Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: fact check

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Friday, December 22, 2023

The @WashingtonPost's investigation about Shifa Hospital misses the real story

On Thursday, the Washington Post published an investigation casting doubt on whether Shifa Hospital in Gaza was being used as a Hamas command center.

Its top major finding: "The rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas."

The key to the story is the word "immediate:"

“The law is about what was in the mind of the attacker at the time the attacker planned and executed the mission with respect to both what they expected the collateral damage they expected to cause and the military advantage they anticipated gaining,” said Michael Schmitt, an emeritus professor at the U.S. Naval War College.

The IDF would not comment on the military advantage sought or achieved.

“What was the urgency? This is not yet being demonstrated,” said Yousuf Syed Khan, a senior lawyer with Global Rights Compliance, a law firm, who has drafted U.N. reports on siege warfare.

While the underground tunnel uncovered by Israeli forces after the raid does point to a possible militant presence underneath the hospital at some point, it does not prove that a command node was operating there during the war.

“We’re getting more of a granular, three-dimensional understanding of al-Shifa Hospital, the tunnels underneath it,” said Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser at the State Department and now a senior adviser at Crisis Group.

“What we’re really lacking here is a confident understanding of the fourth dimension, which is time. When were various elements of the hospital being used in certain ways? When were the tunnels beneath the hospital complex being used in certain ways?”

The Washington Post has its doubts:

The bare, white-tiled rooms showed no immediate evidence of use — for command and control or otherwise. There are no signs of recent habitation, including litter, food containers, clothing or other personal items.

Let's look at the context.

Hamas' use of the hospital for military purposes was well known as early as 2006. Even the Washington Post itself wrote in 2014 that it “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.”

Israel had built bunkers under the hospital when Gaza was under Israeli control, but bunkers aren't tunnels. However, we know that there were tunnels under Gaza's Al Wehda Street that were bombed in the 2014 war, and that street leads directly to the hospital compound. Given that Hamas built hundreds of tunnel shafts underneath their offices and leaders' homes, it is apparent that there were connections between Hamas offices in the hospital basement and the tunnels under Al Wehda Street.

Israel might not have revealed the specific locations of each shaft, and that is hardly important considering that there is no doubt that these tunnels existed directly underneath a hospital.

Just as there is no doubt that the only purpose of these tunnels, underground rooms and bathrooms is military. They aren't hotels or summer camps.

The IDF first laid out a specific series of accusations about the Shifa Hospital on October 27, nearly three weeks before the raid, before the ground war even began. There were unofficial discussions of Shifa Hospital before that. It didn't show "urgency" - it showed unheard-of patience before moving in.

Hamas knew the IDF was coming for them. And they had weeks to clear out and clean up the evidence from the tunnels (even though they left behind plenty of weapons on the hospital grounds themselves, which were harder to clean up since there were so many people around.)

Here's the part that no one is talking about: The IDF knew quite well that they were giving Hamas a heads up that they were coming. They knew Hamas would not stay and it would hide evidence of explicit military use. So why give the warning at all? Why not surprise Hamas? What army tells the enemy where they will be going?

The warning was meant to force Hamas commanders to move to other areas.

This achieves three military aims. Firstly, it disrupts their operations temporarily. Secondly, it allows the IDF to go there, gather evidence and valuable intelligence like footage from cameras, and destroy the military infrastructure beneath Shifa without a firefight and endangering patients and civilians taking shelter. And thirdly, Hamas leaders moving to other areas allows Israel to attack them without worrying about the complexity of protecting hospital patients during a battle.

Israel has now released evidence that Hamas brought hostages to Shifa. The tunnels had electricity and plumbing that were attached to Shifa's infrastructure. Weapons were found in the radiology ward and in a garage on Shifa's grounds. We know that employees and even directors at other hospitals were also Hamas terrorists. The Gaza health ministry is Hamas and it admits its officials have Hamas military rank. While there might not be direct evidence of Hamas using those tunnels underneath Shifa in mid-November as their main headquarters, no one can seriously doubt that Hamas used the hospital for military purposes and that the reason was to use the patients as human shields.

Israel managed to clear Hamas out of the hospital it was using for military purposes with a minimum of fighting and a minimum of physical destruction. That is not violating international law - it is adhering to it in ways far beyond the limited imaginations of those whose entire worldview is poisoned by always assuming malevolence from Israel.

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Memo to Abbas: Jews are Not Descended from Khazars; Here’s Proof (Judean Rose)

"Battle Scene," Folio from a Zafarnama (Book of Victories) of Sharaf al-Din 'Ali Yazdi

Jews aren’t really Jews, according to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, but Khazars, a nomadic Turkic people. These “Khazar Jews” Abbas claims, have no connection to the Land of Israel, just an invented history and a false narrative of religious rights to the Land of Israel. This, of course, is an inversion of the truth. In reality, it is the “Palestinians” who are an invented people with an invented history, and an invented religious right to Jewish territory. By now there is a large body of definitive proof that the Jews are not descended from the Khazars, but those who hate Israel are not interested in either proof or truth.

The purpose of the Khazar myth is to delegitimize all Jewish claims to Israeli territory while spreading the lie that the land in question belongs to others. It’s an if/then proposition. If Jews are Khazars, they have no legitimate claims to Jewish land, which makes them thieves. Except that the Jews are not Khazars. They are Jews. And for thousands of years, Jews have been overwhelmingly endogamous—they marry each other. Abbas says otherwise, because it serves his interests, the main interest being taking land away from the Jews.

Abbas stands truth on its head. The land, he asserts, doesn’t belong to those Khazar Jews, but to his constituents—if you can call them that, when there hasn’t been an election since Abbas assumed office in 2005. Muwaffaq Matar, Fatah Revolutionary Council member and regular columnist for official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, reported on remarks made by Abbas to “various Palestinian intellectuals,” in a 2021 meeting (emphasis added):

[At the meeting he held, PA] President [Mahmoud Abbas] debunked the Zionist fairy tale, which some call the Jewish Israeli narrative…

The president spoke about the 9th century pagan Tatar-Khazar kingdom, which was established in the Caspian Sea area. It underwent attacks and suffered from wars, and therefore its king sought advice to be saved from this situation. His friend, a Jewish man, advised him to convert. The kingdom followed in his footsteps, and it also converted. It remained like this until the 11th century when the kingdom finally collapsed, and [its residents] scattered in neighboring states. These are the Ashkenazis, who were not originally Jews but rather converted.

But this is a lie, as borne out by science. Jews are endogamous: they marry each other (or did until modern times). A study on Ashkenazi hereditary diseases published in 2022, speaks of historically endogamous marriage practices in Judaism in general, and how marrying within the tribe impacted Ashkenazi Jewry in particular:

Judaism is a shared religious and cultural identity, with endogamous marriage practices and distinctive diasporic histories of communities worldwide, particularly a Levantine origin and complex history of migrations over the last ∼2.5 millennia. Present-day Ashkenazim are descendants of medieval Jewish populations with histories primarily in northern and eastern Europe. As a result, they carry distinctive ancestries, and Jewish and non-Jewish medieval individuals living in the same regions would likely show characteristic patterns of genetic variation.

Hereditary disorders in Ashkenazi Jewish populations have been the focus of considerable medical research, with genetic screening now commonplace to mitigate risks. Their prevalence is generally attributed to strong genetic drift during Ashkenazi population bottlenecks, coupled with high endogamy, although other processes such as heterozygote advantage have been proposed.

Candidate population bottlenecks include the phase of dispersion following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the formation of Ashkenazi communities in northern Europe during the medieval period, antisemitic persecution arising from the Crusades, unfounded reprisals for the Black Death, and the movement from western and central Europe to eastern Europe that preceded rapid population growth from the 15th to 18th centuries.

Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (Royal Library of Belgium manuscript, 1376/77)

As we see, the Jews are no Khazars, they married within; but no matter, because Abbas has a useful idiot Jew to lend him credibility. More from the Muwaffaq Matar report:

As proof, the president brought the book ‘The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire [and its Heritage]’ by Jewish-Hungarian author and historian Arthur Koestler.

The Jews never were a people and they never will be. The Zionist organization will continue to invent its own history and transpose it into the books of human knowledge, and even into the holy books, in all languages. This is in order to achieve the goal of mobilizing and gathering enough human ammunition [i.e., immigrants] to carry out missions of occupation and settlement, which the colonialist world powers and empires imposed on it.

What of this so-called proof Abbas brings from “Jewish-Hungarian” author and historian Arthur Koestler? According to Yiddish scholar and expert on Ashkenazi surnames Alexander Beider, there is none. Beider describes the evolution of the unfounded Khazar theory in Ashkenazi Jews Are Not Khazars. Here’s The Proof (emphasis added):

Since the late 19th century, the so-called “Khazarian theory” has promoted the idea that a bulk of Ashkenazic Jews living in Eastern Europe descended from medieval Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic people who founded a powerful polyethnic state in the Caucasus and north to the Caspian, Azov and Black seas. The theory received a recent boost with the 1976 publication of “The Thirteenth Tribe,” a book by Arthur Koestler. Most recently, the Khazarian hypothesis has been promoted by authors like the Tel Aviv University professor of history Shlomo Sand and Tel Aviv University professor of linguistics Paul Wexler, as well the geneticist Eran Elhaik.

Despite this institutional backing, the theory is absolutely without evidence. As any historian will tell you, generations of Jews, like generations of any people, leave historical traces behind them. These traces come in multiple forms. For starters, people leave behind them historical documents and archaeological data. Predictably, archaeologic evidence about the widespread existence of Jews in Khazaria is almost nonexistent. While a series of independent sources does testify to the existence in the 10th century of Jews in the Kingdom of Khazaria, and while some of these sources also indicate that the ruling elite of Khazaria embraced Judaism, the Khazarian state was destroyed by Russians during the 960s. In other words, we can be confident that Judaism was not particularly widespread in that kingdom.

A later report by Matar on the meeting between Abbas and the so-called “Palestinian intellectuals” details the PA president’s sickening assertions of a connection between Nazism and Zionism. Hitler’s “Jewish question,” according to Abbas, arose from the failure of the “Khazar Jews” to properly integrate into European society:

We must focus on what the president said regarding the [Jewish] question or ‘the Jewish problem,’ because its cause is that the Jews of the Khazar kingdom did not integrate in the European societies.

A separate report on the same meeting, this time written by Muhammad Al-Masri, appeared in Ma’an, an independent Palestinian news agency, on Dec. 25, 2021:

[PA] President Mahmoud Abbas presented those present with a concise historical survey, such that dealt intensively with the injustice caused to the Palestinians when the world powers – and foremost among them the US and Britain – agreed to the theft of the homeland and land and to granting them as a gift to the Zionist movement, which is an inseparable part of the international colonialist movement.
President Mahmoud Abbas was clear when he said that inflaming the dreams of the Jews and realizing these dreams within a political entity was not the fruit of the efforts of the Jews themselves, but rather colonialist-theological plans and visions of colonialist world powers, as the modern-day Jews are mostly of Tatar origin. They are descendants of dynasties that established a kingdom in the 9th century called ‘the Khazar kingdom.’ In this statement, it appears that President Mahmoud Abbas sought to say that the colonialist world powers used the Jews in order to execute the great colonialist plan – dismantling the Ottoman Empire and afterwards dismantling the Arab nation.

According to Ehud Yaari, this too is a lot of hooey (emphasis added):

It should be noted that Abbas has his facts about the Khazar empire wrong: the Khazars were not Tatars—rather they were a Turkic people—and [the conversion of the royal dynasty and aristocracy as reported by medieval sources] took place, according to most historians, sometime between 740 and 865 CE. His Prime Minister, Muhammad Shtayeh, also had his dates wrong when declaring on June 26, 2021: “Present day Jews are Khazar Jews, who converted to Judaism in the 6th century.” Regardless of the historical inaccuracies about the Khazar dynasty itself, both statements are instead the product of a more recent and dangerous historical trend, reviving the case offered by the late Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, against the justification of a Jewish homeland. These assertions follow in the vein of numerous Arab writers who have produced a number of volumes over the past five decades identifying the Ashkenazi communities as refugees from the destruction of the Khazar Qaganate by Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev c.965 CE.

Promoting this narrative has not just been the effort of Palestinian and Syrian politicians; many Egyptian, Saudi, and Lebanese intellectuals have also been drawn to a narrative that deprives contemporary Jews of pre-medieval Jewish lineage and history connecting them back to the land. Books dealing with the subject are still on sale all over the region and these theories are widely available across the internet.

This approach is deeply rooted in a widely popular theme of Soviet anti-Semitism, prevalent in many of the institutions where a number of Arab intellectuals studied. In a state where history became subservient to the reigning ideology, Soviet historians depicted the conversion of the Khazars as a humiliation of the Russians, poisoning their values and beliefs and sowing corruption in society. In a famous article published in Pravda (1951) under the pseudonym “Ivanov”—posited to be Stalin himself—an argument was put forth that it would be “shameful” to accept that a Jewish empire governed the vast area between the Caspian and the Black Seas before the appearance of the early Russian princes. This became the official interpretation of the Khazars, mixing dangerously with contemporary accusations of a “Jewish nationalistic plot.” Abbas would have acquainted himself with these concepts while writing his Holocaust-denying Ph.D in Moscow twenty years later.

Abbas was indeed well acquainted with these concepts. In May 2018, Abbas gave a speech to the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the PA, in which he claimed that the nonsensical Khazar theory is backed by Jewish sources:

The sons of Jacob were 12. Where did you bring 13 from? They invented it. Where? In the Khazar Kingdom. When? In the 9th century. It was an irreligious kingdom. Afterwards it became a Jewish kingdom. The emperor converted to Judaism and therefore [the kingdom] converted to Judaism. Afterwards it broke apart, and all its residents migrated to Europe, and these are the Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites, and they have no connection to Semitism or Abraham, Jacob, or others. It was a Tatar-Turkic state...

...Now we are talking about the Jewish homeland. They are talking about longing for Zion and that's why they are going [there] and so forth. I say - not me, rather history says that these words are baseless.

But in fact, science says the baseless idea is the one in which Jews have a Khazar origin story. A 2014 Wayne State University study, No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews, concludes:

Employing a variety of standard techniques for the analysis of population-genetic structure, we found that Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations and, among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East. No particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews to populations from the Caucasus is evident, particularly populations that most closely represent the Khazar region. Thus, analysis of Ashkenazi Jews together with a large sample from the region of the Khazar Khaganate corroborates the earlier results that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe, that they possess considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations, and that there is no indication of a significant genetic contribution either from within or from north of the Caucasus region.

And still, as late as August 24, 2023, Abbas was still spouting his wildly embroidered Khazar lies. MEMRI shared these excerpts:

The truth that we should clarify to the world is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with Semitism. . .The story began in 900 CE, in the Khazar Kingdom on the Caspian Sea. It was a Tatar kingdom that converted to Judaism. . . [In the 11th century], this empire collapsed, and all its population left to the north and to the west. They left for Russia and Western and Eastern Europe. They spread there, and they are the forefathers of Ashkenazi Jews. So when we hear them talk about Semitism and antisemitism – the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites.
Everybody knows that during World War I, Hitler was a sergeant. He said he fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money. In his view, they were engaged in sabotage, and this is why he hated them. We just want to make this point clear. This was not about Semitism and antisemitism.

As for the eastern Jews, they are Semites, because all of them originated in the Arabian Peninsula and they traveled to Al-Andalus, and then came back. We are familiar with this history.

Actually, they are familiar not with history but with lies. Since 2006, the world has known that two fifths of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from four women. Judy Siegel-Itzkovich reported on the discovery by a team of Israeli geneticists:

The team, which studied mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) passed on solely by mothers to their children, found evidence of shared maternal ancestry of Ashkenazi and non–Ashkenazi Jews, a finding showing a shared ancestral pool that is consistent with previous studies that were based on the Y chromosome. This evidence pointed to a similar pattern of shared paternal ancestry of Jewish populations around the world originating in the Middle East. They concluded that the four founding types of mtDNA—likely to be of Middle Eastern origin—underwent a major overall expansion in Europe over the last thousand years.

The “four founding mothers,” [Professor Skorecki] added, “are from lineages that originate long before the launching of the Jewish people some 3400 years ago. They probably came from a large Middle Eastern gene pool.

“As consistent with the Bible, in which the founding Jews were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and his sons, and the matriarchs were ‘imported’ from non–Jewish peoples and then converted, the haplotypes of contemporary Jewish men are much less varied.”

Is there any truth to the idea that the Khazars converted to Judaism? According to Prof. Shaul Stampfer, no. The research simply does not support this idea:

Did the Khazars convert to Judaism? The view that some or all Khazars, a central Asian people, became Jews during the ninth or tenth century is widely accepted. But following an exhaustive analysis of the evidence, Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher Prof. Shaul Stampfer has concluded that such a conversion, “while a splendid story,” never took place. . .
From roughly the seventh to tenth centuries, the Khazars ruled an empire spanning the steppes between the Caspian and Black Seas. Not much is known about Khazar culture and society: they did not leave a literary heritage and the archaeological finds have been meager. The Khazar Empire was overrun by Svyatoslav of Kiev around the year 969, and little was heard from the Khazars after. Yet a widely held belief that the Khazars or their leaders at some point converted to Judaism persists.
Reports about the Jewishness of the Khazars first appeared in Muslim works in the late ninth century and in two Hebrew accounts in the tenth century. The story reached a wider audience when the Jewish thinker and poet Yehudah Halevi used it as a frame for his book The Kuzari. Little attention was given to the issue in subsequent centuries, but a key collection of Hebrew sources on the Khazars appeared in 1932 followed by a little-known six-volume history of the Khazars written by the Ukrainian scholar Ahatanhel Krymskyi. Henri Gregoire published skeptical critiques of the sources, but in 1954 Douglas Morton Dunlop brought the topic into the mainstream of accepted historical scholarship with The History of the Jewish Khazars. Arthur Koestler’s best-selling The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) brought the tale to the attention of wider Western audiences, arguing that East European Ashkenazi Jewry was largely of Khazar origin. Many studies have followed, and the story has also garnered considerable non-academic attention; for example, Shlomo Sand’s 2009 bestseller, The Invention of the Jewish People, advanced the thesis that the Khazars became Jews and much of East European Jewry was descended from the Khazars. But despite all the interest, there was no systematic critique of the evidence for the conversion claim other than a stimulating but very brief and limited paper by Moshe Gil of Tel Aviv University.

Professor Shaul Stampfer

Stampfer notes that scholars who have contributed to the subject based their arguments on a limited corpus of textual and numismatic evidence. Physical evidence is lacking: archaeologists excavating in Khazar lands have found almost no artifacts or grave stones displaying distinctly Jewish symbols. He also reviews various key pieces of evidence that have been cited in relation to the conversion story, including historical and geographical accounts, as well as documentary evidence. Among the key artifacts are an apparent exchange of letters between the Spanish Jewish leader Hasdai ibn Shaprut and Joseph, king of the Khazars; an apparent historical account of the Khazars, often called the Cambridge Document or the Schechter Document; various descriptions by historians writing in Arabic; and many others.
Taken together, Stampfer says, these sources offer a cacophony of distortions, contradictions, vested interests, and anomalies in some areas, and nothing but silence in others. A careful examination of the sources shows that some are falsely attributed to their alleged authors, and others are of questionable reliability and not convincing. Many of the most reliable contemporary texts, such as the detailed report of Sallam the Interpreter, who was sent by Caliph al-Wathiq in 842 to search for the mythical Alexander’s wall; and a letter of the patriarch of Constantinople, Nicholas, written around 914 that mentions the Khazars, say nothing about their conversion.
Citing the lack of any reliable source for the conversion story, and the lack of credible explanations for sources that suggest otherwise or are inexplicably silent, Stampfer concludes that the simplest and most convincing answer is that the Khazar conversion is a legend with no factual basis. There never was a conversion of a Khazar king or of the Khazar elite, he says.
Years of research went into this paper, and Stampfer ruefully noted that "Most of my research until now has been to discover and clarify what happened in the past. I had no idea how difficult and challenging it would be to prove that something did not happen."
In terms of its historical implications, Stampfer says the lack of a credible basis for the conversion story means that many pages of Jewish, Russian and Khazar history have to be rewritten. If there never was a conversion, issues such as Jewish influence on early Russia and ethnic contact must be reconsidered.
Stampfer describes the persistence of the Khazar conversion legend as a fascinating application of Thomas Kuhn’s thesis on scientific revolution to historical research. Kuhn points out the reluctance of researchers to abandon familiar paradigms even in the face of anomalies, instead coming up with explanations that, though contrived, do not require abandoning familiar thought structures. It is only when “too many” anomalies accumulate that it is possible to develop a totally different paradigm—such as a claim that the Khazar conversion never took place.
Stampfer concludes, "We must admit that sober studies by historians do not always make for great reading, and that the story of a Khazar king who became a pious and believing Jew was a splendid story.” However, in his opinion, "There are many reasons why it is useful and necessary to distinguish between fact and fiction – and this is one more such case."

Mahmoud Abbas lies like a rug and he repeats the same lies over and over again as if they were fact. His constituents and Jew-haters at large already know the drill. Abbas says it, and the Jew-hating echo chamber will happily repeat the false narrative until it takes on a life of its own. Mark Twain said that “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

Lies spread like wildfire; they have power. We see it with Mahmoud Abbas and the Khazar origin story. The more Abbas repeats his lies about Jewish lineage, the less anyone cares to hear the truth. The truth simply no longer matters; it has been rendered irrelevant.

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!

Blood libel of the day: "Israel blocking dialysis supplies to Gaza"

From Xinhua:

At least 1,100 Palestinian kidney patients are facing an interruption of life-saving treatment due to a lack of medicines and medical equipment in the coastal enclave, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said on Wednesday.

They include 38 children who are in danger of being denied access to dialysis sessions, Ashraf Abu Mahdi, director of the pharmacy department in the Health Ministry, said in a press conference held in Gaza.

"Patients with kidney failure are forced to live in difficult health conditions as medical supplies will be used up soon," Abu Mahdi added.

Abu Mahdi indicated that stores run by the ministry in Gaza are short of related medical supplies, and the hospitals in Gaza provide 13,000 dialysis sessions for patients per month.

He accused Israel of "banning the transport and shipment of medical supplies to the hospitals of the coastal enclave, putting the lives of thousands of kidney patients at risk."

Israel has never blocked the supplies of medicines or consumable medical supplies to Gaza. Any previous shortages were blamed on the Palestinian Authority, not Israel.

And interestingly, when Gaza health authorities first raised this alarm on Saturday, they didn't blame Israel either:

The Director of the Hospital Pharmacy Department at the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, Alaa Helles, appealed to all concerned authorities “to assume their responsibilities to save the lives of kidney failure patients due to the acute shortage of the necessary medical supplies needed for dialysis sessions, which poses a threat to the lives of 1,100 kidney failure patients, including 38 children.”

Helles called on the relevant authorities to “take urgent action to provide medical consumables for the needs of kidney failure patients, which means continuing service to them and preserving their lives.”

Not a word about Israel, just "authorities." Which is not a word used to refer to Israel.

This is not adding up.

Perhaps a hint to what is really going on can be seen in this June article at ReliefWeb:

In response to the difficult health situation and a looming dialysis services halt in Gaza, Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) has provided the hospitals of Palestine’s Ministry of Health (MOH) in Gaza with a total of 12 dialysis machines and accessories, as well as life-saving medicines and medical consumables for the patients with kidney failure.

Dr. Akram Nassar, head of QRCS’s office in Gaza, said the project of “providing dialysis departments with equipment and medicines in Gaza” was part of QRCS’s unwavering support to the health sector of Gaza. Its aim is to ensure continuing dialysis services, as well as mitigate the impact of depleted medical equipment and supplies for 1,022 patients with kidney failure.

Since 2018, QRCS has been working extensively on dialysis services in Gaza, with three projects to procure 33 dialysis machines, medications, and consumables to MOH hospitals, totaling approximately QR 4.2 million in value.

We learned this week that Qatar was reducing its aid to Gaza. Could it be that they also stopped paying for these dialysis supplies and Gaza has no one else to pay for them?

Given that it appears that Hamas is trying to pressure Israel to pressure Qatar in turn to resume payments, this sounds like it is another means by Hamas - which runs the Gaza health ministry - to make Israel look like the reason for the shortages - and, as we see, the world media won't fact-check any accusations against Israel.

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!

King Abdullah's speech to the UN is a study in hypocrisy and lies

Yesterday, Jordan's King Abdullah addressed the UN General Assembly with polished English and breathtaking hypocrisy.

Harking back to the long-debunked "linkage" theory, Abdullah claimed, "The Palestinian-Israeli conflict [is] the central issue in the Middle East."

This is right after he spoke about Syria, and the 1.3 million Syrian refugees that Jordan hosts!

As has been the case for decades, Arab leaders cannot resist using the Palestinian issue as a means to distract their people from their own shortcomings. Whipping up hatred against Jews means less hatred towards their own leaders.

Five million Palestinians live under occupation—no civil rights; no freedom of mobility; no say in their lives.

About 2.3 million people cross between the West Bank and Jordan through the Allenby crossing every year - most of them Palestinians. Does that sound like they have no freedom of mobility?

Some 90% of Palestinians live under Palestinian civil governance and laws. If they have no civil rights or say in their lives, how exactly is that Israel's fault?

Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Jordan who moved there from Gaza in 1967 have no civil rights or path to citizenship - so who exactly is curtailing the rights of those Palestinians?

And delaying justice and peace has brought endless cycles of violence—2023 has been the deadliest for the Palestinian people in the past 15 years.

No, it hasn't: it has been the deadliest in the West Bank. And nearly all of those killed have been armed terrorists or active fighters, whom Abdullah pretends are innocent civilians.

The past 18 months have been the deadliest in Israel in many years as well - where is the justice for Jews?

Jerusalem is a flash point for global concern. Under the Hashemite Custodianship of Islamic and Christian holy sites, Jordan remains committed to safeguarding the city’s identity.

First of all, Jordan has no custodianship over Christian holy sites. The original (verbal) agreement between the Supreme Muslim Council and the Hashemites was only concerning Al Aqsa. The 1994 Jordan-Israel peace agreement says "Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem." Abdullah is lying.

Secondly, when he says Jordan wants to safeguard Jerusalem's identity, by specifying "Islamic and Christian," he means a Jerusalem that has no Jewish history.

But preserving Jerusalem, as the city of faith and peace for Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, is a responsibility that we all share.

Except that under Jordanian rule, no Jews of any nationality were allowed to visit the Old City. Jordan regularly condemns Jews peacefully touring the Temple Mount. Abdullah supports a Jerusalem where Jews are, at best, tolerated but have no rights. If he cared about preserving Jerusalem for all religions, he would support Israeli sovereignty - since it is only under Jewish rule that Jerusalem has ever been truly open to all.

And we must not abandon Palestinian refugees to the forces of despair. Sustainable funding is urgently needed by UNRWA, the UN agency that provides vital relief, education, and health services to millions of Palestinian refugees. This is essential to protect families, keep communities stable, and prepare young people for productive lives.

Jordan itself gave a mere $4 million to UNRWA in 2022 - much less than the $7 million it gave in 2021. And so far it has only pledged $2 million in 2023. Abdullah is not exactly walking the walk.

But there is a lot of cynicism here: Jordan's economy benefits greatly from UNRWA. Even though UNRWA has no business giving aid to most of its "refugees" in Jordan who are full Jordanian citizens, it spends over $150 million a year in Jordan alone. Abdullah is appealing for UNRWA because that money is money he saves in providing basic services to nearly 2 million of his own citizens.

He pretends his appeal to UNRWA benefits Palestinians, but in reality UNRWA saves Jordan hundreds of millions of dollars, and it injects a great deal of cash into Jordan's economy on the world's dime.

The hypocrisy does not end there. In his speech, Abdullah speaks about "justice" and about how he is against "the black flags of terror, hate, and extremism." Yet even today, Jordan is zealously protecting terrorist Ahlam Tamimi - an unrepentant, proud monster responsible for the murder of 16 civilians including 7 children at a pizza shop in Jerusalem - from being extradited to the US to face justice.

Abdullah doesn't support justice. On the contrary, he supports a celebrity terrorist walking around freely in his kingdom.

Western media and politicians love King Abdullah. He is young, articulate, and smooth. He says all the right things and is considered a "moderate." So no one bothers to fact-check his speeches and analyze his actions. But in just this short address on the biggest stage on Earth, Abdullah has proven himself yet again to be a hypocrite and a liar.

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!

75 years ago: Just like today: False accusations of Israeli massacres along with real Arab terrorism

From the Palestine Post, August 12, 1948:

There was a different version of the story reported by wire services:

Jews have burned 28 Arab villagers alive at Eltera, near Haifa, according to a telegram which is reported to have been sent to the UN Security Councll by the Secretary-General of the Arab League (Azzan Pasha).
The telegram declared that during the present cease-fire an eyewitness saw Jews saturate villagers' clothing with petrol and set them alight. The names of 14 of the victims are known.

And the lurid, lying accusations sometimes became headlines with no caveats (Caneberra [AU] Times)

Needless to say, this never happened and it is not even clear that the complaint was really sent to the UN Security Council. The accusation was enough to make it into the newspapers and make people think that Jews are monsters, which was the intent.

Just like today, baldfaced lies are an effective propaganda technique, because people simply do not want to believe that someone has the gall to make up such extravagant lies.

Meanwhile, there was real terrorism done by the Arab side, meant to cut off any supply of water to Jews in Jerusalem (August 13):

Arab accusations of Jewish terror were, then as now, projections of their own terror attempts and desires.

Interestingly, the Jews in Jerusalem had planned for such an event, and had built their own small but important emergency alternative water pipeline to Jerusalem

The Jews could not rely on anyone else (especially the UN) to solve any problems, not only the water problem.

Which is something that Israel needs to keep in mind today as well.

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The Washington Post humanizes terrorists - and doesn't do basic fact checks

Washington Post reporters are very proud of themselves for scoring an interview with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades:

Zoufi is the commander of the camp’s branch of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is listed as a terrorist group by Israel and the United States. He founded the armed militant cell just over a year ago as Israeli military raids spiked across the West Bank.

The Washington Post spent time with him and some of his 15 fighters, as well as with militants in two other Palestinian refugee camps — Jenin and Askar — over three days in July. The visits, agreed to on the condition that full names and specific locations be withheld, afforded a rare window into the lives and actions of fighters on one side of the worst violence to grip the West Bank in decades.

...Making contact with Zoufi and his fighters meant navigating a clandestine network of intermediaries inside the camps. After being handed off by a string of trusted escorts — walking along narrow lanes laced with sagging electric cables and papered with posters of slain fighters — the Post reporters were led to a room deep inside Balata Camp.
Several men there were eating mana’eesh, a flatbread with za’atar. Weapons rested in their laps or against the walls.
“Welcome. Yalla, join us,” said one man, known in the camp as Goblin.

It is exactly what we have seen countless times before - humanizing terrorists and trusting what they say implicitly while including the bare minimum of Israeli "claims."

I found this paragraph interesting:

The fighters, who inspire both fear and fealty, enjoy cultlike status in the camp. There are no sports teams here. Male unemployment is nearing 90 percent. With few role models of any kind, boys collect stickers, posters and necklaces bearing images of slain militants.

The male unemployment rate in the West Bank altogether is 12.4% (2021). UNRWA says that for all camps, it is 17%. This site says the Balata camp's unemployment rate is 25%. I cannot find any source that says it has an unemployment rate anywhere close to 90%.

The Washington Post does not provide a link to this statistic. It appears that someone they interviewed made it up and they parroted it.

And what, exactly, stops Balata's residents from finding jobs? It isn't Israel. Residents can move out of the camp and go wherever they want in the West Bank. They can get jobs in Israel the way tens of thousands of other Palestinians do.

The only difference is that they have free housing, courtesy of the world paying UNRWA.

Moreover, why is the camp still only a single square kilometer? Why doesn't the Palestinian Authority expand the boundaries so the people aren't so crowded? It isn't Lebanon, and there are open spaces outside the camp.

It is true that there are no sports teams in the overcrowded camp itself. But Balata, the town, does have a sports club - the Ahly Balata club - which includes an entire sports and youth program that also teaches job skills to teens.

According to Google Maps, it is easy walking distance from the camp.

The "90% unemployment" and the "no sports teams for kids" were factoids that were too good to check for the WaPo's reporting team. And for their editors.

How many other things were they told that are simply terrorist propaganda? And why are they so willing to swallow it?

I asked that question in the comments on the article. We'll see if anything changes.

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The first paragraph of the American Anthropological Association's BDS resolution refers to a fictional Palestinian organization (update)

This week, the American Anthropological Association voted to boycott all Israeli academic institutions.

The resolution that they approved is antisemitic. It says that Israel's very existence is "apartheid", not "settlements" or "occupation", saying that "from the onset of the Nakba, the catastrophic events of 1948 that led to the mass expulsion and displacement of Palestinians from their homes, Palestinians—including activists, artists, intellectuals, human rights organizations, and others—have documented and circulated knowledge of the Israeli state’s apartheid system and ethnic cleansing."

The first paragraph of the resolution is all the proof you need that there was no research or academic rigor that went into this decision.

Whereas, in 2005, 175 Palestinian civil society organizations, including the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE), issued a call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli state, in support of the Palestinian struggle for human and political rights, including the basic right of freedom;

The very first paragraph invokes the antisemitic BDS movement as justification for the boycott, blindly accepting whatever accusations it makes against Israel. The following paragraphs are all essentially cut and pasted from BDS materials. No one at AAA did any fact checks on the assertions in the rest of the resolution.

But what about the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees? Their support for a boycott is considered the linchpin from which the entire resolution gets is legitimacy. Who are they?

The PFUUPE does not exist in any real sense.

It has no webpage. It has no Facebook account. It has no Twitter account.

It does have a phone number, which is also the main phone number of Palestine Polytechnic University and the office number of that university's president, Dr. Amjad Barham

He is the president of the PFUUPE according to his CV.

Is it not strange that the president of a federation of unions is also the president of a university that those unions would naturally make demands of for better benefits and working conditions? There appears to be a conflict of interest there.

But not if the PFUUPE is fictional.

There is no evidence that the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees has a single member outside Dr. Barham. It apparently does not have bylaws, or membership fees, or benefits, or recruitment materials, or a board, or committees, or elections, or a vice president.

It is one person named Amjad, a man who lists being able to use a PC and the Internet on his resume, and who issues regular press releases in the name of all Palestinian academics. Nearly all of those are about boycotting Israel. He even managed to parlay his one man organization into a Guardian op-ed - again, advocating boycotting Israel, which appears to be the only purpose of this purported federation.

Many other of the "175 Palestinian civil society organizations" that signed the BDS "call" for boycotts appear to be equally fictional, tiny one-person operations created just for the purpose of appearing to be part of a greater whole. Many of them are not even based in the borders of British Mandate Palestine - these "Palestinian civil society" organizations are in Syria and Lebanon and Canada - but they are presented as "Palestinian" to promote the myth that the BDS movement was initiated by Palestinians.

The American Anthropological Association didn't check out whether the PFUUPE that they refer to in their very first paragraph is a real organization. They have no intellectual honesty at all. And any academic who remains a member of an organization that cannot be trusted to check the facts in its own resolutions is not interested in truth either.

UPDATE: GnasherJew did find a Facebook page for this union.

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