Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, July 16, 2020

07/16 Links Pt2: The Alignment of BDS and Black Lives Matter: Implications for Israel and Diaspora Jewry; Ice Cube Compares Kareem Abdul-Jabbar To Judas For Condemning Anti-Semitism

From Ian:

The Alignment of BDS and Black Lives Matter: Implications for Israel and Diaspora Jewry

International protests over the murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd while in police custody on May 25, 2020, led by the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), have generated expressions of sympathy and support from Western prime ministers, legislators, law enforcement officials, and local government.

American Jewish leaders unequivocally condemned the Floyd killing. World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder denounced it as a “horrific racist act.”2 The Union for Reform Judaism issued a statement that read, “Black Lives Matter Is a Jewish Value.”3 The Orthodox Jewish Union (OU) declared, “Racism is not a thing of the past or simply a political issue. It is a real and present danger that must be met head-on.”4

Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) organizations have ratcheted up racial tensions and anti-Semitic agitation by accusing Israel of complicity in the Floyd murder.5 The BDS strategy is not new. The Jewish State has, for some years, been recast as an illegitimate “white oppressor” state.

Ongoing demonstrations across the United States have reenergized the intersectional solidarity between those protesting anti-Black racism in America and BDS organizations’ demands to “Free Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea” – a clarion call to dismantle the State of Israel.

The BDS-BLM convergence, then, as it relates to the Palestinian issue, has removed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from its territorial framework and has recast the Jewish nation-state as a racial issue – “apartheid” and illegitimate by definition.

Israel adversary Linda Sarsour applauded longtime Israel critic Peter Beinart’s recent disavowal of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. She praised Beinart for legitimizing Palestinian rejectionism of Jewish sovereignty, saying, “Maybe Zionists will listen to one of their own. Peter has evolved over the years, and I welcome his evolution.”

This new radical discourse demands that American Jews be neither liberal nor progressive. Those affiliations accept the existence of the Jewish State, yet are deemed unacceptable according to the “virtues” of a more drastic American dialogue.

The blatant anti-Semitism of Bill de Blasio

Those targeting Jews were other minorities, mainly black and Hispanic New Yorkers. De Blasio did not push back against the dangerous new bail-reform law, which essentially gave a slap on the wrist for criminals and those who did end up in jail ended up being released shortly after committing crimes. He did nothing to protect his Jewish residents.

When the Iranian-backed, terrorist-in-nature Al-Quds Day event was held last year in Times Square, the anti-Israel groups participating had to get a permit; that was allowed. Not even a few weeks ago, a "Day of Rage" protest/march was held in Brooklyn, these events explicitly target Israel which directly is an attack on Jews and often times leads to anti-Semitic incidents. Yet were there any neo-Nazi marches in New York City? Not that those should ever be encouraged, of course, but de Blasio would not give such an easy permit to white supremacists, as he does to every other Jew-hater.

When New York was in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, only the Hassidic Jewish community was the target of de Blasio's ire. Yet there were overcrowding issues in the Bronx and house parties in Harlem. Being vigilant was all in the name of beating the virus, so most Jews did not say much. However, when a legitimate Chassidic funeral on April 28 was planned not only with the approval of the New York Police Department but with pre-approval of the Mayor's Office, de Blasio showed up, "shocked" at the crowd size, and immediately fired off an anti-Semitic tweet directed at the Jewish community. The Jewish community in New York is not cohesive; dozens of vibrant groups make up the proud fabric of Jewry in New York, so to blame "all Jews" due to one pre-arranged funeral, while ignoring other groups who were gathering in large numbers, was absolutely anti-Semitic.

One would think that letting Hassidic children play in neighborhood playgrounds would be far less a crime than thousands marching, many without face masks, but no. De Blasio ordered the police to fine parents whose children went without masks. This behavior towards the religious Jewish community was an injustice when such hypocrisy was on full display during the height of the BLM protests and interwoven riots.

De Blasio's anti-Semitic culture extends beyond himself. Earlier this year, Democrat Councilman Kalman Yeger pointed out the poison of anti-Semitism permeating within the City Council. And mere days ago, a City of New York tweet reminded residents to fill out the 2020 Census. It included a "Palestinian" flag among other flags representing the homelands of the city's residents, but omitted the Israeli flag, despite nearly 2 million Jews living in New York City. To not call out de Blasio as a dangerous anti-Semite is a farce.

Former NYPD commissioner warns US Jews: Protect your communities

Jewish communities in America should follow the example of those in Europe and put security measures in place in synagogues, Former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has said in an interview, as he warned that “we are in a dangerous place in history.”

Budget cuts due to the coronavirus lockdown and an erosion of respect for police officers are creating a perfect storm that will see safety decline in New York and elsewhere, Kelly told Matthew Bronfman, chair of the International Steering Committee of Limmud FSU during an online interview.

“In the US the Jewish community needs to be more alert about who is entering community premises,” Kelly said, warning that in today's environment, synagogues cannot be fully open environments.

Kelly, who now heads the Anti-Semitism Accountability Project (ASAP), has visited ten European countries to meet with government and faith leaders to examine how antisemitism is being tackled on the Continent in comparison with the US, he said.

“Antisemitism there is not new. Neo-Nazis have never gone away, and populism is helping them flex their muscles,” Kelly noted. He acknowledged that the threat was slightly different in the two areas - in France, for example, antisemitism is driven by the left's support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement and the Muslim community, combined with a government which, thanks to a national culture of secularism, is slow to recognize the religious rights of minorities. Consequently, people can walk around with openly antisemitic messages on their t-shirts without consequence, he said.

Hen Mazzig: How Jewish Twitter users and celebrities took down a virtual anti-Semitic mob

When I saw "#JewishPrivilege" was trending on Twitter last week, I cringed. White nationalists had created the hashtag to spread anti-Semitic conspiracies about Jews being "privileged" - that we control the media, the banks and the world. Seemingly progressive Twitter users soon piled on with false claims that Jews don't face any discrimination, while also suggesting they are responsible for the discrimination and other ills many minorities face. This felt like an organized attack - as if everyone was in agreement that Jewish people are to be blamed for all that is wrong in the world.

The virtual mob of anti-Semites sparked flashbacks to my Iraqi grandma retelling stories of surviving the Farhud, a massacre in which a real-life mob of Iraqis murdered all the Jews they could in Baghdad back in 1941. So I urged Jews on Twitter to share their personal stories to refute the #JewishPrivilege falsehood. In a matter of hours, Jews shared their experiences of discrimination, violence, exile and mass murder.

The notion that Jews of any background are the oppressors rather than the oppressed erases our history - including the Holocaust and pogroms of many decades past, as well as more recent chapters, like the plight of the Ethiopian Jews who escaped persecution in Ethiopia by airlifts to Israel in the 1980s and '90s. Seeking to deny the entire Jewish people's generational struggles and erase us from the collective of minority groups denies our humanity and identity, and is thereby an act of deep-seated anti-Semitism.

Poor, Hungry Israelis Unaware They Part Of Global Banking Cabal (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

money money money B'nei B'rak, July 16 - Residents of this entirely-ultra-orthodox city, the second-most-impoverished in the nation according to Central Bureau of Statistics data, possess no knowledge that by dint of their membership in the Jewish people they control global finances, and media, a new study reports.

B'nei B'rak, population just under 200,000, boasts many of the poorest households in Israel, lagging just behind Jerusalem - which only accounts for so many more poor households because of its much larger overall population. Researchers at Bar Ilan University observed that none of the hundreds of random B'nei B'rak residents surveyed displayed any awareness that as Jews they enjoy a share of the cabal that dominates entertainment, news, banking, and other crucial industries all around the world.

"It's a little bizarre," noted lead researcher Adel Sheldenson. "You'd think that as members of a tribe that has sat at the crux of global finance for generations, they might have some clue as to their status, but none seem to. And so many of them live lives of abject poverty."

"Some of that poverty is a function of lifestyle choice," explained researcher Ed Rothschild. "These communities value simplicity and sacrifice for the sake of full-time Torah study. Still, you'd think that, given what everyone out there assumes about the Talmud and the evil stuff it contains, at least some of the folks here might have caught on to its teachings about dominating the subhuman goyim by whatever means, and whatnot. But none of them seem to know about those parts of the Talmud, either."

The same holds true in other poor cities where Haredim form the majority of the population. Jerusalem, as noted, features tens of thousands of poor ultra-orthodox families, though large-scale studies of their involvement in international banking and rootless cosmopolitanism have not taken place. Smaller Haredi population centers, however, such as the towns of El'ad, Kiryat Sefer, and Beitar 'Illit, show identical numbers of Jews who know they and their cohorts have controlled global finance for hundreds of years: zero. That figure surprised researchers as well, given the relative prosperity of those towns compared to the ultra-orthodox in B'nei B'rak and Jerusalem, and thus the greater chance, researchers had assumed, that some might have a hand or tentacle in the vast Jewish-Zionist conspiracy to rule the world.

Researchers intend to follow up the current study with an exploration of how scholars with encyclopedic knowledge of Talmud appear completely unaware of passages in that set of documents that antisemites are fond of quoting.

Lebanon’s Maronite leader and the Israel Exception

From Naharnet:

Maronite Patriarch Beshara el-Rahi again on Tuesday renewed calls for Lebanon’s neutrality towards regional conflicts, stressing that Lebanon has become isolated and is losing its original identity.

“We said nothing new when we demanded Lebanon’s neutrality from regional conflicts. We want back our basic identity, a neutral Lebanon, a civil state, pluralism and coexitence,” said Rahi in a statement from the patriarch's summer residence in the northern town of Dimane.

“Lebanon was open to all countries, east and west, except Israel which occupied our land. Lebanon was Switzerland of the east ... Today, Lebanon has become isolated from the whole world. This is not our identity. Our identity is positive and constructive neutrality, not a warrior Lebanon,” added the Patriarch.

Lebanon wasn’t open to Israel before Israel went into Lebanon and it hasn’t been open to Israel in the two decades since it left. So what is the exact reason el-Rahi says Lebanon doesn’t want to deal with Israel again?

And then he said it again a day later:

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Wednesday met President Michel Aoun in Baabda, following resounding calls that the spiritual leader voiced in recent days for turning Lebanon into a “neutral” country.

…He explained: “Neutrality is to commit to the joint Arab causes without engaging in political or military conflicts or joining axes. It is to be rather the first defender of justice, peace and understanding in the Arab causes, except for what relates to Israel.”

It must be exhausting to say platitudes all day about how your country wants peace and good relations with everyone, and always have to add “except Israel.”

07/16 Links Pt1: Why Palestinians can’t sign an end-of-conflict pact; The ICC: A court that consults with terrorists

From Ian:

JCPA: Amb. Dore Gold: Setting the Stage for a Peace Process that Can Work

The current initiatives that are being tried by the Trump administration are important because they are trying to liberate us from all the failed peace plans of the past.

Most of the architects of peace in the past envisioned a mass removal of Israelis from Judea and Samaria - from the West Bank - and that is simply not going to happen. We pulled out 8,000-9,000 Israelis from the Gaza Strip and we created a scar in the memory of many Israelis from having done that, because we were willing to try to set the foundations of some kind of peace. And what we got was a dramatic escalation of rocket fire shot at Israel.

So having tried that in the past, it would have made no sense to develop a peace plan predicated upon the mass removal of Israelis. You shouldn't try and forcibly remove Palestinians either. A peace plan - to be just and to be fair - has to be based on these populations staying in their homes, which is what the Trump peace plan tries to do.

We have a horrible experience with how architects of peacemaking have worked. Therefore, in this case, what you have is an effort to create a territorial compromise where Israel remains in areas that are of strategic importance to its future defense.

Our position is one that has a firm basis legally, a firm basis morally, and a firm basis for setting the stage for a peace process that can work. We have to give this larger peace plan a chance, as we have in the past, and right now there's nothing else on the table that has any chance of working.

A Better Chance at Peace

The same U.S. plan that would give the green light for Israel to extend its sovereignty over some parts of the West Bank - an intangible change that would be hard to see on the ground - would simultaneously give the Palestinians unprecedented and very tangible concessions to bring the long-sought two-state outcome closer than ever.

The dividends of the U.S. plan for the Palestinians include the express intention of creating an opportunity for establishing an independent state, subject to sensible conditions. Moreover, the Palestinians would receive massive investment and economic opportunity to help ensure the success of that state.

Despite their concerns, most Israelis do support the U.S. plan as a basis for negotiations for a two-state outcome with their Palestinian neighbors. The plan's proponents have called it a way to "break the logjam" in the moribund peace process. The context for the initiative is the fact that the Palestinian leadership has refused to negotiate directly with Israel for more than a decade, after repeatedly rejecting reasonable statehood proposals from Israel in 2000, 2001, and 2008.

Given the longstanding impasse in the peace process - driven in no small part by the Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimacy and permanence of Israel's very existence - knowledgeable and realistic supporters of an eventual two-state outcome should be strongly urging the Palestinian leadership to use the opportunity presented by the U.S. peace plan to return to serious negotiations.

Why Palestinians can’t sign an end-of-conflict pact

If peacemakers truly want a sustainable peace, they have to acknowledge that Israel has legal rights over the 1949 armistice lines if an eventual deal includes land swaps. Just like with the refugee issue, if it is not completely spelled out, no matter what agreement is signed, Palestinians will always have a pretext to say Israel stole Palestinian land with land swaps, and once again, preach and prepare for a new war.

The pro-Palestinian Middle East Monitor said it the best. “ Palestinians will continue to seek a just peace that will provide future generations with their birthright; their land will be returned, one way or another.” Naïve Westerners hear the words “just peace” and assume it means two states for two peoples. What it actually means is the unlimited right of return for every Palestinian forever to Israel, as no Palestinian government can give up an individual Palestinian descendant’s claim to be a displaced owner of what is now Israel.

The annexation debate has obscured the true paradigm of the conflict. The question is not if Israel annexes 30% of the West Bank, would it end the dream of a Palestinian state. The question to ask is, would the Palestinians accept the West Bank with land swaps that ensure Israel’s security, sign an end-of-conflict resolution and accept a Jewish state? The answer for the foreseeable future is no. This is not a territorial conflict or else this would have ended long ago.

If this hill for a comprehensive agreement is too high to climb at this time, so be it. What is needed is honesty, so a putative peace agreement is not just a recipe for fruitless concessions by Israel.

If all the Palestinians are capable of doing is negotiating a better status quo with more economic development and investment in exchange for nonviolence, then that should be the path for this generation.

The Trump peace plan or any other agreement will never have any staying power if it doesn’t include an end-of-conflict agreement, a recognition of two states for two peoples that clearly states that one of those states is Jewish, and an absolute end of any right for descendants of original Palestinian refugees to return to the State of Israel.

In the wake of the Nick Cannon story, I’m seeing lots of people say that the only reason he was in trouble is because Jews control the entertainment industry.
Jewish influence in Hollywood is legendary, but is it still true?
According to this 2019 Investorpedia article, the top ten entertainment companies are Comcast,
CBS, DIRECTV, Dish Network, Netflix, Time Warner, Fox, Viacom, Disney and Wanda Media.
Since then, Viacom and CBS have merged but I am counting them separately for this purpose.
How many of these companies’ CEOs are Jewish? As far as I can tell, here’s the answer at the moment:

Company	CEO	Jewish?
Comcast	Brian L. Roberts	Yes
Disney	Bob Chapek	No
ViacomCBS	Robert Marc Bakish	No
CBS	Joseph Ianniello (acting CEO)	No
Netflix	Reed Hastings	No
Time Warner	Jason Kilar	No
Fox	Suzanne Scott	No
DIRECTV	Manuel Abelleyra	No
Dish	W. Erik Carlson	No
Wanda	Wang Jianlin (chairman)	No

Some antisemitic websites claim Bob Chapek is a Sephardic Jew but I see no evidence of that.
Perhaps it is time to retire this myth of Jews controlling the media.

Nick Cannon issued two apologies to the Jewish community on his social media:

First and foremost I extend my deepest and most sincere apologies to my Jewish sisters and brothers for the hurtful and divisive words that came out of my mouth during my interview with Richard Griffin. They reinforced the worst stereotypes of a proud and magnificent people and I feel ashamed of the uninformed and naïve place that these words came from. The video of this interview has since been removed.

While the Jewish experience encompasses more than 5,000 years and there is so much I have yet to learn, I have had at least a minor history lesson over the past few days and to say that it is eye-opening would be a vast understatement.

I want to express my gratitude to the Rabbis, community leaders and institutions who reached out to me to help enlighten me, instead of chastising me. I want to assure my Jewish friends, new and old, that this is only the beginning of my education—I am committed to deeper connections, more profound learning and strengthening the bond between our two cultures today and every day going forward.

Followed by:

I just had the blessed opportunity to converse with Rabbi Abraham Cooper director of global social action @SimonWiesenthal My first words to my brother was, I apologize for the hurt I caused the Jewish Community. On my podcast I used words and referenced literature I assumed to be factual to uplift my community, but instead turned out to be hateful propaganda and stereotypical rhetoric that pained another community. For this I am deeply sorry, but now together we can write a new chapter of healing.

As celebrity apologies go, these are excellent. It comes across as much more authentic and heartfelt than the usual “I apologize if anyone was offended” garbage we are used to seeing from celebrities. His tone was completely different than the non-apology he issued a mere 18 hours earlier:

As for Viacom, who is now on the wrong side of history, I will continue to pray for you. I don’t blame any individual, I blame the oppressive and racist infrastructure. Systemic racism is what this world was built on and was the subject in which I was attempting to highlight in the recent clips that have been circulating from my podcast. If I have furthered the hate speech, I wholeheartedly apologize.

But now I am the one making demands. I demand full ownership of my billion dollar “Wild ‘N Out” brand that I created, and they will continue to misuse and destroy without my leadership! I demand that the hate and back door bullying cease and while we are at it, now that the truth is out, I demand the Apology!

And, of course, only a day before that Cannon said to Fast Company:

“To me apologies are empty. Are you forcing me to say the words ‘I’m sorry’? Are you making me bow down, ’cause then again, that would be perpetuating that same rhetoric that we’re trying to get away from,” Cannon says. “What we need is healing. What we need is discussion. Correct me. I don’t tell my children to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ I want them to understand where they need to be corrected. And then that’s how we grow.”

“You can say sorry in as many different languages as you want to, and it means nothing,” Cannon continues. “But until someone truly understands where they may have been wrong or where they may have offended someone, then that’s where growth occurs.”

His talk about growth and education is consistent between the interview and his new apologies. The recent posts capture his voice and appear sincere.

I hope he is.

However, you cannot disconnect his turnaround from his being fired by ViacomCBS. Both Cannon and Fox desperately needed for him to stay on as host of the hit show The Masked Singer. The apology came only after a day long discussion with Fox, as Variety reports the network’s statement:

“When we were made aware of Nick Cannon’s interview with Richard Griffin on YouTube, we immediately began a dialogue with Nick,” the network said in a statement. “He is clear and remorseful that his words were wrong and lacked both understanding and context, and inadvertently promoted hate. This was important for us to observe. Nick has sincerely apologized, and quickly taken steps to educate himself and make amends. On that basis and given a belief that this moment calls for dialogue, we will move forward with Nick and help him advance this important conversation, broadly. Fox condemns all forms of hate directed toward any community and we will combat bigotry of any kind.”

Cannon’s apology may or may not have been written by him, but it was certainly vetted by Fox’ PR department to ensure it checked all the boxes before he released his statement, freeing Fox to release their own.

Well, maybe not all the boxes.

ViacomCBS’ statement when they let Cannon go concentrated on his antisemitic statements and it downplayed his racist statements. The “Rothschilds control the world” and “Blacks are the real Jews” themes are very offensive, but the worst part of the Cannon’s Class episode was his long racist monologue about how a lack of melanin causes “them” to be rapists, murderers and savages – and he identified “them” to include all white people (“Europeans”) as well as “Jewish people” and the “Illuminati.”

Because ViacomCBS fired him for antisemitism, Fox crafted his apology to only mention Jews – and not every white person on the planet.

Which, ironically, helps promote the antisemitic trope that Jews control the entertainment industry.

There is a bigger issue here, though. The comments section for his apologies are a disgusting tire fire of Black antisemitism and racism. By at least a 10-1 ratio, Cannon’s fans look at the apology as being proof that Jews and the white devils have forced an outspoken Black man, in Cannon’s own words the day before, “to put the young negro in his place.”

I hope that Nick Cannon learns something in the coming months. But unless he takes a principled position to actively counter the hate that his fans have – partially because of him – then it is a drop in the bucket. The problem isn’t Nick Cannon’s hate or ignorance; it is the hate and ignorance of the larger community that he identifies with and that identify with him. In the hundreds of comments I’ve read on his Facebook, I have not seen one Black person say that his racist and antisemitic statements were wrong. Some are sympathetic to his apology and many are angry, but I didn’t see any who learned a thing from Cannon’s quick conversion.

Cannon’s apology, however manufactured, is a good first step. The only way to know if it is sincere is to see what Cannon says in the coming months - not to the Jewish community but to his Black community.

Are the stories about the remaining Jews being ethnically cleansed from Yemen true?

To my knowledge, on Monday I was the first to write in English about reports that the few remaining Jews in Kharif, Yemen were being imprisoned and being forced to sign over their property to the Shiite Houthi group with the intention of expelling them.

The news reached Israel and the media and government has questioned whether it was true.

The report has yet to be confirmed by any official source, leaving questions about the report’s validity. The fate of the Jews in Yemen if the report is true is uncertain.

When asked by The Jerusalem Post about the matter, Israel's Foreign Ministry said it had been queried about the report many times and it appears to be false.

World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder responded to the reports, saying, “Though the horrific reports we are reading about the persecution of Yemeni Jews are unconfirmed, the international community has a responsibility to investigate the situation and to protect this vulnerable population.”

There appears to be at least partial confirmation from Asharq al-Awsat, a news outlet with a pretty good reputation. it reports:

With tears in their eyes, a Jewish Yemeni left Yemen this week and arrived in one of the Arab capitals, following the instructions of the Houthi militia, which gave the head of the family a choice between staying in prison or leaving his hometown in Amran Governorate (north of Sanaa). The presence of the Jewish community there is nearing its disappearance from this region that has historically represented one of the most important centers of their presence in Yemen.

Asharq Al-Awsat traced the journey of suffering incurred by the Saeed Al-Na’ati family since the beginning of this year, as he was harassed, abused and pursued, before he was imprisoned for more than a month and then told to either leave the Houthi militia-controlled areas, or to remain in prison.

The Jewish community currently does not exceed 33 persons of both sexes. Only five of them live in the Kharif area of Amran governorate and the Arhab district of Sana'a governorate, as the Houthi gunmen intentionally harass the residents of the new market area in Amran governorate, which was a mostly Jewish area before the emergence of the Houthis, who compel them to emigrate and buy their homes and properties cheaply so that there is no presence of the followers of the Jewish religion in their areas.

Last May, the Houthi militia arrested a Jew named Youssef and also imprisoned Sa`id al-Na`ti. After a month and a half of prison as his family pleaded with tribal elders, al-Na`ti was released after he signed an pledge to sell his house and leave the country. This month, the group allowed him to sell some of his belongings and household items, while his mother and three daughters left for the city of Aden before they reached one of the Arab capitals in search of a new homeland.

Members of the sect told Al-Sharq al-Awsat that Al-A’ati had been forced with his family to leave while they were crying, and they did not want to leave their country. One of them said: “There is nothing left in Imran except for an old woman who takes care of her brother who lost his mind, while there are three others in the district of Arhab.”

The sources talked about how the family told the Houthis that they might be prevented from passing through the checkpoints scattered along the road leading to the temporary capital of Aden, but the Houthis answered them, saying, "Travel, and nothing should concern you. We will give you a pass at all points, and the most important thing is that you leave."

Until before the Houthis invaded Amran Governorate, the "New Market" area was like a closed neighborhood, most of whom were Jews who worked in iron workshops, carpentry and car repair,where they coexisted with the Arab population. With the emergence of the sectarian organization of the Houthis in the governorate of Saada in mid-2004, systematic targeting of Jews began, and Yemen saw the first wave of forced internal displacement of the followers of this religion, according to one of its members.

He added: “When the Houthis stormed the Al Salem area they sent a written warning to the Jews to leave the province; the attacks and targeting continued, and the number of these people dwindled from more than five thousand to today it is slightly more than 30 people, most of whom reside in a city owned by the Ministry of Defense near the American embassy in Sana'a.”

This appears to be an accurate account of at least one family of at least 5 people – perhaps 15% of the remaining Jews in Yemen.

The Government Fiddles while the People Burn (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

There is reason to believe that the present government of Israel is not only bloated and venal, but that it is staggeringly incompetent.

The Prime Minister acts almost exclusively to protect himself, and not on behalf of the country. The evidence for this is the absurdly fat and expensive “unity” (one has to laugh) government with its 35 ministers and 8 deputy ministers. This structure exists so that Binyamin Netanyahu can continue to be Prime Minister. There is no other reason.

There are countless difficult issues facing the government, but here are three major ones. In each case, the government has – through laziness or indecision, and by its members seeking political advantage for themselves, failed to deal with them. They are:

The Corona crisis. The numbers of newly diagnosed cases, the percentage of positive test results, and the number of seriously ill are all rising precipitously. The recommendations of the Health Ministry are passed through a political filter so that various constituencies are protected from inconvenience. The 35-minister government has created a 20-member “Corona Cabinet,” supposedly to make quick decisions. But there is also a Knesset Corona Committee which needs to approve them.

The Ministry is trying to find someone who will accept the job as “project manager” [the Hebrew word is “projector”] for the fight against the disease. But so far, nobody has agreed to take the job, because they don’t believe that they will be given the necessary authority. Even the Health Minister, Yuli Edelstein, has complained that the recommendations of his ministry are “gnawed away” by the politicians.

The objective that everyone pays lip service to is to stop the spread of the disease without killing the economy. So far, the effect of the government’s actions has been to not stop the disease, although they have done an effective job of crushing the economy.

The extension of sovereignty. The offer of American support for the extension of civil law to the Jordan Valley and to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria was an unprecedented opportunity for Israel. The window, however, is closing every day. PM Netanyahu first promised that he would act almost immediately after the election; then he said it would be at some point after 1 July. Now it seems that it has receded to an undetermined future date. The main reason seems to be the lack of agreement in the “unity” government. If this does not occur before the pre-election period in the US, it will probably be on ice until the next Republican administration (if we are lucky).

The Iranian threat. This is probably the most serious of all, even more than the epidemic. As everyone knows, Iran has been developing a murderous ring of proxy militias armed with what Maj. Gen. [res.] Yitzhak Brik estimates as 200,000 rockets and missiles in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Gaza. Several hundred of them may also have already been converted to precision-guided missiles that can strike within a few meters of a selected target. Hezbollah also has been training ground forces to invade Israel and capture civilian towns near the border.

The scenario of accurate missiles hitting our runways, refineries and chemical plants, power stations, desalination plants, military headquarters, nuclear reactors, cities – I could go on – is frightening, especially since such an attack could cripple our ability to retaliate. For this reason, the IDF has been carrying out the so-called “War Between the Wars,” a campaign of attacks on Iranian bases and supply lines in Syria and Iraq, to prevent the transfer of equipment to add precision guidance to the inaccurate rockets and missiles that make up their arsenal. Possibly some of the recent mysterious explosions in Iran are also part of the campaign to pull Iran’s teeth (including nuclear ones) before the outbreak of hostilities.

But no matter how hard we try, we can’t totally prevent the upgrading of Hezbollah’s weapons; we can only slow it down. We can bomb truck convoys in Syria, but (at least as far as I know) we have not dared to shoot down Iranian civil aircraft flying to Lebanon. Brik calls Israel’s campaign “a drop in the ocean.”

We have various missile defense systems in place, but they are limited. We do not have the ability to defend against a sustained mass attack, even with inaccurate rockets, from Hezbollah, which could launch thousands of rockets a day. Precision-guided missiles tip the balance even more in the direction of our enemies.

Brik argues persuasively that the fact that we are able to pursue the “War Between the Wars” with very little retaliation from Iran is not an indication of strength, but rather a danger sign. Iran, he says, is displaying restraint so as not to provoke a larger conflict until they are ready. Meanwhile, every day, more of their weapons are fitted with precision guidance systems.
Such a conventional attack would not justify a nuclear response; and in any event, most of the missiles would be coming from Lebanon, and even vaporizing Tehran wouldn’t stop them. The IDF, Brik believes, has not sufficiently upgraded either its offensive or defensive capabilities to counter such an attack. And if Iran succeeds in obtaining its own nukes (which it might even buy from another rogue regime), then Israel would be deterred from using its nuclear option.
Brik has been criticizing the IDF’s level of preparedness for some time, and the response has always been “don’t worry, we have it covered.” I am not so sure.

The citizens of Israel have an implicit contract with its government: we pay heavy taxes and allow the government to control many aspects of our lives. In return, it protects us against attacks from outside and responds to natural disasters like epidemics. We accept a certain amount of waste and even graft, because the alternative of anarchy would be far worse.
But the feeding frenzy of the politicians that accompanied the formation of the “unity” government, the gobbling up of salaries, offices, staffs, cars, and more by the unnecessary ministers, as well as the personal greed shown by the Prime Minister, has brought us to a historic moral nadir. Combined with the fumbling of the major issues facing the state, it’s clear that fundamental change is needed.

But what change, and how, and – importantly – who?

I don’t have the answers. But neither do the morons who rioted in front of the PM’s residence in Jerusalem last night and threw eggs (and worse) at the police. I am sure that any cure they would propose would be worse than the disease.

07/15 Links Pt2: The Attacks on the Uniqueness of the Holocaust; Israel’s outgoing U.N. ambassador: ‘We have to fight anti-Semitism on all fronts’; Israel's law against slavery

From Ian:

BESA: The Attacks on the Uniqueness of the Holocaust

The last decade has seen an explosion of attacks on the memory of the Holocaust. This expresses itself in many ways, including the casting of doubt on the Holocaust’s uniqueness. This version was aired in recent public debates in Germany and can also be found in historical manipulations by academic scholars.

The memory of the Holocaust has been under assault for decades from all sides: the extreme right, the extreme left, and parts of the Islamic world. A common tactic is to assert that the Holocaust was not unique, contrary to the Jewish claim.

Looking at the question on a purely empirical basis, the Holocaust was unambiguously a unique event. While some elements are comparable to other genocides, its combined characteristics are not. Several criteria collectively make the Holocaust an unprecedented event: the totality of the targeting (all Jews everywhere), its priority (all branches of the German state were involved in the effort), its industrial character, and its impracticality (instead of exploiting Jews for labor purposes, they were killed.)

Leading Holocaust philosopher Emil L. Fackenheim noted that the Armenian genocide was confined to the Turkish Empire. And even within that empire, not all Armenians there were targeted—for instance, those living in Jerusalem were spared. Geographical confinement also applies to the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan.

As Fackenheim pointed out, the Nazis, by contrast, set out to exterminate every last Jew on the face of the earth. He said that while the Holocaust does belong to the species “genocide,” the planned and largely executed borderless extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust is without precedent and, thus far at least, without sequel. It is thus entirely appropriate to call it “unique.”

Israel’s Centrist Consensus

So “Left” and “Right” mean only one thing in the Israeli context: where you stand on relinquishing territory in the Land of Israel, particular regarding the territories of Judea & Samaria (the mountainous regions overlooking the coastal plain) and the Jordan Valley, liberated from Jordan’s 19-year illegal occupation (1949-1967) in Israel’s 6-Day War of defense of June 1967.

Radical Leftists promote immediate and unilateral, unconditional withdrawal from what they term “occupied” territories (misrepresenting the Geneva Convention of 1949); the less extreme Left supports a negotiated withdrawal from most of these disputed territories. Both support – with more or less enthusiasm – the idea of the establishment of a “Palestinian” state in those territories.

Extreme Rightists claim all of the biblical Land of Israel and historical Mandatory Palestine as Israel’s patrimony, based on various international legal instruments like the San Remo treaty, and reject any notion of an Israeli withdrawal; they dismiss a “Palestinian” identity separate from wider Arab nationalism, oppose vigorously the idea of a Palestinian state, and would like to see most Arabs who identify as Palestinian move to neighboring Arab states. The less radical Right grudgingly acknowledges a “Palestinian” movement but insists this can be accommodated within existing nation-states in the region, promoting various forms of autonomy, and focuses on Israel’s security needs and the belligerence of the Arab and Palestinian leadership, noting the unlikelihood of any real peace possibilities in the near future.

The middle ground – incorporating various aspects of the more restrained concepts of both the Right and Left in Israel – is actually the ‘high ground’ held by a majority of Israelis, proven in polls and at the ballot box over the past few decades. This is what I call the moderate Center in Israel, and it is far more powerful, and widespread, than most people realize – not least as it doesn’t get the headlines with pithy media phrases like “Peace Now” and “Annexation”, or “Destroy the terrorists” and “Disengagement” and the like. Ironically but significantly, every government and prime minister of Israel, with perhaps the exception of Ehud Barak in 1999-2000, has followed the policy lines of this centrist trend – even ‘Leftists’ like Shimon Peres (who used conservative economic policies to save Israel’s economy in the ‘80s) and ‘Rightists’ like Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon (who were the only Israeli prime ministers to withdraw from territories with Israeli civilian communities living in them).

Where is the ‘Center’ marked? For English speakers’ reference, Rabbi Daniel Gordis is right there, as are journalists/commentators like Yossi Klein Halevi and Haviv Rettig Gur, and historian Gil Troy; former minister and human rights activist Natan Sharansky and former Labor party MK Einat Wilf; and many of the politicians and thinkers and supporters of Blue & White (Benny Gantz, and Moshe Yaalon, less so Lapid’s Yesh Atid), Likud (which has also right-wingers of course in it), and Labor (which has also left-wingers, mostly in fact, of course).

But forget the political parties and labels: read anything by Amotz Asa El (he writes a column in the JPost called “Middle Israel”)… or for that matter anything I write. 🙂 There are Centrists in almost every Israeli political party and movement, except the hard Left and the hard Right, both of which are peripheral in Israeli society though they receive substantial press coverage. Even most of the 1.4 million Arab Israelis, some 20% of Israel’s population, can be included, perhaps ironically, in this category (though for historical, social, religious and cultural reasons many of them unfortunately vote for the most radical, anti-Israel, antisemitic and belligerent politicians to represent their sector in the Knesset). This is clear from both their behavior and polling data. (h/t Yerushalimey)

Phyllis Chesler: Israel's law against slavery

Bravo, Kudos, every kind of Kol Ha Kavod, to all those Knesset members, on both the right and the left, especially former Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, and Gilad Erdan, then-Minister of Internal Security (now Israel’s new Ambassador to the United Nations), who worked on the new legislation that criminalized customers ("Johns"), not prostitutes; who understood that prostitution is violence against women; and who were wise enough to also pass a funded enforcement provision which has just gone into effect.

This is a revolutionary law because it recognizes that prostitution is violence against women.

Although the issue is hotly debated, especially among feminists (“sex workers have to eat, they can’t starve’), I stand with Knesset member, Shelly Yachimovich (Labor) who stated: “The war against prostitution is like a war to free the slaves.”

Oddly enough, many anti-capitalist feminists rarely glorify mind-numbing factory, agricultural, or low-level office work. They are clear that the “workers” are being oppressed. When it comes to prostitution, the alleged “work” is often viewed as a form of resistance, rather than as a forced choice, as a “job” which they actually say allows women greater independence than marriage ever can.

If caught, the newly criminalized customers (“Johns”), will have to pay a fine of 2,000 shekalim ($580.00). Repeat offenders might face criminal charges.

This is not the first time that I’ve been called upon to write about the Israeli heroes who were and still are fighting violence against women.
Dr. Anat Gur is a pioneering Israeli therapist, the founder of the Women’s Wisdom Center, a professor at Bar Ilan, and an author (Women Abandoned: Women in Prostitution, Foreign Bodies: Eating Disorders, Childhood Sexual Abuse, and Trauma Informed Treatment), has worked with women prisoners, incest and eating disorder victims, and prostitutes since 1984.

According to Dr. Gur: “Prostitution is not a job or a livelihood for women. In addition to the severe violence, humiliation, and ongoing rapes, it is not ‘easy money’ for anyone but the pimps and traffickers of women, not for the girls and women who are exploited as prostitutes. Prostitution is the direct continuation of the exploitation of the most vulnerable women in society, those who have already been ‘groomed” by childhood incest, and are ready to be exploited as prostitutes.”

Dr. Gur independently confirmed the important, and also long-time research of Dr. Melissa Farley, namely that the complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorders among prostitutes are more severe than the Stress experienced by many combat veterans of more recognized wars. Dr. Gur told me: “While exploited in prostitution, they are completely disassociated and disconnected and cannot afford to tell what is really happening to them.”

Yisrael Medad is Betar to the bone. Having joined the Revisionist Zionist movement of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky at the tender age of 17, Medad is still enamored of this Zionist figure and his controversial ideology. So much so it seems, that he’s translating Jabotinsky’s words into English, that others might access the work of this prolific genius.

What makes the work of Jabotinsky, a journalist by profession, so controversial? For one thing, Jabotinsky was at odds with the idea of intersectionality, of combining Zionism with other ideologies. He liked his Zionism pure. According to biographer Hillel Halkin, Jabotinsky called this singular devotion to the cause “Zionist monism,” refusing to link Zionism to, for instance, Jewish agrarianization or to socialism. Which put him at odds with, for instance, David Ben Gurion.

But the disagreement went deeper than defining what it means to be a Zionist. Jabotinsky founded the Jewish Legion to help the British fight against the Ottoman Empire, but was disappointed to discover that cooperating with the British brought the Jews no closer to a Jewish State. And then the British issued the infamous White Paper. That's when Jabotinsky founded the Irgun to revolt against the British, who could no longer be seen as a benevolent force.

Ben Gurion, meantime, favored a policy of “havlagah” or “restraint," and looking the other way. He felt the Brits remained the Jews' best hope for attaining statehood.

About havlagah, Jabotinsky had this to say:

Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky

.... I have mentioned the word "Havlagah", a rare word, never heard before in modern, every-day-life Hebrew language in the Land of Israel. It seems this word is now the most common and hated word in the Land of Israel... The Jews should not distort the facts and complain. In the Land of Israel there are young political activists from the left and the right who are not afraid to clash with British soldiers, who are forcing them to act like cowards. They do not fear about their own lives, they fear for the destruction of the 1917 Balfour declaration and the violation of the alliance between England and Jewish people... Any indigenous people will fight foreign settlers as long as they believe there is a chance to get rid of the foreign settlement danger. This is how the Arabs in the Land of Israel are acting and will act in the future, as long as they have the spark in their hearts that they could stop the transformation of Palestine into the Land of Israel... Therefore our settlement can (only) grow under a force which is not dependent upon the local population, behind an "iron wall" that the local population could not break.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky was a pragmatist. The Jews weren't going to hold their land by biding their time and twiddling their fingers. They weren't going to reclaim their territory by kissing up to the British, as they turned a blind eye to Arab terror. If the Jews wanted the land they would have to fight. And this willingness to face the truth made Jabotinsky, the boy from Odessa, a Zionist outlier, a figure of the right.

So how does a boy from New York end up in Israel, translating the works of a boy from Odessa? What makes a man devote his life to keeping the work of Jabotinsky, a man long dead, alive in our hearts? I spoke to Yisrael Medad to learn more:

Yisrael Medad

Varda Epstein: Tell us something about your background and your family, if you would.

Yisrael Medad: Both my parents were American-born, my mother from the Lower East Side and so prior to every Pesach and Rosh Hashana we were down there shopping and eating. My parents were quite American but also very ethnically and traditionally Jewish—yet of the style of Jewish at home and less so outside.

I attended synagogue and Hebrew school but we would drive up to The Bronx on Saturday afternoons. We kept kosher at home but ate at non-kosher restaurants. I remember once returning from shul on Yom Kippur (I started fasting when I was already 11 and my father had purchased me my own mahzorim (high holiday prayer books V.E.) and I came up in the elevator with someone who pressed the buttons for me as I knew it was forbidden, but my mother heard the elevator door slam just before I walked into the apartment. She asked if I used the elevator and when I responded in the positive, she slapped me. When I became bar mitzvah in 1960, we all became chozer b’tshuva (a religious returnee V.E.) but that’s another story. That my mother’s family was from Brody was a very prominent memory item.

I attended Yeshivat Chofetz Chaim and then went on to attend Yeshiva University. I joined Mizrahi Hatzair in 1962 (Yudi Henkin, now Rav Yehuda Henkin, was my madrich (adviser V.E.) but in 1964 I joined Betar.

Varda Epstein: When did you make Aliyah? What was the catalyst? Why Shiloh?

Yisrael and Batya Medad

Yisrael Medad: I spent 1966-1967 in Israel on a program called Machon L’Madrichei Chutz La’Aretz and so my earlier inclination to make Aliyah was sealed – we had a war that year which had me in a foxhole for a few days in June. My future wife, Batya, was similarly inclined and in August 1970, two months after our wedding, we boarded the Queen Anna Maria and arrived in Israel on September 5, after 12 days at sea.

We were first in the Old City of Jerusalem, then the Jerusalem neighborhood of Bayit Vegan, then London for a two-year emissary stint for Betar, back to Bayit VeGan and then in 1981 we moved to Shiloh.

We chose Shiloh for three basic reasons: we wanted a location about which no one could say Jews do not belong there; a place that needed us; and one where we felt we could make a contribution. As an example of such a contribution, in order to open the grade school in Shiloh, our oldest two daughters were required.

Varda Epstein: Can you tell us about your earlier work at the Begin Center and how you came to be translating Jabotinsky’s works?

A young Medad, right, with a fellow soldier in 1974

Yisrael Medad: My employment at the Begin Center began in 2000. Until then I was Geulah Cohen’s aide and director of Israel’s Media Watch among other jobs. I helped create the Begin Center’s Junior Knesset program, historical walking tours, a resource volume of national thinkers, and served in many other areas during the 17 years I was employed. I still remain as a research fellow.

As I had been in Betar and lectured on Jabotinsky and the pre-state underground struggle, joining the editorial committee for the new critical edition of Jabotinsky’s writings was, well, only natural. Then it was decided the volumes would be in English and I was appointed deputy editor. I had done translations of Israel Eldad, Uri Tzvi Greenberg and other Zionist figures and was quite familiar with the terminology, the historical framework, and other such necessary requirements for this work.

Varda Epstein: Last time we spoke you were working on the second volume, so you must be translating a lot of material. I know Jabotinsky was a prolific writer. Can you describe the scope of the items you are translating? Are you translating Jabotinsky’s plays and non-Zionist works and articles? Letters? How much material are you dealing with, exactly?

With Dani Dayan

Yisrael Medad: Well, at present, due to the situation and budget considerations, my work is in low gear. We are trying to work off the Hebrew, and this was spurred by a decade-long research project in Russia to find the approximately 2000 articles Jabotinsky published prior to World War One. These articles were penned during his Odessa and St. Petersburg periods as one of that country’s outstanding Jewish journalists. And these works are in addition to some 1500 or so articles we have already archived, not including his 5000 letters, published separately in Hebrew (now in 15 volumes).

Luckily, the Czarist secret police kept good archives (Jabotinsky, after returning from Italy in 1903, was suspected of being a socialist and was arrested twice). We want to search for his “unknown” works in Russian, as well. Some of his letters are really memoranda of several pages which we’ll also be including.

Varda Epstein: Jabotinsky was fluent in several languages. Did he write in several languages, too? You’ve told me you don’t really know Russian, so how do you manage?

With the late Moshe (Misha) Arens

Yisrael Medad: Jabotinsky wrote in several languages: English, French, Italian, and Yiddish, in addition to Hebrew and his native Russian. There is one instance when he was in Belgium and spoke for an hour, and each quarter of an hour he changed languages: from French to Walloon to English and on to Yiddish.

The one major essay I translated on the Bund and Zionism was first translated from its Hebrew. I then used four different translation engines to discover oddities or unusual grammar, semantics, or terminology and then I needed to go through every sentence with my collaborator on the Russian aspect of the work, Yehiel Fishzon, and with additional assistance from Netanel Bunimovitch and his wife Miriam Feyga, to fine tune, as the original translator of this work into Hebrew took a bit of license at times and even left out of few paragraphs. It took some three months just to complete the work on this one essay. And the main part of my work is taken up in just adding the footnotes to such articles.

Varda Epstein: What are some of the difficulties you’ve encountered in your translation work?

From left: Bobby Brown, Yossi Klein Halevi, Yisrael Medad

Yisrael Medad: An example is when the translator wrote “v’shalom al Yisrael” (literally: “and there should be peace on Israel”). Is that actually what Jabo wrote? No. He wrote: “на Шипке все спокойно (everything is calm on Shipka).”

It took me a week to write this footnote: “Jabotinsky employs an idiom expressing irony about those who are trying to hide a deplorable or dangerous state of affairs. It originated in the official reports of Lt. Gen. Feodor Radetsky on the battle for Shipka Pass in the Balkan Mountains, Bulgaria in December 1877 during the Russian-Turkish war. Despite his sentries freezing to death on duty, men blown off the mountain by strong winds and one-third of the soldiers falling ill, Radetsky’s dispatches assured: “Everything is calm at Shipka.” Besides that, recognizing exactly to what event Jabotinsky was referring to is daunting.

Varda Epstein: Why Jabotinsky?

Yisrael in a TV interview

Yisrael Medad: He is the most intelligent, well-read, most cultured Zionist thinker I know and one who, besides being a novelist, poet, translator, diplomat, soldier and a host of other life’s professions, was the most calumniated. Presenting his works, even in a small quantity, beyond the mostly political works that have already appeared, is a matter of saving a soul.

Varda Epstein: When do you expect the work to be completed?

Yisrael Medad: After my own 120.

Varda Epstein: Can you describe your projected readership? Who benefits from your work and how so?

Yisrael Medad: First, university students. Over the last decade and half there has been an explosion of academic works on Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism. In 2001 there was Michael Stanislawski’s “Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky” and just now, Brian Horowitz has published his collection, “Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900-1925” following his and Leonid Katsis' 2015 translation and editing of Jabotinsky's “Story of My Life.” There is a 2018 article by Gil Rubin on “Jabotinsky and Population Transfers Between Eastern Europe and Palestine.” These are interesting, critical, and potentially explosive subjects and should not be left solely to the academics of the left or of the center.

These are good books but in many places tend to be too critical and there is a need to put out the raw material. And there is the nefarious Dmitry Shumsky who corrupts Jabotinsky in too many instances.

Jabotinsky is today as relevant in the issues and themes he wrote about as a century or 80 years ago. Peter Beinart wrote recently of a semi-binational state entity of Israel-Palestine but did he reference Jabotinsky’s 1940 plan in his “Arab Angle – Undramatized?”

Varda Epstein: What do you see yourself doing next, at the end of this very long project?

Yisrael Medad: To continue doing more of what I do: blog, compose op-eds, research, translate, be funny and enjoy the family.

~~~

More from Yisrael Medad:

MyRightWord

JPost Media Column
JNS

ShilohInSense (עברית)

@ymedad

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.

Real Jews don’t use their Judaism as a prop

Over the weekend, IfNotNow held a small early morning protest outside the house of a member of Congress.

Here’s their photo of the event:

They are led by a woman with a tambourine – and wearing a tallit.

Why does she need to wear a prayer shawl?

Obviously, she doesn’t. The entire reason she is wearing it is to scream “LOOK, I’M JEWISH” while protesting against Israel. To “prove” that “real Jews” oppose Israeli policies.

But real Jews don’t use sacred objects or rituals as cheap props for political theater.

Jews In Name Only (JINOs), however, love to embrace the Judaism most of them scorn to buttress their politics.

IfNotNow held a havdalah service a couple of weeks ago – the service that ends the Sabbath – while it was still daylight on the Sabbath.

They hold “seders” to tell the world that instead of Jews going from slavery to freedom in their own nation, they want Jews to go from nationhood back to the Diaspora.

Any bizarre link they can find to anything remotely Jewish they will grab, twist and publicize as if what they are doing has anything to do with Judaism.

No one is fooled. These people who want you to so desperately believe that they represent Jews are proving the exact opposite with their cynical cheapening of Jewish rituals and objects.

07/15 Links Pt1: Douglas Murray: What is the point of the New York Times?; Gil Troy: Lies my anti-annexationists allies told me; Turkey is increasingly becoming a threat to Israel

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: What is the point of the New York Times?

Some time ago I became aware that I no longer trusted it even on issues that I didn’t know about. Because on every issue I did know about, I discovered that the paper was spreading untruths and lies. Take the bizarre animus against Britain (which I have written about a number of times here). It appears that the NYT at some stage made a decision that Brexit had something to do with Trump, and since the NYT hated Trump, it must not just report negatively against Brexit Britain, but campaign against it. Its London ‘correspondents’ must be among the least informed and most campaign-minded journalists in the paper’s history. The misinformation that the NYT has now published against this country is so extraordinary that nobody who actually knows the UK could possibly trust its coverage. And if you see that this is the case with things you do know about, then why would you remotely trust the NYT on things you don’t know about? And at that stage, what is the point of the paper? It’s not as though it is worth reading for the wit.

Anyhow – after recent sackings at the paper (relating to the publication of a perfectly reasonable opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton) it became clear that Bari Weiss was one of the last couple of liberal voices (in the true sense) left at the paper. And as you could see from the deranged online behaviour of her colleagues towards her, it was clear she was not going to be long for the role.

Her resignation letter is damning. She alleges ‘constant bullying by colleagues.’ And in a memorable line she says, ‘Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.’ Ouch.

Of course there will doubtless now be more bullying and hectoring. All once again done by ‘liberal’ voices presuming that they are acting in the name of good. It is an extraordinary thing this, and in some ways emblematic of the age. Publications like the NYT, who profess to be most opposed to ‘fake news’, continuously turn out to have been the era’s biggest purveyors of the thing they complain of. And campaigning journalists, imagining that they are acting in the name of decency, turn out to behave so indecently that they bully out a minority, dissenting opinion from their ranks.

Bari Weiss has a bright future ahead of her. The same cannot be said of the paper she has just left.

Commentary Magazine Podcast: The Resignation Heard Round the Woke World

New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss has resigned her post and, in so doing, indicted the entire enterprise of modern journalism and its woke arbiters. The podcast on that and the epistemological crisis afflicting the left.

Josh Hammer: Bari Weiss is a casualty of the Left’s woke culture war

In a sense, I am a rather unusual spokesperson for the idea that a morally neutral discursive pluralism is an inherently valuable end unto itself. Indeed, I have spent no shortage of (digital) ink arguing, in accordance with the natural and common law traditions, for the imperative of making moral judgments based on the underlying substantive content of a certain modality of speech.

But, again, I am a conservative. Bari Weiss is a liberal. And all of us, outside the echo chambers of oppressive “wokeness” that constitute the Left’s self-congratulatory institutional bastions, have an acute interest in aiding the liberals mount a comeback in their civil war struggle.

A viable Right and a viable Left have historically existed in a relationship that is, ironically, simultaneously adversarial and symbiotic. Partisans of both camps have not shied away, when need be, from the grueling work required by intellectual fisticuffs in the public square. But, crucially, both camps have also depended upon one another to refine their arguments. There is to be no argumentative refinement, alas, when the Left is overrun by the Jacobins. Robespierre was not known to take kindly to heterodoxy.

For traditional liberals, the choice is clear. As Yoram Hazony frames it, liberals can either submit to the Left or make common cause with conservatives, traditionalists, and nationalists in our struggle against the successor ideology.
Liberals have two choices:
1 Submit to the Left.
2 Alliance with nationalists, conservatives, and Christians.
There are no other choices.— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) June 13, 2020

In making such a choice, liberals should bear in mind that they, too, will be made to care. For liberal Jews, like Weiss, the choice is even clearer. The successor ideology mollycoddles inveterate Jew-haters, peddles an intersectionality that is inherently at loggerheads with the very notion of Jewish particularism, and cavils when a proud Jewish commentator “writ[es] about the Jews again.” The successor ideology has no tolerance whatsoever for Zionism, the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination in their ancient homeland.
Cory Booker Talking by the Forward

Perhaps a more pluralistic, intellectually diverse “mainstream media” opinion will emerge from the ashes of this rock bottom. For now, the Jacobins have found the proverbial guillotine. And in forcing out Weiss, an anodyne, centrist Jewish woman, the radicals have clarified for all to see the battle lines now drawn in the fight for a nation’s soul.

Je suis Bari Weiss.

Judith Miller: The Illiberal Liberal Media

In her letter, Weiss wrote that she had joined the paper to help publish “voices that would not otherwise appear in the paper of record, such as first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of the Times as their home.” She had been hired, she wrote, after the paper failed to anticipate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory because it “didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.” But after three years at the paper, she wrote in her open letter, Weiss had concluded, “with sadness,” that she could no longer perform this mission at the nation’s ostensible paper of record, given the bullying that she had experienced within the newsroom and the almost daily attacks on her, often from Times colleagues, on social media. She deplored the paper’s unwillingness to defend her or act to stop the online intimidation. “They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again,’” she wrote.

Her criticism of Sulzberger rang true to several Times veterans, who note that he has been accused before of yielding to disgruntled liberal staff members. A publisher said to have intervened often in the paper’s news decisions, Sulzberger initially defended James Bennet and the decision to publish the Cotton op-ed, for instance. But faced with a staff revolt, he criticized the essay and the paper’s publication of it, saying that the editorial process had been too “rushed” and that the essay “did not meet our standards.”

Weiss’s departure was quickly hailed by her many critics within and outside of the paper on social media, among them Glenn Greenwald, who has called her a “hypocrite” for her alleged efforts to suppress Arab professors while in college, and for her defense of Israel and some of its controversial policies as a newspaper writer. But her stinging letter rang true to many others, among them former presidential aspirant Andrew Yang and talk-show host Bill Maher. “As a longtime reader who has in recent years read the paper with increasing dismay over just the reasons outlined here, I hope this letter finds receptive ears at the paper. But for the reasons outlined here, I doubt it,” Maher wrote on Twitter.

Her resignation was also lamented by such leading right-of-center thinkers as Glenn Loury. “What a shame—for the country, and on the Times,” wrote Loury, an economics professor at Brown University, in an email. Calling Weiss “courageous,” he added that while the climate she described at the paper was “no surprise,” that it had “driven her to this point is, indeed, shocking.” He also noted that Weiss was one of the few Times writers to sign the controversial “Harpers letter,” which he speculated might have been “the last straw” for the paper.

I can't handle this much pro-Israelism. pic.twitter.com/z2RoAY6Ei1
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) July 15, 2020

The mainstream media was completely irrelevant throughout the entire Nick Cannon story

As I was discussing the Nick Cannon story last night with Dovid Efune of the Algemeiner, I complained that the mainstream media was ignoring the story of a very famous person publicly spreading hate. (Starts at about 18:00)

I take this personally. On Saturday night, Judean People’s Front tweeted the details of the offensive video, and I put together a post about it on Sunday morning. My intent was to get the story trending in major media – it is clearly newsworthy. I pushed the story to the major news media.

And they ignored it.

Sunday afternoon Jewish Insider and the Jerusalem Post ran with the story, and other Jewish and Israeli media followed. But for two more days, every wire service, major newspaper and magazine and TV network remained silent even as social media attention kept increasing.

Efune told me that sometimes they take their time, but not to be upset – because before citizen journalism, stories like these would never get out at all. The news was completely controlled by the major media and they were the gatekeepers of what is and isn’t news. News bloggers like me are critical components of the news cycle nowadays.

Minutes after our conversation came the news that Viacom/CBS had fired Cannon. This is before major media had covered the story at all. The decision was not made because of national attention.

The entire cycle of the story – the outrageous antisemitism, people getting upset, other people defending Cannon’s racism, Cannon’s refusal to apologize, Viacom/CBS terminating their relationship with Cannon – happened over the course of 60 hours while consumers of traditional media missed it all.

What should have been a media-driven story ended up happening and partially resolving without the media.

Consumers of news media should be upset. They pay money to get the news, and the news they will read today (when US newspapers and wire services finally cover it) will be about a story that played out over two and a half days without a single mention. Whether they purposefully wanted to downplay or bury the story, as I suspect, is not so relevant any more – because news bloggers like me now have the power to make a story too big for them to ignore. (Sometimes. There are plenty of stories I break that do not get any traction.)

Either way, this Cannon story shows that the days that the traditional news media calls the shots are over. Their influence is still huge, of course, and people will rely on them as their major or only news source for years to come. But they can no longer be the gatekeepers, and their attempts to minimize a story like this one ends up making them look like they are out of touch – or worse, pushing an agenda of denying their readers stories that they think are better left unreported.

EU says it rejects unilateral moves in Area C - while funding unilateral moves in Area C

On May 16, the EU’s High Representative Josep Borrell said in a statement, “We are convinced that we need to work towards bringing a solution to the Palestinian issue and we reaffirm our position in support of a negotiated Two-State solution. For this to be possible, unilateral actions from either side should be avoided and, for sure, international law should be upheld.”

Yesterday, the EU announced it will support 16 new infrastructure projects for Palestinians in Area C.

The European Union, Denmark, and the Palestinian Authority launched today the implementation of a €5.8 million agreement to build 16 social and public infrastructure projects in Area C. This contribution represents a new package of the European Union Area C Development Programme in the West Bank.

This package is the fifth of its kind to serve public infrastructure projects in Area C. It will fund the completion of 16 social infrastructure projects in 15 localities across the West Bank benefiting over 24,000 Palestinian living in Area C. These projects include schools, roads, multipurpose buildings, water distribution networks, water reservoirs and rehabilitation of electricity networks. This contribution brings the total amount of the programme to €15.2 million intended to build 58 social infrastructure projects in 46 localities. The European Union Area C Programme is funded by the European Union and Member States.

Anyone see a contradiction here?

The EU claims to be against unilateral actions from either side – yet it supports, encourages and funds unilateral actions from the Palestinians.

Under the same international law that the EU pretends to care about, if Area C is legally considered to be occupied, Israel has the obligation – not the right, but the obligation – to administer the lands under the same laws that had been in place in the area previously. In this case it is a mix of Jordanian, British and Ottoman laws. Only Israel can legally issue permits for building.

The EU has every right to object that the permits are not given out fairly. But it has no right under the law to illegally build – unilaterally.

Meir Deutsch, Director General of the Regavim NGO that monitors and documents violations of law in the territories said, “The absurdity of today’s announcement would be laughable if it weren’t so insidious. Claiming, on the one hand, that it condemns unilateral steps, in the very same breath the statement outlines a host of projects that will create facts on the ground and lay the groundwork for the creation of a Palestinian state in Area C . In other words – we will not recognize any changes unless they are changes we make.”

Regavim added a further irony: “Oddly, the EU and its member states don’t find the housing, education, employment, water infrastructure or electricity grid in Areas A and B, the areas of Judea and Samaria under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction, worthy of similar investment.

Even more oddly, the EU seems unperturbed by the massive worldwide financial crisis caused by the corona pandemic and seems to have no qualms about diverting European taxpayers’ money to create new ‘villages’ in previously uninhabited areas of Judea and Samaria. “

Here are some EU-funded projects deliberately being built on IDF training grounds in Judea and Samaria (photos provided by Regavim.)