This image blurs out the face of the victim. I am posting it to prove my point about a culture that would produce such an image. |
Sunday, February 12, 2023
- Sunday, February 12, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
- 2023 terror, Alter Shlomo Lederman, Arab antisemitism, celebrating terror, glorifying terror, jew hatred, kill jews, Mansaf, Muslim antisemitism, silence is complicity, supporting terror, terror victims
Saturday, February 11, 2023
- Saturday, February 11, 2023
- Ian
- 2023 terror, Linkdump
Jerusalem attack: 8-year-old dies day after brother killed, father in serious condition
Two children and a young man were killed and four others were injured in a terrorist ramming attack near the Ramot neighborhood of Jerusalem on Friday afternoon.Caroline Glick: It’s not about democracy
The terrorist, identified as Hossein Karaka, a 31-year-old resident of the Isawiya neighborhood of east Jerusalem, rammed into a bus stop at the entrance to the Ramot neighborhood.
An off-duty police officer and other officers who arrived at the scene quickly after the attack shot the terrorist.
A Facebook account reportedly belonging to the terrorist featured a series of posts in recent months glorifying Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorists, including a post calling the terrorist who conducted a shooting attack at the Shuafat checkpoint last year a "hero."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided shortly after the attack to seal and demolish Karaka's home, expressing his condolences to the families of the victims.
"I conducted a security situation assessment and ordered security forces reinforced, arrests made and to act immediately to seal the terrorist's house and demolish it. Our answer to terrorism is to strike it with all our might and deepen our grip on our country even more."
What’s happening in Israel is not what it seems. The left, in all its component parts, is not fighting against an effort by the government and the Knesset to destroy Israel’s democracy.
We know this for three reasons.
First, the leaders of the fight against judicial reform, who claim that if Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s judicial reform package now making its way through the legislative process in the Knesset passes, Israeli democracy will die, know that this isn’t true.
In a past address to the Kohelet Forum, opposition leader Yair Lapid set out a position on judicial activism completely aligned with Levin’s package. Indeed, Lapid’s remarks laid the foundations of the current reform.
In that speech, Lapid said, “I have opposed, and I still oppose, judicial activism of the sort introduced by [former Supreme Court President and the father of Israel’s judicial revolution] Justice Aharon Barak. I don’t think it is right that everything is justiciable. I don’t think it is right for the Supreme Court to change fundamental things in accordance with what it refers to as the judgment of ‘the reasonable person.’ That’s an amorphous and completely subjective definition that the Knesset never introduced to the legal code. It’s not right in my mind that the separation of powers, the sacrosanct foundation of the democratic method, should be breached by one branch of government placing itself above the others.”
Lapid is not alone. Nearly every prominent member of the opposition has made similar statements over the past several years. One of the most incendiary leaders of the protests against judicial reform is former defense minister and IDF chief of General Staff Moshe Ya’alon. Having lost his bid for reelection to the Knesset, Ya’alon restyled himself as a vigilante protest leader. At a press conference this week Ya’alon said the legal reform package will transform Israel “from a democracy into a dictatorship.” He called the Netanyahu government “criminal and illegal.”
Ya’alon called for a general strike and declared that “the thought of the State of Israel as a fascist, racist, messianic and corrupt state” is keeping people up at night.
But in a speech in 2009, when he first entered politics, Ya’alon sang a different tune. Back then Ya’alon railed against the very forces he now claims to represent. “The media here is biased,” he began.
Friday, February 10, 2023
Melanie Phillips: How Britain has failed to prevent Islamist extremism and to protect Jews
While events in Israel continue to attract disproportionate and distorted global attention, Islamic extremism remains a threat inside Western society. It’s accompanied by the parallel failure of the West even to face up honestly to the true nature of this problem, let alone deal with it adequately.Melanie Phillips: Westminster Holocaust memorial is a tragic betrayal of the dead
This week, a review was published in Britain of the government’s anti-extremism program, Prevent. This was set up in the wake of the 2007 Islamist terrorist atrocity in London, when more than 50 people were murdered and hundreds more injured in a series of four bomb attacks.
While the Prevent program itself is obviously particular to Britain, the findings of the independent review, commissioned by the Home Office and headed by the writer William Shawcross, should also strike discomfiting chords in America and among Jewish Diaspora communities in the West.
The message it hammers home is that the government has failed to protect the country in general, and the Jewish community in particular, from Islamism, or Islamic extremism and supremacism.
Shawcross found that Islamist ideology had been “misinterpreted, misunderstood or even overlooked” by officials through a combination of ignorance and terror of being damned as “Islamophobic.”
This failure had produced the perverse result that some organizations in receipt of government funding to fight extremism had actually been promoting antisemitism. Even more astonishingly, the founding chairman of the Muslim police officers’ association, who had worked with government departments on counter-terrorism, shared content which called for the destruction of Israel and described Jews as “filth.”
The program’s officials also applied a troubling double standard. While 80% of counter-terrorism dealt with Islamism and a mere 10% with extreme right-wing threats, only 22% of cases referred to in Prevent involved Islamist extremism.
The officials chose to focus instead on what they decided was far-right extremism. However, they defined this so broadly that it included center-right or “mildly controversial” discourse unrelated to terrorism or radicalisation.
At the same time, they narrowed their definition of Islamist extremism so that they failed to recognize the all-important continuum between non-violent Islamist narratives and terrorist networks.
It’s groundhog day all over again for the long-planned Holocaust memorial and learning centre in Westminster’s Victoria Tower Gardens.We need a better definition of antisemitism
This huge, Brutalist construction would destroy a quiet green oasis valued by local residents. Last July, the Court of Appeal upheld a ruling that the structure was prohibited by a 1900 Act of Parliament, passed to protect the park from such developments.
Yet now the government — which previously overrode Westminster council’s objections — has declared it will legislate to cancel out that 1900 law.
It will thus ride roughshod over a historic legal protection for the local community. Is this really a desirable context for a project supposedly devoted to memory and law as a defence against oppressive and arbitrary power?
There are more fundamental objections to the memorial’s supposed message.
Although the Nazis murdered many types of people in the Holocaust, their principal driver was the intention to wipe the Jews alone off the face of the Earth. Yet much Holocaust memorialising denies the unique characteristics of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jews.
A graphic example was provided by the UK Online Commemoration for Holocaust Memorial Day last month. Its 23 sections referred to “genocides” in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and Darfur, to “the Nazi persecution of gay people” and to “people being persecuted simply because they were Ordinary People who belonged to a particular group”.
But there was no mention of the genocide of the Jews other than two fleeting references in personal messages from Michael Gove and Sir Keir Starmer. The chief executive and chair of trustees of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust didn’t mention it, urging reflection instead on “the Holocaust, the Nazi persecution of other groups and more recent genocides”.
To my mind, there are four main ways that the IHRA definition, which suffers from being poorly written and imprecise in key places, could be improved. To begin with, there’s the opening sentence: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” This is far too vague and quite confusing for the uninitiated, particularly when the primary audience is studying the definition for its practical usage. More accurate and efficient would be a declarative formulation, for example: “Antisemitism is the negative, hostile or hateful perception of the Jewish people as a collective, expressed through a range of rhetorical, violent and discriminatory measures targeting Jews, or those perceived to be Jews, as well as their property and their communal institutions.”
Then there’s the proverbial elephant in the room: the complete absence of the word “Zionism” from the definition. This omission undermines the contention that contemporary anti-Zionism is a specific form of antisemitism that shares many of the same fixations over Jewish wealth and influence as do its other forms. It also dilutes the historic centrality of the Zionist movement over the last century as a focus for Jewish identity and as an instrument for the rejuvenation of the Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. Hence, the sentence in the definition that identifies as antisemitic “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” might be rewritten to say, “Depicting Zionism, the Jewish national movement, as inherently racist and the State of Israel as an illegitimate entity.”
An additional sentence on anti-Judaism needs to be added, perhaps by acknowledging as antisemitic those efforts to prevent, in my suggested wording, “Jewish communities from observing their most sacred religious practices, such as consuming kosher food and circumcising male infants at the age of eight days, through legislative or other measures.”
Finally, the trend in many countries in eastern and western Europe to appropriate the Jewish victims of the Holocaust—as part of a wider attempt to stress the sufferings of non-Jews under Nazi occupation—should also become part of the definition’s purview. To preserve the historical integrity of the Holocaust, a new clause in the definition might read, “Out of all the victim groups persecuted by the Nazi regime, Jews were held up as the ultimate enemy of humanity, in whose destruction the collusion of non-Jewish populations under Nazi occupation was often encouraged and in many cases received.”
These small but important fixes would make the IHRA definition a much more comprehensive and persuasive text. The counter-argument that the definition is already in its final version, and that amending it would be overly cumbersome, given the number of parties that have already signed up to it, will merely allow the antisemites to stay one step ahead of those whose job it is to combat them.
I’m also acutely aware that the IHRA definition has been attacked by those who resent its identification of antisemitism with anti-Zionism, and I can understand how such a hostile environment might create anxieties about amending the definition among its supporters. Again, though, I don’t find that argument very convincing. If anything, attempts to create an alternative to the definition like the so-called “Jerusalem Declaration” should animate our own intellectual efforts in its defense, to the point that we are willing to make revisions to it when warranted. Otherwise, history will run away from us.
- Friday, February 10, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
- conspiracy theories, Greater Israel, Jordan, little Satan, PalArab lies, Rai al-Youm, Salim Al-Batayneh, Transjordan, Yasser Arafat
Salim Al-Batayneh, a former member of Jordan's parliament and a critic of the government, wrote an op-ed saying that Israel plans to expand to take over Jordan.
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! |
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- Friday, February 10, 2023
- Ian
- 2023 terror, Linkdump
Two killed in Jerusalem terror ramming, including 6-year-old boy; driver shot dead
A six-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were killed and at least five others were wounded in a car-ramming terror attack near East Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood, police and medics said Friday. One of those wounded was a child in critical condition, the brother of the slain six-year-old.
Graphic footage from the scene showed several people strewn on the ground after a blue Mazda vehicle crashed into a bus stop near the Nebi Samuel site, between Jerusalem and the Palestinian city of Ramallah.
Several bystanders were seen aiming firearms at the car. Police said the driver was shot dead by an officer who was at the scene.
The attacker was identified as Hussein Qaraqa, an Israeli citizen and resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya. A senior Israeli official said the attacker appears to have been mentally ill, and was released from a psychiatric hospital in northern Israel only days ago.
Police designated the incident as a terror attack, and officers were seen operating in Issawiya shortly after.
The Magen David Adom ambulance service said the boy, 6, was pronounced dead at the scene. He was named as Yaakov Yisrael Fali. Fali was quickly buried Friday afternoon before the start of Shabbat, in accordance with Jewish law.
The second victim was identified as Alter Shlomo Lederman, a 20-year-old yeshiva student who had gotten married two months ago. He and his wife had been on their way to his parents’ home for Shabbat. Lederman was rushed to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in critical condition, where he succumbed to his wounds.
First victim from today’s #Jerusalem car ramming identified as Alter Shlomo Lederman. He was 20-year-old yeshiva student who had gotten married only 2 months ago. He and his wife had been on their way to his parents’ home for Shabbat. Baruch Dayan Emet. pic.twitter.com/wF2m3H8rRu
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) February 10, 2023
Breaking news from Israel’s capital where a terrorist just rammed a car into a busy bus stop killing 2, including a six year old child, and injuring more.
— Brooke Goldstein (@GoldsteinBrooke) February 10, 2023
Absolutely heartbreaking pic.twitter.com/4jNZXLJmMX
- Friday, February 10, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
- #PayForSlay, 2023 terror, Alter Shlomo Lederman, car ramming, glorifying terror, HRW, Hussein Qaraqa, Issawiya, media silence, NGO silence, pay for slay, PFLP, Ramot, Yaakov Yisrael Fali
A six-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were killed and at least five others were wounded in a car-ramming terror attack near East Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood, police and medics said Friday. One of those wounded was a child in critical condition.Graphic footage from the scene showed several people strewn on the ground after a blue Mazda vehicle crashed into a bus stop near the Nebi Samuel site, between Jerusalem and the Palestinian city of Ramallah.The attacker was identified as Hussein Qaraqa, an Israeli citizen and resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya.
The six year old victim was named as Yaakov Yisrael Fali.
The second victim was identified as Alter Shlomo Lederman, a 20-year-old yeshiva student who had gotten married two months ago. He and his wife had been on their way to his parents’ home for Shabbat. Lederman was rushed to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in critical condition, where he succumbed to his wounds.
- Friday, February 10, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
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! |
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- Friday, February 10, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
Thursday, February 09, 2023
Howard Jacobson: Jews in their own words… so long as they don’t say ‘Israel’
In the stage play and the television documentary, Freedland and Baddiel allowed themselves to be distracted by the question of whether or not an English Jew bears responsibility for Israel’s heinous misdeeds.Hezekiah’s Mistake
There’s a right and a wrong way of answering that. “We are not our brother’s keeper” is the wrong way. “He is not even our brother” is worse still. Insist your innocence of someone else’s heinous misdeeds and all you do is concede the heinousness.
To deny affinity with Israel is to deny affinity with Jewish history. The marauding, child-murdering colonialists of anti-Zionist propaganda (see Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children) are the same hated Jews of 2,000 years ago: separatists, thieves and blood-suckers, long before there was an Israeli soldier patrolling the West Bank.
The same calumnies and caricatures proliferate, only this time the Z-word stands in for the J-word.
Whoever would engage with the double-think of antisemitism today cannot be indifferent to the creeping menace of this shape-shifting. Israel is where antisemitism has migrated. But heigh-ho, “Israel-Shmisrael”. Israeli Jews don’t count.
One cannot accuse Jonathan Freedland of indifference to Israel. For years now, his Guardian column has extolled the country’s achievements while scrupulously criticising “the occupation”.
But is his scrupulousness — as, for example, in the matter of just what words Jews. In Their Own Words speak — too one-sided? Does it lack the tragic dimension of Amos Oz’s vision of Israel’s relations with Palestinians as a catastrophic collision of two rights (latterly two wrongs), and does it leave too much of the old calumny standing?
For all their differences — Freedland the formidably acute and considered thinker, Baddiel the no less formidable polemicist — their views on Israel converge in the old discomfort. Israel just won’t give them the Jew they want.
Israel’s disobligingness, when it comes to the feelings of the diaspora Jew, is long-standing. We have all lost friends to Zionism. But to take the fight to antisemitism means confronting it where it thinks it has the strongest case. There’s no point running a good race only to fall in sight of the finishing line.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and the relevance of ancient lessons of statecraft in the Levant, whether drawn from the Bible or from Assyrian and Babylonian annals, yet remains constant. To be sure, Israel today is no longer the weak biblical statelet it once was. While structural vulnerabilities of size and geography remain, Israel today is a middle power, a technological leader that fields an advanced military with powerful capabilities. It has defeated every attempt made by hostile neighbors to inflict defeat and destruction upon it. More to the point, Israel chose wisely in the contest of great powers during the Cold War, and has helped amplify and project U.S. power, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean.
Yet despite the enduring strength of the U.S. as a global superpower and local patron, Israel’s strategic environment has changed in critical ways over the last decade. And save for a brief interregnum, which coincided with the first two years of the Biden administration, Benjamin Netanyahu has been at the helm, navigating Israel through this new terrain.
During this decade, Israel saw some long-standing threats sharpen, namely the threat from Iran, and security challenges on Israel’s borders become more acute. Israel’s strategic environment changed radically with the return of the Russian military to the region, ensconced in the same theater of operations as Iran on Israel’s northern border. While Russia is a shadow of its Cold War self, it is still a formidable nuclear power. But Russia, in itself, has not been Netanyahu’s toughest challenge. The Israeli leader’s biggest problem, rather, has been in managing relations with his superpower patron.
The prevailing Democratic Party narrative tells a different story, of course. That narrative holds that Netanyahu committed a cardinal sin—a variant of King Hezekiah’s offense—by leading a rebellion against his American suzerain. In the Democrats’ telling, Netanyahu came to Congress at the invitation of the Republican Party and colluded with them to challenge a sitting Democratic president. In so doing, he factionalized Israel’s position in the U.S., turning it into a “political football,” or a Republican equity.
The problem with this version is that, unlike Hezekiah, Netanyahu didn’t pick a fight with the empire. The empire picked a fight with him, and with the country he leads.
Barack Obama entered the White House with a clear vision for how he wanted to reposition the U.S. in the Middle East. He envisioned creating a “new equilibrium”—that is, rearranging the balance of power—in the region by realigning the U.S. away from the states that the American global power had traditionally included in its alliance system, and toward Iran. Such were Obama’s declared aims, in order to achieve a goal that he called “balance.” That is, to move the U.S. closer to an expansionist regional middle power that’s been in conflict with Israel, and whose explicit objective is the Jewish state’s destruction.
After decades of operating under a set of rules in a mutually beneficial arrangement with the global superpower, Israel woke up to find that the new emperor had changed his mind, and decided that he would now empower Israel’s enemy and partner with it in multiple theaters throughout the region. In fact, Russia’s return to the Levant, and the expansion of Iran’s entrenchment there, emerged not as a result of a confrontation with the U.S., but rather with its acquiescence and protection. It must be stressed that while the motives for these actions may be open to interpretation or debate, it is simply a fact that they happened. Realigning the U.S. away from Israel and toward Iran is what Obama decided to do, and he did it.
- Thursday, February 09, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
- coexistence, Gilligan's Island, Jewish geography, Jewish values, Natalie Schafer, popular culture, Sherwood Schwartz, television, Tina Louise
(I can't believe no one has done this before!)
MEMRI: Lebanese Writer: President Assad Destroyed Syria In The Civil War, Which Was A Greater Disaster Than The Palestinian Nakba, And Left Syria Unable To Deal With The Earthquake
In an article titled "Syria and the Ongoing Disaster" in the London-based Qatari daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, French-Lebanese academic and journalist Gilbert Achcar notes that the number of Syrian victims in the recent earthquake is especially large, and this is because Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad destroyed the country in the civil war that has been ongoing since 2012, leaving it unable to cope with a disaster like an earthquake. The Syrian civil war, he adds, was a greater disaster than the Palestinian Nakba, because the number of people who were killed in it and in the oppression that accompanied it is ten times greater. He notes further that the Syrian refugees living in parts of Turkey affected by the quake were packed into buildings constructed hastily and in violation of earthquake regulations, which contributed to the high death toll.ICJ sets deadline for submissions on Israel’s ‘occupation’ of biblical heartland
The following are translated excerpts from Achcar's article.[1]
"If what happened in Palestine before the founding of the state of Israel can be described as a nakba [catastrophe], then what happened in Syria, especially since the start of the civil war there in 2012, can [certainly] be called a calamity. It is one of the two largest calamities in contemporary Arab history, and it is much greater than the Palestinian Nakba, if you count the number of victims. The number of people killed by the war and the oppression in Syria in the last 11 years is about ten times greater than the number of Palestinians killed by Zionism since it first invaded Palestine. And the number of Syrians who have fled from the country and those who are displaced within its borders is equal to the number of Palestinians [now] living in their homeland and in the diaspora [combined]. The only calamity in our region similar in its magnitude to the Syrian one is the calamity that has been unfolding in Iraq since Saddam Hussein seized power there and embroiled [the country] in his stupid wars. This was followed by the American occupation, the arrival of ISIS and everything that happened later.
"We do not present these figures to downplay the Palestinian tragedy, which involves a homeland that was usurped, but in order to highlight the horrific magnitude of the Syrian tragedy. What makes this tragedy worse is that [Syria] is now subjected to five different occupations: the Zionist occupation of the Golan, which has been ongoing since 1967, and the Iranian, Turkish, Russian and American occupations, which began in the recent decade and still continue. And now disaster has once again befallen the Syrian people, since the epicenter of the biggest earthquake to strike Turkey since 1939 was in the city of Gaziantep, which is more or less the capital of the Syrian refugees in Turkey. Moreover, the first quake that struck the region in the small hours of Monday morning [February 6, 2023] also affected a large part of northwest Syria, with Aleppo at its center and Idlib to the west of it.
"Obviously is was Turkey itself, and the Turks and Kurds who live in the area where the quake occurred, that were most affected by it. But the Syrian areas are much weaker in the face of the disaster than the Turkish ones, since some of them are [under the control] of a state that is much better at killing and destroying than at helping to clear the rubble, while others are not [controlled by] any state at all and are even outside the operation zone of most international aid organizations. Furthermore, the Syrian refugees living in southwest Turkey were crowded into many ramshackle buildings which collapsed in a horrific manner, since –due to greed [of contractors] wishing to increase their profits – they were built in violation of the regulations [for construction] in earthquake-prone areas. This means that the number of Syrians earthquake victims, which will surely reach tens of thousands, will be disproportionately high, compared to their share of the population.
The International Court of Justice announced on Wednesday a July 25 deadline for state bodies and organizations to submit documents pertaining to Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria.Why does the US ignore Hamas? - opinion
The U.N. General Assembly in late December approved a resolution, at the behest of the Palestinian Authority, calling on the ICJ to “render urgently an advisory opinion” on what it called Israel’s “prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of Palestinian territory.”
The ICJ said in a statement that it has set “July 25, 2023, as the time list within which written statements on the questions may be presented to the court and October 25, 2023, as the time limit within which states and organizations, having presented written statements, may submit written comments on the written statements made by either states or organizations.”
The ICJ confirmed in late January that it had received the U.N.’s formal request to weigh in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, without indicating that it was launching a probe.
In response to the U.N. resolution, the Israeli Security Cabinet decided, among other measures, to withhold taxes and tariffs collected on behalf of the P.A., in an amount equal to that which Ramallah paid to terrorists and their families in 2022 under its “pay-for-slay” policy.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has since signed an order doubling that amount.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the U.N. move as “disgraceful.”
“Just like the hundreds of distorted U.N. General Assembly resolutions against Israel over the years, this disgraceful resolution will not obligate the government of Israel. The Jewish people is not occupying its land and is not occupying its eternal capital Jerusalem. No U.N. resolution can distort this historical truth,” he said.
MUCH, PERHAPS the major part, of Palestinian opinion shares the view that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land. The Hamas and PLO charters and the Fatah constitution are at one on the ultimate objective of removing Israel and gaining control of the whole of what was Mandatory Palestine, and indeed on the need to take up arms in support of it. It is in the tactics to achieve their common aim that the two main Palestinian parties diverge.
Hamas believes that the only effective way to achieve the desired outcome is through continual conflict and terror. Any pause in the battle must be temporary and provide a tactical advantage. The Fatah-dominated PA, however, continues to follow the tactical path set by Yasser Arafat.
At the Oslo Accords peace discussions in 1993 and 1995, Arafat – on the record as rock solid in his determination to overthrow Israel eventually – decided to woo world opinion by overtly supporting the two-state solution. Paying lip service to a two-state solution would be an exercise in public relations, a stepping-stone to the real objective.
Hamas will have none of it and the disagreement is so basic that it has ensured that Hamas and Fatah have remained at each other’s throats for decades. All attempts at reconciliation have proved fruitless.
Following Arafat’s death, the PA and its new leader Mahmoud Abbas made a determined effort to convince world opinion that it supported the idea of establishing a sovereign Palestine within the boundaries that existed before the Six Day War in 1967 – that is, in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. But pressing for a Palestinian state within those boundaries inevitably meant acknowledging that a sovereign Israel would exist outside them.
This is the pill that Hamas and like-minded rejectionists find impossible to swallow, even though the failure of the PA to sign up to any of the increasingly generous deals subsequently tabled demonstrated what a sham the ploy was.
None of this is secret, so how is it that the US administration, together with a vast swath of world opinion, knowing that at least half of the Palestinian people would never subscribe to a two-state solution, continue to advocate for it? Indeed the Palestinian leadership is perfectly well aware that anyone signing such a deal, endorsing Israel’s right to exist on “their” land, would be denounced as a traitor to the Palestinian cause and would certainly be putting his life in jeopardy.
It is also odd that so little thought has been given to what sort of two-state solution could ever be signed in current circumstances. Since Hamas would never participate or be a signatory, Gaza would be excluded from the arrangement. What sort of sovereign Palestine would it be, shorn of nearly half the Palestinian population?
In short, world opinion has never faced up to the uncomfortable truth that in order to achieve a genuine two-state solution, the Hamas organization must first be disempowered. That is clearly not a task that Washington is minded to undertake.
- Thursday, February 09, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
- antisemitism, Can't have nice things, Dan Easterman, David Mivasair, earthquake, Good news, IsraAID, Jewish antisemite, Palestinian propaganda, Turkey, Turkiye
- Thursday, February 09, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
- by any means necessary, Islamic values, Jewish values, justifying terror, opinion poll, Palestinian values, PCPSR, supporting terror, victimhood
- Thursday, February 09, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
- anti-Israel, Armerican Bar Association, dhimmitude, EoZ Antisemitism, HRW, IHRA, Natan Sharansky, National Lawyers Guild, NGO lies, Woke Antisemitism
Wednesday, February 08, 2023
NGO Monitor: HRW and Antisemitism: Sins of Commission and Omission
SummaryEight Ways of Looking at Israel
In 2003, Human Rights Watch (HRW) committed to “bring problems of anti-Semitism into the overall human rights discourse.” However, for the past 20 years, HRW has taken the opposite direction by failing to contribute meaningfully to ending hatred of and attacks against Jewish people. Indeed, as shown in a systematic review of HRW’s output since 2003, HRW has consistently opposed and obstructed meaningful initiatives to combat antisemitism. In fact, the most significant item on this issue was HRW’s 2023 letter to the American Bar Association, calling for the rejection of a resolution on antisemitism that endorsed the international-consensus IHRA Working Definition. And as this brief report demonstrates, HRW officials – including long-time leader Ken Roth – have made numerous antisemitic comments and shared antisemitic content on social media.
HRW policy of obstruction has come during a period of marked increase in antisemitic attacks around the world – and especially in the United States – reflecting HRW’s total lack of credibility. The 2003 commitment is exposed as empty words.
Ignoring antisemitic crimes
NGO Monitor reviewed HRW publications from 2003-2022. During that time, we identified only 12 cursory instances where HRW discussed antisemitism and antisemitic events per se, without joining them with other issues such as Islamophobia and other forms of racism. This total excludes passing mentions of antisemitic incidents; HRW statements and activities opposing the IHRA working definition and similar responses to antisemitic activity and speech (almost always without suggesting meaningful concrete alternatives); and HRW denying that antisemitic activity and speech is, in fact, antisemitic.
‘And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel‘ by Rick Richman will be available on Feb 12, 2023.Boycotts: A First Amendment History
Israel, like the Jewish people, is both incredibly complex and simple. Everyone thinks that they know the story, but no one really does. The complexity and simplicity of a story that happened in the lifetime of many still living today is what obligates Rick Richman to break down the story of the rebirth of a biblical nation into eight smaller stories of key figures in that drama.
In the parable of the elephant, a group of blind men grope around the beast. Each finds a body part that seems to resemble something else, a snake, a wall, a rope. But this metaphor is true of Israel which represents a unity and also many things that are complex in and of themselves.
Eight ways of looking at Israel is at once too many and too few, but Rick Richman’s book delivers a satisfying survey of a few human beings who account for the complexity and conflicts of advocating for a Jewish State.
And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel is made up of both contrasting and complementary portraits. History introduces a sense of distance from the urgent conflicts that go into the founding of any nation. The Founding Fathers have receded into a single unity although at times some were willing to fight each other to the death. Not enough history has passed that the figures in this book, Weizmann and Jabotinsky, Golda Meir and Ben Hecht, can sit comfortably together. Richman, a lifelong pro-Israel activist and journalist, begins with Herzl and concludes with Ron Dermer who served as ambassador under Netanyahu.
But what Richman is after isn’t a founding story so much as it’s a story of what people found in the cause. There are plenty of stories of what individuals did for Israel, And None Shall Make Them Afraid is in many ways more the story of how advocating for a Jewish State changed the lives of some disparate figures: a couple of journalists from different countries, Ben Hecht, a Hollywood screenwriter, Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president and a biochemist, Golda Meir, a Milwaukee librarian and Ron Dermer, a kid from Miami studying philosophy.
Richman wanted to tell the story of the interconnection between “Zionism and Americanism from 1895 to the present” in his collection of essays and of the eight central figures in its narrative, four are Americans, one a Brit and still another spent a good deal of time in the UK. “I believe in England,” he quotes Jabotinsky as saying, “just as I believed in England twenty years ago.”
Abstract
Over the past decade, more than half of U.S. states have enacted laws that prohibit recipients of public contracts and state investment from boycotting the State of Israel. These so-called “anti-BDS laws” have triggered a debate over whether the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause includes a “right to boycott.” This Essay is the first to take up that question thoroughly from a historical standpoint. Examining the boycott’s constitutional status from before the Founding to the present era, we find that state actors have consistently treated the boycott as economic conduct subject to governmental control, and not as expression presumptively immune from state interference. Before the Founding, the colonists mandated a strict boycott of Britain, which local governmental bodies enforced through trial proceedings and economic punishments. At common law, courts used the doctrine of conspiracy to enjoin “unjustified” boycotts and hold liable their perpetrators. And in the modern era, state and federal officials have consistently compelled participation in the boycotts they approved (like those of apartheid-era South Africa and modern-day Russia), while prohibiting participation in the ones they opposed (like that of Israel).
The Essay concludes that modern anti-boycott laws not only fit within, but improve upon, this constitutional tradition. As the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware illustrates, the common law approach risks violating the First Amendment if the doctrine is applied to restrict not only the act of boycotting or refusing to deal, but also the expressive activities that accompany such politically-motivated refusals. Modern anti-boycott laws avoid that problem by surgically targeting the act of boycotting, while leaving regulated entities free to say whatever they please. From the standpoint of history, these laws reflect First Amendment progress, not decay.