Sunday, January 05, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
Sunday, January 05, 2020Elder of Ziyon
On Thursday, in the most audacious and brave move of his presidency, President Trump ordered the killing of Iran’s top terrorist, Qassem Soleimani — a man who was also the top general of the country. Commentators have compared Iran’s loss of Soleimani to the loss of the Defense Secretary, head of the CIA, and the head of the FBI simultaneously. Soleimani was the man closest to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and some speculated that he would succeed Khamenei at some point. Now, he’s been reduced to pulp.Trump: Soleimani's Reign of Terror Is Over
His death makes the world a significantly better and safer place. Soleimani was responsible for the killing of hundreds of American troops in Iraq (by State Department estimates, 17 percent of all Americans killed in Iraq were Soleimani’s handiwork), the arming of Hezbollah in Lebanon with tens of thousands of rockets, the Houthi terrorism in Yemen, the building of Islamic Jihad, and a bevy of terror plots all around the world, including the latest assault on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Speculation that this represents an “act of war” is utterly baseless — Soleimani is a terrorist who was killed while abroad, in Iraq, planning further acts of terrorism.
Suggestions that the Trump administration is responsible for “escalation” with Iran — after months of Iranian aggression in international waters and in foreign countries, after downing an American drone and attacking an American embassy — are absurd and morally disgusting. When Nancy Pelosi tweets that it is “disproportionate” to kill a terror leader planning action against Americans and our assets and allies, she’s not just reflecting moral confusion — she’s evidencing moral foolishness of the highest order.
There is a lot to be nervous about here. Is the Soleimani killing part of a broader American strategy with regard to Iran, or a supposed one-off? Has the U.S. hardened its assets on the ground in the Middle East in preparation for Iranian retaliation? Are America’s allies ready for the surge in terrorism that will surely follow, given the Iranian government’s need to show strength in the face of this devastating loss?
With all of that said, it’s obvious that President Trump was attempting to restore a deterrence against Iran that had been completely disintegrated by the Obama administration. History didn’t begin with Trump, and Iranian aggression didn’t start with the end of the Iran nuclear deal. Far from it. Iran has become more powerful and aggressive thanks to the overt planning of the Obama administration.
President Obama’s preferred strategy with Iran was wishful thinking and bribery. The Obama administration openly lied to the American people, claiming that there was a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian government that would be elevated through signing them checks and ushering them into the world economy. That was utter nonsense, as national security aide Ben Rhodes later admitted. The Obama administration engaged in the worst sort of appeasement, guaranteeing billions of dollars in economic growth to a regime dedicated to the destruction of American interests around the world and hell-bent on regional domination.
President Donald Trump on Friday said the United States should have taken out Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani a long time ago noting the violent acts recently led by the terrorist leader. The Washington Free Beacon is a privately owned, for-profit online newspaper dedicated to uncovering the stories that the powers that be hope will never see the light of day.
A special episode of the COMMENTARY podcast unpacks the events of the last several weeks in the Middle East, culminating in a targeted strike on Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Commander Qasem Soleimani.In Just A Few Months, Trump Has Taken Out Some Of The World's Top Terrorists
President Donald Trump has taken out some of the world’s top terrorists in a matter of months, approving military raids and strikes that have decapitated the leadership of various terror-affiliated organizations.
The death of Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, on Thursday night, was just the latest in a line of successful assassinations by the Trump administration.
Hamza bin Laden
While it is unclear when exactly Hamza bin Laden, the son of late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was killed, Trump confirmed his death in mid-September. The younger bin Laden was taking on a more prominent role in al-Qaeda before he was killed in a U.S.-led counterterrorism operation in South Asia.
The State Department had put out a $1 million reward for information on bin Laden’s whereabouts in early 2019, but reports say he may have been killed anytime between 2017 and 2019.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed during a Trump-approved U.S. special forces raid in late October.
The raid reportedly lasted about two hours and took place at al-Baghdadi’s compound in Syria. al-Baghdadi was chased into a tunnel by a special forces canine and, after reaching a dead end, the ISIS leader killed himself by detonating a suicide vest. Three children were also killed in the blast.
Trump later gave a medal to Conan, the dog who successfully chased down al-Baghdadi.
One of the main arguments against the strike that killed Qassem Soleimani is that targeted killings of terror leaders are ineffective: They invite escalation and reprisals, and the removal of senior terrorists doesn’t degrade the effectiveness of the groups they lead because they can be quickly replaced.
But this argument doesn’t hold up to the experience of recent history. Take two examples of targeted killing campaigns against terrorist groups in the past 20 years: Israel during the Second Intifada, and the Obama administration campaign against al-Qaeda.
In both campaigns, Israel and the U.S. combined precise intelligence with precision-guided munitions to systematically eliminate the leadership and top operatives of dangerous terrorist groups. The key to these campaigns was that they weren’t one-offs — they were sustained over the course of years.
During that time, in places like Gaza, Afghanistan, and the tribal regions of Pakistan, targeted killings did much more than symbolically remove terror leaders from the battlefield. They helped cripple the effectiveness of terror groups by forcing them to shift from offense to defense.
Instead of recruiting followers and planning attacks, they had to spend time and energy worrying about security. The sophisticated intelligence employed by the U.S. and Israel raised suspicions of informants. Distrust grew. The ability of operatives to propagandize, communicate, plan, and move freely was undermined as every phone call and meeting raised the specter of surveillance or a missile strike. As leaders were killed off and replaced, only for the replacements themselves to be killed, morale suffered.
There is nothing "disproportionate" about killing an enemy commander, in a war zone -- where U.S. troops are deployed according to proper legal authorities -- who is planning and executing attacks on U.S. personnel. https://t.co/z4zAiLAatP— David French (@DavidAFrench) January 3, 2020
Saturday, January 04, 2020Elder of Ziyon
The shocking events in Monsey, together with those in Jersey City, Poway, and Pittsburgh, are proof that the darkness has returned. It has returned likewise to virtually every country in Europe. That this should have happened within living memory of the Holocaust, after the most systematic attempt ever made by a civilization to find a cure for the virus of the world's longest hate - more than half a century of Holocaust education and anti-racist legislation - is almost unbelievable.Melanie Phillips: Anti-Semitism is the ultimate marker of cultural derangement
Cyberspace has proved to be an effective incubator of resentment. The Internet is particularly dangerous for loners, people in whom the normal process of socialization - learning to live with others who are not like us - has broken down.
When bad things happen, bad people ask, "Who did this to me?" They cast themselves as victims and search for scapegoats to blame. The scapegoat of choice has long been the Jews. For a thousand years, they were the most prominent non-Christian minority in Europe. Today, the State of Israel is the most significant non-Muslim presence in the Middle East. It is easy to blame Jews because they are conspicuous, because they are a minority and because they are there.
Anti-Semitism has little to do with Jews - they are its object, not its cause - and everything to do with dysfunction in the communities that harbor it.
Victim culture originated from the West’s pathological reaction to the Holocaust. The realization of its magnitude did not eradicate Western Jew-hatred; it merely drove it underground.Caroline Glick: When will American Jewry wake up?
This set up a terrible resentment that people could no longer blame the Jews for the crimes of which the anti-Semitic West believed they were guilty. The claim of anti-Semitism was perceived to give the Jews a free pass for their misdeeds.
A deep jealousy of anti-Semitism therefore set in. Identity politics sprang up to define groups as victims in order to gain similar impunity.
But there was an enormous difference. These “victim groups” wanted a free pass for actual misdeeds. But the Jews’ perceived threat to humanity existed only in the warped imagination of anti-Semites.
Not only has real Jew-hatred accordingly been denied, but the attention currently given to it has bred yet more by multiplying the resentment. So the anti-Semitism prevalent in black, Muslim or Palestinian discourse has been ignored and white people blamed instead.
In Britain’s Independent, Rivkah Brown wrote that Prime Minster Boris Johnson—a social liberal—was the “acceptable face of white supremacy,” and that the anti-Jewish monster “rising from the slime” was not Corbynism but “white nationalism.”
Similarly, New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio previously blamed the upsurge in anti-Semitism on “the forces of white supremacy” and “the right-wing movement.” And U.S. President Donald Trump, arguably history’s most pro-Jewish occupant of the White House, is himself accused of inspiring this explosion of Jew-hatred.
Such preposterous claims are the product of a culture that has abolished objective truth and thus reason itself.
The Jews always get it in the neck during periods of cultural turmoil. But more to the point, the Jews produced the moral compass the West has now lost.
So it’s no surprise that they find themselves the principal targets of this madness. This open season against them will only end if Western society abandons its decadent ideologies and recovers its center of moral gravity.
But liberals are descending ever deeper into the vortex of unreason and moral inversion. Anti-Semitism is the ultimate marker of cultural derangement. And so this threat to the Jews isn’t going to end anytime soon.
One of the most powerful caucuses in the House is the Congressional Black Caucus. Its leading members publicly support Farrakhan despite his role in propagating anti-Jewish bigotry in the black community.
In the 2016 presidential race, Trump faced near-daily demands – which he met – to reject the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and denounce him. The liberal Jewish establishment refused to accept Trump’s repeated renunciations of his support as genuine.
In the 2008 presidential race, then-Senator Barack Obama was asked once to reject Farrakhan’s endorsement. He refused. 88 percent of American Jews voted for him, and declared him "the first Jewish president."
New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio passed radical bail reform policies that give thugs get-out-of-jail-free cards. Accordingly, last Saturday a woman arrested after violently assaulting three Jewish women in Brooklyn was released from jail without bail. She was arrested again Sunday after attacking a fourth woman, and promptly released again.
DeBlasio blamed the Monsey attack on Trump.
As far as progressive Jewish activists are concerned, DeBlasio’s policies are anti-black. Last week they criticized DeBlasio’s announcement that he was augmenting police patrols in Jewish neighborhoods claiming, "This is what dividing vulnerable communities looks like."
This sort of crazy talk is not cost-free. It is dangerous. Inconvenient truths will not go away just because they are unpleasant.
It is a fact that leftist and black anti-Semites are just as great a threat, if not greater threats to the Jewish community than white nationalist anti-Semites.
It is a fact that the Republican Party rejects anti-Semitism in all its forms and expels anti-Semites found in its ranks, and the Democratic Party enables and advances leftist and black anti-Semites and anti-Semitism.
So long as the liberal Jewish establishment and its members refuse to accept these facts, the attacks against America’s Jews can be expected to increase in frequency and violence.
Qassem Soleimani, the powerful head of Iran’s Quds Force, was killed in an airstrike at Baghdad International Airport, Iraqi TV and three Iraqi officials officials said Friday.Noah Rothman: Soleimani Deserved His Fate
The US Department of Defense confirmed it had carried out the airstrike.
“General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” it said. “General Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.”
The Iraqi officials said the strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces.
Iranian state television said the attack was carried out by US helicopters.
“Two vehicles were attacked with missiles by US forces” and all 10 passengers, including Soleimani, were “martyred,” Iran’s ambassador to Iraq, Iraj Masjedi, told state television.
This was a long time coming.
The strike President Donald Trump authorized on Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Qasem Soleimani neutralized a bad actor with American blood on his hands. According to a Pentagon estimate, roughly one in six U.S. casualties sustained in the effort to subdue the insurgency during the Iraq war was attributable to Iranian actions. Soleimani took an active part in that campaign, establishing training camps and setting up factories to produce the explosive charges that penetrated American armored vehicles.
Soleimani remained outside America’s grip under George W. Bush, and, when the Obama administration began withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq in 2010, the Shiite militias he controlled proved a critical backstop for an Iraqi president who couldn’t rely solely on the hapless Iraqi Security Forces. When the Obama administration lifted travel restrictions on Soleimani amid its quest to secure a nuclear accord with Iran, one of his first stops was in Moscow, to coordinate Iranian and Russian efforts to crush the U.S.-backed anti-Assad rebellion in Syria.
In the months leading up to Soleimani’s death, Iran had begun prosecuting a region-wide campaign of provocations. In 2019, Iran was responsible for the piracy of foreign-flagged vessels in the critical Strait of Hormuz. It engaged in what the nations Iran targeted called a “sophisticated and coordinated” special forces strike on international oil tankers. Iran downed a multi-million-dollar American surveillance drone, and it executed a sophisticated strike on the world’s largest petroleum processing facility in Saudi Arabia. For all this, Tehran faced no proportionate response from the West.
In December alone, Iranian Shiite proxy forces began targeting joint US-Iraq military facilities in Iraq with increasingly sophisticated missile strikes. There had been ten such strikes by the time Secretary of Defense Mark Esper asked the Iraqi government to help prevent attacks targeting U.S. soldiers on December 16th, though to no avail. A rocket attack by an Iranian-backed militia killed an American contractor and wounded three U.S. troops on December 28. In response, the U.S. carried out retaliatory strikes on the militia’s positions in Iraq and Syria. Tehran did not relent.
Paper I wrote a while ago about Iran’s killing of US and British troops, directed by Qassim Soleimani. These represent only a fraction of the death & misery he inflicted. Killing him was the right thing for President @realDonaldTrump to do.https://t.co/CvPe9har1h
— Rɪᴄʜᴀʀᴅ Kᴇᴍᴘ ⋁ (@COLRICHARDKEMP) January 3, 2020
Suleimani is no longer simply a soldier; he is a calculating and practical strategist. Most ruthlessly and at the cost of all else, he has forged lasting relationships to bolster Iran’s position in the region. No other individual has had comparable success in aligning and empowering Shiite allies in the Levant. His staunch defense of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has effectively halted any progress by the Islamic State and other rebel groups, all but ensuring that Assad remains in power and stays solidly allied to Iran. Perhaps most notably, under Suleimani’s leadership, the Quds Force has vastly expanded its capabilities. His shrewd pragmatism has transformed the unit into a major influencer in intelligence, financial, and political spheres beyond Iran’s borders.
It would be unwise, however, to study Suleimani’s success without situating him in a broader geopolitical context. He is a uniquely Iranian leader, a clear product of the country’s outlook following the 1979 revolution. His expansive assessment of Iranian interests and rights matches those common among Iranian elites. Iran’s resistance toward the United States’ involvement in the Middle East is a direct result of U.S. involvement in the Iran-Iraq War, during which Suleimani’s worldview developed. Above all else, Suleimani is driven by the fervent nationalism that is the lifeblood of Iran’s citizens and leadership.
Suleimani’s accomplishments are, in large part, due to his country’s long-term approach toward foreign policy. While the United States tends to be spasmodic in its responses to international affairs, Iran is stunningly consistent in its objectives and actions.
The Quds Force commander’s extended tenure in his role—he assumed control of the unit in 1998—is another important factor. A byproduct of Iran’s complicated political environment, Suleimani enjoys freedom of action over an extended time horizon that is the envy of many U.S. military and intelligence professionals. Because a leader’s power ultimately lies in the eyes of others and is increased by the perceived likelihood of future power, Suleimani has been able to act with greater credibility than if he were viewed as a temporary player.
In that sense, then, Suleimani’s success is driven by both his talent and the continuity of his time in positions of power. Such a leader simply could not exist in the United States today. Americans do not allow commanders, military or otherwise, to remain in the highest-level positions for decades. There are reasons for this—both political and experiential. Not since J. Edgar Hoover has the federal government allowed a longtime public servant to amass such levels of shadowy influence.
Despite my initial jealousy of Suleimani’s freedom to get things done quickly, I believe such restraint is a strength of the U.S. political system. A zealous and action-oriented mindset, if unchecked, can be used as a force for good—but if harnessed to the wrong interests or values, the consequences can be dire. Suleimani is singularly dangerous. He is also singularly positioned to shape the future of the Middle East.
Friday, January 03, 2020Elder of Ziyon
Friday, January 03, 2020Elder of Ziyon |
| Abu Hamza - we think |
The spokesman for Al-Quds Brigades, the military arm of the Islamic Jihad movement, Abu Hamza, confirmed Friday that the martyr Qassem Soleimani supervised direct support to Palestine and the transfer of military and security expertise to its jihadists for two decades.And Hamas:
Abu Hamza said on Twitter: "The Al-Quds Brigades bids farewell to a mujahideen leader who has always spread terror in the heart of America and the Zionist entity."
Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, said in a statement: "As we mourn the leader Hajj Qassem Soleimani, we remember his progress and his great and wide role towards the cause of Palestine and support for the resistance, as he focused much of his effort towards working to eliminate the Zionist entity and sweeping it off the land of Palestine."
Friday, January 03, 2020Elder of ZiyonThe killing of Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and considered to be the second most powerful man in Iran, after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, marks a decisive victory against Iranian terror.
Arab states have long complained of Iranian interference in their internal affairs.
They also warned the international community that this was simply not a regional problem, but an international one.
Thursday, January 02, 2020Elder of Ziyon
De Blasio should also reconsider the Democratic Party's flawed and specious addiction to identity politics, which pits groups against each other and, in its obsession with a difference and power dynamics rather than with universal ethics and spiritual transcendence, is in no way consistent with Dr. King's vision.
This brutal attack and those that preceded it are a reminder that prejudice, racism and anti-Semitic hate have no one face, no one race, no one religion and no one political ideology. Anyone can be either a victim or a perpetrator. While socioeconomic disparities and injustices are real – and some groups have suffered unique hardships – none of that gives anyone the right to abuse another person or group because they are different or perceived to be "privileged," as some imagine Jews to be. And being part of a historically disadvantaged group shouldn't provide immunity from the law.
Those quick to point to a "climate of hate" when it concerns the utterances of U.S. President Donald Trump, and who also embrace identity politics, should consider how they may unwittingly be contributing to this climate by dividing and apportioning values based on ethnic and racial identity without recognizing the deeper truths that we are all human, that no one has a monopoly on prejudice, and that we are all equal under the law. Are kids learning this at home and in school? They should be.
It's long past time to teach the simple truth that anyone, of any religion or race, is capable of dehumanizing others, which is the essence of racism. And anyone can be better than that.
Perhaps that's the first thing that Mayor de Blasio should insist be taught in Brooklyn's public schools as part of a new curriculum he has promised if he's serious about countering hate and the terrible ignorance we've seen spewing onto the streets of New York City in recent weeks.
Lesson One could be: There is only one race, the human race.
“Well, it all started after Dr. King’s death...”
— Dumisani Washington (@dumisani6) January 2, 2020
In October 2018, during Sabbath morning services, a white supremacist attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, murdering 11 people and wounding another six. In April 2019, in the middle of Passover, a white supremacist attacked the Chabad of Poway synagogue, murdering one person and seriously wounding another three. Both incidents started absolutely necessary conversations about the prevalence and nature of the white supremacist threat to Jews across the country.
Four people were murdered at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City by self-described Black Hebrew Israelites just weeks ago; five people were stabbed at a Hanukkah celebration in Monsey, New York; this week alone, New York police are investigating at least nine anti-Semitic attacks. The upsurge of violence against Jews in New York in particular has finally prompted commentary from Democratic politicians ranging from New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who just weeks ago expressed shock at anti-Semitism reaching “the doorstep of New York City”; to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who expressed puzzlement at the attacks, noting broadly: “This is an intolerant time in our country. We see anger; we see hatred exploding.”
This isn’t new. Back in 2018, The New York Times admitted there was a massive spike in anti-Semitic attacks in the city — and even acknowledged that the newspaper of record had failed to cover that surging anti-Semitism because “it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy.” But that has always been true of anti-Semitism. It’s possible, as the Times should recognize, to walk and chew gum at the same time in covering anti-Semitism.
But it’s not mere lack of focus and time preventing the media from taking anti-Semitism in New York seriously. It’s the identity of the attackers. Armin Rosen wrote for Tablet Magazine back in July 2019 about the Jew hatred in New York and correctly noted “that the victims are most often outwardly identifiable, i.e., religious rather than secularized Jews, and the perpetrators who have been recorded on CCTV cameras are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.” This throws the media — and many left-leaning Jewish organizations — into spasms of confusion, since it cuts directly against the supposed alliance of intersectionality so beloved by the political Left. White supremacists attacking left-leaning Jews fits a desired narrative. Black teenagers beating up Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg doesn’t.
And so the Left ignores the wrong type of anti-Semitism.
This is the city we live in, @NYPDHateCrimes data shows jews were attacked a staggering 166 times in first 3 quarters of 2019 pic.twitter.com/C6KDOHZh5D
— WILLIAMSBURG NEWS (@WMSBG) January 1, 2020
New York Times editorial writer Bari Weiss talked about her book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, in which she argued there is a rise in anti-Semitism in America.
Thursday, January 02, 2020Elder of Ziyon
AshrawiThe Jerusalem Municipal Council approved Tuesday night a plan to construct an educational campus for Education Ministry schools near the city's Arab Shuafat and Anata neighborhoods.Naturally, the response to giving Palestinian children a free education and new schools is being slammed as another proof of Israel's evil.
These schools will be an alternative to the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) schools which currently dominate the area.
The project will cost 7.1 million NIS ($2,055,617), and will be located in an area outside the pre-1967 borders but within Jerusalem's municipal borders.
Hanan Ashrawi, member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), condemned on Thursday the announced plan of the Israeli municipality in occupied Jerusalem to replace UNRWA-run schools.Note that the original article says nothing about closing the UNRWA schools, but merely to provide an alternative. While I'm sure Israel wants to close the UNRWA schools that teach children to admire terrorists and to hate Jews, I am not sure that they can under existing agreements with the UN and UNRWA.
"The announced plan of the so-called Israeli municipality in occupied Jerusalem to replace UNRWA-run schools is an extension of the Israeli establishment's campaign of aggression against Palestinian rights and roots in the City,” Ashrawi said in a statement. “It is also an assault on multilateral institutions and international law.”
She continued, “This reprehensible plan also embodies the Israeli establishment's disdain for the United Nations, rejection of Palestinian rights, and illegal actions aimed at altering the historic, cultural, and demographic composition of occupied Jerusalem.”
Thursday, January 02, 2020Elder of Ziyonhumor, Preoccupied
It is easy to criticize the artificiality of the countries established by the League of Nations. But in a world, and particularly a region, where ethnic and religious groups live intermixed and not separated into grid-like boxes, some arbitrariness of borders is inevitable.PodCast: Clifford D. May on Antisemitism, Iran, and Israel
Every League of Nations-mandated territory lumped an unhappy minority in with a majority: the Muslims in with Lebanon’s Christians, the Kurds with Iraq’s Arabs, everyone with everyone in Syria. The process was imperfect, but the known alternatives are what existed before – a vast pan-ethnic empire – or every group trying to carve out its own sliver of territory, which ends up looking like Syria over the past eight years.
THIS IS why the post-World War I borders are overwhelmingly accepted as the binding sovereign borders of the countries that arose in the British Mandatory territories. Both Kurdish secession and Syrian annexation of Lebanon get no international support because they would call into question Mandatory borders.
There is one place in the Middle East where the international community takes the entirely opposite position about Mandatory borders. And that, of course, is Israel.
While the Pompeo statement did not say anything about borders, it did reclaim the San Remo principle that Jewish settlement is not illegal. The legal basis for this deserves some discussion.
Pompeo repudiated the conclusions of a 1978 memorandum by the State Department legal advisor Herbert Hansell. The memo’s conclusions had already been rejected by then-president Ronald Reagan, but it had never been formally retracted.
The four-page memo jumped in broad strokes across major issues, and cited no precedent for its major conclusions. Indeed, in the decades since, its legal analysis of occupation and settlements has consistently not been applied by the US, or other nations, to any other comparable geopolitical facts. It was always what lawyers call a “one-ride ticket” applicable just for Israel.
Hansell’s memo had two analytic steps. First, he concluded that Israel was an “occupying power” in the West Bank. That triggers the application of the Geneva Conventions. He then invoked an obscure provision of the Fourth Geneva Convention that had never been applied to any other situation before (or since). It says the “occupying power shall not deport or transfer its civilian population” into the territory it occupies.
Hansell, without much discussion, concluded that Jews who move just over the Green Line have somehow been “deported or transferred” there by the State of Israel. In short, he read a prohibition on Turkish-style population transfer schemes as requirement that Israel permanently prevent its Jews from living in those areas that Jordan had ethnically cleansed during its administration.
Under international law, occupation occurs when a country takes over territory that is under the sovereignty of another country. This is why borders of countries arising in former Mandatory territories are those of the relevant Mandate. That, for example, is why Russia is considered an occupying power in Crimea, even though most of its population is Russian and it has historically been part of Russia. Yet due to internal Soviet reallocations, when Ukraine became independent, Crimea was incorporated into the borders of its predecessor, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. For international law, this establishes clear Ukrainian sovereignty, even over the self-determination objections of a local ethnic majority.
Middle East Forum Radio host Gregg Roman spoke on December 18 with Clifford D. May, founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), about the recent British election and the fight against antisemitism and radical Islamist actors in the Middle East.The Tikvah Podcast: Arthur Herman on China and the U.S.-Israel “Special Relationship”
According to May, the victory of Boris Johnson and the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn, was first and foremost a resounding public endorsement of Brexit – the UK's withdrawal from the European Union. Though approved in a popular referendum three and a half years ago, parliament has voted against ratification three times, causing seething resentment across the political spectrum.
However, the scale of the Conservative victory underscored the public's rejection of the Labour Party's increasingly socialist platform and the virulent antisemitism of its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. According to May, Corbyn's embrace of Hamas and Hezbollah alienated British Jews, long a mainstay of Labour's political base. Jews "had been leaving the Labour Party, some of them were packing their bags to go elsewhere – to Israel, the United States, Australia somewhere they feel safer," he said. "They can now unpack."
But the fight against antisemitism, an "ancient and shape-shifting pathology," is "not over in Britain by any means," May warned. Antisemitism, both in Britain and in the rest of the world, "is not going away, we're not going to cure this pathology. It can, however, be treated." He pointed to President Trump's recent executive order strengthening the protection of Jewish university students under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as model of such treatment:
What President Trump did is to say antisemitism is rampant on American college campuses. As the laws are now interpreted, Jews are not protected as other minorities are. This executive order says Jews also should be protected as are other minorities facing discrimination.
May expects Prime Minister Johnson to use his stronger parliamentary mandate to promote policies combating antisemitism:
They're already talking about an anti-BDS resolution or law, understanding the extent to which BDS – a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions [against] Israel – is based on antisemitism and is fundamentally antisemitic in its intent. Boris Johnson seems to understand this. So this is good news. Both of these are battles won in this this endless war against this very specific brand of bigotry.
In both Israel and the United States, most politicians, foreign-policy experts, and citizens desire a strong and ever-closer relationship between the two nations. Israel and America share values, interests, and a deeply rooted biblical heritage that ties them inextricably together. But lately, U.S.-Israel relations have hit an impasse of sorts. As the Jewish state pursues greater economic ties with the People’s Republic of China, it has created new friction with America, which views China—rightly—as a geopolitical and economic rival.
In his December 2019 Mosaic essay, Hudson Institute scholar Arthur Herman delves into the sources of the U.S.-Israel tension caused by China and suggests a path forward. This new piece follows up on his 2018 essay, “Israel and China Take a Leap Forward-but to Where?” In this podcast, Herman joins host Jonathan Silver to discuss the evolving nature of Israel’s relationship with China, how that relationship has strained relations with Israel’s most reliable ally, and how Israel and the United States can best preserve their special relationship as they both seek to meet the challenge of China’s rise.
Thursday, January 02, 2020Elder of Ziyon
After it stole the land and Palestinian history, it today steals human organs in complicated operations carried out by the occupation gangs, in violation of all laws. This is a heinous crime and a bitter reality by all standards.It uses as its only source the fully discredited 2009 article in Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that made the same claim and then admitted that it had no evidence but was just "raising questions." Even professional Israel hater Gideon Levy called the Aftonbladet report "cheap and harmful journalism" while his employer Haaretz wrote, "Donald Bostrom, a veteran Swedish journalist, wrote a despicable, utterly baseless article."
Buy EoZ's books!
PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
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