Showing posts with label Palestinian propaganda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Palestinian propaganda. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 06, 2024




Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.


On February 14, Rashida Tlaib refused to support a resolution denouncing Hamas for raping and sexually violating and mutilating Jewish men, women, and children. The only member of the House of Representatives who voted present instead of voting for the resolution, Tlaib said she condemns all sexual violence, but claimed that H. Res. 966, Condemning rape and sexual violence committed by Hamas in its war against Israel, “completely ignores and erases any sexual violence and abuse committed by the Israeli forces against Palestinians, especially children.”

This, of course, is a lie. On many levels. For one thing, the resolution is broad and inclusive, condemning all rape and sexual violence as weapons of war (emphasis added):

That the House of Representatives—

(1) condemns all rape and forms of sexual violence as weapons of war, including those acts committed by Hamas terrorists on and since October 7th;

(2) calls on all nations to criminalize rape and sexual assault, and hold accountable all perpetrators of sexual violence, including state and non-state armed groups;

(3) calls on all international bodies to unequivocally condemn the barbaric murder, rape, sexual assault, and kidnapping by Hamas and other terrorists on and since October 7th, and hold accountable all perpetrators;

(4) reaffirms the United States Government’s support for independent, impartial investigations of rape and sexual violence committed by Hamas on and since October 7th; and

(5) reaffirms its commitment to supporting survivors of rape and sexual violence, including those brutalized on and since October 7.

Tlaib could have happily signed on, knowing that the resolution includes every act of rape and every act of sexual violence no matter the parties responsible for these heinous crimes. But that would not have served Tlaib’s true aims, all of which she accomplished:

She inserted a new idea: that the IDF also commits rape and sexual violence. This is a lie.

She inserted a second new idea: that IDF soldiers are pedophiles who specifically prey on and prefer to rape and commit sexual violence against Arab children. This too, is a lie.

She inserted a third new idea: The resolution does not specifically focus on children as victims of Hamas rape and sexual violence. In accusing the IDF of pedophilia, Tlaib intimates that IDF soldiers are actually worse than actual (Hamas) terrorists. Absolutely false and also repugnant.  

She created a false equivalence between perpetrator and victim—Hamas committed rape and sexual violence on October 7th, and has continued since that time to rape and violate Jewish men, women, and children. The assertion that the IDF also engages in such atrocities is false and also abhorrent, since the war on Hamas is a defensive war, a direct response to Hamas rape and sexual violence.

She inverted the truth. The oldest Arab trick in the book: she accused the Jews of doing what they, the Arabs do. There was no rape or sexual violence by the IDF. The atrocities were committed by one side alone and that one side was Hamas. 

 


The Arab enemy plays dirty. It cheats and it lies and it inverts the truth. But we know what happened. “The evidence is abundant and beyond compelling. Through survivors coming forward, witnesses, video footage and independent analysis, we know that Hamas’s use of sexual violence including rape, mutilation, and brutality was not an anomaly. It was a premeditated part of its strategy to purposefully use sexual violence as a weapon against innocent civilians,” said Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, regarding the horrific sexual crimes of Hamas.

Meanwhile, there are no credible reports that similar deeds, or worse, have been perpetrated by the IDF. But with her lies Tlaib offers up new ways to demonize the Jews, with new lines of propaganda for use by the legions of ugly-minded people siding with terrorists against the Jewish victims. Antisemites don’t care about truth or proof. In their minds, all’s fair in their hatred and envy of the Jewish people.  

The Arab tactic of inverting the truth unlike Tlaib's fake "facts" is not new. A 2007 essay by Joel Fishman goes into the history and use of the "inversion of reality" as he calls it, appropriately begins with the following (ancient) verse:

Woe unto them that call evil good, And good evil;

That change darkness into light, And light into darkness;

That change bitter into sweet, And sweet into bitter.

Isaiah 5:20

A summary of the essay appearing just below these lines makes clear that inversion of the truth is a propaganda tactic designed to be used against the Jewish people (emphasis added):

From the 1960s, inversion of truth and reality has been one the most favored propaganda methods of Israel‘s adversaries. One of its most frequent expressions has been the accusation that the Jewish people, victims of the Nazis, have now become the new Nazis, aggressors and oppressors of the Palestinian Arabs. Contemporary observers have identified this method and described it as an “inversion of reality,” an “intellectual confidence trick,” “reversing moral responsibility,” or “twisted logic.” Because Israel’s enemies have, for nearly half a century, repeated such libels without being challenged, they have gradually gained credence. Since inversion of reality constitutes the basic principle of current anti-Israeli propaganda, it is important to understand what it is and how it works. This propaganda method is a product of Nazi Germany. It is totalitarian both in its methods, particularly the use of the paranoiac myth, and in the absolute solution it advocates. It totally denies all of Israel’s claims and leaves no room for introspection and compromise.

Why is it necessary to invert the truth? Because the truth does not serve the cause of those responsible for spreading twisted logic, the desire to demonize and ultimately, to do away with the Jewish people:

One of the tactical tools of ideological warfare is propaganda, which has been defined simply “as an attempt to influence the attitudes of a specific audience through the use of facts, fiction, argument or suggestion-often supported by the suppression of inconsistent material-with the calculated purpose of instilling in the recipient a certain belief, values or convictions which will serve the interests of the source, by producing a desired line of action.”

To this definition one may add the statement of Dr. Joseph Goebbels that “propaganda as such is neither good nor evil. Its moral value is determined by the goals it seeks.” Here is the classical argument that the ends justify the means. One may ask, however, if in certain cases the very means can be morally defective.

The rise of technology and social media has made spreading lies easier than ever, making the inversion of truth the perfect tactic for modern-day antisemites, for instance Arab propagandists like Tlaib, who have infiltrated the US government. Seventeen years have passed since this essay was penned, yet the ideas and tactics outlined here remains remarkably current (emphasis added):

Inversion of reality as a tool of media war, with its paranoiac state of mind, has persisted to the present. Although contemporary observers have been able to describe its manifestations with considerable accuracy, many have not placed it in historical context. It was in this sense, for example, that the French researcher and philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff applied the term “absolute anti-Semitism” to describe the post-1967 outlook of the Palestinians. He wrote that for them, “Zionism, then, is a new ‘Nazism’ threatening to dominate and destroy the whole human species…. Thus, in a context where Western elites never tire of calling for the avoidance of ‘Islamophobic’ utterances, the head of the Islamic Center in Geneva, Hani Ramadan, coolly denounced ‘the genocide being organized against the Muslims.’”

It is noteworthy that Ramadan’s story line is nearly identical to that of Nazi propagandists. Both presented themselves as targets of a Jewish conspiracy, and the potential outcome of their “logical process”-to use Hannah Arendt’s expression-was genocide. Although both have inverted the truth, their assertions contain an additional feature which is disturbing and dangerous: the inversion of morality which leads to criminal behavior and violence without constraint.

Citing Melanie Phillips as his source, Fishman now quotes Leo McKinstry, a Belfast-born author and journalist who described the inversion of reality with regard to Israel, as it plays out in British public discourse (emphasis added):

In a remarkable inversion of reality, Israel has become a pariah state because of its determination to defend itself. A grotesque double standard now operates, where murderous Arab terrorists are hailed as “freedom fighters” yet Israeli security forces are treated as fascistic thugs. No nation has been more demonized than Israel. One recent survey across Europe revealed that Israel is now regarded as “the greatest threat” to world peace, an utter absurdity given that Israel is actually the only democratic, free society in the Middle East. But such a finding reflects the strength of the hysterical anti-Israeli propaganda that fills the airwaves of Europe. No matter how much this anti-Israeli feeling is dressed up as support for Palestine, it is in fact profoundly antisemitic….

It is clear that nothing has changed since 2007, except for it being easier than ever to invert the truth and spread antisemitic lies whether in Britain or DC—or anywhere else where there are people who don’t like Jews. The Arab inversion of truth, however, really hits its stride beginning in the 1960s:

Prof. Arnold Toynbee delivered a lecture in Montreal in January 1961 in which he “compared from a moral standpoint, the attitude of Israel to the Arabs in 1947 and 1948 with the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews.” The ambassador of Israel to Canada, Yaakov Herzog, read this statement in the Montreal newspapers and challenged Toynbee to a debate which followed on 31 January 1961 at McGill University. Ambassador Herzog did well in this disputation, but it is not clear if Arnold Toynbee’s statement represented an isolated event or, in the years which followed, provided a source of inspiration to others. (Two years later, in April 1964, Arnold Toynbee came to Egypt on a twelve day visit to lecture at Egyptian universities.  It would be interesting to know, if, beyond considerations of academic scholarship, an authoritarian regime such as Nasser’s Egypt had other motives for showing Toynbee such a public sign of great favor.)

During the 1960s, and particularly after the Israeli victory in the Six Day War in 1967, the Soviet Union and its allies in the Arab world reintroduced some of the old propaganda themes. Israel’s victory represented a humiliation to the Soviet cause and posed an internal danger because it shook the foundations of authority.  Domestically, it heartened the minorities in the Soviet Union, not least the Jews. Having suffered a major reverse, the Soviet Union and the Arab countries decided to use political anti-Semitism as a means of shifting world attention from their defeat. They endeavored to delegitimize Israel, to brand Israel as the aggressor, and to bring about its isolation. Some elements of the new propaganda campaign were:

·        The accusation that Israel was the aggressor in the Six Day War and denial of its right to self-defense.

·        The passing of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, “Zionism is racism,” on 10 November 1975 which gave the standing of international law to a proposition totally based on the inversion of reality. This resolution transformed Zionism, the Jewish national movement, into the embodiment of evil by equating it with the depravity of Nazi Germany.

·        The drafting of the PLO Covenant in its various versions of 1964, 1968, and 1974. This document claimed that justice was totally on the Palestinian side and that Israel had no standing at all.

·        The Hamas Charter of 1988.

·        The unprecedented assault on Israel at the end of August and beginning of September 2001 which took place at the UN Conference in Durban.

The UN Resolution of 1975, later overturned, declaring that “Zionism is racism,” is another prime and historic example of how truth can be stood on its head in order to demonize the Jews (emphasis added):

On 10 November 1975, the Soviet Union and its supporters passed UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, “Zionism is racism,” which transformed an anti-Semitic slogan into an internationally accepted “truth.” Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman explained that “the term ‘racism’ was coined in 1936 to rally scientific and political opinion against Nazi doctrines of ‘Aryan superiority’ over Jews and other alleged untermenschen.” According to the original meaning of the term, then, “racism” denotes one of the great abuses of Nazism.  Thus, to equate Zionism with racism represents a serious accusation and inversion of reality.

In considering the tactic of reality inversion, once must also look at the results. The academic in his ivory tower knows the truth, but pushes the lies that serve him. The common man on the other hand, the regular Arab Joe/Yussef on the street, actually believes the lies. He wants to believe the lies, because they put him in the right and the Jews in the wrong. Nadav Shragai describes the impact on ordinary Arab Muslims of the lie that the Jews aim to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque (emphasis added):

The Palestinians and many Muslims charge that Israel “seeks to destroy al-Aqsa” and build the Temple in its stead on a site where no Temple ever stood; that the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount is al-miza’um, that is, “supposed,” “fraudulent,” “invented,” or “imaginary;” that the Jews have no connection to the Temple Mount or, for that matter, to the Western Wall.     

This is a libel on top of a libel, a double lie. The many Muslims who are convinced that al-Aqsa is in danger are now also convinced that “their” al-Aqsa stands on a place where “our” Temple never stood – the latter being nothing but a fabrication.

Some of the legitimacy that terrorism draws from the libel rests on that added lie. It is more legitimate to libel and murder Jews, so as “to protect the captive al-Aqsa and free it from the Jews who are plotting to destroy it,” if Israel and the Jews who “conspire to attack the site,” have only a false and concocted connection to it. Thus, the lie that undergirds the libel also bolsters the legitimacy to murder in its name. From the standpoint of the “Al-Aqsa is in danger” terrorists and their supporters, they do not murder only those who seek to wrest the Mount from their hands. As they see it, they are also murdering the falsifiers of history, who have no link to the site at all. They also want the Mount to be “liberated” psychologically so that their historical and religious narrative will prevail.

Already a decade ago, Lesley Klaff described how the Holocaust has been appropriated by the enemy, and distorted and abused to blame and demonize Israel for the condition of the Arab people (emphasis added):

What has been called ‘Holocaust Inversion’ involves an inversion of reality (the Israelis are cast as the ‘new’ Nazis and the Palestinians as the ‘new’ Jews), and an inversion of morality (the Holocaust is presented as a moral lesson for, or even a moral indictment of ‘the Jews’). More: those who object to these inversions are told [that] they are acting in bad faith, only being concerned to deflect criticism of Israel. In short, the Holocaust, an event accurately described by Dan Diner as a ‘rupture in civilisation,’ organised by a regime that, as the political philosopher Leo Strauss observed, ‘had no other clear principle except murderous hatred of the Jews,’ is now being used, instrumentally, as a means to express animosity towards the homeland of the Jews. ‘The victims have become perpetrators’ is being heard more and more. That is Holocaust Inversion.

Klaff goes further, underlining the ways in which even the memory of the Holocaust is abused, as it places unique moral strictures on the Jewish people—the actual victims of the Holocaust—alone:

Holocaust Inversion [involves] the abuse of the Holocaust memory to issue a moral stricture aimed at Israel and ‘the Jews’, imposing upon them a uniquely onerous moral responsibility and accountability in their treatment of others.

Dr. Yechiel Shabiy, writing for BESA, elaborates on the inverted logic that portrays the Arabs as indigenous to Israel even in the face of absolute proof to the contrary (emphasis added):

The elected representatives of Israel’s Arab community claim that the Palestinians are the original owners of the land—an indigenous minority disinherited by foreign invaders. According to this notion, which is aimed at undermining the Zionist narrative about the Jewish people’s return to its historical homeland, the Arabs of the Land of Israel—like the Indians in America, the aborigines in Australia, and the Zulu tribes in South Africa—are victims of European imperialism/colonialism, which turned them into a disenfranchised and oppressed minority in their own land. From this standpoint, Zionism is a crude perversion of Judaism because the Jews do not constitute a people but only a religious community with no national attributes or aspirations, let alone any right to a state of their own in even a tiny part of the Islamic-Arab-Palestinian patrimony.

That thesis is not only baseless but a complete inversion of the historical truth.

It was Arab/Muslim invaders who came to the Land of Israel as an ascendant imperialist force in the decade after the Prophet Muhammad’s death and laid the groundwork for the colonization of this land by a long string of Muslim empires up to the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI. During this lengthy era, the non-Jewish and non-Christian residents of the land identified themselves as Muslims—not as Arabs, and certainly not as Palestinians—until WWI, when the idea of Arab nationalism gathered steam with the help of British imperialism.

One need only look at common family names among the Palestinians to see their colonialist origins: Hijazi, from the Hijaz in the Arabian Peninsula, from which the original invaders came; Bosniak, from Bosnia; Turk, from Turkey; Halabi, from Syria; Hindi, from India; Yemeni, from Yemen; Masarwa/Masri, from Egypt; Mughrabi, from the Maghreb, and so on.

In contrast, countless place names in the Land of Israel testify to a Jewish presence over thousands of years. Take, for example, the Narbeta River in northern Samaria. Narbeta, which is the Aramaic pronunciation of Arubot, the biblical city in which one of King Solomon’s 12 governors lived, ruled the whole region of northern Samaria. In Narbeta, as Yosef ben Matityahu (Josephus) recounts, the Romans slaughtered thousands of Jews during the Great Revolt (66-73 CE). The area teems with archaeological relics from the Second Temple, Mishnaic, and Talmudic eras.

Each year, Israel is faced with the dilemma of whether to allow Muslim worship on the Temple Mount during Ramadan. With the season upon us, concurrent with Israel’s war on Hamas, the issue was once more discussed and decided: The Arabs are to be allowed to worship on the Temple Mount, in spite of the war and the Arab propensity for violence with the Jews as their target. When Israel was confronted by the same yearly conundrum in 2022, David Weinberg took the opportunity to outline some of the more inflammable Arab rhetoric batted about in regard to Jews and the Temple Mount along with the history of how it has evolved (emphasis added):

I am infuriated by the calls of Western leaders upon Israel, all week long, to "ensure the status quo" on the Temple Mount and "respect the sanctity" of its Moslem holy sites. Often this has been accompanied by tsk-tsking about "provocative incursions" by Israeli police and so-called "excessive force" employed by police to disburse "peaceful Arab worshippers."

The inversion of truth contained in the above description of events and the perversion involved in blaming Israel for Arab rioting on the Temple Mount – is utterly galling!

The plain facts are that the so-called "status quo" on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem long has been dead. It has been violated repeatedly in recent years by radical Palestinian and Islamic actors who have turned the Mount into a base of hostile operations against Israel, instead of protecting it as zone of prayer and peace. Israel, on the other hand, has acted with utmost restraint in the face of Arab assaults. (Too much restraint, in my opinion.)

Waqf and Islamic movement provocateurs have attacked Jewish visitors to the Mount, Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall below the Mount, and Jewish worshippers on their way to the Western Wall. They have attacked Emiratis and Bahrainis praying in Al-Aqsa Mosque (because these countries signed Abraham Accord peace treaties). They have greatly restricted visitation rights to the holy Mount for all non-Moslems; and have hijacked the pulpits in the mosque on the Mount to preach hatred and violence against Israel.

Palestinian terrorists have smuggled machine guns onto the Temple Mount and killed police guarding the gates of the Mount. The terrorists launched their attack from within the Temple Mount and then fled into the shrines on the Mount. The tens of thousands of boulders and rocks stockpiled by Arabs on the Mount for their periodic, planned "outbursts" of rock-throwing violence, including repeated attacks over the past week, are no less outrageous.

The Waqf also has conducted vast, illegal construction projects on the Mount and beneath it, willfully destroying centuries of Jewish archaeological treasures.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, a supposedly "moderate" Palestinian figure, continues to roil the waters and foment violence against Israel by repeating the canard that "Al Aqsa is in danger," meaning that "the Zionists are conspiring to blow-up the mosque and Islamic shrine" on the Mount. This is a blood libel that goes all the way back to the notorious pro-Nazi Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini in the pre-state period.

In fact, Abbas has stoked a broad-scale campaign against the authenticity of Israel's historic rights in Jerusalem. In September 2015 he screeched about "filthy" Jewish feet that were "desecrating" holy Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. "Al-Aksa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher," he bellowed. "They (the Jews) have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet. We won't allow them to do so, and we will do whatever we can to defend Jerusalem."


In 2019, Tzvi Fleischer wrote of the UN inversion of the truth in regard to the status of Arab women, be they Arab women with Israeli citizenship, or those who live under Abbas or Hamas (emphasis added):

The UN has produced another one of the anti-Israel absurdities for which it has become infamous. On July 23, the UN’s 54-nation Economic and Social Council voted 40-2, with 9 abstentions, to single out Israel as the only state in the world branded as a violator of women’s rights. Among those who voted in favour were such paragons of women’s rights as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Yemen (Australia is not a member).

Most of the long resolution said nothing about women but simply parroted generic UN anti-Israel rhetoric, accusing the Jewish state of numerous crimes, but the key clause condemned Israel and the “occupation” as “a major obstacle for Palestinian women and girls with regard to the fulfilment of their rights, and their advancement, self-reliance and integration in the development of their society.”

Of course, the resolution did not mention how Palestinian women’s rights are impacted by their own governing authorities—the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. These surely have the primary responsibility for progressing the “advancement, self-reliance and integration” of the Palestinian women of the West Bank and Gaza respectively.

Yet with regard to the situation of the Palestinian women who are citizens of Israel, recent years have seen achievements which make a mockery of the UN’s claims. A decade ago only 22% of Israeli Arab women were working outside their homes. Today, that number is more than 40% (admittedly, this is still way below the workforce participation rate of Jewish Israeli women, who have one of the highest participation rates in the OECD).

The jump in employment rates among Israeli Arab women is in part the result of deliberate Israeli Government policy. The Israeli Government has set a target of 54% employment for Arab women by 2030. To help achieve that goal, they have been improving public transport to Arab villages so women can reach jobs, building industrial zones in large Arab towns like Nazareth that can offer employment closer to Arab villages and have set up 22 employment centres specifically for Arab women to help match them with available jobs.


The UN is still busy inverting the truth when it comes to Israel and the Jews. CNN reports that UN is investigating “credible reports” that IDF soldiers did to Arabs the disgusting things that Arabs did to Jews (emphasis added):

United Nations experts have called for an investigation into what they described as “credible allegations of egregious human rights violations” against Palestinian women and girls in Gaza and the West Bank by Israeli forces.

The allegations include extrajudicial killing, arbitrary detention, degrading treatment, rape and sexual violence, according to a statement by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights released on Monday. It did not detail how they did their fact-finding, but they referred to photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances reportedly taken by Israeli troops and uploaded online.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) denied the accusations and said it adheres to international law. “Without precise details or proof of individual cases it is not possible for us to examine them in depth,” the IDF said in a statement to CNN.

 i24 News further elaborates (emphasis added):

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has accused the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of raping Palestinian women and girls in detention, sparking a contentious dispute as Israel vehemently denies the claims.

In a report by Sky News, the UN Human Rights Office a few reports of Israeli officers allegedly sexually assaulting Palestinian women and girls while in detention.

Allegations include strip searches conducted by male soldiers and alleged instances of sexual violence against detainees.

“We are particularly disturbed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have been subjected to several forms of sexual assault,” accused the UN agency, affirming that “they had been stripped naked and searched by male soldiers.” “At least two Palestinian detainees were raped, while others were threatened with rape and sexual violence,” the agency said, adding that “photos of detention in humiliating circumstances were taken by the IDF and uploaded on the Internet".

Naturally, no proof is provided. Because there is none. Yet, Reem Alsalem, she of the Muslim Arab-friendly first and surname insists that Israeli violence against Arab women has been “normalized,” and that anyway, the women don’t speak out because they’re afraid of “reprisals” (emphasis added):

The panel of experts said there was evidence of [at] least two cases of rape, alongside other cases of sexual humiliation and threats of rape. Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said the true extent of sexual violence could be significantly higher.

“We might not know for a long time what the actual number of victims are,” said Alsalem, who was appointed special rapporteur by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in 2021.

She noted that reticence in reporting sexual assault was common because of the fear of reprisals against victims. She said that in a wave of detentions of Palestinian women and girls after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on 7 October, there was an increasingly permissive attitude towards sexual assault in Israeli detention centres.

“I would say that, on the whole, violence and dehumanisation of Palestinian women and children and civilians has been normalised throughout this war,” Alsalem said.

Interestingly, Alsalem claimed to be unaware of any rocket attacks against Israel. In spite of actual evidence, something she does not have in regard to imagined Israeli crimes against Arab women.

Perhaps the most galling part of this concerted effort to invert reality was the insertion of a supposed need to investigate reports of imagined Israeli crimes against Arab women, in a UN investigation of actual Hamas sexual crimes against Jewish women (and men and children).

In a piece called UN Investigator: ‘Convincing Information’ of Rape and Torture, But Check the Jews Too Just In Case, the Jewish Press, author David Israel tells us that while "Pramila Patten, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict reported on Monday that she and a team of experts had found 'clear and convincing information' of rape and sexualized torture being committed against hostages seized during the October 7 terror attacks.”

Based on reports in the media, when Patten arrived in Israel, I was encouraged that even though, as a UN representative, Patten was unlikely to be sympathetic to Israel, she would be fair in her investigation. And she was. Up to a point. That point being the one where Arab guilt must be balanced by the presumption of Jewish guilt, even in the absence of proof (emphasis added):

The NY Times report on Patten’s report points out that it “also cited allegations that Palestinians detained by Israel have also been sexually abused.” No need to provide citations, of course, because it’s a known thing that Jews rape Arab women all the time. The fact is that from 1950 to this day there hasn’t been a single rape complaint of an Arab woman against Israeli soldiers. Several academic researchers have actually argued that this phenomenon is an expression of Israeli racism…

According to Israel Police data, between 2007 and 2014, Arab men committed 533 sexual offenses against Jewish women, of which 70 were outright rapes. In many cases, the rapists called their victims “dirty Jews,” later explaining that “Jews are subhuman,” and “Jewish girls have no honor.”

Oh, and the Patten report for some reason noted deep suspicion among Israelis toward the United Nations.

Shocking.

The Patten report was disheartening, because my expectations had been higher than they should have been. By now, I should know better. Where there is proof of Arab malfeasance and no proof of Jewish malfeasance, the idea of Jewish malfeasance will be inserted to minimize that of the Arabs. It’s just the way it is.

Since October 7, world Jewry has woken up to the fact that there is overwhelming Jew-hatred everywhere. It doesn’t matter what we’ve done or haven’t done. It doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do. We Jews live in a time where the truth doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t serve our enemy, which is most of the world. 



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!

 

 

Friday, September 22, 2023




The Palestinian Ministry of Information puts out a regular listing of "incitement and racism in Israeli media."

It shows three examples from August of what it calls "provocative terms" it saw in Hebrew language media.

“A Palestinian bulldozer demolished an archaeological site from the days of the Second Temple."
.
Concerning Walid Daqqa: “Distorted ethics. A human rights organization demands the release of a terrorist with blood on his hands.

“Construction in the West Bank is an appropriate Zionist response to terrorism.”
So, telling the truth is "provocative" and "incitement" and "racism."

I think the Palestinian Authority regards "1984" as a textbook and its "Ministry of Truth" is a model for the Palestinian "ministry of information."




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!

 

 

Thursday, September 21, 2023



MPower Change, the Muslim advocacy group co-founded by Linda Sarsour, just sent out an action alert to its email list with the title "Take Action: No autonomous drones from Israel:"

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) just approved a request by Airobotics, an Israeli government-funded company,¹ to fly “autonomous” drones over U.S. neighborhoods.²

We don’t want unaccountable, autonomous “crime-fighting” drones snooping on us, filling our skies, and making life-or-death decisions.

Tell the FAA: We need safety where we live, not spy drones funded by apartheid Israel.
Airobotics is not funded by the Israeli government. It received a specific grant at the end of August of $540,000 from the Israel Innovation Authority, which is funded by but independent of the Israeli government. The grant has nothing to do with the drone that the FAA approved. The Muslim group is stretching to find any connection, no matter how tenuous, to associate Israel with a myth of drones meant to spy on Muslims and people of color in cities. 

But what does Airobotics' Israel connections have to do with what the drone does? The email pretends that it is trying to protect civil rights of people of color who they imagine will be surveilled disproportionately by these autonomous drones - but if that was really MPower Change's concern, what difference does it make whether they were manufactured or even funded by Israel?  It is up to the people who actually purchase and deploy the drones to determine how they will be used, whether for good or evil purposes. The source has nothing to do with it. 

This is hatemongering, not a concern for human rights. And the implication that a drone company is especially pernicious because it is Israeli is simple bigotry.  

Notably, while the email mentions Israel eight times to whip up their subscribers into a frenzy, their auto-email to the FAA doesn't mention Israel once. Telling the FAA not to approve a drone because it is Israeli would be obvious bigotry. The advocacy group only tells that to fellow Muslims. MPower Change knows that Israel has nothing to do with the issue, but they also know that their email list is filled with people who hate Israel and Jews - and they want to leverage that hate to get them to take action (and raise their own profile.)

This email shows that the word "Israel" is now a dog-whistle for modern antisemites. They use "Israel" the way "Jew" used to be used, as a means to make people angry. 



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!

 

 

Defense for Children International-Palestine writes:

Rafat Omar Ahmad Khamayseh, 15, was shot by Israeli special forces while leaving his grandfather’s house in Jenin refugee camp around 7:30 p.m. on September 19, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International - Palestine. As he left the house, Rafat saw Israeli special forces exiting three Palestinian licensed cars and surround the home of the father of a Palestinian man wanted for arrest. Rafat fled, yelling, “Special forces! Special forces!” One Israeli soldier chased Rafat and shot him in the abdomen from a distance of 10 meters (33 feet).    

 While nearly all of the reports on the Jenin incident identify Khamayseh as being 22 years old, photos indicate that he probably really was 15.

And that he was not exactly an innocent child.


Yet even if we take DCI-P at their word that all he was doing was warning terrorists that the IDF was there, that makes him legally a militant and a legitimate military target.

The US Department of Defense Law of War Manual (revised July 2023) says that a civilian is considered to be taking a direct part in hostilities when he or she is "acting as a guide or lookout for combatants conducting military operations." 

The ICRC agrees. In its document "Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities Under International Humanitarian Law" it says,  "a person serving as one of several lookouts during an ambush would certainly be taking a direct part in hostilities although his contribution may not be indispensable to the causation of harm."

This is exactly what DCI-P is admitting that Khamayseh was doing. His warning endangered the Israeli forces and therefore he became a combatant and legitimate target, no matter what his age.





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Wednesday, September 20, 2023


Har Homa is not in East Jerusalem, nor is it in southeastern East Jerusalem. Har Homa is in southern Jerusalem, period. In fact, Har Homa is located at the southernmost edge of Jerusalem. Observe this OCHA map of so-called East Jerusalem, OCHA not being known for its friendliness to Israel:


See that little square outlined in black, above? It is clearly labeled “East Jerusalem.” Technically, there’s no such thing. Jerusalem is a one, unified city.

But let’s leave that for now. Scroll way down the OCHA map in a southerly direction and eventually, you will hit Har Homa, circled below, in red. It is indisputably, decidedly in south Jerusalem, as distinct from east Jerusalem (and East Jerusalem, which does not exist).’



The Virtual Jewish Library doesn’t seem to have any problem with its compass, moral or otherwise. Its entry on Har Homa is straightforward: “Contrary to Palestinian claims, Har Homa is not in ‘traditional Arab East Jerusalem.’ It is neither ‘Arab’ (most of the land was expropriated from Jews); nor ‘East’ (it is in southern Jerusalem).”

Why then, did Tablet use this Getty photo with its erroneous caption on August 24, 2023? Poor fact-checking? A lack of caring over what might have been seen by the Tablet editor in question as an insignificant detail? Or is Tablet just down with revising geography to suit a “Palestinian” narrative not grounded in reality?



The Guardian is known to lie to make Israel look bad, so we expect them to lie about the actual location of Har Homa. They do it to make it look as if the Jews stole Har Homa from the Arabs, as in this 2014 piece on “settlement expansion.”



Haaretz is also known to invent facts about Israel not in evidence, and a recent (July 2023) piece by Judy Maltz does not disappoint:




Another outlet seemingly determined to distort hard geographic truths for the delectation and delight of their readership, is the Times of Israel. TOI was slightly more in tune with reality than some other outlets, when it referred to Har Homa as “southern East Jerusalem” in a recent report on a nearby stabbing attack. Ah well, if only the word “East” hadn’t been next to “southern.” Also, weirdly, “East” is capitalized while “southern” is not. TOI seems to think that “southern” is a direction” while “East Jerusalem” is a distinct city—one apparently not belonging to Jews.

But of course, no matter how you slice it, the label of “southern East Jerusalem” is erroneous. Its use by TOI suggests to this writer, at least, that the media outlet is carrying water for the wrong side.





The Jerusalem Post carried a similar piece that same day, September 18, 2023, with the caption on the feature photo referring to the “har Homa neighborhood of East Jerusalem.” Here “east” is capitalized where it shouldn’t be, while the “Har” of “Har Homa” is not, when it should be (much as the “New” of “New York” is always capitalized). 



Writer Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, tells his readers that the “Mazmuriyeh crossing” is “near east Jerusalem.”

It is not. Capitalized or otherwise.  But good for him for not capitalizing that E. Maybe this will give him/the JPost some brownie points for Yom Kippur?

Did any outlet get the location right in reporting that recent attack? The Jewish Press did. Kudos to them for bucking the trend by correctly stating that Har Homa is in “southern Jerusalem.” 

Like Nikki Haley at the UN, all the Jewish Press did was “tell the truth” about Israel--but we sure could do with a lot more of that.)

To all my readers, may you be inscribed in the Book of Life: גמר חתימה טובה!



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!

 

 

Yesterday, Jordan's King Abdullah addressed the UN General Assembly with polished English and breathtaking hypocrisy.



Harking back to the long-debunked "linkage" theory, Abdullah claimed, "The Palestinian-Israeli conflict [is] the central issue in the Middle East."

This is right after he spoke about Syria, and the 1.3 million Syrian refugees that Jordan hosts!

As has been the case for decades, Arab leaders cannot resist using the Palestinian issue as a means to distract their people from their own shortcomings. Whipping up hatred against Jews means less hatred towards their own leaders.
Five million Palestinians live under occupation—no civil rights; no freedom of mobility; no say in their lives.   
About 2.3 million people cross between the West Bank and Jordan through the Allenby crossing every year - most of them Palestinians. Does that sound like they have no freedom of mobility?

Some 90% of Palestinians live under Palestinian civil governance and laws. If they have no civil rights or say in their lives, how exactly is that Israel's fault?

Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Jordan who moved there from Gaza in 1967 have no civil rights or path to citizenship - so who exactly is curtailing the rights of those Palestinians?
And delaying justice and peace has brought endless cycles of violence—2023 has been the deadliest for the Palestinian people in the past 15 years.  
No, it hasn't: it has been the deadliest in the West Bank. And nearly all of those killed have been armed terrorists or active fighters, whom Abdullah pretends are innocent civilians. 

The past 18 months have been the deadliest in Israel in many years as well - where is the justice for Jews?
Jerusalem is a flash point for global concern. Under the Hashemite Custodianship of Islamic and Christian holy sites, Jordan remains committed to safeguarding the city’s identity.

First of all, Jordan has no custodianship over Christian holy sites. The original (verbal) agreement between the Supreme Muslim Council and the Hashemites was only concerning Al Aqsa.  The 1994 Jordan-Israel peace agreement says "Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem." Abdullah is lying.

Secondly, when he says Jordan wants to safeguard Jerusalem's identity, by specifying "Islamic and Christian," he means a Jerusalem that has no Jewish history.

But preserving Jerusalem, as the city of faith and peace for Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, is a responsibility that we all share.

Except that under Jordanian rule, no Jews of any nationality were allowed to visit the Old City. Jordan regularly condemns Jews peacefully touring the Temple Mount. Abdullah supports a Jerusalem where Jews are, at best, tolerated but have no rights. If he cared about preserving Jerusalem for all religions, he would support Israeli sovereignty - since it is only under Jewish rule that Jerusalem has ever been truly open to all.

And we must not abandon Palestinian refugees to the forces of despair. Sustainable funding is urgently needed by UNRWA, the UN agency that provides vital relief, education, and health services to millions of Palestinian refugees. This is essential to protect families, keep communities stable, and prepare young people for productive lives. 

Jordan itself gave a mere $4 million to UNRWA in 2022 - much less than the $7 million it gave in 2021. And so far it has only pledged $2 million in 2023. Abdullah is not exactly walking the walk.

But there is a lot of cynicism here: Jordan's economy benefits greatly from UNRWA. Even though UNRWA has no business giving aid to most of its "refugees" in Jordan who are full Jordanian citizens, it spends over $150 million a year in Jordan alone. Abdullah is appealing for UNRWA because that money is money he saves in providing basic services to nearly 2 million of his own citizens. 

He pretends his appeal to UNRWA benefits Palestinians, but in reality UNRWA saves Jordan hundreds of millions of dollars, and it injects a great deal of cash into Jordan's economy on the world's dime.

The hypocrisy does not end there. In his speech, Abdullah speaks about "justice" and about how he is against "the black flags of terror, hate, and extremism." Yet even today, Jordan is zealously protecting terrorist Ahlam Tamimi - an unrepentant, proud monster responsible for the murder of 16 civilians including 7 children at a pizza shop in Jerusalem - from being extradited to the US to face justice.

Abdullah doesn't support justice. On the contrary, he supports a celebrity terrorist walking around freely in his kingdom. 

Western media and politicians love King Abdullah. He is young, articulate, and smooth. He says all the right things and is considered a "moderate." So no one bothers to fact-check his speeches and analyze his actions. But in just this short address on the biggest stage on Earth, Abdullah has proven himself yet again to be a hypocrite and a liar. 




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!

 

 

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

As mentioned yesterday, a group of Palestinian expatriates issued an open letter over the weekend condemning Mahmoud Abbas' antisemitic statements. but really their letter was more anti-Israel than anti-Abbas, as they accused him of toeing the Zionist line.

We the undersigned, Palestinian academics, writers, artists, activists, and people of all walks of life, unequivocally condemn the morally and politically reprehensible comments made by President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas about the Holocaust. Rooted in a racial theory widespread in European culture and science at the time, the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people was born of antisemitism, fascism, and racism. We adamantly reject any attempt to diminish, misrepresent, or justify antisemitism, Nazi crimes against humanity, or historical revisionism vis-a-vis the Holocaust. 

The Palestinian people are sufficiently burdened by Israeli settler colonialism, dispossession, occupation, and oppression without having to bear the negative effect of such ignorant and profoundly antisemitic narratives perpetuated by those who claim to speak in our name. We are also burdened by the PA’s increasingly authoritarian and draconian rule, which disproportionately impacts those living under occupation. Having held onto power nearly a decade and a half after his presidential mandate expired in 2009, supported by Western and pro-Israel forces seeking to perpetuate Israeli apartheid, Abbas and his political entourage have forfeited any claim to represent the Palestinian people and our struggle for justice, freedom, and equality, a struggle that stands against all forms of systemic racism and oppression. 

This letter, signed mostly by American and British citizens, was not meant for Palestinians to read. It was not translated into Arabic.  It was meant for the West, as the signatories could self-righteously pretend to oppose antisemitism while at the same time attack Abbas, since they prefer Hamas and Islamic Jihad as more reflective of adhering to the Palestinian will. 

The are just as antisemitic as Abbas is, but some of them try a little harder to hide it.  (Some don't!) Many of them have engaged in Holocaust inversion themselves. 

However, we do live in an online age, and it was inevitable that Palestinians would see this letter. And their reaction was anger at opposing antisemitism:

A statement issued by a number of expatriate Palestinian academics and activists, regarding what President Mahmoud Abbas mentioned during a recent meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council about the Holocaust, sparked disapproval and condemnation from various Palestinian circles, especially since the statement was fragmentary and consistent with the Israeli and Zionist campaign, and without reference to the occupation, its positions and policies announced by his senior leaders, which are based on the idea of ​​denying the existence of a Palestinian people, in addition to the massacres committed against them.

Former Minister Hassan Asfour commented on this statement by the academics and wrote: “In a strange and surprising way, a group of Palestinian figures, including the names of ‘academics,’ ‘experts,’ and analysts, most of whom hold foreign American and British nationalities, issued a statement attacking the president’s speech about ‘Ashkenazi Jews’ and Germany...a revealing statement. Ignorance of history is not limited only to those who do not read it, but it seems that “understanding has become without teaching from the beginning of the line... Be ashamed and apologize to your people, you pretenders of knowledge.”

Notice that both the letter and the reaction by Palestinians accused their opponents of being on the same side as the Jews. 

It is all theatre.

But it points to a rarely mentioned fact: the Palestinian academics in the West are eager to write papers and speak at panel discussions where they pretend to represent the majority of Palestinian. They claim to support progressive, liberal standards, but they most definitely do not. Their speeches about the Palestinian cause being liberal begin and end with the Jews; they really don't care when the Arab world shows its bigotry or when Palestinians themselves show their illiberal beliefs  - anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-environment, anti-animal rights. 

Like Yasir Arafat before them, they tailor their message to the audience, lying as easily as they breathe, and hoping the world won't see their hypocrisy. 




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!

 

 

Thursday, August 31, 2023

On Thursday, the UN published a document titled, "Study on the Legality of the Israeli Occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem."

It is 107 pages of tendentious and one-sided arguments all intended to declare Israeli actions since 1967 to be illegal. There are counterarguments to each of their arguments - but they don't let the readers know that.

However, the entire basis of the paper is bogus. Turn to page 18, which declares its "methodology.":

The study takes it as a starting point that the Palestinian territory – i.e., the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip – was occupied by Israel in 1967, in the course of an international armed conflict. 
Setting aside Gaza for now, the question is - when did that territory become "Palestinian?"

Looking at newspaper articles in the years after the Six Day War, the West Bank was usually described as "occupied Jordan."

Here are two articles from 1972, the first about how militant Arabs threatened fellow Arabs running for office in the first elections in the West Bank after the war:



When, exactly, did the territory turn from "occupied Jordan" into "occupied Palestinian territory"? 

It never happened. The world just went along with Palestinian propaganda and eventually believed it. 

The question gets starker when we realize that Jordan's annexation of the West Bank in 1949 was illegal, and almost no nations recognized it. It was never legally Jordanian territory.

So the West Bank was never "occupied Jordan." It was part of the British Mandate of Palestine, the same mandate that promised the land to be the Jewish state. Not a Palestinian homeland - only a Jewish homeland.


This is international law, that has never been abrogated. Israel has a superior legal right to Judea and Samaria than anyone else. Israel's characterization of the territory as "disputed" was probably a mistake - it should have always claimed it all. But "disputed" is accurate, "occupied" is not.

Which is why the Mandate is never mentioned, and the "methodology" deliberately omits it, pretending that the territory is "occupied Palestinian territory" without ever saying when, legally, it became "Palestinian."

The paper spends a lot of time on the argument that the Mandate system provided a "sacred trust" for the rights of self-determination of the peoples in the territories. But as the Palestine Mandate document above shows, only the Jewish people were given that right under the Palestine Mandate. And the reason is as simple as it is unpalatable to the UN's legal "experts" - in 1920, no one considered that there existed an Arab "Palestinian people." The Arabs of Palestine who were speaking of nationalism wanted to become part of Syria, their interest in an independent state only arose (with very few exceptions) after the West drew the borders of British Mandate Palestine and unity with Syria was no longer an option. 

To apply the League of Nations Mandate language to apply to the self determination of a people who didn't exist as a people at the time - who didn't even consider themselves a people - is the height of deception.

The next part of the "methodology" is even more absurd:n"The study also takes it as a starting point that Israel continues to occupy the Gaza Strip."

Before Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, no legal expert had ever said that an occupation is possible without soldiers physically on the ground controlling the territory.

For example, see the definition in the 1972 Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms:


Military occupiers are obligated, under international law, to set up a court system, to ensure that cities are governed and continue to run, to set up an entire bureaucracy to run the territory. That is impossible without "boots on the ground," the informal definition of occupation for over a hundred years. 

Israel does not control Gaza. It cannot stop rockets or mortars, weapons manufacturing or military exercises. Israel cannot create a military court system - which is required under the rules of occupation. It cannot arrest anyone. 

The second sentence makes it quite clear that Area A in the West Bank is not "occupied" even if one accepts that somehow the West Bank is "Palestinian territory."

As with all other legal analyses when it comes to Israel, this paper was intended from the outset to determine that Israel's actions and "occupation" are illegal. It set the ground rules to ensure that pesky arguments like the League of Nations Mandate or the accepted definitions of occupation pre-2005 not even be brought up. (When JFK blockaded Cuba, did the US "occupy" Cuba?)

This isn't international law. It is twisting international law against only one state - coincidentally, the only Jewish state. 

And that is only the beginning of the problems with this document. But since the methodology itself is based on lies, that ensures that the rest of the document built on this foundation of lies is invalid as well. 




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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