10/20 Links Pt2: For Israel’s 75th Birthday, Hollywood Should Raise a Toast; Shapiro says Kanye West is spouting anti-Semitism that resembles Nazi propaganda

From Ian:

Gil Troy: For Israel’s 75th Birthday, Hollywood Should Raise a Toast

Now that the High Holy Days are over, let’s start planning what should be the most hyped holiday of this year: Israel’s 75th birthday. Although Israel was founded on May 14, 1948, its diamond jubilee celebration will be, by the Hebrew calendar, on April 26, 2023, 189 days from today. Although only six months remain to figure out how to celebrate the greatest modern Jewish miracle, few Jewish organizations or Israeli leaders seem to have noticed or started planning.

Last May, I tried triggering some brainstorming about how to celebrate this culmination of the arc of Zionist triumph: starting last August with the Zionist Congress’s 125th anniversary, building through this November 29, with the 75th anniversary of the United Nations’ 1947 recognition of Israel and culminating with Israel’s 75th birthday. Celebrating those three moments toasts the idea of a Jewish state, the world’s recognition of that idea and Israel’s realization of that noble, liberating idea.

As the date approaches, I become more dismayed by the organizational and political torpor, and as anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attacks metastasize, it’s clear that we need our friends in Hollywood to help make this moment.

The war against Israel and the Jewish people is now a cultural war. When there is so much hatred against what Israel is, not just what Israel does, when bash-Israel-first has become an instinctive posture, an obsessive pursuit and a shorthand for proving yourself to others, the battleground must shift. I still advocate the Zionist salons, Israeli historical exhibitions, Diamond Jubilee Presidential medals, Zionized haggadot and ice-cream-for-breakfast-eating initiatives I championed last spring.

But in our wired world, where American adults average 11 hours of interacting with media daily and four and a half of those hours being entertained, the pro-Israel entertainment community must mobilize. It may be wise, as in baseball to hit ‘em where they ain’t, in celebrating Israel. We’ve got to reach them where they are.

In that spirit, I offer two suggestions modeled on two successful initiatives. We need 75 Israel jubilee minutes in Hebrew, English, French, and Spanish, modeled on America’s Bicentennial Minutes and the Charles R. Bronfman Foundation’s (CRB) Canadian Heritage Moments. These Israeli history snippets should culminate in a big, brassy, schmaltzy celebration of Israel, modeled on the Saturday Night Seder thrown together in two weeks during 2020’s COVID lockdown, which attracted over a million viewers when streamed on its own website and on YouTube that Passover.

Demand for probe into BBC coverage of Jews and Israel

The JC is launching a public online petition today demanding a parliamentary inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of Jews and Israel.

The move comes after a string of controversial stories by the BBC caused concern in the Jewish community — followed by BBC responses that only deepened that concern.

This week, the BBC admitted unfairly criticising Israel in a report on the beheading of a gay Palestinian by other Palestinians. And six weeks ago, an open letter to BBC Director-General Tim Davie demanding impartiality on Jewish issues was ignored.

Delivered in September, the landmark letter was signed by politicians from both Labour and the Conservatives, from both houses of Parliament, with Jewish groups and public figures.

It also requested the corporation to stop repeatedly hosting Abdel Bari Atwan, an Islamist pundit who has frequently praised terrorism.

Its 36 signatories included former Tory leader Lord (Michael) Howard, the government’s former terror czar Lord (Alex) Carlile and former BBC governor Baroness (Ruth) Deech, as well as historians Simon Sebag Montefiore and the newly-ennobled Andrew Roberts and playwright Steven Berkoff.

“We urge you urgently to take cogent and coherent steps to rectify this worrying trend across your platforms as a matter of the utmost urgency, and look forward to your swift confirmation that this is being done,” the message said.

But the BBC has not replied. At the beginning of September, a BBC spokesperson told the JC: “We’ll get something to you in due course.” There has been no further communication.

It followed the BBC’s contested coverage of an attack on Jewish youngsters on Oxford Street last Chanukah, which reported as fact the disputed allegation that the victims had used a racial slur. The BBC’s reaction to complaints triggered an ongoing probe by Ofcom.

£30,000 reward offered to catch Oxford Street attackers

Jewish groups in Britain are offering a reward of £30,000 (nearly $34,000) to find those responsible for an attack on a busload of Jewish teenagers in Central London during Chanukah last year.

The move comes after the Metropolitan Police Service closed its investigation without identifying any suspects.

The young passengers, a Chabad group of British Jews and Israelis from northwest London, were on the bus on Oxford Street during holiday celebrations in November 2021 when a group of Arab men began yelling and banging on the vehicles. As video of the incident showed, the men even tried breaking the windows and gave a Nazi salute.

No one was injured in the attack and police began an investigation, calling the incident a hate crime.

In a statement given to the Jewish News in the U.K. earlier this month, the Metropolitan Police said they had received tips as to who the assailants were, however, “the only names provided in response to those appeals have been eliminated from our inquiries. The identity of those involved is still unknown. A decision was taken in July to close the case.

“Hate crime of any kind is unacceptable,” the police said in the statement. “Should new information come to light that provides a realistic line of inquiry, we will of course be willing to carry out further investigation.”

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Even Israeli lab-grown meat is colonialist, according to this academic

Israel is a leader in lab-grown cultured meat. But according to at least one academic, this is symbolic of Israeli colonialism.

Yes, really.

Efrat Gilad is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Bern. She wrote "A Colonial Legacy of Cultured Meat" describing how Israel's meat industry, including its recent leadership in lab-grown cultured meat, is really all just a history of Jewish colonialism.

Without the politics, the article would be a pretty good overview of the history of the meat industry in Palestine since Ottoman times. But instead, it is a screed about how evil Jews have upset the wonderful balance of nature in Palestine by introducing a meat-based diet into the region.

You see, native Palestinians didn't consume much meat. But the evil Ashkenazi Jews who selfishly returned to Palestine to save their lives from pogroms brought with them a love of meat, and that transformed the country into something it was never meant to be.

In Europe, Jews had been associated with the cattle trade since the Middle Ages. But in Palestine, consuming meat depended on Palestinian peasants and regional Arab breeders. Jewish actors (importers, butchers, religious authorities, urban officials) tried to gain more ground in the country’s meat trade. In the 1930s, Jewish cattle dealers began to import cattle from Europe, relying on their old continental networks. By shipping in animals from overseas, Jewish dealers expanded Palestine’s regional trade into a transcontinental trade. This ...allowed Jewish dealers to penetrate the country’s meat trade by importing to Palestine European bovines three times the size of local species.

...Tel Aviv, for example, was the settlement’s most important city financially, demographically, and also in terms of meat consumption. Its emerging meat infrastructures – especially its slaughterhouse built in 1931 – facilitated the expansion of the city, and by proxy, the entire Jewish settlement.

Rather than a land of milk and honey, settlers hankered for meat as the material manifestation of arriving at a utopia of prosperity and plenty. Increasing Jews’ access to meat in Palestine under British rule may have been against economic ideals, but still served the Zionist goal: the expansion of the settlement and the colonization of Palestine.

I suppose that their draining the malaria-infested swamps was also a colonialist interference to destroy the natural beauty of Palestine.

Gilad goes on to describe the austerity period after the War of Independence when there was very little meat, and Israeli attempts to create vegetable-based substitutes, as a precursor to today's cultured meat industry. She includes this marvelous cartoon from Maariv in 1949:

“We have been informed of the invention of “artificial meat” in our country, and it was produced from mushrooms and eggplant..” - “What kind of animal is this?” - "It's an artificial cow!"

But she absurdly interprets a brief history of the Israeli meat market by the Tnuva conglomerate as evidence of how Israelis hate Palestinians:

On its website, the company recalls how it entered the meat business: Until 1948 meat supplies depended on “Arab agriculture and nomadic Bedouins. But with the creation of the state, this main source of meat disappeared”. Echoing the hegemonic Israeli stance, Tnuva’s website reduces Palestinians to a “source of meat” and their forced exodus to a “disappearance”.

If you write a history of meat that doesn't center Palestinian suffering, you must be a racist colonialist pig.

In short, when Zionists import beef, it is colonialist. When they try to create ersatz substitutes, it is colonialist. When they lead the world in cultured meat, it is colonialist.

Anti-Zionist glasses are a requirement for academia

Her very thesis that meat is an alien part of the Middle East diet brought in by colonialist European Jews is another manifestation of viewing the world through anti-Zionist glasses. The consumption of meat in Arab countries today roughly corresponds with wealth, not historic diet habits. The per capita consumption of meat in Gulf states - almost all of it imported - is not much different than that of Israel. 

And guess who consumes the most meat in the Arab world?  Palestinians, by far! 

No doubt, Gilad would blame Israel for irrevocably ruining the diet of the natives.

As countries become richer, they buy more meat. It has nothing to do with colonialism. It has everything to do with the crazy idea that people like meat. 

Ascribing Jewish colonialist and racist motives for what is a consumer preference and economic issue is just a more sophisticated  - and academically approved - version of antisemitism. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Israeli firm will design helmet for F-35 pilots

The best part about this story is that it is being reported by Hezbollah's organ Al Manar:

An Zionist company has been selected to take part in manufacturing hi-tech helmets for pilots of the US F-35 stealth fighter, Zionist Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said Sunday.

He said in a statement that Elbit Systems and its US partner Rockwell Collins have been chosen by the Pentagon and F35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin to supply helmets for the next generation of the Joint Strike Fighter, the hi-tech warplane that is supposed to serve as the backbone of future American air power.

Elbit Systems designed the helmet for the fighter.

"The new helmet, which is to be manufactured in the United States, is capable of putting flight data as well as data about weapons systems and intelligence before the pilot's eyes," it said, adding that it would be delivered as standard with every F-35 purchased around the world from 2016.

Al Manar is actually overstating Israel's case a bit; the helmet is a joint venture between Elbit and Rockwell Collins. But it sounds like an amazing technical achievement:

Lockheed said the move amounted to a vote of confidence in the main helmet and efforts to
resolve earlier problems. "To date, more than 100 F-35 pilots have flown more than 6,000 flights and 10,000 hours with the helmet, and their feedback has been very positive," said Lorraine Martin, Lockheed executive vice president and F-35 general manager.

...The Gen 3 helmet will include an improved night vision camera, new liquid-crystal displays, automated alignment and software improvements. The Gen 3 helmet to be introduced to the fleet in low rate initial production Lot 7 in 2016 will meet program requirements to complete test and development in 2017. Rockwell Collins ESA Vision Systems LLC also developed the Gen 2 helmet that F-35 pilots currently use, which will meet the needs for the US Marine Corps to declare Initial Operational Capability in July 2015.

The F-35 HMDS provides pilots with unprecedented situational awareness. All the information that pilots need to complete their missions through all weather, day or night is projected on the helmet’s visor. Additionally, the F-35’s Distributed Aperture System (DAS) streams real-time imagery from six infrared cameras mounted around the aircraft to the helmet, allowing pilots to “look through” the airframe.

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