Showing posts with label Linkdump. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linkdump. Show all posts

Thursday, February 20, 2020

From Ian:

David Collier: Funded by the EU, driven by Palestinians. BDS activism in EU clothing.
Those of us involved in fighting back against spreading antisemitism and the lies about Israel understand that the deeper we dig – the more unbelievable the situation becomes. As I said to someone yesterday when news broke of a UK KS3 schoolbook which suggests the creation of Israel may be behind the 9/11 attacks – nothing surprises me anymore. There are no limits to the level of conspiracy and disinformation – no place that the lies do not exist. The EU have also just provided another example – here is what I found.
The EU photographers

Recently the EU advertised an EU ‘Photo marathon’. An opportunity open to young European photographers to spend a week ‘capturing different aspects of Palestinian life’. The week-long trip, flights, accommodation and meals is fully funded by the EU. As part of the process, there is a request to write a ‘motivation letter’, explaining why the applicant wants to participate and they are asked how they intend to ‘spread the word’ upon their return. The EU Press Team in charge of this process consists of two people – Inas Abu Shirbi and Shadi Othman:

EU spokespeople or BDS activists.
Before being an ‘EU spokesperson’ Inas Abu Shirbi spent some time at the Sharek Youth Forum. She was there when Boris Johnson made remarks about BDS during a 2015 trip to Israel. Soon after Boris ridiculed BDS activists, several Palestinian NGOs who had been due to meet Johnson – cancelled – including the Sharek Youth Forum. At the time Abu Shirbi was the public face of the NGO (she even spoke on LBC). In the public statement, the group put out – there is clear and unequivocal support for BDS.

That means at least one of those leading this ‘photo marathon’ is a Palestinian with a history of support for BDS. We have here a similar issue to the one uncovered at Amnesty International where Amnesty’s ‘Deputy Regional Director turned out to be an obsessive Palestinian activist. Inas Abu Shibri is still active with other Palestinian NGOs – inclduing the pro-BDS ‘Sharek’. How is there not a conflict of interest? When someone references an ‘EU Communications Officer’ – don’t people assume they are from the EU?

Most people never read beyond headlines. Often they tell you all you need to know. Like this headline: that has the EU ‘slamming’ Israel:

EU Slams

Yet when you read the article, you realise the only EU employee mentioned is a Palestinian – Shadi Othman. That article was shared 500 times. Or this one – which becomes almost laughable. The Palestine News and Info Agency report that the EU ‘will not recognise any changes to the pre-1967 borders’. Is it any surprise if the ‘EU spokesman’ is our Palestinian friend from Ramallah – Shadi Othman?

Beware: Communist paper that praised Hebron Massacre gets makeover
Now Jewish Currents is going back to its roots by bringing in Peter Beinart, who had called the murder of Jews by Islamic terrorists, “violent resistance”.

Terrorism, he had argued, was a “response to Israel’s denial of basic Palestinian rights.” And he suggested that, “the Israeli government is reaping what it has sowed."

Beinart is certainly reaping what he sowed as his career tumbles down into the media sewer.

In 2012, Beinart had partnered with the Daily Beast to launch Open Zion, an anti-Israel blog. It closed a year later after failing to find an audience for its hate. Beinart moved on to Haaretz, a red rag whose racist publisher urged “international pressure” to end, “Israeli apartheid”, whose world news editor boasted that he is an anti-Zionist, and whose former editor had urged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to “rape” Israel. "It had always been my wet dream to see this happen," the leftist told her.

Is there anywhere lower Beinart could go?

After Haaretz, he appeared at The Forward, the Morgen Freitheit’s old rival, which runs headlines like, "3 Jewish Moguls Among Eight Who Own as Much as Half the Human Race” and "Why We Should Applaud The Politician Who Said Jews Control The Weather."

There, he accused Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel of being “blind to the harm Jews cause.”

Last year, The Forward dumped its editor and cut 40% of its staff. Instead of taking the advice of Haman’s wife, Beinart doubled down and joined its old even more anti-Semitic Commie rival.

"I think a tremendous need for a kind of American progressive Jewish publication," Beinart babbled, explaining that he wanted to "confront what I see as the kind of moral corruption of the American Jewish establishment and its complicity in various ways with some of the things that Trump is doing and the direction that Netanyahu is taking Israel.”

The only moral corruption is 91 years of Communists, Marxists, and Lefties justifying the murder of Jews.

From Ian:

Evelyn Gordon: What Crimes Do the Companies on the UN Blacklist Engage In?
What horrendous activities do the 112 companies on the UN blacklist engage in? There are several supermarket chains which sell groceries to both Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank. There are several fuel companies which operate gas stations where both Israelis and Palestinians fill up their cars. There are several bus and rail companies, which provide public transportation used by Israelis and Palestinians alike.

There are phone companies, banks, and a water company, which provides drinking water and sewage solutions. There are also several food and clothing manufacturers, like General Mills, Angel Bakeries and Delta Galil, whose crime seems to be the fact that their cereals, bread and underwear can be found on supermarket shelves in the West Bank.

In short, almost all the companies on the blacklist simply provide the most fundamental human necessities - food, water, transportation, communication. Some of these are defined by the UN itself as inalienable rights.

Only three were involved in providing "surveillance and identification equipment," which sounds sinister if you don't realize that such equipment is intended to prevent terrorists from slaughtering children in their beds.

Syrian and Russian soldiers have been slaughtering civilians in Syria on an almost daily basis for nine years now; the death toll is more than half a million and counting. Does anyone think the supermarkets that sell these soldiers food or the water company that supplies their bases with water are engaged in "activities that raised particular human rights concerns"?

Precisely because most of the targeted companies are basic service providers, the economic impact of the blacklist will likely be small. Most of these companies neither export and nor attract much foreign investment. And since their businesses depend almost exclusively on selling or providing services to Israelis and Palestinians, the only way to boycott them would be for the boycotters to actually move to Israel.
Clifford D. May: United Nations Human Rights Council delegitimizes Israel
Such boycotts harm Palestinians at least as much as Israelis. A study by Palestinian Media Watch found that “Palestinians prefer to work for Israeli employers” because Israeli employers provide wages four times higher than Palestinian employers, as well as health benefits and vacation time on a par with those Israelis enjoy.

Orde Kittrie, a legal scholar and senior fellow at FDD, points out that any boycotts spurred by the blacklist would likely “run afoul of some or all of the two dozen U.S. state laws that require divestment from companies that boycott Israel.” In addition, Congress is on record opposing “politically motivated actions that penalize or otherwise limit commercial relations specifically with Israel, such as boycotts of, divestment from or sanctions against Israel.”

Mr. Kittrie notes, too, that “international law does not prohibit business in disputed territories.… That is the official view of the United Nations, expressed in a document titled ‘Guidance on Responsible Business in Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas: A Resource for Companies and Investors.’”

Congress could make its disapproval of the U.N.’s latest assault on Israel clearer. The most convenient vehicle would be the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which updates existing U.S. anti-boycott laws to include not just boycotts initiated by nation-states, but also those fostered by international organizations.

I’m betting that won’t happen because such far-left and anti-Israeli members of Congress as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib now routinely intimidate many of their moderate Democratic colleagues.

President Trump could do more, too, building on other steps he’s taken to repair the damage done to Israel in recent years by the U.N.

The broader problem is the continued existence of such an Orwellian institution as the UNHRC. The U.N. was supposed to help prevent the “scourge of war and advance human rights and dignity.” Seventy-five years after its founding, it generally impedes both — at considerable expense to American taxpayers.
UN sinks to a new low with BDS-inspired blacklist
The stench of anti-Semitism always hovers over Switzerland's Lake Geneva when the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is meeting there. The foul emanations reached a new nadir last week with UNHRC's publication of a "database" of companies doing business in the disputed territories in Israel.

Following the publication of the list, Bruno Stagno Ugarte, deputy director for advocacy of NGO Human Rights Watch, stated, "The long-awaited release of the UN settlement business database should put all companies on notice: To do business with illegal settlements [sic] is to aid in the commission of war crimes."

Ponder that: For the 112 companies on the list – including 18 foreign companies, like General Mills, Airbnb and Expedia – to do business in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank" to the UN) is a war crime.

But what exactly is the crime here? Employing 20,000 Palestinian Arabs as managers, software engineers and in other capacities for triple the pay offered by local Arab businesses, and with far better health and other benefits?

Or perhaps it is a war crime for the wily Israelis and others to have Palestinian Arab and Jewish Israeli workers learn to view each other as colleagues and friends, rather than as adversaries.

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

From Ian:

The UN Should Be Ashamed of Its Anti-Israel Boycott List
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has produced a handy catalogue of companies that supporters of Israel can give their business to. Of course, this was not its intention. The roster was compiled at the request of the UN Human Rights Council. This is a body in which countries whose idea of human rights is gender-neutral torture and equal-opportunity ballot-rigging get together and pass reams of vexatious resolutions against Israel.

The BDS movement's economic warfare against the Jewish state has had little success but that's not the point: a UN body is tacitly legitimizing its agenda and even doing the research for it. What OHCHR's list is about is the UN's institutional hostility towards Israel and support for "de-judaizing" Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria.

Jerusalem is Israel's capital; before that it was the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Judah. However hard the UN strives to erase the Jewish character of the city, its historical record isn't going anywhere. When Israel captured Judea and Samaria in 1967, they did so not from any state called Palestine (no such state has ever existed), but from Jordan, whose annexation was almost universally unrecognized - it was an illegal occupation - and prior to this these lands had been part of Mandatory Palestine.

Mandatory Palestine was created by the League of Nations to "secure the establishment of the Jewish national home." The Israelis have many innovations to their name, but perhaps their greatest feat is being the first nation-state in history to "illegally occupy" their own territory.

The people the UN harms when it works to isolate and delegitimize Israel are the Palestinians. It tells them that their long, painful campaign of national self-harm is just and holds out false hope that it will one day triumph. It won't.

The priority of anyone who professes to be pro-Palestinian should be convincing the Palestinians to recognize that Israel is here to stay and, on that basis, finally accept offers of peace and statehood.
The Australian Editorial: A Brazen Anti-Semitic "Blacklist"
The UN Human Rights Council's "blacklist" of 112 international and local companies operating in the territories is a shameful attempt to strike a blow against the Middle East's only functioning democracy and upholder of the rule of law and religious freedom. No wonder Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council executive director Colin Rubenstein described publication of the blacklist as "a witch-hunt that reminds us of Nazi-era boycotts of the Jewish people." There is no precedent for any UN body taking similar action over a disputed territory, and no basis in international law for it to do so.

As Dr. Rubenstein pointed out, it is not in breach of international law for the 112 companies to operate in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. "They are legitimate businesses providing goods and services...they are not breaking any international laws." Australia must waste no opportunity to condemn and counter the council's brazen hypocrisy and the sinister witch-hunt it has embarked on.

From Ian:

Danny Danon: Mahmoud Abbas’s map of lies
That Abbas brought his map to the highest level of international diplomacy suggests that he believes that the world is ready to entertain this revisionist history of the Middle East. Sadly, in this regard, he may not be mistaken.

Rewriting history has long been a tactic of overtly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic organizations. On college campuses, anti-Israel groups regularly use a version of this map during the notorious Israel Apartheid Week. The anti-Semitic BDS movement features this graphic in its campaign materials. Al Jazeera, the propaganda arm of Qatar that has a growing audience among younger generations in America, has a “Vanishing Palestine” interactive video as part of its “Palestine Remix” channel.

What is most insidious, however, is the growing use of the map in mainstream venues. In October 2015, MSNBC displayed these maps during a live segment discussing a recent spate of Palestinian violence on the Temple Mount (for which it later apologized). In 2017, Columbia University published the maps on advertisements for a workshop on “Citizenship and Nationality in Israel/Palestine.” Last September, a high school matriculation exam in Finland included the maps.

The use of the “Map of Lies” in mainstream media and academic circles in particular will have the effect of normalizing its content and message.

For Israel and the Jewish people, this presents a real danger. Efforts to delegitimize the Jewish State are growing louder, with the United Nations recently releasing a “blacklist” of Israeli companies that operate in Judea and Samaria being only the latest example of revisionist history having tangible consequences.

One’s interpretation and understanding of the past forms their assumptions about the present and determines their vision for the future. Believing Abbas’s “Map of Lies” will do more than dishonor the past; it will irrevocably damage the cause of peace.
David Singer: Netanyahu Goes into Judea and Samaria where Gantz Fears to Tread

Ambassador Friedman heads the three-man American delegation now sitting down with the three-man Israeli delegation on the Mapping Committee.

Gantz has been powerless to stop the formation and work of the Mapping Committee. Indeed Gantz urged Trump to release his peace plan before the elections. Gantz has not even requested that one of his nominees be part of the Israeli delegation on the Mapping Committee.

In ignoring the Mapping Committee – Gantz is signalling the continuation of his policy opposing Israel extending its sovereignty into Judea and Samaria with America’s approval.
Gantz has made his own policy very clear:
“After the elections, we will work to apply [Israeli] sovereignty on the Jordan Valley. We will do this in a nationally agreed process and in coordination with the international community.”

Believing the international community would ever agree to Israel extending its sovereignty into any part of Judea and Samaria – without swaps of existing Israeli sovereign territory – is totally unrealistic. The international community has been fixated for decades on seeing another Arab State created in the entirety of Judea and Samaria – or in an area of the same size including land currently part of Israel.

Gantz – in limiting sovereignty to just the Jordan Valley – is dashing the hopes of an estimated Jewish population of 464,353 in 131 settlements seeking unification with Israel.

Israeli voters now have a clear choice to end the political deadlock that has followed two indecisive elections held in the past twelve months:
Is it Netanyahu – promising the restoration of sovereignty in parts of the heartland of the Jewish people’s historic and biblical homeland for the first time in 3000 years?
OR
Is it Gantz – promising more of the same in Judea and Samaria that has been going on for the last 53 years?


A third deadlocked election result now seems increasingly unlikely.

The choice is stark and the direction Israel will take for generations to come is at stake.

Palestinian rights activists moonlight as terrorists
One of the most egregious examples is the NGO for Palestinian “prisoner rights” Addameer. Addameer leaders regularly meet with EU officials and are very involved internationally. It even participated in the UN Human Rights Council’s discussions on Israel in 2018, and urges the ICC war crimes probe of Israel. They also hold “educational” events on campuses with students in the US. Multiple Addameer employees and leaders have a long and rich track record of terrorist convictions and, in several cases, have been Addameer employees and PFLP operatives simultaneously. It is problematic, to say the least, for the EU or UN to be advised on their decisions by organizations with such extensive ties to an EU-recognized terrorist organization.

From 2013-2019, Addameer received nearly $2.1 million from the EU and European member states, including Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain. The Basque autonomous community alone has given it over $920,000 in grants between 2014 and 2019. From 2014 to 2017, Addameer received $498,700 from the Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Secretariat (according to their website), a joint funding body financed by Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. With such significant EU investment, heightened transparency is an absolute necessity.

If the EU is not prepared to cut funding completely, they must double down and demand not only that Palestinian NGOs commit to not working with terrorist organizations, but also that they demonstrate complete financial transparency as to how their money is being spent. Palestinian NGOs should also be required to prove, in light of the evidence, that their employees and leaders are not active PFLP members, perhaps by a new disclosure requirement of past and present civil society affiliations.

The fact that the ties between Palestinian civil society groups and terrorist organizations have significantly deepened over the years, and that simultaneously their ties to European countries have also deepened, should alarm anyone. The EU, and other European states, have an obligation to ensure their grants are not being used to fund the expansion of terrorist activities. They also have an obligation to ensure that decisions made at the UN and EU regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not unduly influenced by groups with PFLP ties.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

From Ian:

British Comedian Confronts Holocaust Denier in New Documentary
In a new BBC2 documentary that aired on Monday, British Jewish comedian and presenter David Baddiel sat down with a Holocaust denier and challenged his conspiratorial views.

A clip from “Confronting Holocaust Denial” showed a frustrated Baddiel trying to argue logically with Irish antisemite Dermot Mulqueen, who expressed a range of vicious tropes, among them the medieval accusation that Jews murdered Christian children and that Jews “hate” Europeans.

Baddiel at one point countered, “If the gas chambers never existed, us Jews would have no reason to hate Europeans. Why would we hate Europeans for something that actually never happened?”

Mulqueen paused awkwardly in response, before stammering, “…because it’s profitable.”

After being arrested in 2015 for vandalizing private property in protest of Holocaust Memorial Day, Mulqueen unsuccessfully ran in Ireland’s 2016 general election as an independent MP.

In an interview with BBC HistoryExtra, Baddiel said he struggled with the question of whether exposing Holocaust deniers to the public provided them a platform to gain legitimacy.

“My feeling — and indeed the empirical fact — is that Holocaust denial won’t go away if we ignore it and therefore it’s better to confront it, and at some level try to understand it. That was my mission in this film,” explained Baddiel.
BBC: Confronting Holocaust Denial with David Baddiel
The Holocaust is one of the most documented, witnessed and written about events in history, yet one in six people worldwide either think the Holocaust has been exaggerated or deny that it took place. What has happened in the 75 years since the liberation of the camps to have so skewed the picture? And, if it matters, why does it matter?

In this timely and important film, David Baddiel explores the multi-faceted nature of Holocaust denial - in both historical and contemporary terms, in an attempt to understand what motivates this dangerous phenomenon and why it is on the rise, both in Britain and across the globe.

David begin his journey at Chelmno, the site of a huge extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where 200,000 Jews were murdered. He learns of the extraordinary lengths German forces employed to conceal what they were doing – building huge crematoria to burn bodies, using ‘bone mills’ to grind down skeletons and scattering the resulting human ashes in surrounding woodland. For David, this is the starting point of Holocaust denial – where the Nazis themselves were attempting to deny their actions.

But the Germans were not alone in concealing the truth of the Holocaust. In the national archives in Kew, David uncovers an extraordinary memo issued by the Ministry of Information’s propaganda department, discussing how the atrocities of death camps should be reported to the public. The memo recommends reports focus on the camps' ‘innocent victims’, not criminals, and ‘not Jews’. This idea that the suffering of the Jewish people should somehow be played down was still dominant when the camps were liberated - many newsreels barely mention that the majority of victims had been Jewish. For David, anti-Semitism is fundamentally at the root of all Holocaust denial.

David discovers how, as the true scale of the Holocaust emerges in the postwar years, the numbers of people attempting to deny or to downplay its scale increases. There is a direct correlation between a higher profile of the Holocaust and rates of denial, something reflected in David’s own experience. As soon as this programme is announced by the BBC, David's Twitter feed fills with posts trying to deny the truth of the Holocaust. It begs the question whether David, by making the film, is himself fanning the flames of denial? And if so, should he be doing it?


New Forms of Old Hate: Confronting Assad’s Anti-Semitism in Germany
Now more than ever, Germany has its own domestic challenges again rising to the surface: the far-right ideology that has resurfaced throughout Europe in apparent response to the refugee crisis has provoked a resurgence of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia—particularly in Germany. On the one hand, many fear that if Germany fails to address its current situation, the world could relive one of its darkest moments in history. German-Jews have already been told by Jewish leadership to refrain from wearing Kippahs in public and remove mezuzot from their doors—many have begun to conceal their identity. The attempted attack on the Halle Synagogue—though prevented from becoming a full-blown massacre by a locked door—still led to a loss of life and demonstrates the repercussions of not actively addressing this issue. On the other hand, if this issue prioritized, as was publicly called for by Germany’s foreign minister, Germany will have the chance to confirm its position as a ‘land of opportunity,’ where people from around the world can reinvent themselves.

Yet while the German government has vowed to combat anti-Semitism, its threats so far have mainly consisted of unspecified consequences for individuals who attack German Jews. As a Syrian, I know that warnings alone are not enough to counter decades of anti-Semitic messaging. In febrile minds of extreme anti-Semites, attacking Jews can be seen as an honorable and courageous act. In many cases, these individuals have been conditioned since birth to perceive the Jewish people as their enemy, themselves victims of a narrative designed to prevent them from holding their country’s dictators accountable for the widespread misery felt throughout the Arab world.

Syrians must educate themselves on persistent history of Anti-Semitism, which did not start with the Holocaust—nor end with the creation of the state of Israel. Every Syrian who aspires to become a European citizen must refuse to be an anti-Semitic extension of their government. Germany, with its years of retraining its own population, has a lot to offer on this front, but the German government must make this a priority and a commitment with its deeds as well as its words.

A Europe unsafe for Jews will never be safe for other minorities. When Syrian communities throughout Europe come to recognize this reality, there is the remarkable potential for fostering a conducive environment for Jews and Syrians to respect one another, encouraging understanding and cooperation between neighbours and mutual support of minority communities throughout Europe. However, getting to this point will require a lot of effort and determination, both on the side of the German government and among Syrian communities themselves.

From Ian:

PMW: Fake news in real time: Palestinian reporter demonizes Israeli soldier seconds after soldier protected him and other journalists
Question: How long does it take a Palestinian Authority TV reporter to rewrite history and deceive Palestinians into hating Israelis?

Answer: 10 seconds.

This is a classic example of how the Palestinian Authority lies to its own people to demonize Israelis and create hatred of them among Palestinians.

At a Palestinian protest against US President Trump’s Middle East peace plan, an Israeli officer instructed Palestinian journalists to move to the other side of the road to be safe from oncoming cars.

But in the PA TV reporter’s instantaneous rewriting of history – during his live broadcast – this was distorted into a lie, turning the Israeli officer’s attempt at protecting the Palestinians into a racist statement. The PA TV reporter told viewers that the Israeli soldiers ordered them to move because “this is an Israeli road and Palestinians are not allowed on it.” In truth, the Israeli officer stressed that the soldiers were trying to “look out for” the lives of the Palestinians, because they were in danger of being “run over.” It is worth noting that the Israeli officer and the PA TV reporter spoke Hebrew together.

Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Stand over there.”
PA TV reporter (in Hebrew): “We are journalists.”
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Journalists over there.”
PA TV reporter (in Hebrew): “Where?
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Across the street. They’ll run you over. It’s your life. Go over here.”
PA TV reporter (in Arabic): “As you can hear –”
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “You’ll get killed. We’re looking out for you.”
PA TV reporter (in Arabic): “One of the occupation soldiers is making us move away on a false claim that this is an Israeli road and Palestinians are not allowed on it.” [Official PA TV, Jan. 29, 2020]


Iran Threatens to Destroy Ancient Jewish Site and Build Palestinian Consulate
Iranian authorities are threatening to destroy the historic tomb of Esther and Mordechai in the city of Hamedan, 200 miles west of Tehran, in favor of constructing "a consular office for Palestine," ARAM, the Alliance for Rights of All Minorities in Iran, said in a Twitter post on Sunday.

The organization claims that members of Iran's formidable Basij paramilitary force attempted to raid the historic site in what it called "an act of revenge against the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan by President Trump."

"Ester and Mordechai were biblical Jewish heroes who saved their people from a massacre in a story known as #Purim. Their burial site has been a significant Jewish landmark for Jews and history buffs around the world," ARAM said.

In December 2010, Iranian protesters tried to breach the compound citing fears that Israel might damage the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Monday, February 17, 2020

From Ian:

Confronting a noxious new age of Jew-hate
What is it that makes possible a horror like the machete attack on a Jewish gathering in New York in December? The outrage overshadowed increased sightings of anti-Jewish graffiti and incidents of boorishly aggressive behaviour towards Jews in public places, here as well as in the United States. Violence always depends on the normalising of bigotry, in which even the most farcically ignorant prejudice plays its part.

During the election campaign, a Labour candidate was obliged to stand down for having used the name “Shylock” as a term of abuse against a member of the Jewish community. In his defence, he claimed that he did not know that the name had any Jewish associations.

This may be chiefly an indictment of standards in British secondary schools. But it also points to an issue about cultural awareness of Judaism and Jewish history. Schoolchildren, of course, study the Holocaust. But what is disturbing —from our own experience and that of many other teachers—is that they often emerge with only the haziest idea of the specifics. We have heard of students who have studied the diaries of Anne Frank with barely any mention of the fact that she was Jewish. Holocaust education, and even events around Holocaust Memorial Day, can come to be focused on generalities about victimised minorities. We have encountered schoolchildren who have visited Auschwitz and returned with only the vague notion that it is bad to persecute people for their religion. This is a worthy enough principle (as Christians in the Middle East or Pakistan would agree); but it signally fails to bring out what is distinctive about the atrocities of the Third Reich and their accomplices, and what is distinctive about Jewish identity and history.

The Holocaust is not a story about deplorably bigoted attitudes. It was a systematic, indeed “scientific”, effort to exterminate an entire population. It is also about a campaign rooted in two millennia of consistent demonisation of that population by Christian theologians, artists and liturgists—and latterly by political extremists searching for a universal scapegoat. The nightmare of the Third Reich is intelligible only against the background of this long record.

What would effective Holocaust education look like? It would certainly have to involve an attempt to trace these historical roots, to look at, for instance: the history of the “Blood Libel” (the myth that Jews routinely kidnapped, tortured and killed Christian children at Passover), with origins that lie in this country in the Middle Ages; at the expulsion of Jews from England in the 13th century, France in the 14th century and Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th; at the 19th century pogroms in Tsarist Russia, and at the resulting first large waves of Jewish refugees in Britain and elsewhere. It would need to look at how these communities took root and developed, what they had to battle against and still have to combat in the form of lazy prejudices encoded in British literature and popular culture, even when the latter’s Christian rationale has long been forgotten.
Digital bullies are a problem, but they're not the Third Reich
Some important liberal journalists have recently started talking about an ugly fact. Running afoul of Sen. Bernie Sanders's online supporters isn't fun. That was the upshot of a recent conversation on MSNBC when Meet the Press host Chuck Todd read aloud a passage from an article by writer Jonathan Last that was published in The Bulwark, where he wrote about the behavior of Sanders' backers, popularly known as the "Bernie Bros."

Last accurately described fans of Sanders as an online mob that bullies the Vermont senator's critics, "hounding opponents, enforcing discipline, quashing any sort of dissent – and trying to preempt anyone else from taking sides against the Dear Leader." The point of the piece was to compare them to supporters of President Donald Trump, but in doing so, Last went a step further by saying that both Sanders and Trump each had a "digital brownshirt brigade."

Predictably, that sent up howls of protest from supporters of Sanders, who said it was offensive to compare a Jewish candidate's backers to Nazis. And, in the manner of online mobs, Todd's sin in merely quoting the article brought down on his head an avalanche of criticism, including a trending #firechucktodd hashtag. By calling attention to the bullying the press gets from the socialist's posse, Todd (who is also Jewish) was "canceled" by the political correctness police of the left.

The context for this kerfuffle is not one of the usual left-right, pro-Trump/con-Trump variety that seems to characterize all of our political arguments these days.

Todd is a liberal journalist notorious for his disgust of the president. And Last is a #NeverTrump conservative writing in an anti-Trump publication. Yet the tsunami of abuse thrown at Todd proved his point about the way the Sanders mob swarms anyone who speaks up against the current Democratic presidential frontrunner.

But there are two separate points to be made here.

One is that Sanders' supporters are right that Last was wrong to call them Brownshirts. Todd was equally wrong for quoting the passage on air without pointing out the huge difference between even the most obnoxious of the Bernie Bros and Adolf Hitler's Storm Troopers, who were known for their brown uniforms.
Can Democrats survive Bernie Sanders?
Those words can't come from someone caught in the throes of war. In its relentless focus on taking down Trump, the Democratic Party has overlooked the power of a unifying message. Yes, the goal is to replace Trump – but how and with what? Bashing Trump is a tactic, not a strategy. And promising radical changes to the country and the economy is a strategy, but the wrong one.

The lesson of the Trump presidency is that character counts at least as much as policy. America doesn't need a policy revolutionary. It needs decency. It needs a mensch in the White House. A mensch with the wisdom to hear all voices and the spine to make difficult decisions.

Bernie Sanders is no mensch. He's a cranky idealist hell-bent on pushing his utopian socialist agenda – and "healing the country" is not on that agenda. He's exploiting the rage at Trump to trigger the kind of class warfare that spreads even more animosity and division.

Sanders is just the most extreme expression of a phenomenon that has plagued the Democrats: They've allowed their fury at Trump to turn them into a crisis party. In their near panic at the prospect of losing another election, they've thrown the kitchen sink at Trump and the American voters hoping something would stick.

But in the process, they've missed the real crisis: We are a deeply divided nation in desperate need of a courageous leader who will embrace the challenge to Make America One Again.

I know: I'm dreaming. Being a dreamer these days is a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

From Ian:

Trump’s deal highlights the great Jewish rift
One of the less remarked upon, but nevertheless most painful series of reactions to President Donald Trump’s long awaited “Deal of the Century” has been the response of the organized American Jewish Left, which I will refer to here as AJL.

That there has been relatively little focus on this facet of the announcement’s aftermath might be because we have gotten used to the critical-unto-condemning tone adopted by many of these groups toward Israel.

However, the deal and its copious details have provided a unique platform for those attitudes to play out. AJL reactions focus overwhelmingly on the plan’s accentuating and enabling increased Israeli “occupation” (J Street and The New Israel Fund), “annexation” (Israel Policy Forum), and “apartheid” (Jewish Voice for Peace).

There are numerous lamentations about the negative implications for Palestinians and the manifest injustice being paid to them.

Nowhere, though, is there any sense of balance, nuance or understanding.

What comes through overwhelmingly clearly is the profound lack of empathy of these left-wing American Jews for their Israeli brethren. There is no recognition of the conditions that have kept the region in its current limbo state; no understanding of the vulnerability, fragility and tenuousness that even a stronger and more successful Israel lives with daily.
Dore Gold: "We Presented the Americans with What Most Israelis Believe In"
During a briefing last week on the U.S. peace plan at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman expressed his thanks to former diplomat and Jerusalem Center president Dore Gold "for the three years of terrific collaboration and advice. Dore and I have spoken countless times about these issues....He played a very important and significant role in this process and one that I would say was irreplaceable."

Gold would occasionally brief Netanyahu on the content of the talks he was holding with the U.S. administration and got a green light from the prime minister to continue. "Most of the meetings were held in Israel, but quite a few were held at the White House," he said.

"We presented the Americans with what most Israelis believe in," Gold said. "For example, they read the book Jerusalem: Delusions of Division by Israel Hayom columnist Nadav Shragai, which detailed the many dangers that the partition of the city would entail. It's not that they actually wanted to divide the city, but the book gave them the ammunition they needed and the rationale for why it would be problematic."

"I felt like the librarian who had to find the Americans the relevant material so that they could make decisions. But I also felt that I was carrying out an important job and fulfilling my duty to my country and people."

Gold makes it clear that not all of Israel's requests were met. He would have preferred that the plan gave the Palestinians less territory and he is less than thrilled about the prospect of establishing a Palestinian capital in the eastern part of Jerusalem.

"This plan comes with costs, but we look at the cost-benefit analysis. Would anyone have imagined such a plan being rolled out by an American administration several years ago? And a plan that endorses Israeli sovereignty in the Jordan Valley?"
The ‘Deal of the Century’ – changing the borders
Despite the expected resistance of the Palestinian leadership, January 28, 2020, will be remembered as a historic date in the longstanding conflict. The “Deal of the Century” is the most detailed plan ever presented and it showcases a much-needed strategy shift for the region. The plan redefines the psychological borders of the conflict, which will enable the physical borders to be fixed at a later date.

The continuous Palestinian rejection of any type of resolution since the days of the Oslo Accords has imbued them with a false feeling of strength that has harmed both them and the chances of a realistic settlement. From a historical perspective, their reluctance to reconcile themselves with the concept of a Jewish national home caused them to lose land. Every time they refused to share the land “between the river and the sea,” their proposed state shrunk in size. A look at the maps from the Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947, and the eventual cease fire border lines in the 1948 War of Independence show this graphically.

When the Palestinians reached the conclusion that rejection does not pay, they recognized Israel’s statehood and signed the Oslo Accords. Not long after, though, the Palestinians reversed track with the intuition that their rejection would benefit them and increase the size of their eventual state. This theory was supported by empirical facts. The Israeli offers improved in each round of negotiations – from Camp David, to the Taba summit and later to the offer from Olmert to Abbas. So, rejection was deemed worthwhile and serious compromise was delayed.

The “Deal of the Century” reverses this dynamic. The plan changes the psychology of the conflict and its resolution. Palestinian rejectionism will no longer benefit them. Rather, we have returned to the logic of the “Iron Wall” of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Peace will only be achieved when Israel’s neighbors internalize that the nation-state of the Jewish people is here to stay. This has happened with Egypt and Jordan, and now comes the Palestinians turn to play ball as well.

Sunday, February 16, 2020

From Ian:

NGO Monitor: An analysis of the United Nation’s BDS blacklist
After multiple delays over legal, due process and methodological concerns, which do not seem to have been addressed, on Wednesday the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published its “database of all business enterprises” that it claims contribute to “human-rights concerns.” This U.N. blacklist, ordered by the U.N. Human Rights Council, is meant to bolster BDS campaigns, singling out Israel.

This singular treatment of Israel in this exercise, as with many other HRC initiatives, violates the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism.

The database is aimed at economically damaging Israel and companies owned by Jews or that do business with Jewish Israelis. In keeping with the BDS objective, 94 of the 112 companies on the blacklist are based in Israel. Many Arab, European and Asian companies that meet the list’s criteria were excluded; large Israeli companies were included, clearly in order to maximize the economic harm to Israel’s economy as a whole.
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This blacklist operates under the false premises that business in occupied territory is “illegal settlement activity” barred by international law. In fact, there is no such prohibition, and almost every country engages in and/or facilitates business activities in settlements in situations of occupation. Unsurprisingly, however, the United Nations is only pursuing such a list regarding Israel.

A major category of listed companies are those providing consumer goods and services (food, telecommunications, transportation, gas, water) to both Palestinians and Israelis. The United Nations seeks to bar such companies from operating or impose discriminatory business criteria with little regard as to the human rights and economic impacts on the local population and the companies’ employees.

Pro-BDS NGOs, including Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International and Al-Haq, have been major proponents of the blacklist. Over the past few months, these groups, along with UNHRC-member dictatorships, have been intensively lobbying High Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet, the former socialist leader of Chile, to publish it.
Israel freezes ties with UN rights chief after release of settlement blacklist
Israel is suspending its ties with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Foreign Ministry announced Wednesday, several hours after the UN body published a list of 112 companies that do business in West Bank settlements.

Foreign Minister Israel Katz’s office said he ordered the “exceptional and harsh measure” in retaliation for Michelle Bachelet’s office “serving the BDS campaign,” referring to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.

Katz intends to protect the companies operating in Israel, his office stated.

It was not immediately clear what practical implications the decision would have. The commissioner’s office has representatives stationed in Israel, but they are not known to enjoy good working relations with Israeli diplomats. Officials in Jerusalem on Wednesday evening merely said that any requests they may have will not be answered as of today.

Earlier on Wednesday, the commission unexpectedly released the so-called blacklist, which had been in the making since March 2016, when the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution calling for a database of companies promoting or maintaining Israeli settlements.

Israeli reacted angrily to the publication of the blacklist, denouncing the UN body responsible for compiling it and vowing to protect Israeli financial interests. The Palestinians, meanwhile, celebrated a “victory for international law.”

Ninety-four of the 112 companies on the list are Israeli, including all major banks, state-owned transportation companies Egged and Israel Railways Corporation, and telecommunications giants Bezeq, HOT and Cellcom. It also lists medium-size companies such as restaurant chain Café Café and Angel Bakeries.
Humanitarian Aid donated to the Palestinians sold for profit
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) is tasked with administering humanitarian aid and social welfare to Palestinian refugees.

Last year, a leaked confidential report from UNRWA’s ethics office detailed abuses of power among the agency's senior management, documenting incidents of "sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority, for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent, and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives."

In light of the scandal, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and New Zealand suspended funding the agency.

UNRWA has long been controversial as it seeks to perpetuate the Palestinian refugee crisis, rather than resolve it.

The corruption and abuse of power exists even at the most fundamental level.

Food aid donated to the people of Gaza from UNRWA and from private donations has been seen on the grocery store shelves, sold for profit and promoted on the stores social media pages.

One store advertised cans of tuna, clearly labeled as a "gift" from the people of Japan

Powdered milk, donated from the UN Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA) and clearly marked "Not for Sale" was also available

It spite of the ongoing controversy, UNRWA continues to solicit funding worldwide. Its time for anyone committed to justice for the Palestinian people to seriously consider alternatives to the bloated and corrupt UNWRA bureaucracy.

Saturday, February 15, 2020

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Rot Inside American Jewish Organizations
What’s happening here is more than a skirmish over a peace plan, or a distressing glimpse into the way American Jewry’s leaders privilege their partisan leanings over the fact that their leadership roles in American society are due to their Judaism and not their Democratic Party membership. What we are seeing is the way American Jewish leaders fail to take seriously the rising tide of anti-Semitism that masquerades as “anti-Zionism”—and even the way progressive groups enable it. Attacking an American plan for its pro-Israel lean is nonsensical for those who should, by the very nature of who they are and what they do, want the United States to have a pro-Israel lean.

There is no future for Jewry without a strong and surviving Israel. Indeed, for the modern Diaspora, no idea has more successfully preserved the notion of an egalitarian Jewish peoplehood—one that crosses languages and religious boundaries—than Zionism. Long before the reestablishment of the State of Israel, Zionists were the Jews dedicated to arguing compellingly for a coherent Jewish identity and thus for Jews as a minority deserving of the rights and recognition afforded others. If American Judaism is to have a chance at survival, it must first realize that that is what it is fighting for.

What does it look like when a national Jewish community understands what’s at stake? The United Kingdom offers a good example. Heading into the December elections, the Labour Party was (and is, for the moment) led by Jeremy Corbyn. He attempted to pass off his admiration for terrorists and his party’s harassment of Jewish politicians and Jewish voters as “anti-Zionism”—as though that were a good thing—but he still ended up proving that the word “Zionist” is just a stand-in for “Jew” in leftist discourse. He claimed that “Zionists,” even those who have lived their whole lives in Britain, “don’t understand English irony.” The Jew, to leftists like Corbyn, will forever be an outsider.

A full 87 percent of UK Jews denounced Corbyn as an anti-Semite. “What will become of Jews and Judaism in Britain if the Labour Party forms the next government?” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis wrote in late November in the London Times. “This anxiety is understandable and justified.” Jewish Labour groups fought to expose their own party’s bigotry, even as whistleblowers faced retaliation. Jews abandoned Labour. In the event, Labour lost the election in a historic landslide.

Such communal solidarity has become distressingly unthinkable in the United States. Consider the story of the anti-Semitic crime spree in New York. For nearly a year, the steady low-level harassment of visible Jews in the Big Apple spiraled deliberately into an open-ended, slow-rolling pogrom outside the city—a broad-daylight massacre at a Jersey City kosher market followed by a Manhattan man driving 30 miles to the Haredi town of Monsey, where he stormed into a rabbi’s house with a machete and hacked away at stunned victims.

The media ignored the violence until there was blood in the streets; the organized Jewish world reacted like a deer in the headlights; non-Orthodox rabbis sneered at the Haredi community as it absorbed daily assaults; Jewish intellectuals pretended nothing was happening. Well into the Brooklyn violence, anti-Semitism chronicler Liam Hoare insisted that “despite the endless handwringing about anti-Semitism on the left, it is far-right extremism which constitutes the paramount threat to American Jewish life today.” It was a line the Anti-Defamation League had been pushing hard as well. But the renewed violence in the New York area wasn’t coming from white nationalists or alt-right posers. Many of the attacks caught on tape featured African-American suspects in outer-borough neighborhoods where religious Jews were framed as land-grabbing outsiders, with some residents telling interviewers they viewed Israel as the point of origin for these Jews. In Jersey City, the shooters were reportedly Black Hebrew Israelites, a kind of extreme black nationalist group, apparently motivated by a conspiracy theory that Jews pull the strings of the police to kill black people—a calumny that took original form as a claim that Israel was training U.S. cops to persecute minorities. “Israel” very quickly becomes “Jews.”
Melanie Phillips: Denying their parent and embracing their assassin
Christians are arguably the most committed supporters of Israel in the world. At the same time, different kinds of Christians are among the Jews’ worst enemies.

In America, the ones who defend Israel so passionately are (mostly) the “red state” evangelicals. It is these people in their millions, not the so-called and vastly over-hyped Jewish lobby, who make America so pro-Israel.

Many American Jews, however, believe these Christians are antisemites. This is because some want to convert the Jews to Christianity and believe that this will happen at the “end of days.”

None of that, though, poses a serious danger to Jewish interests. A far greater threat is posed by those Christians who appear more reasonable because they sound like secular liberals.

Next month, the executive committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC) is due to elect a new general secretary. One of the two candidates is Dr. Jerry Pillay, a member of South Africa’s United Presbyterian Church who has urged support for the BDS movement against Israel “for the sake of just peace.”

The WCC has played a key role in turning much of the world against Israel. Through its “liberation theology,” it has for decades infused liberal churches with neo-Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-west attitudes — thus placing a virtual halo over the antisemitism of the left.

In Britain, the Church of England and other liberal denominations are institutionally hostile to Israel. Such churches, along with immensely influential Christian NGOs such as Christian Aid, Christ at the Checkpoint or KAIROS, disseminate boiler-plate distortions and falsehoods that demonize Israel and sanitize Palestinian-Arab aggression.

In the United States, a number of churches — most notably the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church USA — have passed BDS resolutions against Israel.

According to Dexter Van Zile, the Christian analyst with the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), the “Never Again” coalition of liberal Protestant denominations created after the Holocaust has attacked the primary victims of the Holocaust with a flood of dishonest propaganda.

Its message, he has written, is that “Israeli Jews abuse the rights accorded to them as a sovereign people in the Middle East,” and that “by exercising undue influence in the democracies where they live, Diaspora Jews help Israel get away with its crimes.”

“It’s a ‘cleaner’ version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” says Van Zile, “but the implications are just as demonic.”

Friday, February 14, 2020

From Ian:

Put BDS to the Test
Now, matters have come to their natural conclusion. The same student government has passed a resolution urging the University to divest from “companies that profit from human rights violations in Palestine and other communities globally.” Despite the nod to “other communities” and a gesture toward immigration issues at home, the resolution focuses on Israel. Erez Cohen, director of U of I’s Hillel, says that it “refers to Israel 11 times more than any other country mentioned.”

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is not an anti-Israel campus. Given the opportunity to participate in referenda on related resolutions in 2017 and 2018, the student body rejected them by wide margins. There is good reason to believe Rabbi Dovid Tiechtel, co-director of U of I’s Chabad, when he says that “this vote does not represent the values and beliefs of students and faculty at the University of Illinois.”

In 2017, proponents of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel succeeded, after years of failure, in passing a resolution at the University of Michigan. It was the norm then, and remains the norm now, not to try to reverse these resolutions. That’s a sensible strategy on some campuses, where, after a resolution has passed, anti-Israel activists can struggle to find a new campaign with the same propaganda value as divestment. Resources are often put to better use educating students and faculty on matters distorted by BDS propagandists, such as anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But I thought then and think now that, at places like the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois, where BDS has struggled to win victories and has won those only by swaying small numbers of student legislators, it’s worth mounting a campaign to repeal or otherwise respond to anti-Israel resolutions. Anti-Israel activists benefit from a fight in which their forces return to the field after a battle is lost, confident that, if BDS ever wins, its campus opponents will retire from the field.

It is a challenge for campus BDS campaigns to find their footing after a win. But it’s also a challenge, as campaigners against BDS know from experience, to go back year after year, even after overwhelming victories of the sort they’d won at the University of Illinois, to hold the ground.

On some campuses, BDS activists, too, should be put to that test.



Democratic Presidential Surrogates Discuss Israel, Jewish Issues
Joel Rubin, Sanders’ director for Jewish outreach, said Sanders would work hard to ensure Israel’s security and in securing a state for the Palestinians.

The evening included discussion of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. Richman said that Bloomberg was opposed to BDS, believing it anti-Semitic and that Bloomberg adhered to the principles set forth by former Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky that the “three Ds” of anti-Semitism were delegitimization, demonization and double standards.

Rubin said although Sanders is opposed to BDS, the Vermont senator believes that “Americans have a constitutional right to participate in nonviolent protests.”

Rob Meyerhoff, a Steyer staffer, said Steyer, who has made climate change the focal point of his campaign for the Democratic nomination, also saw support for BDS as falling under the banner of free speech.

“I’m not a regular surrogate for Joe Biden,” Koretz said. “I just think he’s the right candidate for the right time.”

As for Bloomberg, Richman said, “He has the experience and the toughness to stand up to Donald Trump.”

While Rubin highlighted the extensive support Sanders has received across the country, Simonds called out some of those supporters. Without mentioning anyone by name, he asked Rubin to explain why Sanders has had political ties with anti-Zionists. In response, Rubin urged people to focus on Sanders’ words about Israel, not those of his supporters who may have made troubling remarks about the Jewish State.


Omar Foreign Policy Adviser Dodges Question About BDS
As Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) introduced what she is calling a "progressive vision" for foreign policy, her foreign policy adviser demurred on a cornerstone of that vision: the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign to economically isolate Israel.

At a briefing on Wednesday about the plan, which Omar is dubbing a "Pathway to Peace," Omar aide Ryan Morgan declined to explain why the congresswoman opposes economic sanctions but supports BDS.

Omar left the event after offering brief remarks, leaving Morgan to participate in the panel discussion that followed in her stead.

"You're asking me if I want to take the BDS question?" said Morgan. "No."

Omar announced a package of bills that she says reflects "a bold progressive vision" for U.S. foreign policy. The discussion that followed was moderated by Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a new think tank backed by the billionaires Charles Koch and George Soros.

Both Omar and the Quincy Institute have faced accusations of anti-Semitism.




From Ian:

JPost Editorial: The UN Human Rights Council's shameful blacklist
The UN has reached a new low. The UN Human Rights Council, usually in the news because it includes countries with the worst records of human rights abuse in the world, has now targeted companies that do business in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The so-called blacklist includes 112 companies with the aim of letting the world know who it is that works in Israel’s alleged “occupied territories.”

The publication of the list has been in the works since 2016. Countries with the worst human-rights records, such as Cuba and Venezuela, pushed the list due to their anti-Israel views, not because of an attachment to international law. The Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation also supported the list, neither of which are known for having members with stellar human-rights records.

Unsurprisingly, the UN does not have a global standard for how it labels companies that operate in different disputed areas, such as Crimea, Kashmir, Afrin, Northern Cyprus or Western Sahara. As usual, the Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has merely replicated the antisemitism of previous eras, targeting Israel the way global antisemites target Jews. There is no reason Israel’s role in the West Bank is especially unique.
Corporations that do business in the West Bank are no more involved in human-rights abuses than those accused of fueling such abuses from the Gulf to Asia.

As Lahav Harkov wrote in Thursday’s Post, there is no explanation for why some companies active in the West Bank, in the categories the UN mentions, are on the list of 112 while others are not. The UN supposedly seeks to target companies involved in surveillance, demolition, pollution and hindering the Palestinian economy. The list includes Motorola, Airbnb, General Mills and TripAdvisor, among others. This is confusing, since TripAdvisor enables users to review places in Palestinian areas. Why punish a company that assists people in finding tourism opportunities in Palestinian areas merely because the same company might highlight restaurants that are also owned by Israeli citizens?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will contest the decision with all of its strength and will boycott those who try to boycott it. President Reuven Rivlin said the companies deserve support, and former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also slammed the list.

Caroline B. Glick: Build Bibi, build
From the dawn of modern Zionism, two forms of Zionism have operated in tandem. The first is diplomatic Zionism. The second is pioneering Zionism. One of the unique aspects of the Trump plan is that it embraces both.

The map of Israel envisioned in the Trump plan is a map that adds the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria to sovereign Israeli territory. It bears out the central maxim of pioneering Zionism – the map of Israel is determined by the settlement of Israel. The land Jews live in is the land over which they take possession. The slogan of the pre-state pioneers, "One more dunam [hectare], one more goat," lives on, as relevant than ever in the Trump plan.

As for diplomatic Zionism, the Trump plan is predicated on a recognition that Israel is the legitimate sovereign in Judea and Samaria under international law. This recognition, a hundred years after those rights were anchored in international law in the San Remo Convention, is a singular triumph for diplomatic Zionism.

Over the past 150 years, when progress in one form of Zionism was blocked, the other compensated by taking a more dominant role.

For instance, due then Obama's obsessive hostility towards Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and neighborhoods in united Jerusalem, throughout most of Obama's presidency, pioneering Zionists were stymied. Israel couldn't build new communities or build much of anything inside existing communities without incurring the white wrath of the White House.

So Netanyahu, the greatest diplomatic Zionist since Theodor Herzl grabbed the baton and started running. Through his peripatetic defenses of Israel's rights and relentless push to strengthen and widen Israel's bilateral relations with countries around the world, Netanyahu enabled Israel to withstand the Obama administration's anti-settlement pressure campaign and get through his presidency with all communities intact.

Due to the administration's sudden opposition to the application of Israeli law over the Jordan Valley and the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria ahead of the March 2 elections, the diplomatic pathway to Israeli sovereignty over the areas is stymied. But that there is a path forward. It has a diplomatic component but it mainly involves community building.
Clifford D. May: The return of the Monroe Doctrine
Tehran's regional propaganda headquarters is in Caracas. The two regimes collaborate in a disinformation war against the US Their Spanish-language television networks, Hispan TV and Telesur, respectively, share journalists across Latin America.

Hezbollah, a proxy of the clerical regime, is firmly ensconced within Venezuela's large (about 200,000) Lebanese Shia community. "Simply put," Dr. Ottolenghi notes, "Maduro and his cronies use the trappings of a sovereign state to run a criminal syndicate involved in pillaging state resources and taking commissions from organized crime to use Venezuela as a staging ground for their global smuggling operations."

He adds: "Hezbollah supporters, concentrated in several areas of Venezuela and along the Venezuela/Colombia border, have, over the years, lent their businesses to trade-based money-laundering schemes designed to repatriate drug money for the cartels – minus a hefty commission for Hezbollah."

The day after the State of the Union, President Trump met with Guaido to discuss how "to expedite a democratic transition in Venezuela that will end the ongoing crisis," according to a White House press statement.

I'd argue that will require additional sanctions, not just on the Maduro regime but also and especially on Russia which is violating the Monroe Doctrine – President James Monroe's 1823 warning to Europe that further imperialism in the Western Hemisphere would not be tolerated.

Of course, in 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry announced: "The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over." What he probably meant was that the Obama administration had no wish to dominate the Americas.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian neo-tsar toward whom Bhatt believes Mr. Trump is too solicitous, may have interpreted Mr. Kerry's words differently: as an invitation to exploit US neighbors – an invitation he and others have been only too pleased to accept.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

From Ian:

The Jewish nightmare of Bernie vs. Trump
Ask British Jews what advice they would offer to American Jews, based on their experience fighting Corbynism, and the answer is unequivocal: Don’t wait until it’s almost too late to fight for your political home. Don’t pretend it can’t happen to you.

They mean: Pay attention to how quickly a mainstream party with a long pro-Israel tradition and deep roots in the Jewish community can be transformed into a home for enemies of the Jewish people.

Bernie Sanders is not Jeremy Corbyn, and the Democratic Party is not Labour. Sanders has repeatedly affirmed his support for Israel’s right to exist (though he is far more equivocal about its right to defend that right). We all know about his time on a kibbutz. And the Democratic Party has an overwhelming majority of pro-Israel legislators.

But more than any other leading politician, Sanders is responsible for mainstreaming the Corbynist wing of the Democratic Party. The party’s anti-Zionists, like Linda Sarsour, have gathered around Sanders. And Sanders himself supported Corbyn — ignoring the fears of British Jews, who overwhelmingly saw Corbyn as an anti-Semite.

Corbyn has shown us how quickly the politics of the fringe can become mainstream. Under President Sanders, those still-renegade voices within the Democratic Party would have intimate access to the White House.

Why are Democrats skipping out on AIPAC?
Who's going to #SkipAIPAC? The hashtag campaign created by the anti-Zionist IfNotNow group is winning even when their demands that Democrats, and especially their presidential candidates, stay away from the annual AIPAC policy conference next month are opposed.

The radical group scored an unexpected triumph when one of its members ambushed Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at a New Hampshire campaign event. Warren was asked if she would avoid "legitimizing" AIPAC by skipping the annual conference because it was forming an alliance with "Islamophobes and anti-Semites and white nationalists." When Warren answered this falsified and loaded question with a simple: "yeah," it was heralded as a victory for a marginal organization dedicated to torpedoing the US-Israel alliance.

But in some ways, they also won when former Vice President Joe Biden answered a similar question by saying that he would go to the AIPAC event, but only to "convince them to change their position."

Left unsaid by Biden was what position(s) he was referencing.

Is it AIPAC's continued support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict despite the fact that the formula is looking more obsolete than ever? Or is it their uphill fight to preserve bipartisan support for the Jewish state despite the fact that Democrats are deeply divided about the issue, while Republicans are marching in lockstep behind President Donald Trump's efforts to closely align American foreign policy with that of the Jewish state?

While neither Biden nor Warren is likely to win their party's nomination, the fact that even the former felt that the only way he could justify his presence at AIPAC was to confront its supporters was telling.
Gil Troy: AIPAC’s challenge: Celebrating bipartisanship when it’s passé
Israel still enjoys bipartisan approval – 70% of Americans remain pro-Israel. For this now-threatened status quo to persist, AIPAC and other forces cherishing civility and bipartisanship in America must champion those values too, while AIPAC and others who care about keeping the Democratic Party pro-Israel must figure out how to resist the haters too.

Instead, too many have insisted there’s no problem – overlooking the dramatic warning signs. Last year, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer proclaimed at AIPAC that “there are 62 freshman Democrats – you hear me? Sixty-two not three.” But while reaffirming that which still is, worry about what might soon be.

The “three” Hoyer targeted – Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar – are radicals who oppose Israel and bipartisanship. AOC insists that even before Trump, “bipartisanship was s***ty.” But more and more, the same Democrats who reject bipartisanship as “disastrous,” as “ruining America,” as perpetuating power, also demonize Israel. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean claims Israel “embraces ethnic cleansing.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren says “yeah” when a voter claims AIPAC is in an “unholy alliance… with Islamophobes and antisemites and white nationalists.”

More broadly – and worryingly – many Democratic presidential candidates threaten to blackmail Israel with military aid. And most Democrats refused even to read Trump’s “Deal of the Century” thoughtfully, to see if it offered anything positive.
Congresswoman calls AIPAC a ‘hate group’ after it attacks her in ad
A Minnesota congresswoman called AIPAC a “hate group” inciting against her after the Israel lobby featured her in an attack ad.

“AIPAC claims to be a bipartisan organization, but its use of hate speech actually makes it a hate group,” US Rep. Betty McCollum, a Democrat, said Wednesday in a statement. “By weaponizing anti-Semitism and hate to silence debate, AIPAC is taunting Democrats and mocking our core values.”

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee declined to comment. The lobby removed and apologized last week for at least two Facebook ads that slammed “radical” Democrats in Congress, and altered an online petition that said Israel’s harshest critics in Congress pose a threat “maybe more sinister” than ISIS and other terror groups.

“This is not a call to action, it is incitement,” McCollum said. “Elected representatives in Congress ‘more sinister’ than ISIS? Last year, I met with AIPAC representatives from Minnesota in my office. Do forces ‘more sinister’ than ISIS sit down and meet with AIPAC’s advocates?”

On Twitter, McCollum rejected what she called AIPAC’s “non-apology.” In its statement of apology, AIPAC said the ad was poorly worded” and “inflammatory,” but also said it “alluded to a genuine concern of many pro-Israel Democrats about a small but growing group, in and out of Congress, that is deliberately working to erode the bipartisan consensus.”

One of the ads was illustrated by a collage of three of Israel’s toughest critics in Congress, including McCollum, who is the lead sponsor of a bill that would link Israel’s assistance to its treatment of Palestinian juvenile detainees.


From Ian:

Isi Leibler: Our Age of Miracles but Possible Lost Opportunities
Three months ago, who could have dreamed that we would be in such an extraordinarily good position? The Trump government had already established itself as the most pro-Israel American administration in history and publicly assumed the role of a genuine ally.

For the first time, a US administration has rebutted the false Palestinian narrative and exposed their duplicity at the international level, including the rabidly anti-Israel United Nations. It terminated aid that was being channeled as stipends to terrorists and their families and repudiated the nauseous theme of moral equivalence between murderers and their victims. Trump’s policies on Iran, Jerusalem, the Golan, and the settlements are a stark reversal of the Obama administration’s policies.

Only last month, amid the internal political turmoil as Israel approaches its third election this year, more than 40 world leaders, including royalty, heads of state, and heads of government, participated in a Holocaust commemoration in Jerusalem. They included Russian President Vladimir Putin, who personally inaugurated a memorial commemorating the citizens and defenders of Leningrad during the Nazi siege of the city. The same week, representatives of Arab states attended a memorial at Auschwitz. And just this last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expanding diplomatic relations with African and Latin American countries, including Arab and Muslim states.

However, the high point is surely the release of the momentous Trump Mideast peace plan whose ramifications must not be underestimated. For the first time since the disastrous Oslo Accords, there is an outline of a solution based on reality, supported by the two dominant and centrist parties and the majority of Israelis.
The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace
Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz on the Ben Shapiro Show discussing their book "The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace" (St. Martin’s Press, available on April 28).


UNHRC’s game is rigged, so Israel isn’t playing - Analysis
There is no explanation of why some companies active in the West Bank in the categories they mention are on the list of 112 while others aren’t. Jerusalem’s iconic Angel Bakery is on the list, though it is unclear how it would fit into any of the listed categories, which include surveillance, demolition, pollution and hindering the Palestinian economy, among others. Some of the categories do not specify that these business activities have to take place in settlements – and yet it is only a blacklist of businesses working with the Jews in the West Bank and not the Arabs. Much of the list provides services to both Palestinians and Israelis.

It’s also worth noting that the UNHRC’s mandate is to help UN member states, not corporations, implement the council’s decisions on human rights.

Though the UNHRC’s anti-Israel slant is blatant, the blacklist is both a public relations problem and a potential economic problem. It’s a public relations problem because there are enough people who don’t know that the council is a sham, that commends instead of condemns violators like Iran for their human rights records. It’s a potential economic problem, because some of these companies – especially the 18 from abroad – may feel pressured to stop doing business with Israelis in Judea and Samaria.

Right now, Israel’s plan to mitigate the damage is to work, with American support, to remind the companies on the list that they are not doing anything illegal. Israel is also highlighting the anti-boycott laws passed in 28 states in the US. Israeli consuls in the US have been instructed to contact the governors of states with anti-boycott laws in which companies on the list operate.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demonstrated the Israeli strategy to combat this problem in his remarks on the blacklist. First, he called the UNHRC “biased and lacking in influence” – in other words, the companies can ignore them.

Then, he says: “In recent years, we promoted laws in most states in the US that say that they must take firm action against anyone who tries to boycott Israel.” In other words, if you consider not ignoring the UNHRC, know that there will be consequences.

What Netanyahu and the Foreign Ministry realize is that the only way to fight back against a game that is fixed at the outset is to refuse to play it.

“Whoever boycotts us will be boycotted,” Netanyahu said at a Likud event in Merom Galil. “This is unimportant. We are not afraid… We are not apologizing and not withdrawing even a millimeter.”

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

From Ian:

PMW: Song proclaiming the "slaughter" of Jews uploaded in 11,200 versions on social network TikTok
TikTok is a social network app popular with teenagers and children on which users create and share videos up to 60 seconds long.

Palestinian Media Watch has discovered a song whose Arabic lyrics celebrate that Palestinians/Muslims/Arabs are “dread for the Jews,” and proclaim their “slaughter.” The song has been uploaded 11,200 times by different users, making their own videos (according to the app’s records.)

PMW has made a short video compilation from parts of 14 of these TikTok videos.
Lyrics: “Advance, for you are the symbol of resolve,
For your being in the world is dread for the Jews,
With blows and slaughter on land and sea,
The era of weakness will not return,
Say this in my land
and in the land of the ancestors, [which has] the history of glory
Until eternity”

[Compilation from following 14 TikTok accounts,
khlawy.xd, ????????18, ayhamqarqash, mennahany98, omarrmdan, sabahsame, mohamedelashrey, marwanmedhat42, wadeadweikat, 2961278soso, abouds.shaar, khaledrimawii, odii.mohamed, amjed.z, Feb. 10, 2020]

The message of the Arabic song is that Arabs, Muslims, or Palestinians constitute dread for Jews and will slaughter them.

Last week, PMW exposed an animated video on TikTok that showed reenactments of four real terror attacks against Israelis. Following PMW’s exposure, TikTok promptly removed the video and suspended the account on which it had been uploaded.

PMW calls on TikTok to once again do the right thing and remove the 11,200 songs proclaiming the slaughter of Jews.


Barry Shaw: Replacement theologist antisemitism
Anti-Semitism takes varied forms. One of the under-reported forms of Jew hatred is that perpetrated by Replacement Theologians.

Jews have been persecuted down the ages by Christians who express the view that God has replaced the Jews as His Chosen People for not adopting Christ as our savior.

To this end, Jews have been tortured, banishe and, burnt at the stake by Christians who have used religion as an expression of their Jew hatred.

This continues to this day.

One example is Rick Wiles, who has wrongly been described as a Far-Right anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theorist. He is not. He is a Replacement Theologian.

- Wiles ridiculously accused Jews of being behind the vote-counting disaster at the Democratic caucus in Iowa.
- He accused Israel as being "the people who crucified Christ."
- He accused Israel of funding the first openly homosexual presidential candidate, despite this candidate having a jaundiced view about Israel. In his rantings,
- Wiles accused Israel as being a "foreign power that is anti-Christ," and, to rub in his anti-Semitism, he accused Israel of operating "a Jewish coup" in America.

These are the ravings of a replacement theologian. We have seen this played out in Bethlehem where replacement theologians cohort with the very people who have driven out Christians from a once-Christian town, by foolishly labeling Jesus as "a Palestinian messenger," in a place where Palestinian Arab hoodlums and terrorists have persecuted once prosperous Bethlehem Christians.
Being Fired by Trump Does Not Make You a Holocaust Victim
Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes, one of the media’s favorite Donald Trump antagonists, took to Twitter this weekend to pen a transcendently nonsensical thread comparing the firing of a handful of bureaucrats to the rounding up of political undesirables in the lead-up to the Holocaust.

It’s wouldn’t be a huge deal, except that this kind of hysterical reaction has now been normalized in American discourse, illustrating that once-rational people have either lost all sense of history or are willing to belittle the past for short-term political gain. My bet is on the latter.

Here’s how Wittes begins his updated version of Martin Niemöller’s famous poem:

When fellow Hungarians came for my grandfather — he was one of the first to be deported from the country — they sent him to sweep mines on the Eastern Front before handing him over to the Germans at Mauthausen and then Gunskirchen.

At some point he perished, no doubt, in a vile and undignified manner, perhaps succumbing to starvation or typhoid or dysentery, or maybe he was shot in the head and left in a shallow unmarked grave. We don’t know. His wife and son, the latter of whom he would never meet, would never find out how he died, despite decades of trying. His loss, like the deaths of millions of other powerless and now anonymous victims of that age, would have repercussions that reverberate today.

When “they” came for James Comey, on the other hand, he landed a massive book deal, made millions on the speaking circuit, wagged his finger at his former boss through social media to his million followers, and spent some quality time with family. He never once had to worry about state-sanctioned violence. Comey, a man powerful enough to oversee a cooked-up investigation into a presidential candidate, merely lost a job.

Like Comey, all the alleged victims on Wittes’s ludicrous list served at the pleasure of the president and could be fired by Donald Trump for almost any reason he desired, just as they could have been fired by Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter or FDR. Many of the people on the list, in fact, have been investigated by the inspector general, who found that they acted either incompetently or potentially illegally.

Government bureaucrats aren’t endowed with a God-given right to work in the executive branch of the United States government. Most of these “victims” will find lucrative work elsewhere. None, I confidently say, are going to be thrown into camps. If you don’t like who Trump fires, or how he fires them, you can always vote for another candidate. (h/t FAILexa for FAILosi)

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