Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, September 14, 2017

King Abdullah's everyday lies

From the Petra News Agency, copied to the Jordanian embassy in Washington site, in an interview clearly meant for an American audience.

Jordan News Agency: Your Majesty, when it comes to the Palestinian issue, have there been genuine international efforts to bring the Palestinians and the Israelis back to the negotiating table?

King Abdullah: In my interactions with US President Trump and his administration, I have sensed a commitment to bolstering efforts aimed at reaching a solution that guarantees peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, which is positive and encouraging. I expect that we will see this commitment translated into action in the near future, based on the two-state solution, which is the only way to end the conflict.

Regional issues are interconnected. Reaching just and comprehensive peace that guarantees the emergence of an independent state for the Palestinians on their national soil with East Jerusalem as its capital will, in turn, achieve security and stability for the region and its peoples. In the same vein, failure to make progress in the peace process will fuel frustration and anger among the region’s peoples and serve the agenda of extremists, who exploit the injustices perpetrated against the Palestinians and the frequent violations against Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. We have witnessed this during the recent crisis in Jerusalem.

You will not read about this muted but definite praise for the Trump administration peacemaking efforts in the media.

But the second paragraph is more interesting, even if it is boilerplate.

Abdullah says that the lack of peace will embolden terrorists. This is trite, and false. After all, the Island of Peace massacre occurred after Israel and Jordan's peace treaty. Was this because of frustration at no peace - or frustration that Jewish girls can freely visit a place they couldn't go to before?

The entire "frustration" meme is an excuse to avoid looking at the core issue: Arabs refuse to accept Israel, even if some of them re forced to pretend they do for politicl reasons. But deep down, the vast, vast majority of Arabs look at Jewish sovereign presence in the Middle East as just as temporary as the Crusader control of Jerusalem. If they are patient, the Jews will eventually be forced out.

No one in Jordan's schools is being taught that peace with Israel is a wonderful thing and that Israel is a full member of the region. And this is the most "moderate" of Israel's neighbors, by far.

Moreover, if frustration over no peace leads to terror, then where are the Jewish terror attacks coming out of frustration? Israel doesn't have peace either, right?

Abdullah's lies don't end there. He says that Jewish visitors to Jewish holy places are "frequent violations" against holy sites.

He says that peace cannot occur without Palestinian control over "east" Jerusalem which includes the Old City. Presumably Jews would be allowed to visit in his conception of peace. But why cannot Israel control it and let Arabs visit? If one is not an impediment to peace, why is the other?

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Ha’aretz is the oldest newspaper still in print in Israel. It began life in 1918 as an organ of the British military government, but was soon taken over by left-wing Zionists. The Schocken family bought the paper in 1935; Gershon Schocken was the editor and publisher from 1939 until he died in 1990, and his son Amos (72) has been the publisher since then. Some 40% of the ownership was sold during the past decade, but the Schocken family still solidly controls the paper.

According to a survey at the beginning of last year, the Hebrew print edition of Ha’aretz reaches about 4% of Israelis each weekday, compared to almost 38% for Israel Hayom and 35% for Yediot Aharonot. But its Hebrew and English websites – despite the fact that access to most content is not free – have 26,000 and 18,000 subscribers respectively. In a Financial Times interview last year, Amos Schocken claimed that the paper was “mildly profitable.”

The Ha’aretz editorial policy is strongly on the left. Its 4% reach corresponds roughly to the 4% of Israeli voters that voted for Meretz, the farthest-left of the Jewish parties in the Knesset.

Schocken calls himself a Zionist, but the paper’s editorials and many of its op-eds place it in the anti-Zionist, anti-Israel category. Although he believes in “Zionism [as] a viewpoint that sees the national home in the Land of Israel as a solution for the Jewish people in the framework of a democratic, Jewish state,” his understanding of “democratic” implies complete equality in almost every respect between the Jewish and non-Jewish populations. But this definition (I argue here at length) vitiates the Jewish nature of the state, and if implemented the way Schocken and his writers would like, would result in a state that was neither Jewish nor democratic.

Ha’aretz speaks for the small, even tiny, minority of Jewish Israelis that make up the extreme Left. But it has far greater influence than its circulation figures indicate. The Financial Times writer notes that

The paper and its business section, The Marker, are widely read in the Israeli elite — including by people who loathe its politics — and sets the agenda in many policy debates. Outside Israel, stories that appear online in Ha’aretz in the morning regularly work their way on to the agenda later in the day as talking points in Washington and Brussels.

Although it has a few regular columnists – Israel Harel and Moshe Arens come to mind – who could be called right wing, the paper employs such writers as the unspeakably vile Gideon Levy who accused Israeli pilots of war crimes, the Jewish Palestinian Amira Hass who believes that throwing stones at Jews is the “birthright” of Palestinians, and the anti-Zionist provocateur Rogel Alpher who advocates that Israeli Jews should emigrate, and called for a boycottof the “racist” Maccabiah Games.

Is this the image of Israel that we wish to present to decision-makers in Washington and Brussels?

Ha’aretz, particularly its English internet edition, plays a singular and important role in the international campaign to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state. It serves as an Israeli Jewish voice to validate the worst accusations. Is Israel an “apartheid state?” Ask Hass. Does the IDF deliberately target civilians, especially children? Here is some “evidence” in a piece by Levy. Is Israel turning into an undemocratic theocracy? Here is Ha’aretz editor Aluf Benn saying so.

“You see,” say the world’s Israel-haters and antisemites? “Even Israeli Jews, writers in Israel’s oldest and most respected newspaper, agree with us.”

Schocken pays these seditious saboteurs because they represent his own views. Last year, he called for international pressure to “end Israeli apartheid.” He believes that what he and his paper are doing is a moral enterprise to “make Israel better.”

It is true that Ha’aretz sometimes exposes abuses of members of minorities in Israel. But its moral failure is shown by its completely unbalanced coverage of terrorism and incitement among the Arabs of the PA and Israel, its total failure to understand the security implications of its recommendation to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, its consistent negation of the importance of maintaining the Jewish nature of the state, its disparagement of religious people and ideas, its hatred of “settlers,” and – above all – the pure contempt shown for the only Jewish state we have by the majority of its writers.

There is room for left-wing media in Israel, much as I disagree with their positions. But there is no room for a publication that masquerades as “Zionist” while tearing down the state that gives it life.

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09/14 Links Pt1: The State Department’s Palestinian Fantasies; Phillips: What red lines really mean. Israel gets it. US doesn't

From Ian:

Cheering for Illegal Settlers — as Long as They’re Not Jews

Some on the Jewish left, along with the United Nations and the international news media, have been telling us for years that illegal settlers in the “occupied territories” are the main obstacle to Middle East peace. So these groups should have rejoiced at this week’s news that a small number of settlers were evicted from their home.

What happened? Israel’s Supreme Court forced a group of settlers who had taken over an apartment in eastern Jerusalem that Israel took control of in 1967 — a place that is deemed “occupied Arab territory” by advocates for the Palestinians — to vacate the premises.

The court actually issued the eviction order back in 2013. But those die-hard settlers, no doubt backed by pro-settler money from abroad, managed to exploit the Israeli legal system and drag the proceedings out for more than four years. Finally, this past week, the settlers were compelled to leave the property that they had been illegally occupying.

So you would think Peace Now and its allies would be celebrating, right?

Instead, Peace Now issued a press release calling the eviction of the settlers “a dangerous trend that could threaten a future compromise in Jerusalem.”

But aren’t settlers the obstacle to peace? Wouldn’t their expulsion increase the chances for compromise and reconciliation?

No — because it turns out that the “settlers” were Palestinian Arabs. The rightful owners of the property are Jews. There’s the problem.

The State Department’s Palestinian Fantasies

In spite of recent polls indicating that ordinary Palestinians increasingly recognize that Israel is here to stay, the rejectionist Palestinian leadership remains the most formidable obstacle to a peace agreement with the Jewish state. But running a close second place is the US State Department, where unfounded faith in Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) remains unshaken.

The State Department’s Palestinian fantasies are on display in its congressionally-mandated annual report on international terrorism released in July. Abbas’s PA “continued its counterterrorism efforts in the West Bank where Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine remained present,” according to the report. Abbas is portrayed as a benign leader with an expressed “commitment to nonviolence, recognition of the State of Israel, and pursuit of an independent Palestinian state through peaceful means.”

The report applauds the PA for taking “significant steps during President Abbas’ tenure (2005 to date) to ensure that official institutions in the West Bank under its control do not create or disseminate content that incites violence.” And it asserts that “explicit calls for violence against Israelis, direct exhortations against Jews, and categorical denials by the PA of the possibility of peace with Israel are rare and the leadership does not generally tolerate it.”

So much is wrong with this incredible assessment of the PA’s 2016 activities that either the judgment or the competence of its authors must be questioned.

To begin, claiming that the PA doesn’t tolerate calls for violence requires overlooking the entire PA educational system, which exists to incite violence against Israelis. As then-Senator Hillary Clinton observed correctly in 2007, the PA’s textbooks “do not give Palestinian children an education; they give them an indoctrination...[which] profoundly poisons the[ir] minds.” When the school term ends, PA summer camps keep the children’s skills sharp.

Melanie Phillips: What red lines really mean. Israel gets it. US doesn't

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Video Network about the still under-appreciated Iranian threat, how the US State Department under Rex Tillerson is getting just about everything wrong (as usual) and the significance of the assumed Israeli strike on Syria’s chemical weaponry arsenal.

From Al Monitor:

200,000 Jewish Kurds headed for Iraqi Kurdistan, howls Turkish press

Several Turkish media outlets reported Sept. 13 that Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani had reached a secret agreement with the Israeli government. The alleged deal involves the settlement of Jewish Israelis of Kurdish origin — a community of some 200,000 people — from Israel to the KRG after the independence referendum on Sept. 25.

Pro-government newspapers Yeni Akit and Aksam ran stories on their websites attributed to a magazine called “Israel-Kurd,” allegedly based in the KRG, that Israel will repatriate Kurds living in Israel to northern Iraq should Kurdistan become independent. The news website Internet Haber ran the news under the headline, “Barzani’s game revealed! Insidious Kurdistan plan.”

Another important pro-government outlet, Yeni Safak, commented that it may be Barzani, not Israel, who hopes to attract the 200,000 Jewish Kurds to Iraqi Kurdistan. Yeni Safak reported, “It is said that Massoud Barzani, who received support only from Israel during the referendum process, plans to strengthen his hand … with help from Kurds of Jewish origin who have prominent positions in Israel.”

The sensational if hard-to-believe story came amid another Turkish media blitz directed at Israel.

Even though the Al Monitor story makes it very clear that this report is ridiculous, Arab media picked it up anyway - from Al Monitor - and is saying it is true! The Iraq News Network twists the story as if the different Turkish media outlets all reporting the same absurd rumor is proof that it has been independently confirmed by multiple media reports. It also implies that the 200,000 Kurdish Jews will help the referendum on independence pass, since they will presumably all move to Kurdistan in the next week or so.

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Palestinians show Holocaust-era images as photos of "Israeli massacres" (update)

Tomer Ilan on Facebook made a startling discovery:

Palestinian Media falsely presents Holocaust images as images from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. My research has revealed dozens of cases in which Palestinian and Arab publications, including mainstream newspapers, are publishing images of World War 2 Nazi concentration camps falsely labeling them as events that occurred in the Middle East conflict.

Sure enough, this image from the Gestapo concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora has been used in Arabic media as proof of Israeli massacres. The camp was not primarily meant for Jews although thousands of Jews, including women and children, were sent there towards the end of the war and many died en route and starved to death in the camp itself.

Al Quds, official Palestinian Authority newspaper, says this is an image of Kafr Qasim in 1956 (autotranslated screenshot).

Qudsn.ps says that the photo was of Tel Zaatar in Lebanon from 1976.

Karama Press, the Shasha.ps news site and many other sites identify this photo with Deir Yassin (autotranslated screenshot):

Al Ghad TV says it is a photo of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon:

The already disgusting Holocaust inversion done routinely by Palestinian Arabs and their antisemitic defenders (where Jews are accused of being just as bad as Nazis) becomes even more grotesque here, as these images are meant to erase the Holocaust altogether and replace it with Palestinians as the victims.

(h/t SpotlightingSA)

UPDATE: Our very own Petra Marquardt-Bigman noticed this last year, and she quoted me for noticing it in a slightly different context in 2013!

Welcome to all the new visitors to the site! Check out the many other things you'll see nowhere else!

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Haaretz reported on Tuesday:

The Palestinian security services arrested a Palestinian resident of Hebron on Sunday because he hosted Likud Knesset member Yehuda Glick at his home.

Glick visited Mohammed Saber Jabbar on September 3 in honor of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Adha and later published pictures of their meeting.

The Palestinian security services didn’t say why Jabbar was arrested or what, if any, crime he is suspected of. But sources close to the Hebron branch of the Palestinian police said they assumed he was arrested for meeting with Glick, whom Palestinians view as a radical right-wing activist because he visits the Temple Mount regularly and has long campaigned for Jews to be allowed to pray there.

Jabbar’s family said in a statement issued via mosques and social media that they had severed all contact with him over his meeting with Glick.

Glick said Jabbar’s arrest was senseless and once again proves that the Palestinian Authority doesn’t want peace.

“He’s a peace activist whom I met via the head of the Ahmadiyya community in Haifa,” Glick said, referring to the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam. “I went to wish him a happy holiday on Id al-Adha, and I regret that this is what happened.”

Arab media mostly ignored the arrest, although the family disowning Mohammed Jabbar did get some Arab media attention.

Ramallah News says that Mohammad's two brothers disowned him years ago because he kept on doing "normalizing meetings" with Israeli Jews. They didn't publicize their problems with Mohammed until now because they didn't want to upset their sick mother. I guess they told her he was out at the store for a few years.

As usual, a story about how the Palestinian Authority acts exactly against what could only be considered a small move towards peace is ignored by world media.

The problem is even worse. The media feels compelled to portray "right wing Jews" as militants and "moderate Palestinians" as wanting peace. This photo indicates the first part is a lie and the news story proves the second is a lie as well. But the media will never want to admit it is wrong. the anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian narrative is too strong and they have too much invested in it.

The bias is never ending.

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09/13 Links Pt2: What Happened to the ADL?; HRW Targets Israeli Banks for Economic Warfare

From Ian:

HELL FREEZES OVER: New York Times Defends Shapiro Against Leftists

On Tuesday, in a most unusual place, a column appeared that heartily defended Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, acknowledging him sympathetically as “that wildly exotic creature: a political conservative.” The column also mocked the idea of leftists calling Shapiro a “fascist,” and described him as “a 33-year-old who supports small government, religious liberty and free-market economics and opposes identity politics, abortion and Donald Trump.”

So just where did this paean to Shapiro appear?

The New York Times.

Penned by Times columnist Bari Weiss, the column, titled, "A political conservative goes to Berkeley," noted the impending brouhaha at the University of California, Berkeley due to Shapiro’s speech on September 14, including the hilariously misguided letter to students and faculty members written by Paul Alivisatos, the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost, who offered counseling services for the victims of Shapiro’s supposed rampage through campus.

Weiss notes:
… the activist group Refuse Fascism, which has hailed the left-wing extremist antifa movement as “courageous,” has taken the lead in condemning Mr. Shapiro’s speech, calling him a “fascist” on campus fliers and declaring in a Facebook post that his goal was to “spread ugly fascist views dressed up in slick-talking ‘intellectual’ garb.”

Weiss acknowledges Shapiro can occasionally provoke hostility, mentioning that he “once brought a diaper to a campus speech to offer to ‘self-indulgent pathetic children who can’t handle anyone with an opposing point of view.’” She also notes the viral exchange (which has nearly 50 million views) in which Shapiro confronted the transgender issue by asking the student promulgating the transgender agenda, “Why aren’t you 60?”, although she prefers to elide that exchange in favor of the moment he asked the student, “If I call you a moose are you suddenly a moose?”

But Weiss points out that Shapiro, whom the protesters at UC Berkeley have insanely called a “white supremacist,” was brutally targeted by those same white supremacists and anti-Semites in 2016:

Berkeley "Braces" For Ben Shapiro

WATCH: Berkeley Protesters Claim Ben Shapiro Is The 'Architect' Of A 'Fascist Regime'

First, Berkeley tried protesting. Then, they tried pricing the College Republicans out of holding Ben Shapiro's speech on campus. Then, Antifa got involved. Once they realized The Daily Wire's fearless leader was still showing up, the offered counseling.

Now, the protesters are just flat-out lying.

On Thursday, the Secretary of the Berkeley College Republicans caught Shapiro protesters on video (it's not clear whether the protesters are also students), shouting through a bullhorn, accusing Ben of being the "architect" and "founder" of "this fascist ideological regime" (presumably the Trump/Pence Administration).

If it wren't caught on tape, it would be too crazy to believe.

Refuse Fascism: "@benshapiro one of the architects of the foundations of this ideological fascist regime." Full blown insanity. pic.twitter.com/c3k7Qgk1DT
— Bradley Devlin (@bradleydevlin) September 12, 2017

The first part of the student's speech is inaudible, but you can clearly pick up "... on the same day as Ben Shapiro, one of the architects and founders and ideological foundations of this fascist regime is speaking. Ben Shapiro, who says things like 'Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.'"

The student goes on to encourage fellow Berkeley denizens to protest Shapiro (or worse — it's not clear exactly what the call to action is): "We are calling on people of conscience, that in this moment, this is your opportunity to take a stand. We will look back on history, on people who stood by and did nothing, who said these things have nothing to do with me."

Ari Y. Kelman, associate professor and Joseph Chair in Education and Jewish Studies at the University of California-Davis, has been in the news of late. That's because Kelman authored a study which suggests that campus antisemitism isn't a thing (for background see: New campus study claiming little antisemitism on campus severely flawed by Daled Amos). Kelman came to this conclusion by handpicking just 66 subjects from five separate campuses who have no interest in Israel or things Jewish, thus insuring the very non-randomized study would generate the results he sought. Which led to some cognitive dissonance when a reader drew my attention to a June 14 Times of Israel profile of Dennis Prager in which author Lisa Klug cited Kelman as an expert.

Dennis Prager
Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Prager is known for stating clear simple truths in language that anyone can understand. In the Times of Israel interview he says, “Non-Jews who think anti-Semitism is only the Jews’ problem need to read about miners’ canaries — about miners who think that when canaries die of noxious fumes those fumes won’t kill them,” he says, and “Nothing better identifies incipient evil than anti-Semitism.”

Ari Y. Kelman

This is a true statement, crafted for actual people. Instead of acknowledging the point, Klug suggests that Prager's careful wording might be seen by some as "oversimplification." The use of the word "oversimplification" might, on the other hand, be seen by others as "bias by description." In bias by description, authors use adjectives and characterization to paint a favorable or negative picture of a person, political view, or story. When a reader suspects an article contains bias by description, that reader should look for balance within the piece or in the wider news outlet as a whole.

In terms of this particular piece, Klug brings us the opinions of two academics, both of whom use several negative descriptors in their characterizations of Prager with "balance" provided by the CEO of Prager University, Marissa Streit. The academics are (SURPRISE!) Prof. Ari Kelman of the bogus study, and Daniel Schwartz, an associate professor of history and the director of the Program in Judaic Studies at The George Washington University. Kelman is meant to be the progressive voice:

“Prager’s comments are spurious, overly broad, and, basically inaccurate,” writes Ari Y. Kelman, Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University. “They do not represent the general conditions of Jewish student life on college campuses, and they do not represent the experiences or intentions of many of the faculty associated with Jewish Studies with whom I have spoken."

All 66 of them!

"And I am fairly certain that I have more interaction with both students and faculty than Prager does, which leads me to wonder where he gets his information from."

Perhaps the other tens of thousands of Jewish students Kelman didn't interview?

Klug offers context for citing Kelman as an expert on campus antisemitism.

"Kelman, who also serves as associate director of Stanford’s Berman Jewish Policy Archive of some 40,000 journal articles and research reports is in the midst of a student-focused research project. He and his own students have interviewed about 80 enrollees on five California campuses, Kelman says."

Uh, no. Not "about 80 enrollees." Just 66. And even if it were 80, that would not be an impressive number. (Can you spell "miniscule.")

“I can speak with some authority about the lives of college students because my students and I are in the middle of a research project on how Jewish students are making sense of politics around Israel, being Jewish, Palestine, and other issues on campus,” says Kelman.

Authority. Uh huh. We know how that turned out. Sixty-six handpicked uninvolved Jewish college kids making sense of something they could care less about, including the nonexistent aforementioned state.

But let's move on to Daniel Schwartz, the other academic cited by Klug. His CV's seem to promise Schwartz will generate the balance in this piece. Schwartz, we're told, is an active member of the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) which is against BDS and supports academic freedom, for instance. So far, so good. A glance at the organization's mission statement, unfortunately, suggests the AEN may be crippled by political correctness. Note the phrasing of this sentence: "The Academic Engagement Network aims to promote more productive ways of addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Daniel Schwartz

Compare this phrasing to say, the unabashed forthrightness of Professor Ruth Wisse of Harvard, who speaks of the Arab war against the Jews. A partial transcript:

Ruth Wisse

People talk about the 'Arab Israel conflict' I think the term itself is a lie, and if at all possible, the term should be avoided. What you have is the Arab war against Israel and I would put it even more strongly; what you have is the Arab war against the Jewish people.

The Arab league was created in 1945. It was created the same year as the United Nations and I think one of the main reasons that the Arab League was created, it was not that these Arab countries were so much in love with one another—as we can see the conflicts in the Arab world among the countries themselves are almost as great as their conflict with the Jewish State—but the Arab League came together around one thing more than anything else and that was the prevention of the creation of the State of Israel, and then what has remained the glue of the Arab: of pan-Arabism, of the Arab League formerly, and of what the Arab League represents: the common enmity to a Jewish state, so that the role of opposition to Israel is at the very foundation of Arab politics.

It's frightening in the sense of how important it is to Arab countries because sometimes when one sees it from their point of view, you sort of wonder: What would draw them together if it is not common enmity to the State of Israel? No wonder they have to keep this war going for so long.

It is so essential to their political life and to their internal political life, not only vis-à-vis one another but really in terms of scapegoating, in terms of explaining what's going wrong, in terms of blaming and creating a grievance against another country. So I think it makes no sense to talk about an Arab Israel conflict, because when you use these terms, it almost seems as if you're talking about two entities which are at war with one another. It's almost as if you're thinking of the Franco-Prussian War, where you would have France and Germany in conflict over some territory, or even the Polish Russian War where it was a conflict over whether this country would have the land, or that country would have the land.

Well, what we're talking about is not that kind of conflict. It is the conflict of countries, over 20 countries, with an enormity of land, with more land than they know what to do with, that refuse to allow one people its land. It is a very essential refusal to accept the principle of pluralism, to accept the principle of the possibility of the existence of another people with its own legitimacy. And until that realization begins to be spoken of more openly, and until that realization is really forced back into the Arab world, we don't have a chance of ever solving what that conflict is.

And it's not enough for people outside of the conflict to begin to recognize this truth, the most important thing is for people within the Arab world to begin to acknowledge what they have denied the Jewish people for over 60 years.

Ruth Wisse isn't the only academic who might have provided balance for Klug's hit piece on Prager. At least 8 of them come to mind. But Klug culled Schwartz from an organization hampered by a need to find balance where there is none—in the Arab war against the Jews. Klug writes:

Daniel Schwartz, an associate professor of history and the director of the Program in Judaic Studies at The George Washington University, says he is “all too familiar with Prager’s right-wing extremism.”

But Schwartz needs to be the balance to Kelman, so he offers his creds through an assertion of his opposition to BDS:

Schwartz, an active member of the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), says he would not have joined if “I weren’t concerned about the rash of BDS initiatives on college campuses in the US in the past few years.”

Of course, he doesn't believe that BDS has made it at all difficult for Jewish college kids, contrary to consistent reports of harassment and even violence against them by pro-BDS, anti-Israel, and antisemitic students and groups.

“I am generally skeptical of the notion that boycott and divestment campaigns have created an atmosphere on college campuses that is ‘hostile’ to robust forms of Jewish self-identification and expression, just as I tend to be skeptical of the way the current generation of college students speaks obsessively about a need to feel ‘safe’ on campus, in a way that tends to favor the suppression of certain kinds of speech,” Schwartz says.

This is balance? It's just more psychobabble leftist-speak for "We hate Prager." We KNOW that Jewish students not only do not "feel" safe on campus, but that they actually feel scared and endangered (and with good reason). We also know that BDS is part and parcel of the ethos of the people who threaten those Jewish students and have left them feeling so frightened and alone and so afraid to speak up for Israel. We don't need fake academics to tell us this, because we read about campus incidents nearly every day in the Algemeiner and Israel National News.

The Times of Israel article ends with a brief interview of Streit, but not before Klug makes a snide

Marissa Streit

comment about Streit's office being littered with "made in China" PragerU swag, with Streit, seemingly apologetic, explaining that the water bottles and totes are sent to donors. Streit describes how PragerU works:

A group of about 500 students comprise PragerForce, in which they make a commitment to share content, Streit says. In addition to aggressive online marketing, Streit says the “secret sauce” of PragerU is that the organization has “clear, factual and easy to understand content combined with a very robust marketing platform.”

What I said: clear, simple, easy to understand, factual. What Klug characterizes as "oversimplification." Also, 500 students, versus Kelman's 66. Natch?

Klug asks Streit one final question:

Will the organization’s methods produce a lasting impact?

To which Streit responds:

“If people could hear Dennis and see a video again and again, that could help people to articulate with intellectual ammunition,” Streit says. “If you are pro-American, you are pro-Israel. The more people you bring to American values, the more people you bring to Israel.”

That would have been a great place to end the piece. It's always nice to end on a positive note, with a quote. But no. Klug must sow doubt in the reader's mind over the viral effect of PragerU videos, because this is the anti-Conservative Times of Israel. She must deliver the coup de grâce, kneeing Prager and his followers in the testicles one final time:

Like the future of on-campus debate itself, the legitimacy of this argument remains to be seen.

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Education Ministry Replaces Academic Grades With Racism Scale (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Jerusalem, September 13 - In an effort to keep Israeli educational practices on pace with standards elsewhere in the developed world, the Ministry of Education will direct schools to replace the current outdated system of assigning grades based on student academic achievement with a more relevant approach that assesses only the level of a student's racism.

Ministry Deputy Director for Academic Standards Lee Berl announced today that beginning with the 2018-2019 academic year, teachers will be instructed to assess each student's level of racism at several points during the academic term, and only those students whose racism remains lower than a certain threshold will advance to the next grade, or be permitted to graduate.

Berl informed school principals and teacher representatives today of the impending change, which will require her division to complete the formulation of a system to evaluate racism in 5-18-year-olds. Ministry staff voiced confidence they would meet the challenge.

"We're a diverse group, and that's what important," insisted Ayam Woak, a district inspector. "The question is not whether we will meet the specific criteria of rolling out the grading reform by a target date, but how inclusive are we? the sooner we let go of divisive and, let's face it, Eurocentrist, imperialist concepts such as 'grades' and 'achievement,' the happier we will be."

"Academic scores might serve some purpose, but only insofar as no one's feelings get hurt as a result," added Tala Rint, a high school curriculum supervisor. "That's why a subsequent phase of the grading reform calls for the elimination of certain problematic subjects from the classroom entirely. Western civilization, for example, will only be taught through the lens of populations that suffered at the hands of Europeans or Americans, and never on its own terms. Biology will be considered only from a gender-fluid perspective."

"We cannot eliminate hurt feelings entirely," continued Berl. "But we can do our best to restrict hurt feelings to populations that are OK to hurt, such as Ashkenazi males, for example. Come to think of it, that's the only population it's OK to hurt. And that will be reflected in the way the racism assessments are conducted, with members of marginalized populations given much more lenient treatment than oppressor groups. Can you imagine having the same standard of racism applied to everyone, as if they're equal? I shudder to consider assigning the same racism score to an Arab and an Asheknazi male who perform an identical action."

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09/13 Links Pt1: If Israel played by America's rules, Iraq and Syria would have nuclear weapons; The Palestinians' "Jewish Problem"

From Ian:

If Israel played by America's rules, Iraq and Syria would have nuclear weapons

Israel and North Korea are on opposite sides of the Asian landmass, separated by 5,000 miles. But Israelis feels close to the nuclear standoff between Washington and Pyongyang. They have faced this sort of crisis before, and may again.
In the mid-1970s, it became clear to Israel that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was working on acquiring nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. Saddam had already demonstrated an uninhibited brutality in dealing with his internal enemies and his neighbours. He aspired to be the leader of the Arab world. Defeating Israel was at the top of his to-do list.
After coming to office in 1977, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin tried to convince the U.S. and Europe that Saddam was a clear and present danger to the Jewish state, and that action had to be taken. Begin was not taken seriously.
But Begin was serious, and in 1981 he decided that Israel would have to stop the Iraqi dictator all by itself. His political opponents, led by the estimable Shimon Peres, considered this to be dangerous folly. Foreign minister Moshe Dayan, the legendary former military chief of staff, voted against unilateral action on the grounds that it would hurt Israel’s international standing. Defense minister Ezer Weizmann, the former head of the air force (and Dayan’s brother-in-law) was also against a military option. He thought the mission would be unacceptably risky.
Begin had no military expertise. But his family had been wiped out in the Holocaust. He looked at Saddam, who was openly threatening Israel, and saw Hitler. To Begin, sitting around hoping for the best was not a strategy; it was an invitation to aggression. If there was going to be a cost—political, diplomatic, military—better to pay before, not after, the Iraqis had the bomb.

It's Time to Update America's Important Anti-Boycott Law for Israel

Bipartisan legislation is making its way through Congress that would bar Americans from joining in boycotts by international organizations against companies doing business in Israel. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act has attracted criticism from free-speech advocates. These concerns are unfounded.
In 1977, the Carter administration supported and Congress passed legislation that prohibited American companies from complying with boycotts imposed by foreign governments against nations friendly to the U.S. The measure aimed squarely at the Arab League's secondary boycott of Israel. Over 40 years, the law helped to break the back of the Arab boycott.
The Israel Anti-Boycott Act would extend the 1977 law to international organizations. It couldn't come at a better time. Already, the UN Human Rights Council is creating a database of companies that operate in or have business relationships in the West Bank beyond Israel's 1949 Armistice lines, which includes all of Jerusalem, Israel's capital.
Under this legislation, companies and individuals would not be able to boycott Israel at the behest of international governmental organizations, just as they are now prohibited from doing at the behest of Arab nations. Congress has wide constitutional authority to limit such discriminatory international commercial conduct that lawmakers find contrary to U.S. national interests.
Jonathan A. Greenblatt is chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. Stuart Eizenstat helped negotiate anti-boycott laws in 1977 as President Jimmy Carter's chief White House domestic policy adviser.

Coca-Cola, Teva on UN blacklist of settlement-friendly firms — report

A United Nations blacklist of companies operating in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights includes some of the biggest firms in Israeli industry as well as some household names in the US.
Among those on the UN Human Rights Council list are Coca-Cola, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, and Caterpillar, Channel 2 reported on Tuesday.
The US has threatened to withdraw from the international forum if the list is published.
Israeli companies on list reportedly include pharmaceutical giant Teva, the national phone company Bezeq, bus company Egged, the national water company Mekorot and the country’s two largest banks, Hapoalim and Leumi.
Some of the international companies — namely Airbnb, Caterpillar, and TripAdvisor, as well as Priceline — were previously reported by The Washington Post to be on the list.
The list was recently delivered to the Foreign Ministry, the report said.
Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, on a working visit to US, said in a statement that “the UN is playing with fire.”

The only people in the world without human rights protection are the Jews of Judea and Samaria

As I was researching my last post, I came upon a damning quote from the Encyclopedia of Human Rights, Volume 1:

This would seem to be obvious. Every human being has human rights, by definition, no matter where they live. Human rights law and the Geneva Conventions is dead-set against forcing people to move against their will (outside clear security necessity) and in most cases forcible transfer is considered a grave war crime.

But this section was not talking about Jewish settlers in their ancestral homelands. It was talking about Turkish settlers in Northern Cyprus.

In all the thousands of articles about Israeli settlements and international law, I cannot even once recall seeing a single word about the human rights of the settlers. The only mention I can find is B'Tselem - still insisting that they all be forcibly removed against international law - says they should be compensated as a matter of human rights. (I found another about how Israel's Supreme Court has treated settlements.)

International law is as clear as can be - forcible population transfer is a crime, regardless of circumstances, again with the exception of compelling security concerns. Wikipedia summarizes it:

There is now little debate about the general legal status of involuntary population transfers: "Where population transfers used to be accepted as a means to settle ethnic conflict, today, forced population transfers are considered violations of international law."^[5] No legal distinction is made between one-way and two-way transfers since the rights of each individual are regarded as independent of the experience of others.

Article 49 of Fourth Geneva Convention (adopted in 1949 and now part of customary international law) prohibits mass movement of people out of or into of occupied territory under belligerent military occupation:^[6]

Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.... The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

An interim report of the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (1993) says:^[7]

Historical cases reflect a now-foregone belief that population transfer may serve as an option for resolving various types of conflict, within a country or between countries. The agreement of recognized States may provide one criterion for the authorization of the final terms of conflict resolution. However, the cardinal principle of "voluntariness" is seldom satisfied, regardless of the objective of the transfer. For the transfer to comply with human rights standards as developed, prospective transferees must have an option to remain in their homes if they prefer.

The same report warned of the difficulty of ensuring true voluntariness:

"some historical transfers did not call for forced or compulsory transfers, but included options for the affected populations. Nonetheless, the conditions attending the relevant treaties created strong moral, psychological and economic pressures to move."

The final report of the Sub-Commission (1997)^[8] invoked numerous legal conventions and treaties to support the position that population transfers contravene international law unless they have the consent of both the moved population and the host population. Moreover, that consent must be given free of direct or indirect negative pressure.

"Deportation or forcible transfer of population" is defined as a crime against humanity by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 7).^[9]

There are no exceptions listed in international law for the reasons a population is where it is.

While is is obvious to legal scholars that dismantling entire communities and forcing the population to move elsewhere is a serious violation of international human rights law, the only people on the planet that no one cares about in this context just so happen to all be Jewish. Every one of them. (Arabs who moved cross the Green Line, and there are thousands of them, are not considered "settlers" and therefore, have human rights.)

No one is saying to dismantle settlements in Crimea or Western Sahara or Northern Cyprus and force the civilians there to move. And this includes scores of legal scholars who have not said a word against the widespread assumption that Jewish settlers must be forcibly transferred.

This is more than just bias. This is the culmination of decades of anti-Israel propaganda that has affected international law itself and how legal scholars think. The hypocrisy and the double standards literally could not be any more clear. Arab and socialist propaganda combined with biased "human rights" groups and supposed "impartial" bodies like the UN and the ICRC have cumulatively decided that some 800,000 Jews simply are not protected by international humanitarian law the way every single other person on Earth is.

It is literally a worldwide antisemitic conspiracy.

The scandal is that this is not considered a scandal.

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HRW makes up international law, again

From Bloomberg:

Loans to West Bank Settlers Violate International Law, HRW Says

Human Rights Watch called on Israeli banks to halt the financing of settlement activity in the West Bank, arguing that the legal justification they use for doing business there isn’t valid.

Israel’s five biggest banks, led by Bank Hapoalim Ltd. and Bank Leumi Le-Israel Ltd., are contributing “to serious human rights and international humanitarian law abuses” by financing construction in the settlements, the New York-based group said in a report published on Wednesday.

“Israeli banks are making existing settlements more sustainable, enabling the expansion of their built-up area and the take-over of Palestinian land, and furthering the de-facto annexation of the territory,” the report said.

The headline is slightly misleading, but HRW is still making us its own version of international law for Israel and another for the rest of the world.

Here is what HRW says about the legality of what Israeli banks do:

Israeli banks would have a responsibility in all circumstances to seek ways to honor the principles of internationally recognized human rights.

And

Settlements are unlawful under international humanitarian law. ...International humanitarian law forbids an occupying power from using land except for military purposes or for the benefit of the local population living under occupation.

If HRW was serious about Israeli banks having the "responsibility" to honor principles of internationally recognized human rights, it would say that no company can do business in any country - and certainly cannot loan money to any country - that engages in alleged human rights abuses.

Yet, according to HRW and every other human rights organization, virtually every country is guilty of human rights abuses.

Only Israel has such a uniquely evil system called "settlements" where Jews can live in their historic homeland that deserves the demand that even domestic companies must divest from them.

Oh, wait. Morocco builds settlements. "Hundreds of thousands of Moroccan settlers were encouraged to enter Western Sahara with state-subsidised property and employment, under the army's protection." Yet HRW does not say a word about international humanitarian law and Moroccan settlements. It would be laughable to see a paper by HRW demanding that Moroccan banks stop giving loans to Moroccans living in land Morocco occupies. After all, the EU even invests in companies in Western Sahara.

Turkey builds settlements. "A group of mainland Turkish people ... settled in Northern Cyprus since the Turkish invasion in 1974. It is estimated that these settlers and their descendants (not including Turkish soldiers) now make up about half the population of the North." Yet HRW does not demand any company stop investing in Turkish settlements in Northern Cyprus.

Only for Israel does Human Rights Watch keep adding restriction upon restriction - even when Israel's settlement policy is far better grounded in international law than those of other countries. (For one thing, there was no recognized High Contracting Power to the Geneva Conventions whose territory was seized, so the territory is not legally considered occupied under the Geneva Conventions. Any law or international instrument Israel can be accused of violating was written after Israel already held the territories - meaning, laws written specifically for Israel and no other country, such as the Rome Statute.)

This new report doesn't show or indicate any violation of international law, or humanitarian law, at all. But it does show yet again that Human Rights Watch does not hold any country to anything near the standards it demands of Israel.

And that is yet more proof of HRW's obsessive bias against Israel.

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