Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, April 04, 2021

04/04 Links: Bret Stephens: Can We Really Picture Auschwitz? EU shamefully “inspired” by Palestinian supporter of terror; Capitol Hill ramming attacker member of antisemitic Nation of Islam org.

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Can We Really Picture Auschwitz?

Nine days before the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, Buba and her sister were among the 56,000 prisoners forced to march 35 miles in the dead of winter. As many as 15,000 of those who began the journey from Auschwitz died. The rest, along with Buba and Icu, were put on trains to Germany.

Even with the war all but lost, the Nazi determination to kill Jews didn’t stop.

“The SS had us form a single file,” Buba said of the march. “They eliminated one out of every 10 women. I ran toward Icu so that the same fate would befall us.”

It didn’t. She and Icu were liberated, from Bergen-Belsen, on April 15 by the British Army. No painting of Buba’s haunts me more than the one of her alone, her head in her emaciated arms, the barbed wire still in front, the chimney, still burning, not far behind. Image

“I wondered what to do with my newly granted freedom,” Buba thought. “My world had been demolished.” What better way than this image to help me understand how little life could mean to someone who had lost so much?

Buba put down her paint brushes a few years ago. She is now 95, one of only 2,000 or so Auschwitz survivors still living. Her husband, Luis, who survived Mauthausen, is 99. Both of them embody what, for me, it means to be Jewish: a member of a religion that cherishes life and memory alike, and believes that we live best, and understand best, when we remember well.

In this month of Holocaust remembrance, it’s worth pausing to consider how one brave woman’s memory, and art, help us to see what we must never forget.

US scraps Trump’s sanctions against ICC prosecutor who is probing Israel

US President Joe Biden has revoked sanctions on top officials at the International Criminal Court that were imposed under the Trump administration, the State Department announced Friday.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the economic sanctions imposed on ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and a top aide in 2019 “were inappropriate and ineffective,” and were therefore lifted.

The Hague-based court is probing alleged war crimes in Afghanistan by Afghan forces, the Taliban and US military. It also recently opened a probe into alleged war crimes by US ally Israel and Palestinian terror groups. Neither the US nor Israel are members of the ICC.

“We continue to disagree strongly with the ICC’s actions relating to the Afghanistan and Palestinian situations. We maintain our longstanding objection to the court’s efforts to assert jurisdiction over personnel of non-states parties such as the United States and Israel,” Blinken said.

He added: “We believe, however, that our concerns about these cases would be better addressed through engagement with all stakeholders in the ICC process rather than through the imposition of sanctions.”

ICC hopes for ‘new phase’ as Biden lifts sanctions on prosecutor probing Israel

The International Criminal Court welcomed US President Joe Biden’s lifting of sanctions imposed by former US president Donald Trump on the tribunal’s prosecutor, saying it signalled a new era of cooperation with Washington.

The Trump administration imposed the financial sanctions and a visa ban on Fatou Bensouda and another senior court official last year after she launched an investigation into alleged war crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan.

The head of the group representing The Hague-based court’s member countries expressed “deep appreciation” for the Biden administration move Friday, which comes as the administration seeks a more cooperative approach on a dispute that has alienated allies.

“I welcome this decision which contributes to strengthening the work of the court and, more generally, to promoting a rules-based international order,” Silvia Fernandez de Gurmendi, head of the Association of States Parties to the ICC, said in a statement.

House Republicans urge Biden to curb ties with PA over ICC complaint

A group of 25 House Republicans sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, urging them to curb ties with the Palestinian Authority over its complaint against Israel at the International Criminal Court.

“We are writing to implore the White House and the State Department to uphold longstanding law regarding the threat posed to American soldiers and our allies by the misuse of the International Criminal Court,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, spearheaded by Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina.

When Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, it included language forbidding funding assistance for the PA if it were to initiate an ICC judicially authorized investigation, or if it were to actively support such an investigation into alleged crimes committed against the Palestinians by Israel, the letter said.

“We believe that this type of unilateral lawfare flies in the face of American objectives to help both parties achieve a negotiated, lasting, and comprehensive peace,” the lawmakers wrote. “Such language clearly warned of the ramifications should such action be taken and has been a part of our appropriations process since 2014, with massive bipartisan consensus every year.”

Moreover, “the PA has unequivocally violated the first condition of that provision by, among other things, submitting a formal referral to the ICC in 2018,” they wrote, adding that it also violated the second condition by “repeated submission of purported evidence and materiel to the ICC, and official visits and communications with the ICC Prosecutor and staff, actively in support of the Court’s investigation.”

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach

I will not be online until Sunday night as Passover wraps up.

Have a chag sameach and a Shabbat Shalom!

04/02 Links Pt2: Anti-Semites Should Not Define Anti-Semitism; Saudi FM says ties with Israel would bring ‘tremendous benefit’ to Middle East

From Ian:

Anti-Semites Should Not Define Anti-Semitism

These perpetrators of anti-Israel agitation had been leading a virulent campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel for years now, and it was astonishing that JVP and these meretricious scholars and students ignored all the factual and shameful chronology (of which they have been central fomenters and cheerleaders in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign), and instead were trying to perpetuate the fantasy that the true threat to Jewish students and other Israel supporters is from the Left’s perennial boogeymen, the lunatic fringe of white power extremists who these willfully-blind activists believe, and want others to believe, were the chief perpetrators of anti-Jewish bigotry.

Similarly, in 2014, 40 professors of Jewish studies published a denunciation of a study that named professors who have been identified as expressing “anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric.”

While the 40 academic “heavyweights” claimed they, of course, rejected anti-Semitism totally as part of teaching, they were equally repelled by the tactics and possible effects of the AMCHA Initiative report, a comprehensive review of the attitudes about Israel of some 200 professors who signed an online petition during the 2014 Gaza incursion that called for an academic boycott against Israeli scholars—academics the petitioners claimed were complicit in the “latest humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s new military assault on the Gaza Strip.”

“We believe the professors who have signed this petition may be so biased against the Jewish state that they are unable to teach accurately or fairly about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict, and may even inject antisemitic tropes into their lectures or class discussion,” wrote Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith, co-founders of the AMCHA Initiative, an organization that tracks incidents of campus anti-Semitism, and authors of the report.

Calling “the actions of AMCHA deplorable,” the indignant professors were insulted by the organization’s “technique of monitoring lectures, symposia and conferences,” something which, they believe, “strains the basic principle of academic freedom on which the American university is built.” That is a rather breathtaking assertion by academics; namely, that it is contrary to the core mission of higher education that ideas and instruction being publicly expressed by professors cannot be examined and judged, and that by even applying some standards of objectivity on a body of teaching by a particular professor “AMCHA’s approach closes off all but the most narrow intellectual directions and,” as academics who do not want the content of their output to actually be examined for the quality of its scholarship are always fond of saying, “has a chilling effect on research and teaching.”

Can anyone believe that had the AMCHA Initiative or other organization issued a report that revealed the existence of endemic racism, or homophobia, or sexism, or Islamophobia in university coursework, and had warned students who might be negatively impacted to steer clear of courses taught by those offending professors, that these same 40 feckless professors would have denounced such reports as potentially having a negative effect on teaching and learning?

No one is telling these toxic Israel-haters to remain silent—or even to not utter anti-Semitic speech. What working definitions such as the IHRA definition and anti-Semitism awareness bills do hope to achieve is to allow those who are pretending only to be anti-Israel but are actually anti-Semitic to be identified as such. The measures are not designed to criminalize or suppress speech, even what we would consider “hate” speech, although going forward Israel-haters may not be able to disguise their anti-Jewish bigotry as successfully as they have when they pretended to care only for the rights of Palestinians and assailed the policies of the Jewish state.

It may be inconvenient and even embarrassing for these Israel-haters to finally be named for they are—radical, misguided activists whose unrelenting campaign of vitriol against the Jewish state and its supporters has regularly morphed into pure anti-Semitism—but their efforts to assign the blame to others for the miasma of dark bigotry on campuses they themselves have helped to create shows how crucial such tools as the IHRA definition are, and why its acceptance and use are important to help eliminate, finally, “the oldest hatred” from institutions of higher education.

Caroline Glick: The threats American Jewry refuses to face

After being forced by Covid-19 restrictions to celebrate Passover alone last year, like their Israeli brethren, American Jews were by and large able to celebrate the Passover seder with their friends and families this year. And as in Israel, American Jewish families reveled in their deliverance from loneliness on the Jewish festival of deliverance.

But even the joy of Passover couldn't dispel the twin storm clouds rising around the largest Jewish diaspora.

The first threat is growing Jew-hatred. American Jewish groups are good at fighting white supremacism. Unfortunately, the most dangerous external threat to Jewish life in America doesn't come from neo-Nazis. It comes from their home base.

Along with Hindus, Jewish Americans are the most highly educated religious group in America. American Jews have long assumed that the primary source of anti-Semitism in America is ignorance and that as education levels rise, levels of anti-Semitism would decrease. Given the prevalence of anti-Semitism on university campuses, researchers at the University of Arkansas decided to check this assumption.

Publishing their findings this week in Tablet magazine, they demonstrated just how wrong this assumption has become. Contrary to what Jewish organizations have long claimed, it turns out that the more educated Americans are, the more anti-Semitic they are.

College graduates are five percent more likely to apply anti-Semitic double standards to Jews than Americans who haven't gone to college. Holders of advanced degrees used double standards against Jews 15% more often than respondents without higher educations.

The implications are dire. Academia, American Jewry's home turf for a century and the key to their entry into the American elite – is now hostile territory.

Then there is the media. In the mid-20th century, American Jews were pioneers of the US mass media, entertainment and music industries. Increasingly, however, today they are their punching bag.

Noah Green: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Noah Green was named as the knife-wielding, now-deceased suspect who rammed a car into a U.S. Capitol barricade, exiting with a knife and killing one Capitol police officer while injuring another.

Green is a Nation of Islam follower, according to a review of his now-deleted Facebook page by Heavy, although police have not specified a motive. On Facebook, as recently as March 2021, the suspect expressed admiration for Elijah Muhammad, the now deceased Nation of Islam leader who was a mentor to Malcolm X. Green referred to himself as “Noah X.”

Saudi FM says ties with Israel would bring ‘tremendous benefit’ to Middle East

Normalization with Israel would bring “tremendous benefit” to the region, the Saudi foreign minister has said, but such an accord with the kingdom would depend on progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Under the Abraham Accords brokered by former US president Donald Trump last year, four Arab countries — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan — agreed to normalize ties with the Jewish state.

But Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan said Thursday that any deal with Saudi Arabia was “very much dependent on progress with the peace process.”

He noted that normalization had been on the table since the introduction of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative on the condition of reaching resolution with the Palestinians.

“I think normalizing Israel’s status within the region would bring tremendous benefit to the region as a whole,” he said during an interview with CNN.

“It would be extremely helpful both economically but also socially and from a security perspective.”

But such a process “can only be successful if we address the issue of the Palestinians and if we are able to deliver a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders that gives the Palestinians dignity and gives them their rights.”

Normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦 and Israel 🇮🇱 will bring tremendous benefits to region as a whole. We must find path to resolve Palestinian conflict. All Israelis will be welcome in the Kingdom. - KSA Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud h/t @IsraelArabic @CNN pic.twitter.com/ORdEnHse4h
— Avi Kaner (@AviKaner) April 2, 2021

While we are still trying to make sense out of the most recent Israeli elections, indications are that the Palestinian elections that Abbas called for might also fail to provide clear leadership.

Actually, Abbas has found a way to make his elections even more divisive than the Israeli ones.

Instead of just calling for elections, he has called for 3 elections:

o May 22: Elections for the PA Legislative Council (PLC), the lawmaking body
o July 31: Elections for president of the Palestinian Authority
o August 31: Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) parliamentary elections for the Palestinian National Council (PNC)

According to the Associated Press, the divisiveness of the upcoming Palestinian elections goes even further.

The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, directed by Khalil Shikaki, has done a poll of 1,200 Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. The poll found that if the election for the PLC were held today:

o  43 percent would vote for Fatah
o  30 percent would vote for Hamas
o  18 percent of voters are undecided

But there is more to it than that.

According to Shikaki, the source of Hamas's weakness is the general perception that the group is not up to dealing with the challenges the people face, such as restoring national unity, improving the economy and lifting the blockade of Gaza by both Israel and Egypt. The reputation of the Hamas leadership has suffered from reports of their extravagant lifestyle.

On the other hand, despite being seen as capable of addressing those problems, Fatah's weakness is its lack of unity due to internal rivalries.

And those splits within Fatah are eating away from its potential share of the vote:

a faction led by Mohammed Dahlan, a former senior Fatah leader who had a falling out with Abbas and is based in the United Arab Emirates, would win 10 percent. Nasser al-Kidwa, who was kicked out of Fatah after forming his own list, would win 7 percent. They would mainly draw votes from Fatah, dropping its share to around 30 percent, the poll said. [emphasis added]

Fatah's share of the vote would end up matching the vote that Hamas would get.

There is one name that appears nowhere in the AP's summary of the PCPSR poll: Marawan Barghouti. The PCPSR in fact did make a point of measuring pro-Barghouti sentiment, and if he enters the election, the results would be even more disastrous for Abbas and Fatah:

If Marwan Barghouti forms his own independent list, 28% of the public say they will vote for his list while 22% say they will vote for the official Fatah list formed by president Abbas.

...If Naser al Qidwah forms his own independent list, 7% of the public say they will vote for his list while 30% say they will vote for the official Fatah list. If Marwan Barghouti gives his support to al Qidwah’s list, support for it would rise to 11% and support for Fatah’s would drop to 28%.

Shikaki also makes a point of the volatility of the results of his poll. Unpredictable events could cause a change in public opinion back towards Hamas. For example, if between now and the elections Hamas were to manipulate a prisoner exchange or if Israel were to kill a senior Hamas official -- that would give Hamas a boost. Shikaki is speaking hypothetically -- but who knows.

That of course raises the question of how international opinion would react to a new government that included -- or was even led by -- Hamas. Would the desire for a 2 state solution at any price be the final step in recasting Hamas terrorists as militants?

In its own analysis of the upcoming elections, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes some of the machinations going on behind the scenes. For one thing, Hamas has agreed not to run a candidate for president of the PA, making it easier for Abbas to finally add to his terms in office by actually winning a re-election.

In addition, Hamas has been talking with Fatah about creating a joint Hamas-Fatah candidate list that would allow the leaders of the 2 groups to split up the seats in the PLC in advance.

The Carnegie group notes:

Putting aside the fact that it is hardly a democratic practice to limit who can run in elections and divvy up the seats before voting takes place, such moves seem designed to manage, though hardly bridge, the deep Hamas-Fatah political differences that have fractured the Palestinian polity. [emphasis added]

This is a point made by journalist Daoud Kuttab, that, "elections, which were once considered impossible without reconciliation, are now being used to achieve reconciliation."

Maybe.

But consider the long history of failed reconciliations, trying for reconciliation while locked together in this kind of embrace does not fill one with optimism. As Carnegie puts it, "such an arrangement could result in a two-headed leadership incapacitated by divisions" -- and that is assuming that the 2 sides don't try to cut off each other's head.

Carnegie also judges that not all of the 3 elections are likely to even happen. It suggests that the elections for the PLC are the most likely to be held; the presidential elections are actually a little less likely to be held; and the elections for the PNC appear to be the most improbable.

This may account for what they claim is less international interest in the elections as a whole.

They may be right.

For all the talk about a Palestinian state, it is merely seen as an end towards a 2 state solution that will magically bring peace to the region in general and alleviate the problems of the Palestinian Arabs.

The means towards that end don't really seem to concern world opinion.

04/02 Links Pt1: NYPD Nabs Assailant Behind Shocking Knife Assault on Jewish Family in Battery Park; Biden's Israeli-Palestinian reset is premature, ill-advised; US removes Gulf air defense batteries amid Houthi drone strikes

From Ian:

NYPD Nabs Assailant Behind Shocking Knife Assault on Jewish Family in Battery Park

Police in New York City have arrested a 30-year-old man for a shocking knife attack on a young Orthodox Jewish couple and their baby in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park.

Darryl Jones was taken into custody on Wednesday night and charged with assault, possession of a weapon and possession of the K2 drug. Jones has 12 prior convictions and was released from his latest prison sentence only in February, after serving time for attempted murder.

The attack occurred just before 6 p.m. Wednesday. Video showed Jones running up behind the couple, who were pushing their baby in a stroller through the park. Wielding a knife, Jones slashed at the mother and then the baby, before grappling with the father, who fought off Jones as his wife ran away from the scene with their child.

The unnamed family — visiting New York from their home in Belgium for the Passover holiday this week — were not seriously hurt, but the mother and father both sustained knife cuts to the face, head and lips, while the baby was cut on the chin.

One eyewitness to the attack praised the father’s courage during the attack, observing that his actions had likely prevented an even worse tragedy.

The father had managed to bend the blade of Jones’ knife as the two fought, the witness told the Orthodox Jewish news outlet Hamodia.

“He is a hero, that young guy,” the witness said. “He fought off the thug.”

Trigger Warning - attack on the Jewish family, including a 1 year old baby, was caught on film.

Watch as Darryl Jones walks by the couple and child then TURNS BACK to stab/cut them with his knife.

This was NOT random; he saw Jews and WALKED BACK to attack them.

V/C @nypost pic.twitter.com/6Xzk0U9i3l
— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) April 1, 2021

Girls spit at Jewish man in Brooklyn, bite cop

Some three young girls spat at a Jewish man in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn before biting a cop who confronted them on Thursday, according to the New York Post.

The three, a 13-year-old and two girls younger than her, threw garbage and spat at the Jewish man during an argument on Thursday evening. Police were called to scene and, when officers confronted the girls, the 13-year-old bit one of them and was taken into custody, according to the report.

The other two girls were not detained and the officer suffered minor injuries, according to police.

Probably doesn't help that NY has a mayor and a governor who both publicly labeled the Jews as the disease-spreaders during a deadly pandemic.
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) April 2, 2021

Jordanian textbooks teach that Jews are treacherous

The ADL's David Andrew Weinberg reviewed the currently used Jordanian textbooks, which are all online.

He found some explicit antisemitism.

In the Seventh Grade Islamic Education textbook (first semester) children are taught that “treason and the breaking of pacts are among the characteristics of the Jews and the hypocrites.” The chapter ends with the multiple-choice question: “Among the characteristics of the Jews for which they are renowned are: (A) the breaking of pacts, (B) treachery and treason, (C) hating Muslims, or (D) all of the above.”

Of course, the answer is (D).

A 12th grade Arab and world history book denies any Jewish history in the region. It lists the various rulers of the region of Palestine throughout history but doesn't mention Jews or Israelites until the 19th century, where it discusses “Zionist greed in Palestine,” in league with imperialist powers. It defines the Zionist movement as “a racist, settler political movement aimed at establishing a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine, founded on historical claims without basis in truth.”

The book also says that that Israel is trying to "Judaize Jerusalem and obliterate its Arab, Muslim and Christian landmarks" and that Jewish links to Jerusalem are “founded on historical and religious claims without any actual grounds on which to base them.”

This section says that Israeli archaeological research is meant to "fake Talmudic narratives" and that they destroy Muslim and Christian antiquities.

Here is more proof that the peace agreement with Jordan has nothing to do with actual peace, and that Jordanians continue to teach antisemitism and anti-Israel lies to their children.

Yesterday, we noted that the latest US State Department human rights report does not refer to "occupied territories" as the reports under the Obama administration did.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price was asked about this in the press briefing yesterday by Said Arikat of Al Quds:

QUESTION: Thank you. Just to be redundant on the issue of occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, why can’t you say it is occupied, without all the caveats? Can you say that it is occupied, that you acknowledge that position? It’s been like this since 1967.

MR PRICE: Well, Said, and that’s precisely what I said yesterday.

QUESTION: Right.

MR PRICE: It is a historical fact that Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights after the 1967 war. That’s precisely why the 2020 Human Rights Report uses that term in the current context of the West Bank. It has been the longstanding position of previous administrations of both parties over the course of many decades. Do we think that the West Bank is occupied? Yes.

This actually explains the language in the human rights report - the Biden administration does not use the term "occupied territories" because that phrase is used universally to include Gaza, and it appears that this administration does not consider Gaza to be in the same category as the West Bank.

As far as the Golan and "East Jerusalem" is concerned, it would be politically difficult to say that they are occupied after the Trump administration recognized Israel's annexation of the Golan and "took Jerusalem off the table." So it seems that they will try to stay away from those topics until a reporter forces them to address it.

(h/t YMedad)

Tablet magazine has a most disturbing article that shows that antisemitism is positively correlated with education.

The more years of education people have, the more likely that they will hate Jews.

The authors created a very interesting study that could tease out these prejudices from people who would never admit directly that they are biased against Jews.

We drafted two versions of the same question, one asking respondents to apply a principle to a Jewish example, and another to apply the same principle to a non-Jewish example. Subjects were randomly assigned to see one version or another so that no respondent would see both versions of the question. Since no one would see both versions of the question, sophisticated respondents would have no way of knowing that we were measuring their sentiment toward Jews, and no cue to game their answers.

When we administered these double-standard measures in a nationally representative survey of over 1,800 people, our results differed widely from the conventional view about the relationship between education and anti-Semitism. In fact, we found that more highly educated people were more likely to apply principles more harshly to Jewish examples. By preventing subjects from knowing that they were being asked about their feelings toward Jews, we discovered that more-highly educated people in the United States tend to have greater antipathy toward Jews than less-educated people do.

The methodology was brilliant:

The first item asks whether “the government should set minimum requirements for what is taught in private schools,” with Orthodox Jewish or Montessori schools given as the illustrating example. The second item asks whether “a person’s attachment to another country creates a conflict of interest when advocating in support of certain U.S. foreign policy positions,” with Israel or Mexico offered as illustrating examples. The third item asks whether “the U.S. military should be allowed to forbid” the wearing of religious headgear as part of the uniform, with a Jewish yarmulke or Sikh turban offered as illustrating examples. And the fourth item asks whether public gatherings during the pandemic “posed a threat to public health and should have been prevented,” with Orthodox Jewish funerals or Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests offered as illustrating examples.

The responses showed that antisemitic attitudes correlated with more education:

We found that respondents with higher education levels are markedly more likely than those with lower education levels to apply a double standard unfavorable toward Jews. Across the four items in which the Jewish and non-Jewish versions of questions seemed the most similar, and which the overall sample answered roughly in the same way, subjects with college degrees were 5 percentage points more likely to apply a principle harshly to Jews than to non-Jews. Among those with advanced degrees, subjects were 15 percentage points more unfavorable toward Jewish than non-Jewish examples.

The authors have no idea why there should be such a correlation. They theorize that perhaps universities are teaching facts without any anchoring in morality, and somehow this helps antisemitic attitudes.

They are looking at the wrong place to find the answers.

The antisemitism is directly correlated to the amount of anti-Zionism they are exposed to on campus! The more that they hear that the Jewish state is racist and apartheid and Nazi-like, the more they absorb the idea that Jews are bad people who deserve to be treated worse than others.

One indication comes from another recent survey, the Gallup poll that looked at American attitudes towards Israel and Palestinians. The results show a strikingly similar correlation between education and anti-Israel attitudes that the first survey showed between levels of education and antisemitic attitudes.

In the Gallup poll, favorable opinions about Israel decreased with higher levels of education. The high school or lower respondents preferred Israel over the Palestinians by a 65%-20% margin; the college graduates had a 51%-32% preference for Israel. On the question of which side should be pressured more, the results were even starker: for the less educated, 53%-26% said to pressure the Palestinians more, for the college graduates 45%-32% said to pressure Israel more.

It seems quite probable that the attitudes of students towards Jews will correspond with their attitudes towards Israel. A landmark 2017 survey by Amcha concluded:

Schools with instances of student-produced anti-Zionist expression, including BDS promotion, were 7 times more likely to have incidents that targeted Jewish students for harm than schools with no evidence of students’ anti-Zionist expression, and the more such anti-Zionist expression, the higher the likelihood of incidents involving anti-Jewish hostility.

The Gallup poll didn't ask about postgraduate attitudes towards Israel, only "no college," "some college" and "college graduate." But the trend is there and almost certainly it mirrors the antisemitic trend found by the authors of the Tablet article.

It isn't the additional classroom instruction that makes people more antisemitic. It is additional exposure to the anti-Israel narrative and propaganda subconsciously makes people more likely to be antipathetic to Jews.

Asa Winstanley is an idiot (and an antisemitic piece of trash), part 4/conclusion

Continuing the series showing what an absolute tool Asa Winstanley is based solely on a truly fatuous article he wrote for Middle East Monitor.

Winstanley wrote:

Prior to the rise of Christianity as the established religion of the Roman Empire, Judaism was very much a proselytising faith. As such, it spread widely all over the Mediterranean basin, into Egypt and further afield. Indeed, as late as the eighth century CE, the ruling classes of the Khazar Empire (a confederation of Turkic-speaking tribes in what is today the south-eastern part of European Russia) apparently converted en masse to Judaism.

As such, it is illogical to suppose – as Zionists do – that the ancestral "homeland" of all Jewish people in the world is Palestine. Such a view is actually anti-Semitic.

There is some evidence for some proselytizing by Jews from the first century BCE to the first century CE. Some scholars don't even agree with that. In fact, many think that while Jews didn't discourage conversion for those who wanted it, there was no active outreach or proselytization.

Winstanley, however wants to make it sound like the vast majority of Jews are descended from converts and therefore have no ancestral ties to Israel. DNA evidence shows this to be completely false, as well as the absence of any rabbinical writings that discuss the huge legal implications of mass conversions.

The Khazar theory is complete garbage and has been disproven a hundred different ways.

To claim that most Jews are descended from Jews is antisemitic???

Asa Winstanley is a blooming idiot.

And, of course, he is an antisemite too. He goes on to try to tie Zionist Jews in Europe with the Nazis, which is pure antisemitism. The Zionists who were trying to save the Jews in Europe are painted as collaborators with the Nazis, which is as disgusting as it gets.

Asa Winstanley is an antisemitic, lying, hateful piece of trash. And this article proves it over and over again.

Continuing this series of showing what an idiot Asa Winstanley is, based on a single article he published - appropriately enough - on April Fool's Day.

As Israeli historian Shlomo Sand describes in his book The Invention of the Land of Israel, before the Zionist movement, Palestine was never viewed by Jewish communities around the world as their homeland.

Wow!

What does he think "Next Year in Jerusalem" means in the Haggadah and Yom Kippur service? Major parts of the prayer book talk about Jews returning to Zion! A large section of the Amida prayer, said three times a day, asks for the restoration of a Jewish homeland in Israel!

Not only that, but Jews didn't start returning to Israel with Zionism. There were groups, often led by rabbis, who immigrated to Israel constantly for centuries before modern Zionism. It is so obvious that Israel is the homeland of the Jews that it is astounding to even think that someone has the gall to dispute it!

But, Asa Winstanley is an idiot.

Continuing our dissection of the absolutely moronic article published Thursday in Middle East Monitor, written by the Asa Winstanley.

He writes:

With the rise of Zionism – a European settler-colonial movement founded at the end of the nineteenth century – a new term was invented to describe Palestine: the "Land of Israel". Before then, the word "Israel" had generally been used only as a synonym for the Jewish people, as in the Biblical phrase "Children of Israel".

The first time the term "Eretz Yisrael" - "Land of Israel" - was used to refer to the land was in 1 Samuel 13:19.

"וְחָרָשׁ֙ לֹ֣א יִמָּצֵ֔א בְּכֹ֖ל אֶ֣רֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל"

The term is used constantly in the Talmud and later Rabbinical writings.

Asa Winstanley is an idiot. (More likely, he is a liar.)

I saw an astonishingly stupid article at Middle East Memo by Asa Winstanley on Thursday, so I decided to make a series of posts showing how thoroughly ignorant he is.

The title of the article is stupid enough: "It is necessary to be an anti-Zionist in order to reject anti-Semitism."

But let's go through only some of his specific "factual" claims, skipping his propaganda (like "apartheid") which has been debunked thoroughly many times before.

In reality there is only one country between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. It is called Israel at the moment, which is an apartheid state whose laws privilege Jews over everybody else. Historically, prior to 1948, the only name ever used for all of this territory was Palestine.

He is lying and he knows he is lying. Besides the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel, it was also called Canaan. No one called it Palestine before the second century AD.

The Torah calls it simply "The Land." This pre-dates any mention of "Palestine."

Not only that, but whenever people referred to Palestine before 1922, they meant the lands of the Twelve Tribes of the Children of Israel. The word "Palestine" in the vernacular meant the areas controlled by Jews in Biblical times - including parts of today's Jordan.

Winstanley is an idiot.

04/01 Links Pt2: Cornell West, Campus Politics, and BDS; Israel to pay for 10 Plagues?; Twitter suspends Jewish account key to UK Labour defeat

From Ian:

Cornell West, Campus Politics, and BDS

One of the most notable BDS related developments in March was the claim by Harvard Divinity School professor Cornell West that he was “denied tenure” as a result of his support for “Palestinian rights” and an organized effort by pro-Israel forces. West, 67, had been teaching at Harvard for five years as a non-tenure track professor of practice, and had been offered a 10-year contract and substantial raise. He rejected this and announced his return to Union Theological Seminary.

West blamed the “powers that be at Harvard” for his failure to be moved to a tenure track position, and stated, “In my case, my controversial and outspoken views about and critiques of empire, capitalism, white supremacy, male supremacy, and homophobia are tolerated, but any serious engagement around the issues of the Israeli occupation are rendered highly suspect and reduced to anti-Jewish hatred or prejudice.”

While claims that anti-Israel faculty are being denied tenure are not uncommon, this incident has the appearance of using the accusation as a means of blackmailing a university during a contract renegotiation. West received considerable support from student and faculty groups, which accepted his claims without question.

Responding to criticism, West stated his willingness to debate the issue, but then failed to accept an invitation to do so.

Celebrity academics using BDS and “Palestine” as tools for their own careers and left-wing bona fides is increasingly common. The emerging accusation “progressive except for Palestine” is a gloss on the title of Marc Lamont Hill’s new book, and is now regularly repeated in various settings.

In Britain, the parallel case of Bristol University’s David Miller, long accused of abusing students and of promoting elaborate antisemitic conspiracies, has finally produced a university investigation. Not surprisingly, hundreds of academics have expressed support for Miller, even as a separate police investigation has been opened against him regarding “a hate crime or hate incident taking place during lectures at the University of Bristol.”

Lies in the cognitive war against Israel Part 2

The Lie of Israelis Being the New Nazis
When SJP activists and their invited speakers demonstrate against Israel, their speech and literature is peppered with allegations about Israel’s alleged “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, echoing comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

The Nazification of Israelis—and by extension Jews—is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity, at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.

What is the purpose of this grotesque campaign to transmogrify the Jewish state into the Third Reich? The insidious answer is that once Israel has been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state has been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist—exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought.

What is more troubling is that the characterization of the Israeli as Nazi is a trope now promulgated by Western elites and so-called intellectuals, including a broad contingent of academics who are complicit in, and in fact intellectual enablers of, the campaign to defame Israel by Nazifying its people and accusing Jews again as being the world’s moral and existential enemies as demonstrated by their oppression and brutality toward the 'long-suffering Palestinians'.

Thus, campus anti-Israel hate-fests sponsored by radical student groups have such repellant names as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” or “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” creating a clear, though mendacious, linkage between Nazism and Zionism—clear examples of both Holocaust minimization and inversion and both contemporary versions of anti-Semitic thought and expression.

That same trope is repeated and reinforced by other academics, such as Richard Falk, professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University and the UN’s former, preposterously-titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” who wondered aloud if it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, “I think not.”

Israel to pay for 10 Plagues?

Bible study meets modern litigiousness in a story that may one day yield a riveting courtroom drama.

Ahmad al-Gamal, an Egyptian columnist for Egyptian daily Al-Yawm Al-Sabi, advocated in the newspaper on March 11 that Egypt sue the State of Israel for damages caused by the 10 Biblical plagues,

“We want compensation for the plagues that were inflicted upon [us] as a result of the curses that the Jews’ ancient forefathers [cast] upon our ancient forefathers, who did not deserve to pay for the mistake that Egypt’s ruler at the time, Pharaoh, committed,” the cranky journalist wrote, according to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

According to the Biblical Book of Exodus, the Egyptian king prevented Moses from liberating the Jews and leading them out of Egypt.

The plagues that summarily struck Egypt in consequence included the Nile turning into blood, an outbreak of lice, diseased livestock, boils, and so on, culminating in darkness and the deaths of all Egyptian firstborn males. The telling of the tale features prominently in the Jewish observance of the spring holiday of Passover.

“For what is written in the Torah proves that it was Pharaoh who oppressed the children of Israel, rather than the Egyptian people,” Gamal continued, “[But] they inflicted upon us the plague of locusts that didn’t leave anything behind them; the plague that transformed the Nile’s waters into blood, so nobody could drink of them for a long time; the plague of darkness that kept the world dark day and night; the plague of frogs; and the plague of the killing of the firstborn, namely every first offspring born to woman or beast, and so on.”

Gamal also pressed suing Israel for the “precious materials” used by the ancient Israelites in order to construct their desert tabernacle.

“We want compensation for the gold, silver, copper, precious stones, fabrics, hides and lumber, and for [all] animal meat, hair, hides and wool, and for other materials that I will mention [below], when quoting the language of the Torah. All these are materials that the Jews used in their rituals. These are resources that cannot be found among desert wanderers unless they took them before their departure.”