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Monday, March 25, 2024

03/25 Links Pt2: The UN sows the seeds of its own demise; The Red-Right-Hand Apologists; US: Israel using weapons legally, not blocking Gaza aid

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Loser of the UN Resolution: Biden
The pauper’s diplomacy of the Biden administration was on display today as it facilitated the passing of a UN Security Council resolution heavily weighted against Israel.

Every minor concession to moral decency was rejected in favor of “an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan.” Beggars can’t be choosers, explained Biden’s ambassador to the UN after abstaining from the vote, thus allowing the resolution to pass: “We did not agree with everything in the resolution. For that reason we were unfortunately not able to vote yes. However, as I’ve said before, we fully support some of the critical objectives in this non-binding resolution.”

Let’s be crystal clear about why this was a bad resolution.

Last week the U.S. put forth a version of the resolution that was vetoed by Russia and China. That version asked for Security Council backing for “diplomatic efforts to secure such a ceasefire in connection with the release of all remaining hostages.” [emphasis added]

If you don’t connect a long-lasting ceasefire to the release of the hostages, you are telling Hamas to walk away from the negotiations led by the U.S. to secure those two aims. After all, that same UN ambassador fumed at the time, “we should not move forward with any resolution that jeopardizes the ongoing negotiations.”

Russia’s deputy UN envoy disagreed, insisting that everyone should be comfortable with telling the hostages to rot: “At the coordination stage, almost all Security Council members expressed the view that the demand for an immediate ceasefire should not be conditional on the release of hostages or the condemnation of Hamas.”

Today, the Biden administration declared Russia to be correct. Let the hostages rot or else Joe Biden may lose a few thousand votes in Michigan.

As for the cynical use of “Ramadan” in the ceasefire, the Biden administration should be ashamed of itself for enabling it. The language implicitly portrays Israel’s counteroffensive as a war of religious persecution, or at the very least contempt. That alone will inflame the violent resistance to the mere survival of the Jewish nation. Was there a Hanukkah resolution passed by the UNSC that demanded the release of hostages? Yesterday was Purim; the holiday came and went without a UNSC demand for Hamas to at least return the children it is holding. Next month is the holiday of Passover, in which we recount our ancestors’ prolonged suffering while they were held against their will. How does the godforsaken nest of cretinous trolls at Turtle Bay plan to honor that one?
Intl. law expert: Biden team's moral backbone collapsed
Prof. Anne Bayefsky, president of the Human Rights Voices NGO and director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights, spoke to Israel National News - Arutz Sheva Monday about the US government's decision to abstain rather than use its veto against a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza during the month of Ramadan.

"The failure of the Biden administration to veto this resolution is a shocking redefinition of American priorities: mollifying Iran and its terrorist partners is on the ascent while supporting Israel in its existential battle against terror is plummeting," Prof. Bayefsky said.

She noted, "Last week the United States "demanded" the UN Security Council finally condemn Hamas for the October 7th atrocities - which the Council has never done. The Arab group of states, the Russians and Chinese said no. Just forty-eight hours later, the moral backbone of the Biden team collapsed. The United States allowed the adoption of the third Council resolution since October 7th that fails to condemn its perpetrators."

"Moreover, in her statement before the Council American Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield said Hamas should achieve a ceasefire - in effect saving the terror organization and its plans for more October 7's - with the release of one hostage! In her words: “A ceasefire can begin immediately with the release of the first hostage.” American hostages have been abandoned in Hamas hell holes, by their own government. And U.S. credibility and honor has taken a tremendous hit - to the detriment of Israel, the Jewish people and America," Prof. Bayefsky concluded.
David Singer: The UN sows the seeds of its own demise
Guterres has been responsible for filing only documents from 1947 – not from 1917 - with the International Court of Justice in relation to the UN General Assembly seeking the Court’s advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. The Court’s opinion will be based only on those documents lodged by Guterres– which will exclude the Court considering the 1922 Mandate for Palestine and the 1936 Peel Commission.

Guterres has been the UN front man – supported by UNESCO head Tor Wennesland - pushing for the creation of an independent Palestinian Arab state between Israel and Jordan as called for in Security Council Resolution 2334 adopted on 23 December 2016 – when Obama refrained from vetoing it - that misleadingly claims Jews have no legal right to live anywhere west of the Jordan River. Rescinding Resolution 2334 remains an imperative to rectifying this anti-Jewish canard.

Guterres and Wennesland have refused for the last 18 months to bring before the Security Council for its consideration an alternative solution emanating from Saudi Arabia - authored by an advisor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine solution published in Al Arabiya News on 8 June 2022. Their extraordinary decision ensures the 100 years-old Jewish-Arab conflict will continue – not end.

Emboldened by these clearly anti-Israel UN decisions – increasingly strident Moslems have caused Jewish communities worldwide to become greatly concerned for their own safety as they foment demonstrations around the globe calling for Palestine from the River to the Sea to be free of Jews – supported by lawyers from Australia to artists in the USA signing letters calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza War.

Under Guterres’s leadership the UN has become the epicentre for fostering anti-Israel hatred and Jew-hatred.

The UN has lost its moral compass and is sowing the seeds for its own demise.


Israel using weapons in line with international law, not blocking Gaza aid — US
The US has deemed Israel to be in compliance with a new national security memorandum after it received a written assurance from Jerusalem that it is using American weapons in line with international law and is not blocking humanitarian assistance in Gaza.

This assurance came last week via a “credible high-level official who has the ability and authority to make decisions and commitments about the issues at the heart of the assurances,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller says, referring to the letter sent by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

“These assurances are prospective, but of course our view of them is informed by our ongoing assessments of Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza,” Miller says during a press briefing.

“We’ve had ongoing assessments of Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law. We have not found them to be in violation, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or the provision of humanitarian assistance. We view those assurances through that ongoing work we have done.”

The State Department now has until May 8 to provide Congress with a report on Israel’s compliance with the memo.
Tom Gross: The BBC
A few months before I graduated from Oxford, I was interviewed for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s prestigious two-year journalist trainee course. This was the best way at the time to secure a job at Britain’s most respected news broadcaster. A committee of five interviewed me. The chair asked whether there was anything I would have changed about a recent edition of BBC One’s then-flagship Nine O’Clock News.

In a calm and reasoned way, I said that although the BBC could not report on everything in its half-hour bulletin and had to be selective about which international items to cover alongside British ones, it had struck me that Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Iraqi Kurds at Halabja deserved to be much higher up on BBC News than it had been.

I pointed out that this horrific act was the largest use of chemical weapons against a civilian target since World War II. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Kurdish children and adults had been gassed to death. Yet the BBC had only mentioned it in passing about 20 minutes into its news bulletin, after a light-hearted item about Prince Charles. I added that the BBC’s main news competitor in Britain at the time, ITN, had led its evening news bulletin that day with a five-minute report on the gassing of the Kurds.

There was silence in the room. The members of the BBC interviewing panel glanced at one another with expressions of bemusement. The chair then turned and asked me, with a slight scowl, “Are you a Zionist?”

And then, before I could answer, my interview came to an end.

Today, with the worldwide wave of antisemitism that has followed Hamas’s latest savagery, it is clearer than ever that a great deal of anti-Zionism — from the illustrious lecture halls of Harvard to the streets of European capitals — is merely a mask for old-fashioned antisemitism.

But even more than three decades ago, it was obvious to me that the attitude of the BBC’s interviewing panel perfectly exemplified what Martin Luther King Jr. reportedly told a student in the aftermath of the Six-Day War: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking antisemitism.”

At no point in my BBC interview or application process had I mentioned Israelis, Palestinians, or Jews. In what was the pre-Google era, my family background is not something that the BBC could easily have discovered.

I’m secular and had barely ever made an issue of being Jewish (although that hadn’t prevented me from being on the receiving end of some vicious antisemitic remarks not just from fellow school pupils in London but from the deputy headmaster). It was the BBC that brought up the subject of Zionism. Needless to say, I wasn’t granted a place on the BBC trainee course.

The BBC’s misreporting about Israel, along with its selective inattention to other Middle Eastern issues such as the plight of the Kurds, derives from the same warped view of the world and Israel’s place in it. The BBC’s problem, which persists to this day, is so widespread that many believe it has become institutionalized. It certainly has repercussions for British and Western foreign policy, and for the struggle against antisemitism.
Seth Mandel: The Red-Right-Hand Apologists
As I explained at the time, Mark Ruffalo and Billie Eilish and Ramy Youssef and Ava DuVernay and the rest know the meaning of the “red right hand” of war, regardless of the particular war, because it only ever has had one meaning, even if there are context-specific applications for different wars.

At that point, Jews pointed out, far too delicately, what they see when they look at the red-right-hand pin, as if it were a matter of opinion. This was a mistake. The organization that put together a public-relations campaign on behalf of Hamas isn’t confused, and the participants knew with whom they were getting into bed. After the Israelis were murdered by hand in that Ramallah police station, one of the bodies was thrown out the window to the crowd below, which further tore it apart. One of the videos shows a man holding up what appears to be the victim’s heart. The red right hand pin of Artists4Ceasefire shows the bloody hand holding a black heart. None of this is arbitrary,

But here’s the thing: Even if you were generous enough to allow ghoulish activists to pretend for a moment that it were open to interpretation, Georgetown Law students provided the other bookend to this story. The mere suggestion that Jews “saw” the pin as a reference to the lynching was enough to encourage anti-Israel activists to adopt the “Jewish interpretation” as their own. They showed up dressed as Aziz Salha because they wanted to remove any ambiguity, and because they knew that the Jews they were protesting would get the message.

Ask yourself the following question: After it was made clear how “from the river to the sea” was being “interpreted” by Jews and non-Jews alike—heck, after a congresswoman was censured over it—did activists and demonstrators use the phrase less often? In fact, some started using it when they hadn’t before the meaning was made undeniable, didn’t they?

Why do you suppose it is that when chants and symbols are shown to mean “kill the Jews,” they become more popular?

Stop playing volunteer spin doctor for people who worship at the altar of death.
Why I'm now proud to say: I'm a ZIONIST! Sickened by the Hamas horrors he saw firsthand in Israel, DAVID MARCUS reveals a deeply personal revelation - and why he demands America never abandon the Jewish state
Israel's enemies don't fight for their own liberation. They want to exterminate Jews, in Israel or anywhere else.

My grandfather wasn't paranoid. To him the Holocaust was a living memory, not a TV show on the History Channel.

He understood the phenomenon we're witnessing today. That when the world tips toward chaos and democracy is in retreat, anti-Semitism rises like a foul stench.

Jews live as a religious minority in every country on Earth, save one, so they're always vulnerable to the whims of the majority when evil is on the march.

In the north, by the Lebanon border, wearing a flak jacket and a helmet, I see the abandoned homes of more than 60,000 Israelis, who have been forced to flee as Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, launches rockets across the border.

Buildings in once-quiet communities lie in rubble. Others are now become makeshift IDF army barracks.

Here it is an active battle zone.

But back in the U.S., the Democratic leader of the Senate gave a speech just this month undermining Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's war effort.

Everyone I have spoken to in Israel, from top government officials to taxi drivers and people in the local cafes, knows this war is a fight for survival.

It cannot end without destroying Hamas. These terrorists and their allies must know that they are worse off after October 7, or they'll attack again… and again… until the Jewish state is gone.

But fickle American politics are removed from this reality.
Elliott Abrams: Chuck Schumer, the Highest-Ranking Shoemaker Ever
If we give any credence to the rankings of the official list, the “The Order of Precedence of the United States of America,” there are plenty of Jews who have held higher rank than the Senate majority leader—many Cabinet members, for example, and Supreme Court justices.

But they were not elected to their posts (though they may have been elected to previous posts, like Abe Ribicoff or Dan Glickman). So it seems fair to say that according to the Order of Precedence, Schumer is not the highest-ranking Jew ever to serve in the U.S. government, nor the highest ranking today—nor, thinking of Kissinger, is Schumer the most powerful ever. But he is Jewish, elected, and powerful. Does the bit about rank and history matter?

It seems to matter to Schumer, and it seems related to his defense of his attack on the government of Israel. That is, when he made the attack he spoke as a Jew. As The New York Times described him in a long interview, “he insists it was his deep Jewish faith—and the moral imperative he feels to stand up for Jews and for Israel—that led him to speak out against Mr. Netanyahu.” “This is so part of my core, my soul, my neshama,” he told the Times.

What’s the point of all this—of Schumer’s reliance on his being “the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America ever” and having the very name that means “guardian” of the Jews? These are Schumer’s repeated attempts to say he does not speak merely as a politician but as a historic figure of special rank and responsibility. We would all be better off if he knocked off the rigmarole and said his piece as a highly successful New York politician and the Democratic Leader in the Senate. Even the adulatory New York Times acknowledged that “it is hard to think of Mr. Schumer, the relentless party operator…as someone who ever puts politics aside.” There is no shame in that; Franklin D. Roosevelt would fit that bill, too, as would Mr. Schumer’s predecessors as Democratic leaders and majority leaders Lyndon Johnson, George Mitchell, and Harry Reid.

So let’s hear what New York’s senior senator has to say. But let’s drop the phony “shomer” bit and the claim that his words have special weight because of his religion. Is there any New Yorker, or any American Jew, who would not have paid more attention and given more weight to the words about Jews and Israel of Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan of New York, or Sen. Henry M. Jackson of Washington state? God knows who their ancestors were and what their names meant in the Middle Ages, but they were true shomrim or guardians of Israel.

What Schumer needs to learn is that persuasiveness does not come from etymology or rank—whether true, false, or inflated. If Schumer’s role as Democratic leader has any relevance, it is to raise the suspicion that he is helping the White House cover its left flank by criticizing Israel. As to his religion and his name, they should be irrelevant to his role in the Senate—and they are certainly no defense of his interference in the internal politics of a democratic ally.
From the Edges of a Broken World
On March 10, a big controversy erupted when a small magazine pulled down a story from its website with the cryptic note, “Guernica regrets having published this piece and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.” The retraction followed staff resignations in protest of the piece by Joanna Chen, a British-Israeli author and translator. One wrote that Chen’s article “attempts to soften the violence of colonialism and genocide.”

We emphatically disagreed with the critique and the decision to retract the piece. Like many others who read Chen’s essay—it was available in an internet archive, a kind of samizdat for our time—we found it to be moving and empathetic in the extreme to Gazans and Israelis alike. This is in keeping with Chen’s history not only as a translator who uses language to bridge cultural divides but also as someone who volunteers with Road to Recovery, picking up Palestinian children who live in the occupied territories from the Israeli side of checkpoints and driving them to Israeli hospitals. The ferrying of these children is one of many wrenching accounts in the piece.

We contacted Chen when the controversy erupted and asked if we could post the piece. We’re grateful that she agreed. Here it is with the most minor editorial changes for style and clarity. –-The Editors

The tree lost its mythical powers,
horses huddled at the edge of the earth.
The sniping light turned cold, winter came,
we continued, faces sealed. Only at night
did we sit down with our own names.

It was my Auntie Sheila who taught me the importance of reaching out to others, of lending a hand when needed. Widowed early, she was a feisty lady who helped out in hospitals and hospices in the coastal town of Blackpool, where she lived. Auntie Sheila volunteered for years in the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, holding a warm and comforting hand out to people of all denominations without question. She understood the intrinsic importance of person-to-person contact; she believed it was a two-way street and that she also benefited from it. But my aunt also taught me that you cannot care for others if you do not care for yourself first. This is why she went swimming a couple of times a week and enjoyed quiz shows; this is why she allowed herself jellybeans and chocolate-coated figs, a stock of which she kept in her sideboard.

As a child growing up in the North of England, I often stayed over at Auntie Sheila’s house, which overlooked the local park. At night, when she tucked me up in bed, she would lean over and whisper in my ear: You’re my favorite, but don’t go telling anyone. She whispered the same words to my brother, Andrew, and I’m sure we weren’t the only ones convinced we were her favorites.

When I was 16, my parents moved us to Israel following the death of my brother in a traffic accident. They wanted a fresh start, but the move was wrenching for me: everything was strange and unfamiliar, even the language. Severed from my family back in the U.K., I felt no connection to this land or the people around me. I struggled, and I learned to get by on my own. I immersed myself in grieving for my brother and for the life left behind.
Jewish Foreskins, Black Masks
A new biography of Frantz Fanon reminds us how the left came to prefer their Jews non-Jewish and their Blacks vocally Black

There were, however, Jewish Fanonians who did not see themselves only as “allies,” but understood their own struggles in a Fanonian idiom: Of these, none was more instrumental to Fanon’s posterity than Claude Lanzmann. Like Fanon, Lanzmann was a teenage rรฉsistant and continued to see himself as a consummate “existentialist” man of action: As Fanon would be later—notably in Sartre’s extravagant essay in praise of violence written as a preface to The Wretched of the Earth—Lanzmann was exoticized on account of his “authentic” suffering and resistance to it by the Sartre-de Beauvoir power couple with whom he remained fatefully entangled. He was both de Beauvoir’s lover—officially approved by Sartre—and an editor at Sartre’s magazine, Les Temps Modernes. It was Lanzmann who delivered the manuscript of what was to become The Wretched of the Earth to Sartre. He then arranged the publication of its infamous opening chapter, “On Violence,” in the magazine, and also choreographed the eventual meeting between a dying Fanon, Sartre, and de Beauvoir in Rome in August of 1961.

Shatz acknowledges that Lanzmann’s early documentary films on the IDF (Tsahal) and on the futile armed revolt at the extermination-work camp Sobibor “advanced a strikingly Fanonian defense of violence, arguing that Jews had remade themselves as a people only by taking up arms and fighting their oppressors.” Lanzmann’s kind of Jewish Fanonism is not, however, to Shatz’s taste (read his sneering appraisal of Lanzmann’s memoirs in the London Review of Books (“Nothing he hasn’t done, nowhere he hasn’t been,” March, 2012). In the biography, however, Shatz lets him off with a little litotes, concluding that “it is unlikely Fanon would have approved of Lanzmann’s passion for the world’s last settler-colonial state.” I, for one, wish they could have had that conversation.

“Settler-colonial” is of course a favored epithet of the contemporary internationalist and academic left that seeks to quarantine Jewish national aspirations from those of other newly created post-1945 nation-states. It’s unclear from his writings elsewhere on the subject whether Shatz himself believes the modern State of Israel to have “always already” been “settler-colonial” from the time Zionism existed only as an idea, or whether it became so definitively only after winning the 1967 war. Reputations and opportunities, not to mention paying jobs, in the world of left publishing and, increasingly, in the U.S. State Department rise and fall on such questions, or one’s ability to avoid being pinned down on them.

In his position as the U.S. editor and unofficial chief Israel correspondent at the London Review of Books—a publication with nothing nice to say about Israel—Shatz has tended to cultivate a sort of strategic ambiguity about ultimate causes and final solutions of the Zionist question while remaining firmly opposed to almost every action undertaken by an Israeli government in his lifetime. Nevertheless, writing in the magazine pages in the aftermath of Oct. 7 (“Vengeful Pathologies,” Oct. 19, 2023), before landing on the ideologically correct conclusion that Israeli intransigence was ultimately to blame for the world’s lack of sympathy for Jewish victims, he attempted to remind those in the LRB‘s not at all antisemitic milieu that “intergenerational trauma is as real among Jews as it is among Palestinians.” He even offered a light chastisement to the enthusiastic pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Western capitals: “The ethno-tribalist fantasies of the decolonial left, with their Fanon recitations and posters of paragliders, are indeed perverse.” What this perversion is, though, he doesn’t spell out, perhaps because to do so would force him toward ultimately unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions about Fanon’s ethics of violence and the intersectional left’s renewed enthusiasm for them.

In The Rebel’s Clinic and on multiple occasions elsewhere, Shatz likes to make the argument that Fanon’s views about violence have been distorted and caricatured by both fans and haters on account of a mistranslation: “It is, of course, true that Fanon advocated armed struggle against colonialism,” he writes in the essay about Oct. 7, “but he referred to the use of violence by the colonised as ‘disintoxicating’, not ‘cleansing’, a widely circulated mistranslation.” In the BookForum interview he additionally clarifies this: “By taking up arms, the colonized overcome the almost drunken stupor in which they have lost themselves and in which they ceased to think of themselves as potential historical actors.” So not Al Aqsa Flood, then, more like Al Aqsa Purge. But this tangling over distinctions—when is a cleanse not “disintoxicating” and vice versa?—overlooks the ways that even “limited” violence metastasizes. People can and do become addicts of violence. “Trust us, we only want to kill enough of you to feel better about ourselves” is not a negotiating strategy.

Whatever it is, this kind of political expression certainly limits alternatives, and it has often led to a nihilistic politics of despair. This is indeed how Shatz understands what has happened to Israel: grown into an overdog, excessively powerful nation intoxicated by its own myth of “disintoxication” from Jewish weakness, yet still subjugated by what Shatz—in tune with the beliefs of many intellectuals of the cultural left—considers to be a “traumatic hallucination” of another Holocaust. Perhaps this Israel—to speak in the psycho-political idiom of The Wretched of the Earth—is what the end state of Fanonian self-realization really looks like: a country—like the man—in perpetual struggle with itself, with its own fantasies of weakness as well as with other people’s fantasies about it. To argue that, however, would take a much greater rebellious streak.
I Fought for My Non-Jewish Peers—Their Silence Now Is Deafening
I'm a junior at Vanderbilt majoring in Public Policy Studies and English. I've found that although teens in America are not directly in battle, they are feeling the effects of the Israel-Hamas War on college campuses and school districts across the country.

As a college student, I've felt the divisions on campus following October 7. I am Jewish and have participated in Israeli-Palestinian dialogue through an organization called Seeds of Peace.

At school, I was appointed to the Student Advisory Board of the Vanderbilt Project of Unity and American Democracy and I am part of Vanderbilt's Interfaith Scholars Program.

While I've been in the room where heavy and difficult conversations have taken place, I've also noticed the reactionary environment of college campuses. I have seen many one-sided infographics about the conflict, and I often feel that there is a lack of history and context.

Findings from a poll conducted that Millenials and Gen Z were less likely to say that the American Government should support Israel in the Israel-Hamas War than older generations, including Gen X, Baby Boomers, and Silent and Greatest. Of note, Millennials and Gen Z were most likely to say that the American Government should criticize Israel.

I criticize Israel's policies, but I also put my foot down on antisemitism. I recently attended an ADL event where Jonathan Greenblatt spoke about the spike of antisemitism following October 7.

While I recognize that anti-Zionism is often antisemitism, many of my peers do not understand how their infographics on social media isolate their Jewish peers.

As an NYC public school student who has tirelessly campaigned for social justice and equality, I have felt isolated and unsupported. I have fought battles for many of my peers, but I have found the silence to be deafening.

Differences between generations are also evident in the preferred method of acquiring news. In a 2022 Statistica poll, 47 percent of people aged 18-34 receive their daily news from social media as compared to 20 percent of people aged 65 and older receive their daily news from social media.
What would happen to pro-Palestinian western youth under Hamas? - Syrian American journalist asks
Then came the October 7 massacre. “This was devastating on so many levels,” says Bouzo mournfully. “As if the horrors of Hamas against so many Israeli Jews, Muslims, and Druze weren’t enough to process, then we also had to face the repugnant reactions on social media. We’ve been working on dehumanization for so long that more and more people started opening up. Still, then, the first responses to the attack on Arabic and social media were of people just going back to the narrative that they’ve been taught for decades, which is the total dehumanization of Israeli victims. Additionally, there was either complete denial that the massacre ever happened or a repulsive celebration and justification for it. Of course, it was shocking, but it also made me realize how crucial our work is.”

As for the shocking response from younger generations in the West, Bouzo makes a unique observation. “I was born in a country where people were brainwashed to become tools for the system, so I’m no stranger to that. I identify that here, too, many young people were and are being brainwashed. These young people born in democracies have no idea what it is to be born and raised under dictatorial regimes that support terrorists in committing atrocities. They think that these organizations are acting on behalf of a certain ‘cause.’ It’s heartbreaking for someone like me who knows how privileged they are to live in a free society. What would happen to them if they would’ve lived under regimes such as Hamas? We can all try to guess."

“I believe peace is the only way forward,” says Bouzo. “However, peace cannot be made with terrorist organizations, but rather between people, between Arab countries and Israel, and yes, between Israel and the Palestinians at some point, though several things must happen before that can be achieved.

“We must continue to share the untold stories of what happened in the Middle East. When Palestinians protested in Gaza a few years back, nobody covered that,” she adds angrily. “There are so many innocent Israeli hostages that are held by Hamas in Gaza today. The people of Gaza currently also find themselves under the grip of Hamas’s Iranian agenda, and to a greater extent, organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others under the Iranian regime’s influence are also holding the broader MENA region hostage. Hamas is the enemy of the region, not Israel.”

“At Yalla, we strive to provide a platform for the stories that no other channel in Arabic will share,” explains Bouzo. “We shared the impactful accounts of individuals like Manar al-Sharif, a Palestinian Syrian, who provided eyewitness testimony to the cruelty inflicted by Hamas on Gazans. Our storytelling included the compassionate endeavors of Israeli activist Vivian Silver, who dedicated her life to aiding Palestinians, and Awad Darawshe, an Arab Israeli paramedic. Tragically, both Silver and Darawshe were murdered by Hamas on October 7.”

Bouzo concludes: “I want to encourage our esteemed readers to support genuine grassroots efforts that encourage coexistence and people-to-people peace in every way they can. Through media and education, we can forge a path to a better, safer, and more peaceful tomorrow for everyone in the MENA region and beyond.”
New Jersey’s Sue Altman, breaking with progressive allies, expresses support for Israel
Sue Altman’s background as a progressive organizer and former leader in New Jersey’s Working Families Party raised questions early in her campaign for the seat in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District about how she might approach Israel policy, given the national party’s criticism of Israel and support for conditioning aid to the Jewish state.

But in a position paper shared with Jewish Insider, Altman — now the presumptive Democratic nominee — distanced herself from the hard left on Israel, expressing a personal connection to and affinity for Israel and separating herself from the national WFP’s positions.

Altman is running against Rep. Tom Kean, Jr. (R-NJ) in one of the most competitive battleground districts in the country — one of only 22 toss-up races, as rated by the Cook Political Report. Kean’s district, spanning north-central New Jersey, narrowly voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and has a significant Jewish constituency.

In the position paper, Altman pledged support for continued U.S. military aid to Israel, without conditions, and for the supplemental aid bill for Israel and other U.S. allies, as well as stating her opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Her campaign said she also opposes legislation to place end-use restrictions on aid to Israel.

In an addendum to the paper written in response to the Oct. 7 attack, Altman said that she views Israel as a “vital friend and ally” which “has a right and obligation to respond” to the Oct. 7 attacks. She said that Hamas “must be dismantled” and that “there is no path to peace as long as Hamas continues to exist,” and called for continued international pressure to release the hostages.
The Jewish Canadian MP questioning his future with Liberal Party
Canadian MP Anthony Housefather had hardly made it through the door of his Ottawa office building last Tuesday when a reporter stopped him to ask about one of the most difficult days of his career. Housefather, a Jewish lawmaker who has represented a heavily Jewish district in Montreal since 2015, was one of just three members of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party to vote against a resolution the previous night that, in Housefather’s view, equated Israel to Hamas.

A 50-second clip of the interview, posted by CPAC, Canada’s version of C-SPAN, went viral on social media; it showed Housefather getting choked up as he came face-to-face with a new political reality.

“I think it’s the first time, in my parliamentary career, that I’ve had a reflection like this, where I truly felt last night that a line had been crossed,” Housefather told the reporter. “I started reflecting as to whether or not I belonged.”

His crisis of belonging was sparked by his colleagues in the Liberal Party joining Canada’s New Democratic Party — which Housefather likened to the far-left Squad in Washington — in passing a resolution that called for an end to arms sales to Israel and for Canada to support global prosecutions of Israel in venues like the International Court of Justice, where South Africa has accused Israel of committing genocide.

“Right now, for most North American Jews, and I think that’s the case in Canada and the United States, there’s no issue more important than antisemitism domestically and what’s happening with Israel,” Housefather told Jewish Insider on Friday. “So if I am this far out of line with my party, it has to make me question, am I in the right place?”
Israel Rejects European Bid to Unilaterally Recognize Palestinian State as ‘Reward for Terrorism’
Israel’s foreign ministry on Monday warned four EU member states that unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would effectively amount to a reward for terrorism.

“Recognition of a Palestinian state following the October 7 massacre sends a message to Hamas and the other Palestinian terrorist organizations that murderous terror attacks on Israelis will be reciprocated with political gestures to the Palestinians,” foreign ministry spokesperson Lior Haiat declared on X/Twitter.

Haiat added that a “resolution of the conflict will only be possible through direct negotiations between the parties. Any engagement in the recognition of a Palestinian state only distances reaching a resolution and increases regional instability.”

The foreign ministry was responding to a joint announcement on the sidelines of last Thursday’s European Council meeting in Brussels issued by Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, and Malta. The four EU members stated that they had “agreed on the urgent need for an immediate ceasefire, the unconditional release of hostages and a rapid, massive and sustained increase of humanitarian aid into Gaza.”

Signed by their four respective prime ministers — including the now former Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who abruptly announced his resignation last week — the statement continued: “We are agreed that the only way to achieve lasting peace and stability in the region is through implementation of a two-state solution, with Israeli and Palestinian States living side-by-side, in peace and security. We discussed together our readiness to recognize Palestine and said that we would do so when it can make a positive contribution and the circumstances are right.”

Haiat said that the “comments of the Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, about recognizing a Palestinian state, as well as the joint statement by Spain, Malta, Slovenia, and Ireland about their readiness to recognize a Palestinian state, constitute a reward for terrorism.”


On social media, German official calls on Netanyahu to ‘tear down this wall’
Michael Blume, the commissioner for combating antisemitism for the German state of Baden-Wรผrttemberg, has prompted criticism for his decision to share a social-media post drawing a parallel between the Berlin wall and Israel’s security fence.

Blume retweeted the statement on X, “Mr. Netanyahu, Tear Down This Wall!—Palestinians, tear down their version of the Berlin Wall,” written by Richard Silverstein, a longtime left-wing activist opponent of Israel. He deleted it following a blowback on social media.

The post of antisemitism czar was created in 2018 for each of the 16 German federal states to hold Germany to its historic responsibility to ensure Jewish security at a time of rising hatred. Blume has since been roundly denounced for actions related to his position.

“Comparing Israel to the Communists and the Soviets is a very unfair comparison, and is made by people who have an innate hatred of Israel and would like to see it disappear,” said Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office and Eastern European Affairs at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Efraim ZuroffEfraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office and Eastern European Affairs at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, in 2007. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Zuroff is an American Holocaust scholar responsible for helping bring German Nazi war criminals to trial, part of the platform of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He also served as the first director of the Los Angeles center in 1978, having moved back and forth between the United States and Israel.

“Blume has been doing things like this for years,” said Zuroff.


New Zealand pressured to expel Israeli ambassador by pro-Palestinians
Neil Scott, the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) leader, called on Sunday for the government to expel the Israeli ambassador Ran Yaakoby while calling for an urgent ceasefire in Gaza.

Addressing a cheering crowd in Auckland's Te Komititanga (Briotmart) Square, Scott stated that "we know what [Israel's] crimes are- occupation. Land there, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide. All crimes against humanity.

My challenge to the politicians of Aotearoa is [to] stand up for international law. Oppose Israeli crimes against humanity. Speak up." Scott condemns the New Zealand government for "silence" on Gaza

Scott was condemning the New Zealand government for its "silence" on recent Israeli raids within the Gaza Strip, which killed an alleged 14 Palestinians. "They have never sent the Israeli ambassador home to show our displeasure of those crimes against humanity."

Earlier in February, New Zealand listed Hamas as a terrorist organization while placing sanctions on "extremist Israeli settlers."

Addressing the sanctions, Prime Minister Christoper Luxon stated that the Hamas attacks on Israel in October "were brutal and [must be condemned]." He added, however, that New Zealand wants to be clear that the designation of Hamas is about the actions of an offshore terrorist entity.
UN official resigns weeks after claiming 'Hamas is not a terrorist group'
UN Relief Chief Martin Griffiths, who made headlines in February after claiming that “Hamas is not a terrorist group,” announced on X Monday that he was resigning from his position in the United Nations.

The 72-year-old is resigning for reasons relating to his health, LBC reported. Griffiths contracted COVID-19 in late 2023 and is reportedly now suffering with long-COVID.

“After 3 years on the job, I have informed @antonioguterres of my intention to step down in June,” Griffiths wrote. “To everyone at @UNOCHA, it's been the privilege of my life. I am deeply in your debt.

“To all partners and supporters, thank you for championing the cause of people in crises.”

‘Hamas is not a terrorist group’

Griffiths told a representative from Sky News last month that he did not consider Hamas to be a terrorist group.

Asked about the feasibility of Israel’s military goal to eliminate Hamas and disallow the terrorist group from having any governing say in Gaza, Griffiths responded, “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us; as you know, it is a political movement. But, I think it is very, very difficult to dislodge these groups without a negotiated solution which includes their aspirations.
No ancient Roman racism, says Ramaswamy at Jewish spoils-funded Colosseum
There was no “racism” in ancient Rome, when “emperors were white, black, Arab, didn’t matter,” former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wrote on Sunday.

The entrepreneur posted photos on social media on Sunday of him and his family at the Colosseum in Rome.

“The color of your skin was like the color of your eyes. *Citizenship* is the distinction they drew,” he wrote. “It wasn’t just about what you got in return, it was about your duty to your nation.”

Ramaswamy added that Roman emperors were born in Libya and Arabia. “The fact that people think these things are so incredible as to be implausible reveals how our understanding of history has become unnecessarily racialized,” he wrote.

The Colosseum is said to have been built with the spoils of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and with Jewish slave labor.


Traditionally quiet campuses now face widespread anti-Israel activity
University of Virginia’s politically low-key climate was, in part, what drew Adin Yager to the campus. The fourth-year student had never voted in a student election.

But that changed after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel — students on the Charlottesville campus, seemingly overnight, became activists urging the university to divest from companies with ties to the Jewish state.

“I know many people who, whether they voted yes or no, had never voted in student elections before,” Yager, a music and economics double major who has served on multiple campus pro-Israel committees through Chabad and Hillel, told Jewish Insider. “Since Oct. 7, and especially [amid the divestment referendum], the overall climate here has been way more political.”

“There wasn’t as much talk about other issues, like Black Lives Matter, which is surprising given what happened here in August 2017,” Yager said, referring to the Unite the Right white supremacist rally. “The most talk here has been around BDS,” he said, referring to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. On university campuses, the BDS movement is largely represented by an effort to pass non-binding resolutions or referendums that call on the school to divest from companies that operate in Israel. No university has ever moved forward with the recommendation to adopt the policies of the BDS movement.

UVA is among several universities that have traditionally been politically sleepy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but post-Oct. 7 are suddenly seeing their first-ever BDS campaigns and anti-Israel activity.

BDS efforts nearly disappeared on college campuses in recent years before Oct. 7, with just three resolutions being brought forward in 2022, compared to 44 at their peak in the 2014-2015 school year. But in the months since the initial Hamas attack and start of the war in Gaza — Israel’s longest conflict in decades — there has been a resurgence in efforts to bring BDS back to the forefront.
'October 7 changed the world': Speakers glorify Hamas at Columbia student group event
A student group at Columbia University hosted an event on Sunday called “Resistance 101,” in which a series of speakers, some of whom have direct ties to terrorism and have been banned from entering the European Union, praised Hamas for its October 7 attack on Israel and explicitly endorsed terrorism as a means to win back “every inch of Palestine.”

The event was originally scheduled to take place at Barnard College’s Institute for Research on Women, but, an organizer explained, was moved at the last minute because a PhD student “made a complaint toward the committee investigation”— presumably a reference to the congressional education committee investigating antisemitism on American campuses— and the [New York Police Department],” causing the institute concern.

The organizer said this was part of a “long line of repression” by Columbia, which she suggested was hypocritical after the university allowed a “raging Islamophobe” on campus, presumably a reference to Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a co-founder of Hamas.

The “Resistance 101” event featured Nerdeen Kiswani of the Palestinian activist group Within Our Lifetime, who condemned the Palestinian Authority for formally renouncing terrorism as part of the Oslo peace process, and referred to this decision as “selling out Palestine.”

Also speaking was Khaled Barakat, a leader of the organization Samidoun, which calls for the release of all those associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and which distributed sweets in Berlin on October 7 “to celebrate the victory of the resistance.”

Barakat, who once said that he “wish[ed] ISIS would fight the Zionists,” is banned from entering Germany.


House Ways and Means Committee requests answers from four top schools on campus antisemitism
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) wrote on Thursday to the leaders of Cornell University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania regarding antisemitism on their campuses, suggesting that the schools are at risk of losing their tax-exempt statuses.

He requested that the schools provide information and documents relating to their efforts to combat antisemitism — making his committee the second to request such documentation from the four institutions, following the Education and Workforce Committee. Smith’s letter specifically notes that the universities enjoy tax-exempt status, which falls under his committee’s purview.

The new investigation comes amid calls for Congress to reexamine or potentially revoke tax-exempt status from schools not doing enough to combat antisemitism on their campuses.

“The focus of the Committee’s inquiry and questions is to understand what universities like yours are doing, if anything, to change course drastically and address what has gone unaddressed for years,” the letters read. “Doing so is essential to justifying the generous tax-exempt status that the American people have provided institutions like yours for decades.”

The letters emphasize that the current spike in campus antisemitism, “did not arise from new opinions developed in a matter of hours or days after the Hamas attacks,” instead “reveal[ing] a culture of antisemitism that developed and grew beneath the surface for decades.”

Smith said that the situation requires “serious institutional change” and that the committee and American people “expect” such action.
Harvard's Federal Funds on Chopping Block for Obstructing Congressional Anti-Semitism Probe, House Chair Says
Harvard University risks losing more than half a billion dollars in federal funding as it obstructs a congressional investigation into widespread anti-Semitism on its campus, according to the top lawmaker handling the probe.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce—which is investigating Harvard and other top American universities for their failure to stem an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence on campus—told the Washington Free Beacon in a wide-ranging interview that the Ivy League school’s refusal to comply with the probe could cost it dearly. Harvard took in $625 million in federal funds in 2021 alone, accounting for 67 percent of its total sponsored revenue.

"The ultimate thing is obviously, trying to hold back some of their money if they're just not going to make the students safe," Foxx said, echoing comments from other GOP members of the committee who spoke to the Free Beacon. "That's always an option for us."

Foxx’s House committee issued a subpoena to Harvard in February after the school slow-rolled a massive document production request related to its handling of widespread anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Since that time, Harvard has stonewalled the probe, sending reams of often-redacted documents, in what Foxx termed a "really shameful" situation.

"It's hard to know whether it's arrogance, ineptness, or indifference that is guiding Harvard," said Foxx, who has emerged as a leading critic of the American university system as she shepherds a series of investigations into a systemic failure nationwide to address Jew hatred on campus. "They know the investigation is not going away."

Foxx’s comments to the Free Beacon, which mark the first public indication that Harvard and other schools could lose federal funding for their failure to combat anti-Semitism, is certain to jolt the university’s administrators as they face down that possibility. Harvard did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment on the matter.
Proposed academic boycotts, BDS diminishes U., harms learning, creates social divisions
We are Rutgers faculty from a range of academic disciplines at the New Brunswick, Camden and Newark campuses. We write to express our profound concern over the upcoming referendum put forward by the Rutgers University Student Assembly, which calls for the University to boycott, divest from and sanction (BDS) the State of Israel and terminate its partnership with Tel Aviv University.

While some well-meaning people gravitate to the BDS movement believing that it offers a means for advancing social justice and peace in the Middle East, true peace activists seek ways to speak and work together with the goal of bringing governments and societies into dialogue and coexistence. In contrast, the BDS movement is divisive and illiberal.

Reports have documented that BDS activism, including referenda like these, coarsen campus discourse, promote prejudice and hate and demean and marginalize Jewish and Zionist students. Indeed, research shows that pro-BDS student activism leads to a marked increase in antisemitic incidents on campus.

A university, at its best, promotes learning and inquiry, dialogue and debate, research and innovation. Academic boycotts, which blacklist faculty and students due to nationality, political views and ethnicity, are inherently detrimental to these ideals and to the principles that define the academy: academic freedom, the free exchange of ideas and a community united in learning, exploration and growth.

Suspending Rutgers' partnership with Tel Aviv University would unfairly deny students and faculty — both those at Tel Aviv University and at Rutgers — important educational opportunities and opportunities to hear and be heard, to build bridges and partnerships that advance scholarship and learning.

Commitment to our University's core values of "academic excellence that's both accessible and affordable, building a beloved community where every single member of the University has a voice and serving the common good while making a meaningful difference in the world" requires a rejection of these divisive referenda.

Academic boycotts are inimical to the inclusive, tolerant and respectful learning community to which the University aspires. Our values call on us to reach out, listen and engage — not to isolate, segregate and demean.
Radicalized sociologists on the warpath
October 7 and its aftermath should be prime material for America’s tens of thousands of sociologists. Those who study the factors that shape social behavior should be keenly interested in questions such as: What moves people to join terrorist groups that fire rockets into kindergartens? What influences civilians to accompany and assist gangs of killers on a cross-border murder-and-rape spree? What inspires people around the world to deny or justify ghastly atrocities against Jews?

Yet instead of examining these important questions, a number of extremists in the world of sociology are promoting a resolution about Gaza that pretends the October 7 attack never happened and claims Israel launched a genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza for no apparent reason.

The process leading up to the proposed resolution began 10 days after the October 7 pogrom, when 2,000 sociologists released a statement accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. That was nearly two weeks before a single Israeli soldier had set foot there. The sociologists’ statement did not contain a single word condemning the October 7 massacre. It was just a tirade against what it called “75 years of settler colonial occupation and European empire.” That is, 75 years of Israel existing.

In the weeks to follow, a number of the signatories on that statement established “Sociologists for Palestine,” which, according to its website, was created in order to “support and amplify the work of Faculty for Justice in Palestine [and] Students for Justice in Palestine.” FJP and SJP are the organizers of the extreme and often violent anti-Israel rallies that are taking place on American college campuses. They oppose Israel’s existence and defend the October 7 pogrom.

Recently, 573 of these anti-Israel sociologists asked the American Sociological Association (ASA) to adopt a virulently anti-Israel resolution. The ASA’s general membership will vote on the text in the weeks to come.
Rutgers Must Protect Jewish Students From Antisemitic Referenda
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, is awash in a wave of antisemitic rhetoric and actions. This moment, with Jewish and Israeli students facing unprecedented harassment and challenges, is a dangerous time indeed for the university to proceed with two referenda demonizing Israel. The measures were placed by the Rutgers University Student Assembly on the upcoming Spring 2024 Assembly elections ballot. The administration must step in now and cancel the BDS referendum to protect these students.

On October 7, 2023, the Jewish community faced its largest massacre in a single day since the Holocaust, as Hamas terrorists butchered more than 1,200 innocent people, including over 300 young people at a music festival, raping and mutilating many of the victims, and taking over 240 hostages, over 130 of whom are believed to remain in Gaza. In the months since, Israel has fought to prevent future atrocities, and rescue these hostages, who, according to both released hostages and the United Nations, are experiencing ongoing sexual assault.

What a strange time for Rutgers students to be forced to vote on two referenda delegitimizing Israel, one demanding that the university end its investments in any firms that do business with Israel, and the other insisting that Rutgers terminate its longstanding partnership with Tel Aviv University.

We know that anti-Israel campaigns contribute to a rise in antisemitism on campus, and that anti-Israel activists have raised the climate of antisemitism in the United States to its highest level since before World War II.

At Rutgers specifically, the situation is stark. Between October 7 and February 15, Rutgers Hillel noted 49 individual instances of antisemitism on campus. When Rutgers’ president wrote a letter expressing sorrow at the horrific deaths of the 1,200 civilians in Israel on October 7 — just two days after the nightmare, on October 9 — he was attacked by a group of anti-Israel Rutgers faculty members for sympathizing with Israelis without mentioning Palestinians. In one instance, a student wearing a kippah — a Jewish religious head covering — in the student center was greeted with chants of “Murderer, murderer.”


Media Largely Silent on Latest Survey of Palestinian Public Opinion
On March 20, 2024, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published the results of its quarterly survey on the sentiments within Palestinian society regarding Israel, the ongoing war in Gaza, internal Palestinian politics, and the international community.

With much of the media’s attention turned to Gaza and the West Bank, and with Western leaders hoping to restart negotiations for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, one would think that the results of this survey would have been covered by all the mainstream media organizations.

However, with limited exceptions, practically no mainstream news outlet outside of Israel even reported on this survey’s findings and those that did cover it (Newsweek, The New Yorker, NBC News, and USA Today) only reported on certain results while ignoring others.

In its report on the survey’s findings, NBC News highlighted the fact that support for Hamas has dropped among both Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and that, among Gazans, support for “armed struggle” has dropped while support for a two-state solution has risen.

The New Yorker similarly noted the seemingly promising results concerning the waning support for “armed struggle” and the rise in support for a two-state solution among Gazans.

However, when it comes to these results, there are several flies in the ointment.

For example, while support for Hamas has fallen within Palestinian society, it is still the organization with the most support among Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank and its support in the West Bank is still 20% higher than it was in September 2023 (before the October 7 attack and subsequent Israeli war against Hamas).
What Hostages? Media Ignore Hamas’ Captives, Oct. 7 Massacre
AP and The New York Times took a more subtle approach.

They quoted Netanyahu on the need to enter Rafah to eliminate Hamas, but omitted his reference to the hostages and glossed over October 7th without elaboration.

So uninformed readers are left to wonder what exactly had Hamas done to warrant such a reaction from Israel. After all, not every “attack,” as it is dryly described by The New York Times, justifies such a military campaign.

And these omissions are all the more mind-boggling judging from the articles’ headlines, which seem to promise a full explanation as to why the Rafah operation is necessary for Israel:

But ignoring the existence of hostages and Hamas’ massacre that ignited the war, while focusing instead on the suffering of displaced Palestinians, is not only bad journalism.

It is tantamount to undermining Israel’s right to respond to a genocidal threat.

By doing so, media paint a picture that actively serves Hamas’ agenda.
The Guardian Attempts To Understand the ‘Real Hamas’
What Readers Are and Aren’t Told
Readers are told that the group was formed “against the backdrop of the first intifada, the popular Palestinian uprising [that] ignited when an Israeli truck killed four Palestinian workers in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp.”

But readers are not told that the truck crash was a tragic accident caused by a mechanical failure.

Readers are told how Sheikh Ahmad Yassin was the group’s “spiritual leader” and that he was “diminutive and softly spoken.”

But readers are not told that Yassin called suicide bombing a “religious obligation” and was a terrorist mastermind.

Readers are given the opinion of Azzam Tamimi, who is merely described as an “author” of a book about Hamas.

But readers are not told that Tamimi could more accurately be described as a Hamas supporter who once argued Palestinian suicide bombings are for a “noble cause” and that he would also perpetrate one if he “had the opportunity.”

Leifer’s piece is illuminating at points, including his brief exploration of the theory that a major reason for Israel’s failure to prevent October 7 stemmed from not taking Hamas’ maximalist rhetoric seriously. However, the devil is in the details, and Leifer’s omission of critical facts undermines what could have been a comprehensive understanding of Hamas.
'Mounting body of evidence' that Guardian's coverage is effectively pro-Hamas
The Guardian’s coverage of Israel and the Palestinians can largely be defined as a continuing effort to find evidence in order to reach their pre-determined anti-Israel conclusion. It’s not journalism in the traditional sense. It’s (pro-Palestinian) advocacy. No matter how incendiary the libel, their reporters can be counted on to almost always find a reason to back up the latest charges leveled against the Jewish state – even when the fact patterns clearly don’t line up.

One example is the outlet’s campaign – which began a mere week after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre – to legitimise the “genocide” “ethnic cleansing” allegation. Such a moral inversion, after the worst and most barbaric antisemitic attack since the Holocaust, was in line with pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas social media accounts which, almost immediately – that is, while Palestinian death squads were still in Israeli territory – began promoting that narrative.

The latest Guardian attack on Israel is their promotion of the accusation that “Israel may be committing a war crime by deliberately starving Gaza’s population”. Among the participants in this venture is their former Jerusalem correspondent Peter Beaumont, who wrote a March 20 ‘analysis’ titled “Man-made famine’ charge against Israel is backed by mounting body of evidence”.


It would be wonderful if Muslims remembered Jerusalem’s significance to Jews
By the early 20th century, documentation within the Al Haram Al Sharif (Temple Mount) guidebooks unequivocally identified the area as the site of Solomon’s Temple, contradicting the then-Palestinian president Yasser Arafat’s claims during peace negotiations with Bill Clinton. The acknowledgment of Jerusalem’s historical significance for Jews, affirmed by Islamic sources, presents a dilemma for the Palestinian cause, which has to reconcile a narrative essential for its legitimacy with historical truths.

This reflection on Jerusalem’s fluctuating significance encapsulates the city’s unique position at the heart of religious, historical and political discourses. Its transformation in the Islamic faith — from an initially peripheral site to a central pillar of spiritual identity — illustrates the dynamic interplay between faith, politics and historical memory. As such, Jerusalem remains a symbol of profound religious and cultural significance, its value transcending mere geography to encompass the very essence of faith and identity in the Middle East.

Jerusalem’s journey from “nothing” to “everything” within Islam mirrors the broader human quest for meaning, belonging and sanctity in the physical and spiritual landscapes we inhabit. This narrative not only enriches our understanding of Jerusalem’s place in Islamic tradition but also offers insights into the ways in which sacred spaces are constructed, contested and revered across cultures and epochs.

Jerusalem stands at the crossroads of history and faith. It would be wonderful if more Muslims remembered its significance to Jews.


"Islamists Won’t Accept Loyalty To The Nation State" Ed Husain | The Winston Marshall Show #011
Since October 7th, the voices representing Muslims and Palestinians in the media have been dominated by the more extreme. Moderate voices seem to have been pushed out.

I sat down with author and former Islamist turned anti-radicalisation expert Ed Husain. Now a public intellectual, professor and government adviser, Ed had been swept up by Hizb ut-Tahrir and Hamas in his youth.

Ed explains to me the history of Islamism from Sayyid Qutb to the present. We also take a deeper dive into Islam and the unity and disunity between Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Ed explains Islam in Britain and across the West today, and what needs to change.




Despite ostensible ban, tens of thousands of Palestinians working in Israel — report
Despite a general ban imposed on the entry of Palestinian laborers into Israel following the October 7 Hamas attacks, tens of thousands of permit-carrying workers from the West Bank have been entering Israel on a daily basis, according to a new report.

Channel 13 news said a long list of Israeli businesses have managed to gain exemptions on “humanitarian” grounds, allowing them to employ workers, despite the work in question having little to no apparent connection to any pressing humanitarian need — including hotels, bakeries and furniture companies.

Some 150,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank and an additional 18,500 from the Gaza Strip used to enter Israel daily before October 7, but the permits were frozen by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi for security reasons following the devastating Hamas assault.

Far-right ministers including National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have repeatedly objected to lifting the ban.

As a result, the economy has suffered a severe shortfall in manpower, with the construction and agriculture sectors particularly badly hit.
PMW: Abbas’ response to terror in Russia highlights his hypocrisy and lies
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas continued his hypocritical attitude towards terror by continuing his strong condemnation of terror everywhere in the world, except when Palestinians Murder Israelis.

Following the October 7 Palestinian terror atrocities in southern Israel, Mahmoud Abbas announced that Hamas’ murder, torture, and rape of Israelis was self-defense:

“President [Abbas] instructed to provide defense to our people, and he emphasized the Palestinian people’s right to self-defense facing the terror of the settlers and the occupation forces.”

[WAFA, official PA news agency, Oct. 7, 2023]

Following the ISIS terror attack in Moscow on Friday, Abbas issued a very strong condemnation of terror:

“The [PA] presidential office strongly condemned the terror attack that took place yesterday evening, Friday [March 22, 2024] in Moscow, the capital of Russia, which left dozens dead and wounded (i.e., ISIS attack at a concert hall, 137 killed). The presidential office emphasized its solidarity, its stand alongside the Russia leadership and the friendly Russian people, and its desire for the stability of the situation in the Russian Federation.

[PA] President Mahmoud Abbas expressed his condolences to [Russian] President Vladimir Putin, the Russian people, and the families of the victims. He wished a speedy recovery to the wounded.

The presidential office emphasized once again its confidence in the Russian leadership and its ability to overcome this disaster and provide security and stability in the Russian Federation. It reemphasized the president’s position, which opposes terror regardless of its source.”

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 23, 2024]

Considering that Abbas presented the Hamas’ terror atrocities of October 7 as self-defense, his statement that “opposes terror regardless of its source,” must be understood. According to Mahmoud Abbas and fundamental PA ideology there is no such thing as Palestinian terror. Palestinians according to Abbas have the right to kill any man, woman or child in Israel and it will never be terror. Ever since Israel’s existence, Palestinians have the right to “resist” and killing women and children is part of the way that Palestinian Authority defines “resistance.”

Those who think there is any difference in attitude towards terror between the PA and Hamas, have no understanding of the Palestinian Authority.


MEMRI: Calls For Terrorist Operations Against Israel From Jordanian Territory – Hamas And Muslim Brotherhood Officials, Clerics Close To Qatar: Jordanians Must Buy Arms And Undergo Military Training; Fighting Jews Is 'Islamic Duty'
In the six months since Hamas' October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were murdered and over 240 were taken hostage, and since the outbreak of the ensuing war in Gaza, the popular support for Hamas and hostility towards Israel has intensified – to the extent of possible terror attacks against Israel from Jordanian territory, in the north or the south, similar to the October 7 attack. The support for Hamas and hostility towards Israel are manifested in explicit calls by Islamic elements inside and outside the kingdom urging Jordanians to directly confront Israel and wage jihad against it. These figures explain that, in the present circumstances, jihad has become a personal duty of every Muslim; that fighting the Jews, "the enemies of humanity," is an Islamic duty; that every Muslim soldier is obligated to fight the Jews, and that the Jordanians must fight alongside the Palestinians, so as to "be part of the war of liberation" in which "the eastern side" of the Jordan river (i.e., the Kingdom of Jordan) and its western side (i.e., the West Bank) will unite.

Some of these figures also address the operational aspects of preparing for jihad against Israel from Jordan, and urge young people there to form cells, buy arms and train for military action.

In this context it should be noted that there have recently been attempts to smuggle weapons from Jordan to the West Bank and even an attempt by armed operatives to infiltrate Israel from Jordan to carry out a terrorist attack.[1] It should also be noted that southern Jordan, and especially the Al-Karak and Mazar areas, have changed in the recent decades, turning from areas loyal to the regime into centers of intensive Islamist activity.

Three main circles are leading the incitement against Israel:

1. Hamas officials who urge Jordanians to escalate every form of confrontation and resistance against Israel and to block the border crossings with it. Abu Obeida, the spokesman of Hamas' military wing – who on November 23 exhorted the Jordanians to escalate the resistance (i.e., armed struggle) against Israel – has gained considerable popularity on the Jordanian street. Praise and admiration for him have been frequently voiced in demonstrations, including by sheikhs and tribal figures in the Al-Karak Governorate, and children as well as university students dress up like him.

2. Jordanian and Palestinian members of the Qatar-affiliated International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) who incite against Israel, claiming that fighting the Jews is currently an Islamic duty and that jihad against Israel has now become a personal religious duty incumbent upon each and every Muslim. These figures also incite against the Jordanian regime and its king, Abdullah II, on the grounds of his position on the Gaza war and Jordan's ongoing economic ties with Israel. Among the IUMS members disseminating this discourse are Hamas man Nawaf Takruri, who is also chairman of the Palestinian Association of Scholars Abroad, and Jordanian sheikhs Osama Abu Bakr and Muhammad Sa'id Bakr.

3. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Jordan, which is one of the main elements behind the protests that take place every few days across Jordan, and also organizes events and conferences at which Jordanians are exhorted to wage jihad against Israel and smuggle arms to the Palestinians in the West Bank. Jordanian MB officials, especially Murad Al-Adaileh, chairman of the MB's Islamic Action Front party, encourage Jordanians to take part in the "war of liberation" against Israel, and claim that Israel is a "temporary entity."
Riots outside Israel’s embassy in Jordan as relations cool with Arab state
Riot police on Sunday clashed with hundreds of Jordanians protesting near the Israeli Embassy in Amman against Jerusalem’s war against the Hamas terror group, according to media reports.

Demonstrators reportedly chanted, “No Zionist embassy on Jordanian land,” while others shouted, “We want to go to the borders and kill and kidnap Zionist soldiers. Revenge…revenge…Oh Hamas, bomb Tel Aviv.”

The protesters had initially gathered in the Kaloti mosque close to the Israeli diplomatic mission. Several were reportedly beaten and arrested as they tried to break through a police cordon around the embassy.

Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lior Haiat confirmed to JNS that the protest had taken place, but would say only that all embassy diplomats and staff were safe.

Israel’s embassy in Jordan was evacuated at the beginning of the war on the order of then-Foreign Minister Eli Cohen. Israel also told its citizens to immediately leave Jordan over concerns Jews could be attacked there due to the conflict with Hamas.




Revealed: Illegal Iran nuke site allegedly sabotaged by Israel
The Islamic Republic covered up an alleged Israeli sabotage operation on a secret atomic weapons workshop in Tehran’s Shadabad neighborhood that was set ablaze in 2020.

The independent Iran International news organization disclosed the stunning revelations on Sunday via a trove of documents it recently obtained from a hacker group.

The incident appears to have taken place in July 2020 by a group of nine individuals. The apparent ringleader, Masoud Rahimi, was said to be contracted by an anonymous individual claiming to seek revenge against the owner of the nondescript workshop. He offered $10,000 plus a bonus if Rahimi would set it ablaze, destroy property, and film the event.

Unbeknownst to the perpetrators, they were targeting one of the Iranian regime's undeclared nuclear sites. All nine members of the group were arrested later that same month, and the incident reached the very highest levels of government.

Jason Brodsky, policy director for the think tank United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), told i24NEWS that "This workshop does not appear in the ongoing outstanding safeguards inquiries with Iran that the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] has been pursuing, so this raises serious safeguards questions for the IAEA and the Islamic Republic.”

He added, “Since it was connected to AEOI [Atomic Energy Organization of Iran], it's likely that the workshop focused on centrifuge production or enrichment rather than weaponization, as weaponization activities were absorbed by the Organization for Defensive Innovation and Research, which is part of Iran’s Defense Ministry.”

Iran International reported that “According to judicial documents, the Islamic Republic considers the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, as the main perpetrator of this sabotage operation.”


Teen Who Stabbed Jewish Man in Zurich Was Radicalized Online, Swiss Police Reveal
The teenager who seriously wounded an Orthodox Jewish man in an antisemitic stabbing attack in Zurich earlier this month was radicalized on the internet while living in Tunisia, Swiss police announced on Monday.

The 50-year-old victim, who has not been named, was badly injured during the March 2 attack but survived his ordeal. The attack, described by Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG) as the most serious antisemitic hate crime in Switzerland in two decades, caused widespread shock and concern among the approximately 18,000 Jews in the country, resulting in enhanced security for Jewish sites in Zurich.

The 15-year-old assailant, who was arrested at the scene of the attack, had already been identified by police as having appeared in a video in which he expressed solidarity with the ISIS terrorist organization and called for a “battle against the Jews.”

Speaking on Monday, Mario Fehr, the head of the police department in the Zurich canton, revealed that the assailant was a Tunisian immigrant who was naturalized in 2011. Between 2017 and 2021, he lived in Tunisia, where, according to Fehr, he became a habituรฉ of Islamist chat rooms online. The teenager remains in pre-trial detention.

“There is a strong link with Tunisia,” Fehr commented.
London Jewish boy gets death threats after wearing IDF costume for Purim
A Jewish boy has been threatened with death and abused as a “Nazi” after a photo of him wearing an IDF uniform for Purim went viral on social media.

The image of the child with his face clearly visible was shared by accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers between them.

Some acounts called the child a “Nazi” and an “animal”; others threatened to attack him equated the IDF with Hamas.

One post read: "Looks like a terrorist. Kill him.”

The child, who looks no older than ten, was pictured walking along a clearly identifiable street in London’s Stamford Hill wearing green khakis bearing the Israeli flag, a red military hat and a plastic assault rifle.

The area is home to one of London’s biggest Orthodox communities.

Anonymous account War Monitor shared a photo of the boy to over 900,000 followers on Monday with the caption: “Jewish child walking around … in Stamford Hill, London, dressed as an ‘IDF’ member carrying an assault rifle. Disgusting and despicable behaviour as usual from these people”.

Dilly Hussain, an anti-Israel agitator and editor of Muslim blog 5 Pillars, tweeted the photo to over 100,000 followers.

Purim marks the survival of the Jews after the Persian king tried to murder them. People commemorate the festival with costumes of Queen Esther and Mordechai and more contemporary get-ups such as IDF uniforms.




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