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Monday, June 10, 2024

06/10 Links Pt2: UNSC approves US ceasefire res; The ICC’s Brazen Anti-Israel Bias; The racism of never blaming Hamas for anything; The BBC is an Orwellian, Kafkaesque nightmare

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: The racism of never blaming Hamas for anything
We really are living in an era of moral inversion. Every day there is a sinister twisting of the truth to suit the ideological prejudices of those who loathe Israel. Hamas hides the hostages it seized from the Nova music festival in a densely populated civilian area, and yet it’s Israel that is accused of being ‘perfidious’. Hamas purposely puts its Jewish victims among the women and children of a crowded refugee camp, and yet it’s Israel that is accused of wearing a ‘humanitarian camouflage’. Hamas was founded with the express intention of murdering Jews, an intention it gave brute force to on 7 October with its slaughter of a thousand Israelis, and yet it’s Israel that is damned as ‘genocidal’. The racist hostage-takers are reimagined as victims, the liberators of the hostages as criminals. It is one Kafkaesque lie after another.

Where is Hamas in all the political rage over what happened in Nuseirat? It has been invisibilised, scrubbed from the narrative so that the blame might be heaped on Israel alone. Hamas merits not one mention in Francesca Albanese’s angry doggerel. Does she not know that Hamas started the Battle of Nuseirat, by firing its lethal weaponry at the IDF from amid the civilian hordes? Or perhaps she doesn’t care? You have to go beyond the headlines about Israel ‘killing 274 Palestinians’ to discover that the IDF came ‘under heavy fire’ and ‘fought intense gun battles’ with Hamas militants. To describe an army’s response to the bullets and missiles of terrorists as ‘genocidal’ is an unconscionable manipulation of language for cynical political ends.

The truth is this: Hamas is responsible for every death in Nuseirat. It will be literally responsible for some of them, unless we are expected to believe that you can fire grenades and mortar rounds in an area teeming with civilians without one of the deadly loads going anywhere near an innocent. And it is morally responsible for all of it, for all the suffering we saw on Saturday amid the joy of the four Israelis being liberated from the confinement of the anti-Semites. For the simple reason that it is the author of this hellish war, the instigator of it. Hamas and Hamas alone brought war to Nuseirat.

What the Battle of Nuseirat really exposes is not Israel’s ‘genocidal intent’ but Hamas’s evil. That Hamas placed the four hostages in a crowded civilian area confirms its callous disregard for Palestinians as well as Israelis. That it started a bloody battle with the IDF even as women were shopping and children were playing confirms its terroristic indifference to the injury and loss of innocent life. That it prioritised trying to hurt the IDF and keep a hold of the hostages over and above keeping the civilians of Nuseirat safe from harm confirms how zealous, how unhinged, its anti-Israel, anti-Jewish doctrine has become. This is a movement that prizes killing a Jew more highly than saving a Palestinian. Its cruelty is unparalleled in the modern era.

And yet, all of this is whitewashed. Hamas’s ‘intent’ is rarely mentioned, its ruthlessness rarely commented on, its moral responsibility never even broached. Instead the anti-Israel set infantilises Hamas and holds up Israel as the only true, conscious actor in this conflict. There is bigotry here, even something like racism. There’s the racism of blaming the Jews for everything but also the racism of blaming Palestinians for nothing, as if they are children, not truly answerable for their wrongs.

But Hamas are not children. They are anti-Semitic warmongers. They started this war that has been a calamity for Israelis and Palestinians alike, and they refuse to end it by returning all the hostages. It will be a good day for the Jewish State, the Palestinian people and the world when this barbarous movement is brought to an end.
Sharansky Sees the Return of Marxism
Natan Sharansky interviewed by Ariel Whitman (Globes)

Natan Sharansky is a symbol of Jewish national pride. Sharansky, born in Donetsk, Ukraine, was the spokesman for the human rights movement, a prisoner of Zion, and a leader of the struggle for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. He served nine years in the Gulag.

Asked about Oct. 7, he said, "We were deeply invested in incorrect concepts. For me, it all started back with Oslo. I said then that the idea of our bringing a dictator [Arafat] to the Palestinians who would make peace with us - because we would make him a dictator by giving him a lot of money - did not make sense. It's just the reverse: the dictator would need us as enemies, and therefore would not make peace with us."

"The Jews feel they are part of the liberal world, and the liberal world thinks the progressives are their partners. For years, I wrote...that one day, the liberals would realize they were not partners."

"The whole post-modern ideology that divides the world into oppressed and oppressor is neo-Marxism in its most primitive form. In the studies of critical race theories - which have become the Koran of the progressives - if you replace race with class, you get the ideology of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union."

"There, too, the whole war is between one good side and one bad side, between the proletariat and the capitalists. The capitalists are always wrong and should not be given freedom of speech - aside from those who are considered politically correct. And the capitalist world should be destroyed completely, and a just world will be built on this. It is very sad that Marxism has come back after such a huge failure."
Col Kemp: Spain is now Europe’s most despicable nation
Spain’s hard-Left pile-on against Israel is a foretaste of dangerous things to come under a Labour government in Britain. Madrid is the latest capital to join South Africa’s obscene accusation of genocide at the International Court of Justice. This twisted charge comes straight out of the Soviet playbook which denounced the Jewish state for the same alleged crime in the 1970s. It is intended to taunt and vilify a country that was built to a large extent by survivors of an actual genocide, and is today fighting against a terrorist army whose very charter calls for the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of Israel.

Indeed, Hamas demands ‘the full and complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea’, meaning the replacement of the State of Israel by an Islamic state. These words, often heard from the mouth of Yahya Sinwar, the terrorist leader who planned and led Hamas’s slaughter on October 7, were precisely echoed the other day by Spain’s deputy prime minister Yolanda Dรญaz when she herself said ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’.

It is a sign of the depths to which Pedro Sanchez’s government has descended that one of his ministers should be repeating such slogans.

Here in Britain we can expect similar levels of depravity if Labour wins the election in July. The party manifesto is set to include recognising a Palestinian state, in the wake of Spain’s decision to do so along with other European governments. This has been hailed as vindication of its ‘resistance’. But what has Palestinian ‘resistance’ entailed so far? The murder, torture, rape and abduction of Israelis. Just yesterday, Israeli hostages were freed in a reminder of Hamas’ brutality and vindication of Israel’s continued operations in Gaza.

Labour recognition of a Palestinian state will achieve nothing whatsoever beyond mollifying anti-Israel voters and rewarding terrorism. It certainly won’t bring any progress towards the two-state solution Starmer says he wants, something that can only be brought about by agreement between Israel and Hamas.

But it will have immense costs. Contrary to any hope Starmer might have that appeasing Hamas in this way might lead to peace, it will in fact further embolden them to fight on, extending the bloodshed and reducing the prospects for any ceasefire negotiations, including the release of hostages. After all, why should Hamas make any concessions while the international community is piling the pressure on Israel to stop fighting?


UN Security Council approves US ceasefire resolution
The United Nations Security Council passed a United States-drafted resolution urging both Israel and Hamas to agree to and implement the ceasefire proposal announced by President Joe Biden late last month.

Fourteen members of the 15-member body voted in favor of the resolution on Monday, with one abstention from Russia. The vote represents the international community’s view that the war should come to an end.

The resolution states that Israel has “accepted” the deal and “calls upon” Hamas to do the same. It also “urges both parties to fully implement its terms without delay and without condition.”

“Today, this council sent a clear message to Hamas: Accept the ceasefire deal on the table. Israel has already agreed to this deal, and the fighting could stop today if Hamas would do the same. I repeat, the fighting could stop today,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

A statement from Hamas in the aftermath of the vote said: “Hamas emphasizes its readiness to cooperate with the mediators to engage in indirect negotiations on implementing these principles that are consistent with the demands of our people and resistance. We in the Hamas Movement also stress continuation of our endeavor and struggle with all our people to achieve their national rights, foremost of which is defeating the occupation and establishing their independent and fully sovereign Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, along with the right of return and self-determination.”

Israel came up with the proposal that Biden announced on May 31, and U.S. officials have repeatedly said since then that the onus is on Hamas to agree to this deal to halt the war.

The first phase of the ceasefire would last for about six weeks and would include the return of women, children, and other vulnerable hostages Hamas is holding; the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel; the withdrawal of Israeli troops from populated areas of Gaza; and the surging of humanitarian aid into the strip. The second phase would include the release of all remaining living hostages as well as the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza altogether.

Israel has been unwilling to agree to any ceasefire proposal that would keep Hamas intact and in power in Gaza, while Hamas has demanded that any deal include a complete and total end of the war. It remains unclear exactly how the proposal Biden recently outlined publicly would solve those competing stances.
Israel’s full offer said to include ‘permanent’ truce before all hostages return
Israel’s proposed hostage and ceasefire deal with Hamas includes a commitment to end the war in Gaza even before all hostages are released, according to a news report on Monday, which said it had obtained the document.

Channel 12 published extensive details of what it said was Israel’s May 27 proposal, without citing sources or saying how it obtained it.

Contrary to what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted, the reported four-page document apparently does not include the elimination of Hamas as a governing force in Gaza, and does include an Israeli commitment to end the war even before all the hostages are released.

Immediately following the broadcast, Netanyahu’s office called it misleading and said the claim Israel had agreed to end the war before achieving its goals was “a total lie.”

Israel’s proposal was announced at the end of May by US President Joe Biden, who said Jerusalem had proposed a three-phase deal for a ceasefire in Gaza in exchange for Hamas releasing hostages. Biden told the terror group to accept it and urged the Israeli government to stand behind it.

Both the Biden announcement and Monday’s report said Israel had agreed to end hostilities, a key Hamas demand. Even so, Netanyahu has continued to deny this.

The report said the document, titled “General Principles for an agreement between the Israeli side and the Palestinian side in Gaza on the exchange of hostages and prisoners and restoring a sustainable calm,” includes 18 clauses and three phases and provides the most detailed idea to date of the contents of Israel’s proposals, which Hamas has yet to formally respond to.

In the first phase, according to the reported document, Hamas would free all the women — including soldiers, in addition to men over the age of 50 and ill and wounded civilians — 33 hostages in total. In return, Israel would release 30 Palestinian security prisoners per hostage, or 50 per female soldier, with the inmates belonging to the same group (women, children, elderly, etc.) as the hostages they were being exchanged for.

Notably, the release of Palestinian inmates, including terror convicts, would be “subject to lists to be provided by Hamas based on precedence of their imprisonment.”

Out of the 50 Palestinian prisoners freed for each of the five female soldiers believed to be held alive in the Strip, 30 would be inmates serving life sentences, and 20 would be serving other sentences “limited up to 15 years remaining time in prison,” the document said.
Talisman of Great Expurgation
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says Hamas has been so degraded that it won't be able to repeat the October massacre against Israel.

Maybe.

The Biden plan is part of a pattern of the US behaving as a terzo incomodo [third wheel] in vaudeville, a bothersome third party crashing into a twosome quarrel to prevent a clear outcome and foment confusion to its own advantage.

The US, often with support from the usual suspects including the United Nations and European "allies" did just that in all wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors, thus preventing war from doing its work, which is establishing a victor and a vanquished. The cold peace between Egypt and Israel was made possible when Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin realized that it was unwise to cherish their antagonism more than the object of their hostility.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Rostam-Ali Rafi'i says Biden "sent us a written message" saying Iran is right to attack Israel in revenge, but "should keep the revenge limited."

Tehran is heating up the Lebanese front, thus helping Netanyahu claim that having "degraded" Hamas he should focus on the threat from Hezbollah.

As always by keeping the knife in the wound in the name of peace, the ultimate losers of this latest peace plan will be the Israelis and their Palestinian adversaries-cum-co-sufferers.
Dangerous times: Biden makes allowances for Iran while scolding Israel
THIS EXPLAINS the weak American responses to attacks upon its assets in the Arabian Gulf by Iranian proxies, carefully avoiding killing any Iranians themselves. It also explains Washington’s insistence that Israel not respond significantly to the massive April 14 Iranian missile attacks – an event that should have led to game-changing military action against the Islamic Republic on multiple fronts. But Washington publicly reassured Tehran that it would not take part in any offensive actions against Iran – and made sure that Israel could not do much either.

And then there is Gaza and Lebanon, where Biden has undermined Israel’s attempts to achieve crushing victories in the multi-front pincer war being waged against it by Iranian proxies. This includes withholding weaponry and ammunition; attempting to micro-manage IDF operations neighborhood-by-neighborhood and/or preventing them; forcing Israel into paralyzing, never-ending, and unlikely to succeed hostage negotiations; and insanely insisting that the supply of humanitarian aid to Gazans be Israel’s “priority.”

This is persistent strategic blindness. By concentrating energies on punishing Israel for daring to defend itself against extermination; by failing to give Israel the weapons and diplomatic cover it needs to achieve decisive victories; by refusing to acknowledge Iran’s hegemonic “ring of fire” strategy; by failing to confront the Houthis as they close international shipping routes through the Red Sea (and Suez Canal); and by failing to truly check Iran’s nuclear bomb program, which is moving towards all-out nuclear attack on Israel within a decade – the Biden administration is wreaking disaster on Israel and the West.

WHAT IS particularly sad is that there are ways of halting Iran’s march towards a nuclear bomb and regional hegemony.

A real Biden administration road map for countering Iran would include snapback sanctions on Tehran with tight supervision (especially of Iranian oil exports and dual-use technologies); terrorist designation of the IRGC across Europe; suspension of Iranian membership in international forums; sanctions and economic pressure on individuals and organizations involved in repressing human rights; penalties on key Iranian industries; covert disruptive measures against Iran’s nuclear program – and, most saliently: articulation and demonstration of a credible military threat against the Iranian regime.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington has outlined more than 200 specific measures in the military, cyber, financial, energy, legal, and diplomatic spheres that US government agencies can take in “deploying multiple elements of national power” to confront threats from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Taken together, these measures would enhance American deterrence; reassure America’s true Mideast allies; pointedly punish Iran for terrorism; help Israel win its ground wars in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and Lebanon; and perhaps prevent an Iranian nuclear breakout.

Alas, President Biden prefers to make allowances for Iran while reprimanding Israel; to spare the ayatollahs but scold Netanyahu; and to let the Iranian bomb program advance but not the IDF. Dangerous times indeed.
What’s going to happen in Israeli politics now Gantz has quit the coalition
It wasn't a question of if but a question of when. Already in the first week of the war, people close to the National Unity Party of Benny Gantz briefed me: "We know that Netanyahu will lie to us, we know he will try and take credit for the good things, and blame us for the bad stuff, but we still believe this is the right thing to do – and join Netanyahu's right-wing coalition in an act of unity".

What's surprising, though, is the fact that Gantz is leaving the government when there seems to be no hostage deal in sight – and major decision regarding the "day after" scenario in Gaza will have to be made and the crucial question of rather Israel should go to an all-out war in Lebanon seems to be reaching the point when a decision will have to be made.

Also, the negotiations for a hostage deal, which caused endless debates between Gantz and Netanyahu has reached the point that the new outline-proposal sent to Hamas has been agreed upon by all sides of the war cabinet, and is seen by all of then as the last, and maximum, proposal, which Israel can offer Hamas. So, why now?

It's all about the trust. Not that Gantz and Netanyahu were the two most trusted friends in the world, especially when you look at their unity government during the Covid-19 crises, but Gantz decided to give Netanyahu a second chance because of the war.

Now, after eight months, it seems Gantz got to the point that he cannot work with Netanyahu and feels, and he is quite right about it, that he isn't a real part of the decision making process.

"It also feels like Smotrich and Ben Gvir have a representative in the government – Netanyahu", told me a close aid of Gantz. The big question now is what is what will happen to Gantz politically – and more important: How will Gantz leaving the coalition effect prime minister Netanyahu coalition?

Gantz has been steadily slipping in the polls – from 40 MKs projection in the beginning of the war, to less then 30 now, sometimes even getting close to Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud party. He probably cannot go up, at least in the coming weeks, but can he go down? Meaning – will voters who gave him their voice because he joined the coalition will leave him and vote for other parties now that the act of unity is over.
Former US Ambassador to Israel authors response to two-state proposal
“It’s the response to the post-October 7 argument that the two-state solution is still viable,” said David Friedman, describing his forthcoming book, “One Jewish State.” Friedman was interviewed by Jerusalem Post Editor-in-chief Zvika Klein at the Jerusalem Post Conference on Monday, where he discussed the book and his strategy for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“If you want a good outcome for Israel’s security, if you want a good outcome for the Palestinian people, for their human dignity and their health and welfare, it’s Israeli sovereignty over the entirety of Judea and Samaria,” he said. “It’s a big expansion of the Abraham Accords to get funding to help create the kind of infrastructure, and it’s the creation within the communities of Judea and Samaria that are not Jewish of a paradigm very similar to Puerto Rico, where the people will have local autonomy, will not vote in national elections, but will have certainly a much better quality of life than they have now.” The three alternatives for the Middle East

Friedman said that there are three alternatives regarding territory in the Middle East. “You can negotiate peace. You can take it [the land], or you can leave it.” He said that negotiating peace has been tried for 50 years and has not worked. Leaving Judea and Samaria would not be a viable solution, Friedman added, because whenever Israel leaves territory, it leaves a vacuum that is filled by terrorists. “You’re left with one alternative, which happens to be the convergence of geopolitics, economics, security, and faith.”

Discussing the upcoming US presidential election, Friedman said that American Jews concerned about antisemitism want two things – the defunding of universities that tolerate antisemitic behavior, and enforcement of the law against those who attack Jews. “I’ll leave it to everybody here who they think is a more likely candidate to bring the defunding of universities and the refunding of the police, whether it’s Trump or Biden.”

Following the interview, Friedman remained on stage and introduced the next speaker, Mike Pence, who served as Vice-President of the United States from 2017 to 2021 under President Donald Trump.
Alan Dershowitz: Palestinianism Began with Nazism And Today Is Based on Antisemitism, Sexism, Homophobia and Denial of Human Rights. So Why Is the Left So in Love with It?
It was [Hitler's friend, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-] Husseini who turned the Arab-Jewish dispute from a resolvable conflict over land to an irresolvable conflict over religion.

Were a Hamas-run state to replace Israel "from the river to the sea", it would be a theocratic regime closer to that of Iran than to the autocracies of Jordan or Egypt. Jews and Christians would not be allowed to live as equal citizens in such a state. Indeed, in areas currently controlled by Hamas, Christians and other non-Muslim minorities have been ethnically cleansed.

Hamas is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Iranian mullahs....

The real focus of these demonstrations is not on the alleged victims, but rather on the alleged perpetrators. The perpetrators are actually more anti-Israel than pro-Palestinian... It has always been more about identifying with the alleged perpetrators -- Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara -- than with the alleged victims.

It is Hamas, not Israel, that is responsible for much, if not all, of the victimization of Palestinian civilians.

The disproportionate focus on the Palestinians and Israel can be explained only by bigoted hatred of the nation state of the Jewish people and its alliance with the US, and the wish to see them brought down.
The Ideology of Hamas | John Spencer
This is a clip from tomorrow's podcast episode with John Spencer. In it, he and Dr. Peterson discuss the mentality of both the terrorist organization Hamas and the population under their governance.


Eugene Kontorovich: The ICC’s Brazen Anti-Israel Bias
The House passed a bill last week to impose sanctions against officials of the International Criminal Court if it issues arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. The move came after ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan applied for warrants in late May based on war-crimes allegations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The bipartisan outrage is justified. By targeting a country with a well-functioning legal system that is taking unprecedented humanitarian precautions in an urban war, the ICC is making it more difficult for Western democracies to defend themselves against lawless terror groups. Further, Israel, like the U.S., hasn’t accepted ICC jurisdiction.

The rot within The Hague runs deep. The prosecutor’s decision to issue warrants was based in part on the advice of several consultants he had handpicked. Many of them already had a longstanding bias against the Jewish state; they’ve been publicly condemning Israel and declaring it guilty of war crimes for years. By picking experts who had taken clear positions on the questions they were being asked to consider, Mr. Khan further undermined the credibility and neutrality of any prosecution.

A particularly egregious example is University of Copenhagen professor Kevin Jon Heller, a special adviser to the prosecutor whom Mr. Khan singled out for thanks when announcing the charges. Mr. Heller’s strong views on Israel are evident in his social-media and blog posts. In 2015 he wrote in an article: “I wholeheartedly support BDS”—the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement—“in its economic and cultural forms.” He elaborated in a comment, describing Israel as “committed to systematically depriving the innocent of their most basic rights.”

Mr. Heller wrote in 2016: “Israel is truly the Donald Trump of repressive states—unable to tolerate any criticism that doesn’t stay within the bounds of what it considers ‘legitimate.’ ” In 2020, when he shared a link to a news story about Messrs. Trump and Netanyahu’s Middle East peace plan, he tweeted: “Two criminals conspiring to commit criminal acts against #Palestine and #Palestinians.” Mr. Heller has also given the presumption of credibility to groups that are consistently critical of Israel while dismissing more pro-Israel nongovernmental organizations for spreading “fake law and propaganda.”

Mr. Khan took the unusual step of convening a “panel of experts” in January “to support the evidence review and legal analysis” related to the Gaza case. He announced his pursuit of arrest warrants after the panelists’ unanimous recommendation to do so.
Questioning the motives behind the ICC arrest warrant applications
This leads us to the next point. The ICC was founded on the principle of complementarity. Its jurisdiction to prosecute is secondary to the jurisdiction of domestic judicial systems. But, as Khan made clear in his announcement, this “requires a deferral to national authorities only when they engage in independent and impartial judicial processes that do not shield suspects and are not a sham. It requires thorough investigations at all levels addressing the policies and actions underlying these applications.”

Since Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute and has not voluntarily accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC, the prosecutor had to circumvent this inconvenience, which it did by simply recognizing Palestine as a state for the purposes of the Rome Statute and exercising its jurisdiction over Israeli leaders because the alleged crimes took place on Palestinian territory.

It is, in effect, a checkmate. At the same time as it is waging a war against Hamas, Israel’s government and courts are expected to collectively work together to initiate an investigation into Netanyahu and Gallant for the war crimes and crimes against humanity of which they have been accused. Refusal will be interpreted as an attempt to shield the alleged perpetrators from criminal responsibility and pave the way for the ICC to take over.

Had the arrest warrant applications been issued a few years down the line, after the war had long ended, an Israeli court may very well have decided to initiate an investigation into the allegations. But to expect it to do so while over 200 of its people continue to be held hostage by Hamas and while it is engaged in an active war against an organized terrorist group is unrealistic, and Khan must have known that his timing would tie the hands of Israeli authorities behind their backs. That is why it feels sinister.

Moreover, shielding a suspect from criminal responsibility is one thing, and deciding that there is insufficient incriminating evidence to prosecute is quite another. The ICC itself has closed investigations due to a lack of evidence.

Nothing in the ICC rules require a domestic court to issue a conviction to prevent the ICC from exercising its jurisdiction (indeed, this would undermine the presumption of innocence) – the rules require only a genuine willingness and ability to carry out an investigation or prosecution.

Indeed, even a few years down the line it would be hard to see how an Israeli court, operating independently and in accordance with the rule of law, could find a basis to prosecute Netanyahu and Gallant for deliberate starvation and other war crimes and crimes against humanity, considering the lack of reliability and credibility of the Hamas-issued facts and figures, and the substantial amount of evidence to the contrary.

That evidence includes the United Nations’ own figures, which suggest that not only has Israel facilitated the entry of sufficient food and water to sustain the entire Gazan population throughout the war, but that Gazans have been receiving nearly three times the amount of food they need. Recent official studies have confirmed these reports, finding that the amount of food delivered to Gaza in the first four months of this year constituted on average 40% more calories than the minimum daily amount required in a crisis.

Yet, remarkably, when confronted with this information in his Sunday Times interview, Khan dismissed it entirely, asking readers instead to “look at what the major relief agencies are saying…look at the images of emaciated children”. Images may tell a thousand words, but there are some crucial words they do not tell. And these are the words ascribing liability to the responsible parties. Again, the lack of reference to Hamas is staggering.

Khan's team
Another point bears mentioning. Khan went to great lengths to assemble a team of highly respected international lawyers, who were to review the available evidence and give their stamp of approval to the arrest warrant applications. Despite emphasizing their independence, Khan was quick to highlight in his interview that one of these esteemed lawyers was Professor Theodor Meron, an “Israeli Jew who was an adviser to Israel and a Holocaust survivor – are they going to call him antisemitic?”

If anybody wanted to believe Khan’s experts were chosen for their expertise rather than for who they are, he confidently and swiftly shut that down with this statement. Setting aside that it is a glaring example of tokenism – the practice of symbolically including a representative of a minority group to give the appearance of inclusivity or lack of bias – which is in itself racist, it naturally makes one question the reasons Khan may have had for choosing the other experts in his team. That two of them have made public statements in the last year accusing Israel of committing war crimes and equating the IDF with Hamas, in stating that both of them have been engaged in “terrible conduct” may or may not have been a relevant factor in that choice.

The arrest warrant applications are not public, nor is the evidence that Khan and his team have relied on, and the ICC Judges must still decide whether to actually issue any of the arrest warrants. But should they decide to do so, the ICC and its prosecutor will need, in due course, to explain why they chose to disregard both the publicly available evidence of Hamas’s continued responsibility for war crimes against both Israeli and Palestinian civilians throughout this war, and the evidence which appears to contradict the allegations raised against Israel’s leaders directly. The explanation could not come soon enough.
PMW: PA goal in ICJ: “Tighten the noose” around Israel “and end it”
According to the PA, its request to join South Africa in the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice is not to get Israel to cease operations in Rafah or even to stop so-called genocide against Palestinians. Rather, the objective of the case is to “tighten the noose” around the entirety of “colonialist” Israel and to “end it.” This essentially includes a bid to put all of Israel on trial—its “governmental policy and institutions, legal system, governance system, and military system,” says PA Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Omar Awadallah.

To be clear, when the PA deputy foreign affairs minister refers to “this colonialist system,” he is referring to the State of Israel itself. Awadallah is doing so just as PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas did at the UN when he defined Israel as “another entity in our historical homeland” established and planted by Britain and the United States “for their own colonialist purposes” [Archive News, YouTube channel, May 15, 2023]. He is also reiterating the way PA Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh described Israel as “a colonialist entity that occupied our land and expelled our people” [Official PA TV, Oct. 23, 2023].

The following is the text of the interview on official PA TV:
Official PA TV host: “The State of Palestine asked to join South Africa in its lawsuit against Israel before the [UN] International Court of Justice.”

PA Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Omar Awadallah: “There are attempts by some of the states to show that in Israel – the authority that is actually managing the occupation – there are a few extremists who are committing a number of crimes against the Palestinian people, and we say to them ‘no.’ The International Court of Justice is putting on trial the governmental policy and institutions, legal system, governance system, and military system in Israel, in the sense that all of Israel is accused of committing this crime, along with our process at the International Criminal Court (ICC) that is putting the individuals on trial (see note below -Ed.)… As we have always said, this is part of the legal process that the Palestinian [PA] leadership is implementing to tighten the noose on this colonialist system to dismantle it and end it.”

[Official PA TV, June 3, 2024]
Ruthie Blum: Citing ‘anonymous officials’ for political purposes
The citing of anonymous sources is par for the course in today’s world of click-bait journalism. But since Oct. 7, the practice has completely replaced professional coverage.

There are a few reasons for this. One is to keep up with the pace of social media.

Since individuals are able to post fact, fiction and everything in between on various platforms, formal outlets—already competing against one another—scramble to publish items often posing as “breaking news” without checking their veracity.

A second involves access to people in power. A publication that allows politicians to provide “scoops”—or, more commonly, trial balloons—becomes a go-to address for such maneuvers.

A third is political. A paper interested in promoting a particular agenda might disguise opinion as news by putting it in the mouth of an “official.” And due to the proliferation of such quotes, it’s difficult to discern where they’re lurking.

A report on Monday by NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell is a case in point. According to Mitchell, a “senior [U.S.] administration official” told her that the rescue of four hostages over the weekend “will likely complicate Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s efforts to broker a new cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas that would secure the release of the remaining captives in Gaza.”

Going on to paraphrase the mystery person in question, she explains on his behalf that the “freeing of the hostages has strengthened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to continue pursuing military operations, rather than agreeing to a cease-fire,” and that “Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar, who has held out despite intense pressure for a deal from Qatar and Egypt, could take an even harder line because of the high number of civilian Palestinian casualties from the Israeli rescue operation.”

Furthermore, the “official” added, as per Mitchell, “while the release of the four Israeli hostages is welcome news, it is not going to change the status quo because there is still a significant number of hostages remaining, including five Americans believed to be alive.”

This type of ventriloquism is inexcusable. If the puppeteer is an actual authority figure presenting a genuine position, why not identify him? And if he’s not willing to own his claims, why treat them as reliable?
As long as the Western media spins for Hamas, more innocent lives will be lost
Shabbat was an emotional rollercoaster. We had the dream-like rescue of the four hostages, including Noa Argamani, who had become so familiar it felt like we knew her personally. Then, in short order, we had videos of celebrations on Tel Aviv beach; clips of elated parents rushing to be reunited with their children amid crowds of singing neighbours; footage of the meetings themselves, enough to make the hardest heart weep; details of the courage and skill of the IDF special forces who carried out the rescue; then the heartbreaking news that one of the commanders had lost his life in the fighting.

As surely as night follows day, alongside this came the media narrative. As usual, Hamas released implausible numbers of civilian casualties with implausible speed, an implausible number of whom were apparently “women and children”. In recent months, acres of newsprint have made clear that the terror group’s statistics are not to be trusted. Yet the media trusted them anyway, at best burying a get-out-of-jail disclaimer about the “Hamas controlled health ministry” deep in their stories. Some outlets even mischaracterised the rescue as a “release”, as if the terrorists had welcomed the IDF with knafeh and mint tea.

It is true that the operation claimed the lives of innocent civilians, every one of which was a tragedy. But in its appetite for the narrative of Israeli blood lust, the media succumbed to collective amnesia. What about the fact that Hamas started the firefight in the heart of a residential area? What about the realities of being an infantryman under fire in an urban environment in the chaos and terror of war? What about the much higher numbers of civilians commonly killed by British and American troops in combat? What about the way in which Hamas refused to distinguish between dead combatants and civilians? What about the fact that Hamas was holding the Israelis in a busy part of town to use their own people as human shields? What about the basic truth that Hamas could have avoided all this by not taking the hostages in the first place? All this was swept away in a torrent of Israelophobia.

Before long, the heroic rescue had been fashioned into another Israeli atrocity. A BBC presenter asked former Israeli spokesman Jonathan Conricus why the Israelis had not warned the enemy that the IDF was about to carry out the raid. Because Hamas would kill the hostages and this would “defeat the purpose”, he drily replied. Then came the BBC News alert that has since become notorious: “Blood stained the walls – Palestinians describe horror as Israeli forces freed four hostages in Gaza.” The horror of freeing Noa Argamani!

The disgrace of all this is that Hamas has never hidden its evil – in fact, it has revelled in it, videoed it and beamed it out to the world – and makes no secret of its strategy. The terror group has designed Gaza to create as many civilian casualties as possible in any Israeli attack. The entire population of the Strip could easily fit into the network of terror tunnels, as Londoners took refuge from the bombs in the Underground during the Blitz. But Hamas does not let them in. It has not built a single bomb shelter. Its strategy is not one of human shields so much as human sacrifice.

It is time to recognise that Hamas places its own people in harm’s way simply because it understands how the international media will respond, not to mention the United Nations, NGOs and the world’s progressives.
Julie Burchill: The BBC is an Orwellian, Kafkaesque nightmare
I’m keen on the radio. When I used to stay over at other people’s places, my first thought on finding that there wasn’t a radio in my room was: ‘Why do you hate me?’ These days I tend to stick to Radio 4 Extra. I don’t think I could stand yet another attempt by the regular Radio 4 to shoehorn critical race theory into Bells on Sunday.

Radio 4 long ago became a captured institution, up there with the NHS and the Church of England. It employs only those who toe the party line on everything from breakfast to Brexit, climate change to cross-dressing. This is surely responsible for the astonishing loss of audience over the past few years – down 1.2million in the year up to May 2023, and fading by the day.

This being the case, I can’t say I’m on tenterhooks to hear the much-trailed Radio 4 series, Orwell vs Kafka, the first episode of which airs on Saturday. It’s presented by Ian Hislop and Helen Lewis, buddies from that BBC TV smarm-fest, Have I Got News for You. The aim is to discover why the words Orwellian and Kafkaesque are still so resonant today – and to find echoes of these horrifying dystopias in the real world. The pair are of one mind, I’d wager, on all the issues Radio 4 needs its boxes ticking on, so it sounds like a dreary set-up right from the start.

I guess they won’t be examining the Orwellian and Kafkaesque qualities of the BBC itself. At first glance, I would say the former is more in evidence. There’s the regular Two Minutes Hate sessions on the BBC’s politics shows for those loathed ‘populist’ leaders. There’s BBC News’ amping up of hatred towards Israel – Emmanuel Goldstein to Britain’s Oceania – seen most grotesquely in its over-heated reports from Gaza. Perhaps most egregious was its live reporting of the bombing of a hospital in Gaza City in October. The BBC blamed it on Israel but in actuality, it was caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket ‘misfire’. The deputy chief executive of BBC News, Jonathan Munro, subsequently admitted that the BBC reporter’s ‘language wasn’t quite right… The correspondent was wrong to speculate about the cause of the explosion of the hospital.’

It’s not just Israel; it’s also British Jews who the BBC seems to have antagonised. In 2022, Ofcom stated that it had committed ‘significant editorial failings’ in its reporting of an anti-Semitic attack on Jewish youngsters celebrating Hanukkah, effectively turning them from victims into bigots. After a bus they were travelling on was attacked in London in 2021, the BBC reported that ‘an anti-Muslim slur’ had been heard from inside the bus. But the words heard were actually a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘Call someone, it’s urgent’.

As with many people who don’t care for Jews, the BBC also likes to fawn over Islam – a clear example of Orwellian doublethink when one considers how dismissive it is of Christianity.
Museums are the latest battleground in the anti-Israel crusade
Museums are fast becoming the latest battleground in the campaign to turn Americans against Israel. Hamas supporters recently occupied parts of the Brooklyn Museum, defaced a sculpture, damaged artwork, and harassed staff members. In the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art, protesters unfurled “From the River to the Sea” banners. Extremists tried to disrupt the annual gala of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by hurling smoke bombs and flares at the museum’s entrance.

Perhaps the most ominous development has been the growing ability of Hamas backers to actually shut down museums. In February, they forced a month-long closure of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, and brought about the resignation of its chief executive by inundating her with what she described as “vitriolic and antisemitic” hate mail.

The anti-Israel forces are also crowing about the month-long shutdown of the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle. The closure was engineered by pro-Hamas staff members of the museum, who walked out in protest over some of the wording in an exhibit concerning an anti-racism campaign by American Jews in the 1940s and 1950s.

It happens that my latest book is a history of that anti-racism initiative. Cartoonists Against Racism: The Secret Jewish War on Bigotry (coauthored with comics historian Craig Yoe) chronicles the story of how the American Jewish Committee enlisted cartoonists and comic book artists in the battle against antisemitism and other forms of racism during and after World War II.

The Committee allocated an initial budget of $400,000 to the campaign. That soon expanded to an average of $3 million annually over a period of two decades – the equivalent of more than $63 million in 2024 dollars.

Their strategy was to discredit all forms of bigotry, through the dramatic medium of cartoon illustration. They flooded schools and union halls with anti-racist posters, arranged for newspapers to publish political cartoons mocking prejudice, and convinced some comic book publishers to run stories with anti-bigotry themes. An issue of True Comics, which had a circulation of 500,000 monthly, featured a memorable anti-scapegoating story called “They Got the Blame.”
Howard Jacobson: The anti-Baillie Gifford mob wants to police art. Writers must not give in
In Britain, activists and celebrities have turned their ire on summer literary festivals, succeeding in getting some of them to drop the sponsorship of the investment company Baillie Gifford. Howard Jacobson comments:

Ask what Baillie Gifford has done apart from cough up money from which all writers benefit and you enter the political equivalent of “I know this guy who knows this guy who knows this guy who knows this guy . . .” It has “links,” in other words, and a link when you are playing holier-than-thou can be as tenuous as you like providing a bit of it dislodges in Israel. Oil, too, but the oil argument against Baillie Gifford has been a long time brewing. It’s the link that ends up in Israel that wins the game for whoever finds it.

The extent of the blackmail exerted on festivals, and on writers wondering whether or not to capitulate to it themselves, is hard to gauge. . . . Few, at either end of the bullying—and there can be no denying the bullying—want to say anything that will end in their being yoked into an unflattering conflation with, say, genocidal Zionists. It’s tough enough in these censorious times to write a book, get it past the sensitivity police, find someone to publish it, and then go out into the world to talk about it, without having to submit your solidarity credentials too.

Art eludes the mind of an activist. The best art doesn’t have an agenda, the activist has nothing else. Art finds the language it needs in the course of expressing itself. It is exploratory, self-contradictory, provisional. The minute art makes up its mind, it’s no longer art.
The hypocritical boycott of book festivals over Palestine | SpectatorTV
When the country’s largest literary festival parts ways with its main sponsor, it is not usually a cause for rejoicing among writers, performers, and the sorts of people who like to go to literary festivals. It is usually a disaster for the festival. Yet when on Friday the Hay Festival sacked the investment fund Baillie Gifford as its main sponsor, it was felt that a mighty blow had been struck against injustice. A number of other literary festivals around the UK have since followed suit. What's going on? And what do the protestors want?

The Spectator's books editor Sam Leith speaks to Alex Massie.


USC Jewish center vandalized, glass door smashed: video
A Jewish center at the University of Southern California was vandalized late Tuesday by two individuals who allegedly kicked its glass door and then ran away, according to a security video.

The USC Chabad Jewish Student Center posted a security video and photos of the vandalism on Instagram, showing broken glass and scratch marks on the front door of the building.

The video, which is timestamped 10:10 p.m. Tuesday, shows two individuals approach the building and kick the door before quickly running away.

“Two thugs just smashed the glass on our front door and ran off. Hoping @uscedu DPS can track them,” Chabad USC wrote on Instagram.

“Our world keeps getting crazier! Thank G-d none of the kids were near the door and we are all safe. Have to figure out something to secure the front door until we can get this fixed,” it wrote.
US consulate in Sydney marked with pro-Hamas graffiti
The American consulate in Sydney, Australia was vandalized overnight Sunday, with nine windows being broken and pro-Hamas graffiti being sprayed on the door.

Two inverted red triangles were painted over the coat of arms on the consulate’s entrance by a person carrying a small sledgehammer, according to New South Wales police.

Hamas uses the symbol in video and pictures to mark targets for attack.

“I would just say that people should have respectful political debate and discourse,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a televised media conference from the capital Canberra.

“Measures such as painting the U.S. consulate do nothing to advance the cause of those who have committed what is of course a crime, to damage property,” he added.

The same building was vandalized in April, while the American mission in Melbourne was graffitied by pro-Hamas demonstrators in May.


White House Protesters Vandalized Property and Clashed With Law Enforcement, But Police Say No Arrests Were Made
No arrests were made on Saturday when pro-Hamas protesters surrounded the White House and scuffled with police as they advocated for Israel’s destruction, vandalized property, and called on Hamas to continue murdering Jews, the Secret Service and Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon.

Thousands of protesters from across the country descended upon downtown D.C. to pressure the Biden administration into forcing a ceasefire on Israel following its weekend military operation in the Gaza Strip that freed four hostages. Slogans such as "Israel go to hell, Hamas is justified" and "Death to Amerikkka" were graffitied on city property, and protesters blocked traffic as they held signs reading, "F— Israel. Stand with Hamas." Other chants included, "Kill another Zionist now" and "Death to Israel."

Many of the protesters wore masks and keffiyehs to cover their faces, in apparent violation of a D.C. law that prohibits demonstrations "while wearing any mask, hood, or device whereby any portion of the face is hidden, concealed, or covered as to conceal the identity of the wearer."

No arrests were made during the day, even as protesters vandalized property and clashed with police, according to law enforcement officials.

"The U.S. Secret Service made no arrests associated with the demonstration that took place near the White House complex June 8," an agency spokesman told the Free Beacon on Sunday.

A D.C. police spokesman also confirmed that it "made no protest related arrests yesterday," while a U.S. Park Police spokesman said the agency "did not make arrests during demonstration activity yesterday."


20 Barclays branches across the UK vandalised in coordinated effort by anti-Israel activists
Three Barclays branches in London have been defaced with red paint and their windows smashed as part of a coordinated effort by pro-Palestinian protesters.

Branches in St John’s Wood, Croydon, and Moorgate were all damaged as part of a wider targeting campaign that saw 20 Barclays locations across the country vandalised on Monday.

The protest groups Palestine Action and Shut the System took responsibility for the synchronised stunt, declaring the bank had been targeted over its “investment in genocide”.

The collaboration of the two groups to demand “divestment from Israel’s weapons trade and fossil fuels” has left the bank “shattered”, they claimed.

Activists also hurled rocks with the names of “Palestinian martyrs” at the British bank’s Wealth and Investment Management office in Edinburgh.

PA wrote on X/Twitter, “When will the bank stop funding genocide and respect Palestinian lives, homes, schools, hospitals, universities and land?”


UC Irvine students say politics behind removal of beloved faculty rabbi
For the past three years, it’s been tough to get a spot in Rabbi Daniel Levine’s course in major Jewish texts at the University of California, Irvine, which is a requirement for the Judaic studies minor at the public university.

“It was the most interactive class I’ve ever taken at UCI,” Nova Sari, a third-year student studying history with minors in computer science and Jewish studies, told JNS. “It was the highlight of my week.”

By all accounts, Levine received stellar evaluations from students and the course was “well-balanced,” they and the professor told JNS.

“I’ve had all sorts of people take my class, even Palestinians,” Levine told JNS. “The goal is for everyone to be comfortable, and a little bit uncomfortable. Regardless, there will be something that will challenge you in some way.”

It was news to the rabbi, who also serves as campus rabbi and senior Jewish educator at the Hillel Foundation of Orange County, and to students when UC Irvine opted not to renew his contract, instead bringing in two outside hires.

Sari told JNS that students were shocked. “I honestly didn’t believe something like this could have happened, especially at UCI,” she said. “I didn’t think they’d go as low as this.”

Levine, however, told JNS that the news wasn’t that shocking to him.

“Jewish studies departments across the country, over the last generation, have been moving much more towards an anti-Israel activist lens, as opposed to a nuanced academic session,” he said.
Foxx threatens to subpoena Northwestern, accuses Schill of false testimony
In a scathing new letter to the leadership of Northwestern University on Friday, House Education and Workforce Committee chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC) threatened to subpoena the school. Foxx also accused President Michael Schill of providing false testimony in a committee hearing last month.

Foxx’s letter alleges that, “rather than being cooperative and transparent, Northwestern has obstructed the Committee’s investigation of” antisemitism and Schill “refused to answer questions,” “made statements at odds with the public record” and “demonstrated an overall attitude of contempt” for the committee.

The letter accuses Northwestern of failing to comply with a previous request for documents on the school’s handling of antisemitism and anti-Israel demonstrations. Foxx said in the letter that she’s prepared to subpoena the school for documents and testimony, and that the committee will hold the school’s full Board of Trustees responsible for following her requests.

“Northwestern’s capitulation to its antisemitic encampment and its impeding of the Committee’s oversight are unbecoming of a leading university,” Foxx said. “It is inappropriate to expect taxpayers to continue providing federal funding while Northwestern appears to be in violation of its obligations to its Jewish students, faculty, and staff under Title VI and defies the Committee’s oversight.”

The letter accuses Schill of obstructing the committee by refusing to answer specific questions about specific students and faculty and their conduct. It also said that he provided testimony that contradicts the text of the agreement he struck with anti-Israel demonstrators.

According to the letter, Northwestern produced just 13 pages of non-public documents pertaining to its top-priority requests, all of which were general records of Board of Trustees meetings without specific details.

Overall, Foxx alleged that 78% of the provided documents were not relevant to its requests and that 46% were already public, as well as that Northwestern provided no non-public communications about the anti-Israel encampment.

Foxx said that Northwestern’s lawyers also had pointed to Schill’s “purported willingness to answer questions as an ostensible excuse” for not providing requested documents or a briefing by Northwestern administrators on the encampment agreement.
Controversial Job Offer Leads To Resignations From Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies Board
Two members of the advisory board of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies have resigned in protest over the planned hiring of the center’s new director.

Karen Painter and Bruno Chaouat both resigned Friday evening after learning that Raz Segal, a professor at Stockton University in New Jersey, had been offered the position by Ann Waltner, the interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts, which is where the CHGS resides at the university.

Segal has studied the Holocaust in the Carpathians and in Hungary, and focuses his study of the Holocaust as a result of the decline of empires and the building of nation-states in Europe. The focus on nation-states is a central theme in an argument Segal makes that the Holocaust is not unique compared to other genocides.

“Dr. Segal has positioned himself on an extreme end of the political and ideological spectrum with his publications on Israel and Gaza, including an essay in which he accused Israel of genocide a week after the October 7 terrorist attacks,” Painter wrote in her Friday night resignation email to Provost Rachel Croson and Interim President Jeff Ettinger.

“The CHGS director is ideally a scholar whose principal area of research and public commentary is the Holocaust itself, and certainly should not be an individual publicly identified with extremist positions on the present Middle East war,” she wrote. “We need a center director who will bring our community together to understand how the Holocaust and other genocides occurred, not someone who blames Israel for the rape and murder of 1,200 civilians, and kidnapping of hundreds more.”

Segal wrote in Jewish Currents on Oct. 13, 2023, that Israel’s retaliatory strikes against Hamas positions in Gaza was “a textbook case of genocide.” This piece, as well as other interviews and writings he’s done on other outlets proved troublesome for some involved in the search.

“The assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes,” Segal wrote. “I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians.”

Segal has called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism a tool to suppress all critique of Israel; contends Israel is an apartheid state; and criticized the Israeli defense company Elbit Systems for helping to publish a book distorting the Holocaust in Bulgaria.

In a piece he co-authored for Al-Jazeera in January of 2024, Segal called Israel a “settler-colonial” power.


Columbia Law Review Declares Strike After Breaking Rules to Publish Anti-Zionist Article
Editors at the Columbia Law Review, one of the most distinguished student-led legal journals in the country, have declared a strike aimed at gaining “total editorial independence” following its subversion of long-standing rules to enable the publication of a virulently anti-Israel article.

According to The Columbia Spectator, the controversy began last week when the journal’s board of directors closed access to its website after determining that an article, titled “Toward Nakba As a Legal Concept” — the thesis of which argues that Israel’s existence is a crime — received “secretive” editing from staff, as several members were blocked from viewing it. Later, the board — which includes highly esteemed legal professionals such as judges, lawyers, and Columbia Law School’s dean — resolved to add a disclaimer to the piece noting the circumstances under which it was published.

“The Review‘s editorial processes are intended to allow all members to engage with the scholarship that the Review publishes and with one another,” the board of directors said in a statement. “That engagement is central to the Review’s twin aims of publishing the highest quality legal analysis and educating the next generation of lawyers. Upon learning of this exclusion, the board of directors sought to delay publication by several days to permit the excluded members to read the piece and engage with their colleagues before the piece was published.”

The statement added that the editors published the piece anyway, which resulted in the board choosing to “[memorialize] for now its concerns with the process,” an action which prompted the editorial staff’s strike.

Columbia Law School’s Jamie Jenkins, who was assigned to edit the piece in question, defended the editing process in a statement to The Columbia Spectator.

“The experience with the piece was the same as the rest of our review, in terms of the process that we use to take it from the first draft to the publishable draft,” he said. “There’s no process or requirement that every single piece that’s published for the Law Review is up for discussion with the entirety of the Law Review as to whether it’s going to be published.”

The individual who wrote the article, purported “legal scholar” Rabea Eghbariah, has also commented on the controversy in quotes shared by The Spectator, accusing the board of directors of revealing a “culture of Nakba-denialism” and claiming “US academic institutions are, in fact, a very hostile environment for Palestinian voices and thought.”


Times to investigate complaint over article questioning evidence of systematic Hamas rapes
The Times has said it will investigate a complaint over an explosive article questioning the Israeli claim that Hamas formally sanctioned sexual assault on October 7.

Three Israeli experts interviewed for the article, who specialise in violence against women and have helped gather evidence about the sex crimes that took place on October 7, reacted with fury to the piece, saying it “misrepresented” them.

They also claimed it “attempted to use our expertise to give credence to... alternative views.”

The June 7 article used interviews with the three to support the claim that Hamas had not instructed terrorists to carry out sex attacks.

However, writing on social media on Monday the Israelis appeared to contradict that key contention, saying: “The use of sexual violence as a weapon of war was a significant part of the October 7 attack.”

While the article acknowledged there was some evidence of sexual assault taking place on October 7 it said that there was not enough evidence to say it was systematic or sanctioned by Hamas officials.

The Times said it was “aware of a complaint” about the article and was “investigating”.

Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who served for 12 years on a UN committee overseeing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and now heads Dinah Project 7/10, which collects evidence to support prosecutions for sexual violence committed on October 7, said: “Much of what we said was omitted, and only selective excerpts were used.”

The piece, written by Catherine Philp and Gabriella Weiniger, took in interviews with Halperin-Kaddari along with Orit Sulitzeanu, executive director at the Association of Rape Crises Centres in Israel (ARCCI) and Dr Sarai Aharoni, Head of the Gender Studies Programme, Ben Gurion University.

In a joint statement after the article was published the women wrote: “Since October 7 we have been working actively to amplify the voices of sexual assault victims, especially in forums where such voices are often ignored. In this context, we agreed to be interviewed about the sexual violence that occurred on October 7.

Saying they were “ shocked and disappointed” by the article, they added: “It is our duty to ensure that the full extent of what happened is acknowledged. The use of sexual violence as a weapon of war was a significant part of the October 7 attack. Denying the evidence of such violence has become a disturbing aspect of the global pro-Palestinian discourse, adversely affecting the wellbeing of sexual violence survivors of the massacre, as well as survivors everywhere.”
Will Hostage-Taking Journalist Abdallah Aljamal Be Added to CPJ List?
One day after Israeli security forces rescued four Israeli hostages from their Gazan captivity, both the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security agency) confirmed that three of the hostages had been held captive in the family home of Abdallah Aljamal.

Aljamal, who was killed during the raid that freed the hostages, had previously served as a spokesman for the Hamas-run Gaza Labor Ministry and, as a journalist, had contributed to Al Jazeera and served as a correspondent for The Palestine Chronicle. His last article was published by the Chronicle one day before the Israeli rescue operation.

With Abdallah Aljamal’s death as part of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, it begs the question whether he will be added to the running list of “journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war” compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

Since the start of the war, the CPJ’s list of journalist casualties has been used by a variety of news outlets, activists, pundits, and politicians to highlight the seemingly disproportionate number of Gaza-based journalists killed during Israel’s counter-terrorism campaign and to question whether Israel is purposefully targeting reporters and other media workers.

However, as noted earlier by HonestReporting, a significant number of the journalists who appear on the CPJ’s list were in some way affiliated with Hamas and other anti-Israel terror organizations.

As of this writing (June 10, 2024), close to 50% of the 103 Palestinian journalists listed by the CPJ either worked for news outlets affiliated with terror organizations or were active members in these organizations themselves.
Omission and inaccuracy in BBC reporting on hostage rescue
Although Donnison has no qualms about going on to promote a vox pop claim of “genocide”, he too fails to adequately discuss the issue of hostages being held in a residential area for months on end (clearly with the knowledge of some civilians), Hamas attacking rescue teams with weapons including RPGs and the possibility that some civilian casualties may be the result of those Hamas decisions and actions.

Had such issues been clarified in its reporting, the BBC could perhaps have avoided embarrassing itself with a ridiculous question later posed by its presenter Helena Humphrey – a former UN and Red Cross employee.

As has all too often been the case since October 7th, in the rush to report dramatic stories about Palestinian casualties, the BBC’s journalists are only too willing to promote unconfirmed numbers sourced from the very terrorist organisation which started the war (and has been illegally holding hostages for eight months) and to skip over relevant parts of the story. Sadly for the BBC’s funding public, such irresponsible and agenda-driven reporting no longer comes as a surprise.
Guardian whitewashes pro-terror demo in Washington
CAIR, the article neglected to note, is an antisemitic group whose leader endorsed the Hamas massacre.

The Guardian article would also leave readers with the false impression that chants and banners at the demo were benign and moderate, as it failed report that some signs called for jihad and martyrdom, footage on social media showed, while other activists chanted, “death to Israel”, “Al Qassam, make us proud, kill another soldier now!” and “Hezbollah, Hezbollah, kill another Zionist now!”.

Footage also showed protestors holding up bloody masks of President Joe Biden and chanting, “Biden, Biden, what do you say? How many kids have you killed today?”, as well as, “We don’t want no Jewish state.”

According to NBC News, some protesters also shouted, “We don’t want no two state, we’re taking back ’48,”, while others proclaimed “Say it oud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” A few signs read “f— Israel, stand with Hamas“, while some protesters had green headbands which appeared to be similar to those worn by Hamas members.

Additionally, footage shows some protesters hurling bottles at Parks Police Officer standing guard over a Washington DC statue that had been vandalized, while shouting ‘f-you, fascist’ at him.

The Guardian’s failure to report on the extremism on display at the US capital echoes their coverage of such demos in London, where antisemitic and pro-terror chants and speeches are almost always erased.


Anti-Israel Members of US Congress Silent on Successful Hostage Rescue Operation, Tweet Against AIPAC Instead
Despite commenting regularly on the war in Gaza, some of the most vocal critics of Israel in the US Congress have remained noticeably silent following the rescue of four Israeli hostages from the Palestinian enclave over the weekend.

On Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stormed the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza to rescue four Israeli civilians abducted by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. After a tense shootout, the Israeli army secured the release of the hostages: Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Shlomi Ziv, and Andrey Kozlov. The four had been held in captivity in Hamas-ruled Gaza for eight months. At the time of their rescue, the hostages were reportedly being held by Palestinian civilians cooperating with Hamas.

Euphoric celebrations erupted throughout Israel and the United States in response to the IDF’s successful operation, and many leaders have commended the Israelis for carrying out the daring mission. However, some of the most outspoken US lawmakers regarding the Israel-Hamas war who routinely rail against the Jewish state have said nothing about the hostages being rescued. However, they did take to social media to castigate the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the foremost pro-Israel lobbying organization in the US.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) did not post a statement responding to the release of the hostages from the Nuseirat refugee camp. Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress, has repeatedly issued blistering condemnations of Israel, referring to the country as “Jewish supremacist” and accusing it of “apartheid” and “genocide.” In past statements Tlaib drew an equivalence between Israeli hostages in Gaza and so-called Palestinian “political prisoners” who are being held in Israeli prisons, in many cases for terrorism-related offenses. Last month, Tlaib gave a surprise speech at a conference tied to the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in which she lambasted Israel.

Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA), another prominent anti-Israel member of Congress, has remained silent on the rescue of the four hostages in Gaza. Lee came under fire last July for voting “no” on a resolution that rejected the notion that Israel is a “racist state.” The congresswoman has voted against sending aid to help bolster Israel’s military operations against Hamas terrorists. Lee also called for an “immediate ceasefire” only nine days after Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel which left over 1,200 people dead. More than 250 people were taken to Gaza as hostages during the onslaught.

Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), one of the most left-wing members of Congress, has also refrained from commenting on Saturday’s successful IDF operation. Bush has repeatedly argued that Israel’s war against Hamas is tantamount to a “genocide.” She has accused the Jewish state of engaging in “ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians. The progressive lawmaker also donned a keffiyeh — a traditional Arab headdress that has been repurposed after Oct. 7 to symbolize solidarity with the Palestinian cause — in the halls of Congress.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), arguably the most prominent progressive in Congress, has kept mum regarding the hostage rescue. Ocasio-Cortez has previously denied that Israel is a democracy and accused the state of engaging in “apartheid.” Only weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorism, Ocasio-Cortez called for a “ceasefire” between Israel and the terrorist group. In March, the congresswoman accused Israel of inflicting a “famine” and “genocide” against civilians in Gaza.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) has also not yet released a statement regarding Saturday’s hostage rescue. Like his fellow left-wing peers, Bowman has repeatedly accused Israel of being an “apartheid state.” Only days after the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Bowman signed onto a ceasefire resolution which made no reference to hostages or Hamas. The progressive lawmaker also dismissed the heavily-corroborated claims that Hamas terrorists raped Israeli women as mere “propaganda” and “lies.”
Notorious Left-Wing Domestic Terrorist Donated to Rep. Jerry Nadler, ‘Squad’ Members
In June 2021, then-House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler decried "the right-wing extremists" and "terrorists" who breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Weeks later, the New York Democrat accepted a $1,000 campaign contribution from an old friend: domestic terrorist Susan Rosenberg, who led a communist group that firebombed the U.S. Senate offices and other buildings in its quest to overthrow the government.

Rosenberg, whom Nadler helped obtain a presidential pardon in 2001, gave to Nadler’s campaign on July 26, 2021, according to campaign finance records. Since 2020, she has donated to "Squad" members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Cori Bush (D., Mo.), Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), Summer Lee (D., Pa.), and Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), who accused former president Donald Trump of trying to "overthrow our government to advance his fascist cause."

The armed overthrow of the United States government was precisely Rosenberg’s aim as a member of the Weather Underground and May 19th Communist Organization, a female-led Marxist-Leninist group that bombed the U.S. Senate offices in 1983. The FBI said the May 19th Communist Organization sought "armed revolution" and the "overthrow of the United States government."

According to the FBI, Rosenberg was an associate of "revolutionary organizations which have a great propensity for criminal activity and violence against law enforcement officers." She was sentenced to 58 years in prison in 1988 for her activities with the groups, but pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001, following an aggressive lobbying campaign from Nadler.

Democrats’ willingness to accept donations from a notorious domestic terrorist could undercut their rhetoric on the January 6 riots.

Ocasio-Cortez, who received $410 from Rosenberg through this year, has called for a special congressional committee to investigate the "Jan. 6th domestic terrorist attack."
Israel reprimands Slovenian envoy over Palestinian statehood recognition
Israel has reprimanded the ambassador of Slovenia over her country’s recognition of a Palestinian state, the Foreign Ministry says.

In a statement, the ministry says that during a conversation with the Slovenian ambassador it was emphasized that the statehood recognition “does not promote peace, it encourages the Hamas terrorist organization, and it makes it difficult to promote a deal for the release of the hostages.”
Polish MP who doused menorah in antisemitic attack elected to European Parliament
Grzegorz Braun, a far-right Polish politician who extinguished a Chanukah menorah in Warsaw last year, was elected to the European Parliament this week, according to results published on Monday.

Braun was a candidate for a Polish coalition of far-right parties called Confederation, Liberty and Independence, which came in as the third-largest party in the Eastern European country with 12.08% of the vote.

In December, Braun used a fire extinguisher to put out Chanukah candles in Warsaw’s parliament, injuring a woman attending the holiday ceremony who lost consciousness and was hospitalized.

Braun, known for his history of promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and who has previously been accused of assault against a Holocaust historian, approached the holiday lamp in the parliamentary halls and sprayed it with a fire extinguisher, disrupting the ceremony.

“Those who take part in acts of satanic worship should be ashamed,” Braun said before taking to the podium in the parliamentary chamber and claiming that Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights, is “satanic.”

As part of his campaign for Sunday’s vote, Braun autographed fire extinguishers for his supporters.
Using AI imagery, Israeli FM mocks Spain’s anti-Israel leaders over EU defeat
Foreign Minister Israel Katz posts a rather undiplomatic message on X mocking Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and his deputy Yolanda Diaz for the results of their parties in the European elections.

“The Spanish people have punished @sanchezcastejon and @Yolanda_Diaz_ coalition with a resounding defeat in the elections,” writes Katz about the pro-Palestinian politicians, alongside an AI-generated picture of the two leftist politicians with cracked eggs on their faces. “It turns out that embracing Hamas murderers and rapists doesn’t pay off.”

Diaz ended a May speech with the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Her party only won three seats in the European Parliament elections, and she announced she would step down as leader of the far-left Sumar party. Diaz will remain a minister and deputy prime minister, however.

Sanchez’s socialist PSOE party dropped into second place behind the center-right People’s Party, but limited gains by the far-right allowed Sanchez’s minority government to remain in power.

Spain was one of three European countries that recognized a Palestinian state last month.


Galloway party candidate disputed that six million Jews died in Holocaust
A candidate for George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain has disputed that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, The Telegraph can reveal.

Another candidate for the party shared a social media post belittling Holocaust Memorial Day as a “galactic load of victimhood”.

After returning to Parliament by winning the Rochdale by-election in February, Mr Galloway vowed to field hundreds of candidates across the country.

The Workers Party of Britain has already been forced to drop some candidates after they were accused of anti-Semitism.

Last month, The Telegraph revealed that one had been deselected for sharing a video claiming that Jews had been punished throughout history for “killing Jesus Christ”.

More cases of Workers Party candidates sharing inflammatory material online have now come to light.

Julie Lowe, standing for the party in Chesterfield, has posted a number of controversial tweets referring to Jews. In response to a post questioning whether six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, she wrote: “It can’t possibly be 6m.”

Responding to another post on X, formerly Twitter, in April calling for the sacking of Rachel Riley, the Jewish television presenter, she wrote: “You may have a problem there, Channel 4 are heavy with Zionist Jews like her.”


Palestinian infiltrates IDF Judea and Samaria Division base
A Palestinian man managed to infiltrate an Israel Defense Forces base near Ramallah in Samaria over the weekend and freely roam the premises before being caught.

The intruder managed to climb the fence of the IDF’s Judea and Samaria headquarters without being noticed. The incident reportedly took place on Saturday night after Shabbat.

The suspect was eventually apprehended by two Border Police officers who were exercising in sports clothes while unarmed.

An IDF spokesperson said the army would initiate disciplinary action against two soldiers who were tasked with guarding the sector from where the Palestinian entered, but stressed that there was no security incident as the infiltrator is apparently not a terrorist and is believed to be mentally ill.

In response to the incident, the military said it decided to increase the buffer zone around the base, create a valley between the fence and the road around the base and add additional “security elements.”

The base near Beit El houses the division’s headquarters, Border Police and offices of the Defense Ministry’s Civil Administration.

In related news, two armed Palestinian terrorists overnight Sunday infiltrated the Sde Ephraim Farm located near Neria, northwest of Ramallah, and set a residential structure on fire, the IDF confirmed.

“The fire was extinguished, there were no injuries. IDF forces began searching for the terrorists,” the military said in a post on X.


Palestinian 'Civilians': Complicit in Hamas Crimes
If ruling regimes such as Hamas do not want their civilians killed during hostage rescue operations, they should not start unprovoked wars, then complain when they are hit back. They also should not take hostages, then hide them among the civilian population. It is not complicated.

The Palestinian families can hold only themselves accountable for the scores of Gazans who died during the rescue operation. Those families were not coerced or threatened into keeping the hostages inside their homes. The exact opposite is true: They were delighted to help Hamas because they support the terrorist group.

Unsurprisingly, Abdallah Al-Jamal [a Gazan journalist who imprisoned three hostages in his home] also worked for the Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera network, which has long been serving as a de facto mouthpiece for Hamas and other Islamist terror groups.

Al-Jamal's most recent article, dated June 3, was headlined: "My House Will Always Be Open – Stories from the Gaza Siege."

Indeed, the Palestinian journalist's house was open – but only for hostages kidnapped by Palestinian murderers, thugs and rapists from an Israeli music festival on October 7.

The Biden administration and those in the West who have been crying about the "innocent" and "uninvolved" civilians killed and injured since the beginning of the war initiated by Hamas should direct their anger towards the Palestinians, not Israel, for aiding and abetting murderers, rapists and kidnappers.

"Even if they were [coerced and threatened], what would it have taken to get into contact with anyone from the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and say, 'I'm being forced to hold hostages in my house; please come get them out and take my family with them.' These families made the same choice hundreds of thousands of Gazans made and continue to make daily. They choose to help Hamas, they choose to hate Jews, they choose to participate in the killing and torture of Israelis, and they continue to support a murderous terrorist organization even if it means the death of them and their entire families." — Raylan Givens, X, June 9, 2024.

We must also not forget the thousands of "ordinary" Palestinians, to many of whom Israel had given work permits, who crossed the border into Israel on October 7 and took part in the crimes against Israelis.

The Israeli rescue operation serves as a reminder that Israel is continuing to do everything possible to save its citizens, while Hamas – with the help of many "ordinary" Palestinians -- is doing its utmost to save itself, including sacrificing its own citizens.


Canadians describe Jew-hatred threat ‘as bad if not worse’ than in US
Sadie-Rae Werner, a newly minted lawyer in Toronto, was walking by a Starbucks on her way to work in December when she saw a group of anti-Israel protesters. One offered her a leaflet, which Werner declined.

“She saw my Magen David and started shouting at me that I was perpetrating genocide,” Werner told JNS. “The short answer is that yes, we are worried. All the time.”

That and other instances where Werner has experienced antisemitism, or heard from friends and relatives who have been victims of Jew-hatred, have become much more common in Canada since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack, per official statistics.

The Toronto Police Service announced on May 31 that hate crimes were up 47% from 2022 (248 incidents) to 2023 (365), “with global events contributing to the increase,” the police stated. The Toronto police said that antisemitic incidents were the most frequent kind of hate crimes in 2023, followed by hate crimes against gay people, black people and then Muslims.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs noted that Jew-hatred made up 36% of hate crimes in Toronto and 80% of the city’s religion-based hate crimes in 2023. It added that Jews make up 4% of the Toronto population.

“There aren’t any universal reporting standards or timeliness requirements, so most cities have only shared anecdotal numbers, but their official reports are not yet out,” Nicole Amiel, CIJA’s director of media relations, told JNS. Those reports are typically released in August, she said.

“We have seen that antisemitism and hate crimes overall have risen dramatically in Canada by 150%,” Melissa Lantsman, a Jewish Canadian parliamentarian and deputy leader of the Conservative Party, told JNS.

“Canada’s conservatives unequivocally condemn any form of hate and antisemitism, and we believe in the need to protect Jewish communities,” Lantsman said. “We also firmly oppose the glorification of terror and the disturbing displays of antisemitism in demonstrations, including the targeting of Jewish businesses and Jewish students on campuses.”
42% of Jews have felt unsafe wearing Jewish symbols in public since Oct. 7, study finds
Since Oct. 7, more than 40% of American Jews have felt unsafe wearing Jewish symbols in public and more than a quarter have chosen not to mention their Jewish identity when they meet someone new, according to a new survey.

The survey, commissioned by the American Jewish Committee and published Monday, reports many of the same findings as previous surveys of American Jews since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war eight months ago: More than 80% of Jews feel antisemitism is a problem in the United States and say it has grown. More than 80% also feel it’s important for the United States to support Israel. More than 60% plan to vote for President Joe Biden.

The survey also demonstrates American Jewish discomfort in social settings since Oct. 7. Many American Jews avoid talking or posting about the war. Some say they have ended friendships.

And in a finding that AJC highlighted, 7% say that they have considered leaving the country due to antisemitism. Among those who say they had more education about Israel, AJC reported, that number is higher. In a separate question, 6% of respondents said they had had thoughts of leaving because of antisemitism over the five years prior to Oct. 7.

“Seven percent looks like a small number, but in fact, for Jews who have looked to America as a haven of safety and prosperity, this number is actually quite striking,” said Alexandra Herzog, AJC’s deputy director of contemporary Jewish life, in a press briefing about the survey.

The survey polled 1,001 Jewish adults between mid-March and early April, before many of the most recent major developments of the war and the response to it in the United States, including the campus pro-Palestinian encampment movement, the Israeli military’s invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza or the Israeli ceasefire proposal recently announced by Biden.

A portion of respondents reported serious social breaches. Thirteen percent of people said they lost a friend or a relationship due to disagreements over the war. And 12% say they have ended a friendship or a relationship after the other person “expressed antisemitic views.” Seventeen percent said they have felt unsafe in a conversation about the war.

A majority, 53%, said they had avoided talking about the war with someone. And 45% feel unsafe sharing their views about Israel on social media.
Israeli man says he was assaulted in Barcelona over his Jewish identity
An Israeli man says he was attacked yesterday in Spain over his Jewish identity.

Yotam Eyal tweets a video of what he says were the early stages of the attack in Barcelona, before one of the assailants “kicked my phone out of my hands.”

In the video, several men can be seen shouting “Fuck Israel” toward Eyal.

Writing that the attackers were Arab, Eyal says they began the assault due to the kippa he was wearing.

“Police arrived, I was in the hospital, and I’m okay,” he writes. “They will pay for this attack, I’m already working on it.

“It is horrifying to experience antisemitism in the street out of nowhere from people with whom you have no acquaintance,” he adds.


Israelis chant "Bring Them Home!" at Coldplay concert, Chris Martin singles out Israeli boy
Israelis in the audience at a Coldplay concert in Athens on Sunday chanted “Bring them home!” following a performance of “Yellow,” one of the group’s top hits, because the color yellow has come to symbolize the plight of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

At the same show, the group’s frontman Chris Martin singled out an Israeli boy in the audience holding a sign in memory of Shir Eilat, one of the border observers murdered on October 7 when the Nahal Oz base was overrun by Hamas.

The sign said, in English, “I want to sing with you,” and in Hebrew, “Your song will play forever,” with a picture of the fallen soldier and her name. The phrase was a play on words because “Shir” is Hebrew for “song.” Martin asked the boy to put aside the sign so he could see his face and asked his name, which was Ori Avodi. Jews and Israelis celebrate hostage rescue

As Ori’s face appeared on an on-stage screen, Martin said, “Hey, my brother, I have to ask if you believe in the power of magic. Do you believe in the power of magic? Of course. Of course we do. I need you to close your eyes, close your eyes, and I need you to make something special happen. I need you to think for five seconds and I need for you to create fireworks in your mind.” Ori closed his eyes, and Martin continued, “Do you think you can do this?”

He began counting down and told the boy to keep thinking of fireworks. At the countdown’s end, fireworks erupted over the stadium and the boy opened his eyes in delight.


Why This Year’s Shavuot Is One of the Most Important Ever
Beginning Tuesday evening, June 11, Jews all over the world celebrate Shavuot and commemorate the day they received the Torah and its commandments at Sinai.

The Talmudic Sages, apparently familiar with Alan King’s classic summary of the Jewish holiday — they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat — recognized that some may not consider the reams of obligations placed on the Jewish people as cause for celebration. The Sages were especially insistent that Jews demonstrate otherwise and eat really well on this day.

Particularly now, this celebration is essential for two reasons. First, this year has headlined the experience of Jewish suffering, reviving the harsh reality that for millennia, the Jewish people have been despised, harassed, and persecuted. Still, rather than drive Jews away, the disorienting isolation that American Jews are experiencing has brought them closer together and awakened their desire for connection to Judaism and Jewish community. Jews are craving to celebrate their Jewishness, not just their survival.

Second, the Jewish people are a nation, a religion, and a family — but most significantly, they are a community of values. Their mission since Abraham has been to teach and to model both faith in God and loving kindness towards others. That story continues to this day, as despite the centuries of persecution, the Holocaust, and the constant existential threats that Israel has faced since its rebirth, the Jewish people refuse to turn bitterly inward and remain committed to being a source of blessing to the world.

Nevertheless, the twisted narrative promoted in academia, the media, progressive and far-right spaces, and international forums, has cast the Jewish people everywhere as genocidal, oppressive, and hateful, radically increasing the physical threats of antisemitic violence facing Jews everywhere. But — even more perniciously — this also makes Jews embarrassed of their Jewish identity. The celebration of Shavuot is an opportunity to proudly reaffirm the Jewish people’s core identity and mission as a community of values dedicated to faith and goodness.

The current nightmare began on October 7, Simchat Torah — a holiday when Jews everywhere gather in synagogues in joyous celebration of the completion of the annual cycle of Torah reading. Carrying their children on their shoulders and Torah scrolls in their arms, participants sing and dance in a joyous celebration of family and faith, and — most of all — the values that define them as a community.

The words — the value statements — sung repeatedly on that day express deep appreciation for the blessings of true Jewish identity, and for the good fortune to continue the mission of Abraham and the Jewish people to do good, to be good, to study, to live by God’s word, and to bring light to the world. They sing, they dance, they conclude the reading of the Torah, and then they immediately begin studying it again, demonstrating their true character as the People of the Book.




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