Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

03/17 Links Pt1: Israel’s key Middle East concerns in 2021; 'Time to change anachronistic laws of war,' says Israeli counterterrorism expert; Israel’s Homeland Security Is Collapsing

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: Analysis: Israel’s key Middle East concerns in 2021

For Israel, a continuing priority is that Jerusalem views Iran’s threats as existential and Israel will work to prevent that threat.

“No security or political leadership will ever accept an existential threat,” says the senior official. In Feb. 2021, Iran threatened to enrich uranium to 60-percent, rejected talks with the U.S. in Europe, and sought to use nuclear inspections as bargaining chips with the IAEA.

“The presence of multiple uranium particles of anthropogenic origin, including isotopically altered particles, at a location which was not declared by Iran, is a clear indication that nuclear material and/or equipment contaminated by nuclear material has been present at this location,” said IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi to the IAEA Board of Governors, on March 1.

The track record of Iran’s enrichment, including installing advanced IR-6 centrifuges at Natanz and Fordow, puts Iran back on the course it pursued in 2012 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned about a red line on enrichment. Iran was warned in October 2012 about enrichment to 60 percent.

Second, the Israeli official noted how important U.S. commitment to the region is for stability. “There is no substitute for U.S. power and influence in the Middle East. There is never a vacuum in the Middle East, and any voids will eventually be filled.” He noted that Israel and U.S. have an unshakeable bond based on shared values and bipartisan support in the U.S., which is crucial to Israel’s security. The special relationship with U.S. is an essential part of Israel’s national security, alongside the peace with Egypt, Jordan, UAE and Bahrain.

Third, in the context of Iranian entrenchment and Iranian proxy threats, the U.S. and western allies can count on Israel. Israel and the U.S. have been in close contact since the new Biden administration came into office. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to his Israeli counterpart Gabi Asheknazi in late January and again in late February. The National Security Advisors Jake Sullivan and Meir Ben-Shabbat spoke on Jan. 23, and U.S. President Joe Biden spoke with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in mid-February.

'Time to change anachronistic laws of war,' says Israeli counterterrorism expert

The decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to launch an investigation into Israeli actions warrants an urgent response that should include a push to reform the existing laws of war, a leading counter-terrorism expert told JNS.

Professor Boaz Ganor, founder and executive director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, said, "The response to this dangerous step by the court is to urgently change the anachronistic laws of war and to adjust them to the challenges of war in the face of hybrid terror organizations."

Ganor defined hybrid terrorist organizations as those entities that control territories and populations, such as Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah and Lebanon, and until 2019, ISIS in Syria and Iraq. "They embed themselves in civilian populations and use civilians, even children, as living shields," he said.

Terror organizations are on an evolutionary path, able to adapt themselves and to cynically exploit "every opportunity they encounter," he continued. This means that "enlightened states must unite, through professional experts, jurists and others to formulate fair laws of war that will allow states to defend themselves against these terror organizations while maintaining a maximum protection of the lives of citizens."

The new laws of war should "place the blame on harm to civilians first and foremost on those who use them cynically as living shields," he argued.

Part of that adaptation involves taking advantage of the constraints placed on liberal democracies by humanitarian international law – particularly, the obligation by states to avoid harming civilians in line with the principles of discernment and proportionality, according to Ganor.

"In order to challenge these states, modern terror organizations, especially hybrid organizations, place weapons storehouses and rocket launchers in underground sites underneath residential homes and under-protected facilities like hospitals, medical clinics, schools and others," he said.

"These organizations do not see themselves as being obligated to humanitarian international law, and they use civilian hiding places to conduct random attacks on civilian areas and facilities in the territory of an enemy state. From this perspective, the states dealing with such terrorists find themselves being Gulliver, with their hands and legs bound by morality and by modern combat principles, fighting dwarfs that attack without pause and in violation of every legal or moral principle."

Israel’s Homeland Security Is Collapsing

From its establishment to the present day, Israel is a country that has invested its efforts in the security of its borders against surrounding countries. Countless efforts have been made to develop technologies and capabilities that have, at all times, preserved the military and defensive superiority of the State of Israel in the face of the non-stop threats that it faces.

At the same time, a clear outlook also developed — that military operations can be contained by on-duty forces in the short term, but that war can only be won by reservists. It is not by chance that the ratio of reservists and regular personnel is one regular person for every four reservists. Reservists are the most caring, and also the most influential, population in times of emergency, as history teaches.

But given that the State of Israel knows how to successfully defend its borders, how can we explain the failure in protecting its homeland security?

The state of violence prevailing in almost every aspect of our life has become an existential issue.

It is now routine that thousands of businesses have to pay “protection money” to criminals; frequent murders are happening in Arab society, and women are frequent victims; illegal construction now amounts to an incalculable number of buildings; an unimaginable amount of illegal weapons are found in our society; there is terrorism and agricultural theft in huge quantities; and, in practice, there is almost no police presence or enforcement of any kind in many areas, especially in the Negev.

Hamas celebrates a terror attack on Purim, 1992

Hamas' Al Qassam website is celebrating the anniversary of a 1992 slashing attack that killed two, including a woman waiting to enter a Purim party.

On March 17, 1992, an Arab from Gaza went amok on a Jaffa street with a machete. He murdered Ilanit Ohana, 19, of Bat Yam, who was standing near a business where she had just gotten a job as a clerk. A heroic Arab who owned a nearby garage, Abed Abdelghani, 44, rushed to help her and was stabbed to death as well.

The terrorist then went through the streets and injured some 20 people, mostly schoolgirls waiting to enter a Purim party.

People thought the terrorist with a machete was just someone in a Purim costume.

This is what Hamas and its allies celebrate.

A couple of antisemitic cartoons from a Palestinian site in Europe

The Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad is a website for Palestinians who live outside the Middle East who want to influence the Palestinian political process. The group supports terrorism, as it said in a declaration after a 2017 Istanbul conference.

The editorial cartoonist they use is the same one that draws in Hamas' Felesteen newspaper, but he seems more willing to engage in explicitly antisemitic themes for a European Palestinian audience than for Gazans.

Here's one captioned, "Settlers storming Al Aqsa....and Arab countries."

And this one is captioned simply "The Biden Administration."

Dr. Zafer Fouad Eliyahu, a beloved doctor who was one of the very last Jews in Iraq, has died of an apparent stroke. He was 61.

An orthopedic surgeon, he was one of the last three Jews in Baghdad, along with his sister and her husband. The couple is childless so these are the last Jews of Baghdad, and possibly in all of Iraq.

Dr. Eliyahu himself never married, perhaps because there are no Jewish single women in Iraq.

Colleagues praised him, saying he was kind and always smiling as well as an excellent doctor. Patients on social media say how he saved their lives.

Most people did not know he was Jewish, and he was even nicknamed "Sayyid" which indicates a direct descendant of Mohammed for Shiites.

One colleague said that Eliyahu "was an example of humanity and humility. He treats patients with a smile, even those who do not accept treatment from him after knowing his religion." But that was rare, he added.

Asharq al-Awsat adds that the remaining Jews in Iraq generally keep their religion secret "especially in Baghdad, as a result of the dangers that they may be exposed to if their identities are revealed."

There were over 150,000 Jews in Iraq in 1947. They have been about as thoroughly ethnically cleansed as possible from that country.

03/16 Links Pt2: A New Zionist Congress Is Born; Anti-Semite-in-Chief; WaPo Uses Bad Social Science to Push Anti-Israel Propaganda; Bible scroll fragments among artifacts found in Dead Sea Cave of Horror

From Ian:

A New Zionist Congress Is Born

Defiant Jewish undergraduates are forming their own national organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism and promoting Jewish pride. Join us.

In this new world order, nobody is surprised when a majority of students at Tufts University vote to pass a referendum blaming racist police violence in the United States on the State of Israel. In this new world order, it’s not cause for alarm when an Israeli restaurant in Portland, Oregon, is forced to remove all mention of Israel from its menus and signs, but still gets vandalized with graffiti that reads “eat shit” and “falafel is from Palestine.”

In this new world order, no one blinks when the organizers of a rally against police brutality in New York City say it’s “open to all, minus cops and Zionists.”

In this new world order, the first draft of California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum listed the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions Movement as a domestic civil rights issue and defined the Jewish people through the lens of colonialism and whiteness.

In this new world order, a professor at the University of Bristol can accuse his own Jewish students of being henchmen in a Zionist plot to silence left-wing professors, and still win the support of hundreds of “progressive” colleagues around the world, including Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler.

In this new world order, a man can walk into a kosher supermarket in Michigan and taunt its Jewish customers by asking them to read “Free Palestine” on his phone, post the video to Instagram, and receive hundreds of thousands of likes and comments from adoring fans.

This is the insidious hatred students like me are dealing with on campus. Yet I’ve had professionals call me, their voices shaking, worried that they might get shamed on Twitter by college students if I use their platform to speak freely about what is actually causing anti-Semitism at school. This is all part of a desperate need to sit at the table with those who style themselves as fighting for justice. The adults in the room beg us to reason with them, to explain to them what Judaism means to us and why we have a connection with Israel. “Allyship,” they preach, because the only way we’ll be accepted is if we are conceived as oppressed.

I’m sorry. If a Jew is called a Nazi on campus, is it really his or her responsibility to invite the offending student to share a bagel on the quad? If someone bans me from their organization, is it really my responsibility to, as one individual put it to me recently, “internalize ways in which I am not welcoming, and strive for a more intersectional approach to dialogues about oppression and power”? What the hell does that even mean? What other minority community would be forced to endure this jargon-filled hellscape? Every time Jews speak out about anti-Semitism, we're immediately told to endure a corporate diversity training seminar, one which concludes that it's still our fault for causing all the drama.

And yet for many in the Jewish community, this is a tolerable price to pay to sit at the table. Well, I don't want a seat at that table. I don’t want to be anywhere near that table. I am in fact determined to flip that table over.

At 80 years old, human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler is busier than ever

Unlike most other activists, Cotler might be lucky enough to have a direct line to the person handling U.S. foreign policy. He had a decades-long friendship with U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s stepfather, Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor. “When I was a law professor at McGill, we inaugurated the Raoul Wallenberg Lectureship in Human Rights,” Cotler recalled. The first person to give that lecture was Elie Wiesel; the second was Pisar, sparking a friendship in which Cotler visited him at his homes in New York and in France.

But human rights work is only half of Cotler’s portfolio — he also has another full-time job, as Canada’s antisemitism envoy. He took the job pro bono, he said, with practically no budget, to handle a huge portfolio that includes both domestic and global antisemitism, domestic and global Holocaust remembrance, and chairing Canada’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. (Canada has adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which Trudeau says is part of the nation’s “anti-racism strategy.”)

Cotler sees a straightforward connection between his two passions: the Jewish community and international human rights. “I take a human rights approach to combating antisemitism,” he explained. “While [bigotry] begins with Jews, it doesn’t end with Jews. So for me, all these things converge, and there’s a universal resonance, both of the lessons of the Holocaust and the combating antisemitism today.”

Some on the political left might call this framework intersectionality. But Cotler is not trying to apply a political ideology to his fight against antisemitism, and he says he feels fortunate that Canadians by and large do not politicize the issue. “People are not weaponizing antisemitism. You don’t have the right weaponize it against the left, and the left weaponizing it against the right,” he noted — unlike Canada’s neighbor to the south. “The big difference is Canada is not as polarized or as divided as the U.S.,” and “there still is a consensus.” His biggest concern is what he calls the “normalization” of antisemitism, where “it gets mainstream, and it doesn’t elicit the condemnation, or maybe the outrage, that it deserves.”

One of Cotler’s goals as Canada’s global antisemitism envoy is to address what he views as antisemitism at the United Nations, in the double standard he says the U.N. applies to Israel. “The rights of Israel deserve equal respect, not that human rights standards should not be applied to Israel. They must be. But these standards must be applied equally to everyone else,” Cotler said. He pointed out that Syria was recently appointed to a top position on the U.N.’s Special Committee on Decolonization, despite its well-documented history of brutal repression during the country’s civil war.

Cotler noted that some in the pro-Israel community who criticize the U.N.’s treatment of Israel simply oppose the institution entirely, but he is not among them. “If you’re Canadian, the United Nations is part of your DNA,” Cotler explained, noting that “human rights is a centerpiece of our foreign policy, [and] international law is part of my identity.”

His work truly is international: The cases currently in his docket include Badawi in Saudi Arabia, along with dissidents from China and Russia. During his conversation with JI, he received a call about a matter related to political persecution in Venezuela. “That’s another priority,” he said. For Cotler, every matter related to global injustice is a priority: “I get energized by the work.”

John Kerry spent $180K for a two day trip to Jerusalem (a LOT more than Kushner!)

The Daily Beast has an exclusive!

They even show the details from a US government site that tracks expenses.

Outrageous, right?

Only if you don't act like a reporter and ask if this expense was excessive or normal. Which, of course, the Daily Beast didn't do.

Kushner's trip was to lead a delegation of Americans and Israelis to Morocco in the wake of the peace accords between Israel and Morocco. Sounds like a pretty important trip, not the frivolous way it is being described in the media.

I took a quick look at the same USASpending.gov website to see how much was spent on trips to Israel during the Obama era.

Here's one - a two day trip to Jerusalem by John Kerry on June 11-12, 2013. The trip is described as "IGF::OT::IGF GSO/TRAVEL - SECSTATE 11-12 JUNE PAY LODGING IN JLM."

It costs the US taxpayers $181,245.

It sounds like the Kushner trip was a bargain!

Where is the outrage at how much a Democratic administration spends on hotels?

The media isn't interested in that story.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is media bias.

Usually, when Iran threatens Israel with destruction, it throws in a caveat that it will only do so if it is attacked first.

Today, that seems to have changed.

Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri says capacities have been developed for a destruction and elimination of the Zionist regime, Tasnim reported.

Pointing to the regional and extra-regional adversaries’ fear of the growing power of the Islamic Republic in West Asia and the Mediterranean coasts, the top general noted, “Before entering the second step of the (Islamic) Revolution, the capacities for the annihilation of the Zionist regime and, by God’s grace, the elimination of the fake, child-murdering and odious regime from the political geography of the region has been prepared.”

The second step of the revolution is an initiative that Ayatollah Khamenei began in 2019 to energize the country's youth who weren't alive during the 1979 revolution.

While the statement is open to interpretation, this threat sounds much more specific in its timeframe than previous threats.

03/16 Links Pt1: The UN and the Illiberal International Order; Israel Pursuing Four More Peace Deals, Bibi Says; Iran’s ‘Nuclear Fatwa’ is Nuclear Nonsense

From Ian:

FDD Podcast: The UN and the Illiberal International Order

With the defeat of the Axis Powers in 1945, the United States emerged as the strongest nation on earth. But rather than emulate hegemons of the past, American leaders envisioned a new and different world order.

Their goal was to organize an “international community,” establish “universal human rights,” and a growing body of “international law.”

This project required new institutions, in particular the United Nations.

Three quarters of a century later, it requires willful blindness not to see that the UN and many other international organizations have become bloated and corrupt bureaucracies, increasingly serving the interests of despots.

To discuss what’s gone wrong and what might be done to prevent the UN and other international organizations from drifting further into the clutches of authoritarians host Clifford D. May is joined by Richard Goldberg, Orde Kittrie, and Emma Reilly.

Emily Schrader: Biden must abandon negotiating with Iran, UNHRC, UNRWA - opinion

Since President Biden came into office, he’s made it a goal for the United States to restore relations for diplomatic purposes with a host of entities, from the United Nations to the Palestinian Authority to UNRWA to the Iranian regime. Sadly, these well-intended initiatives are all misguided. The UN will not be any better for the United States being involved, the PA will not suddenly have a desire to make peace with Israel, and Iran is most certainly not going to stop its hostile actions in five – yes five – different countries, nor will they halt their booming nuclear program.

In 2018, the US officially withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council, a body plagued with corruption and anti-Israel obsession, whose members today include Russia, Cuba and even China. Ironically, China is simultaneously committing genocide against Chinese Muslims and violating the human rights of countless other Chinese, Tibetan and Hong Kong residents in the area. It is precisely because of sickening hypocrisy like this that the US withdrew its participation under former president Trump, and why even president Bush was hesitant about joining the council when it was established in 2006. While the intent of the Biden administration may be noble – to “work from within” to change the corruption of the UNHRC – US participation prior to president Trump did nothing to stamp out the corruption, so it is naïve to think that would be different today.

Similarly, the US cut funding to the UNRWA, the UN body responsible for Palestinian refugees (exclusively), due to the fact the mere existence of UNRWA is an obstacle to resolving the Palestinian refugee issue. UNRWA has faced criticism for perpetuating refugee status for generations and preventing Palestinians from resettling. Incidentally, the agency also has had numerous scandals with UNRWA textbooks teaching violence and terrorism in Palestinian schools. The agency itself is also the single largest employer of Palestinians in the Palestinian territories, meaning if they solved the refugee issue, these Palestinians would be out of jobs.

The US was the world’s single largest funder of UNRWA, amounting to over $360 million annually, until president Trump cut funding in 2018, calling the agency “irredeemably flawed.” Since then, throughout the pandemic, UNRWA was found once again to have incitement to violence in their textbooks teaching children in Gaza blood libels and glorifying “martyrs.” These textbooks were condemned by the European Parliament, among others. In a report issued at the beginning of 2021, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-SE) found that UNRWA materials are even more extreme than some of the textbooks issued by the PA itself. Yet at the same time this report confirms the problem of UNRWA, the Biden administration is talking about restoring $360 million in funding to it.

Josh Hammer: Israel’s New Election: No One Else but Bibi

For American friends of Israel buoyed by both the intrinsic moral dignity of an enhanced Israeli alliance and that alliance’s concrete national security benefits in repelling both Iranian hegemony and Sunni jihad, the thought experiment as to who ought to next lead Israel amounts to the following: “Which candidate for prime minister would be best in sustaining Israel’s marked geopolitical and diplomatic progress, centered around but hardly limited to the Trump-Netanyahu doctrine of Middle East peace, amidst the headwinds of what promises to be an anti-Israel administration redolent of the Barack Obama presidency?”

The question practically answers itself. Of course, Netanyahu is best-suited to continue leading Israel at the present moment.

Netanyahu’s now-decade-plus second stint as prime minister largely overlapped with the most anti-Israel U.S. administration in the Jewish state’s history, that of former President Barrack Obama. Netanyahu proved himself admirably adroit and courageous during those tumultuous years, developing a knack for when to strategically appease Obama (for example, the ten-month “settlement” freeze of 2010), mustering the fortitude to loudly confront him when need be (for example, Netanyahu’s spellbinding March 2015 speech before Congress, in opposition to the Iran nuclear deal), and prudently hedging his nation’s decades-long wager on the U.S.-Israel alliance by advancing the Jewish state’s diplomatic interests across Asia, Africa, and Central and South America to hitherto unforeseen heights. Netanyahu, in short, has already weathered the storm of an anti-Israel Democratic presidency without suffering serious blows to Israel’s geopolitical clout, and there is no reason to think he cannot ably do so again.

But the greatest diplomatic breakthrough for Israel over the last four decades, and quite possibly over the course of its national history, was undoubtedly the signing of the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. Those peace agreements would not have been possible without the vision and leadership of Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose skill in selling Israel’s value as a diplomatic, geopolitical, and military ally on the world stage helped land the Jewish state not merely closer defense ties with New Delhi or a new Guatemalan embassy in Jerusalem, but affirmative normalization agreements (and all the beautiful accouterments such agreements necessarily entail) with the very heart of the Arab world itself.

Netanyahu has established himself as a transformative leader. He has overseen both unprecedented diplomatic success overseas and tremendous economic growth and technological innovation at home. In the annals of Israeli political history, he is surpassed by no one other than perhaps preeminent founding father David Ben-Gurion himself. That is not to say Netanyahu is flawless; on the contrary, despite his resoluteness on the Iranian threat, he has too often lacked the courage of his convictions as it pertains to Palestinian-related issues, such as sovereignty in Judea and Samaria and the perennial thorn in the side of the modern Jewish state that is the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. There have been missed opportunities, from a conservative Zionist perspective.

But there is simply no feasible alternative at the present moment. Some conservative Zionists and longtime supporters of Netanyahu’s, frustrated with the inherent political instability that comes with four national elections in just two years and the reality of Netanyahu’s legal travails at the behest of an opportunistic legal fraternity, have urged Netanyahu that now is the right time to finally step aside. But even ignoring the largely frivolous nature of Netanyahu’s specific legal troubles, to say nothing of the fact that it is puerile to necessarily expect awe-inspiring personal virtue from our political leaders, such speculation falls flat when one considers a blunt but crucial reality: There is simply no one else who can take Netanyahu’s place.

Israel Pursuing Four More Peace Deals, Bibi Says

Israel is pursuing four more peace deals with countries in the region and elsewhere, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.

"I brought four peace agreements, and there are another four on the way," Netanyahu said. "I talked about one of them yesterday." He added that one such regional leader spoke with him by phone Monday night. The prime minister did not dispel rumors of other peace agreements in the works with nations such as Niger, Mauritania, and Indonesia.

The longtime Israeli leader also touted the four other agreements he forged last year with Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Africa—Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan—which thawed decades of cold relations.

Israel is inching toward normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, a key partner in the coalition against Iran due to its size, wealth, and military force. Netanyahu met with Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in November. Under the Trump administration, senior officials hinted at prospects of budding relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem in the wake of the historic Abraham Accords signed in August 2020.

Normalization with gulf countries has already borne significant fruit for Israel. Tourism and trade continues to grow apace between Israel and the UAE, with some even remarking that they feel safer wearing traditional Jewish clothing in Dubai than in France now.

The Trump administration furthered such agreements between Israel and regional partners as a senior broker by strongly backing Israel and pressuring Iran. The realignment in the Middle East was appraised by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger as "brilliant." He emphasized that the Biden administration must build on the progress made in peaceful regional ties by continuing Trump-era policies in the region.

Now look at the way Kosovo has been described elsewhere by the Guardian: as a state and a country.

Is the @Guardian deliberately downgrading Kosovo's status in order to downplay the significance of the move for Israel? pic.twitter.com/JObEmepTBQ
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) March 16, 2021

The Washington Post reports:

U.S. Capitol Police suspended an officer Monday after a copy of an infamous antisemitic tract was found near a Capitol Hill security post Sunday, alarming a congressional aide who viewed the document in plain sight at the checkpoint.

Photographs provided to The Washington Post show a printed copy of the Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion on a table inside an entrance to the Longworth House Office Building.

The Post provided the photographs to the Capitol Police on Monday morning and requested comment. The department said Monday evening that acting chief Yogananda D. Pittman had suspended an officer pending an investigation “after anti-Semitic reading material was discovered near his work area on Sunday.”

It is unclear from the photographs who was in possession of the document, which was held together by a binder clip with its pages tattered and stained. A date stamp indicated it was printed in January 2019.

It looks like the printout was well worn and referenced often. Was it passed around from person to person?

A person whose job is to protect US lawmakers spent his or her spare time reading about how Jews are trying to take over the world.

This is truly disturbing. Unfortunately, it is not very surprising. Antisemitism has become fashionable again across the political spectrum.

Here is the abstract of a virulently antisemitic "research paper" - published by a now defunct academic journal and indexed today at ResearchGate - that ties the Protocols to today's Zionism, with copious footnotes.

(h/t YMedad)

Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party is literally falling apart, and Hamas will likely win upcoming planned elections as a result - if Abbas lets them occur.

As I reported last week, Yasser Arafat's nephew and Fatah Central Committee member Nasser al-Kidwa decided to run in the planned elections. Fatah expelled him from the party as a result, and now Kidwa is attempting to gain more people willing to leave Fatah. He is trying to woo popular terrorist/prisoner Marwan Barghouti and his supporters to run in his party.

Mahmoud Abbas retaliated by instructing the Palestinian National Fund to cut off funding to the Yasser Arafat Foundation, headed by Kidwa. They are claiming that Kidwa might be taking funds meant for the Foundation and using them for his campaign. This might be true but it shows how endemic corruption is across the board in Fatah.

Voters are not likely to reward such a move.

Abbas also took away Kidwa's official car and his guards that protected him.

Marwan Barghouti, the terrorist who is serving five life sentences in Israeli prison, is said to be ready to run for president of the Palestinian Authority against Mahmoud Abbas. Polls show that the murderer is the most popular Palestinian politician today.

Also, Mohammed Dahlan - the other Fatah rival to Abbas who was expelled from the party and exiled, has been instrumental in getting the UAE to donate tens of thousands of COVID-19 vaccines to Gaza, where he is most popular. The fact that he managed to get vaccines to the territories when the entire Palestinian Authority has failed to bring in any is also not lost on Palestinians.

Khaled Abu Toameh tweeted this morning that a Fatah official said Fatah is crumbling and Hamas will win the election. I tend to think that if things continue to go badly for Mahmoud Abbas, he will cancel the elections altogether under some pretext (probably that Israel is not allowing polling places to be set up in Jerusalem) and remain in power.

What is clear is that the Palestinian Authority and its dominant Fatah party is in disarray and Hamas is giving the appearance of being competent and respectable by contrast.

If anything, this mess will further embitter Arab nations who have supported the Palestinian cause, and to them, the idea of normalization with Israel becomes more attractive than blind support for a corrupt, petty and/or terrorist Palestinian leadership.

Haaretz interviewed Cornel West, who blamed his not receiving tenure at Harvard on Zionists who didn't like his anti-Israel politics:

Never one to shy from controversy, Dr. Cornel West once again finds himself at the center of a firestorm after Harvard University refused to consider him for tenure – a decision he links to his support for Palestinian rights.

West, 67, previously left the Massachusetts school in 2002 following a public spat with then-President Lawrence Summers, before returning in 2016. He says Harvard’s administration told him there was no possibility for a tenure review but offered him more money or a prestigious chair. He believes there were three possible reasons for Harvard’s decision: his academic work, his age or his politics.

The academic, who will participate in the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 2024, quickly rules out the first two possibilities, citing his previous tenure 36 years ago at Yale and professorships at Harvard and Princeton with the highest possible honors for a faculty member, as well as over 20 books published under his name.

He does not believe his public support for Sen. Bernie Sanders or Black Lives Matter was a deal breaker, noting that his stance on those topics is mainstream enough to not be viewed as alienating. “Then I thought of the Palestinian issue and the Israeli occupation – now that is a taboo,” West says.

West is not telling the truth.

He was not denied tenure - his position was not a tenure track position!

As this article notes, most academic jobs - even senior ones - are not tenure track anymore. West's position wasn't ever eligible for tenure to begin with, and he knew this when he re-joined Harvard in 2016.

During his normal 5-year review, the faculty committee offered him a raise and a 10 year contract, which for a 67-year old man is as good as tenure. But he refused, insisting that they change his position itself into a tenured position - something that this review board couldn't do. As the Boston Globe reported, "The faculty committee was only in charge of reviewing his reappointment and does not have authority to conduct a review for tenure, [Harvard's] spokesman said."

Now, it is obvious why he wasn't granted tenure - he did not have a tenure-eligible job and one cannot make that change at the drop of a hat. West asked for the job to be changed, which is quite a different matter than being denied tenure!

Yet West is insisting in multiple interviews that he was forced out by Zionists at Harvard rather than his own hubris. Yet if the Zionists at Harvard were out to silence him, why did they offer him a raise and a ten year contract?

And is it really that difficult to find professors in Ivy League schools who are anti-Israel?

Now, what does it look like when a professor lies about being denied tenure - and claims that the Jews (sorry, "Zionists") are secretly behind it?

It sounds far more like West planned to leave Harvard anyway, and decided to make a stink accusing "Zionists" of mistreating him.

UPDATE: Mondoweiss has the quote from West where he literally blames Jews for his not getting tenure - because what other possible reason is there?

03/15 Links Pt2: Antisemitism is a Conspiracy Theory Against Meritocracy; The Ramallah Quakers; The Jews' Secret Fleet to Israel After the Holocaust

From Ian:

Daniel Greenfield: Antisemitism is a Conspiracy Theory Against Meritocracy

Last week, the Gross Family Center for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust kindly invited me to address their audience. I spoke to them about Socialist antisemitism and the war on meritocracy, why the enemies of meritocracy are also the enemies of the Jews and why when Jews oppose meritocracy, we're enabling antisemitism.

Here's the video of the speech along with a few key points.

To understand where the new antisemitism came from, it’s important to look at how the origins of modern antisemitism redefined the Jews from the oppressed to the oppressors.

And that didn’t happen in 1948. It didn’t happen in the Six Day War.

The new antisemitism redefines Jews as the oppressors. But redefining Jews as the oppressors dates back to a time before the rebirth of the State of Israel, a time when Jews hardly had any rights, and the few rights they had were coming under attack.

"Every government having regard to good morals ought to repress the Jews," Pierre Leroux, credited with coining the term 'Socialism' wrote. "When we speak of Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce."

American socialism traces its ideological ancestry to Charles Fourier, a French socialist bigot who fumed that Jews were the embodiment of capitalism, “parasites, merchants, usurers”, and the "incarnation of commerce: parasitical, deceitful, traitorous and unproductive".

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in the face of which no other god may exist,” Karl Marx ranted. “The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world.”

The emancipation of the Jews meant that they were free to pursue careers, go into business, and do their best to succeed. (h/t Chairman LMAO™)

The Ramallah Quakers

It is hardly a surprise that Sa'ed Atshan would be given tenure at Swarthmore College. What is noteworthy is how this came about. It points to the special place Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) supporters have in academia.

To start, Atshan is a well-known BDS activist, and the college itself has endorsed BDS. In many ways, Atshan is a poster child for Quaker education—he's an alum of the Quaker school in Ramallah who now teaches for the same Quaker school he attended as an undergraduate. He represents the Quaker echo chamber regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that ensures that only the Palestinian narrative will be voiced.

Atshan has also been active with Students for Justice in Palestine, whose parent organization, American Muslims for Palestine, was recently shown to be connected to the same American Muslim Brotherhood supporters who funded Hamas through the Holy Land Foundation, and which has trained its activists in "Countering Normalization of Israeli Oppression on Campus."

The Ramallah Friends School, where Atshan was educated, is one of the oldest Quaker institutions in the Middle East. The school acts as a feeder to the Quaker colleges in Pennsylvania. Another proud alum of the school is Joyce Ajlouny, the Secretary General of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Ajlouny is a native of Ramallah and formerly the head of the Quaker school.

The Ramallah school has also been exporting its pedagogy through programs like "Go Palestine," which is focused on Palestinian culture. Yet, in addition, "Go Palestine" participants receive a steady dose of anti-Israel rhetoric through films and lectures. These include"Occupation 101" and "Jerusalem: The East Side Story," films which depict Israel as a racist, savage oppressor. A panel on "Youth Activism and Engagement in Palestine" featured representatives of "the Love Under Apartheid Campaign [and] the BDS movement."

The blindspot of NYAG Letitia James

Ms. James’ tepid response to the wave of Jew hatred that proliferated throughout New York City in the summer of 2019 and has continued in various incarnations until this day, will not go unanswered.

It doesn't take much to know that the rudimentary function of the Attorney General is to launch meticulous probes in order to root out the pernicious source or sources from which criminal behavior is emanating, to find out who the suspects are and what their motive is.

While Ms. James is on the fast track to take on Asian-American discrimination with a palpable gusto, her willingness to be a pro-active prosecutor when it pertains to anti-Semitism is sputtering like a faulty engine.

Let’s remember that during the wave of heightened anti-Semitism that plagued New York City and beyond, Ms.James and her cohorts remained completely silent about the insidious surge until she was coerced to hold a press conference in the aftermath of the brutal stabbings of hassidic Jews at the home of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg of Monsey in December of 2019. .

In a statement released to the media at the time, James said, “There is zero tolerance for acts of hate of any kind and we will continue to monitor this horrific situation. I stand with the Jewish community tonight and every night.”

Really, Ms. James? Your actions certainly do not justify these statements.

She followed that up with a press conference after meeting with Orthodox leaders. She then claimed that she would work with local district attorneys in providing them support for their prosecutions of Anti-Demitic attackers. She also promised that she would monitor social media sites that routinely provide a platform for haters to spew forth vitriolic anti-Semitic diatribes.

Suffice it to say, Ms.James, despite her words, has done absolutely nothing to prevent the burgeoning anti-Semitism that has gripped our city and state. She still has not promulgated a viable plan to quash anti-Semitism as the slow motion roll to yet another European style deadly pogrom takes place before our very eyes.

Ms. James, we ask you and your colleagues why you maintain a double standard as it pertains to battling discrimination and prejudice? Why don’t you fight the scourge of Jew hatred with as much fervor as you do when other minority groups are the target of violence?

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.