Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, March 28, 2024

More evidence that Gaza death statistics are not close to accurate

The Telegraph has an interesting analysis of deaths as reported by UNRWA and those reported directly by hospitals in Gaza.

First, it pints out something I have alluded to before: the percentage of male UNRWA worker deaths is much higher than for females, which is statistically unlikely if deaths are random since most UNRWA workers in Gaza are female:

But then comes the interesting part. The author finds that there is a high correlation between UNRWA female deaths and total named deaths reported from Gaza hospitals in Gaza in terms of deaths per thousand.

The writer then compares how this chart diverges with the supposed total of deaths has gone up in recent months:

He doesn't mention it, but look how straight that "total claimed deaths" line is since December. Almost as if people are declaring a total number of deaths to fit numbers that were made up beforehand.

The UNRWA females/total hospital reported correlation might be coincidental, but then the article shows a similar high correlation between the female UNRWA death locations and the more generally reported casualties by the hospitals:

This appears to further strengthen the case for using the UNRWA female staff deaths numbers, and the closely matching numbers from hospital records, as a proxy for the actual mortality numbers in Gaza. If we did this, it would suggest that around 18,000 (not 32,414) had died in Gaza since Oct 7.

Alternatively, the gap between the hospital records and the total claimed numbers may be an indication of the number of Hamas combatants killed (the IDF itself estimates 13,000 combatants killed, for example). Combatants are, after all, less likely to be recorded in hospital datasets.

And since the combatants are likely to be predominantly male, this could also explain the disproportionate number of male deaths in the UNRWA data.

So either there really are 32,000 deaths but Hamas is counting nearly all 13,000 militants as women and children, or there are far fewer deaths altogether.

This is at least the third report that shows the statistical anomalies of total reported deaths in Gaza, all from different angles. Any way you look at it, the number of women and children killed are not close to the number being reported.

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Lethal Exchange: Study Finds US Police Brutality, Racism Learned From Hamas (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Minneapolis, March 28 - New research has upended a contentious and flimsy report from several years ago that falsely attributed American law enforcement excesses to anti-terrorism training with Israeli counterparts. The more recent, and more robust, research, published in this month's edition of the Harvard Law Review, instead identifies the major factor in the stateside phenomenon as Palestinian enforcement behavior against Palestinians, in turn sponsored by, and emulating, Iran and its proxies in the region.

The study found, in the words of the article, "a direct parallel between the violent, discriminatory phenomena that activists decried in United Stated policing vis-à-vis underprivileged minority communities, and the same phenomena as a consistent feature of so-called law enforcement in the Palestinian territories, principally the Gaza Strip but the Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank, as well." Nominally, Hamas controls the Gaza Strip where Israel's current military operations have not supplanted them, while the Fatah faction governs parts of the West Bank.

"Everything from outright racism against Africans to excessive force to arbitrary violence to institutional prioritizing of protecting the organization over any human or civil rights of the citizenry," the article noted.

In particular, the researchers noted the rampant and open discrimination in Gaza against Black Africans; the standard term in Palestinian Arabic for Blacks is "Abed," meaning "slave." De facto segregation and abuse characterize "official" treatment of Blacks in Gaza. The scholars also observed that the Arab Middle East remains one of the chief areas of the world where chattel slavery of Africans still exists; US police can only produce a pale imitation of that level of abuse.

Beyond race itself, the study also found the roots of American police brutality in the way Hamas enforcers treat ordinary Palestinians, that is, with total disregard for the humanity, let alone rights, of those ordinary Palestinians.

An earlier polemic that coined the term "Lethal Exchange" attributed American police brutality to tactics learned by US police forces when the latter studied counterterrorism methods and theories from Israelis experienced in the arena. The "study" made headlines and continues to be cited by race grifters and antisemites, but failed to demonstrate any connection between the training programs and any apparent manifestation of program content in encounters with criminal suspects.

The article predicts that the same "Lethal Exchange" propagandists who made the spurious link to Israel will seize on Palestinian police brutality as evidence that Israeli "occupation" has made Palestinian law enforcement so brutal and dehumanizing, which assumes that Arabs have always been peaceful peoples unknown for any conquests, wars, violence, or mistreatment of minorities.

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03/28 Links Pt1: Israel’s Orwellian nightmare; How much evidence do you need of Hamas sexual abuse?; How Is the Palestinian Authority's Agenda Not Genocide?

From Ian:

Andrew Roberts: The West’s shameful betrayal of Israel gives Hamas the chance to kill again

Have we forgotten? Have we really forgotten so quickly the monstrous events of October 7 last year that we genuinely want an immediate ceasefire in Gaza before Hamas has been utterly destroyed as a military force and potential government there?

As we watched the British ambassador to the UN raise her hand at the Security Council meeting this week to vote for a ceasefire, alongside the Chinese and Russians, leaving our ally the US in the cold as the only member abstaining, do we not feel embarrassed, even ashamed? I know I do.

How proud I would have felt if we had actually had the guts to veto a resolution that is designed to prevent Israel from genuinely exercising her right to self-defence, which Britain and America were so quick to declare they believed in back in October – however, hypocritically, as it turns out. For Israel’s “right to self-defence” is utterly worthless if its forces are stopped from entering Rafah and annihilating the Hamas leadership there.

Hamas has already stated – and in this, at least, one can’t fault the group for its honesty – that it is committed to repeating October 7-style massacres as soon as it gets another chance.

As its spokesman Abu Obeida has stated, Hamas intends to make Israel “taste new ways of death”. The international community has clearly shown that it is happy to let Hamas have the opportunity, because the immediate ceasefire in the UN resolution is intended to be followed by “a lasting sustainable ceasefire”, in which Hamas would surely survive.

It will be hard even for Hamas to think up new ways of making Jews taste death considering what the terrorists did on October 7. Having dehumanised Jews after decades of officially-organised anti-Semitic propaganda to children as young as four, it visited death upon them in more vile, sadistic and depraved ways than can possibly be imagined. “Men, women, and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered,” wrote Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, “in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not.”

Yet a mere five months later, we have shifted our position enough to give Hamas a lifeline, and have joined China and Russia in calling for a ceasefire before the terrorists are destroyed. In military doctrine, the word destruction means: “To render the enemy incapable of accomplishing his mission without reconstitution.”

Hamas’s stated mission is to destroy both Israel and Jews. Preventing any such reconstitution means forcing it into a Berlin 1945 moment in Rafah. As Benny Gantz, former Israeli deputy prime minister and Israel Defence Forces (IDF) chief of the general staff, has pointed out: “You don’t send the fire brigade to put out 80 per cent of the fire.”

Melanie Phillips: Israel’s Orwellian nightmare

President Joe Biden has conditioned military aid to Israel on the requirement that it submits a report within 45 days proving compliance with international law. Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, has threatened to stop arms sales to Israel unless it allows the Red Cross access to Hamas detainees.

Seeking to explain this vicious treatment by Israel’s treacherous allies, commentators cite the need to appease American Muslims and radical Democrats in the U.S. presidential election; the anti-Israel Obama-era retreads in the Biden administration; and in Britain, the outsourcing of foreign policy by the inexperienced Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to Cameron, who shares the poisonous disdain for Israel that’s been entrenched in the Foreign Office for decades.

Plausible as those reasons are, there’s also a deeper issue. Israel’s current Orwellian treatment at Western hands should be no surprise because this treatment has been Orwellian for decades.

Under existential attack since its rebirth in 1948, Israel has repeatedly been forced by America and the West into making lethal concessions to its would-be destroyers that have left it in a state of permanent siege and under repeated attack.

America and the West have feted Palestinian leaders as statesmen even while those leaders brainwash generations into believing it’s their highest duty to kill every Jew. The Americans have armed and trained Palestinian police officers who have subsequently mounted terrorist attacks on Israelis.

The “two-state solution” is being insisted upon by the U.S. and Britain, even though it has been repeatedly offered to the Palestinians who have rejected it because their aim is to wipe Israel off the map.

The reason America and Britain have left Israel to swing in the wind is that they think the genocidal Palestinians have a legitimate case. The shocking treatment of Israel today by its so-called allies is merely a continuation of that decades-old Orwellian nightmare.

The President’s War Against the Jews

Biden owns this war imposed on Israel. The president inherited a Middle East marked by a bankrupt Iran and amicable relations between Israel and Arab countries with more in the works, thanks to President Trump’s historic Abraham Accords. Biden reversed course, enriched Tehran, funded terrorists and destabilized the Middle East—setting the stage for Oct. 7.

Biden shows no sign of reversing even one of his deadly failures. Instead of taking responsibility for his policy mistakes, he blames Israel for not going further and providing Iran with a launching pad on its border by establishing a Palestinian state. Perversely, the attacks of Oct. 7 have only led Biden to kick his effort to establish a Palestinian state into high gear.

Biden claims Hamas is different from the Palestinians. But an overwhelming majority of Palestinians, whether in Gaza or Judea and Samaria, cheered the Oct. 7 atrocities. Videos show Palestinians handing out candy in celebration, and a November 2023 research poll conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) found, “[a]n overwhelming percentage of Palestinians support the October 7 massacre (75%), reject coexistence with Israel (85.9%), are committed to creation of a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’ (74.7%) as the end of the Israeli Palestinian conflict … there is more support for the 10/7 massacre from the Palestinians resident in Judea and Samaria (83.1%) than those residing in the Gaza Strip (63.6%).”

Regardless of Biden’s wishes, the “river to the sea” crowd isn’t interested in living in peace next to a Jewish state: They don’t believe Israel should exist at all. While Israel’s cabinet overwhelmingly rejected Biden’s push for a so-called Palestinian state, with strong backing from 99 of the 120 members of Knesset also voicing their rejection, Biden and his administration continue to push their animus against the Jewish state while fueling rampant antisemitism in America. Biden’s silence, at his State of the Union, about the alarming rise of antisemitism throughout the United States, including the glorification of Hamas terrorism and intimidation and physical violence perpetrated against Jews in America’s towns and cities, was deafening. That’s because his party’s loyal foot soldiers among college and university administrators and professors or their K-12 equivalents, the media, Democratic politicians, or leftist NGOs, include a large number of antisemites, who live openly and happily in the Democratic Party. As Ryan Mauro, Capitol Research Center national security analyst explained, “the disturbing reality is that Hamas’s allies in the U.S. have a significant foothold in the non-profit sector. Major left-wing organizations are funding Hamas’s sympathizers and those who indirectly help Hamas by waging a political war against Israel.”

It was 50 years ago in 1973, when then Sen. Biden was in Israel, sitting with PM Meir. Biden recalled her saying to him that he “look[ed] so worried.” She assured him not to worry, sharing “we have a secret weapon in our conflict with the Arabs. You see, we have no place else to go.” Perhaps it took these 50 years for Biden to figure out how to exploit Meir’s words about Israel’s “secret weapon” to effectuate the ouster of the Jewish people from their ancestral homeland.

Whether Biden and his party are blinded by ideology, lack moral clarity, or both, the fact remains that the battle that Israel is fighting has existential stakes, not only for the Jewish state but for all Western civilization—regardless of party affiliation. Those who understand what is at stake in this fight must stand with Israel in her battle to achieve total victory—not only against Hamas and its barbaric ideology, but also against those in high places in our own country who support them.

Saving Israel from Itself?

The Israelis, according to some Americans, just don't understand their real interests and pursue policies that could lead to the ruin of the Jewish state. The role of Washington, as a friend, is to press Jerusalem to change its diplomatic direction.

American State Department official George Ball in 1977 published an article in Foreign Affairs titled: "How to Save Israel in Spite of Herself" - which soon became part of the American diplomatic lexicon.

The notion that the U.S. had to save Israel from itself to pursue Arab-Israeli peace is a meaningless intellectual exercise. Two years later (1979), Israel signed the peace agreement with Egypt that responded to its national security needs.

Moreover, the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians resulted from an Israeli initiative with very little involvement by the Americans, proving that Israel is an independent diplomatic player that is driven by its interests and can make peace with the Arabs without an American "savior."

In principle, the American president is elected to steward and secure U.S. interests rather than those of foreign countries like Israel. Israel's citizens didn't elect him, which suggests that he doesn't have an obligation to save them and certainly not to make decisions about war and peace in their name. The government elected by Israeli citizens has that responsibility.

Politicians and pundits have to understand that if they fail to convince the majority of Israelis that an independent Palestinian state would pose no threat to Israel, such a state will not be established.

At the "Jewish Voice for Peace" website, rabbi Lynn Gottlieb JVP Rabbinical Council writes about how her community responds to the threat of a Haman:

When we came to the part in the schpiel when Haman’s infamy is revealed, I would ask, “What shall we do with the wicked Haman?”

...Restorative justice ideas stream forth. Haman should intern with Albert the local Jewish baker and learn how to feed Jewish people; Haman and his sons should take lessons in cultural sensitivity and prejudice reduction with Tanya C (an expert educator on this topic in our community); instead of jail time, Haman should work at an interfaith center so he can pay reparations to those injured by his edict.

The kids always suggest he attend Cheder and study for Bar Mitzvah. They figure by exposing Haman to their favorite Cheder activities, he would come to love the Jews of Shushan. “I can teach him Hebrew!” volunteers Simon.

The problem of antisemitism has been solved!

Martin Luther just needed to do some challah baking! Henry Ford should have been invited to a sukkah! Julius Streicher needed to learn more about the beauty of Hebrew calligraphy!

Presumably, this is the advice they would give for dealing with Hamas leaders as well.

Haman, the Spanish Inquisitors, Adolf Hitler and Yahya Sinwar are all fundamentally good people who are just a little misguided. (Unlike, say, Donald Trump.)

(h/t Surely This Will Free Palestine FB group)

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

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Read all about it here!

It is 1348 all over again.

Yesterday, anti-Zionist groups held a seminar at Haverford College that accused Israel of intentionally spreading COVID-19 as a tool of genocide to Palestinians.

Teach-in on Israel’s weaponization of COVID against Palestinians.

Join us to learn about how the Israeli state intentionally debilitates Palestinians through the spread of COVID and how we can resist COVID spread and the genocide against Palestinians

Just as with the Black Death, Jews are being accused of deliberately spreading disease - and this time it is being described as an intentional genocide, part of a planned effort to wipe out Palestinians altogether.

Only hours before the scheduled seminar, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia called on Haverford College to condemn the event.

The event’s title dangerously and inaccurately implies that Israel spread coronavirus to advance its global control, repackaging a centuries-old antisemitic trope that Jews take advantage of global crises as a means for their own gain and advancement. In this case, the event’s narrative takes on a new form of the antisemitic blood libel trope, accusing Jews of committing ritual murder and perpetuating the harmful stereotype of Jews as evil and conniving.

Higher education institutions have a responsibility to establish college campuses as a space for free speech and critical thinking. However, it must be rooted in academic integrity rather than disinformation.

Haverford College and institutions of all sizes have a responsibility first and foremost to protect the safety of their students. This event and the tension on campus that has led to Jewish students and faculty being vulnerable and victimized constitutes a failure of leadership.

There have been no new reports of COVID infections among Palestinians since January 2023. The most recent death from COVID-19 I could find is September 2022.

Which makes this, in a sense, even worse than the accusation against Jews in the 14th century. The antisemites are making up deaths that aren't even happening and blaming them on Jews.

As we are seeing in Europe, this depraved and crazed antisemitism leads to violence. And no one is doing anything effective to fight it - on the contrary, as we see on this campus, there is no pushback from the administration altogether.

(h/t Andrew)

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

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The "young men" who were killed in the West Bank

The official Palestinian Wafa news agency regularly reports on "young men" who are "martyred" in the West Bank.

Here's their photo of one of them according to Wafa:

Here's what he looks like on jihadist sites.

Walid al-Osta on Wafa:

Walid al-Osta according to jihadist sites:

(They don't look the same to me, but this is the name given.)

As usual, the Palestinian Authority is trying to pretend everyone is a civilian. Just like Hamas.

The story as reported by BICOM:

Three Palestinians were killed during an Israeli raid in Jenin yesterday. As troops looked to arrest wanted men, two gunmen were killed by a drone strike and a third by IDF fire after troops responded to his throwing an explosive device. During the raid, a vehicle containing primed explosives was safely destroyed, several Palestinians detained, and weapons seized.

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03/27 Links Pt2: Why Israel’s Critics Keep Changing the Rules; Holocaust Re-Revisionism; We are still haunted by ISIS

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Why Israel’s Critics Keep Changing the Rules

Compared to Israel’s November operation at Shifa, this one has attracted far less press attention (aside from the usual perfunctory stenographic work mainstream newspapers in America do for Hamas). One reason for this is that in November, Israel had to spend time searching the hospital after securing it and committing to the slow process of finding and neutralizing the tunnels. This meant the world spent weeks criticizing Israel before informed criticism was even possible, and then moved the goalposts every time Israel revealed a Hamas war crime in the hospital complex. It was a round of Calvinball. By the time the scope of Hamas’s use of the complex was made clear, the press had moved on.

This time, the press had no excuses even before the operation. Everyone already knows how Hamas turned a large hospital into a war zone. As well, the presence of senior Hamas military commanders makes even the attempt to spin this is an Israeli overreaction look ridiculous. Hamas has been caught in the act, which should theoretically be a headline-dominating story for days. There should be a tidal wave of condemnations from foreign ministries around the world and apologies from medical NGOs and media organizations for having—wittingly or unwittingly—aided a terrorist army’s unprecedented assault on international law and coopting journalists and doctors into undermining the safety and credibility of their peers in other conflict zones.

Ah, but that wouldn’t be Calvinball. The rules adjust, and Israel must adjust with them—and as soon as it does, the rules will change again.

“Israel’s opponents are erasing a remarkable, historic new standard Israel has set,” writes John Spencer, perhaps the leading expert in the field at the moment.

But of course they are; if there is no potential for a Hamas victory, even a public-relations one, there is no story. Israel’s critics should be overjoyed at the blueprint Jerusalem is providing for new and creative ways to protect civilians in urban warfare. But to Israel’s critics, international law isn’t stagnant; those were the laws of war in the last round of Calvinball. And hey, why is Israel’s army always fighting the last war, anyway?

The Accused

Hannah Arendt once called the Dreyfus affair a “dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.” For more than a decade, the saga of a Jewish military officer wrongfully convicted of treason riled turn-of-the-century France and foreshadowed the European horrors to come. Yet there has been a curious tendency by some historians to remove both Dreyfus and his Jewishness from the center of the story. In his authoritative new book, Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, the historian Maurice Samuels rectifies this error, while challenging long-standing myths.

As Paul Johnson pointed out in his magisterial History of the Jews, the Dreyfus affair brought a “decisive end to an epoch of illusion in which assimilated western Jews had optimistically assumed that the process of their acceptance in European society was well under way and would shortly be completed.” It upended Jewish life, leading Jews as far away as the United States to ponder whether they would ever be truly accepted in the lands in which they were a tiny minority. It gave a shot in the arm to political Zionism and eventually mobilized much of the French left against anti-Semitism. And it led to years of political upheaval, toppling French governments and revealing divisions that, as Samuels notes, are still evident today.

Born in the Alsatian town of Mulhouse in 1859, Dreyfus grew up in an upper-class Jewish family. Alfred’s father, Raphael, made his fortune in the mill industry and was able to provide a comfortable life.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 shattered the family’s serene existence. The forces of Prussian minister Otto Von Bismarck defeated Napoleon III and France. A new nation, Imperial Germany, was declared at Versailles. And the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by Germany. This amputation was a severe blow to the French psyche, which mourned the loss for the next half-century. It also made quite the impression on young Alfred, who watched enraged as Prussian troops entered Mulhouse. It spurred his desire for a career in the military.

At the time, it was not unusual for a French Jew of Dreyfus’s social and economic background to pursue such a calling. Indeed, as scholars such as Derek Penslar have highlighted, in the 19th century the armed forces of many European nations opened their ranks to Jewish officers. This was certainly true in France, which had played a historic role in emancipating Jews after the French Revolution. An ardent patriot, Dreyfus wanted to serve.

“The Dreyfus family,” Samuels notes, “had embraced French culture because it was socially advantageous, but they also felt a great loyalty to France for having been the first country to emancipate the Jews.”

Holocaust Re-Revisionism

What more can there possibly be to say about the Holocaust? Plenty, as Dan Stone demonstrates in The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, his sobering and meticulous exploration of aspects of the Shoah that have remained, until now, under-analyzed. And these aspects of the Holocaust are especially salient today, as the Nazis’ carefully orchestrated murderous program has been adopted and adapted by Hamas and other jihadist groups and abetted by their fellow travelers in the West.

“There are still major parts of the history of the Holocaust that have not been understood in the prevailing narrative,” writes Stone, a historian at the University of London and the director of the Holocaust Research Institute. These include a comprehensive genocidal ideology originating with and propagated by, but transcending, the Nazis themselves; the “ubiquity” of collaboration throughout Europe and North Africa; and the extraordinary nature of the trauma suffered by the survivors and the slaughtered alike.

The conspiracy that fed the genocidal instincts of the Nazis and their collaborators began and ended with Nazi race “science.” Stone writes, “To understand the drive for Lebensraum, the creation of a German empire in Europe in which the racial community could thrive, one has to grasp the overriding significance of race for the Nazis.” Invoking the historian Eric Voegelin, Stone contends that the fuzzy, mystical notion of race unified German philosophy, politics, and culture.

Specious as this racial theory was—even “pseudoscience” doesn’t do it justice—it galvanized both Nazi elites and everyday Germans young and old. “It is plain to all who are willing to see,” said Nazi culture minister Karl Weber in the mid-1930s, “that this philosophy involves a call to the younger generation to heroic living, for this reality of race is something which claims them, gives them a standard and orientates their whole life.” Jews became, simultaneously, subhumans who were unworthy of polluting the German gene pool and a collective global superpower that threatened German geopolitical interests.

This nascent worldview reached its first apotheosis on November 9, 1938, when the Kristallnacht pogrom erupted across greater Germany. Some 177 synagogues were burned down, 8,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 100 Jews were murdered, and 30,000 others were hauled off to proto-concentration camps in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. The attack, Stone reckons, evinced “an alarming degree of consensus and cooperation among local inhabitants” and signified a key turning point for what the Nazi race ideology endorsed—and what it could get away with.

The entire Nazi war machine, police and Wehrmacht included, began to dedicate itself to the mission of eradicating global Jewry. Stone’s research gives the lie to historical analyses that blamed only the SS and exonerated the regular German army. Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, in his “Orders for Conduct in the East,” instructed the Wehrmacht in no uncertain terms to “liberate the German people once and for all from the Asiatic-Jewish danger.” That the SS’s focus on killing Jews was more single-minded than that of other military organs does little to excuse the latter.

More photos of weeds on the Temple Mount, 1872

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles just made thousands of old photos of the Holy Land available.

As I've documented before, the Temple Mount was filled with weeds - not exactly how one would expect a place of pilgrimage and holiness to hundreds of millions of Muslims to be treated.

1872:

1877:

I've seen weeds as late as 1960 on the holy spot - when Jordanians and "Palestinians" in Jerusalem had unfettered access to the site.

Back in 2009, I made a video on this phenomenon.

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!

Insane Communist Mental Health Professionals for Hamas

I saw another of the endless open letters from various groups expressing solidarity with "Palestinians" (meaning, Hamas):

Psychoanalysis in Solidarity with Gaza

We are members of psychoanalytic organisations in solidarity with our colleagues in Gaza, standing with Palestine against the genocide currently being waged by the Israeli state. This current onslaught, which has already resulted to date in the death of more than ten thousand people in Gaza, and many murders by settlers of Palestinians in the West Bank, is being conducted with the support of regimes in the global north that care nothing for human life. The Israeli state and those who deliberately abet it care nothing for those they portray as sub-human, and whom they tolerate, at best, as powerless victims.
...
...Our task is to resist the ideological and state offensive carried out against the Palestinians. We call on our colleagues to dissociate themselves from the war on Gaza, and to state unequivocally that they will speak and act for Palestine. This is no time to be silent. Yes to resistance.

This is not language of any mental health professional I know. In fact, the title isn't "Psychoanalysts for Gaza" but "Psychoanalysis" itself in solidarity - the entire field. They are not only arrogant but conceited as if they represent all psychoanalysis.

But then I looked at the group sponsoring it: The Red Clinic. Now it makes more sense. Their mission statement is insane:

The Red Clinic is a collective of communist mental health workers united for a radical psychotherapy, for the care of the oppressed, and for uniting the two in the service of communist politics. We aim to develop truly accessible and sustainable provision of psychotherapy for the working-class and the oppressed in the broadest senses of the terms, attentive to the interrelations between axes of oppression, and transcending national borders. This practice will work in tandem with our efforts to develop a novel theoretical basis for psychotherapy today, informed by Marxist, anti-racist, queer feminist, indigenous, decolonial and radical disability theories, learning from our collective experiences in theoretical application, and honing psychotherapy into a better weapon of the communist movement.

There you have it: psychotherapy is a weapon of the communist movement that supports murdering Jews in the name of "resistance."

Meaning, they are really screwed up people who care more about spreading communism than mental health and we want to spread their own psychoses to their patients.

Many of their online seminars are centered around "Palestine," but this one where they advocate abolishing the family altogether pretty much sums up how unbalanced these "mental health professionals" are.

This idea, which comes straight from The Communist Manifesto, is more prevalent than you think.

The far Left is freaking insane. And the moderate Left tolerates this sickness and evil as just another opinion.

(h/t Phyllis)

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!

03/27 Links Pt1: What Would Victory Mean in Gaza?; Glick: US Gaslights Israel At The UN; Gaza Fatality Data Has Become Completely Unreliable

From Ian:

What Would Victory Mean in Gaza?

Decision/victory is the only optimal outcome of a military campaign. In the last three decades, deterrence has become the desired outcome of an IDF military campaign, while decision/victory has essentially disappeared as the primary goal. This pushing aside of victory and centralization of deterrence was largely due to the limitations the State of Israel and the IDF placed on themselves regarding the use of force.

The goals of these limitations were to reduce casualties among IDF soldiers; reduce civilian losses from rockets hitting the home front; reduce enemy collateral damage; reduce international criticism of Israel over its military conduct; and avoid the need to provide a civil response to the needs of a local enemy population.

Israel's belief that it can rely on intermittent deterrence operations was painfully shattered on Oct. 7. It took a severe blow to national security to force a review of the security doctrine and a rediscovery of the concept of victory/decision. It was quickly understood that victory/decision is required in the current campaign and probably also in future campaigns.

Tactical victory is not about killing all opposing military soldiers or terrorist operatives, but about breaking their ability to fight as a combatant framework. In the current war, operational victory does not mean the threat of guerrilla warfare and terrorism has been removed from Gaza, but that Hamas' ability to cause damage, especially to the Israeli civilian home front, is declining dramatically.

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy's ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. It is achieved by continuing military operations in order to weaken the enemy's guerrilla warfare and terrorism capabilities until they either stop completely or are reduced to the scale of individual events. Grand victory in Gaza would mean a years' long process until the creation of fundamental change. A civilian authority would be established with an effective police force and the capacity for civil, economic and law enforcement governance. The population would implement a basic approach of coexistence with Israel. Yet such a process does not yet appear practical or feasible.

This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. But the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel.

WSJ: U.S. Pushes to Shape Israel’s Rafah Operation, Not Stop It

In two days of meetings between the Israeli defense chief and senior officials in the White House and Pentagon, discussions on Israel’s planned military operation in southern Gaza focused not on how to stop it, but on how to protect civilians during its rollout.

The businesslike tone of the talks was a departure from previous weeks, when top U.S. officials bluntly warned Israel against an all-out offensive on Rafah—where more than a million displaced Palestinians have taken refuge—while Israel’s prime minister defiantly vowed to press ahead.

Rafah has been at the center of a growing rift between Israeli and U.S. political leaders. Those tensions boiled over on Monday, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a visit to Washington by top aides to discuss U.S. concerns over the planned offensive on Rafah, where Hamas fighters are making a final stand. The tit-for-tat move was in response to the U.S. abstaining from a United Nations Security Council resolution that called for an immediate cease-fire while also demanding the release of hostages.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, however, proceeded with his meetings at the White House and Pentagon on Monday and Tuesday, which had been previously scheduled. Gallant is part of Israel’s three-member war cabinet that includes Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, the prime minister’s chief political rival.

While President Biden’s relationship with Netanyahu has frayed, the channel between U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gallant remains strong. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the two defense chiefs have met several times and talked by phone about 40 times.

In Gallant’s closed-door meetings in Washington, a more pragmatic conversation began to emerge in which the discussions were on conducting a phased operation to reduce the potential harm to civilians while still ensuring that Israel dismantles Hamas’s four battalions in Rafah.

“I think there is an understanding we have to dismantle Hamas,” Gallant said, following his White House meetings.

At a Tuesday meeting at the Pentagon, Austin pressed his Israeli counterpart to ensure that effective arrangements were in place to protect civilians before an Israeli military operation is mounted to attack the Hamas fighters there.

“There is a sequence,” a U.S. defense official said. “The military aspect of the operation should not proceed until the humanitarian aspects have been fully addressed.”

Both sides also agreed that the Hamas battalions in Rafah must be dislodged so that the militants cannot attempt a comeback or continue to smuggle weapons into the enclave, which are prerequisites for ending the war and paving the way for a new political authority in Gaza. And that means trying to find ways to work with Israel on its Rafah strategy, for lack of better options.

Washington Denies a Bedrock of Warfighting

The Biden administration recently pressed Ukraine to halt attacks on Russian oil refineries. Ukrainian strikes on refineries and tankers in the Black Sea have contributed to a rise in the global oil price, and specifically of oil products, especially diesel. Almost the last thing the Biden administration wants in an election year is higher fuel prices and associated inflation in other goods and services. But in acting to halt rising oil prices, Washington is undermining the Ukrainian war effort. Denying energy supplies to the adversary in war has long been a bedrock of military strategy. Washington’s policy toward adversary fuel supplies is likely to lengthen the Ukraine-Russia war, as well as the Gaza war.

With oil and fuel product prices rising, Washington has now slammed the brakes on Ukraine’s effective strategies, effectively constraining Ukraine at a time that the war with Russia is likely to escalate soon. This is not the first time the administration has blocked an ally’s effort to choke off its enemy’s energy supplies. In the war in Gaza, the U.S. has demanded that Israel not only desist from disrupting such supplies but actually provide energy to Hamas. As a result, Hamas has been able to sustain tunnel warfare, which depends on liquid fuels. The provision of fuel to Hamas fighters enabled them to continue waging war from underground, prolonging the conflict and thereby endangering the lives of even more civilians in both Gaza and Israel.

In both cases Washington has imposed conditions on its allies that fly in the face of one of the cardinal principles of military strategy: disrupt an enemy’s energy supplies to cripple its forces. Allowing adversaries access to fuel extends a conflict and leads to more deaths as well as delays the conclusion of hostilities. Washington needs to let Ukraine and Israel finish the job, or indeed stop the wars. But hamstringing American partners is the worse option, since it extends the wars.

Bernard-Henri Levy: What If the U.S. Helps Hamas Win?

Let's imagine that Israel yields to the pressure, refrains from entering Rafah to finish off Hamas' four surviving battalions, and agrees to the general cease-fire of indeterminate duration that the U.S. administration seems to push. If that came to pass, Hamas would declare victory - on the verge of defeat, then the next minute revived. These criminals against humanity would emerge from their tunnels triumphant.

The Arab street would view Hamas terrorists as resistance fighters. In the West Bank, Hamas would quickly eclipse the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, whose image would pale next to the aura of martyrdom and endurance in which Hamas would cloak itself.

After that, none of the experts' extravagant plans for an international stabilization force, an interim Arab authority, or a technocratic government presiding over the reconstruction of Gaza would stand long against the return of this group of criminals adorned with the most heroic of virtues. Hamas would set the ideological and political agenda, and hope for peace harbored by moderates on both sides will be dead.

In December, the New York Times quoted an "expert:"

“Under international humanitarian law, the place where you evacuate people to must, by law have sufficient resources for their survival — medical facilities, food and water,” said James Elder, a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“That is absolutely not the case,” he said.

Other anti-Israel sites ran with his words, saying that Israel asking Gazans to evacuate is a "crime against humanity."

There is no such law mentioned in any IHL database I could find.

Perversely, it is Israel's adherence to international humanitarian law that is being called a violation of IHL.

The most relevant rule is IHL Rule 24: "Each party to the conflict must, to the extent feasible, remove civilian persons and objects under its control from the vicinity of military objectives." This is related to Rule 20: "Each party to the conflict must give effective advance warning of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit."

The entire point of the rule is to save civilian lives. Evacuations from the area where there is a military target isn't against humanitarian law - it is an obligation!

The alternatives are to bomb the civilians or to end a war anytime terrorists use civilians as human shields. Neither of those are international humanitarian law. Israelis doing exactly what is required under IHL, to the letter. That makes people like James Elder angry because they want IHL to be handcuffs on only one side.

Nothing in IHL says that a war must stop if the civilians cannot go to a place that has proper medical facilities and food ready for them. If that were the case, then Hamas can stop the war anytime it wants by ensuring that food and medical aid is only available right on top of their weapons caches and tunnels.

Which is exactly what Hamas tries to do!

UNICEF's seeming concern for international humanitarian law begins and ends with lying about Israeli obligations. But they are totally silent about Hamas. And many IHL rules are flaunted by Hamas every single day.

Rule 22: "The parties to the conflict must take all feasible precautions to protect the civilian population and civilian objects under their control against the effects of attacks."

Hamas does the opposite.

Rule 23: "Each party to the conflict must, to the extent feasible, avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas."

Hamas does the opposite.

Rule 96. "The taking of hostages is prohibited."

Hamas does the opposite.

Rule 97. "The use of human shields is prohibited."

Hamas does the opposite.

In all of James Elder's X timeline, he has not once condemned Hamas for any of these violations, all of which directly affect children. In fact, he has not mentioned Hamas at all. He waited until several days after October 7 to say anything, because that way he could "all lives matter" the child victims in Israel and call for a "ceasefire" to stop Israel from defending itself.

This is immorality masquerading as concern for civilians. It is an effectively pro-Hamas, pro-terror position by people who pretend to be on the side of human rights and morality.

Read every section of international humanitarian law, in the original, and not the fictional version that people like James Elder pretend to quote. Every single relevant section is being done scrupulously by Israel, and every single relevant section is being brazenly violated by Hamas.

How many NGOs and news media ever point that out?

(h/t Richard Landes)

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!

New Ramadan series depicts Theodor Herzl as Teddy Roosevelt (video)

Every Ramadan, Arab TV networks vie for viewers with many TV miniseries being shown. Not a few of them have antisemitic or anti-Israel themes.

This year, the most prominent one, which debuted last night, is called Meliha. It is about a family that fled Gaza during the second intifada to western Egypt and their journey to return to Gaza when Libya fell apart.

I don't know if the series directly discusses the current war, but its ads sure use the war to try to attract viewers.

The introduction to the series gives a short and very absurd summary of how Jews came to Palestine in the early 1900s. It is pretty much in line with standard Arab histories: a myth that Jews lived in peace with Muslims and Christians, and that Zionism was a European plot to get rid of their Jews as well as act as a colonial bulwark against Arab barbarians. Jews have no history in the land and no possible reason to move there. (The series appears to be available on Netflix in some Arab countries, so this might be why explicit antisemitism is muted and instead projected to only Europe.)

The videos accompanying this narration have little to do with the words spoken: World War II planes are superimposed on World War I narration, a clip of the Kotel after 1967 pretending to be what it looked like before 1900.

But the craziest and funniest part is the depictions of "Herzl." Every single photo of Theodor Herzl is in fact Teddy (Theodore) Roosevelt!

Here is the intro to the series, with the English subtitles.

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!

From a report by the UN Secretary General to the UN Security Council in 2022:

The conduct of hostilities in urban and other populated areas increased the risks of death and injury for civilians, particularly when fighting involved the use of explosive weapons. In 2021, 1,234 incidents involving the use of explosive weapons were recorded in populated areas in 21 States affected by conflict, resulting in 10,184 victims. Of these, 89 per cent were civilians, compared with 10 per cent in other [non-urban] areas.

This came from a British NGO called Action on Armed Violence. For other wars, it is probably accurate.

Unfortunately, their methodology in counting casualties in the current Gaza war weighs towards assuming all casualties are civilians.

They count 14,009 civilian deaths from explosives in Gaza between October 7 and March 20, but they admit that they are reporting nearly all of those deaths as civilian since terrorist deaths are rarely reported.

This figure refers to the number of reported civilians killed or injured by explosive weapon use in Gaza since 07 October 2023, gathered using incident-specific English language media reporting. ...Where a specific breakdown of civilians and combatants was not provided, casualties are reported as civilians with the caveat that combatants may be included in the toll.

Apparently they are basing their numbers on UN-OCHA daily reports where they repeat Ministry of Health reports of specific deadly airstrikes. Those are the only somewhat detailed English-language daily reports I am aware of. OCHA doesn' t investigate to see if there were military targets inside or underneath the houses that are bombed.

But the methodology appears to be sound in other wars, assuming credible English language reporting, which is reasonable given that overreporting civilian casualties has no military value as it does for Hamas, and where military casualties are not silenced as Hamas does.

Which means that if Israel's estimate of 13,000 terrorist killed is even remotely close to true, Israel is doing an unprecedented job of minimizing civilian deaths in urban warfare.

(h/t Irene)

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!

03/26 Links Pt2: UN Human Rights Council ‘promotes Jew-hatred, Hamas, atrocity denial’; Hostage Uriel Baruch murdered by Hamas

From Ian:

Lies of Hamas and antisemites bear fruit at UN

Like a house of cards, the artifice of lies built by Hamas and its supporters has begun to crumble.

A few weeks ago, statistician Abraham Wyner published a report in Tablet Magazine conclusively proving that Hamas is lying about the casualty figures in Gaza. The deaths reported by the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry rose in a ridiculously linear fashion on a day-by-day basis that is virtually impossible in a real war. In addition, given Hamas’s acknowledgment that at least 6,000 of its fighters have been killed, its claim that 70% of the casualties in Gaza have been women and children is impossible unless male civilians are being miraculously spared. The extent of this lie is apparent when the true casualty numbers for terrorists and combatants killed in Gaza are taken into account, over 13,000.

Yesterday, former Al Jazeera director Yasser Abu Hilala admitted that the accusations that IDF soldiers raped women during the recent operation at the al-Shifa Hospital were fabricated.

"It was revealed through Hamas investigations that the story of the rape of women in Shifa Hospital was fabricated," Hilala wrote, adding that "The woman who spoke about rape justified her exaggeration and incorrect talk by saying that the goal was to arouse the nation’s fervor and brotherhood!"

Anti-Israel forces have made up rape allegations against Israel whole-cloth in order to distract from and excuse the well-documented mass rapes committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and the reports that the hostages still held in Gaza face constant sexual assaults and abuse from their captors.

However, the same day that the rape allegations against Israel collapsed, the constant stream of lies against Israel bore fruit as the Biden Administration caved to the pressure from those who spread these lies and refused to use its veto power against a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire during the month of Ramadan.

This resolution is merely declarative and creates no legal obligations, but it will still make everything worse. Hamas will be further convinced that its strategy of intentionally causing the deaths of its own people and constantly lying to inflate the number of civilian deaths is working and should continue, and it will be encouraged to dig in its heels and refuse any deal to see the hostages released in exchange for a temporary ceasefire. It will be seen as further evidence of Israel’s wrongdoing by those around the world who support Hamas’s genocidal goals, giving a tailwind to the antisemites making life more dangerous for Jews everywhere.

Ironically, hours after this shameful betrayal at the UN, the American government stated that it knows the accusations of Israeli war crimes are lies. Addressing Israel’s compliance with an executive order signed by President Biden last month mandating that recipients of US military aid demonstrate that they are complying with international law, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that “We have not found them (the Israelis) to be in violation, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or the provision of humanitarian assistance.”

Western Guilt

The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz,” runs a bizarre quip ascribed to the Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex. To deconstruct it, consult Dr. Freud. “A convenient way to dispatch guilt,” he might expound, “is to project it onto your victim” — like a schoolyard bully who huffs that the fight started when the other guy hit back.

Guilt-swapping is precisely what Hamas’s cheerleaders around the world did even before Israel struck back after October 7. Hamas had tortured, raped, and murdered 1,200 Israelis. Instead of condolences, Israel reaped a global orgy of antisemitism, be it masked or overt, that also engulfed Jews everywhere, especially university students (demonstrating that higher education is no antidote for frenzy). It was a perfect reversal of cause and effect.

To plumb the Freudian mechanism, go back to postwar Germany, whose Nazi precursor had committed the crime of all crimes. After total defeat and “reeducation,” antisemitism was out. Democracy established strong roots, and philosemitism became the creed of the land. The government paid billions in restitution to the survivors of the Holocaust and the young state of Israel. At Yad Vashem, German officials from the president down would bow their head to the 6 million dead. The arms trade flourished; German-made U-boats are now one leg of Israel’s nuclear triad.

Yet the moral burden stuck, and so Schuldabwehr — “repelling guilt” — crept into contrition and atonement. By the first intifada, in 1987, Germans were telling themselves: “Israel is doing to the Palestinians what we did to the Jews.” “They are conducting a Vernichtungskrieg” — Nazispeak for a war of annihilation. “Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto.” “Haven’t the Jews learned from the past?” Auschwitz, then, was a kind of reform school.

Freud might muse: “Such parallels betray projection. Culpability continued to chafe, and, eventually, Germans sought relief by shifting it onto the victims.” Steeped in the Torah, Freud would add: “Three thousand years before I set up my couch, the Jews invented the scapegoat in Leviticus who ‘shall bear all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.’” But he would explain: “Such displacement, as I call it, spelled vast moral progress — no more human sacrifice to appease the Gods.”

There is no such advance in our days as we run through the third iteration of Jew-hatred.

The first chapter was written by Christianity. Jews were charged with killing God’s son, desecrating the Host, and committing ritual murder. A bitter Jewish joke makes the point. When a little girl was killed just before Passover, the shtetl’s Jews cowered in the shul awaiting an imminent massacre. Suddenly, the rabbi barges in, jubilating, “I have wonderful news. The girl was not Christian, but Jewish.”

The second chapter was authored by Hitler, who went from faith to race, fingering Jews as cosmic enemies of Germany and the world. Once, Jews poisoned the wells; now it is the bloodstream of the Aryans. They had to be quashed like super-deadly bugs.

Chapter 3 unfolds as we speak. “From the river to the sea,” a classic Palestinian refrain, sounds like a geographic reference, but its thrust is ethnic cleansing and extinction. Chanting this mantra, the crowds on Western campuses and squares haven’t read the 1988 charter of its leading exponent, Hamas, which in the name of Allah orders Muslims to kill Jews wherever they hide. Nor do the infuriated know the venom continually oozing from the language of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Tehran. “Israel remains a foreign body,” thundered Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah years ago, as if cribbing from Mein Kampf. Before the International Criminal Court, Israel stands accused of Nazi-like “genocide.” Hamas official Ghazi Hamad: “We must remove that country, because it constitutes a . . . catastrophe for the Arab and Islamic nation.” As for the October 7 massacre, we will do it “again and again.” And “everything is justified.”

Far Right and Far Left Converge — Against the Jews

An extremist distributes a flier about “Zionists infiltrating the media.” A political activist tweets, “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.” A pundit writes about “the dirty tactics of Zionist censorship.”

Can you tell which of these haters is coming from the political right, and which from the political left? The world of antisemitism has become so muddled that it’s almost impossible to tell one from the other.

Consider: One of these three haters was recently arrested for painting the slogan “White Power” on synagogues. One co-chaired the Women’s March on Washington. One is a former New York Times correspondent and speechwriter for Ralph Nader. Can you tell which one is which?

One of the three is a Presbyterian minister. One is a devout Muslim. One owns a Ku Klux Klan robe. Still can’t tell who’s who?

Although these three bigots come from very different places on the political and religious spectrums, they have managed to find something in common: hatred of Jews, thinly disguised as hatred of “Zionists.”

Among the most troubling phenomena of our time is the extent to which antisemitism has become interchangeable among individuals who hold starkly differing views on other issues, from abortion to immigration to civil rights. Yet they all hate Jews.

There is no simple explanation for this because there is no simple explanation for antisemitism. Some bigots hate Jews for religious reasons, some for political reasons. Some focus their ire on Jewish philanthropists, some focus on Jews in the media, some focus on the Jewish state.

And sometimes they focus their hate on each other. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both violently persecuted their Jewish citizens, even as the two regimes went back and forth between being enemies and being allies. The Germans oppressed Jews and Judaism in the name of Aryan racial purity, the Soviets oppressed them in the name of working-class solidarity. Even when Hitler and Stalin hated each other, they never stopped hating Jews.

Leafing through the American Communist press in the 1930s is a ride on an intellectual roller-coaster. U.S. Communists dutifully followed the Soviet line, regularly and passionately denouncing Nazi Germany—until the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazis in August 1939, at which point the American far left suddenly declared that the British, the French, and “the capitalist press” were the real enemy, to cite an editorial which appeared in that month’s issue of Young Communist Review. Two years later, Hitler tore up the pact and America’s Communists returned to being anti-Nazi. All the while, Jews and Judaism remained in the crosshairs of both Marxism and Nazism.