Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: propaganda

Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

The @UN @OCHAOPT knows Hamas is lying - but repeats their Gaza statistics anyway

This is from the latest daily UN-OCHA report on Gaza casualties:

"GMO" is the Gaza Media Office, meaning Hamas.

OCHA claims the 33,797 figure comes from the ministry of health. The MoH does parrot the Hamas figures every day. But it also releases detailed reports every few days of deaths they consider to be verified, which include breakdowns of women, children and elderly,

It is literally impossible for both sets of numbers reported by OCHA to be correct.

The detailed MoH reports say that they have verified 22,397 deaths, of which 11,847 are women and children (4,642+7,205.) According to Hamas and the UN, there are a total of 24,000 women and children killed.

The difference between the number of women and children counted between the two sources (12,153) is higher than the total difference of all deaths between the two sources (11,400.)

Hamas is provably lying - and the UN happily repeats their lies and gives them credibility. The UN reports then get repeated by other UN agencies, media and NGOs as authoritative, notwithstanding the small text on the bottom of the OCHA reports saying "The UN has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures; the current numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health or the Government Media Office in Gaza and await further verification." That isn't good enough: once we know the Hamas GMO is lying, it is irresponsible and libelous to give them any further credibility.

And this has been going on for a long time. The MoH had divided up its "martyrs" into two categories for months - the ones it could confirm and the ones it repeated from Hamas. Both sets have been inconsistent with each other and with Hamas claims of total women and children casualties, but OCHA still always used to unreliable numbers in their headlines.

But, hey, this is the UN we are talking about, where the most outlandish anti-Israel lies are treated as gospel.

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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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Gaza health ministry claims hospital director was tortured - but sort of admits he's right

The Hamas ministry of health released a statement this morning in response to the video of Kamal Adwan Hospital director, Dr. Ahmed Al-Kahlot admitting that Hamas militants control the hospital, uses their ambulances and offices for military activity.

They claim that Kahlot's statement was given after he was tortured, writing on Facebook:

In the face of a new chapter of ongoing crimes targeting the health sector, the occupation forces destroyed large parts of Kamal Adwan Hospital and arrested the hospital director, intimidating and coercing him to give the story of the occupation under the force of beating and torture, we would like to clarify the following:

Their explanation pretty much admits a great deal that Kahlot said!

1. Dr. Ahmed Al-Kahlot works within the cadres of the Military Medical Services, which is an official body affiliated with the Palestinian Ministry of Interior and within the approved components of the Palestinian National Authority.

So the hospital is run by the Hamas military.

2. The rank of brigadier general is a job rank in the medical services apparatus affiliated with the Ministry of Interior, and it is a known and applicable rank throughout the world.

They admit giving Al-Kahlot a military rank within Hamas.

3. The presence of official components and bodies inside the hospital, such as medical investigations and official agencies affiliated with the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, came as a result of the destruction of the infrastructure of these agencies and the search for a place that provides the necessary work requirements, and they are approved agencies within the structure of the Ministry of Interior.

So the Hamas Ministry of Interior - which is responsible for police and other security services - really did have offices in the hospital. (They don't say what everyone knows: the Hamas police are also largely members of the Hamas Al Qassam Brigades.)

4. What was stated by Dr. Ahmed Al-Kahlot was under the force of oppression, torture and intimidation, and we call on all human rights institutions to denounce this criminal behavior practiced by the occupation against our people in general and against health work crews in particular to extract a story consistent with the occupation’s demand, and to extract this testimony under threat. Publishing it in audio and video is a war crime in itself.

There you have it. Using hospitals as military sites isn't the war crime - posting video of the hospital director admitting it is the real war crime!

We call on human rights institutions to open an urgent investigation into the Kamal Adwan Hospital massacre, where children were besieged without water, without food, without electricity, and without water for extended days, which ended with the bombing of the hospital, the killing of two women and two children among the patients, and the injury of dozens. This was followed by storming the hospital and arresting dozens. Of the displaced, the sick, the health personnel, the brutal assault against them, the digging up of graves, the demolition of the hospital, the crushing of bodies under the tracks of tanks, and other horrific details.

Translation: We have to get the narrative back!

The problem is, they probably will. The media is always willing to give Hamas the benefit of the doubt while casting aspersions on everything the IDF says. Which is, really, a form of antisemitism, to say that Jews are suspected of lying with everything they say, even when compared to terrorists who celebrate murdering women and children.

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Times of Israel reports:

The director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabaliya has revealed in a Shin Bet interrogation that his northern Gaza hospital was turned into a military facility under Hamas’s control and that at one point, it had housed a kidnapped soldier.

In footage published on Tuesday by the Shin Bet and Israel Defense Forces, hospital director Ahmed Kahlot could be seen telling an Israeli interrogator that Hamas had offices inside the hospital and used it as a base for operational activity.

According to Kahlot, who said he has been a lieutenant colonel in Hamas since 2010, some 16 members of the hospital’s staff — including doctors, nurses and paramedics — were Hamas operatives serving in the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the terror organization.

He added that several members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades were also employed in the hospital.

Here is his statement:

Kahlout was widely quoted by the media for two months. Now that we know he is Hamas, we can assume that a large percentage of his statements that helped shape world opinion were propaganda.

So what has the media quoted a Hamas official as if he was a dedicated medical professional?

AP quoted him November 7 defending how casualty numbers from Hamas' health ministry are trustworthy.

“Hamas is one of the factions. Some of us are aligned with Fatah, some are independent,” said Ahmed al-Kahlot, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. “More than anything, we are medical professionals.”

The Guardian, November 12:

The head of northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital has told Al Jazeera that the hospital has run out of fuel.
“Ahmed al-Kahlout, the head of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that the facility’s main generator has run out of fuel, forcing the hospital to shut its operation,” the news organisation reports.
More than 5,000 people are sheltering at the hospital in addition to patients, al-Kahlout said.

The Guardian, November 22, quoted him again:

The hospital had received more than 60 bodies with over 200 injured since last night, he added. “The medical teams are very tired. We don’t have a single drop of fuel. We work in the dark using handheld searchlights,” he said
In another message distributed by the health ministry, Kahlout said the hospital was using cooking oil rather than diesel to run the hospital’s generators, and an ambulance targeting the wounded had been struck near the hospital grounds.

CNN, December 11, quoted him as saying that the maternity ward was hit by tank shelling, killing two women and leaving two more so badly wounded their legs required amputation.

Pravda, December 12:

"Israeli drones target anyone entering or leaving the hospital. ...The IOF targeted the hospital's water system, and we had to rely on groundwater. No electricity, water, or food in the hospital. The IOF shelled the maternity ward. Three children in the hospital lost their lives in the last three days due to a shortage of oxygen. "

Every quote from every medical professional in Gaza since October 7 is as suspect as Al-Kahlout's. But there was no skepticism about his accusations - until now.

Now that he is telling everyone that Hamas controls the hospitals and ambulances, the Times of London has lots of reservations about his statements:

Israel has sought to justify arresting scores of medical staff in Gaza by posting a video that purports to show a hospital manager confessing to working for Hamas.
Ahmed Kahlot, head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, was detained last week along with 70 other medical staff.
The release of the video was condemned by pro-Palestinian groups, who said there was no justification for publishing interrogation evidence obtained under unclear conditions without the presence of a lawyer.
Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British-Palestinian surgeon who spent weeks earlier in the conflict working in both al-Shifa and al-Ahli hospitals, said the Israelis were taking these actions because their attempts to show al-Shifa had been used as a command centre had failed.
“The Israelis plan to have show trials to justify the attacks on hospitals, because the whole narrative on al-Shifa was so ludicrous,” he said.

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More EoZ cartoons

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Antisemites framing the discussion so Israel can't win

Israel-haters/antisemites often use an exceptionally effective method to win in the court of public opinion, known a "framing." When one sets the ground rules of what is and is not up for debate, they can create a playing field where the Zionist or Jewish side cannot win. Forcing Jews to argue within those parameters gives them a huge handicap.

One classic example is to pretend that the history of Israel starts with modern Zionism. If you exclude any talk about the history of the Jews in the Land of Israel before the 19th century, they look just like the foreign colonialists that the haters claim we are.

With Operation Iron Swords, the framing has been elaborate and very effective.

The false framework goes like this:

* Telling civilians to move, whether within or without their territory, is a war crime.

* Neighboring countries have no obligation to accept refugees.

* Killing lots of civilians is a war crime by definition.

* Limiting humanitarian aid to a war zone is a war crime.

All discussions of the war on TV is bound by this framework. These four "rules" are not always explicit, which makes it harder to go against them. Who wants to see dead civilians?

The framing statements are incorrect. But the framework is carefully created to ensure that Israel cannot achieve its military objective of destroying Hamas.

* In fact, in a war zone, the attacker is obligated to tell civilians to move out of the war zone - which Israel has done and Hamas has tried to stop.

* While I don't think that Egypt is legally obligated to open its border, it never had a problem with taking in hundreds of thousands of other refugees from elsewhere. It certainly has a moral obligation to do so.

* Targeting civilians is a war crime. Knowing that civilians will die during an attack on a legitimate military target is acceptable as long as the casualties are not excessive, and international law has a much more liberal view of what is excessive than what Israel does.

* Israel has every right to inspect and limit aid to ensure that Hamas does not get it.

But the first four rules are accepted as the framework on CNN and Al Jazeera. Most news shows don't bother explaining the truth about international law because nuance is not TV-friendly.

Spokespeople on TV must break the framework by saying that they do not accept these parameters and creating their own, accurate framework:

* Hamas started this war with an unprecedented, horrific attack on Israel.

* Hamss has made it clear that they will never change or reform. This is who they are.

* The only moral choice is to utterly destroy them.

* Hamas has turned the entire Gaza Strip into a huge human shield for its army and vast subterranean military complex.

* Israel scrupulously follows international law even under these difficult constraints.

* Therefore, while Israel tries to minimize casualties, every civilian death is purely Hamas' fault.

How many TV shows or newspaper articles have you read that accepts these accurate statements as their framework?

It's going to be a long war, and Israel needs to reframe the discussion.

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Arab writer admits that Arab leaders only pretend to care about Palestinians for their own purposes

Writing in Alaraby, Hulmi al-Asmar writes that normalization maybe isn't so bad - that perhaps if Arab nations act nicely to Israel, Israel will implode from infighting since it is dependent on aggression.

Setting aside his main argument, al-Asmar gives a brief description of how Arab leaders have used the Palestinian issue for their own benefit, and how they have actually hurt the Palestinians with this cynical pretense.

For years, official Arab discourse used to murmur a heavy [Palestinian] "nationalist" sentiment, to the effect that "Palestine is the Arabs' top issue." From this slogan, a series of canned phrases emerged that affirmed standing by the Palestinian people and calling for their victory. Preachers filled the space with resonant speech in forums all over the world, and printed millions of pages with them. Books, poems, and commentaries were written about it, and they pulled their voices and roared their throats with enthusiastic songs. Millions of statements, and thousands of conferences and summits were also held, all of which threatened the enemy, or at least “confirmed its position in support of the Palestinian people, and their right to establish their independent state and defeat the occupation.” More than that, under the heading of “confronting the Zionist threat,” billions were spent on arming their armies, while morsels of bread were withheld from the mouths of the hungry, in preparation for the decisive battle with the “enemy” to build what they called “Arab national security,” and for that purpose legislation, emergency laws, and martial law were enacted. How can it not, when the nation is in a state of war and on constant alert? Therefore, there is no time for the luxury of “democracy,” nor for the “mockery” of elections, social justice, and other rights. This is not the time (!), as the nation is passing through a “delicate circumstance” and a “turning point.” It is a "dangerous time in history" and a "sensitive stage" that requires not paying attention to these "trivialities", and focusing effort on confronting "the enemy's plans" aimed at tearing apart the Arab ranks, and undermining "national dignity and nationalism!", etc., to the end of this series of great lies that may have passed on the minds of the "masses"... So what was the result?

Israel is expanding and strengthening every day, while Palestine is withering, and its nakba has been “Arabized” and reproduced. It was not limited to the Palestinian people, but the Arab regime produced other versions and more and revised versions of the Arab catastrophes, so that almost every Arab country has its own nakba.

This is stuff we've been saying for many years. It is rare indeed to see these words in Arabic:

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Palestinians complain about "Talmudic rituals" even when they AREN'T on the Temple Mount

On Saturday, over a dozen Palestinian and Arab news sites reported a story about "Talmudic rituals in the vicinity of Al Aqsa Mosque."

Not "in Al Aqsa." Not "in the courtyards of Al Aqsa." No, their complaint is Jews singing somewhere in the Old City adjacent to one of the gates leading to the Temple Mount that Jews are not allowed to enter.

Jews don't visit the Temple Mount on Saturdays, but Palestinian and Arab media publishes stories about their "Talmudic rituals" and "provocative dances" every day even on days they do not ascend.

Which means that even if Jews were completely banned from their holiest spot, the Palestinians wouldn't be happy until the Jews are driven out of the wall of the Old City altogether.

Here's the video that is so upsetting to them. The Jews are singing "Shir Hamaalot" (Psalms 126) to the tune of "Hatikvah." Notice that the Arab shopkeeper right next to them nearby doesn't seem to be bothered at all.

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Palestinian Authority regards the term "Second Temple" to be "incitement and racism"

The Palestinian Ministry of Information puts out a regular listing of "incitement and racism in Israeli media."

It shows three examples from August of what it calls "provocative terms" it saw in Hebrew language media.

“A Palestinian bulldozer demolished an archaeological site from the days of the Second Temple."
.
Concerning Walid Daqqa: “Distorted ethics. A human rights organization demands the release of a terrorist with blood on his hands.”

“Construction in the West Bank is an appropriate Zionist response to terrorism.”

So, telling the truth is "provocative" and "incitement" and "racism."

I think the Palestinian Authority regards "1984" as a textbook and its "Ministry of Truth" is a model for the Palestinian "ministry of information."

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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.

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Egypt's restoration of synagogue is upsetting Cairo's Muslims

Egypt now has more restored synagogues than it has Jews.

There are only three Jewish women left in Egypt, the youngest of whom is 70. But Egypt has, in recent years, restored five synagogues to their former glory, with seven or eight more still in disrepair.

The most recent restoration was the Ibn Ezra Synagogue which re-opened last week. To tourists only, of course.

While Egypt is presiding over these multi-million dollar restorations, Egypt's Muslims are complaining that the government is destroying Islamic historic sites to make way for development projects.

Muslims are seeing not only Jewish but Christian, Roman, Greek, and Pharaonic antiquities being preserved, while laws to preserve Islamic sites are apparently much more onerous. Resentment is being expressed in Arabic news media.

Egyptian media lists three reasons why Egypt's government is spending so much money and time restoring Jewish synagogues and preserving the Jewish cemetery even as a Muslim cemetery is being relocated for development work.

One reason is that the Egyptians want to stay on the good side of the US, and they think (probably because Jews run the world) that restoring synagogue will pay political dividends.

The second is that it is simply to promote tourism. Tourism went down after the last coup, and they want to attract Jews to Cairo..

The third reason is to make President Sisi look moderate to the world and to his own people. This is the sort of no-risk move that makes him look tolerant of a virtually nonexistent minority. And in 2018, Sisi passed a law allowing him to stay in office until 2030, and the optics were bad - he wants to change them

All three of the reasons are using Jews as a means to an end.

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Columbia University's Center for Palestine Studies welcomes its newest post doctoral fellow!

Ali H. Musleh will be working on his first book project, To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? Using his dual background in design and political theory, he focuses on Israel's design, development and deployment of drones, autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence, treating them as technological processes of managing and differentiating forms of life.

Apparently, this book is a version of Musleh's 341-page PhD dissertation, with the same title. Here's the abstract:

How do weapons make the colonial worlds that Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis inhabit? My dissertation attends to this question starting from an experience shared by Palestinians: that the majority of us have never encountered an Israeli settler, whether in uniform or out of uniform, who is not attached to a weapon, be it an assault rifle, a fighter jet, or a tank, etc. Taking this experience as a philosophical provocation, I subject the settler colony to a form of insurgent study exercised everyday by Palestinians that confronts the settler as contingent and transitory human-weapon ensembles. These studies are bodying and worlding. They reveal and unravel the spatialized embodiments, sensations, affective terrains, orientations and regimes of truth that weapons generate as lived world(s) of experience. In doing so, Palestinians exercise a fleshy sociality that constantly puts into question the self-evidence of the settler and the settler state. Thinking with Palestinians and alongside peoples of struggle, my dissertation is a performance in reverse engineering that moves from micrological sites, scenes and bodies of war, to macro formations of sovereignty. My itinerary focuses primarily on encounters with remote and robotic weaponry as technologies of engineering spatial and procedural distance between the settler and weapon. My task has been to show how that distance became the abyssal site from which forms of war, apartheid, and erasure emerge that consign settlers to martial automatisms that materialize and mediate their existence. The result is a work that dissects settler colonialism as a form of life inseparable from weapon power, as I also consider Palestinian rehearsals of decolonial life in the robotic age of war.

This abstract is a combination of gobbledygook, lies, obfuscation and antisemitism.

Gazans indeed don't have much of a chance to see Israelis., settlers or otherwise, since no Israelis live there. But it is really true that West Bank Palestinians never see "settlers" without weapons? The thousands of Palestinians that visit Rami Levy supermarkets shop alongside Israeli civilians. Well over 100,000 Palestinians work in Israel, and tens of thousands more work in settlements - and most "settlers" do not walk around their towns toting assault rifles. Those "settlers" who roam the Temple Mount, where they are seen by thousands more, don't carry weapons. Most Jews at the Mamilla Mall in Jerusalem, where many Palestinians shop, don't carry weapons. His assertion that most Palestinians never see Jews without weapons is a fabrication.

And then there are Israelis who visit Palestinian towns on their own to go shopping or get their cars repaired. Like Shay Silas Nigreker and his son Aviad Nir who went shopping in Huwara and were murdered two weeks ago because they were Israeli Jews. They weren't "attached to weapons," but they were murdered by Palestinian weapons.

So Musleh's "philosophical provocation" that is the very basis of his paper and book is bullshit to begin with. But what thesis advisor has the knowledge or guts to dispute the falsehood that underpins the text?

To Musleh, all Jewish Israelis are "settlers." After all, how would Palestinians know that Israelis in fighter jets or tanks are settlers or not? And in the first sentence he considers all Israeli Arabs to be "Palestinian" which means that when he says "settlers," he really means "Jews" from either side of the Green Line. Further proof from a similar article he wrote in Politics Today, where he said, "Weeks, months, if not years can go by without an inhabitant of Gaza encountering a settler, but they are more likely to encounter a faceless machine in their day to day life."

To Musleh, every Jew is an implant, who has no business living in the land of their forefathers. If that isn't antisemitic, what is?

Beyond that, to Musleh, every Jew in Israel is not a human being. They are hybrids of humans and weapons. They are essentially cyborgs. The entire paper is meant to dehumanize every Jew who lives in the region.

Musleh tries to sound intelligent by using words that either don't exist or in contexts that make no sense. There is no such words as "bodying" and "worlding." And does his treatise on Israeli evil really deal with "micrological sites"?

Musleh himself characterizes the paper not as reflective of objective truth but as "a form of insurgent study" as well as "a performance" in finding links that simply do not exist in real life, which he falsely calls "reverse engineering" to make it sound quasi-scientific.

Another form of antisemitism we see in this abstract is that it accepts libels against Israel that are not at all universally accepted, and that are provably false, as truisms. "Settler colonialism" and "apartheid" are routinely used in academia and much of the media as fact, but they aren't. By pretending that these lies are truth, the paper is nothing more than naked propaganda.

Yet no one in Columbia University is the least bit bothered by these issues. After all, the social sciences are filled with self-serving propagandistic garbage like this, where the "feelings" of the writer are considered more factual than actual facts.

To Columbia, this self-serving propaganda filled with lies and Jew-hatred are a feature, not a bug.

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No, 9/11 wasn't because of US support for Israel

The increasingly deranged Zachary Foster, formerly a decent researcher, now blames 9/11 on...US support for Israel:

The US-Israel alliance was according to Al-Qaeda one of the reasons for 9/11. The US’s unconditional support for Israel is a massive security risk and endangers Americans.

The US’s support for Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing is risking American lives.

First of all, this is an unbelievably stupid take. If you follow his logic, that means that US policy should adhere to whatever Islamic terrorists demand, because if they kill any Americans, it is America's fault for not doing what they say.

With that mindset, the US should insist that all American women wear the hijab and the US censor most TV shows, because Islamists have railed against the US exporting pornography and immorality to the world.

Secondly, even Bin Laden didn't prioritize the issue of Israel in his 1998 and 1996 fatwas.

His 1998 fatwa gives three grievances against the US: US troops in Saudi Arabia, the US war in Iraq, and US support for Israel was #3 - and his "proof" is that the US was destroying Iraq in order to help Israel, somehow.

In other words, Israel was just tacked on as an afterthought in his fatwa to appeal to Islamist antisemitism. We know that because his 1996 fatwa, which was much longer, mentioned the "Zionist-Crusader Alliance" a few times but had very little to actually say about Israel's supposed crimes considering its length. The target was America: "If there are more than one duty to be carried out, then the most important one should receive priority. Clearly after Belief (Imaan) there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land [Saudi Arabia]." Bin Laden was complaining about attacks on Muslims by Israel but also "massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina."

After 9/11, Bin Laden again gave a bunch of reasons for 9/11 - and suddenly Israel was on the top of the list. OBL thought that he could attract more Muslims to join him with more antisemitism - anyone who actually believes his reasons for attacking the US in this missive really don't understand anything about Islamist terrorism. and Bin Laden added that the Jews were planning to destroy Al Aqsa. But he also complained about Bosnia, supposed US support for Russians in Chechnya and India in Kashmir, pro-US Arab governments, "stealing wealth," US "occupation" of Arab countries, and US "starvation" of 1.5 million Iraqi children due to sanctions. (Child mortality in Iraq in fact did not rise at all during the time of US sanctions, but some people apparently believe Bin Laden's letter as an accurate source of information.)

The Bin Laden letter was a recruitment letter for Muslims, not a real explanation of why he attacked the US.

Obviously, Bin Laden and Al Qaeda altogether have had an antisemitic philosophy. But no one can read the Bin Laden fatwas and think that he was obsessed with Israel - he was obsessed with the US. He would have attacked the US if Israel didn't exist.

At the same time, no one can read Zachary Foster's tweets and think he is anything but obsessed with Israel.

Not surprisingly, his claims have been getting lots of responses from 9/11 "truthers" - apparently they are now the audience he is attracting.

I try to spend my time only refuting intelligent arguments against Israel and pointing out their hidden bias and falsehoods, like the arguments given by the UN, or Amnesty or other NGOs. Their hate for Israel is masked behind sophisticated propaganda that takes effort to tease out and expose. However, this might be the last time I waste any time on Foster since his anti-Israel arguments have now descended into farce.

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Libya says it will quit international energy organizations that have Israel as a member. (They won't.)

The fallout in Libya of the discovery that Israeli and Libyan officials have been meeting secretly for years, and those officials denials, has prompted many other Libyans to pledge that they will never, ever, ever do anything that could be considered the slightest bit of normalization with Israel.

For example, the mayors of Libyan towns felt it was necessary to issue a statement that they "expressed their complete rejection of establishing any relationship of any kind with the criminal Zionist entity."

But perhaps the strangest announcement of people trying to out-Arab the Palestinians - who do indeed speak to Israeli officials - comes from the Libyan Ministry of Oil and Gas, which said

The Ministry of Oil and Gas announces its rejection of state officials calling joining organizations or forums attended by the Zionist entity or in which it is a member, especially in areas related to the oil and gas sector.

I don't know how many international energy organizations Israel is a member of, but Israel certainly has been a member of the World Petroleum Council for decades - and so is Libya, and Iran,.

All three are also members of the International Gas Union.

Is it really going to quit those organizations now? A Libyan boycott of these, and probably many more, international organizations that include Israel would only hurt Libya - it wouldn't affect Israel at all.

Moreover, Israel and Libya have both been members of these organizations for quite a while, and Libya never said a word against it - even though Libya's official laws rejecting normalization of Israel have been in force since 1957.

Just like the announcement of the mayors, this is all posturing. Libya was shamed by the foreign minister's meeting with her Israeli counterpart, and now they are scrambling to regain their "honor." Honor has nothing to do with reality - public declarations of solidarity with Palestinians mean much more than privately insulting them, or privately accpeting Israel's membership in these international organizations.

Put it this way - none of Israel's enemies have quit the UN yet despite Israel being a member.

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BDSers are proud of using violence to stifle free speech

From JTA last week:

Pro-Palestinian protesters injured a university employee while demonstrating against a lecture speaker who heads the Brazilian chapter of a pro-Israel advocacy group.

Andre Lajst, the director of StandWithUs Brazil, was speaking about ways that Israeli technologies could help develop the Amazon region at the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus on Thursday when protesters clashed with security and other university employees outside the lecture auditorium.

According to news reports, the advisor to the university’s rector left the scene with a broken nose after attempting to safeguard her daughter. Several students entering the lecture were also harassed, and police officers escorted Lajst into and out of the venue. One protester was reportedly arrested for pushing a police officer but later released.

Here's video at the scene:

Andre Lajst completed his lecture and had to be escorted out by police for his safety from the violent mob.

But BDS-aligned media are bragging (and lying) that they managed to shut down his speech with their thuggish mob!

Pro-Palestine Brazilians demonstrated at a university in the Brazilian city of Manaus against the organization of a pro-Israeli-occupation event on campus.
Despite the high-security measures against them, the protesters managed to stop the meeting in support of the Israeli occupation, which is entitled “Cooperation with Israel”.
André Lajst, director of the Brazilian branch of StandWithUs, a pro-Israeli-occupation group in Brazil, spoke at the event about supporting the occupation and normalization with it.
Video clips showed the large number of anti-Israel-occupation demonstrators, known as BDS Mob, who confronted the Brazilian police and attempted to shut down the event by force, forcing Lajst and his companions to leave the place quickly.
These protests are a part of the international BDS activities against all forms of normalization with the Israeli occupation, especially educational normalization.

Among themselves, BDSers don't even pretend to be "non-violent." They are happy and proud to threaten and attack people.

And then they claim in mainstream media articles that they are doing it in the name of "academic freedom."

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!