Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, July 12, 2020

07/12 Links: Senior Rabbi Rebukes Junior Rabbi’s Viral Tweet Claiming Jews Aren’t Indigenous to Israel; For PA 'peace' means destroying Israel with 5.6 million refugees

From Ian:

Senior Rabbi Rebukes Junior Rabbi’s Viral Tweet Claiming Jews Aren’t Indigenous to Israel

The tweet quickly went viral, surpassing 10 thousand likes. In the expanded thread, Kahn went on to argue that “Jews, as a people, have not been part” of the indigenous rights struggle because they have not been included in the work by the United Nations for Indigenous Peoples “over the past 20+ years.”

The statement drew criticism from numerous Jewish voices, including Rabbi Joshua M. Davidson, the Senior Rabbi at Kahn’s synagogue.

“I disagree with Rabbi Kahn’s statement in both its facts and its effects, nor does it speak for Temple Emanu-El,” Davidson wrote in a letter to The Forward. “Beyond the Bible, numerous historians argue the Jewish people’s national identity was forged in the land of Israel.”

The senior rabbi also noted that Kahn’s tweets can be harmful and easily exploited.

“Whatever point Rabbi Kahn sought to make, and whether Jews meet the United Nations measure of an indigenous people or not, such claims are too easily manipulated by those who seek to undermine Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish homeland,” Davidson wrote.

He then went on to argue that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel.

“Archeology suggests an ancient Jewish presence there 3,000 years ago corresponding to the period of the Davidic monarchy,” Davidson said.

One group who took major issue with Kahn’s comments were Jews of color.

“You do realize that over half of Israeli Jews never left the Middle East — ever. So, how are we appropriating the suffering of others? Sorry if our indigeneity, oppressions, and culture are inconvenient truth to your political agenda,” Jews Indigenous to the North East and North Africa (JIMENA) tweeted in response to Kahn.

Siamak Kordestani, who is on the young professionals board of JIMENA, penned an open letter to Kahn.

“The fact you a) blocked a large number of Jews including Jews indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa and b) failed to note that these communities have been living in the Middle East for well over 2,000 years deeply concerns me,” Kordestani wrote. “Can you see how this is extremely offensive and even prejudiced against non-European Jews?”

Mitch Albom: Anti-Semitic posts — and tepid reactions — should enrage us

These days, you can lose your job for a tweet. You can lose it for a retweet, or a spouse’s tweet. If your message is considered racist or hateful, it can bring an onslaught of condemnation, followed swiftly by an erasure of your reputation and your career.

So it might seem surprising that after NFL star DeSean Jackson posted several anti-Semitic messages on Instagram last weekend — including a quote he (wrongly) attributed to Adolf Hitler claiming Jews “will extort America” and “have a plan for world domination” — there was no mass outrage from his industry, and no immediate punishment from his team.

In fact, although they labeled the posts "offensive" and "appalling," it took nearly a week before the Philadelphia Eagles finally announced the consequences for Jackson’s hateful messages: An undisclosed fine.

Think about that. A fine. Meanwhile, despite Jackson repeating the worst form of Jewish stereotyping and citing not only Hitler but Louis Farrakhan, who has called Jews “satanic” and likened them to “termites," only a handful of athletes (several of them Jewish) and some notable media voices criticized him.

Jackson did, however, receive support from other sports stars, including former NBA player Stephen Jackson, who initially said DeSean was “speaking the truth” and claimed Jews “are the richest” and “control the banks," then later said, “I don't support Hitler, I don’t know nothing about Hitler and I could give a [expletive] about Hitler!”

Fellow Eagle Malik Jackson supported DeSean Jackson as well, and echoed praise for Farrakhan, even though Farrakhan has referred to Hitler as “a very great man.”

Malcolm Jenkins, an NFL player with the New Orleans Saints known for social justice advocacy, seemed bothered that this was “a distraction” from the Black Lives Matter movement, saying: “Jewish people aren’t our problem, and we aren’t their problem ... We’ve got a lot of work to do, and this ain’t it.”

Respectfully, Malcolm, yes, it is.

Because you can’t separate one hate from all hate, any more than you can separate a breeze from the wind.

Honest Reporting: Activism through Racism: Celebs share Farrakhan video

Social media giants Twitter and YouTube have still not totally deplatformed infamous antisemite Louis Farrakhan. Despite breaching YouTube and Twitter's hate speech policies, his hateful messages continue to reach literally hundreds of thousands of people.

Yet the media remains silent. Why?

EoZTV: Hen Mazzig

I had the privilege of interviewing well-known Israel advocate Hen Mazzig today on EoZTV. We spoke about the Peter Beinart kerfuffle, Black Lives Matter and Israel, intersectionality, the terror attack Hen witnessed as a child, his experiences in the Israeli army for COGAT in Hebron, "annexation," his optimism about the future for Israel in the Middle East and and the importance of Jewish pride in Israel.

A lot of stuff for 35 minutes! Check it out!

This was my 27th EoZTV interview since I started these in April. Check out the ones you missed!

Nick Cannon is an actor, comedian, rapper, director, writer, producer. Most people are familiar with him as being the host on NBC’s America’s Got Talent and Fox’s The Masked Singer.

Two weeks ago, he hosted Professor Griff, who was part of the rap group Public Enemy and had already been known to be antisemitic and anti-gay. In 1988 he said, “If the Palestinians took up arms, went into Israel and killed all the Jews, it'd be alright” and then followed that up with "the majority of them [i.e., Jews]" are responsible for "the majority of the wickedness that goes on across the globe." He added that "the Jews finance these experiments on AIDS with black people in South Africa," and that "the Jews have their hands right around Bush's throat." He was forced out of Public Enemy after this, and his resentment towards Jews as a result is still there.

The entire show is 90 minutes long, but it includes long stretches of pure Jew-hatred by both Cannon and Griff, punctuated with the insistence that they don’t hate Jews.

I edited several sections here.

In the first, Griff says that blacks cannot be antisemitic because they are the real semites (implying, of course, that Jews are fakers.) Then Griff says that “they” drove him out of his group.

The second clip is a conversation where Griff says that Jews have taken the Black people’s birthright and are now scared because Jews know that Blacks know that they are fakes. Cannon then clarifies that, yes, they are really talking about the Rothschild and Illuminati families and global corporations that are trying to silence Blacks for being the people that these white Jews and others want to be.

Griff then goes on to compare this supposed theft of identity to someone who steals the bicycle of another, and then the victim comes back to claim their bike. So that’s why “they” silence Michael Jackson when he sang, “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don't you black or white me” and when Puff Daddy wrote in “All About the Benjamins”, “You should do what we do, stack chips like Hebrews.”

The next clip shows Cannon go on a truly racist screed saying that white people are naturally savage because they lack melanin. He says that “they” have to rob, steal, and rape in order to survive. He then clarifies that when he says “they” he is referring to “Jewish people, white people, Europeans, the Illuminati.”
There’s more that I didn’t highlight here.

Both of them are reverent towards Louis Farrakhan, and Griff seems to be a follower of the Nation of Islam while Cannon is merely a fan.

The video already has 250,000 views on YouTube and who knows how many watched it or listened to it as a podcast.

The week before, Cannon highlighted this part of his show where another guest, also a Nation of Islam follower, absurdly claimed that the US gives Israel $80 billion a year as Holocaust reparations.

This is crazy conspiracy theory nonsense that is accepted as mainstream thinking among many Blacks – with very little pushback. And these kinds of antisemitic conspiracy theories are what prompted the Jersey City shootings.

Nation of Islam-fueled antisemitism is a major problem in the Black community, and too many people are too frightened to push back against it for fear of being labeled racists. As we see from this video, when there is pushback, the Black community to often considers that to be proof of Jewish power rather than a legitimate objection to Jew-hatred. The result? More Jew-hate.

But if you are against bigotry, you should be against all bigotry. It does no credit for people who claim to be anti-racists to condone antisemitism, and we have seen too much of that happening.

(h/t Judean People’s Front)

Nothing is eternal, except antisemitism

This tweet has been shared by the usual Arab and leftist Jewish crowd:

Now, why can one not take a train from Alexandria to Haifa nowadays? Israel and Egypt have had a peace agreement for over 40 years now. What’s the issue?

The issue is Arab antisemitism. Israel would welcome such a train ride, and happily allow it to go into Jordan and Saudi Arabia too.

Everyone knows this.

But the commenters are somehow pretending that Israel is the problem:

No one, net least the Jewish socialists who retweeted this, even considers that Israel is not the obstacle here – it is Arab hate for Jews. It is axiomatic to them that no Arab nation could possibly allow a train line to the Jewish state. But their minds cannot quite take the next step to ask why that is.

The train line used to go from Alexandria through Palestine to Aleppo, Syria and on to Baghdad, Iraq. More recently, Israel has been talking about a railway that could link Saudi Arabia with Haifa, resurrecting the old Hejaz Railway.

Israel sure isn’t opposed to such a railway.

This tiny thread shows, yet again, that the obstacle to peace isn’t Israel. It is Arab antisemitism.

Perhaps, as the last person posted, nothing is eternal, but antisemitism seems as enduring as the stars.

07/11 Links: Peter Beinart’s One-State Call Earns Praise of Israel-Hater Linda Sarsour; 56% of Israelis prefer Trump over Biden as next US president - poll; Has Israel infiltrated Hamas’s military wing?

From Ian:

Peter Beinart’s One-State Call Earns Praise of Israel-Hater Linda Sarsour

While widely panned by mainstream commenters, US Jewish journalist Peter Beinart’s New York Times op-ed earlier this week in which he called for a one-state solution to the Middle East conflict did earn the praise of some on the far-left — including anti-Israel firebrand Linda Sarsour.

In a Facebook post about Beinart’s “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State” article, the Israel-hating Sarsour wrote, “Palestinians have made some of the same arguments that Peter Beinart is making about why a one-state solution is the only way forward but have often been dismissed as antisemites. Maybe Zionists will listen to one of their own. Peter has evolved over the years and I welcome his evolution.”

“Justice, equity, safety and security for ALL is what democracy is supposed to be,” she added. “You can’t be a democrátic state that favors one group over another. You can’t be a democratic state whose survival requires the occupation and dehumanization of another people.”

“Take a read,” Sarsour concluded.

When @PetetBeinart’s essay calling for dismantlement of the Jewish state, gets such glowing endorsements from fellow One Stater, rabid racists and Antisemites like Linda Sarsour & Ali Abunimah, that oughta tell you all you need to know! pic.twitter.com/2oJ6D5dKn4
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) July 10, 2020

Elan Carr calls J Street annexation tweet antisemitic, sparking argument

The United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, Elan Carr, sparked a heated online argument among renowned global Jewish community contributors when he called out a tweet posted by J Street, a liberal Jewish Middle East lobbying group.

The tweet used an image of US President Donald Trump, his son-in-law and White House advisor Jared Kushner, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, and was captioned "Stop Annexation." Under its call to action, the organization wrote "tell the US Senate: US tax payers should not foot the bill for West Bank annexation."

The tweet references Trump's Middle East peace plan, which allows Israel to to annex up to 30% of the West Bank.

Following J Street's July 7 tweet, Carr denounced the image the next day, stating in his own post.
“How dare @jstreetdotorg use this picture in this context. Their imagery uses #Antisemitism and crude anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to advance their agenda. They should withdraw this and apologize to @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and to #Jewish Americans who serve our great country,” Carr tweeted.

How dare @jstreetdotorg use this picture in this context. Their imagery uses #Antisemitism and crude anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to advance their agenda. They should withdraw this and apologize to @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and to #Jewish Americans who serve our great country. pic.twitter.com/g4nz13g8K3
— U.S. Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism (@USEAntiSemitism) July 8, 2020

Student leaders at historically Black US colleges join Israel advocacy effort

As Marvel Joseph walked down the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem for the first time, his grandmother’s words echoed in his head: “Have love for the Jewish people.”

It was 2018 and Joseph, now 23, was visiting Israel as part of AIPAC’s African-American student leader trip. An emotional trip, it was just one stop on the way to his new job as coalitions coordinator with the Maccabee Task Force (MTF). In this role he aims to build support for Israel at historically black colleges and universities, also known as HBCUs.

HBCUs were established in the United States, mostly post-Civil War, to educate freed slaves, who were prohibited from most universities due to racism. Today, about 214,000 students attend about 105 HBCUs nationwide.

Because the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement isn’t as entrenched at HBCUs at other US campuses, the 23-year-old said he considers his job to be “proactive, rather than reactive.”

“My biggest goal is to get pro-Israel advocates on campus. Israel is not a top five issue for a lot of students at HBCUs. BDS is not a big topic either, but I don’t want to wait for the day BDS comes on campus,” Joseph, a recent graduate of Florida Atlantic University, said in Zoom call with The Times of Israel.

Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson founded the Maccabee Task Force in 2015 to oppose BDS and to cultivate support for Israel on campuses across the US. Today the group has a presence on more than 100 campuses.

“There was a time for obvious reasons when Jews and Blacks were united in struggle in America. For a lot of people that was the golden era,” said David Brog, MTF’s executive director.

Oh look, the propaganda arm of the Qatari govt, which has modern-day salves build its football stadiums, is spreading poison about US & Israel. Woke AF. https://t.co/KMx0xSU3WV
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) July 11, 2020

07/10 Links Pt2: Dershowitz: Is the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Platform Antisemitic?; Melanie Phillips: Conversation the eclipse of liberalism and the failure of conservatism

From Ian:

Candidates must adopt IHRA definition of anti-Semitism

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, an organization that takes no position on BDS, told The Jewish Week in late 2018 that BDS is not about free speech. “Lawmakers from both parties are working together to erode the First Amendment in a joint effort to create a new political free speech exception for Israel,” she wrote. “The potential ramifications of this effort are far-reaching and should provoke deep bipartisan alarm.”

Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of JNS, has also written quite often of the erroneous conflation of BDS with free speech. “Political speech is broadly defined in American law, and the courts have chosen to include activity like flag-burning or paying for political advertisements under that rubric. But it has never been defined as granting impunity to those who wish to discriminate against religious or racial groups in the course of conducting business,” he wrote in a Dec. 18, 2018 column titled “Discrimination against the Jewish state isn’t free speech.”

The other concerning statement in Kreibich’s position is: “Advocate for the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank through settlements.” While the word “occupation” should have signaled concern to Kreibich’s Jewish neighbors, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. This statement shows that the candidate does not believe that Israel has the right to self-determination.

The territories to which Kreibich apparently refers are certainly disputed, but they have been part of Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War. It must then be assumed that she means the disputed territories must all be returned to the pre-1967 lines, regardless of Israel’s self-determination through armed conflict. That is a position supported by Sanders and was a position supported by former President Barack Obama in the final months of his term, though not by current Democratic leadership and not even by the current leading Democratic candidate for president, former Vice President Joe Biden.

The IHRA definition includes as anti-Semitic “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.”

Saying that she will “advocate for the end of Israeli occupation” means that to Kreibich, Jews do not have the right to self-determination. According to the IHRA, this is inherently anti-Semitic and provides ammunition to those who would demonize Israel and its right to exist.

In this day and age, editors and reporters at The Jewish Link have learned that it is no longer enough to go to Washington once or twice a year with NORPAC or AIPAC to advocate as a group for America to support Israel. Israel must be accepted as the only democracy in the Middle East and America’s loyal ally since 1948, the establishment of the modern-day nation. Americans should know that Israel has a right to defend its borders and live in peace like any other country. In an era of rising anti-Semitism, xenophobia and violence, the need for American Jews to have a safe haven in the world is more important than ever.

It is incumbent upon every community member who cares about Israel and the survival of the Jewish people to read statements made by would-be elected leaders. This is not a time for complacency or quiet. If Jewish constituents care about the topic, then they must ask for representation from their elected leaders as well as explain, with specificity, why they cannot be supported with views like these.

The IHRA definition is a great place to start.

Pro-Israel activist Richard Millett wins first stage of High Court libel case against Jeremy Corbyn

A High Court judge has ruled that statements made by Jeremy Corbyn on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show in September 2018 could be held to be defamatory of the pro-Israel activist Richard Millett.

In a judgement delivered on Friday Mr Justice Saini rejected the claim by lawyers representing the former Labour leader that he was not referring to Mr Millett when he appeared on the programme and was asked to defend earlier remarks made about “Zionists” who, he believed, “do not understand English irony”.

Handing down his judgement, Justice Saini concluded: "To summarise my rulings on the preliminary issues, I find that the words complained of referred to Mr Millett; that they bore a meaning defamatory of Mr Millett as identified above; and I find that the allegations were factual.”

A June 23rd hearing at the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court took place to enable Mr Justice Saini to determine whether the meaning of Mr Corbyn’s remarks on the show justified a libel action.

The libel case revolves around an appearance by Mr Corbyn on the BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show in September 2018.

Mr. Millett launched a libel action alleging that the words spoken by Mr Corbyn in the programme were defamatory of him and their publication caused and is likely to cause serious harm to his reputation.

Mark Lewis, of Patron Law, who is representing Mr Millett told the JC: "The judge rejected the argument that Mr Corbyn was not referring to Richard Millett when he appeared on the Marr Show defending his 'irony statement'.

"The Court accepted that these were factual allegations that have a defamatory meaning."

Cool. I hit the target. https://t.co/KofnqS4ExI
— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) July 9, 2020

A Polish govt institute honors Poles who saved Jews. Scholars say it’s whitewash

In February 1943, Stanisława and Henryk Budziszewski decided to help a family of Jewish escapees at their farm in the Polish village of Żebry-Laskowiec where they lived with their three sons, Wacław, Stanisław, and Konstanty. The Jewish family consisted of a husband and wife — shopkeepers from the nearby village of Nur — along with their three children. Their surname remains unknown.

Everyone in the local villages knew that hiding Jews was illegal and, if discovered, the crime brought a sure death penalty.

The Jews were successfully hidden for just two weeks before they were discovered by German gendarmes and the Gestapo in the Budziszewskis’ farm, covered in hay in one of the barns. The adults in the Polish family were separated and interrogated; Waclaw, aged just 18, lied to the Germans and claimed that he had been helping the Jews without his parents’ knowledge.

The Jews were deported and murdered at an unknown location. Wacław was sent to the Stutthof concentration camp, where he died on April 1, 1943. The rest of the Budziszewski family was sent to perform forced labor for the Third Reich.

Recently, the Budziszewskis are among 17 cases identified and honored by Poland’s Pilecki Institute as part of a project launched in March 2019 entitled Called by Name.

According to the Pilecki Institute website, the project is “devoted to persons of Polish nationality who were murdered for providing help to Jews during the German occupation.” Once identified, the rescuers are honored with a ceremony in which a memorial stone is unveiled in their name.

While the honor sounds admirable enough, numerous scholars claim that the initiative launched by the Pilecki Institute — an entity founded in 2017 with government funds — is part of an organized campaign to whitewash Poland’s wartime narrative and portray ordinary Poles as rescuers of Jews while ignoring their many acts of betrayal and anti-Semitism.

New blog feature: Printing (and PDF)

I was asked yesterday if it would be possible to add a “print” feature to my articles without the stuff on the sidebars.

I found a solution.

Now, below each article, you can see a widget:

Click on that and you can print the article, or create a PDF. (The email feature isn’t so great, it just links to the article.)

For those who don't have time to read articles during the week, this is a good way to read them on Shabbat for those Shabbat observers who are so inclined.

Ian's linkdumps from Thursday totaled 61 pages!

Enjoy!

07/10 Links Pt1: Jews aren’t indigenous to Israel? According to whom?; Do We Really Have to Read Beinart Again?; Danon: Obama’s Decision to ‘Abandon’ Israel Was Lowest Moment of UN Tenure

From Ian:

Jonathan S. Tobin: Jews aren’t indigenous to Israel? According to whom?

In this woke version of reality, humanity is divided into two groups: white oppressors and indigenous people of color straining under the yoke of white atrocities. And in delineating this stark division between the bad and the good, Jews must accept that they are among the former and irredeemably white. The only thing for them to do is to admit guilt and to struggle against the systemic racist system into which they assimilated into in the United States.

As The Forward noted in an article about the controversy stirred up by Rabbi Kahn, Israel’s Consul General to New York Dani Dayan, recently noted that both Jews and Palestinian Arabs are indigenous to Israel, and that peace will only happen when the latter finally recognize this fact rather than insisting that Jews have no sovereign rights in any part of the country. By lending support to the idea that Jews aren’t indigenous, Kahn is actually undermining chances of peace in the Middle East rather than promoting it.

The fact that the Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel, to which their ties date back thousands of years and were reaffirmed with continuous settlement, as well as prayers throughout the ages, is irrelevant to the woke. So is the fact that the majority of Israeli Jews are not white or European, but descended from people who were forced to flee their homes in the Arab and Muslim worlds after Israel’s creation in numbers that were greater than those Palestinian Arabs who fled Israel during the War of Independence. Yet as far as the rabbi is concerned, Jews who speak of being indigenous are stealing victim status that belongs only to Arabs and other people of color.

Perhaps Rabbi Kahn thinks the semantics here is important because the assertion of indigenous status distracts us from the sufferings of African-Americans or Palestinians. But his scolding of Jews for having the effrontery to claim ownership of this word has implications that go beyond his repellent pedantry and ideological inflexibility.

That’s because telling Jews they are not indigenous to Israel is akin to branding them imperialist colonizers in their ancient homeland. And once you step down that path you aren’t just virtue signaling your concern for the oppressed; you’re also implicitly declaring that Zionism and the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet are illegitimate.

The redefinition of words with plain meanings in order to weaponize them for ideological purposes is key to the Orwellian process by which the woke suppress not only free speech, but the rights of those they consider white oppressors. In effect, what Rabbi Andy is doing when he lectures us about “white Jewishness” and who can be considered indigenous is canceling the entire Jewish people.

The only possible response to such despicable wordplay is to refuse to play by woke rules. There can be no compromise with intersectional canceling. It’s time to make it clear to the self-righteous Rabbi Andys of American Jewish life that we won’t accept their lectures or their politicized language lying down. The alternative is to consent to a denial of Jewish rights whose ultimate purpose is the sort of tragedy that ought to horrify a nice young rabbi a lot more than how to define a word.

Melanie Phillips: Both hero and zero Israel's strategic incoherence

While Israelis are increasingly alarmed by the government’s loss of control over the coronavirus crisis, different events suggest that the country may have pulled off a spectacular advance in the battle against another intractable foe.

Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a succession of mysterious explosions in Iran.

At the end of last month, there was a major explosion in the Khojir missile factory near Tehran and at a power plant in Shiraz, which plunged the city into darkness. There has also been an explosion at a Tehran clinic, and other major fires in power plants and a petrochemical factory.

The most significant event, however, was an explosion and fire last week at Iran’s centrifuge assembly plant in Natanz.

According to the former U.N. nuclear inspector David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington D.C., this destroyed nearly three-quarters of Iran’s main centrifuge assembly hall.

No one has claimed responsibility for these events. But the explosions at Khojir and Natanz required the kind of sophisticated intelligence, coordination and operational skill that suggest the involvement of a foreign power. Many experts assume that, in these at least, Israel was a principal actor.

The two sites were important elements in Iran’s infrastructure of warfare against Israel and the west.

Khojir, which is said to have a network of underground tunnels, is suspected of involvement in the production of ballistic missiles. Intelligence experts agree that the explosion there seemed to be the result of an Israeli cyber-attack. The Kuwaiti newspaper al-Jarida, however, claimed that an airstrike by an Israeli F-35 stealth jet was involved.

The Natanz centrifuge hall, buried deep under concrete and enmeshed steel roof, was inaugurated in 2018 in order to make the advanced centrifuges needed to make an atomic bomb. Albright writes that it was thought to be Iran’s only clean-room operation set up for the mass
assembly of these centrifuges.

Do We Really Have to Read Beinart Again?

Beinart wrote, “The essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel; it is a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society that both offers Jews refuge and enriches the entire Jewish world.”

He is wrong. For most practicing Zionists — who live here and decide what Zionism is — the essence is indeed a Jewish state. In Beinart’s imaginary world, substituting the Jewish State for a far-fetched idea of a Jewish home is not such a big deal. But it is.

Beinart writes that the urgent need for new ideas is based on the moral call to prevent the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. He wrote, “Today, Israeli leaders find the status quo tolerable. But when Palestinian violence reveals that it is not, those leaders — having made separation impossible — could inch closer to policies of mass expulsion.”

Maybe. Probably not. We’ve managed a long time and with a lot of violence without resorting to ethnic cleansing. But even if you accept the necessity of Beinart’s warning, there is a much simpler way to prevent a catastrophe. Convince the Palestinians to refrain from the “violence” that could trigger “mass expulsion.”

Another problem is that a one-state solution does not preclude the option of ethnic cleansing. See Yugoslavia as an example.

On the plus side, what Beinart says is largely unimportant. He is not the first to propose a one-state solution, and probably won’t be the last. He will try to pitch his latest gimmick to a new generation of Jews (anyone for a book deal?). He will find some takers among radical American left-wingers. But where he gets it wrong again is that one of the main reasons Israeli Jews want a state is because they don’t wish to be the world’s pawns. Israel is armed to the teeth. It is savvy, tough and resilient. And if Beinart or any of his self-righteous friends want to take our state away, they can come for it. Let’s see how far they get.

Given that we are now in the three week period of mourning for the destruction of the Temples and Jerusalem, I was interested in this Arabic article from Egy4News of “the most beautiful poems about Jerusalem.”

I have not been aware of any Arabic poetry about Jerusalem before 1967, so I wanted to know the content of these “beautiful” poems.

Automatic translation does a poor job with poetry, but some bits and pieces of the poems come through:

.. A war that destroys the breath of the Zionists .. Ink will cause important events .. Horror of earthquakes, a fire of volcanoes…

…My family in all of the land has been separated .. And the children of the apes are the basis of my scourge…

…The blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque is his land .. A land purified with all serenity .. And the prostitute desecrates his blessings .. With oppression, demolition…

…The face of his dome was covered with soot .. The Jews of treachery had woven nets… so the families in Jerusalem feared for their pigeons.

Attacking Jewish human rights in the name of morality

The Israel-haters, a category that we must now add Peter Beinart to, use the argument that the imperative of Palestinian human rights demands a one-state solution with a natural Arab majority and Jewish minority.

The basic problem with the thesis that a one-state solution is the only way to give Palestinians the human rights they deserve is that this same “solution” would ensure that Jews lose the human rights they deserve.

The issue isn’t human rights. Everyone supports human rights. The issue is how to balance competing human rights of two different groups. But the Israel haters don’t want you to think about that problem – they want to emphasize the Palestinian human rights issue and they do everything possible to avoid the obvious fact that Jews would not do well under any Arab majority government. They also avoid the equally obvious fact that Palestinians under “occupation” are in far better shape than Jews would be under Arab rule.

Why is this obvious? Just look at how Christians are doing in the Arab world. They are oppressed and fleeing as fast as they can.

Arab Muslims hate Jews much more than they hate Christians.

Sometimes, though, the one-stater Israel-haters are forced to answer the question about Jewish human rights directly. And their response is simply, yeah, that might be a problem, but we hope it won’t be that bad, and anyway it is a small price to pay for their vision of a world without Israel.

Listen to Ali Abunimah, whose book on a single state inspired Beinart, answer this very question in 2009 at Hampshire College:

You can never have an absolute guarantee about what the future will be like. ... You cannot guarantee that if there was a one-state solution it wouldn't, it would be…the best scenario is if it's more in the direction of South Africa and Northern Ireland than Zimbabwe. But we couldn't rule out, you know, some disastrous situation, like Zimbabwe.

Beinart, when asked that same question, is even less honest than Abuinimah. He didn’t even admit to the possibility of pogroms against Jews as the Arab world has had for centuries:

If there’s another round of violence between these two populations, why does that presage a situation in which they can live peacefully?

The evidence suggests that once people gain their freedom, the appeal of violence goes way down. The Irish Republican Army killed more than 1,700 people in terrorist attacks both in Northern Ireland and in the rest of Britain. That didn’t mean that Catholics in Northern Ireland were incapable of living alongside Protestants. It meant that they needed to live alongside Protestants with equal rights.

If there is violence, it’s a testament to the dynamics of oppression. It doesn’t show that Palestinians and Jews can’t live together in equality. It shows that they can’t live together without equality.

See? if Arabs are attacking Jews, that is proof that the Jews are mistreating Arabs!

Because Arab antisemitism is unthinkable.

Beinart doubles down on the same idea here:

To human rights posers like Beinart, Arabs cannot be expected to act morally when they are “oppressed.” This is exactly what Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been saying for years after every terror attack: it is a “natural reaction” to Israel’s oppression.

To them, Jews can only be moral by voluntarily putting their lives in the hands of those who have made it clear that they want the entire land to be free of Jews.

The hypocrisy gets worse: Beinart and his friends say that the Palestinians not having the right to vote in Israeli elections is part of the reason that Jews don’t deserve their own state. But Lebanese and Iraqi and Egyptian and a couple of hundred thousand Jordanian Palestinians cannot vote in the limited elections in their own countries either! Palestinians not getting full citizenship in Israel is unconscionable, but Palestinians not having the option of citizenship – by law – throughout the Arab world?

These people who care so damn much about Palestinian human rights that the Jewish state must be destroyed are curiously silent about Palestinian human rights in literally every Arab country.

And one definition of antisemitism is treating Israel with double standards.

In the real world, one tries to balance the competing rights of different people. Whether Peter likes it or not, there is only one Jewish state, and eliminating it is far more immoral than maintaining it while trying to minimize any human rights problems that result. I’m sure Israel can do better, and it should. But destroying Israel would destroy the human rights of Jews – and it would degrade the human rights of nearly two million Israeli Arabs as well.

(h/t kweansmom)

“Peace Now” embracing one-stater Beinart

The Americans for Peace Now webpage describes the group this way:

APN is the sister organization of Shalom Achshav, Israel's preeminent peace movement. APN's mission is to educate and persuade the American public and its leadership to support and adopt policies that will lead to comprehensive, durable, Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab peace, based on a two-state solution, guaranteeing both peoples' security, and consistent with U.S. national interests. We also work to ensure Israel's future and the viability of Israel's democracy and Jewish character through education, activism and advocacy in the United States, and by mobilizing American support for Shalom Achshav.

Like J-Street, they say they are Zionist and pro-Israel and support Israel as a Jewish state.

Like J-Street, they are far less pro-Israel than they claim.

Today, they are hosting Peter Beinart, who is on a self-promotional blitz this week to gain support for his vision of the destruction of the Jewish state:

You cannot claim to be pro-Israel while supporting the end of Israel and the likely slaughter of Jews that would follow.

APN justifies this webinar by saying “APN maintains our strong support for a two-state solution. We also believe that open conversation and critical thinking is crucial to growing a vibrant peace movement.”

If that is true, they would have hosted representatives of the Trump administration, to have an open mind about his two-state vision. If they care about open conversation, they would host Jews who live in Judea and Samaria once in a while.

They don’t. But they are eager to promote a one-stater that is officially against everything they claim to stand for.

Amazing how flexible the supposedly loving critics of Israel are in celebrating opinions to their left and slamming opinions to their right.

Apparently some in the Jewish Left have been itching for a reason to abandon even the pretense of supporting Israel as a Jewish state. Peter Beinart has given them the excuse they have been looking for.

07/09 Links Pt2: Is Wokeness Awakening Antisemitism?; Josh Malina Asks Why ‘Cancel Culture’ Ignores Antisemitism; Al Jazeera Violating U.S. Law by Operating as Undisclosed Qatari Agent

From Ian:

Is Wokeness Awakening Antisemitism?

Is the Media A Toothless Watchdog?

When social media outlets are used to disseminate hatred, they enable bad actors to promote their lies. The good new is that Facebook, YouTube , and Twitter have occasionally deleted accounts that violated their policies against the promotion of violence or incitement to hatred.

But all too often they seem to be playing catch up. As Mark Twain said: “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” That’s the reason that antisemitism cloaked in wokeness is a problem. Society has a long history of bigotry, sexism, racism, discrimination, homophobia, and related ills. Being woke is thus a virtue, since it implies a deep concern about and dedication to social justice. But when known antisemites cynically seize upon this most noble of impulses, the media must act. But how?
Defining Antisemitism: The Time Is Now

According to the Anti-Defamation League, there’s been a significant increase in antisemitic social media posts over the last few months. And the danger of not acknowledging the growth of online antisemitism is that it often doesn’t stay online. That’s why it’s crucial to develop a clear definition of what constitutes anti-Jewish hatred and intolerance.

In recent years, one definition of antisemitism has gained traction. Drawn up by the Berlin-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, this definition has been adopted and endorsed by a growing number of governments.

By working towards a consensus definition of antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred will finally come with a clear label. For years, many people felt that smoking was unhealthy. However, this suspicion only became a widely accepted fact once smoking companies were compelled to clearly label their products, describing the potential consequences of inhaling nicotine.

Going forward, defining antisemitism will empower lawmakers, colleges, professional sports franchises, and social media platforms to devise more effective policies against the dissemination of antisemitism.

If not now, when?

Jewish Actor Josh Malina Asks Why ‘Cancel Culture’ Ignores Antisemitism

Jewish actor and “West Wing” star Josh Malina advocated on Tuesday for the withdrawal of support for public figures who exhibited antisemitic behavior.

“Why’s it so hard to get cancel culture on the line when the problem is antisemitism?” Malina asked on Twitter.

“Cancel culture” calls for the “cancelling” or boycotting of individuals who share controversial opinions or display behavior on social media deemed to be offensive. The “cancelling” results in them being shunned by friends and supporters and turned down in regards to career opportunities.

Malina’s question has already received 2,600 likes. It sparked a conversation on Twitter and even garnered a response from Jewish comedian Elon Gold, who remarked, “Nobody gets cancelled for hating Jews. From Goebbels to [Mel] Gibson.”

Gibson — who has a history of making antisemitic remarks — was recently in the news because Jewish actress Winona Ryder mentioned in an interview that he had called her an “oven dodger,” a clear reference to the crematoria at Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.

Malina’s Twitter post came after a number of recent reports highlighting antisemitic social media posts by well-known figures, including NFL player DeSean Jackson, rapper and entrepreneur Sean “Diddy” Combs, rapper Ice Cube and real estate mogul Mohammad Hadid, among others.

This part in particular is really important: "You're trying to defend something you don't understand is antisemitic, just as people try to defend things that they don't understand are racist against black people."

Yes. And we need more journalists showing this sensitivity.
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) July 9, 2020

Public Campaign Launched to Remove Three-Hour Antisemitic Speech by Louis Farrakhan From YouTube

A public campaign has been launched to persuade YouTube to remove a video of the notoriously antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s July 4 address, in which he referred to Jews as “Satan” who should have their brains knocked out by the “stone of truth.”

Farrakhan’s three-hour rant, titled “The Criterion,” was streamed live on YouTube and has so far garnered over 850,000 views.

In the speech, Farrakhan called the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Jonathan Greenblatt, “Satan.”

He said, “Mr. Greenblatt, you are Satan. Those of you that say that you’re Jews, I will not even give you the honor of calling you a Jew. You are not a Jew… you are Satan and it is my job now to pull the cover off of Satan so that every Muslim when he sees Satan, pick up a stone, as we do in Mecca.”

“When you know who Satan is, you don’t have to kill him, [but] the stone of truth, that’s what you throw. We cast truth at falsehood till we knock out its brains,” Farrakhan continued.

He also called Jewish legal scholar Alan Dershowitz “a skillful deceiver” and “Satan masquerading as a lawyer.”

Furthermore, Farrakhan repeated the blood libel that Israel was responsible for police brutality against minorities in the US.

“That’s why you gotta come at us like a coward,” he said of the police. “Like snakes trying to wrap yourself around us so you could give us the treatment that you were taught in Israel. You may, as you gonna stop your police from going to Israel to learn how to kill better. … Your days of killing us without consequence are over.”

Israel’s Consul General in New York Dani Dayan tweeted:

Tomorrow, Jews will start 3 weeks of commemoration of the breach of the walls of their Capital by an Empire, the destruction of the city, the subjugation of their country and the forced exile of its population, their ancestors. Tell me more about not being indigenous.
— Dani Dayan (@AmbDaniDayan) July 9, 2020

A lot of people argue about what “indigenous” means, and even the UN says there is no standard definition. It seems that too often the people defining the term are more interested in the color of the skin of the people claiming indigeneity than the actual circumstances.

But these same people are often the ones who want to downplay the very real Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. They don’t want to hear that Jews pray to have Jerusalem rebuilt three times a day (not just the Passover Seder’s “next year in Jerusalem!”) They don’t want to hear about the undeniable fact that during the 2000 years of Jewish exile, practically no country that hosted the Jews ever considered them to be truly equal citizens. Everyone throughout history knew that their home was in Israel, and if you look at old books the words “Hebrew” and “Israelite” are used as often as the word “Jew,” emphasizing the Jewish nation in exile.

In exile from where? Everyone knows the answer.

Jews have maintained psychological and physical ties to Israel ever since the current diaspora began. They have no other homeland.

And the current three week period where we mourn the destruction of the two Temples is all the proof you need that Jews have only had one real home.

If that isn’t the definition of indigenous, then you are twisting the word specifically to exclude Jews.

Church Wonders How Many Liberal Jews Would Convert If Christ Recast As 'Anti-Zionism' (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Sistine fingers Rome, July 9 - Leaders of the world's largest Christian denomination have commissioned a study to determine whether the body's ages-old ambition to convince adherents of the Mosaic faith to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God and as their savior from Original Sin might meet more success with Jesus not in the role of the divine incarnate - a notion anathema to longstanding Hebraic sensibilities - but in a form of proven palatability to prominent, if not large, swaths of progressive Jews: opposition to Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland.

Pope Francis appointed a committee this week to explore the possibilities of rebranding Jesus Christ as anti-Zionism in efforts to proselytize to leftist Jews, Vatican insiders reported Thursday. The commission will focus on the potential effectiveness of such a change in semantics based on the realization that Jews who seek entree to elite cultural circles have always faced the demand that they renounce core aspects of Jewish identity and fidelity - but that over the last two centuries, shifts in Western culture have in turn shifted which core aspects of Jewish identity and fidelity they must renounce.

For more than 1500 years the dominant Christian culture insisted that access to elite circles required Jews to violate fundamental principles of Jewish faith by accepting, for example, the divinity of a human, when core Jewish tenets preclude the corporeality of God; now however, following centuries of decline in the influence of Church power and cultural hegemony, elite cultural circles now demand that Jews renounce allegiance to more secular aspects of Jewish identity and belonging - Jewish nationhood, for example, Jewish indigenous status in the one place Jews have ever had a sovereign home, or any collective right Jews might have to reestablish themselves as an independent political entity. That cultural shift has prompted the senior figures within the Roman Catholic Church to consider adapting their ancient compulsion to "prove" the legitimacy of their replacement theology - whereby Christians are the new Israel and the Jews, by rejecting Christ, must disappear - to suit the more modern sensibilities of anti-Zionism.

"If we can dress up the Christ as anti-Zionism that should appeal to all sorts of progressive Jews," explained Cardinal Pedro Beinardo, who heads the commission. "Some Protestant denominations already invoke Jesus in railing against Israel, which is fine, and in fact the reemergence of Jewish sovereignty poses a serious theological challenge to Christians, who still, by and large, insist the the New Testament renders the Old non-applicable. But we think to succeed, the approach needs to take things a step or two further, because there's been an erosion of the spiritual, as classically conceived, in the West, and we need to roll with that. Political ideology is the new religion, and we better understand that."

07/09 Links Pt1: Understanding the collapse of liberal Zionism; Nothing will happen if sovereignty is applied to 30% of Area C; 3/4 of Natanz Centrifuge Assembly Hall Destroyed

From Ian:

Jonathan S. Tobin: Understanding the collapse of liberal Zionism

There’s a reason why most Israelis find it difficult to listen patiently to lectures from liberal American Jews. For Israelis, their country is a real place filled with real people and perplexing dilemmas that have no easy solutions. But for all too many American Jews, Israel is a dreamland—a place for intellectual tourism where we can project our own insecurities and anxieties on the Jewish state while expressing our moral superiority over the lesser beings who live there and lack our wisdom.

Which brings us to the problem of Peter Beinart.

Beinart, the former editor of The New Republic and columnist for The Atlantic, sought to carve out a place for himself as the leading liberal critic of Israel with his 2012 book The Crisis of Zionism. The book was as spectacularly ignorant as it was arrogant in its refusal to acknowledge the reality of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The conceit of the work was that Israelis needed to rise above their fears and recognize that a two-state solution was within easy reach. Anything that contradicted his assumptions—like the nature of Palestinian political culture or the continued rejectionism and obsession with the fantasy of Israel’s destruction—was either rationalized or ignored. Too immersed in their unseemly quest for security and profit, Israelis could only overcome the “crisis” of the title by listening to the wisdom of Beinart, a righteous American pilgrim, whose manifest good intentions should have generated respect and deference from his recalcitrant Israeli pupils.

Much to Beinart’s chagrin, rather than take the advice of a leading American public intellectual to heart, Israelis ignored it. In the eight years since then, Israel has endured more violence and political controversy while the Palestinians have continued to reject peace, whether along the lines laid out by President Barack Obama (whose alleged bona fides as a friend of the Jewish people was discussed at length in his book) or the less generous terms offered by President Donald Trump.

Instead of moving closer to moral and physical collapse as Beinart has been prophesying, Israel has only gotten stronger. Much of the Arab world has tired of Palestinian intransigence and largely abandoned advocacy for their cause, as many now perceive the Israelis as a vital ally in the struggle against Iran, as well as a needed resource in the areas of technology, agriculture and clean water. Peace with the Palestinians is not in sight. But until it becomes possible, the Jews of Israel will hold on and continue to thrive.

Daniel Gordis: End the Jewish State? Let’s try some honesty, first

Israel has had a long and complex history, stained time and again by many moral failings. Israelis have almost always responded by demanding that we be better, not by suggesting that we end the project. Israelis’ frustration with the peace process, our government’s now catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic, our medieval and misogynist, homophobic rabbinate, Israel’s now massive unemployment, the “Price Tag” racists whom the government refuses to punish, the poverty in which Holocaust survivors live, the inequality that Israeli Arabs face daily and much more has not given rise to anything akin to America’s desire to destroy itself.

The unfettered quest for self-immolation, the intellectual thinness of cancel culture, the rage that pulls down statues of Christopher Columbus and advocates abandoning capitalism for socialism without any regard for how Marx’s and Lenin’s theories unfolded in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cuba or elsewhere – all that is a distinctly American response. Israelis, for all their many faults, show little sign of the cultural fatigue, intellectual sloppiness or willed oblivion-to-consequences that are now emblematic of America’s youth. What Beinart has done is to essentially take America’s desire for self-destruction and ask Israelis to adopt it.

No thanks.

We Israelis, like Americans, have had no perfect leaders. David Ben-Gurion was a racist who had utter disdain for darker-skinned Mizrachi Jews and their culture. Menachem Begin got innocent people killed in the King David bombing and decades later, launched the disastrous Lebanon War. Golda Meir famously asked, “What Palestinian people?” Ariel Sharon allowed the massacre at Sabra and Shatila.

Yet we also know that David Ben-Gurion built a Jewish state against all odds and kept it alive when that seemed impossible. Menachem Begin was instrumental in getting the British to leave Palestine, fought against military rule over Israeli Arabs, made peace with Egypt, returned the Sinai and destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Golda Meir launched Israel’s long tradition of reaching out to African countries, out of a belief that if we had independence and hope, they should, too. It was Ariel Sharon who got Israel out of Gaza.

That is why we’re not tearing down statues (not that we erect that many, by the way, which is also interesting). We prefer to recognize that life is complicated, that great human beings are invariably also deeply flawed. The same is true of countries. Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is exhausting and depressing and surfaces much of Israel’s ugliness. No one should “prove” their love for Israel by denying that.

But Israel was created not to be perfect, but to restore the Jewish people to its ancestral homeland, and thus to allow the Jewish people and its culture to thrive and flourish as it can nowhere else on earth. Looked at that way, Israel is not only miraculous, it is an extraordinary success. We Israelis can see our terrible mistakes and still take pride in what we’ve accomplished; many of us are horrified by what it still not right here, but we have no interest in Beinart’s suggestion that we therefore commit national suicide.

Peter Beinart believes that because we cannot get the Palestinians to recognize our right to a state, we should knock over our proverbial king and give up the project. We believe that while we wait for the Palestinians to want a future more than they want revenge, we should build this society and the Jewish cultural, intellectual, religious and historical revival it makes possible. My bet is that Israelis will continue to build the society that is the largest, culturally richest, most intellectually dynamic Jewish community anywhere in the world, and that we’ll still be at it long after Peter Beinart has been entirely forgotten.

Petra Marquardt-Bigman: The Increasing Radicalism of Peter Beinart Must Be Confronted

Yet according to Beinart, Israeli Jews should hope that once they give up on their state, Palestinians would feel they have all the “freedom” they ever wanted and violence would “decline.” Beinart is at least honest enough not to promise that violence would stop, and in any case, he could calmly watch from the comfort of his home in the US if this “Isratine” experiment pans out.

Fantasizing about the elimination of the world’s only entirely Jewish state by eventually transforming it into yet another Arab-Muslim majority state in order to please — and hopefully appease — the Palestinians is of course a fairly popular pastime in some “progressive” circles. But while most progressives won’t be eager to acknowledge that they could once count on the support of the late Libyan dictator Qaddafi, Beinart is apparently not particularly picky about the company he keeps.

When he shared on Twitter “some of the writing that has shaped my thinking,” his list included “Ali Abunimah’s book, One Country,” which Beinart praised as “both trenchantly argued and deeply generous in spirit. I wish I could assign it in every Jewish school.”

It apparently doesn’t bother Beinart that — starting during the murderous Al-Aqsa intifada almost two decades ago — Ali Abunimah has been single-mindedly devoted to demonizing Israel. At his Electronic Intifada site, the Jewish state is constantly presented as a monstrous evil that must be eliminated, and that if Islamist terror groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad help to achieve that goal, they should obviously be cheered on.

Needless to say, Abunimah is certain that advocating the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state while whitewashing and promoting Islamist terrorism can never ever be antisemitic, and he thinks he should therefore be entitled to his own truly Orwellian definition of antisemitism. Preposterously enough, Abunimah sees himself as a fighter against antisemitism, because as far as he is concerned, “Zionism is one of the worst forms of antisemitism in existence today” and “supporting Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.”

The fact that Beinart believes that anything Abunimah writes is “deeply generous in spirit” tells us all we need to know about his judgement.

But whether it’s Ali Abunimah or Muammar Qaddafi or Peter Beinart, the people who advocate the elimination of the Jewish state will always insist that their motives are pure and noble. Their cynical disregard for the lives and aspirations of millions of Israeli Jews reveal the hollowness of that claim.

Dude @PeterBeinart just endorsed an antisemitic book by a raging antisemite in Chicago who supports Assad's mass murder of over 500,000 people in Syria and various Palestinian terrorist entities. What a topsy-turvy world! https://t.co/cFkjy7WHPy
— Benjamin Weinthal (@BenWeinthal) July 9, 2020