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.

‘Nabka’ ??

Maybe he meant Babka? Everyone loves a good chocolate babka! pic.twitter.com/4tULEoxh17

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) November 26, 2022

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10/29 Links: Biden Admin Probed Over ‘Illegal Efforts to Undermine Israeli Sovereignty Over Jerusalem’; What the Kanye West scandal can teach the UN

From Ian:

Biden Admin Probed Over ‘Illegal Efforts to Undermine Israeli Sovereignty Over Jerusalem’

A legal advocacy group says the Biden administration is violating U.S. law by funneling more than half-a-billion dollars to the Palestinian government and is demanding the administration release a slew of internal documents that the group believes will reveal an illegal effort "to undermine Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem," according to a copy of the Freedom of Information Act request provided to the Washington Free Beacon.

America First Legal, a group of conservative lawyers and activists, hit the State Department this week with a FOIA request that instructs it to furnish a slew of internal documents about U.S. funding for the Palestinian Authority, which was frozen under former president Donald Trump but resumed when President Joe Biden took office.

The legal group suspects that a portion of this taxpayer aid is being used to support Palestinian-led projects in Jerusalem that could undermine Israel’s control of its capital city. The Trump administration recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, but the Biden administration, while formally upholding the policy, has moved to open a Palestinian Affairs unit in the city, fueling concerns that the consulate is working with the Palestinian government to erode Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem.

The Biden administration’s funding may also violate a bipartisan U.S. law that prevents taxpayer funds from reaching the Palestinian government until it ends a terrorist payment program known as "pay-to-slay," in which imprisoned militants and their families receive stipends. The Free Beacon reported earlier this month on a non-public State Department report to Congress that determined the Palestinian government is still paying terrorists, even as U.S. aid dollars flow.

"Make no mistake—the purpose here, contrary to U.S. law, is creating facts on the ground to undermine Israel’s borders and sovereignty and to reverse the United States’ recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city," Reed D. Rubinstein, America First Legal’s senior counselor and director of oversight, said in a statement. "The Biden administration is pumping hundreds of millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars into ‘projects’ that directly benefit both the corrupt Palestinian Authority and the terrorist Hamas dictatorship."

The organization’s FOIA centers on a State Department fact sheet from March that outlined projects run by the United States’ Palestinian Affairs Unit, which was opened to increase diplomacy with the Palestinian government. The State Department says this office is responsible for partnering "with Palestinian and American organizations to support projects in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza [Strip] that increase exchange between our two peoples and advance shared goals on topics such as education, entrepreneurship, environmental protection, English language learning, science and technology, art and culture, gender equality, human rights, and democracy, among others."

These programs also include "university linkage projects connecting American and Palestinian universities directly for exchange and collaboration for students and faculty," according to the State Department.

US Democrats Oppose Israel’s Admission to Visa Waiver Program

A group of 20 Democratic members of Congress called on the Biden administration this week to oppose Israel’s membership in the US Visa Waiver Program, Haaretz reported Friday.

The program would waive the current onerous requirements faced by Israelis when they want to visit the United States and would instead automatically authorize 90-day visits for business or tourism purposes.

But Representative Don Beyer sent a letter Thursday – signed together with 19 other Democrats – telling Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “It is clear that Israel cannot and should not be admitted into the visa waiver program under the status quo.”

Israel has been negotiating with the United States over this issue for more than a year.

Israel Among Candidates Being ‘Considered’ for US Visa-Waiver Status
Last month Knesset lawmakers voted to approve the first reading of a bill that would allow Israel to join the program. Under the bill, sponsored by the Justice Ministry, passenger data gathered by airlines during the reservation process are coded into a “passenger name record” (PNR) which would then be transferred to a national center to be set up at the Israel Tax Authority – and is a condition set by the US for Israel’s entry into the visa waiver program.

Last month Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Alice Lugo said Israel “does not currently meet all [program] designation requirements, including extending reciprocal visa-free travel privileges to all US citizens and nationals.”

Lugo was referring to Israeli security personnel at Ben Gurion International Airport who pay close attention to Palestinian Authority Arabs who hold US citizenship and others, particularly so-called “peace activists” and supporters of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

Ben Cohen: What the Kanye West scandal can teach the UN

The Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan offered a telling quip during a debate last week at the international body concerning the latest report of its Commission of Inquiry into Israel and its apparently irredeemable offenses against international law. (The fact that the commission’s formal name is “The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel” itself suggests that its conclusions are hardly likely to be favorable, let alone neutral, towards the Jewish state.)

Referencing the viscerally anti-Zionist and often anti-Semitic utterances of the commission’s members—the canard the Israel is an “apartheid” state, the assertion that Israel shouldn’t be permitted to participate in the U.N. system—Erdan told the assembled delegates that “maybe the U.N. could learn from Adidas when it comes to hiring blatant anti-Semites!”

That, of course, was a reference to the decision of the sportswear company to sever ties with Kanye (“Ye”) West over the rappers’ revolting anti-Semitic comments. But Erdan didn’t have to cite Adidas alone; Foot Locker, Gap, Balenciaga, Def Jam and a host of other companies in the music, sports and fashion spaces have all cut links with West because of his hateful outbursts, while an unauthorized visit to the headquarters of Skechers in Los Angeles last Thursday resulted in him being escorted out of the building. “We condemn his recent divisive remarks and do not tolerate anti-Semitism or any other form of hate speech,” declared a gratifyingly clear statement from the footwear manufacturer, adding for good measure that “we again stress that West showed up unannounced and uninvited.”

In the space of a fortnight, West’s image has shifted from that of a hip-hop artist and fashion mogul with eccentric, often unpalatable opinions to an out-and-out racist and bigot who dresses models in “White Lives Matter” shirts, ostentatiously celebrates his violently anti-Semitic views and flirts with neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology. In the process, West has lost all of the sponsorships mentioned above and many more on top, at one point piteously crying out that he had netted a loss of $2 billion in one day. One can only hope that particular claim is true.

The contrast between the speed with which the private sector moved to condemn West’s anti-Semitism and the stubborn persistence of outdated, unhelpful and anti-Semitic notions about Israel at the U.N. is frankly painful to observe. And it compels us to ask why it is that established multinational companies with thousands of employees are nonetheless nimble enough to call out anti-Semitism in a timely manner, while the governments gathered at the U.N. building in Manhattan either enthusiastically endorse or turn a wearily blind eye towards that body’s long-established, hard-wired hostility towards the world’s only Jewish state.

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Alleged "Kurdish Jewish leader" converts to Islam - but it sounds like a scam

Arabic media is reporting:

Aram Ezzat, Chairman of the Council of the Jewish Religion in the Kurdistan Region, announced his joining the Islamic religion and pronounced the two testimonies in front of the journalists' lens, stressing that his step is embodied in "striving to obtain God's pleasure and the love of the Noble Messenger."  

Ezzat said in a press statement that he informed his Jewish colleagues and friends of his decision and that he handed over the sect's representation to his colleagues to decide to choose his successor after 6 years of holding the position.

He added, "I have other personal reasons, but I have not been subjected to any threat or pressure, and I am not the type who succumbs to threats and everyone knows me."    

This story seems bogus.

I cannot find any mention either of Aram Ezzat or of the "Council of the Jewish Religion" in Kurdistan.

The main self-described leader of the Jewish community in Kurdistan is supposedly Sherko Abdallah, according to an AFP article on Jews of Kurdistan from 2020. He was appointed Kurdistan's official Jewish representative.

That article said that many Kurdish Jews converted to Islam under pressure and while some of them practice Judaism in secret there are very few left.

However, according to the National Association of Jews from Kurdistan in Israel, there are absolutely no native Jews left in Kurdistan (and even Abdallah, the official Jewish representative, is not Jewish:)

Currently, there are no Jews remaining in the Kurdistan Region, except for very few expatriates... When Jews were expelled from Kurdistan in the 1950s, the Jews living in Kurdistan left in their entirety. No Jewish family remained. Because of the very close nature of the Jewish communities, this was never under any doubt, as all members knew each other and were closely attached to their community leaders.

Since the 2010s, a new but rare phenomenon has occurred of a small handful of impostors who claim to represent long-lost Jews, usually in order to obtain some personal advantage, solicit money, or get a position. This is dishonest, degrading, and connected to antisemitism. Impostors serve nothing except usurping goodwill toward Jews, by attempting to gain personal benefits through inserting themselves into the public consciousness about the Jews from Kurdistan. Three examples of such impostors are,

- Mr. Sherzad Omar Mamsani and Mr. Sherko Othman Abdullah. Both men defrauded an earlier Kurdistan Region administration into roles as local Jewish representatives, before the National Association renewed efforts to advise on Jewish concerns.

- Mr. Ranjdar Abdulrahman, under the alias “Ranj Cohen”, whose attempts to displace the authentic Kurdish Jewish community’s role in Kurdistan are reprehensible.

It sounds like this Aram Ezzat is not Jewish, but is trying to somehow scam people by saying he was. Apparently, some Kurds believe that either Jews hid money, or that they can claim reparations from Iraq as Jews, and they are claiming to be part of a community that completely disappeared from Kurdistan and Iraq.

  

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

 

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The other Turkish occupation

Everyone knows about Turkeys' occupation of Northern Cyprus. 

But Turkey also occupied large swaths of territory in northern Syria, and the people who scream about the evil of Israeli "occupation" are silent.

Not only that, but Turkey is threatening to invade Syria, and - again - the people who are upset about countries like Russia invading their neighbors seem to not have much of a problem with this.

From AP:

Turkey's president told journalists that Ankara remains committed to rooting out a Syrian Kurdish militia from northern Syria.

"Like I always say, we'll come down on them suddenly one night. And we must," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on his plane following his Saturday visit to Azerbaijan, according to daily Hurriyet newspaper and other media.

Without giving a specific timeline, Erdogan said that Turkey would launch a cross-border operation against the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units, or YPG, which it considers a terrorist group linked to an outlawed Kurdish group that has led an insurgency against Turkey since 1984. That conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, PKK, has killed tens of thousands of people.

However, the YPG forms the backbone of U.S.-led forces in the fight against the Islamic State group. American support for the group has infuriated Ankara and remains a major issue in their relations.

Ankara has launched four cross-border operations into Syria since 2016 and controls some territories in the north with the goal of pushing away the YPG and establishing a 30-kilometer (19-mile) deep safe zone where Erdogan hopes to "voluntarily" return Syrian refugees.

In 2019, an incursion into northeast Syria against the YPG drew widespread international condemnation, prompting Finland, Sweden and others to restrict arms sales to Turkey. Now Turkey is blocking the two Nordic countries' historic bid to join NATO because of the weapons ban and their alleged support for the Kurdish groups.   

Oh, and Turkey is building settlements, too, to move Syrian refugees to areas under its control 

 The media seems strangely uninterested. 

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

 

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Conspiracy theory of the day: Jews to colonize Iraq!

From the nutty Online Journal, January 30:

Israeli expansionists, their intentions to take full control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and permanently keep the Golan Heights of Syria and expand into southern Lebanon already well known, also have their eyes on parts of Iraq considered part of a biblical “Greater Israel.”

Israel reportedly has plans to relocate thousands of Kurdish Jews from Israel, including expatriates from Kurdish Iran, to the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Nineveh under the guise of religious pilgrimages to ancient Jewish religious shrines. According to Kurdish sources, the Israelis are secretly working with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to carry out the integration of Kurdish and other Jews into areas of Iraq under control of the KRG.

Kurdish, Iraqi Sunni Muslims, and Turkmen have noted that Kurdish Israelis began to buy land in Iraqi Kurdistan, after the U.S. invasion in 2003, that is considered historical Jewish “property.”

The Israelis are particularly interested in the shrine of the Jewish prophet Nahum in al Qush, the prophet Jonah in Mosul, and the tomb of the prophet Daniel in Kirkuk. Israelis are also trying to claim Jewish “properties” outside of the Kurdish region, including the shrine of Ezekiel in the village of al-Kifl in Babel Province near Najaf and the tomb of Ezra in al-Uzayr in Misan Province, near Basra, both in southern Iraq’s Shi’a-dominated territory. Israeli expansionists consider these shrines and tombs as much a part of “Greater Israel” as Jerusalem and the West Bank, which they call “Judea and Samaria.”

Reportedly assisting the Israelis are foreign mercenaries paid for by U.S. Christian evangelical circles that support the concept of “Christian Zionism.”

Iraqi nationalists charge that the Israeli expansion into Iraq is supported by both major Kurdish factions, including the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan headed by Iraq’s nominal President Jalal Talabani. Talabani’s son, Qubad Talabani, serves as the KRG’s representative in Washington, where he lives with his wife Sherri Kraham, who is Jewish.

Also supporting the Israeli land acquisition activities is the Kurdistan Democratic Party, headed by Massoud Barzani, the president of the KRG. One of Barzani’s five sons, Binjirfan Barzani, is reportedly heavily involved with the Israelis.

The Israelis and their Christian Zionist supporters enter Iraq not through Baghdad but through Turkey. In order to depopulate residents of lands the Israelis claim, Mossad operatives and Christian Zionist mercenaries are staging terrorist attacks against Chaldean Christians, particularly in Nineveh, Irbil, al-Hamdaniya, Bartalah, Talasqaf, Batnayah, Bashiqah, Elkosheven, Uqrah, and Mosul.

The ultimate aim of the Israelis is to depopulate the Christian population in and around Mosul and claim the land as biblical Jewish land that is part of “Greater Israel.” The Israeli/Christian Zionist operation is a replay of the depopulation of the Palestinians in the British mandate of Palestine after World War II.

Wow, these Joooz are amazing! I guess that since Israel's attempt to expand to the Nile was derailed by that damned peace agreement with Egypt, they are setting their sites on the Euphrates.

The author, not surprisingly, is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist as well.

Even though this is simply stupid, Iraqpundit points out that the fact that it has been translated into Arabic makes it potentially dangerous:

When talking about what might derail progress in Iraq, people rarely mention the power of the conspiracy theory. Rumours have traditionally done a great deal of damage in the Middle East, and Iraq was never spared from this exercise. Sometimes the talk can be so silly that it's harmless, such as Saddam Hussein wore a crucifix under his suit. And sometimes it can be so carefully constructed that it can persuade even the cynical. I used to think the stories were created only by locals. But here's an American-made conspiracy rumour that is spreading.....

The problem is his story was translated into Arabic, which makes it sound more credible. The the Middle East, if something is written by Americans, British, etc, it is more likely to be believed. Many times people start a rumour and attribute it to a western source.

On the surface, the story sounds so absurd that it should be dismissed, right? But Madsen wants to make sure he ignites something: "According to Kurdish sources, the Israelis are secretly working with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to carry out the integration of Kurdish and other Jews into areas of Iraq under control of the KRG."

Tensions are rising between Kurds and non-Kurds in Iraq. And when Madsen introduces such a conspiracy, he is bound to stir up trouble. The disagreement between the Kurds and non-Kurds centers on a land dispute. And when Madsen brings in Israel, he is playing with fire.

Whether wittingly or unwittingly, conspiracy theorists know to play with the Mideasterner who loves to find the most negative angle possible to explain any situation. Some pretty strange stuff has happened in our past, which is why conspiracy theories are not always so easy to disregard.

Conspiracies have been powerful in Iraq. Under the Baathists, access to information was so limited that people depended on gossip for news. Saddam Hussein used gossip to help control the population. Such habits, the belief in rumours, can be very difficult to break. But ignoring the problem is not a good idea. Serious news coverage in Iraq would be helpful. Maybe when people see that Israel does not colonise Iraq, they can figure out that such stories are not to be believed. If Madsen succeeds in persuading Iraqis that Israel is helping Kurds to take over, say, Mosul -- I don't even want to go there. All I can tell you is that it would be foolish to underestimate the power of the conspiracy rumour.

Iraqpundit is right on. No one knows which theories disappear and which gain traction, but the ones that get believed can have deadly results in the Arab world.

(h/t Suzanne)

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