Twelfth-rate academic Juan Cole notes that in the latest UN World Happiness Report, Israel ranks as the ninth happiest nation in the world and the Palestinian Territories ranks 122nd out of 146 rated areas.
Of course, he must explain how this happened using his own twisted Jew-hating logic. It is, he says, "happiness apartheid."
The per capita income of Palestinians is $3751 a year. The UN estimates that the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian territories has taken out $57 billion since 2000 from their economy that would otherwise have been there, spurring growth. The Palestinian gross domestic product would be 3 times bigger today without that interference.
Israeli per capita income is $34,185 nearly 10 times greater than that of Palestine. Some of that income is produced by usurping land and resources from the Palestinians.
There you go! Jews are stealing Palestinian happiness!
But not only that: Jews are stealing Palestinian health, too!
Palestinian life expectancy in 2019 was 74 years. Because Israel declined to vaccinate most of the people living under its military occupation against COVID-19, it has likely fallen.
Live expectancy in Israel is about 83 years. Again, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett rules both people, directly administering 60% of the West Bank and using the Palestine Authority as his policeman for the other 40%. Yet some of the population he rules drop dead 9 years before the others.
There you have it. The Jews are not only stealing Palestinian land and life expectancy and freedom and money, but they are stealing Palestinian happiness!
Don't let actual facts interfere with Juan Cole's fevered hallucinations.
The number of deaths per million from COVID-19 for the Palestinian territories is 1004 per million. For Israel, it is higher - 1117 per million. So much for that theory.
When the entire Palestinian territories were under direct Israeli rule from 1967-2000, Palestinian life expectancy increased from 54 to over 70. It has gone up since, too.
Cole implies that somehow Israel is fully responsible for Palestinian health. But Israeli laws do not apply to the Palestinian health sector. This is international law under the Oslo accords.
With respect to the West Bank, the Oslo Accords state that health is under the aegis of the Palestinian Authority. As such, it is only in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority that health professionals in Israel can provide assistance to people in the West Bank. Sadly, the Palestinian Authority has decided on a general policy wherein opposing steps, which are claimed to represent so-called normalisation with Israelis, override such cooperation by forbidding Palestinian health-care personnel from working with their Israeli colleagues. We all have Palestinian associates who have privately expressed an interest in working together, but are afraid to stand out.
Other factors that could affect life expectancy (and happiness) that elude the distinguished idiot professor is that a higher percentage of West Bank Palestinians smoke than in Israel (27% vs. 20%), Arabs tend to have more obesity and diabetes, and in recent years, the Palestinian Authority has banned its people from being treated in Israeli hospitals.
The biggest proof that Cole is an idiot comes from looking at the happiness index of other Arab countries that border Israel.
While the Palestinian ranking is 122, it is higher than that of Egypt (129), Jordan (134) and Lebanon(145.) (Syria isn't ranked, but it certainly would also be lower than that of the Palestinians as well.)
Why would those people be unhappier than the Palestinians? None of the factors that Cole lists applies to them - yet they are worse off than the Palestinians that Cole says are practically enslaved by Israel! Apparently, "occupation" actually enhances happiness compared to Israel's non-occupied neighbors!
Cole's hate for Israel colors everything he writes about. It is rarely as clear as it is here.
Sounds reasonable. Who can be against democracy in the Arab world?
Except that the organization, founded and run by anti-Israel activists like Juan Cole, Sari Bashi and Sarah Leah Whitson, is very selective as to which non-democratic nations they want to pressure:
As a US-based organization, DAWN focuses its research and advocacy on MENA governments with close ties to the United States and the military, diplomatic, and economic support that the US provides these governments, as that is where we have the greatest responsibility.
We believe that we can have the most impact by convincing the US government and other international entities, including businesses, to uphold their human rights obligations by ending support for abusive and undemocratic governments in the region.
Oh. So they only care about human rights in Arab nations that are allied with the US, so they can pressure the US to withhold aid and arms to those nations, while the other nations can go ahead and deny human rights all they want.
Specifically, the nations that are funded by Iran are off limits to this group.
So, what is the desired effect of DAWN's advocacy? It is to create a Middle East that is dominated by Iran!
That sounds like a human rights paradise! I mean, human rights in Syria and Hezbollah-occupied Lebanon and Iraq and under Houthi rule in Yemen is the envy of other Arabs!
And by sheer coincidence, the Arab nations in DAWN's crosshairs are also those that are somewhat allied with Israel. Imagine that.
It is no surprise that DAWN associates itself with the late Jamal Khashoggi, who also was feted as a pro-democracy activist when in fact he supported the violent Muslim Brotherhood brand of Islamism and Hamas terror.
These people will insist that they care about human rights, but it doesn't take much to see that their agenda is quite the opposite.
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Israel yesterday opened one of the gates of its rainwater stores east of Gaza, allowing rainwater to flood large swathes of Palestinian land, Ma’an reported.
The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture said in a statement that the water drowned “hundreds of dunams of agricultural lands and damaged barley and wheat crops.”
According to the statement, the water storage area was located in the east of Shuja’iyya neighbourhood in the east of Gaza city.
The accusation of Israel opening floodgates has since died down - until now.
(The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture referred to is the Hamas version, not the PA version. )
But then Middle East Monitor goes even further
Israel builds a number of reservoirs to stop rainwater from running through the Gaza valleys in winter. These prevent Palestinians in the enclave from storing rainwater to irrigate their crops and to fill underground wells.
Israel builds reservoirs in the desert just to deprive Palestinians of rainwater??
Just more lies about Israel being reported and retweeted by the usual crowd of Israel haters.
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Juan Cole, the twelfth rate academic whom I have shown to be a tendentious liar many, many times, is very upset at Jeffrey Goldberg:
Phil Weiss at Mondoweiss, the most lucid and informed voice on the American Jewish left doing journalism critical of right wing Zionism, reports on remarks of The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg at a Jewish Community Center forum in Manhattan.
In Weiss’s telling, Goldberg argued to his audience that Israelis are like the Seminole indigenous people of Florida, and the Palestinians are “the cowboys.”
This framing of the issue is completely ahistorical and frankly ignorant, and is offensive on all sides.
Many Palestinian leaders understand the conflict not as the conflict between the cowboys– the Jews– and the Indians– the Palestinians. But the Jews are the Indians, and the Arabs, the Palestinians, the cowboys, in the following sense. What happened in the Middle East– this is not a political commentary about what should actually be done leading to a fair and equitable solution to the challenge here– but what happened here is the equivalent of the Seminoles sitting in Oklahoma or wherever they are today, scattered around the United States– Seminoles coming together and deciding that they’re going back to Florida. And going back in such numbers and telling the whites and blacks and Hispanics of Florida, Oh by the way, we’re home and we’d like a state, and we’d like to take over Florida. The people of Florida would probably say to them, you haven’t been here in 200 years. This isn’t your home. And the Seminoles would say, Actually, it is our home. This is where our people are buried. This is the center of our religion, this is where we were expelled from. That [discussion] doesn’t happen; and people need to understand that – what’s happened is, it’s really interesting from an analytical perspective. As Israel has become more and more powerful as a country, and every year it becomes more powerful, it becomes bigger, it becomes more militarily powerful, economically powerful, it’s lost more and more control of its own narrative. The narrative is of an indigenous people coming home to its homeland and to some degree, to a large degree, to some degree, willing to share that homeland or at least parts of that homeland with the people who moved in after. Right? But they lost total control of that narrative, because the people who were opposed to Israel’s existence are very very powerful and clever narrators as well. In order to understand what’s going on historically you need to understand history… It is completely natural that the people of Florida would say to the Seminoles who are walking back 200 years after the Trail of Tears, coming back to Florida, What the hell– what do you mean? You don’t live here, your father wasn’t here, your grandfather, your great grandmother, nobody was here, you can’t claim this as your own, but that’s because we don’t really understand and privilege historical memory, among other things.
Cole can't handle the truth, so he sputters. The next sentence in his article is that "Goldberg apparently can’t bring himself to say the word 'Palestinian,' as though all Arabic-speakers are indistinguishable." As you can see above, Goldberg used the word Palestinian and didn't use the word Arab. Cole apparently knows that his brain-dead followers won't bother clicking on the link that proves he cannot help making things up.
Cole then goes on an extended pseudo-history of Jews with cherry picked (and possibly made up) facts where he strenuously tries to say that Jews aren't from Palestine - he doesn't seem to subscribe to the Khazar myth but something close - and that Jews hardly ever controlled Palestine, and that Jews weren't interested in living there anyway.
As an example:
The Crusaders killed or expelled most remaining Jewish populations. From about 1100 until the early twentieth century there were virtually no Jews in Palestine. Oh, there were a handful here and there– a few Kabbalist mystics at Safad, retirees in Jerusalem. But I wrote a book about Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of the Middle East and the French report that they only found 3,000 Jews in geographic Palestine in 1799.
That's an interesting and counterfactual view. Jews were the majority in Palestine until the Muslim invasion - yes, the Arabs were colonialists, even though Cole falsely claims that most Palestinians have been there for millennia. (Research shows that the only truly indigenous Palestinians are the Christian community, and most of them were originally Jews.)
Since the Muslim invasion, the Jews that lived there went through an astonishing number of massacres and expulsions from both Christians and Muslims. Yet through it all, they kept coming back. Dozens of major rabbis kept immigrating with their students, often to be slaughtered again (with a few major earthquakes that also killed hundreds.) This Wikipedia article fills in the gaping historic holes that Cole doesn't want you to know. The overwhelming conclusion is that Jews were always spiritually tied to their land despite it having very few ways of supporting them. This is the exact opposite to what Cole wants you to believe.
What about the 3000 Jews that Cole says he found out about? Well, his book on Napoleon says it - without a citation.
However, it was estimated that there were 4000-6000 Jews in Jerusalem alone in 1815, only 16 years later. This doesn't count Jews in Hebron, Safed, or Tiberias. Perhaps the French person Cole refers to, whoever that is, isn't so trustworthy.
Cole continues to lie:
The European Jews were brought to Palestine by British imperial policy during the early twentieth century heyday of colonialism, and by the rise of Fascism in Europe that drove out or killed millions of Jews. Because of the complications of the Holocaust, Jewish migration into Palestine is not exactly like the voluntary settler=colonialism of the Pieds Noire in Algeria,
Cole, the self described expert, apparently has never heard of the Perushim, the First Aliyah, the Second Aliyah. He thinks that somehow the British brought the Jews to Palestine, even though practically none of those were from Britain. He pretends that most Jews came to Palestine post-Holocaust not because they wanted to but that they were forced to. As someone who has looked up the Holocaust archives for my parents and relatives, I can tell him that the refugees filled out forms where they were offered where they would like to emigrate to. My parents chose America, they weren't forced to go to Palestine; one of my uncles and his mother chose Palestine.
In other words, Cole is a liar. Nothing new about that.
And by denying Jewish history including how fundamental Israel has always been to Jews and Judaism, Cole is proving that he is dabbling in antisemitism as well.
(h/t Dan, who reads Cole so I don't have to)
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The Hamas-supporting Middle East Monitor (MEMO) site has an article by the always ridiculous Ramzy Baroud, claiming that Israel is engaging in "ethnic cleansing" against Palestinian Christians.
After quoting lots of statistics on the disappearance of Christians and blaming Israel, not Muslims or the PA, the article brings its only piece of "evidence:"
A study conducted by Dar al-Kalima University in the West Bank town of Beit Jala and published in December 2017, interviewed nearly 1,000 Palestinians, half of them Christian and the other half Muslim. One of the main goals of the research was to understand the reason behind the depleting Christian population in Palestine.
The study concluded that “the pressure of Israeli occupation, ongoing constraints, discriminatory policies, arbitrary arrests, confiscation of lands added to the general sense of hopelessness among Palestinian Christians,” who are finding themselves in “a despairing situation where they can no longer perceive a future for their offspring or for themselves”.
One is that it is biased against Israel. One of the authors, Bernard Sabella, was at the time also a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. There is no way that this study would look objectively at Muslim persecution of Christians, well documented not only in the territories but also throughout the Middle East.
And when Christians think that the survey is associated with the government, they are unlikely to say anything that might upset the government.
Two is that in order to prove Israeli "ethnic cleansing" of Christians, it would mean that Israel is somehow targeting Christians more than Muslims. Yet this same study showed that Palestinian Muslims shared nearly the exact same level of fear as well as optimism as the Christians surveyed.
If they suffer equally, and the Muslims aren't persecuting the Christians, then why are only the Christians leaving and not nearly as many Muslims?
The third issue is methodological. If one wants to understand why Christians are fleeing the PA-controlled areas, you don't ask the people who are still there - you ask the people who left!
To be sure, part of the reason more Christians leave than Muslims because Christians were more middle class and had more economic opportunity to leave, as well as welcoming communities to go to where there are already many established Palestinian Christians, in the US and South America. But it is just as certain that there has been many cases of reported persecution of Christians by Muslims.
The most hilarious part of this absurd article is that after invoking this ridiculous report as the be all and end all on proof of Israeli persecution of Christians, it adds:
Unfounded claims that Palestinian Christians are leaving because of religious tensions between them and their Muslim brethren are, therefore, irrelevant.
I've published many articles over the past fifteen years documenting how Muslims have been attacking Christians in the West Bank and Gaza, forcing the Christians to look to live elsewhere. This study does not refute that at all.
Another problem with the article itself is that if Israel wants to persecute Christians, why is the Christian population in Israel itself steady and growing?
It is no surprise that MEMO publishes this garbage. Interestingly, eleventh-rate professor Juan Cole was so enchanted by this piece of bad reporting that he copied the entire thing to his blog.
(h/t Dan)
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16 years ago tonight, the 22nd of the Hebrew month of Av, 23 Jews were murdered in a suicide bombing while traveling on a bus in Jerusalem's Beit Yisroel neighborhood. Those murdered included 7 children. There were six terrorists directly involved in the attack, including the suicide bomber, two terrorists killed in an attempt to arrest them and three terrorists who are still in prison.
According to the calculations of Palestinian Media Watch, the Palestinian Authority has paid the imprisoned terrorists and the families of the dead terrorists, as payment for the murderous attack, a cumulative sum of 2,692,500 shekels ($764,482).
One of the more dominant terrorists who planned the attack was Majdi Za'atri who was sentenced to 23 consecutive life sentences and an additional 50 years. He alone, through June 2019, has been paid by the PA 706,800 shekels ($188,996).
Two other terrorist arrested at the same time have been paid the same amount. Accordingly, since the arrest of the three terrorists in August 2003, the PA has paid them, to date, a total of 2,142,300 shekels ($608,263).
The timing of the Palestinian Authority being called to task for antisemitism in its textbooks by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination coincides with the UNRWA mandate coming under debate for renewal every five years, since 1949.
This year, for the first time, there will be no automatic renewal.
What is the connection between the PA textbooks and UNRWA?
I personally interviewed Dr. Na’im Abu Hummus, who was then Palestinian education minister, at his office on August 1, 2000, the very day the first textbooks published by the PA curriculum were provided to UNRWA.
In that interview, Al-Hummus explained that the PA had contracted with UNRWA to function as the exclusive supplier of schoolbooks for all UNRWA schools in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem.
That day, the PA provided the Center for Near East Policy Research (CFNEPR) with its first 80 school books, and the center has over the last 19 years received and examined all 365 school books which the PA has supplied to UNRWA.
Conclusions? The CFNEPR has found that PA textbooks used by UNRWA have been indoctrinating virulent antisemitism into the hearts and minds of refugees from the 1948 War of Independence and their descendants.
Significance? UNRWA is responsible for the education of 321,000 students in 370 schools.
The United Nations General Assembly renews UNRWA’s mandate every three years and is expected to rubber-stamp its extension this November. Perhaps the assembly would reconsider if UNRWA’s top donors — the European Union, Germany, Britain, and Saudi Arabia — made clear that their patience is at an end.
Instead, UNRWA donors should call on the UN to treat Palestinian refugees like all other refugees in the world and address their needs through the UNHCR, which is less prone to corruption, though still not immune. The provision of services to Palestinians in need would continue or even improve. The U.S. could incentivize the proposed reform by offering to restore most or all of its $360 million annual funding if the UNHCR takes charge.
Additionally, as President Trump’s special envoy Jason Greenblatt suggested, nearby countries hosting Palestinians should assume many of UNRWA’s responsibilities — with donor support — so that these populations can finally start building lives outside the camps.
Corruption within a self-serving and self-preserving bureaucracy is entirely predictable. UNRWA has become a vestigial organ, no longer serving its purpose of helping actual refugees. Eliminating a bloated, bureaucratic UNRWA and redirecting its work towards more efficient bodies determined to solve the problem will ultimately serve all interested parties. It would cause some pain, but it is better than condemning another generation of Palestinians to grow up in the camps, where they learn to blame Israel for their suffering.
I haven't looked at idiot academic Juan Cole for a while, but here's his blog headline for a Ma'an story:
Ma'an's headline also called it a "BDS victory" but Cole rewrote it - and he still considers this a "win" for BDS even though the BDS movement is explicitly against students coming to Israel to study.
To think that Cole still tries to pass himself off as a Middle East expert....
(h/t Dan)
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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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