Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: logical fallacy

Showing posts with label logical fallacy. Show all posts

Thursday, August 10, 2023

End the Lebanese and Jordanian occupation of Palestine!

I love when I tweet and the Israel haters are reduced to gibberish in response.

Proof #619 that calling Israel "apartheid" is antisemitic:

Lebanon treats Palestinians worse than Israel by every conceivable yardstick. Discrimination is enshrined in law. Yet no one accuses Lebanon of "apartheid."

The responses from modern antisemites were all along the lines of:

"Whataboutism!" (meaning, don't talk about Palestinian suffering unless it can be blamed on Israel)

"You are a liar!" (without any links or proof)

"Of course it's apartheid - everyone says so!" (appeal to authority fallacy)

But a couple of people responded with something like, "Lebanon isn't occupying Palestinian territory!"

Are they sure?

Here's a map of Palestine from 1870:

It includes large amounts of todays Lebanon as well as much of today's Jordan.

How come no Palestinian is upset at the occupation of Lebanon and Jordan of Palestine?

But, you might respond, this is a Western map. Maybe Arabs felt that Palestine before 1923 included the exact borders of the British Mandate and no more.

Well, here is a 1918 map of Palestine, labeled as such, in Arabic:

It doesn't include Lebanon but a great deal of Jordan is included in this map.

Based on this map, it sure looks like at least Jordan is occupying ancient sacred Palestinian lands!

Why aren't we seeing Palestinians demanding "Free Palestine from Jordan and (maybe) Lebanon!"

Maybe for the same reason that the PLO in 1964 didn't claim the West Bank or Gaza as being part of "Palestine."

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!

A fun Twitter thread with a human rights "expert" trying to defend Ken Roth

Sunjeev Bery is the Executive Director at an NGO called Freedom Forward. He was advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) at Amnesty International USA from 2011-2017. he's been interviewed on TV as some sort of expert.

For the past few days, Bery has been tirelessly tweeting his support for Ken Roth in the Kennedy School story - and going after Roth's critics.

Including me.

Which makes for some very entertaining reading.

Roth tweeted, "Harvard's Kennedy School says it 'welcomes new ideas—even unpopular and controversial ones." Its curriculum "encourages students and faculty to talk openly and effectively about difficult and highly charged issues.' Except for Israel, Dean Elmendorf?"

I responded to Roth, "Perhaps @Harvard @Kennedy_School has a policy against hiring obsessive liars? In 2014 I compiled a list of Ken Roth's Twitter lies over just a few months, and documented why they were wrong. He of course never corrected [any of] them. See for yourself," linking to a list of dozens of lies and distortions that Roth tweeted during and after the 2014 Gaza war.

Sunjeev Bery was very upset, apparently, at the tone of my list. "I started reading your "document" @elderofziyon, and it became clear within 10 seconds that it's a flimsy prop that enables you to just claim that people are liars. You are selling something that is far less than it actually is and using it for propaganda purposes."

Not knowing (or caring) who he was, I answered, "You are invited to tell me where I am wrong."

Instead of doing that, Bery wrote, "Many of the statements you make in your documents are simply claims and represent your beliefs. You seem to be adopting the posture that your claims are The Truth, and that those you disagree with are The Liars. Your intent is propagandistic."

Ah, so it isn't my facts - but my intent - that offends him. Good to know that human rights professionals are as little interested in the truth on Twitter as they are when they write their reports.

Then he hit me with what he considered his real zinger - which he used on other critics of Roth on the thread. "But here's the real question that tests your intentions: What are YOUR human rights criticisms of israel?"

It was already clear now that he was playing a game and had no interest in any semblance of truth, so I said I was done with the conversation: "So you cannot find a single example where Roth was correct and I was wrong. Out of several dozen. And then you want to accuse me of being disingenuous? Bye."

But this human rights professional brought out his inner teenage troll and kept trying to goad me. "Nice try buddy. Again @elderofziyon, what are YOUR criticisms of Israel?." I ignored him.

Another tweeter answered him, "He asked you a question in direct response to your criticism and you still didn’t answer. You should answer his question before you move on."

Bery answered him or her, "Wrong, buddy. If he can't say anything critical of Israel then he is ultimately a propagandist and a pro-government partisan arguing in bad faith."

I gave in and finally responded:

I'm not here for your amusement. I don't pretend to be anything but a pro-Israel site; I provide a tiny bit of counterweight to the tsunami of anti-Israel information out there. I am not a newspaper that pretends to be balanced. That being said, I strive to be 100% truthful.

To me, "bad faith" is accusing me of something and not being able to back it up, and instead changing the subject. THAT is a propaganda technique that the anti-Israel crowd does all the time; reframing the conversation instead of admitting mistakes.
I don't play those games.

After repeating himself for some reason, he gave me his one example of where my criticism of Roth was off-base to him with this screenshot:

By your own admission, you say that Ken Roth uses "the best available data" but because he doesn't include the caveats, you claim he is lying.

This is a totally bad faith argument on your part, and it is one of many many such examples in the document.

And so your overall document @elderofziyon lacks the substantive content necessary to justify your overall claim.

My reaction to the content of your document is that it serves the purpose of creating a propagandistic and misleading headline.

That is why I ask if you have any criticisms of Israel's policies that you are willing to state here publicly?
This is the test for differentiating an honest critic from a propagandist. A propagandist promotes a government and avoids mentioning any criticism whatsoever.

OK, at least he said something specific, even if it made no sense. I responded:

My 2014 article says "dozens of them were flat-out false, and others were knowingly deceptive." Your example is one of the deceptive ones - Roth stated the statistics AS FACT without saying "reportedly" or any other word newspapers would use.

Of course, he never corrected.

To defend that, and to cherry pick that out of all my examples that show how Roth DID lie multiple times, shows that YOU are the one who is being a propagandist. Is this the standard you accept for a human rights leader you have defended so energetically? That's pretty sad.

Bery:

No, I pointed out one example of many lies within your document in response to your request. There are many more examples of similar exaggerations.

But once again, you have failed to answer my question:

What are YOUR criticisms of Israeli policies?

The answer seems to be none.

Obviously he did not point out a single mistake or lie of mine. But I decided to answer his main question:

I defend my family publicly. I criticize them privately.

Everyone has biases. Every media outlet does, too. I admit mine -and the goal of my writings - upfront. Call it propaganda if you want, but I insist on honesty and transparency - which is much more than most media.

To Bery, this was the smoking gun! After a rehash of earlier arguments, he wrote, "Here's the reality, @elderofziyon. You are self-admittedly engaging in pro-Israel propaganda. You clearly state that you avoid making any public criticism of Israel, and that your only public comments on Israel are to defend its policies. "

Uh, yeah.

Yes. It is no secret. Wikipedia calls me a pro-Israel blogger. Not sure why that bothers you.

Ken Roth is also a propagandist, as I proved. But he insists there is no bias, which I have comprehensively shown he has.

And you are cool with that.

Bery's response to this graphic is priceless:

I bet many of Ken Roth's tweets regarding Israel are because he feels pressure to respond to propaganda accounts like yours constantly flooding Twitter with false claims.

So the only reason Roth treats Israel like the worst violator of war crimes is because people like me bother him!

Only then did I look Sunjeev up - and propaganda is his middle name.

Pot, meet kettle.

Sunjeev worked at Amnesty USA during the 2014 Gaza war. AI-USA said that Amnesty would correct any errors in their "Gaza Platform." I pointed out SCORES of them, calling terrorists "civilian." They ignored it.

Who is a propagandist?

His hilarious response was to paste my tweet where I admitted that I am a pro-Israel blogger. So damning!

Then I noticed that this "human rights professional" "Liked" a tweet that was pretty much at his maturity level:

So....it is propaganda when I defend one side, but it is perfectly OK to pretend to be an objective head of an NGO while "Like"ing tweets that say "Zionists love smelling their own farts"?

Bery then fell apart - yet defended it!

1. Zionists and Jews are not the same thing. It is anti-Semitic to conflate the two.

2. There are Christian and Hindu zionists. There are Jewish anti-zionists.

3. You are part of an organized troll strategy of amplifying your propaganda tweets, which I do liken to flatulence.

The guy who was trolling me for hours says I'm the troll!

I responded with my own numbered list:

1. Your Like proves that you are not the least bit objective. Just like your hero Roth.
2. If you don't know what objectivity means, then your defending Roth as objective is far funnier than a fart joke.
3. I wrote a book describing how today's anti-Zionism is a modern form of antisemitism.

4. This thread has proven to any observer that you have zero intellectual honesty.

He then said that I didn't answer him, presumably his non-sequitur that Zionists and Jews aren't the same: "Once again, you didn't respond to anything that I said. But that's cool. Keep up the propaganda! 👍 Your audiences are getting smaller and smaller 😊"

So I finished him and the thread off:

I never once claimed that Jews and Zionists are the same. Your reading comprehension is about the same level as your objectivity.
This thread will make a great post, though. Making a fool of a supposed human rights expert to the entire world is always fun!

His final response after bring proven a hypocrite with not the slightest interest in truth?

The troll couldn't handle being made a fool of.

But the most bizarre part is that while it is obvious that he said nothing at all to contradict a single one of my facts, ... he thinks he won!

Bery's entire argument is that to have any credibility, every Zionist must criticize Israel publicly and constantly. Obviously, he has no similar criteria insisting on "balance" for the anti-Israel zealots he admires and quotes.

I'm actually complimented that he keeps calling my writings "propaganda." Here is his response to the 2009 NYT op-ed by Robert Bernstein decrying how the organization he founded, Human Rights Watch, had gone off the rails by going after democracies like Israel that have checks and balances and downplaying the evil of the real human rights violators of the world:

I'll gladly share the insult with a true human rights giant.

The NGO Bery currently heads, "Freedom Forward," says it "seeks a world in which all people have the benefit of living in societies that are anchored in democracy and respect for human rights." It doesn't appear to actually do anything besides create "campaigns" against Israel and US Arab allies.

I wonder who funds it. The site is not very transparent about that.

Bery himself seems to have a soft spot for that bastion of democracy and human rights, Turkey.

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!

A new, stupid anti-Israel argument: The Oslo Accords are retroactively illegal

Ralph Wilde, an associate professor at the Faculty of Laws, University College London, writes in OpinioJuris that Israel's presence anywhere beyond the 1949 armistice lines is illegal - not the settlements, but the "occupation" of every square centimeter.

It is a classic case where the opinion precedes the evidence, and the evidence is then shoe-horned into the argument.

There is a great deal of garbage there, but here's an argument that I had never seen before, that is profoundly stupid.

Neither United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, nor the so-called Oslo Accords, provide an alternative legal basis for the existence/continuation of the occupation. Indeed, the Oslo Accords are themselves violative of international law, because ‘consent’ to them by the PLO was coerced through the illegal use of force, and, relatedly, they conflicted with norms of international law that have a special non-derogable/jus cogens status (the prohibition on the use of force other than in self-defence, and the right of self-determination).

According to Wilde, the Oslo Accords were illegal because the PLO was coerced to sign them by Israel.

No one to my knowledge has made that claim, ever. Not during the Oslo process from 1993-2000, not during the second intifada, not afterwards.

The PLO itself certainly never made this claim; to this day, Mahmoud Abbas charges Israel with violating the Oslo Accords but he has not once said that they don't apply because the PLO was coerced

What next? Do we retroactively invalidate the Treaty of Versailles because the Germans lost World War I and therefore were subject to coercion if they didn't sign?

Wilde's illogic is remarkable. But he really tries to make it seem reasonable. In his more expansive article on the topic, he writes:

Given that much of international law operates on the basis of a fiction of sovereign equality despite de facto inequality, treaties between unequal parties are not necessarily invalid for that reason. But one red line is when the powerful party, as here, is subjugating the other party in a particular manner—through an illegal use of force—in a way that has so compromised the freedom of action of that other party when it comes to their consent to the agreement, that the agreement can be understood to have been “procured” through that particular form of subjugation. The Oslo Accords meet this test and are legally-void on this basis. Indeed, their procurement in the context of the occupation constitutes a manifest and egregious form of coercion prescribed by the equivalent rule of customary international law to the provision in the [Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties] when it comes to invalidity.

This means that every case of occupation can never be ended through negotiations because the occupied party is by definition coerced into its agreement.

Wilde's bizarre argument brings up another question. Who determines, under his fantasy version of international law, that one party is being coerced? Normal people would say that it would be the coerced parties themselves. But if the PLO doesn't claim they were coerced to sign the agreements, and indeed make constant arguments that Oslo is valid and Israel is violating it, then how can anyone else possibly make that assertion as fact?

Apparently, Wilde thinks that his own opinion on what constitutes coercion outweighs that of the party he says was coerced! This is no longer the pretense of interpreting international law - this is an attempt to create international law based on what a single uninvolved anti-Israel academic thinks.

Beyond that, we have another problem. If Oslo was signed under coercion, then why didn't the PLO sign the proposed peace agreements from Camp David and Taba, when they were being pressured not only by Israel but by the world's only superpower at the time, the United States? How did Arafat resist that pressure but succumb to the much milder coercion of 1993? What changed - under an international law framework - from his being unable to have free will in 1993 and his freedom in 2000?

It gets better. If Oslo is retroactively illegal, then the Palestinian Authority created by them must retroactively disappear, and any agreements that it signed over the past 25 years are also meaningless, since it never existed. And since the UNGA-recognized "State of Palestine" is simply a renaming of the PA, then it must also disappear - and its signature erased from all the treaties it signed.

Wilde, for all his erudition and expertise, proves himself to be a fraud in this argument. He is clearly twisting international law to fit his own pre-determined conclusion.

And that should disqualify him from teaching anyone.

(h/t Irene)

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!

Columbia professor Joseph Massad espouses discredited - and antisemitic - Khazar theory

We've discussed Columbia University professor Joseph Massad before and noted his antisemitism and bigotry since this blog began in 2004.

In an article for Arabi21, Massad strongly indicates that he subscribes to the discredited Khazar theory. While it is not the main point of his article, he writes, "The Zionists of European Jews claimed that they are the descendants of the ancient Palestinian Hebrews and that their settlement project is nothing more than a 'return' to their ancient country, Israel....The pan-Jewish nationalism of European Zionism, which sought to re-establish the glories of the 'Jewish' kingdoms of the Palestinian Hebrews (who were appropriated by the Zionists as ancestors of Europeans who had converted to Judaism), was portrayed as 'progressive' and socialist."

This is similar to what he wrote in English for Electronic Intifada in 2017, saying that European Jews were converts to Judaism.

The Wikipedia entry on the genetics of Ashkenazic Jews shows that nearly all studies find their origin is in the Middle East. So Massad, in the 2017 article, makes his argument that most European Jews as converts by calling it "an established historical fact."

That is "proof by assertion."

The usual version of the theory that Jews are converts is the Khazar theory, which has also been repeatedly debunked from genetic, historical, linguistic and other perspectives. It is embraced by Palestinians because their entire claim of indigeneity is destroyed when another people were there first and most Palestinian Arab families proudly trace their ancestry to Arabia. (The Palestinian Christians, on the other hand, seem to be descended from Jews.)

Since the truth is not on their side, they need to push the Khazar lie. And that lie is meant to say that Jews don't have any historic ties to the Jewish homeland.

Denying Jewish history is just as antisemitic as denying the Holocaust.

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!

Another philosopher fails basic logic when it comes to Israel

We've discussed before the strange phenomenon of so many philosophers through history who were also antisemitic.

It's hard to know why this is, but I pointed out that philosophers often think that they are smarter, better and have more insight into subjects than the dumb masses, and this hubris extends into the idea that they think that anything they come up with must be assumed to be correct.

Brian Leiter is a philosopher and legal scholar who is a Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and founder and Director of Chicago's Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values. He wrote a pithy post on his blog, which he says is the "world's most popular philosophy blog."

The biggest threat to free speech on campus and academic freedom consistently comes from the pro-Israel interest groups. They are running scared because they realize that far too many of Israel's actions can not withstand public scrutiny.

He's referring to the Leila Khaled incident, of course.

Interestingly, any first year student of logic could see that his second sentence is not at all implied from the first. The idea that not wanting a PFLP terrorist to be honored by a university is somehow really a fear that she is going to say something damning about Israel that we cannot read in the newspaper (or philosophy blog) is absurd and doesn't stand even five seconds of analysis.

Not that his first sentence is true either. There is at least as much of a threat to free speech by the Left. Even Leiter writes about cancel culture which is primarily a Leftist phenomenon. How many campus Middle East Studies departments have hosted Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria? If free speech is the goal, then why is the only speech allowed on most campuses so tilted against Israel?

It is undoubtedly true that Jews living in their ancestral homeland are far more likely to have their speech suppressed on campus than Palestinian terrorists.

Two sentences. The first one has no basis in reality, and the second one does not logically follow the first. That's a pretty bad track record for a philosopher.

Leiter links to an article about the Leila Khaled event from Academe Blog. That article is not as bad, although it incorrectly refers to the incident as "censorship." It isn't.

Censorship is the suppression of speech because it is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient. Yet the objection to Khaled's talk wasn't about the content of her talk, but about her being an objectionable person - inviting an unrepentant terrorist whose support of violence against the innocent has not changed for five decades is as inappropriate as inviting a proud racist or rapist on campus. This is obvious because no one I am aware of objected to the other anti-Israel speakers at that webinar.

Moreover, Khaled has nothing original to say. Her words would have been the same socialist anti-Israel garbage that is said every day among the "woke" - it isn't as offensive as it is boring.

At least the Academe blog has enough intellectual honesty to point out that progressives engage in censorship as well:

For those on the left who demand that tech companies censor speech they think are wrong or offensive, this is a chilling reminder that censorship is a dangerous weapon that can be turned against progressives.

Leiter, with all his philosophy and legal credentials, flattens what could be a nuanced discussion of how different groups try to influence discussion into a very one-dimensional assertion of "Zionists bad."

And for someone who is such an opponent of censorship and advocate of free speech, it is curious that Leiter does not allow comments on his blog. Perhaps he has the fear of truth that he imputes to Zionists.

(h/t Dan P)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.