Wednesday, March 22, 2023



Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad is a book that makes you shake your head a lot. You just can’t believe how stupid people are. The stupid things they say and do to make themselves feel better about themselves; the stupid things and the lies they say that allow them to hate Jews and look the other way at the jihadists who target the liars, their loved ones, and their way of life. It’s hard to watch—you want to look away from this slow, global, own-goal suicide. But the author, Professor Richard Landes, has made this work so compelling, you have no choice but to continue reading, even when, as a sane person, it leaves you, the reader, feeling rather queasy. 


Richard Landes

The book takes its title from the words of two men on the subject of blood libels, issued a century apart. There are the mocking words of writer Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsburg), who in 1897, echoing the oft-expressed sentiment by European non-Jews when confronted with proof that, no. Jews don’t use the blood of Christian babies in the manufacture of matzah: “Is it possible the whole world is wrong and the Jews are right?”

Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginsburg)

In 2002, little more than 100 years later, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, referring to Israeli denials of a massacre in Jenin that never occurred, said, “I don’t think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong.”

In this way, antisemitism takes its path. Because there are plenty of Jew-haters in the world. And the more there are, the more they give themselves moral permission to hate. The media, of course, is there to help things along with its own rendition of the modern blood libel. It’s called “lethal journalism.” They use fake footage, knowing it’s fake. They lie, because the lies are what their audiences want to hear. And they demonize Israel every time, because again: it’s exactly what their audiences want to hear.

Landes takes you on a journey, beginning in 2000 with the Al Durah hoax, moving on to 9-11, the phony Jenin “massacre,” and the Danish cartoon scandal (Danoongate). At the end of each chapter, Landes summarizes the stupid things that various figures have said in relation to these events. For example, journalist Catherine Nay said of the faked viral photo of the dead boy in his father’s arms, “This death erases, replaces the image of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto.”

Every bit as shockingly stupid are the words of George W. Bush, spoken at the Islamic Center of Washington only days after 9-11, on September 17, 2001, “Islam is peace.”

Regarding the fictional Jenin massacre, journalist Janine di Giovanni wrote, “Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechniya, Sierra Leone, Kossovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life," 'Inside the Camp of the Dead,' The Times, April 16, 2002.

And off Danoongate, the French Director of Intelligence speaking in 2005, said, “These riots have nothing to do with Islam.”

Landes has been documenting this astounding stupidity and world folly for more than a decade. The result is this 500-page compendium with its prodigious, painstaking footnotes that leave the reader open-mouthed and astonished. You wonder: “How on earth did we get here?”

But you already know. Landes has connected up all the dots: the lies and lethal journalism, and the way the world gave jihad a pass, while damning the Jews. The facts and the progression of this deadly state of affairs have been amply covered by the author and you begin to understand the depth of the threat to our world, today. 

This a book you want on your shelf. It is not an easy read, but a necessary one if you want to understand how we got here—and how we are to dig our way out of this ugly, Jew-hating, jihadi, fake news mess. I put some questions to author Richard Landes to learn more about his book and its implications for the future:

Varda Epstein: Most writers think about who they’re writing for and gear their writing to that reader. “Can The ‘Whole World’ Be Wrong?” seems to be identifying who the reader is not. The book begins with a warning, but it’s more like a dare, or even a threat—like you’re trying to scare the reader off: “If you feel up to the task . . . turn the page. If not, just sit in your tub tweeting about white, racist privilege, while you bleed out.”

Who do you envisage as your reader? Who is it you’re trying to reach?

Richard Landes: My ideal reader is someone who really does care about liberal and progressive values. I actually lay out my concerns in the introductory chapter by contrasting zero-sum and positive-sum values, and stating my unequivocal preference for the latter, while conceding that the former has an inevitable presence in our lives and warning that those thinking they can eliminate zero-sum are not only fooling themselves with messianic dreams, but ultimately opposed to key life forces.

What I document in the book, however, is a massive shift in what was considered “liberal” or “progressive” in the new century/millennium. By 2003 it became a “litmus test of liberal credentials” to be pro-Palestinian (Buruma in NYT), at a time when the Palestinians were engaged in a suicide-mass murder war against Israeli civilians. By any standards of real liberal values that was a travesty which continues to this day (think Gays and LGBTQ for Palestine). So in a sense, the book is an attempt to go back to the moment this travesty first “took” and rethink how it could have happened so quickly and thoroughly. But since I firmly believe that the willingness to hear criticism and take it seriously is one of the key components of the liberal sensibility, I address this criticism to liberals sufficiently committed to their values to take it seriously.

Varda Epstein: Do you worry you’re preaching to the choir? Do you even aspire to reach the masses?

Richard Landes: Well that’s hard to say. Obviously a 500-page book with notes at the bottom of each page is not for “the masses.” But, between masses and choir lies many a circle of readers. Obviously, the “choir” of pro-Israel people are going to find it congenial. A number of people have written me about devouring the book in one sitting and thanking me: “Someone finally has the words for everything I’ve been struggling to say!” wrote one person. And if it helps them make the point to others, that’s great. But my real audience is what we might call the goats. As shepherds know, if you have about one goat to every ten sheep, then when there’s a problem, the sheep look to the goats. If they’re calm, the skittish sheep settle down. Similarly, I don’t think I’m going to reach some gay guy so caught up in his peer group that he repeats nonsense about being passionately for a political culture that hates gays. But if I can reach the thoughtful ones, then maybe they can explain it to him.

Varda Epstein: You write, “In a sense, this book should not have had to be written and I should be able to work on the origins of modern Western civilization in the demotic millennialism of eleventh-century France to my heart’s content.” Why did the “Can The ‘Whole World’ Be Wrong?” have to be written, and why by you, Richard Landes? After all, as you suggest, lethal journalism, antisemitism, and global jihad are not your chosen field.

Richard Landes: Well, actually, global jihad is my field since it’s an apocalyptic millennial movement, and it came on my screen in the mid-90s through the (then) graduate work of David Cook (now at Rice U.). Actually, in the mid-1990s, in my work on the 11th century, I began to work out a model of antisemitism that went in waves starting with philo-semitism, leading to important socio-economic changes that eventually produced an antisemitic reaction. Given that the period after the Holocaust (i.e. my life) was the longest and most philo-semitic period in recorded history (especially in the USA where I grew up), I speculated that the advent of 2000 might mark the reappearance of antisemitism in the West. At the time I thought it would come from the apocalyptic “right” – fundamentalist Christian Zionists disappointed that the Rapture didn’t happen, and Jihadi Muslims who were already openly and ferociously antisemitic. What I didn’t see coming were two linked phenomena: 1) the attraction of the “Left” for the Jihadi apocalyptic narrative that Israel and the US were “Satans”/Antichrists, and 2) the utter failure of liberals, who had a huge presence in the public sphere, to resist. As a result, what I thought would be a wave of Jew-hatred that we could resist, has, over 20 years of astonishing and self-destructive mishandling, become an existential threat not only to Israel (its purported target) but to democracies around the world.

Why did I have to write it rather than someone else? I don’t know. But someone else didn’t write it. It’s such a hard thing to grasp, a history of your own time. Maybe working historians in the early 11th century writing histories of the turn of that millennium made it a conceivable project. Obviously I don’t write about everything (and neither did they). I write in depth about what I think were errors of judgment on a civilizational plane, which continue to be made by very smart people. We all love the story of the emperor’s new clothes, but few of us want to entertain the notion that it’s actually happening. Someone jokingly said that Amazon should bundle my book not with another book, but with antidepressants. It’s dark stuff. Very depressing. Without a deep sense of humor, I wouldn't have been able to keep my eye on this ball over the course of decades.

Varda Epstein: How, if at all, does your work as a medievalist inform your book, and in particular your interest in eleventh-century France? Does your work on the al Durah story, which you mention in your book, have anything to do with that? You cite many French sources and drop French phrases in your book. I’m getting the idea that you’re a Francophile—but not!

Richard Landes: As for the Middle Ages, there are three key issues:

1)      Honor-shame societies: As a medievalist I work on a society in which gaining/keeping honor and avoiding/revenging shame were key components of public life, where it was legitimate, accepted, even required that one shed blood for the sake of honor. Without understanding those dynamics, you don’t understand Arab political culture. Now Edward Saïd made it taboo to discuss these matters (the quintessence of “Orientalism”), and in doing so blinded the West to the cultural dynamics of this region. In my book I show how the Oslo Accords were based on thinking that Arafat and Arab political culture were ready to give up the view that the very existence of Israel was so shameful that it must be destroyed, and go for the positive-sum, win-win, of “land for peace,” to the benefit of both the Israelis and the Palestinians. And how ignoring those dynamics meant that right up to the last second, the peace negotiators thought we were “sooo close.” And still do.

2)      Apocalyptic millenarian: the jihadis are a classic expression of a distinctly (but not exclusively) medieval form of eschatological thinking, namely they embrace an “active cataclysmic apocalyptic scenario” – evil permeates the world and we are God’s agents in destroying it – aiming at a hierarchical millennium – Islam will dominate the world, infidels either accept dhimmitude (subjection), or convert, or die. It’s really hard for moderns to take apocalyptic beliefs seriously because every time in the past that people have been so moved, they’ve been wrong, sometimes disastrously so. (This included modern historians of the Middle Ages.) As a result of this cognitive lapse, and the pressures of political correctness in the 21st century, to avoid anything too negative about Islam (don’t say “radical Islam”), has produced a Western culture that cannot see its enemy (embodied in the absurd formula “war on terrorism”).

3)      Public Secrets: for reasons that I’m not sure about, both my academic career and my journalistic one have found and investigated public secrets, that is, something everyone “in the know” knows about, but when it comes to the public record, they deny any knowledge or existence of the issue in question. In the Middle Ages it was about how Charlemagne was crowned on the first day of the year 6000 from Creation – a millennial date Christian chronographers had been tracking for over 6 centuries – and yet no one who wrote about the coronation, or his imperial period, mentioned it. In this book, the main public secret I deal with is that the Palestinians fake news footage all the time, and that the press is so profoundly intimidated by them, that they run Palestinian “lethal narratives” as news. This unacknowledged, even denied phenomenon, has immense impact on the kind of lethal journalism that we get constantly from our news media.

Varda Epstein: There’s a lot about stupidity in your book—you call it when and where you see it, using exactly that word “stupid” in its various forms. Why is it important to you to use precisely this descriptor and how do you account for the sheer amount of it that exists in the world? 

Richard Landes: First because it’s a technical term in economic and game theory for someone who hurts someone else without gaining any advantage (Cipolla). Secondly because it’s so stunningly prominent in our times. I define “astoundingly stupid” as creating advantages for an avowed enemy. And as far as I can make out, that has been a consistent pattern among the Western opinion leaders – journalists, academics, public intellectuals, politicians, and policy makers – for the last two decades. As Elder of Ziyon put it, my book is a “modern take on the Emperor’s New Clothes.” Then, when I found the comment by Bonhoeffer (which I included in the epigrams)—who also lived at a time when his society was being seized by apocalyptic memes—about the impossibility of arguing with precisely this kind of self-destructive stupidity, I knew I was on the right track. 


Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Varda Epstein: How did you decide on the structure of the book? How does the first part complement the second? Why not have it in, say, two volumes? Oh, and you must tell us about the haikus! That must have been fun.

Richard Landes: The structure wrote itself. The first four chapters are my “history of my time,” namely four incidents in the early aughts (‘00s) that chronicle key moments in the assault of global jihad on western democracies, and the astoundingly stupid way in which the West processed what was happening to them: the outbreak of the intifada and the al Durah affair; 9-11; the “Jenin Massacre”; and the Danish cartoon scandal.

Then, to explain how this could happen, I went through the key players: 1) Shame-Honor driven Arab culture; 2) Apocalyptic-Millennial driven Jihadi beliefs – what I call Caliphators; 3) Liberal Cognitive Egocentrics: people who project their positive-sum values onto cultures that don’t share it; 4) radical progressives who, blinded by Saïd’s assault on Orientalism, end up allying with the most imperialist movement in the world because it’s “anti-imperialist,” i.e. anti-USA and Israel; 5) the lethal journalists who radically disorient their audiences with their Palestinian-compliant “news” reports; and 6) the virtue-signaling Jews who adopt their enemy’s narrative (something an apocalyptic Caliphator predicted in 2001), thereby giving wings to the very kind of exterminationist antisemitism that fueled the Nazi madness.

The last part sketches developments over the next decade and a half (mid-aughts to now), identifying some of the phenomena so striking in our current culture that I think this turn-of-the-millennium seizure helped set in motion – woke, cancel-culture politics, fake news, anti-racism discourse, and what I call pre-emptive dhimmitude, namely the adoption by our information elites of a posture of subjection to Muslim demands for respect which ends up attacking not the invaders of democratic culture, but those (like me) who warn and mobilize against those enemies.

As for the haikus, I’ve been writing them ever since I ran across the form in my youth. The one for al Durah (chapter one) was originally written for Y2K: “We need not have been/ Mouths open inhaling, when/ The sh*t hit the fan.” My favorite is the one for the chapter on Jews against themselves: “Have ever before/ lambs denounced lambs who refuse/ to lie with lions?”

Varda Epstein: I so appreciated all the detailed footnotes you included at the bottom of each page (I hate it when writers put them the end and I have to flip back and forth). But that would have been a daunting task! You must have been taking voluminous notes for years on end, as you read, watched, talked . . . does that about sum it up? How many years was this book in the making? 

"A book that keeps writing itself,"
Tat Aluf Yossi Kuperwasser



Richard Landes: Yes, it does sum it up nicely. Thanks to Evernote (I have over 35,000 notes clipped there), I’ve been able to preserve access to articles that no longer can be found online. I’m ashamed to say the book was over a decade in the making. The working title – They’re so smart, cause we’re so Stupid – was inspired by the Fort Hood Massacre (2009) in which a Palestinian-American major in the army, after extensively displaying his jihadi sympathies, shot dozens of his fellow-soldiers, and inspired Mark Steyn to write an article entitled: “These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event.” It’s just hard to write a history book about your own time. As Yossi Kuperwasser put it, “It’s a book that keeps writing itself.” When Shireen abu Akleh was killed, I knew I couldn't include this ongoing, slow-motion train wreck.

As for the footnotes, I feel passionately about a) having many, and b) at the bottom of the page. I took out all the URLs one can find for oneself easily from the hard-copy book, but for those who want to get them, I have them up at my personal webpage for the book: https://richard-landes.com/the-whole-world/

Varda Epstein: There are so many shocking parts in your book still rattling around in my head. For instance, that remark from a peer, “Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.”

Richard Landes: For me it will always be Charles Enderlin, when I pointed out how much faking was going on at Netzarim Junction the day Muhammad al Durah was allegedly shot, saying to me “Oh yes, they do that all the time.”

But the two worst comments by far were a) when a colleague in the history department responded to my bemoaning the suicide terror war of the Palestinians with the comment, “What choice do they have?” and b) the journalist Catherine Nay saying that the image of al Durah “erased, replaced” the picture of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto. Hard to get more empirically and morally disoriented, and yet people heard these kinds of remarks and nodded knowingly.

What would you say shocked you most about your findings? I’m guessing it’s the stupidity. . .

Richard Landes: That’s one way to put it. Cowardice is another. The way I’d put it, in the ‘90s, I may have seen a wave of antisemitism coming in 2000, and even a wave of Jihadi attacks on the West, but I never dreamed that Western democracies would be so feckless in responding.

Varda Epstein: What do you want the reader to take away from your book?

Richard Landes:

1) that when “the whole world” agrees on something (whether it’s the emperor’s courtiers or the academics and journalists and pundits who think they speak for “the whole world” and are sure they’re right) they can (and have, and are and will) be, sometimes, wrong.

2) that the meanings of “liberal” and “progressive” have been terribly distorted, even betrayed, in the 21st century. 

3) that when the legacy media reports Israel has done something terrible and Israeli sources deny it (or even admit to it only partially) it’s possible that the legacy media is wrong.

4) that we’ve gotten into this mess because a lot of nice and well-intentioned people have allowed themselves to be pushed around, silenced, and cowed by those filled with passionate intensity, and we need to speak up.

5) that to continue down this path spells disaster.

***

Landes, R. (2022). Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad (Antisemitism in America). Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2022. 

(available on Amazon.)



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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

I was browsing Google Books looking for the use of the term "Palestinian Talmud"when I came across  an 1883 work, "The Mishnah on which the Palestinian Talmud Rests; Edited for the Syndics of the University Press from the Unique Manuscript Preserved in the University Library of Cambridge, Add. 470. 1" by William Henry Lowe, a Hebrew lecturer at Christ's College.

This edition of the Mishna has little to do with the Jerusalem ("Palestinian") Talmud. It is a transcription of a 15th century manuscript of the Mishnah at Cambridge, one of the earliest complete such manuscripts. 

Lowe chose to write the entire work using "Rashi" script, rather than the usual Hebrew scripts. But that isn't the weirdest part.

Lowe wrote the Hebrew title page, and the Hebrew introduction, in the style of Jewish works of scholarship, to the extent that he refers to the decidedly non-Jewish Christ's College becomes "The Beit Medrash for the Group of the Messiah."

Here are the English and Hebrew title pages:




Lowe even lists the (Hebrew) publication year (5)643 by using the gematria of a Hebrew Biblical phrase the way Jewish scholars do, using a verse from Psalms 102:14 which happens to be quite Zionist: "You will surely arise and take pity on Zion, for it is time to be gracious to her; the appointed time has come."

His dedication page and introduction are likewise in the style of Jewish scholars.

The original 15th century manuscript that Lowe transcribed (and commented on) is now online at Cambridge's website. 
 
My favorite page is this one, where a child decided to practice his or her Aleph-Bet lessons on the bottom margin of the priceless page:



This, to me, symbolizes Judaism's eternal survival. Scholarship is not relegated to the ivory tower; these books were in people's homes where anyone could access them, including six-year olds. 




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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Raja Abdulrahim wrote an article in today's New York Times that is ostensibly about how difficult Israel is making it for Muslim artisans to repair damage from clashes on the Temple Mount.

From start to finish, the article is a very sophisticated piece of anti-Israel propaganda

The propaganda begins in the headline:


According to the headline, the "Al Aqsa Mosque" and the "Temple Mount" are two names for the same thing. While the article itself says "Al Aqsa Mosque compound" this is part of a relatively new campaign by Muslims to rename the entire Mount as "Al Aqsa Mosque," the third holiest site in Islam, a holy place for Muslims, and not just the mosque itself which is now referred to as the "Al Qibli Mosque." Up until recent years, the Waqf called the building the Al Aqsa Mosque and the compound the Haram al-Sharif.

 At a workshop on the edge of the Aqsa Mosque compound, Muhammad Rowidy spends hours hunched over panes of stained glass, painstakingly carving through white plaster to reveal geometric designs. While he works, there is a thought he can’t shake.

“You see this,” he said, pausing and leaning back, “this takes months to finish, and in one minute, in one kick, all this hard work goes.”
The "one kick" is a clear reference to Israeli security as being the source of damage to the stained glass. And that is the impression that the article tries to give, that Israeli forces are the ones who cause damage, until nearly at the end, when it says:

Mr. Rowidy, 41, said it was easy to tell which side had broken which windows. Those completely smashed were done by the Israeli police with batons, he said. A video posted on Facebook during the unrest shows one of the windows being broken, with what appears to be a baton, from the roof outside.

In comparison, Palestinians who threw stones had knocked large holes in the windows, he said.
So Palestinians stockpile stones inside the mosque, throwing them at Jews and responding troops including through valuable stained glass windows, and Israeli forces shoot tear gas through the damaged windows to avoid entering the mosque. And somehow the Israelis are the ones blamed!

The Times doesn't show these images of deliberate damage to and weaponization of the Al Aqsa Mosque by Muslims:





The article has other examples of one-sidedness:

Incidents at the compound have often served as a spark in the broader Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In 2000, a trip to the site by Ariel Sharon, who later became Israel’s prime minister, surrounded by hundreds of police officers, set off the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising. More recently, the security minister in Israel’s right-wing government, Itamar Ben-Gvir, angered Palestinians and regional Muslim states by visiting the compound.
Sharons' visit didn't spark the second intifada. It was an excuse for a pre-planned, deadly uprising. 

And Ben Gvir's visit did not result in any incident whatsoever, although many predicted it would. So why mention it at all?

But on the other hand, sometimes Muslims start to attack Jews for no reason from inside the mosque - but they are never described as "sparking" anything.


More bias:

The workers at the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, need approval from the Israeli authorities for repairs or replacements, down to every broken window or smashed tile, according to the workers, administrators of the site, and Israeli rights groups.

Jews believe that the compound is the location of two ancient temples and consider it the holiest site in Judaism. In recent years, Jewish worshipers have prayed inside the compound, a violation of an agreement that has been in place since 1967.
Calling Al Aqsa the "third holiest site in Islam" is said with no caveats, even though for Sufi Muslims this is not so obvious, and this is controversial in Shiite Islam as well, as some believe that the Al Aqsa mosque mentioned in the Quran exists only in heaven. 

But while the Sunni Muslim beliefs are written as fact, the location of the Jewish Temples are framed as something that Jews merely "believe," despite the quite clear evidence of the 2000 year old remains of the Temple compound that exist today and a continuous historical thread since Biblical times. 

. With the overlapping holidays this year, there are concerns that increased visits and unauthorized prayers could provoke further clashes between the Israeli police and Palestinians, as has been the case in previous years.
Jews quietly and silently praying "provoke" clashes? No, Muslim intolerance for Jews is the source of the violence, not devout Jewish prayers. 

But perhaps the biggest problem with this article isn't how Abdulrahim artfully manages to avoid running afoul of the New York Times fact checkers while injecting so much bias. The major problem is that she doesn't say a word about why Israel is so skittish about unauthorized and unsupervised repairs on the Temple Mount.

Because Muslims had lied about this before and used those lies to build a massive underground mosque that destroyed and carted away tons of the most valuable archaeological and religious treasures on Earth. And the destruction of valuable treasures continues today. Even during last year's riots the Muslim youth broke some ancient columns, with not a word from the New York Times. 


By not reporting about this wholesale destruction done by the Waqf and Palestinians on the Temple Mount, Abdulrahim frames this as Israeli meddling in Muslim culture just to harass them.

Put it all together, and this isn't a news article. It is anti-Israel agitprop that twists and chooses facts to give an entirely wrong impression to the reader. 




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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

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Kotel, circa 1920


According to Palestinian media, the League of Arab States declared that the 1930 international commission that declared that Muslims had legal ownership of the Western Wall is still true, and the Western Wall - as well as the plaza in front of it - is all Muslim Waqf land where Jews have no legal rights. 

While US and European leaders have fallen over themselves to condemn Bezalel Smotrich for saying that the Palestinian people are a recent invention, saying that statements like that are inflammatory, there is silence in both diplomatic circles and the media about the Arabs denying any rights of Jews to the very place that they have prayed towards for thousands of years.

Selective outrage is the norm, of course. Arabs are expected to say inflammatory, inciting and false statements - they do this every day - but only Jews are expected to speak in measured tones and not to plainly state the truth if it might upset the touchy Arabs.

But there is a very interesting angle to the newfound Palestinian love of the 1930 Western Wall Commission report. (They made it clear at the time that they do not accept that the Commission has any legal right to rule on the issue.) 

If you look closer at the specific Muslim claims in 1930 quoted in the Commission report, you find out that according to their logic at the time, Israel is the legal owner today not only of the Kotel but of all of Jerusalem.

The Muslim side, represented by Ahmed Zaki Pasha, declared  the Muslim legal case to the Commission:

History shows that after having acquired Palestine by the right of conquest, the Jews were definitely driven out of the country by the Romans after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. The Christians then ruled the country until the Arab conquest under Omar. With the exception of 90 years during the epoch of the Crusades the effective possession of the country has been in the hands of the Arabs from generation to generation.  The Jews who came to Palestine were not interfered with by the Arabs and were fairly well treated by the Moslem rulers of the country.  During this long period there were no incidents at the Buraq.  The Jews never claimed any rights to the Wall and were content to go now and them to lament at that place, contented in the assurance that the tolerant Arabs would not interfere with them.  It is the Balfour Declaration, reiterated in the Terms of the Mandate, that has been the cause of the discussion which finally brought bloodshed over Palestine and incited the Jews to urge claims which they had never thought of before. The creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, an Arab country, lost for ever by the Jews hundreds and hundreds of years ago, can only give rise to perpetual troubles and dissensions. The country which the Jews had taken over by right of conquest was again lost, and the Arabs in their turn conquered it, not from the Jews, who had been driven out of Palestine several centuries before, but from the Byzantines. It was not a Jewish kingdom that the Arabs occupied in the 7th century, but a country to which the Jews had no right whatever. 
It is here a question about property which has belonged to the Moslems for many centuries.
The Arab side is saying explicitly that the way that land in Palestine changes legal ownership is by the right of conquest. They admit that Jews owned the land before any Arabs did, legally, by conquering it. Then the Romans, Byzantines and finally Muslims had legal ownership because of their subsequent conquests. And even the Muslim ownership of the Temple Mount and Western Wall had only been for "many centuries" because of the Muslim conquest of the land. 

Since then, of course, the Jews re-conquered the land of Israel. And therefore, according to the Muslim's own testimony to this commission that they now say has legal weight, Jews have complete ownership of all of Jerusalem today, having conquered the city in 1967.

This is not the only part of the Muslim claims from 1930 that undermine their claim today.

One is that the 1930 claims admitted that the original holiness of the Temple Mount came from the Temples themselves, which today's Palestinian deny ever existed:

It ought to be observed that when Mohammed came to Jerusalem, the site of the ancient Temple, which was already an object of veneration for the Moslems, was called Masdjed Al Aqsa (i.e., remote oratory) in contrast to the Mosque of Mecca or Masdjed Al Haram (i.e., oratory, sanctuary).  At that time Mecca was hostile to Mohammed.  Owing to that, Jerusalem and especially the Temple area, for a certain period, became the first Kibla (direction) for the Moslems, i.e., during that period they turned their faces in the direction of Jerusalem when praying and it was not till later on that Mecca became definitely the Kibla.
Another most interesting section notes that according to Sharia law, once land is declared sacred Waqf land, it cannot lose that status - except for one case:
A Waqf property cannot be acquired by usucaption unless the usucaptor has enjoyed a peaceful and uninterrupted possession ab antique, i.e., for at least 33 years. 
Israel has certainly had unquestioned possession of the Kotel since 1967, and arguably all of Jerusalem. (This is probably a very weak argument under Sharia; I imagine any dispute by the previous owner would make usucaption invalid, but it is a fun argument.) 

Perhaps the Palestinians shouldn't be so quick to embrace the 1930 international commission report.  It shows that the same Muslim legal reasonings that sounded good to them in 1930 can now be used against them.





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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

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Heroes Haim Graf and Mordechai Komornik

There were two interesting and related articles in the Palestine Post of March 22, 1948, on events that happened 75 years ago today, that were both about Jewish heroes.

The first real heroes were two guards, Haim Graf and Mordechai Komornik, who saw smoke coming out of the abandoned vehicle outside the Solel Boneh building in Haifa. They warned scores of people about a truck bomb - and who were killed by that very bomb as they were pushing the truck away from the crowded building.


Unfortunately, four were killed besides the guards, including a father and his five year old son.

The other heroic story was of a different type:


The Jews rushed to save the lives of their armed enemies - and Zichron Mizrahi paid with his life.

Why did the Arab Legionnaires assume that the Jews who were trying to rescue them were attacking them? 

Because that is how Arabs would act! 

Palestinian Arabs have a different idea of what being a "hero" means. They have used the word "heroic" consistently with every single murder of a Jew this year (and every other year) by an Arab.

If you want to know a people, know who they consider their heroes.



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Tuesday, March 21, 2023

From Ian:

Bernard Henri Levy: Israel’s Genius, and Its Bad Shepherds
I love Israel.

I’ve loved it since day one, just after the 1967 war, when I discovered this unknown land where everything spoke to me in secret.

I love the miracle of this country, born of a publicist’s passion for a history that he knew very little about; baptized with a name from psalmists and poets who knew nothing of what makes a nation; built by practical dreamers who, while resuscitating Hebrew, realized this other miracle, which was the invention of one of the only true social contracts in history (“we decide to be a republic, therefore we are one”—who else dared, except maybe America?).

I love Israel when I feel it’s a refuge for persecuted Jews, and I love it when it’s being menaced, stigmatized or demonized by adversaries who, by arms or words, intend to weaken or destroy it.

And, unlike France, which after six years of war with Algeria suspended some of its fundamental liberties, or the United States, which needed only six weeks after September 11 to pass their Patriot Act, I love that Israel, even at war, not after six years or six weeks, but since the very day of its birth, i.e., for 75 years, has never removed its freedoms or ceased to be a democracy.
Phyllis Chesler: Israeli protesters, I can no longer keep silent
I can no longer keep silent. I may be sitting in Manhattan, but my heart is in Jerusalem and my heart is very heavy.

I may not be a lawyer or a legal scholar, but I have been an organizer, an activist, a leader who has acted on behalf of civil and human rights—especially women’s rights. But I have never acted in the way that Israeli rioters are now acting: Not stopping, threatening to continue until they’ve brought down an entire country.

These leftists/progressives/“good people” (my former people) seem to be behaving the same way that pro-Palestinian/pro-jihad students behave in the streets and classrooms of America. They are like hecklers in the classroom who will not allow a speaker with whom they disagree to speak, trying to chase them out of the lecture hall. These rioters are aiming to abolish a lawful and democratic election because they despise and fear the people’s choice. They aim to make their country odious in the eyes of the world.

Do they not understand that Israel is already defamed, that the noose has tightened around the Jewish neck globally, that Israel is already hated everywhere? Do they think that by standing for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, minority and Arab rights (all important issues) they will be seen as the “good” Israel, the “good” Jew and will be sent to the gas chambers last?

Do they not see that their style of protesting, however righteously intended, resembles a Black Lives Matter demonstration, a jihadist uprising, a Jan. 6 storming of the American Capitol or an adolescent tantrum? Do they not see that they are enacting their own form of BDS?

Do they not understand that they reside in a neighborhood where such a dangerous riot would be put down with live bullets, prison, torture, execution, perhaps even chemical warfare? Do they not understand that they are lucky to live in a country that does not do such things? Do they have no better way to protest what they view as dangerous and awful as a “tyranny of the majority?”
Thomas Friedman's fury
Nothing riles New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman more than an Israeli government with the audacity to disregard his opinions and demands. His laceration of the Jewish state stretches as far back as his undergraduate years at Brandeis University. There, he was a member of Breira, a left-wing Jewish advocacy group that favored a two-state solution along the pre-1967 lines, thereby removing biblical Judea and Samaria (previously Jordan's "west bank") from Israeli control. Friedman has been an unrelenting critic of Israel ever since.

In a March 8 diatribe, Friedman fancifully warned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pursuing a "judicial putsch to crush the independence" of Israel's judiciary. He urged American Jews "to choose sides on Israel," but not any side – only Friedman's.

"Every rabbi and every Jewish leader in America," he wrote, must speak out to affirm his fury. Friedman's preferred Jewish leader seems to be Los Angeles Rabbi Sharon Brous, who recently delivered a sermon titled "The Tears of Zion," urging her congregation to challenge Netanyahu's "illiberal, ultranationalist regime." Only Netanyahu, it seems, is worthy of rabbinical laceration.

Given Friedman's rants, Brous's was mild criticism. In what he no doubt viewed as his nastiest insult, Friedman not only blamed Netanyahu for embracing "more and more ultranationalist and ultrareligious parties," but also claimed that the prime minister "has come to embrace the Trumpist playbook," whatever that means.

Friedman ignores the fact that, for Israel, former President Donald Trump was the most supportive American president since Harry Truman recognized the fledgling Jewish state back in 1948. Trump acknowledged Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and relocated the American embassy to Jerusalem in 2017, affirming it as Israel's capital. Would that Friedman's preferred presidents, whoever they may be, had done as much for Israel.

In Friedman's indictment, Netanyahu is guilty of "radicalizing his base, attacking Israel's legal, media and academic institutions" and "inciting his loyalists against centrist and left-wing Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs."

The European Union issued a press release:

Today’s decision in the Knesset to repeal some articles of the 2005 Disengagement law concerning the Northern West Bank is counter-productive to de-escalation efforts, and hampers the possibility to pursue confidence building measures and create a political horizon for dialogue.

Israel has reaffirmed its commitment to efforts to reduce tensions just very recently, with the joint communiques of Aqaba (26 February) and Sharm al-Sheikh (19 March).

The EU considers settlements as illegal under international law. They constitute a major obstacle to peace and threaten the viability of the two-state solution. The Gaza Disengagement law of 2005, and its articles concerning Northern West Bank, was an important step towards a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The decision of the Knesset is a clear step back.

We call on Israel to revoke this law and take actions that contribute to de-escalation of an already very tense situation.
The term "West Bank" wasn't capitalized until the 1970s, thousands of years after the area was named Judea and Samaria.

Now the EU has publicized a brand new place name: "Northern West Bank."  I can only find one other place where it is capitalized as a place name - by the obsessively anti-Israel World Council of Churches. 

But the EU is pretending that there is an Israeli law that specifies the "Northern West Bank."  No, there isn't.

The Disengagement Plan that resulted in Israeli withdrawal from Gaza also included the depopulation of several Jewish towns in Samaria - which is referred to repeatedly in the Plan as "Northern Samaria."

The EU would rather adopt a new place name, Northern West Bank, than use what the area is actually called. And the only reason is to separate that area from its Biblical and Jewish roots.

That is not objectivity. That is propaganda to pre-judge the outcome of negotiations. 

(h/t Irene)




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This video from Palestine Times is upset at an Israeli Knesset member suggested that playing soccer on the Temple Mount be prohibited, and defends the right of Muslims to desecrate the holiest place in Judaism.


It is remarkable that the very people who insist that everyone else respect their customs to the extent that all must follow their own laws  (e.g., no one can draw cartoons of Mohammed) and who threaten those who don't adhere to their standards,  have so little respect for the feelings of others.



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From Ian:

FDD: Israel and Palestinians Make Peace Commitments in Sharm el-Sheikh
“The good news is that there is an effort underway between Israelis and Palestinians to curb unrest during Ramadan. The bad news is that violent groups have been preparing to unleash terror attacks for some time now. And it’s difficult to say if any concrete commitments were made at the summit. Outside actors could have an outsized role in keeping a lid on the violence. Jordan’s rhetoric in particular could be a bellwether.”— Jonathan Schanzer, FDD Senior Vice President for Research Efforts to Calm Tension as Violence Soars

The meeting is the second round of talks that began in Aqaba, Jordan, on February 26. The conference aimed to agree on a viable solution to deescalate violence. Recent terror attacks inside Israel — including a March 6 roadside bombing — have exacerbated concerns by Israeli and American officials that terrorist groups will exploit Ramadan to carry out further attacks.

While the talks in Sharm el-Sheikh were proceeding, a Palestinian terrorist shot and injured a U.S.-Israeli citizen who was traveling in the West Bank city of Hawara. Israeli security forces apprehended the shooter, who had used a makeshift weapon during the terror attack. The attack occurred in the same city where a Palestinian terrorist shot and killed two Israelis three weeks ago, provoking retaliation by Israelis against homes and property in Hawara.

Mixed Messages
Prior to the talks, Hamas and other terrorist organizations issued statements urging the Palestinian Authority (PA) not to meet with Israel. The meeting “only serves the occupation’s agenda to consolidate its power and control over Palestinian land,” Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said. An unnamed PA official also expressed doubt, saying the chance of a successful outcome in Sharm el-Sheikh was “zero.” Still, an unnamed American official said the outcome of the talks was “constructive, honest and forthright.”
Knesset repeals 2005 act on West Bank settlement pullout
The Knesset on Tuesday voted 31-18 to repeal articles of the 2005 Gaza Disengagement Law banning Israelis from entering and residing in four communities in northern Samaria.

The Gaza disengagement led to the destruction and evacuation of the Israeli communities of Sa-Nur, Homesh, Ganim and Kadim in northern Samaria, as well as 21 communities in the Gaza Strip.

In addition to rolling back the articles (23-27) banning movement into and out of, and residence in, northern Samaria, the amendment stipulates that Article 28, which canceled rights regarding real estate in vacated territory, will not apply to rights established there starting from the date of the bill's approval.

"There is no longer any justification to prevent Israelis from entering and staying in the evacuated territory in northern Samaria, and therefore it is proposed to state that these sections [of the disengagement law] will no longer apply to the evacuated territory," reads the introductory text to the bill.

The bill's passage erases "to some extent" the "the stain on the garment of the State of Israel" left by the disengagement, it continues.

The IDF must now approve a military order allowing Israelis to return to those areas.

"Seventeen years of attempts, an uncompromising struggle, and a strong belief in the righteousness of this path converged into one moment when the Knesset plenum voted in favor of canceling the Disengagement Law," Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, who sponsored the bill, said Tuesday.

"The State of Israel tonight began the recovery process from the deportation disaster," he added in reference to the 2005 expulsion of some 8,000 Jews from their homes in Gaza and Samaria. "This is the first significant step towards real healing and settlement in Israel's historical territories that belong to it."


Khaled Abu Toameh: Biden Administration Pushing Arabs Towards Iran
Today, China is victorious by sponsoring the historic agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, while the US has a new president who comes to destroy agreements reached by his predecessor, and even brags about it during his election campaign and his presidency." — Saeed Al-Mryti, Saudi political activist, Twitter, March 14, 2023.

"[N]o matter how hard analysts try to beautify the situation for US policy, what Saudi Arabia has done today is a direct and successful blow to the Biden administration and its policy in the Middle East." — Jubran Al-Khoury, Lebanese political analyst, annahar.com, March 12, 2023.

It is thus no surprise that Iran and its terror proxies – Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah – are expressing profound satisfaction over the Saudi-Iranian agreement. In their eyes, the agreement is an indication of the growing weakness of the US and the failed policy of the Biden administration in the Middle East. Thanks to the US administration's fragility, the Iranian-led axis of evil has been significantly emboldened as America's erstwhile Arab allies are rushing towards the open arms of the mullahs in Tehran.


A Hamas media spokesperson said today that Gaza's economy is rebounding now that there is relative calm in the sector.

Governmental data in the Gaza Strip released today "showed a remarkable improvement in the economic situation," especially in the manufacturing and export sectors, according to a report in Sama News. 

The article says that the current state of calm, combined with Israel allowing an increasing number of vetted Gaza workers to commute to jobs in Israel, has helped the Gaza economy a great deal.

The head of the Hamas government media office, Salama Marouf, said that since last August, work has resumed in more than 220 textile factories, which led to the recovery of that sector after many years.

Speaking to Hamas' Al-Aqsa Radio, Marouf pointed out that during the past week, the products of some textile factories were exported and marketed abroad for the first time in years.

Last week, the Gaza government announced that there will be no problems of food shortages through Ramadan.

While there has been sporadic rocket fire over the past year, it has been very limited.

Who would have thought that there could be economic benefits for not being obsessed with killing Jews?





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A new study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue looks at the amount of antisemitic tweets before and after Elon Musk took over the company - and found that the amount of Jew-hate more than doubled:

New research from CASM Technology and ISD has found a major and sustained spike in antisemitic posts on Twitter since the company’s takeover by Elon Musk on October 27, 2022. Powered by the award-winning digital analysis technology Beam– and based on a powerful hate speech detection methodology combining over twenty leading machine-learning models– researchers found that the volume of English-language antisemitic Tweets more than doubled in the period following Musk’s takeover. In total, analysts detected 325,739 English-language antisemitic Tweets in the 9 months from June 2022 to February 2023, with the weekly average number of antisemitic Tweets increasing by 106% (from 6,204 to 12,762), when comparing the period before and after Musk’s acquisition.
There is a lot in the 32-page report, and its methodology appears to be largely sound. (I think if they would use my definition of antisemitism rather than the IHRA Working Definition, they might find it to be more accurate.) 

But one statistic stood out to me: Antisemites were eager to take advantage of the apparent loss of moderation by creating new accounts at a much higher rate than before:

We identified a significant surge of new accounts posting plausibly antisemitic content. 3,855 such accounts were created between Oct 27 and Nov 6, an increase of 223% compared to the 11 days (the equivalent timespan) leading up to Oct 27.
To me, this indicates that much of the antisemitism on social media is not simply unintentional or naïve antisemitism. People go out of their way to not only post antisemitic content but to create new accounts dedicated to hate. 

I would be interested in finding out if there was a similar surge in new accounts dedicated to racist, anti-Asian, homophobic or misogynist tweets in that time period. I'm sure there was an increase - if for no other reason than that antisemites have other targets of their hate - but I have a feeling that the antisemites are far more activist and willing to take the extra effort to showcase their hate than other bigots  





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One of the people who tried to troll me recently is Karen Alqasem, an American whose daughter Lara  who made headline a few years ago for being briefly blocked from studying at Hebrew University for her BDS activities.  Her father is a raging antisemite, Karen supports murdering Jews and then tried to lecture me on morality.  

For fun, I looked at Karen's recent tweets, and this one caught my eye:


Well, since she claims that the Al Qasem family has more history in the land than the Jews, I decided to look up their family tree.

Multiple accounts of their family history are most intriguing.

Of course, the Al Qasems don't originate in the Levant. 

Everyone agrees that they began as a tribe in Arabia. They then spread all over, and today you can find them from Morocco to Lebanon to Syria and Bahrain. 

But they didn't just spread - they conquered.

The Al Qasem tribe was instrumental in the Arab conquest of the Levant, Egypt and North Africa/Maghreb.

They were colonialists! 

The Qasems helped lead the colonial Muslim Arab conquests of non-Arab territories and turned them into Arab regions. 

But their family history articles claim, incredibly, that they fought against colonialism! "Individuals and groups associated with the Al-Qasim family participated in the struggle against colonialism and the conquest of Egypt, the Levant and Morocco," says their family biography.

Talk about projection! She is claiming that Jews are the colonialists, when the truth is that the Al Qasem family are the paradigms of colonialism!

And what about Karen herself, who married into the Alqasem family and now claims to have more history in Israel than someone whose family lived in Hebron for centuries?


Yes - she really is a white European who pretends to be indigenous to the Middle East while claiming Jews who have lived there and kept a connection to the Land for millennia are the white European colonizers.

You can't make this up.

(h/t kweansmom)



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

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Monday, March 20, 2023

From Ian:

Toulouse and the birth of modern jihadism
When two young men embellish a Toulouse FC replica shirt with the name of the city’s most notorious mass murderer, is it just a sick and provocative gag, or evidence of sympathy for the killer’s worldview? Earlier this month, the French courts decided it was “terrorism apologia” and handed out three and four-month sentences to two men who, posted a photo on Snapchat wearing a football shirt with the name of the delinquent jihadist, Mohammed Merah, across it, with the number seven — for the number he killed.

Mohammed Merah began his rampage in Toulouse on March 11, 2012, first executing a French-Moroccan paratrooper who nobly refused an order to lie down. He struck again on March 15, firing on three soldiers in Montauban — two were killed and another left paralysed. The murdered soldiers were all of North African Muslim descent. Then, on March 19, Merah pulled up outside the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school. In the schoolyard, he gunned down a Rabbi before executing the man’s three and five-year-old sons as they tried to crawl to safety. He then entered the school and grabbed an eight-year-old girl, at which point his gun jammed. Unperturbed, he swapped weapons and shot her. He filmed it all. After a manhunt and lengthy standoff, Merah was shot dead by police at his apartment.

Even considering the usual moral squalor of jihadist violence, Merah’s spree stands out for its depravity. Yet, for some reason, he is still widely revered. Nicole Yardeni, a deputy mayor in the city, tells me that his name is sometimes viewed positively even outside of jihadist circles, as “a symbol of rebellion” against society. After all, Merah is the man “who brought France to its knees”, as one local youth reminded the mother of his first victim. Even at the time of the police manhunt and siege, Facebook posts and pages honouring the gunman attracted thousands of likes, while police prevented people from laying flowers at his apartment. (It goes without saying that the overwhelming majority, Muslim and non-Muslim, were horrified.)

Within Salafi-jihadist circles, Merah’s cold-blooded rampage made him an icon. At the time of his attack a petty criminal, 28-year-old Mehdi Nemmouche, was killing time in a prison cell. Ordinarily, he would have refused to watch infidel television, but this time he asked his guards for a TV set so he could jubilantly follow the Merah manhunt live. Nemmouche would later head for Syria where he became a jailer for Islamic State. Chillingly, he told a captive that, like Merah, he “dreamed of grabbing a Jewish girl by the hair and shooting her dead”. Nemmouche would go on to deliberately target and murder Jews, killing four at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in 2014. It was Europe’s first attack by an Isis returnee.
Wikipedia Editors Deliberately Distorted Holocaust Articles
For over a decade, a group of nefarious editors has been distorting Holocaust entries.

If you’ve used Wikipedia to research the Holocaust, you may be a victim of a group of self-appointed “editors” who have been deliberately warping Wikipedia’s Holocaust articles for years.

For the last ten years, a group of committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting a skewed version of history on Wikipedia whitewashing the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolstering stereotypes about Jews,” explains Shira Klein, an associate professor of history at Chapman University in California, who’s tracked this gang’s insidious activities.

Due to this group’s zealous handiwork,” explains University of Ottawa professor Jan Grabowski, who collaborated with Dr. Klein, “Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles, blame Jews for their own persecution, and inflate Jewish collaboration with the Nazis.”

Drs. Klein and Grabowski spent many months pouring over Wikipedia articles, checking facts, and scrutinizing editors’ work and the sources they used. They published their shocking conclusions in an article titled “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust” in The Journal of Holocaust Research. Their article went viral, garnering tens of thousands of views in an academic field in which that sort of exposure is unheard of.

Wikipedia itself stepped in. In an unprecedented move, the website’s Arbitration Committee, known internally as ArbCom, has initiated an internal review; they’ve announced their intention to publish their findings within weeks.
Bassem Eid: GWU academic's antisemitism isn't helping Palestinians like me
With the Palestinian people, our whole identity is often assumed to be bound up with the anti-Western, violent ideology promulgated by Yasser Arafat and his proteges. George Washington University professor Lara Sheehi is just the latest example of this violent misrepresentation, which gives my people a bad name. On her now-deleted Twitter account, she frequently showed her hateful bias against Israelis and repeatedly condoned violence against them.

This past semester, she used her mandatory diversity course to spread such dangerous views and actively discriminated against Jewish students in her class. When the students complained to school authorities, Sheehi counterclaimed that the students were exhibiting "Islamophobia" against her.

Sheehi also verbally attacked a student for speaking about terrorist attacks in Israel, which have killed civilians, including American citizens. Her claim was that the student's use of the phrase "terrorist attack" invoked Islamophobia, even though the student never mentioned Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims.

Sheehi and her fellow antisemitic haters do not speak for me or for the many Palestinians who desire peace and coexistence with our neighbor, Israel. Hatred and radicalism harm Palestinians and do nothing to advance our cause. Sheehi's actions do not and should not represent the Palestinian people, the good men and women I know who respect our neighbors and wish for an end to these endless cycles of violence.

We see how peace, economic opportunity, and cooperation benefit both Palestinians and Israelis, just as the normalization of political and economic cooperation with Israel has brought tremendous advantages to countries such as the United Arab Emirates. This is what most Palestinians want, too.

Violent, hateful rhetoric rejecting the aspirations and experiences of Israelis may get headlines, but it does not represent the majority of Palestinians, who know that peace is the path to a better life for ourselves and our children. When radical actors preach hate and violence, it inevitably leads to violent incidents that only worsen matters and trap us in an escalating cycle.

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