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Friday, January 05, 2024

01/05 Links Pt2: Every Conspiracy Everywhere All At Once; UNRWA Must be Defunded & Exposed as the World’s Leading Anti-Israel Propaganda Machine

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Every Conspiracy Everywhere All At Once
Jews have often noted that conspiracy theories about us openly contradict each other: at one moment, we’ll be accused of being communists; in another, they’ll hate us for being capitalists. But social media today means we live in the era of what I’d call Kitchen Sink Anti-Semitism: Like the movie that cleaned up at the 2022 Oscars, it’s everything everywhere all at once.

A month I ago I wrote about how Israel’s haters love to accuse the Jewish state of genocide because it’s the ultimate way to universalize the Holocaust and deny the particular destructive animus toward the Jews. Since then, such discourse has become ubiquitous: just yesterday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had to field a question about it at a White House briefing, and there’s even been a lawsuit filed against President Biden for his supposed complicity in the “genocide.”

But then there’s the fact that Princeton University just concluded a semester in which a Near Eastern history course assigned the book by Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar featuring the classic blood libel of Israeli organ-harvesting. As Jonathan Marks noted in COMMENTARY in 2016, Puar herself rejected the “genocide” accusation, saying: “The Jewish Israeli population cannot afford to hand over genocide to another population. They need the Palestinians alive in order to keep the kind of rationalization for their victimhood and their militarized economy.”

And so it is that the Jews are simultaneously guilty of genocide and of perpetuating a multi-generational campaign of evil that precludes genocide. Both of these allegations coexist within the same cohort—academic anti-Semites—in psychopathic harmony.
Jonathan Tobin: There’s no middle ground in the fight against DEI antisemitism
Yet too many moderates and liberals are still trying to argue that outrage about the mobs chanting for the destruction of Israel can be separated from the genocide of Jews. It is this warped view that has sent such “progressives” into the streets and onto campuses to vent their rage.

You don’t have to like Stefanik or Rufo, or plan to vote for the Republicans, to understand that so long as woke commissars like Claudine Gay—and her counterparts elsewhere—are dominating America’s college campuses, the virus of antisemitism will continue to grow. Democrats must understand that unless DEI rules are thrown out of academia, the corporate world, the media and the government (where an executive order by President Joe Biden put them in place throughout the federal apparatus), their party will be completely taken over by leftists who hate Israel and are indifferent at best to the spread of antisemitism.

The aftermath of Oct. 7 and the fall of Claudine Gay ought to be a turning point in this debate. But it won’t be if those who acknowledge that antisemitism is on the rise don’t draw the appropriate conclusions about why this has happened.

Gay’s fate or that of any other college administrator is secondary to whether their toxic ideas will be allowed to continue to be the official new secular religion of American civic life. On this question, there is no middle ground. There’s no way to make DEI less antisemitic since it is designed to divide and target some for opprobrium in this manner. Treating the impact of woke ideas as nothing more than a conservative culture war controversy won’t work anymore.

Americans have to choose and traditional political loyalties are no longer relevant. They can either join those seeking to roll back the woke tide and restore basic American values of equality and fairness, or they can stand by and watch as a neo-Marxist faith destroys American liberty piece by piece with the Jews just being the first victims.
Douglas Murray: Harvard tarnished itself with the Claudine Gay debacle
What must you do to fail at Harvard?

It used to be pretty clear.

You had to be caught cheating.

Or doing something so outrageous that it’d get you thrown off campus.

Not anymore.

Today Harvard is an institution that thinks that antisemitism is OK and believes that plagiarism is fine.

Not long ago, a student would have been kicked out for either of these sins.

Today the president has been caught at both.

And the board of the university stuck by her.

Even when she decided to step down this week, both she and her supporters went into full-on “victimhood mode.”

Nothing was her fault.

In a bitter farewell piece, Claudine Gay said she was the victim of “demagogues” who had “weaponized” her presidency to “undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence and truth.”

If those are the animating ideals of Harvard, then they are ones that Gay herself trampled all over. With her lack of academic distinction, her total lack of scholarship, her plagiarism and self-pity.

Gay has published no books, written only 11 articles (most of which turn out to have been plagiarized), but still she was appointed president of Harvard.

As the Somali-born author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali told me in an interview this week, “My grandmother wouldn’t have trusted Claudine Gay to herd her goats.”

Unlike Hirsi Ali, Gay comes from a privileged background, and she will continue her privileged lifestyle.

It emerged this week that although Gay has left the presidency, she is going to stay on at Harvard as a lecturer.

At a salary of an extraordinary $900,000 a year.
Seth Mandel: Mutiny at the Anti-Defamation League
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, for years has spent the organization’s political capital on accruing acceptance in progressive spaces. The ADL has become home to a great many AsAJews. After Oct. 7, the bill came due: The AsAJews and their political mentors decided it was time for the ADL to throw off the yoke of its pretensions and defect from Jewish organizational life to officially join the ranks of those marching on Jewish neighborhoods chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Greenblatt balked, and his creation has apparently risen from the table and walked out of the lab. According to Jewish Currents, the house organ of the AsAJews, several employees have left the ADL unit dedicated to countering online hate, including the Obama administration alum who led that unit, because of Greenblatt’s attempts to get social-media services to crack down on anti-Semitism:

“Former staffers told Jewish Currents that in the past months, Greenblatt has redirected the ADL’s day-to-day work to target pro-Palestine activism rather than focusing on antisemitism in American life, a shift they say seriously undermines the organization’s credibility.”

To translate that from doublespeak: The Anti-Defamation League’s public opposition to those calling for the mass murder of the Jewish people is not what these staffers signed up for. Perhaps this clash was inevitable: Greenblatt’s support for censorship in the public square was a weapon his progressive allies were never going to accept being turned on them.

And there is much anger at the realization that the activists who thought they had fully captured this particular institution still have work to do. Greenblatt’s conscience has awoken in the wake of Oct. 7, and now he won’t just take orders from his subordinates, which apparently was the state of play prior to the massacre.

“There’s a pattern of Jonathan going rogue—belittling in-house experts and ignoring talking points prepared for him,” one former ADL staffer told Jewish Currents, with no apparent self-awareness.


UNRWA Must be Defunded & Exposed as the World’s Leading Anti-Israel Propaganda Machine
The advocacy group UN Watch, enumerated on how teachers in UNRWA schools express support for terrorism and Palestinian terrorist groups, and indoctrinate students to violence. On July 15, 2022, Hillel Neuer, director of UN Watch tweeted that UN Watch has “easily identified 120 UNRWA teachers, school principles and other employees who praise Hitler, glorify terrorist attacks and spread snit-Semitism.” Watch decried the, “exploitation of children as child soldiers” as a “form of child abuse and a violation of international law.”

Recent reports from Israeli sources, including the Telegram news channel Abu Ali Express, reveal disturbing instances of UNRWA schools incorporating art projects that glorify terrorists. The juxtaposition of landmarks like the Dome of the Rock with images of infamous figures like Osama Bin Laden raises serious questions about the agency’s educational content and its clear impact on fostering a culture of violence.

UNRWA’s journey has been marked by decades of continuous funding, transforming it into a permanent fixture in the region. The reluctance of the United States to antagonize the Arab world during the Cold War, coupled with fears of Soviet expansion, led to the sustained financial backing of UNRWA, perpetuating its presence year after year.

One glaring issue is UNRWA’s refugee registration system, which has seen the number of refugees skyrocket from the original 750,000 to a staggering 5.9 million. This exponential increase, primarily attributed to its expansive definition of refugee status, raises serious questions about the agency’s objectives and sustainability. The irony is exemplified by Jordan, the country with the highest concentration of registered refugees at two million. Despite the majority being Jordanian citizens, they are still categorized as refugees, highlighting the absurdity of UNRWA’s approach.

To maintain its relevance, UNRWA employs a dubious refugee definition, explicitly stating that it “does not afford refugee status under the 1951 Geneva Convention.” Instead, the agency operates based on a self-crafted definition that determines eligibility for services and assistance. This strategic maneuvering allows UNRWA to continue its operations without adhering to internationally recognized refugee conventions.

The perpetuation of such a system not only raises ethical concerns but also impedes the path to a sustainable resolution for the Palestinian refugee crisis. By maintaining an inflated refugee count and perpetuating a narrative that contradicts the international standards set by the Geneva Convention, UNRWA risks becoming an obstacle rather than a catalyst for a lasting solution.

The time is long overdue for the cessation of all funding to the UNWRA. This odious organization clearly has a dangerous agenda and must be exposed as the anti-Israel propaganda machine that it is.


UN employee blames ‘hack’ for pro-Hamas posts
The United Nations has claimed antisemitic posts and a message backing Hamas sent from an employee’s social media account were written by a hacker.

An X/Twitter profile created by Lamia Burkart, who has worked for the supranational body in Geneva and New York, posted a string of tweets comparing Israel to Nazi Germany following the October 7 attack.

In December, in response to a photo contrasting an image of the Brandenburg Gate draped in Nazi flags to a contemporary photo of it with a menorah, the account said: “Oh I get it now: Nazi then and Nazio now, right? [sic]”

Later that month, sharing a photo of a billboard with a message declaring that Hamas raped and murdered Israeli women, Burkart’s profile wrote: “Can you think of a better illustration of this basic rule of propaganda: ‘Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth’ May not be a coincidence that it’s often attributed to Nazi Goeballs #DismantleZionism.”

The account later demanded, “DISMANTLE THE NAZI ISRAEL STATE NOW!” and insisted, “We prefer Hamas to Israel 1000 times.”

The Lamia profile also attacked former Board of Deputies representative Khaled Hassan after he announced that an Egyptian academic had left his job following accusations of antisemitism.

It accused him of likely being paid by the state of Israel and of being a “3rd Reich agent x Kristallnacht reveller” supporting a genocide in Gaza.

Minutes later, Hassan told the JC, a LinkedIn profile under Lamia’s name viewed his profile on the business networking site.

The X profile registered under the UN employee’s name then mocked Hassan again, this time referencing the university he attended — a detail available on his LinkedIn.

A UN Human Rights Office spokesman said Lamia’s social media accounts with X and LinkedIn were hacked without her knowledge and that she did not make the abusive posts in question.
Why are you angry at the Auschwitz Museum?
In November last year, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum issued a forthright statement on the Israel-Hamas conflict. Unsurprisingly, the museum supported Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas’s anti-Semitic terror and called for the immediate release of the Israelis held hostage in Gaza following the 7 October attacks. A fierce backlash then ensued. ‘Pro-Palestine’ accounts bombarded the museum with vitriol.

This week, the Auschwitz Museum revealed that, since making that statement condemning Hamas’s murder, torture and kidnapping of Israelis its X account has lost 7,000 followers. This also prompted a flurry of angry responses. Many X users tried to explain why unfollowing or attacking the Auschwitz Museum is actually a principled, ‘progressive’ thing to do.

The response from identitarian activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu was typical:

‘I unfollowed you after your disgraceful endorsement of Israel’s extermination, ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians. The museum should be ashamed of itself. Never again means never again for anyone. You’re an embarrassment to humanity.’

To most people, Mos-Shogbamimu’s tweet will be nothing short of shocking. For many decades, the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland has been the principal symbol of the worst human atrocity in history. The Nazis exterminated one million Jews there, along with a further 100,000 non-Jews, including Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners and others. To describe the museum charged with preserving the memory of these crimes as ‘an embarrassment to humanity’ surely marks a new low for the pseudo-progressive left.
The attempt to colonize Jewish history
Previously, this tactic to erase Jewish history and replace the Jewish people by calling Israel a colonial, occupying enterprise would have shown the claimants to be either ignorant or deceitful. It would not have earned them a teaching position at our celebrated institutions of higher learning, where they have been able to mislead and indoctrinate a generation of students who have not been taught actual history or critical thinking.

Similarly disingenuous was United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres when he claimed that the massacre of Israelis and others in the pogrom of Oct. 7 had context because of Israel’s “occupation.”

His statement was in direct contradiction of the U.N. charter, since the U.N. inherited the obligations of the League of Nations, including the reestablishment of the State of Israel on precisely that “occupied” land.

We also see the word “occupation” deceptively applied to Israel in various newspapers and on other media platforms. We see it used by international leaders and elected officials who, at best, unthinkingly parrot these tired mantras about Israel and, at worst, are actively aiding in the effort to wrest the Jewish homeland away from the Jewish people by verbally rewriting history and denigrating the Jewish state.

Had Israel’s neighbors offered it any kind of reciprocity, any acknowledgement of the rights of the Jewish nation to a sovereign state in its ancestral homeland, they would have planted the seeds of peace. Unfortunately, in the face of the current attempt to drive the Jewish people out of the Land of Israel, the Jews are once again forced to defend their history, heritage and home while the yearning and praying for peace continue.
Scary times ahead
A liberal Jewish lawyer visited Hamas tunnels in 2011. Read her glowing views of Hamas before October 7, 2023. Israel is the bad guy. Op-ed.

We live in truly incredible times. Terror organization supporters in the US are not hiding anymore. As Hamas filmed their attacks on our people, so too in the streets and boardrooms of the United States our enemies are brazen, clear and open.

Take the New York City based respected and successful lawyer Kathleen Peratis of Outten Golden who has visited the Hamas deadly terror tunnels multiple times, praised Hamas leaders, openly opposes a Jewish state and supports BDS. She is a leader of numerous organizations, including serving as a trustee emerita of Human Rights Watch, founding Chair of its Women’s Rights Division, and co-chair of the Advisory Committee of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Division. She is a board member of the New Israel Fund.

While she is a leader on the fight against rape and sexual harassment, as far as I have seen, Ms. Peratis has been silent on the mass rape of Israeli women and silent on the issue of calling for the release of Israeli hostages.

In a 2011 op-ed describing her tours of the Hamas terror tunnels, Gaza’s ‘Tunnel Economy’ Is Booming, Ms. Peratis describes her Gaza visit “…as a fun-filled joy fest spent with friends. She quotes one Hamas leader saying:”Please tell your friends that Hamas people are ordinary people. We are not barbarians.” …

She adds: “Nearly everyone I spoke to – mostly Hamas officials, but also others – seemed to feel a great sense of pride in what he or she had survived, and confidence in the future. They all believe that Hamas triumphed in the prisoner-exchange deal with Israel, that despite international condemnation and punishment they are thriving, and that cutting all ties with Israel has been to Gaza’s benefit. Many seem to think that reconciliation with Fatah is probable, and with it, national elections. They see the Americans engaging with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and think that Hamas – and its further prosperity and legitimacy – may not be far behind. As one Gazan put it, ‘Time is on our side.’

She describes her Hamas mates as people “…who…could not have been friendlier” and as she walked through the tunnels she describes a mood which was “….almost convivial.”
"Intifada" Is Absolutely A Call For Genocide
I rarely write an article condemning another article. My usual goal is to inform, persuade and be critical of flawed or dangerous ideas.

However, I saw something so vile, so wrong-headed, so insane recently that I had to contribute my two cents. I am hoping that I can undo any damage the irresponsible previous garbage article may have done. There are gullible people out there, so who knows how many well-meaning people believed the idiocy that I subjected myself to in reading it.

While I am definitely not a regular reader, I get emails from The Forward, For those who don’t know, it is a very old far-left Yiddish newspaper (now in English) founded for socialists in 1897.

They appear to not have learned much during their 126 years.

It genuinely pains me to write an article criticizing the work of other Jews. Right now, unity is critical and only an extreme circumstance would cause me to write anything that doesn’t further that goal. But I also can’t let people, no matter who they are, actively aid our enemies (even if unintentional) or threaten our current unity forged at the cost of the lives lost in the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7.

Worse, I believe articles like this one allow bigots to justify their hatred, and encourage acts of violence, against us.

So what was this heinous diatribe?

I’m sure we all remember Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s (R-N.Y.) excellent questioning—and take-down—of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was a masterpiece of prosecutorial acuity, and Rep. Stefanik performed masterfully.


John Pilger was a charlatan and a fraudster
The dichotomy is unfortunately not raised at all in an obsequious and evasive Guardian obituary by Anthony Hayward, from which you will learn little, but more thoughtful admirers of Pilger are exercised by this question and do pose it. What made Pilger, the famed voice of radical conscience, go from his celebrated series of films on the plight of Cambodia to his defence of Slobodan Milosevic, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin and his furious denial of their amply documented war crimes?

I immodestly claim to have the answer to this conundrum. There is an essential continuity in Pilger’s work. It’s not, as many believe, that his judgment dramatically deteriorated as he got older: he was always that way, and his reputation has progressively adjusted downwards to match reality. Pilger was not really an investigative journalist at all, for he never did investigations. As a reporter who once worked closely with him explained it to me, Pilger was a polemicist who went out looking for what he wanted to find.

Therein lies the essential transience of Pilger’s life’s work, for while there is much suffering and evil in the international order, a journalist’s first duty, allowing for personal biases and partial information, is to describe the world as it is and not as they might wish it to be. Pilger, by contrast, fabricated his conclusions in order to accord with his premises. This was always his method and I will give examples of this malpractice from his output on two particular issues. The first is his celebrated reporting from Cambodia and the second concerns the wars in the former Yugoslavia, a region he neither knew nor understood.

There is no diplomatic way of saying it but, in his journalism, Pilger was a charlatan and a fraudster. And I use those terms in the strict sense that he said things he knew to be untrue, and withheld things he knew to be true and material, and did it for decades, for ideological reasons. If you know where to look, you’ll uncover his inspiration.
Washington Post under fire for repeated anti-Israel bias, systemic sloppiness in Middle East coverage
As leading mainstream news outlets continue to navigate the pitfalls of covering the Israel-Hamas war, The Washington Post is facing particularly intense scrutiny over a growing number of issues connected to its reporting on the conflict, fueling mounting concerns among Jewish leaders, foreign policy experts and even some staffers, among other critics.

The most prominent source of contention has in recent weeks centered on a factually challenged front-page story, published in mid-November, that detailed the struggles of premature Palestinian infants born in the West Bank and Israel who were separated from their parents amid Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

In an extensive editor’s note added to the story last week after more than a month’s delay, the paper listed multiple inaccuracies in the original article, effectively undermining its core thesis — that Palestinian mothers were required by the Israeli government to return to Gaza when their travel permits had expired. Meanwhile, the note also acknowledged that the triple-bylined feature had not initially sought comment from Israeli officials, “an omission that fell short of the Post’s standards for fairness.”

Though the paper admitted culpability in its mishandling of a politically sensitive subject, the editor’s note still left some questions unresolved, including why the story chose not to identify the hospitals or medical workers it cited anonymously. The story had, without evidence, attributed its decision to protecting “staff members” who “fear reprisals from Israeli authorities.” But critics have cast doubt on that claim, noting that NBC News published a similar story just a few weeks later on two of the parents cited in the Post article — and the outlet was for its part able to name the hospital in East Jerusalem as well as the head of its neonatal unit.

It is unclear why the editor’s note took more than a month to produce. Before it was appended to the top of the article during the holiday break last week, the story had raised eyebrows among some Post staffers who privately expressed reservations that it did not meet the newspaper’s rigorous editorial standards, according to a source familiar with the matter.

A spokesperson for the Post declined to comment on the story and did not address questions sent by Jewish Insider on Thursday afternoon, referring instead to the editor’s note.

Robert Satloff, the executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy whose sustained criticism of the recent Post story helped contribute to the publication of the editor’s note, said he was pleased that the paper had ultimately recognized some of its mistakes. But he added that he remains frustrated with the broader thrust of its Middle East coverage, which he views as flawed.

“I believe the egregious violations of journalistic standards I highlighted in my critique of the Nov. 17 story is regrettably not limited to this article,” he said in an email to JI.
The Washington Post Reprints Antisemitic Blood Libel
Antisemitism is skyrocketing. And one of the largest newspapers in the United States is helping fuel the fire. The Washington Post prides itself on “courageous journalism” and speaking “truth to power,” but a recent report promoted an age-old antisemitic canard.

The Dec. 26, 2023 dispatch, “The World Wants a Respite for Gaza. Israel Vows to Keep on Fighting,” regurgitated the claim that Jews steal organs of non-Jews. As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has documented, such “blood libels and conspiracy theories have played a tragic role in Jewish history” and are responsible for inciting anti-Jewish violence. And one can now find them printed in the pages of the Washington Post.

“Palestinian officials,” the Post wrote, “said Tuesday that Israel had returned the bodies of 80 people it had held during the Gaza War via the Karem Shalom border crossing. The Hamas-run government media office said Israel had not identified the bodies or said where they had been taken from. They had been ‘mutilated,’ the media office said in a statement, and there were ‘clear’ indications that organs had been ‘stolen’ from the corpses.”

“The claims,” the Post added, “could not be independently verified.”

As CAMERA has pointed out, this isn’t the first time that the Washington Post has reprinted claims by Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group that calls for a genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel. Indeed, the newspaper has made a habit of repeating casualty claims provided by the terrorist group, despite overwhelming evidence of their unreliability.

But by peddling a medieval blood libel, the Post has crossed the Rubicon, illustrating that, much like Hamas, there is seemingly no depth to their depravity and capriciousness.
German Foreign Minister Heads to Israel Stressing That Gaza Can No Longer Pose Terror Threat

Ireland’s History Explains Its Hostility Towards Israel and Jews

Amid growing scrutiny of Qatar, U.S. renews military base agreement

Florida Marriott said to lay out welcome mat to those with ‘alarming’ terror ties
By allowing itself to be the venue for the South Florida Muslim Federation’s annual conference for the second year in a row, the Fort Lauderdale Marriott Coral Springs Hotel & Convention Center “stands to tarnish the Marriott’s image as a global hospitality leader.”

That’s according to the Middle East Forum, which charges that the hotel plans to host the “region’s most extreme alliance of Islamist organizations” on Jan. 12-13.

Per Middle East Forum, the event organizer is “a collection of mosques, charities and civic action groups representing the faith’s most radical Islamist sects and movements.” The event “promises to feature hateful speeches from some of the region’s most controversial Islamist voices,” it adds, including those “who regularly traffic in bigotry and possess alarming ties to foreign terrorists.”

Several of the slated speakers have posted or made anti-Israel comments publicly, according to the Middle East Forum. One even praised the Hamas terror organization for its treatment of the prisoners whom it kidnapped.

It further claimed that the hotel’s general manager, who was informed about the group last month, said: “It’s beyond my ability to make a judgment on.” Middle East Forum stated that the hotel has ways to get out of the contract for “justified reasons.”
CAIR's Leader Cheered Hamas's Terror Attack on Israel. Gavin Newsom is Sitting Down With the Group Anyway.
California governor Gavin Newsom (D.) met Thursday with the state's Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter (CAIR) just weeks after the group's leader said he was "happy to see" Hamas's terrorist attack on Israel, a comment that even prompted condemnation from the Biden White House.

Newsom, a potential presidential contender, hosted CAIR officials, the group said in a press release. The activists called on Newsom to push for a ceasefire in Gaza and urged him to ensure freedom of speech for anti-Israel protesters at California schools. The White House, which selected CAIR to serve on a task force to combat anti-Semitism last year, distanced itself from the group in November after CAIR president Nihad Awad said he "was happy to see" Hamas fighters attack Israel on Oct. 7.

In the meeting with CAIR, Newsom provides a high-profile platform to an activist group with longstanding ties to Hamas. Federal prosecutors named CAIR an "unindicted co-conspirator" of Hamas front groups in 2009. Awad in November claimed Israel "does not have a right to defend itself."

The head of CAIR’s California chapter, Hussam Ayloush, praised Newsom after the meeting for providing a "platform to request the administration be proactive in ensuring the dignity of Palestinians."

"In his tenure, Governor Newsom has paved the path as a champion for civil rights, and we urge him to continue to use his voice as the leader of Californians who overwhelmingly demand a ceasefire," said Ayloush.

Ayloush, too, has downplayed Hamas’s attack on Israel, the worst attack in the Jewish state’s history. He asserted in a sermon at the Islamic Society of Corona-Norco in November that it was "a lie" that Hamas’s invasion of Israel was an "unprovoked attack," the Washington Free Beacon reported.

"If I hear that term again, I’ll go crazy," Ayloush said. "Unprovoked in what dictionary?"

Newsom gave $200,000 in 2022 to the Islamic Society of Corona-Norco through California’s Nonprofit Security Grant program, awarded to religious institutions to help protect against terrorist attacks, the Free Beacon reported. Newsom’s office awarded $135,000 to CAIR’s California chapter as part of the program.


House of Commons denies plan to fly Palestinian flag at parliament
On most days, the three speaker's flagpoles outside the Palace of Westminster only display the Union flag.

When Sir Lindsay meets with visitors and international dignitaries at the House of Commons, however, the flag of their nation will be flown.

Criticising the decision, Iain Mansfield, the director of research at thinktank Policy Exchange said: “This is baffling behaviour by the Speaker. The UK does not recognise the state of Palestine.

“Should the Speaker be committing the entire House of Commons to such a controversial position on the current conflict? Is Speaker-led diplomacy really appropriate in this case? It is hardly impartial.

“Mr Speaker has serious questions to answer - not least from the many Parliamentarians who may not share his views.”

Later on Friday, a House of Commons spokesman claimed that Zomlot had never been due to visit at all.

“A routine internal planning email was sent in error,” they said.

"We can confirm no meeting with the Palestinian Ambassador is scheduled to take place.”


Argentine police arrest suspected terrorist cell members over plot to target Jewish sites in Buenos Aires
Argentine police have arrested three men who allegedly planned to carry out terrorist attacks at Jewish sites surrounding the Pan-American Maccabi Games in Buenos Aires.

The three men, two Syrian and one Lebanese, arrived separately in the country and were apprehended in Argentina’s capital and in the adjacent suburb of Avellaneda.

A suspicious package originating from Yemen and weighing about 77 pounds was set to be delivered to the lodging where one of the suspects was staying, local media reported.

One of the Syrians had Venezuelan and Colombian passports in his possession.

Police are scouring the suspects’ cell phones on suspicion there may be additional operatives in their network, according to the media reports.

Buenos Aires is hosting the 15th edition of the Pan American Maccabi Games, with more than 4,000 Jewish athletes from 22 countries participating in the event.

Local police have been on heightened alert for the possibility of terrorist attacks.

It comes after Brazil announced an operation which led to the arrest of Hezbollah-affiliated terrorists plotting attacks on Jewish communities within the country. Targets included synagogues, community centres and kosher restaurants.
Owen Jones, Palestinian Patsy
Then came Jones’s November 16 exchange with TV host Piers Morgan. Jones began with a withering putdown of an Israeli spokesperson who’d just informed Morgan about Hamas’s use of a Gaza hospital as a terrorist base. Jones brushed off this charge as being beyond ludicrous, saying that Israeli spokesmen “have a long track record of lying through their back teeth.” By contrast, he was quick to emphasize that he does believe any statement by the UN – which in this context means the UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hamas. When Morgan mentioned to Jones that Israel had supplied fuel to a Gaza hospital only to see Hamas use the fuel for its own ends, Jones rejected that charge, too, citing, as if it were gospel, testimony by hospital officials – vermin who, like UNRWA, are also under the thumb of Hamas.

On December 4, by the way, Rachel O’Donoghue of Honest Reporting noted a similar example of breathtaking denial on Jones’s part: after the IDF found “evidence of a Hamas command center located within the Al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip” as well as “security camera footage that showed Israeli hostages had been taken there,” Jones “ludicrously claimed the footage offered proof that ‘injured hostages were taken there for medical treatment’ by their captors.’”

But back to Piers Morgan, who at one point in his interview with Jones truthfully pointed out that Hamas’s charter explicitly declares its “genocidal intent” towards the Jews. Jones, unable to deny that plain fact, countered with the allegation that Israel, too, has been guilty of spewing “genocidal rhetoric” – for example, by referring to Hamas as “human animals.” (Far from calling this “genocidal rhetoric,” I’d call it an insult to animals, because no species other than homo sapiens practices the kind of savagery, rooted in pure evil, that was displayed by Hamas on October 7.) In response, Morgan pointed out that the Israelis clearly aren’t genocidal, because they have the ability to “kill everybody in Gaza tomorrow and they’re not doing it.”

Since Jones’s appearance with Morgan, overwhelming evidence has emerged of Hamas’s use of hospitals, schools, mosques, private residences, and other non-military structures for military purposes. Indeed, extensions of Hamas’s intricate network of tunnels have been found to lead into innumerable homes. It has even been said that when entering homes in Gaza to find weapons or tunnel access, the IDF has learned that the first place to look is under the bed or crib in a child’s bedroom. Jones – again, as far as I’ve seen – has yet to acknowledge publicly any of this.

But who on earth, at this point in Jones’s career, would ever expect him to be a remotely fair broker? In his interview with Piers Morgan, as in his earlier TV discussion of the Orlando Pulse massacre, he made it crystal clear that he’s not in the truth business – he’s in the propaganda business. Yes, when pressed, as he was by Morgan, he’ll criticize Hamas’s actions on October 7 and grant that Hamas is a terrorist group that shouldn’t be allowed to govern Gaza. But his declarations of this sort always sound entirely pro forma, and he always moves on from them as fast as he can. He always makes sure to stress, moreover, that it’s Israeli cruelty that has forced Palestinians, in their desperation, to turn to terrorism as a last resort. And he never comes close to admitting that Jew-hatred is a central tenet of Islam, that it’s inculcated in Palestinians from early childhood, and that if only Gazans, during the last 15 years, had been psychologically capable of concentrating their energies on developing their communities instead of plotting obsessively to murder their neighbors, their lives could have been infinitely more productive, more prosperous, and happier.
Heather Mac Donald: Unrepentant DEI at MIT
Kornbluth has heretofore avoided the intense heat directed at the now-ousted presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, despite having given a similarly robotic (and similarly hypocritical) defense of campus free speech at the now-infamous December 5 House hearing on anti-Semitism. The best that could be said of Kornbluth’s congressional performance was that she avoided the condescending hauteur and sense of aristocratic weariness with GOP yokels that characterized then-Harvard president Claudine Gay’s testimony. MIT’s Jewish alumni started organizing after what they viewed as the administration’s inadequate response to student lawlessness during a pro-Palestinian occupation of MIT’s main campus building on November 9, 2023. But the MIT alumni have yet to reach the critical mass or clout of alumni from the Penn and Harvard business schools. Kornbluth’s seeming blindness to DEI’s loss of legitimacy raises further questions about her fitness to lead MIT, however, at the very least on grounds of sheer political cluelessness.

MIT is a science school. Its faculty and graduates have furthered mankind’s conquest of disease, catastrophe, and ignorance by prying loose the secrets of the universe, the atom, and the cell. Nowhere in that triumph of knowledge and discovery did a conscious engineering of “representation” and “diversity” play a role. MIT recognized scientific excellence and pursued it, in whatever color, shape, or sex it came.

Now, however, MIT, too, has succumbed to the ideology of color-consciousness, as the 2020 cancellation of a speech on planetary science by geophysicist Dorian Abbot made clear. (Abbot had co-written an unrelated article supporting meritocratic excellence in college admissions and faculty hiring.) An MIT computer scientist, Mauricio Karchmer, has just resigned, citing the priority put on “promoting a particular world view” in “many of MIT’s departments and programs.”

Kornbluth exemplifies a rule of thumb: anyone in a university leadership position not affirmatively opposed to race politics supports antimeritocratic ideas. She also demonstrates just how blinding campus ideology is: her first instincts are to parrot local received wisdom about MIT’s being insufficiently “welcoming” to diversity and not yet being a place where “all feel that we belong,” in Kornbluth’s words. Kornbluth is proceeding with initiatives called “Standing Together Against Hate” and “Unity Across Differences”—all invitations for further interventions from diversity ideologues.

Campus reformers need to find leaders, faculty, and boards, like the board of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who explicitly repudiate DEI. Everyone else is a trojan horse.
After Penn President's Resignation, Professors Say Anti-Israel Sentiment on Campus Is 'Very, Very Strong'
Until three months ago, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Michael Kahana said he had never felt the need to wear a yarmulke, or Jewish skullcap, to his classes.

"It started Oct. 7. I now feel that if I don't wear a yarmulke then my students might not feel that they can," said Kahana, one of the organizers of some 30 Penn faculty on a solidarity mission to Israel this week.

The aim was mainly to build bridges with the Israeli academic community. Faculty met with Penn alumni, political and hospital leaders, and hostage families and toured sites in Israel where Palestinian Hamas fighters attacked on Oct. 7.

Penn and other U.S. colleges have simmered with tension over the Hamas attack and Israel's subsequent offensive in Gaza. For months, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students have clashed at protests and university administrators have faced criticism for their responses to allegations of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Penn's leadership came under fire from the school's large Jewish community starting in September when the school hosted a Palestinian literary festival featuring some outspoken pro-Palestinian speakers described as anti-Semitic by critics.

Outrage mounted on Dec. 5 when then-president Liz Magill declined to give a U.S. congressional committee a definitive "yes" or "no" answer to the question of whether calling for genocide of Jews violated the school code of conduct.

Magill and the university's former board chair resigned later that month.

Kahana said he did not believe Magill was anti-Semitic. He said the problem runs far deeper than one person. During their visit to Israel, Kahana and many of his Penn colleagues voiced dismay at fellow Penn professors for not condemning Hamas.
Rutgers law student faces expulsion after ‘doxxing’ Hamas supporters: suit

MIT Lecturer Resigns Over School’s Response to Oct. 7, Says Campus Showed ‘Open Hostility’ Toward Jews, Israelis

Lawsuit: ‘Pervasive and severe’ Jew-hatred at School of the Art Institute of Chicago

I Got Ousted From an NYU Student Council Group for Humanizing Jews

Doctor Quits UBC After 30 Years Over Concerns of Anti-Semitism

McMaster University sued for $77 million over alleged antisemitic incidents on campus

CNN’s Investigations Glossing Over Questions of Credibility
Left undetailed, however, is whether CNN made any effort to verify the account, including whether the author was actually in a position to reliably make the claims presented. It is not even explained if the “Israeli soldier” who provided the account was actually at the scene in Huwara. CAMERA queried CNN on this question, but the network said only that it stood by its reporting without elaborating or clarifying.

As the Society of Professional Journalists explains, “reporters should use every possible avenue to confirm and attribute information before relying on unnamed sources” and the “public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability.”

It is entirely possible that the “Israeli soldier’s” account is accurate, but CNN simply doesn’t provide enough information to be able to gauge his or her credibility.

Given that the account was provided by Breaking the Silence, the journalists should have been on notice. The organization has a long history of making dubious allegations against Israeli forces. It has been exposed making claims that are contradicted not just by witness testimony, but by documentary evidence. This makes it all the more concerning that it appears CNN made no effort to speak to any other Israeli personnel on the ground.

Other questions of methodology, which bear on the reliability of evidence, are also left unexplained. For example, the authors claim that “none of the videos” it reviewed “showed [IDF soldiers] firing on the settlers” who were rampaging through Huwara. Left unanswered, though, is how it went about collecting footage. Were the reporters seeking it out themselves from all available sources? Were they just being hand-fed selective footage from certain sources, or relying only on what they could find on social media? Was any of the video footage edited or clipped? Is there any footage they were not able to access that likely has relevance?

Again, it’s possible that the journalists did their due diligence and made all feasible efforts to verify the information. But when making serious allegations under the banner of a “monthslong investigation,” CNN owes it to its readers to be open and transparent about the quality of the evidence and the methodology employed, as well as any important shortcomings of the investigation.
Calgary Student Newspaper Makes Important Admission Of Responsibility In Publishing Anti-Israel Articles

Caribbean Camera, Publisher Of Hateful Antisemitic Propaganda & Defender Of Hamas Terrorism, Received $14,000 In Federal Grants

BBC News reporting on Saleh al Arouri highlights years of omission
The elimination of a senior Hamas operative and several others in Beirut on the evening of January 2nd has caused the BBC to finally provide its audiences with some of the information concerning Saleh al Arouri that has been absent from its coverage for nearly a decade.

At the time of writing, the BBC News website had published four reports relating to that story:
‘Who was Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri killed in Beirut?’ by Shaimaa Khalil & Ali Abbas Ahmadi, January 2nd 2024
‘Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri killed in Beirut blast’ by Raffi Berg & Graeme Baker, January 2nd 2024
‘Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri’s assassination sparks wider war fears’ by Lyse Doucet, January 3rd 2024
‘Saleh al-Arouri: Hamas leader’s death ‘won’t go unpunished’, says Hezbollah chief’ by Kathryn Armstrong, January 3rd 2024

Three of those four reports include a photograph with the same caption:


However, for years the BBC failed to inform its audiences about al Arouri’s direction and facilitation of terror attacks in Judea & Samaria, even when he did so from the haven of a NATO member country.


Iran’s Influence Operations in the U.S. Start with the Universities and Stretch to the Department of Defense
The Islamic Republic of Iran operates extensive terrorist and terror-financing networks not just in the Middle East, but also in Europe and Latin America. Drawing on methods used by the KGB, it has also tried to exert influence over Western minds, specifically through the universities. Mariam Memarsadeghi explains:

The Islamic Republic’s soft-power strategy prioritizes university scholars, giving those of Iranian descent in particular access to regime insiders while grooming them to provide a whitewashed version of even the most brutal aspects of clerical rule.

Scholars at America’s top academic institutions are close to those Washington think-tank analysts who promote appeasement of the Islamic Republic. Recent exposés . . . show how the Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry created an “Iran Experts Initiative” to push Tehran’s positions in Washington, particularly on its nuclear program, and managed to have three of its top members land posts as advisors to Robert Malley, Biden’s special envoy to Iran, who is now under State Department and FBI investigation.

Their reporting has prompted Republicans in both the House and Senate to press the Biden administration, including the Department of Defense, to account for the hiring of individuals to highly sensitive U.S. national security positions who took direction from Tehran.
ISIS claimed deadly Iran blasts 'under Zionist guidance' - IRGC

12 unexpected animal stories from the Israel-Gaza war
War is the most horrid human invention, but unfortunately it also affects animals. And the war raging between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip is no different.

Whether caught in the crossfire, actively participating in it, or trying to shelter from the damage, animals are a silent sideshow to mankind’s violence.

We thought to shed light on some of the more unexpected animal stories emerging from the war to provide you some respite from the morbid news cycle.

May it all end soon, for all of us creatures here.

1. The dog that Hamas kidnapped
Mia Leimberg, a 17-year-old from Jerusalem, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from the southern community of Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak while she was visiting family. They dragged her to the Gaza Strip with other family members and, to Hamas’ surprise, her pet dog, Bella.

The terrorists discovered that Mia was clutching Bella only once inside the Gaza Strip, and Mia says that having Bella helped her navigate captivity.

After almost two months, Mia was freed together with her mother and aunt, while her uncle and her aunt’s partner remain hostage in Gaza.

The photo of Mia emerging from captivity with Bella in her arms was a jaw-dropping moment for Israelis. It radiated hope and, perhaps above all, strength – the strength of a young woman who made it back from hell.

4. Israeli fighter dog undergoes hyperbaric oxygen therapy
When Prof. Shai Efrati, director of hyperbaric medicine and research at the Yitzhak Shamir Medical Center, was asked to treat a dog using his cutting-edge technology, he initially thought to himself, “No.”

But upon learning that the intended patient was Mikey, a fighter dog from the elite canine unit Oketz, he immediately said yes. Mikey was wounded by a grenade while fighting in Gaza, which led to a loss of one eye, a broken leg, shrapnel wounds and brain damage. After traditional treatment offered her little help, she was brought for treatment in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, where oxygen was flooded into her bloodstream to help overcome her injuries – especially the brain damage.

The results, Efrati notes, were astounding, and even more immediate than those seen in humans. Mikey can now walk and understand her surroundings, and her recovery is meant to improve even further, thanks to the top-quality treatment that Israel’s brave fighters – dogs included – are receiving since the war broke out.




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