Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Nathan Thrall

Showing posts with label Nathan Thrall. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

A Palestinian kid killed in a traffic accident with another Arab driver? Nathan Thrall blames Israel!

Israeli medics at the scene of a fatal Palestinian car crash in 2017

Heading Toward a Second Nakba
David Shulman
Nathan Thrall argues that the accident in which Abed Salama’s son died was a predictable, even inevitable, outcome of the Israeli occupation in its quotidian forms.

On a stormy winter day in February 2012, a Palestinian bus carrying schoolchildren on an outing collided with an Israeli trailer truck on the notoriously dangerous Jaba‘ Road near the West Bank village of A-Ram, not far from Ramallah. The bus burst into flames; six young children and one teacher were killed and others were seriously injured. Among the dead was Milad, the five-year-old son of Abed Salama, from the town of Anata. Nathan Thrall has made the story of that accident and that family the thread that binds together A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, a penetrating, wide-ranging, heart-wrenching exploration of life in Palestine under Israeli occupation. I know of no other writing on Israel and Palestine that reaches this depth of perception and understanding.

There is indeed something emblematic about the accident. The Jaba‘ Road is entirely within Area C, the 62 percent of the occupied West Bank that is under full Israeli control, where today there are close to two hundred settlements and settler outposts. Because of the nightmarish maze of roads in the Ramallah area—some of them closed altogether to Palestinians, others blocked by army checkpoints to keep Palestinians without special permits from entering Israel—rescuers were slow in reaching the site of the accident. They were also slow in evacuating the injured, many of them badly burned, to hospitals in Ramallah or inside Israel. Fire trucks, army medics, and ambulances were only a mile or two away in nearby Jewish settlements but failed to arrive quickly. Israeli ambulances coming from Jerusalem were held up for critical minutes at the checkpoints. Moreover, Palestinian neighborhoods in the vicinity of the Separation Barrier had (and some still have) almost no emergency or police services. As one of the Palestinian rescuers at the site of the accident later formulated what had happened: “If it had been two Palestinian children throwing stones on the road, the army would have been there in no time. When Jews are in danger, Israel sends helicopters. But a burning bus full of Palestinian children….”

...No one wanted to kill those children along with one of their teachers. Israeli rescuers and soldiers who finally reached the accident site did their best to save the injured. But the central point of Thrall’s narrative is that this disaster, like today’s ongoing violence in the Palestinian territories in general, was a predictable, even inevitable, outcome of the occupation system in its quotidian forms. It is a regime of state terror whose raison d’être is the theft of Palestinian land and, whenever possible, the expulsion of its Palestinian owners. I have seen this system in operation over the course of the past twenty-odd years.

I did not read the book, and probably won't. But this review already shows the incredible bias and the desire by Thrall to bend any evidence towards his foregone conclusion.

First of all, the driver of the Israeli truck was an Arab.

An average of two to three Palestinian Arabs are killed every week in road accidents. In 2022, there were 144 fatalities in over 16,000 accidents.

Palestinians acknowledge the epidemic of car accidents, and when they are not speaking to Westerners they blame themselves, not Israel, for these deaths. Ten reasons for Palestinian car crashes are listed in this article:

1- Narrow roads

2- Drivers who ignore traffic laws and basic safety, tailgating, passing vehicles on the opposite side of the road.

3- Not maintaining their cars.

4- Using a mobile phone while driving .

5- Low traffic awareness .

6- Young people and teenagers driving vehicles .

7- Drivers showing off.

8- Buildings being built right up to the roads.

9- Drug users who park their cars on the roads away from home.

10- Vehicles from Israel, often that would not pass Israeli inspections, being sold or stolen and used.

Even in Israel, the majority of car accidents involve young Arab drivers.

But what about the supposed delay of help for Milad and the other children? Wasn't that Israel's fault?

It doesn't seem to be true. News reports from the time say:

Following the accident, Palestinian health minister Fathi Abu Mughli accused Israeli rescue services of failing to provide timely assistance, resulting in more casualties. Ma’ariv reported that eyewitness report contradict Abu Mughli’s claim.

Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams transferred at least 30 casualties to hospitals in Ramallah, Petah Tikva and Jerusalem, Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. Israel Radio reported that it took rescue forces seven minutes to reach the scene of the accident.

Thrall believed the Palestinian health ministry, which has a track record of lying, over the Israeli authorities. Which tells you all you need to know about his interest in the facts.

In other accidents involving Arabs in Area C, Israeli and "settler" ambulances rush to the scene to help, indicating who is telling the truth..

Earlier this year a 12-year old Palestinian Arab boy in the West Bank was internally decapitated when he was hit by an Arab car, and doctors in Israel performed an extremely rare and delicate surgery to save his life.

A similar horrific accident as Milad's from 2017 where there was a 3-way collision between an armored Israeli bus, a Palestinian minibus and a Palestinian car saw a swarm of Magen David Adom ambulances and an IDF doctor on the scene within minutes trying to save lives.

In 2017, in another fatal West Bank car accident, a nine month old Arab baby survived while his father was killed and his mother unconscious. The baby refused to drink from a bottle so the Israeli Jewish nurse volunteered to breastfeed him. She put out a call on Facebook asking for other volunteers and Jewish women from as far away as Haifa wanted to help.

The "Jewish supremacy" and "racism" that Thrall takes as a given is an anti-Israel paranoid fantasy. Jews, even "settlers," help Palestinian Arabs in trouble, all the time.

In other words, the very basis of Nathan Thrall's book is built on lies. And that is how anti-Israel writers like Thrall and the reviewer work: not only will they only look at selected evidence that supports their thesis - they will twist counter-evidence to pretend it is evidence.

This supposed microcosm of Israeli evil is anything but. The only malicious actors in this little drama are Nathan Thrall and David Shulman.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Amazing how "pro-Palestinian" voices are being silenced on campus

On Monday, Human Rights Watch's Omar Shakir - a BDS advocate who was hired by that organization not in spite of but because of his rabid hate for Israel - spoke at Yale University about Israel's "apartheid."

During the course of his speech, he predictably engaged in the usual anti-Israel lies, based on the slanderous idea that Israel's non-equal treatment of non-citizen Palestinians is meant to be a system of Jewish supremacy over Arabs.

But then, while actually speaking at Yale, Shakir said the most self-contradictory thing possible:

Shakir then transitioned into a discussion addressing the issue of the academic freedom and space to speak about Palestine on American campuses, with specific reference to Harvard Kennedy School’s fellowship offer, retraction and reoffer to leading human rights advocate Kenneth Roth.

“What happened to Ken has been happening to academics who are critical of Israel and speak out for Palestinian rights, and young academics and Palestinians are facing the worst,” Shakir said. “Things are changing [and] the conversation is changing and the arc of history is bending, [but] this is happening at the very same time that the situation on the ground is getting worse and worse everyday, so we live in this dichotomy”

If the Zionists have such a stranglehold over academic freedom, how did Shakir manage to speak at Yale?

OK, maybe it is only on some campuses - like Harvard - that the Zionist overlords ensure that the campus only allows pro-Israel, anti-Arab messages to get to the students.

Oops, nope:

Join us for this coming year’s Arab Conference at Harvard, to be hosted between March 3-5, 2023 at Harvard University.

Previously known as the Harvard Arab Weekend, the Arab Conference at Harvard (ACH) is the largest pan-Arab conference in North America, bringing together over 1300 students and professionals as well as a 20,000-strong livestream audience from across the U.S. and globally to learn from leaders in a diverse array of sectors.

Strange "silencing" of pro-Palestinian voices at Harvard.

But perhaps these events are not academic events - and professors are silenced on campus as to what they are allowed to teach; that anti-Israel academics are severely limited in their "criticism of Israel."

Nope again.

The very same Omar Shakir who is telling roomfuls of students that academics who are critical of Israel are being silenced and their careers jeopardized tweeted this the very same day:

Yes, an entire course at Bard College by a well-known anti-Israel professor dedicated to spreading a message of racist Jewish evil towards Palestinians.

That instructor, Nathan Thrall, is so silenced for his views that he wrote a huge anti-Israel article for the New York Times Magazine filled with anti-Israel and pro-BDS lies.

The idea that anti-Israel opinions are silenced is a clear falsehood. But in the milieu of the "progressive" Left, victimhood is the coin of the realm, so the Israel haters and modern antisemites have to claim that they are being oppressed while at the same time bullying and shouting down any Zionist voices on campus.

The entire anti-Israel movement is predicated on lies, and they know that no lie is too absurd to be believed if it is repeated and amplified enough.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Crisis Group podcast lies about Israel, settlements

This is based on a thread by Inquisitive Native:

It is sad but not surprising that @CrisisGroup chose to launch its new podcast with this unabashed BDS propaganda, falsehoods and very weak analysis by an "expert" who's main paradigm just collapsed colossally. Here are some nuggets so you don't need to listen to this stuff.

Let's start with the lies.

@NathanThrall unabashedly recycles one of the vilest and most extensively-refuted lie that Israel builds separate roads for Palestinians in the West Bank "so they're removed from the main roads for Israeli settlers" (14:30).

Dispelling the myth of ‘Jews-only roads’ in the West BankThe claim that religiously exclusive roads exist in the West Bank needs to be debunked, suggests Adam Levick.https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/yourview/arid-30856339.html

Israel indeed builds new roads in the 60% of the WB it fully controls according to Oslo (PA does it in the rest), which serve both populations. Should't Palestinians also enjoy new, safer highways? Should those be closed for Jews? There's no coherent moral stance to be found.

He later (29:10) claims that days after the UAE deal "they discussed" (who?) plans to increase settler population by 100,000s, including one to add 100,000 settlers in the Ramallah area alone. It proves the "rabid acceleration of de-facto annexation". Only none of it is true.

Where'd he get it? Maybe from a 27 Aug article on one road which mentions those numbers as either aspirations of settlers or speculations of anti-settlement activists. For him that's enough to claim they're government plans that are being discussed.

Maybe he meant the meeting on 12 Aug of the Civil Admin where 2 plans for roads were approved which, like the rest of them, will serve Jews and Arabs alike. Even if you consider Israel an "occupying power" in Area C, it has every right, and actually a duty to build roads there.

An honest analyst would tell his listeners that in fact there's been a de facto freeze in promoting housing units in settlements for over 6 months now, which is why settler leaders are angry. But that'd spoil the narrative which he lays out clearly:

Israel is "expanding eastwards and totally eliminating any possibility for a normal life for the indigenous people, restricting them into smaller and smaller enclaves" (20:55), so the only moral option is to boycott it. This was too much even for @Rob_Malley who cut him off.

If Thrall's description of current Israeli policies is true he should be able to prove that, say in the past decade:
1. land used by settlers expanded more than land used by Palestinians in Area C.
2. settler population in Area C or E. Jerusalem grew faster than Palestinian

He can't. If anything, available data points the other way. But Thrall won't let anything stop him from describing Israel as a colonial power (31:05) bent on placing Palestinian in reserves like native Americans. Yes, in those very words. Loved to see Malley's face there.

I can understand Thrall's frustration. He's been one of the main voices lobbying for massive external pressures on Israel, and must be hard to realise how wrong he was. Or as his former boss tells him fatherly, it's ok as a personal moral view but not a political strategy.

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NYT claims separation barrier meant to imprison Palestinians, and other lies in Nathan Thrall's love letter to BDS

Nathan Thrall has written a 11,000 word article in the New York Times magazine today that is essentially a huge rose bouquet to people who want to boycott the world's only Jewish state.

The article is filled with slanted and often wrong reporting.

Here's an example of an outright lie:

Last October, nearly a year after the University of Michigan’s divestment vote, there was an “apartheid-wall demonstration” co-sponsored by the campus Latinx group, La Casa. Pro-Palestinian students erected two cardboard walls, modeled after the 25-foot-high concrete slabs that intertwine with fences and barbed wire to encircle Palestinian communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Really? The fence is meant to encircle (i.e., imprison) Palestinians?

The only communities in the territories that are encircled by fences are the Jewish villages and towns who are trying to avoid their residents being murdered by Thrall's wonderful Palestinian muses.

Palestinians claim that the barrier "encircles" Bethlehem or parts of Jerusalem, but it isn't true.

Here's an example of the more popular of Thrall's methods of bias - to say something that the BDSers claim which isn't true and pretend that there is no counterargument:

The B.D.S. movement casts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a struggle against apartheid, as defined by the International Criminal Court: “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” (The United Nations defines racial discrimination as directed at “race, color, descent or national or ethnic origin.”) B.D.S. leaders often cite South Africa’s sixth prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, who likened Israel to South Africa in 1961: The Jews “took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel like South Africa is an apartheid state.”

But given that the definition of apartheid means domination of one racial group over another, and Israel doesn't discriminate against its Arab citizens, Israel cannot be an apartheid state. Every nation discriminates against non-citizens!

Thrall doesn't bother to point that out and the NYY editors didn't insist that he give another point of view that would demolish the argument.

Even more egregiously, Thrall uses the insane argument that BDSers like to use to support the idea that Israel loves white nationalist antisemites:

To bolster the argument that the Palestinian struggle is a fight against racism, B.D.S. leaders have highlighted the support for Jewish ethno-nationalism by far-right European politicians like President Viktor Orban of Hungary, alt-right figures like Steve Bannon and white supremacists like Richard Spencer, an organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. That year, Spencer told an Israeli television interviewer: “You could say that I am a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people. I want us to have a secure homeland that’s for us and ourselves, just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”

It is elementary logic that A liking B doesn't mean that B likes A. It is outrageous to quote the antisemite Richard Spencer's support for the idea of a Jewish state as evidence that Israel supports Richard Spencer.

Far-right websites love to quote BDS leaders - does that mean that BDS is far right? By Thrall's logic, sure. But for some reason this travesty of an argument is only used to damn Israel.

If one believes that connections like these prove how people think, then the fact that Thrall works for the International Crisis Group which is funded by Qatar - a major supporter of Hamas - means that, by Thrall's own logic, he is a Hamas supporter.

I could fisk the entire piece. One last example:

Ben-Youssef said most of the members of Congress and staff members she spoke to were aware of Israeli human rights violations against Palestinians under blockade and occupation but were largely uninformed about Israeli discrimination against Palestinian citizens. It was news to many that tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens live in villages that predate the creation of Israel and are unrecognized by the state, receiving little or no water and electricity.

Is the fact that Israel doesn't provide electricity to unrecognized Bedouin villages in the middle of the Negev evidence of apartheid? Israel has tried for decades to organize and improve the lives of Bedouin by building towns for them with schools and water and electricity. If Israel is against providing electricity to Arabs, why on earth would they spend tens of millions to build entire communities for them with full infrastructure instead of trying to criss-cross the Negev with pipes and wires to scores of tiny villages, almost all built illegally?

How many examples of lies and bias does one need to know that this article does not illuminate anything but is meant to obscure the truth about Israel?

The problem isn't Thrall, whose bias is obvious. The problem is that the New York Times publishes his "reporting" without informing their readers of his obvious bias, as well as without fact checking even the basics of what he wrote.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Gaza: One Man's Genocidal Riot Is Another Man's Peaceful Sit-In (Daled Amos)

We will take down the border (with Israel) and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies.
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, April 6, 2018, on Al Jazeera TV

The sit-in demonstration is set to culminate on May 15 — the day after Israeli independence
NBC News, April 5, 2018

Once again, whenever the conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Israel heats up, a second, parallel story develops as well: the media bias towards Israel.

Take The New York Times, for example.

On April 7, David Halbfinger reported Though Deadly, Gaza Protests Draw Attention and Enthusiasm. He informs us that:

Palestinians seem energized and enthusiastic about sustaining a generally nonviolent form of protest. [emphasis added]

Halbfinger has no problem writing that "Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza and seeks Israel’s destruction, has always advocated armed struggle" -- and then without skipping a beat Harbfinger claims that "so for Gazans, even a tentative experiment with nonviolent protest is a significant step."

It's not just any Islamic militant group seeking the destruction of its enemy that experiments with nonviolent protest.

The Financial Times has a similar problem using the "T" word.

The Financial Times quotes Ahmad Abu Artema, one of the organizers of the protest, who admits

Hamas was no interloper — he and his colleagues, mostly penniless, disorganised and inexperienced, invited the Islamist movement in, hoping for logistics, some media coverage and moral support

and then, like Harbfinger, the article tries to soften the implications of Hamas involvement, claiming that

Hamas ordered its civilian employees to join the march, shipped in food and water and set up tents. Like everything else in Gaza, the march belonged to Hamas, and threatened to trigger a new bout of confrontation between the militants and Israeli forces. [emphasis added]

The Financial Times will not come right out and report that these "civilian employees" are trained terrorists, nor will The New York Times. In fact, the word "terrorist" does not appear in either article.

Writing in The National Post, Vivian Bercovici, a former Canadian ambassador to Israel now living in Tel Aviv, writes about the discrepancy between the claim for peaceful protests and the reality:

Israel’s critics claim the IDF fired recklessly on a “peaceful protest,” massacring innocents. Thing is, peaceful protests do not encourage participants to overrun an international border, or use weapons, while threatening to conquer the country and murder its people. Thousands of Israeli civilians live within a few hundred metres of this fence, in agricultural settlements that have been undisputedly part of Israeli territory since 1948. Peaceful protests are not organized by terrorist organizations and led by terrorist leaders, some of whom show up with Molotov cocktails and other weapons.

If taking Hamas talking points about nonviolence is not jarring to The New York Times' readers, then chances are that neither is any of the other propaganda points that the article takes at face value.

For example, Harbfinger writes that Israel uses "disproportionate force to prevent what they believe could be a catastrophic breach in the Gaza fence." The phrase "disproportionate force" is a term used in international law, and in that usage goes beyond just one side causing more damage or taking more lives than the other one.

Harbfinger uses another term of international law out of its proper context when he writes about Gazans wanting to "protest Israel’s longstanding blockade of the impoverished territory and its two million residents" and that "the 11-year-old blockade by Israel and Egypt has driven it into crisis." [emphasis added]

In What The New York Times Isn’t Telling You About Israel’s Gaza ‘Blockade’, Ira Stoll describes the hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies -- medical, agricultural and building -- to Gaza, in addition to water and electricity. The fact that Israel controls its border with Gaza, Stoll notes, is something that nearly all countries do with their borders.

He concludes:

Accusing Israel of a “blockade” of Gaza when in fact Israel is allowing food, medicine, building supplies, electricity, and water into the territory is inaccurate. It gives Times readers a false impression of what is actually happening, uncritically echoing Palestinian propaganda. That’s not to say that the situation in Gaza is a picnic. But the blame for it lies with the Hamas terrorist organization, not with Israel or some “blockade” imagined by Times journalists.

Harbfinger appears particularly invested in the Palestinian Arab narrative. He quotes Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, who "likened attempts to cross Israel’s fence to American civil rights marchers’ attempts to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., more than 50 years ago"

Here are some pictures of that protest march across Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965:

Here are pictures from the Gazan "peace march":

Notice any difference?

Mr. Munayyer doesn't. Harbfinger goes on to quote him that

it’s very important in this moment for the international community to be supportive of the protesters. They’ve always said, ‘Abandon militancy, abandon violence.’

Actually, what "they" have said is to stop the terrorist attacks and the deliberate murder of civilians - a distinction apparently lost on both gentlemen.

Harbfinger also quotes Nathan Thrall, an analyst for International Crisis Group "who closely watches Gaza." He is more than that. Thrall is the author of the book "The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine." Last year, Thrall wrote a piece for The Guardian, entitled Israel-Palestine: the real reason there’s still no peace, an article described as "an adapted extract" from his book.

Thrall is a big fan of using force to achieve peace, especially applied to Israel, based on the premise that "Israel, for its part, has consistently opted for stalemate" -- as opposed to accepting the standard proposals that have been suggested for peace. Thrall advocates applying force on Israel, following the examples of Eisenhower, Ford, Carter and James Baker.

But to Thrall's dismay, US Administrations seem to have stopped applying that kind of pressure.

As a result, Palestinians have been unable to induce more from Israel than tactical concessions, steps meant to reduce friction between the populations in order not to end occupation but to mitigate it and restore its low cost.

Counted among those mere "tactical" concessions are apparently the establishment of Palestinian Arab control over Gaza and "the West Bank". This seems to be chump change to Thrall, who instead advocates "forcing Israel to make larger, conflict-ending concessions [that] would require making its fallback option so unappealing that it would view a peace agreement as an escape from something worse."

Harbfinger could not have picked anyone more enthusiastic to to add his two cents on the Gaza riots.

But with all of that, maybe things are changing.

Dexter Van Zile, Christian Media Analyst for CAMERA writes Don’t be fooled: Hamas is losing:

Hamas, a group that was previously able to terrorize Israelis with suicide bombings, kidnappings and rocket attacks, is now reduced to staging riots, setting truck tires on fire and getting its young leaders killed in hopeless confrontations with the IDF to generate sympathetic media coverage. News outlets assist Hamas in its PR war, but the fact is, Israelis are increasingly safe from Hamas attacks — and that’s the story that matters.

And perhaps we could finally be due for a change in that media coverage.

Writing about Downhill slide: Posturing over the ‘plight of Gaza’ has passed peak virtue-signaling, J.E. Dyer -- a retired US Navy intelligence officer -- notes:

It probably doesn’t feel this way to the people trying to explain why Israel has to defend herself, but over the past week, since Hamas’ border fence “protests” from Gaza cranked up, there has been a distinctly tinny, perfunctory sound to the adverse media coverage and political shouting.

...The difference between now and a few years ago is that there is mostly a flat, exhausted silence surrounding the rote paroxysms from the legacy media and the West’s radical partisans of Hamas. The public mind has moved on.

It has done so for good reason. The “Palestinian” narrative was always manufactured: a great disservice to the Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, because it was false and misleading, and never about constructing a future for them.

The narrative’s essentially worthless nature is thrown into stronger relief by the tectonic shifts of regional geopolitics. The Syrian civil war, with its growing Iranian menace and its recurring chemical weapon attacks, is only a few dozen miles away. Hamas bearing the brand of Iran, on the other side of Israel, is not a net positive for anyone but the radical mullahs of Qom.

Is the Middle East really changing?
And if so, how long will it take the public -- and the media -- to pick up on it?

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

.@NYTimes again trots out lies and fake statistics in anti-Israel op-ed by @NathanThrall

Nathan Thrall in the New York Times has an op-ed blaming Israel for every problem, as usual. Fact free sentences like this abound:

For American politicians, electoral and campaign finance incentives still dictate a baseline of unconditional support for Israel. The United States has given more than $120 billion to the country since the occupation began, spent tens of billions of dollars backing pro-Israel regimes ruling over anti-Israel populations in Egypt and Jordan, and provided billions more to the Palestinian Authority on condition that it continue preventing attacks and protests against Israeli settlements. And those expenditures do not reckon the cost to American security interests of Arab and Muslim resentment toward the United States for enabling and bankrolling the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

What exactly are the costs of those American security interests? What terror attacks have been directed at America because of the "oppression" of Palestinians that would not have happened if Israel withdrew from the territories? This is simple fiction.

And there has hardly been "unconditional support for Israel" from the US over the past five decades. The US has withheld money and arms from Israel several times over the past 50 years when Israel's policies upset the US administrations.

Or this:

Initially, the threat was of an attack by the Arab states. But that soon crumbled: Israel made a separate peace with the strongest one, Egypt; the Arabs proved incapable of defending even sovereign Lebanon from Israeli invasion; and in recent years, many Arab states have failed to uphold even their longstanding boycott of Israel.

Wasn't there a very costly war against Israel in 1973 where the Sinai Peninsula that was gained in 1967 gave Israel a buffer and precious time to defend itself?

And here:

The only real fallout from continued occupation are major increases in American financing of it, with Israel now receiving more military assistance from the United States than the rest of the world does combined.

This is an absolute lie, as I demonstrated in this post and this chart.

I know from speaking to people who have been involved that the New York Times subjects pro-Israel op-eds to excruciating fact checks before allowing them to be printed. But for anti-Israel op-eds, as we see here, anything goes.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

A bit of nonsense in a NYT op-ed

The New York Times' jihad to mainstream Hamas continues today, with an op-ed by Nathan Thrall called "Hurting Moderates, Helping Militants." Guess who the "moderates" are?

In Gaza, the number of Salafi jihadis — austere militants willing to kill those they don’t consider true Muslims — has grown significantly since 2006. Many of them are former Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters who see Hamas as caving to Israel while getting only blockades, closed border crossings and military incursions in return.

Five years of isolation have not dislodged Hamas, revived the peace process, strengthened Fatah or ensured Israel’s security. Most of the Gaza Strip’s imports now pass largely unimpeded through tunnels that are wide enough to carry cattle, cars, anti-tank missiles and foreign radicals.

Nor has isolating Hamas persuaded most Palestinians to embrace the alternative model in the West Bank, where undemocratic practices remain common, local leaders lack popular legitimacy, and tight security coordination with Israel is routinely denounced.

Instead, blockading Gaza and isolating Hamas have given rhetorical strength to militants who argue that the Islamist movement has erred by holding its fire against Israel and failing to impose Islamic law. As a result, Hamas is slowly losing members to more radical groups.

On Monday, Hamas self-defeatingly sought to bolster its flagging Islamist credentials by mourning the death of Osama bin Laden and praising him as an Arab holy warrior ...

Here's Thrall's bizarre train of thought: Hamas is losing members to more-extreme Salafist groups because it is viewed as not being radical enough by some.

So, according to Thrall, Israel must embrace Hamas, which would moderate its views to accommodate Israel's new friendship.

But according to his own words, this would make more radicals leave the group and strengthen the Salafists because they would look at Hamas as selling out!

On the one hand he is claiming that extreme radical Islamists are pushed there by the relative moderation of slightly less extreme radical Islamists. On the other hand he claims that by Israel embracing the slightly less extreme radical Islamists they will moderate and make peace with - which will again push their members towards extremism!

Thrall also fails to explain why (as he admits) even Islamic Jihad is losing members to the Salafist groups - when Islamic Jihad has not moderated one bit.

Not to mention his equally nonsensical assertion that the entire reason Hamas condemned Bin Laden's death was not because of its clear ideological affinity to Al Qaeda, but as a way to restore street cred among the Salafists.

This is, again, a willful blindness on the part of people who are so wed to the idea that peace with Hamas must be possible that logic and facts go out the window just to prove the unprovable. People to whom the "peace process" is a religion cannot lose their faith, so they must spin more and more crazy theories just to shore up their "flat Earth"-style beliefs.

Sorry. The earth is round, Obama was born in Hawaii, 9/11 wasn't an inside job and real peace between Israel and Islamic movements like Hamas is impossible. Hamas and other Islamist movements must be defeated, not embraced. While victory is difficult, as in any war, it is imperative.

Anyone who claims otherwise is simply ignoring reality and discarding facts for half-baked beliefs.

(h/t David G)