08/28 Links Pt1: The Deadly Militia "Spotters" of Jenin; IDF kills Palestinian kids without recourse, claims HRW; Libyan foreign minister fired after meeting with Israel, fleeing country

From Ian:

JCPA: The Deadly Militia "Spotters" of Jenin

In recent months, Palestinian militias in the West Bank have introduced improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and roadside bombs into their arsenal.

Palestinian spotters alert other units of the approach of an Israeli vehicle so ambushes can be set and roadside bombs triggered.

Palestinian Salim Awad showed CNN a 16-minute video of Israeli military vehicles in Jenin during the fighting in which Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh was killed.

The footage tells us that the spotter was filming and transmitting the location of Israeli armored vehicles.

A plausible answer to the question of Abu Akleh's death is that she stood between Israeli soldiers who believed they were in danger and spotter Salim Awad, filming their location and transmitting his video.

Daniel Greenfield: Biden’s Terror Funding Just Killed an Israeli Preschool Teacher

Batsheva’s murder, like that of the 74 terror victims killed under Biden, was paid for directly and indirectly through foreign aid to terrorists and sanctions relief on Iran’s terror regime. These policies were not undertaken in ignorance, the OFAC documents provide clear evidence that the Biden administration had been warned that it was funding terrorism and that people would die.

That’s why the number of Israelis continues to climb every year that Biden has been in office.

After 7 Israelis, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed in a Sabbath terrorist attack outside a synagogue in January 2023, Secretary of State Blinken met with Mahmoud Abbas and promised another $50 million to UNRWA which acts as the employment agency for Hamas. Earlier that same month, the Biden administration warned Israel to turn over $39 million in tax revenues to terrorists rather than providing that money to help terror victims rebuild their lives.

In August, with 4 Israelis already murdered, the Biden administration demanded that Republicans stop blocking $75 million in “humanitarian aid” to the UN agency. Sen. Jim Risch and Rep. Michael McCaul are determined to block that aid until Secretary of State Blinken certifies that UNRWA “is not affiliated with U.S. designated foreign terrorist organizations”. And yet the Biden administration can’t seem to even manage to clear that lowest of legal bars.

In Batsheva’s hometown of Efrat, which the Biden administration considers an “illegal settlement” despite being referenced numerous times in the bible, the children have lost a teacher and a friend.

The murdered preschool teacher had been on the way to “prepare the kindergarten for the start of the year.” A woman who worked with her described how “every time I entered the kindergarten, she welcomed me with a beaming smile that always accompanied her. The children were everything to her, she always hugged them and gave what she could to the children, the staff, the parents.”

Batsheva did not have to die. None of the 26 already killed this year did. The 3 dead in 2020 show what’s possible. The Biden administration is knowingly funding the murder of the innocent.

Bassam Tawil: How US Politicians Empower Anti-American Jihadists and Other Aggressors

When people such as Vivek Ramaswamy, a candidate for the Republican Party nomination in the 2024 US presidential election, call for decreasing aid to Israel, they are actually sending a message of support to the mullahs in Tehran and their proxies, Hamas and PIJ, as well as the Iran-funded Hezbollah terrorist militia in Lebanon and to nations that would like to see Israel and America "out of the way."

For Israel's enemies, statements such as "cutting aid" are a sign that America is about to throw Israel under the bus, paving the way for them to proceed with their plan to destroy Israel.

The timing of Ramaswamy's call for cutting US aid to Israel could not have been worse. It came at a time when Jews are being murdered by Palestinians on an almost weekly basis. The terrorists are waging their campaign of murder because they want to drive all Jews out of Israel. The terrorists are undoubtedly happy to hear a Republican candidate talk about decreasing aid to Israel. They are hoping Israel will be made weaker. With less US backing, it will be easier to destroy.

The terrorists and others have, even more, long been seeking to end US "hegemony" in the Middle East. They consider the US an enemy of Arabs and Muslims and dictators everyplace. Ending US aid to Israel would not just be the first step toward undermining Israel, it would also be the first step to ending US influence in the Middle East -- the way then US President Barack Obama's abandoned Syria -- the best gift the US could ever give to Iran, Russia, China, Turkey, Qatar, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, Algeria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia and on and on.

The terrorists who want to destroy Israel also want to destroy the United States -- for supporting exactly those freedoms both countries embrace, and which their detractors falsify as "biased."

"Instead of prioritizing social programs and economic development, the PA rewards and encourages this violence, spending more than $300 million a year incentivizing murder. This "pay to slay" policy, funded by the UN, EU, and many governments, rewards those who commit violence (including children) with cash payments. The greater the crime and the more victims injured or killed, the more money received. This campaign targeting children begins from birth and continues throughout childhood and the teenage years. It takes place through state media, schools (including those run by UNRWA), youth groups and centers, and sporting and cultural events in both the West Bank and Gaza." — NGO Monitor, March 1, 2023.

The US doesn’t write Israel a blank check. The strategic alliance between the two countries is mutually beneficial.

Let’s break it down… pic.twitter.com/PkSAILF2f2

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 27, 2023

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Another child soldier that UNICEF doesn't care about

The official Palestinian Wafa news agency reports:

Today, Tuesday, a child from the town of Zababdeh, south of Jenin, was killed by bullets from the Israeli occupation.

The director of Al-Razi Hospital in Jenin, Fawaz Hammad, told Wafa that the child Othman Atef Abu Kharj (17 years old) died of injuries he sustained at dawn today, during the clashes that erupted after the storming of the town.

The description of his death by Islamic Jihad is a little different:

The Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, celebrated, on Tuesday morning, the highest examples of jihad and steadfastness, its fighter son, Othman Atef Abu Kharj, one of the fighters of the deterrence unit in the Al-Quds Brigades, who rose as a martyr, God willing, during his confrontation with his mujahideen brothers.

The Brigades said in a military statement: "We are in the Al-Quds Brigades and we bid farewell to a heroic mujahid knight who is witnessed by the battlefields to confirm that the blood of the martyrs will remain fuel for the continuation of the resistance approach, and that these sacrifices that our heroic mujahideen make will not be lost, and will be a motive for the continuity of engagement and fighting, and will not be lost." We meet our enemy only with bullets and more resistance.

Interestingly, they claim that Kharj was 18 years old, while all other Palestinian media quote the ministry of health saying he was 17.

Yesterday I noted that for the first time I can recall, the UN chided Palestinian terror groups for exposing children to paramilitary "summer camps" as well as for endangering Palestinian children by placing booby traps in camps for IDF vehicles. But although the UN's OCHA-OPT closely monitors every death in the territories, they have never mentioned that terror groups like Islamic Jihad actively recruit and use child soldiers. 

I cannot find any mention of Palestinian child soldiers in UNICEF reports on "the state of Palestine" either. Defense for Children International - Palestine never mentions that the children killed were members of armed groups and actively fighting. 

It is undeniable that Palestinian terror groups recruit and exploit children. Last week, JCPA published a report showing how terror groups in Jenin use children as "spotters" and instruct them using Telegram channels on how they should operate.  

A major reason that children are recruited is in the hope that they will be killed - because they are more valuable as "child victims" than they are as fighters. To Palestinians, children are cannon fodder, and I have yet to see a single article in Arabic media that condemns Hamas and Islamic Jihad for recruiting children.

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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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Book review: "Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership"

I generally abhor divisions in the Jewish community. There are too few of us to be able to afford partisanship and needless hate for our own.

For those reasons I have been reluctant to criticize fellow Jews outside of the fringe who are anti-Zionist or anti-Judaism. And I have been equally reluctant to criticize the leaders of American Jewish organizations, trying and wanting to assume that they do the best they can with the resources they have.

That position is no longer tenable after reading Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, a new book of damning essays edited by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser.  

Betrayal is a strong indictment of those American Jewish leaders, on both the national and local levels. 

The single biggest issue that should unify American Jews is the fight against antisemitism. But as Betrayal shows, the mostly self-appointed American Jewish leaders have been more interested in maintaining their positions of power than in going toe to toe with today's antisemites.

Worse, in example after example in this book, when grassroots Jewish groups organize to fight a specific threat to American Jews, these pseudo leaders generally try to dissuade and discourage them. They claim that their connections with other powerful people, and their quiet diplomacy, will carry the day. Their message to ordinary Jews who want to defend themselves from specific threats is "sha, shtill" - shut up and be quiet.

We cannot read minds, but the overwhelming impression given is that these so-called leaders enjoy their perks of being considered as such. They love to attend their interfaith breakfasts and to attend meetings and parties with local and national secular leaders. They don't want to make waves, to risk their positions and their perceived prestige, their speaking engagements at Temples, their parades for progressive causes.

Problems which should and could have been attacked early on - mosques with terror links, undermining K-12 and university education with the concepts of "wokeness" that slot Jews as oppressors and supremacists, BDS and campus "apartheid weeks" as well as the other constant attacks on Israel that these leaders prefer to sympathize with instead of battle against - have metastasized into major sources of today's American antisemitism. 

An essay by Jonathan Tobin sets the tone with his analysis of how the Anti Defamation League has turned its back on fighting antisemitism and instead steered the ship to be more progressive and partisan rather than defending Jews.  The organization's hiring of a rabidly anti-Zionist Tema Smith as "director of Jewish Outreach" was particularly risible. 

Richard Landes describes how American Jewish leadership has exhibited cowardice in the face of the jihadist threat, preferring to partner with their Muslim friends rather than to ever confront them. Of course, this peculiarly Jewish tendency to compromise on principles in order to seek approval from others is not mirrored by the openly pro-Hamas Muslim American leadership, who - if anything - feel empowered to more extremism because the Jews are on their side.

Josh Block describes the failure of American Jewish leaders to push back against Ilhan Omar's antisemitic statements, and this led directly to her emerging from the controversy as more influential than ever. 

Caroline Glick observes that the "two state solution" has become a religion of sorts for American Jewish leaders, and instead of defending Israel they are defending cutting Israel in half and abandoning nearly all Jewish holy sites. 

Naya Lekht notes how liberal Jewish groups have replaced Judaism with "social justice," a philosophy that comes from Stalin's Soviet Union and that is ultimately used against Jews.

The ADL, the AJC, the local JCRCs and Federations, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs - all of them are stridently criticized as becoming part of the problem rather than the solution for the one theme that Jews should unite around, fighting antisemitism. Specific examples from grassroots groups who were stymied by their local Jewish "leaders" abound. 

The only national organization that has held on to its principles of unwavering support for Jews and Israel is the Zionist Organization of America, and its president Morton Klein writes an essay as well demonstrating how the eagerness by other Jewish leaders to make nice with the anti-Israel and ultimately antisemitic progressive philosophy hurts the Jewish community and makes everyone lose respect for their leaders.

One of the most interesting essays is by M. Zuhdi Jasser, of the Muslim Reform Movement, who has tried to partner with American Jewish leaders - only to be spurned because they prefer their partnerships with Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations that are actively antisemitic. His frustration of being abandoned by those who should be his natural allies is palpable.

Jacobs and Goldwasser's own essay doesn't only describe the problems, but offers a ten point program towards solutions - the exact thing that the supposed American Jewish leaders avoid. These pro-active ideas are what real leaders should come up with and implement. 

Betrayal describes outrageous examples of failed and counterproductive leadership. It will make you angry, and it should.

American Jews pour millions into these organizations that have little or nothing to show for themselves. It is time to replace those fossils with real leadership, real ideas, and real passion. The authors of these 22 essays are all fine candidates to be true leaders of the North American Jewish community. 

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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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04/03 Links Pt2: World Vision, Prominent U.S. Evangelical Charity, Caught Funding Jihadis; How J Street Turned Democrats Against Israel; Telling a Story Founded the Jewish Nation

From Ian:

World Vision, Prominent U.S. Evangelical Charity, Caught Funding Jihadis

When U.S. officials discovered that World Vision was funding a designated terror group, they ordered WV to stop paying ISRA, but WV maintained its relationship with the organization. In January 2015, WV said it had "discontinued any future collaboration." Yet almost a year later, WV posted a job position working with ISRA in December 2015, apparently indicating it had not ceased collaborating as it claimed.

Around the same time, World Vision partnered with yet another group that "has helped fund the Hamas military wing," the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH).

In 2012, World Vision was exposed using Australian government dollars to fund a terrorist front group operating in the West Bank. World Vision was funding the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), a front group for the U.S. terror designated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Australian Solicitor Andrew Hamilton, who worked with the Israel Law Center which exposed the funding, told the Jerusalem Post that, "The Union of Agricultural Work Committees is an integral part of the proscribed terror organization, the PFLP, that Australian citizens and corporations are prohibited from providing support to."

In an email to FWI, Hamilton called on the recently elected Australian Government "to initiate a detailed criminal investigation into the Halabi scandal."

"For more than a decade, World Vision Australia has avoided justice in Australia for its criminal activities in funding PFLP terrorism using Australian taxpayer money obtained by deception," Hamilton told FWI.

"It would be reasonable to assume that if a smaller organization, whose CEO [Tim Costello] was not the brother of a former federal Treasurer [Peter Costello], had similarly deceived the Australian Government to obtain taxpayer funds which were then sent to terrorists, then they would have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law." (FWI has attempted to obtain a response from the Costellos and from World Vision Australia, but has been unsuccessful.)

In 2010, World Vision partnered with a group headed by a PFLP operative, Khaled Yamani, who led the Palestinian Children and Youth Foundation in Lebanon. And a few years prior to that, WV signed joint memoranda with the U.S. designated terror group Interpal, a financial supporter of Hamas.

WV responded to FWI's inquiry regarding the claims made by Cliff Smith in an email declaring, "We remain adamant we are committed to a positive relationship with Israel in our humanitarian work and we do not now, and never have, supported terrorism."

World Vision portrays itself as a "global Christian humanitarian organization." McDonnell asks how WV's support of Islamist terrorists is really in line with the Gospel message it presents. "To see this activity from World Vision in Sudan and then continuing in Israel too—it just makes me wonder: 'What kind of Christians are supporting a group that is funding terrorists?'"

Yisrael Medad: Update on Cordoba: "cultural reductionism"

Spanish Church ‘accused of glossing over Muslim identity of Cordoba’s Great Mosque’

February 28 2023,
The Catholic Church has been accused of glossing over the Muslim identity of the Great Mosque of Cordoba with a visitor centre that emphasises its Christian origins.

The Church’s planned centre for the mosque, which has served as a cathedral since the Spanish city’s reconquest by Christian forces in 1236, aims to “correct” what it deems to be an overly Islamic vision of the city’s past.

“The need to redesign the entire space [of the mosque area] derives from the finding that Cordoba is marked with a very powerful cultural label: that of a Muslim city,” said a report by Demetrio Fernandez, the Bishop of Cordoba.

The mosque has served as a cathedral for hundreds of years and is used for traditional processions at Easter

“The cultural reductionism is so strong that it has the capacity to eclipse the brilliant Visigoth, Roman and Christian [periods]..."

So, Muslims are engaged in cultural reductionism of Jerusalem as the capital of Judea, where the Temple stood on Mount Moriah?

Telling a Story Founded the Jewish Nation

Many of the basic fundamentals of the seder—not only eating matzah and bitter herbs, but also relating the story of the liberation from Egyptian bondage to one’s children—can be found in Exodus 12, which is set in Egypt just before the tenth plague. By imagining what this archetypal seder might have been like, Cole Aronson explores the ritual’s meaning for Jewish history:

You don’t tell the children they were once slaves in Egypt, because that’s all they know. But it wasn’t always so, you tell them—long ago, their ancestors enjoyed over a century of freedom under God. God chose to raise the patriarchs up from the idolatry of their native culture and gave them a covenantal life. A famine some generations later compelled the chosen family to live in Egypt, first as guests and then—until now—as slaves. Tonight, God will keep His promise to the patriarchs and restore the Israelites to His service.

What the parents of the Exodus told their children was the very first maggid the first “telling” of Passover night. But the story as originally told didn’t commemorate the founding of the Jewish nation. Telling the story founded the Jewish nation.

Until the Exodus, the before-time of the patriarchs was a rumor whispered by strangers subjugated in a strange land. On the Exodus night, teaching the children about God’s choice of Abraham converted his descendants into his self-conscious heirs. A free nation was created by restoring a memory of itself. The pageantry of the seder is often and correctly said to recreate the Exodus night in order to tell a story. The reverse is also true. Jews recreate the Exodus night in part by telling a story that the Exodus parents must have told their own children 3,500 years ago, and with the same function—initiating youngsters into the chosen people of God.

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Saudi, Tunisia, Sudanese and Somali delegates meet in Israel for security conference

From i24 News:

More than 20 guests from different Arab Gulf and African countries arrived in Israel on Wednesday for a historic visit to Jerusalem, where they will discuss a range of issues that pertain to regional links with the Jewish state. 

Among these guests, some of whom were from countries with which Israel does not have diplomatic relations, were representatives of think tanks, institutes of applied diplomacy, and journalists, Ynetnews reported. They participated in a three-day conference, initiated by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, focused on Israel's relations with the countries of Africa and the Gulf region.

Representatives of Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Djibouti, Tunisia, Mauritania, and Sudan -  states that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel - were among those at the forum, as well as envoys from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Somaliland, South Africa, South Sudan, and Uganda.

To have delegates from Tunisia and Saudi Arabia is not a small thing.

Arab media and social media are filled with these photos of the delegates:

Topics discussed included the war on terrorism and radicalization, water desalination, food safety and the war on hunger.

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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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12/22 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: The European Union’s subversion of Israel; Returning the Palestinians to Center Stage Undermines Stability in the Middle East

From Ian:

JCPA: The EU's Secret Palestinian Building Plan for Area C

Its actions in unilaterally advancing a Palestinian state in Area C, territories assigned to Israel both administratively and regarding security responsibilities by both the PLO and Israel in a mutually signed agreement of September 28, 1995, represent a violation of international law and call into question the EU’s ability to continue serve in any capacity as diplomatic interlocutor.

The EU’s unpublished policy plan also violates Israel’s legal rights as affirmed by the EU at Oslo and reveals a pro-PLO bias that renders the EU as de facto supporters of the official PA policy of allocating payments to Palestinian terrorists who were killed, captured, or imprisoned as a result of their jihadi terror activity. Israel and the international community bear a responsibility to reveal the EU’s gross violations of its diplomatic responsibilities and those of Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, as well as European Commission President Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen.

This latest revelation is only the most recent example of EU malfeasance as an entrusted diplomatic interlocutor. Ambassador Alan Baker, former legal advisor to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, pointed out in a July 2022 policy brief for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, that EU member states restored funding to six Palestinian civil society organizations designated by Israel as terror-supporting organizations, rejecting evidence submitted by Israel that these organizations are linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an EU-, U.S.-, and Israel-designated terror group.

As Baker notes, contrary to its special status as witness, sponsor, and facilitator of the Oslo Accords, the EU and specifically Norway have consistently conducted a one-sided, partisan policy aimed at prejudging the issues that are still to be negotiated between the parties, such as the issue of Jerusalem and the permanent status of the territories.

Baker added that, “Facilitating international funding to support and encourage Palestinian terror, including providing funds for salaries and benefits of terrorists serving prison sentences, is the antithesis of any genuine international action to promote human rights, peace, and stability in the Middle East.”

Melanie Phillips: The European Union’s subversion of Israel

Now this is out in the open. The E.U. can no longer pretend it is merely contributing to Palestinian “civil society.” Yet even now, there is no mention of any of this by the Western mainstream media. In Britain, the BBC has instead been busy fomenting yet more anti-Israel feeling by telling its audience that Netanyahu has finalized “the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history.”

Similar denunciations by Israel’s outgoing leftist prime minister, Yair Lapid, have been fueling hysteria in the West, not least among liberal-minded Diaspora Jews.

These have been heard describing the yet-to-be-formed Israeli government as “horrific,” and have already been blaming Israel for putting them in danger as a result.

Now the E.U. has been engulfed by revelations of a corrupt relationship with Qatar—the sponsor of Hamas and mortal foe of Israel. While details are still unfolding, this axis isn’t surprising. There’s a nexus between the universalism embodied by the E.U. and the desire to bring down Israel, the nation state of the most particularist culture in the world.

And it’s no coincidence that the majority of British Jews, who in 2016 voted for the U.K. to remain in the E.U. partly through their ludicrous belief that universalism actually protected them against antisemitism, have also swallowed many of the lies about the Palestinian cause—and, like their liberal American counterparts, are now clutching their pearls over Smotrich, Ben-Gvir and Maoz.

While concerns about the extremism of this trio are justifiable, the people they most resemble are the Maccabees. They were Jewish religious zealots who fought the Hellenized Jews because the Hellenizers were adopting Greek universalist precepts and, as a result, taking a wrecking ball to Jewish practices such as circumcision and Shabbat observance.

But the Maccabees fought and defeated the Jews’ Greek oppressors. While being rightly excoriated for violent extremism, the heroes of the Hanukkah story saved the Jewish people from tyranny.

It may be that today’s Maccabean Three are channeling Jewish history once again.

Israeli MKs slam EU policy document for ignoring Jewish land rights in West Bank

A group of 40 Israeli lawmakers led by Likud MK Amichai Chikli sent an open letter on Tuesday to the European Union protesting an official policy document that they say denies historical Jewish ties to the so-called Area C of the West Bank.

The classified June 2022 document exposed by Israeli media gives an overview of the continental bloc's policy toward Area C of the territory, which is fully administered by Israel.

According to the Oslo Accords, a series of interim peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinians signed in the 1990s, this territory is supposed to be gradually relinquished to Palestinian control, with an option for land swaps under a final status agreement. The document shows that the EU is working in concert with the Palestinian Authority to integrate Area C into a future Palestinian state.

The EU criticizes Israeli policies of building in Area C of the West Bank, which the Israeli government refers to by its biblical name — Judea and Samaria.

In the letter, lawmakers criticize EU policies in the West Bank as favoring the Palestinians and ignoring the historical claims of the Jewish people to the land.

"In the last decade, we've witnessed the increasing involvement of the European Union in construction, planning road projects and erecting water and solar energy facilities in hundreds of outposts in Area C," Chikli told i24NEWS.

"The document uncovered this week shows that this is a deliberate strategy that completely ignores Israel's position and sovereignty in the area.

Moreover, the construction moves show that the goal is for the most part to interrupt the sequences of Jewish settlement and to create choke rings around the settlement blocks that will make it difficult for Israel to exercise its sovereignty in the future." "These moves constitute serious damage to the relations between the European Union and the State of Israel."

Israeli lawmakers slam EU policy document on West Bank

Ex-Israeli Military Officers Call EU's Area C Policy "Hostile and Aggressive"

Letter from Israel Defense and Security Forum calls EU policy 'to advance illegal Palestinian development' a threat to Israel's national security

An Israeli organization consisting of more than 16,000 former military, security, and police officers called the revelation that the European Union is working on a Palestinian takeover of Area C of the West Bank "an act of blatant hostility and aggression."

In an open letter sent Wednesday from the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF) and addressed to Dimiter Tzantchev, head of the EU delegation to the State of Israel, the NGO slammed the EU for its confidential policy document revealed by media outlets on Tuesday.

The EU policy document, which was leaked by Israeli media, gives an overview of the EU's policy toward Area C, which is administered by Israel. The document shows that the EU is working with the Palestinian Authority on making Area C a part of a future Palestinian state. The EU criticizes Israeli policies of building in Area C, which the Israeli government calls by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria.

"According to our professional understanding of national security, the dominant terrain of Judea and Samaria in Area C is key strategic terrain that controls or can threaten most of the modern State of Israel’s infrastructure and strategic assets," the letter stated. "The EU’s reported clandestine activity to undermine Israeli control in Area C and to advance illegal Palestinian development in those areas constitutes a clear and present threat to the security of the State of Israel, and is an act of blatant hostility and aggression."

The letter was signed by 12 former military officers and includes the names of dozens more. The IDSF describes itself as a "Zionist, security-based movement" that includes senior officers from all branches of Israel's armed forces, as well as researchers, academics, and Israeli citizens.

The founder and director of the IDSF Brig. Gen. (Res.) Amir Avivi told i24NEWS that the EU's activity undermines the Oslo Accords, which established Israel's control over Area C.

"These areas are crucial to Israel's existence in the long term. It's an existential issue," said Avivi.

"We are the only ones who can define what we need, talking about national security, talking about the Jewish national aspirations. No European country can decide for us what we need, and certainly not go against an accord that everybody should adhere to."

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12/21 Links Pt2: Black America’s Anti-Semitism Problem; 2022 the Deadliest Year for Palestinians? What the Media Didn't Tell You; Chanukah bus incident victims to mark a year since attack

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Contemporary antisemitism should be taught in schools

While Mann commended the “great strides” made in promoting greater awareness of genocide, he said antisemitism “can take many forms” and “it is not enough to teach about the Holocaust.”

As Klein pointed out, Mann’s latest recommendations follow significant progress that has been said to have been made in recent years in combating antisemitism in the UK and worldwide, resulting from two landmark reports published by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism in 2006 and 2015.

One reason for the new report, supported by valued input from stakeholders across the country, was to identify what more needs to be done.

“If this scale of incidence among young people is not tackled, then we are storing up potentially serious problems for the future as well as for the present,” Mann wrote.

Among the recommendations made by Mann is that school leadership teams should be offered guidance from the government on how to deal with incidents of antisemitic hate. This should include how to report incidents that did not happen at school but involved either the targeting of students or students as perpetrators.

A British government spokesperson said in response to the report: “Antisemitism, as with all forms of bullying and hatred, is abhorrent and has no place in our education system. The atrocities of the Holocaust are a compulsory part of national curriculum for history at key stage 3, and we support schools to construct a curriculum that enables the discussion of important issues such as antisemitism.”

We believe Mann’s findings and recommendations should be taken seriously, not just by the British government but by other governments in Europe and around the world.

It is one thing to teach about the Holocaust in schools; it’s quite another to educate students against hatred of all forms, including antisemitism.

As Mann so elegantly put it, the UK government and others should “act on my new calls for action before this form of racism poisons the minds of many more young people.”

Black America’s Anti-Semitism Problem

The effect was most pronounced among young blacks and Hispanics. Both groups were 16 percentage points more likely to agree than whites in their age group. Anti-Semitism was particularly common among young blacks and Hispanics who called themselves "conservative." But that was a small group, and anti-Semitism was more common even among liberal blacks compared with liberal whites. Black and Hispanic young adults, in fact, were about as likely to agree with at least one of the statements as were white "alt-right" identifiers in the same age group.

Hispanics are often lumped with whites in hate crime data, so it is difficult to trace precisely the implications of this prejudice among Hispanics, which is an under-discussed and undercovered aspect of the story.

Hersh and Royden's survey also allowed them to examine several theories of the causes of anti-Semitism. One was "minority group competition": the idea that fighting over scarce resources like housing provokes anti-Semitism. Another was the idea that anti-Semitism is a manifestation of anti-whiteness: As James Baldwin put it, "Negroes are anti-Semitic because they're anti-white." A third, opposite possibility was the idea that people disliked Jews because they dislike Israel and because they supported the Palestinians. And fourth is that demographic or behavioral differences—for example, that minority groups are less well-educated or more likely to go to church—explains the variation.

None of these explanations stood up to scrutiny.

Take group differences. Hersh and Royden statistically controlled for both church and college attendance. While each mattered for whether or not someone held anti-Semitic beliefs, holding them constant blacks are still much more likely than whites to have anti-Semitic views. The authors also compare respondents in states with and without a lot of Jewish people (doable because most Jews live in just a few states). Again, race still predicts anti-Semitic views, meaning that proximity to Jews—"minority group competition"—doesn't explain the difference.

Similarly, Hersh and Royden argue that black anti-Semitism is more than just anti-white bias. That's because they measure views, like whether Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, that only apply to Jews, not whites. They also rule out the idea that anti-Semitism is just a function of pro-Palestinian views: Remarkably, blacks and Hispanics were more favorable toward Israel than whites across three separate measures.

To supplement this, Hersh and Royden asked respondents who said they believed Jews had too much power in which domains they had such power. Very few respondents—7 percent of blacks/Hispanics and 9 percent of whites—selected only Israel and Palestine. Instead, these respondents said Jews had too much power in areas like news media, finance, and entertainment. This suggests that anti-Semitic bias is not driven by anti-Israel views.

Having ruled out these popular explanations, Hersh and Royden are left only to speculate on the causes of black anti-Semitism. They point to the rising salience of victimhood in American culture, arguing that it may either make people more prone to embracing conspiracy theories or provoke competition over "victim" status. It is also possible, of course, that anti-Semitic views are just a product of prejudice—no need for further explanation.

What is apparent is that the views propounded by individuals like West and Irving are not unusual, particularly among black Americans. Unlike other forms of prejudice, Hersh and Royden observe, anti-Semitism is not fading among younger Americans: At least among minorities, the oldest hatred isn't going away any time soon.

Jonathan Tobin: Jews don’t need another left-wing advocacy group

The federations, whose purpose is to represent and raise funds from the entire Jewish community, were used to the JCPA acting like a Democratic Party auxiliary operation. But the latter’s behavior could be justified as the product of a consensus among the majority of Jews who are politically liberal and vote for the Democrats.

But its endorsement in 2020 of BLM was a bridge too far for many in the mainstream Jewish world. For Jewish federations—led for the most part by liberal professionals and donors—to be tied to a group linked to radical anti-Israel and antisemitic advocacy was intolerable, although in the midst of the moral panic set off by the death of George Floyd, many acquiesced. But it created a rift that caused JCPA activists to want to liberate themselves from even the minimal restraints that the connection to the federations brought.

Were this merely a matter of a tiff between Jewish Democrats and Republicans or generic liberals and conservatives, it wouldn’t warrant much attention. But the road that the new JCPA and a lot of its competition are taking—by adopting the catechisms of BLM and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)—is particularly noteworthy and dangerous.

Indeed, the JCPA is siding with forces that are driving left-wing antisemitism and Jew-hatred in the African-American community—highlighted by recent incidents involving celebrities like Kanye West and the epidemic of black attacks on Orthodox Jews in New York City.

Rather than an invigorated Jewish leadership, the new JCPA is additional evidence of the catastrophic and disgraceful failure of the existing liberal establishment. It’s not only a waste of scarce Jewish resources; it also reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of liberals who claim to speak for Jews but are actually working against Jewish interests and security. Redundancy and waste are bad enough. But the current situation is a moral calamity.

Why the ADL abandoned Antisemitism and went woke

The ADL’s education curriculum had started out teaching tolerance, but now teaches intolerance, and advocates partisan politics. Despite the organization’s origins, its handbook is notable for mentioning Jewish people only three times, once in the ADL’s background and twice in its definition of antisemitism.

But the ADL is not a Jewish organization anymore. It’s a generically lucrative leftist group which provides bias insurance to schools while joining in leftist attacks on conservatives.

A few years after Greenblatt came on board, the ADL announced a new program together with eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar: one of the leading funders of the anti-Israel Left. ADL Senior VP Eileen Hershenov was the former general counsel for Soros’ Open Society octopus.

“Kudos to my former boss, George Soros,” she gushed.

Hershenov oversees the ADL’s partnership with the Aspen Institute, funded by Soros. The joint ADL-Aspen program’s civil society fellows included the founding Co-Director of the Open Society Foundation’s Economic Justice Program.

Small wonder that Greenblatt attacks any critics of Soros and the ADL, formerly critical of the Nazi collaborating billionaire, now has a page dedicated to defending the antisemitic leftist.

The ADL’s funders and partners list increasingly resembles those of most leftist activist groups with $1 million from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, the Rockefellers, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. There’s nothing Jewish here.

As an organization, the ADL doesn’t belong in Jewish circles, and its educational curriculum doesn’t belong in any schools.

Are Jews equal under Islam?

Filmed by @el_soco pic.twitter.com/zLzOlbX0sC

— Israel Advocacy Movement (@israel_advocacy) December 20, 2022

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12/20 Links Pt2: To tackle the oldest hatred, it’s not enough to just teach the Holocaust; Caroline Glick: Hanukkah and the new imperialist assault on Judaism; Airbnb launches positive series of articles about Israeli hosts

From Ian:

Stephen Pollard: To tackle the oldest hatred, it’s not enough to just teach the Holocaust

In much of the West there is an assumption among both Jews and those who sympathize with them that teaching people about the Holocaust somehow inoculates them against anti-Semitism. Stephen Pollard observes that education about the Shoah in Britain is very good, but evidence shows that hostility toward Jews is nonetheless on the rise:

Last year, I was told by the anti-extremism educator Charlotte Littlewood of her experience in one school. After giving training to a sixth form about 9/11, a teacher approached her about the session. Why, he asked, had she ignored the “evidence” that 9/11 was organized by the Jews?

Ms. Littlewood is the author of a study cited today by the government’s so-called “anti-Semitism tsar” Lord Mann in his ground-breaking report calling for all schools to have policies to recognize and combat anti-Semitism, which should also be part of teacher training. (One might also point out the inherent irony of the phrase “anti-Semitism tsar.”)

Her study found that recorded anti-Semitic incidents in schools in England have nearly trebled over the past five years. But a mere 47 schools have any kind of formal, written policy that “might make staff more aware of the vicious forms of anti-Semitic bullying”—such as making a hissing sound when Jewish pupils enter a classroom in a reference to the Nazi gas chambers.

[In fact], some of those who think of themselves as being profoundly anti-racist nonetheless harbor stereotypically anti-Semitic thoughts about Jews—that they are rich, they control the media, they stick together, and so on. They won’t even recognize that these are racist ideas, seeing them merely as statements of fact. This explains how you can teach the Holocaust and yet not make any impact on dealing with living, breathing anti-Semitism. Or, to put it another way, the bar for anti-Jewish racism is set at the level of killing Jews.

A Festival of Light for Dark Times

A Hanukkah message from Theodor Herzl, 125 years ago

As noted by the historian Daniel Polisar, Herzl was likely writing autobiographically. He had customarily purchased a Christmas tree for his family and was more well-versed in Latin, Greek, and German than he was in Hebrew. But he was developing the realization that candles of national pride and Jewish tradition, once lit, could attract companions. Writing a few months after the First Zionist Congress—whose 125th anniversary was marked in Basel in 2022—Herzl hoped for the progressing of his project of national reclamation. He anticipated the most desperate, the young and the poor, would be the first to see the light.

Then the others join in, all those who love justice, truth, liberty, progress, humanity, and beauty. When all the candles are ablaze everyone must stop in amazement and rejoice at what has been wrought. And no office is more blessed than that of a servant of this light.

Though Hanukkah is undoubtedly a uniquely Jewish holiday, commemorating the bloody battle for the preservation of its ancient practices and beliefs 2,000 years ago, all Americans may find inspiration in Herzl’s depiction. After all, imagining the reinvigoration of political unity and patriotic pride in the United States today seems no less far-fetched than Herzl’s dream for a renewed Israel seemed on the eve of 1898. Even if we willed it, we undoubtedly feel, it would probably remain just a dream.

Yet, during the American colonies’ earliest decades, and as the colonists subsequently developed hope for independence from Britain, they looked to the branches of a tree to reflect the potential of shared national purpose. Old elms were deemed “Liberty Trees,” a symbol of what one observer called “that Liberty which our Forefathers sought out, and found under Trees, and in the Wilderness.” The biblically tinged image, like the menorah, acknowledges separate branches, but emphasizes the shared root that feeds its growth. It reminds us that by drawing from our common core we might yet expand outward and upward.

In the dark desperation of our current societal disunity, consideration of what Herzl termed the “marvel of the Maccabees” may serve as a hopeful reminder, a means of reclaiming our own sense of national pride and purpose. If we remind ourselves and the next generation of the faith in which we were forged, and envision a brighter, more joyous tomorrow, we may yet find companions amid the slumbering darkness. We may yet find ourselves servants of the light.

Ruthie Blum: No, Gray Lady, the ‘bedrock’ of US-Israel relations isn’t a two-state solution

In a social media post on Sunday, Prime Minister-designate Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu blasted the Gray Lady for its gall.

“After burying the Holocaust for years on its back pages and demonizing Israel for decades on its front pages, The New York Times now shamefully calls for undermining Israel’s elected incoming government,” he tweeted, in response to a weekend editorial titled: “The Ideal of Democracy in a Jewish State Is in Jeopardy.”

He was right to fight back, as the piece not only asserted that his coalition-in-formation poses a “significant threat to Israel’s future—its direction, its security and even the idea of a Jewish homeland”; it also urged the administration in Washington and the American public to support the “moderating forces” in the country that are “already planning energetic resistance.”

Not that Bibi’s response will do any good, other than reminding those who long ago realized that the “newspaper of record”—a broken one where Israel is concerned—doesn’t deserve its self-anointed reputation as a reliable source on any issue.

Nor did its horror at the return to the helm of the longest-serving premier in Israel’s history come as a shock to anyone, least of all Netanyahu himself. On the contrary, had it expressed a more positive view of the cabinet now taking shape in Jerusalem, it would have lost the remainder of its shrinking readership to publications that refuse to compromise on their unabashed radicalism.

In fairness, albeit ill-deserved, the Times and other “anti-Israel-is-the-new-pro-Israel” periodicals abroad are taking their cue from the “anybody but Bibi” contingent at home. The latter’s way of bemoaning its uncontestable Nov. 1 ballot-box defeat has been to decry the imminent demise of democracy at the hands of extremists bent on transforming the Jewish state into an unrecognizable, racist, homophobic theocracy.

The irony is that the bulk of the wokeratti, who can take considerable credit for the electorate’s rightward pull, didn’t use to praise the country for its liberal values. The sudden nostalgia—while the current caretaker government of Yair Lapid hasn’t even left its perch—is not merely laughable, it explains the Times’s disingenuous reference to “Israel’s proud tradition as a boisterous and pluralistic democracy.”

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12/04 Links: A House of Lies; Islamist Terror; Journalistic Error; Has antisemitism in US reached a tipping point?; One day’s headlines reveal the entire Israeli-Arab conflict

From Ian:

Jeffrey Herf: Islamist Terror; Journalistic Error

A review of Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad by Richard Landes, 523 pages, Academic Studies Press (November 2022)

The failures of journalism that Landes examines did not begin in 2000 with the Second Intifada. The idea of Israel as oppressor and colonialist interloper and the Palestinians as innocent victims have been central to Arab and Palestinian Arab political culture since the 1940s. In the early 1950s, the Soviet Union, the support of which during 1947–49 was so important to the establishment of the Jewish state, joined Israel’s enemies in maintaining that first Zionists and then the state of Israel were to blame for the conflict. From the 1960s to the end of the Cold War, an anti-Israeli consensus emerged in the United Nations General Assembly. The Soviet bloc, communist China and other communist regimes joined Islamic states, many Third World nations, and the Arab states in denouncing Zionism as a form of racism and Israel as a practitioner of cruelty and aggression.

The description of Israel as an apartheid state began in the United Nations during those decades as well. After the Six Day War of 1967, the radical Left in Western Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Japan joined the anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli chorus, with intellectual ballast provided by Edward Said and other postcolonial writers and thinkers. Support for Israel became incompatible with membership in good standing in the panoply of progressive politics. It was in those decades that the Palestinians emerged as icons of global anti-imperialism, and the journalistic habits that Landes discusses entered international journalism.

Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? urges us to take a fresh look at the critical months in the fall of 2000, when the idea of Palestinians as the world’s “most honored of victims” entered mainstream discourse in the West’s democracies. It is time, Landes argues, to “reread the Intifada, this time not as an uprising of the oppressed against the oppressor, but as the opening salvo of the Caliphator assault on Western democracies in the twenty-first century.” Landes asks his readers, especially those of liberal and leftist leanings, to recall the liberal nature of the Zionist project and the realities of Israel’s democracy, and to look honestly at the ideology of those seeking to destroy it. His book makes a compelling case that too many prominent journalists, political figures, NGOs, and academics were, in fact, wrong about the fundamental causes of terror. They misunderstood the war between Israel and its enemies, and as a result, they also misunderstood the facts of that war. Landes notes that there were journalists who resisted this consensus, but that they were the exception.

It turns out that, concerning the history of Israel and its secular and Islamist adversaries, the 20th century was a long not a short one. The modern hatred of the Jews, Zionism, and liberal democracy emerged in Europe and the Middle East during the 1940s, persisted into the 1950s, and found global reach by the 1970s and 1980s. The anti-Zionist impulse has drawn from Nazi propaganda, Soviet campaigns during the Cold War, 1960s style anti-imperialist ideology, as well as the traditions of the Islamists. Today, it remains alive and well in the assaults and threats to Israel that Landes examines in this book.

Richard Landes is right to call for a rereading of the Second Intifada, and to draw our attention to the way the images and interpretations of those years contributed to misunderstanding the years of terror, and to a new Islamist-inflected species of antisemitism. He makes a convincing case that, yes, “the whole world”—or at least too many very accomplished professionals in the media, public life, and politics—were indeed wrong about the causes of the terrorism directed at the Jewish state in recent decades. Twenty-two years after the Second Intifada erupted, it is time for a rethink.

A House of Lies

The UN in Perspective Israel’s formal acceptance as the 59th UN Member State on May 11, 1949 was consistent with the UN’s original core beliefs. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in Paris on December 10, 1948 by the UN General Assembly, was issued in response to the “disregard and contempt for human rights” that resulted in the “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind” called the Holocaust—the attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe by the Nazis. [7] Thus the Jewish state and the human rights revolution “were as one in 1948… . There is a clear symbolic—if not symbiotic—relationship between Israel and human rights… and Israel was born of that commitment.” [8]

“On May 14, 1948, Israel’s founders wanted to emphasize to the world that while the Jewish people had been born in Eretz-Israel [??? ?????, the land of Israel], its state was the adopted child of the United Nations” noted historian Martin Kramer. “Israel had a ‘natural and historic’ right to exist,” he said, “and that right had been recognized by the world. Nothing made this point more clearly than the crucial passage of the declaration: “By virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.” [9]

“Does this suggest that the United Nations ‘created’ the state of Israel?” asked Kramer. “Hardly; if it were within the power of the UN to create states, an Arab state would have arisen in 1948 alongside Israel. After all, the Arabs of Palestine possessed exactly the same recognition of their rights and the same license to act as did the Jews (although not the historiical connection to the land, ed). The difference, to revert to the term invoked by the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), was that the Arabs didn’t constitute a “state within a state….absent a Jewish army, Israel wouldn’t have arisen in any borders, and certainly not in the expanded borders of 1949.”[10]

A Final Note
From their initial UN deliberations, the permanent representatives of the UN understood the gravity of the problems they confronted and how their decisions would affect the future of the world. In hindsight, their remarks were prescient.

Moe Finn, a Norwegian politician, who was a member of the UN Security Council from 1948 to 1949, viewed the UN’s attempt to find a solution as being “very well a test case,” since it “may be decisive for the future of the United Nations.” [11]

Addressing the Special Session of the General Assembly held between April 28 and May 5, 1947, Mr. Quo Tai-chi, Chinese representative to the Security Council, prophetically warned that unless Arabs and Jews “learn to love their neighbors as themselves.” there will be no peace in the Holy Land, or indeed, in any land.” Historical and legal procedures, political and economic considerations will never provide a solution for peace. Until Jews and Christians “return to the teachings of the prophets and the saints of the Holy Land … no parliament of man, no statement, no legal formula, no historical equation, no political and economic programme can singly or together themselves solve the problem.” [12]

For Asaf Ali, Indian ambassador to the United States in 1947, Palestine had “become the acid test of human conscience. The United Nations will find that upon their decision will depend [on] the future of humanity, whether humanity is going to proceed by peaceful means or whether humanity is going to be torn to pieces. If a wrong decision flows from this august Assembly…the world shall be cut in twain and there shall be no peace on earth.” [13]

Seth Frantzman: Has antisemitism in US reached a tipping point?

The main tipping point comes due to the amplification of these views in major traditional media and social media. Twitter has now suspended Kanye West’s Twitter account, which had 32 million followers. This comes after he appeared on Alex Jones’ far-Right InfoWars website and praised Hitler. One video of the appearance on the show has received more than two million views on Twitter. West, who is now called Ye, had posted a Star of David with a swastika inside of it on Twitter before being suspended. News about West was one of the top trending topics on CNN’s website on Saturday.

The news cycle of antisemitism has been flooding people’s homes with anti-Jewish views for two months now, since early October. Whenever a celebrity makes antisemitic comments they are then amplified by media and there are numerous interviews.

It is difficult not to see a pattern here. According to an October 11 report at the The Hill “Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, made several antisemitic remarks… in unaired portions of his recent interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson.”

However, that wasn’t the only major interview. Throughout October and November, numerous hosts on various media sought out the “controversy” of interviewing someone who would say “controversial” antisemitic things.

The tipping point comes because today, antisemitism is the “cool” thing that radio hosts and media people want to have on their shows in order to get maximum ratings and clicks. This is more than just “shock jock” culture.

The reason we are seeing a tipping point is because media isn’t rushing to interview people with homophobic or other types of racist views. There is only one group whose hatred they want to amplify.

Of course, they are “against” antisemitism. However, the most “controversial” antisemitic rhetoric is being amplified daily. How many millions of people who are being exposed to this are now beginning to think that the usual filters they might have can be taken off?

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10/07 Links Pt1: PA summer camps - terror training camps for kids; Blame Biden’s disastrous Iran and energy policies for Lapid’s Lebanon fiasco

From Ian:

PMW Special Report: PA summer camps - terror training camps for kids

In recent months, many young Palestinians have died as “Martyrs” while carrying out terror attacks against Israelis – be it throwing Molotov cocktails and rocks, stabbings or shootings. What is it that make kids want this? The answer is what Palestinian Media Watch has pointed out for years: That the PA and its leading party Fatah – both led by Mahmoud Abbas – as policy encourage kids (and adults) to carry out terror and seek Martyrdom - and thereby become heroes.

Now that the summer holiday is over it is important to examine the values the PA and Fatah decided to bestow on Palestinian kids via their summer camps – one of the “tools” the PA uses to inculcate the ideals of terror against Israel and Martyrdom.

One distinctive PA message was that terrorist murderers are heroes. Being presented with this strong role modeling for decades impacts on kids, and many young Palestinians set out to die as Martyrs, seeking to earn the ultimate glory in Palestinian society.

Announcing the opening of the summer camps, PLO Supreme Council for Youth and Sports Head Jibril Rajoub explained that 42,000 young Palestinians were to participate in 600 camps. Rajoub stated that:
Fatah Central Committee Secretary and Head of the PLO Supreme Council for Youth and Sports Jibril Rajoub: “The goal of these camps is to serve as a melting pot and formulate the consciousness of these children according to the Palestinian national ideology.”

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 19, 2022]

Same Rajoub strongly hinted at the content of the teachings in the PA/Fatah summer camps when he in his opening speech singled out terrorist murderer Thaer Hammad who killed 10 Israelis as “deserving of blessings”:
Jibril Rajoub: “[Silwad] is the town of Thaer Hammad (i.e., terrorist, murdered 10), who deserves blessings, and who constituted a milestone in proactive national action. Blessings to him, his family, and our prisoners from Silwad and from throughout the homeland.”

[Facebook page of Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, July 18, 2022]

Prior to Rajoub’s opening of the camps, a Fatah “registration announcement” for participation in a camp under Fatah’s military unit Al-Asifa explained the camp activities which clearly sound like military training and combat, among them: “military order and discipline, infantry, combat skills and Shooting live ammunition at a shooting range”; (emphasis added)

Melanie Phillips: Democracy’s watchdog has abandoned its role

It has often been said that the media is a pillar of democracy because it keeps our politicians honest.

Lifting the veil of secrecy in which authorities like to cloak themselves, revealing inconvenient truths that expose the inadequacies and worse of government actions and subjecting all politicians to forensic questioning without bias—this is how the media acts in the public interest.

But when the media doesn’t deliver, truthfulness goes out of the window, propaganda and ignorance take over and democracy stumbles.

We see this in much Western coverage of Israel, with newspapers often delivering nothing more than thinly disguised Palestinian propaganda. So, people with no knowledge of Israel or Jewish history get a wholly false impression.

It’s in America, however, that we see most graphically and frighteningly the media’s abdication of its professional role.

The most influential mainstream media outlets have turned into brazen shills for the Democratic Party and became willing accomplices in the attempt to remove President Donald Trump via the bogus Russian conspiracy smear, which involved elements of the FBI, Justice Department and the Democrats.

At same time, the media refused to report troubling revelations of corruption involving President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s dealings with Ukraine, which implicated Biden senior as well.

And they have left Americans largely in the dark about the acute peril into which Biden’s policies are putting America, Israel and the West.

Jonathan Tobin: Blame Biden’s disastrous Iran and energy policies for Lapid’s Lebanon fiasco

Unfortunately, however, the Americans clearly hope that strong-arming Israel in order to help Iran-proxy Hezbollah—which will presumably profit, directly or indirectly, from Lebanon’s natural-gas business—will influence its masters in Tehran to stop stalling and sign a new, and even weaker, nuclear deal with the West.

If this happens after more humiliating U.S. concessions to Iran in the negotiations that will likely resume after the midterms, it ought to get Iranian oil flowing freely to the West. That could impact the price of oil in the long term and help the Democrats’ efforts to hold onto the White House in 2024, even if it also guarantees that the Iranians will eventually obtain a nuclear weapon. It will also constitute a betrayal of the courageous demonstrators who have taken to the streets in Iranian cities to resist the theocratic regime.

Lapid walked into this trap because he is committed to a strategy of avoiding public disputes with Biden at all costs. For months, as the Americans moved closer to an agreement with Iran that he knew was antithetical to any notion of protecting the security of Israel or its Arab allies, he spoke of trying to influence the U.S. not to go down the path of appeasement.

Iran’s hardline stance in negotiations momentarily seemed to vindicate him. Yet, when Biden gave him his marching orders on Lebanon, he appeared to have believed that he had no choice but to blindly obey.

Seen from this perspective, it’s clear that Lapid was not so much surrendering to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as he was to Biden, though the blow to Israel’s national interests was much the same.

It remains to be seen whether Biden will tolerate, even if only for the five weeks until the election, Lapid’s act of political survival in moving away from the Lebanon pact that the U.S. administration has ordered him to accept. What is obvious, however, is that Lapid has not yet learned what Netanyahu came to understand during the course of his 15 years as prime minister.

Managing relations with Israel’s sole superpower ally is the nation’s top foreign-policy priority. And though doing so is vitally important, Washington can’t be allowed to dictate to its small Israeli ally. The true measure of an Israeli prime minister’s diplomatic acumen is not how close he can stay to an American president. The real test is showing that a premier can say “no” to the Americans when it’s absolutely necessary, as it was with respect to the natural-gas-fields dispute.

Lapid failed that test. Biden and his team now understand how far they can push him, even when Israeli security is on the line. That’s a fatal flaw in any leader.

Behnam Ben Taleblu: You cannot stand with Iran’s women while seeking a deal with Tehran

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History Repeating Itself as Bethlehem’s Christians Face Extinction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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