Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: HRW

Showing posts with label HRW. Show all posts

Thursday, May 04, 2023

Human rights leaders agree: Incitement to violence is horrible and illegal. Incitement to murder Jews, however, is heroic.

Reuters, reporting on the suicide by starvation of Khader Adnan, writes, "Adnan was arrested and indicted in an Israeli military court on charges that included links to an outlawed group and incitement to violence."

As CAMERA notes, much of the coverage of his death imply that he was under administrative detention or that his hunger strike was about administrative detention. But in fact he was indicted and charged this time.

We don't know the specific example of incitement to violence that Adnan was charged with, but he has been captured on video explicitly calling for Palestinians to shoot and blow up Jews.

The UN has written papers on combating incitement and writes that such incitement is a violation of international law and several international conventions. It held a meeting only last year where all the participants from many countries unanimously agreed that incitement to violence is unacceptable under any circumstances.

Yet for Adnan's death, the UN supported the person who is on the record as calling for the murder of Jews.

Human Rights Watch is on the record for opposing direct incitement to violence in the DRC, in Ethiopia, in Greece and elsewhere. It says that Meta has not done nearly enough to combat incitement to violence on its Facebook and other platforms. Its official position for decades has been that HRW is against laws that prohibit indirect incitement, but it fully supports laws - supported by international law - against direct incitement to violence.

But when it comes to Palestinians directly inciting violence against Jews - not only Khader Adnan, but hundreds of examples that one can see in MEMRI and Palestinian Media Watch - Human Rights Watch is silent, and has not condemned such speech. On the contrary, HRW considers Adnan to be a hero.

Omar Shakir, their Middle East researcher, tweeted, "Make no mistake: Israel killed Khader Adnan. He valiantly struggled against injustice—multiple months-long hunger strikes against administrative detention—until his last breath. He never enjoyed a minute of freedom but dies w his head raised high. His resilience wont be forgotten."

Amnesty has also spoken out about incitement to violence in Myanmar, India, Brazil and elsewhere. But it has never denounced Palestinian incitement to violence against Jews. It also tweeted in support of Khader Adnan, describing him as a "father of 9" without even mentioning his leadership role in the Islamic Jihad terror group, let alone his own direct incitement to blow up Jewish civilians.

In fact, Amnesty's reporting of Adnan's death mentions that he was charged with incitement to violence - but instead of researching what he actually said, it implies that these are trumped up charges and that he was just acting like any normal person would:

In February 2023, Khader Adnan was arrested and indicted by an Israeli military court on charges of “incitement to violence” – largely based on his visits to the families of Palestinian prisoners and to funerals of those killed by Israeli forces.

That last phrase strongly implies that Amnesty knows about the video shown above, and knows that Adnan has called for blowing up Israelis, and instead of condemning Khader Adnan's clear call to murder Jews, Amnesty says that Israel is at fault for arresting him for incitement!

This isn't human rights. This is condoning incitement to murder Jews under the pretext of human rights.

The current wave of terror attacks against Israelis have not emerged in a vacuum. The attacks, especially the apparent "lone wolf" attacks where teens and women start stabbing Israelis or ram their cars into Jews, are a direct result of this sort of incitement that permeates Palestinian media and social media. Incitement kills - and "human rights organizations" know this, because they call it out in other contexts.

But when it comes to Israel, they either don't admit there is any incitement or they frame it as just a normal part of what it means to be a Palestinian. Khader Adnan is not someone who urges Palestinians to murder Jews but a human rights hero bravely protesting his being arrested - for urging Palestinians to murder Jews.

Human rights organizations have become a parody of human rights.

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!

"Pro-Palestinian" activists sure don't care about the suffering of Palestinians in Iraq

There are thousands of Palestinians still living in Iraq with essentially no rights. They have been attacked, and many killed, by Iraqis since 2003. They are not recognized in Iraq as a refugee group. Other Arab countries refuse to allow them to immigrate.

The Safa news agency interviewed Baghdad-based journalist Hassan Al-Khaled who said that there are some 6,000 Palestinians in Iraq, 70% of whom live below the poverty line. He aid that there is no joy this Eid al-Fitr for them.

In 1948, many Palestinians were forced by Iraqi forces to join them and fight against Israel. After their defeat, they were allowed to go to Iraq, where they were treated decently. That all changed after the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein, who had given them huge privileges.

In 2020, UNHCR dropped their rent subsidies for the Palestinian families, throwing them into an even deeper crisis.

Al-Khaled complained about the lack of relief associations or organizations that help Palestinians in Iraq, saying, "If there are any, the amount assistance they provide to the refugees is not enough for everyone."

Think about that. There are hundreds of NGOs in the Palestinian territories, and hundreds more that claim to aid Palestinians worldwide - and this journalist is not aware of a single NGO that provides aid to Palestinians in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Arab countries refuse to allow them to enter, even as hundreds of thousands of other refugees from Iraq have been allowed in. They use Israel as an excuse to keep Palestinians in misery in Iraq. HRW wrote in 2006:

The PLO and the Arab League have rejected in principle and actively discouraged in practice local integration or third-country resettlement of Palestinian refugees. Their view is that local integration or resettlement would negate the right to return of the resettled refugees. The Arab countries hosting large Palestinian refugee populations point to Israel's legal obligation to permit the refugees' return to justify their refusal to integrate the Palestinian refugees and afford them rights equal to their own citizens.

Jordan and Syria have (with some exceptions) refused entry to Palestinians who attempt to flee Iraq, in violation of the international legal prohibition against refoulement. When these two countries made temporary exceptions to their policies of refusal, they conditioned admission of Palestinian refugees on their confinement to camps, for example al-Ruwaishid camp in Jordan in 2003, and al-Hol camp in Syria in 2006. Because of the widely observed policy against resettlement of Palestinian refugees, these camp residents have already waited longer than other refugees fleeing Iraq, such as the Iranian Kurds, for access to third-country resettlement.

Just as with Lebanon, when Palestinians are brutally mistreated by an Arab nation, all of the "pro-Palestinian activists" are suddenly silent. The reason is because they are not pro-Palestinian at all, but anti-Israel. And using Israel as an excuse to actively keep Palestinians in misery - policies that are meant to hurt Palestinians because doing so might indirectly, one day, help weaken Israel - proves that this "anti-Israel" attitude is really antisemitism.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

"Human rights orgs" give the world permission to hate Jews again

In 2001, Barbara Perry wrote a book called "In the Name of Hate: Understanding Hate Crimes." Chapter 7, "Permission to Hate: Ethnoviolence and the State" says:

[H]ate-motivated violence can flourish only in an enabling environment. In the United States, such an environment historically has been conditioned by the activity-and inactivity-of the state. State practices, policy, and rhetoric often have provided the formal framework within which hate crime-as an informal mechanism of control-emerges. Practices within the state-at an individual and institutional level-that stigmatize, demonize, or marginalize traditionally oppressed groups legitimate the mistreatment of these same groups on the streets. This chapter examines the ways in which state rhetoric, policy, and practice provide the context for violence against minorities.

She brings examples of how political figures, by invoking or dog-whistling tropes against oppressed groups, enable hate crimes against the same groups.

The theory seems to have merit. After all, when bigotry is normalized, then the environment is riper for people who want to act in a bigoted way. They don't feel like they are outliers and they believe that there would be fewer consequences for their actions.

There was a cottage industry of people warning that Donald Trump's alleged bigotry would increase hate crimes, and then magically finding such correlations. (The increase in hate crimes began in the second term of the Obama administration, but for some reason no one seems to blame him.)

Relatively few people noted that there was a similar increase in hateful speech from the Left in the same time period - much of it directed at Trump voters.

To be sure, hate from the Left doesn't usually translate into direct hate crimes, while far-Right hate sometimes does. But hate is always directed at the Other - and it is just as reprehensible when the Other is black or gay, or whether The Other is Republican or live in flyover states.

A major barrier to having feelings of hate is that no one wants to believe that they are bigots. They want to believe that their hate is a righteous hate towards a group of people who richly deserve it. It just so happens that groups like Black people, gays, or women are easily categorized and hate towards them is more easily analyzed than hate for political opponents. However, the emotions are the same, and just as destructive - the same feeling of superiority versus the Other and the same imperative that the Other not have the same rights as those of the hater.

Which brings us to modern hate of Jews.

Jews are indeed a defined group with a rich history of victimhood. Outside of the fringe that are white supremacist or neo-Nazi, people don't want to think of themselves as having the label "antisemite.". The Holocaust is still in living memory and no one wants to be on the side of the Nazis.

But lots of people are itching for an excuse to hate Jews without being called antisemitic, indeed while claiming that they are against antisemitism. They want someone to give them permission to hate in a way that they can still look themselves in the mirror - or better yet, to consider themselves paragons of morality.

The UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other "human rights organizations" have been happy to jump in and provide exactly that permission.

Have you ever noticed that the thorough, multiple debunkings of the "apartheid" slander against Israel get no attention? It is partially because the modern antisemites aren't looking for real reasons to hate Israel and Israeli Jews - they are looking for permission to act on the hate they already had beforehand. Once an Amnesty or a UN gives them that permission, by giving Israel a label of "racist" or "Jewish supremacist," they can pretend that their hate is not toxic Nazi-style bigotry but righteous moral indignation. They have no desire to look beyond the modern slanders of accusing Jews of moral crimes - they have "experts" on their side, and that is all they need to legitimize this new bigotry. The 200 page papers don't need to be read or analyzed; they are meant to simply give permission for the masses to hate Jews eight decades after Auschwitz.

This is the same permission that Barbara Perry noted for bigotry on the Right. NGOs fulfill the functions of the Perry's state-supported hate - in fact, they are in some ways more respected because they position themselves as having no political agenda, only a moral one.

Apologists might argue that this Leftist antisemitism, if they even admit it exists, is still much less serious than far-Right antisemitism. The neo-Nazi antisemites are more likely to have guns and to directly murder Jews, while the Leftist antisemites are merely boycotting Israel. If you define the consequences of antisemitism merely by counting the bodies killed directly by the bigots, they would have a point.

However, we have seen in recent years that while the Leftist version of the world's oldest hatred might not directly attack Jews, it encourages Palestinians and Iranian proxies to attack them - and gives them their own moral cover.

They have created an additional false intellectual framework that claims that Palestinian terrorism is legitimate self defense, and that Israel has no right to defend itself or its citizens from Palestinian terror. They push lies that US military aid to Israel has no oversight and that US arms are being used for war crimes - with the intent to destroy Israel's ability to defend Jews from Palestinian terror. They fund "charities" and Palestinian NGOs that are tightly tied to, and often fronts for, terror groups like the PFLP.

This is simply another layer of looking for, and finding, permission to hate and dehumanize.

Jews killed by right-wing crazies in a synagogue in the US are just as dead as Jews killed by Palestinian Jew-haters while driving in their cars in Judea or exiting their synagogue in Jerusalem. But the Left doesn't consider the latter to be victims of antisemitism - the cognitive dissonance would be too painful So they construct yet another castle in the sky, backed up by academics, pretending that the Palestinians who openly admit and publish their hatred for Jews don't really hate Jews and that they are the victims, not the dead Jews.

The entire house of cards of Leftist justifications for hating Jews (and only Jews) in Israel would collapse in an instant if the "progressive" anti-Zionists would spend five minutes looking at the critiques of the "apartheid" slanders and absurd arguments justifying murdering Jews. Or ten minutes to compare Israel's supposed "crimes" with the acts of any other country in the history of warfare. But truth isn't their goal - they only want to have permission to engage in the same kind of bigotry that they claim is exclusive to the Right. Facts get in the way of their deep desire to put those uppity Jews in their place.

Today, in the streets of London, you can get a crowd of thousands to openly cheer the idea that Palestinians have the right to target and murder Jews, and only Jews, in Israel. They just change the word "murder" to "resistance" and terrorism magically transforms from a crime against humanity into a heroic action.

These bigots have permission from the UN, from Amnesty and HRW, from The Nation and Electronic Intifada, from Peter Beinart and Marc Lamont Hill and dozens of other "intellectuals," to hate Jews - and from there to incite the murder of Jews.

People wonder how the Holocaust could have happened. How, centuries after the Age of Enlightenment that normalized the concepts of human rights and equality, could an entire country be so brainwashed to hate Jews? How could such a hate be not only accepted but enthusiastically promoted by ordinary Germans?

The intellectual groundwork for such an event is being put in place in front of our eyes today.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

An epidemic of pseudo-intellectual antisemitism

As my Twitter account gains followers (over 1500 in the past month), it is also attracting a new breed of antisemite - one that many other Zionist social media stars have seen for years.

It is not only that these people cannot stand any posts that are pro-Israel. But they also cannot stand posts that mourn dead Jews - they predictably respond with mentions of dead Arabs or other alleged Israeli atrocities, as a kind of justification for murdering Jews.

But there is another class of people who respond to pro-Israel posts. These are the ones who cite "experts."

They quote UN resolutions, or book authors, or articles that have footnotes, or NGOs, as proof positive that Israel is in the wrong, every time.

These are the people who say that international law allows Palestinians to murder Jews as "resistance."

They quote Shlomo Sand saying there is no such thing as a Jewish people. They quote Amnesty and Human Rights Watch saying Israel is guilty of "apartheid." They love Ilan Pappe's history of 1948. They claim that there was no Arab antisemitism before Zionism. They call Zionism "colonialism." They claim that Zionists tried to stop Jews from being saved in the Holocaust if they weren't going to Israel and they colluded with the Nazis. They toss off terms like "Jewish supremacy" the exact same way Germans used to but it is OK because "human rights" experts say it, too. They claim that Israel has scores of laws that discriminate against Arab citizens. They insist that Israel has "Jewish-only roads" in the territories.

All of these claims have one thing in common: they are easily debunked, as my links here show.

The mindset of the modern antisemite is that Israel and Zionist Jews are evil ab initio. But they don't want to be tarred as antisemites, because antisemitism is bad and something that only the far-Right is guilty of. Therefore, when they see articles that seem to have a sheen of validity that confirm their pre-existing hate, they are happy to accept them and spread them without any skepticism.

We have a small set of intellectual antisemites - many of them Jewish themselves - who craft opinions that carefully choose the facts that support their bigoted positions, and hide the much larger set of facts that shred their arguments. Then there is a much larger set of antisemites who enthusiastically accept this core of intellectual antisemitism as gospel, and shut their ears to any proof that they are fraudulent.

These new antisemites pretend that they are basing their hate on facts when the reality is that they choose their facts to justify their hate.

There is no greater proof than watching how they seethe so much at anyone condemning the murder of Jewish civilians in Israel that they feel they must bury any possible sympathy for the families of the victims with an avalanche of propaganda.

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!

Another absurd anti-Israel report from HRW submitted to the UN

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch submitted a memorandum to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities about the problems of Palestinians with disabilities.

Not surprisingly, it places most of the blame for Palestinian leaders not adhering to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on - Israel.

Here is a section about how Israel restricts movement in and out of Gaza:

Human Rights Watch found that sweeping Israeli restrictions on the movement of people and goods, at times exacerbated by restrictive policies by Palestinian authorities, curb access to assistive devices, health care, and electricity essential to many people with disabilities.

For more than 15 years, Israeli authorities have blocked most of Gaza’s population from traveling through the Erez Crossing, the only passenger crossing from Gaza into Israel through which Palestinians can travel to the West Bank and abroad. Israeli authorities often justify the closure, which came after Hamas seized political control over Gaza from the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in June 2007, on security grounds. The closure policy, though, is not based on an individualized assessment of security risk; a generalized travel ban applies to all, except those whom Israeli authorities deem as presenting “exceptional humanitarian circumstances,” mostly people needing vital medical treatment and their companions, as well as prominent businesspeople.

Israeli authorities also significantly restrict the entry and exit of goods into Gaza. While there are no restrictions on the import of assistive devices, policies regarding “dual-use” items have restricted the entry of spare parts and batteries for hearing aids and other devices, according to the Israeli human rights group Gisha.[7] Medical Aid for Palestinians has documented that Israel has restricted as “dual-use” items carbon fiber components used to stabilize and treat limb injuries, and carbon fiber and epoxy resins used to produce artificial limbs, resulting in patients being fitted with heavier, more uncomfortable alternatives.

....Hamas authorities in Gaza and humanitarian organizations have sought to provide assistive devices to those in need of them, but their efforts often fall short. Gaza’s Social Development Ministry reported on its website in September 2017 that it had allocated US $500,000 in its 2018-2020 plan for assistive devices, but it is unclear what devices it secured and distributed, and what standards it relies on to assess need.[14]

....Under the CRPD, States Parties should take effective measures to ensure personal mobility, including by facilitating access to assistive technology and by promoting the availability, knowledge, and use of assistive devices and technologies.[16] International humanitarian law obliges occupying powers to ensure the safety and welfare of civilians living in the occupied territory.[17]

Israel’s sweeping restrictions on the movement of people and goods, at times exacerbated by restrictive policies by Palestinian authorities, restrict the right of people with disabilities to freedom of movement and access to assistive devices, as set out under articles 20 and 14 of the CPRD.

Here's how HRW's bias works:

It mentions a couple of times that Palestinian authorities also restrict Gazans from leaving the territory. But while it goes into some detail on Israeli restrictions, it doesn't say anything about the Palestinian restrictions. Is it Hamas or the PA? (The answer is both.)

This memorandum is meant as a submission to the CPRD review of Palestinian policies, as they are signatories to the CPRD and have specific obligations under that convention. Israel's policies on allowing Gazans into Israel are not a part of Palestinian responsibilities under the CPRD. HRW is using this as another excuse to bash Israel.

Notice also that the word "Egypt" is not mentioned once in this memo. It is another border through which people and goods can pass, but only Israel is responsible for restrictions, not Egypt.

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!

There is no inoculation for the virus of Jew-hatred

My post about Jimmy Carter's antisemitism last week prompts a question: but what about all the wonderful things he has done?

One cannot argue that Carter has not been sincere when he works with Habitat for Humanity, for example. His Middle East work may be influenced by his antisemitism, but he has worked on many other worthy causes. How can those things fit together?

But one can ask the same thing about lots of other antisemites. Alice Walker is a gifted poet and storyteller, but that doesn't make her immune from antisemitic attitudes. Roger Waters was a good songwriter in the 1970s, but that doesn't mean he doesn't harbor antisemitic attitudes. Roald Dahl wrote fantastic children's books, but also hated Jews.

Then again, we can go back in history and ask the same questions. Voltaire was a groundbreaking philosopher, but he was also a racist and antisemite. Martin Luther was a brilliant theologian and an obsessed Jew-hater.

If theology can coexist with hate, perhaps that invalidates the theology. But pioneers in theology and philosophy and humanitarianism and progressivism and socialism and science and even medical ethics have been found to be antisemites - and these are all fields that, in theory, if you believe their self-definitions, should be immune to antisemitic thought.

Obviously, theory is very different from practice.

Some people say that antisemitism is a conspiracy theory. Or that it relegated to the Right. Or that is is a form of bigotry that is part of a larger group of discriminations against race or sexual preference or age.

Yet it fits in no clear category. It morphs into new forms every few decades.

It is a virus with new strains coming out all the time.

Viruses have only one imperative - survive by adaptation. Right now the most virulent strain of antisemitism spreads by pretending to be outraged at how Jews act in Israel - and it cloaks itself by insisting that this current hate of Jews in Israel has nothing in common with the previous instances, despite the obvious parallels.

This is hardly the first time antisemitism pretended to be the opposite. In 1873, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a resolution on antisemitism that pretends to be philosemitic - but ends up wishing that all Jews should convert to Christianity.

Is this any different than modern antisemites who wish just as fervently that the Jewish state be destroyed, that Jews should live as second class citizens in a Muslim majority state and most of them should be ethnically cleansed? Is the Southern Baptist desire that all Jews see the light different from those who want all Jews to be "good Jews" who shed all nationalism and all attachment to the land of their ancestors?

And both of them claim to be doing it because they care so much about Jews.

The other strains of the antisemitic virus didn't die out. The Middle Ages strain is still there, the Christian strain still thrives in many places, the Nazi strain stays stubbornly alive and spreading. Social media has been a huge boon to the virus, allowing it to spread at the speed of light. People can work very hard for years to come up with a way to minimize the threat of one strain but another one can emerge and propagate in days.

Today, we hear people arguing against accusations of antisemitism. How can Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch be antisemitic when their entire organizations are based on human rights? How can Jeremy Corbyn be antisemitic when he is an avowed anti-racist?

The virus doesn't care what philosophy you have. Whatever you hate most in life can be linked to Jews, and usually is.

Instead of reflecting on the history of antisemitism that shows that anyone can catch the virus of antisemitism, many pretend that they are immune. Worse, they pretend that their progressivism or humanitarianism or anti-racism inoculates them from antisemitism - that they aren't and cannot be antisemitic because their worldview does not allow it.

On the contrary, the virus can grow in any medium. The anti-racists become antisemites by accusing Jews/Israelis of racism. The humanitarians become antisemites by accusing Jews of inhumanity. The very ideas that people believe make them immune to infection are the ones that spread it.

Just like before, they justify their hate as being based on facts, unlike all of their predecessors. even though those predecessors said the exact same thing. They write their articles and posts and tweets that show the exact same kind of irrational, obsessive hate that previous centuries of antisemites had.

As we know from recent experience, viruses are hard to eradicate. We still need to try. But we need to understand that the virus does not avoid anyone because of their belief system. On the contrary, it often uses that very belief system as a means of spreading further.

Beware of anyone who says they cannot be antisemitic because of their worldview. Instead, teach them about the history of antisemitism, and show that they have very prominent Jew-hating forebears, who were the world's leaders in theology, the arts, philosophy, science and the Enlightenment.

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!

Another child mujahid, and more silence from @UNICEF and other NGOs about Palestinians recruiting children

The Palestinian Amad news site shows this photo of another "child" killed by Israeli forces as they engaged in a battle upon entering the Al-Faraa camp to arrest terrorists that the Palestinian Authority refuses to.

Hmmm. 17-year old Mahmoud al-Aidi seems to be carrying something. A laptop bag, perhaps?

Not quite.

In this case, the IDF says that al-Aidi approached them with an explosive device.

In related "child martyr" news, 14-year old Qusai Radwan Waked, who was killed Sunday, appears to have been linked to Islamic Jihad, and was referred to as a "mujahid" in the Jenin Qassam Telegram channel while wearing the PIJ headband and showing the "tawhid" hand gesture popularized by ISIS and now used by Palestinian jihadists.

The martyr, the mujahid cub, Qusai Wakada, son of the town of Al-Arqa in Jenin, who was martyred yesterday while confronting the invading occupation forces in Jenin..

Palestinian militias are recruiting children and encouraging them to attack Israeli soldiers, knowing that their deaths are worth far more in public relations value than their military skills.

And yet NGOs that supposedly care about the welfare of children have been completely silent - because that dilutes from the false narrative of Israeli forces wantonly shooting children, which is also worth far more to them in fundraising value.

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!

Another child militant, aged 14, appears to have been linked to Fatah (UPDATE: Islamic Jihad)

From CNN:

Israeli forces raided the West Bank city of Jenin on Sunday, killing a 14-year-old boy, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said. Qusai Radwan Waked was shot in the abdomen, the ministry said.

The target of the raid was Jibril Zubeidi, who was detained, Israeli and Palestinian authorities said.

In a joint statement, the Israel Defense Forces, Border Police and Israel Security Agency said that during the raid, “armed individuals fired at the forces who responded back with live fire… Furthermore, suspects hurled explosive devices and rocks at the forces.

“We are aware of the reports regarding a number of armed individuals who got injured during the exchange of fire,” the Israeli statement said.

One Palestinian armed group, the Fatah-linked Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, is calling Waked a "heroic martyr," meaning that he was indeed involved in the battle.

But don't expect UNICEF, Defense for Children International Palestine, Human Rights Watch or Amnesty to investigate this poster to find out if Waked was indeed recruited as a fighter for Fatah.

They don't want to know.

UPDATE: It turns out he was a member of Islamic Jihad, which released this photo (h/t Adin):

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!

More reasons the "apartheid" libel is utterly false and antisemitic (infographic)

Last week, Human Rights Watch's "Senior EU Advocate," Claudio Francavilla, wrote an op-ed in the EU Observer:

The recent spike in deadly attacks and repression in the occupied West Bank should surprise no one. Last year, Israeli forces killed more Palestinians than in any other year since 2005, when the UN began systematically recording fatalities: 151, including 35 children. A little over a month, a new year and another Netanyahu-led government, the situation is only getting worse.

Already, we see the bias - and indeed hatred - that animates so-called "human rights experts" who are effectively, if not explicitly, antisemitic.

Yes, there were more Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank (although not Gaza) last year since the Second Intifada. But Francavilla pointedly leaves out three crucial facts - facts that are missing in virtually all left-wing analyses and articles.

The first is that the vast majority of the Palestinians killed were members of armed groups and/or actively involved in hostilities at the time they were killed. Once this is realized, the entire calculus is turned on its head - Israeli forces aren't killing Palestinians but defending themselves and Israelis against Palestinian militants.

The second is that the Israeli actions were a response to the increase of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. The latest terror spree started in March 2022, and Israeli incursions into the West Bank were to stop them.

The third is that armed militias such as the "Lion's Den" were allowed to form over the past 18 months. Their members - many of whom are also members of the ruling Fatah party - publicly strut through the streets of Jenin and Nablus under the noses of the Palestinian Authority that is obligated under existing agreements to combat them.

Cause and effect are ignored by Human Rights Watch, in its zeal to paint the Jewish state as evil - and as "apartheid:"

The government has also responded to Palestinian attacks on Israelis with collective punishment, a war crime in the occupied territory, including razing attackers' family homes.

It is an amazing sentence. He doesn't refer to Palestinian attacks on Jews as war crimes or even as collective punishment. Israel's response to terror, meant to end such attacks, are the only "war crimes" HRW's Francavilla is interested in addressing.

These abusive and discriminatory practices by Israeli authorities are not new: they further a policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and take place in the context of systematic oppression of Palestinians, which collectively amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

This conclusion, reached by Human Rights Watch and other international, Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, legal and UN experts — among many others — should make it impossible for the EU to continue to pretend that the repression of Palestinians is a temporary phenomenon best addressed in the context of the "peace process."

Earlier today I created an infographic to show the deception used by the three major so-called human rights organizations in creating new definitions of apartheid specifically to give Israel, and only Israel, that label.

B'Tselem, Al Haq and the UN, don't bother to use any legal definition of apartheid and simply make the assertion of Israeli apartheid with no proof. HRW and Amnesty - as well as the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard - try to shoehorn the definitions of apartheid in international law to fit to Israel by selectively taking texts from other documents out of context.

The latter groups base their arguments on the assumption that Israel's treatment of Palestinians who are not citizens of Israel differently from Jews are based on a national ethos of discrimination against Palestinians.

We've shown how the papers issued by HRW and Amnesty lie about the facts. To make their basic argument stick, that Israel discriminates against Palestinians based on "national origin," they must prove that Israel discriminates against Arab Israelis as well. To do that, they must egregiously lie.

HRW falsely claims Israeli Arabs do not have the same voting rights as Jews do and that Israeli Arabs cannot move beyond the Green Line, only Jews.

Amnesty falsely claims that not forcing Arab Israelis to join the army is evidence of discrimination (what about Haredi Jews?), and that Israel's raising the threshold of votes needed for small parties to enter Knesset discriminates against Arab parties (when in fact all of the parties who failed to reach the threshold in 2021 were Jewish parties.)

B'Tselem and HRW use as "proof" of apartheid the fact that Palestinian Arabs cannot travel freely in Israel while Israeli Jew can travel to parts of the West Bank. But Israeli Arabs and even non-Israeli Arab residents of Jerusalem have far greater freedom of movement than Israeli Jews do - they can go literally anywhere from the river to the sea, while Jews cannot enter areas A and B of the West Bank, and are severely restricted from the Temple Mount.

If that is your definition of apartheid, then it is apartheid against Jews!

Even beyond that, if you define Israel's policies as based on "national origin" and not citizenship, then you start to go down a bizarre slippery slope that ends in antisemitism.

Israel defines itself as the Jewish state. Its existence is based on the concept that Jews need a single place to live, in their ancestral homeland, where they will not suffer any discrimination whatsoever. Where there is no penalty for following Jewish law in observing the Jewish Sabbath and holidays. where Jews do not suffer discrimination on where they can raise their families. Where Jews can flee persecution to safety without having to remain stateless. This is not "Jewish supremacy" - this is Jewish survival. It is an oasis where Jews can freely be Jews in a way that they simply cannot be in any other country on Earth.

The "human rights groups" are claiming that the entire concept of a Jewish state and a place where Jews can walk freely without fear is wrong and "apartheid." That is antisemitism.

Beyond that, they claim that Israel is discriminating against Palestinians based on their "national origin." But they cannot point to any laws that favor Jews (primarily the Law of Return) that specifically discriminate against Palestinians as opposed to the entire world minus a tiny minority. As with jus sanguinis laws in other countries, these laws favor those of the same national origin versus everyone else; there is no discrimination against any specific group.

If that is apartheid, then most countries with jus sanguinis nationality laws are also guilty of apartheid.

But only the Jewish state is given that label.

Moreover, this also means that, according to these "human rights groups," even Jews whose families lived in Palestine for hundreds of years (or indeed since the days of the Second Temple) do not have a Palestinian "national origin." If they did, then Israel should be discriminating against them as well! Yet Palestinians who moved to the region as late as 1947 from Syria or Egypt do have a "national origin" of - Palestine!

What can you possibly call that except antisemitism?

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Palestinian media refuses to mention that today's terrorist murdered a six year old. Because that isn't "heroic."

From Times of Israel:

A six-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were killed and at least five others were wounded in a car-ramming terror attack near East Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood, police and medics said Friday. One of those wounded was a child in critical condition.

Graphic footage from the scene showed several people strewn on the ground after a blue Mazda vehicle crashed into a bus stop near the Nebi Samuel site, between Jerusalem and the Palestinian city of Ramallah.

The attacker was identified as Hussein Qaraqa, an Israeli citizen and resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya.

The six year old victim was named as Yaakov Yisrael Fali.
The second victim was identified as Alter Shlomo Lederman, a 20-year-old yeshiva student who had gotten married two months ago. He and his wife had been on their way to his parents’ home for Shabbat. Lederman was rushed to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in critical condition, where he succumbed to his wounds.

I went through every Palestinian media outlet that I could think of, and not a single one mentioned that the victim was a six year old child. They all just said that he was a "settler."

Because heroes don't kill children, and the murderer was a hero, therefore they cannot report that he murdered a child. The narrative is the important thing.

And, yes, the attack is described as a "heroic operation" in much of Palestinian media.

While they dehumanize Jews, they humanize murderers of Jews. The terrorist is described as a loving father of three, the oldest being 5 years old. Yes, children he chose to leave fatherless are more important than the ones he rammed his car into.

I am willing to bet that if anyone looks into his background, they will find that he had incentive to commit suicide and receive the guaranteed lifetime salary for his family paid for by the PLO. But no reporter will bother asking those questions. The narrative of a desperate Palestinian who has "no choice" but to murder Jews is too important.

The murderer was not an Islamic extremist. He was a leftist, and a fan (at least) of the PFLP group that is linked to so many Palestinian "human rights" organizations.

I have not seen a condemnation of the PFLP as a terrorist organization from any human rights group since the early 2000s.

After the last terror attack in Jerusalem, Human Rights Watch didn't write a word of condemnation until they could first blame Israel for sealing the house of the murderer's family. "Collective punishment" was the theme of their story that mentioned the attack.

Since they prioritize collective punishment as a worse crime than mass murder, I wonder if they would consider a Palestinian ramming his car into random Jews, ostensibly because of Israeli policies, as a case of collective punishment?

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American Bar Association caves to modern antisemites, condemns an "antisemitism" that could mean anything

The American Bar Association proposed a Resolution 514 condemning antisemitism that referred to the widely accepted IHRA working definition.

Israel haters immediately attacked.

More than 40 organizations, both those that are explicitly anti-Israel and "progressive" organizations, joined a campaign claiming that the IHRA Working Definition chills free speech. "Any embrace of the IHRA definition by the ABA would legitimize and encourage this undermining of core democratic rights," they say, without explaining exactly how.

The National Lawyers Guild said, falsely, that "the IHRA definition would provide a tool to stigmatize and suppress lawyers, legal advocates and law students from expressing political criticism of Israel or advocacy for Palestinian human rights." Of course, they cannot point to any wording in the IHRA definition that would do anything like that.

Human Rights Watch wrote a similar letter.

The main point that these critics make is that the IHRA definition has supposedly been used to suppress free speech. They cannot point to where the definition actually does that, because it doesn't mandate anything: the definition is filled with caveats that in the end only provide guidance. If the IHRA Working Definition is being misused, then these organizations should fight the misuse, not the definition. The fact that they don't tells you all you need to know.

Moreover, the ABA resolution explicitly said that nothing in the resolution is intended to diminish or infringe upon the Bill of Rights or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so even if their lies about IHRA were true, the text wouldn't allow it to be misused that way.

They are lying when they say that their opposition to the definition is based on human rights and free speech concerns. The only problem they have with it is that it notes that singling out Israel as uniquely evil far out of proportion to its supposed crimes is antisemitic. And they want to have the right to do exactly that.

Their objections are based on their hate of the Jewish state, not their interest in Palestinian human rights or in fighting antisemitism.

The original draft resolution also included an attached 17 page report on antisemitism that went through a history of antisemitism in Europe and in the US. It mentioned Natan Sharansky's "3-D" test for antisemitism as well as further references to the IHRA and US State Department definitions of antisemitism.

In the end, the ABA removed everything that could be considered a definition, including virtually the entire report, and left the eviscerated resolution to condemn something that could mean anything:

Without a definition, this is entirely meaningless. Some Israel haters define antisemitism as hating Arabs. Others define Zionism as antisemitism. There is nothing in this resolution that contradicts those bizarre definitions.

The resolution doesn't even mention Jews - only a single reference to improving security at "Jewish institutions and organizations." It mentions "houses of worship," not synagogues.

Right now, the resolution is about as meaningful as a resolution saying that puppies are cute. It is a checkbox - now the ABA can say they oppose antisemitism (whatever that is)! Mazel tov!

Because of the modern antisemites who use obsessive, conspiracy-theory driven hate of Israel as a proxy for the age old obsessive, conspiracy-theory driven hate of Jews, the ABA believes that it passed a resolution that didn't upset anyone.

Well, this Jew is upset.

The Jews who publicly identify as Jews, those who wear identifiably Jewish clothing, those who publicly support the Jewish state or speak Hebrew in public or who stand proud in their Zionism - they are the biggest targets and victims of antisemitism today.

This resolution doesn't give a damn about them.

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

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Predictable: HRW doesn't mention Neve Yaakov massacre until they can condemn Israel for something else

Human Rights Watch's website was silent on the Neve Yaakov massacre last Friday night.

Six days later, they do mention it - in the context of an article condemning Israel for sealing up the houses of the family of the murderer.

The pattern, which we often see in the media as well, is predictable. When Gaza groups shoot rockets, the media only condemns Israel's reaction. When a terrorist kills Jewish civilians, human rights groups wait as long as they can to create a context where Israel is the guilty party.

In this case, murdering civilians is on the same moral plane as sealing the house of a terrorist.

Look how HRW frames the attack in Neve Yaakov:

Israeli authorities’ actions to seal the family homes in the occupied West Bank of two Palestinians suspected of attacks against Israelis amount to collective punishment, a war crime, Human Rights Watch said today.

This punitive measure, which Israeli authorities have said they will follow by demolishing the homes, comes amid a spike in violence that has cost the lives of 35 Palestinians and 6 Israelis since January 1, 2023. The violence has included Israeli army raids that unlawfully attack Palestinian cities and refugee camps, Palestinian attacks on Israelis, and attacks on Palestinians and their property by Israeli settlers, who rarely face punishment for these crimes.

“Deliberate attacks on civilians are reprehensible crimes,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “But just as no grievance can justify the intentional targeting of civilians in Neve Yaakov, such attacks cannot justify Israeli authorities intentionally punishing the families of Palestinian suspects by demolishing their homes and throwing them out on the street.”

Notice how you can never find a straight condemnation of attacks on Jews without a caveat or a "context" in the same sentence. As if sealing or demolishing a home is just as bad as murdering people.

Neither Amnesty nor Human Rights Watch had a stand-alone article condemning Palestinian terror attacks last year when there were several mass casualty events against civilians. Those attacks are also buried in this HRW article, seemingly mentioned for the first time on the site, and do not rate a full sentence: "The [Jenion] raid follows more than 10 months of intensified Israeli army raids in the West Bank, after several deadly attacks by Palestinians inside Israel in March 2022."

There were also fatal attacks in April and May and October and November, but HRW already dedicated about 10% of the article to attacks on Israelis, and that is way above their quota already.

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

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An analysis of Ken Roth's tweets prove his anti-Israel obsession and lack of credibility as a human rights expert

On Thursday I wrote about The Nation article claiming that Ken Roth, formerly head of Human Rights Watch, was unfairly passed over for a position at Harvard Kennedy School because of powerful Jews who didn't like his being a critic of Israel.

The argument, as I showed then, was absurd. Even according to the article, "Roth’s tweets on Israel were of particular concern."

Since then, the "progressive" crowd has been amplifying The Nation story - and its subtle antisemitic trope of rich Jews who try to control free speech - with no skepticism. Roth has also been tweeting the story.

So while I had looked previously at Roth's anti-Israel tweets many times and identified lots of bias and lies, I decided to do a survey of his tweets in 2021, the year before his Harvard rejection, to objectively prove that he has an anti-Israel obsession.

I looked at every tweet of Roth's that used the phrase "war crime" or "war crimes" during the year and counted which countries he was referring to. Some tweets referred to more than one country or entity - for example, Syria and Russia both bombing civilians in Syria - and I would count tweets like that for both countries.

The results are stunning.

In 2021, Roth associated Israel of war crimes 65 times, more than triple any other country or organization.

The only reason Hamas and the PA are in second place is because of his Israel obsession as well - he usually mentioned "war crimes by both sides" when talking about Hamas rockets during the May Gaza war, but most of his tweets about Israel mentioned only Israel.

Is Israel 10 times worse than Russia? Six times worse than Syria? And infinitely worse than North Korea, who didn't get accused of war crimes once?

This is not "criticism of Israel." This is obsessive, psychotic hate, which is part of a consistent pattern we've seen over years of his tweets. And his 2021 tweets were even more obsessive over Israel than his 2020 tweets were.

In that year, 2021, Roth tweeted real antisemitism as well, by blaming British antisemitism on Jews rather than on the attackers. And shortly afterwards implied that American Jews who were upset about Ben and Jerry's anti-Israel moves were acting on behalf of the Israeli government - the age-old dual loyalty trope that is a sure sign of antisemitism.

But the sheer number of anti-Israel tweets, and scores of flatly false accusations of war crimes (neither settlements nor Israeli actions in Gaza are illegal, let alone war crimes), prove without a doubt that Roth has no credibility.

I have plenty of other evidence that Human Rights Watch under Roth was also obsessed with Israel - but the tweets are his own words, from his own keyboard, and these statistics cannot be denied. Roth has a crazed obsession with demonizing Israel. The numbers don't lie, and anyone can reproduce my research.

Harvard did the right thing.

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

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Ken Roth rejected from Harvard Kennedy Center fellowship. The Nation explains: Rich Jews control the school, that's why it hates human rights. (update)

The Nation has a 5,000 word article blaming Jews for Ken Roth being rejected from a fellowship position at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

After describing how the Carr Center wooed Roth, it says the crushing news about the victim who made a $600K+ salary:

Elmendorf informed the Carr Center that Roth’s fellowship would not be approved.

The center was stunned. “We thought he would be a terrific fellow,” says Kathryn Sikkink, the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School.

Sikkink was even more surprised by the dean’s explanation: Israel. Human Rights Watch, she was told, has an “anti-Israel bias”; Roth’s tweets on Israel were of particular concern. Sikkink was taken aback. In her own research, she had used HRW’s reports “all the time,” and while the organization had indeed been critical of Israel, it had also been critical of China, Saudi Arabia—even the United States.

It is curious that a human rights academic cannot fit into her brain that both "HRW criticized other counties" and "HRW, and particularly Roth, exhibited a severe anti-Israel bias" could both be true.

I've documented that bias exhaustively. So have many others. But The Nation discounts that, saying that NGO Monitor is an unreliable, biased source for information, without mentioning a single incorrect thing it ever said. It quotes Roth's bizarre thesis as to why NGO Monitor's Gerald Steinberg might find him biased:

Roth rejects such claims. Most people knowledgeable about Israel, he says, understand that NGO Monitor “is a profoundly biased source” that “has never found a criticism of Israel’s human rights record to be valid.” Roth thinks that Steinberg was “particularly incensed that I dared to criticize Israel even though I am Jewish and was drawn to the human rights cause by my father’s experience living in Nazi Germany.” His father escaped to New York in 1938 when he was 12, and Roth grew up hearing many “Hitler stories.”

This is a completely baseless claim, but The Nation finds it compelling.

Then the article starts to veer into antisemitic territory.

According to people knowledgeable about the school’s programs, its administration is terrified of touching anything related to Palestine, and Palestinian voices have largely been silenced. That’s due not to any particular administrator, they say, but to “the ethos of the place” and the people who fund the Belfer Center.

Prominent among those people is Robert Belfer, who has donated more than $20 million to the Kennedy School since the 1980s—money that has come from his family’s fortune.

In addition to the Kennedy School, he and his wife, Renée, have given to an array of cultural institutions, medical research centers, private schools, universities, and Jewish and Israeli institutions. In a 2006 interview with the US Holocaust Museum, Belfer observed that most of his extended family (including his paternal grandparents) perished in World War II—a loss that gave him “a sense of identity” of “being Jewish, of being very supportive of Israel.”

According to the 990 forms of his family foundation, between 2011 and 2015 Belfer gave more than $300,000 to the American Jewish Committee, on whose board of governors he sits. In 2018, he joined with the Anti-Defamation League to endow a new fellowship at the Belfer Center to study disinformation, hate speech, and toxic content online. Every year, the school hosts three ADL Belfer Fellows. In short, the primary funder of the Belfer Center has been a significant backer of two of the groups—the AJC and the ADL—that Peter Beinart cited as assailing human rights organizations because of their criticism of Israel.

So because Peter Beinart, who accuses Israel of Jewish supremacy and want to see the destruction of the Jewish state, says that the AJC and the ADL are anti-human rights - an absurd claim - that proves that one of their funders hates human rights as well.

And it must be emphasized that while the article repeats that criticism of HRW and Amnesty is because of their criticism of Israel, it isn't. It is because of their obsessive lies about Israel. Provable, easily researchable lies.

Now the article goes into Mapping Project territory, finding links between the Kennedy Center and Jews to discredit it:

[Belfer and his son] sit on the Dean’s Executive Board...The board’s chair, David Rubenstein, is the cofounder and former CEO of the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant.... The 16 members of the Dean’s Executive Board also include Idan Ofer and his wife, Batia. Idan is the son of Sammy Ofer, an Israeli shipping magnate who until his death in 2011 was one of Israel’s richest men. Worth about $10 billion, Idan has come under fire in Israel for moving to London to reduce his tax bill and for a lavish lifestyle highlighted by the €5 million party that he threw on the island of Mykonos for his 10th wedding anniversary.

The Kennedy School dean cannot afford to lose the confidence of this board.

The article doesn't say a word about any ties between Ofer or Rubinstein to any Israeli or Jewish causes. It doesn't have to. Their names tell you all you need to know.

Also on the board are people with Muslim names like Hazem Ben-Gacem (apparently Tunisian) and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani (Iranian.) No reason to mention them, though.

And in case you think I'm being paranoid about the antisemitism underlying this article, it says this:

In 2018, the Kennedy School opened a renovated campus, made possible by a capital campaign that raised more than $700 million. Anchoring it were three buildings bearing the names Ofer, Rubenstein, and Wexner. “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” Dean Elmendorf said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Oh my God - so many Jewish names - who shape Harvard's Kennedy School!

Rich Jews control Harvard's Kennedy School, and that's why the school opposes human rights.

What other evidence do you need?

(h/t Andrew P)

UPDATE: Stephen Walt, co-author of the widely criticized "The Israel Lobby", is still today the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. If Belfer was the nutty Zionist censor The Nation makes him out to be, and if the Kennedy School is so terrified of allowing critics of Israel to be there, why do they allow Belfer's name to be associated with someone whose anti-Israel positions are so well known? (h/t Ian)

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!