Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, May 10, 2018

John McCain and the Lack of Bipartisan Support for Israel (Noah Phillips)

John ‘Maverick’ McCain carries a certain amount of clout to his name awarded by his peers and the American populace over the years, and a distinct reputation as one of the last true advocates of bipartisan collaboration for his numerous efforts to extend beyond party bounds to support the greater good of the American people. Such is the legacy by which his political service will be characterized for years to come. He’s never been one to acquiesce to the ideals or ulterior motives of others, be it constituents or donors--a prevalent component of the Washington political machine, regrettably--or fellow politicians, or the media, even if it means he needs to ‘maverick’ on a particular issue, and adopt an unpopular stance for all the right reasons. For those that are current with secular American politics, you’ll remember he shocked his party and the world with a resounding ‘thumbs down’ to nix the proposed healthcare bill in 2017, among other contentious decisions possibly detrimental to his long term political career, but true to his beliefs. He’s a good person for his evident moral compass, and is also somewhat unique compared to many other politicians: McCain is a truly logical thinker, and supportive of whatever position makes sense to him.

He applies his nearly infallible logical reasoning to the complex issues surrounding the Middle East and Israel, and while Republicans as a cohort comprise a significant amount of Israel’s American support base, Senator McCain doesn’t rely on his party’s alignment with Israel to influence his understanding of what’s going on. Instead, McCain reaches the conclusion that Israel is a free and democratic and just state, through his logical reasoning:

McCain always takes an ‘America first’ approach to any and all political matters, applying his sensibility to assess ramifications for the American people--a tactic surprisingly little-used by American politicians. He reasons that American support for the welfare of the State of Israel can only prove beneficial for American national security efforts. Having a staunchly democratic ally as a proxy in the Middle East can only have an upside for America, logics McCain. A focal point of the McCain 2008 campaign and his work as a senator since has emphasized the eradication of Islamic extremism, and Israel is at the forefront of this effort due to its geographic proximity to the terrorist activities of the region. In a 2008 campaign trail interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, McCain described Iran as “hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, they're hell-bent on driving us out of Iraq, they're hell-bent on supporting terrorist organizations, and as serious as anything to American families, they're sending explosive devices into Iraq that are killing American soldiers.”

And of course, McCain is completely correct, on all of the above. A top-priority of the Iranian government is the swift annihilation of Israel, a sentiment purportedly shared by much of their population. McCain recognizes that Israel is America’s best shot at eliminating Islamic fundamentalism at the source of the problem, before it fully reaches the United States. And Israel simultaneously upholds democratic ideals in a predominantly theocratic Middle East, promoting American interests abroad just by implementing democracy. Ensuring mutually-beneficial cooperation between the two nations is the logical route to take. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out, just a simple understanding of the facts, something disturbingly lacked by many--maybe even most--Americans.

While McCain prides himself on being an individual in all respects, he’s emblematic of a shrinking cohort of moderates in Congress, who place political points below righteousness. Chuck Schumer is an example from one of the political spectrum, who remains justifiably committed to Israel, breaking from the typical Democrat ideology on Israel. But unfortunately, other political figures have in recent years discounted the truth on a host of issues, including Israel, fully undoing the ethical work of senators and congressman like McCain and Schumer.

McCain’s outlook on politics is exactly what the political world is currently lacking, making it all the more unfortunate that his health issues, battles with brain cancer among other issues, have kept him from promoting bipartisanship for the past months. As much as the world has been reluctant to say it over the past few days and as much as it pains me to acknowledge it, John McCain is dying, and it seems the pursuit of truth may die with him, for if the majority of politicians nowadays even remotely worked the way McCain operates, support for Israel would be indisputable, irrefutable and certainly, common ground across the aisle.

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Lies, damned lies and biased surveys written to make the Iran deal sound wonderful (@CNN and @Politico)

CNN published a poll asking Americans if the US should withdraw from the Iran deal.

And the question was designed to get the answers they wanted.

The question was:

As you may know, the United States and five other countries entered an agreement with Iran aimed at preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Do you think the U.S. should or should not withdraw from that agreement?

Pollsters know that most people answering a poll know little or nothing about the topic, so they will include an explanation of what they are asking. That's how they can get the answers they want.

The explanation is "the United States and five other countries entered an agreement with Iran aimed at preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons." If that is the only thing in your mind, why wouldn't you support it?

A similar poll, widely reported, from Politico has the exact same methodological error, and a similar result (56-26.) The question there was:

As you may know, the United States and other countries made a deal in 2015 to lift economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for Iran agreeing not to manufacture nuclear weapons. This agreement is sometimes referred to as the Iran nuclear deal. Knowing this, do you support or
oppose this agreement?

Again, no reason given to oppose something that sounds so great on paper, and critics have no say in the wording of the poll.

A fair question would have either been "Do you think the US should or should not withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal" without any explanation whatsoever, to reveal that most people really don't know one way or another - or it should have added a single sentence: "Critics say that the deal only delays Iran's ability to build a nuclear bomb by a few years and it should be renegotiated."

The results from that poll would be radically different. But CNN and Politico doesn't want people to answer that question.

I believe that the ubiquitous wording that surveys use of "As you may know..." discourages people from answering honestly that they don't know about the topic, and it prompts them subconsciously to make a guess that would make them appear to be better informed than they are. Only people who are intimately aware of the details and who oppose the deal are going to say they are against it; the "don't knows" are prodded to lean towards support by the very wording.

These questions show that polls are now used not to inform, but to influence. It is a scandal that no one wants to talk about. And the media loves to report on polls that fit their biases.

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

As everyone knows, US President Donald Trump has dumped the so-called “Iran deal” (JCPOA), and re-imposed strict economic sanctions on the Iranian regime.

I agree with PM Netanyahu that not only did the deal not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, it “[paved] Iran’s path to an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs.”

The deal limited the enrichment of uranium, at least at the sites that were known to the IAEA. It mandated the removal of some centrifuges from Iran’s facilities and the sealing of a nuclear reactor that could have produced Plutonium. But it did not prevent the regime from developing advanced centrifuges that will allow it to produce fissionable material much faster once we reach the deal’s “sunset” dates. It did not prevent it from continuing its development of nuclear warheads at military sites that are off-limits to IAEA inspectors. It did not prevent it from developing the missiles that will carry those warheads.

It did provide a diplomatic shield that protected the Iranian program from attack by Israel, which quite reasonably sees herself as a target – the regime itself told us so, more than once. It did offer sanctions relief that provided large amounts of money, which were used to finance the war in Syria, terrorism against Israel, and probably secret nuclear-related work. It also weakened existing UN resolutions against missile development.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, anything but a Trump supporter, said the deal “isn’t really an arms-control agreement; it’s just cover for American inaction, and for President Obama’s acute desire to leave the Middle East.” One might add that the Europeans also had a strong desire to see sanctions lifted so that they could jump into the Iranian market with both feet.

The deal, which wasn’t actually signed by either the US or the Iranian regime, was implemented by the Obama Administration against the wishes of the majority in Congress and the majority of the American people, as Bret Stephens, another non-Trump-supporter, notes. But it was ratified by the UN Security Council, which is how previous Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran not undertake missile development were weakened into one that merely called upon Iran to do so.

Supporters of continuing the deal argue that while it isn’t perfect, it at least slows Iran’s progress to an arsenal of deliverable nuclear weapons. They also suggest that ending the deal will cause Iran to be more aggressive in its nuclear program, ultimately leading to war (either with the US, Israel or both).

In response, we need to consider the objectives of the Iranian regime in the region and in the world. If we take it at its word and by its actions, the revolutionary regime has truly grandiose goals: establishing a Shiite caliphate in the Middle East, removing all US influence from the region, ending America’s world leadership, and destroying Israel – which it sees as both an agent of the US and an unacceptable Jewish presence in what should be an all-Muslim region.

The JCPOA assisted Iran in accomplishing these goals. Although it may have slowed her nuclear program somewhat, it allowed the regime to develop components of nuclear weapons without interference, so that when it is ready it can quickly “break out” before its opponents are able to confront it. In the long term, it guaranteed stability for Iran to carry out her plans.

It goes without saying that Israel and the Sunni Arab powers in the Middle East will not permit this to happen, and that if Iran continues its march toward its goals, regional war is unavoidable. What will happen with the US is less predictable, because it will depend on whether the US returns to appeasing the regime – that is, feeding the crocodile in order to be eaten last, as Churchill said – or continues Trump’s policy of starving it. Unlike the far-away USA, Iran’s regional neighbors don’t have the luxury of embracing appeasement. They will always be the ones it eats first.

I’ve argued that war between Iran and Israel is unlikely in the short term due to Israel’s deterrent strength, and the very astute David P. Goldman agrees with me. The long-term picture is cloudier, but it’s likely that continuing the JCPOA would have resulted in a gradually stronger and more militarily capable Iran that would ultimately be ready to challenge Israel. Its cancellation will weaken Iran economically and strategically, and disrupt her plan to make war on her own terms and at a time of her choosing.

Whether it will be enough to prevent war depends on the actions taken by all the anti-Iranian players: the US, Israel, and the Sunni Arabs. The pressure on Iran must be increased, and internal regime opponents strengthened. Countries like India and China that buy a lot of oil from Iran should be encouraged to find alternative sources. Russia’s anti-Western mischief will continue to be a problem, as well as European greed and shortsightedness. Finally, for Israel there is nothing more important than to continue to build up her deterrent capabilities – and also to continue to demonstrate them as aggressively as possible to Iran.

Iran is truly a rogue state, but in conventional military terms it is a relatively weak one. Today it can be deterred, and perhaps at some point its own people will be able to overthrow the regime. But thanks to Obama’s policy of feeding the Iranian crocodile, it has grown stronger and more dangerous in recent years.

Trump’s decision to end the policy of appeasement is the right one. This is a beast we cannot afford to feed.

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05/10 Links Pt1: IDF Strikes Iranian Targets in Syria; Liberman: If it rains in Israel, it will pour in Iran; How Trump took away Iran’s “war” card; Give Netanyahu credit

From Ian:

IDF Strikes Iranian Targets in Syria

Iran is actively conducting its military activities beyond its borders, which not only is a threat to Israel, but to the Middle East as a whole. On Wednesday, May 9, 2018, the Quds force, a special force wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, stationed in Syria, shot 20 rockets towards IDF posts in the Golan Heights. The IDF intercepted four of the rockets, preventing casualties and damage. This is the first time that Iranian forces have directly fired at Israeli troops.

In response, IDF fighter jets struck dozens of military targets in Syria that belonged to Iran’s Quds force. The IDF’s wide-scale attack included Iranian intelligence sites, the Quds force logistics headquarters, an Iranian military compound in Syria, observation and military posts, et cetera. In spite of a warning from Israel, Syrian aerial defense forces fired towards the IAF aircraft as they conducted the strikes. In response, the IAF targeted several aerial interception systems (SA5, SA2, SA22, SA17) which belong to the Syrian Armed Forces. All of the IDF’s fighter jets returned to their bases safely.

This is the second time this year that Iran has used its military facilities in Syria to attack Israel. In February 2018, the Quds force launched a UAV from Syria, which violated Israeli airspace and threatened Israeli security.

Iran’s aggression is further proof of the Iranian regime’s intentions and the threat it poses to Israel and regional stability. Iran continues to use Syria as its personal military outpost from which it can attack the State of Israel and its civilians, while the Syrian regime allows it to happen.

Overnight clashes show Shiite ‘monster’ in Syria is limited, for now

The broadly unsuccessful Iranian military response overnight Wednesday to alleged Israeli attacks on Iranian-affiliated targets in Syria in recent weeks — themselves a response to Iran’s deepening military presence in Syria, and to its launch of an attack drone into Israel in February — reveals a lot about the present Iranian deployment in Syria.

Despite the impression one might get from some Israeli reports that a real monster in Syria is threatening the very existence of the Jewish state, it emerged that pro-Iranian Shiite forces in Syria are, at this stage, limited in their capacity to attack Israel.

During Iran’s overnight revenge operation, 20 rockets were fired at Israel, of which 16 landed in Syrian territory and the other four were knocked out of the sky by Israeli missile defense systems.

It’s doubtful that this was what the Iranians or the ayatollahs had in mind when they authorized Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guards’s Quds Force, to respond to what foreign sources have called recent Israeli attacks on Iranian-affiliated targets in Syria.

Not only did the operation not achieve anything — there was no damage and there were no injuries on the Israeli side — it gave Israel the pretext for a wide-ranging attack on Iranian targets inside Syria.

According to Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, nearly the entire Iranian military infrastructure was attacked overnight. The Israeli army said this infrastructure sustained heavy damage.

What worries Israel, though, is not the attacks launched from Syria but the threat of a broader military confrontation with the much more important Iranian proxy in the region — Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Up until now, the Lebanese Shiite terror organization has avoided being drawn into war with Israel. It is keeping its troops on alert but has not ordered them into action.

As long as Hezbollah in Lebanon remains out of the picture, the exchange of blows in Syria can continue without escalating into war.

Liberman: Israel destroyed ‘nearly all’ Iranian military sites in Syria

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said Thursday morning that the IDF had destroyed “nearly all” of Iran’s military infrastructure sites in Syria overnight in response to a rocket barrage on Israel’s north, and warned Tehran that attacks on Israeli territory will be met with “the strongest possible force.”

In his first public comments following the strikes on dozens of targets that the IDF said were affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ al-Quds Force, Liberman said that Israel has no interest in escalating tensions but will not accept any provocation against it.

“If we get rain, you will get a flood,” he warned Iran, speaking at an annual Herzliya Conference. “We will not let Iran use Syria as a base to attack us from.”

“The Iranians tried to attack the sovereign territory of Israel,” Liberman said. “Not one Iranian rocket landed in the State of Israel. Nobody was hurt. Nothing was damaged. And we’re to be thankful for that. We damaged nearly all of the Iranian infrastructure in Syria.”

But he added, “It’s not a stunning victory. Everything’s limited at the moment to a confrontation between us and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria. Everyone wants to limit this confrontation and keep it in this form.”

Liberman stressed that Israel had no interested in an escalation but that Iranian provocation met with force.

Photos of Israel at 70 celebrations in Cairo

Arab media are distraught as they are showing photos from the Ritz Carlton Cairo Tuesday night, where the Israeli embassy held a celebration for Israel's Independence Day, including Egyptian dignitaries.

The reports emphasize that the hotel is on "Tahrir Square" which adds to the horror.

Lots of anguished comments on Facebook from Egyptians who are horrified at the event and the guests. Apparently some are recognizing some Turkish diplomats.

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It all started when an Arutz-7 reporter went to Tunisia to cover the annual Jewish pilgrimage to the synagogue in Djerba, an event that attracted many rabbis from Europe and Israel.

Arutz-7 got a video statement from the Grand Mufti of Tunisia, Othamane Battikh:

Now Tunisian Islamists are upset that the Mufti spoke to Israeli TV, and call for him to be removed from office.

The opposition Popular Popular Party demanded in a statement published Wednesday that the Mufti should be removed because of his statement which was "a deviation from the deep conscience of the Tunisian people and a betrayal of the blood of its martyrs."

The Mufti, under fire, now claims, implausibly, that the Arutz-7 reporter pretended to be an Arab reporter!
He told the Akher Khabar newspaper that he had been duped by the Israeli journalist who interviewed him, who pretended to be a Palestinian, having worked as a press secretary to Yasser Arafat.

His statement to the camera obviously doesn't bear that out; it is obvious he is speaking to a Jewish audience. But he knows more than most how Arab Islamists could act.

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There is a lot of contradictory information as to what happened overnight in the Golan and in Syria.

At first, Israeli media reported that Iranian forces in Syria shot some 20 missiles towards Israeli military sites, and Iron Dome intercepted "some" of them. The initial announcement from the IDF said there was "limited" damage to Israeli military bases.

Then, this morning Israeli's Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said, “Not one Iranian rocket landed in the State of Israel. Nobody was hurt. Nothing was damaged. And we’re to be thankful for that. We damaged nearly all of the Iranian infrastructure in Syria.” The IDF confirmed that account.

The IDF spokesperson now says that four missiles were intercepted by Iron Dome and the rest of the 20 rockets fell in Syrian territory.

The disconnect between the two statements is concerning. It is possible that some of the Iron Dome shrapnel fell on Israeli territory which prompted the initial assessment, or that the original announcement was meant to play it safe in case there was one missile that made it through that hadn't been noticed yet, but it would be nice to clear that up.

The IDF also says that it struck dozens of Iranian military sites in Syria.

Pro-Assad media, not surprisingly, paints a different picture, but the interesting angle is that it quotes Russian defense sources as well.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the Syrian side shot "dozens" of missiles at Israel. Syrian army sources claimed that Israel fired first, and that they shot 50 missiles in retaliation. No Arab source is claiming that Iran was involved.

Al Medayeen, a pro-Assad news source, claims that Syria targeted ten Israeli military positions, including "a military reconnaissance centre, a position for border security, a military centre for electronic jamming, a military centre for spying on wireless and wired networks, a communication station, an observatory for precision weapons, a gunships heliport, the headquarters of the regional military command of brigade-810, the command centre of the military battalion in Hermon, and the winter headquarters of the special snow unit."

Al Medayeen also quotes Russian defense officials as saying that 28 F-15 and F-16 Israeli aircraft engaged in raids on Syrian territory and fired 60 missiles. More than half of the missiles were intercepted by Syrian air defense. The Russian source admits that Israel targeted air defense systems as well as Iranian positions in Syria.

Syrian state news agency SANA admits that several military sites in Syria including a radar facility, air defense positions and an ammunition depot were destroyed by the Israeli raids.

Lebanese media says that one or two missiles landed in Lebanese territory, causing little damage. It did not say what side these missiles were shot from.

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05/09 Links Pt2: Real anti-Semitism on Campus; The Presbyterian Church’s demonisation of Israel; One man’s race to bring the forgotten music of the Holocaust to life

From Ian:

Jonathan Marks: Real anti-Semitism on Campus

At Ithaca College, of six “bias-related incidents” reported in 2017-18, three were “cases of aggravated harassment involving swastikas.” One Jewish student there reported that a mezuzah “was knocked off of his door and damaged.” At Western Washington University’s library, seven Jewish Studies books were defaced with anti-Semitic slurs or destroyed, and someone drew a swastika on “a poster outside a faculty member’s office.” The University of Miami is investigating multiple anti-Semitic incidents, including one in which someone drew a “large swastika” on a whiteboard hanging on a Jewish student’s door. At Knox College, a professor of African Studies tweeted, among other things, that Jews are “pulling the strings for profit.” A faculty member involved in discussing the incident “found an anti-Semitic image had been slid under her office door.”

That’s a sampling of news stories appearing in the month of April.” This month, we learned of an incident at Towson University in which members of a Jewish fraternity “were walking near the campus when . . . two assailants began shouting “F*** the Jews” and called them by an ethnic slur.” The “assailants then began punching one of the fraternity members in the face.” The victims believe their assailants were fellow students. Last week, at UC-Irvine, amid an anti-Israel protest, a protester called a pro-Israel advocate a “Christ killer.”

The Anti-Defamation League has reported that anti-Semitic incidents were up 89 percent in 2017. There is no reason to think that 2018 will be a better year.

As the AMCHA Initiative’s useful but depressing “swastika tracker” indicates, incidents of anti-Semitism on campus are quite often perpetrated by people who are or are pretending to be neo-Nazis or white nationalists. According to the construct invented by some on right to justify these acts of subterfuge, no treatment is too harsh for the globalists who are betraying our country. A mirror image of this paradigm prevails in certain circles on the left. For supporters of the Jewish state, Jews who refuse to denounce the Jewish state, or sometimes just for Jews who are not card-carrying members of the anti-Israel movement, no treatment can be too harsh. After all, they are responsible for all that is wrong with America.

Left-wing anti-Semitism and right-wing anti-Semitism, then, need to be addressed, and no one who claims to care about anti-Semitism can address just one or the other. It must be said, however, that when it comes to campus anti-Semitism, our failure occurs almost wholly with respect to the left. To be sure, institutions often do quite well when anti-Semitism is absolutely blatant. On the other hand, the most thinly veiled anti-Semitism —for example the blood libel perpetrated by Jasbir Puar of Rutgers University—is not only tolerated but celebrated and rewarded. Academics are much more comfortable denouncing right-wing anti-Semitism, which is almost entirely an off-campus phenomenon, than left-wing anti-Semitism, which has a real, albeit small, foothold at our colleges and universities.

Cary Nelson: The Presbyterian Church’s demonisation of Israel

The Presbyterian Church (USA) has published an ideological and political manual for anti-Israel organising ahead of its bi-annual gathering in June. Reviewing its content, Cary Nelson argues that the publisher’s claim to have produced ‘a study guide’ cannot be accepted. Rather, the language of ‘intersectionality’ is misused in a Church-sponsored demonisation of the Jewish state that is propelled by insinuation more than responsible argument. The controversial academic Steven Salaita argues that the phrase ‘Israeli hummus’ is not just an act of ‘cultural appropriation’ but ‘a promise of genocide’. Sarah Schulman slams Israel’s gay-friendly legal and cultural environment as ‘pink-washing’. Reconciliation and dialogue initiatives are trashed as ‘normalisation’. Israel is accused of ‘genocide’ and the conflict is said to have ‘parallels to the history of slavery in the United States’. The result is a glossy Church-sponsored prospectus for the abolition of the Jewish state that should deeply concern Presbyterians in America.

Toward the end of the Presbyterian anti-Zionist book, Why Palestine Matters: The Struggle to End Colonialism, a sequel to Zionism Unsettled issued in April 2018, just barely in time for PC(USA)’s bi-annual meeting in June, there is a decidedly improbable effort to extend the politics of intersectionality to include a link between Gaza and Puerto Rico. The second item in ‘Parallels with Puerto Rico’ is ‘Letter from Gaza: “We Are All Puerto Ricans,”’ which opens by declaring ‘I know what it’s like to struggle with shortages of vital supplies such as electricity, gas, cash, and safe water’ (82).

Why Palestine Matters is a 110-page oversized book consisting of 39 essays, over 30 breakout supplements, and a large number of illustrations with full paragraph captions. It includes three very useful colour maps, one each of Gaza, West Bank settlements, and West Bank Areas A, B, and C. The editors make an effort to describe it as the third ‘study guide’ issued by IPMN, the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (US), but it is so fiercely one-sided that it really serves exclusively as an ideological and political manual for anti-Israel organising. The volume breaks with IPMN’s history by explicitly aligning itself with the BDS movement and doing so at length. Many of the essays are new, but a few are excerpts from earlier publications. In the latter category are Steven Salaita’s unusually intense ‘Cultural Appropriation or Theft?’ which warns us that the phrase ‘Israeli hummus’ is a radical form of cultural appropriation, amounting to ‘a project of erasure, a portent of nonexistence, a promise of genocide’ (61) and Sarah Schulman’s ‘Rebranding with Sex and Sexuality,’ which reprises her 2011 brief against ‘pinkwashing,’ the purported effort to distract attention from the military occupation of the West Bank by highlighting Israel’s gay-friendly legal and cultural environment.

David Collier: Banksy and the alien god killers that occupy Bethlehem

The Banksy Hotel and antisemitic imagery

Throughout the museum, there is use of Holocaust imagery, part of an ongoing strategy of equating the results of the 1947/48 civil conflict with the Holocaust. This one plays on both Holocaust and the idea that the value of life is not equal, with one Israeli tooth carrying more weight than over 2000 Arab lives.

This one suggests Israelis kill for money. That Arabs die just so Israelis can test weapons and the conflict is only there so that Jewish business can thrive.

Babies, clothing, shoes. Everywhere you look is the image of a brutal Holocaust committed by money grabbing Jews upon a defenceless and helpless population. Devil against the angels.

The next one is classic antisemitic imagery. Jews as god killers. An image of a Christ like figure with a red-dot sight on his forehead.

Endless hate in the Banksy hotel

There are many other similar images that will be uploaded by the groups who were there with me, and the IAM is also producing a video on the trip, but these few images provide a clear taste of the viscous propaganda on display. Our itinerary included various different faces of the conflict, but this was an important one. This is part of what we are up against, raw hatred dressed up as art. There is no middle ground to be found when facing such distortion and those who create it have no interest in building a dialogue. They want Jews to be seen as money grabbing god killers who invaded a foreign land and brutalised the inhabitants.

The Banksy hotel is a disgraceful blot on the landscape and full of antisemitic images. And the truth is that there is far more hate that went into building the exhibits within the hotel, than went into building the defensive wall the Hotel was designed to protest. One was designed to save lives, the other only sets out to demonise a people. Rather than join some of those we met who really want to make peace, Banksy chose to run with the hate.

Hate speech has always been difficult to define. Facebook, caught with its fingers in the cookie jar of our private information, has decided that teaching us what hate speech means is sufficient penance. But penance or contrition isn’t something Mark Zuckerberg understands. Giving us at long last a glimpse into Facebook’s mysterious Community Standards is MZ’s way of saying, “Okay. We stole your information, so here’s what we’ll give you.”

As if this is a business exchange.

Which it most assuredly is not.

For years, private individuals have reported anti-Israel Facebook pages that threaten Jews with violence and death, and defame the Jewish people in coarse and disgusting ways. The response from Facebook support has always been: we reviewed your report and determined that this page/content does not violate our community standards.

But we were never told what those standards were.

As far as we were concerned, a page called Death to Israel, for instance, violates ALL standards of permitted speech and human decency, leading us to believe that Facebook’s Community Standards were no standards at all.

Even worse, when trolls would report pro-Israel advocacy pages, Facebook would accede to demands to censor the pages or close them down. It seems that Facebook had initiated a concerted effort to bolster anti-Israel voices while squelching those of the pro-Israel community. This repugnant policy smelled all the worse for the fact that Zuckerberg is Jewish, if in name, only.

After a while, we discovered a go-around: that if enough people reported those awful antisemitic hate pages, Facebook would usually take them down. But then they’d go right back up, a few days or weeks later. They thought that once we won, we’d stop paying attention and they could allow those pages to tiptoe right back in.

It is a disgusting, disheartening experience that mirrors the process by which trolls are able to keep pro-Israel advocates endlessly in jail.

Now Zuckerberg is at long last being called on the carpet to come clean. In a statement he issued prior to his testimony before the Senate Judicial Committee, the guy admitted he was only reassessing Facebook’s hate speech policies because the media was on him like white on rice.

“… it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake.”

In other words, it was a mistake only because he got CAUGHT.

One result of this was this release explaining, at long last, Facebook’s Community Standards. Here’s an excerpt from the section that defines hate speech:

We define hate speech as a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disability or disease. We also provide some protections for immigration status. We define attack as violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation. We separate attacks into three tiers of severity, as described below.

Sometimes people share content containing someone else’s hate speech for the purpose of raising awareness or educating others. Similarly, in some cases, words or terms that might otherwise violate our standards are used self-referentially or in an empowering way. When this is the case, we allow the content, but we expect people to clearly indicate their intent, which helps us better understand why they shared it. Where the intention is unclear, we may remove the content.

We allow humor and social commentary related to these topics. In addition, we believe that people are more responsible when they share this kind of commentary using their authentic identity.

While some welcomed this attempt to finally lay out for us what Facebook deems hate speech, this document did not at all explain why a page called Death to Israel is allowed to stand, while a page that expresses love for Israel, is not, the minute a troll reports it.

I tend to be courteous on public fora. I avoid coarse language, bias, and bigotry. To the best of my ability, I don’t use insulting language. This approach has served me well. I’ve been in Facebook jail exactly once, and that was years ago, for a comment I shouldn’t have made, calling out a woman for claiming to be a Jew when she had privately admitted to me she was not. I embarrassed her. And I got the equivalent of a Facebook slap on the hand when the woman reported my comment.

Imagine my surprise then, when one week ago, out of the blue, I go to Facebook and confronting me is this text:

This post goes against our community standards.

Only you can see this post because it goes against our standards on hate speech.

Under this was a comment I only vaguely remembered from some years ago. It was a reply on a thread and it read:

Seeing things through rose-colored glasses is also discrimination-an idea you’ve come to with no proof-a generalization about an entire people. You actually don’t know that most Arabs are not terrorists and neither do I. I don’t make generalizations one way or the other. Because it is wrong to do so when you don’t know it for a fact. It is misleading.

I am not frightened of Arabs because I see all of them as terrorists. I am not discriminating against them. I am frightened of Arabs because of Arab terror. It is prudent to be cautious, realistic, considering our reality.

At the bottom of the comment was a button reading: “continue.”

When I went to the next page, there was an explanation that I probably didn’t know enough about Facebook Community standards to realize that this was hate speech, so they were hiding the post, as a kind of first warning. Only I would be able to see it. That is if I wanted to. If I wanted to dig through years and years of hundreds of thousands of comments to find it.

Not that anyone else would be digging through hundreds of thousands of comments to find it either. Although clearly someone in a cubicle at Facebook is busily perusing my comment history, scouring it for something, anything, that would offend the unfathomable Facebook Community Standards.

I would like to say that this little lesson from Mark Z. illuminated everything I needed to know about hate speech. I’d like to say that I learned something about being polite on a public forum, about being a kind, moral, and loving person. But reviewing the comment deemed by the Facebook powers that be as “hate speech,” I’m left more confused and upset than ever.

What I wrote was not hate speech. It was the opposite of hate speech.

I don’t hate Arabs. I don’t love Arabs. I am cordial to Arabs in stores and in public places and count some Arabs among my friends. But I also fear Arabs.

Which is not the same as hate.

The other night, my husband and I drove to my son’s army base in an out of the way settlement, which had years ago suffered a brutal infiltration and terror attack. We didn’t know our way around and it was night. We waited until a Jewish resident was traveling the last several miles up the lonely highway to the settlement and tagged along behind.

At one point, two cars with PA licenses passed us, one on the right and on the left. My husband thought they were about to do a pincer movement to create a barrier on the road that would trap us, so they could attack us and the Jewish family car ahead of us. It was just a split second and then the Arabs in those cars appeared to reconsider and drove on, leaving us unscathed.

Did we imagine it? I honestly do not know. What I do know: we had to be ready. Things like this can and do happen in Israel. And it isn’t Jewish Israelis that do these things, but Arabs. Arabs like the men in these two cars. In the dark, we had very little information to go on.

In the back of our minds, we must always be cautious in our dealings with Arabs we don’t know. It’s not about hate. It’s because of actual things a significant number of Arabs have done to Jews in Israel.

I try to be fair. I try to be open in my dealings with all people, no matter their ethnic identity or color. I don’t hate any people as a group with the exception, for instance, of known terrorists. My fear on that road was a reasonable fear and it was not even a little bit powered by hatred.

With the lecture it gave me on the comment it hid, Facebook taught me exactly nothing about hate speech. What it did teach me is that Facebook is running around in circles to continue in its Big Brother ways—making arbitrary and thoughtless rulings on the limits of free speech.

What a shame to waste all that power and influence when Facebook arguably could have been a force for good.

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Netanyahu Found To Be Least-Corrupt Current Prime Minister Of Israel (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Credit: Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, via Wikimedia Commons

Jerusalem, May 9 - Upheaval gripped the pundit class and political realm in Israel today following the release of a comprehensive academic study that found Binyamin Netanyahu the least corrupt prime minister of Israel in office right now.

A team of researchers from the Political Science department at the Hebrew University issued its findings today after examining numerous criteria to rank heads of government in terms of public trust and freedom from influences such as blackmail, cronyism, bribery, and other symptoms of corruption, determining that of all prime ministers of Israel serving at the moment, Netanyahu ranks highest in those categories.

Members and supporters of the prime minister's ruling Likud Party took the findings as vindication for the embattled premier, while few Opposition figures and critics within right-wing circles voiced willingness to go on record regarding this development. Accusations of corruption, leading to police investigations and talk of prosecution, have dogged Netanyahu for years, to the point that his rivals invoke them almost daily to assert his alleged unfitness for office. Now that Netanyahu has been declared scientifically the least corrupt figure occupying the post of prime minister since 2015, the power of those accusations is expected to wane.

"We've been saying for some time that this is all a witch hunt," declared a gratified Gilad Erdan, Minister of Internal Security and a longtime Netanyahu loyalist. "Now we have the statistical and mathematical proof. I've said before and I'll keep saying that Bibi's enemies will resort to whatever means possible to unseat the man they could not defeat by democratic means, and that is a major problem we need to address."

"Bibi is officially the least corrupt prime minister Israel has had in at least nine years," stated Minister of Culture Miri Regev. "Let that sink in. Nobody said that even about Ben-Gurion, let alone convicted criminals such as Olmert. I hope this puts to rest all the sordid efforts to unseat an elected prime minister through methods that do not involve the ballot box, but given our experience with the political opposition, that may be too much to hope for."

The few Opposition figures who agreed to speak on the matter include Zionist Union alliance head and Hatnua Party leader Tzipi Livni. "It means nothing," she insisted in a telephone interview. "When Bibi can claim victory in the mock-elections held at the Bleich high school in Tel Aviv, then maybe he can claim some legitimacy. That says it all."

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05/09 Links Pt1: Donald Trump Ends the Obama Mirage; Sohrab Amari: Obama Killed His Own Iran Deal; Palestinians announce embassy move date to be ‘day of rage’

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: A Courageous Trump Call on a Lousy Iran Deal

Apologists also claim that, with Trump’s decision, Tehran will simply restart its enrichment activities on an industrial scale. Maybe it will, forcing a crisis that could end with U.S. or Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. But that would be stupid, something the regime emphatically isn’t. More likely, it will take symbolic steps to restart enrichment, thereby implying a threat without making good on it. What the regime wants is a renegotiation, not a reckoning.

Why? Even with the sanctions relief, the Iranian economy hangs by a thread: The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported “hundreds of recent outbreaks of labor unrest in Iran, an indication of deepening discord over the nation’s economic troubles.” This week, the rial hit a record low of 67,800 to the dollar; one member of the Iranian Parliament estimated $30 billion of capital outflows in recent months. That’s real money for a country whose gross domestic product barely matches that of Boston.

The regime might calculate that a strategy of confrontation with the West could whip up useful nationalist fervors. But it would have to tread carefully: Ordinary Iranians are already furious that their government has squandered the proceeds of the nuclear deal on propping up the Assad regime. The conditions that led to the so-called Green movement of 2009 are there once again. Nor will it help Iran if it tries to start a war with Israel and comes out badly bloodied.

All this means the administration is in a strong position to negotiate a viable deal. But it missed an opportunity last month when it failed to deliver a crippling blow to Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s puppet in Syria, for his use of chemical weapons. Trump’s appeals in his speech to the Iranian people also sounded hollow from a president who isn’t exactly a tribune of liberalism and has disdained human rights as a tool of U.S. diplomacy. And the U.S. will need to mend fences with its European partners to pursue a coordinated diplomatic approach.

The goal is to put Iran’s rulers to a fundamental choice. They can opt to have a functioning economy, free of sanctions and open to investment, at the price of permanently, verifiably and irreversibly forgoing a nuclear option and abandoning their support for terrorists. Or they can pursue their nuclear ambitions at the cost of economic ruin and possible war. But they are no longer entitled to Barack Obama’s sweetheart deal of getting sanctions lifted first, retaining their nuclear options for later, and sponsoring terrorism throughout.

Trump’s courageous decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal will clarify the stakes for Tehran. Now we’ll see whether the administration is capable of following through.

John Podhoretz: Trump and America’s Centripetal Foreign Policy

With some exceptions (like the elder Bush’s administration in relation to Israel), every element on this list (if in some cases you substitute the Soviet Union for Russia pre-1991 and Libya for Islamist terror) was to some degree at play in American foreign policy from 1981 until 2008. Such has been the powerful logical flow of American foreign policy since the election of Ronald Reagan. This consensus ebbed and flowed depending on the circumstance, of course, and the parallels are not perfect. What Trump has done, and I don’t think strategically or with any grand design, is to place far greater stock in both the unilateralist and the realpolitik aspects of American foreign policy than his predecessors in the Reagan and post-Reagan era. He views enduring alliances more as constraints than grand benefits, which is perhaps the primary way in which he differs from the consensus. But his attacks on those alliances have basically ceased, which is itself a striking change from candidate Trump’s approach.

And what of 2008 to 2016? Barack Obama, schooled in 1970s liberal foreign-policy shibboleths, came at this consensus and flipped it—not entirely on its head, more like about 140 degrees. We went at Israel, we went light on Russia, we sought a concord with Iran, and Obama was celebrated for his acceptance of the monsters of Havana. Most notably, he accepted the left-liberal critique of postwar American foreign policy’s supposedly bad actions in the world and sought to apologize or make implicit amends for them. Viewed in this light, it’s the Obama years that represent the jarring discontinuity from the consensus path and not the election of the X-factor Trump.

We’ll have to see how this North Korea business goes to better understand Trump. (And certainly Trump’s trade practices mark him as very different, though there’s an argument that’s more an economic than a foreign policy.) There’s no reason to believe any of this is conscious or deliberate or designed. There is no Trump Doctrine. But there might be one yet, and it might be more familiar than we had any right to expect.

Sohrab Amari: Obama Killed His Own Iran Deal

He tried to circumvent the Israelis by keeping them in the dark about secret negotiations with the Islamic Republic. For Obama, Arab fears of Iranian expansionism were a tertiary concern, and he was surprised when the most important Sunni powers didn’t show up for a 2015 summit that was supposed to sell them on the deal. He likewise pooh-poohed Iran’s eliminationist anti-Israel rhetoric (“at the margins, where the costs are low, they may pursue policies based on [Jew] hatred as opposed to self-interest,” he told The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg). His aides described a sitting Israeli prime minister as a “chickens—t” (on background, naturally).

He lectured and condescended, and then lectured some more.

On the home front, meanwhile, Obama relied on his signature “pen and phone” methods to ram the deal through. Rather than welcome GOP hawks as good-faith actors seeking to strengthen his hand against an adversary, he treated Republicans as the adversary. He thought his diplomacy pitted him and reasonable Iranians like Javad Zarif against “hard-liners” in Washington and Tehran.

Meanwhile, Obama’s Ben Rhodes-operated media echo chamber swarmed and shouted down journalists and experts who raised concerns about the terms of the accord, not least the fact that it permitted the Iranians to inspect their own military sites and left unaddressed the question of ballistic missiles. The Obama administration never satisfactorily answered critics’ questions about Iran’s refusal to come clean about its prior weaponization activity—the glaring flaw in the deal’s architecture that contributed the most to its undoing this week.

And here we are. The deal’s demise, then, was written into it by its primary author.

Some of the "anti-Zionist" tweets uncovered by ADL study

The ADL released a report showing that over 4.2 million antisemitic tweets were posted last year.

The report was careful not to include tweets that were "only" anti-Zionist, but some of those were so obviously using the word "Zionist" to represent Jew that they had to count them.

Some examples:

Bring these tweets to a Jewish Voice for Peace meeting or to Linda Sarsour and ask if they are antisemitic or not.

You can learn a lot by how they answer.

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The biggest Human Rights Watch lie yet?

From CBS News:

Israel has given a Human Rights Watch director two weeks to leave the country, accusing him of promoting a boycott, in a move the rights group said sought to muzzle criticism. The interior ministry said Tuesday it had terminated the residency permit of HRW's Israel and Palestine director Omar Shakir, a U.S. citizen, over accusations that he supported a boycott of Israel.

"Following the recommendations of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, containing information that Shakir has been a BDS activist for years supporting the boycott of Israel in an active way, the ministry has decided to terminate (his) residence permit," the interior ministry said in a statement.

"This is not about Shakir, but rather about muzzling Human Rights Watch and shutting down criticism of Israel's rights record," HRW said in a statement.

"Neither Human Rights Watch nor its representative, Shakir, promotes boycotts of Israel."

The media is quick to note that HRW has written critical reports of Israel - a fact meant to support the idea that Israel is muzzling critics.

Yet the articles don't bother to check the simple fact that Shakir indeed has explicitly promoted boycotts of Israel.

And HRW is knowingly lying.

These tweets were before Shakir re-joined HRW (he had worked there in 2013 and then returned in October 2016.) But they show that he is an enthusiastic BDS supporter. Much more from an article by Petra Marquardt-Bigman here.

As far as HRW's assertion that it doesn't promote BDS itself, what about this article in Haaretz by Kathleen Peratis, co-chair of the Middle East North Africa Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch and an emerita member of its board of trustees?

This is a full throated and explicit call for support for BDS and giving advice to the movement on tactics.

HRW lies quite a bit. This may be the biggest lie yet.

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