Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: anti-Zionism

Showing posts with label anti-Zionism. Show all posts

Thursday, November 02, 2023

Antisemites framing the discussion so Israel can't win

Israel-haters/antisemites often use an exceptionally effective method to win in the court of public opinion, known a "framing." When one sets the ground rules of what is and is not up for debate, they can create a playing field where the Zionist or Jewish side cannot win. Forcing Jews to argue within those parameters gives them a huge handicap.

One classic example is to pretend that the history of Israel starts with modern Zionism. If you exclude any talk about the history of the Jews in the Land of Israel before the 19th century, they look just like the foreign colonialists that the haters claim we are.

With Operation Iron Swords, the framing has been elaborate and very effective.

The false framework goes like this:

* Telling civilians to move, whether within or without their territory, is a war crime.

* Neighboring countries have no obligation to accept refugees.

* Killing lots of civilians is a war crime by definition.

* Limiting humanitarian aid to a war zone is a war crime.

All discussions of the war on TV is bound by this framework. These four "rules" are not always explicit, which makes it harder to go against them. Who wants to see dead civilians?

The framing statements are incorrect. But the framework is carefully created to ensure that Israel cannot achieve its military objective of destroying Hamas.

* In fact, in a war zone, the attacker is obligated to tell civilians to move out of the war zone - which Israel has done and Hamas has tried to stop.

* While I don't think that Egypt is legally obligated to open its border, it never had a problem with taking in hundreds of thousands of other refugees from elsewhere. It certainly has a moral obligation to do so.

* Targeting civilians is a war crime. Knowing that civilians will die during an attack on a legitimate military target is acceptable as long as the casualties are not excessive, and international law has a much more liberal view of what is excessive than what Israel does.

* Israel has every right to inspect and limit aid to ensure that Hamas does not get it.

But the first four rules are accepted as the framework on CNN and Al Jazeera. Most news shows don't bother explaining the truth about international law because nuance is not TV-friendly.

Spokespeople on TV must break the framework by saying that they do not accept these parameters and creating their own, accurate framework:

* Hamas started this war with an unprecedented, horrific attack on Israel.

* Hamss has made it clear that they will never change or reform. This is who they are.

* The only moral choice is to utterly destroy them.

* Hamas has turned the entire Gaza Strip into a huge human shield for its army and vast subterranean military complex.

* Israel scrupulously follows international law even under these difficult constraints.

* Therefore, while Israel tries to minimize casualties, every civilian death is purely Hamas' fault.

How many TV shows or newspaper articles have you read that accepts these accurate statements as their framework?

It's going to be a long war, and Israel needs to reframe the discussion.

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!

Nazis put an academic face on Jew-hatred. Now their heirs have "The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism."

The Nazis famously subverted academia by creating an entire new field of “Jewish research” (Judenforschung) where respected academics from various fields produced a corpus of academic papers to justify the Nazi policy of genocide of Jews. One early example of this perversion of academia is described in Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism inNazi Germany by Alan E. Steinweis:

Early in the [Nazi] regime, when the universities’ embrace of antisemitic Jewish studies still seemed tentative, Nazi supporters decided to fill the gap by creating their own free-standing Jewish studies institute. The main force behind this initiative was the historian Walter Frank. In 1935, with support from high-ranking Nazis such as Alfred Rosenberg and Rudolf Hess, Frank founded the Institute for History of the New Germany (Institut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands), the purpose of which was to infuse a National Socialist perspective into German historical scholarship. A short time later, this so-called Reich Institute established its special Research Department for the Jewish Question, based in Munich, and placed it under the direction of the historian Wilhelm Grau. ..Operating under the administrative protection of the Reich Education Ministry, during the second half of the 1930s the Research Department occupied a central position in the emerging field of Nazi Jewish studies. It sponsored research projects at universities, convened conferences that drew participants from a variety of academic disciplines, and published the conference proceedings in a scholarly yearbook, Forschungen zur Judenfrage (Research on the Jewish Question).

What's old is new again.

Modern heirs of Nazi antisemitism have just created their own pseudo-academic institution, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

Don't be fooled by the phrase "critical study." It is just as intellectually dishonest as the Nazi academic studies of Jews were.

The Mondoweiss article "Why we created the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism" proves that this institute is a masquerade for making antisemitism academically acceptable in its very first paragraph:

In recent years, the Israeli flag has increasingly appeared around the world alongside racial supremacist political messaging– for instance, at the January 6th riot in Washington D.C., Hindutva rallies in India, Nazi rallies in Europe, and, most potently, in anti-Palestinian pogroms in the West Bank. At this point, it could not be clearer that Zionism is a political ideology tightly enmeshed with racism, fascism, and colonial dispossession.

It doesn't take a graduate level logic course to understand that "racists embrace the Israeli flag" does not mean "Zionist are racist." That's like saying that KKK use of crosses prove all Christians are racists.

But the intent of this new "Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism" is not detached academic study of Zionism. It is purely political - and it is antisemitic.

The very first of the group's "Points of Unity" is an antisemitic lie: "Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the US, Israel is a settler colonial state. The Institute opposes Zionism and colonialism."

Zionists don't define themselves this way. Only anti-Zionists do. "Critical studies" of a topic are impossible when you pre-determine the results of the studies. These are no "studies" at all - just compiling evidence, no matter how flimsy, on one side of the scale and ignoring any counter evidence.

Zionism is the self-determination movement of the Jewish people. It seeks the return of Jews to their ancestral lands. It is anti-colonialist. It is not racist. However, denying that Jews are a people with national rights - and labeling those Jews who assert those rights as being inherently racist - is indeed antisemitism.

Their political agenda and disinterest in objective studies is made clear in other "points of unity:" "Academic research is not politically or morally neutral....The Institute’s project is to support research from below, produced by a community led by people who are the targets of Zionist and state repression, with a research agenda determined in collaboration with communities resisting repression."

In other words, if you believe that Jews have rights - rights to a state, rights to self-defense, rights not to be murdered by Palestinian terrorists - you are not welcome in this space.

This is not "critical studies." It is anti-Zionist propaganda. And once you get past their name, they don't even pretend to hide it. To study Zionism, they demand that you reject Zionism and Jewish peoplehood as a prerequisite.

This section of the manifesto is most enlightening:

Studying Zionism through such a comprehensive [sic!] lens means, for instance, looking at the role of Zionist institutions in arenas beyond Palestine as well as the range of Jewish communities, organizations, and institutions where it is not as readily transparent.

These modern Jew-haters are embracing David Miller's paranoid concept of looking for, and magically finding, links between Jewish organizations and whatever they are hating today. It presupposes that Zionist Jews have a single, nefarious agenda, all controlled by a small group of Jews who secretly direct all these projects -and always with immoral aims.

The entire project is putting an academic face on pure hate. Its basic principles are based on bigotry and lies.

Antisemitism is becoming mainstream, and it is people like this who are in the forefront.

(h/t Andrew)

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!

Ken Roth's jihad is yet another choreographed anti-Zionist campaign

The timing of the current torrent of articles and posts about Harvard's Kennedy School denying a fellowship to Ken Roth is most curious.

According to the initial article that started this all off in The Nation, Roth was denied his fellowship in the end of July 2022.

It took nearly six months for this news to hit the media.

What happened during those six months? Why didn't Roth lash out at the time - why was he silent for so long?

The answer can be seen in his history at Human Rights Watch.

HRW would issue many reports about human rights abuses worldwide. But only a subset of them would be turned into media events - with much longer reports, behind-the-scenes partnerships with other organizations, embargoed reports to be released on specific days to coincide with their splashy press conferences, and lining up sympathetic reporters and media outlets to publish their articles at the times that would maximize the impact of the campaign.

A large proportion of these campaigns would be against Israel. Relatively minor issues with questionable human rights dimensions, such as the fact that Booking.com and AirBnB listed Jewish-owned properties in the territories, would be promoted far more than actual deadly attacks in Syria or elsewhere.

In short, Ken Roth has a lot of experience creating campaigns that greatly exaggerate what he considers Zionist crimes.

A real victim of a real injustice does not have the luxury of creating a campaign to gain maximum publicity. They need to cry out and hope that a sympathetic person of prominence will help them get the message out to the world. Most of them fail, and real victims of real crimes are almost never heard from.

Every employer can choose not to hire any person for any (legally valid) reason, and they don't have to explain themselves to the world. And a university choosing not to hire someone is in no way "violating academic freedom" - that would mean that they have to hire everyone, no matter how toxic their ideas or methods. Academic freedom applies to faculty members and students, no one else.

Here is an extensive definition of academic freedom. In no universe did Harvard's dean violate it.

In this case, all we know is the second-hand report that the reason for the decision was "anti-Israel bias" and "Roth’s tweets on Israel were of particular concern" - which no one can argue with! Any analysis of his own tweets, in his own words, proves Roth's bias beyond a doubt. This is why Roth and his defenders falsely claim that he wasn't chosen because he is a "critic of Israel," an absurd lie - there are plenty of critics of Israel at Harvard, including Stephen Walt himself, co-writer of the infamous Israel Lobby book, whose position includes the name of the supposed Harvard donor who (Massing guesses) didn't want Roth - yet he still holds that position 15 years after the book controversy.

If the rich Jews who fund Harvard have any say on the contents of Harvard's academic program, it sure isn't obvious how.

Contrast this with the billions of dollars that pour into US universities from Saudi Arabia and especially Qatar, specifically to influence them politically.

For a wealthy, connected and privileged man like Ken Roth, it is not enough to just move on when he doesn't get a job and find the next one (which he did, at another Ivy League school.) He has to use all of his expertise to get revenge at the people who insulted him: the dean at Harvard and the rich Zionist Jews whom he believes (with zero proof!) were behind the decision.

Campaigns take time. Roth had to find a reporter and a media outlet that would maximize the impact of his newest attack on Zionist Jews. And he found both with Michael Massey, a reporter who defended Walt and Mearsheimer's "Israel Lobby" book, and The Nation, which publishes outrageously anti-Israel articles that include boldfaced lies.

Roth made sure not only that they would promote his new jihad against the few Zionists left in academia - but that it would be a cover story.

Now the six month gap makes sense. Front page stories take time.

Note the irony of the illustration - Roth is the little guy, a victim of a God-like thumbs-down from Harvard. A little guy who has the connections to build a months-long campaign that gets him on the cover of The Nation!

The follow-on stories, some probably planted and the others naturally following what looks like news, were a fait accompli. So was his own account of the episode for The Guardian, where he again falsely claims that he didn't get the job "because of my criticism of Israel." That is not what The Nation reported.

He can't stop lying when it comes to Israel.

Roth, with half a million Twitter followers, has plenty of clout to do his own direct promotion as well. And he is tweeting about this as much as he used to tweet his monomaniacal anti-Israel campaigns.

And now he claims that this carefully choreographed campaign has created an "uproar." He's trying to make it self-fulfilling prophecy.

As with the AirBnB campaign, the Harvard story is based on an inversion of reality. Boycotting only Jewish-owned businesses really is discrimination, and not allowing universities full latitude in hiring staff is itself a violation of academic freedom.

Ken Roth is not the victim of an all-powerful Zionist lobby. He is a vindictive, pathetic yet extraordinarily privileged antisemite who has carefully plotted his revenge at the rich Jews whom he thinks sabotaged the only job in the world he felt was worthy of him.

And his actions today prove that Harvard was quite right in rejecting him.

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!

.@WashingtonPost article minimizes antisemitism of author Roald Dahl. Do we have a pattern of insensitivity to Jews at WaPo?

The Washington Post was harshly criticized - justly - for illustrating an article about a measles outbreak in the Somali community of Columbus, Ohio with a photo of Chassidic Jews in Brooklyn on Tuesday.

What makes this worse is that the Somali community is known for its low vaccination rates. They had a breakout of measles in 2017 and also this year in Minnesota. The Hill wrote about the Ohio breakout without mentioning them at all, and NPR's 2017 article tried to explain why the Somali community was reluctant to immunize.

The contrast with how the media treated the Orthodox Jewish community during COVID could not be starker. The Somali angle is minimized and contextualized; the Jewish angle was trumpeted.

The Washington Post has another problematic article, on a completely different topic: a review of a biography of famed children's book author Roald Dahl, the review written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Dirda.

Near the end, it mentions:

Yet to adult eyes, Dahl frequently goes uncomfortably too far in depicting an anarchic Hobbesian world of savagery and violence. When “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” first appeared in 1964, the Oompa Loompas were racist caricatures of African pygmies (though later changed to hippie-ish, rosy-skinned dwarfs). The depiction of Veruca Salt’s father, in that same book, sails close to Jewish stereotypes. Not least, while Dahl defended his notorious “anti-Israeli” political views as justifiable anger over that nation’s treatment of the Palestinian people, many felt this argument was a cover for antisemitism.

Dirda makes it sound like Dahl's antisemitism was simply "anti-Zionism" that may have gone a little bit too far. This is simply false. He admitted himself that he was an antisemite!

Dahl's family has publicly admitted he was antisemitic as well, and apologized for it. "We loved Roald, but we passionately disagree with his antisemitic comments," they said.

And Dahl's comments themselves show how antisemitism and anti-Zionism are two sides of the same coin.

In a review of a book about the Lebanon War that appeared in the August 1983 edition of the British periodical Literary Review, Dahl wrote, in reference to Jewish people, “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.”

He also made reference to “those powerful American Jewish bankers” and asserted that the United States government was “utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions over there.”

Later that same year, he doubled down on his statements in an interview with the British magazine New Statesman. “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” he said. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

A few months before his death in 1990, Dahl stated outright that he was anti-Semitic in an interview with The Independent.

After claiming that Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was “hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned,” he went on to say, “I’m certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism. I think they should see both sides. It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media—jolly clever thing to do—that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.”

In that New Statesman interview, Dahl told the reporter - after his other antisemitic statements - that he didn't see any Jews fighting in World War II. The reporter, angry, responded:

Firmly but not rudely I told him that my father was Jewish, that my grandfather had won all sorts of medals in North Africa and Europe, that Jews fought in enormous numbers in all of the Allied armies, were often over- rather than under-represented, and that this slimy canard of Jewish cowardice was beneath him. At which point he coughed, mumbled something about “sticking together”, and then promptly ended the interview.

This is hardly ambiguous.

Dirda is clearly knowledgeable about Dahl, it is not possible that he is unaware of Dahl's antisemitism. Yet he chose to downplay it as just some people's opinions, not something that Dahl and his family freely admits and supported by his own clear bigoted statements.

What gives, Washington Post?

(h/t Nathan)

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!

"Scholars" defense of Fransesca Albanese's antisemitism reveals astounding hypocrisy

A statement was just released by "64 scholars denouncing the smear campaign against UN human rights rapporteur Francesca Albanese."

Of course, they have to somehow skate around the fact that she wrote that America is subjugated by the Jewish lobby, a classic antisemitic trope.

So they try to gaslight the world:

Once again, a high-ranking UN official defending the human rights of the Palestinians is being castigated, based on disingenuous allegations of antisemitism. This time, the trigger for such allegations is a statement Ms. Albanese made in 2014, excavated from a personal letter about Israel’s attack on Gaza she had shared on Facebook.

Indeed, Ms. Albanese said therein ‘America is subjugated by the Jewish lobby’. But first, she has rightly distanced herself from this inappropriate choice of words, and second, it is clear from the context of her statement that she was referring to pressure groups that are commonly referred to as the ‘Israel lobby’. Books have been written including by Jewish scholars about such groups. They legitimately exist and their influence, however effective, on American foreign policy towards Israel is real, in particular when it comes to blocking any initiatives aimed at holding Israel accountable for its inhumane treatment of the Palestinians.

When Special Rapporteur Albanese is delegitimized and stigmatized as an antisemite based on isolated and decontextualized statements, this amounts to political abuse of antisemitism, which fundamentally harms the urgent and important fight against antisemitism.

Let's look at their defense of Albanese.

First, they claim that it was "excavated" from a "personal letter" she shared. No, by definition, sharing a letter makes it an open letter, written to the world, to raise funds for UNWRA.

Then they claim that she "distanced herself" from that choice of words. Yes, but only when she was called on it - and even then, she denied that the phrase was antisemitic.

Third, they claim that in the context of the statement she was clearly talking about the "Israel lobby," not the "Jewish lobby," and that her critics are taking it out of context. This is another lie: in context, she wrote, "America and Europe, subjugated by both the Jewish lobby and the guilt for the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed - the Palestinians - who defend themselves with the only means they have..."

She is saying that Europe is "subjugated" by guilt for the Holocaust in the same breath that America is "subjugated" by the "Jewish lobby." She is saying that America and Europe are both beholden to not upsetting Jews. In context, it is very obvious that her "Jewish lobby" comment refers to Jews, not AIPAC, or else the Europe part of the sentence makes no sense.

But let's pretend that Albanese really meant "Israel Lobby," not "Jewish Lobby." It is still antisemitic - even according to these "scholars!"

You see, many of the same "scholars" who signed this letter also signed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which is meant as an anti-Zionst alternative to the IHRA Working Definition. Aleida Assmann, Leora Auslander, Angelika Bammer, Omer Bartov, Peter Beinart, Michael Berkowitz, Daniel Boyarin, Jose Brunner, Stephen Clingman, Raya Cohen, Alon Confino, all signed both - and that is only through "C." There is a very large overlap between the signatories to this statement and the JDA.

Now, what does the Jerusalem Declaration say about examples of speech about Israel "that, on the face of it, are antisemitic"? The first one is, "Applying the symbols, images and negative stereotypes of classical antisemitism (see guidelines 2 and 3) to the State of Israel."

Guideline 2 says, "What is particular in classic antisemitism is the idea that Jews are linked to the forces of evil. This stands at the core of many anti-Jewish fantasies, such as the idea of a Jewish conspiracy in which “the Jews” possess hidden power that they use to promote their own collective agenda at the expense of other people. This linkage between Jews and evil continues in the present: in the fantasy that “the Jews” control governments with a “hidden hand,”...

Albanese is saying that Jews/Israelis have power over both the US and Europe, power that she is exposing in her letter. Note that she didn't say that the US and Europe are "influenced" (as the statement claims) or even "pressured" by the Lobby - she says that they are subjugated. That means that Jews/"Zionists" control the US and Europe.

Even dedicated anti-Zionists are on the record as saying that this is antisemitic - including many of the people who signed this statement!

These hypocritical scholars are ignoring their own definition of antisemitism in their zeal to exonerate Albanese.

Ironically, the JDA was written to allow people to freely attack (and boycott) Israel without being called antisemitic, but Albanese even crossed their own extraordinarily high bar for when attacking Israel is considered antisemitic.

They themselves are guilty of what they accuse Albanese's critics of: "this amounts to political abuse of antisemitism, which fundamentally harms the urgent and important fight against antisemitism."

Which shows the level of integrity of the anti-Israel crowd: Exactly zero.

(h/t GnasherJew)

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!

Elder Comix: A little Chanukah hypocrisy never hurt anyone

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!

Cartoon of the Day: Jews Welcome!

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!

Young hiring managers far less likely to hire Jews than older ones

On Friday, I looked at a survey from Resumebuilders that showed that 26% of recruiters and hiring managers in the United States were less likely to hire people they assume to be Jewish.

As shocking as this is, it gets worse.

I asked for the raw data of the survey to see if I can see any patterns of the respondents. One of them stuck out as the biggest factor as to whether the hiring manager would discriminate against Jews.

Their age.

Younger hiring managers were twice as likely to be biased against Jewish applicants than older ones.

Why would hiring managers be any different than the general population? If they aren't, that means that antisemitism is getting continuously worse in America in coming decades. And the total number of those surveyed was over 1000, which should be pretty accurate.

Another very disturbing finding is that nearly 38% of the hiring managers with a post-graduate education were less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants, with a similar percentage feeling that there were too many Jews in their industries. And nearly 37% of Black hiring managers were less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants. (Although the sample size was small, Arab hiring managers were the least likely to not move forward with Jews - only 7%.)

The other major correlation was between certain industries and antisemitism. According to the survey, these industries that had over 70 respondents were most likely to reject Jewish applicants:

Business 37%

Finance 37%

Education 29%

Technology 28%

These are fields that one would expect to be among the most "liberal." Blue collar fields like retail and food had fewer antisemitic attitudes by hiring managers (although 20% is still nothing to ignore.)

It is hard to escape the conclusion that we are losing the fight against antisemitism, badly. If we expected that education is an inoculation against antisemitism, we are seeing the opposite.

And given that surveys are showing that young people are less likely to be pro-Israel it is also hard to escape the conclusion that today's anti-Zionism - especially on campus - is directly contributing to today's antisemitism.

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!

National Library of Tunisia stands up to antisemitic bigots

This week, The National Library of Tunisia sponsored an international symposium called "The Forgotten Languages of Tunisia," about works written by Tunisians in languages that are not widely studied in Tunisia nowadays, including Turkish, Berber, Hebrew and a flavor of Judeo-Arabic that is still spoken in Djerba.

Because of the latter two languages, the symposium was interrupted by antisemites, upset that Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic would be discussed in a scholarly environment. The protesters claimed that this was a form of "normalization" with Israel.

For two hours, the protesters stopped the symposium, chanting, "No to Zionism", "No to Judaism", "No normalization with Israel", "Brainless Jews", "No to Holocaust Museum" , "The Tunisian people are a free people who will not fold to the pernicious Zionist project."

Newspaper Al Chourouk complained that one of the speakers, Jonas Sinony, is a Jew with a Polish (Jewish) mother. (He is a scholar of semitic languages.)

The good news is that the story doesn't end the way that most of these do.

Unlike most cases of attempted cancellation in Arab countries, the library stuck to its guns.

The director of the National Library stayed calm in the face of the screaming protesters, repeating that they will not yield to intimidation.

On their Facebook page, they wrote,

The seminar "Forgotten Languages" was a success, and everyone resisted in the face of the forces of bigotry and extortion.

The presentations were valuable and posted on this page, the fair was a success, and the accusations of "normalization" are oppressive and unjust.

Many thanks to the attendees who sympathized with the National Library and remained in the hall waiting for the scholarly sessions despite the desire of a group of people to cancel them.

Many thanks to the helpers of the National Library who fought to defend and preserve the institution.
And many thanks to the members of the library core union for standing up to the aggressors.

Thanks also to the security forces who negotiated with the aggressors and forced them out peacefully.

66 years after independence, and 11 years after the revolution of dignity, we will not accept the confiscation of freedom of speech and academic freedoms, and we will not accept any arbitrary decision from those who forget that we have become free.

The newspaper "Kapitalis" was also angry at the protesters, writing, "This is our heritage and history, and we are the most worthy to study it. By knowledge we are liberated, not by cancellation, erasure and denial."

"These groups (that protested), who pretend to be defending Palestine, will drag the country into more ignorance and misery," the newspaper quoted observers. "These armies of ignorance, fools, ignorant people and promoters of violence are issuing fatwas against Professor Raja Ben Salama, director of the National Library. They will not rest until they get rid of all the enlightened people and assassinate knowledge..."

I do not recall reading such a direct attack at antisemites in any Arabic media. Normally the most extreme voices win by default, because moderates in Arab countries are not willing to risk being publicly slandered as "Zionists" or "Jews."

This is a very encouraging story, and it will take many more similar stories to root out the antisemitism endemic in the Arab world.

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!

A French court ruled Israel's "occupation" is legal. The UN makes up new laws to say otherwise.

The UN Commission of Inquiry - which is not a court - decided that Israel's occupation is illegal, which is pretty much new legal ground. And the Commission even admits it!

Its report says, "It is unclear in international law and practice when a situation of belligerent occupation becomes unlawful." But that doesn't stop it from trying - and then pretending it did!

A number of legal experts have identified several principles that, when adhered to, may be used to determine the legality of an occupation. These include whether sovereignty and title are not vested in the occupying power, the occupying power is entrusted with the management of public order and civil life in the occupied territory, the people under occupation are the beneficiaries of that trust in view of their right to self-determination, and the occupation is temporary.

In the present report, the Commission focuses on two indicators that may be used to determine the illegality of the occupation: the permanence of the Israeli occupation, already noted in its previous report to the Human Rights Council at its fiftieth session, and actions amounting to annexation, including unilateral actions taken to dispose of parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory as if Israel held sovereignty over it.

No legal precedent. Just asking some "experts" who are anti-Israel - and not asking legal experts who are not already antipathetic towards the Jewish state.

In short, the UN is making things up to come to a pre-determined conclusion by cherry picking legal scholars who agree with that conclusion - and not even seeking the opinions of anyone else.

Yet none of these assumptions as to what makes an occupation illegal - a concept that is virtually sui generis, made up for Israel - are based on actual legal rulings. They are making up novel arguments, treating them as established law, and hoping that people believe it.

There is one case that is precedent for the legality of Israel's presence in the West Bank. And, naturally, the UN doesn't cite it.

In 2013, a French court of appeals ruled in a mostly forgotten but quite important case (Association FRANCE-PALESTINE SOLIDARITE “AFPS” and PLO et. al. vs. SOCIETE ALSTOM TRANSPORT SA) that Israel's presence in the West Bank is a case of legal occupation.

The PLO had claimed that Israel's occupation is illegal based on a hodgepodge of arguments, such as claiming that Israel violates the Hague Convention IX of 1907, Article 5, that says "In bombardments by naval forces all the necessary measures must be taken by the commander to spare as far as possible sacred edifices, buildings used for artistic, scientific, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick or wounded are collected, on the understanding that they are not used at the same time for military purposes...."

The court acidly noted that there were no bombardments of Jerusalem.

More importantly, the French court ruled that the PLO's claims of being occupied under the Hague and Geneva Conventions were invalid to begin with, because those conventions are based on one nation invading the territory of another "high contracting power" and the PLO was not a state.

The case is summarized here.

It is the first time since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 that an independent, non-Israeli court has been called upon to examine the legal status of West bank territories under international law, beyond the political claims of the parties.

While this court does not decide international law, it examined international law and ruled according to those laws. As such, it should have been referred to by the UN COI as a precedent, or at least as a source for legal arguments.

Of course, the COI does nothing of the sort. The French court ruled the "wrong" way and therefore must be ignored, while wholly new legal opinions must be promoted.

Because the UN COI is not trying to determine the truth. Its entire purpose is to twist law and facts to create a new legal framework and a new "truth" tailor-made to damn Israel.

(h/t Yerushalimey)

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Lebanese, Iraqis, Tunisians very upset when their leaders are reported in the same room as Israelis

The COP27 conference in Egypt has the usual comedy that we see at all major international conferences.

Israeli delegates say that they met, or talked with, or were in the same room as Arab enemies, and the Arab delegates are forced to deny or downplay it, as best they can.

In this case, as AP reports:

Israel's environmental protection minister attended a regional meeting Tuesday alongside Iraqi and Lebanese leaders at the global climate conference taking place in Egypt, the minister's office said, where the group pledged to work together to tackle climate change.

According to a statement from the office of Israeli Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg, the meeting took place as part of a regional forum of eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries.

The agreement by the member countries said the parties would work to “strengthen regional cooperation" and “act in a coordinated way” on climate change.

“The countries of the region share the warming and drying climate and just as they share the problems they can and must share the solutions. No country can stand alone in the face of the climate crisis,” Zandberg said in the statement.

In photos provided by her office, she is seen seated behind a small Israeli flag. Two seats away from her is Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid and across the room is Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, each behind their countries' flags.

The Lebanese caretaker prime minister was upset:

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Tuesday denied “any communication with any Israeli official,” after the website of Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a photo showing him and Israel's environmental protection minister along with several world leaders and officials at the U.N.’s COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

“The objectives of the noise that the Israeli media fabricates at such conferences have become known,” Mikati’s office said.

There was also angst at this photo of Zandberg shaking the hand of Palestinian prime minister Mohamed Shtayyeh:

This screenshot from a video of President Isaac Herzog seen joking with Tunisia’s Prime Minister Najla Bouden, both smiling, has also caused upset in the Arab world.

It is a little childish on both sides - Zandberg's announcing that Israel and Lebanon and Iraq are cooperating when there were lots of other nations represented in the room, as well as Israel's Arab enemies getting bent out of shape over any reports of treating Israeli representatives as human beings.

What Israeli officials should do is attempt to shake hands with their enemies with a big smile. If the Arabs reciprocate, wonderful; if they refuse the handshake the Israelis can shake their heads, still smiling, and call out "Have a nice day!" or "No, my hands are really clean, see?" or some other joke, for the cameras.

Even better, calling out to the Arab leader loudly and laughingly, "How wonderful it is to see you! We'll catch up later, OK?" or "Send my best regards to your wife!" or "Meet you at the bar tonight!"

It would instantly turn the supposed Arab honor at refusing to treat Israelis as humans into a bigger embarrassment. And the fear of shame is the major motivating factor in the Arab world.

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!