Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

The disingenuousness of Mitchell Plitnick and the critics of Facebook eying the word "Zionist"

For the past month, the anti-Israel Left has mounted a major campaign - a petition, a website, lots of articles - claiming that Facebook is considering adding the word "Zionist" to its hate speech policy.

The only piece of evidence for this is a single letter that Facebook sent to someone where they wrote:

As you know, in the context of our hate speech policy, we do not allow content that attacks people based on a protected characteristic (e.g., race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation). Under the same policy, we also remove violating attacks where proxies or codewords are used by way of substitute for a protected characteristic.
In that context, we are looking at the question of how we should interpret attacks on "Zionists" to determine whether the term is used as a proxy for attacking Jewish or Israeli people. The term brings with it much history and various meanings, and we are looking to increase our understanding of how it is used by people on our platform.

There is not one clue that Facebook is doing anything wrong or underhanded. On the contrary, it is doing research. A word can be used in many ways, and Facebook was reaching out to understand how the word "Zionist" may be used as a substitute for "Jew."

Facebook no more wants to restrict the word "Zionist" than it wants to restrict the word "Jew" itself. It wants to understand how the context of the word can be interpreted as a slur, just as the word "Jew" can.

The Israel haters are purposefully twisting this Facebook-initiated request to claim that it is a Zionist plot.

Mitchell Plitnick, co-author with Marc Lamont Hill of the recently released book "Except for Palestine," writes in the New Arab:

Facebook is facing a dilemma. The social media Goliath finds itself caught in a debate over the use of the political label "Zionist". Supporters of Israel are pressing Facebook to treat the term "Zionist" as a proxy for "Jew", and to therefore label harsh criticisms of Zionism - a political ideology that must surely be open to criticism in any free society - as anti-semitism, a hateful ideology that has no place in civil discourse.

There's a funny thing about that paragraph. While the rest of the article is replete with links, Plitnick has no link showing that Zionists are pressuring Facebook to do anything. No proof for the main assertion in the first paragraph of the article.

Because, as far as anyone can tell, this wasn't a Zionist initiative. It was Facebook trying to uphold its own policy.

Plitnick then argues unwittingly for Facebook to do exactly that - in terms of the Right:

The use of the word "Zionist" to launder anti-semitism is a real issue. For decades, white nationalist conspiracy theories have talked about the "Zionist Occupied Government," or "ZOG," referring to Jewish control of the United States, or even the world. It is an outgrowth of centuries of anti-semitism and particularly of the continuing malign influence of the notorious Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, first published in 1903.

...The disingenuous practice of using the term "Zionist" to cover for anti-semitism is not difficult to see through. Both opponents and adherents of white nationalist propagandists, for example, routinely understand precisely what is meant.

Which means that Plitnick agrees that sometimes the word Zionist is used as a pejorative proxy for "Jew" and therefore would fall under Facebook's hate speech policy. He admits that the way that white nationalists use the term is clearly antisemitic. So why shouldn't Facebook treat those cases as the antisemitism it is?

He gives no answer. He just says that when legitimate critics of Israel use the term, it never means Jews, so don't bother even checking it out.

Yet even the Left was forced to admit the blatant antisemitism in the British Labour party, often hiding behind "anti-Zionism."

Iranian and Arab media today will talk about "Zionist" control of the media or of banks, simply substituting "Zionist" for traditional anti-Jewish tropes. Only last week I wrote about an Arab article that claimed that Mohammed drove out the deceitful "Zionists" from Medina.

Denying that is denying reality, but Plitnick ludicrously claims that Palestinians and their allies are never antisemitic.

Plitnick's example of the far-right slur "Zionist Occupied Government" is clearly antisemitism. But the Left makes the same claim - that the "Zionist lobby" controls Congress and the White House. What, exactly, makes one of them antisemitic and the other one legitimate criticism? The stereotype is identical, the aims are identical, the language is nearly so. While Plitnick himself criticized some aspects of the infamous "Israel Lobby" book by Walt and Mearsheimer, he didn't consider it antisemitic, and plenty of people on the Left embraced its theme that is indistinguishable from "ZOG."

If even Plitnick agrees that some purported anti-Zionism is thinly disguised antisemitism, what could be wrong with Facebook learning how to identify this and treat it as the hate it is?

Because Plitnick and the groups behind this initiative want to defend left-wing and Arab antisemitism. They doesn't want it to be scrutinized. They want free reign to cross the line between legitimate criticism of Israel and hate. They want to allow the most vile antisemitism to be spouted from people on the Left and then defend it as mere "criticism of Israel."

Facebook wants to see what it can do to flag hate speech. People from the Left want to defend hate speech when it comes from their own side. Which means that they aren't against antisemitism - they just want to use the term to apply only to their ideological opponents.

NBC's "Nurses" program aired an episode that is antisemitic. There is no other way to view it: it characterizes religious Jews as:

* Being against any modern medical procedures

* Being against grafting bone or tissue from non-Jews

* Being against having women's organs or bones placed in men

* Jewish men not directly addressing female nurses

* Saying that prayer and medicine are incompatible

The inaccuracies about how religious Jews are would be laughable if it didn't just teach millions of viewers that they are uncaring monsters who reject women and medicine.

A Hasidic Jewish youth named Israel (of course, in case the point wasn't made) who skipped "temple" to play basketball gets hit by a car and needs an operation to fix his leg and walk normally again. His rabbi father is aghast that doctors suggest a bone graft, which could come from "a dead goyim leg" - from "an Arab, a woman."

Of course, Judaism has no such restrictions. But funny looking Jews with sidecurls are an irresistible target for modern entertainment.

Notice also that the nurse sarcastically makes fun what the rabbi is saying, normalizing the idea that Jewish beliefs can be lampooned on TV. Even though the show is claiming that Jews believe something that is diametrically opposed to Jewish law, the message that gets through from this show is that nurses must be respectful to all people - except Dark Age Jews.

Later, the nurse tries to make a Biblical argument to the son that one can break (nonexistent) Jewish laws to save one's life. The father refuses to acknowledge the nurse is even there, because, of course, she's a woman.

Then the father says that his son getting a bone graft would jeopardize his eternal soul, and that the choice is between trusting medicine or prayer.

In the end, the nurse is frustrated that she couldn't convince the backwards Jews what was best for them.

This entire episode is the Jewish equivalent of having a Black character eating watermelon with fried chicken and saying "Yessa Massa!" It is not only a thoroughly offensive stereotype, but it is a stereotype that has no relationship with reality.

At a time when identifiable Jews are being beaten in the streets simply because of how they look, NBC is contributing to the idea that Jews are not just like anyone else - but that they are fundamentally different, completely wrong and deserve to be treated with contempt.

This requires an immediate and abject apology.

EoZTV: Fisking an anti-Israel propaganda video that tries to exonerate a car-ramming terrorist

From The Guardian:

Israeli forces executed a 26-year-old Palestinian at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank last year, a report has alleged, challenging Israeli police claims that the man was a “terrorist” conducting an attack.

Forensic Architecture, a British research body based at Goldsmiths, University of London, said it had conducted an analysis into the death of Ahmad Erekat, who was shot seconds after his car crashed into a booth and lightly wounded an Israeli border guard.

The incident last June was described on the day by Israeli police as a “vehicle attack”, saying that its forces had “quickly neutralize [sic] the threat from the terrorist”.

In the past few years, Palestinian attackers have used car-rammings against Israeli security forces and civilians.

However, Forensic Architecture said its investigation, which reconstructed the scene using available film, including security footage published by police, cast “significant doubt” on claims Erekat was involved in an attack, and suggested the crash may have been an accident.

It takes a video to fisk a video, and I made one to demolish the major two claims: that Ahmad Erekat was innocent and that the Israeli border police "executed" him for no reason.

Both of those are not only lies, but easily proven lies. Forensics Architecture, an anti-Israel group that pretends to be objective and scientific, uses "computer models" and hand waving to obfuscate the simple truth that is obvious from the 11 second video of the attack: that Erekat accelerated, on purpose, into an Israeli checkpoint and then jumped out of the car one second later, something that innocent accident victims never do.

02/23 Links Pt2: Matti Friedman: Zero-Sum Game; Kemp: The Duped Generation that Supports BDS; The Perils of NonViolent Islamism; Thank You, Michael Che!

From Ian:

Matti Friedman: Zero-Sum Game

When I started reporting on Israel for the international press, I was made aware of linguistic quirks unique to this particular beat. One good example was the word “settlement,” which, in ordinary usage, means “a small village,” an isolated community out of Little House on the Prairie or perhaps colonial Rhodesia—but which we often used to describe suburban towns of 50,000 in the West Bank or certain neighborhoods in Jerusalem. A typical reader of the English language envisioned one thing, while the reality was another. Another quirk was our use of the word “capital,” which we refused to apply to Jerusalem, even though Jerusalem is Israel’s official seat of government, and that is the meaning of the word, which has nothing to do with international recognition. Or there was the word “disputed,” which we weren’t allowed to use for the West Bank, even though there’s obviously a dispute over the territory—the word “disputed” would make it seem like Israel might have a case. Our vocabulary was a kind of political code.

One of the most confusing examples was the word “refugee.” In describing the problems associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we regularly referred to “millions of Palestinian refugees,” summoning a clear image for Western readers—tents, camps, displaced people. The word “refugee” means “a person who flees for refuge or safety, especially to a foreign country,” but this wasn’t true of the vast majority of the people we were describing. So what were we talking about?

That very good question is the subject of a very good book, The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace, by the Israeli journalist Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, formerly a member of Knesset for Israel’s Labor Party. The authors, like most liberal Israelis (and like me), once believed the 1990s-era Western narrative about Israeli-Palestinian peace: that the Palestinians would eventually be satisfied with a state alongside Israel, that everyone desired the same kind of progress, that maximalist rhetoric on the Arab side masked more modest goals, and that the Palestinian talk about millions of refugees and their “right of return” to Israel was a starting position that was bound to be bargained away. We were all wrong, and in this book, the authors set out to explain why.

“Our book demonstrates,” they write, “that in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, decades of shuttling, strong-arming the sides, and endless hours of negotiations came to naught because none of the diplomats or negotiators truly understood and dealt with the root causes of the conflict, choosing instead to turn away and focus on that which appeared easier.” The part that appeared easier, they believe, was the route of the future border—which chiefly meant pressuring Israel to remove settlements. But all along, the real root causes, Schwartz and Wilf argue, were the Palestinian refugees and the desire of Israel’s enemies to use them and their descendants to reverse the very creation of Israel.

Richard Kemp: The Duped Generation that Supports BDS

BDS tells its supporters that it is "an inclusive, anti-racist human rights movement that is opposed on principle to all forms of discrimination, including anti-semitism and Islamophobia". That is a lie.

BDS has also succeeded in making life worse for Palestinian Arabs, the very people they falsely claim to help. This includes backing and strengthening the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas....

Vast international funds provided to assist them have been systematically embezzled by their leaders for their own enrichment.... This month, the UK's Jewish News revealed that $145 million of British taxpayers' money has been spent on incitement in Palestinian schools since 2016 alone.

Young and impressionable men and women, whose main attention is on studying for their degrees, have been duped by Barghouti's BDS rabble-rousers into thinking they were demonstrating in support of a two-state solution to be achieved by peaceful means.

Using words chillingly resonant of the Third Reich, Mahmoud Abbas said during a speech in Egypt: "In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli — civilian or soldier — on our lands". He meant Jews. Israeli Arabs would be welcomed.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that he and President Biden are "resolutely opposed" to BDS because it "unfairly and inappropriately singles out Israel and creates a double standard". The US administration should take up the plans... to target organisations that engage with or otherwise support BDS, such as Amnesty International, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch, and cut off government funding. British and European governments should follow suit....

On pursuing justice: A Merseyside perspective

The following is an op ed by Johnny Cohen of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. Mr Cohen is a respected pillar - and veteran leader - of the city's Jewish community and currently serves as president of the Merseyside Jewish Representative Council.

His article is published under the title “Arnold’s anger over the release of woman who murdered daughter” in this past weekend’s Jewish Telegraph in the United Kingdom.

Their online edition does not include this welcome piece. So with Mr Cohen’s permission, we are grateful to reprint it here. * * * In March 2014, the Liverpool Jewish Forum hosted a special visitor from Israel, Arnold Roth.

He and wife Frimet, parents of a profoundly disabled daughter Haya, had set up the Malki Foundation following the brutal murder in 2001 in the Sbarro Pizzeria massacre in Jerusalem of their older 15 year-old daughter Malki, one of two US nationals among 15 civilians, including 7 children and a pregnant woman, who were killed. 130 others were injured, many severely.

The Foundation, Keren Malki, enables families in Israel to provide quality care at home for children with disabilities, and later I spent a few years as a Trustee, until I found that time pressures did not allow me to do justice to that position.

Arnold’s talk concentrated on the foundation and on Malki herself, not on her murder. But he did express anger and disappointment that the woman who directed Malki’s murder, Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi, was one of more than 1,000 Israeli-held security prisoners who had planned/perpetrated various terror attacks against Israeli targets, but were released from prison in exchange for Gilad Shalit in 2011.

Tamimi, the first woman ever to be admitted to the ranks of Hamas terrorists, had pleaded guilty in an Israeli court in 2003, did not express remorse for her role, and had received 16 consecutive life sentences and an additional 15 years in prison.

02/23 Links Pt1: Joe Biden’s Emerging Folly in the Middle East; Netanyahu: Iran Will Fail like Haman Did 2,500 Years Ago; Vaccination nation

From Ian:

Noah Rothman: Joe Biden’s Emerging Folly in the Middle East

APolitico report published Monday revealed that Joe Biden’s administration wants to rid itself of the troublesome Middle East. In terms of global priorities, one Biden adviser confessed that the region “is not in the top three.” The new administration would prefer to focus on instability in the Western Hemisphere, containing threats and pursuing diplomatic initiatives in Europe, and, of course, finally pivoting to Asia. “They are just being extremely purposeful to not get dragged into the Middle East,” another adviser said. But the Middle East has a habit of dragging the United States back in, and a heedless effort to withdraw from the region is one of the easiest ways to stumble back into open-ended commitments.

The Biden administration encountered one of the first tests of its resolve to disengage from Middle Eastern affairs earlier this month following a deadly rocket attack on an Iraqi military base in which one civilian contractor was killed and nine others were wounded, including a U.S. service member. The Shia militia Saraya Awliya al-Dam, which maintains close links with Tehran, claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Biden administration responded in a “measured” way, according to the New York Times. It does not want to see a nascent attempt to restart negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program derailed by this Iran-linked provocation. But that indefatigable commitment to the pursuit of “rapprochement” with Iran and its proxies has only invited more rocket attacks.

On Monday, locals observed as rockets were fired at the U.S. diplomatic presence in Baghdad within the so-called “Green Zone.” It’s the third attack on Western diplomatic stations in Iraq in a week. Iraq has responded by requesting a larger NATO military presence in the country, and NATO will oblige. In the coming weeks, the Atlantic Alliance will increase its deployments in Iraq from 500 to approximately 4,000, and the Pentagon is not ruling out additional deployments to supplement the Western presence there.

Iranian strategy may seem counterintuitive on its face; why would a rogue state desperate for the rewards associated with the resumption of diplomatic talks risk it all by testing the new administration so brazenly? But Iranians can read American news media, too. If Tehran believes that the Biden administration wants out of the region so badly that it will not absorb the costs associated with sticking around, why not test that proposition? Iran’s long-term objective isn’t just relief from economic sanctions, after all—its regional dominance, with the U.S. all but out of the picture.

Biden squanders leverage Trump stockpiled on Iran in pursuit of a defective nuclear deal

Unfortunately, we’ve seen this movie before. As the Obama administration courted Tehran for nuclear talks from 2012 to 2015, it restricted its counterterrorism and counternarcotics policies toward the regime’s proxies like Hezbollah. As Politico exposed in 2017, U.S. efforts against Hezbollah lessened as the importance of getting a nuclear deal with Iran grew.

The desire to achieve and maintain the Iran nuclear deal also had other negative regional effects. Some of those in the Obama administration arguing for a more robust Syria policy in support of protestors and against the atrocities of President Bashar al-Assad — Tehran’s man in Damascus — were overridden since targeting his regime would have necessarily aggravated the Islamic Republic.

Absent any reciprocity, the Biden administration reversed the Trump administration’s restoration of U.N. penalties on Iran’s military-related procurement and proliferation.

The Biden administration’s eagerness for diplomacy will likely be read by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a vulnerability to exploit. And in response, Tehran will do what it has done for decades: intensify its aggression and only back down if presented with no other alternative.

Iran is watching Washington begin to dismantle maximum pressure in favor of “maximum diplomacy.” Absent a willingness to add to or even maintain existing sanctions, as well lacking broader efforts to tackle the clerical regime’s regional threat network, such an approach is indeed possible to prejudge: It will end in failure.

Joe Biden Must Respond to Attacks By Iran’s Iraqi Proxies

In addition to holding the Iranian regime to account for last week’s attack—something which Secretary Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab both promised to do to the perpetrators—a renewed effort to bring Iranian compliance for nuclear non-proliferation should undoubtedly include robust measures put in place to curb Iran’s ballistic missile development.

While the break-out time for developing a nuclear weapon once Iran reaches 20 percent uranium enrichment (which they have assured under the guise of national sovereign law to implement from February 23 unless U.S. sanctions be lifted) is only a mere three and a half months, Iran will still require the delivery capability which will truly enable the regime to be a nuclear military power.

Only three weeks ago Iran tested a new rocket with improved technology which could be used in its missile program. The new Zuljanah rocket, developed to send satellites 310 miles into orbit, is easily transferable to Iran’s military missile program run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Any renegotiation of the JCPOA by the United States must factor in the requirement to limit Iran’s ballistic missile program, and Britain will be instrumental in helping shape this policy with fellow JCPOA signatories. Curbing Iranian uranium enrichment is only one side of the nuclear coin; the other lies in restricting the ballistic missile program needed to operationalize a nuclear warhead.

Due to the consistent pressure which Iran is applying on the new administration, time is running out for President Biden to show a stronger hand needed to deal with this repeated Iranian aggression. This includes publically acknowledging the role in which Tehran has over sponsoring and controlling the Shia Iraqi militias which continually cause the biggest source of U.S. and British casualties in Iraq. With the recently announced significant uplift of NATO troops to Iraq, this is not the time for appeasing an aggressive Iranian regime.

Netanyahu: Iran Will Fail like Haman Did 2,500 Years Ago

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the story of Purim and the downfall of Haman the wicked who sought the Jewish nation’s destruction to warn Iran against threatening Israel with nuclear weapons.

Speaking on Tuesday at the state memorial ceremony for Yosef Trumpeldor and his comrades who fell in defense of Tel Hai in the north, Netanyahu declared that “on the eve of Purim, I say to those who seek of our souls, Iran and its proxies in the Middle East: 2,500 years ago another Persian tyrant tried to destroy the Jewish people and just as he failed then – you will fail today.”

Purim, celebrated this year on Thursday through Sunday, marks the saving of the Jewish people from Haman, an Achaemenid Persian Empire official who plan to annihilate all the Jews and failed, as recounted in the Book of Esther.

“We will not allow your extremist and aggressive regime to acquire nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told Iran. “We did not make the journey of generations through thousands of years back to the Land of Israel, to allow the hallucinatory regime of the ayatollahs to end the story of the resurrection of the Jewish people.”

Rejecting a renewed agreement with Iran, Netanyahu underscored that Israel “does not rely on any agreement with an extremist regime like yours. We have already seen the nature of agreements with extremist regimes like yours, in the past century and also in this century, with the North Korean government. With an agreement and without an agreement – we will do everything so that you do not arm yourself with nuclear weapons.”

Netanyahu’s cautionary remarks came just hours after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Iran will continue its 20% enrichment of uranium, and will increase enrichment up to 60% “based on the country’s needs.”

Oman Daily has a quite unhinged article by Zahir bin Harith Al Mahrouqi against normalization with Israel by Gulf states.

It starts off by alternatively being happy at how (he says) most Gulf Arabs are still anti-Israel and upset that many Arab youth don't know how truly awful Israel is. But then he really goes off the deep end:

The conclusion is that popular normalization with the Zionist entity in the Gulf and in the Arab countries is unacceptable, and Israel cannot succeed in reaching the Arab peoples, except through twisted methods that it has mastered, such as disguising themselves with Arab names and calling Mordechai "Muhammad," for example, and selling its products to people by changing the name of the country of origin.

May God have mercy on the researcher, Abdel-Wahab Al-Messiri, who predicted how things will turn out, and said: “From now on, we will find Jews in Muslim clothes. The Career Jew. A Muslim who prays with us in the mosque, but he plays the same role as the Jewish general. Accordingly, this phenomenon must be analyzed so that many of us do not convert to Judaism without realizing it. ”

There you have it. The danger of normalization is that soon Muslims will unwittingly become Jews. Perhaps they are afraid that there is a secret phrase that, when uttered, converts people into Jews like the Shahada makes people Muslim.

Iran's International Quran News Agency liked this article so much, they reprinted it.

From the Washington Post, an article written by anti-Israel academics Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami:

The Middle East never lacks for commentary and opinions. Several high-quality surveys regularly ask political scientists and foreign policy experts their views on U.S. policy in the region. But what do scholarly experts on the Middle East think?

Last week, we fielded a unique survey of scholars with expertise in the Middle East, the first of our new Middle East Scholar Barometer. Drawing on the membership of the Middle East Studies Association, the American Political Science Association’s MENA Politics Section and the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University, we identified 1,293 such scholars. The vast majority speak regional languages, have spent significant time in the Middle East, and have dedicated their professional lives to the rigorous study of the region and its politics. Within three days, 521 scholars had consented and responded (a 40 percent response rate), divided almost equally between political scientists and nonpolitical scientists.

Perhaps the starkest finding of the survey is the collective assessment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A strong majority, 59 percent, describes the current reality for Israel and the Palestinians as “a one-state reality akin to apartheid.” An additional 7 percent view it as a “one-state reality with inequality, but not akin to apartheid.”

How scientific was the survey? Not at all. It was a self-selecting online survey, meaning that people with strong opinions were more likely to answer. The survey makes itself sound scientific by saying that it uses the "University of Maryland's Qualtrics platform" when Qualtrics is simply an online survey company that anyone can sign up for in five minutes, send a "poll" to their mailing list, and post the results as if they are meaningful.

Qualtrics is as scientific and rigorous as a Twitter poll.

Legitimate surveys are constructed to reduce bias. This poll is constructed to encourage bias. Unlike legitimate surveys, this online poll ensures that people with strong opinions are more likely to respond. And who are more fanatic than Israel haters and BDS supporters?

Which brings us to the second fatal issue with the poll. The vast majority of the respondents are members of the Middle East Studies Association, which pretends to be apolitical but is anything but. While it has not voted on BDS, it has defended it vigorously. And it defends those who want to boycott Israeli universities in the name of academic freedom, which is as Orwellian as it gets.

Before the "call for BDS" in 2005, MESA issued a 2002 statement that would be a condemnation of BDS:

We believe that critical analysis and argument should infuse university life. We believe that individuals should be accorded equal access to that arena for debate without regard to their personal status, country of origin, religious persuasion or policy preference.

Yet BDS advocates boycotting Israeli academics - and MESA defends them, seemingly silently eliminating the "country of origin" clause in their 2002 statement.

A self-selecting, unscientific, online poll of "scholars" who defend boycotting Israeli universities, and only Israeli universities, is being pushed as if it is meaningful. It doesn't reflect reality - it reflects the biases of the people who came up with the idea of the poll and their friends.

This isn't a one-off. This was the first poll of the "Middle East Scholar Barometer" - a way to push political agendas by creating polls whose results are cooked to begin with, while giving credulous news media the pretense that these are objective and accurate surveys.

(h/t Lenny)

On Sunday, I quoted Times of Israel:

The Palestinian Authority has reportedly sent a letter to Washington stating that all Palestinian factions — including Hamas — have committed to a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders with its capital in East Jerusalem, and to peaceful popular resistance against Israel.

Thge "all Palestinian factions" part upset the Islamic Jihad terror group.

They issued a statement on Sunday night saying that it has no connection with what was stated in the letter, stressing that it did not authorize anyone to relinquish any grain of sand of the soil of the land of historical Palestine.

At the same time, the terror group released a video where their leader says that as long as one Palestinian is alive, they will keep fighting.

02/22 Links Pt2: David Collier: David Miller’s antisemitism – Bristol University shares the blame; SNL’s Anti-Israel Covid Blood Libel; Why Poland Is Trying to Control Holocaust Memory

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: 'We need to BDS them': Mark Levin says of media hostility towards Israel, US

Mark Levin, the conservative Jewish American radio broadcaster with more than 14 million daily listeners, has a gloomy forecast for the future of American media coverage of the US, of Israel and of ties between the two countries.

Ahead of the launch of the Hebrew-language edition of his bestselling book Unfreedom of the Press, Levin told Israel Hayom that to understand the nature and depth of the danger that the US media poses to democracy in America, you have to understand the way that the US media treats Israel.

"I think the American people – forget about the elites – I think the American people and the Israeli people have such a connection, and such a love for each other," he explained.

"We get in this country from our media … that Israel is an apartheid society, it's a racist society. It's the same things they say about our country, they say about Israel. So it's kind of hard to write a book – what I called Unfreedom of the Press – and ignore what's going on in Israel.

"It's also hard to ignore it as a Jew," he adds.

"I see the overlays. I see the animus towards Israel, the animus towards the United States."

For decades Israelis and Israel's supporters in America complained about the anti-Israel bias of the US media. But in Unfreedom of the Press, Levin explains that the problem is far worse than mere bias.

David Collier: David Miller’s antisemitism – Bristol University shares the blame

I have long said Corbyn was a symptom of a far greater problem and only now is that beginning to be more widely understood. The rewriting of history took place in academic halls long before it began to spread on social media. We witnessed the growth of anti-Israel movements only after academic activists had provided them with faux legitimacy. The NGOs fighting against Israel are full of graduates who were taught their twisted hatred, whilst studying at government-funded educational institutions. A whole generation of academics has arisen, who view the world through an antisemitic lens. They protect each other, stand together to silence dissent and spread their false tales to all the new students that appear. It is a factory that creates clones.

If they leave academia to branch out into law, politics or non-profit work, they spread their toxic beliefs wherever they land. It was only a matter of time before a mainstream political party became a target.

In comparison to the battle against Corbynism’s invasion of the Labour party, we are faced with a much more difficult fight. Academia will be protected by academics. The wider uninformed public will not tolerate interference with something that all the little graduate soldiers in media and in NGOs will come out to defend. David Miller’s case highlights this perfectly. The Bristol faculty, certainly the parts surrounding David Miller, are probably very hospitable to his views. When Bristol University considers its response to the outrage facing David Miller, make no mistake – the reaction of their own faculty if they respond harshly is a larger worry to them than having to deal with a few unhappy Jewish students.

But ask yourself this. If Bristol University which adopted the IHRA, still cannot deal with a case as blatant as David Miller then what value does the IHRA have? At the very least, the IHRA demands that a name be given to such breaches – and that name is antisemitism. The Miller case proves that those attacking the IHRA have little to worry about. The responsibility of the University of Bristol

But the bottom line is that this story is all down to the University of Bristol. They chose to give him a senior role even though he had been targeting the Jewish community for a decade. If you employ a racist and he racially abuses your students – you bear responsibility. This is no different.

Bristol is failing in providing a basic duty of care for Jewish students. It is a waste of time turning to an academic who is lost down an anti-Zionist black hole and expecting some type of understanding, sympathy or apology. Miller sees our community as a fifth column with a power base that he would happily dismantle. All this is down to the university. They chose to employ him. They would not have done this to any other minority group. It is time they afforded their Jewish students the basic protections that they are legally obliged to provide.

It is time they start doing their job.

Morton A. Klein: It wasn't funny, Michael Che

The ZOA demands that NBC’s Saturday Night Live (“SNL”) producer Lorne Michaels apologize for and terminate the writer of a “joke” which was not funny and in reality was a dangerous Jew-hating, Israel-bashing blood libel. In addition, this blood libel should be removed from NBC’s website and other fora where it may appear.

On SNL last night, SNL actor Michael Che stated, in a failed attempt at humor that: “Israel is reporting that they’ve vaccinated half of their population. I’m going to guess it was the Jewish half.”

In fact, in Israel, all citizens – Jewish, Muslim, Arab and Christian, are equally eligible and have the equal opportunity to receive the anti-Covid vaccine.

Antisemitic libels are not funny. In fact, in Israel, all citizens – Jewish, Muslim, Arab and Christian, are equally eligible and have the equal opportunity to receive the anti-Covid vaccine. The priorities are health care workers of all backgrounds (including Israel’s many Arab physicians and health care workers) and the elderly of all backgrounds. Approximately 70% of Israeli Arabs over 60 have already received the vaccine.

Israel also offered the vaccine to the autonomous Palestinian Authority (“PA”) and PA President/PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, even though Israel has no obligation to do so. The Oslo accords make clear that the PA is responsible for all issues affecting the health of the PA’s citizens. The PA and Abbas adamantly rejected Israel’s extraordinary, generous humanitarian offer.