Showing posts with label anti-Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-Israel. Show all posts

Sunday, September 24, 2023

From AP:
BOSTON (AP) — A leading Egyptian opposition politician was targeted with spyware multiple times after announcing a presidential bid — including with malware that automatically infects smartphones, security researchers have found. They say Egyptian authorities were likely behind the attempted hacks.

Discovery of the malware last week by researchers at Citizen Lab and Google’s Threat Analysis Group prompted Apple to rush out operating system updates for iPhones, iPads, Mac computers and Apple Watches to patch the associated vulnerabilities.

Citizen Lab said in a blog post that attempts beginning in August to hack former Egpytian lawmaker Ahmed Altantawy involved configuring his phone’s connection to the Vodaphone Egypt mobile network to automatically infect it with Predator spyware if he visited certain websites not using the secure HTTPS protocol.

Prior to that, Citizen Lab said, attempts were made beginning in May to hack Altantawy’s phone with Predator via links in SMS and WhatsApp messages that he would have had to click on to become infected.

Once infected, the Predator spyware turns a smartphone into a remote eavesdropping device and lets the attacker siphon off data.

Given that Egypt is a known customer of Predator’s maker, Cytrox, and the spyware was delivered via network injection from Egyptian soil, Citizen Lab said it had “high confidence” Egypt’s government was behind the attack.
Notice anything missing?

Whenever the media reports on spyware from an Israeli company, they always prominently mention Israel. But when the spyware comes from a different country - in this case, North Macedonia and Hungary - no one says a word.

When Ken Roth was criticized for always mentioning Israel in connection to Pegasus spyware, when it is a private company, he justified that by saying that Israeli export laws allowed the spyware to be sold to countries that are less than paradigms of freedom and democracy. But when it comes to these other companies, the countries that allow them to sell their wares to places like Egypt are not even mentioned in the articles, or by Roth. 

Earlier this year, the US Department of Commerce announced they were blacklisting four spyware firms:

Today, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) added four entities, Intellexa S.A. in Greece, Cytrox Holdings Crt in Hungary, Intellexa Limited in Ireland, and Cytrox AD in North Macedonia to the Entity List for trafficking in cyber exploits used to gain access to information systems, threatening the privacy and security of individuals and organizations worldwide.
Where were all the anguished articles about how Greece and Hungary and Ireland and North Macedonia were peddling tools to repressive governments to target dissidents?

They were never written. But the New York Times did cover part of this story - by highlighting not the countries that allowed these exports, but the Israeli connection to two of the four companies.


If spyware doesn't come from Israel, or is not connected to Israel, the media's interest in the stories plummets to practically nothing.  

This is the textbook definition of media bias.





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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Sunday, July 16, 2023




Haaretz reports that Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, condemned Israel as a "racist state" on Saturday. 

During the Netroots Nation conference, at one point Rep. Jan Schakowsky was introduced. She is one of the highest ranking Jewish members of Congress and a strident critic of Israel. 

She was roundly booed and protesters started chanting anti-Israel slogans as soon as she was mentioned. 

Schakowsky tried to tell the protesters that she is on their side, but they drowned her out, and she briefly considered walking off the stage. But then Jayapal stood up and silenced the protesters by saying, "As somebody who’s been in the streets and participated in a lot of demonstrations, I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state." She added that there were nefarious forces trying to silence them, and Schakowsky is not one of them. 

Meaning, she is one of the good Jews. 

The incident starts around 1:06:00 in this video.



Schakowsky, who almost certainly disagrees that Israel is a racist state, remained silent so as not to anger the mob even more. 

The mob sets the agenda for the "progressives."

The wording is telling. Jayapal isn't arguing that Israel is a "racist state." She didn't bring a single fact to support the statement. She is telling the crowd that the progressive Democrat goal is to spread the word that Israel is a racist state, and that she agrees with the protesters - protesters who waited until a Jewish member of Congress was going to speak before interrupting, an hour into the conference. 

Facts don't matter - propaganda is the goal. If the Israel haters can find some context-less facts that seem to support that narrative, great, and any counter-evidence is summarily dismissed and ignored. That is the entire content of the Amnesty and HRW "apartheid" reports.  The accusation is the important thing, not the facts. And the accusation is seen as an important part of the progressive story. 

The accusation itself is absurd. Unlike apartheid-era South Africa, and despite the lies of some NGOs, there are no Israeli laws that discriminate against Arabs or Muslims. On the contrary, equal rights are explciit in many Israeli laws. If equal rights for all is enshrined in the law in hundreds of ways, then clearly Israel is not a racist state. (I gave an example last week of Israel's law against desecrating religious objects, which does not single out Jewish religious objects but applies equally to attacks on all religions.) 

Israel does discriminate against non-citizens. So does every other nation on the planet. But only Israel is accused of "racism" or "apartheid" for prioritizing its own citizens over non-citizens, especially non-citizens who are attempting to destroy the State.

The only bigot in this conversation is Pramila Jayapal, who is singling out the world's only Jewish state as being intolerant when it its laws are more tolerant of its Muslim minority than much of Western Europe's are. Not to mention the constitutions of nearly every Arab nation being explicitly discriminatory against non-Muslims and non-Arabs. 

There was another accusation of racism against Israel this weekend, and unlike Jayapal, this one pretends to have facts on its side.

The official Palestinian Wafa news agency reports in its English-language site:

The Israeli national water company Mekorot has reduced the daily amount of water supply to the provinces of Hebron and Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank by about 6,000 cups per day, today said the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA), which described the move as ‘racist’.

PWA said the move deprives the people of their right to obtain sufficient amounts of water, especially in light of the sharp rise in temperatures.

“There are no technical reasons behind this reduction,” PWA said, adding that “no faults were detected in the supplying source, but rather it [the move] comes as a discriminatory measure that adds to the racist policies practiced by the occupation authorities.
I could find no news stories about this in Hebrew media, so I have no idea if it is true. But let's pretend that it is, and Israel reduced the amount of water to the governorates of Hebron and Bethlehem by 6,000 cups every day. (The word "cups" is consistent in English and Arabic; in fact the word is "kub" in Arabic.)

Given that there are about 900,000 people in those two governorates, that comes out to about one third of a teaspoon of water per person per day.  If the "6,000 cups" story is even remotely true, no one would notice. Which is why the accusation is almost certainly false - why would Israel reduce the amount of water by such a minuscule amount? 

As with Jayapal, the accusation of "racism" is what drives the story, not any facts. Facts are the enemy of these modern antisemites, which is why they try so hard to drown out the facts with a false, slanderous narrative.





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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Friday, June 30, 2023



What do you do when your hate becomes socially unacceptable?

Find an alternative that people won't blame you for!

From TheJC:

Textbooks in German schools display a strong political bias against Israel, according to a new report.

It reveals a disturbing trend of blaming Israel for the conflict with the Palestinians.
And it says teachers in German schools tend to shy away from discussing Israel in class because of fears of sparking unmanageable debates.

The report, conducted by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and the Mideast Freedom Forum, focused on 16 history and politics textbooks used in secondary schools in Berlin and Brandenburg.

The Amadeu Antonio Foundation described textbooks as “inadequate, often one-sided and tendentious” in their depiction of Israel.
It said there is a “different weighting of the victims on the Palestinian and Israeli sides.

“A mostly paraphrased David versus Goliath narrative is dominant. Terrorist attacks and other acts of violence are sometimes played down or ignored.

“Most of the textbooks portray Israel as a war-mongering crisis state and the sole aggressor in the conflict.

“Uprisings and violent attacks on Jewish civilians are given a kind of legitimacy because of the dominant image of Israel.

“The focus of knowledge transfer at school is on the Six Day War, which is also often presented in a distorted way.”

The report says the Second Intifada is “largely ignored in educational material” and there is an “uncritical representation of Hamas” while the failure of the peace process is often blamed on Israel.

Israeli settlement building, construction of the security wall and Israeli rejection of the Palestinian right of return are presented as obstacles to peace.

But Palestinian terror against the Israeli civilian population is not, says the report.  
I'm sure it isn't only Germany.




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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Monday, June 12, 2023




I'm in the middle of reading "Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership,"  collection of essays edited by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser:

This book—perhaps the first devoted to this topic—documents the devastating failure of the Jewish establishment, including its leaders and major donors, to defend and protect American Jews as anti-Semitism surges across the country....Betrayed by their leaders, the essayists argue, American Jews require new, strong leadership.

While it is not an American Jewish organization, the World Jewish Congress - led by Ronald Lauder - may be a perfect example of this problem.

The World Jewish Congress issued this statement this morning:

World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder issued the following statement praising the return of the United States to UNESCO: 

“The World Jewish Congress welcomes the decision by the United States to rejoin UNESCO after a five-year absence.   

“Under the leadership of Director-General Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO has made an immeasurable impact on the world stage by safeguarding history amid tumultuous and complex global events, so that current and future generations can be exposed to and better understand the lessons of the past.   

“WJC, a longtime UNESCO partner on Holocaust remembrance and interfaith initiatives, is hopeful that the agency will now be able to share its critical work with even broader audiences.”
One of the themes of this site is Jewish unity, and infighting among Jews is one of the organized Jewish community's worst problems. I do not like to attack Jewish organizations. But this statement is outrageous.

The entire reason the US left UNESCO in 2017 was because if its anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias. That bias was consistent for years, with UNESCO regularly issuing biased reports and statements:

Denying any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and even the Western Wall
Deploring Jews visiting the Temple Mount
Ignored Israeli casualties in the May 2019 Gaza war
Complimenting Jordan's plan for rebuilding the public ramp to the Temple Mount while condemning Israel's
Calling Maimonides a Muslim named Moussa ibn Maïmoun and refusing to apologize

I'm not saying that there might not be good reasons for the US to rejoin UNESCO. After months of lobbying by current UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay where she tried to reassure Israel she won’t allow anti-Israeli bias in the organization, Israel told the Biden administration last year that it wouldn't oppose the US re-joining.  The US is concerned that China is now leading UNESCO in ways against US interests.

All this may be true, but: 

The WJC claims that it "protects Jews everywhere and constantly defends the State of Israel against these threats." But Jews and Israel are missing in this press release. Instead, it is cheerleading an organization with a history of horrifying antisemitism and anti-Zionism. 

How could it welcome the US decision, and praise UNESCO, without saying a word about UNESCO's antisemitic history? This is not the time for celebratory press release, but for a warning that UNESCO will be watched closely to see if there has been any significant change in its anti-Israel, antisemitic bias. 

But the WJC is not saying that UNESCO is on its radar. On the contrary, WJC is giving UNESCO a kosher certification. 

It is true that UNESCO has become less noxious under the leadership of Azoulay, but it has hardly ended its bias. Every year UNESCO reaffirms all previous resolutions minimizing the Jewish connection to Jewish holy sites (although it has returned to including the non-Muslim names of the Temple Mount, Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb) as it condemns every Israeli move at all those sites. All the bias and hate are still there, but "softer." 

This is hardly reason for celebration. 

This is not Jewish leadership. This is capitulation. This is giving the message to world Jewry that their self-appointed leaders care more about access to powerful people than actually fighting for Jewish interests. 

Real leaders tell the truth even if that will upset the powers that be. Ronald Lauder is a billionaire - he can say what he wants without any fear of personal consequences. This episode shows that he is no Jewish leader.

(Graphic courtesy of @iTil972)



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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Friday, June 02, 2023

Amnesty's apartheid slur is absolutely antisemitic. The arguments that Amnesty uses for the accusation are literally filled with lies and depends on a brand new definition of apartheid they made up just for Israel. If they would apply the same standards to other states, there would be scores of others that are guilty of the same definition - but Amnesty is creating an entire ecosystem to ensure that Israel and only Israel is accused of one of the worst human rights crimes possible. 

The word "apartheid" is deliberately used to provoke a visceral reaction of disgust. It has nothing to do with reality - it is meant to incite hatred of the Jewish state. 

No sane person would think that Israel is at the bottom of the list of human rights violators, or even that they treat non-citizen Palestinians worse than many other countries treat their (citizen) minorities.  Yet Amnesty spends far more time and money slandering Israel than any other country - and spreading that incitement to hate Israel across all mediums. 

Yes, that is antisemitism.

A new, insanely egregious example can be found in a new campaign that Amnesty-UK launched, called  "Palestine at Home,"  It is meant to show sympathetic Palestinians acting like normal Westerners having fun, spreading information about Palestinian cuisine - and interspersing this with incitement to hate Israel. it has its own logo, its own materials, its own videos. 



Home is peace. Home is safety. Home is love.
For many of us, it is the space we are most at ease, a space where memories are created and happiness forged. When our homes are secure we are free to live and thrive surrounded by community and those who love us. Our need for home connects us all.

But for some of us, this precious space does not exist. Right now, Palestinians are instead experiencing forced evictions and demolitions that destroy their homes and strip them of their safety net. The Israeli authorities’ system of apartheid reaches into homes and rips families apart.

Despite these injustices, Palestinians are resisting. One of the ways they are doing this is through food. Through cooking, they are preserving their histories and telling their stories. Through food, they are keeping the hope of home alive. #PalestineAtHome
This is pure propaganda filled with deception. The entire campaign appeals to emotion, not facts or context, and the purpose is simply to get people angry at Israel without giving Israelis a chance to respond.  All of Amnesty's protestations that they are objective are shown to be lies by the existence of campaigns like this.

It gets worse. Amnesty quotes, without contradiction, a chef's assertion that Palestinians have been under "75 years of illegal occupation."

Which means that Amnesty agrees that Israel's entire existence is illegal.

This propaganda is not only a website. It is also a planned series of videos. It is a set of recipes. 

And make no mistake - Amnesty does not target any other country besides Israel in this way. There are no videos showing cooking with  Rohingyas,  no recipe books of traditional Uyghur foods, no detailed explanations of the warm family lives of the Tutsis in Rwanda, no photos of quaint Darfuri homes. Victims of genocide need not apply to be part of Amnesty campaigns. No - only Palestinians are positioned as victims that are worthy of being elevated this way, and only Jews - not Arab Israelis, but Jews - are the oppressors. 

Ironically, the first recipe in this campaign was for Fattet Makdous - which isn't a Palestinian dish, but Syrian! Of course, Syrian victims of their own regime do not get campaigns on their behalf by Amnesty, but they can be happy that their cuisine is being hijacked by Amnesty and Palestinians. 

If this isn't enough to show how Amnesty-UK is obsessed with hatred of Israel, this is not even their first food based campaign against Israel! 

Last year, in conjunction with their huge publicity campaign around the apartheid slur, Amnesty encouraged baking parties where people could watch films about how awful Israeli Jews are.


Palestinians get two food based campaigns from Amnesty, and the rest of the world - zero.

Just likeAmnesty sells T-shirts attacking only one country in the world. By coincidence, it is again Israel. 

Just like Amnesty's book for children only disparages a single nation in the world - and, yet again, that country is Israel. 

Truly an amazing coincidence that only Israel is singled out, time and time again, for special vitriol from Amnesty. But it couldn't be that it has anything to do with the fact that Israel is filled with Jews. 





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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Thursday, June 01, 2023

Cairo Conspiracy, also known as Boy from Heaven, is a film synopsized as "Adam, the son of a fisherman, is offered the privilege to study at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the center of power of Sunni Islam. Adam becomes a pawn in the conflict between Egypt's religious and political elites."

It was released a year ago. It has received a number of awards and positive reviews.

It was finally released in Israel last week.

Suddenly, Egyptian officials are denouncing the film - and blaming Israel for it.

Islamic writer and researcher, and former Egyptian Undersecretary of the Ministry of Religious Endowments, Saad El-Fiqi, said that showing the movie "A Boy from Heaven" in Israel to tarnish the image of Al-Azhar Al-Sharif failed miserably.

He continued in statements to RT: “The Zionist is known for lying, fraud and promoting everything that is false, and Israel is a bastard state that has no origin and its history is known and established for all wise people in the world,” stressing that one day it will be destroyed as its legend ended in the war of the tenth of Ramadan and the sixth of October.

Al-Fiqi stressed the need to  refute what is published in the Zionist media, especially with regard to Al-Azhar Al-Sharif, which is known for always standing with the cause of Palestine and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as its clear positions against Zionist arrogance and exposing its lies, as well as exposing the faults of those who support the bastard state.

The Egyptian Islamic writer and researcher said that the honorable Al-Azhar, whether Israel likes it or not, remains a dagger in its back, revealing its faults, showing their mistakes and lies, and that it is a state that will inevitably disappear.
If you need evidence that hate for Israel is unhinged, this is plenty.

The director of the film is Swedish-Egyptian. It was co-produced by  Sweden, France and Finland.. It was mostly filmed in Turkey.

So, naturally, it must all be Israel's fault.

Apparently, an Israel Hayom article about the movie mentioned that some of the actors were Israeli. Last year, they were proudly described in Arabic media as being "of Palestinian origin."  That seems to what started this whole thing. 

Yet the film was even reviewed positively by Al Jazeera last year!



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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Sunday, April 30, 2023




The desire to paint Israel as evil is an all-encompassing obsession for some. But they thirst for new material.

+972 Magazine published an expose about Israel's ties to the Greek military junta in the 1960s:

The relationship blossomed during the dark days of the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 and 1974 — a period marked by the brutal repression, imprisonment, torture, and murder of opponents of the regime, and a period that was deliberately omitted from the celebratory narrative Israel promotes.   

Israel, was a besieged country in 1967 surrounded by enemies. The Greek coup happened in April - before the Six Day War. 

For Israel, a potential ally in the Mediterranean would of course be an attractive prospect to cultivate. 

This article mentions, as an aside:
Immediately upon seizing power, the military junta began a campaign to eliminate its real and imagined opponents, an effort embraced or tacitly supported by most Western European countries and the United States.   
So Israel was acting exactly as Western European countries and the US did. This was the height of the Cold War, and the junta's anticommunist position was the major factor in this decision-making.

Yet Israel is singled out for not caring about human rights. This was in a year when Israel was being threatened daily with annihilation in Arab newspapers. 

When countries choose whom to ally with, they look at shared interests, in how that relationship could help each country politically and economically. Human rights is always a very low priority. This is is true for every  country in any time period. It was especially true in the 1960s when nations were divided into pro-Western or pro-communist with little regard to any other issue.

All of that context is missing from the +972 piece. 

But it concludes with its own bizarre spin:

 This history suggests that the State of Israel was not merely a passive player, following only the will of the great powers; it was and remains a powerful and autonomous promoter of its own interests first and foremost, willing to compromise on values like democracy and human rights in order to gain international support in its own oppression of the Palestinian people.
What do the Palestinians have to do with Israel's relations with Greece? The article didn't mention Palestinians at all before its conclusion. Israel's relations with other countries outside the Arab world have nothing to do with Palestinians. Israel's concerns at the time was with the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War, the Palestinian issue was not even close to the top priority of Israel in those days. 

But since the article had no real dirt when exposing Israel's semi-secret relations with the Greek junta, it has to jazz it up to appeal to its audience of Israel-haters - and pretend that everything Israel does is meant to oppress others. 

There is nothing embarrassing about how Israel acted. It acted as any other nation would. But when you have Israel, you don't want to compare it to other nations. Doing so dilutes the message that Israel is uniquely evil - and that message is the only reason +972 exists. 



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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

The New York Times recently published a list of New York's best restaurants. One of them, Ayat with at least two locations, features Palestinian Arab food.

There is nothing wrong with that, of course. Good food is good food and the list has many different ethnic restaurants. But restaurants are more than food - they include presentation, atmosphere.

And Ayat is filled with anti-Israel propaganda.

On the wall of its Staten Island branch there is a huge mural with a crying Palestinian woman together with evil looking Israeli soldiers and tanks and innocent looking Palestinians behind bars, next to a depiction of a map that erases Israel.


Its flagship Brooklyn location has a similar mural, apparently showing a sleeping child being woken up by the evil Jews and Palestinians being held at gunpoint.



The menu prominently says "Down with the occupation."


Another mural on the wall that says that the entire point of the restaurant is political:



Now, could you imagine a restaurant that features artwork about abortion, or that is anti-immigration? Certainly any reviewer would prominently mention that, no matter how good the food is, because the dining experience for people who disagree with the politics would be ruined, no matter how good the food is.

Beyond that, is it not possible to have a Palestinian restaurant, or Palestinian art exhibit, or Palestinian concert, that celebrates Palestinian culture without feeling the necessity to attack Israeli Jews - Jews whose emotional and historic ties to the land dwarf those of Arabs?

They may exist, but they are rare indeed.

(h/t Jerry)





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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Thursday, March 02, 2023




We've discussed the transparent hate that "UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestinian Territories" Francesca Albanese has towards Israel many times, yet she somehow continues to outdo herself.

UN Watch published a well-researched article that showed that Craig Mokhiber, head of the New York office of the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, has a history of anti-Israel bias to the extent of accusing Israel of “genocide,” “large-scale atrocities” and “right-wing white ethno-nationalist terrorism.” 

Albanese responded with something that really goes beyond her previous anti-Israel statements:

Shooting the messenger is the only card left to those whose sole purpose is to shelter Israel from accountability. Unfortunately for them - and for Palestinians- Israel's brutal occupation has grown out of control. It can no longer be whitewashed by smearing human rights voices.
How, exactly, is quoting Moktuber's own words "smearing" him and "shooting the messenger"?

If Albanese considers him the "messenger" that means that she agrees that Israel is engaging in "genocide," a truly sickening and antisemitic position. Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. Accusing Israel of the worst human rights crime - a crime that Jews have been the most prominent victims of over the past century - is not meant to protect Palestinians but to cause pain to Jews. 

(The Genocide Convention has a much looser definition which could be twisted to apply to nearly every nation that has ever been in a conflict; using it against Israel and not against the Palestinians who specifically target anyone Jewish they can find is further evidence of antisemitic double standards that apply only to Israel.) 

In this tweet, Albanese is herself accusing Israel of genocide, and she is defending anti-Israel bias. Given that her job description demands impartiality, this means that she has dropped all pretense of objectivity herself.

It would be refreshing if the UN would act according to its own standards and dismiss her. But the UN doesn't adhere to its own standards of objectivity, so this is clearly not going to happen. 




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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Thursday, February 23, 2023










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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Thursday, February 09, 2023

The American Bar Association proposed a Resolution 514 condemning antisemitism that referred to the widely accepted IHRA working definition.

Israel haters immediately attacked. 

More than 40 organizations, both those that are explicitly anti-Israel and "progressive" organizations, joined a campaign claiming that the IHRA Working Definition chills free speech. "Any embrace of the IHRA definition by the ABA would legitimize and encourage this undermining of core democratic rights," they say, without explaining exactly how.

The National Lawyers Guild said, falsely, that "the IHRA definition would provide a tool to stigmatize and suppress lawyers, legal advocates and law students from expressing political criticism of Israel or advocacy for Palestinian human rights." Of course, they cannot point to any wording in the IHRA definition that would do anything like that.

Human Rights Watch wrote a similar letter. 

The main point that these critics make is that the IHRA definition has supposedly been used to suppress free speech. They cannot point to where the definition actually does that, because it doesn't mandate anything: the definition is filled with caveats that in the end only provide guidance. If the IHRA Working Definition is being misused, then these organizations should fight the misuse, not the definition. The fact that they don't tells you all you need to know.

Moreover, the ABA resolution explicitly said that nothing in the resolution is intended to diminish or infringe upon the Bill of Rights or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so even if their lies about IHRA were true, the text wouldn't allow it to be misused that way.

They are lying when they say that their opposition to the definition is based on human rights and free speech concerns. The only problem they have with it is that it notes that singling out Israel as uniquely evil far out of proportion to its supposed crimes is antisemitic. And they want to have the right to do exactly that. 

Their objections are based on their hate of the Jewish state, not their interest in Palestinian human rights or in fighting antisemitism. 

The original draft resolution also included an attached 17 page report on antisemitism that went through a history of antisemitism in Europe and in the US. It mentioned Natan Sharansky's "3-D" test for antisemitism as well as further references to the IHRA and US State Department definitions of antisemitism. 

In the end, the ABA removed everything that could be considered a definition, including virtually the entire report, and left the eviscerated resolution to condemn something that could mean anything:


Without a definition, this is entirely meaningless. Some Israel haters define antisemitism as hating Arabs. Others define Zionism as antisemitism. There is nothing in this resolution that contradicts those bizarre definitions. 

The resolution doesn't even mention Jews - only a single reference to improving security at "Jewish institutions and organizations." It mentions "houses of worship," not synagogues. 

Right now, the resolution is about as meaningful as a resolution saying that puppies are cute. It is a checkbox - now the ABA can say they oppose antisemitism (whatever that is)! Mazel tov!

Because of the modern antisemites who use obsessive, conspiracy-theory driven hate of Israel as a proxy for the age old obsessive, conspiracy-theory driven hate of Jews, the ABA believes that it passed a resolution that didn't upset anyone.

Well, this Jew is upset. 

The Jews who publicly identify as Jews, those who wear identifiably Jewish clothing, those who publicly support the Jewish state or speak Hebrew in public or who stand proud in their Zionism - they are the biggest targets and victims of antisemitism today.  

This resolution doesn't give a damn about them. 




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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Friday, January 20, 2023

In the wake of the Ken Roth Harvard fellowship episode, the anti-Israel crowd - led by Roth himself - has been pushing the meme that academia is anti-Palestinian and that pro-Palestinian academics must worry that their viewpoints will harm their careers.

And if anything that absurd lie has accelerated since Harvard caved!

Roth doubled down on the lie that Harvard originally caved to evil Zionist forces:


Omar Shakir, the former BDS activist who is now a Human Rights Watch researcher, tweeted:


Palestine Legal said:


Is there even a shred of evidence that "pro-Palestinian" academics are being silenced?

The Middle East Scholar Barometer has serious methodological problems, but it is a decent measure of self-selecting academics who have strong opinions on the Middle East - and it shows that they are overwhelmingly anti-Israel. They support efforts to boycott Israel. 90% describe Israel even within the Green Line as "a democratic state with deep structural inequality (61%)" or "A state akin to apartheid (29%)." 

Far more of them support holding academic workshops in Qatar (80%) than in Israel (48%), and the reason they opposed holding workshops in Israel was overwhelmingly "principled or ethical concerns." Meaning far more consider Israel illegitimate but hardly any say that about terrorist-supporting Qatar.

Middle East academia is strongly anti-Israel. And academia, at least in the social sciences, in general tends to share the same political opinions as the rabid anti-Israel crowd. 

What Roth and Shakir and Palestine Legal are really saying is that the <1% of Middle East academics who answered the question saying that Arab citizens in Israel have the same rights as Jews is still too many for them. To them, a single pro-Israel academic is too many, and evidence of anti-Palestinian bias because a university hired them. 

Here's a question that I'd love to see answered in a future survey: Ask how many academics oppose a Palestinian state that defines itself as Arab, and how many oppose an Israel that defines itself as Jewish. That will tell you everything you need to know about this fictional "Palestine exception to academic freedom."



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Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

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Thursday, January 19, 2023


Former Human Rights Watch director Ken Roth was interviewed on NPR and continued his jihad of falsely accusing Harvard University of denying him a fellowship because of rich donors objecting to his "criticism of Israel."
ROTH: ...the Carr Center called me up and sheepishly had to admit that the dean had vetoed my fellowship because of my criticism of Israel....Apparently, what they objected to in my case was that I'm not partial. I'm an impartial critic of Israeli repression. And that seems to have been the stigma that the Israeli government didn't like, that its supporters didn't like. And that was why my fellowship was vetoed.

FADEL: What does this say about freedom of academic expression on campus? This is an Ivy League campus in the United States.

ROTH: This would suggest that Harvard is allowing donors to compromise intellectual independence at the university.
The original Michael Massing article in The Nation - which was itself biased and filled with baseless allegations - did not say that the Carr Center told Roth he was rejected for "criticism of Israel" but because Roth had an "'anti-Israel bias'; Roth’s tweets on Israel were of particular concern." There is a world of difference between "bias" and "criticism," bias means Roth is not impartial, as he claims he is. 

But there has been not a single thread of evidence that Harvard's decision was based on donor pressure. That was completely made up in The Nation article. Roth - who clearly coordinated his anti-Harvard campaign with the writer of that article - has deliberately been pushing that narrative even though the entire theory is based on antisemitic tropes of rich Jews controlling how people could think.

At the very end of the NPR piece comes a piece of information that we had not seen before: 
Kennedy School media relations director James Smith said the decision not to offer Roth a fellowship was based on an evaluation of his potential contributions to the school. Smith also said  “[It is Harvard Kennedy School’s explicit and consistent policy that] we do not engage with donors or funders in our deliberations or decisions related to fellowship appointments." 

(Bracketed quote fragment from this Daily Beast article.] 

So Harvard's Kennedy School forcefully denies that donors are part of any decision-making. They have refuted The Nation and Roth's entire accusation - and yet this refutation is only mentioned as an afterthought, after allowing Roth to freely spread his antisemitic conspiracy theories of rich Jewish donors controlling HKS' academics.

But it turns out that even if the Kennedy School was not pro-active in getting this message out while Roth has been spouting his lies, the information about Harvard's policy has been on its website for years.

Any reporter could have looked at Harvard Kennedy School's statement on transparent engagement and funding, written in 2020. HKS explicitly says that funders do not and cannot have any influence over academic matters, including hiring:
It bears emphasis that HKS’s funders do not control the way we carry out our work. For all of our activities conducted using external funding, we protect our academic integrity and independence by maintaining full intellectual control: HKS faculty and staff make the decisions about research methodologies and policy findings, about the content of our courses, and about whom we accept into our community as students, faculty, staff, and visitors. No funder is allowed to interfere with those decisions, and all of our funders are aware of that point. We work to ensure that public communications about gifts and grants are clear that HKS is the intellectual driver of the activities.
Written policies have the force of law. The institutions that do not follow their own policies can be sued. Any major corporation or institution takes them very seriously, and Harvard clearly does based on how extensive these and other policies are. 

The idea that donors pressured Harvard is complete fiction - that has been spread by media that also happens to share Roth's anti-Israel bias.

If donor pressure wasn't the reason for Harvard's decision not to hire Roth, then what was? Well, NPR quoted the reason:  they did not think that he would provide a positive contribution to the school.

It is also notable that Dean Doug Elmendorf who vetoed Roth's proposed fellowship  has spoken about this exact topic, about the potential downsides of inviting someone who can tarnish HKS' reputation, in a 2018 speech:

One key reason to invite visitors with a wide range of views is that a vigorous discussion of their actions and words can illuminate crucial issues in public policy and leadership, and thereby improve policy and leadership over time. Another key reason to invite visitors with a wide range of views is that the values of our community, and assessments of who is living up those values or not, are often matters of debate themselves.

At the same time, inviting visitors inevitably conveys, to at least some people, positive recognition by Harvard Kennedy School, whether we intend it or not. That positive recognition is greater for visitors who receive a particular title or honor, such as giving a named lecture or becoming a “Fellow.” We should not ignore the effects of such recognition in inviting visitors or choosing visitors to give named lectures or become Fellows. I learned this lesson the hard way. As a consequence of my learning, we are now adopting a set of standards and processes for naming Fellows, including the ideas that people proposing the appointment of a Fellow should affirm that the candidate has a professional record consistent with the values of public service to which the Kennedy School aspires, and that the dean may ask an ad hoc faculty committee to evaluate a proposed Fellow.
As part of HKS' stated policies, because of the potential of Roth to embarrass Harvard Kennedy School, Dean Elmendorf almost certainly created an ad hoc faculty committee to discuss the pros and cons of allowing Roth to become a fellow. They decided that the cons of hiring someone with a track record of lies and bias outweigh the pros. 

And one does not need to prove Roth's anti-Israel bias to see that he would not have provided a positive contribution to the school. His constant lies about this Harvard episode and his baseless accusations themselves prove that Roth has no regard for the truth or fairness.

No decent school would want a vindictive liar on their staff. 

Unless, of course, that person is only hired to attract rich donors to begin with.




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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

From Jordan's Ammon News:


The Council of the Jordanian Dental Association (JDA) announced that it will not participate in the AEEDC / Dubai 2023 conference, due to the confirmation of the participation of a Zionist delegation in the exhibition activities.

The JDA Tuesday called on all colleagues not to participate in this event, under penalty of union accountability.

The Council also addressed the Jordanian national companies for dental supplies, the Association of Dental Laboratory Owners, Dental Technicians, and all workers in the dental sector to adhere to boycotting the conference.

It is noteworthy that this refusal to participate in the AEEDC conference by the Jordanian Dental Association (JDA) is the third in a row for the same reason.

As far as I can tell, there are no Israelis even giving talks at the conference. The Jordanian Dental Association is boycotting the conference because two out of 570 exhibitors are from Israel!

Last year, the conference attracted  66,000 participants from 155 countries and the exhibition featured 4,800 products. The event generated some $3.9 billion of business deals.

Is the JDA hurting Israel, or itself, by not attending?

This is part of the old, outdated zero-sum mentality of the Israel haters. They are willing to definitely hurt themselves for an infinitesimal chance that they would hurt Israel. It is a hugely diluted version of the mentality that produces suicide bombers and car rammers.

The article says that the JDA boycotted the event last year as well. But guess what?

Plenty of Jordanians attended anyway!


Note also that many countries that have no relations with Israel had no problem attending.

It appears that the JDA threatened their members in 2021 not to attend as well, and also in 2022,  but clearly most Jordanian dentists are not willing to hurt their careers by boycotting major events where they can learn the latest tools and methods. 

It is another case of a boycott that pretends to be successful when in fact it fails miserably.




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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Sunday, January 15, 2023

While Ken Roth and The Nation are trying to stoke outrage that Roth was not hired for a fellowship at Harvard University, blaming rich Jewish donors for the decision without any actual evidence, foreign money pours into US universities with the obvious intention of influencing academia - and more.

Here's a long forgotten incident. In 1989, then-governor Bill Clinton lobbied Saudis to donate to the University of Arkansas. He even met with the Saudi ambassador to the US in 1991. But the Saudis didn't give any money to the university - until Clinton became the Democratic nominee for President in 1992.  And only weeks after he became president, the Saudis gave the university $20 million to establish the King Fahd Middle East Studies Center.

Early efforts by oil-rich Arab kingdoms to donate to prestigious universities in the US were heavy handed, and most universities rejected them because of their demands that the money be used in specific, illegal ways. Over time, they moderated their demands - but the attempt to influence is still quite obvious. As Mitchell Bard writes in a detailed article on the topic:

In 1975, Saudi Arabia was asked to finance a $5.5 million teacher-training program, but several schools, including Harvard, would not participate after the Saudis banned Jewish faculty from participating. MIT also lost a $2 million contract to train Saudi teachers because it insisted that Jewish faculty be allowed to participate.

Georgetown and Harvard accepted $20 million gifts in 2005 from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, whose offer of money to victims of 9/11 was rejected by then mayor Giuliani because of the prince’s suggestion that America rethink its support of Israel. Georgetown’s funding was used to support a center for Muslim-Christian understanding, which was subsequently renamed the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (the center was originally created in 1993 with $6.5 million from a foundation of Arab businessmen led by an Arab Christian, Hasib Sabbagh).As I noted in The Arab Lobby, “Prospective Jewish donors to Georgetown might ask why it is not a center for Muslim-Christian-Jewish understanding, but Jews aside, other donors might wonder why a Jesuit university is accepting funding for such a center from a government that does not allow the practice of Christianity.”

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) asked in February 2008 whether “the center has produced any analysis critical of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for example in the fields of human rights, religious freedom, freedom of expression, women’s rights, minority rights, protection for foreign workers, due process and the rule of law.”...

Georgetown president John DeGioia responded by extolling the virtues of Prince Talal as “a global business leader and philanthropist.” Without answering Wolf’s questions directly, DeGioia simply pointed out that the center had experts who had written about the extremism of Wahhabism and human rights issues. He also lauded the center’s director, John Esposito, the man who had said before 9/11, “Bin Laden is the best thing to come along, if you are an intelligence officer, if you are an authoritarian regime, or if you want to paint Islamist activism as a threat.”

To bolster the credibility of the center, DeGioia revealed the real reason for the Saudis’ interest in Georgetown, and the ultimate threat it poses: “Our scholars have been called upon not only by the State Department, as you note, but also by Defense, Homeland Security and FBI officials as well as governments and their agencies in Europe and Asia. In fact, several high-ranking U.S. military officials, prior to assuming roles with the Multi-National Force in Iraq, have sought out faculty with the Center for their expertise on the region.”

In its investigation of institutional compliance with reporting requirements, the DoE noted that “Prince Alwaleed’s agreement with Georgetown exemplifies how foreign money can advance a particular country’s worldview within U.S. academic institutions.”

The Department of Education began to crack down on universities not properly reporting their foreign donations in 2020, under the Trump administration. It created a website where universities must report the country sources of such donations, although it doesn't publicize the specific donors due to privacy issues. 

Although it is unclear now what percentage of total donations have been reported (many retroactively to the early 2000s), the website currently lists these donation totals to Harvard alone:



Egypt - $44M
Iran(!) - $22K
Jordan - $622K
Kuwait - $22M
Lebanon - $2.5M
Malaysia - $21M
Morocco - $335K
Oman - $1.7M
Pakistan - $1.5M
"State of Palestine"[!] - $1.6M
Qatar - $16M
Saudi Arabia - $61M
Tunisia - $700K
Turkey - $28M
UAE - $80M

The database details some $10 billion in donations from Arab Gulf countries to US universities, many of them earmarked for specific projects. And, as the article I quoted above details, there is plenty that is not reported here.

Harvard, Yale, Georgetown and other schools are awash in Arab funds. The DoE database lists that Qatari donors alone gave Cornell nearly $1.8 billion!

Who can even pretend that the purpose of these funds is not to influence the universities, their faculties, their students and politicians that have these institutions in their districts?

To be fair, much of the Arab money is earmarked to departments with no political focus, with much being spent for science nd medicine. But a significant amount does go towards Arab studies which are almost reflexively anti-Israel. And sometimes the Arab money is not used to create an anti-Israel chair or department, but to lavishly fund an existing anti-Israel department - after all, there are plenty of anti-Israel academics who don't need Arab money to fund their hate, but they welcome that money to promote it further.

The people screaming about "academic freedom" to force a university to hire a specific person known for his bias seem very unconcerned about the billions that are being sent to universities with the obvious intent to influence the academic direction of the university.





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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

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