Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Richard Landes

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Wednesday, May 04, 2022

05/04 Links Pt2: Israel kicks off 74th Independence Day; Why Russia thought its 'Nazi' claims would be convincing; Amnesty Lies & Hides; Leonard Cohen’s Songs of the Yom Kippur War

From Ian:

With ‘quiet’ fireworks and calls for kinship, Israel kicks off 74th Independence Day

Israel slid from grave heartache to celebratory joy Wednesday evening, as the nation ushered in its 74th Independence Day, with calls for unity attempting to cut through political disputes that marred solemn events earlier during Memorial Day.

“Right now, between these two days, with the transition that is so tough and so Israeli, we manage but for a moment to truly be one,” Knesset Speaker Mickey Levy said in a keynote address at the main state ceremony marking the start of Independence Day at Mount Herzl.

“We manage for a moment to not let any division get between us. And if we could do it yesterday, and we can do it tomorrow, I believe we can manage to do it every day; to choose to see the good in each other, to choose to brighten people’s faces, to choose partnership over division, to be together in this home for us all.”

The comments echoed similar calls for unity that have marked the holiday period, including from President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Bennett, who was heckled by antigovernmental protesters during the state’s main Memorial Day remembrance event for terror victims, said that while Israel is well-equipped to handle outside threats, it is still menaced by internal polarization.

“We cannot let hate trap us, rule over us. We need to see each other in the best light, to believe that others also want what is good for the nation, even if their ideology is totally different,” he said in a statement released by his office. Guests at the 74th Independence Day ceremony, held at Mount Herzl, Jerusalem on May 4, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/ Flash90)

Maskless and crowded together with few coronavirus restrictions for the first time in two years, Bennett and thousands of others gathered at Mount Herzl for the ceremony, including recent arrivals fleeing Ukraine and Russia, as well as government leaders and other dignitaries.

She helped get hundreds to safety in Ukraine; now she’ll light a torch in Jerusalem

On March 8, after nearly two weeks of intense Russian bombing, a humanitarian “green corridor” was established in the Ukrainian city of Sumy, allowing the civilians trapped inside to flee to safety. But within just a few short hours, Russian forces violated the negotiated ceasefire, halting the evacuation.

Undeterred, Elizaveta Sherstuk, the head of Sumy’s Jewish community center, set to work to get the most vulnerable members of her community out.

“We managed to evacuate 150 people, mostly the elderly, women, and children. The distance would normally take us three-four hours. It took us seven hours because there was so much traffic. We were lucky that there was a Red Cross column that accompanied it and we managed to join them and security helped us leave the town,” Sherstuk told The Times of Israel through a translator.

Dozens more were subsequently evacuated from Sumy and the surrounding area via buses organized by Sherstuk, who has been involved in Jewish communal life in her hometown since 1999 through the Chessed Chaim aid center, which is funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Two weeks ago, she was chosen to be one of the 12 people to light a torch at the national ceremony making the start of Israel’s Independence Day. Sherstuk will represent the Jewish Diaspora. She was nominated by Diaspora Minister Nachman Shai and approved by Culture Minister Chili Tropper.

“We decided to recommend Elizaveta, not only because of her work as an individual but also because she represents the JDC and the many Jewish and Israeli organizations which have worked to help the Ukrainian people and the Jewish community in Ukraine during this war,” Shai said.

Sherstuk spoke to The Times of Israel shortly after landing in Israel, where she will spend the next two weeks. In addition to participating in the official state Independence Day ceremony, Sherstuk will visit her daughter and granddaughter as well as her sister, who all live in Israel. She’ll also meet with local organizations and donors before heading back to Ukraine.

Matti Friedman: Leonard Cohen’s Songs of the Yom Kippur War

There was always something cryptic about “Lover Lover Lover,” the 1974 classic by the Canadian music icon Leonard Cohen, the “poet of rock.” The song might not be as famous as Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” but it was beloved by fans and important to the singer, who was still playing it in concert four decades later. But what did it mean? Why, in the song’s first line, did he cry “Father, change my name”? That didn’t sound like a love song. Neither did the observation that a body could serve as a “weapon,” or the hope that the song itself would serve as a “shield against the enemy”? Who was this enemy? And who was the audience?

In 2009, Cohen ended a world tour with a show in Israel, where I live. At 75, he put on one of the greatest last acts in music history. This came after he’d emerged from a Buddhist monastery in California to find that a former manager had cleaned out his bank account, went back on the road, and discovered that he’d ascended to the pantheon of popular music. Maybe you were lucky enough to catch one of those concerts. I grew up in Canada, where Cohen has always been considered a national treasure, but until then I hadn’t quite appreciated that his status in Israel was the same. When tickets went on sale here the phone lines crashed within minutes. Fifty thousand people showed up in Tel Aviv.

I didn’t know the reason for the intense connection until an article in a local paper suggested one explanation. It had to do with an experience Cohen had shared with Israelis long before, in the fall of 1973. My attempt to figure out what happened turned into years of research and interviews, and eventually into a book called Who By Fire, which is about how a war and a singer collided to create an extraordinary moment in music. One strand of this story turned out to be linked to “Lover Lover Lover,” and to the struggle of a great artist, or of any of us, to reconcile the pull of the universal with the magnetism of our own particular tribe and past.

The second week of October, 1973, was one of the worst in Israel’s history. At 2 p.m. on October 6, which was the Jewish fast day of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched surprise attacks. Sirens sounded across Israel, an Egyptian bomber fired a guided missile at Tel Aviv, the border defenses crumbled, the air force began hemorrhaging planes and pilots, army fatalities climbed from the hundreds into the thousands, and Israelis were struck with despair. At that moment, out of the smoke of battle in the Sinai Desert, on some quest of his own devising, strode a wry bard from Montreal.

Leonard Cohen’s appearance seemed as strange then as it does now, and has never really been explained, although in Israel this has become one of the stories everyone knows about the Yom Kippur War, just like the famous battles. Cohen was already an international star. Three years earlier he’d played for a half-million people at the Isle of Wight festival, which was bigger than Woodstock, and where wild fans heckled Joan Baez, threw bottles at Kris Kristofferson, and burned the stage with Jimi Hendrix on it, but settled down when Cohen came onstage after midnight and hypnotized them. He was one of the biggest names of the Sixties. And now here he was in the Middle East, at the edge of a desert strewn with blackened tanks and corpses in charred fatigues, playing for small groups of soldiers without an amplifier and with an ammo crate for a stage. Some soldiers didn’t know who he was. Others did and couldn’t understand what on earth he was doing here.

??LIVE NOW: @CarolineGlick in an interview with Israeli Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann:
· Is it rational to serve in the @IDF?
· Is Israel occupying the West Bank?
· Who is responsible for the cleavages on the political right?

In honor of #YomHaZikaron https://t.co/2N08mhpMyC
— Jewish News Syndicate (@JNS_org) May 4, 2022

04/07 Links Pt1: Russia suspended from UN Human Rights Council over war, Israel backs measure; 'The Guns Of August' In The Middle East?; Keir Starmer: Israel is not an apartheid state

From Ian:

Russia suspended from UN Human Rights Council over war, Israel backs measure

The United Nations General Assembly on Thursday suspended Russia from the UN Human Rights Council over reports of "gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights" by invading Russian troops in Ukraine.

The US-led push garnered 93 votes in favor, while 24 countries voted no and 58 countries abstained. A two-thirds majority of voting members – abstentions do not count – was needed to suspend Russia from the 47-member council.

The resolution adopted by the 193-member General Assembly draft expresses "grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine," particularly at reports of rights abuses by Russia. Israel voted in favor of the resolution.

Suspensions are rare. Libya was suspended in 2011 because of violence against protesters by forces loyal to then-leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Russia had warned countries that a yes vote or abstention will be viewed as an "unfriendly gesture" with consequences for bilateral ties, according to a note seen by Reuters.

Russia was in its second year of a three-year term on the Geneva-based council, which cannot make legally binding decisions. Its decisions send important political messages, however, and it can authorize investigations.

Moscow is one of the most vocal members on the council and its suspension bars it from speaking and voting, officials say, although its diplomats could still attend debates. "They would probably still try to influence the council through proxies," said a Geneva-based diplomat.

Last month the council opened an investigation into allegations of rights violations, including possible war crimes, in Ukraine since Russia's attack.

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24, the General Assembly has adopted two resolutions denouncing Russia with 141 and 140 votes in favor. Moscow says it is carrying out a "special operation" to demilitarize Ukraine.

The United States announced it would seek Russia's suspension after Ukraine accused Russian troops of killing hundreds of civilians in the town of Bucha. Read full story

BREAKING: U.N. expels Russia from Human Rights Council. Vote was overwhelming and exactly as we predicted: 93 Yes to 24 No. We only needed double No votes to Yes votes for required 2/3 majority. The 58 abstentions don't count. Backstory of our campaign: https://t.co/ubbex260oz https://t.co/v9jGJyganC pic.twitter.com/8C9522K7B7
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) April 7, 2022

Jonathan Tobin: Expulsion from UNHRC won't stop Russia in Ukraine

Removing Russia while letting China and other equally egregious human-rights offenders remain will not make them care about those who live in other countries where freedom is merely a dream. On the contrary, they will act as if they have proved how much they care about the subject when that is nowhere near the truth.

The UNHRC will not be deterred from devoting most of its efforts to demonizing and delegitimizing democratic Israel, which remains the subject of a disproportionate amount of the council's time and condemnations. As I recently wrote, antisemitic invective and the targeting of the sole Jewish state on the planet remain business as usual there. America's complaints about this have repeatedly proved ineffective.

Worse, Biden's return to the UNHRC sent a signal to it and other prejudiced UN offices that America was not really serious about forcing them to change. The only thing that could possibly get its attention and force it to give up its addiction to targeting and besmirching Israel would be the withdrawal of US funding.

The problem is that the US foreign-policy establishment and the State Department bureaucracy remain wedded to the discredited idea that the United Nations is still capable of realizing the idealistic goals that were behind its founding. With the United Nations preparing a permanent star-chamber investigation of Israel that is intended to smear it and help make it a pariah, every gesture that reinforces the legitimacy of an institution that lost any shred of credibility long ago is not merely wrongheaded. It helps strengthen one of the principal engines of international antisemitism.

Yet somehow, even those who are Israel's friends in this country have yet to learn this basic truth.

That was illustrated by the recent letter to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed by 68 US senators from both major parties, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD), that urged the Biden administration to use its presence on the council to "address major human-rights problems around the world. An important step in this regard would be to redirect the wasteful use of funds and personnel on excessive devotion to disparaging Israel to allow the UN Human Rights Council to fairly promote human rights around the world." The letter goes on to say that the United States should move to halt "discriminatory and unwarranted treatment of Israel" on the UNHRC.

The letter accurately diagnosed what was wrong with the UNHRC but not the remedy. Its language criticizing the institution was both noble and correct. However, by acquiescing to the American return to the council and the idea that changing it is remotely possible, the letter, which reportedly was circulated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, actually does more harm than good.

Far more insightful was a different letter signed by four Republican senators – Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Bill Hagerty, and James Lankford – urging Blinken to withdraw from the UNHRC.

As that letter eloquently stated:
"Remaining on the council does not just legitimize vilification against Israel; it damages America's international moral standing by allowing countries like Russia and China, which are actively perpetrating crimes against humanity and genocide at this very moment, to serve in international human rights bodies. Furthermore, it downplays atrocities perpetrated by Cuba, Venezuela, Libya, and Eritrea by suggesting their leaders can provide human-rights leadership on the council."

It is long past time that even those who understand that the United Nations is a toxic waste dump of Jew-hatred and rationalizations of tyranny stop attempting to correct an institution that is incapable of reform. It is structurally set up to enable these injustices rather than to stop them. Engaging with it and paying for it – 22% of its funds are provided by the United States – is an ongoing disaster that does much harm and no good.

The UNHRC is an example of how bad the United Nations has become. Removing one bad apple like Russia from it won't repair what's broken, but it will allow UN apologists to pretend that it is heading in the right direction. That even many supporters of Israel think that acquiescing to this state of affairs or supporting further American participation in these travesties is justified is an appalling mistake that only makes the situation worse.

03/29 Links Pt2: Five killed in Bnei Brak terrorist shooting; Edinburgh-Gaza twinning proposal withdrawn; Women fighters of the Jewish Holocaust resistance

From Ian:

Five killed in Bnei Brak terrorist shooting

Five people were killed in a shooting spree in Bnei Brak on Tuesday evening.

The shooting was first reported around 8:00 p.m. on HaShnaim Street. One person was found killed in a car and two other people were killed on a sidewalk nearby.

Another person was found dead on Herzl Street, perpendicular to HaShnaim Street. A fifth victim, a police officer, was evacuated to the Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus in critical condition and died from his wounds soon after.

The shooter's body was found on Jabotinsky Street after he was shot by a police officer who arrived at the scene on a motorcycle.

Another person was arrested at the scene and investigated on the scene on suspicion of assisting the shooter, and a third person was arrested later on further east on Jabotinsky Street.

The terrorist was a 27-years-old man affiliated with Fatah, from the village of Ya'bad in the northern West Bank. He was jailed for half a year in 2015 for illegal arms dealing and belonging to a terrorist group, and had worked illegally at a building site in Bnei Brak.

Roman Abramovich, Ukrainian negotiators poisoned in Kyiv talks - WSJ report

Russian-Israeli oligarch Roman Abramovich and three Ukrainian negotiators in the ceasefire talks were allegedly poisoned during a meeting in Kyiv in early March, Netherlands-based open-source intelligence group Bellingcat confirmed a Wall Street Journal report on Monday.

Abramovich and the three members of the Ukrainian delegation, led by chief negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak, reportedly suffered from symptoms of poisoning after the Kyiv meeting held some time in February, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, WSJ reporter Max Colchester reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Sources claimed they were poisoned by Russian hardliners who want to sabotage ceasefire negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv, the report stated. A source close to Abramovich, however, said that it was not clear who targeted the oligarch and the Ukrainian delegation.

The condition of the Russian-Israeli oligarch and the Ukrainian negotiating team has since improved and their lives are not in danger, though it was reported Abramovich lost his vision for several hours.

Experts who have looked into the poisoning incident claimed it was hard to determine whether a chemical or biological agent or some sort of electromagnetic radiation, was used, WSJ noted in its report.

In late February, The Jerusalem Post broke the news that Abramovich is attempting to assist in the talks between Russia and Ukraine at the request of Kyiv.

Tom Gross: The oligarchs can't overthrow Putin, the only real threat to his power may be from FSB hardliners

Tom Gross: The first part of this interview is here: Zelensky is no Havel or Mandela, but he is media savvy, whereas Putin is old school & doesn’t care

Ukraine’s most famous director ostracized for unflinching film on Babyn Yar pogrom

If you live in New York City and are attuned to the programming schedules of local arts cinemas, there is a man who is noticeably having a moment: 57-year-old Sergei Loznitsa.

The fact that Ukraine’s most celebrated film director has so many projects coming to theaters right now is only partially due to the circumstances in his home country. (The IFC Center near New York University, for example, is offering a mini-retrospective.) The other reason is that Loznitsa, who works in both documentary and narrative film, is incredibly prolific, and the ebb and flow of international distribution sometimes makes for a logjam.

The prestigious Museum of the Moving Image just hosted the New York debut of “Mr. Landsbergis,” a four-hour documentary about post-Soviet Lithuania, and his surrealist tragic-comedy about war and disinformation, “Donbass,” which won a directing award at Cannes in 2018, will finally make its way to New York theaters on April 8.

On April 1, however, Film Forum in Manhattan will present “Babi Yar. Context,” a documentary crafted from seldom-seen archival reels concerning a terrible chapter in Ukrainian history wherein close to 34,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust in just a few days. (In early March, it was believed that Russian bombs damaged the contemporary memorial there, but this turned out not to be the case.)

No recordings were made of the actual killings at the Babyn Yar ravine (though still photos — in color — of the aftermath were taken), but Loznitsa’s film has that second word, “Context,” in its title. What he has sculpted, without voice-over and just a few title cards, is a fly-on-the-wall look at the social changes in Ukraine during the Nazi occupation.

From the first tanks rolling in through Lviv to Soviet infrastructure literally covering up the spot where so many Jews were executed, Loznitsa, adding sound to mostly silent footage, shows what happened — and some of it (e.g. a lot of Ukrainians seemingly eager to welcome the Nazi regime) isn’t exactly going over so well at home.

Which brings us to the next topical point. Last week Loznitsa, a six-time winner at the Ukrainian Academy Awards, was summarily dismissed from the Ukrainian Film Academy. Reasons cited include the accusation of being “too cosmopolitan.” Loznitsa, whose previous work includes “Maidan,” a celebration of Ukrainian independence in the face of corruption and Russian interference, commented in an open letter that the choice of words had an antisemitic aspect to it. (As far as I know, Loznitsa is not Jewish. I asked him directly, but he and his interpreter didn’t really respond, as you’ll read below.)

For Jews, Fake News Doesn't Go Back To Trump -- It Goes Back To Al Dura (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Everyone knows about fake news.

Some people know it's all Trump's fault, others know that it's all the media's fault.
And now countries are generating it, using bots on social media.

But for anyone who follows how the media reports about Israel, this is kind of old.

How old?

Daniel Rubenstein addresses this question in his first podcast, featuring Prof. Richard Landes.

Daniel Rubenstein is a tour guide and lecturer, who served as an advisor to Naftali Bennett and also as a social media expert to Netanyahu.
Richard Landes is a medieval historian specializing in apocalyptic millennialism and he blogs about lethal journalism (presenting one side's wartime propaganda as news) at Augean Stables.

Daniel Rubenstein and Prof. Richard Landes

One of the topics Prof. Landes explains is tracing the peaking of media opposition to Israel back to Al Dura.

That incident, in brief:

On Sept. 30, 2000, France2 Television ran a story about Muhammad al Durah, a 12-year-old boy who, along with his father, was pinned down in a cross-fire between Israeli and Palestinian forces at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip. “The target of fire from the Israeli position, the boy was killed and the father badly wounded,” veteran French journalist Charles Enderlin reported. Enderlin distributed the footage to all his colleagues for free, and this story ran around the world in hours.

Landes, who coined the word Pallywood to describe media manipulation designed to win the public relations war with Israel, has written about discrepancies in Enderlin's video footage:

The actual evidence, however, posed serious problems for the explosive narrative of deliberate child-murder. The footage, closely examined, contradicted every detail of the claim that Israel had killed the boy “in cold blood,” as a France 2 photographer put it, from the alleged “forty minutes of [Israeli] bullets like rain” (rather, there were only a few bullets one could identify in the brief footage, all from the Palestinian side), to the 20-minute-long death from a fatal stomach wound (no sign of blood on the ground), to the murdered ambulance driver (no evidence), to the dead boy (who moves quite deliberately in the final scene, which Enderlin cut for his broadcast).

But it was Enderlin's version of the story which spread everywhere, and not just in the Arab world. Bin Laden, for example, used Al Dura as a justification for his terrorist attack on the US. Landes notes that in the West, the Europeans and progressives saw this incident as a 'Get-Out-of-Holocaust-Guilt-Free Card'.

The tremendous influence of the Al Dura narrative cannot be underestimated. It appeared everywhere and dominated the media. One journalist, Catherine Nay, claimed on Europe 1 that

the death of Mohamed [Al Dura] cancels, erases, that of the Jewish child in the hands in the air, shot by an SS man in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Landes points out the enormity of such an idea:

Here you have a woman saying that a dubious picture of a boy most probably -- if killed -- killed in a crossfire, has erased and replaced an image of a boy who symbolizes the deliberate murder of over a million children.

That journalist was not alone in this view. Landes sees this substitution as being at the core of today's Holocaust inversion, the idea that Israel commits genocide against Palestinian Arabs, making Israelis into the new Nazis and Palestinian Arabs into the new Jews.

And the Al Dura effect persists. The original impact has dissipated over time, but the effects continue.

It's hard to get it more wrong than what happened then and we've been paying the price ever since. This is the first massive and still uncorrected wave of fake news -- not fake news coming from bots in Russia, fake news permeating the legacy mainstream media. Disaster. [emphasis added]

This was during the Second Intifada.
And media mendacity at the time was evident.

Less than 2 weeks later, on October 12, two Israeli reservists took a wrong turn and ended up in Ramallah, where a mob of Palestinian reservists lynched them.

Viciously.

In his 2014 book, Israel Since the Six-Day War: Tears of Joy, Tears of Sorrow, Leslie Stein describes how the mob massacred the 2 men:

The mob did not prevent the story from getting out, but they did stop a photographer from taking pictures. Mark Seager wrote a personal account of what the mob did to the bodies of the 2 Israeli reservists -- and what they almost did to him:

They were just a few feet in front of me and I could see everything. Instinctively, I reached for my camera. I was composing the picture when I was punched in the face by a Palestinian. Another Palestinian pointed right at me shouting "no picture, no picture!", while another guy hit me in the face and said "give me your film!".

I tried to get the film out but they were all grabbing me and one guy just pulled the camera off me and smashed it to the floor. I knew I had lost the chance to take the photograph that would have made me famous and I had lost my favourite lens that I'd used all over the world, but I didn't care. I was scared for my life.

In a Wall Street Journal article in 2001, Alex Safian of CAMERA wrote about just how effective Palestinian intimidation was:

But it is not just British reporters who have joined Mr. Arafat's journalistic brigades. Riccardo Christiano, bureau chief of the Italian state network RAI, put it plainly in a letter to the Palestinian Authority in October. After two Israeli reservists were lynched by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah, most journalists at the scene had their film and cameras confiscated. But one crew from the private Italian network Mediaset got out with the videotape, which was then shown around the world. Mr. Christiano was determined to let the Palestinian Authority know that, contrary to rumors, his network was not involved. So he wrote this letter, which unhappily for him found its way into a Palestinian newspaper:

"My Dear Friends in Palestine: We congratulate you and think it is our duty to explain to you what happened on Oct. 12 in Ramallah. One of the private Italian television stations which competes with us . . . filmed the events . . . Afterwards Israeli television broadcast the pictures as taken from one of the Italian stations, and thus the public impression was created as if we took these pictures.

"We emphasize to all of you that the events did not happen this way, because we always respect the journalistic rules of the Palestinian Authority for work in Palestine . . . We thank you for your trust and you can be sure that this is not our way of acting, and we would never do such a thing.

"Please accept our dear blessings."

As Safian observes, "in plain terms, respecting these 'rules' means ignoring stories that would anger Mr. Arafat, and reporting on stories that would please him."

The Ramallah lynching was on October 12.

On the very next day, Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, a member of the PA's Fatwa Council and a former acting Rector of the Islamic University in Gaza gave a Friday sermon at a mosque in Gaza. Among other things, Sheikh Halabiya stressed the importance of killing Jews:

"...None of the Jews refrain from committing any possible evil. If the Labor party commits the evil and the crime, the Likud party stands by it; and if the Likud party commits the evil and the crime, the Labor party stands by it.... The Jews are Jews, whether Labor or Likud... They do not have any moderates or any advocates of peace. They are all liars. They all want to distort truth, but we are in possesion of the truth...They are the terrorists. They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them and will help you to overcome them, and will relieve the minds of the believers...." (emphasis added)

How did The New York Times report this?

William A. Orme Jr. wrote an article, A Parallel Mideast Battle: Is It News or Incitement? where he dealt with the Israeli claim of Palestinian incitement by helpfully summarizing for his readers what Halabiya had actually said:

Israelis cite as one egregious example [of Palestinian incitement], a televised sermon that defended the killing of the two soldiers. ''Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,'' proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya in a live broadcast from a Gaza City mosque the day after the killings. [emphasis added]

Incitement?
What incitement?

This partisan self-censorship continues today. As Landes comments:

To this day, readers of The New York Times, listeners of NPR, viewers of the BBC and CNN do not know what kind of unbelievably vicious nazi-like genocidal hatred is aired in the Palestinian public sphere, constantly.

And of course, social media has only made matters worse -- making it easier to spread propaganda without regard for the source (assuming it is even known), let alone viewing it critically. Social media enables the channeling of moral outrage that makes canceling of people as pariahs so effective.

Today we find ourselves in a situation where, as Prof. Landes notes, you cannot defend Zionism -- neither in journalism nor in academia. It has become a taboo subject --

In 2021, when you had the latest outbreak of violence between Israel and Gaza, you had hundreds of journalists insisting that the media adopt the Palestinian narrative -- adopt their language, adopt their "Israel occupation army" and stuff and you had academics, including Jewish academics in Jewish studies, coming out with statements in support of the Palestinians in which the role of Hamas and the role of terror is completely expunged from the record. And all sorts of claims are made about what Israel has done that are empirically inaccurate.

We are looking at an anti-intellectual movement that has taken over and literally a collapse of the information professions in terms of their ability to give the public accurate and relevant information.

And to a large degree, this all goes back to 2000, and Al Dura.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Read all about it here!

03/02 Links Pt2: Menachem Begin continues to shape Israel's Zionist visio; Biden Calls Ukrainians ‘Iranian People,’ No mention of Israel in State of the Union Address

From Ian:

Menachem Begin continues to shape Israel's Zionist vision

Although Menachem Begin died 30 years ago, he continues to shape Israel – and inspire many of us.

Before 1977, when the Labor Party dominated Israeli politics and the American Zionist imagination, I was born into one of New York’s few Beginite households. My father, Bernard Dov Troy, had been involved in the Betar Zionist youth movement since his youth on the Lower East Side. We worshiped Israel’s longtime opposition leader, and David Ben-Gurion’s nemesis, Menachem Begin. I even invited him to my bar mitzvah.

We were among the few who rejoiced on the night of the “mahapach,” the Reversal, in May 1977, when Begin ended his three-decade futility streak and became prime minister. Most American Jews mourned, lamenting what Israel was becoming, devastated that Israel disappointed them, worried about the growing gap between Israel and American Jewry. Sound familiar?

Begin proved them wrong. Two months ago, working with Jerusalem’s Menachem Begin Center, Adam Bellos and the Israel Innovation Fund convened a panel discussion: “Hadar: Begin’s Lesson of Jewish Pride.”

I couldn’t resist such a speaking invitation, because “hadar” may be my father’s favorite word. Begin and my father followed Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose resurrection of Jewish dignity began with hadar. Though not easily translated, the word connotes glory or splendor, meaning “outward beauty, respect, self-esteem, politeness, faithfulness” in “every step, gesture, word, action and thought.”

I started by saluting Begin for acting with “hadar” and making it contagious, bringing pride back to the name “Jew.” I hailed him as The Fighting Jew, the Holocaust survivor who led “The Revolt” before 1948 – articulating the new Zionist ethos, refusing to be cowed, of being militant when necessary but never unnecessarily militarist. “The Fighting Jew,” Begin proclaimed, “loves books, loves liberty and hates war. But he is prepared to fight for liberty.”

As prime minister, Begin followed that formula. He defied expectations by making peace with Egypt in 1978, then defied the world by bombing the Iraqi nuclear project, Osirak, in 1981, and attacking the PLO state-within-a-state in southern Lebanon in 1982.

Media, Take Note: It’s Not Israel Vs. Iran, It’s Iran Vs. Most of Middle East

As world powers and Iran appear to be on the verge of reviving the 2015 deal aimed at curbing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, major news organizations are depicting developments in Vienna through a narrow lens (see here, here, here, here, and here). The broader regional threat posed by Tehran is regularly downplayed by media outlets that instead seem to be promoting a false narrative that essentially equates offensive actions by Iran — the “world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism” — with the defensive maneuvers of the Middle East’s only democracy: Israel.

The resulting coverage not only effectively calls into question the Jewish state’s right to defend itself against a genocide-preaching regime, but also diminishes the gravity of Iran’s campaign of expansionism and terror and the threat it poses to Sunni states across the Middle East.

Iran’s Long Game: Regional Hegemony
The following quote from a recent New York Times article titled, US and Allies Close to Reviving Nuclear Deal With Iran, Officials Say, is a typical example:
One key issue is how Israel will respond. It has continued its sabotage campaign against Iran’s facilities, blowing up some of them and, at the end of the Trump administration, assassinating the scientist who led what American and Israeli intelligence believe was Iran’s bomb-design project.”

What goes unmentioned is that Israel is far from being the only country in the Middle East that opposes the restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear accord. For while Jerusalem has consistently expressed opposition to the agreement, it has likewise caused grave concern in the Arab world, many of whose leaders believe that keeping the pressure up on Tehran is the correct course of action.

Indeed, Iran continues to invest heavily in its ballistic missile program and building a network of terrorist proxies that cause havoc and destruction throughout the region in order to destabilize countries such as Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Tehran seeks to project power so as to essentially turn these nations into clients states.

This policy has produced what Iran has dubbed the “axis of resistance,” an amalgamation of Tehran-sponsored militias and full-blown terrorist outfits such as Hezbollah and Hamas. This radical alliance threatens Gulf states and Israel alike. For example, Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen have attacked both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates using Iranian-made drones and missiles. Meanwhile, Hezbollah and Tehran-supported terror groups in the Gaza Strip fire their huge arsenal of rockets at Israeli cities.

Accordingly, the Middle East is today a battleground between those entities and nations within Iran’s sphere of influence and more moderate capitals such as Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

The Islamic Republic’s regional interventionism is seemingly being used as a parallel way to advance its nuclear program. As Iranian aggression increases, so too does its atomic program.

In fact, it was reported last May that Iran had enriched uranium to 63 percent purity — a short technical step away from weapons-grade 90 percent — and way beyond the 3.67 percent threshold permitted under the 2015 nuclear deal. At the same time, Tehran has from the get-go opposed the inclusion of Arab countries in the nuclear talks, not wanting to deal with their concerns over Iranian-led proxy wars and the Islamic Republic’s development of ballistic missiles and other conventional weaponry that can reach their territories.

These security threats are shared by Israel and in part helped pave the way for the Abraham Accords — a series of US-brokered deals that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.

In response to these rapprochements, some experts maintain that Tehran is now pushing to enhance ties with its Mideast terrorist proxies.

Biden Calls Ukrainians ‘Iranian People,’ No mention of Israel in State of the Union Address

The first thing I do before starting to analyze a State of the Union address for this news site is plug in the name “Israel,” to see how many times the US president has mentioned it. Good news: on Tuesday night, President Joe Biden mentioned Israel zero times.

I then plugged in “Iran” and got a very strange response. Here it is, his second-to-last line about the war in Europe: “Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people.”

Huh? Yes, folks, it was a Joe Biden mental typo. He meant the Ukrainian people. Otherwise, there was zero mention of the Islamic Republic or the hearts and souls of its people.

Here’s a summary of what the president had to say about what America is doing for Ukraine:
Six days ago, Russia’s Vladimir Putin sought to shake the very foundations of the free world, thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways. But he badly miscalculated. He thought he could roll into Ukraine, and the world would rollover. Instead, he met a wall of strength he never anticipated or imagined.
He met the Ukrainian people.
From President Zelensky to every Ukrainian, their fearlessness, their courage, their determination, literally inspires the world.
Groups of citizens blocking tanks with their bodies. Everyone from students to retirees to teachers turned soldiers defending their homeland.
In this struggle, as President Zelensky said in his speech to the European Parliament, “light will win over darkness.”
The Ukrainian ambassador to the United States is here tonight, sitting with the first lady.

But while it’s always nice to hear an American president who is ready to fight to your last drop of blood, the situation on the ground is decidedly not in favor of the brave people: The Ukrainian army reported Wednesday morning that Russian airborne forces have landed in Kharkov and attacked a local hospital, and a major battle ensued; and the Russian army is operating in Kherson, the mayor sent an urgent appeal to President Zelenskyy: “Help us evacuate hundreds of bodies from around the city.”

Light may win over darkness, but darkness is not a pushover.

02/13 Links: Archaeology proves Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel; Amnesty’s problem with Israel – too many Jews; Abbas openly calls on Palestinians to murder Israelis

From Ian:

David Collier: Amnesty’s problem with Israel – too many Jews

Amnesty’s definition of ‘Apartheid’ means ‘Jewish majority rule’

These are some of the problems in Israel inside Amnesty’s ‘Apartheid’ report:
The report makes clear that they have a problem with Israel’s ‘law of return’ which is the basis of the world having a refuge for Jewish people (page 82).
Amnesty has a problem with Hebrew being the dominant language (page 212).
They have a problem with Jewish majority state control (throughout the document).
Amnesty has a problem with the Jewish state ‘owning’ its own land (throughout the document).
It has a problem with urban renewal projects (throughout the document)
Amnesty has a problem with the Jewish state building towns to house Jewish refugees and immigrants (page 146)
It has a problem with a Jewish majority anywhere – referring to the impact of that majority as ”Judaization’ (example page 22)
Amnesty has a problem when the Jewish state embarks on social and economic development programs (page 153)
Amnesty has a problem with normal economic restraints (such as a state not having enough money to invest as much as it should – see investment on classrooms on page 213)
It has a problem with there being more ‘Jewish localities’ than non-Jewish ones (page 146).
Amnesty scream ‘Apartheid’ when they see a housing shortage (you know, like we have in the UK)

The bottom line is this: Amnesty International have a problem with a Jewish majority state – period.

Wanting to destroy Israel
Being in the majority comes with perks. Most people will speak the same language as you, worship the same god as you and celebrate the same holidays as you. A nation’s culture is shaped by the majority. Christmas day is a big holiday in the UK – not so much in Saudi Arabia. The UK’s flag and many of the state’s emblems carry a cross – which you won’t tend to find on the state emblems in Indonesia. Nothing of this is untoward. The UK is not an Apartheid state because Easter is celebrated with a public holiday – and Ramadan isn’t. And inside pre 1967 Israel – this is what Amnesty are calling ‘Apartheid’ – this is what they want to tear down. They want to destroy the Jewish state.

So remember, when you see Amnesty say ‘Apartheid’ – what they mean is democratic representation inside a Jewish majority state. And when they say they want to ‘end it’ be in no doubt that they are talking about the deliberate destruction of the only democratic nation in the MENA region.

Why are they doing it? – Simply because the Islamist / hard-left alliance have taken a firm grip of what was once Amnesty’s soul.

Richard Landes: Antisemitism and Amnesty International

The report denies the State of Israel’s right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people. Its extremist language and distortion of historical context were designed to demonize Israel and pour fuel onto the fire of antisemitism.

What the outside world heard: “Israel dismisses amnesty report as antisemitic.” For many this response offers proof of the “Livingstone formulation”: Jews use “antisemitism” to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.

What the accusers do not want, is that their audience see them spreading illegitimate anti-Jewish memes at a time when hostility to Jews is most decidedly on the rise even in Western countries formally wedded to Nie Weider. Like Freud, publishing Moses and Monotheism in German, in 1939, they throw fuel, refined fuel, on the flames of the often denied longest hatred. But don’t call them antisemitic. Freud wasn’t.

In order to frame the issue as Israeli apartheid and crimes against humanity, this report systematically projects malevolence – the racist desire to dominate – onto the Israelis, even as it conceals the patent malevolence of her enemies. As such, the report resembles the classic supersessionist projection of ill-will and dominion onto the Jews who allegedly take their “chosenness” as a warrant to dominate gentiles cruelly. This same hostile projection informed the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and like the denizens of the early 20th century, some in the early 21st century will take this report as a warrant for the destruction of the accused.

Indeed, an earlier draft of the report (sent to journalists to prepare for the official release) claimed that “This system of Apartheid originated with the creation of Israel in May 1948 and has been built and maintained for decades.” After much commotion (by the IHRA definition, this is antisemitism), the reference to 1948 was removed from the final English version. But the hasty and limited removal of this reference merely tried to conceal the driving force behind the report, the scaffolding upon which AI assembled it: Israel itself is a racist endeavor, an illegitimate nation. Israel delendus est. As such, like all supersessionists in pre-modern periods (Christians, Muslims), this allegedly civil-society discourse reveals itself incapable of tolerating the existence of an autonomous Jewish entity.

Is this antisemitism? You be the judge. Is it reasonable for Zionists to say that this report fans the flames of Jew-hatred? Yes. Does that mean that Jews are again suppressing legitimate criticism of Israel with the antisemitism charge? You be the judge. Does it mean that you owe it to yourself to read the devastating critiques of this malevolent report? Yes. Does it mean that if the charges against AI are accurate, this Report is a fire accelerant thrown into a combustive global community? You be the judge.

And if you so judge, then speak out. Words matter, especially when the words one opposes are weapons in a cruel war.

Amnesty International’s pseudo-scholarship

Clearly, when a report such as this refers to disputed territories—areas of Judea, Samaria, and sections of Jerusalem which have had a Jewish presence and identity since biblical times—as “Occupied Palestinian Territories” it has already revealed the political bias inherent in its view of the situation about which it has written this report.

In addition to a return, the AI report calls for full reparations for any Palestinian losses of wealth and property, something they never have considered, of course, for the more than 800,000 Jews whose businesses, wealth, and property was seized when they were expelled from Arab countries upon Israel’s birth. The fate of the Jews is never of concern to human rights activists or the virtue-signaling activists on campuses calling for an intifada to “free Palestine” from the current grip of Jews.

“Israel must grant equal and full human rights to all Palestinians in Israel and the OPT in line with principles of international human rights law . . ,” the report demands. “It must also recognize the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to homes where they or their families once lived in Israel or the OPT. In addition, Israel must provide . . . full reparations. These should include restitution of and compensation for all properties acquired on a racial basis,” meaning what, that any properties acquired by “white” Jews who appropriated them from “brown” Arabs during the War of Independence and in 1967?

AI should know that the demand for a right of return, a notion referred to by Palestinian Arabs and their supporters as “sacred” and an “enshrined” universal human right granted by UN resolutions and international law, in fact, has no legal standing at all, and is part of the propaganda campaign that is based on the thinking that if Israel cannot be eradicated by the Arabs though war, it can effectively be destroyed by forcing it to commit demographic suicide. AI, as an international organization that professes to be an authority on human rights and international law, should know the facts and the truth, but, apparently, it does not.

In the first place, the right of return claim uses the fraud as its core notion that the Palestinians were “victimized” by the creation of Israel, that they were expelled from a fictive land of “Palestine” where they were the indigenous people. Except that when historian Joan Peters used the expression “from time immemorial,” in her book of the same name, she proved just the opposite.

As Professor Efraim Karsh, head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and the author of Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians, points out, “this claim of premeditated dispossession is itself not only baseless, but the inverse of the truth. Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, the Palestinians were themselves the aggressors in the 1948-49 war, and it was they who attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to ‘cleanse’ a neighbouring [sic] ethnic community. Had the Palestinians and the Arab world accepted the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947, calling for the establishment of two states in Palestine, and not sought to subvert it by force of arms, there would have been no refugee problem in the first place.”

Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist party in #Israel, in response to accusations of apartheid:

"I would not use the term apartheid…”pic.twitter.com/7KleK4TOhz
— Emily Schrader - ????? ?????? (@emilykschrader) February 12, 2022

01/02 Links: Col. Kemp: Is Biden's Legacy Really Going to Be the Dismantling of Democracies and the Free World?; Where’s the afterglow from Gantz’s meeting with Abbas?

From Ian:

Dore Gold: The UN’s Reinvention of Jerusalem’s Past

The UN is at it again. On November 26, 2021, the General Assembly adopted a resolution referring to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where the Temple of Solomon once stood, only by its Arabic name, the Haram al-Sharif. From the standpoint of the UN, Christian and Jewish connections to the area were non-existent.

For years now, the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been systematically pushing false narratives about Jerusalem that deny the historic connection of the Jewish people to their holy city. In May 2016, UNESCO decided that the Western Wall Plaza should be designated with quotation marks after adopting the term Al-Buraq Plaza for the very same area with no qualification.

UNESCO reaffirmed this language in subsequent years. These distortions, which were blatant violations of its own statute, have penetrated the discourse about Jerusalem in the international media, in universities, and in world parliaments. What was axiomatic 200 years ago is now called into question.

So many people speak about Jerusalem but so few really understand it.

I’ve been a diplomat for over three decades, serving on the front lines of Israel’s struggle over the Holy City. 30 years, and I’m still surprised by the scale of disinformation and by the depth of ignorance regarding the Holy City. The ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence of its historical past. The ignorance regarding historical facts, even recent history.

It’s been 50 years since the reunification of Jerusalem and while across the Middle East holy sites are destroyed, in Jerusalem they’re protected. And yet Israel’s legitimacy is questioned time and time again.

Col. Richard Kemp: Is Biden's Legacy Really Going to Be the Dismantling of Democracies and the Free World?

Biden inflicted untold damage on the free world by his catastrophic surrender in Afghanistan, demonstrating to America's enemies and friends alike that, under his administration, the US was no longer willing to stand by its allies nor to protect its own vital national interests.

Now Biden is planning discussions in early 2022 between Russia and selected NATO members to "defuse" the situation [Russia threatening the Ukraine]. Can he really believe that any negotiations short of capitulation to Russian demands would satisfy Putin or achieve anything? So-called diplomacy down the barrel of 90,000 Russian guns looks a lot like even more appeasement.

Biden has failed to respond to Iranian attacks on Saudi Arabia, Iranian aggression against Israel and even Iranian attacks on US forces in Syria and Iraq. Iran's contempt for Biden was further displayed last week in the launch of multiple ballistic missiles during manoeuvres that Iranian commanders explicitly said were intended to threaten Israel.

In the face of Iranian nuclear provocation, Biden's officials have refrained from any threat of military action — taking off the table the only truly effective deterrent against regimes that respect strength alone.

Biden's policies of appeasement towards Iran and Russia are bad enough. But the greatest threat to the free world today comes from China. Biden has a long record of appeasing Beijing.

Biden's administration has projected only confusion over China's ambitions against Taiwan. The president twice suggested the US might be willing to defend the country in the event of Chinese invasion, with his comments immediately walked back by officials... Similarly mixed messages coming from London led the Argentinian junta to believe Britain, despite its vast military superiority, would not fight to defend the Falkland Islands on the other side of the world, and actually encouraged the 1982 invasion.

"One of [Biden's] first acts on assuming the presidency was to shut down the investigations into the origins of Covid-19 — including the one I led at the State Department in 2020, which presented troubling scientific and circumstantial evidence on the secret activities of the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] that bolster the lab-leak theory". — Dr David Asher, who spearheaded the State Department task force investigating the origins of Covid-19 and the role of the Chinese government, Hudson Institute, November 17, 2021

None of Biden's acts of appeasement are isolated to their targets alone; they are widely observed and cumulative in effect. They embolden America's enemies and unnerve its friends, potentially fracturing alliances that are vital to defending democracy. So much damage has already been done in just one year that even were Biden to change course, his legacy might well be the dismantling of democracies and the free world.

Yisrael Medad: There is Jewish and there is Arab violence

Over the past several months, the pro-Palestinian chorus has been pushing the theme of “settler violence” running rampant in the West Bank. A search using Google shows that these reports say the violence has “risen,” “increased” and “spiked” and that there has been an “upsurge” in violence by Israeli settlers.

In fact, if one reviews the various websites of such organizations and news platforms, which all feed into the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), the theme is a staple of their messaging. One can even read a statement from the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor asserting “state-sponsored violence and attacks” that were mostly “executed with full protection from the Israeli army.”

That body, however, is chaired by Richard Falk, who has been accused of manipulating anti-Semitic memes and whose reports for the United Nations as its Human Rights Council special rapporteur were condemned in years past by the United States.

Incidents do occur; no one denies that.

They are condemned by the official representative bodies that represent the Jewish residents in the West Bank. The questions, though, are how many are there, who initiates them, is the reported damage correct and what are the true overall statistics and context of violence from both sides.

As Jonathan Tobin, of JNS, recently observed, “There is something wrong if a few Jews throwing stones is considered far more important than the fact that attacks on Jews in the same areas are more or less the national sport of Palestinians.” He points to a double standard whereby proportionally fewer Jewish attacks gain greater coverage while “exponentially greater volumes of Palestinian violence is considered either unremarkable or somehow justified.”

Indeed, the data made available by the Israel Police point to something remarkable - the number of incidents of Jewish violence is decreasing. From 2019 to 2021, there has been a 61.1% drop in so-called price-tag attacks. Moreover, the number of indictments of Jewish extremists has doubled from 16 to 32 over the past year. That is not the picture the pro-Palestinian groups wish you to see.

Another factor that is underplayed is the above-mentioned volume of Arab violence in the same area. The Rescuers Without Borders paramedical organization is the first responders unit on the scene of incidents. They provide first aid and ambulance services. In the past two and a half months they reported 315 rock-throwing incidents and 50 firebombs tossed at Jewish targets in the West Bank. That is an average of eight each day. Just last night, in East Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood, dozens of firebombs were thrown at Jewish homes.

The IDF data indicates that in 2020 there were 1,500 rock-throwing incidents, 229 firebombs tossed, 31 shootings, nine stabbings, 541 guns and rifles were seized and 330 knives were recovered.

The Shin Bet security agency recorded over 100 Palestinian terror attacks in the West Bank in October 2021. In 2020, it reported almost 800 acts of Palestinian terror; an additional 424 “significant attacks” were thwarted.

06/13 Links: Richard Landes: Lethal, own-goal war journalism; David Collier: Gaza, Sky News and the Islamist march on London; PA continues its “Pay-for-Slay” policy in breach of the US Taylor Force Act

From Ian:

Richard Landes: Lethal, own-goal war journalism

The month of May 2021 taught us Israelis many unfortunate things—things we hoped were not true (and continue to hope are not true)—about the sad straights of Israeli democracy; the relentlessly authoritarian nature of Palestinian or, for that matter, Arab and Muslim political culture; the troubled relationship between Jews and Arabs in Israel; the rising strength of religious hatred in the region and the world; and, at least for me, the most senseless yet persistent phenomenon that crops up every time open conflict between Israelis and Arabs breaks out: namely the own-goal, lethal war journalism of the Western media and the wave of hatred it predictably unleashes around the world.

A brief preliminary discussion about the three types of unethical forms of “war journalism” is in order. There is patriotic war journalism: reporting as news your own side’s war propaganda; lethal war journalism: reporting as news a foreign belligerent’s war propaganda; and own-goal war journalism: reporting your enemy’s war propaganda as news.

Modern, professional journalism considers patriotic war journalism unethical, a prostitution of its high calling. While reporters sometimes sympathize with one “side” in a foreign war, lethal war journalists systematically give credence to one belligerent’s narratives, depicting the other side as an atrocious enemy. The third category seems wholly improbable, since why would anyone do something that stupid?

And yet, in the 21st century, the land “between the river and the sea” has given birth to a peculiarly virulent case of both lethal and own-goal journalism among Western news providers. From 2000-2002, a wave of the most ferocious and provocative lethal journalism in the history of modern, professional journalism came from Western journalists who published dishonest Palestinian claims about Israeli evil-doing (targeting kids, massacring civilians) and ran them as news.

When those claims were disproven, as they all were, these news outlets did nothing to correct their errors. In the spring of 2002, when lethal journalists filled the global public sphere with reports of Israeli massacres in Jenin (just like the Nazis in Poland), progressives in Europe protested by wearing mock suicide belts in solidarity with an enemy about to attack their own countries. Own-goal journalism scored a massive blow for an enemy whose viciousness was embodied in those very suicide belts that these demonstrators, inebriated with virtue, wore so proudly.

Democrats must require Palestinian leaders to do better

In early June, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin wrote a letter to Sen. Jim Risch, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, asking him to remove a temporary hold on restoring Palestinian aid. That hold was put in place only until the United States can verify, with any sense of certainty, that the recipients will not directly or indirectly funnel the money to terrorists. Releasing it before that happens would be a terrible mistake.

The letter, which was signed by a group of Raskin’s Democratic colleagues, was misleading and generally reflective of a failed Middle East approach that they desperately need to abandon.

The letter was misleading because it is full of partial omissions and false promises. For example, it notes that this “humanitarian and development aid was passed in FY20 with bipartisan support and signed by the former President,” but completely fails to mention that there was also overwhelming bipartisan and executive support for the very limitations that Risch is trying to uphold.

Raskin claims that the money “is to be provided in full accordance with U.S. law. It is administered and overseen by our government and by trusted and vetted partners …. Hamas and other terrorist groups will not benefit from our humanitarian assistance.” The truth, however, is that during a May 24 special briefing, a senior State Department official publicly admitted that while the U.S. would be “working in partnership with the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to try and channel aid there,” at the end of the day “there are no guarantees” it would not end up with Hamas.

It is also problematic and unlawful even to pretend (while noticeably declining to mention them by name) that the PA has suddenly become a “trusted and vetted partner” that the U.S. can work with on distributing aid in the region.

Setting aside the fact that as recently as May 19, during the conflict in Israel, the PA released a public statement calling for a unity government with none other than Hamas, the PA itself consistently calls for violent uprisings and intifada. The PA also doesn’t stop at merely glorifying violence; it literally pays for it by guaranteeing convicted murderers a monthly salary for life, with amounts increased according to the number of victims and the severity of the harm. It spends hundreds of millions annually incentivizing terror, much of it from international aid. (h/t Yerushalimey)

David Collier: Gaza, Sky News and the Islamist march on London

In fact, I went back six months on the Sky Twitter feed and there is not a single tweet, not one, about the persecution of Christians.

Instead there is an endless stream of demonising, anti-Israel propaganda.

The BBC, the Guardian all have similar issues and a similar focus. When these news outlets publish a story against Israel, it goes viral. Their advertisers pay more, their subscriptions increase. But they are chiefly speaking to the Islamist crowd who use the material as fodder for new recruits and they are egged on by the same Islamist mob screaming ‘what about Palestine?’

Where is the front cover of the New York Times displaying rows of Nigerian children who have been lost? There isn’t one. Nobody cares.

Muslim footballers hold aloft the Palestinian flag and everyone takes this as a sign that ‘Palestine’ is the real humanitarian issue of our age. It is nothing of the kind and it is a disgrace that the FA took no action. This is people like Liverpool’s Sadio Mane turning it into a religious conflict and publicly using their fame and football clubs to do it. This isn’t about human rights – it is about their ‘brothers’, ‘Islam’ and the ‘Ummah’. Black Lives Matter is being co opted by the Palestinian cause – like the Palestinian cause co-opts every cause. But when it comes down to it – look at those people in Africa who are really suffering that nobody wants to talk about. Black lives don’t seem to matter at all.

People like the Sky News journalist Mark Stone get to feel important. His following increases, people begin speaking his name. The fool even thinks this somehow means he is doing the right thing- so he does it more often and more loudly. The growing applause confirms to him he is on the right track. After all, there are only 1.8 billion Muslims in the world and truth is a numbers game. The level of the man’s stupidity is only beaten by the size of his ego. A sad combination for a journalist.

We are being let down. There is no excuse for the Israel obsession – none. It is part of an Islamist narrative – and it is what these Islamists want to talk about – all the time. Our media have followed these Islamists down the anti-western, anti-Israel, rabbit hole. They run scared of the Islamists in the newsroom. Our police run scared of them on the street. The government knows that if it takes action – it will be labelled Islamophobic. This is a train heading for a crash – and the sooner we stop it – the less damaging the impact will be.

05/31 Links Pt2: NYT Collaborates With Terror-linked Palestinian NGO to Push Antisemitic Blood Libel About Children; Proleptic Dhimmitude: Why Diaspora Muslims have a free hand to act out

From Ian:

As Hamas Fired Rockets, the New York Times Joined the Assault on Israel

By publishing one anti-Israel essay after another after another, New York Times editors were taking advantage of a persuasion technique. The “mere-exposure effect” describes how people develop preferences for ideas that they’re more exposed to. By repeating anti-Israel messages, the newspaper also manufactures “social proof” — the persuasive phenomenon in which people tend to drift toward positions or behaviors that they believe many others are also engaged in. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote that “a reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition.” And as a trio of German researchers recently noted, although “information repetitions constitute redundancy and, hence, should not affect the recipient’s decision,” in practice repeating information helps persuade people to change their minds in favor of what’s being repeated.

Beyond trying to steer people toward the Palestinian narrative, though, Times opinion editors are guilty of curating a lack of empathy for Israeli Jews. Even as Israeli families were traumatized by emergency runs to bomb shelters as Hamas strove to kill them, their experiences and emotions were largely missing from the paper’s opinion pages.

In the 12 Guest Essays about the conflict published since the start of the rocket attacks, readers got to know to Refaat Alareer’s wife, Nusayba, and their children, including six-year-old Amal and eight-year-old Lina. They were intimately introduced to Laila al-Arian’s grandfather, Abdul Kareem, and her grandmother, Inaam. They were told of Diana Buttu’s 82-year-old father and her seven-year-old son.

Israelis, on the other hand, had no ages and no faces. No brothers or sisters. No Holocaust-surviving grandparents. They were doctors for a moment. Nameless victims for a paragraph or two. But mostly oppressors, attackers, shooters, racists — and generally heartless. While a Palestinian told readers not to pay attention to Hamas, an Israeli told them (wrongly) that Israelis are adept at coping with rocket fire.

That the newspaper encourages lack of empathy for Israeli Jews is bad enough. Their safety, their children, matter. But the empathy deficit doesn’t stop at Israel’s border. A majority of Jews across the world care about Israel. They are more inclined, then, to care about the Hamas rockets, which readers of the country’s most influential paper learn are “legitimate”; or to support Israel’s efforts to stop that rocket fire, which readers are told isn’t really an effort to stop the attacks, but rather to arbitrarily oppress Palestinians. Their opposition to terrorism by Hamas and other antisemitic groups in Gaza is also being demonized on the pages of the New York Times.

So vocal supporters of Israel are bullied online. And worse. As the New York Times news section noted this week, the recent surge in antisemitic violence in the United States has mostly been at the hands of “perpetrators expressing support for the Palestinian cause.” Opinion editors might consider what their role is in cultivating an atmosphere in which attacks on innocent Israeli Jews, and on innocent American Jews, are viewed as justified.

Here are the sources. Note, DCI-P has ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a U.S. designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. pic.twitter.com/xCp5MG9WXO
— Benjamin Fogel (@BA_Fogel) May 30, 2021

Three days ago the NYT printed his picture on the front page as a child victim of the war. Now it reveals this 17yo was actually a fighter for the jihadist "Mujahideen Brigades". #oops https://t.co/q0NgPUbQxt
— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) May 30, 2021

NYT Publishes Infamous Palestinian Propaganda Maps, Defends Image as ‘Art’

The maps are duplicitous in numerous ways, amongst them is the mixing of reality with imagination. Whereas the land really was divided along the lines seen in three out of four of the maps, the terms used serve to create a false impression that a sovereign entity called ‘Palestine’ is being gradually eroded over time. But a closer look reveals that’s not the case at all.

In reality, the set of maps, regularly shared by proponents of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, is a fraud. The land depicted as “Palestinian” was actually first under the British Mandate, then under Jordanian and Egyptian control. Only much later did some of the land ever come under semi-autonomous Palestinian control.

Moreover, the lines drawn dividing the territory never actually existed. In reality, they were only a theoretical outline for fairly dividing the land between Arabs and Jews. The Jews accepted the plan, despite its numerous drawbacks, but the Arabs did not – and ended up with even less land after waging war on their Jewish neighbors.

Back in 2015, MSNBC apologized for using these same deceptive maps following a social media backlash. And in February 2020, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was roundly criticized after appearing before the United Nations Security Council holding up a series of maps that he labeled “The Palestinian Historic Compromise.”

Nevertheless, years after this series of maps has been disproven as misleading propaganda, the New York Times commissioned its own design, thus spreading the lie to a mainstream audience of millions around the world.

David Singer: The NYTimes and Washington Post bash Israel again - but their claims are false

The New York Times should be ashamed of itself for publishing their similarly false and misleading maps.

Brownie points earned by the Washington Post in exposing the New York Times anti-Israel bias were forfeited when Kessler continued “to summarize the two versions of whether there was a historic Palestine for readers who want to hear both sides of the story.”

The Pro-Palestinian version is a complete lie - and according to Kessler maintains:
“In the 18th century, the area saw the emergence of a new Palestine-based autonomous rule, spurred in part by the region’s commercial dynamism, especially its trade in cotton and grain. In effect, between the 1720s and 1775 under the ruler Zahir al-Umar, there was an independent Palestinian state — longer than the British mandate.

Why publish such fabricated nonsense?

Palestine had then been part of the Ottoman Empire for 250 years and remained so until the Allied and Central Powers made their decisions on its future at the 1920 San Remo Conference. Palestine referred to the area and not to any people.

Ending the flow of false information published by “respectable publications” remains a continuing challenge for Israel to combat and finally defeat.

05/19 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Britain slides into an antisemitic sewer; Dershowitz: Why does the hard left glorify the Palestinians?; Martha Gellhorn Loved Hemingway and Israel

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Britain slides into an antisemitic sewer

This is what British and American so-called “progressives” — including, appallingly and tragically, many “progressive” Jews — are actually supporting when they endorse the Palestinian cause. But the point is that this horrific collusion has been going on for decades. And there’s a direct line connecting the west’s systematic incitement against Israel and incitement against Jews.

Over the years, demonstration after demonstration against Israel on the streets of London and elsewhere has featured mobs of Muslims marching shoulder-to-shoulder with leftists, liberals and other useful idiots behind the banners of Hamas — whose charter is committed to the genocide of the Jews, whom it dementedly accuses of every perceived ill of the world from the French Revolution onwards.

Such pro-Hamas demonstrations therefore represented a threat to British Jews. No-one ever did anything about this.

For years, such mobs have screamed on the streets of Britain the genocidal jihadi war-cry: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — in other words, a call for the eradication of Israel. This represented at the very least intimidation of British Jews for whom Israel is intimately bound up with their identity. No-one ever did anything about this.

These mobs have also screamed in Arabic, as they did again on Saturday: “Khayber Khayber Ya Yehud jaish Mohammed Sauf Ya’ud”. This means, “Khayber Khaybar oh Jews, Mohammed’s army is returning” — and is an inflammatory reference to Mohammed’s seventh century slaughter of the Jews of Khybar, and a threat to replicate it.

This represented an unmistakeable menace against British Jews. Not Israelis. Not Zionists. Jews. But no-one ever did anything about it. And unabashed western “progressives” continue to support these people’s cause.

But the threat isn’t limited to this chilling alliance. It’s deepened yet further by the fact that the murderous lies about Israel, which are so dangerously inflaming emotions against Israel and the Jews, are never repudiated by those who shape British political discourse.

Alan M. Dershowitz: Why does the hard left glorify the Palestinians?

The Palestinian people have suffered more from the ill-advised decisions of their leaders than from the actions of Israel.

Back to the present: Hamas commits a double war crime every time it fires a lethal rocket at Israeli civilians from areas populated by its civilians, who they use as human shields. Israel responds proportionally in self-defense, as President Biden has emphasized. The Israel Defense Forces go to extraordinary lengths to try to minimize civilian casualties among Palestinians, despite Hamas’ policy of using civilian buildings — hospitals, schools, mosques, and high-rise buildings — to store, fire and plan their unlawful rockets and incendiary devices. Yet the hard left blames Israel alone, and many on the center-left create a moral equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas.

Why? The answer is clear and can be summarized in one word: Jews.

The enemy of the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and the Chechens are not — unfortunately for them — the Jews. Hence, there is little concern for their plight. If the perceived enemy of the Palestinians were not the Jews, there would be little concern for their plight as well. This was proved by the relative silence that greeted the massacre of Palestinians by Jordan during “Black September” in 1970, or the killings of Palestinian Authority leaders in Gaza during the Hamas takeover in 2007. There has been relative silence, too, about the more than 4,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians— killed by Syria during that country’s current civil war. It is only when Jews or their nation are perceived to be oppressing Palestinians that the left seems to care about them.

While the United States provides financial support for Israel, we also provide massive support for Jordan and Egypt. Even if the United States were to end support for Israel, the demonization of Israel by the hard left would not end.

The left singles out the Palestinians not because of the merits of their case but, rather, because of the alleged demerits of Israel and the double standard universally applied to Jews. That is the sad reality.

David Collier: Sky News and Mark Stone – the anti-Israel propagandists

The recent reporting from Sky News in Israel has been shameful, and their Middle East Correspondent Mark Stone has been leading the charge off the cliff. It wasn’t always this way – something seems to have broken in Stone, and his reporting seems to have recently deteriorated into one-sided anti-Israel activism.

Because of the sense of normality Israel tries to retain, despite rockets raining down around it – conflict in Israel is like nowhere else. It presents reporters with a unique challenge – an imbalance and distortion that they must contextualise to remain professional. The very fact they are there, walking around and able to witness these type of protests in a conflict zone – is repeated nowhere else on earth. This context is everything, and Mark Stone has lost it.

Mark Stone and the ‘peaceful protest’
Although this has been deteriorating for days, the public Mark Stone ‘jump the shark’ event occurred yesterday. Stone got shaken and angry. It is visible in both his online posts and Sky News reports.

There was a ‘Day of Rage’ called for by Palestinian leaders. Both Fatah and Hamas asked for violence, and the ‘Palestinian Street’ was called upon to rise up and confront Israeli security forces. The day started with guns paraded in Ramallah and a thwarted terrorist attack in Hebron. Stone was based in Jerusalem as crowds gathered.

Stone’s reports were all about ‘entirely unnecessary, provocative behaviour by Israeli police/military.’ Stone produced several tweets of the same nature.

The articles went viral online – as of course, they would. But the key issue in all this is not what his partial understanding of what was occurring might have been, it is in his description of the protestors as a ‘peaceful Palestinian group’. He refers to it as a ‘peaceful protest’ several times.

What on earth does he mean? This group literally turned up to a violent ‘Day of Rage’ protest.

It might be possible to have suggested that the protest ended peacefully – had it done so. It is also legitimate to suggest that the Israeli police reacted badly – if this is what Stone felt that he saw. What no journalist trying to report the truth can do in this circumstance, is refer to a group who turned up to a ‘Day of Rage’ in the middle of a conflict – as ‘peaceful’. If they were peaceful – they would have stayed at home. Period.