Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: 2012

Showing posts with label 2012. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

A Palestinian kid killed in a traffic accident with another Arab driver? Nathan Thrall blames Israel!

Israeli medics at the scene of a fatal Palestinian car crash in 2017

Heading Toward a Second Nakba
David Shulman
Nathan Thrall argues that the accident in which Abed Salama’s son died was a predictable, even inevitable, outcome of the Israeli occupation in its quotidian forms.

On a stormy winter day in February 2012, a Palestinian bus carrying schoolchildren on an outing collided with an Israeli trailer truck on the notoriously dangerous Jaba‘ Road near the West Bank village of A-Ram, not far from Ramallah. The bus burst into flames; six young children and one teacher were killed and others were seriously injured. Among the dead was Milad, the five-year-old son of Abed Salama, from the town of Anata. Nathan Thrall has made the story of that accident and that family the thread that binds together A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, a penetrating, wide-ranging, heart-wrenching exploration of life in Palestine under Israeli occupation. I know of no other writing on Israel and Palestine that reaches this depth of perception and understanding.

There is indeed something emblematic about the accident. The Jaba‘ Road is entirely within Area C, the 62 percent of the occupied West Bank that is under full Israeli control, where today there are close to two hundred settlements and settler outposts. Because of the nightmarish maze of roads in the Ramallah area—some of them closed altogether to Palestinians, others blocked by army checkpoints to keep Palestinians without special permits from entering Israel—rescuers were slow in reaching the site of the accident. They were also slow in evacuating the injured, many of them badly burned, to hospitals in Ramallah or inside Israel. Fire trucks, army medics, and ambulances were only a mile or two away in nearby Jewish settlements but failed to arrive quickly. Israeli ambulances coming from Jerusalem were held up for critical minutes at the checkpoints. Moreover, Palestinian neighborhoods in the vicinity of the Separation Barrier had (and some still have) almost no emergency or police services. As one of the Palestinian rescuers at the site of the accident later formulated what had happened: “If it had been two Palestinian children throwing stones on the road, the army would have been there in no time. When Jews are in danger, Israel sends helicopters. But a burning bus full of Palestinian children….”

...No one wanted to kill those children along with one of their teachers. Israeli rescuers and soldiers who finally reached the accident site did their best to save the injured. But the central point of Thrall’s narrative is that this disaster, like today’s ongoing violence in the Palestinian territories in general, was a predictable, even inevitable, outcome of the occupation system in its quotidian forms. It is a regime of state terror whose raison d’être is the theft of Palestinian land and, whenever possible, the expulsion of its Palestinian owners. I have seen this system in operation over the course of the past twenty-odd years.

I did not read the book, and probably won't. But this review already shows the incredible bias and the desire by Thrall to bend any evidence towards his foregone conclusion.

First of all, the driver of the Israeli truck was an Arab.

An average of two to three Palestinian Arabs are killed every week in road accidents. In 2022, there were 144 fatalities in over 16,000 accidents.

Palestinians acknowledge the epidemic of car accidents, and when they are not speaking to Westerners they blame themselves, not Israel, for these deaths. Ten reasons for Palestinian car crashes are listed in this article:

1- Narrow roads

2- Drivers who ignore traffic laws and basic safety, tailgating, passing vehicles on the opposite side of the road.

3- Not maintaining their cars.

4- Using a mobile phone while driving .

5- Low traffic awareness .

6- Young people and teenagers driving vehicles .

7- Drivers showing off.

8- Buildings being built right up to the roads.

9- Drug users who park their cars on the roads away from home.

10- Vehicles from Israel, often that would not pass Israeli inspections, being sold or stolen and used.

Even in Israel, the majority of car accidents involve young Arab drivers.

But what about the supposed delay of help for Milad and the other children? Wasn't that Israel's fault?

It doesn't seem to be true. News reports from the time say:

Following the accident, Palestinian health minister Fathi Abu Mughli accused Israeli rescue services of failing to provide timely assistance, resulting in more casualties. Ma’ariv reported that eyewitness report contradict Abu Mughli’s claim.

Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams transferred at least 30 casualties to hospitals in Ramallah, Petah Tikva and Jerusalem, Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. Israel Radio reported that it took rescue forces seven minutes to reach the scene of the accident.

Thrall believed the Palestinian health ministry, which has a track record of lying, over the Israeli authorities. Which tells you all you need to know about his interest in the facts.

In other accidents involving Arabs in Area C, Israeli and "settler" ambulances rush to the scene to help, indicating who is telling the truth..

Earlier this year a 12-year old Palestinian Arab boy in the West Bank was internally decapitated when he was hit by an Arab car, and doctors in Israel performed an extremely rare and delicate surgery to save his life.

A similar horrific accident as Milad's from 2017 where there was a 3-way collision between an armored Israeli bus, a Palestinian minibus and a Palestinian car saw a swarm of Magen David Adom ambulances and an IDF doctor on the scene within minutes trying to save lives.

In 2017, in another fatal West Bank car accident, a nine month old Arab baby survived while his father was killed and his mother unconscious. The baby refused to drink from a bottle so the Israeli Jewish nurse volunteered to breastfeed him. She put out a call on Facebook asking for other volunteers and Jewish women from as far away as Haifa wanted to help.

The "Jewish supremacy" and "racism" that Thrall takes as a given is an anti-Israel paranoid fantasy. Jews, even "settlers," help Palestinian Arabs in trouble, all the time.

In other words, the very basis of Nathan Thrall's book is built on lies. And that is how anti-Israel writers like Thrall and the reviewer work: not only will they only look at selected evidence that supports their thesis - they will twist counter-evidence to pretend it is evidence.

This supposed microcosm of Israeli evil is anything but. The only malicious actors in this little drama are Nathan Thrall and David Shulman.

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!

Thoughts on the burning of the Quran in Sweden

On Wednesday, an Iraqi immigrant to Sweden tore up and burned a Quran after receiving permission to do so as an act of protest, A Swedish court ruled that burning the Quran was a legal expression of free speech and the police gave a permit for the action.

In response, the Muslim world is seething. Many Muslim-majority countries lodged protests against Sweden, and there were riots in Iraq as protesters attempted to break into the Swedish embassy.

In 1976, on Yom Kippur eve, a group of Arab youths - fueled by a false rumor that Jews had torn Qurans - stormed through the synagogue at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and tore up numerous Hebrew holy books as well as several handwritten Torahs which were ripped to shreds.

The desecration of the Torah is much, much worse than tearing or ripping a printed Quran. The best analogy to a ripped Quran would be to a torn up Chumash, a mass printed version of the Torah; tearing up a Torah is more like tearing up a handwritten Quran manuscript.

And Jewish prayer books, chumashim and other holy books are desecrated by Palestinian Arabs much more often than you know.

In 2007, I visited Samuel's Tomb in Israel, unaware that Arabs had rampaged through there the previous Friday night, tearing prayer books, heavily damaging the Torah ark and stealing a Torah.

Nearly all Israeli media ignored this incident. Because Arabs desecrating Jewish holy books and sites is simply not worth mentioning.

It was hardly a unique occurrence.

Also in 2007, Arabs burned down a synagogue near Doled, destroying Torah scrolls.

In 2009, Arabs raided a yeshiva in Homesh and destroyed many volumes of Chumash and Talmud.

In 2012, Arab youths were caught trying to burn books of Psalms at the Mount of Olives.

Holy books at the Tomb of Joseph have been destroyed by Arabs more than once.

Prayer books were burned in an attack at a Gush Etzion synagogue in 2016.

In May, 2021, Arabs torched synagogues in Lod.

In 2022, Arabs burned a Jewish center in Harasha and destroyed many holy books.

When has the Muslim world condemned these incidents against holy Jewish books - equivalent or far worse than the desecration of one of hundreds of millions of printed Qurans?

They haven't, and this weakens their pretense of outrage. If you demand that people respect your holy objects, then at a minimum you should do the same.

The Muslim outrage over Sweden is not about their disgust at a holy book being desecrated. It is an expression of Islamic supremacy.

They want the entire world to adhere to Muslim laws against blasphemy and that everyone should enshrine Islamic laws against destroying the Quran. These protests are just as much political as they are expressions of popular anger: they send a message that unless the West acts as Muslims demand, they can expect violence.

Any attempts to impose Muslim mores or beliefs on the world must be opposed wholeheartedly. It is an attack on everyone's freedom.

_____________________________________

That being said, Sweden's legal ruling allowing the burning was wrong.

From the narrow perspective of freedom of expression, yes, burning a Quran - just like burning a flag - is valid and should not be illegal. But there is another, far more important issue here.

The deliberate burning of the Quran is a hate crime. It was meant not as a message of freedom but as a direct attack on the sensibilities of Muslims worldwide. It was not an expression of criticism of Islam but an expression of hate against Islam and Muslims, by an apparent ex-Muslim.

And Sweden does have hate crime laws.

The Swedish Penal Code, chapter 16, section 8, says:

A person who, in a disseminated statement or communication, threatens or expresses contempt for a national, ethnic or other such group of persons with allusion to race, colour, national or ethnic origin or religious belief shall, be sentenced for agitation against a national or ethnic group to imprisonment for at most two years or, if the crime is petty, to a fine. (Law 1988:835)

The deliberate burning of a Quran is an expression of contempt for believing Muslims. As such, it should be illegal - and so should the deliberate burning of Jewish holy books.

The protester could make the same point by burning a photo of a Quran. Destroying symbols of a religion or other protected group is criticism; destroying actual objects of importance to those groups is hate.

That is where the line should be drawn between freedom of expression and purposeful hate.

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!

An 1882 matzoh blood libel in Hungary

Here is the text of an 1883 newspaper article about a blood libel in Hungary at the time

THE PASSOVER MURDER.

Vienna, Austria, Aug. 13.—On the 3d day of August the Hungarian Jews who had been under trial on the charge of having killed a young Christian girl for the purpose of mixing her blood with the Passover bread were acquitted. The full text of the conclusion of the trial and of the judgment rendered by the public prosecution is now before me. The prosecutor frankly admitted that the prosecution had never any foundation for their charges, outside of prejudice and ignorant superstition.

T'he circumstances of this case may be summarized as follows: Early in the month of March, lt042, a young girl named Esther Solymosi, in the service of a woman living near Tisza Eslaz, in Hungary, was sent by her mistress to the town to make some purchases, and went, but never returned. As excitement and inquiry grew concerning her dis-appearance, the story began to be circulated that the JEWS HAD KILLED THE GIRL to use her blood for ritual purposes. Samuel Scharf, a child of 5 years old, the son of the Jewish butcher, was induced by liberal gifts of candy to say that his father had called the girl into the synagogue and cut her throat. The child stated that his elder brother, Moritz, a boy of 15, had held the girls' hand while his father killed her. Moritz, however, denied all knowledge of the murder, but the next day, being examined by the police, said that his father and some other Jews killed the girl, and that he had seen the whole affair through the key-hole. Thereupon, the elder Scharf, and ten or twelve other Jews, were seized and thrown into prison.

In June, 1882, a body was found in the River Thetas, dressed in the lost girl's clothes. No marks of violence were visible upon It, and this should have settled the matter and released the Jews, but public feeling was. very strong against them, and few would believe that it was the missing Esther. The body was much disfigured from long immersion in the water, the girl 'a mother refused to recognize it, the village doctor declared it to be the body of a woman of 20, and the story was circulated that the Jews had dressed another body in Esther's clothes, to turn aside suspicion from themselves.

The suspected Jews were kept in prison, and subjected to every species of indignity until June 20, l883, when their trial began, at Nyireghyaza, Hungary. It ended, as has been stated Aug. 3, in the acquittal of the accused parties. Not that there was no evidence against them, there was, on the contrary, an enormous mass of it, but it was almost wholly unworthy of belief. The only motive for the alleged crime was that the blood was wanted to mix with the Passover bread., but as no evidence whatever could be given to show this to be a custom of the Jews, it was soon dropped by the court, and the public prosecutor dismissed it with a mere allusion from his final charge.

The story of the boy Moritz, completely broke down under cross-examination, although he had evidently learned it well, and repeated it as accurately as a parrot. In more than one detail the boy contradicted himself, and by actual test it was found that through the keyhole he could not have seen nearly all the movements that he described, even had they been going on within. Moreover, the Judge would not admit the boy to oath, not merely on account of his youth, but also because of his evident LACK OF MORAL PRINCIPLE, as shown in his abjuring his religion, and the hatred be manifested toward his parents The magistrate who conducted the preliminary Inquiry last year, who seemed to have been the principal agency in giving currency to the charge, and who no doubt instructed the boy Moritz to in the lesson he repeated in court, was found to have been a convict, and to have spent twelve years In an Austrian prison for a murder. His evidence, which was brought forward to strengthen that of Moritz, was thrown out by the court. The raftsmen who had testified that they had taken another body in Esther's clothes from a Jewish woman, and sunk it in the river, afterward confessed that it was false, and they were indicted for perjury. .

Indeed the amount of false swearing and lying by witnesses un both sides, was one of the most remarkable features of the trial, and raises the question whether men and women, in a certain stage of superstition, know when they are telling the truth. As the prosecution was forced to the admission that it had literally no reliable evidence, it had nothing to do but to let the prisoners go. So they were fully acquitted, and after being kept in prison over a year, on a base and groundless charge, and while there subjected to cruelties and insults without number, and kept under trial for thirty-three days, were dismissed with the kind injunction to harbor no bitter feeling against it Christian fellow subjects. If they can obey this injunction they will prove themselves far better followers of the meek-Nazarene than those who bear his name.

Tablet magazine published a horrendous postscript to this affair in 2012:

Last Thursday, Jobbik MP Zsolt Baráth delivered a five-minute speech from the floor of parliament commemorating a blood libel that took place 130 years ago. Several days before Passover in 1882, a young girl was murdered in the Hungarian village of Tiszaeszlár, and the local Jewish community was blamed. A group of 15 accused Jews were eventually acquitted in a court trial, but the murder victim, Eszter Solymosi, has since become a martyr figure for the Hungarian right. A memorial constructed in her honor several years ago is a pilgrimage spot for Jobbik members and other far-right activists. “As we can see, there is no clear explanation, we do not know what happened to Eszter,” Baráth said. “Nevertheless, there is one point common to the known variants: The Jewry and the leadership of the country were severely implicated in the case.”

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!

Anti-Israel activists hush up Palestinian sexual harassment and rape of their women

In the TV documentary series Shtula, at one point members of the ISM tell the woman posing as an anti-Israel activist that, by the way, she can expect to be sexually harassed by Palestinian men.

It's just part of the job.

This is well known in the anti-Israel activist community.

In 2010, a Palestinian convinced a group of female Western activists to let him stay in their guest house in an Arab village because, he claimed, the IDF was trying to arrest him. He then attempted to rape one of the American women - who was the only Muslim. The Palestinian Authority then convinced her not to press charges, because it would be too damaging to the anti-Israel cause.

This was not an isolated incident.

An Israeli peace activist was "severely sexually assaulted" at Sheikh Jarrah. The victim tried to complain, but "after heavy and unfair pressure from the [Western] organizers of the Sheikh Jarrah protest, she withdrew her complaint." And then these "progressives" warned all Western women to cover their hair and bodies in Sheikh Jarrah.

And other incidents slowly leaked out. One activist admitted to an Israeli reporter, “I know of such rape cases from women who are not Jewish: a female European leftist activist, a female Red Cross volunteer and a young Arab woman from Yafo. I met the three of them during reserve service. I met with each of them afterwards… they told me what happens there, in the Palestinian villages, far from any observing eye.” That activist claimed that some of the female activists became unwilling wives and virtual slaves in Palestinian villages.

Haaretz published a similar article about sexual harassment of leftist activist women in 2012.

Apparently nothing has changed.

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!

Amnesty International UK is “institutionally racist”, “colonialist” - and its antisemitism is closely linked to that

Amnesty UK has an annual meeting where they vote on resolutions about various worldwide political issues. Nearly all of them pass with a huge majority, since they don't ask for funding - just vague commitments to "lobby" for the issue.

In 2015, one seemingly routine resolution was put up for vote to condemn antisemitism in the UK and lobby the British government to do more to protect Jews from attacks, which had increased dramatically in the previous year. That was the only resolution that year that was defeated by the Amnesty-UK crowd.

The excuse that Amnesty-UK used to justify not opposing antisemitism was "we can't campaign on everything."

Compare that to a similar 2020 resolution saying "AIUK should campaign against practices which discriminate against Ahmadi Muslims." That one easily passed 748-116.

Amnesty-UK has exhibited double standards against Jews on other occasions. They have a public space that they rent out to nearly all organizations who request it, and they have allowed virulent antisemites to use the space. But when a Jewish umbrella group representing many political opinions wanted to lease it, Amnesty refused to allow it.

In 2012, an Amnesty-UK leader tweeted a joke about Jewish MKs supporting bombing Gaza, even though plenty of non-Jewish MKs supported Israel's actions to stop rocket attacks.

The antisemitism is endemic. Which is why this story from The Independent is not surprising:

Amnesty International UK is “institutionally racist”, “colonialist” and faces bullying problems within its own ranks, a damning inquiry has concluded.

Initial findings of Global HPO’s independent inquiry into the charity were published in April but now the scale of the organisation’s issues with race have been laid bare in their final report.

Released to Amnesty staff members on Thursday, the 106-page document explains that equality, inclusion and anti-racism are “not embedded into the DNA” of the organisation.

“White saviour”, “colonialist”, “middle class” and “privileged” were among the words most used during the testimony and focus groups to discuss Amnesty.

Examples of racist incidents that left black and Asian staff uncomfortable include:

- Being regularly mistaken for other colleagues with similar skin tone
- Negative comments about fasting during Ramadan
- Treating black skin, hair and appearance as matters of fascination and touching hair without consent
- Rude comments about minority celebrities, politicians or events

The same "white savior" complex that permeates the so-called "human rights community" is closely related to the left wing antisemitism we've seen from Amnesty and Amnesty-UK. The mostly white leadership of Amnesty pretends that Palestinians are "people of color" under attack from white "Jewish supremacists" and as such have no responsibility for their own actions - the same kind of infantilizing of non-white people that this report highlights under the pretense of being anti-racist itself.

In short, groups like Amnesty are the pot that call the kettle black.

Yesterday, the head of Amnesty International Agnes Callamard lashed out against accusations of antisemitism in its report accusing Israel, the most diverse state in the Middle East of "apartheid." She claimed that calling out the obvious double standards and antisemitism in Amnesty are "weaponizing antisemitism."

Just as the previous probes finding that Amnesty-UK is systematically racist were dismissed by its leadership, so are the provable accusations of antisemitism.

Their objections in both cases are the same: we are the leaders in human rights, we are against discrimination, we work hard to hold others accountable for their racism, how dare you accuse us!

But accusations of racism and apartheid against Israel, falsely claiming that it deliberately targets Arab children, are the 21st century equivalent of accusations of Jews deliberately killing Christian children in medieval times.

Accusing those who call out leftist antisemitism as "weaponizing antisemitism" is as offensive as saying that those who document Amnesty-UK's racism are "weaponizing racism."

Groups like Amnesty hide behind the pretense that they fight some kinds of bigotry to justify their own.

Antisemites are racists, and racists are antisemites.

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!

Muslim clerics have always used Jerusalem as a political fatwa football

Yesterday I reported that the Mufti of Jerusalem issued a fatwa saying that UAE residents are “forbidden by law” to visit Al Aqsa.

Now a major Islamic scholar, former deputy at Al Azhar University, says that the Palestinian Mufti doesn’t know anything about Islamic law.

Dr. Abbas Shoman, a member of the Supreme Council of Senior Scholars of Al Azhar Al Sharif, expressed his astonishment over a fatwa forbidding Emiratis’ prayers at Al Aqsa Mosque, issued by the Mufti of Jerusalem after the announcement of the UAE-Israel peace treaty.

Dr. Shoman said: “I refuse to issue Sharia fatwas that are not based on sharia rules, and I do not know as a specialist in Islamic jurisprudence that there is a justification that annuls the prayers of an entire people of a Muslim country in a mosque on the grounds of a political position taken by their state.”

He added: “Indeed, the fatwa is selective and not based on Sharia….As far as I know, there has never been a fatwa in our Islamic history that prevents a person or a group from praying in a mosque for Muslims.”

This actually is similar to another dispute from 2012 when a former Mufti of Jerusalem Ekrima Sabri criticized Egypt’s Grand Mufti visiting Jerusalem. He used bizarre logic:

Sheikh Sabri said from a political perspective Gomaa’s visit implied the recognition of Israeli’s occupation.
“Recognition is a form of normalization because no one can enter Jerusalem without an Israeli visa or without proper coordination with the Israeli security forces.”
But if Muslim citizens of Europe or America visit Israel, their visit would not be considered as an act of “recognizing the occupation,” Sabri said.
“If German or French Muslims visit Jerusalem, this is not normalization since their countries already recognize Israel.
“Some Arab governments might not boycott Israel, but their people do and they reject normalization.”

Another dispute over whether Muslims can visit Jerusalem erupted in 2010 when an Egyptian soccer team planned to play a friendly match against the Palestinian team in the West Bank, and Egyptian extremist clerics issued a fatwa against it.

Similarly, major Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf Qaradawi once issued a fatwa against non-Palestinian Muslims visiting Jerusalem:

He stressed in remarks published yesterday in Doha, "We should feel that we are deprived of Jerusalem and fight for it so that Jerusalem is ours, and that the responsibility to defeat the Zionist aggression is the responsibility of the Islamic nation as a whole and not the responsibility of the Palestinian people alone," he said, adding: "It is not reasonable to leave the Palestinians alone in the face of the Zionist state with a large military capabilities."
He said that "Jerusalem will not return except through resistance and jihad, and the combined efforts of the Arab and Islamic nation."

Muslim clerics like to use Jerusalem as a political football, just like Muslim politicians do. Indeed, there seems to be little distinction between Islamic jurisprudence and politics based on how Muslim clerics have issued contradictory (and sometimes self-contradictory) fatwas on Jerusalem in ways that happen to align with their political positions.

Italy's president gives one of Italy's highest honors to an antisemite

Albawaba reported in October:

The President of the Republic of Italy, HE Mr. Sergio Mattarella, bestowed the honor of the "Commendatore dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia " (Commander in the Order of the Star of Italy) upon HE Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, for his valuable contributions and the effort of Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Global in strengthening the Italian, Jordanian and Arab relations.

Established in 1914, the Ordine Della Stella D'italia is one of Italy’s highest honors presented to global dignitaries who contribute in strengthening and promoting relations between Italy and other countries.

The Order was presented in a special ceremony attended by HE Mr. Fabio Cassese, the Italian Ambassador to Jordan, representing the Italian President and a host of Ambassadors to Jordan.

The Italian Ambassador read the official citation stating that Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh is "a close friend to Italy," and "a friend of all the international community."

It turns out that the honoree is an antisemite.

From MEMRI, translating a 2012 Al Ghad interview with Abu-Ghazaleh:

Abu Ghazaleh cites numerous examples of persecution of Jews, including their expulsion from various countries between the 14th and 18th centuries, and examples of leaders and public figures who spoke out against them: "Henry Ford saw the Jews as an international problem, and wasted much money on media and other means to wage a campaign against them. He also presented his ideas in a book called The International Jew: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The World's Foremost Problem [sic]. American president Franklin Roosevelt saw the Jews as an American problem, and claimed that the day would come when the Americans would regret that there were Jews in their midst...

He concludes: "The Jews became known for manufacturing lies and carrying out crimes and terror. [They] created a negative model for establishing a state when the occupation authorities began bringing the 'Haganah' gang into Palestine, and later enlisted all the armed Jewish movements, after calling on all the Jewish residents of all the countries in the world to immigrate to Palestine and establish a state [there]..."[3]

(h/t WC)

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Columbia professor @HamidDabashi implicitly justifies Muslims murdering Jews in an article supposedly against antisemitism

Hamid Dabashi, a professor at Columbia University, writes in Al Jazeera that Muslims and Jews should work together to fight antisemitism.

Sounds reasonable. right?

But this is a smokescreen for Dabashi to to spew his own hate - to claim that Zionism is an ally of antisemitism, that Israel is a colonialist state beholden to European powers while at the same time the Europeans want to export all Jews to Israel, and other hateful nonsense that appears to actually justify modern Muslim Jew-hatred.

For example:

The Zionists claim that the establishment of the state of Israel is to protect Jews against persecution. This is a false claim. The establishment of the state of Israel in Palestine, where Jews have always lived alongside Muslims and Christians, was a European colonial project and as such has exacerbated the terror coming towards the Jews.

Meaning, Muslims who killed Jewish immigrants were justified because it is all Europe's fault.

Let's back up to how Dabashi describes contemporary European antisemitism:

The numbers are staggering and Europe-wide. "Antisemitism is rising sharply across Europe, experts have said," according to a recent report by the Guardian, "as France reported a 74 percent increase in the number of offences against Jews last year and Germany said the number of violent anti-Semitic attacks had surged by more than 60 percent". The article further says: "The figures confirm the results of three recent Europe-wide surveys showing Jewish people feel at greater risk, and are experiencing markedly more aggression, amid a generalized increase in racist hate speech and violence in a significantly coarser, more polarized political environment."

The deep roots of anti-Semitism in Europe are widespread and murderous. From a prolonged history of pogroms to the Crusades to the horrors of the Holocaust, and a long and nasty history in between, European Jews have been the consistent subject of baseless slander, vicious defamation, malignant lies and rumours, wild and vilifying conspiracy theories, all resulting in massacres and ultimately genocide under Nazi Germany. In no other continent, country, or culture have Jews ever been so brutalised as they have been in Europe.

Although no other clime or continent is entirely immune to it, anti-Semitism is a specifically European disease, with European Christianity a main culprit in the carnage.

But look at all the recent attacks against Jews in Europe:

In 2012, in Toulouse, Mohamed Merah shoots dead four people, including three children, at a Jewish school.

In 2014, Mehdi Nemmouche attacks the Jewish Museum in central Brussels, killing two Israeli tourists, a French volunteer and a Belgian museum receptionist.

In 2015, gunman Amedy Coulibaly, claiming allegiance to the Islamic State group, takes hostages at a Jewish supermarket, killing four.

Also in 2015, Omar El-Hussein, a 22-year-old Dane of Palestinian origin, killed a Jewish volunteer security guard outside a synagogue and wounds two police officers.

In 2018, 85 year old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll was savagely murdered by two men, one of whom shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he was killing her.

And these are just the major events. In Sweden, "pro-Palestinian" protesters have been heard saying they want a new intifada to kill the Jews and call Jews "apes and pigs."

They aren't Christian.

Dabashi deliberately erased every single major deadly incident of antisemitism in Europe in order to support his argument that all European antisemitism is Christian. The only mention of an actual attack was the murder of Ilan Halimi by a Muslim gang - but Dabashi just calls them a gang.

In other words, Dabashi - while pretending to be against antisemitism - is erasing rampant Muslim antisemitism in Europe, virtually the only flavor of antisemitism that has actually been killing Jews in Europe over the past decade.

Why does he do this? By mentioning Halimi's murder he shows that he is aware of the many deadly attacks against Jews by Muslims in Europe, so this cannot be an oversight. Dabashi wants to deliberately erase history to bolster his thesis that Muslims cannot be antisemitic and only European Christians can, Why?

The answer can be found in his vitriol against Zionism:

Today, anti-Semitism is real and Zionists are categorically unqualified even to detect, let alone to fight it. Jews are the victims, Zionists the beneficiaries of anti-Semitism. ...

To fight anti-Semitism, the fighter must have moral authority. As a racist apartheid state, Israel lacks that moral authority. As an ideology of racist occupation of Palestine, Zionism lacks that moral authority. As active, hardcore or liberal advocates of that ideology of land theft, occupation and incremental genocide of Palestinians, Zionists lack that moral authority.

According to Dabashi, Zionism is so evil that Zionists have no moral authority - the implication that they have forfeited their very right to be considered human beings.

Of course, Palestinian terror attacks towards "Zionists" in pizza shops and discos are justified because Zionists are immoral subhumans. But he is saying more than that by not mentioning any Muslim attacks against Jews in Europe. That deliberate omission can only be interpreted as a justification for the murder of Jews by Muslims.

The Muslims in Europe weren't attacking Jews bur fighting back against the evil of Zionism. That's why these attacks don't fall in the category of antisemitism - murdering a Holocaust survivor is the action of a freedom fighter. After all, statistically speaking, she was probably a Zionist.

The irony is that while Professor Dabashi says that Zionists cannot claim to be able to define antisemitism, he has proven in this very essay that he is supremely unqualified not only to speak about antisemitism but about any moral issue whatsoever.

Hamid Dabashi is a completely disgusting individual who whitewashes and justifies Muslims murdering Jews.

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