Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, November 19, 2018

11/19 Links Pt2: Seth Mandel: Ostracizing Jewish Trump Supporters Will Only Hurt the Jewish Community; Airbnb to stop operating in Judea and Samaria

From Ian:

When America doubted my Jewish grandmother’s loyalty

As I reflect on these events in my grandmother’s life, I am left wondering if our country has learned anything at all since she sat in that El Paso courtroom. And I confess that these reflections do not leave me feeling terribly cheerful.

Today, Jews are still painfully aware that no matter how “American” we may feel, we can easily be accused of having divided loyalties. Politicians sow fear of immigrants, stoking suspicion among neighbors. A simple mistake, a scurrilous rumor or “foreign-looking” family members can leave many among us vulnerable to others’ suspicions that we cannot be trusted – or, as we have seen in recent days, vulnerable even to violence.

My grandmother’s case offers an early glimpse into this aspect of our national culture, which would continue to corrode in the years that followed. Her hearing in the spring of 1949 was 5 1/2 years before Senator McCarthy would finally be chastened with the famous rebuke “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

We are – thankfully – several decades beyond the paranoia of McCarthyism, but its tenacious cells still sleep in the veins of fear beneath our nation’s skin. Today one can witness firsthand how easily some Americans’ love of our country can metastasize into a strain of xenophobia so pernicious that they can be convinced to turn against their fellow citizens.

Seventy years after my grandmother was summoned before a committee of the federal Justice Department, anti-Semitism is ascendant once again across America. And once more it is garbed in the belief that Jews cannot be fully American, that our values threaten the integrity of the nation which has been our beloved home for centuries.

When we discovered the nondescript black binder among my grandmother’s belongings, we had no idea what secrets it would hold. We could never have predicted the story that those yellowing photographs and official documents would tell. And, I confess, we never expected that the historical territory through which that binder led us would look quite so familiar.

Seth Mandel: Ostracizing Jewish Trump Supporters Will Only Hurt the Jewish Community

On the day of the massacre in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, the political commentator Franklin Foer wrote in the Atlantic that “any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They have placed their community in danger.” Foer was not alone in this sentiment, which was echoed by at least one influential rabbi. Seth Mandel warns of the dangers of this passion for anathematizing political opponents, made even more dangerous by the tendency to blame Israel for the anti-Semitic violence:

Two versions of this [claim] predominate: one, that Israel’s strength has deceived Jews into weakening their position in America; two, that Israeli policies are to blame for the bloodshed. . . . The former Anti-Defamation League official Harry Reis [stated that] Benjamin Netanyahu, the Knesset member Naftali Bennett, the Israeli ambassador to Washington Ron Dermer, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman “are enablers and defenders of [Donald Trump’s] hate and the white supremacists who support him.”

The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson took the next logical step in this progression and—ironically, endorsing a key neo-Nazi talking point—proclaimed: “The bizarre and terrifying nexus between Israel and white nationalism actually starts to make sense when you understand the ethno-nationalist literature. Extreme-right Zionists and anti-Semitic white nationalists have the same core beliefs.” Liberals have thus unwittingly been reprising the old “Zionism equals racism” calumny with the 2018 version: Zionism is borderline Nazism. . . .

So there you have it: the Jews are the authors of their own destruction, supporters of Israel are disloyal Americans, Zionism is a first cousin to Nazism, right-wing Jews are Nazi collaborators, and Trump-supporting Jews should be expurgated from Jewish communal life.

Why are [Foer and others] fixated on excommunication? [There] is a great irony here: liberal laymen and clergy are deploying one of the most heavy-handed rabbinical retributive powers on the menu. . . . But of course the religion we’re talking about isn’t Judaism, is it? It’s progressivism—the Torah of Liberalism. In leftist politics, isolation is the first, not the last, line of defense against upsetting ideas.

EastEnders tackles antisemitism with storyline about vandalised Jewish grave

The BBC’s EastEnders has become the first soap to tackle the issue of antisemitism, in a new storyline introduced this week.

The programme has used the character of Dr Harold Legg, thought to be the only identifiably Jewish role in British soaps, to address the issue. Dr Legg is played by the 92-year-old Jewish actor Leonard Fenton.

Thursday’s programme showed the elderly doctor visiting his mother’s grave in a Jewish cemetery, together with “Dot Cotton”, the role played by June Brown, who is 91.

Dr Legg is explaining to Dot the custom of leaving a stone on a grave, when the pair, to their horror, see graffiti and a swastika daubed on Esther Legg’s tombstone.

As I mentioned at the end of the first part of this review of Lukianoff and Haidt’s 2018 Coddling of the American Mind, the book does not specifically deal with the how the conflict over Israel is playing out on campuses, apart from some examples of pro-Israel speakers being disrupted at talks given at certain colleges.

While their choice to provide a general analysis, rather than diving into one particular controversial issue, is perfectly reasonable, I suspect the role anti-Israel forces have played on campus over the last few decades helped catalyze what we’re now seeing in many places today.

New forms of behavior rarely spring from nothing, nor are they the result of careful analysis then translated into action. Rather, they tend to rely on precedent. For when someone behaves in ways no one else would have ever considered previously, that makes something once unthinkable thinkable. It is only after people start doing things that criticisms as well as justifications of what they are doing get formed, leading to misbehavior either getting shunned or establishing new norms.

Precedent can provide an explanation for many phenomena, such as mass shootings like the horror show in Pittsburg last month. If places like schools, synagogues and other places of worship have been outgunned since the invention of the gun, where did the idea of shooting up lots of innocents in such places originate? This response provides some potential answers based on individual psychology and societal change. But another factor is that it only became possible for an unstable individual to consider opening fire on a schoolyard when someone else had already set the precedent.

If you look across the increasingly radicalized campus landscape, featuring intersectional mobs making demands on administrators, faculty and fellow students based on allegations of systematic racism and other crimes, an eerie familiarity kicks in the more attention you have been paying to how the assault on Israel has proceeded on campuses over the last several decades.

The aggressiveness of the campus campaigns covered in Coddling is one source of such déjà vu. I’ve lost count of the number of incidents of violence that accompanied pro-Israel events, especially during the era of BDS. Where did this form of behavior spring from? At some point (maybe Michael Oren at UC Irvine), a group of anti-Israel activists got it into their heads to try a new innovative tactic of shouting down a speaker they didn’t want anyone else to hear.

Once that precedent was set, justification followed in the form of claims that the protestors were simply taking advantage of their free speech rights, ignoring the fact that those “rights” were being used entirely to shut down the free speech of everyone else. When those responsible for preventing such travesties decided to sit out making hard choices (i.e., when school administrators soft peddled responses to the behavior of SJP and similar groups), a precedent was fully established that said disrupting others through tactics that dance right at (and occasionally over) the line of criminality was justified and would go unpunished.

Today, the mobs are falling on many more than Jews and non-Jewish supporters of Israel. But if precedent had not been set beforehand it is not clear where they might have gotten the idea to do so.

The language, and psychology behind the language, used to explain modern radical politics also owes a debt to the Palestiniaization of campus political discourse.

To begin with, there is the unwillingness to entertain (or even listen to) any fact or opinion that falls afoul of “the narrative.” This reaches extremes in anti-Israel politics, up to and including the need to invent pretend phenomena (like Pinkwashing) to avoid and prevent any thought about the chasm between Israel and her foes regarding treatment of homosexuals. But whole swarths of history, countless demonstrable facts and one of history’s most enormous paper trails detailing Palestinian responsibility for their own fate must also be dumped down the memory hole, or buried beneath mountains of propaganda (some of it written by PhDs) that says black is white, and anyone who disagrees is a bigot.

Does America have a lot to answer for regarding it racist pass? You bet it does. But is racism and white supremacy more prevalent today than ever before? There are fact of the matter and arguments to be made that could be brought in to answer that question. But those touting the narrative underlying today’s campus protests are unable to listen to facts or engage in arguments that conflict with their beliefs, and are ready to stop anyone else from doing so.

Then there is our old friend ruthlessness that needs to be brought into the equation. When the concept of intersectionality (which says all oppressed people are fighting a common struggle and thus should unite) first came on the scene, questions came up regarding who gets to join the struggle (can Jews who support Israel partake, for example?) and what standards will be used to determine a hierarchy of more vs. less oppressed groups.

Today’s campus coalitions provide answers to those questions by establishing which oppressed people and issues can and cannot be discussed. As I’ve noted a number of times before, feminist groups joining such coalitions must fully embrace the Palestinian cause, while the treatment of women throughout the Middle East (including “Palestine”) seems to be permanently off the table.

In discourse I once heard used about the topic of intersectional priorities, the phenomena I just described was boiled down to “Palestine trumps woman,” an especially ironic twist, given that the ruthless actors from SJP and elsewhere who women activists must submit to are mostly men.

I was completely convinced that the psychological and social phenomena Lukianoff and Haidt describe in Coddling are real, and the mechanism they lay out to describe changes they observed is compelling. But remember that there are always ruthless actors ready to take advantage of developing trends, including unhealthy ones, to magnify their own power.

The Palestine Uber Alles cru has managed to establish themselves as the arbiters of what constitutes true belief within this new order, and they have every reason to want damaging trends to continue and spread, regardless of the cost to the rest of the world.

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Rooting for the underdog may be noble, but it is no guarantee that you know what you are talking about.

In November 2016, Ami Horowitz did one of his "Ami on the Street" interviews, this one covering "How white liberals really view black voter."

The issue was voter ID's and the first half showed him interviewing students at UC Berkeley, where the students claimed:

o African Americans are less likely to have state ID's
o Minorities are less likely to have ID's
o African Americans don't live in areas with easy access to DMV's
o African Americans don't have access to the Internet
o African Americans don't have the money to pay an Internet Service Provider
o African Americans don't know how the Internet works

The second half of the video takes place in Harlem -- and needless to say, the African Americans interviewed thought the Berkeley students to be wildly uninformed, if not racist themselves.

See for yourself:

I was reminded of this video when I read about the College of Arts and Science at NYU, where a proposal for a BDS resolution was brought by Rose Asaf last month.

A student countered:

“BDS infantilizes Palestinians, removing any responsibility or agency from their end...It hinders the prospects of a mutually agreed-upon peaceful solution and ultimately hurts the wrong people, namely, the near 50,000 Palestinians with jobs at risk if their firms are sanctioned.”

Asaf however, insisted that major Palestinian trade unions approve of BDS:

“It is neo-colonial and paternalistic to tell Palestinian workers what is best for them when they are telling us what is best for themselves — and that is to support BDS”

Asaf's claim does not actually refute the point that boycotts would harm Palestinian Arab jobs.
The reference to unions approving of BDS just implies that Palestinian Arab workers would be willing to lose their jobs -- assuming these unions actually reflect the opinions of the workers.

But do the union leaders actually represent the Palestinian Arabs and their interests? Do Palestinian Arabs really support BDS?

The case of SodaStream seems to disprove Asaf's point.

SodaStream employed more than 500 Palestinian Arab workers in East Jerusalem and the "West Bank" -- Forbes puts the number of Palestinian Arabs employed at 900.

Those 500+ workers did not care where the plants were located, and when pressure forced SodaStream to move, those workers lost their jobs.

Are Asaf and those unions any more knowledgeable of what Palestinian Arab workers want?
For that matter, is what those workers want even a priority of the supporters of BDS?

Supporting the evidence that Palestinian Arabs are willing to work in Israel and even in the settlements is a July poll carried out by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre, in cooperation with Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. It found that a sizeable majority of Palestinian Arabs in both the West Bank and Gaza have no problem working in Israel:

Another example is the ignorance of those who claim to speak out on behalf of Israel Arabs in claiming that Israel is an apartheid state.

While Israel is not perfect and there is a lot of work still to be done, many of those who claim to defend the interests of the Arabs are apparently unaware of the following list compiled by Elder of Ziyon, illustrating the extent of integration of Arabs into Israeli society that has been achieved:

There are Arabs in the IDF such as:

o Colonel Ghassan Alian, Commander of IDF Golani Brigade
o Yusef Mishleb - IDF Major General
o Annett Hoskia, an outspoken Israeli Zionist, whose 3 sons have served in IDF.
o Shibel Karmy Mansour, announcer Israel Army Radio

In the Israeli judicial system there are:

o George Kara, who led a 3-judge panel that convicted an Israeli ex-President.
o Salim Joubran, Israeli Supreme Court Justice
o Jamal Hakrush, Israeli police deputy commissioner.

And then there is academia:

o Dr. Jacob Hanna, Biologist and stem cell research at Weizmann Institute
o Dr. Rania Okby, first female Bedouin physician in history
o Dr. Hossam Haick, World renowned scientist and inventor of innovative cancer-detection techniques
o Dr. Aziz Darawshe, Director of Emergency Medicine, Hadassah Medical Center - Ein Kerem
o Masad Barhoum, Director General of Western Galilee Hospital
o Professor Alean Al-Krenawi, President Achva College, University of the Negev
o Ashraf Brik, Professor at Ben-Gurion University, winner of Israel's 2011 "Outstanding Young Chemist" Award
o Omar Barghouti, Doctoral student at Tel Aviv -- while a leading Arab advocate for academic boycott of Israel.

In politics and diplomacy:

o George Deek, recently appointed Israel's ambassador to Azerbaijan
o Naim Aradi, Israel's Ambassador to Norway
o Reda Mansour, historian, poet and former Israeli ambassador to Ecuador
o Jamal Zahalka, received BA, MA and PhD. Member of Israeli Parliament & leader of Balad political party - while describing himself a victim of "Israeli racist Apartheid"
o Majalli Wahabi, Former Deputy Speaker of Israel Parliament, and acting President of Israel in 2/07

In popular culture

o Walid Badir, Israeli football star/Capt of HaPoel Tel Aviv
o Mira Awad, Actress, singer & songwriter - represented Israel at 2009 Eurovision Song Festival
o Nissren Kader, Winner of Israeli singing competition
o Lina Makhoul, Chosen by Israeli viewers -- 2013 Winner of "The Voice"
o Rana Raslan, Former Miss Israel
o Lina Machola, Miss Israel Universe
o Niral Karantinji, Winner of Israel's Next Top Model
o Salma Fayumi, Israeli nurse and runner-up in Master Chef Israel
o Lucy Aharish, Israeli news anchor/TV host

As in the case of the Ami Horowitz video above, there is a lot of ignorance out there in the claims made by people claiming to be looking out for the humanitarian rights of Palestinian Arabs.

But also a lot of malignance as well.

It's almost as if the Palestinian Arabs are not their primary concern of some of these critics of Israel.

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11/19 Links Pt1: Caroline Glick: Why Israel let Hamas win latest round of Gaza violence; NGOs in Gaza and the West Bank Incite with European Support

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Why Israel let Hamas win latest round of Gaza violence

Israel’s security cabinet’s decision Tuesday afternoon to walk away from the war Hamas initiated Monday and to accept a “ceasefire” is frustrating and infuriating. Hamas shot nearly 500 projectiles into Israel in under 24 hours. It blew up a bus with a Kornet anti-tank missile. Sixty Israelis were wounded, several critically. One civilian was killed. Numerous homes were destroyed.

Israel has never experienced any rocket onslaught from Gaza remotely as intense as what Hamas and Islamic Jihad shot off on Monday and Tuesday. And yet, rather than respond with equal – or better yet – far greater force and teach Hamas and Islamic Jihad a lesson they would long remember, the security cabinet sufficed with a couple hundred pinpoint air attacks, and then accepted the IDF’s advice and opted for the ceasefire. In so doing, they left the residents of southern Israel virtual hostages of Hamas and Islamic Jihad who have retained the capacity to attack them at will.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman’s sudden resignation on Wednesday may help his little party Yisrael Beitenu get reelected to Knesset in the next elections. But if it does, then Liberman will have won his political survival at Israel’s expense. Hamas is entirely justified in presenting Liberman’s resignation as proof that it defeated Israel this week.

Winners don’t quit. Losers do.

But beyond being frustrating and infuriating, the cabinet’s decision is a cause for deep concern. Why did the cabinet opt to stand down in the face of Hamas’s unprecedented onslaught?

JPost Editorial: Golan, Israel

Anyone remotely familiar with Israel’s geographical and political landscape knows that the notion of giving up the Golan Heights is laughable.

Never mind the natural beauty, ruggedness and open spaces the region offers –qualities which have helped turn it into one of the country’s main getaways and outdoor recreational destinations.

The northern area was captured by the IDF from Syria during the Six Day War in 1967, after Israel was attacked simultaneously by Egypt, Jordan and the regime of Hafez Assad, father of the current leader. The area is a vital strategic asset.

Imagine the strife and danger that northern Israel would be facing due to the long, bloody civil war in Syria if the Golan was still in the hands of brutal Syrian dictator Basher Assad.

Former prime minister Menachem Begin’s surprise measure to annex the Golan Heights – which he pushed through the Knesset in 1981 by a vote of 63 to 21 – has proven to be a far-sighted move that probably has more consensus approval inside Israel than almost any other issue.

Begin’s decision was based on the belligerent Syrian declaration that even if Israel and the Palestinians would have reached a peace agreement, Syria would never make peace with Israel.

The reactions to the annexation were predictable. Then-Syrian president Assad called it a “declaration of war,” and the Reagan administration said that the annexation was inconsistent with the Camp David accords, complaining that the United States had been given no prior warning of the move.

That’s why Friday’s vote by the US to oppose for the first time the UN General Assembly’s annual call on Israel to return the Golan to Syria is so welcome, even though it’s been so long in coming.

NGOs in Gaza and the West Bank Incite with European Support

In Gaza, the NGO network is closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe and the European "Red-Green" alliance, comprised of the European Left and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The NGO network in Ramallah, however, belongs to the historical Palestinian Left - the former Communists and the Marxist terror organizations such as the Popular Front and the Democratic Front.

The NGOs in Ramallah are very radical, marked by hatred of Israel and the U.S., and they foment tension between Europe and the U.S.

In the last Palestinian Legislative Council elections in 2006, the leftist parties won only meager percentages and barely qualified for the Palestinian parliament. They maintain their political power thanks only to the NGO frameworks, which are buttressed by European money.

Mustafa Barghouti is the spokesman of the Ramallah NGOs. He was the leader of the Communist Party in the West Bank. In the 2006 presidential elections, he ran against Abbas and won 20% of the vote.

When former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry tried to promote an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, Barghouti instigated a demonstration against him.

Most Israeli media in English are not publishing the exact statement Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released last night, but parts of it indicate that there may be something going on around Gaza that we are not being told explicitly.

Bibi said "I want to tell you, citizens of Israel, I understand your heart. A large part of the criticism stems from the fact that for obvious reasons, the full details of the IDF chief of staff, the generals of the IDF, the head of the Shin Bet, the head of the Mossad and myself can not be presented, [The plans] are still in full force and that I am obligated to complete them in order to bring full security to the residents of the south and to all the residents of Israel ... I will not say here tonight when we will act and how we will act.

"..... We will overcome our enemies. I say this, my friends, without minimizing the challenge before us, and I tell you beforehand that this will involve sacrifices, but I have no doubt that with the courage of our soldiers, the strength of our citizens, we will overcome our enemies."

Could these secret plans be part of the reason Naftali Bennett decided not to leave the coalition?

This is all very interesting.

(h/t Yoel)

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The origins of the concept of intersectionality were reasonable - to recognize that people do not necessarily belong to a single oppressed group and that their experiences cannot be assumed to be the same as the "mainstream" of that group. Hence, black women have completely different issues of being discriminated against than white women, but mainstream feminism did not take their issues into account.

The problem is that the concept has been twisted into a victimhood Olympics, where people are now competing with each other to be the top victims and therefore most deserving of attention.

This thinking has become so mainstream that in large swaths of the Western world, logic and morality have become nearly meaningless in the face of the intersectional view of the world where your identity as a member of a victim group trumps all else.

All that matters in any conflict - from mere arguments on Twitter to large scale wars - is to understand which side is perceived to be the bigger victim.

The victim always wins in the court of public opinion run by most of the media, academia and diplomats.

Here is my attempt on calculating who is the perceived underdog, and therefore the more righteous, of each side in any conflict. The more you think about it, the more it reflects reality:

Attribute	Victimhood score
Trans	8
Black	8
Native American or other First People	7
Woman	6
Gay	6
Muslim	5
Arab, other Middle Eastern	5
Hispanic	4
Disabled, pregnant	4
Anti-Zionist Jew	4
Wears hijab	2
Palestinian	2
Asian American	1
White	-1
Republican or conservative	-3
Christian (white only)	-3
Jew	-3
Visibly religious Jew	-3
Jewish settler	-6
Identifies proudly as Zionist	-8
Trump supporter	-8
White nationalist/neo Nazi	-18

Multiple attributes are summed. So for example, a female Muslim Palestinian Arab who wears a hijab has a victimhood score of 6+5+5+2+2, 20 in total, which is quite high. (If she is disabled and lesbian, the score soars to 30, meaning that she almost automatically wins the victimhood sweepstakes against anyone - unless the other person is similar but transsexual instead of lesbian.)

The score depends on how you are perceived. So if you only start identifying as a member of a victim group later in life, as long as no one knows any different, you are in. This also applies to those who are half-or-quarter members of the oppressed group.

There are two classes of people who are the lowest of the low, according to this taxonomy. One is white nationalists who are Christian and support Trump, a score of -30. The other is the proudly Zionist religious Jewish settler, who gathers a score of -20 (-21 if white, -16 if Mizrahi.)

White nationalists are the only people who may be considered more evil than Jewish settlers. In other words, if anyone besides a neo-Nazi kills a Jewish settler, the settler deserved it, in the minds of the people who look at the world this way.

This explains why it is not embarrassing for people to publicly support Rasmea Odeh, the Palestinian who murdered two Jews in Jerusalem. She has a score of at least 13 (I'm not certain if she is Muslim) and the people she killed, two Jewish students, had scores of merely -4. The act of murder, of lying to American immigration officials, of openly supporting terror - all that doesn't matter because the victimhood score is the only metric that matters to the intersectional crowd.

Anti-Zionist Jews claim victimhood status because they pretend that the entire Jewish establishment is blackballing them, even though somehow they heroically manage to loudly proclaim their positions without any repercussions. Most of them are still white and of course they are still Jews, so their score isn't very high, but high enough to claim moral authority over the Jews who don't hate Israel.

This chart also explains why Jews aren't considered as victims together with the other groups associated with intersectionality. By default, Jews are considered the oppressors (of blacks, Palestinians, Africans and possibly others) so they don't qualify to be considered victims - unless they are attacked by white nationalists, in which case the intersectional community suddenly pretends to care about antisemitism. (Of course, Mizrahi Jews "of color" or Ethiopian Jews can indeed be victims of Ashkenazic "white" Jews, which is reflected in the chart as they can be identified as Middle Eastern or black.)

Lots of questions are answered by this chart. Why is the world more upset over David Duke than Louis Farrakhan? Add up their scores and find out. Who is more disgusting, Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein? The chart answers all. Why does no one care about an explicit law against Muslims selling land to Jews? Read the chart. Why did Linda Sarsour, who from my understanding is not particularly devout, decide to wear a hijab? It is because it is an easy way to increase her score. Why were people so upset over Rachael Dolezal? Because she was caught cheating at the only system that matters nowadays.

The chart also indicates the level of outrage to be appropriate in any circumstance. The larger the discrepancy in the scores, the more one should be upset. So when Lebanon decides to put Palestinians in a literal open air prison complete with watchtowers and guards, it is a shame and no one supports it, but no one is really outraged either because the scoring differential between Lebanese Arabs and Palestinian Arabs is so small.

The only time that actual facts matter is when both sides have similar scores. So black on black violence, when the victim is the same gender as the assailant, is a matter for the courts, since the intersectional crowd loses interest when there isn't a clear score discrepancy.

All the time we spend trying to come up with cogent arguments for one side or the other are wasted. Sure, a nominal effort needs to be done so that the victims can claim some moral authority outside of identity, but the arguments do not need to make any sense - they are just something to point to as a counterargument to anyone who disagrees. See, for example, the argument that Palestinians have the legal right to kill Israeli Jews under international law - the argument is absurd and has zero basis in reality, but its existence is the fig leaf necessary to maintain the primacy of the victimhood metrics.

We finally have a mathematical model to determine who is the more righteous party in any conflict. You no longer have to worry about the details of the conflict itself. It is already known which side is presumed correct.

It is important to realize that the scores are significant in isolation as well. A score of below zero implies that one is an oppressor, above zero one is oppressed.

UPDATE: Now the calculator is interactive - you can plug in your own values! (h/t L. King)

The Official EoZ Online Intersectionality Victimhood Calculator (version 1.0)

Attribute	Victimhood Score
Trans	8
Black	8
First Nations	7
Woman	6
Gay	6
Muslim	5
Arab or other Middle Eastern	5
Hispanic	4
Disabled, pregnant	4
Anti-Zionist Jew	4
Wears hijab	2
Palestinian	2
Asian American	1
White	-1
Republican or conservative	-3
Christian (white only)	-3
Jew	-3
Visibly religious Jew	-3
Jewish settler	-6
Identifies proudly as Zionist	-8
Trump Supporter	-8
White nationalist/neo Nazi	-18

Total score:

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Alaa Quresh

From JTA:

A chief rabbi of Jerusalem allowed a Palestinian man to be buried in a Jewish cemetery following his body’s exclusion by imams over his sale of real estate to Jews.

Aryeh Stern, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel’s capital, ruled this week as a rabbinical judge that Alah Kirsh may be buried at a Jewish cemetery as an exception because he was a “righteous gentile,” Ynet reported Friday.

Kirsh and five others were killed in a traffic accident on Nov. 4. His family sought to bury his body at their Muslim cemetery in eastern Jerusalem, but the imams turned them away because he had been accused of selling real estate in that part of the capital to Jews several years ago. The family was not allowed to bring Kirsh’s body to the Al Aqsa mosque and was forbidden to pitch a mourner’s tent and receive guests there, as is the Muslim custom.

Ekrima Said Sabri, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, cited a 1935 fatwa, or religious Muslim edict, issued by his predecessor, Amin al-Husseini.

A publicly anti-Semitic leader of Arab Israelis and ally of Nazi Germany, al-Husseini wrote that “anyone who sells a home or land to Jews will not receive a Muslim burial.” Basing a new fatwa on the old one, Sabri wrote: “Whoever sells to the Jews in Jerusalem is not a member of the Muslim nation, we will not accept his repentance and he will not be buried in the Muslim’s cemetery.”

Kirsh’s body was placed temporarily outside a Muslim cemetery in Nabi Salih, a village near Ramallah. Stern ruled that he may be buried at a section of the Jewish cemetery at Har Hamenuchot reserved for people without religion.

“Since the Muslims will not bury him, we must correct the distortion of justice that results in unjust humiliation of a man whose only sin was being prepared to sell land to Jews,” Stern wrote. “It is incumbent on us to honor a righteous gentile, and in this case a person who showed good will and was willing to take risks for the Jewish settlement.”

Arab media are reporting the story, and mentioning the severity of the fatwa by the Mufti as well as another one by a group of Muslim scholars in Jerusalem, saying that selling land to Jews is "one of the largest religious and national crimes committed against Islamic and Arab Jerusalem."

The commission that issued the fatwa stressed the inviolability of any property from Jerusalem, confirming the fatwa issued by the antisemitic Mufti in 1935, and extending it to refusal to sell any property to any non-Muslim out of fear that eventually a Jew might buy it. Christian Arabs in Jerusalem presumably cannot buy property either from Muslims, according to this fatwa.

The commission called on Muslims to "defame real estate traffickers."

Some forms of blatant discrimination against Jews are not found to be objectionable by the "progressives" and "human rights activists" of the world.

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The first comic about the Holocaust, 1955

In Friday's linkdump, there was an item about the late Stan Lee's final essay about how comic books tackled the issue of the Holocaust:

Amidst all the thrilling tales of superheroes foiling evil villains, my colleagues and I have more than once used the pages of comic books in an effort to educate readers about real-life topics. When I wrote the storyline about drug abuse for three issues of Amazing Spider-Man in 1971, and when Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil created stories about drugs, racism, pollution, and other hot-button subjects for Green Lantern/Green Arrow from 1970 to 1972, we were no longer just comic- book creators. We were also teachers.

I’m very proud that comic creators have taught about the Holocaust, too....

As far back as 1955, Al Feldstein and Bernard Krigstein created the astounding comic story "Master Race," about an encounter between a Holocaust survivor and a Nazi war criminal. To this day, that story gives me chills. As far as I know, it was the first attempt by comic creators to address the Holocaust and, appropriately, it is the first story in this volume.

I found the story. It is quite good.

Here it is:

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11/18 Links: UK Parliament hosts Israeli-hating MP despite her once praising the murderer of seven schoolgirls; What Is SJP Hiding?; Record number of tourists visit Israel in 2018

From Ian:

Parliament hosts Israeli-hating MP despite her once praising gunman who killed seven schoolgirls as 'a hero'

A Jordanian politician invited to a House of Commons event last week once hailed the gunman responsible for the slaughter of seven Israeli schoolgirls 'a hero'.

Dima Tahboub, an MP for Islamic Action Front, the political wing of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, rubbed shoulders with Andrea Leadsom, the Leader of the House, and International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt, who is also Minister for Women and Equalities, at the inaugural Women MPs Of The World Conference to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to stand for election to Parliament.

Unusually, MPs agreed for the floor of the Commons to be used for the event, but most of the delegates from more than 100 countries would have been unaware of Ms Tahboub's support for terrorist atrocities.
Dima Tahboub, an MP for Islamic Action Front, the political wing of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, had previously stated that Israel – and all Israelis – were ‘the enemy’

Dima Tahboub, an MP for Islamic Action Front, the political wing of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, had previously stated that Israel – and all Israelis – were 'the enemy'

She previously stated that Israel – and all Israelis – were 'the enemy', including seven Israeli girls, aged 13 and 14, gunned down by Jordanian border guard Ahmed Daqamseh in 1997.

A military tribunal rejected Daqamseh's claims that the girls had mocked him and jailed him for 20 years.

But Tahboub, pictured, who has a PhD from Manchester University, celebrated his release last year calling him a 'hero'.

Netanyahu: Early elections could bring Intifada-level disaster

Holding an early election could have disastrous results, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Sunday, even as his coalition partners continued to insist it was unavoidable.

“In a sensitive period for our security, we don’t need [an early election] and we know what happens when elements in a right-wing government led to the government being toppled, like in 1992 and in 1999, which brought us the disaster of Oslo and the disaster of the [Second] Intifada,” Netanyahu said at the opening of a cabinet meeting.

In 1992, Yitzhak Shamir was voted out of office and replaced by Yitzhak Rabin, and in 1999 it was Netanyahu who was followed by Ehud Barak as prime minister.

Netanyahu’s comments continued on a theme the Likud began on Thursday, warning coalition partners of the dangers of bringing about an early election.

The prime minister plans to meet with Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon on Sunday evening. Kahlon was the first to call for an early election after Avigdor Liberman resigned from the Defense Ministry and pulled his Yisrael Beytenu party from the coalition.

The cabinet is expected to vote on increasing pensions for police officers, along with NIS 22bn. in cuts across all ministries to pay for the raise, to which several ministers expressed opposition. Some see the cuts as an attempt to convince Kahlon to remain in the coalition, in that police officers would vote for his Kulanu party because of the new policy.

However, some in the coalition said an election would be inevitable.

Netanyahu said set to appoint foreign minister, hand out other portfolios

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will appoint a foreign minister in the coming days, according to reports on Sunday, amid a coalition crisis that is threatening to bring down his government and hasten elections.

Hebrew-language media reported Sunday that Netanyahu would likely appoint a Likud member as foreign minister, a post that he currently holds. Channel 10 news said Regional Cooperation Minister Tzachi Hanegbi and Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz were being considered for the position.

Shortly after the reports were published, the Likud party released a statement saying the prime minister would “appoint ministers in the coming days,” without elaborating. Currently, the prime minister holds the foreign affairs, defense, health, and immigration absorption portfolios.

Shortly after the announcement, the Jewish Home party said Netanyahu’s announcement of the appointment of a foreign minister “does not change anything” regarding its demand Naftali Bennett be made defense minister.

“This is a government that is nominally right-wing but acts left-wing,” the right-wing coalition party said in a statement. “The government is a government with leftist policies, a collapsed deterrence against Hamas, the failure to evacuate Khan al-Ahmar, a weak policy toward terrorists and their families after terror attacks.”

Liberal Jewish women notice that Linda Sarsour may really be an antisemite. (Don't worry, they'll forgive her.)

Linda Sarsour published on Facebook the classic antisemitic meme that American Jews who support Israel's existence are guilty of being more loyal to Israel than to America:

This caused some consternation among Jewish women who may be supportive of every single critic of Israel but who still have some vestiges of pride in their Judaism and awareness of the history of that slur:

Really, really, really disappointed to see this canard of dual loyalties from @lsarsour. I don't know if she's subtweeting my piece which actually defended @IlhanMN (https://t.co/84rOBEZAwf) but I am pretty upset by this. What a betrayal of the intersectional ideal. pic.twitter.com/e3JfdTn0W2
— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) November 16, 2018

Hi @lsarsour - you may not know this, but when you imply Jews put loyalty to #Israel above all else - including their progressive values - you’re feeding into a dangerous anti Semitic trope. Please choose your words more carefully. @AJCGlobal @ADL_National pic.twitter.com/BBqBgb621e
— (((TuttleSinger))) سارا تاتل سينجر (@TuttleSinger) November 17, 2018

Zioness, the unapologetically Zionist feminist group, was much stronger in its criticism:

.@lsarsour you are the only one masquerading as a progressive by exploiting social justice spaces to spread anti-Semitism. For centuries anti-Semites have accused Jews of dual loyalty. pic.twitter.com/ODI7BvZWwD
— Zioness (@ZionessMovement) November 16, 2018

The ADL also criticized Sarsour by retweeting the AJC:

Accusing Jews of dual loyalty is one of the oldest and most pernicious antisemitic tropes. No surprise to see it coming from @LSarsour. How long will progressive leaders continue to look the other way in the face of this hate? pic.twitter.com/cY6Mg7KhB4
— AJC (@AJCGlobal) November 16, 2018

But the ADL, which has been leaning heavily left, already knew Sarsour was problematic because she had previously accused them of being Islamophobic and absurdly claims that they are responsible for SU police brutality against minorities.

Will the Jewish feminist embracers of intersectionality and supporters of the Women's March learn the same lesson the ADL did?

I somehow doubt it.

(See also Ben Shapiro here.)

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When religious Israeli Jews demand human rights, they are just acting as immoral settler colonialists, argues another brain-dead academic paper

Here's an abstract for "Temple Mount pilgrimage in the name of human rights: the use of piety practice and liberal discourse to carry out proxy-state conquest," by Rachel Z. Feldman, published in Settler Colonial Studies last year:

Since 2010, Jewish pilgrimage to the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif compound has become an increasingly popular practice within Israeli society. On the Temple Mount, pilgrimage guides and their Jewish participants subjectively perform Israeli state sovereignty, carrying out a proxy-state attempt at land annexation through the format of a piety ritual. During pilgrimages, Temple Mount tour guides filter down a new discursive regime to participants, helping them to frame their act of conquest in the language of the liberal state, claiming that Jewish access to the Temple Mount is matter of ‘human rights’ and ‘religious freedom’. Today, Temple Mount pilgrimage is becoming a public ritual of liberal-settler colonial comportment, where Jewish pilgrims act on behalf of the state, laying claim to the Temple Mount by constituting themselves as human rights victims, and strategically inverting the relationship between settler and native. On the Temple Mount, religious piety and liberal ideologies conjoin, supporting forms of settler colonial domination in Israel/Palestine.

The paper itself is interesting in a few aspects. One is that the author is herself a religious Jewish woman, showing how the religion of anti-Israel studies has infected even some who understand that Jews are the indigenous people of Israel:

While I recognize the holiness of the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif compound for both Jews and Muslims, I do not condone the forced entry of Jewish pilgrims accompanied by armed guards inside the context of Israeli occupation. On a personal level, as an observant Jewish woman, this research represents my desire to address the cooptation of Jewish practice and spirituality, which I hold dear, for the use of land annexation and domination in Israel/Palestine. I wish to shift the conversation on the Temple Mount away from blaming religion and religious actors per say [sic], and instead, to reveal the particularly pernicious junctures of piety practice and liberal ideologies that embolden settler colonial regimes.

Nowhere in the paper does Feldman actually argue that the Jewish claim of equal rights to peacefully worship on the Temple Mount is not valid. The idea that religious Jews have human rights on par with Palestinians is derisively dismissed as mere politics. It cannot even be entertained. Instead. Feldman concentrates on how these Jews that she interviewed really want to build the Third Temple and to extend their "colonialism."

The most telling aspect of the paper is this part that she uses to describe Zionist Jews, but that applies to her and her Palestinian heroes far more:

The Temple Movement’s use of human rights discourse can be situated within a larger phenomenon exhibited by right wing pro-settlement organizations in Israel, who have learned how to mobilize human rights discourses to their advantage in recent years.58 Similar to the way humanitarian discourses were used by the United States to justify intervention in Afghanistan, human rights discourses, mobilized across the political spectrum in Israel, have become resources to legitimize violence and provide the moral justification for forms of settler colonialism.59 Human rights discourses are powerful tools in political projects of domination precisely because human rights appear as neutral, transcendent, and apolitical values.60 Yet, their mobilization at the local level is always political because human rights effectively ‘demarcate the borders of human’, establishing a hierarchy of civilians who fall under their purview.61

Wow. When Jews talk about their human rights, it is political and cynical. But, the implication is, when people talk about human rights of Palestinians, it is "neutral, transcendent, and apolitical."

Yet this entire paper trashes the human rights of Israeli Jews who want to worship on their holiest place, a right that is indeed enshrined in human rights laws.

Feldman's paper assumes that everything the Zionists do is oppressive, without describing why. That, my friends, is political.

(By the way every footnote in that paragraph refers to the same article. Which should be sort of embarrassing.)

It is more than disappointing to see a religious Jewish woman willing to throw her coreligionists under the bus, with a paper that has built-in biases that are obvious to anyone who is not already infected by the sickness that permeates these sorts of pseudo-scholarship. But perhaps more grating is that she uses interviews of Jews who would no doubt have trusted her not to use them as ammunition against their own human rights.

Finally, this is perhaps the most disturbing part of the paper:

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2014–2017).

The National Science Foundation funded a woman to fly to Israel to trash her own people in a paper that has nothing at all to do with the objectivity one expects from science or academia.

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Just an antisemitic pro-Hamas music video (update)

This video showing Hamas terrorists happily decapitating Jews was released recently as a means to terrify Israelis:

It happens to be grossly antisemitic. Here are some screenshots:

The video also makes it clear that the targets of Hamas have nothing to do with "occupation."

While the bad guys in the video look like religious Jews, here is what the good guys look like:

It is distasteful for Western media and diplomats to note the antisemitism that lies behind the groups that shoot rockets to Israel. The emphasis is that Palestinians are only against "occupation" and that this is merely a political dispute over land.

But when videos like this are released, you have to look very long and hard to find a single Palestinian Arab on social media pointing out that this is unacceptable.

Perhaps not every Palestinian Arab is antisemitic. But virtually all of them condone naked antisemitism when shown in context of attacking Israeli Jews.

(h/t @TheMossadIL, who also points out that the music is a direct ripoff of a Bollywood song.)

UPDATE:. The video is actually from 2017. (h/t Ibn Boutros)

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