Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, June 27, 2022

Elder Comix: Abortion meets intersectionality

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Palestinian Media Watch monitors the things that Palestinians say on TV and in their media, and the sheer amount of things they find is almost numbing. But it is important to see that their hate and antisemitism is a constant stream, day in and day out, that rarely hits the mainstream media.

Today, they found this:

Official PA TV “Israeli affairs expert” Fayez Abbas: “We know that the Jewish mind always invents things. The more despicable a thing is, it is an invention of the Jewish mind.”

[Official PA TV, Israel in the News, June 8, 2022]

Garden variety Jew-hatred, in prime time. And the world supports this.

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06/27 Links Pt1: Saudi Arabia to UN: No State between Israel & Jordan; The UN Commission of Inquiry Is an Inquisition; Let UNRWA die already; The sheer audacity of Mahmoud Abbas

From Ian:

David Singer: Saudi Arabia tells Biden & UN: No State between Israel & Jordan

Saudi Arabia has sent US President Joe Biden and the United Nations (UN) a clear message to abandon the idea of creating a new Arab State between Israel and Jordan in an article published in Al-Arabiya News on 8 June headlined: The Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine.

Its author – Ali Shihabi – is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill journalist. He supports and has the ear of Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman (MBS) – the controversial next successor to the Saudi throne.

MBS is the driving force behind NEOM – a brand new US$500 billion megacity to be built on 26500km² in northern Saudi Arabia – an area larger than Israel – powered by 100% renewable energy. The project includes a bridge spanning the Red Sea – connecting NEOM to Africa. NEOM will be close to the borders of Jordan, Egypt and Israel.

Shihabi has been a member of NEOM’s Advisory Board since 2020.

MBS has not sought to publically distance himself from Shihabi’s article.

Shihabi dismisses Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Jordan claims to be separate entities:
“Jordanians and Palestinians are as similar as any people can be. They are Sunni Arabs from the same neighbourhood. Merging them will not create any long-term ethnic or sectarian fault lines.”

Significantly Shihabi’s proposal does not call for Saudi Arabia to replace Jordan as Custodian of the Islamic Holy Sites in Jerusalem – a fear long-held by Jordan.

This Saudi concession should help embolden Jordan to begin negotiations with Israel on this Saudi Arabian initiative – which could see:
- The 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty extended to 100% of the territory of former Palestine – instead of the 95% currently covered
- The two-state solution contemplated by article 6 of the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the 1945 UN Charter finally brought to fruition

Endorsement of this Saudi initiative by Biden and the UN will greatly advance the prospect of finally ending the 100 years-old unresolved Jewish-Arab conflict.

Anne Bayefsky: The UN Commission of Inquiry Is an Inquisition

This study on the UN Human Rights Council's Commission of Inquiry on Israel shines a spotlight on its disturbing methodology of peddling modern anti-Semitism on the world stage. The three members of the commission were appointed precisely because of their non-objectivity, partiality, and bias. Each was on record as having already declared Israel guilty of the crimes that they were tasked with investigating.

Commission chair Navi Pillay told the Human Rights Council: "We made a general call for written submissions, and we received several thousand written submissions." In fact, a group of NGOs submitted millions of unique written submissions and names of Jewish victims of Arab violence and incitement to Jew-hatred.

The inquisitors were mandated to look for root causes and the victims of systematic discrimination based on race and religion. But we now know the search will proceed only so long as the root cause is not Arab hatred of Jews, the masses of victims of such hate are not dead Jews, and the refugees are not Jewish.

Hillel Neuer on CBS News: “The U.N. inquisition against Israel”

CBS News “Eye on the World” radio features UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer. Hosted by John Batchelor and Malcolm Hoenlein, June 23, 2002. Navi Pillay has lobbied governments to “sanction apartheid Israel!” It is a travesty of justice for her to serve as chair of the U.N. inquiry on Israel.

Ruthie Blum: Let UNRWA die already

Bolstering terrorism isn’t the only violation of its mandate that UNRWA has committed, however. No, its misappropriation of millions in American and European tax dollars and euros extends to less lofty ideals than attacking Israel.

A damning internal report exposed in July 2019 by Al Jazeera and AFP revealed that then-UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl and other agency officials were engaging in “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority, for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent, and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives.”

Ironically, the messy business came to light when Krähenbühl was discovered to have embarked upon a private fundraising campaign, using poor old cash-strapped UNRWA as his draw. But he was actually collecting money to pay for business-class trips with his mistress, whom he fast-tracked into a role that he invented for her in 2015—that of his “senior adviser”—so that she could accompany him around in style. It’s not clear what his wife had to say about this, but UNRWA staffers urged to tighten their belts were none too happy.

A few months after the report was made public, in November of that year, Krähenbühl resigned, pointing to “dirty politics.” And the internal probe on by the United Nations, upstanding body that it is, subsequently concluded that the allegations against him had been unfair.

Oh well. At least they’ve now got Lazzarini to do their panhandling.

Speaking of which, while he was standing at the General Assembly podium on Thursday, the NGO U.N. Watch published a report detailing UNRWA teachers’ current anti-Semitism and support for terrorism against Israelis. And this is in spite of proclaiming “zero tolerance” for incitement.

According to U.N. Watch executive director Hillel Neuer, the fact that not a single educator in question has been fired means that UNRWA “should be considered complicit.” He’s got that right. But, then, so should the countries that continue to fork over funds to the deplorable body.

The good news is that if Lazzarini’s bleak forecast is correct, and the organization crumbles, the world will be a better place. UNRWA’s demise is long overdue. Let’s pray for its funeral.

Anti-Jewish crimes still dominate NYC bias crimes

New York City has a word cloud to indicate the relative amounts of the types of bias crimes the city is seeing.

Here are the results for January:

February:

March:

See a pattern?

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The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported that the number of Palestinian workers in Israel and working in Israeli settlements increased by a huge amount in the first quarter of 2022 compared to the previous quarter.

The increase was so large that it more than made up for the decrease of people employed in Palestinian-controlled areas.

The number of Palestinian workers in Israel and the settlements skyrocketed from 153,000 to 204,000, an increase of 33% in a single quarter. Of those the number of workers in settlements - which the PA officially tries to ban - went up from 22,400 0to 31,000 people, an increase of 38%.

At the same time, the number of workers within the Arab areas of the West Bank and Gaza decreased from 939,000 to 904,000 in the first quarter.

The survey didn't mention the average wages of the workers in the West Bank and Gaza. Over the past few years, the daily wage was far less than half that of workers in Israel, which was NIS 268 ($78.80) a day in this report. In 2020, the average Palestinian wage was NIS 104 a day.

If we assume that this number has increased to NIS 112, that means that fully 35% of the total income for Palestinians comes from Israeli employers.

The PCBS didn't mention workers from Gaza. Today it was announced that Israel would increase the number of worker permits from Gaza by 3500.

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The Proto-Protocols of Jewish Domination, 1868

The New Arab, which is considered one of the saner Arab publication, starts off a Sunday article with this:

The Jewish Rabbi Rijkorner said at a secret meeting held by the Jews in Prague, in 1869: “If gold is the primary force, then the press is the secondary force, but the second does not work without the first, and we must, by means of gold, seize the press, and when we seize them, we strive to destroy family life, morals, religion and virtue."

In extreme antisemitic circles, there is a story circulating of a Rabbi Reichorn who supposedly made a speech describing hw the Jews will take over the world - decades before the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The New Arab article is based on that lie.

This wholly fictional speech was published in 1921 in antisemitic French magazine La Vieille France It claimed to have copied this speech from the book La Russie Juive.

Here are the supposed Protocols of 1869:

1. Every hundred years, We, the Sages of Israel, have been accustomed to meet in Sanhedrin in order to examine our progress towards the domination of the world which Jehovah has promised us, and our conquests over the enemy, Christianity.

2. This year, united over the tomb of our reverend Simeon ben-Ihuda, we can state with pride that the past century has brought us very near to our goal, and that this goal will be very soon attained.

3. Gold always has been and always will be the irresistible power. Handled by expert hands it will always be the most useful lever for those who possess it, and the object of envy for those who do not. With gold we can buy the most rebellious consciences, can fix the rate of all values, the current prices of all products, can subsidize all State loans, and thereafter hold the states at our mercy.

4. Already the principal banks, the exchanges of the entire world, the credits of all governments, are in our hands.

5. The other great power is THE PRESS. By repeating without cessation certain ideas, the Press succeeds in the end in having them accepted as actualities. The Theatre renders us analogous services. Everywhere the Press and the Theatre obey our orders.

6. By the ceaseless praise of DEMOCRATIC RULE we shall divide the Christians into political parties, we shall destroy the unity of their nations, we shall sow discord everywhere. Reduced to impotence, they will bow before the LAW of OUR BANK, always united, and always devoted to our Cause.

7. We shall force the Christians into wars by exploiting their pride and their stupidity. They will massacre each other, and clear the ground for us to put our people into.

8. The possession of the land has always brought influence and power. In the name of social Justice and Equality we shall parcel out the great estates; we shall give the fragments to the peasants who covet them with all their powers, and who will soon be in debt to us by the expense of cultivating them.
Our capital will make us their masters. We in our turn shall become the great proprietors, and the possession of the land will assure the power to us.

9. Let us try to replace the circulation of gold with paper money; our chests will absorb the gold, and we shall regulate the value of the paper which will make us masters of all the positions.

10. We count among us plenty of orators capable of feigning enthusiasm and of persuading mobs. We shall spread them among the people to announce changes which should secure the happiness of the human race. By gold and by flattery we shall gain the proletariat which will charge itself with annihilating Christian capitalism. We shall promise workmen salaries of which they have never dared to dream, but we shall also raise the price of necessities so that our profits will be greater still.

11. In this manner we shall prepare Revolutions which the Christians will make themselves, and of which we shall reap the fruit.

12. By our mockeries and our attacks upon them we shall make their priests ridiculous then odious, and their religion as ridiculous and as odious as their clergy. Then we shall be masters of their souls. For our pious attachment to our own religion, to our own worship, will prove the superiority of our religion and the superiority of our souls.

13. We have established our own men in all important positions. We must endeavor to provide the Goyim with lawyers and doctors; the lawyers are au courant with all interests; doctors, once in the house, become confessors and directors of consciences.

14. But above all let us monopolize Education. By this means we spread ideas that are useful to us, and shape the children's brains as suits us.

15. If one of our people should unhappily fall into the hands of justice amongst the Christians, we must rush to help him; find as many witnesses as he needs to save him from his judges, until we become judges ourselves.

16. The monarchs of the Christian world, swollen with ambition and vanity, surround themselves with luxury and with numerous armies. We shall furnish them with all the money their folly demands, and so shall keep them in leash.

17. Let us take care not to hinder the marriage of our men with Christian girls, for through them we shall get our foot into the most closely locked circles. If our daughters marry Goyim they will be no less useful, for the children of a Jewish mother are ours. Let us foster the idea of free love, that we may destroy among Christian women attachment to the principles and practices of their religion.

18. For ages past the sons of Israel, despised and persecuted, have been working to open up a path to power. They are hitting the mark. They control the economic life of the accursed Christians; their influence preponderates over politics and over manners.

19. At the wished for hour, fixed in advance, we shall let loose the Revolution, which by ruining all classes of Christianity, will definitely enslave the Christian to US. Thus will be accomplished the promise of God made to His people.

The text is actually derived from a chapter of an 1868 novel by Hermann Goedsche called "Biarritz." After he died, antisemites turned the fictional chapter into a leaflet purported to be true.

The chapter includes an entire scene of representatives of the Twelve Tribes each meeting in a cemetery in Prague and each reciting a protocol. The New Arab version quotes from this novel, not from the "protocols" listed above. There seem to have been some major changes between the novel and the 19 protocols listed above.

And mainstream Arab media still embraces this antisemitic libel.

Strangely, this French text published during the Nazi era in France is in an online Museums of Paris collection today, without mentioning its antisemitic nature.

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It isn't just one bullet that is missing

While the world is falling over itself to declare Israel guilty for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, no one seems to be talking about how careless and negligent the Palestinian Authority has been in its "investigation."

I've watched lots of videos from the spot where Abu Akleh was killed in Jenin, but I have not seen one that shows the Palestinian police.

Think about every crime scene you have ever seen, in person or on TV. Reporters and residents are kept away, while the police try to preserve the scene, tag and photograph the position of all the bullets, and do everything a proper forensics unit does.

But in Jenin on May 11, there was no hint of police.

Here is where she was killed, not long thereafter, before the tree turned into a full fledged memorial.

Where is the caution tape?

More importantly, the audio shows that there were at least a dozen bullets seemingly from the same source. The PA has one of them - the one that hit Shireen. Where are the rest of them? Any one of them could show that the IDF had fired in that direction - why doesn't anyone seem to have them?

Either the Palestinian police - funded by the West - is spectacularly incompetent, or they are hiding important data from the public.

The people who are investigating using open-source tools don't seem to be bothered by the fact that there is so little information being shared from the supposed side of the victim.

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06/26 Links: Negev Summit to become permanent forum; PA honors 3 murderers of Jews from 1929; A ray of hope amid rampant antisemitism

From Ian:

Negev Summit to become permanent forum

Foreign Ministry Director-General Alon Ushpiz will travel to Bahrain on Monday to meet with representatives of foreign ministries of countries that participated in the Negev Summit that took place in Israel last March.

The summit, which was hosted by Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, brought together Israeli and Arab leaders and was attended by the United Arab Emirates' Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Bahrain's Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, Morocco's Nasser Bourita, Egypt's Sameh Shoukry and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said on Twitter that in March, the states decided the summit would become a permanent forum, "an ongoing process based on six working groups": food and water security, energy, health, education and tolerance, tourism, and regional security.

It said the goal of Monday's meeting was to "determine the working groups' process" and "serve as a milestone ahead of the US President's expected visit to the Middle East."

President Joe Biden is expected to visit Israel, and later Saudi Arabia, in mid-July.

Are Jews the New Nazis?

The internet is awash with claims that Jews are like Nazis. This comes through insinuation or is explicitly stated. Some say Israelis are behaving like the Nazis today. Others, (invariably the same people), say Jews collaborated with Hitler in the past.

This is the first of two articles available for subscribers. The second article addresses the claim that Hitler and Jewish Zionists collaborated in the 1930s. Today’s article deals with the assertion that present day Israel is behaving the same way towards Palestinians as the Nazis did towards Jews.

Let’s jump straight to the conclusion and work from there: it’s a load of bollocks. Comparing Jews to Nazis in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict is a way for stupid people to feel like they’ve had a smart idea. They think the poetic twist of the abused becoming the abuser is a cute thought and that the irony of this role-reversal somehow equals truth. But being proud of a cool story you tell yourself and looking to be praised for your pop-psychology doesn’t mean you’ve actually arrived at the truth.

The most basic understanding of history and the most cursory insight into the present disproves the premise. Nazis tried to exterminate every Jew on the planet for racist reasons. Israel-Palestine is not a racial conflict but a land dispute. Israel has continuously sought peace with its neighbours. If Palestinians also sought peace the conflict would end. But they don’t. None the less, Israel continues to sue for peace because its aspiration is a Middle East in which all people - including Palestinians - can live. This doesn’t quite tally with the Nazis, whose aspiration was a world in which all Jews were dead. Wanting to shake hands with your neighbours and wanting to bury your neighbours are two entirely different things.

It’s worth noting that the global Jewish population still hasn’t returned to its pre-Holocaust numbers. By contrast the Palestinian population has boomed. That’s because there is no ethnic cleansing or genocide being committed by Israel. Israel has the power to wipe out every Palestinian tomorrow if it wanted to - but it does not. Having the power to act - but not doing so - reveals once again that Israel’s intent towards Palestinians is not Nazi-like or genocidal.

I am a Jewish Crimson Editor, and I See the Writing on the Wall…of Resistance

“Zionism is Racism, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, Apartheid.”

On April 29, the Crimson Editorial Board, of which I am an associate editor, published a Staff Editorial that embraced these claims, which were plastered onto the Palestinian Student Committee’s “Wall of Resistance” at the time. The Board “proudly” endorsed the associated Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, while rendering the display a “colorful” and “spirited” emblem of “passion.” The article made no mention of the fact that BDS student activism has been tied to antisemitic exclusion and violence on college campuses.

Having missed the meeting where the Board shifted its stance on BDS, I’ve spent an embarrassing number of hours puzzling over the decision, attempting to make sense of the Board’s reasoning. Yet the more I read the Staff Editorial, the more muddled its logic seemed to become. The Board, seemingly seduced by the “colorful” Wall of Resistance, directs virtually no attention to any concrete or balanced exploration of the conflict, instead evading it by stating that we “can’t nuance away” Palestinians’ lived realities. And eventually, after having evaded all precision and nuance, it blindly accepts BDS’s flawed, factually misleading mission.

And now, BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti has authored a Crimson letter to the editor that repeats a host of deceptive anti-Zionist talking points, recycling references to what others have dubbed “Jewish supremacy” while highlighting reports that characterize the Israeli-Palestinian relationship as a racial dispute. These declarations aren’t just wildly distorted; they’re dangerous. They paint a reductive portrait of the Jewish state, demonizing the nation and delegitimizing its very existence. But they are also provocative, evoking emotion, and are cloaked with a blanket of resonant humanitarian claims. For unknowing onlookers with a taste for justice, that seems to be all that matters.

This slick dynamic, I’ve come to realize, captures the essence — and the dangerous “artistry” — of the broader BDS movement.

It is my intuition that Zionism is not what the Editorial Board — or most people backing an anti-Zionist agenda in the name of justice — believes they are rejecting, or likening to racism and cruelty. Instead, they are rejecting a false projection of Zionism — one that has been carefully constructed by movements like BDS, whose entire narrative is founded upon a hefty hijacking of Jewish identity and history.

BDS’s official website explicitly writes that Israel’s origins can be found within a “racist ideology” of European colonialism, which it then ties to the Zionist movement. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not rooted in a racial struggle, nor in an ideology of superiority or hate. On the contrary, Zionism was born in 1896 as a movement of liberation, of freedom, and of resisting unfair power imbalances during a period in which Jews across Europe were persecuted — barred from government assemblies, attacked in the press, and excluded from business dealings, hotels, social circles, and clubs.

UNRWA held a pledging conference in New York starting on Thursday. While it managed to get an additional $160 million in funding, it says it is still $100 million short of its needs.

At his opening remarks, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini inadvertently described UNRWA's exact problem:

UNRWA cannot be compared to any other UN humanitarian agency.

You have mandated UNRWA to provide government-like services. But we do not have the fiscal and financial tools of a government.

Yet no one is asking why a humanitarian agency is performing government-like functions? Palestinians live under governments in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria - why don't those governments do their jobs and provide medical, educational and housing aid to these faux refugees who have lived under these governments' rule far longer than the Syrian and other real refugees that they do take care of?

The US representative speech highlights the problem:

[The] United States reiterates our support to UNRWA and urges other donors to provide robust, reliable funding to help address the Agency’s long-term sustainability.

UNRWA was always meant to be a temporary agency. Its plans should be to dismantle itself over time, and move the responsibility for the Palestinian "refugees" to where they belong - with their host governments. It shouldn't have long-term sustainability - it should have a strategy to eliminate itself.

The Palestinian Director of the Authority (302) for the Defense of Refugee Rights, Ali Huwaidi, noted that the Arab world did not pledge anything at this conference:

We noticed in the pledges conference that no Arab country contributed any additional amount to what it provided at the beginning of 2022, and there is a Qatari, Kuwaiti and Saudi regression, and it is known that the UAE stopped its support completely in February 2022, although the Arab countries are obligated to pay 7.8 percent of the general budget.

They know that UNRWA is part of the problem, not part of the solution. UNRWA exists to keep a culture of permanent victimhood and hate, and to give Palestinians false hope that one day they will "return" to a country they have never seen and destroy Israel demographically. This justifies treating them like garbage in the meanwhile.

UNRWA should work with the host countries to redirect its budget towards having its responsibilities transitioned to real governments. There is no reason Palestinians who are nearly all Jordanian citizens should live in "refugee"camps. There is no reason Palestinians in Lebanon should have no rights to even buy land or hold many jobs in the land they have lived in for over 70 years. There is no reason Palestinians in the areas of British Mandate Palestine should be considered "refugees." There is no reason the very definition of "Palestine refugee" should not be the same as that of every other refugee. There is no reason why descendants of refugees should automatically inherit that designation.

The reason UNRWA has failed is because for decades UNRWA has not tried to solve the original refugee problem - they exist to perpetuate it, and to justify perpetuating it.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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WSJ: Israel met with Arabs including Qataris, Saudis on defending against Iranian threat

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The U.S. convened a secret meeting of top military officials from Israel and Arab countries in March to explore how they could coordinate against Iran’s growing missile and drone capabilities, according to officials from the U.S. and the region.

The previously undisclosed talks, which were held at Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, marked the first time that such a range of ranking Israeli and Arab officers have met under U.S. military auspices to discuss how to defend against a common threat.

The meeting brought together the top military officers from Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Jordan and came as Israel and its neighbors are in the early stage of discussing potential military cooperation, the officials said.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain also sent officers to the meeting. The U.S. was represented by Gen. Frank McKenzie, then the head of the U.S. Central Command.

The talks were enabled by several changes, including common fears of Iran, improved political ties signaled by the Abraham Accords and the Trump administration’s decision in January 2021 to expand Central Command’s area of coverage to include Israel.

Another factor driving expanding military cooperation has been Arab countries’ desire for access to Israeli air defense technology and weapons at a time when the U.S. is shifting its military priorities toward countering China and Russia.

After initially distancing itself from the Abraham Accords, the Biden administration belatedly started to embrace them and now to expand them to include other Arab countries.

Recall that there was another meeting in March in Sharm el-Sheikh, between the leaders of Israel, Egypt and the UAE, on March 22.

The date of the military meeting is not known, but General McKenzie gave a hint about it in a media briefing from Centcom Headquarters in Tampa, Florida on March 16.

"Iran's ballistic missile threat has continued to advance and expand with greater ranges and accuracy," he said, adding that land attack cruise missiles and small unmanned aerial vehicles also are part of that threat.

Partner nation air defense systems in the region far outnumber those that the U.S. has there, he said. Air defense systems, including high-end ones like the Patriot system, are used by the Gulf States and others.

"The task in the theater is really how do you knit those together so that you create more than a simple sum of the component parts," he said.

"By doing so, you create a common operational picture, so everybody sees the same thing. Everybody gets early warnings; everybody can be prepared to react very quickly to a potential Iranian attack. That's where the future in this theater is," he said.

Iranian ballistic missile threats have provided some opportunities for the United States to advance regional cooperation in the area of air defense, he said.

"Centcom is focused on operationalizing the Abraham Accords as we brought Israel into our area of operations, and missile defense is one area of cooperation that all our partners understand," he said.

The focus, according to the now-retired general, was to facilitate communication between all regional states so everyone can share early warnings of Iranian attacks. This has the advantage, he hinted, of Israel being able to cooperate with Arab countries that it has not made peace with by not requiring any physical presence of Israelis in Arab countries or vice versa.

Such cooperation is still in very early stages, but the Trump decision to incorporate Israel into Centcom is paying off in closer military cooperation between all Arab states and Israel, via the US.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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A week ago, the Iraqi parliament unanimously passed a law criminalising any form of normalisation with Israel. The law threatens the death penalty or life imprisonment for anyone calling for normalisation.

The law says that any Iraq who visits Israel will be sentenced to life imprisonment, and those who establish any political, economic, or cultural relations with Israel institutions, even through social media, will be sentenced to death.

An analysis in The New Arab - which is very anti-Israel - indicates that Iraq might suffer from this law if it enforces it, which it might not do:

The new anti-normalisation law could also be weaponised against Sunni Arab dissidents, warned Tallha Abdulrazaq, an expert in Middle Eastern strategic and security affairs, in an interview with The New Arab.

“I’m a British-Iraqi and in my academic work I engage sometimes with Israeli academics, policymakers, and even lawmakers on occasion…I’m exactly the kind of target whom they’d like to sweep up in this sort of thing because I’m a dissident of the political process and I’m a Sunni. There’s a political aspect and a sectarian aspect to this…So, if you have any interactions with an Israeli entity, they can target you with this law.” He added that “this is going to have a chilling effect on academics abroad and people who work in the media.”

This legislation could also have negative implications for Iraq’s economy and foreign investment climate. Depending on the extent to which authorities enforce this law, investors might worry more about the potential risks of doing business in Iraq on top of concerns surrounding the country’s overall state of insecurity.

There could be “possible obstacles to foreign direct investment in Iraq by companies that feel constrained by their own policies or the laws in their home countries that would penalise anything that looks like cooperating in a boycott of Israel,” according to analysts Yerevan Saeed and Hussein Ibish.

Yet, Abdulrazaq believes that this law will not be weaponised against foreign corporations with links to Israel given Iraq’s current economic problems.

“The Iraqi economy is in absolute shambles…They need these foreign companies [and] foreign direct investment…This is more for popular consumption. It’s not meant as a stick meant to beat foreign companies with. They need them for their economy…If these guys were to leave, then that’s it for Iraq. There’d be almost nothing there for them. Even in terms of their oil sales, it’s not enough. It’s not enough to sustain Iraq itself. They will not chasing any foreign corporations any time soon.”

The initial consensus is that this law is simply a means to unite Iraqis with anti-Israel rhetoric, a time honored tradition in the Arab world that is quickly losing its effectiveness. There seems little appetite to have Iraq allow foreign investors to be chased away because they also have ties to Israel, which was the Arab League position for decades.

(h/t JW)

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06/25 Links: Under the Biden, Iran Sanctions are Violated with Impunity; Sudan: The Genocide No One Talks About; Iran vows to press ahead with nuclear development until West ends ‘illegal behavior’

From Ian:

Under the Biden Administration's Watch, Iran Sanctions are Violated with Impunity

The Biden administration's weak leadership -- to hold accountable those who are violating Iran sanctions -- is likely a critical reason the Iranian regime is flamboyantly ignoring the US and forging ahead -- soon, most likely, to become a nuclear state.

Presumably to take even further advantage of the Biden administration's weak leadership, the Iranian regime is also signing long-term agreements with its oil clients to permanently insulate its economy from the US sanctions.

The ruling mullahs are now producing more oil and selling it at levels close to the pre-sanctions era to countries such as China, which desperately needs more oil, while the Biden administration has cut off US oil exploration.

One of its terms [of the deal recently signed between China and Iran] is that China will invest nearly $400 billion in Iran's oil, gas and petrochemicals industries. In return, China will have priority to bid on any new project in Iran that is linked to these sectors. China will also receive a 12% discount and can delay payments by up to two years. China will also be able to pay in any currency it chooses. It is also estimated that, in total, China will receive discounts of nearly 32%.

The Biden administration must impose drastic economic sanctions on Iran's energy and financial sectors: that would threaten the ruling clerics' hold on power, forcing the leadership to recalculate its priorities. The US must hold those who violate the sanctions strictly accountable, and make clear to the ruling mullahs that if they continue advancing their nuclear program, military options are on the table.

Pierre Rehov: Sudan: The Genocide No One Talks About

Civilian institutions are concerned that Sudan's new puppet government is simply a cover for the return of Bashir and that, although he is in prison, he is behind every development in the Sudanese government.

This, apparently, is also the conviction of El Nur. He notes with distress that the massacres organized by the Janjaweed and the Rapid Intervention Forces have not seen any let up. Daily peaceful demonstrations in Khartoum and the rest of the country are interrupted by the police and state militias, who fire live ammunition at the crowds, while raids are conducted throughout Sudan. Homes are burned. Villagers are forced into the desert without food or water. Summary executions take place. Women and children are crushed by cars. Students are mown down by bullets.

To this day, although the American government has scrupulously honored its part of the agreement, the Sudanese authorities have been careful not to respect the slightest paragraph.

In northern Sudan, mercenaries from the Wagner Group, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, have, with the apparent complicity of the regime, taken over the main gold mines of Al-Ibediyya. Day and night, extracting this gold is carried out by "free" Sudanese whose symbolic salary is close to slavery. Where does this gold go? No one is sure, but reportedly it could be feeding the coffers of Moscow and perhaps those of its ally, the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran.

Last month, the Biden administration suspended all aid to Sudan, including that linked to its normalization agreement with Israel, and informed Jerusalem that no support should be given to the Khartoum government until there are democratic elections.

Bennett: I won't rule out sitting under Netanyahu in future

The 24th Knesset may disperse as early as Monday evening, exactly a week after Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s dramatic announcement to that effect.

While there are still a number of parliamentary hurdles to clear, Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked said on Friday that the negotiations to form an alternate government led by opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu had been exhausted, leaving elections as the only remaining option.

Bennett’s political future is unclear. He met with his longtime political partner Shaked on Friday for the first time since Monday’s announcement, which he made while she was on an official visit to Morocco. The two are set to meet again on Sunday, presumably to discuss their political future.

In interviews on all three major television news outlets aired on Saturday evening, Bennett said that he would not announce his plans for the future until the Knesset officially disperses, but that his decision will be based on whether his remaining in politics would or would not contribute to healing the schism between Israel’s different sectors.

06/24 Links Pt2: Whatever Happened to the ‘Pro-Jewish’ Left?; The moral clarity of Nikki Haley; Google honors the life of Anne Frank with diary doodles

From Ian:

Whatever Happened to the ‘Pro-Jewish’ Left?

The disengagement from Jewish life by some on the left is neither novel nor especially surprising. After all, there’s a long history of Jews identified with the far left who have rejected religion and feeling responsible for the Jewish people. But the masses of American Jews who identified with political liberalism thought differently. They saw no tension between their commitments to aid fellow Jews while also supporting non-sectarian causes. Nor did they indict their religion as the source of human failings. Twentieth century Jewish liberals often were leaders of federations of Jewish philanthropy, defense organizations, social service agencies, and Jewish educational and religious institutions. During the 1960s, baby boomers seeking to make their mark on American Jewish life were committed to anti-war protests and the Civil Rights movement, as well as labor unions—even as they marched to free Soviet Jewry and defend the embattled State of Israel. While in our time it is not uncommon for Jewish progressives to ridicule efforts to ensure “Jewish continuity,” youthful activists in the early 1970s critiqued Jewish organizations for investing too little in Jewish education and too much in Jewish health care facilities that no longer served a primarily Jewish clientele. In that era, too, the Jewish left produced the Havurah fellowships, the turn to neo-Hasidism, significant aliyah to Israel, Jewish feminism, and mass demonstrations in support of Jewish causes. Undoubtedly, some on today’s Jewish left passionately share similar Jewish commitments. But the data we have cited point to the indifference of many Jewish liberals today—particularly younger adults—to most forms of Jewish particularism, religious life, and positive identification with Israel as a Jewish state.

How might this situation change in the direction of greater involvement by political liberals in Jewish life? It’s possible that American society, including political liberals, will re-embrace religious commitment and a more positive approach to cultural heritage. The pendulum may swing back: Americans may come to place more value on association, cooperative work, and volunteering. Just as trends in the wider society have pushed liberal Jews in the past to distance themselves from their religious and collective needs, a broader shift in attitudes may make Jewish particularism more attractive. Not least, rising levels of antisemitism may accelerate these changes.

There also are possibilities for some rebalancing of priorities within the American Jewish community. Reform, we expect, would have to come from inside the camp of Jewish liberals. Sobered by findings such as those we report, liberal-minded leaders may take up the challenge of rebuffing ideas and influencers undermining participation in Jewish religious and communal activities. In all likelihood, only highly respected and credible liberals committed to Jewish life—and there still are tens of thousands of them—have a reasonable chance to reverse the Jewish commitment gap we have highlighted. They are best-positioned to make the case to their ideological allies for the compatibility of liberalism with active participation in Jewish communal and religious endeavors and reject those aspects of left-leaning thinking inimical to Jewish life.

Why ‘Pro-Israel’ Is No Longer Enough

Speaking to a group at last month’s Israeli conservatism conference, former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman was asked how best to “sell Zionism” in America.

Before delving into his reasoning, the former ambassador answered that “selling Zionism” first requires “selling Judaism.” Friedman correctly maintains that Zionism rooted in the belief that Israel exists as a Jewish state will inevitably unite the “political left, right, and center.” Friedman argues that Jews must stop trying to appease antisemites by “bifurcating Zionism and Judaism.”

Decades ago, being raised in a pro-Israel household, taking a Birthright trip, and living within a Jewish community protected against the anti-Israel hostility that a young Jewish student might encounter on campus. But today, US Jews are being peddled a brand of popularized universalism that often demonizes Israel. As a result, the repackaged antisemitism, which partners a hatred of Israel with progressive causes, is neglected and, increasingly, is bolstered by some in the Jewish community.

Moreover, an affinity for Israel based on expressed parental support does not advance the Israel literacy required to combat contemporary antisemitism, or give Jewish students the critical thinking tools necessary to counter anti-Israel propaganda spouted at them on campus.

With an attachment to Jewish peoplehood already weakened, the crucial work of organizations like Birthright Israel and StandWithUs are not strong enough to teach young Jews the truth about what is happening in Israel and “Palestine.”

Most will already be exposed to social media postings decrying Israeli “apartheid,” and media lies falsely accusing Israel of war crimes. In California, as part of the K-12 ethnic studies curriculum, students may have previously completed coursework affirming that Israel is a “settler state” founded on “genocide.”

Accruing the resiliency and knowledge to combat anti-Zionism will inevitably raise critical and, at times, uncomfortable questions.

Melanie Phillips: The moral clarity of Nikki Haley

The challenge facing western leaders therefore could not be more momentous. But could any leader meet it? Is it actually possible to stop America’s slide into cultural fragmentation and global impotence?

When asked this question in London, Haley said America simply couldn’t afford to fail. And her own approach showed how, if this desperate task has any chance of succeeding, the west can stop itself from plunging off the edge of the cultural cliff.

The only way is through leadership that exhibits the kind of moral clarity she was expressing. For the reason that evil currently has the upper hand in the world is the absence of leaders prepared to make it clear that they simply won’t stand for attacks on their society at home or on the free world abroad.

What is so astounding isn’t just the appeasement of the west’s enemies abroad. It is also that that, at home, the lunacies of critical race theory and intersectionality have gained such traction in the universities, schools, companies and even the armed forces. It’s all part of the same dismal story — a wholesale absence of western spine.

What makes the timidity of western politicians all the more frustrating is the demonstrable public hunger for such leadership, and the rewards that it brings.

In America, this was demonstrated by last year’s stunning election victory in Virginia of Governor Glenn Youngkin, who gained office in a hitherto solidly Democratic state by emphasising parental rights to make decisions about their children's education with the slogan, “parents matter”.

And in Israel, the Trump administration’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem not only did not produce the eruption of violence so adamantly predicted by the US State Department and hosts of other faint-hearts, but ushered in the revolutionary Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf states.

One thing above all is required at present from the leaders of the west. It’s moral courage. Whoever displays that deserves to win the highest office. It is essential that whoever fails to display it does not.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The media completely ignores the corruption inherent in the PLO and PA

On Thursday, Mahmoud Abbas led a meeting of the PLO Executive Committee, for which he has been the chairman since 2004.

Here is what the meeting looked like as they prayed to open the session:

Sixteen older white men, almost all Muslim.

Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian woman, was a member of this committee but she resigned in 2020 - partially because all the decisions were being made by old men.

Keep in mind that the Palestinian Authority (or, as they call it, the "State of Palestine") reports to the PLO. This non-elected organization is what really makes the decisions, not the PA. So for example, in 2009 the PLO Executive Committee - headed by Abbas - voted to allow Abbas to remain the president of the PA indefinitely, even in the absence of elections. This power also allowed Abbas to dissolve the High Court and replace it with his own appointees, and to sideline the legislative branch of the government when Hamas won those elections.

This is dictatorial power, and the Western media just shrugs - or pretends that the PA is a democracy because it sometime stages meaningless elections.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!