Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

03/16 Links Pt2: Why anti-Zionists lie and exaggerate about Israel; State Dept. Hire Who Ran UN Terrorist Textbook Program Also Spoke at Anti-Israel Conference

From Ian:

Gil Troy: Why anti-Zionists lie and exaggerate about Israel

Radicals used the horrific George Floyd murder in 2020 to popularize the Deadly Exchange libel blaming IDF training for police brutality – as if American racists need Israeli coaching to hate. Now, Bash Israel Firsters tweeting “War in Ukraine = Continued violent takeover of the West Bank,” link two random events, trying to hijack the world’s justifiable disgust with Vladimir Putin – to dump on Israel.

Writers who make their careers demonizing Israel embrace this libelous idiocy. In The Guardian, Peter Beinart argued that if “remaking borders by force violates a core principle of international law,” America must undo “Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 war.” Straining to compare Israel with Russia, Beinart prefers twistory to history, ignoring the inconvenient facts that Syria repeatedly bombarded Israel from the Golan and never respected Israel’s right to exist – I somehow missed Ukraine’s bombing and anti-Russian delegitimization campaign.

In a harsher screed, “Justifications for Destroying a People,” Beinart equated the “arguments Russia’s government deploys to dehumanize Ukrainians” with “the ones Israel’s government uses to dehumanize Palestinians.” Targeting that evil, right-wing maniac Yair Lapid, who dared to suggest, as Gazans tried swarming Israel in 2018, that “the Hamas charter repeatedly calls for the genocide of the Jews, and these riots were another element in Hamas’s attempts to destroy the State of Israel,” Beinart declared: “Baselessly accusing a people of committing genocide creates the pretext for horrendous violence.” Such twistory, in the rush to demonize Israel, overlooks decades of Palestinian terrorism stirred by Palestinians’ “Death to the Jews” (not just Israel) rhetoric.

These obsessive attacks weave antisemitism into anti-Zionism, as the Jewish state becomes the despised, scapegoated collective Jew, the all-purpose lightning rod attracting so many different bolts of hatred. These smears prove that Jews can be guilty of Jew-hatred when they collaborate in the Jew-haters’ dirty work. They prove how plastic Jew-hating Zionophobia is, as the haters keep adapting it to changing headlines. And they prove Natan Sharansky’s analysis that demonizing and delegitimizing Israel, holding it to double standards, sinks from criticizing Israel into traditional cesspools of Jew-hatred.

In this topsy-turvy context, I admire Paul O’Brien’s honesty. This Amnesty International official said Israel “shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state.” He dismissed scientific polls showing that 80% of American Jews support Israel – because those aren’t the elitist progressives he hobnobs with. “I actually don’t believe that to be true,” O’Brien proclaimed. Why? “I believe my gut tells me” that instead of a Jewish state, American Jews want “a safe Jewish space.”

Ruthie Blum: A free lunch for Amnesty's antisemitism

Sure, as long as the antisemitism and accompanying physical attacks on Jews don't emanate from left-wing and pro-Palestinian sources (which, of course, they do). Indeed, during Operation Guardian of the Walls last May, while Israel defended itself from barrages of Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets from Gaza, as well as from bloody riots in eastern Jerusalem and Arab-populated cities elsewhere in the country, Jews around the United States and Europe were being pummeled in broad daylight.

The disingenuousness on display during O'Brien's talk was in tough competition with his organization's lies. His assertion that one of the goals of the Amnesty report was to "collectively change the conversation" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which "needs to start, first and foremost, with the Jewish community," is a perfect example.

As Jewish Insider revealed, he cast aspersions on a 2020 Ruderman Family Foundation survey showing that "eight in 10 Jewish Americans identify as 'pro-Israel,' and two-thirds feel emotionally 'attached' or 'very attached' to the Jewish state."

He had the nerve to say, "I actually don't believe that to be true. I believe my gut tell[ing] me that what Jewish people in this country want is to know that there's a sanctuary that is a safe and sustainable place that the Jews, the Jewish people, can call home."

Where this so-called "safe Jewish space" is concerned, he said, "I think they can be convinced over time that the key to sustainability is to adhere to what I see as core Jewish values, which are to be principled and fair and just in creating that space."

Finally, the anti-Zionist educating Jews about "core Jewish values" insisted that "the right of the people to self-determination and to be protected is without a doubt something that we believe in, and I personally believe that. [But] we are opposed to the idea – and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate – that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people."

It's not surprising that O'Brien exhibited the very antisemitism that he was denying. Amnesty International does that on a regular basis.

But his audience, made up of "enlightened" Democrats, welcomed him as a speaker. The point is that nothing Israel can do – other than totally succumb to its own progressives and Palestinian lobbyists – will remove the "wedge" that the left inserted with gusto.

Open Letter to My Fellow Progressive Jews: Amnesty Wants to Tokenize You

And finally: Do you think it is appropriate to attempt to weaponize my Jewish identity against my Jewish community, or convince me to participate in the delegitimization of the world’s only Jewish state, especially if you don’t have expansive answers to each of the above questions?

I also want to remind my fellow progressive Jews that standing up for yourself and your people does not mean you must be silent on the plight of the Palestinians. We can—we must—fight for their sovereignty and self-determination with the same fervor that we fight for our own. This is not a binary—except to the extent that organizations like Amnesty work so hard to try to make it one.

For 2000 years pre-1948, Jews were violently denied self-determination everywhere we lived. Jews, and the international community, supported Israel as a Jewish democracy knowing that, in the context of a world order defined by nation-states, it was the only way to ensure Jewish self-determination. Without Israel, without sovereignty, Jews would be plunged back into a state of total systemic powerlessness, our self-determination and our communal security ripped away. Mr. O’Brien and Amnesty need to know that despite their self-declared conviction in “Jewish self-determination,” that without supporting the sovereign existence of the Jewish state, this phrase is nothing more than an empty platitude.

So to my fellow progressive Jews who have felt this squeeze before, and to those who will feel it in the future, please know: Your Jewish community stands with you. Truth, righteousness and liberation for all are not and cannot be exclusive to any people, but they are core values of your people. You can believe in, and fight for, the Jewish future without abandoning your dreams of the same free, sovereign, self-determined future for the Palestinian people. In fact, recognizing the humanity and the inalienable rights of both peoples is the only way for progress to ever occur. And anyone who tells you otherwise is perpetuating anti-Jewish blind spots, biases and bigotries that will harm us all.

The other day I read that some yokel named “Paul O’Brien” thinks Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state. Which is interesting, because I’ve never heard of the guy, so who cares what he thinks? Personally, I think that people who think that Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state, shouldn’t exist.

Paul O’Brien is apparently some sort of an icon for the hard, Jew-hating left as head of Amnesty International USA—even if no one else has ever heard of him. (I certainly haven’t.) He’s probably getting much more attention than he should at the moment, especially from Jews, regarding his response when told of a survey in which most American Jews said they identify as pro-Israel:

“I believe my gut tells me that what Jewish people in this country want is to know that there’s a sanctuary that is a safe and sustainable place that the Jews, the Jewish people can call home.”

O’Brien’s “gut” didn’t tell him these things at all. Paul O’Brien, however, thinks that if he tells Jews that his gut tells him something, they will listen and believe him. Which is funny, because Paul O’Brien is a nonentity, a flash in the pan, a dumb little twit.

Paul O’Brien knows that Israel is not about having a safe space and it’s not about having something Jews can “call” home. It’s about a very particular piece of real estate and we don’t “call” it home. It actually IS home. And has been for thousands of years.

We think that’s pretty darned “sustainable.” Unlike Paul O’Brien. People like O’Brien—conniving, ugly-hearted people like O’Brien and Haman—have come and gone throughout the centuries. But guess what? The Jews are still here. Even though that grinds your gut, Paul O’Brien.

Paul O’Brien thinks he can cajole Jews into thinking that Israel is superfluous to them by warning them off and threatening them. When O’Brien tells Jews what they really need is a safe, sustainable place, what he’s telling them is that Israel never really belonged to them. According to O’Brien, the Jews only created Israel to be safe, but their presence in the land is not “sustainable,” which means they will never be safe if they try to stay in Israel. Because what Paul O’Brien really wants is to get the Jews the hell out of Israel so he can flood it with fake Arab refugees. Because hey, “Those nasty JEWS.”

He doesn’t even try hide it, Paul O’Brien. “I think they can be convinced over time that the key to sustainability is to adhere to what I see as core Jewish values which are to be principled and fair and just in creating that space.”

Aye yay yay. Everything “I” Paul O’Brien. Or should I say RABBI Paul O’Brien, since he clearly knows so much more than your average Chaim Yankel about core Jewish values. But no. Jews see what he did there.

By saying that Jewish values are to be “principled and fair and just,” O’Brien is saying that Jews are not being principled, fair, or just, in creating our “space,” meaning the Jewish State, which—as it happens, Paul O’Brien—was created on Jewish indigenous soil. We didn’t create or invent our history in the land or our religious imperative to live there. As Balfour and the League of Nations, as people who have actually read the bible, well knew.

In fact, I am sure that Paul O’Brien himself is familiar with the bible, and knows the truth. Israel has always belonged to the Jews. But in O’Brien’s Jew-hating little mind, Jews are an unprincipled lot, and so unfair in having created a Jewish State of Israel on Jewish land that Arabs want. That’s just not just, says “Paul O’Brien,” who insists on goy-splaining to us that we are going against our own religious principles, by insisting on living on land coveted by others, POC who only lately tried to claim it as their own.

What we have here in O’Brien’s statement is not a treatise on Jewish values, but a threat (emphasis added):

“I think they can be convinced over time that the key to sustainability is to adhere to what I see as core Jewish values which are to be principled and fair and just in creating that space.”

What Paul O’Brien did here was to say that the Jews will never be safe in Israel, that our presence there is unsustainable. O’Brien as much as said, “If you want to stay alive, you better do what I, Paul O’Brien say, and get the hell out of Israel.”

In case you haven’t, AS A JEW, absorbed his meaning, O’Brien is happy break it all down for you (emphasis added):

[Israel] shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state, [though Amnesty] takes no political views on any question, including the right of the State of Israel to survive.

In other words, Israel has no right to exist, but Amnesty will cover its butt by saying it has no particular view on whether or not Israel has a right to survive. Which kind of means Amnesty doesn’t think Israel has the right to survive. Which is pretty much a green light for Arab terrorists to do what terrorists do: kill Jews in order to remove them permanently from the Land of Israel—land that has always belonged to the Jewish people.

Look at it like this. You go to the Riviera for a month's vacation. You come back and strangers are in your house. But it’s your house. They don’t get to stay there, even if they’ve unpacked and settled in—lived there for an entire month. Their presence in your home is and remains actually illegal. It’s breaking and entering.

Of course, the Jews were not in the Riviera on vacation. We were expelled from our home. Numerous times. By foreigners who covet our land, having created new religions built on Jewish scripture that repaint reality and distort the truth: that Israel belongs to the Jews. That God gave the land to the Jews, and commands them to live there.

O’Brien however, not content with denying the Jews’ rightful presence in the land, and Jewish land rights, says Jews may have a right to self-determination, but not in Israel, where Jews, according to O’Brien, have no right to be. “The right of the people to self-determination and to be protected is without a doubt something that we believe in, and I personally believe that. We are opposed to the idea — and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate — that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people.”

O’Brien thinks all peoples have the right to self-govern, including Jews. It’s just that the Jews should not be in Israel, which should, in his opinion, not be Jewish. (Personally, I think Paul O’Brien shouldn’t be Irish. But what do I know?)

What Paul O’Brien needs to know is that the Jews aren’t going anywhere, and this time, the enemy will not vanquish us, no matter how much O’Brien would like them to off those effing Jews. We’ve built a powerful army to protect us from outsiders trying to take our land from us once again, outsiders who resort to violence against civilians, much as the Russians have done with Ukraine and to Ukrainians.

The Jews did not leave their home to vacation in the Riviera for a month. We were forced out of our land by strangers, and left to wander the inhospitable world. The truth is, there is no “safe space” for Jews. Even Israel is not safe for Jews. People like O’Brien and the organization he represents, ensure and perpetuate this truth and this lack of Jewish safety.

But O’Brien cannot pull the wool over our eyes. His false assurances are false. And anyway, we will never be convinced that our presence in Israel is somehow unprincipled, unjust, or unfair. We will never be convinced that Jerusalem is not ours. We will never be convinced that some random people can have our holy land. Because our ancient prayers and commandments tell us all day long that Israel is ours and we need to be there, no matter what.

No matter that “In each and every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.”

O’Brien perhaps forgot the next bit of that verse: “And the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hands,” as He did when we were enslaved in Egypt, as He did when Haman attempted the genocide of the Jewish people in Persia, as He did when the Greeks came into the land and outlawed the practice of Judaism.

O’Brien may have forgotten, but the Jews did not. We didn’t forget any of the times that Jews were attacked and forced to wander from place to place. We didn’t forget being expelled from our land, and returning again and again. We daily spoke of our return to the land, numerous times a day in our prayers, prayers that are in our ancient tongue, which we always retained.

The connection was never severed. And O’Brien will one day grow old and die and he will be gone. But the Jewish connection to the Land, and the Jewish presence in the Land, will continue. Whether O’Brien and his ilk, and the false claimants to the Land, like it or not.

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

Read all about it here!

Morality propaganda: Ukrainian refugees, Israel, and money (Forest Rain)

By Forest Rain

Over the years I have learned to smell propaganda. Being an Israeli means being under constant attack – both overt and covert. We are threatened with physical violence, terrorism, and war. We are also threatened by more sophisticated and elegant methods such as lawfare (using the court system as a weapon of war) and media manipulation, propaganda designed to wage war in the court of public opinion.

News is supposed to report facts. Opinion and feelings are in the eyes of the beholder and have their place. Propaganda is different in that it deliberately presents partial facts, rumors, half-truths, or lies as if they were news, as if they were facts, to win the war of public opinion.

Propaganda designed to delegitimize Israel and even destroy her from within is a billion-dollar business. The BDS movement to organizations like “Breaking the Silence” and the New Israel Fund are just a few examples. Foreign organizations and governments have and are meddling in Israeli internal affairs in countless ways (If you don’t know about this please read Catch the Jew by Tuvia Tenenbaum and take a look at the Terrorists in Suits report).

Now, the eyes of the world are turned to Ukraine, and yet, in this war that has nothing to do with Israel or Jews, somehow Israel, Jews, and the Holocaust, are in the limelight. Why?

Russian and Ukrainian leadership have both invoked Holocaust comparisons to elicit sympathy for their cause and to prod Israel into supporting them. That’s propaganda.

Although Israel has already sent enormous amounts of humanitarian aid to Ukraine, we are told that we aren’t doing enough to help.

Although Israel has gone to extraordinary measures to rescue Jewish Ukrainians, non-Jewish Ukrainians who fall under the category of the “Right of Return” and embraced Ukrainians with no connection to anything Jewish or Israeli we are accused of heartlessness and told that we should open our doors to all Ukrainians, with no stipulations and no limits. The Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel has deemed our immigration policy unacceptable and has sued the Israeli court system in order to force our elected government to change policy.

That’s lawfare.

Israel is under attack and most people don’t even seem to notice.

You might ask, who is attacking Israel? Why? The real question is, why not? There are many individuals and institutions who are motivated to attack Israel and the war in Ukraine provides a perfect “let no crisis go to waste” opportunity.
The world is changing. It is again acceptable to openly express Jew-hate. There is a global trend towards socialism and collectivism, against individualism, free speech, and anything that reflects national pride. Israel is the last hold-out of Judeo-Christian values and independent thinking in a time when many are promoting dependency and victimhood. Many desire the destruction of Israel but it can’t be countered if people don’t even realize what is happening.

It is easy to tell you are under attack when the violence is physical. When morality propaganda is turned against you it is more difficult.

For Jews in particular, morality propaganda is like kryptonite, devastating in its effectiveness.

Suddenly, from every direction, we are told what is moral and that, to belong to the correct team, to be on “the right side of history” we must behave according to the definition proposed of what is moral. The arguments are designed to trigger emotions, not thinking, to push us into doing what feels right rather than what is in our best interest.

Morality propaganda appeals to the most basic human desires. We want to feel that we are good people. We want to belong to the right team.

Jewish empathy and the drive to make things better, to minimize suffering, is deeply ingrained in every fiber of our being. We know it is our job to be a “light unto the nations” and model what is good and right. On Passover, we are directed to “remember that once we were slaves in Egypt.” Jews have been banished from their homes so many times, over so many centuries that the displacement caused in WW2 is only a more recent horror among many. We know what it’s like to be refugees, with no home and no place to turn to. How can we not have sympathy for other refugees? Jewish empathy has driven Jews to participate in the US Civil Rights movement and in countless charities around the world, striving to make the world better for others.

Jews and especially Israelis are not cowed by violence. We know how to fight back in the legal arena. Being told that we are not kind enough, not supportive enough, that we must not allow what was done to us to be done to others knocks the air out of us.

We must be kind. We must act. We must remember. We must not allow what was done to us to be done to others. But is that what is happening?

The easiest way to determine where the truth ends and morality propaganda begins is to follow the money.

Spontaneous, grass-roots demonstrations don’t come with pre-printed, professionally designed signs. That takes organizations and funding.

Especially not branded signs.

I was unfamiliar with the logo on the signs in this image of a “spontaneous” demonstration in demanding Israel bring Ukrainian non-Jewish refugees so I looked them up. On their website it says: Zazim is an independent movement, brought together by shared values of human rights, combatting the occupation and racism, and social and environmental justice… On their who funds us page it says: We are an independent organization that does not receive any funds from governments, political parties or corporations. Further down that same page it says: The rest of our budget comes from private foundations - the New Israel Fund and affiliated donors as well as the Rockefeller Foundation

Jews and Arabs against the “occupation.” New Israel Fund. That explains a lot.

And then there is this series of very expensive billboards that suddenly appeared in the center of the country in prominent locations. Each depicts a “refugee” crying out to a specific politician “Why are you deporting me?!” In a brilliant marketing move, the different posters are directed to the leading politicians in the government, both on the right and the left. This supports the idea that this is a cry for morality rather than an agenda driven campaign.

The slogan used is: “A Jew doesn’t deport a refugee.” The wording makes it obvious that the people in question are not Jews and yet the appeal is towards the morality of Jews. The slogan comes from the Disengagement from Gaza when Jews pleaded with the government to not rip them from their homes “A Jew doesn’t deport a Jew.” The choice of this slogan is both a cynical perversion of the original message and an assumption that the useful idiots are too stupid to remember.

I really don’t like being manipulated.

The organization that is credited for this campaign is the “Forum for the Absorption of Ukrainian Refugees.” Absorption as in immigration, not providing temporary shelter. Where did this forum suddenly appear from, overnight? They have a web page to gather leads and active social media platforms. They swiftly gathered the activist celebrities on their side and are pushing this agenda on every platform available.

Interestingly, I didn’t see any mention of who funds them. It does say that they have offices in a central location in Tel Aviv. Again – money. Lots of it.

The genius of this morality campaign frightens me. The use of empathy and Jewish values to undermine the foundation of the Jewish State is diabolical.

The Israeli public is generally very logical and reasonable. When surveyed about their opinion on how to handle the non-Jewish refugee question their answers were:

25% Only those eligible under the Law of Return should be allowed in
24% Adhere to the cap the government decided on [5000 people]
24% Increase the amount the government determined [in other words, have some limit but allow more]

13% Let in everyone, with no limitations

In other words, there is a public consensus that a limitation is necessary, it’s only a question of where to draw the line.

It is a tiny minority that is making all the noise, participating, amplifying the morality campaign, and pressuring our politicians to remake policy into an image of a New Israel – a country that might have Jewish citizens but isn’t a Jewish State.

When Amnesty declared that the Jewish State should not exist, many, including friends of Israel abroad, immediately denounced this unacceptable stance. When organizations and even foreign governments declare that the Jewish State has no right to determine that immigrants should be Jewish or at least connected to Israel, few see the problem with that.

After all, we all want to be moral, don’t we?

03/16 Links Pt1: Zelensky invokes 9/11, Pearl Harbor in plea to US Congress for no-fly zone; The False Narrative of Israeli Neutrality in Russia’s Ukraine Invasion

From Ian:

Eli Lake: The World Has Changed and We Must Change Along With It

Zelensky’s bravery in the face of overwhelming odds has proved a reminder that great peril can produce great leaders. America is in desperate need of such leadership today. Our country has been mired in self-doubt. We have forgotten who we are. The nationalist right and the socialist left don’t agree on much, but they both regard America’s recent wars as moral abominations and the country’s economic realities as marks of an irredeemable corruption. Who are we to judge or intervene, when we have tortured prisoners and droned wedding parties? Who are we to promote equality when we have income inequality?

It’s time for both parties to soundly reject this myopic politics. American global leadership is the only way that weaker democracies can survive. It is the only chance for long-term peace. And for all the ugly chapters in American history, our enemies have done and are doing and will do worse. We remain a beacon of hope for all people who struggle for freedom, whether we know it or not.

Rejecting the recent myopia and division requires some faith in the American people as well. The campaign against “disinformation”—much of it based in the idea that stupid Americans were wildly susceptible to Russian manipulation—has resulted in pointless censorship. We should not make that mistake again. Consider that all of Russia’s propaganda and bribery in Europe, aimed at weakening the continent’s resolve during a war like this, has failed miserably. Putin’s menace and Zelensky’s heroism galvanized Europeans and their leaders to impose unprecedented sanctions on Russia and reinvestment in their militaries in record time. There is no need to ban Russian state propaganda from the Internet. Moscow’s lies are self-discrediting.

This moment should also stir the Republican Party to take a hard look at its future. Donald Trump is too enamored with strong men to carry on America’s tradition of fighting tyranny. He views their amorality as a new kind of realism. Republicans have every reason to look higher.

And so, too, does Joe Biden. He is the leader of the free world—but he seems be more concerned about his position as the leader of a domestic political party whose elites have spent the past two years embracing the idea that America was born in evil and is awash in racist sin even now. He has greeted the challenge from Putin with resolve, but he has also defaulted to a strangely passive notion that Putin will fail in his goals because “freedom” will somehow triumph over “tyranny.” That’s not how it works. Tyranny must be resisted and boxed in as a precondition for freedom’s eventual victory. It will not happen on its own. It never does, and it never will.

If Biden cannot find a way to greet this moment by saying unambiguously that we are the good guys, that our cause is just, and that we are engaged in a titanic struggle with evil regimes that believe that the only way they can rise is if we fall, history will dub him a dominated weakling.

We must prepare for the long struggle ahead. The world has changed. We must change along with it.

Putin’s American Apologists

On the left, the Democratic Socialists of America—once a fringe group but that now boasts in its ranks four members of the U.S. House of Representatives (Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman) as well as dozens of state legislators and many local officials—issued a statement on January 31 in response to Russia’s massing its army on Ukraine’s borders. It began:

Following months of increased tensions and a sensationalist Western media blitz drumming up conflict in the Donbas, the US government is responding to the situation in Ukraine through the familiar guise of threats of sweeping sanctions, provision of military aid, and increased military deployment to the region. [DSA] opposes this ongoing US brinkmanship, which only further escalates the crisis, and reaffirms our previous statement saying no to NATO and its imperialist expansionism and disastrous interventions across the world.

Nowhere did the document attempt to explain what had caused the sudden “increased tensions,” or so much as mention the Russian forces. It called instead on the U.S. “to reverse its ongoing militarization of the region.”

When the Russians attacked, DSA issued a new statement, which did indeed condemn the invasion while opposing any “coercive measures… economic or military” to counter it. In contrast to the UN General Assembly, which voted almost unanimously to “demand” the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces, DSA merely “urge[d]” this. It went on to “reaffirm our call for the USA to withdraw from NATO, and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” and it declared “solidarity with…antiwar protestors in both countries [Russia and Ukraine],” although it did not explain where the latter had been sighted.

Others on the left were less flagrant but also assigned more blame to Washington than Moscow. Noam Chomsky, in a lengthy interview in the online journal Truthout, explained:
The crisis has been brewing for 25 years as the US contemptuously rejected Russian security concerns, in particular their clear red lines: Georgia and especially Ukraine. There is good reason to believe that this tragedy could have been avoided.

Now, he said, focus must turn to the future. He warned, “repeatedly, [America’s] reaction has been to reach for the six-gun rather than the olive branch.” But the superior wisdom of a gentler approach, he explained, had been taught to him personally during his wartime travels to North Vietnam by representatives of the Viet Cong, a group whose penchant for gentleness was lost on less acute observers than Chomsky. Moreover, he added, “like it or not, the choices are now reduced to an ugly outcome that rewards rather than punishes Putin for the act of aggression—or the strong possibility of terminal war.” In short, our only sure path to avoid nuclear Armageddon is one that “rewards” Putin.

Lee Smith: Biden Blames the Jews for His Ukraine Policy

Even with Moscow supporting Assad’s war on their border, the Israelis stood publicly with Ukraine. Shortly after Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Israel voted at the U.N. in defense of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Soon, Russian forces would move toward Israel’s border with its 2015 escalation in Syria, a move celebrated at the time by U.S. officials but in no way welcomed by the Israelis.

In public, Obama’s aides claimed Russia would help rid the world of ISIS and other terror groups, but that’s not why Putin dispatched his forces at the request of Iranian terror commander Qassem Soleimani. The Russians were there to support Iran. And that’s what Obama wanted, too. What was the point, after all, of legalizing Iran’s industrial-scale nuclear program, if the Iranian regime was going to lose its war in Syria? Iran had to win, which meant Putin had to help. The government of then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understood that for the first time in half a century, Jerusalem would not have Washington’s support if it wound up in a shooting war with Moscow.

Accordingly, the Israelis worked out a modus vivendi with Putin, a “deconfliction” mechanism by which Israel was permitted in certain circumstances to attack Syrian and Iranian forces, including Hezbollah. But should the Israelis get it into their heads to conduct air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, they’d have hell to pay on their border. Putin supplied the deterrence that protected the only foreign policy goal that really mattered to Obama. With Putin in Syria, Israel could only go so far.

Yet even then, in December 2016, Israel again took Kyiv’s side at the U.N. in a vote on the human rights situation in Crimea.

How did Vice President Biden show his appreciation for Israel’s principled stance against Putin’s war in Europe? Less than a week later, he strong-armed the Ukrainian president to vote for Security Council Resolution 2334, finding that Israel was in occupation of Palestinian land—which according to the resolution included historical Jewish holy sites. The Ukrainians asked to abstain, but Biden said no. Kyiv then asked for a delay. There was a large and influential Jewish community in Ukraine with family ties to Israel. And after all, what would the optics be of turning against Jerusalem just days after the Israelis had stood with Ukraine? That was not good enough for Biden. So the Ukrainians joined the other powers the Obama team had corralled into voting against Israel.

The Biden administration’s moves against Israel over Ukraine are part of a ghoulish puppet show. Yes, the administration will sanction the Russian economy until it bleeds—at the same time that the nuclear deal with Iran gives Russia a cash-rich client eager to buy Russian arms. And why not? From the perspective of the Obama-Biden faction, Russia is hardly the main problem. That distinction is reserved for Israel.

Everything you need to know about antisemitism you can learn in the Book of Esther

Antisemitism hasn't changed in its fundamental form for thousands of years.

Here is the base text of all antisemitism, from Esther 3:

Some time afterward, King Ahasuerus promoted Haman son of Hammedatha the Agagite; he advanced him and seated him higher than any of his fellow officials.

All the king’s courtiers in the palace gate knelt and bowed low to Haman, for such was the king’s order concerning him; but Mordecai would not kneel or bow low. Then the king’s courtiers who were in the palace gate said to Mordecai, “Why do you disobey the king’s order?”
When they spoke to him day after day and he would not listen to them, they told Haman, in order to see whether Mordecai’s resolve would prevail; for he had explained to them that he was a Jew.
When Haman saw that Mordecai would not kneel or bow low to him, Haman was filled with rage. But he disdained to lay hands on Mordecai alone; having been told who Mordecai’s people were, Haman plotted to do away with all the Jews, Mordecai’s people, throughout the kingdom of Ahasuerus.

In the first month, that is, the month of Nisan, in the twelfth year of King Ahasuerus, pur—which means “the lot”—was cast before Haman concerning every day and every month, [until it fell on] the twelfth month, that is, the month of Adar.

Haman then said to King Ahasuerus, “There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws; and it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate them. If it please Your Majesty, let an edict be drawn for their destruction, and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver to the stewards for deposit in the royal treasury.”

Thereupon the king removed his signet ring from his hand and gave it to Haman son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the foe of the Jews. And the king said, “The money and the people are yours to do with as you see fit.”

The king's courtiers are essentially the media of the day. They see something happening and - pretending to be only interested in transparency - try to stir things up so they have something to talk about and feel important. They tell Haman - at the equivalent of a press conference - hey, check out that Jew who is not bowing to you! What are you going to do about it?

Haman didn't notice it himself. He's the Grand Vizier, after all. But he cannot ignore an affront to his honor once it is pointed out. People will make fun of him. And, then as now, honor is supreme.

But Haman, like all antisemites in history, generalizes one Jew to the entire nation. He must wipe them all out. It is an obsession.

Haman knows how irrational it is. So when he presents his plan to the King, he cannot possibly say he hates Jews because of one Jew who doesn't bow. He needs to find an excuse where getting rid of the entire Jewish nation is the moral thing to do. It has no right to exist. And that bogus reason is treated as if it is truth, even though the actual hatred always precedes the justification given afterwards.

Haman makes up lies about the Jewish people. He makes them sound like they are different from other people, that they ignore laws. Kind of like how today's self-appointed arbiters of morality falsely say that Israel is violating international law when defending itself.

He implies that these different people could conspire against the Kingdom.

Compare Haman's accusations against the Jews with this description in an 1826 newspaper (it was published in America but appears to have been republished from elsewhere, perhaps England.)

The king really doesn't care that much about Jewish lives. If Haman says there's smoke, there must be fire, and it is not worth the time to find out if there is another side to the story. After all, Haman is a respected member of the human rights community - he wouldn't lie.

And Jews cannot rely on others to protect them.

But Haman wants to make sure that the king is on his side, so he literally tries to bribe him. The king might not take the bribe but he is honored at the offer. Just as today's antisemites are honored as brave souls who speak truth to power - once they join that side, they cannot change their mind no matter what the facts are. They are tied to their original opinions and they are lauded for it.

Notice that Mordechai realizes the psychological power of the bribe offer as well in the next chapter.

Nothing changes.

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The Jerusalem Post writes about a talk US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides gave to Americans for Peace Now, where he agreed wholeheartedly with that left-wing group's agenda of being against Jews living across the Green Line.

"We can't do stupid things that impede us for a two-state solution. We can't have the Israelis doing settlement growth in east Jerusalem or the West Bank," Nides told the left-wing Americans for Peace Now during a virtual event on Tuesday.

"I'm a bit of a nag on this, including the idea of settlement growth, which infuriates me, when they do things, just infuriates the situation, both in east Jerusalem and the West Bank," he continued.

The US ambassador explained that he has to pick and choose his battles. He had however, he said, fought to prevent the advancement of a 3,500 apartment unit project in an area of the Ma'aleh Adumim settlement known as E1.

The Right has spoken of the project's importance in expanding Ma'aleh Adumim and ensuring the preservation of a Jewish corridor around Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Authority and the international community have argued that it would make a future Palestinian state unviable.

Construction of E1 would be a "disaster," Nides said. "I went full board on E1…It is a very important area which if [built] could cut off any possibility of a capital for the Palestinians," he added.

The idea that any Palestinian state must have its capital in Jerusalem is completely artificial. It is a demand that was created for one purpose only: to deny Jews access to their holiest places.

When Arabs and Muslims controlled Jerusalem during the Ottoman era, it was not considered important to them. You would be hard pressed to find any Islamic artwork or poetry extolling the city before the 20th century. Only when Zionism made political gains did the Mufti start to create the twin myths about the centrality of Jerusalem to Muslims and how it needed to be defended against by Jewish desire to destroy Al Aqsa.

Those two ideas are intertwined. And they remain so.

From 1948-1967, Jordan didn't attach any importance to Jerusalem. There was little growth and little investment in infrastructure on the Arab side, while the Jewish side more than doubled in population.

The 1964 PLO Charter does not mention Jerusalem once. Neither does the 1968 PLO Charter.

As with the Mufti, Yasir Arafat only started to emphasize Jerusalem years later, during the 1970s, as a means to inflame Arab passions against Jews. It was a theme created to unify the fractured Christian and Muslim Palestinian terrorist groups by concentrating on "liberating Jerusalem" from Jewish control - a theme that both groups could get behind.

Nowadays, every single mention of a Palestinian state by Abbas and Shtayyeh reflexively include "with Jerusalem as its capital." Yet Jerusalem was never the capital of any Muslim or Arab nation. It is an artificial demand meant to incite hate and to take away the Jewishness from the Jewish state.

And the West has bought this lie that a Palestinian state must include Jerusalem without any skepticism.

Why, exactly, must a Palestinian state have Jerusalem as its capital? What, exactly, stops it from having its capital in Ramallah or Gaza City? After all, Ramallah and Gaza City are the current Palestinian seats of government. There is absolutely no objective reason that Jerusalem must be included in a Palestinian state, let alone that it must be its capital. Somehow, ovcr 190 other states manage to exist without Jerusalem as their capital.

The Palestinian obsession with Jerusalem, today as well as in the 1920s, is based on taking it away from Jews and not on any historic or legal ties to the city.

Moreover, why is the West insisting that a unified Jerusalem be split up again? Who in their right mind thinks that Jerusalem would be more peaceful if Jews are again restricted from visiting their holiest spots, all of which are claimed by the Palestinians as being exclusively theirs? Jerusalem, under Jewish rule, is more diverse and tolerant of all religions than it has ever been in history.

Insisting on giving Arabs control over the most sensitive areas, the way they had between 1949-1967, is a recipe for war, not peace. If you want real peace, take Jerusalem off the table and tell the Palestinians, frankly, that peace and splitting Jerusalem is not compatible and they can choose one or the other.

The world has been scammed by the "Jerusalem is Palestinian" lie. Very few have the bravery to say this out loud.

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

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Chief Iran negotiator really doesn't care much if Israel gets nuked - he's hated Israel since 1980

Gabriel Noronha served as Special Advisor for Iran in the U.S. Department of State Department from 2019-2020. He wrote in Tablet last week a damning description of what is happening behind the scenes during the Iran nuclear negotiations, specifically how lead negotiator Robert Malley is recklessly allowing Iran to get everything it wants:

Anyone seeking to gauge the imminent outcome of the international talks over Iran’s nuclear program being held in Vienna should take a look at reports from late January that three top U.S. diplomats had quit—largely in protest over the direction set by U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley, who serves as the U.S. government’s chief negotiator.

Having served for two years in former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Iran Action Group, I knew that this development was tantamount to a public cry for an intervention. Such resignations—not of conservative dissenters, but of career staff and President Joe Biden’s own political appointees—should have been cause for Biden or Secretary Antony Blinken to recall Malley and investigate. Their failure to do so is a sign either of a troubling lack of attention to the talks, or else the possibility that Malley—who served in the same capacity under President Barack Obama when the first Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was originally negotiated and signed—has been given a free hand to negotiate whatever he wants, as long as he gets Iran to sign.

Evidence for the latter view can be gleaned from the fact that Blinken has reneged on his pledge that his Iran negotiating team would have “a diversity of views.” Instead, he has let Malley continue to concede issue after issue in Vienna. Multiple career officials view these capitulations as so detrimental to U.S. national security that they contacted me requesting that I rapidly share details of these concessions with Congress and the public in an effort to stop them.

In 1980, when he was a freshman at Yale, Robert Malley wrote an anti-Zionist screed that veers into antisemitic territory, titled, "Examining the myth and reality of Zionism."

My claim is that any human being who opposed the Nazi era in Europe - and who did so not only because Jews were being massacred but mainly because people were being massacred - can only, if he wants to be consistent, support the Palestinians in their struggle for a homeland and a state.

In this one paragraph Malley "all lives mattered" the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

No, this is not to say that one must automatically support Palestinian terrorism - which one might do one the basis that it was their sole means of making their cause publicized - but simply that any sense of justice calls for a recognition of Palestinian rights.

...
There is also a lot to be said about the Israeli treatment of Arabs - shameful on the part of a people who suffered more than any other from the injustices and horrors of racism. And the fact must be faced that the resort to violence by the Palestinians is the inevitable corollary of the violence done to them. How can one rationally expect it to cease unless the moral and physical violence of the state of Israel also cease?...

Who then is today being treated as an inferior race? Who, I cannot resist asking, are the Jews of the Jews?

Malley trafficked in Holocaust inversion and justification for terrorism. It is clear that he has a problem with Israel's existence.

It is true that Malley wrote this in 1980, as a freshman, and freshmen are usually idiots. But has he shown any indication in the ensuing 42 years that he changed his mind one iota about Israel? In 2008, Marty Peretz wrote in The New Republic that Malley "is a rabid hater of Israel. No question about it," even though he was a negotiator between Israel and Palestinians during the Clinton administration.

Since Israel is the one and only country that Iran would consider dropping a nuclear bomb on, Malley's apparent antipathy towards Israel makes him a uniquely poor negotiator.

(h/t Andrew)

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03/15 Links Pt2: Amnesty International is no longer a human-rights group, it’s just another ‘progressive’ lobby; Lifting Human Rights Sanctions on Iran Would Be a Mistake

From Ian:

NYPost Editorial: Amnesty International is no longer a human-rights group, it’s just another ‘progressive’ lobby

If you had any doubts that Amnesty International opposes the very existence of Israel, its executive director just made it crystal-clear: Addressing the Women’s National Democratic Club, Paul O’Brien announced his “gut” belief that even “Jewish people in this country” think Israel “shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state.”

In reality, as even left-wing Jewish outfit J Street noted, polling shows the vast majority of American Jews “support Israel’s future as a democratic state and homeland for the Jewish people.”

So do most Americans, period. But the AI chief plainly only talks to people who share his prejudices.

O’Brien later tried to cover himself by tweeting that the Jewish people have a “legitimate concern” about their existence and “that needs to be part of the conversation.” But he stands by the new AI report accusing Israel of “apartheid,” when Israeli Arabs are easily the freest Arabs in the Middle East.

As William Daroff of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations noted, “It is now abundantly clear that [Amnesty is] firmly entrenched in the cadre of extremist anti-Israel provocateurs.”

Bottom line: Amnesty’s current leadership (at least) puts left-wing dogma ahead of all other considerations, milking its prestige to push the lockstep “progressive” agenda.

Amnesty USA Director Paul O’Brien’s remarks to the Woman’s National Democratic Club

In response to claims from O'Brien regarding Jewish Insider’s reporting, JI is publishing the audio of his remarks and excerpted transcripts

On Friday, Jewish Insider published a story about an event featuring Amnesty International USA Director Paul O’Brien at the Women’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. In response to O’Brien’s claims that JI attributed to him quotes that he did not say regarding whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state, JI is publishing the full audio of his lecture and his conversation with a JI reporter at the end of his speech. The following excerpts include those portions of his speech and the subsequent exchange that were quoted in the article.

The political question of Israel’s right to survive
I was with a young Palestinian lawyer and she took us to the top of the hill and pointed pretty much towards the west. And you could see, like, some buildings in the very distance, and said, ‘That is Gaza, and if you point north, you can see the beginnings of the West Bank. But my village used to be there.’ And we sort of worked out the geography of it. It was an unrecognized village. And it had been destroyed because the Israeli military were concerned that Palestinian communities from Gaza, through to the West Bank, were increasingly becoming an interconnected community that created a security threat. And so for her, she had lost her village. They had moved into another village in the area for a period. But they couldn’t get any services into the village so that in the case of having to give birth, ambulances would not go into the village. Would not. They were hoping to start a family. They moved into the city so that they could get basic service provision. We went back to visit some of their older relatives that were there. And as we were walking away, she said something like, that one day soon, they won’t be there either.

And what I experienced in listening to her story was the failure of imagination in creating a society that — I personally believe, this is not, Amnesty takes no political views on any question, including the right of the State of Israel to survive. We firmly oppose antisemitism. But if you ask most people who work at Amnesty, do you understand what it means to feel that a state that has provided you sanctuary is now under threat? I don’t know of anybody at Amnesty that would say no, I don’t understand what that means. And I don’t understand why the Jewish people in the United States and in Israel would be concerned about that.

But as a human rights activist, what I do firmly believe is that if we are going to live in dignity with each other in a secure and sustainable way, it cannot be built on a system that racially oppresses another group in order to survive. That is no pathway towards the future. And that is why I believe history is on our side. Our job by talking about it honestly is to hurry up that history. There has to be a future for the Jewish and Palestinian people to live together in peace, to know that they have a home, and to do so on the foundation of human rights.

Rabbis: Amnesty International Is an ‘Anti-Semitic Hate Group’ Promoting ‘Jew-Hatred’

Amnesty International, the human rights group whose leader recently said Israel "shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state," is blatantly promoting "Jew-hatred," according to a group of influential rabbis.

Amnesty International has been facing criticism since releasing a report last month that accused Israel of waging apartheid against Palestinians and demanded that Israeli officials face prosecution in international courts for these alleged crimes. The report was widely condemned by Israel, leading American-Jewish officials, and members of Congress—all of whom labeled the report as anti-Israel propaganda.

Amnesty International faced a wave of renewed criticism this month when the director of its American branch, Paul O'Brien, who is not Jewish, said that Israel "shouldn't exist as a Jewish state" during remarks at an event hosted by the Woman's National Democratic Club.

O'Brien's remarks are anti-Semitic and amount to "Jew-hatred, plain and simple," according to the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), an advocacy group that represents leading Orthodox rabbis.

"This is Jew-hatred, plain and simple, of a piece with Amnesty's slur of ‘apartheid' against the only ethnically diverse country, the only one with a substantial Jewish population, in the Middle East," Rabbi Yaakov Menken, CJV's managing director, told the Washington Free Beacon.

"O'Brien's reported remarks should surprise no one, as he merely said the quiet part out loud. There are 23 countries where Islam is the state religion, and 21 formally Christian states, but Amnesty only has a problem with the one identified with Jews," Menken said. "O'Brien openly argued that indigenous Jews, exclusively, should be denied self-determination in their indigenous homeland."

All 25 Jewish Democratic House members condemn Amnesty International USA’s executive director Paul O’Brien for saying that Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state pic.twitter.com/IVJF13bBBQ
— Jacob Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) March 14, 2022

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Algerie Presse Service found an anti-Israel Moroccan who is foaming at the mouth over the first Royal Air Maroc flight to Tel Aviv.

The Makhzen system [Morocco] has raised the pace of normalization with the Zionist entity, in a "hysterical" manner, to include almost all sectors in a short time, including the air transport sector, where, on Sunday, the first direct flight between Morocco and the Zionist entity was launched, despite warnings of human rights organizations, and opponents of normalization, against normalization of tourism, which they considered as a "new colonization of the kingdom."

The head of the Moroccan Commission for the Support of Nation's Issues, Abdel Samad Fathi, warned ... that the opening of a direct air line between the Zionist entity and Morocco aims to "enable the Zionists to invade Morocco through the tourism gate, and this is after the doors became open for the hordes of occupying settlers, to enter the homeland."

He highlighted in this context that the opening of direct air routes between Morocco and the occupying entity also aims to “quadruple the number of Zionist visitors compared to before the fateful agreement, and to achieve 200,000 Zionist invaders annually, with the participation of the Zionist entity airline, which will make four weekly flights between the Zionist entity and Morocco."

The Moroccan human rights defender condemned the opening of this direct route, which falls under the "treason, normalized crime, and moral fallibility", for various reasons, including that "it is a welcome for killers and criminals, and a reward for those who emigrated from Morocco to engage in a Zionist project, occupy Arab land and kill and displace its Muslim people. "

And the same speaker stressed that if tourism normalization is “treason and a crime”, it is also not without risks for Morocco on several levels, including “weakening the people’s immunity from the Zionism virus, which paves the way for the intellectual and emotional penetration of the Zionist project for the Moroccan people.”

Besides, tourism normalization, according to him, “facilitates the process of espionage and recruitment for the benefit of the Zionist entity against the interest of the homeland and the nation, with the Palestinian cause at its heart, and contributes to spreading corruption by encouraging sex tourism, as well as contributing to supporting and strengthening normalization lobbies in our country and making them implement tools for its subversive projects.”

According to the head of the Moroccan Commission for the Support of the Nation, the danger of tourism normalization also lies in “facilitating the process of implementing Zionist plans, because it is an enemy and owner of a racist expansion project,” stressing that “it is an illusion to think that the presence of the Zionists in Morocco will be limited to recreation.”

Now read the first paragraph again and decide who is "hysterical."

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

Read all about it here!

03/15 Links Pt1: Russia’s Anti-Ukraine Propaganda Has Its Roots in Soviet Anti-Semitism; Neoconservatism: A Vindication; Jewish groups call for pre-Purim fast for Ukraine, Zelensky

From Ian:

Russia’s Anti-Ukraine Propaganda Has Its Roots in Soviet Anti-Semitism

Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, and Ukraine’s resistance has confirmed some old assumptions, shattered prevalent illusions, and led to a remarkable response by the democracies. It also offers yet another example of the disastrous consequences of antisemitism that emerged in the Soviet Union and has persisted in the decades since its demise.[1]

Putin justified his aggression against Ukraine with a lie. Ukraine, he said, had to be “de-Nazified.”[2] Ukraine today is the only state in the world besides Israel that has a President and a Foreign Minister who are Jewish. Accusing political opponents within, liberal democracies outside the Soviet bloc, and Israelis of being fascists and Nazis is a lie with deep roots in the history of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy after World War II. In the anti-cosmopolitan and antisemitic purges of 1949 to 1953, the Soviet Union hurled the accusation at Communists who supported the state of Israel, and at political opponents who rejected the Communist one-party. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union repeatedly denounced the United States and West Germany as fascist or Nazi. In 1961, when East Germany built the Berlin Wall–a wall that turned that country into a prison with seventeen million inmates–it described it as “the anti-fascist protection wall.”[3]

In 1967, Soviet Ambassador Nikolai Fedorenko at the United Nations described Israel’s military operations as examples of “fascist aggression.” During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, his successor, Jakob Malik compared Israel’s response to the Arab state attack to Nazi aggression during World War II in Europe.[4] The Israeli as Nazi canard spread to the radical left around the world. On the West German far left, it served to justify terrorist attacks against Israelis as a form of revolutionary anti-fascism. Such falsehoods about Israeli democracy played a role in Islamist and radical leftist attacks on Israel.[5]

This reversal and transformation of the meaning of antifascism from what it meant during the years before and during World War II and the Holocaust was consequential. It lent apparent legitimacy to what were, in fact, antisemitic and false conspiracy theories about the policies of Israel. Sadly, the Soviet Union achieved great success with its “Israeli as Nazi” propaganda. Associating attacks on the Jewish state with the language of antifascism comprised a crucial chapter in the reemergence and renewed respectability of antisemitism in the international radical left during the Cold War. So, it is not at all surprising that Putin, whose roots lie in the Soviet era KGB intelligence services, denounced Ukraine as a state of Nazis and fascists.

Putin’s aim to “de-Nazify” Ukraine has had predictable and grave consequences. They are evident on our TV, computer and smart phone screens as missiles and artillery shells—and cluster bombs—crash into Ukrainian civilian areas—just as they did in Aleppo and other cities in Syria not so long ago. The Nazi accusation is enormously dangerous because, for civilized humanity, Nazism represents absolute and radical evil. Hence, if, you describe your enemy or adversary as a Nazi and assert that the Ukrainians used their rights as citizens to vote for Nazi leaders, then those civilians are also guilty of complicity in this Nazism. Thus, the cruise missiles and artillery shells crashing into civilian homes and apartment buildings in these days are, from Putin’s perspective, part of a noble battle against a Nazified Ukraine. The accusation leads to a policy that abolishes the distinction between soldiers and civilians in an era in which modern weaponry makes that distinction possible. This mendacious and corrupt version of antifascism serves as a justification for viewing the civilian population of Ukraine as a legitimate military target. It serves as an immoral justification for what international law now recognizes as war crimes.

Russia-Ukraine conflict: ICJ to rule Wednesday on genocide claims

The United Nations' International Court of Justice will rule on Wednesday regarding accusations of genocide in Ukraine.

The announcement was made on the ICJ's Twitter account that it would announce its decision on the case, which has been named "Allegations of Genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Ukraine v. Russian Federation)."

The ruling is set to be made at the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, at 4:00 p.m. local time.

The ruling is in response to a suit Ukraine filed on February 27 following Russia's accusations that it was committing genocide against Russian speakers. Ukraine denies these allegations, with President Volodymyr Zelensky saying that Russia is distorting and manipulating the very concept of genocide as a pretext to invade his country.

"Russia must be held accountable for manipulating the notion of genocide to justify aggression," Zelensky wrote on his Twitter account. "We request an urgent decision ordering Russia to cease military activity now and expect trials to start next week."

John Podhoretz: Neoconservatism: A Vindication

In 2022, the idea that Vladimir Putin’s Russia would actually roll the tanks and march the soldiers across the border into Ukraine seemed so irrational and peculiar to the Western consciousness that most of us—and in that “us” I would even include the heroic Volodymyr Zelensky—were living in a kind of weird haze of disbelief and denial that it could even happen.

Then it did.

And the surprise Jimmy Carter had felt in 1979 was as nothing compared to the shock wave across Europe in 2022. It took the United States three years to double its defense budget after the Soviet invasion. It took Germany three days. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced his country would increase its defense spending from 47 billion euros to 100 billion euros 72 hours after the Russians crossed the Ukrainian border.

History. Speeding up. And rhyming.

Will this be a hinge moment in history as well? If so, the rhymes of history may be heard in the surprising present urgency of neoconservatism.

Throughout the 1970s, the band of writers and thinkers who came to be known as “neoconservatives” had taken defiantly unfashionable positions when it came to matters of defense and foreign policy. The neoconservatives opposed negotiations and treaties with the Soviet Union, which they considered a great evil. They reviled the United Nations for its “Zionism is racism” resolution at a time when the UN was almost sacrosanct (millions of little boys and girls across America, including me, had proudly toted orange tzedakah boxes on Halloween to raise money for UNICEF). And they feared that the United States had, in the wake of Vietnam, undergone what a 1975 symposium in this magazine called “A Failure of Nerve” that would have global consequences.

The general opinion among the American cognoscenti was that the neoconservatives were hysterics and vulgarians incapable of seeing shades of gray. A more mature sense of the world’s complexity was supposedly represented first by the hard-won realism of the establishmentarians who had embraced the policy of détente with the Soviet Union—and second, by hipper foreign-policy thinkers whose worldview was encapsulated by Carter’s May 1977 declaration that America had gotten over its “inordinate fear of Communism.”

Then came 1979. The year began with the Iranian revolution engendering an oil crisis. By the end of the year, Iran’s fundamentalists had taken 52 American diplomats hostage as crowds chanted “Death to America” in the greatest public humiliation the United States had ever experienced as a nation. A thousand miles from the U.S. border, Nicaragua fell to a puppet guerrilla army of the Cubans and the Soviets while a similar puppet force was threatening to do the same in El Salvador—thus potentially creating a Soviet-friendly anti-U.S. bloc on the American subcontinent.

Suddenly the vulgarity of the neoconservatives didn’t seem quite so vulgar. But they remained prophets without much honor in the quarters in which they had traveled for most of their adult lives. Both the old and new establishments were largely impervious to the way history was vindicating their warnings and fears.

Tufts University's Students for Justice in Palestine wrote a "BDS Pledge."

It includes these solemn promises:

- I pledge to stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle against displacement, colonization, military occupation, and apartheid by following the call for BDS.
- I pledge to boycott Sabra Hummus and Pillsbury.
- I pledge to refuse to be involved with Friends of Israel, J Street U Tufts, Tisch Summer Fellowship with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Tufts Birthright Israel, TAMID, Study abroad programs in Israel.
- Boycott targets of BDS globally including HP, Israeli fruits and vegetables, Puma, AXA, SodaStream, and Ahava.
- Commit to BDS until Palestine is free.

We've seen these sorts of things before - after all, the BDS movement itself is based on "pledging" to boycott Israeli products and institutions and more - but did you ever think about the concept of a pledge?

Does Birthright or Hillel demand that people must "pledge" to a certain way of thinking or acting in order to join?

The very concept of a "BDS pledge" is really an attempt to ensure that people are not exposed to opinions that BDS leaders find objectionable.

When they try to stop pro-Israel speakers on campus, or even Israeli speakers on topics that have nothing to do with politics, they are saying that they don't want anyone to even hear anything that they don't approve of or that normalizes the existence of Israel.

When they try to stop trips to Israel, they are saying that they do not want anyone exposed to anything they disagree with.

Their description of J Street U where they pledge not to be involved with the group is most revealing:

In the past, SJP and Tufts J Street have collaborated on educational events based on the shared knowledge that anti-Zionism is not antisemitic, and to honor the rich history of Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Zionism. Many members of SJP began their journeys with Palestinian solidarity at J Street, and we acknowledge the space it has given Jewish-American members in particular to begin to question the Zionist narrative they may have been immersed in at various Jewish institutions.

J Street officially advocates for “peace” through a “two-state solution.” While it may seem innocuous to frame the occupation as a conflict between two equal nation states, and the solution as a simple division of land right down the middle, this perspective fails to recognize Israel as a settler colonial state and Zionism as a white supremacist ideology.

J Street U is a great gateway drug to becoming an unthinking anti-Israel drone, but it doesn't agree with today's antisemites that Zionism is a white supremacist ideology, so it is verboten to associate with them.

The most glaring distinction between liberal Zionist and "progressive" anti-Zionist groups is the willingness to discuss things with the other side. This refusal by BDSers to even talk with anyone who disagrees with their extremist positions isn't a sign of strength, but of weakness. It shows that they have no confidence that their propaganda can survive when confronted with other ideas.

This pledge proves that BDS isn't a movement or a philosophy. BDS is a cult.

The best part of this pledge is that it lists lots of student groups on campus who support Israel as a Jewish state. They clearly dwarf the BDSers on campus. And the very existence of this pledge, and similar ones on other campuses, is all the proof you need that BDS makes a lot of noise but it knows that it must use brainwashing methods to keep its core members.

(h/t Andrew P.)

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

Read all about it here!

Suhail bin Boutros bin Matti Qasha was an Iraqi thinker, researcher, and Christian theologian from the town of Bakhdeda, east of Mosul. He died last month.

He was well respected, wrote widely and published a number of books.

According to his complimentary obituary in Al Akhbar, he was also a Jew-hater. His views show the antisemitism that is endemic in the Arab Christian world. There is no attempt at anything but a paper distinction between Zionism and Judaism, and his claims against "Zionism" exactly mirror the conspiracy theories against Jews throughout the ages. His hate shines through the pseudo-intellectualism.

Excerpts of the article are based on Qasha's book, "Zionism distorts the Bible:"

Father Suhail Qasha emphasized that the concept of Zionism is to work towards the formation of a Jewish community in Palestine, and the Zionist thought stems from the doctrines of the Torah, the laws of the Talmud, and the racist Jewish thought.

Father Qasha reviewed the relationship of Zionism to Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasonry, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Christian Zionism, and other organizations, all of which, according to his opinion, are forms and means of a single global Zionist plan “aims to dominate the world and subjugate the Jewish people on whom the Zionist movement imposed itself as a guardian.”

The Zionist movement is working, secretly and publicly, to destroy other religions, especially Christianity, in order to plunge the world into chaos and moral disintegration in implementation of the Zionist scheme to dominate the world.

This was manifested mainly in the distortion of the Bible and the issuance of an “Israeli version” of the books of the New Testament that was printed in Jerusalem in 1970. Zionism worked to spread this edition in various churches, organized conferences and supported Christian sects and heresy Zionism aimed at persuading the Christian masses in Europe and America to help the Jews to establish the state of Israel in preparation for the return of the Messiah.

The distortion and forgery movement culminated in the document acquitting the Jews of the blood of Christ, which was issued by the Ecumenical Council in 1963. Zionism took advantage of this tolerant humanitarian position of the Vatican to employ the vindication in the process of distorting the true Christian faith and encouraging heresies, movements and suspicious churches, especially in the United States of America to employ them in support of the government of Israel and the merging of the Zionist ideology with the expansionist American ideology.

Zionism first targeted Eastern Christianity because the Antiochene churches are the closest to the spirit of true Christianity, and they are the most capable of confronting the attempts of distortion and forgery carried out by Zionism.

Moreover, Zionism primarily targets eastern Christians because they are an element of resistance to its Judaization projects. Therefore, Zionism sought and seeks to displace Christians from their east, especially in Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Lebanon, so that the land would be permissible for the expansion of “Israel” and its Judaization of the region in order to build Greater Israel.

Zionism views Eastern Christianity with hostility and hatred, because the Antiochene Church is authentic and solid in its commitment to its Christian faith. The conflict of Antiochian Christianity with Zionism is an existential struggle because it is a civilizational conflict that extends to its historical roots. It is a struggle between racism and abolition on the one hand, and tolerance and love on the other.

“Zionism distorts the Bible” is not just a book that exposes the infiltration of Zionist Jews into the Church, and their control at times over centers of Christian education, interpretation of the Bible, and theological guidance through distortion and falsification. This book is not just a scientific text. Rather, it is a cry that Father Suhail Qasha wanted as a small bell with gentle ringing to save the human conscience first and the Christian second because of the Zionist plans of demolition and sabotage policies.

People who pretend that there is a distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism cannot possibly explain this.

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From Naharnet:

Lebanon seems to be inclined to reject U.S. envoy Amon Hochstein’s proposal regarding the demarcation of the sea border with Israel, a media report said on Friday.

“There is an inclination to reject the proposal in a polite way that does not infuriate the American side,” al-Akhbar newspaper reported.

“The dominant inclination within the committee is to reject Hochstein’s proposal, seeing as it does not fully grant the possible Qana field to Lebanon and rather leaves a pocket under the Israeli enemy’s sovereignty, which would create a problem between the state and some domestic forces that totally reject any form of engagement in what they consider to be normalization platforms,” the sources added.

Gee, who could that be? Here's a hint:

Informed sources meanwhile warned that accepting the U.S. proposal would represent a “scandal.”

“It is like a maritime ambush aimed at preoccupying the Lebanese side with studying proposals whose unviability is known by the Americans,” the sources said.

Hezbollah has made clear that there is no choice at all. The terror group can veto anything and everything.

So instead of gaining millions of dollars of energy, Lebanon will get zilch but with the "honor" of knowing that they are choosing to starve their own people rather than agree to anything with Israel. It's a funny definition of honor, but hate does funny things to people.

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

Read all about it here!