It condemned the statements of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on a radio program recently, where he reiterated: "It took us a bit to work our way through it, but ultimately after studying all sides of debate, we agree with President Reagan that the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank are not per se inconsistent with international law."
The Palestinian ministry responded:
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates consider these statements to be anti-Semitic, denying the existence and right of the Palestinians on this land is itself anti-Semitism and a denial of the truth that has been established for thousands of years. Not to mention the racist and fascist aspect, which was reflected in these declarations encapsulated by a biblical, missionary vision that forfeits the right of the other, regardless of whether this right is fixed, firm, clear and standing.
They don't explain how exactly giving Jews the right to live in their ancestral homeland is antisemitic. Chances are that they are using the old, idiotic argument that Palestinians are Semites and anything they don't like is antisemitic - a "1984" style definition whose existence is meant to eliminate the very idea of anti-Jewish bigotry as a concept.
Because they know that they are the antisemitic bigots and want to subvert the term itself for their own propaganda.
It will be interesting if they bother to translate this stupidity in the English section of their website, or if they will try to avoid being a laughingstock.
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Jewish Voice for Peace NYC videoed some 30 members singing a Chanukah song with new lyrics that are hard to understand, but they seem to include stuff about Trump's Executive Order and how it attacks Palestinians, somehow.
What kind of a person attends an event like this?
They are overwhelmingly female. Of all ages. Only a couple of them seem to be really into it, enthusiastically doing the hand motions that were supposed to be synchronized.
And if we are honest, most of the demonstrations by Palestinians and their Western dhimmis are attended by people who aren't the brightest bulbs in the pack. The kind of people who are happy to repeat back the chants done by a person with a microphone are not the type that think too independently. They aren't knowledgeable enough to maintain an argument with someone who knows their stuff.
But still...something attracts these not-too-bright people to an off-key singing session. It isn't ideology that attracts these people.
It is that they are lonely. They live in New York City but cannot make real connections with people. Being mostly female, they need to find spaces where they can meet people and be safe. JVP provides that for them.
Look at them. Except for a couple of the middle aged women, they aren't having fun. There are very few smiles. Why on Earth would anyone voluntarily join such a joyless event? It is because they are desperate for companionship, and this is the best option they are aware of.
This is important - because it means that Zionist groups are not fulfilling the need that these (mostly) women have. Most Chanukah parties are fun. This one certainly isn't.
Jewish Zionist groups in New York and elsewhere should be doing some outreach to find the unaffiliated and the lonely - and create fun events that can attract the Jews who are lost.
Like these people.
(No sing-alongs please unless they are ironic, and if you are going to play dreidel, make the stakes more interesting than chocolate gelt.)
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We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
There is no end to what must be done, beginning with funding, distributing, and doing whatever it takes to compose new textbooks on racism that include Jew hatred and that make them mandatory reading; new courses in anti-Semitism and Israel, new courses in the history of Islam and then doing whatever it takes to make sure that they, too, are mandatory; forging anti-indoctrination curriculums that will take 50-100 years before they can begin to exert some influence over the media, human rights organizations, government leaders, leftists, and the Muslim world, etc.
This is trench warfare. This is clearing the swamps, inch by inch. There is no one quick fix.
What about our Jewish leadership? Where have they been? Most have spent the last twenty years focused on white, right-wing Nazi Jew haters, have been too politically correct, and overly sensitive to the sorrows of recent immigrants, to note from whence the danger cometh. How do we re-educate our leaders? Failing that, how do we replace them, and in time to make a difference? How do we insure that this time round, we do not give up our religious brethren or our Israeli brethren? And that we do not surrender ourselves?
Finally—finally, even some left-wing American Jews are a bit frightened, on edge, and are asking the kinds of questions that we all should have been asking fifteen or twenty years ago—maybe seventy years ago if we hadn’t been living in such a “goldene medina” at such a golden time in history.
Now, a few more of us can hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at full gallop.
This just in from a very liberal friend who was born in hiding in Europe and grew up in a DP camp. “Now I’m really getting frightened. My kids and grandkids all look very Jewish. Black hats. Payes. Sheitels. The works.”
This, from another non-religious friend. “This is wild. How can we stop this?”
This, from a former shul mate: “How did you know this would be happening? Are you some kind of psychic, a prophet, maybe a witch?”
Ah, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing...
Hannukah Sameach—our holiday which celebrates both military might and divine intervention. We need both.
On Tuesday, December 10, 2019, in a premeditated attack, two shooters opened fire inside a kosher deli in Jersey City, New Jersey and murdered four people. The killers included a former member of a notoriously antisemitic group and, reportedly, a follower of Louis Farrakhan.
It’s becoming obvious to most Jews that we are living in a state of siege. Practically every Jewish institution in America now needs significant security. College campuses have become hostile territory for Jewish students. Jews are murdered in Pittsburgh, San Diego, and Jersey City, beaten on the streets of Brooklyn, bullied and harassed in the universities, defamed by The New York Times and CNN, and now maligned in the US Congress.
There are many reasons for the current situation. Many are not within our control, but one thing truly ought to be: Jewish leadership.
The abolitionist leader Fredrick Douglass understood the consequences of failed leadership. He wrote: “Find out what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact … measure of the injustice and wrong … which will be imposed upon them.”
It’s hard to ignore the simple fact that Jewish leaders have failed to stop or even slow down the accelerating epidemic of Jew-hatred in America. Good intentions and doing their “best” is not good enough. It’s irrational to continue with the current policies and leaders and expect different results.
Part of the reason for their failure is that many mainstream Jewish leaders, with a few exceptions, most significantly Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), have failed to fully understand the new threats we face. Like failed generals fighting the last war, they focused on Nazis and the political right — and ignored the changed battlefield for as long as they could. They deliberately, out of political consideration, minimized the assaults coming from “progressives” and Islamists.
The Paris Court of Appeal declared that the young man's discernment - 27 years old at the time and under the influence of illicit substances - was abolished at the time of the facts and that he is therefore criminally irresponsible. The civil parties have five days to decide whether they can appeal to the Court of Cassation.
"The issue here was neither the fight against this scourge which is anti-Semitism nor the desirable criminal policy against cannabis, but only the question of the discernment of Kobili Traore at the material time. However, it was clearly abolished," said the suspect's lawyer, Mr. Thomas Bidnic, who said he was "satisfied" and "relieved. "
Mr. Francis Szpiner, Lawyer for the three children of the victim, denounced the outcome as "an outrageous decision".
Speaking to the press, Mr. Francis Szpiner, lawyer for the three children of the victim, denounced the outcome as "an outrageous decision".
"A man whose experts said that he had had a delusional puff as a result of a deliberate intake of drugs was therefore granted impunity," he added. "We have just created in our country a Sarah Halimi jurisprudence, that is to say that any person who will suffer from a delirious drug addiction because he will have taken an illicit substance that is dangerous for health will be exempt from criminal responsibility ."
This inadmissible and incomprehensible decision shows the dilapidated state of French "justice", incapable of punishing the criminals.
Laws and justice are the foundation of any decent society, in fact for every decent life.
The Archbishop of Sebastia of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, Atallah Hanna, fell ill over the weekend.
So he blamed Israel for poisoning him.
Speaking to what appears to be dozens of reporters at a hospital in Jordan, Hanna changed the original story of his illness, when he claimed that Israel shot some sort of shell into his church in Jerusalem, a claim that was obviously not corroborated.
He now says that it is possible that the alleged poison was hidden somewhere in his library.
Hanna says "I hold the occupation authorities responsible for the serious health problem that has afflicted me for this day."
He says that he is having difficulty speaking, even though he gave a 13-minute statement without any seeming slurring or stuttering.
But he also said, "I cannot be certain that Israel is behind this incident, but indications are that it is behind it...I believe that if Israel was implicated in this incident, its goal was not an assassination, but rather an attempt to harm me."
Because it makes so much sense for Israel to put poison hidden in his library, not knowing if or when he would be exposed, and only wanting to get him sick but not seriously harmed. It's so obvious!
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Divest This will be
taking a break for a while to focus on work and family.
Before going on a previous hiatus, I paused to reflect on what
the whole BDS project and the fight against it meant in the context of the
wider war against the Jews and their state.
This ended up a nine-part Bigger Picture series
that should still be relevant to anyone fighting the good fight who wants to
better understand what we’re up against.
Since knowing who you are fighting only gets you so far, I
used that understanding after returning from hiatus to look at the strategies
and tactics needed to defeat not just BDS but the militant movement BDS is
simply one part of.
Those are both longish series/documents, and I never expected
everyone to read them in full and act accordingly. But the principles they lay out are still
relevant and can be summarized as:
·Far from being a peace
movement, BDS represents the propaganda arm of a war movement, one designed to
weaken the Jewish state so that others can do the dirty work of eliminating
it.
·The war movement of which
BDS is a part relies on language carefully selected to convince progressive-minded
individuals and groups that the anti-Israel cause is a virtuous fight against
racism, imperialism and other contemporary sins.
·Because the societies that
back BDS represent the greatest enemies of the progressive values listed above,
BDS advocates must militantly police the left end of the political spectrum it
is trying to coopt in order to ensure everyone stays in line. This is why, for example, feminist groups
must bow down before the (mostly male-dominated) Palestinian cause, but anyone
pointing out the inherent sexism and homophobia within that cause is
immediately hounded out of “the movement.”
·BDS itself is not a
movement, but simply a tactic designed to paint the Jewish state as the
inheritor of South Africa’s mantle as the world’s worst human-rights abuser. So
even when BDS loses this or that battle, even if the Israeli economy tripled in
size during the BDS decades, the campaign continues since its propaganda goals
are met every time people are exposed to the Israel = Apartheid narrative
(especially young people who were not even born when South African Apartheid
existed).
·The fight against BDS is
stymied by debates over whether we are “just playing defense” vs. “going on the
attack.” Missing from this binary choice
is an analysis of how offense and defense represent different aspects of a
military strategy – each required at different times. But because we do not treat the fight against
Israel’s detractors as a military campaign (rather than an argument to be won
or lost), we end up fighting with each other over which ineffective defensive
or offensive tactics everyone should be using.
·Treating our fight as a
military campaign requires recognizing the nature of the battlefield, the
relative strengths and weaknesses of each side, including the fact that one
side (ours) does not want to ultimately see our enemies destroyed. Given this, we should adopt tactics
associated with siege warfare, switching to pitched battles and other tactics
only when they are militarily prudent (or required).
This is just a quick summary of what is contained in the
material linked above, the bottom line of all of which is that patience is the
most potent military and political force in the universe. While it is painful to see Israel smeared
from coast-to-coast, and the rise of anti-Semitic movements and parties
(especially in the West) is enormously frightening, we should also look at and
learn from positive long-term trends.
For example, one need only compare Israel, which has thrived
and grown richer and more powerful since 1948, with the chaos and decline that
characterized her enemies during this same period. While there is always the chance that his
chaos will expand to engulf far more than just the Middle East, the best
defense against this trend is an Israel that is militarily powerful,
economically independent and allied with others fighting the same fight.
Please reach out via the contact form at Divest This if
anything comes up while I’m taking a break from blogging, and enormous thanks
to Elder for letting me participate in his fabulous site over the last several
years.
Onward!
DT
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Another (secular) year is over and we have again done amazing things for what is essentially a single person operation.
We brought attention to the antisemitic TruNews network and prompted reassurances from the White House that they will not get getting press credentials as they sometimes had been. Other smaller victories came from our publicizing things we discovered - like having Dictionary.com change its sources on defining Zionism, prompting the Israeli government to drop a recommended film for high schoolers after the director was discovered to have said he wanted Israel to drown, getting Haaretz to change a photo caption, and more.
EoZ has been quoted and/or cited about 90 times this year in news media. Some of our tweets have gone viral, being seen by literally millions of people.
The site continues to create videos, cartoons, posters and more besides our original analysis. EoZ is truly one of the most influential pro-Israel websites and Twitter accounts out there.
Plus,. EoZ hosts some amazing columnists - Divest This, Daled Amos, Judean Rose, PreOccupied Territory, Vic Rosenthal, and some others that have added their unique perspectives. And Ian has continued to put together the best linkdumps and synopses of articles, videos and tweets, twice a day during the week, an invaluable resource that is for some people their main source for all news about Israel, the Jewish world and the Muslim world.
All of this isn't free.
So please, donate to EoZ and help make this site even better in the future!
Or you can send a gift card for Amazon to us (elder@elderofziyon.com.)
Or you can ask for Elder to speak to your group.
You can also advertise on EoZ and then get a tax deduction. (For significant donations, there are ways of making it tax deductible as well. Email for details.)
Either way, I appreciate your friendship and support.
I wish all of my Jewish readers a very happy Chanukah, and for my many Christian readers may you have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Israel does not intentionally harm civilians in Gaza or anywhere else. Yes, civilians are harmed in Gaza by IDF actions, but they are not the target. In 2015, a panel of former top military leaders and generals from eight democratic countries investigated the 2014 Gaza War. Their conclusion: Israel's conduct in the conflict "met and in some respects exceeded the highest standards we set for our own nations' militaries....The IDF not only met its obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict, but often exceeded these on the battlefield at significant tactical cost."
Furthermore, Jews living at the site of the biblical Shiloh, or in the shadow of the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, are not committing war crimes. To say that a Jew living in Judea - the cradle of Jewish civilization - is a war criminal is ridiculous. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Cabinet on Sunday: "To turn the fact that Jews are living in their land into a war crime is an absurdity of unimaginable proportions."
What starts with Israel will not end with Israel. If today Israeli politicians and soldiers will be charged with war crimes for the unintentional death of innocents during a military campaign, then tomorrow the politicians and soldiers of other countries will also find themselves so accused.
Syria intentionally commits war crimes. Iran intentionally commits war crimes. Turkey intentionally commits war crimes. Israel does not.
7. Does the ICC unfairly single out Israel for censure?
It is certainly possible to argue that getting dragged into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a good look for the court. A bloody civil war has been raging for years in Syria with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced; there are massive human rights violations in China, Myanmar, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere; and The Hague does nothing.
Instead, the ICC, which seeks to prosecute only the “most serious crimes of international concern,” is gearing up to investigate a Western democracy that insists it is fighting defensive conflicts against brutal terrorist organizations, and building homes on disputed territory captured in a defensive war.
“Who are they accusing here? Iran? Turkey? Syria? No — Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. This is terrible hypocrisy,” Netanyahu said Sunday.
On the other hand, this “whataboutism” argument isn’t entirely straightforward, either. The aforementioned states, like Israel, are not members of the ICC and the court thus does not have jurisdiction over crimes committed on their respective territories.
The ICC did not choose to get involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It did not initiate the process. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that the court, with its limited resources and already poor reputation, was hoping to stay far away from it. However, it was dragged into it by the Palestinians. Frustrated with the lack of progress in the peace process, Ramallah viewed The Hague as a convenient arena to score potent points against Israel.
However, it can be counter-argued, the prosecutor could have easily rejected the case by determining that the ICC does not have jurisdiction because Palestine is not a state. Whether she chose the opposite path out of purely legalistic or political-ideological reasons we may never know definitively. But we will find out soon enough whether the pretrial chamber agrees with or reject her arguments.
In the meantime, it is worth noting that the prosecutor’s announcement last week did not come as a surprise to Israel. For the last five years, senior politicians, including those on the right, were keenly aware that Bensouda was watching Israel’s every step. Netanyahu’s vocal support for expanding the settlement enterprise, including his recent repeated vows to annex significant portions of the West Bank, self-evidently did not help convince her to close the case and let it be.
ICC to Open Probe Into War Crimes in West Bank, Gaza
Israel's ministerial cabinet on Sunday decided to classify its discussions of the International Criminal Court’s expected investigation of alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, local media reported.
The International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor reportedly met with a Palestinian group, but avoided meeting with Israeli organizations, before the court announced Friday that it was preparing to probe alleged war crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians.
The Israeli organizations sought to present prosecutor Fatou Bensouda with information on alleged crimes by the Palestinian Authority, Channel 13 reported on Sunday.
Despite avoiding the Israelis, Bensouda met several times with Palestinian organizations ahead of the decision, with the most recent meeting occurring roughly two weeks ahead of the announcement.
One of the pro-Israel organizations that tried to meet with Bensouda was the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, a human rights group with representatives in Israel, the US and the UK.
The head of the organization, Meir Linzen, told Channel 13 that “for about a year we contacted the prosecutor several times, and didn’t get an answer.”
Linzen said the organization had prepared documents with its legal opinion that the ICC lacked authority to investigate the case, as well as information on the Palestinian Authority’s financial compensation of those involved in carrying out terror attacks against Israelis. The group reached out to Bensouda via both email and phone calls to no avail.
Bensouda met with representatives of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, who criticized the ICC for being unfairly biased toward Israel in a tense meeting earlier this month. The center posted footage of the meeting on its Facebook and YouTube pages on December 8.
For the first time, Saudi Arabia will officially welcome the secular New Year this year.
Official Saudi social media announced a fireworks show, a countdown to 2020 and music with a DJ.
Last year, private New Year's parties and events were allowed but nothing official from the Kingdom.
Up until now, the Kingdom and its Muslim clerics refused to celebrate the New Year because it is forbidden in Sharia law.
A member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, Dr. Saleh Al-Fawzan, said on many occasions and fatwas that "participation in New Year's celebrations is forbidden by Sharia," describing it as a "legal innovation."
Things are definitely changing in Saudi Arabia, and the reason is probably the desire to attract tourists as oil is becoming less and less stable as the major source of the kingdom's income.
(Photo above was for the Saudi National Day celebrations.)
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The International Criminal Court is meant to be a "court of last resort" to try the most heinous war crimes that are otherwise not being prosecuted by the existing national courts.
1) Intentionally launching disproportionate attacks in the 2014 war
2) wilful killing and wilfully causing serious injury to body or health
3) intentionally directing an attack against objects or persons using the
distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions
4) the transfer of Israeli civilians into the West Bank since 2014 (when the Palestinian Authority joined the Rome Statute)
5) use by members of the IDF of non-lethal and lethal means against persons participating in demonstrations beginning in March 2018 near the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel
If the prosecutor is fair, she will drop four of the five charges. Israel's High Court as well as Israel's Military Advocate General exhaustively investigate all incidents and there is no way a fair court can say that Israel doesn't uphold the rule of law. The High Court is respected internationally.
A footnote in this prosecutor's report shows that the fourth charge, that of "transfer of civilians," cannot be defended by Israel. She notes that Israel's High Court has refused to rule on that issue because it is far more a political that a legal issue. Paragraph 180:
The Israeli Government, in turn, has considered the settlements to be lawful. And while the Israeli High Court of Justice has examined the legality of discrete actions taken by Israeli public authorities connected to the Government of Israel’s settlement policy based on individual claims before it, despite the High Court’s recognised independence, it has consistently held the broader policy question of the Government of Israel’s settlement policy as such, which has been deemed to be predominantly political in nature, to be “non-justiciable”.[572]
The footnote says:
See Ayub et al. case, pp. 12-13 (Vice-President Landau: “I have more willingly reached the conclusion that this court should refrain from considering this issue of civilian settlement in an occupied territory under international law, knowing that this issue is in dispute between the government of Israel and other governments and that it may be debated in the context of a crucial international negotiation of which the government of Israel is a party. Any opinion expressed by this court on such a sensitive issue which cannot be said other than as an obiter dictum, will neither add nor derogate, and issues which by their nature belong to the realm of international politics should better be discussed in that realm only. In other words, although I agree that petitioners' complaint is generally within the court's jurisdiction, in view of the fact that it involves proprietary rights of individuals, this special aspect of the matter should be regarded as not within the jurisdiction of the court when the petition is submitted to this court by an individual.”); Bargil et al. case, p. 9, President M. Shamgar ((referring to HCJ 852/86 Aloni v. Minister of Justice): “As we said there, attempts have been made to bring predominantly political disputes into the jurisdiction of the court. In that case I pointed out that I personally do not believe that it is, in practice, possible to create a hermetic seal or filter that are capable of preventing disputes of a political nature from penetrating into litigation before the High Court of Justice. The standard applied by the court is a legal one, but public law issues also include political aspects, within the different meanings of that term. The question which must be asked in such a case is, generally, what is the predominant nature of the dispute. As explained, the standard applied by the court is a legal one, and this is the basis for deciding whether an issue should be considered by the court, that is, whether an issue is predominantly political or predominantly legal./ In the case before us, it is absolutely clear that the predominant nature of the issue is political, and it has continued to be so from its inception until the present.”); Bargil et al. case, p. 11, Justice E. Goldberg: (“does this case fall into the category of the few cases where this Court will deny a petition for lack of institutional justicity [...] I believe that we must answer this question in the affirmative. This is not because we lack the legal tools to give judgment, but because a judicial determination, which does not concern individual rights, should defer to a political process of great importance and great significance. Such is the issue before us: it stands at the centre of the peace process; it is of unrivalled importance; and any determination by the court is likely to be interpreted as a direct intervention therein. The special and exceptional circumstances referred to, which are unique, are what put this case into the category of those special cases, where the fear of impairing the public’s confidence in the judiciary exceeds ‘the fear of impairing the public’s confidence in the law...’”). See also Green Park International Inc v Quebec 2009 para. 265, observing with respect to the scope of what the HCJ has deemed non-justiciable: “On its face, the Bargil case plainly does not support the view that the HCJ would refuse to hear the Action on the basis that the alleged violation of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention is non justiciable. It merely expresses the well-established principle of judicial economy whereby a court may abstain from considering a question in the abstract.”
By the High Court of Justice avoiding these rulings on the grounds that they are non-justiciable, Israel has opened itself up to the charge that allowing Jews to live in 2% of Judea and Samaria is a war crime - and the Rome Statute that the ICC must use at the basis for its rulings was written specifically to include Jews being allowed to live in Judea and Samaria to be considered as an equally vile crime as torture, biological experimentation or taking hostages.
The Arab hate of Israel and the apathy of the world (save the United States) to stop them allowed the creation of a completely new category of war crime that never existed in the history of international law to be added to the Rome Statute. I have previously detailed the entire history of how "international law" has been systematically changed specifically against Israel. This is of course a sickening application of international law - the idea that one nation's actions must be redefined from legal to illegal, using "legal" means, is nothing short of perverted. Yet all the moves made by the Arab nations since at least 1977 deliberately and specifically against Israel within the framework of creating brand new international laws directed at a single state have been accepted by the international community.
And never considered to be used against any other nation that also not only allows but even forces the transfer of its citizens into occupied territory.
Israel cannot defend itself against this charge because the entire world has been complicit in allowing a brand new international law to come into effect directed only at Israel - a law that the ICC cannot ignore. The cards have been not only stacked but reprinted: a magician's deck is the only one allowed to be used by the ICC when Israel is involved.
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We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Because between the "war crimes" under investigation by chief ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and the request of a country that doesn't exist, "Palestine," are the Jewish communities beyond the Green Line and Israel's self-defense in Operation Protective Edge – versus the persistent attempts to invade Israel's sovereign territory from Gaza under the guise of "March of Return" border protests. In other words: Jewish settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel, which are not at all occupied territories according to actual international law, is a "war crime." Also a war crime, apparently, is preventing "Palestinian refugees" from invading Israel's sovereign territory from an area that Israel willingly transferred to Palestinian control.
This is not, therefore, a legal measure to bring any Israeli "war criminals" to justice, but the exploitation of the international judicial system to implement the diplomatic goal of destroying the State of Israel. According to the international definition of anti-Semitism, this amounts to pure anti-Semitism because it entails the denial of the Jewish people's right to self-determination and employs double standards against Israel.
Bensouda willingly ensnared herself in the web spun by the "Palestinians" around the international judicial system for the purpose of creating their own international law, to incriminate Israel and put it on the same footing with the Nazis. Thus, from their perspective, they can kill two birds with one stone: The Jews would no longer be perceived as victims of history, and another precedent will have been set in their war to delegitimize the existence of the Jewish state. It now remains to be seen whether the ICC's judges fall into this trap and further throw their own court's legitimacy into question by turning it into yet another absurd circus show – ala UNESCO, UNRWA, and the UN Human Rights Council.
Bensouda, who has struggled mightily to launch war crimes and crimes against humanity investigations in the most clear-cut of cases (such as Venezuela or Ukraine), has filed a request with judges to decide whether the ICC has jurisdiction in Judea and Samaria, east Jerusalem, and Gaza. Israel – similar to the United States and Russia – declared long ago that it has no intention of ratifying the tribunal's inaugural convention. Therefore the ICC has no authority to discuss Israel's affairs, unless crimes were committed against a country that is a signatory to the ICC convention (among its neighbors, only Jordan falls in this category), and unless it is proven that the Israeli justice system is incapable of properly trying suspected war criminals.
The judges at The Hague, therefore, must determine whether "Palestine" is a country at all, the status of the "territories," and whether the Israeli judicial system is functioning properly or not. Tackling these matters is akin to wading into a minefield, which could threaten the very viability of the International Criminal Court.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday tore into the International Criminal Court for saying there were grounds to investigate alleged Israeli and Palestinian war crimes, calling it an “absurd” decision that showed the court was being weaponized against Israel.
“As we’re moving forward to new places of hope and peace with our Arab neighbors, the International Criminal Court in The Hague is going backwards. On Friday it finally became a weapon in the political war against Israel,” Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu said the prosecutor’s decision contained three “absurdities,” the first of which was going against the court’s founding principles.
“The ICC was established after the horrors of World War II, in particular the terrible horrors done to our people, and it is meant to deal with problems that states bring up against war criminals, such as genocide or mass deportation,” he said.
Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in the courtroom of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands, August 28, 2018. (Bas Czerwinski/Pool via AP)
Second, taking aim at the court’s scrutiny of West Bank settlements, Netanyahu argued that the decision went against “historical truth” of Jewish rights in the historic land of Israel.
“It is acting against the right of Jews to settle in the homeland of the Jews. To turn the fact that Jews are living in their land into a war crime — it is hard for there to be a greater absurdity than this,” he said.
Finally, Netanyahu said the ICC was ignoring the “present truth,” lashing it for not instead pursuing probes of Iran or Syria.
“This is terrible hypocrisy,” he said. “We’ll fight for our rights and our historical truths with all tools at our disposal.”
He also said the US was “fighting these distortions, this lack of justice and this lie,” without elaborating.
The ICC Prosecutor is saying that Jews living in the Old City of Jerusalem is a war crime. No one has ever been prosecuted for this “war crime”, & Prosecutor herself has ruled that Russians moving into occupied Crimea is NOT a war crime. This is not int’l law, its something else.
My academic article explaining why the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israeli settlements (whether or not there exists a "State of Palestine" is, alas, paywalled (a drawback of peer-reviewed journals) but here is the abstract https://t.co/HfkJsUHQvd
The inexcusable decision by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor to proceed with a probe into Israeli “war crimes” can only be explained as being motivated by raw antisemitism.
How else to fathom the ICC’s singling out of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which goes further than any other military in the world to protect civilians in the battlefield.
The IDF operates in a complex theater in which Palestinian terrorists use civilians as human shields, deliberately house their terrorist infrastructures in densely populated civilian areas and indiscriminately fire projectiles into Jewish civilian population zones.
Still, the IDF goes to extreme lengths to ensure the protection of Palestinian civilians even though terrorists intentionally surround themselves with civilians to thwart Israeli operations because they know that Israel is a beacon of morality.
The Israeli military regularly warns civilians of incoming attacks with phone calls and text messages. It employs “roof knocking” — or firing warning shots before any aerial bombing – thus providing Palestinian terrorists with advance warning of incoming attacks. If civilians in the vicinity still don’t evacuate, the Israeli army often makes announcements on loudspeakers. The IDF has called off scores of military raids because civilians were in the way.
Making a mockery of justice, ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced on Friday that she was “satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation into the situation in Palestine.” Bensouda ignores that Palestine, of course, is not an existing state.
Despite having previously acknowledged in 2015 that “the date chosen by the Palestinians as the starting point for the ICC to investigate requires explanation as it is clearly not arbitrary”, this report makes no effort to inform audiences why the ‘start date’ of June 13th 2014 – which deliberately excludes the abductions and murders of three Israeli civilians by members of a Hamas terror cell – was selected by the Palestinians.
The BBC’s report promotes reactions from the Palestinian Authority and a political NGO also engaged in lawfare against Israel.
“In a statement, the Palestinian Authority said: “Palestine welcomes this step as a long overdue step to move the process forward towards an investigation, after nearly five long and difficult years of preliminary examination.”
Reacting to the ICC decision, B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said: “Israel’s legal acrobatics in an attempt to whitewash its crimes must not be allowed to stop international legal efforts to, at long last, hold it to account.””
It closes with promotion of the BBC’s standard but partial mantra concerning ‘international law’.
“There are some 140 Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which most of the international community consider illegal under international law. Israel disputes this, and last month the US reversed its position and declared it no longer considered the settlements invalid.”
At the bottom of the article readers are told that they “may also find interesting” an embedded video dating from August 2019 which features as one of its main interviewees the director of another political NGO – Addameer – which is linked to a Palestinian terrorist organisation.
Although the BBC acknowledged years ago that the Palestinian decision to join the ICC and pursue this suit is part of what it has described as “a new strategy to put pressure on Israel“, that information is completely absent from this latest report.
I recently published a Facebook tidbit titled, "The Grounding of Democratic Party Racism is the Progressive Left." There I suggest that the progressive-left is racist in three primary ways. These are anti-white racism, antisemitic anti-Zionism, and an imperial condescension toward those of non-European descent. In response, Corinne Blackmer, a Professor of Biblical and American literature and gender studies at Southern Connecticut State University, pointed me to a 2019 article by Keith Payne published in Scientific American titled, "The Truth about Anti-White Discrimination." The thesis is that anti-white racism is, itself, a racist delusion on the part of "white" people. Payne's conclusions are grounded in a piece published in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Michael Norton and Sam Sommers, titled "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing." Payne writes:
...a national survey reported that both blacks and whites believed that discrimination against blacks had declined over the past few decades, but whites believed that discrimination against whites was now more common than discrimination against blacks... Whites tend to view increasing diversity as anti-white bias.
The implication is clear. The only reason that "whites" detect anti-white racism is out of their own sense of unearned privilege. It is not that there is any incessant cultural or academic tendency to berate "whites," but merely an irrational sense of weakness and vulnerability in the face of rising diversity and social justice in the United States. The premise of Payne's argument rests on the undeniable fact of disparity of income between "white" people in the United States versus "black" people here. He claims that "the average black family earns about half as much as the average white family" and "that the unemployment rate for blacks is twice that for whites..." Of course, none of this takes into account the fact that East-Asian Americans, Asian-Indian Americans, and American Jews, out-earn Americans of European descent. It seems hard to argue for "white privilege" in a society wherein those at the top of the economic hierarchy are not "white." Nonetheless, the disparagement of "white" people as essentially racist is obviously itself a racist notion and Jews are swept up in it. Recently there has been considerable conversation around the notion of the "white Jew." The basic idea is that since Ashkenazim are "white" we enjoy "white privilege" and are, in fact, among the primary oppressors of "people of color." Democratic Party devotees of Louis Farrakhan even believe that Jews were the driving force behind that Atlantic Slave Trade and remain so to this day... as if that makes the slightest bit of sense. The question then becomes, so what is the evidence for this political and cultural anti-white racism? I am not a sociologist and have not done independent research on the question. So we will have to make do with a few pieces of anecdotal evidence, and one scholarly study, that represents a tiny drop in the bucket if you decide to look into the matter further. My favorite example is MTV's 2017 New Years Resolutions for White Guys.This one is fun because it is just so transparent in its contempt toward "white guys." Another interesting piece from the New York Times, written by Ekow N. Yankah, is titled, "Can My Children Be Friends With White People?" Can you begin to imagine a New York Times piece titled in all seriousness, "Can My Children Be Friends With Black People"? Yankah is not sure that his children can be friends with "white" people and this was published in The Times. Thankfully, Yankah tells us, "I have not given up on being friends with all white people." And I have no doubt that "white" people -- whoever they may be, exactly -- appreciate that very much. This one captured my attention shortly after the election of Donald Trump. This is a case wherein some young black kids tortured a mentally-handicapped white kid because Donald Trump won the 2016 election. The torturers made a point of calling the kid "white" as they stripped him naked into a bathtub and taped his mouth. The point, of course, is that he was tortured for being "white"... whatever that means, exactly. I feel reasonably certain that the people doing the torturing were not Republicans. Finally, I want to point you to a piece written by Muneeb Hafiz, a PhD Candidate and Associate Lecturer at Lancaster University, UK, published in Critical Ethnic Studies by the University of Minnesota Press, titled "On Whiteness" (2018). Hafiz writes:
Whiteness “is on a toggle switch between ‘bland nothingness’ and ‘racist hatred,’” Professor Nell Painter tells us. It is a “metaphor for power” in James Baldwin’s vocabulary. According to Kehinde Andrews, Whiteness is “a process rooted in the social structure, one that induces a form of psychosis.” Whiteness, Achille Mbembe explains, “became the mark of a certain mode of Western presence in the world, a certain figure of brutality and cruelty, a singular form of predation with an unequaled capacity for the subjection and exploitation of foreign peoples.” A fantasy — no more real than Blackness, we should add — later transformed into a kind of common (non)sense, Whiteness “involves a constellation of objects of desire and public signs of privilege that relate to body and image, language and wealth.”
It is frankly astonishing that we can reify "whiteness" as a negative toxic epistemology in human history and not recognize this notion for the racism that it is. This does not only affect those of European descent. It represents racism towards Jews, as well.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Jordanian haters of Israel are trying to increase pressure on the government to cancel a deal where the energy-poor kingdom buys natural gas from Israel.
They started a hashtag campaign his weekend to "Bring down the gas agreement" complete with graphics like these:
The companies controlling the Leviathan and Tamar gas fields in Israeli waters plan to sell natural gas to both Egypt and Jordan starting next month. I have not yet seen similar protests from Egypt.
The gas deal with Jordan is worth $10 billion, with Egypt is it worth $15 billion.
Arab media are falsely reporting that the gas deals are with Israel itself, and that Israel admitted that some of the revenue will go towards its military. (Although, of course, some of the tax revenue undoubtedly would, as some portion of taxes from any country would go towards defense budgets.)
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
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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Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
