Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: media bias

Showing posts with label media bias. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Proud to be a Zionist - 75th Anniversary Edition

Every year for the past 22 years, even before I started this blog, I've written an essay for Yom HaAtzmaut entitled "Proud to Be a Zionist." Here is the latest edition for 5783.

____________________

There are two Israels.

No, I'm not talking about the religious vs. secular, or the right vs. left, or those who hate Bibi and those who love him.

I am talking about the real Israel and the fictional one that the world sees.

The world sees an Israel filtered through the eyes of the media, so-called "human rights" NGOs, Palestinian and other Arab antisemites, and "progressive" anti-Israel organizations on college campuses.

The real Israel has no resemblance to that other Israel.

The real Israel is messy and beautiful. It has diametrically opposed viewpoints and surprising amounts of consensus. It has passion and cynicism, the heights of joy and the depths of sadness, incredibly serious decisions that affect people's lives and black humor.

I am a proud Zionist and I embrace all of these.

I have infinite respect for those Zionists who live in Israel - secular and haredi, Jew and Arab, Christian and Druze, college professor and bus driver, every shade of skin color, speaking every language under the sun. Their opinions on the important issues of the day are much more important than mine, because they are directly affected by those decisions.

While Israel must never discriminate against its non-Jewish minorities, it is and must remain a Jewish state. That is what makes it special. It is the only place in the world where a Jew can be him or herself without apologetics, without explanation, without fear. I am still tickled when I visit and see so many tiny examples of living in a Jewish state - Talmudic expressions in graffiti, quotes from Tanach on the side of a delivery truck, buses whose electronic signs with everyone a happy holiday in Hebrew, the automatic "Shabbat Shalom" said by cashiers and in emails on Fridays and "Shavua Tov" Israelis say on Saturday night.

There is a reason that the expression "Shver tsu zayn a yid" (It is hard to be a Jew) is in Yiddish and not Hebrew. Because for all the problems in Israel, it is much easier to be a Jew in Hebrew-speaking Israel than it ever was anywhere in the Diaspora.

After a pause of a few decades, antisemitism is becoming mainstream again,, often disguised as "progressivism" or "human rights" or whatever else is trendy. And I am glad to know that no matter what, Israel is there and will welcome me.

Israel is wonderful. Israel is maddening. Israel is glorious. Israel is frustrating. The real Israel is filled with Jews who want to do the right thing, and disagree strongly and passionately on what that is. The reason they can be so earnest, so loud and so argumentative is because they are all family - and people are more comfortable raising their voices at their own family members than at strangers.

There are deep divisions in Israeli society. But there always have been. Debates about the wisdom of "land for peace," about "who is a Jew," socialism vs. capitalism, frictions between Likud and Labor, and between Ashkenaz and Mizrahi, have been no less passionate.

The real Israel is a balagan, but without that constant chaos it wouldn't be Israel.

75 years is an incredible accomplishment. Mazal tov, 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!

Something happened this week that completely contradicts everything you've been reading about the current Israeli government - and the High Court.

From Haaretz

:The Supreme Court should reject a petition demanding the eviction of residents of the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar, because the eviction involves “diplomatic and security considerations” that should be made by the Israeli government, according to a brief filed on Monday by Israel.

The government explained that it does eventually plan to carry out the demolition orders issued against the village, but wants to decide for itself when and how to do so.

Hold on. Isn't this the "most right wing government in Israeli history"? Isn't the Supreme Court the last liberal holdout against total right-wing dictatorship?

As far as I can tell, over the years the Supreme Court has upheld the legality and importance of evacuating the illegal squatters on Area C land that was part of a military firing zone. And the governments of Israel have been trying to avoid that evacuation.

In other words, the exact opposite of what the narrative is. Not once since this whole thing went to court over the past ten years has the Supreme Court ruled that the residents have the legal right to remain there or that the State of Israel does not have the right to evict them from their illegally built homes.

And the State of Israel has always petitioned to delay the demolition, at least until a plan is agreed to for the residents to move - knowing quite well that the illegal squatters will never agree to move anywhere.

Meaning that Netanyahu is more left wing than the Supreme Court, and those who support the Supreme Court's independence should be supporting the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar - if they are being consistent, that it.

Reality is a lot different from the simplistic narratives in the media. And politics beats out supposed "principles" every time.

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!

What the media doesn't tell you about Huwara

The New York Times has an article about how awful things re for residents of Huwara, living with a huge IDF security presence:

Huwara, a town of about 8,000 people, sits on the only major road connecting the West Bank’s north and south, and is traversed regularly by both Palestinians and Israeli settlers. That has long put it on the front line of Israel’s expanding settlements in the West Bank, and it is a target of frequent attacks and harassment by settlers driving through.

But on Feb. 26 the violence reached new levels, traumatizing the residents of Huwara and leaving them fearful for their safety, as attacks by settlers surge and Israel’s right-wing government vows to assert greater control over the occupied West Bank.

That day, two settlers were shot and killed by a suspected Palestinian gunman as they drove through Huwara, prompting an angry mob of hundreds of Israelis from the hillside settlements to rampage through the town and neighboring villages, throwing rocks and burning homes, businesses and vehicles. In the wake of the attack, in which a Palestinian man was killed, the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself, called for Huwara to be “erased” by the state.

Hundreds of Israeli soldiers are now deployed on its streets, occasionally shutting roads and intersections, forcing businesses along the main road to close and seizing rooftops and entire buildings.

While I'm not at all excusing the violence done by settlers there, the article spends 95% of its time discussing the response to a double murder in Huwara and very little about the terrorism that prompted the response.

Reading the article, one gets the impression that there is a major road passing through Huwara. Looking at Google Maps, one gets the same impression of a highway slicing a corner of the town:

Photos from this "major road" show the reality: a crowded, car-filled road where Jewish drivers can be easily stopped in traffic and become sitting ducks for any angry Palestinian with a gun.

And there are hundreds of angry Jew-hating Palestinians with guns.

Of course the army has to be there. There is no other way to secure the non-Arab population that pass through the area. And, last I checked, Jews still have human rights not to be murdered, even by Palestinians.

Even "settlers."

Instead of balancing the stories of two populations in fear, the NYT - as it virtually always does - humanizes the Palestinians and positions the Israelis as faceless, inhuman aggressors.

The dangers of driving through Huwara have been known for a while. To reduce friction, since 2019, Israel has been building a bypass road specifically to avoid this problem.

This is a sign advertising the upcoming bypass road:

It says that the project is expected to be completed by...February, 2023. It is now scheduled for completion in March 2024.

The Yaniv brothers were murdered on February 26.

If this bypass road had been completed, not only would the Yanivs be alive - but the Palestinians in Huwara would not be living in fear of the IDF and angry Jewish residents looking for revenge.

Wouldn't that be a win-win?

The New York Times would never publish that information - because the road makes life more livable for "settlers." The NYT would rather see Jews (and Palestinians) killed and radicalized than help entrench the "occupation." They want to see 700,000 Jews being forced out of their homes as the highest moral imperative.

So even though this bypass road would have saved lives, it is a Bad Thing that must not be discussed until there is an angle found to say that it hurts other Palestinians somehow. In fact, I predict that by 2025 there will be articles in the mainstream media about how awful the bypass is for some random person who is inconvenienced by it - and not a word about the lives it is likely to save.

(h/t YMedad)

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!

Palestinian propaganda for the win

On Sunday, the official spokesman for the Palestinian president, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, claimed "the extremist Israeli government" is "fully responsible for the dangerous escalation against the Palestinian people, their land and sanctities."

He gave two examples.

One was "the burning of the house of citizen Ahmed Maher from the town of Sinjel in Ramallah by extremist settlers," and the other was "the Israeli occupation forces stormed the Al-Qibli prayer hall in the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque and assaulted those who were in i'tikaaf (staying in the mosque all day and night, usually done in the last days of Ramadan.)

Both of them are lies.

The house fire was almost certainly the result of a short circuit. There is literally zero evidence of any arson. No gas-soaked rags, no petrol bottles, no broken glass from Molotov cocktails, not a single burnt match. The only "proof" given was that one resident of Sinjil claims that he saw some settlers in a car nearby at roughly the same time - not even at the home.

The baseless, evidence-free accusation was enough for Arab media to repeat the lie as truth and for a government recognized by most of the world to make this baseless claim publicly.

The other incident has a grain of truth - Israeli forces did remove, without violence or incident, a number of Muslims who were staying in the Al Aqsa Mosque over night Saturday night. But what the anti-Israel media isn't reporting is that the people were breaking a long-negotiated deal between Israel and the Waqf:

According to police, the stay of Palestinians overnight in the mosque went against agreements made with the Waqf, adding that mosques outside the Temple Mount had been prepared for those wanting to stay overnight. Police attempted to get those barricaded inside to leave on their own accord, but most refused to leave.

Police stated that they removed the Palestinians as some of them were planning to conduct riots on Sunday morning during the dawn (Fajr) prayers and during visits by Jewish visitors.

Arabic language media confirms that Palestinian religious leaders called publicly for all Palestinians to perform i'tikaaf at Al Aqsa, specifically to confront and stop Jews from visiting the Temple Mount through the entire month of Ramadan.

Since 1967, there has only been one time that Palestinians attempted to spend the entire Ramadan in Al Aqsa - that was in 2015, and then the reason again had nothing to do with religious devotion but to attempt to stop Jews from ascending to Judaism's holiest site.

This attempt to have i'tikaaf for all of Ramadan is a violation of the status quo, which Jordan and the Palestinians pledged to keep during Ramadan this year in the joint communique issued at the Sharm el-Sheikh conference.

We also know there was a deal between Israel and the Waqf not to allow the i'tikaaf in Al Aqsa because there was no objection by the Jordanian government, which controls the Waqf, when Israeli forces removed the worshippers. Normally, the Jordanians are in the forefront of accusing Israel of violating Al Aqsa's sanctity, but here the police walked inside the mosque itself and removed people without a word from Jordan.

Even though Jordan knows about the deal to not allow i'tikaaf, it didn't say this publicly. Jordan wants to be known as the defender of Al Aqsa and admitting that they made this deal to tamp down violence would make them look weak to Palestinian and Jordanian Islamists. What this means, in effect, is that the most violent and extremist Muslims set the agenda and the Palestinian and Jordanian "moderates" follow the lead of the crazies to stay in power.

Here is yet more evidence that the Palestinian Authority, including Mahmoud Abbas' own office, regularly lies in their own press releases and statements, multiple times in a single day.

The Palestinian leaders have no disincentive to lie, because the world media doesn't call them on it. At best, the media might do a "he said, she said" version of events, and not bother to spend the slightest amount of time refuting the lying side.

These lies turn into incitement, the incitement turns into violence, and the violence turns into deaths. If the media would do its job, the Palestinians would be shamed to stop their lies and lives would be saved.

However, deep down, the reporters think that showing that the Palestinians are lying would be somehow "Islamophobic" or a demeaning of their culture. And they are complicit in the resulting violence.

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!

About that poll saying Democrats favor Palestinians over Israelis - it doesn't.

Israel haters are absolutely gloating over a recent Gallup poll. As NBC reports:

More Democrats have sympathy for Palestinians than for Israelis amid their ongoing conflict, according to recent polling from Gallup. The shift marks the first time since Gallup began collecting this data in 2001 that members of either party have been more sympathetic to the Palestinians.

The survey finds 49% of Democrats saying they're more sympathetic to Palestinians, while 38% say they’re more sympathetic to the Israelis.

Now, it is true that this is the first time that the question garnered more sympathy for Palestinian than for Israelis. But there is another part of the poll that, for some reason, the Israel haters and mainstream media are ignoring.

The poll had one other question: "I’d like your overall opinion of some foreign countries. What is your overall opinion of [country]? Is it very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable or very unfavorable?"

For that question, 56% of Democrats answered that their opinion of Israel was favorable, while only 36% felt favorably towards the Palestinian entity.

In fact, the "favorable" question has shown a large preference for Israel that has been fairly consistent of more that 40 percentage points over time.

And while the media loves to make it sound like Democratic support for Israel is at an all-time low, it isn't so - they gave worse ratings in 2004 and 2010, for example.

To be sure, the Democratic support for Israel among the young has been flagging. There is reason for concern, as the anti-Israel players have the media and academia solidly on their side. But more Americans, including Democrats, feel warmly towards Israel and far fewer feel that way towards the Palestinian Authority even now.

There's another problem with the "sympathy" question. It reflects an either/or mentality, and there are good reasons to sympathize with Palestinians - I myself do. They are led by corrupt leaders and intimidated by their own terror groups, their leaders are against any serious peace deal, kids are taught in schools that their highest aspiration is to die as martyrs - there are very good reasons to sympathize with Palestinians. And if forced to choose between two sides for sympathy, Palestinians are in much worse shape than Israelis are.

The proper response should be that the question is flawed. It assumes a zero-sum game - that you can only pick one side for sympathy, that there is a winner and loser.

That is false.

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!

The @NYTimes is whitewashing Muslim desecrations on the Temple Mount

Raja Abdulrahim wrote an article in today's New York Times that is ostensibly about how difficult Israel is making it for Muslim artisans to repair damage from clashes on the Temple Mount.

From start to finish, the article is a very sophisticated piece of anti-Israel propaganda.

The propaganda begins in the headline:

According to the headline, the "Al Aqsa Mosque" and the "Temple Mount" are two names for the same thing. While the article itself says "Al Aqsa Mosque compound" this is part of a relatively new campaign by Muslims to rename the entire Mount as "Al Aqsa Mosque," the third holiest site in Islam, a holy place for Muslims, and not just the mosque itself which is now referred to as the "Al Qibli Mosque." Up until recent years, the Waqf called the building the Al Aqsa Mosque and the compound the Haram al-Sharif.

At a workshop on the edge of the Aqsa Mosque compound, Muhammad Rowidy spends hours hunched over panes of stained glass, painstakingly carving through white plaster to reveal geometric designs. While he works, there is a thought he can’t shake.

“You see this,” he said, pausing and leaning back, “this takes months to finish, and in one minute, in one kick, all this hard work goes.”

The "one kick" is a clear reference to Israeli security as being the source of damage to the stained glass. And that is the impression that the article tries to give, that Israeli forces are the ones who cause damage, until nearly at the end, when it says:

Mr. Rowidy, 41, said it was easy to tell which side had broken which windows. Those completely smashed were done by the Israeli police with batons, he said. A video posted on Facebook during the unrest shows one of the windows being broken, with what appears to be a baton, from the roof outside.

In comparison, Palestinians who threw stones had knocked large holes in the windows, he said.

So Palestinians stockpile stones inside the mosque, throwing them at Jews and responding troops including through valuable stained glass windows, and Israeli forces shoot tear gas through the damaged windows to avoid entering the mosque. And somehow the Israelis are the ones blamed!

The Times doesn't show these images of deliberate damage to and weaponization of the Al Aqsa Mosque by Muslims:

The article has other examples of one-sidedness:

Incidents at the compound have often served as a spark in the broader Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In 2000, a trip to the site by Ariel Sharon, who later became Israel’s prime minister, surrounded by hundreds of police officers, set off the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising. More recently, the security minister in Israel’s right-wing government, Itamar Ben-Gvir, angered Palestinians and regional Muslim states by visiting the compound.

Sharons' visit didn't spark the second intifada. It was an excuse for a pre-planned, deadly uprising.

And Ben Gvir's visit did not result in any incident whatsoever, although many predicted it would. So why mention it at all?

But on the other hand, sometimes Muslims start to attack Jews for no reason from inside the mosque - but they are never described as "sparking" anything.

More bias:

The workers at the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, need approval from the Israeli authorities for repairs or replacements, down to every broken window or smashed tile, according to the workers, administrators of the site, and Israeli rights groups.

Jews believe that the compound is the location of two ancient temples and consider it the holiest site in Judaism. In recent years, Jewish worshipers have prayed inside the compound, a violation of an agreement that has been in place since 1967.

Calling Al Aqsa the "third holiest site in Islam" is said with no caveats, even though for Sufi Muslims this is not so obvious, and this is controversial in Shiite Islam as well, as some believe that the Al Aqsa mosque mentioned in the Quran exists only in heaven.

But while the Sunni Muslim beliefs are written as fact, the location of the Jewish Temples are framed as something that Jews merely "believe," despite the quite clear evidence of the 2000 year old remains of the Temple compound that exist today and a continuous historical thread since Biblical times.

. With the overlapping holidays this year, there are concerns that increased visits and unauthorized prayers could provoke further clashes between the Israeli police and Palestinians, as has been the case in previous years.

Jews quietly and silently praying "provoke" clashes? No, Muslim intolerance for Jews is the source of the violence, not devout Jewish prayers.

But perhaps the biggest problem with this article isn't how Abdulrahim artfully manages to avoid running afoul of the New York Times fact checkers while injecting so much bias. The major problem is that she doesn't say a word about why Israel is so skittish about unauthorized and unsupervised repairs on the Temple Mount.

Because Muslims had lied about this before and used those lies to build a massive underground mosque that destroyed and carted away tons of the most valuable archaeological and religious treasures on Earth. And the destruction of valuable treasures continues today. Even during last year's riots the Muslim youth broke some ancient columns, with not a word from the New York Times.

By not reporting about this wholesale destruction done by the Waqf and Palestinians on the Temple Mount, Abdulrahim frames this as Israeli meddling in Muslim culture just to harass them.

Put it all together, and this isn't a news article. It is anti-Israel agitprop that twists and chooses facts to give an entirely wrong impression to the reader.

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!

92.5% of Palestinians killed this year were members of terror groups or actively involved in attacks

As he did last year, Adin Haykin is documenting every single Palestinian killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank this year, and explaining the circumstances.

I put his current thread on a Twitter Thread Reader post.

Out of 80 killed this year, I count six who were uninvolved civilians. (I'm counting a father who was shot while trying to stop his son's arrest as a civilian.)

That means that 92.5% of those killed were actively part of hostilities, or members of armed groups. And that includes every single minor who was killed this year.

It is also entirely possible that some of the civilians listed were killed by Palestinian fire, which as we've seen has been quite wild.

A far as I can tell, never in the history of urban fighting has the percentage of innocent civilians killed been this low.

In contrast, over 50% of those killed in Operation Banner in Northern Ireland by the British Army were uninvolved civilians.

Western troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have never achieved anything close to this record.

The mainstream media emphasizes the uninvolved, as they should. But they do not contextualize their deaths with these facts that the IDF is far exceeding what is considered acceptable by any other army in history, especially when it often operates in an extremely challenging environment when there stone throwers and firebombs coming from attackers on all sides.

If any other army went under the same microscope that the IDF does, they would look horrible by comparison.

For example, the New York Times reported in 2021 about an attack by US forces five years earlier that no one knew about:

Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.

Do you remember reading about this incident, or the dozens of others that were uncovered in that story using Pentagon records? No, the story disappeared from the news media radar in no time.

Now, imagine the tsunami of coverage from multiple news outlets, the UN resolutions and condemnations from every nation on the planet, that would result if Israel killed 120 civilians in an air strike and claimed it was a successful strike on dozens of fighters.

That is not just a double standard. That is treating Israel as uniquely evil and ignoring far, far worse things done by "the good guys."

And that is the entire point. Israel's critics do not want you to know this context when they accuse Israel of war crimes. They do not want you to see how Israel compares to other armies. They never make 3D models of US bombing of wedding parties.

There is only one possible explanation for putting Israel under an electron microscope for doing an amazing job targeting terrorists while virtually ignoring the horrible mistakes that every other professional western army does. It isn't "concern over taxpayer dollars" or "humanitarian concerns" or any of the dozens of other excuses used to justify this obsession with how Israel fights terror. None of the Western armies who wantonly bombed dozens of innocents had to worry about an immediate threat of someone slipping through a porous border and attacking their own citizens who live only a few kilometers away.

The only explanation is antisemitism.

Maybe not the explicit, neo-Nazi kind, but this crazed obsession with finding everything wrong with Israel defending itself from real, imminent threats while ignoring everyday Palestinian terror cannot be logically explained any other way except to say that a Jewish state is assumed to be automatically criminal the way Jews have lived under that assumption for thousands of years.

The truly remarkable thing is that the IDF, like the Jews throughout history, don't respond by saying that they might as well act the way they are being accused of acting. Instead, they continue to improve their methods and work towards a 100% record of only killing those who are actively trying to kill them first. (In attacks on Iranian targets in Syria, they are very close to that 100%.)

The IDF is truly the most moral army in the world. It isn't even close.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

This frame appears to show a muzzle flash, but the WaPo can't see it.

The Washington Post has an article that they believe damns IDF troops - and they are so excited about it they took away the paywall so everyone can see their computer-modeled 3D analysis.

They did indeed document a war crime, but not the one they are pretending to have uncovered.

Israeli security forces in an armored vehicle fired repeatedly into a group of civilians sheltering between a mosque and a clinic after a Feb. 22 raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, killing two people, including a teenager, and wounding three others, according to witnesses and a visual reconstruction of the event by The Washington Post.

For all the fancy 3-D modeling and hundreds of photos they claim to have used, the newspaper relies completely on one video, taken from above, showing a man with his arm extended with what appears to be a gun, and then running for cover. It is in the third part of this video:

The newspaper tries to claim that there is no evidence that the gunshot one can hear was from that gun, and even says, " The videos reviewed by The Post do not clearly show whether the man had a gun or fired, and none of the witnesses interviewed by The Post said they saw a gunman fire at the Israelis." Yet there appears to be a muzzle flash at the very beginning of the video (see photo above.) It is ignored by the Post.

They consult two experts about the two bangs heard, who say wildly different things: one says that they are not gunshots at all, and the other says they are gunshots but come from the Israelis, without saying how he could make such a distinction.

If two experts cannot even agree if a sound is gunfire or not, then what value do they add? The answer is that the WaPo can claim that they consulted audio experts when coming up with their foregone conclusion, even when they don't agree on anything!

When you look at the video of the man who appeared to be pointing a weapon then running to where the civilians are trying to avoid gunfire, it is obvious that he is holding something heavy like a gun. If his hands were empty he would not be running with his arms close together in front of him; his arms would be pumping at his sides the way normal people run.

Moreover, the civilians are running away before the IDF vehicle is shooting anything. (Look at the ones in the sunken plaza.) It appears they are running away from previous Palestinian gunshots, not Israeli.

The nature of open source forensics is that they are necessarily incomplete. We have no idea if there are any gunmen in the building behind the civilians, or on surrounding roofs, or across the street that may have shot the victims. The IDF did certainly fire in this video; we can see that some shots hit the pillar. But even if the IDF did shoot at the gunman and accidentally hit the victims, it is not a war crime. It is a split-second decision based on the information the soldiers had - they were being shot at, the gunman went for cover behind a stone pillar, and they were responding to the likelihood that the gunman would resume shooting at them as they passed the pillar. It is unclear that the soldiers even saw the civilians on the top of the stairs before the gunman ran to cover behind the pillar.

The entire life and death decision needed to be evaluated and made in fractions of a second.

Under the laws of armed conflict, while the existence of civilians is one factor to be weighed in such a decision, it is not the only factor. Troops are allowed and expected to defend themselves. A known gunman who runs for cover behind a pillar and who is about to be in line of sight is certainly a legitimate military target.

In peacetime, police are held to this higher standard of doing everything possible to avoid accidentally hitting civilians even if it means the gunman gets away. For armed conflicts, the laws are different. But the Washington Post doesn't say that - their entire article is geared towards the idea that the IDF had no right to target an armed man who was hiding among civilians. (And they know quite well that the civilians were not the intended targets.)

Isn't it interesting that the Post spent weeks and used four reporters with several experts consulted, and yet didn't even ask an international law expert whether Israel violated the laws of armed conflict?

And that brings up the other omission in the Washington Post's coverage: the armed man ran for shelter among civilians, making them into human shields. I mean this literally - he placed himself behind civilian bodies knowing that he was a target, possibly even shoving one person aside. And that really is a war crime!

Apparently, the reporters know quite well that the IDF didn't violate any laws. And that the Palestinian gunman did. And they don't want their readers to know that.

Remarkably, whenever the news media spends lots of time and money putting together elaborate 3D models of something involving Israel, it is always to say Israel is guilty. They try to replace honest investigations with razzle dazzle. And they are nearly always wrong.

When you put it all together, this article, like the others, is not meant to illuminate the truth, but to obfuscate it.

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 couple of cartoons for the weekend (Eldertoons)

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!

Today, 2-year old Hadar Noga Lavi was laid to rest less than a week after being critically wounded in a head-on collision as her mother was returning her from a medical appointment.

Her mother, Idit Lavi of Shiloh, is convinced that her daughter was the victim of a suicide terror attack.

The mother said that Hadar had hurt her back and she took her to Shaarei Tzedek hospital in Jerusalem on Saturday night. She was returning, driving on Route 60 in Samaria, when she saw a car approaching her in the wrong lane. She swerved to the opposite lane, he followed her, and she zig-zagged back to the right lane and he again followed her and crashed into her car head-on.

While Idit Lavi is certain that it was an intentional attack, Israeli police and the Binyamin council are treating this as a simple car accident, complaining about the road conditions that contributed to the crash and about wild Arab drivers on that road.

Arabic media reports from the time do seem to indicate that it was a multi-vehicle accident. Three Arabs were killed and others injured in other cars.

Perhaps the Palestinian driver, with two other young men in the car, was playing "chicken."

But since Hadar's death today, Arab media prefer the narrative that this was a terror operation, calling Hadar a "female settler." Palestinians would rather than their own heroically die by trying to kill a young mother and small daughter than think that they died in an accident.

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!

The crime of "Judaizing" - what's old is new again

Times of Israel has an interesting article about how crypto-Jews in Mallorca would continue to celebrate Purim by calling it the "Feast of St. Esther."

A brave woman named Ana Cortés admitted to the Church that she was still celebrating Jewish holidays and studying (illegal) Jewish texts.

The crypto-Jews of Mallorca paid a heavy price for clinging to their Jewish faith. Pedro Onofro Cortés was burned at the stake. Ana Cortés was sentenced twice for the crime of “Judaizing” or secretly practicing and teaching Judaism, once in 1677 and again in 1688.

Indeed, historical works about the Inquisition mention the "Judaizing" charge brought against crypto-Jews.

Today, the same term "Judaizing" is still being used as an epithet - when referring to Israel "Judaizing" Judaism's holiest city.

Just as it was then, the term is used by antisemites to make it moral crime to keep Jews or the Jewish capital - Jewish.

It was an insult then and it is an insult now. And in both cases, it is only antisemites who use the term as an epithet.

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!

The UN reluctantly admits that Gazans have more freedom of movement than before Hamas takeover

From the UN's OCHA:

The number of exit permits for [Gaza] workers and traders issued by Israeli authorities increased from just over 10,000 in January 2022 to more than 18,000 in November 2022. This has allowed more exits of people compared with any time since the early 2000s. At the same time, the Egyptian authorities allowed more exits than any time since 2014.

This is an understatement. The number of Gazans allowed to cross into and Israel and back more than doubled between 2021 and 2022, and it was by far the most since Hamas took over Gaza.

Less authorized goods were brought in through Israel and more were imported through Egypt. Goods exiting through either border increased and, for the first time, exceeded the pre-blockade annual figures.

There are more Gaza exports than there were before the Hamas takeover of Gaza!

These are the exports (ignore the caption, this is for both Erez and Rafah crossings):

Israel is clearly trying to help the Gaza economy.

When Israel acts the opposite of the narrative (which says they are starving Gazans in their open-air prison), suddenly the news media loses all interest in reporting about movement and exports from Gaza.

Remember when the UN said Gaza was going to be uninhabitable by...2020?

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 lying left-wing antisemite from +972 dies

+972Mag writes an obituary for Yossi Gurvitz:

It is impossible to imagine Israeli anti-occupation writing without thinking of Yossi Gurvitz. A relentless, fearless, incredibly knowledgeable, prolific, and sharp writer, Yossi passed away last week at the age of 53.....

Yossi’s roots were as far from the left as one could imagine. He was born to a national-religious family and educated at Nehalim Yeshiva, an Orthodox boarding school...Yossi hated religious studies, and even more so the racism and nationalism he encountered at school, including among the rabbis. Gradually, he began to lose his faith. “I started devouring philosophy books,” he would later write: "By the time I started grade 11, I was Orthodox in name only. Earlier, I rejected Jewish law as racist; now I could no longer believe in a deity which was managing the world and interested in our lives … "

I only wrote about Gurvitz twice, over a decade ago, but he stuck in my mind as an exemplar of everything a journalist shouldn't be: a bigot, a liar, and an antisemite.

In 2012, Gurvitz claimed that a person wrote a halachic question to a rabbi essentially asking whether it is permitted for Israeli soldiers to rape women, and that the answer was that they could. He completely misrepresented the question and answer - as well as the rabbi's clarification after the fake story exploded. The question was about how horrible the thought of such a thing was, and the rabbi agreed. It was obvious the rabbi was saying that such an act is forbidden today, the exact opposite of Gurvitz's claim.

Gurvitz let his inner antisemite out in his original text: "Those texts were written mostly in a barbaric period by ignorant people, fuelled by the hatred of mankind which is endemic to Judaism." It leaves no doubt that Gurvitz could not be trusted to write about Judaism at all. (The +972 editors quickly changed that when they realized how bigoted Gurvitz's words were.)

In the +972 obituary, they say, "During his time at +972, his writings on the racism found in some Jewish religious texts was a constant source of editorial frustration. No matter how much the other editors and I explained that some phrases that worked in Hebrew would not translate well into English, and could lead to accusations of antisemitism (or that we should simply pick our battles), Yossi would hear none of it. What made matters worse was that none of us had the depth of knowledge to argue with him."

Notice that not one of the "journalists" at +972 even considered that Gurvitz's hate of Jews and Judaism, which he didn't hide, might color his reporting. Not once did they fact check his lies against what a knowledgeable religious Jew would say.

That is the state of +972's "journalism."

But the other time I looked at Gurvitz's work was perhaps even more damning to him and to +972. Gurvitz repeated the lie,that there were Israelis dancing in celebration of 9/11 in New Jersey. He wrote this in context of claiming that Israelis are all inherently supportive of international terrorism, a truly libelous and absurd assertion, based entirely on a couple of comments in a news article.

Again, the professional editors at +972 didn't bother to fact check Gurvitz. And again, Gurvitz's own bigotry drove the story - not the facts. The only place to find the "dancing Israelis" lie is on the very same right-wing conspiracy theory websites that +972 readers would consider antisemitic in any other context.

Why was Gurvitz reading them? Because he shared their opinion of Jews.

Yes, Gurvitz wrote thousands of other articles. I haven't read any of them. Once I saw these two, why assume that they are anomalous? It isn't like Gurvitz or 972 apologized for the lies they published.

I'm sorry Gurvitz is gone. But I am not mourning the loss of a bigot and antisemite whose hate of Jews that started when he was a teen informed his entire adult life.

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!