12/12 Links Pt2: The Apartheid Libel to Destroy Israel; Teaching Terror to Tots - reevaluating the Oslo Accords; Collier: An open letter to Gary Lineker

From Ian:

PMW: Teaching Terror to Tots - reevaluating the Oslo Accords

Many observers have been puzzled why the 1993 Oslo peace accords did not lead to peace but precisely the opposite. Sporadic Palestinian terror attacks prior to 1993 were replaced by repeated Palestinian terror waves murdering more than 2,000 Israelis. PMW’s report "Teaching Terror to Tots” is the key to understanding the post-Oslo terror enigma.

Palestinian Media Watch as been documenting official PA/Fatah ideologies, policies and messages disseminated through every framework they control for over 20 years and everything that PMW has exposed has raised questions about the sincerity of the PA/Fatah in the peace process. PMW recently published a report on Fatah’s Waed magazine for children ages 6 – 15, covering every issue published over the last eight years. The messages for Palestinian children spread through Waed confirm that the PA/Fatah end game was, and remains, Israel’s destruction and Israel’s replacement by “Palestine”.

The hundreds of examples in the 70 page report show that through Waed, Fatah – that has dominated and controlled the PA since its creation – has been teaching Palestinian children that:
“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” after “the Zionist invaders will go to the garbage can of history” because “the period of Zionism will eventually pass.” As a last step all “the Jewish settlers in Palestine will disappear.”

Israel must be destroyed because Jews/Israelis are:
“Zionist thieves who stole our land”… “Jewish invaders”… “foreigners from all ends of the earth who did not know Palestine and did not live in it – neither them nor their forefathers.”

Since Jews have no rights, Palestinians have the “right to wage an armed struggle to take back its stolen homeland.” This is the only PA/Fatah path, because “the liberation of Palestine will only be achieved through armed struggle.”

In short, the PA/Fatah’s message to children is that Israel was created by theft, its continued existence is a crime, and its destruction via the armed struggle is justified and inevitable. The children who read Waed are taught that they have the responsibility to bring about the future world without Israel.

The PA/Fatah education that is documented in the report is the driving force behind the current Palestinian terror wave that is led by Palestinian youth who have been raised on these hate messages. If no action is taken to combat the PA/Fatah education to hate and terror, it will continue to be the driving force for Palestinian violence for generations.

PMW’s exposure of the PA/Fatah messages through Waed should have far-reaching political implications. Attitudes towards the Oslo Accords and policy towards the PA must be reassessed based on the reality of what the PA is and not the illusion of what the international community imagined it would be. If Palestinian terror is to be stopped and stability returned to Israel, the newly exposed PA/Fatah teachings must be the impetus for a new attitude towards the PA.

PMW is releasing this report at the GPO’s Christian Media Conference in Jerusalem.

To read PMW's "Teaching Terror to Tots" click here.

The following is an Executive Summary of "Teaching Terror to Tots":

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Apartheid Libel to Destroy Israel

Recently... however, with the UNHRC's persistent allegations that Israel is an apartheid state, that label is being pushed even further in an apparent effort to make it stick. The complicity of recent reports from NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch appear to be trying to ensure that their libel will be complete.

The campaign emboldens the radicals among the Palestinians, including the Iranian-backed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), whose declared goal is to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamist state.

Terrorist groups such as Hamas and PIJ are undoubtedly happy to see non-Arabs and non-Muslims -- and even ostensible human rights organizations -- join their effort to falsely depict Israel as an apartheid state.

Former UNHRC chief Navi Pillay, despite extensive evidence of massive anti-Israel bias, was recently appointed to chair the UNHRC's first and only open-ended Commission of Inquiry.

Basically, [the New York Times] is saying that although the two countries cannot be equated, the comparison is being forced and twisted into place for the sake of furthering an alternate agenda which has little to do with the facts on the ground.

Israel's founding charter pledges to safeguard the equal rights of all residents: "... It will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."

Among many of South Africa's Apartheid laws, the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act effectively stripped all Blacks of their South African citizenship and of the right to vote.

Israeli Arabs, however, have full citizenship, including the right to vote and to public demonstration. They are represented in all levels of government, including positions as members of Knesset (parliament), in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and as Supreme Court justices. Israeli Arabs hold positions as high-ranking officers in the Israel Defense Forces, including that of major-general in the Central Command.

David Collier: An open letter to Gary Lineker

Last week a Palestinian tried to attacked Israelis in the car. He then stabbed a nearby border guard in the face. When he lost a struggle to steal a weapon he was shot and killed. A UN spokesperson reduced it to a ‘scuffle’. This vile rewriting of history was then repeated in the Guardian newspaper.

There is no correlation remaining whatsoever between the event (the terror attack) and the way it was reported (an innocent man was shot). It is the lie that goes viral. Raw propaganda packaged for the international virtue signallers.

Why on earth would you want to get involved in this?

Spreading myths empowers the extremists. It perpetuates the conflict and pushes peace further away. Nobody in their right mind seriously believes those people attacking Israelis want a two state solution. Nor do those putting up illegal structures. They have deliberately created a battlefield (it doesn’t actually exist unless they come out to confront Israelis).

All this ends with people on the outside, people such as yourself – making it all worse by promoting the propaganda.

So please, can you virtue signal at someone else’s expense – and leave what you do not understand alone.

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11/16 Links Pt1: Glick: The Biden administration weaponizes the FBI against Israel; Stray missiles: What Ukraine, Poland can learn from Israel; Dershowitz says US-Israel ties could reach 'doomsday scenario'

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: The Biden administration weaponizes the FBI against Israel

Even if the crisis passes quickly, the incoming government needs to understand that so long as the Democrats are in power, the next crisis is just a progressive rally away. As the midterm elections demonstrated, today, there are two Americas, not one. The Republican America, led by the likes of Sen. Cruz, Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump, is the best friend Israel has ever had.

The Democratic America hates Israel and the Republicans. They view both as fundamentally illegitimate.

This state of affairs, where one America loves Israel and the other hates it, is unlikely to change for the better in the foreseeable future. The Abu Akleh affair makes clear that moderates in the Democratic Party—like Biden himself—have transferred policymaking power regarding Israel to their all-but openly anti-Semitic progressive base.

What awaits us will be even worse than what Israel suffered with Barack Obama. We can expect to see the Democrats’ America backing arrest warrants of IDF soldiers and commanders. Democrats can be expected to cut off critical arms supplies. We can expect them to do in public what they are already doing in private—namely funding Palestinian terrorists. We can expect them to support economic boycotts of Israel and to enable the passage of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN Security Council.

To contend with the threat posed by the Democrats’ America, the incoming government must move to swiftly diminish Israel’s strategic dependence on the United States. We should end our receipt of U.S. military assistance. We should move production lines for critical platforms, including Iron Dome missiles, from the United States to Israel, regardless of the economic cost. And we should withdraw the outgoing government’s offer to allow the United States to fund the completion of our military laser program. Full ownership and control over the critical program should be restored to Israel’s military industries, again, regardless of the cost.

Apparently, the FBI informed Israel that it was opening the probe a few weeks ago—presumably before the Nov. 1 election. Gantz and outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid hid the news from the public, for obvious reasons. For a year and a half, they had insisted that Netanyahu was the cause of Israel’s troubled relations with the Democrats. The Biden administration’s probe of our soldiers makes clear that this was never the case. Netanyahu was right to stand up to Obama, and he will be right to stand up to Biden. Israel cannot be beholden to those who view our boys and girls as murderers for defending our lives and our nation. We can only defy them, even when they are former friends in Washington.

FBI has a double standard for Abu Akleh, Israeli victims - comment

What is behind Washington's double standard?
In a way, this fits in with the way the Biden administration has treated other allies in the Middle East, as though the accidental killing of someone caught in a crossfire is akin to the horrific murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi, whose body was dismembered and dissolved in acid, ordered by the Saudi leadership. The Washington Post also recently published details of a leaked National Intelligence Council report on Emirati efforts to influence US policy. It must be said that those countries are not democracies and the actions Washington is criticizing were not followed with cooperation and transparency, in contrast with Israel following Abu Akleh’s death.

Some have talked about it being a shot across the bow to prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu as he’s expected to form a far-right government, though Washington is expressing dissatisfaction at events that occurred under a government to the left of Netanyahu.

Another argument made is that this is about US politics. The midterms just took place and US President Joe Biden may feel freer to take more controversial actions than he did before. The left-wing of the Democratic Party pushed for a probe of Abu Akleh’s killing and, as Netanyahu says in his recently-published memoir, Biden professed to feeling pressure on Israel issues in what is “not Scoop Jackson’s Democratic Party.”

US Senator Ted Cruz certainly sees it that way, saying the FBI investigation “underscores how corrupt and blatantly politicized the Justice Department has become, and how entirely beholden to the radical left-wing Squad Democrats really are. This administration has spent its time in office weaponizing the DOJ to target their political enemies as a matter of policy, and now they have allowed that tactic to bleed into their obsession with undermining our Israeli allies.”

Whether it’s about the Biden administration’s moralistic approach to the Middle East or about Democratic Party dynamics, this just contributes to a broader sense that the FBI has used and abused as a political tool in recent years.

The Abu Akleh investigation announcement happened to take place in the week in which Commentary released an issue with a cover story by intelligence reporter Eli Lake about how the FBI is desperately in need of reform.

“FBI officials routinely deceive not only the public but also the institutions designed to protect the public from FBI overreach. Agents lie to supervisors. Supervisors lie to judges. FBI directors mislead Congress. And almost no one is ever punished,” Lake wrote, following it up with a litany of recent abuses.

FBI leaders who leaked to the press and went after certain politicians are feted, Lake pointed out, asking: “What lesson will others draw from this, except that there are no consequences for abusing authority against the right political targets?”

JPost Editorial: Would the FBI come to different conclusion of Shireen Abu Akleh's death?

We are dismayed by the news that the FBI is launching an investigation into the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin on May 11. Israeli officials confirmed media reports on Monday that the US Justice Department had recently informed Israel’s Justice Ministry of the move, and they also voiced their firm opposition to the probe.

Israel conducted several thorough investigations into the circumstances of Abu Akleh’s killing, with the IDF concluding in September that she was most likely killed in “unintentional fire” from an Israeli soldier who did not realize she was a journalist. The US even participated in one of the investigations, including examining the bullet that the Palestinians said was the fatal one. The results of all the investigations were shared with the US, and particularly with the State Department.

Why then does the US administration believe that a new FBI investigation is necessary? As Defense Minister Benny Gantz succinctly said in a statement, the FBI probe is a grave error and there is no reason for Israel to cooperate with its investigation, even though it has nothing to hide.

“The decision taken by the US Justice Department to conduct an investigation into the tragic passing of Shireen Abu Akleh is a mistake,” Gantz said. “The IDF has conducted a professional, independent investigation, which was presented to American officials with whom the case details were shared. I have delivered a message to US representatives that we stand by the IDF’s soldiers, and that we will not cooperate with an external investigation.”

Just heartbreaking 💔

At funeral of Michael Ladygin, father of two, who was murdered by Palestinian terrorist in Ariel yesterday, his wife in tears says:

“My husband loved Israel, he wanted to live here. I hope no other family ever enters this circle of bereavement.” pic.twitter.com/N9CdmOlOVz

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) November 16, 2022

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11/13 Links: Palestinian Resolution at UN Is a Desperate Step; Major Terror Attack in Turkey, 6 Dead, 53 Wounded"; Chappelle: 'Not a crazy thing to think' that Jews run Hollywood

From Ian:

Palestinian Resolution at UN Is a Desperate Step

The worst-case scenario – a future declaration by the ICJ stating that Judea and Samaria are being annexed – will not be a blow to Israel, but a headache at most. The countries that are already hostile to the Jewish state do not need a court to justify their approach. Similarly, the states that understand the situation or support Israel will not change their policies because of a political opinion disguised as international law. There have been plenty of these over the years and we are still standing.

Saturday's vote at the UN makes it clear who is on our side and who is against us. Sixty-nine countries opposed the measure, which is not a few. These include the United States, Germany, Canada, and Australia, where left-wing governments have been in power in recent years. Italy stood by us for the first time as well, as did others.

Most other Western countries abstained. Those who supported the Palestinians were mostly Arab, Muslim, or African countries, with one notable exception: Ukraine, which continues to put sticks in our wheels at the UN while asking Israel for favors in reality. Strange.

And speaking of reality, it is not yet certain whether the ICJ will even publish the opinion that the UN is requesting. The whole world knows that the conflict is political, not legal. With this very rationale, many countries have turned to the ICC requesting not to advance Palestinian claims against Israel. By the looks of things, those requests were convincing. The process is stuck there, which is a good thing.

In any case, even if such an opinion is published, it will take years before it is written. So early in the game, no one knows what it will say, much less what its effect will be on the world. But it doesn't mean we can bury our heads in the sand.

The Palestinian appeal to the ICJ is a desperate step taken by Mahmoud Abbas and his people in order to internationalize the conflict. This process started more than a decade ago, which is when-then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not counteract.

Abbas learned that he is not held responsible for the diplomatic battles he starts with Israel, which is why he has since escalated by appealing to a long list of international institutions.

It was a dire mistake. Israel has and has had a lot of leverage against Abbas and the senior PA officials. There is no reason, for example, for him to fly to meet with leaders around the globe as long as he seeks to undermine Israel's status. The same goes for other senior PA members as well.

These are the first tools in the toolbox and they are now at the disposal of the new government. They will have to use them until the final vote in the General Assembly in a month. In addition, the new foreign and defense ministers – when appointed – will have to make it clear to the US that it must put limits on the Palestinian Authority. The administration is very afraid of its disintegration. It must therefore contribute to returning the demon attempting to internationalize the conflict straight back into the bottle.

Lapid calls to exact price from Palestinians for UN ‘occupation’ vote

Israel is preparing a security and diplomatic response to the Palestinians for their UN resolution calling on the International Court of Justice to consider the illegality of Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank, Prime Minister Yair Lapid said on Sunday.

Lapid instructed the government to prepare a “security and diplomatic toolbox” to respond.

“The way to resolve the conflict does not pass through the halls of the UN or other international bodies, and the Palestinians’ move at the UN will have consequences,” the prime minister warned.

The UN General Assembly Fourth Committee voted 98-17 on Friday to ask the ICJ to consider whether the IDF’s ongoing presence in Judea and Samaria, east Jerusalem and the Golan can be considered de-facto annexation after 56 years. The resolution, officially proposed by Nicaragua because “Palestine” is a UN observer, questions the status of Jerusalem, ignoring Jewish ties to its holiest site, the Temple Mount, and referring to it as al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary). The resolution must be approved in another, full UN General Assembly vote before it goes to The Hague.

Israel slams UN panel decision on West Bank probe

Israeli leaders are decrying a UN decision to seek a legal opinion from the International Court of Justice on Israel's activity in the West Bank.

Former ambassador Daniel Shek joins us to discuss how Israel will approach the resolution, and the countries that voted in favor, including Ukraine.

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Universities Paper Over The New Exclusion Of Jews On Campus -- Just Like In 1930's Poland (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Just two weeks ago, I wrote about how in May last year, the violence by Hamas terrorists resulted in increased antisemitic attacks on American Jews. In its report, the US Commission on Civil Rights put the anti-Zionism of protesters in context:

The Commission recognizes that individuals have a right to be critical of Israel and the Israeli government; however, anti-Semitic bigotry disguised as anti-Zionism is no less morally deplorable than any other form of hate. [emphasis added]

It's not clear if many noticed this point, that anti-Zionism can be just another form of antisemitism. Universities, for their part, appeared to miss the point entirely -- and still do.

In 2019, as a result of a lawsuit brought by the Lawfare Project alleging discrimination, San Francisco State University agreed to issue a statement affirming

it understands that, for many Jews, Zionism is an important part of their identity.

This apparent landmark development did not stop the president of SFSU the following year from defending the invitation of the terrorist hijacker Leila Khaled to speak there on the grounds of "academic freedom" and "free speech" -- while noting in passing the importance of Zionism to Jewish identity. 

The required statement was no magic formula and the words had no effect. There have been no attempts to bring similar lawsuits to encourage recognition of Zionism at other university campuses.

Instead, the situation on campus gets even worse as anti-Jewish groups have gone from toxic speech against Jews to attempts at ostracizing Jews on campus.

Here are 2 examples in the news.

University of Vermont

The Department of Education Office for Civil Rights opened a formal investigation into claims of discrimination and harassment of Jews on the University of Vermont campus:

o  May 12, 2021, in response to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza, UVM Empowering Survivors posted on Instagram that it would “follow the same policy with zionists that we follow with those trolling or harassing others: blocked,” going on to say that “we will not be engaging in conversation about . . . Zionism.”

o  On May 1, 2021, UVM Revolutionary Socialist Union book club's first Instagram post stated that “No racism, racial chauvinism, predatory behavior, homophobia, transphobia, Zionism, or bigotry and hate speech of any kind will be tolerated.” The complaint further stated that the club’s bylaws “require every RSU member to pledge ‘NO’ to Zionism.”

o  On Sept. 24, 2021, a group of “rowdy, intoxicated students” reportedly vandalized the university’s Hillel building for close to 40 minutes by throwing rocks at the upper, dorm portion of the building, and hurled “items with a sticky substance” against the building’s back. UVM administrators did not categorize the attack as a “bias incident,” even though it took place where a large number of Jewish students were known to be.

o  The complaint also named a university teaching assistant who repeatedly targeted student supporters of Israel on social media. In a series of tweets on April 5, 2021, she wrote: 

is it unethical for me, a TA, to not give zionists credit for participation??? i feel its good and funny, -5 points for going on birthright in 2018, -10 points for posting a pic with a tank in the Golan heights, -2 points just cuz i hate ur vibe in general.

The following month, the TA wrote: 

“the next step is to make zionism and zionist rhetoric politically unthinkable,” (adding that it should be) “worthy of private and public condemnation, likened to historical and contemporary segregationist movements.”

University of Vermont Responds

Suresh V. Garimella, president of the university posted a denial on the university website and AP summarized his response:

After investigating the complaint made Sept. 30. 2021, that two groups excluded from membership students who supported Israel as the homeland for Jewish people, the university determined the groups were not recognized student organizations, received no university support and were not bound by the university’s policies governing student organizations.

The university also investigated allegations that an undergraduate teaching assistant made anti-Semitic remarks and had threatened to lower the grades of Jewish students. The university determined that no grades were lowered and no student reported they had been discriminated against.

Finally, after learning that rocks had been thrown at a campus building where Jewish students lived, police determined small rocks were thrown at the building to get the attention of a friend, and there was no evidence it was motivated by antisemitic bias, Garimella said. [emphasis added]

Garimella missed the point, claiming everything was fine and that the real problem was the investigation itself which "has painted our community in a patently false light." 

The action that the university president took with the 2 groups is laughable:

To ensure an inclusive environment within recognized UVM student organizations, student leaders were reminded of university policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of religion, national origin, or any other protected category. [emphasis added]

There was no condemnation of the exclusion by the groups. Instead, they were "reminded" of the university policies -- policies that Garimella claims the groups don't have to follow anyway.

In his online response, he dismisses the posts by the TA, claiming:

The university took prompt action to ensure that the objectionable statements did not adversely impact students in the classroom and further, to perform a thorough review to ensure all grades were awarded on a non-discriminatory basis. [emphasis added]

So Garimella claims that the comments by the TA are irrelevant as long as grades were not altered. He argues that the hate expressed and the discrimination encouraged by the TA "did not adversely impact students in the classroom" as long as the threats were not carried out.

Garimella's description of the Hillel incident, claiming it was an innocent attempt to get someone's attention fails to address the allegation reported by The Lewis D. Brandeis Center that

When one student whose window had been pelted called out asking the perpetrators to stop, one of the students responsible for the rock throwing shouted, “Are you Jewish?”

Garimella's insistence that the intent was innocent is also contradicted by the claim that a sticky substance was put on the wall of the building.

University of California, Berkeley

The Jewish Journal reports that Berkeley Develops Jewish-Free Zones:

Nine different law student groups at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law, my own alma mater, have begun this new academic year by amending bylaws to ensure that they will never invite any speakers that support Israel or Zionism. And these are not groups that represent only a small percentage of the student population. They include Women of Berkeley Law, Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, Law Students of African Descent and the Queer Caucus. [emphasis added]

The article is by Kenneth L. Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center. He describes this current development as going beyond the anti-Jewish discrimination that has long been proliferating on college campuses. Instead of toxic speech being aimed at Jews who stand up for their pro-Israel identity, now Jews themselves are being targeted on campus.

In response to the claim that these groups are allowed to exclude pro-Israel Jews as an expression of the groups' free speech, Marcus quotes Berkeley's dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, who said that the exact opposite is true because these groups have deliberately included anti-Zionist bylaws which themselves limit the free speech of Zionist students.

Marcus goes further, writing that discriminatory conduct -- excluding students who support Israel -- is not protected free speech:

While hate speech is often constitutionally protected, such conduct may violate a host of civil rights laws, such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is not always the case that student groups have the right to exclude members in ways that reflect hate and bigotry. In Christian Legal Society [CLS] v. Martinez, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of another Bay Area University of California law school, Hastings College of the Law, to require student groups to accept all students regardless of status or beliefs. Specifically, the Court blessed Hastings’ decision to require Christian groups to accept gay members. [emphasis added]

A Washington Post article at the time quotes Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who made a comment on the case that seems prescient today:

"Although the First Amendment may protect CLS's discriminatory practices off campus, it does not require a public university to validate or support them," Stevens wrote separately.

CLS forbids those who engage in "unrepentant homosexual conduct," Stevens said, but the same argument could be made from groups that "may exclude or mistreat Jews, blacks, and women -- or those who do not share their contempt for Jews, blacks, and women. [emphasis added]

A university has no obligation under free speech to support a group that discriminates and excludes Jews who support Israel.

University of California, Berkeley Responds

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky was widely quoted as making the point that under the exclusionary criteria of these groups he himself would be banned from the groups as well as  90% of his Jewish students.

Yet despite this, he defended the groups against Marcus.

Chemerinsky claims that the Law School has an "all-comers" policy, meaning that every student group and all student-organized events must be open to all students. He claims he knows of no case where this has been violated or that Jewish students have been discriminated against.

He goes on to complain that Marcus exaggerates the extent of the exclusion of pro-Israel speakers:

But what [Marcus] does not mention is that only a handful of student groups out of over 100 at Berkeley Law did this. He also does not mention that in a letter to the leaders of student groups I expressed exactly his message: excluding speakers on the basis of their viewpoint is inconsistent with our commitment to free speech and condemning the existence of Israel is a form of anti-Semitism.

Finally, it is important to recognize that law student groups have free speech rights, including to express messages that I and others might find offensive.

Like Garimella of UVM, Chemerisnsky plays down the impact of the anti-Zionist actions taken by student groups on his campus.

In response to his numbers game that only a relatively few groups have an exclusionary policy, Marcus responds:

Would it be okay for only 5% or 10% of the campus to be segregated? What percentage of the Berkeley campus should be open to all? Shouldn’t it be 100%? And what is the right number of doors that should be closed to students of any race or ethnicity: isn’t it zero?

On Chemerisnsky's claim that these student groups have a free speech right to exclude Zionists, Marcus draws a key distinction:

Excluding Zionists is not like excluding Republicans and environmentalists. It is not just viewpoint discrimination. If a Democratic club amended their bylaws to prohibit Republican speakers from appearing before them, we could accept their right to do so. We might regret that they are restricting the possibility of dialogue. We might prefer the approach of those law student groups that seek balanced presentations, in order to advance civil dialogue and promote learning. But we wouldn’t consider this to be a civil rights issue.

When persons are excluded on the basis of their ethnic or ancestral identity, however, we must respond differently. [emphasis added]

University indifference to the increasingly virulent exclusion of Jews on campus is compounded by the spread of this new attempt to ostracize Jews to other universities:

Last month, the Brandeis Center and JOC filed a similar complaint with OCR [Office of Civil Rights] on behalf of two Jewish State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz students who were also kicked out of a sexual assault awareness group and then cyberbullied, harassed and threatened, over their Jewish and Israeli identities. Currently OCR is investigating complaints filed by the Brandeis Center against the University of Illinois, Brooklyn College, and University of Southern California (USC). And the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating a Brandeis Center employment discrimination complaint of anti-Semitism in the DEI program at Stanford University.

 

1930's Poland 

Rafael Medoff writes about a historical analogy to the exclusion of Jews at Berkeley in an article on Berkeley's Version of "Ghetto Benches":

In many universities in pre-World War II Poland, antisemitic faculty and students humiliated Jewish students by forcing them to sit in the back of classrooms. Those areas came to be known as the “ghetto benches.” In some instances, the benches were marked with the first letter of the name of the Jewish student group on campus—a kind of precursor to the Nazi practice (first instituted in German-occupied Poland, in fact) of identifying Jews via a badge or i.d. card bearing a Star of David and the letter “J” or the word “Jude.”

If there were insufficient seats in the back of the Polish classrooms, the Jewish students were made to stand, even if there were empty seats elsewhere in the room. Jewish students who ignored the regulation were often assaulted, and those who boycotted classes in protest were severely penalized. [emphasis added]

In a 1964 article in The Jewish Quarterly Review, "The Battle of the Ghetto Benches," H. Rabinowicz writes about Endek -- the fascist anti-Semitic National Democratic party of Poland. Endek influenced the creation of an anti-Jewish "Green Ribbon" League and pushed for an "Aryan paragraph" that would limit membership and rights to members of the "Aryan race," thus excluding Jews.

Many students succumbed to Endek influence. Warsaw's anti-Jewish "Green Ribbon" League developed rapidly. The nationalists proclaimed "A Week Without Jews", and the Aryan paragraph figured in the new Statute of the Warsaw Polytechnic. It placed the Jews outside the student Code of Honour as persons with whom non-Jews were to have no dealings and who could not even be challenged to duels. [p.154]

Back then, white supremacy was used to exclude Jews on campus.
Today, Jews are accused of being white supremacists.

Anti-Jewish student groups are not picky about the excuses they use to ostracize Jews. 

After years of disrupting Jewish and Israeli speakers, and pushing the idea of boycotts, it was only a matter of time before student groups on campus would gravitate towards one more tactic that was successfully implemented in the furthering of Jew-hatred.

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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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Poland demands compensation from Germany for the Jews burned alive - by Poles

Last week, Poland demanded compensation from Germany for its estimates for World War II losses it estimated at $1.32 trillion.

Jan Grabowski, an expert on the Holocaust in Poland, discovered that some of these demands were to pay Poland for killing its own Jews.

On the 83rd anniversary of the outbreak of World War II last week, a three-volume report was published entitled “Report on Losses Suffered by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation during World War II 1939–1945.” The report was written by a parliamentary investigative committee established in 2017 to assess damages from Germany for Polish losses during the war....

However, the report ascribes to Germans the murder of Jews carried out by their Polish neighbors without the involvement of Germans. Canadian-Jewish historian of Polish origin, Prof. Jan Grabowski, discovered this when reading the third volume of the report, which includes a list of 9,292 places where Germans committed atrocities against Poles in occupied Poland between 1939 and 1945. According to the report, the list is intended to “commemorate the Polish citizens who were killed by Nazi Germany in World War II.”

Grabowski, who called the report “shameful," and a “rewriting of the history of the Holocaust,” discovered that one of the sites listed in the report is the town of Jedwabne, where it states that 1,650 Jews were murdered. The pogrom there, carried out in July of 1941, is well documented through historical research based on archival material and eyewitness accounts.

According to the research, the pogrom was carried out by Poles exclusively, without German involvement. The precise number of Jews murdered in this event is not known but is believed to be a few hundred. Beaten and threatened, they were led by Poles to a local barn, where they were burned alive.

Prof. Grabowski was surprised to find the victims of Jedwabne in a report meant to deal with German crimes against the Poles in World War II. Writing on Facebook, Grabowski said he was "dismayed" that the "Polish authorities would actually ask the Germans for compensation" for the Jews murdered by Poles in 1941. "To say that the whole situation is grotesque is to say nothing at all," he wrote.

Along with requesting reparations for Poles' murder of the Jews of Jebwabne, the new report includes other sites where Jews were also killed by Poles exclusively. The list includes the murder of Jews in the towns of Radzilow, Bzura and Szczuczyn, all in the summer of 1941.

Grabowski calls the inclusion of these towns in the report “grotesque,” but his claims against the writers of the report are more significant. He bases his arguments on the fact that in the calculation of Poles murdered and killed during World War II, the Poles also include 3 million Polish Jews, among whom he says about 200,000 were murdered with the help of or directly by Poles. What kind of restitution does Poland want from the Germans for 200,000 Jews murdered by the Poles or with Polish participation?" he asked in Polish on Twitter.

The tweet drew angry responses, with comments calling him “Jewish bastard” and “Jewish swine,” among other things.

Poland has been engaged in historical revisionism about the Holocaust in recent years, denying Polish complicity with the Holocaust and allowing historians who documented it to be sued.

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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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Three minutes of color film footage of the Jews of Nasielsk, Poland, on the eve of the Holocaust (video)

In January, The New York Times wrote a story about a new documentary about the discovery and preservation of a remarkable color home movie.

Glenn Kurtz found the film reel in a corner of his parents’ closet in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., in 2009. It was in a dented aluminum canister.

Florida’s heat and humidity had nearly solidified the celluloid into a mass “like a hockey puck,” Kurtz said. But someone had transferred part of it onto VHS tape in the 1980s, so Kurtz could see what it contained: a home movie titled “Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England, 1938.”

The 16-millimeter film, made by his grandfather, David Kurtz, on the eve of World War II, showed the Alps, quaint Dutch villages and three minutes of footage of a vibrant Jewish community in a Polish town.

Old men in yarmulkes, skinny boys in caps, girls with long braids. Smiling and joking. People pour through the large doors of a synagogue. There’s some shoving in a cafe and then, that’s it. The footage ends abruptly.

Kurtz, nevertheless, understood the value of the material as evidence of Jewish life in Poland just before the Holocaust. It would take him nearly a year to figure it out, but he discovered that the footage depicted Nasielsk, his grandfather’s birthplace, a town about 30 miles northwest of Warsaw that some 3,000 Jews called home before the war.

Fewer than 100 would survive it.

Now, the Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter has used the fragmentary, ephemeral footage to create “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a 70-minute feature film that helps to further define what and who were lost.

It isn't so easy to find the actual footage as a whole, but I found a lower-resolution version with some added background music. 

The kids are excited, making faces, jumping into the view, even hitting each other. Men and women help their elderly parents down the stairs of the synagogue. It is all utterly unremarkable except that nearly all of them would be gone within a few years. 

This is a rare view of how dynamic and alive the Jews of pre-war Europe were, and how many distinct worlds were lost in the Holocaust.

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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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01/08 Links Pt2: Netanyahu: I won’t let settlements be uprooted in any diplomatic plan; Pres. Trump: No Lives Lost; Iran ‘Appears To Be Standing Down’; Court Upholds Anti-BDS Law in State of Arizona

From Ian:

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Netanyahu: I won’t let settlements be uprooted in any diplomatic plan

Settlements will not be evacuated in any peace plan while Benjamin Netanyahu is prime minister, he vowed on Wednesday amid talk that the Trump administration may present its peace plan within weeks.

“I will not let any settlements be uprooted in any diplomatic plan. This idea of ethnic cleansing...It won’t happen,” Netanyahu said at the Kohelet Forum’s conference on the US decision that settlements are not illegal.

His remarks came as diplomatic sources say the Trump administration is strongly considering releasing its plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians in the coming weeks, before the March 2 Knesset election.

“There is a window of opportunity. It opened, but it could close,” Netanyahu added, warning of “weak leadership” that will “hit rewind,” in an apparent reference to his election rival Blue and White leader Benny Gantz.

Netanyahu expounded on Jewish rights to live in Judea and Samaria, pointing to its anchoring in legal documents from the San Remo Conference and the League of Nations.

“There was no West Bank separate from the rest of the land. It was seen as the heart of the land. We never lost our right to live in Judea and Samaria. The only thing we lost temporarily was the ability to exercise the right,” Netanyahu explained.

PM Netanyahu: "Israel is Completely Beside the United States"

Israel's caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised US President Donald Trump for authorizing the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the powerful commander of Iran's Quds force. In his speech at a summit in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said Soleimani was behind deaths of "countless" innocents and sowed "fear, and misery, and anguish" -- and was planning to do even worse.

Pompeo 'disavows' Carter-era anti-settlement policy

The US rejects a 1978 memo determining that Israeli settlements in the West Bank violate international law, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday in a video statement to the Kohelet Forum’s conference on his settlement policy.

Pompeo said the US is “disavowing the deeply flawed" the Carter-era memorandum, written by then-State Department Legal Adviser Herbert Hansell, which called all Israeli settlements beyond the 1949 armistice lines to be illegal.

This goes a step further than Pompeo’s statement in November that the US “no longer recognize Israeli settlements as per se inconsistent with international law.”

“It’s important to speak the truth that the facts lead us to, and that is what we have done,” Pompeo said in his video message. “We are recognizing that settlements do not inherently violate international law.”

As such, he added, the US is returning to a more “balanced” policy, “advancing the cause of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Professor Eugene Kontorovich of the Kohelet Forum said: “For decades, the obscure Carter-era memo was used as justification for anti-Israel policies...Secretary Pompeo’s statement makes clear the US’s wholesale rejection of the legal theory that holds that international law restricts Israeli Jews from moving into areas from which Jordan had ethnically cleansed them in 1949.”

Celebrating “Pompeo Doctrine” on legality of Israeli settlements with Psagot ⁦@SecPompeo⁩ wine at ⁦@KoheletForum⁩ conference, with ⁦@IsraeliPM⁩ ⁦@USAmbIsrael⁩ ⁦@AmbDermer⁩. pic.twitter.com/RhdxPNRcic

— Eugene Kontorovich (@EVKontorovich) January 8, 2020

Bennett: Area C of West Bank belongs to us, we’re waging a battle for it

Israel is waging a “real battle” against the Palestinians for control of Area C of the West Bank, Defense Minister Naftali Bennett said on Wednesday, as he declared “officially" that the territory belongs to Israel.

“Our objective is that within a short amount of time, and we will work for it, we will apply [Israeli] sovereignty to all of Area C, not just the settlements, not just this bloc or another,” Bennett told the Kohelet Policy Forum in Jerusalem.

Bennett, who heads the New Right party, added that he intended to make that demand part of his coalition agreement to enter the new government after the elections.

The second goal, Bennett said, was to ensure through the promotion of settlement construction to ensure that within a decade a million Jews will live in Judea and Samaria.

In the interim, Bennett said, “We are embarking on a real and immediate battle for the future of the Land of Israel and the future of Area C. It started a month ago and I am announcing it here today.”

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Don’t Send Your Children to Poland, Please (Judean Rose)

This year, when it came time for my son, the youngest of 12 children, to register for the class trip for Poland, I was ready. I sat Asher down for a talk and explained that he wasn’t going, that even if we had the money for such a trip, even if the school were to give him a full scholarship, he wasn’t going. I wasn’t going to allow my son to become a source of income for a country of antisemites.

And that was that.

Asher understood. More than that, he agreed. At 17, he is politically “woke.” He gets it.

This was before the whole business with Poland’s new legislation became big news. I didn’t need Poland to pass a law to understand which end was up. They don’t want us to connect Poland with the Holocaust? So fine, let us not send our children there to see the remnants of Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto.

So what if the Holocaust couldn’t have happened without Germany, without the Nazis?

Does that whitewash the long history of Polish Jew hatred, the pogroms?

Does it make Poland pure and innocent compared to Bulgaria and Denmark, that did so much to help the Jews?

So what if Poles were killed, too. This too, does not erase the antisemitism that Poles imbibe with their mothers’ milk.

Moreover, why, of all countries, should the Jewish State be propping up Poland’s economy with these trips that have become a rite of passage for Israeli high school students? We’re talking some 30,000 children, spending at the very least, a few thousand shekels each for this “privilege.”

To my mind, this is one thing we can do: not support people who hate us. Just as we shouldn’t be using Israeli tax money to help the PA pay stipends to terrorists who have spilled Jewish blood.

It is exactly the same thing. No reason to reward such people or even give them a living. The latest expressions of Polish antisemitism (see for instance: Antisemitic Images, Cartoons, Flood Polish Press as Holocaust Law Dispute Festers, Polish Jews Reel from Wave of Antisemitism Following Furur Over Country’s New Holocaust Law, Top Polish Educator Blames Jews for Communist Atrocities in Antisemitic Facebook Rant, Polish PM: There Were Jewish Perpetrators of the Holocaust) only serve to reinforce what I already knew in my marrow.

What of the people who say the experience of visiting Poland is moving, and a good way to teach the Holocaust?

I say hogwash. I never traveled there and I have an acute understanding of the Holocaust and so do my children. In fact, I’d say that boycotting the place is every bit as powerful a teacher as going there.

Which is why I was raised to check labels, to not buy items from Germany or Spain or from companies that are known to be owned by antisemites. I was proud to express my heritage in this manner. Always was. Even from a young age.

We are lucky enough to have survivors still among us. Let us bring them into the schools to give testimony to our Israeli children. Let us teach the children about the horrors through books and museums. It was enough for me, and it is enough for them.

A friend very involved in Holocaust education told me that my attitude only reinforces the antisemitic trope that Jews turn everything into a matter of money. My response? Do I really care if by refusing to spend money in their country, I look “Jewy” to the Poles??

I couldn’t care less.

Let me tell you a little story: some years ago, I studied my family tree. Politics were off-topic for all the genealogy forums so I started a little yahoo group for this purpose, for people who wanted to speak about Lithuanian politics, in particular as they pertain to the Jewish people. We weren’t a huge group but we had some really interesting members, for instance, the late Prof. Dov Levin, who was a partisan in Kaunas (Kovno) during the war, and who wrote hundreds of articles and at least 16 books on the subject of the Holocaust.

At the same time, I remained active in various genealogy groups, including one for those researching my ancestral shtetl of Wasiliski (Vashilishok), Belarus, in what used to be Lithuania. Our Vashilishok group was approached to clean up the centuries’ old cemetery, which was in a deplorable condition. It wouldn’t cost very much, we were told, since the locals could be hired dirt cheap to do the job. It would take a few weeks at most to get it done.

My maternal paternal great grandfather Haiman Kopelman in Egypt in 1914. He was born in Wasiliski Belarus.

One of our group was going out there anyway for a roots trip, so he took a look and reported back to us. It seems the locals had plowed under the Jewish cemetery, claiming they were preparing to build a strip mall there. But years had gone by, and nothing had been built. Instead, the residents were grazing their cattle in this spot.

Our landsman looked, but could not find a single legible fragment of stone, so thorough had been the destruction of our ancestors’ final resting place, now a place for cows to eat and crap.

We were essentially being asked to build a fence around the area, using local labor, to keep the cattle out, and to put up a sign marking the site as a Jewish cemetery.

As we discussed this issue in our forum, I found myself really not wanting to do this thing. I knew that more Lithuanian Jews had been murdered by Lithuanians than Nazis during the war. Why would I want to support their descendants? Not to mention, I’d seen recent photos of what used to be the Jewish matzoh factory and was now a school. Covered with antisemitic graffiti.

Nothing had changed.

I sought counsel from a local rabbi on behalf of our group. The rabbi saw nothing wrong with fencing off the cemetery. Nor did he find it to be something we must do. The ball was back in our court.

I was going to see Prof. Levin in his Jerusalem home on a different matter. I figured I might as well ask him what he thought. Prof. Levin’s entire family had been murdered in the Holocaust, including his twin sister. He was from the same country as my ancestors, and like me, had made Aliyah. I figured that if anyone could give us an informed opinion, a response touched with the pain of having lived through the Holocaust, it would be Prof. Levin.

I put my question to him. Prof. Levin said (with some vehemence), “Your ancestors would not want you to spend a single shekel on restoring that cemetery! Save your money and spend it in Israel on a suitable project, where it helps the Jewish people. This is what your ancestors would want you to do.”

I felt relieved and comforted to hear Prof. Levin say this. I knew that our collective conscience could now rest easy not doing this thing. We didn’t have to do it. Moreover, we should NOT do it.

We all of us contributed, instead, to a local project that spoke to us.

And that was the last of that subject.

Now you should know that a lot of pressure was brought to bear on us by the local Belarussian Jewish community to do this thing. But we said no.

And that is as it should be.

The trips to Poland by Israeli high school students must stop. Instead, let us invest our money in their education here in Israel. Because our ancestors would not have wanted us to be sending our youth to Poland. They would want us to be building our own country, the Jewish State, with all our might and resources.

One more small story: back in the 1970’s, it was the fad for Jews to bring blue jeans and matzoh to the Jews of Russia. The refuseniks, in dire straits, could sell the jeans on the black market and have money to live on. The matzoh was for them to eat on Pesach, something unobtainable in that black hole of repression. One couple came back from Russia to tell my youth group about their trip, how they knew their hotel room had been bugged, and how dangerous it had been.

I told my late great uncle, Morris A. Paul, all about it. Uncle Morris was president of the Pittsburgh ZOA for years on end, honorary vice president of the national Executive Committee of the ZOA, and on the national budget and finance committee of the ZOA. He also served on the national Executive Board of State of Israel Bonds. Hearing about this couple’s trip to Russia, Uncle Morris commented, “I don’t know why anyone would go to Russia. I was glad to leave.”

Uncle Morris sent all my cousins to Israel for their 16^th summers. He knew where he wanted to put his consumer dollars. Right in the hands of the State of Israel.

Morris A. Paul, or “Map” as he liked to be called, would never have financed a high school student’s trip to Poland, and he sure as shooting would have been downright irritated to hear about Israeli high school students traipsing off to Auschwitz.

This is something our children do not need. And it is something we should not do.

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