Monday, April 05, 2021
- Monday, April 05, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- Monday, April 05, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- Monday, April 05, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
The Caesarea hoard displayed at the Israel Museum is one of many discovered in Israel in recent years. In Tiberias a cache of no less than 700 rare bronze tools, and 81 coins from the 9th to 11th centuries was discovered. On the seabed by Caesarea other archaeologists found a hoard of 2,000 gold coins from the 11th century. In Apollonia, just north of Tel Aviv, a cache of 400 Byzantine coins was found: 108 gold coins, 200 Samarian lamps, gold coins and jewelry.At a construction site in Yavne, builders came across 425 coins made of solid 24-carat gold from the Abbasid period, about 1,100 years ago....In Ramle, by the White Tower, archaeologists discovered 376 gold coins more than 1,000 years old, weighing 1.6 kilograms. ...[During the] discovery of the Tiberias hoard ..., the archaeologists uncovered a neighborhood from the Abbasid-Fatimid period (ninth to 11th centuries). And then: in a back room they found a huge pithos, a large clay storage container.“We were astounded at what we found. We sat all night long, three archaeologists, and counted the amazing contents,” Gutfeld tells: more than 330 bronze lamps; games; musical instruments and cooking gear. All were beautifully decorated.”The pithos also contained 42 candlesticks of the highest quality of manufacture. “We knew already that there’s one such candlestick in a museum in Kuwait and they’re very proud of it. Imagine what we felt when we found 42 of them,” he says. “That same night we realized that we had found the largest Islamic metal hoard in the world. Suddenly you see proof that Tiberias was a commercial power 1,000 years ago – an important commercial center in the span from Afghanistan in the east to Morocco in the west.”
Sunday, April 04, 2021
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.US scraps Trump’s sanctions against ICC prosecutor who is probing Israel
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 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.ICC hopes for ‘new phase’ as Biden lifts sanctions on prosecutor probing Israel
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.”
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.House Republicans urge Biden to curb ties with PA over ICC complaint
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.
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.”
Friday, April 02, 2021
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.Caroline Glick: The threats American Jewry refuses to face
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.
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
- Friday, April 02, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- cartoon of the day, humor
- Friday, April 02, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- analysis, Daled Amos
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)
o 43 percent would vote for Fatah
o 30 percent would vote for Hamas
o 18 percent of voters are undecided
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]
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%.
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]
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.
— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) April 1, 2021
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
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
- Friday, April 02, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- Friday, April 02, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
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.
- Friday, April 02, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
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.
Thursday, April 01, 2021
- Thursday, April 01, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- Winstanley
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.
- Thursday, April 01, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- Winstanley
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.
- Thursday, April 01, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- Winstanley
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".