Article about EoZ on Jewish News Service ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, April 02, 2024

Article about EoZ on Jewish News Service

I was interviewed by JNS a few weeks ago, ahead of my 20th Blogoversary coming up this August.

The reporter dug up some stuff about the site even I had forgotten. (I added links.)

The Washington think tank Jewish Policy Center has called him an “essential” read half a dozen times, and the watchdog CAMERA UK said he is “indefatigable” and “one of the best pro-Israel bloggers out there.”

“Elder of Ziyon” is the pen name of a man who works in high tech and, for the past 20 years, has authored some 40,000 posts on a reader-supported, pro-Israel blog that goes by the same pseudonym. The site has received between 30,000 and 50,000 daily views, “Elder” told JNS.

The anonymous poster’s first entry was dated Aug. 15, 2004, and it ran five words, linking to an article in the Israeli press. Since then, “Elder”—whose identity is unknown to JNS—has reported longer-form material, including an investigation that led McGraw-Hill Education to pull the publication of a textbook he accused of anti-Israel propaganda.

In 2022, “Elder” self-published Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism, which Gerald Steinberg, founder of NGO Monitor, called “the essential reference handbook” in “exposing the lies behind the modern embodiment of the infamous ‘Protocols.’”

....Among the blog’s greatest hits over the years are some cheeky items, including the backdoor nomination of “Elder” for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.

“Is it that difficult to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize? Not really. The Nobel committee has criteria for who can nominate others for the prize, and tens of thousands of people—parliamentarians and university professors in certain fields among them—are qualified,” he wrote on Oct. 3, 2018.

“A friend of mine, who happens to be one of those people, has officially nominated my blog persona, the Elder of Ziyon, for the Nobel Peace Prize of 2019,” he added.

The blog also offers an “intersectionality victimhood” calculator—an attempt to calculate “who is the perceived underdog, and therefore, the more righteous of each side in any conflict.”

The blog is also quite serious at times.

An “Elder gets results” section details some of the site’s impact, from an antisemitic article removed from an Arab news site to Israel and its flag added to U.S. online visa applications, and Washington boycotting the Durban IV conference to an amended National Geographic article that displayed anti-Israel bias.

Looking ahead, “Elder” would like to see human-rights nonprofits answer whether Gazan refugees who want to go to Egypt or Jordan ought to be allowed to do so.

“That’s the only question I want to know because they’re so pro-refugee,” he told JNS.

“Elder” noted that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International complained that Egypt created unnecessary impediments for refugees entering from Sudan. The organizations also supported Iraqi, Somali and Syrian refugees. “So why not Palestinians?” he asked.