Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 22, 2021

03/22 Links Pt2: ‘Who Needs the Daily Stormer When You’ve Got the New York Times?’; How "tamed"Jews deny what's all around them; London police probe assault, attempted suffocation of pregnant Jewish woman

From Ian:

‘Who Needs the Daily Stormer When You’ve Got the New York Times?’: An Excellent Question

A Jewish organization worked tirelessly with non-Jewish allies to help win clemency for indigent prisoners, including many non-Jews, who had been sentenced to excessive sentences.

Rather than praising it, the New York Times targeted it on the Sunday front page with what the paper itself described as “an investigation.” The Times inaccurately smeared the work as an effort for “wealthy or well-connected people,” the product of what the Times called a “network” of “influential” “Orthodox Jewish leaders” operating “behind-the-scenes.” As if anyone could miss the point, the Times illustrated the article with a Protocols-of-Elders-of-Zion diagram in light blue and mustard yellow showing how all these rabbis have their tentacles in President Trump.

A thread of tweets by Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon did a fine job of assessing the situation, likening the Times investigation to neo-Nazi propaganda. “Who needs the Daily Stormer when you’ve got the New York Times? An Orthodox Jew helps free more than 4,000 Black men from prison. NYT: A LOOSE ALLIANCE OF ORTHODOX JEWS USED THEIR MONEY TO UNDERMINE JUSTICE AND PUPPET MASTER THE PRESIDENT. Anyone else who had done as much to mitigate mass incarceration would be lauded as a hero. But when Orthodox Jews do it, the whole enterprise is tainted by their ‘lobbying,’ their ‘lawyers,’ their ‘loose network;’ and of course, the crime of being Orthodox Jews to begin with! You can’t bring yourself to write about the First Step Act? Fine. You can’t bring yourself to admit Kushner did something good? Fine. But you don’t get to use your institutional allergy to reporting the facts to spread disgusting anti-Semitism.”

Ironically, the same Times reporter responsible for Sunday’s embarrassment — Kenneth P. Vogel — was as recently as 2018 assailing another “loose network” that criticized George Soros. “Employing barely coded anti-Semitism, they have built a warped portrayal of him as the mastermind of a ‘globalist’ movement,” Vogel wrote for the Times of efforts to smear Soros, which he said included notions of a “shadowy Jewish cabal” and a “common anti-Semitic trope.”

Vogel has gone from reporting on barely coded antisemitism and antisemitic tropes to, as Ungar-Sargon accurately described it, himself perpetuating it.

Alan Dershowitz Talks Trump Pardons

Melanie Phillips: How "tamed"Jews deny what's all around them

Tuvia Tenenbom is perhaps the most successful author to experience extreme levels of difficulty in getting his books published in English.

I Slept in Hitler’s Room and Catch the Jew, his books about antisemitism in Germany and the Middle East, were published in Germany and Israel and became bestsellers. Despite this success, his subsequent book about American Jews and antisemitism couldn’t obtain a publisher in America. He was told that it would upset American Jews.

Now he has a new book out, The Taming of the Jew, a pointed, savage and often comic travelogue about attitudes in Britain and Ireland. And guess what? He couldn’t find a British publisher. So it’s been published in English by his Israeli publisher, Gefen.

The reason for Tenenbom’s difficulty is that he frightens people. He does so by lifting a curtain to expose not only antisemitism in places where people don’t want to admit it exists, but also the often craven attitudes towards it of some diaspora Jews.

The methods he uses also provoke unease. That’s because he often pretends to be something he is not, in order to lull people into speaking in an unguarded fashion. Think Sacha Baron-Cohen with blond hair, a large belly and a passing resemblance to Falstaff.

He gets people to say things which are so outrageous that readers sometimes can’t believe they really said it. In response, he maintains that he and his wife tape-record or video every encounter.

A former playwright and theatre director, he gets people to say these things through what some might call an act, and others might call a trick.

For Tenenbom, who wrote a column for the German paper Die Zeit for many years, often introduces himself as a German or half-Jordanian reporter. When he does so, certain people assume he is an antisemite. So believing that they’re talking to a kindred spirit, they come out with ripe examples of antisemitism.

Media’s Hyper-Focus on Israel Shields World’s Worst Human Rights Abusers

Yet, for NBC and numerous other news organizations, this is a story that apparently warrants reams of breathless coverage. Why? Why is NBC (and most other Western news media) devoting far less virtual space and time reporting on the plight of the Uyghur Muslims in China? Why are they not discussing the starvation of children in Yemen? Why are they not focusing on the ongoing slave trade in Libya? Why are they spending far less time reporting on the ongoing slaughter and kidnapping of children in Nigeria by Boko Haram?

I think we all know the answer to these questions. These media organizations know they receive a lot more views promoting stories that bash the one Jewish state than those that focus on actually significant human rights stories around the world.

But while this hyper-focus on Israel certainly does do some harm to Israel, the people it harms the most are those who the media outlets largely ignore compared to how they cover Israel and the Palestinians. This media malpractice really hurts the Uyghurs, the imprisoned political dissidents in Hong Kong, those protesting another dictatorship in Myanmar, the Tigray civilians being slaughtered in Ethiopia, the gay people oppressed by Iran and the countless other actual human rights violations that barely get any attention.

In much the same way that the hyper-focus on Israel by so-called “human rights” organizations (such as the United Nations Human Rights Council) protects the world’s worst human rights abusers from answering for their crimes against humanity, the hyper-focus on Israel by the media prevents widespread coverage of the most heinous human rights abuses by the worst dictatorships and terror groups on earth.

In the first three months of 2021 alone, Boko Haram has kidnapped and murdered hundreds of people in Nigeria, many of them children. Yet a Google search for “NBC News Boko Haram” doesn’t come up with a single news story from 2020 or 2021. Not one.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Walter Lippman famously said, “There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.” Well, if the “devil” is not those kidnapping and murdering thousands in Nigeria, putting hundreds of thousands in concentration camps in China, starving tens of thousands in Yemen, etc., then the “devil” doesn’t need shaming. Only then could dozens of international news stories about kids being detained for trying to steal parrots possibly make sense.

Your anti-Israel rhetoric fuels anti-Semitic attacks.
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) March 22, 2021

In the weekly cabinet meeting, Palestinian Authority prime minister Muhammad Shtayyeh said something interesting.

He said that Israel increased the amount that it reduces the PA's tax revenue payments from 41 million shekels to 52 million shekels per month.

Israeli law says that it must reduce the amount paid by the same amount that the PA pays terrorists. Up until now, Israel's deduction was based on the salaries that the PA paid to terrorists in prison; Israel has now included the stipends the PA pays families of "martyrs" and those wounded during attacks.

According to Times of Israel, the PLO recently admitted that it pays about 50 million shekels a month in terrorist salaries, so this is more in line with the true total that the Palestinian leadership pays terrorists.

Shtayyeh said that the Palestinian Authority will seek additional funds from Arab countries to make up the shortfall in its budget.

03/22 Links Pt1: Biden Torpedoes Abraham Accords Summit; Glick: Netanyahu – Israel's indispensable statesman; Biden Admin Cites Antisemitic Durban Conference as Positive Precedent

From Ian:

Lee Smith: Biden Torpedoes Abraham Accords Summit

Plainly, the Obama-Biden team doesn’t care about interfering in Israeli elections or else Barack Obama’s State Department wouldn’t have funneled money to an NGO that campaigned against Netanyahu in 2015. Nor do Arab royals sitting atop petro-kingdoms have much theoretical or practical reason to worry about appearing to back one candidate against another. Smaller powers like the UAE make alliances not with factions but with states—and all parties in Israel support the Abraham Accords. Israel’s strategic class, its political, military, and intelligence echelons, as well as Israeli voters consider relations with Gulf Cooperation Council members a strategic boon. It is difficult to imagine any circumstances short of war under which an Israeli prime minister would think it politically wise to abandon a normalization agreement with any Arab state, never mind a major oil producer.

No, “election interference” is a staple of American political discourse. More particularly it is the rhetoric through which the Democratic Party now pushes information operations, like the Russiagate conspiracy theory holding that Russia interfered with the 2016 vote to put Trump in the White House. News of the canceled visit by the Israeli prime minister was eagerly pushed in the press and on social media by Obama’s Israel point man Dan Shapiro through his proprietary Israel wing of the echo chamber.

But there’s a bigger play here than interfering in Israeli politics by denying Bibi a preelection photo op with Israel’s peace partners in the Gulf. Their larger goal is to weaken or dismantle the Abraham Accords, which by assembling a treaty structure that binds Israel together with the Gulf states structurally interferes with the administration’s stated goal of realigning the United States with Iran—and therefore against Israel and the Gulf—by reentering Obama’s nuclear deal.

But isn’t peace in the Middle East the collective dream of the Beltway policy establishment, left and right? Trump, love or hate him, got Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan as well as the UAE to normalize relations with Israel, the first peace agreements with the Jewish state since Jordan signed in 1994—and Biden said he wanted to build on the Abraham Accords. But as it turns out, “peace” has a very particular meaning for American policymakers. For the Middle East hands in the Biden administration, what matters most is completing the project many of these Obama alumni helped initiate while serving under Biden’s former boss—realignment with Iran.

Trump didn’t just withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, which undergirded Obama’s realignment strategy, he also designed a strategic architecture to counter Iranian influence—the Abraham Accords. To bind Israel and the Arab Gulf states, the Trump White House had to bracket the issue that previously kept these traditional American allies apart—the Palestinians. That alone earned Trump the wrath of Washington’s wise men.

For decades the professional peace processors warned that there could be no stability in the Middle East unless there was a comprehensive settlement to the Palestinian issue. By giving the Palestinians unbridled veto power, the Beltway establishment also ensured their job security. As long as the Palestinians said no, the peace processors were still in business. Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner wondered why the wise men held them in contempt for making peace. What they didn’t understand was that making peace meant the wise men were fired.

The alliance between Israel and the Gulf states is an impediment to the dream of a reempowered, nuclear-armed Iran backed by the United States, which was Obama’s main foreign policy aim—and an affront to peace processors convinced of their own never-ending importance. The Biden administration apparently aims to sink the accords by penalizing Israel and its peace partners for getting too close, and returning the Palestinians to center stage—in order to prepare the ground for reentering the Iran deal.

Caroline Glick: Netanyahu – Israel's indispensable statesman

According to The National's report, the new administration intends to cancel the Trump administration's policy regarding Israeli exports to the US That policy determined that exports from Area C of Judea and Samaria, which are under full Israeli control, will be marked as "Made in Israel."

The new administration intends to reinstate US financial support for UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority and will pressure Israel to permit Jerusalemites to vote in the Palestinian elections. It will undertake to reopen the US's diplomatic mission to the PA. The memo also makes clear that the Biden administration will reinstate the Obama administration's policy of pressuring Israel to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines "with mutually agreed land swaps and agreements on security and refugees."

As to the Abraham Accords, despite the memo's deliberately vague diplomatic language, it is clear that the Biden administration intends to subvert the accords in a way that will indirectly reinstate the PLO's veto over Arab-Israeli ties.

The contents of the memo, as described in The National report are not surprising to anyone who paid attention to statements made throughout the 2020 presidential campaign and since by President Joe Biden and his advisors. But the report does make clear the magnitude of the challenge Israel will face in managing and maintaining its alliance with the US in the coming years.

This challenge grew even more daunting last Wednesday and Thursday as Biden torpedoed US-Russian relations by calling Putin a "murderer" and threatening him; and Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan got into an ugly public fight with their Chinese counterparts on live television.

The need to steer Israel's ship of state between a hostile ally and two rival superpowers with whom Israel enjoys relatively reasonable if limited ties may well be the most difficult challenge facing Israel's prime minister in the coming years.

On Tuesday, as Israelis go to the polls, they should pause a moment and ask themselves, "Which candidate is most capable of competently protecting Israel in the regional and international arenas in the coming years?" The answer isn't hard to ascertain.

Israeli Minister Exposes the Truth About the Palestinian People

David Singer: Netanyahu’s feats merit his being Israel’s next Prime Minister

The country’s relatively small size and electronic health records that cover more than 99% of residents were two important reasons for siting the study in Israel, Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said in an interview late Thursday with Israel’s Channel 12 news. But what tipped the scales in Israel’s favor was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s persistence, which Bourla termed an “obsession.”

“He called me 30 times,” Bourla said. “He would ask me about the variants, what data we have. And I would say, ‘Prime Minister, it’s three o’clock.’ And he said, ‘No, no, don’t worry, tell me.’ Or he would call me to ask about the children, ‘I need to vaccinate the schools.’ Or to ask about pregnant women. So he convinced me, frankly, that he would be on top of it.”

On advancing the personal safety and security of every Israeli citizen – Netanyahu has overseen:
- The United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco establishing diplomatic relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords.
- Kosovo - one of the few Muslim countries in Europe - establishing an embassy in Jerusalem.
- The UAE announcing the setting up of a $10 billion fund to invest in Israel
- Israelis visiting Dubai in their tens of thousands
- Several more Arab countries reportedly being on the brink of joining the Abraham Accords -including Oman, Qatar and Mauritania.
- Normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel beginning with Saudi Arabia granting overflight rights to Israel and - most recently - allowing an Israeli racing team to participate in the Dakar Rally.
- An offer of Gaza, 70% of the West Bank and areas of Israel’s sovereign territory being made to the Palestine Liberation Organisation for the creation of a second Arab State – in addition to Jordan – in the territory formerly comprising Mandatory Palestine.

Denigrators and detractors contesting Netanyahu’s re-election face an uphill battle.

The position of the United States, the UN, the EU and Russia about what a legitimate Palestinian government would look like has been consistent since this statement made in 2006: "It is the view of the Quartet that all members of a future Palestinian Government must be committed to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Road Map."

Hamas - the frontrunner in the planned upcoming Palestinian legislative elections - has yet again made it crystal clear that it has no intention to abide by even one of these conditions.

In a statement released for the 17th anniversary of Israel's assassination of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas explicitly affirmed five principles that are utterly inconsistent with the wishful thinking of Western diplomats:

First: The purification of Jerusalem from the filth of the occupying Zionists is a sacred duty for every Arab and Muslim, so that an Arab and Muslim city would become the capital of the free and independent state of Palestine.

Second: There is no recognition of the occupation, no reconciliation with it, nor a waiver of a speck of soil from the land of Palestine and its sanctities.

Third: The return of refugees is a sacred right, and there cannot be bargaining over it, and resistance will continue until they all return to their homes and the countries from which they were displaced.

Fourth: Prisoners will return to their homes freely despite the occupation. They are our children, and we will not accept that they remain behind the bars of the criminal jailer.

Fifth: The partnership based on the institution and the national program is a goal that we will continue to work for until the occupation and its consequences are defeated.

The word "resistance" means terrorism and war. The phrase "land of Palestine" includes all of Israel.

There has been very little public discussion by the US, EU and UN about how it is impossible to reconcile the Quartet principles with the reality of Hamas running in these elections and likely winning. Even the letter reportedly sent to the Biden administration by the PA did not contradict Hamas' violent and intransigent stated principles.

Notably, Mahmoud Abbas has repealed a decree he issued in 2006 that required candidates to accept the PLO’s political platform and principles, allowing Hamas to run unhindered, and there wasn't a peep of protest from the West.

The Western attitude seems to be that it would be hypocritical to denounce any aspect of the elections, even if they will usher in the rule of an Islamist terror group, so it is better to ignore the issue altogether.

Which means that, just like in 2006, the media and the governments will act very surprised to suddenly realize that have to deal with Hamas while still pretending to want to push peace.

Jordan renews $435M defense agreement with the US, Ahlam Tamimi not a factor

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said on Sunday that Jordan recently signed a defense agreement with the United States.

The agreement, which allows US forces to enter Jordan freely, was signed on January 31 and approved by the Jordanian government on February 17.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told the Jordanian parliament that "the defense agreement with the United States of America took place after lengthy negotiations. It includes 19 articles and appendices that include the legal status of the American forces and civilian employees of the US Department of Defense and it regulates the relationship between the Jordanian Armed Forces and the American forces."

Safadi added that the agreement is worth some $435 million annually to Jordan.

There is no indication that the Biden administration (or the Trump administration beforehand) even tried to condition the agreement on progress in extraditing Ahlam Tamimi, the terrorist responsible for the murder of two Americans and any others at the Sbarro pizza shop bombing.

It appears that justice for the victims of the bombing is back to becoming the lowest priority to the United States.

There is an old joke about two Jews who are about to be executed by firing squad in Czarist Russia. One tells the other that he is going to request a last cigarette, and the other says, "No! Don't make trouble!"

That is how the Jews of the UK sound in Tuvia Tenenbom's latest book, The Taming of the Jew.

The book repeats his style of his previous books - part Borat, part Columbo, but always keenly intelligent, Tenenbom travels the world with genuine curiosity to meet all kinds of people and to get them to reveal how they really feel.

In this book, he visits the United Kingdom, where he meets a serious challenge: British people don't tell the truth. A fan of theatre, Tenenbom recognizes that the reason the British are such wonderful actors on stage is because they hone their skills all their lives, rarely revealing their true feelings, and many times in this book he listens to British people saying things that are the exact opposite of the truth.

Tenenbom's journey came as the UK was grappling with Brexit and the Labour Party was grappling with its own antisemitism issues. Others have done excellent reviews of the book and there is a lot there - it is far longer than his other books.

I would like to concentrate on what he reveals about the Jewish community in Great Britain.

The first Jews he meets are small communities in Ireland, Scotland and Leeds. As he writes about the elderly Leeds community, at first they tell him that everything is great, "but if you continue talking to them, they tell you that everything is a disaster."

In Manchester, there is a significant Jewish community, thousands strong. Tenenbom asks a couple at a pizza shop if they ever heard of any antisemitism there, and they say, not at all. He then asked their eight year old son who responded that he and a friend were pelted with eggs recently because they were Jews.

The father sheepishly admitted that it was true, and then said, "What do you want me to do? If I tell you about the antisemitic attacks that we experience here, you'll write about them, inviting copycats, and more people will attack us. If I tell you that everything's good, hopefully it will be good."

That is a serious level of fear and denial. And later Tenenbom finds out that two kosher restaurants in Manchester were firebombed and spent months rebuilding. Tenenbom hears similar stories about kosher restaurants in Golders Green, the Jewish section of London. (When I visited Golders Green one weekend in the 1990s, the synagogues there were already fortresses, way before US shuls started worrying about shootings and bombings.)

I follow the news fairly closely and I was not aware of these firebombings. It seems the Jews don't want to make trouble.

In Gateshead, where there is a major yeshiva, the Jews live in absolute fear. The Jewish bookstore keeps its shutter down all the time; Jews are attacked all the time on the streets in similar ways we saw religious Jews attacked in Brooklyn. The Gateshead yeshiva itself does not allow anyone in without authorization.

The contrast between the security at the synagogues Tenenbom visits and the mosques, which are wide open, couldn't be clearer. Many British synagogues are fortresses and often do not even display their names on the outside. The world talks about Islamophobia but the houses of worship shows who really is in danger.

One other alarming episode is an interview with Lord Stone of Blackheath, who is Jewish. He is more forthcoming than most of the Jews interviewed. He is not close to right wing - he is working on a plan for Jews and Palestinians to join a federation, he has experts working on the constitution for such a Frankenstate, he thinks it is the best chance for peace. He won't directly address the Labour Party antisemitism issue, but then he says something shocking: "I have a bag which I carry everywhere. In it I have my passport nd twenty-seven different currencies. If I had to leave tomorrow, I'd go. I'm 76 and I've lived here for 76 years and I'm a member of the House of Lords and yet.....That's why I've got a flat in Jerusalem."

A Jewish Lord does not feel at home in the country he has lived in his entire life.

(Yesterday, the London Shomrim released a horrific video of a pregnant woman being attacked because she was Jewish. Tenenbom keeps the tone light, but the hate of Jews in the UK is real and dangerous.)

Tenenbom also notes how ubiquitous Palestinian flags and murals are, especially in Ireland. When he speaks to Irish people nearly all of them express hate and disgust for Israel and love of Palestinians. When Tenenbom presses them for details, they know less than nothing about Israelis nor about the Palestinians they show such solidarity with. The Palestinian issue is an excuse to hate Jews and feel righteous about it, that's all. It is proof positive that anti-Zionism is often a thin excuse for good old fashioned Jew-hatred. It is notable thatTenenbom interview a number of Jewish politicians who agree with the IHRA working definition of antisemitism but are unwilling to apply it to, say, Jeremy Corbin.

Is Tenenbom's characterization of Jews as a group that is too scared to stand up for themselves accurate? To an extent. He did interview Rachel Riley, who didn't grow up with that fear and is now an outspoken voice against antisemitism. There are other Jews in England who are not afraid to make waves with their unabashed support of Israel. But it is hard to escape the fact that so many Jews clearly are scared out of their wits, acting like the pre-war Jews in Russia and Europe who went to great lengths to "not make trouble."

It never works.

The Taming of the Jew is as funny, entertaining, and maddening as Tenenbom's other books, and it must be read.

Dayenu through a far-Left lens

Just imagining the editing session of a Jewish Voice for Peace/IfNotNow/Jewish Currents Haggadah....

03/21 Links: Will the Exodus story be the next victim of cancel culture?; What has anyone ever done for the Palestinians?; Failure to stop Iran's terror support might lead to Israel-Hezbollah war

From Ian:

Will the Exodus story be the next victim of cancel culture?

With Pesach (Holiday of Passover) literally just around the corner, should we be concerned that the story of Exodus may very well be the next victim of “cancel culture”.

The story of Exodus tells of the Jewish nation’s departure from Egypt, the revelations at Mount Sinai, and their wanderings in the desert wilderness for 40 years prior to entering the Land of Israel. The central message of Exodus was that the Jewish nation was delivered from slavery to freedom by God, and therefore became the “Chosen People” by the covenant given to the Jewish nation at Mount Sinai.

Early Christians saw the Exodus as a typological prefiguration of resurrection and salvation. The story has also resonated with other non-Jewish groups, such as the early American settlers fleeing persecution in Europe, and African Americans striving for freedom and civil rights. However, this message of liberation from slavery to redemption may very well be nothing more than a hollow manifestation of wishful thinking and a remnant of what was once accepted as progressive thinking.

Today’s progressive movers and shakers, such as Black Lives Matters and their supporters among America’s intelligentsia, academia, and media celebrities, have rendered this interpretation of Exodus no longer valid. With the proliferation of fake news alongside the unparalleled political polarization that has swept America, its makes it nearly impossible to establish an agreed-upon set of historical facts from which to draw conclusions, let alone accept the story of Exodus as a beacon of hope and freedom from slavery.

Current progressive thinking has a wholly different approach and asserts that not only are Jews to be seen as privileged whites, but that being Jewish can be invoked and used to benefit Jews as a way of intensifying someone’s status as being white. This being the case, their argument goes further and claims that essentially Jews have no right to be identified as oppressed and thus cannot claim sympathy for being slaves under Egyptian bondage. Inferred in this interpretation is that Jews should not be viewed in the same way as other minorities who have been freed from slavery. In other words, the Jewish nation's past persecution has been canceled by their present day status as white privileged.

National Review Editorial: Against California’s Ethnic-Studies Curriculum

The proposed Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum is probably the most radical, polemical, and ideologically loaded educational document ever offered up for public consideration in the free world. Even after all of the many revisions made to the document, it remains at bottom a political catechism, clearly formulated for the purpose of indoctrinating children into the intersectional electoral priorities of the far Left.

The first draft of the curriculum was so far outside the boundaries of the Overton window in California that it was rejected out of hand by the Board of Education, the governor, and even by the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, who ridiculed it as an “impenetrable mélange of academic jargon and politically correct pronouncements.” One of its lesson plans included a list of 154 influential people of color but omitted to mention Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, or even the late congressman John Lewis. Pol Pot, however, the architect of the Cambodian genocide, did make an appearance, alongside other violent revolutionaries.

Antisemitism has also plagued the development of the model curriculum from the start. An early draft listed the anti-Semitic BDS campaign alongside Black Lives Matter and #MeToo as an example of an historic American social movement and also referred to the 1948 Israeli War of Independence only as the “Nakba,” an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe.” Even in the final version of the curriculum, Jews have been relegated to an appendix. Their outsized contribution to American life does not warrant a place in the core content of the course in the eyes of the curriculum’s authors.

Jonathan S. Tobin: The Problem With Ethnic Studies Isn’t Just How It Treats Jews

The trouble with ethnic studies is that even with the more overt symptoms of anti-Jewish prejudice removed, the curriculum is still a political catechism rooted in intersectional ideology about Third World nations and people of color locked in a never-ending struggle against white oppression. The subtext is therefore still one that puts Jews in the unfortunate position of either denying their own “privilege” or being enlisted in a political struggle that has little to do with a celebration of diversity, let alone the manifold blessings of American liberty.

The disturbing aspects of this teaching go beyond the trouble it makes for Jews. After all, in California, students are only required to take three semesters of English and two of math to graduate high school. But while subjects like biology, chemistry, physics, geography, civics, history, and foreign languages are merely optional, this ideologically tainted ethnic studies curriculum will be mandatory. Think about what this means for the future of a country in which important disciplines, including those that were once correctly viewed as essential for an informed citizenry in a democracy, are ditched in favor of lessons about prioritizing race and tearing down the country.

Those who are trying to remind Californians of the struggles and achievements of Jews in America have a good story to tell that is deserving of attention. The same is true of Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, and a host of other groups. But Jewish success in the United States is rooted in the core truths about that so-called “dominant” narrative about the country in which immigrants from a variety of backgrounds joined together to embrace the values and the ideas of the Founding Fathers about political and economic freedom. The same is true for the successes of every other group, including those who were subjected to far worse discrimination than the antisemitism Jews had to face.

By enshrining an ethnic-studies course into law in this manner, California has set up a destructive competition along racial, religious, and ethnic lines that makes race the primary way we all define ourselves rather than as individuals and Americans. It glorifies a struggle for “equity” in which some Americans will get privilege and power based on their group identity, rather than demanding that all are given an equal chance and judged on their own merits.

We should know the stories of all groups that make up the mosaic of American life. But the critical race theory animating this curriculum and other versions of it infiltrating into American society is a poison that undermines national identity and patriotism. Instead of Jews demanding their piece of the ethnic pie and begging that the core ideology of intersectionalism that dismisses them as privileged whites be watered down, we should be rejecting the entire edifice of this deplorable curriculum as something that will hurt all Americans.

From Time, March 29, 1954:

At dawn one day last week, a bus pulled out of the stockade at Elath, Israel's southernmost outpost and single Red Sea port. It headed north into the Negeb desert, toward Beersheba and civilization, wheezing and jogging for hours through the cratered wasteland that comprises half of Israel. The 15 passengers chatted and compared souvenirs. Outside, vultures wheeled in the pale sky.

The bus reached treacherous Scorpion's Pass, 60 miles south of Beersheba, and started up the grade like a clumsy beetle. As it neared a stone monument, erected to honor the Jews who fell in 1948 to win the Negeb, it was struck by a volley of gunfire. Ephraim Fuerstenberg, the driver, slumped dead; the bus rolled to a stop. Four passengers raced wildly through the door; a second burst spat from a hillock, and they fell lifeless onto the bleached clay. A bottle of cologne broke in the pocket of Hanna Kirshenbaum, 29, mother of three, and mingled the scent of flowers with her blood.

Two khaki-clad Arabs raced for the bus, leaped inside and sprayed it with Tommy guns. A soldier saved Ephraim's five-year-old daughter by throwing himself across her body, but he was riddled. Then the Arabs grabbed revolvers and fired into anything that twitched. "I played dead," said Miriam Lesser, a waitress. "One of the Arabs dragged me up by my hair to see if I was alive, then shot at my head but missed." A moment later, the assassins were gone.

Behind them they left eleven dead and a woman and a child critically wounded. Three shammed death. For a long time they dared not move because they heard noises. Later they learned that the sounds had been made by a dying man's feet drumming the bus floor in his last agony. Ephraim's daughter whimpered a few times; her father and mother were dead. The vultures were swooping lower and lower when an army truck twisted up the road and onto the terrible scene.

Once again—as it does almost every day—blood flowed in mockery of the state of affairs that diplomats call the Palestine truce.

Trackers traced the footsteps of approximately five people to Jordan, and the Jordanians then saw that the team split up, but they were never found. One of the IDs of a victim was found later in Gaza.

This was before 1967, before "occupation." Today, "occupation" is an excuse for Palestinian terror, but there was no such excuse before "occupation" and there was plenty of terror.

I've mentioned before that Palestinians have been protesting UNRWA's decision to a implement a "unified food basket program" where it would give all families the same food benefits and take away free food for families with a steady income.

Cash-strapped UNRWA isn't backing down, so the Palestinian protesters have been escalating their activities.

Today, the Joint Committee for Refugees closed all UNRWA service centers in the Gaza Strip for two consecutive days in protest, ensuring that no one gets food at all.

If they keep it up, UNRWA can save lots of money on food rations. Soon all recipients of food aid in Gaza can starve thanks to the people who pretend to defend them.

This is the sort of story that gets roundly ignored in the Western media, because Palestinians having reckless disregard for their own people isn't worth reporting on.

Captain Triumph was one of the many mostly forgotten superhero comics of the 1940s.

In one episode Triumph confronts a thinly disguised composite of Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini named "Mussler:"

Triumph's friend pretends to be the dictator's guard, and when the Hitler character demands to know what happened to his regular assistant, he is told that his grandfather was found to be a ....unnamed type of person. Therefore he was shipped off to a concentration camp.

There has been research in how comic books in the post-war years addressed the Holocaust, but I couldn't find any mention of how the comics - which ridiculed the Axis countries often - ever hinted at the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.