Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

02/27 Links Pt2: Disdain For Jews Is The Sinew Of Identity Politics; Melanie Phillips: Poland v Israel round two, Labour party antisemitism; Run4Ari to Commemorate Ari Fuld HY’D in 2019 Jerusalem Marathon

From Ian:

Disdain For Jews Is The Sinew Of Identity Politics

Omar’s anti-Semitism drew endorsements from white supremacist David Duke and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. If there is one thing white supremacists and black nationalists share, it is hatred of Jews.

Women's March co-president Tamika Mallory, a vocal supporter of Farrakhan's, naturally added to Omar's defense, parroting Farrakhan's specious indictment of Jews as being responsible for the slave trade.

Jews provide a convenient focal point for the American Left's hate. And progressive Jews, given a choice between their leftist politics and their fading Jewish identity, have joined the Hamas chorus, lending a twisted credibility to hackneyed tropes that have resulted in inquisitions, crusader massacres, pogroms, and the Holocaust.

Max Berger, co-founder of the anti-Zionist IfNotNow, calls on his fellow Jews to stand with Omar against AIPAC, which Omar alleges buys votes from her fellow members of Congress.

Berger and Omar are obsessed with AIPAC, using old tropes of Jews and money. But somehow the various Arab lobbies, including the powerful Saudi and Emirates lobbies, escape their concern.

For all of Omar’s trafficking in allegations of Israeli apartheid, there is actually an empirical measurement of racism among states. Muslim states tend to be racist and xenophobic.

But Omar's accusations bear no relation to facts — as fellow traveler Ocasio-Cortez has said, if you are morally correct, the facts don't matter.

Neither do they matter to those who seek to mobilize a mass movement built on hatred as the sinew that ties it all together. In this pursuit, both Omar and her progressive accomplices are of one mind. Jews should take note, for those who do not pay attention to history are known to repeat it.

Douglas Murray: Must We Really Be Careful What We Do Lest We Offend Extremists?

What is striking and controversial are the repeated interventions into the debate made by the government's own 'extremism commissioner', Sara Khan. Over recent years Khan has been a hugely admirable figure. The founder and leader of the women's group 'Inspire', Khan has shown a generation of British people – including, most importantly, young Muslim women – that it is possible to be resilient against the fanatics in their faith and also to argue for the rights of women. She has been an unarguable force for good, and has had to withstand appalling pressure from Islamist groups in the UK.

"It is, I think, completely misconceived to suggest that we should change our foreign policy because it might cause some people to take up arms against us. That's a form of blackmail...." — Michael Howard, former Conservative party leader

In 2006 a small group of peers, MPs and Islamist groups sent an open letter to the then-Labour government. The signatories included the subsequently jailed Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, the subsequently disgraced (over expenses fraud) Baroness Uddin and the then-MP, now Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. This letter suggested to the UK government of the day that British foreign policy "risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad." This is a commonly heard argument of course, and is especially commonly heard from various extremist groups.

Melanie Phillips: Poland v Israel round two, Labour party antisemitism

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired the latest developments in our crazy world. On our agenda this week: well, afraid it’s pretty much wall-to-wall antisemitism. There’s a lot of it about, alas.

We first of all discuss the row that blew up between Israel and Poland over remarks, made first by Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu and then by its new foreign minister Israel Katz, drawing attention to the complicity of Polish people with the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

As I wrote here, the Polish government tries reprehensibly to conceal the fact that there were Polish anti-Jewish programs before, during and after the Holocaust. But Poland today is warmly disposed towards Israel and its friendship is valuable.

As I say in this discussion, the way for Israel to handle this delicate situation (the second time this row has erupted) is surely to be both fair and unsparing: to insist that the Polish government is wrong to try to sanitise its country’s history of anti-Jewish hatred, while acknowledging that the Nazis slaughtered thousands of Poles too and that many Poles risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis.

Avi and I then go on to discuss the crisis over antisemitism in Britain’s Labour party from which nine MPs have now departed, either partly or wholly in revulsion at the leadership’s continued refusal to deal with this scourge.

Hamas announced the death of Mohammed Ibrahim Qadih, 24, after suffering a heart attack while working in a "resistance tunnel."

Heart attacks are pretty rare for 24 year olds. It is possible that Hamas wanted to get rid of him and found a way to do it.

Ma'an reported that he died from an accident, not a heart attack. So something is not quite right with this story.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

The Cat In The Hat Comes Back Is A Zionist Ethnosupremacist Allegory (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

By Gree Vance, Professor of Literature, Bumblethuck College

New York, February 27 - Theodore Seuss Geisel earned numerous plaudits for his children's books, but a new examination of one of his better-known works reveals a dark undercurrent of racism, Islamophobia, and support of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by colonialist Europeans under the pretext of Jewish self-determination.

Other scholars have already provided academic treatment of the first book in the series, The Cat in The Hat (1957), notable among them: Uppjørs (1977), who perceived Freudian themes; Dissin-Terry (1980), who explored the recurring motif of Eurocentric anthropomorphism in gestalt as symbolized by the fish, the nameless mother figure, and the large red box; and the deconstructionist feminist modalities as brought to bear on the text and imagery by Blecch (1996). None of these, however, gave thorough treatment of the sequel The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (1958), and none of them touched on the glaring use of Zionist, colonialist, anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, and Jewish-supremacist in the latter work. This article aims to fill that void.

Seuss's name itself provides the first indication of intersectional problematics qua problematics, in that the author consciously uses a German surname coupled with the honorific "Dr.," a term that invites association with the established Jewish reverence for practice in the medial field; Seuss thus a priori plants in the unsuspecting reader's mind - it is a children's book - the notion that doctors, especially Jewish ones, should be trusted, effectively ignoring those doctors involved in the harvesting of Palestinian organs.

In general, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back traffics in classic racist assumptions, chief among them the notion that white, as represented by the snow, must remain free of color, represented by the bathtub ring. Disaster, in this Zionist racist view, occurs when the snow takes on color, as the European colonialist Zionists try to "cleanse" Palestine of peoples of color and only barely tolerate the Jews of color among them.

Each of the devices the characters employ in turn to effect this cleansing reflects a historical or ongoing motif in oppression of Palestinians: the bathtub, a reference to the Baath Party of Iraq under Saddam Hussein and of Syria under the Assad family, oft-cited justifications for Zionist supremacist militarism; mother's white dress, yet another example of feminine whiteness needing protection from other races, but also the appropriation of Palestinian dress and other elements of indigenous Palestinian culture such as falafel and hummus; the wall, which references both the racist Apartheid separation barrier and the claim that Jews have any rights to the al-Buraq wall surrounding Haram al-Sharif, calling the latter the "Temple Mount" and the wall the "Western Wall" of a fabled non-Khazarian structure of ancient irrelevance; Dad's $10 shoes, a dual reference to the control Jews exert over the world economy and the known Mossad tactic of stealing Palestinian activists' footwear; and the rug in the hall, which serves as a metaphor for Zionist ambitions to seize all the lands of the region, including Iran, the home of Persian rugs.

The indoctrination and justification of ethnic cleansing continues with the "stain" transferred to the bed, an endorsement of the dehumanizing of Palestinian women inherent in IDF soldiers refusing to rape them; then, when he Zionists alone cannot effect the cleansing they aim to achieve, they must rope in other outsiders such as the US, represented by the 26 little cats whose efforts only bring further mayhem, and whose efforts to commit genocide prove unsuccessful as the oppressed Palestinian population of color continues to multiply.

In the end, much like the Zionists of our world, the characters in the book can only preserve whiteness by annihilating enemies in a cataclysmic blow, reminiscent of Israel's nuclear weapons and its ongoing efforts to prevent peace-loving countries such as Iran from attaining.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

02/27 Links Pt1: Palestinians and the Disastrous Politics of Rage; The Rise of Fatah, Fifty Years On; Caroline Glick vs. Donald Trump; India used Israeli arms for strike inside Pakistan

From Ian:

Palestinians and the Disastrous Politics of Rage

Palestinian victimhood knows no reconciliation with Israel because central to identity politics is the conviction that permanent victim status must be maintained.

Palestinian identity politics hamstrings Palestinian aspirations for a better life. Grassroots criticism of the Palestinian leadership is disallowed because it threatens the collective Palestinian identity.

Failing to establish the institutions of a functioning state, Palestinian leaders turn to globetrotting in a look-busy-while-doing-nothing action plan of self-righteousness. They insist the world must come and save them.

Palestinians pluck the chords of European colonial guilt in order to receive generous aid, discouraging Palestinian self-agency and personal responsibility.

Palestinians routinely call for "days of rage," where the rage is an end in itself that fuels an identity predicated on victimhood.

The narrative of victimization loosens moral standards. When a Palestinian murders a Jew, it is explained and excused as "a natural outcome of the occupation." Ironically, Palestinians ignore just how racist their own narrative of victimization really is.

To maintain that any Israeli Jew is a fair target for murder simply because he is an Israeli Jew - is racist. To maintain that any Palestinian has license to murder simply because he is Palestinian - is racist.

Palestinian leaders will "keep the conversation going" about reconciliation interminably because of the capital they accrue with world leaders by doing so.

CAMERA Op-Ed: The Rise of Fatah, Fifty Years On

February 4, 2019 marked an important, albeit unheralded, date: the fiftieth anniversary of the ascension of Fatah in Palestinian politics. On Feb. 4, 1969, the movement’s founder, the Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat, was appointed chair of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). For most of the half century since, Fatah has dominated Palestinian affairs—with fateful consequences for the Middle East and beyond.

Arafat, his biographer Barry Rubin wrote, “succeeded at creating and remaining the leader of the globe’s longest-running revolutionary movement.” Yet both he and Fatah would also lead “his people into more disasters and defeats than any counterpart.”

It was a swift, but uneven, rise for both.

Arafat and about fifteen others founded Fatah on Oct. 10, 1959 in a private home in Kuwait. At the time, Arafat was an engineer working for Kuwait’s Department of Public Works. Most of his compatriots were young Palestinian students or workers employed in the country, which was then experiencing an oil boom and economic growth. They called themselves Harakat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya (Palestinian Liberation Movement), whose acronym reversed spells Fatah, which means “conquest.”

Arafat himself was deeply influenced by his time at King Fuad University in Cairo, where he received military training from Muslim Brotherhood members who were active on the campus. Arafat, Rubin records, would later seek “to play down his connections with the Brotherhood since it posed political problems” for him in future dealings with Arab nations that viewed the organization as a threat.

But the Muslim Brotherhood nevertheless influenced his ideology. Arafat and Fatah’s role models “did not come from Arab nationalist leaders or thinkers” like the Syrian or Iraqi Ba’athists or Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, “but from the struggle of the early Muslims for whom only total victory over infidels and Crusaders was acceptable.” Indeed, as Rubin pointed out, Arafat’s chosen nom de guerre was Abu Ammar—in honor of a man the Palestinian leader described as “the first martyr of Islam.”

Caroline Glick vs. Donald Trump

Continuing his meet the candidate series, Gil Hoffman interviews New Right Knesset candidate and former Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick.

Two years after she was the keynote speaker at an influential pro-Trump rally in Jerusalem, Glick vows to “absolutely” be the opposition who stops the plan by pressuring Netanyahu to reject it.

She says she will be in the Knesset to prevent “the partition of Jerusalem and giving 90% of Judea and Samaria to terrorists,” because the plan is a “danger” and “antithetical to the US’s national security interests almost as much as it is to Israel’s.”

As a Knesset member, she promises to send that message to the Trump administration. Gil also reveals how he got the scoop on a rabbi who compared the views of an Israeli political party to Nazism.

Zionist letter methodically taking apart a Reform writer's anti-Zionist arguments, 1918. Some things don't change. (Library of Congress) pic.twitter.com/Xr4dzR46up
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) February 27, 2019

Since the "woke" crowd is so attuned to antisemitic dog whistles, what do they think about this one?

Enemies of humanity, i.e. intl’ capitalists & Zionists, have decided since 100 years ago to destroy families which represent a divine tradition. Wherever people ignored divine laws, they managed to implement their policies and they tried to do so in our country, but they failed.
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 26, 2019

"Enemies of humanity, i.e. intl’ capitalists and Zionists"? Can it get any more blatant?

But I don't expect many European intellectuals or progressive Americans to be too upset over this antisemitic tweet from a world leader with half a million followers in English.

Because they want to be allied with him.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Arab and Muslim media, especially Palestinian media, routinely deny that there were ever any Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount.

This academic paper by Milka Levy-Rubin about why the Dome of the Rock was built to begin with gives copious amounts of proof that show that the Muslims who built the Dome chose the site precisely because of its association with the two Temples.

The main point of the paper, published by the Bulletin of SOAS at the University of London in 2017, is that the Dome of the Rock was meant to be a rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon which would fulfill the need by Muslims to have their own significant holy place in their conquered lands that could compete with the Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople which claimed to have surpassed in beauty of Solomon’s temple.

Whether she proves this or not is not the point here. She does bring lots of proof from early Muslim literature on the Dome of the Rock that leaves no doubt that Muslims understood the importance of the site and chose it because of its history and holiness to Jews.

Most scholars now agree that the initial motivation behind the Muslim sanctification of the Temple Mount and the building of the Muslim religious monuments on it was the return to the sanctified place of the Jewish Temple. Hence the use of terms such as Bayt al-Maqdis (Hebrew Beit Ha-Miqdash), a term used for both the temple itself and the city of Jerusalem, and Haykal (Hebrew – Heykhal), the search for the Rock of Bayt al-Maqdis and its sanctification and the Muslim tradition regarding the active participation of the Jewish convert Kaʿb al-Ahḅ ār, or, in a later Jewish tradition, the Jews themselves, in locating the sacred spot. The fact that they were building “The Temple of God” (naos Theou) is mentioned also by Anastasius the Sinaite, a contemporary Christian source writing at the time of the building of the Dome.

More importantly, in ʿAbd al-Malik’s Dome of the Rock the rituals themselves seem initially to have been related to Jewish Temple rituals, including the special attire worn by the performers of the ceremonies, the assignment of a special status to Mondays and Thursdays, days of special importance in Jewish liturgy, purification before the rituals, the mode in which incense was used, the call for prayer and more. Although this was short-lived, it was nonetheless the obvious reason for choosing this site. Based on artistic features corroborated by Islamic sources, some scholars, such as Soucek and Shani, claim in fact that it is specifically the Solomonic temple that was being reconstructed in the building of the Dome of the Rock.

As noted by Livne-Kafri, Muslim sources convey the pain of the Jews over the destruction of the Temple and hopes for its resurrection by Muslims. Many of these are found especially in the Fadạ̄ ʾīl Bayt al-Maqdis (Praises of Jerusalem) literature, now recognized as representing early traditions from the second half of the seventh and the eighth century CE. While these traditions have been preserved only in the compilations of al-Wāsiti (d. 1019) and ̣ al-Musharraf b. al-Murajjā (d. c. 1055), Kister discovered that many of them are found in the commentary on the Quran by Muqātil b. Sulaymān (d. 768).

Moreover, both were careful to note the chain of transmission of the traditions, choosing also to include in their collections Isrāʾīliyyāt, i.e. traditions received from Jews and converts, which were often criticized and omitted in other sources.

Muslim identification with the Jews regarding the Temple Mount is manifest in a rare tradition, which divulges the initial ties to Jewish sentiment, before its dissociation:

From Kaʿb al-Ahḅ ār, it is written in one of the holy books: “Ayrūshalāyim, which means Jerusalem (Bayt al-Maqdis), and the Rock which is called the Temple (al-haykal). I shall send to you my servant ʿAbd al-Malik, who will build you and adorn you. I shall surely restore to Bayt al-Maqdis its first kingdom, and I shall crown it with gold and silver and gems. And I shall surely send to you my creatures. And I shall surely place my throne of glory on the Rock, since I am the sovereign God, and David is the King of the Children of Israel”.

Note the use of the name Ayrūshalayim in its Biblical form, with a translation of the name, and the lām and nūn al-taʾākīd, laying stress on the verbs, and giving it a prophetic aura. The last sentence has clear Jewish connotations. In fact, according to this tradition the temple will be reinstated by ʿAbd al-Malik after which God will once again place his throne of glory there.

The mention of David, the king of the children of Israel here, leaves no doubt that the aim is to restore the ancient Jewish Temple.

This rare tradition exposing the initial connection to Jewish tradition, which was identified as one of the Isrāʾīliyyāt, was later adapted and censured, leaving out David and the Children of Israel.

The idea that God’s throne was located on the rock is an ancient Jewish idea. The Ark of the Covenant was conceived as God’s throne or footstool and Jeremiah prophesies that the whole of Jerusalem will replace the ark as God’s throne (Jer. 3: 16–7). Jewish legend speaks about the “lower throne” which is found underneath the “heavenly throne” and in fact reaches all the way up to it.81 This tradition resonates in Muslim literature as well. Ibn al-Murajjā cites the convert Kaʿb al-Ahḅ ār: “It is said in the Torah that [Allah] said to the Rock of Bayt al-Maqdis: you are my lowest throne and from you I ascended to heaven...”. Rosen-Ayalon and Shani claim that the inside of the Dome itself in fact attempts to portray the setting of God’s throne. This idea goes hand-in-hand with many other features attributed to the sakhra ̣ or to bayt al-maqdis in Muslim tradition which originate in Jewish tradition.

Muslims have always known that the Temple Mount is the site of the Jewish Temples. The Arabic words to refer to the area - Bayt al-Maqdis and Haykal - are directly taken from the Hebrew descriptions of the Temple.

Only in this generation are Muslims being taught otherwise - for purely political and antisemitic reasons.

(h//t Yoel)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Pro-Palestinian and pro-BDS social media activists are very happy to see the hip-hop group DAM announcing their tour of England next week:

What they don't mention is that DAM is based out of Lod, Israel.

They might identify as Palestinian, but they are Israeli. They might have songs that are anti-Israel, but they pay Israeli taxes. They started their career singing in Hebrew and playing in Tel Aviv clubs. Their first anti-Israel song was written after one of their friends was killed in a shooting - even though he was killed by an Arab.

Their Internet domain is registered in Israel.

By any definition, they are an Israeli hip-hop group that sings now in Arabic.

But BDS isn't boycotting this Israeli band.

No, the woke people behind BDS only boycott "Israeli" artists when they are Jewish. If DAM would bring in a leftist anti-Israel Israeli Jew to sing with them, they would lose every gig in England because of protests.

BDS is pure Jew-hatred dressed up as "anti-Zionist."

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

02/26 Links Pt2: The BBC and Guardian as fake news outlets. Enabling antisemites; Thirty-million-page backup of humanity headed to moon aboard Israeli lander

From Ian:

‘Telling Israel’s story in the 21st century will have a lot less to do with the Warsaw Ghetto than it will with Kurdistan and Aleppo.’ An interview with Matti Friedman

Journalist and author Matti Friedman talks to Fathom Deputy Editor Calev Ben-Dor about his acclaimed recent book, Spies of No Country which tells the little known story of the origins of Israeli intelligence by following four of Israel’s first spies through the 1948 War of Independence. He also discusses the importance of the ‘Mizrachi’ component in Israel’s identity, arguing that without grasping its centrality, neither Israelis, Westerners nor those in the Arab world can properly understand the country

CB-D: I recently interviewed Yossi Klein Halevi about his book, Letters to my Palestinian Neighbour and one of the things he emphasised was how he wanted to tell a 21st century Zionist story. You touched on this earlier, in that the story often told is overly Euro-centric – the narrative begins with the pogroms in Russia and ends with the Holocaust. Your book, which is different in many ways, has a similar idea in that if we are to tell the story of Israel today – both to Israelis and outsiders – we need to make it more accurate to include a Mizrachi component.

MF: People still tell the story of Israel as: When the Jews of the Islamic world moved to Israel they joined the story of the Ashkenazim – so the story of Israel is the story of the Jews of Europe. But having thought about this, and having lived here for 23 years, it is clear to me that what actually happened is much closer to the opposite. The remnants of the Jews of Europe come to the Middle East and inserted themselves into the story of the Jews of the Islamic world. The State of Israel is shaped by our contact with Islam and Jews who have lived here for centuries. The dominant narrative of the European Jews is wrong.

Looking ahead, telling Israel’s story in the 21st century will have a lot less to do with the Warsaw Ghetto than it will with Kurdistan and Aleppo. And Western observers find that difficult. But if we want to understand Israel, we are going to have to make an effort to move our centre of consciousness to the Middle East because that’s where we are.

Jewish 'New York Times' writer to pen book on antisemitism

New York Times opinion editor and columnist Bari Weiss will be writing a book about fighting antisemitism.

Weiss has penned a two-book deal with Crown Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House, she announced on Twitter this week. The first book, due out in September, is titled How to Fight Anti-Semitism, and was described as “an urgent wake-up call to all Americans, exposing the alarming rise of antisemitism in this country and in Europe – and explains what we can do to defeat it.”

Weiss gave a speech on the topic of fighting antisemitism on Monday evening, at the Temple Emanu-el Streicker Center in New York City.

The Jewish writer and editor, who grew up in Pittsburgh, worked at Tablet magazine and The Wall Street Journal before landing at The New York Times in 2017.

During her time there, she has written several columns on the Jewish-American experience and antisemitism in the 21st century.

Weiss called US President Donald Trump's refusal to condemn neo-Nazis in Charlottesville an "utter moral failure," and called out Rep. Ilhan Omar for "making accusations based on nothing more than prejudiced stereotypes." Last year, after the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where Weiss held her bat mitzva, she penned a moving op-ed.

David Collier: The BBC and Guardian as fake news outlets. Enabling antisemites.

When did the BBC and the Guardian become ‘fake news’ outlets? Last week the Guardian newspaper, published a letter, written by ‘over 200 Jewish members’. It was compiled to belittle the problem of antisemitism in the Labour Party, and in support of Jeremy Corbyn. For some (as yet to be discovered) reason, BBC News even gave airtime to it. The letter is no more than a rehash of the last time the Guardian decided to give this particular rabble a voice. Nor any different from the one before that, nor the one before that. We can follow this line all the way back to 2002, when the Guardian first gave publicity to the movement that was to become BDS.

Who is inside the rabble? People like Naomi Wimborne Idrissi, who have spoken under the flag of the soon to be proscribed Hezbollah and Elleanne Green, founder of the antisemitic Palestine Live Facebook group. Without the antisemites, this group could not gather a regular ‘minyan‘, which is why they never publicly demonstrate. In other words everybody should know, including those at the BBC and the Letters Editor at the Guardian newspaper, that this fringe crowd is not a legitimate ‘Jewish’ voice.

Last September, the Independent also gave publicity to another list of Jewish organisations that upon closer inspection was also not a legitimate Jewish voice. That list even contained the vile group ‘Scottish Jews against Zionism‘. The face of ‘ScottishJAZ’ is Jolanta Hadzic:

Jolanta is just another person who spreads rabid antisemitism and Holocaust denial:

What do all these letters have in common? That it is always the same names. Some of those involved are not Jewish and some are even publicly outed hard-core antisemites. Both the Independent letter and the Guardian letter have signatories who spread Holocaust Denial. The situation is absurd. There are always people who will stand in opposition to anything. You can find Christians who oppose Christ, people who believe in Santa and Muslims who fast on Yom Kippur. There are more people who believe that they were abducted by aliens, than there are active anti-Zionist Jews in the UK. Would the BBC or Guardian run an article about alien abductees every time they aired a show featuring Brian Cox in order to ‘add balance’?

No of course not, because they would quickly be regarded as fake new junk sites. Which is exactly why we must not let them get away with how they treat Jews.

The head of the PLO's executive committee, Saeb Erekat, said that Hamas had revealed its true nature and had officially removed its mask to prove that it was an operational tool for Donald Trump's "deal of the Century" peace plan.

Erekat said to Voice of Palestine Radio that Hamas and others calling for Abbas to leave his role as president are "functional tools created to carry out the strike against the Palestinian national project and prevent the establishment of an independent state."

There have been some large rallies in Gaza recently, organized by Hamas, calling on Abbas to resign.

It used to be that Palestinians accused each other of being Zionist, or Jewish. Now they are accusing each other of supporting Trump.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

More new captions for old cartoons

Yesterday, I posted some cartoons I took from The New Yorker and changed their captions to be reflective of the casual antisemitism of today's Left.

Here are some more:

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

02/26 Links Pt1: Douglas Murray: The UK’s Hezbollah ban is a victory for common sense; Denmark, Australia: UNHRC must stop biased treatment of Israel

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: The UK’s Hezbollah ban is a victory for common sense

On the one hand was the military wing of Hezbollah, which has spent decades raising the levels of violence in Lebanon and bringing destruction to various neighbouring countries, including Israel and Syria, as well as further afield. But according to the UK Foreign Office this organisation was a totally separate entity from the one known as Hezbollah (political wing). Of course this division of labour within Hezbollah existed in no other realm other than the minds of a few officials in Whitehall and their counterparts across Europe. It didn’t exist in the eyes of anyone in the region. It didn’t exist when the terrorist group blew up a bus carrying tourists in Bulgaria in 2012, or attacked targets in South America. And it certainly didn’t exist in the eyes of Hezbollah itself, who must have been bemused by the division of labour which the British Foreign Office chose to impose upon people working in the same organisation.

So as I say, a victory for common sense. But also a victory for the many victims of Hezbollah’s terror across several continents. It should also be said that this is a victory for the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, who appears to be chalking up a set of wins at the moment. Though the action he announced this morning is only what any and all of his predecessors could have and should have done (these facts have all been known in Whitehall, as elsewhere, for many years) the fact that he has done it is commendable.

There is only one other thing to say. For years at radical and Islamist demonstrations in London it has been commonplace to see the flag of this terrorist organisation being waved. After such events – such as the Khomeinist ‘Al-Quds Day march’ which takes place in London each year – the police have said that they will not arrest people flying the flag of Hezbollah because the wavers might be demonstrating support for the (unbanned) political wing rather than the (already banned) military wing. From now on that distinction will quite rightly not be able to be held or claimed. So as well as pursuing any and all funds that go through the UK or UK banks for Hezbollah or any of its subsidiaries, it can be presumed from now on anybody flying the Hezbollah flag in Britain will be arrested, tried and imprisoned for supporting a terrorist group. I find myself almost looking forward to ‘Al-Quds day’ this year.

Labour Refuses to Support Hezbollah Ban

Just hours after Labour chose to impose only a one-line whip on the vote on banning Hezbollah, meaning that Labour MPs – including Corbyn – are under no obligation to vote for the ban, a Labour spokesman has gone further and directly challenged Sajid Javid’s decision to ban it:

“The Home Secretary must therefore now demonstrate that this decision was taken in an objective and impartial way, and driven by clear and new evidence, not by his leadership ambitions.”

Hezbollah is already banned in its entirety – including the political wing – by numerous states and organisations from the United States to the Arab League. Even apart from their direct terrorist and military activities, Hezbollah are prolific spreaders of Holocaust denial and egregious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and their ultimate goal remains the destruction of Israel. Hezbollah itself has mocked the supposed distinction between its military and political wings that its apologists like to promote in the West…

Corbyn once again shows why he is completely unsuitable to be Leader of the Opposition, let alone Prime Minister. Labour MPs who talked themselves into not quitting the party yet because of his second referendum pledge must be having serious second thoughts already…

Pro-Maduro guerillas attack Jewish journalist Annika H. Rothstein

Jewish political writer and journalist Annika H. Rothstein was one of several journalists to be attacked and robbed on Venezuela’s border with Columbia.

Rothstein, a native of Sweden, was detained by paramilitary guerillas sympathetic to embattled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday.

“I was taken by the pro-Maduro guerilla in San Antonio del tachira, robbed and beaten along with my security and then they forced us to get on our stomachs while they held guns to the back of our heads. They took everything we had,” Rothstein tweeted on Saturday from a stranger’s phone.

“The guerilla was HEAVILY armed and I truly believed they would kill us all, they saw my camera and press pass and put guns on us all. After they finally let us go we only got 10 minutes down the road before gunfire broke out on both sides and we hid in a shed for over an hour,” she also tweeted. “They yelled at me that I was trying to infiltrate Venezuela and that what I was doing was a crime, they took my things and called it contraband and slapped me across the face when I didnt move bc of shock.”

Ricochet Podcast: Annika Rothstein Alive from Caracas

Annika Rothstein @truthandfiction, an independent journalist, has been reporting for some time on the miseries – and resilience – of the Venezuelan people. Last weekend she went to the Colombian border, where government forces had assembled to keep an aid convoy from entering the country.

The story she got was one she was lucky to survive. We speak to her in relative safety, where she recounts the story of a very bad day in a dangerous country – and what the people she encountered say about the forces wrecking Venezuela.

Check out the Palestinian cabinet's new tablet PCs

The Palestinian Cabinet meets every week and issues bland statements about how evil Israel is and what the next official holiday will be.

But this week, the image of the meeting seems to have something new.

Let's look a little closer:

These look like 10 or 11 inch tablet PCs, purchased very recently.

Somehow, there is always money for the things they really want. Which are rarely the same as what their people want.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.