Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: bbc

Showing posts with label bbc. Show all posts

Thursday, October 05, 2023

Pure antisemitism in @BBCArabic: "Observant Jews consider spitting on Christians a holiday ritual"

Earlier this week, some religious Jews were captured on video spitting in front of Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem.

A thoroughly stupid extremist named Elisha Yered posted on X that the custom of spitting next to a church or near priests is an “ancient and long-standing custom.”

His statements and the spitting incidents themselves were roundly condemned by Israeli officials and prominent rabbis.

Rabbi Shlomo Aviner wrote Tuesday: “There is no Jewish law that you have to spit at idol worship. There is no such rule in the Gemara, nor in Maimonides, nor in the Shulchan Aruch. ... It simply causes disputes and quarrels and we lose from it. We have to educate the children to behave respectfully.”

Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel David Lau said, "These immoral phenomena have certainly nothing to do with Jewish law."

After an earlier such incident in the summer, many prominent rabbis condemned the practice, including Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Shlomo Amar issued a strong statement condemning the practice and said that those who spit at non-Jews are a chilul Hashem, desecrators of God's name, one of the most serious prohibitions in Jewish law:

But according to BBC Arabic, there are no rabbis who condemn spitting at or near Christians. On the contrary - religious Jews all agree that spitting on Christians is exactly how Jews are expected to celebrate Sukkot!

BBC Arabic released a video on their website and on X that both describes the spitting incidents and how Jews celebrate the Sukkot holiday, as if the two topics are related. Here's the headline translated into English:

One of the sections of the video says this (Arabic screenshot above; this is the screenshot translated into English:)

"Observant Jews consider spitting on Christians a holiday ritual."

Then they showed Yered's tweet.

Even the most disgusting apologists for the spitting don't say it is associated with celebrating Jewish holidays, let alone all religious Jews.

This is stright-up antisemitism and anti-Jewish incitement published by the BBC Arabic. And it isn't the first time....this week.

The BBC should not only remove the videos. They should not only publicly apologize - in English and Arabic - for posting these lies.

The BBC must immediately fire whomever wrote that hateful lie. That person has no journalistic integrity; on the contrary, the video producer is simply a hatemonger. If the BBC allows that person to remain in their job, any claims of impartiality that the BBC pretends to maintain are shown to be simple lies.

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!

This week's EoZ memes and posters

Cartoons in next post....

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!

BBC's blood libel came straight from a recent antisemitic Haaretz op-ed

The BBC has weakly apologized for presenter Anjana Gadgil saying, as a fact, that “Israeli forces are happy to kill children” during her interview with former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett.

In a statement, the BBC said, “While this was a legitimate subject to examine in the interview, we apologise that the language used in this line of questioning was not phrased well and was inappropriate.”

But how could Gadgil have even thought that Israelis are such monsters to begin with?

The answer is almost certainly - Haaretz.

A review of news articles from the past 20 years finds that it is very rare for even the most extreme haters of Israel to accuse Israelis of happiness at killing children.

During the 2009 Gaza war, in The Guardian, a resident of Gaza writes in an op-ed, "A short message to the pilots in the Israeli F-16s: does it make you feel happy to kill Palestinian children and women? Do you feel it's your duty? Killing every child and woman, man and teenager in Gaza? I don't know what exactly you feel, what exactly you think, but please think of your mother and sister, your son and daughter." But even for a Gaza resident seeing airstrikes, the idea that Israel wants to kill children was not stated as a flat fact.

A satirical Israeli filmmaker in 2012 prompted children visiting a war museum to say that killing Arabs makes them happy, which the Electronic Intifada promoted as if they don't understand how Borat-style filmmakers can elicit the responses they want from people eager to please an interviewer.

But outside of those contrived cases from years ago, I cannot find even the most biased news source making such a libelous claim that killing children makes Israelis happy.

Until this two months ago.

That's when Haaretz published an op-ed by an execrable person named Yossi Klein who wrote, "Killing children is designed to cause pain, to strike the most sensitive place of all. It isn’t designed to stop terrorism; it’s designed to deter the terrorists and make us happy."

The Haaretz headline that everyone saw, since changed, was "Killing children brings Israelis together."

At the time I argued that this was the most antisemitic article ever published. Hitler never claimed Jews relish killing children. Medieval Christians and later Muslims said that the Jews murder gentile children for religious reasons, not out of sheer pleasure.

Only Haaretz made that claim.

Western news professionals rely heavily on Haaretz to inform themselves of the alleged Israeli zeitgeist. It cannot be a coincidence that Gadgil's libelous accusation comes on the heels of Klein's own blood libel. No one would have dared to say something so outlandishly false unless they felt that it was backed up by facts - and Haaretz gave the antisemites of the world the ammunition they need to go even beyond the classic blood libel accusation.

When the Haaretz article was published, I wrote that Klein's words "will be used by antisemites forever as proof that Jews admit their happiness at murdering Arab children."

That is exactly what happened here.

And it will keep happening - because what would be unthinkable to say out loud gets a kosher stamp of approval when a Jew says it.

(Interestingly, as of this writing, Haaretz has not reported on the BBC interview nor on the apology. Could it be that they do not want people to make this connection between their own libel and that of Anjana Gadgil?)

(h/t Benjamin)

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!

Despite BBC blood libel, combatants under 18 are legitimate targets in international law

Here is a blood libel from the BBC.

In response to Naftali Bennett saying that every single person killed in Jenin was a terrorist, the presenter said, as a fact, "Terrorists but children. The Israeli forces are happy to kill children."

Bennett's answer was good, but here is another case where news interviewers are either ignorant or willfully twisting international law.

Child combatants are still combatants under international law. No matter whether they were forcibly recruited, whether they are under 14, whether they are girls - once someone is shooting at a soldier they are legitimate targets, according to every article I can find on the subject.

In 2000, a group of child soldiers in Sierra Leone known (in the West) as the "West Side Boys" captured a patrol of British soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment along with their Sierra Leone Army liaison officer. Several of the British soldiers were held for two weeks before the British Army decided to free them in an operation that killed between 25 and 150 of the West Side Boys.

Was the deliberate, planned killing of those children a war crime? Of course not.

Absolutely no international law scholar disputes that the British Army had the right to free their fellow soldiers because they were held by combatants under 18. And no BBC reporter responded to the event by saying on the air, "The British Army is happy to kill children."

No, only Jews are routinely accused of relishing the murder of children. The accusation is centuries old and it is as popular today in England as it was in 1144 when Jews were accused of happily murdering William of Norwich.

Unlike the West Side Boys, who were obviously children, the two "children" killed by the IDF in Jenin were heavily armed, fully grown near-adults. One was a member of Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades.

Of course soldiers in the middle of an operation are not expected to question the ages of those who are shooting at them to determine whether they've celebrated their 18th birthday yet. The idea is absurd to the extreme. International conventions do not distinguish between child combatants and adult combatants - anyone engaging in hostilities is a legitimate military target.

The BBC presenter is knowingly twisting the facts in ways that cannot be interpreted as anything but malicious. She says, " The UN has defined them as children and we know that four people between the ages of 16 and 18 have been killed in this targeted attack let's not forget it's a targeted attack."

Yes, the UN defines anyone under 18 as children. But the UN doesn't say that armed 16 year olds are not combatants.

And suddenly she switches from the UN definition of children to including 18 year old adults as "children," too, contradicting her own definition of children in the very same breath! Her desire to paint Israel as evil causes her to expand the definition of children to make it look like Israel "targeted" four children.

If you think that blood libels went out of fashion in recent decades, here is an example of how they are just as malicious today as they were in the Middle Ages.

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!

04/27 Links Pt2: Israel Is Antiracist, Anti-Colonialist, Anti-Fascist (and Was from the Start); Why the world has turned against Israel; Caroline Glick: An afternoon among the angels

From Ian:

Jeffrey Herf: Israel Is Antiracist, Anti-Colonialist, Anti-Fascist (and Was from the Start)

Nor did support for Israel come only from the Soviet bloc. Liberals and leftists in London, Paris, New York, and Washington heard Jamal Husseini, the representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations, reject a Jewish state in Palestine, because, he said, it would undermine the “racial homogeneity” of the Arab world. Such remarks resonated in a profoundly negative fashion with Americans who had followed the appalling news out of Germany during and after the war. In the Senate, Robert Wagner, a major author of New Deal legislation, extolled the Jewish contribution to the Allied cause. He had already denounced appeasement of the Arabs during the war. With the Allied victory, continuing to appease Arab rejectionism surely made no sense. In the House, Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn led efforts to focus attention on Jamal Husseini’s cousin, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who had entered into a written understanding with Germany and Italy to “solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries . . . as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.”

The liberal media also took note. Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis was thoroughly documented in the New York Post as well as in the left-wing publications PM and The Nation, by I.F. Stone, Freda Kirchwey, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Edgar Mowrer, who urged Husseini’s indictment at Nuremberg. Nevertheless, despite extensive State Department files on Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis, the American bureaucracy succeeded in resisting efforts to put him on trial and publish its evidence of his Nazi-era activities.

The brief confluence of Soviet and liberal Western sympathies for the nascent Jewish state was brilliantly exploited by Ben-Gurion. He understood better than anyone that it presented a unique moment to bring Israel into existence, with the assent of the world’s two great powers — and that it was an opportunity that would soon close, as indeed it did. During the “anti-cosmopolitan” purges of the early 1950s, Stalin reversed course, spread the lie that Israel was a product of American imperialism, repressed the memory of Soviet support for the Zionist project, and launched a four-decade campaign of vilification against Zionism and Israel. It was one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the Cold War.

Stalin succeeded in rewriting American history, too. His insistence that it was the Americans and not the Soviets who had wholeheartedly supported the establishment of the State of Israel carried the day. And yet the records of the Departments of State and Defense and the CIA clearly document their emphatic and consequential opposition to the Zionist project.

The differences between the international political landscape of the late 1940s and the one that emerged first in Soviet and then world politics in the 1950s and 1960s need to be reflected in American-Jewish discussions about the establishment of Israel. Contrary to what we’ve heard at the United Nations for decades, in international BDS efforts, and in academic descriptions of Israel, the Zionist project was never a colonialist one.

Just the reverse. The generation that created the state, and its supporters abroad, viewed it as part of the era of liberal and leftist opposition to colonialism, racism, and, of course, antisemitism. The evidence is clear: Whatever faults Israel may have, its origins had nothing to do with American or British imperialism. The argument to the contrary is a conventional unwisdom that has found a home in too much scholarship and journalism of recent decades. Israel’s establishment was not a miracle that eludes historical explanation. It was an episode of enormous moral and military courage for which space was created by canny and hard-headed political leaders in the cause of historical justice — in particular David Ben-Gurion, who seized a fleeting moment, Israel’s moment, to create an enduring achievement.

Daniel Ben-Ami: Why the world has turned against Israel

From Israel's foundation in 1948 through the 1960s, the left generally celebrated Israel as an expression of Jews' right to national self-determination. By the 1990s, however, Western elites started to reject the idea of national self-determination. Yet the denigration of the right to national self-determination undermines the Palestinian cause, too.

Indeed, many of today's anti-Israel activists aren't really interested in Palestinian self-determination. They are mainly concerned with attacking Israel as a symbol of everything they dislike. This leads them to uncritically endorse Hamas, the leading Islamist representative of the Palestinians, and often Islamism more broadly.

Islamism's goal is not national self-determination, for the Palestinians or anyone else. Rather, it wants to create an international Islamic order. The destruction of Israel - and not the creation of a Palestinian state - is seen as central to achieving that objective. Islamists regard Jews as an expression of "cosmic Satanic evil," who should be physically exterminated if Islam is to flourish.

The Palestinian slogan, "from the river to the sea" (meaning from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean), is popular among both Islamists and Western leftists. Islamists often state openly that they want to murder most if not all of the Jews living there. So when they chant "Palestine should be free," they typically mean free of Jews.

Stephen Daisley: Why I love Israel

[T]here are plenty of reasons for Zionists to be gloomy on this, Israel’s 75th birthday, but there is one reason for optimism that outshines them all: Israel is 75. Israel was created; survived an immediate Arab effort to annihilate it; ingathered the survivors of the death camps; settled the land and built kibbutzim; struggled through the lean and lonely years; triumphed in the Six-Day War and reunited Jerusalem; pulled through the Yom Kippur War; endured two intifadas; rescued Beta Israel and welcomed the refuseniks; lost Yamit, lost Rabin, lost Gush Katif; made the desert bloom with fruits and microchips; and made peace with Arab nations. All of that in 75 years and, despite impossible odds, Israel lives yet.

Israel is a hard country and for many a hard country to love. It is flinty but whiny, eager for the world’s love but diplomatically tin-eared, unsentimental but gripped by existential angst. It is a country that adores its army and reveres military discipline but is so hectically informal that you wonder how it made it to 75 days, let alone 75 years. It also boasts the highest density of rude people in the known universe, although I find that strangely endearing. I have never loved Israel more than the time the manager of a Tel Aviv minimart yelled at me for a) not speaking Hebrew, b) being a foreign journalist, and c) coming in to shop when she was trying to watch TV. Only in Israel, the innovation nation, could they invent the inconvenience store.

If Zionism is the theory, Israel is the practice and like all practical translations of idealism it is compromised, haphazard, sometimes unsightly, and occasionally disheartening. But that tension between Zionism and Israel, between ahavat and ha’aretz, is where the great debates take place and where the course of Jewish history can be set or changed. Israeli independence, as it reaches 75 years, is still a miraculous application of a mundane idea: Jewish self-determination.

Israel Independence Day: Celebrating 75 Years with Natan Sharansky

Former Prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky's personal journey reflects that of the Jewish people, and the centrality of Israel in his life and Jewish identity mirrors the experiences of so many Jews around the world.

Sharansky: "The existence of Israel and, in a way, the existence of the Jewish people is the best demonstration of the importance of these two basic desires of people - to be free and to belong."

"For a thousand years, what were we fighting for? For our right to live freely in accordance with our identity. And then Israel was established. It could not be created as a non-Jewish state and it would never have succeeded in gathering all the Jews if not for its freedom." "There is no other nation or any other state which embodies the strength of this connection. And if you look at history and compare us with Israel 50 years ago, we have much more freedom and much more identity. We have far more of a Jewish and democratic state, so that's the direction we're heading in....Our history and our triumphs are the best proof of how important it is for these two things to go together." "I grew up [in the Soviet Union] having zero connection with anything Jewish except through antisemitism....It was Israel that came in a very powerful way to the center of our life, from the Six-Day War, and it allowed us to discover our identity, that we have a history, we are a people and we have a state. That gave us the strength to fight for our Jewish rights and for a better world."

"When people simply want tikkun olam [repairing the world] without any identity...your life is very shallow. Look at how all these Birthright kids - whose bar mitzvah was the last time they've had a connection to being Jewish - suddenly discover that it's cool and even interesting to live inside history....Suddenly, they have energy, meaning and understanding....In this age, there is no better way to quickly give Jews a brief injection of the importance and meaning of discovering their Jewish identity than coming to Israel."

The BBC promotes the new antisemitism

The BBC's latest article on Christians in Jerusalem is a classic example of how antisemitism has been mainstreamed in today's "civilized" world.

The title is "Jerusalem Christians say attacks on the rise."

Walking in the footsteps of Jesus, huge crowds of Christian pilgrims have this month thronged Jerusalem's ancient streets where the Easter story unfolded.

"It's very emotional, I already cried a little," says Marina, who is visiting from Belgrade and joined the Orthodox Good Friday procession carrying a wooden cross. "It's something you have to feel to be here."

Local Christians also stand out as they join the devotions, with Palestinian and Armenian scout groups leading religious processions.

But in recent months, Christians living in the occupied East of the city say they have seen increased harassment and violence.

The first crime of omission is the biggest.

Palestinian Christians belong to the most extreme doctrinal antisemitic churches in the world. The Greek Melkite Church and the Greek Orthodox Church, which make up the majority of Jerusalem's Christians, still hold on to the classic Christian supersessionist philosophy that regards Judaism itself as an aberration. The most vicious doctrinal antisemitism in pre-Zionist Palestine came from local Christians, not Muslims, and in fact their antisemitism shaped modern Muslim Jew-hatred.

The church leaders in Jerusalem have been the most extreme anti-Zionists and antisemites, and have been deathly afraid of saying anything negative about the Muslims who have indeed been oppressing them for centuries. They have enthusiastically taken on the role of dhimmi and defended that second-class status assigned to them by the larger Muslim world.

When they say they are oppressed by Jews, one must be skeptical at the very least.

The main Christian interviewed by the BBC, Bishop William Shomali of the Latin Patriarchate, was quoted in a Vatican magazine in 2012 as saying, “The Talmud, the holy book studied by the ultra-orthodox, more highly venerated than the Bible itself, invites religious hatred, speaks badly of Jesus, and even worse of Mary and, in general, of Christians. In Israeli schools love for the other is not taught but rather the destruction of the other.”

This is pure antisemitism - with a dollop of anti-Zionism on the side.

The BBC then lists some recent examples of Jewish vandalism or disrespect towards Christian sites in Jerusalem. Some of them are legitimate - and the Israeli police arrested the perpetrators. One came from an American. There is no indication that things really are worse than in previous years outside of what the Jerusalem Arab Christians are claiming, and furthermore no proof outside of speculation that this alleged increase is a result of the current Israeli government making extremist Jews bolder.

The Talmud quote above was a response to anti-Christian graffiti in 2012, so there have always been extremist Jews who have attacked church property. They were outliers then and they are outliers now. Any blanket blame of all Jews or all Israel for the actions of a minority who act in opposition to Israeli policy is just another form of antisemitism - of generalizing the actions of a few to the larger population.

But the BBC's antisemitism is not only from quoting antisemites without context, which is bad enough. The reporter shows her own bias here:

The holy city of Jerusalem lies at the heart of the Christian faith. However, the number of Christians living here has dropped from a quarter of the population a century ago to under 2%. Many have emigrated, escaping the painful daily realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and seeking better opportunities elsewhere.

The clear implication is that Israeli policies are driving an exodus of Christians, and the article goes on to say that "Many Christians feel that the growing hostility towards them is meant to push them out."

However, if one looks at the demographic history of Jerusalem, one sees that the only major exodus of Christians came under Jordanian rule - from 19% of Jerusalem residents in 1944 to only 4% in 1967, with far more than half of the Christians of Jerusalem fleeing during those years.

The reason that the percentage has gone down from 4% to 2% today is not because of Israel forcing Christians out but because Israel expanded Jerusalem to include more Jews and more Muslims. In absolute terms, the Christian population has slowly grown in Jerusalem, and the only times it has ever gone down in history have been under Muslim rule. Indeed, Israel's Christians are overwhelmingly satisfied with living in Israel.

That paragraph shows that the BBC is not interested in the truth, but in anti-Israel and indeed antisemitic propaganda.

If the BBC had included any of the context mentioned here, it wouldn't have an article. So it airbrushes Muslim abuse of Christians and Palestinian Christian antisemitism out of the picture, leaving only an ugly lie that blame Jews as a nation for persecuting Christians.

(h/t Martin)

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!

02/15 Links Pt2: The Truth Behind the Palestinian ‘Catastrophe’; Irwin Cotler: To combat antisemitism, we must first agree how to define it; Moral idiocy: Academics fuel Palestinian terror against Israel

From Ian:

The Truth Behind the Palestinian ‘Catastrophe’

ON AUGUST 5, 1948, not quite three months after the new state of Israel was invaded by five Arab armies, a short volume titled Maana al-Nakba (later translated as The Meaning of the Disaster) appeared in Beirut to popular acclaim. The author was Constantine K. Zurayk, a distinguished professor of Oriental history and vice president of the American University of Beirut.

Zurayk was the wunderkind of the Arab academic world. Born in Damascus in 1909 to a prosperous Greek Orthodox family, he was sent off at 20 to complete his graduate studies in the United States. Within a year he had obtained a master’s from the University of Chicago. One year later, he added a Ph.D. in Oriental languages from Princeton. He then returned to Beirut and the American University.

Zurayk soon became one of the leading advocates of the liberal, secularist variant of Arab nationalism. After Syria won its independence in 1945, he was chosen to serve in the new nation’s first diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C., and also served with the Syrian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly.

Zurayk’s book reflected the sense of outrage among the Arab educated classes over the 1947 UN partition resolution and the creation of the Jewish state. Zurayk’s anger was even more personal, since he had participated in the UN deliberations on the Palestine question. His 70-page book then became a reference point for future pro-Palestinian historians and writers. Yoav Gelber, a prominent Israeli historian of the 1948 war, cited Zurayk’s work when he told me he didn’t think there was much new in Arafat’s 1998 Nakba Day declaration. “The Nakba was at the basis of the Palestinian narrative from the beginning,” Gelber said. “Constantine Zurayk coined the phrase in 1948.”

In previous writings about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, I wasn’t able to comment on Zurayk’s book. A limited-edition English translation of Maana al-Nakba appeared in Beirut in 1956, but it was never published in the United States. It was only recently that I found a rare copy in a university library and finally read the real thing.

It was not what I expected. The Meaning of the Disaster actually isn’t about the tragedy of the Palestinian people. According to Zurayk, the crime of the Nakba was committed against the entire Arab nation—a romantic conception of a political entity that he and his fellow Arab nationalists fervently believed in. And, it turns out, Zurayk was no champion of an independent Palestinian state.

In an introductory paragraph, Zurayk writes about “the defeat of the Arabs in Palestine,” which he then calls “one of the harshest of the trials and tribulations with which the Arabs have been afflicted throughout their long history.” Zurayk’s only comment about Palestinian refugees is that, during the fighting, “four hundred thousand or more Arabs [were] forced to flee pell mell from their homes.” (All italics added.)

Zurayk predicted that all Arabs would continue to be threatened by international Zionism: “The Arab nation throughout its long history has never been faced with a more serious danger than that to which it has today been exposed. The forces which the Zionists control in all parts of the world can, if they are permitted to take root in Palestine, threaten the independence of all the Arab lands and form a continuing and frightening danger to their life.”

Irwin Cotler: To combat antisemitism, we must first agree how to define it

The IHRA definition provides examples of both forms of antisemitism. The examples addressing older forms include stereotypes of Jews as controlling the media, world governments and the economy. Examples of newer forms include denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel.

These latter examples have provoked some opposition, with opponents alleging that the IHRA definition will stifle criticism of the actions of the Israeli government, as well as advocacy for Palestinian human rights. This claim is as misleading as it is unfounded.

In fact, distinguishing between what is and what is not antisemitic enhances and promotes free expression and peaceful dialogue. In particular, the IHRA definition explicitly states that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

Accordingly, the definition serves to protect speech that is critical of Israeli policy — which I have myself engaged in — so long as it does not cross the delineated boundaries into antisemitism. Conversely, using this definition, genuine antisemitism, such as those examples listed above, can be defined and recognized.

The IHRA definition therefore sets the parameters for a healthy, democratic, tolerant debate and dialogue. It fosters non-hateful communication, and prevents both actual instances of antisemitism as well as unjust labelling of antisemitism. In doing so, it aligns with Canadian values of equality, diversity and human rights.

My hope for 2023 is that the Canadian jurisdictions that have not yet adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism will do so, and that the ones that have adopted it begin to implement and use it. The IHRA definition is an indispensable resource in helping to identify, recognize and define antisemitism, and adopting it is the critical first step towards Canada’s collective effort to combat the rising tide of antisemitism.

Gil Troy: Moral idiocy: Academics fuel Palestinian terror against Israel - opinion

Imagine the hate required to overrun fellow humans at a bus stop. Imagine the super-sized evil required to keep accelerating when you notice six- and eight-year-old brothers standing there, innocently chatting with their dad. And imagine the perversity involved in celebrating such murders. Friday proved – again – how deep anti-Jewish demonization has been drilled into too many Palestinian hearts, deforming their souls.

Until the world acknowledges this wickedness – which on Friday ended three lives – more such murderers will be mass-produced – with Western dollars, progressive encouragement, and, in modern Jewry’s sickest trend, some Jews’ validation too.

Too many Blame-Israel-Firsters discount this cultivated ugliness which mocks their delusions that peace will descend once Israel retreats, creating a Palestinian dictatorship – er, state – next door. These pie-in-the-skiers keep deciding that Palestinian abominations confirm Israeli iniquity. They theorize that only desperate individuals driven by evil “occupiers” would act so viciously.

Jews have often been blamed for their enemies’ enmity. This Palestinian addiction to violence, however, reveals more about the killers than those killed.

This, the real cycle of violence, with Palestinian rejectionism and antisemitism fueling terrorism, poses the biggest obstacle to peace. The terrorist rot infects Palestinian identity. Contrast Israel’s army, which will abort legitimate missions to minimize civilian casualties, with Palestinians’ death cult, which targets kids and often blackmails the most vulnerable Palestinians into terror.

The Terrorist-Intellectual Complex
An academic recently challenged some other centrists and me for attacking the Netanyahu-Deri corruption yet ignoring the “occupation’s corruption.” Actually, I’m struck by many critics’ corruption, judging us long-distance through ivy-clouded lenses.

Their “Terrorist-Intellectual Complex” perpetuates violence. Palestinians keep deluding themselves that terrorism works, emboldened by ever-accumulating stacks of UN resolutions, academic treatises, “human rights” proclamations, and student petitions – amplified by retweets and likes.

Many have long noted that only intellectuals could figure out how to call themselves “progressive” while supporting sexist, homophobic, Jew-hating, murderers. Today, “woke” parents training their kids in self-abasement and cravenness to dodge confrontations, even in self-defense, nevertheless cheer Palestinians’ killing cult. And self-proclaimed “Social Justice Warriors” justify this most unjust movement, forgiving the Palestinian Authority and Hamas autocracies.

Biden Joins Campaign To Erase Jewish Historical Ties To Israel (Daled Amos)

Arafat got the ball rolling.

In a 1997 online article on Azure, Yoram Hazony describes a 1996 festival staged by Arafat's Ministry of Culture, in honor of Ba'al:

Arab youths dressed in robes bearing ancient Canaanite figures brandished torches as they danced about the town square, packed with officials of the PLO’s administration and security services...On the stone stage in the middle of the square, a dramatic passion was acted out, with the Ba’al, god of the heavens and fertility in the pantheon of the ancient Canaanites, heroically struggling against Mut, god of the underworld...the narrator took the opportunity to pour praise on the loyal Palestinian-Canaanite nations, the Amorites, Girgashites, Jebusites and Perizzites, which had fought at his side in the battle against the Hebrew invaders from across the Jordan.

And Arafat kept the ball rolling. On March 30, 2000, Arafat declared during a 'Land Day' speech:

Our forefathers, the Canaanites and Jebusites, built the cities and planted the land; they built the monumental city of Bir Salim [Jerusalem]…

The previous year, his advisor and minister for Jerusalem affairs, Faisal Husseini, said in an interview with New York Times Magazine:

I am a Palestinian. I am a descendant of the Jebusites, the ones who came before King David. This [Jerusalem] was one of the most important Jebusite cities in the area…. Yes, it’s true. We are the descendants of Jebusites.

Similar claims by Abbas and Saeb Erekat are not new.

The Middle East Forum finds efforts of this falsification in 1978 in the Palestinian encyclopedia (Al-Mawsu'at Al-Filastinniya),

which declared, "The Palestinians [to be] the descendants of the Jebusites, who are of Arab origin," and described Jerusalem as "an Arab city because its first builders were the Canaanite Jebusites, whose descendants are the Palestinians."The entry continued, "Ever since the destruction of the Temple, the link with Jews and Christians has been severed. Muslims alone have a right to the Temple."

No Palestinian claim is too absurd to be made -- after all, who in the West ever calls them out on such things. Here is Dr. Hayel Sanduqa on PA TV, on June 2, 2011, claiming that a famous Psalm was actually first said by a Crusader:

[The Israelis] have acted to change Jerusalem's character. Even the expression (Psalm 137:5) “If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.” This statement said by the Frankish (Crusader) ruler of Acre shortly before he left – was borrowed by the Zionist movement, which falsified it in the name of Zionism.

Is the problem really that the West is unwilling to call out the Palestinian Arabs on their falsification of history, or is the problem really much bigger -- is the West actually complicit in this falsification?

UNESCO

Erasing Jewish history seems to be a UNESCO specialty.

In 2011, Elder of Ziyon pointed out how UNESCO identified the Rambam (Maimonides) as Maimouna Ibn Moussa, effectively claiming that the revered Jewish philosopher, legal scholar and leader of the Jewish community during the 12th century was a Muslim.

Other attempts by UNESCO to erase Jewish ties to their land just up to 2011 alone include:

o  November 7, 1974: voted “to withhold assistance from Israel in the fields of education, science and culture because of Israel’s persistent alteration of the historic features of Jerusalem.”
o  November 20, 1974: voted to exclude Israel from its European regional group -- until 1978, after the US withheld $40 million in payments from the organization in protest.
o  1989: claimed “Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem” was destroying the holy city by “acts of interference, destruction and transformation”
o  1990: attacked the “irreversible” changes to Jerusalem's architectural heritage resulting from Israeli “occupation”
o  1993: then-UNESCO director-general Frederico Mayor boycotted an international conference on science in Jerusalem
o  1995: When the UN celebrated its 50th anniversary, UNESCO refused to mention the Shoah in its World War II resolution
o  1996: organized a symposium on Jerusalem at the body’s Paris headquarters without inviting any Jewish or Israeli groups
o  1998: a delegation visiting Jerusalem refused to meet with Israeli officials.
o  2001: UNESCO promoted the “Cairo Declaration Document for Jerusalem Antiquities Preservation,” accusing Israel of destroying Islamic antiquities on the Temple Mount and in Jerusalem’s Old City
o  2002: During the Second Intifada, condemned Israel for “the destruction and damage caused to the cultural heritage in the Palestinian territories” as “a crime against the common cultural heritage of humanity.”
o  2009: designated Jerusalem as a “capital of Arab culture”
o  2010: declared Rachel’s Tomb and Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs as “Muslim mosques.”
o  2011: called on Israel to stop all archaeological works in the Old City of Jerusalem

In the past, UNESCO also has also called for “financial sanctions against Israel” and passed hundreds of resolutions criticizing Israel’s activities in Judea and Samaria

According to the UN Watch Database:

Between 2009 and 2021, UNESCO adopted 82 resolutions against Israel; 9 on Crimea; 4 on Iraq; 2 on Syria; and none on Iran, Sudan, North Korea, or any other country in the world...UNESCO repeatedly denies the ancient Jewish heritage and culture of the holy cities Jerusalem and Hebron – which it has declared a World Heritage site of “Palestine.”

The Supreme Muslim Council in 1925

But when it comes to denying Israel's right to Jerusalem and its Jewish history, everyone wants to get in on the act -- which is ironic, considering how in 1925, the Supreme Muslim Council published A Brief Guide to Al-Haram Al-Sharif, which in addition to permitting non-Muslims to visit, explicitly recognizes the history of Solomon's Temple as being "beyond dispute" as the location where the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque stand today -- and quotes from the Book of Samuel to make its point. The guide goes on to mention in passing that in 637 Caliph Omar "occupied Jerusalem."

The Mosque of Omar, 16 miles southwest of Jerusalem, has an inscription dating back to the 9th or 10th century CE that refers to the Dome of the Rock as “the rock of the Bayt al-Maqdis” -- literally "the rock of The Holy Temple."

Things have changed.

The BBC

Things have changed in the media as well. CAMERA UK has pointed out that while at one point the BBC recognized the Jewish historical ties by referring to The Temple Mount...

...in 2014, after the PLO warned international reporters not to use the term Temple Mount, the media obliged and perpetuates the Palestinian Arab narrative, the BBC among them. Last month, when Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the Temple Mount, the BBC reported:

The hilltop site is the most sacred place in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam. It is known to Jews as the Temple Mount, site of two Biblical temples, and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, the site of Muhammad's ascent to Heaven. The entire compound is considered to be al-Aqsa Mosque by Muslims. [emphasis added]

The BBC includes a graphic that helpfully emphasizes the point:

By perpetuating this distortion, the BBC is aiding the Palestinian Arabs who undercut Jewish rights and Jewish history by increasing the number of mosques on the Temple Mount from 1 to 5 while deliberately destroying archaeological evidence of the ancient Jewish ties to the area.

Helping the Palestinian cause is the EU.

The EU

Back in December, a document came to light describing the EU's plan to help the Palestinians by undercutting the Oslo Accords and help Palestinian Arabs gain a foothold in Area C of Judea and Samaria.

The six-page document calls for mapping the territory in order to prove Palestinian rights to the land and monitoring Israeli archaeological activity, as ancient Jewish ties reinforce Israeli claims.

The document also recommends strengthening Palestinian infrastructure in Area C and supporting Palestinians with legal aid.

The article quotes Shlomo Ne’eman, head of the Gush Etzion Council and the Yesha Council who decries how "the allies of the State of Israel, the European governments, are actively working to change the borders of our country." This is just taking the attempt to arbitrarily refer to Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel and taking it to a whole new level.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia is doing its share to falsify history.

Wikipedia

An article on Wikipedia on Iran–Jordan relations, traces those relations back for "most of Jordanian history" -- in this case back to the Persians:

The article on Jordan itself tells you that "the oldest known evidence of hominid habitation in Jordan dates back at least 200,000 years."

You have to check out the Wikipedia article on Iraq-Jordan relations to get the straightforward history starting in the 20th century:

And now the Biden Administration has decided to play along with the Palestinian Arabs.

The Biden Administration

According to a press release from the Manhattan DA's office:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., today announced the repatriation of an ivory cosmetic spoon dating back to approximately 800-700 B.C.E to the Palestinian Authority, marking the first time a cultural object has been returned to the Palestinian people from the United States...

“We are proud to join our law enforcement and government partners in this moment. It is impossible to put a value on the cultural and historical significance of looted antiquities and I thank our talented team of attorneys and investigators who are continuing their incredible work of returning these objects to where they rightfully belong,” said District Attorney Bragg. [emphasisd added]

Rightfully belong?

As Johanna Markind pointed out at Legal Insurrection:

American law calls for repatriation of certain artifacts to Indian tribes, if “the requesting Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization can show that the object was owned or controlled by the Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization.” That is, the Smithsonian would return a qualified Cheyenne artifact to the Cheyenne tribe. It would not return a Cheyenne artifact to, say, the Pawnee.

According to the law, then, the artifact should have been returned to Israel. But that would have been a problem. After all, the spoon was originally looted from Hebron, so returning it to Israel would amount to admitting the Jewish ties to that area.

So instead, we are treated to an onslaught of government officials publically supporting the Palestinian Arabs in fabricating an imaginary history:

o  Ivan J. Arvelo, a special agent in charge of US Homeland Security Investigations in New York, described the transfer of the spoon to the PA as a "historic repatriation”
o  George Noll, head of the US Office of Palestinian Affairs, described the spoon as “an example of Palestinian cultural patrimony.”
o  DHS official, Jeff Brannigan, claimed that, “This repatriation is representative of HSI’s commitment to ensuring the storied heritages of peoples around the world through the preservation and protection of cultural artifacts.”

The Biden Administration is pushing a falsified history -- much as Biden himself famously falsified his own history during the 1988 presidential campaign when he claimed:

o  He graduated from Syracuse University’s law school in the top half of his class.
o  He received 3 undergraduate degrees.
o  He attended law school on a full academic scholarship

But this time, the media is unlikely to call him out on this fake history.

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!

01/18 Links Pt2: Moshe Dayan’s Tragic Blunder; Mahmoud Abbas’ Dissertation; Why Israel’s enemies will hate the Louvre; No room for anti-Israel bias at Kennedy School

From Ian:

Meir Y. Soloveichik: Moshe Dayan’s Tragic Blunder

There is an argument to be made for permitting wider access and the right to pray for Jews at the site of the biblical Temples. In part, this argument charges that defense minister Moshe Dayan, in electing not to fully realize Israel’s sovereignty over the Mount immediately after its breathtaking capture in the 1967 war, helped facilitate the resonant Palestinian lie that the Jews have no connection to our ancient homeland—for surely, if the Temple Mount was historically ours, religiously ours, we would not have handed it back to them.

Dayan self-evidently thought otherwise. Anxious to avoid a full-on confrontation with the entire Muslim world, and utilizing the halachic argument that Jews should not set foot on the Mount for fear of defiling the sacred ground where the Temple and its Holy of Holies once stood, he allowed Jordan’s Muslim Waqf to continue to administer the compound’s holy places.

Netanyahu, Horovitz continued, had “wisely” adopted Dayan’s approach previously, but now the prime minister had “sanctioned” an act of “potential pyromania.” Horovitz’s account leaves out the fact that the decision of the ardently secular Dayan was founded on total disregard for what the Temple Mount meant to religious Jews.

After his paratroopers broke through Jordanian lines in 1967 and reached the site, Mordechai Gur exultantly exclaimed that “the Temple Mount is in our hands.” Dayan, in contrast, infamously reflected, “What do I need this Vatican for?” As the Israeli journalist Nadav Sharagai has documented, Dayan’s actions were based in the presumption that the Temple Mount is not of any religious significance to Jews at all:
Dayan thought at the time, and years later committed his thoughts to writing, that since the Mount was a “Muslim prayer mosque,” while for Jews it was no more than “a historical site of commemoration of the past…one should not hinder the Arabs behaving there as they do now and one should recognize their right as Muslims to control the site.”

But of course the Temple Mount is more, for Jews, than a commemorative locale of the past: It is the holiest site in Judaism, the one toward which Jews pray all over the world, because they believe that God dwells there in a special way. Dayan’s decision did indeed facilitate Palestinian claims, rampant today, that no Temple ever stood in Jerusalem and that the entire Jewish connection to Jerusalem is a fabrication. This is why more and more religious Jews are realizing that visiting the site is essential. It is not only far-right figures who are visiting the Mount. Entering certain sections of the Mount in a manner sanctioned by Jewish law is becoming more and more mainstream among Orthodox Jews. And that is why opposition to Jewish access to the Mount is growing more and more frantic by the day.

All this points to a profound irony. The return of Netanyahu has been met with the journalistic gnashing of teeth and the rhetorical rending of garments by writers and public figures about the danger that the (democratically elected) government of Israel poses to democracy. And yet it is these very critics who are often so dismissive of the most elemental of democratic injustices: denying Jews in Israel the right to visit, and to pray at, Judaism’s holiest place. Perhaps, when it comes to the history of the democratic liberties of mankind in the eyes of those who piously intone on the subject, it is only the rights of religious Jews that do not matter.

Mahmoud Abbas’ Dissertation

On Feb. 1, 1972, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued a directive “On further measures to fight anti-Soviet and anti-communist activities of international Zionism.” The social sciences section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences soon established a permanent commission for the coordination of scientific criticism of Zionism, to be housed at the academy’s prestigious Institute of Oriental Studies. Over the next 15 years, the IOS would serve as an important partner in the state’s fight against the imaginary global Zionist conspiracy that Soviet security services believed was sabotaging the USSR in the international arena and at home. In 1982, the IOS would grant the doctoral status to one Mahmoud Abbas, upon the defense of his thesis The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945.

Abbas’ dissertation has been a subject of considerable interest over the years. The thesis isn’t publicly available: By all accounts, it is kept in an IOS special storage facility requiring special authorization to access. But if one visits the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, one can easily get the Palestinian leader’s so-called avtoreferat—an extended dissertation abstract. Written to the standards of the Soviet State Commission for Academic Degrees and Titles and authored by the candidate, the 19-page document outlines the dissertation’s relevance, methodology, main arguments and unique contribution to the field. It also provides a literature review and lists the individuals and institutions that were involved in shepherding the work through to completion. It therefore offers a peek not only into Mahmoud Abbas’ academic accomplishment, but also into the system that produced it.

Using the social sciences to support political and ideological agendas set by the Communist Party was a matter of course in the USSR. Entire academic disciplines had been established to grant scholarly legitimacy to the state’s guiding ideology. “Scientific atheism,” for an example, was tasked with proving scientifically that God did not exist and that religion was the opiate of the masses. “Scientific communism” was supposed to supply scientific proof that communism was the superior stage of social and economic development and would supersede both Soviet socialism and global capitalism. When, instead, capitalism superseded Soviet socialism and the cushy budgets that sustained these disciplines vanished, they, too, quietly dissolved.

As a field, “scientific anti-Zionism” never took root in the Soviet academy as broadly as the other two subjects. Like them, it died as soon as its primary client—the Soviet state—disappeared. Soon a million Soviet Jews resettled in Israel and the newly independent former Soviet states restored diplomatic relations with the country.

I grew up in Akademgorodok—a suburb of the Siberian city of Novosibirsk that was home to the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences. Adults around me lived and breathed science—real science, like physics and biology. It was well-known that portions of the academy were corrupted by ideological agendas. The antisemitism in its math division and elsewhere was a fact of life. Humanities and social sciences in particular were ruled by ideological priorities. But seeing the intellectual corruption that is evident in the story of Abbas’ dissertation is disturbing nonetheless.

Why Israel’s enemies will hate the Louvre

The Palestinian Authority and its supporters have a new enemy: the Louvre.

The world’s most-visited museum, the famous French institution that holds some of the greatest works of art and antiquities, is likely to find itself on anti-Israel boycott lists around the world.

This is because among the Louvre’s storied collections is a slab of stone with an inscription that affirms the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.

The stone, known as the Mesha Stele, was first discovered in 1868 near the Dead Sea, but its inscription, written in the language of the ancient Moabites, was only partially understandable due to centuries of wear and damage. The inscription recounts a war between King Mesha of Moab and the Jews—the same conflict described in the third chapter of the Book of Kings. In addition, the words “House of David” appeared to be included in the inscription, but damage to the artifact meant this could not be proved conclusively.

Linguists and historians associated with a University of Southern California research project recently analyzed the artifact with a new technology called Reflectance Transformation Imaging that “takes digital images of an artifact from different angles and then combined to create a precise, three-dimensional digital rendering of the piece,” according to an article by two of the researchers, André Lemaire and Jean-Philippe Delorme, in the latest issue of Biblical Archeology Review.

This allowed the damaged section of the stele to be read. As was long suspected, it indeed referred to the “House of David.” So, once again, archaeological discoveries have affirmed what was already written long ago in the Hebrew Bible.

Do you know what is not mentioned in the inscription? “Palestine” or “Palestinians.”