Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, August 02, 2020

08/02 Links: Rabbi Cooper: Tech giants should stop letting bigots, terrorists spread hatred online; Israel’s unique methods against the Iranian threat; Hamas leader debunks some BBC narratives

From Ian:

Rabbi Abraham Cooper: Tech giants should stop letting bigots, terrorists spread hatred online

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and other tech giants have revolutionized our lives for the better in many ways and raked in billions of dollars in profits in the process. But unfortunately, they have also allowed the Internet to become an important tool used by racists, anti-Semites, terrorists and other purveyors of hatred and violence.

With social media and websites increasingly serving as our lifeline to news, entertainment and our children’s education, it would be irresponsible to ignore people who weaponize these essential communication tools in the service of hate groups.

I launched the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Digital Hate Project 27 years ago, when the Internet was in its infancy. When we first met with Facebook it was a small company that owned one building. Now more than 1 billion people around the world use Facebook.

Millions of us were outraged to see neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen, and other anti-Semites and white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017, loudly chanting “Jews shall not replace us.” They carried torches as if they were proudly parading in Nazi Germany in the 1930s or 1940s.

But when these groups use the Internet to spread lies and hatred they draw far less attention from most Americans. Yet the groups can actually have greater impact in cyberspace in poisoning impressionable mind and infecting them with hatred.

It is irresponsible for Big Tech companies to say they are simply common carriers that transmit information the way telephone companies transmit calls. The tech companies have an obligation to set and follow rules setting limitations on what can be said on their platforms so they can degrade the online marketing efforts of purveyors or racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry in all its ugly forms.

And since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, it has become vital to our national security that the tech companies stop terrorists from using their platforms to plot deadly attacks and recruit new terrorists.

High-fives are few and far between in the struggle against hate. And there is precious little to celebrate when preparing a report card on social media-delivered hate.

Take the new social media whiz-kid on the block, TikTok, which President Trump said Friday he will ban from the U.S. However, TikTok’s general manager for the U.S. posted a video saying “We’re not planning on going anywhere,” and any move by the president to shut down the site by executive order, as he said he would do, would likely face a legal challenge. Fox Business reported Friday that Microsoft has begun talks to buy the company.

An algorithm on TikTok’s platform drove 6.5 million viewers to an anti-Semitic song that includes the lyrics: "We're going on a trip to a place called Auschwitz, it's shower time."

Jpost Editorial: Wake up Twitter, shut down Khamenei’s account

Head of Twitter Policy for the Nordics and Israel Ylwa Pettersson, participating in the meeting via video link, categorized Khamenei’s tweets as permissible political speech.

“We have an approach to world leaders that presently says direct interactions with public figures, comments on political issues of the day or foreign policy saber-rattling on military and economic issues are generally not in violation of twitter rules,” Pettersson said.

Twitter’s Vice President of Public Policy Sinéad McSweeney went further writing to Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Orit Farkash Hacohen that Khamenei’s hateful tweets did not violate their policies.

“World leaders use Twitter to engage in discourse with each other, as well as their constituents,” McSweeney wrote in a June 15 letter.

“Political issues”? “Discourse with each other”? “Foreign policy saber-rattling”? Has Twitter lost its mind? Calling for the destruction of another people is not a political issue and is not foreign policy banter. It is a declaration of genocide, against a people that has some experience in attempts to wipe it out.

In another exchange, pro-Israel activist Emily Schrader asked Pettersson about Holocaust denial on the platform, pointing out that Facebook and TikTok ban it.

Pettersson said: “As our hateful conduct policy states, if the content tries to directly threaten or harass on the basis of religion, then that is something we would enforce.”

Meaning, Holocaust denial not targeting someone specific would not be a violation.

Social media companies like to say that they do not censor what people write out of a desire to uphold freedom of speech. We agree that freedom of speech is a value worth fighting for but there have to be red lines. Antisemitism, sexual exploitation, murder, organized hate and announcing plans to kill someone.

This also needs to apply to the leader of a state calling to destroy another state. This is not political talk or foreign policy disagreements. This is beyond the pale and standing by, as Twitter is doing, will be a stain on the platform for as long as Khamenei is allowed to continue to tweet.

Take a stand Twitter. Shut down Khamenei’s account.

Deputy anti-Semitism envoy slams Twitter for double standard on Khamenei and Trump

U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism Ellie Cohanim slammed Twitter on Friday for censoring U.S. President Donald Trump, but not Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction, saying that it’s “clear” that all that the social media company cares about is the November presidential elections.

In an interview on Fox News on Friday, Cohanim said that she and her family had to flee Iran during the 1979 revolution and increasing anti-Semitism.

“So, I can tell you that I personally understand the threat that…Ayatollah Khamenei presents to the Jewish people and to the world,” she said.

Cohanim also said, “The hypocrisy is so thick it becomes clear to me … that this is about one thing and one thing only and that’s the elections coming up in the United States on November 3rd.”

Queen Elizabeth would have been impressed with today's Gaza supermarkets

In 1957, Queen Elizabeth made her first visit to the United States as a monarch.

After watching college (American) football game, while her motorcade was driving through suburban West Hyattsville, Maryland, she saw a modern American supermarket (in the Queenstown shopping center on Queens Chapel Road) and asked if she could visit. Arrangements were quickly made.

“It’s very nice to be able to take your children here, isn’t it?” Elizabeth asked one bewildered shopper.
[Prince] Philip said to another shopper, picking up the lone cucumber that rested at the bottom of the man’s shopping cart, “You haven’t got very far, have you?”

If an American supermarket amazed the Queen of England then, imagine what she would have thought of today’s Gaza supermarkets.

The Al-Farra family of Khan Younis has apologized for how bad they made Gazans look in a video they made celebrating the cruel slaughtering of cows in the streets of Gaza for Eid al Adha on Friday.

The video, set to war-like music, shows a large clan of young men screaming in celebration for their macho abilities to stab tethered cows, prominently showing off their blood stained hands and clothes as if they were trophies.

The Al Farra family issued a statement that tried to justify the video as a means to make Gazans feel good about themselves, emphasizing that they are peace loving people and proud terrorists.

The Al-Farra family is considered an integral part of the entire Palestinian community and it is a family that preserves the rites of our religion, our customs and beliefs and has a firm doctrine that stems from the teachings of our Islamic religion and we would like to clarify what happened from some of the young people who published a video that shows their joy in the feast. …The family emphasize the following:
1 - Some of the family's youths attempted, with innocent intentions, to bring happiness to their families by celebrating the blessed Eid Al-Adha, but they were betrayed by how it was expressed, and some scenes which we did not accept and which the enemies of the nation took advantage of to distort the image of our people and our nation appeared.
2- These young people wish to live in peace like all the peoples of the world and do not like violence and blood.
3 - These young people have university degrees, including higher degrees, and they suffer from unemployment, like other young people under the siege, but they will remain pillars of this country for liberation and state building.
4- We deplore the scenes that appeared in the videos, which aroused the feelings of many and offended the image of our Palestinian people and our Islamic nation.
5- The Farra family, as part of the Palestinian fabric, has offered many martyrs, prisoners of war and wounded, and the family will remain an asset and a pillar of the homeland and religion.

Clearly the family itself edited the video to highlight their bloodlust, so their only regret is that some non-Gazans saw it and put it on social media.

This other Gaza Eid video shows a cow trampling a young man who is attempting to stab it, so other men beat it with an iron bar.

(h/t Abu Ali)

Does anyone actually read Peter Beinart’s Jewish Currents?

Since Peter Beinart had kept himself in the news with his absurd one-state solution, it is instructive to see whether he has a following that is commensurate with all the media attention.

Beinart is the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents. Jewish Currents seems well funded, with dozens of writers. So how many people actually read it?

The answer it, not too many.

According to Similarweb, Jewish Currents received about 116,000 visits in June 2020 – significantly less than any other Jewish news or opinion site ranked by that site that I could think of.

According to Google Analytics, EoZ had 80,000 pageviews in June, so Jewish Currents – despite having far more reporters, articles and Beinart - is closer in readership to a blog than a professional news site. (In May EoZ and Jewish Currents differed by only 10,000 views.)

Peter Beinart might be great at self-promotion, but his actual influence is far less than he makes it appear. (I don’t know whether his Open Zion site which closed in 2017 did any better. )

Beinart can get on CNN and he can generate buzz, but he doesn’t seem to have any real following.

08/01 Links: Caroline Glick: Riots and protests from Portland to Jerusalem; After Tisha B’Av fast, Nick Cannon reviews Bari Weiss’ anti-Semitism book

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Riots and protests from Portland to Jerusalem

In Israel, in contrast, the left is post-religious and ideologically bankrupt. Its two gods – peace and surrender – came crashing down 20 and 15 years ago, respectively. The failure of the Camp David peace summit in July 2000 and the start of the Palestinian terror war in September 2000 killed the religion of peace. The left's "unilateral withdrawal" god was shattered when months after Israel expelled its citizens from Gaza and handed the area over to the PLO in August 2005, Hamas seized power and embarked on a war against Israel that has yet to end.

Although bereft of an ideological message to sell the public, the Left in Israel has considerable power. Its control over Israel's deep state – including the entire legal system – is far more comprehensive than the American Left's control over its state apparatuses.

The Israeli Left controls most media organs, the universities, and cultural institutions. It has a limitless funding from foreign governments and private foundations in Europe and the US.

And the Israeli Left has demonstrators who are willing to cause mayhem to promote hatred of Netanyahu.

Like their American counterparts, the demonstrations in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are happening in the context of the pandemic. The demonstrators have hitched a ride on the economic distress the pandemic has induced. They also benefit from the closure of the public sphere.

With the bars and nightclubs shut down – and all travel abroad blocked until further notice – young people looking for a way to get together have only one option. The anti-Netanyahu demonstrations are the only parties in the country.

No matter who wins in November, it's hard to see how the situation in the US will stabilize and how order will be restored. The rise of progressive politicians at the expense of moderate Democrats indicates the radicalization of the American Left is not a flash in the pan. One electoral cycle won't fix what has been broken incrementally over five decades.

In Israel, in the absence of an ideological Left, the main and most tangible danger posed by the demonstrations is that one of the incited protesters will try to kill Netanyahu and his family. Threats to assassinate the prime minister and his wife and children have proliferated on social media as the massively and sympathetically covered protests have grown more incendiary.

But as far as Israeli society as a whole in concerned, so long as Netanyahu and his family remain safe, the protests are not likely to gain much traction. The public on both the Right and the Left are more moderate than they were 25 years ago. Netanyahu's public resilience – despite the Left's 25-year campaign to destroy him – is proof of the limits of the Left's power.

There are many conservative commentators on the right side of America's unbridgeable political divide that believe the US public will respond at the ballot box to the violence in their streets by reelecting Trump. Author Victor Davis Hanson wrote this week about the coming "counter-revolution."

In Israel's case, elections, and counter-revolutions, while necessary to enact the reforms required to rein in the deep state and restore Israel's democratic order, probably won't be needed to end the demonstrations. How many people will choose to stand outside screaming once the pubs reopen?

Amnesty International vs. Morocco and Israel

Amnesty International is a human rights NGO lionized by the media that disproportionately singles out Israel for condemnation. Even when occasionally denouncing human rights violations in other Middle Eastern countries, it endeavors to impute much of the responsibility directly or indirectly to the Jewish State.

Lately Amnesty has been targeting Israel through its fixation on Pegasus, a software that can be “injected” into smartphones to track the user’s location, calls, messages, etc. (a technique known as “spear phishing”). Pegasus was developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cybersecurity company founded in 2010 for combating the incessant terrorist attacks that target Israel’s civilian population. It was, and continues to be, instrumental in saving the lives and limbs of countless men, women and children.

It stood to reason that this important tool could be equally effective in preventing terrorist attacks all over the world, as well as disrupting drug and human trafficking and various other crimes. To minimize the possibility of it being misused, the company chose to sell this and other technologies only to “authorized governments,” more recently “in alignment to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.”

The Israeli Defense Ministry licenses the export of Pegasus to foreign governments but not to private entities. To cite just one of numerous examples, the Mexican government reportedly recaptured the notorious drug lord El Chapo in 2014 by means of the Pegasus software.

It is common knowledge that even life-saving medications may cause undesirable and at times dangerous side-effects. Penicillin and acetaminophen can and have caused deaths. Practically no human inventions, including software programs, are totally and predictably risk-free or immune from misuse.

That was the case with Amnesty’s allegation that Saudi Arabia used Pegasus to spy on, and later murder, Jamal Khashoggi, according to analyses performed by Citizen Lab at the behest of Amnesty that indicated that certain “domain names point[ed] to websites that appear to be part of NSO’s Group’s Pegasus infrastructure.”

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the uncertainty provided by words such as “appear to be” is often absent in Amnesty’s reports, as are other Citizen Lab caveats like “apparently,” “believe” and “suspected.”

How the Mossad hunted the ‘Butcher of Riga,’ who murdered up to 30,000 Jews

In March 1965, the West German Bundestag overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to bring to an end the hunt for Nazi war criminals and introduce a statute of limitations for their crimes.

The months leading up to the debate had seen a wave of opposition to the plans across the world. Thousands took to the streets from Tel Aviv to Toronto and Los Angeles to London. Nobel Prize winners, politicians, playwrights and the future Pope Benedict XVI raised their voices in protest. And in Germany, a bitter and divisive national debate broke out about how the country should atone for its sins and how widespread the responsibility for them truly lay.

But in those months another effort had also been launched to derail the German proposals. Hatched in secret by Israel’s intelligence chiefs and approved by prime minister Levi Eshkol, it was one that was nonetheless designed to focus the world’s attention on the hundreds, if not thousands, of perpetrators who had never seen the inside of a courtroom or prison cell — and likely never would if the Bundestag approved the statute.

It was also an effort in which Israel itself would act as judge, jury and executioner. Israel’s foreign intelligence agency the Mossad, it was decided, would hunt down and kill Herberts Cukurs — the “Butcher of Riga” — who was accused of being personally responsible for the deaths of at least 30,000 Latvian Jews.

Cukurs’s assassination, for which Israel would claim no responsibility, would publicize and punish his terrible crimes. It would serve, too, as a warning of the kind of rough justice that would be meted out to others if Germany provided an amnesty to war criminals.

The story of the mission to kill Cukurs is told in journalist and author Stephan Talty’s new book, “The Good Assassin: Mossad’s Hunt for the Butcher of Latvia.” It is a brilliantly written, heart-stopping, and, at times, heartbreaking tale; one that crosses continents from the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe to the jungles of South America.

At the center of Talty’s retelling lie two men: Cukurs and the undercover agent dispatched by Mossad to ensnare him, Yaakov “Mio” Meidad.

Known in the agency as “the man with the hundred identities,” Meidad was a German-born Jew whose parents had perished in the death camps. He had helped abduct Adolf Eichmann and bring him to Israel for trial.

Talty, who first encountered the story of the mission when reading Ronen Bergman’s “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” was fascinated by both Cukurs and Meidad, as well as the events that had brought them together.

“It was this idea that these two characters existed on either side of a terrible historical moment and now they had to meet, and Mio had to basically form a friendship with someone who was sort of the face of the ‘ordinary men’ of the Holocaust,” Talty told The Times of Israel.

07/31 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The progressive world: An antechamber to evil; In condemning antisemitism, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is in a league of his own

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The progressive world: An antechamber to evil

That enduring moral blindness means the progressive world is fated to replicate its role as the antechamber to evil. Today, that's why it supports the anti-white racists of Black Lives Matter. It's why the universities – the supposed crucibles of reason – have turned into cauldrons of intimidation and censorship.

It's why we have descended into a nightmarish Orwellian world in which those deemed to be part of a victim group present lies as truth, justice as injustice, and their own anti-white racism as anti-racism.

And it's why Israel-bashing has become the poster cause of the Western left, and open season has been declared against the Jews.

This way of thinking now dominates progressive politics in general and the Democratic Party in particular. That's why Democrat politicians are tacitly or actively supporting violent attacks on civic order.

As Barr observed: "This is the first time in my memory that the leaders of one of our great two political parties – the Democratic Party – are not coming out and condemning mob violence and the attack on federal courts. Why can't we just say, you know, violence against federal courts has to stop? Can we hear that?"

Jews are directly in the cross-hairs of those who are intent on overthrowing Western values. That's because Judaism, mediated through Christianity, gave the west its civilized moral precepts.

So attacks on Jews are symbiotically connected to left-wing attacks on western civilization.

Of course, there are still decent Democrats and those who remain sympathetic to Israel. But in general, the Democrats, like Britain's Labour Party and other progressive folk, have drunk the anti-Western Kool-Aid.

The tragedy is that so many Jews are incapable of seeing this. So they'll continue to vote Democrat, just as they'll continue to read The New York Times.

Reaction against the onslaught on American and Western values is what brought Trump to power. Many are outraged and exasperated by him. I share many of their criticisms.

But the choice at this coming presidential election is a fateful one; and for all who care about protecting American and Western core values, as well as Israel and the Jewish people, a Democrat victory is much to be feared.

Tracy-Ann Oberman: I experience anti-Semitism online every day – all I want is for social media companies to be consistent

On Wednesday I opened my Twitter account for the first time in two days. I’d been following the 48 hour social media ban which I (and Saul Freedman) had instigated , in response to social media sites allowing grime artist Wiley to repeatedly post anti-jewish hate speech, leaving some posts visible for 12 hours.

Our grassroots ban under the title #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate snowballed into a global phenomenon with high profile politicans, journalists, lawmakers, actors, musicians and hundreds of thousand of others demanding why Twitter, Instagram and Facebook had effectively given a megaphone to Wiley to spew out Jew hate to over 600 thousand followers.

I’ve been overwhelmed by the heavyweight commitment that I have received on this. From the Prime Minister down and across the house. Most significantly social media CEOs have had to sit up and see what I have been saying for a very long time. That anti-Semitism is running rampant, unchecked, infecting social media sites.

Back to Wednesday morning. I logged in to Twitter and first tweet of the morning to me read: “Fucking shut up, sticking your nose into literally everything apart from an oven where it actually belongs”.

When I was four years old my mum and dad, in a mad moment of 1970’s parenting, took me to The Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. My Dad went into the Hall of Names to look for relatives who he wanted verified had died in the concentration camps. I was pretty much left to wander around on my own. No four-year-old should have to process what I saw that day – pictures of skeletal bodies PILED in open graves, a pile of Jewish children’s shoes, teeth and hair. The picture I have never been able to erase from my memory, even after years of trying, was of a naked dead Jewish female body being placed into an oven to be incinerated. That would be the “oven” the tweeter told me I deserved to be in.

My great Uncle Josef who survived the Warsaw ghetto and two concentration camps was my hero. When I would ask how the world allowed the Holocaust to happen, in all its modern industrial German mechanised precision, he would answer in his thick Polish accent, “because people looked the other way. They didn’t want to see it.”

I’m a successful actress and a writer. I’m not a politician or an activist. It was never my aim to take the job of speaking out against race hate especially to Jewish people so vocally and vociferously. But I have spent my life making sure that I would never be one of those people who would “look the other way”. By standing up on social media (Twitter especially) I have become the target of much anti-Semitic and misogynistic abuse.

I’ve been called a “Jewish whore”, “a zio baby killer”, “a grooming paedophile”, “a tax evading shill”, and have been accused of “exaggerating the Holocaust for my own nefarious ends” and more. I’ve been told by Twitter that many of these tweets don’t “violate their terms and conditions”.

Seth Rogen - not funny

If you never heard of Seth Rogen, just as well. He made a splash in some off-beat movies, and became famous as an actor.

Turns out he is more than an actor. Or less than an actor. But more of a comedian, and not so funny.

In a normal world we would not care either way. So why do we care?

Nowadays we have to listen to idiots because they run our world, and he is one of them. He is also Jewish, which proves it takes all kinds.

He tells us that his Canadian parents are “radical Jewish socialists.” No kidding.

So this apple did not fall far from the tree, as we hear him tell an interviewer that “Israel makes no sense.” He questions why the state should exist, a story Al-Jazeera was quick to pick up.

That’s right. We do not need Farrakhan when we’ve got varieties homegrown. Alas, Rogen’s voice makes a sound throughout his “woke” generation.

Along comes this rebuke from Richard Trank, who uses gentle persuasion in the hope of showing Rogen the way to a Jewish heart…which would mean a love of Zion.

A lost cause.

Because Israel, from the ancient to the modern, is in your heart, mind and soul, or it isn’t, and if it isn’t, nothing’s going to help if you insist on being a wise guy.

Seth Rogen, Ahmadinejad to Costar in Stoner Terrorist Comedy (satire)

Actor and comedian Seth Rogen will team up with former Iranian President and die-hard Tupac fan Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a comedy about the duo’s marijuana-filled attempt to launch a terrorist attack on Israel, Point Grey Pictures announced.

Ahmadinejad will play himself in the film, as he looks to cap off his career of public service with a devastating suicide bombing of the Dizengoff Center mall in Tel Aviv. Rogen, meanwhile, will play a Jewish millennial who becomes angry at his parents and disillusioned with his pro-Israel upbringing after reading a tweet by pop star Selena Gomez.

Ahmadinejad recruits Rogen’s pot-loving character, named Seth Rothberg, to help him carry out the attack, and smoke-filled hilarity ensues, according to a teaser put out by the studio.

“We’ve already started doing some guerilla marketing for the film,” Rogen told The Mideast Beast. “Like, I’ve been doing interviews in character as Seth Rothberg and saying all sorts of crazy shit, like ‘Hey, maybe Israel shouldn’t exist,’ and, ‘You know, those Ayatollahs aren’t such bad guys after all,’ and not telling anyone I was playing a character.”

“And everyone is like, dude, what the f#%k?” Rogen continued. “Like, even my mohel called me and said, ‘I should have cut your d#$k off when I had the chance.’ It’s been kind of fun to see everyone freak out.”

No, speaking about Black antisemitism does not make one a racist

An article in the New Socialist crystallizes the discomfort that many socialist Jews have had with the Twitter 48 hour boycott campaign – by claiming that targeting a Black antisemite is actually racist:

Recent stories, and much longer-run patterns of discourse, have seen many people, including some Jews, attempting to “ethnicise” antisemitism. To construct it as a peculiarly “Black problem” or “Muslim Problem.” This is not a new phenomenon but it does seem to be gaining ground in the current moment - not coincidentally amidst the largest global Black liberation struggle in several generations. The thinker Adolph Reed has aptly noted in his essay “What Colour is Anti-Semitism” that,

Anti-semitism is a form of racism, and it is indefensible and dangerous wherever it occurs. What doesn’t exist is Blackantisemitism, the equivalent of a German compound word, a particular - and particularly virulent - strain of anti-Semitism. Black anti-Semites are no better or worse than white or other anti-Semites, and they are neither more nor less representative of the ‘black community’ or ‘black America’.”

Part of the specification of a particularised “Black antisemitism” seems to be connected to the seeming relish with which many white people, including some white Jews, see instances such as Wiley’s outburst as an opportunity to call Black people “racist.” There is a tendency to impose collective responsibility on Black or Muslim “communities” for instances of antisemitism (and for many things other things) in ways that Neo-Nazis like David Duke or Nick Griffin (both of whom, incidentally, not banned from Twitter) [this article was written before Duke’s suspension – EoZ] are never held to be representative of white, English or American culture. Except, of course, that is what they are. The discourses and violence that make up the long history of antisemitism are far more organic to the cultures of white, Christian Europe and its settler colonies than anywhere else. Attempts to ethnicise antisemitism today are regularly mobilised, often by non-Jews, as a means to derail and discredit justice and liberation movements and their demands. This comes with its own grim irony, given that justice and liberation movements aim at the undoing of precisely these cultures of white, Christian Europe that were formative for and continue to reproduce antisemitism.

I can only speak for myself, but this is absolutely false.

Most blacks are not antisemitic. While a higher percentage of blacks are antisemitic than of the general population, the percentage of blacks who hold antisemitic opinions has gone steadily down since the 1990s when it was about 37%.

I have no glee speaking about Black antisemitism or Muslim antisemitism or white supremacist antisemitism. But I do think it is critical to not put them all in the same bucket.

If one wants to fight antisemitism, one needs to understand it. And the recent public examples of Farrakhan/Griff/Wiley antisemitism are much different from traditional Christian antisemitism, much different from neo-Nazi antisemitism, much different from Muslim or Arab antisemitism. They are also somewhat different from what Black antisemitism was like in the 1960s.

All kinds of antisemitism have a righteous justification. No one says “I hate Jews for no reason.” One way of fighting antisemitism is with education, and it is critical to take away the justifications for antisemitism by directly attacking the assumptions of the antisemites.

Just like there is no one type of antisemitism, there is no one way to combat antisemitism. (This socialist article went on to pretend that there was only one antisemitism and it looks at it through a class lens, which is ridiculous. Antisemites come in all classes, colors, political affiliations and religions.)

When Rabbi Abraham Cooper went on Nick Cannon’s show, I was upset because he did not directly attack the fundamental myths that were the basis of Cannon’s and Griff’s rants. And the comments on that YouTube video show that practically the entire Black audience were not swayed by Cooper’s words – he was speaking the language of victimhood, of the Holocaust, of historic Black and Jewish commonality, while Cannon’s fans are convinced that they are the true Hebrews. This was the wrong argument. I looked at the root of what we can call Black replacement theology, where Jews are frauds and Blacks are the true Jews. That is what Rabbi Cooper should have done.

But Muslim antisemitism is different. Arab antisemitism is different even than Muslim antisemitism although there is huge overlap. Christian and scientific and philosophical and, yes, modern anti-Zionist antisemitism are all different, and it is not racist to call that out.

Of course racism exists and it is a serious problem. But only people who already look at the world through a lens of race will find racism literally everywhere.

It isn’t about Israel (poster)

A poster I made after a comment in Facebook by Rob Levy during my Twitter boycott…

07/31 Links Pt1: GOP Lawmaker Calls on Trump to Designate Top Palestinian Official as Terror Sponsor; New UNRWA head to 'Post': No glorifying terrorists in our schools

From Ian:

GOP Lawmaker Calls on Trump to Designate Top Palestinian Official as Terror Sponsor

A US congressman with a track record of countering terrorism sponsored by the Palestinian Authority (PA) has called on President Donald Trump to blacklist a leading PA official.

In a letter to Trump on Thursday, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) urged Trump to designate the PA’s Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs and its director, Qadri Abu Bakr, as sponsors of terror because of their direct involvement in providing monthly payments to terrorists and their families.

Lamborn was a principal backer of the 2018 Taylor Force Act, which conditions US aid to the PA on a verifiable abandonment its “pay‐for‐slay” policy. Two years after the legislation’s passage, the PA has not changed its policy.

“Unfortunately, the Palestinian leadership has continued to pay the terror rewards to terrorists, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year to these monsters and their families,” Lamborn wrote in his letter to Trump. “Since the passing of the Taylor Force Act, and a similar law in Israel’s Knesset passed by my friends MKs Elazar Stern and Avi Dichter in July 2018, the Palestinian leadership has spent over 1.2 billion shekels, or $350 million, continuing to reward terror.”

“This vile practice must end, and your administration has the courage and moral clarity to do it,” Lamborn declared.

New UNRWA head to 'Post': No glorifying terrorists in our schools

The phrase “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” may be a cliché, but in the case of Dalal Mughrabi, the difference could define the political landscape of the Middle East for decades to come.

In 1978, Mughrabi took part in the Coastal Road Massacre in which an Israeli bus was hijacked. Thirty-eight Israelis lost their lives in the attack, including 13 children. To Israelis, Mughrabi is a terrorist.

To the Palestinians, she is a national treasure. Children are taught to emulate her example. Five schools under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority are named for Mughrabi, as are town squares, summer camps and a women’s center.

She also pops up regularly in textbooks, where she is lauded as martyr and a hero.

Responsibility for reaching a definitive ruling on Mughrabi’s status – if such a thing is possible – may ultimately fall to Philippe Lazzarini, the incoming commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for the Palestinians.

His agency is committed to delivering international quality education to the more than 530,000 children educated within UNRWA’s 708 elementary and preparatory schools in the region. And as we are always told, the children are our future.

So, is Mughrabi a terrorist, or a martyr? What should the children be taught?

“Let’s be clear, there is no glorification of martyrs being taught in UNRWA schools,” Lazzarini told The Jerusalem Post via Zoom from Amman, Jordan. “There is none of that. No teacher is teaching that.

“We have extremely clear guidance regarding this because UNRWA is also in disagreement with this example [of Mughrabi]. I know this keeps popping up, but UNRWA has given clear instructions that this not be taught in the schools because it can be perceived as incitement, depending on how it is brought to the attention of the children.”

Talk about Chutzpah! @Twitter literally wrote to Minister @FarkashOrit, flat out saying that Iran leader @khamenei_ir calling Israel a ‘cancerous growth’ to be ‘uprooted and destroyed’ is mere “foreign policy saber rattling”?

Seriously @jack @smcs @Policy?

cc. @CotlerWunsh https://t.co/wq7ihnQ0g8
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) July 31, 2020

Oh, hi 👋 Iran state propaganda mouthpiece @PressTV. Thanks for the mention, though I’m pretty sure you misquoted me!

Here’s the full video 🎥 in case you missed it: https://t.co/gSxi3XyZ9P pic.twitter.com/XuglV639GZ
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) July 30, 2020

Intersectionality Makes For Strange Bedfellows (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Intersectionality has been a big thing for years now, basing itself on the solidarity of various minorities against their oppression that crosses the lines of race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

Uniting all minorities, that is, except for Jews who refuse to renounce Israel.

But historically, it's not as if we needed to wait for the concept of intersectionality to come along before people would be willing able to stand up for each other. The idea of minorities standing together in defense of human rights is neither a new nor a novel idea.

For example, the history of Jews standing together with blacks is well known, and pictures of Abraham Joshua Heschel marching together with Martin Luther King in Selma are practically iconic.

Abraham Joshua Heschel with Martin Luther King. YouTube screengrab

Jewish participation in the Civil Rights Movement led King to say in 1965 that Jews

demonstrated their commitment to the principle of tolerance and brotherhood not only in the form of sizable contributions, but in many other tangible ways, and often at great personal sacrifice.

Now that the purveyors of intersectionality have made clear that they feel Jews do not qualify as oppressed minorities, what is it exactly that others gain with today's intersectionality?

These days, pro-Palestinian groups have come out in support of the human rights of blacks following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police.

But just what have these groups done for Palestinian Arabs?

Yes, we all know that for years these self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian Arab groups have attacked, harassed and muted speakers who came on campus to speak about and for Israel.

We know who these groups speak against -- but just who are they supposed to be speaking for?

They are not speaking for Israeli Arabs. A variety of different polls show that the number of Israeli Arabs who identify as "Palestinian" is down to as low as 7%. Most Israeli Arabs prefer to see themselves as Israelis (23%), Arabs (15%) or Israeli-Arab (51%). With 76% feeling a degree of Israeli identity, that shows a level of integration, contrary to the out-of-touch groups who accuse Israel of Apartheid. This is still a lot of work to do, but those groups are too busy burnishing their anti-Israel creds to offer anything constructive.

Meanwhile, Arabs in Judea/Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza have sovereign territory under Arab rule for the first time ever in their history -- under incompetent, corrupt governments with poor human rights records.

Which groups in the US are speaking out on their behalf?

At the same time, in Lebanon, Palestinian Arabs are forced to live in camps as second class citizens, suffering under Apartheid conditions where they are barred from 73 categories of jobs, suffer from 65% unemployment and 80% live in poverty.

Meanwhile, in Syria, as of 2017 there have been 3,443 Palestinian Arabs killed, with 79,000 fleeing to Europe as of 2016 and over 60,000 taking refuge in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and Gaza.

Where are the rallies these pro-Palestinian groups have held on their behalf?

If the pro-Palestinian groups won't raise a finger for their own people, what kind of allies are these for the Black community?

Meanwhile, in China, it is estimated that 1 million Uighur Muslims are being held in detention centers. Where is the outcry from Arabs everywhere for their fellow Arabs there?

Contrast that with the Jewish community.

Jews in the old Soviet Union were refused permission to leave while at the same time prevented from practicing their Judaism and expressing their Jewish identity. Synagogues were systematically closed down and antisemitic books were published.

But their fellow Jews around the world fought for them.

And succeeded.

Among those who joined Jewish groups to protest was Martin Luther King, who back in 1966 addressed a national telephone hook-up of Soviet Jewry rallies:

While Jews in Russia may not be physically murdered as they were in Nazi Germany, they are facing every day a kind of spiritual and cultural genocide. Individual Jews may in the main be physically and economically secure in Russia, but the absence of opportunity to associate as Jews in the enjoyment of Jewish culture and religious experience becomes a severe limitation upon an individual.

These deprivations are a part of a person’s emotional and intellectual life. They determine whether he is fulfilled as a human being. Negroes can well understand and sympathize with this problem. When you are written out of history as a people, when you are given no choice but to accept the majority culture, you are denied an aspect of your own identity. Ultimately you suffer a corrosion of your self-understanding and your self-respect.

Among those claiming to support the Black community is American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) -- which the ADL already noted in 2010 "promotes extreme anti-Israel views and has at times provided a platform for anti-Semitism" -- taking up the cause of Black rights following the death of George Floyd by the police.

One difference from the historical Jewish support for Black rights is that among Jewish groups you don't have leaders like the AMP's National Development Coordinator, Mohammed Habbeh, who while president of Students for Justice in Palestine at Rutgers tweeted about Blacks being abeed, a derogatory Arabic word for “slaves,” which Canary Mission points out in their archived copies of Habehh's twe ets:

That account was closed.

In his current Twitter account, Habehh now keeps tweets private.

So much for those intersectional allies with anti-Israel, antisemitic agendas.
Come to think of it, if anything, an honest approach to intersectionality would allow for recognizing the basis for solidarity between Blacks and Jews.

In his blog on Times of Israel, Micha Danzig suggests The real ‘intersectionality’ – European and Arab oppression and persecution of Jews and Africans:

If one wants to look at credible examples of “intersecting” and “related systems of oppression, domination or discrimination” one would be hard pressed to find a better example than the millennia plus oppression and colonization by both Europeans and Arabs of Africans on the one hand and Jews on the other.

Danzig reviews the Hellenization by the Greeks, followed first by the colonization by the Romans, and then the massacre of Jews and the expulsion of millions of Jews by them -- followed then by 2,000 years of oppression and massacres of Jews in Europe.

As for the Arabs, in 641CE, the Caliph Omar had both Jews and Christians removed from all but the southern and eastern fringes of Arabia. Those Jews who remained in their homeland after the Roman expulsion were treated after the invasion and conquest of Islam as second-class dhimmis, like any other non-Muslim. The yellow star the Nazis instituted for Jews to wear dates back to the Caliph Omar.

As for Black history, the Arab slave trade in Africa continues to this very day.
And one of the loudest exponents of Black pride and empowerment covers it up.

Charles Jacobs, president of the Ameri can Anti-Slavery Group, has written about how Farrakhan betrays today’s black slaves:

Cornered at a news conference on March 14, 1996, Farrakhan was asked about the slaves of Sudan. The New York Times reported that an emotional Farrakhan shot back: “If slavery exists, why don’t you go, as a member of the press?! And you look inside of the Sudan, and if you find it, then you come back and tell the American people what you found!”

The Baltimore Sun took up the challenge and dispatched reporters to Sudan where they bought the freedom of two young African slave boys from an Arab slave retriever. Their report ran as a front-page series in the Sun and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Leaders of the South Sudanese peoples’ struggle for liberation then asked Farrakhan for his help. He promised he would help them but betrayed them instead.

Today, there could still be as many as 35,000 Africans in bondage to Arab masters in Sudan. Mauritanian blacks continue to serve as slaves to Arab and Berber masters in Mauritania. The black Muslim soldiers of Boko Haram in Nigeria enslave black Christians. CNN has video of Libyans holding black slave auctions, and in Algeria, Africans seeking a passageway to Europe are being caught and enslaved.

Farrakhan continues to stay quiet about black slavery in Muslim North Africa while blaming the troubles of black people worldwide on the Jews.

Two years later, the March 1998 edition of the Sudan Democratic Gazette had an article entitled Louis Farrakhan: Tormenting the Heart of Africa, on Farrakhan's denial of Arab slavery:

Each time Farrakhan goes on his annual world tour, which always includes Khartoum [capital of Sudan], he makes it a point to slur the struggling people of South Sudan. After the 1995/96 tour, he came back and mounted a vigorous campaign to deny reports that slavery was still endemic in the Sudan. Yet, that was the time when, due to our relative military weakness, government militia were raiding villages and taking women and children to slavery as if it were 1695. Human rights advocates and institutions have vigorously investigated and proven slavery in the Sudan. There are volumes of corroborative literature on current slavery in the Sudan recorded by journalists, human rights groups, and the United Nations. Khartoum says all this is “Zionist conspiracy.” They would say that, wouldn’t they? But why Farrakhan parrots them beats me silly.

The oppression of minorities is real.

And Jews are not the only dependable allies in the fight for human rights.

But the weaponization of intersectionality is as poisonous as the long history of the exploitation of antisemitic rhetoric and hate as a tool to mobilize followers.

The exclusion of Jewish groups by those who claim to stand for the rights of all oppressed minorities is the failure of intersectionality.

The most underreported story: Palestinians suffering from the PA’s refusal to cooperate with Israel

The Palestinian Authority’s refusal to cooperate with Israel, ostensibly because of “annexation” plans that have not happened, is only hurting Palestinians.

Which means the media is not reporting on the repercussions for fear of upsetting the narrative that Palestinian suffering comes from Israel alone.

A close reading of the UN’s OCHA-OPT reports for the last two months give a small glimpse of the issue, even though they try to downplay it as well.

From OCHA’s Gaza Strip: Snapshot June 2020, released this week:

Two infants died after their exit arrangements for treatment in Israel and East Jerusalem have been delayed due to the halt of coordination between the Palestinian and Israeli authorities since 21 May.

From OCHA’s COVID-19 Emergency Situation Report 14 (15 – 28 July 2020):

Global shortages of medical equipment and the disruption of coordination between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel, in response to Israel’s plan to annex parts of the West Bank, have significantly delayed the procurement of key medical equipment. According to the MoH, up to 150,000 tests per month will be required until the end of 2020, along with at least two million gloves and up to 750,000 surgical masks every month, until the end of the year.

The United Nations Development Programme writes in an article on the OCHA website:

The public health hazard for both waste collectors and the people living in the vicinity of these informal sites is exacerbated due to the practice of dumping hazardous medical infectious waste, along with ordinary domestic waste…leaching from solid waste that is unsafely disposed across the oPt has also contributed to the degradation of groundwater.

After considering various alternatives, UNDP has opted for the introduction of a specialized microwave device as the main method for treating infectious waste. Following consultations with the Ministry of Health, the Environment Quality Authority and WHO, and with the financial support of the oPt Humanitarian Fund, UNDP procured such a treatment unit with a 1.5-ton capacity, to be installed at the Johr Ad Dik landfill. However, due to the halt in coordination between the PA and Israel, the processing of the required importation documents has been delayed, impeding the delivery of the device from Belgium to Israel.

Mahmoud Abbas, out of a sense of “pride,” chose to hurt his own people by stopping coordination with Israel on critical life-saving projects. He also knowingly painted himself into a corner by doing so, because even though Israel hasn’t extended sovereignty over any part of the territories, Abbas cannot change his mind without looking even weaker than he is.

The only things that can force him to act like a responsible leader would be media attention to how his policies are hurting and even killing his own people. But, as usual, international media won’t touch the story.

Iran pretends to be against bigotry in English, but in Arabic/Farsi their antisemitism is explicit

The Supreme Leader of Iran tweeted his support for Black Lives Matter:

Yes, Khamanei pretends that Iran has no police brutality. Yet only last year, Iranian police killed as many as 1500 protesters. But, who’s counting?

As far as Iran’s supposed dedication to equal right goes, this week it yet again published an article in the government news site Mehr News that the Saudi royal family was Jewish, just like they did last year.

I found an English version of the bizarre conspiracy theory that says that the House of Saud was founded by a devious, murderous Jew:

In Hijra in 851, a group of people from the al-Masalih tribe, a tribe of the Anza tribe, equip a caravan to purchase cereals (wheat) and other food products from Iraq and transport them to Najd. The leader of the caravan was a man named Sahmi bin Haslul. The caravan arrived in Basra, where the caravan went to a grain merchant, a Jew named Mordahai bin Ibrahim bin Moshe. During the negotiations, the Jew asked them: "Where are you from?" They replied: "From the Anza tribe of the al-Masaleh clan." Hearing this, the Jew began to fiercely fool each of those who came, saying that he was also from the al-Masaleh clan, but that he lived in Basra because of a quarrel between his father and some members of the Anza tribe.
After he told the story he had invented, he ordered his servants to load camel goods with food in a much larger volume; this act seemed so generous that representatives of the al-Masaleh clan were very surprised and primed for their relative, who managed to become a successful merchant in Iraq…
When the caravan was ready for departure, the Jew asked to take it with him, because he really wants to visit his homeland Nedzh. Upon hearing his request, the caravans gladly agreed to take him with them.
Thus, the Jew secretly reached Nejd. In Nejd, through his supporters, whom he passed off as his relatives, he began to diligently propagate himself. …
To achieve such ambitious plans, he began to become very close to the Bedouins and in the end he declared himself their ruler!
At the same time, the Ajaman tribe, in alliance with the Banu Khalid tribe, realizing its essence and that the insidious plan drawn up by this Jew begins to produce results, decided to destroy him. They attacked his city and captured it, but could not capture a Jew who was hiding from enemies ..
This Jewish ancestor of the Saudi dynasty, Mordahai, hid on a farm that at that time was called al-Malibed-Usaibabliz al-Arid, the current name for this area is ar-Riyad

He sought refuge from the owner of this land. The owner was a very hospitable man and allowed the Jew to stay. In less than a month, a Jew killed all the members of the farm’s owner’s family, hiding the traces of his crimes and showing as if the thieves who had entered here destroyed the family. He then announced that he had bought the land before the death of the former owner and remained living there. He renamed the area, giving it a name - ad-Diriya, as well as the area that he lost.
This Jewish ancestor (Mordakhai) of the Ibn Saud dynasty built a guest yard on the lands of his victims under the name “Madafa” and gathered around him a group of his minions, hypocritical people, who began to stubbornly say that he is a prominent Arab leader. … He had a lot of wives who gave him a huge number of children. He gave Arabic names to all his children.

Since that time, the number of his descendants has increased, which allowed the creation of a large Saudi clan, following his path, controlling the Arab tribes and clans. They ruthlessly selected agricultural land, and physically eliminated the rebellious. They used all kinds of deceit, deceit to achieve their goals, they offered their women money to attract as many people as possible. They were especially zealous with historians and writers in order to forever obscure their Jewish origin and connect it with the original Arab tribes of Rabia, Anza and al-Masaleh.

If Iran wasn’t antisemitic, why is it obsessed with saying that the Saudis are Jews?