Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 14, 2022

03/14 Links Pt2: Amnesty International admits – it wants the destruction of Israel; Netanyahu says it’s ‘absurd’ Iran nuclear talks ongoing after Erbil attack

From Ian:

David Collier: Amnesty International admits – it wants the destruction of Israel

Tokenising Jews, silencing their voice
We are left with O’Brien sitting in his ivory tower talking about Jews. He says he knows what Jews think. He disagrees with surveys that suggest he may be wrong. O’Brien clearly thinks he knows Jews better than they know themselves. British Jews know this antisemitic feature of the hard-left all too well. We dealt with it as it ran rampant through the Labour Party. People telling Jews that they knew better than the Jews, what being Jewish was about.

Since when was it in Amnesty’s remit to cast aside surveys of American Jews and suggest that Amnesty know better?

Like many, O’Brien does not understand ‘Jews’ at all. I am sure he has one or two Jewish friends. People, with one foot already outside of the community who have turned their ‘Jewishness’ into something abstract and meaningless. Just as the Corbynites hid behind fringe hate groups like Jewish Voice for Labour, Amnesty have found their ‘acceptable’ Jews now too.

But Jews won’t be told by naive fools such as O’Brien what they do or do not want. We will reject Amnesty’s blatant antisemitism. The Jewish people were stateless for long enough. We know all too well how high the price can be for political impotence. And as we look at Ukraine – it is worth reminding ourselves of the reality of the world that we live in. The world needs a Jewish state that is independent and capable of defending itself. We need Israel. This is not up for debate.

Seeking the destruction of Israel
So now we know for sure. Amnesty International is seeking the destruction of Israel. O’Brien has his vision. He calls it a ‘Jewish safe space’. He says Israel should not exist as ‘a Jewish state’. We recognise this terminology. It is the same language that BDS uses. With Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran all making genocidal threats, O’Brien is trying to convince Jews they live in ‘Switzerland’.

He has the same problem many on the left do. He sees Jews as white and privileged and he sees Palestinians as ‘brown’ and gives them no agency. Rather than viewing the Islamist need for imperial domination as the problem, he sees the tiny Jewish safe haven as being the cause of the conflict. There is no point looking for logic, truth or consistency in this. It is the same incoherent modern leftist swamp in which antisemitism thrives.

The bottom line is this. Amnesty seeks the destruction of Israel. They want a world without an independent state for the Jewish people. They have clearly placed this at the top of their ideological wish list. There is no argument anymore. Amnesty International are as antisemitic as they come.

JPost Editorial: Amnesty International's report on Israel is full of distortions and lies

In the US, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) called the report “a gross mischaracterization of Israel, its history and its values.” State Department spokesperson Ned Price warned against applying double standards to Israel.

Most Jewish organizations also rejected the report. But O’Brien, who is not Jewish, obviously trusts his gut instinct more. He also seems to be hoping that by “changing the conversation” and repeating the apartheid lie enough times, he can create new facts.

The event is the first in a series hosted by the WNDC that will explore “Palestine past, present and future.” Israel’s own ancient past, its successful present and its future as the Jewish state is of less importance to the group.

In a separate story published over the weekend, JTA revealed that the environmental Sierra Club NGO has canceled its scheduled trips to Israel in response to pressure from progressive and anti-Zionist groups after activists alleged the organization was “greenwashing the conflict” and “providing legitimacy to the Israeli state, which is engaged in apartheid against the Palestinian people,” according to an email seen by the news agency.

This is another example of what happens when the apartheid libel is deliberately spread.

Such efforts don’t only harm Israel’s image, they cause once respected organizations to lose their credibility and standing. Above all, they do absolutely nothing to promote peace or help the Palestinians.

By criminalizing Israel and ignoring Palestinian anti-normalization and terrorism, these organizations and the progressive activists are encouraging more rejectionism and more terror.

The Palestinian Authority will see no reason to make even basic moves to peace as long as it believes it can erase Israel with progressive, Western support. The lies themselves fuel further attacks, both on Israelis and on Jews and Jewish targets around the world. The apartheid libel is not only a lie, it is a dangerous one.

Because it’s not like there’s an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Ukraine or anything, so @hrw is back to their favorite topic - Jew bashing. Of course taking everything out of context, to engage in some not-so-mild misinformation and bigotry. https://t.co/5iPbRpQYPN
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) March 14, 2022

Netanyahu: New Nuclear Agreement Will Give the Ayatollahs a Nuclear Arsenal

Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu launched a scathing attack on world powers who are continuing to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran — even after the Islamic Republic fired missiles toward the US consulate in Iraqi Kurdistan.

In video messages posted to social media in both Hebrew and English on Sunday evening — addressed to Israeli and American citizens, respectively — the former prime minister said it was “absurd” for world powers to continue to negotiate in Vienna with Tehran.

“The desperate rush to sign this flawed nuclear agreement with Iran is not only absurd, it’s downright dangerous,” Netanyahu stated in his English video, posted with the caption: “Every American family should watch this video.”

“Yesterday, Iran fired missiles in the vicinity of the American consulate in Iraq, and the US continues to charge ahead, along with the other powers, to sign a nuclear agreement that will give the ayatollahs a nuclear arsenal,” Netanyahu charged.

“It would also relieve sanctions and give them hundreds of billions of dollars in order to continue the terror that they waged yesterday and wage every day throughout the Middle East and the world,” he said. “This agreement is even worse than its predecessor, because in three years’ time, under this agreement, Iran will be a threshold nuclear state. It will have enough enriched uranium to create dozens and dozens of nuclear bombs and it will have the ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles] to deliver them to any place in the United States.”

The final details of the burgeoning nuclear deal between Iran and world powers have yet to be revealed, and diplomats involved have said that some remaining elements are still being negotiated. It was not immediately clear which documents or intelligence Netanyahu was basing his claims on.

Every American family should watch this video. pic.twitter.com/BVo5ZFJwKk
— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) March 13, 2022

Today, Palestinian prime minister met with what Palestinian media called 300 Harvard University students to spout anti-Israel propaganda.

"The biggest challenge [for Palestinians] is national unity and ending division, and we will work to achieve it by all means. The second challenge is the Judaization of Jerusalem as the capital," Shtayyeh said.

The trip was part of Harvard Israel Trek, an annual subsidized trip to Israel and the territories during spring break.

Despite the students being exposed to unfettered Palestinian propaganda, BDSers on campus try to dissuade students from going:

Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine hung flyers across campus last week (February 25) urging undergraduates to boycott Harvard Israel Trek, an annual subsidized spring break trip to Israel and the West Bank.

Organizers for HOOP — a student group spearheaded by the Palestine Solidarity Committee that calls on Harvard to divest holdings linked to Israel’s presence in Palestine — posted flyers with QR codes linked to a document that alleges trip-goers are “complicit in apartheid and settler colonialism.”

In 2019, the PSC distributed a petition urging undergraduates to boycott Israel Trek, which was ultimately canceled due to Covid-19.

Applications for this year’s trip closed last October. According to Israel Trek student leader Ty L. Geri ’23, more than 450 students applied for just 100 spots.

The trip includes a visit of the West Bank and discussions with high-ranking Israeli and Palestinian officials. In emails about the trip sent last semester, organizers say the trip provides participants an opportunity to explore “unique and nuanced realities at the core of Israel’s geopolitical landscape.”

HOOP organizer Christian B. Tabash ’21-’22 said he rejects the idea that the trip can provide a balanced perspective on the conflict between Israel and Palestine despite including the West Bank on its itinerary.

“It doesn’t matter if you spend a few hours in the West Bank, a day in the West Bank, a few days in the West Bank, or if you talk to a Palestinian,” Tabash said. “That is irrelevant, because power is unequal and Palestinians exist as the colonized.”

HOOP's problem isn't with "balance." It is that they do not want any student to ever hear what any Zionist ever has to say. They want their propaganda to be the only thing Harvard students ever hear about the region.

And, to be honest, they probably look at Shtayyeh as a sellout for not being directly connected to terror.

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Americans still admire Israel, don't like Palestinian Authority much. Including Democrats.

A new Gallup poll of how Americans view different countries show that Americans overwhelmingly admires Israel, while they look at the Palestinian Authority worse than Cuba and Saudi Arabia:

The attitude towards Israel is a little worse than in 2020/21, a little better than 2019.

The Palestinian Authority score went up from 23% in 2020 to to 30% last year and down to 27% today.

Among Democrats, most are still favorable towards Israel and less favorable towards Palestinians - 65% to 38%.

(h/t Noah)

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03/14 Links Pt1: BHL: Ukraine and the Jews; Natan Sharansky: Putin will go as far as the world lets him; The Winner in Ukraine Won’t Be Russia or America. It Will Be China

From Ian:

Bernard-Hemri Levy: Ukraine and the Jews

And finally, President Volodymyr Zelensky, the descendant of a family decimated by the Holocaust and a living symbol of mourning done right. The first time I met him, on the eve of his election, I asked him by what turn of history might the Ukraine of the extreme-right Azov Battalion place in its highest office a Jew from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. With his customary dry humor, leavened at that moment with unusual gravity, he replied as follows (and how well later events would prove him right!): “There remains a far right in Ukraine, of course; but you will soon see that it carries less electoral weight here than in Russia or even in France …”

Today it is Putin who threatens the city of Uman, which the Jews of Galicia brightened with their sabbaths, their Talmudic studies, their radiant Hasidism, and their modernity.

It is Putin’s missiles that, in destroying Kyiv’s television tower, barely missed Babi Yar and the 33,000 souls buried in the sandy ravine, whose guardians are the Ukrainians.

It is Putin who is pounding the Jews of Bucha, Irpin, and Borodyanka, who had been living peacefully with their fellow citizens of all faiths.

And that is why, despite the provocations that isolated bands of rogue soldiers may commit, as they do in all wars, we should be guided by a simple compass.

If there is a leader who urgently needs denazifying, it is Vladimir Putin, with his fetish for brute strength, his Slav Anschluss, and his talent for bringing back from the shadows of the 20th century the specter of total war.

Among those whom his demoniacal prestidigitation is taking hostage and victimizing with his cynical lies are the survivors—and the children and grandchildren of the survivors—of the most monstrous crime of all.

And for them, for all the world’s Jews, for Israel’s leaders who know better than anyone where the will to annihilate a people and a state can lead, there is a single categorical imperative: Refuse to be blackmailed; resist the supposed constraints of shortsighted realpolitik; and, in standing with the Ukrainians as they are bombed, starved, and massacred, remain faithful to an ancient human vocation.

'Israel could pay steep diplomatic price for Ukraine policy,' Sharansky warns

Natan Sharansky, a former prisoner of Zion and deputy prime minister, is convinced that Israel made a mistake by trying to stay neutral regarding the war in Ukraine. "We of course have interests when it comes to Russia and Ukraine, but we should have said from day one that the Russian attack and unjustified targeting of the civilian population are unacceptable."

It's not just the moral consideration that should have led Israel to adopt a clearer position, says Sharansky. The diplomatic calculation also supports this view: Ukraine is going to play an important role in the global balance of power structure, and it's in Israel's interest that Ukraine remember Israel for standing by its side and helping it in its time of need.

"How can it be that the Ukrainians beg us for a field hospital, Israel throws around promises for an entire week, and in the end, the finance minister says we don't have the funds?" wonders Sharansky.

He recalls how he acted as a minister in former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's first government to thwart a supply of Ukrainian and Russian-manufactured nuclear industrial equipment earmarked for Iran. "Russia refused to listen to the Israeli case at the time, while in Ukraine we were able to convince then-President [Leonid] Kuchma not to fulfill his commitments to the Iranians and not sell them turbines for a nuclear power plant," says Sharansky.

Sharansky blames the Americans, namely the Obama administration, for teaching Russian President Vladimir Putin that he can blackmail the world in general and Israel in particular.

"Because of Obama and the West's weakness, Russia was handed the keys to Syria, and the Iranians received billions of dollars. The West's basic weakness is patently obvious: It is afraid of confronting Putin. Recently he even raised the stakes with implicit threats of using nuclear weapons, and what was the West's response? It actually canceled the annual test of the intercontinental ballistic missile that can carry a nuclear warhead. In the eyes of the West, this step was meant to avoid exacerbating tensions. In the eyes of Putin, this was a sign of weakness. In Soviet prison, I learned who controls the cell. Not the strongest, but the person willing at any given moment to fight the other, and even kill. Putin is exactly like this, and the West, instead of being a deterrent, it deterred," he said.

"Two factors woke the free world up," Sharansky continued, "Ukraine's heroism and Putin's barbarism. The methodical and brutal way he is erasing entire cities in the heart of Europe is causing alarm. Of all people, the man who claims Ukrainians are not a nation is the one making the world care about Ukraine and hold it in high regard. Just as importantly, Putin delivered a gigantic blow to Russia and its place as an influential player straddling the East-West divide. It will take Russia a very long time, perhaps hundreds of years, to restore its moral legitimacy and its place in human civilization.

"The Ukrainians' readiness to fight for their liberty surprised both Putin and Western leaders. The sanctions imposed on Russia are not enough to change Putin's course of action, but they still reflect unprecedented solidarity from the free world with a nation fighting evil. The question remains whether the West will uphold sanctions over time."

Natan Sharansky on Vladimir Putin: He will go as far as the world lets him

Famed Jewish dissident, human-rights activist and former Knesset member Natan Sharansky provided his opinion on the situation in Ukraine on Tuesday, analyzing what could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motivations for the invasion into Ukraine, as well as the moral obligation Israel and the West have to support Ukraine.

In a Zoom session hosted by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) and moderated by JINSA president and CEO Mike Makovsky, Sharansky said that he believed that Putin is looking to recreate the Russian Empire, rather than the Soviet Union since Putin is not interested in bringing back Communist ideology. Instead, as one of the world’s longest-serving leaders, he considers his heroes Tsar Peter the Great, Empress Catherine the Great and former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan late last year and showed what Sharansky called great weakness in its dealings with Syria during the country’s civil war, Putin began to believe that the United States was too weak to respond to an invasion in Ukraine just as the world did not respond to the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Putin has also used his nuclear weapons as a deterrent against the west’s intervention, even though Sharansky thinks he won’t use them.

“I think Putin doesn’t want to use nuclear weapons. He’s not an Iranian leader who thinks about the next world,” said Sharansky. “He wants to rule this world. But to use the threat? That’s his main weapon, and it does work.” Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate by email and never miss our top stories

But according to Sharansky, Putin underestimated that Ukraine is also a proud nation and that Russia’s onslaught has contributed to the strengthening of Ukrainian will, having been thrust into the center of history.

Putin may also have underestimated the resolve of the rest of the world, which has united in its condemnation of the invasion, possibly believing the old Soviet saying that capitalists are never united when their profits are threatened.

The Winner in Ukraine Won’t Be Russia or America. It Will Be China.

In addition to the crimes, the heroism, and the heavy toll in blood, the struggle for Ukraine may also come to represent one of the most strategically significant events of this century, or any other—the one that established China, not America or Russia, as the dominant power in Europe.

Most Western observers have taken Beijing’s professed readiness “to play a constructive role to facilitate dialogue for peace” as a sign that Ukraine is somewhere between a headache and a disaster for Xi Jinping, who announced a Sino-Russian partnership with “no limits” at the Beijing Olympics only last month. The assumption is that Xi is now in danger of looking complicit or credulous (or both), and that the Communist Party—having argued incessantly for the sanctity of China’s own territorial integrity—may now stand accused of hypocrisy. Xi’s support of Putin is also seen as having put Beijing at risk of igniting anti-Chinese sentiment in Europe, of squandering the many investments it made and trade relationships it built in the European Union, and of pushing otherwise friendly EU capitals closer to Washington.

Triangulation between Russia and Europe will no doubt require a degree of finesse for which China’s Wolf Warriors are ill-prepared, and providing Putin with liquidity to fund his war machine, for example, is not a cost-free decision. But anyone taking pleasure in China’s supposed bind probably has it backwards. In the wake of its partial expulsion from the global trade and financial system, Russia—with its vast supply of raw materials—is likely to become a Chinese economic dependency. That is a good thing for China, and if Xi can successfully position himself as the only world leader capable of restraining Putin, it will go a long way toward extending his hegemony all the way to Lisbon, as China starts to displace the United States as Europe’s most important global partner.

After all, would a seat at the European table really be too much to ask for the man who saves Europe from nuclear war? Reading the recent statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry that promised “China’s mediation efforts for a ceasefire” in Ukraine, and the EU foreign policy chief’s concurrence that the broker of peace “must be China,” it’s not hard to see the request being made, and being answered in the affirmative—with Washington reduced to second fiddle on a continent it spent the better part of a century defending and holding together.

The strange route of the first Royal Air Maroc flight from Casablanca to Tel Aviv

From AFP:

Royal Air Maroc took off from Morocco’s economic capital Casablanca bound for Tel Aviv on Sunday, in the carrier’s first direct flight to the Jewish state since the two countries normalized ties in 2020.

Aviation sources and local media sources said a Moroccan business delegation was on the inaugural flight, delayed by three months because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Casablanca/Tel Aviv for 400 euros ($440). Who would have believed it?” tweeted David Govrin, head of Israel’s liaison office in the Arab state.

The Moroccan carrier RAM is to fly four times a week between Casablanca and Tel Aviv, while Israeli airlines launched flights to Morocco’s Marrakesh last July, although they were suspended in late November because of coronavirus travel curbs.

Here is the route that the flight took:

Flights between Morocco and Israel cannot go in a straight line because Algeria, Libya and probably Tunisia would not allow them to fly over their airspace. So the flight must pass over parts of Spain, Italy and Crete.

But that isn't the only reason for the flight path.

Algeria doesn't only block overflights from and to Israel - it bans any air traffic to and from Morocco! The ban took effect last September over their own cold war.

Flights from Casablanca to Cairo take a very similar route, avoiding Algerian airspace:

Interestingly, there do not appear to be any direct flights from Morocco to Jordan.

Which means that in one sense, Israel's ties to Arab Morocco are closer than those of Jordan.

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Hamas and the PA calls on Palestinians to attack Jews who visit the Temple Mount on Purim

This week is the holiday of Purim, celebrating the salvation of Jews from the schemes of the Persian Empire and its evil vizier Haman to destroy them.

Hamas, which shares Haman's desire to destroy the Jews, is now telling Palestinians to attack any Jews who want to visit the Temple Mount this week for the occasion.

Mohammed Hamada, a Hamas spokesman, issued a statement saying that Hamas "warns the occupation and its colonial settlers against desecrating the sanctity of Al-Aqsa Mosque during the so-called “Feast of Purim” amid its calls for storming the Mosque on 16th and 17th of March."

He said that "the occupation's desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque is a crime and violation of all heavenly norms and laws, and a direct provocation to our Islamic nation."

Jews visit the site every Sunday through Thursday, and for the past few years they have even been quietly praying there, without incident. But Muslim fanatics want there to be an incident, and they want bloodshed.

"We call upon the masses of our Palestinian people in Jerusalem, West Bank, and 1948 occupied lands to confront the Zionist storming, protect Al-Aqsa, and prevent the Zionist extremists from desecrating it," Hamada said.

This mirrors a Saturday statement from the PA’s top Islamic judge and presidential adviser Mahmoud al-Habbash who is also trying to incite violence:

Al-Habbash said that "terrorist groups and settler gangs are taking advantage of Jewish religious occasions to storm the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, and try to impose a fait accompli as part of the Judaization schemes that target the Holy City in general and the Temple Mount in particular."

He called on our people everywhere, who are able to reach the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, to intensify their presence there in the coming days, to thwart the plans of the settler terrorist groups, and to defend the mosque with all their determination.

Al-Habbash called on scholars, thinkers and governments of the Islamic world to carry out their religious and moral duty towards the city of Jerusalem and the Noble Sanctuary, “to emphasize the Islam of the mosque and to send a clear message to the world that violating Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa is a violation of the faith of more than a billion and a half Muslims in all parts of the earth, and that the religious war that the occupation seeks to ignite will burn the whole world with its fire, and no one on the face of the earth will be spared from it or its consequences.”

In other words, if a billion Muslims decide to start World War III, it will be because they were forced to by Jews walking quietly in Judaism's holiest spot. Yet, he claims, it is the Jews who want a religious war.

This is all incitement to violence. It happens every day. And the West ignores it, and acts surprised when Arabs attack Jews.

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In June, Sweden will host the conference “Stockholm+50: a healthy planet for the prosperity of all – our responsibility, our opportunity” to mark the 50th anniversary of the first United Nations conference on the human environment – the 1972 Stockholm Conference.

Palestinian prime minister Mohammed Shtayyeh received an invitation to attend.

So naturally, he issued a statement about how terrible Israel is.

Shtayyeh responded to the invitation by saying that the international community must pressure Israel and implement anti-Israel United Nations resolutions. He added, "We are proud of our relationship with Sweden, and we hope that it will serve as a model for the rest of Europe to recognize the Palestinian state in order to stand by truth and justice, as well as protect the two-state solution, in light of the systematic destruction that Israel is carrying out on the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state."

He didn't say a word about the environment.

In 2014, the Consulate General of Sweden in Jerusalem commissioned a team to see how well the Palestinian Environment Quality Authority was doing its job. The resulting 130 page report was polite, but withering in its criticism of how poorly the Palestinian organization tasked with protecting the environment did its job and how unprofessional it is:

The major capacity gaps in operations are:
1. Not ensuring implementation on the ground through effective operating systems
2. Not assuming lead functions for Environmental protection
3. Not assuming the role as knowledge centre and expert organization functions
4. Not sufficiently looking for partnership opportunities with other more resource-strong organizations
5. Appling a reactive approach instead of providing leadership with clear priorities
6. Insufficient monitoring and law enforcement that covers a marginal proportion of establishments.

It also found major gaps in management.

It's been nearly eight years. Has anything changed? It seems doubtful. But it is enormously difficult to find out the answer because there seems to be nobody interested in the subject.

What is clear is that the Palestinian leaders don't care about the environment - they want to hijack the environment issue to attack the Jews. Just as they don't care about women's rights, or Christian rights, or any other liberal talking point except as a means to use them as weapons against Jews.

It happens all the time. And it will happen in Stockholm. And the world leaders who will be there will smile and applaud as Shtayyeh says that Israel is the root of environmental evil.

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An Italian citizen who works at Lebanon's embassy in Italy visits Israel, Lebanese freak out

Lebanese media are going nuts over a report that an employee at their embassy in Italy visited Israel.

The employee, who is not named, is a Christian with Italian citizenship, and she visited with her Italian passport. She claims that she cleared the visit with the ambassador, Mira Daher, beforehand.

The woman says she simply wanted to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Lebanon's Ministry of Foreign Affairs says this is an explicit violation of the laws that prevent Lebanese from visiting enemy territory and it caused a cascade of events involving Lebanon's Public Security division.

However, as with everything in Lebanon, there also seems to be a political motive here. Some have had complaints against the ambassador for a while so some of this appears to be meant to embarrass her.

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03/13 Links: Iran attacks Kurdish region in Iraq in message to US; The West is selling out to Iran to lower gas prices; Lapid says ‘no justification’ for Russia invading Ukraine

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: The West is selling out to Iran to lower gas prices

The administration would like to halt the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine. To its credit, it is not so foolish as to listen to the delusional advice of those who want NATO to become a combatant in the war by imposing a no-fly zone that would have unknowable and likely catastrophic consequences. The grim truth is that after cutting the Russians off from the international economy and sending armaments, Washington has likely done all it could reasonably hope to help Ukrainians, who are bravely resisting the Russian onslaught. But if Putin is truly determined to get his way by any means possible, then he continues to hold all the cards.

Still, it's time to stop the pretense that outreach to Venezuela or Iran is really about Russia.

With respect to Venezuela, it's a tragic abandonment of the already beleaguered democracy movement in that country that has been as thoroughly squelched by the leftist regime as anything Putin has done in Russia or would like to do in Ukraine.

With respect to Iran, the rush to get their oil on the market is more than a betrayal of principle that won't help democracy in Ukraine or anywhere else. It's a sellout of American security interests, as well as allies like Israel and the Arab states that are directly threatened by an accord that doesn't put off an Iranian nuclear weapon so much as it guarantees that Tehran will get one at the end of the decade or sooner. As Gabriel Noronha details in an article in Tablet, the new deal is "much, much worse" in terms of its appeasement of Iranian terror, in addition to failing to accomplish the pact's stated goal of preventing this fanatical Islamist regime from becoming a nuclear power.

The current rush to implement this disgraceful measure is rooted in Biden's political woes. The record inflation ravaging American households is the fruit of his failed policies that downgraded American oil production – not just the recent spike in gas prices caused by sanctions on Russia. But what he's doing now is creating an existential threat to Israel and other Iranian targets merely in order to try and keep the prices at the pump from going any higher while pretending that it will stop the bloodshed in Ukraine.

It's difficult to imagine a more cynical or destructive policy than one that endangers friends merely in order to boost the president's political standing at home. Much as Americans want to put a lid on gas prices, to buy that outcome by appeasing Iran is an immoral abandonment of American interests and obligations that won't aid Ukraine or stop Putin.

Ruderman Family Slams Amnesty-USA Official Who Rejected Jewish American Support for Israel Based on ‘Gut Feeling’

After Amnesty International USA director Paul O’Brien called into question a Ruderman Family Foundation survey on the connection American Jews have to Israel, based on “his gut,” Jay Ruderman, President of the foundation issued the following statement:

“By rejecting a comprehensive survey of 2,500 American Jews that overwhelmingly support Israel saying ‘his gut’ tells him otherwise, O’Brien dismisses verified data. It is indefensible for the organization’s USA director to reject the verified opinion of the American Jewish community.”

The 2020 study, commissioned by the Ruderman Family Foundation and conducted by the highly respected Mellman Group, found that eight in 10 Jewish Americans identify as “pro-Israel,” and two-thirds feel emotionally “attached” or “very attached” to the Jewish state.

In published reports on a Women’s National Democratic Club event on Wednesday, O’Brien commented on the data saying: “I actually don’t believe that to be true. 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.”

Having sampled 2,500 Jews representing the adult Jewish population in the US, the foundation’s survey is one of the most comprehensive studies of the Jewish community in the United States in recent years, and one of the largest ever.

“If Amnesty International dismisses American facts, it calls their own reports into question,” Ruderman quipped. “Gut instincts should not be the basis for shaping opinion and policy.”

According to Jewish Insider, O’Brien suggested at a Women’s National Democratic Club meeting that most American Jews don’t want Israel to be a Jewish state, but rather “a safe Jewish space” based on “core Jewish values.”

The Palestinian Museum has a collection of some 130,000 digitized photos and documents. A couple of them portray Jews, perhaps from the 1920s, praying at the Western Wall.

Here is how they describe the scene:

Jewish Pilgrims Pray by al-Buraq Wall, Jerusalem the 1920s

Taken in the 1920s, this photograph shows Jewish pilgrims praying by the al-Buraq Wall; which Zionists and Jews call the "Wailing Wall", located in the southern section of al-Aqsa Mosque near the al-Maghariba Gate. Although the wall is an Islamic endowment, the Jews have been trying since the end of the nineteenth century to control it, claiming that it is a remnant of the temple, but they failed. After the British Mandate in 1917, Jews began to gather in masses in an attempt to hold control over the Wall area, which led to the Buraq Uprising in 1929, which was basically a revolution to defend the Wall from Judaization, which resulted in the birth of an international commission of inquiry that issued in 1930 a decision stating that Muslims have the right to the Wall. But after the 1967 June War and the occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem by the Israeli Occupation Forces, the Occupation Authority took control over the wall area and demolished the adjacent Mughrabi Quarter and worked to Judaize and completely change the features of the place.

Source: The Zeyad Badee' Abdallah Collection

Nearly every sentence is a lie, starting with the description of Jews whose families had lived in Jerusalem for centuries as "Jewish pilgrims."

Jews never called it the Wailing Wall - that was a Christian thing.

The Jews never "failed" in identifying it as a retaining wall of the Temple. (The commission of inquiry mentioned said in no uncertain terms that "The Wailing Wall forms an integral part of the western exterior shell of the Harem-esh-Sherif which itself is the site of the ancient Jewish temples, at the present day supplanted by Moslem Mosques.")

Jews gathered there way before the Balfour Declaration.

The 1929 pogroms against Jews were pure antisemitism and had nothing to do with the Kotel except as an excuse - what did the massacres in Hebron have to do with the Wall?

And of course Jerusalem was always Jewish, and had a Jewish majority a century before the Six Day War in 1967.

Even the source is bogus. This photo comes from the Matson Collection at the Library of Congress.

The International Council of Museums has a code of ethics that says, "Museums should ensure that the information they present in displays and exhibitions is well-founded, accurate and gives appropriate consideration to represented groups or beliefs."

This is only one egregious violation of that code.

The Palestine Museum is a propaganda museum.

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Things are getting even worse for Jews in New York City.

In January, the number of hate crimes in the city went up 75% compared to January 2021. However, most of that increase came against Jews - anti-Jewish hate crimes increased 275% in January, from 4 to 15.

February was not only worse, but much worse.

Hate crimes against Jews in New York City skyrocketed 409% compared to the same month in 2021, from 11 to 56. That means that there were nearly four times as many hate crimes against Jews in February compared to January.

How does that compare to the scourge of Islamophobic hate crimes that we hear so much about?

In those two months, there were exactly three hate crimes against Muslims. And 71 against Jews.

Yes, one is too many. But when there are over 23 times as many of one crime compared to another, making them sound equivalent is not only irresponsible - it is intentionally misleading.

Those who feel that they cannot mention antisemitic incidents without reflexively including Islamophobia are minimizing antisemitism.

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

Read all about it here!

Covid-19 conspiracy theorist blames Ukraine invasion on Jews

Last year, anti-vaxxer Dr. Sherry Tenpenny was widely reported to be peddling antisemitic Covid-19 conspiracy theories, which she denied. She did quote Holocaust deniers and post that "the CEOs of the major vaccine manufacturers are Jews," which she said was written by a member of her team.

It will be hard for her to deny her latest post about Jews on Telegram.

Quoting Holocaust-denial Telegram channel EndTimesNewz, she posted:

Whilst everyone is distracted by the events in (((Ukraine))), the (((WHO))) is ramming through an international treaty on 'pandemic' procedures.

Same tribe every time 🔯

Practically anywhere you find conspiracy theories, you find antisemitism.

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

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03/12 Links: How progressive charity platforms help foment anti-Israel terror; MSNBC guest: Hitler didn't kill ethnic Germans unlike Putin to Russians

From Ian:

How progressive charity platforms help foment anti-Israel terror

In a $2 billion contract sealed last summer, the global investment firm Apax Partners announced that it would be acquiring EveryAction, a fundraising portal that currently hosts more than 18,000 organizations and serves as parent to Ngp Van, which today remains the “leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive campaigns” in America.

Also included within the landmark deal was SalsaLabs, Inc., an American fundraising company that joined the EveryAction “family” several months preceding the Apax acquisition. While providing donor management to a host of institutions ranging from Westchester Children’s Association to Wilderness Watch, SalsaLabs is also fueling the success of controversial groups like The Alliance for Global Justice (“AFGJ”).

In 1998, the Tucson, Arizona-based AFGJ was incorporated under the Nicaragua Network and today mobilizes on behalf of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist objectives. With contributors including Amnesty International and the anti-Semitic Tides Foundation, the AFGJ had grown its revenue from $3.3 million in 2016 to approximately $7 million in 2020.

The AFGJ supports convicted terrorists through fundraising for Samidoun, also known as the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. Today, Samidoun is involved in a campaign to free Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leader Khaled Barakat, who in 2020 was barred from entering Germany for four years over his ties to Palestinian terrorism.

Since 1997, the PFLP has been recognized by the United States as a foreign terrorist group and is listed by the United States Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets and Control (OFAC) as a Specially Designated National and Blocked Person (“SDN”). The organizations and individuals listed on OFAC’s site have their assets blocked and are prohibited from conducting business with U.S. citizens.

As a terrorist organization, the PFLP is on the SDN roster and is barred from entering into financial transactions with U.S. entities. SalsaLabs’s use of its platform to represent an establishment with documented links to a terrorist group potentially places the company in non-compliance with U.S. anti-terror laws.

New York Democrat Scrambles To Appease the Radical Anti-Israel Left

A far-left member of Congress is scrambling to boost his anti-Israel bona fides after rank-and-file members of the Democratic Socialists of America privately lashed out at him for visiting the Jewish state.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.), an "active" member of the DSA, was hammered on a private message board of the organization in the final weeks of last year for traveling to Israel, with many members calling for the national organization to expel him. One socialist on the message board posting as RyanMosgrove said Bowman’s conduct was in "direct opposition" to the DSA’s "stated values and goals," and that he "should not remain a member." Another socialist posting as Gabe said Bowman's trip to Israel empowered an apartheid state.

"The impact of Jamaal Bowman’s public, repeated legitimization of Israeli apartheid extends beyond an internally voiced disagreement with the platform," Gabe wrote in his argument for expelling Bowman, which he asked his fellow socialists to keep contained to the private message board and off social media. "If we lack the organizing power in a given place to endorse a candidate who is going to put the priorities of our movement over other lobbies, especially lobbies for apartheid states like Israel, we shouldn’t endorse candidates there."

Gabe’s views were echoed by nearly all on the private message board, which the Washington Free Beacon obtained access to. The group's message board requires a login for anyone to access its posts. At issue was not only Bowman’s trip to Israel, which was sponsored by liberal anti-Israel group J Street and included a meeting with Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, but also his vote last September in support of funding Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. "Do you think Bowman’s visit and photo op with an Israeli war criminal was ok?" asked Gabe. "Do you think his Iron Dome vote was correct?"

The national organization elected not to expel Bowman, but the backlash has spurred the lawmaker to sprint to the left to win back the supporters he lost. On Wednesday night, he was one of just 15 Democrats to vote against a bill that included funding for the Iron Dome—a complete reversal of the position he held just months ago. He was joined in opposition by "Squad" members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), and Ilhan Omar (Minn.), the most infamous opponents of funding for Israel in Congress.

The @SierraClub caves to BDS bullies, cancels all its Israel trips (update)

From J Weekly:

The national environmental nonprofit Sierra Club, headquartered in Oakland, has canceled its scheduled trips to Israel in response to pressure from progressive and anti-Zionist groups.

The decision came after activists alleged the organization was “greenwashing the conflict” and “providing legitimacy to the Israeli state, which is engaged in apartheid against the Palestinian people,” a volunteer leader with the nonprofit summarized in an email this week.

News of the Sierra Club’s decision came in a mass email obtained by J. that was sent out by Mary Owens, the chair of the Sierra Club’s National Outings team, to hundreds of volunteers who lead part-recreational, part-educational, conservation-focused trips around the world.

For years the Sierra Club, established in 1960, has offered trips to Israel to explore the country’s biodiversity, bird migrations, desert landscape and ancient ruins. Last year’s trip was called “Natural and Historical Highlights of Israel,” offered for two weeks in March for about $5,000 per person. It advertised a “comprehensive journey through this enduring land,” with birdwatching, sea snorkeling, a visit to the Dead Sea and evenings on a kibbutz. Sierra Club outings are a major source of fundraising for the organization.

The email from Owens, who said she was not authorized to speak to the press, described the Sierra Club’s decision to cancel its trips — one scheduled for this month, and another for March 2023 — as the result of an advocacy push from one “Jewish American activist” and a host of both progressive and anti-Zionist groups, including the pro-Palestinian Adalah Justice Project, the Indigenous rights group the NDN Collective, the Campaign for the Boycott of Israel, Jewish Voice for Peace, the Sunrise Movement and the Movement for Black Lives.

The email from Owens read: “On January 20, the board of directors received an email from a Jewish American activist urging us to cancel our upcoming trips to Israel (scheduled for March 15 and 29, 2022 and March 2023), saying that we are greenwashing the conflict there and providing legitimacy to the Israeli state, which is engaged in apartheid against the Palestinian people.”

The board notified Owens and the National Outings team, which “sent our standard response which states that we don’t restrict our trips due to regional conflicts or politics,” Owens wrote. “The activist was not satisfied and said he planned to get additional activist groups involved.

“On February 22, the board received an email from a coalition of activist organizations … threatening that if we did not cancel the upcoming trips within a week, they would go public that the organization was violating the organizational values it recently rolled out.”

Acting executive director Dan Chu, the email said, “appointed a group to handle the response” and notified Israel trip leaders.

The special group appointed by Chu met with the progressive activists, the email said, “who insisted that there was no room for compromise and reiterated their demand that we cancel the trips by March 7.”

The group “spent the next few days reviewing the pros and cons of each outcome,” Owens wrote, adding: “the National Outings team did not want to cancel the trips.”

In the end, two members of the group appointed by Chu recommended that he cancel the trips, “and he agreed,” Owens wrote.

The Sierra Club is freely admitting that it caved to threats from BDSers. There was no decision based on Israel's supposed policies: it was to stop the haters from blackmailing them with threats of making a big publicity stink.

This is hardly a moral response by the Sierra Club. It is pure cowardice. It caved to haters and violated its own policies not to let politics enter into these kinds of decisions.

And it deserves to receive at least as much criticism for being so spineless to professional antisemites as it would have gotten from the haters.

It looks like they cancelled three trips. Here was what the Sierra Club Israel trips page looked like last week; it has now been taken down.

UPDATE: The Sierra Club has a planned trip to China this coming October. Their description of the country is glowing.

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

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03/11 Links Pt2: Washington's betrayal has only just begun; How the Biden Administration Is Funding the Effort To Delegitimize Israel; Matti Friedman: “Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai”

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: America and the truth of asymmetric warfare

In an interview about the war against Ukraine, the former Soviet dissident turned Israeli public figure, Natan Sharansky, made a key observation.

Commenting in Tablet that both Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, were far from the strongest in the world, Sharansky shared something he had learned from his time in a Soviet prison.

The ringleader in the cell, he said, wasn’t the one who was physically strongest but the one ready to use his knife. “Everybody has a knife, but not everybody is prepared to use it,” he said. “Putin believes that he is willing to use his knife and the west isn’t—that the west can only talk even if it is physically stronger.”

Of course, most people assumed that Putin would never use his knife. They thought he would never invade Ukraine and embark on a horrific campaign against its civilian population. Yet that’s exactly what he has done.

In a similar vein, no one apparently believed that Putin would ever deploy nuclear weapons. Yet with the Russian dictator issuing not-so-veiled threats about nuclear war, Britain and America are refusing to yield to the pleas by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to fly bombing raids against the invading Russian forces for fear that Putin may do just that.

At a stroke, therefore, a key tenet of western defence policy has been destroyed. For decades, western leaders have told themselves that the principle of “mutually assured destruction” — under which any nuclear first strike would provoke a devastating nuclear counter-strike — is so obviously suicidal that no leader in his right mind would ever use nuclear weapons.

Yet what Putin is demonstrating is that this doctrine may not apply to him. The west’s nuclear knife is sheathed; but he is brandishing his own in a menacing manner and, as a result, has the upper hand.

Once again, the west has made the false assumption that every world leader is fundamentally a rational actor acting in his own self-interest. But some individuals are driven by fanatical devotion to a cause which means they make an entirely different set of calculations.

This is one reason why the Biden administration is making such a catastrophic mistake over Iran.

Caroline Glick: Washington's betrayal has only just begun

The Biden administration justifies its pro-Iranian and anti-Israel/Sunni Arab policy by claiming it is a means to disengage the US from the Middle East at a time that Washington is keen to concentrate its resources and attention on Asia and the rising threat of China. While on its face, this justification seems reasonable, it stands on a rotten foundation.

During his term in office, then-President Donald Trump sought to minimize US presence in the Middle East in order to focus US efforts and resources in Asia to contend with the rising threat from China. To achieve this goal, Trump empowered America's allies – Israel and the Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia. He provided political, diplomatic, logistical, and when necessary, military support to ensure the success of their efforts to combat Iranian aggression against them.

Trump's concept, which was successfully diminishing both the level of violence in the region and the US's direct involvement in the Middle East, was that since America's allies share the US's interests in the Middle East, the more able they are to defend their own interests, the less the US will have to invest in protecting its interests in the region.

Trump created institutional frameworks for cooperation between US allies both by forging the Abraham Accords which effectively ended the Arab conflict with Israel, and by integrating Israel into the US Central Command and so fostering operational military cooperation between Israel and the US's Arab allies under the aegis of the US military.

Biden's policies are the polar opposite of Trump's policies both conceptually and substantively. Biden's policies represent a reinstatement and escalation of Barack Obama's policies for Iran and the wider Middle East. In contrast to Trump, Obama, Biden and their advisors believe that the US's Middle Eastern allies – Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states – maliciously worked for decades to entangle the United States in the wars of the Middle East. To disentangle America from the region and its pernicious "allies" the Obama-Biden doctrine posits the US must realign itself away from its allies and weaken them, and towards Iran, which it must empower.

This brings us to Israel, and what its government must do in the face of the administration's betrayal. Since supporting Iran and undermining Israel are the founding principles of Biden's Middle East policies, they are not subject to change. Israel cannot influence them. It doesn't matter how many times Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid gush about Israel's "true friends," Biden and Blinken. They have chosen a path that is impermeable to reason and argument.

Rather than expend efforts to woo an implacably hostile administration – through futile mediation of other people's wars and committing Israel to a policy of "no surprises" in its handling of Iran's Biden-supported-nuclear program, Israel's leaders must prepare for what awaits us.

We are about to be scapegoated.

In 2014-2015, in their efforts to sell their original cataclysmic nuclear deal with Iran, Obama and his advisors ran a campaign to demonize Israel and its supporters in Congress specifically and in US public life more generally. Now that Biden has agreed to an even more dangerous nuclear deal, Israel can expect for the demonization campaign that awaits it to dwarf its predecessor. In fact, as we see with the administration's efforts to scapegoat Israel directly, through its media partners and through the Ukrainian leadership, for not being sufficiently anti-Russian, the campaign has already begun.

The Saudis and the Emirates clearly already recognize the sucker's game that Biden and his team are playing. On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal reported that Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Muhammed bin Zayed of the UAE both refused to accept phone calls from Biden this week. Israel's leaders should follow them in accepting reality and acting accordingly before the situation deteriorates still further.

Demonstration in front of the U.S embassy, against the dangerous nuclear agreement with Iran

How the Biden Administration Is Funding the Effort To Delegitimize Israel

The Biden administration is offering nearly $1 million for groups to investigate alleged human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, an effort that will delegitimize Israel, according to sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

The State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) is soliciting nonprofit groups to apply for grant money up to $987,654 to "strengthen accountability and human rights in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza," according to a grant notice first posted online in mid-February.

Groups applying for the grant money will investigate alleged crimes inside Israel and these territories and "collect, archive, and maintain human rights documentation to support justice and accountability and civil society-led advocacy efforts, which may include documentation of legal or security sector violations and housing, land, and property rights," according to the State Department.

Israel's defenders on Capitol Hill expressed outrage over the program and said the Biden administration is helping fund international efforts to delegitimize Israel and boost the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. The grant is also fueling concerns about the Biden administration's relationship with Israel and its hiring of officials who have been critical of the Jewish state.

"This is disgraceful," Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) told the Free Beacon. "The Biden administration wants to use American taxpayer money to subsidize the international NGO campaign to demonize and isolate Israel, which then serves as a basis for anti-Semitic efforts to boycott and wage economic warfare against Israeli Jews. Congress did not appropriate funds for this purpose and has repeatedly condemned such campaigns."

The State Department, Cruz said, "should immediately cancel this program and investigate how it was approved."

1a. Beinart gaslights on the genocidal intent of Hamas' 1988 charter. The charter quotes a famous Hadith calling for the slaughter of Jews, but Beinart doesn't quote that part. https://t.co/71JySzVY2x pic.twitter.com/ItaMbypf5Q
— David May (@DavidSamuelMay) March 9, 2022