Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: anti-Zionist Jews

Showing posts with label anti-Zionist Jews. Show all posts

Thursday, September 21, 2023

Terrorists hiding behind children doesn't make them immune to attack, morally or legally

Israel haters were given a huge gift this week courtesy of anti-government protester Shira Eting.

Eting, interviewed by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, said, "I was a combat helicopter pilot…. If you want pilots to be able to fly and shoot bombs and missiles into houses knowing they might be killing children, they must have the strongest confidence in the people making those decisions."

The modern antisemites have been having a field day with an attractive and articulate Israeli woman matter of factly saying that Israelis knowingly shoot missiles into homes that kill children. Here we have proof of how monstrous Israelis are - even leftist Israelis!

A number of years ago, I looked at a B'Tselem report on families killed in their homes during 2014's Operation Protective Edge. Even that incomplete report showed that many families were acting as human shields for the terrorists - sometimes the shields were the terrorists' own families, and sometimes the terrorists were sheltering in an innocent family home.

I did further research and listed over a hundred children who were used as human shields to protect terrorists, often senior terrorists.

This is only what I could find out with open source research. But it proves the point: Israel is not going to bomb a house unless it has excellent intelligence that the house is a legitimate military target. Perhaps a senior terrorists is inside, perhaps a weapons cache is underneath, perhaps a command and control center is in the apartment next door.

As long as the military advantage outweighs the collateral damage, this is a moral decision and also legal under international law. While we are not privy to the specific calculus that Israel uses in making those decisions, it employs teams of lawyers to review every airstrike and goes to great lengths - never reported in the media - to ensure that it minimizes mistakes. Israel goes above and beyond the requirements of the Laws of Armed Conflict in its own policy decisions.

Eting caused more harm to Israel with her out of context quote than the proposed judicial reforms she is protesting could possibly do. But she wasn't wrong in what she said: in the real world, in real wars, decisions must be made that sometimes mean children would die.

In the case of Gaza, that is entirely the fault of the terrorists who deliberately choose to locate military targets in residential areas.

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Honest T-shirts for Israel haters

If Israel-haters were honest, their slogans might look something like these:

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Today's bogus accusations of Israel's racism: Facts are so 20th century

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.

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Newest EoZ memes, cartoons, posters - seven of them!

A variant of two previous posters.

This really happened.

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

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Old anti-Zionist organizations don't die...they just fade away, slowly

Have you ever heard of the American Council for Judaism?

We've discussed it before. It was the IfNotNow of the 1940s and 1950s, holding an anti-Zionist position that it pretended was Jewish. The ACJ pretended to be loyal to "classical Reform Judaism," and insisted that Jews were a religion but not a people and that to be Zionist was to be anti-American. In 1957 the Union for Reform Judaism emphatically rejected the ACJ as having nothing to do with the Reform stance towards Zionism.

Because it had the name "Judaism" in its name, the media loved to quote it even though it represented only a fringe of a fringe of American Jewry. Just like "Jewish Voice for Peace" today, the early head of ACJ - Elmer Berger - managed to grab headlines and make it appear that ACJ was a major player in American Judaism.

So whatever happened to the ACJ?

It is still around, and even more irrelevant.

It has a website, and apparently it still has some assets, but not much income.

The website shows that there is a quarterly journal, "Issues of the American Council of Judaism." Nearly every article for the past twelve years is written by the same person, Allan C. Brownfeld.

Brownfeld, in a good As-A-Jew tradition, also writes for anti-Israel outlets like Mondoweiss and the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs.

If you want to know what JVP and IfNotNow will look like in ten years, look at the American Council of Judaism.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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"Jewish Voice for Peace" says to symbolically burn US and Israeli flags on Passover eve

From Jewish Voice for Peace's Facebook page:

Nationalism is chametz, during Passover and always!
Freedom only for some is never enough. This Passover, at a time when violence against Palestinians by the Israeli state, military and settlers continues to escalate, we gather to demand and dream liberation for everyone.
For anti-Zionist Jews, this holiday can be a challenging time. For some, it can feel impossible to separate our holiday traditions from Zionist propaganda advocating ethnic cleansing and land theft. Many of us feel reluctant to even celebrate the holiday as Zionist terror escalates in Palestine. And many of us may be facing yet another holiday where our beliefs and politics are not welcome.
This year, bring your whole anti-Zionist self to our virtual seder! Our beloved community is coming together to set the Pesach table for you. Our seder will feature joy and rage and hope from our Havurah, BIJOCSM and student networks, our campaigns, our rabbis, and from JVP members from near and far—all gathered for collective liberation for us all.

They never seem to have a problem with Palestinian nationalism. I wonder why.

Their latest "Haggadah" is just as twisted in its interpretations of what Passover is about. I looked at a previous version in 2012, which was 28 pages long and included an essay on "pinkwashing."

Apparently that was way too much for the current TikTok generation that JVP wants to attract, so this new one is a mere 14 pages long, deleting nearly all of Maggid, Hallel and Nirtzah. it doesn't even describe the overstuffed seder plate of the previous editions that included an olive (for Palestinians) and an orange (for feminists and LGBTQ+.).

This one still includes the third cup of wine celebrating BDS, though.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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A lying left-wing antisemite from +972 dies

+972Mag writes an obituary for Yossi Gurvitz:

It is impossible to imagine Israeli anti-occupation writing without thinking of Yossi Gurvitz. A relentless, fearless, incredibly knowledgeable, prolific, and sharp writer, Yossi passed away last week at the age of 53.....

Yossi’s roots were as far from the left as one could imagine. He was born to a national-religious family and educated at Nehalim Yeshiva, an Orthodox boarding school...Yossi hated religious studies, and even more so the racism and nationalism he encountered at school, including among the rabbis. Gradually, he began to lose his faith. “I started devouring philosophy books,” he would later write: "By the time I started grade 11, I was Orthodox in name only. Earlier, I rejected Jewish law as racist; now I could no longer believe in a deity which was managing the world and interested in our lives … "

I only wrote about Gurvitz twice, over a decade ago, but he stuck in my mind as an exemplar of everything a journalist shouldn't be: a bigot, a liar, and an antisemite.

In 2012, Gurvitz claimed that a person wrote a halachic question to a rabbi essentially asking whether it is permitted for Israeli soldiers to rape women, and that the answer was that they could. He completely misrepresented the question and answer - as well as the rabbi's clarification after the fake story exploded. The question was about how horrible the thought of such a thing was, and the rabbi agreed. It was obvious the rabbi was saying that such an act is forbidden today, the exact opposite of Gurvitz's claim.

Gurvitz let his inner antisemite out in his original text: "Those texts were written mostly in a barbaric period by ignorant people, fuelled by the hatred of mankind which is endemic to Judaism." It leaves no doubt that Gurvitz could not be trusted to write about Judaism at all. (The +972 editors quickly changed that when they realized how bigoted Gurvitz's words were.)

In the +972 obituary, they say, "During his time at +972, his writings on the racism found in some Jewish religious texts was a constant source of editorial frustration. No matter how much the other editors and I explained that some phrases that worked in Hebrew would not translate well into English, and could lead to accusations of antisemitism (or that we should simply pick our battles), Yossi would hear none of it. What made matters worse was that none of us had the depth of knowledge to argue with him."

Notice that not one of the "journalists" at +972 even considered that Gurvitz's hate of Jews and Judaism, which he didn't hide, might color his reporting. Not once did they fact check his lies against what a knowledgeable religious Jew would say.

That is the state of +972's "journalism."

But the other time I looked at Gurvitz's work was perhaps even more damning to him and to +972. Gurvitz repeated the lie,that there were Israelis dancing in celebration of 9/11 in New Jersey. He wrote this in context of claiming that Israelis are all inherently supportive of international terrorism, a truly libelous and absurd assertion, based entirely on a couple of comments in a news article.

Again, the professional editors at +972 didn't bother to fact check Gurvitz. And again, Gurvitz's own bigotry drove the story - not the facts. The only place to find the "dancing Israelis" lie is on the very same right-wing conspiracy theory websites that +972 readers would consider antisemitic in any other context.

Why was Gurvitz reading them? Because he shared their opinion of Jews.

Yes, Gurvitz wrote thousands of other articles. I haven't read any of them. Once I saw these two, why assume that they are anomalous? It isn't like Gurvitz or 972 apologized for the lies they published.

I'm sorry Gurvitz is gone. But I am not mourning the loss of a bigot and antisemite whose hate of Jews that started when he was a teen informed his entire adult life.

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!

"If you love Israel, it is your obligation to hate Israel"

The Forward has an op-ed by David Enoch, a professor of philosophy and law at Hebrew University:

If you want to support Israel, boycott its new government

....Even if the justification of boycotts has in the past been questionable, I think that American Jews owe it to Israel, and to Israelis like myself, to promote such measures now. After the disproportionate Israeli military incursion into Jenin, and the predictably tragic cycle of violence it engendered the next day in Jerusalem, Israel’s far-right government is using this as an opportunity to further their own political goals. We cannot allow this kind of illiberalism to continue.

Yes, boycott Israel out of love!

As you can tell from this paragraph, Enoch has no love of Israel.

And Enoch's desire to boycott Israel includes an academic boycott.

Im Tirtzu summarizes David Enoch's supposed love of Israel:

Signed a petition calling on EU member states to boycott “organizations and companies if they are active, directly or indirectly, in the occupied territories.”[1]
Draft-dodger.[2]
Compared the IDF’s activities during Operation Protective Edge to that of Hamas.[3]
Signed a petition in support of the Islamic Movement.[4]
Participated in a protest against the drafting of Christians to the IDF.[5]
Signed a petition in “support and appreciation” of students and lecturers who illegally refused to do IDF service in Judea and Samaria.[6]
Signed a petition advocating for the release of terrorist supporter Dareen Tatour, who was arrested and convicted for inciting violence and supporting a terrorist organization.[7]
Signed a petition in support of the anti-Zionist organization “Breaking the Silence.”[8]
Threatened to take legal measures against students who came in army uniform in support of an IDF officer who was reprimanded by a lecturer for arriving to class in uniform.[9]

Somehow, all these things happened before the current government was (democratically) elected.

Enoch wants, along with many others, to use the excuse of the current Israeli government to push their hate that existed beforehand.

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!

Pointing out the word "Palestine" before 1948 is not the win the idiots think it is

Rabid Israel hater "Rabbi" David Mivasair tweets what he considers to be a "gotcha" for Zionists:

I love this old menu on the wall of a Jewish deli in my hometown of Baltimore. It tells quite a story. "Buy Palestine Matzo"

Anyone need to have that explained?

I'm always amused when I see modern antisemites triumphantly bring pictures of old coins or stamps that say "Palestine" as if that means there was a state of Palestine before 1948.

I mean, does Mivasair think that Jews in Baltimore considered buying matzoh from an Arab country a selling point? There were lots of Jews in Egypt, Iraq and Syria at the time - but no one in the US cared about buying their matzohs!

"Palestine" was simply the English translation of "Eretz Yisrael" before 1948.

But for those who really love to see the word "Palestine" used before 1948, here are some great examples:

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!

Two can play the Neturei Karta game

Anti-Zionists like the extremist, fringe Neturei Karta sect because they share the ir desire to destroy Israel and the embrace terrorists. But the real reason they love them is because they use them as evidence that they are not antisemitic - after all, they like some Jews!

It's a stupid game, but it is one that both sides can play.

From Times of Israel:

Police on Thursday said officers arrested a man who entered the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank earlier this week along with two other members of the fringe anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox sect Neturei Karta, and met with Palestinians from local terror groups.

Elhanan Lax, 38, from the central city of Petah Tikva, was detained on suspicion of “supporting and associating with a terror group” and illegally entering Area A of the West Bank, where Jenin is located. Israeli citizens are barred from entering Area A, as it is under the Palestinian Authority’s civilian and security control under the Oslo Accords.

The three men were filmed meeting with prominent Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group officials as well as families of terrorist attackers on Monday.

Police said they are seeking to arrest the other two men. The trio could face lengthy prison spells if convicted of supporting terror.

Hold on - I thought that Israel was all about Jewish supremacy! About anti-Palestinian racism! How could Israel arrest fellow Jews, and threaten them with long prison terms, when they only treat Palestinians that way?

Moreover, how could Israel ban Jews from Area A? Arab Israelis can, and do, go to Palestinian controlled areas all the time. Isn't that the exact opposite of Jewish supremacy?

By the logic of the anti-Israel crowd themselves, Israel cannot be racist - just as the Israel haters use the NK idiots as proof that they cannot be antisemitic.

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!

01/11 Links Pt2: Col Kemp: Jew-Hate at American Universities; Caroline Glick: The ‘woke’ West is assaulting Jews for embracing their heritage with Richard Landes

From Ian:

Col Kemp: Jew-Hate at American Universities

[The Amcha] report paints a stark picture of an increasing, intensifying and carefully coordinated campaign of attacks on Jewish identity at over 60% of the colleges and universities that are popular with Jews, including 2,000 incidents intended to harm Jewish students since 2015.

[T]hese activists demand an end to Zionism, which... means just one thing: an end to the democratic State of Israel. This itself is antisemitism in any book and is spelt out as such in the US State Department definition of antisemitism.

Despite expending so much energy against their fellow students, German Gentiles had plenty left for their Jewish professors. Unsatisfied with Nazi race regulations restricting Jewish faculty, students boycotted the classes of those who were exempt under the race laws and pressured university authorities to dismiss them. The result was that every Jewish professor who was still legally allowed to teach had resigned by 1935.

The Amcha report characterises the situation on US campuses today as a crisis for American Jews. It is much more than that. It is a crisis for us all that one section of our student body is bullied, abused, intimidated and cast down by their fellow students and often abandoned by their professors and faculty authorities.

It is high time for the federal government, under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to withdraw its funding from all universities that participate in bigotry such as that.

Jonathan Tobin: Ilhan Omar is the Democrats’ problem, not Kevin McCarthy’s

By standing with Omar, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have effectively normalized antisemitism. And McCarthy’s effort to punish her will again test whether they mean what they say when they speak of their opposition to hate.

As was the case with Greene and Gosar last year, it will take a vote by the majority of the House to remove Omar from her perch on the Foreign Relations Committee. Given the GOP’s narrow majority, the fate of Schiff (who repeatedly lied about the hoax he helped promote that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election) and Swalwell (who had an intimate relationship with a Chinese spy) will also be part of the same debate.

Democrats will also answer the list of Omar’s antisemitic statements and actions with their own brand of “whataboutism,” which will involve McCarthy’s recent embrace of Greene, who was an ally during his fight for the speaker’s chair. They’ll bring up other Republicans for censure, as well. One is Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who lied about just about everything during his campaign for election, including whether he was Jewish.

If every member of Congress or the executive branch had to be censured for lying, however, Washington would soon be emptied of politicians, including Biden, who takes second place to no one when it comes to being a serial fabulist. Moreover, there is an argument to be made that neither party should be engaging in this kind of tit-for-tat punishment.

If the voters think they deserve nothing better than to be represented by such scoundrels, perhaps it’s best if we leave it to them to decide at the ballot box who should sit in Congress or on committees. As the great cynic, journalist H.L. Mencken wrote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Nevertheless, if the Democrats are going to play this game, then McCarthy can hardly be blamed for answering in kind. And if House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) isn’t prepared to agree to remove Omar, then the speaker is justified in seeking to oust her.

At stake here is not the broader question of how much extremism or bad behavior Congress should be willing to tolerate in its members. Rather, it is specifically one that will force Democrats to decide what is more important to them.

Is it the fight against antisemitism at a time when Jew-hatred is on the rise throughout the globe? Or is their true allegiance to identity politics and the toxic intersectional myths that allow Omar to paint herself as an oppressed victim, rather than a hatemonger, simply because of the color of her skin?

Caroline Glick: The ‘woke’ West is assaulting Jews for embracing their heritage

As Israel is being pilloried at the U.N. Security Council by friend and foe alike for daring to allow Jews to visit the Temple Mount, professor Richard Landes joins Caroline Glick on this week’s episode of the “Caroline Glick Show” to discuss the contemporary roots of the demonization of Jews and the Jewish state.

Landes recently published “Can the Whole World Be Wrong: Lethal Journalism, Anti-Semitism and the Global Jihad,” the product of 22 years of work.

He began his study of the subject in the aftermath of the first modern blood libel, the alleged killing of Muhammed al-Dura, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, by IDF forces in Gaza on Sept. 30, 2000.

The false allegation that the boy was killed by IDF forces that day, and that they murdered him deliberately, formed the basis of a massive propaganda effort. Its product has been the legitimization of the mass murder of Jews in Israel and worldwide by Palestinians and other jihadists.

Landes argues that the West’s embrace of the al-Dura blood libel was the foundation not only of the antisemitism assaulting the Jewish people worldwide today, but also of the West’s inability to acknowledge, let alone defeat, the forces of global jihad, whether in the United States or Europe or in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and beyond.

Glick and Landes examine the current pathologies of the “woke” West—including the assault on Jews for embracing their heritage, by among other things, visiting the Temple Mount—through the prism of the al-Dura incident. Their conversation traverses space and time and ends with vital insights into what needs to happen for the West to survive the ravages of the Red-Green alliance which was born with the al-Dura blood libel.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 1902, recognized that Zionism was a historic part of Judaism

From the 1902 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica:

Less than a decade after the term was coined, the writer - Lucien Wolf - recognized clearly that modern Zionism was a direct "lineal heir" to the longtime Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel since the Jewish nation's first exile.

Today's scholars find such an idea anathema, because it would mean that the Jews have a historic tie to the land, and too many modern academics want to separate Zionism from Judaism. But at the time, it was obvious to all, Jew and non-Jew.

Wolf was an anti-Zionist himself. He lobbied against the Balfour Declaration and co-founded the anti-Zionist League of British Jews. His political opinion caused his blind spot, both in this article and his article on antisemitism in the encyclopedia, where he fervently believed that Jew-hatred was a thing of the past and the world was more enlightened - dooming Zionism to failure.

His predictions were fatally wrong.

Yet even as the antisemitism that he confidently believed had been receding was proven to be not only resilient but far deadlier than anyone could imagine, he didn't have the honesty to admit his mistakes.

If there were fewer Jewish anti-Zionists in England in the 1920s and 1930s, it is possible that many more Jews could have been saved from the gas chambers.

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!