Showing posts with label Kanye West. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kanye West. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 07, 2022

12/07 Links Pt2: Every Time You Wish Someone ‘Happy Hanukkah’ You Acknowledge The Historic Jewish Claim On Jerusalem; Israel is 5th safest country in the world for tourists

From Ian:

'Herzl is our George Washington and Thomas Jefferson all wrapped in one'
"Today, Theodor Herzl is best known for his beard, not his books," laments Gil Troy, editor of "The Zionist Writings of Theodor Herzl," in his introductory essay to a new edition of Herzl's diaries.

Troy, a professor of history at Canada's McGill University now living in Israel, wants to make Zionism's founders come alive for the next generation. His latest effort is a three-volume collection of Herzl's writings.

The brainchild behind the series is Matthew Miller, owner of Koren Publishers, a Jerusalem publishing house producing mainly religious texts. Drawing inspiration from the Library of America, a publisher of notable American classics and historical works, Miller decided to create a Library of the Jewish People to bring together the best writings from Jewish history in the fields of religion, the arts and politics.

"The Zionist Writings" are the first titles in that ambitious effort. They include a fairly comprehensive collection of Herzl's diaries and other works, including his play "The New Ghetto" (1894), of which Herzl biographer Alex Bein said, "Herzl completed his inner return to his people"; Herzl's 1896 manifesto "The Jewish State"; and important essays, like "The Menorah" (1897), showing how, through Zionism, Herzl reconnected with his Judaism.

The series uses translations from the original German made by historian Harry Zohn in the 1960s. Other works, like "The New Ghetto," are newly translated by Uri Bollag.

Troy, who spoke to JNS the day after the book launch at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, said the Herzl series is his fourteenth book project and the first where he stood before an audience and said "Shehecheyanu" – a Jewish prayer to give thanks for special occasions – both to mark the 75th anniversary of the date the UN General Assembly voted in favor of a Jewish state (Nov. 29, 1947) and to celebrate the launch of Library of the Jewish People.

"It's an attempt to invite the Jewish people to build a bookshelf, because we've been building a bookshelf for thousands of years, but most of us don't know the Jewish texts, the Jewish canon," he said.

Troy sees no better place to start than Herzl. "He's our George Washington and our Thomas Jefferson all wrapped in one," said Troy. "Washington's diaries are interesting, but they're not ideological. That's why, when talking about Herzl in American terms, we say he's a cross between Washington and Jefferson, because he's also a conceptualizer."

Troy, who pored through 2,700 pages of Herzl's diaries, described them as "a political-science version of an artist's sketchbook."

"Herzl draws in the contours of the Jewish state. He plans different dimensions from a flag to the architectural aesthetic, from labor-capital relations to the dynamics between rabbis and politicians," Troy writes in one essay.
Every Time You Wish Someone ‘Happy Hanukkah’ You Acknowledge The Historic Jewish Claim On Jerusalem
On Hanukkah eve, I tweeted out a somewhat reductionist thought commemorating the bloody Maccabean rebellion against the Seleucid Empire and their traitorous Hellenized Jewish accomplices. It seemed to upset some of my followers.

Every time you wish someone a Happy Hanukkah you are acknowledging the historic Jewish claim on Jerusalem. — David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) December 12, 2017

Why are you politicizing such a pleasant holiday? Does wishing someone a “Merry Christmas” now mean that you accept Jesus as your lord and savior?

Well, first of all, the story of Hanukkah isn’t pleasant. Violent, brutal, and passionate, maybe. But not pleasant. And of course wishing someone a “Happy Hanukkah” isn’t an endorsement of any theological position, any more than wishing someone Merry Christmas is (although we appreciate the recognition of the Jewish presence in ancient Bethlehem). Mostly it’s convention and good manners. Thank you.

Fact is, there isn’t a ton of theology to worry about. Hanukkah is not a Jewish “yom tov,” which in the literal translation means “good day” but in religious terms means the holiday was not handed to the Jewish people through the Torah. Unlike Passover or Yom Kippur, there are no restrictions on work. The two books that deal with the Maccabees aren’t Jewish canon. The “miracle of the lights” — which you might be led to believe is the entire story of the holiday — is apocryphal and was added hundreds of years later in the Talmud. (To be fair, the story of miraculous oil is far more conducive to the holiday gift-giving spirit than, say, the story of the Jewish woman who watched her seven sons being tortured and slaughtered by Antiochus because she refused to eat pork.)

But whatever reasons you have for offering good wishes, Hanukkah itself is a reminder that Jews have a singular, millennia-long historic relationship with Jerusalem. By the time Mattathias rebelled against Hellenistic Syrian king Antiochus, who had not only ordered a statue of Zeus to be erected in the Holy Temple but that swine be sacrificed to him, Jerusalem had likely been a Jewish city for more than 1,000 years. As some readers have suggested, Hanukkah might be the only Jewish holiday that celebrates events confirmed by the historical record. The Hasmonean dynasty, founded by Mattathias’ son Simon, is a fact.

Tuesday, December 06, 2022

12/06 Links Pt2: Jewish Life Is Cheap; How academia omits facts to make Palestinians the perpetual victim; It sucks to be a Jew on the left; Glick: The US liberal Jewish establishment is failing at fighting antisemitism

From Ian:

Jewish Life Is Cheap
For the past five years, the dominant media narrative about race—perhaps the dominant media narrative, period—has built up a hierarchy of racial justice. At the top are the perennially marginalized “BIPOCs,” victim to the lash of the ever-present colonial whip. At the bottom lurks the “white male,” inherently and ineluctably racist, even when (or perhaps especially when) they’re trying hard not to be.

In a manner true to our history, Jews have been sucked into this Manichean whirlpool, cast by radical academics and their media acolytes as an essential, almost distilled element of the global system of racial oppression. We are not just white; we are the plotters and financiers of the entire sysyetm of white supremacy.

Worse still, if Jews are white then they are not, well, Jews. The largely successful effort to assign Jews to the white race means Jews do not have the moral privilege of determining our own identity. The perverse result of dispossessing Jews of their own history is that it grants the mantle of Jewishness to our enemies. Thus Ye, in the same Twitter thread where he threatened to go “death con 3” on Jews, also claimed: “I actually can’t be antisemitic because Black people are actually Jew also.”

When Whoopi Goldberg asserted on The View that the “Holocaust was not about race,” she was advancing a version of the same arguments made by virulent Black Hebrew Israelite hate preachers, professors who insist on the indelible whiteness of Jews, and anti-Zionists who deny the legitimacy of Jewish historical identity. It’s true that only the last two groups tend to have their ideas promoted by the media, but all three share the idea that “Jew” is not a meaningful or legitimate category. Palestinians can be Jews—thus the Democratic political activist and Louis Farrakhan fan Linda Sarsour is invited to participate as an expert in a prominent panel on antisemitism. And by the same logic, Black Hebrews can be Jews. Ye can be a Jew. Only Jews are not allowed to be Jews.

Over and over, Jews have watched this trend play out, and largely we’ve been silent.

In a key scene in the 2014 Oscar-nominated Selma, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leads a group of activists and protesters across a bridge alongside Black civil rights leaders. Not pictured in the scene was a man who walked in that front line of protesters, fighting for civil rights: the great American Jewish rabbi and leader Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Why would Ava Duvernay, the film’s director, compromise the film’s historical integrity to erase one of America’s most prominent Jewish spiritual figures out of the image? The answer is that over the past decade, the anti-racist movement that has been the media’s single most championed social cause has turned a syllogism into a truism: Whites are by definition white supremacists; Jews are the whitest of whites because they falsely hide behind their fake ethnicity; Jews, therefore, are at the top of the white supremacy totem.

The media has actively spread these ideas by turning woke racialism into the defining moral cause of our time, while at the same time ignoring the consequences of this campaign. While Ye was “canceled” for making open threats and affirming his love for Hitler, little more than a week earlier hundreds of Black Hebrew Israelites marched through central Brooklyn, uniformed and in formation, chanting “we are the real Jews.” Save for some coverage in the New York Post and in Tablet’s daily newsletter, The Scroll, the rest of the media was virtually silent. The media is still talking about the alt-right’s 2017 hate march in Charlottesville, treating it as one of the defining events of the modern era, but when hundreds of virulent antisemites march in Brooklyn—the mecca of America’s media establishment—it was crickets. The silence was appalling but also unsurprising given that the same media has largely ignored the routine violent attacks against religious Jews in New York.
Ben-Dror Yemini: How academia omits facts to make Palestinians the perpetual victim
Recently, Prof. Shay Hezkani claimed in an article he wrote for “Haaretz” newspaper that I misled my readers when I wrote that the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine faced an existential threat in 1947 and 1948.

I challenge Hezkani to an intellectual debate. I am even willing to provide him here with some of the arguments at my disposal - shall he answer my call.

“Every week Ben-Dror Yemini tells readers of ‘Yedioth Ahronoth’ about Arab leaders in 1947 who called to throw the Jews into the sea, planning to systematically murder them,” Hezkani wrote in his Haaretz column last week.

“Throughout 15 years of my research, looking into hundreds of propaganda pieces from 1947-1949, I ran into only one case in which Hassan al-Banna - founder of the Muslim Brotherhood – mentions the ‘sea’ and ‘Jews’ in the same sentence - while calling to expel the Jews from Egypt,” Hezkani wrote.

“The quote [used by Yemini and attributed to ex-Secretary General of the Arab League in Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam] is not backed by credible sources in Arabic, and it’s unclear whether or not it was actually ever said.”

I read the Haaretz article and could not believe my eyes. In the book I published titled “Industry of Lies,” I presented a more detailed list of threats made against the Jews, with credible sources, during that time period.

But, Hezkani looked into hundreds of documents and somehow found nothing. It’s a little weird that I did not spent 15 years researching this topic in an academic setting, yet found so much more information. To clear all doubts, prior to publishing the research-backed chapters of my book, they were reviewed by three prominent academics.

It could be that Hezkani has difficulty reading books. So, let’s start with the leader of the Palestinian Arabs, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who in 1941 arrived at Nazi Germany and called to kill every Jew, before returning to lead the Palestinians.

If Hezkani believes that al-Husseini had changed his mind later on, he should refer us to the relevant sources. In an interview to the “Al Sarih” newspaper, al-Husseini said the Arab goal during the 1948 War of Independence wasn’t to undo the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, but to “continue to fight until the Zionists are dead.”
Hadley Freeman: It sucks to be a Jew on the left
As Hadley Freeman leaves the Guardian for the Sunday Times, she opens up about her Jewish experience

Honestly, what a dumpster fire that whole period was, to the point that it’s almost hard to remember what actually happened. But just off the top of my head, here is a list of things I remember lefty non-Jews saying to me back then:
1. “I don’t think you should write about antisemitism because you obviously feel very passionately about it.”
2. “What, exactly, are Jews afraid of here? It’s not like Corbyn is going to bring back pogroms.”
3. “Jews have always voted right so of course, they don’t like Corbyn.”
4. “It’s not that I don’t believe that you think he’s antisemitic. It’s just I think you’re being manipulated by bad-faith actors. So let me explain why you’re wrong…”
5. “Come on, you don’t really think he really hates Jews.”

All of the above were said to me by progressive people, people who would proudly describe themselves as anti-racism campaigners. And yet. When Jews expressed distress at, say, Corbyn describing Hamas as “friends”, or attending a wreath-laying ceremony for the killers at the Munich Olympics, or bemoaning the lack of English irony among Zionists, we were fobbed off with snarky tweets and shrugged shoulders.

What we were seeing, they said, we were not actually seeing. You could not design an exercise more perfectly structured to cause madness. It was, to be blunt, gaslighting.

Anyway, that’s all in the past now, right? Well it is for me, because I’m walking away. A lot of illusions were broken, and I lost a lot of respect for a lot of people I thought I knew, but it turned out I didn’t. Not really. Not at all. So I have left the garden. And it feels bloody great. (h/t messy57)
A rock star channels Jewish outrage at antisemitism
The antisemitic utterances of Kyrie Irving and Ye (formerly Kanye West) prompted condemnations from many celebrities, both those with Jewish backgrounds and those who weren’t Jewish but who issued solemn pledges of support for their Jewish friends and colleagues. Oscar-winning actress Reese Witherspoon went as far as to tweet, “This is a very scary time,” to which one follower chimed in with an anti-Israel rejoinder.

Solemnity, however, unexpectedly yielded to outrage at the annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Los Angeles. What was no doubt expected to be one of the evening’s least momentous junctures, the honoring of lawyer-agent Allen Grubman, turned into a consciousness-raising session when rock star John Mellencamp took the stage for a profanity-laden introduction speech.

“Allen is Jewish, and I bring that up for one reason,” Mellencamp said. “I’m a gentile, and my life has been enriched by countless Jewish people.”

Mellencamp then turned it up a notch. “I cannot tell you how f***ing important it is to speak out if you’re an artist against antisemitism,” he continued. “Here’s the trick: Silence is complicity. I’m standing here tonight loudly and proudly with Allen, his family and all of my Jewish friends and all of the Jewish people of the world. F*** antisemitism!”

Whoa.

What was surprising about Mellencamp’s speech was not his principled stance, but the sheer indignation and the unbottled emotion that gave voice to it. For millions of Jews who have fearfully observed the growing normalization of antisemitic motifs in today’s popular culture, such a righteous outburst was surely a welcome surprise, but it begged a question for the entertainment industry: “Where have you been until now?”

Monday, December 05, 2022

12/05 Links Pt2: A Blood Libel Against Israel on Netflix; The Navel-Gazing Inanities of MESA; The story of Jewish expulsion from Arab countries must be told

From Ian:

A Blood Libel Against Israel on Netflix
On Dec. 1, Netflix started streaming the Jordanian film "Farha," which depicts fictionalized, heartless Israeli soldiers viciously killing Palestinian men, women and children in cold blood. These events never actually happened and the film admits that it is "dramatized." But that does not mean it will not have an outsized impact on anti-Jewish hate and violence.

The movie offers a fanciful retelling of the 1948 war in which the would-be genocidal Arab armies failed to destroy a newborn Jewish state (and kill all its inhabitants in the process). Those who tried to help them do it are romantically recast as the helpless victims of a horrible catastrophe.

Yet primary sources - from the Arab side - attest to the fact that the vast majority of Arabs who left their homes did so voluntarily, or under orders from the invading Arab armies, not the Israeli armed forces.

This is not a matter of perspective or worldview. A movie that malevolently depicts Israeli forces murdering defenseless Arab children in order to feed the nakba mythology is nothing short of a modern blood libel.

In a world of rising antisemitism, it is dangerous and disgusting for Netflix to feed false and anti-Jewish information to the masses by giving a film like this a platform.


Anger over Netflix film ‘aiming to destroy Israel’
Netflix is under fire for screening a movie depicting Israeli soldiers executing a Palestinian family in cold blood, made by filmmakers who have a track record of inflammatory comments about the Jewish state.

The film, Farha, set in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, is being launched on Netflix in most countries from 1 December, and is likely to be Jordan’s entry to next year’s Oscars.

Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, told the JC that the film was intended to “destroy [Israel] by all means possible”.

He said: “I find it deeply troubling that Netflix has apparently failed to do the most basic due diligence before supporting and promoting this project.”

In an investigation into the filmmakers, the JC and activist group GnasherJew discovered that producer Ayah Jardaneh tweeted last year that “Israel is the real terrorist” and posted a “map of Palestine” that erased all trace of Israel.

She also tweeted that Mike Pence was supporting “an apartheid state, an occupier and Zionism”.

Addressing Mr Pence, she wrote: “If you love them so much give them your land and leave your house live as a refugee and let them live there instead”.

In 2014, Ms Jardaneh retweeted a post that said “Hamas or his firecracker rockets is not a problem, but seven decades of Israeli brutality and oppression is”.

She has also used the hashtag #27027KM, described as “the area of all Palestine from the river to the sea”.

Ms Jardaneh, who works at the Amman-based company TaleBox, is not the only member of the team to have made such controversial statements online, the JC found.


Netflix blocks controversial Nakba film for Israeli subscribers
The Jordanian movie "Farha" – which shows Israeli soldiers executing a Palestinian family - became available on Netflix several days ago, but it seems not for all the subscribers of the popular streaming service.

Although many Israelis have expressed outrage and terminated their Netflix subscription after the streaming platform announced that it would upload the film, Israelis who chose to keep their subscription would not be able to view it after it was blocked for them.

Many Netflix subscribers in Israel said that when they tried to upload "Farha" in the Netflix search engine, and could not find it, while others received a message saying "this title cannot be viewed in your country." It should be noted that for some subscribers who had an English interface, the film remained available for them, but still many had an error message and couldn't watch it.

Last week, Far-right lawmaker and destined National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir slammed the new Jordanian film.

"The inciteful Jordanian film that will be broadcast on Netflix demonstrates how hypocritical the world could be," Ben-Gvir said.

"Israel has been attacked by murderous terror before it was even established, this consciousness engineering should be handled by the Foreign Ministry with advocacy that shows the real picture, and who the real bloodthirsty murderers are," he said.

Sunday, December 04, 2022

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?

Saturday, December 03, 2022

12/03 Links: Happy Nakba Day; Bibi Could Upend Biden’s Weak Foreign Policy; More media excuses for Palestinians and terror; US Jews battle ‘mainstreaming’ and normalization of antisemitism

From Ian:

Happy Nakba Day
The Jewish/Arab conflict in the Middle East is not about the relative merits of Jew or Arab to live on the Land; there is enough land in what was formerly known as “Palestine” for all without Israel giving up any of the area it now possesses. The ongoing war in Israel is the fulcrum of the intellectual/spiritual conflict between the worldviews that oppose G-d’s rule on earth, and its manifestation through the return of the Jews to the Land.

They say: "Come, let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel will be remembered no more. The consult together with a united purpose; against Hashem do they make a covenant. The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, Moab and the Hagrites. Gival, Ammon and Amalek; Philistine and the residents of Tyre. Assyria is also joined with them; they have become an appendage of the children of Lot, selah. (Psalm 83)

A sovereign Israel is an existential threat to the adherents of Christian & Moslem replacement theologies; it shakes their worldviews to the foundations. A thriving Jewish Commonwealth puts the lie to their system of beliefs. The destruction of the State of Israel and the re-expulsion of the Jews are critical to Christian and Moslem worldviews, in order to correct the “aberration” of the Ingathering of the Exiles, kibutz galuyot. All efforts to hobble and constrict the State of Israel, to push her back to indefensible borders, to murder Jewish women and children, especially new immigrants, are important milestones toward their ultimate goal of rolling back history to the good old days when the Jews were scattered to the four corners of the globe, easy prey for the Jew haters.

So the UN passes yet more Jew hating resolutions. Pish Tush, as Gilbert & Sullivan would say.. Should they ever succeed in uprooting the People of Israel from the Land of Israel, you can rest assured they would trip over themselves building elaborate memorials to the failed Jewish enterprise.

However, Israel and the settlement enterprise will endure because it is the mitzvah she’kol ha’mitzvot t’luyin bah (i.e., living in the Land of Israel is the mitzvah upon which every other mitzvah is predicated). Witness the open miracles in the battles of 1948, 1967, 1973. Nowhere in Biblical Prophecy does it suggest that Hashem will return us to our land only to be expelled again.

In a certain sense, Theodore Herzl was wrong: the establishment of Der Judenstaat has failed to solve the problem of Jew hatred. Israel is now reckoned as the Jew among the nations. But their strenuous objections to the Jewish State serve merely to reinforce the fundamental integrity of our worldview, our mission, and our hopeful vision for humanity.

So let’s celebrate Nakba Day! The proper response to the exasperated last gasps of our detractors is to build, build, build. Build up the Land. Build more houses in Yehuda, Shomron and the periphery.

And finally: let us extend our hand in brotherhood to those gentiles who see the Hand of G-d in historical events, and who wish to join with us to bring us closer to the day when G-d is One and His Name is One in the world.
How did Kohelet Forum become Israel's dynamic think tank?
What is the function of the Kohelet Policy Forum?
The Kohelet Policy Forum promotes Israeli national sovereignty and individual liberty. This makes it a “small c” conservative center. It was founded in 2012 by Prof. Moshe (“Moish”) Koppel, an American-born oleh and a true polymath. A specialist in machine learning and artificial intelligence (specifically, natural language processing), he also has written on the metalogic of Halacha and on constitutional law.

He recently wrote a witty book about Jewish identity in the modern age, Judaism Straight Up, which examines the differences between traditional societies and contemporary cosmopolitan ones.

Kohelet is basically a “libertarian” shop. This means that it seeks to broaden individual liberty and promote free-market principles in Israel. Much of its efforts have been aimed at driving deregulation, cutting government bureaucracy, reforming local and national government bodies, and eliminating impediments to free and fair trade (like tariffs, quotas, cumbersome product standards, and licensing requirements). In this it has been enormously effective.

Kohelet has tackled the (mis-)management of government corporations and pension funds, land use and housing policies, labor and social welfare policies, food cartels, the regulation of cannabis cultivation and export, policies meant to better integrate Arab women and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men in higher education and the productive workforce, and more.

Kohelet also singlehandedly has put on the national agenda the demand for reform of the legal system and the need to re-balance the anchors of Israel’s democratic system – the Knesset and the courts.

In many ways, legal or constitutional reform is the hottest and most acute partisan issue on the domestic agenda, something akin to abortion as the most piercing issue in American politics. And Kohelet put it there (correctly so, in my view). I am sure that Kohelet’s thinkers and legal experts will play a sizeable role in the coming debate over the contours of judicial reform.

If then-justice minister Ayelet Shaked gets credit for appointing approximately 300 judges largely in a conservative and libertarian mold (out of a grand total of some 800 judges in the entire judicial system), then Kohelet shares part of that credit. Kohelet specialists raised national consciousness about the importance of who gets appointed to the bench and how, and helped Shaked make wise choices.

Kohelet also emphasizes “national sovereignty.” Indeed, Prof. Koppel wrote the very first draft of Israel’s so-called nation-state bill. Working with Avi Dichter MK and then many other parliamentarians on both sides of the Left-Right divide in Knesset, the Forum successfully drove passage of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.
More media excuses for Palestinians and terror
As could be expected, the media is having a field day criticizing Israel for allowing citizens in a democratic election to choose some despicable characters to represent them in the next government. Outside of those who voted for them, you do not hear much support from Israelis for the views of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Nevertheless, their inclusion in the government is being portrayed in apocalyptic terms. The media has no such concern for the state of the U.S. government, with antisemites like Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Minn.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in Congress.

The Washington Post devoted nearly an entire page in its “The World” section to the article, “Palestinians fear for their children after Israeli vote.” Several Palestinians are quoted about their fears to give the impression that Israelis are targeting children. One says he tells his children to be careful around soldiers “because any kind of movement, and they will shoot them.” Similarly, another Palestinian says she won’t let her young children walk to school for fear they will be targeted by soldiers.

Claire Parker mentions Ben-Gvir’s position on giving security forces greater latitude to use live ammunition but provides zero evidence that Palestinian children are in any danger following the election, or that soldiers are shooting children on their way to school or by simply moving in an unthreatening way.

The article references a “spate of Palestinian attacks” but does not label the perpetrators terrorists or mention the number of Israeli civilians who have been murdered this year by terrorists. It does refer to the number of Palestinians killed and injured without any explanation of the circumstances.

What made the article especially galling, and just one more example of anti-Israel bias, was that a short article appeared below it about the protests in Iran. This merited four short paragraphs and did not mention that as many as 63 children have been murdered by Iranian security forces. So, while Iranian children are being killed, the Post devotes most of its attention to the parents of Palestinian children who have not been harmed.

The coverage of the twin bombings in Jerusalem by the Post and others was also problematic. In keeping with past practice, reporters could not bring themselves to use the word “terrorist” to refer to the attacks or the perpetrators. Some stories mentioned that Israelis have been victims of violence numerous times this year but, again, refused to label them as victims of terror. Many also could not simply report the facts about the bombings and were compelled to mention the number of Palestinians who have died in clashes with Israeli forces.

Friday, December 02, 2022

12/02 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Diaspora Jews keep making the same mistake; Trivializing antisemitism based on politics; Not just Kanye – it’s an online coalition of hate

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Diaspora Jews keep making the same mistake
A perverse feature of the Jewish people is that they make one particular mistake over and over again. They are persecuted. They frantically try to assimilate into their host community in the belief that this will avert future persecution. They are persecuted again. They frantically assimilate again.

This week saw the publication of the first collected works of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of modern Zionism. The set initiated the Library of the Jewish People, a new series of works by classic Jewish writers issued by the Koren publishing house.

Publishing this now is particularly fitting because of striking similarities between Herzl's time and today.

Gil Troy's masterful introduction to the collection draws attention to the complexities of Herzl's tortured life. This rings a loud contemporary bell, not just about the persistence of antisemitism but about the current attitudes of Diaspora Jews.

Assimilated and sophisticated, Herzl had an ambivalent attitude towards his Jewishness. Infatuated with the German high culture that was dominant in Europe, he refused to circumcise his son and lit Christmas tree candles for his children.

Jews had risen to the highest levels of German and Austrian political, professional and cultural society. Yet at the same time, Germany and Austria were becoming more and more pathologically hostile to the Jews.

Herzl was caught in a permanent identity crisis – a conflict between his "enlightened" Europeanized self and the Jewish culture whose fundamental importance he only gradually came to understand.

As he reeled from one antisemitic shock after another, he repeatedly tried to reconcile the high degree of assimilation achieved by European Jews with the fact that, for non-Jewish Europeans, the Jews were unassimilable.


Not just Kanye – it’s an online coalition of hate
Some dismiss TikTok as an innocuous forum for children who want to be creative. Yet TikTok’s pattern of catering to young, impressionable, naïve audiences, combined with the impact of bad-faith actors who post hateful content, must be taken more seriously. Despite claims that TikTok and other platforms are monitoring content, a new variety of antisemitism has emerged in which hatred is articulated through “dog whistles” or coded language used for a specific audience. Jews, for example, are referred to as Skypes (to rhyme with kikes). Black people are “Googles,” Latinos are “Yahoos,” and Muslims are “Skittles.”

Current concerns also extend to more mainstream platforms like Twitter, whose acquisition by Elon Musk casts doubts on whether the social media giant will engage in any form of content moderation – even when it comes to hate speech. Advertisement

But it is on the Dark Web where antisemitic content truly thrives and festers. Inaccessible via what’s known as the “Surface Web,” where you and I search for restaurants, order books and play Wordle, the Dark Web operates in the vast walled-off realm of the Deep Web. It’s a lawless and faceless environment where hateful groups find a comfortable home not only on their own but more concerningly together, as a coalition that amplifies their individual and collective impact.

While it may be tempting to shrug off Ye’s defenders as a hateful nuisance, it is crucial to remember that violent terrorist groups spew similar rhetoric and also have access to the Deep Web. ISIS had to use cloud storage when navigating mainstream platforms became impossible. Thousands of films from Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbollah are floating in internet archives.

In an ideal world, Ye’s words should not matter. However, they reflect the cesspool of online hate that translates to violence on the streets. The Anti-Defamation League has documented a rise in antisemitic incidents in the US from 927 in 2012 to a record-high 2,717 in 2021. That is no coincidence.

We are missing a vital opportunity to call out not just Ye the individual, but the chronic trend of Jew-hatred itself. And what starts with Jews never ends with them. It spreads to other groups and reflects a decay in the moral fiber of society.

Let’s not talk about Ye. Let’s redirect the conversation toward forming a new coalition that counters the fusion and coalition of hate. While the Dark Net presents a tough challenge and there is no way to regulate it, however, it can be studied. Because words — whether they are uttered by an anonymous source or a celebrity — can and do kill.
Trivializing antisemitism based on politics
After news broke that former President Donald Trump carelessly dined with both Ye and avowed holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-A-Lago, Ben Shapiro, who has been outspoken about his support for Ron DeSantis should the Florida governor run for president in 2024, was quick to voice his disgust. "A good way not to accidentally dine with a vile racist and antisemite you don't know is not to dine with a vile racist and antisemite you do know," Shapiro posted, setting off a back-and-forth Twitter squabble between the defamed rapper and Daily Wire executives that had me reaching for the popcorn.

No doubt, Trump's meeting deserves public condemnation. But it's unfortunate that Shapiro can see the splinter in Trump's eye and not the log in his own. Shapiro coming down on Trump for associating with antisemites rings hypocritical in the face of his absence to do just that as his colleague, Candace Owens, continues to prattle on regularly about Ye being her "friend." Waving Owen's defense of an antisemite, presumably because of a shared, mutual interest says much more about Shapiro's character than Trump's dinner says about him.

According to a recent article by Dennis Prager, Owen's former boss, Owens is wrongly being smeared as an antisemite. Prager provides a laundry list of evidence that points to her allegiance with the Jewish people and her support of the Jewish state. But that woman who Prager stands behind has been nowhere to be found this past month. And after Ye's embrace of Fuentes, Dennis should ask himself some tough questions about her. That Shapiro and Prager refuse to publicly identify the brute that she has become on this issue not only has former supporters wondering if they are suffering from a mercenary conflict of interest but if they, like the ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt and other establishment Jewish leaders, have become so comfortable in their untouchable elite status, that they are now detached from the harsh realities of hatred their fellow Jews face every day on the streets of New York and Los Angeles.

If Shapiro and Prager honestly respected Ms. Owens, they would hold her to a higher standard, the standard that both the Daily Wire and Prager U profess to hold all people to. And certainly, the standard that Shapiro is currently holding Trump to. And no, this does not mean firing her, but it does mean straightening out their priorities by taking her to task for her concrete thinking and moral failings. What a fantastic exercise in free speech that would be, would it not?
Israel Advocacy Movement: Ben Shapiro is wrong about Kanye
In this video we examine the Ye effect

Thursday, December 01, 2022

12/01 Links Pt2: Cultural appropriation and the Jews; UN envoy to Hamas: ‘You have the right to fight Israel’; Kanye praises Hitler, says every human has value, 'especially Hitler'

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Cultural appropriation and the Jews
The notable aspect of West’s behavior is that whereas Irving issued a groveling apology for his antisemitic outburst, West doubled down. In every public appearance since he openly defended Irving’s anti-Semitism, West has not only restated his antisemitic positions, he has expanded on them, and escalated his attacks on Jews as a people, a community in America, and as individuals. In redefining himself as an antisemite first and a rapper and public figure second, West has chosen to associate himself most closely with other antisemites, particularly white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

West’s decision to act as a bridge between black antisemitism, which is generally associated with the progressive political camp, and white supremacist antisemitism, which is generally associated with the political far right, exposes a much-ignored but fundamental fact about antisemitism: it isn’t a political position. It is a cultural outlook; a way of understanding the world. Antisemites hail from the political left, center and right. They come from all religions. Their antisemitism directs their politics. Consequently, antisemitic policies have advocates in all political camps.

This brings us back to the Israeli reporters in Doha.

Black Israelites and the Nation of Islam, which base their identity on the appropriation of Jewish identity, comprise a small but powerful minority of the black community in America. They impact the Congressional Black Caucus and other key black power centers, which in turn impact the Democratic Party. And while their cultural and political power are growing, they are still limited.

In contrast, embrace of the Palestinian narrative is all but universal across the Arab world, across the wider Muslim world and across large sections of the Western world. It is nearly universally accepted in Europe and by progressives in America. All of the people who accept and champion the Palestinian narrative accept the validity of a political cause that is entirely based on the appropriation of Jewish peoplehood.

Shechnik and his fellow reporters were stunned to discover the truth about the war against them as Jews, and against their state. The antisemitism that animates their antagonists in Doha has nothing to do with who leads Israel’s government or what the Israeli military does in any given war or operation. Support of the Palestinians, and their goal of wiping Israel off the map, is rooted in Jew hatred, shared by billions of people across the world.

The Palestinians are popular because they provide a vehicle for expressing and advancing that hatred, including in the halls of power across the world. Israel’s endurance is unacceptable, because simply by surviving, simply by having reporters to send to cover the World Cup in Doha, the Jewish state proves that the Palestinian narrative is untrue, and based on a rejection of observable reality and the historical record, not on justice or truth.

Likewise, American Jews are stunned to discover that black antisemitism, like Palestinian-predicated assaults on Jews from Peoria to Miami, has nothing to do with who is in power in Israel or whether American Jews identify with progressive or conservative politicians and causes. It has nothing to do with whether or not American Jews are willing to accept “white guilt.”

Irving, West, the Black Israelites, the Nation of Islam and their ilk don’t hate Jews because of anything any particular Jew may or may not think, say or do. They hate the Jews because they have stolen Jewish history, heritage, nationhood and culture and appropriated all of them to themselves. Having done so, they have no choice but to demonize the Jews, because Jewish endurance and legitimacy expose the fraud at the heart of their invented identity.
From New York City to the Negev Desert: Who Are the Black Hebrew Israelites?
From Jews to Israelites: The Third Wave
The third wave of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement began in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to the civil rights movement and the subsequent Black Power movement.

The third wave is defined as a period when BHI denominations emerged that were more patriarchal, more militant and more extreme.

The third wave is also when the movement began to self-identify as “Black Israelites” instead of “Black Jews.”

Initially, the third wave continued in the footsteps of the second wave by adopting Jewish traditions and learning Jewish texts.

However, as the third wave continued, new BHI denominations began to emerge that were influenced by Black separatism and the militancy that colored 1960s America.

One of the most prominent Black Hebrew Israelite denominations that emerged during this period was the Israeli School of Universal Practical Knowledge (commonly known as “One West”).

Founded in the late 1960s by Eber Ben Yomin (also known as Abba Bivens), a former member of the Commandment Keepers, One West espouses the belief that white Jews stole the identity of Black, Latin and Native Americans (who are the true Jews) and that the mainstream Jewish community is responsible for all the challenges that face these communities.

One West also adopted the tactics of confrontational street preaching and wearing colorful garments, emulating the clothing that they believe that the original Israelites wore thousands of years ago.

Some of the most radical, militant and bigoted Black Hebrew Israelite sects to emerge in the past 40 years are offshoots of One West.

These groups include Israel United in Christ, the Israelite school of Universal Practical Knowledge, the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, the Sicarii, House of Israel, True Nation Israelite Congregation and Israelite Saints of Christ.

Of all these groups, Israel United in Christ (IUIC) is one of the most vocal and public. They are also one of the most militant and bigoted. They are known for street-preaching, rallying (including on behalf of Kyrie Irving) and marching.

In its writings and speeches, IUIC has made a wide variety of antisemitic statements, including that Jews are demons, that “everything they [Jewish people] do is about lying” and that Jewish people are responsible for a “Holocaust” that Black people have been experiencing since the 1400s.

The Black Hebrew Israelites in the State of Israel
One of the sects that emerged during the third wave was the Original African Hebrew Israelite Nation of Jerusalem.

This sect was founded by Ben Ammi Ben Israel, a Chicago-born man who claimed that he had received a vision in 1966 that he was to return the African-American descendants of the ancient Israelites to the Promised Land.

By 1967, Ben Israel had persuaded 400 people to leave the United States with him for the Promised Land. After a brief sojourn in Liberia, that was seen as a means of purging the negative influence of captivity, this group arrived in Israel in 1969.

When they arrived in Israel, the group was given temporary visas and housing in the southern Israeli development town of Dimona.

Soon after the initial group’s arrival in the country, the Israeli government noticed that more members were arriving and illegally staying in the country (since it was determined that they were not Jewish, they were not eligible to become citizens under the Law of Return).

The State of Israel’s attempt to bar more members of the African Hebrew Israelite Nation from moving to the country led to a protracted conflict between the state and the sect.

During this nasty fight, which lasted 13 years, members of the sect took part in a public campaign against the State of Israel, which included calls for a halt to American aid to Israel and a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses.

In 1990, the Israeli government and the African Hebrew Israelites came to an agreement whereby members of the sect would be granted permanent residency.

In 2004, the first member of the African Hebrew Israelites enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces and by 2006, 100 members were serving in the Israeli military. In 2009, the first member of the sect gained Israeli citizenship.

There are currently between 3,000 to 5,000 members of the African Hebrew Israelites living in Israel, the majority of whom are in the southern towns of Dimona, Arad and Mitzpe Ramon.

The African Hebrew Israelites place a strong emphasis on healthy living. They follow a vegan diet and highly limit their intake of sugar and salt. In addition, members are forbidden from smoking, taking drugs or drinking alcohol (aside from naturally fermented wines). The African Hebrew Israelites also follow a strict exercise schedule.

Until 1990, members of the African Hebrew Israelite community practiced polygamy due to its existence in the Biblical tradition and because there were many more women than men in the first years of the community.

Aside from the Biblical holidays, the African Hebrew Israelite community also holds a special festive celebration every May: New World Passover, which commemorates their exodus from the United States in 1967.


UN envoy to Hamas: ‘You have the right to fight Israel’
Italian lawyer Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ special rapporteur for the Palestinians, spoke at a Hamas-organized conference in Gaza on Monday.

She plans to continue on to Israel, which is considering refusing her entry.

Senior members of the U.S.- and E.U.-designated terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) were among those in attendance, including Hamas’s Basem Naim, Ghazi Hamad, Isam al-Da’alis and Abdul Latif al-Qanu, and PIJ’s Ahmad al-Mudallal and Khadr Habib.

In her speech, translated in real-time to Arabic, Albanese told the crowd: “You have a right to resist this occupation.”

The UN official recently said, “If they [Israel] don’t let me in….I’ll be able to claim that I’ve been denied access.”

Albanese has a history of supporting violence against Israelis. In June, she said, “Israel says ‘resistance equals terrorism,’ but an occupation requires violence and generates violence.”

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

11/29 Links Pt2: What happened to the 1947 UN Partition Plan?; The Failed British Double-Cross of Israel; Kanye walks out of interview after being questioned about antisemitic beliefs

From Ian:

What happened to the 1947 UN Partition Plan?
Today, Nov. 29, 2022, is the 75th anniversary of the 1947 UN Partition Plan – UN General Assembly resolution 181 - which divided the geographical area to the west of the Jordan River, into two states: A Jewish state and an Arab state. In its essence, the Partition Plan was a fundamental breach of the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which placed that entire area under the governance of Great Britain, for the sole purpose of creating a Jewish state on all of the land.

The 1922 Mandate for Palestine had already taken the entire geographical area then referred to as “Palestine” and divided it in two: The eastern part of Palestine - the Arab country - was placed under the rule of the Hashemite family and changed its name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The western part of Palestine was to become the Jewish state.

Despite the breach of the Mandate, the Jewish leadership of the day – represented by David Ben Gurion - accepted the plan. The Arab leadership and countries, on the other hand, rejected the plan and immediately started planning how to eradicate the Jewish state before it even came into existence.

75 years later, speaking at the UN, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has now decided to accept the plan and even demand its implementation:
“Therefore, I present today to this UN organization, the title of international legitimacy in this world, with a formal request to implement General Assembly resolution 181, which formed the basis for the two-state solution in 1947…”

[WAFA, English edition, Official PA news agency, Sept. 23, 2022]

In making this demand, Abbas ignores a number of fundamental realities.

First, Abbas is demanding the implementation of a plan that has been defunct for 75 years. Living up to their promises, even before the British Mandate came to an end on May 14, 1948, the Arab countries attacked the nascent Jewish state.

[Boston Evening Globe, May 1, 1948]

While Israel managed to survive and expand in a war in which 6.000 Israeli men, women, and children were killed, a full 1% of the population most of the areas allocated for the Arab state - Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip - were occupied by Jordan (which was not yet recognized by the UN as a state) and Egypt, respectively.

In its original charter from 1965, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is now headed by Abbas, disavowed its connection to the areas provisionally allocated for the Arab state openly declaring:
“This Organization [The PLO] does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area”.

Indeed, while Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip and Jordan controlled Judea and Samaria (which it renamed “The West Bank”), from 1948 to 1967, they and the other Arab countries refrained from creating what could have been the “Palestinian” Arab state.
The Failed British Double-Cross of Israel
When the warrior poet Avraham “Yair” Stern founder and leader of Lohamei Herut Israel (Lehi, “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”) who believed that the British had to be forced out with assassinations and bombs and would never leave voluntarily, was killed after being captured and handcuffed by British detectives on Feb. 12, 1942, no Jew could celebrate his death.

But the leaders of the Jews of British Mandatory Palestine, already then led by David Ben-Gurion, viewed Stern’s death as a gain for the national cause rather than a loss—and not only because the poet and his followers were reckless political dilettantes: Some fantasized alliances with Mussolini, even the Nazis, as well as Arab nationalists in a common anti-British cause.

At a time of maximum danger—Rommel seemed to be on the verge of conquering Egypt, with Palestine next—Ben-Gurion and his allies doggedly pursued cooperation with the British in spite of bitter disappointments. Perhaps the worst of these was the May 1939 White Paper which limited the immigration of Jews to 75,000 over five years, sentencing countless European Jews to death at the hands of the Nazis. Yet Ben-Gurion believed, and rightly so, that the British were the least-bad allies the Jews could have.

Nor did Ben-Gurion have much choice. The Americans had refused to enter the war even after the Germans had conquered most of Europe. They still refused to act when the Germans seemed on the verge of defeating Russia, which would soon mean Britain’s defeat, too. On Dec. 2, 1941, German tanks were 14.7 miles from Moscow’s Red Square. America was only at war when Stern died in 1942 because the Japanese had attacked them.

It was unimaginable that the Americans would intervene on behalf of the Jews in the distant Middle East—indeed the U.S. only lifted its total weapons embargo on Israel in August 1962!—to allow the sale of defensive antiaircraft missiles, seven years after the Soviets had agreed to deliver bombers to Nasser’s Egypt (part of a huge Soviet weapons gift package misrepresented as “Czech” at the insistence of the CIA to avert hostility from their own man Nasser: That always-wrong agency was betting on Nasser’s mighty Arab nationalism rather than on seemingly puny Israel).

When Avraham Stern was killed, the communists still gave all their loyalty to Stalin. According to Ben-Gurion and the majority of Jewish leaders in Palestine, Churchill was still the best bet the Jews could have, even after the exposure of his crass duplicity toward the Yishuv. Having vehemently condemned the May 1939 White Paper to please his Jewish benefactors while out of office and short of ready cash, Churchill refused to change the policy once he became prime minister—thus denying escape from death to millions, and incidentally preventing my father, mother, two brothers, and myself from leaving Arad, Romania, to reach safety by a comfortable Orient Express ride to Istanbul and thence Haifa. A 5-inch-by-2-inch Palestine entry slip was enough to obtain Bulgarian and Turkish transit visas, but the British refused to issue them, even in 1944—by which point detailed eyewitness accounts and impeccable documentation of the operation of every part of the Nazi killing machine had reached London and Washington.

In spite of all that, on the evidence available at the time, Ben-Gurion was still mostly right and Avraham Stern was still mostly wrong. The British did eventually, and very reluctantly, agree to the U.N.’s termination of their mandatory rule on May 15, 1948, thus allowing the Jews to fight for their state. The qualifier is necessary because a factor in the British decision was the terrorist attacks inspired by Stern, including the July 22, 1946, bombing of the British headquarters in the King David Hotel whose 91 killed set a deadliest-attack record that lasted for decades.
I Was Robbed of 70% of the Land of Israel
Jordan ruled over Judea and Samaria, Egypt ruled over Gaza and Syria ruled over the Golan Heights. For those that do not understand the importance of the sentence above, it means that all the lands that the Arabs call “occupied” were under Arab control between 1948-1967! Was there peace?

It was Jordan, Egypt, and Syria that built the refugee camps and stuck their own Arab brothers and sisters in them to create a refugee problem in order to bash Israel. If creating a new State called Palestine was the goal and all the Arab countries are in favor of such a State, why didn’t Jordan Egypt and Syria help the “Palestinian” Arabs start a State during those 19 years (1948-1967).

Israel liberated Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan from Arab States occupation and it has nothing to do with an Arab people who call themselves (since 1964) Palestinians. We never occupied an Arab place called Palestine and there never was an Arab place called Palestine before Israel that could have been occupied.

You are probably saying this is enough to completely destroy the anti-Israel propaganda, but it gets much better (or worse). Today, Jordan is ruled by a king.

Over 75% of Jordan’s population are Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians”! So why hasn’t the majority of “Palestinians” taken over? Because Jordan does not give them full rights!

In fact, Jordan has the largest “Palestinian” refugee camps!

Where is the UN? Where is UNWRA? Where are the SJWs? Where are all the Leftists who care about Human Rights?

Just to sum up, Jordan sits on 77% of British Palestine and has a majority of over 75% of Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians”. Why aren’t the Arabs, who so want to create a Palestinian State, not fighting over 77% of the Land where they are a 75% majority? Why are they fighting over a small sliver of 23% where they are the minority? The answer is simple.

This has never been a struggle to build a new state called Palestine, it’s a struggle to destroy the one called ISRAEL.

Now, can we start fighting for truth and stop giving into false diplomacy that is based on lies?


Monday, November 28, 2022

11/28 Links Pt2: IHRA Definition of Antisemitism Is Only "Polarizing" to Israel's Detractors; Anti-Israel activists and human sacrifice; Ye x Milo x Fuentes

From Ian:

IHRA Definition of Antisemitism Is Only "Polarizing" to Israel's Detractors
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) "working definition" of antisemitism is not polarizing to anyone other than Israel's detractors and antisemites.

The IHRA definition has been adopted by three dozen nations, at least six Canadian provinces and numerous states in the U.S.

The IHRA's detractors refuse to acknowledge that modern antisemitism is often tied to the Jewish State (e.g., Jewish soldiers being called Nazis).

They accuse those of us who defend the definition of being "right-wing" and of "weaponizing antisemitism" in order to defend Israel.

This is meant to undermine our efforts to protect ourselves against hate.

In the case of the IHRA definition, it's often the same people who call for universal rights and freedoms who oppose those very same rights for the Jewish people, particularly as they define their relationship with the State of Israel.

The IHRA definition is not "polarizing" to anyone other than those who either lack an historical understanding or are with an agenda to exacerbate the problem of hate and defame the Jewish state.
Anti-Israel activists and human sacrifice
In the anti-Israel context, there is the more recent case of Rachel Corrie. A college senior, Corrie became a member of the International Solidarity Movement, a terror-connected NGO that exploits foreign activists in service of the Palestinian cause. It is likely that she had already been indoctrinated in anti-Israel ideology, but the ISM almost certainly compounded it by orders of magnitude via a cult-like environment of hate.

Corrie lived for some time in Gaza, where she became infatuated with the people and decided that Israel was committing genocide against them, in which, as an American, she was complicit. In 2003, she knelt in front of an Israeli bulldozer, ostensibly in protest of a house demolition. The driver could not see her, and she was crushed to death.

She has, of course, become a martyr, and her letters and emails have been transformed into books and plays. Yet what they reveal is a deeply insecure and troubled young woman, possessed by existential guilt and desperate to redeem herself. Corrie’s death, in other words, was less a tragic accident than a kind of seppuku—a ritual suicide that she hoped, perhaps unconsciously, would be a moral expiation. She did not come to this conclusion on her own. She was the victim of unscrupulous people who wanted, or at least knew they were likely to acquire, a martyr.

One should not look away from what this means: Emotional blackmail kills. It is a kind of murder. Murder at third hand, perhaps, but murder nonetheless.

It is also part of a very ancient tradition. What the blackmailers are after, in the end, is the most primal of all forms of absolution: the human sacrifice. It is sometimes an emotional sacrifice, but far too often it is also physical.

From their origins in prehistory, such sacrifices were, almost invariably, expiatory acts. They were attempts to redeem a person or a community from their sins, to appease the gods and turn them away from stern judgment. And above all, such sacrifices made the victim a sacred object.

There are many among us, often young and vulnerable, who wish to become sacred objects and are told that if they sacrifice themselves, whether in life or in death, they will become so. It is tragic that many choose to believe this, but that does nothing to redeem those who lead them to the altar.

Judaism has always seen human sacrifice as an abomination, which indeed it is. We should not forget this admonition. No one, however righteous they consider themselves to be, has the right to demand such things from anyone. Like the priests of Moloch, those who use emotional blackmail of vulnerable individuals to achieve such an end stand accused.
Ye x Milo x Fuentes
Stop me if you've ever heard this one before:

Fueled by his hatred of Jews, one of the most recognizable black man of his era decided to forge an alliance with one of its most high-profile white nationalist, or, at the very least, the one whose juvenile stunts attract the most attention. One of the men behind the scenes who worked on arranging the meeting is himself Jewish, though he has long repudiated his heritage, is known to have engaged in antisemitism, as well as for being a grifter, and is distrusted by many in the movement. On the other hand, he has shown an uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with its leaders and keep the spotlight on himself. All of this revolving around grand political ambitions on both sides.

Obviously, I'm referring to the infamous 1961 entente of George Lincoln Rockwell, Malcolm X, and Daniel Burros which culminated in years of friendly relationships between the American Nazi Party and the Nation of Islam.

On June 25th, 1961, ten members of the American Nazi Party quietly arrived at the Nation of Islam rally in Washington, DC. In the Uline arena, they were surrounded by more than 8000 members of the Nation of Islam. They were not there to disrupt, attack the attendants, to protest the speech; instead, they were front-row guests. That night, Elijah Muhammad had called in sick, so Malcolm X took the stage to give the keynote speech in his stead. Rockwell contributed $20 to the cause and, while having his picture snapped by Jewish photographer Eve Arnold, he barked at her, 'I'll make a bar of soap out of you.' (She answered, "As long as it isn't a lampshade”).

At first glance, it would seem highly bizarre that members of the American Nazi Party, in full regalia and occasionally Sieg Heiling, would be tolerated amongst the Black Nationalist movement. Still, it more than made sense once you realized that they shared the same antisemitism and views on racial separatism. There was also a historical precedent; the units described as the most vicious, brutal, and antisemitic of the SS were the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar, composed almost entirely of Muslims.

Eight months after their first public meeting, George Lincoln Rockwell addressed more than 12,000 black audience members at the Chicago International Amphitheatre, urging them to ally with Nazis to be truly uplifted. "You know we call you niggers," he addressed the crowd. "But wouldn't you rather be confronted by honest white men who tell you to your face what the others all say behind your back?". He later praised the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad as the 'Adolf Hitler of the black man.'
The Decline of Islamism, and the Rise of the Muslim-American Far Left and Far Right
Born in St. Louis, Umar Lee (né Brett Darren Lee) converted to Islam at the age of seventeen, and was quickly drawn to its stringent Salafist form, and to Islamist political radicalism. He subsequently broke with extremism, although he remains a committed Muslim. In conversation with Dexter Van Zile, Lee discusses his own experiences—including a recent visit to Israel—and his observations about Islam in the U.S.
Islamism is no longer popular. Back in the day, it was very popular. . . . I attribute that to reality—the failure of the Arab Spring, the disaster of what happened in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Islamist politics has become so unpopular in the Muslim world that historians in 100 years are going to write that there was a 40-year period—from the mid-to-late seventies until the late 2010s—of Islamist political revival that faded away after the Arab Spring. In the U.S. we don’t see people talk about Islamist politics.

Conversion had some negative consequences [for me]—a period of extremism and Islamist politics—but it also kept me out of trouble and away from a criminal lifestyle. You have to remember that a very high percentage of guys who grew up where I did ended up addicted to drugs, or alcoholics. Many didn’t live to see forty and quite a few didn’t make it to twenty-one. For all of the problematic aspects of the Muslim experience in America, there is a track record of conversion keeping some men off the streets and clean.

On the subject of how American Muslims fit into contemporary political divides, Lee comments:
What you’re increasingly seeing in the Muslim community in America is a gender divide. You’re seeing that progressive politics [are] very popular, especially with women, especially young women. We know after 9/11 there was [a] leftward shift in the American Muslim community. . . . But you’re [now] seeing an insurgency led by men, particularly younger men, that are rejecting this progressive shift. They’re rejecting it in very harsh terms and going very far to the right. What you’re seeing in the Muslim community is—especially the young people—the left, and now this segment of the far right, are really taking up all the oxygen and moderate politics is very unpopular.

Unfortunately, there is more uniformity when it comes to attitudes toward the Jewish state:
By far, the least popular thing you can do [in the Muslim community] is support Israel. I could get on video and drink liquor [or] smoke weed and people would say, “Hey everybody, no one’s perfect. Everyone makes mistakes.” I could be in a [pornographic film] and people would say, “Hey, well, . . . ” But support Israel? That is the worst thing that you can do.

When it comes to Israel, everyone is still unhinged. It doesn’t matter what segment of the communities they’re in. There are very few rational people. And even the rational people I talk to, [who] agree with me in private, won’t say anything in public.

Saturday, November 26, 2022

11/26 Links: Second person dies of injuries days after Jerusalem bombing attack; How do human rights orgs operate in the West Bank?; Kanye West's antisemitism inspired by Louis Farrakhan

From Ian:

Second person dies of injuries days after Jerusalem bombing attack
A victim of this week’s terror bombing in Jerusalem succumbed to his injuries on Saturday, raising the death toll from the attack to two.

Tadese Tashume Ben Ma’ada was critically injured in an explosion Wednesday morning at a bus stop at the main entrance to Jerusalem, one of two bombings that rattled the capital.

A statement from Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem said trauma and ICU teams “fought for his life but unfortunately his injuries were too serious.”

“We offer our deepest condolences to the family,” the hospital added.

Ben Ma’ada’s family said they were thankful for the support they’d received since the attack but asked the public and the media to respect their privacy.

Ben Ma’ada, 50, immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia 21 years ago. He leaves behind a wife and six children.

Responding to the reports of Ben Ma’ada’s death, Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu sent his condolences to the family and praised medical teams who had treated him.

“Last week, I visited his dedicated family, who wrapped him with love, and the doctors who bravely fought for his life. I embrace the family at this difficult hour. May he rest in peace,” Netanyahu said on Twitter.

Outgoing prime minister Yair Lapid said he was “heartbroken” to hear of Ben Ma’ada’s death.

The double attack in Jerusalem initially left one person dead and 22 others injured. The first victim was named as 16-year-old Aryeh Schupak, a yeshiva student from Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood, and a dual Israeli-Canadian national.


How do human rights orgs operate in the West Bank?
All the material that journalist Zvi Yehezkeli gathered for the documentary series Double Agent(Shtula in Hebrew), which just began airing on Channel 13, sat in his desk drawer for three years, until it was approved for broadcast.

“I’d gathered 3,000 hours of footage and recorded numerous interviews for which we needed legal approval in order to use them,” Yehezkeli explains. “This type of content involves a great number of individuals, and so the risk of being saddled with international lawsuits is huge. The whole process was absolutely insane. I’d never worked on such a long series before,” he says.

The series Yehezkeli created is being broadcast on TV as the security situation in the West Bank is worsening, just after the controversial gas agreement with Lebanon was signed and while protests over the wearing of the hijab in Iran are escalating.

“If you’ve spent any time with regular people who live in Iran, you’ll see that the story is different from what you hear about the Middle East,” says Yehezkeli, the Arab Affairs correspondent at Channel 13.

“They want to be like us – they admire us. They don’t care at all about Khamenei and all the complicated politics. This is a generation that grew up after the Islamic Revolution, and they want freedom. They want to be able to make money.

“The intensity of this wave of protests has shown us how stressed out Iranians feel, and that Iran is like a powder keg that is going to explode at any moment.”

The Double Agent series follows a pro-Palestinian Swedish woman who arrives in Israel as a tourist to study architecture. One day she meets a man from the settlement town Eli, who explains the Israeli angle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to her.

“Slowly, she integrates herself into a human rights organization in the West Bank and becomes an intelligence agent for the Israelis,” Yehezkeli explains.

“After a year, she goes to a meeting with senior Hamas leaders, who reveal details to her about their fundraising apparatus, and the connection between the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas headquarters in Europe and the human rights organizations. In other words, the human rights organizations, including BDS, are operated by Hamas personnel.

“This agent ends up uncovering a wealth of intel, including secrets that Hamas operatives told her, some of which are documented in written correspondence.

“So, we started creating a documentary series. It’s extremely complicated, since we used a lot of hidden cameras, and we also need to make sure that our agent remains safe.”
Why German intellectuals link Nakba and Holocaust
It’s not just a shocking exception. This summer, the German Documenta, one of the world’s most important art shows – also publicly funded – was run by an Indonesian curators’ collective that included BDS supporters and presented at least one blatantly antisemitic artwork. Despite ongoing attempts to help them make it right, its organizers proved incapable of issuing a clear apology, taking responsibility, and engaging in a productive debate about what had transpired.

The state-funded House of World Cultures in Berlin is now run by a director who wrote this Facebook post: “They will pay a million fold for every drop of blood in GAZA! Palestine shall be free!” and a Palestinian activist, speaking to an applauding audience at a House of World Cultures event this past June, referred to debates about the Holocaust as “Jewish psychodrama.” Again, these are institutions funded by the German state.

Frequently, such events are framed in terms of postcolonial perspectives on the assumption that Israel is a colonial project that has violated an indigenous people’s rights without even questioning whether that assumption applies (it doesn’t, but it’s obviously a topic that needs to be discussed). Yet that still doesn’t really explain the strange urge to mix in Palestinian narratives when the topic is the Holocaust or Holocaust remembrance. What does the German culture of remembrance, or “Erinnerungskultur” – a broad term that refers to the nation’s historical consciousness or, simply put, to those parts of its history that German society deems worthy of remembering and that is widely used to refer to the Third Reich – have to do with the Nakba, one may ask?

Many Germans think that the State of Israel defines itself as the answer to the Holocaust – that the Shoah is basically its raison d’etre. This incorrect and specifically German take on Israel courses daily through the media, statements by public figures, and cultural events. And that very deeply-rooted German view of Israel comes with an underlying sense of guilt and responsibility towards the Palestinians as victimized by Israel’s status as a reparation for Germany’s crimes. The title of the indefinitely postponed Goethe-Institut event suggests this, too, because it includes the Nakba in the German culture of remembrance.

It would be productive and enlightening to launch a discussion about whether the German culture of remembrance has anything to do with the Nakba at all – to start at the root, so to speak, and to shed some light on the assumptions guiding those who think it does. Why do decision-makers in German cultural institutions think it makes sense to discuss the Nakba together with the Holocaust rather than, say, within the obvious historical context of the war that Arab states waged on the Jewish state after it became independent – also a source of pain from an Israeli perspective? Has the German culture of remembrance taken on the tragedy of the Palestinians to relieve its very own heavy load? Hopefully, after all the scandals of these past months and years, these are some of the questions that will be debated at cultural institutions in Germany in the future.

Friday, November 25, 2022

11/25 Links Pt1: Phillips: The humbug of the West over murdered Israelis; New US Palestinian affairs representative bodes ill for Israel; Kanye West takes white nationalist Nick Fuentes to dinner with Trump

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The humbug of the West over murdered Israelis
To Western liberals, the suffering of Israeli victims at the hands of the Palestinian Arabs is all but invisible. So too is the suffering of Palestinians under their own leaders.

Western liberals appear not to see that Palestinian leaders jail, torture and kill their own people. They don’t see Palestinian attacks on Christians or Druze. They don’t see Hamas throwing gays off roofs to their deaths.

Last month, Ahmad Abu Marhia, a gay 25-year-old Palestinian Arab living under asylum in Israel in fear for his life at the hands of his family and residents of his village, was abducted and beheaded in Hebron.

The liberal media was mostly silent. There were no demonstrations on American campuses. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides tweeted his horror at the murder but conspicuously failed to say the victim had fled his Palestinian village for sanctuary in Israel because he was gay.

Western liberals have fixed in their heads the falsehood that Palestinians are the oppressed victims of Israel and therefore can do no wrong. In parallel, these liberals have blanked Israel out of their moral universe, so that Israelis don’t have the same right to exist as Western liberals do themselves.

How can we explain this astounding and shocking mindset?

The history of the Jewish people tells us that when cultures are beset by terrifying forces apparently beyond anyone’s control, Jews are identified as the cause. Pinning the blame on the Jews is how the simple-minded have tried to make sense of incomprehensible threats for generations.

But there’s always a catalyst: The people who actually point the finger at the Jews and incite the mob against them. In the Middle Ages, it was the Church. In the last century, it was Hitler. Today, it’s the Palestinian Arabs.

The common factor is their psychotic demonization of the Jewish people. Yet there is an even more devastating connection.

War was waged against the Nazis to defend the free world, which was duly saved from invasion, enslavement and tyranny. The war was not waged, however, to save the Jews. Indeed, the West shut its eyes to the extermination of the Jews, of which Western leaders were made well aware at the time.

Much of the West regarded Hitler as a monstrous aberration who managed to brainwash the Germans into supporting his psychotic ravings. But in the Middle East, the Palestinian Arabs were Hitler’s legion. They were led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who pledged to exterminate every Jew in the Middle East if Hitler won the war.
JPost Editorial: West Bank lawlessness is a threat to Israelis and Palestinians alike
The PA is the recipient of huge largesse internationally. Probably per capita, the West Bank has received more international financial support than any other place in the world over the last decades.

This has included European Union support for Palestinian police institutions and US support for the Palestinian Security Forces.

However, despite almost two decades of all this support for law and order and institutions, basic things like treating a victim of a car accident and not letting a body be kidnapped from a hospital elude their security forces.

This kind of lawless criminal behavior is not an aberration. Recently, Israel and the PA have been forced to take on the gunmen of the rogue Lions’ Den group in Nablus.

This is in addition to the daily raids in the West Bank under Operation Breaking the Wave that the IDF undertakes.

It was one of these raids that led to the death of Shireen Abu Akleh in a gun battle between Israeli forces and Palestinian terrorists – that has resulted in international condemnation of Israel and even an FBI investigation of Israel’s actions.

The lawlessness, therefore, is not just a threat to human life and a violation of basic rights of human dignity, such as being treated in a hospital; it is also responsible for incidents that are of international importance to Israel.

The lawlessness could also represent an emerging threat to Israel and the Palestinians. This is because it appears there is a flood of illegal firearms in the West Bank.

The images of Palestinians killed in recent gun battles with Israeli forces has illustrated that many of the Palestinians have access to an arsenal of M-16s and other types of arms.

The men who use these weapons are now turning them on the PA and seem to be taking over more areas in the West Bank, exerting more influence.

With the leadership of the PA aging and increasingly out of touch with average people, the institutions decaying and lawlessness spreading, it’s imperative for all those who care about peace and stability to focus on reducing the role that lawless gangs, armed men, militants and terrorists are playing in the West Bank.

Israeli authorities coordinate with the Palestinians on a variety of issues, as the return of Ferro exemplifies.

However, both sides, as well as the US, EU and other international players, need to take a realistic assessment of how we can improve the situation.
Ruthie Blum: New US Palestinian affairs representative bodes ill for Israel
The promotion this week of Hady Amr, who’s been serving as US deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli and Palestinian affairs since President Joe Biden’s inauguration nearly two years ago, is the latest example of Washington’s disastrous Mideast policies. But at least the heretofore non-existent role that was concocted for the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer more accurately describes his true leanings, as well as those of his bosses at Foggy Bottom.

The only thing that this already obvious and therefore unnecessary transparency required – other than an undoubtedly handsome pay hike for the proud author of the Brookings Institution’s 2004 report, “The Need to Communicate: How to Improve US Public Diplomacy with the Islamic World”– was the dropping of “Israeli” and addition of “special representative” to his title.

It’s not a shabby career elevation for the founding director of Brookings’ Doha Center in Qatar, among whose additional works for the dubious think tank include “The Opportunity of the Obama Era: How Civil Society Can Help Bridge Divides between the United States and a Diverse Muslim World.”

NOR DID the timing of the announcement to Congress on Tuesday about Amr’s newfound position seem to cause Secretary of State Antony Blinken the slightest bit of embarrassment, despite virtually coinciding with a vile act of Palestinian aggression in Jenin against Israel’s Druze community. It also preceded by less than 24 hours a double bombing in the Jewish state’s capital, which left 16-year-old Aryeh Shechopek dead and some 20 other innocents wounded.

About the latter, Blinken declared in a statement on Wednesday: “The United States stands resolutely with the people of Israel in the face of the terrorist attacks that occurred this morning in Jerusalem. We express our condolences to the family of the deceased and wish all victims a speedy recovery. We remain in close contact with our Israeli partners and reiterate that our commitment to Israel’s security remains ironclad.”

He failed to mention the previous day’s murder of 18-year-old Tiran Fero from the town of Daliat al-Carmel in the Haifa district. The Israeli-Druze car accident victim was being treated for multiple injuries at the Ibn Sina Hospital in the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Jenin, the area of the crash, when gun-wielding terrorists stormed into his room, threatened the relatives at his bedside, pulled the plug on his ventilator and snatched him from the premises.
Caroline Glick: The face of the Palestinian war of succession
Rather than kill each other, Palestinian terrorists seek to build their power and influence by murdering Jews. The more Jews the various factions murder, the more powerful they become. This conceptual model explains both the expanded involvement of the P.A. directly in attacks, and the rise overall in attacks. It also explains why Iran has decided to get involved directly in Palestinian attacks. Iran’s regime wants its proxies to replace Abbas, and by getting involved in directing their attacks, Iran increases its chance of taking over. Indeed, the nature of the Palestinian power struggle is tailor-made for the mullahs.

Since all the Palestinian factions share the same enthusiasm for killing Israeli Jews, none of them has an ideological problem with accepting Iranian money or guidance for the operations. If Iran wants to take over the Palestinian theater, now is the time to act. So it is.

These circumstances are rife with strategic implications for Israel’s war planners. But specifically with regards to the Palestinians, they expose the utter futility of the Israeli left’s hopes of disengaging from the Palestinians by among other things, withdrawing from Judea and Samaria along the lines set out by the Oslo peace process and supported by the Biden administration.

Israel cannot stand back and watch the Palestinians kill each other because that is not what they are doing now, and it is unlikely that that is what they will be doing after Abbas dies. Instead, we are likely to see more of what they are doing now, and worse. After Abbas passes away, Palestinian factions, including the P.A., will continue to compete for power and turf by killing Israelis, wherever they are.

Given this reality, the only way for Israel to defend itself in the short and long run is by ending the conceit that the P.A. is a legitimate governing body and carrying out a military operation that will dismantle the P.A. militias along with the rest of the terror groups operating in Judea and Samaria. For a short while, Israel may need to take on functions of civil governance in the Palestinian population centers. But once it asserts its full security control over the areas, will be able to delegate those powers to local leaders.

In light of the Biden administration’s obsessive support for the Palestinian Authority, and its refusal to acknowledge either the P.A.’s central role in cultivating hatred of Israel and Jews as the central organizing principle of Palestinian society, or the true nature of the power struggle already going on among the Palestinian terror groups, such an Israeli move can be expected to provoke an angry response from Washington.

But Wednesday’s attacks in Jerusalem are a clear indication that Israel’s incoming government will have no choice but to order such an operation sooner rather than later. To this end, upon assuming power, the incoming Netanyahu government will have to embark on a two-pronged strategy. It must prepare contingency plans for taking over the Palestinian population centers by force. And to the extent possible, it must prepare the ground diplomatically for the inevitable.
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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 over 19 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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