Thursday, February 29, 2024

From Ian:

Lipstadt urges US Jews not to ‘go underground’ amid surging antisemitism
She told the congregation that bad actors, particularly autocratic regimes, are fanning the flames of antisemitism to undermine faith in democracies, and that “all government leaders” agree with that assessment, as do members of the US intelligence community.

When members of the public buy into antisemitic conspiracies claiming Jews control elections, the media, or banks, they have “essentially given up on democracy,” she told the audience at Central Synagogue, indicating a loss of faith in the system or that the government cannot ensure their welfare.

She said that trend had become more pronounced since October 7. She highlighted increased antisemitism on social media platforms controlled by the Chinese government, speculating that promoting antisemitic messages could be a way to subvert American interests.

She compared efforts to stoke antisemitism to a “cooking spoon to stir up the pot” of societal discord. If people don’t feel safe due to real or perceived threats, they lose faith in their governing system, she told the congregation.

“If you think you’re a failed state, if you think the government can’t protect you if you think terrible things are going on, then you feel unstable,” she said.

Lipstadt was in New York for a series of meetings, including on Wednesday at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Ahead of the trip to New York, she traveled to Germany for the Munich Security Conference and held meetings in London. Her visit to Central Synagogue and conversation with its rabbi, Angela Buchdahl, was co-sponsored by the synagogue and UJA Federation of New York.

During her visit this month to Europe, she met with American United Nations representatives and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, whom she applauded for speaking “passionately” about Hamas hostages and antisemitism. Guterres has come under fire from Israel and its advocates for saying in October that Hamas’s brutal incursion “did not happen in a vacuum,” as well as repeatedly expressing concern about Israel’s military operations in Gaza alongside his condemnations of Hamas.

Lipstadt decried rhetoric from others in the international community, however, saying recent statements by the UN special rapporteur for the Palestinians, Francesca Albanese, were “beneath contempt” and “overtly antisemitic.” Albanese, who once said that the “Jewish lobby” controls the US and has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, said this month that October 7 victims were not targeted because of Judaism, but because of “Israeli oppression.” The statements drew public rebukes from Israel, the US, France and Germany.
The “Occupation” Dodge
A naïve interlocuter might ask the throngs of young people clamoring for Palestinian liberation what makes Palestine “occupied.” There is only one answer: Jews are sovereign over it. Hamas and its cheerleaders want to liberate Palestine from Jewish control. Is there a difference between murdering Israelis because one hates Jews and doing so because one would sooner burn them alive than accept Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish ancestral homeland?

Recognizing that this line of reasoning does not end well, most anti-Israel activists today have taken an additional step. They argue that removing Jewish sovereignty from Israel is not necessary because Jews are Jews, per se, but because Jews are not “indigenous” to the territory. Liberating Palestine is thus an anti-colonial struggle to restore property to its original national owner. Western students and progressive activists have increasingly adopted this position to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism.

This logic has many problems, too, but let’s focus on just one: If Jews are non-indigenous occupiers in the land that was once called Judea, where do they belong? Where are Jews indigenous? For those who refuse to say, “Israel,” the question yields only bad answers. The most common one is that Jews belong in Europe—a very bad answer indeed. Many Jews, including a majority of Jews in Israel, are Mizrahi or Sephardi, meaning that their forebears spent their diasporic millennia in the Middle East and North Africa. Most of these Jews never lived in Europe. Even Ashkenazi Jews have distinct genetic markers showing that we are quite similar genetically to Levantine Arabs.

What the indigeneity argument (or any other attempt to deny the Jewish connection to Israel) amounts to is a doubly unacceptable claim: first, that Jews are not a unified ethno-religious group that traces its ancestry to ancient Israel, as Jews claim; second, that today’s Jews are impostors who pretend to descend from the ancient Israelites so they can steal property from downtrodden natives.

If these excuses for so-called anti-Zionism end up sounding like the deranged rantings of a conspiracy theorist, that is no coincidence. After all, in some quarters—say, college campuses, the UN, or Hamas—advancing wild theories about the perfidious Jews duping the world is a sure road to advancing your career.


Bari Weiss: What It Means to Choose Freedom
This past Sunday, I gave a speech at the 92nd Street Y called “The State of World Jewry.” The address is a historic one. Over four decades, it has been delivered by the likes of Elie Wiesel, Abba Eban, Amos Oz, and more.

But for a sense of the state of Jewish life in America these days, you need only to have walked by the building that night. You would’ve found that police had cordoned off the entire block—and for good reason. Anti-Israel protesters, many wearing masks, gathered to intimidate those who came to the lecture. On the way in, you would’ve been screamed at—told you were a “baby killer” and “genocide supporter” among other choice phrases. You might have even glimpsed Jerry Seinfeld being heckled and called “Nazi scum” on his way out of the talk. (Classy.)

This is of a piece with what’s happening across the country at Jewish events.

On Monday at the University of Berkeley, to choose one of so many examples, a violent mob gathered outside an event featuring an IDF reservist. The students who gathered to hear him—and never got a chance to—were forced to evacuate. One student reported being physically assaulted. Another says he was spat on. Various students say the mob yelled slurs including “Jew, Jew, Jew.”

I am beyond grateful to the NYPD, and the entire staff of the 92nd Street Y, for making sure that everyone who attended the talk was able to do so safely. But everyone must ask themselves: Do we want to live in a country in which simply giving a speech about a Jewish subject requires serious police protection? What does that reality say about the state of our country and our freedoms?

I hope the words I delivered offer some measure of explanation about the moment we find ourselves in and how we might emerge from it. You can watch the video just below. The transcript follows.
  • Thursday, February 29, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon
Two months ago, the World Health Organization condemned the "effective destruction" of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.


It was bulldozed! Burying Palestinians alive! 

Yesterday, Al Jazeera filed a video report from that same hospital, claiming that babies are starving from malnutrition there.

But the video shows the electricity is on, the incubators and equipment is working, and everything we see is intact.



Not only that, but the hospital is - according to the report - busier than ever! The doctor was quoted as saying, "We used to admit 500 to 600 babies a day into the hospital. Now we admit between 1,000 and 1,200 babies a day."

If this is true, then the even babies who supposedly died of malnutrition may have died of natural causes. The infant mortality rate in the US is about 5.4 deaths per thousand; if they are seeing that many every day then one would expect several to die every day.

As usual, the world is being fed propaganda, not truth. 

(h/t Irene)






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Washington, February 29 - Heads of nations who for years have blamed Binyamin Netanyahu for stifling prospects for a peaceful, long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continued this week to speak and act in ways that all but guarantee the embattled prime minister will secure another term in office when the time comes, since their rhetoric and decisions play into Netanyahu's established image as an unabashed fighter for Israeli security in the face of unjust opposition.

Netanyahu, who has stood at the helm of Israeli politics for almost all of the last fifteen years, faced a deepening crisis of confidence with voters following the systemic failure of intelligence and preparedness of October 7 and sparking the current war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. His persistent legal troubles, a fizzled attempt to reform the judiciary, and a well-funded opposition protest movement had eroded much of his popular support, even if no single credible alternative leader had yet to emerge. In the meantime, internationally, proponents of deep Israeli concessions to Palestinian demands expressed continual frustration at Netanyahu's refusal to play along with the notion that Palestinians would be ready for peace anytime soon, and many of those global leaders openly spoke of sidelining or ousting him, at least by empowering or funding the opposition.

His administration's prosecution of Operation Iron Swords, however, put the domestic political concerns in abeyance while Israel came together to fight the enemy of the moment - Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah. Netanyahu's much-forecasted political doom became something of a consensus prospect in Israel - until the continued international pressure to reward the terrorism of October 7 with concessions came to bear on the Jewish State, allowing Bibi to position himself once again as standing in the breach against a hostile international community that refuses to take Israel's security concerns seriously.

For example, reports of a leak several weeks ago from the US State Department that the Biden Administration intends to recognize a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, whether true or not, galvanized Israelis in a way that only the war effort had been able to achieve until now. Some analysts expected the opposition to seize on the reports as evidence that Netanyahu's decisions have alienated the country's most important ally, but those expectations failed to materialize; Israeli voters, united in a more bunker-like mentality, instead blamed American and global naivety and rallied together instead of against Netanyahu; even the center-left elements of his wartime unity coalition rejected the purported move.

In response to these internal Israeli political developments, international opponents of Netanyahu prepared further moves to prove him correct.



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From Ian:

Peace can be achieved only through decisive victory
That is why Israel must destroy Hamas to ensure that, despite the terrorist group’s promises to repeat those atrocities over and over, they will never happen again. Israel must execute this war and save the hostages on its own terms and timetable, as well as implement strategies, protocols, and tactics that will truly prevent 10/7 from ever occurring again.

Everyone with whom we met – ministers and MKs from the Left, Center, and Right; government officials; reservists and active-duty soldiers; retired military personnel, police, and commanders of regional security; intelligence experts; parents of the fallen and a father of a hostage; and members of the Druze community – passionately asserted that Israel must win. In fact, one MK went so far as to suggest that had Israel adopted the MEF Victory Project ideals, October 7 may not have happened. Nonetheless, there is now a nationwide consensus that winning is not an option; it is an imperative.

ISRAEL AND THE WEST share enemies who are watching. That’s why any discussion of rewarding the Palestinians with a state of their own sends the message that terrorism works. The mere mention of two states sends the absolutely wrong message at this dangerous time. Radical Islam understands this. Biden and the West? Apparently not.

Israel’s regional friends are watching as well. Hamas’s intention was to disrupt normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. It succeeded – temporarily. The Gulf nations are also observing, and they seek to ally with a strong horse. Without victory, the future of the Abraham Accords is at risk.

While the West seems to have forgotten what it means to win (think Afghanistan and Iraq), Israel can no longer afford to spend its days fighting the next war between wars. Israelis understand that this must be the last.

Too many policymakers in Israel and the West ignorantly mistook Palestinians as a people in search of peace, prosperity, and opportunity. Palestinian aspirations do not align with those of the West. Everyone from Jake “the Mideast has never been quieter” Sullivan to the hopeful Jews living on the kibbutzim in the South failed to recognize this reality. And while 10/7 apparently was not a wake-up call for Western policymakers, Israelis learned the hard way that victory must be achieved in order to end the barbarians’ ambitions of destroying Israel.

The response to the October 7 massacre is an inflection point for Israel’s – and the West’s – survival. If peace is the goal, decisive victory is the only means to its achievement.
Gerald Steinberg: No, Most People in Gaza Are Not “Just Like Us”
According to the mantras of peace activists, the way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is by recognizing that the people on the other side are "just like us." This article of faith is also passionately repeated by Western diplomats. But is Palestinian society "just like" Israeli society?

Israelis look at Gaza and see that many supported the horrendous brutality in the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7. Large crowds turned out to cheer the terrorists returning from their heinous spree of torture, murder, rape and kidnapping. Some of the "ordinary civilians" ran immediately to join in the looting. Long before Oct. 7, everyone living in Gaza (including UNRWA employees) knew that Hamas was stealing international aid to build a massive underground terror infrastructure.

In contrast to the majority of Israelis, many Palestinian mothers repeatedly encourage their children to become "martyrs" and express pride when they are killed while murdering and brutalizing Jews. No, they are not "just like us." In what Prof. Richard Landes calls "honor-shame cultures," humiliation (such as defeat in an aggressive war) leads to unbounded determination to exact revenge. This is the essence of the Palestinian nakba - the ongoing humiliation of the 1948 war in which the Arab armies were defeated by Jews and Zionists. If Palestinians were "just like us," they would instead examine their own shortcomings.

In contrast to Palestinian textbooks, in which Jews and Israelis are depicted as monsters, Israeli children are not systematically raised on hate and incitement. The fundamental differences in our identities are deeply embedded in cultural values taught to children.

To avoid more disasters, Israelis must firmly reject the temptations of "common humanity" and other messianic illusions. As long as the goal of the Palestinians, Iran, and their allies is the elimination of Israel, sufficient military power must be available and displayed so that they understand that attacks on Israel will result in their own destruction. A strong and "disproportionate" deterrent force is the best option for survival.
Why a Palestinian State Isn't Going to Happen
The Palestinians will never accept a state within reasonable parameters. They have painted themselves into a corner with their non-negotiable "right of return" claim, as if 5.9 million "refugees" have the God-given right to "return" to the villages in Israel that their grandparents left 75 years ago. Many of the villages don't exist anymore. Anyway, that demand would mean that while the Palestinians would have their own state, they would insist that the majority of their people must go and live in someone else's state, namely Israel.

Creation or even declaration of a Palestinian state would relieve Israel of several burdensome chores under the Oslo process, which would be automatically canceled. No more Palestinian use of Israeli seaports. Israel would no longer collect taxes for the Palestinians. Coordination of customs duties would end. So would security cooperation.

Israel could close its borders to a Palestinian state completely if it so decided, just as Israel's borders with Syria and Lebanon are closed. Tens of thousands of Palestinian workers in Israel? Treatment of Palestinian patients in Israeli hospitals? Commerce? Not unless Israel agrees.
  • Thursday, February 29, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon
Jordan has been proud of its role in airdropping aid to people in north Gaza. 

But its air force is having problems hitting...Gaza.

On Monday, one of the drops landed in the Mediterranean, and some reports say in southern Gaza, not the north where it was intended.


Today, another one landed in Israel instead of Gaza.

Arab caricaturists are making fun of the mistakes.




There have been lots of articles (falsely) accusing Israel of inaccuracy in its bombing terrorist targets. But Jordan can't even hit Gaza accurately!




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  • Thursday, February 29, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon
Israel National News reports:
The IDF on Thursday reported that as aid trucks were brought into northern Gaza on Thursday morning, Gazan residents gathered around the trucks, acting violently and looting the supplies.

"Early this morning, during the entry of humanitarian aid trucks into the northern Gaza Strip, Gazan residents surrounded the trucks, and looted the supplies being delivered," the IDF confirmed. "During the incident, dozens of Gazans were injured as a result of pushing and trampling."

According to the reports, some of the masses neared the IDF troops in a dangerous fashion, threatening to harm the troops.

The soldiers, whose job it was to allow safe distribution of the aid, felt threatened by the masses and responded with live fire.
The IDF released a video showing the crowds massing around the aid trucks, some climbing on top of them, but it doesn't show the shootings or any panicked fleeing to my eye.


It seems likely that some people fell off the trucks and some might have been crushed.

The reporting in Arab media is quite different:
 In a new massacre committed by the Israeli occupation tanks and artillery strikes, at least 104 civilians were killed and dozens were injured  today while waiting for food aid in Al-Rashid Street southwest of Gaza City.

Medical sources said that occupation forces opened heavy machine-gun fire towards thousands of citizens from the northern Gaza Strip, specifically from Gaza City, Jabalia and Beit Hanoun, who were waiting for the arrival of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid in Al-Rashid Street southwest of Gaza City, resulting in the killing of over 104 persons.  
104 dead from troops shooting? Machine gun fire? And other reports claim artillery as well.

Others are now claiming 150 killed.

One site claims to have video of the "massacre" - but it shows nothing, no gunshots or even panic.

All we know is that the IDF did shoot at some people. 104 or 150 is an insanely huge number to be killed. Normally as soon as the first shots ring out everyone else scatters. 

With hundreds of people there, one would expect to find lots of videos being shared on social media of the shootings. The most gruesome photo I could find shows several bodies, but I cannot see any gunshots - their injuries seem more consistent with a stampede than shootings.



I count seven or eight bodies in an Al Jazeera video.

What seems most likely is that some - maybe dozens - of Palestinians were killed in a stampede, perhaps as they were crowding around the trucks and perhaps fleeing the IDF defensive shooting. Even if the stampede was running away from live fire, there wouldn't be that many dead, because it was an open area and high casualty deadly stampedes only happen in spaces where the crowds have nowhere to go. 

Palestinian officials are inflating the death count by an order of magnitude, which they have been doing since the beginning of the war as we saw in the Al Ahli Islamic Jihad rocket explosion. They look at any incident where civilians are killed as an opportunity to demonize Israel, a higher priority than saving lives or grieving. 

There was at least one tragic incident this morning. But there is no way that over a hundred people died. 

UPDATE: The IDF says it hit no more than 10 people and shot at their legs. They say it was a separate incident and not connected with the convoy.



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  • Thursday, February 29, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon


Jordan's Foreign Minister called out Israel as the only guilty party on October 7.

Adopting Hamas talking points, Foreign Minister Ayman Al-Safadi justified what he called the “Al-Aqsa Flood” massacre on October 7th, saying it must be looked upon in "context" of Israeli actions against Palestinians. 

This came during a press conference with his Austrian counterpart, Alexander Schallenberg, in Amman.

A reporter asked Al Safadi why he is only calling for Israel to stop fighting in Gaza, "Why haven't you called on Hamas to release the hostages, and maybe lay down their arms so that this war could end?" 

Al-Safadi didn't answer the question. Instead, he dissembled for a couple of minutes, falsely claiming that "the whole Arab world condemned the killings of Israeli civilians on October 7." This is an absolute lie. Most official statements were of "concern" over "escalation of violence on both sides" while the Arab world itself was supportive of the attacks as "legitimate resistance." Outside of the UAE and Bahrain, who issued clarifying statements days later after Israeli complaints on their "all lives matter" statements, I don't see any Arab nation condemning Hamas. Including Jordan.

He then falsely compared this faux condemnation to the lack of condemnation of Israeli officials for the "killing of 30,000 Palestinian civilians."  Yes, he called 12,000 Hamas terrorists "civilians."

Al-Safadi then claimed  that there can be no peace without a Palestinian state as he continued to refuse to call for Hamas to release hostages or lay down their arms.

But that wasn't the worst part. 

He then added this disgusting addendum:  “We have to remember that October 7th did not happen out of a vacuum, there's a context,” and he then went through a laundry list of supposed Israeli crimes.  He then said that if Palestinians don't get a state, there will be more October 7ths in coming years, justifying not only last year's massacre but peremptorily justifying whatever outrages Palestinian terrorists do in the future. 




All of this was said in fluent English.

There are scores of separatist movements in the world demanding their own state. No one says that violence is justified in their pursuit of their goals. Only for Palestinians are world leaders saying, sure, what can you expect, of course they will be violent forever unless they get their demands met.

Schallenberg, for his part, did not say anything to disagree with al-Safadi's words, and he even thanked Safadi "for the warm welcome and thought-provoking discussions." 

I'm tweeting Schallenberg to ask whether blaming Jews for being slaughtered is considered "thought provoking" to him.





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Wednesday, February 28, 2024

From Ian:

What Jews Mean to America
Taking a long view of Jewish history, Meir Soloveichik observes that there is nothing especially surprising about the surge of anti-Semitism in the U.S. since October 7. What is surprising, he writes, are the “stalwart, public defenses of Jews” from public figures. Soloveichik believes such attitudes have deep roots in the American founding, and are summed up in Abraham Lincoln’s description of Americans as God’s “almost chosen people,” by which he meant that

America is not biblical Israel’s replacement; it does not seek to supersede or supplant the Jews. It does not envy Israel’s eternity but seeks to learn from it and be blessed by it; it is biblical Israel’s imitator, learning the lessons of Israel’s story. Whereas other nations saw in Jewish eternity a reminder of their own ultimate demise, America, as Lincoln argued, learned from the biblical story that it could hope that it would not “perish from the earth” if it remained true to its covenantal calling. The phrase “almost chosen people” warns and inspires America, implicitly embracing the faith that, despite centuries of exile, God’s covenant with the original “chosen people” remained.

Such attitudes, Soloveichik argues, bolster both American sympathy and antipathy toward Zionism:
It is not merely that many Americans of faith support Israel but that Israel’s story supports faith. Many religious Americans . . . find in Israel the vindication of traditional Western, and especially American, beliefs. Israel’s story is seen as the ultimate indication that “God exists; he drives history; he performs miracles in real time; God’s word in the Bible is true.”

It is only with this in mind that we can truly understand the intense hatred directed at Israel from the American left. . . . Progressives elementally understand that Israel, ancient and modern, is a profound source of inspiration in the way America sees itself as a covenantal people. Many progressives, meanwhile, are driven by the fierce belief that America has never been a nation dedicated to a great idea, . . . and its story is entirely a tale of evil and oppression. Woke progressives hate Israel because they hate America; they work, above all, to undermine the notion that America can consider itself a covenantal nation, and they therefore hate the embodiment of the original covenantal nation.

This is why the more the righteousness of Israel’s current cause is revealed, the more agitated and angry the anti-Semites become. Thus we have those who claw at posters of child hostages, destroying evidence of the evil of Israel’s enemies.
Benny Morris: The NYT Misrepresents the History of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict
Earlier this month, the New York Times Magazine published a long article, titled “The Road to 1948,” drawn from a conversation among six professors, three Arab and three Jewish. But even the composition of the panel fits what Benny Morris terms the article’s “misleading attempt to project even-handedness,” as two of the Jewish participants betray a sharply critical attitude toward Zionism, while the three Arab scholars “almost uniformly toe the PLO (or Hamas) line, which is indistinguishable from propaganda.” Morris also notes:
Five of the six people involved can hardly be deemed experts on either the Arab-Israeli conflict or the 1948 war. Only one—Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington—has published works of some relevance.

Morris dissects the article’s numerous errors, half-truths, and omissions. For instance:
Emily Bazelon, [the piece’s moderator and editor], informs readers that the first bout of violence took place when the 1920 Muslim Nebi Musa festivities in Jerusalem “turned into a deadly riot,” in which “five Jews and four Arabs [were] killed.” Neither she nor any of the panelists mention that an Arab mob attacked, murdered, and wounded Jews or that the crowd of perpetrators chanted “nashrab dam al-yahud” (“we will drink the blood of the Jews”). Nor does she tell us that the crowd shouted, “Mohammad’s religion was born with the sword,” according to the eyewitness Khalil al-Sakakini, a Christian Arab educator.

The other errors are more severe still, but I found this point about the Bir Zeit University sociologist Salim Tamari especially noteworthy:
Tamari blithely dismisses the [1948] war by saying that the Palestinians and the Arab states were weak and that “the Arab defeat was almost a foregone conclusion.” But this only seems true in retrospect. In May 1948, the American and British intelligence services predicted an Arab victory.

Tamari and the others thus seem to go beyond the standard academic argument that Israel independence was built on the terrible and inhuman mass-dispossession of Palestinians. They also want to defend the collective honor of the four Arab armies that lost to a group of Jews they outnumbered and outgunned.
Michal Cotler-Wunsh: A never again moment — again
All of this is reminiscent of the “denial spectrum” witnessed in response to the Holocaust — including distortion, minimization and trivialization. It is echoed in the contextualization of the Oct. 7 attacks, which seeks to offer understanding of the perpetrators, paving the way for justification, dressing up mass murder as “resistance.”

All these arguments have now become common. But it’s the response from institutions and organizations that were created and entrusted to uphold and protect the international rules-based order and human rights that have been most shocking: U.N. Secretary General António Guterres contextualized the massacre by saying it “did not occur in a vacuum.” A former director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division disputed the veracity of the Oct. 7 attacks and the atrocities committed.

Meanwhile, American university presidents were unable to determine if calling for the genocide of Jews in the “context” of Oct. 7 violated their codes of conduct, whereas calling for the genocide of any other group would have almost certainly been considered such a violation. Instead, a Cornell University professor was “exhilarated” by the massacre; the director of the campus sexual assault center at a Canadian university disputed whether any sexual violence had been committed on Oct. 7; and a column in the Yale University student paper was edited to remove the line “unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.”

No wonder a recent Harvard-Harris poll in the U.S. found that 66 percent of respondents aged 18 to 24 believed Oct. 7 was genocide, while an astounding 60 percent believed the assault could be “justified.”

In the streets, protestors around the world, including in countries that designated Hamas a terror entity, have justified the “resistance,” echoing the genocidal Hamas charter with their chants of “from the river to the sea” — and it takes just one look at a map of Israel to understand this is a call for its annihilation. Unfathomably, the spectrum of responses has now “legitimized” a tsunami of antisemitic attacks — of Jews and all those who support Israel’s right to defend herself.

Unequivocal condemnation — without a “but” at the end of the sentence — remains the only ethical response to the barbaric war crimes and crimes against humanity that were perpetrated on Oct. 7. Silence, denial, contextualization, justification and anything in between points to a shocking collapse of morality, of the rules-based international order, of the mechanisms, institutions and principles established in the aftermath of the Holocaust, so that “never again” would become a reality.

Alarmingly, we are at a never again moment — again.



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

Contrary to popular antisemitic belief, Jews are not “white Europeans” who so rudely colonized land where “Palestinian” Arabs had lived for thousands of years. First of all, Jews are neither European nor white. Secondly, one cannot colonize one’s own land. Thirdly, “Palestinian” Arabs did not live in pre-state Israel for thousands of years.

It’s all a big, fat lie.

Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst Joseph E. Katz, citing a 1937 Palestine Royal Commission Report out of London, writes:

“The Jewish presence in ‘the Holy Land’ -- at times tenuous -- persisted throughout its bloody history. In fact, the Jewish claim -- whether Arab-born or European-born Jew -- to the land now called Palestine does not depend on a two-thousand-year-old promise. Buried beneath the propaganda -- which has it that Jews ‘returned’ to the Holy Land after two thousand years of separation, where they found crowds of ‘indigenous Palestinian Arabs’ -- is the bald fact that the Jews are indigenous people on that land who never left, but who have continuously stayed on their ‘Holy Land.’ Not only were there the little-known Oriental Jewish communities in adjacent Arab lands, but there had been an unceasing strain of ‘Oriental’ or ‘Palestinian’ Jews in ‘Palestine’ for millennia.”

Katz goes on to cite Reverend James Parkes, an authority on relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East. In 1949, Parkes assessed what he called the Jews’ “real title deeds” censuring the Zionist movement for its failure to stress that the Land of Israel has NEVER been without Jews.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar-Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained the Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement. This page of Jewish history found no place in the constant flood of Zionist propaganda.... The omission allowed the anti-Zionists, whether Jewish, Arab, or European, to paint an entirely false picture of the wickedness of Jewry trying to re-establish a two thousand-year-old claim to the country, indifferent to everything that had happened in the intervening period. It allowed a picture of The Land as a territory which had once been "Jewish," but which for many centuries had been "Arab." In point of fact any picture of a total change of population is false....

It seems possible, even probable, that the failure of Zionist Movement to depict the Jewish presence in the Land in its proper context, is what led to the myth à la mode that Jews are “white” Europeans who up and stole “Palestine” from poor peaceful Arabs who’d lived there for “centuries.” The fact is that there has been a continual Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. There was never a time when there were no Jews living in the Land of Israel, and in fact there is robust evidence that there were significant numbers of Jews living in the Land, throughout time.

Katz tells us that despite physical violence against Jews in the Holy Land by post-Roman Christians, there were over forty Jewish communities that could be traced to the 6th century, comprising "twelve towns on the coast, in the Negev, and east of the Jordan, and thirty-one villages in Galilee and in the Jordan Valley.”

In 438 CE, says Katz, Galilean Jews declared an end to the exile when Empress Eudocia allowed Jews to once again pray on the Temple Mount. Archaeological findings, Katz tells us, bear testimony that in 614 CE, the Jews fought alongside invading Persians to overwhelm the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem. Yet when the Arabs seized Jerusalem two decades later, they found a city with a strong Jewish identity. The prevailing culture of Jerusalem was Jewish. Despite all the foreigners who had come and gone, raping and pillaging Jewish land, the Holy City remained Jewish in everybody’s minds. Because it was, is, and always will be.

Katz goes on to describe the tragedy that was life for the Jews under Arab Muslim invaders and occupiers. Spoiler Alert: it wasn’t good for the Jews. And still, the Jews, as stiff-necked as their reputation, clung on to the Holy Land, however they could. Sometimes they couldn’t, against their will. So they wandered the earth, and some of them settled in Europe, praying to return.

Other Jews however, never left but stayed in the Land of Israel. They stayed and stayed. It was hard. But they stayed in the Land, their indigenous territory. Only here could they fulfil the commandments.

And here is where people get stuck. They don’t understand or don’t want to understand that Jews and the Land of Israel are indivisible. The Jews have to be in Israel. This is commanded of them by God.

We pray “Shema Yisrael!” Listen Israel! The Jews are called “Israel.” The Land of Israel literally means "Land of the Jews."

Even in faraway non-Jewish lands, the Jewish people are synonymous with the Land. They read the same prayers with variations related specifically to living outside the Land, outside the place where Land and Jews are one. And still, these exiled Jews are tied to the Land in ways that can never be undone. All Jews are. We all have that holy connection.

When a European minyan, a quorum of ten, prays for rain, they are praying for rain in Israel. When a Jew in Cleveland eats bread, he says an after-blessing, thanking God for giving him the Land of Israel, and praying for the Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem, speedily in our time.

The enemy in Gaza and under the PA has none of this weighty history, and no valid claim to any land at all. They are but an odd admixture of people who call themselves “Palestinian” while claiming Jewish land—it’s right out of the Roman playbook. But there are censuses. And people with brains can think for themselves. The enemy is a liar and a thief, or rather a wannabe thief, because the land will never be theirs. 

The Land will always be Jewish land, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Even after October 7, even now, there is nothing that can ever change this singular fact: The Land of Israel belongs to the Jews, forever.



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  • Wednesday, February 28, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon


SpyTalk writes:

What has made the war in Gaza so much deadlier and destructive than Israel’s previous operations against Hamas is the combination of its use of artificial intelligence, which generates more targets than ever before, and the IDF’s relaxation of rules limiting strikes against non-military targets and civilians,  according to little noticed statements by current and former IDF officials, as well as an investigation by the Israeli-Palestinian +972 online magazine and the Hebrew-language news site, Sikha Mekomit, or Local Call. 

According to the IDF’s official website (which was down on Saturday), the military’s intelligence branch created its AI-assisted targeting directorate in 2019. The website disclosed it employs an AI-assisted target creation platform called Habsora in Hebrew (the Gospel, in English) in the IDF’s war against Hamas “to produce targets at a fast pace.”

In an interview published a few months before the Gaza war, retired Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, who stepped down as the IDF’s chief of staff last year, described the AI-assisted targeting platform as “a machine that processes vast amounts of data faster and more effectively than any human, translating them into actionable targets.”

To illustrate the impact that the system has had on targeting, Kochavi said that before the platform was created, the IDF’s intelligence branch would produce 50 targets in Gaza in a year. “Once this machine was activated, it generated 100 new targets every day,” Kochavi said.

There have been a number of articles like this that claim that AI is helping the IDF kill more civilians.  They base their claims by relying on the ignorance of people about AI, about the IDF and natural hatred for Israel that overwhelms any attempts at fairness. 

All of the articles mention this much larger number of potential targets being identified. What very few say is that the ultimate decision on what will be hit is made by humans. 

As Bloomberg reported in its own biased piece before October 7:

Though the military won’t comment on specific operations, officials say it now uses an AI recommendation system that can crunch huge amounts of data to select targets for airstrikes. Ensuing raids can then be rapidly assembled with another artificial intelligence model called Fire Factory, which uses data about military-approved targets to calculate munition loads, prioritize and assign thousands of targets to aircraft and drones, and propose a schedule.

While both systems are overseen by human operators who vet and approve individual targets and air raid plans, according to an IDF official, the technology is still not subject to any international or state-level regulation. Proponents argue that the advanced algorithms may surpass human capabilities and could help the military minimize casualties, while critics warn of the potentially deadly consequences of relying on increasingly autonomous systems.

Generating targets based on AI is exactly the same as generating targets based on other kinds of intelligence, just much faster. There is no change in procedures. There is no change in policy. If anything, these AI tools can minimize mistakes.

These articles all have the same pattern. They call upon "experts" who know literally nothing about the IDF or its policies, and then spin nightmare scenarios where "with the push of a button" the IDF could choose to have the machines take over and make all the decisions. 

The SpyTalk article relies on two retired, anonymous CIA officials who compare Israel's AI with Vietnam War-era technology used by the US.  Really. 

They say things like:

“In war, AI systems require the ingestion of quality inputs of intelligence at a massive level,” he said. “This is particularly true for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems input.  But that’s not effective when you have little current intel on the enemy, who is hiding underground and who doesn’t maneuver as armies do, but rather as insurgents amidst a civilian population.”

 If the old method took a week to identify a target, how timely would that information be by the time the target is attacked? Isn't a system that identifies them faster going to be inherently more accurate?

And, yes, targets are now underground. AI doesn't make that issue worse than it was, and arguably it can identify entrance and exit points of tunnels much better than humans can by identifying people entering one building and exiting another, for example, of seeing when cell phone signatures jump from one place to another. Of course computers would do a better job than humans would. 

And, again, humans review the AI data for accuracy, just as they would have reviewed the recommendations of humans beforehand. There is literally no difference - except that this is much better.

Another criticism often leveled at AI is that it is sometimes impossible to understand how it reaches a decision. But this is something that Israel recognized and appears to have fixed long ago. Bloomberg says:

Many algorithms are developed by private companies and militaries that do not disclose propriety information, and critics have underlined the built-in lack of transparency in how algorithms reach their conclusions. The IDF acknowledged the problem, but said output is carefully reviewed by soldiers and that its military AI systems leave behind technical breadcrumbs, giving human operators the ability to recreate their steps.  

In other words, the "experts" are basing their knowledge of AI on playing with ChatGPT rather than understanding the state of the art. 

These same "experts" predicted thousands of IDF deaths and Gaza cities being deathtraps. Ai isn't the only reason that the IDF performance has surpassed expectations, but it is a major one.

The effectiveness cannot be denied. Hamas deaths outnumber IDF deaths by a 50-1 ratio even when Hamas deploys teams of only two or three people at a time while there will be at least 10 IDF soldiers deployed on any given mission. 

West Point's Articles of War blog summarized things nicely last year:

One encouraging aspect is that it seems the IDF seeks to use tools that complement human decision making, rather than as substitutes for the human factor. It is important to maintain a human in the loop in order to promote accountability, because we are not fully aware of the capabilities and the risks of AI tools. In this regard, Israel is setting a positive example that should be followed.

Too many articles on Israel's use of AI are based on science fiction scenarios of robots running amok. The IDF has been researching AI for over a decade, and it applies its own moral code to the tools as it does for every other tool. They've thought through these problems, and solved them, way before the "experts" started charging consulting fees for their uninformed opinions. 

(h/t Martin)



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From Ian:

The General Who Believes in Winning Wars
Hacohen is not a believer in peace with the Palestinians, but he does not think violence alone can solve Israel’s strategic dilemmas. Two days before I met him, the MEF group had been in the north of Israel, looking through binoculars into the dread stillness of communities that had been ghost towns since early October. The naked eye could spot a white building on a far ridge, a U.N. post 80 meters inside of Lebanese territory where Hezbollah staged a military demonstration in April of 2023. The evacuation of 60,000 Israelis from 43 towns within 5 kilometers of the border had created a free-fire zone for the Shiite jihadists, who have blown up over 500 Israeli houses since October, and severely wounded a 15-year-old in Kiryat Shmona earlier that same day. Without an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, Iran-backed militants seemed unlikely to withdraw to the Litani River, their farthest permitted position under the worthless U.N. Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 Lebanon war.

Hacohen does not think such an invasion will be easy. “First of all it is a mountainous area,” he said. “We must learn from the Allied forces, the United States and the British in their march under the command of Patton from Sicily to Monte Casino. It took them too much time. … The Germans succeeded to stop them for nine months in Monte Casino.” Southern Lebanon “is a land, a very specific infrastructure, and a terrain giving all conditions for a small army to stand against a huge army,” he said.

Even if Hezbollah were chased back to the Litani, Hacohen thinks that peace would be unlikely to dawn over northern Israel, or any other part of the country for that matter, because so much of the Jewish state would still be within range of Hezbollah’s surviving arsenal. “They intentionally build themselves so that they can fight even by losing that southern part of Lebanon. They have depth,” Hacohen warned. Hezbollah would be able to bombard the center of Israel even if the IDF made it all the way to Beirut. “The idea that [Hezbollah] can go ahead with warfare, even though they are defeated in the battlefield, it is one of the [things] explaining the difference between the 1967 war and now,” he said.

There was one more crucial layer of complication: The Lebanese army, like the Palestinian Authority security forces, is a project of the United States, meaning Israel’s closest ally is now supporting two regional military forces who see their paramount foe as Israel, and provide practical support and political cover for Iranian-backed terror militias. “We must admit that there is huge strategic embarrassment for Israel,” Hacohen said.

“The first solution is to be aware about the dilemma,” he explained. The way out of the morass might involve careful diplomacy with the U.S., clever war-planning, and a high national threshold for chaos—above all, it means steeling the Israeli public for a second unprecedented national crisis in six months.

If Hacohen is optimistic about anything, it is the Israelis themselves, who “decided to fight for the honor of the Jewish people” after Oct. 7. Hacohen, who says he has 50 family members on active IDF duty, credits the army’s successes in Gaza to the rank-and-file rather than their commanders. The IDF had spent three decades avoiding massive face-to-face combat. Its soldiers have now dismantled three-quarters of Hamas’ brigades and chased its terrorists through hundreds of miles of cramped and booby-trapped tunnels without any sag in morale.

Hacohen used an unlikely example to illustrate how this fight for survival might change Israel. During World War II, Marlene Dietrich’s “Lili Marleen” became a favorite of both Allied and Axis soldiers. Dietrich, who as Hacohen noted performed in Israel in 1960, knew that she was the last female voice that thousands of young men would ever hear. In light of her significance to the deadliest event in human history, a postwar career in Hollywood proved unsatisfying to Dietrich, who opened a club that veterans from across America flocked to. The German actress, like the soldiers who had heard her over the radio and who now came to hear her sing in person, realized that the war had been more than just an episode, and that it had become a defining aspect of her own identity.

The point of Dietrich’s story is that “if you are a real warrior, a real general, participating in a war that is almost like independence warfare, it is just the highlight of your life,” Hacohen said almost wistfully. “After that, just to be something else, it is not really to respect what happened in that huge challenge that you overcame.”

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have fought in such a war for their national existence since Oct. 7. How they understand what they’ve fought for and why could determine the country’s future as much as any geopolitical event. Against a sometimes-bleak horizon of official failure and looming conflict, the strength of Israel’s people is perhaps the most important remaining unknown.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: The Origin of Hamas's Human Shields Strategy in Gaza
Hamas believed that as a people's militia and a righteous religious resistance group against the Israeli occupation, it had a moral right to operate amongst the population from which it derived its strength, legitimacy, and fighters.

Unfortunately, and horrendously, this strategy ultimately failed and brought unspeakable death and suffering upon the people of Gaza. Over time, and in past and current wars, the IDF became less risk-averse and more willing to tolerate civilian casualties in pursuit of high-value targets and military infrastructure. Israeli airstrikes and bombardment would regularly hit and destroy entire neighborhoods, commercial areas, schools, mosques and hospitals.

While it is true that Hamas would use these places for its activities, it unfortunately became exceptionally easy for the IDF to justify civilian casualties, wrongful deaths, and questionable actions by blaming Hamas for embedding itself amongst civilian populations and infrastructure.

Hamas's immoral decision to normalize the self-described "human shields" strategy has not only been incredibly destructive for Gaza's civilian population. It has also proved ineffective as the IDF loosened its rules of engagement to allow for more risky and deadly strikes on Hamas targets.

Multiple things are true simultaneously: The Israeli military kills civilians in its pursuit of militants and subsequently attempts to absolve itself of moral and operational responsibility by blaming Hamas's use of Gazans as human shields. And Hamas absolutely disregards the safety and well-being of Gazans by deliberately and nefariously placing its infrastructure and armaments among civilians and crowded neighborhoods and cities throughout the Gaza Strip. The group gives itself the right to be anywhere it deems necessary in Gaza because the interests of the "resistance" far outweigh any harm done to innocent civilians in pursuit of the supposed "greater good" and the "liberation of Palestine."

What began as Nizar Rayan's human shields strategy to protect militants' houses from Israeli bombing has sadly and ironically ended up with Hamas turning innocent and uninvolved Gaza civilians into its own "collateral damage."
Noah Rothman: Hamas’s Death Cult Comes to America
‘We love death like our enemies love life.” That chilling mantra, expressed a decade ago by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, has since become the terrorist outfit’s unofficial motto. “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves,” Hamas official Ali Baraka told a Russian interviewer less than a week after the October 7 massacre. “The thing any Palestinian desires the most is to be martyred for the sake of Allah.”

Neither Haniyeh nor Baraka, who respectively reside in Qatar and Lebanon, were speaking for themselves. Both are sufficiently removed from the war to which they’ve consigned Gaza’s people that they have little reason to anticipate their own glorious martyrdom. They are, however, happy to see their charges massacred in furtherance of the death cult Hamas has erected around itself. That cult extends well beyond the borders of the Gaza Strip, as the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell sadly illustrates.

Bushnell announced himself as an active-duty U.S. airman when he approached the gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. on Sunday. There, he declared his opposition to “genocide,” dowsed himself in a flammable liquid, and set himself alight. He died of his wounds shortly thereafter. Bushnell seems to have captured the hearts of Americans who are predisposed to share Bushnell’s outlook on Israel’s defensive war against Hamas and the Biden administration’s support for it. Their praise for his act of violence is evidence of both the depravity cultivated by Hamas’s obsessive bloodlust and an unspoken but apparently widespread desire to see more violence follow it.

“Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell, who died for truth and justice!” declared Cornel West, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and an independent candidate for the presidency in 2024. Indeed, the outright support (bordering on advocacy) for Bushnell’s suicide seems most common among Ph.Ds. Prolonged exposure to post-colonial agitprop explains a statement attributed to Biden “administration staff.” In an open letter, the fifth column in the White House explained that Bushnell’s “act of protest” represents “a stark warning for our nation” — a “haunting reminder for those who refuse to change course,” namely Joe Biden.

What is this sort of advocacy meant to achieve other than to convince other naïve, blinkered radicals to commit similar acts of violence — acts that may not be limited to self-harm? We’re left with no other conclusion, particularly given the strained efforts to maintain that Bushnell was of entirely sound mind when he committed this atrocity.
  • Wednesday, February 28, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon


On Monday, Joe Biden said - while eating ice cream - that he was hopeful for a "ceasefire" by next week.

"We're close," President Biden told reporters. "We're not done yet. My hope is by next Monday we'll have a ceasefire."

It was a very stupid thing to say.

Once Biden said that he thought a deal was close, that made Hamas far less likely to agree to a deal. 

Everyone in every Western government that deals with the Muslim world, from Presidents down through the grunts in the foreign ministries, really needs to take a basic course in honor/shame culture.

When Hamas leaders read this report, they felt that they were being manipulated. They want any agreement to look like they are the ones making the demands, not meekly following others. Their "honor" demands this. 

When Biden said that they were close to an agreement that made Hamas look weak, in their minds. 

Indeed, when they rejected the proposed agreement, they practically said so:

Another Hamas official, Ahmad Abdelhadi, said that the group was sticking to its demand that Israel agree to a long-term cease-fire and that leaks about the talks were designed to pressure Hamas to soften its position.

“We are not interested in engaging with what’s been floated, because it does not fulfill our demands,” Mr. Abdelhadi said Tuesday in a televised interview with al-Mayadeen, a Lebanese broadcaster.
Qatar, for all its faults, understands the basics of what you say publicly when dealing with a group where honor is a paramount concern.
Qatar, a key mediator in the talks, also expressed caution on Tuesday, saying it could not comment on Mr. Biden’s view that negotiators were nearing an agreement.

“The efforts are ongoing; all the parties are conducting regular meetings,” Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Qatari foreign ministry, told reporters in Doha. “But for now, while we certainly hope it will be achieved as soon as possible, we don’t have anything in our hands so as to comment on that deadline.”
It appears that Biden wanted to look, especially in an election year, like he was leading the effort and getting results. His ego and ambition got in the way of the goal. 

The other concern is that he used the term "ceasefire" and not "pause" or "truce." "Ceasefire" has been the stated desire of Israel's haters. Since he was speaking off the cuff, this may or may not have been intentional, but it is certainly concerning. 



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Read all about it here!

 

 

  • Wednesday, February 28, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon
It has been 144 days.

Not one human rights organization, not one major media outlet, not one world government, not one UN agency has publicly called on Arab countries to open their borders for Gazans in a war zone to flee.

This is unlike every other war in modern history. Millions of Ukrainians, Syrians, Somalians, Sudanese and other refugees flee war zones all the time and the world's human rights organizations and editorialists relentlessly call for borders to be opened and for refugees to be treated humanely.

Except for Gaza.

And as far as I can tell, not one reporter - not one! - has bothered asking HRW and Amnesty and Gisha  and UNRWA  - or even the State Department or white House -  what their official position is on Egypt's and Jordan's refusal to allow any Gazans to seek safety within their borders.

It is astonishing. Not a single major group, organization, pundit or nation who claim to care about the welfare of the civilians of Gaza is willing to even express a passing public  criticism of Egypt's and Jordan's quite public proclamations that they will not allow a single Palestinian to flee to safety.

There are two overlapping sets of double standards for Gaza. 

One is discussed quite a bit: antisemitism. The very charge of "genocide" that is only hurled at Israel and no other nation at war can only be explained by hatred of Jews. The demands that Israel behave in ways that no one else is expected to are antisemitic. The suspicion that Israel's statements are suspect, that their claims and evidence must be corroborated before they can be believed no matter how much evidence is produced, is classic antisemitism where Jews are considered shifty and always scheming. 

The other double standard is Islam-phobia, the very real fear of Islam that has been exhibited in the West since the 19th century, not to be confused with "Islamophobia."

No one wants to admit it aloud, but there is a great fear in the West of upsetting Muslims, who are regarded as irrational creatures who might just decide to attack you if you make them angry. And many Muslims take full advantage of this fear, threatening violence or terrorism that could somehow result if they don't get their way.

If anyone would publicly call on Egypt to open its borders to Gazans, the Egyptian government would react with great anger - it would suspend relations with any country, it would expel or imprison any human rights workers, it would embark on a smear campaign against any pundits, it would self-righteously say that its policy is the most humane policy possible for Palestinians and no one would dare contradict them.

And Islam-phobia ensures that no one wants to shame Egypt or prompt such reactions. "Speaking truth to power" only applies to power that doesn't act irrationally or violently. It directly leads to the deaths of thousands of civilians.

The violence we are now seeing in Western cities and campuses, ostensibly in defense of Palestinians, is partly a result of Western reluctance to appear "Islamophobic" in acting against the lesser offenses of "only" blocking major transportation routes. 

No one wants to criticize Palestinians for overwhelmingly supporting the mass murder of Jewish civilians. Calls for a "ceasefire" begin and end with Israel. Calls for Hamas to release hostages are pro forma and forced, while calls for Israel to stop fighting and allow Hamas to win are strident and angry.

This overlapping of Islam-phobia and antisemitism has some surprising commonalities. In both cases, context is anathema.

No one wants to compare how Egypt is expected to act with Gazans with how they are expected to act with other people seeking refuge from war.

No one wants to compare Israeli actions with the behavior of the US and Britain and Germany in various Muslim theatres of war. 

Almost no one wants to seriously publish the IDF's extensive controls in place to minimize civilian harm and how difficult that is in an urban war with Hamas hiding beneath civilians. Very few seriously compare Israel's actions with real international law, instead creating new rules for Israel that have never been applied anywhere else.

Gaza is where the double standards for Jews and the double standards for Muslims intersect.  



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  • Wednesday, February 28, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon

One year ago, UN Women reported that "Nearly one-third of Ukraine’s population have been forced to flee their homes. Around 60 per cent of the 7.7 million internally displaced adults are women while 90 per cent of the 5.6 million refugees who fled Ukraine are women and children, making it one of the most gendered displacement crises of our times."

The men stayed to fight and they sent the women and children to safety.  Which is what normal people do during wartime.

The contrast with Gaza could not be starker.

Instead of trying to protect the women and children, Hamas wants them to die. The men hide underground and leave the women and children to protect them from IDF bombs. 

And the Arab world is complicit with this sick mentality. Without exception, they are all insisting that Gaza civilians be forced to stay in Gaza, most of them against their will. 

Ukrainian refugees are welcome in the Czech Republic, Moldova, Poland, Hungary, Romania and elsewhere. Egypt builds walls and stations tanks to keep Gaza refugees out.

UNHCR created an entire infrastructure for Ukraine refugees. UNRWA simply accepts that Gazans imprisoned , without even attempting to move them to their other areas of operation in the West Bank or Jordan.

Muslims love to explain how much they cherish their women, that the hijab is a sign of respect and keeps women safer (it doesn't.) But here is a real world case where women and children could have been in relative safety in neighboring Arab countries.

Not only does no one want them - they are gaslighting them to say that being stuck in Gaza is for their own good, that it helps the Palestinian cause. 

Because anything that can be blamed on Jews is considered a win to them. 

The mentality has been so thoroughly accepted that hardly anyone questions it. Palestinians just act this way, and Egyptians just act this way, and Jordanians just act this way, ad Gazans who disagree must be silenced. Human rights groups and the UN and other NGOs simply accept that Palestinians are perhaps the first civilians in the history of warfare who are forced to stay in a war zone and no one blames their neighbors living only a couple of miles away for building a huge wall to keep them out. And their leaders would prefer that they die than live elsewhere.

This is the opposite of chivalry. This is honor killing on a massive scale, where each dead civilian considered by Palestinians and their supporters to be not a tragedy but a net positive for the Palestinian national movement. 

Martyrdom is honorable. Escaping is shameful. It is a truly sick psyche. 

And if you think that this somehow makes sense, then explain why the world treats Ukrainian civilians so much differently. 

(h/t Irene)




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