Monday, December 04, 2023

12/04 Links Pt2: Kissinger’s Final Interview: Forget a Palestinian State, Let Jordan Rule; Israeli Arabs vs. the ‘Pro-Palestinian’ West

From Ian:

Kissinger’s Final Interview: Forget a Palestinian State, Let Jordan Rule
The late Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who passed away last week at the age of 100, gave a recent interview in which he suggested that Hamas’s terror attack October 7 had killed the two-state solution, and Jordan should rule the West Bank.

The October 18 interview, published by Politico on Saturday, is thought possibly to be Kissinger’s last. It includes the following:

I am in favor of a peaceful outcome. I don’t see a peaceful outcome with Hamas involved in the conflict. I would favor negotiations between the Arab world and Israel. I do not see, especially after these events, that direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians are very fruitful.

A formal peace doesn’t guarantee a lasting peace. The difficulty of the two-state solution is shown by the experience of Hamas. Gaza was made quasi-independent by [former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in order to test the possibility of a two-state solution. It has led, in fact, to a much more complex situation. It has become so much worse in the last two years than it has been in 2005. So the two-state solution doesn’t guarantee that what we saw in the last weeks won’t happen again.

I believe the West Bank should be put under Jordanian control rather than aim for a two-state solution which leaves one of the two territories determined to overthrow Israel. Egypt has moved closer to the Arab side, so Israel will have a very difficult time going forward. I hope that at the end of it there will be a negotiation, as I had the privilege to conduct at the end of the Yom Kippur War. At that time, Israel was stronger relative to the surrounding powers. Nowadays, it requires a greater involvement of America to prevent a continuation of the conflict.

Kissinger was referring to the “disengagement” by Israel from Gaza in 2005, when it pulled out all of its soldiers and civilians.

Instead of turning Gaza into a viable state, despite generous promises of international aid, the Palestinians turned it into a staging ground for terror attacks and rocket fire against Israel. Hamas aso seized power from the Palestinian Authority in a 2007 coup, making the problems of the Gaza Strip even worse and giving Iran a foothold in the area, leading to several conflicts with Israel.

The “Jordanian option” has long been favored by the Israeli right, though it has been, until now taboo in foreign policy circles.
Seth Mandel: Israeli Arabs vs. the ‘Pro-Palestinian’ West
The truth is more complicated but also more rewarding for anyone who wants to understand the conflict. Israeli columnist Nadav Eyal points to a new study, which finds a decrease in Arabs’ description of their “most important identity factor” as Arab and an increase in those “who say the most important part of their identity is Israeli citizenship, which now stands at over 33%, surpassing all other factors (religious affiliation, Palestinian identity, and Arab identity).”

Israeli was the top choice for the most important facet of Arab-Israeli identity. The least popular choice? Palestinian, with 8 percent. That certainly counts as “many” people if, say, you’re stuck in an elevator with all them.

It’s not too difficult to understand the trend. After all, on October 7, a foreign army invaded their state and butchered Jews and Arabs alike. A similar poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found a marked increase in Arabs who feel part of the state. A few months ago, Tamar Sternthal and Gilead Ini surveyed previous polling:
A 2019 Israel Democracy Institute report found that only 13 percent of those surveyed identify as Palestinian (“Jews and Arabs: Conditional Partnership”). Other surveys have similar findings. For example, a 2017 study by Arik Rudnitzky and Itamar Radai found that only 8.9 percent of Israeli Arabs identify as “Palestinian in Israel/Palestinian citizen in Israel” and 15.4 percent identify as “Palestinian” (“Citizenship, Identity and Political Participation… ” p. 22). A third study, conducted in 2020 by Camille Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, found only 7 percent of non-Jewish people in Israel identify as Palestinian. Similar findings are apparent in the 2017 Shaharit survey.

None of this means the Palestinian cause isn’t important to Israeli Arabs. The point is that much of the Western media and activist class sees Israel’s Arabs as their own personal agents of destruction within Israeli society, while Israelis of all stripes view them as citizens. Deep Western antipathy toward coexistence in the Middle East isn’t helping anyone. It is also, thankfully, unrepresentative of the people these activists claim to speak for.
Nick Cohen: Why the far left sides with Hamas
The great fault of the global left is not that it supports Hamas. For how could western left-wing movements or left-inclining charities or academic bodies truly support Hamas if they were serious about their politics?

No one outside the most reactionary quarters of Islam shares Hamas’s aim of forcing the people of the world to accept ‘the sovereignty of Islam’ or face ‘carnage, displacement and terror’ if they refuse. You cannot be a progressive and campaign for a state that executes gay men. An American left, which includes in its ranks the Queers for Palestine campaign group, cannot seriously endorse lethal homophobia in its own country. Their kind will turn a blind eye in Palestine, but not in New York or Chicago. No left-wing organisation proudly honours the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the fascist tradition Hamas embraces, although in a sign of a decay that has been building on the left for more than a generation, many will promulgate left-wing conspiracy theories which are as insane as their fascist counterparts.

No, the problem with the global left is that it is not serious. It ‘fellow travels’ with radical Islam rather than supports it. The concept of ‘fellow travelling’, with its suggestions of tourism, dilettantism, and privilege, is well worth reviving. The phrase comes from the Bolsheviks. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 they looked with appreciation on westerners who supported them without ever endorsing communism. Artists, writers, and academics who were disgusted with the West, often for good reason, I should add, were quite happy to justify Soviet communism and cover up its crimes without ever becoming communists themselves.

Leon Trotsky put it best when he said of fellow travellers that the question was always how far they would go. As long as they did not have live under the control of communists in the 1920s or the control of Islamists in the 2020s, the answer appears to be: a very long way indeed. W. H. Auden said, as he looked back with some contempt on his fellow travelling past, if Britain or the United States or any country he and his friends knew were taken over by a ‘successful communist revolution with the same phenomena of terror, purges, censorship etc., we would have screamed our heads off’. But as communism happened in backward Russia ‘a semi-barbarous country which had experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment’, they could ignore its crimes in the interests of seeing the capitalist enemy defeated.


JPost Editorial: While making tough choices, we must keep a unified front
The breakdown in the temporary truce between Israel and Hamas following the terror group’s violation of the ceasefire was to be expected.

During the nearly weeklong pause, both sides were able to claim an advantage. For Israel, seeing 110 captives – 86 Israelis and 24 foreigners – freed during dramatic nightly releases was a cathartic event that brought the country together in a giant embrace of the reunited families.

Hamas, meanwhile, was able to regroup, assess its situation, and prepare for the next round of warfare.

Israel had hoped that the deal, which initially focused on freeing women and children, would be extended into Sunday. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said there were still 15 women and two children were still being held hostage in Gaza.

However, in explaining why Hamas had decided not to continue the agreement and instead start firing rockets toward Israel again, Deputy Hamas chief Saleh Al-Arouri made new demands, saying that no more prisoners would be exchanged with Israel until there was a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and all convicted Palestinian prisoners, including murderers, in Israeli jails were released.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking to the nation on Saturday night, accused Hamas of violating the deal and said “the war would resume.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in the United Arab Emirates on Friday that Hamas had breached the deal. The temporary truce, he said, “came to an end because of Hamas; Hamas reneged on commitments it made. In fact, even before the pause came to an end, it committed an atrocious terrorist attack in Jerusalem [on Thursday], killing three people and wounding others, including Americans…. It began firing rockets before the pause had ended. And as I said, it reneged on commitments it made in terms of releasing certain hostages.”
Avigdor Liberman: Innocents in Gaza? Don’t be naive
For years good people with good intentions believed in and promoted the idea of peace between us and the Palestinians. Naive people – and yes, it is fair to call them that – who believed with all their hearts in the idea of two states thought there were normal people who dream the same dream living in Gaza. That dream shattered into pieces on October 7, 2023.

After recovering from the initial shock of the horrific massacre and with the revelation of the evidence of the atrocities committed by the Nazi terrorists, there is no shadow of a doubt that among those who took part in the attack on southern Israel, provided the intelligence on the homes of the residents, and led the mob in the second wave of looting and destruction were Gazans who worked in the kibbutz communities they invaded. They earned a living and ate in the homes of the massacred residents, some of whom were the very residents who helped Gazans and their families when they were sick, and took care of transporting them from Gaza to Israel for life-saving treatments in Israeli hospitals.

The late Vivian Silver from Kibbutz Be’eri was one of those people who worked for peace and for the people of Gaza. She established aid programs for Gazans, made sure the workers were paid fair wages, transported the sick to hospital treatment and a few days before the massacre organized a peace rally in Jerusalem where Israeli women marched alongside Palestinian women. On Black Saturday, she was murdered with terrible cruelty by people on whose behalf she had worked for years, and no condemnation or expression of shock was heard from the residents of Gaza.

Some will say Gazans are afraid of Hamas and that is why we have not heard any condemnation from them, but the scenes we witnessed every evening when our kidnapped were being transferred to the Red Cross and the testimonies of those who have returned from captivity suggest otherwise. It’s clear that Hamas has massive support in Gaza: The frenzied crowd jeering and spitting on the abductees, the testimonies of Israeli children who say they were beaten by Gazans of all ages, and the demonstrations of joy and support for terrorists throughout Gaza testify to the cruelty of a populace that educates its children to hate Israel and is raising a new generation of terrorists and supporters of terrorism whose goal is the destruction of the State of Israel and all its citizens.
The New Antisemitism Is the Oldest Kind
The antisemitism that has poured forth onto the country's streets and campuses in the autumn of 2023 is a reversion to a politics of aggressive, unapologetic hate. Of course, the new Jew-haters - especially young people on campuses - think of themselves as perfectly virtuous. What is a thousand times worse, they think of their Jew-hatred as righteous. It's morally fashionable among them.

Sympathy for innocent Palestinian civilians who have been killed under the Israeli bombardment of Gaza? By all means. Who doesn't feel that? But wait. As Lenin said: How you assign blame for violence depends on who has done what to whom. The Americans didn't bomb Yokohama on Dec. 7, 1941; the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. And the Japanese were responsible for what followed.

Students at Harvard and Columbia don't protest the region's routine inhumanities. They do so only when there are Jews around to blame and to hate. It's the Israelis' Jewishness that brings the demonstrators out. This isn't "a new antisemitism." Antisemitism is never new. It's an ancient beast that awakens from time to time.
UN and Hamas: Partners in Crime
To understand how the UN effectively runs the Hamas propaganda war, it is important to know that the UN, through its agency for Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), is effectively embedded with Hamas in the Gaza Strip...

"The UN has 13,000 employees in tiny Gaza. They know exactly what's going on... They all knew Hamas' terror infrastructure was in the hospital compound, where Israel wouldn't attack. They lied to the world for 16 years. To paint Israel as evil." — Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, November 16, 2023.

[T]he UN has sustained an incessant campaign, especially on social media, that accuses Israel of deliberately targeting schools, children, civilians, hospitals and healthcare workers. While those are protected from attack during war by international law, that protection does not apply to schools, hospitals and other civilian sites that are used for military purposes.

When Israel carried out an airstrike on an ambulance in northern Gaza, which was being used by Hamas terrorists, [UN Secretary-General António] Guterres expressed that he was "horrified" with Israel's action, while ignoring Hamas's war crimes. In practice, the UN and Hamas act as partners in crime.

Above all, the UN's transparent complicity with Hamas should convince the US, finally, that much of the UN is a destructive organization that prolongs wars, and needs immediately to have its funding decimated, and be reduced in importance to the corrupt relic that it is, deserving no place in this century.
Hillel Neuer on i24 News: UNRWA staff praised the October 7th Hamas attack
Hillel Neuer appeared on i24 News to discuss UNRWA's links to terrorism:
"Systematically, we found UNRWA staff celebrating October 7th. UNRWA has a systematic problem of support for antisemitism and Jihadi terrorism and they refuse to address the problem."




‘The media have become stenographers for terrorists’
Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, the West’s identitarian elites have tied themselves in knots. The atrocities of that day ought to have challenged their simple-minded view of the world, in which Israel is always the evil aggressor and Palestinians are always the virtuous victims – even when they are Hamas murderers. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, the purveyors of identity politics, especially in the media, have doubled down. Many have gone out of their way to diminish the suffering of Israelis, while excusing the crimes of Hamas.

To help us understand how we ended up here, Newsweek deputy opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon joined Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Emily Hand, a nine-year-old Irish-Israeli girl, was released by Hamas recently after she was taken hostage on 7 October. She has been left deeply disturbed by her ordeal. She believes she spent more than a year in captivity. She can’t sleep. She will often burst uncontrollably into tears. She now speaks in a whisper because she was likely conditioned to stay quiet. What’s your take on the elite media reaction to the Hamas pogrom, including the release of innocent hostages like Emily?

Batya Ungar-Sargon: The elite sections of society, and their countless media outlets, have for a long time held a lot of problematic ideas and values. But it is astonishing just how quickly they have become the stenographers of terrorists. There’s nothing Hamas could do that would stop the elites from giving it the benefit of the doubt. Western elites and the mainstream media treat Hamas like a rowdy frat house. The prevailing attitude is that sometimes these terrorists might go too far, but they’re fundamentally the good guys.

When it comes to Emily Hand, the fact that some reacted to her release by arguing that she was treated ‘very well’ reflects a complete moral breakdown. It is so hard to imagine how these people can think the way they do about the abduction of children. But this is exactly what wokeness and victim culture look like in practice. This is what happens when you take a worldview based on a concrete understanding of moral right and wrong, and you replace it with a worldview based solely on who has more power and who has less.

Virtue is ascribed to people or groups who have less power, while total suspicion is applied towards people who have any amount of power at all. Anyone perceived to be a person of colour, or to be simply marginalised, is robbed of their agency and becomes a victim incapable of any wrongdoing. This is exactly why identitarians have lost the basic ability to decipher right from wrong. They simply refuse to make that distinction, especially when confronted with people like Jews who look white – people who, in their view, don’t have the right credentials to be a victim. It’s a completely amoral system.

We are seeing in real time how this worldview leads people to implicitly or explicitly side with Hamas. A lot of it is out in the open, such as the New York Times continuing to regurgitate the casualty numbers provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. This is still happening even after the media were made to look like idiots for feeding the Hamas narrative that Israel bombed a hospital that was actually hit by Islamist terrorists.
MEMRI: Ask Hamas: 'From The River To The Sea' Is A Call For The Destruction Of Israel And Killing Jews

MEMRI: Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei Knowingly Lies By Claiming That Iran Never Said That The Jews/Zionists Should Be Thrown Into The Sea And That Iran Never Wanted This

Phyllis Chesler: Feminism and Palestine at Barnard
The Barnard Center for Research on Women is still at it– disguising their pro-Jihad style of anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism as an academically trendy version of feminism.

Tonight on December 4th, six of Columbia’s professors are presenting a panel titled: “On Feminism and Palestine.”

Faculty speakers include Columbia’s very own Lila Abu-Lughod, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, Jack Halberstam, Premilla Nadasen, Neferti Tadiar. Sarah Haley will moderate. Five of these panelists are professors of Sexuality and Gender and/or Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as is the moderator. They are experts in “Islamophobia,” queer studies, African-American and Afro-Caribbean studies, transgenderism, working class women of color, women of color in the Philippines, post-colonialism, Black feminist history, prison abolition, “colonial” feminism, etc.

Their work in these fields may be excellent. However, none of it seems to be about Palestine. No one seems to have grown up there. Only one panelist claims to have ancestors from the region and has studied Muslim and Bedouin communities.

There is much to say about Feminism and Palestine, especially at this moment. For example, let’s begin with Hamas’s use of civilian women, children, and the elderly as human shields in Gaza– for which only Israel is blamed; Hamas’s occupation of mosques, hospitals, and schools in Gaza; Hamas’s persecution of gays, dissidents, and women in both Gaza and in Yehuda and Shomron– aka the West Bank; Hamas’s Gaza-based and Iranian-funded and sexually violent pogrom against Israeli girls and women on October 7.

However, there are other burning issues for feminists to address about Palestine, including forced child marriage, forced veiling, polygamy, normalized woman-battering and rape, as well as honor killing. I wonder whether these are the issues that will be addressed. Somehow, I doubt it.

That’s because I am familiar with Lila Abu-Lughod’s work. She believes that indigenous honor-related violence is best understood as a consequence of Western colonialism — perhaps even of “Islamophobia.”

On October 25, 2010, at the American University of Beirut, Abu-Lughod admonished (Western) feminists who “sensationalize” honor killings. She “warned that an obsessive focus on so-called honor crime(s) may allow “scholars and activists to ignore important contexts for violence against women: social tensions; political conflicts; forms of racial, class, and ethnic discrimination; religious movements; government policing and surveillance; and military intervention.”

What kind of feminism does Abu-Lughod represent? She is a post-colonial, postmodern, multicultural relativist, a professor who does not believe in universal standards of human rights. However, her work primarily serves the cause of one nationalism– Palestinian — and one tradition only — Islam/Islamism.
The Dangerous Lies of Guardian Columnist Owen Jones About Israel-Hamas War
The harrowing 47-minute film titled Bearing Witness features footage taken from body cameras worn by Hamas terrorists, CCTV from street and home security systems, car dash cams and even the mobile phones of victims.

Described as “disturbing,” “traumatizing” and “evidence of genocide,” the film shows uncensored the horror of the October 7 massacre in southern Israel by Hamas: men and women being shot, stabbed and blown up; bodies of dead babies still lying in their cribs where they were executed; naked and brutalized corpses of women after they were gang-raped; charred remains of humans burnt beyond all recognition.

It’s the stuff of nightmares and also incontrovertible proof of the unspeakable savagery perpetrated by Hamas on innocent and unarmed civilians.

But for British left-wing activist and Guardian columnist Owen Jones, the 47 minutes apparently wasn’t enough proof.

Shortly after attending a press screening of the film in the UK, Jones uploaded a 25-minute video of himself discussing the film called, “I Watched The Hamas Massacre Film. Here Are My Thoughts” to his personal YouTube channel.

As stomach-churning as it is self-indulgent, the video shows Jones repeatedly attempting to cast doubt on certain aspects of the massacre, including the rape of women by Hamas terrorists and whether children were intentionally killed during the slaughter.
How Oct. 7 — and the left's reaction — made me a Zionist
Jews have a historic understanding of persecution and the inconstant nature of acceptance. It is therefore no surprise that they have played such an outsized role in the left’s fight for social justice, participating in every major rights battle of the 20th century.

The lyrics to “Strange Fruit,” the 1930s standard recorded by Billie Holiday that confronted America with its history of lynching, were written by Abel Meerpol, a Jewish writer from the Bronx. And during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, young Jews died as Freedom Riders.

Similarly, Jews like Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem were at the forefront of the women’s rights movement. And Jews like Frank Kameny, Larry Kramer and the martyred Harvey Milk led the fight for gay liberation.

That’s what makes the betrayal by today’s intersectional feminists, union leaders and “queer” movements disgusting. They’re happy to erase Israel, the one Middle Eastern nation that defends gay rights, in favour of the theocratic despots who throw us from their rooftops. By the way, 93 per cent of Arabs in east Jerusalem prefer the area to be governed by Israel, rather than the Palestinian Authority.

The overt antisemitism of the illiberal woke ought to shame anyone in Alphabetland who knows their history. We share a bond: Jews and LGBs and Ts have been hated around the world for millennia and made the subject of blood libels involving children.

Sometimes we have been lulled into complacency. Before the Second World War, there were thriving Jewish and LGBT communities in Berlin. That ended under Nazi persecution: Jews were forced to wear the Star of David; gay men were forced to wear the pink triangle. We died together in the gas chambers.

That horror ended, but the hate didn’t. Decades into my lifetime, our communities were both denied housing and jobs. (Outside the West, we continue to be forced to live in the shadows, or risk beatings and murder.)

On Halloween in the late 1960s, I was corralled by my housemates in university residence to see the drag queens entering St. Charles Tavern, a gay bar in Toronto. We ended up behind police barricades in a mob that threw eggs and screamed obscenities and death threats. It was traumatic. So was being chased down Toronto’s Bathurst Street in the 1970s by a gang wielding hockey sticks.

Consequently, it takes little imagination for me to know how terrifying it must be for Jews to hear crowds chant, “From the river to the sea,” and to face a wave of antisemitic attacks that could strike any of them at any moment.

I urge non-Jews to show the same empathy we would expect for ourselves. How would we like to be denied the right to self-defence? How would we like to be falsely accused of genocide? How would we feel, and what would we demand, if not a single country in the history of the world had ever provided us sanctuary?

Put yourself in the shoes of the Jewish diaspora and you may discover the Zionist within.
He’s Got $250 Million to Spend on Communist Revolution
Fergie Chambers, an avowed communist since the age of 13, wants everyone to hold it against him forever that he is heir to an enormous fortune. And he’s willing to go to enormous lengths to tear down the mechanisms—capitalism, imperialism, liberalism, the rule of law, America—that delivered it into his lap.

That struggle has taken him from the charming cobblestone streets of his Brooklyn childhood to the mountains of upstate New York to the lake country region of Georgia to the Donbas region of Ukraine and now, back to the woods of the American Northeast, where locals say that his radical political organizing has taken a menacing turn, especially when it comes to the Jewish state on which he’s uniquely fixated.

“Make Zionists afraid,” Fergie wrote in a post on his Instagram on November 15. In another he wrote: “We need to start making people who support Israel actually afraid to go out in public. We need to make all of white America afraid that everything they have stolen is going to be burned to the ground. That’s what makes them listen.”

Since the war broke out, Fergie and his group have been organizing demonstrations around the country. Ostensibly they’re in support of Palestine—except members of the Berkshire Communists reportedly harassed a hardware store owner for selling Israeli flags and followed home employees of an Israeli defense company based in Boston. “No descendant of European settlers is oppressed, anywhere,” Fergie posted recently. “Not nearly enough, anyhow.”
Celebrating Terror – new research indicates a radicalisation of antisemitic discourse about Israel online in the wake of the Hamas terror attacks
Since 2020, the Decoding Antisemitism project has been analysing antisemitic comments posted on social media in the UK, Germany and France. Based at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at Technische Universität Berlin, and made up of international researchers from a range of disciplines, the project’s rationale is that much, if not most, antisemitism online is not expressed in direct form. While there are plenty of antisemitic comments which abuse or threaten Jews explicitly, many are disguised or coded, so that their meaning can only be understood in context. Some of the most virulently antisemitic posts do not mention the word ‘Jew’ or other obvious terms at all. They use puns, in-jokes, or memes, or make references whose meaning can only be grasped by careful analysis of a comment’s immediate context, linguistic structure and wider ‘world knowledge’. The proliferation of ‘coded’ antisemitism online poses a serious problem for both the analysis of the levels of antisemitism online, and for strategies to counteract it.

To combat this, the project uses qualitative analysis by trained experts to draw out implicit meanings of comments that might otherwise be missed by automated or ‘keyword’ approaches. The project’s methodology begins with the identification of certain ‘discourse triggers’ which may stimulate antisemitic responses – i.e. scanning the news to find stories that are related to Jews or to Israel in some way. The focus of the project is on responses posted to major media outlets, rather than extremist or radicalised milieus: the aim is to discover the extent to which antisemitic ideas are penetrating politically ‘moderate’ debates online. Once these triggers have been selected, comment threads posted in response are downloaded for analysis. Each ‘corpus’ of comments is then analysed for antisemitic content using a comprehensive ‘guidebook,’ which sets out the key characteristics and common modes of expression of more than 45 antisemitic concepts and stereotypes.

In the weeks following the Hamas atrocities in Israel, Decoding Antisemitism has analysed over 11,000 social media comments posted on You Tube and Facebook in the UK, Germany and France.[1] Last week the project published a preliminary report on their findings, Celebrating Terror: Antisemitism online after the Hamas attacks on Israel. The analysis was restricted to mainstream news stories reporting directly on the Hamas attacks, i.e. prior to any Israeli military response. The results were striking: they suggest a significant radicalisation of online discourse about Israel, Israelis and Jews. Taking the corpus as a whole, the levels of antisemitic comments was generally higher than in previous escalation phases of the Middle East conflict (such as the May 2021 conflict between Israel and Hamas). In some threads, antisemitic comments accounted for 50 per cent or even 60 per cent of the total. This is a dramatic leap from the previous average of 10–15 per cent of antisemitic comments on the French and 20–25 per cent of antisemitic comments on the UK side in Israel-related topics.
Keyboard warriors: Fighting for Israel's digital story
Israel’s War Cabinet has identified two goals in its war with Hamas: bringing home the hostages and wiping out the leaders and infrastructure of the Iran-backed terrorist organization. With misinformation splattered all over the internet in real time, reaching mass audiences in multiple languages is a priority for Israel. For more stories from The Media Line go to themedialine.org

One of the critical underpinnings of the war has been the Arab world’s understanding of the conflict, and Israel is reaching out to Arab nations, ranging from those that have normalized relations with the Jewish state to those that outright seek its extinction. Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are among the social engagement networks that are some of the most sophisticated tools of war today, and Israel and the Israeli people are battling for the message as never before.

David Saranga heads the Digital Division at Israel’s Foreign Ministry. A former Israeli ambassador to Romania and a senior foreign affairs adviser to then-President Reuven Rivlin, He also served as head of the European Parliament Liaison Department at the Israeli Embassy in Brussels and prior to that as consul for media and public affairs in the United States.

Saranga has had decades of experience in the branding of Israel and was the first diplomat to bring web channels into Israel’s governance initiatives.

He spent time with me at Israel’s Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, describing the sophisticated web world, who his main targets are, and how his ministry is reaching out to Arab nations. He escorted me through the narrow hallways and cubicles that are the belly of operations of his department, where a team of seasoned social media experts are busy creating, designing, monitoring, and responding to the digital war of hearts and minds.

There I also met with Sapir Levi, who heads the Arabic New Media Desk for Israel’s Foreign Ministry. With grandparents of Moroccan origin, she holds a degree in Middle Eastern studies and Arabic language and literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is completing a master’s degree in the same field.
Left-Wing Publisher Praises Hamas Nazis

Is It Time for Israel to Ignore the World?
Today, as global elites in media, academia, politics and government bend to terrorist propaganda, Israel is being bludgeoned for defending itself against an enemy that has consistently vowed to destroy it. It's time for Israel to ignore the world, the pundits and the protesters.

Israel has played the game of hope and change long enough. Israelis hoped working toward a two-state solution and some modicum of peaceful coexistence was possible. They thought providing the Gaza territory to the Palestinians in 2005 would change the trajectory of the relationship. They thought providing essential services such as power and water as well as thousands of work visas for struggling Palestinians in Gaza would result in a more hopeful future.

However well-intentioned those moves were, they didn't work. Since 2006, tens of thousands of rockets and innumerable other attacks have been committed unprovoked by Hamas against Israel. Hizbullah and now Houthi terrorists are part of a global Islamist crusade against Israel.

Biblical history dispatches the ridiculous notion that Jews are occupiers of the region. The unprovoked terrorist attacks on Israel clearly demonstrate that despite the propaganda, the only group involved in this fight that has faced genocide is the Jewish people.
Why MBS wants peace with Israel MEMRI: Senior Saudi Journalist: Arabs Have Double Standard On Israel And Hamas

Why Belgium, Norway, Spain and Everyone Should Refrain from Recognizing a 'Palestinian State' Just Now
In the case of a "Palestinian State", there is no territory on which even the Palestinians agree. Indeed, the charter of Hamas -- designated as a terrorist organization by many countries in the West, and which has reigned unchallenged in the Gaza Strip since 2007 when it forcibly expelled the Palestinian Authority, in part by throwing its members off 15-storey buildings -- calls for the "liberation" of "every inch of Palestine" through jihad.

The Palestinian Authority also lays claim over all of the territory, including all of Israel...

In addition, the Palestinian Authority is counting on the Palestine Liberation Organization's 1974 "Ten Point Plan" (also known as the "phased plan") for the "comprehensive liberation" of all the land stretching "from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea" -- a euphemism for the elimination of Israel. The plan calls for the PLO to use whatever territory it is offered as a base of operations to get the rest.

Belgium's possible recognition of a "Palestinian State" makes no sense in terms of international law. It comes, in reality, less as the result of a desire to help the Palestinians -- whose lives will not be improved by it -- than of a fierce and increasingly undisguised hostility towards the State of Israel, and most likely also Jews.

Recognizing a Palestinian state with no authority, no realistic territorial demands and no acceptable leadership -- and with a long-term, outspoken desire to militarize and destroy its neighbor Israel -- right after a jihadist pogrom against Jews, will not add to the happiness of any of the parties involved, or, for that matter, anyone else.


When Will Palestinians Shed Their Victimhood and Look to Coexist with Israel?
In 1991, I visited the home of a Palestinian woman in Gaza who had just lost her son. She didn't know I was Jewish.

She launched into a recitation of her people's mission to stay in Gaza until the Jews left Israel.

On her mantel was a photo of her son. She gave me a copy of the picture and told me that all the teenage boys had pictures ready for distribution upon their death.

She chose to live a life of protest rather than one of betterment for the next generation.

More than three decades later, the mission is unchanged, and the venom directed at Israel has been passed to several subsequent generations of Palestinians.

Rather than funneling their brainpower and international aid into becoming Singapore or the United Arab Emirates, Palestinians in Gaza remain in despair.

Perhaps it's time for Palestinians to take a page from the Jews they hate so much and shed their victimhood and hopelessness.


New York County Exec Launches Primary Campaign Against Anti-Israel Democrat Jamaal Bowman

Several Muslim leaders protesting Biden at Michigan conference defended Hamas massacre

'You don't see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women': CNN host Dana Bash slams 'Squad' Democrat for condemning Israel INSTEAD of Hamas terrorists' sexual violence on Oct. 7

Turkey’s Erdoğan: ‘Butcher’ Netanyahu will be tried for war crimes

260,000 firearm permits sought since Oct. 7, after Ben Gvir push to arm civilians

Study: Nearly 50% of Israeli citizens volunteer in wartime

The Determination of Israel's Reservists I met IDF reserve soldiers at a base just across the border from Gaza during the recent ceasefire. These soldiers are older and more emotional than you would imagine. Their intentions are clear: "Never Again." The Oct. 7 massacre will never be permitted to reoccur. Israel must be freed from the nightmare of Hamas.

These soldiers have completed their three-year military service - or two years, if they are women - but they all keep their reserve duffel bag under the bed. If the phone rings, as happened on Oct. 7, they rush to the front, whether they are in Tel Aviv or Japan, whether they are left-wing or right-wing, professors or taxi drivers.

Commander A. hasn't been home since Oct. 7. His brigade was sent into Beit Hanoun in Gaza. He said, "We had to quickly learn a lesson.... The terrorists let you enter easily. There's a row of houses, two or three more, and that's where Hamas is waiting for you - where you don't expect it, in civilian structures."

"If we decide to destroy a structure and there are civilians inside, we warn the civilian population....There are precise rules for evaluating whether we have to act, whether it's essential because if we don't act, the lives of soldiers or Israeli civilians are in danger. We try to stop Hamas' continuous use of human shields by moving the civilians out completely."

Maj. Moshe, a 50-year-old engineer who works in high-tech, said, "An army generally advances on a territory that, once occupied, is the starting point of your next step. But here, through the tunnels under the ground, suddenly you find the enemy shooting at you from behind."

First and foremost, however, they are Jews who know exactly what was done to their people on Oct. 7 and will continue their war of justice and survival. One of them tells me, "Yes, I feel when we fight, feel it physically, that our kidnapped citizens are not far away, and I fight for them too with all my heart. This is the most just war of all time."

Campus antisemitism is at a generational crossroads

This professor is unfit to address an antisemitism conference

FDD: 7 Things to Know About Campus Support for Hamas and Antisemitism

Antisemitism in America: Teachers Introduce BDS-like Materials for Pre-Schoolers

Harvard Alumni Are Tackling Antisemitism
I am a poster child for Jewish assimilation. So, what compelled such an unlikely adherent to become what a friend recently dubbed a "Super Jew"? Even before the blood was dry following Hamas' murderous attack on Israel on Oct. 7, three dozen student groups at Harvard College aggressively condoned the terror group's rampage.

Within days, my collegemate Eric Fleiss and I started the Harvard Jewish Alumni Association. Our mission is to advocate for a truly pluralistic campus community, where all students are welcome, regardless of religious identity. And that includes Jews. Especially Jews. I was surprised that Harvard didn't already have a Jewish alumni group, but the reason was obvious. We never needed one. But something has changed rapidly and profoundly. Suddenly, it has become fashionable for students and faculty to hate Jews.

Within a month following the Hamas attack, we built a network of 2,000 alumni - 200 of whom are actively working on complex issues related to campus finance, media, education, policy enforcement, outreach, student support and admissions.

Among many saddening discoveries, we see that Jews have been purged across campus - from the administration and the Board of Overseers to the faculty and the student body. Since the 1970s and for the next four decades, Jews comprised roughly 25% of students. Today, the class of 2027 is barely 5% Jewish.

Injustice isn't just a Jewish issue: Once hateful and violent factions are finished with us Jews, everyone else could easily be next.


Anti-Israel Cornell students 'convict' university president of genocide in sham trial and occupy buildings as classmates try to study for finals

Columbia University Cancels Anti-Israel ‘Teach-In’ Celebrating Hamas’ Oct. 7 ‘Counteroffensive’

‘Washington Post’ says Israel, Hamas exchanged ‘captives,’ seeming to equate credibility of two

CNN’s Nima Elbagir Parachutes Into Israel to Whitewash Palestinian Prisoners

CBC Interviews Representative From Banned Organization Accused Of Terrorism – But Tells Readers It’s An Advocacy Group

AFP IMPROVES COVERAGE AFTER UNDERSTATING NUMBER OF HOSTAGES AS ‘DOZENS’

MEMRI: Palestinian Businessman And Millionaire Munib Al-Masri: Hamas' October 7 Attack Was 'Natural Reaction,' 'Legitimate Right'; Congratulations To The Palestinian Resistance For Its Achievements

PMW: Top Fatah official promises: “The next and more violent [than Oct. 7] explosion will be in the West Bank”



PreOccupiedTerritory: Kuwait To Expel Palestinians Just To Show It Can Get Away With It While Israel Can’t (satire)

Seth Frantzman: Iran attacks US, seeks release of $6 billion from Qatar

Iran's Regime Soon to Have Nuclear Bombs; Hezbollah Is Next
The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran must not be underestimated. Iran's regime has frequently threatened to wipe a whole country -- Israel -- off the map, and is also increasing military cooperation with Venezuela and Cuba to threaten the US. Europe, too, remains a rich target for nuclear blackmail. Iran would not even have to use its nuclear bombs; the threat would be enough.

It is high time for the Biden administration and the European Union at least to stop Iran from selling its oil. If not, much of the planet will soon see itself either in World War III or a surrender.

It would have been so much less costly in life and treasure to stop Hitler before he sent the German army across the Rhine in 1936. Perhaps US President Joe Biden is trying to bribe the mullahs not to create any more mayhem before next year's US presidential election – but the only result of such timidity is that the price goes up – with a worse war to follow. Biden would not have won WWII.

The Iranian regime, through its proxies, has already attacked US forces in Iraq and Syria at least 74 times since October 17. US retaliation – against the proxies, not Iran – apparently could not impress Iran's regime less. Someone else takes the bullet: that is why Iran has proxies in the first place... The Biden administration is not only allowing to Iran's mullahs to create a war cost-free, it is paying them to do it.


Israel issues severe travel warnings to dozens of countries amid rising antisemitism

Police seize ISIS propaganda from home of 16-year-old arrested for terroristic threats Ballarat Mayor says neo-Nazi protesters 'don't represent our community' amid condemnation of masked demonstrators

Survivors’ Stories—and Recipes

Rapper Kosha Dillz exposes anti-Israel bias
American-Israeli Rapper Kosha Dillz exposes anti-Israel bias




Ben-Gurion University Gets $100 Million Donation to Rebuild and Strengthen Negev Region
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) has been awarded a $100 million donation by the Sylvan Adams Family Foundation, it was announced Monday.

"After the October 7th massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas, it is crucial that we strengthen Israel's south to ensure that Israelis feel safe and secure to rebuild their lives in the Negev," said donor Sylvan Adams, a Canadian billionaire and philanthropist who moved to Israel several years ago.




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

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