Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, January 04, 2019

Rashida Tlaib Swears In on Thomas Jefferson's Koran -- But Why Did He Have One? (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

This week, Rashida Tlaib will be one of our first 2 Muslim congresswomen. Ilhan Omar is the other. Tlaib's swearing-in will be noteworthy because she will be sworn in using Thomas Jefferson's own copy of the Koran.

Tlaib, of course, will not be the first to use Jefferson's Koran for the swearing-in -- Keith Ellison used it, amidst all kinds of discussion and debate back in 2007. At the time, Ellison said his use of Jefferson's Koran

demonstrates that from the very beginning of our country, we had people who were visionary, who were religiously tolerant, who believed that knowledge and wisdom could be gleaned from any number of sources, including the Koran.

Two volume set of the Koran, translated by George Sale
Snapshot from YouTube video

Yair Rosenberg touches upon the use of Jefferson's Koran, noting the complicated history of Thomas Jefferson’s Koran. The complication is that Jefferson's copy of George Sale's 1734 translation of the Koran has the following introduction:

“Whatever use an impartial version of the Korân may be of in other respects, it is absolutely necessary to undeceive those who, from the ignorant or unfair translations which have appeared, have entertained too favourable an opinion of the original, and also to enable us effectually to expose the imposture.”

According to Rosenberg, this original intent of Sale's edition of the Koran to convert Muslims makes its use "particularly appropriate for this occasion, not in spite of the prejudice within it, but because of it." That is because it serves as a reminder that Islam has been part of American history from its beginning, while on the other hand, Sale’s translation reminds us of the fear and misunderstanding of Muslims.

Fair enough. Islam has been part of US history from the beginning -- but how?
And might there have been any other motivation for Jefferson to own a copy of the Koran?

Joshua E. London, author of the book "Victory in Tripoli: How America's War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation" wrote an article back in 2005 about that part of US history in an article, "America’s Earliest Terrorists Lessons from America’s first war against Islamic terror."

Some background from Mr. London:

The Barbary states, modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, are collectively known to the Arab world as the Maghrib (“Land of Sunset”), denoting Islam’s territorial holdings west of Egypt. With the advance of Mohammed’s armies into the Christian Levant in the seventh century, the Mediterranean was slowly transformed into the backwater frontier of the battles between crescent and cross. Battles raged on both land and sea, and religious piracy flourished.

The Maghrib served as a staging ground for Muslim piracy throughout the Mediterranean, and even parts of the Atlantic. America’s struggle with the terror of Muslim piracy from the Barbary states began soon after the 13 colonies declared their independence from Britain in 1776, and continued for roughly four decades, finally ending in 1815.

In 1786, a meeting was arranged in London for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the Tripolitan ambassador to Britain in order to negotiate a peace treaty protecting the US from the threat of Barbary piracy.

During the meeting

These future United States presidents questioned the ambassador as to why his government was so hostile to the new American republic even though America had done nothing to provoke any such animosity. Ambassador Adja answered them, as they reported to the Continental Congress, “that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

London emphasizes that this all happened long before Western colonialism made its way to Muslim lands -- before oil interests drew the US in and long before the re-establishment of Israel.

There is more to that copy of the Koran than an intent to convert Muslims.

Here is 4-minute video with more background on why Jefferson actually read the Koran:

You cannot argue about the Crusades without noting the conquests of the Islamic empire into Northern Europe. Similarly, you cannot properly appreciate the complexity of the symbolism of Jefferson's Koran without noting the history of the Barbary pirates and their jihad against the United States.

You need the balance from both sides of the story in order to appreciate just how complex and multifaceted a symbol Jefferson's Koran really is.

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The two faces of Fatah

Today, in Hebron, the Fatah party headed by Mahmoud Abbas is holding a conference that is being heavily touted in their social media.

Last night, in Nablus, the same Fatah headed by the same Mahmoud Abbas held a parade and rally to mark the 54th anniversary of their first terror attack.

Here's what that looked like:

The world only gets to see the first face.

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The Egyptian army announced on Thursday that 37 tunnels were destroyed on the border with the Gaza Strip in 2018.

The army began a massive operation to destroy tunnels to Gaza in September 2015. The tunnels had been used not only to smuggle weapons and goods to Gaza but also by jihadists in the Sinai to maintain ties with jihadist groups in Gaza.

Egypt used to blame Hamas for much of the ISIS-related activity in the Sinai but lately it has been trying to work for reconciliation between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, with little luck.

The army statement also said that it caught and arrested nearly 19,000 illegal immigrants from various countries trying to get to Europe via Egypt.

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01/03 Links Pt2: Israeli study: 1/4 of Jews killed in Holocaust murdered in 100 days in 1942; I called out Alice Walker’s Jew-hatred again, and she confirmed it

From Ian:

Israeli study: 1/4 of Jews killed in Holocaust murdered in 100 days in 1942

A new Israeli study claims that almost a quarter of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were killed during 100 days in 1942, making it the period with the highest killing rate in the 20th century.

The killings between August and October 1942 included Jews murdered in the Auschwitz extermination camp, in Ukraine and as part of the infamous Operation Reinhard — an intense mass-slaughter campaign carried out by Nazi Germany between March 1942 and November 1943 in death camps Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor (that operation alone eventually killed some 1.7 million Polish Jews).

Prof. Lewi Stone of Tel Aviv University made the claim in a study published Wednesday in the Science Advances academic journal, based on his analysis of German train deportation data to the three death camps compiled in the 1980s by Holocaust historian Yitzhak Arad.

The kill and death rate during Operation Reinhard has been “poorly quantified in the past,” Stone contended, noting that most records of the killings were destroyed by the Nazis.

The average death rate of almost 15,000 per day during the “extreme phase of hyperintense killing” — which began after the fuhrer Adolf Hitler ordered the operations “sped up” — is almost three times higher than previous estimations.

Stone argued that the murder rate decreased in November 1942 because “there were relatively few Jews left” in the Nazi-controlled areas in and around occupied Poland, “so the rate of the killing likely subsided because of the difficulty of rounding up victims.”

How Hitler’s ‘fake news’ assault on America came perilously close to succeeding

Not only was president Franklin Roosevelt a war monger and closeted Jew, his real name was Rosenfeld. The war in Poland and Russia was entirely the fault of England, and the American press was bent on bringing the country into war against peaceful Germany. These allegations, according to a new book titled “Hitler’s American Friends,” were some of the key German propaganda messages spread by Nazi spies in the US during the late 1930s and into World War II.

Written by Bradley W. Hart and published in October, the book details Hitler’s “classic disinformation campaign” against the US, along with incidents of “outright espionage.”

“Hitler’s American Friends” is divided into chapters named after the Religious Right, the Businessmen, the Bund, and other groups from which the Nazis drew support. While some of the Nazi supporters are well remembered — such as Father Charles Coughlin and his anti-Jewish radio tirades — the affinity of many “ordinary” Americans for Hitler’s New Germany was largely forgotten after the war, according to Hart.

Hitler was aware of support for National Socialism in the US, and this was the basis for his campaign. An alliance with America was unlikely, but German agents could — at the very least — work to confuse the American public about their government, the press, and other democratic institutions. Throughout the 1930s, Nazi spies operated on Capitol Hill, from church pulpits, and in front of massive crowds at rallies.

In 1937, Congress was compelled to enact the Foreign Agents Registration Act because so many Nazi spies had been caught seeking “to subvert the American democratic system,” wrote Hart. The foresight of the act’s authors helped ensure the American public wasn’t fed pro-Nazi “fake news” during the first two years of Germany’s “war of annihilation” in Europe, before Hitler declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor.

“The American political system survived a series of major existential threats at a moment when the fate of the free world hung in the balance,” wrote Hart, a professor at California State University. With what he describes as “courageous” stands taken by American leaders, “Hitler’s friends never stood much of a chance,” he wrote.

Gil Troy: I called out Alice Walker’s Jew-hatred again, and she confirmed it – again

While it’s legitimate to debate universalism versus particularism, equating an oppressed group with its cruelest killers is evil. Can you imagine calling a mean African-American boss an “overseer” or “plantation owner?” What about calling an abusive wife a “rapist?” I had to override my moral auto-correct even to write these terrible thoughts – which shows how Walker’s meanness replicates and infects like thought cancer cells.

Talk about a big lie. The Nazis pursued a race-based, master-race-oriented, strategy of genocide that shrank European Jewry from 9.5 million in 1933 to 3.5 million in 1950. Zionism is a rival nationalist movement to Palestinian nationalism – no Israeli laws define anyone by race, color or blood. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million in 1947 to between six and seven million in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza today. Palestinian propagandists exaggerate those numbers at their convenience, sometimes overcounting how many have lived, sometimes, how many have died.

Walker and Cohen are free to criticize Israel or Zionism. But Nazifying all Zionists – who simply believe that the Jews are a people, with ties to their ancestral homeland, and have rights to establish a state on that homeland – is so ugly, so categorical, it indicts the abuser not the abused – and her academic enabler.

America is afflicted with a president who leads by abuse, polluting our politics by escalating rhetorically and demonizing those who dare disagree with him. It’s pathological: he cannot see how his vicious counterattacks usually prove his rivals’ points. Watching writers and academics mimic such misanthropy is depressing.

Cohen writes: “By reading the poem you can judge for yourself.” Absolutely! HNN’s editor, Rick Shenkman, cleverly entitled this indefensible defense: “In her own words.”

Fortunately, most HNN respondents judged for themselves: “Professor Cohen, you have proven the counterpoint, not your point,” one person wrote. Another added: “Was this SERIOUSLY an attempt to prove she ISN’T a Jew hater?”

Alice Walker damaged Alice Walker’s reputation in her own words, more than any critic could. Like the president she loathes, encased in the oh-you’re-so-wonderful celebrity bubble since the 1970s, she lost touch with reality. Meantime, Cohen seems equally imprisoned: in the loony Left’s Israel-can-do-no-right-but-we-its-critics-can-do-no-wrong bubble.

Know How to Answer #7: "There are more Palestinian refugees than any other refugee group"

Nearly six years ago I gave a lecture at Yeshiva University on how to answer anti-Israel arguments. Since the lecture was over an hour and twenty minutes, I decided to break it up into 20 sections, one each to answer one popular anti-Israel argument.

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

It's my party...

As everyone knows, Israel has way too many political parties. In the last election, ten parties made it past the 3.25% cutoff into the Knesset. In all, twenty-five parties contended for the 120 seats in our parliament, and some of those were alliances of multiple parties pooling their votes to keep from falling below the cutoff (the Joint List, for example, is composed of four primarily Arab parties).

There is a party called Ale Yarok (Green Leaf) which calls for legalization of marijuana and managed to get more than 47,000 votes from members who were not too stoned to find the polls. There is a party called Hapiratim (The Pirates), which belongs to an international movement favoring extremely democratic and open government, and which garnered 895 votes, or 0.02% of the electorate. Arghh! The party with the least amount of votes was the Manhigut Hevratit (Social Leadership) party, which consists of a convicted felon named Yosef Ba-Gad. Apparently he has enough friends and relatives to obtain 223 votes.

In fact, Israel does not need anywhere near this number of parties. I would like to propose a simpler arrangement of only six parties. Here they are, with their platforms:

1.      The Really Religious Party: God is on our side, so give us money, don’t draft us, and keep your immodest women away from us and their pictures off our bus shelters.

2.      The Very Right-Wing Party: Send the Arabs to Jordan and annex the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

3.      The Bibi Party: He knows best. Just be quiet and do what he tells you.

4.      The Cheap Apartments Party: Apartments are too expensive. In fact, everything is too expensive. Make everything cheaper. We are not interested in security and stuff.

5.      The Very Left-Wing Party: End The Occupation. This will bring Peace. The state will use the money it saves on the IDF and Shabak to provide cheap apartments and a free subscription to Ha’aretz for one and all.

6.      The Arab Party: End Zionism. Put us in charge, admit that everything is your fault and apologize for the Nakba and maybe we’ll let you live, which you actually don’t deserve, you dogs.

Right now many of you are saying that it’s impossible to live without Ashkenazic and Sephardic Haredi parties, and indeed without Hassidic and Mitnagdic Ashkenazi Haredi parties. And others are saying that there is a big difference between religious and secular right-wing Zionism, or that we can’t forget the historic difference between Etzel and Lechi, or Mapai and Mapam, Ichud and Meuchad, Betar and B’nai Akiva.

Get a grip.

I am still angry about the Altalena, but I’m willing to be in the same party as anyone who understands the importance of a Jewish state for the Jewish people, who is capable of understanding that the Arabs are not just Jews that go to shul on Fridays, and that someone who wants to kill you or your people is an enemy. My heroes are Jabotinsky and Begin, but I could work with Rabin, despite his big mistake (I’m sure if he were here today, he’d admit that he shouldn’t have allowed himself to be pushed into Oslo).

Right now, in the run-up to the election to be held on April 9, we are watching a depressing spectacle of various public personalities maneuvering here and there in the political spectrum, making and breaking alliances, and positioning themselves to feast on what they think will soon be the political corpse of Binyamin Netanyahu. We have the unpopular Avi Gabbai publically kicking the equally unpopular Tzipi Livni out of his “Zionist Union” movement, which went from 24 Knesset seats in the 2015 election, to 8 or 9 projected seats if the election were today. We have Benny Gantz, whose qualifications are that he was IDF Chief of Staff and is very tall, and who refuses to say anything about his position on any important issue, with 14 projected seats (Netanyahu said, and I agree, that “anyone who won’t say whether he is Left or Right is Left”).

One interesting development is the defection of Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked from the religious Zionist Beit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) party to create a right-wing party that would truly be a home for both religious and secular people, called Haymin Hehadash (The New Right). I think the name is a little cheesy, but ideologically it’s a good fit for me and many others who found the Zionism of Jewish Home appealing, but were uncomfortable with the degree of social conservatism of some of its members. I’m sure also that Bennett and Shaked understand that an explicitly religious party would never have a chance to lead the government.

Today there is already a party that purports to be right-wing and welcoming to both secular and religious Jews, and that is Netanyahu’s Likud. So probably The New Right will draw its votes from the old Jewish Home and from the Likud, and will cooperate in a coalition with them as well. As long as Netanyahu is more popular than Bennett/Shaked, and the Right maintains its present edge over the Center plus the Left, the governing coalition after the next election will end up looking more or less as it does today.

However, if Netanyahu steps down for any reason, the Likud is likely to lose much of its appeal to security-minded voters (and most Israelis fall into this category). The balance of power on the right might then move to the New Right, and one could imagine a government led by Bennett or Shaked. Bibi certainly doesn’t intend to quit now, but we’ll see what impact the possible criminal indictments (which, in my opinion, are simply political warfare by legal means) will have. And Bennett and Shaked are young, 46 and 42 respectively, while Netanyahu is 69. Their day will come no matter what.

The as-yet undefined party of Benny Gantz, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party, and other centrists will try to present themselves as hawkish on security to prevent this. The danger is that they might succeed, and we could end up with a Center-Left coalition. Naturally, Bibi is making sure to remind us of this at every opportunity. And I agree with him that letting the Left within 100 km of power would be a disaster. Look what the two Ehuds, Barak and Olmert, almost did when each was Prime Minister.

It’s not possible to reduce the number of parties to six today. Founding political parties seems to be a national pastime here, and the inflated egos of politicians, each one of whom believes that only he or she is qualified to lead a party or the nation, prevents the system from becoming more rational.

Today I am leaning toward voting for The New Right, despite the silly name – unless Bibi convinces me that this will empower the Left. So far, I don’t see it.

Or unless my brother-in-law starts his own party. Then I’d have to vote for him.

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01/03 Links Pt1: Goodbye UNESCO; Elbit rejects HSBC's BDS disclaimer stating: 'We don’t produce cluster bombs'; Europe's New "Munich": Iran

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Goodbye UNESCO

Israel’s decision – along with the US – to leave the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on January 1 is extraordinary. It represents a loss for UNESCO as well as a global tragedy, demonstrating how world heritage has been manipulated by politics.

According to Israeli officials explaining the decision to leave the global organization, UNESCO is a deeply biased organization that sought to rewrite the history of the Land of Israel. “Israel will not be a member of an organization whose goal is to deliberately act against us, and that has become a tool manipulated by Israel’s enemies,” Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said.

Michael Oren, former ambassador to the US and outgoing Knesset member, applauded the move. “Today is the first day that the State of Israel is outside of UNESCO,” he said. It had joined a list of enemies of Israel, alongside the Assyrians, the Roman Empire and the ayatollahs in Iran, who deny the connection between Jews and Israel’s capital in Jerusalem, he added.

Across the sea, former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley tweeted on January 1 that “UNESCO is among the most corrupt and politically biased UN agencies. Today the US withdrawal from this cesspool became official.”

The process has been more than a year in the making. The administration of US President Donald Trump made the decision to leave in October 2017 and Israel supported the US move. Since UNESCO granted Palestinians membership as a state in 2011, the organization has become increasingly hostile to Israel. The US and Israel wanted reform, but like too many things at the UN, instead of reforming, the organization has remained stuck in its ways.

Elbit rejects HSBC's BDS disclaimer stating: 'We don’t produce cluster bombs'

Elbit Systems Ltd. does not produce cluster bombs, the Israeli arms company said as it rejected attempts by the international bank HSBC to separate its decision to divest from the company from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign that had been waged against the global banking power house.

HSBC’s decision to divest from Elbit last month was first made public in a private email correspondence with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a British-based non-governmental organization.

The group, which had waged a stiff campaign against HSBC in hopes of persuading it to divest from Israeli arms company, published news of the divestment decision as a BDS victory.

HSBC’s divestment came in the aftermath of its November acquisition of the Israeli arms company IMI Systems Ltd., formerly known as Israel Military Industries or Ta’as. IMI has a history of producing cluster bombs.

Elbit’s vice president David Vaknin said that the bank had not contacted his company prior to making its decision nor had it been in touch with the company since it divested.

“We have not received any notification in this regard from HSBC nor any inquiry as to the facts concerning the nature of our activity or our policies in this area,” Vaknin said.

“As part of the Elbit Systems organization, IMI Systems will not be continuing its prior activities with respect to cluster munitions. All of Elbit Systems activities relating to munitions, including those activities to be continued by IMI Systems, will be conducted in accordance with applicable international conventions or US law,” Vaknin said.

In addition, he said, “Elbit Systems [itself] is not engaged in the production of cluster munitions.”

Jordan is Not the Only Mideast Country the US Refuses to Demand to Hand Over Terrorists From (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

We know that Jordan has failed to extradite the Hamas terrorist Ahlam Tamimi -- the mastermind of the Sbarro massacre -- to the US, despite an extradition treaty that Jordan has honored in the past.

But is the problem just that Jordan refuses to honor its treaties, or is there more to it? Could the US be trying harder and applying more pressure on Jordan if it wanted to?

Just compare the example of Jordan to the US failure to pursue Americans murdered by Palestinian terrorists.

Stephen Flatow, whose daughter was murdered by Palestinian terrorists, questions the apparent immunity Palestinian terrorists have from prosecution. It was one thing when the PLO terrorist entity was in charge -- the US had no leverage to demand that terrorists be handed over. But after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the Palestinian Authority was in charge, there was an actual political entity with which the US formed a relationship.

True, the US has never had an extradition treaty with the Palestinians, but there is still another option:

Either because of U.S. pressure, or because of a general desire to have friendly relations with the U.S., governments frequently agree to “rendition”—that is, to voluntarily hand over terrorists for prosecution in America.

Rendition is so much easier than extradition that Mexico, which does have an extradition treaty with the US, often uses rendition instead.

And yet the US government consistently resists the idea of utilizing this option.

According to Flatow, the US is so reluctant to press for the rendition of Palestinian murderers of US citizens, that it has failed to take advantage of bonafide opportunities. A prime example is Mohammed Abbas, the mastermind in 1985 of the hijacking of the Achille Lauro that resulted in the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, who remained free for years. Over time, Abbas lived in countries from which the US could have demanded extradition, but did not take action. The excuse used was the statute of limitations, despite the fact there is no limitation on murder; the US claimed that Abbas was wanted for hijacking, not murder. In 2003, he was captured by American forces in Iraq while he attempted to escape to Syria. He died in US custody in 2004, the day before he was supposed to be handed over to Italy.

Flatow believes the reason for the failure of the US to pursue Palestinian terrorists who have murdered US citizens over the years boils down to the "fetid swamp of political convenience." Over the years, US administrations have been fixated on the Holy Grail of Middle East peace, and opted for 'the greater good' of having friendly relations with the Palestinians rather than pursue justice for murdered Americans:

Putting a Palestinian terrorist on trial in America would infuriate the PA, which would defend the terrorist as a “hero” and a “martyr.” That would sour America’s relations with the PA, reveal that the PA’s view of terrorists has never changed, and undermine American public sympathy for Palestinian statehood.

This held true during the administrations of Clinton, Bush and Obama.

What about Trump?

President Trump. Public Domain

Watching Trump praise Jordan for its role in fighting terrorism -- while it plays host to the terrorist Ahlam Tamimi -- is a familiar scenario. Foreign policy concerns seem once again to take a priority over justice. The US has an extradition treaty with Jordan and has asked Jordan to turn her over. The US has even posted a reward for her capture, but has stopped short of applying pressure.

On the other hand, Trump has taken steps beyond anything his predecessors have done in applying strong financial pressure on Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.

It could be that he is willing to apply pressure to get things done.

But it could also be that Trump has decided to apply pressure on the Palestinians instead of aid in order to facilitate his version of a Middle East peace -- but will continue to coddle Jordan for the old familiar reasons.

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The academic fraud, and obnoxious editor who defends her lies, in the NY Review of Books

Professor Katherine Franke of Columbia University - whom we have mentioned before - wrote last month about the completely fictional "Pro-Israel Push to Purge US Campus Critics."

The article is riddled with half truths and errors, but one is particularly easy to show.

She writes:

Especially chilling, the US Department of Education recently adopted a new definition of anti-Semitism, one that equates any criticism of Israel with a hatred of Jews.

Is that what the policy says? No, it says the exact opposite. It says, explicitly, "[C]riticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic."

Franke is 100% wrong.

When this was pointed out to the editor of the New York Review of Books, he responded in an astonishing way:

A perfectly reasonable and accurate criticism was leveled at Seaton - and his response was dismissive and derisive.

Is this how editors are supposed to deal with fact checking? By making fun of the number of followers the fact checkers have?

I couldn't resist responding to Seaton:

I just was made aware of this exchange and I am astonished at the lack of ethics of an editor at @nybooks. The tweet is absolutely correct, Franke is 100% wrong in her assertion. Weeks later and there is no correction.

And Matt -I have a LOT more followers than you do, "loser."
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 3, 2019

I usually don't use ad hominems in my tweets, but by Seaton's yardstick for how important one is, he indeed is a loser compared to me. Not to mention if one compares how either of us deal with honest fact checkers.

Of course, as of this writing, Seaton hasn't responded. He can't because whatever he says (outside of an abject apology to the original fact checker) would make him look like even more of a "loser."

I don't know if Seaton is the person who edited Franke's inaccurate article and allowed her lies to be published under its name.

But one wonders why the New York Review of Books, which often has the word "prestigious" attached to its name when it is mentioned in the media, would employ someone who is so utterly dismissive of both readers - and of the truth.

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According to the Palestine Times, Israel has changed the area that Gaza fishing boats can go.

It used to be 9 miles out to sea, but (apparently for security reasons) Israel has reduced it to 6 miles in the north and south of Gaza, but to make up for the loss of area it increased the distance for the middle of Gaza to 12 miles.

The Gaza fisherman's union rejected the changes, in protest of the six mile limit at the northern and southern borders.

Which means that they still cannot go further that six miles anyway in the north and south - and they are not taking advantage of the additional three miles newly available to them.

As far as I know, Israel never allowed a 12 mile area to be fished since the blockade was started.

Ironically, last summer when Israel increased the fishing zone in central Gaza from six to nine miles, fishermen complained that the additional area was not suitable for fishing - and they demanded a 12 mile zone.

Now they have it and their own union will not let them use it.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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Know How to Answer #6 - "UNGA 194 demands Palestinian right of return"

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01/02 Links Pt2: The deal that disappeared; The threat posed by Jeremy Corbyn; AP Shills For Peace Now; Muslim Antisemitism in Berlin Schools

From Ian:

The deal that disappeared

Historian Kobby Barda has found a lost chapter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: After World War II, the U.S. gave Israel and Arab nations $1.5 billion to solve the Middle East refugee problem. But only Israel lived up to its end of the deal.

Kobby Barda couldn't believe what he was seeing. While researching the establishment of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee under the auspices of the Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies at the University of Haifa, Barda found his way to the personal archive of one Isaiah Leo "Si" Kenen, a Canadian-born lawyer, journalist and philanthropist who was one of the founders of the pro-Israel lobby.

Among the many documents that record in detail Kenen's work in the first years of Israel's existence as a state, Barda discovered a lost chapter in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the start of the 1950s, in addition to pouring money into the Marshall Plan to rehabilitate Europe after World War II, the U.S. decided to provide money to Arab states and Israel so they could find a solution to the refugee problem created by the 1948 War of Independence.

The American aid earmarked to solve the issue of Middle East refugees was supposed to have been split evenly between Israel and the Arab states, with each side receiving $50 million to build infrastructure to absorb refugees. The money to take in the Arab refugees was handed over to the U.N. agency founded to address the issue of Palestinian refugees, and the Americans gave Arab countries another $53 million for "technical cooperation." In effect, the Arab side received double the money given to Israel, even though Israel took in more refugees, including ones from Arab nations – Jews who had been displaced by the regional upheavals. The amount Congress allocated to provide for Middle East refugees – Jewish and Arab – at the request of then-President Harry Truman was equal to $1.5 billion today.

David Collier: The smear tactics of the Jeremy Corbyn cult. A case study.

We all know that the Jeremy Corbyn cult uses smear tactics. It can be well highlighted by this case study. It is a worthwhile exercise to show just how empty and crudely constructed these smears can be.

My website was attacked on the evening of the 22nd December. It was down for several hours and when the server restored the site, it remained unstable as the new security systems were configured. I have ample proof of the attack. For example there are numerous emails from the host company as they attempted to deal with the problem, including one that confirms a DDOS attack. Someone also kindly archived how the website looked at the time of the attack:

The antisemitic mindset of the Corbyn conspiracy cult
Everyone knows there are bad people in the world who pose a danger. But for the antisemite, this does not hold true for the Jews. In the eyes of the antisemite, the Jews *are* what is bad in the world. So when Jews complain they’ve been hacked, they are lying. When they say they are victims of antisemitic abuse, they are conspiring to smear someone, and even when six million of them ‘go missing’, they have somehow deceived the world just to gain power and make money. It does not matter that in some cases the antisemite has replaced the word ‘Jew’ with ‘Zionist’, the seams always show where it has been stitched in.

So through the eyes of the antisemites, the attack on my website could not be real. It did not take long for someone to write up a version that turned the DDOS attack into a conspiracy to smear Jeremy Corbyn supporters, and of course being Jewish, make some money whilst I did it. On 30th December, the Prole Star upload an article that did just that:

The Prole Star and its editor
The Prole Star is a Jeremy Corbyn support media. It self references as a socialist site ‘counteracting mainstream media bias’. The Facebook page has 6000 followers. On Twitter, they have another 10,000. It seems to rely on freelance writers desperately seeking media to publish their articles. The Editor and chief contributor is Maria Roberts. Roberts has been writing for the Pole Star for over two years.

I don’t know much about her. Her Facebook friends include Jacqueline Walker, Tony Greenstein, Piers Corbyn, Jon Lansman and Grahame Morris MP. Beyond her editorial role at the Pole Star, her profile also suggests she is a Director at a Company called ‘Red Letter Ltd‘. Company House has her using the names ‘Jeanne Roberts‘ and ‘Jeanne Maria Roberts‘. She is listed as holding ‘overall control’. The accounts and Confirmation Statement are also both overdue, so if you are reading this Maria – chop-chop.

Alan Dershowitz: Comparing Trump to the Nazis Is Holocaust Denial

Professor Alan Dershowitz joined FOX and Friends on New Year's Day to discuss a new poll that finds most children are completely ignorant of the Jewish Holocaust in World War II. Dershowitz then went on to say that any of the people today who compare the current US political climate to the Nazis are basically Holocaust deniers. (h/t jzaik)

Jews are white when the left wants to exclude them from participation in, for instance, the Women’s March. Jews, on the other hand, are anything but white when the right wishes to exclude them from normative society.

Fellow white Jews: can we please stop embarrassing ourselves by arguing we aren't white or don't benefit from white supremacy? Read this 👇👇👇 https://t.co/389lmWGWtp
— Ariel Elyse 💕🔥💕 (@ArielElyseGold) December 29, 2018

GAL GADOT IS NOT FUCKING WHITE, JEWS ARE NOT WHITE, SHE HAS CONDITIONAL, REVOCABLE WHITE-*PASSING* PRIVILEGE
— Shira Sandler (@redshira) June 6, 2017

Dr. Duke & Don Advo prove Jews say they are not White & Why they support Black Lives Matter… https://t.co/YhhrBrQUEH pic.twitter.com/UgCNnLKgCm
— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) June 7, 2017

Isn’t it nice that we’re so malleable a people that you can make us be whatever you want to fit your own personal dynamic—to exclude us from all your ranks at either end of the spectrum?

How accommodating of us.

The truth is, of course, that Jews can be any color of the human rainbow. The first Jews were nomads in the Middle East, so they were likely somewhat dark in color. Then as now, however, color was an unimportant factor in determining one’s Jewish identity. What was and is important is a belief in one God, matrilineal descent or conversion, and circumcision for males. These beliefs and activities, rather than the color of one’s skin, determine whether or not one is a Jew.

If you are a Jew, or you become a Jew, you were standing there at Mt. Sinai when God gave us the Torah and the commandments. There was no white privilege in play. We all received the same Torah, the same commandments. We all said naaseh v’nishma: we will do and we will listen. We were as one and our God was/is/and always will be one (and not some trisected or multiple being).

Professor Gunnar Heinsohn, of the University of Bremen makes the case that Jews were murdered in the Holocaust not because of race, but because of their Torah values. It makes sense if you think about it: if the Final Solution had been about skin color, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics would have been killed in the same numbers, in the same fashion.

Professor Gunnar Heinsohn

This was obviously not the case, which leads Heinsohn to view the Holocaust as an event that is uniquely unique, and not comparable to any other genocide. Hitler’s real goal, according to Heinsohn, was to exterminate the Jewish people so as to erase Judaism from world memory as an ethics system. This would enable the Germans to break whatever commandments they liked with a free conscience. They could do whatever they wished: murder entire groups of people, weak people, handicapped people, and minorities; and plunder and conquer territory, without being hampered by morals or a guilty conscience, all the while claiming superiority over other beings.

Heinsohn lays out his evidence in a paper called “Hitler and the Jewish People.” He explains, for instance, that Hitler didn’t believe in a racist antisemitism, sharing from a letter written to Martin Bormann, on February 3, 1945:

I have never been of the opinion that the Chinese or Japanese, for example, are racially inferior. Both belong to old cultures and I admit that their tradition is superior to ours. […] I even believe that I will find it all the easier to come to an understanding with the Chinese and the Japanese, the more they persevere in their racial pride. […] Our Nordic racial consciousness is only aggressive toward the Jewish race. We use the term Jewish race merely for reasons of linguistic convenience, for in the real sense of the word, and from a genetic point of view there is no Jewish race. Present circumstances force upon us this characterization of the group of common race and intellect, to which all the Jews of the world profess their loyalty, regardless of the nationality identified in the passport of each individual. This group of persons we designate as the Jewish race. […] The Jewish race is above all a community of the spirit. […] Spiritual race is of a more solid and more durable kind than natural race. Wherever he goes, the Jew remains a Jew […] presenting sad proof of the superiority of the ‘spirit’ over the flesh.

Only when it comes to blacks, in fact, does Hitler betray a streak of honest-to-goodness racism, as in this passage from Mein Kampf:

From time to time magazines call the attention of the bourgeoisie to another case of the first Negro ever to have become a lawyer, teacher, even a pastor or star tenor or the like. While the feeble-minded bourgeoisie marvels at this miraculous feat of trained performance, full of respect for this fabulous result of present-day pedagogy, the Jew slyly takes advantage of the opportunity to construct new proof of the correctness of his theory of the equality of human beings which it is his mission to hammer into the heads of the nations. It does not dawn on the degenerate bourgeois world that in truth what we have here is an offense against all reason, that it is outrageous lunacy to keep drilling a native anthropoid until one is convinced of having made a lawyer of him.

Hitler’s racism was real, but racial theory, says Heinsohn, fails to explain the Holocaust. “According to the logic of the racist theory, Hitler’s main war should have been waged against black Africans. But since it was waged against Jews, reasons other than those of racism must be investigated.”

No. It wasn’t racism, but something else. Hitler wanted to be free to act without conscience, free to violate the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”

In the first edition of Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that infanticide is preferable to the modern practice of prophylactic birth control.

“The exposure of sick, weak, deformed children, i.e. their annihilation, was in reality a thousand times more humane than the deplorable lunacy of our present-day time,” writes Hitler, who goes on to speak of an emerging “obsession” with:

“Saving” even the weakest, even the sickest, at all costs. […] A stronger race will banish the weaker ones, for in the end the instinct to survive will always break the ridiculous bonds of a so-called humanity of the individual, allowing the humanity of nature to take its place, a humanity which destroys the weak to provide space for the strong. Therefore, he who wants to ensure the existence of the German nation through a self-limitation of its reproductive process is depriving it of the future.

In case you were wondering, Hitler tells us straight out where this, in his opinion, false humanity, comes from. “In recognition of the consequences [of birth control], it is not, coincidentally, the Jew above all who so skillfully sets about embedding such mortally dangerous ideas in the minds of our people,” writes Hitler.

At the 1929 party convention in Nuremberg, Hitler publicly condemned the Jewish way of thinking, in preference to what he suggested was an older, Indo-Germanic right:

If one million children were born in Germany per year and 700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest eliminated, the final result might possibly even be an increase of strength. The worst danger is that we are interrupting the natural selection process ourselves (by caring for the sick and weak). […] The most far-sighted racial state of history, Sparta, systematically implemented these racial laws.

Hermann Rauschning, the Nazi leader of Danzig, wrote a book about a meeting with Hitler in the early 1930’s. Rauschning summarized Hitler’s remarks in his report as follows:

Our lawyers and lawmakers make a fundamental error in assuming that one can create life with a code of laws and a constitution. Our revolution is not merely a political and social one. We face a tremendous upheaval of moral principles and the spiritual orientation of man. With our movement the intervening age, the middle age, has come to its end. We terminate a wrong path of mankind. The Tables of Mount Sinai have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is our duty to depopulate, just as it is our duty to provide appropriate care to the German population. We will have to develop a technology of depopulation. What do I mean by depopulation, you will ask. Do I intend to eliminate entire peoples? Yes, more or less. That is where it will lead to. Nature is cruel. We therefore have the same right. […] For centuries people have been driveling on about the protection of the poor. The time has come to address ourselves to the protection of the strong from the inferior. One of the most important tasks of an eternally valid German politics will be to use every possible means to prevent the further growth of the Slavic peoples. Natural instinct commands every living being not only to defeat the enemy but to destroy him. In earlier ages there existed the good right of the victor to exterminate entire tribes, entire nations.

Hitler saw Jewish values as a kind of infectious organism that prevented lebensraum and with it, Aryan national survival. As early as August 7, 1920, Hitler wrote:

Do not think that you can fight a disease without killing the causative agent, without destroying the bacillus, and do not think that you can fight racial tuberculosis without seeing to it that the nation is freed from the causative agent of racial tuberculosis. The influence of Judaism will never fade as long as its agent, the Jew, has not been removed from our midst.

“The Jewish race is above all a community of the spirit,” wrote Hitler, almost 25 years later. In one of his efforts to destroy this “spiritual bacillus” he ordered four priests hung in Luebeck on November 10, 1943, because they distributed a sermon of Bishop von Galen which spoke of the Lord pronouncing “Thou shalt not kill” “amidst thunder and lightning on Sinai.” Their crime was WehrkraftZersetzung, the destruction of a soldier’s will to fight and kill.

If Hitler served to dehumanize Jews in the eyes of the people, it was only a means to an end: to motivate the people to do away with the Jews, so that Germans could be free to murder and plunder and have the world to themselves. They felt they deserved this, after so many hard years with a busted economy. Annihilating the Jews was a means to an end.

By the same token, the contemporary Jewish leftist wants to destroy Judaism and its brightest symbol, Israel, in order to absolve himself of the guilt of not recognizing God and His Torah. If Judaism is declared immoral, therefore moot, Jews on the left need not feel guilty for not following the commandments. This tautology of the contemporary Jewish left offers a perfect dovetailing with Hitler’s 20^th century Nazi ideology.

Hitler gave the Germans permission to be morally bankrupt. The fact that they fell in with him so easily, and cooperated so well, speaks not to Hitler’s force of personality, but to the fertile ground of the German soul, so conducive to breeding greed, hate, licentiousness, and murder—as long as all is done in an orderly fashion and properly recorded for posterity.

What then, is the excuse of the Jews?

h/t Quirinus Amsterdam

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Confusion As Virtue Signaler Displays Actual Virtue (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Tel Aviv, January 2 - Activists and media figures voiced bewilderment today following a display of real, verifiable moral fiber and character on the part of a person showcasing a public measure of care for the oppressed, social justice warriors are reporting.

Witnesses at a rally for the rights of migrant workers in the southern neighborhoods of this Mediterranean city recalled a woman holding a sign that railed against the racism, xenophobia, and other ills plaguing the mostly-African group that arrived illegally over the last decade, who intervened with her body when a migrant attempted to assault a photojournalist who had captured images of other migrants assaulting an elderly woman. The incident shook them, the activists confessed, as they had rarely, if ever, encountered someone who defends the rights of the oppressed yet expects the oppressed to still behave with some sense of decency.

"I'm confused right now, and a little, a little shaken," stammered one demonstrator. "That's not what I'm used to. I still have to process what happened here today. I didn't think anyone was supposed to display any kind of moral consistency or courage in this milieu. My understanding has always been that ethical behavior was something you only demanded of others, and certainly not of the oppressed people with whom you're showing all-important solidarity and allyship."

"It's weird - I don't think I've seen this before," added a second. "Intersectionality's hierarchy implies that you can't require the oppressed to behave by the same standards as the class of oppressors, since those standards are just ways in which the oppressors cement their privilege. That's not what this woman - forgive me for assuming her gender, we just don't know - assumed, obviously, and that's a challenge to our paradigm that I'm having difficulty assimilating."

A third demonstrator contrasted the woman's behavior with the more typical model common in the progressive social justice realm. "Virtue is for signaling, not for practicing," she insisted. "That's why it was OK for Omar Barghouti to pursue a degree in ethics from Tel Aviv University while spearheading the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement against Israel. It's about the noise you make, not the life you lead. It's why Linda Sarsour led the Women's March and bellowed 'MeToo' even as she defended an accused sexual harasser on her staff and refused to believe the accuser. What I saw today made me profoundly uncomfortable, and some of us are going to have to sit down and hash out today's episode so we can decide whether we need to wreck this traitor's life and reputation for her treason."

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01/02 Links Pt1: Iranian Nuclear Weapons and ‘Palestine’: Dangers for Israel; Thank heaven we're done with UNESCO; Bennett taps Caroline Glick for New Right’s Knesset slate

From Ian:

Iranian Nuclear Weapons and ‘Palestine’: Dangers for Israel

Israeli planners may soon have to understand that the efficacy or credibility of their country’s nuclear deterrence posture could vary inversely with enemy views of Israeli nuclear destructiveness. However ironic or counter-intuitive, enemy perceptions of a too-large or too-destructive Israeli nuclear deterrent force, or of an Israeli force that is not sufficiently invulnerable to first-strike attacks, could undermine this deterrence posture.

Also critical, of course, is that Israel’s current and prospective adversaries see the Jewish state’s nuclear retaliatory forces as “penetration capable” — meaning they are capable of penetrating any Arab or Iranian aggressor’s active defenses. Naturally, a new state of Palestine would be non-nuclear itself, but it could still present a new “nuclear danger” to Israel by its impact upon the more generally regional “correlation of forces.” Thereby, Palestine could represent an indirect but nonetheless markedly serious nuclear threat to Israel.

There is still more to be done. Israel should continue to strengthen its active defenses, but Jerusalem must also do everything possible to improve each critical and interpenetrating component of its nuanced deterrence posture. The Israeli task may also require more incrementally explicit disclosures of nuclear targeting doctrine, and, accordingly, a steadily expanding role for cyber-defense and cyber-war. And even before undertaking such delicately important refinements, Israel will need to more systematically differentiate between adversaries that are presumably rational, irrational, or “mad.”

Overall, the success of Israel’s national deterrence strategies will be contingent upon an informed prior awareness of enemy preference and of specific enemy hierarchies of preferences. Altogether new and open-minded attention will need to be focused on the seeming emergence of a “Cold War II” between Russia and the United States. This time around, the relationship between Jerusalem and Moscow could prove helpful rather than adversarial. For Jerusalem, it may even be reasonable to explore whether this once hostile relationship could turn out to be more strategically gainful for Israel than its traditionally historic ties to the United States. At this transitional moment in geostrategic time, when Donald Trump’s often incoherent alignments could multiply or escalate, virtually anything is possible.

In any event, it is essential that Israeli planners approach all prospective enemy threats as potentially interactive or even synergistic. If a formalized state of Palestine does not readily find itself in the same ideological orbit as Iran — now an increasingly plausible conclusion in view of still-accelerating Shiite-Sunni fissions in the Middle East — the net threat to Israel could become more perilous than the mere additive result of its pertinent area enemies. All things considered, in approaching the possible simultaneity of Iranian nuclear weapons and Palestinian statehood, Jerusalem must consistently bear in mind that the adversarial “whole” could prove palpably greater than the calculable sum of its belligerent “parts.”

For 2019, there could be no more important security consideration.

Thank heaven we're done with UNESCO

Thank God, it's over. When 2018 ended, Israel's withdrawal from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization took effect. Don't feel bad. Under existing conditions, there was no reason to keep our place at the table with the gang of hypocritical liars that every few months rewrote another chapter of the history of the land of Israel and the Jewish people, and coopted it for the Palestinians. Rather than thrilling at the glorious cultural, religious, historic, and archaeological legacy of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, the organization chose time and again to adopt "fake history" and give its seal of approval to more fabrications from the Palestinian pack of lies.

UNESCO questioned Jewish ties to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. It treated us as if we were occupiers in our own capital, even though Jerusalem in all its holiness was never a capital – in terms of either politics or conscience – for any Arab or Muslim ruling entity. Even the Jordanians, who together with the Palestinians prompted UNESCO to pass resolutions hostile to Israel – never used Jerusalem as their capital in the years in which they occupied the city. They desecrated the places that are holy to Jews, and in violation of agreements we signed with them, even denied us access to those places. Back then, the Jordanians and the Palestinians – before they invented themselves as a "people" – cited the Temple Mount as the location of Solomon's Temple on their maps and in their writings. Today, they boldly deny ever doing so and UNESCO is helping them by partly adopting their denial.

But UNESCO has more than Jerusalem in its sights. Rachel's Tomb, which UNESCO decided to call, as the Palestinians term it, Bilal Ibn Rabah mosque, was never traditionally called that. Ibn Rabah, of Ethiopian descent, was one of the first muezzins who served the Prophet Muhammad. He was killed in Syria and buried in Aleppo or Damascus. Only when the Palestinian Authority realized it had failed to capture the site from Israel during the Second Intifada did they link Ibn Rabah to "Kubat Rachel," the Arabic name for the site that had been used for generations. In the case of Rachel's Tomb, UNESCO supported an attempt to take over people's minds in place of a physical occupation of the site which failed.

Maybe UNESCO Will ‘Learn a Lesson’ From US and Israeli Withdrawals, Ex-Envoy Says

“Maybe they will learn a lesson,” a former Israeli ambassador to UNESCO told The Algemeiner on Tuesday as the Jewish state officially left the global cultural institution.

David Kornbluth — who served as Israel’s UNESCO envoy from 2005-2009 — said the country was pulling out of the body now largely because the US had scheduled to leave by the end of 2018.

“It’s completely in coordination with the United States,” he noted. “This is part of the reason also why it’s being done. Politically, it didn’t seem that we could stay in it if the United States is going, on our behalf as it were. Part of the reason they’re going is because of Israel.”

Israel and the US stayed in UNESCO for so long, he stated, “because they believed that once you leave these organizations, it’s much more difficult for Israel to get back in than the United States to get back in,” but the worsening situation had finally forced their hand.

“It was bad then,” Kornbluth said of his tenure. “It’s really nasty being attacked all the time, but was more manageable. But things got worse and worse, it just goes on and on and on, and politically it becomes just a bit disgusting.”

Asked whether the withdrawals will force UNESCO to change its attitude toward Israel, Kornbluth responded, “Hard to tell. The Israel-bashing thing has been going on forever, but the United States is staunchly with Israel and it’s quite true for many many decades already that Israel relies on the United States in UNESCO for the air it breathes. So I can’t tell if it will have a positive effect. It will have some effect. Since the United States and Israel came out two years ago with the intention to withdraw, UNESCO has moderated itself a bit towards Israel, but not sufficiently.”

This is the reason the Israeli Defense Forces @IDF IS the most moral army in the world: not because it fights with flowers (it doesn't), not because Jews have a unique moral DNA (no people does), but because the IDF is forced to carry out its missions under unparalleled scrutiny: https://t.co/fo2kH2mH5t
— Dr. Einat Wilf (@EWilf) January 1, 2019