01/11 Links Pt2: Col Kemp: Jew-Hate at American Universities; Caroline Glick: The ‘woke’ West is assaulting Jews for embracing their heritage with Richard Landes

From Ian:

Col Kemp: Jew-Hate at American Universities

[The Amcha] report paints a stark picture of an increasing, intensifying and carefully coordinated campaign of attacks on Jewish identity at over 60% of the colleges and universities that are popular with Jews, including 2,000 incidents intended to harm Jewish students since 2015.

[T]hese activists demand an end to Zionism, which... means just one thing: an end to the democratic State of Israel. This itself is antisemitism in any book and is spelt out as such in the US State Department definition of antisemitism.

Despite expending so much energy against their fellow students, German Gentiles had plenty left for their Jewish professors. Unsatisfied with Nazi race regulations restricting Jewish faculty, students boycotted the classes of those who were exempt under the race laws and pressured university authorities to dismiss them. The result was that every Jewish professor who was still legally allowed to teach had resigned by 1935.

The Amcha report characterises the situation on US campuses today as a crisis for American Jews. It is much more than that. It is a crisis for us all that one section of our student body is bullied, abused, intimidated and cast down by their fellow students and often abandoned by their professors and faculty authorities.

It is high time for the federal government, under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to withdraw its funding from all universities that participate in bigotry such as that.

Jonathan Tobin: Ilhan Omar is the Democrats’ problem, not Kevin McCarthy’s

By standing with Omar, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have effectively normalized antisemitism. And McCarthy’s effort to punish her will again test whether they mean what they say when they speak of their opposition to hate.

As was the case with Greene and Gosar last year, it will take a vote by the majority of the House to remove Omar from her perch on the Foreign Relations Committee. Given the GOP’s narrow majority, the fate of Schiff (who repeatedly lied about the hoax he helped promote that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election) and Swalwell (who had an intimate relationship with a Chinese spy) will also be part of the same debate.

Democrats will also answer the list of Omar’s antisemitic statements and actions with their own brand of “whataboutism,” which will involve McCarthy’s recent embrace of Greene, who was an ally during his fight for the speaker’s chair. They’ll bring up other Republicans for censure, as well. One is Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who lied about just about everything during his campaign for election, including whether he was Jewish.

If every member of Congress or the executive branch had to be censured for lying, however, Washington would soon be emptied of politicians, including Biden, who takes second place to no one when it comes to being a serial fabulist. Moreover, there is an argument to be made that neither party should be engaging in this kind of tit-for-tat punishment.

If the voters think they deserve nothing better than to be represented by such scoundrels, perhaps it’s best if we leave it to them to decide at the ballot box who should sit in Congress or on committees. As the great cynic, journalist H.L. Mencken wrote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Nevertheless, if the Democrats are going to play this game, then McCarthy can hardly be blamed for answering in kind. And if House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) isn’t prepared to agree to remove Omar, then the speaker is justified in seeking to oust her.

At stake here is not the broader question of how much extremism or bad behavior Congress should be willing to tolerate in its members. Rather, it is specifically one that will force Democrats to decide what is more important to them.

Is it the fight against antisemitism at a time when Jew-hatred is on the rise throughout the globe? Or is their true allegiance to identity politics and the toxic intersectional myths that allow Omar to paint herself as an oppressed victim, rather than a hatemonger, simply because of the color of her skin?

Caroline Glick: The ‘woke’ West is assaulting Jews for embracing their heritage

As Israel is being pilloried at the U.N. Security Council by friend and foe alike for daring to allow Jews to visit the Temple Mount, professor Richard Landes joins Caroline Glick on this week’s episode of the “Caroline Glick Show” to discuss the contemporary roots of the demonization of Jews and the Jewish state.

Landes recently published “Can the Whole World Be Wrong: Lethal Journalism, Anti-Semitism and the Global Jihad,” the product of 22 years of work.

He began his study of the subject in the aftermath of the first modern blood libel, the alleged killing of Muhammed al-Dura, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, by IDF forces in Gaza on Sept. 30, 2000.

The false allegation that the boy was killed by IDF forces that day, and that they murdered him deliberately, formed the basis of a massive propaganda effort. Its product has been the legitimization of the mass murder of Jews in Israel and worldwide by Palestinians and other jihadists.

Landes argues that the West’s embrace of the al-Dura blood libel was the foundation not only of the antisemitism assaulting the Jewish people worldwide today, but also of the West’s inability to acknowledge, let alone defeat, the forces of global jihad, whether in the United States or Europe or in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and beyond.

Glick and Landes examine the current pathologies of the “woke” West—including the assault on Jews for embracing their heritage, by among other things, visiting the Temple Mount—through the prism of the al-Dura incident. Their conversation traverses space and time and ends with vital insights into what needs to happen for the West to survive the ravages of the Red-Green alliance which was born with the al-Dura blood libel.

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Alex Kane at Jewish Currents justifies terrorism

At the socialist site  Jewish Currents, writer Alex Kane provides us with an excellent example of anti-Israel agitprop - and even justification of terrorism -  disguised as a critical analysis of the definition of terrorism.

Like all good propaganda, the article starts off with a very reasonable point:

ON OCTOBER 9TH, a Palestinian shot and killed Noa Lazar, an Israeli soldier serving at a checkpoint near the Shuafat refugee camp. Three days later, a Palestinian gunman killed Ido Baruch, a soldier who was guarding Israeli settlers as they marched near the Palestinian town of Sebastia in the occupied West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid called the Shuafat attack a “severe terrorist attack,” and said the assailant behind Baruch’s shooting was a “despicable terrorist.” The Jerusalem Post, Israel HaYom and i24 News referred to the Shuafat shooting as a “terrorist” act. The centrist Anti-Defamation League as well as the liberal Zionist J Street also referred to the shootings as “terror” attacks.

This broad consensus across the Zionist political spectrum reflects a commonly-held view among many Israelis and Israel advocates that the killings of soldiers engaged in a military occupation are acts of “terror,” in the same category as indiscriminate attacks on civilians. But this view represents only one pole of a discursive struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, and, more broadly, Western countries and formerly-colonized nations, who have clashed in international fora like the United Nations (UN) over whether violence against agents of a military occupation ought to count as “terrorism.”

While different countries have codified their own definitions of terrorism in their national laws, “there is no international legal consensus on the meaning of terrorism,” said Ben Saul, Challis Chair of International Law at the University of Sydney and author of the book Defining Terrorism in International Law. According to Saul, there is general agreement among states that the deliberate killing of civilians to achieve political goals constitutes terrorism; the disagreement lies in “whether insurgent or guerrilla attacks on soldiers in armed conflicts should also be called terrorism.”

Kane is partially correct - not only Israel but most Western nations and media usually refer to attacks on their own soldiers as terrorist attacks, but generally not attacks on other nations' soldiers (not just "agents of a military occupation" as Kane claims.)  For example, the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed over 300 US and French soldiers was referred to as a terrorist attack in US statements and news articles even though the targets were military.

However, the official definitions of terrorism adopted by many countries do not give exceptions for attacks against soldiers. Most Western countries make no mention of civilian or non-combatant targets in their definitions. The FBI defines international terrorism based on the identity of the attackers being associated with designated terror groups; attacks against armed forces are not excluded.

Be that as it may, Kane's initial point has validity - one instinctively associates terror attacks with civilian targets - and he leverages that to skillfully pretend that other criticisms of the use of the term have equal validity. 

Since 2000, countries at the UN have tried to come to a consensus on what’s called the Comprehensive Terrorism Convention, which would codify the criminalization of terrorism in international law. But consensus has again stalled due to disagreements on how to classify national liberation struggles. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a body of 57 mostly Muslim-majority countries, argues that violence committed by those in a struggle for self-determination—a term referring to a people’s ability to form their own state and govern themselves—should not be covered by the terrorism convention but rather by international humanitarian law, which governs the permissible use of force based in part on the “principle of distinction” between civilians and soldiers. The OIC’s argument is aimed at exempting Palestinian and Kashmiri fighters from being considered “terrorists” under international law when they launch attacks on Israeli or Indian soldiers who currently occupy their lands. The African Union and League of Arab States share the OIC’s perspective: Both bodies have adopted regional terrorism conventions that exclude struggles for national liberation from their definition of terrorism.    

Here's where we see the depth of Kane's dishonesty. Building on his initial point, he frames the objections of the OIC and others in terms of their targets, saying that their main objections are against considering attacks on "occupying soldiers" to be terrorism.

But that is not what they are saying. The OIC's proposed definition would exempt any attack, even against civilians, even targeting women and children, from being considered terrorism as long as they are "in situations of foreign occupation" or any "armed conflict." It was written, at the height of the second intifada, deliberately to excuse Palestinian suicide and bus bombings.

And this is borne out by parallel activities by anti-Israel activists who have attempted to claim that even directly targeting Jewish civilians are part of a legitimate "right to resist" - by any means. Richard Falk, former  United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, wrote that "Palestinian resistance to occupation is a legally protected right" specifically in reference to the second intifada attacks on Jewish civilians. 

Kane is presenting these justifications for attacks on civilians as merely objections to use of the term "terrorism" against soldiers. By not mentioning these facts, he is framing the controversy over the definition of the term "terrorism" as two sides making reasonable, equally valid points and that their disagreements are only about attacking the military. 

Kane then subtly justifies attacks on civilians, again by using misdirection to pretend he is only talking about soldiers:

According to George Bisharat, an emeritus professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, “terrorism” is “a buzzword” intending to cast violence against occupation soldiers as illegitimate. In Israel/Palestine, “it’s being used for its political and rhetorical impact to discredit any violent resistance against Israel’s occupation,” he said, which is why “the non-aligned nations, as they call themselves, are insistent on the principle that violence exercised to advance the right of self-determination is not illegal.”  

 The legal distinction Kane is making has suddenly changed from target of the violence (ostensibly, soldiers) is to the reason for the violence - "self-determination." Kane introduces Bisharat as only talking about targeting soldiers, but  Bisharat's words say otherwise. If "violence exercised to advance the right of self-determination is not illegal" then that includes all attacks, including civilians. (Bisharat himself knows that attacks on civilians is illegal, but he is unhappy about it, ludicrously complaining that the inaccuracy of Palestinian rockets makes it too difficult for Palestinians to adhere to international law by only hitting military targets.)

Which means that Kane is classifying attacks on civilians as just another valid position. He's too smart to say it explicitly, but the Bisharat sentence is in fact the main point that he wants to give the reader - that Palestinian terrorism is legitimate because it is resistance.

In fact, the tone of the article is that Israel is unjustifiably referring to legitimate resistance as terrorism, while those who have cheered and funded the murder of Jewish civilians (the non-aligned nations) have solid legal ground for their support. 

There is another layer to Kane's propaganda techniques.

This entire article is meant to obfuscate a basic fact. By only talking about Palestinian attacks on soldiers, he is implying that soldiers are the main targets of the terror groups. But the terrorists, whether they are Hamas or Fatah or Lion's Den, make no such distinctions. Their own words and publications never say that they only want to attack soldiers - their targets are "settlers" and, to them, every Israeli Jew is a "settler." When they attack soldiers and guards it is because those are the ones on the front lines, not out of any concern for international law or the definition of terrorism. When the armed groups have the opportunity, they attack civilians, and indeed they prefer to attack civilians because they are softer targets. 

This is why the attackers are terrorists by any definition. And that is exactly what Alex Kane and Jewish Currents wants you to forget.

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

 

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The 15 year plan to convict Israel at the ICC

The International Criminal Court has a list of crimes that are within its mandate to prosecute. The general categories of these crimes are:

• The crime of genocide;
• Crimes against humanity;
• War crimes;
• The crime of aggression. (this has not yet been defined.)

The Rome Statute details the specific crimes that are applied. For genocide:

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The first seven crimes against humanity:

• (a) Murder;
• (b) Extermination;
• (c) Enslavement;
• (d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;
• (e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
• (f) Torture;
• (g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;

War crimes include such obvious examples as:

• Wilful killing;
• Torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments;
• Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health;
• Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly;
• Compelling a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power;
• Wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial;
• Unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement;
• Taking of hostages.
• Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;
• Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives;
• Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, as long as they are entitled to the protection given to civilians or civilian objects under the international law of armed conflict;
• Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated;
• Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives;
• Killing or wounding a combatant who, having laid down his arms or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion;

You can see a pattern - the worst most heinous war crimes are listed.

But among all these terrible crimes that are spelled out explicitly by the Rome Statute is this one:

• The transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

Keen eyed observers will note that this is a huge amplification of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which stated "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." By adding "directly or indirectly" it is obvious that the Rome Statute has changed what was originally intended to put a stop to the WWII practice of states actively moving part of their unwilling population into a territory, and instead it was designed for one reason only: to explicitly call Jews moving to their ancestral lands a war crime.

There is no better example of a sui generis law than this.

How did the idea of Jews voluntarily moving to almost completely empty spaces and building houses turn into a war crime on the par of torture or taking hostages? How could  the writers of the Statute allow, as far as I can tell, this to be the only part that is not mentioned explicitly by the Geneva Conventions?

It all started in 1999, when the Rome Statute was being drafted. On August 10, 1999, a group of Arab nations -Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen - drafted this text to be added to the Statute:

The perpetrator, directly or indirectly:
(a) Induced, facilitated, participated or helped in any manner in the transfer of civilian population of the Occupying Power into the territory it occupies.

Given the source, it is quite obvious that this was meant to create an international law that would only be used against Israel....when the time was right.

 The US fought against it and proposed its own wording that would limit it to real war crimes:

1. That the act took place in the course of a military occupation with respect to territory where authority of a hostile army was actually established and exercised.
2. That the accused intended to effect the compulsory transfer, on a large scale, of parts of the population of the Occupying Power into such occupied territory.
3. That the accused effected such transfer of nationals of the Occupying Power into such occupied territory.
4. That the accused intended that such transfer would endanger the separate identity of the local population in such occupied territory.
5. That the transfer worsened the economic situation of the local population and endangered their separate identity. 
6. That the transfer was without, and the accused knew it was without, lawful justification or excuse. 

The US is clearly interpreting the Fourth Geneva Convention Article 49  according to its original written intent, not the joke interpretation that Israel-haters have been using that has now gained currency.

Being a committee, the US text was rejected and the Arab text was watered down, with the result being the wording we showed above.

The Geneva Convention definition  was never tested in any international court as to whether it could apply to Israel and the disputed territories. The ICC's Rome Statute, however, has elevated what was clearly not the intent of Geneva into defining "Jews building houses" as a war crime.

The Arab countries that sponsored this change to Geneva couldn't directly prosecute Israel in the ICC, because it is not their right to do so. Only a state member of the ICC that is the victim of "war crimes" can do that.

Now when you fast forward to today, where Mahmoud Abbas is renewing his threats to go to the ICC, we see the culmination of a process that began in 1999 - during the Oslo process, when it appeared that there might be a Palestinian Arab state sooner rather than later. But even so, the moves by the PLO to get accepted as a state by the UN had this specific idea in mind.

Anyone looking at the situation today can see how the Arab initiative of 1999 was meant to play out eventually - a goal that is now in reach.

It is obvious that this was a long-term strategy by the Arab states to damn Israel. This is only one example of Arab strategy and patience, attributes that the West doesn't understand.

Their goal to destroy Israel is not meant to play out in months or years, but over decades. Western-style democracies think instead in terms of sound bites and election cycles, and they simply cannot think the way that Arabs do.

Over time, this proves to be a fatal shortcoming.

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