Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, February 02, 2022

The Jacob Wexler Story: A Submission to the UN "Commission of Inquiry” Kangaroo Court

The Slabodka Yeshiva in Hebron, circa 1929

This submission in itself should not be understood as an endorsement of the "Commission of Inquiry," including its mandate. I would like to offer information regarding the “underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict in and between the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel; as well as systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity."

My name is Varda Meyers Epstein and I would like to tell you about my husband’s cousin, Jacob (Yaacov) Wexler, who was murdered in the 1929 Hebron Massacre because of his religious identity as a Jew.

Jacob (Yaacov) Wexler circa 1929

Jackie, as he was known, grew up in Chicago, where he was a promising student at the Hebrew Theological College. During a family visit to British Mandate Palestine, 16-year-old Jackie begged to stay in order to study at the famed Slabodka Yeshiva (seminary) in Hebron. Jackie’s father Richard, after being reassured by American students already at the seminary that Jackie would be safe and well taken care of, consented to allow his son to stay and fully immerse himself in his Torah studies.

During his time at the yeshiva, Jackie was happy. In a letter to his parents he praised the yeshiva and his life in the Land of Israel. "I've never experienced happiness my whole life as in Simchat Torah* in Hebron," he wrote.
In August of 1929, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El Husseini, preached from the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that the Jews planned to take control of the site. The Jews had no such plans and in any event, had no power. The British were in charge and they favored the Arabs. But the rumor that the Jews planned to take over the Mount was all that was needed to incite the Arab masses to violence.

The Mufti’s words unleashed a wave of pogroms beginning in Jerusalem and spreading to other cities. Angry Arab mobs stormed Safed and Hebron, massacring more than 100 Jews. Jackie Wexler, of Chicago, now 17, was one of the 67 Jews murdered in Hebron. Like the others, Jackie was murdered because he was a Jew.

There is documentation of what happened in Hebron. There were decapitations, gouged-out eyes, rapes, members cut off and stuffed into body cavities, limbs and digits sliced off, the heads of babies bashed against ancient walls. Women, babies, young children, and the elderly were all murdered. Jackie died from an axe blow to the head. All of these people were murdered because of their religious identity. They were murdered because they were Jews.

No one should be murdered because of their religious identity, no matter where they live. No young person should be murdered because of their religious identity while studying abroad at a seminary, no matter where that seminary is located. Jackie Wexler’s story is just one of many. Jews were killed because they were Jews before there was a state called “Israel.” Jews continue to be targeted in their own state in Arab terror attacks, only because they are Jews.

This is tragic. It is systematic discrimination based on religious identity—worse yet, it is murder, every time it happens—and it is plainly wrong.

In sharing this true story of a family member who was targeted and murdered in the city of Hebron because of his religious identity, I hope to add to the body of information examined by your “Commission of Inquiry.”
Further information and sources are listed below my signature.

Sincerely,

Varda Meyers Epstein

A Western Union telegram telling Jackie’s parents that they should prepare themselves “for the worst,” can be seen here: https://www.kedem-auctions.com/en/content/letters-yaacov-wexler-%E2%80%93-murdered-1929-massacre-yeshivat-hebron

A list of the 67 murdered Jews of Hebron can be seen here: http://en.hebron.org.il/history/520

Eyewitness testimonies from survivors regarding the Hebron Massacre can be seen here: http://hebron1929.info/Hebronletter.html

*Simchat Torah is a Jewish holiday that celebrates the yearly completion of the Torah as the new cycle is begun. The name of the holiday translates to “Rejoicing of the Torah.” See: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Simchat-Torah

***
Now that you've read my submission, I have to tell you that I am not sure it was the right thing to do. Will such submissions help? Does the submissions campaign give too much recognition and validity to the "Commission of Inquiry" witch hunt?

I honestly don't know. I procrastinated about sending them something. I went ahead only after two friends made sure I knew about the effort. They seemed to think this was a good idea. Or perhaps they only thought it was something I might want to do.

In the end, going ahead with this project made me uncomfortable. These people hate us. They're a malign presence in the world. And here I was, exposing my tragedy to them: submitting to them.

In light of these mixed feelings, I am not going to urge you to follow suit with your own submissions. I do however request that you take a look at the submissions campaign webpage and see what you think. While there, you can also learn how to submit your own testimony should you decide it's something you want to do: Pillay's Pogrom: The UN's "Commission of Inquiry" Targeting Israel.

[EoZ: I don't think that submitting testimony to this commission is helpful and it may give it legitimacy it does not deserve, since the entire point is to have the UN declare Israel to be an apartheid state and use this "evidence" before the ICC. But some people think that flooding it with pro-Israel testimony and have it ignored would make the point that it was never meant to be an objective commission.]

Standing Together (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

I still follow the rabbi of the largest (Reform) synagogue in the small California city where I lived before returning to Israel some 8 years ago. Yesterday, I saw that he wrote on his Facebook page that he and his institution, and I presume others of good will, “stand together,” against racial, religious, and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, and “against all those who seek to divide us...all those who make people into 'others.'”

He wrote this in response to a news report that several historically black colleges had received bomb threats for the past two days.

I don’t mean to suggest that he is insincere about deploring various forms of prejudice, but could there be an emptier gesture? I was tempted to suggest that if he really wanted to take action, he should send a busload of congregants to the nearest historically black college where they could spend the day checking dumpsters and bus shelters for bombs, as I recall doing during my army reserve duty.

Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), in a perversion of its name and mandate, has established what Amb. Alan Baker calls “a permanent inquisition” against the State of Israel. With a large staff and budget, this “Commission of Inquiry” will proceed to demonize and delegitimize the one Jewish state. Even for the UN, such a one-sided “inquiry” is unprecedented, and its outcome will be used to justify prosecutions, sanctions and perhaps even expulsion from the international body for the Jew Among Nations.

I did not see that the rabbi mentioned this on his Facebook page. Again I was tempted to ask what he thought about it, since almost one of the first acts of the Biden Administration, for which at least 80% of his congregation voted, was to rejoin the UNHRC.

I also did not see any mention of Amnesty International’s vicious, antisemitic smear of Israel as an apartheid state, which will certainly be used as “evidence” by the UNHRC in its indictment of Israel. Amnesty’s report calls for the arrest and prosecution of Israel’s leaders whom it deems guilty of “crimes against humanity” [!] and sanctions against the country and any other countries that support it. It manages to almost entirely leave out the hundred-year long war against the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel that has been waged by Palestinian and other Arabs and their supporters (with the help of the Nazis, the Soviet KGB, and other interested parties). Even the Union for Reform Judaism, to my surprise, found the Amnesty report scandalous.

If there were ever a group that suffered from being made “others,” it would be the Jewish people. In addition to Israel’s confrontational enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, and the grass-roots antisemitism that appears to be popping up everywhere lately, there is also an organized and heavily funded international campaign against the Jewish state. Participants include the UN, the EU, and their allies in the so-called human rights industry, like Amnesty. If you read the Amnesty report, you will see that they will not be satisfied with anything less than the replacement of Israel with an Arab state. Anything else would deny the “human rights” of the millions of descendants of 1948 refugees. What would happen then to the Jewish people, inside and outside of Israel?

American Jews, some 90% of whom are non-Orthodox, make up the second largest Jewish community in the world (Israel recently surpassed it for the top spot). If they would “stand together” as the rabbi suggests, and present a unified political front to defend the Jewish state, it would be a powerful counterforce to the international conspiracy – there is no other word – against the State of Israel.

But unfortunately, they seem to care much more about every other identifiable group – blacks, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, and even Palestinian Arabs. When will we see the liberal Jewish establishment demand that its constituency “stand together” … for Israel?

02/02 Links Pt1: Amnesty International Wants to End the Jewish State; Amnesty report affirms PLO's 'apartheid' strategy; UAE proceeding with planned $10b. Israel investments

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The Amnesty International hate group

Amnesty International has produced a report that claims Israel is an “apartheid” state. This follows similar diatribes by other NGOs obsessively promoting the delegitimisation and destruction of Israel.

Their strategy is to shift from their usual fare of false allegations about Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian Arabs in the disputed territories to false allegations about Israel’s oppression of Israel’s Arab citizens.

Libelling Israel as an “apartheid state” is the unconscionable agenda of the UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry, about which I wrote here, which is working hand-in-glove with NGOs in a veritable axis of evil determined to bring about Israel’s destruction.

The accusation of Israeli apartheid is risible, and anyone with a functioning brain can see at a glance that Amnesty has produced a report as ludicrous as it is malevolent.

It’s ludicrous to claim apartheid is enforced against the Palestinian Arabs living in the disputed territories of the “West Bank” — because they aren’t even citizens of Israel.

It’s ludicrous to claim apartheid is enforced against Israel’s Arab citizens because they have full civil and religious rights. An Arab Islamist party, for heaven’s sake, holds the balance of power in Israel’s ruling coalition. An Arab judge sent a previous Israeli president to jail. Amnesty falsely claims:
Israel maintains Jewish domination over the Palestinian economy through the exclusion and intentional neglect of Palestinian communities inside Israel.

But as Elder of Zyon points out:
Yet Israel's largest Arab-majority city, Nazareth, is a high tech hub, hosting R&D centres from Amdocs, Microsoft, Broadcom and Salesforce. Nazareth hosts over 70 startups. Thousands of Arabs work in technology and the number is skyrocketing.

If Israel intends to have Jewish dominance over the Arab economy by neglecting Arab communities, then why does it allow so many major companies to open up in Nazareth?

Why indeed. And as this report observes, Arab Israeli superstars are making strides in culture, sports, medicine, environment, fashion, diplomacy, education and technology.

Richard Kemp: Amnesty International Wants to End the Jewish State

Unfortunately for the inveterate peace-processors and their followers, the Arab world has moved on from their own opposition to Israel. They see the country for what it is: a source of stability and prosperity in the region. They understand the dangers of continuing Palestinian intransigence and animosity and have denied them a veto on progress — a veto that Amnesty and its fellow Israel rejectionists want to see reinstated.

This report will also provoke increased violence, abuse and boycotts against Jews in Israel and Jews who support Israel in the diaspora, in an era where antisemitic attacks are already at a high point and on the rise. That may not be Amnesty's aim in producing this twisted document, but they cannot be so blind as to fail to see its bloody consequences, which have played out over decades following similar distorted reports, debates, resolutions and media fabrications.

The definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) includes: "Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor". The British government has signed up to the IHRA definition. Amnesty is based in the UK and the UK police should now investigate it for spreading these grievous antisemitic lies.

47 years ago, Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog addressed the UN to refute the terrible lie—sponsored by Soviet & Arab tyrannies—that the idea of Israel's creation was "a form of racism." Today a new generation of Ambassador Herzog must refute the same lie, now revived by Amnesty. https://t.co/x65IbtU7ug
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) February 1, 2022

Amnesty's Fall: Understanding the NGO's True Agenda

Amnesty International has suffered the same fall. In April 2018, Amnesty's Secretary-General called Israel's democratically-elected government "rogue." In 2010, the head of its Finland branch called Israel a "scum state." Amnesty's UK Campaign Manager has likened Israel to ISIS and been condemned for his attacks on Jewish Members of Parliament.

In 2015, Amnesty UK voted down a motion to campaign against antisemitism amid deadly acts against Jews in Europe. The organization claimed it did not support campaigns with "a single focus," dubious indeed given its anti-Islamophobia campaigns and obsessive pursuit of Israel.

The former head of Amnesty's gender unit, Gita Sahgal, was suspended from the organization and eventually forced out after she criticized Amnesty's partnership with the controversial British group, CAGE, which campaigns for the release of those detained in the war on terror. Moazzam Begg, CAGE's director of outreach has said that British, American and Australian troops were "the bad guys" and that the Taliban "should be given the right to celebrate" its conquest of Afghanistan.

Then there's the researchers Amnesty hires to write its reports. Amnesty hired Deborah Hyams as its "Israel, Occupied Palestinian Territories" researcher despite Hyams' earlier record of participating in protests alongside local activists and acting as a "human shield" against Israeli soldiers. Another senior Amnesty hire, Saleh Hijazi, previously worked for the Palestinian Authority and was the listed contact for a local NGO whose slogan is "We are Intifada!" Amnesty's research consultant, Hind Khoudary publicly declared she wanted Israel "gone."

Any of these associations should have disqualified these individuals from ever touching anything concerning Israel. Instead, Amnesty prizes and defends them as assets.

The former U.S. diplomat Daniel Moynihan once observed that the most democratic states suffer the worst accusations of human rights abuses because their transparency makes them so easy to see, report and exploit. They pay for their openness. To defer to Robert Bernstein's wisdom once more, only by returning to their "founding mission and the spirit of humility" can these organizations again serve as a moral force.

Until then, they have no moral authority to comment.

Why does @amnesty attract antisemites? Apsana is a well known antisemite who had to close her FB account after we exposed her disgusting views. #SHAMnesty https://t.co/sMcwDRuQcD pic.twitter.com/VWnyRTN7tw
— GnasherJew®????? (@GnasherJew) February 2, 2022

Daoud Omar Daoud writes in Ammon News (Amman, Jordan) about how the apartheid accusation has been going.

One side comment reveals the actual hope of many in the Arab world:

Describing Israel as an "apartheid regime" carries within it political connotations and a project for solving the Palestinian issue. And if this system is dismantled, the rule will pass to the people of Palestine. Yet the Jewish settlers will remain where they are, which will be a disappointment for everyone who longs to see Palestine return completely to its owners.

They don't hate Jews because of Israel. They hate Israel because of Jews.

When the announcement about normalization between Israel and the UAE went public in 2020, some prominent Arab commentators in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere started to publicly denounce the Palestinian leadership with the slogan "Palestine is not my cause."

It became a popular hashtag. The phrase keeps popping up in op-eds, such as this one during the May Gaza war.

Today, there is an op-ed by Dr. Mustafa Youssef Al-Ledawi in Palestine Today who claims that the phrase represents only a tiny minority, but it must be fought against. It clearly has made serious inroads in Arab thinking.

Al-Ledawi summarizes how things have changed in the Arab world and their complaints against Palestinians:

We must admit that the climate has changed, and that the policies that prevailed in the past have changed, and the Palestinian issue has become for most Arab and Islamic regimes their last concern, and least concern. Some Arab regimes have portrayed the Palestinians saying that they are the danger [to the Arab world], and that it is their actions that have harmed them and caused them to perish, and that it drained their resources and hindered their abilities, and describes them as rogues, corrupt, liars, hypocrites, unfaithful stalkers, turning against those who stood with them, biting the hand that fed them, and denying those who supported them, and thus they do not deserve sympathy.

Ledawi contradicts himself several times, claiming both that these are fringe opinions but then saying that Arab media is controlled by those who hold them, which is absurd. He also doesn't even attempt to answer the Arab criticisms of the Palestinians - that they side with Iran, that they remain divided, that the money that has poured into them from the Arab world has been wasted on corruption and infighting, that they have spurned peace offer after peace offer.

Despite his trying to downplay the issue, it is clearly a major concern for Palestinian leadership who have seen donations from Arab states dry up in recent years.

Terror groups ❤️ Amnesty International, as they follow the Durban blueprint for destroying Israel

The biggest violators of human rights in the world, and the biggest antisemites in the world, welcomed Amnesty International's report falsely claiming that Israel is guilty of apartheid.

Hamas, whose original antisemitic and genocidal charter is still in effect, hailed Amnesty on its English language webpage:

In its statement, Hamas considers Amnesty its partner in destroying the Jewish state:

Hamas considers the current Amnesty International report an essential and detailed part of the international and legal efforts that seek justice for our Palestinian people, who are facing the last barbaric racist occupation on earth, in legal efforts to end the Israeli occupation's injustice.

The word "justice" is a dog-whistle that both Hamas and Amnesty understands to mean the dissolution of the Jewish state. Amnesty's draft report said that Israel was born in sin, it modified that slightly in the released report, but it obviously believes it.

Islamic Jihad, even more radical than Hamas, also praised the report. So did Fatah and the Palestinian foreign ministry.

Perhaps the most important praise came from the PFLP. Remember, the PFLP is linked to major Palestinian NGOs, and Amnesty supports them despite of (or because of) those links with a terror group whose political platform supports murdering Jews. Amnesty considers the PFLP-linked groups to be allies and it has nothing negative to say about the PFLP members who lead some of these groups.

The PFLP, which is on the record saying that killing Jews in Israel is a human right, also embraces Amnesty International's report. Remarkably, it described the exact game plan for the anti-Israel organizations to destroy Israel:

The Popular Front demanded the necessity of accumulating this event and exposing all the violations and crimes committed by the enemy against our defenseless people, leading to the trial of the occupation and the recognition of the crime of ethnic cleansing that took place against our people in 1948, on the way to ending its presence on our entire Arab Palestinian land.

The Amnesty report is part of a concerted, organized effort to give backing to the UN commission that will also declare Israel to be an apartheid state later in 2022, and that in turn is a precursor to putting Israel on trial at the ICC, with the aim of pressuring the world to withdraw recognition of Israel. Amnesty, HRW and the PFLP with its own NGOs are all part of the same Global Left.

And we are now seeing the fruits of the 2001 Durban Conference - an antisemitic conference that Amnesty participated in and bragged about years later.

Recall that in 2001, the NGO forum of the infamous Durban conference included this call in its final statement which was submitted to the UN:

We also call upon the UN to ensure the implementation of the various UN resolutions on the OPT including the withdrawal of the Israeli colonial military occupation, the right of return for refugees, and for the protection for refugees of the UN High Commission for Refugees until such time as they may be able to exercise their right to return and in accordance with UN resolution 194.

We also call for the repeal of all discriminatory laws within the state of Israel, including those of return and citizenship, which are part of the institutionalized racism and Apartheid regime in Israel.

We Call for the establishment of a war crimes tribunal to investigate and bring to justice those who may be guilty of war crimes including the crime of Apartheid which amount to a crime against humanity.

We also call for the establishment of a UN Special Committee on Apartheid and Other Racist Crimes Against Humanity perpetrated by the Israeli Apartheid regime to monitor and to report Apartheid and other racist crimes.

Finally we call upon the international community to impose a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state as in the case of South Africa which means the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargo and the full cessation of all links between all states and Israel.

This has been the blueprint of the Global Left for over twenty years. Amnesty's report is only one small part of the entire strategy, and its recommendations in this report are remarkably similar to the recommendations of members of a conference where

This same conference saw people distributing this flyer, without a word of objection from Amnesty or the other "respected" human rights groups.

The antisemitic Left and antisemitic Right were all on the same page in Durban.

The antisemitic "human rights groups" and the antisemitic terror groups are on the same page today with the Amnesty report. Terror groups are in perfect sync with Amnesty and the UN in the desire to destroy Israel.

Amnesty didn't decide to write this "apartheid" report now - it has been waiting 20 years to do it. And today's Nazis are just as happy as the terrorist groups are.

02/01 Links Pt2: Ben Shapiro Tears Down Whoopi's Anti-Semitic, Left-Wing Philosophy; What Ukraine can learn from Israel; The ADL’s new Jewish outreach director hates Jews

From Ian:

The EU's basic error

International law expert Dr. Jacques P. Gauthier of Canada wrote his doctoral thesis on the legal status of Jerusalem. His conclusion, after 1,300 pages and 3,200 footnotes is that the world community of nations granted the Jewish People irrevocable legal rights to Jerusalem, and to the entire area west of the Jordan River, in a non-broken series of treaties and resolutions beginning with the Balfour Declaration and the San Remo Conference, as well as affirmations by the League of Nations and the UN.

As such, all claims that the Arabs deserve a state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are groundless. For, as Dr. Gauthier often repeats, the legal principle of "la chose jugée" (judged issue) means that once the issue was decided, as it was in the above councils, it becomes irreversible and forever binding in a "sacred trust."

After the UN was formed, seven Arab armies invaded the land, seeking not only to wipe out the Jewish presence there, but also to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, in opposition to the UN's stated intention. "Israel's War of Independence in 1948 was considered lawful and in self-defense," writes Hertz, "as may be reflected in UN resolutions naming Israel a 'peace-loving State' when it applied for membership at the United Nations," by both the UN Security Council and General Assembly.

No changes in the legal status of the land were made by the time, less than 20 years later, that Arab armies tried again to destroy Israel. This became the Six Day War, which finally left Israel in control of, inter alia, Judea and Samaria – and able to implement its aforementioned rights to settle it.

Even if San Remo and the UN are ignored, Prof. Hon. Stephen M. Schwebel, former President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), makes very clear that Israel's military activity during this war was purely defensive, and that "a state acting in lawful exercise of its right of self-defense may seize and occupy foreign territory, as long as such seizure and occupation are necessary to its self-defense."

Judea and Samaria was administered by Jordan (recognized as sovereign there only by Great Britain and possibly Pakistan) between 1948 and 1967, during which period it was populated by Arabs with no recognized national entity [nor could there have been, as their national rights to the area were purposely left unrecognized by Jordan]. In light of all the above, Schwebel and other experts agree: Israel has the best legal title and claim to Judea and Samaria.

Perhaps the European Union would like to consider no longer repeating the canard that Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel is illegal under international law. One hundred years of history say the EU is wrong.

What Ukraine can learn from Israel

During 1948 War of Independence, the Israelis desperately needed arms; the world said no (and indeed doled out lectures on international law). So they went out and illegally bought a load of Czech arms. They refused to take lectures when facing the literal extinction of the nascent Jewish state. I’m not saying Ukraine should start scouting the black market, but the broader principle should be internalised.

And widely. These sentiments are not just confined to Ukraine. When I reported from Greece just before the pandemic, I noticed that Israel, for so long a bogeyman for a country steeped in leftist ideology of the most reductive kind — “Free, Free Palestine!” roar the protestors who march each November in remembrance of the 1973 student uprising against the Greek Junta — had become a friend to be courted. The culmination was an April 2021 defence deal worth around £1.2 billion between the two. And why not? After all, what is Greece if not a small country perpetually menaced by Turkey, a much larger enemy on its border?

As my friend Constantine Lerounis, once an adviser to the former President of Greece, Prokopios Pavlopoulos, told me recently: “Both Greece and Israel are facing states or potential coalitions of states with far greater resources and larger military forces. When Greece looks to Israel now, it sees not a colonial oppressor but a state that has little choice but to maintain a disproportionately large military and a high state of readiness. And it understands why. The Greek-Israeli rapprochement has been in the making for some time now. What was unfathomable a decade ago is now merely common sense.”

Over the years, I’ve listened to people in Moldova and Belarus and in the Baltic States tell me more or less the same thing: Israel is a model for small countries in an increasingly unforgiving world. And it’s not just about an accretion of individual beefs between neighbours, either. Something has changed.

Report: Israel mulls possible airlift of Ukrainian Jews if Russia attacks

Top Israeli government officials and leaders of Jewish organizations held a meeting on Sunday to discuss the possibility of evacuating Jews from Ukraine if Russia invades.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been amassing troops at the two countries' borders since the fall, reportedly including the placement of weapons such as ballistic missiles, with some estimates of an impending crossing or invasion early this year.

According to a report in Israeli media, the meeting was held with members of the National Security Council, the Prime Minister's Office, and the Foreign, Defense, Diaspora Affairs, and Transportation ministries.

It also included representatives from the Jewish Agency and Nativ, which maintains connections with Jews in former Soviet countries.

Jewish organizations estimate that some 75,000 Ukrainians living in the eastern part of the country, many of them elderly, are eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, which allows immigration to those who have one Jewish grandparent.

A possibly imminent invasion by Russian troops into Ukrainian territory has the world on edge as leaders and experts try to guess Putin's next steps and prevent what could become the largest military action in Europe since World War II. For Israel, the focus and concern lies with Ukraine's Jewish community in its Donbas region, where Jews have lived relatively free and safe. Now, their lives could be in mortal danger as they will be caught in the crossfire if war breaks out between Ukraine and Russia.

It's been a while since we've seen Zionist cows attacking innocent Arabs. The last time was in Lebanon when they drank water.

But now:

Settlers continue to graze their cows and sabotage citizens' crops in Khirbet Samra in the northern Jordan Valley.

Over the past two weeks, the settlers have relied on releasing their cows to the citizens' rain-fed crops in several areas of the northern Jordan Valley, especially Al Hadidiya, Makhoul and Samra.

These practices cause great losses to the citizens in the Jordan Valley, who depend on rain-fed crops, and these violations come within the policy of pastoral settlement in the Jordan Valley, with the aim of preventing citizens from benefiting from their crops to displace them from their lands and facilitate their seizure.

These aren't just Zionist cows - they are settler cows, hellbent on ethnically cleansing Arabs!

02/01 Links Pt1: Why Amnesty’s “Apartheid” slander makes peace and two-states harder; Beyond Crooked. Meet the Amnesty judges and jury; US bans ‘Death to America” Iranian wrestler

From Ian:

Amnesty report is part of a coordinated diplomatic lynching against Israel, says EJC President Kantor

The European Jewish Congress (EJC) has attacked a new Amnesty International UK report which accuses the State of Israel of being an “apartheid state” as unprofessional, inaccurate and malicious.

The report, titled: “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity”, was to be released for publication on Tuesday, 1st February.

“There is nothing new in Amnesty’s sudden discovery of the word ‘apartheid’, in relation to Israel,” EJC President Dr. Moshe Kantor said. “They are in lock step with anti-Israel and antisemitic activists in a coordinated diplomatic lynching against the Jewish State, and the mere concept of Jewish self-determination and collectivity.”

“It is clear from the tone and language used that they are seeking the end of Israel, and are using all of their supposed good name and diplomatic capital to launch a full-frontal attack against the Jewish State. That they use the terminology of ‘apartheid’ while Israel’s Arab citizens sit in the Knesset, are ministers in Israel’s current government and sit as judges on the country’s Supreme Court, shows just how disingenuous and twisted this imagery is. These are extremist political activists disguised as human-rights advocates, and their obsessive focus on Israel should dispel any notion of objectivity, neutrality or accuracy.”

“This report will become a weapon used against Jews around the world,” Dr. Kantor continued. “We have seen that every time that there are high-profile attacks against Israel with these types of scurrilous lies, people think Jews everywhere should be made responsible for it. As a result, Jewish students and members of the academia will be forced to express fealty to these distortions, and attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions will increase. None of the authors of the report will be able to ignore the direct line from their work with a rise in antisemitism.”

WSJ Editorial: The ‘Apartheid’ Libel of Israel

The report treats Israel’s founding as the original sin from which all other offenses flow. In the 27-page executive summary alone, we counted at least 26 references to 1948 or 1947-1949. Amnesty’s message is that Israel was created as an apartheid state and continues as such today.

This is a libel that distorts history. Israel was founded in the wake of the Holocaust with broad international support. The Jews who settled in historic Palestine had to fight to survive against Arab militias and national armies that wanted to push them into the sea.

Amnesty makes no attempt to explain Israel’s laws and practices in the context of the many wars Israel has had to fight since 1948. It mentions in passing that Hamas sends missiles into Israel from Gaza with no regard to its targets. But then it quickly moves on to denounce how Israel defends itself against these indiscriminate attacks.

The report glides over the Oslo accords of the 1990s as if they were merely one more opening to subjugate Palestinians. The accords were an historic concession by Israel to recognize a Palestinian state if peace could be negotiated. The report ignores that Hamas, which controls Gaza, is sworn to destroy Israel and that Israel has no choice but to impose security measures to protect against terror attacks.

Above all, the report all but ignores that Israel is a democracy that accords more rights to Arabs and Palestinians than does any other state in the region. Arabs participate in elections, hold seats in the Knesset, and one Arab is now a cabinet minister. The Palestinians in the West Bank could have their own state with comparable rights if they had accepted the concessions that Israel offered, under U.S. auspices, in the 1990s and again in 2000. Their leaders refused and the ugly stalemate continues.

The Amnesty report is especially ill-timed in an era when Israel and Arab states are negotiating new deals for commerce and travel since the Abraham Accords. A fair assumption is that Amnesty’s drafters hope to block such progress by inflaming world opinion with the “apartheid” slander. Amnesty also calls on the United Nations to sanction Israel, and the International Criminal Court to investigate and hold Israelis criminally responsible.

We assume the Biden Administration will denounce this calumny and oppose all efforts to use it as a cudgel against America’s best friend in the Middle East.

NY Post Editorial: Amnesty International’s latest Israel smear

Amnesty International UK waited until after Holocaust Remembrance Day to publish its latest report on Israel — which depends on ignoring that history and Palestinian efforts to repeat it.

Expect the media to be all over it, since Amnesty is, for the first time, officially accusing Israel of “apartheid” (joining Human Rights Watch, which made the same obscene jump last year).

Anti-Zionist activists and politicians love using the word to smear Israel’s citizenship laws and national-security policies — to delegitimize the Jewish state by equating it with South Africa’s old racist regime.

Amnesty has only accused one other country of current apartheid policies, by the way: Myanmar, which is regularly genocidal against the Rohingya minority. Not China, Iran or Syria, which also seek to wipe out minority populations.

Anti-Zionist activists and politicians often use the word “apartheid” to demean Israel’s citizenship laws and national-security policies.

The report reviews Israel’s history since independence, pointing to a skein of examples that supposedly prove the “apartheid state” canard.

But what a lot of history Amnesty ignores. The Holocaust appears only in discussing Israel’s 1952 proffer of citizenship to any Jew who wanted it. It mentions “expulsion” — without noting, for example, Jews getting the boot from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.

Yasser Arafat does not appear. It mentions Hamas 25 times but no specifics of its political and military programs that openly aim at Israel’s annihilation. References to Egypt’s “tight” restrictions on the Rafah border crossing don’t explain the “why” — namely, that nation’s desire to prevent terror attacks on both sides of that border. It describes the unprovoked May 2021 indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli citizens as just “armed hostilities [breaking] out.”

By Daled Amos

Zahra Billoo attacked US Jews last year at the American Muslims for Palestine Conference, singling out as 'enemies' not only Jewish organizations but also "Zionist Synagogues." CAIR's national office came to her defense. After all, Billoo is the executive director of their San Franciso branch.

Among those Billoo targeted:

We need to pay attention to the Anti-Defamation League. We need to pay attention to the Jewish Federation. We need to pay attention to the Zionist synagogues. We need to pay attention to the Hillel chapters on our campuses, because just because they are your friends today, doesn’t mean that they have your back when it comes to human rights.

And Billoo also pointed out those Jewish groups that she finds 'acceptable':

Know your JVP leadership, your SJP leadership, your IfNotNow leadership, the list goes on. Know who is on your side. Build community with them, because the next thing I’m going to tell you is to know your enemies.

One would imagine that CAIR would agree with Billoo that groups like JVP and IfNotNow are groups that represent the kinds of Jews that are acceptable and can be associated with.

Which is kind of odd.

Because it is not at all clear if CAIR itself, which claims to be "America's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization," actually represents the US Muslim community it claims to serve.

Irina Tsukerman, a human rights lawyer and national security analyst, writes that CAIR is one of those Muslim organizations that have fabricated their human rights image:

through a combination of generous political donations and influence campaigns, and by outright disinformation, presenting themselves as the mainstream of Muslim American communities and as the authoritative voices on Muslim civil rights issues. In reality, these groups are a fringe minority recycling and cross-pollinating members from charity to charity, who nevertheless go to great lengths to suppress alternative voices. CAIR and others receive the sort of support that nascent community organizations do not; they portray themselves as pan-Islamic organizations ignoring the fact that Muslim American communities are culturally and religious diverse.

They have also gained legitimacy by being the only game in town and forming partnerships with political training groups, intelligence agencies and law enforcement, and soft power institutions.

Going a step further, Abdullah Antepli, Associate Professor of the Practice of Interfaith Relations at Duke University, has stated not only that Muslim organizations like CAIR and ISNA represent only a small fraction of the Muslim community in the US, but that such organizations pose a danger to American Muslims as well:

They don’t represent in any significant portion of the American Muslim community. They represent the organized Muslim community space, which is more or less like 10%. And they are bullying and thought policing that space irresponsibly, reprehensive really with so many consequences to the American Islam and American Muslim community.

Their damage is not limited to 10%. They are further alienating American Muslim communities. They are further marginalizing American Islam. They are damaging the image of Islam as a religion and Muslims as Americans, Muslims as a people. But by all means, they are not representative. [emphasis added]

This description of CAIR as a fringe group claiming a larger role for itself than it actually has, is supported by a Gallup poll published in 2011.

The poll supports CAIR's claim to be the largest organization representing the Muslim community -- if you compare it to how tiny the support is for the other groups. However, the fact that the majority of Muslim men did not think any Muslim organizations represented their interests or, put another way, that 88% of Muslim men did not think CAIR represented them is revealing. And the responses of female Muslims was no better.

But why doesn't CAIR have a large following?

In 2007, The Washington Examiner published information on the number of CAIR's members based on CAIR's tax records. It found that CAIR's membership plummeted from 29,000 in 2000 to less than 1,700 in 2006. Their annual income based on dues fell from $732,765 in 2000 when dues were $25, to $58,750 in 2016 when dues were higher at $35.

The terror attacks in 2001 may account for some of this.

But the article quotes M. Zuhdi Jasser, director of American Islamic Forum for Democracy, who puts the blame on CAIR itself:

o CAIR marginalized itself by exploiting the media attention it garnered in order to promote 'victimization issues' at the expense of representing the priorities of the American Muslims
o CAIR's sympathy for Islamism combined with its apparent inability to condemn Muslim terrorist groups was a turn-off for American Muslims who did not share their ideology.
o Some Muslims did not want to join an organization that may be linked to other groups that finance terrorism

According to The Washington Examiner, as a result of a shrinking membership and decreasing dues --

The organization instead is relying on about two dozen donors a year to contribute the majority of the money for CAIR’s budget, which reached nearly $3 million last year.

It would have been nice to know more about who was making those contributions because it seems likely that CAIR would have been more representative of the desires of those major contributors than to the few members who were paying dues.

Maybe it's time for another look at CAIR's membership and funding?

Another indication of CAIR's desperation is noted in the conclusion to the article, where it notes how CAIR exaggerates its role on behalf of the Muslim community:

CAIR constantly notes in its press releases that it cooperates with federal law-enforcement activities and claims to conduct sensitivity training for Homeland Security officials. A February press release from CAIR’s Chicago office says it met with Homeland Security immigration officials and made an agreement to “conduct sensitivity training to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers and possibly prison personnel.”

When asked, officials from Homeland Security denied CAIR's claims, and a check of a database of government contracts since 2000 indicated that in fact CAIR was never awarded neither a grant nor a government contract.

A Homeland Security official noted:

The department does not have a formalized relationship with that particular organization. We do have formalized relations with other community groups with whom we do contracts for training and consultation on matters that are specific to a given community.

It is not uncommon for that particular organization to issue a press release attempting to overstate their interaction with the department. [emphasis added]

That was then. But what about now?

It seems that CAIR is still desperate to stay in the spotlight.
How desperate?

The Middle East Forum (MEF) reported last year that CAIR opposed the appointment of a Muslim federal judge:

In a historic June 10 vote, the US Senate confirmed Judge Zahid Quraishi's appointment to the US District Court for New Jersey, making him the first Muslim federal judge in American history. Although the nomination received bipartisan support, an unlikely source sharply criticized Quraishi's appointment: a leading civil rights organization that claims to speak on behalf of Muslim American interests.

..."I would much rather have a white Christian judge with progressive values," said Zahra Billoo, head of CAIR's San Francisco branch, a supposedly non-partisan Islamic civil rights group. "It's not enough that he is Muslim. In fact, it's insulting," she added.

While the reasons given for opposing Quraishi were based on issues relating to his record, many Muslim groups were supportive of the appointment.

MEF suggests that CAIR's motives stem from jealousy -- and an inability to compete with an up-and-coming rival Muslim group:

Despite its former proximity to the White House, CAIR failed to accomplish what a relative newcomer to Muslim political advocacy circles has achieved in the first months of the Biden administration. Founded in 2017, the American Pakistani Public Affairs Committee (APPAC) is loudly claiming credit for Quraishi's nomination, insisting that it played an "instrumental role" in selecting the judge from among "dozens of potential candidates."

...While CAIR's own political action committee raised a paltry $4,250 in federal donations last election cycle, APPAC gave over $1.3 million to the Biden campaign in a single August fundraiser. During this event, Biden was chummy with Ahmed, calling the APPAC chairman a "vouching force" in his community. [emphasis added]

Billoo's latest attack shows that CAIR is not about to change what it sees as a tried and true formula of radicalization and attacks on the Jewish community to maintain its status, at the expense of American Muslims.

When I asked Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, director of EMET’s Program for Emerging Democratic Voices From the Middle East, about how representative CAIR was of the Muslim community, he replied:

I'm sure a majority of American Muslims are not interested nor invested in any kind of activism and just trying to live normally. However I'm sure CAIR supporters numbers went up due to the radicalizing effect on the progressive wave on Muslim youth.

What will it take before CAIR is seen for what it is?

Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) issued a scathing report about routine torture by multiple Palestinian Authority security services of critics of the regime.

They admit that they are probably underreporting the problem.

They investigated 250 out of more than 2600 arbitrary arrests of Palestinians between 2015 and mid-2021. They were all for either political activity, criticism of the Abbas regime or participation in protests.

61% of the detainees were tortured, including beatings, deprivation of food, deprivation of toilets, and sleep deprivation.

One victim said, "I was subjected to falanga; they whipped my feet with a plastic tube or hose. This happened four times. After the beating, the interrogator would force me to walk in the corridor in front of the investigation office and run barefoot for ten minutes. They tied my hands in the back and threw the rope over the iron door and pulled hard until my body arched forward. The rope was tied to the iron door from behind, and they covered my head with a hood."

The report exposes cases where detainees are kept in prison even after posting bail, sometimes for months and with multiple payments.

The detainees were arrested for protests against sanctions imposed on Gaza, a social security law, and even for protesting in support of people with disabilities.

When the Amman-based ARIJ tried to get comments from Palestinian officials, they refused to answer because ARIJ is not a Palestinian organization. The Palestinian NGOs know that their job is to attack Israel, not protect Palestinians.

The report notes that the Palestinian Authority has laws against torture. In addition, it has signed multiple international treaties that prohibit torture. This gives support for my reporting that the PA/PLO signing international treaties is done only to use them against Israel and to join the ICC for prosecuting Israel - they have no intention of actually adhering to them.

The impression one gets is of a society where the rule of law simply doesn't exist. There are no checks and balances since Mahmoud Abbas is the singular power behind the legislative, judicial and executive branches. It is a dictatorship in every sense of the word.

ARIJ is a respected group that teaches reporters throughout the Arab world the techniques of investigative journalism and has created a college course in the topic.

Even though this report was released in English two days ago, it has received no coverage in Western media (and nearly none in Arab media.) Even worse, the Arabic report was reported in scattered Arabic media in December!

In many ways, that is the real story. The world's media fall over themselves to cover the most absurd and easily debunked reports against Israel, in the name of caring about Palestinians, but when it comes to protecting Palestinians from their own leaders, these self-styled watchdogs become deaf and mute.

Because the media and Palestinian leaders agree: anything that distracts from the narrative of Israeli evil must not be spoken of.

(h/t Tomer Ilan)

From the beginning, the "apartheid" slur was meant as a rhetorical weapon, not as truth. And so it remains today.

I found an interesting if quite biased academic paper called "Palestinian Non-Violent Resistance and the

Apartheid Analogy" which traces the beginnings of the accusations that Israel is guilty of apartheid - an accusation that pre-dates "occupation."

While the author, Nina Fischer of Goethe University Frankfurt, tries to position the apartheid slur as just another means of "resistance"for Palestinians, she doesn't quite realize she is saying that lying about and slandering Israel is a conscious decision on the part of Palestinian leaders as a means to destroy it - just as violent resistance is.

She traces the accusation to Fayez Sayegh, one of those "Palestinians" who was born in Syria and whose family moved to Palestine in the 1920s to take advantage of the economic opportunities created by Jews. Sayegh became a major Palestinian theorist. He wrote a book about "Zionist colonialism" before 1967 and then became the UN's special rapporteur to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which enabled him to become one of the architects of the 1975 UNGA "Zionism is Racism" resolution.

He would often equate Zionism with “genocide”, “crimes against humanity”, and “racist discrimination” alongside apartheid. It is clear to all that this was his weapon, in concert with Palestinian bombs.

Sayegh may have helped draft an UN resolution against apartheid, 3151 of 1974, by adding Zionism in its text. The resolution decried the “unholy alliance” between “Portuguese colonialism, South African racism, zionism [sic] and Israeli imperialism.”

Fischer admits that Sayegh used the apartheid slur mainly as "a metaphorical trope with much emotive power, shaping the international discourse and aiming to cause condemnations and the political isolation of Israel."

Fischer reiterates this:

[T]he term apartheid is harnessed for its emotive power. ...The Palestinian story needs telling in a way that resonates with an audience and guides listeners’ interpretations. This means that the apartheid analogy in the Palestinian context functions ...politically, as it allows being heard, aims to influence and shape opinions, and can create a reaction.....Internally, in Arabic, a different story might be happening concerning terms employed, but Palestinian discourses in English that use apartheid as a prism were always intended for international consumption.

In other words, the apartheid analogy was always all about propaganda and never about facts. Its effectiveness is not a reflection of reality but of the eagerness for many people to label Jews as evil.

The sequence of events since then is that the accusations that Zionism is racist and apartheid keep resurfacing, and every new generation tweaks the slur with more "facts" fed to them by fraudulent academics to make the accusations sound more legitimate. Even the reports of B'Tselem, HRW and now Amnesty show an evolution: each successive one tries to refine the argument because the previous ones were demolished.

The point is that when you look at the history of the slur, the accusation pre-dates the justifications. Jew-haters came up with the slander and when they are revealed to be antisemites, the next iteration tries to make the argument a little better and less obviously a manifestation of Jew hatred. The reports pretend to be an objective look at the definition of apartheid and how Israel is guilty, but they assume Israel was guilty ahead of time, and they twist the facts to fit the verdict.

When Amnesty, HRW et. al. say that Israel is guilty of apartheid, they know as well as Sayegh that they are engaging in propaganda. not truth telling. They throw in plenty of footnotes and circular definitions, knowing full well that they only need to give those who hate Israel and Jews an excuse for their hatred. Lots of footnotes are enough, along with ignoring the huge amounts of counter-evidence that proves them wrong.

The intention was always the same as it has been since the PLO was created: destroying Israel by any means necessary. Amnesty and HRW are the propaganda arms of Fatah and Hamas. And their interest in the truth is just about the same.