Harvard partners with Palestinian university that rewards and supports terrorism

From Harvard University's FXB Center:

The Institute of Community and Public Health (ICPH) at Birzeit University, the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights, and the World Health Organization in the occupied Palestinian territory have launched the Palestine Social Medicine course. This intensive course is part of the activities of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights, a partnership between ICPH at Birzeit University and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, United States. The course is supported through Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation funding to WHO occupied Palestinian territory Right to Health programme.

Birzeit University is a center of antisemitic, pro-Jihadist terror.

Last December, it hosted a PFLP march where they exhorted students to "blow up the settler's head!"

Also last year, Birzeit's Hamas group hosted a reception for new students where they celebrated a famous Hamas bombmaker, Yahya Ayyash, who was a graduate of Birzeit U:

This display of Nazi-style salutes, a model of a rocket and of a suicide belt was not in Gaza, but in Birzeit University:

Does it sound like Birzeit is a center of "health and human rights?" Is it appropriate for Harvard to partner with a university that is a center for incitement of violence against Jews?

Actually, maybe it is. Because Harvard's own recent record is one of sacrificing academic integrity for "social justice" causes such as hating Israel.

The entire Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights appears to be far more concerned with bashing Israel than in actually helping promote Palestinian health.

The FXB Center's Health and Human Rights Journal recently dedicated an issue to Palestinian health. The entire thrust of the journal was to call Israel "racist" and "apartheid" and "settler colonialist":

Its studies pre-suppose that Israeli policies are fatally hurting Palestinian health and work. And when biased people look for evidence of their thesis, they can invariably find it - as long as they ignore any counter-evidence.

Similarly, Harvard's School of Public Health offers a course that looks at Palestinian health through the lens of Israeli "settler colonialism" making the initial assumption that health services are drastically impacted by Israeli policies.

Yes, a Harvard University course actually highlights "The Map that Lies" that has been thoroughly debunked and retracted by numerous organizations. 

Yet in real life, Palestinian healthcare - and indeed, Palestinians' general quality of life - is better than that of neighboring Jordan which does not suffer from "settler colonialism" or "Israeli apartheid:"

In fact, it is difficult to find studies that look at and evaluate Palestinian healthcare on its own merits, or that compares it with the rest of the Arab Middle East - something that is basic in studying the healthcare of every nation on the planet.  One rare example that does is this obscure paper, "Experiences of Palestinian patients with hospital services: a mixed-methods study" which employs a standardized survey used throughout the world to evaluate patient experiences in Palestinian hospitals. They aren't great, they aren't terrible, and the study makes recommendations on how to improve them. 

Palestinians themselves blame their governments, not Israel, for healthcare shortfalls. A recent survey says that one third of Palestinians say they do not have enough hospitals, 24% complained of scarcity of supplies, 20% said the lack of skilled medical professionals was the biggest problem, and 10% said it

was the high costs of care or the lack of medical insurance. 

But looking at the real issues is not how Palestinian health is studied in the West. Instead of caring about how to improve Palestinian healthcare, these seminars and courses and studies are all designed to sacrifice Palestinian healthcare on the much more important altar of using every possible social means to demonize Israel. By viewing everything Palestinian through a "settler colonialist apartheid structural racist" lens, actual daily Palestinian healthcare is neglected and ignored. 

Demonizing Israel is a higher "human rights" imperative than improving the lives of Palestinians. 

So perhaps it is appropriate that Harvard, which has already hijacked Palestinian healthcare as  ammunition to be used against Israel, partners with Birzeit University, which glorifies those who use actual ammunition against Israel. 

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Russia's RT.com pushes one-state solution, insults Israel, US, Canada, Australia

RT.com, the Russian state-funded English-language media outlet, posted what is meant to be a humorous "rap news" piece that purports to give the truth about Israel. The show is created by two Australians.

The number of lies and slanders in this 7 minute piece rival anything in Arab media.



The piece shows a trigger-happy, kippa-wearing Netanyahu justifying Israel's existence based solely on Jewish suffering, wantonly killing a Hamas leader who was willing to recognize Israel. The Six Day War is shown as a malicious land grab and UNSC 242 is misrepresented as insisting that Israel return all lands, which Bibi says is antisemitic.His actions are justified by American media and John Kerry, afraid to say anything to offend Israel.

"The Map that Lies" makes an appearance, as does Norman Finkelstein to insult both the US and Israel.

The US, Canada and Australia are said to support Israel only because they are all genocidal states built on stolen land.

Palestinian Arabs are shown as pure victims of Israeli evil. The show goes on to say that treating Israel like South Africa and imposing a one-state solution is the only real answer and will turn Arab terrorists into Nobel peace prize winners.

It is easy to disprove literally every stanza of the "rap" but one cannot easily counter the fact that lies that are disguised as entertainment are accepted by viewers uncritically. People simply refuse to believe that they are being lied to explicitly, especially when the lies are what makes them laugh.

It is masterful agitprop in the mold of the Soviet playbook that has been the backbone of leftist anti-Israel propaganda for decades.

(h/t Shlomedic)

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How PCUSA twists history to justify their hate of Israel

I finally got a copy of "Zionism Unsettled," the Presbyterian Church USA's 80-page "study guide" to teach Presbyterians how awful Israel is that was in the news a month ago.

Others have done a good job showing how bad it is - and it is very bad. For example:

• After describing how much pressure Jews are under to not say anything bad about Zionism, it goes on to quote a hundred years' worth of anti-Zionist writings by Jews. 
• It has a sidebar of an "unsung hero of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising" - because he was anti-Zionist.  
• It gives Brant Rosen, the anti-Zionist reconstructionist "rabbi," an entire chapter to describe his pseudo-theological basis for hating Israel. 
• It shows The Map That Lies. 
• It says in a pull-quote  "There are similarities between Zionism, South African apartheid, and Jim Crow segregation in the Southern US."

I thought it would be helpful to reproduce the PCUSA's timeline of the region's history to show how easy it is to lie with facts and factoids  - when you get to select which ones to use.

Like all anti-Israel histories of the conflict, they start with the 19th century. Jewish people living in the Land of Israel from Biblical times aren't good to mention because that undercuts the fundamental argument that the land is Arab land that Jews came and took away. 

And the "First Aliya" was hardly the first wave of Jews to return to Israel. They came throughout the centuries, perhaps not in waves but there was always a desire in Jewish culture to return. Major rabbis made "aliya" from Babylonia to the Land of Israel in the 2nd-5th centuries CE. They never stopped coming.

Also not mentioned is that the large majority of Palestinian Arabs in this timeframe did not want an independent state but they wanted to be part of Syria, just to forestall the possibility of a Jewish state. Then, as now, the point was not to establish a state but to end one. 

Notice anything missing?

They don't want to mention the deadly anti-Jewish attacks in 1920, 1921 and of course the pogroms in 1929 where many Jews lost their lives and many more lost their homes. Yes, Jews were driven out of their homes by Arabs (in Jaffa, Hebron, parts of Jerusalem and elsewhere) long before the "nakba." Yet only one set of people have rights according to PCUSA.

The 1936-9 revolt was not only against Jewish immigration - it was against Jews altogether. It was a violent uprising and hundreds were killed. Not worth mentioning, of course.

Here the writers are engaging in sophisticated deception. Zionism of course predates the Holocaust and by the eve of World War II there was already a functioning Jewish government in Palestine in readiness for statehood. No such parallel government existed on the Arab side. 

But PCUSA wants to frame Israel's founding completely as a result of the Holocaust, with the implication that the Arabs did nothing to deserve suffering at the hands of the Holocaust victims. Of course, the Holocaust contributed to the urgency of establishing a haven for Jews (as well as Western reticence at accepting hundreds of thousands of refugees) but the timeline minimizes Zionism's pre-war accomplishments.

The last item is a lie. There were zero Arabs displaced by Zionists in mid-November, 1947. In fact, before the partition vote Jews were forced out of their homes in Jaffa in August 1947 - once again, the first victims were Jews. Arabs shot at the Jews from minarets of mosques. 

Tens of thousands of Arabs did flee at the first attacks of Arabs against Jews in the hours after the partition vote. They remembered 1936-39 and those who had the means decided to flee to Lebanon and elsewhere to sit out the fighting. It was completely voluntary. 

Why put "war of liberation" in scare quotes? Well, if you don't believe that Jews have a right to their historic land, then it isn't liberation, is it?

Plan Dalet is not described here, but it is certainly being misrepresented as a plan to ethnically cleanse Arabs. This is a lie.

Deir Yassin is mentioned - but not the Hadassah hospital convoy massacre a few days later  which had a similar number of victims. How's that for bias?

Why is the UN adopting the UDHR mentioned here? Obviously because PCUSA claims that Jews violated it - and not Arabs.

Wars just somehow break out. Nothing about incessant fedayeen attacks on Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. Nothing about Arab threats to annihilate Israel and throw the Jews into the sea. Nothing about Yasir Arafat's first terror attack in 1965, before "occupation." Nothing about how the original PLO charter specifically excluded the West Bank and Gaza from its goals. Nothing about Israel warning Jordan to stay out of the war, but Jordan attacking anyway - and losing the West Bank. No, we cannot have Jews feeling real fear, can we? 

Also missing: Black September, when Jordan killed and expelled thousands of Palestinians.

In the text of the booklet, PCUSA says "Sadat had taken the initiative by his historic trip to Jerusalem in November 1977. Begin resisted responding to Sadat's peace initiative until public pressure forced his hand." This is a flat-out lie. Israel responded to Sadat's speech in Cairo within hours with an invitation to Jerusalem. Begin had made numerous contacts with his Arab neighbors to negotiate peace between entering office and Sadat's trip to Jerusalem. 

Who massacred the Arabs in Sabra/Shatila? PCUSA implies it is Israel, because they haven't said a word about Lebanese Christians, so who else could it be?

The 1994 entry shows how one can write a completely factual statement and still lie.

The first Arab suicide attack in Israel was in 1989 and it killed 16 people- but it wasn't a bomb. 

There were two other suicide attacks against Israelis in 1993 - but they were in Judea and Samaria. 

PCUSA mentions the Hebron massacre first to imply that Palestinian Arab terror was in reaction to it. That is clearly not true. But they only publish the facts that make their anti-Israel case. 

There were dozens of terror attacks during the 1990s. Over 150 Israelis were killed in suicide bombings. Not worth mentioning. But PCUSA wants to imply that the second intifada was the result of Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount - in reality is was an excuse, not a cause. 

Israel's peace offers in 2000 and 2001 (and 2007)  that were rejected by the Palestinian Arabs are not mentioned. The unacceptable Arab League proposal which could have destroyed the Jewish state demographically is highlighted, so Israel alone appears rejectionist. 

Notice that Hamas is not mentioned here as a terrorist or even an Islamist group. Hamas rejected the roadmap outright, but that is not worth mentioning either. 

Ah, so Hamas has some militants -but they only attack Fatah militants. They never do anything bad to their oppressor Jews.

Not a single mention of thousands of Hamas rockets being shot at Israeli civilians. Not a mention of who started the war in Gaza (by calling it a war on Gaza PCUSA is purposefully ignoring the Gaza rockets during the war.)

This is only the tip of the iceberg, but the pattern is clear - PCUSA will not write up any history that makes Israeli Jews look like anything but a bloodthirsty aggressors hell bent on dominating and controlling poor, innocent Arabs. (It will not mention that some IDF soldiers, politicians and diplomats are Arab and Druze, because they want to imply that Jewish exceptionalism - a major theme of the booklet - is responsible for all ills.)  If anything contradicts that narrative it must not be mentioned.

People who are not familiar with the real history of the region see a timeline and they assume that it must be an accurate portrayal of history. Yet the lies and omissions are all in the same direction - to demonize Israel and to whitewash Arab threats and terror, which are virtually nonexistent in the 80 pages of the booklet.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how Israel-haters lie with cherry-picked facts.

(h/t Ari)

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Fatah publishes The Map That Lies

We've discussed, and taken apart, different versions of The Map That Lies, the ubiquitous and lying set of four maps that purport to show how Israel is taking "Palestinian" land.

The official Fatah Facebook page has an even worse version that they tweeted this morning:

Mahmoud Abbas is, of course, the leader of Fatah.

Every nation has some founding myths. "Palestine" has nothing but  myths.  And by a strange coincidence, every one of those myths are meant to destroy another state.

(h/t Judge Dan)

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Vancouver transit ads show "the map that lies"

From The Province:

Jewish groups in Vancouver say they are considering suing Trans-Link for accepting controversial political advertisements showing the "disappearance of Palestine due to Israeli occupation over the past 66 years."

On Tuesday, a group called the Palestine Awareness Coalition announced the launch of 15 bus posters and a large mural in a central Vancouver SkyTrain station, that depict the territory of Palestine steadily shrinking into the state of Israel in a succession of dated maps.

Marty Roth - a 79-year-old member of the coalition group behind the ad campaign - said they have already won a victory over groups that tried to "suppress" the ads.

"This will be controversial with a number of traditional Jewish organizations that have tried to suppress the ads," Roth claimed. "But Trans-Link has refused to agree with them,

because these are educational ads that are well within national advertising guidelines and the Canadian Charter (of Rights and Freedoms)."

Roth said, as a Canadian Jewish man, he believes Israel is unjustly oppressing the people of Palestine and his group wants to educate the Canadian public about the conflict.

But Jewish leaders including Mitchell Gropper, chair of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, called the ads a provocative attack on Jewish people that will incite hatred. "This is of grave concern to our community at large, because the ads make the use of the buses unwelcome and unsafe," Gropper said, noting that terrorist attacks in Israel often target buses.

"I don't think I've ever seen ads on our TransLink system that attack a section of our society. If the transit system will be used to attack Israel and the Jewish people, who is next?" Gropper, a Vancouver lawyer, said his group went to the "highest levels" of TransLink and argued that the Palestine ads should be rejected, but they were told TransLink must accept the ads for legal reasons.

The Province sought interviews with TransLink officials but were referred to a prepared statement, which says TransLink sought a "third-party legal opinion" which said the Supreme Court of Canada decided TransLink must run ads such as "Disappearing Palestine" under the Canadian Charter.

The ads are even less accurate than the popular four-panel maps that I have shown in the past to be absolute lies.

Here is a photo of the full ad, plus a close-up:

The first panel is is a lie. The entire area was called "Palestine" including the white parts (that symbolize private Jewish ownership.) As I have explained, most of the land was owned by the British Mandate, and was not privately owned by either Jew or Arab.

The second panel is a lie. The UN partition plan, which the Arabs rejected, called the two states simply "The Jewish state" and "The Arab state."  At no time was there any attempt by Arabs to allow a Palestinian Arab state to be created.

The third panel is a lie. During that time period, no one was calling for a Palestinian Arab state in the territories occupied by Jordan and Egypt - least of all, Jordan and Egypt, but Palestinian Arab leaders didn't demand one either. The PLO, founded in 1964, explicitly excluded the green areas from its desired state in its charter!

The fourth panel is a lie. Israel has not annexed all the white areas and has offered far more than the green areas for any future peace plan.

However, I am not sure if the Vancouver Jewish community's arguments, based on the ads making Jews feel insecure and unwelcome as they use the transit system, are the correct arguments to make.

I value free speech and those arguments make me uncomfortable. Seeing a message I passionately disagree with is not automatically an attack on me.

However, there is a very good reason why the ads should be taken down.  The problem isn't offensiveness - it is truth in advertising. 

According to the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards:

(a) Advertisements must not contain inaccurate, deceptive or otherwise misleading claims, statements, illustrations or representations, either direct or implied, with regard to any identified or identifiable product(s) or service(s).

(b) Advertisements must not omit relevant information in a manner that, in the result, is deceptive.
[...]

(e) Both in principle and practice, all advertising claims and representations must be supportable.

This ad clearly and provably fails each of these clauses.

This is why the ads must be pulled, and the people who place such lying and deceptive ads must be exposed not as advocates, but as liars and haters to whom truth is less important than demonizing the Jewish state.

I hope that the Zionist community in Vancouver goes after the ads on that basis. It should be a slam-dunk. Here is the webpage where one can file a complaint with Canadian Advertising Standards.

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Notable EoZ blog posts of 2012 (part 3)

July:

Switched at birth in Gaza?

Debunking "The Map that Lies"

English translation of the legal arguments in the Levy Report

Egyptian newspaper: "Death to the Jews"

Mahmoud Abbas' connections to the Munich Olympics massacre

August:

Egyptian "scientist" claims NASA hiding proof of Quranic miracle

There were a number of similar posts culminating in this one:
How Muslims misrepresent Western science as supporting the Koran

Churchill and Wedgwood on Palestinian Jews, 1921

September:

The Charlie Hebdo caricature of Mohammed (for some reason, my most popular post ever)

Masked terrorists with AK-47s celebrate "Mohammed - Messenger of Peace"

"We're not against Jews. We're against non-Arab Israeli citizens"

The fundamental dishonesty of Judith Butler

And I forgot about this one from June:

Islamic Jihad is coming after me, so I must defend myself.

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Best EoZ posts this week

Popular:
Debunking "The Map That Lies"
A very short essay on Zionism

Unearthing reference material:
Fourth Geneva Conventions, Article 49 - the Travaux Préparatoires
English translation of the legal arguments in the Levy Report

Irony alert:
Hamas demolishing homes of pre-1948 Arabs

Arabs rewriting history:
Jordanian official calls Jewish refugees from Arab countries "fabrications"

Most under-reported story:
Iran promises not to send athletes against Israelis in London. Will the IOC sanction them?

Media bias:
Israel welcoming black Jews as citizens, so AP reports "racism"

Book review (and interview):
"David & Goliath: The explosive inside story of media bias in the Mideast conflict"

Best linked article:
Europe's new anti-semitism (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks)

Best photo post:
Central Park 7/11

Also, this week I head about an Israeli company named Uppsite that automatically turns blogs into phone apps. There are some glitches they are working through so my blog is not a full-blown app yet, but you can see it as a "sub-app" if you download the Uppsite app from the Apple App Store and then search for "Elder of Ziyon."

You can compare it with how it looks under Google Currents, another app (Android and Apple, tablet and phone) that turns any blog into a very attractive magazine, optimizing it for size.

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