Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, December 23, 2019

12/23 Links Pt1: JPost Editorial: Israel Does Not Commit War Crimes; Ben-Dror Yemini: The ICC campaign of lies; The Real Danger to Palestinian Christians Doesn’t Come from Israel

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Israel Does Not Commit War Crimes

Israel does not intentionally harm civilians in Gaza or anywhere else. Yes, civilians are harmed in Gaza by IDF actions, but they are not the target. In 2015, a panel of former top military leaders and generals from eight democratic countries investigated the 2014 Gaza War. Their conclusion: Israel's conduct in the conflict "met and in some respects exceeded the highest standards we set for our own nations' militaries....The IDF not only met its obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict, but often exceeded these on the battlefield at significant tactical cost."

Furthermore, Jews living at the site of the biblical Shiloh, or in the shadow of the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, are not committing war crimes. To say that a Jew living in Judea - the cradle of Jewish civilization - is a war criminal is ridiculous. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Cabinet on Sunday: "To turn the fact that Jews are living in their land into a war crime is an absurdity of unimaginable proportions."

What starts with Israel will not end with Israel. If today Israeli politicians and soldiers will be charged with war crimes for the unintentional death of innocents during a military campaign, then tomorrow the politicians and soldiers of other countries will also find themselves so accused.

Syria intentionally commits war crimes. Iran intentionally commits war crimes. Turkey intentionally commits war crimes. Israel does not.

The Hague vs. Israel: Everything you need to know about the ICC Palestine probe

7. Does the ICC unfairly single out Israel for censure?

It is certainly possible to argue that getting dragged into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a good look for the court. A bloody civil war has been raging for years in Syria with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced; there are massive human rights violations in China, Myanmar, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere; and The Hague does nothing.

Instead, the ICC, which seeks to prosecute only the “most serious crimes of international concern,” is gearing up to investigate a Western democracy that insists it is fighting defensive conflicts against brutal terrorist organizations, and building homes on disputed territory captured in a defensive war.

“Who are they accusing here? Iran? Turkey? Syria? No — Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. This is terrible hypocrisy,” Netanyahu said Sunday.

On the other hand, this “whataboutism” argument isn’t entirely straightforward, either. The aforementioned states, like Israel, are not members of the ICC and the court thus does not have jurisdiction over crimes committed on their respective territories.

The ICC did not choose to get involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It did not initiate the process. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that the court, with its limited resources and already poor reputation, was hoping to stay far away from it. However, it was dragged into it by the Palestinians. Frustrated with the lack of progress in the peace process, Ramallah viewed The Hague as a convenient arena to score potent points against Israel.

However, it can be counter-argued, the prosecutor could have easily rejected the case by determining that the ICC does not have jurisdiction because Palestine is not a state. Whether she chose the opposite path out of purely legalistic or political-ideological reasons we may never know definitively. But we will find out soon enough whether the pretrial chamber agrees with or reject her arguments.

In the meantime, it is worth noting that the prosecutor’s announcement last week did not come as a surprise to Israel. For the last five years, senior politicians, including those on the right, were keenly aware that Bensouda was watching Israel’s every step. Netanyahu’s vocal support for expanding the settlement enterprise, including his recent repeated vows to annex significant portions of the West Bank, self-evidently did not help convince her to close the case and let it be.

ICC to Open Probe Into War Crimes in West Bank, Gaza

Israel's ministerial cabinet on Sunday decided to classify its discussions of the International Criminal Court’s expected investigation of alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, local media reported.

ICC reportedly spurned Israelis, met Palestinian group before probe decision

The International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor reportedly met with a Palestinian group, but avoided meeting with Israeli organizations, before the court announced Friday that it was preparing to probe alleged war crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians.

The Israeli organizations sought to present prosecutor Fatou Bensouda with information on alleged crimes by the Palestinian Authority, Channel 13 reported on Sunday.

Despite avoiding the Israelis, Bensouda met several times with Palestinian organizations ahead of the decision, with the most recent meeting occurring roughly two weeks ahead of the announcement.

One of the pro-Israel organizations that tried to meet with Bensouda was the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, a human rights group with representatives in Israel, the US and the UK.

The head of the organization, Meir Linzen, told Channel 13 that “for about a year we contacted the prosecutor several times, and didn’t get an answer.”

Linzen said the organization had prepared documents with its legal opinion that the ICC lacked authority to investigate the case, as well as information on the Palestinian Authority’s financial compensation of those involved in carrying out terror attacks against Israelis. The group reached out to Bensouda via both email and phone calls to no avail.

Bensouda met with representatives of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, who criticized the ICC for being unfairly biased toward Israel in a tense meeting earlier this month. The center posted footage of the meeting on its Facebook and YouTube pages on December 8.

For the first time, Saudi Arabia will officially welcome the secular New Year this year.

Official Saudi social media announced a fireworks show, a countdown to 2020 and music with a DJ.

Last year, private New Year's parties and events were allowed but nothing official from the Kingdom.

Up until now, the Kingdom and its Muslim clerics refused to celebrate the New Year because it is forbidden in Sharia law.

A member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, Dr. Saleh Al-Fawzan, said on many occasions and fatwas that "participation in New Year's celebrations is forbidden by Sharia," describing it as a "legal innovation."

Things are definitely changing in Saudi Arabia, and the reason is probably the desire to attract tourists as oil is becoming less and less stable as the major source of the kingdom's income.

(Photo above was for the Saudi National Day celebrations.)

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The one "war crime" that Israel cannot avoid being guilty of by the ICC

The International Criminal Court is meant to be a "court of last resort" to try the most heinous war crimes that are otherwise not being prosecuted by the existing national courts.

The Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC detailed her potential charges against Israel (and Hamas) in paragraphs 94-96 of the 112 page report released Friday, "Prosecution request pursuant to article 19(3) for a ruling on the Court’s territorial jurisdiction in Palestine." Those charges include:

1) Intentionally launching disproportionate attacks in the 2014 war

2) wilful killing and wilfully causing serious injury to body or health

3) intentionally directing an attack against objects or persons using the

distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions

4) the transfer of Israeli civilians into the West Bank since 2014 (when the Palestinian Authority joined the Rome Statute)

5) use by members of the IDF of non-lethal and lethal means against persons participating in demonstrations beginning in March 2018 near the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel

If the prosecutor is fair, she will drop four of the five charges. Israel's High Court as well as Israel's Military Advocate General exhaustively investigate all incidents and there is no way a fair court can say that Israel doesn't uphold the rule of law. The High Court is respected internationally.

A footnote in this prosecutor's report shows that the fourth charge, that of "transfer of civilians," cannot be defended by Israel. She notes that Israel's High Court has refused to rule on that issue because it is far more a political that a legal issue. Paragraph 180:

The Israeli Government, in turn, has considered the settlements to be lawful. And while the Israeli High Court of Justice has examined the legality of discrete actions taken by Israeli public authorities connected to the Government of Israel’s settlement policy based on individual claims before it, despite the High Court’s recognised independence, it has consistently held the broader policy question of the Government of Israel’s settlement policy as such, which has been deemed to be predominantly political in nature, to be “non-justiciable”.[572]

The footnote says:

See Ayub et al. case, pp. 12-13 (Vice-President Landau: “I have more willingly reached the conclusion that this court should refrain from considering this issue of civilian settlement in an occupied territory under international law, knowing that this issue is in dispute between the government of Israel and other governments and that it may be debated in the context of a crucial international negotiation of which the government of Israel is a party. Any opinion expressed by this court on such a sensitive issue which cannot be said other than as an obiter dictum, will neither add nor derogate, and issues which by their nature belong to the realm of international politics should better be discussed in that realm only. In other words, although I agree that petitioners' complaint is generally within the court's jurisdiction, in view of the fact that it involves proprietary rights of individuals, this special aspect of the matter should be regarded as not within the jurisdiction of the court when the petition is submitted to this court by an individual.”); Bargil et al. case, p. 9, President M. Shamgar ((referring to HCJ 852/86 Aloni v. Minister of Justice): “As we said there, attempts have been made to bring predominantly political disputes into the jurisdiction of the court. In that case I pointed out that I personally do not believe that it is, in practice, possible to create a hermetic seal or filter that are capable of preventing disputes of a political nature from penetrating into litigation before the High Court of Justice. The standard applied by the court is a legal one, but public law issues also include political aspects, within the different meanings of that term. The question which must be asked in such a case is, generally, what is the predominant nature of the dispute. As explained, the standard applied by the court is a legal one, and this is the basis for deciding whether an issue should be considered by the court, that is, whether an issue is predominantly political or predominantly legal./ In the case before us, it is absolutely clear that the predominant nature of the issue is political, and it has continued to be so from its inception until the present.”); Bargil et al. case, p. 11, Justice E. Goldberg: (“does this case fall into the category of the few cases where this Court will deny a petition for lack of institutional justicity [...] I believe that we must answer this question in the affirmative. This is not because we lack the legal tools to give judgment, but because a judicial determination, which does not concern individual rights, should defer to a political process of great importance and great significance. Such is the issue before us: it stands at the centre of the peace process; it is of unrivalled importance; and any determination by the court is likely to be interpreted as a direct intervention therein. The special and exceptional circumstances referred to, which are unique, are what put this case into the category of those special cases, where the fear of impairing the public’s confidence in the judiciary exceeds ‘the fear of impairing the public’s confidence in the law...’”). See also Green Park International Inc v Quebec 2009 para. 265, observing with respect to the scope of what the HCJ has deemed non-justiciable: “On its face, the Bargil case plainly does not support the view that the HCJ would refuse to hear the Action on the basis that the alleged violation of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention is non justiciable. It merely expresses the well-established principle of judicial economy whereby a court may abstain from considering a question in the abstract.”

By the High Court of Justice avoiding these rulings on the grounds that they are non-justiciable, Israel has opened itself up to the charge that allowing Jews to live in 2% of Judea and Samaria is a war crime - and the Rome Statute that the ICC must use at the basis for its rulings was written specifically to include Jews being allowed to live in Judea and Samaria to be considered as an equally vile crime as torture, biological experimentation or taking hostages.

The Arab hate of Israel and the apathy of the world (save the United States) to stop them allowed the creation of a completely new category of war crime that never existed in the history of international law to be added to the Rome Statute. I have previously detailed the entire history of how "international law" has been systematically changed specifically against Israel. This is of course a sickening application of international law - the idea that one nation's actions must be redefined from legal to illegal, using "legal" means, is nothing short of perverted. Yet all the moves made by the Arab nations since at least 1977 deliberately and specifically against Israel within the framework of creating brand new international laws directed at a single state have been accepted by the international community.

And never considered to be used against any other nation that also not only allows but even forces the transfer of its citizens into occupied territory.

Israel cannot defend itself against this charge because the entire world has been complicit in allowing a brand new international law to come into effect directed only at Israel - a law that the ICC cannot ignore. The cards have been not only stacked but reprinted: a magician's deck is the only one allowed to be used by the ICC when Israel is involved.

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Chanukah music video night 1: A Star Wars Chanukah (Six13)

This is pretty funny!

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12/22 Links: New ICC ruling reveals organization's true anti-Semitic intentions; Amnesty International- from bias to obsession; Podhoretz: The Reverse Blood Libel; Save Me from My Defenders!

From Ian:

New ICC ruling reveals organization's true anti-Semitic intentions

Because between the "war crimes" under investigation by chief ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and the request of a country that doesn't exist, "Palestine," are the Jewish communities beyond the Green Line and Israel's self-defense in Operation Protective Edge – versus the persistent attempts to invade Israel's sovereign territory from Gaza under the guise of "March of Return" border protests. In other words: Jewish settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel, which are not at all occupied territories according to actual international law, is a "war crime." Also a war crime, apparently, is preventing "Palestinian refugees" from invading Israel's sovereign territory from an area that Israel willingly transferred to Palestinian control.

This is not, therefore, a legal measure to bring any Israeli "war criminals" to justice, but the exploitation of the international judicial system to implement the diplomatic goal of destroying the State of Israel. According to the international definition of anti-Semitism, this amounts to pure anti-Semitism because it entails the denial of the Jewish people's right to self-determination and employs double standards against Israel.

Bensouda willingly ensnared herself in the web spun by the "Palestinians" around the international judicial system for the purpose of creating their own international law, to incriminate Israel and put it on the same footing with the Nazis. Thus, from their perspective, they can kill two birds with one stone: The Jews would no longer be perceived as victims of history, and another precedent will have been set in their war to delegitimize the existence of the Jewish state. It now remains to be seen whether the ICC's judges fall into this trap and further throw their own court's legitimacy into question by turning it into yet another absurd circus show – ala UNESCO, UNRWA, and the UN Human Rights Council.

Bensouda, who has struggled mightily to launch war crimes and crimes against humanity investigations in the most clear-cut of cases (such as Venezuela or Ukraine), has filed a request with judges to decide whether the ICC has jurisdiction in Judea and Samaria, east Jerusalem, and Gaza. Israel – similar to the United States and Russia – declared long ago that it has no intention of ratifying the tribunal's inaugural convention. Therefore the ICC has no authority to discuss Israel's affairs, unless crimes were committed against a country that is a signatory to the ICC convention (among its neighbors, only Jordan falls in this category), and unless it is proven that the Israeli justice system is incapable of properly trying suspected war criminals.

The judges at The Hague, therefore, must determine whether "Palestine" is a country at all, the status of the "territories," and whether the Israeli judicial system is functioning properly or not. Tackling these matters is akin to wading into a minefield, which could threaten the very viability of the International Criminal Court.

Netanyahu on war crimes probe: ICC has become a ‘weapon’ against Israel

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday tore into the International Criminal Court for saying there were grounds to investigate alleged Israeli and Palestinian war crimes, calling it an “absurd” decision that showed the court was being weaponized against Israel.

“As we’re moving forward to new places of hope and peace with our Arab neighbors, the International Criminal Court in The Hague is going backwards. On Friday it finally became a weapon in the political war against Israel,” Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.

Netanyahu said the prosecutor’s decision contained three “absurdities,” the first of which was going against the court’s founding principles.

“The ICC was established after the horrors of World War II, in particular the terrible horrors done to our people, and it is meant to deal with problems that states bring up against war criminals, such as genocide or mass deportation,” he said.
Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in the courtroom of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands, August 28, 2018. (Bas Czerwinski/Pool via AP)

Second, taking aim at the court’s scrutiny of West Bank settlements, Netanyahu argued that the decision went against “historical truth” of Jewish rights in the historic land of Israel.

“It is acting against the right of Jews to settle in the homeland of the Jews. To turn the fact that Jews are living in their land into a war crime — it is hard for there to be a greater absurdity than this,” he said.

Finally, Netanyahu said the ICC was ignoring the “present truth,” lashing it for not instead pursuing probes of Iran or Syria.

“This is terrible hypocrisy,” he said. “We’ll fight for our rights and our historical truths with all tools at our disposal.”

He also said the US was “fighting these distortions, this lack of justice and this lie,” without elaborating.

The ICC Prosecutor is saying that Jews living in the Old City of Jerusalem is a war crime. No one has ever been prosecuted for this “war crime”, & Prosecutor herself has ruled that Russians moving into occupied Crimea is NOT a war crime. This is not int’l law, its something else.
— Eugene Kontorovich (@EVKontorovich) December 21, 2019

My academic article explaining why the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israeli settlements (whether or not there exists a "State of Palestine" is, alas, paywalled (a drawback of peer-reviewed journals) but here is the abstract https://t.co/HfkJsUHQvd
— Eugene Kontorovich (@EVKontorovich) December 21, 2019

Aaron Klein: ICC Decision to Probe Israel for ‘War Crimes’ Is Pure Antisemitism

The inexcusable decision by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor to proceed with a probe into Israeli “war crimes” can only be explained as being motivated by raw antisemitism.

How else to fathom the ICC’s singling out of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which goes further than any other military in the world to protect civilians in the battlefield.

The IDF operates in a complex theater in which Palestinian terrorists use civilians as human shields, deliberately house their terrorist infrastructures in densely populated civilian areas and indiscriminately fire projectiles into Jewish civilian population zones.

Still, the IDF goes to extreme lengths to ensure the protection of Palestinian civilians even though terrorists intentionally surround themselves with civilians to thwart Israeli operations because they know that Israel is a beacon of morality.

The Israeli military regularly warns civilians of incoming attacks with phone calls and text messages. It employs “roof knocking” — or firing warning shots before any aerial bombing – thus providing Palestinian terrorists with advance warning of incoming attacks. If civilians in the vicinity still don’t evacuate, the Israeli army often makes announcements on loudspeakers. The IDF has called off scores of military raids because civilians were in the way.

Making a mockery of justice, ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced on Friday that she was “satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation into the situation in Palestine.” Bensouda ignores that Palestine, of course, is not an existing state.

Superficial and one-sided BBC reporting on ICC statement

Despite having previously acknowledged in 2015 that “the date chosen by the Palestinians as the starting point for the ICC to investigate requires explanation as it is clearly not arbitrary”, this report makes no effort to inform audiences why the ‘start date’ of June 13th 2014 – which deliberately excludes the abductions and murders of three Israeli civilians by members of a Hamas terror cell – was selected by the Palestinians.

The BBC’s report promotes reactions from the Palestinian Authority and a political NGO also engaged in lawfare against Israel.

“In a statement, the Palestinian Authority said: “Palestine welcomes this step as a long overdue step to move the process forward towards an investigation, after nearly five long and difficult years of preliminary examination.”

Reacting to the ICC decision, B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said: “Israel’s legal acrobatics in an attempt to whitewash its crimes must not be allowed to stop international legal efforts to, at long last, hold it to account.””

It closes with promotion of the BBC’s standard but partial mantra concerning ‘international law’.

“There are some 140 Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which most of the international community consider illegal under international law. Israel disputes this, and last month the US reversed its position and declared it no longer considered the settlements invalid.”

At the bottom of the article readers are told that they “may also find interesting” an embedded video dating from August 2019 which features as one of its main interviewees the director of another political NGO – Addameer – which is linked to a Palestinian terrorist organisation.

Although the BBC acknowledged years ago that the Palestinian decision to join the ICC and pursue this suit is part of what it has described as “a new strategy to put pressure on Israel“, that information is completely absent from this latest report.

I recently published a Facebook tidbit titled, "The Grounding of Democratic Party Racism is the Progressive Left." There I suggest that the progressive-left is racist in three primary ways. These are anti-white racism, antisemitic anti-Zionism, and an imperial condescension toward those of non-European descent.

In response, Corinne Blackmer, a Professor of Biblical and American literature and gender studies at Southern Connecticut State University, pointed me to a 2019 article by Keith Payne published in Scientific American titled, "The Truth about Anti-White Discrimination."

The thesis is that anti-white racism is, itself, a racist delusion on the part of "white" people. Payne's conclusions are grounded in a piece published in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Michael Norton and Sam Sommers, titled "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing."

Payne writes:

...a national survey reported that both blacks and whites believed that discrimination against blacks had declined over the past few decades, but whites believed that discrimination against whites was now more common than discrimination against blacks...

Whites tend to view increasing diversity as anti-white bias.

The implication is clear. The only reason that "whites" detect anti-white racism is out of their own sense of unearned privilege. It is not that there is any incessant cultural or academic tendency to berate "whites," but merely an irrational sense of weakness and vulnerability in the face of rising diversity and social justice in the United States.

The premise of Payne's argument rests on the undeniable fact of disparity of income between "white" people in the United States versus "black" people here. He claims that "the average black family earns about half as much as the average white family" and "that the unemployment rate for blacks is twice that for whites..."

Of course, none of this takes into account the fact that East-Asian Americans, Asian-Indian Americans, and American Jews, out-earn Americans of European descent. It seems hard to argue for "white privilege" in a society wherein those at the top of the economic hierarchy are not "white." Nonetheless, the disparagement of "white" people as essentially racist is obviously itself a racist notion and Jews are swept up in it.

Recently there has been considerable conversation around the notion of the "white Jew." The basic idea is that since Ashkenazim are "white" we enjoy "white privilege" and are, in fact, among the primary oppressors of "people of color." Democratic Party devotees of Louis Farrakhan even believe that Jews were the driving force behind that Atlantic Slave Trade and remain so to this day... as if that makes the slightest bit of sense.

The question then becomes, so what is the evidence for this political and cultural anti-white racism? I am not a sociologist and have not done independent research on the question. So we will have to make do with a few pieces of anecdotal evidence, and one scholarly study, that represents a tiny drop in the bucket if you decide to look into the matter further.

My favorite example is MTV's 2017 New Years Resolutions for White Guys. This one is fun because it is just so transparent in its contempt toward "white guys." Another interesting piece from the New York Times, written by Ekow N. Yankah, is titled, "Can My Children Be Friends With White People?" Can you begin to imagine a New York Times piece titled in all seriousness, "Can My Children Be Friends With Black People"? Yankah is not sure that his children can be friends with "white" people and this was published in The Times. Thankfully, Yankah tells us, "I have not given up on being friends with all white people."

And I have no doubt that "white" people -- whoever they may be, exactly -- appreciate that very much.

This one captured my attention shortly after the election of Donald Trump. This is a case wherein some young black kids tortured a mentally-handicapped white kid because Donald Trump won the 2016 election. The torturers made a point of calling the kid "white" as they stripped him naked into a bathtub and taped his mouth. The point, of course, is that he was tortured for being "white"... whatever that means, exactly. I feel reasonably certain that the people doing the torturing were not Republicans.

Finally, I want to point you to a piece written by Muneeb Hafiz, a PhD Candidate and Associate Lecturer at Lancaster University, UK, published in Critical Ethnic Studies by the University of Minnesota Press, titled "On Whiteness" (2018). Hafiz writes:

Whiteness “is on a toggle switch between ‘bland nothingness’ and ‘racist hatred,’” Professor Nell Painter tells us. It is a “metaphor for power” in James Baldwin’s vocabulary. According to Kehinde Andrews, Whiteness is “a process rooted in the social structure, one that induces a form of psychosis.” Whiteness, Achille Mbembe explains, “became the mark of a certain mode of Western presence in the world, a certain figure of brutality and cruelty, a singular form of predation with an unequaled capacity for the subjection and exploitation of foreign peoples.” A fantasy — no more real than Blackness, we should add — later transformed into a kind of common (non)sense, Whiteness “involves a constellation of objects of desire and public signs of privilege that relate to body and image, language and wealth.”

It is frankly astonishing that we can reify "whiteness" as a negative toxic epistemology in human history and not recognize this notion for the racism that it is. This does not only affect those of European descent. It represents racism towards Jews, as well.

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Jordanians protest buying natural gas from Israel as Egypt prepares its own purchase

Jordanian haters of Israel are trying to increase pressure on the government to cancel a deal where the energy-poor kingdom buys natural gas from Israel.

They started a hashtag campaign his weekend to "Bring down the gas agreement" complete with graphics like these:

Jordanians are also planning a series of demonstrations against the deal in the coming days.

The companies controlling the Leviathan and Tamar gas fields in Israeli waters plan to sell natural gas to both Egypt and Jordan starting next month. I have not yet seen similar protests from Egypt.

The gas deal with Jordan is worth $10 billion, with Egypt is it worth $15 billion.

Arab media are falsely reporting that the gas deals are with Israel itself, and that Israel admitted that some of the revenue will go towards its military. (Although, of course, some of the tax revenue undoubtedly would, as some portion of taxes from any country would go towards defense budgets.)

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Today's Hellenists celebrate Chanukah

Chanukah celebrates a bloody, violent rebellion by Jews against the Seleucids and the assimilated Jews who preferred Greek culture to Jewish religion.

Which is why it is so strange to see pesudo-Jewish groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace pretend to celebrate Chanukah - when they would have been the first to become pro-Seleucid Hellenists.

Jewish Voice for Peace's Chanukah ideas show that they are not even pretending to be interested in peace. They just hate Israel, period.

They aren't saying "criticize the occupation." They aren't saying "criticize the Israeli government." They are saying that they hate the very idea of Israel as a Jewish state and that Jews should subvert their holidays to attack the Jewish state.

Their logo in 167 CE would have looked like this:

Similarly, the "IfNotNow" logo would have looked something like this:

But if you think about it, even the "moderate" J-Street would never have supported Mattithias/Matisyahu slaying the Jewish Hellenist who wanted to sacrifice to the Greek gods, which sparked the Jewish rebellion. They would have been aghast at such seemingly unprovoked violence. Because, they say, they are pro-peace.

Maybe they would have lobbied the Seleucids to allow Jews to worship in their own Temple; maybe they could share the Temple with the Jews? If they ask really nicely?

The sad fact is that most Jews today would not support the Maccabees. And Chanukah is the most ironic holiday in the Jewish calendar as it is the one holiday against Jewish assimilation and yet is has become a Jewish Christmas instead.

And it is the main holiday about Jewish sovereignty over Judea and the Temple Mount - the very areas that the anti-Israel, pseudo-Jewish groups want to make Jew-free again.

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12/21 Links: Palestinian NGO employees arrested as a part of Shin Bet crackdown of PFLP; UAE foreign minister tweets article about Israel, Arab alliance; Evelyn Gordon: Jewsraelis

From Ian:

‘Extensive overlaps’ between BDS and terror groups revealed

The Shin Bet announced on December 18 that it arrested approximately 50 members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), ending the investigation into the August 23 terror attack that killed 17-year-old Rina Shnerb and revealing the organization’s ties to BDS, JNS reported. Shnerb’s brother and father, both of whom were with her during the explosion were injured, but survived.

One of those arrested was Khalida Jarrar, who is said to be the head of the terror group’s operations in the West Bank, served as the vice chairperson, director and board member of the BDS organization Addameer, according to JNS. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement calls on the world to put pressure on Israel through economic, academic and cultural measures.

“With regard to Jarrar, this is really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the BDS/terror connection,” Marc Greendorfer, president of the Zachor Legal Institute and author of “The New Antisemites: The Radicalization Mechanism of the BDS Movement and the Delegitimization Campaign Against Israel,” told JNS.

“Jarrar is simply one example of the extensive overlaps between terror organization leadership and BDS, going all the way to the top, where the organizing and operational leadership of BDS [the BDS National Committee, or BNC] includes a coalition of groups designated as foreign terror organizations by the United States and other countries,” Greendorfer told JNS.

Palestinian NGO employees arrested as a part of Shin Bet crackdown of PFLP

The Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency) announced that is has uncovered a 50-person terror network operating out of the West Bank in cooperation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP).

The statement named multiple PFLP leaders who were linked to non-governmental organizations, several of which receive direct funding from the United Nations.

Among those named in the report were Samer Arbid and Abdel Razep Farraj of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees; Walid Hanatsheh of the Health Work Committees; Itiraf Hajaj (Rimawi) of the Bisan Center; and Khalida Jarrar, former vice president of Addameer - who according to Jarrar's indictment, has led the PFLP in the West Bank as of June 2016.

Many of these NGOs receive taxpayer funding from Europe and other nations, including Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Spain, the European Commission and the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Several of the alleged terrorists have work as financial directors, accountants or fundraising directors for many of these organizations.

The Independent must apologise for appalling article claiming antisemitism accusations stifle criticism of Israel while bemoaning “the trouble with Jews today”

An op-ed in The Independent contends that accusations of antisemitism are levelled to stifle criticism of Israel while also complaining about “the trouble with Jews today”.

The brazen article, written by Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, and published earlier this month, adopts the “Livingstone Formulation”, the formula named after Ken Livingstone that claims that accusations of antisemitism are used to silence criticism of Israel.

The article on the one hand claimed that “today, the charge of antisemitism is addressed at anyone who critiques Israeli policy,” while also insisting on the other hand that “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.”

Aside from the dubious history intended to minimise if not erase the historical and religious connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, which goes back thousands of years, Mr Zizek is “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel,” in breach of the International Definition of Antisemitism. In case this was not obvious, The Independent, recognising that the statement was antisemitic, subsequently amended it to read: “the trouble with the settlement project today is that it is now trying to get roots in a place which was for thousands of years inhabited by other people”.

Of course the irony of the piece — which exemplifies the sinister folly of the Livingstone Formulation — is that Mr Zizek’s “criticism of Israel” was in this instance antisemitic, thereby undermining his entire thesis. Editors at The Independent utterly failed to recognise this, but perhaps they should be credited for correcting the article, not merely for belatedly removing the offending phrase, but also for conceding that Mr Zizek’s choice of words was appalling.

12/20 Links Pt2: British Jews Take Their Stand; Sharpton-Led Group Backs Jersey City Official Who Blamed Jews for Anti-Semitic Attack; Beinart Promotes False Claim in the Forward

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Political auto-immune disease among diaspora Jews

Gluck is said by those who know him to have devoted his life to good works. So it’s not surprising that he’s committed to interfaith initiatives, in which Jews and Muslims try to build bridges around shared experiences.

Indeed, it would appear that Gluck’s commitment to interfaith initiatives is so profound that he has now actually transposed the characteristics of Islamic jihadi fanaticism onto a Jew.

Belief in interfaith within the British rabbinate is so unshakeable that Orthodox rabbis are in the forefront of equating antisemitism with Islamophobia. They have thus become the useful idiots in the Islamist extremists’ strategy of religious war.

The distinction between antisemitism and Islamophobia is as crucial as it is poorly understood. People think Islamophobia is just a word for prejudice against Muslims. It’s not. It’s a term used specifically to silence people who criticize the Muslim world.

After all, the term “phobia” isn’t applied to prejudice against Sikhs or Hindus or anyone else. “Islamophobia” deliberately appropriates the key aspect of antisemitism — that it is truly deranged — and falsely turns all criticism of the Islamic world into a psychological disorder, thus making that world unchallengeable. The difference between antisemitism and Islamophobia is between truth and lies.

The Muslim world is deeply jealous of the unique status of Jew-hatred as the ultimate bigotry. Some in the wider community are similarly jealous because they think it confers ultimate impunity for misdeeds. And that is a fundamentally antisemitic belief.

But the Jews who equate it with Islamophobia can’t bear the uniqueness of Jew-hatred either. That’s because in the diaspora, many Jews don’t want to be unique. They want to be just like everyone else.

They are frightened that uniqueness will make them the targets of hatred. So they deny the uniqueness of antisemitism, and thus its true evil.

And that’s why, although Jeremy Corbyn has now been defeated, the leadership of Britain’s Jewish community is itself marching it towards the edge of the cultural cliff.

Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik: British Jews Take Their Stand

Sacks wrote his book as an eloquent critique of multiculturalism, and a plea for Britons to find a way to build a common culture predicated on respect for difference. What Sacks does not describe is the one form of unity that arose from multiculturalism: intersectionality, where diverse groups have come together in a shared culture of victimhood and a shared hatred of Jews. As Sohrab Ahmari wrote in these pages: “Precisely because it is a theory of generalized victimhood, intersectionality targets the Jews–the 20th century’s ultimate victims. Acknowledging the Jews’ profound claims to victimhood would force the intersectional left to admit the existential necessity of the State of Israel.” This, however, the intersectional left has refused to do, because “Israel has been prejudged an outpost of Western colonialism. Therefore, the Jews cannot possibly be allowed to ‘win’ the intersectional victimhood Olympics.” Rather, Jews must be targeted as the enemy that unites the diverse members of the multicultural left.

It should therefore be unsurprising that leftist anti-Semitism took over one of the most important political parties in the Western world. For American observers, it is important to understand why this occurred and to be reminded that it can occur here as well. On Twitter, the Washington Post explained to its readers that Mirvis had attacked Labour leaders because of their “strong statements on Palestinian rights.” In perfect political jujitsu, Jewish fears of anti-Semitism had been turned into a lack of compassion for Palestinian victims. The offending tweet was deleted, but the underlying sentiment that gave rise to its initial publication remains. The forces sympathetic to intersectional victimhood exist in our institutions as well, and they instinctively apologize, obfuscate, and spin on the anti-Semites’ behalf.

As this article goes to print, polls have closed in Britain, and a resounding defeat for Corbyn and the Labour Party has taken place. This electoral result is truly a source of jubilation and celebration; but what occurred in Anglo Jewry before the election is worth celebrating as well. The stand taken by Rabbis Sacks and Mirvis, and others in England, should inspire Jewish pride everywhere. After centuries as guests in an English “country home,” and decades as targets of the multicultural left, British Jews spoke as equals in their country. They issued a plea for the future of Britain to their countrymen, but their outcry has implications for the entire free world. It is therefore apt to paraphrase one of the greatest and most philo-Semitic of Britons in concluding that, whether the three and a half centuries of Jewish thriving in England comes soon to a close, or whether it continues for many hundreds of years, it can well be said that this was their finest hour.

Honest Reporting: UK Rejects Antisemitism

One week ago, British Jews were scared that Jeremy Corbyn's antisemitic Labour party might win the UK's general election. Now, the newly-installed government has moved to show that it's ready to take a stand against antisemitism and BDS.

The PM:
"When it comes to standing by our friends, one innovation that this Queens Speech introduces is that it stops public bodies from taking it upon themselves to boycott goods from other countries.... that with nauseating frequencies that turn out to be #Israel" pic.twitter.com/iqMHiFLrkP
— SussexFriendsofIsrael (@SussexFriends) December 19, 2019

VIDEO: @EricPickles welcomes @BorisJohnson plan to outlaw public body boycotts of Israel.
“If we’re being really honest, BDS is just a thing disguise for antisemitism. We as @Conservatives should always tackle racial discrimination” pic.twitter.com/hpLyCum0vc
— CFoI (@CFoI) December 16, 2019

UCLA students meet with a Palestinian antisemite who believes the "Protocols" myth

Earlier this month I reported that Fatah Revolutionary Council member Osama al-Qawasmi met with two groups of lawmakers, from Wisconsin and California, where he could fill their heads with the usual lies about Israel.

I revealed that Qawasmi has, on multiple occasions, spouted antisemitic conspiracy theories, including that the Jews are following the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by creating Islamist groups to divide the Muslims.

US groups just love to visit this antisemite.

Students from UCLA visited Qawasmi on Friday, what they called a "fact finding mission." Funny that they decide that an antisemite is the best person to provide them with facts.

But the students are so happy!

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