Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, March 07, 2020

03/07 Links: Why Abbas Rejects Trump's Deal (And Any Other Deal With Israel); Melanie Phillips: The real centre ground the only political show in town; Remembering a one-armed Zionist hero

From Ian:

Ha'aretz: Why Abbas Rejects Trump's Deal (And Any Other Deal With Israel)

Years passed, and, responding to Trump’s plan at a January 28, 2020 press conference in Ramallah, Abbas exposed the deeper layer of the PLO’s beliefs, saying: “Dear brothers, I consider this deal as the culmination of the Balfour declaration… The ‘Deal of the Century’ is based on the Balfour Declaration, which was created by America and Britain. Some may find this strange. America? Yes, America! And Britain. It was America that formulated [the Balfour Declaration], in agreement with Britain, and it was America that incorporated it into the Covenant of the League of Nations… America founded the Balfour Declaration, and it has now begun to implement it.”

Indeed, according to Article 20 of the 1964 Palestinian Covenant, “The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void.” And so, even 22 years after the ceremony in which the covenant was “abolished,” the PLO continues to consider the Balfour Declaration a source of continuous injustice that has been done to the Palestinians. It is in this spirit that in his article marking the centenary of the declaration titled “The Burden of Lord Balfour” (The Cairo Reviews of Global Affairs, November 17, 2017) Abbas wrote: “Lord Arthur Balfour was a British foreign secretary who decided to change the identity and fate of Palestine, a land that he did not own, by promising it to the Zionist movement, and dramatically altering the history of the Palestinian people... The Balfour Declaration of 1917 symbolizes the international role in the Palestinian catastrophe and exodus, the Nakba of 1948.”

In that article Abbas also proposed a solution to the refugee issue: “We also reiterate that, in order to end claims with Israel, there must be a just solution for the seven million Palestinian refugees based on the choice of every refugee,” i.e., his choice between returning to his family’s original home in Israel and accepting financial compensation.

The meaning of this permanent demand is that the PLO is not authorized to represent the will of each individual refugee, and hence the PLO is unable to agree with the Israeli government on any quota of refugees that would be allowed to settle in Israel. Hence, the PLO is unable to include in any agreement the vital component of “mutual end of claims.” This barrier is in addition to the PLO’s ongoing claim to the entire territory of Israel, a demand on which organization still educate its youth.

The new American “Peace to Prosperity” plan implicitly anticipates that, within the next four years, the PLO leadership will return to the negotiation table. In order to avoid future mistakes, we must abandon the erroneous theory that “the PLO is the solution.” We must not close our eyes to the simple fact that, for the PLO, the core issue is the hundred-year-old “injustice” embedded in the very existence of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine. This gap cannot be bridged, and no plan that any Israeli government can accept can also satisfy the PLO. Therefore, a peace treaty with the PLO cannot and will not be signed.
Ze’ev B. Begin is a researcher in MEMRI, The Middle East Media Research Institute.

How Bad Is Antisemitism In Europe? Surveys Suggest It’s Rampant

Pew Research nodded toward this issue last year, while studying European attitudes 30 years after the Berlin Wall’s fall. Jews were not the poll’s focus, but it’s striking that Jews were rated favorably by their fellow countrymen in “the Netherlands (92%), Sweden (92%), the UK (90%) and France (89%).”

Seventy-four years after the Holocaust’s end, Pew also learned that only 12 percent of Germans in former East Germany and 5 percent in former West Germany viewed Jews unfavorably. Eighty-six percent of Germans told Pew they had favorable opinions of Jews in 2019, compared to 53 percent in 1991.

Unfortunately, other surveys don’t echo these upbeat numbers. Asked about this, a Pew Research spokesman, who pointed to some questions posed by Pew’s “international religion survey team” in 2017, emailed, “Neither survey set out to measure antisemitism. In fact, we are very careful NOT to make any claims that our questions are actually measuring antisemitism.”

So, stipulating that Pew’s surveys do not expressly study antisemitism, lack the qualitative data Pew’s spokesman considers necessary, and include few questions, let’s look at the 2017 data, because Pew remains a reputable source. That year, surveyors asked Europeans in 15 countries whether they would accept a Jew as family or a neighbor, whether Jews “pursue their own interests” rather than their home country’s, and whether Jews “overstate how much they have suffered.”

I’d submit that the number of Europeans opposed to Jewish relatives is irrelevant here. While it reflects a form of prejudice and is upsetting to any people involved, it doesn’t threaten Jews’ ability to live freely or safely.

By contrast, not wanting Jewish neighbors is housing discrimination and affects every Jewish citizen. So when 12 percent of Italians, along with 10 percent of Irish and Portuguese respondents say they wouldn’t “be willing to accept Jews as” neighbors, that matters.

When 36 percent of Portuguese respondents, along with 32 percent of Spaniards, 31 percent of Italians, and 28 percent of Belgians agree that “Jews always pursue their own interests and not the interest of the country they live in,” that’s concerning.

And when 36 percent of Italians, 33 percent of Portuguese, 30 percent of Spanish, and 28 percent of Belgian respondents tell Pew pollsters they agree that “Jews always overstate how much they have suffered,” that’s a red flag. Neighbors who believe you’re exaggerating about historical suffering are unlikely to empathize over your contemporary concerns.

Anti-Zionist Propaganda, Conspiracy Theories Fueling Rise of Antisemitism in Italy, New Report Shows

Anti-Jewish incidents in Italy climbed sharply in 2019, the latest report from the country’s main antisemitism monitor revealed on Friday.

Data gathered by the Milan-based “Osservatorio Antisemitismo” (Antisemitism Observatory) showed that there were 251 incidents of hatred targeting Jews last year, compared with 197 such incidents in 2018.

About 30,000 Jews live in Italy, concentrated in a handful of major cities.

The majority of the 2019 incidents — 173 — involved antisemitic posts online that were reported to the Observatory. In other categories, there were 31 incidents of verbal abuse, 23 instances of antisemitic graffiti and two violent assaults, one involving a woman in Rome who was slapped and spat upon by her assailant, and the other a man in the northern town of Prunetto who was punched and insulted with anti-Jewish epithets.

Stefano Gatti — the editor of the Observatory’s report — told the Italian Jewish news outlet Bet Magazine Mosaico that part of the reason for the increase was a greater willingness among victims to report attacks.

Equally, Gatti emphasized that the available data was likely an “underestimate” of the scale of the problem, “because they only include explicit complaints and not cases that are unknown or unreported.”

Asked to explain the broader context around the rise of antisemitism in Italy, Gatti pointed to the visibility of anti-Zionist propaganda demonizing the State of Israel and the related popularity of conspiracy theories centered upon Jews.

Two of the incidents recorded by the Observatory in 2019 — the cancellation of a concert in Sardinia by the Israeli musician Eyal Lerner and a public campaign for the boycott of Israeli goods — were characterized as antisemitism promoted by Italian supporters of the effort to subject the Jewish state to boycotts, divestment and sanctions.

“In the pro-Palestinian rhetoric, the themes, myths and symbols of anti-Judaism re-emerge,” Gatti commented. “Deicide, the blood libel, exclusivism, hatred for the rest of humanity: Anti-Zionist propaganda is hybridized with anti-Jewish myths.”

Palestinian PM shops at local grocery to assure people about Covid-19 - but the shop sells Israeli products

Palestinian Authority prime minister Dr. Muhammad Shtayeh too a tour on Saturday evening of a number of shops. He said, "The people's morale is high and there is no shortage of food supplies. Our people are great in giving and in a spirit of solidarity in crises."

At least one of the stores he visited had a product with Hebrew prominently displayed at checkout (see at left in photo.)

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03/06 Links Pt2: Top Sanders Surrogate: Zionism Is a ‘Racist’ Ideology; Former Nazi camp guard, 94, who lived in US for years, to be deported; The End of the Jaffa Orange Highlights Israel Economic Shift

From Ian:

Top Sanders Surrogate: Zionism Is a ‘Racist’ Ideology

A top surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders's (I., Vt.) presidential campaign claimed Zionism is a "racist" ideology and even criticized Barack Obama for saying otherwise.

Phillip Agnew, a self-proclaimed militant, was published by Ebony magazine in 2015 arguing that Zionism "is a racist, exploitative, and exclusionary ideology."

"There is no direct line from Zionism to the Black Freedom struggle," Agnew wrote. "No rhetorical imagination-acrobatics can conjure one, and no amount of intimidation can chart one. It is a racist, exploitative, and exclusionary ideology."

Agnew, who also goes by Umi Selah, criticized then-president Obama for comparing the right of Jews to "have a homeland and to feel safe and free of discrimination" to African Americans having equal protection under the law. He called it a "lie" and a "figment of our well-manicured imagination."

The Sanders campaign and Agnew did not respond to requests for comment.

Agnew's viewpoint is out of line with even the United Nations, which has a history of heaping scorn on the Jewish state. The international body voted overwhelmingly in 1991 to revoke a statement it previously passed, saying, "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination."

"The official count found 111 nations in favor of repealing the statement and 25 nations, mostly Islamic and hard-line Communists, voting against," the New York Times reported at the time. "Thirteen nations abstained. Seventeen other countries, including Egypt, which recognizes Israel, and Kuwait and China, did not take part in the voting."

Agnew is the cofounder of Dream Defenders, a group that promotes the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which advocates an economic boycott of Israel and its people.

Jonathan Tobin: Did Bloomberg give ammunition to anti-Semites?

There are a lot of people who are relieved that Michael Bloomberg has dropped out of the Democratic primary race, and not all of them are named Biden.

The withdrawal of the former mayor of New York City gives a boost to former Vice President Joe Biden. Bloomberg's jumping on the Biden bandwagon removes the last competition for more moderate Democratic primary voters and lessens the chances that Sen. Bernie Sanders will become the Democratic nominee. That's a relief for both centrists who fear the Vermont Socialist can't beat President Donald Trump, as well as supporters of Israel who have been rightly outraged by Sanders's slanderous attacks on AIPAC and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Bloomberg's exit from the presidential contest also brings a sigh of relief to those who feared that his wild spending was providing ammunition to anti-Semites.

The idea that Jews buy political influence to pursue secret agendas has been a trope of anti-Semites dating back to the publication of the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the start of the 20th century. It's been revived in various forms, including by some anti-Semitic supporters of Sanders, such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who claimed that supporters of Israel were purchasing Congress in her now-famous quip: "It's all about the Benjamins."

Indeed, the fact that Bloomberg and two other billionaires with Jewish ties, George Soros and Tom Steyer (who has a Jewish father and who also recently ended a futile presidential bid) have been the largest donors to Democratic candidates and liberal political causes in recent years has created an unhealthy dialogue about campaign finance and anti-Semitism. The slightest hint of criticism of the trio – who have invested large sums promoting liberal politicians and policies – has been seized upon as evidence of Jew-baiting.

Ex-deputy NSC head: Israelis unaware of collapse in support among Dems

From Iran, to Syria to the Palestinians, if a Democrat wins the US presidency, especially Bernie Sanders, Israel will need to make major policy adjustments, former deputy National Security Council head Chuck Freilich told The Jerusalem Post.

Under Sanders, “I would advise for everyone to pray,” he said, adding that confronting a nuclear Iran with Sanders in the White House “is a horror.”

But Freilich, who advocates many moderate national security ideas, said Sanders in some ways is a symptom of issues that have festered much longer.

If in November a Democrat wins the presidency, “whether [Joe] Biden or Sanders, there is a critical role of repairing to be done,” he said.

“I don’t think the people of Israel are fully aware of the collapse of support – the absolute free fall in support for Israel especially among younger people in the Democratic party – and in the Jewish community, which votes in the high 70% range for Democrats,” Freilich said.

“There is pent up fury with decades of frustration over the policy regarding Palestinians in the West Bank,” which was exacerbated by the direct confrontation between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Obama administration over Iran and by Netanyahu’s cozying up to the Trump administration, he said.

“There are also tectonic changes in American demographics, which have nothing to do with Israel,”Freilich said. “The fastest-growing groups are Latinos and the religiously unidentified. Latinos are not interested in Israel,” and if people who are more religious tend to support Israel, people who are less tend not to.

Here are a couple Arab political cartoons in Hamas media against Mahmoud Abbas, showing opinions one normally doesn't see in Western media.

The road-sign points towards "Palestinian rights" and Abbas is depending on the UN to give him those rights, symbolized by a dead horse. Abbas is sitting on a carriage marked "negotiations". The wild horse that is tied is marked as "resistance."

Abbas is seen sniffing cocaine that spells "security coordination" (with the IDF), while holding a sign saying "glory to our martyrs and freedom for our prisoners".

Cocaine is at least as prohibited in Islam as alcohol, so this is especially vicious.

(Al Jazeera.net is not the same as the famous Al Jazeera from Qatar.)

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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03/06 Links Pt1: Caroline Glick: Democrats and anti-democrats; Coronavirus: For Once, Israel and the Rest of the World Are on the Same Side; Jews and Saudi Arabia

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Democrats and anti-democrats

In Israel, the checks and balances move in only one direction. The Knesset and the government – that is, the elected branches of government – are fully checked by the legal fraternity. The justices, attorney general and state prosecutors, for their part, have no checks on their power at all. The reason they keep seizing the powers of the Knesset and the government is because they can.

Whereas Likud and its coalition partners are committed to pursuing significant reform to check the power of the prosecutors and justices, Blue and White's platform dismisses outright all possibility of reform. The Left knows what its source of power is. And it isn't the people.

On Wednesday, Blue and White announced it will seek the passage of a law barring indicted officials from serving as prime minister. In so doing, Blue and White formalized its rejection of democracy. If passed into law, Blue and White's bill will do two things which are both antithetical to democracy.

First, it will give the unelected attorney general the power to decide who can run for office. If all that is needed to block a politician from running is a criminal indictment, then the only person who matters in Israeli politics will be the attorney general.

Second, the bill seeks to cancel Monday's election. More than two million Israelis voted for Netanyahu, either directly by voting for Likud, or indirectly, by voting for its coalition partners. And the Blue and White bill intends to throw their ballots into the trash.

If the law passes, Israel's parliamentary system will have more in common with Iran's parliamentary system than with Britain's. In Iran, the Guardian Council of the Islamic Revolution decides who can run for office. In Israel, the Guardian Council of the legal revolution will perform the same function, and to the same end.

It's not at all clear how we can proceed from this point. But what is clear enough is that we have reached an inflection point. Either three members of the Blue and White coalition break ranks and join Netanyahu to form a government and save Israeli democracy, or Israel will cease to be a democracy.

Coronavirus: For Once, Israel and the Rest of the World Are on the Same Side

Israel is a country that has known more than its share of national emergencies. Over time its citizens have weathered Arab invasions, ballistic missiles and terror bombing campaigns. The sudden attack of coronavirus is something new. For once, we and the rest of the world are on the same side.

In the first stages of the virus, Israel's aggressive instincts have kicked in as it has adopted emergency measures. Tourists from countries affected by the virus have been sent home. Foreigners from "contagious" nations were banned. Avoiding panic is central to the government's strategy. Officials want to contain the virus as much as possible. It appears to be working. No Israelis have yet died from corona and less than two dozen are hospitalized.

"We are in control of the situation, thanks to the great caution we have adopted," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the country on Wednesday. "We have been forced to take very severe steps to slow the spread of the virus in Israel and that is what has happened. We have ordered quarantines and mass checkups that many other countries haven't done."

Critics say that the hardline virus defense policy is exaggerated. But that is unknowable in advance. Risking lives to placate treasury officials, tourist agencies, business travelers or disappointed children on Purim is a step responsible officials can't contemplate.

El Al cancels flights to San Francisco, Europe amid ‘unprecedented’ virus crisis

El Al on Friday cut back flights to San Francisco and a number of European cities amid a global drop in travel over fears about the new coronavirus, with a senior company official calling it “an unprecedented crisis.”

Flights that left for San Francisco Friday morning were combined, according to El Al, due to the low number of passengers on each plane.

In Europe, the Israeli airline was cancelling some flights to Berlin, Barcelona and Zurich. All three cities are located in countries which Israel began restricting the entry of non-nationals to on Friday as part of efforts to slow the spread of the virus.

“This is an unprecedented crisis,” a senior El Al official told the Ynet news site.

“The consequences of this crisis are huge and we are trying to do everything we can [to handle it],” he said.

El Al was also expected to cancel flights on Sunday to Munich, Budapest, Amsterdam, Brussels, Bucharest, Vienna and Marseille.

Amid Coronavirus, Netanyahu Asks Israelis to Use Indian Namaste Greeting instead of Shaking Hands

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday encouraged his countrymen to adopt ‘Namaste’ - the Indian way of greeting - instead of the normal handshake as one of the measures to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

At a press conference following a review meeting to fight the spread of coronavirus, Netanyahu said that several measures will be announced to prevent the spread of coronavirus but some simple measures like avoiding the normal handshake while greeting people may possibly be replaced with other forms of greetings like the Indian ‘Namaste’.

He also demonstrated at the press conference as to how the Indians do ‘Namaste’ while greeting people.

Netanyahu said that “we are in the middle of a global epidemic”, but Israel has done well as it was quick in taking action to prevent the spread of the virus in the country.

Palestinian Arabic histories online continue to create fantastic new facts about a people who never existed before the last century.

This article in Al Watan by Ali Oqla Arsan about the history of Jerusalem says that Arabs were in the area from the fourth millennium BC, something that historians would be interested in knowing.

For the purposes of the article, though, everyone in the area had to be Arab because then, if they were between the Mediterranean and the Jordan they could be considered "Palestinians."

As a result, the Jebusites who controlled Jerusalem - who we only know about from the Jewish scriptures - are Palestinians.

In his fantasy retelling of history, the writer says that the native Arabs resisted the invasion of the Jews. Even David wasn't able to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Arabs. During the days of David and Solomon, Jews only had a kind of limited autonomy that was graciously granted by the Arabs of the area.

My favorite part is this:

The Arab Canaanites who gave the world the alphabet from 1400 to 1200 BC - as the Phoenicians are part of the Canaanites - remained the people of civilization, the people of the lands, and the people of sovereignty in most of the cities of the Levant in the time of that city-state. Their struggle with the Jews continued after they entered the Levant, and the invaders were not able to extend their control over the region nor to provide it with a special cultural presence - just as they could not form a prominent presence in it even at the military level except in the time of David And Solomon (1000-923 BC).

In this "history" the Jews contributed nothing to civilization and the "Palestinians" introduced the world to everything.

Not only that, but history is viewed from the distorted lens of how Arabs see the world today. Therefore, when Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Israel, he was being lobbied by Babylonian Jews who were his advisors - just like AIPAC does today!

I've seen previous articles that claim Palestinians invented chariots - because of the Hittites.

These inspired me to tweet:

Hey Palestinians:

Canaanites weren't Arab.
Jebusites weren't Arab.
Phoenicians weren't Arab.
Hittites weren't Arab.
Philistines weren't Arab.

𝗡𝗼 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗝𝗲𝘄𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝗮𝗯.
— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) March 6, 2020

Ali Oqla Arsan is from Syria.

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Every year, Gallup polls the world for their attitudes towards American leadership.

In 2013, 80% of Palestinians disapproved of the job performance of Obama administration. This was the highest disapproval rating in the world at the time.

Things didn't change much during his last year in office, when the disapproval rate among Palestinians of the US leadership was at 79%.

In 2007, under Bush, the disapproval rating was 83%.

And now? In the 2019 survey (for 2018), the Palestinian disapproval rating for the Trump administration was 81%.

The Palestinian attitude towards the US barely changed under the most pro-Palestinian administration ever compared to the previous and following administrations.

There is a strange mindset among many that if only the West would be nicer to those who hate us, then they wont hate us as much. These people think that goodwill will be reciprocated. But it doesn't work that way: it didn't work with Iran and it didn't work with the Palestinians.

When people say they hate you, giving in to their demands doesn't make you more loved.

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Hossam Khader, a Fatah member in the Balata camp near Nablus, was arrested from his home in the middle of the night by Palestinian Authority security forces.

He had been critical of Mahmoud Abbas recently. When doctors threatened to strike, Abbas criticized them and Khader in turn criticized Abbas, demanding that he apologize.

Khader's daughter said that the arrest by Palestinian security was brutal and they forcibly retrained her.

Khader himself has been an outspoken critic of the "old guard" leaders of Fatah for decades. He criticized Arafat to Western media in the early 2000s and he was attacked by Abbas supporters in 2009.

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03/05 Links Pt2: Jewish student sues NJ school district after anti-Semitic bullying; House Dems Block Anti-BDS Bill; Canadian Arabic newspaper publishes article accusing Jews of blood libel

From Ian:

Jewish student sues NJ school district after anti-Semitic bullying

A Jewish woman filed a lawsuit against her former New Jersey school district Wednesday after she said officials failed to protect her from “endemic anti-Semitism."

Students at the Marine Academy of Science and Technology drew swastikas in notebooks and read “Mein Kampf” in public, according to the lawsuit. One posed for a photograph next to the words, “I h8 Jews.” After her parents complained, the woman became “a pariah,” the complaint said, while school leaders were “deliberately indifferent” to her plight.

The state attorney general’s office previously found “reasonable suspicion” that the district overseeing the Sandy Hook school broke New Jersey’s anti-discrimination law.

The complaint named the Monmouth County Vocational School District, its board of education and school leaders in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey.

“I’m forever saddened that this happened to me, but I have grown to accept that my family and I did the right thing by reporting it," the 18-year-old said in a message sent by her lawyer, Eric Hecker. He asked that the former student’s full name not be used to protect her privacy. She is no longer at the academy.

"I am trying to move forward but this will always be something I carry,” she said.

In a statement, District Superintendent Timothy McCorkell said the school had “appropriately disciplined” the students involved with the “I h8 Jews” photo.

Soon after that photo was taken, the school consulted with the Jewish Federation in the Heart of New Jersey. The South River-based nonprofit recommended curriculum about Jewish history and hate speech.

“Ongoing education” is crucial in situations like these, said Lisa Karasic, a spokesperson for the federation. “Both for students and educators.”

Many students at the academy were later enrolled in programs about the Holocaust and “cultural competency,” McCorkell said, in line with recommendations made by the state attorney general.

House Dems Block Anti-BDS Bill

House Democrats on Wednesday blocked the consideration of a bill that would have prohibited domestic support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Rep. Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) sponsored the bill, which would have modified existing law to take aim at the anti-Israel BDS movement by forbidding domestic support for foreign boycotts from organizations like the United Nations Human Rights Council and the European Union.

Lawmakers voted along party lines to defeat the consideration of the bill by a margin of 219 to 194.

"We cannot be quiet when it comes to combating anti-Semitism and anti-Israel mentalities," Rep. Debbie Lesko (R., Ariz.) said on the House floor. "We need to work together in Congress and pass common-sense legislation on this issue. H.R. 5595 does just that."

Zeldin added that the bill established Congress's opposition to the BDS movement and condemned the United Nations "blacklist" of companies that do business in the West Bank. He called on Congress to also condemn the United Nations' actions against Israel.

"BDS tries to delegitimize Israel by turning it into a pariah state, cut off from all trade, tourism, military, diplomatic, and cultural ties with the rest of the world," Zeldin said.

If true, this shows exactly what BDS are about, they are willing to put millions of people at risk because of their obsessional hatred of the only Jewish state - Israel

Their compulsion for hatred isn’t rational & comparisons can be drawn to the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses https://t.co/hKmILflWXx
— GnasherJew®גנאשר (@GnasherJew) March 5, 2020

Canadian Arabic newspaper publishes article accusing Jews of blood libel

An Arabic-language Canadian newspaper has published an article praising Palestinian terrorists and accusing Israel of burying prisoners alive and stealing their organs.

Al-Meshwar, which circulates in the Greater Toronto area, dedicated half a page in its February 28 edition to an article titled "The Abuse of the Martyrs and the Manipulation of Their Bodies Are Jewish Commandments and Israeli Directives,” according to B'nai Brith Canada.

The article was penned by former Hamas official Dr. Mustafa Yusuf al-Lidawi, who has a track record of accusing Jews of blood libel and other antisemitic charges. In it, he praised the "martyrdom" of Muhammed al-Na'im, a commander in the al-Quds Brigade of Palestinian Islamic Jihad who was killed on the Gaza/Israeli border last month trying to plant a bomb. An IDF bulldozer prevented other Palestinians from retrieving his body, in a tit-for-tat action over the holding of fallen IDF soldiers in Gaza.

Of Palestinian terrorists, Lidawi wrote: “Blessed is their martyrdom, and congratulations to them on their dwelling [in heaven], and hail to them in the highest Paradise.” He also accused Israel of burying prisoners alive and stealing their organs, ascribing such a practice to Israel's “ancient malice, and Talmudic and Torah commandments.”

B'nai Brith Canada has filed a complaint with Toronto Police.

“It is unacceptable that Canadian publications, in any language, continue to demonize Jews and glorify terrorism,” said Michael Mostyn, Chief Executive Officer of B’nai Brith Canada. “These relentless and baseless attacks on our community undermine inter-communal relations and increase the risk to our safety.”

Last month, Israeli judoka Peter Paltchik won the gold in Paris Grand Slam tournament.

During the playing of Israel's national anthem Hatikva, the president of the Algerian Olympic Committee Mustapha Berraf was seen, standing up, along with the entire crowd. You can see him circled in a couple of quick scenes here.

Naturally, there was an uproar in Algeria for his not thinking of sitting down during the Hatikva.

Berraf resigned from his position, even though the Olympic Committee didn't want to accept his resignation.

A major Algerian news site today published how awful normalization with Israel is, based on this story, and it then descends into antisemitism as it accuses Algerian Jews of never being loyal subjects.

The Jews of Algeria were a fundamental cause of the occupation of Algeria in 1830. The Bakri and Bushnaq families were among the largest Jewish families at the time, enjoying strong political influence and high economic status, through their control over foreign trade and specifically the wheat trade, which represented most of the Algerian exports to France. And they were involved in the famine and debt crisis that caused the occupation of Algeria.
The Jews of Algeria were agents and traitors working as translators and spies for the French army, which caused the French government to grant them citizenship by virtue of a decree (Cremieux) dated October 24, 1870 AD, and this decree states that the Algerian Jews have become French citizens. Their number was estimated at about 37,000 Jews at the time, which means the voluntary abandonment of their Algerian identity and their acquisition of French identity, and the enjoyment of all political and civil rights, after they betrayed their religious courts and accepted military service in the French occupation army.

This is the insanity of how much of the Arab world looks at Jews and Israel. And it proves yet again that anti-Zionism and antisemitism go hand in hand.

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Of COURSE We Will Allow Jews To Live In Palestine. Then We Will Kill Them. by Saeb Erekat, Chief Palestinian Negotiator (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Of COURSE We Will Allow Jews To Live In Palestine. Then We Will Kill Them.
by Saeb Erekat, Chief Palestinian Negotiator

Ramallah, March 5 - We Palestinians have grown tired of the contention that we demand a state with no Jews in it. Not only does it distract from the core issue of our statelessness and displacement, it presumes something false. In fact we make no such demand - any Jews whom we can exterminate will receive a warm welcome to remain within our borders, until we unleash our just wrath against them for the suffering we have endured for more than seventy years.

Accusations such as "Apartheid," "ethnic cleansing," and the like only serve to divert attention from the real injustice: Palestinians living under foreign occupation since 1948, who want nothing but the sovereignty and liberty to slaughter as many Jews as they can. Calling unwarranted attention to some spurious would-be policy that the State of Palestine would establish itself a priori as Judenrein only distorts the reality that the people of Palestine would have no problem accepting Jews living within its borders, no matter how many. You read that correctly - contrary to the slanders of the warmongering Zionists, all the Jews who wish to remain withing this state once Palestine asserts its rightful borders may continue to do so, until we kill them.

We fully understand that some Jews might choose to move elsewhere before the State of Palestine reclaims it rightful boundaries and sovereignty, and they may do so. We in fact recommend they do so right now. We have been recommending it for many decades. Palestinian activists have expended enormous effort to persuade the Jews in this land to make some other place their home, for more than a hundred years. We have made clear, again and again, as painfully as possible, the wise choice to make. For a group reputed to have higher-than-average intelligence, well, let us simply say one might have expected a quicker grasp of our intent.

It must therefore be made clear: Jews may stay in Palestine. Permanently. This time we might not even bother desecrating your graves, because in the circumstances I foresee, you will not have to go through the trouble of preparing for maintaining any such thing. Our policies toward the Jews who do stay will spare you the effort necessary to dig an individual grave.

Stop the slander. Palestine need not be Jew-free; disbelieve the lies the Zionists tell you about our supposed ethnic policies. The Jews may stay, as long as we allow them.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

03/05 Links Pt1: Who’s the Real Cause of Gaza’s Misery? Surprise: It’s Not Israel!; Eugene Kontorovich on the Trump Peace Plan; Trump Just Enabled Israel to Attack Iran's Nuclear Sites

From Ian:

Who’s the Real Cause of Gaza’s Misery? Surprise: It’s Not Israel!

Instead, everyone looks the other way — condemning Israel, which is actually Gaza’s greatest, though still-hated, benefactor.

In reality, Egypt could open its border with Gaza tomorrow. It could declare a free trade zone to aid the shattered Gazan economy. It would have masses of trucks and civilian transportation crisscrossing the border, as they do at Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, giving Gazans freedom of travel and employment in a place their leadership hasn’t insistently deemed worthy of total destruction. After all, Gazans and Egyptians are Arab brethren, with a shared language, culture, and religion.

So why doesn’t Egypt open their arms to their Gazan brethren? Simple: thanks to Hamas and PIJ, Gazans are thoroughly indoctrinated in militancy and terrorism. Islamist elements that have made it into Sinai from Gaza have murdered Egyptian citizens and soldiers on a large scale. What’s more, Egypt has enough trouble containing the Muslim Brotherhood on its own territory — remember the Morsi regime? The last thing Egypt wants is to allow the free movement of Hamas operatives into Egypt; Hamas is, after all, the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

So why then does the media ignore Egypt’s critical role in keeping Gaza boxed in and isolated? The answer is simple: When in doubt, blame Israel. Gazans inevitably get shot trying to invade Israel, making for good TV and photos. Plus, it fits neatly into the mainstream media’s preferred narrative — Israel is Goliath. Likewise, the Hamas leadership fully appreciates that attacking the Egyptian border and launching hundreds of missiles into Egypt would cause a reaction that would make Israel’s responses look positively pacifistic in comparison.

Egypt is responsible for the perpetual pressure cooker that is Gaza. While Israel’s blockade of Gaza completes its encirclement, that encirclement would not be possible if the world demanded that Egypt throw open its border with Gaza. The focus on Israel as the culprit in Gaza’s misery is misplaced and hypocritical.

The Tikvah Podcast: Eugene Kontorovich on the Trump Peace Plan

Since the administration of President Jimmy Carter, nearly every American president has sought to attain the holy grail of diplomacy: a solution to the conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors. In some ways, the Trump Administration’s new peace initiative, “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People,” is merely another proposal for an American-brokered arrangement, the next plan in a line of many.

But its vision is based on political premises that reveal a fundamentally different understanding of American interests in the region. From its approach to Israeli settlements and the “land for peace” paradigm to the nature of its ambitions and its conception of America’s role, this new plan, whether it proves successful or not, could come to be seen as the beginning of new era in Israeli security and regional order.

In this podcast, Professor Eugene Kontorovich, who participated in the crafting of the Trump Administration’s plan, joins Jonathan Silver to explain the details of the “Peace to Prosperity” vision and why it represents a step forward for U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East.

The Best Pro-Israel Argument You Will Ever Hear!

From the one and only @CarolineGlick. pic.twitter.com/vQm4CcAaYk
— Im Tirtzu (@IMTIzionism) March 4, 2020

View Jared Kushner's PowerPoint Briefing on the U.S. Peace Plan

Senior White House advisor Jared Kushner on Thursday briefed a bipartisan group from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the U.S. Middle East peace plan.

Kushner argued that the status quo is broken and something else has to be tried. He added that the lingering Israeli-Palestinian conflict is used as a pretext for more radicalization in the Middle East.

He said the White House wanted to use the plan to bring Israel and the Arab and Muslim worlds closer together. He also presented a list of reforms he said the Palestinians must undertake to achieve statehood and reduce the risk of creating a failed state.

A White House official slammed the Palestinian response to the plan, saying, "It has exposed the Palestinian leadership who is defending the status quo. We are moving the debate to discussing the technical challenges and the details as opposed to romanticizing about things that people know will never happen."

Kushner's PowerPoint presentation notes that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

The hypocrisy of Amer Zahr’s antisemitic anti-Zionism (part 2) (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

If you read part 1 of this documentation, you know already that Bernie Sanders surrogate Amer Zahr hates Israel, but got an Israeli passport for himself and regularly visits to perform his “comedic routines” – which presumably include an act on the topic “BDS for thee but not for me.”

Unsurprisingly, it turned out that Zahr is also not particularly honest when he claims that he comes from a family of Palestinian refugees. His maternal grandparents apparently decided to emigrate from Israel to the US; but what about his paternal grandparents – and how come Zahr was born in Jordan?

The relevant story is recounted in a post on Zahr’s website, which – all too predictably – includes some creative re-writing of history. The two sentences that deal with the birth of Zahr’s father are a good example: “In March 1948, George [i.e. Zahr’s father], their first child, was born. […] One month later, Zionist forces (with the support of the British government) took Yafa by military force, forcing tens of thousands of Arabs from the city, including Elias, Salma, and their infant child” [i.e. Zahr’s grandparents, who were Christians, and his father].

Zahr could probably learn a lot about what really happened in Jaffa from the book of his maternal great-grandfather (see Part 1) – though he might not like what his great-grandfather wrote. In any case, Zahr is wrong: “Zionist forces” – which did NOT have “the support of the British government” – didn’t take Jaffa in April 1948, but only on May 13, 1948. Most importantly, however, the “Zionist forces” did NOT force “tens of thousands of Arabs from the city.”

The supposed ethnic cleansing of Jaffa by evil Zionists is a fairly popular myth, but it is well documented that the more affluent Arab residents of Jaffa set an example for the rest of the population by starting to leave the city soon after the United Nations Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947. Jaffa’s poor neighborhoods had been swelled by tens of thousands of migrants since the early 1920s, and many of the local migrants soon decided to return to the villages they had come from, while migrants who were from further away may have tried to get back to wherever they had come from.

More recent research has also shown that tensions between the politically moderate Arab upper- and middle classes in Jaffa and supporters of the militant mufti and Nazi collaborator Amin al-Husseini (whom the French had allowed to escape to Egypt) created chaos in Jaffa – indeed, as Amer Zahr surely knows full well, his own maternal great-grandfather “fled from Jaffa to Ramallah in December 1947” because he feared being assassinated by Husseini’s people. In addition, “violent clashes erupted and tensions ran high between the local population and the Arab Army of Salvation recruited by the Arab League, which consisted of Syrian, Iraqi and other volunteers, if not mercenaries […] Many Arab testimonies […] describe cases in which the foreigners engaged in looting and arbitrary confiscation of merchandise from local Arab shopkeepers.”

The vast majority of Jaffa residents who left the city well before “Zionist forces” took over in mid-May 1948 fled preparations for a war instigated and pursued by an Arab leadership and Arab governments resolved to prevent Israel’s re-establishment with “a war of extermination and momentous massacre.” Already in October 1947, Arab League secretary-general Azzam anticipated that this war would “be an opportunity for vast plunder,” but while he insisted it would be seen “as dignifying every Arab and every Muslim throughout the world,” he also expected “horrible battles.”

In order to avoid getting caught up in these “horrible battles,” Amer Zahr’s grandparents left Jaffa with their newborn son and, as Zahr puts it, “refuged to Amman.” According to Zahr, the family had a “hard life in Amman,” because although “Palestinians were granted citizenship in Jordan, they were and remain second-class citizens. King Hussein constantly cracked down on them, most notably during the fighting of the fall of 1970, dubbed ‘Black September.’ During that time, the Jordanian army killed at least 10,000 Palestinians.”

Zahr apparently hopes that those who have no clue about the “Black September” fighting won’t suspect that it was a result of the reckless conduct of Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which used Jordan as a base for a terrorist war against Israel in total disregard for the interests of Jordan’s government and King Hussein.

But it seems that Amer Zahr’s grandparents managed to get through “Black September” unscathed, and after his father George Zahr “graduated from college in Jordan,” he went “to study further in Beirut, and eventually earned a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley, where he married a fellow Palestinian refugee.”

However, Zahr’s mother was not a “refugee,” and it also doesn’t make much sense to describe his father as a “refugee.” It’s true that Zahr’s paternal grandparents had left Jaffa with their newborn son to escape the bloody war that Arab League secretary-general Azzam had anticipated so eagerly, and they may not have intended to settle permanently in Amman. But as Amer Zahr acknowledges, “Palestinians were granted citizenship in Jordan,” i.e. both his grandparents and his father, who grew up in Jordan, presumably had Jordanian citizenship.

Moreover, by the time George Zahr met his future wife during his studies at Berkeley, she was already living in the US for about a decade, and it’s reasonable to assume that she had acquired American citizenship (in addition to her Israeli citizenship). Since George Zahr participated in research “sponsored by the United States Government” at Berkeley, he also might have applied for, or acquired, American citizenship.

After finishing his studies (in chemistry) in 1976, George Zahr was apparently hoping to pursue an academic career, and in 1977, “he returned to Amman and became a professor at the University of Jordan.” Soon afterwards, Amer Zahr was born, but he didn’t get to grow up in Amman, because in 1979, “as a result of an ugly and unjust political episode, George, wildly popular with his students, was fired from his post. He was exiled from Jordan and found a new life in America.”

Needless to say, Amer Zahr thinks that this made him a “refugee”. As he wrote in a 2001 article entitled “On visiting the place of my birth”:

“While I am Palestinian, my roots in Jordan are deep. After being expelled as a refugee at the age of one month in 1948 as a result of the creation of the state of Israel, my father was raised and attended university in Amman. Amman was his home in exile, and it was also the place of my birth. At the age of three, amid my father’s political “disagreements” with the government of Jordan, I became a refugee and was subsequently raised just outside of Philadelphia, PA (Incidentally, the ancient Roman name for the city of Amman was ‘Philadelphia’). When it comes down to it, my father and his families were expelled from Palestine in 1948 for being Palestinian and expelled from Jordan in 1980 for acting Palestinian.”

But it seems Zahr doesn’t really bear a grudge against Jordan. After all, it’s an Arab country where hatred of the world’s only Jewish state runs deep – which is something that makes Amer Zahr very happy. As he posted in December 2018: “Jumana Ghunaimat, Jordan’s minister of media affairs and communications, stepped on the Israeli flag at a building in Amman. Jumana, that leaves with me with one question: Are you single? #FreePalestine #Palestine #Jordan.”

It’s worthwhile to look at one more version Amer Zahr offers for the “refugee” story of his father. In a post written in May of last year under the title “DON’T MESS WITH PALESTINIANS!”, Zahr pondered the Palestinian “nakba”, i.e. catastrophe, and presented his father as an example for his claim that “this whole Nakba-Naksa-Youm El Ard stuff has actually made us [i.e. Palestinians] stronger.” According to Zahr, Palestinians are now “the hardest working people in the world” and “the smartest people in the world”:

“To illustrate all these points, I’d like to tell you of the case of a particular refugee I know quite well. His name is George Zahr. He was born in Yafa, Palestine in March 1948. At one month old, he became a refugee. He grew up in Jordan, starting his education in UNRWA schools. Then, he finished high school with honors, college with honors, master’s degree with honors, and a doctorate degree in chemistry with honors. As you can see, there’s a theme.

His education got him a professorship, then a well-paying research position in America for thirty-five years. A big house. Nice cars. College-educated kids. That’s the Palestinian story. From nothing to everything.

Education catapulted my dad from a shoeless Palestinian refugee to a spoiled American who owns a triple-control, seven-jet, multi-functional, Bluetooth-enabled, state-of-the-art, voice-activated shower. I love this country.

And it all happened because Israel tried to get rid of him.”

It’s nice to hear that Amer Zahr loves America – which you wouldn’t always know from his social media posts. And it’s of course very nice to hear that his father was so successful in pursuing the American dream. But it didn’t “all happened because Israel tried to get rid of him”: Zahr’s father was born before Israel was established, and his parents fled the preparations for “a war of extermination” that Arab leaders and governments threatened and incited in order to prevent Israel’s re-establishment.

Reading Zahr’s “nakba” post from last year illustrates not only his usual disregard for facts and his seething hatred for Israel, but it also reveals his almost pathological Palestinian nationalism. This is how he concludes his post:

“Remember how I said Israel created 800,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948? Well, that was true. But they didn’t get everyone. About 150,000 Palestinians remained in what is today Israel. Now, if those 150,000 people had increased at the average global population growth rate, today they should number about 350,000-400,000 people. But they’re not 350,000-400,000 people. Nope. They’re 1.8 million people. That’s right, they drop bombs, we drop babies. They have tanks and helicopters, but we have the strongest weapon in the world.

And that population spike is not our fault. When you shut down the roads, deprive us jobs, and confine us to ghettos, there’s a lot of free time to fill. And don’t forget, two thousand years ago, we got a woman pregnant without touching her. What did you think was gonna happen when we started touching each other?

So, I guess my message is this. Don’t push us. Don’t challenge us. We end up as multilingual, super-educated, hyper-reproductive, overachieving marvels.

That’s right. Don’t mess with us Palestinians. If you do, we will outwork you, we will outsmart you, and we will, if necessary, outfuck you too.”

Perhaps Zahr feels he can write like this because people will keep in mind that he’s a comedian and be inclined not to take him too seriously. But when he boasts that “two thousand years ago, we [Palestinians] got a woman pregnant without touching her,” he picks up a recurring theme of his activism that should be taken seriously, because it echoes the long and bloody history of Christian antisemitism.

It’s unclear if Zahr identifies as a Christian because his father was born to Christian parents. Zahr’s mother is Muslim, and it seems that Zahr sometimes performs at events where organizers probably assume that he is Muslim. Most likely, Zahr views religion like he views facts: as something that can be twisted, or ignored altogether, depending on what’s more convenient.

But Zahr’s efforts to use Christianity in order to promote an antisemitic message are quite serious and sustained. At the time of this writing, Zahr’s pinned tweet is from December 2018 and announces: “Merry PALESTINIAN Christmas! Jesus was one of us! Palestine is full of history. Could you be named after a Palestinian? #MerryChristmas #Palestine #FreePalestine #Jesus #JesusIsPalestinian”

The clip featured in the tweet is downright idiotic and leaves you wondering if Amer Zahr is perhaps not particularly bright, or if he just thinks his followers are hopelessly dim.

Zahr starts out claiming that celebrating Christmas means “celebrating the birth of a Palestinian.” He goes on to list figures from the New Testament, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and tells his viewers that anyone sharing any of the names of these New Testament figures is named after a Palestinian.

It gets even more ridiculous when Zahr asserts: “Jesus fought against occupation and tyranny” – but if that’s what you believe, it’s obvious that Jesus would have fought against the Roman occupation of his ancestral Jewish homeland. When the Romans executed Jesus, they mocked him as “King of the Jews”; and it was of course the Romans who eventually “exiled the majority of the Jewish people and renamed Judea ‘Palestina’. To be clear, ‘Syria Palestine’ officially became a Roman province about a century after Jesus’ crucifixion. The idea was to erase the Jewish presence from Judea and to designate their homeland with reference to their Biblical enemies”, i.e. the Aegean people (from what is now Greece) called “Philistines”/ “Plishtim.” The “Philistines” had disappeared centuries earlier, but the Roman renaming of the Jewish homeland was obviously intended as “a last humiliation.”

The Jew-haters of today may enjoy it when people like Zahr try to re-enact the Roman humiliation of the Jews, and Zahr is only too happy to promote antisemitic Palestinian propaganda by abusing Christian holidays for his “Jesus was a Palestinian” nonsense.

But while the kind of Palestinian propaganda promoted by Zahr might seem ridiculous, it shouldn’t be ignored that it reflects the roots of Christian antisemitism. As the eminent scholar Walter Russell Mead has emphasized, some of the writings in the Christian New Testament illustrate that it was considered “extremely important that Jesus was a Jew and that the story of Jesus is part of the story of God’s encounter with the Jewish people.” However, “Christians going back to the first century AD have often wished this wasn’t so. In ancient times, various Greek and Roman cults grew up that detached the figure of Jesus from this Jewish context […] More recently, the Nazis in particular hated the idea of Jesus being a Jew, and some of them went so far as to invent an “Aryan Christianity” with an Aryan Christ. The Nazis were picking up on a kind of anti-Semitism that flourished in the first and second centuries after Christ as theological writers like Marcion argued that the Jewish God of the Old Testament had nothing to do with the much higher, more noble, and philosophically acceptable deity proclaimed by Jesus.”

One of the links Mead provides leads to a book on “The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany,” which seems sadly relevant for Palestinian efforts to “dejudaize” Jesus. Here is the introductory paragraph:

The Palestinian need to deny that Jesus was a Jew is of course rooted in the refusal to acknowledge that the Jews are indigenous to today’s Israel and the historic areas of Judea and Samaria; needless to say, this also includes the denial of the fact that Jerusalem became a holy city for Christians and Muslims because the Temple Mount had first been – and remains – Judaism’s holiest site.

Putative “progressives” like Bernie Sanders surrogate Amer Zahr would never even dream of denying the history of indigenous people anywhere – except for the Jews. Zahr may be a comedian, but there’s nothing funny about the endless lies and fabrications he comes up with in order to demonize the world’s only Jewish state.

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On Wednesday, jared Kushner gave a presentation to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the administration's "Peace to Prosperity" plan.

According to Barak Ravid as reported by Axios, he showed the same Powerpoint presentation that he showed the UN Security Council last month.

The main point that Kushner pushed is that the status quo does not incentivize either Israel or the Palestinians to take any risks.

Here it is:

Kushner Powerpoint on Peace to Prosperity Plan by Eldad Tzioni on Scribd

Interestingly, Kushner's argument was anti-settlement. A White House official was quoted, “Kushner’s message was that every time negotiations failed, the Palestinians got more money and Israel was able to keep expanding the settlements, but the peace process became a false notion and didn’t solve anything. Both parties' leaderships just kept getting what they want without improving the lives of the people."

Kushner told the committee that the plan was still quite alive. he said that there were several positive statements about the plan from Arab countries, that the EU was not united in opposition to the plan, and that the Palestinians push against the plan stalled at the UN when they tried and failed to create a Security Council resolution.

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Palestinians launch truly insane, babbling lawsuit in DC against Netanyahu, Kushner, Trump, Adelson, AIPAC....

A 175-page lawsuit was reportedly filed in District Court, District of Columbia with the fascinating title of

COMPLAINT FOR AIDING AND ABETTING (1) THE DENATIONALIZATION AND

DEHUMANIZATION OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE, (2) THE INSTALLATION OF

AN APARTHEID REGIME IN THE OPT, AND (3) AND (4) SECURING AWARDS OF

DECLARATORY RELIEF THAT THE ISRAELI CITIZEN KNOWN AS MR.

NETANYAHU IS A WAR CRIMINAL AND THAT THE ISSUE OF THE LAND

TRANSFER COMPONENT OF DEFENDANT KUSHNER’S PEACE PLAN SHOULD

BE REFERED TO THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY.

Plaintiffs include Ahed and Bassam Tamimi, the Dawabshe family, and a number of people whose names I don't recognize but who are supposedly Palestinians or Palestinian Americans.

The defendants include Donald Trump, Bibi Netanyahu, Andrew Cuomo, Miriam Adelson, AIPAC, David Friedman, Jared Kushner, Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and more.

The text looks more like a manifesto of a mass murderer than a real legal document. It is filled with completely nutty assertions, antisemitic allegations, and fantasies.

The antisemitism is clear. Some 15 times it accuses Israel of poisoning Palestinian water wells and livestock, an echo of one of the original blood libels.

Here is one of the introductory paragraphs that contain nothing but fantasies:

The war crimes inflicted on the Palestinian civilian population were necessary because the Zionist Organization of America (herein after ZOA) mandated in 1898 that the country of Palestine would be the location of the new Jewish homeland. Consistent with that mandate, PMN (Netanyahu) and former PM Sharon decided forty years ago that Palestinians had to become a denationalized, dehumanized, and an irrelevant population if Ben-Gurion’s vision of a sterile Jewish state was to be established in Palestine. The World Zionist platform (removal of all non-Jews from Palestine) dictated that Israel’s founding father, Ben-Gurion (1948)- “must take over all of Palestine,” as confirmed by former PM Golda Meir- “We must destroy any vestige of the Palestinian culture.” To accomplish these objectives, PMN gave a green light to his local guerilla army, i.e. settlement militia units, to maim and murder Palestinians, destroy their olive groves and their livestock, and steal their private property.

We learn, for example, that Jared Kushner is Netanyahu's adopted son.

Netanyahu changed the name of the "Israeli Army" to the "Israel Defense Forces" to make the world believe that it was meant for defense.

The main aim of AIPAC is to expel all Palestinians from the territories.

Trump planned to "defund the UN before being inaugurated so he could deprive Palestinians of any foreign aid and deny them healthcare, i.e. genocide."

This story is especially idiotic and antisemitic:

In 1998, at the height of the Tiananem Square demonstrations, PMN wanted to remove approximately 50,000 non-Jews from the OPT, thinking the world’s focus would be elsewhere, which it was. He concluded that if Israeli leadership could not get rid of the Palestinians, he must exterminate them, much like the Nazi regime concluded with respect to the Warsaw Jewish population, i.e. the final solution. He knew he needed some major financial support to make this happen, so he assembled a group of zealous, wealthy Americans, a representative sample being the Defendants named herein. He also needed a propaganda campaign machine, enter AIPAC. He needed massive off the books funding, enter Adelson and Kushner families and phony 501(c)(3)s. He needed a core group of vile, disgusting individuals who would do his dirty work and that of the Adelson family, i.e. settlers from Brooklyn. They never owned property before, and they took advantage of the situation in the OPT. They basically proclaimed that Jesus gave them this property, and told a BBC work crew, “this is our land, get the fuck out of here.”

The lawyer, Martin McMahon, who seemingly drafted this stream of consciousness drivel, has done stunts like this before.

The Jewish Press also has an article about this absurd suit with more background.

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