Antisemitic Palestinian 1948 folktale is basis for an upcoming videogame

Palestinian propagandists know that novels, movies and videogames are great mediums for them to brainwash unsuspecting people enjoying the entertainment. Since the story itself is obviously fiction, players and viewers believe that the are based on real events, and the background descriptions of history are assumed to be accurate. 

In this way, lies about history can be presented without the worries that newspapers and academics have about being exposed as liars. After all, it is a work of fiction!

The latest example of blood libels against Jews being presented as entertainment is an upcoming videogame called "Dreams on a Pillow."

According to the crowdsourcing site  that is funding it, it is based on a true story - but it isn't. It is based on a folktale:

Like all oral folktales, the story of Omm has numerous variations, however, all stories share the same fundamental elements: a young mother living in Palestine had her husband murdered by the Zionist invaders, and she ran to her home to retrieve her newborn child from the bed. She fled out of town in a panic, only to realize later that she had carried along a pillow instead of her child. The ending of the folktale differs wildly based on the audience - in most stories, the mother loses her mind - in others, she is murdered, or successfully avoids the roaming Zionist gangs and military groups to make it out of her homeland - not to return in her lifetime.

 Each detail is more lurid and more antisemitic than the last.

Throughout the game, Omm, Pillow, and the player will experience often untold stories of Palestinian history. As Omm travels from the massacre of al-Tantura to the concentration camps of Atlit, she will later encounter the campaign of terror that led to the fall of Haifa, the bioweapon poisoning of Acre, and the Zionist attacks on refugees towards the Lebanese border.

The game developer, Rasheed Abueideh, tells a personal story that appears to be as filled with propaganda lies  his game.

Rasheed struggled to carve out a sustainable career in the games industry, facing a decade of rejection and avoidance from funding partners and publishers who deemed supporting a Palestinian “too risky” or “controversial”. While he continued to tinker on small games projects, he opened a nut roastery near his hometown of Nablus to support his family.

Today, the building sits empty as Israeli colonists terrorize the roads of the West Bank, making travel to his roastery unsafe. With Israel’s assaults on Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon intensifying daily, Rasheed -unsure of his continued safety in the face of relentless colonist attacks on the West Bank- has set his sights on continuing to following the path he was forced to abandon a decade ago: using games to not just tell the story of the 1948 Nakba, but to let people experience it through a game. To share the catastrophe that has haunted generations of Palestinians with displacement, apartheid, occupation, and violence.

It appears that Rasheed is very good at spinning Palestinian folktales. 

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

09/05 Links Pt2: For the OIC, “Human Rights” Is a Tool to Manipulate the West; Musk Fuels White Supremacist ‘Ban the ADL’ Campaign on Social Media

From Ian:

For the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, “Human Rights” Is a Tool to Manipulate the West

Currently consisting of 56 states in addition to the Palestinian Authority, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) began with an effort in 1969 to blame Israel and “Zionists”—falsely—for setting fire to al-Aqsa Mosque. The group, which touts itself as “the collective voice of the Muslim world,” has made a consistent habit of condemning the Jewish state, and to a lesser extent India, for supposed abuses. It also supports boycotts of Israel and sharply condemned Danish caricatures in 2005. One country it has not condemned is China, which is currently seeking to extirpate Islam from its northwestern territory by the most brutal of means. Georgia Gilholy writes:

This week an Organization of Islamic Cooperation delegation visited China. It offered slavish praise and deference to the state responsible for atrocities against millions of mostly Muslim Uighurs, which a British tribunal designated as genocide. . . . In a July 2019 statement, over a dozen OIC member states went so far as to cosign a letter that “commended China’s achievements in the field of human rights.”

The key factor behind the OIC’s double standards is obvious: money. The attempt to decimate and subjugate the Uighurs is an informal component of the “Belt and Road” Initiative. This program is scheduled to pour over $8 billion into a transcontinental “belt” of overland economic corridors. This “belt” and its corresponding maritime “road” will encompass a major chunk of the world’s Muslim-majority nations from Sudan to Indonesia.

Easy cash, however, is just one part of the story. Just as the dictators of Russia, Cuba, and North Korea collaborate with China on the international stage in a bid to normalize authoritarianism at large, administrations across the Muslim world likewise seek to reap the same nefarious rewards.

Cunning employment of moral relativism is at the heart of this arrangement. When engaging with democracies, OIC representatives gleefully employ the language of liberal human rights. When brown-nosing other autocracies and dispensing domestic law, however, these principles are mysteriously absent.

Did the Mufti-Hitler photo row influence Netanyahu’s plan to fire Yad Vashem head?

It is now believed that the Netanyahu government has backed down from its plan to fire Dani Dayan, a political appointee head of Israel’s flagship Holocaust memorial museum at Yad Vashem, after an international outcry. Dani Dayan was the target of criticism from veteran guides when he refused to re-instate a floor-to-ceiling photo of the famous meeting between the Palestinian wartime Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Adolph Hitler in 1941, because’ it seeks to harm the Palestinians’ image today’. We do not know if the Mufti-Hitler photo affair was a factor in the government’s intention to dismiss Dayan, but we reproduce a JNS News article by Lyn Julius explaining why the Yad Vashem head’s views on this matter are wrongheaded:

What impact did the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, have on the Nazi enterprise? According to Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, the Mufti’s role was limited – so marginal in fact that Dayan refused to re-instate a large photo of the Mufti meeting Hitler in November 1941. The floor-to-ceiling photo used to feature at the Museum before it was re-designed in the 1990s. Denying at first that the photo was ever at Yad Vashem, Dayan even told Haaretz: Those who want me to put it up aren’t really interested in the Mufti’s part in the Holocaust, which was limited anyway, but seek to harm the image of the Palestinians today,” he says. “The Mufti was an antisemite. But even if I abhor him, I won’t turn Yad Vashem into a tool serving ends not directly related to the study and memorialization of the Holocaust. Hasbara, to use a term, is an utterly irrelevant consideration that shall not enter our gates.”

It is certainly true that the Mufti was marginal to the ‘final solution’: Benjamin Netanyahu was wrong to remark in 2018 that the Mufti ‘convinced’ Hitler to annihilate the Jews. However, there were instances when the Mufti, who was known to have visited Nazi camps and hobnobbed with Himmler and von Ribbentrop, proved even more extreme than the Nazis. In 1942, a plan to bring ten thousand Jewish children from Poland to Theresienstadt and exchange them for German civilian prisoners was dropped after fierce protests by the Mufti. The children were sent to their deaths. The Mufti’s Muslim SS units in the former Yugoslavia murdered tens of thousands. According to his memoirs, Hitler had given an explicit undertaking to the Mufti at their famous meeting in November 1941 that he would be allowed to solve the Jewish problem. ‘ The Jews are yours,’ Hitler said. The Mufti did had the satisfaction of exterminating the Jews in his sphere of influence – but his alliance with the Nazis was far more ideological than pragmatic.

But it is not the Mufti’s effect on the Nazis which Dayan ignores, but his impact on the Arabs. And here he had a massive effect – and many would argue, still has. Wherever he went in the Arab world, he stirred up trouble against the local Jews. He was a driving force behind the pro-Nazi coup in Iraq leading to the Farhud massacre of hundreds of Jews in Iraq in June 1941 – proof positive that anti-Zionism had spilled over into outright antisemitism. Escaping to Berlin when he was Hitler’s lavishly-funded wartime guest the Mufti and a group of Arab exiles pumped out poisonous propaganda from the short-wave transmitter at Zeesen, fusing anti-Jewish verses from the Qu’ran with modern anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

Putin: West put ethnic Jew to rule in Ukraine to 'cover glorification of Nazism'

Russian President Vladimir Putin alleged in a television interview on Tuesday, without citing evidence, that Western powers had installed Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, as president of Ukraine to cover up the glorification of Nazism.

In seeking to justify its invasion of Ukraine, which it calls a "special military operation," Moscow accuses Kyiv's leaders of pursuing a neo-Nazi "genocide" of Ukraine's millions of native Russian-speakers - something Kyiv and its Western allies call a baseless pretext for a war of acquisition.

It was not the first time Putin had tried to associate modern Ukraine's democratically elected government with the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews in World War Two by Nazi German occupiers of Soviet Ukraine and their local collaborators.

Zelensky's Jewish identity
Zelensky, himself a native Russian-speaker who was democratically elected in 2019, has said some of his grandfather’s brothers were killed in the Nazi Holocaust, and has repeatedly rejected Russian accusations that he has supported neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

Putin told Russian television reporter Pavel Zarubin:
“Western curators have put a person at the head of modern Ukraine - an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins. And thus, in my opinion, they seem to be covering up an anti-human essence that is the foundation ... of the modern Ukrainian state," Putin said.

"And this makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, in that an ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and covering up those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine at one time - and this is the extermination of one and a half million people."

In answer to a request for comment, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Putin himself was disgusting "when he tries to justify mass crimes against citizens of another country with a monstrous lie."

Read More

06/07 Links Pt2: Andrew Pessin: A new book’s indictment of American Jewish leadership; How antisemitism adopted the Stalinist approach

From Ian:

Andrew Pessin: A new book’s indictment of American Jewish leadership

There could hardly be a timelier book than Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership. Though antisemitism springs eternal, it has sprung up with particular force in recent years, especially in the United States.

As editors Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser put it, “American Jewry is under siege, ideologically and physically. In the media, on college campuses, in the streets of major cities, even in high schools and in Congress, Jews and the Jewish state are smeared, hated and attacked. Celebrities spew anti-Jewish ravings … to tens of millions of followers. This is a new time for Jews in America.”

With this assault on American Jews came the debates about how to handle it. Some prefer to ignore it, keep their heads down, not cause trouble and hope it will go away. Some try to handle it discreetly, behind the scenes, by forging alliances and reasoning with reasonable people. Some double down on their Jewish identity and go on the offensive. Some, alas, disavow their Jewish identity and “convert” by joining the enemy.

One thing, however, as the book demonstrates throughout, seems crystal clear: The major establishment Jewish organizations—the American Jewish Committee, the Conference of Presidents, the Union for Reform Judaism, Jewish Community Relations Councils, regional Federations, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) and most of all the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)—have failed to respond effectively to the eruption of Jew-hatred.

In fact, as more than one of the book’s essays argues, it’s even worse than that: These organizations, for the most part, have joined the enemy. They have done so by adopting and disseminating progressive ideologies that are hostile to Jews and the Jewish state. This in turn has led them into alliances with groups that are openly opposed to and working towards the destruction of the Jewish state and its supporters—that is, the vast majority of American Jews.

How antisemitism adopted the Stalinist approach

"Death solves all problems," Joseph Stalin is quoted as having said, "No man, no problem." A significant number of influential people are now applying the Soviet dictator's logic to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Their formulation is as simple as it is homicidal: "No Israel, no problem."

Iran's rulers express their genocidal intentions forthrightly. "We will not back off from the annihilation of Israel, even one millimeter," Brig.-Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi, spokesman for the regime's armed forces has vowed.

Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, proxies of Tehran, have the same goal, as does Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza (also supported by the Islamist regime). Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank, is cagier. He doesn't call for Israeli Jews to be killed but he does provide financial rewards to Palestinian terrorists and their families.

The featured speaker at the City University of New York's law school graduation last month was Fatima Mousa Mohammed, who called for a "fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism around the world."

On social media, she has wished that "every Zionist burn in the hottest pit of hell." To be clear: Before the establishment of Israel in 1948, a Zionist was someone who favored self-determination for Jews in part of their ancient homeland. After 1948, a Zionist became someone who favors Israel's continuing existence.

Anti-Zionism is now common on American campuses. Ms. Mohammed expresses it crudely. Others employ more erudite language.

For example, four well-established professors – Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami – published an essay in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, the prestigious journal of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Elliott Abrams, a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at CFR, encapsulated its thesis in this headline: "As Israel turns 75, Foreign Affairs publishes a call to eliminate it."

To accomplish that goal, the professors would have the U.S. pressure Israel to grant citizenship to Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank. Jews would then become a minority in Israel, presumably living under the rule of Hamas or the PA. What would happen to them after that? The question does not appear to interest the essay's authors.

NY march shows true colors of left-wing media

Forty thousand people took to the streets of Manhattan on Sunday to participate in the Celebrate Israel Parade. Forty thousand marchers, both Jews, and non-Jews, including New York Mayor Eric Adams, expressed their support for the Jewish state.

Wearing colorful clothes and waving Israeli flags, they took time out of their lives to celebrate Israel, whose existence they hold dear. But if you watched Channel 12 News reporting on the event, you would not know any of this.

Although the outlet did cover the parade, the angle it chose to present was very specific. It did not speak about the support and the celebration but rather focused on the anti-judicial reform protest that was held at the same time.

Organizers said that around 1,000 people attended the demonstration, but journalists marching with the parade in Manhattan, who reported in real time, did not even realize that any protests were taking place, because they were swallowed up by the cheering crowd.

Footage of the demonstration showed about a dozen participants and even photographs posted by the organizers themselves, who claimed there were 1,000 attendees, featured maybe half that number.

Read More

05/31 Links Pt1: W.H.O. Singles Out Israel as Violator of Health Rights; Mahmoud Abbas's Two-Palestinian-State Solution; Terror victim Meir Tamari laid to rest

From Ian:

How lies became facts: The Tantura ‘massacre’ returns

The battle over Israel’s legitimacy, of which this story of the great “massacre of Tantura” is but a chapter, is part of the overall war being waged in the West by the progressive camp to impugn the moral foundations of the West as a civilization advancing freedom.

These revisionist arguments echo the ideas of the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, and his concept of “cultural hegemony.” Progressive thought holds that Western narratives are deliberately constructed around so encompassing a body of myths and so pervasive a structure of institutions that they become the received wisdom and obscure an underlying condition of perpetuated oppression.

Gramsci argued that codes of morality are constructed by dictatorial elites in order to create norms that uphold, validate and deepen the systemic oppression inherent to the capitalist system. Even the concepts of logic, truth and facts—the foundations of Western rational debate—are dismissed as forms of such hidden systems of oppression designed to contain debate into a repressive and misleading straitjacket.

As such, the idea of “approximate truth”—where narratives trump factual records of history—become valid to legitimize a cause or perspective even when the facts would suggest otherwise, because facts are themselves a form of repression.

The story of Tantura—or rather the myth of Tantura—is thus part of this larger assault on Western foundations. It is neither a historical work, a documentary, or even a docu-drama that took some artistic license. It is the intentional obfuscation of fact in an attempt to use the device of the “approximate truth”—something factually wrong but nonetheless representing a desired truth—to actually undermine truth and rewrite the historical narrative of Israel.

It is an attempt through fiction cropped as fact to paint Israel’s creation in such a dark palette that it is exposed as a historic evil born of colonial desire to suppress the Arab and Muslim people rather than as an attempt to correct the historical wrong of the exile of the Jewish people and instead to deliver them finally their liberation and sovereignty after two millennia.

W.H.O. Singles Out Israel as Violator of Health Rights

Deviating from its focus on public health emergencies, the annual assembly of the UN’s World Health Organization held a special debate on May 24th to single out Israel, which was condemned by Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela and Cuba, for allegedly violating the health rights of Palestinians and the Druze population in the Golan Heights.

By a vote of 76 to 13, with 35 abstentions, the world health assembly adopted a resolution submitted by the Syrian and Palestinian delegations requiring the WHO to hold the same debate at next year’s meeting, and to prepare another report on the “Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.”

Co-sponsors of the resolution included Syria, Libya, Algeria, Cuba, Pakistan, Somalia, Venezuela and Yemen. No other country received a special agenda item at the 76th World Health Assembly, which concluded yesterday.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based UN Watch, an independent non-governmental organization that monitors the UN, condemned the “cynical politicization of the world’s top health agency at the expense of focusing on urgent health priorities affecting hundreds of millions around the globe.”

WHO Singles Out Israel, Ignores Russia, Syria, Afghanistan, Ethiopia

“Out of 25 items on the current world health assembly’s agenda,” said Neuer, “only one focused on a specific country — Israel.”

Bassam Tawil: Mahmoud Abbas's Two-Palestinian-State Solution

The "right of return" is not actually a "right," especially if you are the party who started the war and then lost it, as took place in 1948.

The "right of return" is, rather, a demand: that all the Palestinians who fled their homes during the war of 1948 – and all their descendants – be allowed to return to what is currently the State of Israel.

Thousands of wealthy Arabs left their homes in anticipation of a war, thousands more responded to Arab leaders' calls to get out of the way of the advancing Arab armies. A handful were expelled, but most simply fled to avoid being caught in the crossfire as the Arabs waged war in response to the establishment of Israel.

"There is a limit to how far Abbas should go to appease Israel." -- Saudi commentator, mepc.org, 2012.

[A]n extensive letter to Abbas, signed by 78 Palestinian organizations, contained a semi-veiled death threat.

It has now become clear that when Abbas says he supports the two-state solution, he is actually talking about one Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, and another one that would replace Israel.

In Israel, there are currently about seven million Jews and two million Arabs. An influx of untold millions of Palestinians would mean, literally, the end of Israel. This appears to be exactly what Abbas and other Palestinians are hoping to achieve.

In pursuing this hardline push for the "right of return," Abbas desires a two-state solution: two Palestinian states, one in the West Bank and Gaza, and the other in all of Israel.

The only 'partisan' here, is you @KenRoth - a partisan of blind Jew hatred and relentless obsession with Israel. https://t.co/tu8KK58KQ3

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) May 31, 2023

Read More

"Tantura massacre" is a conspiracy theory

The Guardian reported last week:

An investigation into a massacre in a destroyed Palestinian village carried out by Israeli forces in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation has identified three possible mass graves beneath a present-day beach resort.

Palestinian survivors and historians have long claimed that men living in Tantura, a fishing village of approximately 1,500 people near Haifa, were executed after surrendering to the Alexandroni Brigade and their bodies dumped in a mass grave believed to be located under an area that is now a car park for Dor Beach. Estimates have ranged from 40 to 200 people.

In recent years, a growing body of evidence for the Tantura massacre has generated significant controversy in Israel, where atrocities committed by Jewish forces in 1948 remain a highly sensitive subject: an Israeli-made documentary about what happened in the village faced widespread backlash on its release last year.

The extensive new investigation by the research agency Forensic Architecture identifies what it says is a second mass grave site in the former village of Tantura, as well as two more possible locations, in the most comprehensive research yet.

There is a difference between history and conspiracy theory. In legitimate historical research, you start with all the facts that then look for larger historical patterns that the facts lead to. With conspiracy theories, however, you start with the theory, and then look for the facts (or half facts) that support the theory and ignore or disparage anything that contradicts them.

The Forensic Architecture "analysis" of Tantura, like their others, is a conspiracy theory dressed up as scientific research.

Historian Benny Morris has dismantled the Tantura massacre myth, using the tools of a historian. Morris has documented every major event that happened in 1948, including what would be considered war crimes today. In every case the Arab victims and victims of relatives spoke about the events in real time, loudly, to whomever would listen.  Yet, he notes:

If there was a massacre of 200 to 250 people at Tantura, it was the largest of the 1948 massacres. But there is no available document from 1948 that mentions a massacre at Tantura, apart from one document, which I’ll come back to below, that deals with the execution of a handful of Arab prisoners of war on the fringes of the village. Strange, very strange, because all the massacres perpetrated by Jews in 1948 are at least mentioned, if not described, in documents from 1948. These include documents of the Haganah, the main Jewish militia until the end of May 1948, the Israel Defense Forces, the UN (which had observers on the ground from May 1948), the Red Cross (whose officials operated in the country from April 1948), as well as records by the British and the Americans, whose representatives reported from Israel to London and Washington about the wartime events.

Deir Yassin, Burayr, Ein Zeitun, Lod, Hunin, Dawayima, Eilabun, Arab al-Mawasi, Majd al-Kurum, Saliha, Jish, Safsaf, Bi’na-Deir al Asad – the massacres perpetrated by Jews in these places and others are all mentioned in contemporary 1948 documentation, and in some cases are described in detail. Just not Tantura, not one mention.

Not that Haganah/IDF officers ignored Tantura in 1948. Accounts of the battle, the expulsion, the demolition of buildings afterward, all appear in the documents. Just not a massacre. On June 18, during the war’s First Truce, under the supervision of the International Red Cross and the United Nations, more than a thousand refugees from Tantura were transferred in an army convoy to Tulkarm, then under Iraqi army control. A document in the Haganah Archives sums up Arab radio broadcasts of that period (Haganah Information Service, “E.I. [Eretz Israel, Mandatory Palestine], June 21-22, 1948”): “An Arab woman from Tantura… relates that the Jews are raping Arab women and demolishing the place.” But according to the report, the woman did not mention by so much as a word that the Jews also massacred hundreds of her fellow villagers. (A slightly different version of this report states that the woman related that the Jews “raped women in addition to the acts of robbery, theft and arson.” Again, no mention of a massacre). These items were broadcast on Radio Ramallah.

In addition, as far as I was able to discover, the archives of the UN and the Red Cross – whose officials organized and escorted the move of the Tantura refugees to Tulkarm and reported frequently to their headquarters – contain no mention of a massacre at Tantura. Does it stand to reason that among the thousand deportees, who were no longer under Jewish control, not one bothered to tell the Iraqi officers or the UN and Red Cross officials that, by the way, they had endured a horrific massacre of their fathers, brothers, sons, as described by Katz and Schwarz and their supporters? It is simply inconceivable, if a large-scale massacre that they had eyewitnessed or at least heard about had indeed occurred.

Morris admits that there is evidence that the Israeli troops killed between 8-10 snipers in the village. That's it. No civilians. 

He brings plenty of other evidence that the modern blood libel is false and that the current "researchers" are knowingly lying.

Forensic Architecture, however, is looking for a huge massacre. And when you start from that perspective, just like with 9/11 "truthers" or Holocaust deniers, it is easy to find "evidence" that fits your preconceived notions.

In this case, the entirety of the "evidence" they discovered are two shadows in 1949 aerial photos that they didn't see in 1947 photos.

According to them, the only possible explanation for these shadows are that they are man-made earth mounds that would be the site of mass graves. They even do some helpful math:

We believe that if bodies were laid shoulder to shoulder and oriented northwards in a single layer, there could be around seventy bodies under a mound of this size. Were the bodies to be layered on top of each other, as one testimony suggests, the total number could be double that, up to approximately 140 bodies. Thus, our assessment is that the total number of bodies contained in a mass grave site such as this would be in the range of seventy to 140.

... As we did with Earthwork 1, we used the measurements of the mound to calculate the likely number of bodies which could be buried there. Our assessment is that the total number of bodies in a mass grave of this size is in the range of forty to eighty.

Ta-da! Shadows have now become proof of the murder of 240 people, coincidentally the highest amount that people made up fifty years after the event!

At times, FA doesn't even pretend that they are merely guessing. In this diagram, they refer to the supposed earth mound they claim the shadows indicate definitively as a mass grave, no questions asked:

So what if decades of research since this "Tantura massacre" allegation first appear in the 1990s have not uncovered the name of a single victim? We have shadows! 

It's science!

There are two years between the two photographs they are comparing. As is obvious, there are other changes between the 1947 and 1949 photos besides these shadows - new buildings and roads being built. Israel did move quickly in 1948 to build new villages to house immigrants, and Tantura was one of the spots where there was building activity (Palestine Post, August 2, 1948).

All of those require moving earth. 

The Nachsholim settlement was built there.

But Forensic Architecture knows that those shadows were created on May 24 or 25, 1948, and not in the months before or afterwards. How? 

Because, like all conspiracy theorists, they aren't considering any other possibility, and will not admit that any other theory is possible.

Let's say that they are correct and that these faint lines really represent two long 85 centimeter high earth mounds. What could be the reason?

Maybe the animals in the village who were not being fed died and needed to be buried. Maybe the graves of the snipers really are there and there are only 10 or so people buried separated by three meters out of respect. Maybe the kibbutzniks decided to build a fence between the trees and the field and cleared the area with a bulldozer. Maybe the leftover earth cleared for the new buildings and road was, for some reason, deposited on the edge of the field perhaps as a marker. Maybe there was a garbage dump that was attracting insects or animals that needed to be buried. 

The point is that when you only are willing to accept the most obscene explanation at the outset, you aren't engaging in research - you are just looking for proof of a conspiracy theory. 

And only antisemites would assume that the most likely explanation for two shadows is the existence of mass graves that contain some 240 people murdered by Jews whom no one can name and whom no one heard about until 50 years later.

No amount of 3D reconstruction can make up for the fact that the "researchers" at Forensic Architecture are anti-Israel bigots who consistently start their "research" with their conclusion and then connect the dots to reach it after the fact. 

---

---

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!

 

Read More

03/28 Links Pt2: Why critical race theory could be dangerous for America's faith-based communities; Meet the Starbucks Union Activist Who Called a Palestinian Terrorist a 'Freedom Fighter'

From Ian:

Lauder to Biden: ‘This is Not Germany in 1938; This is the United States in 2023’

Back in 2016, Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, presented the Theodor Herzl Award—the organization’s highest honor—to then-Vice President Joe Biden. On March 26, he penned a letter to the now US president, whom he called “a friend of the Jewish people,” about the need to curb rising antisemitism.

“Today, America is witnessing the most frightening increase in antisemitism since the end of World War II,” Lauder wrote in the letter appearing as an ad in the New York Post. “Jews make up just 2% of the US population, but are the target of more than half of all religious hate crimes.”

“Jews have been murdered, beaten and spat upon—especially Orthodox Jews—with almost complete silence from political leaders and the media,” added Lauder.

He noted that it is common for celebrities, athletes and even members of Congress to say “the most outrageous anti-Jewish slurs,” and Jewish students are “singled out” on campuses for their Jewish names or defense of Israel’s right to exist.

“Jewish enrollment at elite schools has plummeted. Jewish students are excluded from clubs and denied positions,” he wrote. “This is not Germany in 1938; this is the United States in 2023. Mr. President, only you can stop this rising tide of hatred against the Jewish people.”

Lauder urged Biden to state “in the strongest language” that hating Jews is dangerous and un-American. He also called on the US president to do three things.

Why critical race theory could be dangerous for America's faith-based communities - Opinion

CRT demonizes success, arguing that achievement is the product of exploitation and also undermines free speech and enforces ideological conformity by forcefully shutting down views and opinions that put the individual in the center, and encourages individual accountability and responsibility.

One of the core tenets of CRT and intersectionality is that a society based on “meritocracy” is inherently white supremacist. For America to continue to flourish, excellence should be rewarded, not used as ammo in cultural wars and ideological debates.

AP classes are being eliminated, grades are disappearing from schools, and SAT scores for college admission are going extinct. For decades these metrics have helped assess students’ individual abilities and tailor programs for their specific needs and talents. Meritocratic excellence, familiar to faith-based communities, is being systematically replaced with Marxist-inspired equity.

CRT pits group against group and foments hatred for the “other”.

Understanding that all people have the power and resources to fulfill their potential, regardless of their ethnic background, is imperative for a diverse society to flourish. Individuals are capable of great evil, great courage, and everything in between. An oppressor/oppressed binary pits people against people, without distinction.

Efforts by radical left activists in shaping California’s ethnic studies curriculum demonstrates how CRT/intersectionality functions in the school system. Jews and Asians, although minorities and regardless of their individual achievements and life circumstances, are considered “white adjacent” and are therefore beneficiaries of the white power structure and contribute to the oppression of people of color. This framework disallows merit, the complexity of American society, and causes bigotry and ignorance.

Americans who choose to prioritize traditional values, are seen as “oppressor adjacent” and promoters of a “white supremacist” ideal. The result is that instead of leading to a more equal and better society under CRT/intersectionality the oppressors become oppressed, and the cycle of hate continues.

America is too diverse, complex, and open-hearted to be pitting fellow Americans against each other. It goes against the ethos of America’s “Golden Rule” of interpersonal respect and tolerance.

America was founded by people fleeing religious persecution. We built a society rooted in religious tolerance. The spread of CRT is a danger to every person of faith. We need to build alliances between Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and everyone who believes in objective right and wrong, and the traditional values on which this country is built.

Meet the Starbucks Union Activist Who Called a Palestinian Terrorist a 'Freedom Fighter'

The activist helming the Starbucks union drive has praised a convicted Palestinian terrorist as a "freedom fighter," called for replacing Israel with Palestine, and urged labor federations to reject police unions.

Jaz Brisack, a former Rhodes Scholar who began unionizing Starbucks while on the payroll of the Service Employees International Union, catapulted into far-left politics as a full-scholarship student at Ole Miss. While there, she defended Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh as a "political prisoner" in a 2017 op-ed letter published by the student newspaper. Brisack wanted to repudiate a story by a fellow student who referred to Odeh as a terrorist with communist ties—a description Brisack called an "ad hominem attack."

"Odeh has been targeted in an attempt to undermine her advocacy for Palestinian liberation," Brisack wrote. Odeh was convicted of coordinating two bombings, including one at an Israeli supermarket that killed two students and injured seven—including an Auschwitz survivor—and admitted her involvement to a Lebanese journalist.

"She has called attention to the fact that Israel, guilty of the crime of apartheid, illegally occupies Palestinian land and subjects the Arab population to countless indignities," Brisack continued.

These declarations could hurt 25-year-old Brisack’s star turn as the U.S. Senate spotlights her organizing efforts this week. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) on Wednesday will convene a committee hearing to grill former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz over allegations the company retaliated against Brisack and other union organizers. Schultz, who got his start as a Starbucks employee before transforming the company into a global conglomerate, recently stepped down from his interim leadership post.

Brisack’s praise for the Palestinian terrorist Odeh aligns with the progressive and anti-Israel bent of her other political beliefs, which include support for defunding police and boycotting and sanctioning Israel. Odeh became a celebrity cause for American progressives when the Trump administration deported her in 2017 for lying to obtain a fraudulent visa.

Read More

02/17 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Can the whole world be wrong?; BDS shares concentration camp photo, claims it's a massacre of Palestinians; Abu Dhabi’s new ‘Abrahamic Family House’

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Can the whole world be wrong?

One of the mysteries of the war against Israel is the extent to which a monstrously twisted narrative about Israel and the Palestinian Arabs — casting the former as evil and the latter as sanctified victims — has been absorbed by so many people.

Still stranger, this narrative seems to be the driver of progressive politics. It’s not just that “intersectionality” demonises the Jews, but that it is driven by an obsession with Palestinianism.

As Corinne Blacker wrote in Tablet: “In queer and women’s studies programs, the topic of Palestine is regularly inserted into the most unlikely contexts, to the extent that one student in a class about queer history told me that they discussed nothing but Palestine.”

The astonishing story of Mohammed al-Durah illustrates just how perverse this is. On Sept. 30, 2000, the French TV station France 2 broadcast footage from Gaza that apparently showed the 12-year-old al-Durah being shot dead by Israeli fire as he clung to his father during a demonstration.

This iconic picture detonated the second intifada, the Palestinian terrorist war waged against Israeli civilians that murdered more than 1,130 of them and wounded more than 8,000 between 2000 and 2005. The footage incited hysteria across the Arab and Muslim world.

Eleven days later, when two Israeli reservists strayed into Ramallah, a mob beat them to death. They threw one body out of a window, mutilating it and parading it through the streets. A gloating Palestinian Arab was pictured waving his hands in the air covered in the Israelis’ blood while the mob screamed “revenge for the blood of Muhammad al-Durah!”

One year later, at the UN’s sickening anti-Jewish hate-fest in Durban, South Africa, Mohammad al-Durah’s body was paraded in effigy among thousands of demonstrators screaming hatred of Israel. Then Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was beheaded by al-Qaeda explicitly for the killing of the child.

The whole al-Durah killing, however, was a set-up and a grotesque lie. As I saw in a Paris courtroom in 2007, previously unseen French TV footage showed that the scenes of battle had been staged with cameras, producers and even make-up technicians visible in a carnival atmosphere.

Palestinian “demonstrators” were laid out on stretchers and carted off to ambulances. But there was no blood or evidence of injuries whatsoever, not even on Mohammad al-Durah, with the boy peeping through his fingers moments after a reporter announced he had been killed.

U.S.-Based NGO Claims Slain Palestinian Terrorists as ‘Theirs’

A U.S.-based nonprofit is holding rallies in major American cities to protest a recent Israeli Defense Forces counterterror operation, labeling it a “massacre.” The NGO, Al Awda has a long and troubling history of vocally supporting terrorist groups committed to the destruction of the Jewish state.

On Jan. 26, 2023, the IDF carried out an operation in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) town of Jenin. The raid, an IDF statement said, was to foil an imminent attack being planned by a cell of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

According to the Times of Israel, a local wing of PIJ claimed that its operatives shot IDF forces and used explosives. Nine Palestinians were killed, seven of whom were linked to terrorist groups, including al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The other two were civilians, including a sixty-one-year-old woman named Magda Obaid. The shootout reportedly lasted three hours and left several IDF jeeps so damaged from explosives that tow trucks were required to remove them.

Within hours, the New York branch of Al Awda condemned the “massacre committed in the Jenin refugee camp.” The NGO’s Jan. 27, statement mourned “the nine martyrs” who were killed in the “Zionist massacre.” It was, Al Awda claimed, the latest “intensification of violence by the new, ultra-fascist Zionist regime.”

Al Awda omitted that the IDF was carrying out a counterterrorist operation to thwart an impending attack. Instead, the U.S.-based nonprofit proclaimed that it “honors the resistance fighters in Jenin.” Al Awda hailed what it referred to as “our fighters” and “our resistance people” who “used explosive devices, guided bombs and bullets leading to certain injuries among the occupation forces.”

“We, Al Awda NY, will not forget the role of President Biden, the U.S. Congress and all those who facilitate the endless flow of arms and financial support to the Zionist murder machine,” the group warned.

BDS shares concentration camp photo, claims it's a massacre of Palestinians

In a tweet shared on Twitter, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) claimed that they are displaying a photo where the so-called "Tantura Massacre" took place in 1948, but a Holocaust expert proved it was actually a Nazi concentration camp in Germany. The photo showed tens or possibly hundreds of corpses in a black and white photo, before being buried in a mass grave.

PACBI, a BDS-affiliated organization, tweeted that "the Palestinian Academy for Science & Technology calls on EMBO to relocate workshops from apartheid Israel, including the one at the site of the Tantura massacre." In the shared photo, it is claimed that a mass grave is underneath the parking lot next to the beach.

EMBO is an organization of more than 1,900 researchers "that promotes excellence in the life sciences in Europe and beyond," according to the organization's website.

"EMBO has a moral obligation to end its complicity in whitewashing Israel’s crimes," the PACBI tweet said.

Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli responded on Twitter to the matter "the racist BDS movement breaks a Guinness record, uses a picture from the German concentration camp of Nordhausen to lie about a fictional massacre during Israel's War of Independence. Holocaust distortion, appropriation and denial, further victimizing Jewish people. Pure evil."

Read More

12/21 Links Pt2: Black America’s Anti-Semitism Problem; 2022 the Deadliest Year for Palestinians? What the Media Didn't Tell You; Chanukah bus incident victims to mark a year since attack

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Contemporary antisemitism should be taught in schools

While Mann commended the “great strides” made in promoting greater awareness of genocide, he said antisemitism “can take many forms” and “it is not enough to teach about the Holocaust.”

As Klein pointed out, Mann’s latest recommendations follow significant progress that has been said to have been made in recent years in combating antisemitism in the UK and worldwide, resulting from two landmark reports published by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism in 2006 and 2015.

One reason for the new report, supported by valued input from stakeholders across the country, was to identify what more needs to be done.

“If this scale of incidence among young people is not tackled, then we are storing up potentially serious problems for the future as well as for the present,” Mann wrote.

Among the recommendations made by Mann is that school leadership teams should be offered guidance from the government on how to deal with incidents of antisemitic hate. This should include how to report incidents that did not happen at school but involved either the targeting of students or students as perpetrators.

A British government spokesperson said in response to the report: “Antisemitism, as with all forms of bullying and hatred, is abhorrent and has no place in our education system. The atrocities of the Holocaust are a compulsory part of national curriculum for history at key stage 3, and we support schools to construct a curriculum that enables the discussion of important issues such as antisemitism.”

We believe Mann’s findings and recommendations should be taken seriously, not just by the British government but by other governments in Europe and around the world.

It is one thing to teach about the Holocaust in schools; it’s quite another to educate students against hatred of all forms, including antisemitism.

As Mann so elegantly put it, the UK government and others should “act on my new calls for action before this form of racism poisons the minds of many more young people.”

Black America’s Anti-Semitism Problem

The effect was most pronounced among young blacks and Hispanics. Both groups were 16 percentage points more likely to agree than whites in their age group. Anti-Semitism was particularly common among young blacks and Hispanics who called themselves "conservative." But that was a small group, and anti-Semitism was more common even among liberal blacks compared with liberal whites. Black and Hispanic young adults, in fact, were about as likely to agree with at least one of the statements as were white "alt-right" identifiers in the same age group.

Hispanics are often lumped with whites in hate crime data, so it is difficult to trace precisely the implications of this prejudice among Hispanics, which is an under-discussed and undercovered aspect of the story.

Hersh and Royden's survey also allowed them to examine several theories of the causes of anti-Semitism. One was "minority group competition": the idea that fighting over scarce resources like housing provokes anti-Semitism. Another was the idea that anti-Semitism is a manifestation of anti-whiteness: As James Baldwin put it, "Negroes are anti-Semitic because they're anti-white." A third, opposite possibility was the idea that people disliked Jews because they dislike Israel and because they supported the Palestinians. And fourth is that demographic or behavioral differences—for example, that minority groups are less well-educated or more likely to go to church—explains the variation.

None of these explanations stood up to scrutiny.

Take group differences. Hersh and Royden statistically controlled for both church and college attendance. While each mattered for whether or not someone held anti-Semitic beliefs, holding them constant blacks are still much more likely than whites to have anti-Semitic views. The authors also compare respondents in states with and without a lot of Jewish people (doable because most Jews live in just a few states). Again, race still predicts anti-Semitic views, meaning that proximity to Jews—"minority group competition"—doesn't explain the difference.

Similarly, Hersh and Royden argue that black anti-Semitism is more than just anti-white bias. That's because they measure views, like whether Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, that only apply to Jews, not whites. They also rule out the idea that anti-Semitism is just a function of pro-Palestinian views: Remarkably, blacks and Hispanics were more favorable toward Israel than whites across three separate measures.

To supplement this, Hersh and Royden asked respondents who said they believed Jews had too much power in which domains they had such power. Very few respondents—7 percent of blacks/Hispanics and 9 percent of whites—selected only Israel and Palestine. Instead, these respondents said Jews had too much power in areas like news media, finance, and entertainment. This suggests that anti-Semitic bias is not driven by anti-Israel views.

Having ruled out these popular explanations, Hersh and Royden are left only to speculate on the causes of black anti-Semitism. They point to the rising salience of victimhood in American culture, arguing that it may either make people more prone to embracing conspiracy theories or provoke competition over "victim" status. It is also possible, of course, that anti-Semitic views are just a product of prejudice—no need for further explanation.

What is apparent is that the views propounded by individuals like West and Irving are not unusual, particularly among black Americans. Unlike other forms of prejudice, Hersh and Royden observe, anti-Semitism is not fading among younger Americans: At least among minorities, the oldest hatred isn't going away any time soon.

Jonathan Tobin: Jews don’t need another left-wing advocacy group

The federations, whose purpose is to represent and raise funds from the entire Jewish community, were used to the JCPA acting like a Democratic Party auxiliary operation. But the latter’s behavior could be justified as the product of a consensus among the majority of Jews who are politically liberal and vote for the Democrats.

But its endorsement in 2020 of BLM was a bridge too far for many in the mainstream Jewish world. For Jewish federations—led for the most part by liberal professionals and donors—to be tied to a group linked to radical anti-Israel and antisemitic advocacy was intolerable, although in the midst of the moral panic set off by the death of George Floyd, many acquiesced. But it created a rift that caused JCPA activists to want to liberate themselves from even the minimal restraints that the connection to the federations brought.

Were this merely a matter of a tiff between Jewish Democrats and Republicans or generic liberals and conservatives, it wouldn’t warrant much attention. But the road that the new JCPA and a lot of its competition are taking—by adopting the catechisms of BLM and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)—is particularly noteworthy and dangerous.

Indeed, the JCPA is siding with forces that are driving left-wing antisemitism and Jew-hatred in the African-American community—highlighted by recent incidents involving celebrities like Kanye West and the epidemic of black attacks on Orthodox Jews in New York City.

Rather than an invigorated Jewish leadership, the new JCPA is additional evidence of the catastrophic and disgraceful failure of the existing liberal establishment. It’s not only a waste of scarce Jewish resources; it also reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of liberals who claim to speak for Jews but are actually working against Jewish interests and security. Redundancy and waste are bad enough. But the current situation is a moral calamity.

Why the ADL abandoned Antisemitism and went woke

The ADL’s education curriculum had started out teaching tolerance, but now teaches intolerance, and advocates partisan politics. Despite the organization’s origins, its handbook is notable for mentioning Jewish people only three times, once in the ADL’s background and twice in its definition of antisemitism.

But the ADL is not a Jewish organization anymore. It’s a generically lucrative leftist group which provides bias insurance to schools while joining in leftist attacks on conservatives.

A few years after Greenblatt came on board, the ADL announced a new program together with eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar: one of the leading funders of the anti-Israel Left. ADL Senior VP Eileen Hershenov was the former general counsel for Soros’ Open Society octopus.

“Kudos to my former boss, George Soros,” she gushed.

Hershenov oversees the ADL’s partnership with the Aspen Institute, funded by Soros. The joint ADL-Aspen program’s civil society fellows included the founding Co-Director of the Open Society Foundation’s Economic Justice Program.

Small wonder that Greenblatt attacks any critics of Soros and the ADL, formerly critical of the Nazi collaborating billionaire, now has a page dedicated to defending the antisemitic leftist.

The ADL’s funders and partners list increasingly resembles those of most leftist activist groups with $1 million from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, the Rockefellers, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. There’s nothing Jewish here.

As an organization, the ADL doesn’t belong in Jewish circles, and its educational curriculum doesn’t belong in any schools.

Are Jews equal under Islam?

Filmed by @el_soco pic.twitter.com/zLzOlbX0sC

— Israel Advocacy Movement (@israel_advocacy) December 20, 2022

Read More

12/01 Links Pt2: Cultural appropriation and the Jews; UN envoy to Hamas: ‘You have the right to fight Israel’; Kanye praises Hitler, says every human has value, 'especially Hitler'

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Cultural appropriation and the Jews

The notable aspect of West’s behavior is that whereas Irving issued a groveling apology for his antisemitic outburst, West doubled down. In every public appearance since he openly defended Irving’s anti-Semitism, West has not only restated his antisemitic positions, he has expanded on them, and escalated his attacks on Jews as a people, a community in America, and as individuals. In redefining himself as an antisemite first and a rapper and public figure second, West has chosen to associate himself most closely with other antisemites, particularly white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

West’s decision to act as a bridge between black antisemitism, which is generally associated with the progressive political camp, and white supremacist antisemitism, which is generally associated with the political far right, exposes a much-ignored but fundamental fact about antisemitism: it isn’t a political position. It is a cultural outlook; a way of understanding the world. Antisemites hail from the political left, center and right. They come from all religions. Their antisemitism directs their politics. Consequently, antisemitic policies have advocates in all political camps.

This brings us back to the Israeli reporters in Doha.

Black Israelites and the Nation of Islam, which base their identity on the appropriation of Jewish identity, comprise a small but powerful minority of the black community in America. They impact the Congressional Black Caucus and other key black power centers, which in turn impact the Democratic Party. And while their cultural and political power are growing, they are still limited.

In contrast, embrace of the Palestinian narrative is all but universal across the Arab world, across the wider Muslim world and across large sections of the Western world. It is nearly universally accepted in Europe and by progressives in America. All of the people who accept and champion the Palestinian narrative accept the validity of a political cause that is entirely based on the appropriation of Jewish peoplehood.

Shechnik and his fellow reporters were stunned to discover the truth about the war against them as Jews, and against their state. The antisemitism that animates their antagonists in Doha has nothing to do with who leads Israel’s government or what the Israeli military does in any given war or operation. Support of the Palestinians, and their goal of wiping Israel off the map, is rooted in Jew hatred, shared by billions of people across the world.

The Palestinians are popular because they provide a vehicle for expressing and advancing that hatred, including in the halls of power across the world. Israel’s endurance is unacceptable, because simply by surviving, simply by having reporters to send to cover the World Cup in Doha, the Jewish state proves that the Palestinian narrative is untrue, and based on a rejection of observable reality and the historical record, not on justice or truth.

Likewise, American Jews are stunned to discover that black antisemitism, like Palestinian-predicated assaults on Jews from Peoria to Miami, has nothing to do with who is in power in Israel or whether American Jews identify with progressive or conservative politicians and causes. It has nothing to do with whether or not American Jews are willing to accept “white guilt.”

Irving, West, the Black Israelites, the Nation of Islam and their ilk don’t hate Jews because of anything any particular Jew may or may not think, say or do. They hate the Jews because they have stolen Jewish history, heritage, nationhood and culture and appropriated all of them to themselves. Having done so, they have no choice but to demonize the Jews, because Jewish endurance and legitimacy expose the fraud at the heart of their invented identity.

From New York City to the Negev Desert: Who Are the Black Hebrew Israelites?

From Jews to Israelites: The Third Wave
The third wave of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement began in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to the civil rights movement and the subsequent Black Power movement.

The third wave is defined as a period when BHI denominations emerged that were more patriarchal, more militant and more extreme.

The third wave is also when the movement began to self-identify as “Black Israelites” instead of “Black Jews.”

Initially, the third wave continued in the footsteps of the second wave by adopting Jewish traditions and learning Jewish texts.

However, as the third wave continued, new BHI denominations began to emerge that were influenced by Black separatism and the militancy that colored 1960s America.

One of the most prominent Black Hebrew Israelite denominations that emerged during this period was the Israeli School of Universal Practical Knowledge (commonly known as “One West”).

Founded in the late 1960s by Eber Ben Yomin (also known as Abba Bivens), a former member of the Commandment Keepers, One West espouses the belief that white Jews stole the identity of Black, Latin and Native Americans (who are the true Jews) and that the mainstream Jewish community is responsible for all the challenges that face these communities.

One West also adopted the tactics of confrontational street preaching and wearing colorful garments, emulating the clothing that they believe that the original Israelites wore thousands of years ago.

Some of the most radical, militant and bigoted Black Hebrew Israelite sects to emerge in the past 40 years are offshoots of One West.

These groups include Israel United in Christ, the Israelite school of Universal Practical Knowledge, the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, the Sicarii, House of Israel, True Nation Israelite Congregation and Israelite Saints of Christ.

Of all these groups, Israel United in Christ (IUIC) is one of the most vocal and public. They are also one of the most militant and bigoted. They are known for street-preaching, rallying (including on behalf of Kyrie Irving) and marching.

In its writings and speeches, IUIC has made a wide variety of antisemitic statements, including that Jews are demons, that “everything they [Jewish people] do is about lying” and that Jewish people are responsible for a “Holocaust” that Black people have been experiencing since the 1400s.

The Black Hebrew Israelites in the State of Israel
One of the sects that emerged during the third wave was the Original African Hebrew Israelite Nation of Jerusalem.

This sect was founded by Ben Ammi Ben Israel, a Chicago-born man who claimed that he had received a vision in 1966 that he was to return the African-American descendants of the ancient Israelites to the Promised Land.

By 1967, Ben Israel had persuaded 400 people to leave the United States with him for the Promised Land. After a brief sojourn in Liberia, that was seen as a means of purging the negative influence of captivity, this group arrived in Israel in 1969.

When they arrived in Israel, the group was given temporary visas and housing in the southern Israeli development town of Dimona.

Soon after the initial group’s arrival in the country, the Israeli government noticed that more members were arriving and illegally staying in the country (since it was determined that they were not Jewish, they were not eligible to become citizens under the Law of Return).

The State of Israel’s attempt to bar more members of the African Hebrew Israelite Nation from moving to the country led to a protracted conflict between the state and the sect.

During this nasty fight, which lasted 13 years, members of the sect took part in a public campaign against the State of Israel, which included calls for a halt to American aid to Israel and a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses.

In 1990, the Israeli government and the African Hebrew Israelites came to an agreement whereby members of the sect would be granted permanent residency.

In 2004, the first member of the African Hebrew Israelites enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces and by 2006, 100 members were serving in the Israeli military. In 2009, the first member of the sect gained Israeli citizenship.

There are currently between 3,000 to 5,000 members of the African Hebrew Israelites living in Israel, the majority of whom are in the southern towns of Dimona, Arad and Mitzpe Ramon.

The African Hebrew Israelites place a strong emphasis on healthy living. They follow a vegan diet and highly limit their intake of sugar and salt. In addition, members are forbidden from smoking, taking drugs or drinking alcohol (aside from naturally fermented wines). The African Hebrew Israelites also follow a strict exercise schedule.

Until 1990, members of the African Hebrew Israelite community practiced polygamy due to its existence in the Biblical tradition and because there were many more women than men in the first years of the community.

Aside from the Biblical holidays, the African Hebrew Israelite community also holds a special festive celebration every May: New World Passover, which commemorates their exodus from the United States in 1967.

UN envoy to Hamas: ‘You have the right to fight Israel’

Italian lawyer Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ special rapporteur for the Palestinians, spoke at a Hamas-organized conference in Gaza on Monday.

She plans to continue on to Israel, which is considering refusing her entry.

Senior members of the U.S.- and E.U.-designated terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) were among those in attendance, including Hamas’s Basem Naim, Ghazi Hamad, Isam al-Da’alis and Abdul Latif al-Qanu, and PIJ’s Ahmad al-Mudallal and Khadr Habib.

In her speech, translated in real-time to Arabic, Albanese told the crowd: “You have a right to resist this occupation.”

The UN official recently said, “If they [Israel] don’t let me in….I’ll be able to claim that I’ve been denied access.”

Albanese has a history of supporting violence against Israelis. In June, she said, “Israel says ‘resistance equals terrorism,’ but an occupation requires violence and generates violence.”

Can you please ask the government to extradite Ahlam Tamimi?
She is wanted by the FBI for terrorism and is very vocal and very proud of having slaughtered Jewish civilians.https://t.co/iw3hEj2dtP

— NoamTLV (@Noam_NYC) November 29, 2022

Read More

11/03 Links Pt2: Israeli Film Purports to Expose the Story of a Massacre That Never Happened; Melanie Phillips: The Jihadi Onslaught Against Christians; The Deception of Palestinian Nationalism

From Ian:

A New Israeli Film Purports to Expose the Story of a Massacre That Never Happened

Beginning this evening, the Manhattan Jewish Community Center is hosting its Other Israel film festival. Featured movies include Boycott, described as an “inspiring tale of everyday Americans” engaged in “legal battles that expose an attack on freedom of speech across 33 states in America”—namely, legislation that prevents states from doing business with entities that discriminate against and boycott Israel. Another film featured at the festival is about smugglers who help Palestinians evade Israeli soldiers, while a third film focuses on Mizra?im who were “denied their right to a better life in Israel” by the Israeli government.

At the festival’s opening night, there will be a screening of the documentary Tantura, directed by Alon Schwartz, which investigates allegations of a massacre perpetrated by the Haganah during the 1948 war. But like the “massacre” at Lydda, or the more famous one at Deir Yassin, it’s unlikely this atrocity ever took place. The distinguished historian Benny Morris sets forth the evidence:

In both [a recent article published in Haaretz] and the film, Schwarz maintains that Israeli forces, specifically the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade, perpetrated a large massacre against the inhabitants of Tantura immediately after they captured the seaside village on May 23, 1948. The film is based on the allegations made by Teddy Katz in his master’s thesis, submitted to the University of Haifa in 1998. . . . Katz is the film’s hero and chief narrator.

Schwarz maintains in the article that his film is based on Katz’s paper and on “documents, military aerial photographs, and other archival materials.” This is just another crude lie, which points precisely at the central historiographic problem with Katz’s thesis and Schwarz’s film: there is no written evidence from 1948—not in Israeli archives, not in United Nations’ archives, and not in the archives of the Red Cross or the Western powers—that describes or even mentions a big massacre at Tantura. Katz and Schwarz base the “big massacre” thesis entirely on interviews with Arabs and Jews who “remembered” or claimed that they remembered it 40 years after the event.

Particularly damning is the absence of reports on this supposed outrage from contemporaneous Palestinian sources. Radio Ramallah, for instance, reported on the Israeli victory at Tantura, but said nothing about a massacre.

It’s noteworthy that a memorandum of the Arab Higher Committee, titled “The Atrocities of the Jews,” which was sent to the UN in early July 1948, makes no mention of Tantura—another puzzling omission if a large-scale massacre had recently taken place there. It’s worth noting that Palestinian historiography in the decades after 1948 also did not mention a massacre at Tantura. The book deemed the Nakba bible, the six-volume al-Nakba published between1956 and 1960 by the chronicler Aref al-Aref, does not mention a massacre at Tantura.

Melanie Phillips: The Jihadi Onslaught Against Christians

Last Saturday, there was violence in the vicinity of Bethlehem. You won’t have read a word about this in the mainstream media. That’s because the perpetrators weren’t Israelis but Muslim Arabs, and the targets weren’t Palestinians but Christians.

This was but the latest in a serious of attacks on Christian Arabs in the Bethlehem area. You won’t have read about those in the mainstream media either — just as you will have read hardly anything there about the horrific attacks on Christians that continue to take place in Nigeria and other African countries.

This is what happened on Saturday, according to contemporaneous reports on social media. A Christmas bazaar opened in Beit Sahour, a town near Bethlehem. A young Muslim Arab went to the bazaar and started taking videos of Christian girls wearing western clothes, which to his eyes probably seemed immodest.

A Christian scout leader threw him out of the bazaar. A short time later, he returned with a gang of men. They started stoning the Holy Forefathers Greek Orthodox Church near the bazaar. They smashed up cars parked nearby belonging to Christians and struck the scout on the face. In the absence of the Palestinian police, the church rang its bells — a known danger alert for churches.

Videos of these events started circulating on social media. You can see one here, in a tweet which suggests the perpetrator had tried to enter the church.

2008: The Deception of Palestinian Nationalism

The evidence that simple autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza was never the PLO’s true goal is everywhere. In 1970, US Secretary of State William Rogers suggested that the West Bank and Gaza be given up by Israel in return for peace and recognition. This plan was accepted by Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Only Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, rejected it, opting instead to attempt an overthrow of Jordan’s King Hussein.

The evidence runs deeper. Yassir Arafat, who was head of the PLO until 2004, was under the direct tutelage and control of the KGB. Ion Mihai Pacepa, KGB officer and onetime chief of Romanian Intelligence, was assigned to handling Arafat. Pacepa recorded several of his conversations with Arafat when they met in Romania at the palace of brutal dictators Nicolai and Elena Ceausescu. In these conversations, Arafat unequivocally states that his sole aim is to destroy Israel.

Pacepa and the KGB were delighted. They consulted General Giap, a close associate of Ho Chi Minh, who was involved with the North Vietnamese propaganda effort during the Vietnam War. Giap recommended to Arafat that he “stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your [Arafat’s] terror war into a struggle for human rights.” It had worked in Vietnam, he claimed, because transforming the conflict from one of ideologies (Socialism vs. Capitalism) to one of an “indigenous” people’s struggle for liberty had turned the tide of popular support in the West against the war.

Similar advice was provided to Arafat by Muhammed Yazid, minister of information in two Algerian wartime governments. He wrote “wipe out the argument that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the Arab States, or the reduction of the Palestinian problem to a question of refugees; instead present the Palestinian struggle as one for liberation like the others. Wipe out the impression that in the struggle between the Palestinians and Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. Now it is the Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only facing the Zionists but also world imperialism.”

Yasser Arafat heeded this advice, and with the help of bi-weekly plane-loads of Soviet supplies brought in through Damascus as well as the Soviet propaganda machine, he began to portray the Palestinian Arabs as a supposedly indigenous population whose human rights were being tarnished by Israel.

The fact is that after the War of 1967, Israel inherited Arab refugees living in the West Bank and Gaza that were forced to live there in the period of Egyptian and Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967. Israel immediately offered to return the lands it won in 1967 (West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights) in return for a peace treaty. This offer was rejected by the Arab countries in the Khartoum Conference (Aug. 29- Sep. 1, 1967). In Arafat’s authorized biography, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker, Arafat claims this moment as one of his greatest diplomatic victories.

It is telling that Zahir Muhse’in, member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee, said the following in a 1977 interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Trouw. “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”

Palestinian nationalism is therefore a historical fabrication born out of a communist thirst for expansion and an Arab resentment of the existence of Israel. The “need” and “desire” for Palestinian is a veiled expression of the “need” and “desire” to end Israel’s existence.

Read More

05/26 Links Pt2: Kontorovich: "Israel Apartheid" Is the New "Zionism=Racism"; In 1925: The Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound's 'Identity With The Site Of Solomon's Temple Is Beyond Dispute'

From Ian:

Prof. Eugene Kontorovich: "Israel Apartheid" Is the New "Zionism=Racism"

The coordinated reports by European government-funded NGOs accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid are an example of a "Big Lie." The Amnesty International apartheid report claimed that Israel since its founding was an apartheid state. Thus, it is not any policies of Israel's but the idea of a Jewish state that is apartheid.

The reports treat the Palestinians as silent objects, rather than political actors who have shaped their own destiny. In particular, the reports ignore the reality of Palestinian self-government and systematic Palestinian efforts to murder Israeli Jews. Since 1993 the Palestinians have had their own government, which regulates almost every aspect of their lives. Unlike South African Bantustans, the PA government is recognized by most countries of the world and functions outside of Israeli control.

Under the Oslo Agreements, the PA government and Israel agreed on a framework for dividing authority and jurisdiction in areas where their governments and populations are intertwined. The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report cites those very features as evidence of apartheid - in effect saying that the internationally-backed Oslo Accords, for which several Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded, is equivalent to apartheid.

All of the movement restrictions and the separation wall were established not as part of a policy of racial separation, but only in response to the murderous wave of terror unleashed by the PA in 2000, which killed over 1,000 Israelis. HRW tries to paint self-defense as subjugation, and thus makes no mention of the mass-murder of Israeli civilians.

"Israel apartheid" is not just a lie, it is an inversion of the truth. In all areas controlled by Israel, Jews and Arabs mix freely and openly. Yet all the areas under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority are Jew-free. The Palestinian constitution defines "Palestine" as an exclusively "Arab nation," makes Islam the official religion and Arabic the sole official language.

Yisrael Medad: 'You Do to Us What the Nazis Did to You'

One of the central propaganda lines of the pro-Arab Palestine school of misleading misinformation is that the establishment of the state of Israel was made, and ageed to by Europe and America, as a form of an assuaging of their guilt for their responsibility for the Holocaust.

The line continues that the Arabs are being forced to pay for the sins of Europe which is unfair. Europe wants to placate their consciousness over the year 1939-1945, do it somewhere else.

Of course, that ignores 3000 years of Jewish national identity bound up with the Land of Israel - which the Arabs turned into 'Palestine" after conquering it and then occupying it.

But I have now found a pre-war claim on that theme in the Palestine Post's review on January 26, 1939 of Arnold Toynbee's volume Survey of international Affairs, 1937 in which he asserts the Mandate of Palestine "pays for Europe's sins".

MEMRI: Jerusalem's Supreme Muslim Council, Headed By Grand Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, In 1925: The Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound's 'Identity With The Site Of Solomon's Temple Is Beyond Dispute'

The Haram Al-Sharif Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the old city of Jerusalem, known to Christians and Jews as the Temple Mount, is a focal point of tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.

In 1925, the Jerusalem-based Supreme Muslim Council,[1] which was headed by Grand Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, published a 16-page informational booklet about the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound titled A Brief Guide to Al-Haram Al-Sharif. The booklet establishes that the site is holy to Jews and that the ancient Jewish temples had stood there (contemporary Palestinian figures often reject such claims about the Temple Mount and about its historical and religious significance to Jews – see Appendix I).

Following are the quotes from the booklet (see Appendix II for the full booklet).

Excerpts From The Booklet
Page 4:
"The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest (perhaps from pre-historic) times. Its identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to the universal belief, on which 'David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings [2 Samuel 24:25].'"

"[The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound's] identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute."

Page 16:
"Little is known for certain of the early history of the chamber itself. It dates probably as far back as the construction of Solomon's Temple."

"[The Solomon's Stables chamber] dates probably as far back as the construction of Solomon's Temple."

The Jordanian Government Erases Mention Of The Temples In The 1966 Updated Version Of The 1925 Booklet

It should be noted that in 1966, the Jordanian Ministry of Awqaf (to which the Supreme Muslim Council's functions were transferred in 1951) published a new version of the Supreme Muslim Council's booklet, titled A Brief Guide to the Dome of the Rock and Al-Haram Al-Sharif.

In this new version, there are very few mentions of the compound's pre-Islamic history, and not one mention of the Jewish Temples. The term "temple" was only used twice in the 1966 booklet, on pages 20 and 60, in reference to when the Crusaders dubbed the Dome of the Rock "Templum Domini" ("The Lord's Temple") and the adjacent Al-Aqsa Mosque "Templum Solomonis" ("Solomon's Temple," a term that also refers to the First Temple).

Read More