Showing posts with label 2014. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2014. Show all posts

Monday, October 23, 2023

In 2018, Middle East Online reported:
Hamas is accused of deepening the crisis of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, after the criticism it has been exposed to regarding the seizure of international grant funds and aid from more than one party.
Hamas, as it controls the Gaza Strip, receives millions of dollars in support from countries and international organizations to build hospitals, schools, and roads for more than two million Palestinians stuck in the Gaza Strip.
Despite the harsh measures and siege imposed by Israel on Gaza under the pretext of preventing Hamas from arming, which further complicates the lives of Palestinians, the movement spends a lot of money to purchase and develop weapons and equip its military arm, the Al-Qassam Brigades.
Hamas is accused by the Palestinian National Authority of practicing a policy of blackmail by seizing international support, as the Palestinian government said in 2018 that Hamas “steals the money of the Palestinian people and seizes all of the sector’s revenues, refuses to transfer them to the public treasury, and imposes fees and taxes on citizens for its treasury.”
It is one of the great untold stories of Gaza: hundreds of millions of dollars worth of aid has been diverted by Hamas into its own terror operations. 

Here are some examples:

In 2009, dozens of Hamas militants attacked a charity, Cooperative Housing Foundation International (CHF), arrested its workers, and confiscated aid meant for needy families. 

In February 2009, UNRWA accused Hamas of stealing over 3,500 blankets and 406 food parcels meant for UNRWA "refugees." Days later, UNRWA said Hamas stole 200 tons of wheat and 100 tons of rice.

In 2010, French aid group Help Doctors accused Hamas on Wednesday of seizing computer equipment, telephones, chairs, office equipment and medical files.

Also in 2010, Hamas was accused of stealing medicine and medical equipment  provided by the PA and putting them for sale in Hamas-owned pharmacies. People talked about seeing medicine clearly labeled "in support of the Palestinian people" or "donated by Charity X."

In 2014, Hamas was again accused of stealing medicine meant to be given for free to Palestinians.

In 2019, poor Gazans accused Hamas of stealing meat sent by Saudi Arabia during Ramadan and reselling it on the black market, along  with medicines and other aid.  

Meanwhile, Gaza stores could be seen selling UNRWA-marked food packages, saying in English "not for sale." 


We don't know if Hamas stole than and then sold them to stores, but clearly aid to Gaza was not reaching its intended recipients. 

With this history, why would anyone believe that current aid to Gaza will not be diverted to Hamas first? That's what they do. (And so does the Palestinian Authority.)

So as terrible as this sounds, aid should not be sent if Hamas is the primary beneficiary. All the controls in the world cannot stop that theft from happening, and Hamas threats keep the witnesses mostly silent. 



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

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Friday, October 20, 2023

By Daled Amos

These days, along with the rush to condemn Israel in its war to eliminate the Hamas terrorist threat, there are instances of retractions and deletions of hasty anti-Israel posts. One of the more unusual and unexpected examples is Ilhan Omar backtracking on her accusation that Israel bombed a hospital:


While Omar has reacted to pressure, Tlaib is still at it.

Another example of backtracking comes from Secretary of State Blinken. It's not that Blinken condemned any particular action of Israel, but rather that he came out with a suggestion that was so insulting and ill-timed that he soon deleted it. Just one day after the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians, Blinken publicly recommended a cease-fire:
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken deleted a social media post Monday morning that expressed support for a "cease-fire" in Israel after Palestinian militants invaded the nation late last week.

The now-deleted post, which appeared on Blinken's X account late Sunday, described a conversation Blinken reportedly had with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan.
While the tweet was deleted, it did not go unnoticed -- and was saved for posterity:


Fernandez is a former US diplomat and vice-president of MEMRI. 

Keep in mind that it is unlikely that Blinken would publicly suggest this and try to set the idea for a cease-fire in motion without Biden's approval. A friend suggested to me that this was a trial balloon, which was soon shot down.

But there is another example of deletion, one not intended to save face but intended instead to save the Hamas terrorists and save their own skin.









There was a time when the UN openly confirmed that Hamas violated international law.

John Ging, Director of the Operational Division at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in 2014 admitted that Hamas was using both UN facilities and residential areas to fire rockets at Israel.


At the time, in 2014, there were a number of journalists who reported on Hamas using human shields. Maybe because Hamas was using them as the shields.








Shifa has indeed “become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices,” the Washington Post reported on July 15. The Wall Street Journal‘s Middle East correspondent, Nick Casey, wrote on Twitter that Hamas uses Shifa “as a safe place to see media,” but removed the post afterwards.
Some journalists even tweeted about it -- even if they did delete those tweets later.


Here is a journalist tweeting about 9 children killed by Hamas -- once he was safely out of Gaza.
Italian journalist Gabriele Barbati said he was able to speak freely about witnessing a Hamas misfire that killed nine children at the Shati camp, confirming the Israel Defense Forces version of events, but only after leaving Gaza, “far from Hamas retaliation.”

Why did Barbati wait until after he was out of Gaza?
The answer has implications for the reporting by the journalists who stay in Gaza.

In 2021, when Israel destroyed a 12-story building in Gaza used by Hamas military intelligence and AP denied knowing that it shared a building with the terrorist group, a former AP journalist refuted their claim:
As to whether AP was aware of Hamas involvement with the building, Matti Friedman wrote in his 2014 Atlantic piece: “When Hamas’ leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby — and the AP wouldn’t report it.”

Friedman claimed the Hamas militants would regularly “burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff — and the AP wouldn’t report it.”
UNRWA's deletion and subsequent "clarification" shows that the same fear exists. And the history of Hamas's massive violations of international law makes the indications of Hamas stealing humanitarian supplies from their own people very believable.




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

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Sunday, July 09, 2023

Last week, Peter Beinart tweeted this:

People in Jenin can't become citizens of the country in which they live. Can't vote for the govt that determines if they live or die. Can't return to the lands from which their families were expelled. This underlies everything happening now. The American press rarely mentions it

Beinart complains that Palestinians do not have a state of their own where they can vote and make their own decisions, but wants to imply that this is entirely Israel's fault..

He blocks me but I tweeted a response:

Palestinian Arabs rejected plans that would have given them their own state in 1937,  1947, 2000, 2001, 2008, 2014, and 2020. They will not accept the existence of a Jewish state on ANY  borders.
This underlies everything happening now, and for the past 8 decades.

And Peter Beinart  never mentions it   - because his agenda exactly matches theirs.

I decided to make the point in a more acerbic way, with a cartoon:


The more my memes and cartoons tell the truth, the angrier the Israel haters (masquerading as "pro-Palestinians") get. And the many angry responses to this cartoon prove my point.

Are you willing to give a bunch of squatters your land?  If you say yes then you are a liar.

That's because the Zionists are dishonest and have an agenda of occupying most of the middle east by force anyway. There is no reaching an agreement with Zionists. People see you.

Revisionist history. Didn’t learn from the pain of Holocaust denial.

thats like asking are you willing to have a gang of theiving ni66ers move into your house?  ckuf NO, every single time

Without proper peace deal & Jerusalem NO.

Everybody knows those are false. Zionists need war to survive. They need chaos. Only with chaos and war, they can expand - under pretext of “defending themselves”. If there was peace, Isra*l won’t be as big as it is now. 

Can you agree to share your house ownership with me?

Can I come to your house and live in one of your rooms coz my parents kicked me out?  I'll slowly occupy your whole house & then kick you out.

Off course “BIG NO” It’s like asking: 🤔 do you accept Zionists who are coming from Western Europe and some African countries to steal your homeland!!? Zionists are very sick

Zionists stole Palestine through terrorism and massacres. WHY would any government agree to be occupied? Especially by European Jewish terrorists?

The history of your settler colonialism proves the opposite you never wanted any coexistence.
The analogy with the house is false. There was no Palestinian state before 1948 and there isn't one now. The peace offers aren't taking away land - they are offering a nation where none existed. The ones since 1948 involve Israel willingly giving away land it controls, something that is practically unprecedented in history. 

But there is a second layer to the responses. Only some say it explicitly, but the message is that there is a preference for Palestinians to remain stateless and without a nation than for them to join the community of nations. 

Mahmoud Abbas himself said, in retrospect, that the Palestinians should have accepted the 1947 UN partition plan. But you cannot turn back the clock and say that you retroactively accept the peace plan of 75 years ago. 

What the Palestinians and their supporters simply refuse to accept is the existence of a Jewish state on any borders. That is the only consistent position that they have had throughout history. And today, Palestinians and their "supporters" maintain that even if there is a two state solution somehow, it is only meant to be a stage on their path to destroy Israel altogether. 

Chaim Weizmann famously argued when the 1937 Peel Commission recommended a tiny, indefensible Jewish state - covering only 20% of the British Mandate, divided geographically, with no Jerusalem - that “The Jews would be fools not to accept it, even if the Jewish state were the size of a tablecloth." He understood that something is better than nothing.

It is a lesson that the Palestinian side strenuously disagrees with: they would prefer nothing if the something includes the existence of a Jewish state. 

It is worse even than a zero-sum mentality. They are claiming that they would prefer not being citizens of any country than to accept a Jewish state on any borders. Instead of compromising and getting something, they prefer to remain with nothing, as long as there is a Jewish state as well. 

This isn't just spite - this is pure antisemitic hate. And the only people this attitude hurts are Palestinians themselves. 

Israel, sometimes with reservations, accepted all these peace plans and frameworks. Palestinians rejected them all, even though they all would have given them the independence they supposedly want. What their responses to these plans, as well the responses to this cartoon, prove is that it was never about gaining an independent Palestinian state but the destruction of the Jewish state. 





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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Wednesday, February 01, 2023




There was a very revealing thread by academic fraud Noura Erakat, who calls herself a "human rights lawyer:"

Palestinians under siege, subject to killing by world’s 11th most powerful army & deputized settlers but news producers want me to come on air to comment on Palestinians celebrating the killing of 9 Israeli settlers? 
Why this pathology of Palestinians and apology for apartheid? Why exceptionalize this Palestinian expression when you know full well ANY human who lived under such devastating circumstances without an army or international protection would similarly respond to this operation
It's the combination of absolute removal of context, together with dehumanization of Palestinians that makes media more interested in examining Palestinians as hateful, blood thirsty rather than absolutely emblematic of humanity
Only in this context, are news media more concerned about sporadic Palestinian operations aimed at resistance to apartheid, than an Israeli government & society that has caged 2 mil Palestinians in Gaza, suffocates children with tear gas, shoots to kill over 1 Palestinian a day. 
I shared this with the producer who rushed off the phone. Shocking. 
We should be invited to comment on the situation and context, not to spend air time being a corrective and scrutinizing the segment itself. 
Erakat is angry that a TV producer wants to frame Palestinians as hateful and bloodthirsty - and then justifies Palestinians being hateful and bloodthirsty.

She is saying that Palestinian celebrations on the death of Jews targeted outside a synagogue is perfectly normal and "human." She claims that any human would act that way. 

Would they?

A Google search of "celebrate terror attack" finds that the overwhelming majority of examples refers to Palestinians. When they are filtered out, all the remaining hits are Muslims - and the only cases I can find of handing out sweets are Hezbollah supporters in Lebanon also celebrating a terror attack in Israel

Did Jews celebrate the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany in 1945, killing tens of thousands of civilians? No - no one did

Erakat's thesis is a lie. But it is one she clearly subscribes to herself - she is saying that she felt the same joy that other Palestinians did, and she is irritated that she has to explain to dense reporters why this bloodlust is normal and Israel targeting terrorists is the real crime. 

Notice also that she doesn't frame the Jerusalem massacre even as something distasteful. She justifies the massacre itself as a "Palestinian operation aimed at resistance to apartheid." To her, murdering Jews is not an outrage but an act of heroism, and Jewish worshippers are themselves the enemy to be killed, no different than a soldier.

This is not what a real human rights activist or human rights lawyer would ever say. Erakat is a fraud as an academic, as a lawyer and as a human being.

(And, no, the famous photos of children in Northern Israel under rocket attack in 2006 and Sderot residents watching Israeli airstrikes in 2014 are not Israelis celebrating the deaths of civilians.)




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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Thursday, January 12, 2023

Sunjeev Bery is the Executive Director at an NGO called Freedom Forward. He was advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) at Amnesty International USA from 2011-2017. he's been interviewed on TV as some sort of expert.

For the past few days, Bery has been tirelessly tweeting his support for Ken Roth in the Kennedy School story - and going after Roth's critics.

Including me.

Which makes for some very entertaining reading.

Roth tweeted, "Harvard's Kennedy School says it 'welcomes new ideas—even unpopular and controversial ones." Its curriculum "encourages students and faculty to talk openly and effectively about difficult and highly charged issues.' Except for Israel, Dean Elmendorf?"

I responded to Roth, "Perhaps @Harvard @Kennedy_School has a policy against hiring obsessive liars? In 2014 I compiled a list of Ken Roth's Twitter lies over just a few months, and documented why they were wrong. He of course never corrected [any of] them. See for yourself," linking to a list of dozens of lies and distortions that Roth tweeted during and after the 2014 Gaza war.

Sunjeev Bery was very upset, apparently, at the tone of my list. "I started reading your "document" @elderofziyon, and it became clear within 10 seconds that it's a flimsy prop that enables you to just claim that people are liars. You are selling something that is far less than it actually is and using it for propaganda purposes."

Not knowing (or caring) who he was, I answered, "You are invited to tell me where I am wrong."

Instead of doing that, Bery wrote, "Many of the statements you make in your documents are simply claims and represent your beliefs. You seem to be adopting the posture that your claims are The Truth, and that those you disagree with are The Liars. Your intent is propagandistic."

Ah, so it isn't my facts - but my intent - that offends him. Good to know that human rights professionals are as little interested in the truth on Twitter as they are when they write their reports.

Then he hit me with what he considered his real zinger - which he used on other critics of Roth on the thread. "But here's the real question that tests your intentions: What are YOUR human rights criticisms of israel?"

It was already clear now that he was playing a game and had no interest in any semblance of truth, so I said I was done with the conversation: "So you cannot find a single example where Roth was correct and I was wrong.  Out of several dozen.  And then you want to accuse me of being disingenuous? Bye."

But this human rights professional brought out his inner teenage troll and kept trying to goad me. "Nice try buddy. Again @elderofziyon, what are YOUR criticisms of Israel?." I ignored him. 

Another tweeter answered him, "He asked you a question in direct response to your criticism and you still didn’t answer.  You should answer his question before you move on."

Bery answered him or her, "Wrong, buddy. If he can't say anything critical of Israel then he is ultimately a propagandist and a pro-government partisan arguing in bad faith."

I gave in and finally responded:
I'm not here for your amusement.  I don't pretend to be anything but a pro-Israel site; I provide a tiny bit of counterweight to the tsunami of anti-Israel information out there. I am not a newspaper that pretends to be balanced. That being said, I strive to be 100% truthful.

To me, "bad faith" is accusing me of something and not being able to back it up, and instead changing the subject. THAT is a propaganda technique that the anti-Israel crowd does all the time; reframing the conversation instead of admitting mistakes. 
I don't play those games.
After repeating himself for some reason, he gave me his one example of where my criticism of Roth was off-base to him with this screenshot:

By your own admission, you say that Ken Roth uses "the best available data" but because he doesn't include the caveats, you claim he is lying.

This is a totally bad faith argument on your part, and it is one of many many such examples in the document.

And so your overall document @elderofziyon lacks the substantive content necessary to justify your overall claim. 

My reaction to the content of your document is that it serves the purpose of creating a propagandistic and misleading headline.

 That is why I ask if you have any criticisms of Israel's policies that you are willing to state here publicly?

This is the test for differentiating an honest critic from a propagandist. A propagandist promotes a government and avoids mentioning any criticism whatsoever.

OK, at least he said something specific, even if it made no sense. I responded:

My 2014 article says "dozens of them were flat-out false, and others were knowingly deceptive." Your example is one of the deceptive ones - Roth stated the statistics AS FACT without saying "reportedly" or any other word newspapers would use.

Of course, he never corrected.

To defend that, and to cherry pick that out of all my examples that show how Roth DID lie multiple times, shows that YOU are the one who is being a propagandist. Is this the standard you accept for a human rights leader you have defended so energetically?  That's pretty sad.
Bery:
No, I pointed out one example of many lies within your document in response to your request. There are many more examples of similar exaggerations.

But once again, you have failed to answer my question:

What are YOUR criticisms of Israeli policies?

The answer seems to be none.
Obviously he did not point out a single mistake or lie of mine. But I decided to answer his main question:
I defend my family publicly. I criticize them privately.

Everyone has biases. Every media outlet does, too.  I admit mine -and the goal of my writings - upfront. Call it propaganda if you want, but I insist on honesty and transparency - which is much more than most media.
To Bery, this was the smoking gun! After a rehash of earlier arguments, he wrote, "Here's the reality, @elderofziyon.  You are self-admittedly engaging in pro-Israel propaganda. You clearly state that you avoid making any public criticism of Israel, and that your only public comments on Israel are to defend its policies. "

Uh, yeah. 

Yes. It is no secret. Wikipedia calls me a pro-Israel blogger. Not sure why that bothers you. 

Ken Roth is also a propagandist, as I proved. But he insists there is no bias, which I have comprehensively shown he has. 

And you are cool with that.
Bery's response to this graphic is priceless:

I bet many of Ken Roth's tweets regarding Israel are because he feels pressure to respond to propaganda accounts like yours constantly flooding Twitter with false claims.
So the only reason Roth treats Israel like the worst violator of war crimes is because people like me bother him!

Only then did I look Sunjeev up - and propaganda is his middle name. 

Pot, meet kettle.

Sunjeev worked at Amnesty USA during the 2014 Gaza war. AI-USA said that Amnesty would correct any errors in their "Gaza Platform." I pointed out SCORES of them, calling terrorists "civilian." They ignored it.

Who is a propagandist?
His hilarious response was to paste my tweet where I admitted that I am a pro-Israel blogger. So damning!

Then I noticed that this "human rights professional" "Liked" a tweet that was pretty much at his maturity level:

So....it is propaganda when I defend one side, but it is perfectly OK to pretend to be an objective head of an NGO while "Like"ing tweets that say  "Zionists love smelling their own farts"?
Bery then fell apart - yet defended it!

1. Zionists and Jews are not the same thing. It is anti-Semitic to conflate the two.

2. There are Christian and Hindu zionists. There are Jewish anti-zionists.

3. You are part of an organized troll strategy of amplifying your propaganda tweets, which I do liken to flatulence.

The guy who was trolling me for hours says I'm the troll!

I responded with my own numbered list:

1. Your Like proves that you are not the least bit objective. Just like your hero Roth.

2. If you don't know what objectivity means, then your defending Roth as objective is far funnier than a fart joke.

3. I wrote a book describing how today's anti-Zionism is a modern form of antisemitism.

4. This thread has proven to any observer that you have zero intellectual honesty.

He then said that I didn't answer him, presumably his non-sequitur that Zionists and Jews aren't the same: "Once again, you didn't respond to anything that I said. But that's cool. Keep up the propaganda! 👍 Your audiences are getting smaller and smaller 😊"

So I finished him and the thread off:

I never once claimed that Jews and Zionists are the same.  Your reading comprehension is about the same level as your objectivity. 

This thread will make a great post, though. Making a fool of a supposed human rights expert to the entire world is always fun!

His final response after bring proven a hypocrite with not the slightest interest in truth?


 The troll couldn't handle being made a fool of.

But the most bizarre part is that while it is obvious that he said nothing at all to contradict a single one of my facts, ... he thinks he won!

Bery's entire argument is that to have any credibility, every Zionist must criticize Israel publicly and constantly. Obviously, he has no similar criteria insisting on "balance"  for the anti-Israel zealots he admires and quotes.

I'm actually complimented that he keeps calling my writings "propaganda." Here is his response to the 2009 NYT op-ed by Robert Bernstein decrying how the organization he founded, Human Rights Watch, had gone off the rails by going after democracies like Israel that have checks and balances and downplaying the evil of the real human rights violators of the world:

I'll gladly share the insult with a true human rights giant.

The NGO Bery currently heads, "Freedom Forward," says it "seeks a world in which all people have the benefit of living in societies that are anchored in democracy and respect for human rights."  It doesn't appear to actually do anything besides create "campaigns" against Israel and US Arab allies.

I wonder who funds it. The site is not very transparent about that. 

Bery himself seems to have a soft spot for that bastion of democracy and human rights, Turkey




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!

 

 

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

In a recent interview in Hamodia, US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides said, when asked about a recent poll that showed 72%  of Palestinians support terror groups like Lion's Den, "I firmly believe, and you might disagree with me, but the vast, vast majority among the average Palestinians doesn’t wake up in the morning wanting to kill someone who happens to be Jewish. They want to live just like you and I do."

Stephen Flatow responded quite nicely in JNS to this.

I would like to add my own observations.

Nides was careful in his words. He didn't say that the vast majority of Palestinians don't support terror, only that most of them don't want to personally kill Jews.

I've been closely following Palestinian polls for over 15 years.  I suspect Nides knows that polls show consistently over the years that a majority of Palestinians support terror attacks as part of a strategy to gain independence. Those questions are asked in the abstract.

But when Palestinians are asked about specific terror attacks, support goes way up.

In 2008, a terrorist entered the Mercaz Harav yeshiva and started mowing down students. 8 were killed, including 4 children. When Palestinians were asked if they supported that attack, an astonishing 84% said they did.

You can see how Palestinians consistently support specific terror attacks that murder Jews more than general attacks in the abstract from that March 2008 poll.

This is more than simply supporting terror for political gain. This is bloodlust against Jews. 

Nothing has changed since then. In 2014, after a string of stabbing attacks including the massacre of four rabbis in Har Nof, not only were celebrations shown on Palestinian TV. A survey shortly after the event asked, "Recently there has been an increase in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in attempts to stab or run over Israelis. Do you support or oppose these attempts?" Four out of five Palestinians supported murdering Jews, and one in three emphasized that they strongly support such attacks.

Although the media and government officials try hard to wave this away, the truth is in these surveys.

It goes beyond that. You will never find a Palestinian official on Arabic TV condemning these attacks - besides when Mahmoud Abbas is pressured to do so by the US. On the contrary, the murderers are "martyrs" and "heroes," virtually every time. 

Do well-meaning lies and obfuscations from people like Nides, and New York Times reporters, and Europeans, help the cause of peace? No, they don't. When the West gives Palestinians who support terror the benefit of the doubt, they learn an important lesson: that the West is on their side. By downplaying explicit and overwhelming Palestinian support for terror, they leaves the door open for "human rights" groups and Western parliaments to demonize Israel as the obstacle to peace, and the Palestinians as hapless, defenseless victims. 

This emboldens the terrorists and results in more dead people on both sides.

It is important to note that Gulf countries, in Arabic, have been criticizing Palestinians for nearly a decade now, even as their own support for suicide terror has plummeted in other surveys. The Abraham Accords is in no small part a result of a refreshing honesty in parts of the Arab world about the real situation. 

The West needs to stop its default stance of "don't upset the Palestinians." It hasn't worked and it has empowered them to be more intransigent, thinking that the West is doing their bidding. 

Palestinians live in an honor/shame society. Therefore, upsetting them is exactly what needs to be done. Palestinians must be shamed into stopping support for terror in their schools and media.  

If Tom Nides really wants peace, that is the most effective tool he has. 

Coddling and covering up Palestinian support for terror does the exact opposite - and we see how well that has worked.


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!

 

 

Sunday, December 25, 2022

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Happy inclusive holidays!
What a minefield this whole identity thing is. Thank goodness Chanukah doesn’t present this problem, eh?

For many diaspora Jews, Chanukah is regarded as Christmas-lite with gifts, diet-destroying delicacies and a lighted menorah in place of a glittering tree.

And there can hardly be much danger of offending anyone with a card displaying a chanukiah, dreidel or doughnut, or standard anodyne message such as “Festival of lights”, “Love, light, latkes” or “Peace, love and miracles”.

Hold on a minute. Chanukah is not actually a festival of peace and love. It celebrates instead the victory of the Maccabees who went to war against both the Seleucid Greeks and the Hellenists, Jews who were themselves drawn to the pagan ways of their Greek overlords.

The Maccabees were not apostles of peace. They were more like resistance commandos, fierce and uncompromising warriors who fought their Greek oppressors.

Moreover, they also committed violent atrocities against the Hellenised Jews who had absorbed Greek universalism and as a result had taken aim at circumcision, Shabbat observance and Torah study.

The Maccabees regarded those overly-assimilated Jews as traitors to Judaism and dealt with them accordingly.

In the saccharine world of much Chanukah observance, the Maccabees are commonly presented as heroes fighting and defeating the tyrannical Greeks. This was undoubtedly true.

But other commentators equally plausibly describe them as zealots, violent religious extremists who forced Jews to conform to a strict interpretation of Judaism and expelled non-Jews from the land. To the Hellenised Jews, they were religious nuts.

Ring any bells? Today, many diaspora Jews (and liberal Israelis) are hyper-ventilating over the likely inclusion in the new Israeli government of three men whose agenda has distinct echoes of the Maccabees.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the putative security minister, called in his younger days for the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel (although he says he has changed his views). Bezalel Smotrich, tipped as a finance minister, has said his ultimate aim is an Israeli theocracy.

And Avi Maoz, who is set to run an office of “Jewish identity”, has taken explicit aim at the “Hellenising Jews” of the Israeli left and progressive denominations whom he terms “the real darkness”.

Celebrating the Maccabees might therefore be seen as celebrating Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and Maoz.

Well that’s the end of Chanukah cards, then.
PMW: Jesus the Palestinian terrorist and his 72 dark-eyed virgins
One of the many ways in which the Palestinian Authority distorts history in order to invent a centuries-old Palestinian identity, is to turn Jesus the Judean (Jew), who promoted peace on earth, into a Palestinian terrorist who was murdered by the Israelis, thus becoming the first Palestinian “Martyr,” who is now reveling in heaven with Allah, in the arms of 72 dark-eyed virgins.

While the language the PA uses to describe Jesus as a terrorist and as someone enjoying his virgins is less direct, the meaning is the same.

When referring to Palestinian terrorists, the PA calls them “self-sacrificing fighters,” or “fidai”. So, when the PA and its officials use the same terms to describe Jesus, they are in fact saying he is a terrorist.

As Palestinian Media Watch has shown, here, here, here, here, and here, among other places, the definition of Jesus as a terrorist enjoying his virgins is not a fringe idea, but rather one expressed by the highest order in the PA.

Jesus the “Palestinian” terrorist murdered by the Jews

When PA Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh sought to declare Jesus a terrorist, and link him to Palestinian terror, he referred to him as a “Palestinian self-sacrificing fighter” who, similar to the PA descriptions of suicide bombers, “paid for his mission with his life” and whose birth takes place “at the same time as the anniversary of the outbreak of the Palestinian revolution” – i.e the anniversary of the first Fatah terror attack:
“The birthday of our lord Jesus, peace be upon him - the first Palestinian self-sacrificing fighter from whom we learned Martyrdom-death, and who paid for his mission with his life - takes place at the same time as the anniversary of the outbreak of the Palestinian revolution (i.e., the anniversary of “the Launch” of Fatah, counted from its first terror attack against Israel), for which thousands of Martyrs have paid with their lives so that we will live and remain, and so that our children will dream of a better future.”

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 28, 2020]


Muwaffaq Matar, a member of the Revolutionary Council of PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party and regular columnist for the official PA daily similarly adopted Jesus as a Palestinian and compared him to terrorists calling him a “self-sacrificing fighter”:

Friday, December 16, 2022

There has been a lot of coverage of UNHRC Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's antisemitic posts on social media, including one post where she said, "America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed — the Palestinians — who defend themselves with the only means they have."

But in that same post, Albanese also engaged in a blood libel - falsely accusing Israel of killing a baby.

She wrote (translated):

Meanwhile, Gaza needs help, medicine, food, water. Everything we can give is a small but essential help to save more innocent lives. Like that of little Shayman, who after being born by her dying mother due to bombings, was rescued and kept in an incubator by medical staff in Gaza. The miracle of his life went off when Israel bombed Gaza’s only power supply source, and the Shayman’s incubator stopped working.
I cannot find any mention of any child dying from an incubator losing power in 2014.

Human Rights Watch wrote about the effects of Israel's (unintentional) bombing of Gaza's power plant fuel supply after Albanese's post. Here is everything it said about how the power plant going offline affected hospitals in Gaza:
The shutdown of the Gaza Power Plant ...caused hospitals, already straining to handle the surge of war casualties, to increase their reliance on precarious generators.

Mahmoud Daher, head of the Gaza office of the UN World Health Organization, said that hospitals have been given priority for scarce electricity, with Shifa, the territory’s largest hospital, getting the most, at 16 hours a day. If the fuel required to run generators were to run out, or a generator to fail, a hospital could lose power.

An official at al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City told Human Rights Watch on August 7 that because of electricity interruptions:

We use a large generator for six to eight hours per day, then have to rely on three smaller ones, because the large one cannot be run full-time. If the large one goes, we don’t know how we would repair it, because of the lack of spare parts. It powers the oxygen station, the hospital’s two elevators, and the air conditioners – this amounts to 80 percent of the hospital’s total electricity consumption. When we use the smaller generators, they can only power one elevator, and none of the air conditioners, which makes it difficult for staff to work long hours in the August heat, and dangerous for patients.
 If the power outages had shut down incubators, HRW would have mentioned it. If anyone died as a result of such power outages, HRW would have made that the headline. So would have every media outlet.

Albanese's story about "Shayman" and his "dying mother" is a lie. It never happened. It is a blood libel.

Not only that, her relating that story that was not mentioned in any mainstream media proves that Albanese reads and trusts the most fringe, anti-Israel and antisemitic Arab media, and believes even the most outrageous lies about Jews and Israelis implicitly.

So this pattern holds: Francesca Albanese is an antisemite.

UPDATE: GnasherJew found the story that I couldn't find. There was a baby on a respirator, not an incubator. Other news stories say the doctors were watching her closely, and it seems unlikely to me that the oxygen wouldn't be a top priority for generators in a hospital. 

The six-day-old baby was born by emergency Caesarean section Friday after doctors at Deir al-Balah hospital in central Gaza managed to save her from the womb of her mother, who died when an Israeli tank shell hit her home.

The mother, 23-year-old Shayma al-Sheikh Qanan, had been eight months pregnant, and the baby was named after her.

But the baby was deprived of oxygen between her mother’s death and doctors being able to operate, which meant she had to be hooked up to a respirator at the maternity ward in Khan Yunis hospital in southern Gaza.

“The baby suffered an oxygen deficiency in the womb after her mother’s heart stopped,” Dr Abdel Karem al-Bawab, head of the maternity ward at Nasser hospital, told AFP Thursday.

This deficiency caused the baby to asphyxiate unexpectedly, rendering her brain dead,” he said of the tragedy, which occurred Wednesday.

“The ongoing electricity shortages played a role because her oxygen tubes did not work properly and we had to resuscitate her more than once manually.”



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

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Thursday, October 06, 2022

A photo of Hosam Salem from his Facebook page


Yesterday, Gaza photojournalist Hosam Salem tweeted that his contract with the New York Times had been terminated. Here's his thread:
After years of covering the Gaza Strip as a freelance photojournalist for the New York Times, I was informed via an abrupt phone call from the US outlet that they will no longer work with me in the future. 
I began working with the newspaper in 2018, covering critical events in Gaza such as the weekly protests at the border fence with Israel, the investigation into the Israeli killing of field nurse Razan al-Najjar, and more recently, the May 2021 Israeli offensive on the Gaza strip 
As I understood later, the decision was made based on a report prepared by a Dutch editor - who obtained Israeli citizenship two years ago - for a website called Honest Reporting. 
The article, which the New York Times had based its decision for dismissing me, gives examples of posts I wrote on my social media accounts, namely Facebook, where I had expressed support for the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation... 
... My aforementioned posts also spoke of the resilience of my people and those who were killed by the Israeli army - my cousin included - which Honest Reporting described as “Palestinian terrorists”. 
The editor later wrote an article stating that he had succeeded in sacking three Palestinian journalists working for the New York Times in the Gaza Strip, on the basis of us being "anti-Semitic”. 
Not only has Honest Reporting succeeded in terminating my contract with The New York Times, it has also actively discouraged other international news agencies from collaborating with me and my two colleagues. 
What is taking place is a systematic effort to distort the image of Palestinian journalists as being incapable of trustworthiness and integrity, simply because we cover the human rights violations that the Palestinian people undergo on a daily basis at hands of the Israeli army 
He doesn't link to the Honest Reporting article that shows that he praised the massacre of four rabbis and a Druze policeman in 2014, that he has repeatedly praised suicide bombers that killed 10 in 2004, and he has continued to explicitly support terror attacks even after starting his work with the Times:

On November 18, 2014, Hosam Salem again used Facebook to express his joy over the massacre of four rabbis and an Israeli-Druze police officer in a synagogue in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof.

Citing the Quran, he encouraged his followers to “smite the necks” of unbelievers, adding: “[This is the] summary of the Jerusalem operation [sic] today.”

There’s more. In 2015, Salem applauded two acts of terror (see here and here); a shooting at the Gush Etzion Junction that killed an American teenager, an Israeli man, and a Palestinian bystander; and a Jerusalem stabbing that killed three.

Some three years later, after being hired by The New York Times, Salem called for more violence following an attack that killed two IDF recruits in the West Bank. “Shoot, kill, withdraw: three quick operational steps…to bring peace to the hearts of sad people like us,” the inciting post read.

Finally, he has repeatedly eulogized Mohammed Salem and Nabil Masoud. The two were responsible for a 2004 suicide bombing that killed ten workers at the Ashdod port, Israel’s second-busiest harbor (see here and here).

(It is possible that suicide bomber Mahmoud Salem was a relative.)

Now let's look at Salem's words defending himself again. "I had expressed support for the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation..." That is an admission that he considers praising murdering innocent people to be "supporting Palestinian resistance." 

And he concludes by saying that "What is taking place is a systematic effort to distort the image of Palestinian journalists as being incapable of trustworthiness and integrity..."

Salem is positioning his explicit support of terror as being a mainstream view among all Palestinian journalists. He says that exposing his praise of terror attacks is an attack on all Palestinian journalists. 

In other words, he is saying that his opinions are mainstream, not anomalous. 

If a Zionist would say that all Palestinian journalists cannot be trusted to be objective because they all support terror, the Zionist would properly be branded a bigot. Each journalist must be judged on their own merits and their own words. Stereotyping them is wrong.

But what does it mean when a Palestinian journalist insists that all Palestinian journalists like him support terror? When he claims that his noxious support for murdering rabbis and others is simply the same "covering human rights violations" that all reporters supposedly do? He isn't apologizing for his views - he is claiming that he, like all Palestinian journalists, is just covering the news. Praising the murders of Jews is indistinguishable from journalism.

He puts all Palestinian journalists in the same bucket as himself. (And so does Al Jazeera.)  Does that make him a racist? 

The reality is that support for terror is a mainstream Palestinian opinion, across multiple surveys for decades. Sometimes the majority support terror, other times is drops to less than 50%, but it is always an accepted, popular opinion. Assuming that all Palestinians support terror is indeed racist, but understanding that there is a high chance that a random Palestinian who is hired for a position at a major Western media outlet might indeed be a terror supporter is prudent. As the New York Times has learned, vetting one's social media posts before hiring anyone is essential.  

As far as the many who are claiming that Salem is the victim of anti-Palestinian racism, they are the ones who are racist - because they are claiming that all Palestinians support murdering Jews. 





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

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Thursday, September 29, 2022


By Daled Amos

Just two weeks ago, I wrote about the bond between Russia and Israel, the result of their shared experiences with terrorist attacks against their civilians and because of the large number of Russians living in Israel.

Now it turns out that on September 10, a delegation of Hamas terrorist leaders -- led by leader Ismail Haniyeh -- visited Moscow at the invitation of the Russian government. As a matter of policy, Russia does not see Hamas as a terrorist organization and hosted it back in 2020 and Grigory Karasin, chair of the Federation Council's Foreign Affairs Committee, has described Haniyeh as "one of the most moderate and prudent leaders of Hamas."

In 2017, the Russian ambassador to Israel -- Alexander Shein -- explained in an interview why Russia does not recognize either Hezbollah or Hamas to be terrorist organizations:

We do not consider these organizations to be terrorist. True, they are radical organizations, which sometimes adhere to extremist political views...Russian law - the Supreme Court, following an appeal by the prosecution - defines terrorist organizations as such when they intentionally conduct acts of terror in Russian territory, or against Russian interests abroad - installations, embassies, offices, or citizens. [emphasis added]

Apparently, it escaped Shein's notice that the large number of Russians with dual citizenship living in Israel would qualify as "Russian interests" according to his own definition.

Israel and Russia restored full relations between the 2 countries in 1991, 24 years after Russia broke off relations following the Six Day War. During that time, the US displaced the then-Soviet Union as the major power broker in the region. Since the renewal of relations, Russia has not been silent when Israel was targeted by Hamas.

In 2014, Russia came out in support of Operation Protective Edge, Israel's response to Hamas targeting Israeli civilians with its rockets:

“I am closely tracking what is happening in Israel,” Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked in a meeting on Wednesday with a delegation of Chief Rabbis and representatives of the Rabbinical Center of Europe.

...“I support Israel’s battle that is intended to keep its citizens protected,” he [Putin] said about the Israel Defense Forces’ operation to restore quiet to the region and stop Hamas terrorism.

“I also heard about the shocking murder of the three teenagers,” Putin added about the kidnapping and murder of Naftali Fraenkel, Eyal Yifrach and Gilad Shaar, three Yeshiva students in Israel. “This is an unconscionable act and I ask that you bring my condolences to the families.”

Despite the condemnation, Russia has not dumped Hamas as a "friend," instead keeping all ties open, much in the same way that China maintains relations simultaneously with both Israel and Iran.

But what is the point of Russia's personally inviting the Hamas leaders for a visit?

JNS hosted a discussion of the possible reasons for the invitation.

One suggestion was that this was Putin's way of dispelling the current image of Russia as an isolated pariah:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has no one who wants to play with him. So he’s happy to invite anyone. And, not surprisingly, it’s going be someone with whom no one wants to play either.

But that can hardly be the whole answer, since hosting Hamas is hardly a way for a leader to establish his legitimacy and demonstrate that he is in demand.

Another, possibly additional, motivation for the invitation could be a rebuke of Israel. Back in May, Hamas was invited to Russia, shortly after then-Foreign Minister Lapid accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine. But if so, it was not clear what Israel did this time to provoke the invitation this time around.

A third possibility, suggested by Jonathan Schanzer of Federation for Defense of Democracies, is that the invitation is part of a growing alliance that Russia is building:

It appears that Putin is building an axis of like-minded governments and entities, Schanzer said. “It really does look like he is working to create a new revisionist axis that already includes the Iranians, includes China potentially, and includes North Korea.”

“The question is whether this is an effort to legitimize and recruit Hamas to be part of that broader coalition. Or is this for show, or something else entirely?”

For its part, Hamas thinks there is a shift taking place among the world powers, and it wants to get in on the ground floor. At a conference this past June in Gaza entitled Palestinian Sovereignty, the Strategic Variables and Future Paths, Haniyeh spoke about 4 variables towards a new strategic vision:

The "success" of the Sword of Jerusalem campaign during the fighting of May of last year
o  America's withdrawal from  the area, a sign of its declining power and influence
o  The Russia-Ukraine war, which supposedly is actually between Russia and the West
o  The Abraham Accords, specifically the military and security alliances with Arab countries

The key variable, according to Haniyeh, is the 3rd one -- the war in the Ukraine:

"This is the broadest and most significant war in the struggle between the world's camps since the end of WWII." Stressing that "after this war the world will no longer be the same," he added: "It will undoubtedly become a multipolar world, and the currently prevailing unipolar era in international and global policy will end. This will certainly be a very important change, and it will impact both our Arab and Islamic region and our [Palestinian] cause and our struggle with the occupation."

Haniyeh is very keen on this up-and-coming multipolar world:

"Haniyeh stated that the Zionist narrative is no longer current, that Israel's status is not what it once was, and that there are important variables to be based on, including openness to large and influential countries such as China and Russia as well as Islamic Iran and all the countries that are confronting the Israel-U.S. policy in the region... [emphasis added]

Haniyeh's speech seems to dovetail nicely with the suggestion that this new multipolar world is something that Russia itself may be pursuing.

But if Haniyeh was expecting a confirmation of his goals against Israel during his visit to Russia, he was disappointed. The statements issued separately by the Russians and Hamas were very different.

Russia's statement emphasized the need to settle the conflict on the basis of a generally recognized legal framework, but Hamas emphasized that all negotiations with Israel have failed and that "resistance" was the only realistic option remaining:

According to the official statement of the Russian foreign ministry, the talks between the ministry officials and the Hamas delegation focused on "the developments in the Middle East, with emphasis on Palestinian affairs. The Russian side stressed the importance of quickly restoring the Palestinian national unity on the basis of the PLO's political program, as well as the need to settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the basis of generally-recognized legal framework, which is rooted in the relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council and General Assembly and the Arab peace initiative."

...The Hamas statement, on the other hand, emphasized that the delegation had informed the Russian officials of "the Israeli violations" against the Palestinian people and had stressed the Palestinians' right to "resist the occupation by every possible means, until liberation and return [are achieved]."...The statement said further that Hamas "is working to strengthen its ties with its Islamic and Arab surroundings and with influential international elements that support our people," and added: "The hegemonial status of the U.S. in the world order has harmed the Palestinian cause, and we believe that the shift to a multipolar world order based on just principles will benefit our people and our cause."

Publicly, at least, there seemed to be very little to indicate that Russia considered Hamas to be an asset -- let alone a valued ally. Hamas may very well see the value of a "multipolar world," but that does not mean it will get to sit at the same table with these other countries.

But if that means that this whole exercise of hosting Hamas was intended as a rebuke and warning to Israel, it doesn't appear to have had the desired effect.

Just this week, Israel had its own rebuke for Russia in response to its attempt to annex parts of Ukraine

Israel's Foreign Ministry stated on Tuesday that Israel "recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine," as Russia holds its fifth and last day of referendums as a prelude to it annexing four Ukrainian regions.

Israel "Will not accept the results of the referendum in the Eastern districts of Ukraine," the Israeli statement said, in a rare rebuke of Moscow.

Considering the sensitive agreement between Israel and Russia regarding Israeli flights into Syria in response to Iranian threats, the statement was somewhat unexpected -- especially since it preceded any official statement by Russia and the statement itself was apparently not the result of US pressure.

Israel seems to see Russia hosting Hamas as a rebuke -- nothing more.

As for Haniyeh, he may be jumping the gun when he compares the Russia-Ukraine war favorably to WWII as an opportunity for Hamas to reap the benefits of a new world order. He seems to have forgotten about the other world war, WWI. 

That was when the Ottoman Empire also saw a new world order in the making -- and joined against the allied powers.





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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

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