Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: AI

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Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Amnesty report again accusing Israel of war crimes based on nothing but their hate for Israel (update)

Amnesty International has released a report on the August mini-war in Gaza where they say that Israel should be investigated for war crimes. (Unusually, they also accuse Islamic Jihad of possible war crimes for a single rocket misfire.)

Amnesty investigated three incidents, two of which are from Israeli fire. The first one:

Amnesty International has examined in detail two Israeli attacks that must be investigated as possible war crimes because they appear either to have deliberately targeted civilians or civilian objects or to have been indiscriminate attacks. On 5 August 2022, an Israeli tank round struck the house of the alAmour family in Khan Yunis, where 11 civilians were staying, killing Duniana al-Amour, aged 22, and wounding her mother and her sister. Based on its identification of the projectile that struck the house as a “highly accurate” 120mm M339 tank round, and its calculation of the distance between the house and the closest military objects using satellite imagery, Amnesty International believes that the al-Amour family’s house was the intended target of the attack. The killing of Duniana al-Amour and the apparently deliberate targeting of her house must therefore be investigated as a possible war crime.

It does appear that Israel targeted a house. Amnesty says it "found no evidence that any members of the al-Amour family could reasonably be believed to be involved in armed combat. "

This is true. But Amnesty is hiding something - something that they certainly reviewed before writing this report. They are hiding what the ITIC wrote about this attack, that one of the "civilians" in the house was Islamic Jihad's commander of the southern Gaza Strip.

The ITIC is close to the Israeli military. It said that the fatal attack on the Falluja cemetery was from the IDF when even Haaretz assumed it was an errant Islamic Jihad rocket, so it cannot be accused of lying. It is the closest thing we have to an official IDF comment on the incident.

If a senior commander was in the house, it was a valid military target. It is a tragedy but certainly not a war crime.

Amnesty doesn't want you to know that, so they simply don't report it.

The second incident:

In another instance, on 7 August 2022, a missile apparently fired from a drone hit Al-Falluja cemetery in Jabalia, killing five children and seriously injuring another. Based on a review of pictures of the weapon’s remnants, Amnesty International determined that they were consistent with an Israeli guided missile. Unnamed sources from the Israeli army told an Israeli newspaper that a preliminary internal probe conducted by the army into the attack showed that neither Palestinian Islamic Jihad nor the AlQuds Brigades were firing rockets at the time of the attack and that Israel was carrying out attacks on “targets” near the area. Satellite imagery showed that there were no military targets visible in the area 10 days before the attack and residents interviewed by Amnesty International said that none appeared in the intervening period. There are strong indications that the strike on Al-Falluja cemetery was either a direct attack on civilians or an indiscriminate attack where Israel failed to comply with the obligation to take all feasible precautions to distinguish between civilians and fighters.

Notice how Amnesty assumes that the Israeli sources are simply lying when they say there were targets in the area. A "target" is likely a member or leader of Islamic Jihad. 10-day old satellite imagery will not find such a target, and residents being interviewed sure as hell will not admit they saw a militant even if they did. Amnesty simply assumes Israel either targeted kids for fun, or didn't check for civilians. It does not even consider that the laws of war say that a military commander can act based on the best intelligence information available at the time - he or she does not have to wait for 100% accuracy. Sometimes, as in this case, the information was not accurate enough and there is a tragedy.

And while Amnesty investigated only one (of several) Islamic Jihad rockets that fell short and killed people, it emphasizes that everything ends up being Israel's fault: "Israel’s apartheid remains the root cause of Palestinians’ suffering and the recurring violations against them and must be dismantled." Even though the August hostilities had nothing to do with the scurrilous "apartheid" accusation, to Amnesty, Israel's existence is the original sin.

And one that it is doing everything it can to destroy.

UPDATE: The Amnesty video accompanying the report mentions the Islamic Jihad rocket that killed 7 children - but then blames that on Israel as well.

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!

10/12 Links Pt2: Alan Johnson: On Amnesty’s Antisemitic ‘Apartheid’ Report; Kontorovich: Israel should not sign a cultural agreement with Europe

From Ian:

Alan Johnson: On Amnesty’s Antisemitic ‘Apartheid’ Report

This new introduction to the updated 2022 edition of The Apartheid Smear (forthcoming), originally published by BICOM in 2013, critiques a recent Amnesty International report, one of a crop of very similar ‘reports’ published by NGOs and UN bodies in 2021 and 2022 that smear Israel as an ‘apartheid’ state [6]. The introduction is organised in three parts, critically examining in turn the analysis, politics, and methods of Amnesty’s report.

Why is it so important for opinion formers and policy makers who seek peace via the two-state solution to reject the Amnesty Apartheid Report?

Because it has long been understood by democrats on all sides that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impossible without the hard work of mutual recognition and peacebuilding, negotiations and compromises, and, eventually, a lasting settlement based on a division of the land and an institutionalisation of the democratic right to national self determination of both peoples.

Some way-stations on the journey to peace have been Madrid, Oslo, Camp David, Taba, Annapolis, and the Kerry-Obama talks. Yes, the last inch of the journey, as the saying goes, is a mile deep, but there is no real-world alternative to trying again to traverse it. Today, that effort will proceed in the more hopeful context of the Abraham Accords, a historic series of agreements between Israel and several surrounding Arab states. For an extensive collection of some of the most creative and expert thinking from Israelis, Palestinians and others about how to recommence that journey to peace see Rescuing Israeli-Palestinian Peace: The Fathom Essays 2016-2020.

However, while a negotiated two-state solution remains the only viable way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by recognising the right of both peoples to national self determination, right now the gaps between the sides remain significant, and there is insufficient trust, or political will, to build the kind of relationships between the leaderships that might allow those gaps to be bridged.

In the real world, which is found at some distance from NGO-UN Reportland, the task of Britain, along with other European states, the US and Arab leaders, is not to make Israel an international pariah as the Amnesty report would have us do, but to prevent further deterioration on the ground, lower tensions, and find ways to improve the situation. This approach may not be well suited to winning applause from a campus audience, but it is well suited to encouraging a recommencement of the peace process down the line. The analysis, politics and methods of the Amnesty report would take us in the opposite direction, and should be rejected as a political dead-end by opinion-formers, policy makers and, not least, Palestinians.

Mainstream Jewish Organizations Don’t Have Leftwing Antisemitism “Under Control”

While the Jewish community is playing the short game, doing what it’s always done to win the moment, radical social justice warriors are playing the long game—what activists call “the long march through institutions”—in inculcating a stark ideological worldview that portrays anyone with power or success (success is a function of power, in this worldview)—America, Israel, Jews, Asians, men, etc.—as oppressors. Schools are teaching students to see people’s identities as markers of privilege and power and to “recognize and resist systems of oppression.” The problem is that the ideologues who are driving the agenda define the oppressor as anyone perceived to be powerful and successful, and the oppressed as anyone they deem powerless and, hence, unsuccessful. It’s a highly simplistic, binary worldview.

With this ideological software running through our kids’ brains, the school system does not have to even utter the word “Jew” or “Israel” for Jews and Israel to be ultimately implicated in oppression. Indeed, this is already happening. Survey data shows a strong correlation between progressive political attitudes on oppression and antisemitism on the left. The Jewish Institute for Liberal Values commissioned a poll of 1,600 likely voters. Survey respondents were split roughly between Democratic and Republican voters. Respondents were asked: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? America is a structurally racist country in which white Americans, and white-adjacent groups who emulate white culture (like Asian Americans and Jewish Americans), have unfair advantages over minorities which must be addressed to achieve equity?” The poll revealed that those on the far left were much more likely to agree with the statement, an indication that progressive ideological attitudes about structural racism are fueling antisemitic and anti-Asian sentiment (viewing Jews and Asians as privileged).

The ideologues are rewiring the way young people think so that they’ll adopt their worldview, including the view that Israel is a “settler-colonialist” state. They are, in effect, laying the groundwork for the Berkeley Law Schools of the future, when there will be more true believers on their side, at which time the future Dean of the Law School will face more pressure from radical activists and less pushback from us.

For Jewish organizations to effectively counter the long-term threat, they must come to terms with the underlying ideology that powers progressive antisemitism. They cannot, on the one hand, pretend to support this oppressor/oppressed binary, as many did in the California Ethnic Studies controversy, and, on the other, hope and pray that such a stance doesn’t ultimately manifest in the portrayal of Jews and Israel as oppressors. As long as radical social justice ideologues are experiencing success pushing a program that simplistically divides the world into oppressed and oppressors and condemns anyone who doesn’t agree with them, we are going to have major antisemitism problems, in ever greater frequency and intensity.

The sooner the Jewish community comes to terms with this reality and stops playing footsie with radical forces, the sooner we can develop strategies and tactics aimed at winning the long game.

Martin Kramer "Semites, Anti-Semites, and Bernard Lewis: The Life and Afterlife of a Seminal Book"

Martin Kramer is a historian of the Middle East and Israel at Tel Aviv University and the Walter P. Stern Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He was the founding president of Shalem College, a liberal arts school in Jerusalem, and a visiting professor or fellow at Brandeis, Chicago, Cornell, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the Wilson Center. He earned his degrees from Princeton, under the supervision of Bernard Lewis. Among his many publications on Islam, Israel, and the Middle East, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (2001) has been widely discussed and influential.

Cartoon of the Day: Objective NGO reports to order

I was looking at the Amnesty YouTube channel, and saw one video that was quite anomalous.

It was a 2019 video, attempting to be snarky, attacking TripAdvisor for including Jewish-owned destinations in Judea and Samaria.

I couldn't find any other video on the site on any other topic that attempted to have that same sarcastic tone. And it didn't do a very good job. But it illustrates how, for Amnesty, Israel is uniquely evil - only Israel is treated that way. Only for Israel do they spend the money to try to reach audiences that might make their videos go viral.

On the other hand, they also prove how their obsession with Israel has nothing to do with the seriousness of the human rights abuses that they claim Israel is guilty of - because Amnesty would never attempt to make light of real human rights abuses in the same jokey way.

Anyway, this cartoon shows how "research" can be subverted: when the conclusions are decided before the research is done; everyone knows what the report will say and the researchers are tasked with reaching a specific conclusion ahead of time. That way they can only include the "evidence" that supports their thesis and ignore or downplay any counter-evidence.

That's what Amnesty, HRW and other "human rights" NGOs do, all the time.

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!

A Palestinian's home will be demolished - but no human rights groups will care this time

Tamer Abu Bakra received a demolition notice for half of his already tiny 60-square-meter home.

But you won't hear a word about this from B'Tselem or ICAHD or HRW or Amnesty, who love to publicize when Palestinian homes are to be demolished.

Because this demolition notice came from Hamas.

Bakra put out an appeal on social media, saying the Khan Younis house "has been lived in by my father and my family since the Nakba, and it has been inherited from them to this day."

It had been burned down in 2020 and he has been rebuilding it himself.

Bakra said it is already too small to be called a "home."

Too bad he had the misfortune of building his house where no one would care if his home gets taken down.

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!

"Human rights" activists and groups silent as Hamas executes "collaborators"

Times of Israel reports:

The Hamas terror group announced on Sunday that it had executed five Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including two for “collaboration” with Israel.

“On Sunday morning, the death sentence was carried out against two condemned over collaboration with the occupation (Israel), and three others in criminal cases,” Hamas, which rules Gaza said in a statement.

It added that the defendants had previously been given “their full rights to defend themselves.”

Hamas media is reporting that "experts" and "activists" are supporting the executions. Many use a hashtag, #القصاص_حياة, "Retribution is Life," from a Quran quote.

I can find no "progressive" anti-Israel activist who is condemning Hamas' death penalty for either the Gazans convicted of murder or of "collaboration."

Moreover, the "human rights" groups that Israel has outlawed are not saying a word either. Al Haq, "Protecting and Promoting Human Rights & the Rule of Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory," is silent.

Also silent, as of this writing, are the social media of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, who regularly condemn the death penalty in the US.

PCHR, a Palestinian human rights group not considered illegal by Israel, to its credit, does consistently condemn the death penalty. But B'Tselem hasn't said anything about this.

So-called human rights groups pretend that they are even handed and condemn Hamas when appropriate. But except for rocket fire, they tacitly support everything Hamas does with their silence, while they spend thousands of hours looking for new things to accuse Israel of.

The "collaboration" crimes occurred in 1991 and 2001.

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!

09/01 Links Pt2: Amnesty International - Hypocrisy and Double Standards; Closet Zionist? Linda Sarsour’s On the Down Low Visit to Israel

From Ian:

Amb. Alan Baker: Amnesty International - Hypocrisy and Double Standards

In the context of the ongoing armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Amnesty International (AI) recently issued a report, dated August 4, 2022, entitled “Ukrainian Fighting Tactics Endanger Civilians.”1 This report names Ukraine responsible for the deaths of Ukrainian citizens caused by Russian bombardments. The report accuses Ukraine of violating international humanitarian law and endangering its own civilians “by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals…” and thereby turning civilian objects into military targets, generating Russian strikes in populated areas thereby causing civilian fatalities and destruction of civilian infrastructure.”

There can be no doubt as to the centrality and essential nature of those humanitarian requirements set out in the internationally accepted and recognized instruments of international humanitarian law, requiring the protection of civilians and avoidance of military attacks against civilian concentrations and objects. Such instruments include the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949,3 and the Protocol Additional relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977.

To maintain credibility and dignity as a bona fide human rights watchdog, Amnesty International must carry out its duty impartially and without the slightest indication of political partisanship.

The choice of Amnesty International to direct the bulk of its criticism against Ukraine and to hold Ukraine partly responsible for the deaths of Ukrainians attacked by the Russian military has become the subject of considerable international criticism.5 This is especially true since the report implies that Ukraine may be committing war crimes and that its soldiers’ actions might be interpreted as using civilians as human shields.

Much of the criticism revolves around serious flaws and clumsy and negligent methodology used by Amnesty International researchers and the fact that the organization chose to publish its findings despite a lack of solid facts and without taking into due consideration pertinent constraints generated by the context of the Russian offensive.6

Nevertheless, one cannot avoid drawing a comparison between Amnesty International’s demonstrated and justified concern for the protection of civilians and civilian centers in Ukraine and its demonstrated and unjustified lack of concern about the actions of Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

While Amnesty calls out Ukraine for allegedly “establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals, thereby turning civilian objects into military targets,” it curiously refrains from addressing precisely the same phenomenon employed by the Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Such an apparent double standard is incompatible with Amnesty International’s core principles and stated mission.

Amnesty appears to ignore or minimize blatant violations of international humanitarian law committed by these Palestinian terror groups in using the local Palestinian public in the Gaza Strip as human shields and in flagrantly directing thousands of rockets against Israeli civilian targets, including towns, villages, agricultural centers, schools, and hospitals.

Jonathan Tobin: Celebrate Gorbachev’s failure to save the Soviet Union, not his heroism

Gorbachev hadn’t come into office as an advocate for human rights, economic liberalism or freedom for the captive nations that languished under Soviet control. Nor was he known for his love of the Jewish people. Had he been any of those things, he never would have been elevated to the head of the Communist state. But his ability to see the weakness of the Soviet state and, unlike his predecessors, his lack of any real prejudice against Jews led him to a series of decisions that would lead to the end of the regime and the opening of the gates to a million Jews who chose to leave for Israel and the United States.

Still, none of that would have happened had the West continued to be led by weak leaders like President Jimmy Carter, or realists like President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who were so overawed by the facade of Soviet strength that they chose a policy of détente that essentially accepted it rather than seeking to resist it. Though hailed in the 1970s as astute foreign policy, détente helped prop up and preserve the Soviet Union. Reagan and Thatcher chose a different path, which eventually created the circumstances that led Gorbachev to concede that the Soviets couldn’t beat the West.

Equally important was the resistance to Soviet tyranny on the part of dissidents like nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov and refuseniks like Sharansky, who inspired not just the movement to free Soviet Jewry but a spirit of revulsion against the Soviets in Western opinion that buttressed Reagan’s stand.

Sadly, Gorbachev’s failure to preserve the Soviet Union set an example that other tyrants aren’t likely to forget. In 1989, most people were sure that the Chinese Communist state would suffer the same fate as the empire of Lenin and Stalin. But the Chinese Communist Party had no intention of being merely shoved aside as their Soviet counterparts had been. It liberalized its economy, allowed massive investment from the West, and made it richer and stronger. Still, its leaders never loosened up their authoritarian instincts, repressing freedom of speech and all dissent even as they legalized free enterprise, albeit with the state always having the option to step in and take what it wants.

The Iranian regime understands that same fact and unleashes its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to massacre dissidents in the streets whenever protests arise.

History Repeating Itself as Bethlehem’s Christians Face Extinction

The demise of Christianity in Palestinian-controlled areas is part of a more general pattern of Christians disappearing in the Middle East and North Africa.

In 2019, a UK-commissioned report laid bare the scale of the problem, describing their dwindling numbers as “coming close to genocide.”

“Forms of persecution ranging from routine discrimination in education, employment and social life up to genocidal attacks against Christian communities have led to a significant exodus of Christian believers from this region since the turn of the century,” the report said.

“In countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia the situation of Christians and other minorities has reached an alarming stage. In Saudi Arabia there are strict limitations on all forms of expression of Christianity including public acts of worship. There have been regular crackdowns on private Christian services,” the report concluded.

The crisis currently facing Christians is not unique to the region — it is part of a grim pattern that started with the mass expulsion of Jews over 70 years ago.

As HonestReporting has detailed, approximately one million Jewish residents of Arab countries were forced to flee their homes following the rejection by Palestinian and Arab leaders of the 1947 UN Partition Plan.

Although Jews had lived in North Africa and the Middle East continuously for thousands of years — long before the advent of the Islamic faith — their presence has, except for in Israel, effectively been eliminated.

Christians living under Palestinian rule and in the region as a whole now face the same future. This, while church leaders fail to denounce the root cause.

The Levin/Stevens race proves that hypocritical J-Street is way out of the mainstream for American Jews

Tuesday's primary is over, and in the closely watched Michigan congressional race between two incumbents, moderate Haley Stevens and "progressive" Andy Levin, Stevens trounded Levin by 20 percentage points.

The result is being painted by the far-Left crowd as AIPAC stealing the election by spending millions of dollars through their PAC, UDP, to pay for ads for Stevens. While AIPAC did spend the money, the margin of victory is not because of them - it is because Stevens was heavily backed by moderate Democrats.

One byproduct of the race, though, is that is exposed J-Street's hypocrisy.

J-Street went all out for Levin, no less than AIPAC did for Stevens. They falsely painted Levin as having mainstream positions in the American Jewish community.

The truth is quite the opposite, and it shows J-Street's extremism.

In their message after the race, J-Street wrote:

It is alarming that this race, like many other Democratic primaries this cycle, was heavily impacted by the aggressive outside spending of AIPAC and its SuperPAC, the United Democracy Project. They spent nearly $5 million to target and defeat Levin, far more than was spent by any other group. While Rep. Levin is a proudly pro-Israel Jewish-American, AIPAC smeared him as “anti-Israel,” “fringe” and “hostile.” They targeted him for holding principled, mainstream views about US diplomatic leadership in the Middle East, and for proposing legislation to help uphold Palestinian rights and secure Israel’s future as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people.
...

With their overwhelming spending, AIPAC hopes to send an intimidating message to others: Cross our red lines, and you could be next. While political space for open and healthy debate over US foreign policy has opened up considerably in recent years, they appear determined to close it down. Instead of building sustainable bipartisan support for Israel, AIPAC has harmfully turned Israel into one of the sharpest wedge issues in American politics.

To respond to this new challenge, Democratic Party leaders should make absolutely clear just how harmful and unwelcome AIPAC’s interventions in its primary contests are. Candidates in future primaries should disavow and decline the support of AIPAC and its SuperPAC – which have come as a surprise to at least some of them.

J Street remains committed to doing all that we can to represent the views of the majority of Jewish Americans and American voters. We will keep up our work to ensure that our national political and policy debate about foreign policy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in honest fact, shared democratic values, and a commitment to lasting peace.

The hypocrisy shown here is off the charts.

Levin's positions are not mainstream in the Jewish community. His centerpiece "Two State Solution Act" has no traction and zero co-sponsors because it is abhorrent to pro-Israel Americans. It makes demands on Israel and none on Palestinians. It defines the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall as "occupied territory." It also defines Gaza as "occupied" even though no Jews have lived there in nearly two decades.

J-Street's hand wringing over AIPAC's spending is also hypocritical because before AIPAC created their superPAC, the largest Jewish political PAC was JStreetPAC - by far.

But far more telling is what Haley Stevens positions on Israel are that J-Street opposes. From her campaign website section on Israel:

Chief among my priorities are safety and security, both here in the U.S. and abroad, and I believe that our strong and enduring partnership with the State of Israel is a cornerstone of maintaining these goals. The United States and Israel have maintained a steadfast partnership for over seven decades, bound by our shared commitment to common values. The U.S.-Israel partnership is one that must continue to thrive – and importantly, cannot become a partisan issue. I stand firm in my commitment to the U.S.-Israel alliance and will continue working in Congress to support policies that strengthen our strategic alliance.

I had the opportunity to visit Israel for the first time in 2019, where I experienced its deep history, cultures, and natural beauty. I was also able to learn more about the innovative technologies Israel has created that Americans depend upon for agriculture, energy, healthcare, commerce, transportation, and national security, among many others. I look forward to finding new ways to develop strategic plans to build on these technological successes.

I stand alongside Israel against the BDS movement, which seeks to undermine Israel’s economy and legitimacy. Its main goal is to delegitimize Israel’s existence and inflame tensions in communities and on college campuses, which undermines the prospects for peace. At a time when anti-Israel boycotts are prevalent around the country and globe, and the Anti-Defamation League is reporting a dramatic uptick in anti-Semitic hate crimes, it is now more important than ever to stand beside Israel and oppose state-sponsored BDS.

I believe in Israel’s fundamental right to self-defense. As the only democracy in the Middle East and our strongest ally in the region, Israel’s safety is paramount to our interests at home and abroad. Congress must continue to unconditionally support critical programs that help Israel upgrade its fleets in air, land, and sea, enhance the mobility of its ground forces, and continue to strengthen its missile defense capabilities. The landmark Memorandum of Understanding reached under the Obama Administration provided Israel with robust funding to accomplish these goals, and I will continue to support funding from this historic agreement, as I have each year. We must prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and further destabilizing the region. Diplomacy must be the first option and is the best solution but all options must remain on the table.

I believe in the worth and value of every Palestinian and every Israeli and will work to support a negotiated solution resulting in two states—a democratic Jewish State of Israel, and a viable, democratic Palestinian state—living side-by-side in peace, security, and mutual recognition. This peace process should be settled by the parties directly.

Our countries share a commitment to justice and equality for all. From standing up for women’s rights to affirming our support for the worldwide LGBT community, our common values are what unite us. That deep sense of justice – born out of a shared commitment to repairing the world – is why we can always count on each other.

This statement says more positive things about Israel than J-Street has during its entire existence. Moreover, it is clearly within the mainstream of the American Jewish community - supporting a two state solution, supporting a strong US-Israel relationship, supporting Israel's right to self-defense, supporting Israel's liberal values, and opposing BDS.

These position are what J-Street opposes. Which makes J-Street an extremist group, not a moderate pro-Israel group.

One other Stevens statement:

I am deeply concerned by the persistent and growing effort to demonize Israel, the world's only Jewish state and a close American ally, on the international stage. Whether through the chronic bias displayed by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) or accusations put out by groups like Amnesty International, I stand opposed to efforts to unjustifiably brand Israel as an "apartheid state," and I will always work to mitigate the threat of delegitimization against our closest friends in the Middle East. Since its inception in 2006, the UNHRC has created 33 Commissions of Inquiry, out of which nine have dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There have been no UNHRC commissions of inquiry into Iranian or Chinese human rights violations. Israeli Arabs are represented in the Israeli Knesset, Supreme Court, Governing Coalition, and Defense Forces, in short. Instead of holding the world’s only Jewish state to a double standard, we should investigate why its adversaries are so keen on finding new methods to undercut its legitimacy as a vibrant, multi-ethnic democracy. This disastrous characterization of Israel will not serve to end the conflict and suffering in the region but will rather serve to incite violence and hatred toward the world's largest hub of Jewish life amid a time of overwhelming concern for the international Jewish community. I support good faith efforts to address the underlying causes of recurrent tensions and instability in the region in pursuit of peace, but I fervently condemn this campaign to vilify our close American ally with these displays of hateful discrimination.”

This is mainstream American Zionist and Jewish opinion. But I cannot find a single J-Street statement opposing the UN Commission of Inquiry.They issued no condemnation of the antisemitic statements of its member Miloon Kothari that the "Jewish lobby" controls social media.

J-Street's opposition to Stevens proves that they are not pro-Israel at all.

Moreover, I cannot find a single statement from Andy Levin decrying those who call Israel an "apartheid state." His silence is tacit support. J-Street says it is against that specific term - but they fully support the anti-Israel reports from HRW and Amnesty that make that accusation.

There is a further hypocrisy from J-Street in their letter. They pretend to be upset that AIPAC is turning Israel into a wedge issue - yet that is J-Street's entire purpose, to divide the American Jewish community and to promote the ideas and candidates whose opinions are anathema to most American Jews.

And their self-righteous posturing that billionaire money corrupts democracy is even more hypocritical. J-Street was formed with the early support (within six months of its founding) of billionaire George Soros, a fact that they tried to hide.

All you need to know about J-Street can be seen in this one campaign. And it proves that J-Street holds fringe opinions on Israel that they try to obscure behind their mantras of "pro-Israel, pro-peace, two states."

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!

Studies prove that facts don't matter: how propaganda takes advantage of psychology and normalizes antisemitism

I came across this 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Kubin et al: "Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts."

People believe that facts are essential for earning the respect of political adversaries, but our research shows that this belief is wrong. We find that sharing personal experiences about a political issue—especially experiences involving harm—help to foster respect via increased perceptions of rationality. This research provides a straightforward pathway for increasing moral understanding and decreasing political intolerance. ....In moral and political disagreements, everyday people treat subjective experiences as truer than objective facts.

The paper makes the assumption of goodwill; if you want to convince someone of the truth of your position, enhance your facts with personal experience. The authors suggest that narratives can increase political tolerance.

But it doesn't consider how malicious people weaponize this knowledge in order to lead people away from the facts to begin with - and how propagandists can use this to increase intolerance.

A commentary on the paper in PNAS does touch on this:

The power that story has over facts to capture the imagination and create respect for an individual’s position is easily exploited. ...Narratives are easily weaponized by propagandists and other bad actors. From this perspective, Kubin et al. may not have uncovered a feature in human discourse that might bridge moral divides but rather a bug that could be easily exploited. While presenting facts garners more respect than claims with no backing at all, these studies still find that narratives beat out facts in creating a greater perception of rationality and even perceived truth. Yet, a position backed by one personal anecdote is no more objectively true than one backed by no anecdote or facts at all. More crucially, a position backed by a personal narrative is not more true than a position backed by facts.

While both narratives and facts can be cherry-picked to support a position, personal narratives, as the authors point out, are unimpugnable. A conclusion drawn from facts, on the other hand, can be disputed and disproven and, thus, science and society should prefer fact-based positions. Yet, when it comes to respect, feelings are prioritized over facts. As these studies show, what is true gains less respect than what one might feel to be true.

Are we to get into a battle of cherry-picked narratives of harm to promote our policy positions, amplified by social media and the ease with which these narratives can spread? How can such narratives be combated? The counter to a story of harm is, by definition, a story of lack of harm (e.g., a vaccine that reduces future infection). However, the larger problem is that the real counternarrative for any anecdotal evidence is found in the data (e.g., a peer-reviewed paper showing the benefits of vaccination for the treatment condition). As such, a troublesome implication of this work is that a false personal story will have more power to create respect than facts, including those facts that would serve to correct the narrative.

This is accurate - but it doesn't go far enough, either.

If narratives are more effective than facts, and personal narratives about being harmed are most effective of all (because no one wants to impugn a personal story about how someone was harmed,) then over time the cumulative narratives of alleged harm by a specific certain group will create hate for that group.

The original study hoped that using personal narratives would increase tolerance. It didn't anticipate that large groups were already weaponizing that as a propaganda method that increases intolerance - towards Jews. Because the Palestinian propaganda machine promotes antisemitism with a torrent of stories about humiliation at the hands of the Jews.

When a Palestinian goes through a Jordanian checkpoint, they are angry and upset. But when they go through an Israeli checkpoint, even though they are treated with more respect, they claim they are humiliated - because they resent Jews on what they consider their land to begin with. So the only stories the world hears are those of humiliation, whether true or not. And over time the followers of that topic start to believe that Jews are deliberately humiliating Palestinians, because that is what the Palestinian stories say.

NGOs also weaponize this propaganda tool against Israel. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch reports against Israel are far more detailed and longer than those on other countries. I once did a comparison between two Amnesty reports released around the same time:

Amnesty reports	Israel/WB	Syria/Yarmouk
Title of report	Trigger-happy	Squeezing the life out of Yarmouk
Number of pages in the report	87	39
Number of civilians killed according to Amnesty	22	194
Time period covered	12 months	8 months
Circumstances of their deaths	Mostly while participating in or near violent acts	Starvation, sniper fire, bombings
Number of extensive personal stories given for victims	At least 18, some three pages long	Zero
Number of photos of victims (dead and injured)	At least 14	Zero
Video produced to support report?	Yes, 4 minutes	No
Placement on Amnesty webpage	Linked from front page two weeks after report issued	On front page only the day it was released

Palestinians are humanized and their stories are told. Those stories are detailed and centered on showing how they were harmed and at creating empathy for them.

Meanwhile, to Amnesty, Syrian victims are just statistics.

Along with the empathy for the subjects of heart-rending stories comes anger at the victimizers. This is especially true when the storytellers themselves are angry at their supposed tormentors. Just as the audience wants to identify with the victim, they want to share in the anger the victim has towards those they blame for their pain.

So it is no surprise that the Western narrative about Israel, over time, has become more explicitly antisemitic. These same NGOs are now completely at ease in claiming that Israel has a policy of "Jewish supremacy," meant to evoke white supremacy, one of the most evil crimes possible. Singling out Israel as the only current state practicing (a made up definition of) apartheid is another example of normalizing antisemitism in the name of supporting the victims of Jewish greed. Gaza children are only victims of Israeli war crimes; their being cynically used as human shields by terrorists who were the target of the bomb is not mentioned.

The decades of favoring narrative over facts has created conditions ripe for increased Jew-hatred.

Also, in this world where narratives are favored over facts, there is little penalty for lying. After all, the victims are describing the facts as they claim that they experienced them, and arguing with that is considered to be adding to their victimhood.

One of Israel's reasons for existence is so that Jews will no longer be hapless victims of a world that doesn't care about them. Israel has helped achieve that goal - so now Jews are at a permanent disadvantage in the discourse about which side is in the right exactly because we can no longer claim the same degree of victimhood. And victimhood is the coin of the realm.

There is no defense. Ben Shapiro's famous quote "facts don't care about your feelings" may be true, but facts cannot argue with feelings, either. People want to empathize with and support the real or imagined victims.

Israel's success at protecting Jews is itself its unforgivable crime, and the Israel-haters are using that success as a reason to try to destroy it.

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!

"Experts" who have NEVER been correct upset at being ignored

This tweet from Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders' foreign policy advisor and president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, is really amusing:

A good question for reporters to be asking this week about the Abraham Accords is why this regional "peace deal" doesn't seem to be supported by actual regional peace and human rights activists.

The "experts" on the Middle East have been proven to be completely and totally wrong in their analysis, which incidentally has not changed at all since 1995.

In their universe, Palestinians who are dedicated to destroying Israel should have veto power over anything Israel does with any Arab state.

And for the years of the Obama administration, that is exactly how things were.

Then, Gulf states realized that their slavish dedication to supporting Palestinians who couldn't even solve their own internal split was counterproductive - and that partnering with Israel would bring great benefits.

So then the largest sea change in the Israeli-Arab conflict since Camp David happened - the Abraham Accords.

These "experts" were really upset that their formula didn't work, and they keep trying to shoehorn a radically changed Middle East into their old thinking, since they really have no imagination beyond "Israel bad, Palestinians good."

Hilariously, Duss resorts to saying that the "experts" - human rights activists who spend a large percentage of their time demonizing Israel - don't support the Abraham Accords, so therefore they must be meaningless.

Never in their wildest dreams can these blowhards consider that they have been wrong since - well, forever.

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!

The @Amnesty T-shirts that prove anti-Zionism is antisemitism

According to this tweet by Amnesty International UK Campaigns Manager Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty-UK will soon be selling "End Israel Apartheid" T-shirts.

I looked through the Amnesty USA and Amnesty UK website ad could not find any other merchandise that attacks a single nation.

No anti-Russia or anti-China or anti-Myanmar items. Nothing being sold against Afghanistan or Syria or North Korea.

But the issue isn't only that Amnesty decided that Israel should be given this unique treatment. It is that Amnesty knows that some people would proudly wear such a T-shirt.

Wearing a message T-shirt is a social activity. No one buys one to wear alone at home. They are meant to be seen. More importantly, they are meant to be responded to, if only subtly. People wear message T-shirts to feel the thrill of people agreeing. People want to wear messages that get those who read them to say "Yeah!" or "Clever!" or "Me too!" or just a smile and a nod.

In the case of anti-Israel T-shirts, the wearer gets the positive feedback thrill because there are enough fellow haters that would respond positively.

The reason you don't see "End Chinese Genocide" or "End Myanmar Persecution of Rohingya" T-shirts is because they wouldn't elicit the same positive response. No one wants to hang out with those T-shirt wearers; their message is fundamentally anti-social. Anyone who reads them are likely to be offended, too, because real human rights abuses are trivialized when placed on T-shirts.

But publicly proclaiming you hate Israel brings a thrill that would usually be amplified by the positive reactions of other haters. It is like being part of a club - just like the appeal of the German "League of Antisemites."

The only nation that is is socially acceptable to publicly hate is the Jewish state. So the only T-shirts that Amnesty would ever sell that call out a specific nation would obviously be anti-Israel T-shirts.

Just like the only nation called out for hate in Amnesty's children's book is also Israel.

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!

A brief Twitter thread on anti-Zionism and antisemitism

A follower of mine from Brazil asked me a question on Twitter:

Good morning, Sr. Elder of Ziyon. I'm from Brazil and could you tell why does Palestine hate Israel? In Brazil, all history teachers love Palestine and hate Israel. Why??

My brief response, expanded here:

Anti-Zionism is the modern (and socially acceptable) version of antisemitism. My book describes it in great detail. The unhinged loathing you see for Israel and Zionists have few parallels beyond historic hate of Jews. (And Palestinians admit they hate Jews in Arabic.)

Anti-Zionists will claim that they are only supporting human rights, or opposing Israeli policies. But there is an entire NGO industry dedicated to making up or exaggerating Israeli crimes without context and without comparison to others. See my recent post on how Ben and Jerry's ignore human rights abuses in many countries they sell ice cream to.

In order to accuse Israel of "apartheid," for example, Amnesty and HRW had to create an entirely new definition of apartheid that only applies to Israel. Now haters can point to that and claim Israel is worse than anyone - which is objectively absurd.

The haters also go on to redefine Zionism itself. Zionism is a movement supporting self determination for the Jewish people. Anti-Zionists make up new definitions to justify their hate.

Another way to prove this is that virtually all of these people who pretend to care about Palestinian rights have little to say about discrimination against Palestinians in Arab countries. They are only upset when they can blame...Jews.

By any normal yardstick, Israel cares more about human rights than most countries. It is more progressive. It is far more tolerant of Muslims than much of Europe. It has worked harder than almost every other country to avoid civilian casualties in war.

Haters deflect and ignore the facts. The only reason for their obsession is because Israel is a 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!

Amnesty USA's "Israel-Palestinian" Twitter account never condemns terrorism, rails against "hasbara," accuses pro-Israel tweeters of being "paid trolls"

Amnesty USA maintains a Twitter account with the name IOTPA and the Amnesty logo. It describes itself as an unofficial account: "Amnesty International USA member leader team for Israel/OPT/Palestine. Views our own. Re-tweets should not be construed as a position of Amnesty International."

It might not be official, but it sure shows how anti-Israel Amnesty USA is. Beyond that, it uses Amnesty's name and logo, without any apparent pushback from Amnesty International, so its tweets are tacitly approved by the larger organization.

Over the past several months, Israel has experienced a terror wave where innocent civilians have been slaughtered in the streets. The victims are the sort of people that Amnesty claims to want to protect.

IOTPA has not said a word about any of these attacks.

In fact, one would need to look very hard to find any condemnations of any attacks on Israelis. The few attacks on Israelis I found were couched in terms of "but Israel is far worse." I found one condemnation of a Hamas bus bombing - in 2016.

Not only that, but when these "human rights professionals" deign to mention any criticisms by Zionists, they usually dismiss them as "hasbara smear language."

The folks at Amnesty USA are not shy about admitting that they are anti-Zionist. They just redefine it to mean "critical of Israel." But in reality it means that they oppose self-determination for the Jewish people. Which is pretty antisemitic.

The account consistently dismisses any pro-Israel viewpoint as a lie by definition - and accuse anyone who supports Israel of being trolls paid by the Israeli government. In one exchange, they wrote to a critic, "R u one of the paid trolls by #Israel? Wonder what a person's soul sells for nowadays." And "R u a paid troll perhaps?" And "Do you get paid to troll? How much do you make?"

They actually said that no one should believe a word that the Israeli government or pro-Israel people says: "Don't believe the 'hasbara' (propaganda) being spread by Israeli military and supporters. They always try to control the narrative so their statements should never be taken at face value."

They've never said this about the Palestinian Authority. Or Hamas. Only supporters of Israel are accused of being liars by definition.

Yet they insist that they aren't biased.

Judge for yourself.

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!