10/27 Links Pt2: Marking 4 years since Tree of Life massacre, Biden rues ‘ugly rise’ of antisemitism; Melanie Phillips: The unholy alliance between Republicans and Islamists; BigLaw’s Jewish Problem

From Ian:

Marking 4 years since Tree of Life massacre, Biden rues ‘ugly rise’ of antisemitism

US President Joe Biden led memorial messages and vows to combat antisemitism on Thursday, marking four years since a gunman shot dead eleven Jewish worshipers and injured seven others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“A quiet Shabbat morning was shattered by gunfire and hate, and a place of sanctuary became a place of carnage,” Biden said in a statement.

“As we grieve this deadliest act of antisemitism in American history, we stand with the community of Squirrel Hill — and Jewish communities across America and around the world — in resolving to combat antisemitism and hate in all of its forms,” he said.

“This is especially true as we witness an ugly increase in antisemitism in America.”

Listing action the administration has taken to confront antisemitism, Biden noted the appointment of Holocaust expert Deborah Lipstadt as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, an ambassador-level role.

He also cited the largest-ever increase in funding for security for synagogues and other religious institutes, and other actions announced last month at the United We Stand Summit.

“The rabbis teach that ‘what comes from the heart, enters the heart,'” Biden said, citing the eleventh Century Rabbi Moses ibn Ezra.

“On this difficult day, our hearts are with the families of the victims, the survivors, and all those impacted by the Tree of Life shooting. May their memories be a blessing, and may we continue to bridge the gap between the world we see and the future we seek.”

US Antisemitism Envoy: France ‘Ground Zero’ for European Antisemitism

France has become the epicenter of 21st century antisemitism in Europe — a phenomena which is now beginning to replicate in other countries around the world, the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism has warned.

“I think that in many ways France has proven to be ‘Ground Zero’ for European antisemitism, in part because of the large Muslim population,” the envoy, Deborah Lipstadt, told a panel hosted by the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) and the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in Paris on Monday. “If we’d been having this conversation 15 years ago, I would have said France is a unique situation – sadly, it’s not unique anymore.”

In her remarks, which follow a week-long trip to Belgium and France to meet with EU officials on combating antisemitism, Lipstadt cited some of the deadly antisemitic and terrorist attacks that have plagued France over the last twenty years, among them the 2006 kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi, a young cellphone salesman, by an antisemitic gang known as “The Barbarians”, as well as the 2012 and 2015 respective gun attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and a kosher supermarket in Paris.

Other incidents included the 2017 murder of Sarah Halimi, a Jewish woman who was beaten and thrown to her death from the third-floor window of her Paris apartment by her neighbor, Kobili Traore, during a frenzied antisemitic assault. French Jews were outraged in April 2021 when the country’s highest court upheld an earlier decision that Traore could not be held criminally responsible for Halimi’s death because his intake of marijuana on the night of the killing had rendered him temporarily insane.

Lipstadt warned the evolution of antisemitism which once limited to France had now spread to other countries, including the United States. “I think that in many respects, France emulates what we’ve seen in other places, because it’s not just Islamist extremist antisemitism, it’s also from the right and from the left,” she said.

Lipstadt also noted that the convergence of antisemitic criticism of Israel from the fringes of both right and left wing ideologies is occuring not only in France, but in the US and UK as well.

Statement from Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt on Recent Antisemitism pic.twitter.com/UBdbJdtGLx

— Special Envoy Deborah Lipstadt (@StateSEAS) October 26, 2022

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10/14 Links Pt2: Phillips: Hysteria greets British PM's embassy move proposal; Amnesty UK refuses to sack official who likened Israel’s Gaza policies to the Shoah

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Hysteria greets British PM's embassy move proposal

Few expect that the British embassy will actually be moved. Indeed, given the chaos that has engulfed Truss since she became prime minister, with the financial crisis and collapse in electoral support sparked by her scorched-earth economic policies currently threatening to bring her down before she has her feet properly under the Downing Street table, moving the embassy would hardly seem to be a priority.

If it were to happen, however, it would not only be an enormous boost to Israel. It would also represent a dramatic change in British policy.

Unlike the US, where despite various presidents' relative coolness towards Israel the Christian heartlands remain solidly supportive, Britain's attitude towards the Jewish state has always been at best ambiguous and at worst – as in Mandatory Palestine – actively hostile.

Moving the embassy would not only start to reset Britain's shameful attitude towards Israel. It would also advance the cause of peace.

The only reason this century-old conflict continues is that the Palestinian Arabs have repudiated the two-state solution. They have refused repeated offers of a state of their own, because their goal is not a Palestinian state but the eradication of the Israeli one.

Towards this infernal goal, their principal weapon has been the refusal by Britain and other western countries to recognize the Palestinians' real agenda, providing them instead with funding, training and diplomatic recognition.

In other words, Britain and the rest of the west have incentivized, rewarded and perpetuated the war against Israel by going along with the morally bankrupt proposition that the Palestinian Arabs are entitled to a state of their own, even though their actual purpose is to use that state as a means to destroy Israel.

By moving the embassy, Truss – who describes herself as a "huge Zionist" – would be signaling an end to the shameful British capitulation to the Palestinians' lies and blackmail.

That is precisely why there's been such a reaction. While the average British citizen doesn't have an opinion about Israel one way or the other, Britain's elites loathe Israel on a scale that just doesn't exist in America.

The proposal to move the British embassy has lifted a stone, and we can all see what has crawled out from underneath.

Amnesty UK refuses to sack official who likened Israel’s Gaza policies to the Shoah

Amnesty International UK is defying calls to sack a senior official who shared a post comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and likened the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.

Garry Ettle, who represents the human rights charity as “country coordinator for Israel and Occupied Palestinian territories”, retweeted a message asking how video footage showing Israeli youths shouting at a Palestinian woman was “any different from Nazi Germany”.

The activist called Israel’s policies towards Gaza a “slow holocaust” in a Facebook message posted on 27 January 2020.

He also condemned US band Black Eyed Peas for playing a gig in “apartheid Israel” in another social media post last year.

Mr Ettle’s hardline views, which were revealed by online investigations group GnasherJew, have led to calls for Amnesty International UK to sack him.

Tory peer Lord Leigh of Hurley, an executive board member of the Conservative Friends of Israel, told the JC he thought Mr Ettle should be dismissed, adding: “Amnesty International UK has a very worrying record and this is the moment for decisive action to be taken by them.”

And a spokesperson for advocacy group Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “Only at Amnesty and like-minded organisations could someone who allegedly compares Israel to Nazis describe himself as a ‘human-rights activist’.

“Such comparisons are a breach of the universally accepted International Definition of Antisemitism. We would call on Amnesty to investigate and dissociate itself from this individual, but the organisation’s record on antisemitism gives little reason to think that it holds the views of the Jewish community in anything but contempt.”

Both the left and the right have turned on the Jews

Conservatives claim to abhor anti-Semitism, and yet foolishly believe they can ride the coattails of non-conservative loose cannons like Kanye West and greedily feed off the cultural scraps that fall to the ground; all while trampling on the supposed principles that were their “hills to die on” in their battles with the opposing side.

Kanye West, who in a matter of days argued that Jared Kushner sought peace in the Middle East to make money, repeatedly promoted the radical Black Hebrew Israelite conspiracy theory that American blacks are the “real Jews,” implied that Jews created cancel culture and announced that he would be going “death con 3” on “Jewish people,” has shown no signs of apologizing.

And yet, days later, conservatives celebrated Kanye West—an open and unapologetic anti-Semite—on the red carpet, labeling his very presence iconic.

A line has been crossed.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke with Jeremy Corbyn and said veiled anti-Semitic things in the past, and conservative media—myself included—never let it go. And quite rightly so.

Kanye West, who has far more cultural influence than Ocasio-Cortez, pushed multiple explicit anti-Semitic tropes, and what was the result?

Many high-profile conservatives shrugged and moved on that same day. Some didn’t even shrug at all.

Now, many have responded to my vocal criticism of this appalling conduct with “whataboutism,” declaring that the leftist media ignores anti-Semitism all the time.

Yes, they do. So what?

I was under the impression that we were meant to be the principled ones. If that is true, where on earth are our principles?

I do understand the attitude of wanting to bring culturally-powerful people into our tent based on their supposedly aligned views on single-issue topics. (Let’s leave aside for now the fact that Kanye West’s “pro-life” views are based on an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.) However, if there are no entry requirements to the ideological tent, if admission numbers are the only metric of value, what does that tent even represent?

Until our movement is willing to look in the mirror and stick to their supposed principles, the Jewish people cast out from this tent will wonder whether any of this is worth fighting for.

Yet again, Jews are alone.

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10/09 Links: Amb. Dore Gold: Why a Two-State Solution Won’t Work; IDF soldier dies of wounds following Jerusalem attack; Annexation and International Law

From Ian:

Amb. Dore Gold: Why a Two-State Solution Won’t Work

There is a school of thought among historians that each of the Arab states, back then, had its own particularistic aims for attacking Israel: Damascus was looking to establish a Greater Syria in the Levant, Amman hoped to reinforce its hold on the holy sites of Jerusalem after the Hashemites lost the holy sites of Islam that they once held in the Hijaz, and Cairo was looking to connect itself with the Mashreq – that portion of the Middle East that was located in West Asia – and by doing so avert becoming isolated in North Africa.

If the considerations of the Palestinian Arabs were paramount for the Arab world, then why wasn’t a Palestinian state established in Judea and Samaria during those years, when the Arab world had the chance because it already held those areas?

True, the Palestinian Arabs tried briefly to set up a mini-state in the Gaza Strip, known as the All-Palestine Government, but it never acquired wider backing through international recognition.

Its association with the Jerusalem mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader most visibly connected with Nazi Germany during the war, undermined the chances of the All-Palestine Government succeeding. Gaza remained an area under Egyptian military occupation until the Six-Day War.

Today, Israel needs to design an approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that keeps in mind the true dimensions of the wider conflict. The Arab-Israel conflict has resembled an accordion that can expand or contract according to international circumstances. In 1967, there was an Iraqi expeditionary force that sought to cross into Israel by cutting through Jordan. The conflict had grown.

By 2022, Iraq was no longer the same strategic factor. And it was Iran that was recruiting Shi’ite militias from all over the Middle East and sending them mostly to Syria.

Today there is a risk that if the two-state solution becomes popularized again, without justification, then Israel will come under rising international pressures to adhere to its terms, even if they do not apply. It risks stripping Israel of its right to secure boundaries which is an integral part of Resolution 242.

What recent events have demonstrated is that a very different Middle East has arisen. Diplomacy remains vital in this new period, but it will only yield results if it addresses the vital interests of the parties which engage in it. That is the lesson of the Abraham Accords, which produced four normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states.

But right now, the two-state solution is just a nice-sounding mantra that will lead diplomats off course. This should be the message of the State of Israel the next time an Israeli prime minister addresses the UN General Assembly.

The silence that screams

Sunday, Oct. 9, 2022 is the 40th anniversary of the 1982 Palestinian terror attack on the Great Synagogue of Rome, in which a two-year-old child, Stefano Tache, was killed and 37 others wounded. Stefano’s brother Gadiel, also wounded in the attack, has just published his memoir, The Shouting Silence, in which he deals with the Italian government’s complicity with the terrorists.

The whole of Italy must thank Gadiel for his strength and determination, and for telling the story of his suffering and that of his whole family, especially his courageous mother Daniela and his father Joseph. His story is a personal one of universal value. It teaches us that victims of terrorism face an emotional tsunami from which they can never completely recover. Their psychological and physical pain is unacknowledged and still far from being fully understood, defined and addressed.

In recent months, Israel has faced a wave of terror attacks and attempted attacks. Only the victims know the trauma they must endure, the family heartache, the legacy of physical wounds. During the second intifada, I saw the streets of Jerusalem literally covered in the blood of over 1,000 dead. Yet the aggressors were absolved and even exalted as princes of the world’s oppressed. The victims, however, were erased, and Israel and Jews libeled as oppressors.

Gadiel Tache’s account of his personal experience and the horrific political scandal that allowed the attack sheds light on the true nature of anti-Semitic terrorism and the suffering it causes. In his book, Gadiel makes it clear that anti-Semitic terrorism is simply the latest historical iteration of genocidal anti-Semitic violence, which culminated in the Holocaust. Anti-Semitic terror today uses political viciousness, media defamation, campus and social media hate and outright physical attacks on Jews around the world.

This terror is at its worst in Israel, where anyone, anywhere can fall prey to shooting, knife and car-ramming attacks. There is no family that does not have a relative or friend who has been a victim of terror. But there is also no place in the world that has not known anti-Semitic terrorism, from the 1972 Munich Olympics to Paris, Madrid, London, Toulouse, the Netherlands, New York and many American cities, as well as Mumbai, Kenya and, of course, Rome.

Melanie Phillips: Welcome, Sir Tom. It's been too long My 2020 review of "Leopoldstadt"

The analogy with today could hardly be more obvious. Diaspora Jews will always view their position and prestige in society as proof not only that they have assimilated into the host culture but that the host culture has assimilated them. And on that latter point, they will always be wrong.

Those who think that, with Jeremy Corbyn on his way out, Britain’s antisemitism crisis has passed, have their heads stuck firmly in the sand— even if the “moderate” Keir Starmer becomes Labour leader.

The crisis is far broader and deeper. For some of us, Jew-hatred made Britain unbearable years before Corbyn became party leader. We concluded we’d been living in a fools’ paradise, that after Auschwitz there had been merely a 50-year moratorium on antisemitism which had now ended.

Under the fig-leaf of anti-Zionism and Israel-bashing, it was clear that Jews would only be accepted as fully British on condition that they didn’t identify as a people, and certainly not with Israel’s fate.

For some British Jews, therefore, anything that dwells upon the myopia of that doomed pre-war Jewish community may exacerbate the disquiet they already feel.

It’s important, though, for British people to be made more aware not just of the liquidation of the Jews of Europe but also the nature of the culture that was thus destroyed. Many in the wider society have no idea about the significance to Jews of brit milah, for example, or the Passover seder.

Maybe Stoppard himself now wonders how different his life would have been had he been brought up inside Jewish family life.

Except that the specific culture to which he is drawn here is one that no longer exists.

Among Jews who feel the pull of their Jewish identity after years of having ignored or suppressed it, it’s not uncommon for them to identify not with Jewish religious rites and practices, nor with the State of Israel, but with a Jewish culture that is no more.

Sometimes this is a disreputable impulse, identifying with those murdered in the Shoah in order to cloak themselves falsely in reflected victimhood and moral impunity.

For others, though, it’s a Jewish epiphany no less genuine for being so tenuous.

Often, such stirrings of identity occur through discovering the fate of family members who were murdered. Recreating their culture in literary form creates a line of continuity with a people to which no other link is desired.

Indeed, what other link can there be? Often implacably agnostic or atheist, viewing the world through the Christian or secular prism of the society in which they were raised and educated, and indifferent or even hostile to Zionism and Israel, the only way such people can realistically connect to their Jewishness is through the ghosts of their family’s past.

With Leopldstatdt, Stoppard is saying “hineini” — here I am, Jewish people, I am one of you and I am declaring it to the world. Welcome, Sir Tom; it’s been too long.

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melanie Phillips: Democracy’s watchdog has abandoned its role

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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09/23 Links Pt1: Phillips: The real reason for the war against Israel and the west; Glick: Israel’s choice: independence or appeasement; Why does the EU support terror-linked NGOs?

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The real reason for the war against Israel and the west

The core reason, however, why the West has gone through the looking-glass over all this is its total incomprehension of anti-Semitism.

No other prejudice shares the characteristics of anti-Semitism: its driving belief that the Jews control the world; that they are leaders of a conspiracy to harm others to serve their own interests; that they are a supernaturally demonic power.

Ultimately, anti-Semitism is a form of lunacy that defies explanation. But the West cannot grasp this, because it believes everything has a rational cause.

So, it seeks to explain anti-Semitism as just another form of racism, the result of jealousy towards the Jews’ astonishing achievements or something the Jews bring upon themselves by being clannish, keeping themselves separate, looking down on everyone else and other supposed offenses.

Similarly, the West tries to explain the Nazi Holocaust not as the result of psychotic anti-Semitism, but rather of Germany’s humiliation and bankruptcy after World War I. It holds that the Palestinians are driven to behave as they do by dispossession and despair. The fact that the Islamist war against the West is fundamentally driven by a religious war against the Jews is simply unknown.

Israel has never accurately presented the war against itself as an Islamic jihad. When asked, some Israelis have said this is because holy war is a supremely fearsome thing. With Israel’s nine million citizens potentially pitched against the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims, the Jewish state prefers to cast the conflict as a nationalistic struggle it can deal with by fighting the fires that break out day-by-day, week-by-week.

The result is that Israel has done a disservice to itself and to the world. It has failed to explain the murderous reach of anti-Semitism. It has allowed the West to undermine its own defenses against a holy war it doesn’t understand. It has enabled a false narrative about the Palestinians to spread without fundamental and essential challenge.

And now an Israeli prime minister has compounded the error.

Caroline Glick: Israel’s choice: independence or appeasement

Caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his supporters in the media went berserk Tuesday after Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu spoke out against the gas deal the Biden administration is mediating between Israel and Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon.

Since Hezbollah launched two drones against Israel’s Karish gas platform in July, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly threatened to blow up Karish if Israel brings Karish online without first surrendering to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon large swathes of sovereign Israeli land underneath Israel’s recognized maritime economic zone, including the Qana gas field.

Rather than stand with Israel against Hezbollah, the Biden administration is siding with Hezbollah—Iran’s Lebanese foreign legion against Israel. U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein has pressed Israel to surrender to most of Hezbollah’s outrageous demands. And Israel has folded to the combined U.S.-Hezbollah extortion. Lapid has agreed to give “Lebanon” the Qana field. Together with his partner in strategic collapse Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Lapid insists that with the Qana field, “Lebanon” will be economically saved and once that happens, the Hezbollah-controlled country will magically free itself from Hezbollah’s grip and sign a peace deal with Israel.

Netanyahu’s statement popped their balloon. Summarizing the negotiations to date, Netanyahu warned, “Lapid has entirely collapsed to Nasrallah’s threats. Nasrallah threatened him that if we operate the Karish platform before we sign a gas deal with Lebanon, he’ll attack Israel. Lapid got scared and didn’t bring Karish online.

“Now he plans to turn over to Lebanon, with no Israel control or oversight, a gas field valued at billions of dollars that Hezbollah will use to purchase thousands of missiles and rockets that will target Israel’s cities.”

Netanyahu was right, of course, and that is the problem for Lapid and Gantz. For months the media have hidden the dangers implicit in the deal, and sufficed with parroting government talking points. Lapid intended to avoid public scrutiny, ram the deal through before the Nov. 1 elections and declare himself a genius statesman. When Netanyahu exposed the bluff, Lapid threw a tantrum, accusing Netanyahu of harming Israel’s national interests by interfering with the talks.

Mariam Memarsadeghi: The Gender Apartheid State of Iran

When President Barack Obama promoted the original Iran deal, his pitch was that the normalization of ties with the Islamic Republic would improve the welfare and freedoms of ordinary Iranians. The exact opposite happened. Even with injections of billions in cash into the regime’s coffers, the people grew poorer and the state more repressive. The so-called “moderate” former President Hassan Rouhani presided over the killing of over 1,500 protesters. That President Joe Biden wants to obtain a watered-down version of that deal with Raisi in Rouhani’s office, and with the supreme leader still in power, shows the moral vacuity of a foreign policy that aligns itself with the most repressive tyrants on the planet, even as they murder women, gay people, political liberals, journalists, and anyone else who dares to assert the most basic claims to their own humanity.

Biden has been willing to stick Americans with extortionate gas prices in order to fight for Ukraine and trash our alliance with India by sticking up for “human rights” in the subcontinent. But when it comes to Iran, the president of the United States and leading officials in his administration have been eager to abandon young Iranians, women especially, who have been fighting courageously for freedom since 2009. The greatest asset America has for a peaceful Middle East is the Iranian people, and yet the Obama-Biden playbook is predicated on their permanent oppression under the heel of a brutal regime of America-hating, Holocaust-denying, theocratic misogynists who beat women to death for exposing their hair.

There is no telling whether this time the Iranian people will finally win. What is certain is that the Handmaid’s Tale regime that hates women and hates America is still being courted by the Biden administration, which is a failure not just of our morality but of our national interest. When you look at the photographs of beautiful young Mahsa Amini tortured to death, and when you watch videos of the same thugs who killed her attempting to beat her young compatriots for protesting for her life, remember that these are the thugs the United States is attempting to equip with more power, more cash, and more prestige, at the expense of people who desperately want to be free of their tyranny.

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02/01 Links Pt1: The Palestinians: Who Really Cares?; Melanie Phillips: Ireland’s obsessional hatred of Israel; Booker Flip Flops on BDS; Saudi columnist mocks boycott of Israel

From Ian:

---

The Palestinians: Who Really Cares?

Protests by the Palestinians in Lebanon are unlikely to draw any attention from the international community, including so-called pro-Palestinian groups that are active especially on university campuses in the US and Canada, among other places.

The real "pro-Palestinian" groups are those who are willing to raise their voices against the mistreatment of Palestinians at the hands of their Arab brothers. The real "pro-Palestinian" groups are those who are prepared to defend the rights of women and gays living under Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The real "pro-Palestinian" groups are those that are prepared to advocate for democracy and free speech for Palestinians living under the repressive regimes of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The real "pro-Palestinian" groups are those who are prepared to condemn Lebanon for its racist and discriminatory measures against Palestinians, living and dead.

Hiding at a university campus and spewing hatred against Israel does not make one "pro-Palestinian." Rather, it makes one just an Israel-hater. Will the "pro-Palestinian" groups listen to the urgent messages coming from the people in Lebanon they claim to represent?

David Singer: Trump Should Reaffirm Core Bush-Congress Commitments to Israel

The upcoming Israeli elections will give Israelis the chance to vote on the future direction Israel’s new government should take in resolving the future of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza (“disputed territories”) – the last remaining 5 per cent of the territory of the Mandate for Palestine where sovereignty still remains unallocated between Arabs and Jews.

The choices offered to Israeli voters should be explicitly spelt out by the political parties contesting the elections. The newly-elected government’s stated policy should be implemented. This basic premise of democracy has been undermined in America as Trump’s election commitment to build his promised border wall remains unfulfilled because of Congress’s opposition.

Trump should not similarly attempt to thwart the mandate of Israel’s next government.

Trump should shelve his long-overdue ultimate deal indefinitely – due to the changed circumstances that have demonstrably arisen since his well-intentioned thought bubble in November 2016.

Instead – Trump should:

• Pledge his Government’s full support for Israel’s next duly elected Government
• Reaffirm the core commitments made by President Bush to Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Bush’s letter dated 14 April 2004 – endorsed overwhelmingly by the Congress by 502 votes to 12 (“Bush/Congress Commitments”).

Those core American commitments – made to procure Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza – included:

• Opposing any peace plan other than the 2003 Bush Roadmap
• Being strongly committed to Israel’s security and well-being as a Jewish state.
• Not supporting any right of return by Palestinian refugees to Israel
• Regarding as unrealistic a full and complete withdrawal from the disputed territories.

Congress could endorse this Trump initiative – reinforcing continuing bipartisan support for Israel.
Peace will remain elusive – but Trump will have saved himself from drowning in a cesspool that has swallowed previous American presidents who believed they had the answer to ending this unresolved 100 years old conflict.

Dr. Martin Sherman: Benny Morris, an unlikely proponent of Arab emigration?

As readers will recall, I have, for years, been urging the initiation of a largescale initiative for the incentivized emigration of the Arab population in Judea-Samaria and Gaza, as the only viable policy option that can facilitate (albeit not ensure) the continued survival of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people—as it is, demonstrably, the only policy option that allows Israel to adequately contend with the geographic and demographic imperatives required for such survival.

This week, I encountered strident—albeit somewhat doleful, and certainly unintended—support for my thesis from a rather unexpected source—the well-known historian, Benny Morris.

Morris: Coming full circle?

Once a member of the so-called New Historians, a radical, left-wing group of academics, who challenged the traditional Zionist view of the inception of Israel—particularly the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Arabs due to the fighting during the 1948 War of Independence—Morris has come to adopt a far more understanding view of the alternatives facing the then-nascent Jewish state—and its resultant actions.

Indeed, in many respects Morris has come “full circle”—at least in terms of prevailing public perceptions of his political positions. Once denounced as an anti-Zionist, considered too radical for employment in the Israeli academe, and who was imprisoned, rather than serve as an army reservist in the “occupied territories”, he now not only defends, but endorses, the coercive displacement of Arabs—indeed, even lamenting that it was not sufficiently implemented.

In this regard, he has chided Ben Gurion for being overly reticent: In a 2004 interview with Haaretz’s Ari Shavit, he declared provocatively: "If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job…my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all.”

Morris speculates: “If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion --the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full expulsion - rather than a partial one - he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations."

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04/01 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Bewildered Britain still doesn’t get it; Zionist 'joins' radical leftist tour

From Ian:

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Melanie Phillips: Bewildered Britain still doesn’t get it

The British still don’t understand, though, that the UK and Europe have long funded and connived at not just Palestinian terrorism, but the incitement that causes it.
They don’t understand that this incitement is based on anti-Semitism, not a dispute over land boundaries.
They don’t understand that anti-Semitism is the signature motif of a deranged culture that should be treated as a pariah rather than excused, sanitized and rewarded, as Britain does with the Palestinians.
They don’t understand that the anti-Semitic derangement that drives the Palestinians also drives the Muslim war against the West.
They don’t understand that by indulging the lies, intimidation and moral inversion of Palestinian Jew-hatred, Britain and Europe have made it impossible to fight off the Islamist threat to themselves.
They will only start to defend themselves properly when they start treating Israel as their indispensable ally rather than a cosmic foe.

David Collier: Jews and Hamas propaganda at Birkbeck

The event started and the ‘Palestine Remix’ product itself is impressive. The technology behind the website allows for the user to engage with documentary evidence, search videos using text references and then take the chosen excerpts to share on social media, download or to ‘remix’ into a bespoke documentary. All available in several languages. ‘Heady stuff’.
And they want to push this as an education tool in our schools and in our universities. Coming just a day after I attended a dire Zionist event, this highlights the gulf between the tired, lifeless, self-indulgent Zionist leadership in the UK and the fresh, innovative and spirited defence emerging from the Palestinian side. And a useful tool it would be too if it were not total propaganda. Al-Jazeera has delivered an instrument of total historical revisionism. The timeline of 1948 does not include a single violent Arab action. This, the underlying distortion in the Arab narrative that turns a bloody civil war and a battle for survival into a one sided and brutal rout.
There is even a documentary about Moroccan Jews who describe Zionist actions that ‘conned’ them into fleeing Morocco. As hundreds of thousands of Jewish Arab refugees were created through persecution and expulsion, this website passes it off as a self created ‘Zionist plot’.
Rawan Al-Damen relies on the exception/rule strategy that fuels the entire Palestinian propaganda machine. They take the rule (Arab violence and rejectionism) and make it look like an exception whilst taking the exception (Israeli extremist action) and make it look like the rule. This way, they get to turn the entire story on its head and the victim becomes the aggressor. This piece of software should get nowhere near children or students, it is a brain washing machine.

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