Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: COVID-19

Showing posts with label COVID-19. Show all posts

Sunday, July 16, 2023

Study: Antisemitism is associated with conspiracy thinking, authoritarianism and desire to overturn the social order

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.., made headlines this weekend when he seemed to claim that COVID-19 could have been genetically engineered to target certain populations, and then mentioned there have been studies that suggested that Chinese people and Ashkenazic Jews are less susceptible to the virus.

"COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese," the Democratic presidential candidate said in a video that the New York Post published.

There is indeed such a study, from 2020, which he gets slightly wrong. The two groups that the study claimed were less likely to be susceptible to COVID-19, based on an analysis of two specific genes, were Ashkenazic Jews and the Amish. Latino, South and East Asian, and Finnish people were less susceptible than other groups as well.

Kennedy later clarified, saying he “never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”

Obviously, a large number (and percentage) of Ashkenazic Jews died of COVID-19, so the study did not predict anything accurately.

But the cat is out of the bag, and conspiracy theorists now have more ammunition to attack Jews.

And they are the most likely people to be antisemitic to begin with.

A new study published in Nature shows that antisemitism is not so much associated with the political Right or Left as it is with extremist thinking and conspiracy theories.

The researchers checked the association between antisemitic attitudes and likelihood to believe in other theories. For example, they found a high correlation between antisemites that those who believed in totalitarianism:

•To bring about great changes for the benefit of mankind often requires cruelty and even ruthlessness.
•Soft and idealistic people can never be the doers of great events.
•Almost any unfairness or brutality may have to be justified when some great purpose is being carried out.
•The unhappiness of a few people simply doesn’t matter when it is a question of a step forward for the majority of the people.
•Sometimes when a new society is in its early stages, the masses have to be ruled with an iron hand for their own good

Similarly, antisemitic attitudes were correlated with belief in conspiracy theories, such as:

•The government permits or perpetrates acts of terrorism on its own soil, disguising its involvement.
•The power held by heads of state is second to that of small unknown groups who really control world politics
.•A small secret group of people is responsible for making all major world decisions such as going to war.
•Secret organizations communicate with extraterrestrials, but keep this fact from the public
•The spread of certain viruses and/or diseases is the result of the deliberate, concealed efforts of some organisations.
•Technology with mind-control capacities is used on people without their knowledge.

And they are also associated with support for authoritarianism, both associated with the Right:

•What our country needs most is discipline, with everyone following our leaders in unity.

•An ideal society requires some groups to be on top and others to be on the bottom.
•Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups

And the Left::

•Rich people should be forced to give up virtually all of their wealth.
•Most investment bankers need to be thrown in prison.
•Political violence can be constructive when it serves the cause of social justice.

•Books that contain racism or racial language should be censored.
•I should have the right not to be exposed to views I find offensive.

While both the Right and the Left attack each other as antisemites, they usually remain blind to the antisemitism that is on their own side. And too many on their own sides want to see an authoritarian government that supports their viewpoints - and violently represses others.

Which indicates that antisemites are often some of the worst people on Earth. And those who find antisemites on their own political side should be in the forefront of denouncing them, not accommodating them.

Incidentally, the introduction to the study cited quite a few studies that showed a strong correlation between Judeoiphobic antisemitism and anti-Zionist antisemitism. And the people who would self-describe as anti-Zionists were just as likely to believe in the other noxious theories listed here as those who espouse the "old" antisemitism.

(h/t Irene)

our country needs most is discipline, with everyone following our leaders in unity.

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!

Health journal article: Antisemitism is a necessary therapy for Palestinians' mental health

The Health and Human Rights Journal has a special section this month: "Settler Colonialism, Structural Racism, and the Palestinian Right to Health." It was organized and curated by the Community and Public Health at Birzeit University and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

Its seven articles are predicated on malicious, antisemitic lies about Israel. The lies - that Israel is a racist, apartheid, settler-colonialist state bent on eradicating Palestinian Arabs and their culture - are accepted as unvarnished truth, without any debate.

The introduction of an article purported to be about amputations begins with this antisemitic framework:

Since 1948 and with the establishment of the state of Israel, Israel has been deploying physical and structural violence against Palestinians in multiple well-documented ways, all aimed at the erasure, subjugation, and oppression of the Palestinians, in line with what Patrick Wolfe has called the “logic of elimination” in settler-colonial states.[1]

Israel’s colonial ideology is manifested in the “daily assault on Palestinian life as a result of settler-colonial ideology that renders them killable as a part of and a furthering of their removal from their land.”[2]

Another article's abstract begins with antisemitic lies as irrefutable facts:

In this paper, we examine the social construction of race as a determinant of health inequities in Palestine. Race myths about Palestinians conform to the “logic of elimination” integral to settler colonialism, predicated on the dispossession and removal of the Indigenous people from the land.

These are all absurd and hateful lies. Somehow, the Palestinian population nearly quadrupled under this genocidal regime since 1967.

Another article based wholly on a lie claims that systemic Israeli racism is behind Israel's "refusal" to provide Covid-19 vaccines into the Palestinian controlled areas. In fact it was the Palestinian Authority that refused to partner with Israel on obtaining vaccines. And if Israel is racist, then why did it provide vaccines for its Arab citizens - and for Palestinian students at Israeli universities?

Again, the article is predicated on lies, but those lies are not even up for debate. Naturally, their conclusions are based on these lies. The articles are anti-Israel propaganda, pretending to be science, with lots of footnotes as if linking to previously written antisemitic articles in the social sciences or by NGOs is the same as linking to a real scientific paper that has gone through rigorous proof.

One of the articles in the journal outshines the others, though.

Titled "A Call for Social Justice and for a Human Rights Approach with Regard to Mental Health in the Occupied Palestinian Territories," it says that the only effective method to treat Palestinians' mental health issues is to teach them to blame Israel (i.e., Jews) for their issues.

It seems necessary and urgent to look at the effects of political and systematic violence on Palestinian mental health in order to strengthen the resilience of communities, instead of individualizing their suffering. This can be achieved by moving away from a mental health framework that regards them as individual victims affected by political violence and toward a human rights framework that sees them as rights holders and survivors of a collective experience of violence within a social and political context...

[T]he solution to breaking the cycle of internalization is to be found in resistance and in directing feelings outward, to those who oppress, instead of inward.

Hating Jews - and "resistance," which is understood by Palestinians as physical attacks on Jews - becomes the preferred path to solving Palestinian mental health issues.

Come to think of it, there are numerous papers about the trauma of Palestinians suffering under Israeli oppression, but I don't recall a single [Palestinian] academic paper about mental illness that might prompt Palestinians to want to kill random Jews. Apparently, the mental health professionals in the territories don't regard terrorists as mentally ill to begin with, but rather as role models who are breaking the paradigm of victimhood, as suggested by these authors.

Beyond that, the authors urge mental health professionals in the territories to become anti-Israel activists themselves, and they rail against the "depoliticization" of their roles - the exact opposite of decades of psychological practice:

A stronger understanding of the political and social implications of trauma and a more active role in relation to social injustices and human rights violations are essential against the background of the ethical standards of our profession. As mental health professionals, our commitment to advancing human rights can be shown by highlighting the pathogenic context in which trauma develops and by demanding social justice on a political level.

All of the articles in this journal have the usual disclaimer that the authors have no competing interests. But one of the co-authors of this article has a supremely competing interest: Samah Jabr is the head of the Mental Health Unit within the Palestinian Ministry of Health. She has every incentive to demonize Israel and declare it the source of all Palestinian problems.

And, in fact, she does. On her Facebook page, she frames the Israeli celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Resolution as "celebrating the historical trauma of Palestinians." Her entire mindset is based on nearly all Jews as evil people whose entire goal is to cause pain to Arabs.

A competent mental health professional would note the amount of psychological projection that she shows in this paper. Because the only ones who have physically tried to rid the region of an entire people are her fellow Arabs, not the Jews.

(h/t MtTB)

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!

Arab scientists feud over camel urine as a miracle cure

A professor of physiology at the Faculty of Medicine at Ain Shams University in Egypt, Amal Kenawy, had advised people should drink camel urine, due to the many benefits it contains. Kenawy says that many scientific experiments have proven camel urine's benefits.

She's not the only one. A preacher in Kuwait made a video over the summer extolling not only the health benefits of camel urine, but its wonderful taste, when mixed with camel milk.

There are lots of articles in Arabic websites that extol the benefits of camel urine, to treat cancer and kidney stones and as a miracle cure for other diseases. One Iranian in 2020 said it cures COVID-19.

Finally, a Jordanian doctor weighs in, and says that drinking camel urine is not only ridiculous, it is dangerous.

In a post on Facebook Ali Al-Saudi, said: "These news messages [about the health benefits of camel urine] are myths that have no basis in science and are not supported by any research or studies, in fact they are exactly the opposite."

Al-Saudi warned of large quantities of toxins and urea in camel urine, which could kill humans and cause diseases.

He addressed Amal Kenawy, "Do not make the world laugh at us more."

The World Health Organization recommends against drinking camel urine.

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!

Abbas declares a state of emergency for Covid, which hasn't been a problem at all. No one questions him.

From the official Palestinian Wafa news agency:

President Mahmoud Abbas today declared a 30-day state of emergency in Palestine to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

The state of emergency was first declared in March 2020 after the discovery of the first cases of coronavirus in the Palestinian territories.

The state of emergency gives the government the power to act in any way it deems necessary to combat the pandemic.

I have not seen any articles about a new wave of Covid-19 in the West Bank. There has been a slight uptick in the last couple of weeks, but the rate is way below Israel's. At its recent peak there have been two deaths a week.

As far as I can tell, he is not automatically extending an old state of emergency every 30 days. According to Xinhua:

The state of emergency was first declared in March 2020 after the discovery of the first coronavirus cases in the Palestinian territories. It was last extended or re-declared in January this year, local media reported.

Under the state of emergency, the government is empowered to take any step it deems necessary to fight the pandemic.

I cannot find a single Palestinian news site that questioned this announcement. They just parroted it. They didn't even elaborate on it, showing a rise in cases or in deaths.

And on Mahmoud Abbas' Facebook page, the announcement was greeted with Soviet-style unanimous praise for his great insight and wisdom:

If there was a free press, people would be asking questions why Abbas just added emergency powers on top of his already dictatorial powers over the executive, judicial and legislative branches of Palestinian government.

World leaders and media still treat the Palestinian president and his government as if they are rational leaders. If anyone would read their own media and government websites for a couple of weeks with a critical eye, the levels of dysfunction would be obvious. And there is something very rotten about this "state of emergency."

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!

Crazed, antisemitic rant submitted as a motion in US District Court

In 2016, a lawsuit was filed by Bassem al-Tamimi and many others against a host of American Jews and companies, including Sheldon Adelson, Elliott Abrams, Fox News and the United States itself, alleging that they are supporting genocide against the Palestinian people.

Recently, one of the plaintiffs - Abdul-Rahim Dib Dubar - filed his own motion for immediate partial summary judgment in the case.

His motion looks like it was copied and pasted a crazed antisemitic website - including all caps.

Here's one page of 30, but most of them look like this, with falsified quotes that have been debunked hundreds of times.

He ties Israel to...January 6:

He doesn't even pretend to be opposing "Zionists." He hates Jews, and submits insane fantasies.

Dubar also suggests that the Covid-19 virus was created in Israeli labs in Nes Tziyona. He claims that Israeli rabbis issued an edict to rape Palestinian girls during combat.

If you have any doubt as to Dubar's antisemitism, he (probably mis)quotes an article about Satmar Jews and how they have Jewish supremacy - not mentioning that Satmar Jews are anti-Zionist!

And, for proof of Jewish evil, he quotes a Nazi:

This unhinged antisemitic rant reveals the antisemitism behind the Palestinian cause. The plaintiff isn't even embarrassed at his ravings. Brainwashed, he submits the antisemitic stories he sees on the Internet as truth.

Dubar is asking for $1.2 billion in compensation for his family, who left of their own accord from Acre in 1948. (Thousands of Arabs in Acre stayed.)

(h/t David Abrams)

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!

Academic journals allow themselves to be centers of anti-Israel propaganda

Here's another academic paper that is purely meant to smear Israel but hides behind a pretense of objectivity:

Vaccine apartheid and settler colonial sovereign violence: from Palestine to the colonial global economy

This article examines the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine both in Palestine and globally through a decolonial lens. In dominant Euro-American discourse, the invention, production, and distribution of the vaccine is largely judged as an indicator of sophisticated and advanced health care systems and economies. The underlying premise being that the advanced, wealthy, and capable nation-states have endogenously earned the position of power and prosperity. The world’s poor nation-states are posited as the recipients of charity from these rich states only after the latter have sufficiently inoculated themselves. The entire discourse turns the question of vaccines into a series of technical questions about capabilities, facilities, infrastructure, economic purchasing power, and so on. Concealed in this discourse is a settler colonial foundation – an aspiration towards omnipresent and absolute power – which not only creates the contrast between Palestinians and Israelis, rich and poor, colonizer and colonized, but also seals a forcefully imposed settler colonial contract in which colonizing populations ensure their ability to inoculate themselves by debilitating the colonized.

Ostensibly, the paper is about the larger question of whether it is fair or acceptable for rich states to ensure that their own populations are medically safe before offering help to poorer countries. That is a reasonable question and one worth exploring. (The answer is that the supreme obligation for any state is to protect its own citizens first.)

But the abstract makes it clear that this is only an excuse for attacking Israel. The very title, "Vaccine apartheid," is meant only for Israel. It pretends that the Palestinian issue the paradigm through which the entire world is viewed, when it is nothing of the sort - an analysis of how Australia and New Zealand gave vaccines to their own citizens before providing them to small island nations that depend on them would never been called "apartheid" and yet it is the model for how the entire world acted when vaccines were scarce.

I don't quite know how the paper includes "settler colonial sovereign violence" in this topic, but I bet that the paper does not mention:

1. The Palestinian Authority never asked for vaccines from Israel except in small amounts, which Israel gave them.

2. The PA claimed throughout the process that it will procure its own vaccines.

3. Israel inoculated tens of thousands of Palestinians who work in Israel.

4. The number of deaths per million remained lower in the Palestinian territories than in Israel even during the months that Israel had the vaccine and the PA did not.

This is nothing more than anti-Israel propaganda, and modern antisemites finding new venues to spout their hate.

Either Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory doesn't realize that it is being used - or it does. Given the state of social sciences today, I'm afraid it is the latter.

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!

Vaccine debacle: Palestinian leaders and "human rights" NGOs hate Israel more than they value the lives of Palestinians

The Pfizer vaccine fiasco reveals so much about the Palestinian leadership as well as about the "human rights" groups and activists who pretend to be "pro-Palestinian" but truly aren't.

The Palestinian Authority had agreed with Israel to obtain over 1 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine now, and not to have to wait until September to get them directly from Pfizer. The agreement was signed and the PA knew perfectly well that Israel would first transfer the vaccines that were closest to expiring, and the exact expiration dates of the first doses.

As the NYT reports:

An Israeli official, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the initial batch of doses would expire at the start of July and said that would give enough time for Palestinian health workers to administer them.

The official added that the authority had been aware of the vaccines’ expiry date before agreeing to their delivery, and said the authority had scrapped the deal only because it had been criticized by Palestinians for agreeing to receive vaccines perceived to be of poor quality.

The official also said that none of the remaining doses would have been delivered less than two weeks before their expiry date.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians could have received their first doses in the next two weeks.

This should be considered a debacle by any civilized society. Thousands can get sick and scores could die because of this decision by the PA.

But, incredibly, the only inquiry that Palestinians are demanding is one into how the PA almost bought vaccines that they claim were of "inferior" quality. Terrorist media is reporting about how the PA is incompetent - not for trying initially to fight COVID but for making a deal with Israel. The PA, naturally, has to defend its "honor" by canceling the deal.

Keep in mind that the PA eagerly accepts Russia's Sputnik vaccine which did not have anywhere near the same quality trials as the Pfizer or Astra-Zeneca vaccines did.

Unless you are hopelessly biased against Israel, this episode shows beyond any doubt that Palestinian leaders don't care about the lives of their own people, and are willing to sacrifice their people so as not to appear to be "normalizing" with Israel. They hate Israel more than they love their own citizens.

Even more telling are the reactions - or non-reactions - from so called "human rights" groups and Palestinian activists.

As far as I can tell, none of the supposed Palestinian human rights groups are saying a negative word about a decision to delay vaccinating their own people for three or four more months.

Not B'Tselem. Not PCHR. Not Al Mezan Center.

Their silence shows that they are not interested in the human rights of Palestinians - after all, what human right is more basic than the right to life and health?

Ken Roth, of Human Rights Watch, took the absurd Palestinian excuse of "almost expired" vaccines at face value, and used this as another reason to bash Israel.

As if any more evidence was needed, this episode shows that the "pro-Palestinian" community is nothing of the sort. These groups simply use the Palestinian issue as a means to bash the Jewish state.

People who really care about Palestinians would be up in arms over the PA putting their people at risk. Where are their voices?

Israel haters keep the vaccine libel going

The Guardian has yet another article accusing Israel of not providing COVID vaccines to the Palestinian Authority.

Not surprisingly, the author's analysis highlights a barely-36 hour delay of a couple of thousand vaccines by Israel, yet ignores that:

Israel vaccinated hundreds of Palestinian college students at Tel Aviv University and probably elsewhere
Israel has vaccinated all Arab residents of Jerusalem who wanted to be inoculated - most of them not Israeli citizens
Israel has vaccinated thousands of Palestinian prisoners
Israel has facilitated the delivery of hundreds of thousands of vaccines that the Palestinian Authority negotiated on its own
Israel is setting up facilities for thousands of Gaza merchants to receive vaccines so they can travel to the West Bank
Every time the Palestinian Authority asked Israel for help with vaccines, Israel did everything they asked

Both the Oslo Accords and the Geneva Conventions say that the primary responsibility for vaccinations comes from the Palestinian Authority

As far as the last point goes, the Oslo Accords 1995 Interim Agreement explicitly states that the Palestinian Authority is responsible for acquiring vaccines in case of an epidemic. Annex III, Article 17:

1. Powers and responsibilities in the sphere of Health in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will be transferred to the Palestinian side, including the health insurance system.

2. The Palestinian side shall continue to apply the present standards of vaccination of Palestinians and shall improve them according to internationally accepted standards in the field, taking into account WHO recommendations.

6. Israel and the Palestinian side shall exchange information regarding epidemics and contagious diseases, shall cooperate in combating them and shall develop methods for exchange of medical files and documents.

The idea that Oslo contradicts the Geneva Accords is absurd - the Geneva Conventions and its authoritative interpretation say the exact same thing!

[T]here can be no question of making the Occupying Power alone responsible for the whole burden of organizing hospitals and health services and taking measures to control epidemics. The task is above all one for the competent services of the occupied country itself.

Israel has and continues to work with the Palestinian Authority on fighting COVID-19 as it has since the first cases appeared in the region, in line (and beyond) its obligations under international law.

There are no articles in official Palestinian media demanding that Israel provide vaccines to Palestinians. These articles are only in Western media. Palestinian leaders have said from the beginning that they want to be responsible for procuring vaccines, and they have negotiated with all the major vaccine manufacturers as well as with the international COVAX system to obtain them.

On the contrary - Palestinian media is filled with stories about how well the PA is dealing with the pandemic. 140,000 people have received vaccines so far (not counting the ones that Israel inoculated.) The Palestinian media and government blame literally everything on Israel, but not a word blaming Israel for withholding or delaying vaccines to them.

Despite this article being pure propaganda, the libel was retweeted by Human Rights Watch's Ken Roth, that famous "leftist Zionist."

Palestinian cabinet blames Israel for everything - but not for lack of COVID-19 vaccines

Every Monday, during the Palestinian Authority cabinet meeting chaired by prime minister Muhammad Shtayyeh, he presents a summary of problems being worked on.

He is not shy about saying anti-Israel rhetoric. In today's meeting, for example, he thanked the members of Congress for writing an anti-Israel letter to Secretary of State Blinken and he condemned Kosovo for opening up an embassy in Jerusalem.

Obviously, he has to address the coronavirus crisis. The Palestinians have been promised vaccines from Russia, from Astra-Zeneca and from COVAX, but none have actually been shipped.

Yet when it comes to this topic, he never says a word against Israel.

Last week he said:

Global supply chains for vaccines are delayed due to competition from other countries and their attempt to acquire vaccines. About 75% of the vaccines are concentrated in ten rich countries, while 130 countries have not received a dose of the vaccine according to UN reports. The only available weapon in our hands today are the masks and the physical distancing, so by adhering to this, we protect ourselves and our society from the risks of infection with the new strains of the virus .

I call on friendly countries, vaccine-producing companies, and the global COVAX mechanism to fulfill their obligations and work to supply the vaccines that we were promised as donations or those that we paid for and whose supply dates were delayed so that we can provide a safe environment for the legislative elections scheduled to take place on the twenty-second of next May.

This week:

Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh said that great progress has been made in communications to obtain anti-Coronavirus vaccines, whether those that we will receive in the form of donations from the international COVAX mechanism, or those that we have paid for with the companies producing vaccines.

Shtayyeh explained at the beginning of the weekly cabinet meeting, today, Monday, in Ramallah, that the problem is not in providing funds, but in fulfilling companies' obligations, as there is piracy of the vaccine and politicization of its provision, and there is a tremendous demand and limited supply, and despite that we have activated all our diplomatic, political, medical and international channels.

He expressed his hope that these efforts will bear fruit with the arrival of the first batch of vaccines.

Even many weeks after the Palestinian leaders announced that vaccines were on their way, both that they purchased and that were donated, the vaccines never showed up. And yet even though the entire world is blaming Israel and falsely claiming that Israel must provide vaccines, there is not a word against Israel in any of Shtayyeh's addresses.

Clearly the Palestinian Authority has always intended to act like an independent state that can procure its own vaccines for its own people. And even in the face of more procurement delays, in its own internal meetings the Palestinian Authority is not calling on Israel to give or sell any surplus vaccines to them, nor is it blaming Israel for not providing vaccines for free as so many anti-Israel activists claim the Geneva Conventions mandate.

They don't want help from Israel. And when they ask for limited amounts of help, Israel has given it.

It is also notable that Israel's drive to vaccinate some 120,000 Palestinian workers is unreported in official Palestinian news agency media.

Tel Aviv University vaccinates hundreds of Palestinian and international students, @972mag silent

Earlier this month, +972 Magazine published an article about a Palestinian student at Tel Aviv University who attempted to get a COVID-19 vaccine during a university drive - after she was promised that she was eligible - but was denied the shot,

The article was slanted to show how awful Israel is for denying the shot to this woman who spent hours traveling to receive her shot. However, a close reading of the article shows that there was not an ounce of malice there - it was a snafu, a miscommunication, and TAU was not authorized to provide a shot to anyone who was not under an Israeli insurance plan, including Palestinian and international students.

Despite the Health Ministry’s insistence on refusing to vaccinate the Palestinian student, she said that Tel Aviv University went to great lengths to try and get her a vaccine. One university coordinator spoke to the medical staff on site and called the Health Ministry, she said, while senior university officials arrived at one point to try to help, to no avail. According to the student, the university staff also spoke to the administration at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, the city’s major hospital, yet nothing helped. She was later told that the university president had sent a letter to the Health Ministry on the matter.

In a comment to +972, the Health Ministry claimed it was not contacted by Tel Aviv University on the matter, and that had the university reached out, the student would have been vaccinated as “an exception.”

The headline of the article was enough, however, for countless posts in social media condemning TAU and Israel for what was just a screw-up.

Now, it seems, Tel Aviv University has solved the paperwork problem and has successfully vaccinated hundreds of students who couldn't get the vaccine a couple of weeks ago - including Palestinians:

Clearly, the evil anti-Palestinian Israeli government approved this. Clearly, no one in Israel has any objection to vaccinating Palestinian students in Israeli universities.

That idea is only in the fevered hallucinations of the anti-Israel crowd.

Of course, +972 didn't issue an update or report this story - which is still on their front page. The truth is not as important as the narrative when it comes to attacking Israel.

It is also clear from the TAU tweet that this one Palestinian woman was not singled out for not getting the vaccine last month, but that hundreds of non-Israeli students including internationals were not eligible at the time because of insurance and paperwork requirements then.

There was not an ounce of anti-Palestinian sentiment anywhere - except from the slanderers at +972.

The vaccine double standards against Israel keep piling up around the world

From The Independent:

If the US has leftover vaccines once every American has had the opportunity to get a jab, the Biden administration will share its inventory with the rest of the world, the president said on Wednesday.

“The surplus will – if we have a surplus, we're going to share it with the rest of the world,” Mr Biden said on Tuesday, shortly after announcing his government had secured a deal for the purchase of another 100m doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

“So we're going to start off making sure Americans are taken care of first, but then we're then going to try to help the rest of the world.”

I've pointed out months ago that Australia and New Zealand are doing the same thing - prioritizing their own populations before giving it to their neighbors.

Yet only Israel is expected to provide vaccines for others before its own population is fully inoculated.

Similarly, when Israel said a few weeks ago that it will give some symbolic amounts of vaccine to friendly nations as a form of diplomacy, it was pilloried in the media. How dare something that saves lives be used in this way - it is practically blackmail!

Yet China, India and Russia give out lots of vaccines specifically for the purpose of strengthening ties with other countries - and no one seems to have a problem with that.

Israel is now providing some 120,000 vaccines to Palestinians for free - with IDF soldiers helping out - and the coverage is sparse.

The double standards are overwhelming, and absolutely normal when it comes to Israel.

Vaccines for Palestinians delayed again, and Palestinians still not asking Israel for help

Magen David Adom vaccinating Palestinians at Tulkarm Thursday

The Palestinian Ministry of Health has admitted that it has no idea when it will be getting COVID-19 vaccines that they say have been promised from the major drug manufacturers.

At the end of January, the ministry claimed that it would begin receiving mass quantities of the Pfizer, Sputnik-V and AstraZeneca vaccines "within days." It never happened.

In early February, the health ministry said that 2 million doses of the Russian Sputnik-V vaccine would arrive starting February 14. It never happened.

The minister of health said in late February that two million doses from AstraZeneca would be arriving starting at the end of February and the beginning of March.

None of that happened.

Now, a ministry of health spokesperson has admitted that they don't know when any vaccines will arrive. He said that the shipments from the COVAX mechanism are due to begin arriving after March 20th, but no date is given for the arrival of the vaccines supposedly procured from Pfizer, Moderna and Russia. Interestingly, he didn't mention the AstraZeneca vaccines that were said to have been purchased as well.

Nowhere in this interview did the spokesperson say a word about Israel. He didn't claim that the PA ever asked for vaccines from Israel, nor did he say that Israel was stopping any vaccines from coming. The times that the Palestinians have asked Israel for help with vaccines, Israel complied (although sometimes delayed.)

The lack of asking Israel for help is despite the fact that new, faster spreading mutations of COVID-19 have been devastating Palestinian hospitals which are at capacity.

That fact the Palestinians have avoided asking Israel for help has simply not been mentioned in the hundreds of media reports criticizing Israel for not providing vaccines to Palestinians. Israel cannot provide vaccines without cooperation of the Palestinian health authorities. They aren't going to leave boxes of vaccines at checkpoints.

Israel's ability to help is much more limited than is being reported, though. Today, Israel does not have enough vaccines to inoculate all Palestinians. It has some 300,000 Moderna vaccines today with 700,000 more supposed to come in April.

Israel was supposed to start a program to vaccinate over 120,000 Palestinian workers today but that has been delayed for administrative reasons after a pilot program that gave some 700 doses last Thursday. Two doses for each worker would deplete the majority of Israel's existing Moderna supply, and it is still waiting for much more from Moderna as well as AstraZeneca.

Palestinian health minister says 2 million vaccine doses are arriving very soon

Palestinians should begin receiving two million vaccine doses by the end of the first week of March.

Palestinian health minister Mai Al-Kailah spoke to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa and said, "We have completed an agreement to purchase two million doses of vaccine from AstraZeneca , and we have done all the necessary procedures, from registering the vaccine and providing the company with all the documents necessary for the purchase agreement, negotiating its price, and logistical requirements such as refrigeration supplies .

"We are awaiting the supply of vaccines, and the company informed us that the vaccines will start arriving at the end of February and early March," she added.

This means that the Palestinians are getting mass quantities of vaccines ahead of many nations and not too long after some major Western-oriented nations.

And they did it without asking Israel for help. Which is what they said they wanted to do all along.

Too bad the media keeps skipping that small fact.

The Palestinian Authority could have paid top dollar for COVID-19 vaccines for every citizen. It paid terrorists instead.

Palestinian Media Watch reports that during 2020, the Palestinian Authority continued to pay salaries to terrorist prisoners, hiding the salaries under the budget line of “PLO institutions.” The total payments in 2020 to terrorist prisoners and released prisoners were at least 512 million shekels, which is over $156 million.

There are about 4.5 million people under Palestinian rule, of which about 2.5 million are over 20 years old.

For $156 million, the PA could have purchased two doses of the Moderna vaccine at an expensive $30 a dose for every adult Palestinian. For the Russian Sputnik-V vaccines, they could have purchased enough for every single citizen of any age at $10 a dose and still had $66 million left over for other critical expenses.

Instead, they pay terrorist salaries, on a sliding scale, where the more Jews they attacked roughly means more money from their government.

One of the arguments that anti-Israel activists use to justify their demand that Israel provide free vaccines for Palestinians is that the Palestinians cannot afford to buy their own without wrecking their economy. These people seem to agree that it is more important for Palestinians to pay terrorists than to pay for vaccines.

Today, finally, Hamas started the process of inoculating Gazans with the Russian Sputnik-V vaccine.

Besides the 2000 doses sent through Kerem Shalom last week, another 20,000 doses were donated by the UAE and were shipped in through Egypt yesterday.

That is interesting in itself. The UAE, still upset at the Palestinian Authority for rejecting its own COVID-19 aid last summer, apparently decided to bypass the PA altogether and send vaccines straight to Gaza.

And they worked with Mahmoud Abbas' political rival from Fatah, Mohammad Dahlan, who is angling to be a player in the upcoming planned election.

Politicizing vaccines would be considered reprehensible if done by anyone but Palestinians. (Yet another example of the "Palestine exception.")

The other interesting fact about the vaccines in Gaza is that even though the Hamas health ministry opened up an online registration drive, only 7,000 out of 2 million Gazans actually signed up for vaccines so far.

After all of the publicity of the delay of bringing vaccines in to Gaza, it seems that most Gazans aren't too interested in getting the vaccine anyway, at least up until now.

The first people to receive the shot, in front of reporters, were former Gaza health ministers.

Hamas has not yet vaccinated a single person from the batch it received Wednesday, after the world screamed about a 36 hour delay from israel

Last Wednesday, Israel allowed a batch of 2000 vaccine doses to enter Gaza. This came after a debate in Knesset about whether it was wise to allow the vaccines to be sent to a terror group. This debate delayed the transfer of the vaccines by a little more than a day.

During that time, Israel haters and the media reported extensively on Israel's "refusal" to send the vaccines and Israel's inhumanity for not caring about Gazan lives. That 36 hour delay was called a war crime and Israel was painted as a ghoulish entity hell-bent on punishing ordinary Palestinians.

What happened to the vaccines?

Nothing. They are still sitting in refrigerators, unused.

Originally the Hamas health ministry announced that health care workers in Gaza would be inoculated today. But today they announced another delay, and the vaccines will not start to be administered tomorrow, at 11 AM.

That is a six day delay from when the vaccines were delivered.

And the world is silent. The BDSers are silent. The media is silent. The critics are silent.

Once again, we see that Palestinian lives don't matter unless Jews can be blamed.

Just like no one cares that Palestinians in Lebanon are three times more likely to die from COVID-19 than Lebanese citizens because of their poor health and living conditions that are enforced by Lebanese laws against them.

This is modern antisemitism, folks.

It is also anti-Palestinian to ignore when Arabs - including Palestinians themselves - to be reckless with Palestinian lives while expecting Israel to value those lives ahead of its own citizens.

Palestinian vaccine hypocrisy continues

This week there was more of a circus when it came to COVID-19 vaccines to the Palestinians.

The Palestinians sent a truck with supposedly 1000 double-dose vaccines to the Beitunia crossing on Monday to go to Gaza. They didn't coordinate this with Israel and Israel didn't do anything.

So the Palestinians and the haters started the story that Israel was refusing to send vaccines to Gaza.

The Israeli government did indeed debate whether to allow the vaccines to enter Gaza, knowing that it would go to terrorists and knowing that Hamas still held Israelis and the bodies of soldiers. The haters spent all day Tuesday tweeting about how terrible it was that Gaza had to wait to get the vaccines.

But on Wednesday, Israel allowed the vaccines to go to Gaza. The delay was only a little more than a day.

Now that the vaccines are in Gaza, when will they be distributed?

According to Hamas officials, not until Sunday.

There were dozens of articles and hundreds of tweets complaining about a one day delay for vaccines to Gaza, but a four day delay to actually distribute them? No one says a word.

Because Israel cannot be blamed.

One would think that Gaza is the worst possible place to be for the coronavirus given the amount of media attention. Yet is has suffered only about 270 deaths per million, which is better than 64 countries. (The US is at 1460 deaths per million.)

Meanwhile, in another COVID-19 story that the Western media ignores, Palestinians in the West Bank are complaining about the favoritism surrounding who received the first shots distributed there. Besides the 200 doses that were sent over to Jordan seemingly to relatives of Palestinian officials, there were complaints that vaccines went to highly placed Palestinian officials, tribal leaders, clerics and media professionals ahead of health workers.

The "pro-Palestinian" crowd is curiously silent about this.

Another development today is that Israel announced it intends to vaccinate 120,000 Palestinian workers, which will also be twisted into something evil in about an hour or two.

Report: Palestinians misusing COVID-19 vaccines, giving them to friends before medical workers

Gal Berger of Israel's Kan News tweeted:

Breaking: The Palestinian Authority secretly sent vaccines to Jordan. These are 200 Sputnik vaccines that were transferred last Thursday via the Allenby Bridge to the Jordanian General Intelligence Agency. This is what Palestinian sources told Kan News.

It is unclear whether the vaccines are intended for the Jordanian defense establishment or for Palestinian officials living in Jordan.

In recent days, there has been growing criticism of the Palestinian Authority, which allegedly vaccinated senior officials, associates and official journalists, before it began vaccinating groups at risk in the general population.

To date, the authority has received enough vaccines to vaccinate only 6,000 people against the virus (12,000 vaccine doses) and as far as is known had begun vaccinating medical staff.

Why would the PA send the scarce vaccines into Jordan? The theory that it is going to Palestinian officials there makes the most sense.

Of course, the people complaining about how Israel is supposedly withholding vaccines will not say a word about how nepotism and politics, not need, seems to be driving Palestinian vaccinations.

(h/t ymedad)