Biden's message to terrorists and dictators worldwide: Use human shields to defend yourselves

From CNN:

President Joe Biden said for the first time Wednesday he would halt some shipments of American weapons to Israel – which he acknowledged have been used to kill civilians in Gaza – if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a major invasion of the city of Rafah.

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett in an exclusive interview on “Erin Burnett OutFront,” referring to 2,000-pound bombs that Biden paused shipments of last week.

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” Biden said.

The president’s announcement that he was prepared to condition American weaponry on Israel’s actions amounts to a turning point in the seven-month conflict between Israel and Hamas. And his acknowledgement that American bombs had been used to kill civilians in Gaza was a stark recognition of the United States’ role in the war. 

He said he had conveyed to Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that American support for operations in population centers was limited.

“I’ve made it clear to Bibi and the war cabinet: They’re not going to get our support, if in fact they go on these population centers,” he said.

Most people commenting on this are concentrating on the political aspect, as it signals a serious rift in US-Israel relations. 

Far more important is that this policy shift, if applied uniformly, would not save lives nearly as much as it further endangers civilians.

The message that Hamas, ISIS and every terror group and autocratic regime like Iran is hearing is that human shields are a legitimate and impregnable defense, one that Western countries cannot counter. As long as terrorists and their enablers place their military assets in the midst of civilian areas, they are untouchable.

This has never been the US position. Nor is it the position of most Western democracies, nor is it the position of international law. Civilians are protected by the principle of distinction between military and civilian objects, and the principle of proportionality to limit damage to civilians and civilian objects as much as possible while attacking valid military objectives. And as we have seen, Israel is more restrictive on calculating proportionality to protect civilians than international law requires. 

Every civilian death in Gaza is the result of Hamas choosing to hide behind and underneath civilians. If Hamas separated every military object from civilians as international law requires, there would not be a single civilian death in Gaza. The implication that Israel is not being careful enough in protecting civilian life when Hamas is cynically using them as its own Iron Dome is slanderous.

Destroying Hamas is a valid, moral and necessary military objective. But Biden is proposing an alternative that he claims, without any evidence, would accomplish the same goal: assassinating Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

“I said to Bibi, ‘Don’t make the same mistake we made in America. We wanted to get bin Laden. We’ll help you get Sinwar,’” he said, referring to the Hamas leader in Gaza. “It made sense to get bin Laden; it made no sense to try and unify Afghanistan. It made no sense in my view to engage in thinking that in Iraq they had a nuclear weapon.”

Yet even though President Obama prioritized killing Osama bin Laden, he didn't abandon the major aim of destroying Al Qaeda altogether. He said in 2009, “Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.” And even after killing Bin Laden, he said, "We must finish the work of defeating al Qaeda and its associated forces." Killing Bin Laden was important but not sufficient to eliminate the threat against US civilians. 

Why is the US morally obligated to destroy Al Qaeda but Israel has no right to do what is necessary to destroy Hamas? Why is the US pushing Israel to stop the war and allow Hamas to survive, where it can declare victory, rebuild, attract more members and allies and strengthen Iran's "axis of resistance" that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean?

Biden's message is that terrorists have a "get out of jail free" card: Surround themselves with civilians and live to kill another day. 

With the full support of the United States.

This policy runs counter to the United States' own historic policy towards terror groups. It is paternalistic, telling Israelis who are directly threatened by Islamist terror in their own cities  that the US knows what they need to do better than they do. Not only that, but it is not even effective: it endangers the very civilians that Biden is pretending to care about because it encourages other groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah to actively position their missiles and members among and underneath schools and mosques and hospitals even more than they already are.

Encouraging immoral acts in the name of morality is nothing but hypocrisy. 

---

---

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!

 

President of SUNY Purchase College caves to antisemitic bullies

Anti-Israel protesters at Purchase College celebrated as they announced that the president of the college, Milagros (Milly) Peña, had caved to every single demand they made.

Over the weekend, it appeared that the college administration  was growing a small backbone in the face of disruptive protests:

SUNY Purchase released a statement, saying students participating in protests were reminded over the past several days that they may assemble protests, vigils, rallies and other free speech activities but only up to the start of quiet hours.

In a statement the school said in part, "Quiet hours are especially important during finals as they respect the rights of Purchase students to sleep, prepare for finals, and complete their final projects."

The statement went on to say, "Protestors were also invited multiple times to meet with the president and cabinet members to voice their concerns, as long as campus rules were followed, including dispersing at midnight from the protest last night. The protestors chose not to take the offer."

But all of that meant nothing, Pena met with the group, "Raise the Consciousness" - which is not a recognized campus student group - and the group announced last night that "we got every single demand!"

“After five-and-a-half hours of negotiating, after five days of working in an encampment at SUNY Purchase for the freedom of Palestine, we were able to get Mili Pena to agree to all of our demands in some capacity and we were able to get everything we wanted,” the speaker says.

Milly Pena

That was an exaggeration, but not much of one. Pena released a statement describing what the college agreed to with the illegal student group:

A commitment that a committee of students will meet with the relevant board to discuss ethical investing;

A commitment to hold in abeyance any disciplinary consequences for those arrested on 5/2 contingent on the students committing no further actions that go against the student code of conduct or local, state, or campus policies;

A commitment to a full review of the incidents of 5/2 by an entity outside of the campus;

A commitment to transparency regarding the companies that engage in business with Purchase College;

In the coming days I will share my thoughts with the campus community recognizing the loss of all innocent lives and how we can further the cause of lasting peace.

Our progress together must be built on a relationship of trust. As was clear from the email from Faculty Presiding Officer Andrew Salomon below, at no point did the college agree to divest from Israel or take any ‘BDS action, (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) nor did we agree to any proposals beyond those described above.

 Why didn't the college agree to boycott Israel? 

Not because of academic freedom. Not because BDS is antisemitic. 

The reason is because New York State has laws against BDS by publicly funded institutions.

The president caving to the demands of students who treated the college with such disrespect is only the tip of the iceberg of the rot at Purchase College. 

The president of Hillel, Esti Heller, wrote a letter to President Pena describing how badly Jews have been treated on campus since October 7. It is a long read but very important.

To President Milagros "Milly" Pena: I have spoken to you many times before. I've met with you. You even came up to congratulate me at my senior showcase. I genuinely believed that we had a good relationship. As a Jewish leader through Hillel, StandWithUs, and the JewishOnCampus student union, I have talked to you countless times about providing a safer community for Jewish students since the first antisemitic incident of this year on September 20, and especially after October 7. Time and again, you assured me you would take action. Time and again, I received no follow up. 

I am writing to you now out of sheer disgust and disappointment at your appeasement of Raise the Consciousness (RTC) after the repeated disruptions, vandalism, and conduct violations they have committed throughout the year, while failing to give any measurable credence to the harassment and bullying consistently reported to you and your senior leadership. You have effectively rewarded bad behavior and offered nothing in the form of support or protection to victims under your purview who have repeatedly asked for your help. Despite all of this, while I was disappointed in your lack of action in support of Jewish students, I had been sure that you would not actively create a hostile environment for us. Now I see that I was wrong. 

Over the course of this year I have brought specific examples of antisemitism from student groups on campus, abuse of power and discrimination from within the student government, and harassment and demonization of Jewish students at Purchase College. I have informed you and your administrators about the organization Samidoun, which is banned in Germany for hosting anti-Jewish rallies and funding the terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), being invited to our campus. I sat with you as an elected student representative accused my friend and I, Hillel board members, of "controlling the student government;" a classic antisemitic trope which you failed to address in the moment, nor since that March 5 meeting. I have forwarded every recorded reference of "intifada", "from the river to the sea", and "isra-hell has got to go" documented from protests held on our campus. I have urged you to take action, whether by adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, providing bias training, or simply establishing a safe, moderated space for students of all backgrounds to respectfully discuss their opposing views. Your response to the vitriol that Jewish and Israeli students have been subjected to was to host a healing circle. Out of the approximately thirty students who showed up, only four were there to attend rather than protest. Those four students were all Hillel members. During this event we were jeered at by our peers, taken photos of, and tossed around like props for your photo opportunity. We received no follow up afterwards, even as we were told that we had blood on our hands by our peers. 

President Pena, my senior year should have been spent enjoying my last few moments on the Purchase College campus that I loved. Instead, I spent countless hours responding to antisemitic incidents, comforting Jewish students who were afraid to leave their dorms, and strategically planning a way forward as you refused to do for the affected Jewish students. In the past few days alone I have set aside all of my final exams in order to solely comfort my Jewish and Israeli peers as they navigated this new reality which you enabled; a reality in which their classmates can call for suicide bombings targeting them as well as the death of their ancestral homeland and/or home country with no consequences. I'd like to ask you, President Pena—is this what "think wide open", our school's motto, looks like? Your establishment of "free speech zones" in which these students can protest during finals week, in violation of your own campus policy, has created no go zones for Jewish students. The few of them that are left on campus have been forced to spend hours mapping out their route to class in order to avoid that area due to fear for their safety. Your leadership has caused an exodus of responsible Jewish students who have been unable to exercise their right to education in a safe environment. 

As much as I had faith in your leadership, despite many disappointing meetings throughout this year, I must say your decision making during this time has been nothing short of abysmal. The overwhelming and overly hostile force that you sent the encampment's way on Thursday night, leading to seventy arrests (several of whom were not participants in the protest), only led to an increased support for Raise the Consciousness. Your complete lack of response the following day when the encampment returned only emboldened them to become more radical in their actions. And now, your appeasement of their unrealistic, antisemitic, and illegal demands has shown this campus that as long as one is loud, any action is on the table. 

On Sunday morning at 4:00 am, after hours of calming Jewish and Israeli students, I sent you one last email urging you to take action. The student government, one you oversee, unanimously had approved a BDS resolution and condemned you for denouncing Hamas following the October 7 massacre. They then immediately began to endorse RTC and promote their events, despite the fact that they have never been a registered student organization. This action on account of the student government was exclusionary, divisive, and removed any pro Israel Jew or Israeli from the campus life at SUNY Purchase. I sent you a detailed account of what Jewish and Israeli students were going through. I called upon our past meetings, email exchanges, and begged you to prove to me that you were still an ally. To this day I have not received a response. Instead, I received an email detailing your negotiations with RTC and your agreements to discuss auditing campus vendors in alignment with their calls to divest. 

I have been a Jewish student at SUNY Purchase for four years. I have loved my time on this campus. I was proud of its diversity, commitment to the arts, and the many communities available for students. Now, on this day, I do not recognize it and cannot help but feel a profound sense of disillusionment. My senior year here has been marred by the specter of antisemitism, a scourge that has only grown in strength due to your consistent inaction. I carry with me the heavy weight of disappointment and betrayal, because despite my countless pleas and tireless advocacy, the safety and well-being of Jewish students have been delegitimized. My final days on this campus should have been filled with joy and celebration, but instead, they have been overshadowed by fear and uncertainty. I leave behind a community torn apart by hatred, where we have been forced to flee, to seek refuge elsewhere, because our voices went unheard and our safety was compromised. Until real action is taken to combat antisemitism, my faith in the integrity of this institution remains shattered, and I will continue in my unrelenting fear and concern for the future of Jewish and Israel students at Purchase. Ultimately, you had the power to stop this from happening. I hope you are asking yourself why you did not. 

Respectfully, Esti Heller 

The letter is chilling.

---

---

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!

 

05/08 Links Pt2: VDH: The End of Old Left-wing Mythologies; BBC (fake) News – written by terrorists; UNRWA caught stealing, selling humanitarian aid

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Biden’s Missed Opportunity

President Biden spoke late this morning at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on anti-Semitism, and while he missed the opportunity to deliver a still-needed rebuke to his own party, Biden did manage to avoid repeating the two biggest mistakes he’s made on this issue: the false equivalence and the “legitimate grievance” trap.

Last month, for example, he demonstrated both blunders in the same answer to a question about the anti-Semitic protesters at various U.S. college campuses: “I condemn the anti-semitic protests… I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

There, in one breath, the president gave equivalent condemnation of those committing anti-Jewish violence and those who lack sufficient empathy for the violent anti-Semitic protesters. Underlying it all is the idea that the protesters have a legitimate grievance with their victims.

It was the closest the president has come to his own “there are very fine people on both sides” moment.

Fact is, Jews are being openly harassed in the U.S. as retribution for something the protesters are falsely accusing the state of Israel of doing thousands of miles away. That’s it—that’s the whole scene. There is, in other words, no possible justification for the actions of these pro-Hamas extremists. There is no “both sides.”

Similarly, we all know exactly what Gaza has to do with the guy who threw a bottle at a Jewish man’s head at the Columbia gates and told him to “go back to Poland”: Nothing at all.

The examples go on for days, but the point is clear: Anti-Semitic violence as a response to the war in Gaza is indefensible on any level. Linking the two as some sort of cause-effect equation is nothing less than making anti-Semites’ arguments for them.

The Times centers Palestinians in coverage of Biden's Holocaust speech

However, why would Dawber expect the US president, in a speech commemorating the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, mention Palestinians?

There are many ways to read this, but, given the context, as well as having covered the journalist’s writing over the years, it seems to be a way of legitimising the odious canard that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. It also reflects a broader media pattern of centering Palestinians in articles about antisemitism, such as when reports on efforts to promote the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism includes complaints that IHRA will ‘silence’ Palestinian voices. This is particularly absurd narrative given that Palestinians are, based on polling, among most antisemitic people on the globe.

But, in the context of the war, the Times journalist’s framing also likely represents an effort to pushback at Biden’s correct assessment that, on Oct, 7, the Palestinian terror group which runs Gaza carried out the most lethal and barbaric (trigger warning) antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust.

In fact, Biden’s speech included the observation that “That [ancient antisemitic] hatred was brought to life on October 7th in 2023. On a sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist group Hamas unleashed the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” The president also said that “Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas’s appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews.”

Dawber’s insistence on downplaying antisemitism is also evident in a sentence further into the article:

Victor Davis Hanson: The End of Old Left-wing Mythologies

The current radical and often violent protests on mostly blue-state, supposedly elite campuses have exposed in toxic fashion what the left has become. And yet, in a paradoxical fashion, the campus insanity has offered the nation some moral clarity.

What’s surprising is not that the demonstrators are violent and nihilist, but that they are, on the one hand, so openly and crudely anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-American, and yet on the other hand, so passive-aggressive, narcissistic, and weepy.

Nevertheless, the antics of the campus cry-bullies have exploded myths that were for so long foisted on the American people by politicos and the media.

#1. Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic: We have been lectured ad nauseam that hating Israel has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. The last month has blown up that old shibboleth for good. The left makes no distinction in their eliminationist chants between Israel and Jews. “Go back to Poland” is a homonym for “From the River to the Sea.” Both are shorthand for eliminating Jews—aside from the explicit threats to kill Jews and occasional praise for Hitler and the Final Solution.

When pro-Hamas thugs chase Jews into libraries, block their entrances on campus, and scream “beat the Jew” as they hit piñatas, they do not first ask Jews whether they support Israel—because they could care less. For the Islamist Middle Easterner on a student visa or green card and his useful American student, it is enough that their targets are Jewish—period.

Remember, the protests started on October 7, not on October 27, when the IDF went into Gaza. At that point, campus and street protests merely changed from euphoric triumphalism on the news that Hamas had slaughtered, decapitated, mutilated, raped, or kidnapped hundreds of Jews (“exhilarated,” a Cornell professor gushed of the carnage), to furor and violence. So after three weeks of celebrating dead Jews, the street protests grew furious only when the IDF finally began fighting back and destroying Hamas, even as its terrorists cowardly hid beneath mosques, hospitals, and schools to ensure enough collateral damage to incite pro-Hamas Western throngs.

#2. Pro-Palestinian/Pro-Hamas: The left also blew up the ancient pretense that being “pro-Palestine” was not “pro-Hamas.” But the campus and street demonstrations now make no distinction between the two. The calls for the destruction of Israel and “death to America” come right out of the Hamas credo. Hamas (and Hezbollah as well) logos and flags are easy to find among the protestors. Interviews with the protesters repeatedly reveal massive support for Hamas, to the extent of staging lessons in hand-to-hand combat.

Polls in the Middle East still show strong Gazan support for their one-election/one-time Hamas autocracy. Apparently, any anger that Gazans bear toward Hamas for destroying the peace on October 7, wrecking their state, and getting civilians killed by using them as human shields is outweighed by the plus side on their ledger of the murder of 1200 Jewish civilians. In other words, the campus protests promote the fascistic, terrorist Hamas clique because of, not despite, its murder of Jewish civilians.

David Collier: BBC (fake) News – written by terrorists – the proof

This exclusive shows without doubt that the BBC puts out blatant fake news reports, and it also proves that the sources they rely upon for news include Al Jazeera, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad!

Hamas propaganda – the mass graves of Nasser Hospital
As part of the move south, the Israeli forces began to close in on the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. In mid-January fighting between Israel and the terrorist factions became intense in the *vicinity* of the hospital. Hamas propaganda channels were reporting dozens of casualties by January 22. On the same day, Palestinians began burying the bodies (almost certainly mostly dead terrorists) in the grounds of the hospital:

Videos were released showing them ‘burying their martyrs’. A week later, on the 27th & 28th January – along with undated evidence presented in additional footage – we are told by Hamas channels that more bodies were buried in the grounds of the Nasser Complex. One Hamas (QNN) post claimed an additional 150 bodies were buried (January 27th).

Therefore, Hamas claimed that in the last weeks of January 2024, over 200 bodies were buried by Palestinians in the courtyard of Nasser Medical Complex. Most of them almost certainly dead terrorists.

The creation and spread of fake news
On the evening of April 20th (close to midnight Gaza time), Hamas propaganda channels (eg QNN) began reporting on a mass grave being found on the grounds of Nasser hospital in Gaza. By the morning, hundreds of bodies were reported to have been found.

At 10:07am (Gaza time) on April 21st Al Jazeera English spread the story around the globe. By 17:30, Al Jazeera was reporting that at least 180 bodies had been found. Al Jazeera showed footage of Palestinians digging up the bodies, and claimed that Israeli forces carried out the massacre.

Hamas was now blaming Israel for mass graves which they themselves had reported were dug in January by Palestinians following a battle between Israeli forces and Hamas!

Amateur, blatant, stupid
The fake news story being promoted by Hamas was obvious from the start. Al Jazeera picked it up because it is a Hamas mouthpiece. But to any decent journalist or reporter, the attempt was amateurish, blatant and stupid. All anyone had to do was compare images between the January and April incidents.

The Rafah Refugees: Why Won’t Egypt Let Them in? (Judean Rose)

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

Photos of Rafah refugees fleeing however they might—by car, on foot, by bundle-laden donkey-driven carts—were everywhere yesterday, the unseasonable rain adding a poignant touch of pathos to their plight. The parents looked grim for the photos, while the children seemed cheerful enough, with smiles on their faces. They were leaving Rafah. It was an adventure.

The much-anticipated IDF operation in Rafah had already begun if you count the evacuation of some 100,000 Rafah civilians to a new humanitarian zone created just for them. For the refugees, it would be no picnic, obviously, but there would be “field hospitals, tents, and increased provisions of food, water, medicine, and other supplies,” said the Jerusalem Post.

Some of the refugees attempted to cross into Egypt, to no avail. They were turned away by the Egyptian military, who had beefed up their presence and level of preparedness along the 12-kilometer border between Gaza and Egypt.

You read that right: Egypt shares a border with Gaza. If you look at a map, you will see it is true.

(Red line: border fence between Rafah and Israel. Brown line: border line between Rafah and Egypt.)

But Egypt will not provide a haven for the desperate-to-leave Gazan civilians. Not unless they pay a fee of anywhere from $5,000-$12,000 a head.

Most refugees don’t have that kind of money.

A touching Ynet piece, 'We hate Hamas like we hate Israel': the Palestinians who managed to flee Gaza, shares the stories of various Gazans forced to relocate—in some cases, more than once—as a result of the war Hamas started on October 7:

The procedure of leaving Gaza went on for days. In the first stage, Dr. Mukhaimer Abu Saada, who lived near the upscale Al Rimal neighborhood, was forced to move with his wife Rosanne and his children to Khan Younis where he found shelter at a relative’s apartment. Two weeks later, IDF forces told the area’s residents to move to Rafah where the man, who until recently was head of the department of political science at Al-Azhar University, huddled with his family in a tent in appalling conditions.

Only then did they receive word and the family reported at the border crossing. They waited in line. Someone had made sure to pay $8,000 per person. Only then were they granted a permit to cross into Egypt. “It was a nightmare,” he says in an interview from his new home in Cairo. “We didn’t know until the last minute whether we’d be able to get out of there.”

Despite the upheaval, Dr. Abu Saada is considered one of the lucky ones. Since the start of the war, very few Gazans have managed to leave the bombed and burning Strip. Some only passed via Egypt en route to Europe or Arab countries that had agreed to take them in. Others have settled in Egypt. The transition cost a great deal – amounts of money most Gazans could only dream of . . .

 . . . Since November, when the Rafah crossing opened for around-the-clock activity, 600 Palestinians holding dual nationality have managed to leave the Gaza Strip. Then came the privileged, like Abu Saada, whose people paid for their departure. At the moment, it’s the rich who can get out. At first, they paid $8,000 per person. The price then dropped to $,5000 and it’s now risen to $10,000 (children paying $2500). The permit arrives at night and is only stamped the following day. If you miss that window of opportunity, you have to start the process all over – with increments of thousands of dollars per person. Only a few dozen people have so far managed to get out in this way. . .

 . . . Like Abu Saada, M., along with five family members, managed to make it to Cairo. “We were lucky,” she says, “we only paid $5,000 per adult and $2,000 per child. The price is now twice that.” She doesn’t want to disclose her complete name, and definitely not to an Israeli newspaper. “Yes, I’m in Egypt in a safe place, but I have first- and second-degree relatives in Gaza and I need to think of them.”

The Rafah civilians should be safe in the humanitarian zone created for them by Israel—unless Hamas finds a way to use them as human shields. But the homes they left may very well be reduced to dust. Hamas is behind that—behind all of the death and destruction. The rapists have wormed their way through Gaza every which way: from belowground in tunnels, and from aboveground, too, embedding itself in apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals.

Hamas makes extensive use of human shields, putting civilians in harm's way to shield itself. It’s a very effective tactic from the terrorists’ perspective. Hamas hides behind the civilians, and the IDF holds its fire. In this cruel manner, civilians provide the perfect protection for Israel's real nemesis: the Hamas rapist cowards.

When, however, Gaza civilians do get caught in the crossfire and subsequently die, it's a win-win proposition for Hamas. There’s nothing quite like photos of dead Gazans to demonize Israel and further Hamas aims. The photos are framed in such a way as to take the onus off the true culprit, Hamas, for  the Gazan death and destruction, while shifting the blame onto Israel. 

The AP and Reuters, of course, just lap this stuff up. It’s what their audiences crave most: Israel as murderer without mercy, the Gazans as poor innocent lambs. That’s the media narrative and they're sticking to it. And it is this narrative that continues to empower and embolden Hamas, who holds not only Israelis hostage, but the people of Gaza, too.

One might have thought, if one were inclined to think, that among the 22 Arab nations, there’d be one or two that might take pity on the people of Gaza, and absorb and resettle at least some of them, and on their own dime. They share a common language along with the same culture and religion as the fleeing refugees. Yet, not one of these 22 Arab countries will let them in. That’s a lot of places that might extend a charitable hand to the Gaza refugees, but fail to do so.

Of course, one cold-hearted country stands out from among the rest in regard to its lack of concern over the plight of its Gazan brethren, and that country is Egypt. Egypt shares a border with Gaza. And all Egypt has to do is open its gates and heart to its Arab brothers and sisters—the ones who will die if it doesn’t.

But it won’t.

There are many reasons why Egypt won’t take in its kin—won’t take in its own. But we won’t go into that here. Instead we will talk about the shame of it. How shameful it is that Egypt won’t take in its own people.

Confronted with this truth, those plugging the anti-Israel narrative have a rote response at the ready, "What does Egypt have to do with any of this—this Hamas war with Israel?"

Actually, quite a lot. Beginning with the fact that many if not most Gazans are of Egyptian heritage.

"Masri” is slang for "Egyptian" and according to “Palestinian Tribes, Clans, and Notable Families,” a prominent surname in Gaza:

Notable Families

The third clan-like grouping in Palestine in the urban elite notable family, a social formation typical throughout the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire. Many of the most well known and prominent Palestinian families come from this notabsle, or a’yan, social class: Husayni, Nashashibi, Dajani, Abd al-Hadi, Tuqan, Nabulsi, Khoury, Tamimi, Khatib, Ja’bari, Masri, Kan’an, Shaq’a, Barghouthi, Shawwa, Rayyes, and others. These are extended families that dominated Palestinian politics until the 1980s, and are still relatively prominent today.

The preponderance in Gaza of the surname “Masri” (also “al-Masri” and other variations), betrays the Egyptian origins of a large number of Gazans. They’re the same people of the same stock; they’re Egyptians. But Egypt shares more than blood ties with Gaza. Egypt shares a border with Gaza, something the stupid don’t know when they talk about Gaza being an “open-air prison”

There are TWO ways in and out of Gaza, two shared borders. One with Israel and one with, Egypt, from whence the people of Gaza come. The Egyptians are their family, their kin.

But kids these days. These ignorant protesting dummies on college campuses, so drunk with genocide cool aid, that they haven’t even looked at a map. How could we expect them to do a bit of digging, apply some critical thought to the idea that they're fighting for—to look at the clues contained in the surnames of the people they claim are subject to Israeli genocide? It's their own family who won’t let them in!

Smart people know better than these campus idiots because they bother to look at a map, and investigate the facts. They see how shameful this is, how Egypt, only 599 kilometers from Rafah, should be ashamed of itself. That’s what intelligent people know to think when they see photos in the media of the sad and grim refugees set to wandering yet again. 

It’s what we should all be thinking and asking out loud: Why won’t Egypt give refuge to its brethren? Why won’t it save its own people? Why has Egypt trapped the people of Gaza in an open-air prison even now, when it counts most, when the homes and lives of the Gazan people of Rafah, lie in the balance?

History will not be kind to Egypt for its despicable behavior toward the people of Rafah. All will be noted and recorded, a new black mark on the reputation of Egypt, the country that once oppressed the Jews and now oppresses its own.

It's a shameful thing, a shonda. 

For shame, Egypt. 

For shame.

---

---

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!

 

05/08 Links Pt1: Sinister Hamas deal would let it keep most hostages, win the war, inflame the West Bank; Noa Marciano killed by doctor at Shifa Hospital

From Ian:

Sinister Hamas deal would let it keep most hostages, win the war, inflame the West Bank

On Tuesday night, more than a day after Hamas claimed to have approved what it said was the Egyptian and Qatari mediators’ proposal “regarding a ceasefire agreement,” the US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller finally declared publicly, “That is not what they did.”

Rather, said Miller, “They responded with amendments or a counterproposal.” The US, he said, was “working through the details of that now.”

In fact, close examination of the Hamas document, as issued (Arabic) by the terror group itself, shows that far from containing “amendments” or a remotely viable counterproposal, it is constructed with incendiary sophistication to ensure that Hamas survives the war and regains control over the entire Gaza Strip. (Quotations from the Hamas text in this piece are from a translation by the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera website.)

But that’s far from all.

It is also calculated to ensure that Hamas secures further key, immensely far-reaching goals without having to meet the prime Israeli requirement for a deal: the release of all the hostages. In fact, Hamas can abrogate the deal, with all of its key goals achieved and then some, while continuing to hold almost all of the hostages.

Among those goals is one of the most central Hamas objectives since it invaded Israel on October 7 — seeing its declared war of destruction against the Jewish state expand to the West Bank. By extension, the terms of the document are also designed to destroy US President Joe Biden’s grand vision of Saudi normalization and a wider Middle East coalition against Iran.

A stream of ominous changes
Much has been made of the fact that, whereas Israel has repeatedly insisted it will not end the war as a condition for the release of the hostages, Hamas, in the opening paragraphs of its own sinister alternate proposal, specifies that one “aim” of the deal is “a return to a sustainable calm that leads to a permanent ceasefire.” But relatively speaking, that’s splitting hairs: The proposal conveyed by the mediators to Hamas late last month, and described by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken as an “extraordinarily generous” Israeli offer, reportedly provides for an “arrangement to restore sustainable calm” — which sounds like a near-euphemism for a permanent ceasefire.

Much has correctly been made of the fact, however, that, in the Hamas document, Israel is to cease military operations in the first six-week stage of the three-stage deal, in which 33 hostages are to be freed, and that the IDF must “withdraw completely” from Gaza and a “permanent cessation of military operations” must take effect before any more hostages are freed in the second stage.

Less widely appreciated is that the Hamas proposal states that, in the first stage, “internally displaced people in Gaza shall return to their areas of residence” and that “all residents of Gaza shall be allowed freedom of movement in all parts of the Strip,” with all Israeli “aviation (military and reconnaissance)” in Gaza to cease for much of each day.

Combined with a partial withdrawal of IDF troops as further specified for this first stage, the effect of these demands would be to enable Hamas’s gunmen and officials to retake control of the entire Gaza Strip. The Hamas proposal does use the word “unarmed” in one clause to describe the displaced persons who would be allowed to return to their areas of residence, but the accompanying demands and provisions mean that Israel would have no right and no means under the proposal to impose any such limitation.

Even more significant, and largely unrecognized, however, is the radical reconfiguration in the Hamas document of the terms and process for the release of Israeli hostages.

Many of the relatives of the 128 Israelis still held in Gaza since October 7, alive and dead, have pleaded, desperately and understandably, for a deal at any or almost any price, including an end to the war, in return for the release of all, most, or even many of the hostages.

But the Hamas proposal is structured to enable it to release very few of the hostages in return not only for an end to the IDF’s campaign in Gaza and its survival and resumption of full control there, but also for a planned surge in support for Hamas in the West Bank, the further neutering of the Palestinian Authority, and the potential major escalation of violence against Israel in and from the West Bank.

How so?

Gadi Taub: The Gantz Megillah

In the eyes of the Biden administration Hamas is the smaller problem. The bigger problem is Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. is willing to live with Iran’s proxies everywhere, as part of its “regional integration” policy—i.e., appeasing Iran. But they are unwilling to live with Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. The stubborn Netanyahu clearly does not want to learn from his would-be tutors like U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken how to “share the neighborhood” with genocidaires in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, and Tehran, whom his electorate understands to be bent on murdering them.

If the Netanyahu problem is too big to contain, then it follows that it must be solved. And it seems that the Biden administration has zeroed in on what Tony Badran has called a Herodian solution: finding a local proxy who will impose the U.S. agenda on a reluctant Israeli electorate.

King Herod the Great won his throne because the Roman Empire stepped in and helped him defeat his Israelite adversaries. The American empire wants to help install Benny Gantz as Israel’s next prime minister for the same reason: The plan is for the administration to help him defeat Netanyahu, then for him to assemble a dovish coalition that will return Israel to the two-state track negotiations—which, though unlikely to produce two states, would nevertheless help “de-escalate” in Gaza, the last hot spot in the region where Iran’s power is actually challenged.

Since the whole Democratic Party’s Middle East policy is at stake, the pressure on Israel has been relentless. Never before has an American administration worked so systematically to undermine Israeli democracy and sovereignty, an effort that is especially shocking in the context of an existential war for survival following a heinous, large-scale terrorist murder spree. Wars provide opportunities, and it seems clear that the opportunity that the Biden administration saw in the Oct. 7 attacks had less to do with ensuring Israel’s security than it did with stifling any remaining resistance to Washington’s pro-Iran regional integration policy.

The U.S. is holding Israel on a leash by rationing the American-made ammunition on which the war effort depends; it has forced us to supply our enemies with “humanitarian aid” which Hamas controls and which sustains its ability to fight; the U.S. is building a port to subvert our control of the flow of goods into Gaza; it refrained from vetoing an anti-Israel decision at the U.N. Security Council at the end of March; it leaked its intention to recognize a Palestinian state unilaterally; it allowed Iran to attack us directly with a barrage of over 300 rockets and drones without paying any price whatsoever; and then told us that Israel’s successful defense against that strike (which was mostly stopped by a combination of superior Israeli tech and faulty Iranian missiles that crashed all over the Middle East, and to some extent by U.S. interceptors) should be considered “victory”; it consistently protects Hezbollah from a full-fledged Israeli attack; it did all it can to prevent the ground invasion of Rafah, which is necessary for winning the war; it is trying to stop the war with a hostage deal that would ensure Hamas’ survival.

The U.S. is not protecting Israel from the kangaroo courts in The Hague which now threaten to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and others. Instead, it is goosing those warrants, in part by itself threatening to impose sanctions on a unit of the IDF, thus subverting the chain of command and pressuring IDF units to comply with American demands rather than with orders from their superiors. At one point, Secretary of State Blinken outrageously asked for a one-on-one meeting with IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi (he was refused), treating the commander of Israel’s armed forces as if he was answerable to a delegate of a foreign power.

Meanwhile, the entire Democratic Party apparatus from Joe Biden on down has continued directly attacking Netanyahu in the harshest, most personal and demeaning terms, publicly proclaiming their contempt for Israel’s wartime leader. Biden called Israel’s elected prime minister “a bad fucking guy,” while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer went so far as to explain to Israelis they made the wrong choice in their elections. Senior Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler went Schumer one step better, proclaiming Netanyahu to be the worst Jewish leader in “2,000 years”—i.e., in the period since Herod.

Jonathan Tobin: Biden’s double game on Hamas should fool no one

Preserving Hamas in Rafah
But once the IDF had backed Hamas into the last enclave it held in Gaza, Biden stopped talking out of both sides of his mouth and made it clear that he opposed Israel going into Rafah and destroying the last operational Hamas military forces that had retreated there.

He’s gone to great lengths and expense to support humanitarian aid for civilians in Hamas-held portions of the Strip and blamed Israel for interrupting the flow of supplies there, including the building of a U.S. floating harbor to assist in the distribution of food and fuel. That has happened even though it’s long been obvious that if there is any real privation there, it is solely because Hamas is stealing the aid that arrives and reserving it for its own use.

Just as troubling, he’s put the full force of American influence behind an effort to broker a ceasefire deal with Hamas that will essentially hand the terror group a victory in the war it started.

The terms of the proposed deals that Washington has backed are appalling. They call for the release of some hostages, but only a percentage of those Hamas is still holding under who knows what horrible conditions. And the pressure that Washington has exerted on Netanyahu to take a deal on virtually any terms and conditions—along with the way it has coordinated this with Hamas’s ally, Qatar—has given the terrorists all the leverage. That’s why Hamas continues to turn down even the most lopsided of agreements; its leaders are convinced that Biden will not let them be defeated. That means they think they can hold out for a deal that will end the war and return the situation to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo in Gaza and still not give up all the hostages, let alone be held accountable for mass murder.

Even when it comes to the surge in antisemitism in the United States, the gap between Biden’s Holocaust speech rhetoric and the reality of his policies grows wider every day. He may have chided the pro-Hamas protests for their violence, rule-breaking and antisemitism. But the only people trying to hold the universities accountable are his Republican opponents. There is no sign that the administration is willing to take any action to withhold funds from these schools.

Moreover, even though the protesters won’t forgive him for his pro-Israel statements and have labeled him “genocide Joe,” Biden has refused to break with openly antisemitic members of his party like Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Just as telling was his administration’s invitation to the anti-Zionist IfNotNow group that has spread antisemitic blood libels to a meeting about antisemitism and its inclusion of the pro-Hamas Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) among those who were allowed to give input on an antisemitism initiative that was nothing but virtue-signaling anyway.

Actions speak louder
So, while Biden’s Holocaust speech soothed the feelings of American Jews who are reeling from an unprecedented spike in antisemitism, especially at educational institutions where Jews have thought they were welcome, his actions speak much louder than those words.

An administration that is using every tactic it can think of to prevent Israel from eliminating Hamas can’t claim that it has not forgotten Oct. 7. Stopping Israel from going into Rafah isn’t about saving Palestinian lives; Hamas is all too happy to sacrifice as many of its people as necessary if that advances their goal of isolating and smearing Israel. It’s about an effort to convince American leftists and Hamas supporters that Biden isn’t as pro-Israel as he sometimes wants to pretend to be.

Having allegedly run for president in 2020 because of his supposed concerns about the hate on display from neo-Nazis at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi march in

Charlottesville, Va., he is now trying to hold onto office by intermittently appeasing left-wing antisemites and undermining Netanyahu’s efforts to prevent Hamas from committing more atrocities on Israeli soil. The only calculus to judge Biden’s touting of the Holocaust or Oct. 7—or to determine if he truly cares about preserving Israel’s security—is whether he will let Hamas be destroyed. If not, all of his rhetoric about those subjects is nothing more than hypocrisy and hot air.

Logical fallacies that Israel haters use, part 4

Continuing the series of logical fallacies that Israel haters - including academics who should know better - use when making their anti-Israel arguments.

46. The Half-Truth: "Israel had Baruch Goldstein, Palestinians have suicide bombers. What's the difference?"

47. Hero-Busting: "The Megillah itself describes a genocide by Jews planned by Mordechai!"

48. Identity Fallacy: "Israelis have stolen the Palestinian dishes of hummus and falafel!"

49. Infotainment: Every Pallywood picture and video.

50.The Job's Comforter Fallacy: "Allah turned Jewish sinners into apes and pigs."

51. "Just Do It":  "Israel must be destroyed by any means necessary (even if that means murder, rape &c.)"

52: The Law of Unintended Consequences: "Since Israel cannot predict what will happen in Gaza, it is best that they don't do anything militarily."

53: Lying with Statistics: "Israel has 51 laws discriminating against Palestinians."

54. The Tiny Percentage Fallacy: "The number of Palestinians who actually try to murder Jews is quite small, don't exaggerate their importance."

55. Mala Fides (Arguing in Bad Faith): "Zionists partnered with Nazi executioners of Jews with the Haavara Agreement."

56. Measurability: "Antisemitism is a thing of the past; when you ask people if they hate Jews for no reason nearly all say they don't."

57. Mind-reading: "No matter what they say, Israel intends to kill innocent Palestinian civilians."

58. Moral Licensing: "Hamas supports a lot of poor people in Gaza; they are allowed to defend them by shooting rockets at Jews."

59. Moral Superiority: "Since Muslims are so much more moral than Jews, they can do whatever is necessary to destroy the evil"

60. Moving the Goalposts: "Okay, so there are witnesses to rape on October 7 who have come forward, but they are all unreliable."

61. "Mind Your Own Business": "I don't have to justify my tweets glorifying Hamas on October 7. Blocked."

62. Name calling: "Never read her column. She's an Islamophobic racist."

---

---

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!

 

Hamas' "ceasefire" allows it to repeat October 7th

The New York Times reports:

Israeli officials said on Tuesday that major gaps remained with Hamas over the latest proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza, as delegations from both sides arrived in Cairo to resume talks.

Hamas said on Monday that it had accepted the terms of a cease-fire proposed by Arab mediators, and U.S. officials said it had minor wording changes from a proposal that Israel and the United States had recently presented to the group.

But Israeli officials disputed that characterization, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying on Tuesday that his war cabinet unanimously believed the proposal Hamas had agreed to was “very far from Israel’s core demands.”

The most substantive sticking point centers on a key phrase that appears in both the Israeli- and Hamas-approved proposals: a path to “sustainable calm.”

In the proposal that Israel approved, and that Egypt conveyed to the Hamas leadership on April 26, the two sides would work toward achieving a “sustainable calm” in Gaza after an initial six-week pause in fighting. That proposal left those two words open to interpretation.

But in the Hamas-approved proposal, that term is clearly defined as a permanent cessation of hostilities and a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip.

The text of the proposal that Israel had approved is not available to analyze the differences, so I cannot confirm that the differences were merely "minor wording changes." 

I suspect that one real issue is the full phrase that Hamas approved. Al Jazeera's translation of the second stage of the proposal says:

A return to sustainable calm (a permanent cessation of military and hostile operations) must be announced and take effect before the exchange of captives and prisoners – all remaining living Israeli men (civilians and soldiers) in exchange for an agreed-upon number of prisoners and detainees in Israeli prisons and detention camps.

Israeli forces shall withdraw completely from the Gaza Strip.

 The word "return" in "return to sustainable calm" means that the situation would revert to the way things were on October 6. 

Which means that there is nothing in the agreement, from Hamas' perspective, that would stop it from planning and executing another pogrom against Israeli civilians. After all, there was a "sustainable calm" before 10/7 according to their text.

From Hamas' viewpoint, the October 6 "status quo" must return before even the third phase of the agreement of returning bodies. 

Moreover, the third phase includes "A complete end to the siege of the Gaza Strip" meaning Israel cannot restrict imports into Gaza, including weapons. 

This agreement would be a complete victory for Hamas. Israel would not gain a single thing it did not have before the war, and it would in fact lose what controls it did have. 

No matter what the Israel-approved proposal was, there is no way it was anything close to this. Le Monde quotes a Hamas official responding to the proposal:

A senior Hamas official insisted late Saturday that the group would "not agree under any circumstances" to a truce that did not explicitly include a complete end to the war, including Israel's withdrawal from Gaza

Which means that Israel's proposal as of Saturday was nowhere near what Hamas says it agreed to on Monday. 

The most troubling part is that US officials are characterizing Hamas' text as a positive step and only cosmetically different from Israel's proposal of April 27.  Israeli officials say  “Israel got played” by the U.S. and the mediators who submitted the new proposal without their approval. 

I see nothing that indicates anything otherwise. That means that the Biden administration has completely different aims than Israel does in these negotiations - aims that would imperil Israel's security. 

---

---

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!

 

Israel is trying to save Rafah civilians. @Amnesty would rather see them dead than leave.

Israel is giving warnings to some 100,000 civilians in Rafah to leave because of an imminent military operation.

Amnesty is very upset:

Responding to the Israeli military’s orders for over 100,000 residents, most of whom are internally displaced, to “evacuate” whole neighbourhoods in eastern Rafah amid news its military operations in the area are already underway, Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Senior Director of Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns said:

“The Israeli army’s latest ‘evacuation’ order, issued just 24 hours before it began a ground incursion into eastern Rafah, comes hot on the heels of intensified bombardment in the southern governorate. It follows months-long threats to launch a large-scale ground operation in Rafah, which will further compound the unspeakable suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza.

“In a cruel and inhumane move that already illustrates the disastrous impact of such an operation on civilians, Israeli tanks have launched a ground incursion on the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing, blocking a crucial lifeline for humanitarian aid for a population already facing famine and the risk of genocide.

Israel's warnings to the civilians are an obligation under international law. It is meant to save lives. It is the opposite of "genocide." 

Amnesty would rather they stay where they are, to force Israel to allow Hamas to survive and attack Israeli civilians in the future.

So humanitarian!

The Lieber Institute at West Point just published an article by Lieutenant Colonel William C. Biggerstaff, a professor at the US Naval War College, on when an army is obligated to give effective warning to, and even evacuate, civilians ahead of military activity.

A long-observed rule of customary international law is that parties must exercise feasible precautions to minimize the risk of any incidental civilian harm when planning and conducting attacks on otherwise valid military objectives. A corollary to these so-called precautions in the attack (or active precautions) is the more specific obligation to provide effective advance warning of attacks that may cause death or other physical harm to the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit...

To be effective, an evacuation warning must be communicated at such a time and in such a manner as to provide the affected civilian population with a reasonable opportunity to meaningfully protect itself.

As this implies, the duty to warn is prospective in nature. Effectiveness thus does not turn on whether, or if so how, the civilians in question heed a warning. Their decision to evacuate pursuant to an attacker’s duty to warn is inherently voluntary. Although an effective warning must allow civilians a reasonable amount of time to evacuate a military objective if feasible, they are not obliged to do so. Accordingly, if the civilians refuse to evacuate, they retain their immunity from being made the object of attack and should still be accounted for in determining the proportionality of any collateral damage.

This is an important point. If the civilians refuse to leave, Israel would be hampered in its ability to attack Hamas - it must still try to avoid killing them as much as possible. But their choice to stay does no tmean Israel cannot attack at all, as Amnesty implies. It means they are choosing to put their lives, and the lives of their families, in danger, and even though Israel must do everything it can to avoid civilian casualties, that does not mean it must call off the military operation. Otherwise, using human shields would change from a war crime to be considered as a legitimate military method.

What about forced evacuations? Israel is not considering that now, and in most cases forcibly moving civilians during war is a war crime, but there is an exception:

Under certain circumstances, evacuation is not merely permitted but is in fact required. The duty to exercise precautions by those subject to attacks (or passive precautions) is set forth in treaty form in the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. In relevant part, Article 58 provides that “[p]arties to [a] conflict shall, to the maximum extent feasible . . . endeavour to remove the civilian population, individual civilians and civilian objects under their control from the vicinity of military objectives.” Although AP I is not universally ratified, this provision is widely recognized as reflecting customary international law applicable to both international and non-international armed conflicts...

This is not possible unless Israel has complete control over the entire territory to be evacuated. But it shows that contrary to what Amnesty is saying, armies with a valid military objective - and destroying Hamas is not just valid but necessary - are sometimes obligated to evacuate civilians.

An earlier article in the same site discussed those who objected to Israel's earlier warning to evacuate Gaza City, and the author - well-regarded expert Michael N. Schmitt - described the choices accurately, and his analysis applies today to Rafah:

Reduced to basics, an assessment of Israel’s warnings to evacuate requires a comparison of two alternatives: an urban assault into an area full of civilians; and evacuation into a place that is not fully prepared to accommodate them. Undoubtedly, residents of Gaza City [Rafah]  and other concentrations of civilians in the north will be at a greater risk of harm staying in place than moving away from the combat zone. Moreover, once the operation starts, fleeing the hostilities will become extraordinarily dangerous, and access to humanitarian assistance will become impossible for those remaining behind. ...The simple fact is that civilians who [leave]  will be safer. Moreover, warning the civilian population makes good sense not only because it protects civilians but also militarily, as U.S. forces learned in Fallujah and Mosul.

Given this reality, it is bewildering that humanitarian organizations are not encouraging the civilian population to move away from what will be a destructive and deadly urban battle, in which telling the difference between fighters and civilians is particularly difficult, especially considering Hamas’s past tactics of operating near civilians, engaging in perfidy, and failing to distinguish themselves from civilians.

Along the same lines, it is mystifying that humanitarian organizations are not condemning Hamas’s efforts to keep the civilians in place. Obviously, this is an attempt to exploit the civilians as human shields to complicate Israel’s operations, for the more civilians in the area, the more complicated Israeli targeting and clearance operations become. And, sadly, the more civilians who tragically will become “collateral damage.”

This is straightforward and obvious - except for those who are rooting for Hamas.

Like Amnesty.

---

---

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!

 

05/07 Links Pt2: Phillips: A Holocaust remembrance day like no other; Columbia Custodian Trapped by ‘Angry Mob’ Speaks Out; Imagining a world without antisemitism

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: A Holocaust remembrance day like no other

Israel and the Jewish diaspora are not only traumatised by this mass disdain for Jewish life and wholesale adoption of psychotic lies about Israel. They are also astonished by Britain’s suicidal refusal to join up the dots.

They can’t understand why Britain can’t see the direct connection between the Islamists’ aim to destroy and colonise Israel and their aim to destroy and colonise Britain (and America). They are shocked that the British authorities believe seven months of weekly hate-marches screaming “globalise the intifada” and for the destruction of Israel, and which have terrorised British Jews, constitute the legitimate expression of “free speech”. They are astounded that Britain has done nothing to prevent the emergence of a Muslim bloc that now threatens to upend British politics by religious sectarianism.

Israel and its supporters view such a bloc as innately and irredeemably anti-Jew and anti-west; they note the remarks made by some of these people and their supporters that they are now well on course to Islamise Britain; they are amazed at the near-omerta in Britain over this sectarian voting and bigotry against Israel and the Jews; they are appalled that political leaders are not only doing nothing to challenge this but are actively fanning the flames by regurgitating Hamas propaganda lies about Israel; and they observe that anyone expressing concern about any of this is dismissed as the “Islamophobic” fringe.

Isolated by the west; with rockets still flying from Gaza and Lebanon, with Israelis continuing to be attacked and with tens of thousands of them still displaced and unable to return safely to their border homes; with the dread knowledge that the toll of young conscripts falling in Gaza is bound to rise along with anti-Israel global hysteria as the IDF go into Rafah; with the threat of an American weapons embargo and lawfare in international tribunals aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state hanging over Israel’s head; with Iran sprinting towards building its genocide bomb; with our hearts permanently in our mouths but our spirit unbowed, those of us in Israel nevertheless feel it’s safer — and such a privilege — to be a Jew here rather than in Britain at this pivotal moment in Jewish destiny.

Columbia Custodian Trapped by ‘Angry Mob’ Speaks Out

It’s the viral image that captured the clash between the anti-Israel protesters who stormed Columbia and the campus workers who tried to stop them. As the mob invaded Hamilton Hall in the early hours of April 30, a facilities worker was photographed pushing a demonstrator against a wall.

Later, it emerged that the protester was a 40-year-old trust fund kid named James Carlson, who owns a townhouse in Brooklyn worth $2.3 million. The man who tried to hold him back was Mario Torres, 45, who has worked at Columbia—where the average janitor makes less than $19 an hour—for five years.

Now, in an exclusive interview with The Free Press, Mario Torres describes the experience of being on duty as protesters stormed the building in the early hours of the morning, breaking glass and barricading the entrances. “We don’t expect to go to work and get swarmed by an angry mob with rope and duct tape and masks and gloves,” he said.

“They came from both sides of the staircases. They came through the elevators and they were just rushing. It was just like, they had a plan.” Mario said protesters with zip ties, duct tape, and masks “just multiplied and multiplied.”

At one point, he remembers “looking up and I noticed the cameras are covered.” It made him think: “This was definitely planned.”

Torres was trying to “protect the building” when he ended up in an altercation with Carlson: “He had a Columbia hoodie on, and I managed to rip that hoodie off of him and expose his face.” (Carlson was later charged with five felonies, including burglary and reckless endangerment.) “I was freaking out. At that point, I’m thinking about my family. How was I gonna get out? Through the window?”

Torres has not been to campus since the incident. He says he does not feel safe. “When it comes to the public safety, the workers’ safety, people don’t feel comfortable walking through a mob to punch in to get into campus. That’s crazy,” he said.

He added that he’s worried Columbia might take disciplinary action against him for speaking out. He worries about losing a job he loves. He worries about supporting his young family.

“Is Columbia going to retaliate and find a reason to fire me? Is someone going to come after me? So I’m taking a big risk doing this, but I think that they failed. They failed us. And I think that’s the bigger story. They failed us. They should have done more to protect us, and they didn’t.”

Transit union honcho to sue Columbia alleging mistreatment of staffers in building takeover

A prominent transit union leader plans to sue Columbia University over alleged mistreatment of school staffers during a building seizure last week — the latest labor group to wade into the debate surrounding campus unrest.

John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union — which represents 155,000 workers across the airline, transit, railroad, universities, utilities and service sectors — castigated Columbia President Minouche Shafik for waiting too long to authorize the NYPD to clear out Hamilton Hall after demonstrators occupied it last Tuesday night.

“It’s on them to protect their workforce and they didn’t do it,” Samuelsen told POLITICO. He called dissidents’ behavior toward staffers working at the time of the takeover, including two custodians and a security officer, “an outrageous affront to working people.”

One of the union’s local branches represents 725 workers at Columbia, including custodians, security officers and electricians.

Officials should have known the building was a target given its history as the site of an occupation by students advocating for racial justice in the 1960s, he charged.

“We’re exploiting every legal means at our disposal against Columbia, against the individual occupiers of the building … [who] thought that they could hold our custodians hostage to their ideology,” he added.

Yisrael Medad: The anti-Jewish collegiate revolution

We are facing, I would suggest, a situation in which could be said that never have so many university students been not only on the wrong side of history but on the most immoral side as well. That is true at least since 1933 at Oxford, when 428 students against 275 voted in favor of the resolution, which Winston Churchill termed “that abject, squalid, shameless avowal” not to fight for king and country “under no circumstances.”

Any fair observation of the happenings across campuses this past month in the United States would not be wrong to characterize them as aggressive, threatening, menacing, occasionally out-right violent, foul-mouthed, damaging and very anti-Jewish.

Even a correspondent for The New York Times, Katherine Rosman, could not avoid writing on April 26 that the “issue at the core of the conflict rippling across campuses nationwide [is] the tension between pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitism.” Three days later, she highlighted how it works when three Jewish students approached a tent village at Columbia University and the cry went up: “We have Zionists who have entered the camp.”

At the University of California, Los Angeles, a campus journalist was prevented from walking about. A Jewish female student there was beaten and required medical attention and an older man was attacked and threatened. One Christian, supporting Israel at the University of Pennsylvania by holding the blue-and-white flag, was “ghettoized,” having a chalk circle drawn around him (at 0:54 on a CNN video). At Stanford, a protester dressed up as a Hamas suicide-bomber. This violence—actual and implied—and more probably led to the ugly scenes the night afterwards. But the atmosphere of violence was initiated by the pro-Palestine proponents.

This has led to a situation whereby students have termed as “conditionally Jewish” those Jews who are barely acceptable in polite society on campuses, as Tessa Veksler explained to Mandana Dayani. There’s a scale now for being Jewish, and it has nothing to do with Judaism as a religion or ethnicity. Rather, it has to do with the degree of revolutionary value—specifically on behalf of the ideology, Palestinianism—that seeks to eliminate both Jewish national identity and as many Jews as possible.

UN Women prefer Hamas "media office" for statistics to the Gaza health ministry

Here's a detail from a graphic from UN Women as of April 16:

The footnote says these statistics come fromthe Gza Media Office - meaning, Hamas.

And here's a detail from a graphic from the Gaza health ministry Telegram channel today:

Less than 5,000 women killed according to the MoH but over 10,000 weeks ago according to the Hamas media office.

For months, we have been told that 70% of the dead were women and children. But when they actually count them, it is only a little over 50% - and male adults of military age, who are less that 25% of Gaza's population, is the largest category of those killed. 

Even if the total number of correct, and every single one of the missing 10,000 are women and children, it is impossible to reach 70% women and children fatalities.

Why is UN Women taking inflated statistics from Hamas instead of from the health ministry, which issues detailed reports every couple of days?

The key word is "inflated." 

UN Women want to grab the highest number they can, and if Hamas is the one behind those numbers, they just call it the "Gaza Media Office" which sounds like a real organization and not some masked guy with a Telegram channel. 

When they exaggerate by 100%, though, perhaps the UN is not the most honest broker. 

---

---

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!

 

05/07 Links Pt1: Biden betrays Israel with Hamas ‘deal’ that wasn’t; The US's hypocrisy is infuriating; Why are pro-Palestine protesters heckling Holocaust survivors?

From Ian:

NYPost Editorial: Biden betrays Israel with Hamas ‘deal’ that wasn’t

Joe Biden betrayed Israel last night.

Hamas announced with great fanfare that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal. There were celebrations in Gaza, and the White House said it was “reviewing” the deal.

Except: The Israelis knew nothing about it.

The supposed agreement wasn’t even on the table. Hamas had changed the terms of a previous treaty to one more favorable to the terror group. To take just one horrific alteration: Rather than turn over hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, Hamas would surrender dead bodies of the hostages it had killed.

That Hamas would try to pull this ruse, with the help of negotiators in Egypt and Qatar, is typical. It wants to pretend that Israel was the one “rejecting” a ceasefire it never knew about. Anti-Israel protesters in the US and a compliant media would eat it up, and they did.

But there’s a shameful twist. Axios reports that the US was aware of the Hamas deal but did not brief Israeli officials.

“Two Israeli officials said the feeling is that ‘Israel got played’ by the U.S. and the mediators who drafted ‘a new deal’ and weren’t transparent about it,” the outlet says.

Just as those same officials are willing to give Iran everything and more for the terrible nuclear deal, so Biden would bend over backwards for Hamas if only it will placate the Israel-haters on his left.

But this is beyond the pale. To push through an agreement without Israel’s input? To let Hamas, which attacked Israel, killed, raped and took hostages, dictate the terms? The US is siding with terrorists!

Seth Frantzman: 'The Godfather' in Gaza: What a mafia movie tells us about Hamas war

Again, it’s worth going back to that scene in The Godfather when the heads of the mafia families meet and Don Corleone finally realizes that it was “Barzini all along” who had been behind this war. The war that Hamas launched on October 7 was not just launched by Hamas in Gaza. This is evident from the fact that the Hamas leadership in Doha was not surprised by the attack. They didn’t run and make frantic phone calls to their hosts, saying, “We didn’t do this; we had no idea.” Their hosts didn’t call their allies in the West and say, “Hamas has betrayed us; we hosted them but they have carried out this terrible attack.” In fact, if you go back to October 7, there is no evidence that anyone linked to Hamas was surprised by this attack. Moscow didn’t make frantic calls. Tehran didn’t. Ankara didn’t.

Back on October 6, Israel was being sold a story that portrayed Hamas as “deterred.” Back on October 6, Israel was being sold a story that portrayed Hamas as “deterred.” After October 7, we are told that it is almost impossible to defeat Hamas because of how strong it is, and that defeating most of its 24 battalions is enough of a “win” in Gaza. The two narratives don’t make sense. If Hamas was deterred and incapable of doing much damage to Israel, then how is it also so powerful that it is almost impossible to defeat? And, if Hamas was actually known to be very powerful, with 24 battalions of fighters – 30,000 terrorists – then why was the border left almost undefended against a genocidal terrorist group?

Clearly, the answer to that question is that Israel trusted Hamas because Hamas was filtered through a kind of Don Barzini character. After Hamas lied about being deterred and carried out a huge massacre, it continued to rely on its hosts and backers abroad during the war on Israel. For instance, Israel was told in December to transition to a lower intensity war in Gaza. In February, Israel was told it should do a ceasefire for Ramadan. Then Israel was told to postpone a Rafah offensive. At each stage, Hamas got the breathing space it needed and was able to Shanghai the hostage talks. We now understand that Israel was likely deceived throughout the entire process using a strategy of bait and switch. The macabre talks have been prolonged by Hamas, which continues to refuse to hand over a list of living hostages. Hamas has said that it wants to release one hostage for each day of a ceasefire so that it can parade them to get applause in the region.

It now wants up to a weeklong ceasefire for each hostage. Hamas’s goal and the goal of its backers is to use the hostage deal as an end to the war in order to take over the West Bank in the long run.

It’s now fair to say that it was Barzini all along. The powers that stand behind Hamas and have been influencing this war from the start, in order to keep Hamas in power in Gaza and bring it to power in the West Bank, are Barzini.

24 States Urge Congress To Permanently End Funding for ‘Anti-Semitic’ UNRWA

A coalition of 24 state attorneys general are calling on Congress to permanently end all American funding to the United Nations’ chief Palestinian aid group, citing its anti-Semitic bias and links to the Hamas terror group.

Led by Iowa attorney general Brenna Bird and South Carolina’s Alan Wilson, the state officials want Congress to enact a permanent ban on American funding to the United Nations' Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), saying that lawmakers must step forward to "stop funding anti-Semitic education efforts run by the United Nations body tied to terror organization Hamas," according to a copy of the letter sent Tuesday to congressional leaders and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

"Not one more dollar should go to fund this organization so long as it is committed to spreading anti-Semitism—much less an organization 10% of which had links to foreign terror organization Hamas," the attorneys general write, citing information indicating that UNRWA employees participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror rampage through Israel. The letter follows similar calls from outside advocacy groups, as well as efforts by Republican lawmakers to permanently freeze UNRWA’s funding as a result of its ties to Hamas.

The letter signals a growing appetite on the state level to hold UNRWA accountable for its history of promoting anti-Semitic educational materials and allowing Hamas to overrun its facilities in the Gaza Strip. Earlier this week, Israel struck a Hamas command center located in an UNRWA facility, one of several that have been discovered over the course of the seven-month war. At the state level, some officials and advocacy groups have floated the possibility of stripping the tax-exempt status enjoyed by UNRWA USA, the aid group’s American fundraising arm.

"The U.S. should not be funding terrorism. Period," South Carolina’s Wilson told the Free Beacon. "We’ve known UNRWA is used by terrorists and has helped facilitate terror attacks for decades. The UN’s own investigation confirms what we’ve been raising the alarm about for months. It’s time to permanently cut funding for UNRWA, and we need to do it before they receive another dime."

UNRWA, the state officials say in their letter, has mainlined anti-Semitic propaganda to a generation of Palestinian children that have become radicalized supporters of Hamas’s campaign to eradicate Israel. American funding—which totals millions and accounts for a sizable portion of UNRWA’s budget—is responsible for spreading anti-Semitic hatred, the attorneys general say.