Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, April 15, 2019

04/15 Links Pt1: Has the Body of Israeli Hero Eli Cohen Been Recovered?; Trump Deal Offers No Palestinian State; PA: Zionism = Antisemitism

From Ian:

JCPA: Has the Body of Israeli Hero Eli Cohen Been Recovered?

The Syrian opposition issued reports that the remains of the Israeli spy Eli Cohen had been delivered to the Russians, and they also gave details about the remains of Israelis buried in Syria, in general.

There has been no clear Israeli denial of these reports. If Cohen’s remains have indeed been transferred, they will have to undergo Israeli identification. Meanwhile, the Syrian opposition also issued new information on how Syrian intelligence has been guarding the remains of Israelis in Syria at President Bashar Assad’s bidding.

Israeli intelligence agent Eli Cohen

The Syrian opposition reported on the remains of Israelis and how the Syrian regime has been tending to them.

The first report was issued on Twitter on April 14, 2019, by someone in the Syrian opposition, and it concerned the remains of the Israeli spy Eli Cohen.

The tweet stated:
There are unverified leaks within Damascus itself about a coffin that was transferred with the Russian delegation that left Syria. The leaks say the coffin may contain the remains of the Israeli spy Eli Cohen. We are awaiting verification.

No other source has verified this tweet, which was first publicized in Israel by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. It, too, however, has not been denied clearly by Israel.

Subsequently, the Syrian-opposition website Orient Net posted a detailed report on the remains of Israelis buried in Syria.

Rumors on Eli Cohen’s remains spread in Arab media

Rumors circulated Sunday night that a Russian team, possibly assisted by Syrian opposition groups, had extricated the remains of venerated Israeli spy Eli Cohen, taking them from Syria in a coffin and preparing to return him to Israel.

The legendary “our man in Damascus,” Cohen spied on the Syrian military establishment for four years after befriending top-level Syrian officials and celebrities under the alias Kamel Amin Thaabet. After being discovered, he was tortured by the Syrians before being executed on May 18, 1965.

In Israel, his name became synonymous with self-sacrifice and heroism, the information he provided having been fundamental to Israel’s decisive victory in the Six Day War.

Israeli officials have kept silent regarding the reports, which came in just two weeks after Sgt. 1st Class Zachary Baumel was buried on Mount Herzl, 37 years after he went missing during a battle of in Operation Peace for the Galilee.

Baumel was also exhumed by Russia and his personal effects were honored in a special ceremony in Moscow attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Since Cohen’s execution, widow Nadia Cohen has been working to bring his remains home but to no avail. In 2008, a former bureau chief of former Syrian leader Hafez Assad said no one knew where Cohen was buried, because the grave had been relocated when officials became concerned that Israel would find it.

Last year, Nadia was presented with her late husband’s wristwatch by the Mossad intelligence agency, an article which had been retrieved in a special operation.

PMW: PA: Zionism = Antisemitism

With victimhood being the most prominent component of Palestinian identity, and with the world increasingly condemning Antisemitism, the Palestinian Authority has decided to embrace Antisemitism as a new category of Palestinian victimhood. The PA Foreign Ministry has announced that since Palestinians are "Semites," any policies that harm Palestinians are expressions of Antisemitism. Since the PA sees Zionism as victimizing Palestinians - "Zionism is hostile to Palestine" - they conclude that Zionism inherently is Antisemitism. Moreover, American policy critical of the Palestinian Authority, is likewise Antisemitism.

This creative new Palestinian victimhood category announced by the PA comes in response to the American position expressed recently by Secretary of State Pompeo: "Let me go on record: Anti-Zionism IS Antisemitism."

According to the PA's new announcement, anti-Zionism cannot be Antisemitism because Zionism itself, by hurting Palestinians, is Antisemitism.

The following is an excerpt from the article in the official PA daily:
"The [PA] Ministry of Foreign Affairs... said that... American Secretary of State [Mike] Pompeo has voiced a series of false positions... Pompeo has allowed himself to remove the Palestinians and the Arabs from the Semitic race by stating that 'Anti-Zionism or objection to Israel's existence as the homeland of the Jewish people, is a type of Antisemitism that is escalating (see note below -Ed.).'

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasized that hostility towards the Palestinian people is Antisemitism, and that the ugly, recurring, and deliberate Antisemitism that [US President] Trump's administration is committing against Semitic Palestine is also Antisemitism. In addition, the American administration has no right to ignore the fact that Semitism is not exclusive to the original Jews, but also includes the Arab Palestinians, and therefore any manifestation of hostility towards Palestinians is an explicit manifestation of Antisemitism. Moreover, since Zionism is hostile to Palestine, its people, and the establishment of a national homeland for the Palestinian people on the land of its homeland, this makes Zionism itself antisemitic."
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 29, 2019]

Most NGOs in Gaza and the West Bank care little about actual Palestinians. As we have seen over and over again, organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, not to mention most Palestinian-based NGOs like Adalah, do nothing to help actual Palestinians and spend all of their time and money in the region on bashing Israel.

Exceptions are rare but worth highlighting.

One of the biggest challenges to the Palestinians, especially in Gaza, is jobs. There seem to be more of them employed to generate white papers about how bad things are than to actually do anything positive for their community. The fact that Hamas actions have isolated Gaza means that Palestinians that want good jobs need to look for jobs that can be done from anywhere in the world.

I am aware of only one such initiative, and that is Gaza Sky Geeks, run by MercyCorps in conjunction with many partners including Google.

The Code Academy, a joint project of Gaza Sky Geeks and Founders & Coders International, is the first full-stack coding bootcamp in Palestine. We will train 16 students per cohort in a full-time, intensive course for 8 weeks with an additional 16 weeks of project-based learning with real-world clients to jumpstart your professional portfolio. The objective is to graduate as full-stack developers who can deploy production-grade software online and secure high-quality jobs with companies or work as freelance developers.

Our immersive course is peer-led and project-based with students working in teams of 4. Students take turns delivering workshops, running code reviews, and managing projects. The course covers test-driven development, using a full JavaScript stack (JavaScript and Node.js) with relational databases. We also teach aspects of UX design and project management.

Once finished, graduates of the Code Academy will be competent full-stack developers, able to work in big teams, build complete prototypes to test their ideas, work with clients, and manage the lifecycle of a product.

Unlike other NGOs, I see no hint of a political program in this initiative. This is one of the very few programs that are truly meant to help Palestinians and not look at them as pawns to further an anti-Israel objective.

The real question is, why is Gaza Sky Geeks so anomalous?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be that the other NGOs have learned that bashing Israel is the easiest way to raise money. The people who pretend to want to help Palestinians are usually really anti-Israel (and the only reason to be so obsessively anti-Israel is essentially always antisemitism.) It is a sick cycle of chasing limited donor funds and NGOs turning into political actors rather than organizations that care about actual people. This is why worldwide NGOs seem to do worthwhile work in other areas of the world and still treat Palestinians like nothing beyond ammunition against the Jewish state.

Gaza Sky Geeks proves that it doesn't have to be this way.

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Why, exactly, does @UNRWA exist in Jordan again? No one seems to know.

Last week, UNRWA tweeted this:

Which again brings up a fundamental question: Why does UNRWA still exist in Jordan?

There are over 2.2 million Palestinians getting services from UNRWA in Jordan, about 45% of the total number of people that get UNRWA aid. The vast majority of "refugees" in UNRWA are not refugees by any definition, but in Jordan the disconnect is worse - since nearly all of them are citizens of Jordan.

And their families have been citizens for 70 years.

What possible justification is there to maintain a parallel educational, housing and medical aid system for full Jordanian citizens, on the world's dime?

And just as importantly, why does the world accept Jordan officially treating a significant part of its population as not being quite Jordanian?

Even the most ardent fans of UNRWA have no answer to this. I once engaged in a brief Twitter discussion with a major academic supporter of UNRWA who claimed (falsely) that UNRWA's criteria for being a "refugee" is very close to that of UNHCR, but even he admitted that there is no way UNHCR would accept most Jordanians as refugees.

Yet UNRWA, with all of its financial crises, still exists in Jordan and still provides hundreds of millions of dollars of services there. While the US is thankfully no longer contributing to this organization whose only purpose is to keep Palestinian nationalism alive instead of trying to solve a refugee problem, one has to wonder when the other major donors to UNRWA will start asking the simple question: what possible justification is there for a continued presence in Jordan of an "refugee" organization that is giving services to people who are fully Jordanian citizens and haven't been refugees by any definition for decades?

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In Financial Times, former prime minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland weighs in about how the two state solution is in danger, and how she is afraid that Israel might annex parts of the West Bank that would become part of Israel in any conceivable peace plan anyway.

She displays, as so many do, a peculiar amnesia about what exactly happened to end negotiations between Israel and the PLO:

For 25 years Europe’s relations with Israelis and Palestinians have been based on the assumption that the promises of a two-state solution would be realised. As the prime minister of Norway when the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, I hoped we had finally seen a breakthrough. Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization sat together, and agreed that they would gradually move towards a negotiated peace within five years.

Tragically, that approach was never seen through. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who had signed the accords with Yasser Arafat, was assassinated in 1995 for his brave move towards peace. After that, Israel expanded settlements, instead of transferring West Bank territory to the Palestinians. Meanwhile, Palestinian factions carried out violent attacks on Israeli civilians as well as military personnel.

There have been repeated attempts to revive negotiations, but all have petered out.

Actually, Israel did transfer more land to Palestinians after Rabin's assassination - 80% of Hebron. The prime minister who made that decision? Benjamin Netanyahu.

That cannot be mentioned because Rabin was a saint and Netanyahu is a right wing warmonger.

But even worse than that lie is the complete absence of mentioning Bill Clinton's attempts to forge an agreement in 2000 through the end of his term in 2001. Israel agreed - the Palestinians refused. And when negotiations failed, Palestinians started a war against Israeli civilians.

That is important information in understanding why Israel is not more forthcoming for peace. But even with that, Israel offered Palestinians a state in 2008 and accepted a US framework for peace in 2014, both times to be rebuffed again, without a counteroffer.

These facts are relevant to understand the failure of Oslo, but to many people, Oslo is a religion and it doesn't matter how much proof one has against it, it must be believed in.

Brundtland, together with about 25 other former European diplomats and leaders have signed onto a letter affirming the two state solution as the only solution ahead of Trump's proposed plan that is rumored not to include a full Palestinian state. That letter similarly doesn't mention any peace attempts by Israel that were quashed by Palestinian terror. Only Israel is held to be in violation of Oslo and international law, and only Israel is at fault for the failure of the two state solution, according to these former diplomats trying to be relevant. This op-ed is part of that push.

If these diplomats and former leaders cannot even admit the basic facts about why Oslo failed nearly two decades ago, why should anyone trust that they know what they are talking about now?

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Documentary on how Arabs mistreated Jews in Arab countries

I don't know what year this was made. Gal Productions is an Israeli producer of video that has been around for a while.

It shows that the claim that Jews and Arabs lived together in harmony is simply a lie.

There are way too few films on this topic.

Here are all three parts:

(h/t Rachel)

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04/14 Links: The myth of 'land for peace'; Assange’s anti-Semitism revisited; Louis Farrakhan Is Not a Fringe Lunatic; He Is Dangerous

From Ian:

The myth of 'land for peace'

Israelis, and friends of the Jewish State alike, are accustomed to the never-ending scorn the United Nations heaps on the Middle East’s only free democracy, never mind its desire for peace with all of its Arab neighbors. It may seem unfathomable then that the very same institution [UN] was ultimately responsible for the creation of Israel.

In 1917, Secretary Arthur Balfour simply expressed Great Britain’s view with favor for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

In contrast, the Mandate is the multilateral binding agreement which laid down the Jewish legal right to settle anywhere in the geographical area called Palestine, the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, an entitlement unaltered in international law.

The Mandate was not a naive vision briefly embraced by the international community. The entire League of Nations – 51 countries – unanimously declared on that July 24th, 1922: “Whereas recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”

The Mandate clearly differentiates between political rights referring to Jewish self-determination as an emerging polity—and civil and religious rights, referring to guarantees of equal personal freedoms to non-Jewish residents as individuals and within select communities. Not once are Arabs as a people mentioned in the Mandate for Palestine. Nowhere in the document is there any granting of political rights to Arabs.

Article 2 of the “Mandate for Palestine” document, calls to place the country “Under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.”

Article 5 of the “Mandate for Palestine” clearly states that "The Mandatory [Great Britain] shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of the Government of any foreign power." The territory of Palestine was exclusively assigned for the Jewish National Home.

Assange’s anti-Semitism revisited

Assange himself has spoken about Jews several times, with plain and heartfelt hostility. The first occasion was in 2011, when he phoned Ian Hislop, the editor of the British satirical magazine Private Eye, to complain about a piece that highlighted Assange’s friendship with a notorious character named Israel Shamir. (A Russian Jew who converted to Orthodox Christianity, Shamir has been writing unhinged missives denouncing Judaism and Zionism for the last 20 years, mostly for far-right websites.) By running the item, Assange said, Hislop had joined an international conspiracy against WikiLeaks led by journalists, all of whom, Assange emphasized, “are Jewish.” When Hislop challenged this invocation of a classic anti-Semitic trope, Assange suddenly replied, “Forget about the Jewish thing.”

But Hislop didn’t forget, and Assange promptly accused him – as is the fashion among those charged with making anti-Semitic statements – of engaging in a smear campaign. Those who gave Assange the benefit of the doubt on that occasion were, however, stumped in 2013, when WikiLeaks employee James Ball resigned from the organization precisely because of Assange’s relationship with Shamir, whom he described as “an anti-Semitic writer … and a man with ties and friends in the Russian security services.” Then, in 2016, four years into his residency at the Ecuadorian Embassy, Assange picked up on the social-media meme of placing parentheses symbolizing an echo chamber on either side of the names of Jewish writers.

“Tribalist symbol for establishment climbers? Most of our critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses. Bizarre,” Assange said on Twitter, in a routine example of anti-Semitic dog-whistling. Shortly afterward, and getting a taste of his own medicine, a private message sent by Assange in which he insulted the Jewish journalist Raphael Sutter was leaked online. “He’s always been a rat,” Assange said of Sutter. “But he’s Jewish and engaged with the ((()))) issue.”

It would seem, then, that what most agitates Assange about Jews is their clannishness and tribalism, their habit of sticking together politically, their notorious practice of smearing critics as “anti-Semites” and their penetration of the establishment. It’s probably not coincidental that these supposed traits are exactly what Shamir detests about Jews, too, as will be demonstrated by a quick perusal of his ravings.

The antisemitic tweets of murdered Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi

Khashoggi also showed some genuine interest in the makeup of Israel, tweeting in June 2011 about the role of Iranian Jews in the country. In a tweet that same month, he wrote about the “desperation of the Jews to deny the Protocols.” Belief in the antisemitic forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has remained common in the Middle East in both Arab nationalist and Muslim Brotherhood circles up until the present day. Former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and Hamas both pushed conspiracies regarding the text. These conspiracies were also advanced by Malaysian President Mahathir Mohammed in a 2003 speech to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. As such, Khashoggi would have been familiar with this view.

In December 2011 and July 2012, he referenced the marginalization of Jewish women by “religious Jews,” and the “superstition of the Jews” in reference to Israel and prayers at the Western Wall, calling Jews “deceivers” or “swindlers.”

In August 2012, he argued in relation to Israel: “There is no land that God has made for a people,” noting that while Jews defeated the Canaanites, the Romans defeated the Jews, and it was Muslims who made the land “for all religions.” He was also skeptical of Jewish heritage in the Land of Israel, a theme that returns several times in his tweets. In July 2014, he referred to Jews in Israel as “usurpers,” implying they had stolen or occupied the land.

In September 2012 – when a controversial anti-Islamic video in the US led to riots in Egypt and Libya, and to the murder of the US ambassador in Benghazi – Khashoggi was asked why it was permitted to have a film critiquing Islam in the US., but not questioning the Holocaust. “The reason,” he replied, “is that the Jews passed legislation that criminalized the [questioning] of the Holocaust, while even Catholics failed to criminalize the abuse of Christ.”

On September 13, 2012, he tweeted, “If this was skeptical of the Holocaust, America would not allow it to be published, because the Jews succeeded in obtaining a law that would prevent it in America and Europe.” There is no such law in the US preventing Holocaust denial, but Khashoggi used the false claim to attack Jews.

Father Manuel Musallam is a prominent Palestinian Arab priest and former head Department for the Christians of the PLO Foreign Office. He has been a Fatah activist for decades.

In a recent interview in Palestine Today, he says explicitly that the Palestinian ambition is to take over Israel.

"The great March of Return and its continuation reflects the state of the clash between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli occupation forces, and the alarm bell in Israel continues to touch on the fact that the Palestinian did not forget and will not forget his land, country and villages. Jerusalem is the capital of Gaza, Jerusalem is Gaza, Gaza is the Palestinian right, Gaza is Haifa, Safad, Acre, Umm al-Rashrash (Eilat), Nablus, Galilee, and all of the land of Palestine."

Tellingly, he spoke at a rally in Jenin in 1993 meant to get Palestinians on board with the Oslo process that had begun only days earlier. The speaker before him at that speech, representing Fatah's youth group, "gave a short, passionate defense of the Declaration of Principles, arguing that gaining a foothold in Gaza and Jericho would be but an initial step in an eventual reclamation of all of Mandate Palestine and the return of all refugees." Musallam's speech was received even more enthusiastically and he ended it with a bastardization of Psalms: ‘If I forget thee, O Palestinian Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning.’ He now routinely refers to "occupation" as starting in 1948, not 1967.

This is five days before Arafat said the same thing on Jordanian TV:

Do not forget that our Palestine National Council accepted the decision in 1974. It called for the establishment of a national authority on any part of Palestinian land that is liberated or from which the Israelis withdrew. This is the fruit of your struggle, your sacrifices, and your jihad … This is the moment of return, the moment of gaining a foothold on the first liberated Palestinian land … Long live Palestine, liberated and Arab.

Everyone in Yasir Arafat's Fatah knew from the beginning that Oslo was a Trojan horse meant to take over all of Israel.

And yet the Western media and pundits and politicians still look at Oslo as the solution, rather than the first stage of the intended destruction of Israel.

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Abbas brags to new cabinet about 31 years of intransigence

Yesterday, Mahmoud Abbas gave a speech to inaugurate what he called the 18th government of "Palestine." (I have no idea how that is calculated.)

Most of the speech was boilerplate.

Abbas stressed that they will not accept any tax money from Israel as long as Israel deducts the salaries they pay terrorists, which he called a "red line."

Abbas said that that they will never accept a state that doesn't include Jerusalem or the 1967 "borders" that never existed.

Abbas claimed that the 12 year split between Hamas and Fatah is all Hamas' fault, and so forth.

Most importantly, he bragged about his intransigence and refusal to compromise one bit for peace, saying "We will not retract one word in the resolutions of the national councils since 1988 until today." That means that Abbas has refused to change one bit from Yasir Arafat's position throughout his entire leadership.

It also means that the PLO didn't make any meaningful concessions throughout the entire Oslo process.

He has said this numerous times before. Western media ignores not only Abbas' intransigence, but his glee over not being willing to compromise one iota for peace and relying, today, on terrorist Yasir Arafat's red lines.

One thing he said was slightly new:

Women wherever they are must take their rights. We must support them and develop their presence. Women are no less than men. They do not lack anything to be minister and president anywhere in Palestine.

Here is what the cabinet looks like: 20 men, 3 women.

One of the women is the women's affairs minister. The others are the tourism and the health minister.

The hypocrisy of his statement is of course not mentioned in Palestinian Arab media.

I am intrigued by the water bottle with the green cap next to Abbas.

A few years ago the government was embarrassed when it was shown they were drinking Israeli water at their meetings, and since then they switched to an Arab brand which can be seen on the table.

But at one point in his speech, someone poured Abbas some water from this other bottle - a bottle with no label on it.

Is he drinking water from an Israeli company that they removed the label from to avoid embarrassment?

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Last week, Airbnb backtracked on its November decision to de-list Jewish-owned homes in Judea and Samaria, causing lots of headlines and a new lawsuit by Palestinian Arabs against them.

How could Airbnb have avoided the controversy? By not caving to the blackmail by Amnesty International to begin with.

(Yes, it is blackmail - claiming that their business model was illegal and that they would be subject to international law sanctions if they don't do what Amnesty demands.)

The original Amnesty report targeted Tripadvisor, Booking.com and Expedia, besides Airbnb. Those other three companies politely told Amnesty that they provide travel information to everyone about everywhere, that they are transparent about where the attractions are and that they don't think they are doing anything illegal, which is a polite way of telling Amnesty that they were wasting their time.

As Booking.com told Amnesty (in the annex to their report):

Everything we do in terms of how we display information on Booking.com is focused on the customer and always in accordance with applicable law. Our geographic labeling of properties gives full transparency to customers about where an accommodation is located and we continuously update and optimise this information. By marking properties concerned as being in 'Israeli settlements' we provide transparency to anybody looking (or not looking) for accommodations in these territories.

In other words, don't try to tell or customer where they can or cannot go.

Only Airbnb caved to the Amnesty campaign - and now only Airbnb is subject to the hate mail and controversy.

Do the right thing to begin with and don't let others meddle with your business model. It seems obvious, and three out of the four companies targeted by Amnesty did exactly that. The fourth is paying a dear price for not following that rule.

Personally, I would like to see TripAdvisor threaten a lawsuit against Amnesty for modifying their logo to defame them:

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04/13 Links: Trump says Netanyahu election win means a ‘better chance for peace’; The Implosion of Jeremy Corbyn; Ilhan Omar, Con Artist; Elan Carr: Boycotting Israel is Anti-Semitic; EU's Collusion with Iran

From Ian:

The Implosion of Jeremy Corbyn

According to polling by The Jewish Chronicle, 85 percent of British Jews now think that Corbyn is anti-Semitic. And that was before this week’s bombshell: documents obtained by The Sunday Times showing that Labour failed to investigate hundreds of anti-Semitism complaints, and let hundreds more slide. The documents show not only that Labour’s procedures for investigating anti-Semitic incidents were—despite public assurances to the contrary—dismally subpar, but also that members of Corbyn’s office directly intervened in more than one in 10 investigations, despite having claimed that they were impartial.

A council candidate who said that Jewish members of Parliament were “Zionist infiltrators” was allowed to continue his campaign. Out of 863 alleged incidents detailed in the files, only 29 resulted in a party member being expelled; 145 resulted in a “formal warning”—which is largely meaningless—and 191 cases were resolved as requiring no action. The rest, the Times reports, are unresolved, including 249 that haven’t even been opened.

A Labour spokesperson said that the report “does not reflect the full details … and is not up to date,” a non-denial that did nothing to stem the bleeding. That evening, the Jewish Labour Movement—one of the party’s oldest affiliates, linked to Labour since 1903—passed a vote of no confidence in Corbyn.

A year earlier, in March 2018, the story broke that Corbyn had been a member of three secret Facebook groups in which virulent anti-Semitic memes were sometimes shared. Understandable, perhaps, in radical campaign circles. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, right? We’re protesting an occupation, not forming a government. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about deploring Israel Defense Forces violence in Gaza, but if Palestine is your cause, sometimes you’re going to meet people who really just hate Jews—just like if Israel is your cause, sometimes you’re going to meet people who really just hate Muslims.

In one of the groups, Corbyn wrote supportively to the artist of a mural in London. It wouldn’t have been so bad—just a throwaway comment—except the mural depicted anti-Semitic tropes so blatant you could see them from space, hook noses and all. Corbyn trying to apologize was an agonizing sight. “I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely at the image I was commenting on,” he said. “I am sincerely sorry for the pain which has been caused.” It was as if, in a lifetime of fighting for causes—framing the world as good versus evil—he never really learned how to say sorry.

Abe Greenwald: Ilhan Omar, Con Artist

You see? She’s just an all-loving, rage-filled, anti-Semitic victim of prejudice.

If you set aside the canned baby talk of her speeches and articles, her actions don’t reveal much in the way of understanding and compassion. Or was she “showing up with love” when she claimed that Americans who support Israel are guilty of “allegiance to a foreign country” and that pro-Israel American leaders are somehow being paid off to support the Jewish state, and that—lest we forget—“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel?” Are all these examples of what she sees as a “mission as humans to love one another”?

Whenever Omar gets called out for her anti-Semitism or anti-Americanism, she makes a steady retreat back to the faux-compassion and understanding, simultaneously vowing to “learn” from her actions and claiming innocent victimhood. It’s then that her liberal supporters seize on her sunny rhetoric and denounce all the criticism that’s come her way. That’s precisely what’s been happening since she was caught describing 9/11 as a null event.

The con artist will thrive as long her marks are willing to be conned. Which is to say, Ilhan Omar has a bright future in the Democratic Party.

Seeking Israel From the Left

Israel has always been a Rorschach test for the left, Susie Linfield argues in her new book about intellectuals' writings on the first decades of the Jewish home state. And she's right, if not quite in the way she may have intended the metaphor.

Yes, Israel is like a Rorschach test, in the sense that many people over the 70 years of the country's existence have seen in its abstract representation some strange specificity wrought by their own fervid imagination. But Israel is like a Rorschach test in another and more important way. Something disturbing is revealed when the symmetrical inkblots of a Rorschach test provoke descriptions of violence and hatred. And something just as disturbing is revealed when the image of Israel provokes ferocious anger and unrelenting hostility.

Which it does, for a large percentage of the left these days. In her introduction and conclusion, Linfield points out that Israel was created by people who were often socialists, and it enjoyed considerable support among leftists in the West into the 1960s. But somehow, these days, Israel faces a violent antipathy from the left. An important task for historians lies in exploring how that reversal came about.

Linfield, a journalism professor at NYU, is a self-proclaimed leftist worried about the ways in which anti-Zionism has led to a surge of anti-Semitism. And yet, despite her interest in the question of why the left has rejected Israel, she attempts something different in The Lions' Den. In essence, she attacks the premise. Examining the work of prior generations of prominent intellectuals and journalists, The Lions' Den suggests that Israel has always provoked strange notions in intellectuals.

The figures Linfield takes up are a gallery of prominent Jewish left-leaning thinkers from the 1940s on—especially in her chapters on Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Isaac Deutscher, Maxime Rodinson, I.F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky. She focuses as well on two further figures: Fred Halliday (the only gentile writer she takes up) and Albert Memmi (the Tunisian writer and only non-Westerner in the book). All of them were sometime Zionists, and all of them indulged anti-Zionism. By describing their intellectual journeys—and their intellectual peculiarities—Linfield hopes to illuminate the left's odd
relation to Israel.

04/12 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: We must call out the Muslims who hate Jews; Israel Rockets to the Moon While Its Enemies Launch Rockets at Civilians; Cornell Student Assembly Rejects BDS

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: We must call out the Muslims who hate Jews

Jewish leaders rightly call out the Labour party for failing to deal with the rampant antisemitism in its ranks. Yet they fail to hold the Muslim community similarly to account.

For sure, many Muslims are decent people. Indeed, a group called Muslims Against Antisemitism has taken out full-page newspaper adverts to show their solidarity with Jews. One of its organisers, Fiyaz Mughal, has said that “antisemitism from segments of Muslim communities needs to be challenged and robustly challenged.”

Jews, however, are not doing so. They regularly identify antisemitic threats from two sources, the left and the far right. But on the people from the Islamic world who pose the biggest such threat, they are all but silent.

Worse, some Jews are now even joining the manipulative campaign to camouflage Muslim antisemitism and extremism by claiming the biggest threat to the world is coming from the far right.

Certainly, there’s a growing threat from white supremacists. But this is vastly exceeded by the threat from the Islamic world.

Worse still, people on the left are now smearing all anti-Islamists by lumping them together with white supremacists under the labels of “far right”, “alt-right” and “Islamophobes”.

After the New Zealand mosques massacre a stupendously brave Muslim leader, Yahya Cholil Staquf, wrote: “It is factually incorrect and counter-productive to define Islamophobia as ‘rooted in racism’. In reality, it is the spread of Islamist extremism and terror that primarily contributes to the rise of Islamophobia throughout the non-Muslim world.”

Furthermore, the antisemitism of the left is being fuelled by the antisemitism of the Muslim world — which is in turn emboldened and incentivised by the refusal of the non-Muslim world to condemn it.

These are the vicious and lethal circles to which the silence of the Jewish community is making an unwitting contribution.

Melanie Phillips: Madonna chooses freedom singing at Eurovision

The singer Madonna has announced she’ll be singing at next month’s final of the Eurovision song contest in Tel Aviv before an estimated global audience of 180 million viewers. She intends to perform two songs, including a new one from her forthcoming album.

Cue all the too predictable outrage from those who demonize Israel. Jewish Voice for Peace launched a “Tell Madonna to Choose Freedom” campaign, claiming that “there’s no neutrality in situations of injustice,” and calling on the star to “stay home” and “lend your voice for freedom.”

Would that be the same Jewish Voice for Peace which blamed Israel and pro-Israel Jews for US police brutality against African Americans, thus sliding from its habitual vicious falsehoods about Israel into an antisemitic blood libel?

It would.

The Madonna furor is but the latest development in the campaign to boycott the Eurovision final. In Britain, cultural figures such as musicians Peter Gabriel and Roger Waters, actors Julie Christie and Miriam Margolyes, directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, and writer Caryl Churchill signed a letter calling on the BBC to push for the final to be moved to another country on the grounds of Israel’s “systematic violation of Palestinian human rights.”

Would that be the same as Caryl Churchill whose 2009 play, Seven Jewish Children, accused the Jews of inflicting upon others through the State of Israel the same kind of extermination that had been meted out to them, rooting this murderous trait in Judaism itself with lines such as this one: “Tell her I don’t care if the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people”?

It would.

An open letter from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel suggested Madonna’s appearance would be used by the Israeli government “to mask its deepening oppression of Palestinians.”

What oppression would that be? The corruption of the Hamas regime in Gaza causing shortages of food and essential supplies?

Douglas Murray: Roger Scruton’s sacking exposes the Tories’ cowardice

So the New Statesman decided to interview Sir Roger Scruton. Perhaps there are those who think that Scruton should not have agreed to be interviewed by the New Statesman, the left-wing magazine being unlikely to conduct a fair interview. But Scruton was the magazine’s wine columnist for many years, and under the editorship of Jason Cowley the magazine has been a slightly fairer and less battily leftwards publication than it was of old.

But today the magazine’s deputy editor, George Eaton, took to social media to announce the results of what he is parading as a ‘gotcha’ interview. The interview – which Eaton conducted himself – was, he promised, positively crammed full with ‘a series of outrageous remarks’. Eaton later posted a picture of himself drinking champagne to celebrate the fate of his interviewee, with the caption “The feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government adviser.” Eaton has since deleted the picture. Here it is.

So what are the ‘outrageous remarks’? It appeared that Scruton had said that Islamophobia is ‘a propaganda word invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue’. Which is true. He also said that ‘Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.’ A fact which is also true. Obviously since the British Labour party became a party of anti-Semites it has become exceptionally important to pretend that anti-Semitism is equally prevalent on the political right in Britain and that to criticise any of the actions of George Soros is in fact simply to indulge in anti-Semitism equivalent to that rolling through the Labour party. A very useful play for the political left, but wholly untrue. Anyway, I say ‘it appears’ that Scruton said this because there seem to be a few journalistic problems here.

Though Eaton says that Scruton said the above I am not confident that this is so. For Eaton – who used to be the Statesman’s political editor – appears to have a somewhat Johann Hari-esque way with quotes. He claims, for instance, that what Scruton said about Soros was somehow a comment ‘on Hungarian Jews’. As though Scruton had attacked all Hungarian Jews, rather than one very influential and political man who happens to be a Hungarian Jew.

The amnesiacs of Oslo (David Gerstman)

Aaron David Miller, a former negotiator during the Oslo process, tweeted this as a comment on the Israel elections:

Bottom line from Israel’s April 9 elections — a deeply divided country torn between a real desire for change and the realities of dysfunctional politics; a cruel region and a Prime Minister eager to play to and upon a nation’s fears rather than its hopes.

In response, journalist David Gerstman gave Miller a much needed history lesson on Twitter:

In 1993, Israel agreed to accept the PLO as a negotiating partner for peace. The PLO agree to give up terror and negotiate in exchange for no longer being designated as a terrorist organization.

Despite a rise in terror, by the end of 1995 Israel had removed its troops from the main Palestinian population areas in the West Bank, putting roughly 90% of Palestinians under the control of the PA, the PLO's successor organization.

In early 1996 Israel was struck by a wave of suicide bombings on buses, subsequently, Netanyahu was elected to his first term as PM.

After Netanyahu was voted out of office in 1999, his successor Barak met with Arafat in 2000 and offered the PA leader a peace deal. Arafat said no, and two months later started a bloody terror war.

In 2000 Israel withdrew all of its troops from Lebanon. The withdrawal was certified as complete by the UN.

Hezbollah built up its arsenal and terror infrastructure in southern Lebanon leading to a war in 2006 and remaining a significant threat on Israel's northern border.

Israel withdrew its troops and citizens from Gaza in 2005. Subsequently Hamas built up its arsenal and terror infrastructure leading to wars in late 2008, in 2012 and in 2014 and remaining a significant threat on Israel's southern border.

Palestinian leaders (Arafat in 2000 and Abbas in 2008 - at least) refused peace deals that would have ended the conflict.

Abbas refused to negotiate with Israel and pays terrorists, violating the principles accepted by Arafat.

In the first two cases (1996 and 2000) you were part of the team that shaped events. Now you're saying that Netanyahu plays to Israel's fears not hopes.

My God, Israel listened to you (and subsequently like-minded individuals) and paid a huge price for it. How dare you dismiss Israeli fears.

If Netanyahu resonates with the Israeli electorate, it isn't just that he understands it better than you do. It's also that Israelis see that they can't trust you and people like you to stand up for them when they do what you consider to be the right thing and suffer for it.

They see someone like you who demands that Israel makes peace for its own good and legitimacy, but pays little more than lip service to the idea that the Palestinians have any agency to make peace or moral responsibility to do it.

So please think long and hard before you mock the Israeli electorate for having fears.

It sometimes feels like there is an amnesia around what happened between Oslo and today, including the terrorism during the 1990s at the same time as the Oslo process.

The idea of Oslo and "two states" is so embedded in people's minds that they casually assume that Israelis who lived through the dark years that were direct consequences of the sunny predictions of peace are irrational, and those criticizing Israel without having the real fear of going on buses or to supermarkets are superior to the Israelis who know the pros and cons better than anyone.

It is worth reminding people that, today, Israel has less terror and the borders are quieter than perhaps at any time in its history. This is not because of the peace process - that only brought death. It is because of a priority placed on security.

Those so willing to bet Israeli lives on their personal attachment to a failed peace process are despicable.

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