Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, December 03, 2020

12/03 Links Pt1: Joe Biden’s Dream of a Worse Iran Nuclear Deal; WB goods to be labeled Israeli in Bahrain; U.N. Targets Israel in 5 Resolutions, Rest of the World 0

From Ian:

Noah Rothman: Joe Biden’s Dream of a Worse Iran Nuclear Deal

In the final days of the Obama administration, it was fashionable for the deal’s defenders to dismiss its critics by contending that Iran was in full compliance with the terms of the accords. But those critics did not disagree. Their problem was always that “full compliance” was not difficult to achieve.

Iran provided inspectors access to declared nuclear sites but not military sites where illicit activities were likeliest to occur. A subsequent agreement allowed inspectors the opportunity to access suspect sites but only with at least 24-days-notice—enough to dispose of the evidence of small-scale work on components related to a bomb. But functionally, that 24-day timeline could be reset by Iran, which could stretch the delays out for weeks—ample time to deceive inspectors.

The IAEA routinely insisted that they had ample access to sites like Natanz and Fordow, though the uranium-enriching centrifuges at those sites were only mothballed and could be quickly restored (as they were last year). But inspectors were blocked from accessing sites like the Parchin military complex, where Iran allegedly conducted nuclear explosives and hydrodynamic testing before bulldozing the area and layering it with asphalt. To satisfy observers unnerved by Iran’s intrigues, Tehran was allowed to use its own inspectors to take environmental samples from around Parchin. Shocking though it may be, neither the Iranians nor the IAEA inspectors who checked their work found anything untoward.

The IAEA also insisted that it regularly conducted snap inspections of various civilian and military sites, but Western diplomats noted that nearly all of those inspections were of places like university laboratories or manufacturing plants with little sensitive intelligence value. When pressed by the former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in 2017 to reinspect some suspicious military sites to satisfy the Trump administration’s concerns, the IAEA declined—insisting, correctly, that the terms of the deal required a specific and credible basis to request such intrusive inspections.

The deference afforded to Iran didn’t end there. In 2018, a spectacularly successful Israeli intelligence operation recovered a cache of documents related to the Iranian weapons program that clearly illustrates the extensive work the Islamic Republic had done in pursuit of a fissionable device. Those documents were hidden away, presumably to be pulled out of storage after the deal had expired and Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon had been fully legitimized. But Iran was under no obligation to disclose those documents, even though it had repeatedly claimed (and former secretary of State John Kerry affirmed) that all of Iran’s past nuclear-weapons work was on the table.

The JCPOA was never designed to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear-nation status. It was only aimed at dragging that process out while reshuffling the region’s geopolitical deck in Iran’s favor and ultimately providing a patina of legitimacy to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Any talk about exhuming and reanimating this agreement that glosses over its weak verification regime suggests that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration, will settle for any deal—even a bad one. When Iran is on the ropes, it’s Joe Biden who is committed to negotiating from a position of weakness.

Iran's Mullahs Want the "Nuclear Deal", So Does Biden

Iran's mullahs love the nuclear deal because of its fundamental flaws, especially the sunset clauses that remove restrictions on Iran's nuclear program after the deal expires soon. The nuclear deal, rather than preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as it was falsely touted to do, in fact paves the way for Tehran to become a legitimized nuclear state.

With the nuclear deal, the regime would gain global legitimacy, making it even more difficult to hold Iran's leaders accountable for any malign behavior or terror activity across the world.

Finally, Iran's ruling clerics want immediately to rejoin the nuclear deal because it would again alienate other governments in the Middle East and inevitably lead to a worsening of relations between the US and its traditional allies, especially Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

This flawed deal, in favor of Iran, failed to recognize the rightful concerns of other countries in the region about Iran's potential nuclear capability, missile proliferation or funding of violent proxies -- both within and next door to their territories.

Iran’s Guardian Council Approves Law on Hardening Nuclear Stance, Halting UN Inspections

Iran‘s Guardian Council watchdog body approved a law on Wednesday that obliges the government to halt UN inspections of its nuclear sites and step up uranium enrichment beyond the limit set under Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal if sanctions are not eased in two months.

In retaliation for the killing last week of Iran‘s top nuclear scientist, which Tehran has blamed on Israel, Iran‘s hardline-dominated parliament on Tuesday approved the bill with a strong majority that will harden Iran‘s nuclear stance.

The Guardian Council is charged with ensuring draft laws do not contradict Shi’ite Islamic laws or Iran’s constitution. However, the stance of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all matters of state, is not known.

“Today in a letter, the parliament speaker officially asked the president to implement the new law,” Iran‘s semi-official Fars news agency reported.

Under the new law, Tehran would give two months to the deal’s European parties to ease sanctions on Iran‘s oil and financial sectors, imposed after Washington quit the pact between Tehran and six powers in 2018.

In reaction to US President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy on Tehran, Iran has gradually reduced its compliance with the deal.

The law pushed by hardline lawmakers would make it harder for US President-elect Joe Biden, who will take office on Jan. 20, to rejoin the agreement.

This makes no sense. Once you give Iran JCPOA 1.0, you have given it everything, including a bomb. It has no incentive to agree to JCPOA 2.0. Anybody who has read the text will understand this. https://t.co/gW0Z9HDvzZ
— Mike (@Doranimated) December 2, 2020

Iraqi paper says "Israeli Khazarian Zionist Talmudic terrorist group" wants normalization so UAE and Israelis can have sex

Iraq's Mustaqila, the Independent News Agency, describes itself as committed to "accuracy, objectivity, transparency and an independent approach with a commitment to professional performance."

Keep that in mind when reading this column published yesterday written by Asaad al-Azzouni. It shows yet again that Arab "anti-Zionism" is simply old school Jew-hatred.

It is true that Egypt and Jordan signed “peace” treaties with the Israeli Khazarian Zionist Talmudic terrorist group in 1978 and 1993. However, the agreements between the two signatories created a cold peace and remained within the formal framework, just as forced marriage is devoid of any marital practice. The Egyptian and Jordanian governments and decision-makers in Egypt and Jordan did not impose normalization on their peoples, and this shows that what they did was a coercive scheme only.

As for the political teenager in the Gulf [UAE], which has not passed forty days after normalization with the Zionists at the official level, they committed a folly that followed a folly...

The normalization of political adolescence in the Gulf moved very quickly, and they began to allow Jewish visitors to desecrate mosques, accompanied by figures from the authority, and broadcast pictures and comments from inside the mosques that they entered with their shoes and without purification of course, insulting the mosques...

In another dehumanizing move, they began to open kosher restaurants for Jews in the Gulf, and to hold Jewish wedding parties in some capitals of the Gulf, a clear indication that Israel has achieved a decisive victory in this field. In every sense of the word, it was no longer a cultural, political or economic normalization. Rather, it shows that this is shameful.

This normalization, which was exposed in pictures by the enemy's media, is part of the exchange of visits between the Zionist youth and the Gulf youth, to have sex, as young Gulf men travel to have sex in Tel Aviv, while young Zionists travel to the Gulf to have sex as well, and thus the role of the bridge will not stop and Jewish schools will be opened. In the Gulf, the practice of prostitution will flourish more in the Gulf, and we will witness an expansion in human trafficking and trade in women.

Social normalization is now including Gulf families hosting Zionist families and vice versa, to mix and exchange family experiences and social values, and dear reader imagine what this program will include in terms of demolishing values and morals or what remains of them in the Gulf after the shameful normalization.

The last paragraph is talking about this photo, which has caused a great deal of anger in social media among Arab antisemites like al-Azzouni.

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If you are a BDSer who wants to celebrate Chanukah, Israeli candles are the least of your problems

Jewish Voice for Labour posted an absolutely hilarious tweet that perfectly exposes the hypocrisy and antisemitism) of the anti-Israel Left:

Yes, they did the legwork to find Chanukah candles that were not manufactured in Israel that British anti-Zionist Jews could buy.

And if they are manufactured in a country that oppresses and tortures a million Muslims, well, that's the price you have to pay to be moral.

There's a deeper issue here, though.

Chanukah is the most Zionist Jewish holiday there is (at least before 1948.) It celebrates a revolt for an independent Jewish state, and the holiday specifically celebrates the recapture of Jerusalem by a Jewish army and the rededication of the Jewish Temple there.

How can the people who consider the Six Day War to be a disaster celebrate Jews defeating their enemies to liberate the exact same land that Judah Maccabee redeemed 2100 years earlier?

Since they don't want to claim to be against Chanukah, they try to co-opt it into symbolizing whatever they want it to symbolize, as this page from Jewish Voice for Peace last year shows:

Anti-Zionists cannot celebrate Chanukah as it is, so they hijack it to become what they want it to be.

Because they are against everything that Chanukah represents.

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Al Jazeera reports:

Qatar and Saudi Arabia are close to striking a preliminary agreement to end a dispute that has pitted the Gulf neighbours against each other for more than three years, sources told Al Jazeera.

The expected deal comes after United States President Donald Trump’s adviser Jared Kushner arrived in the Gulf region as part of a last-ditch effort to resolve the Gulf crisis, before the Trump administration leaves office in January.

The person who has been derided as an inexperienced, spoiled, rich real estate heir from a corrupt family who has no business being anywhere near the White House has proven to be the single most effective Middle East negotiator in history.

Here is a three year dispute that is on the way to being resolved after three days of Kushner arriving - representing a lame duck administration that can't offer any real incentives.

This comes on the heels of Kushner's key role in negotiating normalization agreements between Israel and the UAE, Israel and Bahrain and (in progress) Israel and Sudan.

Still, Kushner gets little respect from the media and practically no respect from the "experts" who have spent decades spinning their wheels in the Middle East. Even the accomplishments themselves are downplayed and minimized. His Wikipedia page is filled with vitriol - it is perhaps the most biased Wiki I've ever seen - and its brief summary of his diplomatic achievements ignores Bahrain and Sudan and frames the UAE deal as Kushner opportunistically jumping in when such a deal would have happened anyway:

After Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the United States, wrote a June 2020 opinion piece warning that annexation of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank would threaten better relations between Israel and the Arab world, Kushner saw an opportunity and stepped in to facilitate talks. The talks led to the August establishment of diplomatic ties between the United Arab Emirates and Israel.The agreement normalized what had long been informal relations between the two countries.

To state the obvious, if any one of Kushner's diplomatic victories had occurred under a Democratic administration, he would be on the cover of magazines every week like Kissinger was during his heyday.

But it is not even conceivable that any other White House - Democrat or Republican - would have given the role to anyone who had not already been indoctrinated the failed philosophy of traditional American diplomacy. Kushner took intractable problems and found solutions that every professional diplomat was blind to.

As one UAE journalist who interviewed Kushner wrote:

Before interviewing him, I had read dozens and dozens of articles about the 39-year-old Harvard-graduate in the US media. There was a quite negative and cynical labels about almost everything pertains to him, be it his competence, skills or even personal traits. There is a prejudgment that evidently turned into a bias against him.

My impressions of Kushner that I had met were kind, humble, soft-spoken and certainly a pragmatic. Having met several heads of state, top-level officials and many celebrities from different industries throughout my humble career, I can say his composure and emotional intelligence are distinctive. His ability to understand, give and take, turn old foes into brand-new friends, and embark on missions to resolve, what many previous American leaders and top officials could not, are evident through many outcomes, lately in his role in Israel’s peace accords with the UAE and Bahrain.

It is a breath of fresh air in the Washington, Abu Dhabi, and Tel Aviv today as a chapter of the old Middle East has ended and a new one has started.

It speaks volumes that it is difficult to find this sort of analysis of Kushner's skills in US media.

UPDATE: And now Morocco!

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12/02 Links Pt2: Obama’s memoir: The anatomy of Iran-appeasers and bash-Israel-firsters; The End of Arab Nationalism; A Cautionary Tale for Democrats: The UK Labour Party

From Ian:

Gil Troy: Obama’s memoir: The anatomy of Iran-appeasers and bash-Israel-firsters

Feeling guilty about America’s past dishonors, Obama believed he could engage Iran’s mullahs honorably. And uncomfortable with the West’s disproportionate power globally, he decided that “given the asymmetry in power between Israel and the Palestinians... it was reasonable to ask” Israel, “the stronger party, to take a bigger first step in the direction of peace.”

Ideologically, in pressuring Israel while engaging Iran, Obama overcompensated for America’s previous “sins.” That’s why he sanitizes the Palestinian turn from negotiation toward terrorism in 2000 by describing a mutual “lure of violence,” while underplaying how the terrorism Palestinians initiated betrayed and traumatized Israelis. Instead, he decides ”Israeli attitudes toward peace talks had hardened, in part because peace no longer seemed so crucial to ensuring the country’s safety and prosperity.” This obsession with Israel’s economic and military power blinds him to Israelis’ feelings of vulnerability and Palestinian culpability.

Personalities played a part, too. Obama writes that Bibi Netanyahu’s “vision of himself as the chief defender of the Jewish people against calamity allowed him to justify almost anything that would keep him in power.” In our new book, Never Alone, Natan Sharansky agrees that Netanyahu “believes his staying in office keeps Israel alive, an equation that only grows more significant the longer he stays in power.” Sharansky, however, writes with admiration, tinged with occasional frustrations; Obama exudes contempt.

Obama believes his position is equitable, idealistic – and resents the criticism he received, especially from AIPAC. But his European-style obsession with power dynamics and America’s lack of exceptionalism made him too indulgent of the sins of dictators and terrorists like the Iranians and the Palestinians, and too harsh regarding the missteps of liberal democrats like the Israelis.

President-elect Joe Biden and his new team should correct Obama’s mistakes, not repeat them. Look peripherally, not just bilaterally. It’s not just about borders or nukes: Palestinian leaders must stop terrorizing Palestinians and Israelis; Iranians must stop terrorizing the world. Rather than bashing friends like Israel and coddling enemies like the Iranians and the Palestinians, restore the true moral order to the universe: Support your friends, your fellow liberal-democrats, and confront our enemies.

Israel exists. It is the largest Jewish community in the world and the center of Jewish life worldwide. @PeterBeinart and his buddy @RashidaTlaib seek its annihilation. That makes both of them anti-Jewish bigots, Beinart's Jewish heritage notwithstanding. https://t.co/EZJ8ADvDIc
— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) December 2, 2020

Bit of course @ArielElyseGold is just ‘fine’ with @RashidaTlaib’s calls for genocide and destruction of #Israel. pic.twitter.com/30V7qjSGGO
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) December 2, 2020

The End of Arab Nationalism

When last summer the Trump administration brokered the Abraham Accords—a peace agreement between Israel and the two Gulf states of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates—much commentary focused on their immediate causes, particularly the signatories’ shared fear of Iran. Reports of a recent face-to-face meeting in Saudi Arabia between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will only reaffirm that explanation.

Yet the historic character of the accords lies elsewhere. The accords recognize the Jewish and Arab people’s common ancestry in the region, accepting that Jews as a people and their faith are indigenous to the Middle East and have a legitimate right to be there. This affirmation discards two central tenets of Arab nationalism: the inherent rejection of a Jewish state as an alien, colonialist presence in the region and the idea that Arab-Israeli peace must defer to Palestinian grievances. The affirmation thus marks the end of Arab nationalism. Henceforth, the Arab countries that join the accords signal that they intend to pursue their national interest and seek alliances with the Jewish state, each on their own terms and without the need of a pan-Arab strategy.

Proximate causes, to be sure, matter. After all, it was President Jimmy Carter’s misguided foreign policy in the Middle East—alongside Israeli intelligence’s tipping off of Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, of a Libyan assassination plot against him—that propitiated Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977. His trip set off direct bilateral peace talks that would culminate in the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. But those events simply flicked a switch. Peace ensued not only because strategic interests suddenly aligned, but because worldviews turned upside down.

The same can be said of the Abraham Accords. Common cause against an ascendant Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and radical Islam have driven Gulf countries closer to Israel. So has the desire to leverage full peace against Israel’s avowed intention to annex portions of the West Bank earlier this year. And no doubt, the election of Joe Biden as the next U.S. president raises the possibility that the United States will rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a move both Arab countries and Israel firmly oppose. Both enthusiasts and detractors of the accords have mostly focused on these catalysts of historical change rather than recognize that a paradigm shift has emerged as a result of long-term trends.

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

You hear about it, but you don’t really believe it.

What is happening in American universities to Jewish students, and particularly those who support Israel even to a small degree, is appalling, and it hasn’t diminished as courses have moved online during the pandemic. Misoziony, “new antisemitism,” and plain old Jew-hatred that doesn’t even try to disguise itself have become part of the everyday experience of Jewish students in a way that would have been unimaginable for me or for my children when we were students. Read Blake Flayton’s article at the link above. You can say that it’s just a collection of anecdotes, but they are characteristic of the atmosphere at most universities.

One of the more distressing aspects of it is that it is not just coming from other students, but often from faculty and administrators. The adult authority that is expected to protect students goes missing when the victims are Jewish. Administrators that are exquisitely sensitive to reports of microaggressions against “people of color” or sex/gender minorities, often act as though Jewish students do not deserve protection, because after all they are the most privileged of the privileged. In the event that they are not properly anti-Israel – they don’t even have to identify as Zionists – they are vilified and discriminated against in multiple ways for supporting a “racist apartheid state” that can only be repaired by allowing its enemies to overrun it. Those staff members that do sympathize with Jewish concerns or Israel are often afraid that they will be targeted if they don’t stay quiet (see here, here, here, here, etc.)

Campuses are pervaded by a postmodern ideology, which permits free speech only for those that support it, and a postcolonial one that institutionalizes racist attitudes against “whites,” by which they mean (somewhat incoherently) anyone that does not belong to one of a variable collection of “oppressed” groups. Jews, despite a history of millennia of pogroms, expulsions, and genocides, are never included.

Unfortunately, the postmodern/postcolonial ideology (“wokeism”) is not limited to the universities anymore. The so-called “cancel culture” that pervades progressive media is derived from postmodern ideas like truth being a social construct while feelings are a priori valid. The willingness of both the Left and the Right to simply invent “facts” – because the irrefutable “truth” of their narrative overrides any possible falsification by reality – comes from the same place. The ideology has spread to k-12 education, too. And, surprisingly, even the corporate world is becoming suffused with it, as shown by the obsession with various forms of sensitivity training and “anti-racism education.”

This is not surprising, because the woke penetration in the universities has been going on for at least two decades, and graduates now work for the biggest corporations, media, law firms, ad agencies, local and national government, and public and private education. One misses the 19^th century robber barons who were interested primarily in money, and didn’t have social objectives like the management of Google or Twitter.

Elements in the black community also seem to find wokeism congenial, because the idea that they are a colonized population makes it possible to argue that all the problems that they face in the larger American society are due to the structural racism inherent in it. That implies that they are owed something in addition to equality of opportunity, because of what was taken from their ancestors by slavery and continues to be taken from them by institutional racism. Unfortunately, the anti-Jewish aspects of woke culture fit in with the historical antisemitic bias of the black community, which was introduced by the Nation of Islam as early as the 1930s, and today is represented by Louis Farrakhan. The racial disturbances and controversies of the 1960s (like the New York teachers’ strike) sharpened the differences between blacks and Jews in urban areas.

Other groups in American society, such as the non-Evangelical Protestant Churches have also adopted a great deal of the woke ideology. Evangelicals, with their belief in absolute biblical truth, and traditional Catholics and Orthodox Jews who also reject the idea of the relativity of truth, have rejected it.

The woke generation adopts various causes that they believe oppose injustice. They are somewhat arbitrary in their choices: although they devote a lot of attention to racism against black people in the US, they almost entirely ignore the phenomenon of black slavery in Muslim countries, which seems to primarily interest conservatives. Of course one of the most prominent causes – far more prominent than is justified by the number of “victims” of oppression and the degree to which they are oppressed – is the Palestinian one.

I would argue that the Palestinian cause, which might better be called “the anti-Jewish sovereignty movement,” actually favors injustice, as its pretense of promoting Palestinian self-determination is easily shown to be a smokescreen for ending Jewish autonomy. Such things as the violence of the Palestinian side compared to the defensive actions of the Jewish side; the vicious racism and religious prejudice of the Palestinians; their poor treatment of women and LGBT people; economic inequality; cruelty to animals; neglect of the environment; oppressive, undemocratic government; and other characteristics that are normally anathema to the woke are completely acceptable when the perpetrators are Palestinian.

One reason for the popularity of their cause is the large number of Arab and Palestinian students in American universities. Google “scholarships for Palestinian students in the USA” and you get a surprising number of results. There are numerous organizations (including the US State Department) that offer them, and some like the FMEP and AMIDEAST, which would be expected to seek out political activists. Many of these students are activists, and they tend to be highly focused on their goals. Many lead chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and similar groups.

Since the 1970s, Arab countries pumped millions into American universities to establish departments and endow chairs of Middle East Studies – by which they meant Arab/Muslim studies – which often became centers for political activism.

Devotees of the Palestinian cause are found throughout American society, among the woke population as well as more traditional liberal segments. The degree of misinformation that these people have absorbed can be stunning. Recently, liberal/progressive icon Barack Obama published a book in which he presented a short discussion of the Israeli-Arab conflict and its history. It was remarkable for the number of falsehoods and biased statements it contained, clearly aimed to justify aggression against Israel and to damage the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Did he honestly believe this tissue of lies for the eight years that he was President of the US? Or did he simply write them into his book to justify his anti-Israel policies and to influence his successors? I’m not sure it matters.

American Jews are in a difficult position today. The traditional violent Jew-hatred that was mostly expressed by uneducated people is still there, and social media has given it a new life, resulting in several murderous incidents. At the same time, the misoziony of the overeducated class, which is trickling down to the average American, often spills over into antisemitism. Jews in urban areas (that’s most of them) also have to face hostility from many of their black neighbors as well.

Finally, Israelis need to realize that the pendulum of public opinion in the US, especially among the decision-making class, is swinging against the Jewish state. The Arab and Iranian strategy of introducing money and activists into Western universities has been hugely effective in changing the national perception of Israel for the worse. The change took some years, but with the help of other social and political trends, is now rapidly accelerating.

We had a brief respite with the Trump Administration, which strongly opposed wokeism and also was truly pro-Israel in a way that few previous ones were. But that was an anomaly. In the past, an anti-Israel president had to contend with a generally pro-Israel public, and a Congress that reflected that view.

The future will be different.

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Palestinian restaurant in Brooklyn has a theme: "Israel is evil"

Even though the Ayat restaurant in Brooklyn has only been open a few weeks, the New York Times rushed to give it a raving review:

A new restaurant showed up in October on Third Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, announcing its arrival right in the sidewalk, where a tracery of Arabic script meaning “end the occupation” and a peace sign are imprinted in concrete. Above the street wall — a grid of windows that slides open in good weather — the restaurant’s mission is written in swooshes of red, green and black spray paint: “Shawarma. Falafel. Palestinian Street Food.”

Ayat is all that and more.

The reviewer thinks that the V hand symbol is a peace sign, as if the Palestinians are hippies from the '60s. No, it means "victory for Palestine."

For example, it is the profile logo of this account run by a BDS group, which is certainly not interested in peace.

Since it means "victory," guess who is the loser?

The photo of the restaurant in the article show a mural painted on the wall. It depicts a crying Palestinian woman, evil looking Israeli soldiers holding Palestinians prisoner at gunpoint, the Dome of the Rock, and the words "Down with the Occupation."

Can you imagine a restaurant with a theme of Jewish suffering? A mural of an auto-da-fé here, a pogrom there, the burning of the Talmud, some smokestacks?

But this restaurant is more proof that Palestinians wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Jews that they could blame for their suffering. It is a sickness to even consider that this is an appropriate mural for people to go out and enjoy their meal.

Unless the customer base is Bay Ridge woke people who think it is trendy to support a Palestinian restaurant whose very walls scream hate.

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12/02 Links Pt1: Knesset advances motion to disband, moving toward 4th elections in 2 years; Israel Aims To Make Iran's Nuclear Program a Risky Venture; Biden's team blind spot on terror

From Ian:

Knesset advances motion to disband, moving toward 4th elections in 2 years

The Knesset on Wednesday passed a bill to dissolve, setting the stage for the fourth round of national elections in two years as Defense Minister Benny Gantz and his Blue and White party broke from the coalition and voted in favor of the measure.

The bill passed with 61 MKs voting in favor and 54 against.

Gantz’s support for the opposition bill will likely spell the end of his ill-fated power-sharing partnership with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, some six months after agreeing to join a unity government in order to deal with the coronavirus crisis.

The measure must still go through committee and pass three more readings in the Knesset before new elections are called, likely for sometime in the spring or summer.

“The dissolution of the Knesset is not a victory, it’s the first step toward a different government, which will deal with the coronavirus and the economy and won’t cause Israelis to hate each other,” Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, who proposed the measure, tweeted after the bill was passed.

Coalition whip Miki Zohar, a Likud party ally of Netanyahu’s, accused Blue and White and the opposition of again “dragging” Israelis to the ballot box.

“The only thing in common between the factions that make up the opposition and Blue and White is their ambition to harm Netanyahu’s tenure,” he wrote on Twitter. “This is a sad moment for the Israeli people.”

Gantz on Tuesday night announced he would support the measure, accusing Netanyahu of committing an “economic terror attack” by refusing to allow the 2020 and 2021 budgets to move forward.

If the Knesset dissolution bill isn’t ultimately approved, the government has until December 23 to pass a 2020 budget or the government will fall and elections will automatically be scheduled for March 23, 2021.

Israel Aims To Make Iran's Nuclear Program a Risky Venture

Netanyahu's predecessor, Ehud Olmert, was even more explicit. In a 2018 interview with Israeli television channel Kan, the former premier suggested that the Iranian scientist represented a target of opportunity for Israel's clandestine service. "I know Fakhrizadeh well. He doesn't know how well I know him. If I met him in the streets, most likely I would recognize him," Olmert remarked. "He does not have immunity, he did not have immunity and I don't think he will have immunity." Israel now appears to have made good on Olmert's warning.

Yet Friday's killing has another facet, as well: It reflects what amounts to a significant shift in strategy on the part of the Jewish state. For years, speculation has abounded that Israel might ultimately decide to act unilaterally against Iran's nuclear program, which represents the gravest external threat to its security. The possibility of an Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear sites is still very much on the table today, but it is an option hamstrung by a harsh reality: It is simply not possible to bomb knowledge.

Over the past two decades, Iran has amassed a formidable cadre of experts, scientists and engineers to power its atomic effort. In turn, the Iranian regime has taken great comfort in the idea that these specialists, spread over the length and breadth of its national nuclear endeavor, provide a guarantee of sorts that any military strike would turn out to be, at best, a temporary setback to the regime's path to the bomb.

Changing that calculus has naturally become a growing priority for Jerusalem. Over the past decade, no fewer than five high-level Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in a variety of very public ways. The assassination of Fakhrizadeh is just the latest part of this pattern.

Whether this campaign has any lasting effect on Iran's nuclear trajectory remains to be seen. The larger message it is trying to convey, however, is crystal clear. Israel is putting Iran's nuclear scientists on notice that their chosen vocation could turn out to be downright hazardous to their health, and that they would be prudent to seek other employment.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Arabs Warn Biden: Do Not Embolden Hezbollah

The message they [nationals of Lebanon] are sending to a new US administration is: The Lebanese people are hoping that you will help them get rid of Hezbollah. Cozying up to Iran would further embolden Hezbollah and allow it to destroy Lebanon by turning it into an Iranian-controlled colony.

"The Lebanese people... are being held hostage today by a militia that is financed by Iran, whose weapons are coming from Iran, and even whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is stating clearly and publicly that he takes orders from Iran." — Samy Gemayel, leader of the Christian Kataeb Party, November 23, 2020.

"Hezbollah is the only party in Lebanon that has 20,000 soldiers on the ground.... it can do a lot to make our democracy totally fictive. Today, we are being treated as hostages, and therefore the international community must help us." — Samy Gemayel.

Rabi's expressed hope that Biden would refuse to follow the policies of former President Barack Obama toward Iran. "This mistake needs to be corrected," Rabi wrote, referring to Obama's policy of appeasement toward Iran. "Correcting it can only be done by adopting a policy different from the Obama policy."

The Lebanese and Arab warnings about a possible return to the nuclear deal with Iran and the resulting empowerment of Hezbollah need to be taken seriously by the new US administration. The Lebanese and Arabs are trying to tell Biden what they and the Trump administration have known for the past few years, namely, that Iran and its proxies -- such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis -- are poised to wreak havoc in the Middle East.

How to create a slander, Turkish style

In October, JTA reported:

Germany has pledged to include Israel in Europe’s deal for a future vaccine against the coronavirus, in keeping with Germany’s “special relationship” with Israel as a response to the Holocaust.

According to Hebrew-language media on Monday, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and Health Minister Jens Spahn made the commitment to Israel’s Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff in conversations on October 11.

Yesterday, over six weeks later, Turkey's state-owned TRTWorld decided to publish the story - with a twist:

The Palestinian territory of Gaza, however, may not be so lucky. The virus in Israeli blockaded land which is also densely populated has reached a “catastrophic stage.”

Gaza was already suffering from a shortage of medical equipment after more than a decade of a deadly Israeli siege leaving hospitals without vital equipment needed to cope with a pandemic.

Pleas by Palestinian doctors in Gaza that the health system could collapse, have largely gone unheard and the Berlin-Tel Aviv deal only underscores that which makes no mention of Palestinians.

There have been no commitments made by Germany towards the Palestinians who are currently under an Israeli occupation which has its own historical reasons that can be closely linked to Germany’s actions.

This is simply state-sponsored slander in a news article. Israel does not bar medical equipment from Gaza. It also hints at the "Palestinians are the real victims of the Holocaust" meme that Israel haters like to say.

TRTWorld deliberately chose to exclude the widely-reported story that Israel has committed to provide millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses to the Palestinians and in every deal Israel signs with pharmaceutical companies, they are including Palestinians in their purchases.

In other words, when Israel gets vaccines, Palestinians get vaccines.

The reverse is not true. Palestinians will also get vaccines from the United Nations and international aid organizations.

Of course, this story got promoted by IfNotNow. Liars have to stick together.

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Peter Beinart's dishonest defense of Rashida Tlaib's hate

On Sunday, Rashida Tlaib (and Linda Sarsour) retweeted the statement "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" used by Israel haters calling on the destruction of Israel.

When Jews got upset, she took down the retweet.

Peter Beinart, now a New York Times op-ed writer, defended Tlaib's original post - twice.

His arguments are so disingenuous and filled with so many falsehoods that they need to be seen to be believed.

Beinart started off with this tweet:

Beinart's first sentence that Tlaib wants a single state were Jews live in equality with Palestinians is based on her carefully vetted campaign conversation with The Detroit Jewish News where she claims that al lshe cares about is human rights and that it is Israeli racist policies that force her to this position; she visited Israel in 1995 and was impressed that Jews and Arabs lived together in peace but she says that is no longer true.

This is gaslighting.

Even before she was sworn in to Congress she posed with the map that had a Post-It note in her office that indicated she wants to replace Israel with Palestine. If she wants a state with equal rights, why can it not be called Israel? (updated, h/t Israellycool)

More importantly, Tlaib explicitly supports the "right to return," whose only purpose is to destroy the Jewish state and force Jews to live under Arab majority rule. Her talk about "equality" only applies to a situation where Arabs control what "equality" means, which can be seen in the Palestinian constitution:

Article 1
Palestine is part of the larger Arab world, and the Palestinian people are part of the Arab nation. Arab unity is an objective that the Palestinian people shall work to achieve.

Article 4
1. Islam is the official religion in Palestine. Respect for the sanctity of all other divine religions shall be maintained.
2. The principles of Islamic Shari’a shall be a principal source of legislation.
3. Arabic shall be the official language.

This doesn't leave much room for Jews except as a tolerated minority. That is the "equality" Tlaib wants to see.

Beinart's second sentence is one of his go-to themes, where he pretends that Palestinians who live in Area A and Gaza - with their own flag, Olympic team, prime minister, president, court system, police, citizenship laws, passports, trade, zoning laws, cities that Jews couldn't live in if they tried, UN membership - are really living in Israel where they are denied citizenship. By his logic, Canadians live in the same state as citizens of the US since their economy is dominated by another country. It is a laughable lie but one that Beinart loves to repeat.

Beinart then doubled down on his defense of Tlaib's bigotry with an equal display of knowing lies and breathtaking ignorance:

Beinart starts off as a wise man: "I get it! But they are all wrong!"

It isn't "some" that have used the statement "From the river to the sea" to espouse the replacement of a Jewish state with an Arab state - it is everyone! There are no counterexamples. The idea that the boundaries of an Arab/Islamic Palestinian state is the exact borders drawn by Westerners to create the British Mandate is in the founding charters of the PLO and Hamas. (Although the 1964 PLO Charter contradicted itself by specifically excluding the areas controlled by Jordan and Egypt, because only Jewish control is anathema to the freedom-loving Palestinians.)

Beinart then mentions that Hamas charter. It doesn't use that specific phrase once.

Beyond that, by using the phrase "1st Hamas charter" Beinart is pretending that it has been superseded. He's either lying or ignorant about a topic he pretends to know cold. Hamas never replaced the charter in 2017; it issued a new political document but was explicit - in Arabic - that the original genocidal Hamas charter is still in place.

Why would Beinart want to downplay Hamas' evil? Because it blunts his message of Israel as an unparalleled violator of all that is holy and good - a position he shares with Rashida Tlaib.

But to point out that Tlaib tacitly supports BDS and explicitly supports the completely nonexistent "right to return" - which are both intended to destroy Israel and replace it with a Palestinian, not binational, state - is a "smear."

Beinart has no intellectual honesty. These two tweets prove that.

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A 14 year old convicted of stabbing two Israelis

What makes NGOs completely make up lies?

The New Israel Fund writes, "Between 2017-2019, five thousand children aged 12-18 from the West Bank and East Jerusalem were arrested by the Israeli military and tried in military courts, including dozens of children under the age of 13."

No source is given.

The number is absurd. It would mean that Israel averages between 4 and 5 arrests of children every day, which would be about 32 every week for that three year period.

According to the UN's OCHA-OPT, looking at a random sample of their biweekly Protection of Civilians reports, there are far fewer children arrested - 8 in this two week period, 13 in this biweekly period, and usually none mentioned.

But NIF goes beyond that, claiming not only that they are arrested but that they are tried in military courts.

A favorite statistic from many NIF grantees comes from a Haaretz article in 2011 that said that Israel has a 99.74% conviction rate in military courts in the West Bank.

If NIF's and Haaretz' numbers are correct, there would be thousands of children in prison! However, there are only a couple of hundred, nearly all of them males over 16.

Even other anti-Israel NGOs, like Defense for Children International, says that Israel arrests between 500 and 700 children a year - far less than NIF's claim of over 1300 a year, and they do not even pretend to say that every one of those get tried. (They also do not say the source of that statistic. UNICEF in 2013 gave a similar figure, but it admitted it was a guess based on speaking with lawyers in the courts who defend the children.)

The NIF statistic is made up from whole cloth. And these are the people who fund lots of other left-wing groups critical of Israel like Breaking the Silence and Yesh Din.

I suppose that NIF doesn't request the truth from the groups it funds, either.

(h/t Tomer Ilan)

UPDATE: Tomer found a HaMoked report where roughly 3000 Palestinian kids were detained in 2018-2019, but there is a big difference between "detained" by police and "arrested and tried."

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12/01 Links Pt2: Stop whitewashing FDR's abandonment of the Jews; Jerusalem Post, Khaleej Times team up for first-ever Dubai conference; First-ever Jewish school to open in Dubai

From Ian:

Stop whitewashing FDR's abandonment of the Jews

Franklin D. Roosevelt is widely remembered as a strong leader who boldly led America out of the Great Depression and to the brink of victory in World War II. Yet when it comes to the Holocaust, some defenders of FDR's record want us to believe he was not responsible for keeping Jewish refugees out of America—as if that was all the handiwork of the State Department, which supposedly ran U.S. immigration policy and foreign policy independently of the president’s wishes.

Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways.

Prof. Daniel Greene, speaking recently at the University of Oklahoma, continued to perpetuate the implausible notion that President Roosevelt was too hapless to make his own foreign policy. Remarkably, Greene spoke for nearly an hour about America’s response to Nazism and the Holocaust, yet barely mentioned the president.

This tendentious approach is consistent with the theme of the controversial exhibit on “Americans and the Holocaust” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for which Greene was senior curator. The exhibit has been criticized by many scholars for downplaying President Roosevelt’s abandonment of European Jewry.

Greene told his Oklahoma audience that the reason so few German Jews were admitted to the U.S. in the 1930s was because of “bureaucratic walls put in place by the State Department” —as if the White House had no occupant.

What actually happened is that the State Department implemented Roosevelt’s policy of restricting immigration far below what the existing law allowed. The annual quota of German immigrants—about 26,000—was filled only once in FDR’s twelve years in office; in most of those years, it was less than 25% filled.

There are letters from the president himself at the time in which he acknowledged and defended the fact that visas were, as he put it, “considerably under-issued.” There are documents showing that State Department officials briefed the president on their efforts to keep refugees out.

The Battle Over Antisemitism

Attacking the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism

Those who attack the IHRA definition of antisemitism are those who discriminate against Jews, practicing antisemitism, as defined by the IHRA. They are primarily proponents of the BDS movement. Among the bill’s fiercest adversaries are leaders and members of a BDS organization inaptly called “Jewish Voice for Peace” (JVP), who try to put a “Jewish” seal of approval on antisemitism, misrepresenting their own antisemitic campaigns and rhetoric as human rights activism and valid criticism of Israel. The group actively agitates against the use of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and attacks the anti-BDS legislation introduced in Senate and Congress, as well as other efforts to raise awareness of antisemitism. They write op-eds and circulate petitions that falsely claim the bills are “intended to codify criticism of Israel as antisemitic” and to “make dissent about Israel illegal” when, in fact, neither the definition of antisemitism nor the bills proposing its use would outlaw criticism or dissent about Israel. On the contrary: The definition includes language specifying that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

JVP leads the charge that the widely-accepted IHRA definition of antisemitism is undemocratic. The group substitutes its own alternate definition that restricts age-old hatred against Jews to Christian theology-based or Nazi white supremacist-based racial theories alone. This disingenuous propaganda is aimed at those who are unacquainted with antisemitism or with the proposed legislation against it, as it sounds an alarm against any practical attempt to hold people accountable for anti-Semitic racism and persecution of others. JVP demands that: It is vital that Jewish organizations across the globe stand united against harmful definitions of antisemitism and together for human rights and the freedom to protest. We at JVP are proud to have initiated this historic effort.

In November 2017, Former Executive Director Rebecca Vilkomerson joined Linda Sarsour—a vitriolic, anti-Israel, BDS activist who has been accused of outright antisemitism—on a panel that redefined antisemitism to exclude the panelists’ own activities.

Former Executive Director Rebecca Vilkomerson (2nd to right) joining Linda Sarsour (right) in panel that redefined antisemitism.

On December 15, 2020, several BDS and anti-Israel organizations are convening a panel made up of those who seek the demise of the Jewish state, in order to redefine antisemitism. The panelists include Rashida Tlaib—a U.S. congress member accused of using antisemitic tropes of dual loyalty, spreading anti-Jewish blood libels, singling out politicians for criticism because of their Jewish identity, and having close ties to a Holocaust denying, conspiracy theorist and terror-supporting anti-Zionist activists; Barbara Ransby — a university professor in History, African American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies who is prominent player in the BDS movement, supporting violent anti-Israel terrorists and using her platform to spread false and vicious anti-Israel propaganda; Marc Lamont Hill— BDS proponent and one-time CNN journalist who advocates the elimination of a Jewish state, justifies anti-Israel terrorism, and is associated with the notoriously antisemitic Louis Farrakhan. The single Jew on the antisemitism panel is Peter Beinart — an “as a Jew” Jew who has made a career of vilifying the Jewish state and advocating its abolition.

Canary Mission: Anti-Semites Lead Farcical Panel Discussion on Anti-Semitism

If you were assembling a panel of experts to teach the world how to dismantle anti-Semitism, who would you choose? Perhaps a well-known journalist who deals with Jewish issues like Bari Weiss or a dynamic young activist like Hen Mazzig, or perhaps you would contact one of the myriad of great organizations tackling anti-Semitism.

Well, Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow and friends have done the opposite. They have put together a team of anti-Israel pundits, anti-Semites and terror supporters; and asked them to lead the discussion on dismantling anti-Semitism.

The farcical panel titled "Dismantling Antisemitism, Winning Justice" is set to take place on December 15th.

LET'S GET TO KNOW THE “QUALIFICATIONS” OF THESE PANELISTS: Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib is widely known for her anti-Israel activism and support of the BDS movement, for which she was barred from entering Israel in 2019. She has claimed that Palestinians saved Holocaust survivors and compared boycotting Israel to boycotting Nazi Germany.

Peter Beinart, the ONLY Jew on the panel, has called the Jewish state a “cancer” and lamented the Jews' “unfortunate Zionist obsession” with Jewish statehood. He has referred to Israeli society as “racist” and has implied that Israeli and American Jews are Nazis in relation to the Palestinians.

Marc Lamont Hill was fired from his position at CNN in November 2018 for using language associated with the destruction of Israel. He has also promoted anti-Semitism, fundraised for a convicted terrorist and glorified anti-Israel violence. Read more in his NEW Canary Mission Profile.

Barbara Ransby is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a long-time supporter and friend of terrorist Rasmea Odeh; she has also demonized Israel and promoted violent anti-Israel protests. Read more in her UPDATED Canary Mission Profile.

OUTRAGEOUS: Upcoming @jvplive panel on antisemitism includes @thisisUIC professor Barbara Ransby, a long-time supporter and personal friend of PFLP terrorist Rasmea Odeh, who masterminded the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket that killed two students.https://t.co/kb04N8LBoU pic.twitter.com/mRsgDl6HB3
— Canary Mission (@canarymission) November 30, 2020