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.

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

 A variant of two previous posters.

This really happened.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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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