Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, April 09, 2019

Tunisian actor says Jews "have a special smell"

In a recent radio interview, Tunisian actor Walid Nahdi recently accused Jews of having a distinctive body odor.

"When I was young we had Jewish neighbors whose smell I could not bear," he said on RadioMed.

"Jews have a special smell," he added.

"I can not stand sitting next to a Jew .. or a homosexual," Nahdi continued.

The Tunisian Minority Support Association filed a complaint against the actor for his comments against Jews and gays.

Ironically, his Instagram includes these memes:

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04/08 Links Pt2: A Rocket Hit My House. Now BDS Wants Me Out; CAIR Antisemites Fight ‘Anti-Semitism Awareness’ Bill; Guardian editors to Israeli voters: Trust us with your security.

From Ian:

A Rocket Hit My House. Now BDS Wants Me Out.

In January 2009, a long-range missile from Gaza was fired into Israel. This has been a common occurrence ever since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. As a child, I was taught at school to immediately run to a bomb shelter if sirens go off, so I did that.

I was home alone in my room and quickly ran to the shelter we had in our house. It was 9:30 a.m. Normally, I would stay in the shelter and wait for the sirens to stop, as rockets rarely reached my town of Gedera. Unfortunately, this day was different. A mere two seconds after I entered the shelter, I heard a loud boom, and felt my home collapse. After leaving the shelter, I saw the rocket had hit my bedroom and killed my dog Rosie. I was only 12 years old.

The story of my home in Gedera is not unique. It resonates with tens of thousands of Israelis who have been under a constant threat of rockets from Gaza over the past 18 years. According to the Israeli Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, 40 percent of the children in the Israeli border town of Sderot suffer from PTSD. This is what happens when, at any moment, you could be given only 15 seconds to run for shelter. The rockets often come unprovoked, as we witnessed as recently as two weeks ago: A long-range missile was launched from Gaza and flew over Tel Aviv, hitting the community of Mishmeret and wounding seven Israeli civilians.

But rockets are not the only threat from Gaza. In 2018, hundreds of hectares of Israeli fields were burned in the area surrounding Gaza because of burning kites and explosive balloons released from Gaza. In the poverty-stricken Gaza Strip, where 1.8 million Palestinians are crammed into 140 square miles and unemployment is over 50 percent, Hamas brags about having a tunnel system twice as large as the Viet Cong. Hamas is said to have spent between $30 million and $90 million and used 600,000 tons of concrete to build these tunnels. In 2006, Hamas used the tunnels to kidnap the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. In July 2014, Hamas militants used a tunnel to prepare an ambush in the fields of Kibbutz Nir-Am, but the Israel Defense Forces stopped them.

These examples are not meant to compare suffering with suffering, or military might with military might — a framing the BDS movement relentlessly tries to push. The people of Palestine are suffering, and deserve a chance at a peaceful life with dignity. They need a country, but it doesn’t have to replace our own.

#YouNeverToldMe is our fault. #WeNeverToldYou

Purporting to speak for young American Jews, IfNotNow, and other radical organizations are running the #YouNeverToldMe Campaign, accusing Jewish institutions of not sharing the full story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a Jewish educator, I feel guilty as charged.

As a proponent of this campaign put it on Twitter

“The #YouNeverToldMe campaign was born out of a pattern of realizations that the education we receive about Israel is one-sided and incomplete. @IfNotNowOrg has developed a syllabus that includes Palestinian narratives and an honest look at the Occupation.”

Indeed, we Jewish educators are guilty of not sharing the full story. This is why I decided to launch the #WeNeverToldYou campaign, for Jewish educators and professionals, to help alleviate this crisis.

#WeNeverToldYou that in 1948 just three years after the end of the Holocaust, Palestinians joined a proud campaign that openly declared it wanted a second Holocaust, to annihilate all the Jews between the river and the sea.

The Arch of Titus

The Jewish people have over a 3000 year connection to the land of Israel. The Arch of Titus in Rome, which showcases the Romans expelling the Jews after destroying and looting the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, serves as one of the main pieces of evidence that the Jews have an undeniable long history in Israel.

How many Palestinian Arabs would emigrate if they could?

Times of Israel reports:

Explaining his support for a one-state solution, Feiglin contended that over 90 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and 65% of Palestinians in the West Bank would already prefer to emigrate, making it possible to maintain a Jewish majority in an expanded sovereign Israel between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. (He did not specify a source for the statistics and the Zehut party was not able to provide one either.)

I don't know where he got his numbers from either.

The latest PCPSR poll of Palestinians notes 50% of Gazans and 22% of West Bankers say they want to emigrate, a far cry from Feiglin's assertion. It is possible that he is stretching the interpretation of the answers, because while I don't have the details of any recent surveys, older ones when asked the question had two separate answers "do not seek to emigrate" and "certainly do not see to emigrate," and it is possible that the Zehut party is choosing anyone who didn't say "certainly" as being a potential emigrant.

There is always the question of where they want to emigrate to. In Jordan, one third of citizens want to emigrate themselves, including nearly half with university degrees.

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Most of the kids marching against Israel on college campuses today were not even born in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, meaning they have little to no idea how much their rhetoric and actions are built on nearly 150 years of political tactics honed during the near 150 year "Age of Ideology" that began in the mid-19^th century and ended with the demise of the USSR.

But the behaviors we see among anti-Israel activists today did not emerge from thin air. For just as current Students-for-Justice-in-Palestine types insist that any true liberal must embrace their agenda (the PEP argument noted previously), Marxist ideologues in previous eras scoffed at progressives who "merely" wanted to improve the lives of workers or solve pressing social issues, rather than replace the entire capitalist system through a spasm of revolutionary violence.

And once it turned out that the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was only ever going to be a dictatorship, the ruthlessness of Soviet action was matched by a ruthlessness of language in which their every crime was denied and every accusation against it buried in a mountain of rhetoric insisting that the Marxist cause by judged solely by its theoretical goal of creating heaven on earth.

In service to the cause, nothing was off limits: not civic society within the USSR and not multi-national institutions outside of it, which is why tyrannies allied with the "movement" were so successful in corrupting virtually every organization dedicated to human rights and international law, turning them from potential moderating influences in an increasingly interconnected world to weapons of war.

Accusing those that created and perpetuated this system of cynicisms would be an error, for the people who split progressive and labor movements for their own ends, who ardently rejected any criticism of their crimes (while perpetually attacking their opponents) were driven by fanaticism that more resembled religious fervor than rational calculation.

The Jews played an unusual set of roles during this Age of Ideologies. While Medieval religious anti-Semitism was still rife when the political terms "Left" and "Right" were first coined (they applied to which side of the king one sat at the National Assembly at the time of the French revolution, BTW), by the time Karl Marx was writing what would become the sacred texts of the Marxist faith, negative reaction to Jews were being cast in economic and political vs. religious terms.

To Marx (a German who had long ago abandoned his own Jewish heritage), the continuation of the Jews for nearly two Millennia after the fall of the Jewish state was a political aberration growing out the need of powerful Christian elites for a class of moneylenders, rent collectors and economic middlemen to do their financial dirty work. This allowed kings and clerics to gather their rents and borrow the cash needed for their lifestyles and wars. And when their own loans came due, they could always sick the mob on these despised Jewish landlords and "loan sharks," and begin the cycle anew with a new set of Jews ready to play the game of politically powerless financial middlemen.

This novel description of Jewish history was fleshed out in Marx's famous essay On the Jewish Question, a work that today seems rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes, portraying Jews as congenial "hucksters" whose One God is actually Mammon. But when he wrote it, Marx had a different agenda in mind. For, according to the theories he was developing, the capitalist system was in the process of replacing the Jewish middlemen of antiquity with a class of capitalist (consisting of people of all faiths) which (according to Marx) meant the economic deformities once managed by a persecuted Jewish minority was now becoming the cornerstone of the modern political system.

Thus his call to free Europe from the Jew was really a call to free society from the "hucksterism" represented originally by the Jews but which now infested all of capitalist society. And what of actual Jews who (like Marx's parents and grandparents) were not simply economic abstractions? As with most human beings, they had a role to play within Marx's developing theoretical framework. In this case, they (meaning the Jews as a distinct people) were meant to disappear once their economic role became irrelevant as man passed into a new post-capitalist era.

To someone like Marx, this proposition was not entirely fanciful. For hadn't many people born into Jewish families (including Marx himself) shed their religious identity once they encountered European enlightenment? And if Marx and others he traveled with were able to successfully toss aside their Jewishness, wasn't that the ultimate solution to "The Jewish Problem" once a classless society freed from capitalism eliminated the need for Jewish middlemen and Jewish "husksterism" (whether practiced by Jews or Christians) entirely?

In one of his last works, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews and Israel, Robert Wistrich uses "ambivalence" to describe Leftist attitudes towards Jewish questions, given Marx’s predictions of the historic inevitability of Jewish assimilation and disappearance. In theory, this meant outright hostility towards Jews as Jews did not need to play much of a role in the political movements inspired by Marx’s works.

But this also meant that actually defending Jews against the racism being directed against them (especially by purely anti-Semitic political parties emerging in countries Germany and France in the decades following Marx's death) was equally irrelevant to the Marxist-informed Left. This is why you began to see condemnations of anti-Semitism (insults and violence directed at the Jews) balanced by equally vehement condemnations of "philo-Semitism" (attempts to defend Jews from these racist attacks), with arguments that Jews defending their own interests were guilty of parochialism and selfishness echoing to today.

As already noted, Marx's theories about the redemptive power of Jewish assimilation and disappearance were confirmed by his own experience, as well as the experience of other hyper-assimilated Jews attracted to various Socialist movements. But as these "enlightened" Jewish and non-Jewish Socialist began to encounter unassimilated Jews (especially those of Eastern Europe) and as Eastern and even Western Jews began to advocate for distinct Jewish political and even national rights, ambivalence turned to hostility which became more and more virulent as the "inevitable" world revolution never materialized, shaking Communist faith to its core.

Like so many disappointed millennialists, the revolutionary Left had someone to blame and a new cause to believe in (hostility to the Jews and their state) once their original Messiah failed to appear. How this played out will be covered next.

To be continued…

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04/08 Links Pt1: David Singer: Hashemite Rule in Jordan on Collision Course with Trump and Israel; The EU’s Heights of Golan Hypocrisy; Don't Rejoin the Iran Deal, Fix It

From Ian:

David Singer: Hashemite Rule in Jordan on Collision Course with Trump and Israel

The founding Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Charter in 1964 specifically excluded any PLO claim to sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.

In the 1967 Six Day War Israel captured Judea and Samaria from Jordan. The PLO – claiming Jordan and Israel to be one indivisible territorial unit – removed its non-claim to sovereignty from the revised 1968 Charter.

In September 1970 the PLO unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Jordan’s Hashemite ruler King Hussein. Israel helped save Hussein.

Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty 1994 (Peace Treaty) – which has withstood many events that could have seen its termination.

That Treaty is again under threat – as Jordan has:

indicated it is not prepared to renew an expired 25-year lease of Jordanian sovereign territory farmed by Israelis and

given the PLO 40% representation on the body charged with administering the Moslem Holy Sites in Jerusalem – breaching the Washington Declaration and the Peace Treaty.

Jordan’s resistance to negotiating with Israel on Trump’s plan could see Trump shelving it and abruptly ending the 2018 five years $1.275 billion America–Jordan Memorandum of Understanding underpinning Jordan’s security and stability.

The PLO – as in 1970 – is waiting in the wings as current ongoing unrest in Jordan is destabilizing continuing Hashemite rule there.

Abdullah might find that spurning Trump and Israel could see him facing the PLO on his own.

Yisrael Medad: TransJordan, 1933

Full Text:
A strong fight for the right of Jews to settle in Transjordania was put up at the last session of the League of Nation’s Mandates Commission, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency learned today, although minutes of the session will not officially appear before September. The fight was conducted mainly by the Dutch representative, D. Van Rees, vice-chairman of the Mandates Commission, who demanded an explanation of the British Government’s opposition to Jewish settlement of Transjordania.

Van Rees emphasized that the mandate does not exclude Jewish immigration in the Transjordan area, and he indicated that the population of Transjordania is in favor of Jewish settlement there. Van Rees pointed out that Transjordania is double the size of Palestine, but has only 300,000 inhabitants at present, while Palestine has 1,000,000.

LAND SALE PROHIBITION

“Besides, why prohibit sale of land there to Jews when the Emir Abdullah of Transjordania desires it?” he asked.

He also pointed out that many Jews living in Palestine at present are not Palestinians, but are still subjects or citizens of countries belonging to the League of Nations. Considering the principle of equality for the citizens or subjects of all countries which are members of the League, it would be impossible to prevent these persons from settling in Transjordania, Van Rees stated.

Evelyn Gordon: How Israel's Electoral System Brings the Country's Fringes Into Its Center

Like Haviv Rettig Gur in “How and Why Israelis Vote,” I, too, think the advantages of Israel’s parliamentary system outweigh its disadvantages, and for essentially the same reason: because it keeps a great many people in the political system who would otherwise remain outside it.

Critics of the system’s plethora of small parties—as Gur notes, no fewer than 43 parties have been vying for Knesset seats in this year’s election—maintain that it should be streamlined and redesigned so that only big parties would be able to enter the Knesset. In that case, the critics argue, people who currently vote for small parties would simply switch their votes to large ones.

No doubt, some voters would do so—but many others would not. There are at least three groups among whom turnout would plummet if niche parties became by definition unelectable: Arabs, Ḥaredim (including some ḥaredi Zionists), and the protest voters who, in every election, propel a new “fad” party into the Knesset. (In 2015, as Gur writes, the fad party was Kulanu. This year, it’s been Moshe Feiglin’s pro-marijuana, libertarian, right-wing Zehut party, which Gur doesn’t discuss although polls have consistently showed it gaining five to seven seats.)

Together, these three groups constitute roughly a third of the country, and all three are to some extent alienated from the mainstream. If they were no longer even participating in elections, that alienation would grow.

Why does this matter? In answering that question, I’ll focus mainly on Ḥaredim and Arabs, the most significant and also the most stable of the three groups (protest voters being by nature amorphous and changeable).

A serious proposal or simply an election ploy? Both @Tamar_hos_bran & @EVKontorovich tell @BeckyCNN that #Netanyahu’s talk about annexing West Bank settlements is about “changing the narrative.” pic.twitter.com/mqc6CdUMjo
— Connect the World (@CNNConnect) April 8, 2019

World Bank and EU partner with Kuwaiti BDS organization

The Kuwait-based Women's Cultural and Social Society (WCSS) has partnered with the EU on various events. One from last month is shown here:

They also meet with world diplomats, like from Australia.

Recently they met with World Bank representatives.

And they have also sponsored BDS events and "Israel Apartheid Week."

The EU promises not to support BDS groups, and have been shown to lie before about that. Add some more groups to the list.

(h/t WC)

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The Temple Mount status quo that never was

Haaretz has an article on a photo exhibition showing pictures of the Temple Mount since the dawn of photography at Jerusalem’s David Citadel Museum. (The article can be seen for free here.)

The article notes:

In the years to come (after 1967) the Temple Mount was photographed by countless Israelis who toured the place. In those years the Waqf didn’t seem to uphold the current so-called “modesty” regulations. Many men and women are seen strolling on the site in shorts, some holding souvenirs or bags after shopping in the Old City.

In the ‘70s the site was used by photographer Mula Eshet as a set for fashion photos for Gottex. In the display, a model wearing a blue dress is photographed on the background of the blue decorations of the Dome of the Rock – a scene hard to envision today.

These details show that the "status quo" of the Temple Mount that is supposedly upheld by the Jordanian Waqf never was. The restrictions on Israelis and Jews visiting the site that exist today, both in terms of clothing and in terms of carrying bags, didn't exist.

One more thing about that 1976 photo of the model.

I have noted on occasion that the Dome of the Rock has throughout the centuries been overrun with weeds, hardly how one would expect a Muslim holy site to be treated. Here's an example from the 1950s:

The Gottex model picture shows that there were weeds pushing through the pavement in the area even as late as 1976.

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Palestinians claim Trump will try to move them to the Sinai

Arab media is abuzz with rumors that the US purchased large parts of the Sinai adjacent to Gaza to move Palestinians to. There's even a map:

There have been rumors like this for years, and former Egyptian president Mubarak claims that Netanyahu asked him to give parts of the Sinai to Palestinians in 2010. He says that he resisted such plans since the 1980s when the Americans suggested relocating Palestinians from Lebanon to the Sinai.

The rumors resurfaced in the past two years in context of the Trump "Deal of the Century."

Now they have come up again. The map shown above was supposedly published by YNet in Israel but I cannot find it; it appears to be a screenshot of a video. According to this map and the rumors, the US would pay Egypt billions to purchase massive amounts of the Sinai which would become attached to Gaza in exchange for Israel annexing parts of the West Bank.

Israeli analysts bring up versions of this idea every so often. Just this week the BESA center published an article noting that Gaza's situation is partly the result of the Israel-Egypt peace plan in 1979:

Gaza could no longer develop westward into the potential open space between Rafah and El-Arish. The Strip was thus closed in the Egyptian direction and deposited on Israel’s doorstep as an urban pressure cooker on the verge of explosion.

The Palestinian media is of course against the idea, because even expanding their territory is anathema if it would help Israel. Some are even arguing that the boundaries of British Mandate Palestine are sacrosanct and must never be changed an inch, as they are burned into the consciousness of all Palestinians.

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ElderToons: Today's intersectionality

The funny thing is, it makes just as much sense as most "intersectional" gibberish.

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04/07 Links: Corbyn's Labour displays shocking lack of action against antisemitism; Ahed Tamimi says UK is “completely occupied and controlled by Israel” despite wanting to study here; How Qatar infiltrated The NYTs

From Ian:

Corbyn's Labour displays shocking lack of action against antisemitism

The extent of antisemitism raging in the British Labour party was displayed once more on Sunday morning, when The Sunday Times published an article exposing shocking messages Labour members shared online without being sanctioned.

The report titled "Labour’s hate files expose Jeremy Corbyn’s anti‑semite army" revealed how Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's office actively interfered, delayed and disrupted the inquiry into the hate-filled and conspiratorial posts by many Labour members.

Some examples of such posts include "Heil Hitler," Jewish MPs being accused of being "Zionist infiltrators," and blaming Israeli Jews for the 9/11 attacks. Complaints about these posts have been filed a year ago, yet none of the authors of these posts have been suspended from the party.

According to internal documents obtained by the paper, Cobyn's office interfered in 101 of such complaints.

The confidential emails and database which was last updated March 8, brought to light the antisemitic messages and the handling, or lack thereof, of the Labour Party under Corbyn's leadership.

One Labour member was returned to the party ranks after his message blaming Jews for the 9/11 attacks was exposed.

Ahed Tamimi says UK is “completely occupied and controlled by Israel” despite wanting to study here

Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian teen who slapped an Israeli soldier and called on others to become terrorists, has called the United Kingdom “racist” and “completely controlled by Israel” even though she is planning to study English here.

Asked a question about British exports of weapons to Israel, Tamimi replied saying, “The UK government is completely controlled by Israel, who are the biggest supporter of terrorism. They encourage the killing of Palestinian people.”

“The UK is completely occupied and controlled by Israel and it is supporting Israel to kill innocent people who are demonstrating for their rights,” Tamimi said.

Tamimi appears to be applying an anti-Semitic trope that Israel (or Jews) control foreign governments.

She turned further conspiratorial, saying, “The whole world is defeated, we are alone”, before declaring, “but I am pretty sure that the Palestinian people will bring back dignity to the whole world even to the UK who are supporting Israel. The UK brought Zionism to Palestine in the era of the British mandate. We will eventually end this occupation. Their power will not last forever.”

Ahed Tamimi then spoke of Israel’s actions on the Gaza border, falsely accusing Israel of wanting to “kill all Palestinians” – a blood libel.

“They (Israel) have no right to harm any Palestinian and this is another reflection to their terrorism. They want nothing but to kill all Palestinians so they can take all their land. They believe that all Palestinians should be killed, which also shows that they’re racist.”

How Qatar infiltrated The New York Times

Last weekend, Israel was attacked in a new way. No, I’m not referring to the horrific onslaught of rockets Hamas launched into Israel that left two children hospitalized and five others injured; the tens of thousands of rioters who tried to breach the Gaza border fence; or the three Palestinian youths who were killed.

I’m talking about an outlandish article published in The New York Times Magazine about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that evokes age-old anti-Semitic tropes to accuse prominent Jewish philanthropists, like Haim Saban, of holding the Democratic Party hostage on Israel — authored by a man with ties to one of the world’s biggest sponsors of terrorism.

Many rushed to shame the Times for welcoming writer Nathan Thrall’s “propaganda.” But it isn’t just the propaganda or anti-Semitism that should concern Jews everywhere – it’s Nathan Thrall himself and his alarming ties to Qatar. A deep dive by the Free Beacon revealed that Thrall is employed by an organization that receives funding from the Qatari government and has ties to several anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activists.

That’s right: The New York Times published an article written by someone connected to the Qatari payroll, who tars and feathers pro-Israel philanthropists, gives an international platform to the BDS movement, and devotes not a single of its 11,500 words to Qatar – the world’s central bank for terrorism and a known sponsor of Hamas.

David Brennan, a UK-based Newsweek reporter, somehow reported on an event in New York City last Friday - from London.

Anti-Israel organization IfNotNow held a rally in New York on Friday morning, blocking traffic fr a bit (to curses from commuters) and sitting at the entryway of the office building that houses Birthright, among scores of other offices.

Looking at Brennan's article, you see he has an entire interview with IfNotNow's spokesperson - which must have been done before the demonstration. He posted the article during the demonstration, and included a live feed from IfNotNow itself.

In other words, his article was an advertisement and press release for an anti-Israel organization, with no comment from anyone who opposes it.

The most ridiculous part was this pretense of even-handedness: the original version of the article said Birthright did not immediately respond to a request to comment. The article was datelined 9:08 AM EDT, Birthright wasn't even in their offices when and if he tried to contact them.

Since then the article has been updated with a comment, probably since I tweeted about his bias. But it doesn't mention that IfNotNow members were arrested by the police - because why wait until after a demonstration to report on it?

Of course, Brennan described IfNotNow as a "progressive Jewish" organization and not an anti-Israel organization, as its parent Jewish Voice for Peace is.

This isn't the first fawning article Brennan has written about IfNotNow - from Britain.

I remember when Newsweek was a respected news magazine.

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Feminism, jihadi style (photos)

Islamic Jihad held a conference last week called Women of Jihad.

It shows the deep respect that Gaza jihadists have for women.

They proved that they can hold signs as well as any man can!

And they can even hold guns!

Whoa - they can hold guns while walking!

Yet, as this skit shows, they are still unparalleled at sweeping floors.

The women in the audience were enthusiastic. At least, we assume they were.

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