10/25 Links Pt2: The New Progressivism Makes No Room for Jews; How did a radical Islamist fool the West?; Adidas drops Kanye West

From Ian:

The New Progressivism Makes No Room for Jews

In 2016, as “intersectionality” escaped from academia to become a progressive buzzword—and came to to signify a doctrine that all just causes are linked and complementary—David L. Bernstein began to suspect that it was apt to be used against the Jews. As he pointed out in an article published that year, activists argued under the banner of intersectionality that anyone opposed to racism in the U.S. should also oppose the existence of Israel. He thought, however, that there was hope:
While I didn’t say so explicitly, I’d come to believe that the mainstream Jewish community needed to find a way to include the Jewish narrative in the intersectional matrix—to complicate it—so that Jews and Israel were not viewed as the perennial oppressors and Palestinians the perennial victims. Concerned about the growing backlash to my article, I used the opportunity [to participate in a panel discussion with some of my critics] to soften my stance on the topic, stating “I still have much to learn,” and that “intersectionality is a complex, interesting, and nuanced phenomenon that we need to understand, not just from the perspective of the pro-Israel community, but from its own perspective as well.”

Bernstein, at the time still president of the left-leaning Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), soon learned that there was little room for such a compromise position:
[In 2020], the JCPA pulled together a Zoom meeting for a coalition called Jews for Criminal Justice Reform, which included top Jewish criminal-justice activists from around the country. After an inspiring talk by Paul Fishman—a former federal attorney from New Jersey—on the need to end mass incarceration, we broke up into smaller groups to discuss next steps. A lawyer named Jared, the group facilitator for my breakout session, asked, “What do you all think our criminal-justice reform priorities ought to be?” Ariella, a young professional staffer from a Jewish civil-rights organization, interjected, “Before we talk about strategy, there’s a lot of internal work we have to do in the Jewish community. We need to recognize our complicity in white supremacy and ensure we have black Jews at the forefront of these efforts.”

More and more, that’s how it is now: a young staff person holding the work process hostage until we recite some prescribed litany of woke pieties. What, pray tell, did Ariella think all this self-reflection would do to help black people get out of being jailed for low-level drug charges? I suspect she didn’t have a clue. And as things turned out, our breakout session never discussed a single criminal-justice reform measure.

In short, Bernstein discovered that there is no room in this brand of progressive ideology to see Jews as anything but oppressors, and for Jews to do anything but proclaim their own imagined sins. This discovery is the subject of his newly published book, Woke Antisemitism.

How did a radical Islamist fool the West? - analysis

Many articles written about Qaradawi after his death emphasized his condemnation of al-Qaeda and ISIS and his moderate rulings permitting certain Western conduct for Muslims living as minorities in Western countries.

These articles portrayed him as many Westerners wanted to see him: a widely accepted authentic Islamic scholar who wanted to dialogue with the West and rejected violence.

However, the intelligence center noted that many of these articles left out that he helped shape “the concept of violent jihad,” especially justifying “carrying out terror attacks, including suicide bombing attacks, against Israeli citizens, the US forces in Iraq, and some of the Arab regimes.”

Qaradawi supported violent jihad and suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. He was a source of supreme religious authority for Hamas at a time when many Islamic scholars still prohibited suicide of any kind.

Qaradawi claimed that violence was a legitimate expression of the so-called “resistance” and that Israel was a militaristic society in which every civilian is a potential soldier, said the report.

His antisemitism was not limited to Israel, with the report saying he frequently expressed antisemitic statements worldwide and even issued a fatwa authorizing attacks on Jews around the world.

In that fatwa, “he claimed that there is no essential difference between Judaism and Zionism, and therefore every Jewish target equals an Israeli target,” according to the report.

‘The Squad’ urges Biden administration to negotiate ceasefire in Ukraine

30 Democratic US Congressmembers – most notably the young progressives who have become colloquially known as “The Squad” – penned a letter to President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday in which they ask the administration to avoid direct military conflict and attempt to bring Russia and Ukraine to a ceasefire.

“Given the catastrophic possibilities of nuclear escalation and miscalculation, which only increase the longer this war continues, we agree with your goal of avoiding direct military conflict as an overriding national-security priority,” the letter read. A call for diplomacy

The congress members noted the difficulties involved in a settlement, particularly with the issue of annexed territories in the east of Ukraine, though they also mentioned Biden’s commitment to end the war. While no concrete plan of action was presented in the letter, the congress members suggested that easing sanctions against Russia would be a natural step to take.

“Such a framework would presumably include incentives to end hostilities, including some form of sanctions relief, and bring together the international community to establish security guarantees for a free and independent Ukraine that are acceptable for all parties, particularly Ukrainians.”

“The alternative to diplomacy is a protracted war, with both its attendant certainties and catastrophic and unknowable risks,” the letter continues.

The signers of the letter also pointed to the food and commodity crises brought upon by the war as reasons to seek an end to the war. “Economists believe that if the situation in Ukraine is stabilized, some of the speculative concerns driving higher fuel costs will subside and likely lead to a drop in world oil prices.”

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Muslim clerics have always used Jerusalem as a political fatwa football

Yesterday I reported that the Mufti of Jerusalem issued a fatwa saying that UAE residents are “forbidden by law” to visit Al Aqsa.

Now a major Islamic scholar, former deputy at Al Azhar University, says that the Palestinian Mufti doesn’t know anything about Islamic law.

Dr. Abbas Shoman, a member of the Supreme Council of Senior Scholars of Al Azhar Al Sharif, expressed his astonishment over a fatwa forbidding Emiratis’ prayers at Al Aqsa Mosque, issued by the Mufti of Jerusalem after the announcement of the UAE-Israel peace treaty.

Dr. Shoman said: “I refuse to issue Sharia fatwas that are not based on sharia rules, and I do not know as a specialist in Islamic jurisprudence that there is a justification that annuls the prayers of an entire people of a Muslim country in a mosque on the grounds of a political position taken by their state.”

He added: “Indeed, the fatwa is selective and not based on Sharia….As far as I know, there has never been a fatwa in our Islamic history that prevents a person or a group from praying in a mosque for Muslims.”

This actually is similar to another dispute from 2012 when a former Mufti of Jerusalem Ekrima Sabri criticized Egypt’s Grand Mufti visiting Jerusalem. He used bizarre logic:

Sheikh Sabri said from a political perspective Gomaa’s visit implied the recognition of Israeli’s occupation.
“Recognition is a form of normalization because no one can enter Jerusalem without an Israeli visa or without proper coordination with the Israeli security forces.”
But if Muslim citizens of Europe or America visit Israel, their visit would not be considered as an act of “recognizing the occupation,” Sabri said.
“If German or French Muslims visit Jerusalem, this is not normalization since their countries already recognize Israel.
“Some Arab governments might not boycott Israel, but their people do and they reject normalization.”

Another dispute over whether Muslims can visit Jerusalem erupted in 2010 when an Egyptian soccer team planned to play a friendly match against the Palestinian team in the West Bank, and Egyptian extremist clerics issued a fatwa against it.

Similarly, major Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf Qaradawi once issued a fatwa against non-Palestinian Muslims visiting Jerusalem:

He stressed in remarks published yesterday in Doha, "We should feel that we are deprived of Jerusalem and fight for it so that Jerusalem is ours, and that the responsibility to defeat the Zionist aggression is the responsibility of the Islamic nation as a whole and not the responsibility of the Palestinian people alone," he said, adding: "It is not reasonable to leave the Palestinians alone in the face of the Zionist state with a large military capabilities."
He said that "Jerusalem will not return except through resistance and jihad, and the combined efforts of the Arab and Islamic nation."

Muslim clerics like to use Jerusalem as a political football, just like Muslim politicians do. Indeed, there seems to be little distinction between Islamic jurisprudence and politics based on how Muslim clerics have issued contradictory (and sometimes self-contradictory) fatwas on Jerusalem in ways that happen to align with their political positions.

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Latest Muslim leader accused of being a secret Jew is a good one

If you want to insult your opponent in the Muslim world, you can't do better than to call him a Jew - or worse than a Jew.

We've already seen Muslim Brotherhood supporters claiming that Egypt's al-Sisi is Jewish, and we've seen Sisi's supporters saying that the original founder of the Muslim Brotherhood was Jewish.

We've seen Shiites accused of being worse than Jews, secularists accused of being worse than Jews. and Islamists accused of being worse than Jews.

So who's left?

Why, it is our favorite antisemite and popular TV preacher, Sheikh Yussuf Qaradawi!

According to a pro-Shiite newspaper, "research" has shown that Qaradawi's family came from an area where
Jews of the Bani Qurayza tribe had fled from Arabia to Egypt. His grandfather practiced usury, just like the Jews, and gouged farmers with high interest loans. He would confer with Jewish rabbis on how to do his immoral money lending business. In other words, while they don't want to say it explicitly, Qaradawi is of obvious Jewish descent!

Qaradawi had called for jihad against Syria and Hezbollah, which pretty much explains this whole accusation.

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Old video of Erdogan visiting Herzl's grave causing him embarrassment

The accusations in the Muslim and Arab world of political opponents being Jewish or Zionist continue.

A video of Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan visiting the grave of Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism, apparently during a 2005 trip, is causing him embarrassment as it has resurfaced on a number of websites. To make matters worse, he is shown next to then-prime minister Ariel Sharon.



Towards the end we see Erdogan paying respects at the grave of a master terrorist in Ramallah, but that is not controversial at all.

Apparently, opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood are circulating this to discredit Erdogan's support for the Islamists.

Similarly, the statement that antisemitic preacher Yusuf Qaradawi made recently - that "even the Jews" never performed a massacre like the army in Egypt did last week - is now being spun as if Qaradawi was "praising the humanity of the Israeli Army"!

Photos of Qaradawi with Neturei Karta nutcases cannot be far behind.

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Tamarod Gaza gaining steam; releases video slamming Hamas

I had mentioned the Tamarod Palestine Facebook group that was making Hamas so nervous.

That group was against both Hamas and Fatah. But Tamarod Gaza is only against Hamas, and they are growing, now with over 30,000 Facebook "Likes."

They are pushing for a major anti-Hamas rally in Gaza on November 11, and just released a video slamming Hamas for its actions.

The video says that Hamas practices "murder, torture, vandalism and bullying, bribery, smuggling, as if they were one of the gangs in the Middle Ages, but it's shameful shameful that they practice [these crimes] in the name of religion and the homeland and the resistance..."

The group misses the old Hamas, the one that fought only against Israel. "The Hamas of today is not the Hamas of Yassin," they say.

Tamarod Gaza's message ends by saying "All our options are open, but we disagree with you as to the choice of weapon. We are not raising arms against our brothers, but you are; we are after bloodshed but you are; we do not drag bodies in the streets, but you do; we will not kill children and men, women and young people, but you do; we do not demolish mosques, but you do; we understand Palestine and its people and their will, their pride and dignity but not you."

Hamas has said that Fatah is behind this group and has started a crackdown on suspected members.

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Qaradawi: "Even the Jews never did a massacre like the Egyptians"

Sheikh Yusuf Al Qaradawi, the antisemitic, terror supporting TV preacher who is allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, decided to use the J-bomb in his criticism of the Egyptian crackdown on Islamists.

In a phone interview on Al Jazeera, he said that he never saw such a "massacre" such as the army in Egypt performed with the help of the police, "even from the Jews."

He claimed that they killed and burned thousands of demonstrators.

Qaradawi demanded that Egyptians go out "to defend the gains of the January revolution and the defense of the innocent martyrs."

Even worse than the Jews? How can such a thing be?

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Gaza could get lots more goods through Israel, but they choose not to

This week I had an email conversation with the COGAT Gaza spokeswoman about the precise process of how goods get transferred into Gaza.

Here is how it works. (These are mostly COGAT's words, I edited them from multiple emails):

When a Gaza businessman wants to order goods from Israel privately, his first stop would be at the PA offices. There, there's a committee that is in charge of integrating all the requests and putting them in order, the Civil Committee of the PA, according to the format that is familiar to both sides. After that, it is that committee's job to pass a list of trucks that are to cross the next day. The head of the civil committee is in direct contact with the Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA) and they work with him closely every day, through phone calls and meetings, in order to make the work process efficient. The PA committee is the CLA's POC, but it is not the one ordering the goods.

When the lists are received at the Gaza CLA, they get to the approval process, and once they are approved they are passed to the CLA's representatives at Kerem Shalom, who are the first to receive the truck drivers the next morning.

As of today, the capacity of Kerem Shalom is 400 trucks per day. Due to the number of requests from the PA Civil Committee the number of trucks crossing per day never reaches 400. It can go up to 300 trucks on a good day.

Of course, if the Palestinian side would like to add more trucks to cross at Kerem Shalom, they're free to do so. The Israeli side will make its arrangements to meet the demands.

Unfortunately, many trucks are a no show at the crossing, for Palestinian personal matters. The trucks are coordinated, and are on the list, but every day the CLA sees a large number of blank forms for trucks that never crossed. That depends almost entirely on the Palestinians. Should they decide to cancel a truck for whatever reason, the CLA only knows about it at the end of the day, when they sum up the merchandise that went through. (It appears possible that the Israeli seller might renege sometimes as well, but that doesn't appear to be the normal case.)

The Palestinian businessmen do their coordination with Israeli private companies on their own. They only interact with COGAT (through the PA) when it comes to making sure the goods actually cross.

My comments:

While Kerem Shalom can handle 400 trucks a day, and perhaps 300 actually are hired typically, often dozens of the expected trucks never make it, for whatever logistical reasons that the Gazans canceled the delivery at the last minute. Last week about 10% of the expected trucks did not arrive.

The upshot is that Kerem Shalom is not being run at capacity - not even close. If Israel's "siege" was so painful, one would expect that the crossing would be over capacity and that there would be pressure to expand it. But even now that Egypt has cracked down on smuggling, Kerem Shalom is not close to its limit. It has increased transfers markedly, from 4700 in February to 6600 in July, but it can handle far more.

It seems apparent that Hamas prefers goods to be sent through Rafah than from Israel, for a number of reasons. One is that the PA is not involved in Rafah tunnels. Another is that Hamas can tax tunnel goods at will. Yet another is that fuel and some other smuggled goods are cheap because Egypt subsidizes them, so Hamas can buy things like construction material and diesel at a discount. And the fourth is that Israel happily ships goods to businessmen and to NGOs, but not to Hamas. (Also, dual-use materials are still restricted so Hamas has no choice but to smuggle those.)

People and businesses in Gaza don't need that many imports from Egypt - but Hamas does.

The simple fact is that if Gaza was suffering from a "crushing siege," Kerem Shalom would be operating at capacity. It isn't.

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