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.