Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, May 02, 2019

US representative Betty McCollum introduces bill to give millions of dollars to NGO aligned with PFLP terrorists

NEW LEGISLATION PROPOSED by Rep. Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat, would ban Israel from using any of the billions of dollars in military assistance it receives from the United States every year to pay for the detention, interrogation, or torture of Palestinian children living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank.

McCollum’s bill, HR 2407, would amend the Foreign Assistance Act to prohibit funding for the military detention of children in any country, including Israel. The proposed law would also provide $19 million a year to American, Israeli, and Palestinian nongovernmental organizations to monitor the treatment of children detained by Israel’s army and offer physical and psychological treatment.

This bill is heavily influenced by "Defense of Children International - Palestine," which is promoting the bill on its website. It appears that McCollum worked with DCI-P to craft the language of the bill. Indeed, the bill quotes from a DCI-P report to "prove" how Israel mistreats children:

The nongovernmental organization Defense for Children International Palestine collected affidavits from 739 West Bank children who were detained between 2013 and 2018, and concluded that 73 percent of the children endured physical violence following arrest...

We've looked at DCI-P before. It's methodology is to interview these children with leading questions and to prompt them to answer what they want. They almost admitted this in previous reports, saying that first they seek out people to write affidavits, and then "Lawyers and human rights documentation professionals reviewed testimonies and other documentation for accuracy and assessed any gaps that required further research." - meaning if there were problems with the "testimony" they would try to fit the evidence to their preconceived notions.

We know that DCI-P does not adhere to the "UN standards" they claim to use for interviewing people. During the 2014 war, it ludicrously claimed that the IDF kept a 16-year old son of a Hamas terrorist for five days to go, alone, into Gaza houses to look for Hamas tunnels and to dig for them with his bare hands. These were all obvious lies compounded by his father saying that the family disposed of the too-large clothes that the IDF supposedly gave him and "forgot" to take photos of his many injuries at the hands of the Israelis. (The New York Times reported this as fact, too.) These are laughable lies. UN standards for interviewing include being skeptical of what people say and how to corroborate the stories. DCI-P prompts or believes anything that makes Israel look bad.

In addition, DCI-P has listed children known to have been killed while involved in terror attacks as being innocent, and to count those killed by Hamas rockets as being killed by Israel. They know that some of the children they count as innocent victims are terrorists themselves - they've admitted it on Palestinian TV - but their official reports never mention that.

In other words, DCI-P reports have nothing to do with reality.

It would be bad enough if DCI-P was merely another NGO with dubious methodology whose entire purpose is to smear Israel. There are lots of those. But DCI-P is far worse.

DCI-P is associated with the PFLP terror group.

NGO-Monitor has documented many workers for DCI-P who were also officials of the PFLP. For example, here is DCI-P General Director Rifat Odeh Kassis addressing PFLP and DCI-P member Hashem Abu Maria’s memorial service in front of the PFLP flag and pictures of the group’s founder, George Habash:

HR 2407 doesn't just rely on bogus research by a NGO with known terror ties. It wants the US to give millions of dollars to that NGO!

FUNDING.—There is authorized to be appropriated not less than $19,000,000 each fiscal year to the Secretary of State to be made available to nongovernmental organizations from the United States, Israel, or the Occupied Palestinian Territory for the following purposes:
(1) MONITORING HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES ASSOCIATED WITH ISRAEL’S MILITARY DETENTION OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN.—
(A) IN GENERAL.—Nongovernment organizations with human rights experience are eligible to receive funding under this subsection.
Such funding shall be used to monitor, assess, and document incidents of Palestinian children subjected to Israeli military detention, including interviews with victims, family members of victims, relevant community members, health care providers, legal advocates, civil society monitors, and Israeli military officials.

This is exactly how DCI-P describes itself! The rest of the description of the role of these "NGOs" - annual reports showing affidavits from children - shows that DCI-Palestine is the only organization in the world that adheres to the requirements of the bill.

A US member of the House of representative, Betty McCollum, is introducing a bill to give millions of dollars annually to a fake NGO, associated with a US-designated terror organization, that knowingly and consistently lies in its reports.

This is scandalous and sickening.

(h/t Daled Amos)

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To make the Shoah a little more real for you, look up your (Hebrew) name in the Yad Vashem database of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Although I know I was named after an uncle who was murdered, I found another person besides him with my first, middle and last name - probably a distant relative, since my surname is rare - a man who was around 50 years old when he was murdered.

I even found his picture.

More creepy was that I found a child with my son's name, who was murdered in Treblinka in 1942 at the age of 10.

I also found a 23 year old woman with my daughter's name who was murdered in 1940.

Since I don't know if anyone is saying Yizkor for these people, I will.

If you can't find someone with your exact name, look for variants for you to remember.

Seeing your loved ones' names in lists of those who were slaughtered is jarring. It is a scary, sober and rewarding exercise to find your own "twin" and those of your loved ones who was murdered by the Nazis, yemach shemam.

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Cartoons, "criticism of Israel," and Jew-hatred (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

The publication in the International Edition of the New York Times of a classically antisemitic cartoon ignited a firestorm of criticism (see also here) against the paper. The ADL, American Jewish Committee, Israeli Ambassador to the US, US Ambassador to Germany, Israeli Foreign Ministry, Mike Pence, and President Donald Trump joined in. Even Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism, whom I suspect rarely met an anti-Israel article in the Times that he didn’t like, criticized the Times on the URJ’s Facebook page (although at this writing, J Street has had no comment).

The cartoon is an example of a genre going back at as far as the Middle Ages, through the Dreyfus affair and Nazi period, and common today. Ask the Internet. Ugly, hook-nosed Jews look back at you, grinning as they drain blood from their victims, ravish blonde women, hoard gold coins, entrap the world in octopus tentacles or spider webs, enslave world leaders, exploit the poor, and – more recently – dress in Nazi uniforms and eat Palestinian children.

Today you will find them regularly in the media of Europe and the Muslim world, unremarked. The cartoonist, Antonio Moreira Antunes, produced the usual explanation: it was not antisemitic, just anti-Israel. It doesn’t fly: it was not only anti-Israel, it was anti-Jewish in ways reminiscent of Arab and Nazi propaganda. Trump wore a kipa, Netanyahu was portrayed by a dog, the dog had a Magen David attached to his collar, and the message – that world leaders are blindly led around (even hypnotized) by international Jewry – is a traditional antisemitic proposition.

I believe that as a European, Moreira genuinely did not see the problem. Jew-hatred is part of the daily intellectual diet in Europe, only a little less so than in Egypt. They are used to it. But in America people are still a bit shocked, although now that shooting Jews in synagogues seems to have become almost as common as shooting children in schools, the milder forms of antisemitism may become less upsetting.

Another cartoonist, the Brazilian Carlos Latuff has produced dozens, perhaps hundreds of viciously anti-Israel cartoons. While his cartoons carry unsubtle messages – the IDF are murderers, Israel is like the Nazis – he mostly avoids the dogs and big noses. Latuff too claims that he is only a political opponent of Israel, not a hater of Jews.

These cartoonists, and writers like NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, often argue that antisemitism and anti-Zionism – hatred of the Jewish people and hatred of the Jewish state – are fundamentally different, and while the former is unacceptable, the latter is perfectly legitimate political speech.

They are wrong. We don’t need to waste time looking for hooked noses, dogs, spiders, octopi, dollar signs and so on in order to draw a line between traditional antisemitism like the Moreira cartoon and the sanitized but still obsessive demonization and persecution of the Jewish state that Latuff and the New York Times regularly engage in, because they are two closely related forms of the same thing.

Today, the Jewish state is the home of more Jews than any other country, and almost as many as all the others put together. The Jewish population in Israel is growing while it declines in other places. It is the heart of Jewish culture, religious and secular. Today’s North American Diaspora is moribund. Many of the “Jews” that live there are Jews in name only, having abandoned the Jewish people for a progressive “one world” ideology, with or without a pseudo-Jewish religion based on “tikkun olam.” They can’t be accused of dual loyalty: they will consistently place their progressive politics above the good of the Jewish people whenever there is a conflict. The few hundred thousand Jews that still survive in Europe are irrelevant, and may find refuge in Israel, North America, or other places when conditions become worse, as they surely will.

The Jewish state today is the real, concrete expression of the Jewish people. Destroy the former, as its enemies have not ceased trying to do since 1948, and you destroy the latter. The protestations of Latuff, for example, that he is not anti-Jewish, only critical of “Israel as a political entity,” are as if someone insisted that he had nothing against Brooklynites, he only wanted to destroy Kings County, and kill or drive out its inhabitants.

The obsessive demonization of Israel, with its associated double standard by which only one state in the world – which happens to be the one belonging to the Jewish people – is singled out for obloquy and persecution, is not conceptually identical to antisemitism, in which the Jewish people itself is singled out and ill-treated. They differ because the targets of these two parallel, violent and irrational hatreds are different. One is a state and the other is a people. But almost everything else about these ideologies of hate is the same. And someone who professes one of them is usually in the grip of the other, whether or not he admits it.

It’s difficult to understand this phenomenon without noting its historical origins. Until 1973, Israel was more or less treated like a normal 3^rd world state, buffeted by the struggle between the West and the Soviet Union, with the US as its patron, and the Arab states as local enemies. But in the late 1960s, the Soviets developed a narrative for the Arabs, more sophisticated than the ethnic and religious prejudice and damaged Arab honor that had previously served them – and did not work in the West. The Palestinians were presented as an oppressed indigenous people with a national liberation movement, the PLO.

Nothing really changed immediately, except for the extreme Left, which welcomed the PLO into its pantheon of liberation movements. But after the 1973 war, the Arabs activated their oil weapon, tripling oil prices. Markets crashed, fuel prices shot up, shortages of gasoline, heating oil, and diesel fuel became common. The Arabs made sure the entire world understood that it was Israel’s fault.

In 1975, the UN punished Israel by declaring Zionism a form of racism, and the PLO carried out several high-profile acts of international terrorism to emphasize the point made by the oil embargo – that Israel was the problem. Governments and other institutions around the world understood. The combination of these practical actions with the “appealing” Soviet-developed Palestinian narrative, facilitated the mutation of traditional European antisemitism into obsessive anti-Zionism. It has only grown stronger since.

In 2001, the Durban conference on racism was turned into an anti-Israel hatefest, focusing on the alleged Israeli denial of human rights to Palestinians; the outlandish idea of “Israeli apartheid” was introduced, and it proved to have legs. In a manner similar to the events of the 1970s, it was immediately followed by the 9/11 attack, with kinetic terrorism driving home the ideological point.

Recently, the traditional “extreme right-wing” style of highly violent Jew-hatred has become more visible in the US. It is aided by internet communications, and fueled by a general breakdown in social structures. It is more violent and frightening (at least in the US) than the anti-Zionist movements; but the latter are far more dangerous to the Jewish people in the long run.

Back to the cartoon: personally, I’m tired of listening to excuses. I don’t accept the NY Times’ apology. Let them apologize for years of continuous negative focus on Israel as well as the stupid cartoon. Or not apologize; they could just admit that they would prefer that there were no Jewish state. It’s always best to know who one’s real enemies are.

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05/01 Links Pt2: Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day amid fears of resurgent anti-Semitism; Corbyn endorsed antisemitic book; Instagram story of young Holocaust victim Eva aims at new generation

From Ian:

The ‘Peaceful’ Movement to Destroy Israel

The immediate result of Israel’s recent election was a victory for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a close ally of American President Donald Trump. But the election results have also revived the perennial interest outside the country in the political lives of Israelis and Palestinians. Paradoxically, while formal relations between the governments of Israel and the U.S. appear to be at a high, anti-Israel political movements have also been getting stronger as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has inched closer to normalization in American progressive and to some extent liberal politics.

The growth of the BDS movement in America presents a serious challenge. It means that even as the U.S. alliance with Israel may grow stronger on some fronts it will always remain vulnerable to changes in political administration and sudden setbacks and it has a negative impact on the relations between Israel and left-leaning Jewish Americans. It is imperative, therefore to confront the false premises on which the BDS case has been constructed and expose the great distance between the polite myths repeated by BDS supporters and the violent realities inherent in a political cause that holds as its ultimate goal the destruction of Israel.

Setting the record straight on the issue of the ‘two-state solution’
One place to begin examining the misconceptions surrounding BDS is with a long article written in The Guardian last August by the American journalist Nathan Thrall, which purported to explain the historical roots and current aims of the movement. In fact, Thrall’s thousands of words on the subject highlighted the fallacies animating the beliefs of progressive Americans on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Thrall mentions “two-states” 15 times in his Guardian article, but not even once does he mention “two-states for two-peoples,” which indicates his deep misunderstanding of the issue. Indeed, the Palestinian leadership is ready to have a “two-state solution” as long as it is not a “two-states for two-peoples, with a mutual recognition of their national identity” solution. The Palestinian narrative thus negates the existence of a Jewish people and of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine throughout history, and treats Zionism as a racist, colonialist movement created by the Europeans to promote Western interests. It therefore rejects the idea of a state for the Jewish people on any grain of soil in Palestine.

This is the core of the conflict and has been so since this narrative was formed after the Balfour Declaration in 1917, since, before 1900, namely before the emergence of Zionism, the Arab residents of this piece of land did not consider themselves Palestinians.

Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day amid fears of resurgent anti-Semitism

Israel will begin marking national Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday evening, launching 24 hours of ceremonies, services and events honoring the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II and more who lived through the Shoah.

The annual remembrance is one of the most solemn days on Israel’s national calendar, with much of the country all but shutting down to honor the victims of the Nazi killing machine.

Cities, towns and schools throughout the country will hold ceremonies featuring candle lightings and the memories of survivors, TV and radio station will focus exclusively on memories of the genocide. At Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum, an official state event will feature six torch lightings from those who lived through the genocide and addresses by Israeli leaders.

The Yad Vashem event will begin at 8 p.m., and be attended by the president, prime minister and other dignitaries.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday his speech would include comments about a cartoon denounced as anti-Semitic that appeared in the New York Times last week. The Times has since apologized for the drawing.

The ceremony will air live on Israeli television. It will also be available with simultaneous translation into English, French and Russian on Yad Vashem’s Facebook page as well as on YouTube.

Yom HaShoah

“In 1942 the Italians, who had already determined to adopt a more radical policy against the Jews, used the Jewish community’s enthusiastic welcome of the Allied soldiers as a pretext to punish the Jews of Libya for their betrayal. Mussolini determined to disperse or remove the Libyan Jews; this campaign was called “sfollamento”. The sfollamento of the Libyan Jews was different depending on the area in which they lived. In the Cyrenaica area, the Jews were divided into three groups according to their citizenship:

Jews with French citizenship or under Tunisian protection were to be sent to concentration camps in Algeria and Tunisia;

Jews with British citizenship were to be sent to camps in Europe. Though initially they were thrown into detention camps in Italy, once the Germans occupied Italy in 1943 they were taken to Bergen Belsen, in Germany, and Innsbruck-Reichenau, an affiliate of Dachau, in Austria;

Jews holding Libyan citizenship, especially those from the Cyrenaica region, were to be deported to concentration camps in Tripolitania, the most infamous of which was Giado (Jado). […]

Giado (or Jado), on the border of the desert, 235 kilometers south of Tripoli, was the most brutal of the camps in Libya. Jado was a former army camp, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Its commandants were Italian, and the guards were Italian and Arab policemen. By June, 1942, the Italians had deported, in stages, a total of 2,584 Jews to Jado; all but 47 of them were Libyan Jews. Living conditions in the camp were miserable. The camp was overcrowded – tens of families slept in a space of four meters and separated only by bedding and blankets. Daily food rations consisted of a few grams of rice, oil, sugar and coffee substitute. Men over the age of 18 were sent out everyday to forced labor. Water shortages, malnutrition, overcrowding, and filth intensified the spread of contagious diseases. Inmates buried the dead in a cemetery on a hill outside the camp which had been an ancient Jewish cemetery. On top of this wretched existence, the Italian guards of the camp enjoyed humiliating the Jews. Out of the almost 2,600 Jews sent to Jado, 562 Jews died of weakness and hunger, and especially from typhoid fever and typhus. This was the highest number of Jewish victims in Islamic countries during World War II.”

Holocaust Survivor Testimony: Iris Mozzeri

Watch my new whiteboard animation which explores the connection between #Jews as a people, #Judaism as a religion, & #Israel as a state. It shows how this connection is intrinsic to the link between antisemitism and anti-Zionism; something too often overlooked or misunderstood. pic.twitter.com/zJjedgZ2ZX
— Rabbi Sacks (@rabbisacks) April 30, 2019

We were sorry when Bret Stephens left the helm of the Jerusalem Post. We liked him. He was young and intelligent, and not (yet) poisoned by the left.

He gave class and weight to our small town paper, with his Wall Street Journal editorial creds. It gave us pride to think we’d snagged him for ourselves.

But then he left. It was 2004, the Second Intifada, when bus bombings were a near daily event. One of those bombs exploded near the Stephens’ family residence, in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia. From the Sydney Herald:

Bret Stephens, editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post, said he heard the boom and ran to the scene.

"There was glass everywhere, human remains everywhere, shoes, feet, pieces of guts. There were pieces of body everywhere," he said.

We well understood the fear, why he left. But it seemed, nonetheless, a betrayal. We needed Stephens and his reasoned editorials. We needed him in Jerusalem.

With regret and a longing for what might have been, we kept our eyes on Bret as he returned to the Wall Street Journal, taking his talent and insight with him. He usually got it right on Israel, and for that at least, we were grateful.

Then he went to the New York Times. As did Bari Weiss, after having served at Tablet, a respected Jewish interest publication, and like Stephens, a subsequent stint at the Wall Street Journal.

When these two went to the New York Times, Jews collectively wondered what in the actual hell was going on. Both Stephens and Weiss were known to be pro-Israel centrists, which is almost like being conservative. Why would they go to the New York Times, which has long been seen by many Jews as anti-Israel? It felt like they’d gone to the dark side. And it was fishy.

We had no idea what was behind the move. All we could do is hope they’d bring reason to the pages of a newspaper that had never liked the Jews or Israel.

A review of their columns since the move offers mixed messages. Stephens, for instance, told us in one editorial, written on the occasion of Israel’s 70^th birthday, that some Diaspora complaints, especially with respect to religion and refugees, are valid and should be heeded by Jerusalem. That didn’t sit well with those of us who feel that having left, he has no valid business telling Israel what to either heed or disregard.

Regarding Lara Alqasem, who was expelled from Israel (and ultimately allowed back by a turncoat Israeli High Court), Stephens wrote,

“The case for such liberalism today is both pragmatic and principled. In practice, expelling visitors who favor the B.D.S. movement does little if anything to make Israel more secure. But it powerfully reinforces the prejudice of those visitors (along with their supporters) that Israel is a discriminatory police state. If the Israeli government takes umbrage — and rightly so — when Israeli academics or institutions are boycotted by foreign universities, the least it could do is not replicate their illiberal behavior.

“Detaining people like Ms. Alqasem also does little to stem a worrying trend among young American Jews, who are increasingly alienated from Israel because of its hard-line policies. . .

“. . . Societies that shun or expel their critics aren’t protecting themselves. They are advertising their weakness. Does the Jewish state, which prides itself on ingenuity, innovation and adaptability, really have so much to fear from a 22-year-old graduate student from Florida?”

This too, did not sit right with those of us who remained in Israel. The attempt to expel Alqasem was popular in Israel, as her intention in coming here was to punish and hurt the Jewish State, and to poison the minds of young Israelis. For far too long, we’d been a doormat and let people like her in the front door to do their damage. At last we’d grown a pair and told someone capable of doing harm that she was not welcome. In criticizing Israel’s attempt to bar her entry, we definitely felt that Stephens was playing for the wrong team.

Then there was his response to U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a town that had hosted Stephens and his family. Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem was another move popular with Israel, but apparently not with Stephens, who wrote:

“There’s the view that recognition is like giving your college freshman a graduation gift: a premature reward for an Israeli government that hasn’t yet done what’s needed to make a Palestinian state possible.”

It is difficult to believe that Stephens is unaware of just how much Israel has done to advance the cause of peace, and conversely, how little the other side has done with its continuous famous no’s; its refusal to accept normalization with Israel on any level. Stephens, having heard and witnessed the aftermath of a bus bombing, having lived in the heart of the city that Trump recognized, would seem to be the last person to tell Israel that it has not done “what is needed” to satisfy the other side. In suggesting that Israel had omitted some act that would somehow change the Arab refusal to accept anything less than all the territory Judenrein, Stephens most definitely drew a line in the sand between him and us, meaning between Bret Stephens and Israel.

While we might wonder what the New York Times offered to get Stephens (and Weiss) on board, both physically and metaphorically, it’s important to note that their views have not been confined to the Grey Lady. In the pages of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Stephens came out of the closet on settlements:

“Israel is not a nation of saints and has made its mistakes. The most serious of those is proliferation of West Bank settlements beyond those in historically recognized blocs.”

Really? Settlements are the problem, a mistake? This is what prevents peace? Jews building homes in indigenous territory? Or is it that intransigent non-peace partner who refuses a Jewish State within any borders one might name? The “partner” who blew up the bus that made Stephens and his family, pick up and leave?

As for Bari Weiss, she also gets it wrong on settlements.

“So the big criticism, right, is that they're occupying another people and that is corrosive to the State of Israel, sort of morally like to occupy another people. On the other hand what happens if they pull out of the West Bank tomorrow, right?

"I'm for a two-state solution ultimately ending the occupation but if I'm real I have to be honest about what that would look like. Well, what it looks like in Gaza is that now you have a terrorist State right at the border which is ruled by Hamas.”

Why is this position on settlements wrong? Because Jews have a right to build homes in Judea and Samaria. They have the legal right and the moral right. It is their indigenous territory. Building homes hurts no one. Building homes does not prevent peace or coexistence. Also, Israel occupies no one. Arabs either live as Israeli citizens, or under Arab leadership in towns and villages in Judea and Samaria, or in Gaza.

The Arabs could have had a state, and rejected every offer. And in fact, they received 78% of the British Mandate to build their own national home. This is Jordan, where 80% of the population is “Palestinian.” Israel furthermore gave the Arabs a second territory to rule, expelling thousands of Jews to do so, in the Disengagement from Gaza.

There is so much more I would say to Bari if only we could sit down for a heart-to-heart. I feel I know her. Both of us are from Squirrel Hill. Her grandmother was my beloved English teacher.

Andy Weiss was not only a beloved English teacher, but served as my student adviser, inviting me to her beautiful home for Sunday brunch just so we could chat at length. I could tell her anything. And did.

Her late aunt, Ellen Weiss Kander, was my dear bunk mate at summer camp, a woman who was kind and sweet as sugar. Her untimely death from liver cancer was a loss to all of Pittsburgh and certainly to the Jewish community.

Ellen Weiss Kander, A"H, is second from right, top row. She was sweet as sugar. The author, Varda Meyers Epstein, is second from left, bottom row

But aside from the settlement issue, Bari gets it wrong on Israel. Especially here, where she says, “Zionists love Israel because of the way in which it brings together the values of individual freedom and Jewish civilization, not because of some blood and soil nationalism.”

That is exactly wrong. I love Israel because of exactly neither of those values, but in particular because of blood and soil nationalism. I would eat Israel’s dirt with a spoon. I love it that much. (I kissed the tarmac at Ben Gurion. And that was not tasty. But I digress.)

Having reviewed the evolution of views regarding Israel since the move by Stephens and Weiss to the New York Times, we come to Stephens' latest op-ed on the now infamous antisemitic cartoon of a blind, be-yarmulked Trump led by the dachshund Netanyahu.

Stephens begins:

“As prejudices go, anti-Semitism can sometimes be hard to pin down, but on Thursday the opinion pages of The New York Times international edition provided a textbook illustration of it.”

. . . and then did so again on Saturday:

The second antisemitic cartoon appeared a day after the publication of Stephens’ op-ed, and the same day an antisemite 1) killed Lori Kaye; 2) peppered little kids with shrapnel; and 3) blew off a rabbi’s finger(s). Here we will give Stephens credit: he could not have prophesied, as his deadline approached, that the second cartoon would be published. But the second cartoon blows away Stephens’ premise for his piece: that the (first) cartoon was an oversight, not policy.

Stephens says what Jews long known about the New York Times: that it buried news of the Holocaust during World War II and ever since, has been rabidly anti-Israel. “For these readers,” says Stephens, “the cartoon would have come like the slip of the tongue that reveals the deeper institutional prejudice. What was long suspected is, at last, revealed.”

Stephens fails to mention the Congress Jew tracker that appeared, then quietly disappeared, in 2015. He also neglected to bring up the “Jesus is a Palestinian” piece that had been published in the pages of the NY Times just one week prior to either antisemitic cartoon.

But with his brief mention of selected historical facts, Stephens now thinks he has us in the palm of his hand—that we’ll now buy anything he has to say. At this point, the op-ed becomes an apologia. “The real story is a bit different, though not in ways that acquit The Times. The cartoon appeared in the print version of the international edition, which has a limited overseas circulation, a much smaller staff, and far less oversight than the regular edition. Incredibly, the cartoon itself was selected and seen by just one midlevel editor right before the paper went to press.”

This does not pass the smell test. This is the New York Times. Oversight is its middle name. But even if we were to be persuaded it was a mere editorial oversight, what happened in the wake of publication proves otherwise. There was the non-apology that stood only until we wouldn’t stand for it, at which point, a “real” apology was issued. There was the second cartoon, which, like nothing else before it, reveals the endemic antisemitic policy at the New York Times. Finally, there is the lack of action: no one was fired.

And there is definitely a feeling that someone must be fired. A head needs to roll, and if, as is suggested by Stephens, it was “just one midlevel editor” than that is the elected head.

What happened, this situation, cannot be left as is, allowed to fester and stink. This is an ugly bloom that must be nipped in the bud.

So first Stephens tells us it was an oversight. Then he tells us that the publication of the (first) cartoon was not a willful expression of antisemitism, only ignorance. (Which is it? Ignorance or an oversight?) He writes:

“The problem with the cartoon isn’t that its publication was a willful act of anti-Semitism. It wasn’t. The problem is that its publication was an astonishing act of ignorance of anti-Semitism — and that, at a publication that is otherwise hyper-alert to nearly every conceivable expression of prejudice, from mansplaining to racial microaggressions to transphobia.”

This too, does not wash. Of the two actors who let that cartoon go to press, the cartoonist and the editor, neither of them were ignorant. The grudging non-apology, as well, was a purposeful expression of the newspaper not being sorry for hating Jews. All of what happened sprang, indeed, from willful antisemitism.

But this is what Jews do when they are a part of the problem: they make excuses for the bad behavior of others toward them and their people. This is wrong. The New York Times, precisely now, must remain in the hot seat, and do much, much more to rectify this sickness, this evil.

Almost as an afterthought, Stephens finishes his defense of the Times, by committing an act of fealty to the anti-Trump overlords at his place of work: treason by omission. Stephens refers to a need to apologize to the Israeli prime minister, “The paper owes the Israeli prime minister an apology,” but then goes on to say nothing about the insult to his own president.

Here was POTUS depicted as the big blind hulking Jew led by Israel, but Stephens deems this unworthy of even a pat New York Times apology. Because in Stephens’ world, it is apparently a mitzvah to kick Trump in the teeth, to overlook any insults to him, and to never apologize for any of it.

I’m not sure what happened to Bret Stephens. Was this always how he felt—what he believed? It is difficult to understand, and it is not very pretty. All I know is, I used to admire the man, and now I find I cannot.

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Hamas Fires Rockets Into Mediterranean To Train For When Jews Already Driven Into Sea (Preoccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Gaza City, May 1 - Military planners of the Islamist movement that governs this territory conducted a missile test today that involved shooting a salvo of the weapons into the waters off the coast, in preparation for the eventual defeat of the Zionist Entity and the consequent forcing of all its Jews into those waters.

Hamas fired the rockets in coordination with several other factions with a presence in Gaza, both as a warning to Israel and as part of a strategic effort to maintain readiness if and when the hoped-for victory over the Jews occurs and the faithful can finally achieve the vision that Palestinian leaders of the 1940's first promulgated: driving the Jews into the sea. Once that occurs, a spokesman for the movement explained, its fighters must continue to fight the Jews driven into the sea, by whatever means, and the group's continued development of missile technology aims partly toward that stage of the conflict.

"We must be prepared for victory," stated Fawzi Barhoum. "What good is defeating the Zionist usurpers if we are unready to exploit that defeat? To that end we have continued to hone our rocket capabilities along two fronts: the current stage of the war, targeting the soldiers and settlements where the rapist scum Jews ravage our native soil, and the next stage, when we have driven them all into the Mediterranean and must target them there."

Analysts note that Hamas's attention to a future without Israel marks an important shift in the movement's orientation, which until now has focused solely on ridding the world of the Zionist scourge, and not in any serious way on what to do after achieving that goal. "It's significant that there's now been some practical thought given to the post-Israel situation," remarked Phil Latio of the Brookings Institution. "Most revolutionary movements, which is what Hamas and its parent, the Muslim Brotherhood, are, need an enemy, the better to unify the masses and remove potential focus from the leadership's failings or crimes. That usually results in poor governance once the revolution succeeds, since the enemy has been vanquished, so now what? As with Iran, for example, Qaddafi's Libya, or Chavez's Venezuela, the leadership feels compelled to continue insisting the enemy remains. It's encouraging that Hamas appears to be looking beyond victory at what actual policy looks like in the absence of their lifelong enemy. It's a breath of fresh air."

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05/01 Links Pt1: Shapiro: The NYTs’ Anti-Semitism Is Shocking, but Not Surprising; Glick: NYTs, Central Clearinghouse of Antisemitism in America; Would Hamas Attack 2019 Eurovision Event in Israel?

From Ian:

Ben Shapiro: The New York Times’ Anti-Semitism Is Shocking, but Not Surprising

The Times suggested that information about Palestinian payments to families of terrorists was “far-right conspiracy programming.” The Times simply ignored Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s calling U.S. ambassador David Friedman “son of a dog,” didn’t report Abbas’s comments about Jews “falsifying history,” and omitted coverage of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar telling Palestinians about to storm the Israeli border, “We will take down the border, and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies.”

Back in 2015, the New York Times printed a list of lawmakers who voted against the anti-Israel Iran deal — listing them by the percentage of Jews in their districts and noting which ones were Jewish themselves. Back in 2014, the publisher of the newspaper, Margaret Sullivan, had to remind her own reporters to cover the Palestinians as “more than just victims,” thanks to the paper’s insanely one-sided coverage.

The Times’ ugly record of anti-Semitism goes all the way back to 2000, when the newspaper printed a photo of a Jewish student beaten by Palestinian Arabs and defended by an Israeli soldier – but captioned the photo by labeling the beaten man an Arab.

In actuality, the Times cares about anti-Semitism only when it can be used as a political weapon. The Times admitted in November that it had neglected to cover anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York City specifically because such anti-Semitism “refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy,” explaining that “when a Hasidic man or woman is attacked by anyone in New York City, mainstream progressive advocacy groups do not typically send out emails calling for concern and fellowship and candlelight vigils in Union Square.”

The mainstream Left has engaged in self-flattering blindness when it comes to Jew-hatred. And all too often, that blindness veers into outright anti-Semitism.

Caroline Glick: New York Times, Central Clearinghouse of Antisemitism in America

The Times’ active propagation of anti-Jewish sentiment is not the only way the paper promotes Jew-hatred. It has co-opted of the discourse on antisemitism in a manner that sanitizes the paper and its followers from allegations of being part of the problem. It has led the charge in reducing the acceptable discourse on antisemitism to a discussion of right wing antisemitism. Led by reporter Jonathan Weisman, with able assists from Weiss and Stephens, the Times has pushed the view that the most dangerous antisemites in America are Trump supporters. The basis of this slander is the false claim that Trump referred to the neo-Nazis who protested in Charlottesville in August 2017 as “very fine people.” As Breitbart’s Joel Pollak noted, Trump specifically singled out the neo-Nazis for condemnation and said merely that the protesters at the scene who simply wanted the statue of Robert E. Lee preserved (and those who peacefully opposed them) were decent people.

The Times has used this falsehood as a means to project the view that hatred of Jews begins with Trump – arguably the most pro-Jewish president in U.S. history, goes through the Republican Party, which has actively defended Jews in the face of Democratic bigotry, and ends with his supporters.

By attributing an imaginary hostility against Jews to Trump, Republicans, and Trump supporters, the Times has effectively given carte blanche to itself, the Democrats, and its fellow Trump-hating antisemites to promote Jew-hatred.

John Earnest and Robert Bowers were not ordered to enter synagogues and massacre Jews by the editors of the New York Times. But their decisions to do so was made in an environment of hatred for Jews that the Times promotes every day.

Following the Bowers massacre of Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the New York Times and its Trump-hating columnists blamed Trump for Bowers’s action. Not only was this a slander. It was also pure projection.

NYT Suspends Publication of Syndicated Cartoons After Anti-Semitic Allegations

Brooke Goldstein on the Hannity Show, Fox News, discussing the latest anti-Semitic cartoons published by The New York Times...

Ruthie Blum: Jewish violence: What the Gray Lady knows it need not fear

It is too early to tell how many Times readers will cancel their subscriptions in the wake of the debacle. It is also unclear how long it will take for the storm to blow over.

But one thing is certain: The only worry that the left-wing daily has at the moment is about loss of revenue and damage to its already dubious reputation.

Nobody at the paper or elsewhere is bracing for an armed Jewish onslaught. You know, like the slaughter in 2015 of 12 cartoonists and editors at the left-wing satirical French weekly, Charlie Hebdo, when it went after Islam. That the Paris-based paper regularly mocked Judaism and Christianity did not factor into the Islamist terrorists’ rampage, which continued on to the district’s Hyper Cacher kosher market, where shoppers were taken hostage and four Jews were murdered.

The Charlie Hebdo office was also fire-bombed in 2011, after publishing a cartoon of Muhammad in an issue whose cover was titled “Sharia Weekly.” This was five years after the paper was sued for running a series of controversial Muhammad-based cartoons that had appeared months earlier in the Danish daily, Jyllands-Posten, and caused a global Islamic assault.

Indeed, when Jyllands-Posten published a series of Muhammad cartoons in September 2005, the angry reaction on the part of local Muslims was swift. Although the paper’s editors explained that the purpose of the cartoons had been to spur debate in Denmark about ethnicity and free speech, what the satirical illustrations sparked was a worldwide frenzy.

Indeed, as word of the cartoon controversy gradually spread—in the days before Twitter was a household name—Muslims began to riot in Europe, North America, Australia, Africa and the Middle East.

At least 200 people were killed during or as a result of these demonstrations, which were also used as an excuse for radical Muslim groups to vent their rage against Christians. Churches and Western embassies were attacked, and Jyllands-Posten cartoonists, who were receiving credible death threats, went into hiding.

The ADL Opposes Racism, But Meets With a Racist (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

On Sunday, The ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt joined in the furor over The New York Times' antisemitic cartoon -- and Greenblatt didn't hold back.

Greenblatt warned against normalizing vile antisemitism

Greenblatt went further, calling out The New York Times for "a moral failing of major proportions" -- and the need for accountability and action

He concluded with recommendations, including that a review of policy is necessary:

The fact that Greenblatt and the ADL stepped in is important. It shows that at a time when accusations are flying back and forth accusing either the left or the right of being the main cause of the rise of antisemitism in the US, the ADL takes a balanced approach and rises above the fray, addressing the incitement of hate wherever it sees it.

If only Greenblatt could spot racism when he encounters it face to face.

Hat tip: Mark Jacobs

On the one hand, who better to go to for pointers on hate crimes than Al Sharpton - After all, Sharpton has a history of inciting hatred.

Putting aside Sharpton's central role in the Tawana Brawley hoax, Sharpton's history of deliberately inciting hatred against Jews is well established.

In 1991, after a Hasidic Jewish driver in Crown Heights accidentally killed Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, antisemitic riots erupted. At the funeral, Sharpton made a point of inflaming the crowd, blaming the "diamond merchants" (Jews) with "the blood of innocent babies" on their hands. Going further, Sharpton then mobilized hundreds of demonstrators on a march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, "No justice, no peace." There, Yankel Rosenbaum, a rabbinical student, was surrounded by a mob shouting "Kill the Jews!" and was stabbed to death.

The Forward quotes comments by Sharpton at the time that could easily be mistaken for the racism spewed by Farrakhan:

The world will tell us [Cato] was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident...It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights...Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid...All we want to say is what Jesus said: if you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no kaffe klatsch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’. Pay for your deeds...It’s no accident that we know we should not be run over. We are the royal family on the planet. We’re the original man. We gazed into the stars and wrote astrology. We had a conversation and that became philosophy. We are the ones who created mathematics. We’re not anybody to be left to die waiting on an ambulance. We are the alpha and omega of creation itself. [emphasis added]

A few years later, in 1995, Sharpton got involved in the protests against Freddy's Fashion Mart and again raised tempers, warning "we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business." Sharpton's organization, National Action Network, set up picket lines. Customers who entered the store were spat on, cursed and accused of being "traitors" and "Uncle Toms." Some protesters starting shouting, "Burn down the Jew store!" while simulating striking a match and Sharpton's colleague Morris Powell saying "We're going to see that this cracker suffers". On December 8, one of the protestors entered Freddy's, shot 4 of the employees and set the store on fire, killing 7 employees.

And it's not as if Sharpton has lost his touch. More recently, Sharpton involved himself in the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin. Without verifying the facts, Sharpton publicly made a statement "that racial language was used" -- a claim that an investigation proved false. Sharpton also exacerbated tensions by deliberately referring to Zimmerman as "white," despite the fact that his mother is Peruvian.

But during their chummy get-together, Greenblatt doesn't say a word about Sharpton's background. These are just two activists fighting the good fight for human rights.

So despite Greenblatt's lecture to The New York Times on Twitter -

o Here we have the ADL normalizing the vile antisemitism of Al Sharpton
o It is the ADL, under Greenblatt's leadership, that demonstrates "a moral failing of major proportions"
o It is Greenblatt who should "commit to reviewing policies"

The question is how Sharpton gets away with this and has not only reinvented himself but is a figure that politicians come to in order to get his blessing.

Whatever the reason, the impunity Sharpton enjoys has spread to a new generation that includes Sarsour, Mallory (a disciple of Sharpton), Omar and Tlaib. Their immunity to criticism and ability to claim they are instead victims of smears and incitement are all part of a growing trend in the incitement of racism and antisemitism in the US.

And the ADL is no longer the champion it used to be in this fight.

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How can you satirize the absurdity of a leader of the Women's March, a huge rock star, a documentary maker who used to be a commentator on CNN and a sportswriter for a national publication complaining that they are being "silenced" at a public event at a major university?

“Israel, Free Speech, and the Battle for Palestinian Human Rights” is the topic of an upcoming event at the University of Massachusetts Amherst that is already drawing its own controversy, including opposition from Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, whose mission is to fight anti-Semitism. The panel, titled “Not Backing Down,” is being put on by the Media Education Foundation and will feature prominent figures who have spoken out against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. Some of the speakers have been labeled as “anti-Semites.”

Among the speakers: Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights who supports a cultural boycott of Israel as part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or BDS; Palestinian-American political activist Linda Sarsour, the co-chair of the Women’s March who also supports BDS; Marc Lamont Hill, a professor and political commentator who CNN fired last year for remarks he gave at the United Nations in support of Palestinian rights and a boycott of Israel; and Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation magazine who has been a vocal critic of the Israeli government.

Sut Jhally, a UMass Amherst communications professor and executive director of the Media Education Foundation, is the organizer of the event. Jhally himself has faced backlash over his film “The Occupation of the American Mind,” which “explores how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby have joined forces, often with very different motives, to shape American media coverage of the conflict in Israel’s favor,” according to the film’s website.

“We’re not really intimidated anymore by this selective outrage,” said Ananya Bhasin, who is part of the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. “This event really is about silencing, so, the more silencing we get, the more it solidifies why this event needs to take place.”

Zirin, who is Jewish, also takes issue with those who have said Sarsour and the other panelists traffic in anti-Semitism. That rhetoric, Zirin said, is an “old tactic that’s meant to silence debate and chill discussion.”

I'm sorry, but have any of these people been "silenced?" Have they been intimidated into not speaking their minds?

These "silenced" critics of Israel - who often traffic in antisemitism as well - somehow manage to get on the front pages of major media. Their tweets get retweeted thousands of times by their fans.

It is absurd.

If anything, when people point out any antisemitism they traffic in, like Marc Lamont Hill's accusation that Israeli Jews are poisoning Palestinians' water, that doesn't get mentioned in the major media in stories about Hill. He's regarded as being merely a "pro-Palestinian activist."

That is what silencing looks like.

I also tweeted about the hypocrisy going on here:

Upcoming UMass conference with @lsarsour, @marclamonthill and @rogerwaters:: "We hate when those racist, colonialist, baby-killing, water poisoning, America controlling 'Zionists' try to silence us by calling us antisemitic." pic.twitter.com/b7MCu6E957
— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) May 1, 2019

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Tehran International Book Fair includes, of course, antisemitiic books

On Monday, Iran's "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Khamenei visited Tehran’s 32nd International Book Fair.

One of the books on sale at the fair is the Farsi-language "The Secret Role of Jews in Islam" by Yusuf Rashad.

The book says that Jews have gained the ability to consolidate their dominance through Zionist lobbies that govern all the affairs of major Western countries, and this is only possible after the destruction of the religion of these countries, which is Christianity. They have replaced Christianity with philosophy, which is a Jewish idea, according to the book.

In the first chapter, it explains how the Jews found the ability to succeed, by following the steps of the devil, his army and his party, and by working hard, with precise planning, they excel, control, dominate, and ruin the Christian religion.

Here are some chapter titles:

Hostility of the Jews and their betrayal of Islam and Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)
Violation of the covenant of the Jews against the Muslims
Treason and betrayal of the people of Qa'a
Ka'bbn Ashraf and his betrayal of Muslims
The story of the killing of Ashraf
Betrayal, disobedience, and violation of the holy Jewish tradition
Great betrayal and partisanship of the Benghazi Jews
The betrayal of the kings of the Jews
Israelis; the role of secret Jews in the Islamic heritage
The Hidden Jewish Hand in Islamic Interpretation Books
Hidden Jews in the Territory of the Ottoman Caliphate
The relationship between the Jews and the Freemasonry movement
The influence of the two Jews on the Turkish regime
The Turkish leader, Mustafa Atatürk and the Jews of Dhummeh
The role and influence of the two Jews in the Turkish media

Just from the chapter titles we see that the book is nothing but incitement - it tells stories (whether true or not) of individual Jews as a proxy for all Jews.

Remember, Iran claims to not be antisemitic at all.

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