Sunday, December 31, 2023

  • Sunday, December 31, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon
Israel has been accused of destroying Gaza's cultural heritage with various attacks. But Gaza's best known mosque is a site where Jewish cultural heritage was quite literally erased.

One of the accusations is that Israel destroyed the Great Omari Mosque of Gaza:
The Omari Mosque, Gaza's most iconic landmark and oldest mosque stretching back centuries, has been largely destroyed in an Israeli strike, Gaza City officials and eyewitnesses say.

An Israeli official, who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity to offer a preliminary assessment, confirmed the strike and said the mosque grounds contained a tunnel shaft used by militants, and that Hamas fighters from the elite Nukhba battalion had regularly used the mosque for cover.  
Israel was reported to have destroyed the same mosque in 2014. Amazing how this historic mosque can be destroyed so many times.

Hamas used the mosque as a military site. And it wouldn't be the first time Hamas was associated with the mosque.

In 2007,  Fatah gunmen shot dead the imam of the Great Omari Mosque, Mohammed al-Rifati, 40, by attacking his home with rocket-propelled grenades, because he was a Hamas supporter. 

In 2014, Hamas chose the supposedly destroyed Omari Mosque as the spot to publicly execute six men in front of hundreds of spectators including children.  The hooded suspected "collaborators" were dragged along the floor to kneel by a wall facing the crowd, then each man was shot in the head individually before being sprayed with bullets fired from an AK-47. 

Hamas leaders regularly preached at the Omari mosque. Ismail Haniyeh preached there in 2018, and at a funeral there in 2016 for seven Hamas men who were killed in a tunnel collapse he praised those building tunnels. 

Hamas senior official Mahmoud Zahar gave a press conference at the mosque last year.

In 1870, archaeologist  Charles Clermont-Ganneau examined the Great Omari Mosque of Gaza and found a column with an unmistakable menorah, lulav, etrog and shofar in bas relief. In Hebrew and Greek underneath the image it said "Hananiah bar Yaakov."

He took a squeeze of the find and published it:


Apparently, the Muslims took a column from the site of an ancient synagogue and placed it there. 



The anti-Zionist-and-definitely-not-antisemitic Gazans methodically chiseled out and smoothed over this representation of Jewish symbols sometime between 1987 and 1993.

Here's another famous case of Palestinians deliberately destroying Jewish heritage in Gaza: In 1966, Egyptian archaeologists discovered a mosaic in Gaza which in a building they identified as a church, showing a figure playing the lyre. A photo of the figure was published, and it was obvious that the Hebrew word "David" was next to the figure, and it was a synagogue that was uncovered, not a church. 

When Israel took over Gaza in 1967, they went to the site - and found that the Gazans had gouged out David's face and other parts of his body.

The mosaic has since been restored.

The treatment of ancient artifacts in Gaza is a microcosm of the war itself. Hamas cynically hides itself under Gaza's historical heritage and blames Israel when it is destroyed in pursuit of Hamas. But Gazans deliberately destroying Jewish heritage in Gaza aren't condemned at all.







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!

 

 

From Ian:

‘Nothing prepares you for it’
“We’d walk into a room full of blood and see no sign of shooting or bombing. There, Hamas terrorists didn’t use a gun to kill their victims, they used an axe to chop them into pieces,” said Simcha Greiniman, a 47-year-old veteran ZAKA.

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people in Israel, 800 ZAKA volunteers have worked around the clock to recover the remains of the dead.

“I am there every day from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. to make sure that these families get the closure they need to properly mourn their loved ones,” Greiniman told JNS.

Founded in 1995, ZAKA deals with instances of unnatural death, and works in close cooperation with emergency services and security forces.

Over 3,000 ZAKA volunteers are currently deployed cross the country, on call 24/7, to respond to terror attacks, accidents or natural disasters. ZAKA With Destroyed Cars, Oct. 7 AttacksZAKA personnel work at a field with destroyed cars from the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, Dec. 12, 2023. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90.

Greiniman has been volunteering for ZAKA for the past 32 years and oversees groups in charge of conducting Chesed Shel Emes, honoring the dead by bringing bodies to burial, which is considered one of the greatest mitzvot [commandments] in Judaism.

“In the Bible, there is a special need to make sure bodies get a proper burial and that no part, not even blood samples or small bones, are left behind,” explained Greiniman. ZAKA personnel clean blood off the ground at the scene of a suspected terror attack near the entrance to Jerusalem, on Nov. 22, 2022. Two explosions at two bus stops left one person killed and at least another 13 injured. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.

As part of ZAKA International, Greiniman has volunteered both in Israel and overseas in scenarios ranging from natural disasters to accidents and terror attacks. In recent years, ZAKA International flew to Haiti, India, Turkey and Morocco.
Why the full extent of Hamas’s sex crimes may never be known
Free link
There was little time for investigation, and little expertise to formally identify the crimes Hamas had committed.

But forensic reviews of video footage of the aftermath of the attacks, and dozens of interviews clearly points to a pattern of gender-based violence on Oct 7.

There are believed to be at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted, or mutilated.

Dozens of bodies of women and girls with signs of sexual abuse were found, medics told The New York Times.

Videos of the aftermath are said to show soldiers shot in the vagina, and kibbutz residents with nails driven into their thighs and groin.

The scenes at the rave are some of the most graphic, with reports of Hamas terrorists with hammers gang raping party-goers, and cutting off breasts to throw to each other as they laughed.

Both Mr Otmazgin and Ms Mendes admitted that they were overwhelmed on the day of the attacks and their work was focused on finding survivors or preparing bodies.

Ms Mendes said everyone was in a hurry at the morgue to release the bodies to the families for burial instead of looking for clues about exactly what had happened to them.

“Our main concern, especially in the initial days, was identification so that family members could be notified and only then preparation for burial,” Ms Mendes told the UN earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the means by which bodies were collected from the scene of the atrocities may have hampered evidence records.

Mr Otmazgin recalls how he raced to the festival site on the morning of the terror attacks only to be stopped in the road by an Orthodox Jewish man trying to help recover the scores of dead.

When the man opened the boot of his white Skoda, Mr Otmazgin saw the bodies of two young women, in short shorts and trainers lying next to each other.

Mr Otmazgin swore at the man, and then placed the bodies in the ambulance and drove on south.

He came across some soldiers blocking the way while fighting was still raging.

Overwhelmed, they had rushed to remove some bodies from the party that needed to be collected.

Mr Otmazgin works for Zaka, a volunteer group of ultra-Orthodox men who deploy to mass-casualty events simply to collect bodies as fast as they can. They are not there to investigate.

While evidence of pervasive sexual violence became known among therapy providers, gynaecologists and first responders, the details were not initially widely publicised.
Israel building biggest case against Hamas since Eichmann trial
Israel is preparing for the country’s most significant trial since the 1961 court case against Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

Investigators and prosecutors are compiling a massive amount of evidence for an indictment against the captured Hamas terrorists who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre of some 1,200 persons in the northwestern Negev. Thousands more were wounded and at least 240 kidnapped back to Gaza. Terrorists committed acts of rape, sexual abuse, torture, burning and desecration of corpses.

Some 200 Hamas terrorists were captured in Israel during the Oct. 7 invasion, and additional terrorists are being taken prisoner as the Israel Defense Forces continues its ground offensive against the terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli parliament voted in early December to form a subcommittee that will create a legal framework for the prosecution of Hamas terrorists who participated in the Islamist group’s Oct. 7 massacre.

“The state of Israel has never before dealt with crimes and an investigation on this scale,” Roi Sheindorf, former deputy Israeli attorney general, told the Journal. “This will be one of the most important trials to take place in Israel.”
I’m a former hostage. What I thought when I saw Hamas release captives
Ana Diamond works with the Oxford Disinformation and Extremism Lab and the Red Team Network at OpenAI. She is also the co-founder of the Alliance Against State Hostage-taking, having endured over 200 days in solitary confinement as a hostage in Iran between 2016 and 2018.

As 105 hostages were slowly released during the pause in fighting over the end of November, a particularly unsettling phenomenon caught my eye as I perused social media: the crude denialism, even erasure, of Hamas’ atrocities toward their hostages in Gaza. It involved the active online participation of what could best be described as pro-Hamas publicity by sharing footage of Israeli hostages who appeared to be smiling, exchanging high-fives, waving and, at times, even expressing gratitude to their captors.

These images, the Hamas sympathizers insisted, were proof that the hostages had been treated decently and liked their Hamas guards. One user on X (formerly Twitter) wrote, “[Hostages] were having the time of their lives”; another one commented on how “they were treated well.” I find this very difficult to believe, especially since there have been instances where the hostages have taken the risk to attempt an escape from their captors – only to be tragically killed by the Israel Defense Forces by mistake. Furthermore, harrowing details shared by relatives of released hostages speak to beatings, hunger and lack of proper medical care.

As a former hostage of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran (IRGC), I was distraught to see the misleading viral narratives disseminated about the Israeli hostages on social media. Iran is the country that set the blueprint for rogue hostage-taking when Islamist students held more than 50 US Embassy staff hostage following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and unsurprisingly it is now funding Hamas.

It is true that hostage takers have good reason to keep their prisoners alive — they can extract a higher price for their release. While it is dangerous to idealize Hamas’ actions as humane, the fact that the hostages’ value lies in their well-being does mean their external conditions can appear relatively adequate. But even if there aren’t explicit signs of physical abuse, the psychological repercussions of terror and shock can take years for hostages to overcome. Leading psychiatrists have remarked on the necessity of extensive treatment for the trauma experienced by the hostages released from captivity in Gaza.

But it is wildly problematic to read any meaning into one orchestrated moment of release when hostages were still under Hamas control. In these politically precarious times, our social media landscapes have transformed into virtual war zones. It’s imperative to acknowledge that every hostage release serves as a carefully curated photo opportunity for Hamas, and for us to understand what the accurate experience of hostages in these circumstances is.
Happy October 86th
For the families of the hostages being held, for the families of the soldiers risking their lives day in and day out in Gaza, for the more than 1,400 families who have lost a loved one, for those cradling one of the many thousands of wounded in battle and for the country at large which experiencing the worst trauma in its history, it doesn’t matter that 2023 has made way for 2024.

Only in the hope that this calendar year doesn’t contain the heartache and grief of its predecessor (a very low bar, indeed), are we able to mark a differentiation between 2023 and 2024.

As long as our boys are dying in battle, our collective family is being held in inhumane conditions in Gaza, and Hamas is still clinging to a semblance of control, there is no room in our hearts – and no time in our lives – to celebrate.

The best we can do is raise a toast in the hope that October 86th will soon make way for a date in January or February to be determined. And that come next December 31st, Israel will have a blowout to match any New Year’s Eve celebration. And we won’t call it Sylvester.

By Daled Amos

I had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Harold Rhode.

Dr. Harold Rhode has a Ph.D. in Islamic history and lived for years in the Muslim world. He served as an advisor on the Islamic world to the Department of Defense for 28 years.

Dr. Harold Rhode

Do all of the signatories to the Abraham Accords, Arabs and Israelis, see the Abraham Accords the same way?

We Jews want people to love us. And the peace we are looking for is that you will stop fighting, and we will stop fighting, and everyone will live together in peace. But the Muslims do not have a concept like that. They won't stop until the whole world will be Muslim. They follow what their prophet Muhammad did. He signed a 10-year ceasefire with Quraysh. After 2 years, Muhammad realized Quraysh had weakened -- so he attacked them, and won. There is a classic Latin phrase "Bellum omnium contra omnes, pace inter omnes interpellatur," that war is the natural state of man, interrupted by periods of peace.

We do not look at life like that, but historically most people do. From a Muslim point of view, they can agree to have relations with their enemies -- whether they be Muslims, Jews, or anybody else. They can make temporary agreements just like their prophet did. Those agreements can be renewed, renewed, and renewed. But to think that the Saudis see peace the way we Jews see it is a pipe dream. 

In 1949, after Israel's War of Independence, there was a peace conference in Rhodes. The Arabs insisted the borders be called "ceasefire lines" and not borders. The situation was not set in stone. Arabs do not have the concept that when the fighting is over, we can be friends. If we think we will have a peace agreement with the Saudis in the way we understand peace, we will be disappointed. 

Does this mean the Abraham Accords are a pipe dream?

No, that does not mean the Abraham Accords are an illusion. We can have agreements with the Arab countries -- as long as we have things they want from us, such as hi-tech, connections to the outside world, and alternate routes in place of the Suez Canal. They are interested in what is in it for them, not for the sake of friendship. Friendship is between people. Countries ally themselves because of common interests. The Abraham Accords are not about peace; they are about what is in both sides' interest. 

The Arab word “salam” has nothing to do with the Hebrew word shalom. Shalom comes from the root for "completeness." The word "shalaim", means to pay. When two people come to an agreement on a price, that payment completes the process.

In Arabic, the word “salam” is similar to the Hebrew word “shalom,” but they do not have the same meaning. “Islam” and “salam,” come from the same Arabic root. Islam means “submission,” while “salam” means something like the special sense of joy that someone has by submitting to Allah’s will through Islam. Shalom, on the other hand, means letting bygones be bygones, a concept that is totally alien to Islam. Clearly, "salam" and "shalom" do not mean the same thing.

The following example illustrates the Arabic meaning of the word in a Muslim context: If you take a look at the correspondence between Yemen and Saudi Arabia during the war in 1934, the leaders of the two sides wrote the most threatening things to each other -- and then closed their letters with "salam alaikum". These leaders hated each other, but they were fellow Muslims addressing each other. So if "salam" meant peace, how could they end their letters to each other with “salam alaikum?” How could they close their letters with "Peace be unto you"? Because the phrase has nothing to do with peace -- it is about submission to Allah, which both of them, as fellow Muslims, are required to do.”

So, we are dealing with cultures that are so incredibly different from ours, from the Western culture, which is partially based on the Hebrew culture.

I am for the Abraham Accords, very strongly so. The Arab countries are interested because Israel is strong. The proof of that goes back to when contact between Israel and the UAE became serious. Netanyahu spoke before Congress against the Iran deal in 2015, in defiance of the US. He showed Israel was an independent country that could make its own decisions, and was willing to stand up to the US. That was when the Arab countries decided they could do business directly with Israel. It is why Saudi Arabia and Israel have had good relations for a long while and both have a strong dislike for Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

But wouldn't you think that at some point the "experts" would catch on to the fact that the Arab world is different?

No, not at all. Few of these “experts” know the languages or haven’t taken the time to learn about and understand the cultures of the Muslim world. They think anyone who speaks English is a closet American. The White House ignored the Kurds, but when Iraq was liberated during The Gulf War, the White House greeted them as part of Iraq. A State Department senior official approached the Kurds and told them, "You have to stop thinking of yourselves as Kurds; you have to think of yourselves as Iraqis."  

The experts don't read Bernard Lewis. They read Edward Said. His approach is that you can never understand another culture, so don't waste your time trying to. Don't learn the languages and don't learn the culture. Bernard Lewis' attitude was quite different. He said you had to immerse yourself in the culture and the language. You have to try to understand what they are doing and saying in terms of their culture. In modern parlance, what the experts are doing is the equivalent of telling a person not to think of themselves as a man or a woman, but rather as a human. 

I recall the reaction of a very senior leader when war broke out in Syria in 2011. I suggested this was nothing more than the return of the ancient Shiite-Sunni conflict. His response was, "Well, we can't have that!" I said to myself it didn't matter if we could or could not have it. The fact is that they see it this way. The reality is the reality, and if you choose to ignore it, you do so at your own peril.

Let's talk about October 7. On the one hand, Israel's weakness was revealed by the Hamas attack. On the other hand, Israel has entered Gaza and taken the battle to Hamas to a degree few could have predicted.

Hamas misread the Jews. 

But how do the Saudis and the rest of the Gulf states read this? Do they see this as a sign of Israeli weakness or do they see Israel's reaction as a sign of Israel's strength?

They understand strength very well and Israel has come back very strongly. That part of the world has immense patience -- the Jews don't, but everyone else there does. They know how to wait. Let the Saudis put off signing the agreement. I don't really care if there is a formal agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, because their relationship is so strong. The relationship is between governments, because these Arab countries rule from the top, down, unlike in a democracy, where leaders are elected by the people and must take into account the will of the people they lead.

Israelis seem to have a Westernized view of the Middle East. You would think they would have a keener insight and understanding of their Arab neighbors.

Superficially, Israel is a Westernized country. But when you scratch the surface, you see how the Israelis have reacted to the issue of judicial reforms, which the Arabs saw as a weakness -- it is another reason why Hamas decided to pounce now -- but Israel has created a younger generation, who are going to have a huge say after this, a revolution against the politics, military, intelligence, and the media: "We put our lives on the line -- not for you, but for the Jewish people." That is what they are saying. We will see where all this leads. It is only going to be healthy.





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!

 

 

  • Sunday, December 31, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon
Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times, wrote:
Gazans know the truth. Fresh polling data reported by AFP indicates that on the eve of Oct. 7, “many Gazans were hostile to Hamas ahead of the group’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel, with some describing its rule as a second occupation.” 
The AFP article says:
Amaney Jamal 

"We find in our surveys that 67 percent of Palestinians in Gaza had little or no trust in Hamas in that period right before the attacks," said Amaney Jamal, dean of Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs.

"This is especially important because of the (erroneous) argument that all of Gaza supports Hamas, and therefore all of Gaza should be held accountable for the actions, atrocious actions of Hamas."

Jamal is one of the driving forces behind the Arab Barometer which conducts surveys and polling in the region, including in Gaza where fieldwork concluded on the eve of the attacks on Israel.

She said that Hamas, which won elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006 and is designated a "terrorist" organization by Washington and the EU, was seen as "corrupt" and "authoritarian" by many respondents.

"Seventy-five percent said in the previous 30 days, they could not afford to feed their households. So again, this is an impoverished society, a society that is basically saying the Hamas-led government has some levels of corruption," said Jamal.
It is true that most Gazans felt Hamas was corrupt ahead of the war. They aren't blind; it is a corrupt organization - giving land and apartments and other perks to its own members, spending money on tunnels instead of the wellbeing of Gazans. Everyone in Gaza knows this.

But that doesn't mean that they were against Hamas' genocidal aims.

A majority of Gazans, and of Palestinians altogether, supported "armed struggle" - meaning terrorism - against Israeli civilians ahead of the war.  And as I've noted many times, when asked after the fact whether they support specific terror attack against Israeli civilians, the numbers are consistently over 70% for over 20 years. 

This "expert" and others have been twisting the poll results in the media to imply something that is the opposite of the truth, that Gazans hate Hamas terror and want peace.

In that same AFP article, Jamal added a whopping lie:
Ahead of the attacks on Israel, more than half of respondents favored a two-state solution -- a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The remainder opted either for a Palestinian-Israeli confederation or a one-state solution. But one-in-five supported armed resistance before the events of October 7, and the massive Israeli military response that followed.

"(Gazans were) open to a peaceful reconciliation with Israel based on 1967 borders," Jamal said.
In polls, everything depends on how a question is worded. And in this case, the Gazans were given four choices - but not the choice that they have consistently and overwhelmingly supported from the beginning, which is a single Arab state and destroying Israel. When asked if they support “regaining all of historical Palestine from the river to the sea”  Palestinians always choose that over a two state solution.  And even a September poll showed that Palestinians opposed a two state solution by a 2-1 margin. 

The dean of Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs is lying. She is whitewshing  what Palestinians really think, which can be seen consistently in poll after poll.  She is pushing propaganda that Palestinians want to live in peace with Israel and that it is Israeli actions, like defending itself from a genocidal group, that cause Palestinians to hate Israel. 

Arab hate for Jews, including in Palestine,  was around for centuries before 1948. And that is something that is not taught in Princeton or any other Ivy League school, nor mentioned in any AFP article, nor ever  even considered by Thomas Friedman. 



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!

 

 

  • Sunday, December 31, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon



Back in 2018, I introduced the Intersectionality Victimhood Calculator. And it has remained quite accurate five years later.

To recap, the calculator is meant to determine who is the "winner" in any conflict in this new woke world. 

The actual facts in any conflict are utterly irrelevant - only the victimhood score, which is the sum of all victimhood or oppressor values a person has.

One with a negative victimhood score is perceived as an oppressor, a positive score means that one is oppressed.

My scoring system is:



Intersectionality Calculator 1.1

Attribute
Victimhood
Score

Trans8
Black8
Native American or other First People7
Woman6
Gay6
Muslim5
Arab or other Middle Eastern           5
Hispanic4
Disabled, pregnant4
Anti-Zionist Jew4
Wears hijab2
Palestinian2
Asian American1
White-1
Republican or conservative-3
Christian (white only)-3
Jew-3
Visibly religious Jew-3
Jewish settler-6
Trump Supporter-8
White nationalist/Neo Nazi-18
Zionist -8


Total score: 0




People with a positive victimhood score who are also Zionist are considered traitors to their intersectionality rankings, and therefore have their scores multiplied by -1 to flip to negative. 

The system has held up amazingly well. 

In the context of the current Gaza war, after the initial October 7 shock, things normalized to usual: Gazans, even those who cheered the massacre, even those who participated in the massacre, have victimhood scores of at least 12 if they are Muslim, while Israelis generally have scores ranging from -2 to -17. An Israeli Jewish woman who was raped and murdered is still an oppressor and her rapist is a victim.  

The only change I might need to make is to modify the "Jewish settler" category to just "Israeli citizen," as the woke crowd no longer even pretends to distinguish which side of the Green Line Israeli Jews live. They are all "settlers." 

But there is a new application for the calculator: it also informs us of how the media will report on the war.

Let's take an example from this weekend:

Israeli forces shot at a United Nations convoy of armored vehicles in central Gaza on Thursday evening as it was returning from delivering aid in the northern part of the territory, U.N. officials said.

“Israeli soldiers fired at an aid convoy as it returned from northern Gaza along a route designated by the Israeli Army,” Thomas White, the Gaza director for UNRWA, the U.N. relief agency for Palestinian refugees, wrote on social media. He said that one vehicle in the convoy had been damaged, adding: “Aid workers should never be a target.”

The Israeli military did not immediately comment when asked about the episode.

The convoy, whose vehicles were marked with U.N. insignia, was returning from delivering aid, including flour. It was south of Gaza City when it came under fire, Juliette Touma, spokeswoman for UNRWA, said in an interview. Before setting out to deliver the aid, the convoy had coordinated its plans with the Israeli military and notified it of the routes it would take, she added.

Ms. Touma said that the Israeli military had told the convoy to take a different route, which it did. “They rerouted and then the shooting happened,” she said.
In this case, the accusers are UNRWA employees who might be white, but they weren't on the ground during the alleged incident - they are quoting "witnesses" who are Gaza Palestinians with scores of at least 12. This is why they reflexively blame Israel for the shooting (if there was a shooting) and not Gaza militants - it is what the calculator tells them to do.   Even though the accusation makes zero sense, the amount of proof required by the New York Times for the accusation is essentially zero. 

It is up to the IDF to figure out what happened if anything before issuing a denial. This will take several days. By then, no one will follow up with a new story.

If the media treated both sides equally, it would at least ask for some proof, some witnesses, some verification from UNRWA, and find out if there are any other factors in play - like historic antipathy towards Israel - that might make them shade the truth a little bit. 

The Al Ahli hospital attack was reported the same way: the accusations against Israel by "victims," with no evidence that it was an Israeli airstrike, is what created the narrative. 

The Gaza casualty figures is another place where the victimhood calculator writes the story more than the reporters themselves. The BBC story on the Gaza death toll not only believes Hamas figures of the total number killed, but also their breakdown of how many are women and children. It quotes officials who have no actual evidence as verifying Hamas' figures - because they have their own internal victimhood calculator that trusts those with higher victimhood scores. But when it comes to Israeli estimates of roughly 7.000-8,000 Hamas terrorists killed, the skepticism goes way up, both from the BBC and their quoted "experts:"

The BBC has not been able to establish a clear method of verifying the number of fighters killed.
Prof Michael Spagat, said he would "not be at all surprised" if around 80% of those killed were civilians.
The IDF's numbers for combatants killed "have been all over the place, devoid of details and without explanations", he added.
But Hamas figures are believed! Because even terrorists always have a higher victimhood score than Israeli officials, so therefore their statements are believed far more readily than Israeli statements.

An honest reporter would ask how Hamas could have such detailed and specific data when they don't have reliable communication channels, and when all experts at actually counting victims in war zones say how it takes a great deal of time to get accurate numbers. If you look at estimates of the number of victims of other wars in Wikipedia, you will find huge variances from different sources - but Hamas figures being so specific doesn't raise any red flags. 

Any wild accusation by Gazans is taken seriously by the media, any detailed denial by Israel is not believed . While antisemitism is part of this - it is baked into the calculator - a lot of the reason is also because perceived victims are considered more trustworthy than perceived oppressors. 

And being slaughtered, raped, kidnapped and burned is not enough to make you a victim when your victimhood scores are below zero.




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!

 

 

Saturday, December 30, 2023

From Ian:

Kids in Israel Feel Connected to Their Country
On Wednesday, Sammy Jackman, an immigrant from Britain, eulogized his beloved son, Efraim, who was killed in battle in Gaza. He described his ambition and drive, his love for family, his high standards and unwillingness to compromise, and the way he gave his all for the army, his country and his people. He said: "Only in Israel can you raise children like this." It's true.

Kids are educated to give of themselves to society at large. This spirit of volunteerism pushes them to serve as counselors in youth movements, to run camps for the physically disabled, to visit the elderly, and to organize all kinds of group activities to help their communities. This tough spirit fosters independence and idealism. That's what happens when you give 18-year-olds guns and tell them they are responsible for each other's lives.

The so-called "Tik-Tok generation" in Israel was able to put down their screens in a matter of moments and get out there to protect their people and their country. They have shown little sign of the entitlement, coddling, or failure to take responsibility that plague many of their counterparts in other countries.
Douglas Murray, Col. Richard Kemp explain uphill battle for Israel
RESPONDING TO the issue of the hostages, Murray said that he was genuinely shocked by “the lack of empathy for Israel internationally.”

A glaring example, he said, was the tearing down of posters of the hostages around the world. “If you put up a poster of a missing cat or dog in your neighborhood, you would not expect anyone to rip it down,” he asserted.

“And if anyone did rip it down, you would think that person was subhuman. This wasn’t dogs or cats. These were Jewish children. In city after city, sociopaths tore down these posters. This lack of empathy has been there since [Oct. 7].”

Addressing the tragic incident in which three hostages were mistakenly killed by Israeli troops, Murray said: “The media treats it as more evidence of the brutality of the Israeli soldiers – ‘they even kill their own!’

“Imagine the lives of those soldiers who shot those three hostages, how they must have felt. And yet, instead of recognizing what a tragedy that is for everybody involved, they use it as a weapon against Israel! That really has slightly startled me.”

When asked by the moderator about “the day after,” Kemp said: “The IDF has no option whatsoever, apart from to stay in control of Gaza from now on. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks; it doesn’t matter what President Biden might want to happen.

“What is absolutely certain is that the IDF must maintain security control of Gaza. It means either a permanent IDF presence inside the whole of Gaza, or it means the creation of a one- or two-mile buffer zone on the inside of the Gaza border that no one is allowed to go into and that the IDF can police.”

About the general population of Gaza, Kemp said: ”The reality in Gaza is that the vast majority of allegedly innocent civilians support Hamas. Even when they see the horrors that Hamas has brought on them, they still support Hamas. And there will be efforts to have a Hamas 2.”

Murray concurred that it is a “very bleak necessity” for Israel to stay in Gaza. For how long? “Call me a pessimist,” Kemp said, “but I would say forever.”

Both Kemp and Murray spend time visiting the wounded in hospitals. On a recent visit, Murray met a farmer from a border kibbutz who had lost his wife, son, and both his legs in the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack. He told Murray: “I have been a leftist all my life. I now want to look out on nothing but potato fields from here to the Mediterranean.”

Commented Murray: “Who can risk living beside these people? Nobody else in the world would be expected to have to put up with that. I think you should have the right to live in peace and know that the border you have does not contain genocidal maniacs on the other side who want to kill you.”
Kenyan reverend: UN ‘obsessed’ with Hamas war, ‘hates Jews’
A prominent reverend from Kenya, who also directs the Israel Allies Foundation African office, has accused the United Nations of having “an obsession with antisemitism.”

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post via WhatsApp a few days after he returned to his country from a solidarity mission in Israel, Rev. Dennis Nthumbi said that “the war against Hamas has exposed the decay in the UN and its moral rot that has led to the molestation of its statutes.”

He accused the UN of becoming so preoccupied with the Israel-Hamas conflict “because it hates Jews” that it has failed to offer a response to real genocides – one in his area – namely the genocides of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar in Southeast Asia and the Masalit civilians in Sudan.

“The UN is no longer useful,” Nthumbi said. “Abolish it. All sane member nations should either demand a refund or a leadership change.”

He also accused the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) of “running an education system that is enshrined on the principles of jihadism” with an objective of “churning out child terrorists” and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) of disregarding the slaughter of Israeli children on October 7.

Nthumbi is a senior, though unofficial, adviser to Kenya’s president, William Ruto, whom he accompanied on a mission to Israel in May. Both Ruto and Nthumbi are devout Christians who believe their biblical obligation is to support Israel.

Friday, December 29, 2023

From Ian:

Rabbi David J. Wolpe: On the Hatred of Jews
Israel is the only country in the world that is routinely and widely targeted for eradication. So is anti-Zionism synonymous with antisemitism?

There are exceptions, but the overlap is striking. I have never heard of activists who are angry with China targeting Chinese restaurants in Paris, but when Hamas terrorists were recently arrested in Europe with plans to blow up Jewish institutions, they were not targeting Israel, but Jews. If someone is angry at Israel, they target Jewish synagogues, businesses, and restaurants — anything associated with Jews, anywhere in the world — no matter their relationship to Israel.

This enmity has deep roots.

I have a position at the Harvard Divinity School, and I often wonder whether we teach students that both the New Testament, and to a lesser extent the Koran, contain messages hostile to Jews. Do the students learn that Martin Luther said Jews “are a serpent’s brood” and their synagogues should be burned, or how during periods like the Almohad persecution, Jews could accept Islam, flee, or die? How Christians persecuted and periodically murdered Jews for some 1,500 years?

Jews experienced more acceptance in Muslim lands, yet still were labeled impure, subjugated, and were often persecuted. Many of my congregants in Los Angeles were forced to flee Iran when the Shah fell in 1979 — their property confiscated, the leader of the community executed, and the Khomeini regime making clear they were unwelcome in the new Islamic republic. Having lost everything and escaping with their lives, years later, they still have nightmares.

Why all this hatred against one small people? We remained different, distinct. We would not become Christian or Muslim. We were outsiders, others, champions of diversity.

Moreover, Jewish culture — portable, book-focused, and one that venerates scholarship and learning — primes us for economies where information and mental agility lead to success. When you don’t like someone, seeing them succeed magnifies the antipathy.

Finally, Jews introduced the idea of ethical monotheism — the moral demands that one God makes on human beings — to the western tradition. As Jewish essayist Maurice Samuel said, “no one likes an alarm clock”; Jews represent conscience and conscience is a disruptive and painful partner in our lives.

The energy and outrage Jews generate — making up 0.2 percent of the world population — is oddly disproportionate. Antisemitism is a wild, irrational eruption.

Harvard has a long and ignoble history of antisemitism, as Harvard President Claudine Gay said in her remarks to Harvard Hillel in October. It is time to admit it, confront it and overcome it. One can criticize policies without calling for the end to the only homeland Jews have ever known. One can demand a Palestinian state without globalizing the intifada — the term for a protest that previously resulted in over 110 suicide bombings that targeted buses, cafes, and malls.

If we cannot learn to argue civilly at Harvard, how can we have hope for the civility of other places in the world?

Jews gave the world a precious gift: the idea that each human being is an image of God. I pray that we all remember and honor that gift.
Yisrael Medad: ‘Palestine’ and the energy of colonization
In what can only be considered as an ironic twist of intention, it has become apparent that not only has the idea of a free Arab state of Palestine become an agenda item of the first degree for the United Nations, human-rights NGOs, and other similar bodies and institutions, but it has become the ideal of these bodies as well. The slogan “Palestine must be free” has literally colonized the minds of intellectuals, academicians, diplomats and university students, thus assuring, at least for the short term, it being a constant of discussion, debate and involvement.

In what I have termed as the rhetoric of obversity—that is, the orchestration of language to mean not what was originally intended, as well as the expanding of their meaning to include new definitions—the normative definition of settler colonialism has been modified. Settler colonialism is when invaders occupy a territory to permanently replace the existing society with the society of the colonizers so as to enjoy metropolitan living standards and political privileges. It has been applied, wrongly and falsely, to Zionism.

This allows news items, such as one from Dec. 20, “Illegal Israeli Colonizers Raze Land,” to hammer the term into the heads of Jewish youth who should know better as it more easily does into the thinking of others.

Implicit in applying the “settler colonialism” terminology is to suggest that the goals of Zionism were and are the elimination and exploitation of the “native” population. However, that never happened, nor was it the intention of the Zionist enterprise. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Cary Nelson, is his magnificent “Israel Denial” on the faculty campaign against the Jewish state, notes on pages 120-123 how the older claim of Zionism as a colonialist movement has now been linked to the false assertion not only of a supposed Arab Palestinian identity but an Arab Palestinian indigeneity as well, thereby interlocking the core forces that drive the anger and involvement of college student even while this causes a racialization format.

In an academic treatment, Sai Englert quotes Fayez Sayegh who described the core of Zionism’s ideology as one of “racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness and racial supremacy” on p. 22 in a 1965 PLO booklet. Sayegh, the Syrian-born founder of the Palestine Research Center of Beirut, is held to be a pioneering analyst in the field. Perhaps one of the more illustrative examples of language rape practiced by the proponents of pro-Palestine propaganda is the one used at the March 2011 Seventh Annual Conference of the London’s SOAS Palestine Society. It would have us believe that “[f]or over a century, Zionism has subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new colonial Israeli society.”

To give but one example of the relative primitiveness of the approach in its early period is to quote from Sayegh writing: “The frenzied ‘Scramble for Africa’ of the 1880s stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonization in Palestine.” Jews at that time were a permanent feature for centuries in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron. Leading up to 1740 and in the following decade, thousands immigrated to Eretz Yisrael expecting the Messianic era to evolve, including Rabbi Moses Haim Luzzatto and Kabbalist Rabbi Haim ben Attar.

Indeed, in all the previous centuries, Jews were moving to reside in Eretz Yisrael, including hundreds of rabbis and some of the greatest luminaries of Jewish scholarship. In the mid- to late 18th century, hundreds of Chassidim, many with families, were immigrating to the country. By the early 19th century, the pupils of the Vilna Gaon, too, were making the move. Not antisemitism but religious motivation was the force behind this.
How Westerners Empower Radical Islam
Yasmine Mohammed - not her real name - is the author of the 2019 book Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. Born in Vancouver with a father from Gaza and an Egyptian mother, she says, "any criticism of Islamic cultures is deemed xenophobic or racist." But this reluctance to apply to Islam the same pressures for change and improvement we apply to ourselves is a form of the inverse racism of low expectations.

This is evident in the failure of many Westerners to properly condemn Hamas' actions on Oct. 7. Instead of heaping condemnation on Hamas, as we would do with any other group, she feels that many Western universities, media, and politicians imply its behavior is a fitting response to Palestinian grievances.

"After the Holocaust, would you now expect Jewish people to jump into the homes of German people and start slaughtering families and kidnapping people? Of course not." But when it comes to Arabs or Muslims, a different, lower set of expectations is applied - as if barbarism is perfectly OK.
  • Friday, December 29, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon


The media often quotes the "Gaza Government Media Office." 

It has been the source for the recent charge that Israel is harvesting organs from dead Palestinians, for many sketchy casualty allegations, that Israel is is guilty of hundreds of "field executions" of civilians, that Israel destroyed over 200 archaeological sites, and so on. It is a non-stop factory manufacturing lies.

So, who is behind it?

Their website is down. Their YouTube channel has been removed.Their Instagram and Facebook pages have not been updated since October. They are not holding press conferences.

Everything comes from their Telegram channel (which, as of this moment, I cannot find the link to.) That is what gets quoted in Arabic media.

Earlier, we discussed Israel's transparency. Well, here is an example of Hamas' opacity.

There is no means to check anything released by the Hamas media office. There is no name attached to it. 

The head of the media office was Salama Marouf, but he hasn't posted anything on his own Facebook or TikTok since October 9, and his last messages on Facebook strongly hint that he was not healthy.  He posted, "Our Lord, do not burden us with what we have strength to bear, forgive us, and have mercy on us, You are our Lord, so give us victory over the disbelievers."

So we don't even know who is in charge of the Telegram channel. We don't know its sources. 

The media that quotes Hamas' media office knows literally nothing about who they are transcribing. It could be an AI, it could be a hacker, it could be a 14-year old son of Marouf. 

Yet this completely opaque channel is trusted enough to be quoted as if the journalists know that it is legit, let alone that the information it spreads is accurate. 

And while statements from this mystery terrorist Telegram channel are trusted, official Israeli statements given by people with real names and real faces and backed up with real evidence are treated as potential lies. 

Treating what Jews say as barely more reliable than the statements of murderers and rapists is not journalism. It is antisemitism dressed up as journalism. 




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!

 

 

From Ian:

NYTs: ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7

Free Link

At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”

In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.

The video was shot in the early hours of Oct. 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis.

The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.

One family knew exactly who she was — Gal Abdush, mother of two from a working-class town in central Israel, who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.

As the terrorists closed in on her, trapped on a highway in a line of cars of people trying to flee the party, she sent one final WhatsApp message to her family: “You don’t understand.”

Based largely on the video evidence — which was verified by The New York Times — Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.

Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck — the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the kibbutzim — they brutalized women.

A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.

Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.

Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.

And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.

Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.

The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.

The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.

Hamas has denied Israel’s accusations of sexual violence. Israeli activists have been outraged that the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, and the agency U.N. Women did not acknowledge the many accusations until weeks after the attacks.

Investigators with Israel’s top national police unit, Lahav 433, have been steadily gathering evidence but they have not put a number on how many women were raped, saying that most are dead — and buried — and that they will never know. No survivors have spoken publicly.

The Israeli police have acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples from women’s bodies, requesting autopsies or closely examining crime scenes. At that moment, the authorities said, they were intent on repelling Hamas and identifying the dead.

A combination of chaos, enormous grief and Jewish religious duties meant that many bodies were buried as quickly as possible. Most were never examined, and in some cases, like at the rave scene, where more than 360 people were slaughtered in a few hours, the bodies were hauled away by the truckload.
Islamic Jihad terrorist admits to rape, NYT probes Hamas's sexual violence
A Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist captured in Gaza admitted during questioning that he participated in the massacre on October 7 and that his squad committed rape and then murdered victims during the massacre, KAN reported on Thursday.

Serious sexual offenses were part of the method Hamas and other terrorist groups utilized in the massacre on October 7. Lahav 433, Israel’s top national police unit, collected evidence of dozens of cases of sexual offenses and sexual abuse from investigations of the terrorists and the collection of survivor testimonies.

A survivor of the massacre recently testified to the police about a rape she saw with her own eyes, and her testimony was verified by another survivor who was close to her.

"I understand that he raped her, then they gave her to someone else. She was alive and finally, he shot her," said the survivor. Some of the terrorists said in their investigation that they received permission to abuse corpses, to create fear in Israeli society.

On Channel 11, testimonies were revealed that were provided to the Zman Emet (Real Time) show - two witnesses who saw and heard the atrocities and decided to speak about it now for the first time and openly. One of them, Raz, a discharged officer who participated in the Nova festival in Re'im, said: "A white car arrived and five terrorists exited out of it. They stood in a semi-circle around her, grabbing her by force so she wouldn't move. It happened 30 or 40 meters from us. There was a lot of movement...he raped her. I look and see that the girl is no longer moving, but the terrorist still continues to rape her. It was impossible to help her. I couldn't do anything. I wish I had a weapon and I could help," he said.

After Cohen's appearance on Channel 11, he gave evidence to the police, becoming the first witness to openly describe the acts of rape he witnessed on October 7.


  • Friday, December 29, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics issued a report showing the economic costs to Palestinians  of the Gaza war, in both Gaza and the West Bank, through the end of November.

During the war, Israel has not allowed Palestinian workers into Israel. It has also not allowed Israeli Arabs to go to the PA-controlled areas of the West Bank, where they would often shop and obtain services at a lower price than they could get in Israel.

As a result, the Palestinian private sector lost about $1.45 billion compared to what would have been expected in October and November. It is losing about $25 million a day.

This is not including direct losses from the war of property damage.

Productivity in the West Bank has gone down by roughly half, which shows how dependent the Palestinian economy is on Israel. In Gaza, predictably, productivity has been slashed some 86%,  The only sectors doing well in Gaza are humanitarian aid and health.

Yet there are no protests in the West Bank demanding that Hamas end the war. Zero. 

There are no doubt that individuals are not happy about their wellbeing being affected by Hamas deciding that killing Jews is more important than Palestinian lives and livelihoods. But you won't hear about any of them, because every Palestinian knows that they must show unity with their leaders,and the West Bank leaders know they must show solidarity with whatever Hamas is doing. Any public disagreement is regarded as a source of shame. 

Hamas and Palestinians take great pleasure in seeing any signs of a rift in Israeli society. They eagerly report about families of hostages pressuring the government for a deal. They regard internal debate as  sign of weakness, and because they project their own honor/shame culture on others, they think that Israel must be in really bad shape to subject itself to such shame. 

Supporting Hamas killing Jews is, bizarrely, considered honorable. It is far more honorable than having jobs or paying for food and living expenses.

It is a truly sick society. 

 



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!

 

 

  • Friday, December 29, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon


Djibouti's real estate is incredibly valuable from a geopolitical perspective.

It lies on the African side of the Bab al-Mandab Strait that overlooks all maritime traffic to the Red Sea - the strait that the Houthis have been threatening.

Djibouti is a poor country, and gets a great deal of income from traffic that goes through those straits.

Even so, Djibouti supports the Houthis, even though that support for the blockade hurts Djibouti.

Its reasons are important for the West to understand. From Saba (Yemen):
Djibouti's Foreign Minister, Mahmoud Ali Youssef, confirmed today that his country did not condemn the Sanaa attacks in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab, because it considered them "true relief for the Palestinians."

Youssef said in a television interview: Djibouti has reservations about participating in the coalition formed by the United States, even though the cessation of maritime trade in Bab al-Mandab will harm Djibouti’s economy.

He pointed out that maritime trade is an essential part of Djibouti's national income, and if Bab al-Mandab is closed, "its economy will collapse."

He added: The Yemeni Ansar Allah group “attacked the ships in order to rescue and relieve the Palestinians, and we must all support Palestine because brother supports his brother, even with the weakest faith, and Djibouti does not condemn the Yemeni operations because they are a fraternal duty.”

The US has a military base in Djibouti, as do Italy, Japan, Germany, Spain and Saudi Arabia. None of them are fans of the Houthis or Hamas. They could put economic pressure on a country that is utterly dependent on them to issue statements denouncing Hamas, condemning its massacre on October 7, call on it to release hostages.

But they don't.

The honor/shame mentality is not only individual. It is also at the level of tribes, countries and ethnic groups. As this statement makes clear, Arabs must not show cracks in their unity, because it would be shameful to expose differences of opinion in front of the larger world.

This gives a huge advantage to violent Arab extremists. They can count on unquestioned public support by a half billion fellow Arabs or two billion fellow Muslims no matter what heinous acts they perform. As long as they don't attack fellow Arabs, they have an automatic cheering section that is willing to support, rally and lie for them. 

There is a huge irony here. Jews are accused by antisemites of having a single, secret agenda. It makes no sense to accuse Jews of controlling the government or various industries unless you accept as a premise that Jews are monolithic and working towards a single agenda. Yet Jews are the least homogenous group there is. Jews are willing and often eager to publicly argue and disagree with other Jews. 

But Arabs, and Muslims, are much more monolithic. They will support each other even when they disagree with what they are doing. They will publicly pledge solidarity even when that hurts themselves. 

The Houthis aren't saving a single Palestinian life. They are following the instructions of (non-Arab) Iran. They are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Arab civilians. But when they claim they are fighting Israel, they get automatic, reflexive public support from the larger Arab world.

Just as Hamas is. 

The fiction of Arab unity, fueled by "honor," was part of Hamas' calculations when they decided to start this war. No matter how horrified some Arabs might be at Hamas, they will not criticize the group in public. 

Which means that the honor/shame culture that mandates Arab and Muslim unity is a culture that encourages war and terror. 





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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

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  • Friday, December 29, 2023
  • Elder of Ziyon
The New York Times reports:

The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had caused “unintended harm” to “uninvolved civilians” in two strikes this week on a densely packed Gaza Strip neighborhood, where, the local health authorities said, dozens were killed.

It was a rare admission of fault by the military over its conduct of the war. The military said it was targeting Hamas on Sunday when it launched two strikes on the central Gazan community of Al Maghazi, which has been flooded with Palestinians uprooted by war and crammed into homes by the dozen.

“A preliminary investigation revealed that additional buildings located near the targets were also hit during the strikes, which likely caused unintended harm to additional uninvolved civilians,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement.

“The I.D.F. regrets the harm to uninvolved individuals, and is working to draw lessons from the incident,” the statement said.
In 2021, the New York Times reported that over 60 civilians were killed in a 2019 US airstrike in Syria. It dropped a 500-ton bomb on a crowd and then two 2,000 pound bombs. It also reported that the US Army did everything it could to cover it up:

The Baghuz strike was one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State, but it has never been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. military. The details, reported here for the first time, show that the death toll was almost immediately apparent to military officials. A legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.
After the New York Times report, the army mounted an investigation, and said that nearly all of the casualties were military - 52 militants and four civilians. It did admit fault in delays of reporting on the incident.

That's ovcr three years between the airstrike and any public reporting of findings into the incident.

Here, Israel investigated and found indications that it used a larger munition than necessary for the legal attack on militants - and it admitted this mistake within only four days.

And that is not the only official recognition of a mistake given by the IDF on Thursday. It also released a report - not a preliminary report, but results of as full an investigation as possible in a war zone - on the accidental killing of three hostages December 15.  That's less than two weeks.

Perhaps the reason that admissions of fault are "rare" is because actual fault is rare by Israel, despite the journalists' desire to find such fault. For example, the New York Times also published an investigation on Israel's use of 2,000 pound bombs based on craters seen from satellite imagery and described how destructive they are. But they described the wrong bomb, as Lenny Ben David reports:

The Times based its analysis on the wrong bomb, a Mark-84, which explodes on impact with little penetration properties. The Times failed to report on a more credible bomb, the BLU-109 “bunker buster bomb,” that penetrates many meters below the surface before it explodes, making it a very effective weapon to destroy deep Hamas tunnels. The craters were the telltale sign of underground voids, such as tunnels, collapsing. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The United States has not previously disclosed the total number of weapons it sent to Israel nor the transfer of 100 BLU-109, 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs.”2

One U.S. intelligence officer (retired) told the author, “The crater in the (Times’) image is ridiculously clean for there to have been a target on top of it. The crater is also symmetrical, which would not be the case if the bomb had glided in.”
The BLU-109 would give much less collateral damage since it explodes underground, but the NYT report describes only a bomb that explodes on the surface and sends shrapnel for thousands of feet around - not the craters the Times showed. 

CNN made the same error - knowingly. It published a map showing that schools were within the 1000 meter damage zone of a Mark-84 bomb, but in the small print it admitted that the craters were consistent with bombs that explode underground - meaning no damage zone. And the bomb craters are on a straight line, indicating they were meant to destroy tunnels deliberately built near those schools.


Israel is fighting in a battlefield that was deliberately built over 15 years to maximize civilian harm in order to attack the enemy. It is probably the most difficult battle in history for any army that values human life.This is unprecedented.

Israel has dropped far more bombs than the number of people killed. For an urban war zone, this is unprecedented.

Israel has mounted investigations in a highly complex environment and given accurate information on specific incidents within days at a time when there are many attacks. This is unprecedented. 

Israel has admitted mistakes within days of events, not years afterwards. I'm pretty sure this is unprecedented.

All evidence points to Israel being the most moral army in history. All evidence points to Israel being the most transparent army in history. 

And all evidence also points to a media environment that is ignorant of the realities of war at best, or deliberately misleading about it at worst.




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!

 

 

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