Saturday, December 28, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
Through such ostensible even-handedness, the British government has been supporting for years a Palestinian agenda that is predicated on the destruction of Israel. And that’s why the menace of antisemitism in Britain extends far more widely and deeply than Corbyn’s Labour Party.Israel Advocacy Movement: BBC and Sky News demonise Israel for Christmas
A recent poll of the British public found that 21% felt warmth towards the Palestinians while only 19% felt warmth towards Israel.
This isn’t surprising at all, given the unremitting pro-Palestinian propaganda and corresponding incendiary falsehoods about Israel that are standard discourse on the BBC and other media, as well as in the universities.
Instead of fighting these untruths, the government actually reinforces the lies attempting to write the Jews out of their own history. These help fuel both anti-Israel hatred and the Jew-baiting that such discourse inevitably licenses and sanitizes.
In America, President Donald Trump is a true friend of Israel and the Jewish people. That’s because he doesn’t try to drive a wedge between the one and the other, and he recognizes the link between hatred of Israel, hatred of Jews, and hatred of America.
Johnson has yet to show he understands that those who attack Israel have the West in their sights too. He owes his large parliamentary majority to the patriotic British working class who understand precisely that. But for Britain’s intellectual governing class, hatred of Israel is a signature motif.
If Boris Johnson really wants to stand with the Jewish community against the forces of darkness, then he needs to start educating the public in the truth about Israel and its enemies.
He needs to start telling people about the Palestinians’ eye-watering antisemitism, about their repeated refusal of a Palestine state, and their real aim to exterminate Israel.
He needs to start telling the public that the Jews are the indigenous people of the land. He needs to explain to them that antisemitism is not a prejudice like any other but is unique in its deranged nature and scope.
He needs to start calling out those NGOs, universities and media that spread murderous falsehoods about Israel. He needs to start telling the truth about the lies. And he needs to change his own government’s policy that spreads them.
We shouldn’t hold our breath. But then again, given these extraordinary times, who knows?
Zionism’s Maritime Revolution: The Yishuv’s Hold on the Land of Israel’s Sea and Shores, 1917 – 1948 - Kobi Cohen-HattabHonest Reporting: A Hero of Israel: Who Was Clark Clifford?
One summer day in 1947, a ship about to sail from the London docks made history when it raised a new flag: the blue-and-white pennant of the Jewish national movement. There was a commotion on the riverside. “Thousands crowded onto the shores of the Thames,” an observer recorded:
This was the first time in history that seamen’s orders were given in Hebrew at the Thames dock. The appearance of the lovely Jewish ship with the Jewish crew on the Thames made a strong impression not only on the Jewish groups but also on the British trade and shipping classes.
The ship, SS Kedmah, was the very first vessel belonging to the Zionist movement’s new shipping company, ZIM. It was sailing for the Land of Israel, still under British control, where its arrival was occasion for a national celebration in the Jewish home. Crowds came to the Tel Aviv beach to see the ship steam in, and five Piper Cubs flew an honor guard overhead (one carried Golda Meir). Children waved flags, and Zionist leaders delivered speeches praising what was then called the “conquest of the sea.”
As usual, the story—as told in Kobi Cohen-Hattab’s excellent new history, Zionism’s Maritime Revolution—wasn’t that simple. The new Zionist ship was, in fact, a refurbished English vessel with 20 years of rough service behind her, including the wartime evacuation of Singapore in 1941. She nearly broke down in the Mediterranean en route to the Yishuv. Saltwater got into the internal systems, the refrigerators didn’t refrigerate, the ovens didn’t cook, and the lights went out. The crewmen, who were Jewish, couldn’t stand the officers, who were British. The feeling was mutual, and eventually there was—inevitably, in those times of proletarian consciousness—a strike.
And yet the moment truly was historic, marking the launch not only of the national shipping company but of a significant Jewish presence in the Mediterranean. Within a year of Kedmah’s arrival, there would be a state called Israel with a navy, commercial vessels, a fishing industry, and ports—all of which would have seemed like a farfetched dream just two or three decades before, when a few Zionist enthusiasts and cranks under Turkish and British rule began promoting improbable visions of sovereign Jewish seamen sailing Jewish boats on what David Ben-Gurion once imagined as a “Jewish sea.”
The story of how this unfolded in the 30 years before Israel’s birth in 1948 is the subject of Zionism’s Maritime Revolution: The Yishuv’s Hold on the Land of Israel’s Sea and Shores, 1917 – 1948. While the early years of Zionist settlement on land have been exhaustively documented, it’s surprising to learn here from Cohen-Hattab, a professor of history at Bar-Ilan University, that so far there hasn’t been a comprehensive account of what happened on the water, no book that “has used a critical approach and the totality of existing sources to relate the story of the sea and its professions within the chronicles of the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in the modern age in the years prior to the establishment of the state.” The author has set out to fill the hole in the record, explaining how modern Jewish seamanship grew from a few failed fishing communes and handmade boats to the beginning of real naval power.
Lovett suggested that recognizing a Jewish state was nothing more than an attempt to win Jewish votes in the upcoming November 1948 presidential election. He also suggested that the new Jewish state would be filled with Jewish immigrants who were in fact communist agents working for the Soviet Union.
But there was one more person in that meeting – White House Counsel Clark Clifford, a close friend and adviser to the president. Clifford argued that a new state committed to democracy would do wonders for the chaotic Middle East. In Clifford’s memoirs he relates that Marshall was “red with suppressed anger as I set forth the case for the immediate recognition of the Israeli state.” Marshall told the president that if he followed Clifford’s advice, then “the great dignity of the office of president would be seriously diminished.” He went as far as saying that if the president supported the new Jewish state then in the November election, “I would vote against the President.”
Clifford further wrote that “When I finished, he (Marshall) exploded, ‘Mr. President, I thought this meeting was called to consider an important, complicated problem in foreign policy. I don’t even know why Clifford is here.’” According to Clifford, Truman replied, “Well, General, he’s here because I asked him to be.”
In the end, Truman recognized the newly declared Jewish state minutes after it was declared on May 15, 1948. It is clear that he did so based on his deep belief in the Bible which promises the Holy Land to the Jewish people. In fact he later said:
I had faith in Israel even before it was established, I knew it was based on the love of freedom, which has been the guiding star of the Jewish people since the days of Moses. I believe it has a glorious future before it, not just as a sovereign nation but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.
But, with his most important cabinet members being strongly against this recognition, Truman needed the voice of a trusted friend arguing that supporting a democratic Jewish state in the biblical and ancestral homeland of the Jewish people would create a beacon of light and stability in the Middle East, and that this was in America’s best interest.
And Clark Clifford was the right man in the right place to make that happen.
United States recognition of Israel was critical to its survival in the face of worldwide criticism and condemnation.
And that makes little-known Clark Clifford a hero of Israel.
Friday, December 27, 2019Elder of Ziyon
SINCE THE question in this narrative is to determine who the first occupant was, this implies that historical Jewish presence must be denied and that, as a corollary, Palestinians need to prove that they were the first occupants. The consequence of this narrative is that anything Jewish is erased from the history of the country.Col. Richard Kemp The ICC decision on Israel would make Himmler proud
For example, recently, Palestinian academics denied archaeological evidence of Jews in Israel, part of a narrative to portray Jews as recent invaders. More generally, this creates an impossible historical conundrum, since the presence of an Arab population emerged as a notable community in the territory of Israel after the Muslim conquests of the seventh Century and that, thereafter, this population always cohabited with the Jewish and Christian communities that remained after the conquests.
More specifically, the aspect of this broad narrative relating to the inherent illegality of Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria implies a certain view of the history of the past century. One could even say that this narrative requires a sort of Orwellian rewriting of the past, to erase key moments that fit uneasily with such a narrative.
Indeed, it requires a rewriting of the recognition of a Jewish right to self-determination that followed the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It ignores the conditions under which Judea and Samaria, as well as Gaza, were occupied respectively by Jordan and Egypt from 1947 to 1967. It ignores the circumstances of the 1967 Six Day War when Israel took control of this territory in a defensive war. It ignores the negotiated terms of the Oslo Agreements in relation to the distribution of authority in Judea and Samaria and the lack of final status of both borders and territories.
The wide-sweeping argument of illegality per se also ignores the diverse nature of each individual presence in these territories, in terms of where it is, how it came into existence, what legal regime applies to it, etc.
As in a courtroom, the issue comes down to the identification of competing narratives before the international community acting as a judge. Each side is therefore faced with the choice of which narrative to choose from. Some narratives can be reconciled. Others cannot.
The fact remains that the position that settlements are illegal as such serves a war-like narrative that denies any legitimacy to Jewish presence on the entire territory of Israel, as exemplified by numerous declarations, including a recent declaration by a Fatah official that Palestinian people will not relinquish a grain of soil from the land of historical Palestine from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River.
The December 20 announcement by the ICC prosecutor that she is ready to open a formal investigation with settlement-related activities at its core will undoubtedly be seen as a first narrative victory for those challenging Jewish presence in Israel. This can only be countered if another narrative is presented, not just in public discourse, but at the ICC itself, which provides genuine procedural opportunities for participation in the judicial debate, as we noted in an editorial last September.
The ICC prosecutor accuses Israel, during the 2014 Gaza war, of using disproportionate force, willfully killing and injuring civilians, and intentionally attacking protected individuals and locations. She also alleges that the IDF committed war crimes against Gazans violently attempting to breach the border into Israel in 2018 and 2019.
I was present during these conflicts, witnessed, and was extensively briefed on IDF operations. I was a member of an investigation into the 2014 Gaza war by the High Level Military Group, an independent body of retired generals from Western armed forces and human rights experts. The group unanimously concluded that: "The IDF not only met its obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict, but often exceeded these on the battlefield."
Gen. Martin Dempsey, at the time Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented: "Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties." My first-hand observations during the Hamas-instigated Gaza border violence in 2018-19 echo these assessments.
The allegation that Israel committed war crimes by transferring parts of its civilian population into occupied territory can only be described as outrageous. The West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza are not "occupied territories." The suggestion that willing tenancy on this land by Jews is intrinsically illegal sees the ICC prosecutor adopting the Nazi concept of Judenrein, cleansing an area of Jews.
Despite situations where such crimes have actually occurred, including Northern Cyprus and Crimea, no prosecutions for war crimes in this category have ever been brought against anyone. Special treatment is reserved for the Jewish state.
"The IDF takes more steps than any other Army in the history of warfare to preserve the lives of innocent civilians on the battlefield" @COLRICHARDKEMP @i24NEWS_EN pic.twitter.com/ORw3M45Ixt
— Jeff Smith (@JeffSmithi24) December 26, 2019
Since September 2012, when the Palestinians' status was upgraded in the UN to an observer state, they have repeatedly warned that if Israel does not submit to their demands, they will turn to the International Criminal Court in The Hague and formally submit war crimes complaints.
Israel tried to persuade ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda that the tribunal has no authority to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since Israel is not a signatory to the Court's Rome Treaty and the Palestinians are not a state. Israel correctly argued that it has a strong and independent judiciary investigating every incident, and does not hesitate to prosecute and frequently convict whenever there is even the shadow of a violation of law. As such, the ICC has no authority to act as a super-review court for the Israeli justice system.
Every IDF tank and helicopter has an on-call legal advisor who is relied upon to instruct the units whether to shoot a shell or fire a missile when there is even the slightest question concerning collateral damage to civilians. But all of these defensive arguments seem to have fallen on deaf ears. The writer, an Israeli civil rights attorney, is president of the Shurat HaDin Law Center.
Friday, December 27, 2019Elder of Ziyon
2004, incitement, jew hatred, jihad, Mahmoud al-Habbash, Muslim antisemitism, PalArab lies, religious war, Zionists not Jews
Friday, December 27, 2019Elder of Ziyon
Friday, December 27, 2019Elder of Ziyon
This is the beginning of the collapse of Zionism, this is God's revenge for them
Let them take their graves with them, why leave them in Beirut
when the day comes, they say this is a Jewish land, and they demand that I give them their bones and save your soul
Jews 💀👽😢😔
My brother, even the grave rejects them
We will see in the near future this photo and hear the address saying its country is Israel has fallen and the Palestinians are now returning to their areas and lands and building Palestine again
Save the street, it has become impure
Glory to Allah
We wish to see the Jews killed in Palestine, God willing
Even the earth refuses their bones to be unclean to hell, sons of the Devil
Even the dead in the Arab countries are upset with her.
God's curse on the Zionists and the stinking Netanyahu
God willing, the Israeli settlement in Palestine collapses like the cemetery, say Amen, Lord of the Worlds 🤲
There is no god but God and
Muhammad is the Messenger of God, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him ...
There is neither power nor strength except in God the Most High, the Great ...
Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds ...
may Allah help
Thank you, a strong storm that annihilates Jewish impurity
God's wrath
Glory be to Allah
bones? We thought the Jews were slugs 😀😀
God is great and praise
My Lord is angry at them even when they are dead, Latif.
And you are healed, and there is no temple, as liars
Glory be to God, and with His praise, Glory be to God the Most High, Glory to the Holy One, Lord of angels and spirit
The land of Bilad al-Sham rejects Jews living and dead
Ha ha ha ha
May God curse them all, alive and dead
Divine justice does justice to our brothers in all the Arab countries that are oppressed by the stormy Jews. They did not destroy a single house and came to most of the cemetery. Glory be to God.
Now the Zionists will say that (the Temple of Solomon) is in Beirut .😅
Thursday, December 26, 2019Elder of Ziyon
In a December 23, 2019 tweet that was just deleted today, Chris Gunness, the spokesman of UNRWA from 2007 until his departure earlier this year, made light about the hanging of “collaborators” by Hamas:
Why is a former top UN official glorifying murder?
This latest rant by Gunness is hardly his first:
2. In May, Chris Gunness went on a crazy rant about 'Judeo-Nazis'. When we sent him our 130-page report on UNRWA teachers who glorify Hitler, he lashed out at us. https://t.co/D197La4zRr
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) December 26, 2019
A reminder how some use the veneer of 'pro-Palestinian' to mask their hate. pic.twitter.com/55dOKe14g7
Gunness has previously justified the stabbing of Jews, even as he pretended that he didn’t:
Why do the EU, Germany, Britain and Canada give tens of millions of dollars annually to UNRWA, even though its leading officials glorify murder?
DELETED: Tweet by Chris Gunness, ex-UNRWA spokesman, glorifying Hamas hanging "collaborators." https://t.co/BIdA1zmpN3
— UN Watch (@UNWatch) December 26, 2019
Time and again he covered up for dozens of his UNRWA teachers who glorified Nazism, praised Hitler, spread genocidal antisemitism & incited Jihadi terrorism. pic.twitter.com/JhpW1athFr
Thursday, December 26, 2019Elder of Ziyon
Thursday, December 26, 2019Elder of Ziyonhumor, Preoccupied
These are countries that wrongly believe Israel’s presence in the West Bank is illegitimate. But these are also countries whose official policy is Israel and the Palestinians should pursue a negotiated two-state solution. What kind of negotiation can take place with a partner like the Palestinians, who are taking punitive unilateral steps?European Countries Allow Oppressive Regimes to Manipulate the ICC
Of course, they are not just dissembling when it comes to the ICC. When European countries say they want a two-state solution, the aim is supposed to be peace. Yet European donations to so-called human rights NGOs that have ties to terrorists are commonplace.
Many of the Palestinian groups working to have Israelis prosecuted for war crimes share personnel with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Just last week, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) arrested PFLP members in the West Bank who were part of a 50-person terrorist network. One of them was responsible for murdering 17-year-old Rina Shnerb in August. He and several others work for a number of European-funded NGOs, including in top financial positions, while being leaders of the PFLP.
The PFLP is recognized as a terrorist organization by the EU, and these revelations about their work in NGOs are not new, but these European countries keep funding them.
The hypocrisy is so screamingly obvious that it is practically smacking the staffers at various development agencies run by European governments in the face. It’s hard to understand how they can live with the cognitive dissonance. And yet they’ve been doing this for years, although research institutions and Israeli government officials from the Strategic Affairs and Justice Ministries have brought these issues to their attention.
These countries need to decide: Do they want a negotiated settlement or punitive unilateral Palestinian action? Do they oppose or support terrorists? They say one thing, but their money talks, and it says the opposite.
Most of the regimes that shape international bodies and legal tribunals have no respect for the values of peace, tolerance, and human rights, resulting in the manipulation of the ICC and other bodies.
European countries that join forces with oppressive regimes in these bodies grant them legitimacy. Without this legitimacy, the international bodies would have been dismissed as nothing more than a circus that should be ignored because they are being controlled by outcast regimes. But the Europeans have systematically stood by those who distort the very values they have championed.
The European elites continue to live according to the illusion that the world will embrace Western values and be built under the auspices of international law using global legal and political bodies. If you confront European countries with the reality that there are major cultural gaps between Europe and most of the world, you will be dismissed as racist.
We know what the ruling will be: The ICC will become the first international tribunal to rule that the “state of Palestine” is sovereign over all disputed areas of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem.
Just two weeks ago, the media reported that high-ranking legal scholars in Israel’s Attorney General’s Office had warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to take steps to apply Israeli law to the Jordan Valley, out of concern that the ICC would decide to launch an investigation against Israelis for that “crime” too.
It was obvious to anyone who keeps tabs on the ICC that there would be an investigation of Israel, regardless of whether sovereignty was applied to the Jordan Valley or not. The legal advisers’ warning not only demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the ICC, but also gave it more motivation to act against Israel by supplying it with proof that the court is influencing a state’s conduct with threats of legal action.
This was not the first time that legal authorities in Israel, including some at the top ranks of their profession, have operated in a manner that unintentionally spurs on the ICC to proceed with its anti-Israel actions. High-ranking legal authorities have talked about the Israeli legal system as a “defensive shield” against ICC investigations, as if the ICC were acting out of professional legal motivations rather than political and diplomatic ones.
As long as Israel continues to treat the ICC as a legal entity, and as long as it maintains relations with ICC staff under the assumption that their intentions are good, as long as Israel continues to make legal arguments as if anyone at the ICC is listening, it will continue to lose the battle. We must wake up and take more stringent political steps — as the United States already has — before the nightmare of indictments against Israeli soldiers becomes a reality.
Thursday, December 26, 2019Elder of Ziyon
"Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland [from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic.];Somehow, East Europe has been transformed into the Middle East.
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island [Afro-Eurasia];
who rules the World-Island commands the world."
Thursday, December 26, 2019Elder of Ziyon
Thursday, December 26, 2019Elder of ZiyonAfter days of protests across Iran last month, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appeared impatient. Gathering his top security and government officials together, he issued an order: Do whatever it takes to stop them.Iran is very upset at this story. That discomfort has proven, yet again, that Iran is antisemitic.
About 1,500 people were killed during less than two weeks of unrest that started on Nov. 15. The toll, provided to Reuters by three Iranian interior ministry officials, included at least 17 teenagers and about 400 women as well as some members of the security forces and police.
Reuters News Agency, part of Thomson Reuters which was sold to a Canadian Zionist figure by its original British company several years ago, has unfortunately in recent years pursued a policy of prejudice and lies against Iran ...
Reuters policy is in line with the policy that [Rupert] Murdoch, the owner of the Zionist media empire, had formally stated years ago: Jewish-owned media in the world have a duty to support Israel. Not surprisingly, the same top priority today comes from Reuters' Canadian and Zionist owner from Toronto, supporting Israel.An Iranian diplomat is tweeting antisemitic conspiracy theories.
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PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
