Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, August 22, 2019

What's Wrong with Advice for Dealing with Zionophobia on Campus? Part 1 (Victor Muslin)

A guest post by Victor Muslin. I have divided it up into parts - EoZ

A toxic anti-Israel climate on college campuses is on the rise. This increase in Zionophobia is a source of anxiety to Jewish students and their parents. Students are wondering what awaits them on campus and how to best navigate the hostile environment of academia. Parents are wondering what can be done to protect their children and combat Jew hatred at their school. With the next school year approaching, there has been no dearth of advice from professional advice-givers of mainstream Jewish organizations and well-meaning intellectuals. But how effective has this avalanche of advice been?

Recently I read a blog in the Times of Israel entitled "Before you head to campus, read this." The author acknowledges that "many campuses have become ground-zero for anti-Israel activism" and advises pro-Israel students "to be knowledgeable enough, open to talking with others in your circle, willing to grapple with complexity, and confidently owning your identity." When it comes to Israel, the advice is to "discuss with nuance and sophistication, not bombast" and to "understand that there is more to every student than where they stand on this issue. Disagreements on Israel shouldn’t be the only thing keeping individuals or student groups from interacting."

In broad daylight on Broadway in front of the main entrance to Columbia University campus. This is the reality of Jewish experience on a toxic anti-Israel campus. As a Jewish student, are you prepared to see this at the main entrance to your campus?

It is solid advice that might work well on campuses where pro-Israel students are confronted by peers who, as the TOI piece states, "may have never met a Jew before and for whom Israel is simply a faraway country." If only such open-minded peers who are genuinely ignorant about Israel were the main problem.

Unfortunately, this is not the reality on many problematic campuses and this sensible advice has a fatal flaw as it presupposes that one's opponents are acting in good faith, i.e., that they are fair people, sincere in their beliefs, open to examining whether these beliefs are based on the truth, and are willing to change their minds if shown contrary facts.

Protesters attempting to disrupt a talk at Columbia University by the Israeli UN Ambassardor Danny Danon. (click this caption for the videos)

If only it were possible to prevail in arguments by "discuss[ing] [Israel] with nuance and sophistication" as the article recommends. If only it were possible to educate by a calm presentation of facts and reason. If only it were possible to win sympathy by explaining what Israel means to the Jewish people who were exiled by the Romans and persecuted in the Diaspora. If only it were possible to win admiration by extolling the miraculous success of the tiny nation of refugees who, surrounded by enemies, overcame tremendous odds and who, by sheer hard work and intellectual brilliance, created amazing technologies and medical breakthroughs benefiting the entire world. If only it were possible to win empathy by pointing out how Israel has been always the first nation to help in a disaster, even when the disaster strikes its enemies. If only it were possible to win hearts and minds by dispelling lies. If only...

The level of Zionophobia fueled by BDS-inspired Jew hatred is not the same on every campus. Anti-Israel activities are concentrated in a small number of prestigious campuses popular with Jewish students; the larger the Jewish student population the more pervasive is the anti-Israel hostility. The worst anti-Israel schools tend to be prominent, prestigious universities that wield enormous influence and generate the largest amount of publicity. Averaging anti-Israel sentiment of Columbia University which had 108 incidents recorded by AMCHA or New York University which had 75 incidents with Appalachian State University which had 4 incidents or Bradley University which had 1 incident distorts the reality. It tempers what it feels like to be an isolated pro-Israel student on a campus with an active pro-BDS movement fueled by aggressive chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), IfNotNow and J Street U, where professors are anti-Israel propagandists, where Hillel eschews involvement beyond anodyne statements and serving Shabbat dinners to avoid antagonizing their liberal donors, and where the administrators—the supposed "adults in the room"—are intimidated by, if not openly complicit with, the students and faculty claiming for themselves the exclusive right to be the arbiters of human rights and social justice.

To appreciate the intensity of what pro-Israel students face on an actively anti-Israel campus, watch this excerpt from an excellent documentary "Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus" or consider an article from the New York Post entitled "Israeli student at Columbia says she’s being bullied by Palestinian group" that stated,

"Ofir, the 24-year-old daughter of Israel Consul General in New York Dani Dayan, said she is harassed and threatened over her background by the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and that the school is failing to protect her. 'SJP is violent,' she said. 'I’m worried about my personal safety.' The political science major had her initial run-in about a month into the fall 2017 semester, when she was in the lobby of Knox Hall — home to the Middle East Institute — having a phone conversation in Hebrew. 'A girl heard me and started screaming, "Stop killing Muslim babies! . . . You’re a murderer!" Ofir said. 'Then she screamed, "Zionist, get out!" A nearby public-safety administrator did nothing.'"

Are you prepared for pro-Israel events to be disrupted and be called "colonizers" and "baby killers"? Anti-Israel students disrupting a Columbia University event "Indigenous People Unite!" organized by Students Supporting Israel (click on the caption for the full article).

If you really want to know how it feels to be a pro-Israel student on a hostile anti-Israel campus imagine the opprobrium, scorn, animosity, ostracism, ridicule, harassment, and insults anyone openly advocating racist, misogynistic or homophobic views would face on a liberal campus. It is not an exaggeration. Israel is accused of every imaginable crime, such as apartheid, genocide, organ trafficking, testing weapons on children, testing drugs on Palestinian prisoners, stealing Palestinian water, poisoning Palestinian wells, raping Palestinian women and not raping Palestinian women (both accusations were made by the same academic!), police brutality against African Americans in the US—you name it—by the virulently anti-Israel academics and semi-professional student agitators, and not a word of criticism from the school's administration who routinely ignore or dismiss student complaints.

It is no surprise that in an environment like this students who express sympathy for Israel are treated as evil supporters of a bloodthirsty regime that has no right to exist and needs to be exterminated together with its supporters. Are these the people to whom the pro-Israel students are supposed to listen and with whom they are expected to engage in nuanced conversations?

Part 2 next week.

For more information about Zionophobia in academia and specifically at Columbia University and Barnard College, please visit https://www.cu-monitor.com/

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As Arab media marks the 50th anniversary of the arson attack by Australian Christian Denis Michael Rohan there is a lot of analysis to blame Israel.

This one from Al Resalah in English is similar to the Arabic articles out there.

On August 21, 1969, the Al-Aqsa Mosque was burned, the first of the two Islamic Qibla and the third major mosque that attracts the traveler. The Zionist entity claimed that a young Australian named Dennis Michael Rohan carried it out, but this incident came within the framework of a series of actions carried out by the Zionist occupation since 1948 with the aim of obliterating the Islamic civilization identity of the city of Jerusalem.

Golda Meir, then Prime Minister of the Zionist entity, said after the incident; "I did not sleep all night, I was afraid that the Arabs could enter Israel in big groups from everywhere, but when the sun rose the next day I knew that we can do anything we want!"

These words were the key to Zionist barbarism in the occupied territories.

The Golda Meir quote is, of course, a complete fabrication.

It has been mentioned in other Arab newspapers . It is even listed as a "famous quote" in the Arabic Wikipedia page for Golda Meir (without a footnote.)

If there is ever to be peace, the Arab side has to learn to distinguish between truth and falsehood. They argue with complete conviction the most absurd lies, but too many in the West believe the conviction and don't bother to check the facts.

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In 19th century Algeria, no worse insult than to call someone a Jew

Here's another in a never-ending series showing how Arabs and Muslims are lying when they say how wonderfully they got along with Jews in their countries.

This is from the 1890 book Winters In Algeria, by F.A. Bridgman:

The hatred which exists between Arab and Jew is very marked, and "Youdi" (damned Jew) is a term that he reserves for one of that race, and uses also when he wishes to exhaust, in one ejaculation, his vocabulary of curses against a member of his own persuasion.

There was one other interesting section:

The origin of the Arab's hatred to the Jews was a legend which he told with religious conviction. Mohammed the prophet owned a large park filled with gazelles; the favorite of these animals had horns and hoofs of pure gold, which attracted one day the eyes of a Jew. He gave chase, and running the gazelle down secured the precious metal.

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Donald Trump said:

Five years ago, the concept of even talking about this – even three years ago – of cutting off aid to Israel because of two people that hate Israel and hate Jewish people – I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. … Where has the Democratic Party gone? Where have they gone where they’re defending these two people [Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar] over the State of Israel? … I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat – it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.

The CNN article linked above goes on to quote Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL and several other minor public Jews as saying that Trump is invoking the antisemitic “dual loyalty trope.”

The “dual loyalty trope” is far more than the idea that Jews care about Israel, see American and Israeli interests as aligned, and want US policy to be supportive of Israel. It implies that Jews would be willing to work against American interests in order to help Israel, to stab America in the back – as Hitler accused German Jews of doing to Germany – for their own purposes.

This is a pernicious doctrine, but there is no evidence that this is what he meant. Indeed, if the Jews were more loyal to Israel than the US, they would be more likely to vote against the party of Tlaib and Omar, Israel’s enemies, than for it.

Halie Soifer, executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, went farther:

If this is about Israel, then Trump is repeating a dual loyalty claim, which is a form of anti-Semitism. If this is about Jews being 'loyal' to him, then Trump needs a reality check. We live in a democracy, and Jewish support for the Republican Party has been halved in the past four years.

I think these responses are not just deliberate misunderstandings intended to attack Trump. I think that these people are really unable to understand his rather obvious intention, which is that Jews who support the Democratic Party are disloyal to the Jewish people. Not to America, not to Trump, but to the Jewish people.

So let me correctly translate his statement, with which you can agree or disagree: “the Democratic Party has tolerated, even embraced, the antisemitic and misozionist* Tlaib and Omar, and Jews who still support it are either ill-informed or disloyal to their own people.”

One could argue that this is not true, that the Democratic Party can be saved from going down the road traveled by Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, that there are elements in the party that are strongly opposed to their positions, that most House Democrats opposed Omar’s pro-BDS resolution and indeed passed one condemning BDS by a large margin, and so on. I don’t intend to discuss this here. My point is that an interpretation of Trump’s words as antisemitic is simply nonsensical.

There is a reason for the inability of these people to get the point. It is that at bottom they do not feel a part of a “Jewish people.” And they also don’t understand or don’t care that the conditions that enabled the Jewish people to survive in the diaspora no longer hold. Today, the survival of the Jewish people as a unique people in history depends on the survival of the Jewish state.

To those Jews whose worldview was inspired by the 19^th century reformers who believed that they could protect their communities from antisemitism and integrate them with non-Jewish society by insisting that Jews were not a people, but only a group sharing a common religion – Germans or Americans of the Jewish Persuasion so to speak – Trump’s remark was unintelligible.

Interestingly, even the Republican Jewish Coalition seems to have missed the point. It tweeted, “President Trump is right, it shows a great deal of disloyalty to oneself to defend a party that protects/emboldens people that hate you for your religion.” That’s wrong. The disloyalty Trump is referring to is not to “oneself,” but to one’s people. And they don’t hate us for our religion: they hate those of us who support a Jewish sovereign state in a place that they believe belongs only to Muslims. They see the Jewish people as a rival, even an enemy of theirs.

The PLO knows there is a real Jewish people and that it has a deep historical connection to Eretz Yisrael. They deny it because they would like the world to accept their false narrative, but they know that the Jewish people are the aboriginal inhabitants – the oldest extant indigenous people – of Eretz Yisrael, the Jewish ancestral homeland. Many American Jews do not know or care.

Trump himself probably thinks the responses were just attempts to attack him, and maybe that is a part of it. Trump, like Polemarchus in Plato’s Republic, seems to believe that “justice resides in helping one’s friends and hurting one’s enemies,” and doesn’t understand people who invert this idea, like the progressive Jews who subscribe to “Tikkunism.”

Because this post mentions Trump, I will get a lot of angry mail. But before you sit down at your keyboard to type all the adjectives that are so beloved of those who believe that Trump is the Devil, please understand that as usual, this post is not primarily about him. It is about the importance for Jews, even in the diaspora, to understand that they are a unique people, with a homeland that is theirs alone.

Trump is comfortable with nationalism, which American liberals have long since rejected, and it makes sense to him that members of a people would naturally want to stick up for their ancestral homeland, even while preferring to live somewhere else.

It makes sense to me too.

___________
*Misoziony is the extreme and irrational hatred of the Jewish state. It is antisemitism raised up one level of abstraction, although almost all misozionists are antisemites as well.

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08/21 Links Pt2: The Case Against Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib; What Rep. Tlaib Forgot To Mention: 212 Killed – 1,149 Wounded; The Land Waited for the Jews; Tokenism Is Racism - Except For Jews

From Ian:

Noah Rothman: The Case Against Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib

Despite the backlash, neither Omar nor Tlaib have shown any willingness to pare back their anti-Semitic agitation. When Israel made the arguably ill-advised decision to invoke the country’s new anti-BDS law to bar the congresswomen from visiting the Jewish state, Jerusalem did so on the unassailable legal grounds that the organization sponsoring their trip was viciously anti-Semitic. That organization, Miftah, accused Jews of consuming “the blood of Christians,” has published neo-Nazi screeds, and has celebrated murderous terrorist attacks targeting children. To protest their treatment by the Israeli government, the two congresswomen shared a cartoon drawn by Carlos Latuff, a draughtsman who placed in Iran’s 2006 International Holocaust Cartoon Contest. The two congresswomen have regularly claimed that Israel’s character as a Jewish state is incompatible with representative democratic governance, likened Israel to Nazi Germany, and compared the Hamas-linked BDS movement to the Boston Tea Party.

Through it all, Omar and Tlaib were described in the press not as outliers but leading indicators of a sea change in the Democratic Party’s outlook toward Israel. They are the vanguard of a generation challenging old Democratic nostrums along the “uncomfortable intersection of race, gender, and religion.” They are “changing the conversation” about America’s relationship with Israel, igniting a hostile response “in particular from Republicans eager to exploit divisions in the Democratic Party.” Such a pronouncement is akin to suggesting that Rep. Steve King is “changing the conversation” around America’s relationship with white nationalism when his racist claims generate only censure and opprobrium from conscientious custodians of American national comity.

The only thing that saves Reps. Omar Tlaib and Rashida Tlaib from the universal reproach they are due is the plausibility of the claim that their displays of anti-Semitism are unconscious. But the preponderance of evidence suggests that they know exactly what they are saying and why. Those who continue to defend them probably do, too.

At The Risk Of Further Upsetting Ms. Tlaib

It thus seems fair to note that while not one Jordanian was killed by a terrorist Palestinian to liberate “Palestine” from the Jordanian government in the 19 years of occupation, 2,143 Israelis have been killed and nearly 10,000 wounded by Palestinians in deliberate attacks. It seems fair also to emphasize the word “deliberate.” Dead Jews were the goal. Fair, too, to remind her that 19 of the dead and 172 of the wounded were victims of a massacre during a Passover Seder; Nava Applebaum and her father David were murdered sitting in a café the night before her wedding; Kobi Mandell and Yosef Ishran, two 13-year-old boys, had their heads smashed against rocks; 3-month-old Hadas, 4-year-old Elad, 11-year-old Yoav, and parents Ruth and Udi Fogel were murdered in their beds. Eighteen people, including Americans Malki Roth and Shoshana Yehudit Greenbaum, were killed in a Sbarro pizza parlor (their killers received an estimated $910,823 in “salary” from the Palestinian Authority).

There are 2,132 others to be named and remembered.

Israelis live not only with checkpoints, but with intrusive security in airports, schools, shopping centers, concert halls, and other places because all have been attacked by people — Palestinians, not Costa Ricans or Laotians or Nepalese — intent on killing them.

And yet, Israel is here, strong, vibrant, growing, democratic, and tolerant of everyone except those openly dedicated to its destruction.

If that further upsets Ms. Tlaib, so be it. (h/t messy57)

The Land Waited for the Jews

In 1867, the journalist Samuel Clemens visited the Land of Israel with a group of American pilgrims; he described what he saw there in The Innocents Abroad, published two years later. The place described as so lush in the Hebrew Bible appeared to him to be barren and dispiriting. The nearer he and his fellow travelers came to Jerusalem, “the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became.” As Meir Soloveichik notes, the exiled Spanish rabbi Moses Naḥmanides formed a strikingly similar impression when he arrived there 600 years prior. But with a difference:

Naḥmanides describes the barrenness of the land of Israel as ordained by God with the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jews by the Romans. . . . “From the moment we left” into exile, he writes, the abundance of the land has failed to show itself. Throughout the generations, “all seek to settle it,” yet the land resists cultivation. It mourns just as its people mourn. He, too, notes what Twain had sensed as a paradox: that the earth grows more barren as one approaches Jerusalem. “The general principle,” he wrote to his son, is that “the holier the land is, the more desolate it remains.” After all, the Holy Land yearns for the Jews; the holier a speck of soil may be, the more it refuses to provide its fruits until the Jews return.

Naḥmanides saw in 1267 what Twain in 1867 had failed to see. Clemens could never have imagined that exactly 100 years after he visited the Temple Mount in 1867, Jewish soldiers would stand there to claim it as their capital of a flourishing land. Yet credit for this wondrous event can in some sense be linked to Naḥmanides, whose own arrival in Jerusalem exactly 700 years before the Six-Day War marked the beginning of a seven-century Jewish presence in the sacred city. To this day, there is a synagogue in Jerusalem founded by this exiled rabbi—a man who believed that if Jews would return to Jerusalem, Jerusalem would one day return to the Jews.

Rashida Tlaib made a tearful statement to the press on Monday, expressing her need to “expose the truth” about Israel, which she calls “Palestine.”

Much of what she says is inaccurate and lacks context, which makes it a lie. This for instance:

“As a young girl, visiting Palestine to see my grandparents and extended family, I watched as my mother had to go through dehumanizing checkpoints -- even though she was a United States citizen and proud American. I was there when there when my [grandmother] was in a terrible car accident and my cousins and I cried so she could have access to the best hospitals -- which were in Jerusalem.”

For one thing, it is doubtful Tlaib ever saw her family go through checkpoints "as a young girl" as there were no checkpoints when Tlaib was small.

Another lie by Tlaib.

She was a young girl in the 80's / early 90's at best. That was before checkpoints when Israelis & Palestinians easily crossed over into each other's territory, relatively safely. Before Oslo & the installation of Arafat's terror government. https://t.co/ATaKyQYy2u
— Chaim Redmann (@The_Bear_Jew18) August 20, 2019

Liar Tlaib,
By the time they had checkpoints she was a young adult:
Rashida Harbi Tlaib (/təˈliːb/;[1]; born July 24, 1976) Yes. By the 90s she was 14. By 93 she was 17. This is simply fakery.
pic.twitter.com/uba68wL1Wu
— Rabbi Zvi Solomons 🕎 (@RabbiZvi) August 21, 2019

Then too, it is not only Arabs who must pass through checkpoints. Jews, too, must wait their turn in traffic to go through checkpoints. I go through checkpoints every time I go from my apartment in Judea to the nearest city, Jerusalem. I went through checkpoints each time I labored to give birth to the final 6 of my 12 children, in order to get to the closest hospital in Jerusalem. We all go through the checkpoints, which make us late for appointments, and waste precious minutes getting us to hospital emergency and delivery rooms.The unfortunate inconvenience of the checkpoints is the trade-off for the many lives they save.

I won't lie: It is true that when the soldiers at the checkpoints see I am Jewish, they wave me through, knowing that I am not going to Jerusalem to blow up a bus or smuggle arms.

Other people do get stopped and checked. Some more thoroughly than others. It depends on how much suspicion these people arouse, and yes, whether or not they are Arabs. Profiling like this saves lives. That is because in Israel, the people who perpetrate terror attacks are Arabs.

And even with the checkpoints, with soldiers looking in at the drivers, one by one, as cars pass through, we sometimes fail to catch terrorists, as this tweet from Frimet Roth demonstrates:

Rep Tlaib cried about her mother being "dehumanized" at Israeli checkpoints. My child Malki, a US citizen murdered at 15, would be here today had a checkpoint stopped her murderer and a 10 kg bomb from entering Jerusalem. Remind Tlaib: Checkpoints prevent terrorism - save lives. https://t.co/6KD0l7rdhn
— Frimet Roth (@FrimetRoth) August 20, 2019

While checkpoints save lives, we do of course understand that everyone should have access to medical care. And there is no doubt that Tlaib’s family would have wanted her grandmother to have access to the best possible hospitals after a bad car accident. But why, with the world pouring billions of dollars in aid into UNRWA and the PA, have the Arabs not built their own good hospitals, closer to home? Why should Muftia Tlaib be required to travel, at all?

The answer is this: the aid that goes to the PA and Hamas is used to fund terror, not hospitals. And that is a choice. With all that money, dozens of state-of-the-art hospitals could have been built in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza for the exclusive use of the Arab people. Better hospitals than the Jews have in Jerusalem, which would obviate the need for travel, passing "dehumanizing" checkpoints, and ensuring that people like Tlaib's "sity" get help on the spot.

But the Arab people choose not to build hospitals. They choose instead to use the monies they receive to fund the murder of Jewish Israelis. Weapons cost money. So do the Pay to Slay salaries for terrorists and their families.

This Palestinian Authority-sanctioned policy of supporting and inciting terror over building hospitals makes it necessary to create even more “dehumanizing” checkpoints, even while PA constituents lack adequate and sometimes even urgent medical care. The Arabs have put the murder of the Jews ahead of the health of their own people. Murdering Jews is their top priority.

And why, after all, should this money not be spent on the Jew-killing machine? PA and Hamas leaders and their families are well provided for: they have no difficulty obtaining medical care inside the State of Israel. Senior PA leader Jibril Rajoub was treated in an Israeli hospital in May. Hamas terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh and four of his family members received treatment in Israel. PA President Mahmoud Abbas and three of his family members were treated in Israel. Why would these senior officials earmark funds for the medical care of people like Tlaib's "sity" when it doesn't affect them personally?

Putting terror first, and putting the haves before the have nots, explains the tragic disparity between available funding and the lack of medical care for the Arab people of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, people like Tlaib's "sity." There should be no need for these people to travel to Jerusalem after a bad car accident. There is enough money to build hospitals and urgent care centers for everyone, very close to home.

This choice: choosing to murder Jews over providing medical care to your own people, is sick and wrong. Especially when corrupt leaders have the access to medical care that their people do not. But to cast the blame on Israel for these awful priorities, for these choices, and to then cry crocodile tears at press conferences in your official capacity as a public servant, as Tlaib has done, is even more wrong. It is an abuse of power. And it does nothing to help the Arab people.

Israel is not to blame for the choices made by Tlaib’s own people. Israel is, on the contrary, one of the two victims of this choice, this unquenchable thirst to shed Jewish blood; the other being the Arab people, who lack adequate medical care as a result of their grim and tragic priorities.

It is true that checkpoint solders waved me through as I labored with my 12 children on the way to Jerusalem. They might well have waved through Rashida’s “sity” after her car accident, too, except for the fact that Arabs have historically misused medical services for nefarious ends, for instance for the smuggling of bombs past the checkpoint in order to blow up Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem. From the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA):

Unfortunately, there have been documented cases of Palestinians abusing the neutrality of ambulances and medical facilities for terrorist purposes. On March 26 2002, Ahmed Jibril, a Tanzim operative, was detained at an IDF roadblock near Ramah Bridge, south of Ramallah. Jibril worked as an ambulance driver for the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC). He was arrested while driving an ambulance belonging to the PRC in which were found an explosives belt and explosives. Jibril admitted that Mahmoud Titi, a Tanzim leader in Samaria, told him to deliver them to Tanzim operatives in Ramallah.

In addition to Jibril, a woman and three children, aged 6 months, three and four years old, were in the ambulance. The explosives belt held sixteen pipes containing approximately 10 kilograms of explosive materials. The belt was hidden under the mattress of the stretcher on which one of the children was lying.

Nidal Abd al Fatah Abdallah Nidal, an ambulance driver from Qalqilya employed by UNWRA, was arrested in August 2002 by IDF forces. He admitted using the ambulance to transport weapons and explosives for Hammas. Waffa Idris, a PRC employee, perpetrated the suicide bombing on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem in January 2002. She was dispatched by a PRC ambulance driver who is also a Tanzim operative, and she was assisted by another PRC employee. It is also believed she may have traveled in a PRC vehicle, and used PRC documents to go through IDF checkpoints.

I have been in Israel for four decades, now. I remember these incidents and others, too. It is a known thing: Arab terrorists smuggle arms in ambulances, even placing them under the body of a child. How then can we simply wave Tlaib’s “sity” through a checkpoint after a bad car accident? We want to help. We are good people. But too many Arabs are not.

The MFA website explains Israel's humanitarian predicament:

These incidents are not exceptional. There have been others in which Palestinian terror organizations abused the privileged status of ambulances, as well as many intelligence warnings of their intentions to do so. There is also abundant evidence that terrorists operate from within hospitals and health clinics; that terrorist organizations recruit PRC employees; and that wanted terrorists frequently travel in Palestinian ambulances to escape capture.

In light of these Palestinian practices, the IDF is forced to stop and search ambulances, which unavoidably results in impacting the Palestinian population, despite the IDF's efforts to minimize the disruption caused.

International law may mandate safeguarding the neutrality of ambulances, medical transports and personnel. However, it has also long recognized that when ambulances and medical transport are used for military purposes, they can no longer keep their protected status.

Should we choose to let ambulances through unchecked, taking a chance on the lives of innocent Jews? Or should we trust the Arab passengers of these vehicles, knowing the history, knowing they have abused this trust in the past--Israel's trust--on several occasions?

Ambulances are something most of us see as sacrosanct: something never to be weaponized. This is the issue that Tlaib should be tearfully addressing from her platform of power: how to fix her people so they no longer breech these basic human standards of decency, no longer exploit Israel’s humanitarian impulses, so that Israelis no longer need fear them--fear for their lives--when an ambulance carrying wounded Arabs rushes by. Because ambulances just like the one that carried her “sity” have been used to carry explosives to murder Jewish Israelis, simply because they were Jews.

This, and not some pretend lack of Israeli humanity is the reason for the “dehumanizing” checkpoints: Arab terrorists who exploit Israel’s good nature, who exploit ambulances and other medical services, using them as tools to murder Jews.

This is the reason for the checkpoints in the first place: the Arab propensity for placing the murder of Jews above all else, even medical care for their own people. That is true crux of the problem. A problem Tlaib will never address.

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Palestinian UN ambassador pleas for relevance

From the official Wafa news agency:

The Permanent Representative of the State of Palestine to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, told the Security Council that the question of Palestine is just and the Middle East cannot be addressed without talking about the issue of Palestine.

"Efforts to downplay the devastating effects on the entire region as a result of the uprooting of the Palestinian people more than 70 years ago, and to overlook the practices of the occupying Power to this day, serve neither peace nor security in the region," Mansour added.

Ambassador Mansour spoke to ambassadors and representatives of the countries of the world of the absolute immunity accorded to Israel and the double standards in the world of the state of sorrow and the disruption of confidence in the international system, especially among young people who lose hope in international law and fairness.

If you read a little between the lines, this is a plea by the PLO for relevance. They are very upset that the Gulf states are no longer looking at a Palestinian state as being a prerequisite for dealing directly with Israel.

His pretense on defending international law is amusing, considering that even "moderate" Palestinians publicly say that terrorism against Israeli Jews are acceptable under international law.

"We warn against creating a fertile environment for a religious war in Palestine because of the acts and inflammatory statements carried out by Israel, including violations in the Haram al-Sharif by extremists supported by the army in a clear contempt for the sanctity of the place and its historical status and the status of religious sites and sensitivity surrounding the site, all contribute to fueling religious sentiment and thus the risk of a religious war. "

Just a reminder:

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08/21 Links Pt1: Exposing physical and intellectual terrorism to awaken the oblivious; Trump: Any Jew voting Democratic is uninformed or disloyal

From Ian:

Exposing physical and intellectual terrorism to awaken the oblivious

It is terrible that incidents like using cars to run over innocent children and other means of terror are still happening in Israel and around the world, and that so many oblivious individuals are not being informed about these events - and even if they get to know about them, they do not care.

They do not understand that once evil is unleashed, ALL people from ALL walks of life, will become its victims.

Unfortunately, terror today is taking two major forms. One is the physical attack, by all kinds of weapons which may include cars, knives, bullets, rockets, bombs, etc. The other one is the verbal attacks which intend to incite, malign, deceive, rewrite history and educate the oblivious to become the perpetrators of malicious action. These actions could be physical terrorism and/or no less aggressive non-violent terrorism, which includes Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

Our fight against evil is relentless but there is too much uncontrolled evil to address with too few people fighting it. Therefore, it is imperative to educate as many people as possible with the correct information. This will help them join the effort to stand up against evil and expose the perpetrators of the deception, even if those perpetrators are members of Congress, University Professors, High School Teachers or any other person in important decision-making or educational positions.

The risks to free society are too high to remain timid or silent and let evil prevail.

Who says that crime does not pay?

Only four years ago, the man whom we rely upon for terror research, Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi, discovered and translated the official ordinance of the Palestinian Authority which provides an automatic payment to anyone who murders a Jew, and that includes a payment to his family for life.

This official Palestine Liberation Organization incentive for murder has been incorporated into a series of working papers on the subject of incentifying murder, published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and accessible at http://jcpa.org/the-2018-report-on-palestinian-authority-payments-of-salaries-to-terrorists-in-2018/

How do Jews around the world react to the payment incorporated into the Palestinian Authority rule of law which provides automatic payment to anyone who murders a Jew?

It is hard to tell. So we posed a question to Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the largest Jewish denomination - the Union for Reform Judaism

We have asked Rabbi Jacobs , who passionately supports the establishment of a PLO state, for his response to the fact that the PLO, through is PA administrative arm, awards anyone who will murder a Jew.

Rabbi Jacobs will not answer the question, which we have posed to him more than once.

Israel has a responsibility to do everything it can to rid itself of the PLO , which places the murder of any Jew.as the highest value for a Palestinian Arab to strive for. Israel can now define anyone who supports the PLO state as an accessory to murder.

Trump: Any Jew voting Democratic is uninformed or disloyal

US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that American Jewish people who vote for Democrats show "either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty."

Trump's claim triggered a quick uproar from critics who said the president was trading in anti-Semitic stereotypes. It came amid his ongoing feud with Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, both Muslim.

Trump has closely aligned himself with Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while the Muslim lawmakers have been outspoken critics of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and have evoked anti-Semitic tropes to bolster their arguments. Tlaib is a US-born Palestinian American, while Omar was born in Somalia.

The US president, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, replied to Omar’s call to cut the $3 billion in assistance given to Israel annually stating, “I can’t even believe we’re having this conversation.”

“Five years, the concept of even talking about this, even three years ago, of cutting off aid to Israel because of two people that hate Israel and hate Jewish people, I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. Where has the Democratic Party gone? Where have they gone where they are defending these two people over the state of Israel? I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty," he said.

Another antisemitic Miftah article says "Jews demand our submission," claims Ben Gurion wanted to expand Israel to Syria, Jordan and Egypt

Miftah, the NGO founded by Hanan Ashrawi and that is in the news for both is historic antisemitism and its offer to sponsor the Ilhan Omar/Rashida Tlaib aborted visit to "Palestine," still has many offensive and ahistorical articles on its site from over the years.

John Paul Pagano found another one, named "America's Tar Baby," (archived here), written by a humanities professor and conspiracy theorist named Clara Rising, where she says things like "Jews demand our complete submission" and finds justification for suicide bombing:

By what historical stranglehold do the Jews demand our complete submission to their unapologetic brutality to their Arab neighbors? From 1948 until the present year 2001—for half a century—they have chanted, like some mesmerized tribe in a jungle, the magic mantra of Security. Security from what? Yasser Arafat no longer has an army. He has no air force. No tanks. He is not bulldozing Israeli houses or invading neighborhoods with armed troops or firing from helicopter gunships. He has a desperate people who have produced suicide bombers, young men driven almost mad by the despair of living in a bottle like those drugged roaches—which is what the West Bank and Gaza have become.

The entire article is vile and filled with bizarre conspiracy theories, which is perhaps fitting, because the author had President Zachary Taylor exhumed to prove her theory that he was assissinated with poison. (Experts found no such evidence.)

Rising includes number of debunked Zionist quotes, but I found this one interesting:

According to the Zionist agenda, Palestine would be just the first step toward a "Greater Israel," which would ultimately include Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and even Iraq. If this sounds preposterous, one need only go back to the beginning, in 1948, when the first prime minister of Israel, Ben-Gurion, addressed his General Staff. Confident—largely because of American money which had secured Israel’s military superiority—Ben-Gurion told them: "We should prepare to go over to the offensive with the aim of smashing Lebanon, Transjordan and Syria….When we…bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo."

The entire paragraph is insane - remember, this is written after Israel had given up the Sinai to Egypt and much of the West Bank to the PLO - but who can even consider that Ben Gurion had designs on the entire Levant in 1948?

The quote comes from Noam Chomsky, in his 1983 book The Fateful Triangle, republished and updated a number of times since then:

Although the Chomsky book includes hundreds of footnotes, it provides none for this quote.

Every other place on the Internet that quotes this refers to Chomsky, not to any primary source.

It appears to have been a complete fabrication.

Which makes it perfect for an antisemitic professor to publish in the antisemitic Miftah.

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It's Another Round of Omar-Tlaib vs Trump -- And Jews Are Caught In The Middle (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

We've seen that Trump is determined to paint the Democratic party as the party of AOC, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

With the latest blowup over Israel banning Omar and Tlaib from entering the country -- Trump, Omar and Tlaib are at it again, but this time with not only Israel, but also the American Jewish community itself caught in the middle.

Yet some of the themes and some of the accusations being cast back and forth seemed oddly familiar, with a certain double standard being applied.

This is especially apparent on Twitter.

Deflecting Criticism With Impunity

In the current situation, we see Omar deflecting criticism of her support of BDS and her and Tlaib's reliance on the viciously antisemitic Miftah, by claiming the criticism is really all about her and Tlaib being Muslim:

But oddly enough, we have seen that when there is even a hint that criticism of Israel is being deflected by claiming it is antisemitic -- there is an uproar that this is proof that defenders of Israel are evading the issue.

Do We Want Netanyahu To Have a Good Relationship With The US President?

David Hazony points out that not so long ago we were told about the importance of Netanyahu having proper respect for the President of the United States:

That is an idea that Herb Keinon dwells on:

Netanyahu, and by extension Israel, were damned when they had a difficult relationship with the US president, and now Netanyahu, and by extension Israel, is damned for enjoying a good relationship with the US president.

At Powerline Blog, Paul Mirengoff expands on this idea:

When Barack Obama was in office, Benjamin Netanyahu had a terrible relationship with the American president. Back then, as Herb Keinon reminds us, liberals and their media pals insisted it was crucial that the Israeli prime minister have a strong relationship with the president of the U.S.

These days, Netanyahu’s relationship with the American president could hardly be stronger. So what’s the liberal/media line now? Netanyahu is too close to President Trump.

Exhibit A is Netanyahu’s decision to cancel a visit to Israel by Reps. Omar and Tlaib — a visit that apparently was going to take place until Trump tweeted that it shouldn’t. But if the relationship between the U.S. president and the Israeli prime minister is so important, why shouldn’t Netanyahu take Trump’s opinion into account when making what probably was a close call?

Well, actually, strong relations with the president would be considered a good thing -- even with a Republican president -- but in this case, where Trump has been so thoroughly demonized by the Left and the Media, it really is no surprise to see Netanyahu criticized for having a good working relationship with him. After all, the ban is carefully framed as an example of Netanyahu giving in to Trump and being manipulated by him, which makes matters seem even worse.

Calling Jewish Loyalty Into Question Yet Again

Just when it seemed that the uproar over Israel refusing entry to Omar and Tlaib was beginning to wane, Trump stirred things up again:

Not that we haven't seen other politicians in Washington recently accuse Jews of disloyalty:

If there is a difference, it would be that Omar was accusing Jews of being disloyal to the US and being guilty of dual loyalty.

Trump, on the other hand, in his own sloppy way, seemed to be saying that Jews voting for Democrats were being disloyal to the Jewish community as a whole.

But as far as his opponents were concerned, it was a difference without a distinction and they are playing it up for all it was worth.

Lost in this kerfuffle, was the fact that another Democrat was throwing around accusations of disloyalty as well

Congressman Ted Lieu accused US Ambassador David Friedman of being disloyal to the US by defending Israel's decision to ban Omar and Tlaib.

It was a sharp attack and Lieu later deleted the tweet and gave an unapologetic apology:

But as pointed out on Legal Insurrection, Lieu's excuse in pleading ignorance was not altogether honest.

Just last month, Lieu indicated he understood full well the impact of being accused of having dual loyalties, both in general and to Jews:

The suspicion that immigrants are not to be trusted or are unpatriotic is not just wrong, it is un-American. And dangerous. Yet it has marred America's past, including with the 19th-century "Yellow Peril" hysteria, the internment during World War II of more than 110,000 people who happened to be of Japanese descent and accusations against Jewish Americans of harboring dual loyalties. [emphasis added]

Even now, there are reports that as a result of the anger of Democrats, Israel’s ambassador to the US is done in the House, and the US ambassador to Israel may not be far behind.

Lost in all this is that Friedman, as ambassador, represents Trump -- not the American people.

When Cartoons Become Antisemitic Weapons

Remember when the Trump came out with this tweet, which he later deleted:

All that uproar over a star of David being used -- and Trump was again being accused of antisemitism.

But that kind of outrage is very selective.

As much as the media loves to jump at the chance to accuse Trump of antisemitism, that same media takes care to mute their criticism of Omar-Tlaib when they do something similar:

Batya Bungar-Sargon pointed out the problem:

Oof. Looks like both Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib shared this awful Carlos Latuff cartoon in Instagram stories yesterday. In 2006, Latuff came in second in Iran's International Holocaust Cartoon Contest, which is a thing that exists, in case you thought the TL couldn't get any worse.

Putting aside Latuff's history of antisemitic cartoons and his mocking of the Holocaust, this cartoon -- which Omar and Tlaib eagerly shared -- shows the arms of Trump and Netanyahu forming the stripes of the Israeli flag, with a Jewish star in the middle, implying a conspiratorial connection between Trump and Netanyahu, something we haven't seen in a cartoon since The New York Times graced its pages with this:

Not that The New York Times has learned its lesson and would call out the antisemitism of the Latuff cartoon:

The Times, after publishing an antisemitic cartoon in its international edition a few months ago, editorialized it is a “dangerous mistake“ to dismiss antisemitism as a fringe element in society, but on Miftah, Tlaib, and Omar the paper continues to fall painfully short of “unblinking journalism and the clear editorial expression of its values.” Or its values seem to require a certain amount of blinking.

Jews and/or Israel are accused of

o Hiding behind claims of antisemitism to avoid criticism
o  Allowing Trump to dictate Israeli policy
o  Trying to influence US policy
o  Being accused of dual loyalty
o  Trying to control Muslims

And through it all, Jews are becoming ever more aware that the hatred of Jews that we read about happening in Europe has reached the US and is getting worse.

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NGO accuses Israel of systematically killing Palestinian prisoners. Its own statistics show the opposite.

Quds News Network "reports:"

The Committee of Palestinian Prisoners and Former Prisoners said Tuesday that the administrations of Israeli jails deliberately assault wounded and sick Palestinian prisoners through medical negligence and deprivation of treatment to make them die.

The committee stated in a statement issued on Tuesday that through prisoners’ witnesses and close monitor of the health condition along several years, it turned out that the medical care provided for sick prisoners is the worst. It is formal and nearly never provided.

The committee stressed that prisoners are detained in very bad conditions. Their cells are damp and badly ventilated. It is also overcrowded and unsanitary, and infested with insects and rodent.

The number of Palestinian martyrs, who died in Israeli jails due to medical negligence, has reached 64 prisoners since 1967.

Arab prisoners in Israeli prison

Let's do some back of the envelope math.

Let's assume that the average Palestinian prisoner is male and 25 years old.

In the US, the odds of dying for that person in any given year is 0.13%. Let's assume that it is roughly the same for Palestinians.

Let's further assume an average of 6000 prisoners incarcerated at any given moment since 1967.

That means that if they were outside prison, about 8 would be expected to die any year.

I will vastly overestimate the number of the Palestinians that die from car accidents or conflict (not likely in prison) to be half of that total, or 4 per year. The actual number is far lower; most Palestinian deaths are from non-communicable diseases. But let's vastly underestimate the number of non-accidental deaths to be half this total.

Which means that we would expect 4 prisoners to die of natural causes every year if they are all young and otherwise healthy.

We would expect the total number of prisoner deaths over 52 years to be above 210 .

If only 64 have died in that time period, then Arab prisoners must be receiving exceptional medical care compared to Palestinians who are not in prison.

The Committee for Prisoners has proven that Israel takes very good medical care of its Arab prisoners.

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