To an antisemite, nothing is more painful than the truth
By the time of my Bar Mitzva, I had known for years not to trust the mainstream media’s reporting on Israel and that when Israel was accused of a crime, the accusation was likely a lie.Kassy Akiva: The Dark Relationship Between U.S. Universities and An Anti-American School Controlled By Terrorists
In 2000, at the beginning of the Second Intifada, the New York Times published a photograph the Associated Press captioned as depicting an Israeli police officer standing over a beaten and bloodied Palestinian Arab. In reality, the photograph depicted Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish American citizen who had been beaten by a mob of Arabs and rescued by the police officer standing over him.
In 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada, British media such as the Guardian and the BBC published false reports of a massacre allegedly committed by IDF forces in Jenin. So-called human rights NGOs like Human Rights Watch enthusiastically echoed and spread these lies about a nonexistent massacre. In fact, 12 Israeli soldiers were killed in Jenin because the IAF did not bomb it before they entered the refugee camp.
These two incidents taught me as a child to have a very healthy skepticism for reports of Israeli wrongdoing, a skepticism that continued to be justified in my teenage years and into adulthood. That makes it all the more frustrating that there are so many who are incapable of seeing what is obvious to a small child, no matter how many times this skepticism is proven correct.
Hardly a day seems to go by in this war without some new lie about Israeli crimes. In October, it was claimed that Israel bombed the Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, killing 500 people. Nearly every detail about this incident was a lie designed to tarnish Israel’s reputation, and yet it was eaten up by a media that never learned or wanted to learn to treat anti-Israel accusations with the skepticism they deserve. It was quickly proven that Israel had not bombed the hospital, that the blast was caused by a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket that struck the parking lot, and that the death toll was a small fraction of what had been claimed.
You would think the media would have learned its lesson after the Baptist Hospital Libel, but some refuse to ever learn.
More lies were told about the IDF’s March operation at the al-Shifa Hospital, where it was claimed without evidence that soldiers raped Palestinian Arabs. This lie was designed to distract from the horrific sexual crimes committed against Jews on October 7 and against the hostages held in Gaza, and from the extraordinary IDF accomplishments at al-Shifa, where hundreds of terrorists were killed or arrested and not a single civilian was killed.
The most recent lie is the claim that Israel is training dogs to rape Palestinian Arabs. This follows a long line of claims of Israel using animals for various nefarious purposes, from using sharks to attack Egyptian divers, dolphins and birds as spies, and pigs to destroy crops, among others. Wikipedia, a site that has become more and more likely to publish antisemitic lies about Israel as if they are true as its recent decisions on who is considered a reliable source on Israel demonstrate, has an article dedicated to conspiracy theories involving Israel and animals.
It does not matter how outlandish or obviously false the accusations against Israel are. There will be always be those who are so blinded by hate that they want desperately for the accusations to be true. Briahna Joy Gray, for instance, who was fired from the Rising political talk show after she displayed her utter contempt for the sister of one of the Israeli hostages, attempted to spread the lie about the dogs by claiming it needed to be investigated - as if it had any credibility.
Birzeit University, located just outside of Ramallah in the West Bank, is home to an overwhelmingly Hamas-affiliated student government that holds on-campus terrorist parades. It also has relationships with some of America’s most prestigious universities, despite the fact that its leadership and faculty openly harbor pro-terrorist and anti-American sentiments.Israel Under Fire - Israel's Legal Rights regarding Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria
The chairwoman of Birzeit’s Board of Trustees denied Hamas’s brutality and rape on October 7, and the school’s official account called for “glory to the martyrs” days after the attack. Yet its relationships in the United States remain largely intact — it has active relationships with Harvard University, Rutgers University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others across the country.
Harvard University is set to host a “Palestine Social Medicine Course” next month at Birzeit, where students will learn about “settler colonialism.” Rutgers University affirmed its relationship with Birzeit in May amid student encampment protests and William Paterson University entered into an agreement with the Hamas-run university in 2022 for exchange programs, sharing curricula and joint degree programs. Other schools, such as MIT, have recently co-hosted conferences, invited Birzeit professors for speaking events, or had student groups visit its campus.
Experts say the university has “gone off the deep-end” since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 terrorist attack, with leadership openly defending the actions and broadcasting lies about the conflict.
Birzeit’s Terrorist-Sympathizing Leadership
Hanan Ashrawi, the chairwoman of Birzeit University’s Board of Trustees, has denied Hamas committed sexual assault on Israeli civilians during its October 7 massacre, endorsed the lynching of Israeli soldiers, and defended Hezbollah, according to CAMERA UK.
On October 11, Ashrawi wrote that Israel’s “spin machine” was “manufacturing horrific lies in an orchestrated smear campaign claiming rape, slaughtering babies, beheadings, burnings alive” and that the Western media “immediately swallowed & regurgitated such vile slander.” Ashrawi doubled down on sexual assault denial in March, calling a UN report finding grounds that Hamas committed sexual violence invalid because it included mostly interviews with Israelis.
Jonathan Schanzer, Senior Vice President for Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said he is not surprised that Birzeit’s radical views are expressed at the highest levels.
“Ashrawi has had a forked tongue for decades,” Schanzer told the Daily Wire, pointing out that she was once part of the Oslo Accords. “While she was once seen as a woman of peace, that ship sailed a long time ago and she has since been a mouthpiece for radicalism for the better part of a decade.”
This report analyzes the legality of Jewish settlements in eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria from an international law perspective. Since the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel has extended its law, jurisdiction, and administration over eastern Jerusalem but not to Judea and Samaria.
The legality of Jewish settlements in these areas derives from the Jewish people's historical, indigenous, and legal rights to settle in those areas, validated in international documents. Denying Jews their right to live in the Old City of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria means denying their ties to their biblical and historical homeland, precisely those ties that have been recognized in these documents.
The claim that the Palestinian Arabs are entitled to an independent state in all the territories, while Jewish settlement is forbidden, is unfounded in international law.
Following Israel's War of Independence in 1948, there was an exchange of approximately 600,000 people from each side. Whereas Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees, the Arab states, rather than absorbing the Arab refugees, invented a new "Palestinian people" that had never before ruled the land; there is no "Palestinian" language and no specific "Palestinian" culture or history.
The Oslo Agreements were drafted to enhance "a just, lasting, and comprehensive peace." Yet, since they came into effect, the Middle East has witnessed not peace but violence and terror. The establishment of the Palestinian Authority and the subsequent takeover of Gaza by Hamas, as well as the popular support Hamas enjoys in Judea and Samaria, should serve as a guide to the grave risks posed by such an Arab state, which may eventually lead to the destruction of the Jewish state.