Ryan Bellerose: Unassailable
Pro-Israel advocates and activists need to understand that we do not have to say things like “ Jews are indigenous BUT….” Or “ The Arabs have rights too….” Of course the Arabs have rights of longstanding presence but those rights are not the same as indigenous rights.IsraellyCool: Why Is The News Fake?
The indigenous argument is important, because its airtight. The only arguments against it come from people who don’t even understand indigenous rights or indigenous status. The people who say “but the Arabs are indigenous” are only doing so because they have been force-fed false history and lies. The Arabs are indigenous… TO ARABIA, the Hejaz where their language, religion, customs and genetics all come from. If they self-identify as Arabs then they cannot self-identify as indigenous to non-Arab lands and that means any land outside the Hejaz, because truthfully the Arab world should be called the “Arabized” world. Indigeneity is site specific – Jews are not indigenous to the entire Middle East any more than Arabs are, any more than Amazigh are or Bedouin. It’s time to start calling out false narratives, not empowering them.
Jews can trace their lineages back several thousand years. They can show the genesis of their spiritual mode and method and trace it back to Israel, their evolution as a people, their cultural and linguistic coalescence, all of it comes right back to Israel, every path, every creek and stream, every hill, all have a story attached, that’s how you know the Jews are home. How can you expect that to be balanced with a group of people who started showing up in the 7th century and never actually built anything other than some scabby villages and a few mosques?
So get off the fence, you don’t need to be – besides some of you have been fence-sitting so long your ass must be getting sore by now. Take a side, take a stand, because we are the good guys and we are tired of having to carry your ass. No more virtue signaling, no more weak and vacillating arguments that give equal time to the enemy. It’s time to tell the truth.
Jews are indigenous to Israel. Jews are from Judea, Arabs are indigenous to Arabia. It’s not complex, it’s not fair, it’s not balanced, it’s simple unfettered truth.
Have you ever wondered what I know about how the News Wires like AP, Reuters and Agence France Press (AFP) operate which leads me to be so contemptuous of most of their coverage. This is the first time I’ve told this story in public.
When Matti Friedman first came out and exposed the goings on at Associated Press (AP) in Israel, I recognised the pattern. I had a chat with him and told him the same story I told above: he had never been to the APTN offices in London and wasn’t working directly with the video side but as soon as I told him he started to rethink about things he’d seen while working at AP in Israel.
His original whistle blowing article had put the finger on the problem completely: there is a filter through which the news passes. Stories painting Israel in a positive light very often get blocked, negative stories pass. Negative stories about Palestinian leadership almost never see the light of day.
If you want to see a written version, I first put this down in 2006. It was republished in 2010 largely unchanged. If I have to stress one point about what I saw at the offices of AP TV News in London it is this: why are over half the staff I saw working in a London office speaking and working almost exclusively in Arabic?
Melanie Phillips: Lionising the fringe elements
The key fact about Jackie Walker, however, which has merely been reinforced by her Edinburgh travesty, is that she is troublingly obsessed by Israel and the Jews. In any normal universe, such a person would be treated as a (truly) fringe wacko of repulsive views and ignored. Instead, she is lionised. At Edinburgh she received a standing ovation (ok, there were only about 30 people in the audience, but still) with a banner fixed to the front of the stage reading: “Anti-Semitism is a crime. Anti-Zionism is a duty”.
Across the Atlantic a not dissimilar scene was being enacted by the far left Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) at a convention in Chicago last Saturday. That passed a BDS motion, with 90 percent approval of the 697 delegates from 49 states, to wild applause while participants chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. In other words they were chanting their support for the extermination of Israel. This is, of course, what the BDS movement is all about.
You can watch that horrible scene here.
As with the British Labour Party’s Jew-baiting and Israel-bashing bigots, the issue that should cause such concern is the tacit or overt support for such views – or at the very least, the conspicuous failure to confront them.
The DSA claim that they now have about 25,000 dues-paying members nationwide, up from 8,000 in recent years. A similar rapid increase is true of Labour’s far-left Momentum caucus. The real problem, however, is the failure by the Labour Party to kick Momentum out, and the silence of the Democratic party in the US over the DSA spectacle – for even though the DSA is a separate organisation, this is the general direction in which the Democratic party itself has gone.
The deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee Keith Ellison, who has been associated in the past with the virulently anti-Jewish Nation of Islam, has made a number of questionable remarks including recorded comments at a 2010 private fundraiser in which he said that American foreign policy was “governed” by Israeli interests.
In other words, both Jackie Walker in Britain and the DSA in America are holding a mirror up to the so-called moderate left. Like Caliban in The Tempest, those self-described centrists may be recoiling from what they see in that glass – but it’s their own reflection from which they are flinching.