Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, May 29, 2021

05/29 Links: The International Community is Encouraging Hamas to Attack Israel Again — and Again; Bill Maher: It’s Not Progressive to Side with Hamas

From Ian:

Alan Dershowitz: The International Community is Encouraging Hamas to Attack Israel Again — and Again

The role of the international community, and its institutions, is to discourage just the kinds of attacks Hamas routinely engages in. Yet its recent statements and actions clearly incentivize Hamas to repeat its attacks with the assurance that it will win on the court of public opinion even if it loses on the battlefield.

Albert Einstein once defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” What the international community is now doing clearly fits that definition. By that definition, if it persists in blaming only Israel or in creating the moral equivalence between morally very different actions, it will become complicit in Hamas’ crimes. It will become responsible for the inevitable civilian deaths that occur when Hamas uses its own human shields to fire rockets at Israeli civilians. The goal of Hamas is to increase civilian casualties. The goal of Israel is to reduce them. Israel makes enormous efforts to warn civilians who are in and around Hamas rockets, but inevitably there will be civilian casualties. The world is outraged when Israel kills Hamas civilians in an effort to protect its civilians. But it said and did little when 4,000 Palestinians — including thousands of children — were killed by Syria during its civil war and when many more thousands were killed by Jordan during Black September. Only when Jews kill Palestinians, even in self-defense, does the international community and media rise up in selective moral indignation. This has to stop.

There are only two ways for Hamas’ repeated strategy to be deterred: either the international community must do the right thing, and condemn Hamas in proportion to its moral responsibility; or Israel must be allowed to continue its self-defense actions until the Hamas military is completely degraded. But the world does neither, it condemns Israel, and it prevents Israel from deterring Hamas’ repetition of its war crimes.

There is no other area in which the international community acts in such a self-defeating, cynical and, I must add, antisemitic manner. Yes, antisemitic. There is no other explanation for why Israel is singled out for this special treatment. There are many, many more unjustified civilian deaths in other parts of the world in which battles are taking place. Yet the world’s obsession is on Israel, precisely because it is the nation state of the Jewish people. In the face of growing antisemitism throughout the world, the time has come for the international community to apply a single standard to Israel and to stop encouraging Iran and its proxy Hamas to persist in its efforts to end the existence of what it calls the “the little Satan.”

JPost Editorial: Launching Gaza war probe is proof of UN bias against Israel

The UN decision is a boon to terrorism. Hamas, as expected, welcomed the decision and said that its actions – the firing of over 4,000 rockets into Israel, constituted “legitimate resistance.”

A look at the countries which supported the opening of the war crimes probe is quite telling. There is China, Russia, Pakistan, Cuba, Libya and Venezuela. The fact that these countries even have a seat on the UN Human Rights Council is itself absurd, let alone them standing suddenly on the side of human rights against Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East.

What these countries fail to remember is that Operation Guardian of Walls was the most accurate and precise military operation in world history. Israel dropped around 1,000 bombs on 1,000 targets. Any other military doing so would have killed thousands of people. In this case, Israel went to amazing lengths to safeguard civilian life and while every life lost is tragic and regretful, never before has a military carried out such precise airstrikes like Israel just did.

It is a testament to the investment the IDF makes in sparing the lives of civilians in the Gaza Strip, which includes phone calls to residents of homes and buildings before they are bombed as well the use of the roof-knocking tactic. No other military in the world goes to these lengths to save the lives of its enemy.

And this also has to be said: The side that is responsible for the deaths in Gaza is not Israel but Hamas. Yes, it is an Israeli plane dropping an Israeli bomb, but it is Hamas that purposely stores its weapons in civilian homes and launches its rockets from office buildings indiscriminately into Israeli population centers.

Doing so is the true war crime. It is also part of Hamas’s strategy. It embeds its weapons and installations in civilian areas since it knows Israel will retaliate to defend itself and it knows that the world will then criticize Israel and open war crimes probes like the one launched on Thursday.

By opening the probe, the UN is standing with Hamas and handing a victory to terrorism. This is the real problem and it needs to be fixed.

Fifty Holocaust survivors who volunteer at our Museum have released a letter to American leaders and citizens. "We cannot remain silent in the wake of the recent antisemitic attacks in cities and towns across the country. We know firsthand the danger of unchecked antisemitism."
— US Holocaust Museum (@HolocaustMuseum) May 28, 2021

Maher: It’s Not Progressive to Side with Hamas, I’m Frustrated ‘There Was No One on Liberal Media’ to Defend Israel

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that he was frustrated during the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas “because there was no one on liberal media to defend Israel,” and that he’s amazed that “progressives think that they’re being progressive” by siding with Hamas and “would run screaming to Tel Aviv if they had to live in Gaza for one day.”

Maher said, “One of the frustrations I had while I was off is that I was watching this war go on in Israel…and it was frustrating to me because there was no one on liberal media to defend Israel, really. We’ve become this country now where we’re kind of one-sided on this issue.”

He later added, “[A]s far as Gaza goes, it’s amazing to me that the progressives think that they’re being progressive by taking that side of it, the Bella Hadids of the world, these influencers. I just want to say, in February of this year, a Hamas court ruled that an unmarried woman cannot travel in Gaza without the permission of a male guardian, that’s where the progressives are? Bella Hadid and her friends would run screaming to Tel Aviv if they had to live in Gaza for one day.”

Watch: Bill Maher absolutely destroys the prevailing anti-Israel narrative, calling out the hypocrisy of Instagram celebs like Bella Hadid, “Bella Hadid and her friends would run screaming to Tel Aviv if they had to live in Gaza for one day.” pic.twitter.com/WR0sZ7oRUU
— Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) May 29, 2021

05/28 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The murderous doctrine of moral equivalence; The Intelligentsia's Craven Silence in the Face of Anti-Semitism Is Unforgivable

From Ian:

Rabbi David Wolpe (NYTs): The Jewish History of Israel Is Over 3,000 Years Old. That’s Why It’s Complicated.

My first visit to Israel was when I was 12 years old. The group was led by my father, a rabbi from Philadelphia. We had been invited to participate in an archaeological dig near the city of Beit Shean, in the country’s north, near the Jordan River Valley. Soon after we arrived, one of my friends happened upon a pottery shard, really an ostracon, a fragment with writing on it. The archaeologist on site said something to him in Hebrew. My father translated: “He said you are the first person to hold that in over 2,000 years.”

Such shocks of antiquity are not rare in Israel. In 1880, archaeologists discovered a Hebrew text carved in stone in a tunnel under Jerusalem. It recounted how workers had chiseled from opposite ends of the ancient city; as they grew closer the sounds of stone cutting grew louder until they met in the middle. The tunnel is believed to be dated from the time of Hezekiah, a king who reigned 715-687 B.C., almost 3,000 years ago and 100 years before the Temple was razed, and Jews were sent into the Babylonian exile. Hezekiah ordered the tunnel’s construction to bring water from outside the city walls into the city. Jerusalem may be a city of sanctity and reverence, but its citizens needed water as much as they did God.

That intersection of the holy and mundane remains. Over the past month of crisis, turmoil, protest and death we have been inevitably captured by the situation of the present. But part of the intractability of the conflict in the Middle East is that the Jewish relationship to Israel did not begin in 1948. Our history here, of both pain and holiness, stretches back dozens of generations.

Our ancient historical markers, scattered throughout this land, are the tactile expression of Jewish memory, and an ancient spiritual yearning. For thousands of years, Jews in the Diaspora would leave a corner of their homes unpainted, to remind themselves that they were not home. They prayed in the direction of Jerusalem. They knew the geography of a land they would never see, often far better than the country in which they lived. They recited prayers for weather — in services during the winter, we yearn for rain or dew — not to help the harvests outside Vilnius or Paris or Fez, but for those in Israel, since we expected at any moment to return.

The Bible depicts an ideal land, one flowing with milk and honey. Yet Israel has always been one thing in dreams and another in the tumult of everyday life. When the five books of the Torah end, the Israelites are still in the wilderness and Moses, our leader out of Egypt, has been denied the promised land. The message is manifest: The perfect place does not yet exist, and you must enter a messy and contested land armed with the vision God has given you. Jews conclude the Passover Seder with “next year in Jerusalem.” Yet if one has the Seder in Jerusalem, the conclusion is not “next year here.” Rather, it is “next year in a rebuilt Jerusalem” — a city that reflects the ideals and aspirations of sages and prophets, one marked with piety and plenty.

For many Jews, that vision is as relevant today as it was in ancient Israel. That means the past, present and future of the land is not just an argument about settlements or structures alone, but also an ideal of a place of safety, a heavenly city on earth, one that we continue to strive and pray for, especially after the violence of these last few weeks.

Melanie Phillips: The murderous doctrine of moral equivalence

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his counterpart, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, visited Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week to offer help in building on the ceasefire with Hamas.

Both Blinken and Raab declared themselves committed to Israel’s security. Both governments have also condemned the antisemitism running rampant in their countries.

These are vapid bromides. For neither the British government nor the Biden administration acknowledges that the war against Israel and the war against the Jewish diaspora form an indivisible line of bigotry, which they themselves unwittingly help maintain.

The tsunami of antisemitism continues to inundate the west. In America, antisemitic acts reportedly rose by 80 percent this month, and in Britain by at least 500 percent. More than 17,000 variations of “Hitler was right” have recently appeared on Twitter.

In Britain, after the actors’ union Equity called on its members to join last Saturday’s anti-Israel march in London at which demonstrators burned Israeli flags and displayed antisemitic slogans, Jewish actors have said they are beginning to hide their Stars of David at auditions.

There are many non-Jews who are as horrified as they are bewildered by this evil that has overtaken their society. It is indeed astounding in its scope and scale.

For it is effectively a takeover of millions of western minds by Soviet-style brainwashing, in which the Palestinian perpetrators of murderous, exterminatory antisemitism are regarded as oppressed and dispossessed while their Israeli victims are labeled Nazi oppressors — and diaspora Jews are accused of backing “pogroms” in “Palestine”.

This madness urgently needs to be fought by those who help make the cultural weather. It’s not enough for politicians to promise support to a Jewish community that’s under siege. They need to call out the broadcasters and newspapers peddling Palestinian propaganda and incitement in the guise of journalism.

They need to tell people that Israel stands for law, justice and human rights while the Palestinians stand for their negation.

Caroline Glick: Google, Amazon, and Israel in the New America

The polarization of opinion on Israel that we are witnessing in American politics between Republicans who support Israel and Democrats who oppose Israel, is an expression of a much larger division within American society. The heartbreaking but undeniable fact is that today you can't talk about "America" as a single political entity.

Today there are two Americas, and they cannot abide by one another. One America – traditional America – loves Israel and America. The other America – the New America – hates Israel and doesn't think much of America, either.

Traditional America believes that the US brought the promise of liberty to the world and that even though it is far from perfect, the United States is the greatest country in human history. In the eyes of the citizens of Traditional America, Israel is a kindred nation and the US's best friend and most valued ally in the Middle East.

New America, in contrast, believes that America was born in the sin of slavery. New Americans insist America will remain evil and an object of scorn at home and abroad so long it refuses to exchange its values of liberty, capitalism, equal opportunity, and patriotism with the values of racialism and equity, socialism, equality of outcomes, and globalization. For New Americans, just as the US was born in the sin of white supremacy so Israel was born in the sin of Zionism. In New America, Israel will have no right to exist so long as it clings to its Jewish national identity, refusing to become a "state of all its citizens."

New America's power isn't limited to its control over the White House and Congress. It also controls much of corporate America. Under the slogan, "Stakeholder Capitalism," corporate conglomerates whose leaders are New Americans use their economic power to advance the political and cultural agendas of New America. We saw stakeholder capitalism at work in March following the Georgia statehouse's passage of a law requiring voters to present identification at polling places. Major League Baseball, Coca Cola, Delta and American Airlines among others announced that they would boycott the state, denying jobs to thousands of Georgians in retaliation.

Silicon Valley is the Ground Zero of Stakeholder Capitalism. Its denizens are the loudest and most powerful proponents of using technological and economic power to advance the political and cultural agendas of New America.

Microsoft and Oracle are appealing the Nimbus tender award. They are basing their appeals on what they describe as technical and other flaws in the tender process. Israel should view their appeals as an opportunity to reverse course.

In light of New America's hostility towards Israel generally, and given the proven power of Google and Amazon employees and their expressed antagonism towards Israel, the Finance Ministry should reconsider the tender award. Technical considerations aside, the decision to grant Google and Amazon- xclusive control over the State of Israel's computer data did not give sufficient weight to all the relevant variables.

Fiasco: Rutgers Chancellor apologizes for his statement condemning antisemitism after Palestinians complain (update)

This is truly a horrifying story of how easily liberals get bullied by Israel hating antisemites.

The chancellor of Rutgers University issued a statement against antisemitism. But of course, it "All Lives Mattered" Jews, and it ended up being a statement against any discrimination, past or present, and Jews are just one tiny example.

Excerpts:

Dear Rutgers–New Brunswick Community,

We are saddened by and greatly concerned about the sharp rise in hostile sentiments and anti-Semitic violence in the United States. Recent incidents of hate directed toward Jewish members of our community again remind us of what history has to teach us. Tragically, in the last century alone, acts of prejudice and hatred left unaddressed have served as the foundation for many atrocities against targeted groups around the world.

Last year’s murder of George Floyd brought into sharp focus the racial injustices that continue to plague our country, and over the past year there has been attacks on our Asian American Pacific Islander citizens, the spaces of Indigenous peoples defiled, and targeted oppression and other assaults against Hindus and Muslims.

Although it has been nearly two decades since the U.S. Congress approved the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, the upward trend of anti-Semitism continues. We have also been witnesses to the increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East leading to the deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region and the loss of lives in Israel.

...
Therefore:

We call out all forms of bigotry, prejudice, discrimination, xenophobia, and oppression, in whatever ways they may be expressed.
We condemn any vile acts of hate against members of our community designed to generate fear, devalue, demonize, or dehumanize.
We embrace and affirm the value and dignity of each member of our Rutgers community regardless of religion, race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, gender, and ability.

Sincerely,

Christopher J. Molloy
Chancellor

Francine Conway
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Research and Academic Affairs

This is already offensive to Jews. Instead of tackling antisemitism, Rutgers threw antisemitism into a mix of all bigotries. As we've seen, when that happens, Jewish safety becomes the lowest priority - and Jews being attacked by other members of "victim" groups are presumed to be guilty themselves by the sick algebra of victimhood scoring.

No one would ever issue a statement on racism and throw in anti-Asian, anti-Jewish and anti-LGBTQ bigotries. Everyone saw how offended Black people were to "all lives matter." But with attacks on Jews, it is practically required to mention other victim groups, so no one could possibly think that the person making the statement is a Jew-lover. Or a Zionist. Or something.

But this awful statement, watered down into a summary that didn't even mention Jews, was still too much about Jews for Jew-haters who have made a career out being outraged and bullying others with their crazed displays of anger.

It appears that Molloy reacted to an Instagram post by Students for Justice in Palestine, which is about as much of a hate group as exists on cmpuses today. He completely caved within a single day to the pressure from haters who were against a condemnation of antisemitism.

He wrote this disgusting, abject apology for not being inclusive of the Jew-haters in a message about antisemitism:

Dear Members of the Rutgers–New Brunswick Community,

We are writing today as a follow-up to the message sent on Wednesday, May 26th to the university community. We understand that intent and impact are two different things, and while the intent of our message was to affirm that Rutgers–New Brunswick is a place where all identities can feel validated and supported, the impact of the message fell short of that intention. In hindsight, it is clear to us that the message failed to communicate support for our Palestinian community members. We sincerely apologize for the hurt that this message has caused.

Um, who has been attacking Jews lately?

This is like apologizing to white people - who are the victims of anti-white attacks - after denouncing racist attacks.

It is infuriating.

Rutgers University–New Brunswick is a community that is enriched by our vibrant diversity. However, our diversity must be supported by equity, inclusion, antiracism, and the condemnation of all forms of bigotry and hatred, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. As we grow in our personal and institutional understanding, we will take the lesson learned here to heart, and pledge our commitment to doing better. We will work to regain your trust, and make sure that our communications going forward are much more sensitive and balanced.

Our goal of creating a beloved community will not be easy, and while we may make mistakes along the way; we hope we can all learn from them as we continue this vital work together.

The only lesson Molloy learned is that it is better to cave to the demands of antisemites than to show solidarity with the victims of antisemitism.

Molloy didn't even show enough respect for the Jewish community to consult with them before sending out this letter that threw them under the bus.

This is not the first time Molloy pissed on Jews. Here's his statement after Jews were murdered in Jersey City - and the entire statement doesn't mention the word "Jew" or even "antisemitism" once:

Jews at Rutgers must immediately show that the Rutgers administration has completely lost their trust, and that their feelings were just stomped upon.

What self-respecting Jew would send their kids to Rutgers anymore after this fiasco?

(h/t Daily Caller, RedRover)

UPDATE: Rutgers took down both posts and replaced them with a post denying that they apologized for condemning antisemitism. I fixed the links above to go to archive sites with the original posts.

05/28 Links Pt1: Gaza Proves that Iran’s Next War on Israel Will Be Far Bloodier; NGOs Distort International Law with “Disproportional” Casualty Claims

From Ian:

The People of Israel Live!

Now that Hamas and Israel have entered into a ceasefire, everyone seems obsessed with who won and who lost. The Jerusalem Institute for Security and Strategy has just emailed me telling me that, “Since war is about inflicting pain, winning can be evaluated by two separate pain parameters” and claiming that Israel won on that basis.

I’m not convinced that this description of war passes muster. It wouldn’t with Carl von Clausewitz, the soldier whose book On War defined the study of warfare from 1832 right up to today. He calls war “an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will”. A more philosophical ancient Chinese general, Sun Tzu, claimed that, “to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.”

But what if life is war and enemies are eternal? What if your life consists of constant struggle against adversity to succeed in your own goals? By what measure can we decide whether an individual skirmish is a success?

This makes the articles I’m seeing about who “won” the latest round of violence rather galling. No one won. There was no war and there is no peace.

The latest flare up between the two sides is almost perfect as a metaphor for the Jewish experience. After having no peace, we fought. The fighting finished and now Jews, within Israel and without, have to wait in fear for the next round of fighting.

Talk of winning and losing belongs to the same mode of thinking as those who talk about a “solution” to the conflict as if it will all just go away once a piece of paper is signed or a magic wand is waved.

People are accusing Israel of genocide. These human rights lawyers beg to differ

According to the United Nations, “genocide” consists of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” That can include killing members of the group, inflicting serious bodily harm on them, preventing births, forcibly transferring their children or creating “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Some Palestinian advocates say that definition applies in Gaza. Noura Erakat, a human rights lawyer and assistant professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University, wrote a Twitter thread to her 108,000 followers last week explaining why she believes Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and trying “to eliminate their presence & destroy their nation.”

“The whole world stays silent and turns a blind eye to the genocide of whole Palestinian families,” Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riad Al-Maliki said at the United Nations last week. Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan walked out of Al-Maliki’s speech.

Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American international human rights attorney, told JTA that she used to avoid describing Israeli actions as genocide because when she did, some people “will automatically just have this visceral reaction that shuts you out instead of actually listening to you” because the word is so strong and because, for Jews, it evokes the Holocaust.

Now, however, she is reconsidering. Arraf said that given the ongoing Israeli oppression of Palestinians that she observes, the question of whether Israel is committing genocide deserves to be investigated.

“I don’t think it’s a secret that Israel does not want the Palestinian people there,” she said. “The actions are so vicious and brutal that it’s almost wrong to shy away from calling it what it seems like it is now. It might cause some people to close it off or blow it off or become just defensive, but I’m not sure that that’s necessarily a sufficient reason to hold back from calling it what it looks like.”

Pro-Palestinian activists have accused Israel of genocide before — and sparked backlash from Jewish groups and others. During the 2014 Gaza war, Steven Salaita, a Palestinian-American professor, lost a tenured position he had been hired for at the University of Illinois following a series of critical tweets about Israel, including one that said, “The word ‘genocide’ is more germane the more news we hear.”

JINSA: Gaza Proves that Iran’s Next War on Israel Will Be Far Bloodier

At a minimum, that means making clear to Iran and its regional terror network that this latest conflict in Gaza has only strengthened the U.S.-Israel alliance. For sure, doing that won’t be easy in the face of the growing power of the Democratic Party’s increasingly strident progressive wing, which has been harshly critical of Israel’s policies.

But it’s essential. Biden and those embattled remnants of his party in Congress who remain faithful to the muscular internationalism championed by the likes of President Harry S. Truman and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson need to push back against the rising anti-Israel chorus among progressives. They’ll have the overwhelming support of their Republican colleagues if they do so, as well as the majority of average Americans who still intuitively grasp the difference between a democratic ally exercising its inherent right to self-defense and a terrorist group dedicated to its destruction. Among other things, that United States support should include an announcement from the administration on the immediate resupply and strengthening of Israel’s life-saving missile defense system, its inventory of precision-guided munitions and bunker-busting bombs, and its air power. The president’s statement last week declaring his “full support” to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome interceptor missiles was an excellent start.

But it also means that President Biden needs urgently to reassess the wisdom of his administration’s headlong rush back into the Iran nuclear deal. As surely as night follows day, a resumption of the 2015 deal—with its requirements for massive American sanctions relief—will result in tens of billions of dollars being funneled to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and their terrorist proxies not only in Hezbollah and Hamas, but among Houthi rebels in Yemen and Shiite militias in Iraq as well.

There’s no polite way to say this: Especially after the tragic scenes that we’ve just witnessed in Gaza, it would border on strategic madness for the United States to barrel ahead on a course that is virtually guaranteed to underwrite Iran’s next war against Israel and help the Revolutionary Guards and their terrorist foreign legion inflict levels of destruction on U.S. allies and interests that will make the awfulness of the recent Gaza war seem like a walk in the park by comparison.

Air Force Gen Dagan discusses @IDF air targeting procedures & measures to minimise civilian casualties in Gaza conflict. Hamas use more simplified procedures. They just point their missiles at civilian population centres & hope for maximum casualties. https://t.co/EN4TMRIjMt
— R?????? K??? ? (@COLRICHARDKEMP) May 28, 2021

Former Ambassador David Friedman: ‘Trump administration would have given Israel free reign to defend itself’

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was dispatched to Israel by U.S. President Joe Biden this week in the direct aftermath of an acute conflagration highlighted by 11 days of indiscriminate rocket attacks by Hamas on Israeli population centers and pinpoint Israeli airstrikes on Hamas installations in Gaza in retaliation.

Blinken attempted to apply significant pressure on Israel behind closed doors in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while diplomatic relations with the Palestinian Authority, which were suspended during the Trump administration, were officially restored.

The visit confirmed fears in Jerusalem that Washington’s policy would now be essentially reversed, following four of the friendliest years ever between a U.S. administration and Israel. The United States intends to renew funding to the P.A. and reopen a shuttered consulate in Jerusalem dealing exclusively with Palestinian affairs. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly rejected the prospect of opening up a Palestinian office in Israel’s capital.

In addition, Blinken updated Netanyahu on U.S. intentions to negotiate towards a new Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Former President Donald Trump had pulled out of the deal in May 2018 and set about to level the harshest sanctions to date on any nation against the Islamic Republic.

On the heels of Blinken’s visit, JNS sat down with former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, a trusted adviser of Trump, and one of the key architects of the administration’s Mideast policies.

Felesteen reports that a Palestinian woman sent all of her money and jewelry to Mohammed Dief, the head of Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades.

She attached a letter, where she wrote that this was her contribution to the manufacture of rockets that crush Israel, or, as she put it, the "plundering entity."

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

Police warn Jewish residents in Luton about potential antisemitic rally on Shabbat by Muslims (UPDATE)

This notice was distributed to the Jewish community of Luton, UK, warning Jews to stay away from a "pro-Palestine" demonstration (h/t Sharpy58)

It says that the Jewish community of Luton has been advised by the local police that the Luton Council of Mosques will hold a demonstration on Shabbat, and Jews should be aware of where the protest will be to keep safe. The community says Jews should stay away from the area.

Why should Jews be concerned? After all, Muslims aren't antisemitic, and anti-Israel demonstrations are legitimate criticism of Israel with no animosity towards Jews, right? That is the message that we have been told thousands of times from Muslims and non-Muslim officials alike.

Why should local police warn Jews? They should be able to stroll right past the protesters in their Shabbat clothes and yarmulkes and be treated with utmost respect, from what we are told.

It makes no sense!

Could it be that Muslims are, by and large, antisemitic? That Jews walking in the midst of a bunch of angry Muslims are in danger of being attacked because they are Jewish? That everyone knows that Muslims, incited by inflammatory speeches and a diet of lies, are likely to attack the first Jew they see?

The fear of angering Muslims brings us to this point where everyone knows the truth but no one wants to say it out loud.

I couldn't find the poster for this rally, but a similar one being held in Bradford on Sunday features a Photoshopped picture of the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock being burned, presumably by Jews who have been accused of intending to destroy those sites for a hundred years, causing untold number of riots and deaths.

This is direct incitement for violence. Everyone knows it. No one wants to admit it. And that ensures that the violence will occur.

Jews have to stay home for their own safety to ensure the rights of Muslim antisemites to freely scream their hate. This is what it has come to.

Update: A response tweet to where I saw this originally: "this is a lie. the police always ask people to stay away from the area when there's a demonstration. "

It may be true, but still the Jewish community felt it important to inform their members of the potential danger.

UPDATE 2: Read this important thread clarifying the facts, the original email seems to have been based on incorrect info.

Yesterday, Hamas took journalists through a damaged school to show how horrible Israel is.

Note the pattern of tiny holes all over the walls.

This not not how Israeli missiles work. Israeli attacks to Gaza have been as pinpoint as possible, for obvious reasons Israel wants to avoid collateral damage (it used to use cluster munitions, but it stopped that in 2006, although it is still criticized for exporting them to other countries.)

Here is a home destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, probably belonging to a terrorist. There are very few small holes in the walls, unlike the damage from Hamas rockets.

The spray pattern happens to be exactly what Hamas rocket damage looks like, though:

Hundreds of rockets from terror groups fell short in Gaza, and it is likely that many of them caused deaths and serious damage.

Save the Children claims 50 schools in Gaza were damaged in the recent fighting. The Palestinian Ministry of Education says the number was 187. There is no doubt that some schools were damaged as Israel attacked tunnels under streets that schools were on.

Journalists clearly aren't asking how many of the schools shown by Hamas to gain sympathy were actually damaged by ....Hamas?

(h/t Abu Ali Express (K.) via Yoel)

05/27 Links Pt2: Eve Barlow: The Social Media Pogrom; WHO Meeting Deviates From COVID-19 to Single Out Israel As Violator of Health Rights; Ethiopian Jews and the Elephant in the Anti-Israel Room

From Ian:

Eve Barlow: The Social Media Pogrom

Two weeks ago, as Westerners began educating themselves about Sheikh Jarrah and the Iron Dome through stick figures with biased speech bubbles on the Diet Prada and Refinery29 Instagram feeds, something else started happening on social media. I coined it the world’s first social media pogrom. The activity that Jews—Zionist Jews in particular—experienced all over the web was bizarre at best and invalidating, abusive, and dehumanizing at worst. Zionist Jews weren’t just being unfollowed for advocating for themselves and their brothers and sisters in Israel and Palestine, we were also losing access to direct message and comment abilities, having posts removed for violating community guidelines (while blatant antisemitism online almost never receives the same treatment), and having our accounts threatened with temporary suspension or closure.

The cherry on top, of course, was that we were simultaneously fighting off a barrage of thousands upon thousands of troll comments and hateful direct messages, which frequently included homophobic, misogynistic, and extremely violent language. Some people even generously took the time to record voice messages. I received a few of those, including one from a woman with a British accent calling for my family to burn in hell. She sang it. Or she tried to.

The seeds of this pogrom have been sown for a while. Online, there are different degrees of erasure and exclusion. First comes the unfollow, which hurts, especially from those we consider friends, those we love and cherish, whose memories are still fresh. Sometimes an unfollow is the result of pressure from other online users who dox people they disagree with. Sometimes an unfollow is a decision taken with complete autonomy, someone deciding to simply delete a person from their timeline rather than ask for clarification or, God forbid, pursue a fair-minded discussion.

If you’re a Zionist, you are not deemed worthy of dialogue. Most people who think this couldn’t give you a working definition of Zionism. They just know which labels are accepted by the intersectional world, and which labels are not. Anti-Zionism good. Zionism bad. Except Zionism is a globally recognized concept, whereas anti-Zionism doesn’t seem to have an agreed-upon definition. It exists only as a knee-jerk rejection of a belief in the State of Israel and anyone’s justification of its existence, regardless of how reasoned, empathetic, or fair-minded that justification might be.

Social Media Backlash After Actor Seth Rogen Mocks Jewish Journalist Trolled on Twitter

Actor Seth Rogen was criticized by Twitter users on Wednesday for poking fun at a Jewish journalist who wrote an article about the rise of antisemitism.

Reporter Eve Barlow tweeted a link to a recent article she published in Tablet magazine that discussed being trolled by hundreds of Twitter users who wrote “Eve Fartlow” — which was also trending on Twitter — and compared the current rise of antisemitism on social media to digital pogroms. Rogen, 39, who is also Jewish, responded to Barlow’s Twitter post with a “gust of wind” emoji commonly used to represent flatulence, further mocking the journalist.

Rogen’s reply received over 14,000 likes and 1,000 retweets, fueling the abuse directed at Barlow. The star of “An American Pickle” also engaged in conversation with a Twitter user who continued the mockery by posting “Eve Fartlow” along with an attempted joke about apartheid.

Many came to Barlow’s defense and slammed Rogen for his crude response, including former Democratic New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind. He wrote, “Seth, how pathetic are you? How desperate are you to be liked by Jew haters that you’re trolling a Jew on their behalf?”

Others called his remark “disappointing” and accused Rogen of “dumb, vicious, misogynistic bullying of a Jewish woman.” One Twitter user said, “With a massive platform, comes a level of responsibility. Shame you choose to use yours to orchestrate pile ons onto a besieged woman.”

Alan M. Dershowitz: How Social Media Validates Anti-Semitism by Censoring Everything but Anti-Semitism

People often forget that the very concept of political correctness was invented by Stalin's Soviet Union.

Now... that social media companies have decided to become "Glavlit" -- to publish only material that is supposedly truthful and passes its "community standards" -- they have become more like the former Soviet Union than like the United states under the First Amendment.

This is not a call to censor anti-Semitic tweets. It is a call for the social media companies to stop censoring other speech based on criteria of supposed truthfulness, "community standards" and other such questionable criteria that are subject to political, Ideological and other biases. I want no censorship other than for material that is already prohibited by law. But if the social media companies persist in censoring, they must apply a single standard to everything. I want no censorship other than for material that is already prohibited by law.

The current social media have the worst of both worlds: they censor material that is neither dangerous nor necessarily false; and then permit material which is both highly dangerous and demonstrably false.

Bethany Mandel: 17,000 Tweet ‘Hitler Was Right,’ and Big Tech Barely Reacts

In a disturbing example, the anti-Semitic hashtag #Covid1948 has been trending on Twitter in several countries, including the United States. Often accompanied by nakedly anti-Jewish content, the hashtag likens the birth of the state of Israel in 1948 to the COVID-19 virus. According to the NCRI, the hateful hashtag was shared up to 175 times per minute for over four hours on May 13. It often appears alongside #FreePalestine and is associated with other anti-Semitic hashtags like #Hitlerwasright and #Zionazi. Adolf Hitler raises a defiant, clenched fist during a speech.

Disturbing messages of “Hitler was right” were reportedly posted across social media channels over 17,000 times.

While we’ve seen President Donald Trump and countless numbers of his supporters booted off Twitter’s service, purveyors of Jew hate like Iran’s Supreme Leader Imam Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyyeh, and Louis Farrakhan are still regularly posting. Adeel Raja posting in praise of Hitler throughout his time on Twitter finally lost him a gig as a freelance CNN contributor but didn’t even warrant a suspension, let alone ban, from the social media service.

Over the last year, we’ve seen official and viral social media campaigns for Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate. Social media companies and their users stood up to hatred and promoted content designed to stand athwart prejudice. And now with an increase in online and in-person hatred against Jews, we’re met with silence.

Around the world, we’ve seen violent attacks on Jews walking down the street, dining at kosher restaurants, at synagogues, and demonstrating in support of Israel. The videos of incendiary devices thrown at Jews standing in the Diamond District or dining outside are jarring — and the muted reaction online, with the only vocal response coming almost entirely from the Jewish community, has been perhaps even more alarming than the attacks themselves.

These aren’t just an isolated set of events with a handful of bigots roaming the streets looking for Jews to target; no, we are witnessing a wholesale abandonment of the Jewish people at the hands of these mobs both in the streets and on the web.

The popularity of these anti-Semitic messages, the silence of social media companies and their users in response to these attacks, and their outrage that someone like Meghan McCain would dare speak up against it speak volumes about our priorities as a society. While we may stand against some forms of hatred, the oldest form, Jew hate, is still fair game.

Last year, large corporations lectured us about "systemic racism."

Now, these same companies are mostly silent about the surge of anti-Semitic attacks against Jews. pic.twitter.com/ExBMuLNPsr
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) May 26, 2021

The Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality last week opened a lottery for people to purchase 28 apartments that are available at about 30% lower than the market price and the apartments.

The apartments are only available to Arab Christians and Muslims, not Jews.

The land originally belonged to Arabs before 1948.

To be sure, this is a very small project that took ten years to come to fruition. The housing is still expensive (roughly $400,000 per unit, much cheaper than comparable but hardly low income housing.)

The point is that the one sided vilification of Israel as always stealing land from Arabs is simplistic nonsense. Israel is a complex place and the people who hate Israel don't want you to know that things are not as simple as gets reported.

(h/t Yoel, imshin)

Eschewing Term 'Abraham Accords,' Biden Admin Now Calling Israel 'Jewville' (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Abraham Accords Washington, May 26 - Diplomatic sources in the White House and Department of State have confirmed that in addition to the current administration refraining from reference to last year's historic peace agreements between Israel and several Persian Gulf states by their proper name, so as to avoid implying any positive achievement by their predecessors, a quiet rhetorical change in nomenclature has also taken place, under which representatives of the administration refer not to "Israel" but instead refer to it as "Jewville."

Biden administration spokespeople indicated in separate on-background telephone interviews that a terminology shift is underway since the current president took office in January, whereby anyone providing an official stance must take pains not to allow the previous president, Donald Trump, any credit for his attainments while in office. Refusing to call the Abraham Accords by their official name, instead referring to them as "normalization agreements," helps to downplay that diplomatic coup by Trump and his adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner in forging those agreements between Israel and several Gulf nations that once bitterly opposed the Jewish State.

"This rhetorical policy is of a piece with insisting that nothing effective to combat COVID happened under Trump, either," explained an aide to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. "Politics has become a zero-sum game. Conceding that Operation Warp Speed, for example, contributed to expedited availability of a vaccine - a vaccine that Biden himself got while Trump was still in office - or that Trump could have accomplished anything worthwhile internationally, would undermine the entire 'Trump-and-the-GOP-are-irredeemably-evil narrative that has served us so well with a sympathetic media. The term 'normalization agreements' conveys much a more lukewarm feeling about the agreements than 'Abraham Accords,' a name that automatically evokes epic, historical rapprochement between once-estranged brothers Isaac and Ishmael. Of course it won't do."

"The Jewville thing is just an extension of that thinking," added a White House staff member. "It's hard to grapple with the move of our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the acknowledgment of Jerusalem as the country's capital - not to mention recognition of Jewville claims to the Golan Heights - so we have to work in other ways to weaken support for Isr- for the Zionist Entity. Trump was as enthusiastic a supporter of, of that place, as any president ever, probably more so, which has to mean that support for them is evil. Fortunately, that sensibility already dovetails with a vocal chunk of our die-hard voters and members."

05/27 Links Pt1: UNRWA's director spoke truth that Israeli strikes were precise; UNHRC approves permanent probe into Israeli human rights abuses; Hamas chief Haniyeh's niece treated for cancer in Israeli hospital

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: UNRWA's director spoke truth that Israeli strikes were precise- editorial

When Matthias Schmale, director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip, told Channel 12 on Sunday that Israeli airstrikes during the recent conflagration were “precise” and “sophisticated,” he was simply stating the truth as he saw it.

In the interview with journalist Arad Nir, Schmale was asked about the IDF’s assertion that its military strikes against terrorist targets had been very precise. He responded, “I’m not a military expert, but I would not dispute that. I also have the impression that there is a huge sophistication in the way the Israeli military struck over the last 11 days, so that’s not my issue. I’ve had many colleagues describe to me that they feel that, in comparison with the 2014 war, this time the strikes felt much more vicious in terms of their impact. So yes, they didn’t hit – with some exceptions – civilian targets, but the viciousness, ferocity of the strikes was heavily felt.”

He noted that more than 60 children were killed in Gaza, including 19 who attended an UNRWA school.

“I think the precision was there, but there was unacceptable and unbearable loss of life on the civilian side,” Schmale stated.

It did not take long for Gazans to voice outrage over Schmale’s remarks, accusing him of exonerating Israel and calling for his reprimand and dismissal. In a joint statement, several Palestinian rights groups accused Schmale of “indirectly praising the precision and sophistication of the Israeli Army, when Israel is in fact constantly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people.”

Hamas tweeted that it was shocked by the statements, accusing the UNRWA official of pretending to be a “military analyst for the occupation army.”

Hamas chief Haniyeh's niece treated for cancer in Israeli hospital

A relative of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh is currently being treated at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, part of the Sourasky Medical Center, for over a month, N12 reported.

According to reports, the hospitalized family member is his seventeen-year-old niece, who has received a bone marrow transplant.

The report noted that she was hospitalized during Operation Guardian of the Walls.

According to Maariv, the hospital's spokesperson said that "during the war she was treated with dedication."

"Israel only knows how to give one type of humanitarian aid ,and it comes at the cost of [Israeli] civilians' lives," commented Yamina MK Idit Sliman.

Sliman decried the government's failure to return Israeli prisoners who are stuck in Gaza, adding that she will "contact Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] today to find out why humanitarian action during the Operation [Guardian of the Walls] was one sided."

The bodies of IDF soldiers Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin, who were who abducted by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip in 2014, have not been returned as part of the ceasefire agreement.

UNHRC approves permanent probe into Israeli human rights abuses

The United Nations Human Rights Council has approved on Thursday a resolution to investigate Israel and Hamas for war crimes.

The resolution also called for an arms embargo against Israel.

If approved at Thursday "special session" the 47-member UNHRC the "commission of inquiry' would begin looking at incidents that occurred both before and after April 13, 2021. The decision to call for such a probe was sparked by the 11-day IDF-Hamas war and was submitted by the Palestinian Authority and Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

It would mark the first time that the UNHRC created a permanent fact-finding mission with respect to any UN member state.

The UNHRC already calls annually for an arms embargo against Israel. Its insertion is in addition to that annual text.

This new text "urges all States to refrain from transferring arms when they assess, in accordance with applicable national procedures and international obligations and standards, that there is a clear risk that such arms might be used in the commission or facilitation of serious violations or abuses of international human rights law or serious violations of international humanitarian law."

The UNHRC's special session on Israel, is the 30th it has held since its inception in 2006. This is the ninth such session it has held on Israel.

BREAKING: U.N. Human Rights Council adopts PLO-drafted resolution ignoring Hamas rocket attacks & creating inquiry targeting Israel with unprecedented open-ended mandate that stretches indefinitely into past & future. Shame on 🇲🇽 Mexico for backing it.

📜 https://t.co/hAEcjUKMXi pic.twitter.com/XU4vIPH3JO
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) May 27, 2021

No, @KenRoth, the graphic is not "striking" at all. The inquiries on Libya, Venezuela, etc. were sponsored by democracies seeking to protect human rights. The inquiries on Israel were sponsored by murderous regimes like Iran and Syria seeking to protect Hamas terrorists. https://t.co/Gep5PQ0XOo
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) May 27, 2021

Ahmed Nafea, writing in Egyptian news site SadaMisr, proposes ethnically cleansing Jews from the Middle East.

As usual, no one blinks or condemns these kinds of articles.

Nafea just discovered Birobidzhan, the Soviet-era Jewish Autonomous Oblast set up as a counter to Zionism. It is in an isolated region bordering China in far-east Asia. The Soviets encouraged Jews to move there, and several thousand did, with the population reaching some 50,000 Jews most of whom came as refugees after the Holocaust.

They didn't stay in the isolated region. The experiment failed miserably and today Jews make up 1% of the population of whom nearly none practice Judaism.

Ahmed Nafea thinks this is the solution to that pesky Jewish problem, and says that Israel is hiding the existence of the entire oblast:

The original homeland of the Jews is the forgotten Jewish republic of Birobidzhan.

Yes, the first Jewish republic, Birobidzhan , is located in southeast Russia. The majority of the world is not aware of its existence because Israel is striving to conceal this fact and prevent the media from visiting it.

What Israel and the Western countries supporting it fear is promoting the idea of the return of the Jews to their first homeland in this republic and persuading the world of a safe return for the Jews residing in Palestine to the Republic of Birobidzhan, to live in safety and peace, enjoy the atmosphere of the prevailing Jewish culture in it and speak the Yiddish language, the language of European Jews, without any anti-Semitism as currently promoted by world Zionism.

Global Zionism deceived the whole world when they claimed during the Second World War that they are in dire need of the land of Palestine as their national home and that they are displaced and have no national home to house them, and thus they have shielded the displacement of the Palestinians and the seizure of their lands until now.

During the disintegration of the Soviet Union, this republic was eligible to declare independence from the Russian Federation, just like Chechnya, but Zionism prevented this from happening due to the sensitivity of the emergence of a Jewish republic in a place other than Palestine.

See? The solution is so easy!

This is the casual kind of antisemitism that pervades the Arab world. The fact that Jews don't want to live in Birobidzhan doesn't even enter his mind - they must be forced to move there and they'll be happy!

Terrorists continue to die from their wounds, including Fatah's main rocket engineer

The death toll from Gaza continues to rise, and most of the people dying are terrorists.

Today, Islamic Jihad announced the death of Ahmed Kamel Abdel Karim Ammar. They won't identify his position in the movement but his age (33) and the prominence of the announcement in Islamic Jihad media indicates that he was a major figure.

Fatah terrorist Mu`in Jamal Al-Amsi died on Sunday from his wounds. Fatah isn't as sensitive about saying the jobs of those who were "martyred," and al-Amsi was a member of the Nidal Brigades Military Council and commander of their Engineering and Manufacturing Unit.

Meaning, he was their rocket chief.

Fatah made an entire video showing his accomplishments at manufacturing hundreds of mortars and rockets.

Another Fatah terrorist died of his wounds on Sunday, Mahmoud Ammar Abu Jarad.

These died after the fighting, most of them at hospitals in Egypt.

In eleven days, Israel hit more than 1500 terror targets in a heavily populated area.

How many people would normally be killed in such an operation? 3000? 6000? A single bomb could easily kill scores of people.

But the numbers seem to indicate that roughly 300 were killed by Israel, of which 200 were terrorists.

Assuming those numbers hold up, this will be an unprecedented achievement in avoiding civilian casualties in a largely urban warfare environment.

Never in history has any war where the terrorists deliberately place their targets among civilians resulted in a lower civilian to fighter ratio of deaths. And as tragic as civilian deaths are, most of the civilians were killed because they were near high value legitimate targets.

Under Geneva, civilians do not shield legitimate targets, unless their loss is not proportionate. The rules on proportionality depend on the opinion of a "reasonable military commander" given his intel available at that moment.

So as regrettable as the death of civilians are, it is legal and part of war. If a Hamas commander is with his family, Israel has every right under international law to attack the house he is in, even if his family will undoubtedly get killed. This is what happened with Iyad Fathi Sharir, commander of the Hamas anti-tank missile unit, who was killed along with his wife, teenage and toddler daughters.

Israel is literally the model for avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths. It spends millions on ensuring that the strikes are as accurate as possible, in sizing weapons to be big enough to kill the target but small enough to minimize damage to surrounding families. It requires incredible intelligence and a deep knowledge of Gaza, of the targets, and of international law. For better or worse, Israel probably has the most experience in understanding and interpreting the laws of armed conflict of any nation.

Despite this, Israel is vilified as the worst human rights abuser in the world.

No matter that its critics cannot point to any time in history that an army did better at avoiding civilian casualties. That is all irrelevant. Even though this war caused fewer deaths than the 2014 war, the protests were much more numerous and the media coverage was much more negative.

In reality, those who are protesting so energetically against Israel would protest just as much if the death count was 999 Hamas terrorists and one civilian. They would say that Israel killed a thousand innocent people anyway.

Israel tries to minimize the number of people killed on both sides. The terrorists try to maximize the number of people killed on both sides. The supposed "peace" groups who hold up photos of dead Gazan kids agree with Hamas - they love dead Gaza kids. They make wonderful props.

Israel cares more about those kids than these hypocrites do.

Similarly, Israel's critics want to see more Jews killed. That is the only possible reason they keep a scorecard of how many were killed on each side - because they want to say that not enough Jews dying is unfair.

Dead civilians only help Hamas and people who support Hamas. Israel has no interest in killing kids. Israel certainly does not want to kill reporters, as "human rights" leaders accused. People accusing Israel of targeting civilians are Jew-hating liars. It is not easy to drop 1500 bombs and not to kill thousands of people.

And yet, the world media cannot ferret out simple facts.

How hard would it be to find a retired high ranking US or European military officer and ask them whether they think Israel acted inappropriately? How hard would it be to ask them how Israel could have avoided more casualties? Or, even to ask their opinion of the ludicrous notion, published in major media, that Israel should just allow thousands of rockets to be shot at Israeli citizens and pray that Iron Dome does its job?

Not one reporter bothers. Because they support the anti-Israel meme, not the truth.

It isn't paranoia when the world really is against you.

Israel will continue to act as morally as possible - securing the lives of both its citizens and the civilians of its enemies - no matter what others say and lie. It would be so easy to say that they will make up lies anyway, why bother working so hard to minimize casualties?

But Israel doesn't think that way. Instead, right now, Israeli military leaders are looking at the results, learning from any mistakes, and trying to reach the unreachable goal of only killing terrorists and no one else in the next, inevitable war.

And that's the way it will always be.