Thursday, November 21, 2024

From Ian:

Unfulfilled Promise
Pope Francis has called for an investigation to determine if Israel’s operation in Gaza constitutes genocide, according to a new book published for the Catholic Church’s jubilee year. “According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” the pope said in excerpts published Sunday by the Italian daily La Stampa.

What makes the inflammatory statements in the pope’s book especially disturbing is that they follow on remarks by the pope that appear to demonize Jews even more broadly and which are contrary to teachings of the Church. Pope Francis’ prior Letter to Catholics of the Middle East on the first anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel from Gaza provoked widespread confusion and consternation among Jews and Catholics. While he has spoken regularly about the attack and the fighting that erupted in its wake, his inclusion in the letter of a citation of John 8:44 to denounce the evils of war was to many inexplicable.

The verse chosen by the pontiff, a vitriolic accusation that the Jews “are from [their] father, the devil,” has for centuries provoked and been used to justify Church hostility to Jews. Yet such terrible imagery of Jewish malfeasance is thoroughly out of place in a modern Catholic document. Regrettably, the pope nonetheless chose to use this notorious verse at a time when global antisemitism has reached disturbingly high levels. Such a statement threatens the intellectual work of his Catholic predecessors going back to the 1960s.

While the citation is surely troubling, more significant is the letter itself, for it is yet another example of an ongoing presentation of Francis’ extensive and controversial views on the Israel-Hamas war. This letter has made people aware of this significant body of statements and demonstrates the compelling need to understand current relations with one of the Jewish community’s most influential and important partners, Pope Francis and the Catholic Church. In the year after the attack, Francis has spoken publicly about the war at least 75 different times. The conflict is not just like other conflicts, for it occurs in a place “which has witnessed the history of revelation” (2/2/24). Not only is he understandably very distressed about the war, but he is also clearly knowledgeable about it and notes many aspects of it (e.g., hostages, negotiations, humanitarian aid, Israeli airstrikes, challenges for aid workers). With the possible exception of Russia’s war on Ukraine, no other conflict has received such frequent mention by Francis, nor has he engaged so intimately with the specific features of other, often more deadly conflicts. He addressed the war most often in scheduled gatherings for the Sunday Angelus Prayer and in weekly audiences with the general public, though he has discussed it at greater length in official contexts (e.g., Address to Members of the Diplomatic Corps Accredited to the Holy See, 1/8/24).

Pope Francis does not just speak homiletically. His statements express his deep-seated and passionate convictions about morality and political affairs. They also both reflect and influence current trends in Catholic thinking about the Israel-Hamas war. The Holy See of course is not just a religious institution but also a state, engaged in pragmatic exchanges and negotiations with other states and organizations. The pope’s views on war and peace necessarily shape Vatican diplomacy and guide Catholic political proposals, as seen for example in the statement of the Apostolic Nuncio to the U.N. in January 2024, which is replete with references to Francis’ speeches and elaboration on his ideas.

Francis is struggling to reconcile traditional Catholic just war theory, which began with St. Augustine centuries ago, with contemporary Catholic resistance to almost any justification of war, especially without international sanction (Fratelli Tutti 258 n. 242; see also the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2302-17). The latter, more skeptical view of war has roots in the 19th century but emerged strongly after World War II and the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), especially in the wake of the Shoah and the development of nuclear weapons. It continues to develop today, with Francis giving it his own emphases that reflect his roots in the global south and the influence of liberationist theology.

It is ironic, or perhaps predictable, that the Catholic Church in the modern period, now without access to military power, has moved away from just war theory and now largely deploys its more restrained views of war and peace in judging others. Given the prominence of the Israel-Hamas war in Francis’ speeches and its moral and political complexity, as well as his stature internationally, his views are relevant and influential.
Melanie Phillips: The pope’s embrace of evil discourse
In other words, his attack on Israel is far more than boilerplate liberal hostility to the existence of the Jewish state. It regurgitates the ancient Christian theological hatred of the Jews and the desire to obliterate them.

This pushes the Vatican backwards by several decades. Unlike Protestant churches, the Catholics have made significant attempts from the 1960s onwards to retract their ancient libel against the Jews and express contrition for what the church had done to the Jewish people.

Particularly neuralgic had been the behavior of Pope Pius XII, who was accused of having failed to speak out publicly against the Nazis and thus made the church an accomplice to the Holocaust.

Now Pope Francis has undone all of that progress.

Yet he has also said good things about Israel and the Jews. In Tablet magazine, Adam Gregerman points out that the pope has celebrated the change in Catholic thinking about Judaism that meant “enemies and strangers have become friends and brothers”; expressed sadness over Catholics’ past misdeeds against Jews; said “the State of Israel has every right to exist in safety and prosperity”; and insisted that “to attack Jews is antisemitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also antisemitism.”

Responding to a letter from Jewish scholars written in November 2023 expressing deep concern over “the worst wave of antisemitism since 1945,” he said the Oct. 7 atrocities reminded him that the promise “never again” remained relevant, and must be taught and affirmed anew.

So what’s the explanation for the apparent contradiction?

The answer is surely that the pope is driven entirely by his identification with suffering victims—and since all wars inevitably create victims, he always opposes war. Four days after the Oct. 7 pogrom, he said: “No war is worth the tears of a mother who has seen her child mutilated or killed; no war is worth the loss of the life of even one human being.”

He is a consequentialist. Seeing only the awful consequences of war, the cause becomes irrelevant. War to stop a genocide thus becomes as bad as genocide.

That amoral thinking leads him effectively to deny any justification for a just war. He thus inevitably condemns innocent victims of aggression—in this case, the Israelis—to unlimited slaughter, torture and suffering, and ultimately the State of Israel itself to existential destruction.

Believing that war is itself a crime against humanity, he excuses, sanitizes and implicitly encourages actual crimes against humanity while anathematizing the defense against them.

By believing that this Marxist-derived ideology represents conscience, Pope Francis has made himself an accomplice of evil.
Yisrael Medad: On academic indoctrination in American universities
For those opposed to Zionism, Israel is a symbol of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism—the core evils leftists exist to oppose. This is the underlying layer of today’s debasement of anything pro-Israel, its pillars sunk into a feeling of intense and even depraved degradation of Jews and all things Jewish, especially an independent and successful Jewish state.

What has evolved is epitomized at Villanova University outside Philadelphia, where a director of counseling services can present antisemitic views at an international conference, describing Zionism as a “disease” that requires psychotherapy. FBI-style “Wanted” posters targeted Jewish faculty and staff members at the University of Rochester. The sheriff’s office in Walla Walla, Wash., was required to respond to a pro-Palestine student protest outside a Whitman Board of Trustees dinner at a winery forcing the college to relocate its dinner venue.

At De Paul University, supporting Israel landed one Jewish student in the hospital while a second student was lightly injured. At Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, the campus flagpole had a Hamas flag hoisted.

The deeper invasive connection between academia and anti-Zionism, however, is not in protests but in the educational content, or rather the indoctrination, that a student undergoes. For example, the University of California, Berkeley has announced that it is offering a course this coming spring semester describing Hamas as a “revolutionary resistance force fighting settler colonialism.” More invidious, the course description reads as if a primer for a revolutionary underground:

“With the U.S.-backed and -funded genocide being carried out against Indigenous Palestinians by the Israeli Occupying Force, many have found it difficult to envision a reality beyond the one we are living in today.”

A second example is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seminar taught by linguistics professor Michel DeGraff. The course deals with “language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation and for peace and community-building.”

His position is that Jews have no connection to Israel and that Israeli textbooks “weaponize trauma of the Holocaust.” Israeli youth, he further asserts, grow up “with this trauma that made them fear that their existence is in threat.” That may be a fair observation, but he adds that the threat comes from “anyone who doesn’t believe in the superior position of the Jewish people in Israel.”

If you perceive some racism and black supremacist theory in this explanation, you are probably correct.

This is but one sphere of influence crushing on a student. In too many cases, his/her lecturers and advisors are those who sign pro-Palestine petitions, marshal the demonstrations and sit-ins, and provide support for campus groups when they are disciplined—or more correctly, when administrations attempt to do so.

The Capital Research Center has published a study titled “Marching Towards Violence” that investigated militant left-wing antisemitism on the campuses of U.S. colleges and universities. It has identified more than 150 campus groups that explicitly support terrorism or, at the least, emphasize violent anti-Israel rhetoric.

David Bernstein, founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and author of Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, sums up the situation:

“Anti-Israel forces focused on U.S. college campuses have transformed the American university into a vector for their activist agenda … playing the long game—what activists call “the long march through institutions”—in inculcating a stark ideological worldview that portrays anyone with power or success … as oppressors.”

Is there an antidote? One is the Deborah Project, which defends the civil rights of Jews facing discrimination in educational settings. Its aim is “to use legal skills and tools to uncover, publicize and dismantle antisemitic abuses in educational systems.” Other groups and individuals work on many levels of engagement; still, if the monied Jewish establishment institutions do not get behind this, then the anarchy, irrationality and hate will at some point come to overwhelm Diaspora Jewry.
From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy : There Is No ‘Genocide’ in Gaza
I have “studied” these subjects in depth. I have seen genocides in Srebrenica and Darfur with my own eyes. I have filmed those tortured by Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the bodies burned alive, thrown from rooftops, beheaded, by ISIS at Mosul. I have documented, on the ground, the indiscriminate killings by Russia in Ukraine.

I covered, long before that, the carnage of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, from which the French writer Kamel Daoud escaped. I have borne witness to those survivors in the Christian villages of the Middle Belt of Nigeria, their lives decimated by the Islamist Fulani.

In short, I know what it means to be promised death. I have seen skeletons exploited to their last strength and, when that strength expired, thrown into a pit. In other words, I know what genocide and crimes against humanity mean.

The world has willingly forgotten that, in this war of Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its puppets, the IDF is the first army in the world to take so many measures, sometimes to its strategic detriment, to ensure that as few innocent civilians as possible are caught in the furnace of battles.

Thus, myths are forged.

Thus, we go from the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, or Judeo-Bolshevik, or Judeo-Capitalist conspiracy, to the Judeo-genocidal conspiracy of which all the Jews of the world would be more or less complicit. And thus we insult, not only the truth of facts and names, but the holy memory of the victims of the genocides of the last century. BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
Unsanction Israel
President Biden's sanctions regime against Israelis "for undermining peace, security, and stability in the West Bank" violates several standards of sanctions policy. America almost never sanctions other democracies. Americans respect the desire of other self-governing peoples to govern themselves, rather than to obey coercive dictates from Washington. If America cannot peacefully persuade another democracy to change its ways, America lives with it.

America sanctions rogue states and non-state groups that brutalize people lacking recourse to courts or democratic institutions. Think China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. Or the terror groups and states within states in Yemen and Sudan.

American sanctions policy now classes Israel with the world's worst regimes, including Iran, a state sponsor of terror officially dedicated to Israel's destruction. Actually, American sanctions now treat Israel worse than Iran: by targeting the speech of its citizens. Sanctioning Israel in wartime also advances the best hope of Israel's enemies - to isolate Israel from its friends.

Moreover, the sanctions regime the administration has set up grossly misidentifies the culprit. West Bank Palestinians have committed hundreds of terrorist attacks and killed at least 20 Israelis since Oct. 7, 2023. Nearly all alleged incidents of West Bank Jews committing violence against Arabs involve property crimes.

Settler violence is so infrequent that the Biden administration has struggled to find perpetrators to sanction. Instead, it has sanctioned persons never accused of violence or already dealt with by the Israeli authorities. Meanwhile, endemic Palestinian property crimes against Jews remain under-prosecuted by Israel, ignored or encouraged by the Palestinian Authority, and unsanctioned by America.

At a recent Israeli parliament meeting, both opponents and supporters of the Netanyahu government condemned the sanctions regime. Americans should join with Israelis in opposing this intervention in Israeli public life - to protect their own free-speech rights and to support an American security partner.
State Department’s last-gasp effort to sabotage an Israeli victory over terrorists
Israel’s detractors believe that America’s unwavering support for Israel is driven by the mythologically omnipotent “Jewish lobby.” The truth is it is the Arab lobby, entrenched within the deep state, which has been adversely affecting U.S. policy since the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s.

The Arabists fought first to prevent the establishment of Israel, then to strangle the nascent state at birth, and ever since, have sought to drive a wedge between the two countries despite their shared values and interests. This tradition has continued in the Biden administration, where the Arabists are determined to make a last stand before Donald Trump takes office and make their anti-Israel positions as Trump-proof as possible.

We have seen this movie before.

In the 1940s, President Harry Truman’s push for the creation of Israel was met with fierce resistance. The Arabists in the State and Defense Departments were adamantly against the establishment of a Jewish state, fearing the United States would lose access to Middle East oil (which we did not yet depend on), that Israel would be Communist, and that the Soviets would exploit Arab anger with America to gain influence in the region. Truman ordered them to support partition; however, after the resolution to create a Jewish and Arab state was adopted, American diplomats tried to prevent its implementation. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations announced that partition was unworkable and proposed an international trusteeship for Palestine instead. Truman learned about it from the newspaper. Historian Robert Silverberg said Truman “became a staunch Zionist for the first time” and ensured that he would no longer listen to “the appeasers of the Arabs, the worriers over oil, the frenetic anti-Communists and the subtle anti-Semites in the Departments of State and Defense.”

The Arabists have never given up.

We saw President Barack Obama’s Arabist instrument, John Kerry, sticking it to Israel as he headed out the door in a preemptive strike against the incoming Trump administration. As I wrote at the time, he and Hillary Clinton “carried out President Obama’s agenda to turn on our most fervent allies, such as Israel, make catastrophic deals with enemies such as Iran and, in a nod to Nero, fiddled while Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Yemen burned.”

After the failure of Kerry’s efforts to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and Trump defeated Clinton, Obama ordered the United States to abstain rather than veto Security Council Resolution 2334, a one-sided measure labeling Israeli settlements “a flagrant violation of international law” that damage the prospects of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obama had previously vetoed a similar resolution but now claimed the vote reflected longstanding U.S. policy.
The US media’s war on Trump’s Middle East policy
In recent articles on Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on northern Israel, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal all referred to the “Israeli-occupied” or “Israeli-controlled” Golan Heights. The terms were revealing. In March 2019, President Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, making it an indivisible part of the Jewish state. In describing the Heights as “occupied” and “controlled” by Israel, America’s papers of record were publicly rejecting the position of the country’s democratically elected leader in favor of those of Belgium, China, and the Obama administration.

The willingness of the mainstream press to make its own foreign policy signals a deeply troubling trend. Presidents often rescind their predecessors’ decisions. George Bush and Donald Trump withdrew America’s representation on the flagrantly anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council and Barack Obama and Joe Biden restored it. Trump nullified Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and Biden tried to revive it. But the negation by the and large parts of the public of a formal White House policy poses far greater challenges. More than Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, at stake is the legitimacy of presidential decisions.

Those challenges will certainly mount under the incoming administration. Much of the controversy will center, once again, on the Middle East. President Trump has selected Secretaries of State and Defense, a National Security Advisor, and ambassadors to Israel and the UN, whose outlook on the region sharply diverges from that of the previous policymakers. While the Biden administration sought to limit Israel’s ability to defend itself, condemned Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank, and supported the creation of a Palestinian state that the vast majority of Israelis opposed, the Trump team believes that Israel should fight as it sees fit, calls the settlements communities and the West Bank by its Biblical name, Judea and Samaria. And though President Trump’s 2020 peace plan provided for a Palestinian state, those soon to be forging US foreign policy will undoubtedly oppose the establishment of any Palestinian entity bound to quickly fail and fall to Hamas. The Biden White House refused to stand up to Iran in any significant way and tried to appease it back to the negotiating table. In complete contrast, Trump’s senior staff will work to thoroughly isolate and weaken Iran. Should it ever come back to the table, it will do so begging for a deal.

All of this, of course, is good news for the majority of Israelis. Many dubbed Trump’s selection of Secretary Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and Ambassadors Elise Stefanik and Mike Huckabee, the “Dream Team.” The Iranian regime promptly told that team it was no longer planning to attack Israel and was willing to negotiate with Trump. The restoration of trust in the relations between the United States and Israel, and fear among our common enemies, holds out the promise of unprecedented stability in the Middle East, the conclusion of wars, and the expansion of existing peace treaties. But will it last?
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Tel Aviv, November 21
- An audit of spiraling military expenditures amid the current war has determined that the quickest, most effective avenue for cutting costs involves switching suppliers for the annual Hanukkah refreshments, and refraining from purchase of those products from a chain whose elegant holiday pastries make even the wealthy balk at the prices.

The authors of the study hope that their findings and recommendations will have an impact in time for this year's festivities: Hanukkah begins on the twenty-fifth of the Jewish month of Kislev, coinciding in 2024 with Wednesday night, December 25 - about a month from now. If Ministry of Defense and IDF staff can be prevailed upon to order donuts from sources other than Roladin, the authors write, then savings can amount to more than two billion shekels - about 530 million US dollars.

Defense Ministry spending could fall further, despite the mounting expenses of the October 7 war, already in its second year, if Hanukkah donuts expenditures disappear entirely - though the team of auditors doubt the feasibility of such a cut, which they worry could spark mutiny. However, the tantalizing possibilities of expanding such an austerity policy to other government entities has economists, government accountants, and civic watchdog groups thinking that the entire national budget could shrink by up to seventeen billion shekels per annum by forgoing Roladin Hanukkah donuts.

Jewish celebrations of Hanukkah have long featured the consumption of food fried in oil, a custom documented as far back as the High Middle Ages. The practice commemorates the Talmud's narrative of the festival's origins, when the Hasmoneans who liberated the Temple from Seleucid occupation in the second century BCE found only one undefiled flask of oil to light the candelabra as mandated in the books of Exodus and Numbers, a quantity sufficient for only one lighting. But it lasted a full eight nights, until new oil could be produced and procured. Earlier sources cite other reasons for the eight-day observance, but the story of the oil miracle fired the popular and gustatory imagination in more lasting ways.

Roladin, a cafe-style bakery and patisserie, has locations in every major Israeli city and town. Their year-round fare compares in price to other establishments of similar target markets. For Hanukkah, the chain has for years advertised its stylized, complex, and artistic donuts for Hanukkah - with a commensurate rise in the price of each one as the designs became more and more elaborate.

Market observers expect this year's Roladin offerings to include some new, even more expensive feature, such as pieces of the True Cross.



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

  • Thursday, November 21, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon


Six months ago, someone painted a large Palestinian flag along with anti-Israel graffiti on the wall of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.

The message says "Stop the genocide. Stop "Israeli" terror. From the river to the sea Palestine will be free! BDS IPSC"

The local Jewish community is frightened and do not want to go to a hospital with such a message. It is clearly inflammatory and upsetting, not to mention illegal.

It is still there.

Why hasn't the hospital removed it? 

That's what the Democratic Union Party's Diane Dodds  asked Belfast Trust Chief Executive Maureen Edwards.  "My understanding is that it has been there for almost six months. In the interests of a health service that's available and open and everyone is welcome to that health service, it is a bit appalling that we have waited six months to get rid of antisemitic graffiti," Dodds noted.

Edwards answered that they approached several contractors to sandblast off the graffiti - something that would take at most a couple of hours - but they all refused. 

Not because they disagree that the graffiti is antisemitic.

Because they are fearful as to what the pro-Hamas BDS antisemites would do to them if they erased the message.

This is terrorism, pure and simple.  And Ireland appears to be OK with it, as long as the only people hurt are Jews. 





Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

  • Thursday, November 21, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon
The Journal of Palestine Studies recently published a paper named "Fire as Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine."

The abstract seems to celebrate a devastating 2021 fire in the forests near Jerusalem as a type of "intifada."

In August 2021, wildfires erupted in the southwestern hills of Jerusalem, engulfing and ultimately destroying up to 20,000 dunums of pine forests planted by Israeli settlers. The burned landscape revealed a stunning vista of terraced hillsides, a visual testament to the existence of Palestinian land-based relations hidden under the camouflaging foliage. In this experimental visual essay, fire is postulated as an elemental force of Indigenous Palestinian resistance to the ongoing conditions of environmental and human Nakba imposed on Palestinian lands and bodies under Zionist settler colonialism. Fire, as a transformative and atmosphere-altering medium, is thus theorized and visualized as elemental intifada.
I don't have access to the "experimental visual essay" but it references New Arab article that says:

The wildfires which ravaged Jerusalem's hills in August, and which tore through 25,000 dunams of dense woodland laid bare a long-hidden landscape, full of forgotten traces alluding to the crimes which took place in 1947-8 during the Nakba.

This has served as a reminder of the ethnic cleansing which took place in the hilly region southwest of Jerusalem, in which all the Palestinian villages were destroyed and their remains concealed.

The fire returned the hills to their natural state, allowing their underlying shape to become visible once more: their historic terraced slopes testifying to the work of Palestinian farmers over centuries, as they strove to cultivate the land and make it bear fruit for its inhabitants.

While Israeli media mourned the burning forests and the wrecking of dozens of Israeli homes which had been built on the ruins of Palestinian villages, ancient agricultural terraces were revealed which go back more than 400 years. They alluded to the complex farming methods which Palestinian peasants developed, bringing into being flourishing agriculture.
On my trips to the West Bank and the occupied territories, when I passed by the expansive areas of Palestinian farmland, I was always awed by the sight of the long chain of terraces, mustabat or mudrajat in Arabic. I thrilled at their grandeur and the precision of the work that attests to the connection between the Palestinian fellah and his land.
The photos of the destroyed forest do show the terraces that were built into the hills.



It sure looks like proof of a deliberate Jewish plan to cover up ancient Palestinian farming methods, doesn't it?

Except that when you look a little further, you learn that:

1. The forests were planned and planted before 1948, before the "nakba."
2. They were planted with full cooperation and knowledge not only of the British but also the local Arab population.
3 The idea of terrace farming on hills and mountains in the region is at least 2,000 years old, way before "Palestinians."

An article in the San Francisco Examiner from April 11, 1920, shows a diagram of the plan by the British to return the land to the state it was in in years past - because it was ruined by the Ottoman Empire, especially during World War I. Amazingly, this diagram shows the terraces on the hillsides and the plan to bring water back to the areas because it had fallen into disuse and drought.



The article says:

A vast scheme of irrigation and reforestation, under the control of a British governmental commission, has been completed and approved both by the enlightened Jewish leaders, as well as the Arab Moslems under the guidance of the Grand Mufti, their head. The project contemplates raising the level of the Sea of Galilee, upon whose waters the Saviour walked, by damming its outlet into the River Jordan. It also contemplates subsidiary dams along the course of the Jordan and similar manipulation of other streams that run through the valleys and deep gorges of Palestine. An elaborate system of pipings from these reservoirs, great numbers of artesian wells in other regions and the planting of hundreds upon thousands of trees on the now desolate slopes of hill and mountain, are depended on to give the country the moisture that is the only thing needed to make it blossom into the garden it was when Moses looked down upon it from the top of Mount Nebo and saw the promise of Jehovah fulfilled.

... How different is that picture now, which the observer can see from the same mountain top, or from one of the hills just outside Jerusalem, where, according to Dr. Simon Lowenstein, one of the American Red Cross commissioners to Palestine, one can look over the country to the Mediterranean Sea on one side and to the Red Sea on the other! "Palestine," he says. "is now a tragically barren land. One can walk for miles without seeing a tree or a shrub large enough to cast any shade, and yet this land of our ancient fathers was and can become again an agricultural paradise." It is largely the destruction of the forests that retained and fed out to Palestine the waters that made it fertile, which is the cause of its present aridity.

The effect of the destruction of trees upon a land is too well known to need detailing. Forest masses act not only as reservoirs for rain, but as one of the causes of precipitation. The rainfall soaks into the ground and is retained by the roots, finding its way gradually into brook and stream. Besides this, a gradual evaporation is caused from which comes humidity to be in due course condensed into .storm and shower. When trees are ruthlessly cleared away the rain either soaks rapidly through the ground or is carried off at once along anything which provides a watercourse.

For hundreds of years Turkish misgovernment caused the land to be stripped of its natural resources in the way of lumber. But during the war this process of deforestation went on at a tremendous rate. Dr. Lowenstein, before quoted, and Dr. John H. Flnley, his associate in the Red Cross Commission to Palestine, says of this:  "The process of deforestation was tremendously accelerated during the great war. Whole sections of Palestine were cleared of livestock and trees. The Mount of Olives is almost denuded. In some quarters of Bethlehem and other communities the people burned everything they could spare."

While the plan of irrigation is still in abeyance, that of reforestation is in actual effect. In various favorable sections, nursery gardens have been planted. Almost a quarter of a million timber and fruit trees have been set out and are growing upon the barren mountain slopes. Upon these slopes occur pockets of earth debris, left behind by the rushing floods of the winter rains. Not only do these provide excellent planting spaces, but by growing in them the trees the area of fertility is enlarged by the action of the roots in breaking up the stony soil.

Concerning the wanton destruction of trees during the war, "Palestine," an Arabic journal published in Jerusalem, recounts with bitterness the repressive measures of the Turks and Germans before the liberation of the country in cutting down the olive trees for fuel for the railroads. It tells how the owners of the ancient trees, the "blessed" trees, watched the process of cutting with streaming eye and fainting hearts.

When the Turkish officers were replaced by Germans, the paper says, their hopes rose that the remaining trees would be spared. But instead of clean, cutting steel which left a stump which might sprout again, dynamite was employed, utterly destroying the roots, among which the destructive energy was placed. The account closed with a well-known Arabic proverb, "'After I avenged myself upon Omar, I wept for Omar.' The Turk was more merciful than the German." 

The roses of Sharon have all been dead for long the plain that was once so fragrant with them being now, for almost eight months in the year, little better than a dusty desert, but under enlightened control of the country these roses will bloom again..
It is clear that the reforestation of the land was only of areas that were not being farmed because they were barren. There were no farms, no crops, in these areas. The British didn't confiscate land that was legally owned or actively farmed. 

The Arab population welcomed the plans, including the Mufti who preceded the antisemitic Mufti Husseini. 

But what about the terrace farming? Isn't that Palestinian?

Those specific terraces may have been built by local Arabs, but the idea pre-dates them by many centuries. The Mishna (gathered and written from the first to third century CE) lays out the laws of the sabbatical "shemitta" year, and says that building terraces ("steps") in the hills is not allowed to support farming on the seventh year:


The Hebrew word used for "steps" is "madregot" - almost certainly the source for the Arabic "mudrajat" mentioned in Haaretz as proof of the Palestinian origins of the methods.  

So literally everything being claimed by the Palestinians now about these forests is a lie. It was not their innovation, Jews didn't plant trees to erase them but to save local farming, and the Arab leaders at the time supported the reforestation plan to counter the damage done under Ottoman Muslim rule. 

Not only are today's Palestinians lying, but they are celebrating the destruction of forests in Israel and the environmental damage that results. When it comes down to it, all their moral posturing and supposed love of the land is outweighed by their immense hate of Jews. 





Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

  • Thursday, November 21, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon
Today, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.

The arrest warrants are classified as ‘secret’, in order to protect witnesses and to safeguard the conduct of the investigations. However, the Chamber decided to release the information below since conduct similar to that addressed in the warrant of arrest appears to be ongoing. Moreover, the Chamber considers it to be in the interest of victims and their families that they are made aware of the warrants’ existence.  

Even that justification is antisemitic. The court is stating that Israel would assassinate anyone who testified to its alleged crimes. 

The details they do give are filled with easily provable lies and the outrageous implication that if they only had a little more evidence, they could also charge Netanyahu with "extermination."

Showing that they are liars requires only one proof.  Here's what they say about medicines into Gaza:
The Chamber considered that there are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity, from at least 8 October 2023 to 20 May 2024. 
UNRWA's database of incoming items into Gaza show that 1,409 trucks entered Gaza under the category of medicines, medical supplies and similar between October 8 and May 20.  The total amount classified under those categories add up to 31,474 pallets of items. (Some of them were mixed with other supplies like food or beds but most of them were exclusively medical supplies.)

Here is a small sample from the last week of December.


Thousands of those pallets came through Kerem Shalom. Every one of these trucks was coordinated between Israel and the NGOs listed. It is ludicrous - and slanderous - to claim that the thousands of man-hours Israel worked to facilitate medicines (and food and other supplies) into Gaza are part of an effort to exterminate Gazans, or merely an effort to appease Western governments.

Moreover, we know that Hamas was confiscating the medical and other supplies that came from Egypt and then selling them to those in need, to bankroll its aggression.

While all of the ICC charges are disgusting lies, this is enough to prove that they know that they are lying. And as such the court loses any claims to have any interest in justice.

Quite the contrary. It allows its own antisemitism to override the truth. Which makes the ICC profoundly unjust and in fact a source of bigotry. 




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

  • Thursday, November 21, 2024
  • Elder of Ziyon


On May 3, the UN OCHA announced that the number of missing persons in Gaza jumped from 7,000 to 10,000, quoting Hamas.

As I showed then, the number had been exactly 7,000 for five months. 

The number of people said to be missing under the rubble remained at 10,000 for the past six months according to Hamas and therefore according to UN-OCHA. 

Could 10,000 people really be buried under the rubble for six months? None of them have been dug out by their families? 

This week, Hamas apparently decided that this statistic was getting old. In its latest dump of made-up statistics, it now claims 11,000 people missing in Gaza under the rubble.

In general, Gazans are no longer in buildings. No on is being buried under rubble nowadays, except perhaps in tunnels. Israel has not been doing massive airstrikes on buildings for many months. There is no way the number of missing is increasing.

The previously made-up 10,000 number has been repeated mindlessly as fact by Turkish news agencies, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Amnesty International (saying they were "presumed dead,") Yahoo News ("according to health authorities,") the Washington Post ("local authorities estimate") and WHO (no caveats).

Once again, there is no source for these numbers. None. No one even knows how these numbers are estimated. 

Hamas literally makes then up. And the media and NGOs treat them as if they have legitimacy, even when they pretend to be objective by adding "according to authorities." 





Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Why they refuse to see Jews as victims
It was the speed with which the racism fearmongers became racism deniers that was most unnerving. Virtually overnight, as men whose only crime was their Jewishness were still being patched up in Amsterdam hospitals, the preening racism denouncers of what passes for the Euro-left were saying this wasn’t racism. The very people who see racism everywhere could not see it here, in the broken teeth, black eyes and bloodied faces of Israelis who became the prey of a self-described Jew hunt earlier this month in Amsterdam. Confronted with beaten, bruised Jews, they said, for the first time I can remember, ‘Maybe it wasn’t a hate crime. Maybe it was something else.’

It has been extraordinary. The people who wring their hands over the racial microaggression of asking a woman in African garb ‘Where are you from?’ were positively blasé about the racial macroaggression of a mob smashing in a man’s face because he ‘helped a Jew’. The people who cry ‘Islamophobia!’ when a schoolkid lightly scuffs a page of the Koran struggled to see the Judeaophobia in a gang of self-styled Jew-hunters accosting men and asking them: ‘Are you Yehudi? Are you Jewish?’ The people who madly insist that every tabloid piss-take of Meghan Markle is an act of unforgivable ‘racist bullying’ refused to accept that ‘Jew hunters’ on mopeds who fired fireworks at Israelis might have been racist bullies.

The zeal of the downplayers felt alarming. There are prominent British and American leftists who for a whole week devoted every waking hour to disproving the claim that Israeli Jews were the victims of a mass, coordinated racist attack. The moral energy they normally reserve for proving that the West is institutionally racist they now expended on proving that a pogrom did not take place in Amsterdam. That was their main beef: the use of that p-word by Dutch and Israeli politicians, Jewish groups and sections of the media. ‘There were no “anti-Semitic pogroms” in Amsterdam’, they cried, as noisily as they normally cry that racism is the disease our societies will never shake off.

On the rubble of the ‘pogrom’ – their scare quotes – that they feverishly rebutted, they built a new narrative. It was the visiting Israeli Jews, the brutes and bigots who support Maccabi Tel Aviv, who really instigated the violence. They were the real racists. They brought the ‘spirit of Israeli facism’ to Amsterdam. It was these ‘marauding gangs’ of foreign fans who carried out a ‘racist rampage’, cried the BDS movement. They tore down a Palestinian flag, they made offensive anti-Arab chants – ‘incitement to genocide’. These thugs embody ‘the most fascistic, right-wing, racist, misogynist elements of Israeli political culture’, said one observer. The Israeli disease, infecting Europe.

And in this retelling, in this ruthless confiscation of the rights of victimhood from the Israelis battered for being Israelis, the ‘Jew hunt’ came to be reimagined as ‘street justice’. That’s how one left-wing commentator in the UK referred to the hunting and assaulting of the visiting fans – these ‘notoriously thuggish’ football followers started a fight in the Dutch capital and ‘the street justice [was] swift’. You know who else thought that beating Jews to a pulp was a ‘just’ response to alleged misbehaviour by other members of their ‘race’? I’m not even going to say. It’s too easy.

It has added up to one of the most pitiless dismantlings of a people’s experience of racism that I can remember. The very activist class that insists we respect the ‘truth’ of what ethnic-minority people tell us were now giddily shredding the truth of what happened on the streets of Amsterdam, of this jodenjacht organised via Telegram and visited on anyone in the city that night who looked Israeli or Jewish or who just helped a Jew. And here’s the worst thing: the dismantling has been successful. These radicals’ jealous, furious chipping away at the Israeli Jews’ experience of racial hatred has had the desired effect: more people are backing off from the word pogrom. Now even the political class and media elites wonder out loud if it was just a scrap, no big deal, nothing to trouble the history books with.
Kassy Akiva: Ketanji Brown Jackson To Headline Event Featuring Activists Who Justified October 7
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is set to headline a conference in Boston this week that will also feature activists who justified Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

Jackson will deliver a Thursday keynote address at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention. Representing educators from K-12 to college, the 100-year-old organization adopted a 2017 vision calling on members to “apply the power of language and literacy to actively pursue justice and equity.”

The four-day-long convention, which has the theme “Heart, Hope, Humanity,” will also include Sawsan Jaber and Hannah Moushabeck, two activists who have been outspoken in justifying Hamas’s October 7 attack multiple times.

Jackson faced criticism during her confirmation hearings for her membership in Harvard’s Black Student Association, which invited anti-Semitic speaker Leonard Jeffries to speak during her time at the school. Jackson told Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-NC) that she did not attend Jeffries’ speech and does not share his views.

Mika Hackner, a Senior Research Associate for the Jewish Institute For Liberal Values, said it is “distasteful and unconscionable” that NCTE put Jackson in a position where she will be appearing at an event with anti-Israel activists.

“A Supreme Court justice, a representative of the highest court in our land, charged with protecting the laws and values of our liberal democracy, should not be sharing any kind of engagement or platform with activists who promote the view that Hamas are “legitimate resistance,” Hackner said.

Hackner noted that several sessions as a whole focus on “using education as a tool of social justice activism.”
Canadian-Israeli philanthropist Sylvan Adams challenges Roger Waters to debate
Roger Waters, co-founder of the renowned British rock group Pink Floyd, who has become notorious for his outspoken anti-Israel and antisemitic statements in recent years, may have met his match in Sylvan Adams, the noted Canadian-Israeli philanthropist who made aliyah in 2015 who bills himself as Israel’s “self-appointed ambassador-at-large.”

In October, Adams appeared on the CJN Daily podcast of the Canadian Jewish News, in which he discussed the anti-Israel protests that took place at McGill University in Montreal and the defacement of the $30 million Sylvan Adams Sports Science Institute which he donated to the school – the largest-ever gift to a Canadian university campus.

In the course of the podcast, Adams, who has long promoted Israel to the world through sports, music, and culture, expressed an interest in initiating a commemorative concert after the Swords of Iron War that would feature the two remaining members of Pink Floyd – who have repudiated Waters’ antisemitic views – and Irish musician Bono, who condemned the October 7 attack.

Ideally, he said, the concert would be held in Re’im, where hundreds of Israeli youth were massacred at the Nova Music Festival on October 7.

In response to Adams’ podcast, Waters penned an article that appeared on a progressive Canadian website called “rabble,” in which he termed Adams a “looney Zionist billionaire who thinks that he can reunite Pink Floyd to promote and celebrate the genocide of the Palestinian people.” He called Adams a “racist supremacist” and suggested that he lacked the courage to participate in a debate to discuss whether Israel’s actions in the war could be defined as genocidal.

Waters also accused Adams of bringing Madonna and the Argentine national soccer team to appear in Israel as an attempt to “whitewash Israeli apartheid.”

Speaking with the Jerusalem Post, Adams said, “He accuses me of being a looney Zionist billionaire. I don’t think I’m looney, and I don’t think that being called a Zionist is an insult. I think that Zionism, the love of our Jewish homeland of Israel, and appreciation for our 3,500-year magnificent journey is a beautiful story of a persecuted yet indestructible people who achieved something seemingly impossible by returning home. If Roger Waters thinks that Zionism is a dirty word, I vehemently disagree. It’s simple Jewish nationalism for our homeland of Israel. Not only am I not ashamed, I’m extremely proud and proud to call myself a Zionist.”
From Ian:

Another Report from Human Rights Watch: Ignore Hamas, Blame Israel
On November 14, Human Rights Watch released a report titled “Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged,” which accuses Israel of numerous war crimes in Gaza.

The report is based primarily on interviews with 39 Gaza residents, along with analysis of photographs, satellite imagery, and evacuation orders the IDF published on social media.

Of course the war has caused tremendous suffering for Gaza. While fighting against Hamas in a densely urban setting makes this largely inevitable, Israel should not be immune from scrutiny as to whether it has done enough to respect the rights of Gaza civilians. So investigation and analysis of Israel’s conduct is certainly in order.

However, as we’ve unfortunately become accustomed to from Human Rights Watch, this report is biased against Israel at every turn.

Standard of Perfection
Humanitarian law is extraordinarily demanding in the protections it affords civilians — so much so, that no army has ever succeeded at upholding humanitarian law completely. In fact, most do a terrible job. A reasonable question might be to ask how Israel’s humanitarian score compares with other Western nations in their own recent conflicts. But Human Rights Watch holds Israel to a standard of complete perfection — any time Israel falls the slightest bit short of what they believe humanitarian law requires, no matter how impossible the situation, this report immediately accuses Israel of a war crime.

For example, in declaring most evacuations of civilians illegal, the report says, “failure to ensure the security and the guarantee of protections of displaced persons as they fled and in the places to which they were displaced would still render the displacement unlawful.”

In other words, the IDF told civilians to leave a residential area where it was planning to operate against Hamas missiles and tunnels, where they would be in enormous danger should they remain.

But even though evacuation was clearly a good idea and would make them much, much safer, since Israel couldn’t guarantee that they would be completely safe while traveling and at their destination, Human Rights Watch says the evacuation was a war crime.

But how can anywhere in Gaza be completely safe, with Hamas popping up all over? This demand that Israel ensure complete safety for evacuees is impossible, and that would be the case for any other army as well.

The report even criticizes Israel for this: “The evacuation orders also failed to take into account the needs of people with disabilities, many of whom are unable to leave without assistance.”

Of course it would be best if Gaza residents had plenty of time to leave in an organized fashion, with special consideration for those with disabilities. But rockets were raining down on Israel’s cities, with hostages languishing in captivity and Israeli soldiers in danger of attack by Hamas as they wait. Human Rights Watch makes it sound as if Palestinian civilians are the only ones whose rights need to be considered. They’re not.
It Is Time for Qatar to Choose a Side: The United States or Terror Groups
For the sake of peace and stability in the Middle East, it is vital that the United States drastically change its relations with Qatar. Qatar has long played a double game, seeking good relations with the United States while maintaining ties — if not support — for its adversaries. That pattern appears to be repeating itself again, with competing reports about whether the leadership of the terrorist group Hamas will continue to be welcome to live in Doha.

It is vital that the United States convince Qatar to play it straight, and cut off political and financial support for Hamas while increasing accountability.

Earlier this month, Biden administration officials claimed that Qatar was evicting Hamas from the country. But, just days later, the Qatari Foreign Ministry strongly denied those reports. Instead, Qatar said it was suspending its role as a mediator in hostage and ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas.

Yet, an Arab diplomat told The Times of Israel that last week senior Hamas officials left Qatar for Turkey, a NATO ally that also risks running afoul of Washington if it provides safe harbor to terrorists.

Amid this confusion, it is not clear what exactly is taking place: has Qatar actually expelled Hamas’ leadership, but is denying it to save face publicly? Would Doha welcome these officials back if they agree to negotiate? Which Hamas members, if any, still reside in Qatar?

Whatever is happening behind the scenes, the ambiguity of the current situation is representative of Qatar’s broader strategy to play all sides and keep everyone guessing regarding its loyalties and interests. Thus, while it hosts, and helps pay for, the largest US military base in the Middle East at al Udeid, Qatar has also provided a haven and financial support to radical groups, terrorist organizations, and American adversaries such as the Taliban, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood, while maintaining good relations with Iran.

Doha portrays its refusal to choose sides as a strategic asset, not only for itself but for others as well. For example, Qatari officials have claimed that allowing Hamas officials to reside on its territory is a selfless investment in diplomacy. Qatari Defense Minister Khalid bin Mohammed al-Attiyah explained that Hamas officials would remain in Doha “not because we want Hamas to stay in Qatar, but because we want to facilitate the negotiations with the parties through the organization’s office.”

Yet, there is good reason to be skeptical of these claims of Qatari neutrality and magnanimity.



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

When Donald Trump won the election, there was great relief in Israel, something like a collective sigh. There was also anxiety. It’s a long time until January, and we don’t know how much longer the hostages can hang on. But there was, and is, a further cause for anxiety, and that concerns Trump’s cabinet picks, which here in Israel we can’t help but think: are these anointed ones good or bad for the Jews and for Israel?

Matt Gaetz

We might as well begin our examination with Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, a bad choice by all accounts. Gaetz has what we call in Hebrew, “panim doresh steerot,” a face that needs slapping. There is a lot of noise about his sexual peccadilloes, corruption, and illicit drug use. We remember how Gaetz forced Kevin McCarthy out of his role as House speaker. It’s not as if Gaetz didn’t have plenty of support for the ousting of McCarthy. Nonethless, McCarthy insisted that Gaetz had led the charge against him specifically to wiggle out of an ethics investigation:

“I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker. Because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old, an ethics complaint that started before I ever became speaker. And that’s illegal and I’m not gonna get in the middle of it.

“Now, did he do it or not? I don’t know. But ethics was looking at it. There’s other people in jail because of it. And he wanted me to influence it.”

Indeed there are plenty of reasons to dislike Gaetz, but from the standpoint of the Jewish people, the main issue should be his horrid antisemitsm. Gaetz voted against the Antisemitism Awareness Act, saying that International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism would hold the bible itself as antisemitic because, Gaetz claimed, Christian scripture dictates that the Jews are responsible for Jesus’s death.

Um no. That would be the Romans. Which makes Gaetz a horrible person for pinning this death on the Jews. It’s that kind of slander that leads and has always led, to the letting of Jewish blood. There can be no benign reason for an educated person to say such things. Matt Gaetz hates Jews.

“This evening, I will vote AGAINST the ridiculous hate speech bill called the ‘Antisemitism Awareness Act,’” said Gaetz prior to the vote. “Antisemitism is wrong, but this legislation is written without regard for the Constitution, common sense, or even the common understanding of the meaning of words. The Gospel itself would meet the definition of antisemitism under the terms of this bill!”

Matt Gaetz, in addition to blaming the Jews for what the Romans did, invited Charles Johnson, a Holocaust denier and white nationalist, to be his guest at a 2018 State of the Union address. Gaetz claimed he hadn’t know these things about Johnson, then subsequently defended him, and denied the accusations. Johnson, said Gaetz, is “not a Holocaust denier. He’s not a white supremacist.” But Johnson is both.

When crazy Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene compared COVID public safety measures to the Holocaust, Gaetz defended her. “[Greene] defends Israel and attacks Democrats. Media falsely slams [Greene] as antisemitic. Some Republicans take the bait, sadly,” said Gaetz.

Our attorney general-to-be has been known to hire staff members who hang with white nationalists, and say white nationalist things. He called the ADL “racist” when that body called for Tucker Carlson to be fired from Fox News on account of Carlson pushing the Great Replacement theory. Matt Gaetz said that Carlson is “CORRECT about Replacement Theory.”

The Great Replacement theory, as described by the ADL, “claims there is an intentional effort, led by Jews, to promote mass non-white immigration, inter-racial marriage, and other efforts that would lead to the ‘extinction of whites.’”

RFK Jr.

Moving along, we come to RFK Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. RFK Jr. is another one for conspiracy theories. While dining with journalists, Bobby Kennedy Jr. aired a nutty conspiracy theory positing that COVID was designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.

“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact,” said Kennedy, who also claimed that vaccine mandates made people less free than Anne Frank under Nazi rule.

After the footage was leaked, Kennedy went into damage control mode, claiming that he never EVER suggested the virus was designed to spare Jews.

“I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews,” wrote Kennedy. “I accurately pointed out — during an off-the-record conversation — that the US and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021 study of the COVID-19 virus shows that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races since the furin cleave docking site is most compatible with Blacks and Caucasians and least compatible with ethnic Chinese, Finns and Ashkenazi Jews.”

RFK Jr.’s friendship with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was cemented through just such views as these. Bobby Jr. in fact, called Farrakhan a “truly great partner” for helping him spread the idea that vaccines cause autism. Andrew Wakefield, now disgraced, concocted this “theory” in 1998 and was subsequently exposed as a fraud. When COVID hit, Farrakhan urged his congregants to "follow Robert Kennedy," claiming that scientists developed the coronavirus vaccine in order to "depopulate the Earth."

If RFK Jr. and Farrakhan agree on these nutty conspiracy theories, what other views might they share in common?

Of course, RFK Jr. was wise to quickly disavow his affinity for Farrakhan the antisemite at the outset of his presidential campaign. When asked about the relationship between during his campaign, Kennedy said he is an “opponent” of Farrakhan and "never endorsed anything that Louis Farrakhan has said," which of course, is a lie.

Should Jews look the other way on RFK Jr.? Perhaps. Bobby Jr., speaking to Reuters, expressed support for Israel’s fight against Hamas in Gaza, and for the return of the hostages. Asked if he was in favor of a temporary Gaza ceasefire, Kennedy said, "I don't even know what that means right now," commenting that every previous ceasefire was “used by Hamas to rearm, to rebuild and then launch another surprise attack. So what would be different this time?

"Any other nation that was adjacent to a neighboring nation that was bombing it with rockets, sending commandos over to murder its citizens, pledging itself to murder every person in that nation and annihilate it, would go and level it with aerial bombardment," said Kennedy.

"But Israel is a moral nation. So it didn't do that. Instead, it built an iron dome to protect itself so it would not have to go into Gaza," he added.

Nutty conspiracy theories notwithstanding, so far Bobby Jr. sounds okay on Israel. Perhaps he inherited his views from his father? Bobby Sr. spent time in Pre-State Israel, reporting for the Boston Post and was kindly disposed toward the Jews, and supported their efforts at statehood. Unfortunately, he was murdered because of this support.

Tulsi Gabbard

We come next to Tulsi Gabbard, who is to be national intelligence secretary. It’s hard to dislike Gabbard. She’s a serious person, and is unafraid to change her mind when changing her mind is called for. But she backed the Iran deal, and that’s a huge problem. Gabbard also voted against a House resolution to condemn the U.N. Security Council resolution regarding Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria, saying, "While I remain concerned about aspects of the U.N. resolution, I share the Obama administration's reservation about the harmful impact Israeli settlement activity has on the prospects for peace."

Seriously?? Jews building homes has a harmful impact on “prospects for peace?” That’s just reprehensibly antisemitic, and I don’t care how popular it has become to repeat the canard that Jewish families building homes, threaten peace. It’s a disgusting and stupid thing to say no matter how many people say it and no matter how often it is said. It’s just, pardon my French, total crap.

I hope that Gabbard will now be able to take a step back and examine the issue from a more commonsense position with good people to take her through it. Maybe now, as part of the Trump cabinet, she’ll educate herself on Israel. In her past, however, she has taken some problematic positions.

Gabbard defended Ilhan Omar, for example, when Omar tweeted that US support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins.” Speaking to CNN, Gabbard said, "There are people who have expressed their offense at these statements. I think that what Congresswoman Omar was trying to get at was a deeper issue related to our foreign policy, and I think there's an important discussion that we have to be able to have openly, even though we may end up disagreeing at the end of it, but we've got to have that openness to have the conversation."

Gabbard also voted for House Resolution 246, which expressed House opposition to the BDS movement and affirmed support for a two-state solution. When asked to explain her vote, Gabbard said she supported "a two-state solution that provides for the rights of both Israel and Palestine to exist, and for their people to live in peace, with security, in their homes. I don't believe the BDS movement is the only or best way to accomplish that. However, I will continue to defend those who choose to exercise their right to free speech without threat of legal action."

The two-state solution is a naïve and unworkable concept, and always was. Neither of the parties want it. So why do pols continue to push the two-state solution down the throats of people who do not want it, and do not see it as the solution it is touted to be? Why does Tulsi Gabbard, who is clearly a clear-thinking person, think the two-state solution makes any sense at all?

There can only be two reasons for supporting the two-state solution: 1) Anti-Jewish prejudice, that is to say, a desire to take land away from the Jews and give it to the people who want to kill them, and 2) Ignorance on the part of people who have never actually studied the matter. “Two-state solution” is just something people say. Endlessly. Meaninglessly. One would hope that Tulsi would know better.

But we have all watched Tulsi Gabbard evolve in her politics. We watched her leave the Democratic Party, become an Independent, and finally, become a staunch, pro-Trump Republican. Perhaps Tulsi’s views will evolve on Israel and antisemitism.

There is reason to be optimistic about Gabbard. Tulsi Gabbard criticized Biden and Harris for not joining a solidarity March for Israel as the Jewish State fights the war forced on it by Hamas. She is clear in that she supports a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. When Gabbard was still a Democrat, in 2015, unlike 58 other Dems, she did not boycott Netanyahu’s address to Congress, stating that “It’s unfortunate that an issue as important as preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons has been muddled by partisan politics. This is an extremely serious issue, at a critical juncture, that should not be used as a political football.”

Gabbard also said that it was important to “rise above the political fray, as America continues to stand with Israel as her strongest ally.”

Nice words and a real show of support for Israel.

Mike Huckabee and Pete Hegseth

Now we come to Mike Huckabee and Pete Hegseth. I know what you’re going to say. Why are they included in this list of potentially problematic Trump candidate members? Both are staunch friends of Israel. They don’t fall prey to propaganda, don’t use terms like “Palestinian” or “West Bank.” They don’t have a problem with Jewish sovereignty, or Jews building homes in their indigenous territory.

Take for example Mike Huckabee, who is slated to become the next ambassador to Israel. Asked whether he would stop using the terms “Judea and Samaria” to describe what most of the world now calls the “West Bank,” Huckabee said, “I can’t be what I’m not. I can’t say something I don’t believe. As you well know, I’ve never been willing to use the term ‘West Bank’. There is no such thing. I speak of Judea and Samaria. I tell people there is no ‘occupation.’ It is a land that is ‘occupied’ by the people who have had a rightful deed to the place for 3,500 years, since the time of Abraham.

“A lot of the terms that maybe the media would use, even the people who are against Israel would use, are not terms that I employ, because I want to use terms that live from time immemorial, and those are the terms like ‘Promised Land’ and ‘Judea and Samaria’. These are biblical terms, and those are important to me, and so I will continue to follow that nomenclature unless I’m instructed otherwise, but I don’t think that’ll happen.”

Huckabee has also said plainly that there is “no such thing as a ‘Palestinian.’” Being that there was never an Arab state called “Palestine,” that makes perfect sense. As Huckabee rightly stated during his 2008 failed presidential campaign, the assertion of the existence of a “Palestinian” identity, is only “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.”

So far, there is not one thing here with which this writer disagrees.

Of the moronic idea known as the “two-state solution,” Huckabee commented in a 2015 interview on Israeli TV, that it is “irrational and unworkable,” and also said that “there’s plenty of land” outside of Israel in the “rest of the world” for a Palestinian state.

All true.

Pete Hegseth, picked for secretary of defense, says all the right things when it comes to Israel. At a 2018 Israel National News conference Hegseth spoke of the right of the Jewish people to claim their indigenous territory for themselves, and themselves alone.

"I, and others, had a chance to go see the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Western Wall Tunnels, and so much of the Old City," said Hegseth. "When you stand there, you cannot help but behold the miracle before you."

"It got me thinking about another miracle I hope all of you don't see as too far away. 1917 was a miracle, 1948 was a miracle, 1967 was a miracle, 2017, the declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a miracle, and there's no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible. I don't know how it would happen, you don't know how it would happen, but I know that it could happen, that's all I know," he said.

"A step in that process is the recognition that facts and activities on the ground truly matter. That's why going to visit Judea and Samaria, understanding that the very sovereignty over Israeli soil, cities, locations, is a critical next step to showing the world that this is the land for Jews, and the land of Israel," concluded Hegseth.

So why are Mike Huckabee and Pete Hegseth included in an article on Trump cabinet picks who might not be good for the Jews/Israel? Both men are respectful of Jewish beliefs and rights. That respect springs out of their Christian faith, which is fine. What would not be fine is if either the two men or Israeli officials began to speak about “shared values” or “Judeo-Christian values,” as if that were a thing.

Judaism stands alone. We Jews have our own faith, our own laws, and a religious narrative we do not share with Christians or those of other faiths. We should not want Christians telling us they are like us, and we should not want Israeli leaders to do so, either. That should be and must be a red line that is respected on both sides.

We can see the good in these two men without searching for nonexistent religious common ground. It is hoped that Huckabee and Hegseth understand these sensitivities and will remain as respectful to the Jewish people as ever. On the other hand, will official Israel be able to control itself—to refrain from slobbering over these men? It’s a problem.

It is so rare for Israel to have staunch friends, people who understand us, and believe in our right to our rights. Their sincere friendship makes us Jews feel like we actually belong to the family of man—at last there is someone who sees us.

Within this warm circle of cozy coexistence lies a temptation—the temptation to assert that we are alike. But we are not, and it is wrong to say otherwise. Hegseth, despite the allegations against him in the media, seems like a nice person. Huckabee, too. And that’s where the similarities start and end.



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

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