Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, August 03, 2020

08/03 Links Pt1: International Law, Not Terrorism, Must Be the New Paradigm; China’s Emerging Middle Eastern Kingdom; Israelis have more in common than not with one another

From Ian:

International Law, Not Terrorism, Must Be the New Paradigm

What must occur to alter the course of this perpetual cycle of violence, terror and violation of law and rights is a fundamental shift in the paradigm applied. Israel and the international community must transcend and move away from terms rooted in terror, and hold the violators accountable to the language and terms of international law and human rights.

In practice, what this means is that negotiations anywhere must not take place on the terms determined by genocidal terrorist regimes and their supporters, and that the price paid must conform to agreed-upon international standards. It means a system of "monetary for humanitarian," where only when the humanitarian needs of Israel are met does the cash flow.

For example, instead of allowing Hamas to set the negotiation terms, the international community must acknowledge that holding four Israeli citizens captive is a standing violation of international law, and humanitarian aid is therefore at risk of being embargoed if the Israelis are not returned and if the law is not upheld. The fact that one of the Israelis being held captive for six years nearly to this day—Hadar Goldin—was killed during an internationally brokered humanitarian ceasefire only further strengthens the international legal and moral argument. The concept of a "prisoner swap" prescribed by terrorist thought and rhetoric as the tool to use in such a scenario must be denounced; instead, international law must be upheld.

Similarly, the financial support—known as "pay-for-slay"—that the Palestinian Authority provides to terrorists, must cease, or their humanitarian aid and the provision of international aid by United Nations agencies must be limited. Announcements that Israel is now seizing these terrorists' salaries form a necessary first step. The international community also must make difficult choices of when to restrict aid in order to uphold international laws and human rights norms. If it fails to do this, these laws and norms risk losing their very meaning.

This new paradigm of international law, human rights and norms means that Israel too must move away from the old paradigms or prisoner swaps and cease allowing the "pay-for-slay" payments to take place. The global community and Israel together have the potential of leading by example, utilizing the language of rights and expecting consistency and reciprocity from the international community in return. Only then can the cycle of violence begin to unravel, and a renewed "world order" be built on a profound commitment to uphold, promote and protect human rights.

Michael Doran and Peter Rough: China’s Emerging Middle Eastern Kingdom

If the Russian-Iranian alliance should die, or become weak and ineffectual, China will not step in directly to build it back up—because Beijing fears a direct confrontation with the United States. The first priority of American policy, therefore, is to remove the sword from China’s hand by crushing the Russian-Iranian alliance. The domestic American political climate will not permit the use of large numbers of American troops in this project, but four other tools do exist:
1) Economic sanctions. The Trump administration has been imposing these effectively. The Iranian economy is in perilous condition, and the economic situation of Iran’s allies, the Assad regime and Lebanese Hezbollah, are equally dire.
2) Clandestine operations. In recent months, Iran has experienced a wave of mysterious fires and explosions at industrial complexes and military installations. One of these events, at the nuclear fuel enrichment site at Natanz, reportedly set back the country’s nuclear program significantly. A foreign hand is suspected in at least some of these episodes, and the finger of suspicion points most often at Israel. But the sabotage could just as easily be the result of a joint American-Israeli operation.
3) Direct military action by allies. The Turks and the Israelis have both carried out very effective operations in Syria that have significantly degraded not just Iranian but also, in the case of the Turks, Russian capabilities.
4) Selective and judicious use of American military capabilities. The killing of Qassem Soleimani in December did more to shake the Iranian regime than any step the United States has taken in the last 30 years, with the possible exception of the invasion of Iraq. It not only removed from the game an indispensable player, but it boosted the morale of America’s allies and demoralized its enemies.

These tools, taken together, can effectively remove the Russo-Iranian sword from the hand of China. They are already being used. Are they the result of a conscious Trump administration strategy, or have they simply materialized as a set of ad hoc responses to the president's insistence that his national security team contain Iran aggressively, yet with an economy of force? Whatever the answer, they point the way forward. The goal of American policy should be to use them separately and in coordination so as to increase their lethality.

The greatest advantage that the United States has in its competition with China and, indeed, with any of its adversaries, is hard power. In the realm of trade and investment, Washington simply cannot compete with China and hope to win. If it is to contain China successfully, then it will win with its sledgehammers: military power and economic sanctions. In the Middle East, what America’s allies crave most is the security that comes from the might of the American military. Nothing does more to encourage allies to hedge their bets and cozy up to Beijing than the fear that the United States has decided to abandon military competition as a tool of statecraft.

As China works to make the Middle East a factor in the Western Pacific balance of power, the United States should respond by bringing the Pacific to the Middle East. China’s energy supply lines and its aspiration to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf should become a regular and significant part of America’s discussions with its Pacific partners and India. The goal of this dialogue should be to arrive not just at a shared picture of the threat but also at strategies for assuring that China’s supply lines remain highly vulnerable. China’s partners and potential partners in its plan to become a Middle Eastern military power—Iran, Djibouti, Pakistan, Iraq, and others—should be put on notice that the days of harmonic convergence are over. Support for Chinese hard-power aspirations must come at a steep price. The U.S. must bury harmonic convergence as an organizing principle, or risk ceding control of the international system to a hostile, anti-democratic power.

Israelis have more in common than not with one another - opinion

If there is a large protest, the media will – as it must – interview the protesters and then the politicians. The protesters are protesting because they are angry, and that anger comes out in their words. The politicians are looking for someone to blame, and that anger comes out in their words.

Both Transportation Minister Miri Regev (Likud) and MK Moshe Ya’alon (Yesh Atid-Telem) – on opposite sides of this country’s pro- and anti-Netanyahu divide – sound as if they are about to blow a gasket every time they talk about the other side. Interviewee after interviewee sound angry, mad and full of hate.

But there is another Israel out there. It’s the one that quietly goes on with its life in these uncertain times, perhaps not agreeing – and perhaps even strongly disagreeing – with the political outlook of their neighbors or co-workers, but not hating them, not wanting to wage an all-out war against them. In fact, there are many who feel a great deal of sympathy for their countrymen’s suffering as a result of the pandemic.

The problem is that right now, that does not attract attention and does not get air time. What attracts attention is extreme rhetoric. What attracts attention is comparisons to dark periods of history. What attracts attention is saying that the other side are a bunch of fanatics hell-bent on destroying the country: anarchists to the left of me, fascists to the right.

And since that is what attracts attention, that is what is shouted out from the megaphones, picked up by the press and amplified on social media. So one wakes up and believes that is the reality.

Except it’s not. It might be a slice of this country’s reality, but only a slice.

There is another reality out there,reflected in that meeting of those reservists, of an Israel where not everyone hates the other side, and where – though it might sound corny – what binds really is greater than what divides.

Which is not to say that the atmosphere is not charged, and that in a charged atmosphere someone may commit an act of political violence. But civil wars – the type some are warning of now – are not made of individuals on the fringes taking extreme action, but rather, brother taking up arms against brother because the hatred in their hearts overflows.

Walk the streets of the country beyond Balfour Street during one of the nightly protests – or step away from Twitter for a day – and chances are that you won’t encounter that overwhelming hatred, but rather, a reality that, while contentious, is softer and far less toxic and hate-filled than what you come across every time you turn on a computer, radio or television set.

Most people are not inhabiting the hate-permeated reality being portrayed in the media and online. There is another Israel out there.

Many critics of Israel (and others) say that philosemitism is just a form of antisemitism.*

I disagree. Two recent examples of seeming praise for Jews shows how to tell the difference between true admiration for Jews and fear of Jews.

Jordanian news site Ad Dustour often has explicitly antisemitic articles. So this article by Muhammad Dawudiya seems incongruous at first glance because it appears to praise Jews.

Judaism is a closed, non-missionary religion that does not promote conversions and refuses to engage in it. Numerical abundance does not occupy a position, interest or goal in the Zionist thought and planning.

No Jewish rabbi calls anyone in the world to convert to Judaism.

The number of Jews in the world is around 14 million, but their financial, electoral, political, media, scientific, and industrial influence is increasing exponentially.

Jews in the world are closer to the party, organization, and system run by the World Jewish Council and their lobbies scattered around their places.

This organization is based on a culture of solidarity, support, and sympathy for the center of the Jews - Israel, the state of all Jews, which constitutes the first investment destination for wealthy Jews who own 10% of the world's billionaires' fortunes, which are achieved by their domination of the knowledge economy, which they manage almost entirely.

Jewish organizations strongly support youth initiatives and innovation, which has achieved fortunes that exceed all the wealth of all Arab countries combined, two to three times!

The number of Christians in the world is about 2.2 billion people, or 32% of the world's population. The number of Muslims in the world about 1.6 billion people, making up 23% of the world's population. The number of Arabs is about 370 million, making up 5% of the world's population.

The number of Jews in the world is about 14 million, making up only 0.2% of the world's population.

Despite the minuscule number of Jews, they have influence that they control in most parts of the world.

More than 80% of the top American managers are Jewish or married to Jews.

According to the Center for Arab Gulf Studies, 3 million Jews possess more than the budgets and incomes of 152 countries in the world!

The average Jewish families’ donation to Jewish students, scientific research, elections, media and other goals amounts to about 9 billion dollars annually.

The place the Jews have achieved is proof of the need to focus on quality rather than quantity. And proof that many of us will not liberate Palestine.

Here we remember Lenin's saying: "Give me a dozen men and I will change the world with them." That dozen of men really changed the world.

Is this article philosemitic? Not at all. It is meant to teach Arabs the supposed Jewish strategy of taking over the world so the Jewish plans can be learned from.

But how can you tell when praise of Jews comes from admiration and when it comes from fear and hate?

Recently, Jonathan Hoffman’s blog reported:

In late March 2019 Stephen Lamonby, 73, a part-time lecturer at Solent University, remarked to a colleague, Dr Janet Bonar, that people from different countries had become good at certain things owing to “high exposure”. He said that Germans are good at engineering because they are “exposed to a high level of industry from an early stage in their lives”. When Dr Bonar, a US-born engineering lecturer, mentioned her degree in physics, Mr Lamonby said that Jewish people had “a particular gift” for the subject. He used Albert Einstein as an example and asked Dr Bonar if she was Jewish. She took offence and called Mr Lamonby a racist. He replied: “I believe that the Jewish are the cleverest people in the world. They are much maligned because of it. I asked if you were Jewish because of your ability with maths/physics et cetera. Which is a speciality of theirs.”

Here is a non-Jew who said that Jews are good at physics, offending his supervisor when he asked if her skill in the field perhaps comes from her being Jewish.

What differentiates Ad Dustour’s praise of Jews from that of Dr. Lamonby - or Donald Trump?

The answer is quite simple.

People who admire Jews would want to partner with them. They want to be friends with them. They want to hang around them.

People who view Jews as an implacable enemy want to learn their “secrets” from a distance. They want to use secondary sources to learn about Jews, but they don’t want to deal with them directly.

UPDATE: Yair Rosenberg wrote to me explaining that he definitely does not say that philosemitism is the same as antisemitism, and he has written this up as an article here.

From the gaming magazine Kotaku:

Israel is currently testing a new armored vehicle prototype that uses a wide array of modern technology, most notably an Xbox controller that allows soldiers to perform combat functions as if they were playing a video game.
…
The only open conflict in which Israel currently finds itself is against the people of Palestine, many of whom are essentially confined to regions run like open-air prisons. They cannot travel freely. They are second-class citizens. Their protests against these conditions are met with overwhelming aggression by the IDF, which even targets children and medics while violently shutting down dissent. When global organizations like the United Nations take steps to curtail Israel’s human rights abuses, the United States is quick to step in and block them.
That’s all to say that we shouldn’t be making it easier or more comfortable to kill someone. The more we make war like Call of Duty, the more removed humans will be from the act of killing. The monitors and controllers that fill these vehicles serve as much as a barrier between the user and the people outside as the vehicles’ armor does. In the Carmel tank, we see the perfect encapsulation of concerns brought up during previous integrations of gaming technology with military equipment: weaponizing the inherent desensitization of video games to turn young men and women into more capable and efficient killers.
As weapons of war have become more sophisticated, so too have the ways in which world governments shield soldiers from the psychological reality of taking another human life. By combining this remove with the familiarity of a video game controller, armies are turning a hobby we love into a de facto training exercise, getting younger generations ready to mow down children or fight in the next world war. We should not be inured to this; we should be horrified.

The writer, Ian Walker, breezily refers to Israel as an “apartheid state” so he is not exactly the most objective writer. But this is what happens when Israel haters push their venom into venues where people aren’t familiar with the facts and can easily be brainwashed.
In fact, as the original Washington Post article about this made clear, the US has been using gaming controllers in various weapons systems for years. If you are in a war, you want every advantage, and using an interface that soldiers are already familiar with is a way to make weapons safer, not more dangerous. Walker knows literally nothing about actual warfare and he apparently thinks that his playing war games on XBox make him some sort of expert.
In fact, Israeli soldiers know more about international humanitarian law than Walker can ever hope to know. The IDF spends millions to avoid innocent casualties. The propaganda that Walker so easily repeats from his forays into anti-Israel sites are lies, but they are lies that his magazine is not likely to catch and edit.
Walker purposefully did not quote the parts of the Washington Post story that contradicts his twisted propaganda agenda:

Critics of the intersection of gaming and war have pointed to the potential desensitizing effect that games could introduce to an arena with lethal consequences. Seeking to fight potential blurring between video games and real life war, Shabtai’s team opted against a virtual reality system with goggles and for an interface that requires a shared sense of reality with other people.
“When you’re dealing with the battle arena itself, you can’t be alone,” Shabtai said. “You’re not fighting in an aircraft, you’re on the ground, with other forces and another team member, everything needs to be connected.” The AI system also integrates weapon selections based on myriad circumstances, he said, giving the example that it would not present the operator with a missile option to respond to a single enemy shooting a rifle from a populated area.
Friedman said the distinctions are very clear. “It’s not being at home, eating and drinking and having fun. This is work,” he said. “There’s also the way [Carmel] moves, the noise it makes, it’s very different from a video game.”

In other words, the Israeli designers specifically thought about Walker’s scenario and mitigated that issue. Walker chose not to mention that, because his article is meant to portray Israelis as bloodthirsty killers, not moral human beings.

UPDATE: Israellycool beat me to this story.

After the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri and 21 others in 2005, the UN set up a special tribunal to investigate the attack and to try the suspects behind it in absentia. The four people on trial are members of Hezbollah and the verdict is expected this week.

Reports say that France has assured Hezbollah that it will protect the terror group if it is found to be complicit in the terror attack.

France has reportedly conveyed “assurances” that the ruling in the murder trial of ex-PM Rafik Hariri will not be followed by international procedures against Hizbullah, and that France has played a major role to make that possible, al-Joumhouria daily reported on Monday.

Quoting diplomatic sources, the daily said: “Paris has assured Hizbullah that ruling in the assassination case of Hariri will not be followed by an international course or effects against the party, and that Paris has played a fundamental role in this field.”

The sources added that France has in return asked Hizbullah to show “lenient” positions and stop media campaigns against the Gulf States, reported al-Joumhouria.

According to the sources, Paris will also work to control the behaviour of Bahaa Hariri, the son of the slain ex-PM, so that anti-Hizbullah regional powers do not invest that in their own interest.

It added that the new French ambassador will continue the task of direct contact with Hizbullah, and an expert assistant will assist in this matter.

France and the EU only designate Hezbollah’s “military wing” to be a terror group, as if there is a magical wall between its terror and political components. That fiction is bad enough.

But to assure the group that it will be actively shielded from international censure by a major Western power is a clear message to the world that France actively supports the group.

In June, France’s ambassador to Israel Eric Danon said that France had no plans to follow Germany in designating all of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. At the same time he said why France was against any Israeli moves to extend Israeli law over the territories: “France has always promoted a vision of international relations based on the rule of law and on negotiations, and not on unilateral actions,” he said.

Isn’t France telling Hezbollah ahead of the verdict that it will defend it from censure by other nations a unilateral action, not based on negotiations with the other nations?

Cartoon of the Day: From the river to the sea

Making fun of clueless protesters is always fun….

Larry Johnson, a former football player, tweets:

Johnson is saying that there IS a Jewish cabal that deals in human sacrifice, ritualistic child torture, pedophilia and so forth.

As evidence, he uses a Samuel L. Jackson movie character who describes how to know a person is lying by his eye movements - and then shows Kellerman looking up and to the right as he says there is no secret Jewish cabal – which, to morons like Johnson and his followers, is proof that there is a secret Jewish cabal for world domination.

Even Marc Lamont Hill, who himself loves ancient antisemitic conspiracy theories, politely told Johnson this was garbage. But many of Johnson’s followers loved what he had to say about Jews.
(The theory that eye movements reveal liars was debunked in 2012.)

Once again, a Black celebrity is spouting Jew-hating garbage. Johnson has nearly 150,000 followers, some of whom are happy to repeat or embellish his hate.

And yet again, the anti-Zionist Jewish Left ignores explicit antisemitism because they want you to think that the only Jew-hatred that exists is white supremacism.

I don’t know if antisemitism is getting worse or if Black celebrities feel more comfortable spouting hate out loud than they were a few months ago, but the net effect is that Jews are less safe today in America than they have been in years.

08/02 Links: Rabbi Cooper: Tech giants should stop letting bigots, terrorists spread hatred online; Israel’s unique methods against the Iranian threat; Hamas leader debunks some BBC narratives

From Ian:

Rabbi Abraham Cooper: Tech giants should stop letting bigots, terrorists spread hatred online

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and other tech giants have revolutionized our lives for the better in many ways and raked in billions of dollars in profits in the process. But unfortunately, they have also allowed the Internet to become an important tool used by racists, anti-Semites, terrorists and other purveyors of hatred and violence.

With social media and websites increasingly serving as our lifeline to news, entertainment and our children’s education, it would be irresponsible to ignore people who weaponize these essential communication tools in the service of hate groups.

I launched the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Digital Hate Project 27 years ago, when the Internet was in its infancy. When we first met with Facebook it was a small company that owned one building. Now more than 1 billion people around the world use Facebook.

Millions of us were outraged to see neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen, and other anti-Semites and white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017, loudly chanting “Jews shall not replace us.” They carried torches as if they were proudly parading in Nazi Germany in the 1930s or 1940s.

But when these groups use the Internet to spread lies and hatred they draw far less attention from most Americans. Yet the groups can actually have greater impact in cyberspace in poisoning impressionable mind and infecting them with hatred.

It is irresponsible for Big Tech companies to say they are simply common carriers that transmit information the way telephone companies transmit calls. The tech companies have an obligation to set and follow rules setting limitations on what can be said on their platforms so they can degrade the online marketing efforts of purveyors or racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry in all its ugly forms.

And since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, it has become vital to our national security that the tech companies stop terrorists from using their platforms to plot deadly attacks and recruit new terrorists.

High-fives are few and far between in the struggle against hate. And there is precious little to celebrate when preparing a report card on social media-delivered hate.

Take the new social media whiz-kid on the block, TikTok, which President Trump said Friday he will ban from the U.S. However, TikTok’s general manager for the U.S. posted a video saying “We’re not planning on going anywhere,” and any move by the president to shut down the site by executive order, as he said he would do, would likely face a legal challenge. Fox Business reported Friday that Microsoft has begun talks to buy the company.

An algorithm on TikTok’s platform drove 6.5 million viewers to an anti-Semitic song that includes the lyrics: "We're going on a trip to a place called Auschwitz, it's shower time."

Jpost Editorial: Wake up Twitter, shut down Khamenei’s account

Head of Twitter Policy for the Nordics and Israel Ylwa Pettersson, participating in the meeting via video link, categorized Khamenei’s tweets as permissible political speech.

“We have an approach to world leaders that presently says direct interactions with public figures, comments on political issues of the day or foreign policy saber-rattling on military and economic issues are generally not in violation of twitter rules,” Pettersson said.

Twitter’s Vice President of Public Policy Sinéad McSweeney went further writing to Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Orit Farkash Hacohen that Khamenei’s hateful tweets did not violate their policies.

“World leaders use Twitter to engage in discourse with each other, as well as their constituents,” McSweeney wrote in a June 15 letter.

“Political issues”? “Discourse with each other”? “Foreign policy saber-rattling”? Has Twitter lost its mind? Calling for the destruction of another people is not a political issue and is not foreign policy banter. It is a declaration of genocide, against a people that has some experience in attempts to wipe it out.

In another exchange, pro-Israel activist Emily Schrader asked Pettersson about Holocaust denial on the platform, pointing out that Facebook and TikTok ban it.

Pettersson said: “As our hateful conduct policy states, if the content tries to directly threaten or harass on the basis of religion, then that is something we would enforce.”

Meaning, Holocaust denial not targeting someone specific would not be a violation.

Social media companies like to say that they do not censor what people write out of a desire to uphold freedom of speech. We agree that freedom of speech is a value worth fighting for but there have to be red lines. Antisemitism, sexual exploitation, murder, organized hate and announcing plans to kill someone.

This also needs to apply to the leader of a state calling to destroy another state. This is not political talk or foreign policy disagreements. This is beyond the pale and standing by, as Twitter is doing, will be a stain on the platform for as long as Khamenei is allowed to continue to tweet.

Take a stand Twitter. Shut down Khamenei’s account.

Deputy anti-Semitism envoy slams Twitter for double standard on Khamenei and Trump

U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism Ellie Cohanim slammed Twitter on Friday for censoring U.S. President Donald Trump, but not Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction, saying that it’s “clear” that all that the social media company cares about is the November presidential elections.

In an interview on Fox News on Friday, Cohanim said that she and her family had to flee Iran during the 1979 revolution and increasing anti-Semitism.

“So, I can tell you that I personally understand the threat that…Ayatollah Khamenei presents to the Jewish people and to the world,” she said.

Cohanim also said, “The hypocrisy is so thick it becomes clear to me … that this is about one thing and one thing only and that’s the elections coming up in the United States on November 3rd.”

Queen Elizabeth would have been impressed with today's Gaza supermarkets

In 1957, Queen Elizabeth made her first visit to the United States as a monarch.

After watching college (American) football game, while her motorcade was driving through suburban West Hyattsville, Maryland, she saw a modern American supermarket (in the Queenstown shopping center on Queens Chapel Road) and asked if she could visit. Arrangements were quickly made.

“It’s very nice to be able to take your children here, isn’t it?” Elizabeth asked one bewildered shopper.
[Prince] Philip said to another shopper, picking up the lone cucumber that rested at the bottom of the man’s shopping cart, “You haven’t got very far, have you?”

If an American supermarket amazed the Queen of England then, imagine what she would have thought of today’s Gaza supermarkets.

The Al-Farra family of Khan Younis has apologized for how bad they made Gazans look in a video they made celebrating the cruel slaughtering of cows in the streets of Gaza for Eid al Adha on Friday.

The video, set to war-like music, shows a large clan of young men screaming in celebration for their macho abilities to stab tethered cows, prominently showing off their blood stained hands and clothes as if they were trophies.

The Al Farra family issued a statement that tried to justify the video as a means to make Gazans feel good about themselves, emphasizing that they are peace loving people and proud terrorists.

The Al-Farra family is considered an integral part of the entire Palestinian community and it is a family that preserves the rites of our religion, our customs and beliefs and has a firm doctrine that stems from the teachings of our Islamic religion and we would like to clarify what happened from some of the young people who published a video that shows their joy in the feast. …The family emphasize the following:
1 - Some of the family's youths attempted, with innocent intentions, to bring happiness to their families by celebrating the blessed Eid Al-Adha, but they were betrayed by how it was expressed, and some scenes which we did not accept and which the enemies of the nation took advantage of to distort the image of our people and our nation appeared.
2- These young people wish to live in peace like all the peoples of the world and do not like violence and blood.
3 - These young people have university degrees, including higher degrees, and they suffer from unemployment, like other young people under the siege, but they will remain pillars of this country for liberation and state building.
4- We deplore the scenes that appeared in the videos, which aroused the feelings of many and offended the image of our Palestinian people and our Islamic nation.
5- The Farra family, as part of the Palestinian fabric, has offered many martyrs, prisoners of war and wounded, and the family will remain an asset and a pillar of the homeland and religion.

Clearly the family itself edited the video to highlight their bloodlust, so their only regret is that some non-Gazans saw it and put it on social media.

This other Gaza Eid video shows a cow trampling a young man who is attempting to stab it, so other men beat it with an iron bar.

(h/t Abu Ali)

Does anyone actually read Peter Beinart’s Jewish Currents?

Since Peter Beinart had kept himself in the news with his absurd one-state solution, it is instructive to see whether he has a following that is commensurate with all the media attention.

Beinart is the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents. Jewish Currents seems well funded, with dozens of writers. So how many people actually read it?

The answer it, not too many.

According to Similarweb, Jewish Currents received about 116,000 visits in June 2020 – significantly less than any other Jewish news or opinion site ranked by that site that I could think of.

According to Google Analytics, EoZ had 80,000 pageviews in June, so Jewish Currents – despite having far more reporters, articles and Beinart - is closer in readership to a blog than a professional news site. (In May EoZ and Jewish Currents differed by only 10,000 views.)

Peter Beinart might be great at self-promotion, but his actual influence is far less than he makes it appear. (I don’t know whether his Open Zion site which closed in 2017 did any better. )

Beinart can get on CNN and he can generate buzz, but he doesn’t seem to have any real following.

08/01 Links: Caroline Glick: Riots and protests from Portland to Jerusalem; After Tisha B’Av fast, Nick Cannon reviews Bari Weiss’ anti-Semitism book

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Riots and protests from Portland to Jerusalem

In Israel, in contrast, the left is post-religious and ideologically bankrupt. Its two gods – peace and surrender – came crashing down 20 and 15 years ago, respectively. The failure of the Camp David peace summit in July 2000 and the start of the Palestinian terror war in September 2000 killed the religion of peace. The left's "unilateral withdrawal" god was shattered when months after Israel expelled its citizens from Gaza and handed the area over to the PLO in August 2005, Hamas seized power and embarked on a war against Israel that has yet to end.

Although bereft of an ideological message to sell the public, the Left in Israel has considerable power. Its control over Israel's deep state – including the entire legal system – is far more comprehensive than the American Left's control over its state apparatuses.

The Israeli Left controls most media organs, the universities, and cultural institutions. It has a limitless funding from foreign governments and private foundations in Europe and the US.

And the Israeli Left has demonstrators who are willing to cause mayhem to promote hatred of Netanyahu.

Like their American counterparts, the demonstrations in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are happening in the context of the pandemic. The demonstrators have hitched a ride on the economic distress the pandemic has induced. They also benefit from the closure of the public sphere.

With the bars and nightclubs shut down – and all travel abroad blocked until further notice – young people looking for a way to get together have only one option. The anti-Netanyahu demonstrations are the only parties in the country.

No matter who wins in November, it's hard to see how the situation in the US will stabilize and how order will be restored. The rise of progressive politicians at the expense of moderate Democrats indicates the radicalization of the American Left is not a flash in the pan. One electoral cycle won't fix what has been broken incrementally over five decades.

In Israel, in the absence of an ideological Left, the main and most tangible danger posed by the demonstrations is that one of the incited protesters will try to kill Netanyahu and his family. Threats to assassinate the prime minister and his wife and children have proliferated on social media as the massively and sympathetically covered protests have grown more incendiary.

But as far as Israeli society as a whole in concerned, so long as Netanyahu and his family remain safe, the protests are not likely to gain much traction. The public on both the Right and the Left are more moderate than they were 25 years ago. Netanyahu's public resilience – despite the Left's 25-year campaign to destroy him – is proof of the limits of the Left's power.

There are many conservative commentators on the right side of America's unbridgeable political divide that believe the US public will respond at the ballot box to the violence in their streets by reelecting Trump. Author Victor Davis Hanson wrote this week about the coming "counter-revolution."

In Israel's case, elections, and counter-revolutions, while necessary to enact the reforms required to rein in the deep state and restore Israel's democratic order, probably won't be needed to end the demonstrations. How many people will choose to stand outside screaming once the pubs reopen?

Amnesty International vs. Morocco and Israel

Amnesty International is a human rights NGO lionized by the media that disproportionately singles out Israel for condemnation. Even when occasionally denouncing human rights violations in other Middle Eastern countries, it endeavors to impute much of the responsibility directly or indirectly to the Jewish State.

Lately Amnesty has been targeting Israel through its fixation on Pegasus, a software that can be “injected” into smartphones to track the user’s location, calls, messages, etc. (a technique known as “spear phishing”). Pegasus was developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cybersecurity company founded in 2010 for combating the incessant terrorist attacks that target Israel’s civilian population. It was, and continues to be, instrumental in saving the lives and limbs of countless men, women and children.

It stood to reason that this important tool could be equally effective in preventing terrorist attacks all over the world, as well as disrupting drug and human trafficking and various other crimes. To minimize the possibility of it being misused, the company chose to sell this and other technologies only to “authorized governments,” more recently “in alignment to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.”

The Israeli Defense Ministry licenses the export of Pegasus to foreign governments but not to private entities. To cite just one of numerous examples, the Mexican government reportedly recaptured the notorious drug lord El Chapo in 2014 by means of the Pegasus software.

It is common knowledge that even life-saving medications may cause undesirable and at times dangerous side-effects. Penicillin and acetaminophen can and have caused deaths. Practically no human inventions, including software programs, are totally and predictably risk-free or immune from misuse.

That was the case with Amnesty’s allegation that Saudi Arabia used Pegasus to spy on, and later murder, Jamal Khashoggi, according to analyses performed by Citizen Lab at the behest of Amnesty that indicated that certain “domain names point[ed] to websites that appear to be part of NSO’s Group’s Pegasus infrastructure.”

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the uncertainty provided by words such as “appear to be” is often absent in Amnesty’s reports, as are other Citizen Lab caveats like “apparently,” “believe” and “suspected.”

How the Mossad hunted the ‘Butcher of Riga,’ who murdered up to 30,000 Jews

In March 1965, the West German Bundestag overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to bring to an end the hunt for Nazi war criminals and introduce a statute of limitations for their crimes.

The months leading up to the debate had seen a wave of opposition to the plans across the world. Thousands took to the streets from Tel Aviv to Toronto and Los Angeles to London. Nobel Prize winners, politicians, playwrights and the future Pope Benedict XVI raised their voices in protest. And in Germany, a bitter and divisive national debate broke out about how the country should atone for its sins and how widespread the responsibility for them truly lay.

But in those months another effort had also been launched to derail the German proposals. Hatched in secret by Israel’s intelligence chiefs and approved by prime minister Levi Eshkol, it was one that was nonetheless designed to focus the world’s attention on the hundreds, if not thousands, of perpetrators who had never seen the inside of a courtroom or prison cell — and likely never would if the Bundestag approved the statute.

It was also an effort in which Israel itself would act as judge, jury and executioner. Israel’s foreign intelligence agency the Mossad, it was decided, would hunt down and kill Herberts Cukurs — the “Butcher of Riga” — who was accused of being personally responsible for the deaths of at least 30,000 Latvian Jews.

Cukurs’s assassination, for which Israel would claim no responsibility, would publicize and punish his terrible crimes. It would serve, too, as a warning of the kind of rough justice that would be meted out to others if Germany provided an amnesty to war criminals.

The story of the mission to kill Cukurs is told in journalist and author Stephan Talty’s new book, “The Good Assassin: Mossad’s Hunt for the Butcher of Latvia.” It is a brilliantly written, heart-stopping, and, at times, heartbreaking tale; one that crosses continents from the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe to the jungles of South America.

At the center of Talty’s retelling lie two men: Cukurs and the undercover agent dispatched by Mossad to ensnare him, Yaakov “Mio” Meidad.

Known in the agency as “the man with the hundred identities,” Meidad was a German-born Jew whose parents had perished in the death camps. He had helped abduct Adolf Eichmann and bring him to Israel for trial.

Talty, who first encountered the story of the mission when reading Ronen Bergman’s “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” was fascinated by both Cukurs and Meidad, as well as the events that had brought them together.

“It was this idea that these two characters existed on either side of a terrible historical moment and now they had to meet, and Mio had to basically form a friendship with someone who was sort of the face of the ‘ordinary men’ of the Holocaust,” Talty told The Times of Israel.

07/31 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The progressive world: An antechamber to evil; In condemning antisemitism, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is in a league of his own

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The progressive world: An antechamber to evil

That enduring moral blindness means the progressive world is fated to replicate its role as the antechamber to evil. Today, that's why it supports the anti-white racists of Black Lives Matter. It's why the universities – the supposed crucibles of reason – have turned into cauldrons of intimidation and censorship.

It's why we have descended into a nightmarish Orwellian world in which those deemed to be part of a victim group present lies as truth, justice as injustice, and their own anti-white racism as anti-racism.

And it's why Israel-bashing has become the poster cause of the Western left, and open season has been declared against the Jews.

This way of thinking now dominates progressive politics in general and the Democratic Party in particular. That's why Democrat politicians are tacitly or actively supporting violent attacks on civic order.

As Barr observed: "This is the first time in my memory that the leaders of one of our great two political parties – the Democratic Party – are not coming out and condemning mob violence and the attack on federal courts. Why can't we just say, you know, violence against federal courts has to stop? Can we hear that?"

Jews are directly in the cross-hairs of those who are intent on overthrowing Western values. That's because Judaism, mediated through Christianity, gave the west its civilized moral precepts.

So attacks on Jews are symbiotically connected to left-wing attacks on western civilization.

Of course, there are still decent Democrats and those who remain sympathetic to Israel. But in general, the Democrats, like Britain's Labour Party and other progressive folk, have drunk the anti-Western Kool-Aid.

The tragedy is that so many Jews are incapable of seeing this. So they'll continue to vote Democrat, just as they'll continue to read The New York Times.

Reaction against the onslaught on American and Western values is what brought Trump to power. Many are outraged and exasperated by him. I share many of their criticisms.

But the choice at this coming presidential election is a fateful one; and for all who care about protecting American and Western core values, as well as Israel and the Jewish people, a Democrat victory is much to be feared.

Tracy-Ann Oberman: I experience anti-Semitism online every day – all I want is for social media companies to be consistent

On Wednesday I opened my Twitter account for the first time in two days. I’d been following the 48 hour social media ban which I (and Saul Freedman) had instigated , in response to social media sites allowing grime artist Wiley to repeatedly post anti-jewish hate speech, leaving some posts visible for 12 hours.

Our grassroots ban under the title #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate snowballed into a global phenomenon with high profile politicans, journalists, lawmakers, actors, musicians and hundreds of thousand of others demanding why Twitter, Instagram and Facebook had effectively given a megaphone to Wiley to spew out Jew hate to over 600 thousand followers.

I’ve been overwhelmed by the heavyweight commitment that I have received on this. From the Prime Minister down and across the house. Most significantly social media CEOs have had to sit up and see what I have been saying for a very long time. That anti-Semitism is running rampant, unchecked, infecting social media sites.

Back to Wednesday morning. I logged in to Twitter and first tweet of the morning to me read: “Fucking shut up, sticking your nose into literally everything apart from an oven where it actually belongs”.

When I was four years old my mum and dad, in a mad moment of 1970’s parenting, took me to The Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. My Dad went into the Hall of Names to look for relatives who he wanted verified had died in the concentration camps. I was pretty much left to wander around on my own. No four-year-old should have to process what I saw that day – pictures of skeletal bodies PILED in open graves, a pile of Jewish children’s shoes, teeth and hair. The picture I have never been able to erase from my memory, even after years of trying, was of a naked dead Jewish female body being placed into an oven to be incinerated. That would be the “oven” the tweeter told me I deserved to be in.

My great Uncle Josef who survived the Warsaw ghetto and two concentration camps was my hero. When I would ask how the world allowed the Holocaust to happen, in all its modern industrial German mechanised precision, he would answer in his thick Polish accent, “because people looked the other way. They didn’t want to see it.”

I’m a successful actress and a writer. I’m not a politician or an activist. It was never my aim to take the job of speaking out against race hate especially to Jewish people so vocally and vociferously. But I have spent my life making sure that I would never be one of those people who would “look the other way”. By standing up on social media (Twitter especially) I have become the target of much anti-Semitic and misogynistic abuse.

I’ve been called a “Jewish whore”, “a zio baby killer”, “a grooming paedophile”, “a tax evading shill”, and have been accused of “exaggerating the Holocaust for my own nefarious ends” and more. I’ve been told by Twitter that many of these tweets don’t “violate their terms and conditions”.

Seth Rogen - not funny

If you never heard of Seth Rogen, just as well. He made a splash in some off-beat movies, and became famous as an actor.

Turns out he is more than an actor. Or less than an actor. But more of a comedian, and not so funny.

In a normal world we would not care either way. So why do we care?

Nowadays we have to listen to idiots because they run our world, and he is one of them. He is also Jewish, which proves it takes all kinds.

He tells us that his Canadian parents are “radical Jewish socialists.” No kidding.

So this apple did not fall far from the tree, as we hear him tell an interviewer that “Israel makes no sense.” He questions why the state should exist, a story Al-Jazeera was quick to pick up.

That’s right. We do not need Farrakhan when we’ve got varieties homegrown. Alas, Rogen’s voice makes a sound throughout his “woke” generation.

Along comes this rebuke from Richard Trank, who uses gentle persuasion in the hope of showing Rogen the way to a Jewish heart…which would mean a love of Zion.

A lost cause.

Because Israel, from the ancient to the modern, is in your heart, mind and soul, or it isn’t, and if it isn’t, nothing’s going to help if you insist on being a wise guy.

Seth Rogen, Ahmadinejad to Costar in Stoner Terrorist Comedy (satire)

Actor and comedian Seth Rogen will team up with former Iranian President and die-hard Tupac fan Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a comedy about the duo’s marijuana-filled attempt to launch a terrorist attack on Israel, Point Grey Pictures announced.

Ahmadinejad will play himself in the film, as he looks to cap off his career of public service with a devastating suicide bombing of the Dizengoff Center mall in Tel Aviv. Rogen, meanwhile, will play a Jewish millennial who becomes angry at his parents and disillusioned with his pro-Israel upbringing after reading a tweet by pop star Selena Gomez.

Ahmadinejad recruits Rogen’s pot-loving character, named Seth Rothberg, to help him carry out the attack, and smoke-filled hilarity ensues, according to a teaser put out by the studio.

“We’ve already started doing some guerilla marketing for the film,” Rogen told The Mideast Beast. “Like, I’ve been doing interviews in character as Seth Rothberg and saying all sorts of crazy shit, like ‘Hey, maybe Israel shouldn’t exist,’ and, ‘You know, those Ayatollahs aren’t such bad guys after all,’ and not telling anyone I was playing a character.”

“And everyone is like, dude, what the f#%k?” Rogen continued. “Like, even my mohel called me and said, ‘I should have cut your d#$k off when I had the chance.’ It’s been kind of fun to see everyone freak out.”

No, speaking about Black antisemitism does not make one a racist

An article in the New Socialist crystallizes the discomfort that many socialist Jews have had with the Twitter 48 hour boycott campaign – by claiming that targeting a Black antisemite is actually racist:

Recent stories, and much longer-run patterns of discourse, have seen many people, including some Jews, attempting to “ethnicise” antisemitism. To construct it as a peculiarly “Black problem” or “Muslim Problem.” This is not a new phenomenon but it does seem to be gaining ground in the current moment - not coincidentally amidst the largest global Black liberation struggle in several generations. The thinker Adolph Reed has aptly noted in his essay “What Colour is Anti-Semitism” that,

Anti-semitism is a form of racism, and it is indefensible and dangerous wherever it occurs. What doesn’t exist is Blackantisemitism, the equivalent of a German compound word, a particular - and particularly virulent - strain of anti-Semitism. Black anti-Semites are no better or worse than white or other anti-Semites, and they are neither more nor less representative of the ‘black community’ or ‘black America’.”

Part of the specification of a particularised “Black antisemitism” seems to be connected to the seeming relish with which many white people, including some white Jews, see instances such as Wiley’s outburst as an opportunity to call Black people “racist.” There is a tendency to impose collective responsibility on Black or Muslim “communities” for instances of antisemitism (and for many things other things) in ways that Neo-Nazis like David Duke or Nick Griffin (both of whom, incidentally, not banned from Twitter) [this article was written before Duke’s suspension – EoZ] are never held to be representative of white, English or American culture. Except, of course, that is what they are. The discourses and violence that make up the long history of antisemitism are far more organic to the cultures of white, Christian Europe and its settler colonies than anywhere else. Attempts to ethnicise antisemitism today are regularly mobilised, often by non-Jews, as a means to derail and discredit justice and liberation movements and their demands. This comes with its own grim irony, given that justice and liberation movements aim at the undoing of precisely these cultures of white, Christian Europe that were formative for and continue to reproduce antisemitism.

I can only speak for myself, but this is absolutely false.

Most blacks are not antisemitic. While a higher percentage of blacks are antisemitic than of the general population, the percentage of blacks who hold antisemitic opinions has gone steadily down since the 1990s when it was about 37%.

I have no glee speaking about Black antisemitism or Muslim antisemitism or white supremacist antisemitism. But I do think it is critical to not put them all in the same bucket.

If one wants to fight antisemitism, one needs to understand it. And the recent public examples of Farrakhan/Griff/Wiley antisemitism are much different from traditional Christian antisemitism, much different from neo-Nazi antisemitism, much different from Muslim or Arab antisemitism. They are also somewhat different from what Black antisemitism was like in the 1960s.

All kinds of antisemitism have a righteous justification. No one says “I hate Jews for no reason.” One way of fighting antisemitism is with education, and it is critical to take away the justifications for antisemitism by directly attacking the assumptions of the antisemites.

Just like there is no one type of antisemitism, there is no one way to combat antisemitism. (This socialist article went on to pretend that there was only one antisemitism and it looks at it through a class lens, which is ridiculous. Antisemites come in all classes, colors, political affiliations and religions.)

When Rabbi Abraham Cooper went on Nick Cannon’s show, I was upset because he did not directly attack the fundamental myths that were the basis of Cannon’s and Griff’s rants. And the comments on that YouTube video show that practically the entire Black audience were not swayed by Cooper’s words – he was speaking the language of victimhood, of the Holocaust, of historic Black and Jewish commonality, while Cannon’s fans are convinced that they are the true Hebrews. This was the wrong argument. I looked at the root of what we can call Black replacement theology, where Jews are frauds and Blacks are the true Jews. That is what Rabbi Cooper should have done.

But Muslim antisemitism is different. Arab antisemitism is different even than Muslim antisemitism although there is huge overlap. Christian and scientific and philosophical and, yes, modern anti-Zionist antisemitism are all different, and it is not racist to call that out.

Of course racism exists and it is a serious problem. But only people who already look at the world through a lens of race will find racism literally everywhere.

It isn’t about Israel (poster)

A poster I made after a comment in Facebook by Rob Levy during my Twitter boycott…

07/31 Links Pt1: GOP Lawmaker Calls on Trump to Designate Top Palestinian Official as Terror Sponsor; New UNRWA head to 'Post': No glorifying terrorists in our schools

From Ian:

GOP Lawmaker Calls on Trump to Designate Top Palestinian Official as Terror Sponsor

A US congressman with a track record of countering terrorism sponsored by the Palestinian Authority (PA) has called on President Donald Trump to blacklist a leading PA official.

In a letter to Trump on Thursday, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) urged Trump to designate the PA’s Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs and its director, Qadri Abu Bakr, as sponsors of terror because of their direct involvement in providing monthly payments to terrorists and their families.

Lamborn was a principal backer of the 2018 Taylor Force Act, which conditions US aid to the PA on a verifiable abandonment its “pay‐for‐slay” policy. Two years after the legislation’s passage, the PA has not changed its policy.

“Unfortunately, the Palestinian leadership has continued to pay the terror rewards to terrorists, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year to these monsters and their families,” Lamborn wrote in his letter to Trump. “Since the passing of the Taylor Force Act, and a similar law in Israel’s Knesset passed by my friends MKs Elazar Stern and Avi Dichter in July 2018, the Palestinian leadership has spent over 1.2 billion shekels, or $350 million, continuing to reward terror.”

“This vile practice must end, and your administration has the courage and moral clarity to do it,” Lamborn declared.

New UNRWA head to 'Post': No glorifying terrorists in our schools

The phrase “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” may be a cliché, but in the case of Dalal Mughrabi, the difference could define the political landscape of the Middle East for decades to come.

In 1978, Mughrabi took part in the Coastal Road Massacre in which an Israeli bus was hijacked. Thirty-eight Israelis lost their lives in the attack, including 13 children. To Israelis, Mughrabi is a terrorist.

To the Palestinians, she is a national treasure. Children are taught to emulate her example. Five schools under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority are named for Mughrabi, as are town squares, summer camps and a women’s center.

She also pops up regularly in textbooks, where she is lauded as martyr and a hero.

Responsibility for reaching a definitive ruling on Mughrabi’s status – if such a thing is possible – may ultimately fall to Philippe Lazzarini, the incoming commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for the Palestinians.

His agency is committed to delivering international quality education to the more than 530,000 children educated within UNRWA’s 708 elementary and preparatory schools in the region. And as we are always told, the children are our future.

So, is Mughrabi a terrorist, or a martyr? What should the children be taught?

“Let’s be clear, there is no glorification of martyrs being taught in UNRWA schools,” Lazzarini told The Jerusalem Post via Zoom from Amman, Jordan. “There is none of that. No teacher is teaching that.

“We have extremely clear guidance regarding this because UNRWA is also in disagreement with this example [of Mughrabi]. I know this keeps popping up, but UNRWA has given clear instructions that this not be taught in the schools because it can be perceived as incitement, depending on how it is brought to the attention of the children.”

Talk about Chutzpah! @Twitter literally wrote to Minister @FarkashOrit, flat out saying that Iran leader @khamenei_ir calling Israel a ‘cancerous growth’ to be ‘uprooted and destroyed’ is mere “foreign policy saber rattling”?

Seriously @jack @smcs @Policy?

cc. @CotlerWunsh https://t.co/wq7ihnQ0g8
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) July 31, 2020

Oh, hi 👋 Iran state propaganda mouthpiece @PressTV. Thanks for the mention, though I’m pretty sure you misquoted me!

Here’s the full video 🎥 in case you missed it: https://t.co/gSxi3XyZ9P pic.twitter.com/XuglV639GZ
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) July 30, 2020