Monday, July 27, 2020

  • Monday, July 27, 2020
  • Elder of Ziyon

Hamas claims it rejected $15 billion aid to Gaza in exchange for dismantling its terror wing

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Ismail Haniyeh, head of the “political wing” of Hamas, claims that he rejected a a proposal that was submitted to Hamas two months ago which would have included $15 billion in infrastructure projects in Gaza, including an airport, seaport, and other major projects.

The proposal, which presumably came from a moderate Arab country in cooperation with the Trump administration, was for Hamas to integrate its terror wing into the Palestinian police force and to end the division between Hamas and Fatah in exchange for the cash.

Haniyeh said that he especially rejected the idea that Hamas would give up its “heavy weapon” of missiles that can reach Tel Aviv and beyond, whose entire purpose is the war crime of targeting civilians.

It would be interesting to see a poll of Gazans themselves to see whether they would prefer Qassam rockets or cash and an airport.

Palestinian leaders have a habit of making decisions that use their people as pawns, and if this offer was in fact made, this is no exception.

Sunday, July 26, 2020

  • Sunday, July 26, 2020
  • Elder of Ziyon

#NoSafeSpaceForJewHate–boycotting Twitter for 48 hours

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JPost reports:

Prominent Twitter users are calling for a 48 hour boycott of the social media platform starting Monday, July 27 at 9 a.m. GMT following the site's refusal to take satisfactory action against antisemitism.

Using the hashtag #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate and backed by a number of prominent users including writers, politicians and other celebrities, the new campaign is fueled by frustration felt by many Twitter users over the lack of action taken against antisemitism on the site, despite the platform's claims of being against racism.

The campaign was sparked over the lack of action taken against British rapper Wiley, who made several antisemitic comments on the platform.

“If you work for a company owned by 2 Jewish men and you challenge the Jewish community in anyway of course you will get fired,” Wiley wrote and then added, “Infact [sic] there are 2 sets of people who nobody has really wanted to challenge #Jewish & #KKK but being in business for 20 years you start to undestand [sic] why.”

In several other tweets, Wiley claimed that Jews control "the Law," and made several claims about Israel not being a Jewish country, "Listen to me Jewish community Israel is not your country I'm sorry."

He later doubled down on the comments, stating after being confronted: "Anti Semetic? What's it called the way you rip us off in business then? What's that called when you tell us there is 1 rule for us and another rule for you lot? What's that called?" He added "Anti Semetic? Are u stupid? Do you know what these people do to the world?"

Wiley is only the tip of the iceberg as many Black celebrities have been posting Jew-hatred on social media in recent weeks. Some have huge followings.  Twitter is complicit in Jew-hate worldwide.

I will not be posting anything to Twitter for 48 hours (I hope I managed to shut down all my automated posts.)

nospace

 

Please check out my posts directly on my blog, or go to Facebook to see my most recent posts. If I have the urge to tweet, I’ll write everything on Facebook instead. (Not that Facebook is that much better than Twitter…)

  • Sunday, July 26, 2020
  • Elder of Ziyon

My “I have a joke” memes

Over the weekend Twitter was overrun with “I have a joke…” memes. So I made a few of my own.

07/26 Links: Time for social media to change its ways; #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate; Islamists co-opted the George Floyd protests

From Ian:
Time for social media to change its ways
On June 30, 2016, 17-year-old Mohammad Tra'ayra from the West Bank village of Bani Naim infiltrated a home in nearby Kiryat Arba and stabbed 13-year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel to death as she slept in her bed. It was later discovered that his Facebook feed was rife with messages of hate and incitement and that he boasted on his own page that he wished to die as a "shahid" – a martyr – writing, "Death is a right and I demand that right."

The complaints lodged with Facebook over his posts, as well as the demand later to remove posts praising the killing and the murderer were, as always, ignored.

Social media platforms enjoy absolute immunity from any liability over the user-generated content they feature. They can remove controversial content without being perceived as responsible for its nature. Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have an internal mechanism for dealing with "content that violates the community's rules," and they remove posts according to their sole discretion.

The broad immunity afforded to them by law often translates into selective enforcement.

There have been dozens of cases when right-wing activists and journalists has their Facebook accounts suspended for allegedly violating the community's rules with their posts, all while someone sitting in Facebook headquarters in Ireland has no problem allowing posts inciting the murder of Jews to stand.

Facebook's own interpretation of the limits of freedom of expression has had a clear impact on the waves of stabbing and ramming attacks in Israel and around the world. This has been clearly shown in examples of inciting social media posts included as evidence of motive and intent in many cases of mayhem and murder.

The evidence proves that the killers were often inspired by and drew ideological justification for their actions from posts by extremist religious leaders. It also proves that they received "training" from videos posted by terrorist groups on their websites as well as on social media.
High profile Twitter users call for boycott of site over antisemitism
A group of high-profile Twitter users, backed by leading community figures, writers, celebrities and politicians have launched a campaign for a 48 hour 'walkout' from the site from Monday, in protest at Twitter's refusal to take proportionate action against rapper Wiley.

The grime star - who has nearly 500,000 followers - published a series of antisemitic posts on Twitter and Instagram on Friday and Saturday

But Twitter merely imposed a 'suspension', leaving almost all the posts still on the site.

Wiley is the latest in a long line of accounts with large numbers of followers who have posted antisemitic tweets.

A spokesman for the group said: “The action we are announcing today is to show that the Jewish community and its allies have had enough of platforms like Twitter acting as loudspeakers for antisemitism, amplifying the hatred of Jews to millions of other social media users.

"As soon as Wiley began posting his antisemitic tweets on Friday Twitter was flooded with requests to have his account taken down. In response Twitter deleted a couple of his tweets and gave the grime star a brief suspension. It was a completely inadequate response.

"Unless there is an immediate change in how Twitter operates then there will be further action, including legal action, against the organisation.”

The walkout is being promoted using the hashtag #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate




Home secretary demands social media giants act faster on antisemitism
The home secretary has called on social media companies to act faster in removing “appalling hatred” from their platforms following outrage over anti-Semitic posts made by grime artist Wiley.

Police are investigating a series of comments made on the musician’s Instagram and Twitter accounts on Friday that led to him being banned from both for seven days.

In a tweet on Sunday, Priti Patel said: “The antisemitic posts from Wiley are abhorrent.

“They should not have been able to remain on Twitter and Instagram for so long, and I have asked them for a full explanation.

“Social media companies must act much faster to remove such appalling hatred from their platforms.”Following Wiley’s posts, Twitter was accused of “ignoring anti-Semitism” as his tweets were still visible 12 hours after they were first posted.

A number of tweets have now been removed and he has been given a seven-day ban by the site.

On Sunday, a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, said the platform had also issued the rapper with a seven-day block on his account.





Cartoon of the Day: Reading material

toon bari

Metropolitan Museum of Art calls tefillin “an Egyptian amulet”

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This is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art webpage showing its collections:

 

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This object is obviously tefillin shel rosh, called “phylacteries” in the New Testament, that Jewish men wear for prayer every day (and in the times of the Talmud, all day.)

It is sort of amazing that tefillin could be categorized in the museum as Islamic era amulet since 1962 with no one recognizing it.

This tefillin shel rosh  looks startlingly modern with even the four-branched Shin on the side.

While tefillin shel rosh seem to have been cube shaped since at least the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are conical tefillin shel yad in the Cairo Geniza and cylindrical tefillin shel yad as late as a 1725 engraving by a French/Dutch artist Bernard Picart, as well as tefillin shel yad shaped like an arch in (seemingly) the 19th century.

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Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz says that the Talmudic prescription that tefillin shel yad must be square only refers to the base, not the box, as is the case with all of these.

Today’s Peter Beinart lie: “Palestinians have been excluded from mainstream US media”

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Peter Beinart continues with his push to destroy Israel with another whopper of a lie.

“For decades, Palestinians have been largely excluded from the mainstream US media conversation about Israel-Palestine. That exclusion continues today, and represents one more form of Palestinian dispossession,” he tweeted.

Really?

Judging from the New York Times op-ed page since Arafat rejected Oslo, I see articles by

Marwan Barghouti
Saeb Erekat
Diana Buttu
Ahmed Abu Artema
Mahmoud Abbas
Hanan Ashrawi
Ali Abunimah
Ayman Odeh
Raja Shehadeh
Zena Agha
Daoud Kuttab
Yasir Arafat
Ali Jarbawi
Yousef Munayyer
Rashid Khalidi
Khalil Shikaki
Linda Sarsour
Zahi Khoury

I’m probably missing some. Most of these were in the past decade. Many of these have written articles more than once. (If you include the years before 2000, there are even more, like Edward Said and Mamdouh Aker. )

Not to mention that Rashida Tlaib has been all over the media since her election. Hanan Ashrawi and Saeb Erekat have been staples on TV news shows for decades.

Now, how many countries can claim to have had more citizens writing in US media? Israel, probably the UK, maybe Canada. Are there more articles by Germans or the French or Mexicans or Japanese than Palestinians? I doubt it highly.

Even this doesn’t tell the whole story. For while the US newspapers are eager to publish Israelis who oppose Israel’s policies, one would be hard pressed to find Palestinians who are against the Palestinian leadership or who are pro-Israel in the media. Voices like Khaled Abu Tomaeh or Bassem Eid are rarely found in the New York Times nowadays (Bassem Eid was published in 2001 and 1996, not since.)  Throughout the 2010s, the ratio of anti-Israel to pro-Israel op-eds in the NYT was about 4-1, meaning that the Palestinian perspectives were well represented even if not from Palestinians  - which is not unusual, as there were more Americans who wrote op-eds and columns about the conflict than Israelis and Palestinians combined.

In short, Peter couldn’t name more than  a handful of actual countries that have had more representation in US media than Palestinians. The truth is the exact opposite of his claim.

But when someone is seeking attention for his immoral ideas, making things up is not unexpected.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

  • Saturday, July 25, 2020

07/25 Links: Twitter faces 48-hour boycott over ‘failure to tackle antisemitism’; Jewish group asks head of Philadelphia NAACP to resign after anti-Semitic Facebook post

From Ian:
Twitter faces 48-hour boycott over ‘failure to tackle antisemitism’
Anti-racism campaigners and public figures have joined calls for a mass walkout from Twitter in protest at the site’s failure to sufficiently tackle antisemitism.

Users of the platform are being urged not to post on the platform for 48 hours from Monday at 9am. The action comes after Twitter failed to remove the account of British grime artist Wiley following a string of hate-filled posts to his half-a-million followers between Friday and Saturday morning.
Grime artist Wiley has been dropped by his management company over accusations of anti-Semitism.( Photo credit : Matt Crossick/PA Wire)

“Wiley’s is just one of a recent number of high profile and influential Twitter accounts that has incited racial hatred against Jews, receiving an insufficient response from the platform provider,” said organisers of the campaign that includes actress Tracy-Ann Oberman. “This incident reflects the need for clear legislation, such as the Online Harm Reduction Bill.”

Activist Saul Freeman, who tweets under @nuddering, approached Oberman with the idea of a mass walkout after she tweeted on Friday night that she might stop using the platform.

Twitter faced sustained criticism from the Jewish community and high-profile figures beyond including Piers Morgan after only removing a few of Wiley’s tweets and slapping him with a week-long ban, rather than taking down his account.

Among dozens who have already pledged to join the walkout before it was even publicly announced are anti-racism campaigner Sir Trevor Phillips, singer Beverley Knight, comedian Shappi Khorsandi, former MP Luciana Berger, broadcaster Maajid Nawaz and writers Nick Cohen and Sathnam Sanghera. The call for action also has the backing of the CST, Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council.

CAA calls for prosecution, revocation of MBE and closure of social media accounts of musician Wiley over unhinged incitement against Jews
Campaign Against Antisemitism is calling for the prosecution of the musician known as Wiley over his unhinged incitement against Jews. We have also called for the revocation of his MBE and asked Twitter and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, to close his social media accounts.

The rapper, whose name is Richard Kylea Cowie but who is known as Wiley, has spent today engaged in an escalating rant which has culminated in calls for Jews to be shot and for black people to go to “war” against them.

After a day spent likening Jews to the Ku Klax Klan and claiming that Jews had cheated him and were “snakes”, Wiley tweeted that Jews should “hold some corn”, which is a slang expression meaning that they should be shot. He added “Jewish community you deserve it”.

He also called on “black people” to go to “war” with Jews.

Wiley repeatedly evoked conspiracy theories that Jews were responsible for the slave trade and that modern-day Jews are in fact imposters who usurped black people — a conspiracy theory that has incited acts of terrorism against Jews, such as a stabbing attack in Monsey in New York in December.

As Wiley spewed his antisemitic venom, Campaign Against Antisemitism responded with the facts, for example that the conspiracy theory that Jews were responsible for the slave trade has been described by the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project at University College, London, as based on “no evidence whatsoever”.

Wiley’s racist ramblings, which he apparently referred to as “Black History Lesson For Today”, come after the musician known as Ice Cube tweeted a picture of an antisemitic mural and several other celebrities have promoted the antisemitic hate preacher Louis Farrakhan. During his rant, Wiley praised Ice Cube.
Police probes British rapper Wiley after an antisemitic tirade on Twitter
British rap artist Richard Kylea Cowie Jr., most commonly known as Wiley, is facing a police investigation after a string of antisemitic comments appeared on his social media accounts, prompting his management to drop him.

“If you work for a company owned by 2 Jewish men and you challenge the Jewish community in anyway of course you will get fired,” Wiley wrote and then added, “Infact [sic] there are 2 sets of people who nobody has really wanted to challenge #Jewish & #KKK but being in business for 20 years you start to undestand [sic] why.”

In several other tweets, Wiley claimed that Jews control "the Law," and made several claims about Israel not being a Jewish country, "Listen to me Jewish community Israel is not your country I'm sorry."

When confronted about his tweets, Wiley wrote "Anti Semetic? What's it called the way you rip us off in business then? What's that called when you tell us there is 1 rule for us and another rule for you lot? What's that called?" He added "Anti Semetic? Are u stupid? Do you know what these people do to the world?"

Police confirmed they had received complaints about Wiley.




Friday, July 24, 2020

07/24 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Betraying Jewish history by watering down the Holocaust; Arsen Ostrovsky: Xinjiang Shows We Haven't Learnt a Thing from Auschwitz

From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: Betraying Jewish history by watering down the Holocaust
The British baroness Ruth Deech, whose family were Jewish refugees from Nazism, recently delivered an impassioned address to the Oxford Jewish community about the way the Holocaust is being evacuated of meaning by memorials and museums in its name.

Her concern was prompted by the controversial plan to build a Holocaust memorial and learning center in London's Victoria Tower Gardens, a small park near the Houses of Parliament.

Westminster council, the local planning authority, has turned down this proposal on environmental grounds. The space is a small, green oasis that would not only be marred by a jarring brutalist structure, but risks becoming submerged by tourist traffic and anti-Jewish vandals alike.

The British government is making extraordinary and arguably irregular efforts to overturn this decision and get this center built. Its insistence is all the more strange given that there are already five major Holocaust memorials in Britain.

Deech's concerns, however, go far deeper than inappropriate positioning. Her sharpest point is that these memorials tend to shy away from the real causes of Jew-hatred. Instead, they are increasingly being used to promote a self-congratulatory and sometimes self-exculpatory image of the country that erects them.

Britain's memorials, for example, do not note how in the 1930s and 1940s, the U.K. government blocked the entry into Palestine of desperate European Jews in flagrant repudiation of the British Mandate to settle Jews there, thus facilitating their extermination in the Nazi slaughter.

"The Holocaust didn't involve "injustices" against the Jews. It involved the attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish people."

Hungary, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries have used Holocaust memorializing to erase their own complicity in the slaughter of the Jews, presenting themselves instead as historic victims of the Nazis or even equating the Nazi killing of Jews with the Soviet killing of other minorities.

As Deech observed, the Holocaust tends to be lumped together with other genocides and examples of racism or persecution, thus watering down its significance. The message becomes a generalized one of avoiding hatred and intolerance.

But that doesn't address or explain the roots of the Holocaust: "Namely, centuries of Jewish persecution; first, on the grounds of religion, and then on the grounds of race, and now on the grounds of a distorted left-wing view of the State of Israel."
Arsen Ostrovsky: Xinjiang Shows We Haven't Learnt a Thing from Auschwitz
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called Chinese government actions in Xianjiang the "stain of the century," and asserted that China is "in a league of its own" on human rights violations.

The Treasury Department has also imposed Magnitsky sanctions on some of the Chinese officials responsible for these crimes, while President Trump has signed into law the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, giving the U.S. an even greater array of tools to target Chinese abuses—which the administration has signaled its preparedness to use.

Meantime, there is currently a bipartisan bill before Congress to ensure that goods made with forced labor by the Uyghurs in Xinjiang do not enter the U.S. market.

The next, and perhaps most powerful step, must be to invoke the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against China, which is a signatory.

However, one cannot help but ask, where is the rest of the international community?

The Muslim world has completely turned its back to the cries of their own people being slaughtered. As Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council suggests, they have been entirely outmaneuvered by China, their silence bought with billions of dollars in supposed aid and investment.

Enlightened Europe, which recently managed to secure over 1,000 parliamentarians to sign a letter condemning Israel's proposed application of sovereignty over the West Bank, has not been able to muster more than a whimper when it comes to China.

Meantime, the United Nations, which was created in the wake of the Holocaust to serve a bulwark against genocide and crimes against humanity, has likewise been deafeningly silent, with China's Security Council veto guaranteeing virtual impunity. At the same time, in an abominable act of injustice, China is now set to be elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council, according to U.N. Watch.

In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel warned us "there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."

Here, too, we cannot remain silent, thereby giving China impunity for its crimes. We must speak up for the Uyghur people.

(Another) Cartoon of the Day: Little David’s trip

This cartoon caption came out better than I expected.

toon occup

07/24 Links Pt1: Caroline Glick: Stability for our enemies; Oslo revisited; Head of PA’s Mission to UK Lies and Distorts 1948 History; Europe’s NGO cold war to ‘mitigate pro-Israel voices’

From Ian:
Caroline Glick: Stability for our enemies
Since the 1990s, the dominant view in Israel's national security community has been that Israel's top priority in relation to the Palestinians is to maintain the stability of their leadership. This is the case in relation to both the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria and the Hamas regime in Gaza.

The rationale behind this view is that despite their hostility, if the regimes lose control, things will be worse, not better for Israel. Israel will have to take over, at great cost in lives and international stature. In other words, it's either Fatah and Hamas or the Israel Defense Forces. And Israel's security establishment prefers the former.

To achieve the goal of preserving the Fatah regime, Israel's generals and their think tank colleagues have long insisted the government ensure its financial viability. In practice, this has required Israel to collect customs and other indirect taxes for the PA and transfer the funds, with no strings attached to the PA every month. The fact that the PA has always used large portions of its budget to finance terrorism was of little consequence to the generals and their colleagues.

In the case of Hamas-controlled Gaza, preserving the terrorist regime has required Israel to permit the PA to transfer funds to its employees in Gaza, even though by paying their salaries the PA effectively enabled Hamas to devote its resources solely to waging its war against Israel. Preserving Hamas has also involved Israel allowing Qatar to send truckloads of cash to Gaza to keep Hamas's terror state afloat.

Safe in power – thanks to Israel – Fatah has been free to devote its energies waging its multidimensional war against Israel. It funds terrorists – with the tax arrears Israel collects for it. It incites terror on its media organs – again paid for by the taxes Israel transfers. It pays its security forces and indoctrinates its members to seek Israel's destruction. It engages in large-scale theft of government lands and illegal construction in Judea and Samaria to choke off Jewish communities. And the Fatah-PA wages diplomatic war against Israel at the UN, in the world capitals, and increasingly at the International Criminal Court.

Safe in power in Gaza, Hamas builds up its forces. It develops collaborative ties with Hezbollah and the Houthis and strengthens its client relationship with both Iran and Turkey. And every so often, it opens another missile offensive against aimed at killing and terrorizing Israeli civilians.

Whether they like it or not, the denizens of Hamastan and Fatahland alike have no choice other than to live under the jackboot of their regimes. Thanks to Israel – and its stability minded security experts – they have no chance of competing for power or rebelling.

Oslo revisited
The days of the Oslo Accords were dark days for Israel. Fortunately, the public put a stop to the Oslo trend before it endangered the very fabric of the State of Israel.

As Tisha B'Av rolls closer, it behooves us to ponder how Israel managed to extricate itself from the trap laid for her in the 1990’s by the infamous Yasser Arafat and by the “liberation” terror organization that he led.

The Oslo Accords cost us over one thousand casualties, but the dangerous veering toward the sea, eventually slowed. Nowadays we are discussing sovereignty – not “victims of peace”. There is plenty of room for improvement in our diplomatic discourse even today. But everything is relative.

In contrast, remember what happened in the darkest days the Jewish people ever experienced, ever – in Nazi Europe. You remember the famous poem, by a German Lutheran leader called Martin Niemöller, about being passive and keeping silent:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

The Oslo Accords, horrific as they were and still are, never reached anywhere near the point Europe reached during Nazi days. Why? Not because Palestinian Arab leaders are lacking in antisemitism. They are not. The central reason was that during Hitler’s day, there was no State of Israel. But there was also another reason. The second reason was that prominent people in Nazi Germany simply did not do very much about it, when ugly things began to happen in their country.

In Israel however, way before things slid into a complete abyss, people did things. People stood up and said, this is not cool. Not just the downtrodden, not just the persecuted, stood up and banged on the national table. Prominent people stood up and said this – not many of them, but enough of them.

Head of PA’s Mission to UK Lies and Distorts 1948 History
However, the op-ed in The Times (paywall) by Sammy Stein, co-chair of Glasgow Friends of Israel, he’s referring to doesn’t even allude to the Zomlot family’s dislocation during the Arab-Israeli war, and doesn’t accuse Palestinians of lying about their flight during that time.

In other words, Zomlot’s accusation — that Stein accused Zomlot of lying, is itself a lie.

Rather, Stein’s piece largely focuses on what he refers to as the “politicised hijacking of a term Nakba,” and characterizes “The Nakba” as self-inflicted by the Arab leaders who launched a war of annihilation against Israel instead of accepting partition.

Zomlot continues to mislead in a subsequent paragraph:
Palestinian refugees, scholars everywhere, as well as a growing number of Israeli historians, have all attested to the reality of al-Nakba (the “Catastrophe”), when hundreds of towns were depopulated, looted and destroyed. Overall, more than half the population of Palestine was expelled. This is what Mr Stein refers to as “Israel’s success”

First, it’s not true that all of the refugees were expelled. Most fled due to orders from Arab military and political leaders, or of their own accord — to escape the war. More deceiving, however, is Zomlot’s claim that Stein referred to the Palestinian exodus as an Israeli “success.”

Here are the relevant paragraphs from Stein’s op-ed, where he refers to Israeli success:
The politicised hijacking of a term Nakba which bemoaned the absence of pan-Arab unity and castigated Arabs for their failings, into a term of abuse against Israel is a calculated and continuous act of deception, designed to absolve Arab states of blame and condemn Israel for successfully defending itself against attack.
…
Today Palestinians and their apologists worldwide might stop to consider these realities and face up to the fact that Nakba describes their failure, not Israel’s success.

It’s clear that Stein is referring to Israel’s survival in the Arab war as an Israeli “success” — not the flight of Palestinian refugees.

To see more deceit from Zomlont, read this post on his recent appearance on BBC’s “Hardtalk.”

Cartoon of the Day: The problem with Jews

Continuing with my recaptioning of single panel cartoons….

I think that this is a bit deeper than it looks.

toon guilty
  • Friday, July 24, 2020
  • Elder of Ziyon

Iranian writer upset over showing “VeggieTales” cartoon about the Purim story (Plus: Was Esther green?)

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The children’s TV series VeggieTales once adopted the Book of Esther for children.

The video, “Esther: The Girl Who Became Queen,” never mentions Jews.

 

This show is available on an Iranian streaming service, and this upset the Iranian Revolutionary Guard :

On July 15th, Iran’s Fars News Agency, which is linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), published an article stating that “a Zionist hero has infiltrated our streaming services.” The author was referring to the VeggieTales movie “Esther: The Girl Who Became Queen.”

The animated film is broadcast both on Iranian streaming service Filimo and through the streaming outlets of an organization directly linked to Supreme Leader Khamenei. Despite it’s connections to Khamenei and his government, the journalist calls out VeggieTales’ representation of Esther for painting Persians as the antagonists. The journalist interprets the film’s presentation of Haman as a statement about Iran.

“This is a historical fabrication that can easily mold the mind of a child,” writes the journalist. “Such a mind would be more amenable toward accepting Zionist conceptions, Judaism, and occupation of the land of Palestine.”

As an aside, I was going to make a joke about how VeggieTales chose to represent Esther as the famous Talmudic interpretation (Megillah 13a) that says that Esther was green (“yerakroket.”) But Wikipedia, of all places, has a really interesting explanation of that Gemara:

To the Rabbis, Esther was one of the most beautiful women ever created.[2] Another source says Esther was yerakroket, often translated as "greenish";[3] but as classical Greek used the word chloros ("green") to refer to honey-like yellow and to human skin as well as what we call green,[4] the rabbis who lived in a Greek-influenced context may have intended that Esther's skin was a normal shade of yellow.

This site  goes through the various types of “green” mentioned in the Talmud and refers to a commentary by the 11th century Rabbeinu Chananel who says that “yarok” could refer to the color of an egg-yolk or to reddish-gold, and concludes that that Esther, described as “yerakoroket,” was a blonde. But gold colored skin could easily be considered beautiful as well.

Elder gets results! CNN changes offensive paragraph

Yesterday I tweeted and posted about an offensive paragraph in this CNN article:

cnn1

 

Since then, CNN changed the paragraph and added links:

An estimated 6 million Jewish people were killed in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Also killed were hundreds of thousands of Roma people and people with mental or physical disabilities.

“Murdered” would be a better and more accurate term than “killed,” although this is much better than the passive “died.”

It is still inaccurate – CNN does not know the difference between concentration camps and extermination camps, and does not account for the huge number of Jews that were killed outside those camps.

But, hey, baby steps. Why assume one of the most influential news sources should get it right the second time?

 

(h/t Mark B)

Thursday, July 23, 2020

  • Thursday, July 23, 2020
  • Elder of Ziyon

Head of largest Muslim UK charity quits after antisemitic, pro-terror posts uncovered



The Times of London revealed that a leader of Britain’s largest Muslim charity had posted a string of antisemitic and pro-Hamas posts on Facebook.

The revelation forced Heshmat Khalifa, a trustee and director of Islamic Relief Worldwide, to step down. 

In Facebook posts he referred to Jews as the “grandchildren of monkeys and pigs” and called Egypt’s president a “Zionist pimp.”

Islamic Relief's £570 million income over the past five years included contributions from the United Nations, the European Commission and the British taxpayer.

Khalifa wrote on social media that Hamas is “the purest resistance movement in modern history”. He added that declaring its armed wing a terrorist organisation was a “shameful disgrace to all Muslims.”

Many of his antisemitic insults were aimed at Egypt's president Al Sisi. Khalifa called the Muslim president a “pimp son of the Jews”, a “Zionist pig”, a “Zionist traitor” and a “Zionist criminal”.

Khalifa deleted the posts after the Times informed him that they would be writing about them.

Like most antisemites nowadays, he denied he was a Jew-hater. He told The Times that his comments were “my expressions of frustration with the political regime, rather than beliefs that I hold”. He said: “I did not intend to insult the Jewish community and neither do I hold views which are antisemitic. I have dedicated much of my life’s work to promoting tolerance and freedom of religion and beliefs.”

How that translates to calling Jews the descendants of apes and pigs is unclear.

The British-based Muslims Against Antisemitism denounced the posts, calling them "appalling antisemitism" and saying "These precise comments are more widespread than thought, and we will continue to work to reduce antisemitism, inspire Muslims to stand up against it, and support those who do."

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.
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EoZ Book:"Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism"

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Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون



This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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