Monday, January 29, 2024

01/29 Links Pt2: Bibi: The Obstacle to Peace Is Not the Absence of a Palestinian State but the Opposition to a Jewish State; The Numbers Game Over the Casualties in Gaza

From Ian:

PM Benjamin Netanyahu interviewed by Tunku Varadarajan (WSJ): The Obstacle to Peace Is Not the Absence of a Palestinian State but the Opposition to a Jewish State
To "ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel" will require "durable demilitarization, which can only be carried out and sustained by Israel," along with "deradicalization," a cleansing of the ideological poison in Gaza that most Jewish Israelis on both left and right now regard as nonnegotiable preconditions for peace with the Palestinians.

How is the campaign against Hamas going? "Better than many expected. It took the U.S. and its allies nine months to defeat radical forces in Mosul" in 2016-17 against Islamic State. "Mosul is smaller than Gaza and did not have the massive terror underground infrastructure. We're now in the fourth month."

Netanyahu, like most Israelis, is aghast at the way protesters in the West - especially on American campuses - demonize Israel and, in some cases, laud Hamas. "This is a problem not just for Israel but also for America....America is the vanguard of freedom and the guarantor of liberty in this century. If a younger generation emerges in America that supports the head-choppers, it is a problem for civilization."

Asked about Washington's push for a two-state solution while Israel is in the throes of an existential war, he says, "Anyone supporting Israel and who also supports a two-state solution should ask themselves some questions. Do they support the Palestinians having an army? The answer is of course not. Should the Palestinians be able to bring in weapons? The answer is of course not. Should they be able to make military pacts with Iran? Of course not."

"In any future agreement, the Palestinians should have all the power to govern themselves and none of the powers to threaten Israel." In any agreement, "Israel must retain overall security control over territory west of the Jordan River, and that includes Gaza."

"Some in the United States believe that the obstacle to peace with the Palestinians is - me. They don't realize that I reflect the view of most Israelis." Polls confirm Netanyahu's assertion and indicate that Israelis, far from clamoring for a two-state solution, are adamant that the war should be fought with intensity.

Most of his compatriots "understand that the problem is that the Palestinians don't want peace with Israel but peace without Israel." It's "not the absence of a Palestinian state but the opposition to a Jewish state that is the obstacle to peace."
Bassem Eid: My Fellow Palestinians: It's Time to Get Rid of Our Leaders and Accept Israel's Offers for Peace
When the United Nations General Assembly voted to divide the Mandate into Jewish and Arab states in 1947, the Jewish community joyously accepted their proposal. Yet tragically, the Palestinian Arab leadership again rejected even a small Jewish state in the territory. They then invited the armies of seven neighboring Arab countries to invade and destroy the newborn Jewish state in what became Israel's War of Independence.

The trend continued with the Oslo Accords of 1993, in which Israeli leaders generously allowed a genocidal terrorist group called the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), run by the mastermind mass murderer Yasser Arafat, to take control over most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The year 2000 was a critical juncture. At the Camp David Summit, Israel extended an unprecedented offer of Palestinian statehood. They were once again met with Palestinian leadership's refusal—and the eruption of the bloody Second Intifada, a wave of suicide bombings that killed almost a thousand Israeli civilians.

The betrayal shattered any illusion of a commitment to a peaceful resolution from the Palestinian side.

Then came 2008, at the Annapolis Conference, where Israel once again reached out with a proposal for an independent Palestinian state. The refusal of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to accept this offer was not just disappointing; it was infuriating. Today, Abbas, who came to power in 2004, is serving the nineteenth year of his four-year presidential term, having suspended both elections and the constitution in the Palestinian territories.

Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip is ruled by the vile Hamas, the ISIS of Palestine, which, on October 7, 2023, invaded the communities of Southern Israel, murdering 1,200 souls in a single day of nightmares and taking more than 240 captives to Gaza. Alongside these murders were unspeakable acts of sexual assault and continuous abuses of hostages until today, a grim reminder of the human cost of this conflict.

The sworn objective of Hamas's founding charter is not coexistence but the obliteration of Israel. Khaled Meshaal, former head of Hamas and still one of its most senior leaders, clarified just this month Hamas's position on the idea of a two-state solution: "We reject this notion, because it means you would get a promise for a [Palestinian] state, yet you are required to recognize the legitimacy of the other state, which is the Zionist entity... We will not give up on our right to Palestine in its entirety, from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea." He insisted on his belief that Oct. 7 only "enhanced this conviction."

The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict regarding a two-state solution reveals a harsh reality: Israel has consistently made genuine efforts toward peace, only to be met with rejection, treachery, and blood-curdling violence by the Palestinian side. This pattern of refusal, particularly epitomized by groups like Hamas, has been the real obstacle to peace.

It's time to acknowledge this truth bluntly. Those who claim to desire peace must confront and challenge the rejectionist elements within Palestinian society, including Hamas. We need to get rid of the Palestinian establishment who have ruled for 15 years without actually representing the Palestinian people. Only then can we hope to forge a path toward a peaceful, two-state future.
Bassam Tawil: Time to End UNRWA's Jihad against Israel
"Hamas is involved in everything. Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers. Hamas manages UNRWA. They are those in charge in the agency. From the day Hamas came to power, they took control of everything. The UNRWA employees are from Hamas. The heads of the departments and the senior staff are Hamas members." —Palestinian from the Gaza Strip to an Israeli officer in a recorded call, X (Twitter) December 27, 2023.

It is now clear that the UN heads were lying when they said they were unaware of the involvement of their employees with terror groups. In fact, they knew but did their utmost to appease Hamas.

In a moment of rare honesty, in 2021 the UN acknowledged that UNRWA's school curriculum referred to Israel as "the enemy," taught children mathematics by counting "martyred terrorists," and included the phrase "Jihad is one of the doors to paradise" in Arabic grammar lessons.

"Before UNRWA, this terrorist accomplice [Abdallah Mehjez] worked for the BBC..." — Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.

"Now is the time for reform. Reform for rehabilitation - so that the minds of Palestinian children can no longer be poisoned. So that there can be a shared vision of peace in this land." — Lt. Col. (res.) Peter Lerner, X (Twitter), January 27, 2024.

Western taxpayers should not be funding terror groups disguised as humanitarian organizations.

UNRWA was established to support the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees, not to support the development of terrorism.
UNWRA was established to aid Jewish as well as Arab refugees
Following evidence that it has colluded with Hamas in Gaza, several countries have withdrawn or paused their funding to UNWRA, the UN agency tasked with giving relief to Palestinian Arab refugees* fleeing in 1948 from what would become Israel. But there is little discussion of why an agency set up as a temporary measure should still be giving relief to ‘refugees’ 75 years later. It is not generally known that UNWRA was established with the aim of helping refugees on both sides of the conflict, but no one today talks of Jewish refugees, who have been fully absorbed.

According to Don Peretz (Who is a Refugee?) initially UNRWA defined a refugee “as a needy person who, as a result of the war in Palestine, has lost his home and his means of livelihood.

This definition included some 17,000 Jews who had lived in areas of Palestine taken over by Arab forces during the 1948 war and about 50,000 Arabs living within Israel’s armistice frontiers. Israel took responsibility for these individuals, and by 1950 they were removed from the UNRWA rolls leaving only Palestine Arabs and a few hundred non-Arab Christian Palestinians outside Israel in UNRWA’s refugee category.

At the time there was no internationally recognised definition of what constituted a refugee. In 1951, The UN Refugee Convention agreed the following definition:

“A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”

This definition certainly applies to the 850,000 Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Arab countries, synagogue burnings, arrests and riots. Returning to these countries would have put – and still does -their lives at risk.

The burden of rehabilitating and resettling the 650,000 Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel from Arab countries was shouldered by the Jewish Agency and US Jewish relief organisations, such as the Joint Distribution Committee. They were shunted into transit camps or ma’abarot. The conditions were appalling.

The American aid earmarked to solve the issue of Middle East refugees was supposed to have been split evenly between Israel and the Arab states, with each side receiving $50 million to build infrastructure to absorb refugees. The money to take in the Arab refugees was handed over to the U.N. agency founded to address the issue of Palestinian refugees, and the Americans gave Arab countries another $53 million for “technical cooperation.” In effect, the Arab side received double the money given to Israel, even though Israel took in more refugees, including ones from Arab nations – Jews who had been displaced by the regional upheavals. The bills presented to Congress in 1951 included a bill to send Israel aid to take in refugees. It was the first and last time that any mechanism was established for the Jewish refugees. The amount Congress allocated to provide for Middle East refugees – Jewish and Arab – at the request of then-President Harry Truman was equal to $1.5 billion today.


Alan Dershowitz: Civilian Deaths in Gaza: Relatively Low
Critics of Israel almost never cite comparable data from other military encounters. This omission creates the false impression that the civilian death tolls in Gaza are among the highest in history, when they are in fact among the lowest.

The New York Times' conclusion that the new data suggests that it is "wrong to accuse [Israel] of wanting to maximize civilian deaths" is highly relevant to the false charges of genocide that are being considered by the International Court of Justice.

The decreasing civilian death rate among Gazans should also end the campaign to impose a ceasefire on Israel before the IDF completes its legitimate mission to destroy Hamas' military capacity. Successfully completing that mission will save civilian lives in the long run, by reducing Hamas' capacity to keep its promise of repeating the barbarism of October 7 and also by reducing its use of civilian shields.

The time has come, indeed it is long overdue, for the world to stop imposing a double standard on the nation-state of the Jewish people. Double standards are a form of bigotry, and when bigotry is addressed to the only nation-state of the Jewish people, it becomes a form of international anti-Semitism against the Jew among nations. It must stop.
Jake Wallis Simons: Israel Goes to Greater Lengths to Avoid Civilian Casualties than Any Other Nation
Ever since its birth, Israel has been subjected to empty judgments and prim finger-wagging. While the International Court of Justice resisted the urge to demand that Israel lay down its arms and bare its neck for the slaughter, it could not help but deliver a scolding. Israel goes to greater lengths to avoid civilian casualties than any other nation.

Take the leaflets warning people to leave the combat zone in advance of an attack or the strikes aborted when innocents are spotted in the target zone. Did the RAF do the same when we pounded Iraq, Afghanistan or the Houthis in Yemen? Did the Americans? Israel has managed to maintain a combatant-to-civilian ratio of around 1:2, even on a battlefield designed to put civilians in harm's way (the global average is 1:9).

Will the ICJ now address Russia's invasion of Ukraine or Turkey's massacre of the Kurds? It's not the killing that's the problem. It's the Jewishness of the finger on the trigger. As Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky remarked: "We do not have to account to anybody. We are not to sit for anybody's examination and nobody is old enough to call on us to answer. We came before them and will leave after them. We are what we are, we are good for ourselves, we will not change, nor do we want to."
Navigating Myths: Humanitarian Law & Urban Warfare in the Israel-Hamas War - January 24, 2024
John Spencer: Navigating Myths: Humanitarian Law & Urban Warfare in the Israel-Hamas War. This was an important conversation I had with @TTU_Law Professor Geoffrey Corn


Kyle Orton: Cynicism and Consequences: The Numbers Game Over the Casualties in Gaza
Again, to put it more bluntly than Epstein does, the United Nations’ conduct on this issue has been disgraceful. The health ministry’s own figures belie its repeated claim—foregrounded by the U.N.—that 70% of the fatalities are women and children, pointing to a figure under 60%, and the severing of the health ministry’s connection to the north, where there has been two months of heavy ground combat between Israel and Palestinian terrorists, mean that even if the ministry was acting in good faith it would have missed hundreds and possibly thousands of adult male Gazan fatalities.

The IDF claimed two weeks ago that it had killed over 9,000 HAMAS and allied Islamist militants in Gaza (plus 1,000 terrorists within Israel on and after 7 October). Epstein quite correctly says this estimate “should … be treated with some skepticism”, and it is an open question whether it was wise for Israel to get into playing the numbers game. Be that as it may, U.S. intelligence followed by leaking its estimate that Israel has killed between 20% and 30% of a HAMAS’ force that was estimated at 25,000 to 30,000 before the war, which would mean the IDF has eliminated 5,000 to 9,000 terrorists. Assuming that anything like this is true, it underlines the male-underreporting issue with the HAMAS fatality counts: the health ministry recorded 6,088 men dead as of 31 December; however that discrepancy was resolved, it would involve a radical increase in the male total, and a corresponding decrease in the female and child totals. That said, the most these IDF numbers really tell us is that there is an “enormous gap between HAMAS and Israeli claims”, as Epstein puts it.

Epstein sums up:
Expecting significant precision or accuracy in death tolls in a war zone … is a fool’s errand. What can be said for certain is that HAMAS-produced statistics are inconsistent, imprecise, and appear to have been systematically manipulated to downplay the number of militants killed and to exaggerate the proportion of noncombatants confirmed as dead.

The clear intent of HAMAS and its allies is to portray the Israeli military campaign in Gaza as indiscriminate at best, and really as quite discriminating, targeting women and children in a genocidal rampage. A key metric in judging such claims, Epstein notes, is “the civilian-combatant fatality ratio”, and we simply do not know that.

“None of the analysis presented here diminishes the scale of the human tragedy in Gaza since HAMAS sparked the war with Israel in October 2023”, Epstein goes on, adding that refusing to trust HAMAS’ statistics is not an attempt to minimise the death toll in Gaza: there are an unknowable number of people, innocent civilians and terrorists, buried under the rubble and likely in the tunnels by the time this is all over. When they are uncovered and documented, the total fatalities might be higher than what HAMAS is currently claiming, albeit the make-up of that total will include a much smaller percentage of children and a much higher percentage of terrorists.

CONCLUSION
It is obviously important to highlight when the herd of independent minds directing the media coverage of an event as important as war is engaged in systematic bias and misinformation to the detriment of one party involved, in this case Israel. It has to be emphasised, however, that the main victim of the media’s behaviour is the civilian population in Gaza: when the media collaborates in Iran/HAMAS’ political warfare over the casualty figures, it vindicates the human sacrifice strategy, incentivising the IRGC to continue on this path, and shows other terrorists they can profit by adopting this strategy. Those journalists doing this in the sincere belief that helping generate enough pressure on Israel to force a ceasefire is the most humanitarian option must understand they have it exactly wrong. The elimination of HAMAS is vital not only to protect Israel from further genocidal assaults like 7 October, but to prevent HAMAS using the Gazan population like this ever again and to send a clear message to all the malign actors watching this that they will not benefit if they try to follow in HAMAS’ footsteps.


Dispatch from Israel: Jonathan Conricus
The former international spokesperson for the IDF on the fate of hostages, which news agencies disgraced themselves covering the war, and why you should always respect your enemies

"It's an hour and a half by car, half an hour by bike," says the former international spokesperson for the IDF, the person much of the world saw explaining the chaos and carnage following the October 7 in Israel. Earlier this month, Conricus became a senior fellow at The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, where he believes he can add "some original perspective" to the Israel-Arab conflict and specifically to UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. (Spoiler: He's not a fan).

From the patio of the Tel Aviv Sheraton Hotel - and with the occasional bomb booming in the distance - Conricus talked about the fate of hostages, which news agencies disgraced themselves covering the war, and why you should always respect your enemies.

The interview had been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me where you were on October 7th.

JC: I was home with my wife and four kids. We were woken by the alarm around 6:30. We are very fortunate to have 90 seconds to run for shelter - unlike the people who live close to Gaza, who allegedly have 15 seconds. That's more of an urban myth than reality; usually they first hear the explosion, then the alarms. We rushed to the bomb shelter in our building, with all of the neighbors in their pajamas.

I, of course, took my phone with me. At around 6:40, I saw something and really understood, this is going to be different. I saw the first clip on Telegram of a white pickup truck with Hamas terrorists on it, inside Sderot. The attack itself was unprecedented - and that was before anybody knew how gruesome the attack really was. We didn't know then what the consequences of Hamas' plan would be; didn't know how many Israeli civilians would be killed, how many would be abducted, and how tremendous the whole event would be. But at 6:40, I think I understood: This will probably lead to war.
Parents of slain IDF soldier Cedrick Garin to be granted Israeli citizenship
Interior Minister Moshe Arbel instructed the Population and Immigration Authority to grant citizenship to the Philippines-born parents of fallen soldier Cedrick Garin, he told Hebrew media outlets on Sunday.

Arbel delivered the news to Imelda and Rico, the slain IDF reservists’ parents, during a bereavement visit on Sunday, and told them his ministry would sort out the question of citizenship immediately, the Kan public broadcaster reported.

Imelda raised Cedrick in Israel alone while working as a cleaner after his father was deported when he was two, and the fallen soldier gained Israeli citizenship after completing his IDF service. Imelda, however, currently holds the status of temporary resident.

“Cedrick’s parents sacrificed that which was most precious to them for the country, and we need to be by their side at this time,” Arbel told Haaretz on Sunday. “There is much weight to the issue of status and citizenship, but it’s important to remember that also temporary residents have rights like national insurance and the ability to work.”

During his last year of high school, Cedrick dropped out and got in trouble with the law, before later turning his life around and fighting to enlist in a combat position in the IDF and serve his adopted country.


Tom Friedman’s Soft Jihad Against Israel
The New York Times employs a diverse group of anti-Israel writers, such as Soliman Hijjy, who loves Hitler, and Raja Abdulrahim, who blames Israel for Palestinian suicide bombers. Occasionally their over-zealous anti-Zionists get carried away, like Jazmine Hughes and Jamie Lauren Keiles whom the Times fired in November after they signed a letter accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and genocide.”

But the Times‘ most effective anti-Israel scribe is not a raving, knuckle-dragging “river to the sea” enthusiast. Rather, it is Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer prize-winning columnist whose polished anti-Israel rhetoric has done more damage to Israel than that of the Times’ hardcore Israel haters.

As William McGurn observed in comparing Barack Obama’s anti-Israel sentiments to those expressed by Rashida Tlaib, “Obama would never be so crude as to invoke river-to-the-sea language or actually come out and say that Israel is as evil as Hamas … his argument is smooth and sophisticated. That’s what makes it so pernicious.”

Likewise, Friedman’s appeal is his claim to have staked out a consistently moderate and objective approach to Middle East affairs. His soft jihad against Israel is more subtle and acceptable, making it dangerous precisely because it is entertained by rational people and policymakers, especially Democrats.

Friedman loves the PLO/PA
Ever since his college days at Brandeis University, where he was a leader in the so-called “Middle East Peace Group,” Friedman has been an Arafat fan.

Because Friedman has been around for so long, he knows all the players. In the 1980s, as chief of the Beirut bureau of the Times, he cozied up to the PLO. In the 1990s, he cozied up to the Palestinian Authority (PA). His solution to “the Palestinian problem” has been consistent for decades now: strengthen and trust the PA, even though the PA has long demonstrated that it is not trustworthy.

In the weeks following October 7, Friedman has criticized Hamas (though not as much as he criticizes Israel) while continuing to push the PA as the alternative to Hamas. But he hasn’t always objected to Hamas.
“A Land without a People for a People without a Land”
In the minds of many of Zionism’s detractors, the “land without a people” formulation has become a defining element of Zionism’s original sin. But to what extent was that slogan actually employed by the early Zionists? The official Zionist mantra of the era stated that “The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.” Zionist groups used a range of other slogans, including “Torah and Labor,” “The Land of Israel for the People of Israel according to the Torah of Israel,” and “Zionism, Socialism, and Diaspora Emancipation.” These, along with “Jewish State,” “Back to the soil,” “Return to Zion,” “Jewish homeland,” “A Palestine open to all Jews,” and, by far most frequently, “Jewish national home,” were widely-propagated Zionist slogans. In a search of seven major American newspapers—the Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post[51]—there were more than 3,000 mentions of the phrase “Jewish national home” through 1948. No other Zionist phrase or slogan comes close. In contrast, there are only four mentions of Zangwill’s phrasing, “country without a people,”[52] all before 1906. There is no mention of its variants: “land without a people” or “country without a nation.” ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers database shows one additional use of the phrase before 1972: the 1947 “Text of the Statement before U.N. by Jamal el Husseini on the Arabs’ Position on Palestine: Arab Statement Denounces U.N. Proposal for Partitioning Palestine,”[53] in which Husseini charges that “the Zionist organization propagated the slogan ‘Give the country without a people to the people without a country.'”

Despite the claims of Husseini, Said, and Khalidi, it is not evident that this was ever the slogan of any Zionist organization or that it was employed by any of the movement’s leading figures. A mere handful of the outpouring of pre-state Zionist articles and books use it.[54] For a phrase that is so widely ascribed to Zionist leaders, it is remarkably hard to find in the historical record.[55]

Attendees at the 1905 Zionist congress associated the phrase with Zangwill,[56] and it appears to have passed out of use along with the rejection of his proposal to establish the Jewish homeland in British East Africa. In the rare instances where the phrase is found in a post-1905 Jewish source, it is usually as a specific reference to Zangwill[57] although sometimes it appears when a Jewish author quotes a Christian writer.[58]

Mainstream writers refer to the phrase as something used briefly and years before. In 1914, Chaim Weizmann referred to the phrase as descriptive of attitudes common in the early days of the movement.[59] Israeli writer and historian Amos Elon dated Zionist use of the phrase to 1903 but said it had faded from the lexicon by 1917.[60] The single use of the phrase in The Maccabean, the journal of the Federation of American Zionists, occurred in 1901.[61] By 1922, Christian journalist William Denison McCrackan described the phrase as no longer in use.[62]

Unless or until evidence comes to light of its wide use by Zionist publications and organizations, the assertion that “a land without a people for a people without a land” was a “widely-propagated Zionist slogan”[63] should be retired.


Lord Cameron: We all abhor unpleasant deals, but that's what must happen if we are to solve the Gaza crisis
We must give the people of the West Bank and Gaza the political perspective of a credible route to a Palestinian state and a new future. And it needs to be irreversible. This is not entirely in our gift. But Britain and our partners can help by confirming our commitment to a sovereign, viable Palestinian state, and our vision for its composition. And, crucially, we must state our clear intention to grant it recognition, including at the United Nations.

The Palestinian leadership must help as well, by forming a new government which can immediately start to deliver.

There is now a younger generation of Palestinians. They share their leader President Abbas's dedication to realising a Palestinian state. But they know it is going to need a technocratic, modern administration that can win the confidence of people in Gaza, the West Bank and the wider Muslim and Arab world.

All these things are intricately linked because you can't get one without all the others.

Arab and other allies in the region won't help guarantee the end of Hamas terrorism or back a new Palestinian authority unless they see a clear pathway to a state called Palestine.

Israel won't forswear renewed hostilities unless Hamas are finished in Gaza.

And Palestinians won't believe life will really be different unless they are governed by other Palestinians and see a long-term future.

There will be many other elements to add to such a plan:
The promise of normalised relations between Israel and countries such as Saudi Arabia, whose influence is growing across the region and the world;
Genuine security guarantees for Israel and restrictions on what a future Palestinian state can do in terms of security and alliances;
A programme to end radicalised education programmes that teach children to hate those of a different faith;
A massive international effort to rebuild Gaza and make the most of its pivotal location and brilliant people.

Naturally, there will be differences of opinion about the right order of these steps and to extent to which they must be completed and by when. That's why we are pressing for a Contact Group that brings together the US, UK, key EU states, Gulf and Arab countries and Turkey to be set up at once.

In all of this the aim must be clear. Let's use a pause in the fighting to build unstoppable momentum towards a lasting solution.

It's only when the prize on offer from peace is more attractive than the potential benefit of continued conflict that we will have the chance of a better future.

And the time to start is now.
‘Oslo is dead’: Right-wing ministers, MKs call for return to Gaza settlements
Twelve government ministers, 15 members of the Knesset, and some 3,000 people attended a conference on Sunday calling for Jewish resettlement of Gaza, according to organizers.

“Part of correcting the mistake of the Oslo Agreement, which brought on October 7, is the return of settlements to Gush Katif,” said National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir as the crowd burst into applause.

The event was held at the Jerusalem International Convention Center and was organized by Nahala.

Ben-Gvir called for "return of settlements to Gush Katif" in Jerusalem on Sunday
Ben-Gvir called for the death penalty for terrorists and joined the audience as they began to shout “Death to terrorists.”

He called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make the "brave decision" to return Jewish settlements to the Gaza Strip.

Head of the Shomron Regional Council, Yossi Dagan, said: “After the Shoah, we suffered on October 7. The answer is only...the return to the Gaza Strip and Gush Katif. We call on the government to speak in the only language the Middle East will understand and establish settlements in the Gaza Strip. We are here to take the first step on the long journey. It will be difficult, but the only other alternative is Shoah."

“Oslo is dead. The people of Israel live,” he shouted, calling on the audience to join him in the chant.
Uganda disowns its dissenting judge in court ruling on Israel genocide claim
Uganda has distanced itself from an opinion written by a Ugandan judge on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) dissenting from the panel’s ruling in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel and said the remarks do not reflect Uganda’s position.

Julia Sebutinde was the only judge on the 17-member ICJ panel to vote against all six measures adopted by the court in a ruling ordering Israel to take action to prevent acts of genocide as it fights Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

She was also one of only two judges to oppose the court’s assertion that some Israeli actions in the war against Hamas may violate the Genocide Convention. The other was Israeli Justice Aharon Barak.

“The position taken by Judge Sebutinde is her own individual and independent opinion and does not in any way reflect the position of the government of the Republic of Uganda,” the government said in a statement issued late on Saturday.

It added that the East African country supported the position of the Non-Aligned Movement on the conflict that was adopted at its summit in the Ugandan capital this month.

That NAM position, contained in a document issued at the end of the summit, condemned Israel’s military campaign and killing of civilians and also called for an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian access.

The movement was formed officially in 1961 by countries opposed to joining either of the two major Cold War-era military and political blocs. Many of the countries were newly independent of their colonial rulers.
Labour MP suspended after ‘hollow’ apology for genocide remarks on HMD
Labour's chief whip has suspended MP Kate Osamor from the Parliamentary Labour Party pending an investigation after she said that Gaza should be added to a list of “recent genocides” when taking part in remembrance for Holocaust Memorial Day.

Kate Osamor, the MP for Edmonton, sent local party members an email on Friday pointing out that it was HMD on Saturday.

Osamor said she thought there was an “international duty to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.”

She went on to list the “more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia” to be remembered on HMD, adding that there was one also happening “in Gaza.”

Osamor tweeted an apology on Friday night saying: “I apologise for any offence caused by my reference to the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza.”

A Board of Deputies statement condemned “the attempts by Kate Osamor to link the Holocaust to the current situation in Gaza. The industrialised mass murder of six million Jews is in no way comparable to Israel’s efforts to uproot Hamas from Gaza.

“We believe Ms Osamor was perfectly aware of what she was saying and therefore view her apology as utterly hollow. We call for the Labour Party to immediately remove the whip.”

The London Jewish Forum also condemned the MP’s comments. It said Osamor had “insulted the Holocaust survivors who so bravely share their testimony.

“Kate Osamor’s apology is too little too late, she should be suspended from the PLP whilst this incident is properly investigated.”


Congressman pushes ban on tax dollars to Hamas-tied UN agency
A new congressional proposal would prohibit federal dollars from being directed to a Hamas-linked United Nations agency dishing out Palestinian aid.

The State Department revealed Friday it paused funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency and is reviewing allegations that 12 of the office’s employees may have participated in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre of more than 1,200 people in the Jewish state of Israel. On the heels of multiple countries also halting aid to UNRWA, Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) is introducing legislation Monday aiming to gut the office to the very core, according to a copy of the bill text obtained by the Washington Examiner.

Dubbed the “UNRWA Elimination Act,” the bill seeks “to establish the policy of the United States that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East should be disbanded completely” and to transfer UNRWA’s responsibilities to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees — a separate agency headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

“No Federal funds are authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, including for the salaries or expenses of any employee of such Agency,” the ban provision in the bill outlines.

Mast’s bill, which comes after Republican senators put forth a similar one in December of last year, is the latest escalation of pressure on UNRWA due to its longstanding connections to terrorism and promotion of antisemitism. The Trump administration froze aid to UNRWA in 2018, though the Biden administration resumed support, culminating in at least $730 million flowing from the U.S. to the U.N. agency since 2021.
AOC dodges question about whether ‘Genocide Joe’ protests go too far
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) avoided saying whether or not protests calling President Joe Biden ‘genocide Joe’ went too far, instead saying that the fact the word was being used shows the “mass inhumanity that Gazans are facing.”

In an appearance on Meet the Press, Ocasio-Cortez was asked if Biden, who she had voiced full support for moments earlier, was guilty of facilitating genocide in Gaza, as many of her progressive allies believe.

“Some of your colleagues — and we talked about what’s happened at the protests this week — have called the president ‘Genocide Joe,’ do you agree with that word ‘genocide,’ that the president’s been supporting a genocide, or does that go too far?’ host Kristen Welker asked Ocasio-Cortez.

“I think what we are seeing right now throughout the country is that young people are appalled at the violence and the indiscriminate loss of life,” she said. “We are not just seeing twenty-five thousand people that have died in Gaza. We are seeing the starvation of … millions of people, the displacement of over two million Gazans.”

She then directed attention to the case South Africa brought before the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide. When countered that the court hasn’t decided whether or not a genocide is taking place, Ocasio-Cortez said that it was telling that the word was even in play.

“The fact that they said there’s a responsibility to prevent [genocide], the fact that this word is even in play, the fact that this word is even in our discourse, I think demonstrates the mass inhumanity that Gazans are facing,” she said. “And so whether you are an individual that believes this is a genocide, which, by the way, in our polling, we are seeing large amounts of Americans concerned specifically with that word. So I don’t think that it is something to completely toss someone out of our public discourse for using.”




They Blamed Israel for Hamas’s Attack. Jamaal Bowman Is Touting Their Endorsement.
New York congressman Jamaal Bowman is touting an endorsement from an anti-Israel group that blamed the Jewish state for provoking Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack, a move that comes as he attempts to fend off intense criticism from his district's Jewish community over his response to the attack.

Bowman on Thursday posted a photo with members of The Jewish Vote, who smiled alongside the congressman while holding signs that read, "Jews for Jamaal." The group is the electoral arm of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), a left-wing nonprofit that has routinely disparaged the Jewish state and argued against sending anti-Semitic hate criminals to jail.

In its Oct. 7 statement on "escalating violence in Israel-Palestine," JFREJ said Hamas's slaughter of innocent Israelis was not "unprovoked," citing "decades of occupation" and "the stifling blockage of Gaza." Days later, the group's executive director, Audrey Sasson, accused Israel of "genocide." On Jan. 18, meanwhile, JFREJ condemned a proposal from New York governor Kathy Hochul (D.) to expand the list of offenses that can be charged as hate crimes. Those who commit hate-fueled crimes against Jews, the group said, should be met with "restorative, community-based education and healing," not "a police-driven response with criminal penalties."

Bowman's embrace of The Jewish Vote comes as he faces a difficult primary challenge driven in large part by his response to Hamas's Oct. 7 attack.

Bowman, much like The Jewish Vote, blamed the attack on Israel's "blockade of Gaza" and went on to accuse the Jewish state of "mass murder," "genocide," and "ethnic cleansing." Those comments have incensed local Jewish leaders. Twenty-six rabbis in Bowman's district, for example, wrote a letter in October urging Westchester County executive George Latimer to launch a primary campaign against Bowman, citing the congressman's "effort to erode support for Israel on Capitol Hill and within the Democratic Party."

"Many of us tried to engage the congressman early in his term, seeking constructive dialogue about the damaging positions he took—especially on matters related to America's relationship with Israel," the rabbis wrote. "Regrettably, Congressman Bowman disregarded our outreach and doubled down on his anti-Israel policy positions and messaging." Latimer formally entered the race against Bowman in December.
Terrorist Caught Illegally Crossing The Border Was Allowed To Roam Free For Nearly A Year, Memo Says
Federal authorities caught a terrorist at the U.S. southern border and released him into the country, where he roamed freely for nearly a year before being arrested in Minnesota just days ago, according to an internal federal memo exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The unnamed individual, who the memo only identifies as a member of the Somali terror group al-Shabaab, was released shortly after being caught illegally crossing the southern border near San Ysidro, California on March 13, 2023, according to the memo, which the DCNF is not publishing in order to protect the identity of a confidential source. The Terrorist Screening Center “deemed him a ‘mismatch'” after running his name through the terror watchlist, according to the memo, which was sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials.

However, on January 18, 2024, the Terrorist Screening Center “made a redetermination” that the individual was “a confirmed member of al-Shabaab” and was involved in the use, manufacture or transport of explosives or firearms, the memo states. Two days later, ICE nabbed the al-Shabaab member in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (RELATED: Feds See Highest Ever Number Of Southern Border Crossings In A Single Month)

Border Patrol caught 172 terror watchlist suspects attempting to enter the U.S. illegally during fiscal year 2023. Former homeland security officials say the constant deluge of illegal immigrants hitting the southern border is making it easier for bad actors to slip into the country.

“Many within the Biden administration, including Secretary Mayorkas, have repeatedly assured us that the vetting process at the border is comprehensive and complete,” John Fabbricatore, a retired ICE field director who now sits on the National Immigration Center for Enforcement’s (NICE) board, told the DCNF. “However, we continue to witness alarming instances where terrorists are able to freely roam the United States for months after being released at the border before their criminal and terrorist histories come to light.”
Two Canadians with Hells Angels ties charged in alleged Iranian murder plot
Two Canadian men with ties to Hells Angels have been charged in what U.S. authorities are calling a “murder-for-hire scheme” allegedly coordinated in Iran.

The U.S. Department of Justice revealed Monday that the two men, 43-year-old Damion Patrick John Ryan and 29-year old Adam Richard Pearson, allegedly conspired with an Iranian national, Naji Sharifi Zindashti, to murder two people in Maryland.

U.S. officials allege Zindashti recruited Ryan, a member of the Hell’s Angels who allegedly has ties to criminals in the U.S., Canada and Greece. Ryan then recruited fellow Hell’s Angels affiliate Pearson to allegedly carry out the attack.

The alleged conspiracy took place between December 2020 and March 2021, the Justice department said.

“As alleged, Mr. Zindashti and his team of gunmen, including a Minnesota resident, used an encrypted messaging service to orchestrate an assassination plot against two individuals,” said Andrew Luger, the U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, in a press release.

Both Ryan and Pearson are currently in jail in Canada on unrelated charges, American authorities said. Zindashti remains in Iran.

According to U.S. authorities, Zindashti ran a criminal network that “targets Iranian dissidents and opposition activists for kidnapping and assassination at the direction of the Iranian regime.” The U.S. has barred Zindashti and “several of his key associates” from transactions or deals involving American people or that take place in that country.


Bernie Sanders again abandons the Jews
US Senator Bernie Sanders took to the pages of the Guardian (“The US must act to end the Gaza disaster“, Jan. 17) to decry what he describes as Israel’s “illegal” war and “inhuman treatment” of the Palestinians, while giving Hamas a moral pass. In fact, in his 1,700 word piece, he mentioned the perpetrator of the worst antisemitic attack since the Holocaust only twice. Though he condemns the group for their Oct. 7 attacks, there’s no suggestion that he holds them in any way responsible for the suffering of Palestinian civilians in the territory.

He peddles pro-Palestinian talking points about Israel “going to war against the entire Palestinian people”, and cites casualty figures claiming that “70%” of the “25,000” killed during war “are women and children” without noting that these stats come from the Hamas-controlled health ministry, that teenage combatants are counted as “children” and that Israel estimates that between 9,000 to 10,000 of those killed were terrorists.

Further, as Yaakov Katz, the former military correspondent and editor in chief for the Jerusalem Post pointed out, the combatant-civilian death ratio in Gaza, where for every combatant killed, around 1.5 civilians are killed, is far better than what the UN says is the international average of one combatant for every nine civilians.

Sanders then complains that “1.7 million people have been driven from their homes, almost 80% of the entire population of Gaza”, while failing to acknowledge that this undermines the claim that the IDF is engaged in a war against Palestinian civilians, as the evacuation of civilians from combat zones prevented countless more Palestinians from being killed. In fact, Israel’s efforts to avoid harming civilians has included the issuing of warnings before IDF offensives, forfeiting the strategic advantage by effectively giving Hamas an alert to upcoming Israeli troop movements.

Israel’s critics like Sanders can’t have it both ways. They can’t simultaneously accuse the Jewish state of intentionally targeting civilians while criticising them for having taken measures to evacuate civilians out of harm’s way. Israel’s critics, like the Senator from Vermont, evidently fail to see the contradiction in their demonising rhetoric.

Sanders then calls out Israel for the high percentage of “housing units in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed”. This suggests that the IDF has been targeting ‘civilian’ buildings, but elides it’s true significance: the fact that Hamas military assets and fighters are embedded in homes, schools, hospitals and mosques – and that their 350-450 miles of military tunnels run below civilian infrastructure, including under UNRWA facilities.


Twelve-year-old debates protester carrying 'End the power of the Zionist lobby'
In a video posted on Sunday to X, formerly Twitter, a twelve year old boy is seen interviewing a protester holding the sign “End the power of the Zionist lobby” on the streets of the United Kingdom.

The interview starts with the interviewer stating the definition of Zionism as seen in the dictionary, “Zionism is the belief that Jews should have a homeland.”

The protester responded, saying that she believes that is "fair, but Palestine wasn’t empty. Palestine had people in it.”

She added, “You can’t just take over a land where people are living and plant a flag and say now it's ours. You can't do that.”

The interviewer then begins to push back at her by saying that's not exactly what happened, and brings up that the UN voted for the establishment of Israel in 1947.

The protester then argues that the Balfour Declaration was wrong. The Balfour Declaration was a statement, made in November 1917, of support by the British for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

The document did not mention the political or national rights of non-Jewish communities living on the land, however it did iterate “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”


Head of Harvard's Anti-Semitism Task Force Backs Out of Panel on Anti-Semitism
The head of Harvard University's anti-Semitism task force backed out of a panel on anti-Semitism he was scheduled to participate in Sunday, citing an unwillingness to answer questions publicly "about goings on at Harvard."

Derek Penslar, co-chair of Harvard's Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Semitism, was slated to speak at a Sunday morning Center for Jewish History panel titled, "What is Antisemitism? Definitions and Debates." At the start of the panel, however, moderator Gavriel Rosenfield announced Penslar's withdrawal from the event and read a statement from the Harvard professor, who has faced criticism for signing an open letter that called Israel "a regime of apartheid."

"I am mindful of my role as co-chair of the Harvard Task Force on Combating Anti-Semitism," Penslar said in his statement, "and since at the symposium I would invariably be asked to speak about the goings on at Harvard, and since the task force is only now just being put together, and its plan of action is being formed, it would not be appropriate for me to make public comments at this time."

Penslar's selection to the task force elicited widespread criticism, including from prominent Harvard alumni. Former Harvard president Larry Summers last week said Penslar was "unsuited" for the task force, while billionaire investor Bill Ackman said Penslar's selection shows Harvard "continues on the path of darkness."

One panel participant, Fairfield University's Glenn Dynner, spoke out against Penslar's critics, accusing them of pushing "a certain agenda."

"I do feel I should acknowledge … how problematic it is and the chilling effect that occurs when somebody's arguments and words are suddenly used against them and often twisted and used for a certain agenda," Dynner said after praising Penslar.

"I think all of us feel a little bit now worried that our words too are going to be twisted," he continued. "So there is a kind of chilling effect that I would like to acknowledge."
Dutch university reinstates Holocaust course cancelled upon pro-Palestinian lobbying
A university in the Netherlands recently canceled a planned series of lectures about the Holocaust, reportedly amid pressure by a pro-Palestinian lobby group, but reinstated the course after uproar from politicians and the Jewish community.

In an about-face, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht will run the series of eight lectures as planned beginning on February 7, the local De Telegraff outlet reported Monday.

The development came following a few turbulent days, during which the university at first announced Sunday that it was canceling the lectures, and then said it was delaying them indefinitely, given concerns that “the security of speakers, students, teachers, and visitors cannot be assured.” It also tied the course material to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip that began with the Palestinian terror group’s devastating October 7 assault.

A university spokesperson said it wanted “dialogue on the matter and need more time in order to place the events of October 7 and others in a broad perspective, with space for other views and beliefs,” De Telegraff reported.

A Utrecht pro-Palestinian group, New Neighbors, claimed to have lobbied for the course to be canceled.


The Washington Post Abandons ‘Truth’ and ‘Fairness’ in Its Israel-Hamas War Coverage
Despite The Washington Post espousing principles of “truth” and “fairness,” its expansive coverage of the Israel-Hamas war since October 7 has been marred by its bias against Israel’s defensive actions and conduct in the region.

Over the past four months, HonestReporting has tracked this biased coverage, focusing on three particularly concerning areas:
The narrative produced by The Post’s general reporting;
The opinions expressed in its editorials;
Its disconcerting reliance on the testimony of controversial sources.

“Civilians,” “Fighters” & “Captives”: The Washington Post’s Skewed Reporting

Through its use of certain terminology, skewed facts, and context-free assertions, The Washington Post’s general reporting on the war helps to create a narrative that implicitly portrays Israel as the aggressor while simultaneously downplaying the ruthlessness of Hamas and its regional allies, including Hezbollah.

One of its most influential pieces produced since October 7 has been the investigation into the IDF’s claims regarding Hamas’ use of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

In order to undermine the evidence presented by Israel to the public (which is not the full extent of its relevant intelligence), The Post made a variety of speculations and context-less assertions to lay doubts in its readers’ minds as to the veracity of Israel’s case.

The Post used this amateurish “muddying the waters” tactic to subvert the IDF’s justified entrance into the hospital complex, portraying Israel as the aggressor while relinquishing Hamas of any responsibility for using civilian infrastructure for terrorist purposes.

In another investigative report, The Post sought to cast a dark pall over the IDF’s actions in Gaza by claiming that the number of children killed in this conflict might be unprecedented in the annals of 21st-century warfare.

However, The Post was only able to reach these conclusions by skewing the statistics against Israel: It relied on selective data that didn’t provide a complete picture of the damage wrought by these other conflicts and also relied on verified statistics for the other conflicts while relying on Hamas’ unverified number for the Gazan casualties.
BBC News report on UNRWA scandal quotes former BBC and UNRWA staffer
From the ninth amendment onwards, the report also includes a contribution from a former UNRWA spokesman (until 2019) who is also a past BBC employee and who now runs an organisation which lists among its staff members a film director called Rishi Pelham who made a film for UNRWA in 2012 and who appears to be the son of one of the BBC journalists to whom this report is credited.

“Speaking to the BBC, the organisation’s former chief spokesperson, Christopher Gunness, said that the suspension of aid to UNRWA was disproportionate and can only lead to further suffering in Gaza.

Mr Gunness believes UNRWA has demonstrated its zero-tolerance policy by sacking the staff members before their internal investigation was complete.

“One million displaced people are currently taking refuge in and around UNRWA buildings. They are the ones who will suffer as a result of this decision,” said Mr Gunness, adding: “The curtailing of UNRWA services will also destabilise the region at a time when Western governments are trying to contain a regional conflagration.””

Fowler and Pelham apparently did not ask Chris Gunness (who in the past few months has given US and Israel slamming interviews to the Hamas-supporting Qatari outlet Al Jazeera and done podcasts with the anti-Israel outfit Electronic Intifada) about the efficacy of that alleged “zero-tolerance policy” in relation to previous cases – including during his term of office – in which, for example, rockets were found in UNRWA schools in the Gaza Strip and the chairman of the Hamas-controlled UNRWA staff union was elected to the Hamas political bureau in the Gaza Strip.

The recent exposure of widespread support for the October 7th Hamas massacre in an UNRWA teachers Telegram group (including a former BBC employee) is only mentioned in the BBC’s report in the context of a quote from an Israeli spokesman and no further details are provided. The report makes no mention of past documentation of incitement to violence by UNRWA employees.

The five later versions of Fowler and Pelham’s article are illustrated with a photograph carrying the caption “UNRWA has been struggling to get humanitarian aid to many Gazans” and all versions of the report include a section on that topic with the latest reading:
MEDIA OUTLETS CORRECT YOAV GALLANT MISQUOTE ON ELIMINATING HAMAS
Following The New York Times’ correction last week of an Op-Ed in which Megan K. Stack truncated the words of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to falsely depict him calling for the annihilation of the Gaza Strip, CAMERA has prompted additional corrections at National Public Radio, Salt Lake Tribune and The Telegraph (London).

In the wake of Yair Rosenberg’s critique of various media misquotes of Israeli politicians concerning the fate of Hamas (“What Did Top Israeli War Officials Really Say About Gaza?,” The Atlantic), The New York Times published the following correction:
An article on Jan. 12 about charges of genocide against Israel omitted part of a quotation from Yoav Gallant. He said, “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything.” He did not say only, “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”

After the publication of The New York Times correction, CAMERA contacted multiple media outlets which had likewise misreported Gallant’s statements. In response to CAMERA’s correspondence with National Public Radio concerning Laila Fadel’s misquote of Gallant during the Nov. 21 “Morning Edition” broadcast, editors commendably appended the following correction to the top of the transcript:
[POST-BROADCAST CLARIFICATION: Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s full quote, referenced in this interview, was: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything.”]

As of this writing, NPR has not run an on air correction.
‘Crossed The Line’: MK Calls for Sky News Anchor Resignation After She Compares Hamas War to Holocaust
Likud chairman and MK Danny Danon called for the resignation of Belle Donati, an anchor on the British broadcaster Sky News, after comments she made in an interview with Danon last Friday which were widely panned as antisemitic.

In the interview, Donati pushed back on Danon’s calls for voluntary emigration of Gazans to Arab or Western states, calling the proposal “ethnic cleansing” and seeking to compare the move to the Holocaust, calling the Jews transfer to concentration camps “voluntary relocation.”

Danon told The Algemeiner in an interview, “I’m used to some of the anchors being hostile, but what happened on Friday crossed the line… She started with line of ethnic cleaning, and then the comparison to the Holocaust.”

Danon said he is normally calm, but this caused him “to lose it. I told her she needs to apologize.”

In a letter he addressed separately to the executive chairman of Sky News, David Rhodes, Danon wrote, “I found it particularly distressing when [Donati] audaciously likened the present situation in Gaza to the Holocaust, the largest premeditated mass murder of Jews in history.”

Sky News issued an apology later in the day of the interview, denouncing the “comparison between Mr. Danon’s comments on Israel’s war with Hamas and the treatment of Jewish people in the Holocaust. Sky News recognizes the complete inappropriateness of this comparison and the offensive nature of those comments. Sky News would like to apologize unreservedly for the comparison and to Mr. Danon personally for making the comparison.”

Danon acknowledged the apology, but wrote, “My disappointment lies in the absence of a personal and sincere apology from Ms. Belle Donati herself… Furthermore, my concern deepens as I observe her Twitter feed, which exhibits a discernible bias and a clear anti-Israel stance.”

He then called for the media group “To facilitate the immediate resignation of Ms. Donati from her current position.”


CAMERA Op-Ed The Washington Post Gives a Pass to Antisemitic Institutions
“Sunlight,” the jurist and Zionist Louis Brandeis famously observed, “is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Yet, one of the world’s leading newspapers, The Washington Post, is failing to shine a light on institutions that are propagating antisemitism, a virus that has resulted in the murder of millions in living memory.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is one such institution. The ICRC has failed Israelis and failed to live up to its mandate. Time and again, the organization has laid its biases bare in the latest iteration of the Israel-Iran war.

The ICRC’s self-described mission is to “ensure humanitarian protection and assistance for victims of war and other situations of violence.” Judged by its own standards, the ICRC has failed spectacularly. The ICRC was MIA after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, and it has continued to fail both Israelis and Jews ever since.

As Commentary’s Seth Mandel noted in November 2023, the ICRC has “failed to advocate meaningfully for the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza,” appearing “uninterested in gaining access to them or their release.” Hostages have been murdered, raped, and tortured while being held by Hamas and Palestinians in Gaza.

Several hostages who have been released as part of agreements with Israel have spoken of the horrors that they faced. Many were starved and beaten. One elderly woman, 84-year-old Elma Avraham, has been in critical condition since her release. She was reportedly starved. Others have spoken of being literally branded and assaulted. The ICRC has failed to help them.

Indeed, instead of applying pressure on Hamas, the ICRC has blamed Israel. ICRC officials met with Roni and Simon Steinbrecher, whose daughter, Doron, was kidnapped from her apartment in Kfar Aza. The ICRC refused to take medication to Doron.

After refusing to take the medication to her, ICRC officials told her parents to “think about the Palestinian side.” Dor Steinbrecher, Doron’s brother, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that a Red Cross employee even told them to “care more about Arab people on the other side.” Of course, polls show that a majority of Palestinians — almost three in four — support the Hamas massacre that precipitated the war.

Worse still, evidence suggests that the ICRC may be worse than incompetent; they might be complicit in Hamas’ actions.


MSNBC Four Months of Disinformation
Since the barbaric Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, in which 1200 men, women, and children were tortured, raped and killed and over 200 more taken hostage, MSNBC has churned out multiple biased and distorted reports, featuring some of the worst anti-Israel propagandists such as Rula Jebreal, Noura Erekat, and Ilan Pappé. While Mehdi Hasan’s recent departure from the network is a positive step, it does not go far enough to address the problems there. Many of the network’s other anchors and commentators continue to distort events related to the war with Israel that Hamas started.

Of course, the reporting has not been universally bad. For example, on October 14, José Díaz-Balart hosted Israeli spokesperson Eylon Levy. Díaz-Balart also allowed Israeli soldier Rudy Rochman to provide the perspective of a soldier preparing for the ground invasion, as well as to speak about his experience defending Israel on October 7 and to describe the atrocities he witnessed that day. That same day, reporter Raf Sanchez described the preceding week as “a nightmare that Israel can’t wake up from.” On October 15, Katie Phang interviewed ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt who told her and her audience, “anti-Zionism, I’ve long said, is antisemitism. I was wrong. Anti-Zionism is genocide.” On October 26, Mandana Dayani appeared on Morning Joe, talking about her experience as a Jew who fled Iran and how, in light of that experience, she perceived the worldwide reaction to October 7. Memorably, correspondent Martin Fletcher movingly spoke about his own family members who had been taken hostage by Hamas.

Yet, some specific problems have recurred. One theme in the coverage was commentators who ignored or minimized the 2005 disengagement, when Israel withdrew every last civilian and soldier from Gaza, leaving Gaza with a greenhouse agricultural business, a beautiful coastline for tourism, and the opportunity for the people there to chart their own course for the future. In 2006, when the people of Gaza had the opportunity for independence, and the opportunity to build a peaceful and prosperous society, they elected Hamas, a group dedicated to the destruction of Israel. On October 7, 2023, Hamas acted on that sentiment, and everything that is happening today flows from that decision. But MSNBC commentators repeatedly ignored this, blaming Israel’s siege or occupation, rather than the election of Hamas, for the attack as well as for the current war. CAMERA counted at least six instances in which the conflict was distorted in this manner. This type of omission is a form of disinformation.

Another recurring issue is the elevation of Jews who hold fringe positions and have limited credentials, such as Sarah Schulman, a fiction writer who teaches at the College of Staten Island, Daniel Levy, presented as an “Israeli peace negotiator,” who never negotiated anything that was successful, Masha Gessen, a staff writer at the New Yorker, Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of the fringe group IfNotNow, or even MSNBC’s own Peter Beinart. The vast, vast majority of both American and Israeli Jews support Israel in its defensive war against Hamas. But MSNBC presents such guests as if they hold expertise or authority, creating a false impression of a division in Jewish opinion about the war. Such individuals represent a tiny and extreme minority opinion at best, and are not representative of the Jewish community.

A third recurring problem is that MSNBC commentators presented Hamas casualty statistics without caveat, emphasizing the alleged number of civilian and child casualties, without noting that Hamas itself does not distinguish between civilian and combatant casualties, without noting that Hamas recruits child soldiers, without noting that some of those casualties have been caused by shortfalls of Palestinian rockets, and without noting the numbers of combatants the IDF claimed to have killed. This is another example of an omission that is itself a form of disinformation, as it skews people’s perceptions of events. CAMERA noted at least two cases in which MSNBC falsely characterized the entire Hamas-supplied casualty count as “civilians.”
BBC News amplifies Scottish MP’s unevidenced allegation
On January 24th the BBC News website published a filmed item headlined ‘SNP asks PM to call Israeli actions a ‘war crime” on its ‘Middle East’ and ‘UK politics’ pages.

The synopsis to that item includes the following:
“Stephen Flynn cited an ITV news report where an unarmed Palestinian man under a white flag was “shot and killed” by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).”

The video itself shows an exchange in the UK parliament between SNP MP Stephen Flynn and the prime minister which opens with Flynn saying:
“Last night, as Tory MPs were once again fighting among themselves, the public were sat at home watching John Irvine of ITV News report on footage from Gaza of an unarmed Palestinian man walking under a white flag being shot and killed by the IDF. Prime Minister; such an act constitutes a war crime, does it not?”

The BBC News website did not bother to inform its audiences that there is no evidence to support Flynn’s claim that the IDF “shot and killed” an “unarmed Palestinian man walking under a white flag”.

The obviously edited footage (which was filmed by a photojournalist from the Gaza Strip called Mohammed Abu Safia) put out by ITV on its TV channel and on its website does not show the source of fire and certainly does not provide any evidence to show that the shooter was an IDF soldier.

Nevertheless, the BBC News website chose not only to provide worldwide amplification for Flynn’s totally unevidenced claim but also to hamper the ability of audiences to make up their own minds about his reckless promotion of misinformation in Parliament.


MEMRI: Dr. Naji Zaheer, Special Representative To Hamas Leader Khaled Mash'al, Shares Stage In Pakistan With U.S. Treasury Specially Designated Global Terrorists Saifullah Khalid And Faisal Nadeem

PMW: PA: Murderer of 68 Israelis is the “heroic Abdallah Barghouti”

PMW: Palestinian Columnist: Hamas' Policy Exacts A High Price From The People Of Gaza; It Must Acknowledge Its Mistakes

MEMRI: Egyptian Short Film 'A Century And Six Years' Depicts Grandsons Of Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini And Adolf Hitler Uniting To Fulfill Hitler's Alleged Promise To Liberate Palestine From The Jews

State Department releases report on a century-plus of Kremlin antisemitism
It likely wasn’t a coincidence that the U.S. State Department published a report on Russian antisemitism directly ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.

That date marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp by the Red Army.

“Vladimir Putin loves using this specific occasion to talk about the glorious deeds of the Red Army and the fact that the USSR ended the Holocaust, and therefore was a friend of the Jews,” Izabella Tabarovsky, a Jewish American expert on Soviet and contemporary left antisemitism, told JNS, referring to Russia’s president.

“He used to make this point to the Israelis, and there were discussions a few years back among his propagandists about using this highly circumscribed set of facts to turn the global Jewish community to Russia’s side,” she said. “The State Department’s report is a nasty present to him in this regard.”

The special report from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center—called “More Than a Century of Antisemitism: How Successive Occupants of the Kremlin Have Used Antisemitism to Spread Disinformation and Propaganda”—ties together more than 100 years of Tsarist, Soviet and Russian antisemitism. And now, Moscow has weaponized it to “discredit, divide and weaken their perceived adversaries at home and abroad.”

The report notes that much of the Kremlin’s antisemitic propaganda currently targets Ukraine and its Jewish leader, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has referenced Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s alleged Jewish heritage.

“The Kremlin falsely portrays Ukraine and its supporters as Nazis, antisemites and Russophobes, demonizes Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, accuses Jews of being the worst Nazis and manipulates the history of the Holocaust for political purposes,” the State Department report reads.

“Today, Kremlin officials and Russia’s state-run or state-controlled media spread conspiracy theories, fueling antisemitism intended to deceive the world about its war against Ukraine. These tactics build on a long tradition of exploiting antisemitism to create division and discontent,” the report adds.
‘He’s Got a Knife!’: Kosher Supermarket Employees in London Stave Off Attempted Terror Attacker
Police in London on Monday arrested a man who attempted to carry out a knife attack on employees of a kosher supermarket in the heavily Jewish Golders Green section of the British capital.

Video of the attempted assault filmed by witnesses showed the 34-year-old man grappling with two employees outside the store as voices off-camera shouted the warning “He’s got a knife!” in Hebrew.

Ignoring appeals to “go away” and “calm down,” the man began swinging a kitchen knife with a large blade as the employees attempted to fend him off by pushing a shopping cart in his way.

“I told Shomrim to come, but I didn’t see he had a knife,” one employee can be heard saying, referring to a voluntary communal organization that assists victims of antisemitic violence.

The same employee is then heard on the phone making an emergency call to the police. “Somebody outside our store has got a knife,” he is heard saying. As the assailant departs the scene, the employee adds, “He’s going up Hamilton Road. Urgent, urgent.”

The assailant, who has not been named, was later subdued by police officers and Shomrim volunteers and placed under arrest on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon, criminal damage and racially-aggravated assault.
‘I used Krav Maga on knifeman’ says Golders Green teen
A heroic Golders Green teenager has fended off a knifeman using Krav Maga he learned at school.

Yosef Chaim Reitman, 18, confronted a man wielding a knife in the Kay’s Kosher supermarket on Hamilton Road in Golders Green, after the man demanded to know where shop staff stood on “Israel and Palestine”.

The Metropolitan police have arrested the man who pulled out a large knife on customers and shop assistants after he was subdued by officers and Shomrim volunteers.

Shopkeeper Evyatar Reitman, 48, was in his shop with his 18-year-old son Yosef Chaim when the man came in.

Reitman said: “I could see the hate in his eyes. He looked like he came in looking for a fight.

“He came to ask about Israel Palestine and seemed to want us to say we were pro-Israel so he had a reason to attack.

“He demanded: ‘What's your side? Where do you stand on Israel and Palestine?

“I replied, ‘I don't discuss politics’. I thought he was going to stab my son. We managed to walk him out.”

18-year-old Yosef Chaim said: “He told me I live here, let’s go around the corner and speak. I didn’t want to do that, I said let’s stay here. That’s when he got very angry and he grabbed my neck. I learned Krav Maga at school and other martial arts, from years 5-7 - Baruch Hashem.

“I tried to tackle him and restrain him. I wanted to stop him.

"That’s when people shouted ‘knife’ and I quickly let go, even before I tried to trip him over he had the knife out. “He went towards my father with the knife. Then he went towards me. Hashem gave me the idea to take out one of the trollies and then I pushed it against his stomach to try and repel him. He kept coming at me. As he started coming towards me I quickly through the trolly towards him


‘I don’t like your energy,’ says Lyft driver, who attacked DC rabbi
A Lyft driver kicked a Chabad rabbi out of his car in Washington, D.C., and attacked him on Sunday, sending the latter to an urgent care facility with cuts on his face.

Menachem Shemtov, 29, director of Chabad Georgetown, and the son and grandson of prominent Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis in the nation’s capital, told The Washington Post that he asked the driver to lower the music in the car. The driver, who looked much younger than the photo on the Lyft app suggested, turned the music off.

“He made a passive-aggressive comment about how I should book a quiet car next time,” Shemtov told the Post. “Then 20 seconds later, he said, ‘Get out of my car.'” Pressed for a reason, the man said, “I don’t like your energy. Your energy is kind of offending me.”

“He was just saying ridiculous stuff as an excuse or reason to get me out of the vehicle,” Shemtov told the Washington Jewish Week. “He slashed me with his keys about an inch below my eyeball.”

“Videos of the incident, taken by both Shemtov and witnesses, show the driver punching and hitting the rabbi with a set of keys,” the Post reported. “The attacker fled the scene, according to a police report, which described his vehicle as a red Toyota sedan bearing the Maryland license plate 3FR1602.”


Jake Wallis Simons: How Israel Differs from the Rest of the West
If you want a healthy society, you need a spirit of unity. As we saw in London during the Blitz, if citizens feel they are part of a national family, they can maintain their morale even in the face of great adversity.

While across the democratic world, societies are in a state of slow-motion collapse, one country dramatically bucks this trend.

Israel has retained a powerful sense of national pride and togetherness, with a strong ethos of sacrifice for the good of the nation.

Since Oct. 7, the Israeli diaspora has returned home en masse to join the war effort.

The willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good of the country is instilled in Israelis from a young age, and reaches its most vivid expression in military service.

It is this sense of social responsibility that enables young fathers to say goodbye to their little children and head off to war, from which they may never return.

They do so to protect their families, their country and their people.
Dan Senor explains the Genius of Israel



Unbeaten Israel wins gold

The extraordinary story of holocaust survivor Paul Alexander



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