Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: lost in translation

Showing posts with label lost in translation. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Palestinians reject open letter against Abbas' antisemitism

As mentioned yesterday, a group of Palestinian expatriates issued an open letter over the weekend condemning Mahmoud Abbas' antisemitic statements. but really their letter was more anti-Israel than anti-Abbas, as they accused him of toeing the Zionist line.

We the undersigned, Palestinian academics, writers, artists, activists, and people of all walks of life, unequivocally condemn the morally and politically reprehensible comments made by President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas about the Holocaust. Rooted in a racial theory widespread in European culture and science at the time, the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people was born of antisemitism, fascism, and racism. We adamantly reject any attempt to diminish, misrepresent, or justify antisemitism, Nazi crimes against humanity, or historical revisionism vis-a-vis the Holocaust.

The Palestinian people are sufficiently burdened by Israeli settler colonialism, dispossession, occupation, and oppression without having to bear the negative effect of such ignorant and profoundly antisemitic narratives perpetuated by those who claim to speak in our name. We are also burdened by the PA’s increasingly authoritarian and draconian rule, which disproportionately impacts those living under occupation. Having held onto power nearly a decade and a half after his presidential mandate expired in 2009, supported by Western and pro-Israel forces seeking to perpetuate Israeli apartheid, Abbas and his political entourage have forfeited any claim to represent the Palestinian people and our struggle for justice, freedom, and equality, a struggle that stands against all forms of systemic racism and oppression.

This letter, signed mostly by American and British citizens, was not meant for Palestinians to read. It was not translated into Arabic. It was meant for the West, as the signatories could self-righteously pretend to oppose antisemitism while at the same time attack Abbas, since they prefer Hamas and Islamic Jihad as more reflective of adhering to the Palestinian will.

The are just as antisemitic as Abbas is, but some of them try a little harder to hide it. (Some don't!) Many of them have engaged in Holocaust inversion themselves.

However, we do live in an online age, and it was inevitable that Palestinians would see this letter. And their reaction was anger at opposing antisemitism:

A statement issued by a number of expatriate Palestinian academics and activists, regarding what President Mahmoud Abbas mentioned during a recent meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council about the Holocaust, sparked disapproval and condemnation from various Palestinian circles, especially since the statement was fragmentary and consistent with the Israeli and Zionist campaign, and without reference to the occupation, its positions and policies announced by his senior leaders, which are based on the idea of denying the existence of a Palestinian people, in addition to the massacres committed against them.
Former Minister Hassan Asfour commented on this statement by the academics and wrote: “In a strange and surprising way, a group of Palestinian figures, including the names of ‘academics,’ ‘experts,’ and analysts, most of whom hold foreign American and British nationalities, issued a statement attacking the president’s speech about ‘Ashkenazi Jews’ and Germany...a revealing statement. Ignorance of history is not limited only to those who do not read it, but it seems that “understanding has become without teaching from the beginning of the line... Be ashamed and apologize to your people, you pretenders of knowledge.”

Notice that both the letter and the reaction by Palestinians accused their opponents of being on the same side as the Jews.

It is all theatre.

But it points to a rarely mentioned fact: the Palestinian academics in the West are eager to write papers and speak at panel discussions where they pretend to represent the majority of Palestinian. They claim to support progressive, liberal standards, but they most definitely do not. Their speeches about the Palestinian cause being liberal begin and end with the Jews; they really don't care when the Arab world shows its bigotry or when Palestinians themselves show their illiberal beliefs - anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-environment, anti-animal rights.

Like Yasir Arafat before them, they tailor their message to the audience, lying as easily as they breathe, and hoping the world won't see their hypocrisy.

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!

Book review: "(In)sights: Thirty Years of Peacemaking in the Oslo Process" by Gidi Grinstein

Diplomacy and peacemaking is not a smooth process. It requires a huge amount of preparation, planning and flexibility.

It is always illuminating to look behind the scenes of the Oslo process. Gidi Grinstein, the youngest person at Camp David in 2000, is releasing his account of the events that he witnessed as well as his opinions of what to do moving forward to mark the 30th anniversary of Oslo.

His book, "(In)sights: Thirty Years of Peacemaking in the Oslo Process" is his attempt to set the record straight after so many others gave their own versions of what happened at Camp David.

Grinstein writes from the perspective of someone who truly wants to see peace. No one can doubt his love of Israel and Zionism - he was part of the team that founded Birthright Israel - but his perspective is decidedly on the Israeli Left.

I found his account fascinating, but perhaps not for the reasons he intended.

Obviously Grinstein tries to spin the events towards his own politics. Instead of giving a straight chronological account of what happened, he spends a great deal of time on the "sausage" behind each negotiating point and then an overview of what has happened since then, along with his own opinions as to where things failed and what Israel should have done instead, in retrospect.

While Grinstein was the junior member at Camp David, he is perhaps the one person with the most knowledge of the big picture. He served as the Secretary and Coordinator of the Israeli Delegation for the Negotiations with the PLO from 1999-2001 under Ehud Barak.

Grinstein admires Barak a great deal, but his description of Barak is of someone who is cold and calculating, who is more than willing to throw his own people under the bus for his own ends. He keeps his own cards close to his vest, so no one working for him has a clear idea of what their goals are. Grinstein extols Barak as "the smartest man in the room" who keeps his people working in a "matrix" of smaller tasks, while only Barak knows his real plan. This means that Barak creates his own backchannels to undermine the people officially working for him when he deems it necessary, he bypasses the chain of command, and he ensures plausible deniability.

Which, when you think about it, is a lot like Yasir Arafat.

Before he worked for the Prime Minister's office, Grinstein worked for the Economic Cooperation Foundation. The ECF, founded in 1990, was itself one of those backchannels for creating relationships with, and building a peace plan with, the PLO. It was a power that helped bring about the Oslo Accords.

To me, one of the most jarring parts of the book was where Grinstein describes how the ECF helped end Bibi Netanyahu's first term as prime minister. The ECF, which worked hand in glove with Yitzchak Rabin, opposed Netanyahu - and this Israeli think-tank colluded with the PLO to bring him down. Netanyahu demanded more concessions from the PLO in order to keep the Oslo process going, and the ECF convinced their friends in the PLO to pretend to agree to Netanyahu's demands, prompting him to sign the Hebron Agreement and the Wye River Memorandum based on lies. This caused the right wing of his coalition to revolt and new elections were called that brought Barak into office, just as the ECF intended.

Grinstein seemingly has no compunction about Israelis collaborating with the US and PLO to bring down an Israeli prime minister. The cause of peace justifies all.

Even Grinstein admits that the peace negotiators never really seriously thought about the possibility that Arafat had no intention to really sign a permanent agreement that would end the conflict and what would follow. They became friends with the PLO negotiators, and he lovingly describes how well his team would be treated when they visited Bethlehem or Ramallah and the personal friendships they struck up with the Palestinian team. He mentions and is fully aware of the wave of terror attacks during the 1990s, Arafat's incendiary speeches in Arabic, his actions being fully consistent with his "phased plan" to destroy Israel, but all of that is brushed aside in the pursuit of peace, just as using underhanded methods to bring down an Israeli prime minister is framed as a positive thing.

The only person who predicted the failure of the Oslo process, and that it would lead into war, was US Ambassador to Egypt Daniel Kurtzer, who hosted the negotiators for a Shabbat dinner. He had better insight than the entire Israeli peace delegation, who didn't even consider this.

Barak bet everything on the idea that Arafat could be pressured into signing an agreement. He was wrong. But there is very little hand-wringing on that mistake that brought about the second intifada. In fact, Grinstein emphasizes that Arafat was not the direct instigator of the intifada - even as he admits that Arafat had planned for such an event months ahead of time, and that his own security forces, trained and armed by the US, turned their weapons against Israeli forces in the first days of the fighting. He emphasizes that Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount that supposedly triggered the war was fully coordinated with the PA but still doesn't blame the PA for its role - instead noting that the Jerusalem police response to the violence helped escalate it.

Again, Grinstein isn't blind. But he seems to purposely keep one eye closed.

Similarly, he emphasizes that, in retrospect, Barak should not have pushed for an all or nothing deal, and worked towards a provisional Palestinian state that could be further refined with later negotiations. This, of course, would have been a huge concession by Israel to recognize a Palestinian state up front. But while he praises the Quartet for employing that idea in their Road Map for Peace, he glosses over that the Palestinian leaders rejected the Road Map out of hand, and have consistently said that they do not want a provisional state.

Also jarring is that, as far as I can tell, the Israeli peace negotiating teams -- both Track I and Track II - apparently were exclusively made up of non-religious males, overwhelmingly if not exclusively Ashkenazic. He notes that the only Israeli woman at Camp David was a secretary. He never mentions that any of the participants in the many meals hosted in the West Bank or Europe had to make accommodations for kosher food. Most of Israeli society is not represented by these peacemakers, who all seem to believe that they are smarter than anyone else in how to look at the big picture, and not really self-critical when it comes to their miscalculations and false assumptions that led to the failure of the peace process. Diversity was not a priority for these liberals.

There is a lot of good information in this book, and it is illuminating - sometimes in ways that it is not meant to be. It is not edited well, unfortunately - for example, it talks extensively about the ECF without explaining what it is, and there are still numerous typos and misspellings (French Premier "Shirak"), it repeats the same anecdotes a couple of times. Hopefully these will be fixed by the time it goes to press.

The book is planned to be released in Israel in two weeks and in the US in December.

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!

An analysis of a Palestinian lie

August 21 was the anniversary of the fire that gutted al Aqsa Mosque in 1969. It was set by a mentally ill Australian Christian.

Here is how an Arab publication wrote about the event yesterday:

On the morning of August 21, 1969, a huge fire broke out in the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the fire quickly spread to the southern portico, the mihrab of Salah al-Din, and the dome pillars in the blessed mosque, in a Jewish attempt to turn the sacred Islamic heritage, even the most sacred, and rare in human civilization, into a pile of ashes. To build the alleged temple on its ruins.
Jerusalemites, Muslims and Christians, rushed to extinguish the fire, just as Palestinians from villages and cities in the West Bank rushed to participate in extinguishing it and saving Al-Aqsa Mosque from the imminent Jewish threat to destroy it.
The Israeli occupation army closed the gates of the Haram and Al-Aqsa Mosque, to prevent the Palestinians from entering to extinguish the fire, so that the Zionist flames, which hate to Arabism, Islam and all humanity, would devour it.
The Palestinians forced the Israeli army to open the doors after a violent clash that lasted 45 minutes, thinking that "Israel" would turn the Al-Aqsa Mosque into ashes during that period.
When the Palestinians started trying to pump water from the wells of the mosque, they found the water pumps unfit for work, so they took the water with small containers and climbed the roof of the mosque to extinguish the fire.
And when the fire trucks arrived from the municipalities of Ramallah, Al-Bireh, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, Bethlehem and Hebron to participate in extinguishing the fire, the occupation army and the Israeli police prevented them from entering the mosque yard under the pretext that the extinguishing operation is within the jurisdiction of the Zionist occupied Jerusalem municipality. The Palestinians succeeded in putting out the fire after the important part of the mosque was burned, including the mihrab of Salah al-Din, which he took from the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo to Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem.
And the Israeli government officially announced, as usual in lying and deceit, that the fire was due to a defect in the electrical wires inside Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The Arab Jerusalem Electricity Company, at the request of the Islamic Commission, sent a committee of experts and engineers to investigate the causes of the fire, and they confirmed that it was not the result of an electrical fault, as officially announced by “Israel”, but rather an intentional fire.
They proved that the fire was meticulously planned, which embarrassed the Israeli government and prompted it to announce the arrest of the person who confessed to having set the arson attack, the Jew Michael Mohan, and brought him to trial and sentenced him to five years in prison, and later issued a decision to release him and deport him to Australia.

Here is how Time magazine described the events at the time:

SOON after early-morning prayers at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque one day last week, flames burst from the ceiling beneath its famed silver dome. For three hours, the fire raged, destroying part of the roof and an 800-year-old pulpit of exquisitely carved cedarwood and inlaid ivory, a gift from the Islamic hero Saladin (1137-1193). Before Israeli and Arab firemen could extinguish the flames or anyone could investigate the fire, the entire Middle East was echoing with outraged Moslem demands for jihad—holy war.

Automatic Assumption. In their fury, many Moslems automatically assumed that the Al Aqsa blaze had been started deliberately—and by an Israeli. Hundreds of Arabs rushed to the still-burning mosque, threatening firemen who were trying to control the blaze and shouting "Nasser! Nass-er!" When Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan arrived on the scene, he was jeered. An Arab mob coursed down the Via Dolorosa—the path Jesus took to the Crucifixion—shouting "Death to Israel!" Police blocked them at the fifth Station of the Cross.

The Israelis, who have ruled Arab Jerusalem since 1967, protested their innocence, but in vain. Premier Golda Meir convoked an emergency Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem to offer help in repairing the mosque (the offer was spurned) and to appoint an investigating commission that included two Arab dignitaries (local Moslems named their own board of inquiry). Sheik Hilmi Al-Muh-tasib, chairman of Jerusalem's Moslem Council, quickly summoned newsmen to pointedly announce that "a blond, freckled man dressed in khaki, who did not appear to be a Palestinian," had been seen fleeing from the mosque just before the fire. That was all the information that Arab propagandists needed. Cairo Radio called the fire a "premeditated crime." Al-Fatah, the Palestinian Arab commando organization, demanded shrilly in its broadcasts: "Moslems, what are you waiting for? The Zionists are burning down your sacred shrines. How can you face the Prophet Mohammed?" Jordan's King Hussein, whose grandfather King Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian Arab gunman in front of the Aqsa mosque in 1951, called for an Arab summit meeting.

At first the Israelis maintained that the fire was accidental. A welding torch was found beneath the roof, where work men had been repairing old timbers treated with inflammable linseed oil.

At week's end, however, Israeli police arrested and charged with arson neither a Moslem nor a Jew but a member of the third faith that holds Jerusalem holy: Michael Dennis William Rohan, 28, an Australian ranch hand who has been touring Israel for several months and who, according to the police, belongs to the Church of God, a Protestant evangelical sect. Some reports said that Rohan spoke of a dream in which God commanded him to clear a site in the compound on which to build a Jewish temple. Anxious to damp down the incendiary emotions aroused by the fire, the Israelis held a press conference on the Jewish sabbath—an unprecedented peacetime action—to announce the arrest. Police emphasized that Jerusalem Arabs provided the most important clues by giving them a description of the man and a vest that had been torn from him as he fled from the scene. Said an Israeli police official: "We have enough evidence for any court in this country to convict him."

The Time article is more accurate 54 years ago than the Arab media today. But there were plenty of other lies in current Arab accounts of the fire.

One can see Israeli rescue equipment at the scene. You can look at video of the firefighters and it seems clear that Israeli and Arab firefighters worked together to fight the flames.

Rohan was indeed mentally ill. His trial was covered extensively in Australian papers, where he said things like that he was going to become the king of Jerusalem and that God had "promised him maidens:"

But to spread the lie that Israel was responsible for the fire was not enough. The Muslim world pushed through a resolution blaming Israel for the fire, although not explicitly saying that Israel set it.

The US abstained. It was the first time the US didn't support a resolution against Israel on Jerusalem.

What we see in this episode, as in so many others, is that the Arab lies came first, and the desire to keep the lies going is far greater than any desire to tell the truth. If something terrible happens, the Jews must be behind it. Fatah and Arab leaders didn't waste a minute in blaming Jews for the fire, and they rushed to get the UN to back their lies.

While much has changed in parts of the Arab world since then, the Palestinians have kept the exact same playbook that they had then.

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!

No matter what they do, Palestinians are victims

The official spokesman for Mahmoud Abbas, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said today that the "assassination" of "three young men" by the IDF near the gate of Mount Gerizim in Nablus is a "war crime", and it is a continuation of the policy of "collective punishment" to which our Palestinian people are subjected.

The "victims" were terrorists who opened fire on the Israeli troops and were killed in response.

The "young men" were 32, 33 and 43 years old.

While the Palestinian Authority in English says that they were innocent victims of Israeli aggression, Hamas says it is proud of "this group of the al-Qassam Brigades' mujahideen, who set out with all their faith and certainty to confront this criminal enemy."

There is no universe where soldiers killing those who fire at them first are war criminals - except in Palestinian fantasy land.

Unfortunately, fantasies are often treated as reality when people want them to be true.

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!

Latest EoZ memes and comics

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!

In English, Palestinians are poor, hapless victims. In Arabic, they are strong jihadists.

A tweet from Palestinian propagandist Nour Odeh:

Overnight, Israeli forces attacked Nour Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem and literally plowed the streets & infrastructure leaving devastating & destruction in its wake.

She showed a video of an IDF bulldozer and then a bulldozed street.

But in Arabic, Palestinian terrorists are celebrating - because they have video of IED exploding in those same streets.

In other words, they mined their own streets - endangering their own people - in an attempt to blow up soldiers, and the IDF is forced to use the armored bulldozers to clear the IEDs.

An explosion like that would barely slow down an armored D9R bulldozer.

As usual, the Palestinians are trying to have it both ways - claiming victimhood status while they bury IEDs in their own streets. Their placement of the bombs are meant to protect terrorist infrastructure as they whine about civilian infrastructure that they are subverting for attacks.

(h/t Jon S)

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!

UN Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs quotes antisemitic Hamas-linked newspaper

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur for the territories, tweeted:

The Quds News Network is a Hamas-affiliated news site. In this case it translated the words of Ben Gvir incorrectly - he threatened terrorists, not Palestinians. Haaretz quoted him as saying, “Our government killed the most terrorists, over 120 in the past six months, but a lot of work remains – and we have to lend a helping hand to soldiers and the police to support and strengthen them.”

But an Arab or Hamas media outlet lying about what an Israeli said is hardly news. Far more interesting is that this is where a UN representative gets her news from.

Quds News is an unabashedly pro-terror site, like most Palestinian media. But it is also explicitly antisemitic.

One article denies that Jews are a people, quoting the Khazar myth and others.

This Quds News article about the Holocaust says that Jews believe "the suffering of the Jews cannot be compared to the suffering of the rest of the peoples, since the Jews are the people chosen by the Lord El, while the rest of humanity becomes in an inferior stage of this choice, - being gentiles - and therefore the suffering of the Jews - the supreme race of all - is not similar to the suffering of inferior Gentiles." In this quote, Quds News is echoing the justifications of the Nazis for genocide.

It then says that Palestinians are the primary victims of the Holocaust, not Jews.

This is all classic antisemitism. It is hate that the news site is quite proud of and not at all ashamed of. So it is no surprise that Francesca Albanese considers an antisemitic, Hamas news site to be a reliable source for her to quote.

(h/t Israellycool for Hamas link)

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!