H.Res.496 introduced by Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib is an attempt to sanction antisemitism under the guise of "free speech."
The most offensive part is its comparison of boycotting Israel with boycotting Nazi goods:
Whereas Americans of conscience have a proud history of participating in boycotts to advocate for human rights abroad, including— (2) boycotting Nazi Germany from March 1933 to October 1941 in response to the dehumanization of the Jewish people in the lead-up to the Holocaust;
This is Holocaust inversion and it is one of the examples of antisemitism under the IHRA definition, "Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis."
Yes, US Congress now has a resolution that will be debated that includes antisemitism.
But perhaps the most insidious part of the resolution is saying that it is only supporting "boycotts in pursuit of civil and human rights."
You see, boycotts are just another word for discrimination. Every boycott says that the boycotter will choose one provider of goods and services over another based on reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the product.
The exact same logic that protects boycotts of Israelis applies to bigots boycotting businesses owned by blacks or gays or immigrants or women.
In order to forestall the free speech protection of boycotts against people who fall on the positive side of intersectionality pseudo-science, Omar and Tlaib are characterizing BDS not as a product of bigotry and antisemitism but as "pursuit of civil and human rights."
Even if this resolution gets defeated, their underlying logic that implies that Israel is a violator of human rights on par with Nazi Germany will be debated in Congress and enshrined in the proceedings of Congress forever. As I have recently noted, the debate itself is what BDS is after, not the boycott - they want to normalize anti-Zionism and its antisemitic components as a mainstream opinion.
As I have noted in the past, BDS is explicitly antisemitic. The call to boycott "Israeli" goods does not extend to good created by Arab Israelis. The call to boycott "settlement" goods only applies to goods created by Israeli Jews, not Israeli Arabs. A look through the businesses in industrial parks in Mishor Adumim, Barkan, Atarot and other "settlements" show quite a few with Arab names, like Radwan Brothers Refrigeration and Air Conditioning or Khaled Ali Metals or the Shweiki Glass Factory.
So, yes, BDS is antisemitic and Omar and Tlaib are defending antisemitic boycotts under the pretense not only of "free speech" but of "protecting human and civil rights." This is a very serious line being crossed.
(For a comprehensive list of legal arguments that show that there is nothing at all wrong with anti-BDS laws, see David Bernstein here and here.)
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Odeh Bisharat is an Arab novelist, political writer and activist, who is also – quite painfully for him – a citizen of the Jewish state of Israel. He recently published an op-ed in that flagship of Jewish shame, Ha’aretz, in which he describes the display at Arab schools of the flag of the state of Israel, the very Jewish magen david, as “an act of sadism:”
After all, the national flag … is related to the Arabs’ tragedies from 1948 to the present. It provokes considerable sadness, bitterness and even revulsion. It was under this flag that most of the Arab villages were captured in 1948, and later their residents were expelled under this flag, and in the shadow of this flag all those villages were destroyed. … The Arabs don’t object to the flag because of what it symbolizes for the Jews — a state and independence — but because of what it symbolizes for the Arabs: expulsion and destruction.
I understand. After all, Jews were forced to stand in view of all kinds of flags, from the Roman standards that symbolized the destruction of our holy Temple and expulsion from our homeland of Judea, to the Christian cross of persecution, and even the twisted cross of Nazi Germany.
But painful or not, there is an important lesson conveyed by the flag of the state of Israel to its Arab residents, a lesson that Bisharat rejects with his “sadness, bitterness and even revulsion.” That lesson, which the editors of Ha’aretz also would prefer not to learn, is that the Jews won their War of Independence in 1948, a war that was forced upon them by the refusal of the Arab residents of the land and their Arab neighbors to accept any Jewish state, no matter how small.
It was a vicious war, in which the Arab armies eliminated any trace of Jewish presence in the areas they controlled, expelling or murdering the people and destroying synagogues and even cemeteries. The Arab nakba was nothing compared to the “war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades,” in the words of the Arab League’s Abdel Rahman Azzam, that would have occurred had the Arabs won.
But note: they didn’t win. A Jewish state was created, one which does not insist on ethnic purity within its borders; and Odeh Bisharat lives and works in it, received a university education in it, can vote and hold political office in it, and is not punished – indeed, he is paid – for vilely speaking out against it as he does.
Nevertheless, he should be aware that the Jews didn’t go through the trials of blood required to create their state to turn it into a “state of its citizens” or a binational state. It is and will be a Jewish state with a Jewish flag, other Jewish symbols, a right of return for Jews only, and even a Nation-State Law that asserts those propositions.
Bisharat does not like to be reminded – it is a “sadistic” torture – of the fact that a Jewish state was established on land that he believes should belong to Arabs. I am sure that if it were pointed out to him that there are 21 explicitly Arab states in the world and only this one Jewish state, he would say that there is only one Palestine, and that it should belong to the “Palestinian people.”
Excuse me, but this is rubbish. “Palestinians” didn’t even self-identify as such until the mid-1960s, when the KGB suggested that this would be a good strategy. Palestinian Arabs are mostly descended from 19th and 20th century migrants from various countries in the Arab world, and their culture reflects that. Unlike the Jewish people, they do not have a unique language, religion, or place of origin. What is specifically “Palestinian” about their culture is its ultra-violent hatred and rejection of Jewish sovereignty; as well as airline hijacking, suicide bombing, and stabbing random Jews in the street. What else is “Palestinian?”
Odeh Bisharat does not have a deed to this land. If the Arabs of Palestine had any claim to justice, it was blown away by the hundredth exploding bus or pizza restaurant. His “revulsion” is misdirected: it should be aimed at the real architects of the nakba, the Arab states that tried to wipe out the Jews and then put the Arab refugees of 1948 in camps instead of resettling them, as Israel did for the Jews fleeing Arab countries. It should be aimed at Haj Amin al-Husseini, who incited pogroms against Jews and then went to Germany to work with Hitler to create a Middle Eastern edition of the Holocaust. It should be aimed at Yasser Arafat, who made himself fabulously wealthy by stealing aid intended for Palestinian Arabs, while masterminding international terrorism and creating an educational system that has been successfully breeding murderers since 1993.
Arab citizens of Israel need to think regularly about these things. They would rather not. It’s more comfortable to see themselves as victims or resistance fighters. But if they want to live here, to enjoy the benefits of a relatively uncorrupt and highly developed modern society, they will have to understand that here they will always be Arabs living in a Jewish state. If displaying the flag on every school, Arab or Jewish, will help make that clear to everyone, it’s worth Bisharat’s discomfort.
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According to the New York City Police Department, the city has seen nineteen violent anti-Semitic attacks in the first half of this year and 33 in 2018, compared with only seventeen in the previous year. There is reason to believe many more unreported incidents have taken place. Overwhelmingly, the victims are Orthodox Jews in the ḥasidic Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Borough Park, and Williamsburg. Armin Rosen, examining this phenomenon, notes that no discernible pattern can be identified among the perpetrators, who have no links to anti-Israel groups, Islamists, the alt-right, or any known anti-Semitic ideology:
One popular explanation both within and beyond the affected communities is that Jews are being blamed for gentrification. . . But if rising housing prices really are causing the anti-Semitism surge, then it means New York’s harassers and attackers are little different from Jew-haters of centuries past, who have always blamed their Jewish neighbors for whatever the current evils happen to be—whether it’s bubonic plague or the arrival of wealthy newcomers. Nor is there a public record showing dozens of random attacks against gentrifying white hipsters in the same neighborhoods. . . .
Another explanation for the spike is that there is no spike: Orthodox Jews have always been attacked and harassed in New York. The perception of a rise in anti-Semitism may therefore be a function of heightened vigilance and reporting, social media, and omnipresent security cameras in Jewish neighborhoods.
Whatever the explanation, Rosen continues, the official response has been lackluster:
There is scant evidence that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration or local politicians have made stopping physical attacks on Jews in New York City a priority. After [he was nearly strangled to death outside of his synagogue in Crown Heights in 2018], recalls Menachem Moskowitz, “not one politician came to me to find out what happened or comforted me.”
On July 15, 2019, I spoke at the Department of Justice Summit on Combatting Anti-Semitism, on a panel regarding Anti-Semitism on Campus. My presentation was on “Intersectionality.”
Attorney General William Barr, in his opening statement to the Summit, specifically noted the importance of intersectional anti-Semitism: Another panel will focus on the problem of anti-Semitism on campus. On college campuses today, Jewish students who support Israel are frequently targeted for harassment, Jewish student organizations are marginalized, and progressive Jewish students are told they must denounce their beliefs and their heritage in order be part of “intersectional” causes. We must ensure – for the future of our country and our society – that college campuses remain open to ideological diversity and respectful of people of all faiths.”
If you really want to help
Israel, please lose the word “conflict” from your vocabulary. There is no such
thing as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A conflict is two sides attacking
each other. This is simply not the case when it comes to Israel and the Arabs. The
Arabs attack, the Israelis defend.
People like the notion of a “conflict.”
It’s the American way. It’s tidy.
Americans like to think, “It
takes two to tango,” which really means “It takes two parties to have a
conflict and we prefer a conflict to one party attacking the other so let’s
call it that."
It's not only Americans, of course. Progressives, in general, like to say things like, “There’s
bloodshed on both sides,” as if the cause of blood being shed has no import, no
weight. A dead murderer is equal in death to his victim, therefore the cause of
death must be also be equal. One fact creates the other, in spite of the truth.
So if you have a home invasion and the cops come and shoot someone who just killed your family member, is that also "bloodshed on both sides?" https://t.co/6kdbEZxTqQ
Because people have this need
for parity, for fairness. But this situation does not satisfy the necessary
conditions that define conflict.
A conflict must have two parties at odds with each other. You don’t have that
here. In the case of Israel, you have one side minding its own business and
interests.
The losers, meanwhile, can’t cope with reality. They won’t make the
best of a situation and you can’t make them. They prefer to maim, kill, and
destroy: an adult version of the two-year-old tantrum, albeit an evil version.
Because two-year-olds aren’t responsible in any moral sense for their choices.
But adults, are.
In this case, the adults, who
happen to be Arabs, know just how bad it is to, for instance, kill a
ten-month-old infant in her stroller by sniper fire. This makes the act evil,
which means that in no sense is such an attack at all like a two-year-old’s
tantrum. It is, instead, a willful act of ugly violence. A deed of the Devil.
Shalhevet Pass, HY"D, was ten months' old when she was killed by Arab sniper fire.
Anyone who describes the
situation in Israel as a “conflict” needs to be told the story of Shalhevet
Pass, HY”D. Because where’s the reciprocity in that? What did Shalhevet do to the
man who murdered her? What was his “conflict” with her? Was she perhaps not
wearing enough sunscreen that day?
“Conflict.” I hear the word and
I shake my head. Because the murder of Shalhevet Pass
is not even an isolated incident. Chaya
Zissel Braun was only three months’ old when an Arab rammed his car with
purpose into a waiting crowd of people at a train stop. Chaya Zissel was there with her parents, sitting in her stroller. She sailed into the street and then crashed into the pavement below, dead
on impact. It was too fast for her parents to even try and stop the inevitable
from happening.
Chaya Zissel Braun, HY"D.
But what did Chaya Zissel do to
her murderer? Where is the conflict, the parity?
I will tell you where it is, what it is. It is this:
Chaya Zissel was born a Jew. As was Shalhevet Pass, and Hadas Fogel, HY”D, who was
the same age as Chaya Zissel when Arabs murdered her by decapitation, when she wouldn’t stop crying.
Hadas Fogel, HY"D
Ah! There you have it: she
wouldn’t stop crying! A provocation if I ever heard one. Is this the locus of our "conflict?"
But no. It wasn’t about
the crying. It was that Hadas Fogel was a Jew. Her mere existence was the sole locus of the "disagreement," the point of "conflict" between the "two warring parties."
This is important because so many believe that there really is a conflict and that it is about land. And the only way that any of this is
connected to land is that the Arabs don’t want the Jews to have it. Land rights is a pretend issue, an excuse for Arabs to murder Jews. Because once you paint terror as a conflict about land, there's a focal point for disagreement. Which means two equal warring parties. Parties who can come to the table and negotiate. And since it's a land issue, negotiations means land concessions, which means Jews giving up bits and pieces of the Jewish State until there is nothing left.
Such a process of course, seen from a truer lens, is only Jewish victims rewarding those who murder them. Rewarding terror, alas, only makes them kill more of us to get more of what we have.
Think about it: if it were about land, why on earth would that make it okay to kill a baby? The baby is not responsible for where it is raised. The baby has no guilt, has stolen nothing, does not oppress you. It is just a baby. Something most societies hold as a value to protect and nurture.
The answer, of course, is that it is not about land, and it is not a conflict.
It is about Jews and Jewish continuity. The Jews who continue to live and the people who don't want them to. This is the locus of the conflict, the point of disagreement.
It is the Jewish identity of the victims, in fact, that gives the murderers their courage. It is what allows them to kill old people, children, pregnant women. Or rather, it is the Jewish identity of the victims that takes away any need for a murderer's courage.
Because if you're taught to think of Jews as less than human: apes or pigs, as pests or some sort of vermin, you don't need courage to kill them.
From that perspective, killing Jews is like killing ants or mosquitoes. There are no moral qualms. You step on one, slap at the other. The main thing is they die instead of crawling on
your food, or stinging your arm.
Once we have established the fact that a Jew is something less than human, there is no issue of killing a person with a soul. It's killing a Jew! Knowing all this, why wait until a Jewish baby grows up? It will only do more damage, become harder
to kill.
This process of dehumanizing Jews makes it possible for terrorists to kill innocent infants and other vulnerable populations. But depicting Arab terror as a conflict about land, offers terrorists something more: the freedom to kill Jews at will,
with impunity. Because once there is a conflict, a thing with a focal point for disagreement, you have parity: two opposing sides. And where there is conflict, there are no murderers or victims. Only parties to a disagreement. Even when those "parties" are infants.
In a conflict, there's no question of guilt or blame or innocence. There are just two rivals lashing out at each other in perfect equality, both fighting for the same thing.
Which is so much nicer, after all, than thinking about the men who kill Jewish babies in their strollers and cribs, solely on the basis of their religion.
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Pakistan authorities on Wednesday arrested Hafiz Saeed, the alleged mastermind of a four-day militant attack on the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008, on terror finance charges, a spokesman for the chief minister of Punjab province said.
The arrest came days before a visit to Washington by Prime Minister Imran Khan, who has vowed to crack down on militant groups operating in Pakistan.
Saeed, designated a terrorist by the United States and the United Nations, is the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), or Army of the Pure, the militant group blamed by the United States and India for the Mumbai attacks, which killed more than 160 people.
He has denied any involvement and said his network, which includes 300 seminaries and schools, hospitals, a publishing house and ambulance services, has no ties to militant groups.
A spokesman for Punjab Governor Shahbaz Gill said Saeed was arrested near the town of Gujranwala in central Pakistan.
“The main charge is that he is gathering funds for banned outfits, which is illegal,” the spokesman said.
President Trump’s “deal of the century” – aimed at ending 100 years of conflict between Jews and Arabs over the territory once called “Palestine” – continues to flounder in the face of
· The PLO’s outright rejection of Trump’s deal – even before its details have been published
· Jordan’s continuing refusal to agree to negotiate with Israel when the deal is released
Jordan comprises 78 per cent of former Palestine and is the only sovereign Arab state to have ever occupied (albeit illegally) the West Bank – 4 per cent of former Palestine - between 1948 and 1967. Former Israeli Prime Minister – Ariel Sharon – proposed his own deal in 1992.
Sharon warned against granting autonomy to West Bank Arabs – something that occurred in 1993 after Oslo Accord I was signed and 95 per cent of the West Bank Arabs came under PLO administrative control:
“We must face a simple fact. Autonomy will inevitably lead to Palestinian statehood. The self-governing Authority will enjoy international recognition and command universal attention. Every self-respecting state will open a mission there.
Journalists will coo over keffiyeh-wrapped PLO murderers glowing with a romantic halo. The chairman of the Authority will sit in his office adorned with a wall to wall picture of another chairman, arch-murderer Yasser Arafat. And there will be a PLO flag in the front of the building.”
27 years later, autonomy has not translated into statehood – due to the PLO’s racist policy of refusing to accept the right of Jews to live in the West Bank – the ancient biblical, historic and legally-designated heartland of the Jewish people.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers told Trump administration officials they have reservations about the proposal for a passage connecting the West Bank and Gaza as part of the White House Middle East peace plan, sources briefed on the matter tell me.
Why it matters: The proposal was part of the economic portion of the U.S. plan. It was revealed by the White House to Netanyahu and his aides two weeks before the plan was made public, Israeli officials say. Netanyahu has publicly stressed several times that Israel will keep an open mind about the plan.
The big picture: The economic plan focused almost exclusively on boosting the Palestinian economy and on investments in infrastructure, health and education. But the $5 billion proposal for a highway and railway between the West Bank and Gaza has political significance.
- It showed the U.S. sees the West Bank and Gaza as one territorial unit in any future peace deal. That's in conflict with Israel's policy, in place for over a decade, of keeping the West Bank and Gaza separate.
- The main reservation Netanyahu and his aides conveyed to the Trump administration had to do with security, the sources say.
- They say Israel gave U.S. officials examples of how even today — with no transportation corridor and Israel in full control of Gaza’s borders — Hamas attempts to transfer operatives, messages and know-how from Gaza to the West Bank by exploiting entry permits granted for humanitarian reasons.
Egyptian news site Gomhuria published an article by Dr. Shaima Khattab, "Researcher in Political History and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,"where she shared some results of her research.
Apparently, the Jewish mystical teachings of Kabbalah is what is behind Zionism.
Her muddled theory goes something like this:
Among the Jews of the Middle Ages, there was the philosophy of Kabbalah, which is the study of mystical esotericism in Judaism. It expresses mythical intellectual ideas in Judaism based on magic, sorcery and mysticism. Kabbalah saw the Jewish presence as necessary for the cosmos.
The Jews lived in the Middle Ages in European countries isolated in isolated neighborhoods and did not mix with the people of the country, which affected their thought and their perception of themselves as a clean chosen people!
Since 1902, the founding conference of the "World Mizrahi" movement emerged. Some religious forces have exploited the religious feeling of the Jews to attract them to the ranks of the Zionist movement and to increase the influx of the land of Palestine.
I didn't think early religious Zionists were Kabbalists, but I don't have a Ph.D.
Dr. Khuttab also gives a quick summary of all the major facets of Kabbalah. No, not the sefirot. There are really only three principles of Kabbalah according to her:
1. Magic
2. Killing non-Jews
3. Violation of the sanctity of the Sabbath to save a life.
That makes it much easier to understand!
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China then orchestrated a letter from 37 nations supporting its repressive policies. That letter commended China's efforts in "protecting human and promoting human rights through development," echoing Chinese propaganda points about its detention and re-education camps.
That letter was signed by 14 Muslim majority states, all members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and the United Arab Emirates.
Last December, the human rights committee of the OIC mentioned "disturbing reports" of China's actions against Muslims in a series of tweets.
That all seemed to change by March, when the OIC issued a report saying that it "commends the efforts of the People's Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People's Republic of China."
This was the precursor to last week's sham of a letter supporting China fully in its oppression of Muslims.
Muslim nations love to talk about pride and honor. When they attack Israel in the UN they claim that they are merely defending their fellow Muslims from attacks by others.
This willingness to suck up to China shows that they not only have no pride and no honor, but that they really don't even care about their fellow Muslims.
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Niall Collins is an Irish TD (Member of Parliament) who is the foreign affairs spokesperson with the main opposition party Fianna Fáil and one of the forces behind the "Occupied Territories Bill" banning goods and services from Israeli "settlements" to the point that tourists who buy souvenirs in Jewish-owned shops in Jerusalem could be fined up to €250,000 and subject to up to five years’ imprisonment.
Here is is interviewed on a show about how pro-Palestinian voices are supposedly silenced (not quite sure how this show wasn't affected by this insidious plot). During the interview, while answering a question on this supposed suppression of pro-Palestinian voices, he says he says that the issue cannot solely be blamed on Trump, but also that pesky huge Jewish lobby.
I wouldn't entirely blame the Trump administration either in terms of when we're apportioning blame to the United States, because right across right across corporate America and right across America I think at every level there's a huge Jewish lobby who who have helped to create the the problem that we're now discussing.
Scratch a "pro-Palestinian" voice and you find antisemitism.
The host actually cuts Collins off to go back to his Jewish guest Neve Gordon to stop Collins from embarrassing himself.
(h/t Tomer Ilan)
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Such Holocaust Relativism is rampant among Corbynistas, too, who will frequently ask why Jews keep going on about the Holocaust or will nauseatingly compare Israel to the Nazis and the Gaza Strip to the Warsaw Ghetto. Here, Holocaust Relativism reaches its dire and racist conclusion. It doesn’t only say ‘Jews are nothing special when it comes to suffering’. It also says they are the Nazis now, the genocidaires, the privileged persecutors of minority groups. This is an explicit attempt to erase or make meaningless the history of Jewish persecution by insisting they are now the persecutors, doing to others what was once done to them.
The chipping away at historic Jewish suffering can also be seen in the way the racism they suffer is always, without fail, contrasted with other forms of racism. Jews might face a little bit of hatred, but at least their white privilege protects them from the most visceral forms of hatred, the identitarian racists will argue. Against the aim is the systemised dilution of Jewish experiences to the end of demoting Jewish suffering and elevating other forms of suffering – in particular the prejudice suffered by Muslims.
When Corbynistas continually say, ‘What about Islamophobia?’, they think they are being good, progressive anti-racists. But in truth what they’re doing is reorganising ethnic, racial and social groups according to their own view of whether they are good or bad, deserving or undeserving, sympathetic or privileged. Their instinct is to demote and by extension denigrate Jews through saying: ‘You have privilege. You have media attention. You are always treated as special people. And we’re sick of it.’ And this, of course, is nothing more than a rehash of the old hard-right hatred for these arrogant, rich, well-connected ‘Chosen People’.
The Corbynistas’ anti-Semitism problem is far more profound than they could ever realise. It points to one of the most terrible things about the relentless rise of identity politics on the left – the way it unwittingly rehabilitates old racial thinking and even old racial hatred through its myopic reorganisation of ethnic groups according to the new morality of victimhood. That some leftists are denouncing the Jews as privileged and overly pampered, and are attempting to distract attention from the racism they suffer today and the horrors they suffered in the past, confirms that so-called progressive identitarianism is in truth the means through which some very old, very ugly prejudices find expression today. Identity politics looks increasingly like a gateway drug to racism itself.
🎥 What is the difference between the UK's Conservative Party and the USA's Republican Party? European Member of Parliament and author @DanielJHannan speaks with @BenShapiro about the Conservative movement in America and Europe.
Former CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill claimed that news outlets like NBC and ABC were “Zionist organizations” that produced “Zionist content,” during a panel on Friday at the annual Netroots Nation summit held by progressive activists in Philadelphia.
The summit describes itself as “the largest annual conference for progressives” and has long been a stop for Democratic presidential hopefuls, including this year.
Hill’s comments came less than a year after he lost his CNN perch after calling for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” during an appearance at the U.N. The statement was interpreted by many as a call for the elimination of Israel, something Hill denied.
He made his comments during a panel on “embedding Palestinian rights in the 2020 agenda,” which also featured statements that Israel was engaged in a “white supremacist” project.
In response to a question from the audience, Hill described the choices faced by young journalists when they tell stories about Palestinians.
“They’re like, I want to work for Fox, or I want to work for ABC or NBC or whoever. I want to tell these stories,” he said. “You have to make choices about where you want to work. And if you work for a Zionist organization, you’re going to get Zionist content. And no matter how vigorous you are in the newsroom, there are going to be two, three, four, 17, or maybe one powerful person — not going to suggest a conspiracy — all news outlets have a point of a view. And if your point of view competes with the point of view of the institution, you’re going to have challenges.”
At the summit, t-shirts were sold grouping Zionism with racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism as maladies to be “resisted.” (h/t MtTB)
Marc Lamont Hill suggests ABC and NBC are "Zionist organizations" that produce "Zionist content"
Hill was fired by CNN late last year after he called for the elimination of Israel
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) recently sat down with Hill on BET and did an interview with him pic.twitter.com/jgbbyIJKLq
Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican, has been an outspoken critic of socialism and has frequently emphasized the importance of standing in staunch opposition to an overbearing government.
“They’re wrong when they rush to blame America first, when they fail to recognize that this is the greatest nation that has ever existed, the exceptional nation,” Cheney said. “They’re wrong when they fail to recognize that no people have ever lived in greater freedom, and then they go on and fail to provide the resources our men and women in uniform need to defend that freedom.”
While abstaining from directly naming who she was reprimanding, the rebuke came only hours after four House Democrats, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Massachusetts Rep. Aryanna Pressley held a press conference of their own. During the presser, the group of freshman, referred to as “the Squad,” attacked President Donald Trump for what they considered to be racist and sexist motives.
Cheney also reiterated her condemnation of “vile anti-Semitism” that the freshman group has espoused on multiple occasions.
Omar and Tlaib became America’s first Muslim congresswomen when sworn into office in January. Along with Ocasio-Cortez, the three progressive lawmakers have been embroiled in allegations of anti-Semitism and anti-American sentiments even prior to taking office.
Continuing on my series of re-captioning single panel cartoons (this is about #42 I think...)
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Palestinian solidarity activists in North America are accustomed to being abandoned by many of their “progressive allies”, be it church officials or municipal councils or politicians. This is the sad reality of working in today’s political landscape, where opportunism runs rampant and the pro-Israel lobby has often succeeded in dominating the agenda with its relentless smear and intimidation campaigns. But the cut runs deeper and is profoundly more devastating when it is a long-time genuine ally that enables the Zionist settler colonialist narrative; such is the case with the recent visit of a Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) delegation to Cuba and their presentation at a climate conference in Havana. A visit that besmirches the long history of joint struggle and solidarity between the Cuban and Palestinian peoples.
It is funny that the only place to find good news about Israel is in a virulently anti-Israel publication. As the good guys despair over the gains that seem to be made by the Israel haters, the haters are despairing more over how they have lost their previously-reliable allies!
_________________________
The article goes on to mention the statistic that Israel has cut down 800,000 olive trees since 1967. I have never found a valid source, it seems to be as bogus as the lie that Israel has imprisoned 800,000 Palestinians since 1967.
It links to the poster shown here from Visualizing Palestine. VP gives two sources for the statistic that Israel uprooted 800,000 olive trees in one of its well-designed and completely lying infographics. One is Oxfam, which mentions it in a fact-sheet yet gives no source. The other is an OCHA UN document, "Olive Harvest Factsheet 2011," which doesn't say what they claim it says. Neither does the 2012 document, the last time it was issued.
It is a made-up statistic.
Just as with the prison lie which gets accepted as truth in the UN, the olive tree statistic has been repeated by others as fact.
Without any actual studies to document the number, the 800,000 figure has to be considered a lie.
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The land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has been inhabited for millennia, this much is indisputable. Jericho, Jerusalem, Jenin, and Jaffa are all some of the oldest cities in the world, having been continuously settled since before 2000 BCE.
However, just about everything else about this land is contentious, right down to the name. Palestinian historians such as Nur Masalha and key members of the Palestinian leadership as high as Mahmoud Abbas have claimed that the Palestinians are descendants of ancient peoples such as the Canaanites and Philistines, and that it is from this connection that the name “Palestine” is derived.
Bearing in mind that nationalism as we understand it is in and of itself a 19th-century phenomenon, it’s worth asking if the Palestinian claims are true.
Did the name Palestine come from the people, or did the people take their name from the place?
There are two primary sources for the region which is variously known today as Israel, Palestine, the Levant, and Canaan: archaeology and the Bible. While there are differences between the two, archaeologists and historians agree that the general narrative of the Bible is correct: Canaanites ruled the Levant before being pushed out by the ancient Hebrews, who then fought with the Philistines until invading empires conquered both tribes.
The name “Palestine” first appeared in Herodotus’ 5th century BCE histories to describe the coastal area of the Levant where the Philistines lived, before Romans applied it to the whole of the area following the suppression of the Bar Kochba Revolt of 132 CE. Thereafter, the word Palestine applied to the whole of the land, and subsequent rulers identified it as such.
Welcome to the wounded world of George Orwell’s Winston Smith: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” Add to this – “Jesus was a Palestinian.” This Palestinian Jesus is a distant cousin of Nazi Germany’s Aryan Jesus. I never believed Jesus was my savior. He was a failed messiah. I respect Christians for their beliefs. But Jesus was born a Jew, was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, lived and preached as a Jew in the Galilee, and was executed by Rome as a Jewish rebel. Those who deny that Jesus was a Jew are engaged in “Land of Israel Denial.” These are the same folks who erase from the history books the Hebrew Bible, the Merneptah Stela, Jerusalem’s City of David, the Tel Dan inscription, the Shalmanesser III Obelisk, the stela of Mesha the Moabite, the Hasmonean coins, the Western Wall, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bar-Kochba letters, the Beit Alpha synagogue mosaic, the Mishna, the Midrash, the paytan cantorial poets. And of course, the clay stamp of Baruch ben Neriyah. Deny the Holocaust. Deny the ancient origin of our people in Eretz Yisrael. Deny Jewish history. Deny literary and archaeological evidence. Deny history and prostitute it to ideology.
Add to Orwell’s newspeak: Zionism is imperialism. This lie equates Jews fleeing the pogroms and poverty from the Russian Pale of Settlement with the colonial ambitions of great empires in India, the Congo, and Algeria. I am not the descendant of Khazars whose elite converted to Judaism in the eighth century. This is yet another lie that epitomizes “Eretz Yisrael Denial.” The overwhelming proof from the Bible, historical scholarship, and archaeology is that the origin point of the Jews is the Land of Israel. Ben-Tekoa writes: “The re-birth of the Jewish commonwealth is a direct slap in the face to Islam’s plagiarized image as Allah’s chosen people who are destined to rule the world – versus the millions of Christians whose faith has survived and even been energized by the return of the Jews to their common bible’s promised land. Under Islam, by contrast, the existence of Israel is a mortal threat to the very existence of Islamic belief.” Ben-Tekoa’s most interesting theme is the role that the Algerian war to throw out the colonial French only a few years before the emergence of the PLO and al-Fatah played a central role in transforming a Muslim struggle to destroy the Jews into the rebellion of a Palestinian nation against Zionist occupiers. This is not about a 100-year political struggle between two nations. It is grounded in religion and history dating back 1,400 years.
My given name includes the title of the chief deity of the ancient Canaanites, a name that was transformed into one of those of the God of Israel. The relationship between Canaanite culture and religion and that of ancient Israelite religion and culture is still being debated. But the point is moot. If the Canaanites are, indeed, the original denizens of the Land of Canaan – that was thousands of years ago and does not reflect today’s reality. My name says more about “indigenous peoples” than any propaganda spewed at the UN. How many more lies will the world embrace? This attack on the Jewish people – on the reality of the existence of Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch ben Neriyah – is the product of a false narrative that is worthy of George Orwell’s ministry of truth.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines apartheid as “a political system in which people of different races are separated.” Oxford defines it as “a policy of system of segregation on grounds of race.” Two dictionaries specifically relate this word to South Africa. Merriam-Webster defines “apartheid” as “racial segregation specifically: a former policy of segregation and political and economic discrimination against non-European groups in the Republic of South Africa.” The Collins dictionary says, “apartheid was a political system in South Africa in which people were divided into racial groups and kept apart by law.”
Arabs make up about 20 percent of Israel’s population. A simple study of the Israeli political situation shows that Arab Israelis hold positions in the highest levels of legislative branch (the Knesset), the executive branch (the Israeli cabinet) and the judicial branch (the Supreme Court) something which could not happen in an apartheid society.
The only legal distinction between Jews and Arabs is that Arabs are not required to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. This policy came from David Ben Gurion’s decision not to put Arab Israelis in a position of having to fight fellow Arabs. Volunteers are accepted, and the number of Arab Israelis in the IDF is growing modestly. One can read about people like the IDF’s highest ranking Arab officer, the mostly-Arab Desert Reconnaissance Battallion (a.k.a. Gadsar), an observant Muslim woman serving in an infantry battalion, as well as Arab Christian soldiers. Six Arab Israelis have even received the IDF’s highest decoration, the Medal of Distinguished Service.
1. Why do you choose borders drawn by colonialists? Palestine in maps before 1917 included parts of today's Jordan and none of the Negev - what makes this "historic Palestine"?
Could it be that you are only interested in land controlled by Jews?
2. You claim that money for your products goes towards the Palestinian cause. Your website doesn't specify exactly what organizations, or what percentage of profits. Hamas? The PLO? Islamic Jihad? Your own pockets?
3. Do you support terrorism? Because your "flower out of a bomb" T-Shirt sure makes it sound that way. Are you proud of the thousands of Jewish civilians killed by your cause?
4. Your website is also curiously silent as to exactly who you are. No names, no real contact information. Are you scamming your customers? 5. The term "West Bank"was completely made up by Jordan. It didn't exist before 1948. What exactly is "Palestinian" about that term? Why didn't Palestinians demand that land for a state from Jordan before 1967?
6. Finally, so you have any customers stupid enough to spend $24 on T-shirts where they don't know who you are or where the money is going? For all we know, you could be Zionists trying to make a buck off of a supposedly "progressive" cause. Are you?
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
A sample exam paper for Year 12 students claimed as fact that Israel has persecuted Arabs by demolishing their homes because “they don’t follow the Jewish religion”.
The Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation last night agreed to recall all copies of the practice assessment task meant for Health and Human Development students, following a complaint from a prominent Jewish school in Melbourne.
The paper, part of the council’s 2019 package of school-assessed coursework tasks, known as SACs, that are provided to schools for a fee, contains questions and answers, including one asking students to demonstrate how religious discrimination affects mental health and wellbeing.
According to the sample answer provided: “An example of an individual being persecuted for their religion could be the Arab families living in Israel who practise the Islam religion rather than the Jewish religion. Including unlawful demolition of homes and forced displacement and detainment of these families.” It claims that “when a person is discriminated against … it could push a person to become more dogmatic in following their religion, possibly leading to extremism”.
Before the paper was recalled, it was defended:
The council, a professional body representing health and physical education teachers, initially defended the document.
“We make sure that for the answers we provided, there would be evidence for them,” said professional learning manager Bernie Holland, adding SACs were written by four expert teachers and reviewed by two others.
This is the real problem.
"Expert teachers" are so brainwashed by media lies about Israel that they didn't even bother to fact-check something that they felt was obviously true. They think that Israel just randomly persecutes Israeli Arabs and demolishes their homes because they aren't Jewish.
These lies then get passed on by these ignorant "expert teachers" to their students, who learn to hate Israel early in life.
Imagine how bad the "non-expert teachers" are!
In this case, the sample test was created by the Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation which creates the Health curriculum for Australian schools. Their latest newsletter shows that they consider "social justice" to be part of their educational mandate in teaching about health and physical education.
This may be where the problem starts.
(h/t Hilary)
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Thursday, July 18, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
Free Palestine Initiative 
