Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, December 20, 2018

A Twitter conversation with Americans for Peace Now @PeaceNowUS

From last Friday:

Seriously? Does Hamas shoot rockets to Ashkelon because of settlers? Were bus bombs in Tel Aviv because of settlers?

Are you really effing blaming the pregnant woman for being shot because she chooses to live in Judea?

You are despicable with your excusing terror.
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) December 14, 2018

So, as promised, here's the exchange. Americans for Peace Now claim that I'm the one who is ignoring everything the other says and that I "got mad."

Needless to say, APN didn't post their withering takedown of this supposed "right wing extremist" on their blog. (I have little problem with a two state solution - if Israel had an actual peace partner that would allow Jews to live there, to buy land and to freely visit their holy places without fear. The fact that the idea of such a solution is so absurd is the real problem, not Israeli intransigence.)

The post I linked to from 2010 is an important one. Peace Now's main argument is that "We advocate a negotiated Isr-Pal peace agreement, w/ 1-to-1 land swaps, that would leave most Israelis where they live now in the West Bank. Israel would then have complete moral high ground and full int'l support when responding to terrorism."

But does Israel really have full international support for Gaza operations after its full withdrawal? Does it really have full international support to respond to Hezbollah after its full withdrawal from Lebanon? It is an absurd fallacy, and Peace Now's entire existence is based on this fallacy of "IF Israel does what we want, THEN things will be peachy keen."

No one can argue that the "if/then" formulation is anything but wishful thinking. But it is the entire basis for Peace Now's existence!

It never worked before, but groups like Peace Now insist, without any evidence, that it will work - next time. And if it doesn't, well, it is because Israel didn't do enough.

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From IMEMC News:

Palestinian teacher Rana Ziada, from al-Zahra School, in Gaza, has been chosen among the 50 shortlisted for the world’s best teacher prize.

Ziada is competing for the best teacher, in the US $1 million Global Teacher Prize, which is carried out by Varkey Foundation.

Here are pictures from her Facebook page that romanticize violence:

She also recently featured this picture of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar:

I didn't know that teachers who teach their kids violence were praiseworthy.

UPDATE: On her nomination page, it says, "In 2004 Rana started work as a teacher in the East Gaza area of Palestine, an area near the dividing line with the occupied territories."

Meaning that the Global Teacher Prize considers all of Israel to be "occupied territories." (And, interestingly, since this text was clearly submitted by the teacher herself, she doesn't consider Gaza to be occupied!)

(h/t Mat2580)

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12/19 Links Pt2: Ben Shapiro: The Left Lends Cover to Anti-Semitism; Everyone is Misreporting the Texas BDS Lawsuit; How Historians Will See Canary Mission Years From Now

From Ian:

Ben Shapiro: The Left Lends Cover to Anti-Semitism

And Walker isn’t alone. In fact, anti-Semitism is often accepted by prominent black intellectuals on the left. Marc Lamont Hill trafficked in anti-Semitism for years before losing his CNN contributorship over preaching a Hamas slogan before the United Nations. Cornel West suggested that Israel was born because “Jews jumped out of the burning buildings of Europe in a Jew-hating Europe led by a gangster named Hitler, right? They landed on the backs of some Arabs in the 1940s.” Toni Morrison explained that “a lot of black people . . . believe that Jews in this country, by and large, have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.” James Baldwin suggested the same thing, explaining, “The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro’s understanding. It increases the Negro’s rage.”

And these are the intellectuals. A bevy of black “community leaders” have been similarly anti-Semitic, and survived and thrived. Rabid anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan was still welcome at Aretha Franklin’s funeral, where he hobnobbed with Bill Clinton. Al Sharpton, whose anti-Semitic record includes helping to incite a riot against Jews in Crown Heights in 1991 and an arson in 1995, has a show on MSNBC, and Democratic presidential candidates come to pay him homage. And while we tend to downplay it now, it’s rather telling that Barack Obama sat in the pews of anti-Semitic pastor Jeremiah Wright for two decades.

It’s a mark of the Left’s intersectional priorities that anti-Semitism from minority groups has been so widely ignored. It is a simple fact that anti-Semitism in the United States does not break down evenly by race. An Anti-Defamation League survey in 2016 found that 23 percent of black Americans had “anti-Semitic propensities,” as measured by an eleven-factor survey, compared with 10 percent of white Americans. That disproportion has been the norm since the ADL began the survey in 2007. Similar disproportionate anti-Semitism exists in the Hispanic community as well. But none of that draws any media coverage. As the New York Times admitted in its survey of anti-Semitic violence in New York City, “bias stemming from longstanding ethnic tensions in the city presents complexities that many liberals have chosen simply to ignore.”

Ignoring anti-Semitism depending on the perpetrator’s ethnicity or background is simply lending cover to anti-Semitism. Alice Walker should be just as toxic for her anti-Semitism as David Duke is for his. After all, they push the same message when it comes to Jews. Failing to acknowledge as much lends credence to the anti-Semitic idea that Jews have somehow earned their hatred from certain groups.

Media Once Again Wakes From Coma, Discovers Liberal Icon Is Anti-Semite

And yet just in the past few months, Walker has been interviewed by NPR, MSNBC (twice), BBC Radio, and now the Times with scarce a mention of her unconventional views. In the rare moments Walker's kooky beliefs have received media coverage, they are inevitably downplayed. Take the Associated Press article on the latest fiasco, obtusely headlined "Author Alice Walker criticized for support of writer's book."

Or take this April interview with the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, in which Walker said the following:
"David is actually brilliant, and I think people should listen more to what he has to say," she said. Reptilians? "What about it? My parents always said that the white people around us were like snakes, because of the way they treated us."

AJC‘s headline, amazingly, was "Author Alice Walker on women, men, and the fate of the planet."

It'd be easy to chalk this all up as a blind spot for Walker, an iconic African-American author. But it mirrors the recent muted reaction to an exhaustively-researched Tablet piece about the Women's March. The magazine confirmed that the feminist organization has been teeming with anti-Semitism from the outset, with national leaders berating their Jewish peers, repeating conspiracy theories about Jews, and outsourcing security to the militant wing of the Nation of Islam.

However, a Lexis Nexis search finds the Tablet piece got minimal coverage in the national media outside of Jewish and conservative outlets. The Washington Post mentioned the controversy in an aside in a piece about the Women's March rolling out a new platform. It received a short blurb in The Guardian‘s live-blog. Only New York Magazine asked "What the Hell Is Going on With the Women’s March?", and even that piece was more about a PR firm's inept attempt to deflect from the controversy.

Aaaaand, that's it. Three mentions.

Time and time again, the media fails at due diligence and ignores the warning signs of anti-semitism in those they agree with. Often they end up with egg on their face, as when CNN ignored complaints about contributor Marc Lamont Hill taking smiling photos with Louis Farrakhan, only to have to fire him a month later for a second anti-Semitism controversy.

The New York Times learned the same lesson yesterday. Ignore hate all you like, but don't act surprised when you end up publishing it.

Everyone is Misreporting the Texas BDS Lawsuit

Speech pathologist Bahia Amawi, who works as a contractor for the Pflugerville Independent School District in Texas, has filed a lawsuit claiming that an anti-boycott-of-Israel pledge she was asked to sign violates her First Amendment right to freedom of speech. This was reported first by Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept, who set the tone for the media coverage by claiming, in his typical exaggerated and dishonest fashion, that the lawsuit arose after Amawi "refused to sign an oath vowing that she 'does not' and 'will not' engage in a boycott of Israel or 'otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm' on that foreign nation." (Greenwald's headline is even more misleading, and demagogic in a way that undoubtedly appeals to anti-Semites, claiming that Ms. Amawi was required to sign a "pro-Israel oath.")

There are a lot of things I could say about the law and the lawsuit, but I have some time constraints, so I will just explain why Greenwald's take, repeated ingenuously by reporters apparently too lazy to look up the actual text of the underlying law and what Ms. Amawi was asked to sign, is wrong.

Texas has a law banning state entities from contracting with businesses, including sole proprietorships, that boycott Israel. As a result, just like local governments require contractors to certify that they adhere to many other state laws, such as anti-discrimination laws and financial propriety laws, they also must certify, in compliance with state law, that their business does not boycott Israel.

Note that, consistent with the language and obvious intent of the law (see the text here, it's even titled "PROHIBITION ON CONTRACTS WITH COMPANIES BOYCOTTING ISRAEL"), the school district certification applies to the business, "it," not the individual "she." Contrary to what I've been reading all over the internet, Ms. Amawi is not being asked to pledge that she, in her personal capacity, will not privately boycott Israel, much less that, e.g., she will not advocate for boycotting Israel or otherwise refrain from criticizing Israel.

No, a Texas woman did NOT lose her job for refusing to sign “pro-Israel pledge”

Here’s the headline of a Dec. 18th article at The Independent:

The claim that a Texas woman was forced to sign a “pro-Israel pledge” is repeated in the opening paragraph of the article.

A speech pathologist at a Texas elementary school has sued after allegedly being forced out of her contract job at an elementary school for refusing to sign a mandatory pro-Israel pledge.

First, it’s telling that the article is based on a report at the Intercept by Glenn Greenwald, a far-left activist who never misses an opportunity to smear Israel and its supporters, often by using antisemitic tropes and dog whistles. In fact, the Indy’s characterization of the requirement as a “pro-Israel pledge” was clearly inspired by language used by Greenwald in his report.

“I’ve been meaning to discuss this with you,” began my husband as he turned from Route 60 onto el-Amal St. We often turn off here to avoid the Gush Etzion-Jerusalem highway, which is invariably congested. It wasn’t built to handle the number of people who call Gush Etzion their home. El-Amal St. leads one to the intersection of what we locals call “Derech Wallajah” since the road passes the al-Wallajah village (though we never actually see the village). “Not that I want to speak of these things, but if something happens, what would you do?”

I feinted as if to scoot down into the well at the front of my seat, the front passenger seat, then looked to him for approval. “That’s good,” he said, “But now move to your left as you get down.”

I did it. “That’s right,” he said, explaining that this way was a better angle, a longer angle, that would help me fold my body into the tiny area.

In general, we feel safe on this road. The area is populated in the main by Christian Arabs. They are not out for our throats, though possibly for our business. Most of the small businesses, and several dentists letter their signs in Hebrew, too. Why not? Our shekels are just as good as anyone else’s.

But there have been so many attacks of late, ever since the UN declined to pass a resolution designating Hamas a terror organization. And even before that, an Israeli man was stabbed at the little mom and pop store called Ricardo, that lies just past the junction. We pass that store all the time, and wondered what would happen if we went in there.

Probably nothing. A friend often stops there for the 3 NIS cokes. For some reason, products available in Arab shops are dirt cheap. And anyway, we don’t believe it was a local, Christian Arab who stabbed the Jewish man, though who knows?

This isn’t the first time my husband has given me a mini-course on what to do in the event of a terror attack. Look, we’ve been in Gush Etzion since before the first Intifada. They called us “electioneers,” since settling us there was a bid to get Yitzchak Shamir elected. (P.S. It worked.)

We lived with our very large family in a flimsy little “caravan” on a windy hilltop. But my husband had to go overseas to visit his family back in Chicago. He worried about leaving us. So he practiced with me what to do should a terrorist infiltrate our home. Dov had me flip up the mattress against the wall, and mock shoot around the corners of doorways with my Uzi, until he was satisfied I knew my stuff.

The idea of practicing for terror attacks must be very disconcerting to people who don’t live where we live. And they might wonder that we chose to raise our children in such a place. Maybe they think we are crazy. Or that we are thrill seekers.

Others hate and revile us, because they think we have no right to live in our indigenous territory. These people have turned the word “settler” into a pejorative (though I have always seen it as the most honorable designation possible).

I do not sympathize with people who profiteer from tragedy. I have no sympathy for robbers. | Opinionhttps://t.co/h9cWBSVJE3
— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) December 16, 2018

But the truth is, we live in a state of protective denial. We live here because we believe that the more people who live here, the safer it is for all of us. For us it can’t only be lip service or part time. We have to be here, feel compelled to secure the land for our people. It’s a mitzvah called Kibush Haaretz.

I’m too old for thrill-seeking and my sanity is in check. Most of the time, I’m just fine. I don’t think about the danger. But sometimes it gets to me. After all, I tell people, I’m a writer. My imagination gets carried away.

So sometimes I’m in bed on a Friday night, resting after a hard day of cooking while the men are in shul, and my mind starts to wander. I imagine a knock at the door, and when I answer, an Arab sprays my face with bullets. I picture myself crumpling to the ground. My husband coming home to see me in a pool of blood.

Or sometimes I’ll be washing dishes at the kitchen sink, and I’ll imagine an Arab construction worker coming up to the window, smashing it in with a brick, climbing in and grabbing me by the neck, then stabbing me multiple times until I am dead. My children coming home from school and finding me like that.

It’s just my imagination running wild. But it echoes so many scenarios that have actually happened in our part of the world. There was an attack in Kiryat Arba in 2003, that happened just like that knock on the door on a Sabbath eve scenario. Which is why it haunts me.

But most of the time, I don’t think about any of this. Because you really can’t live like that, breathing danger. It’s no way to live. You use the Stanislavsky method and act as if everything is okay, and you (and your family) are safe. It’s a kind of protective shield, this active denial and I welcome it (and dread those moments when my imagination runs away with itself).

When people ask me if I’m not frightened to live where I do, I ask them if Squirrel Hill, where I grew up around the corner from Tree of Life Synagogue, is safe. What is safe, where is safe, when one is Jewish?

Is it better to live in Squirrel Hill believing you are safe, or is it better to live in Gush Etzion, as prepared as anyone can be for the worst, and hanging tough? What is the point of dying as a Jew in someone else’s country?

I always think that if I die in a terror attack in Gush Etzion, God forbid, at least I will have lived a life worth living. If it has to happen, and I hope it won’t—I know I have a lot of living left to do—at least I will have done my part for my people, strengthening our inheritance, the land.

Here I will make a confession: not all of my children share my deepest religious convictions. But all 12 of them share a deep and abiding affection for the land. So maybe I didn’t get all of it right, but I think I got some of it right—the part that has to do with love of country.

And if I could do it all over again, live anywhere else in the world, I know I’d want to be right here in Judea, living in protective denial and hanging tough.

My heart wants nothing more.

The Whole AirBnB Fiasco Is A Good Pretext For Not Cleaning My House (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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The Whole AirBnB Fiasco Is A Good Pretext For Not Cleaning My House

By Yaakov Cohen, Gush Etzion resident

Efrata, December 19 - Don't tell my wife, but the recent foofaraw over de-listing Jewish-owned short-term rental properties in Judea and Samaria provides just the excuse I need to delay clearing out that spare bedroom we've been using as storage space and making it livable again.

I'm going to dress it up in just the right terms when we talk, though. One does have to maintain appearances for diplomacy's sake. "Oh, wouldn't you know it, I was just about to find a better place for those boxes of old textbooks and binders, but it doesn't make so much sense now, huh. Those bastards." "Yeah, I know, I was also looking forward to earning a bit of extra income on that room, but you know how it goes." That kind of thing.

Renting out the room on AirBnB was my idea in the first place, so this helps me save face, at least temporarily. I suppose I owe Human Rights Watch a little thank you for their efforts in saving me some hard work. While I'm at it, you don't think any of them would like an old wooden cradle? I think it's an antique. My brother-in-law slept in it as a baby fifty years ago, so it's gotta be worth something. Couldn't bear to just chuck it. Well, in the back of the spare bedroom it stays. No need to disturb anything there now. Certainly not the boxes of audio cassettes I haven't gotten around to converting to digital. Any month now on that score. I think there might even be a Lez Miz original Broadway cast album in there.

Outwardly I have to act as if I'm really annoyed, that it's unconscionable for AirBnB to cave like that to propaganda and harassment by so-called human rights organizations. All that's true, but I'm finding it hard to get totally into the indignation when the situation suits me just fine. I mean, Lord knows what the hell I was going to do with those random cables and connectors I could swear we'll have a desperate need for within days of getting rid of them.

Still, there could be a reversal. Even if there isn't, my wife might hear about any of the dozen alternatives to AirBnB such as Booking.com, VRBO, or this new Israeli site launched specifically to address the AirBnB thing, OlehStay. Then I could really be in trouble.

Here's hoping they don't cave.

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12/19 Links Pt1: Netanyahu calls Hezbollah tunnel-digging ‘act of war’; Israel to present evidence proving Lebanese army assists Hezbollah; Poll shows Hamas leader would defeat Abbas to win Palestinian elections

From Ian:

Ahead of UN meet, Netanyahu calls Hezbollah tunnel-digging ‘act of war’

Ahead of a United Nations Security Council meeting on the attack tunnels Hezbollah dug across the Lebanese-Israeli border, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday urged the international community to take decisive action against the Shiite terrorist group.

At an English-language press conference at the Knesset, Netanyahu called Hezbollah’s tunnel-digging an “act of war,” and accused the Lebanese Armed Forces of doing nothing to counter those acts. While Beirut did not know about the tunnels while they were being dug, its military now knows but still fails to act, he maintained.

He also revealed that he recently spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a bid to convince Moscow not to defend Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors during Wednesday’s Security Council session.

Netanyahu said that the four tunnels the Israeli army has so far discovered in its recently launched, ongoing effort to uncover such passages were aimed to “penetrate our territory, kidnap our people, including civilians, murder civilians, and conquer the northern piece of the Galilee. This is not merely an act of aggression. It’s an act of war. It’s part of a war plan, I would say.”

Every third house in South Lebanon is used in one way or another to hide Hezbollah’s tunnel-digging project, the prime minister charged. “It’s targeting Israeli civilians while hiding behind Lebanese civilians. That’s a double war crime,” he charged.

Israel to present evidence proving Lebanese army assists Hezbollah

Some two weeks after Israel launched Operation Northern Shield to eliminate Hezbollah's cross-border attack tunnels from Lebanon, Israel has said it will present the U.N. Security Council with damning evidence proving that the Lebanese army has been helping Hezbollah in its excavation efforts in violation of the U.N.'s resolutions.

The council was set to meet on Wednesday, days after the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon concluded that the tunnels snaking under the Israel-Lebanon border and jutting into Israeli territory were a violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701.

The resolution, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah, prohibits the presence of any Lebanese armed group south of the Litani River, apart from the central government's military, known as the Lebanese Armed Forces.

On Tuesday, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon said that "now that UNIFIL has confirmed that the Hezbollah tunnels are a severe breach of Resolution 1701, the Security Council is duty-bound to use every means at its disposal against Hezbollah, which continues its buildup under the auspices of the Lebanese government."

Danon plans to emphasize that Lebanese troops have given their tacit approval and turned a blind eye to Hezbollah's tunneling activity, effectively sanctioning it.

IDF: Suspicious rock formation, strange fire helped locate 4th Hezbollah tunnel

The Israeli military on Wednesday said it had become aware of a recently uncovered cross-border tunnel from Lebanon thanks to a number of suspicious incidents in the area in recent years.

The tunnel near the Lebanese village of Ramyeh, the fourth uncovered so far in the army’s operation to unearth and destroy Hezbollah attack tunnels, had been monitored for years before the Israel Defense Forces launched Operation Northern Shield this month.

The IDF noted that several factors had led it to suspect that a tunnel was being dug from a forested area near Ramyeh: the burning of a single tree in May 2016, the appearance of a new rock formation at the site, and the creation of new and unnatural paths in the area.

The army said the tunnel, which it uncovered over the weekend, crossed a few meters into Israeli territory but was not yet operational.

The village is opposite the Israeli town of Zarit, where residents in the past complained of hearing digging sounds, prompting an IDF investigation in 2014. But the military said that probe had not had results, and the tunnel was found unrelated to locals’ reports. There were no details on when Hezbollah began building the tunnel.

The army said IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot toured the area with other top military commanders Wednesday to survey the digging operation.

“The effort to expose and neutralize terror tunnels will continue as needed,” the military said in a statement.

Last week I reported that a major Netflix movie, The Old Story, was being filmed in Jordan as a stand-in for Israel, and filming was stopped when angry residents complained that Jews would be present for a scene where a terrorist hides in a mosque after a bombing.

Now, the Minister of Islamic Affairs in Jordan is trying to reassure residents that they have nothing to fear.

After investigation, he is pleased to announce that not a single Jew is involved in the filming in Jordan.

In a press conference, minister Abdullah al-Abbadi said that the filming in the mosque of Abu Nusair al-Kabir does not harm the Islamic religion and "there is no form of normalization with the occupation. "

In a meeting with the parliamentary committee to discuss the subject of the film yesterday he denied the presence of any Jews in the film, stressing that the only people involved were Jordanians and Palestinians and non-Jewish foreigners.

He said the production company has vowed not to insult any religion, but rather to spread tolerance and peace among people, and not to carry out any bombings inside the mosque and to return the mosque to its previous state in the event of any damage. He also said that the film "serves our cause," i.e., it won't make anyone look bad but Israelis.

He also said that the the American producer of the film donated over $42,000 to the mosque.

The deputy head of the committee, Yahya al-Saud, adopted a memorandum of confidence in the Minister of Awqaf, Nasser Abu al-Basal, against the backdrop of filming the film, stressing that the Jordanian people reject any normalization with the "occupation."

"Occupation" is, of course, how Jordan and other Arab states refer to all of Israel.

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