As he looks at pictures of his parents and sisters who perished in Auschwitz, Szmul Icek begins to tremble, tears clouding his eyes.
It may have been 75 years ago, but for this survivor of the Holocaust the memories of life and death in the Nazi extermination camp remain painfully fresh.
More than a million Jews were killed at Auschwitz, in then occupied Poland. The last survivors, now all elderly, still live with the physical and mental scars of the horrors of that time.
Since their liberation three quarters of a century ago, their skin has wrinkled with the march of time and the numbers tattooed on their left arms have faded — much in the same way that the collective memory of the Holocaust is blurring.
These survivors are the last witnesses to traumatic events that, now in the 21st century, are often called into question by anti-Semitic revisionists.
So as Israel prepares this month to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camp at a ceremony to be attended by a host of world leaders, AFP reporters met with about 10 survivors to hear their testimonies.
Images of what the Allies found when they liberated the first Nazi death camps towards the end of World War II brought the horror of the Holocaust to world attention.
Many of the ghastly pictures were at first held back from the broader public, partly out of concern for those with missing relatives.
The concentration and extermination camps were liberated one by one as the Allied armies advanced on Berlin in the final days of the 1939-1945 war.
The first was Majdanek in eastern Poland, which was freed on July 24, 1944, by the advancing Soviet Red Army.
But it was only the following year that media coverage was encouraged by the provisional government led by general Charles De Gaulle set up after the liberation of France.
The fight against the resurgence of antisemitism is being taken to social media in an effort to broaden awareness of the problem and create a modern and relevant dialogue about this ancient scourge.
The “Stop this Story!” campaign initiated by the European Jewish Congress (EJC) has secured the support of global celebrities and influencers, including Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli, actress Vanessa Kirby of the hit Netflix show The Crown, sex therapist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth, former NBA player Omri Casspi and President Reuven Rivlin, to help spread the message.
The campaign, conducted on Instagram, YouTube and other platforms, utilizes Instagram’s 3D-effects capability. The personalities involved in the project have created images of themselves holding up their hands bearing the words: “Stop this Story!”
In addition, a time-lapse video project, featuring Dr. Ruth Westheimer, 91, the world-renowned sex therapist, media personality and Holocaust survivor, will be posted on Instagram and other social-media platforms in a series of stories. The video highlights the never-ending story of antisemitism, utilizing impressive visual techniques.
I noted in early December that Fatah spokesman Osama al-Qawasmi met with two delegations of US lawmakers from California and Wisconsin, apparently unaware that he is a blatant antisemite.
Qawasmi is on video quoting the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" as if it is a real Jewish document on how to rule the world. He says Israel controls America. He has said that Israel is worse than Hitler, the Nazis and fascism.
Yet a stream of American delegations continue to go on pilgrimages to meet with this Jew-hating piece of filth.
Does no one Google who they will be meeting any more?
Or is meeting an antisemite not considered as bad as meeting with other types of bigots?
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One of the people that Abbas honored is Salah Khalaf, known as "Abu Iyad," a founder of the Black September Organization. In his memoir, he said that he had hand-picked the gunmen for the Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympic Games, as well as having transported the assault rifles and grenades used in the attack. Abu Daoud has said that Abu Iyad was his partner in organizing the terror attack.
The Palestinian authority has named a school after Khalaf in Tulkarem.
At the ceremony, attendees stressed that the blood of the three "martyrs" will not be wasted.
Anyone who says that Abbas no longer supports terror isn't reading his own official media.
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If this all seems unbelievable, it’s because it is—and also because you’re probably still imagining that Obama’s goal was to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But once you understand the real purpose, these moves become much clearer. To wit: Why did Obama give the regime enough uranium to make 10 nuclear bombs? To pressure the incoming Trump administration to stick with the nuclear deal. If Trump chose to leave the JCPOA, he’d have to deal with the fact that with 130 tons of uranium already on hand Iran had an easier path to the bomb. In effect, the last president handed the Iranians a loaded gun to be pointed at his successor.
The press corps was crucial in helping Obama deceive the American public. There were some journalists at the time who asked important questions about the JCPOA; most of them on the State Department beat, like the AP’S Matt Lee and Bradley Klapper. The media echo chamber, on the other hand, who helped sell the deal, consisted largely of reporters covering the White House and national security beat who were accustomed to being hand-fed by the Obama inner circle. This group would later form the core of the media operation pushing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
For the Iran deal, the task of these correspondents was to drown out anyone who challenged the wisdom of Obama’s fire sale, including senior Democrats, like Sens. Chuck Schumer, Ben Cardin, and Bob Menendez. They were smeared as dual loyalists in formerly prestige press outfits like The New York Times, aghast at the “the unseemly spectacle of lawmakers siding with a foreign leader [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] against their own commander in chief.” The administration also spied on Democrats and pro-Israel activists critical of the deal.
Cory Booker was the one candidate among the field of Democrats running in 2020 who understood the nature of the JCPOA. He backed it at the time but said in a June debate that he wouldn’t necessarily reenter the deal. On Monday Booker announced he was dropping out of the race. And what about the Democrat leading the polls? Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden is proud of his role pushing the JCPOA, even if he’ll have to manage the consequences of the deal if he defeats Trump in November. As for the rest of the field, they’re making their opinions known with their silence regarding the Iranian protesters.
Now three years after Obama left the White House, it’s clear why the former president’s party is worried about the fate of his signature foreign policy initiative. By killing the Iranian commander Obama officials were sending messages to, Trump has shown his fiercest critics to be right—he’s nothing like Obama.
The smoke had not yet cleared above the crater in which the body of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Qasem Soleimani’s languished before the American press pronounced its verdict. “Trump’s Iran war has begun,” pronounced Vox.com’s Zack Beauchamp. Donald Trump’s “actions put the U.S. on a new path of escalation,” McClatchy reported. The president had “miscalculated,” in the view of the Independent’s deputy political editor Rob Merrick. “This is a massive walk up the escalation ladder,” the New York Times quoted the Middle East Institute’s Charles Lister as saying. “With Soleimani dead, war is coming.” Trump sought to “bully” Iran by appealing to the “Jacksonian logic of sudden and terrifying force as a first and last resort,” New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore opined. Soleimani’s “assassination,” as New Yorker’s Robin Wright characterized it, was “tantamount to an act of war.”
In the ten days that have elapsed, these reactions to the Trump administration’s strike seem more than a little hyperbolic. But that hyperbole was not a product of the fog of war. Those who adopted a cautious response to the president’s actions were informed by the months of preamble leading up to this confrontation, to say nothing of the basics of international relations.
Before Trump’s strike on Soleimani, Iran had engaged in a campaign of attacks on American interests for which it faced no proportionate consequences. When the United States finally did proportionately respond to the killing of a U.S. contractor and the wounding of three service personnel in one of the regular rocket attacks on American positions by Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Iran’s proxy forces mounted the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that put the U.S. diplomatic presence in Iraq in jeopardy. As I wrote at the time, this was not escalatory but de-escalatory. The administration’s attempt to impose unacceptable costs on a reckless adversary while degrading its capacity to execute attacks on American interests and those of its allies was an effort to step back from the precipice of direct, conventional conflict.
If observers were shocked by Iran’s attempt to take the temperature down with a face-saving volley of rockets into Iraq (which were self-limited, and those limits were communicated to Iraq and the United States), they should not have been. These events might have represented the best-case scenario for the Trump administration, but the administration did not luck its way into a textbook method for deterring an aggressive and revisionist adversary. To recognize the strategy, you need to have read the textbook.
Hundreds of protesters in Iran refused to trample US and Israeli flags and denounced others who did as rallies continued against the regime for the downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet that killed all 176 people on board.
Videos and reports emerged Sunday showing the crowds deliberately walking around the edges of the massive flags painted on the pavement of a university in Tehran.
Those who did walk across the Stars and Stripes and the Star of David were immediately pointed at and booed, with the crowd chanting “shame on you.”
Many of the protesters shouted, “Our enemy is Iran, not America.”
Hillel Neuer, the executive director of the human rights group UN Watch, tweeted out a video of the crowds taking pains from treading on the flags on Sunday.
“These courageous Iranian students who refuse to trample the U.S. & Israeli flags represent the hope for a better Middle East. Engage with and promote them instead of their oppressors, and maybe Iran-backed wars & terror across the region will end,” he posted.
The unrest surged across Tehran and other Iranian cities and towns for a second day on Sunday after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard admitted mistakenly shooting down the Ukrainian airliner on Wednesday.
Trump on Sunday continued to show his support for the protesters as he did Saturday in a series of tweets.
Over a week has passed since the US operation that took out Qasem Soleimani, and during that time the media -- both social and mainstream -- has featured opinions, both pro and con, as to how to interpret what happened.
Those who think Trump deserves a medal, or at least another 4 years in office, see the operation as a major success in the fight against terrorism in general and against Iran in particular.
o Hamza bin Laden, the son of Osama, who had been taking a more prominent role in al-Qaeda, but may have been killed any time in the last 2 years o Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS o Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, the likely successor to al-Baghdadi o Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of Kataeb Hezbollah or the Popular Mobilization Forces, which was responsible for the attack that killed an American contractor, leading to the storming of the US embassy and the US operation that took out both Soleimani and al-Muhandis in the same strike.
I'm inclined to think it's a less important event than most people. In the first place, Soleimani was an operative, not a decision-maker; he carried out instructions, he didn't develop those instructions. He was clearly very competent at it, but operators are not that difficult to find. And there have been prior cases where an operator has been taken out, and then someone else replaces him and is about as good, or maybe even better. So, I don't think the killing has enormous consequences for Iranian capabilities.
...It makes sense strategically if it's followed up. If it's a one-time thing, it doesn't make much difference. But if it is followed up, this means that after 40 years of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the U.S. government has finally decided to respond to its aggression not just economically, but militarily: to Iran's building nuclear weapons, to its jihad, to its more or less taking over four countries – Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq – and to its ideological aggression. If this means a such a profound change, then yes, it's big. But if it's a one-time killing of an operative, no, it's not very significant.
But let's evaluate Trump's decision to kill Soleimani in the context of past presidents and the measures they took -- or didn't take -- in response to terrorist attacks against US citizens.
In September 2004, Norman Podhoretz, form editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine, wrote World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win. In comparison with World War I and World War II, Podhoretz sees the Cold War as World War III and the threat subsequent to 9/11 as World War IV.
He writes that starting with Richard Nixon back in 1970 and continuing with Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and up to "the pre-9/11 George W. Bush" -- US did not respond to terrorist attacks. For example, during both the Nixon and Ford administrations, from 1970 to 1975, several US diplomats were murdered in Sudan and Lebanon and others were kidnapped, all by factions of the PLO.
And there were no reprisals.
We know what happened to US citizens in Iran in 1979 during the Carter administration.
We also know that just hours after Reagan became president in 1981, Iran released the hostages, apparently out of fear of what the hawkish Republican president might do.
But neither Iran's supposed fear nor Reagan's hawkishness lasted for long, according to Podhoretz's list of US appeasement under Reagan, where there was no retaliation for terrorist attacks:
o In April 1983, Hezbollah exploded a truck in front of the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon --killing 63 employees, including the Middle East CIA director. 120 were wounded.
o In October 1983, a Hezbollah suicide bomber blew up an American barracks in the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. Marines in their sleep and wounding another 81. This time, Reagan approved plans for retaliation, but Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger convinced him to cancel it because it might damage US relations with the Arab world. Soon after, Reagan pulled the Marines out of Lebanon.
o In December of that year, the American embassy in Kuwait was bombed.
o In March 1984, the CIA station chief in Lebanon, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hizbullah and then murdered.
o Buckley was the fourth American to be kidnapped in Beirut, and many more suffered the same fate between 1982 and 1992 (though not all died or were killed in captivity).
o In September 1984, the U.S. embassy annex near Beirut was hit by yet another truck bomb, also traced to Hezbollah. In this case, Reagan did approve covert proxy retaliations by Lebanese intelligence agents, but then pulled the plug when one operation failed to get its main target and unintentionally killed 80 other people.
o In December 1984, a Kuwaiti airliner was hijacked and two American passengers employed by the U.S. Agency for International Development were murdered.
o In June 1985, Hezbollah operatives hijacked still another airliner, TWA flight 847. An American naval officer aboard the plane was shot, and his body was hurled onto the tarmac.
o In October 1985, an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, was hijacked by a group under the leadership of the PLO's Abu Abbas, with the support of Libya. An elderly wheelchair-bound American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, was thrown overboard. Klinghoffer's murderer was apprehended and sent to prison in Italy, but the Italian authorities let Abu Abbas go. The US protested the release of Abu Abbas, but Italy let him go anyway.
o In December 1985, Rome and Vienna airports were bombed and 20 people were killed, including 5 Americans. In April 1986 a discotheque in West Berlin frequented by American servicemen was bombed. In this case, when US intelligence tied Libya to both bombings, an American air attack in retaliation hit one of Qaddafi's residences -- and in retaliation, Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal executed 3 US citizens who worked at the American University in Beirut.
Not exactly the kind of record we would have expected of Reagan, whose promise to restore US pride was one of the reasons for his landslide victory over Carter.
In 1987, President Reagan ordered the reflagging of Kuwaiti tankers. Shortly after, the SS Bridgeton, a reflagged tanker, struck an Iranian mine. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, today considered a reformist leader, commented it was “an irreparable blow on America's political and military prestige.” Iranian blustered increased until, the following year, President Ronald Reagan ordered Operating Praying Mantis after the Samuel B. Roberts struck a mine. That skirmish escalated into one of the largest surface naval engagements since World War II and led to the decimation of the Iranian Navy and Air Force. Iranian leaders blustered then as now, but refrained from attacking the United States directly for years after until the generation of military officials who experienced that day slowly rose through the rank and retired.
An aerial view of the Iranian frigate IS Sahand burning on 18 April 1988
after being attacked by aircraft of U.S. Navy. Public Domain
The Washington Post at the time reported US Sinks or Cripples 6 Iranian Ships in Gulf Battles, describing it as "the sharpest hostilities between the United States and Iran since the fall of the shah in 1979":
The United States sank or crippled six Iranian ships and fired at Iranian warplanes yesterday during a daylong series of fierce sea and air battles that erupted across the Persian Gulf after the U.S. Navy destroyed two oil platforms in a retaliatory strike ordered by President Reagan.
...U.S. estimates of Iranian ship losses as of last night were one Combattante II high-speed missile boat sunk; one Boghammar patrol boat sunk and two others believed crippled, and two Vosper Mark 5 frigates severely damaged, if not sunk.
President Reagan said, "We aim to deter further Iranian aggression, not provoke it. They must know that we will protect our ships, and if they threaten us, they'll pay a price." There was wide bipartisan approval in Congress of the president's action. [emphasis added]
And the fight between the US and Iran did not end there.
Both sides appeared before the International Court of Justice, where both the US and Iran argued that the other was in violation of the 1955 Treaty of Amity between the 2 countries.
For all the strength embodied in these 2 measures during the last years of the Reagan administration, they are still not typical of the US response to Iran, let alone to terrorist attacks against Americans.
Taking out ships and oil platforms is not the same as taking out terrorists that murder your citizens. Then again, today, Iran's ambitions in the Middle East -- and beyond -- has grown in proportion to its growing number of proxies.
Iranian-backed terror isn’t a stubborn, unchanging fact of the international landscape, except to the degree that we made it so. The policy of appeasement that began in 1979, with the embassy takeover, culminated in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) when the Obama administration flooded Soleimani’s war chests with hundreds of billions of dollars and legitimized Iran’s “right” to a large-scale nuclear weapons program. In line with the decadeslong U.S. policy of augmenting the Iranian threat in order to avoid taking action against it, Obama said the only alternative to giving Iran the bomb was war.
And to the extent that he broke the rules whether in moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem or recognizing the legality of Israeli settlements -- Trump is the bull in the china shop that is the Middle East when it comes to Iran:
It was perhaps to be expected that an outsider who often doesn’t know when to keep quiet, and can’t stay off Twitter, would be the one to sing out like the boy in the fairy tale. It’s true, the emperor has no clothes.
Like Reagan, Trump too has seemed been reluctant to get too heavily entangled in Middle East power struggles. But now that he has actually drawn that red line, will he, like Reagan, be willing -- and able -- to maintain it?
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On Saturday, President Trump tweeted a message in support of the Iranian people - in Persian.
به مردم شجاع و رنج کشیده ایران: من از ابتدای دوره ریاست جمهوریم با شما ایستادهام و دولت من همچنان با شما خواهد ایستاد. ما اعتراضات شما را از نزدیک دنبال می کنیم. شجاعت شما الهام بخش است.
This tweet has so far gathered over 365,000 "Likes," making it - by far - the most liked tweet ever written in Farsi.
The importance of the President supporting the protesters in Iran cannot be underestimated. During the Obama administration, Iranian protesters received essentially no moral support from the US and were crushed. Now the president of the United States is quite publicly supporting them.
So it is no wonder that Iran is very upset at this tweet.
Iran has called President Donald Trump's bluff on expressing support for Iranian protesters in Farsi just after he threatened to attack their cultural heritage, asking the US president not to defile the Persian language.
"Hands and tongues smeared with threatening, sanctioning and terrorizing the #Iranian nation, are not entitled to dishonor the ancient #Persian_language,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi tweeted late Sunday.
Hands and tongues smeared with threatening, sanctioning and terrorizing the #Iranian nation, are not entitled to dishonor the ancient #Persian_language.
By the way, are you actually "standing by" millions of Iranians whose hero you just assassinated or "standing against" them?! https://t.co/sfmT0qLXJqpic.twitter.com/6IwJL1uYUh
Trump's tweet came after dozens of people protested outside a university in downtown Tehran to denounce officials' belated confirmation of a Ukrainian passenger plane unintentionally downed outside the Iranian capital.
It was a few more than "dozens."
And as was widely reported, the protesters avoided stepping on the flags of the US and Israel:
Except for a few, who were yelled at with the same word in the video above, "Besharaf" - "Shameful!"
Students in Tehran University take pains to avoid walking on the flags of U.S. & Israel—as the regime forces people to do—and when two Basiji regime agents then make a point of trampling the flags, the crowds shout "Besharaf!" #بیشرف — the regime is shameless, dishonorable. pic.twitter.com/BLr5QKztr8
Psychologically, this is a heavy blow to Iran's leaders. It has raised its youth for over 40 years to hate Israel and the US, and here these same youth are saying that they prefer those two nations to Iran.
The PressTV article goes on to justify their arrest of the UK ambassador:
Meanwhile, the Iranian media is abuzz with reports of British Ambassador Rob Macaire monitoring the protest from a safe distance.
Macaire was briefly arrested by security forces over his presence at the site of a protest.
He later acknowledged his brief detention in Twitter messages posted in Farsi, but denied that he had taken part in demonstrations.
"Can confirm I wasn't taking part in any demonstrations! Went to an event advertised as a vigil for victims of #PS752 tragedy," he wrote, adding that he left the site immediately after a number of people started chanting slogans, but was arrested half an hour later.
The following is footage released by Iranian police of the UK envoy's presence at the protest site:
The Foreign Ministry said it had summoned the British ambassador to protest his unconventional behavior and participation at an illegal rally, and to remind him that such conduct on the part of a foreign ambassador runs counter to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961.
Which is very funny because the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations explicitly says that diplomats have immunity from arrest in their host country. It is Iran that broke the protocol.
Iran tried to organize a "Death to UK" protest outside the British embassy in response, and it saw more police in attendance than the few dozen unenthusiastic protesters.
Iranian propagandists are spinning as much as they can, but their lies are obvious - especially to Iranians themselves.
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Jordanian media report that the head of the Palestinian Parliamentary Committee in the Jordanian parliament, Yahya Al-Saud, announced "that the right of return is sacred and cannot be forfeited by statute of limitations or through agreements concluded with the Israeli enemy."
He called for a campaign to collect one million signatures refusing to drop the "right of return."
Now imagine how this news is received by Jordanians, both those of Palestinian descent and those who aren't. A committee in their own parliament is saying that Palestinians are not true Jordanians, but different second-class citizens who is expected to "return" to Palestine as soon as Israel can be pressured to admit them.
How can Palestinians build their lives in Jordan when they are constantly reminded by their own rulers - and even the political opportunists who are of Palestinian descent themselves - that they are not real Jordanians. That the only "right" Jordan supports for them is their right - to leave Jordan.
Combine this with the history of Jordan taking away citizenship of thousands of Palestinians against their will, and you can see that the supposed Arab love of Palestinians is really a giant excuse to get rid of them.
For their own good, of course.
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Trebek never figured to be at the center of controversy. Generations grew up with him. He’s been a comforting presence; the older brother always there with a pat on the back.
He may well be the most trusted, and the most beloved public personality in America. All that, through some 36 years on the job. That’s something.
He is originally from Canada. Maybe that explains it; they turn them out polite and non-confrontational over there, eh?
Alas, his term may be coming to an end, due to poor health.
We will assume that his legacy won’t be touched by the current tempest, and that the show itself will move forward intact, since, as we noted, from March 30, 1964.
Well now, that makes Jeopardy older and more “ancient” than the “Palestinians” – doesn’t it.
They were designated as a “people” for the first time, by the Arab League, June 2, 1964, when the League approved the PLO, and an Egyptian, Arafat, as its leader.
Before that, before 1948, the Palestinians were the Jews living there, including the Jewish leadership, and that means David Ben-Gurion as well, as all the records will show, from The New York Times to the BBC. We can understand the current “Palestinians” trying so hard to concoct for themselves a history and a heritage, because they have neither.
In an earlier column, we presented the case for the Beatles, how even they preceded today’s “Palestinians” as a “people” on the world stage.
That was Feb. 7, 1964, on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town.
Other than all that, it is good to know that terrorist/Jihadist leaders are watching Jeopardy. Very good. Might learn something.
The word “colonialism” brings to mind many things. Most notably, it is a term associated with European imperialist adventures in the “New World” and all of the attendant horrors that followed. It invokes, in specie, mental images of white-European settlers, armed with Bibles and bayonets, dominating “less advanced” (and typically non-white) indigenous populations, leading to some of the worst human rights atrocities in history – the massacre at Wounded Knee, the African slave trade, the racial segregation policies of South Africa, the reservation schools, and the extirpation of countless native cultures throughout the world.
And since nearly all of these and other more infamous examples of colonialism were specifically white-European, the concept itself has come to be seen as coterminous with white supremacism. In other words, it is perceived as an exclusively European vice, whereas the colonial histories of non-white nations are (in almost all cases) ignored or summarily dismissed. It is under this rubric, and in conjunction with the postmodern progressive fixation on racial justice (and the very recent re-formulation of Ashkenazi Jews as “white-European”), that Zionism has been cast as a “colonial” movement, while the ongoing Arab effort to reverse the gains made by the indigenous Jewish people in 1948 is championed as “anti-colonialism”. Many have even gone as far as to describe Israel as the “last remaining settler colony in existence”.
Zionism, however, is not colonialism, but the polar opposite thereof. To understand why this is so, it is important to clearly define both of these concepts.
Colonialism is, at a baseline level, the practice of expropriating foreign territory and incorporating it into a metropole, or “mother country” (e.g. the British Crown). This process typically entails occupying these new lands with settlers, suppressing local indigenous populations, and enforcing the tongue, culture, and lifestyle of the metropole on the aforementioned indigenous inhabitants. It is, to quote Wikipedia (which I am loathe to do), the relationship of domination of an indigenous population by foreign invaders, with the latter ruling in pursuit of their own interests.
It can also, in a more rudimentary sense, mean “building a town or a city”. That is how Ze’ev Jabotinsky used it in his famous Iron Wall essay, which anti-Zionists were quick to pounce upon. But for the purpose of this article, I will use it in the former sense.
PALESTINE POSTS: AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL By Daniel S. Chertoff is an amazing book. Chertoff found a collection of his father's correspondence written between 1947-1949 when Mordecai S. Chertoff (his father) was here witnessing the end of the British Mandate and the beginning of the State of Israel.
Mordecai Chertoff came to "Palestine" officially to study in Hebrew University but was quickly drafted to the staff of the English newspaper, The Palestine Post, now called The Jerusalem Post. In addition, he joined the Haganah, and later after the establishment of the State of Israel, he became a citizen and was subsequently drafted into the IDF.
The letters Daniel found were from his father to the family in America and letters sent to him from them. Besides the correspondence, Daniel had an incomplete memoir of the time, his father had once started writing. Besides all that, there are many of the articles Mordecai had written for the Post and other publications. Daniel's job was to weave these all together along with a historical narrative informative enough for those less knowledgeable to follow and not too simplistic for those who already know the history. He did a very good job. I can recommend the book to all.
I had a personal need to read the book very carefully. My Uncle Izzy, Israel Shanks "Red" Shankman, was also here in Palestine-Israel at the time. He was in the Palyam, the naval branch of the Palmach as high level crew, medic plus, on some of the ships that defied the British in an attempt to bring Jewish immigrants to safety. It's very possible that they had been acquainted, though my uncle isn't mentioned. My uncle also left Israel for New York, around the same time.
Mordecai's letters are invaluable in describing what life was like in Jerusalem during the long, difficult siege. There was rationing, since water and food were almost impossible to find. The only road Jews could take to Jerusalem, for deliveries of all sorts, went through enemy Arab territory. Attacks were frequent. It's amazing that people survived on such small quantities, but they did.
James Stavridis, the retired U.S. Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO, wrote an op-ed that was published in various newspapers over this past week:
This tactical success is not matched by an articulated strategic approach from the administration of President Donald Trump. Think of chess, a game the Persians refined: Trump has taken one of the opponent's most powerful pieces off the board. Good. Yet there's no reason to think he has a plan to ultimately defeat a clever opponent who still has many capable moves available.
And perhaps most concerningly, there are an increasing number of unintended consequences beginning to emerge -- several of which could have a disproportionate impact on global events. The effects of Soleimani's death will ripple from Baghdad to Tel Aviv to Nairobi to South America.
I agree that there should be a strategy and that there are always unintended consequences for any action. I disagree that the unintended consequences only happen when there is not a sound strategy - they happen all the time.
Stavridis' examples, though, seem a bit half-baked themselves.
Let's start with Venezuela. Over the past couple of days, there has been an apparent inflection point as the corrupt regime of Nicolas Maduro has attempted to unseat the legally elected leader of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido. Maduro has used the typical heavy-handed techniques, including physically blocking Guaido and other anti-regime elected officials from the assembly, while supporting a regime puppet to lead it. Why is Maduro suddenly emboldened? In part, no doubt, because he knows the U.S. administration is focused on Iran, not watching events in Latin America closely. Unintended consequence.
Are the US foreign and defense establishments really so incompetent that they are "focused" on only one area of the world and helpless in all others? If that is the case, this isn't a case of unintended consequences - it is a case of the US being unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. Whether this was part of Maduro's calculus has nothing to do with whether the US can handle it.
How about East Africa? On Sunday morning, three Americans were killed in Kenya, the latest of a string of attacks against U.S. interests by the terrorist group al-Shabab. Members of the group, which is associated with al-Qaeda, stormed an air base shared by U.S. troops and Kenyan forces and damaged American aircraft in addition to killing one U.S. service member and two civilian contractors. Al-Shabab watches CNN like every other terrorist group, and is well aware that the "unblinking eye" of U.S. intelligence collection has shifted its gaze to Iran. Unintended consequence.
Interesting theory. Here's another: On December 29, the US struck at Al Shabab terrorists, killing 4, in retaliation for a deadly attack that killed 79 shortly beforehand.
Why does Stavridis assume that this attack had more to do with Soleimani than revenge for the US attack in Somalia? His theory seems like a stretch, to put it mildly.
Then there is Israel, which faces an enormous threat from Iran's Lebanese proxy force, Hezbollah, which has tens of thousands of surface-to-surface missiles directed against America's closest friend in the region. While most Israelis are happy to see Soleimani dead, there is understandable concern about whether Iran will energize the Hezbollah missile force against Israel. The Israelis have many tools at their disposal to degrade that threat, but a massive rocket attack on Israel would change the strategic calculus of the Middle East significantly. Unintended consequence.
If anything, this was an assumed consequence - the very reason why Trump gave Netanyahu a heads up about the strike. Yet this consequence hasn't happened yet, and Lebanese turmoil makes it seem unlikely at this point. Why is something that hasn't happened considered an unintended consequence?
New drama unfolding in the Iraqi parliament will probably lead to the departure of the last 5,000 American troops from that very divided nation. At one time, of course, the U.S. had more than 180,000 troops in Iraq. The final tranche of military ground power is there primarily to destroy the Islamic State, but its secondary purpose is to be helpful in countering the strong Iranian influence in Iraq. One of the principal goals of Iran -- and of Soleimani himself -- was to ensure that the U.S. left the region generally, and especially that it depart Iraq. It will be ironic in the extreme if Soleimani's death ends up ensuring his key goal: the U.S. finally exiting Iraq after so many years and so much blood and treasure lost, squandering its ability to shape events across the Middle East. Unintended consequence.
Again, this does not seem nearly as likely a consequence as Stavridis assumes.
On Iraq's western border, important operations against the Islamic State have been "paused." Why? Because U.S. forces are taking defensive measures to keep people and assets safe against the inevitable Iranian response. This is prudent on the part of the Defense Department, of course, but it gives the terrorists a breather. And make no mistake, the embers of ISIS are still quite capable of flaring back up in both Iraq and Syria. Unintended consequence.
If the hit on Someimani had been part of a brilliant strategic plan, wouldn't this have happened anyway? And, again, nothing has actually happened.
A consequence is something that actually happens as a result of another action, and Stavridis has not shown a single one.
Then the article becomes a bit bizarre:
Based on what information has been made public and my own experience, I support the administration's decision to take out Soleimani.
But the consequences, especially the unintended ones, are going to set back U.S. efforts in the Middle East and around the world. You can't escape the law of history.
If he supports killing Soleimani, then the consequences are by his own definition not as consequential. If he thinks that it is going to set back US interests, then why support the hit?
Beyond that, there is a problem with his basic assumptions. The Obama administration did have a strategy for Iran - a strategy that was terrible, based on wishful thinking and inaccurate assumptions, a strategy that had a direct line to allow Iran to build nuclear weapons, albeit delayed for a few years.
Which means that not all strategies are good.
I have no idea if Trump has a real strategy for Iran, but my guess is that he has the outline of one: pushing for regime change. Soleimani's death fits nicely with that strategy. But no matter how good one's strategy is, you can't guarantee the results you want.
The irony is that the supposed unintended consequences of Trump's moves have not come to fruition. How many times can we say that about well-developed strategies?
This is a truly bizarre op-ed, all the more so because Stavridis always seemed to be a level headed person.
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According to Arabic media, Major General Hussein Salami, the (current) commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, told the Iranian parliament on Sunday that Iran will announce in the coming days a "great victory" over the United States.
Salami said, "In the coming days we will talk about the great victory over the United States," adding, "The Ukrainian plane crash has not yet allowed us to reveal the full dimensions of the victory that we achieved by bombing the two American bases in Iraq."
Will they announce that they killed 800 soldiers instead of 80? Perhaps they destroyed hundreds of fighter jets? Maybe Trump secretly visited and they killed him!
I can't wait to find out what the Iranians can come up with.
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It would be despicable and unforgivable for Britain and the EU, whose support for the 2015 Obama-brokered deal hugely helped empower this unconscionable regime, now to weaken the protesters and strengthen their tyrannical rulers still further – at precisely the point at which the possibility has arisen of bringing down a regime which otherwise risks plunging the world into a terrible war.
The protesters have been ripping down mourning posters of Soleimani, chanting that both he and Khamenei were murderers. “They are lying that our enemy is America; our enemy is right here,” they have cried. At a university outside Tehran, they refused to trample upon the American and Israeli flags that had been laid out on the ground but instead stepped respectfully around them, chastising any who stepped on them. (Even though elsewhere some pro-regime thugs predictably burnt the British and Israeli flags, the former was the far more remarkable development.)
Compare all this this with the west’s received opinion about the Soleimani killing: that he was a hero, that Trump was the war criminal and monster, and that the elimination of this supposedly great general had united the Iranian people against America.
You think? According to Saeed Ghasseminejad, senior adviser and financial economist at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies: “This tweet by @realDonaldTrump with more than 100k likes is already the most liked Persian tweet in the history of Twitter. A strong show of support by Iranians for Trump’s Iran policy, something the MSM does not and will not report.”
The people of Iran know Trump is behind them and against the regime which so oppresses them and menaces the civilised world; and they also know that the west’s so-called “liberal progressives” are against them and are instead lined up behind the regime.
This is one of those moments where the division between those who seek to defend civilisation and those who wish to aid its would-be destroyers is being starkly and terrifyingly exposed.
AS OF now, it appears that the Iranian sound and fury over the skies of Iraq on January 8 look set to signify the conclusion of the round of hostilities that began with the killing of a US contractor by the Iran-linked Ktaeb Hezbollah militia on December 27. This act provoked a US attack on Ktaeb which killed 25 of its fighters. The Iranians then launched the violent protests against the US Embassy in Baghdad. The US upped the ante at that point with the killings of Soleimani, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and the others. The latest Iranian response indicates that Iran wants an end to this round.
Of course, Iranian efforts to expel the US from Iraq will continue. The Iranian calculus at this point may well have included the assumption that the current US administration wants out of the Middle East, and therefore should not be provoked into staying.
Iranian propaganda makes much of the notion that the Iranian project is slow and systematic and at a level of sophistication that makes it invulnerable to the attacks of its enemies. That remains to be seen. But the latest round of hostilities indicates that those who helm the Iranian bid for regional hegemony are aware of their drastic limitations in the military arena, are not suicidal, and are capable of formulating and implementing policy in line with the prevailing power realities.
Iran has emerged completely discredited from the recent phase of conflict with the United States and US President Donald J. Trump appears, for the time being, to be the big winner.
The Iranian regime is proving to be totally incompetent: incapable of managing the funeral of the so-called "martyr" Qassem Soleimani, which resulted in the deaths of more than 50 people, but capable of shooting down "as a result of human error" a commercial flight with 82 of its own nationals on board and killing a total of 176 passengers and crew members. This is the same regime that now announces the resumption of its nuclear weapons program. The bomb could be launched "by mistake," of course, at Israel - or dropped on a neighboring country, such as Sunni states in the Gulf, or even on Iran itself.
The Iranian people know that the plane was shot down by their own government. There are anti-regime protests across Iran. There is anger over the incompetence and the lies of the last few days. The regime will come out of it weakened. After the death of Soleimani, images of mass rallies may have given the impression of a popular rally against the United States, but it has long been known that such impressions can be misleading.
Think, for example, of the images of Parisian crowds applauding Marshal Pétain in 1940, used by Vichy propaganda. In the absence of free elections and polls, it is difficult to know the real feelings of the majority of the Iranian population. As of this writing, many are protesting against "Supreme Guide" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and calling for his resignation.
The countries of the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the lead, will be convinced more than ever that their security -- in the face of an aggressive regime that does not hesitate to export its "revolution" to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, etc. -- depends on America's protection. No longer dependent on the region for its energy supply, the United States will be able to ask those countries to pay for it, as President Trump keeps asking.
The freedom of opinion, expression through speech and writing, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, and the freedom of association, are all guaranteed within the scope of the law.
It turns out this is not really true.
Lebanon's penal code has a bunch of penalties for defamation, slander and similar offenses.
Article 384 punishes with up to two years’ imprisonment anyone who “insults” the president, the flag or the national emblem, with up to two years' imprisonment. Articles 386 and 388 criminalize defamation of public officials and public entities. Articles 582-584 provide for up to three months imprisonment for "slander" of any public official.
Moreover, Article 157 of the Military Justice Code prohibits defamation of the army.
The truth is not a defense against these charges.
In recent months, these laws have been invoked more and more often as Lebanese have been protesting the government. One crazy example:
When banks started to issue withdrawal limits weeks before the revolution, people took videos and photos at the banks and posted them on social media.
Among them, Lebanese journalist Amer Shibani who, according to Middle-East Eye on October 15th, was threatened by a lawyer of a major bank, “You will delete your tweet or else.”
According to journalist twitter user @chehayebk, "Several were interrogated over accusations of slander and defamation," just for posting photos of the banks.
In other words, anything that someone doesn't like can become a target for a "defamation" action.
Lebanon is enforcing online "defamation" as cybercrime. The Lebanese Cybercrimes Bureau reportedly initiated 3,599 defamation investigations between January 2015 and May 2019 and the number is increasing.
This journalist deleted a tweet saying a certain bank stopped handing out dollars after he was summoned by the Cybercrimes Bureau.
In October, a group of lawyers accused the British magazine The Economist of damaging Lebanon’s reputation, economic well-being and desecrating the country's flag because it illustrated an article about Lebanon's floundering economy with this picture:
While HRW is actually on top of this story, the media has been remarkably silent - especially given that the media is the target of much of these laws.
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President Hassan Rouhani has signed an amended law that expands Iran’s designation of American terrorist organizations to include the Pentagon and all its subsidiaries.
Iran’s parliament passed the initial version of the law back in April, which designated the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) a terrorist organization after the US blacklisted the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).
Last week, the Iranian parliament expanded it to include the Pentagon, in response to US assassination of IRGC Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani and his companions in Baghdad.
Rouhani signed the amended version, thus making its implementation imperative upon all the country’s related bodies.
The new version blacklists all staff members of the Pentagon and subsidiary companies and institutions, in addition to those who commanded and perpetrated General Soleimani’s assassination.
All the 233 lawmakers present at an open session of the parliament on Tuesday unanimously adopted the triple-urgency motion.
It is not just urgent, and not just doubly urgent, but triply urgent!
The vote was unanimous!
Mike Pompeo must be quaking in his boots.
This will have a huge effect on the Pentagon's many bank holdings in Tehran. Not to mention that Pentagon employees won't be able to speak at prestigious Iranian security conferences.
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The Polish government marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday, but completely ignored the complicity of Poles who actively participated in crimes against Jews during World War II.
Rather, Warsaw seemed to stress Polish suffering and Polish efforts to rescue Jews, leading an Israeli Holocaust historian to charge that Poland is trying to make the Nazi genocide look like a “Polish rescue project.”
Historians debate how many Poles aided the Nazi death machine during World War II, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
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But Poland has never admitted to complicity on any large scale and last year Warsaw passed a law prohibiting people from blaming the Polish nation for Holocaust atrocities.
Indeed, a new study on Holocaust remembrance in Europe argues that the Poles are among the “worst offenders” when it comes to efforts to rehabilitate Nazi collaborators and war criminals and “minimizing their own guilt in the attempted extermination of Jews.”
According to the study, conducted by researchers from Yale and Grinnell colleges and published last week, the right-wing government in Warsaw has “engaged in competitive victimization, emphasising the experience of Polish victims over that of Jewish victims.
“The government spends considerable effort on rewriting history rather than acknowledging and learning from it,” the study found.
The Auschwitz Museum Twitter account appears to be part of the Polish whitewashing of their people's complicity in the Holocaust.
The account has a lot of very good information. It humanizes many victims of the Holocaust. It has gone on a massive campaign to recruit followers, and is nearing its goal of one million.
But the Auschwitz Museum account minimizes Polish complicity in the Holocaust just as the Polish government does. This thread from Sunday illuminates this, as the Museum posted this:
Viktor Hardarson responded:
Let´s analyse your own tweet "honestly, fairly & professionally".
The beginning of the tweet sets the tone, the context and the content of the rest of the tweet.
So, the beginning is about actions of Poles during German occupation of Poland in WW2. It
mentions these actions (acts) "must be researched honestly fairly & professionally" "within the context of the German occupation...and extermination of Jews" if they were "heroic or horrible"
This is the "prelude" in your tweet.
That whether the acts of Poles relating to the Holocaust and under German occupation were heroic or horrible.
So far we´re talking about what the Poles did in relation to the extermination of Jews.
What is revealing is the phrase "heroic or horrible".
It implies direct actions with good or bad consequences
It is clear that you are talking about the acts of individuals that affected Jews in direct relations. Man to man. What one did directly to another.
And of course that should be researched. And it has been researched. For 75 years.
The 2nd part.
"However, in the case of the history of the Auschwitz camp talking about Polish complicity is false".
We´ve already established that the 1st part is about ones behaviour towards another in direct relation. It can not be about anything else based on the wording.
So the latter part has nothing to do with "planning" or "running" Auschwitz.
It´s a continuation of the 1st part so what you´re saying is: Poles had nothing to do with Auschwitz and no Jew ended up in Auschwitz as a result of Polish complicity.
This is false.
As far as I agree that research of the Holocaust should be continued there´s no need for further research on Polish complicity. We have so much knowledge about that from eyewitnesses, documentation, news, articles and so on that we know that history isn´t going to change.
Poles were complicit in the Holocaust. And Poles were often the reason Jews ended up in Auschwitz.
That is the "shit" you need to own.
In the first part of the Tweet you literally blamed Polish behaviour on the Germans. Something you have repeatedly done in our conversation.
If that was the case, that the Polish behaved the way they did because of the German occupation, then it´s equally true that those heroes that sheltered Jews also behaved in that way because of the German occupation.
There´s one thing that determines your actions. And 1 thing only.
Who you are.
How you act, or react, to circumstances is solely based on who you are.
Blaming others for your own behaviour is immature.
And it´s "whitewashing".
So let me tell you what we see in your tweet.
"If the Polish ppl did good or bad to the Jews, if it was bad it was because of the German occupation - it´s their fault, needs to be researched. But Poles had nothing to do with Auschwitz".
Does this sound like a true description of the events to anyone?
No.
This Polish historian estimates that some 200,000 Jews were killed by Poles betraying them, sometimes after extorting all their possessions.
That is part of the history that the official Auschwitz Museum account doesn't want you to know about.
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Society-wide, the numbers around anti-Semitism are stark. Six of 10 Jews in Germany have experienced anti-Semitic “hidden insinuations,” while 9 of 10 Jews in Germany feel “strongly burdened” by anti-Semitism directed at their family, according to a 2017 qualitative study out of Bielefeld University titled “Jewish Perspectives on Antisemitism in Germany.”
Schools in Berlin have seen an uptick in incidents, reporting 41 incidents in 2018, up one-third from the previous year, according to RIAS, a monitoring agency that tracks anti-Semitic incidents.
Recently, at one Berlin public school, Mr. Königsberg says, a teacher was instructing a unit on religion. One boy offered up that he was Jewish, only to hear a classmate mutter in response, “I’ve got to kill you.” The teacher heard the remark, but did nothing to intervene, says Mr. Königsberg.
Other school situations can be understated or offhand, and even perpetrated by teachers, he adds. Take the time a Berlin public school took a field trip to the city’s Holocaust memorial. A 14-year-old Jewish girl, emotional over what she was seeing, began to sob. Her German teacher told her, “Why are you crying? It was so long ago.”
A Jewish woman whose child attends an elite Berlin public school says she volunteered to run the Israel booth at the school’s international fair. She says she immediately felt uncomfortable. First, a child of about 5 years passed by and told her, “Israel is bad.” Later, as students assessed the falafel offered at the booth, several offered that the food had “nothing to do with Israel.”
Toward the end of the fair, a teenager leaned over the table to get in her face, snarling, “I wish the falafel were grenades, and that they would explode in your face.” Another parent intervened and moved the teen away from the table.
The woman visited with police over the verbal assault, but ultimately decided not to file a report. “I didn’t feel a 15-year-old should have a criminal record,” she says.
When she reported the incident to the school principal, she came away disappointed. “The issue was never raised with the community,” says the woman, who wished to remain anonymous since her child is still enrolled in the school. “Eventually the principal left. Nothing was done.”
It sounds like incidents like these are hugely unreported.
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