Al Resalah has an interview with Bassam Abu Sharif, political advisor to late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
According to Abu Sharif, the Oslo Accords was an "ambush" to Palestinian dreams and, despite being warned, Arafat only realized this in January 1997, when the Hebron Agreement was signed.
"From that time he started preparing to resist the occupation, and that is why they murdered him with poison – because he decided to resist, " Abu Sharif charged.
Abu Sharif said that that Arafat renounced the Oslo agreement from the time that he discovered the supposed deception, and he "decided to complete the path of struggle through a number of popular waves, be it the (Western Wall) Tunnel riots or the Second Intifada."
The Western Wall Tunnel Riots were in September 1996, months before the Hebron Agreement, so the timing here is a bit off. Nevertheless, here is an Arafat aide that says that Arafat planned the Second Intifada at the height of the Oslo "peace" process, and three years before the Camp David summit.
There is far more independent evidence that Arafat was behind the Second Intifada. Hamas admits openly that Arafat instructed them to start attacking Jews. Arafat's wife Suha says that he warned her to leave Palestine after Camp David's failure because he planned to start an intifada.
Even if Abu Sharif is making this entire story up, it shows that Palestinian leadership is proud of violence and killing Jews.
(h/t Ibn Boutros)
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Syrian website Geiroon has an article about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which completely believes the myth.
Somehow the article manages to avoid saying the word "Jews" as is describes how “Some elements of the Zionist conspiracy throw the seeds of controversy and riots in all countries, through secret societies: political, religious, artistic and sports, Masonic forums, clubs of various activity, associations of every color, as well as the transfer of states from tolerance to political and religious extremism, pornography, chaos, impossibility of justice and the principles of equality."
Throughout the article the word "Jews" is replaced with "Zionists" as if the Protocols was written about Israel.
But the illustration for the article reveals the sham of simply replacing the word "Jew" with "Zionist" to avoid the charge of antisemitism:
It comes from a Spanish edition of the Protocols from 1930:
Nah, nothing antisemitic about that.
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The commissioner of the Hessian Federal State Government for Jewish Life and the Fight Against Antisemitism has filed a criminal complaint against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s chapter in the German city of Wiesbaden.
Uwe Becker told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that he made such a move after the chapter posted several tweets that targeted the Jewish state and also led to anti-Jewish incitement.
“[The] Wiesbaden branch of the antisemitic BDS movement stoked incitement on social media that targeted an American synagogue with antisemitic insults” on September 12, Becker said. “Wiesbaden termed the State of Israel, in its statements on social media, as a ‘Zionist colony’ and the flag of the Jewish state as a symbol of a genocidal, colonialist ideology.”
The BDS group’s tweets were replies to a post by American philanthropist Adam Milstein. Milstein tweeted a video showing the Baba Sale Synagogue in Los Angeles, which was vandalized with “Free Palestine” graffiti on September 11.
Milstein condemned the graffiti, tweeting that “BDS is the 21st Century #Antisemitism, it radicalized all other extremist movements, promotes violence against Jews and resembles the Nazi methods to boycott The Jewish people.” Wiesbaden’s BDS chapter replied with several tweets.
The commissioner said he considers the group’s statements on social media “deeply antisemitic” and that the tweets exceed the threshold of incitement.
Oxfam faces a $160 million counter-terror claim in a New York court. The case, brought by a pro-Israel lawyer and activist, alleges that the NGO contravened US law during its work in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.
The lawyer behind the case told The New Humanitarian he has filed five other similar cases, which remain under seal in the US courts.
David Abrams, who runs the Zionist Advocacy Center, alleges that Oxfam’s work on an agriculture policy project in Gaza constituted “material support” to Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.
The seven-page filing claims that Oxfam should have acknowledged the Gaza project when signing other grants with USAID, the US federal government department that administers aid and development projects, amounting to $53 million.
The agriculture project was largely funded by the Swiss government and the USAID grants mentioned include projects in Iraq, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. Under the alleged offence, the other USAID contracts don’t need to be related to the alleged material support; what matters legally is that Oxfam signed agreements to receive US government monies.
In response to questions, Oxfam emailed TNH a statement saying, “Oxfam takes such matters extremely seriously. We are aware of the lawsuit and reject the allegation made in it."
If Linda Sarsour wanted to ponder which side of history her longstanding association with AMP puts her, she could check out AMP’s slideshow on “Jerusalem in the crosshairs.” The third slide is a good example of the vileness on display: it justifies the murderous violence incited by the notorious Haj Amin al-Husseini against the Jews of British Mandate Palestine exactly 90 years ago, in 1929.
Arabs murdered 133 Jews and wounded hundreds, but as far as AMP is concerned, the victims were to blame: “The uprising was sparked after Zionist groups came to the wall and planted Zionist flags, declaring that ‘This wall is ours.’” The wall in question is the Western Wall, which had been designated as a Jewish place of prayer for hundreds of years. Revealingly, AMP prefers the term “al-Buraq Wall” since this term is popular among those who want to erase Jewish history on the basis of the myth that one night, a flying horse named Buraq conveyed Islam’s founder to the Al-Aqsa mosque, which of course didn’t exist during Muhammad’s lifetime.
While Linda Sarsour presumably feels she and groups like AMP are on the right side of history, Bari Weiss can only be commended for being on the other side. What angers Sarsour so much is that Weiss doesn’t buy into the illusion promoted by many of today’s self-described “progressives,” who insist that the oldest hatred stopped evolving with the Nazis and, therefore, only right-wing Nazi-style antisemitism deserves to be considered dangerous. But as Bari Weiss points out, “Neo-Nazis, in a way, are straightforward. We know they wish us dead. Antisemites with PhDs, the ones who defend their bigotry as enlightened thinking, are harder to fight.”
Linda Sarsour may not have a PhD, but she’s still rather good at defending her hatred for the world’s only Jewish state and her whitewashing of murderous Islamist Jew-hatred as enlightened thinking. And she arguably deserves a dishonorary PhD in hypocrisy and cynicism for pretending to cheer Bernie Sanders’ candidacy as a historic Jewish milestone, while dismissing mainstream Jewish concerns about contemporary antisemitism as “being on the wrong side of history.”
So antisemites in 1920s North America referred to their Jewish friends, who were much better than the other, disgusting Jews, as "white Jews."
The term is used by antisemites today, too - just they consider "white Jews" to be the bad ones.
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Dismantling the Villa in the Jungle: Matzpen, Zochrot, and the Whitening of Israel
Johannes Becke
Abstract
As a contribution to the debate over Zionism and Jewish whiteness, this essay establishes a typological framework that analyzes the history and politics of Israel’s self-whitening. The typology argues the Zionist emphasis on self-westernization has resulted in three modes of Ashkenazi-Israeli whitening: while colonial whitening describes the acquisition of whiteness by means of conquest, anticolonial whitening consists in the self-critique as colonial settlers, a process of acquiring whiteness by denouncing it. In contrast, postcolonial whitening shifts its emphasis to the politics of memory and atonement, a form of becoming white by means of white guilt. In order to explore the continuities and ruptures throughout the process of Israel’s whitening, the analysis focuses on both Zionism and Anti-Zionism, with a special emphasis on the two left-wing organizations Matzpen and Zochrot. Based on the typological framework, the essay argues all three forms of Ashkenazi-Israeli whitening might best be compared to what Edward Kamau Brathwaite describes as “bastard metropolitanism,” the long-distance Eurocentrism and denial of Creolization which characterizes the elite culture of postcolonial societies.
The actual paper shows an obsession both from this author and from those he quotes to ascribe "whiteness" to Jews, or mostly to Ashkenazic Jews.
The introduction shows that the "color" of Jews has changed over time, but the reasons he gives are telling:
While American Jews became white by suburbanization, Israeli Jews did so by colonization (Brodkin 1998; Goldstein 2006; Sicher 2013). In both cases, the crossing of the colour line coincided with the crossing of geographic boundaries. Like other “ethnic” immigrants from Europe (especially Italian and Irish Catholics), American Jews became white by leaving the inner cities in a process described by Painter as the “third enlargement of American whiteness” (2010, 359). In contrast, European Jews transformed from an “Orientalisches Fremdlingsvolk (a foreign Asiatic people)” (Reinharz and Shavit 2010, 136) into a “white settler community in Palestine” (Owen 2000, 19) by crossing the Mediterranean. Throughout this process of whitening, racialized discourse on Jewish otherness switched into reverse. As long as Jews represented the “internal Orient” (Rohde 2005) of Europe, their Orientalization went hand in hand with speculations about their Middle Eastern descent.1 Once Israeli Jews came to represent the “internal Occident” of the Middle East, their Occidentalization was increasingly expressed in the form of speculations about their whiteness, since (to quote Joseph Massad) “they look like other Europeans,… they speak European languages” (Massad and Morris 2006, 163).
So what are Mizrahi Jews? If they are colonialists, they are white, if they are oppressed by whitened Jews, they are black.
This obsession with "color" gets even more absurd, as the author posits that Israeli "whitening" makes American Jews more white as well:
Both US Jews and Israeli Jews gained a certain sense of whiteness as part of the boundary expansion of European colonialism, a process in which ever expanding geographic boundaries coincided with shifting notions of racialized discourse.
It is obvious throughout the paper that "white=evil" and "black=good." "White" represents colonialism and racism, but only for Jews as alleged European proxies. Arab colonialism is never described in academia as "whitening."
This next section is telling. He knows that there is really no racial distinction between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East; he knows that it is too simplistic to categorize people as either black or white. But he has to!
The binary classification of human beings into “black” and “white” seems woefully ill-equipped to capture the multi-ethnic reality of Jewish peoplehood (Azoulay 2001). Given its origins in the pseudo-science of racial theory, the dichotomy could easily be dismissed as too unscholarly, too Eurocentric, and too recent to illustrate the formation of Jewish-Israeli identity. The categorization as “white,” for instance, would have made little sense to earlier generations of Zionists and Arab nationalists: both had been influenced by the complex racial theories of nineteenth-century Europe, which understood Jews and Arabs as too closely related to stand on different sides of the racial divide of “whiteness.”
However, since the discourse on Ashkenazi-Jewish whiteness has come to structure core elements of the Arab–Israeli conflict and Israeli identity [by idiot academics but not by the parties themselves - EoZ] , the process of Israel’s (self-)whitening deserves to be studied from a historical perspective (Sasson-Levy 2013). Whiteness has become a crucial category for the self-understanding of the “white sabra” (Benvenisti 2012),5 the distinction between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews as “white Jews” and “black Jews” (Chetrit 2010) as well as the Arab nationalist understanding of Zionism as a form of settler colonialism by people who “look like other Europeans” (Massad and Morris 2006, 163). The terminology of “whitening” and “self-whitening” deployed here already indicates the fluid, socially constructed, and ultimately contingent nature of racialized discourse (Tessman 2001). Even for a trained observer, it might be hard to distinguish Jews from Arabs and Ashkenazi Israelis from Mizrahi (or Middle Eastern Jewish) Israelis on the streets of Jerusalem.
This is academically approved racism. The author admits that there is no scientific distinction between "white" and "black" Jews or Arabs, but there have already been so many papers written that embrace that distinction, so we might as well embrace it.
There is a further irony. This author admits that Israelis now do not self-identify as white at all, and look upon themselves as indigenous. This threatens the thesis of "self-whitening." So who comes to the rescue? Leftist Jews who blame Israel for all the problems of the region, who are doing this because they identify as white and they suffer from white guilt!
The colonial whitening of Zionist Orientalism transformed Jewish immigrants in the Land of Israel/Palestine into cultured Europeans, eager to liberate the Middle East (and themselves) from the “Orient.” In contrast, the anticolonial whitening of anti-Zionist Occidentalism turned a handful of New Left activists into “white revolutionaries” who would bring down their Zionist settler-state in order to ensure the survival of their community in a non-Zionist non-state. While both cultural formations still breathed the colonial vitalism of white (or maybe whitish) supremacy, the postcolonial whitening of Zochrot (or rather its elaborate staging of pseudo-postcoloniality) might be interpreted as the reflection of an increasingly post-western world order and a post-western Israel, in which the declining appeal of whiteness can only be savoured in the bitter-sweet aftertaste of white guilt.
Note that the German author finds these uber-Leftist Jews to be just as distastefully "white" as other Jews.
To give an idea of how offensive this all is, imagine saying that Barack Obama is white, given his perfect elocution of "white" English and his full acceptance as an ideal person by white liberal Americans. Obama would be offended, and rightly so.
Yet calling Jews who nearly all originated in the Middle East as white - when the word is used as an epithet to mean colonialist, racist, European Westerner - is not at all looked down upon by the very people who are conditioned to find offense in the slightest seeming act that can be interpreted as racist or orientalist.
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Instead of acknowledging their responsibility for failing to combat the drug trafficking, the leaders of Hamas have been trying to blame everyone but themselves.... These leaders are trying hard to convince Palestinians that Israel and Hamas's rivals in the Palestinian Fatah faction, headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, are responsible for flooding the Gaza Strip with illegal drugs.
The Palestinians' attempt to establish a connection between Israel and illegal drugs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is no less dangerous than their terrorist attacks against Israel. The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are sending the following message to their people: The Jews are conspiring to destroy Palestinians by delivering illegal drugs to our communities. Therefore, we need to fight these Jews to prevent them from achieving
The Palestinians have never provided a shred of evidence to corroborate this false accusation against Israel. Why should they allow the truth to get in the way of a good story? Palestinian leaders are experts when it comes to blaming Israel and Jews, instead of the real sources, for all the miseries of their people.
Palestinian leaders are also unlikely to denounce the criminals and terrorists who planted the narcotics in the shampoo and cream bottles of ill women before they traveled for medical treatment in Egypt. Instead, Palestinian leaders will continue to incite their people against Israel and Jews, spreading blood libels of every sort at every turn. In that way, Palestinians will continue to hunt down Jews -- whether they are behind trees and rocks or in plain sight.
‘I had a call today with Prime Minister Netanyahu to discuss the possibility of moving forward with a Mutual Defense Treaty, between the United States and Israel, that would further anchor the tremendous alliance between our two countries,” US President Donald Trump tweeted on Saturday. “I look forward to continuing those discussions after the Israeli Elections when we meet at the United Nations later this month!”
Netanyahu thanked Trump in a subsequent tweet: “The Jewish State has never had a greater friend in the White House... We will continue full steam ahead with our common battle against terrorism.”
In Hebrew, Netanyahu tweeted: “On Friday, I received support from President Trump, and [Blue and White chairman] Benny Gantz received support from [talk show hosts] Ophira and Berko.”
Thus a treaty between Israel and its greatest ally, the US, was reduced to an election campaign gimmick.
A mutual defense treaty between Israel and US would be a major development – whether good or bad remains to be seen.
The benefits of such a treaty seem obvious. It codifies American support for Israeli defense. The US has generally had our backs in times of trouble, but this would mean an official commitment on paper, that if Israel were under attack, the US would be there to help us, perhaps even with troops on the ground, something that has never happened before.
However, there are quite a few downsides to the treaty. Netanyahu himself opposed it in the 1990s, when then-prime minister Shimon Peres pursued it. On his first visit to Washington as prime minister in July 1996, Netanyahu argued that he would not even consider a treaty that could limit Israel’s military independence. His defense minister, Itzik Mordechai, similarly said that the cost of a defense treaty could be greater than its usefulness to Israel. Former US president Bill Clinton also offered such a treaty to Netanyahu in exchange for concessions of Israeli sovereignty to the Palestinians, according to negotiator Dennis Ross’ memoirs, and Netanyahu turned it down.
I want to express gratitude to Jason who is a great leader. Everything that has happened under the president is because of his leadership and his team. We have honored Jason in the City of Jerusalem with the Friends of Zion Award and we will miss him dearly. We know Jason Greenblatt – nothing will change with his love of Israel and his commitment to Israel.
The award we bestowed on Greenblatt is earned by world leaders and influential figures that have gone “above and beyond” for the state of Israel and the Jewish people. Others who have received this award are: US presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, Prince Albert II of Monaco, Bulgarian president Rosen Plevneliev, Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales and, most recently, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.
The Friends of Zion Museum reveals fascinating stories emphasizing the support and heroism of the many friends of the Jewish People and the State of Israel. It serves as a platform to fight global antisemitism and to stand strong against the BDS movement.
The Museum is launching a $100 million project to help educate pro-Israel supporters around the world about the Jewish state, its challenges, and its achievements. FOZ is developing an Ambassador Institute, which includes the first Christian Zionist think-tank, a communications center and an online university. It has become one of the top must-see sites in Israel for all tourists and Israeli residents.
Currently sitting on the board is IDF General (res.) Yossi Peled as the head of the FOZ Israeli Board of Trustees, along with other distinguished members. The Friends of Zion Museum was honored to have as its former international chairman, the late president Shimon Peres.
Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch has, for the first time, indirectly addressed a tweet of mine.
I pointed out that he wrote about how important it is for refugees to be able to be resettled in third countries, and I noted that he never demanded that from Palestinians who remain stateless in Arab countries be given citizenship, and HRW has only insisted on "return."
He is saying here that Israel is "wrongfully block[ing] return."
Is Israel wrong to have its own immigration law? Must it conform with Roth's idea of international law?
HRW (as well as Amnesty) pretend that descendants of Palestinian refugees be eligible for "return" based on a tortured reading of the Nottebohm case before the International Court of Justice. Nottebohm, written in 1955, is explicit in saying that for a person to be considered a citizen of a country he must have well-established connections to the state - not the land, but the state. Somehow HRW uses this as proof of the right of return for UNRWA "refugees" to still have ties to a state of Palestine that never existed, and therefore they can "return" to be citizens of Israel.
The irony is that HRW and Amnesty completely ignore what Nottebohm says about nationality that destroys their argument:"international law leaves it to each State to lay down the rules governing the grant of its own nationality. "
That is pretty explicit international law. But Ken Roth disagrees, because his law of "Israel is Always Wrong" is of a higher moral dimension than simple international law.
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The Palestinian Authority has said, repeatedly, that payments for terrorists in prison and families of terrorists are sacred and will not be touched, no matter what economic sanctions are placed on the PA for their "pay for slay" system.
It turns out this is not quite true.
Hatem Abdel Qader
Hatem Abdel Qader, member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, this morning criticized the Palestinian Authority's continued cutting salaries of militants and to the families of "martyrs," wounded and convicted terrorists in Israeli prison.``We should not face a war from the Israelis and the Americans at the same time when the PA is distracted by cutting salaries of the martyrs and the wounded, '' he said.
Back in February, it was reported that the PA had cut the salaries to terrorists and their families - but only for those who belonged to president Mahmoud Abbas' political opponents in Gaza, including former Fatah members, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. At the time the cuts were blamed by PA officials as a "technical fault."
It was no such thing. By summer, it was clear that the salaries were not going to be paid for some 2700"martyrs", prisoners and their families. These included members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and followers of Abbas' political rival Mohammed Dahlan, going back to late 2018.
Abbas similarly cut salaries completely to workers in Gaza as well, while he cut the salaries of those in the West Bank by 50%.
Suddenly, the "moral" stance of Mohammed Abbas where he claimed he would prioritize paying "martyrs" over all others only applies to members of his own Fatah faction.
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Arabic Egyptian news site Al Bidda is not happy with Netflix' The Spy, about Eli Cohen.
Its criticisms are all over the place. For example, completely missing the point of the story, the article says "It is strange for a spy series, which is taken from the Israeli narrative of Cohen's mission in Syria, that it embodies the story of a spy who ultimately failed and was arrested and executed in a public square in Syria after the discovery by Egyptian intelligence to trick him and inform their Syrian counterpart. "
I have not seen any story that credits Egyptian intelligence with having anything to do with Cohen's capture.
But the real issue that Egyptians have with the series is the scene I highlighted earlier, which could not have lasted more than three seconds, showing Syrians making fun of Egypt's president Nasser in posters on this wall.
The author is convinced that Netflix made the entire series for that one scene, "insulting the symbols of the July (1952) Revolution."
By presenting this "distorted" content, Netflix raised several questions, the most important of which are: Are the network's officials trying to pass political agendas against Egypt and the Arab countries within a dramatic content?
Can you say "paranoid?"
From this review one would think that the series was about Egypt and not Syria and Israel.
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New York, September 12 - The publicists for a former Pink Floyd front man sought to downplay reports today that their client had made frequent trips on the private aircraft of a late sex-trafficking kingpin, insisting that he traveled on that airplane maybe half a dozen times at most.
Roger Waters only made five or six trips on Jeffrey Epstein's private jet, tops, asserted Dane Brammidge to reporters Thursday, and that any talk of underage girls on the same flights remains pure speculation and fodder for a libel suit, at least until clear evidence emerges of same. Epstein committed suicide in his NY jail cell soon after his arrest on federal charges.
"Mr. Waters would like to assure the public in general, and his fans and activism allies in particular, that reports of his frequenting Jeffrey Epstein's underage brothels are spurious, possibly slanderous, nonsense," proclaimed Brammidge. "He took flights on the Epstein jet no more than, say, six times, but probably fewer, and any attempt to paint him as some sort of close friend of a sex-trafficker will be met by legal means."
"These reports are probably the work of those who resent or oppose my client's political activism and advocacy," continued Brammidge. "I would not be surprised to discover that the regimes or groups whose vested interests Mr. Waters opposes in his efforts to secure human rights for the oppressed are behind the idea that he made more than like five or six flights like that, and they certainly cannot produce evidence that any alcohol or underage prostitutes played any part in that small handful of flights, at least not yet."
Brammidge emphasized that Waters's several trips on Epstein's plane, which took place between 1990 and 2016, occurred as part of the musician's ongoing advocacy for Palestinian rights. "It is cynical at the very least, and perhaps even sinister, to smear my client's work in this manner. One can only wonder whether these allegations are part of a broader effort to tarnish the very causes for which he works so tirelessly, such as inflatable pigs with dollar signs and Jewish stars getting tossed around at his concerts."
The spokesman also wondered aloud whether any such media follow-up has dogged Israeli politician Ehud Barak after the latter was photographed entering Epstein's Upper East Side mansion, just a random thought, not for any special reason, even though of all the public figures he could have mentioned with documented or alleged ties to the deceased Epstein, he chose the one Israeli.
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One of the central elements of the Palestinian narrative is the negation of the entire Jewish history in the Land of Israel in general and in Jerusalem in particular. Despite numerous sources and archeological finds proving the opposite, the Palestinian Authority regularly repeats this claim because it is the basis for the PA's denial of Israel's right to exist. Recently, the PA Minister of Culture emphasized this Palestinian lie, claiming Israel has "no connection" to Jerusalem, history, geography or even to the future. He then asserted the second fundamental Palestinian historical revision intended to create a Palestinian right to exist. He claimed that Palestinians were Canaanites with a 6,000-year history in the land:
PA Minister of Culture Atef Abu Saif: "Our struggle is with this State [of Israel] that came out of nowhere, without a history and without geography, stole our land, and wants to put an end to our existence... There is a lying author who wrote a story about his false presence on this land, and then comes and wants to realize his tale. There is nothing in history that proves this presence. They have not found one stone... [Israel knows] that they have no connection to this city [Jerusalem], that they have no connection to this history, and that they have no connection to the geography, just as they have no connection to the future... If Israel celebrated the lie of '3,000 years [of Jewish history] in Jerusalem,' we have 7,000 years in Jerusalem - so what? We Canaanites are the first ones who built Jebus more than 6,000 years ago. And perhaps we need no celebrations because it is natural that we are here. Those who celebrate are foreigners."
[Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, Aug. 26, 2019]
Palestinian Media Watch documented that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas himself recently voiced the PA claim that today's Palestinians are descendants of the biblical Canaanites in order to establish an ancient historical connection of "5,000 years" to the land:
Abbas: "[Israelis] will remember that this land belongs to its people; this land belongs to its inhabitants; this land belongs to the Canaanites who were here 5,000 years ago - and we are the Canaanites!"
[Facebook page of the PA Presidential Office, Aug. 10, 2019]
PA Minister of Culture denies Jewish history: Nothing proves it, they have no connection to history.
One of the central elements of the Palestinian narrative is the negation of the entire Jewish history in the Land of Israel.
Its critics have accused Israel of a lot of terrible things over the course of its 71 years of existence, but The New York Times has now added one more to the list that will particularly resonate with intellectuals. While Israeli policies in Jerusalem since its reunification in 1967 have often been blasted, a recently approved proposal to deal with the city’s seemingly insoluble traffic problems is being put down as “Disneyfication.”
The object of scorn is a cable car that will start its journey at the First Station cultural complex in western Jerusalem and then travel over the Hinnom Valley to a stop at Mount Zion before landing in the City of David archeological park in eastern Jerusalem. There, visitors and worshippers will be able to tour the historic excavations at the site and walk to the Western Wall via recently excavated underground passageways that were taken by pilgrims on their way to the Second Temple 2,000 years ago. If planners have their way, this line will be the first of many that will crisscross the city in the future, delivering people to destinations that would otherwise require them to navigate jammed streets.
The accusation that Jews are trashing the holy city and turning it into a theme park due to this plan was the focus of a feature published this week by the Times. The cable-car scheme is fair game for criticism from architects and others who worry about the potential aesthetic damage to the ancient capital. But the subtext of the campaign against the initiative goes far deeper than whether or not it will make Jerusalem look like a Swiss ski resort or even Disneyworld. For Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman and many of the Israel-bashers he quotes in his piece, the real story is about how Israel is seeking to emphasize Jerusalem’s Jewish history.
Kimmelman is perfectly entitled to critique the Israeli cable car plan on the grounds of architecture and design. Indeed, one of the critics he interviews is Moshe Safdie, the architect responsible for many Israeli building projects including within Jerusalem. But Kimmelman goes further: The cable-car project is an example, illustrating how Israel wields architecture and urban planning to extend its authority in the occupied territories. Whatever its transit merits, which critics say are negligible, the cable car curates a specifically Jewish narrative of Jerusalem, furthering Israeli claims over Arab parts of the city.
What is this architecture and urban planning that Israel wields? An illustrative photo below the paragraph shows a walled section of Israel’s security barrier as an example. The barrier is not about extending Israeli authority but preventing acts of Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians.
And what exactly is a “specifically Jewish narrative of Jerusalem,” a city that has been central to Judaism and the Jewish people for thousands of years?
Later, Kimmelman also states: Cable car passengers will be funneled through a Jewish version of the city’s history.
As if Israel is somehow imposing on or ‘Judaizing’ the city.
Indeed, according to Kimmelman: the cable cars will swoop down from a Jewish neighborhood in the western part of Jerusalem to Mount Zion.
This is an interesting use of language given that cable cars usually descend fairly slowly. Instead, we have them “swooping down” almost like a predatory bird, which might well be a subliminal image for Kimmelman who sees Israel preying on the holy city.
Related reading: Deal With It: Jerusalem is Israel’s Capital
It’s also worth pointing out that while Kimmelman sees Israel promoting a “Jewish version of the city’s history,” Israel is the one authority that has consistently and effectively protected all holy sites in Jerusalem for all religions. Indeed there is nothing preventing tourists from visiting the many Christian or Muslim historical sites. The only party that denies a Jewish historical connection to the city is the Palestinians.
Speaking of the NYT was reading Deborah Lipstadt’s review of a new book on it and my lord the stuff the Times pulls and still calls itself a newspaper pic.twitter.com/sHrNEyDFQs
Micha Mitch Danzig, Attorney,
former IDF, Middle East analyst
The question of Ashkenazi Jewish "whiteness" is receiving increased attention.
If to be "white" means anything it means to be of European descent. But in today's western-left political culture what it really means is "bad, racist, colonialist, imperialist, hater of all-things-good."
In other words, it means to be a contemptible person.
To be "white" no longer merely suggests ethnicity, but a toxic ontology (way of being) and a toxic epistemology (way of knowing.)
Ironically, this racist view of "whiteness" primarily derives from those who claim to be the ideological descendants of Martin Luther King, Jr. If King stood for anything, however, he stood for judging people according to character, not ethnicity and not gender. Those who despise "whiteness" assign this racial category to Ashkenazi Jews in order to spread that hatred onto one of the most persecuted peoples on the planet. This tendency among "progressives" is nothing if not illiberal.
It is, at least in part, for this reason, that many American Jews are walking away from the progressive-left and the Democratic Party.
The reality is that the entire notion of Ashkenazi Jews as “White people” is very new (from a historical perspective) and it is also completely detached from any historical context, including in America, where, as recently as the early 1960s there were still quotas on Jewish enrollment in some Ivy League schools. Ironically, since the origin of the European pseudoscientific racial classifications (dividing humanity as White, Black, and Yellow races); Jews in Europe (both Ashkenazi and Sephardi alike) were regularly persecuted on the basis of being “non-white.”
This is worth a read because the question of Jewish "whiteness" goes to the question of Jewish indigeneity within the Land of Israel.
And the fact of Jewish indigeneity goes to the very heart of the Movement for Jewish Freedom, which we affectionately call "Zionism."
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Palestine Today published this photo feature of a horse race in Gaza at the site of the old airport.
The jockeys, spectators and horses all seem well-fed.
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I am not a fan of the cable car idea, but the Times article goes beyond valid points into much more fundamental criticism of Israel's excavation and preservation of ancient Jewish sites - criticism that cannot be viewed as anything but an anti-Israel narrative.
Examples:
The cable-car project is an example, illustrating how Israel wields architecture and urban planning to extend its authority in the occupied territories. Whatever its transit merits, which critics say are negligible, the cable car curates a specifically Jewish narrative of Jerusalem, furthering Israeli claims over Arab parts of the city.
...Cable car passengers will be funneled through a Jewish version of the city’s history. After disembarking at the City of David, they can tour the archaeological site, then proceed underground to the Western Wall via Herodian passageways walked by Jewish pilgrims during the era of the Second Temple and now partly excavated beneath the homes of Palestinian families in Silwan.
Notwithstanding that several Arab homes may be demolished to make room for it, in effect the cable car pretends Arab Silwan isn’t there. Tourists will fly over and tunnel under Silwan’s Palestinian residents without actually having to encounter them.
It is a cable car meant for tourists. Silwan is not exactly a tourist spot. This criticism is not about the cable car but about the fact that Arabs claim that Silwan, known earlier as Shiloach, is an exclusively Arab area.
It was, once, after the Jews were expelled in the 1930s.
The article notes that one of the cable car stations is at what is now known as Mount Zion, which is more associated with Christianity than Judaism - it has the "Room of the Last Supper" and other places more of interest to Christians than Jews. But the New York Times doesn't mention that because the thesis of the article is how Israel is Judaizing Jerusalem - exactly what the Arabs claim.
Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, tweeted:
I was the head of the preservation committee in #Jerusalem and most of the buildings we were preserving were Arab ones because we understand the value of history, what the @nytimes is doing is completely denying #Jewish history
The plan can bring to mind Israel’s so-called bypass roads, built to safely speed Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank to Jerusalem without passing through Palestinian towns.
The alternative is to endanger the Jews who want to reach their homes, who could easily be caught in Arab roadblocks and lynched. Apparently, that is preferable to the reporter.
Even the cladding of East Jerusalem’s settlements in Jerusalem stone, the architectural uniform traditionally worn by buildings in Jewish West Jerusalem, helps spread the image of a single Jewish city.
Guess who created the law that all buildings in Jerusalem be built with Jerusalem stone? The British, as can be seen in this 1995 article in the very same New York Times that glorified the city's use of Jerusalem stone:
Heaven intrudes upon Jerusalem in another way, too, in the recurring question of how much the whole city should itself resemble a perfect kingdom, or simply be allowed to look like other places. The British, who governed Jerusalem from 1917 to 1947, made a powerful gesture toward a higher Jerusalem when they decreed that all buildings had to be faced with Jerusalem stone, a local form of limestone with an exceptionally warm, golden hue. .... This rule may be the most important single act of city planning ever in Jerusalem. The stone is an extraordinary material, rich and textured and almost magical in the glow of dawn and dusk in the city's heavy light, and it brings even the most mediocre architecture into a sense of wholeness with the city.
The newer NYT article praises the British for doing the very thing it falsely berates the Israelis for doing:
Modern Jerusalem was spared Disneyfication, first by the highborn culture of British colonialism, with its awe for the city’s antique past, and next by Jordanian paralysis, which froze the Old City as if in amber.
Well, not exactly. The Jordanians destroyed a number of major synagogues that used to be part of the Jerusalem skyline and now are being rebuilt by those terrible Israelis who, the Times implies, have no regard for history by "Disneyfying" Jerusalem.
Again, I think the cable cars are a mistake, but this article is blaming Israel for the remarkable job of keeping Jerusalem both a sacred place and a livable place over the past 52 years.
(h/t Yisrael Medad)
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Minnesota police made an arrest Friday in connection with a fire that destroyed Adas Israel Synagogue in Duluth earlier this week.
Matthew James Amiot, 36, was booked on a first-degree arson charge Friday and is in custody at the St. Louis County Jail. He is scheduled to appear in court Monday.
The Star Tribune reported that no one else was arrested on Friday and that the suspect had nearly a dozen misdemeanor convictions for trespassing, burglary and theft.
Amiot's Facebook page is a little sparse, but it gives a little indication of what he is like.
He doesn't seem to be a white nationalist. He has had previous profile images of Tupac Shakur with the quote "Is it a crime, to fight, for what is mine?"
He also has friends in Duluth who are black.
Amiot also seems obsessed with organized crime, with a number of photos of this Goodfellas quote (his profile picture for the past year) and a picture of noted crime bosses of the 1930s:
I don't think a white nationalist would quote a rap artists or show great affinity to Italian mobsters.(There are a number of Jewish mobsters in the photo as well.)
He loves guns, as the photo on top and this one shows:
He seems to be anti-Christian, based on this photo:
(He has one picture of Jesus but I think it is meant to be ironic.)
He announced his engagement in 2007 and one of the comments from a friend was "Church lady?" followed by a "Hehehe," so it seems to have been a joke.
The engagement didn't last, and this post might explain why.
If I had to make a guess, I'd think that Amiot is an incel, a trait shared by many mass murderers. Incel forums are known to include antisemitism along with racism and extreme sexism as well as anger against the world for their forced celibacy.
As bad as burning down a synagogue is, Amiot might have been very close to doing a mass shooting instead.
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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Elder of Ziyon
