Not only Arabs: "Progressives" cheer and justify Arabs treating Jews like garbage

Earlier today I wrote about how Arab media is celebrating Arabs in Qatar refusing to speak with Israeli reporters. 

I want to emphasize that Arabs have every right not to be interviewed by whomever they want, that isn't a human right. But the stories coming out of Qatar include Arabs kicking Israelis out of taxis and ganging up on/bullying (presumed) Israelis. That is what I am pointing out as a violation of Israeli human rights. (And let's be honest - lots of Arab Israelis came to Qatar and we haven't heard any issues with them.)

It turns out that it isn't only Arabs cheering and justifying Arabs ganging up on Jews.

Sarah Leah Whitson, formerly of Human Rights Watch and who now runs her own "human rights" organization, tweeted, "A good reminder that Israel's 'peace' with dictatorships (aka Abraham Accords) is not peace with the Arab people. And yeah, no justice, no peace."

Besides the idiocy of saying that Israel shouldn't make peace with dictatorships (who, exactly ,is eligible in the Arab world?) her "no justice, no peace" is a flippant way to justify treating Israeli Jewish professionals as subhuman. Which is a curious thing for a human rights expert to say.

Daoud Kuttab tweeted this justification for Arab antisemitism, heartily endorsed by Peter Beinart:

"Every action has a reaction?" Really? So Israel is justified in fighting back when Hamas shoots rockets? Israel can try to arrest those who kill Jews and try to hide in Area A? Please. Israel is never justified in protecting its citizens when Palestinian Arabs attack according to these masters of creating rules for Israel that do not apply to anyone else. You will never hear Kuttab or Beinart justify Israeli defensive moves to protect the lives of her citizens, saying "every action has a reaction." 

The hypocrisy is obvious to everyone except for those who aren't already stuck in the mire of hate towards Israel, where Arabs have no responsibility for their actions yet Israel must be compared to a "turn the other cheek" ideal that literally no other country is expected to come close to reaching.

These hypocrites - all of whom swear up and down they are not antisemitic - always somehow manage to find the one exception to their own stated moral codes. It's awful that gays want to visit the World Cup must stay in the closet, but Israeli Jews who visit should expect abuse.

It's their own fault - for being Israeli.

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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 American Jewish Committee in the 1960s: Peter Beinart's NYT lies more egregious than I reported

I wrote my fisking of Peter Beinart's NYT op-ed quickly, but the true depth of Beinart's dishonesty can be seen from a deeper dive into one of the topics he mentioned and I touched upon.

He wrote, "Although supportive of Israel’s existence, America’s leading Jewish groups did not make it the center of their work in the mid-20th century. And when they did focus on Israel, they often tried to bring its behavior in line with their broader liberal democratic goals. The A.J.C. repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In 1960 the head of the group’s Israel Committee explained that it hoped to eliminate “antidemocratic practices and attitudes” in the Jewish state so the organization could more credibly “invoke principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.”

Beinart links to a fairly obscure 1998 academic paper, "Transformation Through Crisis: The American Jewish Committee and the Six-Day War," by Lawrence Grossman, published in the journal American Jewish History. This is already a red flag - if American Jewish organizations in the 1960s  were so uniformly critical of Israeli democracy, wouldn't there be a New York Times article about it that Beinart could link to?

The entire point of the academic article Beinart links to is to show that the AJC was out of the mainstream of American Jewish opinion on Israel and Zionism before 1967. It refutes Beinart's point - but Beinart quotes a small portion and pretends that the AJC's ambivalence on Israel represented mainstream American Jewish thought.

On the contrary - that attitude made the AJC nearly irrelevant in the 1960s. The paper makes the AJC's anomalous status clear:

The Jewish community had shifted massively toward the Zionist pole, and the AJC risked being marginalized if it did not adjust.

By the early 1960s, writes Naomi Cohen, AJC "had virtually stopped growing." In 1962 Executive Vice President John Slawson told a newly organized AJC Committee on National Growth that one reason Jews were reluctant to join was that  "there is still a feeling that we are anti-Israel."

The article also notes that the AJC was literally the only Jewish organization in America to criticize Israel for  a 1966 retaliatory raid in Jordan after a series of Arab attacks and not to condemn a UN anti-Israel resolution on the issue.  The Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations, the major American Jewish umbrella group, condemned the UN resolution. The National Community Relations Council, the other large American Jewish umbrella group, was prevented from joining the Conference of Presidents resolution because its rules required a unanimous vote - and the objection of the AJC, which had only recently joined the NCRC, vetoed it.

Beinart must have read the entire piece to find the out-of-context quote he published, which means he knows very well that he was misrepresenting the opinions of major American organizations.

To be sure, American Jews in the 1960s had other issues to worry about besides Israel. There was still explicit antisemitism in America, and the plight of Soviet Jewry started gaining recognition. But I did a quick survey of the front page of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, as a representative of Jewish mainstream concerns, on its first issue in each year from 1960 to 1967. Israeli topics were featured as the top story in every issue (judged as the right-most story on the front page):

January 1, 1960: Golda Meir criticizes a World Bank loan to Nasser's Egypt

January 6, 1961: David Ben Gurion says a speech of his was distorted and he lauds US Jewry

January 5, 1962: Soviet-Egyptian pact on arms a concern for Israel

January 4, 1963: "Middle East arms race unfolding to Israel's disadvantage": Javits

January 3, 1964: Israel charges Syria with "barbarism" in treatment of Israeli prisoners

January 1, 1965: Cabinet decides against reopening Lavon affair

January 7, 1966: State Department confirms supplying Jordan with up to 100 Patton tanks

January 6, 1967: Israel complains to Security Council over Arab raids

Beinart is making things up, knowing full well that most people - and certainly the New York Times editorial board - will not fact-check him. This is a pattern with Beinart, who is not only lying, but attempting to rewrite history itself. 

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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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08/27 Links: The Use Of Human Shields Is A War Crime. America Must Hold Terrorists Accountable; Why are Israelis so happy? Because Israel is small

From Ian:

The Use Of Human Shields Is A War Crime. America Must Hold Terrorists Accountable

The administration and Congress should take several steps to more effectively counter the widespread use of human shields by PIJ and other terrorist organizations.

First, the administration should implement its legal authority to designate terrorists who use human shields. Despite strong evidence of human shields use by PIJ and other terrorists, and the requirements of U.S. law, neither Trump nor Biden has thus far imposed any human shields sanctions on anyone. Imposing sanctions on PIJ leaders for their use of human shields would be an important first step.

Meanwhile, Congress should reauthorize and enhance the existing sanctions law,which is set to expire on December 31, 2023.

In addition, the US, Israel, and other allies should work together, including with NATO, to press the UN and other international organizations to investigate, condemn, and encourage penalties for human shields use by terrorist organizations and their material supporters. For example, the UN human rights high commissioner and council should be encouraged to vigorously investigate, condemn, and encourage accountability for the use of human shields.

Finally, the militaries of Israel, the United States and other NATO members, and other allies must coordinate in sharing best practices for more effectively addressing the use of human shields by terrorist organizations.

A robust U.S. government response to the use of human shields by PIJ and other terrorist groups would concretely advance several American national security and foreign policy objectives. These objectives include protecting U.S. and other NATO troops against terrorist use of human shields; setting the record straight in the face of UN and other efforts to falsely accuse Israel of committing war crimes; and undermining PIJ, Hamas, and other terrorist groups while supporting Palestinians who are prepared to make peace with Israel.

Jonathan Tobin: An end to the delusions about Biden, Iran and Israel?

Like any gambler who is willing to seize on any glimmer of hope that irresponsible betting will be rewarded with an unexpected reversal of fortune, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid was sounding hopeful this week. The Israeli government that he now leads spent the last year wagering the Jewish state’s security on the idea that better relations with the Biden administration and a decision to downplay differences would influence Washington to finally show some spine and stop appeasing Iran. So, it was hardly unexpected that Lapid would seize on the news that the United States had “hardened” its response to the latest Iranian counter-offer in the talks about renewing the 2015 nuclear deal.

The “good news” consisted of a report claiming that Lapid had been told by Washington that it would not give in to Iranian demands that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cease investigating Tehran’s nuclear program or take the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) off the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Shorn of context, that might be an encouraging development. But with the international media publishing multiple stories based on leaks from the administration about an agreement between the two sides being imminent, the notion that any victory on these two points, whether temporary or not, vindicates the decision Lapid’s tactics is risible.

Even taken in isolation, these points don’t mean that much.

As bad as giving in on that point would be, the IRGC issue is largely symbolic. If a new deal is reached, Iran’s terrorist arm will be immeasurably strengthened and enriched along with the rest of the regime, regardless of whether they’re on a U.S. list of terror groups. It’s also true that even if Iran doesn’t get Biden to agree to drop the involvement of the IAEA altogether, that means nothing. As the Iranians have demonstrated ever since former President Barack Obama’s signature foreign-policy achievement was put into force in 2015, violating they have no compunctions about repeatedly violating it, especially with regard to flouting the components requiring compliance with IAEA regulations.

More to the point, if these provisions and other points of equal importance are the only obstacles standing between an agreement, then Lapid knows his hopes of persuading the administration not to sign a new deal are negligible. As Lapid has recently reiterated, Israel’s position is that the United States and its partners in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) are making a huge mistake. Mossad chief David Barnea has been adamant in insisting that the plan is a “strategic disaster” for Israel and based on “lies.”

‘Basmanny Justice’ and the Jews of Russia

Six months into the war in Ukraine, Russia is being Russia once again.

By that, I mean the predatory, bullying Russia that we know from history. The Russia that persecutes Jews and other minorities, whether under the tsars or the Bolsheviks. The Russia that sneers at freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the other precious individual rights that prevail in the democratic West, while pushing its own brand of nationalist, obscurantist ideology.

When it comes to the “Jewish Question,” as the Bolsheviks were fond of calling it, Russia’s hostility is eminently recognizable. For much of the Putin era, that reality has been obscured, as the Russian dictator actively promoted the impression of a benevolent disposition towards the country’s Jewish minority, assisted in this task by a number of Jewish influencers abroad who really should have known better. Yet as was predictable, with the first whiff of a geopolitical crisis, Jews have once again been cast in a villainous role.

In a recent interview with the Voice of America’s Russian-language service, Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet Jewish refusenik who served as head of the Jewish Agency from 2009 to 2018, observed that Russia is “almost completely isolated from the free world.” Like a wounded animal, it is lashing out at its adversaries as a result, trying to find and pressure any weak spots. Sharansky pointed to the example of Germany, where the coming winter is anticipated with dread given the German dependence on Russia’s heavily sanctioned energy sector.

“They are scaring Germany with the fact that people will start dying from the cold in winter,” said Sharansky.

In Israel, of course, the mild winters and the lack of dependency on Russian natural gas—earlier this year, the European Union even signed a deal to import Israeli and Egyptian natural gas as part of weaning the bloc off Russian supplies—mean that the regime in Moscow has to select a different pressure point. “In the same way, they are starting to put pressure on us, using the Jewish Agency,” emphasized Sharansky.

Russia’s campaign against the Jewish Agency, which assists Jews wishing to emigrate to Israel, was launched at the end of last month. The Russian ministry of justice filed a legal bid to close the agency’s local operations, alleging that a database of Russian citizens was being maintained in contravention of Russian law.

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Fisking Peter Beinart's propaganda, again

I have noted before that Peter Beinart is a master propagandist. He carefully frames his arguments in ways that sound reasonable unless you understand the facts as well as his methodology.

Today he writes in the New York Times that those who accuse Israel bashers of antisemitism are wrong.

Let's look at his arguments:

Over the past 18 months, America’s most prominent Jewish organizations have done something extraordinary. They have accused the world’s leading human rights organizations of promoting hatred of Jews.

Last April, after Human Rights Watch issued a report accusing Israel of “the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” the American Jewish Committee claimed that the report’s arguments “sometimes border on antisemitism.” In January, after Amnesty International issued its own study alleging that Israel practiced apartheid, the Anti-Defamation League predicted that it “likely will lead to intensified antisemitism.” The A.J.C. and A.D.L. also published a statement with four other well-known American Jewish groups that didn’t just accuse the report of being biased and inaccurate, but also claimed that Amnesty’s report “fuels those antisemites around the world who seek to undermine the only Jewish country on Earth.”

These examples are all accurate. It is almost absurd to argue that one-sided, lying accusations against Israel do not stoke antisemitism. But Beinart tries:

Defenders of repressive governments often try to discredit the human rights groups that criticize them. A month before the A.J.C. accused Human Rights Watch of flirting with antisemitism, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Global Times accused it of being “anti-China.” In 2019 a spokesman for Iran accused Amnesty of being “biased” against that country. In this age of rising authoritarianism, it’s not surprising that human rights watchdogs face mounting attacks. What’s surprising is that America’s most influential Jewish groups are taking part.  

The fact that bad people sometimes do the same things as good people doesn't make good people bad. Beinart doesn't say this explicitly, of course, but he is trying to make the reader equate China's defenders with Israel's, which is unconscionable.

Although supportive of Israel’s existence, America’s leading Jewish groups did not make it the center of their work in the mid-20th century. And when they did focus on Israel, they often tried to bring its behavior in line with their broader liberal democratic goals. The A.J.C. repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In 1960 the head of the group’s Israel Committee explained that it hoped to eliminate “antidemocratic practices and attitudes” in the Jewish state so the organization could more credibly “invoke principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.”  

This is deceptive on a number of levels.

The AJC had a history of being non-Zionist - sympathetic to Zionism but not explicitly supportive. Other American Jewish organizations, like the American Jewish Congress and the Zionist Organization of America, were more supportive.

By 1960, the AJC realized that the American Jewish community wanted a more Zionist message from them. They therefore decided to open up an office in Israel, but - as Beinart's link shows! - there was still an undercurrent of resentment at Israel starting to take center stage in world Jewry. The entire quote, which Beinart knows most people won't look up, says:

This was not a mainstream American Jewish attitude, as Beinart pretends. American Jews were heavily Zionist in this timeframe - after all, this was the time of Leon Uris' and Paul Newman's book and movie Exodus. He is lying, knowing the NYT won't call him on it.

This began to change after the 1967 war. Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip made it master over roughly a million stateless Palestinians, which fueled anger at the Jewish state from leftists in the United States and around the world. At the same time, assimilation was leading many progressive American Jews to exit organized Jewish life, which left Jewish groups with a more conservative base as they searched for a new agenda now that civil rights for Black Americans had become law.

The result was an ideological transformation. In 1974, two A.D.L. leaders wrote a book arguing that Jews were increasingly menaced by a “new antisemitism,” directed not against individual Jews but against the Jewish state. Almost a half-century later, that premise now dominates mainstream organized American Jewish life.

The term "new antisemitism" started in the 1960s, before the Six Day War, as Soviet antisemitism that hid as anti-Zionism became mainstream. The book Beinart references also talks about Arab antisemitism, which is undeniable - and therefore ignored by Leftists like Beinart. In other words, the new antisemitism is quite real and well documented, and not a made-up concept from conservative Jewish Americans like Beinart implies. 

But NYT readers would believe Beinart's alternate history.

Largely as a result of lobbying by Jewish organizations, the American government has embraced the proposition, too. The State Department now employs a definition of antisemitism whose examples include opposing Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. This year the Senate confirmed Deborah Lipstadt — a historian best known for fighting Holocaust denial — to be the Biden administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. Ms. Lipstadt has said that Israel’s “continued holding of the West Bank is problematic,” but when asked at her confirmation hearing about Amnesty’s report accusing Israel of apartheid, Ms. Lipstadt claimed that the report’s language was “part of a larger effort to delegitimize the Jewish state” and thus “poisons the atmosphere, particularly for Jewish students” on college campuses. In 2018 several Palestinian members of the Knesset tried to introduce legislation that would grant Palestinians equal citizenship rather than what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls “Jewish supremacy.” According to America’s most prominent Jewish organizations and the U.S. government, this kind of call for equal citizenship constituted bigotry.  

No. Saying that the Jewish people have no right to self determination is bigotry. Saying that the Jewish state has no right to exist is bigotry.  No one says that Arab Israelis (not "Palestinians") demanding equal rights is bigotry. That is more Beinart doubletalk.

Now that any challenge to Jewish statehood is met with charges of bigotry against Jews, prominent American Jewish organizations and their allies in the U.S. government have made the fight against antisemitism into a vehicle not for defending human rights but for denying them. Most Palestinians exist as second-class citizens in Israel proper or as stateless noncitizens in the territories Israel occupied in 1967 or live beyond Israel’s borders because they or their descendants were expelled or fled and were not permitted to return.

Israeli Arab citizens are not second class citizens, although discrimination still exists like it does everywhere else. And Palestinian non-citizens are not...citizens. They can make peace with Israel tomorrow and create their own state. The only reason they haven't is because they do not accept the Jewish state's very existence - which is, indeed, antisemitism.

And make no mistake - the unanimous support for Mahmoud Abbas' Holocaust trivialization this past week shows that Palestinian anti-Zionism is just a cover for old fashioned Jew-hate. Which is another topic Beinart doesn't want his readers to know about.

But the campaign against antisemitism is being deployed to justify not merely the violation of Palestinian human rights. As relations have warmed between Israel and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, American officials have begun using the struggle against antisemitism to shield those regimes from human rights pressure, too. In June, Ms. Lipstadt met the Saudi ambassador in Washington and celebrated “our shared objectives of overcoming intolerance and hate.” From there she flew to Saudi Arabia, where she met its minister of Islamic affairs and affirmed, once again, “our shared goals of promoting tolerance and combating hate.” In the United Arab Emirates she sat down with the country’s foreign minister, whom she declared a “sincere partner in our shared goals of” — you guessed it — “promoting tolerance and fighting hate.”

This is nonsense. According to a report this year by Freedom House, a human rights think tank funded largely by the U.S. government, Saudi Arabia is more repressive than Iran. The United Arab Emirates is more repressive than Russia. And although Ms. Lipstadt declared that her visits to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi left her “heartened by changes underway in parts of the Middle East,” both countries, according to Freedom House, are more oppressive than they were in 2017. Less than two months after she lauded the Saudi monarchy’s tolerance, it sentenced a member of the country’s persecuted Shiite minority to 34 years in prison for Twitter activity critical of the government.

When it comes to their own disenfranchised populations, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are as intolerant as ever. 

Again, Beinart is hiding the truth. No one is supporting Saudi or Emirati human rights violations, and to claim that Zionists do is nothing short of slander. His main lie is that last sentence - that they are as intolerant as ever. 

The fact that there is a rabbi in Saudi Arabia and synagogues in the UAE prove that the truth is the opposite. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for all their many faults - and not to minimize those faults - have changed course dramatically in recent years as far as tolerance goes.

And Israel is accelerating their slow march towards a more Western-oriented position, where human rights is a factor in their decision making.

Are they free societies? Not at all. But to disparage their positive changes is not a pro-human rights position. 

Beinart's premise is wrong, his examples are cherry-picked and deceptive, and his framing and methodology is nothing less than that of the best antisemitic propagandists in history.

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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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Palestinian officials and media unanimously support Abbas' antisemitism

After Mahmoud Abbas yet again spouted antisemitic lies in Germany on Tuesday, Palestinian officials and pundits unanimously supported him. 

Bassam al-Salihi, head of the People's Party and PLO Executive Committee member,  wrote that Abbas' statement that Israel committed fifty "holocausts" against Palestinians was true. "President Abbas' statements express the position of all the Palestinians, and the unrelenting Israeli incitement against the Palestinian president is totally and completely rejected," he wrote on his Facebook page.

Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement also supported his statement. Fatah spokesman Munther al-Hayek said that Abbas' words were meant "to remind the world of the suffering of the Palestinian people and the massacres committed by Israel." If there is to be any apology, al-Hayek said, it should be to the Palestinian people "whose land was occupied and the most heinous crimes were committed in front of the eyes and ears of the world without the killer being held accountable."

Ma'an News Agency reported Abbas' statements as "bold" and dismissed criticism by Israel as "hysteria."

The editor of Amad strongly defended Abbas' antisemitism, saying that "the patriot must stand without hesitation, conditionality, or thinking in the battle to defend President Abbas’s words, and that they represent what every Palestinian inside and outside the homeland believes… It is a political moment that never accepts neutrality. Silence on the fascist entity's war against the content of President Abbas's words is a partnership in it..there is no consolation for the cowards and the trembling."

Wattan.net even went beyond Abbas' words, with a Jew-hating screed that said that Israel is guilty of far more than 50 "holocausts." By insisting that the Holocaust is a unique event, the editorial says, Jews believe that their lives are worth more than anyone else's. "The Zionist extremist voices that have become addicted to blackmailing the world are nothing but a follow-up to the idea of ​​ethnic or religious discrimination linked to the illusion and myth of 'God’s Chosen People'  attributed to a racist god, and a real estate and land dealer who is intolerant of a part of his creation, which does not fit the description of the Creator."

I could not find one condemnation of Abbas' words in Palestinian media. 

For his part, Abbas' fake apology was an excuse to insult Israel again. He didn't apologize at all, but merely said that he "condemned the Holocaust in the strongest terms," which is as low a bar as one can imagine. 

But Abbas then attacked Israel, and implied that what Israel does is worse than the Holocaust, saying, "the crimes and massacres committed against the Palestinian people since the Nakba at the hands of the Israeli forces... have not stopped to this day." Meaning, the Holocaust ended in the 1940s but Palestinian suffering has lasted for over seven decades. (This theme has been used often in Palestinian media.)

Among the anti-Israel activists I follow on social media, I could not find one condemning Abbas' words besides J-Street. This includes the self-described experts on antisemitism who follow he Middle East extensively like Linda Sarsour, Rashida Tlaib, Marc Lamont Hill, and Peter Beinart. Because to them, if antisemitism doesn't come from a white nationalist, it isn't antisemitism. 

Their silence condones Abbas.

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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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Andy Levin's Views On Israel Matched The Israel-Haters He Looked To For Support (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Representative Andy Levin's defeat in the Democratic primaries has brought out his defenders, who staunchly defend his Jewish bonafides.

Like Mehdi Hassan, for example:

Because nothing establishes the unassailability of your position on Israel like being a synagogue president.

Sheesh, indeed.

If you do a search on Twitter, it seems that everyone knows that Levin was a synagogue president, and thinks it actually means something. Twitter doesn't track how many tweets come up, but in a Google search, over 9,500 hits come up.

More dishonest is Hassan's deft little twist that the opposition to Levin must be based on his support for Palestinian human rights -- a nice touch.

Peter Beinart certainly agrees:

Left unsaid is the fact that Jewish opposition to Levin was not about his support for Palestinian human rights.

Israel-supporters were more concerned with backing for the rights of Israelis in their homeland.

After all, Levin is the one who introduced the H.R.5344 - Two-State Solution Act, which if passed would have established (among other things):

o  It is the policy of the United States that the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza are occupied territories and should be referred to as such consistently in official United States policies, communications, and documents.

o...the United States should maintain diplomatic relations with the Palestinians, including by reopening a United States consulate in Jerusalem and allowing for the reopening of the Palestine Liberation Organization foreign mission in the District of Columbia. [emphasis added]

So according to Andy Levin -- the Congressman and former synagogue president -- Jerusalem should once again be a divided city.

And according to Levin's bill, the Western Wall belongs to the Palestinian Arabs.

But the problem with Levin's stand goes beyond his wanting to undo Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem.

On November 18, 2019, Secretary of State Pompeo announced a change in US policy on Israeli settlements:

After carefully studying all sides of the legal debate, this administration agrees with President Reagan: the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not, per se, inconsistent with international law.

On November 21, Levin responded with a letter he initiated, signed by such Israel-haters as Betty McCollum, Ilhan Omar, Mark Pocan, Rashida Tlaib, Pramila Jayapal, Henry Johnson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others.

A copy of Levin's letter, with the signatures, is available online.

Pompeo wasted no time in responding and rebutting Levin's claims, writing:

I am in receipt of your letter of November 21 in which you criticize the State Department’s determination that the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not categorically inconsistent with international law - a decision which you contend reverses “decades of bipartisan US policy on Israeli settlements.” You further argue. in conclusory fashion, that this determination “blatantly disregards Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

While I appreciate your interest in this important issue, I could not disagree more with those two foolish positions. [emphasis added]

In response to Levin's claim that "the State Department's decision to reverse decades of bipartisan U.S. policy on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank," Pompeo wrote:

First, the State Department’s determination did not reverse any policy with regard to Israeli settlements. Rather, the State Department reversed a legal determination by Secretary Kerry made during the waning days of the Obama Administration, that the establishment of settlements was categorically inconsistent with international law. That determination was made in a failed attempt to justify the Obama Administration’s betrayal of Israel in allowing UNSCR 2334 — whose foundation was the purported illegality of the settlements and which referred to them as “a flagrant violation” of international law — to pass the Security Council on December 23, 2016. [emphasis added]

In response to Levin's claim that the US policy on settlements, as reflected in UN Resolution 2334 had bipartisan support, Pompeo reminded him:

Secretary Kerry’s determination did not enjoy bipartisan consensus. Rather, it received bipartisan condemnation, including from leading Democrats in both chambers of Congress. Indeed, an overwhelming number of Senators and House Members, on both sides of the aisle, supported resolutions objecting to the passage of UNSCR 2334. 

...No less a Democratic spokesman than the Senate Minority Leader [Schumer] publicly stated at his AIPAC address on March 5, 2018, that “it’s sure not the settlements that are the blockage to peace.” [emphasis added]

Levin goes so far as to challenge Pompeo on The Geneva Convention, "This State Department decision blatantly disregards Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which affirms that any occupying power shall not 'deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.'" -- which Levin apparently is taking literally, as if the Israeli government was actually transferring Israelis to these areas, a claim Pompeo rebuts with a reference to Eugene Rostow, former Dean of the Yale Law School and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs during the Johnson Administration. He was responsible for the draft of UNSCR 242, a foundation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Pompeo quotes Rostow, who stated in 1983 that “Israel has an unassailable legal right to establish settlements in the West Bank.”

Former Ambassador David Friedman writes in his book, Sledgehammer:

I was deeply grateful that 106 members of the House, led by Congressman Andy Levin of Michigan, wrote to Pompeo to condemn his decision. Without that letter, the record supporting the decision might have been incomplete insofar as some members of the Legal Department at State were reluctant  participants.. But the letter created a platform for a more fulsome response. [p. 165]

Hassan, Beinart and other defenders of Levin will of course continue to attempt to muddy the waters on the reaction against Levin's attempt to impose his leftwing politics on Israel.

But the fact remains that Andy Levin no more represented support of the Democratic Party for Israel than did the Israel-haters he found it convenient to ally himself with.

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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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Peter Beinart pretends antisemitism hasn't changed since 1944

One of the most important features of antisemitism is that it morphs over time to make Jews villains as circumstances change. 

Jew-haters of the 18th century - where Jews were primarily considered Christ-killers (or the Islamic equivalent of "killers of prophets")  - would not recognize the "scientific" antisemitism of Wilhelm Marr asserting that Jews were racially inferior and criminal. They would be mystified at the idea of the traditionally weak Jews in ghettoes being the Elders of Zion controlling the world. 

Jew-hatred is insidious because it changes with the times, to claim that Jews are guilty of whatever the worst crimes of the age are. Today, that would be racism, violation of human rights, white supremacy, and colonialism.

But to Peter Beinart, in a discussion in Germany last month, antisemitism is exactly the same as it was in the 1940s, as he defines it here:

"By antisemitism I mean a kind of classical definition that says you don't like Jews because they're Jews, right, you say they have too much power, they stick together too much, you know, they're trying to rip everyone off, whatever."

As a master propagandist, Peter first frames the argument before he makes it. But he uses a false framework, and he knows it. He repeatedly says "classic antisemitism" because he knows that antisemitism does change, and today's antisemitism is as different from that of a hundred years ago as that one was from a hundred years before that. 

The examples that he uses are telling as well. Beinart doesn't mention that classical antisemitism also says that Jews enjoy killing Christian children, that they poison the wells of the non-Jews, that they control the world politically. But he doesn't want to mention those examples in his definition, because the audience might realize that modern antisemites on the Left say that the Jewish State enjoys killing Palestinian children, that Israel poisons Palestinian water supplies, and that Zionists control the Western world. 

Modern antisemites accuse the Jewish state of everything the "classic" antisemites accused Jews themselves of doing. Mentioning that fact would undercut Beinart's thesis that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism.

His absurd extrapolation that Zionists are themselves antisemitic itself fits the pattern of how antisemitism morphs. After the Holocaust, antisemitism became a major social crime. So of course, anyone who supports Israel must be guilty of that crime, because Zionists and Israelis are guilty of every social crime, by the Left's definition. Beinart then twists reality to ensure that Israel is guilty of antisemitism just as Jews have been guilty of every social crime in history. 

Beinart's selective definition of antisemitism is itself proof that anti-Zionism is modern antisemitism.

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