Showing posts with label FBI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FBI. Show all posts

Sunday, January 08, 2023

US signs agreement to send billions to Jordan - no strings attached




This story from September sure flew under the radar.

US Ambassador to Jordan Henry Wooster has said that the memorandum of understanding (MoU) Jordan and the US signed in Washington on September 16 is a platform that will enable the two governments to start a dialogue over common issues.
 
Speaking to journalists at his residence on Tuesday, Wooster said that the MoU focuses on two main issues: water and the public sector. 

Under the MoU, the US government will provide a total of $10.1 billion in aid to Jordan between 2023 and 2029, at around $1.45 billion annually. It is the fourth such document signed by the two countries since 2010.

Wooster stressed that support for sectors was determined by Jordan, which sets priorities, and not by the US, and that there are no conditions attached to the MoU, which are not legally binding.
The US doesn't have any say on how the money would be spent?  No conditions? No auditing?

It looks like some of the funds are very generally earmarked: out of the $1.45 billion of grants annually, $610 million is direct assistance to the Treasury; $75 million to the stimulus support fund; $350 million towards implementing priority development schemes with USAID; and $400 million in military aid to the Jordanian Army.

Beyond that, it looks like Jordan can do whatever they want with it.

And of course, there is no requirement for Jordan to extradite mass murderer Ahlam Tamimi to the US, despite her being on the FBI's Most Wanted list. 

Israel is routinely accused by its detractors of having a blank check to use US funds however they want. It is a lie. There are extensive audits for US aid to Israel.

But here, the same people who claim to care so much about how US taxpayer dollars are being spent are suddenly mute in a case that really appears to be a blank check to Jordan - $610 million a year we know going straight to its treasury which can then be spent however they want - and no pushback.

How much of that money goes to fund explicitly antisemitic educational materials? Jordan funds the building of mosques - how many teach hate? Would US funded weapons be used to quash peaceful protests? There are no guardrails.

And no one even seems to suggest that Jordan should not get a penny until it sends Tamimi to the US for trial.

(h/t Arnold Roth)

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!
 

 

Tuesday, January 03, 2023

01/03 Links Pt2: FBI Says Violence Against Jews Is in Decline. Jews Aren’t Buying It; Sweet success in Ben & Jerry’s-MDA blood donor project; Bret Stephens: Jews and Cancel Culture

From Ian:

FBI Says Violence Against Jews Is in Decline. Jews Aren’t Buying It.
The FBI’s latest annual report shows a decline in violence against Jews, findings that are at odds with Jewish watchdog groups who say anti-Semitic hate crimes have hit their highest levels in history during the past two years.

The FBI’s 2021 findings, released at the end of last year, have sparked accusations the federal law enforcement agency is deflating these statistics at a time when the American Jewish community is facing an unprecedented wave of anti-Semitism. At least one watchdog group is calling on Congress to investigate how and why the FBI underreported anti-Jewish hate crimes.

"At a time of record anti-Semitic hate crimes, it is appalling that the FBI's data-gathering has been so badly botched," said Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a watchdog group that combats Jew hatred. "This massive failure has undermined the purposes of hate crimes data precisely when we most need the data. If the FBI doesn't quickly correct this problem, congressional committees will need to ask some serious questions."

Marcus said the FBI’s 2021 statistics on hate crimes against Jews are "essentially useless" due to new reporting procedures that omitted statistics from organizations typically included in the federal agency’s yearly assessment. While the FBI claimed that violence against Jews decreased last year, groups such as the Anti-Defamation League reported that 2021 saw the highest levels of anti-Semitic violence on record. A report from the AMCHA Initiative, a Jewish advocacy group, last year found that assaults on Jewish students and their identities doubled in the 2021 and 2022 academic year.

Marcus, an attorney and former staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, said the FBI’s inaccurate reporting is likely to prompt congressional oversight.

"In my experience overseeing federal civil rights data collections, congressional committees have historically taken a keen interest in the completeness and accuracy of governmental information provided to the public," Marcus told the Washington Free Beacon. "It is hard to imagine that a failure of this scope would escape the notice of congressional oversight staff."

"I am hopeful that the Department of Justice and FBI will clean up this mess on their own," Marcus said. "If DOJ and the FBI do not fix this problem, however, by providing corrected and complete data to the public, we should not be surprised if Congress should get involved."
Sweet success in Ben & Jerry’s-MDA blood donor project
Ben & Jerry’s Israel and Magen David Adom have begun a joint project to raise awareness and encourage young people to join MDA’s regular pool of blood donors in Israel.

To sweeten the project, Ben & Jerry’s set up ice-cream carts at four blood donation stations across the country where anyone who donated blood received free ice cream.

Locations included the Dizengoff Center, where 71 units of blood were donated; in Rishon Lezion, which collected 119 units; at Rupin Academic College, where 80 people donated units of blood; and at the Knesset, which collected 120 units. The donated blood can conceivably help save the lives of about 1,000 people in less than two months.

Able to save the lives of around 1,000 people in under 2 months
MDA vice president of blood services Prof. Eilat Shanar said, “In order to maintain a proper blood supply in the State of Israel, MDA’s blood services are required to collect about 1,000 blood units from volunteer donors every day. We are very happy about the cooperation with Ben & Jerry’s and we hope to continue this activity in other places throughout the country and encourage more and more people to donate blood and save lives.”
Is the UK Turning into Something Extremely Different?
On December 1, 2022, Britain’s Office for National Statistics released the latest 10-yearly census, carried out in 2021, showing that the fastest-growing population in England and Wales is Muslims. According to the census:
“For the first time in a census of England and Wales, less than half of the population (46.2%, 27.5 million people) described themselves as ‘Christian’…”

“It’s not a great surprise that the Census shows fewer people in this country identifying as Christian than in the past,” the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, said in response to the findings, “but it still throws down a challenge to us not only to trust that God will build his kingdom on Earth but also to play our part in making Christ known.”

The Muslim community in Britain reacted otherwise. Zara Mohammed, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said:
“Whilst the Census does look at religion, the lack of wider religion-specific monitoring prevents us from fully understanding how acute the issue of under-representation of Muslims is in British society.

“These initial figures give us an opportunity to now make meaningful change and create a better Britain for all.”

In 2013, British journalist Vincent Cooper wrote: “By the year 2050, in a mere 37 years, Britain will be a majority Muslim nation.”

The census taken 2021 has revealed that while fewer than half of people (27.5 million) in England and Wales now describe themselves as Christian, those claiming “No religion” rose by 12 points to 37.2% (22.2 million). Those identifying as Muslim rose from 4.9% in 2011 to 6.5% (3.9 million) in 2021. The next most common responses were Hindu (1.0 million) and Sikh (524,000), while Buddhists overtook Jews (273,000 to 271,000).

Religion seems a far more important part of life for Muslims than for other Britons: it appears central to their sense of identity. According to a report from 2006:
“Thirty percent of British Muslims would prefer to live under Sharia (Islamic religious) law than under British law…. Twenty-eight percent hope for the U.K. one day to become a fundamentalist Islamic state.”

An article by Abdul Azim Ahmed, published by the Religion Media Centre in September 2021, admitted that within Britain all the divergent schools of Islam are present — although Salafism has grown in recent years, particularly among younger Muslims.

Trevor Phillips, former head of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality and Equality and Human Rights Commission, found that the followers of Islam hold very different values from the rest of the society; many apparently want to lead separate lives. “Muslims are creating nations within nations,” he said.

Friday, December 16, 2022

12/16 Links P2: Liberals, Progressives, Wokeness and Israel; Smearing Israel from the Ivory Tower; US Congressman Slams FBI Hate Crimes Data As Bipartisan Criticism Grows

From Ian:

Liberals, Progressives, Wokeness and Israel
Putting all this together, what the JILV survey powerfully documents is a troubling phenomenon that has pervaded the larger American political system today: namely political sorting. In its most basic form, political sorting, which is often confused with polarization, is a fairly new phenomenon and is where ideological and attitudinal positions no longer vary but are expected to align to particular liberal or conservative attitudes. The result today is that Democrats are more uniformly left-leaning and Republicans are more uniformly right-leaning than they were decades ago. Both the left and the right promote packages of ideas and attitudes that must be adopted wholesale if one is not to fall into disfavor. Today, dissent and divergence become almost impossible if one is to avoid adverse social consequences and possibly real professional ramifications as well. And for macro-political development, as Democrats are more habitually liberal and Republicans become more conservative, compromise and bipartisanship becomes harder to achieve. This is exactly what is happening with respect to Israel and ideology and represents an existential threat to the Jewish community and American support for Israel as well.

The recent uproar at Berkeley Law School is a case in point. Nine student groups at the law school banded together to amend their bylaws so as to exclude any Zionist speaker from ever speaking at the law school. That Women of Berkeley Law, the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association and the Law Students of African Descent felt compelled to join forces with the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association in this endeavor, illustrates how powerful this ideological sorting can be. Under the guise of intersectional solidarity, groups that have nothing to do with the Middle East conflict institute a litmus test that permanently excludes the vast majority of Jews who believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state. To be part of the community of the good is to expel people with improper beliefs.

More specifically, to understand sorting what is critical to understand is that the electorate has not changed significantly in the aggregate as generations have aged in and out, but voters have sorted. Consider that in the 1990s there were many pro-choice and pro-immigration Republicans and pro-gun Democrats. These variations have disappeared with issues all lining up on the left or right such that if you are a Democrat, you have to believe and promote a particular agenda wholesale and thus one can predict an individual’s political positions based on partisanship alone. Thus, the United States is experiencing increased partisan polarization now even though Independents have grown as a share of the electorate while the number of partisans has shrunk

Turning to the JILV survey itself, support for Israel has become part of the larger political sort of the American public. Today, vast majorities of Republicans support Israel, while Democratic backing is much lower. To be on the left these days means that one cannot support Israel and be ideologically pure; backing Israel is a conservative value and that line cannot be crossed in the ideologically sorted world of today. Thus, it is also the case that those who score lower on the woke scale are appreciably more aligned with Israel than those who are highly woke. Attitudes toward Israel are now part of the liberal or conservative packages that partisans must uniformly adopt, constituting a new norm in American politics evident in the data here. As Abrams and Wertheimer pointed out, sorting has become so deep that it has influenced views and sharply divided Americans on ideas as varied as the nuclear family, the structure-enabling philanthropy and, of course, the police and justice systems.

Moreover, views toward religion, tradition and history have become part of the story now. To be liberal today means real disdain for people of faith and their rights to religious liberty including support for Israel, while conservatives take the exact opposite approach. As Zaid Jilani has written with respect to race, the vision of the now sorted left is one where, “America isn’t a land of opportunity. It’s barely changed since the days of Jim Crow. Whites, universally privileged, maintain an iron grip on American society, while nonwhites are little more than virtuous victims cast adrift on a plank in an ocean of white supremacy.” The emergent narrative and anti-racist policy positions are now stories, “where whites are the villains and minorities are the victims” making “honest discussion of why homicide is the leading cause of death for young Black men … off limits” for instance. The JILV data show the exact same trend with respect to Israel; support for Israel, even with its faults and complex narratives, is simply on the wrong side of the story and cannot be supported if you are on the liberal side of things.

Given the growth of woke culture and the inexorable sorting process in American political life, friends of Israel must ask themselves some tough questions: Should they continue to focus attention on progressives with deeply held woke commitments who seem to be sorting themselves out of support for Israel, or seek to strengthen support among those who don’t share those ideological commitments and are more inclined to support Israel? To what extent should friends of Israel continue to focus efforts on making Israel’s case in the public realm, and to what extent should they join forces with others in opposing the ideology that gives rise to the growing antipathy toward the Jewish state?

Now is a good time to rethink the mainstream Jewish posture in American politics.
Ungrateful France’s ‘national narrative’ ignores the Jews
France has had Jews for over 2,000 years, and their contributions to the economy, politics, culture and science cannot be denied. But the journalist and blogger Veronique Chemla notes that Judaism and the Jews are virtually absent from the “national narrative” in school curricula and textbooks as well as in exhibitions in French museums. This post is an extract from a talk she gave about this blindspot to the Tsedek Lodge of B’nai B’rith France. She also discussed the issue in her interview with André Barmoha on Radio Chalom Nitsan on 13 December 2022.

Revolutionary, Republican, secular France fought the influence of Catholicism. The state remains embarrassed by the history of religions and by the Jews whom she nevertheless emancipated. France also feared fragmenting the nation by isolating the Jews, while not daring to seem to exclude them. The revolutionary Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre had affirmed: “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and grant everything to the Jews as individuals” – a phrase that still inspires French diplomacy. But even as individuals, the ungrateful homeland ignores them in its national narrative.

Other factors were a pro-European France which denied the “Jewish and Christian roots of Europe” (Jacques Chirac), choosing instead multiculturalism, cultural relativism, atonement. History was perceived through an anachronististic moral lens – the Rights of Man, “political correctness”, making France feel guilty for slavery or colonization. The Crémieux decree was hidden from view while Eurabia ( an European-Arab alliance – ed) was rejected. French Jews are caught between, on the one hand, “pedagogues’ who “deconstruct” history, and, on the other hand, “political correctness”, the disintegration of the nation, European political “elites”, the claims of the “racialized” – Eurabia in different guises.

Jewish historians – Jules Isaac, co-author of school textbooks during the first half of the 20th century, and Marc Bloch – may have felt awkward writing about their co-religionists.

Most important of all, generations of historians, whose studies have skirted around Jews and Judaism, have produced a vicious circle of ignorance, bias and misunderstandings of Jewishness, Judaism and Jews.
Smearing Israel from the Ivory Tower
Israel, a tiny country the size of New Jersey, is the only state in the Middle East that substantially recognizes individual rights, such as legal equality for men and women, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the freedom to engage in same-sex relationships. Compared to its neighbors—Islamic dictatorships that trample rights and violently oppress their populations—Israel is an oasis of enlightenment and liberty. Yet many American and European professors increasingly show support for anti-Israel movements and tyrannical regimes that aim to erase Israel from the map.

Iran is among the most brutal. According to the U.S. State Department, “The Islamic regime in Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” and the “regime elites squander the people’s resources and opportunities, while suppressing freedom and basic human rights.”1 As of this writing, for more than a month Iranian “security forces” have been violently cracking down on widespread protests, which sprang up after the regime’s so-called morality police reportedly killed a young woman for not wearing a hijab correctly.2

Iranian leaders call for “death to Israel,” “death to England,” and “death to America.”3 They fund terrorist groups that wreak havoc in countries neighboring Israel, forming a “ring of fire” around it with the goal of annihilating the tiny democratic republic.4

Yet according to the academic watchdog group Canary Mission, which documents people and groups promoting hatred of the United States and Israel, more than eight hundred professors on North American campuses participate, to varying degrees, in efforts to undermine Israel. So do many in Europe. Among the most vocal anti-Israel professors are David Miller, recently fired from the University of Bristol; Amin Husain at New York University (NYU); and Marc Lamont Hill at Temple University. They are working to erode Israel’s stability, credibility, and security. This despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that Israel is a vital partner and strategic ally of the West.

Miller, previously a tenured professor who served as chair of Bristol’s sociology department, has spent years maligning Israel by advancing conspiracy theories in the classroom and via articles, social media, a website, and a talk show. In his quest to delegitimize the country—which he calls “a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing”—he has claimed, for instance, that British Jewish students are “being used as political pawns.”5 Without evidence, he accuses these students of being “constitutionally bound to promoting Israel and campaigns to silence critics of Zionism or the State of Israel on British campuses.”6 To achieve his goal, Miller advocates prohibiting pro-Israel groups from exercising their right to assemble, saying, for example, that Israel “depends for its lifeblood on the transnational Zionist movement. To dismantle the regime, every single Zionist organisation, the world over, needs to be ended. Every. Single. One.”7 (Zionism is the belief in and support of a Jewish homeland.)8

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

12/14 Links Pt2: No, Zionism isn’t out of date: Why the US arrests some terrorists but ignores others; Professor reveals pervasive antisemitism at University of Toronto Medical School

From Ian:

No, Zionism isn’t out of date
Ha’aretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer does not believe in Zionism. He doesn’t oppose it, he just thinks talking about it is a category mistake:

You cannot be either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist, he says, just as you cannot be a veteran of Iwo Jima unless you were born at least 90 years ago and fought in that battle. Zionism isn’t an ideology. It’s a program, or an ideological plan, to establish a state for Jews in the biblical homeland. And that program was fulfilled on May 14, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence at the old Tel Aviv Museum. That’s it. Done.

"…believing that on the whole, founding the State of Israel was the right thing to do, doesn’t make you a Zionist any more than thinking that Oliver Cromwell was right to overthrow King Charles, makes you a Roundhead. It simply doesn’t matter what you think about long-ago events you didn’t take part in. Israel is a reality and it’s not going anywhere."

He’s wrong. There absolutely is such a thing as Zionist ideology, a set of basic principles that Zionists believe. And here they are:
-There is an am Yehudi, a Jewish people. You might think this is obvious, but Mahmoud Abbas denies it, and so do the “[insert nationality here] of the Mosaic persuasion” crowd, which includes the American Reform Movement.

-The survival of the Jewish people requires the Jewish state, a state that is more than just a state with a Jewish majority. The precise meaning of “more” differs according to the faction of the Zionist movement to which one belongs, but the Nation-State Law that was passed by the Knesset in 2018 is an example of a secular attempt to explicate that.

-Only in the Jewish state can a person fully realize his Jewish identity. You can still be a Zionist if you don’t believe that all Jews ought to live in the Jewish state, but Zionism includes the idea that diaspora life is sub-optimal even when it is not actively dangerous.

-One needn’t be a Jew to be a Zionist. Agree with the principles above and you are a Zionist, regardless of your own religion or ethnicity.

Pfeffer points out that there were religious and secular, socialist and revisionist Zionisms. This was true before 1948, and it’s still true today. But all of them affirm the principles above. The existence of factions doesn’t negate the truth behind an ideology. After all, these are Jews we are talking about!
Tom Stoppard and the Failure of ‘Diasporism’
As much as the contributions of Diaspora Jews should inspire pride and celebration, it has become clear that there has emerged no serious alternative other than Israel for those who would sustainably perpetuate specifically Jewish achievement and inquiry. Those of us in the Diaspora will not all move there—although Stoppard is here to remind us that Jews will always require a refuge from the forces of hatred that now seek Israel’s destruction. But we are called upon to support the Zionist project not only as a form of self-defense but also to continue providing the wider world with the fruits of Jewish labors. Leopoldstadt’s invocation of a potential Jewish state at the play’s beginning, and Israel’s existence at its end as the tiny remnant of the Merz and Jacobowicz families gathers in the once-grand apartment of assimilation in 1955, mark it as one of the most profoundly Zionist documents of our time.

It is a reflection of the durability and power of anti-Semitism that, even if the playwright had uncovered the facts of his own Jewish past in 1955 the way his young British character does, rather than in the 1980s, he would have risked a great deal by writing Leopoldstadt as a young man in the wake of his career-making success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966. He likely would have become known as a Jewish, rather than a British, playwright—a dramatist making a special pleading due to the tragedy visited upon his own family. No, it was his established reputation as the greatest living English dramatist that has enabled this unlikely production—among other things, Leopoldstadt has a cast of 38, the largest any play on Broadway has seen in generations. Therein lies yet another lesson about the limits of Diasporism.
The Hanukkah Queen Who Saved the Jews
A generation after the Hanukkah miracle, in the midst of great turmoil, Salome Alexandra defended Judaism and restored Jewish practice.

The story of Hanukkah is one of the best-known in Jewish history: how a small group of faithful Jews, led by the Maccabees, revolted against their Hellenist Greek rulers during the years 167-160 BCE, and restored the Temple in Jerusalem to Jewish worship once again.

Their unlikely military victory and the miracle of a single jug of oil burning in the Temple’s golden Menorah for eight days are celebrated during the holiday of Hanukkah. Less known is what came next.

The “Maccabee” brothers (named after one brother, Judas Maccabeus) established the Hasmonean royal dynasty that ruled the Jewish kingdom of Judea for over 200 years. Far from presiding over a peaceful nation, the Hasmonean rulers were mercurial, autocratic, and ruled a land continually on the brink of civil war. It fell to Queen Salome Alexandra - also known as Shlomit Alexandra and as Shlomzion - to stand up to some of the most terrifying dictators imaginable, champion traditional Judaism, and restore peace to Judea.

A key fact that’s often ignored in telling the Hanukkah story is that many Jews at the time embraced a Hellenist lifestyle, worshiping Greek deities and embracing Greek values. Within a generation of the Hanukkah miracle, the Jewish community was again riven into factions, most notably the Sadducees, who rejected the Talmud and many Jewish elements of a traditional Jewish lifestyle and who dominated the ruling classes, and the Pharisees who clung to Jewish traditions and lifestyles.

Queen Salome and her Wicked Husband
Queen Salome was born into a prominent scholarly family and married into royalty. She possessed incredible courage and calmness. Salome’s brother was Shimon ben Shetach, one of Judea’s most renowned rabbis and a champion of the Pharisee cause. When it became too dangerous for her brother to remain in Judea because of Sadducee persecution, Queen Salome hid him, as well as other rabbinic allies of traditional Judaism.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

12/13 Links Pt2: Landes on Why Leftists Embrace Islamist Ideas about the West; The history of the media intifada against Israel; Brandeis Center: FBI Report Grossly Understated Antisemitic Crimes

From Ian:

Richard Landes on Why Leftists Embrace Islamist Ideas about the West
Richard Landes, chair of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and author of Can the "Whole World" Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, was interviewed in a December 5th Middle East Forum Webinar (video) by Dexter Van Zile, editor of the Middle East Forum's Focus on Western Islamism (FWI), regarding the left's embrace of Islamist ideas about the West.

Landes said Edward Said's 1978 book, Orientalism, had "pretty much taken over academia" with its premise that any criticism of Islam was a form of "Western racism." By 2000, said Landes, Said's ideas had "crystallized into a basic feature of the Western public sphere." In 2001, a further significant watershed in this process was the U.N.-sponsored Durban conference, an international forum purportedly held to fight racism. At the conference, "You had the NGOs ... their sacred theme was human rights ... lining up with and joining forces with some of the most regressive groups on the planet. And so as a result ... And the key thing in that unification was the adoption by both sides .... They had already both more or less developed this thought, but they jointly targeted Israel and the United States as, in millennial terms, the Antichrist. Or in Muslim terms, the Dajjal."

Landes described the alliance formed at Durban, followed three days later by the jihad against America on 9/11, as a "red-green alliance" between the "progressive left and jihadis." He referred to it as a "marriage between post-modern sadism and post-modern masochism." The poisonous seeds of that merger account for the Islamists' marching in lockstep with the left, targeting both Israel and the U.S.

Landes said their joint strategy to undermine the West is "demopathy," i.e., using democracy to destroy democracy. Both groups used their platforms to channel their hostility, often publicized at anti-U.S. and anti-Israel protests in the form of symbolic imagery on placards linking swastikas with the American flag and the Jewish star. Landes noted that Islamist propagandists have grown "bolder and bolder. Initially, they didn't think they could get away with saying the things that they say now, so they couched it in human rights terms." He said that "what's happened over the last 20 years is that they've just seen how foolish Western leaders are and that they can get away with just about anything. But I think they still, by and large, don't openly say in English what they say in Arabic."


Phyllis Chesler: The history of the media intifada against Israel
From the moment Yasser Arafat launched his long-planned second intifada against Israel in 2000, the most brazen lies about both Jews and Israel were relentlessly told and widely believed. For years, master propagandists in cyberspace, the Western media and academia managed to diabolically invert reality. The entire world believed an utterly false narrative.

Richard Landes’s new work Can the Whole World Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad fearlessly, carefully, relentlessly and brilliantly documents this history.

Landes is a historian and a scholar of apocalyptic movements. He is the author of eight books and countless articles. He maintains a formidable website, The Augean Stables. He is also a consummate wordsmith. For example, he coined the phrase “Pallywood” (Palestinian Hollywood) to describe the Palestinians’ tactic of staging theatrical productions in war zones in order to create anti-Israel propaganda disguised as news.

In his book, Landes proceeds blood libel by blood libel, beginning with the iconic death of Mohammed al-Dura, a Gazan child allegedly murdered with malice aforethought by cruel Israeli soldiers. With his death caught on video and immediately blamed on Israel, even though the video proved no such thing, al-Dura became the boy whose image has graced a thousand mugs and t-shirts, inflamed the entire world and led to countless Muslim atrocities, including suicide bombings, shootings, knife attacks and car-rammings against Israeli civilians.

As Landes notes, the initial reporting on the incident was malicious and incendiary: “The (flawed) footage and its accompanying narrative immediately went viral, then mythical. The footage was spectacular, as emotionally powerful as the dogs attacking Black protesters in Birmingham (1963), and the terrified Vietnamese girl running down the road naked, aflame with napalm (1972). … Despite extensive problems with the footage … journalists piled on the story. … It became the icon of hatred for the 21st century. One cannot overestimate its impact.”

“The role of al-Dura as incitement is clear,” Landes writes, “and if the damage was less than the old European pogroms, it’s only because the Israelis could defend themselves as the Jews of Kishinev could not.”

Landes also reminds us that Osama bin Laden used al-Dura in a recruiting video for global jihad and that the first Palestinian suicide bombers featured al-Dura in the videos they left behind.
EU source says anti-Israel measure 'tainted' in wake of Qatar corruption scandal
A source that has been privy to the European Parliament's behind-the-scenes deliberations over an anti-Israel resolution has told Israel Hayom it was problematic to have this measure come up for a vote at this time in light of the recent revelation that Qatar allegedly bribed senior officials in the legislative body in exchange for treating it with kid gloves over human rights.

"This corruption case involving the parliament raises the question of whether this is the right time to vote on this [anti-Israel resolution]," the source said.

The parliament's subcommittee on human rights has been at the center of the scandal and its chair Maria Arena has had to step down due to possible involvement (it is unclear if she is among the four being charged, who include EU Parliament's Vice President Eva Kaili, who was arrested).

Arena, who has initiated the anti-Israel motion, has stepped aside as chairperson in the wake of the investigation and her office has been sealed off, but the subcommittee has continued working on the draft. "This is the same subcommittee that has initiated the effort to hold the vote on the Israel resolution," the source said. "Considering this, perhaps it would be inappropriate to have these measures stay on the subcommittee's docket; perhaps they should be shelved for the time being until the picture becomes clearer."

On Monday, the various elements in the parliament tried to reach an agreed language, but all the drafts currently being circulated are not good for Israel, with some outright hostile. All call for the adoption of the two-state solution. The most pro-Israel draft has been sponsored by the right-wing parties, as it condemns Palestinian terrorism and demands it come to an end. The other resolutions call on Israel to avoid approving new communities in Judea and Samaria and voice criticism over the Abraham Accords, while also coming out against the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism.
NGO Monitor: Report: Potential Abuse of German Development Resources by Terror Affiliated Palestinian NGOs
Development and cooperation aid is seen as one of the most effective strategies for promoting democracy and fundamental rights, as well as building sustainable and inclusive societies, particularly in places where these processes are in their initial phases. To be sure, the path to building a democratic society is a political process, traversing existing ideological and social rifts, and subject to passionate debates between different political camps.

Especially in conflict ridden areas, politicization can result in development aid lending a platform to radical voices and amplifying inflammatory, hateful narratives. Such aid is particularly susceptible to abuse by groups that promote radical political narratives.

This is even more pronounced in the Palestinian-controlled areas, including Gaza, where many of the political factions are designated as terror groups by Europe (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP]).

This paper provides a case study that examines the ways that political actors propagate and legitimize radicalized narratives – namely, local Palestinian civil society organizations affiliated with the PFLP terror group, which receive European and more specifically German development aid.

The PFLP is multifaceted, consisting of overlapping functions including militant operations, local partisan political activity, and international advocacy via a “human rights” NGO network. These aspects are complementary, all contributing to the broadening of the PFLP’s sphere of influence and to achieving its goals.

The overlapping character of PFLP activities was illustrated acutely when several senior NGO employees (including those in financial leadership positions) were arrested for a PFLP terror attack in 2019, in which Rina Shnerb, a 17-year-old Israeli, was murdered. A subsequent investigation run by the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MoD) concluded that six PFLP-affiliated NGOs had diverted public funds. Ultimately, all six were designated as terror entities.

FBI hate crimes statistics against Jews have just turned meaningless




From CBS News:

The FBI released its 2021 hate crime statistics, but the data falls short of providing a complete picture of targeted violence in the U.S. Despite rising concerns about targeted violence and domestic terrorism, less than two-thirds of law enforcement agencies reported data on hate crimes to the FBI, last year, marking a significant drop-off. 

Agency participation for hate crime statistics fell dramatically from 93% in 2020 to 65% in 2021. That drop comes as the FBI and the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics transition to a more detailed and comprehensive crime-reporting system, known as the "National Incident-Based Reporting System" or NIBRS. The new data collection method offers a more complete picture of crime in the nation, with additional information gathered about victims, offenders, and those arrested — including age, sex, and race, as well as a description of any relationship between victim and offender. 

Incidents of hate crimes are not decreasing, according to the FBI. But until participation in the FBI's new data collection programs increases, the bureau will not be able to make a meaningful comparison of the number of hate crimes with years past.  

For reporting on anti-Jewish crimes, the inaccuracy is much worse - because the cities with the highest Jewish populations are not represented at all:

Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, noted 35 major U.S. cities reported zero hate crimes in 2021. "The report provides a woefully inadequate assessment of the reality and extent of hate crimes targeting Jews in the United States," he said in a statement.

Major cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Miami, did not provide data to the bureau. Others, including Chicago and Phoenix, reported zero hate crimes in 2021, according to the FBI's report.

The FBI reports that anti-Jewish hate crimes decreased from 963 in 2019, to 683 in 2020, to only 324 in 2021. 

Yet in New York City alone, there were 196 anti-Jewish incidents recorded in 2021. (And 195 this year through September only.)

In Los Angeles, there were over 80 anti-Jewish crimes in 2021.

Chicago reported only 8 antisemitic crimes last year but over 25 this year.




None of them are recorded in the FBI statistics. Even though these statistics are publicly reported, the FBI chooses to ignore them because they are not using the FBI's official system. 

The FBI has always had a problem with many cities not reporting their statistics, but this is far worse than ever before. And now we cannot tell how much worse antisemitic crimes are getting.


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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!
 

 

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

11/30 Links Pt1: Murdering Jews Should Be as Unacceptable as Murdering Druze; Biden Rewards Palestinians for Terrorism, Incitement; UNRWA Finds ‘Man-Made Cavity’ Under Gaza School

From Ian:

Israel’s UN ambassador: Mideast Jews were victims of the ‘real Nakba’
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan inaugurated an exhibit on Tuesday highlighting the expulsion of Jews from Middle East countries, calling the story of these Jewish refugees the “real Nakba.”

The Palestinians have long used the Arabic term “Nakba,” or catastrophe, to describe Israel’s creation and the resulting displacement of some 700,000 of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war initiated by Arab nations to destroy the nascent Jewish state.

Marking the 75th anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of a resolution to create Israel, Erdan said that “those who really suffered from ‘Nakba’ following the decision were Jews—almost a million were expelled from Arab countries and Iran. Since the vote [on Nov. 29, 1947,] which the Arabs rejected, the United Nations has been telling a completely false story about the ‘disaster’ the Palestinians brought upon themselves,” he added.

While the vast majority of Jewish refugees from Arab countries were absorbed into Israel, the United Nations, by contrast, created the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to tend uniquely to Palestinian refugees. Today, the organization recognizes some 5 million Palestinians as “refugees,” having effectively transformed the status into a hereditary trait applicable only to Palestinians.

“A day after the [partition] decision, Jews were violently and cruelly expelled from Arab countries and Iran. This year, after a long struggle, we managed to place an exhibition with photos that document the story of the real Nakba. I will continue to fight for the truth and against the false narrative that the Palestinians and their supporters spread,” said Erdan.


Monday, November 28, 2022

11/28 Links Pt1: A New Strategic Landscape in the Middle East; IDF arrests 3,000 Palestinians, thwarts 500 attacks in past 6 months; How not to condemn an Arab terrorist attack

From Ian:

A New Strategic Landscape in the Middle East
Arab-Israeli relations are a source of good news these days. The conflict between the Jewish state and its radical enemies, Palestinians and others, is far from over, and the threat of the Iranian revolutionary regime may be greater than ever. However, a new strategic alignment promises a better chance for regional states to isolate and stand up to the radicals who continue to threaten the existing order. The old structure of the Arab-Israel conflict that defined the Middle East for generations is now being replaced by a strengthening Arab-Israeli coalition against Iran and its radical Arab proxies.

The erosion and ultimately the abolition of aggressive regional solidarity targeting the Jewish state has been the supreme objective of Israel's regional strategy since its inception. Breaking up regional solidarity is an indispensable precondition to any progress toward peace. Arab states would consider accepting Israel only following a painful recognition of the failure of the attempt to erase it at an acceptable cost.

The profound change in the strategic landscape of the Middle East in the recent decade may be characterized by four pillars: the magnitude of the Iranian regional threat, the inability of Arab states to stand up to that threat by themselves, the questionable steadfastness of American support, and the proven capacity and dependability of Israel.

Unlike most European and American officials, Arabs fully realize the magnitude of the Iranian determination to hegemonize the Middle East at their expense and the effectiveness of Iranian brutality and sophistication in the pursuit of that objective. Watching the impact of the Iranian takeovers in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen and its subversion in their own countries, they know they are in desperate need of external assistance to survive.

The most vulnerable Arab states turned to the only power that fully appreciates the magnitude of the Iranian threat and is capable and determined to provide a forceful response. Israel has been engaged for more than half a decade in a wide-scale preventive war in Syria and western Iraq to thwart the Iranian takeover where it threatens Israel most acutely. The historic all-Arab coalition against Israel has been replaced by a de facto Arab-Israeli coalition against the radical forces that threaten them both.
IDF arrests 3,000 Palestinians, thwarts 500 attacks in past 6 months
The IDF’s ongoing Operation Break the Wave in the West Bank has seen thousands of troops and reservists crack down on Palestinian terrorism, arresting over 3,000 suspects and thwarting over 500 terror attacks.

The operation began in late March after a series of terror attacks in Israeli cities left 20 people dead. Israeli security forces, including the IDF, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and Israel Police have been carrying out raids during day and night against Palestinians suspected of terrorism.

For more than six months, some 25 regular battalions have been deployed to the West Bank along with an additional 84 of reservists deployed to the area by the end of next year.

The large number of troops comes as the level of violence in the West Bank continues to remain unusually high, with massive amounts of gunfire directed against troops carrying out operational missions as well as against Israeli civilians.

The past year has seen a marked increase in terrorism, with 281 serious terror attacks by Palestinians: 239 against soldiers and 42 against civilians.

There were also a total of 8,483 violent incidents by Palestinians such as riots or stone throwings, about 40% of them against Israeli civilians and 60% against IDF troops. The number marked a significant rise of almost 20% from the 7,039 attacks last year.
Israel Upgrading Security Barrier in Northern West Bank
On Nov. 14, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz approved plans to upgrade a section of the West Bank security barrier after a series of terror attacks were committed by Palestinians who illegally entered Israel.

A tall fence, similar to those on the borders with Egypt and Gaza, will replace a 50-km. stretch of fencing from the Te'enim checkpoint near Avnei Hefetz to Oranit in the northwestern West Bank.

In the summer, construction began on a 9-meter tall concrete wall to replace another 50-km. stretch of fencing in the northern West Bank from Salem to the Te'enim checkpoint that was built 20 years ago.

Both upgraded sections will be equipped with surveillance cameras and sensors.

In July, the IDF began to strengthen defenses along the existing security fence in the Judean Desert in the southern West Bank, digging a deep trench over 20 km. to prevent the passage of people and vehicles.

Many credit the West Bank security barrier with helping to end the Second Intifada (2000-2005), though only 62% of the barrier was completed.

Sunday, November 27, 2022

11/27 Links: Israel does not need anyone’s permission to exist; The FBI should investigate the attack on US citizen in Jerusalem bombing; How Israel lets the Palestinians get free power while taking over land

From Ian:

Israel does not need anyone’s permission to exist
This November, Iraq is hosting a celebration to honor 90 years since the British gave it independence. Iraq will be joined by Jordan, which will mark 76 years since the British Mandate for Transjordan ended. In attendance at these ceremonies will be United Nations officials. A keynote speech will be delivered by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who will reflect on Britain’s role in the creation of two major Arab countries.

Except this won’t happen.

After World War I, the League of Nations created five mandates in the Middle East: Syria, Transjordan, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Lebanon. All those mandates, with the exception of Palestine, became sovereign nation states, retaining the borders identified by the League of Nations. Not one of them had ever before held sovereignty over that territory. The Jews alone had once maintained a sovereign kingdom in the Levant.

Yet the only country still celebrating its right to exist by genuflecting before the world is Israel, which hosts annual celebrations of the 1947 U.N. Resolution 181 that partitioned British Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

This year is no different. For example, in Los Angeles, the Consul General of Israel is organizing a 75th anniversary celebration of the event. Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate by email and never miss our top stories

Resolution 181 is now a staple in Jewish and Israel education in the Diaspora. When I attended Jewish day school, our teachers, with pride and tears in their eyes, would show us film of the outburst of applause and standing ovation as the U.N. consecrated the Jewish people’s right to their historic and ancestral homeland.

No one can deny that Resolution 181 was historic and significant. Israeli-American philosopher and computer scientist Judea Pearl called it “the encounter between the Jewish people and history.” But this mythology of the resolution has contributed to the Jewish people’s recurrent need for external recognition.

Seventeenth-century French philosopher Rene Descartes’ emblematic declaration, “I think, therefore I am,” was a pivotal moment in our understanding of the nature of knowledge, forging a philosophical connection between self-awareness and existence. Sadly, for the Jews, Descartes’ exultant affirmation reads more like, “The non-Jews think, therefore we are.”

This concept has long been applied to Israel, whose legitimacy is constantly in question, and to the Jew, who during his 2,000-year exile from the Land of Israel was considered a nuisance and later a pariah. The “Jewish Question” was, at its core, the non-Jewish world’s attempt to grapple with the existence of the Jew. During the French revolution, non-Jews gave an answer to this question: To the Jew as a citizen, everything; to the Jews as a nation, nothing. Tragically, many Jews embraced this form of partial acceptance.


The FBI should investigate the attack on US citizen in Jerusalem bombing
US law does not restrict the pursuit of terrorists who harm Americans overseas only to those who kill Americans. It also includes anybody who “attempts to kill” a US citizen (18 US Code 2332).

Palestinian Arab terrorists have murdered 146 American citizens, and wounded 204 more, since 1968. Yet, not one of those killers has ever been handed over to the United States for prosecution.

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to discuss this matter with senior officials of multiple administrations, Republicans as well as Democrats. The excuses I have heard as to why they don’t pursue Palestinian Arab killers of Americans have ranged from evasive to downright disingenuous.

For example, they have claimed that the US “can’t find” the suspects, even when they are hiding in plain sight, by serving openly in the Palestinian security forces or – in the case of Sbarro pizzeria killer Ahlam Tamimi – hosting a radio show in Amman, Jordan.

US officials also have claimed that nothing can be done because America does not have an extradition treaty with the Palestinian Authority – even though the US frequently arranges for the transfer of criminal suspects from countries with whom it does not have formal treaties.

In fact, the real reason that the FBI is not investigating the latest attempt to murder an American citizen in Israel is the same reason it has never pursued any of the other Palestinian terrorists who have killed or injured Americans: because it would interfere with the administration’s goal of maintaining friendly relations with the Palestinian Authority in order to bring about the creation of a Palestinian state.

The PA will resist any request to hand over killers of Americans, since it regards the killers as heroes. For the United States to pursue justice, it would have to be willing to confront the PA, including putting political and financial pressure on the PA leadership. That would interfere with the Biden administration’s warm relationship with the PA.

And so, justice is sacrificed in order to avoid angering the PA. That’s why the FBI will investigate the accidental death of an Arab-American in Israel who placed herself in a dangerous situation, but not the deliberate murder and attempted murder of Jewish Americans in Israel. That’s why terrorists will be extradited and transferred to the US from around the world – but not if they are Palestinian Arab killers of Americans. And this outrageous double standard will continue until American Jewish leaders make it clear to the Biden administration that they will no longer stand for it.

The writer is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.
Canadian lawmaker vows to defend Israel, Jews
She’s a Jamaican-born lawyer who immigrated to Canada with her family at age five. She made history by becoming the first woman of color to run for the Conservative Party leadership in Canada and is well-known for tweaking the establishment view with her unabashedly socially conservative opinions. And she’s also a staunch supporter of the State of Israel.

Meet Canadian MP Leslyn Lewis, the new chair of the Canadian Parliamentary Israel Allies Caucus, a cross-party faith-based parliamentary lobby that seeks to strengthen the bonds between the two nations.

“The existence of Israel is at the cornerstone of our faith as Christians,” Lewis, who represents Haldimand—Norfolk in southern Ontario, says in a telephone interview with JNS from Ottawa. “As both Canadians and Christians we stand in support of the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Lewis sees a direct link between the increasing levels of antisemitism both in Canada and around the globe and the narrative coming out of the BDS movement that seeks to delegitimize and demonize Israel, conceding that it is becoming increasingly challenging to reach the hearts and minds of the next generation at a time when pro-Israel students are being silenced and demonized on university campuses.

“Young people are more focused on things that pull at their heart-strings—so when you throw out words like racism and Apartheid of course their view is ‘I want to fight against that,’ ” she said. “When they tie it in with racism, it becomes very visceral. As a person of color I can see it.”

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

11/22 Links Pt2: Bari Weiss: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Kanye, Kyrie, and Antisemitism; The Black Hebrew Israelites are a real problem for the left; Why Is Jon Stewart Ignoring and Excusing Antisemitism?

From Ian:

Bari Weiss: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Kanye, Kyrie, and Antisemitism
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar retired from the NBA in 1989, but he remains one of the greatest basketball players of all time. Many argue he is simply the greatest.

He is still—even with Michael Jordan and Steph Curry and Lebron and Shaq and Kobe—the NBA’s all-time leading scorer (38,387 points) and the league’s only six-time MVP. In March, the basketball news site HoopsHype included Abdul-Jabbar in its list of the top ten most influential players of all time. ESPN called him the greatest center in NBA history.

As Jews say every Passover: It would have been enough.

But there’s so much more that makes the 7-foot-2-inch Abdul-Jabbar a true giant. His religious conviction, his integrity, his wide-ranging intellectual proclivities, his outstanding performance in the 1981 movie Airplane!—and the unusual fact that this black, Muslim basketball star has been a consistent and outspoken voice against antisemitism.

For all those reasons, I wanted to speak with Abdul-Jabbar about the various firestorms of late: Kanye and his antisemitic rants; Kyrie Irving’s promotion of an antisemitic movie that denies the Holocaust; and the alarming rash of anti-Jewish hate crimes seemingly inspired by their worldview. A few weeks ago, a banner declaring “Kanye was right” hung over the 405 in Los Angeles as people gave Nazi salutes. On Halloween, the side of a townhouse in an Atlanta neighborhood was sprayed with graffiti: “Jews kill Blacks.” On the stop sign around the corner: “Jews enslave Black lives.” Last week, headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Chicago were vandalized with swastikas and the phrase “Kanye was rite.” And in Brooklyn, physical attacks against Orthodox Jews have become routine.

I asked Abdul-Jabbar about all of that and more in the Q and A below. And if you’re looking for more from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, check out his Substack, where he writes and talks about everything from basketball to pop culture to politics. — BW

BW: I want to focus on Farrakhan’s influence. He believes that Jews are parasitic, that Jews are behind a plot to exploit black Americans, and that blacks are the real Jews from the Bible. We’re hearing these ideas come out of the mouths of musicians like Kanye West (“Jewish people have owned the black voice”) and athletes like Kyrie Irving (“I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I come from”). For many Jews, hearing this kind of rhetoric is shocking, but many black Americans have noted that these views are more commonplace than we’d like to admit. So what I think a lot of people are afraid to ask is: How mainstream are these beliefs among black Americans? Are Kanye and Kyrie unique? Or has the influence of people like Farrakhan made this strain of antisemitism somehow more normal than many want to believe?

KAJ: Certain black leaders do exactly what certain white leaders do who want to gather followers, money, and power: They find a scapegoat they can blame. They can’t blame others who are marginalized because of the color of their skin, like Latinx or Asian-Americans, so they go for the default villain of fascists and racists: Jews.

What astounds me is not just the irrationality of it, but how self-destructive it is. Black people have to know that when they mouth antisemitism, they are using the exact same kind of reasoning that white supremacists use against blacks. They are enabling racism. Now they’ve aligned themselves with the very people who would choke out black people, drag them behind a truck, keep them from voting, and maintain systemic racism for another hundred years. They are literally making not only their lives worse, but their children’s lives. The fact that they can’t see that means the racists have won.
British Comedian David Baddiel Takes His ‘Jews Don’t Count’ Argument to TV
David Baddiel, a comedian-turned-activist against antisemitism who calls himself “one of the U.K.’s very few famous Jews,” was holding court in the basement of one of Britain’s best-known TV studios.

As a reporter headed hurriedly for the exit, Baddiel slouched into his chair, seemingly exhausted by the interview he had just completed about the forthcoming documentary based on his 2021 bestseller, “Jews Don’t Count.”

“I am speaking to many people like the last journalist who had not thought about any of this in their life,” he said.

The “this” Baddiel was referring to was to the idea, outlined in his book, that progressive anti-racists are guilty of hypocrisy towards Jews by not viewing them as worthy of similar protection or championing as other minorities because they are seen as white, privileged and wealthy.

When the book came out last year, it received rave reviews, and Baddiel has since become seen by some as a “voice for Britain’s Jews.” He often litigates the finer points of contemporary antisemitism as a guest on radio and television, and he has been quick to square off with trolls and critics on Twitter.

Now, with the premiere of an hour-long documentary also called “Jews Don’t Count” on Britain’s public Channel 4 network, Baddiel gets a primetime slot to make his case to a bigger audience. Featuring Baddiel’s interviews with Jewish stars of pop culture in both Britain and the United States — ranging from comedian Sarah Silverman to novelist Jonathan Safran Foer to actor Stephen Fry — the film argues that “in a culture where all forms of racism are being monitored, called out and held accountable, one form is apparently invisible.”
Can we fight antisemitism without losing our sense of humor?
If a comic with a huge following like Dave Chappelle goes over the line, he will immediately be put under a societal microscope that will analyze and respond from every possible angle, as I’m doing now.

If you run an organization that fights antisemitism, or simply cares for the welfare of the Jewish community, it’s almost certain that you will feel obligated to respond. Many of those responses follow the usual dance of “expose, condemn and ask for an apology.”

Chappelle himself poked fun at that dance at the start of his monologue: “Before I start tonight, I just wanted to read a brief statement that I prepared. I denounce antisemitism in all its forms and I stand with my friends in the Jewish community. And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time.”

Chappelle exposed the uneasy truth of celebrities getting caught saying something offensive and then releasing a statement that everyone knows was written by a PR handler. By revealing the goal of “buying yourself some time,” he captured the phoniness of the whole exercise.

That was cutting and funny. It’s when he played up antisemitic tropes around the “all powerful” Jew that he entered dicey territory.

“I’ve been to Hollywood,” he said. “And I don’t want y’all to get mad at me, I’m just telling you this is just what I saw. It’s a lot of Jews. Like a lot.”

Perhaps realizing he was on sensitive ground, he called the idea that Jews run show business a “delusion,” but then added: “It’s not a crazy thing to think. But it’s a crazy thing to say out loud in a climate like this.”

In other words, it’s not crazy to think that Jews run the show; just don’t say it out loud.

Whether he intended it or not, that “hush hush” vibe suggests mystery and conspiracy, precisely the ancient trope that fuels Jew-hatred and makes so many Jews nervous.

Which brings us back to the “Chappelle trap.” It’s one thing to fight antisemitism when it comes from places like a neo-Nazi march or a BDS group or even celebrity musicians or athletes. None of those people make a living by making us laugh.

Chappelle does.

Because Chappelle plays in the very Jewish playground of comedy, it makes it that much harder to calibrate our response. How do we fight a comic without losing our sense of humor, without losing what made America love us in the first place? At what point do we say, “We can’t take this joke because it goes too far?”

If the ritual of “expose, condemn and ask for an apology” is phony anyhow, is it worth losing our sense of humor? And does complaining so loudly, as much as it makes us feel good, make things better or worse?

In the classic Jewish tradition, I have more questions than answers.

Friday, November 18, 2022

11/18 Links Pt2: Theodor Herzl was gone, but his message survived; BBC broadcasts folksongs that glorify attacks on Jews; FBI Director: Jewish Community Under Threat ‘From All Sides’

From Ian:

Gil Troy: Theodor Herzl was gone, but his message survived
Editor’s note: Excerpted from the new three-volume set “Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings” edited by Gil Troy, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People, now available at www.theljp.org. This is the 11th in a series.

In 1897, Theodor Herzl essentially described himself when he wrote about a man who once “deep in his soul felt the need to be a Jew,” and who, reeling from Jew-hatred, watched “his soul become one bleeding wound.” Finally, this man “began to love Judaism with great fervor.”

In this short story, “The Menorah,” Herzl saluted his step-by-step Judaization and Zionization. Celebrating Hanukkah, he delighted in the “growing brilliance” candle by candle, gradually generating more and more light.

The “occasion became a parable for the enkindling of a whole nation.” Flipping from the reluctant, traumatized Jew he had been to the proud, engaged Jew he was surprised to see in the mirror, Herzl admitted: “When he had resolved to return to the ancient fold and openly acknowledge his return, he had only intended to do what he considered honorable and sensible. But he had never dreamed that on his way back home he would also find gratification for his longing for beauty. Yet what befell him was nothing less.”

Herzl concluded: “The darkness must retreat.”

Seven years later, Herzl spelled out Zionism’s dynamic power, its spillover effects. “For inherent in Zionism, as I understand it, is not only the striving for a legally secured homeland for our unfortunate people, but also the striving for moral and intellectual perfection,” he wrote.

This vision made Herzl a model liberal nationalist. He believed that “an individual can help himself neither politically nor economically as effectively as a community can help itself.”
Mark Regev: Did Israel's famed diplomat Abba Eban lack clout back home?
The 20th anniversary of the passing of Israel’s legendary foreign minister Abba Eban on November 17 is an opportunity to ask whether the acclaimed diplomat, with his stellar global reputation, was as effective in defining Israeli policy as he was in advocating it abroad.

An outstanding student at England’s Cambridge University, Eban graduated in 1938 with an exemplary triple first, positioning him to pursue a lifetime career as a respected academic.

But the South Africa-born Eban could not sit out the impending world crisis that would so heavily impact the Jewish people. Drawn to Zionism, he worked at the London headquarters of the World Zionist Movement under the leadership of Chaim Weizmann (who later became Israel’s first president).

With the outbreak of World War II, Eban joined the British military to fight the Nazis, serving as an intelligence officer in Mandatory Palestine. Discharged at the end of the war, Eban joined the staff of the Jewish Agency’s political department and was sent to New York where he became the Jewish Agency’s liaison with the UN’s Special Committee on Palestine, helping steer it toward recommending Jewish statehood. Subsequently, Eban was part of the lobbying effort that produced the necessary two-thirds majority General Assembly vote for partition on November 29, 1947.

After successfully orchestrating Israel’s acceptance to the UN in May 1949, Eban became the Jewish state’s permanent representative to the organization. In parallel, he also served as Israel’s ambassador to the US, concurrently working in both Washington and New York throughout the 1950s.

Eban was a celebrity. His remarkable intellectual and oratorial prowess made him one of the foremost English speechmakers of the period, on a par with Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy. Henry Kissinger wrote: “I have never encountered anyone who matched his command of the English language. Sentences poured forth in mellifluous constructions complicated enough to test the listener’s intelligence and simultaneously leave him transfixed by the speaker’s virtuosity.”
Howard Jacobson: Ulysses Shmulysses
Homeric he is not; but a hero for our time he is. Ulysses is first and foremost a comedy of exile. Joyce wrote it while living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. That Dublin went on calling to him throughout the years he lived elsewhere is clear from the novel’s intense recreation of the city’s bursting vitality. But novelists thrive on being away, and Joyce needed to be anywhere but Dublin, free from Irish politics, the church, and his own memories of personal and professional failure. Leopold Bloom is not given that choice; Joyce does not buy him a ticket from Dublin to Tiberias. But he is already, in his Jewishness, exile enough for Joyce. Behind the epic figure of Odysseus, in this novel, looms the shadow of the mythical Wandering Jew who, for having jeered at Jesus on the way to the cross, is doomed to roam the earth until the end of human time. Call him a figment of early Christian antisemitism. And while antisemitism isn’t a major theme in Ulysses, it shows itself with some unexpected savagery from time to time as in the figure of the headmaster Mr. Deasy who gets a kick out of declaring “Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews … and do you know why? She never let them in. That’s why.” “That’s not life for men and women,” Bloom responds, “insult and hatred.” Those who are not let in, must find somewhere else to go.

This has been in large part the Jewish story for 2,000 years. And the homeless Jew is the metaphorical undercurrent of Ulysses. Joyce is said to have worked up the the character of Leopold Bloom from the Jews he met in the course of his own wanderings in Trieste and Zurich. He must have studied them attentively, for Bloom is no mere token Jew. In his queer lapses from Judaism, mistaking words and confusing events, he is every inch the part-time, no longer practicing Jew, making the best of the diaspora, more Jewish to others than to himself.

And in him, unexpectedly but triumphantly, Joyce sees a version of his own rejections and rebuffs. Without going into what we know or think we know of Joyce’s own sexual predilections, it is accepted that there are similarities between Bloom’s submissiveness and his creator’s, and that Joyce chose Bloom’s Jewishness as the perfect vehicle to express the passive, much put-upon and all-suffering openness to life that he needed to drive—or, rather, be driven by—this novel. At home in being far from home, content to be cuckolded and remaining in love with the wife who cuckolds him, pessimistic and yet happy enough, dialectical, pedantic—in one lunatic scene he morphs into “The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft who tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved tradition of medical science … produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centre”—Bloom makes being a stranger in a strange land an enticing condition.

One of the best jokes made about Bloom is that he was once a traveler for blotting paper. His absorbency might not make him the most forceful husband for Molly, but it is the key to the novel’s plenty. With Bloom around to soak in every misadventure without complaint, there’s no limit to what Joyce might plausibly invent. Ulysses first appeared in 1922. Worse things than exile were still to happen to Jews. And for many novelists in the ensuing years, the Jew would become the perfect protagonist, the very model of humanity in extremis—homeless, tragic, patient, funny. But James Joyce got there first.
La Revue Blanche
The Dreyfus affair was not the only social battle in which the Revue engaged. In 1897, across two issues, it published a remarkable “Enquete sur la Commune,” a series of brief, firsthand accounts of the great uprising of 1871 whose specter still haunted France. A century and a half later it remains one of the best accounts of that event.

The repressive legislation passed in response to the anarchist bombing wave of the early 1890s, laws which effectively banned anarchist propaganda and activity of any kind, was harshly criticized in the pages of La Revue blanche. The strongest criticism was an article signed “Un Juriste.” The author described the legislation as, “Everyone admits that these laws never should have been our laws, the laws of a republican nation, of a civilized nation, of an honest nation. They stink of tyranny, barbarism, and falsehood.” The pseudonymous author was the future three-time prime minister of France, Léon Blum.

An 1898 volume of anti-militarist articles released by the review’s book publishing arm, provocatively titled L’Armée contre la Nation (the army against the nation) would lead the minister of war to press a charge of defamation against the publishers, a charge the Natansons were able to successfully defend themselves against by claiming the book contained nothing but articles that had already been published elsewhere and not been found criminal.

By the turn of the century French intellectuals began withdrawing from the political field. Charles Péguy later described the letdown felt during and after the Dreyfus affair by lamenting that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” At the same time, the editorial staff and stable of writers at the review had turned over several times. One of its later editors, Urbain Gohier, was a barely disguised antisemite who would become an important figure on the anti-Jewish fringe. Yet the quality of the contributors was still high. If Mallarmé’s poetry no longer appeared in its pages, the young Guillaume Apollinaire did. Alfred Jarry became a regular contributor, the Revue publishing his masterpiece, Ubu Roi, as well as Octave Mirbeau’s classic Diary of a Chambermaid, serially and in book form by its Editions de la Revue blanche. That enterprise also published what is considered to be France’s first bestseller, a translation of—of all things—the Pole Henryk Sinkiewicz biblical epic Quo Vadis.

By the first years of the 20th century only one Natanson brother, Thadée, remained on the magazine. Embroiled in a lengthy divorce, he seemed to have grown tired of the magazine. It was losing money, but then, according to Thadée’s wife, later famous as Misia Sert, that had always been the case. In 1903 La Revue blanche published the last of its 237 issues. Its closing was in no way an indication of failure. It had set out to be the voice of a new France, of a more open country, both politically and culturally, and was, in the end, both its begetter and its voice.

11/18 Links Pt1: Congress Eyes Investigation Into Anti-Israel Bias at Biden Justice Department; Why Is Israel Always Held to a Different Standard?; Eureka! Arab lobby discovered

From Ian:

Eureka! Arab lobby discovered
As I documented in my book, the Arab lobby, starting with State Department Arabists, has been active since the 1930s. My book focused on how the Saudis attempted, and sometimes succeeded in influencing U.S. policy. At the time, the other Gulf nations were far less involved in lobbying, but that has changed. The Post reported, for example, that since 2016, the UAE has spent more than $154 million on lobbyists, and “hundreds of millions of dollars more on donations to American universities and think tanks, many that produce policy papers with finding favorable to UAE interests.”

As of 2007, I wrote that Arab governments, and donors from Arab countries, had donated more than $320 million to American universities. Qatar had given $150 million, Saudi Arabia, more than $130 million, and the UAE $52 million. In a study published last year, I reported total contributions since 1986 had ballooned to more than $8 billion (most donated since 2015) with 80 percent coming from Qatar ($4.3 billion), Saudi Arabia ($2.1 billion) and the UAE ($1.1 billion).

Most of the Arab lobby is focused on Arab states, not the Palestinians. A tiny component of the lobby is pro-Palestinian. It is also the least influential. Even when the Arab states were lobbying the United States to oppose partition and, later, criticized support for Israel, their interest was never in the establishment of a Palestinian state. Even Jimmy Carter revealed in 1979, “I have never met an Arab leader that in private professed the desire for an independent Palestinian state.” Arab leaders might rant about Israel, but their primary interest was acquiring weapons, economic assistance, and promises of protection.

The UAE and the Arab lobby in general operate mostly below the radar. Unlike supporters of the Palestinians who make a lot of noise without having any influence, the Arab states prefer to remain invisible and quietly impact policy. The Arab states also lobby for something—their national interests—whereas homegrown pro-Palestinian groups primarily attack Israel.

Before deciding to finance political candidates, AIPAC also had a more Rooseveltian approach of speaking softly and carrying a big stick. The pro-Israel lobby, however, can’t avoid attention because of the conspiracy theories, sometimes promoted by the Arab lobby, about Jewish power and the constant media focus on Israel. By contrast, most Americans couldn’t find the Gulf states on a map let alone care about their lobbying activities.


Congress Eyes Investigation Into Anti-Israel Bias at Biden Justice Department
Garland is "using the FBI to attack and undermine one of our closest allies at the behest of the anti-Semitic Squad," Cruz said. "Merrick Garland has already done more damage to the FBI’s credibility and legitimacy than anyone in history, including [Richard] Nixon’s [attorney general] who was literally sent to prison."

Two senior congressional officials tracking the situation told the Free Beacon that the DOJ should prepare to face its own probe into politicized weaponization.

"We're going to find out who thought it was a good idea to unleash the FBI on Israel and reopen something that everyone else—including the president's State Department—had already resolved," said one of the sources, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

The second source, also not authorized to speak on record, said the DOJ’s probe is the result of the president hiring far-left progressive activists, including anti-Israel agitators, who are now working at all levels of government.

"Biden has seemingly filled every department with woke activists who hate Israel, and now they’re burrowing in," said the source, a veteran congressional official who works on Israeli issues. "They’re everywhere. It’s going to take years of investigations and work, and ultimately a new president, to even begin to fix the problem."

Pro-Israel organizations are also applying pressure on Congress to find out why the DOJ decided to reopen the Abu Akleh case.

"It is both shocking and appalling that the Department of Justice has allowed anti-Israel Members of Congress to pressure an allegedly independent arm of the executive branch into this investigation," Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the nation’s largest pro-Israel advocacy organization, said in a statement.

A senior official with a pro-Israel organization told the Free Beacon the DOJ probe "smacks of politics." The probe was announced shortly after conservative Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu—who was close with former president Donald Trump—was reelected as the country’s prime minister.
The Caroline Glick show: The Biden administration is weaponizing the FBI against Israel
In this week’s “Caroline Glick Show,” author Lee Smith joins Glick to talk about the Biden administration’s newest move against Israel: the FBI’s probe of the death of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh. Glick also warns against the frightening mainstreaming of antisemitism in the U.S.


Jonathan Tobin: Israel’s new coalition shouldn’t write off American Jewry
It’s true that evangelical Christians provide most of the pro-Israel muscle in American politics nowadays. But relying entirely on them, or on the minority of American Jews who are Orthodox, ignores a vast reserve of people who are, or who might be, persuaded to back Zionism.

It wasn’t that long ago that Conservative and Reform Jewry were bastions of pro-Israel sentiment. That has changed in recent decades, with evidence mounting that even many rabbis are adopting fashionable liberal stands according to which Israel is an illegal occupier and human-rights abuser.

That 90 students at the Reform and Conservative rabbinical seminaries signed an outrageous letter taking sides against Israel in the spring of 2021, when the Jewish state was under assault from thousands of rockets and missiles launched by terrorists in Gaza, was a seminal moment.

Against this travesty, a movement of rabbis dedicated to reviving support for Israel has arisen. The Zionist Rabbinic Coalition faces an uphill fight against long odds. But it is clearly in Israel’s interest for the organization to succeed in pushing back against these toxic trends that are rooted in antisemitism and woke ideology.

Letting the religious parties win on the conversion and Law of Return issues would effectively ensure that its efforts will have been in vain. That’s why it’s likely that Netanyahu, who understands Americans much better than most Israelis, is not likely to concede.

He is aware that writing off the vast majority of world Jewry would be a catastrophe, as well as a blow to Israel’s efforts to maintain its standing in the United States and to mobilize support from those Americans who are interested in helping the Jewish State.


Can Netanyahu stop Biden from strengthening a tottering Iranian regime?
In this week’s episode of “Top Story,” JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin speaks with columnist Ruthie Blum about the fallout from both the Israeli election and the American midterm elections. Blum says Israel is ready for a shift in policy on dealing with terrorism and crime as well as judicial reform from a new government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The two argue that a main challenge for Netanyahu will be dealing with the Biden administration’s commitment to a policy of appeasing Iran, even though the regime there is tottering. They also discuss former President Donald Trump’s prospects in the 2024 presidential race agreeing that his ego-driven attacks on fellow Republicans have undermined his case for leadership of the GOP.
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