From a Twitter thread I wrote today: ------------------------------
For the past few weeks, @KenRoth and @hrw have been claiming that Israel not renewing the work permit of an anti-Israel activist shows how Israel treats human rights orgs.
Here's an indication of how many human rights NGOs are in Israel today. (I created this picture.)
Don't believe HRW's lies.
If any country on Earth has more NGOs per square kilometer, and more NGO workers per capita, than Israel, I'd love to know about it.
Yet instead of showing how open Israel is to criticism, these NGOs compete as to who can make Israel look the worst.
It's their business model!
Their mostly Western funders aren't paying them to find what is good about Israel, or how Israel compares favorably with EVERY other country at war in history. They only pay for dirt, and the workers know that their jobs depend on vilification, not accuracy and context.
Israel's very openness is what allows more NGOs to criticize Israel more, with more critical reports and articles and tweets, than any other state in history. (Any counterexamples are welcome. Don't think you'll find them.)
Who will pay to read a report that Israel is more tolerant of Muslims than France (burkini ban) or Switzerland (minaret limits)? No one cares. They want to show Israel is evil, and with enough money thrown at NGOs, amazingly, they find (or create) all the dirt they need!
It is an entire industry that is funded by people and organizations who generally have a problem with a Jewish state or Jewish sovereignty.
Yet these NGOs, and their funders, have no accountability. No independent audits of their methodology. No fact checkers. No ombudsmen.
So that's why @KenRoth can keep obsessing over Israel. He, and the other NGOs, have full impunity - the very thing they falsely accuse Israel of.
Besides @NGOmonitor and sites like mine there is essentially nothing that exists to check this power to unfairly vilify Israel.
Because Israel is indeed the democracy and open society that these NGOs all fall over themselves to say the opposite.
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Jerusalem, December 5 - Time-traveling Zionists tasked with manufacturing a convincing ancient history for Jewish presence and sovereignty in the Holy Land clashed with the Creator, witnesses report, over the former seeking to place objects in the same spot where the latter intended to place dinosaur bones as a test of faith in the literal truth of Scripture.
Eyewitness accounts place a group of three or four Zionist time-travelers at the scene of a hillside argument with the LORD this afternoon, with each side claiming precedence over the other for the privilege of planting fake historical or prehistorical evidence. Reports indicate that the LORD relented, allowing the Zionists to construct an elaborate series of structures with distinctly Jewish features such as ritual baths on the site, and to strew the bones of only kosher animal species, among other activities, while the Creator Himself selected a spot a short distance away that also proved suitable for the placement of paleontologic hoax material.
"As I understand it, the Zionists conceded that God did in fact have precedence," recalled an eyewitness. "They were simply arguing for some divine flexibility, given that they had planned a complicated site-specific project that would take an enormous amount of time and effort to adapt for some other location, whereas the Almighty could alter reality at will and simply adapt some other location for His purposes."
"God didn't like that idea, mostly because He appears to prefer working with what's already there," added a second observer. "But it all worked out, if I recall correctly, because there was a place nearby that worked for the fossil thingies just as well as the original site.
Zionist time-travelers still operated at the site as of this evening, engaging in planting such items as coins minted to designate a certain period; potsherds associated with specific groups; and clay seals with names of personalities in the Bible. The group also spread ash at a certain underground level to indicate destruction of a Jewish town congruent with Biblical accounts.
The LORD, meanwhile, expressed satisfaction that He had planted the right fossils in the right place to fool those unwilling to believe the plain text in its strictest sense, so that He could reward those who disregard the eyes and capacity for rational analysis that He also planted within them.
"This is gonna be great," the Almighty pronounced. "I can't wait to see the hullabaloo that this sparks."
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Most objections to the State Department’s recent determination that international law does not prohibit Jews from living in the West Bank were based, Evelyn Gordon notes, on prudential rather than legal grounds. Citing as examples the statements of the presidential candidates Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, she points to the dangers of this inability, or unwillingness, to distinguish policy from law:
[T]he concept of “it’s legal, but it stinks” has evidently gone out of style, especially on the left. When leftists think something stinks, they want it declared illegal, even if it’s not.
The advantages of this tactic are obvious. Policy questions, by definition, are disputable. . . . But law ostensibly eliminates controversy because once the courts rule something illegal, then everyone is supposed to accept that it must stop. . . . [The] problem is this tactic’s enormous cost, which far outweighs any possible benefit: when people start branding anything they object to as “illegal,” they turn the law into just another player on the political battlefield. And once that happens, legal decisions will be treated with no more respect than any other political pronouncement.
Gordon notes a perhaps far more dangerous parallel within Israel’s political system, in the form of the attorney general’s decision to indict Benjamin Netanyahu:
[T]he attorney general’s office and the courts have intervened in literally thousands of policy decisions over the past three decades, frequently in defiance of actual written law and almost always in the left’s favor. In short, both . . . have routinely behaved like political activists rather than impartial jurists. So rightists have no reason to trust their impartiality now.
[Moreover], Netanyahu has been targeted by frivolous investigations—including, in my view, two of the three now going to trial—ever since he first became prime minister in 1996. All involved genuinely repulsive conduct on Netanyahu’s part. But rather than treating such conduct as a problem on which the public, rather than the courts, must render judgment, the legal establishment repeatedly opened cases against him, to which they devoted countless man-hours before finally closing them.
Now, the legal establishment says it has finally found a real crime. But as in the story of the boy who cried wolf, Netanyahu’s supporters no longer believe it.
Every day when Palestinian girls enter their high school in Bethlehem the Palestinian Authority reminds them that the suicide bomber who was their age, 17-year-old Ayyat Al-Akhras who murdered 2 and wounded 28, is their role model.
At the entrance to this PA school is a sign in memory of the “Martyrs” of the PA terror campaign (the second Intifada, 2000-2005) in which more than 1,100 Israelis were murdered, many in suicide bombings. The memorial, which was established in cooperation between the Education Directorate under the PA Ministry of Education and Fatah’s Shabiba Youth Movement, specifically names suicide bomber and Fatah member Ayyat Al-Akhras who blew herself up near a Jerusalem supermarket on March 29, 2002:
Text on sign: “This memorial was established in cooperation between the Education Directorate (i.e., branch of the PA Ministry of Education) and the Fatah Shabiba [Youth Movement] organization, in order to commemorate the Martyrs of the Al-Aqsa Intifada at the Bethlehem High School for Girls for the anniversary of the outbreak of the Palestinian revolution
Jan. 1, 2003
Martyr Ayyat Al-Akhras (i.e., suicide bomber, murdered 2, wounded 28)
Martyr Nida Al-Izza (i.e., Palestinian who apparently was accidentally shot by Israeli soldiers)” [Facebook page of the Bethlehem High School for Girls, Nov. 19, 2019]
The wall to the left of the school entrance also bears a drawing of former PLO and PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, and to the right of it the logo of the Fatah Shabiba Youth Movement that includes the PA map of “Palestine” that presents all of Israel as “Palestine” together with the PA areas in the colors of the Palestinian flag.
Palestinian Media Watch has exposed the PA’s child abuse through its educating even young children to seek death as Martyrs for Allah and for “Palestine.” Telling teenage girls that a suicide bomber of their age is an honored “Martyr” on a prominent plaque they see daily at the entrance to their school, sends two morally deplorable messages: First, that murdering Israelis is not only acceptable but honorable and second, that killing oneself in order to kill Israelis is likewise heroic.
The Danger of the Jews and the Hypocrites on Islam and the Muslims
The Jews Breaching Treaties:
The Jews ignored what was mentioned in their book and didn’t enter Islam except the very few.
They were not loyal nor serious regarding the treaties they signed with the prophet, they quickly breached them, showed hostility towards the Muslims, attempting to pre-occupy the Muslims from spreading Islam and establishing a state so that they could remain in control of the Arabian Peninsula through maintaining a monopoly on money and loaning it to others with usury as well as having a monopoly on weaponry they manufactured in which they found it to be a profitable trade amongst the fighting Arab tribes.
The Jews saw in Islam an arch-enemy, since the (Islamic legislation) will end their control and dominance over people as Islam forbids usury which (put a stop) to the Jews from exploiting the needy and sucking their blood.
The fighting Arab tribes became compassionate after embracing Islam which lead to a slump in weapons trade for the Jews.
When the thorn of the Muslims intensified and the prophet’s dawah (invitation to Islam) extended, the Jews took part in conspiracies to weaken the Muslims and disgrace them.
The next pages go into details of the four conspiracies, which are:
1- Inflaming the fire of fitnah (civil strife) between Muslims
2- Expressing hostility (towards) the Muslims
3- Backing the polytheists against the Muslims
4- Attempt to kill the prophet
Activity
Search for other conspiracies by the Jews against Islam and Muslims and write it in your notebook.
"The Jews claim usury is a necessary system the world economy is based on that you can’t get rid of so they could remain taking advantage of world’s wealth, the economists responded to them and determined usury is a corrupt system and the reason for world crises as it increases the money for the lenders and reduces the consumer purchasing power"
(h/t WC)
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One of the "political" leaders of Hamas, Mahmoud al-Zahar, stressed that the current calm between Gaza and Israel is not permanent and Hams only accepts it to regroup and re-arm.
Speaking to "Felesteen," Zahar said, "Truce with the occupation is a means for the resistance to catch our breath and use it as a project of resistance to accumulate the tools of the struggle for liberation."
Anyone who tries to portray the truce as a kind of security cooperation or agreement with the occupation is wrong," he added.
"We must not lose sight of the basic goal. Our banner will never come down. Our project is a project for the liberation of all Palestine, no borders for Gaza or the West Bank or the 1948 lines, these are temporary borders and our natural borders [is all of Palestine] with neighboring Arab countries," Zahar emphasized..
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Last night the "Red Carpet Human Rights Film Festival" began in Gaza.
A large screen was placed in front of a cinema that has been closed for decades for the opening. The festival's artistic director Montaser Al-Sabe told reporters that the festival will include about 45 films to be shown in various venues throughout the Gaza Strip until December 11.
The theme of the festival this year is "I am a human being" to send a message that there are more than 2 million people in the Gaza Strip living under Israeli "blockade" for more than 12 years.
Organizers said that Hamas facilitated the organization of the festival.
Yes, a terror group - one that could easily have allowed some of the 11 shuttered cinemas in Gaza to re-open since it took over, but didn't - is positioning itself to be a champion of human rights by allowing a film festival.
Not one film tackles the issue of human rights violations in Gaza by Hamas or by other Islamist groups. No films about harassment of Christians, of honor killings of women, of armed groups recruiting children, of indoctrinating generations into hating Jews and Israel. Not one filmmaker who pretends he is brave for attacking Israel will dare say a word about actual human rights violations in Gazans' day to day lives.
This censorship, and self-censorship, is not unusual for the human rights community. After all, human rights film festivals in London wouldn't dare say anything negative about Hamas either. There is only one narrative that is acceptable - the one that Ken Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, has been pushing on his Twitter account - that Israel is the only human rights violator in the Middle East worth mentioning every day.
A real human rights community would object to how obscene it is for a recognized terror group to facilitate a farce of a "human rights film festival." Sadly, the world has no such human rights community.
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My home town of Fresno, California has a tiny Jewish community. The metropolitan area of about a million people, in almost the geographical center of the state, has only about 1000 Jewish families. There are three congregations: a Reform temple with several hundred members, a much smaller Conservative shul, and a Chabad house.
I haven’t been to the US since moving back to Israel more than five years ago. But I keep in touch. So recently I noticed an announcement on the Facebook page of the Reform congregation for a talk by a Rabbi John Rosove on the subject “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, an American Zionist Perspective.” I thought that was interesting, since I, too, am a Zionist and (you can tell by my accent) will always be an American.
Rabbi Rosove went to Berkeley (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and Hebrew Union College, and is Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Israel in Hollywood. Investigating further, I found that the talk would be about “… the destructive impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinians, Israelis and the future of Israel’s democracy.” And I noted that Rabbi Rosove is a national co-chair of the J Street Rabbinic Cabinet, and is associated with several “Reform Zionism” groups.
This is not my kind of Zionism – it demands a suicidal “two-state solution,” and wrongly analogizes our conflict with the Palestinians to the American civil rights struggle, two things that couldn’t be more different.
Let’s assume that Rabbi Rosove is one of these. His talk is being held at Clovis Community College, next door to Fresno, and is free. But who paid Rosove’s expenses? The announcement for the talk indicates that it is sponsored by GV Wire, a local progressive news website. GV Wire is a very slick production, with a professional staff including Bill McEwen, a former Fresno Bee columnist and editorial page editor.
The “GV” in GV Wire stands for Granville Homes, one of the biggest real estate developers and homebuilders in the Fresno area. And Granville Homes is owned by the Assemi family, who came to California from Iran just before the revolution. Among the founders of the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno, the Assemis are among the biggest philanthropists in the Central Valley of California. Granville has done some projects in the downtown area which have improved parts of town that many people thought were lost forever. They donate large amounts to numerous causes and organizations, especially “progressive” ones.
The publisher of GV Wire is Darius Assemi, Granville’s President and CEO. He is deeply involved in local politics, and is probably one of the most powerful people in the area. And of course, he’s no friend of Israel. He’s described Israel’s shooting terrorists climbing its border fence as a “massacre.”
So why would he bring a self-described “Zionist” speaker to the area (even if he’s as much a Zionist as I am Queen of England)?
The explanation is the reaction to Assemi’s previous speaker, Alison Weir, who appeared on September 18 (her presentation can be viewed here). Weir is viciously anti-Israel and antisemitic, to the point that even pro-BDS groups like Jewish Voice for Peace have disavowed her. Her position is that the Israel/Jewish lobby dominates the US government, causing it to act against American interests in order to help Israel oppress, exploit, and murder Palestinians, which it does in the most sadistic way possible. She asserts that US media, controlled by Jewish interests, is biased in favor of Israel, and that any criticism of Israel is derailed by accusations of antisemitism. She is a low-key, persuasive speaker, and if you don’t recognize the lies, lack of context, and distortions, she will convince you.
Weir was originally invited by the college, which canceled the event following complaints by the ADL and other Jewish organizations.
But Assemi thought that she should be heard, so he had GV Wire sponsor the event and rent the hall, absolving the college of responsibility. ADL and the others protested again, but rather than cancel the event, Assemi decided to also invite “a speaker who will explain the deadly realities in this region from the Jewish perspective.” Balance. That would be Rabbi Rosove.
So now we will get a “Jewish perspective” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Jew who says he is a Zionist, but represents an organization that is actually anti-Zionist, and is even supported financially by Israel’s enemies. And a Jewish house of worship is advertising it.
Welcome to the highest level of useful idiocy!
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Those familiar with the history of the Holocaust would not be surprised by Wistrich’s description, but they might be startled by his depiction of Europe at the time of the interview, which took place more than a decade ago.
Europeans, he said, “are reluctant to accept and admit that, despite all the Holocaust education and commemoration that’s taking place – and all the solemn declarations about having thoroughly learned the lessons of the past – anti-Semitism has returned in such strength.”
He went on to recount the shock expressed by non-Jewish British lawmakers at testimony he gave before an inter-parliamentary committee in the UK. “I don’t recognize the country you’re talking about,” one of them said to him when he was done. Others claimed to be “aghast” at what they’d learned.
In all the years that have passed since then, the plight of Jews in Britain has deteriorated, not improved, thanks in large measure to the legitimacy that Corbyn’s Labour has given to anti-Semitism.
Indeed, it is the mainstreaming of the phenomenon that should be cause for such concern, and not only among Jews, whose negligible number, at 300,000, makes up a minuscule minority of the total UK population, which is approximately 66 million.
Britain beware: Anti-Semitism is and always has been a “canary in the coal mine,” boding deathly ill for any society that embraces it.
However, Zizek, who’s previously expressed his support for a one-state solution, uses this convoluted logic to advance another calumny – that Jews don’t in fact have “roots” in the land. However, the trouble with Jews today is that they are now trying to get roots in a place which was for thousands of years inhabited by other people.
In addition to the insidious “trouble with Jews today” line, the claim is grotesquely misleading, as Jews’ uninterrupted presence in the land “for thousands of years” is a historical fact, not Zionist propaganda. He also seems to be accepting the ahistorical claims by Palestinians that they were the original inhabitants.
Zizek then revisits and further expounds upon his previous canard: that Jews and/or Israelis cynically use the charge of antisemitism, and memories of the Holocaust, to silence legitimate criticism of Israel: Today, the charge of antisemitism is more and more addressed at anyone who deviates from the acceptable left-liberal establishment towards a more radical left–can one imagine a more repellent and cynical manipulation of the Holocaust? When protests against the Israel Defense Forces’ activities in the West Bank are denounced as an expression of antisemitism, and (implicitly, at least) put in the same line as Holocaust deniers–that is to say, when the shadow of the Holocaust is permanently evoked in order to neutralise any criticism of Israeli military and political operations–it is not enough to insist on the difference between antisemitism and the critique of particular measures of the State of Israel. One should go a step further and claim that it is the State of Israel that, in this case, is desecrating the memory of Holocaust victims, ruthlessly using them as an instrument to legitimise present political measures.
The truth is that the only time that anti-Israel demonstrators are accused of antisemitism is when they espouse antisemitic tropes (per the IHRA definition), or threaten Jews with violence, in the service of their cause.
The writings of Slavoj Žižek, an admirer of Lenin and foe of liberal democracy who who attributed the attacks of 9/11 to the “antagonisms of global capitalism”, have all the markings of a socialist revolutionary intellectual trying desperately to stay relevant in an age which has rejected such historically lethal ideologies.
Unsurprisingly, the Corbyn-Milne brand of neo-Marxist politics he embraces also seems intent on at least trying to hide one central component of his core beliefs – an innate hostility to Jews and Israel.
Zizek calls into question the morality of the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, whose op-ed drew widespread attention. Without mentioning Corbyn by name, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis recently wrote in an article for the Times that “a new poison–sanctioned from the top–has taken root in the Labour Party.” He conceded: “It is not my place to tell any person how they should vote,” though went on to add: “When December 12 arrives, I ask every person to vote with their conscience. Be in no doubt, the very soul of our nation is at stake.” I find this presentation of a political choice as a purely moral one ethically disgusting–it reminds me of how, decades ago, the Catholic Church in Italy did not explicitly order citizens to vote for Christian Democracy, but just said that they should vote for a party which is Christian and democratic.
Chief Rabbi Mirvis called on all people of good moral standing to consider the issue of antisemitism in how they vote. Zizek’s criticism is similar to the belief of many Corbyn supporters that the antisemitism issue is merely a bad faith smear used by political enemies to damage the Labour party.
Having claimed that antisemitism is deployed in bad faith, Zizek goes even further by claiming the same principle concerning the Holocaust: When protests against the Israel Defense Forces’ activities in the West Bank are denounced as an expression of antisemitism, and (implicitly, at least) put in the same line as Holocaust deniers–that is to say, when the shadow of the Holocaust is permanently evoked in order to neutralise any criticism of Israeli military and political operations–it is not enough to insist on the difference between antisemitism and the critique of particular measures of the State of Israel. One should go a step further and claim that it is the State of Israel that, in this case, is desecrating the memory of Holocaust victims, ruthlessly using them as an instrument to legitimise present political measures.
I have a thing about Germans. I
cannot stand to see or hear them. It isn’t intellectual, not something thought
out, but a gut reaction: it literally turns my stomach to be in proximity to
them, to Germans, even through the media of film.
Do you want to call my kneejerk
response to Germans simple bigotry? An inability to forgive? It’s not. Truly.
The way I feel about Germansis just
the well-honed instinct of a Jewish person, a response to the way Germans systematically
packed my people into cattle cars, shipped them off to death camps, and gassed
and burned them in the millions.
No. You’re right. They weren’t
the ones who did all that. Because the people who did that are mostly dead. So
it wasn’t them but their parents and their grandparents. But the thing is,
their parents and their grandparents are their people. And that is what their people did.
In fact I’m not thinking about
any of this when it happens, when I have contact with Germans. It’s like a
flash, a moment of impact or a collision, something primal. It’s my stomach
turning when a German tourist on a Jerusalem bus turns to me with a smile,
holding out his bag of cookies. “Take one,” he says, smiling, even laughing.
My head flies ‘round, as I turn
my face to the side so I will no longer see him. I am being obvious and it’s
not nice of me. But I can’t help it. Still, I cannot just ignore him. So I turn
my face forward once again and shake my head no, never looking up. Not once.
Because I literally can’t bear it. Can’t bear to look at him.
It’s physical, this reaction,
and you can call it animal instinct, or self-preservation, I really don’t care.
I’m not thinking about any of that when I’m around Germans: the people of the
people who did what their people did, which is murder Jews in the millions.
My guts twist because I am a
Jew. It’s something that happened to me. I’m a product of centuries of cell
division of a single people descended from four
mothers.
I am a Jew.
So when a friend sends me a video
of a “Stairway to Heaven” flashmob from the Kirschgarten, in Mainz, Germany, I
try, I really do. But I last only 40 seconds. Then it happens. My gut turns and
I have to shut it down. I just can’t.
I want to be nice. My friend
was just being nice. So I take several deep breaths, trying to decide what to
say, what to do. Finally, I thank him. I tell him I just can’t stand to see or
hear Germans, but let him know I tried to watch it and that I do appreciate
that he wanted to share something beautiful with me.
I want to be honest. The instinct,
what happens when I see or hear Germans, wasn’t always there. It is a learned
instinct. When I was a young girl in elementary school, I befriended a German
girl, whose parents were doing graduate studies in Pittsburgh. The girl was new
in my class and I wanted to be nice to a stranger. I didn’t know I shouldn’t be
friends with her, and Antje was really, really nice.
One day she invited me to come
home with her after school. I called my mother, who said it was fine. As it got
closer to the time for me to go home for supper, Antje’s parents begged me to
stay for dinner, and said that afterward, they were going to a movie. I
remember it was “Yellow Submarine” that was playing, and they said I could go
with them. It seemed there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do for me, they were
being so nice. I called home and asked if I could stay a bit longer, for dinner
and so forth, maybe for a movie.
My dad got wind of the phone
call, having just come home from work. He asked my mother what was going on,
asked her some questions, then took the phone and said, “You can’t stay. I am
coming to pick you up. Be ready.”
“But Daddy,” I began to beg.
“No,” he said. Just the one
word. But there was a kind of finality to it. I wanted to demand a reason, but knew
it wasn’t going to work on him. I wasn’t going to wheedle this out of him or change
his mind and I knew it. I said goodbye to Antje and her family and I never went
back there ever again.
I wasn’t allowed to.
My dad explained it to me in
the car. “They are Germans being nice to a Jewish girl. They think it can make
up for what they did to us in the war.”
My dad mentioned a few of these
things. Bars of soap. Babies. He didn’t have to say much.
I still liked Antje after that,
but I never really spent time with her again. It was impossible. She was a
German. I was a Jew. The war. The soap. The babies.
Now when I think about her
parents trying so hard to get me to stay over that evening, I feel sick inside.
The way they tried to woo a little Jewish girl. “Hey! We’re not so bad. See? We’re
just people, like you.”
But you see, they’re not.
They know it. I know it. Why
try to pretend?
Some of us, of course, get the
message better than others. My eldest sibling, for instance, never got the
message, never developed the instinct. Perhaps there was a blip in the gene
pool. She bought a used Volkswagen bug during college and my dad didn’t speak
to her until she had it towed away, a few years later.
We didn’t buy German things. And
good God! Especially not a Volkswagen. But the truth is, it wasn’t specific to
Germany. We didn’t buy things from Spain because of the Spanish Inquisition.
And when my father discovered that a particular American discount chain store
was owned by an antisemite, we were told never to frequent that establishment,
ever again. My mom knew he meant business, and we never did.
For the record, I do not hate
Germans. It’s just that more than anything else, I love and am proud of being a
Jew. And this is what my body does to protect my Jewish soul. It has a violent
reaction when I come in contact with Germans.
It’s not malicious, and in
fact, like with the nice tourist offering me cookies, sometimes I feel bad
about it. But it is what it is.
I feel no need to apologize.
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Joseph Massad is professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.
Even though he has written articles that are so antisemitic as to be indistinguishable from neo-Nazi literature, and even though he is a homophobe who accuses gay activists of colonialism and imperialism, he still gets respect. Which makes one wonder if it is possible for an Arab academic to ever say anything to outrageous for the Left to cheer him.
He just wrote an article for Middle East Eye where he uses his normal antisemitic rhetoric, claiming that Israel's Law of Return is illegal and that Palestinian "right of return" is international law.
The irony is not one that Israel does not recognise the right of refugees to return to their homeland; rather, Israel recognises only the right of Jews - whom it claims, based on its religious and colonial myths, were refugees from Palestine who had lived in exile for 2,000 years - to “return”, while it denies that right to Palestinians, whom it recognises as having been displaced from Palestine.
Of course, no one claims that Jews returning to Israel is based on international law. It is based on Israel's right to create its own immigration policy, as every other country has.
As usual, Massad's "proofs" for Palestinian "right of return" are a mixture of groundless assertion and links to documents that say no such thing. He cites the case of Bosnia, when that return was part of the Dayton Agreement and not based on international law. He cites without a shred of proof that descendants of refugees are considered eligible for return (he links to Somalian law saying some descendants of Somali refugees are eligible for citizenship - this has zero to do with international law.)
After all the smoke and mirrors, though, Massad gets to the real reason he wants to fool readers into believing that millions of Palestinians have the "right to return" to a country most have never seen:
The Palestinian struggle today, therefore, must not waiver on the implementation of the Palestinian right of return, as this right is the legal key to undoing the Zionist conquest of Palestine in its entirety.
Massad freely admits that his desire for "return" is not for human rights, or to help Palestinians escape statelessness, or any real legal reason. He sees it as a pseudo-legal way to destroy Israel.
Which is exactly the reasons given by Arab leaders for decades for not allowing Palestinians to become citizens in their countries - because it is better that they remain stateless and miserable but potential cannon fodder to one day, maybe, destroy Israel. The more miserable they are, the better.
Massad is not interested in justice or mercy. He just wants to see the Jewish state destroyed, and keeping Palestinians in misery is the way he wants to see it done.
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The White House approached several Arab states to encourage them to reach non-belligerence agreements with Israel, according to Israeli, Arab and U.S. sources.
Why it matters: One of the Trump administration’s main goals in the Middle East has been to promote the normalization of ties between Israel and the Gulf states. Non-belligerence agreements are an interim step between the secret relations Israel has with those countries now and full diplomatic relations.
The Israeli, Arab and U.S. sources tell me President Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Victoria Coates, met last week with the ambassadors of the UAE, Bahrain, Oman and Morocco in Washington. All four countries have secret contacts and cooperation with Israel but no diplomatic relations.
- Coates raised the initiative for non-belligerence agreements, told them the Trump administration supports such a move and asked what their positions were.
- The Arab ambassadors said they would report back to their capitals and return soon with an answer.
That White House request builds off of an initiative led by Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, Israeli officials say.
- Katz raised the idea in a September meeting at the UN with Omani Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi and Emirati Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash.
The US State Department concurred with Rabbi Cooper: “The fundamental business model and fiscal practices that have marked UNRWA for years – tied to UNRWA’s endlessly and exponentially expanding the community of beneficiaries – are simply unsustainable and the organization has been in crisis mode for many years. The United States will not commit further funding to this irredeemably flawed operation. We are very mindful of, and deeply concerned with, the impact upon innocent Palestinians, especially school children, resulting from the failure of UNRWA and key members of the regional and international donor community to reset the way UNRWA does business.”
Former Israeli Communications Minister Ayoob Kara added: “If UNRWA’s money went to building homes for the refugees, all of the cities in Gaza and the West Bank would look different. They would have nice Palestinian cities, just as Israel which absorbed all of the Jewish refugees from the Arab world managed to build nice cities. But instead, all of their money goes to supporting terror indoctrination. Because of that, I am very happy that there is increased international support for stopping this, which is necessary for the free world.”
In conclusion, Yaakov Hagoel, Head of the Department for Countering Anti-Semitism of the World Zionist Organization, liked the idea of calling upon the donor nations to make their continued contributions to UNRWA dependent upon reforms that will lead to an end of the anti-Semitic war indoctrination that is presently occurring in their schools: "UNRWA is one-sided against Israel. Everyone who harms the Jewish people and the State of Israel and does anti-Semitism, we must do everything against this."
We will check into the option of applying pressure onto the donor countries.” The time has come for UNRWA donor nations to wake up and smell the coffee, and recognize that there is a true problem that must be dealt with. The time has come for UNRWA to be comprehensively reformed and to stop indoctrinating Palestinian children to support terrorism.
On Tuesday, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda closed the 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla case for a third time. In her past two decisions to close the case, she merely said that 10 dead activists who clashed with the IDF was not a high enough volume of casualties to warrant her office's attention, which deals mostly with genocide or mass killings.
This time Bensouda said that one reason that she would not open a criminal probe was that the case had been probed by the IDF legal division. Her explanation noted that if a country's legal division's probe were viewed as a sham, that they would not have provided any protection from the ICC, meaning that the IDF probe here was not a sham.
Along the same lines, Bensouda pointed out that Spain, England, Sweden and Germany had all dismissed any war crimes allegations against the IDF for the incident, with some recognizing Israel's justice system as legitimate and as having properly probed the issue.
One of the more fascinating parts of the Antisemitism Barometer recently released by the Campaign Against Antisemitism (UK) was that it previously only asked people whether they agreed with stereotypical statements against Jews, but this time also asked questions as to whether they agreed with lies about Israel.
When analyzing the answers to the to sets of questions, there was a significant correlation between the two, even though the people mostly on the Left who have anti-Zionist positions insist that they do not harbor any bit of antisemitism.
There was a large overlap between people who agreed with at least one antisemitic statement and those who agreed with at least one ant-Zionist statement.
The more interesting statistic is that "54% of those respondents who held one or more anti-Zionist antisemitic views also held one or more Judeophobic antisemitic views, and 63% of those respondents who held one or more Judeophobic antisemitic views also held one or more anti-Zionist antisemitic views. "
The 63% doesn't surprise me - most antisemites are also anti-Israel, despite the attempts by some on the Left to say the opposite. But the 54% of those who claim they are simply "anti-Israel" who also hold traditional antisemitic opinions should (but won't) be a clear indication that the problem on the Left is not simply "anti-Zionism" but also the old fashioned Nazi-style Jew-hatred.
As the report says, "Although some people insist that attitudes toward the Jewish state have no connection to attitudes to Jews, our survey results suggest that if an individual holds at least one antiZionist antisemitic view, it is more likely than not that he or she will hold at least one Judeophobic antisemitic view as well."
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Thursday, December 05, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
