One of the most common
challenges to the Divest-nista crowd is why they don’t call and march for
divestment against Sudan, China, Syria or any of the totalitarian dictatorships
whose daily human rights abuses dwarf anything Israel could have possibly done
over the course of 60 years.
Generally, their first
response is to ignore the question and move onto their next accusations (real
or imagined) against Israel, hoping that no one will peek behind the curtain.
While such stonewalling can work for a while, those trying to sell BDS to the
general public must eventually explain the apparent double standard whereby
Israel must be punished while its dictatorial critics are left alone. Some of
the more easily dismissed excuses I’ve seen from US-based divestniks include:
·Israel is a democracy and
thus our protests can have an impact there (ignoring the obvious corollary that
the best way to avoid the wrath of these alleged “human rights” champions is to
be a dictatorship)
·Israel is an ally of the
US, and thus as Americans we are obliged to criticize our friends more than our
foes (ignoring the obvious question as to why their limitless hostility does
not extend to other US allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt)
·“Israel receives [pick
your sum, ranging from three-billion to eleventy-jillion dollars] in US aid so
as a US citizen it’s the use of my tax dollars I’m protesting” (never
specifying why a country like Egypt, which receives 2/3 as much US aid as
Israel - a formula calculated at Camp David decades ago - receives <1 66="" against="" boycotters="" direct="" hostility="" israel="" o:p="" of="" rather="" than="" the="">
Clearly, these are just
excuses or rationalizations for people who have a political agenda (hostility
towards the Jewish state) who feel a need to dress up their attitudes in the
ill-fitting garments of legitimate principle. Yet even if such hypocrisy is the
compliment vice pays to virtue, the excuses BDSers use to explain their obvious
double standards only stretches so thin, often with embarrassing results.
My favorite example of
over-reach in an effort to explain away the double standard was the UK academic
boycotters who claimed their effort to sanction Israeli universities would be
particularly effective because of the Jews unique love and respect for
learning. Needless to say, this implied dissing of the scholarly passions of
non-Jewish societies did not go over well with the boycotters' third-worlder
constituency.
Within this rickety pile
of excuses, the only one that is backed by enough fact to not be immediately
dismissed as a smoke screen is the claim that the call for boycotting Israel
welled up from the Palestinians themselves in the form of a 2002 boycott call
from the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (or PACBI).
Because the PACBI BDS call (unlike so many divestment hoaxes) actually exists,
poking holes in this argument takes a little more effort. But not much…
To be continued…
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Omar Shakir from Human Rights Watch responded to his critics that wanted him deported from Israel last April:
Israeli authorities say they’re deporting me because I promote boycotts of Israel. Setting aside the paradox of the region’s self-proclaimed “only democracy” deporting a rights defender over peaceful expression, the claim isn’t true.
Human Rights Watch neither supports nor opposes boycotts of Israel, a fact that Israel’s Ministry of Interior acknowledged last year. Rather, we document the practices of businesses in settlements as part of our global efforts to urge companies, governments and other actors to meet their human rights responsibilities. We also defend the right of individuals to support or oppose boycotts peacefully, as a matter of freedom of speech and conscience.
Initially, the Israeli government said it revoked my work visa based on a dossier it compiled on my long-past student-activist days, before I became the Human Rights Watch Israel-Palestine director in October 2016. When we challenged the deportation in court, noting that the Interior Ministry’s own guidelines require support for a boycott to be “active and continuous,” they shifted to highlight Human Rights Watch research on the activities of businesses such as Airbnb and our recommendation that they cease operating in settlements.
His entire argument is that advocating businesses boycott settlements is not a boycott of Israel but a human rights activity against occupation. He says he hasn't advocated boycotting Israel since he was hired by HRW.
His latest tweet shows this to be an absolute lie:
Shakir is now explicitly calling for Airbnb to boycott Israel itself.
By this criterion, Airbnb couldn't operate anywhere in the Western Hemisphere or Australia because all land is "stolen." Is that HRW's position? Or is it, as always, only Israel that has to fit these bizarre and arbitrary criteria to be considered moral enough?
This also shows that the rhetoric against the "occupation" has always been a smokescreen by critics of Israel. They are against Israel, period, and they latch onto the "settlements" as an easier target, but their true aims are shown here.
Including the true aims of Human Rights Watch.
(h/t Michael Elgort)
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Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was a rapist. Like most jihadists, his main motivation was murder and genocide, combined with far-Right religious hatred. In Islamic State, the organization and "state" that he led, he was able to exploit various strands of followers to create the closest thing the Middle East has seen to a short-lived, Nazi-style country.
He spent his days as leader raping women the group had kidnapped while his men died on the front lines. Like Hitler, he enjoyed the good life while his Sunni soldiers suffered under the bombs of the US-led coalition and struggled to stop the rising tide of Shi’ite militias and Kurdish fighters arrayed against them.
For much of his time in the leadership of ISIS, the rapist Baghdadi was a kind of mirage, a shadowy figure who was reportedly killed several times. Yet he survived, escaping again and again as his enemies closed in. Baghdadi was a religious devotee as a young man, and was detained by the Americans after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Born in central Iraq, he joined an extremist group, was picked up near Falluja, and held at Camp Bucca in 2004. Rukmini Callimachi, the New York Times correspondent who covers ISIS, writes that by the time he was detained, he was not only radicalized but he “began inciting attacks against Shia prisoners, using metal shanks.”
In his hatred of Shi’ites, Baghdadi was channeling a new kind of jihadist zeal. While al-Qaeda and others had launched a war against the West and against local totalitarian and corrupted governments under the banner of “Islam,” the concepts floating around Iraq in 2004 viewed non-Sunnis as sub-humans. They all had to be killed: Christians, Shi’ites, Yazidis and other groups such as Kurds.
This was a truly Nazi-style ideology that saw the world in terms of believers and sub-humans. It was helped along by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq who pushed for more targeting of Shi’ites and minorities. Mass attacks in 2004 on Shi’ite shrines were carried out in Karbala, killing hundreds. Baghdadi was paying attention.
The US raid that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was executed in the first hours of October 27. It has many similarities with the raid to kill al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in 2011. President Donald Trump’s theatrics have made it sound more interesting. We don’t know all the details, but here are some of the takeaways.
It took an hour to get there
Trump says that the eight helicopters had to fly over an hour to their target. This has led to speculation about where they came from. Martin Chulov at The Guardian says that the raid began just before 3:30 a.m. and the copters flew from Erbil in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region. It was a 70-minute flight. But Trump, in subsequent comments to the press on October 27 said the copters landed in a “friendly country” in a “port.” The port comment has led to a bit of a mystery, and it’s also not entirely clear if Trump would refer to Iraq as a friendly country.
Thank you: Russia, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Kurds
Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and the Syrian Kurds were all given thanks for their support. The Syrian Democratic Forces have been warning for months about Baghdadi trying to get to Idlib province in northwest Syria, where he was eventually found. In March, they had indicated that he might be there. The SDF is the main partner of the US on the ground in Syria, but Trump’s decision to leave Syria enabled a Turkish attack on the SDF.
The US had to fly over areas with Turkish and Russia air defense. It had to inform Russia, the Syrian regime and Turkey.
Trump was seeking to leave Syria as intel found Baghdadi
Trump was about to announce the US withdrawal from parts of Syria on October 6 when intelligence began to pinpoint Baghdadi, who had released tapes in September and April. Many believed he was in his home country of Iraq, or in the Syrian desert. There are up to 14,000 ISIS fighters there in the desert regions of Iraq and Syria, so he could hide with them. But as it turned out, a man appeared in mid-September before Iraqi intelligence who had smuggled two of Baghdadi’s wives through Turkey and two of his brothers. Iraqi intelligence was then able to penetrate Baghdadi’s family and handed details to the CIA.
As the information came in, Trump was already making his move to leave. But the intel led to several false starts. For weeks, Baghdadi was under surveillance. Three raids had to be cancelled, Trump said. Finally at the end of October they had him, in a house next to the Turkish border, home to another extremist group called Hurras al-Din. Baghdadi might have been seeking to go across into Turkey, or to revive ISIS in Idlib. He had to be taken down before he could move again. Trump agreed.
Some experts claim the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is only a symbolic success against the Islamic State. That’s wrong. It’s a major blow to IS and Islamic jihadists around the world, at least as important as the killing of his former leader Osama Bin Laden in 2011.
Al-Baghdadi was a hugely influential and inspirational figure for radical Muslims everywhere, his claim to be directly descended from the prophet Muhammad’s grandson widely accepted. A Koranic scholar at the University of Baghdad, he had a religious authority that armed his followers to counter claims that IS was a distortion of Islam.
Al-Baghdadi had been on the run and his Islamic State in retreat for many months following intensive coalition attacks against them. His death signals their final defeat but only in its current form. It does not mean the end of al-Baghdadi’s brutal vision any more than Bin Laden’s death was the end of Al Qaida, which has since increased its strength in various parts of the world.
Two months ago he named his successor but experience shows that terrorist groups evolve like the hydra, sprouting multiple heads, with subordinate leaders freed to carry out their own malevolent and sometimes more effective plans. Al-Baghdadi himself gained power after the killing of his former boss Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Islamic State in Iraq.
Yamine Mohammed is an ex-Muslim who now helps Muslims and ex-Muslims deal with their circumstances with their communities and families.
Her recently published memoir, Unveiled, is a truly harrowing account of her life. It is ultimately a heroic story of how she managed to overcome a sickeningly abusive childhood and to escape her circumstances, while shining a light on how millions of Muslims are forced to live.
To be sure, most Muslims do not have to endure what Yasmine did. Her mother has severe psychological problems and turned to extreme Islam in order to find order in her own life. She married (according to Islam) an abusive man who was already married and who insisted on strict application of rules that he called Muslim. This man sexually abused Yasmine.
But the real abuse came from her mother. She only got pregnant with Yasmine in order to try to keep her first husband from leaving her and since that plot failed, she treated Yasmine like an unwanted excretion from her body that she was stuck with. (She would actually tell her that.)
Her mother embraced the most extreme Islam of her husband in order to find meaning in her own damaged life.
To a large extent, the book is Yasmine's relationship with, and attempts to break free from, her mother - a woman who would tell her husband that 6-year old Yasmine didn't do her prayers properly so that he would brutally beat his stepdaughter on the bottoms of her feet so the bruises wouldn't show.
Yasmine grew up believing that she was worthless and that her mother held the key to allow her into heaven, so she was in a never-ending cycle of trying to gain love from a woman who truly hated her. But she would always question the rules she was forced to live under, and sometimes she would meet others who liked her for who she was, giving her a glimmer of much-needed self-esteem under the crushing weight of the twin burdens of her family and Islam.
So many times in her life it looked like she would finally break free, only to be reeled back in by circumstances.
Chillingly, Yasmine finally gave in to be married to a man her mother chose for her that her mother herself tried to seduce. This man imprisoned her in every real sense, even beating her for idly singing the alphabet song when looking up something in a reference book. Their baby's birth both cemented her prison sentence and gave her the resolve to escape so her daughter would never have to live through the same hell she did.
She finally managed a (Canadian) divorce, and only later found out that her husband was a major Al Qaeda terrorist.
Slowly, sometimes agonizingly so, Yasmine manages to escape the hell of her upbringing.
How much of her awful childhood was a result of Islam and how much from a psychotic mother and abusive stepfather/"uncle"? Yasmine brings statistics and plenty of anecdotes from other Muslims and ex-Muslims about things like female genital mutilation, sexual assault and the psychological pain from wearing a hijab and (later) a full burka. She mentions a friend who broke free, and when she fell and hurt herself and her boyfriend ran to see if she was OK she assumed he would berate her for being so stupid. That's how generations of women are taught to think about themselves.
There is no way most Muslims grow up in such an environment, certainly not in Canada where Yasmine was born, but her story is not so different from how many Muslim women are forced to live in Muslim-majority countries. She had opportunities to meet others, especially the years she was allowed to go to public school, and to start to question things. Most Muslim women in Islamic countries do not even have that lifeline.
Her final chapter is an appeal to today's feminists, who are so anxious to find something to protest that they spend their time blowing up truly minor issues like whether to remove the "e" from "women" yet they ignore the patriarchy and often abuse that is imposed on hundreds of millions of girls and women, today, in Muslim-majority countries. Fear of being labeled "Islamophobic" wins out over helping so many who are imprisoned as Yasmine was. It is a damning indictment of today's Western feminism and a world where Nike would never consider to put its logo on Mormon women's underwear but happily places it on a hijab that so many wear not out of free will but out of fear.
This is a frightening and ultimately uplifting book about a remarkable woman and her incredible journey.
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On Sunday, the J-Street conference hosted a panel session entitled "Scorched Earth: The Trump Legacy on Israel/Palestine."
The participants were:
Debra Shushan, Director of Policy and Government Relations, Americans for Peace Now (Moderator)
Khaled Elgindy, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Ilan Goldenberg, Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Security Program, Center
for a New American Security
Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, Political Analyst, Public Opinion Expert
Daniel Seidemann, Founder and Director, Terrestrial Jerusalem
Shushan gave a monologue at the beginning. She reviewed most of Donald Trump's moves, all of which she considered to be awful, and she wanted her panelists to describe how all of them can be rolled back in a future Democratic administration.
She called the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem "the hostile takeover of the consulate in Jerusalem by [David] Friedman's embassy."
She also encouraged the audience to boo Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel. It is axiomatic at J-Street that certain government officials must be treated with utmost disrespect, something Democrats complained bitterly about - rightly - when Obama was president.
In addition, Shushan sarcastically said that Israeli claims that annexation of the Golan Heights and the West Bank would be legal based on the principle that one can annex land won in a defensive war was a brand new, legally untenable position. While most modern legal scholars agree with Shushan that land cannot be legally annexed in any circumstances, it is not unanimous nor has it been uniformly applied since the UN Charter, as Eugene Kontorovich has demonstrated.
Daniel Seidemann described how he gave a tour of Jerusalem to Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt. He told them that Arabs in Jerusalem east of the Green Line "are not entitled to receive citizenship" in Israel.
He is lying and he knows he is lying. (He is an expert on Jerusalem so it is disappointing when he knowingly pushes lies.) The process has been difficult but thousands have become citizens and many more are on their way; Israel is trying to streamline the process.
Khaled Elgindy said during his main talk that Clinton and Obama tried to make peace - but for some reason never mentions that Palestinian rejectionism was what stopped the initiatives. Later on someone asked him bout whether Arafat missed the boat in rejecting the Clinton peace plan and Elgindy denied that Arafat did that, saying that both Barak and Arafat accepted the plan. He later tweeted me his proof:
I responded that Clinton had no desire to sabotage any chance for peace while he was in office by insulting Arafat but not long after he left office he made it clear that Arafat was the rejectionist and Barak was ready to give major concessions:
And this as well:
While I agree that technically both Arafat and Barak accepted the plan with reservations, Clinton showed afterwards that Barak was the only one serious about it and Arafat was playing games (which Barak elaborates on in great detail.)
The bigger point is that Jews have been accepting and proposing peace offers since before 1948 and each of them has been consistently rejected by the Palestinian Arabs. That is a key point in any discussion on peace, which J-Street claims it cares about, yet only Israel is blamed for the lack of peace. This is a major blind spot in the liberal world which then leaks into a blind spot for everyone who does not spend serious time researching the topic.
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The Jewish Agency's board of trustees was meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday to approve a strategic action plan of action for the next decade, addressing the challenges facing the Jewish people in the modern era - and at its center the sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents around the world.
According to the plan, the Jewish Agency will work to ensure the security of Jewish communities around the world, and will fight vigorously against the manifestations of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
The agency will work with the government of Israel, Jewish communities and other organizations in three key areas.
1. Political, which will include activities involving heads of state, parliaments and law enforcement bodies
2. Security, which will increase the protection for Jewish institutions
3. Educational, which will focus on eliminating the phenomenon of anti-Semitism through in-depth study, bolstered by hundreds of Israeli emissaries and working with local educators
The Jewish Agency will also encourage immigration to Israel – helping those immigrate freely as well as conducting clandestine "emergency aliyah" operations in hostile nations.
That last item becomes the most important on in Arab media, where the headline is on a "secret plan" to encourage Jews to move to "Palestine." They say "The main aim of the plan, described by the paper as 'an additional goal,' is to encourage Jewish immigration to Israel by providing assistance to those who choose voluntary immigration to Israel. "
Who knew the Jewish Agency encouraged aliyah?
Here is the illustration in the Al Araby article:
Scary religious Jews!
And that is not only in Al Araby. The same article in other Arab media uses a similar picture:
Scary Jews doing Talmudic rituals!
The idea of Jews moving to Israel causes panic among Arabs, ever since they got the British to limit immigration from Jews in the 1930s. And these pictures are of the scariest Jews around to them - the ones who actually have a spiritual attachment to the land.
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A series of "considerations" and "financial complications" has forced the Islamic Republic's Chess Federation not to dispatch Iran's team to the World Youth Under-16 Chess Olympiad in Turkey, says the federation president.
Without further elaboration, Mehrdad Pahlavanzadeh insisted on Sunday, October 26, that the international chess federation (FIDE) has not eliminated Iran from the list of competing countries, and Tehran has voluntarily decided to stay out of the championship.
Based on an "unwritten law," Iranian athletes are banned from competing with their Israeli counterparts or attending medal ceremonies alongside them.
Iranian athletes' refusal to compete with Israelis has triggered a series of disputes between Tehran and international sports federations.
Reacting to Iran's refusal to participate in the World Championship in Turkey, FIDE said in a statement last week that it would punish the Islamic Republic's Chess Federation in a way that would detrimental for the Iranian chess players.
Earlier this month the International Judo Federation (IJF) enacted a provisional ban on Iran over its refusal to allow its judokas to face Israelis.
Sports federations are finally starting to show some backbone.
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J-Street's conference had a panel on "Fighting Anti-Semitism and its Weaponization in American Politics."
Already by equating antisemitism with its supposed "weaponization" (which exists but is not nearly as big an issue,) the panel was doomed from the start from seriously looking at the problem.
The panelists were:
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, Executive Director, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights (Moderator)
Peter Beinart, Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York
Maya Berry, Executive Director, Arab American Institute
Haile Soifer, Executive Director, Jewish Democratic Council of America
Eric Ward, Executive Director, Western States Center
The entire discussion was naturally about antisemitism on the Right. It is a real problem, but not the way it was framed here. Haile Soifer wasted no time in attacking Donald Trump, the only president who has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren. She claimed falsely that he excused the white supremacists in Charlottesville, and she claimed that he failed to condemn antisemitism ever (although she accidentally said "condone.") She also claimed that the white nationalists who have attacked blacks and Jews in the US all were aligned with Trump, when they almost all hated him because he was too philosemitic.
I do not disagree that Trump has said things that embolden racists in the US. There is plenty to criticize him for in dividing the nation. (It is not so clear that the number of racist incidents increased under Trump, when the 2018 FBI hate crimes statistics are released we'll have a better idea. 2017 showed a marked increase but also many more agencies were added to the reporting compared to 2016, so the data sets may not be comparable.) But when you criticize him, do it accurately.
Peter Beinart said "I agree with everything [Haile] said." So, truth is certainly not something that this J-Street panel prizes.
Beinart also said, to applause, that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, but his reasoning was quite bizarre:
"The vast majority of Palestinians are anti-Zionist...The Palestinian experience with Zionism has been a very bitter, painful, traumatic experience. You do not have to be an antisemite...to be in solidarity with the Palestinian experience...Any definition of antisemitism that dehumanizes and silences Palestinians is not a response to bigotry - it is an expression of bigotry."
Would Beinart say that Jews who say that there is no room for Palestinians to have any political power in the region are not bigots? Of course not. But Palestinians who say that Jews have no right to live in the region as anything but second class citizens - which is the standard and mainstream Palestinian position - cannot be called antisemitic because that would "silence" them!
Sorry, Peter, antisemitism's definition is not dependent on whose feelings it might hurt. Arab and Muslim antisemitism is a thing, as much as you don't want to admit it. Saying that the Jews are not a people - the official PLO position! - is antisemitic. Saying that they do not have the right for self-determination in their historic homeland is antisemitic. And having a different standard for what Jews can say about Palestinians and what Palestinians can say about Jews in the area is itself an example of bigotry.
"The reality is that the definition of antisemitism that was developed for use overseas that has been adopted by some here in the United States ...that they are attempting to use that definition on our college campuses, that is not an acceptable definition of antisemitism. As a result, we're entering in this sort of grey space...[During a time of worries about white supremacist violence] we're trying to decide how much I can criticize the State of Israel before I get labeled a certain thing. I think that's crazy. "
So now we are told by a Muslim that Jews cannot define what antisemitism is because she demands the right to compare Israel to Nazis or say Israeli Jews love to kill children and poison the wells. IHRA has no problem with criticism of Israel, and Berry knows that - but she wants the right to demonize any Jew who supports Israel or to demonize the Jewish state for actions that would be considered nothing in every single Arab state.
(I have yet to see a critic of the IHRA definition say which specific examples given there of anti-Zionist antisemitism they do not agree with. Because they know that double standards for Israel is in fact antisemitism.)
She also said, "I think one of the biggest mistakes J-Street makes is the position its taken on BDS. [Applause!] Because if you equate the entire movement with antisemitism then the logical conclusion is Rashida [Tlaib] is an antisemite. And that is a problem we should all be very concerned about."
This is after she noted that Jews never considered the previous Muslim members of Congress to be antisemitic, and it is only because Tlaib and Ilhan Omar support BDS that they are considered as such.
This is a mirror of Beinart's argument that if a definition of antisemitism ends up calling someone you like an antisemite, it must be wrong. That is not how definitions work.
(Also, J-Street does not say that BDS is antisemitic.)
Perhaps the most offensive part of the session was a question from a J-Street board member, Victor Kovner, that was itself antisemitic:
"I'd like to ask an easy question about whether white nationalism is rising within the Jewish community....Is it true, that because of policies about Israel, that white nationalism is rising among particularly the ultra-observant community? Is that true? And is it also rising in the Israeli settler movement?"
In other words, are religious Jews the disgusting racists I think they are?
Of course no one called Kovner out for his fairly clear bigotry. Beinart tackled the question but watered it down for public consumption, saying that some Zionists naturally will ally with like-minded political groups, as if Jews are willing to accept right-wing Tree of Life-level Jew-hatred for Israel. But the question revealed much more about how the (mostly elderly) leftist J-Street attendees really think.
In short, it was an antisemitic question that was tolerated at a panel supposedly about antisemitism.
Kovner, a major J-Street fundraiser, described J-Street's goal in a 2008 New York Times article this way: "Candidates would also be able to use the group’s endorsements as a shield against accusations that they were anti-Israel."
Does this sound like someone who loves either Israel or Jews?
This panel was a disgrace for a supposedly Jewish, pro-Israel organization that pretends to care about antisemitism.
(h/t Daled Amos)
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US President Donald Trump delivered a special announcement on Sunday announcing the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a US Special Ops raid, explaining that the success could not have been achieved without the acknowledgement and help of other nations such as "Russia, Turkey, Syria and Iraq."
"The United States has been searching for Baghdadi for many years," Trump began. "He died... whimpering and screaming. The only ones remaining were Baghdadi in the tunnel, and he had dragged three of his young children with him that were led to certain death. He reached the end of the tunnel as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and his three children.
"The thug that tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in total fear," Trump continued. "Baghdadi's demise demonstrates... our commitment to the enduring and total defeat of ISIS and other terrorist organizations. Our reach is very long."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated Trump for the killing of Baghdadi, calling it an “impressive achievement.”
Netanyahu, who released a statement within moments of Trump ending his press conference where he announced Baghdadi's killing, said that it “reflects our shared determination – of the United States and all free states – to fight terrorist organizations and terrorist states.”
Netanyahu said that while this was an “important milestone,” the campaign against terrorism is “still in front of us.”
Trump additionally clarified that no US personnel were killed in the operation, though one dog was injured entering the tunnel. He stated that the number of people killed on Baghdadi's end of the operation will be announced in the next 24 hours.
He described watching the operation, which he saw along with Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien, and several other military and intelligence officials, as something "like a movie."
"Today's events are another reminder that we will continue to pursue the remaining ISIS terrorists," Trump stated. "That also goes for other terrorist organizations. Baghdadi and the losers who work for him, and losers they are, had no idea what they were getting into. In some cases, they were very frightened puppies; in other cases, hardcore killers. Baghdadi was vicious and violent, and he died in a vicious and violent way; as a coward, running and crying."
Defense Department officials are slowly leaking out details of the shocking raid in western Syria that resulted in the death of ISIS mastermind, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — and there may even be video of the exact moment al-Baghdadi detonated his own suicide vest, killing himself and several members of his family so that he couldn’t be taken alive by the American military.
The Daily Mail reports that “between 50 and 70 members of the US Army Delta Force and Rangers flew in on six helicopters and surrounded al-Baghdadi during the overnight raid in Syria’s Idlib province,” per sources.
The attack had been planned for weeks, President Donald Trump told reporters during a press conference Sunday morning, and a special team of soldiers was amassed for the raid. The team knew, based on information from friendly intelligence sources in the area, that al-Baghdadi was “lurking in Syrian border towns, often wearing non-traditional or ‘regular’ clothes, using a civilian car, and making sure anyone around him had no mobile phones or electronic devices in order to bypass detection,” according to Fox News.
Al-Baghdadi arrived at the compound where he ultimately perished a mere 48 hours before the U.S. military’s raid. He was accompanied there by two of his wives and several of his children, all of whom were outfitted with suicide vests.
US special forces carried out a high-level raid in Syria against Abu Bakr al-Bahgdadi, killing the elusive Islamic State terror group’s leader. The assassination of Baghdadi is a major symbolic blow to the organization and everything it represents, but its impact must not be overstated. His death does not mean the end of IS.
The organization’s modus operandi will not change dramatically and its operations are more likely to be constrained by larger military and financial issues than by the death of one man. Now, after the disintegration of its territorial empire, the Islamic State is already more of an idea than a concrete reality and, as such, it is expected to continue, in a changed form, to plague the West for years to come.
The big question we should be asking at the moment is what will happen to the larger idea of Salafist jihad? After the death of Osama bin Laden, IS stepped into the newly created jihadist leadership vacuum. The organization ascended to new levels of brutality that surpassed, in many ways, even the tactics employed by the notoriously vicious al-Qaeda.
There are still several other competing jihadist groups, such as Tahrir a-Sham, operating in Syria’s Idlib province, where Baghdadi was killed. Harried by Syrian and Russian airstrikes, their capacities are limited, and it is more than likely that we will see the ascension of another organization, led by a figure no less charismatic than Baghdadi, that will push a radical agenda, perhaps more extreme than that of IS, if such a thing can be imagined.
With a $25 million US bounty on his head, Baghdadi was the world’s most wanted man, responsible for steering his chillingly violent organization into mass slaughter of opponents, and directing and inspiring terror attacks across continents and in the heart of Europe.
Shifting away from the airline hijackings and other mass-casualty attacks that came to define al-Qaeda, Baghdadi and other IS leaders supported smaller-scale acts of violence that would be harder for law enforcement to prepare for and prevent.
An amazingly vacuous tweet from a person and organization that we've come to expect such from:
Human Rights Watch sees a similarity between protests in Hong Kong and riots in Gaza?
The goal of the Hong Kong protests is (generally) to move towards independence from China. The goal of the Gaza protests is to destroy Israel - not to build an independent Palestinian state but to invade the independent Jewish state.
Hong Kong demonstrators don't shoot rockets into China. It doesn't start fires with balloons or kites in China. Most of all, they are not controlled by internationally recognized terrorist groups that decide if and where the protesters gather, when, and what activities they will do. Terror groups that decide how many children will approach the fence with Israel and put their lives in danger.
Hong Kong protesters don't have Molotov cocktails (as the PCHR article she links to admits) and guns.
The only comparison between Gaza and Hong Kong is that Gaza could have become a Hong Kong by now if its citizens and rulers wanted to. After Israel's disengagement they could have built a Mediterranean paradise, tourist hub and high tech center - there was no blockade then.
Instead, they decided that they wanted to keep attacking Israel.
This is a very false analogy, but HRW and Whitson have a monomaniacal hate for Israel that trumps all logic.
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J-Street likes to pretend that it is pro-Israel and that the people on the Right who claim to be pro-Israel are really anti-Israel by considering parts of the West Bank to be part of Israel in any final status agreement.
But as this excerpt from the J-Street Conference indicates, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times thinks that any Democratic candidates who are "too" pro-Israel are also "far-Right."
"What I think is interesting is that this is going to be...the first presidential primary where some candidates will pay a price for being too pro-Israel, and that was never a thing before. That could potentially change politics if there is a price to be paid too far-Right as well as being too far-Left."
Even subconsciously, she associates being pro-Israel with the political right and being anti-Israel with the political Left, at an unabashedly anti-Right conference that claims to be "pro-Israel."
And yes, she actually implied that some Democratic candidates were so pro-Israel as to be considered "far Right."
(I have no idea what candidate she has in mind who could remotely be considered "too" pro-Israel to the extent that it would hurt him or her. I certainly haven't seen anyone in the Democratic presidential field who remotely qualifies as such.)
She did preface this by saying that most of the candidates were still sticking to the old "pro-Israel" playbook of supporting our only democratic ally in the Middle East, which (in my impression of what she means) sounded like everyone knows this is just something they have to say even if they don't believe it. I was honestly expecting her to finish that statement with "blah, blah, blah."
The entire video is filled with smug, "we know better than Israel" comments. Similarly, tossing around idiotic statements like the US and Israel are turning "fascist" is regarded as accepted wisdom. J-Streeters position themselves as messianic figures who are the only ones who see the truth and everyone else is simply too dense to recognize their brilliance.
The smugness inspired me to tweet this morning, "Telling Arabs how to act morally is condescending and colonialist. Telling Israelis how to act morally without bothering to ask their side of the story is woke."
The J-Street Conference also includes PLO speakers. Jeremy Ben Ami defended that, and I responded:
I read the PLO positions in the original Arabic. I know very well how they really think. If you think that what they say to a @jstreetdotorg conference is remotely accurate compared to how they speak in Arabic, you are a complete fool. And you are willing to push their lies.
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 Democratic presidential hopeful, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, has suggested that she would consider cutting military aid to Israel to force it to halt construction of settlements in the disputed territories.
“It is the official policy of the United States of America to support a two-state solution, and if Israel is moving in the opposite direction then everything is on the table,” she said. To ensure that no one failed to understand her threat, she repeated her final phrase.
Her comment furnished more evidence that Warren resembles British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in her far-left and Israel-bashing views. This threatens to harm not only the sole democratic U.S. ally in the Middle East, but also the interests and security of America itself.
Nevertheless, opposing Israeli settlements and taking the side of the Palestinian Arabs is unlikely to damage Warren’s prospects in broader progressive circles because these are views that they generally share.
This is not merely a divisive policy stance. It also displays a fundamental misconception about the Arab war against Israel that is shared widely within the Jewish as well as non-Jewish world.
At the most obvious level, bashing the settlements is historically and legally wrong.
Israel is entitled to retain and settle these territories twice over. The 1922 Palestine Mandate, whose terms have never been abrogated, gave the Jews alone the right to settle in what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza. In addition, international law upholds Israel’s right to retain land taken, as it was in 1967, in a war of defense against those who still continue to use it as a landing stage for attacks.
Moreover, the belief that the settlements prevent the creation of a Palestine state that would end the Middle East conflict is transparently false and historically illiterate.
The Palestinian Arabs think all Israel is a “settlement” of squatters with no rights to the land, and they want all of Israel gone. They make this plain in their deeds, their propaganda, and their maps and flags.
‘There is hatred for everything that is different,’ a friend tells the incredulous young woman, as their world collapses around them in Nasser’s Egypt.
‘Le dernier Khamsin des juifs d’Egypte’ is the novel (in French) which the author Bat Ye’or ( her pen name, meaning Daughter of the Nile) had always wanted to write. Instead the Cairo-born Jewess’s life was thrown off course by her pioneering research into the dhimmi, the subaltern status of Jews and Christians under Islam.
The Hamsin is the hot wind blowing in to Egypt from the Sahara. For the 80,000 Jews of Egypt, riots combine with state-sanctioned persecution to blow this age-old community out of the country, never to return.
The book is written in an impressionistic style but is nuanced and covers all aspects of the exodus. It is heavily autobiographical. Arriving in 1957 as a young refugee in London to study at the Institute Z, Elly ( Bat Ye’or) comes from a well-heeled family. Now she is struggling to survive on a handout of eight pounds a month. Depressed in the cold and the fog, she tries to make sense of what has happened. She is haunted by flashbacks and ghosts from her Egyptian past. Her long-dead, observant relatives are resigned to their fate, but Elly, of a new breed of educated, secular, independent women, can’t accept that Egyptian Jewish life is being wiped out. Elly’s father is burning their family archives lest they be accused of Zionism before their hurried departure. They can’t leave without signing a declaration forfeiting their property.
The storm has been brewing for 100 years. Egyptian nationality was only granted to those who could prove roots going back to 1845.
Last month, the world marked the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the start of WWII. In Israel, too, this was a big milestone: Kids discussed it at school, academics held conferences at the various universities, newspapers ran articles and editorials. But this wasn’t, of course, always the case in Israel. For years, the war—and the Holocaust—were taboo topics. European Jews, many Israelis felt, had gone to the camps like sheep to the slaughter, without resisting, without putting up much of a fight.
Then that perception changed, almost overnight, as a result of one major event: the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann. Every other Israeli, it seems, claims to have been connected to that heroic operation. But for years, one man who actually was at the heart of the covert kidnapping did all he could to erase himself from the history books. Gregory Warner and Daniel Estrin bring us the complicated story of Dr. Yonah Elian, the anesthesiologist who sedated one of the world’s most notorious Nazis. Today’s episode comes from Rough Translation, an NPR podcast that tells stories from around the world that offer new perspectives on familiar conversations.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Monday, October 28, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
