Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, January 03, 2022

Hunger striker Hisham Abu Hawash is a terrorist. Here's what he's done.

The media is filled with stories about Hisham Abu Hawash, the Palestinian hunger striker who is reportedly near death as he insists to be released from administrative detention.

Arab members of Knesset are visiting him. Rashida Tlaib is calling for his release. Islamic Jihad is threatening war if he dies.

Nobody is talking about his record, though.

While the reasons for his current detention have not been released, he has a long track record of terror - and the media is not reporting about his past attacks, which certainly have relevance today. He is no innocent lamb. His current detention is to stop a planned attack, but the details are confidential.

Israel's Channel 14 did the research.

In 2002 he assisted other terrorists by spying on IDF movements and letting them know the details. He also helped find hiding spots for another terrorist.

In 2004, he obtained a rifle and hid it until a planned attack. The attack came later in 2004 as he tried to fire on IDF jeeps, but his gun malfunctioned and he was caught. He received a 56 month prison sentence for that.

One can assume that after his prison stint, he has remained active in Islamic Jihad and has been rising through its ranks. 39 year-olds are senior operatives. If Israel says he was planning a major attack, it doesn't seem like they just made that up.

(h/t Tomer Ilan)

01/03 Links Pt2: Palestine Action: How and why they have crossed the line into antisemitism; UN envoy goes after Harry Potter star Emma Watson for Palestinian solidarity post

From Ian:

Palestine Action: How and why they have crossed the line into antisemitism.

Finally — the blood libel, “Israel’s love for blood”
This is the clincher, which makes it pretty clear that this is no normal “activism”. Which other countries, during protests, have been accused of having a “love for blood”? I challenge you to Google it, the answer is: none (except for Israel of course)

This is vehemence on a scale that goes far beyond normal hatred. It is the kind of hatred whipped up against the Jews by Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s.

The last video I discuss is the one featuring Sarah Wilkinson, talking about why she is an activist against Elbit. In her words, Israel doesn’t mearly cause deaths during a war with a determined enemy, it “slaughters Palstinian civillians”

Behind the doors of an innocuous looking office door in Shenstone, the evil Zionists design “some of the most hidious weapons in the world”, which are “responsible for the death of hundreds of thoudanss of men women and children”

The number of Palestinian “people” Israel has “slaughtered” seems astronomical — even by the standards of its neighbours, who do far worse. Then comes the accusation that Palestinians are used as “Guinea pigs”, conjuring up images of animals in cages, having goodness knowns what awful experiments performed on them .

As a person, whose identity as a Jew is determined by his long Jewish ancestry (many of whom were murdered in Nazi death camps), and who grew up in Northern Israel, where Jewsish nuses regularly work alongside doctors, videos such as these don’t make me angry - they make me frightened, very frightened, because if these people believe that we are as evil as the worst Nazis (or possibly even more so), then what is to stop them trying to harm or even kill us in order to support a “just cause”?

I my opinion, had Labour got into power, with much of the party membership (and many officials too) apparently believing these sorts of things about Israel, it is not inconceivable that they would have moved to outlaw anyone with any connection to Israel or anyone perceived as a “Zionist” (most British Jews would fall under this category)

I hope to have show n that the direct-action group Palestine Action are motivated by the oldest hatred in the world. Their statements are replete with echoes of the blood libel, which originated here in England in 1144 (in Norwich), where 18 Jewish leaders where executed as a consequence. The total expulsion of English Jews followed shortly after.

Palestine Action should not be regarded as a normal activist group, but rather they should be regarded as were Combat 18 — a British neo Nazi group from the 1990’s. And their antisemitism should be made clear to the public.

Jonathan S. Tobin: What is the greatest threat to Jews?

These groups are prepared to mobilize their supporters to march on behalf of an issue that is, for all of the hyperbolic and largely dishonest rhetoric expended on its behalf, tangential to Jewish issues. Yet there is little sign that they will be heading to the streets to protest another bout of Iran appeasement from the Democrats.

In analyzing this issue, we need to discount President Joe Biden's transparently false attempts to compare voter ID laws to "Jim Crow" or his claim that this presents the "greatest threat to our democracy since the Civil War. That's not hyperbole. Since the Civil War." It's a statement that makes one wonder whether even a president as prone to hyperbole as Biden actually knows what the word means.

Instead, this points us toward something that ought to be at the top of any theoretical end-of-year list of top 10 mistakes that Jewish organizations make.

I don't doubt that many of the constituents and donors of the JCPA, the ADL and the host of other liberal Jewish groups enlisted to fight for the president's priorities will applaud the willingness of these organizations to do so. In a time when politics now fills the role religion used to play in most people's lives, partisanship is second nature, and most Jews are Democrats.

Many if not most American Jews consider issues which are not particular to Jewish interests to be the most important priorities. That notwithstanding, those organizations that exist to defend specifically Jewish interests, whether it is to combat antisemitism or to speak up on behalf of Jewish security, should nonetheless prioritize those topics. If they don't, then they've essentially discarded their main responsibilities and have become merely Jewish auxiliaries for non-Jewish interests.

So, if Jewish groups are going to treat the Democrats' partisan claims about voting to be (as Harris would have it) the top issue, while either running interference for Biden's Iran appeasement plans or treating it as an issue of lesser importance, then that matters a great deal. If that's the direction they are headed in, and there's little reason to doubt it, then they might as well drop the pretense that they are defending Jewish interests.

Lapid: 2022 will see intense effort to paint Israel as apartheid state

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid warned on Monday that Israel will face intense campaigns to label it an apartheid state in 2022.

“We think that in the coming year, there will be debate that is unprecedented in its venom and in its radioactivity around the words ‘Israel as an apartheid state,'” Lapid said during a Zoom briefing with Israeli journalists.

“In 2022, it will be a tangible threat,” he predicted.

Lapid pointed at Palestinian campaigns against Israel in the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and the UN Human Rights Council’s establishment of a permanent “Commission of Inquiry” — the most potent tool at the council’s disposal — into Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, including Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021.

“The commission of inquiry into Guardian of the Walls is unprecedented because it doesn’t have a time limit, it doesn’t have a limit of scope, and it is well-funded with many people working on it.,” Israel’s top diplomat emphasized.

Lapid pointed out that the COI has a budget of $5.5 million with 18 staffers. By contrast, the COI looking into the Syrian Civil War has an annual budget of about $2.5 million and 12 staffers.

“It shows where it is heading,” he said, stressing that the campaign by the Palestinian Authority and anti-Israel organizations could affect Israel’s ability to participate in international cultural and sporting events, among other challenges.

Lapid called the accusation that Israel is an apartheid state “a despicable lie.”

Daily Nous, a philosophy news blog, writes:

Have Jews insinuated themselves into positions of power and influence in politics and culture because they are innately gifted with higher IQs, or is it also because they are ethnocentric and hypocritical networkers good at using non-Jews in their self-serving mission of “transforming America contrary to white interests”? Race science and/or conspiracy theory? This—pardon the editorializing—outrageous question is currently under discussion in the pages of the academic philosophy journal Philosophia.

Welcome to 2022.

January 1st saw the online publication of “The ‘Default Hypothesis’ Fails to Explain Jewish Influence” by Kevin MacDonald, who is described on Wikipedia as an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist, and retired professor of evolutionary psychology.” MacDonald’s 32-page article is a response to a piece by Nathan Cofnas, “The Anti-Jewish Narrative,” that Philosophia published last February, and which is one of a series of pieces in which Cofnas critiques McDonald.

Both MacDonald and Cofnas are preoccupied with the question: “Did Jews create liberal multiculturalism to advance their ethnic interests?” (Cofnas, p.1332).

The summary may be a bit unfair to Cofnas. Let's backtrack a bit.

Kevin MacDonald is described in Wikipedia as "an American antisemitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist,and retired professor of evolutionary psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). In 2008, the CSULB academic senate voted to disassociate itself from MacDonald's work."

In one of his books, he has a chapter called " "National Socialism as an Anti-Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy". In other words, Nazism arose as a logical counter to Jewish supremacy, and antisemitism is justified as an evolutionary counter-strategy for the supposed Jewish evolutionary strategy of dominating non-Jews.

However, MacDonald is influential among the modern alt-Right as an intellectual support for their bigotry and antisemitism.

The abstract of a 2021 article in Antisemitism Studies titled "A New Protocols: Kevin MacDonald's Reconceptualization of Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory" says,

Kevin MacDonald is a key figure in shaping contemporary antisemitism for the Alt-Right. He repackages classic antisemitic beliefs for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by cloaking them in a language of evolutionary psychology. His most important innovation is to reject The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as factual but retain them as a metaphor for Jewish anti-white activism. By arguing that it is Judaism itself as “a group evolutionary strategy” that leads Jews to tear down white society (European-derived Christian majority states in the Western world), he is able to present an image of the Jews akin to that of The Protocols, but one that obviates the need for any actual conspiracy. Once Jewish culture and genetics become the driving force of this effort to destroy white society, one only needs to show that individual Jews are acting on its behalf, not that they are conspiring together to do so.

Nathan Cofnas, who works with the philosophy of biology and ethics at Oxford, decided to write a full paper in Philosophia - which is an Israeli journal - last year to rebut MacDonald's arguments from within the evolutionary psychology framework that MacDonald uses. He defends his choice to treat MacDonald seriously and not dismiss him as a crackpot in an earlier 2018 article in Human Nature:

There are at least three reasons to give MacDonald a hearing.

First, some respected psychologists and evolutionary theorists have reported that they found value in MacDonald’s work. For example, David Sloan Wilson endorsed the ideas in A People That Shall Dwell Alone and strongly criticized the representatives of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society who rejected MacDonald: .... This amounts to at least some degree of prima facie evidence that MacDonald’s theory should be considered.

Second, it is an undeniable fact that, in the past few hundred years, Jews have had a disproportionate influence on politics and culture in the Western world, if not the whole world. It might be worthwhile to investigate this phenomenon from a biosocial or evolutionary perspective.... The idea that Jewish influence resulted, at least in some cases, from their pursuit of a group evolutionary strategy cannot be dismissed a priori. Since MacDonald has defended this theory, he seems to provide a starting point for anyone wishing to investigate the understudied issue of Jewish influence. If he is wrong, it may be useful to know why and how.

Third and perhaps most important, though, is that MacDonald’s work has been influential—enormously so—in a certain segment of the lay community, namely, among anti-Semites and adherents of the burgeoning movement known as the “alt-right.” It is hard to overstate his influence among this group. Some years ago Derbyshire (2003) called him “the Marx of the anti-Semites,” and with the advent of the alt-right his audience has grown substantially. Richard Spencer, whom the New York Times calls “the leading ideologue of the alt-right movement” (Goldstein 2016), introduced MacDonald at a conference with one sentence: “There is no man on the planet who has done more for the understanding of the pole around which the world revolves than Kevin MacDonald” (Spencer 2016). Andrew Anglin, who runs the most popular alt-right/neo-Nazi website, says in his “Guide to the Alt-Right” that “MacDonald’s work examining the racial nature of Jews is considered crucial to understanding what the Alt-Right is about” (Anglin 2016). ...

Cofnas does not repeat this argument in the newer paper.

Now, Kevin MacDonald himself has written his own response to Cofnas' paper in the current issue of Philosophia.

And now an antisemite has been mainstreamed as a respectable philosopher.

How could have this been handled better?

I admit I only skimmed through the papers, but at first glance it appears that Cofnas made two errors. While his 2018 paper did an admirable job in showing how MacDonald was not intellectually honest - cherry picking sources, ignoring counter-proofs or even misrepresenting them as supporting his theories - he does not "go in for the kill" in that paper and point out that MacDonald's errors are a direct result of his antisemitism. Anyone can find support for any position if they only choose to report the evidence that supports their position, or misrepresent other facts as doing so. This is propaganda. We see this all the time with anti-Israel propaganda. The reader is still left with the impression that MacDonald's theories have some merit, even if he has clear biases.

The other error is that Cofnas presented his own alternate theory as to why Jews are disproportionately influential in Western culture. This now makes his theory a target for MacDonald - who indeed attacks that theory in the new Philosophia issue - and now MacDonald looks again like he has a valid viewpoint. He gave the opening for MacDonald to attack rather than put him on the defensive, and now it looks like a "he said, she said" debate.

Making MacDonald's antisemitism mainstream.

By not looking at and emphasizing the entire context of MacDonald's antisemitism, Cofnas let MacDonald control the framing of the debate giving him an advantage to promulgate his antisemitic theories as legitimate.

Of course, Philosophia should not have published MacDonald at all, but in this context, of the pretense of pure philosophical debate, it would have ad a hard time denying a response without giving MacDonald more ammunition about how the Jews are controlling the debate.

These people might know philosophy, but they don't understand the nature of antisemitic propaganda. And now the damage is done - an Israeli journal and an eminent academic have, without meaning to, spread an antisemitic theory.

Daily Nous adds:

Philosophia is edited by Asa Kasher (Tel Aviv). In response to questions about the publication of these articles, he wrote that the papers were refereed prior to publication, but that it was “a mistake” to publish them, explaining that he was “not aware of the general background of the debate” and that he is “sorry for treating the discussion as an ordinary philosophical debate.” He added that further comments from him may be forthcoming.

Yesterday, Moti Mizrahi (Florida Institute of Technology) who was until last night the associate editor of Philosophia, wrote on Twitter: “I had nothing to do with the publication of this [McDonald’s] paper in Philosophia. I’ve asked the EiC to reconsider its publication in Philosophia.” Later in the day, he announced his resignation from the journal.

So this is turning into a major debacle.

(h'/t Dan)

A swastika in a Jewish newspaper 100 years ago

Ahead of New Year's Day 1922, a laundry service in Milwaukee wished its customers a happy new year.

In the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle.

I don't think this is the kind of "reputation" the laundry would have wanted.

The Nazi party had adopted the swastika as its symbol only a year beforehand, and it was still used as an innocent decorative motif with no associations with genocide. But it is really jarring to see.

By Rosh Hashanah 1922, the swastika was dropped.

("Almost" dry?)

Here's what is that location today: General Rubber Company.

01/03 Links Pt1: Betraying the memory of Lieutenant Taylor Force; Abbas meets Gantz one day and bashes Israel the next; 2021 Saw Lowest Israeli Fatalities in West Bank in Years

From Ian:

Abbas meets Gantz one day and bashes Israel the next

Abbas has been around quite a while and obviously knew that his meeting with Gantz would trigger furious responses on the Palestinian street. Then why make the meeting public? Why not meet in secret? A secret meeting would likely have yielded the same results, and he would probably have received the same gestures from Gantz.

The reason is that while the Gantz meeting might not have aided Abbas’s sinking popularity among Palestinians, it helped him with the world. The US, EU, UN and various countries praised the meeting, signaling that they hoped this would build momentum for something bigger. Being seen as constructive could help Abbas build support for his never-ending effort to convene an international peace conference.

For Abbas, therefore, the Gantz meeting served a purpose in giving the world what it wanted to see. He also surely realized that while the Gantz meeting would grab headlines, a speech in which he slammed Israel a couple of days later on New Year’s Eve wouldn’t garner much international attention.

And while that assumption might be correct, Abbas again mistakenly chose to treat Israeli opinion as if it doesn’t count, that it doesn’t matter, something he has done repeatedly in the past. Abbas has never seemed to realize that any diplomatic process with Israel will need the backing of the Israeli people and that words like the ones he uttered Friday drive them away.

While Abbas has met in the past with left-wing Israeli politicians and activists as a way of outreach to Israeli society, that is not going to convince mainstream Israel that he is a man who can be trusted to make peace.

If Abbas really ever wants to reach any accommodation with Israel, he – or whoever follows him – will eventually need to win over the Israeli center. And one way not to do that is to accuse Israel of “organized terrorism” and “ethnic cleansing” just two days after meeting Gantz and walking away with a few confidence-building measures.

Gantz, ‘disappointed’ by criticism of Abbas meeting, vows to meet PA chief again

Defense Minister Benny Gantz on Monday pushed back against criticism of his recent meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, vowing to continue meeting with the PA leader.

“I heard the criticism and again say, it’s the one who sends soldiers into battle who’s responsible for doing everything to prevent it,” Gantz said during a faction meeting of his Blue and White party.

Gantz hosted Abbas at his home in Rosh Ha’ayin last week, the first time the PA leader met with a senior Israeli official inside Israel since 2010. It was also their second meeting since the new Israeli government was formed in June, with the first sit-down held in Ramallah.

The meeting was strongly criticized by right-wing opposition parties and some hawkish members of the ruling coalition, which includes factions spanning the political spectrum and has clashed over various policy matters, including those pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“I was disappointed by cabinet ministers who preferred to speak from a political position at the expense of security needs. Behind closed doors, they sound different,” Gantz said. “For me, whenever the political interest runs into the security interest, security must always prevail.”

Gantz said “the need to maintain Israel’s security” was the main focus of his meeting with Abbas, along with countering the Hamas terror group.

“And this is the reason I will continue to meet with him and other elements in the region with whom discourse helps our stability, security and interests,” he said.

PMW: Betraying the memory of Lieutenant Taylor Force

Taylor Force was a West Point graduate and veteran of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist while walking along the promenade in Tel Aviv, visiting Israel as part of a Vanderbilt University MBA study group trip examining global entrepreneurship. The terrorist was killed at the scene, before he could murder other innocent people. To this day, the Palestinian Authority pays a monthly allowance for life to the family of Taylor’s murderer, simply because the terrorist was killed during his murderous terror attack.

In order to prevent US money going to the PA as long at it pays millions of dollars every month to terrorist prisoners, released terrorists, wounded terrorists, and the families of dead terrorists - collectively known as the PA’s “Pay-for-Slay” payments - US Congress passed the Taylor Force Act (TFA) in 2018. Focusing on Economic Support Fund (ESF) aid - the largest section of US aid to the PA - TFA conditioned the ESF aid on the PA’s ending its “Pay-for-slay” payments.

Ignoring the clear call of Congress, since 2018, the PA has spent an estimated one billion dollars, paying monthly terror rewards, including over $32,434 dollars to the family of Taylor’s murderer.

While the US administration is prevented from providing direct aid to the PA, according to PA Minister of Finance Shukri Bishara’s Advisor Stephan Salameh, for 2022 the US has promised at least $225 million worth of financial aid to the Palestinians.

PA Minister of Finance Shukri Bishara’s Advisor Stephan Salameh: “The promises [from the US] are: There are promises that next year [2022] $225 million will be allocated to development projects. Also $50 million will be transferred for joint projects.”

Official PA TV host: “From institutions, not from the American administration?”

Stephan Salameh: “From the American administration, $225 million for development projects, not through the Palestinian [PA] government but rather projects by other bodies, but for developmental needs.”

TV host: “That's a good sign.”

Salameh: “Of course. $50 million for joint economic projects and support for the private sector. Also, from this $225 million there is a project to support the private sector. In addition to this, there will be between $150-200 million to support UNRWA, and additional support for other issues.”

[Official PA TV, Personal Encounter, Dec. 16, 2021]

In order to bypass the letter of US law but openly violating the spirit of the TFA, the US administration is providing the aid through its own aid organization (USAID) and is not giving the money “directly” to the PA, thereby circumventing and undermining TFA.

Israeli newspapers are reporting:

Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh says that if Israel does not come to a prisoner accord with the terror group, it will kidnap more Israelis.

“We have four prisoners, and if Israel is not convinced by that, then we will add to our stash,” Haniyeh says in comments circulated in official Hamas media.

So what's new?

2004:

Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, a member of the political leadership of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, confirmed that his movement is determined to free the Palestinian prisoners, through the kidnappings of Israeli soldiers.

2007:

Yesterday, a Hamas official threatened to kidnap more Israeli soldiers to force the Israeli authorities to release Palestinian prisoners.

2010:

The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) threatened to kidnap more Israeli soldiers if the international community did not intervene to solve the issue of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.

2015:

Khalil al-Hayya, a member of the Hamas political bureau, threatened today, Thursday, to kidnap Israeli soldiers and settlers as long as the heroic prisoners remain in the prisons of the Israeli occupation.

2021:

The Hebrew Kan channel revealed on Wednesday evening that Hamas has threatened to resume kidnappings and capture of Israeli soldiers if a new deal fails. According to the Hebrew channel, a senior Hamas official, Khaled Meshaal, threatened to kidnap new Israelis if Israel refused to release heavy prisoners in a new dea

Kidnapping is a core strategy of Hamas and has been since at least 1989. After the Gilad Shalit deal, they redoubled their efforts to kidnap Israelis. Hamas praised and then boasted about the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, Naftali Fraenkel who were then murdered in 2014. A primary goal in the 2014 war was to abduct Israeli soldiers.

There is nothing new here.

Here's another example of someone who would swear that he isn't antisemitic as he spouts classic antisemitic tropes.

Editor in Chief of Ma'an, Dr. Nasser Al-Lahham, writes first about how utterly evil and racist Zionist Jews are:

Israel has entered the phase of apartheid and racial discrimination: politically, parliamentary, judicial, municipal, labor market, employment and security. And even in sports, tourism, hotels, apartment rentals, road networks, trains and airports. Israel sank as a whole in the quagmire of racial discrimination and there is no hope of saving any part of it from its inevitable fate.

It has turned from an island of salvation for European Jews into an epidemic area that spreads viruses of racism and hatred throughout the world.

So what's the next move for the evil Jews?

I believe that Zionism is behind the aggravation of relations between Russia and Ukraine, leading to a war and the inevitable result of which is that Russia will occupy Ukraine in a matter of hours. The Zionist movement will accelerate the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Ukraine to Palestine. The Ukrainian Jews will be disposed of in the occupied West Bank and Syrian Golan settlements.

So Zionists are secretly manipulating Russia and the Ukraine to fight each other in order to force Ukrainian Jews to immigrate to Israel and settle in "occupied" territory.

Nah, nothing paranoid or antisemitic about that. After all, the Jews are behind all wars which are waged to help and enrich the Jews. I read it in a book somewhere.

Ma'an is regarded as one of the "moderate" Palestinian news sites. It has historically been funded by various European governments and NGOs.

The body of Montaser Balawi, 51, a military judge in the Palestinian Authority, was found at dawn Sunday with a bullet to his head.

His body was found inside his home in Tulkarm.

Palestinian media is calling this part of recent "security chaos" in the West Bank which has recently escalated. There have been several little-reported armed clashes.

Palestinians are upset at the police because they are perceived as protecting Israel instead of protecting them. The proof, to them, is that the police saved the lives of two Hasidic Israelis who accidentally drove into Ramallah. The crowd attacked them and torched their car but the police rescued them. According to Palestinian media now, Palestinians are angry that they weren't allowed to rip the two Jews apart.

Similarly, Hamas media also complains that the PA arrests Hamas terrorists who are planning attacks against Jews, and it tries to incite people into being angry at police for doing their jobs, which contributes to this "security chaos."

Iranian cartoon obsession with Israel betrays official state antisemitism

The Ahlul Bayt News Agency, an Iranian website geared towards a pro-Shiite agenda, publishes regular editorial cartoons.

Since May, it has published 57 editorial cartoons.

53 cartoons of them are anti-Israel, 3 are anti-US, and only one that is about the rest of the world.

And it is not like they have only one cartoonist. They choose cartoons from multiple sources - including Carlos Latuff in Mondoweiss - that are all fixated on hating Israel, and often with antisemitic motifs.

The editors don't want you to hate the Israelis because of their alleged actions. The reader's are supposed to increase their hate because the Israelis are Jews.

01/02 Links: Col. Kemp: Is Biden's Legacy Really Going to Be the Dismantling of Democracies and the Free World?; Where’s the afterglow from Gantz’s meeting with Abbas?

From Ian:

Dore Gold: The UN’s Reinvention of Jerusalem’s Past

The UN is at it again. On November 26, 2021, the General Assembly adopted a resolution referring to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where the Temple of Solomon once stood, only by its Arabic name, the Haram al-Sharif. From the standpoint of the UN, Christian and Jewish connections to the area were non-existent.

For years now, the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been systematically pushing false narratives about Jerusalem that deny the historic connection of the Jewish people to their holy city. In May 2016, UNESCO decided that the Western Wall Plaza should be designated with quotation marks after adopting the term Al-Buraq Plaza for the very same area with no qualification.

UNESCO reaffirmed this language in subsequent years. These distortions, which were blatant violations of its own statute, have penetrated the discourse about Jerusalem in the international media, in universities, and in world parliaments. What was axiomatic 200 years ago is now called into question.

So many people speak about Jerusalem but so few really understand it.

I’ve been a diplomat for over three decades, serving on the front lines of Israel’s struggle over the Holy City. 30 years, and I’m still surprised by the scale of disinformation and by the depth of ignorance regarding the Holy City. The ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence of its historical past. The ignorance regarding historical facts, even recent history.

It’s been 50 years since the reunification of Jerusalem and while across the Middle East holy sites are destroyed, in Jerusalem they’re protected. And yet Israel’s legitimacy is questioned time and time again.

Col. Richard Kemp: Is Biden's Legacy Really Going to Be the Dismantling of Democracies and the Free World?

Biden inflicted untold damage on the free world by his catastrophic surrender in Afghanistan, demonstrating to America's enemies and friends alike that, under his administration, the US was no longer willing to stand by its allies nor to protect its own vital national interests.

Now Biden is planning discussions in early 2022 between Russia and selected NATO members to "defuse" the situation [Russia threatening the Ukraine]. Can he really believe that any negotiations short of capitulation to Russian demands would satisfy Putin or achieve anything? So-called diplomacy down the barrel of 90,000 Russian guns looks a lot like even more appeasement.

Biden has failed to respond to Iranian attacks on Saudi Arabia, Iranian aggression against Israel and even Iranian attacks on US forces in Syria and Iraq. Iran's contempt for Biden was further displayed last week in the launch of multiple ballistic missiles during manoeuvres that Iranian commanders explicitly said were intended to threaten Israel.

In the face of Iranian nuclear provocation, Biden's officials have refrained from any threat of military action — taking off the table the only truly effective deterrent against regimes that respect strength alone.

Biden's policies of appeasement towards Iran and Russia are bad enough. But the greatest threat to the free world today comes from China. Biden has a long record of appeasing Beijing.

Biden's administration has projected only confusion over China's ambitions against Taiwan. The president twice suggested the US might be willing to defend the country in the event of Chinese invasion, with his comments immediately walked back by officials... Similarly mixed messages coming from London led the Argentinian junta to believe Britain, despite its vast military superiority, would not fight to defend the Falkland Islands on the other side of the world, and actually encouraged the 1982 invasion.

"One of [Biden's] first acts on assuming the presidency was to shut down the investigations into the origins of Covid-19 — including the one I led at the State Department in 2020, which presented troubling scientific and circumstantial evidence on the secret activities of the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] that bolster the lab-leak theory". — Dr David Asher, who spearheaded the State Department task force investigating the origins of Covid-19 and the role of the Chinese government, Hudson Institute, November 17, 2021

None of Biden's acts of appeasement are isolated to their targets alone; they are widely observed and cumulative in effect. They embolden America's enemies and unnerve its friends, potentially fracturing alliances that are vital to defending democracy. So much damage has already been done in just one year that even were Biden to change course, his legacy might well be the dismantling of democracies and the free world.

Yisrael Medad: There is Jewish and there is Arab violence

Over the past several months, the pro-Palestinian chorus has been pushing the theme of “settler violence” running rampant in the West Bank. A search using Google shows that these reports say the violence has “risen,” “increased” and “spiked” and that there has been an “upsurge” in violence by Israeli settlers.

In fact, if one reviews the various websites of such organizations and news platforms, which all feed into the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), the theme is a staple of their messaging. One can even read a statement from the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor asserting “state-sponsored violence and attacks” that were mostly “executed with full protection from the Israeli army.”

That body, however, is chaired by Richard Falk, who has been accused of manipulating anti-Semitic memes and whose reports for the United Nations as its Human Rights Council special rapporteur were condemned in years past by the United States.

Incidents do occur; no one denies that.

They are condemned by the official representative bodies that represent the Jewish residents in the West Bank. The questions, though, are how many are there, who initiates them, is the reported damage correct and what are the true overall statistics and context of violence from both sides.

As Jonathan Tobin, of JNS, recently observed, “There is something wrong if a few Jews throwing stones is considered far more important than the fact that attacks on Jews in the same areas are more or less the national sport of Palestinians.” He points to a double standard whereby proportionally fewer Jewish attacks gain greater coverage while “exponentially greater volumes of Palestinian violence is considered either unremarkable or somehow justified.”

Indeed, the data made available by the Israel Police point to something remarkable - the number of incidents of Jewish violence is decreasing. From 2019 to 2021, there has been a 61.1% drop in so-called price-tag attacks. Moreover, the number of indictments of Jewish extremists has doubled from 16 to 32 over the past year. That is not the picture the pro-Palestinian groups wish you to see.

Another factor that is underplayed is the above-mentioned volume of Arab violence in the same area. The Rescuers Without Borders paramedical organization is the first responders unit on the scene of incidents. They provide first aid and ambulance services. In the past two and a half months they reported 315 rock-throwing incidents and 50 firebombs tossed at Jewish targets in the West Bank. That is an average of eight each day. Just last night, in East Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood, dozens of firebombs were thrown at Jewish homes.

The IDF data indicates that in 2020 there were 1,500 rock-throwing incidents, 229 firebombs tossed, 31 shootings, nine stabbings, 541 guns and rifles were seized and 330 knives were recovered.

The Shin Bet security agency recorded over 100 Palestinian terror attacks in the West Bank in October 2021. In 2020, it reported almost 800 acts of Palestinian terror; an additional 424 “significant attacks” were thwarted.

Last week, a fight broke out in Jordan's parliament over discussions about a constitutional amendment.

What caused such a violent response?

Jordanian law does not say that women have equal rights. The discussion was about adding the word "women" to Article VI of the Jordanian constitution about rights, which now says, "Jordanians shall be equal before the law with no discrimination between them in rights and duties even if they differ in race, language or religion." Not gender.

Opponents of the amendment are concerned that it would then give women equal rights in inheritance as well as other areas.

There is also a Palestinian angle. Right now, only children of Jordanian men receive automatic citizenship. Jordanians are concerned that allowing children of Jordanian women to be citizens would affect the national character of Jordan - and most of the new citizens would be Palestinian.

Before 1967, Arabs explicitly said ALL of Israel was occupied Palestinian territory at the UN

It is easy for clueless Westerners to think that when anti-Zionist Arabs speak of "occupation" that they are only talking about the areas that Israel won in 1967.

However, UN documents show that the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab world as a whole considered all of Israel to be illegally occupied by Zionists.

Issa Nakhleh, a Palestinian Arab envoy of the Arab League who was invited to speak at the 367th meeting of the UN Special Political Committee, 12 December 1962, floated the idea that Israel illegally occupied all of Palestine:

If the situation in Palestine was the result of an armed conflict between the Jews and the Arabs, the occupation by the Jews of 80 per cent of the area was a belligerent occupation subject under international law to the law of war. It was clear from the Abandoned Areas Ordinance of June 1948 that the Jewish authorities based themselves on conquest and occupation. In that Ordinance an abandoned area was defined as any area or place which had been conquered by .Jewish armed forces, had surrendered to Jewish armed forces or had been deserted by its inhabitants. Thus the Jewish occupants would be entitled only to the rights attributable to a temporary belligerent occupation pending the settlement of the dispute by peaceful means and subject to the law of war regarding the belligerent occupation.

This was echoed as definite international law a year later by the Jordanian delegate to the UN at the 411th meeting of the Special Political Committee, Monday, 18 November 1963:

14. In paragraph 166 of volume II of his book International Law,.Y L. Oppenheim, the leading authority on international law, said that it had taken the whole of the nineteenth century to develop the rules regarding occupation. Those rules, which were universally recognized, were based on the principle that, although the occupant in no wise acquired sovereignty over a territory through the mere fact of having occupied it, he exercised for the time being military authority over it and he must use that authority for the ultimate benefit of the inhabitants.

15. It was thus clear that Israel had no sovereignty over the area it occupied in Palestine and· that its position there was simply and purely that of a military occupant. As such it was not entitled to oppose such action as the United Nations might take to protect the properties of the refugees.

16, Although some might contend that Israel at least had sovereignty within the borders allotted to it by the General Assembly under the Partition Plan that was not so under the rules of international law. Israel had acquired no sovereignty whatever over the territory it now occupied, because the legitimate owners had not ceded that territory to it and because the United Nations itself did not possess the power to cede the territory of one people to another or to transfer sovereignty over it. Now did recognition of one States by any number of Member or non-member States confer sovereignty on it under international law. Israel could acquire sovereignty only if the territory which it occupied was ceded to it by the legitimate sovereign, namely the Arabs of Palestine.

Jordan's 1962 argument is that the UN had no right to recognize Israel as a state, ever, because the entire territory belong to the fictitious Palestinian Arab nation first, and it then puts forth the argument that unless the Arabs of Palestine agree to it, Israel can never become a state.

When Palestinians say that they want to end the "occupation," they are usually very careful not to say anything about 1967. To them, "occupation" means the entire State of Israel, and most Westerners are too clueless to ask them that question directly.

From Times of Israel:

The Israel Defense Forces said Saturday morning that two rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip toward central Israel.

Large explosions were heard in a number of central Israel cities around 7 a.m.

Video circulating on social media showed an explosion in the sea off the coast of Jaffa.

Other footage apparently showed the two rockets being fired from Gaza.

Armed factions in Gaza said the rocket fire was “caused by weather conditions,” not the first time the excuse has been used to explain the firing of projectiles toward Israel.

Indeed. I know of at least two times that rocket fire was said to have been caused by lightning strikes - but the other two times, the IDF actually accepted the excuse.

One was in November 2020, and the other in October 2018, both times the rocket fire was blamed on lightning. And Israel seemed to accept that excuse.

In at least one of the previous attacks, Israel was able to link the launch with a specific lightning strike. The video of the rockets being launched over Gaza today shows rainy conditions, but no lightning is evident.

Clearly Israel didn't believe that excuse this time, because the IDF responded with limited attacks against Gaza military targets early Sunday morning.

There are other differences. These rockets did not seem to be aimed at targets, but deliberately towards the sea and another unoccupied area. They appear to have been a message from, probably, Islamic Jihad, to pressure Israel to release a prisoner on a hunger strike whose condition is deteriorating.

UPDATE: Hamas, and Iran, are trumpeting the claim that Hamas responded to Israel's raid with SAM-7 rockets, the first time they have used those anti-aircraft missiles.

It seems entirely possible that the initial rocket fire was meant to get a predictable, symbolic reaction from Israel just so they could use those missiles and claim to field a successful new weapon.

01/01 Links: The Middle East: A year in review; Socialism’s Jewish question: Modern antisemitism explored in new book; Danish-Israeli Restores the Historic Iconic Jaffa Clock Tower

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: The Middle East: A year in review

In contrast to this threat, Israel increased its joint training with the US and other partners and allies. It hosted an exercise with the British and Americans called Tri-Lightning and sent F-35s to fly in Italy. It also did a joint naval drill with US Central Command and Bahrain and the UAE in the Red Sea. It hosted US Marines at the same time for training in Israel. This was the highest tempo of joint training in Israel’s history. It came amid a joint drone training in Israel and the Blue Flag drills that saw an unprecedented number of partner countries come to Israel.

Israel was putting itself on the map in military technology in a way it hadn’t before. This was tied to Israel’s increased work with the US defense industry and also talk of more Israeli partnerships in the Gulf and beyond. This is where Israel excels, in developing new technology such as precision weapons, artificial intelligence and air defense. Israel revealed, for instance, that it had used a drone swarm for the first time over Gaza in the May war, and it had used more artificial intelligence. The message was that Israel could confront Iranian-backed adversaries.

For Israel’s friends in the Gulf, though, the big question was whether the US would be leaving the region. After the debacle of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, it became clear that the US was not going to remain in many places. The US might reassess its role in Syria in 2022. It was taking all its combat troops out of Iraq. This was lip service to appease pro-Iran voices in Iraq. But the larger context was the Iran deal talks in Vienna and major worldwide shifts, as the US pivots to confront China. Many countries wondered if the absence of the US in the region would require them to change their policies.

Toward that end the UAE and Egypt patched things up with the Assad regime, and together with Saudi Arabia they seemed willing to patch things up with Iran as well. At the end of the day, this didn’t fit a clear narrative of who was on whose side in the region. The Assad regime, for instance, is backed by Iran, but countries in the Gulf want it to reincorporate with the Arab League.

With everyone hedging their bets at the end of the 2021, the question was also what Russia and China would do.

Russia and Turkey were playing an increasing role in Africa. China, meanwhile, appeared to have signed a 25-year deal with Iran, and China was becoming more critical of Israeli actions. The overall story was that China believed that if it was going to be confronted by the US, then it would be tougher on Western countries and regional countries that are close to the US.

This presents the US with a problem. It wants to leave the Middle East and Africa to confront China and do near-peer rivalry with Russia in Ukraine. But every time it leaves a place like Afghanistan, it is China and Russia that seek to move into the vacuum. They don’t see it as a zero-sum game; they believe they can move into areas the US is leaving, while the US believes it must leave to focus on China and Russia. This puts US allies and partners in the region in a bind.

At the end of 2021, it remains to be seen what long-term ramifications this major shift will lead to.

Socialism’s Jewish question: Modern antisemitism explored in new book

Book: The European Left and the Jewish Question 1848-1992 As several contributors to this book remark, socialism took on the form of a quasi-religion. Belief rather than analysis became the centerpiece of endeavor. For many, Jews simply did not count when it came to discrimination. So when the Soviet show trials took place in the 1930s, many on the Left, including critics of Stalin, preferred to look away when anti-Jewish themes pervaded the courtroom.

Several authors highlight external factors that have influenced groups on the Left. The Spanish Left imbibed ideas at the altar of historical anti-Judaism during the Inquisition. The Christian Left promoted the vision of a Jesus who identified with the poor – and thereby with the Palestinian refugees.

In France during the 1950s, many embraced anti-colonialism and supported the National Liberation Front’s struggle for independence in Algeria – and warmed to Nasser’s backing for it. Decolonization during the 1960s allowed the New Left in Europe to identify more with the nascent Palestinian national movement than with the Israeli one – and this was before the West Bank settlement drive.

In an effort to express solidarity with discriminated Muslim minorities in Europe, some on the French Left maintain a mistaken silence about the reactionary politics of the Islamists. And anti-Zionism sometimes tips over into overt antisemitism. There were antisemitic killings in Toulouse, Montauban and Vincennes in recent times. In 2006, Ilan Halimi was killed because he was Jewish – the first antisemitic murder in France since 1945.

This volume is unusual because it goes into the origins of contemporary antisemitism and anti-Zionism within the European Left in mainly France and Italy. Pushing the slogans and clichés of campaigners against antisemitism to one side, it looks at the roots of the problem today. Its detailed explanations by scholars will certainly provide food for thought for those who wish to deepen their knowledge.

Desmond Tutu and the Jews

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died on Sunday, was a Nobel Prize winner and a hero of the anti-apartheid movement. Yet despite all his many qualities, he had a real problem with Jews and the Jewish State. He had many Jewish friends and admirers. But his blatantly antisemitic rhetoric, on public record, consistently and simply proved that you can be a likable, even sweet hero, and still be a dangerous fool.

I have tried to understand why so many perfectly nice, good Christians seem to have such trouble with Israel. Is it just the sympathy for the underdog? Or the arrogance of many Israelis? Is it something about Jews or Judaism that offends them?

Mahatma Gandhi, one of the founders of modern India was regarded as a holy man. He, too, could not sympathize with Jewish aspirations. Gandhi’s great ideal was that of satyagraha: non-violent resistance to evil. A lovely idea in theory, and a very Christian idea of turning the other cheek observed more in the breach. Of Hitler’s evil, Gandhi said in 1938, “the calculated violence of Hitler may result in a general massacre of Jews, but if their minds could be prepared for voluntary suffering, the massacre could be turned to a day of thanksgiving and joy.”

Thank you, but no thank you. He admired the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who visited Hitler to ensure that if he invaded the Middle East, he would exterminate the Jews there too. He even suggested that “the Jews should follow the doctrine of satyagraha and offer themselves to the Arabs to be shot or thrown into the dead sea.” One wonders why he didn’t suggest satyagraha to Stalin.

There were two men I admired who were both committed Christians and devoted much of their lives to fighting against Apartheid. And yet they did not suffer from Tutu’s blind spot when it came to sympathizing with Jewish aspirations for and the right to defend a homeland. Robert Birley and Trevor Huddleston — both men I had got to know late in their lives through my involvement in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and close friends.

Pseudo-journalist CJ Werleman - who we have already proven is an lying antisemite - is at it again,

From Turkey's TRTWorld:

The Zionist state has been pumping billions of dollars into US-based groups to portray Muslims as a community of terrorists.

Billions!

Recent revelations that an anti-Muslim hate group allegedly paid thousands of dollars to two employees of a Muslim advocacy organisation to undermine American Muslim activists on behalf of the Israeli government are undoubtedly shocking but represent only the tip of the iceberg in what is now a decades-long effort by the Jewish State to harass, smear and threaten pro-Palestinian activists in the United States.

The International Project of Terrorism is not an Israeli group. It is also not an anti-Muslim group, from everything I can see. It exposes antisemitism and terror ties in some Muslim groups, I have never seen it say any blanket anti-Muslim statement.

Anyway, that is "thousands" of dollars, and not from Israel. Next?

[T]he nexus between Zionism and the Islamophobia industry is documented in great detail, starting with a Zionist-funded conference in 1979. The conclave brought together US neoconservatives with Likud Party figures to tie Islam to terrorism in mainstream political discourse, with the aim of tying Palestinian aspirations for liberation to “terrorism” in the minds of American voters, as observed by Professor Deepa Kumar in Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire.

The book isn't online, so I have no idea what conference this is, but even here Werleman doesn't claim that the supposedly anti-Islamic conference was funded by Israel, just that it was "Zionist-funded." Strike two.

His next two examples likewise say that Zionist groups are funding anti-Islamic groups. Nothing about Israel, and if anyone wants to bother to check if these groups are really Islamophobic, feel free. I've never seen anti-Muslim statements from Campus Watch or Daniel Pipes or the others.

Strike two. Next?

Last year, the Jewish-American magazine Forward obtained documents showing that Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs transferred $40,000 to US-based Christian Zionist organisation,

Proclaiming Justice to the Nations (PJTN), which has been identified as an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a non-governmental organisation that tracks hate crimes in the United States.

I couldn't find PJTN listed as an Islamophobic group on the SPLC website. Werleman doesn't want you to know that the PJTN strongly protested, and the SPLC removed them from their Islamophobic list!

So the only "evidence" that Israel gives "billions" to "Islamophobic hate groups" is a single $40,000 contribution to a Zionist Christian group that isn't a hate group.

Werleman strikes out, and proves yet again that he is a serial liar. I don't expect him to recant - his lies are deliberate - but perhaps Turkey's media mouthpiece has at least a modicum of journalistic ethics.