2025 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Saturday, January 04, 2025

01/04 Links: UNRWA Defenders’ False Choice; Trump administration plans crippling sanctions on ICC; Hamas releases video of hostage Liri Albag

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: UNRWA Defenders’ False Choice

Usually, when people make the case for UNRWA, they speak in generalities. They point to the nearly 200 schools that UNRWA at one point operated in Gaza. The implication is that Gazans are reliant on the agency for education. The truth is that Gazans aren’t getting education; they are getting—as the children at these schools openly admit—a Sovietesque radicalization against Jews. This brainwashing, in turn, produces another generation of war, and then another and another in perpetuity.

The Palestinian child who learns to hate Jews does not benefit from this status quo. The opposite is true. So Hashash isn’t the only UNRWA hostage among Palestinians. There are arguably many thousands of them.

Until about 2014, UNRWA was merely an ally of Hamas. But after that, UNRWA practically merged with Hamas. The agency shared space with Hamas all over the enclave.

In February, the IDF discovered something shocking. UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza City sat atop a Hamas data center with sleeping quarters for Hamas commanders. The data center was connected to UNRWA’s own wiring in the building. This was done so that Hamas would be protected from an Israeli airstrike. When I say UNRWA merged with Hamas, I mean it: The only reason UNRWA remained nominally a separate entity was so it could safeguard key Hamas figures and facilities and keep Hamas communication lines open during its war with Israel.

We should reject the idea that aid to Palestinians must necessarily come with terrorism and widespread human misery. Keep the dialysis machines, lose the hostage-takers.

Kristallnacht now: Oct. 7 led to the worst demonization of Israel in history

That is why most self-anointed champions of “Palestine” are peaceable Palestinians’ worst enemies by doing Hamas’s bidding. If anti-Israel agitators truly cared about Gazans, they would be up in arms against Hamas, since the terrorist group has inflicted far more harm on them than Israel has ever done by keeping them in penury as permanent refugees, even in their own autonomously run enclave where a mini Dubai could have sprung up in nothing flat since Israel vacated the premises in 2005. And all this in the name of a monomaniacal pipe dream that one day the Jews will be driven into the Mediterranean and “Palestine will be free.”

Then what? With Israel gone, a theocratic state of Palestine under Hamas and its ilk would be no more a bastion of democracy, religious tolerance, free speech, gender equality, and gay rights — which Israel is — than Afghanistan under the Taliban or Iran under the mullahs. It’s unlikely, though, that leftist anti-Israel diehards are thinking that far ahead. These days, having the correct “progressive” opinions relieves you of the burden of having to know much about the Arab-Israeli conflict or anything else.

“Having engaged with numerous protesters [over six months in London], I have noticed a startling disconnect between their strong opinions on the Gaza conflict and their shaky grasp of basic facts about it,” Potkin Azarmehr, an Iranian-British activist, wrote in O’Neill’s own Spiked magazine last summer. “It wasn’t just young people who were uninformed. An older woman with an American accent, seemingly a veteran protester, admitted she knew that Hamas was linked to the Muslim Brotherhood but had no deeper knowledge of its ideology or history.”

There’s more: In a recent survey of American students, only one in two of those “who regularly chant the infamous slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ were able to name the river and the sea it references. Some thought it referred to the Nile and the Euphrates. Others to the Caribbean,” O’Neill observes. “Less than a quarter of the students knew who Yasser Arafat was. More than 10 percent thought he was the first prime minister of Israel.”

Such acute nescience would be comical if its consequences weren’t so dire for Jews everywhere. Across much of the world, particularly in Western Europe, they haven’t had it this bad since the Holocaust, and things are bound to get worse, what with the unrelenting demonization of “Zionists.” This, too, is telling, by the way: No Muslims in Europe need fear being lynched, stabbed, or blown up by said Zionists, but rare is the Jew safe from militant Islamists.

O’Neill steers clear of these fratricidal matters, but After the Pogrom is a well-argued jeremiad, a heartfelt cri de coeur against the shrill histrionics and wanton double standards of anti-Zionists. Kudos to the author for it. “Israel is the great corrupter of Earth, the spoiler of men’s souls, threatening to ail us all with its disease of inhumanity,” he ventriloquizes the Jewish state’s most slanderous detractors. “They once said that about the Jewish people – now they say it about the Jewish nation.”

This headlong relapse into the oldest hatred greatly harms Jews and Israel, no question. But it harms the West no less because, as O’Neill’s book shows, when hard-won civilizational values erode, lunacy, bigotry, and savagery follow. ■

MEMRI: New Leader Of Hamas's Military Wing Al-Qassam Brigades And Head Of Ceasefire Negotiations Delegation To Qatar Khalil Al-Hayya: 'Go And Besiege Israeli And American Embassies'; 'The Blood Of Martyrs Marks The Path To Victory'; 'Only The Gun Will End The Occupation' – Clips From The MEMRI TV Archive

On December 26, 2024, top Hamas political bureau official Khalil Al-Hayya was appointed leader of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas's military wing.[1] Al-Hayya also heads the Hamas delegation to Doha, where he met with Qatar's Prime Minister to discuss a ceasefire and hostage deal with Israel.[2]

Senior Hamas Official Khalil Al-Hayya At Haniyeh's Funeral In Tehran: The Zionist Entity Is The Source Of Evil, Injustice, Instability – The World Must Uproot This Cancer – August 2024
Khalil Al-Hayya, a member of Hamas political bureau spoke at the Tehran funeral of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on August 1, 2024. He said that the "Zionist entity" is the source of evil, injustice, and instability and that the world must unite to "uproot this cancer." Al-Hayya vowed to "go after" Israel until it is uprooted from the land of Palestine and from Jerusalem. The funeral was posted on Khameni.ir.

Senior Hamas Official Khalil Al-Hayya Calls On Arabs And Muslims To Besiege Israeli And American Embassies – May 2024
Khalil Al-Hayya of Hamas’s political bureau said on a May 16, 2024 show on Al-Manar TV (Hizbullah-Lebanon) that the Arab and Islamic nations must not become acclimated to the bloodshed. He called on them to besiege Israeli and American embassies in Arab countries, letting them know that the "Arab nations do not accept any injustice against the Palestinians."

Senior Hamas Official Khalil Al-Hayya: Israel Is The Head Of The Serpent; By Fighting It We Weaken Its Bad Global Influence; Qatar And Iran Support Us – March 2023
Hamas Political Bureau member Khalil Al-Hayya, who also serves as the head of Hamas's Arab and Islamic Relations Portfolio, said in a March 19, 2023 interview on Al-Jazeera Network (Qatar) that Hamas's confrontations with Israel are the "greatest gift" to anyone who hates occupation. He said that Israel is the "head of the serpent" and that by fighting it, Hamas weakens its evil influence around the world. Al-Hayya also praised the aid Qatar gives to the Palestinians and particularly to the Gaza Strip. Speaking about the recent rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Al-Haya said that Hamas's relations with Iran are focused on its support of the Palestinian enterprise. He added that Iran supports Hamas and other "resistance forces" by providing them with money and weapons.

Senior Hamas Official Khalil Al-Hayya In Tehran: The Path To Victory Is Marked By The Blood Of Martyrs; We Do Not Fear Death – April 2022
Senior Hamas official Khalil Al-Hayya said in an April 29, 2022 International Quds Day speech in Tehran, Iran that aired on Palestine Today TV (Gaza/Lebanon) that the spirit of Islam and martyrdom is increasing every day in the souls and hearts of the Palestinians, who are determined to achieve victory. He said that death does not scare the Palestinians, that martyrdom brings one closer to Allah, and that the path of victory towards Jerusalem is marked by the blood of the martyrs. In addition, he said that fear of Israel and the U.S. has disappeared and that the Islamic nation, with Iran at its heart, supports the resistance and the Palestinian people. Khalil Al-Hayya's speech was translated live into Farsi.

MEMRI: Celebrating October 7 Attack As It Happens, Eulogizing Slain Designated Terror Leaders, Encouraging Protests In The West: A One-Year Review Of Samidoun On X – October 7, 2023- October 7, 2024

Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, has maintained an account on Twitter, now X, since November 2011 (X.com/Samidounpp). As of this writing, it has posted 58,300 tweets and has over 26,000 followers. In the year following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel, it has shared photos, videos, links, and retweets via with a focus on celebrating the attacks, lionizing and eulogizing slain and assassinated terror leaders including Hamas's Yahya Sinwar and Hizbullah's Hassan Nasrallah, promoting and encouraging violent protests, including vandalism and destruction, and expressing support for and solidarity with designated terrorist organizations.

Samidoun maintains a website and social media accounts for all its branches in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and worldwide, in a range of languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Arabic, Farsi, and more. It publishes its own unique content as well as content from other sources.

In October 2024, Samidoun, along with the Samidoun-affiliated Palestinian-Canadian senior PFLP official Khaled Barakat, were sanctioned by both the U.S. and Canada as "key international fundraiser[s] for Foreign Terrorist Organization PFLP."

Joseph Converses With Judah, His Brother, James Tissot c. 1896-1902 thejewishmuseum.org

What, exactly, in Yehudah (Judah's) speech caused Yosef (Joseph) to break down and reveal his identity to his brothers?

Most would say that it is was his offer to have himself imprisoned instead of Binyomin (Benjamin) that convinced Yosef that he had truly reformed and repented from his sin of selling Yosef. But something I only noticed today in his speech seems to me to be more powerful.

Later our father said, ‘Go back and procure some food for us.’
We answered, ‘We cannot go down; only if our youngest brother is with us can we go down, for we may not show our faces to the man unless our youngest brother is with us.’
Your servant my father said to us, ‘As you know, my wife bore me two sons. כִּ֥י שְׁנַ֖יִם יָֽלְדָה־לִּ֥י אִשְׁתִּֽי
But one is gone from me, and I said: Alas, he was torn by a beast! And I have not seen him since.
If you take this one from me, too, and he meets with disaster, you will send my white head down to Sheol in sorrow.’

In Yehudah's retelling, he quotes Yaakov (Jacob) as saying that his wife gave him two sons. But Yaakov had twelve sons from his two (four) wives.

The sons of Leah and the two other wives were always sensitive to the favoritism that Yaakov gave to Rochel (Rachel) and her sons. And this is understandable - they didn't want their own mothers to be considered second class. But when Yehuda gave this speech - and keep in mind that there is no record of Yaakov telling him these words - he was saying that he was accepting that Rochel was the wife that his father loved, something that must have been enormously difficult for him to say to the Egyptian leader.

That, I believe, is what convinced Yaakov that Yehudah and the other brothers (who didn't protest) did a true repentance, and that is what caused Yosef to break down and admit who he was before he could finish his plan to fully fulfill his dreams of the brothers and father bowing down to him.

It was Yehudah's humility and willingness to admit this very uncomfortable truth that is what qualified him and his descendants to be the political leaders of Israel.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/03 Links Pt2: The ISIS Threat Never Left; When Ireland Became ‘Paddystine’; Documentary about Nova music festival massacre nominated for PGA award

From Ian:

The ISIS Threat Never Left

Terrorist movements wax strong when they believe that history is on their side. And there is no better way to rid the terrorists of that notion than to deny them haven and reduce their leaders to ash.

America forgot this lesson. Our leaders reduced commitments in Iraq and Syria. Federal law enforcement shifted its attention to domestic extremism and white nationalism. Worst of all, President Biden beat a hasty retreat from Afghanistan that left 13 U.S. servicemen killed, U.S. citizens and visa-holders stranded, Afghan allies abandoned, the Afghan people in hock to a jihadist militia that calls itself a government, and Afghanistan's ungoverned spaces in the hands of ISIS.

At the time, Biden pledged continued surveillance of the enemy, "over-the-horizon" military capabilities, and support for Afghan women and girls. None of this was true. Retired general Frank McKenzie, former CENTCOM commander, said last spring that "in Afghanistan, we have almost no ability to see into that country and almost no ability to strike into that country." The Taliban resumed public executions, imposed dress and behavioral codes on women, and deprived girls of schooling. The other day, the Taliban said it would shutter NGOs that employ women.

Consider the contrast between Israel and the United States. Israel possesses the will to strike its enemies, establish facts on the ground favorable to its security, and restore deterrence in a dangerous neighborhood. The United States, meanwhile, has been tossed about by a whirlwind of events that it believes are beyond its control: an open southern border, a passive-aggressive desire to renew the nuclear agreement with Iran, disaster in Afghanistan, war between Russia and Ukraine that is lessening weapons stockpiles, virulent anti-Semitism on campuses and in city streets, and long-running operations against the Houthis that have led nowhere. This aimlessness and passivity create openings for terrorists. It gives them the sense of impending victory.

I am not arguing that we re-invade Afghanistan tomorrow. Nor am I saying that a more assertive U.S. foreign policy would end every threat to the homeland. My argument is that the way to reduce the ISIS threat, foreign and domestic, is to take the fight to the evildoers. Don't pretend jihadists can be left to their own devices. Put them on the defensive. Thin out their ranks, dry up their finances, keep them on the run. Then ISIS's ability to inspire will wane. And justice will be done for the people of New Orleans.

Global rise in antisemitism leaves Jewish community isolated, rabbi says world at 'a tipping point'

The escalation of antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 terror massacre in Israel has paved the way for attacks on Jewish communities around the world. For the duration of the past year, schools, community centers and houses of worship have faced threats, intimidation and physical violence.

Rabbi Moshe Hauer, the executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, told Fox News Digital that throughout 2024, the "level of presumed security" the American Jewish community has lived with has shifted. "That’s difficult, when you have a place that you call home, and suddenly you don’t feel so at home." With the environment of "rolling antisemitism" in the U.S. becoming "an accepted part of daily life," Hauer said the issue "is still looked at as a problem for Jewish people as opposed to a stain on society."

The suddenness of the shift has been striking, Hauer said. "It was like we were a source of darkness," he explained. "All those who we stood shoulder-to-shoulder with to fight for their needs and to fight for their rights suddenly don’t recognize us, so that’s jarring."

The Anti-Defamation League tallied over 10,000 antisemitic incidents between Oct. 7, 2023 and Oct. 6, 2024, up from 3,325 during the prior year and representing the highest annual total the group has counted. They include over 8,000 incidents of harassment, 150 physical assaults and 1,840 acts of vandalism. Combined, more than half of these incidents took place at anti-Israel rallies (over 3,000) or at Jewish institutions (over 2,000).

Some politicians and the United Nations (U.N.) have stoked domestic anti-Israel hate. In January, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza without also calling for the disarmament of Hamas, drawing wide condemnation from Jewish community leaders.

Despite multiple U.S. officials and the State Department condemning her spread of antisemitism, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese visited numerous U.S. campuses in October while presenting her latest report before the U.N. General Assembly. During a stop at Barnard College, Albanese "described Israel’s war in Gaza as a ‘genocide,’ justified the October 7 attack, and questioned Israel’s right to exist," the Times of Israel reported.

Hatred that had been percolating on university campuses took new shape when anti-Israel encampments sprung up at learning institutions countrywide during the spring. During some encampment protests, Jewish students were excluded from their own campus spaces.

Terror flags have been flown on U.S. streets and campuses during anti-Israel protests. School administrators and business leaders who have angered anti-Israel protesters have had their homes and institutions tagged with the inverted red triangle that Hamas uses to denote military targets. In July, protesters replaced the American flag with the Palestinian flag in Washington, D.C., and wrote "Hamas is coming" on a statue of Christopher Columbus.

A Jimmy Carter surprise: He hated Jews, not just Israel Remembrances of former President Jimmy Carter, who passed away on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, should keep in mind how America’s 39th president profoundly damaged the Jewish state, especially with his deceitful 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

But the story of Carter’s attitude towards Israel goes deeper. He was not simply a modern-day anti-Zionist—an ignorant idealogue who wrongly believed that Israeli counter-terrorism policies harmed the “human rights” of the Palestinian people. Carter was, in fact, a traditional, old-fashioned Christian antisemite.

We know this because his many post-presidential activities included teaching Sunday school. In 2007, Simon & Schuster released a 13-disc CD boxed set of recorded sermons that Carter gave at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Ga., called “Sunday Mornings in Plains.”

The sermons contain a slew of chillingly pre-modern antisemitic prejudices. For example, he claimed that Judaism teaches Jews to feel superior to non-Jews, that Jewish religious practices are a sleazy “trick” to enhance personal wealth, and that current Israeli policy towards Palestinians is based upon these “Jewish” values and practices.

In the sermons recorded between 1998 and 2003, Carter attacked Israel by retreading antisemitic tropes dating back to the gospels and patristic writings of the early church. These anti-Judaic beliefs were formulated not in the 1960s or 1970s but between the first and fifth centuries C.E., ensuring well over a millennium of institutional, lethal Christian antisemitism.

Speaking of Jews’ supposed air of “superiority” to non-Jews, the former president said in one lecture, “ … [T]his morning I’m gonna’ be trying to relate the assigned Bible lesson to us in the Uniformed Series with how that affected Israel, and how it affects us through Christ personally. … It’s hard for us to even visualize the prejudice against gentiles when Christ came on earth. If a Jew married a gentile, that person was considered to be dead. … How would you characterize from a Jew’s point of view the uncircumcised? Nonbeliever? And what? Unclean, what? They called them ‘dogs!’ That’s true. …What was Paul’s feeling toward gentiles in his early life [before his conversion] … ? Anybody? Absolute commitment to persecution! To the imprisonment and even the execution of non-Jews who now professed faith in Jesus Christ. … We know the differences in the Middle East. But the differences there are between Jews on the one hand, who comprise the dominating force both militarily and also politically, and the Palestinians, who are both Muslim and Christians.” When Ireland Became ‘Paddystine’

Higgins charged the Mossad for leaking his “fawning letter of congratulations” to Iran’s new president, but it was the Iranians themselves, not the Israelis, who had made his letter public. Informed of this, he did not admit to his mistake, much less apologize to the Israelis for his initial claim. Higgins also makes preposterous claims about Israeli expansionism. When he received the new ambassador of “Palestine,” he claimed that in Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt Israel was aggressively assaulting those countries’ sovereignty, presumably meaning that the Zionists hope to enlarge Israel so that it extends “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” This is an old chestnut among the world’s antisemites.

In reality, the aggression is all coming from Hezbollah, and now many Lebanese, not just the Christians and Sunnis, but even many Shia, are tired of Hezbollah’s continuing war against Israel that has led to so much destruction, not only in southern Lebanon between the Litani River and the Israeli border, but elsewhere as well — especially in southern Beirut, most of which has been leveled by Israeli airstrikes. And Hezbollah has also been responsible for other destruction that did not involve Israel. Think of the “Beirut blast” of August 4, 2020, that resulted from Hezbollah’s faulty storage of ammonium nitrates in a hangar at the Port of Beirut. That huge explosion — the largest non-nuclear explosion in history — caused 218 deaths, 6000 wounded, and $15 billon in damages. Lebanon has only suffered from Hezbollah’s dominance, its killing of so many of its political enemies, including Rafik Hariri, Samir Kassir, George Hawi, Gebran Tueni, Pierre Amine Gemayel, and Walid Edo.

01/03 Links Pt1: The Weight Israel Carries; Hamas’s War on Gaza’s Electric Grid; UNRWA preparing to shutter Gaza, WB operations ahead of Israeli ban

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Weight Israel Carries

Israelis aren’t blind to the mental-health challenge posed not just by the war but by what started it: scenes of inhumanity reminiscent of the Nazis. In September, Israel’s health minister, Uriel Buso, warned that Israel was facing “the largest mental health event the state has known since its establishment. A crisis that requires us, as a state and a society, to change perceptions and upgrade the public mental health system.”

The following month, Buso introduced legislation designed to decentralize mental-health treatment. Though it went mostly unnoticed at the time (even in the Israeli press), Buso had hit on something important: Just as is the case with physical ailments, you don’t want the last resort to be the first intervention. The goal of primary-care medicine is to keep you out of hospitals and emergency rooms. That prevention can be even more difficult in the chaos of wartime and regarding mental health, the deterioration of which is not always noticeable to others.

Buso also sought to take advantage of Israel’s close-knit society. He got a boost to his department’s budget, and instead of keeping it all under his nose at the national level, he disbursed it throughout local community healthcare providers. Psychiatric institutions would merge with major hospitals to make treatment easier and, the Health Ministry’s director general seemed to suggest, reduce the stigma of seeking help.

All of which is yet another reminder that Oct. 7, 2023, caused a seismic change in Israel and the Jewish world. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks, Israel’s HMOs “reported record levels of requests by patients for sleeping pills, painkillers, and tranquilizers,” Tablet’s Hillel Kuttler reported. According to the IDF, of the 17 soldier suicides in 2023, seven of them—40 percent—happened in just the final three months of the year after the attacks.

Meanwhile Hamas continues to torment the country over the remaining hostages by refusing to let the parents of these captives even know whether their children are still alive. Missiles from as far away as Yemen continue to fall on Tel Aviv. Homes in the north have spent a year empty, as have communities in the Gaza envelope.

Israel continues to be the only Western country that truly acts like it has a stake in how this now-global conflict ends. A country of barely 10 million has been putting the rest on its shoulders. Yet still, Israelis somehow seem immune to the paralysis that most would inevitably succumb to. The CEO of Israel’s largest mental-health organization told the Times of Israel that she doesn’t want people to merely say “the country is in trauma. That doesn’t help us. It’s vital that we look at what we can do, how we can be proactive.”

Here’s hoping Israelis have less of a burden to carry in 2025, or, at the very least, that they get some help carrying it.

Seth Frantzman: Future of the Middle East: What does 2025 hold for Jordan and Egypt

Jordan and Egypt are both important states in the Middle East, and they have been Israel’s historic peace partners from the 1980s to 1990s.

This means that these two countries share certain qualities that are of great importance to Israel and the wider region.

Egypt, the most populous country in the area, is a historic center of military power and culture.

Jordan, by contrast, is less populated and is a relatively modern country straddling an expanse of desert between Israel, the Gulf, and Syria.

The Kingdom of Jordan enters 2025 with concerns about the outcome of the changes in Syria. Jordan had worked to reconcile with now-toppled president Bashar al-Assad’s regime over the last several years.

The kingdom has hosted hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. Many Syrians who fled southern Syria have clan or tribal ties in northern Jordan, so their appearance in Jordan did not change Jordan’s demographics.

However, this is a burden for Jordan, which is a relatively poor country compared to others in the Gulf. Jordan is a historic monarchy that grew out of the British Mandate era.

The monarchy has to balance the interests of former Bedouin tribes with the townspeople of northern Jordan and the Palestinians who fled to Jordan in 1948.

Amman views itself as having unique rights in Jerusalem, and even though it gave up its claims to the West Bank, it has a keen interest in the Palestinians. It has been concerned about the outcome of the October 7 massacre and how that might propel Hamas to power in the West Bank.

Jordan is also concerned about being used as a conduit for Iranian weapons smuggling via Iraq. The Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah group in Iraq attacked US forces in Jordan in January 2024, killing three Americans. The kingdom is aware that it is sandwiched between Iran’s interests in Iraq, Israel, the Palestinians, the Gulf, and Syria.

Thus, it knows it must balance all these nations that surround it. Jordan is likely concerned that the Syrian shift in power to a new government could lead to troubles at home.

What if Jordanians get the idea that they could have similar changes in Amman?

Seth Mandel: Hamas’s War on Gaza’s Electric Grid

The new Syrian administration run by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leaders of the successful rebellion and overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, is at least making a pretense of constructing a functioning government. What that government does, of course, is a separate conversation entirely. But simply as a case study of Islamist institution-building, one gets the impression that, unlike Hamas, HTS wants to be seen as giving a whit about the people who depend on them.

To take one example, from Aaron Zelin’s daily diary of the Syrian transition yesterday: “Syrian Minister of Electricity Omar al-Shuqruq: Six months of maintenance are required to fully restore the electricity network. Re-establishing electrical linkage with Jordan is one of the key solutions to securing power supply for Syria.”

Electricity has been one of the main challenges in Gaza, because Hamas refuses to do the one thing that would solve the problem almost overnight: stop its forever war against Israel. Now, it’s possible that HTS is planning to launch semiannual wars against Jordan and sabotage its own power supply, but I consider the possibility unlikely. That is, however, what Hamas does daily.

Here’s how the electricity in Gaza works. Israel provides 50 percent of the enclave’s power—and I do mean “provides.” Technically, Israel is selling electricity to Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority is supposed to pick up the tab. But they very often don’t, and certainly Hamas doesn’t pay, and every so often Israel threatens to cut off electricity for lack of payment—the debt is usually somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. But Israel always backs down or accepts low partial payments.

How much does Hamas value that electricity? Well, it is not uncommon for their own rockets to hit the power lines and cut off parts of the grid. Usually, Israel just fixes the lines when Hamas destroys them. (Israel is terrible at doing genocide.) But on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas knocked down more than half of their own power lines and Israel did not fix them; it had, if you remember, a few other priorities.

From the Justice Department:

A former resident of Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh on charges of attempting to support the foreign terrorist organization Hizballah and making false statements involving international terrorism to a department or agency of the United States, United States Attorney Eric G. Olshan announced today.

The three-count Indictment names Jack Danaher Molloy, 24, formerly of the Upper St. Clair suburb of Pittsburgh, as the sole defendant. ...

As alleged, Molloy—a dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, who previously served on active-duty status in the U.S. Army—traveled to Lebanon in August 2024 and attempted to join Hizballah. While in Lebanon, Molloy was told by multiple individuals that the time was not right, and that he needed to take other steps before he could join the terrorist organization. Molloy then traveled from Lebanon to Syria in October 2024 in an effort to fight for Hizballah in Syria. After returning to the United States, Molloy resided in Upper St. Clair, where he continued his attempts to join Hizballah, including through communication with individuals online and in Lebanon. During his time in the United States and abroad, Molloy also allegedly expressed his hatred toward, and promoted violence against, Jewish people. Molloy’s alleged animus toward Jews was also evidenced by multiple images and videos on his electronic devices and the usernames he chose for his social media and email accounts, including the username “KIKEKILLER313” on the social media platform X. In one alleged WhatsApp exchange with a family member, Molloy agreed that his “master plan was to join Hezbollah and kill Jews.” And while he was residing in Upper St. Clair, Molloy also allegedly visited a website detailing the possible incarceration location of Robert Bowers, who carried out the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooting during which he murdered 11 Jewish worshippers.

But I thought Hezbollah was only anti-Zionist, not antisemitic!

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Under Israel's new budget, the Foreign Ministry will receive $150 million - twenty times more than today - for public diplomacy.

Gil Hoffman of Honest Reporting writes an op-ed on how this money should be spent, and much of the advice is excellent.

Here is what I would like to see Israel spending some of this money on:

1. Making information available. Right now if I email a question for the IDF Spokesperson or COGAT or anyone else, it is rare that I get a response. Pro-Israel advocates must dig in to do our own research and take educated guesses as to what the Israeli government is doing instead of getting the proper answers from the right people. I understand that some information must remain classified but that should be the exception, not the rule, and reporting even that the information would compromise security is better than not getting a response at all.

2. Similarly, make more material available on websites in all languages. Make it easy to find. Invest in and improve existing projects like the Jewish Virtual Library. Create easy to search databases of important information like terror attacks, aid to Gaza, Palestinian antisemitism, and other important topics. Some of the material is already out there but often it gets moved or is hard to find. Hire a librarian to put this all together.

3. When an influencer (like, I guess, me) uncovers something new or novel that hadn't been publicized before, amplify it. The government cannot possibly reproduce what we bloggers and Tweeters and Tik-Tokers do, but it can make sure that a lot more people are exposed to it.

4. EDUCATION. Most Jewish students entering college are clueless about how to properly answer anti-Israel arguments. Learning about Israel's history is important, but that isn't enough - they have to know what the other side is saying and come equipped to counter them with facts. Invest heavily in Zionist material, and especially defending Israel material, to be available to Jewish schools, Talmud Torah schools, synagogue youth programs, summer camps. Not only that, but I get the impression that our community leaders (for example, Federations) are little more conversant in these topics as well, and they are the ones who get interviewed by the media when antisemitic incidents occur. Train them!

5. I humbly believe that my definition of antisemitism should be added to the IHRA definition to eliminate ambiguity in IHRA. It is an algorithm, a test that can and should be used to determine when criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism, and it also can help stop people over-using labeling things as antisemitic that are not, to avoid watering down the accusation. If Israel would adopt the definition and encourage others like IHRA to do so, it would help refine our messaging.

6. Universities are still the epicenter of doctrinal anti-Zionism with lots of bogus papers written to very poor standards. There need to be more Zionist scholars, Zionist academic papers, Zionist centers in universities that uphold the highest academic standards. Israel could fund chairs, train Israeli academics for stints in Western universities, and organize real debates on campus - the exact activity that the haters don't want to see.

(The image above was generated by AI; the Hebrew is nonsense.)

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Here is 100% proof that the Gaza Ministry of Health lies to the media about Gaza deaths, and the @NYTimes believes their lies

An op-ed in the New York Times by Khaled Elgindy states, as fact, that the Gaza war "has killed more than 17,000 children." The statistic links to a recent article that quotes the Gaza health ministry as saying that "At least 17,492 of those killed were children."

As I have noted previously, the Palestinian Ministry of Health has been publishing two sets of numbers. One comes from a list that they say is of verified deaths (a combination of hospital records and self-reported forms people can fill out) and the other source is not described, although it tracks closely with the statistics issued by the Hamas media office.

The last time the ministry published an infographic breaking down the statistics from the verified list was on October 7 2024, where they said the total number of those killed at the time was 42,010 but the number of verified victims for which they had names and other information was 40,717. For months, the gap between those two figures had been in the range of 10,000 but over time, apparently, the names people added from the online form has gotten the two figures relatively close, a difference of only 3%.

Here's their infographic from October 7 showing the detailed breakdown of women, children and elderly from their database of victims.

But these aren't the numbers that the ministry is telling the media every day. Those numbers can be seen in the Ramallah-based Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Here are their numbers from October 9 via the Internet Archive:

Comparing the two sets of figures, we see that the PCBS numbers quoting the Ministry of Health show 1,192 more total victims compared to the MoH verified list.

But the difference of the number of children is 3,608; the difference of women killed is 4,271 between the two sets of statistics. In total, the number of deceased women and children is nearly 8,000 higher than those counted on the verified list when the total difference of deaths is less than 1,200.

This is obviously impossible.

The verified list includes names, genders, ages, and ID numbers. While its own methodology is suspect, it at least has some data backing it up. The other statistics with the inflated women and children numbers cannot possibly be reconciled with the verified list.

Since the same Ministry of Health publishes both sets of irreconcilable statistics, we can confidently call them liars.

The New York Times is getting its numbers from the inflated list, not the verified list. In fact, the Ministry of Health has not updated the verified list in the intervening three months while it updates the inflated list regularly, making it sound legitimate since it is seemingly up to date.

As mentioned, the source for the inflated numbers is never discussed. It cannot be from hospitals and it cannot be from the user online forms, since they publish those names, their ages and genders on the verified list.

The real source is that Hamas makes them up, and issues its own statistics nearly every day that have nothing to do with bodies found or names counted. The MoH doesn't want to contradict their bosses, so they repeat Hamas statistics as if they counted the numbers themselves.

The New York Times and other media (and the UN, and NGOs) are not getting their numbers from the Ministry of Health counts of victims but from Hamas propagandists in the Gaza Media Office being laundered through the MoH.

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The most antisemitic incidents of 2024 in Turkey as voted by Turkish Jews

Alvaremoz, a Turkish Jewish newspaper, asked Jews in Turkey to vote for what they considered the most antisemitic incidents of the year 2024 in that country.

Here are the top results:

7. The Yeni Safak newspaper published the blood libel, asking if Jews will be murdering gentile children to drink their blood in America, too.

6. Abdurrahman Uzun, who has 1.2 million followers on social media, also told his audience that Jews "rape, kill and steal the organs of children" and that synagogues in Turkey are a threat.

5. Turkiye Gazete published that 4,000 Turkish Jews are engaged in "genocide" in Gaza, inciting Turkish Muslims against Jews.

4. A BDS group in Turkey, Boykotdedektifi called to boycott a Jewish service organization because it said it would hold a ceremony in memory of the Holocaust.

3. The doors of the Sinyora and Algazi Synagogues in Izmir were defaced with red paint and the number "5.60," on October 7, referring to verse 5:60 in the Quran which says disobedient Jews were turned into apes and pigs.

2. Sweets were distributed in Istanbul encouraging prayers for the Adolf Hitler's soul on the anniversary of his death.

1. A father made a video showing him teaching his young son to murder Jews.

@basyazar Küçücük çocuğa Türkiye'deki Musevileri, Yahudileri öldürmeyi öğreten #firatismailyeleritutuklansın pic.twitter.com/S9y6yiOVvg
— Platoon (@Platoon0011) June 21, 2024

Incidents like these are spreading from Turkey to Muslims in Western countries and then to "progressives." That's been the pattern for some decades now.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/02 Links Pt2: How media bias fuels the facade of Palestinian nationhood and ignores accountability; Danny Danon: UN has failed Gaza. It’s time for a new era

From Ian:

How media bias fuels the facade of Palestinian nationhood and ignores accountability

FOR MANY of the world’s leading media outlets, there isn’t even the need for an honest accounting of the war dead. Hamas says 45,000 have been killed – who cares how many are militants or if the numbers are massaged with calculated impunity? Hamas says yet another Israeli attack has killed journalists – never mind if they’re also freelancing as Islamist terrorists.

Meanwhile, despite being the elected leader of a Western democracy, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been branded a genocidaire – unable to enter Poland to honor the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation owing to an international arrest warrant by a bogus global court.

And Israeli cultural and civic groups are being banned from global gatherings. Most recently, the delegation to the World Bowls Tour was forbidden from participating in the event in Great Britain next month after an outcry from the pro-Palestinian Action Network, which branded Israel an “apartheid and genocidal state.” (The World Bowls Tour has since reversed its decision.)

And yet much of Hamas’s leadership still travels freely across the Middle East, while pro-Palestinian films continue to be hyped out in Hollywood.

As Hamas refuses to confirm its hostage count, both Israel and the world are forced to negotiate with literal terrorists so that terrorized civilians might go free. Gleeful murderers must be set loose so that Israel may bring their innocent back home.

Nothing is demanded of those murderers to go free, no conditions imposed to ensure they, like Yahya Sinwar, don’t re-offend in an even bloodier and more spectacular fashion. Lots of impunity – little accountability.

For many, a Palestinian state remains the ultimate goal – possibly as a byproduct of Israel’s eventual normalization with Saudi Arabia. Both are still possible.

But even if statehood were achieved, how would Palestinians govern if they never learned the most basic building block of sovereignty – accountability? There can be no sovereignty without accountability to its citizens, neighbors, regional allies, and, ultimately, the global community. Once again, accountability has never been something Palestinians have done particularly well.

As 2025 arrives, both increased military activity in Gaza and yet another potential hostage deal are crowding the headlines. Israel, as always, is being pressured to compromise while the Palestinians continue to play hardball.

This may be business as usual – but it’s a bad business. It’s bad for Israel, which lacks a serious negotiation partner; for the Gaza civilians forced by their craven leadership to jockey for martyrdom; and for the Palestinian nation that so many pretend already exists.

Many hope it never will, but for those who believe that it must, the era of carte blanche diplomacy must end in Gaza, Doha, and Ramallah. And in its place, the gift that no one has dared to demand – the gift of Palestinian accountability.

UNRWA's Refusal to Accept Israeli Sovereignty Will Harm the Palestinians

Israeli authorities found that more than 2,135 UNRWA employees were also terrorists in either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). One-fifth of UNRWA school administrators were Hamas terrorists, and 10% of the senior positions (school principals and their deputies, directors, and deputy directors of training centers) were members of Hamas or PIJ.

UNRWA's facilities in Gaza had been turned into terror bases. Hamas had dug extensive tunnels under UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City in which they placed one of their main computer server farms. The electricity for the computers, as well as water, came directly, and in plain sight, from within UNRWA's headquarters.

Having concluded that UNRWA had lost all credibility and morphed into a vassal of the terrorists, Israel's Knesset passed laws on Oct. 28, 2024, to end Israel's June 1967 invitation to UNRWA to operate in Israel, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. The laws will come into full force on January 30, 2025.

For 76 years, UNRWA has served as the primary vehicle for perpetuating the lie that the "Palestine refugees" will one day demographically and democratically destroy Israel. Under UNRWA, the number of "Palestine refugees" has swelled from 711,000 in 1949 to six million in 2023.

Despite having been given sufficient notice, terror-infested UNRWA is refusing to wrap up its operations and transfer its functions to other actors. It would seem that UNRWA believes it can force itself upon Israel, irrespective of the new legislation.

However, by acting in this manner, UNRWA is doing a disservice to the people to whom it provides services. The international community would be wise to find suitable alternatives.

The Man Who Wasn’t There_ An Account Of A Fake Witness To The Gaza War

The charge by Israel’s enemies that it is committing a genocide against the Palestinians is false, malicious and a complete inversion of the truth. It relies on disinformation and invented legal standards to deny the Jewish state its right to self-defense following Hamas’s genocidal attack on October 7, 2023. Nevertheless, it is being promoted by certain Israelis, whose words are used as an authoritative validation of the bogus claim. One such Israeli– who serves as a hero to those who delight in vilifying Israel– is Lee Mordechai, whose false “genocide” charges against Israel provides fuel for the delegitimization of the Jewish state.

Below is an article by Yigal Carmon — a former Israeli intelligence officer, counterterrorism adviser, and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute — debunking Mordechai’s sanctimonious accusations.

Introduction
The website “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War,”1 run by Israeli historian Lee Mordechai,2 claims to be “both a public statement and an archive… [that] aims to make sense of a deeply complex and troubling situation” in Gaza.

Mordechai states that his website/archive “compiles evidence from reliable sources, including humanitarian organizations, investigative reports, and firsthand accounts” of war crimes committed by Israel against the people of Gaza 3 – which, according to Mordechai, meet the definition of “genocide” (in Mordechai’s words, “my definition of genocide”).4

This document will refute several major claims made by Mordechai on his website.

A Note On Mordechai’s Website
Mordechai’s website, Witnessing-the-gaza-war.com, appears to be inaccessible from an Israel-based server. It is unclear why this is so, and whether or not this is deliberate.5 “Witness”

A Misleading Use Of The Term In The Name Of Mordechai’s Website
The first and most basic element to be refuted in Mordechai’s project is his self-definition as “a witness.” Mordechai did not witness any of the alleged war crimes he cites in his report. The name of his website – “bearing witness to the Israel-Gaza war” – is misleading; what Mordechai does on his website is present a collection of information from a wide range of news websites and social media platforms, and reframe it as “evidence.” He has witnessed none of these firsthand.

Harnessing Irrelevant Expertise (History Of The Justinianic Plague) To Claim Authority
Mordechai begins his statement of purpose with the words: “I, Lee Mordechai, an Historian by profession and an Israeli citizen…”6. He harnesses his academic authority as “a historian by profession” to provide pseudo-academic basis to his claims of genocide.

Mordechai’s field of expertise in academia is the Justinianic plague and global pandemics,7 which fall under the research category of Environmental History. Mordechai is not an expert or an academic authority on the topic of genocide. Before publishing this document, Mordechai never dealt with the subject.8 He uses his title of a Late Antiquity historian (AD 541–549) to muster whatever authority and stature he can so as to appear knowledgeable in a field in which he has no expertise whatsoever.

01/02 Links Pt1: From college campuses to Afghanistan, we let Islamic terrorism rise again; The ‘intifada’ comes to New Orleans

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: From college campuses to Afghanistan, we let Islamic terrorism rise again

Let’s all give a big shout-out to the “Globalize the intifada” crowd. You got your way! Congratulations. Hope it feels good.

For years, citizens of Israel have had maniac jihadists driving at them and trying to mow them down on their streets. But this got only cheers from the dolts on US college campuses and New York street protesters.

Then, just before Christmas, Germany again got a taste of this “intifada.” That was when a Saudi immigrant decided to plow a vehicle through a previously happy Christmas market. He killed five people and injured almost 200.

Then, on New Year’s, it was America’s turn again.

This time, the wishes of the students at Columbia and other college campuses arrived on the streets of New Orleans. A man carrying an ISIS flag drove a pickup through New Year’s revelers, killing 14 people and seriously injuring dozens more. The FBI is looking into his network of contacts.

There are several things to say about all this.

The first is that although many people hoped the threat of jihadist violence had diminished, it has not gone away. With jihadist groups running Afghanistan and Syria, among other countries, they are back in control of vast areas, as they were before 9/11.

After the 2001 attacks on this city, America vowed there should be no safe havens for terrorists. That included ungoverned or Islamist-governed spaces abroad where terrorists can be trained and then come to the United States and other Western countries and carry out attacks.

Such spaces were indeed reduced by US and allied forces in the years that followed. But they have come back. Today Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen (to name just three countries) are places where jihadists can train and learn battlefield tactics. Our intelligence agencies and military need to keep a close eye on these places and strike when needed.

The second thing is that it is obvious that a considerable campaign of recruitment inside the United States is still ongoing. The New Orleans terrorist appears to have been radicalized while in the United States. Whether that was online or via a network within the US will soon be learned.

But we should hope that the full force of the law — and law enforcement agencies — comes down on any and all such groupings.

Many in the intelligence community and the police are indeed working hard on such cases. But there is a societal torpor about this work.

If the New Year´s Eve attack had not been jihadist, but had — for instance — been some far-right white supremacist, every corner of our media and politics would be rightly lining up to demand answers. We would be asking who the people were who had put such a person up to such an attack. Who had helped him? Who had encouraged him? Who had said it was all right — in fact good — to do such a thing?

Melanie Phillips: America’s Islamist problem

This political interpretation of Islam is called Islamism. It’s important to acknowledge that many Muslims living in the West are entirely signed up to Western values. However, the aggressive literalist interpretation is dominant among the faithful.

Polling has shown that 52% of British Muslims want to make it illegal to display a picture of Islam’s founder, Mohammed; almost half say Jews have too much power over government policy; and one-third favor implementing Sharia law and declaring Islam as the national religion.

In the United States, a survey by the Heritage Foundation found that 39% of American Muslims believe “Hamas did not commit murder and rape in Israel on Oct. 7” while 43% said: “Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish homeland.”

Islamism is spread throughout the world by the Muslim Brotherhood. While this has been banned by several Islamic states, neither London nor Washington has proscribed it.

Western nations also refuse to acknowledge that the Palestinian cause is an Islamist front not just against Israel but also against them. The hostility of the Palestinian Arabs to the existence of a Jewish state has always been at the core a jihadi cause. That’s why the Palestinians persistently make the false and hysterical claim that Israel intends to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

Hamas and Hezbollah say openly that the war against Israel is part of their war against the west. In New York and elsewhere last month, anti-Israel demonstrators attacked Christmas trees. Hours after the New Orleans atrocity, a mob chanted in Times Square: “There is only one solution—intifada revolution!” “Resistance is glorious, we will be victorious!” and “Gaza, you make us proud.”

Israel and the west are umbilically linked as the targets of Islamic jihadi conquest. Yet for decades, it has been impossible to say any of this without being denounced as “Islamophobic” and singled out for attack.

Islamists have taken full advantage of the West’s refusal to defend an identity it no longer understands while telling itself it’s not worth defending. This myopia has extended across the political spectrum.

During Trump’s first administration, although he banned Muslims from certain countries from entering America, he didn’t recognize the full extent of the threat.

As Sam Westrop pointed out on the Middle East Forum in 2021, his administration handed out more federal money to domestic Islamic organizations than any previous administration, with more than half going to groups with some degree of Islamist influence. “In other words,” he wrote, “under Trump, America has served as a leading state sponsor of nonviolent Islamism.”

Americans have told themselves that the war between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is over the division of the land. They’ve told themselves that ISIS has been defeated, that leaving Afghanistan and Iraq has meant that the United States is no longer a target, and that Iran is a threat solely to Israel. They’ve told themselves that the Islamic world is not their problem.

As New Orleans has so horribly demonstrated, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Brendan O'Neill: The ‘intifada’ comes to New Orleans

The New Orleans massacre follows more than a year of noisy Islamo-apologism in educated circles in the West. Since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023, sympathy for Islamism has been all the rage among the right-on. ‘Long live the intifada’, they cried. Even ‘Globalise the intifada’. This gushing over ‘intifada’ in the weeks and months following an ‘intifada’ that involved the slaughter of more than a thousand Jews by an army of fanatical Islamists dragged us to ever greater depths of ethical delirium and moral depravity. Some even hailed the Islamist butchery of 7 October as ‘exhilarating’ and ‘energising’. Imagine if someone said that about New Orleans. Imagine if they said they felt elated upon hearing of this barbarous slaying of the young. Perhaps someone will. It is a testament to the slow, deadly corrosion of our civilisational values that it would not be wholly surprising if someone did.

For the truth is that something very like the New Orleans massacre happened on 7 October, only on a far larger scale, and back then the activist class celebrated it. The 364 young men and women butchered at the Nova music festival by the invading Islamists from Gaza were every bit as innocent as the slain of Bourbon Street. They were every bit as ‘full of life’. Yet their extermination was downplayed. In some cases it was outright cheered. That Islamist assault was a ‘day of celebration’, some said. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, said student agitators days after those ‘martyrs’ raped and murdered hundreds of revellers who were indistinguishable, in their spirit and their liberty, from the revellers of New Orleans.

The case was made, whether implicitly or explicitly, that the Nova partygoers weren’t all that innocent. They were citizens of a ‘settler-colonial’ regime. They were inhabitants of the ‘Zionist entity’. They had the gall to live free, untroubled lives in a ‘genocidal state’. If it turns out that the butcher of Bourbon Street thought similarly – that no one in America is truly innocent because America commits ‘war crimes’ and sponsors Israel’s ‘genocide’ – what will we say? What can we say? After all, our elites have fully embraced the poisonous ideology of collective guilt and punishment, where if you live in a state that does ‘bad’ things, then you have no right to be surprised if Islamist vengeance comes your way.

No, this is not to say the suspect in the New Year’s Day massacre was directly inspired by the past year’s depraved cries of ‘Bring the intifada home’. The bored rich kids of the West who unforgivably made light of the Islamist slaughter in Israel are not responsible for what that man allegedly did. But we do need to talk about the creepy empathy for the Islamist ideology that has spread like a pox through our institutions. For years, the West failed to take seriously the threat posed by the Islamist menace. Even as hundreds were massacred by Islamists in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and elsewhere, we said ‘Don’t look back in anger’, don’t get too het up, don’t say or do anything that might stir up ‘Islamophobia’. Over the past year, this lethal insouciance in the face of the Islamist derangement morphed into something even worse: active sympathy for Islamism. They call it ‘intifada’ but we all know what they mean: the killing of citizens by Islamist ideologues with a grievance. Like what happened on Bourbon Street.

The attack on New Orleans was an attack on America itself. On its young, its workers, its openness, its freedoms. We should mourn the victims and then confront, head-on, the unsettling rapport with such neo-fascism that has bubbled up in our very own societies in recent years.

Activists Screaming For Someone, Anyone, To Stop Gaza Genocide Also Think Hamas Winning (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

London, January 2 - Supporters of the Palestinian cause who take fabricated reports of Israel targeting innocents at face value, resulting in what they claim to be hundreds of thousands of deaths, and who therefore demand that the international community act to aid the helpless Palestinians, simultaneously believe that the Palestinian militant group fighting against Israel kills Israeli soldiers at will and has sent them packing not just from battlefield after battlefield in Gaza, but from Israel itself.

"Stop the Genocide!" and "Victory is imminent from the River to the Sea!" cries emerge concurrently from the same quarters the world over, as activists struggle to decide on which message will resonate with the target audience: Hamas prowess or Palestinian victimhood. They therefore proclaim the slogans of both axioms.

The cognitive dissonance necessary to engage in both rhetorical avenues appears not to trouble those who engage in both lines of argument at the same time, observers say. "Hamas is this powerful military force that can strike the deepest fear in Zionist soldiers," noted journalist Hoyt Petard. "At the same time, every single Gazan is a journalist doctor humanitarian aid worker pregnant child woman. So who's killing all the Zionists?"

"What are the Zionists fleeing from?" wondered Dilly Hussein, a keyboard activist. "We have all these credible reports of Israelis crowding the airports to leave because of October 7 and rocket attacks and the Resistance, but of course there are no acts of violence by Palestinians, who are totally innocent and blameless. Do the glorious rockets exist? Only if you think you're talking to people who can either be intimidated or already want to back a strong horse. Otherwise, the rockets are either a desperate response to oppression which somehow succeed in striking enough terror into Jews to make large number of them level, but not enough terror to get them to stop the genocide."

A puzzled Hussein appeared stunned into silence by a reporter's suggestion that mighty Hamas do something to protect Gazans from the Israeli onslaught, the death toll from which ranges from somewhere around 40,000 - about half of them Hamas or affiliated men, according to IDF sources - to in the hundreds of thousands, as some activists seem to want.

After several moments, Hussein responded. "Since when is it an elected government's responsibility to provide for and protect its people?" he demanded. "What universe do you even live in that that's an expectation?"

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Yes, we know that he praised October 7. Yes, he's compared Israel to Nazis and teaches that comparison to his students. Yes, he espouses the discredited and antisemitic Khazar theory that Jews aren't really Jews.

But that's when Joseph Massad is speaking to a Western audience and he doesn't want to look like a Jew-hater in public. He always skated right up to the line where he could claim that he was only talking about Zionists or something.

But in an interview last March with a Pakistani podcaster, Massad drops any pretense.

He starts off by asserting lots of things that are simply not true, which is a pattern we've seen from him before.

Zionism of course begins perhaps in its earliest manifestations in the Crusades of the 11th century. After all it was the Crusades who began to also refer to Palestine as the holy land and the idea at the time was that uh you know and the major sort of papal announcement of the Crusades, the idea was that Palestine had to be cleansed of um its uh both Muslim and non-Catholic occupiers.

This is not only false but insane. Massad is defining Zionism as "ethnically cleansing Palestine" so therefore the Crusaders, who murdered tens of thousands of Jews, must have been Zionists.

Saying that the Crusaders coined the term "the Holy Land" is also wrong. The Vulgate Book of Wisdom (1st century BCE or CE) explicitly calls the Land of Israel "terra sanctae," the Holy Land. At the time it was not a typically Hebrew phrase which would call it "the Promised Land."

The holiness of the land was never in question for Jews, though - there are many laws from the Torah and elucidated in the Talmud that only apply within the borders of the Promised Land, the reason being precisely because of its sanctity.

Massad is an ignoramus whose view of history is colored exclusively by his hate for Jews.

He goes on:

Remember Judaism had been a missionary religion since its inception and continued to be so through another of the early part of the 11th 12th and 13th centuries and in that sense the idea that European Jews are somehow direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews is of course a bogus claim...

The Talmud quotes a Baraita (2nd-3rd centuries CE) that explicitly says to discourage converts to Judaism. The rabbis are instructed to tell the would-be convert, "What did you see that motivated you to come to convert? Don’t you know that the Jewish people at the present time are anguished, suppressed, despised, and harassed, and hardships are frequently visited upon them? "

Does this sound like missionary religion to you?

Again, in his zeal to demonize Jews, Massad makes up history.

What is special here about Zionism is not only the invention of Ancient Israel and the invention of Jews as descendants of the Ancient Hebrews – it is almost like a Hitlerian project to speak of Jews genetically in this fashion. It only becomes fashionable, of course, in the 19th century, with the rise of racial science and the biological sciences.

So tracing your origins is now "Hitlerian?"

How about the Muslims who use the title "Sayyed" to indicate that they are direct descendants of Mohammed - are they Hitlerian too? Or the many Palestinians who proudly trace their origins to the Arabian Peninsula, preferably Mecca and Medina, but many from Yemen, and who keep track of all their families and tribes - are they "Hitlerian"?

Or is that term only to be used for the people who were the victims of Hitler, not the people who want to continue Hitler's goal of exterminating the Jews?

Massad is no scholar. He is a professor who uses the trappings of scholarship to promote antisemitic propaganda.

(h/t MEMRI)

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