Lavatories are nonsensical, especially when you’re in a hurry. Of course we snort when we get an email from someone advising us of his/her/their pronouns of choice. And of course we cannot contain our contempt when some fragile Bristolian tells us that having to pass a statue of a colonist make her/him/them cry. Try being a Jew having to negotiate a dozen churches every day, each a memorial to your infamy, each reminding you of who you were reported to have killed and what the consequences still are. But do we ask for them to be pulled down?

There’s a further compelling reason for Jews to shy away from woke. We don’t need to be given lessons in how to treat the poor, the repressed, the alien, the easily wounded, the neglected and the incoherent. Moses handed us a comprehensive ethical code we call the Ten Commandments, hot from the mouth of God, several thousand years ago. And we were given a sense of humour a thousand or so years before that. When a full-woke Minnesota librarian says we should stop teaching Shakespeare because his ‘works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogynoir,’ we laugh not only because what makes writers problematic is precisely what we read them for, but because of the way woke invariably spirals into grievances most of us have never heard of. Misogynoir! What does Moses have to say about hating black women? Ask the black woman he married.

So why am I invoking what we neither need nor respect? Because woke doesn’t respect us. Because woke will trammel us in its nets if we are not careful.

Only think of the sorrow for Israelis and rage against Hamas we expected after October 7. Weren’t the woke so many snowflakes who fainted if someone made a cutting remark in their presence and didn’t dare go to the theatre for fear someone might die on stage? How would they survive the images of Hamas murdering babies? Well, here’s a surprise. They not only loved them, they called for more.
Stephen L. Miller: Chuck Schumer—Name the Antisemites in Your Party or Sit Down
So while I applaud Schumer's speech, he is approaching antisemitism as though it is a Never Ending Story-style black cloud of nothingness, driven by mysterious, unseen forces, and happening in random odd places. It is not. It is being driven and funded by the Democratic Party apparatus in this country—in government, activism, media and academia. It's being driven by people whose names Chuck Schumer well knows.

Dark money groups of his own party sponsoring activists like disgraced Women's March Director Linda Sarsour as well as Democratic House Members like Ilhan Omar, who has been admonished in the past for her antisemitic remarks, went nameless in Schumer's remarks. So did Congresswoman Tlaib. Even as Schumer made specific references to incidents like the Jewish teacher in Queens who was forced to hide from her own students, Schumer neglected to accept responsibility that this is happening in his own state. Queens, New York is not MAGA Country.

Until Schumer is willing to call out these elements stemming from his own state and jurisdiction and members of his own donor base and Democratic colleagues, he cannot simply be praised for doing the bare minimum. The closest Schumer came to admonishing his own party for their role in promoting and endorsing antisemitism was a passive reference to "people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers."

Without standing up and naming names for fear of intra-party backlash and a "Dems in Disarray" media news cycle, Schumer's words, while eloquent, remain politically hollow.

Jewish Americans deserve real leadership
Seth Mandel: U.S. Support for Israel Is Based on the Facts
Public opinion on Israel’s conduct in its war with Gaza is split in ways both encouraging and dispiriting. But easily the most underappreciated is that Americans clearly support Israel when considering the category of information we’ll call Things We Know Are True.

Here’s what I mean. Overall, Americans support Israel over the Palestinians (in this case, Hamas). As David Leonhardt, who analyzed the various polls on this issue, notes this morning, “This finding holds across polls.” A Marist poll has Israel with double the support of the Palestinians; YouGov finds Israel with triple the support; and an NBC poll had Israel’s approval near 50 percent and Hamas’s at 1 percent.

Here’s part of the reason why: “Most people blame Hamas for starting the war — that is, they see the Oct. 7 killing and kidnapping of Israelis as the central cause.… In a Quinnipiac poll that asked Americans who was ‘more responsible for the outbreak of violence,’ 69 percent chose Hamas and 15 percent chose Israel.”

What we know about Oct. 7, we know. We don’t suspect, or feel, or assume, or hypothesize. We know. It’s on video. After a Senate screening of footage from the Hamas attacks, some of which Hamas filmed and publicized themselves, JTA’s Ron Kampeas found the U.S. senators “barely able to shape their mouths into a single word.” The most common response reporters got was to be waved away by senators with tears in their eyes.

Americans also know Hamas’s intentions. This is not mind-reading. Hamas’s charter calls for wiping Israel off the map, and its officials reiterate that goal whenever and wherever they can find a microphone and camera. During the course of the war itself, Hamas officials have been clear about this: Their aim is to kill all the Jews. It’s not complicated.

Where things get murkier, public opinion stutters a bit. Leonhardt points out that the Ipsos poll finds 76 percent agreeing with the sentence: “Israel is doing what any country would do in response to a terror attack and the taking of civilian hostages.” The same poll finds 68 percent support for the following: “Israel should call a cease-fire and try to negotiate.”

Leonhardt says readers should “avoid the temptation to focus on only one of these two patterns — the support for a cease-fire or for Israel’s military actions — and to ignore the other one.”

More EoZ cartoons















Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Hamas Promises Free Apartment Rubble To Anyone Who Fights Israel (PreOccupied Teritory)


Hamas Promises Free Apartment Rubble To Anyone Who Fights Israel  

Gaza City, December 3 - Leaders of the Islamist terrorist organization that governs most of the Gaza Strip urged residents of the territory to resist the ongoing Israeli incursion by all means possible, and as a reward, the movement undertakes to provide each such volunteer, free of charge, pieces of the ruins that would have been a new home if not for the war.

Hamas officials called again for the Palestinians of Gaza not to use the humanitarian corridors that Israel has provided for noncombatants to flee conflict zones, but to take up arms and fight the Zionists. Anyone who participates in resisting the Israeli operation to eliminate Hamas, the organization vowed, will received the ruins of what once was a beautiful new apartment before Hamas used it as a fighting position, armament-storage facility, or other military purpose, for which the IDF targeted and destroyed it.

"All who join the glorious resistance against the usurper-occupier Zionist pig-dogs will be rewarded," declared Abu Obeida, the organization's unofficial spokesman. "When the fighting ends and the ape-Jew invader is defeated and exterminated, your leadership will grant each adult, or his family if he does not survive, the mess of concrete, steel, glass, and other materials that used to be a home until it wasn't."

If Hamas remains in power after the war - which began when the organization invaded southern Israel in an orgy of murder, rape, mutilation, torture, and abduction on October 7 - it will have vast swaths of Gaza City rubble to allocate to those who helped resist Israel. In addition to the pieces and skeletons of destroyed buildings, the ruins include hundreds of miles of reinforced-concrete tunnels beneath those former buildings - meaning that the rubble available to reward those who remained loyal to Hamas and took an active part in fighting Israel actually exceeds the volume of rubble from destroyed apartments.

The incentive represents an adaptation of an earlier offer by Hamas to Palestinians civilians who participated in the pogrom of October 7: a free apartment. IDF operations with the declared aim of destroying Hamas have rendered impracticable the same policy vis-à-vis the ongoing battle withing the Gaza Strip now that Israel has taken the fight to the enemy and landed numerous destructive blows.

Aides to Mr. Obeida acknowledged that while numerous apartments remain available in the southern section of the Gaza Strip, and Israel's operations on the ground have concentrated so far in the north, most observers anticipate that Israel will shift to the south once it hits all of its targets in the north.



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

11/30 Links Pt1: Douglas Murray: Wartime Diary; Israel ‘cannot claim self-defense,’ Abbas says; ‘Oct. 7 was just a rehearsal,’ warns Sinwar

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: Wartime Diary
Gaza itself is a blown-out wasteland. I was there within the first week, embedded with the IDF and traveling in Israeli vehicles through the border opening that the terrorists had broken through. As well as a feeling of trepidation, there is a sense of victory in going through that crossing. Hamas had come for the Israelis. And now the IDF was coming back for the people who’d done this.

In Gaza itself, anything can happen. The Israelis were still bombing the north, where I was, and up from the al-Shifa hospital I watched the streams of Palestinians making their journey south. It was a pitiful sight, and a reminder of what Hamas has wrought on the people under its control.

While I was there, the IDF found a Hamas tunnel and blew it up in front of me. The earth shook. But the earth shook a lot that day. Machine-gun fire kept breaking out, as well as the rockets and air strikes. People often ask what it’s like in a live conflict zone. The truth is, absolutely anything can happen. You just have to hope that it doesn’t.

At one point, right in the middle of Gaza, I spoke to a senior IDF commander and asked if he had been here before.

“Yes,” he replied.

“When were you last here?” I asked.

“In 2005,” he said, “when I pulled family friends out of their houses. Now eighteen years later, here I am, back again.”

It is a reminder of the insolubility of the Gaza situation. Nobody has an answer to it. But why has this impossible problem been given to the Israelis to solve? Get someone else to resolve it. If the outside world thinks it knows what to do with a whole generation Hamas has indoctrinated into hate, then be my guest. Any takers? Any?

For now, the war is still on hold. The IDF is trained to go. But currently they sit around, like everyone, waiting and watching and wondering how long this suspension can continue. The pause strengthens Hamas and weakens Israel. Some people say that Israelis should be less sentimental. But when you see footage of a child running back into his father’s arms, you think again. And then you have to think of both these things at once.

The jihadists say they will win because they love death more than we love life. I think they are wrong. Israel will win precisely because they—we—love life. The Jews are ordered by God to “choose life” and even in the face of death, they do. The enemy can’t stop the great surge for life that comes up everywhere here in Israel, even in these days. The units I visit have unity and morale of a kind you would barely think possible. Because everybody now knows what the alternative to war is. The alternative is constant massacre.

Watching the sun go down tonight I think of Fallaci again, and when she returned from Vietnam, how she answered the little girl’s question, “What is life?”

What did Fallaci say to her?

“Life is something you’ve got to fill up well, without wasting any time. Even if you break it by filling it too full.”
Victor Davis Hanson: What Were the Hamas Monsters Thinking?
For all the boasts about loving death, it was Hamas who cowardly murdered the unarmed, scampered back to the safety of their tunnels, and used their own kindred Gazans to shield them from death—delivered to them by supposed nerds who love life too much.

Europeans also have had it with unlimited immigration from the Middle East. Restrictionist politicians throughout Europe are ascending as never before, in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Sweden.

They all reflect growing public anger that Europeans are hated by the very people who seek them out and wish to destroy their Enlightenment institutions by manipulating and discrediting them. The thousands who hit the streets to cheer on October 7 and damn their hosts only confirm a growing global consensus—in the West, Latin America, Asia, and even throughout the Middle East—that admitting migrants from Palestine or Gaza, or their supporters, is a veritable death wish.

Pro-Hamas protestors calling Joe Biden “Genocide Joe” and boasting about the Arab or Muslim vote in Michigan is incoherent. Not only do harassing Thanksgiving shoppers and parades, disrupting iconic American holidays and events, swarming highways and bridges, and preying on Jews alienate Americans. But also taking credit for ensuring Biden’s defeat will only distance the Democratic establishment, such as it is, from its embarrassing, loud, but ultimately relatively impotent Islamic constituency.

Shouting for mass death “From the River to the Sea” does not endear the pro-Hamas crowd to half of their fellow Democrats, much less unabashedly strutting their anti-Semitism. The current overt support for Hamas, in other words, has revealed to the nation the bankruptcy of the entire pro-Hamas/DEI base of the Democratic Party and will do much to ensure a conservative president in 2024.

And that president will likely deport anyone on a green card or student visa promoting Hamas terrorism, or violating U.S. law, while ensuring a travel ban from terrorist supporting regimes in the Middle East. Such measures will win overwhelming public support, despite media and academic outrage.

Strategically, Iran, Hamas, and the Palestinians may seem to have flummoxed Israel into endless concessions by metering out hostages for serial pauses. But again, no Israel government can retain power by allowing the mass murdering Hamas to survive and so it will not.

Despite all the blood-curdling rhetoric of Hezbollah and Iran, neither will attack Israel or U.S. assets in force, given no American president could afford not to retaliate disproportionately. And “disproportionately” would mean rendering Iran’s military and Hezbollah to something akin to the current status of Hamas.

So for now, Hamas and its American-residing apologists are full of themselves and feel they are leveraging and manipulating the West. But such haughtiness may be a delusion. Hamas in the Middle East and its enablers in Europe and America have done more to harm the Palestinian cause and the idea of Middle Eastern immigration to the West than at any time since 9/11.

It is hard to anger Westerners, but continue the death chants, the violent demonstrations, the creepy anti-Semitism, and the proud support for the Hamas bloodwork of October 7, and they will be surprised at the growing anger of otherwise postmodern Europeans and distracted Americans.

Just as Israel realizes that there is no living with Hamas killers, so the West is learning that it can no longer sustain universities that despise the culture that nourishes it or Middle Eastern immigrants, visiting students, and residents that use the gift of freedom and tolerance to promote their abhorrent anti-Semitism, violence, intolerance—and, yes, hatred of their generous hosts.
‘They Can Go to Hell and Hide There’
A day after scores of civilians died in an Israeli air strike on a market in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, we spoke with an eyewitness to the tragedy. While Hamas and its allies persist in charging that Israel targets innocents, our interviewee explains that Gazans pin their own survival strategy on the understanding that innocents serve Hamas as human shields.

“To stop Hamas members from walking in our narrow streets,” he explains, “[my neighbors] blocked the streets off with sheet metal, so no one could get in at night.” He goes on, “We know it’s Hamas that makes the problems. They’re the ones who hide among us. . . though it still doesn’t justify killing civilians.”

Fears have grown that this misery will needlessly be prolonged by Westerners who strive, in effect, to perpetuate Hamas rule, according to one Gazan woman.

Addressing protesters who have taken to the streets to demand a cease-fire on behalf of Palestinians, she calls on them to make a choice: “Either support the Palestinian people or the Hamas regime that oppresses them.” If protesters harbor a humanitarian motive, she asks, “Why don’t we see them demonstrating against Hamas?”

If the war ends with Hamas in power, the woman predicts, then they will repeat the October 7 scenario, but within Gaza: “They’ll brutalize everybody who didn’t stand with them in the war.”

In Episode Nine, a speaker in Jabaliya critiques a particular strand within the protest movement: Palestinian diaspora figures who have supported Hamas for years. They watch the conflict “with tea and popcorn, as if we’re a TV series,” he says, and cheer Hamas leaders without regard for the suffering they cause regular Gazans.

He points out Tamim Al-Barghouti, a U.S.-based activist whom The New Yorker described as “a spoken-word rock star.” Barghouti’s post–October 7 tweets include praise for the apparent rape and kidnapping of an Israeli woman and call for “Death to the Palestinian ’National’ Authority.”

“He hasn’t seen anything that happened in Gaza for 18 years,” the Jabaliya resident says.

All of the above bring us back to the patient at al-Shifa Hospital who Al Jazeera cut off mid-sentence.

For a sense of what he might have told viewers if he had been allowed, we reached another patient there—and gave her the space to say her piece. “Every Palestinian knows Shifa hospital is full of [Hamas fighters],” she explains, “but nobody can talk: death by the Jews is better than death by ISIS.” She also echoes a sentiment we have encountered repeatedly in interviews with Gazans post–October 7: “Hamas is the destruction of the Palestinian people. We’ve had enough. They need to be wiped out—because if they remain, the people will be wiped out.”

This conviction is the darker half of a Gazan worldview that, though prevalent, has been largely filtered out of most international coverage of the conflict. Its brighter half—the vision of a different future—is encapsulated here by a young woman who spoke with us in Gaza City last year.

Hamas' price for hostages will get higher and higher



Zaher Jabarin, who is Hamas' official in charge of prisoners in Israel, went on Turkey's TRT yesterday. 

According to the Meir Amit ITIC, he said that Israeli hostages will be held until all estimated 8,500 Palestinian prisoners are released.  He said the number of abductees  held by the “resistance” was large enough that it could impose all its conditions.

That means that the 3-1 ratio of prisoners for hostages will end very soon. 

As I've mentioned before, the women and children and foreign hostages are a headache for Hamas, and they lose nothing by releasing them. They always intended to hold onto men and soldiers, remembering the absurd 1000-1 trade of prisoners for Gilad Shalit, and hoping Israelis will keep pressure on the government to keep releasing prisoners.

At what point would the price become too high? 

Clearly domestic politics and Israeli pressure is part of the equation. It is less costly and risky to keep a ceasefire going and get 10 hostages a day than to attempt to rescue them. 

But at some point Israel has to draw a bright red line: for example, no prisoners who were convicted of murder. No prisoners who were ringleaders of attacks should ever be released. No one with a life sentence. 

If Israel hadn't released Yahya Sinwar in the Shalit deal, 10/7 may never have happened.  Every life is precious, but Shalit's life in 2011 was not worth 1,200 dead Israelis in 2023. 

Hindsight is 20/20 but it can help predict the future, too. Prisoners who have any chance of leading future terror attacks must be off the table. 





Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Jewish women don't matter to the UN: @UNWomen tries to bury Hamas rapes. UN Office @EndRapeInWar has not said a word about October 7 rapes.

JTA reports:
Nearly 50 days after Hamas’ attack on Israel left 1,200 dead, and after weeks of criticism over its silence about allegations of sexual violence during the attack, the  women’s rights group UN Women issued a statement condemning the terror group on Friday.

Then it deleted the post.

“We condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on October 7 and continue to call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages,” read the initial statement, posted on UN Women’s instagram page. It was soon replaced with a statement that dropped the condemnation of Hamas and only called for the release of the hostages.

Reached for comment, UN Women told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Instagram post had been scheduled in advance and was deleted because the message in it no longer reflected where the organization wanted to put its main focus.

Here is the initial post and what replaced it.

It is pretty obvious that the real reason they took down the post condemning Hamas is that there are a lot of Hamas fans in the UN that were upset.. 

CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga asked UN Women Deputy Executive Director Sarah Hendriks why they couldn't specifically call out Hamas atrocities. Her response was a word salad about independent investigations that didn't come close to answering the question.


This is all a way to say that UN Women doesn't care about Israeli women victims of war. And it isn't only from October 7 - Hamas sent thousands of rockets all over Israel and women were the targets of those attacks as well. Today there was a terror attack that murdered two women in Jerusalem. Where is UN Women?

UN Women has published about 16 posts on Instagram specifically calling to protect Gazans without mentioning or even hinting at Israeli victims. It cannot be bothered to call out Israeli victims or to condemn Hamas. 

But perhaps there is a UN organ that is even worse.

The UN has an Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. It's X account is named @EndRapeInWar. If any UN organization should condemn the brutal rapes and sexual assaults against Israeli women on October 7, this should be the one.

It hasn't said a word.

The message is clear: Israeli and Jewish women are not a concern to the UN. On the contrary: it actively tries to hide and obfuscate the violence that is  aimed specifically at them by Palestinian terror groups.  





Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Hamas official or "human rights leader"? They sound the same

Who said this?
The Zionist entity knows no mercy and violates all humanitarian laws by killing children.

The Zionist entity does not abide by any international laws, and it seems that this entity came in contravention of international laws and built the state on crimes and blood.

The occupying entity does not know the language of peace, negotiations, and laws, and only knows killing, blood, and committing massacres against civilians.
Sounds like Hamas, doesn't it?

But it is actually a quote from Dr. Haitham Abu Saeed,  Permanent Special Representative of the International Human Rights Commission to the United Nations in Geneva, speaking on the Arabic DMC channel.

When "human rights" NGO statements are indistinguishable from those of international terror organizations, there is something seriously wrong. with this world.




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

11/29 Links Pt2: Brendan O'Neill: We mustn’t let the left erase the truth of 7 October; Hostages held in homes of UNRWA employees; What Yale Has in Common With Hamas

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: Israel Is Reevaluating
A 32 year-old Israeli who had been pursuing agriculture went into the reserves here after October 7 and in the weeks that immediately followed came to realize his true calling was in serving the nation’s security and the security of others—felt a sense of purpose and belonging vitally important to him—and believes he will be changing his career path once this war is over. A young religious man who has been studying in yeshiva for a very long time and believed he would continue to do so is instead planning on joining the military to join in the fight.

Everywhere you turn here in Israel, people are reevaluating. They are reevaluating everything.

They are reevaluating their political stances. Leftists are expressing regret for what they now see as a kind of foolish utopianism in their view of Gaza and the Palestinians. Rightists who believed the Left could not be trusted with the nation’s security speak of their sense of betrayal and dismay, because the parties and leaders they voted for and worked to elect—parties and leaders who promised they were the only ones in the country who could deal with Israel’s safety from a position of strength—failed utterly to fulfill this first and most significant promise.

They are reevaluating their cultural stances. Anti-Zionist or non-Zionist haredim (the ne plus ultra of the ultra-Orthodox) are abandoning the separation from the state that has been their guiding political philosophy for seven decades and signing up by the thousands to join the military—which they need not do, as they have been exempted from service since the beginning.
Germany is in danger of betraying Israel
Time and again, German chancellor Olaf Scholz has appeared incapable of sticking up for his support for Israel. Indeed, he often seems more concerned with appeasing Israel’s critics.

This became painfully apparent earlier this month during Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s trip to Berlin for a meeting with Scholz. In their joint press conference, Erdoğan claimed that Germany was stuck in a ‘psychology of guilt’ when it comes to Israel. With Scholz standing stoney-faced next to him, Erdoğan said that, because Turkey did not share Germany’s Holocaust history, it had no debt to Israel.

This should have been a chance for Scholz to reject the pernicious idea that Germany only supports Israel because of a deep-seated feeling of historical guilt. Yet Scholz failed to rise to the challenge. He merely said Germany and Turkey had ‘very different perspectives on the conflict’.

It was a profound mistake for Scholz to duck this challenge. After all, it’s not just Erdoğan who thinks that Germany’s support for Israel is born of historical guilt. This view is increasingly widespread among Islamists and the Islamist-adjacent in Germany itself. ‘Free Palestine from German guilt’ was heard at the controversial, borderline anti-Semitic Documenta Fifteen art exhibition in Kassel last year, and it’s now a popular slogan at the many pro-Palestine demonstrations.

Scholz had an opportunity to challenge this mistaken perception of Germany’s relationship with Israel. He had a chance to point out that standing with the Jewish State against the barbarism of the 7 October attacks has nothing to do with historical guilt. It is simply the right thing to do.

Where Will Your Children Go to School? (Judean Rose)


Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

                                                                                --1--

As an American-born Israeli, I have worried about antisemitism on American college campuses for decades. For me, it’s personal. My friends and family are there. I worry about the physical safety of their children, but am actually more concerned that the rhetoric will damage their psyches and souls. When we text or speak I always want to ask, and sometimes do, especially if the kids are seniors in high school, “Where will they be going to school?”

My question is no different after October 7th, but now I voice it to the collective: Where will your Jewish children go to school, now that all of us know they are unsafe? And where will they go to college?

Will they attend Hillcrest High, where a Jewish teacher hid in a locked office for two hours? Will they go to Citizens of the World Charter School-East Valley where teachers spoke to first graders about the “genocide in Gaza”? 

Sometimes I imagine what you are thinking now: How long until it reaches the playground, the grocery store, the synagogue, now that it has been proven without a doubt, that Jew-hatred can rise up, as it did on October 7th, and sweep across a kibbutz, dance festival, or campus like a tidal wave.

It’s not about October 7th, but about the nature of antisemitism. Too many of us don’t want to learn the lesson that yes, it can happen again. And it did. Because it’s not enough to say a slogan.

                                                                       --2--

I knew what this column would be called, but I didn’t know what form it would take. All I knew was that I wanted to talk about the fears that Jewish parents must be experiencing right now. Did I want to focus on the individual schools? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure what I’d need, but I did want to get an idea of the scale. So I went online and boom, boom, boom. The internet started blowing up. Within the hour I had found dope—antisemitic dope, so to speak—on the following 33 schools, the majority of them institutes of “higher” learning.

1.      University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

2.      MIT

3.      Yale

4.      Columbia

5.      University of Pennsylvania

6.      UC Berkeley

7.      Harvard

8.      NYU

9.      University of Southern California

10.   University of North Carolina

11.   Hillcrest High School

12.   University of Maryland

13.   Brown

14.   UCLA

15.   Princeton

16.   University of Minnesota

17.   Montclair State University

18.   Brandeis

19.   Bard College

20.   CUNY

21.   University of Cincinnati

22.   Oberlin

23.   George Washington University

24.   Wellesley

25.   Murray State University

26.   Cooper Union

27.   UC San Diego

28.   Stanford

29.   University of Arizona

30.   University of Massachusetts

31.   University of Florida

32.   Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh

33.   Citizens of the World Charter School-East Valley

An hour’s worth of research cannot claim to be exhaustive or authoritative. It is only disappointing that I found so much of this stuff in such a short time, just surfing the internet. It’s not surprising; it’s unsettling. I worry about Jewish children and what the hatred and violence is doing to them. Antisemitism is a kind of crucible. Will they merely wrestle with fear, despair, and faith, or are we looking at a Norman Finkelstein or Max Blumenthal situation? 

It’s hard for kids and adults of any age to go through this, to experience antisemitism, no matter how jaded we think we are. It hurts—especially when it comes from a teacher and the university does nothing, or when it happens where you least expect it.

You know what I will say, because I must. I believe that the answer of where your children should go to school is, “in Israel.” There is no remedy for antisemitism, but there’s treatment: come to Israel and strengthen your people. Take your children and move there—move to Israel. Make Aliyah. I wish you would.



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Remember the 1,000 boat flotilla that was supposed to sail from Turkey to Israel a week ago? I was the only one who called it a hoax.


The media fell all over themselves last week claiming that a 1,000 boat flotilla was about to sail from Turkey  to blockade Israel. The event was to take place last Wednesday.

I was the only one who called it a hoax.

And I was right. 

It was all fake news, based on the crazy claims of one guy, Volkan Okçu. 

Not one news outlet checked for a shred of corroboration. They didn't ask him who else was involved, the names of any boats, who is organizing it, how they planned the logistics for such a large project.  The media simply didn't do its most basic job, to check sources. 

I looked at Volkan Okçu's tweets and saw that he had no idea what he was doing and then denied he was the organizer altogether. 

And  since then, not one media outlet admitted that they were fooled. They just let the story disappear.

Just because "everyone" reports something doesn't mean it is true.  

The media is failing; they'd rather report (or, more often, repeat) what sounds juicy than make a phone call to check it out themselves. 

I'm not saying this to brag. I spent no more than ten minutes researching this. But I am pointing out that this is a pattern we have seen a great deal during the Gaza war alone.

A large percentage of the news surrounding this Gaza war is as fake as this flotilla, and has just as little corroborating evidence. The sources for much of Gaza news are just as unreliable as Volkan Okçu is. The news comes from one doctor, one "witness," And the news media just runs with it.

They do it with casualty numbers. They did it with the Al Ahli hospital event. They did it with the Salah al-Din Road explosion. 

Consistently, the media reports what it wants to be true, and if the editors like the story, they don't bother to fact-check it. 

Just because "everyone says" something doesn't make it a fact. Very often, everyone jumping to repeat a story that sounds really good is the best evidence that it isn't real. 





Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

11/29 Links Pt1: The Red Cross has Jewish blood on its hands- and it couldn't care less; Hamas claims Bibas family killed in Gaza

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Yes, Hamas Can Be Destroyed
The other idea put forth as a reason for Hamas’s unbeatability is Palestinian nationalism. “I understand the desire to destroy the Hamas apparatus, but I just don’t think it’s doable,” Benjamin Friedman, policy director at the realist think tank Defense Priorities, told the Christian Science Monitor. “If you envision any degree of Palestinian self-rule, then I think some version of Hamas 2.0 remains in power.”

Except Hamas’s belief system isn’t a Palestinian nationalism compatible with Palestinian self-rule, as counterintuitive as that may seem. That’s because Hamas self-rule requires Israel’s destruction.

The terror group made a big show in 2017 of revising its founding charter. The resulting document moved the group’s ideology away from an obsession with jihad and Jews to one that only referred to those topics euphemistically. The entire point, it seems, was actually to give Western apologists an excuse to pretend Hamas endorsed the two-state solution, thereby making it a legitimate representative of Palestinian nationalism.

That passage reads: “without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”

As is clearly stated, Hamas will accept (or claims that it will) a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines and with right of return of all descendants of Palestinian refugees to Israel, merely as a step toward reclaiming all the land—most of which is intended to be accomplished with the influx of millions of Palestinians claiming a right to kick Jews out of their homes.

It is an explicitly genocidal doctrine, repeating its intention to erase “Zionism” “from the river to the sea.” Now, genocide is, I suppose, an idea. It may even be a powerful one. But the Allies didn’t rationalize away the need to defeat those who embraced that same idea in World War II and to liberate Europe from the Nazis by fretting that fascist thought could never be fully eradicated.

Yes, Hamas can be defeated. Yes, Israel and the West possess the capabilities to do this. And yes, it has been done before. The final ingredient is national will—and that part is up to Israel and Israel alone.
Ricahrd Hanania: Israel Must Crush Palestinian Hopes
The problem with hampering the Israeli war effort through appeals to human rights norms is that it simply ensures that the conflict continues indefinitely into the future. Are Palestinians being well served right now? Would living under occupation for another 75 years do them good? The way I see it, for Israel to survive there will have to be separation between the two sides at some point, and it would be better for it to happen now than later.

During and after the Second World War, Japan and Germany saw their governments destroyed, and the political ideology that the previous regime had relied on in each country extinguished. Both peoples were better off for it in the end. I think the next generation of Uyghurs will be some of the most loyal members of the Chinese Communist Party. This is a less hopeful example since Chinese totalitarianism is bad, unlike liberal democracy. But it shows that when people are given no other options they adjust to their new reality.

Right now, it’s hard to imagine Palestinians giving up their political dreams. But the idea that Japan would become a pacifist society content to manufacture electronics and watch anime while renouncing all geopolitical ambitions must have seemed just as improbable in early 1945. What ended World War II wasn’t the two atomic bombs that the US dropped, as Japan still had the capability to go on fighting. It was knowledge that there would be a third, a fourth, and a fifth if it didn’t surrender. If there was a way Israel could guarantee with 100% certainty that it wouldn’t stop until Hamas was destroyed, I think Palestinian resistance would decline. As things stand, there’s still a good deal of hope out there that Western pressure will eventually force Israel to stop short of regime change in Gaza. In which case, we would simply find ourselves in the same situation as before October 7.

Unlike the Palestinians, Japan already had a state, so in this case moving on means trying to make Gazans into refugees, in many cases not for the first time of course. This will be tough for one or two generations, but eventually lead to a more humane outcome for all involved. Right now, even Westerners seem outraged by the idea of population transfer. One might ask why in every other conflict in the world, we consider it a self-evidently good thing to get civilians out of war zones. What’s special about this particular conflict is the attachment that Arabs and Westerners feel to the cause of Palestine. But it’s an evil cause, which clearly emphasizes hating Jews more than making its own people better off.

As long as hope for a two-state solution exists, the idea of reducing the Palestinian population in the region conflicts with larger political goals. Gazans themselves, living off of international charity and romanticized as warriors, feel no urgency to call for their leaders to let them leave or demand that the rest of the world welcome them in. The end of the Palestinian cause would reduce the terrorist threat inherent in accepting people from Gaza as refugees and make other countries potentially more welcoming.

Eventually, I think that we can get to a place where emptying Gaza becomes seen as a realistic option both within and outside the region. But it will require Israel to extinguish all hopes of Palestinian statehood first. The US can be useful here by continuing to provide support to Israel, refraining from putting pressure on it on humanitarian grounds, and trying to incentivize other nations to accept Palestinians as refugees.
The Red Cross has Jewish blood on its hands- and it couldn't care less
In the second movie of the hugely popular Pirates of the Caribbean film series, Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow is told that a moment will come when he has the chance to do the right thing. Sparrow’s response? “I love those moments. I like to wave at them as they pass by.”

That is apparently how the Red Cross feels about the opportunity to do anything to help innocent Jewish children and old women, let alone the other hostages.

Under the hostage deal between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization, the Red Cross was supposed to be able to visit the Israeli hostages who have been held in Gaza for nearly two months. The original date for the end of the ceasefire has passed and it has been extended, and still not a single visit to a hostage has occurred.

The Red Cross did not even try. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his government that the agreement allowed the Red Cross to visit the hostages, the organization did not spring into action. It did not demand that Hamas fulfill its obligations under the deal, let alone under international law. It did not put any pressure on Hamas. Instead it equivocated, questioning whether the deal really allowed for the organization to do the job it was supposedly created to do.

When the family of Elma Avraham, one of the hostages released this week, attempted to give the Red Cross the medication she needed so she could receive proper medical care while in Hamas captivity, the Red Cross refused them outright.

Elma, who is 84, had to be hospitalized in serious condition when she was returned. According to her daughter Tal Amano, she had a body temperature of just 82 degrees Fahrenheit and a heartrate of just 40 beats per minute.

The Avraham family’s pleas were repeatedly rejected, with one Red Cross official asking: “Again you came with her package of medications?”

Real international law experts agree: Hamas is guilty of war crimes and almost certainly genocide. But the media ignores that message.


It looks like this letter was written within a week or two after October 7. I randomly looked up several of the 300 signatories and all of them are real legal experts, at major law schools. 

Public Statement by International Law Experts

On October 7th, 2023, over a thousand terrorists, members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, infiltrated and captured civilian villages and towns in Israel, as well as a number of military bases. The terrorists massacred over 1300 people, including women, children, elderly people and young adults who were celebrating at an outdoor party.  Thousands of people were severely wounded. The numbers of those slaughtered are still not final, and details about the magnitude of the atrocities are still unfolding. These acts constitute gross violation of international law, and, in particular, of international criminal law.  As these widespread, horrendous acts appear to have been carried out with an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a national group – Israelis – a goal explicitly declared by Hamas, they most probably constitute an international crime of genocide, proscribed by the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

In addition to those murdered and wounded, it is estimated that over 150 people were kidnapped and taken hostage. The majority of the hostages are civilians, and they include Israeli as well as non-Israeli citizens. Among those abducted there are women, children, infants, elderly people in need of medical care and people with disabilities. According to media reports, some kidnapped persons were murdered following their abduction. Videos, released mostly by Hamas, posted on social media, document acts of torture, sexual violence, violence towards children and molestation of bodies. Hamas leader Salah Al-Arouri and Abu Obeida, spokesman of Izz ad-Din al-Kassam confirmed that they were holding Israeli abductees. No information has been provided regarding the current location, status and condition of hostages. They are being held without any communication with the outside world, and the ICRC has not had access to them.  There is every reason to believe that their lives and basic rights are under immediate threat of the gravest nature.  

War Crimes

International law prohibits the taking of hostages, defined in the International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages as seizing or detaining and threatening to kill, to injure or to continue to detain another person “in order to compel a third party, namely, a State, an international intergovernmental organization, a natural or juridical person, or a group of persons, to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the hostage”. The customary international law prohibition on the taking of hostages applies both to international armed conflicts and to non-international armed conflicts. It thus applies to the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas.  

The taking of hostages is defined as a war crime, including by article 8 (2) (c) (iii)of the Rome Statue, reflecting customary international law. The laws pertaining to the holding of prisoners of war do not apply to terrorist organizations. Thus, holding both civilian and soldier hostages constitutes a war crime. The circumstances surrounding the kidnapping of all hostages, civilian and soldiers, reveals that they were taken with the purpose of holding them hostage. Hamas must release all hostages immediately.

In addition to taking hostages, according to information posted on social media and testimonials of survivors, members of Hamas deliberately targeted their attacks against large numbers of civilians, committing murder, torture, rape, mutilation and molestation of bodies. Each of these acts constitutes a war crime, for which perpetrators must bear full accountability.

Crimes Against Humanity

Crimes against humanity refers to acts conducted as part of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population”. The acts that may constitute crimes against humanity include, among others, enforced disappearances, torture, sexual violence and persecution. The abduction of people without provision of information regarding their whereabouts constitutes the crime of enforced disappearances. Furthermore, available information indicates that many abductees were tortured by their captors.  These acts were multiply committed by Hamas towards the hostages in execution of its policy to attack civilians, and thus constitute crimes against humanity, for which perpetrators must bear full accountability.

Pending the release of hostages, Hamas must provide under international law information regarding the hostages, including their medical condition, and provide them with the necessary medical care. International law imposes additional particular duties of care towards women and children.

It is the legal and moral duty of all states to act swiftly to halt these crimes.

The international community, including all states and relevant international organizations, must take all measures necessary to ensure immediate release of all hostages held by Hamas. Any delay in action will result in more loss of human life and aggravated human suffering.

Pending release of the abductees, all states must demand Hamas to immediately provide clear information as to the actual whereabouts and condition of all abductees.

Pending release, humanitarian organizations, including the ICRC and all relevant UN agencies should demand from Hamas to provide them with access to the abductees. These organizations must also do their utmost to ensure that essential foodstuff and appropriate medical treatment are provided.

Pending release, all states should use all available means to support Israel, the ICRC and all other relevant organizations and states to gain access to the abductees and to receive information about their fate and whereabouts. Such assistance should include, at the least, providing all possible logistical assistance and available intelligence and supporting relevant diplomatic efforts.

Without derogating from the duty to demand the immediate and unconditional release of all abductees, all states and international organization have a duty to use all available means at their disposal in order to pressure Hamas to give precedence to the immediate release of those abductees who belong to specially protected groups: children, women, older persons, people with disabilities and those in need of medical treatment.


Isn't it interesting that  the media has so few articles that mention these self-evident points?

And isn't it equally interesting that open letters that accuse Israel of "genocide" or other crimes get far more publicity than letters like this one?

No legal expert can seriously contest anything written here. Which is a large reason why we have never heard anything about it. 

(h/t JW)




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!