Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, January 03, 2025

01/03 Links Pt1: The Weight Israel Carries; Hamas’s War on Gaza’s Electric Grid; UNRWA preparing to shutter Gaza, WB operations ahead of Israeli ban

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Weight Israel Carries

Israelis aren’t blind to the mental-health challenge posed not just by the war but by what started it: scenes of inhumanity reminiscent of the Nazis. In September, Israel’s health minister, Uriel Buso, warned that Israel was facing “the largest mental health event the state has known since its establishment. A crisis that requires us, as a state and a society, to change perceptions and upgrade the public mental health system.”

The following month, Buso introduced legislation designed to decentralize mental-health treatment. Though it went mostly unnoticed at the time (even in the Israeli press), Buso had hit on something important: Just as is the case with physical ailments, you don’t want the last resort to be the first intervention. The goal of primary-care medicine is to keep you out of hospitals and emergency rooms. That prevention can be even more difficult in the chaos of wartime and regarding mental health, the deterioration of which is not always noticeable to others.

Buso also sought to take advantage of Israel’s close-knit society. He got a boost to his department’s budget, and instead of keeping it all under his nose at the national level, he disbursed it throughout local community healthcare providers. Psychiatric institutions would merge with major hospitals to make treatment easier and, the Health Ministry’s director general seemed to suggest, reduce the stigma of seeking help.

All of which is yet another reminder that Oct. 7, 2023, caused a seismic change in Israel and the Jewish world. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks, Israel’s HMOs “reported record levels of requests by patients for sleeping pills, painkillers, and tranquilizers,” Tablet’s Hillel Kuttler reported. According to the IDF, of the 17 soldier suicides in 2023, seven of them—40 percent—happened in just the final three months of the year after the attacks.

Meanwhile Hamas continues to torment the country over the remaining hostages by refusing to let the parents of these captives even know whether their children are still alive. Missiles from as far away as Yemen continue to fall on Tel Aviv. Homes in the north have spent a year empty, as have communities in the Gaza envelope.

Israel continues to be the only Western country that truly acts like it has a stake in how this now-global conflict ends. A country of barely 10 million has been putting the rest on its shoulders. Yet still, Israelis somehow seem immune to the paralysis that most would inevitably succumb to. The CEO of Israel’s largest mental-health organization told the Times of Israel that she doesn’t want people to merely say “the country is in trauma. That doesn’t help us. It’s vital that we look at what we can do, how we can be proactive.”

Here’s hoping Israelis have less of a burden to carry in 2025, or, at the very least, that they get some help carrying it.

Seth Frantzman: Future of the Middle East: What does 2025 hold for Jordan and Egypt

Jordan and Egypt are both important states in the Middle East, and they have been Israel’s historic peace partners from the 1980s to 1990s.

This means that these two countries share certain qualities that are of great importance to Israel and the wider region.

Egypt, the most populous country in the area, is a historic center of military power and culture.

Jordan, by contrast, is less populated and is a relatively modern country straddling an expanse of desert between Israel, the Gulf, and Syria.

The Kingdom of Jordan enters 2025 with concerns about the outcome of the changes in Syria. Jordan had worked to reconcile with now-toppled president Bashar al-Assad’s regime over the last several years.

The kingdom has hosted hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. Many Syrians who fled southern Syria have clan or tribal ties in northern Jordan, so their appearance in Jordan did not change Jordan’s demographics.

However, this is a burden for Jordan, which is a relatively poor country compared to others in the Gulf. Jordan is a historic monarchy that grew out of the British Mandate era.

The monarchy has to balance the interests of former Bedouin tribes with the townspeople of northern Jordan and the Palestinians who fled to Jordan in 1948.

Amman views itself as having unique rights in Jerusalem, and even though it gave up its claims to the West Bank, it has a keen interest in the Palestinians. It has been concerned about the outcome of the October 7 massacre and how that might propel Hamas to power in the West Bank.

Jordan is also concerned about being used as a conduit for Iranian weapons smuggling via Iraq. The Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah group in Iraq attacked US forces in Jordan in January 2024, killing three Americans. The kingdom is aware that it is sandwiched between Iran’s interests in Iraq, Israel, the Palestinians, the Gulf, and Syria.

Thus, it knows it must balance all these nations that surround it. Jordan is likely concerned that the Syrian shift in power to a new government could lead to troubles at home.

What if Jordanians get the idea that they could have similar changes in Amman?

Seth Mandel: Hamas’s War on Gaza’s Electric Grid

The new Syrian administration run by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leaders of the successful rebellion and overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, is at least making a pretense of constructing a functioning government. What that government does, of course, is a separate conversation entirely. But simply as a case study of Islamist institution-building, one gets the impression that, unlike Hamas, HTS wants to be seen as giving a whit about the people who depend on them.

To take one example, from Aaron Zelin’s daily diary of the Syrian transition yesterday: “Syrian Minister of Electricity Omar al-Shuqruq: Six months of maintenance are required to fully restore the electricity network. Re-establishing electrical linkage with Jordan is one of the key solutions to securing power supply for Syria.”

Electricity has been one of the main challenges in Gaza, because Hamas refuses to do the one thing that would solve the problem almost overnight: stop its forever war against Israel. Now, it’s possible that HTS is planning to launch semiannual wars against Jordan and sabotage its own power supply, but I consider the possibility unlikely. That is, however, what Hamas does daily.

Here’s how the electricity in Gaza works. Israel provides 50 percent of the enclave’s power—and I do mean “provides.” Technically, Israel is selling electricity to Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority is supposed to pick up the tab. But they very often don’t, and certainly Hamas doesn’t pay, and every so often Israel threatens to cut off electricity for lack of payment—the debt is usually somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. But Israel always backs down or accepts low partial payments.

How much does Hamas value that electricity? Well, it is not uncommon for their own rockets to hit the power lines and cut off parts of the grid. Usually, Israel just fixes the lines when Hamas destroys them. (Israel is terrible at doing genocide.) But on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas knocked down more than half of their own power lines and Israel did not fix them; it had, if you remember, a few other priorities.

From the Justice Department:

A former resident of Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh on charges of attempting to support the foreign terrorist organization Hizballah and making false statements involving international terrorism to a department or agency of the United States, United States Attorney Eric G. Olshan announced today.

The three-count Indictment names Jack Danaher Molloy, 24, formerly of the Upper St. Clair suburb of Pittsburgh, as the sole defendant. ...

As alleged, Molloy—a dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, who previously served on active-duty status in the U.S. Army—traveled to Lebanon in August 2024 and attempted to join Hizballah. While in Lebanon, Molloy was told by multiple individuals that the time was not right, and that he needed to take other steps before he could join the terrorist organization. Molloy then traveled from Lebanon to Syria in October 2024 in an effort to fight for Hizballah in Syria. After returning to the United States, Molloy resided in Upper St. Clair, where he continued his attempts to join Hizballah, including through communication with individuals online and in Lebanon. During his time in the United States and abroad, Molloy also allegedly expressed his hatred toward, and promoted violence against, Jewish people. Molloy’s alleged animus toward Jews was also evidenced by multiple images and videos on his electronic devices and the usernames he chose for his social media and email accounts, including the username “KIKEKILLER313” on the social media platform X. In one alleged WhatsApp exchange with a family member, Molloy agreed that his “master plan was to join Hezbollah and kill Jews.” And while he was residing in Upper St. Clair, Molloy also allegedly visited a website detailing the possible incarceration location of Robert Bowers, who carried out the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooting during which he murdered 11 Jewish worshippers.

But I thought Hezbollah was only anti-Zionist, not antisemitic!

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Under Israel's new budget, the Foreign Ministry will receive $150 million - twenty times more than today - for public diplomacy.

Gil Hoffman of Honest Reporting writes an op-ed on how this money should be spent, and much of the advice is excellent.

Here is what I would like to see Israel spending some of this money on:

1. Making information available. Right now if I email a question for the IDF Spokesperson or COGAT or anyone else, it is rare that I get a response. Pro-Israel advocates must dig in to do our own research and take educated guesses as to what the Israeli government is doing instead of getting the proper answers from the right people. I understand that some information must remain classified but that should be the exception, not the rule, and reporting even that the information would compromise security is better than not getting a response at all.

2. Similarly, make more material available on websites in all languages. Make it easy to find. Invest in and improve existing projects like the Jewish Virtual Library. Create easy to search databases of important information like terror attacks, aid to Gaza, Palestinian antisemitism, and other important topics. Some of the material is already out there but often it gets moved or is hard to find. Hire a librarian to put this all together.

3. When an influencer (like, I guess, me) uncovers something new or novel that hadn't been publicized before, amplify it. The government cannot possibly reproduce what we bloggers and Tweeters and Tik-Tokers do, but it can make sure that a lot more people are exposed to it.

4. EDUCATION. Most Jewish students entering college are clueless about how to properly answer anti-Israel arguments. Learning about Israel's history is important, but that isn't enough - they have to know what the other side is saying and come equipped to counter them with facts. Invest heavily in Zionist material, and especially defending Israel material, to be available to Jewish schools, Talmud Torah schools, synagogue youth programs, summer camps. Not only that, but I get the impression that our community leaders (for example, Federations) are little more conversant in these topics as well, and they are the ones who get interviewed by the media when antisemitic incidents occur. Train them!

5. I humbly believe that my definition of antisemitism should be added to the IHRA definition to eliminate ambiguity in IHRA. It is an algorithm, a test that can and should be used to determine when criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism, and it also can help stop people over-using labeling things as antisemitic that are not, to avoid watering down the accusation. If Israel would adopt the definition and encourage others like IHRA to do so, it would help refine our messaging.

6. Universities are still the epicenter of doctrinal anti-Zionism with lots of bogus papers written to very poor standards. There need to be more Zionist scholars, Zionist academic papers, Zionist centers in universities that uphold the highest academic standards. Israel could fund chairs, train Israeli academics for stints in Western universities, and organize real debates on campus - the exact activity that the haters don't want to see.

(The image above was generated by AI; the Hebrew is nonsense.)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Here is 100% proof that the Gaza Ministry of Health lies to the media about Gaza deaths, and the @NYTimes believes their lies

An op-ed in the New York Times by Khaled Elgindy states, as fact, that the Gaza war "has killed more than 17,000 children." The statistic links to a recent article that quotes the Gaza health ministry as saying that "At least 17,492 of those killed were children."

As I have noted previously, the Palestinian Ministry of Health has been publishing two sets of numbers. One comes from a list that they say is of verified deaths (a combination of hospital records and self-reported forms people can fill out) and the other source is not described, although it tracks closely with the statistics issued by the Hamas media office.

The last time the ministry published an infographic breaking down the statistics from the verified list was on October 7 2024, where they said the total number of those killed at the time was 42,010 but the number of verified victims for which they had names and other information was 40,717. For months, the gap between those two figures had been in the range of 10,000 but over time, apparently, the names people added from the online form has gotten the two figures relatively close, a difference of only 3%.

Here's their infographic from October 7 showing the detailed breakdown of women, children and elderly from their database of victims.

But these aren't the numbers that the ministry is telling the media every day. Those numbers can be seen in the Ramallah-based Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Here are their numbers from October 9 via the Internet Archive:

Comparing the two sets of figures, we see that the PCBS numbers quoting the Ministry of Health show 1,192 more total victims compared to the MoH verified list.

But the difference of the number of children is 3,608; the difference of women killed is 4,271 between the two sets of statistics. In total, the number of deceased women and children is nearly 8,000 higher than those counted on the verified list when the total difference of deaths is less than 1,200.

This is obviously impossible.

The verified list includes names, genders, ages, and ID numbers. While its own methodology is suspect, it at least has some data backing it up. The other statistics with the inflated women and children numbers cannot possibly be reconciled with the verified list.

Since the same Ministry of Health publishes both sets of irreconcilable statistics, we can confidently call them liars.

The New York Times is getting its numbers from the inflated list, not the verified list. In fact, the Ministry of Health has not updated the verified list in the intervening three months while it updates the inflated list regularly, making it sound legitimate since it is seemingly up to date.

As mentioned, the source for the inflated numbers is never discussed. It cannot be from hospitals and it cannot be from the user online forms, since they publish those names, their ages and genders on the verified list.

The real source is that Hamas makes them up, and issues its own statistics nearly every day that have nothing to do with bodies found or names counted. The MoH doesn't want to contradict their bosses, so they repeat Hamas statistics as if they counted the numbers themselves.

The New York Times and other media (and the UN, and NGOs) are not getting their numbers from the Ministry of Health counts of victims but from Hamas propagandists in the Gaza Media Office being laundered through the MoH.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The most antisemitic incidents of 2024 in Turkey as voted by Turkish Jews

Alvaremoz, a Turkish Jewish newspaper, asked Jews in Turkey to vote for what they considered the most antisemitic incidents of the year 2024 in that country.

Here are the top results:

7. The Yeni Safak newspaper published the blood libel, asking if Jews will be murdering gentile children to drink their blood in America, too.

6. Abdurrahman Uzun, who has 1.2 million followers on social media, also told his audience that Jews "rape, kill and steal the organs of children" and that synagogues in Turkey are a threat.

5. Turkiye Gazete published that 4,000 Turkish Jews are engaged in "genocide" in Gaza, inciting Turkish Muslims against Jews.

4. A BDS group in Turkey, Boykotdedektifi called to boycott a Jewish service organization because it said it would hold a ceremony in memory of the Holocaust.

3. The doors of the Sinyora and Algazi Synagogues in Izmir were defaced with red paint and the number "5.60," on October 7, referring to verse 5:60 in the Quran which says disobedient Jews were turned into apes and pigs.

2. Sweets were distributed in Istanbul encouraging prayers for the Adolf Hitler's soul on the anniversary of his death.

1. A father made a video showing him teaching his young son to murder Jews.

@basyazar Küçücük çocuğa Türkiye'deki Musevileri, Yahudileri öldürmeyi öğreten #firatismailyeleritutuklansın pic.twitter.com/S9y6yiOVvg
— Platoon (@Platoon0011) June 21, 2024

Incidents like these are spreading from Turkey to Muslims in Western countries and then to "progressives." That's been the pattern for some decades now.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/02 Links Pt2: How media bias fuels the facade of Palestinian nationhood and ignores accountability; Danny Danon: UN has failed Gaza. It’s time for a new era

From Ian:

How media bias fuels the facade of Palestinian nationhood and ignores accountability

FOR MANY of the world’s leading media outlets, there isn’t even the need for an honest accounting of the war dead. Hamas says 45,000 have been killed – who cares how many are militants or if the numbers are massaged with calculated impunity? Hamas says yet another Israeli attack has killed journalists – never mind if they’re also freelancing as Islamist terrorists.

Meanwhile, despite being the elected leader of a Western democracy, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been branded a genocidaire – unable to enter Poland to honor the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation owing to an international arrest warrant by a bogus global court.

And Israeli cultural and civic groups are being banned from global gatherings. Most recently, the delegation to the World Bowls Tour was forbidden from participating in the event in Great Britain next month after an outcry from the pro-Palestinian Action Network, which branded Israel an “apartheid and genocidal state.” (The World Bowls Tour has since reversed its decision.)

And yet much of Hamas’s leadership still travels freely across the Middle East, while pro-Palestinian films continue to be hyped out in Hollywood.

As Hamas refuses to confirm its hostage count, both Israel and the world are forced to negotiate with literal terrorists so that terrorized civilians might go free. Gleeful murderers must be set loose so that Israel may bring their innocent back home.

Nothing is demanded of those murderers to go free, no conditions imposed to ensure they, like Yahya Sinwar, don’t re-offend in an even bloodier and more spectacular fashion. Lots of impunity – little accountability.

For many, a Palestinian state remains the ultimate goal – possibly as a byproduct of Israel’s eventual normalization with Saudi Arabia. Both are still possible.

But even if statehood were achieved, how would Palestinians govern if they never learned the most basic building block of sovereignty – accountability? There can be no sovereignty without accountability to its citizens, neighbors, regional allies, and, ultimately, the global community. Once again, accountability has never been something Palestinians have done particularly well.

As 2025 arrives, both increased military activity in Gaza and yet another potential hostage deal are crowding the headlines. Israel, as always, is being pressured to compromise while the Palestinians continue to play hardball.

This may be business as usual – but it’s a bad business. It’s bad for Israel, which lacks a serious negotiation partner; for the Gaza civilians forced by their craven leadership to jockey for martyrdom; and for the Palestinian nation that so many pretend already exists.

Many hope it never will, but for those who believe that it must, the era of carte blanche diplomacy must end in Gaza, Doha, and Ramallah. And in its place, the gift that no one has dared to demand – the gift of Palestinian accountability.

UNRWA's Refusal to Accept Israeli Sovereignty Will Harm the Palestinians

Israeli authorities found that more than 2,135 UNRWA employees were also terrorists in either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). One-fifth of UNRWA school administrators were Hamas terrorists, and 10% of the senior positions (school principals and their deputies, directors, and deputy directors of training centers) were members of Hamas or PIJ.

UNRWA's facilities in Gaza had been turned into terror bases. Hamas had dug extensive tunnels under UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City in which they placed one of their main computer server farms. The electricity for the computers, as well as water, came directly, and in plain sight, from within UNRWA's headquarters.

Having concluded that UNRWA had lost all credibility and morphed into a vassal of the terrorists, Israel's Knesset passed laws on Oct. 28, 2024, to end Israel's June 1967 invitation to UNRWA to operate in Israel, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. The laws will come into full force on January 30, 2025.

For 76 years, UNRWA has served as the primary vehicle for perpetuating the lie that the "Palestine refugees" will one day demographically and democratically destroy Israel. Under UNRWA, the number of "Palestine refugees" has swelled from 711,000 in 1949 to six million in 2023.

Despite having been given sufficient notice, terror-infested UNRWA is refusing to wrap up its operations and transfer its functions to other actors. It would seem that UNRWA believes it can force itself upon Israel, irrespective of the new legislation.

However, by acting in this manner, UNRWA is doing a disservice to the people to whom it provides services. The international community would be wise to find suitable alternatives.

The Man Who Wasn’t There_ An Account Of A Fake Witness To The Gaza War

The charge by Israel’s enemies that it is committing a genocide against the Palestinians is false, malicious and a complete inversion of the truth. It relies on disinformation and invented legal standards to deny the Jewish state its right to self-defense following Hamas’s genocidal attack on October 7, 2023. Nevertheless, it is being promoted by certain Israelis, whose words are used as an authoritative validation of the bogus claim. One such Israeli– who serves as a hero to those who delight in vilifying Israel– is Lee Mordechai, whose false “genocide” charges against Israel provides fuel for the delegitimization of the Jewish state.

Below is an article by Yigal Carmon — a former Israeli intelligence officer, counterterrorism adviser, and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute — debunking Mordechai’s sanctimonious accusations.

Introduction
The website “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War,”1 run by Israeli historian Lee Mordechai,2 claims to be “both a public statement and an archive… [that] aims to make sense of a deeply complex and troubling situation” in Gaza.

Mordechai states that his website/archive “compiles evidence from reliable sources, including humanitarian organizations, investigative reports, and firsthand accounts” of war crimes committed by Israel against the people of Gaza 3 – which, according to Mordechai, meet the definition of “genocide” (in Mordechai’s words, “my definition of genocide”).4

This document will refute several major claims made by Mordechai on his website.

A Note On Mordechai’s Website
Mordechai’s website, Witnessing-the-gaza-war.com, appears to be inaccessible from an Israel-based server. It is unclear why this is so, and whether or not this is deliberate.5 “Witness”

A Misleading Use Of The Term In The Name Of Mordechai’s Website
The first and most basic element to be refuted in Mordechai’s project is his self-definition as “a witness.” Mordechai did not witness any of the alleged war crimes he cites in his report. The name of his website – “bearing witness to the Israel-Gaza war” – is misleading; what Mordechai does on his website is present a collection of information from a wide range of news websites and social media platforms, and reframe it as “evidence.” He has witnessed none of these firsthand.

Harnessing Irrelevant Expertise (History Of The Justinianic Plague) To Claim Authority
Mordechai begins his statement of purpose with the words: “I, Lee Mordechai, an Historian by profession and an Israeli citizen…”6. He harnesses his academic authority as “a historian by profession” to provide pseudo-academic basis to his claims of genocide.

Mordechai’s field of expertise in academia is the Justinianic plague and global pandemics,7 which fall under the research category of Environmental History. Mordechai is not an expert or an academic authority on the topic of genocide. Before publishing this document, Mordechai never dealt with the subject.8 He uses his title of a Late Antiquity historian (AD 541–549) to muster whatever authority and stature he can so as to appear knowledgeable in a field in which he has no expertise whatsoever.

01/02 Links Pt1: From college campuses to Afghanistan, we let Islamic terrorism rise again; The ‘intifada’ comes to New Orleans

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: From college campuses to Afghanistan, we let Islamic terrorism rise again

Let’s all give a big shout-out to the “Globalize the intifada” crowd. You got your way! Congratulations. Hope it feels good.

For years, citizens of Israel have had maniac jihadists driving at them and trying to mow them down on their streets. But this got only cheers from the dolts on US college campuses and New York street protesters.

Then, just before Christmas, Germany again got a taste of this “intifada.” That was when a Saudi immigrant decided to plow a vehicle through a previously happy Christmas market. He killed five people and injured almost 200.

Then, on New Year’s, it was America’s turn again.

This time, the wishes of the students at Columbia and other college campuses arrived on the streets of New Orleans. A man carrying an ISIS flag drove a pickup through New Year’s revelers, killing 14 people and seriously injuring dozens more. The FBI is looking into his network of contacts.

There are several things to say about all this.

The first is that although many people hoped the threat of jihadist violence had diminished, it has not gone away. With jihadist groups running Afghanistan and Syria, among other countries, they are back in control of vast areas, as they were before 9/11.

After the 2001 attacks on this city, America vowed there should be no safe havens for terrorists. That included ungoverned or Islamist-governed spaces abroad where terrorists can be trained and then come to the United States and other Western countries and carry out attacks.

Such spaces were indeed reduced by US and allied forces in the years that followed. But they have come back. Today Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen (to name just three countries) are places where jihadists can train and learn battlefield tactics. Our intelligence agencies and military need to keep a close eye on these places and strike when needed.

The second thing is that it is obvious that a considerable campaign of recruitment inside the United States is still ongoing. The New Orleans terrorist appears to have been radicalized while in the United States. Whether that was online or via a network within the US will soon be learned.

But we should hope that the full force of the law — and law enforcement agencies — comes down on any and all such groupings.

Many in the intelligence community and the police are indeed working hard on such cases. But there is a societal torpor about this work.

If the New Year´s Eve attack had not been jihadist, but had — for instance — been some far-right white supremacist, every corner of our media and politics would be rightly lining up to demand answers. We would be asking who the people were who had put such a person up to such an attack. Who had helped him? Who had encouraged him? Who had said it was all right — in fact good — to do such a thing?

Melanie Phillips: America’s Islamist problem

This political interpretation of Islam is called Islamism. It’s important to acknowledge that many Muslims living in the West are entirely signed up to Western values. However, the aggressive literalist interpretation is dominant among the faithful.

Polling has shown that 52% of British Muslims want to make it illegal to display a picture of Islam’s founder, Mohammed; almost half say Jews have too much power over government policy; and one-third favor implementing Sharia law and declaring Islam as the national religion.

In the United States, a survey by the Heritage Foundation found that 39% of American Muslims believe “Hamas did not commit murder and rape in Israel on Oct. 7” while 43% said: “Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish homeland.”

Islamism is spread throughout the world by the Muslim Brotherhood. While this has been banned by several Islamic states, neither London nor Washington has proscribed it.

Western nations also refuse to acknowledge that the Palestinian cause is an Islamist front not just against Israel but also against them. The hostility of the Palestinian Arabs to the existence of a Jewish state has always been at the core a jihadi cause. That’s why the Palestinians persistently make the false and hysterical claim that Israel intends to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

Hamas and Hezbollah say openly that the war against Israel is part of their war against the west. In New York and elsewhere last month, anti-Israel demonstrators attacked Christmas trees. Hours after the New Orleans atrocity, a mob chanted in Times Square: “There is only one solution—intifada revolution!” “Resistance is glorious, we will be victorious!” and “Gaza, you make us proud.”

Israel and the west are umbilically linked as the targets of Islamic jihadi conquest. Yet for decades, it has been impossible to say any of this without being denounced as “Islamophobic” and singled out for attack.

Islamists have taken full advantage of the West’s refusal to defend an identity it no longer understands while telling itself it’s not worth defending. This myopia has extended across the political spectrum.

During Trump’s first administration, although he banned Muslims from certain countries from entering America, he didn’t recognize the full extent of the threat.

As Sam Westrop pointed out on the Middle East Forum in 2021, his administration handed out more federal money to domestic Islamic organizations than any previous administration, with more than half going to groups with some degree of Islamist influence. “In other words,” he wrote, “under Trump, America has served as a leading state sponsor of nonviolent Islamism.”

Americans have told themselves that the war between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is over the division of the land. They’ve told themselves that ISIS has been defeated, that leaving Afghanistan and Iraq has meant that the United States is no longer a target, and that Iran is a threat solely to Israel. They’ve told themselves that the Islamic world is not their problem.

As New Orleans has so horribly demonstrated, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Brendan O'Neill: The ‘intifada’ comes to New Orleans

The New Orleans massacre follows more than a year of noisy Islamo-apologism in educated circles in the West. Since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023, sympathy for Islamism has been all the rage among the right-on. ‘Long live the intifada’, they cried. Even ‘Globalise the intifada’. This gushing over ‘intifada’ in the weeks and months following an ‘intifada’ that involved the slaughter of more than a thousand Jews by an army of fanatical Islamists dragged us to ever greater depths of ethical delirium and moral depravity. Some even hailed the Islamist butchery of 7 October as ‘exhilarating’ and ‘energising’. Imagine if someone said that about New Orleans. Imagine if they said they felt elated upon hearing of this barbarous slaying of the young. Perhaps someone will. It is a testament to the slow, deadly corrosion of our civilisational values that it would not be wholly surprising if someone did.

For the truth is that something very like the New Orleans massacre happened on 7 October, only on a far larger scale, and back then the activist class celebrated it. The 364 young men and women butchered at the Nova music festival by the invading Islamists from Gaza were every bit as innocent as the slain of Bourbon Street. They were every bit as ‘full of life’. Yet their extermination was downplayed. In some cases it was outright cheered. That Islamist assault was a ‘day of celebration’, some said. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, said student agitators days after those ‘martyrs’ raped and murdered hundreds of revellers who were indistinguishable, in their spirit and their liberty, from the revellers of New Orleans.

The case was made, whether implicitly or explicitly, that the Nova partygoers weren’t all that innocent. They were citizens of a ‘settler-colonial’ regime. They were inhabitants of the ‘Zionist entity’. They had the gall to live free, untroubled lives in a ‘genocidal state’. If it turns out that the butcher of Bourbon Street thought similarly – that no one in America is truly innocent because America commits ‘war crimes’ and sponsors Israel’s ‘genocide’ – what will we say? What can we say? After all, our elites have fully embraced the poisonous ideology of collective guilt and punishment, where if you live in a state that does ‘bad’ things, then you have no right to be surprised if Islamist vengeance comes your way.

No, this is not to say the suspect in the New Year’s Day massacre was directly inspired by the past year’s depraved cries of ‘Bring the intifada home’. The bored rich kids of the West who unforgivably made light of the Islamist slaughter in Israel are not responsible for what that man allegedly did. But we do need to talk about the creepy empathy for the Islamist ideology that has spread like a pox through our institutions. For years, the West failed to take seriously the threat posed by the Islamist menace. Even as hundreds were massacred by Islamists in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and elsewhere, we said ‘Don’t look back in anger’, don’t get too het up, don’t say or do anything that might stir up ‘Islamophobia’. Over the past year, this lethal insouciance in the face of the Islamist derangement morphed into something even worse: active sympathy for Islamism. They call it ‘intifada’ but we all know what they mean: the killing of citizens by Islamist ideologues with a grievance. Like what happened on Bourbon Street.

The attack on New Orleans was an attack on America itself. On its young, its workers, its openness, its freedoms. We should mourn the victims and then confront, head-on, the unsettling rapport with such neo-fascism that has bubbled up in our very own societies in recent years.

Activists Screaming For Someone, Anyone, To Stop Gaza Genocide Also Think Hamas Winning (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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London, January 2 - Supporters of the Palestinian cause who take fabricated reports of Israel targeting innocents at face value, resulting in what they claim to be hundreds of thousands of deaths, and who therefore demand that the international community act to aid the helpless Palestinians, simultaneously believe that the Palestinian militant group fighting against Israel kills Israeli soldiers at will and has sent them packing not just from battlefield after battlefield in Gaza, but from Israel itself.

"Stop the Genocide!" and "Victory is imminent from the River to the Sea!" cries emerge concurrently from the same quarters the world over, as activists struggle to decide on which message will resonate with the target audience: Hamas prowess or Palestinian victimhood. They therefore proclaim the slogans of both axioms.

The cognitive dissonance necessary to engage in both rhetorical avenues appears not to trouble those who engage in both lines of argument at the same time, observers say. "Hamas is this powerful military force that can strike the deepest fear in Zionist soldiers," noted journalist Hoyt Petard. "At the same time, every single Gazan is a journalist doctor humanitarian aid worker pregnant child woman. So who's killing all the Zionists?"

"What are the Zionists fleeing from?" wondered Dilly Hussein, a keyboard activist. "We have all these credible reports of Israelis crowding the airports to leave because of October 7 and rocket attacks and the Resistance, but of course there are no acts of violence by Palestinians, who are totally innocent and blameless. Do the glorious rockets exist? Only if you think you're talking to people who can either be intimidated or already want to back a strong horse. Otherwise, the rockets are either a desperate response to oppression which somehow succeed in striking enough terror into Jews to make large number of them level, but not enough terror to get them to stop the genocide."

A puzzled Hussein appeared stunned into silence by a reporter's suggestion that mighty Hamas do something to protect Gazans from the Israeli onslaught, the death toll from which ranges from somewhere around 40,000 - about half of them Hamas or affiliated men, according to IDF sources - to in the hundreds of thousands, as some activists seem to want.

After several moments, Hussein responded. "Since when is it an elected government's responsibility to provide for and protect its people?" he demanded. "What universe do you even live in that that's an expectation?"

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Yes, we know that he praised October 7. Yes, he's compared Israel to Nazis and teaches that comparison to his students. Yes, he espouses the discredited and antisemitic Khazar theory that Jews aren't really Jews.

But that's when Joseph Massad is speaking to a Western audience and he doesn't want to look like a Jew-hater in public. He always skated right up to the line where he could claim that he was only talking about Zionists or something.

But in an interview last March with a Pakistani podcaster, Massad drops any pretense.

He starts off by asserting lots of things that are simply not true, which is a pattern we've seen from him before.

Zionism of course begins perhaps in its earliest manifestations in the Crusades of the 11th century. After all it was the Crusades who began to also refer to Palestine as the holy land and the idea at the time was that uh you know and the major sort of papal announcement of the Crusades, the idea was that Palestine had to be cleansed of um its uh both Muslim and non-Catholic occupiers.

This is not only false but insane. Massad is defining Zionism as "ethnically cleansing Palestine" so therefore the Crusaders, who murdered tens of thousands of Jews, must have been Zionists.

Saying that the Crusaders coined the term "the Holy Land" is also wrong. The Vulgate Book of Wisdom (1st century BCE or CE) explicitly calls the Land of Israel "terra sanctae," the Holy Land. At the time it was not a typically Hebrew phrase which would call it "the Promised Land."

The holiness of the land was never in question for Jews, though - there are many laws from the Torah and elucidated in the Talmud that only apply within the borders of the Promised Land, the reason being precisely because of its sanctity.

Massad is an ignoramus whose view of history is colored exclusively by his hate for Jews.

He goes on:

Remember Judaism had been a missionary religion since its inception and continued to be so through another of the early part of the 11th 12th and 13th centuries and in that sense the idea that European Jews are somehow direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews is of course a bogus claim...

The Talmud quotes a Baraita (2nd-3rd centuries CE) that explicitly says to discourage converts to Judaism. The rabbis are instructed to tell the would-be convert, "What did you see that motivated you to come to convert? Don’t you know that the Jewish people at the present time are anguished, suppressed, despised, and harassed, and hardships are frequently visited upon them? "

Does this sound like missionary religion to you?

Again, in his zeal to demonize Jews, Massad makes up history.

What is special here about Zionism is not only the invention of Ancient Israel and the invention of Jews as descendants of the Ancient Hebrews – it is almost like a Hitlerian project to speak of Jews genetically in this fashion. It only becomes fashionable, of course, in the 19th century, with the rise of racial science and the biological sciences.

So tracing your origins is now "Hitlerian?"

How about the Muslims who use the title "Sayyed" to indicate that they are direct descendants of Mohammed - are they Hitlerian too? Or the many Palestinians who proudly trace their origins to the Arabian Peninsula, preferably Mecca and Medina, but many from Yemen, and who keep track of all their families and tribes - are they "Hitlerian"?

Or is that term only to be used for the people who were the victims of Hitler, not the people who want to continue Hitler's goal of exterminating the Jews?

Massad is no scholar. He is a professor who uses the trappings of scholarship to promote antisemitic propaganda.

(h/t MEMRI)

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Hezbollah used to publicly announce and celebrate all of its "martyrs." As of September 23, it said that it had lost 513 members, and as of that point the vast majority of deaths in Lebanon had been terrorist group members.

Since then, when Israel escalated its air and then limited ground campaign against Hezbollah, the group stopped admitting any deaths besides prominent leaders. Instead, it adopted the Hamas model of pushing a narrative of Israel killing nobody but civilians.

Lebanon has announced 3,402 deaths between September 15 and the ceasefire on November 27. How many of those were terrorists?

L'Orient le Jour attempted to find out.

A Syrian researcher with the nom de plume of Qalaat al-Mudiq has been scouring Facebook to count the number of funerals held in southern Lebanon for Hezbollah fighters. So far, they count 1,742 Hezbollah members killed in that timeframe plus 80 members of other militant groups. However, they note that this is a conservative estimate:

"Fighters whose affiliation with Hezbollah was unclear were excluded, making this a conservative estimate,” they explained.

They added, “The analysis indicates that Hezbollah has lost an average of nearly 20 fighters per day since Sept. 23, particularly Syrian war veterans and young reservists. The actual number is likely higher, exceeding 30 per day based on our monitoring, but we lacked the resources to verify all cases.”

If the number is 31 per day for those 65 days, then at least 2,015 terrorists were killed - about a 1.4 to 1 ratio of terrorists to civilians.

Lebanon says that 1,040 women and children were killed in that time period.

One other detail to note from the article is how many foreign forces allied to Hezbollah have been killed:

Although not exhaustive, L’Orient-Le Jour identified several dozen foreign combatants likely killed in Lebanon, despite Hezbollah's denial of deploying external forces.

Among them are five Yemeni fighters affiliated with Ansar Allah, the official name of the Houthi rebels, six Syrians associated with Hezbollah in Syria and Islamic jihad. Additionally, two Iraqis from Kata'ib Hezbollah, one Iranian from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and one Saudi member of the Saudi branch of Hezbollah have been documented. Various Palestinian factions present in Lebanon have also suffered losses.

At the moment, it appears that the ratio of militants to civilians killed exceeds 1.4 to 1; if you include all deaths since October 7 in Lebanon the ratio is closer to 1.9 to 1.

These numbers aren't perfect. A few dozen have been killed since the ceasefire, the total militant count includes about 40 Hezbollah members killed in Syria, and bodies are still being found in the rubble. But it seems pretty clear that this is an exceptional result for urban warfare and that Israel's warnings to civilians to leave areas saved thousands of lives that could have been lost if any other army was fighting under similar circumstances.

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The spokesman for Islamic Jihad's Al Quds Brigades attacked the families of hostages today by claiming, that one hostage who would have been released in the first round of a deal attempted suicide.

The statement said " the medical team succeeded in saving the prisoner's life after he attempted suicide due to his psychological state that deteriorated as a result of the Netanyahu government's decision, which set new conditions that led to the failure and delay of negotiations for his release."

The transparent lie is meant to cause pain to the suffering families of hostages and to use them to protest against the Israeli government, ultimately to allow a deal that will keep the terrorists in charge of Gaza.

The lie becomes obvious when we look at previous claims by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

In a strikingly similar announcement in May, Hamas said “We rescued, a few days ago, in the final moments, one of the enemy's prisoners after he attempted suicide in his place of captivity. We hold the enemy and (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu personally responsible for the deteriorating physical and mental health of some of the enemy's prisoners.”

In July, Islamic Jihad said, "Some enemy prisoners have attempted suicide as a result of the extreme frustration they are feeling due to their government's neglect of their cause." They also claimed that they started treating the prisoners the same as Israel treats their prisoners, resulting in the suicide attempts.

In all the cases the reasons given for the supposed suicide attempts happens to align with the political goals of the terror groups. Of course, they show no evidence that any of it is true.

Besides their cruelty, this is the definition of terrorism - they intend to terrorize the Israeli civilian population, desperate for any crumb of news about the hostages, for political ends.

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"Jewish Voice for Peace" absurdly claims celebrating the military victory of the Hasmoneans is a Zionist invention

One would think that the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council would know at least a little bit about Judaism. Unfortunately, they are nearly as ignorant as the JVP members who celebrate Havdalah while the sun is out and say kaddish for dead terrorists.

For the last day of Chanukah, JVP's rabbis engage in a little revisionism of two millennia of rabbinic writings.

Mai Hanukkah – “What is Hanukkah?” asked the rabbis of the Talmud. In answer to their own rhetorical question, they chose not to tell the story of the Maccabean victory over the Seleucid empire in 160 BCE. Rather, they offered the famous story of the rededication of the Temple and the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days. For the rabbis, the oil of the menorah symbolized hope and faith in the face of overwhelming odds, not the spoils of war.

The phrase "Mai Chanukah" in the Talmud (Shabbat 21b) comes after a discussion of the mitzvah of lighting the menorah - including the famous argument between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai on the number of candles to be lit each night. It is not the introduction to the topic. Which means that the phrase "Mai Chanukah" is asking what is the reason for the lighting of the candles, not what Chanukah is about.

The answer mentioning the cruse of oil also notes the military victory: "When the Hasmonean monarchy overcame them and emerged victorious over them, they searched and found only one cruse of oil..."

But JVP then says that celebrating the military victory is a Zionist invention that Jews didn't consider before the 19th century.

This inspiring sacred message of Hanukkah lasted centuries, until it was subverted and overturned by political Zionism.

Tragically, the Zionist movement chose to put its faith in human power and national territorial sovereignty, seeking to create a “Third Jewish Commonwealth” in historic Palestine. In so doing, it forged a wholly new Jewish identity: an internalization and inversion of European antisemitic themes of Jewish feebleness. This ideal prioritized physical strength and militarism, and was often exemplified by the revival of the Maccabees as Jewish heroes, forsaking the miracle of the oil for a focus on violent militarism.

Al Hanissim in 1642 siddur

Wow. The authors of the Al Hanissim prayer (found in prayerbooks from the 9th century) who spelled out the miracles of Chanukah didn't know that. The prayer thanks God for the military victory - and doesn't mention the miracle of the oil at all!

Zionists!

Similarly, Maimonides (Rambam) in his Mishneh Torah (12th century) discusses the military victory before the miracle of the oil. (The 17th century Pri Chadash explains that, according to the Rambam, the first day of the celebration was instituted in appreciation of the military victories, and the remaining days to commemorate the miracle of the oil. This is one of hundreds of answers to the age-old question of why Chanukah is eight days long, not seven.)

"HaNeirot Halalu" from a
1684 prayerbook

The song sung during the lighting of the candles, HaNeitor Halalu, which is centuries old, also calls out the military victory.

It is true that early Zionists emphasized the military victory and downplayed the miracle of the oil. That was a fairly temporary phenomenon. But the JVP "rabbis" are truly the modern Hellenists, doing everything they can to replace Jewish concepts like celebrating God's help in a military victory of the "few against the many" with their own false gods of anti-Zionism and the pretense of caring about human rights.

And to justify their Jewishly indefensible position, they have no problem twisting and rewriting 2,000 years of Jewish history.

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01/01 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The truth of the Palestinian cause; The Cautionary Tale of Jimmy Carter; Ireland’s Top Catholic Cleric Attacks Israel for Gaza War in New Year’s Message

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The truth of the Palestinian cause

The only proper response is to call out these Palestinian lies. But instead of regarding them as a collective psychopathology, politicians and media stoke the flames of Jew-hatred by themselves parroting the propaganda about Israel behaving unconscionably.

Left-wing governments that ideologically support the Palestinian cause and also kowtow to Muslim constituencies in which Jew-hatred is rife, shockingly recycle the lies about Israel. The worst offenders have been the governments in Britain, Australia and Canada. No surprise, therefore, that Jew-hatred in those countries is now so brazen, pervasive and extreme.

Alas, too many Jews are also part of this madness. They support the Palestinian Arab cause out of a misplaced sense of fairness, a craving for fashionable approval or extreme ignorance about Jewish and Middle East history. So instead of calling out genocidal acts and fabricated claims of Palestinian Arabs, these co-called “moderate” Jews redouble support for a “two-state solution” as a response to exterminatory aggression.

Jew-hatred has not only been normalised. It’s been rebranded as social justice because support for Palestinianism, which seeks to write the Jews out of their country, their history, and the world, is what now passes for a moral sense among swathes of the public, the entire intelligentsia and even — heaven help us — many Jews.

Let’s not hear any protests that you were once a member of Habonim or have a holiday home in Herzliya or have had to unfriend former chums on Facebook because they’ve callously ignored the Israeli hostages. If you support the Palestinian Arab cause today, you are facilitating deranged and murderous Jew-hatred. Own it.

What Does “Globalize the Intifada” Mean and How Can it Lead to Targeting Jews with Violence?

Since Hamas’ massacres against Israelis on October 7 and Israel’s following attempts to free hostages and eliminate the threat posed by Hamas, Jewish individuals, synagogues, and cultural institutions have been the target of violence in the name of protests against Israel. These are in addition to anti-Israel protesters targeting corporations that do business with Israel.

A social media post from the anti-Israel group Within Our Lifetime, a self-described Palestinian-led community organization, was headlined with the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” and had examples of Israeli and U.S. companies and transit hubs, the locations included The New York Times, Penn Station, Grand Central Station, the BlackRock investment firm, and the Israeli tech company Check Point.

“Each of the locations on this map reflects the location of an office of an enemy of both the Palestinian people and colonized people all over the world. Today and beyond, these locations will be sites for popular mobilization in defense of our people,” the group wrote.

“May this map serve as a call for every struggle to act in their own interest,” the group said in its call to action. “As we do so, we uplift one another’s struggles and free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

Everything you need to know about this antisemitic term.

AJC CEO Ted Deutch said: “This is not promoting peace. This is an incitement to violence against Jews and it must be taken seriously.”

That map was one of several posted by the group, which has supported the October 7 Hamas massacre as “whatever means necessary it takes” to achieve Palestinian liberation and has held numerous street protests denouncing Israel.

Other posts displayed additional maps with pins showing the locations of several Jewish and Jewish-led organizations.

If the New York mapping strategy feels familiar, it should.

In June 2022, an anti-Israel campaign dubbed the “Boston Mapping Project.” claiming to show the ties between various Massachusetts institutions and “support for the colonization of Palestine,” raised alarms over its dangerous targeting of the Jewish community. The map put a target on the backs of Jews who were already feeling highly concerned about their safety.

The Massachusetts map, published by anonymous supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, was promoted by anti-Israel groups such as Boston BDS and Massachusetts Peace Action

Jesus was Palestinian? That really would be a miracle

Grylls subsequently removed the reference to Mary being Palestinian and clarified his position, saying she was “clearly Jewish”. So why call her Palestinian in the first place?

After more than a year of pro-Palestinians telling Jews that their historical and biblical links to Israel were irrelevant (in an attempt to delegitimise the Jewish state) it turns out that historical and biblical links really are important, so long as they don’t involve Jews. Now Jesus is Palestinian, the theory goes, it’s completely fine to argue that “some” of those who inhabited the region 2,000 years ago do have a claim on the land after all. Placards at marches read “Jesus is Palestinian” or “Jesus, the most famous Palestinian”.

There is, of course, a deeper precedent for this, in that Jesus’ Jewishness has been played down since the third century, when Christianity proliferated into Roman society. Then, even more so when his death became an excuse for anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages. In that sense, this attempt to politicise him is nothing new. There was also a certain German group you may have heard of from the 1930s and 40s who were very keen to eliminate any link between Jesus and his Jewish identity. It’s in this long, troubled context that we should see the potential harm this idea possesses.

There have been nativity scenes with the baby Jesus wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh across UK and US towns recently, following the “Nativity in the rubble” concept that began in Bethlehem, along with assertions that he was born in “occupied Palestine”. This concept hit the jackpot when it appeared in the Vatican in a scene blessed by Pope Francis himself (although it was later removed following criticism that it portrayed Palestinians uniquely as the victims).

If you leave aside the theological and historical absurdity – equating a Jewish man from 2000 years ago with a political identity that didn’t exist – this is the nub of the problem. It promotes the idea that Jews are systematic baby killers. This is the sort of thing that is screamed at elderly people on the streets of London, Glasgow and Brighton. That’s not something Jesus would have approved of. He was Jewish, after all.