Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 15, 2021

Cartoon of the Day: Next year in Al Quds

Mondoweiss published a word salad of intersectional nonsense that is also a petition that won't be sent to anyone.

The preamble actually says it all:

In the interest of advancing a truly intersectional and decolonial feminist vision for the U.S., Palestine and our world, the Palestinian Feminist Collective is urging others to join them in declaring Palestine is a feminist issue.

In English: "We hate Israel and we want to pretend to use feminism as a weapon against it, even though there is nothing remotely connected to feminism at issue."

The text is unintentionally hilarious:

For decades, Palestinian feminists have resisted Israel’s masculinist and militarized siege of Palestinian land and life. Since its inception, the Zionist settler colonial project has hinged on the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and land, creating generations of landless Palestinian refugees. Zionist violence continues to dominate Palestinian lives in intimate ways. Throughout the homeland, Israel demolishes Palestinian homes, subjects Palestinian prisoners of conscience to systematic sexual and physical abuse and torture, and polices Palestinian bodies, sexualities, reproductive rights, and family life. Palestinians continue to affirm life in the face of the enduring Nakba (catastrophe), which takes place through deadly closure in the Gaza Strip, military occupation in the West Bank, legal designations of second-class citizenship in the settler state, exile in refugee camps and across the shatat (global diaspora), and denial of the right to return home.

We uphold the legacies of solidarity between Palestinian, Black, Indigenous, Third World feminist, working class, and queer communities who have struggled side-by-side within larger anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist movements in the US and globally. This stands in contrast to liberal feminist traditions in the U.S. that continue to weaponize feminist discourses against Palestinians and other marginalized communities by failing to confront the structural forms of gendered and sexual violence inherent to settler/colonialism, imperialist wars, racial capitalism, and global white supremacy. Liberal and Zionist feminisms rely on Orientalist discourses to silence and undermine the collective aspirations of Palestinian women and their co-strugglers, contributing to intensified political repression that criminalizes free speech on Palestine and Palestinian liberation.

Did you see anything here about how Israel is discriminating against women? Neither did I, or anyone else. It is a wall of buzzwords meant to make idiots think that there is a "there" there. ''

The ironic part, of course, is that Palestinians literally have laws against its women. Lots of them.

I wrote about it at length last week.

Obviously, the "Palestinian Feminist Collective" is a sham, utterly uninterested in women's rights.

Last year, a suspiciously similarly named "Palestinian Feminist Working Group" with a suspiciously thin Internet footprint wrote a suspiciously similar manifesto also on Mondoweiss.

Hate of Israel is clearly stronger than actual feminism for these hypocrites.

03/15 Links Pt1: Jared Kushner: On Iran, the U.S. Should Continue to Play the Strong Hand It Was Dealt; Israel to push for UN adoption of IRHA definition of anti-Semitism

From Ian:

Jared Kushner: On Iran, the U.S. Should Continue to Play the Strong Hand It Was Dealt

The roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict stretch back to when Arab leaders refused to accept the creation of the State of Israel after World War II and spent 70 years vilifying it and using it to divert attention from domestic shortcomings. But today, Muslims are posting pictures of peaceful visits to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, blowing a hole in the propaganda that the holy site is under attack.

The Abraham Accords exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians that need not hold up Israel's relations with the broader Arab world. It will ultimately be resolved when both sides agree on an arbitrary boundary line.

While many were troubled by the Biden team's opening offer to work with Europe and rejoin the Iran deal, I saw it as a smart diplomatic move. The Biden administration called Iran's bluff. It revealed to the Europeans that the JCPOA is dead and only a new framework can bring stability for the future. When Iran asked for a reward merely for initiating negotiations, President Biden did the right thing and refused.

America holds a strong hand. Iran is feigning strength, but its economic situation is dire and it has no ability to sustain conflict or survive indefinitely under current sanctions. America should be patient and insist that any deal include real nuclear inspections and an end to Iran's funding of foreign militias.

Mohammed Khalid Alyahya: The Price of Empowering Iran

Since the Biden administration's decision to reverse the designation of Yemen's Houthi militia as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) on Feb. 12, drones and ballistic missiles have targeted Saudi Arabia 48 times. It is a fallacy to understand the region's politics as a contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Seen from Tehran, the central contest in the region is between the American alliance system and Iran's self-styled "resistance alliance."

Biden's misconception leads to a number of erroneous ideas: that the U.S. can play a neutral, mediating role between Riyadh and Tehran; that by distancing itself from Saudi Arabia, it creates opportunities for regional stability and understanding; and that it is the Saudi role in Yemen - and not the Iranian role - that has perpetuated the conflict in that country.

Iran has waged a forty-year war to spread its control across the region - not to compete with Saudi Arabia, but to undermine the American alliance system. Iran's network of terrorist groups in the region chant, "death to America," not "death to Saudi Arabia."

Iran's attacks on Saudi Arabian civilian infrastructure, via its proxies in Yemen and Iraq, are reactions to U.S. policy - not Saudi Arabian policy. Appeasing Iran, and punishing U.S. allies, will come at the expense of the entire region.

Abraham Accords: Getting a win-win for Israelis and Palestinians

AT THE END of 2020, as part of the omnibus spending package, Congress enacted the Nita M. Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act (MEPPA) with bipartisan support. MEPPA authorized a five-year, $250 million people-to-people peace-building fund and an investment initiative to give the bandwidth and budget to answer the question, “What are we doing to ensure the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians don’t hate one another?” Often an afterthought, MEPPA gives the administration a coordinated way to think about peace-building, not as a series of programs, but as an integrated policy tool.

Congress, wanting to leverage the groundbreaking American investment as well as maximize its efficacy, baked into MEPPA a multilateral element encouraging international donors. In doing so, Congress intended to harness the added legitimacy gained from multilateral endorsement of MEPPA in the eyes of Israelis and Palestinians and ensure equitable burden-sharing.

The Biden administration can use MEPPA to gather additional commitments from both the region and European allies to address incitement, dehumanization and economic disparity between Israelis and Palestinians. In doing so, the administration can utilize MEPPA to further the Abraham Accords, institutionalize new regional dynamics while providing needed economic stimulus to the Palestinian private sector, and deal head-on with adult and youth attitudes that must change if progress will be possible.

The advantages that the Abraham Accords have created should not be quarantined to just the fight against a nuclear Iran. MEPPA offers the ideal way to capture the new regional spirit to elevate aspirations for a just, sustainable and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

MEPPA sets in motion long-term grassroots peace-building combined with joint Israeli-Palestinian economic development projects to support future diplomacy. It also enables an early opportunity for the US to repair relations with the Palestinians, cultivate a foundation of trust between Israelis and Palestinians, rebuild trust with European partners, and capitalize on the regional normalization dynamic in a way that prioritizes Israeli-Palestinian peace. MEPPA can show once again how US taxpayers can amplify and solidify their investment and impact through engaging allies, and how US leadership and innovation is still the indispensable ingredient for meaningful international cooperation.

Palestinian cabinet blames Israel for everything - but not for lack of COVID-19 vaccines

Every Monday, during the Palestinian Authority cabinet meeting chaired by prime minister Muhammad Shtayyeh, he presents a summary of problems being worked on.

He is not shy about saying anti-Israel rhetoric. In today's meeting, for example, he thanked the members of Congress for writing an anti-Israel letter to Secretary of State Blinken and he condemned Kosovo for opening up an embassy in Jerusalem.

Obviously, he has to address the coronavirus crisis. The Palestinians have been promised vaccines from Russia, from Astra-Zeneca and from COVAX, but none have actually been shipped.

Yet when it comes to this topic, he never says a word against Israel.

Last week he said:

Global supply chains for vaccines are delayed due to competition from other countries and their attempt to acquire vaccines. About 75% of the vaccines are concentrated in ten rich countries, while 130 countries have not received a dose of the vaccine according to UN reports. The only available weapon in our hands today are the masks and the physical distancing, so by adhering to this, we protect ourselves and our society from the risks of infection with the new strains of the virus .

I call on friendly countries, vaccine-producing companies, and the global COVAX mechanism to fulfill their obligations and work to supply the vaccines that we were promised as donations or those that we paid for and whose supply dates were delayed so that we can provide a safe environment for the legislative elections scheduled to take place on the twenty-second of next May.

This week:

Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh said that great progress has been made in communications to obtain anti-Coronavirus vaccines, whether those that we will receive in the form of donations from the international COVAX mechanism, or those that we have paid for with the companies producing vaccines.

Shtayyeh explained at the beginning of the weekly cabinet meeting, today, Monday, in Ramallah, that the problem is not in providing funds, but in fulfilling companies' obligations, as there is piracy of the vaccine and politicization of its provision, and there is a tremendous demand and limited supply, and despite that we have activated all our diplomatic, political, medical and international channels.

He expressed his hope that these efforts will bear fruit with the arrival of the first batch of vaccines.

Even many weeks after the Palestinian leaders announced that vaccines were on their way, both that they purchased and that were donated, the vaccines never showed up. And yet even though the entire world is blaming Israel and falsely claiming that Israel must provide vaccines, there is not a word against Israel in any of Shtayyeh's addresses.

Clearly the Palestinian Authority has always intended to act like an independent state that can procure its own vaccines for its own people. And even in the face of more procurement delays, in its own internal meetings the Palestinian Authority is not calling on Israel to give or sell any surplus vaccines to them, nor is it blaming Israel for not providing vaccines for free as so many anti-Israel activists claim the Geneva Conventions mandate.

They don't want help from Israel. And when they ask for limited amounts of help, Israel has given it.

It is also notable that Israel's drive to vaccinate some 120,000 Palestinian workers is unreported in official Palestinian news agency media.

Tel Aviv University vaccinates hundreds of Palestinian and international students, @972mag silent

Earlier this month, +972 Magazine published an article about a Palestinian student at Tel Aviv University who attempted to get a COVID-19 vaccine during a university drive - after she was promised that she was eligible - but was denied the shot,

The article was slanted to show how awful Israel is for denying the shot to this woman who spent hours traveling to receive her shot. However, a close reading of the article shows that there was not an ounce of malice there - it was a snafu, a miscommunication, and TAU was not authorized to provide a shot to anyone who was not under an Israeli insurance plan, including Palestinian and international students.

Despite the Health Ministry’s insistence on refusing to vaccinate the Palestinian student, she said that Tel Aviv University went to great lengths to try and get her a vaccine. One university coordinator spoke to the medical staff on site and called the Health Ministry, she said, while senior university officials arrived at one point to try to help, to no avail. According to the student, the university staff also spoke to the administration at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, the city’s major hospital, yet nothing helped. She was later told that the university president had sent a letter to the Health Ministry on the matter.

In a comment to +972, the Health Ministry claimed it was not contacted by Tel Aviv University on the matter, and that had the university reached out, the student would have been vaccinated as “an exception.”

The headline of the article was enough, however, for countless posts in social media condemning TAU and Israel for what was just a screw-up.

Now, it seems, Tel Aviv University has solved the paperwork problem and has successfully vaccinated hundreds of students who couldn't get the vaccine a couple of weeks ago - including Palestinians:

Clearly, the evil anti-Palestinian Israeli government approved this. Clearly, no one in Israel has any objection to vaccinating Palestinian students in Israeli universities.

That idea is only in the fevered hallucinations of the anti-Israel crowd.

Of course, +972 didn't issue an update or report this story - which is still on their front page. The truth is not as important as the narrative when it comes to attacking Israel.

It is also clear from the TAU tweet that this one Palestinian woman was not singled out for not getting the vaccine last month, but that hundreds of non-Israeli students including internationals were not eligible at the time because of insurance and paperwork requirements then.

There was not an ounce of anti-Palestinian sentiment anywhere - except from the slanderers at +972.

Save the Children: Another lying, anti-Israel NGO

Last October, the UK-based Save the Children organization issued a report about Palestinian children detained by Israel.

Its press release and headline says:

It goes on to say:

81% [of children] endured physical beatings and 89% suffered verbal abuse.
52% were threatened with harm to their families.
86% were subjected to strip searches, leaving them humiliated and ashamed.
88% did not receive adequate and timely healthcare, even when explicitly requested.

These are very specific statistics, with no caveat, in the press release. A respected NGO is telling the world that 81% of detained kids get beaten by Israeli soldiers and more than half were threatened with hurting their families.

Sounds pretty bad.

But the actual report has this curious paragraph:

It is important to note that this research provides insight based on a specific sample of the population in the West Bank. Save the Children recognises that it is not a statistically significant or representative sample. As the report intentionally presents children’s experience from their own perspective, it is also important to note that incidents they mention have not been independently verified by Save the Children; however, available data from other sources is provided to support the information that children reported. The intention is that this survey will provide a springboard for further in-depth consultation with children and young people across the West Bank about the resounding impact of detention on their lives, in order to inform policy, donor funding decisions, and the support that Save the Children and others provide for Palestinian children and their communities.

In short, you know those statistics that were in the press release? They are lies. They are statistics based on a sample of "children" (many interviewed years later) who were primed by the NGO to say what the adults wanted them to say. "Did they beat you? Did they threaten you? Did they blindfold you? Did they torture you?"

Nowhere does the report even hint that the interviewers had any expertise in asking non-leading questions, or that there was even a goal of eliciting truthful and accurate answers.

These statistics were of a highly selective sample of interviewees, naturally weighted towards those who would have juicy stories to tell or vivid imaginations. It was not a random sample of detainees. Kids who were detained for a couple of hours and released without incident are far less likely to have been sought out and questioned.

By presenting the statistics as being specific and accurate, Save the Children has shown that it is more a propaganda outfit than an objective organization. The entire study was created to come to a foregone conclusion, and it succeeded. The only victim is the State of Israel, and who cares if they are treated fairly or not? They are already assumed to be evil child beaters, so there is no reason to spend any effort to find out anything otherwise.

More evidence of bias comes from the fact that many of the accusations given in the report should not have happened after June 2018, when the IDF issued a new set of standards for minors in custody, including their being informed of their rights to a lawyer in their language during questioning and treating everyone under 18 as a minor (it used to be 16.) . The dates of the incidents from the interviews are not given so it seems likely that many of the stories came from before that date - and Save the Children does not even mention these new standards once.

NGO Monitor came out with many more issues with the report.

This report has no relationship with the truth, and it shows that Save the Children lies.

(h/t Adin)

Cartoon of the Day: Progressive Seder

This is almost verbatim from this idiotic tweet.

03/14 Links: Why Europe "Will Remain Hostile to Israel"; Phyllis Chesler: Tehran on My Mind; South Africa’s Chief Justice Confronts the Apartheid Analogy

From Ian:

Rafael Bardaji on Why Europe "Will Remain Hostile to Israel"

Rafael Bardaji, executive director of the Friends of Israel Initiative and Spain's former national security advisor, spoke to participants in a February 15 Middle East Forum webinar (video) about the persistent "clash of interests ... between the European Union (EU) and the Israeli government" likely to endure for the foreseeable future.

According to Bardaji, three points of friction between the EU and Israel are prominent this year. The first is the decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its former prosecutor, Gambian lawyer Fatou Bensouda, to "accept the Palestinians as a national state ... able to ask for investigation, prosecution and indictment of a non-state-member of the ICC," namely Israel. "The Europeans are very well attached, by heart, to the ICC despite all violations of international law regarding this decision." Bardaji said the most effective way to counter the ICC's illegal action is to approach those European powers opposed to Bensouda's decision and persuade them to defund the ICC.

The second point of friction concerns Iran. Despite Tehran's violations of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the EU is eager to "keep it afloat" and press the U.S. to lift its sanctions imposed under Trump in order to resume their own trade with Tehran. The Biden administration's clear desire to reach out to Iran for a new agreement will encourage the Europeans to "offer even more concessions to Iran" to hasten a deal.

The third point of conflict is European eagerness to "pull the Palestinians back into the center stage" of the Middle East peace process, despite the fact that their longstanding belief that "without them, nothing can be done in the region" has been proven wrong. The Abraham Accords established as a result of Trump's "thinking out of the box" bore results, but the Biden administration has expressed "doubts about nurturing new countries" to join the accords, which will cause the Europeans to stiffen their own resistance.

Honest Reporting: NYT, CNN Ignore Former ‘Moderate’ Palestinian Authority PM’s Apparent Radicalization

Former Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad recently stated his belief that in order to run in prospective Palestinian legislative and presidential elections or, more generally, be a member of any Palestinian political entity, one need not accept the three guiding principles of the Quartet — a body made up of representatives from the United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

The Quartet was established to facilitate peace negotiations and laid out basic criteria for the Palestinian leadership to abide by as a basis for talks: namely, to recognize the State of Israel, respect previous diplomatic agreements signed with Jerusalem and renounce violence.

Yet, the New York Times, CNN and other major news organizations that had once praised Fayyad as the personification of a new, moderate, conciliatory Palestinian political echelon have not reported on his apparent rejection of Israel’s right to exist or the need for the Palestinians to adhere to the Oslo Accords and end their support for attacks on Israelis. New York Times: Fayyad as a Model of Palestinian Moderation

Salam Fayyad is no obscure figure.

Last week, he announced that he would be submitting a list of independent candidates who will run in the May 22 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Fayyad served as the Palestinian Authority finance minister under Yasser Arafat from 2002 to 2005 and, following Hamas’ takeover of the Gaza Strip in an internecine war, was sworn in as prime minister of an emergency West Bank-based Palestinian government on June 15, 2007.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas reappointed him to the position in 2009, a post he held until 2013.

He has been lauded by the media as an economic reformer who cracked down on corruption, while his views on the Israel-Palestinian conflict were deemed a welcomed breath of fresh air.

During Fayyad’s tenure, former New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Steven Erlanger quoted the PA prime minister expressing ostensible support for co-existence with the Jewish state:
It is obvious that Israelis and Palestinians need to live together, he [Fayyad] said. “There should be no question in anybody’s mind in Israel that this is what this is about, in a way that leads to us living like them, as free people, in a country of our own, right next door to them. It’s not that we have to; we want to.”

Thanks to Jordan, Jews can't pray on the Temple Mount - analysis

In the 1994 peace agreement between Israel and Jordan, Israel stated that it “respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem.” In other words, the Jordanian Islamic Trust, known as the Wakf, would be responsible for the day-to-day administration of the Al-Aksa Mosque.

Jordan has taken that to mean that it can demand things like the removal of metal detectors from the site, installed immediately after a terrorist attack in which Muslim Israelis murdered two Druze Israeli police officers.

Plus, Jordan thinks it is within its rights to demand that high-profile Israelis not visit the Temple Mount, despite the agreement stating that “there will be freedom of access to the places of religious and historical significance.”

King Abdullah also declined to allow Israel to continue to lease small pockets of farmland from Jordan, as detailed in the peace agreement, further contributing to the decline of relations.

Beyond that, he’s done nothing to counter the coldness of the peace between Israel and Jordan, and rampant anti-Israel sentiment in society. Jordan has blocked the extradition to the US of Ahlam Tamimi, one of the masterminds of the 2001 suicide bombing in a Sbarro in Jerusalem, in which 15 were killed and 122 injured; she has since become a TV star in Jordan.

A 2019 study by IMPACT-se, which analyzes the content of textbooks in the region, found "minimal recognition of Israel and the peace treaty," which it called "cause for concern." Official textbooks warn of the "Zionist Danger," and describe Israel as "a Zionist entity with no rights." One textbook expresses a "wish to see Palestine liberated from the Zionist Occupation;" another compares Zionism to Nazism and fascism.

But not letting the prince have as many armed guards as he wants at Temple Mount is the real problem in Jordan-Israel relations.

Maybe Prince Hussein can talk to Oprah about it.

"Progressive" members of Congress lie about vaccines and more in letter to Blinken

Below is a letter sent by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and other anti-Israel members of Congress to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The disregard for the truth by members of Congress - on the record - is breathtaking.

1) These members of Congress are not advocates for the rights of the Palestinian people. They have never said a word about official discrimination against Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. They have never said a word about Palestinians imprisoned and tortured to death in Syria.

They are not pro-Palestinian - they are anti-Israel.

2) The request to investigate whether Israel uses US equipment to demolish the homes of terrorists to dissuade future attacks is not a serious request. Every dollar sent to Israel is earmarked for specific purposes, and there is already an extensive audit mechanism in place, as there is for all money that goes for foreign aid. The only purpose for these repeated requests is to slander Israel and get the media to imply that Israel is misusing US funds. It is meant to cast doubt in the minds of Americans who are not aware of how transparent the process of aid to Israel is.

3) Israel is not obligated under the Fourth Geneva Convention to provide free vaccines to Palestinians. Both Geneva and the Oslo Accords (which cannot and would not contradict Geneva) make is clear that the primary responsibility for health care in PA-controlled areas is the PA itself, and they are the ones that must ask Israel for help if they want to. With rare exceptions, they haven't, and when they have, Israel has provided them with what they requested - thousands of vaccines to the West Bank which were promptly given to PLO cronies, and thousands more to Gaza from Russia.

4) As of the date of this letter, Israel had given far more than 5000 doses to Palestinians. As of Thursday, Israel had given over 50,000 doses to Palestinian workers in Israel. Also, Israel had inoculated tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem who are not citizens of Israel. This is blatant lie.

5) Gaza's medical crisis is not from Israel at all. Israel does not block medical supplies to Gaza at all. However, the Palestinian Authority has limited basic medical supplies and medicines to Gaza many times over the past decade, and Hamas has stolen medicines to resell them at a profit to Palestinians there. None of this was ever condemned by the signatories to this letter who pretend to be advocates of human rights for Palestinians.

6) When the members of Congress say that "settler colonialism...is illegal under international law," they aren't talking about the West Bank. They are referring to Israel itself. The theorists who came up with the idea of "settler colonialism" refer to all of Israel. I have never seen an academic paper accusing only Jews in Judea and Samaria of "settler colonialism" - they always refer to all of Israel.

Moreover, the letter writers are saying that the United States itself is illegal. The concept of "settler colonialism" was made up when it became obvious that Israel is not a colonial state since it is not attached to a major colonial power, but by Jews who want to return to their homelands. The idea that people who voluntarily move to a land and settle it are "settler colonialists" has been extended by the academics who made up the concept to include other lands where people have moved voluntarily to build a new nation - including the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries. And these same academics say that the US is guilty of settler colonialism today.

The writers of this letter are not just anti-Israel, but anti-America.

7) Whether they like it or not, any two state solution must provide security for Israel and it must not force Israel to relocate hundreds of thousands of Israelis. The Trump plan, with all its faults, is far more realistic - and therefore a far more likely path to real peace - than the demands of these writers, who want to ethnically cleanse Judea and Samaria of Jews.

8) The letter implies that any Jewish presence in "east Jerusalem" is a crime. They are saying that the holiest site in Judaism should be Judenrein. This is beyond disgusting.

It is most troubling that members of Congress are so willing to lie and slander Israel - as well as the United States itself. And they are eager to do it on the record.

Monster Ahlam Tamimi celebrates Interpol's removal of her "red" status

The architect of the Sbarro pizza shop bombing, Ahlam Tamimi, is celebrating her name being removed from Interpol's list of people wanted for arrest.

This photo seems to have been taken at a party for Tamimi's legal victory.

The photo has been circulated only in the past few days, so it seems to be a reaction to the Interpol news.

Interpol's letter itself is sickening:

This means that this murderous and proud child killer can now travel to other countries besides Jordan without fear of being arrested by local police.

Tamimi's supporters say that this was the result of one and a half years of legal pressure to Interpol.

Her lawyer, Mustafa Nasrallah, claims that the US attempt at extradition is illegal because she has already been tried and convicted in Israeli courts and this is therefore "double jeopardy." That is simply not true, the US has every right to try her for her role in the murder of two Americans killed in the Sbarro attack.

Meanwhile , Tamimi is celebrating her new freedom in a country that treats her like a celebrity while pretending to be against terror.

From the B'nai Brith Messenger, March 11, 1921:

SHOMER ISRAEL ROSENBLATTS NEW SONG

It Will Soon be Heard All Over Land—Helps War Orphans
Within a few days , Shoimr Isroel , the song dedicated to the Jewish War Orphans Fund by Cantor Josef Rosenblatt, will be known and most widely advertised piece of music in New York City jazz and sentimental love ditty not excluded . Arrangements have been made by which practically every music shop on Broadway will display this song in the window and sell it to the public without exacting any commission.. ... In every window in which the song is displayed , a statement is shown , stating the facts and aims of the Jewish War Orphans Drive . This is expected to prove a most effective salesmanship device, as well as to attract the passersby to the window.

You can hear it here:

The Jewish War Orphans' Fund was started that same year, with an estimated 150,000 Jewish orphans from World War I in Europe and Palestine.

03/13 Links: Only Arabs in Israel have true democracy; Largest Pro-Israel Group in US Launches Ads Against Biden Pentagon Pick; Black Lives Matter is a politically correct ISIS

From Ian:

Only Arabs in Israel have true democracy

Which of the hundreds of millions of Arab citizens in the Middle East will be able to vote in free and fair elections this year?

It’s obviously not Syria. Even before a brutal civil war that killed half a million people and made almost half the population refugees, the country was a brutal dictatorship. Libya is in carnage and Yemen is still the world’s biggest humanitarian catastrophe.

Egypt is under a state of emergency and the President’s main opponents were banned from the last election. Whilst there are varying degrees of political development in the Arab monarchies, the unelected Monarch retains the final say in all of them.

The first election for nine years eventually took place in Lebanon in 2018, after being called off by the government three times. Elections also take place in Iraq but are marred by corruption and Baghdad comes down hard on anyone who really tries to exercise self-determination, as the Kurds found out with the military action and blockade they faced after their referendum in 2017.

Many won’t want to hear it, of course, but apart from Tunisia, the likelihood is that the only Arab citizens in the whole of the Middle East who will get to elect the people who run their country in free and fair elections live in Israel.

Almost 380 million Arab citizens live in two dozen countries stretching across five million square miles and the only ones who truly have a say in who runs their country are the 1.9 million in the tiny state of Israel.

Later this month, all nine million Israeli citizens, whatever their religion, race, ethnicity or heritage, will have exactly the same rights at the ballot box. All citizens of Israel vote on an equal basis and Arab voter turnout for the 2020 election reached 64.8%, its highest level in the last two decades.

Visit the Knesset and you will see one of the most diverse and disputatious legislatures in the world representing every shade of opinion from the far left to the extreme right.

MEMRI: Gaza Ceremony On International Women's Day Lauds Palestinian Women Terrorists Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, Leila Khaled, Dalal Al-Mughrabi

The Palestinian Authority's Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs held a ceremony in Gaza in honor of freed female prisoners on International Women's Day. It was aired on Palestine TV on March 8, 2021. The governor of Gaza Ibrahim Abu Al-Naja spoke on behalf of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He condemned the new UAE ambassador to Israel and added: "Damn him and his country!"

Senior official of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Maryam Abu Daqqa lauded Palestinian women and said that they have been an integral part of the armed-struggle and resistance against Zionism, from the early days of the "Zionist invasion" to the "modern-day Palestinian revolution." She said that Palestinian women are part of a "triangle of terror" threatening the Zionist entity – on land, at sea, and from the air. She gave the example of PFLP member Shadia Abu Ghazaleh who was killed while preparing a bomb in 1968, Leila Khaled who was the first female plane hijacker, and Dalal Al-Mughrabi who had participated in the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in Israel.

Gaza Governor Al-Naja: "Palestinian Women Have Sacrificed Like No Other Women In The World; [They] Send Their Sons... To Go [Fight] For The Sake Of Their Cause"

Announcer: "And now to the speech by President Mahmoud Abbas, Abu Mazen, which will be delivered on his behalf by the governor of the Gaza Governorate, Ibrahim Abu Al-Naja, Abu Wael, please. "

Gaza Governor Ibrahim Abu Al-Naja: "Palestinian women have sacrificed like no other women in the world. Palestinian women are still role models, because they are seekers of freedom, they are mothers, they are sisters, they are fighters, they are martyrs and they are bereaved.

"Look at how these women send their sons, one after the other, telling them to go [fight] for the sake of their cause, for the sake of freedom in the world, and for the sake of human rights.

"This is the message that the world has ignored. This is the message that was rebuffed by the enemies of our nation and our people. This is the message that our [Arab] brothers do not want to understand. They want to erase our history. This is a disgrace. We reject and condemn this and we do not want this to be recorded in the annals of our nation's history.

"Yesterday, an ambassador of a country we used to call 'brotherly' presented his credentials...

French Jews Remember Anniversary of 2012 Terror Attacks That Culminated in Massacre at Jewish School

France on Thursday began commemorations for the ninth anniversary of a devastating Islamist terror spree that claimed the lives of seven people, including three children at a Jewish school and two soldiers in the French army.

The tributes to the victims — murdered in the Toulouse region by Islamist terrorist Mohamed Merah between March 11-15, 2012 — coincided with the Europe-wide national memorial day for the victims of terrorism. That event takes place on March 11 to commemorate the 2004 terror attack on the same day upon the Atocha train station in the Spanish capital, Madrid.

The French Jewish communal organization CRIF tweeted a tribute to the first of the seven victims, Imad ibn Ziaten, a parachutist in the French armed forces from a Muslim family of Moroccan origin. Ziaten was shot dead by Merah at point blank range after refusing to obey the terrorist’s instruction to lie on the ground.

“A few days later, six people including two other soldiers, three children and a father were also murdered,” the CRIF tweet noted.

On March 19, 2012, Merah launched a gun attack on the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse. He murdered Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, who taught at the school, together with his two sons, six-year-old Aryeh and three-year-old Gabriel.

Merah then grabbed another child, eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego, and shot her through the head before escaping. Following a 30 hour siege at his apartment building in which six agents were wounded, Merah was shot dead by a police tactical unit on March 22.

03/12 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Meghan Markle and the Jewish question; UK Jews are fooling themselves; The Western cultural Stockholm Syndrome

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Meghan Markle and the Jewish question

The secular world, including many secular Jews, tells itself the opposite. It claims that the West’s most valuable achievements, such as science and the promotion of freedom and equality, come from having dumped the Bible as mere mumbo-jumbo involving punitive codes of behavior that destroy freedom.

On the contrary, these are values and achievements that could not have existed without Judaism and Christianity. And every one of the ideologies which has replaced the Hebrew Bible—ideologies that have helped extinguish freedom and equality and undermined scientific integrity—is anti-Judaism or anti-Israel.

Moral relativism denies the Mosaic moral codes. Egalitarianism denies the differentiation and distinctiveness that underpin the very idea of right versus wrong.

Environmentalism, which denies the superiority of humankind over the natural world, devalues humanity in favor of the planet. Materialism, or the belief that everything in the universe has a material explanation, denies the existence of God. Transnationalism dismisses the importance of the individual nation with its particular culture and laws, which is the very essence of Judaism.

Responsibility for the crisis in the West, however, doesn’t only lie with the liberals—and liberal Jews—who subscribe to these ideas. Conservatives have conspicuously failed to fight them.

After the fall of communism, conservatives thought their anti-Western fox had been shot. They turned instead to defending liberty against the state at home. But liberty shouldn’t be an end in itself. It should be the means to a more important end: how to live a civilized life and help create a civilized society.

The failure of conservatives to understand this, coupled with their tendency to view the world through the prism of economics, meant they were largely blind to the urgent need to defend the West’s core values of individual and collective moral responsibility.

When the culture war against the West morphed into a lifestyle free-for-all and the growth of identity politics, these so-called conservatives gave up and decided to go with the flow.

In general, observant Jews tend to be politically conservative. So are some religiously liberal Jews, but these are vastly outnumbered by politically liberal Jews who are either secular or are trying to refashion Judaism itself into a secular and liberal Golden Calf.

The challenge for Jewish conservatives is to find the language to reclaim and communicate Jewish values to both the Jewish and non-Jewish world, and to use these values to drive the defense of the Western nation and its culture against the forces that seek to obliterate it through the moral chaos we now see all around us.

UK Jews are fooling themselves

English Jews are experiencing a wrenching time. They struggle with anti-Jew hatred from migrants, knife attacks, vandalism to their synagogues and Jewish schools. The perfidious anti-Semitism in all its vizards once pervading the Labour Party gave it gravitas until the exorcism. It lingers in the larger society and on public display as pro-Palestinian activism.

Tenenbom wants to learn about Brexit but gets caught up in the Jewish questions. How pervasive is anti-Semitism in the United Kingdom? How are Jews responding? He takes to the streets and reports his findings in a new book.

Tenenbom chronicles his capers roaming through Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. He is more of a participant than a detached journalist. Anti-Semites, he reports, commonly disguise their positions as pro-Palestinian fulminations. Underneath it all lie traditional crude blood libels. For instance, a favorite indictment of the Jews is they purposely kill or support the killers of Palestinian Arab children.

Tuvia reports the findings in a solid, entertaining, and informative book, and best-selling e-book, titled The Taming of the Jew (Gefen Publishing, 2021/5781). His favorite theme is exposing the place of Jews living in free societies, in the age of tolerance, and how Jews respond.

Enjoy the humor and self-deprecation of Tenenbom’s writing. They are his hallmarks, but don’t give short shrift to the importance of his findings. He is genuine, remarkably sensitive to the surroundings, and insightful per Mead and Benedict, but funnier. Methods include driving the back roads, walking neighborhood streets, drinking in local pubs, eating in family restaurants, sleeping in off-beat hotels and engaging ordinary folk and influencers.

Tenenbom is relentless in questioning Christians about the Jews. He is no less relentless when talking with Jews about anti-Semitism. He presses everyone about the pro-Palestinian love affair promoted by politicians and NGOs.

The Western cultural Stockholm Syndrome

I spend a lot of time reading about and writing about worrisome cultural trends in what have traditionally been the liberal democracies of the West, including America, Canada, Australia, Israel and a weakening Europe.

I am saddened when I contemplate the extent to which our traditional free society has succumbed to:
1. an excessive tolerance of evil (which, in a book by the same name, I term “tolerism”);
2. a masochistic self-hatred, leading to threats to our fundamental liberties; and
3. ultimately a submission or surrender to what I call the Leftist-Islamist-Globalist alliance.
- We make compromises in our freedoms to accommodate fascist collusion among leftist Democrats, big Tech censorship, our education and university systems, and media that blatantly ignores stories that challenge their bias.
- We accept, even welcome, a totalitarian Islamist theocracy.
- We tolerate attempts from offshore to terrorize us, to make us submit to their values, instead of defending ours.
- We allow citizens of totalitarian states that regularly print anti-Semitic cartoons to dictate to us in our country not to print cartoons they find “offensive”.
- I have had, as far back as 18 years ago, a lecture shouted down by “Islamofascists” who said I had no “right” to speak if I disagreed with their views, and our civil liberties groups were silent.
- We cower in the face of threats that this policy or that policy may “inflame the Arab street” or Black Lives Matter.

Our tolerance and submission to Islamism has clearly paved the way for our tolerance and submission to Black Lives Matter, and the increasing number of violent domestic terrorists, who, despite media falsehoods, are predominantly on the left. As recently as last Saturday, the American city of Portland, Oregon was still seeing rioting in its streets.

We allow Big Tech censors to delete anything that offensive fascists say offends them. Our ideology of Tolerism combined with our ready adoption of the Stockholm Syndrome has laid down the path for large groups of our young people to respond to their alienation from a culture and economy that makes their prospects difficult by a great “transformation” or “re-set”.

This recalls when Judith Butler referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as "social movements that are progressive."

03/12 Links Pt1: Is the Biden Administration Planning on Violating the Taylor Force Act?; Exposing the ICC’s anti-Israel bias; UAE announces $10 billion fund for investments in Israel

From Ian:

Stuart Force, Sander Gerber and Mike Pompeo: Is the Biden Administration Planning on Violating the Taylor Force Act?

The Biden Administration has signaled its desire to resume aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a way to jump start the moribund Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” The obstacle to peace, however, is not the absence of US assistance but the PA’s incentivizing of terrorism. The bipartisan Taylor Force Act blocks US funding for the PA until it changes this behavior. There is no indication that it has, making any resumption of US taxpayer aid a contravention of this important law and a further hindrance to peace.

The PA’s “pay-for-slay” policy was highlighted by the 2016 murder of an American tourist in Israel by a Palestinian terrorist. The tourist, named Taylor Force — a West Point graduate, US Army veteran, and son of one of the authors of this post — was in Tel Aviv on a school trip when he was stabbed to death.

Force was neither Israeli nor Jewish. Yet, the PA celebrated the killer repeatedly as a “heroic Martyr” and held a large, festive funeral where he was hailed as a national hero. The murderer’s family soon began receiving benefit payments from the PA.

The PA spends massively on these payments to terrorists and their families and treats this perverse benefits system as a sacred obligation. Codified in PA law, the system adds bonus payments for Israeli Arabs and Arab residents of Jerusalem who have Israeli IDs and therefore more freedom of movement to carry out attacks. The longer the prison sentence, the greater the payments — meaning the deadlier, the more lucrative. The PA employs some 550 people in its pay-for-slay bureaucracies and devotes over seven percent of its budget, or $350 million, to the program, compared to just $220 million for non-terrorist welfare programs.

To address this despicable system, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act (TFA) — a bill the ACLJ has long supported — cutting off US aid to the PA until the pay-for-slay bureaucracy is dismantled and the laws governing it are repealed. The logic is simple: since money is fungible, aid that supplants the governance responsibilities of the PA frees up PA money to reward terrorists.

The Taylor Force Act corrected a profoundly immoral policy that had American taxpayer funds being laundered unwittingly through PA accounts to incentivize murder. The bill also offered a simple litmus test of the PA’s seriousness about making peace: If the PA cannot revoke the laws and infrastructure conferring special treatment for terrorists, then the PA itself remains an obstacle to the “peace process.”

Yet, the Biden Administration claims renewed aid for the Palestinian people will not violate TFA, which bars aid programs that “directly benefit” the PA. And news reports indicate the PA believes it can satisfy the Administration by making terrorist compensation “needs based” rather than based on the success of attacks, as it is now.

The Administration also appears set to endorse and empower the PA by giving it preemptive rewards, such as re-opening the PLO mission in Washington, DC, the office that directly administers the pay-for-slay program.

European, Arab diplomats attempt to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts

Leading European and Arab world diplomats announced potential “small steps” Thursday toward reviving Middle East peace efforts after upcoming Israeli and Palestinian elections.

The officials — from the UN, EU, Egypt, Jordan, Germany, and France — did not release any specific details, however. And the meeting came amid new tensions between Israel and Arab countries around Jerusalem.

There have not been any serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in over a decade and it is unclear what the diplomats can do concretely to create conditions to bring the two sides closer together, especially without the participation of the US.

The Biden administration has called on both sides to refrain from unilateral steps that could harm peace efforts but has yet to announce any major effort to resolve the decades-old conflict as it focuses on the coronavirus, the economy, and other domestic issues.

“We are going to initiate meetings with both parties within a timeframe built around the electoral calendar to identify, with them, the steps they are in a position to take to kickstart mutual trust,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said. He mentioned possible health and economic measures, without elaborating.

Any next moves will depend on the outcome of the Israeli election on March 23, as well as Palestinian elections later this year.

Progressives who say “we oppose illegal settlements in the West Bank”, who then say nothing when those settlements are built by Arabs… are really saying “we oppose Jews living in the West Bank”.

How very progressive.

Follow @RegavimIsrael to learn more. https://t.co/hxDQuIVxqB
— Israel Advocacy Movement (@israel_advocacy) March 12, 2021

Why is Norway, the Custodians of the Oslo Accords and who seek to advance peace in the Middle East, further investing in @UNRWA, one of the main impediments to peace, that is inciting violence & Antisemitism? @NorwayMFA @NorwayinIsrael @miffno @NGOmonitor https://t.co/HU2vtQ9rBL
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) March 12, 2021